The Grasshopper King Read Online Free PDF Page B

learned nothing. Dean Moresby leaned forward. “I think we ought to end this,” he told Rosso.
    â€œAll right,” Rosso said, reluctantly, “the meeting is adjourned. Thank you, Cheryl.” Still crying, clutching her starched sides, the girl fled.
    What had happened? In brief: the word “potato” was the last one Higgs had spoken. After eating his cheeseburger he’d gone back to his office and begun writing letters: a note authorizing Ellen to make financial arrangements in his name, references for his few persisting graduate students, a petition for sabbatical, effective at once and continuing until such time as Higgs saw fit to end it. Since then he had not spoken to anyone, nor had he communicated in writing. The professors and the Dean had tried every flavor of cajolement and threat; all in vain.
    Only Ellen seemed unperturbed. “I suppose he’ll talk again,” she said, “when he has something to talk about.” After she’d gone, the committee members buzzed at her equanimity. Rosso wondered aloud how long she’d keep it up. Rosso, Dean Moresby reflected, hadn’t known the girl when she was twelve.
    Months went by; Higgs remained speechless. His story went out as human interest on the AP wire. In April, Harry Reasoner arrived on campus to film a piece on Higgs for 60 Minutes . The segment, when it aired, implied strongly that the whole enterprise was a veiled act of protest against the war. A movement, Reasoner hinted darkly, might be on its way. In those days it was possible to imagine such a thing; silent professors on every corner, accusing and significant, our homegrown variety of torched monk. But it didn’t catch on.
    Higgs retreated to his house on the cliff. Every so often the student paper ran an article: “ PROFESSOR STILL IN SECLUSION ” or some such, on the back page, under the comics. That was all.
    One afternoon in September, Ellen responded to a knock on the door to find her father on the stoop, accompanied by two professors she didn’t know, a nervous-looking graduate student, and a pair of technicians laden with tape recorders, microphones, and yards of wire.
    She stepped into the doorway and crossed her arms. “What’s this all about, Daddy?”
    Eyes fixed on the lintel, he explained: the Henderson scholars had formed a plan. Recalling that Higgs’s shorter pauses had invariably concluded with some concentrated insight, they had reasoned that the current silence promised a breakthrough on a previously unimagined scale, a Grand Unified Theory of Henderson. They were terrified of missing it, when it came. They had no reason to be confident that Higgs would publish, or even repeat himself for their benefit. So the Henderson Society had arranged a substantial fund to assure that Higgs’s next words would not go unwitnessed. The nervous graduatestudent would sit all day with Higgs; the tape recorders would run all night. In this way an exhaustive record could be kept.
    â€œAbsolutely not,” Ellen said. “There will not be strangers in this house bothering my husband.” She shut the door and barred it.
    â€œHoney, be reasonable,” Dean Moresby said through the door. “You’ll get used to it.”
    â€œOut of the question.”
    He took a deep breath. “I don’t like to have to remind you that your house is owned by the university.”
    â€œThen don’t.”
    â€œThink how terrible it will be if the police have to come.”
    After a meaningful interval Ellen pulled back the bar, allowed the intruders to file shamefacedly past. Higgs was sitting in the kitchen, eating corn chips one by one from an ancient-looking wooden bowl. Ellen stepped behind his chair and laced her fingers together; and in this conjugal tableau, silent and stubborn, they remained, as the workers installed the recorders and the mikes. But when the technicians started upstairs to the bedroom she