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had put this name about as a disgruntled seeker after the job Ivar had now held for fourteen years, was long gone elsewhere, and had in fact died of the heart attack he deserved.
    Foremost in the provost’s internal data bank just now were the results of his morning meeting with the President of the university and His inner circle of administrative advisors. They were not positive results, did not redound to the university’s professed goal of excellence in every area, or even the provost’s own secret goal of adequacy inmost areas. Cutbacks, on top of cutbacks already made, were in the air, though no one had yet used the word, which was a technical term and a magical charm to be used only at the time when items in the budget were actually being crossed off. It was a technical term in that you could refer to “shifting resources” and “reallocating funds” right up to the moment you told some guy that his research assistant was being fired and his new lab equipment was not being ordered, and it was a magical charm because it instantly transformed the past into a special, golden epoch, the grand place that all things had been cut back from.
    One thing that Ivar had noticed at the meeting was the way that the president and his right-hand and left-hand men, Jack Parker, federal grant specialist, and Bob Brown, human cipher, pushed back from the table as the word “cutback” entered the discussion. It was clear from their manner that the actual cutting back would be beneath the three of them—they were adopting a regrettable-but-necessary-I’m-leaving-for-the-airport-right-after-the-meeting sort of detachment. It was perhaps for this reason that the actual amount to be cut from the budget had not seemed to faze them—the three of them dealt only in numbers. What the numbers would buy, whether copying machines or assistant professors, they did not precisely know. Or at least, the president and Jack Parker, a hawk-nosed man with close-set eyes who Mrs. Walker told Ivar had once been a private investigator, did not know. Bob Brown, balding, round-faced, ever-smiling, seemed to know either everything or nothing. In his two years on the campus (at a salary higher than Ivar’s own) he had not yet divulged what he did know. His only distinct characteristic was his habit of referring to the students as “our customers.”
    Though his computer screen was shining with color and information, Ivar was biting the eraser of his pencil and marking in little tiny writing on a little tiny piece of paper, etching the little tiny names of enormous corporations, potential investors of great big sums of money. Like everyone else at the meeting, he was preparing a list for Elaine Dobbs-Jellinek, associate vice-president for development, whose whole job was made up of the sort of approaching, stroking, grooming, and teasing that these corporate contracts, or “grants,” demanded. Until the advent of Jack Parker, she had approached, stroked, groomed, and teased the federal government, too, but now Jack did that, spending most of his time in Washington, D.C., where, Ivar couldn’t help imagining, the first thing he did when he got tohis hotel room, before he even cast his glittering gaze around the room for evidence of hostile intrusion, was to pull out his .357 Magnum and set it on the table beside his bed. Elaine’s beat was corporate headquarters in places like Wichita and Fargo, where university-trained engineers and agronomists had built empires based on flow valves and grain sorghum.
    Associations of mutual interest between the university and the corporations were natural, inevitable, and widely accepted. According to the state legislature, they were to be actively pursued. The legislature, in fact, was already counting the “resources” that could be “allocated” elsewhere in state government when corporations began picking up more of the tab for higher education, so success in finding this money would certainly convince