“Here’s the deal,” he said at last, turning back to Dennis. “I’ll tutor you.” Dennis broke into a grin, but Will cut him off before he could express gratitude, knowing that his good cheer would only last a moment. “But I can only afford the time to offer you very limited tutoring. I can help out in the classes that we’re in together, because helping you understand those will help me get a better grasp of the material. But for the others, for the older work ... I don’t know, maybe you can try Estresor Fil or something. I just ... Dennis, I really can’t spare the time. Not without killing my own chances.”

Dennis’s smile had vanished as quickly as it appeared. “I know, Will. Believe me. I’m so sorry I had to even ask you.” Will thought that would be the end of it, and was relieved that Dennis was taking the news with such good grace. But then Dennis dropped the anvil. “But I’m begging you, Will, to reconsider. Limited tutoring won’t help me. I’m too lost. I need major help. Or I need to cheat. I can get this stuff, I’m just not as smart as everyone else and I need more time, a lot more. Cheating is wrong, I know that. But it’ll buy me time to really understand everything. That’s what I need.”

“Dennis, don’t ask me for that,” Will said sadly. “I can’t. I just ... I can’t.”

Dennis stared at him with eyes that had gone cold. Will was surprised. It was like looking at someone he didn’t even know. “You could, Will,” he said, his voice glacial. “If you wanted to. To help a friend, you could.”

“What?” Will said, astonished at Dennis’s sudden sea change. “You’re saying I’m not your friend because I won’t help you cheat?”

“I’m just saying that if you really considered me a friend, you’d help me in some way.”

“I offered to tutor you—”

“In a very limited way,” Dennis reminded him. “An hour here, an hour there. And at the end of it, you feel good about yourself and I flunk out anyway. No, thanks. If you don’t care to offer some real help, then I guess we know what this friendship is.”

“What?” Will asked him, still bewildered by this turn.

“A lie,” Dennis said. “Nothing but a lie.” He lurched to his feet and stomped across Will’s room, headed for the door. “Thanks for nothing, Will,” he said. He let himself out.

In stunned silence, Will watched him go. Maybe it’s the stress,he told himself. It’s making Dennis act in ways he wouldn’t ordinarily. He’ll come hack and apologize in a few minutes. Or tomorrow, first thing, he’ll feel so bad he’ll beg me to forgive him.

But even as those thoughts bounced around in his head, Will knew that he was probably wrong. The hateful look in Dennis’s eyes, at the end, the set of his jaw ... maybe this Dennis was the real Dennis, and the one Will had thought he’d known was the imposter. Maybe Dennis Haynes was someone who would befriend you as long as he thought you could help him, and then cut you off as soon as you were no longer useful. He didn’t want to believe that, but he knew that it was possible. The way Dennis had glared at him brought that home.

Taking his place at the computer again, Will realized that he had probably lost a friend, for good.

But on the bright side, it gave him that much more time to study.

Chapter 27

The next day dawned clear and warm over San Francisco. This was the kind of day that, before the advent of climate control technology, had been so rare here that it brought the residents outside in droves. Even now, when everyone knew that the weather could be manipulated to a large extent, there was something about such a lovely late spring day that people were tempted to skip their responsibilities and lounge about in the sun.

Will Riker was not one of those people. He appreciated nice weather as much as anyone—growing up in Alaska made one particularly appreciative of warm, sunny days—but at this point in his Academy career nothing could tempt him away from the tasks he had set for himself. He had lunch with Felicia, and their concession to the weather was to eat at an outside table. The table was in a kind of alcove sheltered by a stand of bamboo which rustled in the gentle breeze, with a winding brook on the other side. Felicia had told him that this was one of her favorite spots on campus.

Over lunch, he recounted Dennis’s visit to his room the night before. As he told the story he saw her face darken with anger, until he regretted having brought it up at all.

“Will!” she exploded when he finished. “He’s your friend! I can’t believe you treated him like that!”

Will shrugged. “What was I supposed to do, Felicia? Throw away my own career for his? Cheat for him? How would that help?”

“You could have helped him out in some way,” she insisted.

“I offered. He didn’t want it. It was everything or nothing, as far as he was concerned.”

“Still.

“Are you going to tutor him?” Will asked.

“He hasn’t asked me to.”

“But he might. What if he does? And you could always volunteer, you know. Are you willing to spend hours every day helping him catch up?”

“Maybe it won’t really take that long,” she said. “Maybe he’s exaggerating the situation.”

“Maybe,” Will admitted. “But I don’t think so. It seems like he knows what his own position is, and it’s pretty precarious.”

“Even so,” Felicia said, anger still simmering in her voice and body language, “you ought to do what you can to help him out. Friendships are important, Will. Relationships are important. You can’t just turn a friend away like that.”

“Felicia,” Will said, feeling suddenly helpless. “I told you, I offered to do what I could. It just wasn’t as much as Dennis wanted.”

She nodded. “And then, instead of negotiating something in between, you just let him walk out the door. Have you seen him today?”

“No,” Will replied.

“Don’t you think you should find him? Make sure he’s okay?”

“If you had seen him last night, Felicia ... he turned into an iceberg, like our entire friendship rested on that one question, and when I said no, then it was just over. I don’t feel like it’s my place to track him down. If he wants to find me and apologize, he knows where I live.”

Felicia had folded her arms across her chest and looked toward where the brook cut through a sward of grassy lawn, instead of at Will. “You disappoint me, Will,” she said. “Truly.” She rose, then, and walked away from the table, leaving Will with the remains of their lunch. “I guess I’ll talk to you later,” she called back as she left.

Will genuinely didn’t know what he was supposed to say to that. Hadn’t he made the best offer he could to Dennis? Didn’t he need to keep his priorities straight in order to graduate with the best grades he could? He cleaned up the lunch mess, checked the time, and headed toward his next class.

Professor Knudsen was, Will believed, one of the best lecturers he’d had during his time at the Academy. She paced the front of the room as she talked, a slight, blonde figure in tailored civilian clothes, speaking with a heavy Scandinavian accent, stopping from time to time to accentuate a point with a jabbing finger or a fist punching the palm of her other hand. She knew her material, which was the history of the Federation’s first contacts with alien races, inside and out, and never needed notes when she lectured. Normally Will took pleasure in watching her. Her utter command of the subject matter was inspiring and she made it seem important and valuable.

But today he couldn’t even focus on what she was saying. He kept running through his conversation with Dennis in his head, and the argument with Felicia that it had precipitated. She hadn’t come right out and called him a jerk, but her tone of voice and the way she’d carried herself had done that job for her. He couldn’t think of anything he might have done differently, that was the problem. He couldn’t accede to Dennis’s demands; they were unreasonable. They would put his own standing in jeopardy, maybe even threaten his whole career. It just didn’t make sense to take a chance like that for anybody.