Title: Angels of the Silences
Author: E.A. Week
E-mail:
Summary: The tenth Doctor goes undercover at a small American college to unravel the mystery behind a brutal murder, but he's not the only incognito time-traveler on campus.
Category: Doctor Who.
Distribution: Feel free to link this story to any Doctor Who or fanfic site, or distribute on a mailing list, but please drop me at least a brief e-mail and let me know you've done this.
Feedback: Letters of comment are always welcome! Loved it? Hated it? Send me an email and let me know why!
Disclaimers: Copyrights to all characters in this story belong to their respective creators, production companies, and studios. I'm just borrowing them, honest! The story title and all chapter titles are shamelessly stolen from Counting Crows.
Story rating: This story is rated M for language, sexuality, and adult themes.
Possible spoilers: This story takes place after the fourth season of the new Doctor Who series.
Chapter One
American Girls
The Concord Trailways bus rumbled to a halt in the center of town, and Cassie Sterlin hopped up to her feet, messenger bag slung around her shoulders, twitching with impatience while the students in front of her disembarked. At last she stood outside in the bright mountain sunshine, the heat of late summer lingering, still a shock after the winter she'd left behind in the southern hemisphere. Kids chattered while the driver opened the underbelly of the bus, and one by one, the students fished out their luggage. Cassie made a quick survey of their faces, but these were kids she didn't recognize—youngsters, most of them, kids who would have been freshmen the year before, when Cassie had been abroad in Australia.
Her body still had the heady, disoriented sense that came from having crossed so many time zones so quickly. There had been the flight from Perth to Sydney, the flight from Sydney to Los Angeles, then from LA to New York, where she'd spent a hectic twenty-four hours at home, then there had been the flight from La Guardia to Manchester, and finally, the bus ride into Vermont. At least she'd have a few days to recover before classes began.
When the crowd cleared a little, Cassie retrieved her bicycle and her big backpack. She stashed the messenger bag with her laptop into one of the bike's saddlebags, strapped on the backpack, and swung a leg over the bicycle. The other kids observed her brisk efficiency with envious eyes; some of them were already piling into taxi cabs. Cassie waved and smiled, then pushed off with one foot and started pedaling toward campus.
(ii)
When Cassie had left Ethan Allen College at the end of her sophomore year, Grover Hall had been half-finished, a pile of metal beams and exposed pipes. Now it stood complete, its red brick façade blending so well with the rest of campus that it might have stood there for a hundred years; only the lack of creeping ivy gave it away. Cassie locked her bicycle to a bike rack out front.
Inside the main entry hall, she greeted a harried-looking RA, who looked up Cassie's name in a box of small brown envelopes containing keys to the dorm rooms.
"Sterlin, there you are, 302b." She passed an envelope to Cassie. "You can get your zap card at Facilities."
"Thanks!"
Grover Hall had been built with an elevator, for ADA compliance, but Cassie was too impatient to wait, and she sprinted up to the third floor. In a cozy southwest alcove she found suite 302, a cluster of four single rooms, her own name on the door to 302b. Cassie unlocked the door, almost dancing with excitement, finding within a spacious room with a tall window and new furniture in pale pine. The room was wired for cable TV and Internet access, the desk designed for good ergonomics, light years ahead of the antique dormitories where Cassie had lived her first two years on campus. She removed her backpack and plugged her laptop into the wall socket, checking her e-mail. Still no messages from Dr. Cavanaugh.
It didn't look like either Chelsea or Exa had arrived yet, so Cassie bounded out of the room to get her ID card and see about retrieving her trunks and boxes from the storage room of Bakken Hall, her sophomore year dormitory.
(iii)
Moving her belongings from one dorm to another, without benefit of a car was hot, sweaty work, but Cassie hoped the exertion would help her sleep that night, help get her body's rhythm back into the correct time zone. A strapping male RA helped Cassie move her biggest trunk; she smiled and tried to chat him up, but he was only a sophomore, not interested.
Footsteps and a loud voice proclaimed a new arrival, and a moment later, Exa von Alt appeared: petite and raven-haired, sophisticated after a year in Europe.
"Cassie!" she shrieked, running to embrace her friend. "Ohmigod, when'd you get back? Did you get my text?"
"Uh…" Cassie realized she hadn't checked her phone for a couple of hours. "Sorry; I've been schlepping boxes." She waved at Exa's parents. "Hi."
Exa's room, 302a, was almost identical to Cassie's. "Any sign of Chelsea?"
"Not yet..." Cassie was checking her Nokia. "Wait, here's a text—she'll be here around eight." Of the three friends, Chelsea lived closest to the college and was usually the last to arrive. While Exa and her parents carried bags and crates into the room, Cassie thumbed a quick response.
"Who's our fourth?" Exa pointed to the door of 302d. "No name."
Cassie flagged down a female RA, who was herding some new students to their rooms.
"Hi, who's in 302d?" she asked.
The RA checked the photocopied list in her hands. After a moment or two of hesitation, the girl asked, "Did you know Tracy Bannerman?"
Cassie and Exa glanced at each other, shaking their heads.
"Nope," Cassie provided. Studying the RA's expression, she said, "Why, what's wrong?"
"She was abroad in London last year, and she died. In the—you know, in the attack."
Cassie felt some of the bright cheer go out of her day. "Oh."
"So, the room's empty, for now."
"Okay."
The RA departed with her charges, and Exa said, "Well, there's a happy note to start the year on."
Cassie slumped against the wall. "I wonder how many other kids aren't coming back?"
"Dunno," said Exa. "Depends where they were in June."
Mrs. von Alt asked Cassie, "Is your family all right?"
"They hid in the basement 'till it was over," Cassie told her. "My grandfather built it as a shelter—my great-grandmother made him do it. She always said someday something would attack us from the sky."
"A woman ahead of her time," Mrs. von Alt joked, with no real humor.
"We're lucky we live in the Adirondacks," her husband added. "Nobody bothers you there. Were you all right Down Under, Cassie?"
"Yeah, I was out at a research station in the bush. The cities got hit the worst."
"On the upside, careers in science are booming," Exa said, giving Cassie a friendly poke. "Especially astronomy and the defense industry."
"No, thank you," said Cassie, wrinkling her nose.
"Is that everything, Exa?" Mrs. von Alt nodded toward her daughter's pile of luggage.
"Yeah, that's it."
"We need to get going," her father said. "It's a long drive home."
After Exa had seen her parents off and returned upstairs, she said, "They hate talking about the attack, like it'll go away if they don't pay attention to it."
"I've been doing the same thing." Cassie had plugged her iPod into a set of small speakers, and music filled the room.
"Something like that could happen again," argued Exa.
"What, the whole planet being moved to another part of space?" Cassie brushed a fine strand of brown hair from her eyes. "Sorry for being an ostrich, but I'm happy to pretend it'll never happen again."
"Did you actually see...?"
"See what?"
"One of those things," Exa said.
"No, they didn't bother with the outback—why should they? There's nothing important there. We saw the ships, though, flying overhead."
"God, that was fucking creepy," Exa shivered. "I'm glad I was in Vienna—France and Germany got hit a lot harder. We saw everything on TV, though, 'till communications went down." They fell quiet, each reliving those nightmarish two days. For Cassie, the worst part had been the absence of sunlight, the perpetual darkness.
"When we started moving back, what'd you think?" asked Exa.
"That it was the end... maybe that the planet was breaking up." Cassie shuddered, despite the warm August sunlight streaming in through the west-facing windows. "Me and the other kids were holding onto each other and waiting." At the time, Cassie's incoherent thoughts had centered on her far-away parents, full of anguish that doomsday had found them half a world away from each other.
"Yeah, same here, pretty much." Exa said, "We were under tables and in doorframes, and then bam, there was daylight again and the ground stopped moving."
"It was night down in Oz, but we could see the moon at least, and we knew we were home again."
"Home!" Exa shouted, bouncing up and down. "We have a bigger definition of it now, huh?"
"No shit," Cassie said, and they both laughed until they couldn't breathe.
(iv)
Dinner that night in the dining commons was somehow loud and subdued at the same time. The new freshmen made a lot of noise—nervous, excited jabber—but beneath the energy, sadness and worry persisted. Cassie and Exa learned of more students who weren't returning, among them kids in their own class. While the college itself had been spared, there had been casualties among juniors studying abroad, and still more students whose parents had withdrawn them from Ethan Allen, transferring them to colleges closer to home.
"Maybe someone should offer a seminar on alien invasions," Cassie joked when they were walking back to Grover.
"I've heard this wasn't the first time," said Exa. "There's whole branches of the military, special ops, that do nothing but deal with alien attacks."
"That sounds so stupid," said Cassie. "Roswell, Area 52, all that shit."
"No, it's true."
Loud Celtic folk music announced the arrival of Chelsea Zariello, and Cassie bolted down the hall, extraterrestrials forgotten for the moment.
"When'd you get here?" Cassie demanded, hugging her friend. Exa piled on top of them.
"Like fifteen minutes ago. We ate on the way—you just missed the 'rentals." Unlike tiny Exa and athletic Cassie, Chelsea was a pre-Raphaelite goddess: tall and curvaceous, with miles of wavy blond hair. In the hallway lay piles of suitcases and boxes full of art supplies. Her portable easel leaned against one wall.
"How was RISD?" asked Exa, pronouncing the acronym "ris-dee," as everyone did. Chelsea, an art major, had spent her junior year at the Rhode Island School of Design.
"Wicked fun," said Chelsea. "I hated to leave."
Cassie had picked up Chelsea's big sketchpad, to see what her friend had drawn recently. The first piece, in vivid pastels, were those twenty-six planets, looming in a black sky.
"You drew this?" Cassie sputtered. "Why?"
"Why not?"
"It was the end of the fucking world, and you were out there drawing pictures?" Exa nearly shrieked.
"Sure, why not? I got some great photos, too—" Chelsea pulled out her digital camera and showed her friends a slideshow of circular metal saucers spinning through the night.
"Jesus, Chel," said Cassie, feeling sick. "What were you thinking?"
Eyes misty and blue, Chelsea said, "I knew we'd be okay."
"How?"
"Dunno," she shrugged. "I wanted to get pictures of everything, as much as possible—it was like the most phenomenal thing that ever happened in history! Providence wasn't hit, thank God. Boston lost a few buildings—but as my friend Joe likes to say, at least they spared Fenway Park."
"Hell, yeah, let's keep our priorities straight!" Exa snarked.
"Most of the damage in the northeast was to New York City and Washington," said Chelsea.
"Centers of government and communication," said Exa. "Makes sense, though it's scary to think how smart those monsters are. Were. Whatever."
"There wasn't anything to do, so I set up my easel—if nothing else, it was a way to pass time 'till the planet got moved back where it belongs." She said this so casually, as if Earth had been temporarily misplaced. Chelsea flipped page after page in her sketchpad, showing her friends the drawings she'd made of the alien worlds. "I really liked this one, right here—wasn't it pretty? It kinda looks like a woman holding her head in her hands."
"I had a different view, down in Australia," Cassie reminded her. "I don't remember seeing that one."
"You didn't take any pictures?" Chelsea asked her. She sounded shocked, as if any sensible person's reaction to impending doom would be to document the event.
"No, I was too busy trying to contact my parents and see if they were okay."
"Sorry," said Chelsea. "I kinda thought, if I'm gonna die, it'll be with a paintbrush in my hand. I'm weird like that." From 302c, Enya breathed and cooed over synthesized strings and woodwinds. The song stopped, and in the silence that followed before the next track began, Chelsea took the sketchpad from Cassie. "Guess we should unpack?"
Exa said, "Yeah… apocalypse or no apocalypse, classes start in three days."
(v)
By the next morning, Cassie still hadn't heard from Dr. Cavanaugh, so she swung past the Klugman Science Center on her way back from her morning run. Klugman consisted of a cluster of old and new constructions, all hooked together in a mazelike complex. Dr. Cavanaugh's office was on the first floor of Hogan Hall, the oldest building—Cassie could never remember the number, but it was the first office on the left, past the fire doors.
She thought she must have made a mistake when she saw the empty shelves, the bare desk, and she kept going down the hall. Only when she reached the central staircase did she realize she'd gone too far, and turned back, puzzled. Room 104—she'd never noticed the number in the past, because the little placard always had been covered with papers. The door and the office now stood stripped bare, giving off a faint whiff of disinfectant.
A young man in shirtsleeves and sat behind the desk, staring at a computer monitor, tapping the keyboard with two fingers.
"Uh, hi… did Dr. Cavanaugh move to another office?"
The man removed a pair of glasses and asked, "Who are you?"
"Cassie Sterlin—one of her advisees."
"Cassie… short for Cassandra?" His face was apprehensive.
"Cassiopeia," she winced. "Are you new?"
"John Smith. I just started two days ago." He stood, offering a hand. "Why don't you have a seat?"
Cassie had a sinking, dreadful feeling then, almost as bad as when she'd looked up at the sky to see neither sun nor moon nor stars, but only the massive shapes of unfamiliar planets, the gut-churning sense that everything solid and comforting and dependable in life had been yanked away from her.
"Did nobody tell you?" he asked, sitting opposite Cassie.
"Tell me what?"
"I'm sorry," he said. "I thought they'd have told the students. Lucille Cavanaugh died three days ago."
Cassie could only stare at him, stunned.
"What happened? Was she—?" It couldn't have been the alien attack; that had been in June. "Was she sick?"
"She was murdered. I'm sorry."
"By who?" Cassie demanded. "Who'd kill an old woman?"
"I don't know."
"So you're—what are you doing here?"
"Dr. Holland hired me for the year. To replace her."
The walls of the room were closing around Cassie, like a suffocating prison. She stood so quickly that the wooden chair toppled over and crashed to the floor.
"No," she said. "No one could never take her place!" And she turned and ran from the office, the building, as fast as her legs would carry her.
(vi)
A good friend knows when to pass over a glass of wine. An even better friend knows when to pass the whole bottle. Cassie sat guzzling a sweet Italian white that Exa had brought back from Europe, probably planning for it to be consumed with more elegance.
"Easy there," said Chelsea, pushing over a large dish of chocolate, ice cream, and hot fudge sauce: the student center's signature dessert, a decadent brownie sundae. "Have some food to go with that."
"Yeah, screw the calories," said Exa.
Cassie grabbed a spoon and dug in, her eyes still swollen from crying.
"What happened?" asked another student, wandering over to their table. "Booze and chocolate? Must be pretty bad."
"Professor Cavanaugh was murdered," said Exa.
"No shit!" The boy took a fourth seat, turning it around and straddling it. "Really?"
"There hasn't been an official announcement yet," added Chelsea. "It happened like two or three days ago."
"Oh, man!" The boy looked at Cassie. "You knew her?"
"She was my advisor. She was supposed to be supervising my thesis." Cassie hated talking about Dr. Cavanaugh in the past tense. Lucille had been her mentor and friend during her first two years, and all during Cassie's year in Australia, the elderly professor had been in constant contact by email, talking about their plans for Cassie's honors thesis. Cassie had been looking forward not only to their work together, but to renewing their friendship. Realizing that she'd never see the woman again made Cassie's eyes water anew.
"So, who's taking her place?" asked Exa.
"I dunno," Cassie said, slugging down more wine, wishing the combination of alcohol and sugar would blot out the pain. "Some guy. An adjunct, I guess."
"What are you gonna do about your thesis?" asked Chelsea.
"I dunno," Cassie repeated. There were so many other things for which she'd been relying on Dr. Cavanaugh's help, including her applications to veterinary school. Right now she was too numb to think about even the next hour, let alone the rest of the year. "This sucks."
The boy asked, "What about the funeral?"
Cassie shrugged. "Her family will arrange that. I don't know them at all."
"So what... what happened?" he asked.
"I don't know." Cassie dug into the pile of ice cream and chocolate. "The new guy just said she was murdered."
"There hasn't been any kind of announcement yet," said Exa. "They'll have to, pretty soon. Maybe they're trying to decide the right spin to put on it."
"Jesus," said Chelsea. "What a way to start the year!"
Cassie didn't argue with that; instead, she guzzled more of Exa's wine.
(vii)
When her hangover wore off the next day, Cassie took herself off on a long bike ride on mountain roads and trails, half-forgotten during her year away. She tried to let the fresh air and warm sunlight sooth her monstrous sense of grief: Dr. Cavanaugh had loved nature and the outdoors, devoting her life to the study of birds and animals. She'd always exhorted her students to work to the fullest extent of their abilities, and Cassie knew she would have expected her young charges to continue their studies after she was gone.
Back on campus, with a clear head and a new sense of resolution, Cassie marched into the office of Rachel Fiske, one of the other biology professors.
"No, Cassie, I'm sorry—I already have five thesis advisees of my own, and I'm taking on three of Lucille's. You'll have to find someone else—ask Dr. Gupta if anyone else has the time."
Professor Gupta, the head of the biology department, greeted Cassie with a harried expression and much the same news. "No, I'm taking on two of Lucille's students myself, and everyone else in the department is overbooked—classes, advisees, committee work."
Cassie groaned. While she'd been getting drunk and feeling sorry for herself, her more pragmatic classmates had been finding new supervisors for their independent studies.
"Why don't you talk to Dr. Smith?" Professor Gupta suggested.
"He's new." Cassie could hear the whine in her voice. "I don't even know him."
"He's perfectly qualified," said Professor Gupta. "Degrees from Cambridge and Oxford. A lovely man, too. I think he'll be very happy to supervise your work."
Cassie started to protest, but Professor Gupta shooed her away. "I'm sorry, Cassie. He's the only instructor in the department with enough time."
She dragged her feet from Professor Gupta's office through the science complex, passing labs and classrooms, through the atrium where the previous year's senior theses were exhibited in glass cases. For three years, Cassie had fantasized about seeing her own work displayed there. Now that dream, like so many others, seemed like it would never come to fruition.
Half-hoping Professor Smith would be out, she trudged through Hogan to room 104. The door was open, the lights on, a schedule of classes and office hours taped to the frosted glass. Cassie experienced another spasm of pain: those were Lucille's classes: intro biology, an intermediate ecology course, and of course, the advanced seminar for thesis students.
She tapped on the door frame. "Dr. Smith?"
He sat flipping through a science periodical, and now he glanced up, removing his glasses.
"Yes, hello?"
Wondering if he even remembered her, she said, "I'm Cassie Sterlin. I was in here yesterday—"
"Cassiopeia!" he beamed. Grabbing a piece of paper off his desk, he said, "You're one of my seniors. There's a constellation called Cassiopeia—it's upside down for half the year; isn't that brilliant?"
"Uh, yeah." Lowering herself into a chair, Cassie said, "Dr. Cavanaugh was supposed to be supervising my thesis. My independent study. Uh, none of the other faculty have time... Dr. Gupta said, like, maybe you could..."
"Of course!" Dr. Smith leaned back in his chair. "What are you doing? Some kind of experiment?"
Cassie experienced a simultaneous rush of guilt and relief; if he even remembered her rude outburst, he didn't hold it against her. "We were gonna look at squirrels that live on the campus green and compare them to the populations in the woods," she explained. "Look at differences in behavior, feeding patterns..." As she spoke, Professor Smith began jotting down notes.
"We can do some DNA testing, too, see if there's any breeding between the two populations," he said, warming to the project.
They discussed trapping and banding the squirrels, and the best way to observe the animals. They agreed to a regular schedule of meetings, and Cassie told him about the work Dr. Cavanaugh had already done in preparation for the project. Before Cassie realized it, she was telling Professor Smith about her year in Australia, finding him blessedly easy to talk to.
"So, is this what you'll be doing when you leave here? Field biology? Another Jane Goodall, out with the chimps of Gombe? Lovely woman, Jane. Don't ever play badminton with her; she'll crush you. Not many people know that about her."
Laughing, Cassie said, "No, I'm going to vet school. Most of my work in Australia was rehabilitating injured animals—you know, like kangaroos that get hit on the highways. I volunteer sometimes at a rescue shelter downtown."
"Good for you!" he said, and Cassie found herself smiling, despite her sadness, amused by his contagious enthusiasm.
"Uh, you know, I have work-study as part of my financial aid, and last year, Dr. Cavanaugh said I could be a TA in her baby bio lab." At his blank look, she said, "A teaching assistant in the intro biology labs. Help the kids out, grade their lab reports, stuff like that."
"An assistant! Oh, I love having an assistant!" Cassie chewed the inside of her mouth to keep from laughing: did he always talk like that, or was he a nut case? "That's brilliant."
"Okay!" she said. "It beats the hell out of washing dishes. Thank you."
"It's my pleasure."
"Listen," she said, "I'm really sorry about yesterday—"
He shook his head. "Don't worry about it." The kindness in his face made Cassie feel even more ashamed about the way she'd reacted the previous day.
With a quick glance around at the bare walls, she said, "I've never seen it look so empty. When—when'd they take all her stuff away?"
"One of her sons is in town, and I gather the facilities staff helped him put everything into boxes."
"Do you know anything about the funeral?"
"Charlie said that'll be down in North Carolina." Now it was Cassie's turn to stare blankly. "That's where she was from."
"I know that—who's Charlie?"
"Your academic VP."
"Dr. Holland?" A moment later, Cassie remembered his first name was Charles. "I'm not on a first-name basis with the higher-ups."
"Will you attend the funeral?" he asked.
"Not if it's in North Carolina," she said. "That's too far away. Do you know if there'll be any kind of memorial service here on campus?"
"I believe it's being organized."
"Thanks." Cassie stood up, afraid that her emotional control might start slipping again. "Thank you for everything, Dr. Smith."
"Just Doctor," he said, smiling. "Please."
"Okay, Doctor. I gotta run—see ya!"
Outside the building, a rustling noise attracted Cassie's notice, and a moment later, a small gray head poked up from a nearby trash receptacle. The squirrel hopped out, a half-eaten bagel secured in its jaws. Laughing, Cassie told it, "I'll be seeing you, too."
(viii)
Water tumbled and splashed against Cassie's ears as she approached the wall. Judging distance, she pulled herself into a tuck and flipped over, pushing herself off the wall, grimacing at the lack of power in her dolphin kicks. Swimming was the one activity she'd had to give up during her year away, and it wasn't easy to get back into. After only ten laps, her legs were screaming for mercy, and she yearned to return to her dormitory bed. Her body still hadn't adjusted to the time change, and 7:30 AM felt like the middle of the night.
After another ten laps, Cassie gave up, hauling herself from the water. Early morning wasn't a popular swim time, and save a yawning lifeguard, she'd had the place to herself for most of the hour. Even now, only one other swimmer had arrived, a muscular woman in a smart two-piece white suit. Her cap was also white, her goggles black, mirrored eyepieces reflecting the light. Cassie watched her smooth, economical strokes, her powerful kick, her rapid, assured flips at the wall. She groaned, jealous, thinking how much time she'd need before she built up to that level again.
Outside the gym, running into Diana Wollcinac didn't help matters.
"Cassie!" the triathlon coach bellowed. "You're back!"
"Just got out of the pool," laughed Cassie. "Whoo boy, I'm wiped."
"We'll get you moving again!" Diana thumped Cassie's shoulder. "You up for a ride on Sunday? Ten miles, lots of hill work."
"What time?"
"We're taking off around nine."
"Yeah, I can do that."
"I'll have the schedule for the master's classes up by next week."
"Good," said Cassie, though right now she felt that she never wanted to see another pool again for as long as she lived.
"You still running?"
"Yeah, I'm building up to about twenty miles a week."
"Great! I'm holding a clinic on weight-training next month, too. Watch for it."
"Sure. How many kids did you have last year?"
"Maybe a dozen, plus some faculty and staff. Only about five of them were serious. It's a tough sell. People like the glamour, but not the work."
Cassie laughed. "I'll see what I can do to recruit some noobs."
"Hey, I heard about Lucille—wasn't she your advisor?"
"Yeah, she was."
"I'm sorry. What a shitty thing to happen!"
"Yeah." The chapel bell had begun to chime, and Cassie said, "I need to run… later, okay?" She bolted for the dining commons.
(ix)
Part of working as a TA included attending class lectures, so that she'd know what material the instructor was covering. Cassie didn't mind the 9:00 AM lectures, which forced her out of bed, if nothing else. She counted heads in the small lecture hall: about forty, all told, so there'd be twenty in each lab section, mostly freshmen and sophomores.
On the stroke of nine, Dr. Smith arrived, dressed in a brown pinstriped suit that had seen a better day. He wore white basketball sneakers on his feet. From a battered leather briefcase, he withdrew a sheaf of papers and began handing them around.
"Right, settle down," he said, and the chatter began to subside; this was many kids' first class of the semester, and for some the first of their college careers. "I'm Dr. Smith—just 'Doctor,' if you please. I was hired to cover Dr. Cavanaugh's courses. If you downloaded her syllabus from the college web site, please discard it. You may also have noticed there's no textbook for the course. Science textbooks are rubbish—you don't learn science by reading about it; you learn by getting your hands dirty in the field. By the time books are published, half the material in them is obsolete. You'll read journal articles, as assigned."
The syllabus was making its rounds, and kids had pens and notebooks ready; Dr. Smith spoke very quickly, and Cassie could tell right away that keeping up with him would pose a challenge for some of the underprepared kids.
"You'll notice our first topic will be evolution. Dr. Cavanaugh had this last on her syllabus, which is also rubbish—you can't learn anything about biology without understanding its most basic underlying mechanism." Dr. Smith turned to the whiteboard and scrawled EVOLUTION in big capital letters with a black marker.
"Right," he began. "Evolution by natural selection is, in its simplest—" He turned and pointed a finger. "Fifth row, third from the left, blue hoodie. Yes, you. Please put away the cell phone."
All heads turned, and the red-faced offender tucked her cellular into a nearby book bag.
"Right. Now, the easiest way to—yes, what is it?"
A boy near the front had raised his hand. "What about intelligent design?"
"What about—I'm sorry?"
"Intelligent design," the boy persisted, his tone belligerent. "The theory that something as complex as life on Earth had to have been the work of an intelligent entity."
From the back, a loud voice complained, "He means creationism," and a few other kids snickered.
"Ah!" Dr. Smith nodded. "Creationism is a myth."
The boy started to protest, but Dr. Smith cut him off. "Creationism is a story your ancestors devised to explain something they couldn't understand—something they didn't have the tools to understand. Myths aren't evil or wrong, but they are essentially stories, and they don't make terribly compelling science."
"But we should at least consider the possibility," the boy argued.
"If you want to debate faith versus reason, there's a lovely philosophy department, right here on campus. This is a science classroom."
"But shouldn't we at least learn about competing theories?"
"Creationism isn't theory, and it's not science," Dr. Smith maintained. He glanced around the room. "Anyone care to guess why?"
A girl's hand shot up. "Creationism can't be proved."
"Nice job." Dr. Smith fished into his briefcase, pulling out an apple and a banana. He set the fruit on the table. Addressing the boy who'd started the argument, he said, "Please tell me what we have here."
"An apple and a banana," the boy said.
"Right." Dr. Smith returned the banana to his book bag. "Now, what do we have?"
"An apple," the boy said.
"No, I think you're wrong. I think we still have an apple and a banana."
"There's no banana," the boy said. From his tone of voice, Cassie gathered he was beginning to feel like an idiot.
"No, there's a banana here. You just can't see it. Now, I know there's a banana, because the Golden Book of the Holy Banana tells me so."
More laughter swept through the room, and Cassie almost felt sorry for Mr. Intelligent Design.
"Can anyone tell me what's the problem with my banana?"
Another boy said, "Believing the banana's still there is something you have to take on faith."
"Exactly! Now, this apple—it's sitting right here, right? How do you know that?"
"I can see it," the second boy said.
"Right! And can everyone else see this apple?"
Heads nodded all over the room.
"If you touch it, if you taste it, you know it's an apple. Now, we might disagree on what it means to have an apple sitting here, but we can all agree that it's an apple, and it's here, is that right?"
More nods.
"So, what do we have?" Dr. Smith asked. "Consensus, that's what we have. Agreement, based on our mutual observation. I can repeat this exercise with a hundred apples, and we'd still say the same thing: it's an apple. The fact that there's an apple sitting right here isn't anything any one of us has to take on faith—we can observe it with our senses." He turned to the boy. "Now, if you're satisfied, can we get on with evolution?"
The boy squirmed but said nothing, slouching down in his seat. Cassie regarded Dr. Smith with new appreciation. She was beginning to think she really liked this guy.
(x)
"Golden Book of the Holy Banana!" Deborah Katz, the college's Jewish chaplain, shouted with laughter when Cassie told her the story. "Wonderful. I'll have to remember that one."
"He's a great instructor," Cassie said, aware she was gushing. Toning down her voice, she said, "I've never heard anyone explain evolution the way he did—I actually took notes, even though we've covered evolution in every biology class and since high school."
"So, you're working in the labs?" asked Debbie. "You can't spare us an hour or two a week?"
"No—sorry. It's almost like I'm taking a fifth class. I have lectures all morning every day, and labs all afternoon, Monday through Thursday, plus watching my squirrels, plus triathlon training."
"That's an awful lot on one plate," Debbie smiled.
"It's better that way—if I don't keep busy, I start spacing out, and I don't get anything done."
"What about this Saturday morning?" Debbie asked, eyes pleading. "We don't have any student help lined up yet, and I need someone to cover the center while I'm running the Sabbath services."
"Ehh," Cassie laughed. She'd been looking forward to sleeping in on Saturday, after such a tumultuous reentry.
"Oh, come on. For old times sake. It's nine until maybe eleven. You can spare two hours, can't you?"
"Okay," Cassie relented. "Twist my arm." During her first two years, she'd had work-study hours at the college Interfaith Center, and she'd been a student member of the Interfaith Council as well—her parents' mixed marriage gave her a good perspective.
"Great," said Debbie. "Thank you!"
(xi)
Saturday morning, Cassie schlepped a backpack full of homework over to the Interfaith Center, unlocked the office, and turned on the lights. The center had been built into the side of a hill, with offices and a snack bar on the upper level. The snack bar functioned as a kind of coffee house, where guest speakers, musicians, and comedians often made appearances on weekends; Cassie had met Chelsea at an event their freshman year.
A multi-use chapel occupied the lower level, opening onto a beautifully landscaped meditation garden. Students could come and go through the center all day, unlike the main college chapel, which was only open at certain times. Cassie made sure everything was unlocked before returning to the office.
After only three days of classes, Cassie didn't have much homework, but she liked to keep on top of everything, to avoid being swamped at the end of the semester. She transcribed some lecture notes into her laptop, then spent the next hour reading. She'd opted to take an advanced biochemistry course, to bolster her veterinary school applications, but looking over the dense material, Cassie thought, I might live to regret this.
When the chapel bell struck eleven, Cassie packed up her homework; Debbie would be coming back soon. Remembering the garden bird baths, she filled an empty gallon jug of water and went downstairs.
Outside in the garden, she had a sudden sense of something gone wrong. Cassie couldn't put a finger on it, but she experienced a weird, creepy rush, as if she'd come across a bad traffic accident. The garden was too quiet, she realized, sounds from the outside oddly muffled. She set down the water jug on a nearby bench and made a cautious circuit of the paths.
At first she didn't recognize the pile of pulverized stone lying scattered across an herb bed, and it took a few moments for her to remember that on this spot had stood a statue of St. Francis of Assisi. Cassie stared at the stone fragments, numb; St. Francis, the patron of animals and birds, had always been her favorite.
She didn't touch anything. At one end of the garden, some kids from the Newman Association had made a little grotto to the Virgin Mary, and here, the saint had likewise been cast down, the little alabaster statue smashed to bits. Her sense of outrage growing, Cassie continued her circuit of the garden, somehow knowing already what she would find: a bronze sculpture of Garuda, the Hindu god of birds, scratched and dented, as if someone had struck it repeatedly against a stone. That figure had been donated by Professor Gupta; it had come to America with his late parents, and he'd intended for this corner of the garden to be a memorial to their memory.
Around another corner lay the smashed remains of a stone Buddha. The disembodied hand holding its lotus blossom had tumbled forward, lying near Cassie's feet, like some grotesque amputation.
Trembling, Cassie rounded the last curve in the path. In a freshman year pottery course, Chelsea had created a likeness of the three-fold goddess: maid, mother, and crone, wonderfully stylized, like so much of Chelsea's work. Now it lay broken into pieces, the terra-cotta shards an incongruous cheery pink against the gray stone of the path.
To be continued…
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