The Chronicles of Nevin Reasoner: The Complete Duology

by Thomas Lombard

  Anson stepped all the way into the corridor but found it hard to let go of the metal knob on the door, in case he might need a quick retreat from some unexpected encounter. After a long minute with no threat, he gingerly let go of the knob and started to walk slowly down the corridor. Stopping to look back, he saw a narrow black plate fixed to the top of the door he just exited. On this plate was an unfamiliar phrase in white letters: JANITOR’S STOREROOM. This confirmed his guess that the room was indeed a storage place probably for alchemic supplies, but he wondered whether Janitor was a man or woman’s name and what new alchemy he could learn from him or her.

  Anson continued walking in tiptoe fashion when his gaze fell to the floor. From one end of the corridor to the other, the entire floor was made of narrow slats of wood with a highly polished finish that brightly reflected the illumination from the ceiling lights. Stepping on a slat that creaked noticeably, Anson froze and grimaced over the possibility of detection. This caused him to notice a small red box on the wall to his left. Suspended from the box on a necklace-type chain was a tiny hammer. A piece of clear glass covered most of the small metal box, but it was not a tiny window because nothing was visible behind it except a metal hook. Embossed on the top of the box in raised letters were several words:

  IN CASE OF FIRE

  BREAK GLASS

  AND PULL ALARM

  He certainly did not want to raise an alarm, so he took a few quick steps farther down the hallway and found himself by the open door. He looked in and was astonished.

  The door was an entrance to a small room. Directly opposite the door was a very large window, half of which was oddly below ground level. The only rooms below ground he knew of were dungeon cells. Between the door where Anson stood and the window, a type of table with drawers was located flush to the wall. The rest of the room was dominated by shelves upon shelves of books, possibly hundreds of books, most of which seemed unusually small. There might be more books in this room than in the entire kingdom of Antrim. Maybe this is a king’s private library. So many books! Surely, it would be widely known if Antrim’s King had such a magnificent collection. His mouth agape, he concluded that this must be some other unknown place, perhaps not even in Antrim at all. With that realization, he set his hand on the doorframe to steady himself. His fingers touched a black plate fixed to the wall, just to the right of the doorway. This plate was smaller than the one seen atop the storeroom door, but it had similar white lettering that spelled out what appeared to be a name: NEVIN REASONER.

  Anson stood weak-kneed in the open doorway. This must be the sanctum of someone very learned, possibly even a High Mage. From down the corridor to his right he heard approaching footsteps echoing off the wooden floor and walls. Coming toward him was the tallest human he had ever seen!

  As this man approached, Anson was relieved to see that he was unarmed and his manner was not threatening. Anson trembled as the man spoke with a resonant, authoritative voice. “I’m Nevin Reasoner. Can I help you?”

  Not only was this man imposing in size, maybe two feet taller than any man in Antrim, but he was the very one for whom this chamber was named! This must be the High Mage himself. Anson did not know what to say and began to reel. His head throbbed and his body still ached miserably from his ordeal, forcing him to lean against the wall to support himself. He struggled to speak, “I...I have been...delivered here. Am I still in Antrim?”

  Chapter 5

  Nevin

  Earlier that day Nevin Reasoner sat at his usual table in the Rainbow Café.

  With a pencil poised on her order pad, the waitress fidgeted impatiently. The morning rush was under way and Nevin was taking too long to decide. As he continued to stare through the menu, the waitress started to tap the pad with her pencil. “What’ll it be today, Professor?” The waitress, Judy, tried to be patient despite the rush. Nevin was a frequent customer and good tipper, and she thought he was less snooty than other college professors who ate at the cafe. Nevin was always pleasant to her and the other waitresses, except that he seemed preoccupied today. One time he had been so absorbed in thought that he never noticed she brought him oatmeal instead of bacon and eggs. She could see that today was another of those deep-in-thought days.

  Nevin looked up absently, realizing the waitress was waiting for him to say something. “Hmmm, Judy,” he said. “I suppose you want me to make up my mind. OK. Let me have two poached eggs on white toast. I’ll have herb tea instead of coffee.”

  “You want bacon with that, Professor?” The waitress was a little surprised because he rarely deviated from his usual order.

  “No, I have decided to stop eating bacon.” Much as he liked it, he could no longer ignore the mounting evidence of the undesirable effects of frequent bacon consumption. It was not bacon’s dietary cholesterol that dissuaded him, since those effects were still debatable; rather, the potential harm from sodium nitrites persuaded him to beg off. It satisfied him to yield to a good scholarly argument, even when debating with himself. After today, though, he was going to have to make more than dietary changes in his life. “Judy, let me have the orange tea, please.”

  “OK, Professor.” The waitress slightly raised an eyebrow and made the correction on her order pad. Not only did he ask for tea instead of his usual coffee, he had already ordered a different flavor tea.

  Judy made the corresponding notes on her order pad and moved off. She always referred to Nevin as “Professor,” even though he once tried to explain to her that he was a Lecturer, not a Professor. To her it was no big deal. It was not a big deal to his students, either, who also called him “Professor,” but it was an important distinction to him—and to certain tenured faculty at Hempstead College.

  As a joke, Judy returned with hot water and a bag of peppermint tea rather than the two teas he ordered. Nevin stared out the window, ignoring the service. The waitress smirked as she walked back to the kitchen. She had bet her tip with another waitress that Nevin wouldn’t notice she had brought the wrong flavor tea. It was a good bet. Nevin was too deeply engrossed in his dilemma to think about tea or coffee.

  He had been a Lecturer for five years at Hempstead College. Five years was the maximum term of employment allowed for Lecturers who did not have a completed postgraduate degree. Last week a motion was made in the Faculty Senate to allow Nevin a one-year extension, but it failed by one vote. One side argued that Lecturer positions were intentionally limited to five years so that procrastinating graduate students would not avoid completing their degree. Even though Nevin was technically not a graduate student and was willing to remain the lowest paid teacher at the college, it pleased some faculty members that today he would be teaching his last class at Hempstead College.

  Nevin sipped his peppermint tea. He felt some consolation that many current and former students had rallied to his support. Regrettably, the five-year rule would prevail.

  Nevin had taught one course each semester for the past five years. It was always the same course—The Philosophy of Science—but he changed the content each time to match the interests of the students. He organized his course so that it incorporated knowledge and methods from several fields of science, and focused on pressing human problems foremost on the students’ minds: world hunger, nuclear disarmament, national economy, depletion of the ozone layer and other timely issues troubling to students. It was indisputably the most popular class on campus. For the past three years the class enrollment had to be limited to 80 students, matching the number of seats in the college’s largest lecture room. Nevin’s class was inevitably one of the first to fill up during registration week. For the past two semesters, it was even scheduled at the earliest hour of the day as a means to offset the high student interest. Many students still attended class sessions even after they had completed the course; some came occasionally and others with regularity, despite not receiving additional course credit. Voluntary attendance at an 8:00 AM class without receiving course credit was the height of inspiration for a col
lege teacher, but that did not put off Nevin’s detractors.

  The waitress brought the remainder of his breakfast. Nevin placed the poached eggs on the toast, being careful not break the yokes, but soon lost interest in food as he drifted off again. He considered himself lucky that he had a teaching job at Hempstead in the first place. There had been a dispute among the various science departments over which professor was going to teach the Philosophy of Science course to incoming freshmen, which was a dreaded teaching assignment. Historically, this course was unchallenging and uninspiring to both teachers and students alike, and it was usually delegated to the junior faculty member. Due to a variety of circumstances, a vacancy opened for teaching this course and Nevin applied for it.

  Nevin had completed a Bachelor of Science degree at another college, and subsequently accumulated additional coursework and field experience covering a variety of physical, natural and social sciences. He had never earned an advanced degree and this initially worked against his application for the teaching position. Since there were no other candidates and the semester was about to start, Nevin was hired at the minimum faculty grade of Lecturer.

  Some of the older faculty members objected to his teaching methods. Among the reasons for their attitude was his refusal to have a formal syllabus and his radical departure from their own introductory science courses. Others bore a grudge against Nevin for the past embarrassment he had caused two tenured professors. The first of these incidents took place six years earlier, before Nevin was hired as a Lecturer, while he was auditing a sociology class as a special student. The professor used the Reconstruction Period after the American Civil War as an example of “anomy,” an anarchistic breakdown of law and order in a society. Nevin disagreed with the professor’s example, politely at first, pointing out that “anomy” represented complete chaos with the loss of government control which was not the case during this period of American history. The sociology professor, a man with twenty-five years seniority at the College, was taken aback by the correction. He was so annoyed that he ridiculed Nevin for wasting the class’s time. In defense of himself, Nevin articulately pointed out there “were no examples of ‘anomy’ in American history since the First Continental Congress. During the Reconstruction Era federal, state and local governmental bodies were actually emerging and asserting control, which carpetbaggers frequently manipulated to achieve position and wealth.” The professor retorted that maybe Nevin should be the one to teach the class, since he was so well informed—which Nevin proceeded to do, first by informing the class that the preferred spelling was a-n-o-m-i-e. The professor lodged a formal complaint seeking to have Nevin removed from the class, but an inquiry by a subcommittee of the Faculty Senate ruled that Nevin had acted in a scholarly manner (and, though not stated in the record, that his points had been correct).

  The second incident occurred two years later, just after Nevin was hired as a Lecturer. In his first week, he discussed the ethical pros and cons of extracting petroleum from sandy soil to ease the country’s mounting oil shortage (a process called sand fracking). One of the students carried this discussion over to her geology class and rebutted her geology professor, who had advocated that same extraction procedure that Nevin’s class had decided was environmentally unsound. This geology professor happened to be a part-time consultant for an oil company and eventually became the target of student demonstrations against the growing practice of sand fracking. As a result, the oil company dropped him as a consultant. Blaming Nevin for this incident, he angrily cautioned other faculty members to be wary of this upstart Lecturer.

  Nevin dropped his napkin to his plate and got up to leave, his breakfast mostly uneaten. After paying his bill, he left the cafe. Judy watched him leave, noticing that he was not carrying his ever-present briefcase. He must have absent-mindedly forgotten it, she said to the cashier, but that was not so. When leaving his apartment earlier that morning, he gathered his briefcase with his class notes as usual. After a second thought, he flung it into a trash bin. For him, that was a rare impulsive act. His class notes were always impeccable and he never went to class without them, but today he left that behind as a silent, albeit impotent, protest against the forces that were changing his life. For Nevin, this was a rare concession to emotion.

  * * *

  Even though it was only a five-minute walk from the cafe to the campus, it was enough time for Nevin to waver. The reality of his situation began to cause him increasing anxiety. Despite his reputation for precision and accuracy when it came to teaching the sciences, he had not made any plans for his future. He chastised himself for getting into this fix. Despite the great number of college courses he had taken, he was unwilling to conform to a formal degree program. Although he had accumulated more credits than many graduate programs required, he preferred to pursue knowledge without encumbrances.

  He had immersed himself in coursework from many fields. Botany, geology, philology and physics were his favorites but he like other fields nearly as much. One of his supportive professors referred to these pursuits as “academic bingeing,” but she admired his ability to bring together overlapping knowledge from different fields of study. She encouraged him to continue his unorthodox approach to his own education, yet she warned him that without an advanced degree he would have no “union card” for employment as a teacher, particularly at the college level. He did not worry about that admonition because he was satisfied with the modest living he made as a Lecturer, which he supplemented with income from an occasional magazine article. Now, the lack of a formal degree meant he would lose his job at Hempstead.

  He had found great pleasure from his path of self-directed learning because he had unencumbered freedom to explore whatever problems or applications he chose. This degree of freedom was, ironically, not readily available in graduate degree programs. He thought there were too many required courses with overly strict syllabi, reinforced by narrow viewpoints of professors who were specialized in one, or at most two fields of knowledge. Despite his straits now, he was satisfied he had gone about his education the best way for him. Young as he was, he was his own man. His only regret was that a population of one made for a pretty small community.

  Nevin reached the steps of the Science Building and stopped to take a deep breath to calm himself. His last class awaited him.

  After entering the building, he went directly to the large classroom on the first floor. The room was designed in the European style, requiring two stories with cascading rows of seats arranged in a wide semicircle. Several ascending aisles were steeply angled. Just in front of the bottom row of seats, a lectern was situated in the center of the floor. Both the seating and the lighting directed unobstructed attention from the seats down toward this lectern, isolating the person who stood there. Nevin disliked this lecture room because its design made it difficult to promote discussion among the students.

  Nevin stopped at the classroom door, completely taken by surprise at what he saw. The room was filled to overflowing. Every seat was taken, every step in the aisles occupied. There were dozens more seated on the floor around the lectern.

  When he appeared at the door, the rustling of idle movements and student chatter stopped immediately. All heads turned silently as he slowly moved toward the lectern. He took a moment to smile at the assemblage, scanning the rows from left to right and bottom to top. They were there to express appreciation for his skills as a teacher and scholar. This show of support was a far better indicator of one’s professorial skills than the completion of a pedantic doctoral program, he thought, but his standing as a teacher was a lost battle. Better to get this over with without complaining. He smiled broadly and spoke to the group. “Well...this is quite a turnout for our last class. And at eight o’clock in the morning, no less. If there is one thing I have learned from you, it is a repudiation of the myth that college students cannot wake up before noon.” There was muted tittering.

  He continued, “You have accomplished a lot as a class over t
his semester, as have those of you who came today but took this course at other times.” His glance fell to a dark-haired woman in a wheelchair among the students seated around the lectern. “Ms. Hanson, here,” he nodded and extended an open hand toward her, “has a four-year attendance record for this course—second only to my own.” A brief snuffle of laughter ensued with a gracious smile from the young woman. “I thank you for your interest, Ms. Hanson, and the support and interest the rest of you have shown for this course. I hope the person who teaches this class in the future will enjoy it as much as I.” The dark-haired woman nodded at this acknowledgment, along with several others who lowered or turned their heads to hide their feelings. Nevin cleared his throat to stifle the lump.

  “We have had spirited debates in this class over some important problems and the role science can play in solving those problems. Many of you have changed your views...repeatedly, it seems...and sometimes found yourselves arguing both sides of issues. Some of you, like Mr. Thompson, argued both sides of an issue so well I thought you might have been twins.” It was a feeble attempt at humor, but the best he could do under the circumstances. More students grinned and the laughter grew a little louder.

  “Mr. Thompson, here,” Nevin said, acknowledging a student in the front row, “went back and forth so often on acid rain, we couldn’t tell whether he wanted to own a steel company or convert one into a city park.” Their mirthful reaction indicated their enjoyment of these heated debates with Thompson, who was one of the few students in this class who would argue from a pro-business viewpoint.

  “Most of you probably don’t know that Mr. Thompson’s family does, in fact, own a steel mill, and he has the opportunity to become its Chief Executive Officer. I don’t think he would mind if I shared with you some conclusions he has reached from our debates in this class. The research paper he submitted for this course offers a planned diversification for a steel mill. As you might expect, his plan provides for expansion and a profit motive. However, he proposes to develop voluntary retraining for employees as the company experiments with new ventures. In order to recoup the cost of pollution control, which Mr. Thompson feels must be mandated by law, he proposes to recycle the mill’s fly ash. He has discovered that the ash can be used in the construction of earth-wall homes, although economically it is a break-even proposition at best. It might surprise some of you, particularly those of you who view science from the left side of the political spectrum, that Mr. Thompson has come to think that some business ventures only need to break even if they provide a needed public service. Many of the ideas in his steel mill proposal came from those of you who argued hardest with him—which, from my perspective, ladies and gentlemen, demonstrates how the world gets improved through scientific discourse.” Nevin nodded at the young man in the first row, who was obviously sheepish about the attention.