The Return of the Black Widowers

by Isaac Asimov

  Avalon, who had been an army officer, looked austere, but said, "Perfectly legitimate."

  Drake said, "He wasn't serious about it—about chemistry, I mean. He had no natural aptitude for it and he never worked, particularly. He was satisfied to get no more than a B minus and it was about all he was good for. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, and it was good enough to sweat out a master's degree for himself—which doesn't amount to much in chemistry. The grades weren't good enough to qualify him for research toward the doctorate, however.

  "That was the whole point. We all—the rest of us who were in graduate chemistry that year—assumed he would only go as far as the master's. Then he'd get some sort of job that would keep his draft exemption going; we figured his father would help out there—"

  "Were the rest of you jealous of him?" asked Rubin. "Because that kind of guy—"

  "We weren't jealous of him" said Drake. "Sure, we envied the situation. Hell, those were the days before government grants fell about us like snow-flakes. Every college semester, I lived a suspense story called 'Do I Dig Up the Tuition Or Do I Drop Out?' All of us would have liked to be rich. But Lance was a likable guy. He didn't parade the situation and would lend us a few bucks when we were in a hole and do it unostentatiously. And he was perfectly willing to admit he wasn't a brain.

  "We even helped him. Gus Blue tutored him in physical organic—for a fee. Of course, he wasn't always scrupulous. There was one preparation he was supposed to have synthesized in lab, and we knew that he bought a sample at a chemical supply house and turned it in as his own. At least, we were pretty sure he did, but it didn't bother us."

  Rubin said, "Why not? That was dishonest, wasn't it?"

  "Because it wouldn't do him any good," said Drake in annoyance. "It just meant another B minus at best. But the reason I bring it up is that we all knew he was capable of cheating."

  "You mean the rest of you wouldn't have?" interposed Stacey. There was a touch of cynicism in his voice.

  Drake lifted his eyebrows, then dropped them again. "I wouldn't guarantee any of us if we were really pushed. The point is, we weren't. We all had a fighting chance to get through without the risk of cheating, and none of us did. As far as I know. Certainly, I didn't.

  "But then there came a time when Lance made up his mind to go on for his Ph.D. It was at a smoker. The war jobs were just beginning to open up and there were a few recruiters on campus. It meant money and complete security from the draft, but Ph.D.'s meant a lot to us and there was some question as to whether we'd come back to school once we got away from class for any reason.

  "Someone (not I) said he wished he were in Lance's shoes. Lance had no choice to make. He would take the job.

  "'I don't know,' said Lance, maybe just to be contrary. 'I think I'll stay right here and go on for the Ph.D.'

  "He may have been joking. I'm sure he was joking. Anyway, we all thought he was, and we laughed. But we were all a little high and it became one of those laughs without reason, you know. If one of us started to die down, he would catch someone else's eyes and start off again. It wasn't that funny. It wasn't funny at all. But we laughed till we were half suffocated. And Lance turned red, and then white.

  "I remember I tried to say, 'Lance, we're not laughing at you,' but I couldn't. I was choking and sputtering. And Lance walked out on us.

  "After that, he was going for his Ph.D. He wouldn't talk about it but he signed all the necessary forms and that seemed to satisfy him. After a while, the situation was as before. He was friendly.

  "I said to him, 'Listen, Lance, you'll be disappointed. You can't get faculty approval for doctoral research with not a single A on your record. You just can't.'

  "He said, 'Why not? I've talked to the committee. I told them I'd take chemical kinetics under St. George, and that I'd make an A in that. I said I'd let them see what I could do."

  "That made less than no sense to me. That was funnier than the remark we laughed at. You'd have to know St. George. You ought to know what I mean, Arnold."

  Stacey nodded, "He gave a stiff course in kinetics. One or two of the brightest would get an A minus; Bs and Cs otherwise."

  Drake shrugged. "There are some professors who take pride in that. It's a kind of professorial version of Captain Bligh. But he was a good chemist; probably the best Berry has ever had. He was the only member of the faculty to achieve national prominence after the war. If Lance could take his course and get a high mark, that would be bound to be impressive. Even with Cs in everything else, the argument would be: 'Well, he hasn't worked much because he hasn't had to, but when he finally decided to buckle down, he showed fire-cracking ability.'

  "He and I took chemical kinetics together and I was running and sweating and snorting every day of that course. But Lance sat in the seat next to me and never stopped smiling. He took notes carefully, and I know he studied them, because when I found him in the library it was always chemical kinetics he was working on. It went down to the wire like that. St. George didn't give quizzes. He let everything hang on the discussion periods and on the final examination, which lasted three hours—a full three hours.

  "In the last week of the course, there were no lectures and the students had their last chance to pull themselves together before finals week. Lance was still smiling. His work in the other courses had been usual Lance quality, but that didn't bother him. We would say, 'How are you doing in kinetics, Lance?' and he would say, 'No sweat!' and sound cheerful, damn it.

  "Then came the day of the finals—" Drake paused, and his lips tightened.

  "Well?" said Trumbull.

  Drake said, his voice a little lower, "Lance Faron passed. He did more than pass. He got a 96. No one had ever gotten over 90 before in one of St. George's finals. I doubt somehow that anyone ever did afterward."

  "I never heard of anyone getting it in recent times," said Stacey.

  "What did you get?" asked Gonzalo.

  "I got 82," said Drake. "And except for Lance's, it was the best mark in the class. Except for Lance's."

  "What happened to the fellow?" asked Avalon.

  "He went on for his Ph.D., of course. The faculty qualified him without trouble and the story was that St. George himself went to bat for him.

  "I left after that," Drake went on. "I worked on isotope separation during the war and eventually shifted to Wisconsin for my doctoral research. But I would hear about Lance sometimes from old friends. The last I heard he was down in Maryland somewhere, running a private lab of his own. About ten years ago, I remember I looked up his name in Chemical Abstracts and found the record of a few papers he turned out. Run of the mill. Typically Lance."

  "He's still independently wealthy?" asked Trumbull.

  "I suppose so."

  Trumbull leaned back. "If that's your story, Jim, then what the hell is biting you?"

  Drake looked about the table, first at one and then at another. Then he brought his fist down so that the coffee cups jumped and clattered. "Because he cheated, damn his hide. That was not a legitimate final exam and as long as he has his Ph.D., mine is cheapened by that much—and yours, too," he said to Stacey.

  Stacey murmured, "Phony doctor."

  "What?" said Drake, a little wildly.

  "Nothing," said Stacey, "I was just thinking of a colleague who did a stint at a medical school where the students regarded the M.D. as the only legitimate doctor's degree in the universe. To them, a Ph.D. stood for 'phony doctor.' "

  Drake snorted.

  "Actually," began Rubin, with the typical air of argumentativeness he could put into even a casual connective, "if you—"

  Avalon cut in from his impressive height, "Well, see here, Jim, if he cheated, how did he get through?"

  "Because there was nothing to show he cheated."

  "Did it ever occur to you," said Gonzalo, "that maybe he didn't cheat? Maybe it was really true that when he buckled down, he had fire-cracking ability."

  "No," said Drake, with another coffee cu
p-rattling fist on the table. "That's impossible. He never showed the ability before and he never showed it afterward. Besides he had that confidence all through the course. He had the confidence that could only mean he had worked out a foolproof plan to get his A."

  Trumbull said heavily, "All right, say he did. He got his Ph.D. but he didn't do so well. From what you say, he's just off in a corner somewhere, poking along. You know damn well, Jim, that lots of guys get through to all kinds of professional positions, even without cheating, who have all their brains in their elbows, and so what. Why get mad at one particular guy, cheating or not? You know why I think you're off your rocker on the subject, Jim? What gripes you is that you don't know how he did it. If you could figure it out, why you'd forget the whole thing."

  Henry interrupted, "More brandy for anyone, gentlemen?"

  Five delicate little glasses were raised in the air. Avalon, who measured out his allowance with an eye dropper, kept his down.

  Drake said, "Well, then, Tom, you tell me. How did he do it? You're the code expert."

  "But there's no code involved. I don't know. Maybe he—he— managed to get someone else to do the test for him and handed in someone else's paper."

  "In someone else's handwriting?" said Drake scornfully. "Besides, I thought of it. We all thought of it. You don't suppose I was the only one who thought Lance cheated, do you? We all did. When that 96 went up on that bulletin board, after we got our breath back—and that took a while—we demanded to see his paper. He handed it over without trouble and we all went over it. It was a near-perfect job, but it was in his handwriting and with his turns of phrase. I wasn't impressed by the few errors he made. I thought at the time he threw them in just in order not to have a perfect paper."

  "All right," said Gonzalo, "someone else did the test and your friend copied it over in his own words."

  "Impossible. There was no one in the class but the students and St. George's assistant. The assistant opened the sealed test papers just before the test started. No one could have written a paper for Lance and another for himself, even if you could imagine no one else seeing it done. Besides, there wasn't anyone in the class capable of turning out a 96-level paper."

  Avalon said, "If you were doing it right there, it would be impossible. But suppose someone managed to get a copy of the questions well before the test and then swatted away at the textbooks till he worked out perfect answers. Couldn't Lance have done that somehow?"

  "No, he couldn't," said Drake flatly. "You're not suggesting anything we didn't think of then, take my word for it. The university had had a cheating scandal ten years before or so and the whole procedure had been tightened up. St. George followed standard procedure. He worked out the questions and turned it in to his secretary the day before the test. She mimeographed the necessary number of copies in St. George's presence. He proofread them, then destroyed the mimeograph and the original. The question papers were packaged and sealed and placed in the school safe. The safe was opened just before the test and the papers handed to St. George's assistant. There was no chance of Lance seeing the questions."

  "Maybe not just then," said Avalon. "But even if the professor had the questions mimeographed the day before the test, how long might he have had the questions in his possession? He might have used a set of questions used on a previous—"

  "No," interrupted Drake. "We carefully studied all previous test papers prepared by St. George as a matter of course before the final exam. Do you think we were fools? There were no duplications."

  "All right. But even if he prepared an entirely new test, he might have prepared it at the beginning of the semester for all you know. Lance might somehow have seen the questions early in the semester. It would be a lot easier to work out answers to a fixed number of questions in the course of the semester than to try to learn the entire subject matter."

  "I think you've got something there, Jeff," said Gonzalo.

  "He's got crud there," said Drake, "because that's not the way St. George worked it. Every question in that final exam turned on some particular point that some particular student goofed up on in class. One of them, and the most subtle, covered a point that I had missed in the last week of lectures. I pointed out what I thought was a mistake in a derivation, and St. George—well, never mind. The point is that the tests had to be prepared after the last lectures."

  Arnold Stacey broke in, "Did St. George always do that? If he did, he would have been handing a hell of a lot to the kids."

  "You mean the students would have been waiting for questions covering errors made in the discussion periods?"

  "More than that. The students would have deliberately pulled boners on those parts of the subject they actually knew well in order to lure St. George into placing twenty points' worth on it."

  Drake said, "I can't answer that. We weren't in his previous classes, so we don't know whether his previous tests followed the same line."

  "Previous classes would have passed on the news, wouldn't they? At least if classes in the forties were anything like classes now."

  "They would have," admitted Drake, "and they didn't. He did it that way that year, anyway."

  "Say, Jim," said Gonzalo, "how did Lance do in the discussion periods?" "He kept quiet; played it safe. We all took it for granted he'd do that. We weren't surprised."

  Gonzalo said, "What about the department secretary? Couldn't Lance have wheedled her into telling him the questions?"

  Drake said grimly, "You don't know the secretary. Besides, he couldn't have. He couldn't have suborned the secretary, or broken into the safe, or pulled any trick at all. From the nature of the questions, we could tell the exam had been constructed in the last week before it had been taken, and during that last week he couldn't have done a thing."

  "Are you sure?" asked Trumbull.

  "Oh, you bet! It bugged us all that he was so confident. The rest of us were sea green with the fear of flunking and he smiled. He kept smiling. On the day of the last lecture, someone said, 'He's going to steal the question sheet.' Actually, I said it, but the others agreed and we decided to—to—well, we kept an eye on him."

  "You mean you never let him out of your sight?" demanded Avalon. "Did you watch at night in shifts? Did you follow him into the John?"

  "Damn near. He was Burroughs' roommate and Burroughs was a light sleeper and swore he knew every time Lance turned over."

  "Burroughs might have been drugged one night," said Rubin.

  "He might have, but he didn't think so, and no one else thought so. Lance just didn't act suspicious in any way; he didn't even act annoyed at being watched."

  "Did he know he was being watched?" said Rubin.

  "He probably did. Every time he went somewhere he would grin and say, 'Who's coming along?' "

  "Where did he go?"

  "Just the normal places. He ate, drank, slept, eliminated. He went to the school library to study, or sat in his room. He went to the post office, the bank, a shoe store. We followed him on every errand all up and down Berry's main street. Besides—"

  "Besides, what?" said Trumbull.

  "Besides, even if he had gotten hold of the question paper, it could only have been in those few days before the test, maybe only the night before. He would have had to sweat out the answers, being Lance. It would have taken him days of solid work over the books. If he could have answered them just by getting a look at them, he wouldn't have had to cheat; he would have gotten a look at them in the opening minutes of the test period."

  Rubin said sardonically, "It seems to me, Jim, that you've painted yourself into a corner. Your man couldn't possibly have cheated."

  "That's the whole point," cried Drake. "He must have cheated and he did it so cleverly no one could catch him. No one could even figure out how. Tom's right. That's what gripes me."

  And then Henry coughed and said, "If I may offer a word, gentlemen?"

  Every face went up as though some invisible puppeteer had pulled the strings.
/>   "Yes, Henry?" said Trumbull.

  "It seems to me, gentlemen, that you are too much at home with petty dishonesty to understand it very well."

  "Why, Henry, you hurt me cruelly," said Avalon with a smile, but his dark eyebrows curled down over his eyes.

  "I mean no disrespect, gentlemen, but Mr. Rubin maintained that dishonesty has value. Mr. Trumbull thinks that Dr. Drake is only annoyed because the cheating was clever enough to escape detection and not because it existed at all, and perhaps all of you agree to that."

  Gonzalo said, "I think you're hinting, Henry, that you're so honest that you're more sensitive to dishonesty than we are and can understand it better."

  Henry said, "I would almost think so, sir, in view of the fact that not one of you has commented on a glaring improbability in Dr. Drake's story that seems to me to explain everything."

  "What's that?" asked Drake.

  "Why, Professor St. George's attitude, sir. Here is a professor who takes pride in flunking many of his students, and who never has anyone get above the 80s on the final examination. And then a student who is thoroughly mediocre—and I gather that everyone in the department, both faculty and students, knew of the mediocrity—gets a 96 and the professor accepts that and even backs him before the qualifying committee. Surely he would have been the first to suspect dishonesty. And most indignantly, too."

  There was a silence. Stacey looked thoughtful.

  Drake said, "Maybe he couldn't admit that he could be cheated from, if you know what I mean."

  Henry said, "You find excuses, sir. In any situation in which a professor asks questions and a student answers them, one always feels somehow that if there is dishonesty, it is always the student's dishonesty. Why? What if it were the professor who were dishonest?"

  Drake said, "What would he get out of that?"

  "What does one usually get? Money, I suspect, sir. The situation as you described it is that of a student who was quite well off financially, and a professor who had the kind of salary a professor had in those days before the government grants began to come. Suppose the student had offered a few thousand dollars—"