Cold Rain by Craig Smith

number of ways, but I chose silence. Silence, I hoped, would cut more deeply than any argument involving adolescent aesthetics.
    ‘Johnna Masterson did practically the same thing.
    You thought her story was funny.’
    ‘Johnna Masterson has talent.’
    I was not thinking about the euphemistic sense of that word, but Buddy Elder, after a semester of drinking with Walt Beery, picked up on it at once. He gave me a conspirator’s grin. ‘That’s pretty much what I figured.’
    I did not handle this very well. In fact, I gave Buddy a definition of talent that left him wanting in every respect. In the process, I made some specific compar-isons to Masterson’s story, but essentially I broke Buddy’s story down without concern for his feelings and perhaps not even for objectivity. I didn’t like the way the man had looked at Molly and Lucy. To be honest, I didn’t even care for the way he had looked at my horses. This was my revenge. I did not use a single expletive. I tortured him with the tools of my trade. When he tried to interrupt, I poured on the contempt. He asked for my opinion, I said, so he could just sit there and listen!
    I cannot recall ever treating a student to such honesty.
    I gave it without stint. I gave it because I wanted to hurt Mr Buddy Elder in ways that I did not even understand at the moment.
    When I had finished with him, Buddy just smiled, though it was a pale, trembling smile at best. ‘You don’t like me, do you?’
    I thought about laughing, because what he said was a masterpiece of understatement, but I did not want to give him even that much satisfaction. What I said was, ‘It’s not too late to drop the class, Mr Elder.’
    A moment later, I sat alone in my office. There were no students waiting to see me, and I found myself wanting a drink. The feeling actually startled me, all the more so when I realized it was nine-thirty in the morning. I stood up and ripped open Roger Beery’s literary nightmare as much to kill the impulse to drink as to finish with all unpleasantness at once.
    The title was Virgio 9 , and it was dedicated to Arthur C. Clarke. On the first , a starship commander was battling with a starship malfunction of some sort.
    I skimmed ahead until he landed at Virgio 9. On 114, about five minutes at my reading, I slowed down for a seven sex scene between the starship commander and a shapely hermaphroditic clone. Roger got things worked up pretty well with the male-male, male-female anatomies, but a phone call, via a chip implanted in the starship commander’s ear, interrupted them, and our hero had to return to ship before completion of his exotic encounter. I noticed some reveries on the captain’s preferences once he was safely inside his ship, and somewhat embarrassed by the writer’s unconscious ambiguities, I began flipping s. With eight hundred s behind me, I checked the last . I still had two thousand-some s to go. At the halfway point, I stumbled into a three-way of aliens and tried in vain to discover if there was more same-sex stuff going on. Because they were aliens, I couldn’t really figure out what body parts went where, and I hadn’t the patience to work through the thing carefully. I skimmed the last seven hundred s in another five minutes.
    As I still had no students at my office door, I called Barbara Beery. I told her I’d finished her son’s manuscript and wanted to talk to him about it. For one of the few times in her life, Barbara Beery seemed to enjoy the sound of my voice. She was almost girlish as she asked me to hold on. ‘I’ll see if Roger is awake.’
    Roger came to the phone sounding like a man pulled from a deep sleep. I told him I was ready to talk about his novel. He seemed to expect something over the telephone, but I lie much better when I can see how it’s being swallowed and offered to buy lunch if he could get to campus around noon. Noon was obviously inconvenient, but for the sake of art Roger said he would try.
    I hadn’t