Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber Read Free Book Online Page A

for a meeting at Mrs. Carr’s office. Four o’clock this afternoon, Meantime she’s seeing Dr. Gardner. That should sober her up.”
    “Four o’clock,” repeated Norman, standing up. “You’ll be there?”
    “Certainly. I’m sorry about this whole business, Norman. Frankly, I think Mrs. Carr botched it. Got panicky. She’s a pretty old lady.”
    In the outer office Norman stopped to glance at a small display case of items concerned with Gunnison’s work in physical chemistry. The present display was of Prince Rupert drops and other high-tension oddities. He stared moodily at the shiny dark globules with their stiff, twisted tails, vaguely noting the card which told how they were produced by dripping molten glass into hot oil. It occurred to him that Hempnell was something like a Prince Rupert drop. Hit the main body with a hammer and you only jarred your hand. But flick with a fingernail the delicate filament in which the drop ended, and it would explode in your face.
    Fanciful.
    He glanced at the other objects, among them a tiny mirror, which, the legend explained, would fly to powder at the slightest scratch or sudden uneven change in temperature.
    Yet it wasn’t so fanciful, when you got to thinking about it. Any over-organized, tension-shot, somewhat artificial institution such as a small college, tends to develop danger points. And the same would be true of a person or a career. Flick the delicate spot in the mind of a neurotic girl, and she would erupt with wild accusations. Or take a saner person, like himself. Suppose someone were studying him secretly, looking for the vulnerable filament, finger poised to flick — But that was really getting fanciful, He hurried off to his last morning class.
    Coming out of it, Hervey Sawtelle buttonholed him.
    Norman’s departmental colleague resembled an unfriendly caricature of a college professor. Little older than Norman, but with the personality of a septuagenarian, or a frightened adolescent. He was always in a hurry, nervous to the point of twitching, and he sometimes carried two brief cases. Norman saw in him one of the all too many victims of intellectual vanity. Very likely during his own college days Hervey Sawtelle had been goaded by arrogant instructors into believing that he ought to know everything about everything, be familiar with all the authorities on all the subjects, including medieval music, differential equations, and modern poetry, be able to produce an instant knowing rejoinder to any conceivable intellectual remark, including those made in dead and foreign languages, and never under any circumstances ask a question. Failing in his subsequent frantic efforts to become much more than a modern Bacon, Hervey Sawtelle had presumably conceived a deep conviction of his intellectual inadequacy, which he tried to conceal, or perhaps forget, by a furious attention to detail.
    All this showed in his narrow, shrunken, thin-lipped, highbrowed face. Routine worries ceaselessly chased themselves up and down it.
    But at the moment he was in the grip of one of his petty excitements.
    “Say, Norman, the most interesting thing! I was down in the stacks this morning, and I happened to pull out an old doctor’s thesis — 1930 — by someone I never heard of — with the title Superstition and Neurosis .” He produced a bound, typewritten manuscript that looked as if it had aged without ever being opened. “Almost the same title as your Parallelisms in Superstition and Neurosis . An odd coincidence, eh? I’m going to look it over tonight.”
    They were hurrying together toward the dining hall down a walk flooded with jabbering, laughing students, who curtsied smilingly out of their way. Norman studied Sawtelle’s face covertly. Surely the fool must remember that his Parallelisms had been published in 1931, giving an ugly suggestion of plagiarism. But Sawtelle’s nervous toothy grin was without guile.
    He had the impulse to pull Sawtelle aside and tell him