The Dragon and the George Read Free

in a few lines on these forms and sign them. You married?"
    "We're going to be," said Jim, "by the time we move in here."
    "Well, if you aren't married yet, you've either got to both sign or one of you has to be listed as subrenting. It's easier if you both sign. Then that'll be two months rent, the first and the last, as a deposit against damage. Two hundred and eighty dollars."
    Angie and Jim both stopped handling the papers.
    "Two-eighty?" Angie asked. "Danny Cerdak's sister-in-law was paying a hundred and ten a month. We happen to know."
    "Right. I had to raise it."
    "Thirty dollars more a month?" said Jim. "For that?"
    "You don't like it," said the manager, straightening up, "you don't have to rent it."
    "Of course," Angie said, "we can understand you might have to raise the rent a bit, the way prices are going up everywhere. But we just can't pay a hundred and forty a month."
    "That's too bad. Sorry. But that's what it costs now. I'm not the owner, you know. I just follow orders."
    Well, that was that. Back in the Gorp once more, they rolled down the windows and Jim turned the key in the ignition. The Gorp gorped rustily to life. They headed back down the highway toward the college.
    They did not talk much on the way back in.
    "It's all right, though," Angie said as Jim pulled into the parking lot next to their co-op and they went in together to lunch. "We'll find something. This chance opened up all of a sudden. Something else is bound to. We'll just keep looking until it does."
    "Uh-huh," said Jim.
    They cheered up a little over lunch.
    "In a way," Angie explained, "it was our own fault. We got to counting on that mobile home too much, just because we'd been the first ones to hear about it being vacant. From now on, I'm not going to count on anything until we've moved into it."
    "You and me both."
    By the time they had eaten, little time was left. Jim drove back to Stoddard Hall and let Angie out.
    "You'll be through at three?" he asked. "You won't let him keep you overtime?"
    "No," she said, closing the car door and talking to him through the open window. Her voice softened. "Not today. I'll be out here when you pull up."
    "Good," he said; and watched her go up the steps and vanish through one of the big doors.
    Putting the Gorp in gear, he pulled away and around to the other side of the campus to park in his usual space behind the History Building. He had said nothing to Angie, but over lunch a decision had crystallized inside him. He was going to confront Shorles with the demand that he give him his instructorship without any further delay—by the end of spring quarter and the beginning of the first summer session at latest. He ran up the three flights of the back set of stairs and came out into the long, marble floor corridor where most of the top staff members in the department had their offices.
    Shorles was one step above anyone else in the department. He had a secretary in his outer office, who doubled as secretary to the department itself. Jim came through the door now and found her retyping something that looked suspiciously like the manuscript of Shorles's latest paper on the Etruscan roots of modern civilization.
    "Hi, Marge," Jim said. "Is he in?"
    Jim glanced toward the door leading to Shorles's separate office as he spoke, and saw it closed. So he knew Marge's answer almost before she gave it.
    "Not just now," said Marge, a tall, sandy-haired girl in her mid-thirties. "Ted Jellamine's with him. They shouldn't be more than a little while, though. Do you want to wait?"
    "Yes."
    He took one of the hard seats for visitors in the outer office; and, at her desk, Marge resumed typing.
    The minutes crawled slowly by. Another half-hour passed and another quarter-hour on top of that. Suddenly the door burst open and out came Shorles, carrying his ample belly energetically before him and closely followed by Ted Jellamine in cowboy boots and a checkered houndstooth jacket. As they headed for the outer door