Just a Couple of Days Read Online Free PDF

a matter of fact, one of your colleagues in the former Philosophy Department is currently developing a paper exploring the ethics involved in such research. Feel free to contact her. I can’t recall her name, but she’s the philosopher we retained for the new Humanities Department.”
    â€œDr. Carthorse?” He was talking about Blip’s wife, Sophia.
    â€œThat’s the one. I always get her and the historian confused. She’s a woman, too.” Without warning he served the ball, this time giving it a backspin. It curved crazily after it bounced and I managed to catch it to avoid having to give chase once again.
    â€œWhat the hell was that, Fountain?” He barked at me like a high school gym teacher.
    â€œSorry.” I tossed it back to him and ignored his abrasive manners.
    â€œYou know,” he snapped the ball out of the air after it bounced. “I’ve always had a knack for this game.” He fondled the ball as he vaunted on about his Ping-Pong heroics. “It’s like an inborn ability with me. My body is somehow congenitally outstanding at table tennis.” He paused his thrasonical throes, waiting for my response, but my intellect was preoccupied. When it became apparent that no kudos were forthcoming, he tossed the ball back to me. “Score’s four-zip, Fountain. Game point. That means it’s your serve.”
    My serve was clumsy, but it made it over the net. Sneering, Tynee spun it back to me with a broad stroke of his arm. My mind, however, was not on the game, but rather was rapt with curiosity, turning over the possibilities of the assignment.
Consequently, I reacted to his volley with no conscious effort, returning the ball in a neat bounce off the corner of the table on his side. I was momentarily stunned, as was Tynee, only I was surprised at my own sudden unpracticed skill, and he was vexed that I had denied him a sweep and easy victory.
    â€œWell.” He abruptly checked his watch. “I’ve another meeting. The details of your assignment are in the purple envelope by the door. Beware of academic espionage. I expect a reply by Friday.” He placed his paddle on the table. “We’ll just say I won.”
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    6 The institution of the university was transformed long ago from a center of learning into a center of earning. The pursuits of wisdom, truth, knowledge, and freedom are as antiquated as the masonry monuments that bear such academic platitudes, having given way, respectively, to the corrosive pursuits of profit, efficiency, technical expertise, and employment. Ivy-covered buildings shelter the bespectacled neurons of technocratic consciousness, department after department attracting grant money to generate research to create new industries and professions to make more money. Status competition keeps us racing to publish, and if we fail in that regard, punishment is swift and severe: teaching. Dr. Blip Korterly taught full-time, though his employment was considered part-time. I, on the other hand, have not taught a class in over five years. I, Dr. Flake Fountain, molecular geneticist, have been a willing and well-paid servant, a slave butler who gets to wear fancy clothes and sleep in the mansion, but a slave nonetheless, and subject to beatings if I don’t cower with a bow.
    My department attracts millions of dollars to the university,
and only the football program generates more revenue. Many of my colleagues believe, with the peculiar pride of a master’s pet slave, that we will overtake the TU Turkeys within a few years. They are probably correct. Only four years ago, we seceded from the Biology Department and formed the Department of Molecular Genetics. There had been considerable hostility between the ecologists, drawn to biology via the essays of Emerson, Thoreau, and Muir, and the molecular geneticists, drawn to biology via the promise of research stipends the size of sequoias. Our new department, though