He had to be honest. Could it be that he had actually written this just to impress her? Anything printed on a computer looked convincing. If that had been his motive, this served him right. Now was the time to say something witty, but he was no good at all with words– a fact he didn't doubt was more than obvious to her. She probably knew every smart, interesting man in the university, which meant he might as well forget about making any headway toward looking like anything other than an unkempt, poor, math-and-computer-obsessed nerd whose idea of intelligent conversation was to show off the morning's computer escapades.

"You didn't have to go to the trouble of writing a program."

"Ha! Well, no trouble. Easier to have the machine do it than work it out by hand. Once you get good on the computer, that is." He bit his up and looked out the window. "Which isn't to say I think I'm some kind of great programmer. I mean, I am, but that's not how I think of myself."

"You aren't a hacker," she suggested.

"Yeah! Exactly." Everyone knew the term "hacker," so why hadn't he just said it?

She looked at him carefully. "Didn't we meet somewhere before? I could swear I recognize you from somewhere." He had been hoping that she had forgotten, or that she would not recognize him through his glacier glasses. That first day, yes, he had read her computer card for her– a hacker's idea of a perfect introduction!

"Yeah. Remember Mrs. Santucci? That first day?" She nodded her head with a little smile; she remembered it all, for better or worse. He watched her intensely, trying to judge her reaction.

"Yes," she said, "sure. I guess I never properly thanked you for that, so– thank you." She held out her hand. Casimir stared at it, then put out his hand and shook it. He gripped her firmly– a habit from his business, where a crushing handshake was a sign of trustworthiness. To her he had probably felt like an orangutan trying to dislocate her shoulder. Besides which, some apple-blackberry jam had dripped out onto the first joint of his right index finger some minutes ago, and he had thoughtlessly sucked on it.

She was awfully nice. That was a dumb word, "nice," but he couldn't come up with anything better. She was bright, friendly and understanding, and kind to him, which was good of her considering his starved fanatical appearance and general fabulous ugliness. He hoped that this conversation would soon end and that they would come out of it with a wonderful relationship. Ha.

No one said anything; she was just watching him. Obviously she was! It was his turn to say something! How long had he been sitting there staring into the navy-blue maw of his mini-pie? "What's your major?" they said simultaneously. She laughed immediately, and belatedly he laughed also, though his laugh was sort of a gasp and sob that made him sound as if he were undergoing explosive decompression. Still, it relaxed him slightly. "Oh," she added, "I'm sorry. I forgot Neutrino was for physics majors."

"Don't be sorry." She was sorry?

"I'm an English major."

"Oh." Casimir reddened. "I guess you probably noticed that English is not my strong point."

"Oh, I disagree. When you were speaking last night, once you got rolling you did very well. Same goes for today, when you were describing your curves. A lot of the better scientists have an excellent command of language. Clear thought leads to clear speech."

Casimir's pulse went up to about twice the norm and he felt warmth in the lower regions. He gazed into the depths of his half-drained beer, not knowing what to say for fear of being ungrammatical. "I've only been here a few weeks, but I've heard that S. S. Krupp is quite the speaker. Is that so?"

Sarah smiled and rolled her eyes. At first Casimir had considered her just a typically nice-looking young woman, but at this instant it became obvious that he had been wrong; in fact she was spellbindingly lovely. He tried not to stare, and shoved the last three bites of pie into his mouth. As he chewed he tried to track what she was saying so that he wouldn't lose the thread of the conversation and end up looking like an absent-minded hacker with no ability to relate to anyone who wasn't destined to become a machine-language expert.

"He is quite a speaker," she said. "If you're ever on the opposite side of a question from S. S. Krupp, you can be sure he'll bring you around sooner or later. He can give you an excellent reason for everything he does that goes right back to his basic philosophy. It's awesome, I think."

At last he was done stuffing junk food into his unshaven face. "But when he out-argues you– is that a word?"

"Well let it slip by."

"When he does that, do you really agree, or do you think he's just outclassed you?"

"I've thought about that quite a bit. I don't know." She sat back pensively, was stabbed by her chair, and sat back up. "What am I saying? I'm an English major!" Casimir chuckled, not quite following this. "If he can justify it through a fair argument, and no one else can poke any holes in it, I can't very well disagree, can I? I mean, you have to have some kind of anchors for your beliefs, and if you don't trust clear, correct language, how do you know what to believe?"

'What about intuition?" asked Casimir, surprising himself. "You know the great discoveries of physics weren't made through argument. They were made in flashes of intuition, and the explanations and proofs thought up afterward."

"Okay." She drained her coffee and thought about it. "But those scientists still had to come up with verbal proofs to convince themselves that the discoveries were real."

So far, Casimir thought, she seemed more interested than peeved, so he continued to disagree. "Well, scientists don't need language to tell them what's real. Mathematics is the ultimate reality. That's all the anchor we need."

"That's interesting, but you can't use math to solve political problems– it's not useful in the real world."

"Neither is language. You have to use intuition. You have to use the right side of your brain."

She looked again at the clock. "I have to go now and get ready for Krupp." Now she was looking at him– appraisingly, he thought. She was going to leave! He desperately wanted to ask her out. But too many women had burst out laughing, and he couldn't take that. Yet there she sat, propped up on her elbows– was she waiting for him to ask? Impossible.

"Uh," he said, but at the same time she said, "Let's get together some other time. Would you like that?"

"Yeah."

"Fine!" With a little negotiation, they arranged to meet in the Megapub on Friday night.

"I can't believe you're free Friday night!" he blurted, and she looked at him oddly. She stood up and held out her hand again. Casimir scrambled up and shook it gently.

"See you later," she said, and left. Casimir remained standing, watched her all the way across the shiny floor of the Megapub, then telescoped into his seat and nearly blacked out.

She did not have to wait long amid the marble-and-mahogany splendor of Septimius Severus Krupp's anteroom. She would have been happy to wait there for days, especially if she could have brought some favorite music and maybe Hyacinth, taken off her shoes, lounged on the sofa and stared out the window over the lush row of healthy plants. The administrative bloc of the Plex was an anomaly, like a Victorian mansion airlifted from London and dropped whole into a niche beneath C Tower. Here was none of the spare geometry of the rest of the Plex, none of the anonymous monochromatic walls and bald rectangles and squares that seemed to drive the occupants bonkers. No plastic showed; the floors were wooden, the windows opened, the walls were paneled and the honest wood and intricate parquet floors gave the place something of nature's warmth and diversity. In the past month Sarah had seen almost no wood– even the pencils in the stores here were of blond plastic– and she stared dumbly at the paneling everywhere she went, as though the detailed grain was there for a reason and bore careful examination. All of this was an attempt to invest American Megaversity with the aged respectability of a real university; but she felt at home here.