“It’s not really my area of expertise, but, yes, I have done some work related to document authentication.”  Annie Sinclair glanced at the call screen on the kitchen phone and at the unfamiliar number.  “Mostly I work with early codices—manuscripts. If what you need is a handwriting expert, though— I mean, if you’re involved in a lawsuit or something of that sort, I doubt that I can help you, Mr…what did you say your name was?”

    “How remiss of me, Professor Sinclair!  My name’s Perdue.  Lincoln Perdue.  I’m not an attorney.  I’m the director of UFODARC.”  She waited a moment, but he didn’t elaborate. 

    “Oh, yes. UFODARC,” Annie searched her memory for any scrap of information.  Must be some obscure university organization. “Well, Professor Perdue…” she began experimentally. 

    “I don’t have a title, Professor Sinclair.  I’m merely a sort of independent scholar.  Not a highly-trained academic like you.”

    “Well…thanks.” She waited for another brief moment. Independent scholar?  Of what? Is he going to tell me why he’s called me?  Most likely a kook, she suspected, but she assumed her best professional manner.  “So how can I help you?” 

“You would consider yourself generally able to tell whether a document is authentic? That follows, doesn’t it?  From your knowledge and experience? You could spot a fraud?”  The phone seemed to vibrate with his sudden intensity.

    “Well, not necessarily.  It depends on the situation. Different sorts of documents raise different problems, and the authenticity of any attribution is hardly ever straightforward.  Each case is like solving a puzzle.”  Annie sat down on a kitchen chair and glanced up at the wall clock.  Charles was a bit late.  “For example, there are questions of provenance and the use of language. For manuscripts, you have to look closely at the script—the abbreviations, the conventions, the ductus--” Despite herself, she was warming to her subject. 

    “The ductus.  Ah.  Sounds interesting.  Ductus.  Hmm.  You do sound as if you’re an expert in your subject—just the person we’re looking for.”

    “Well, thank you, but for what, exactly?”  

    “We’re having our annual convention—er, conference—in Columbus next week, and we’re hoping that you might consider…” he paused and began again, “…we would be honored if you would lend your expertise…”

    Even as she was beginning to formulate a polite refusal—what assistant professor scrambling to complete a tenure file had time for inconsequential talks to obscure organizations?—a thought struck her. Another conference paper right now might— just might—  help her case, if it were the right kind of paper, the right kind of conference. “Might consider what, Mr. Perdue?  What would you like to ask me to do?

 “To give an address to our organization on the techniques you’re known for.”

    “Known for?” Annie repeated. She thought about her vita, posted like every other faculty member’s, on the Woburn College website. What techniques does he think I’m known for?

“Why, the techniques you used and wrote about in your article published in The Journal of Modern Syntactical Analysis. You know, the one where you proved that three stories written under different names were actually the work of a single author--someone notable, as I recall, or was it in fact the wife of the editor? I’m sorry, but I just can’t recall that, or the name of the magazine—some 1930s pulp crime magazine, wasn’t it?”

    Annie remembered—and with dismay.  “Dark Felony,” she admitted.  “There was actually a little more to it than just that. But never mind.  I’m, uh, surprised that you came across the article.” Surprised? Horrified would be more like it. Written during her grad-student days as a cheeky sendup of the readings she’d had to wade through in an uninspired class in corpus linguistics, her analysis of the lurid stories--each probably dashed off in an afternoon of heavy drinking–had been a folly she’d hoped would fade into oblivion once she’d established her scholarly bona fides.  Not to mention the other part of it—best not brought to my current colleagues’ attention, she thought.

    “Our treasurer, Tom Poindexter— you might call him my right-hand-man— did a search through some academic databases. That’s how we found your work.”

    “I see,” Annie said, noncommittally.  She heard the front door open. “Charles!” she called, her hand over the phone mouthpiece. 

    Time to get this conversation over with, Annie thought. Charles is finally home, and I need to talk to him about Sheff’s latest complaints about my file over a drink. She turned back to the call.  “Look, Mr. Perdue, let me see if I understand you. You’re asking me to give an academic address?”

    “Exactly!” Perdue said, with enthusiasm.  He sounded blithely unaware of the skepticism in Annie’s tone.

    “And what was your organization again?”

    “UFODARC, Professor.  UFODARC.”

    “And that stands for …the University Forum on Discourse and…”  Annie’s voice trailed off.  She tried out some other guesses. University Fans of Detection and Readers of Crime?  Union of Foucauldians, Obscurantists, Deconstructionists and Reader-Responsive Critics?  She shuddered at her own imagination. 

    “No, Professor Sinclair. It’s UFO Description, Analysis, and Research Consortium.  We’d like to have you discuss how one might go about authenticating the Regal Nine documents.”  

    Annie managed to suppress a sigh, though she closed her eyes and dropped her head on her hands for a moment.  An address at an academic conference, however slight, might have bolstered her tenure case—but a talk at a convention of flying saucer chasers? Still…“Regal Nine?” she asked, against her better judgement.  She laid a hand over the mouthpiece of the phone and called to Charles again. There was still no answer, though she thought she heard the hall closet door.

    “A collection of government documents that turned up over a series of years.  They indicate how deeply the government has been involved in tracking aliens and applying scraps of alien technology that it has picked up here and there.”

    “I see.  Tracking aliens.”

    “But, for many, the authenticity of the documents is an open question.” 

    “Uh-huh.”  She turned her head to hear better what sounded like a subdued struggle in the hall closet.  “Charles!  I’m in the kitchen!”  Still no answer.

“And so, when I learned that you were an expert in settling questions of authorial authenticity…”

    “I wouldn’t quite go that far.”  Where was Charles?  And what was going on in the closet?

    “Don’t be so modest, Professor Sinclair.  Your work on Dark Felony Magazine certainly establishes your credentials as far as we’re concerned.  I found your analysis of the third story particularly convincing. “Dripping Talons,” I believe it was called—it was the one where the murderer used a trained…”

    “Yes, yes,” Annie cut him off hastily.

“So, please do consider coming and giving an address at our annual meeting—our symposium, if you will--in Columbus this coming weekend.”

    “Are you sure?  It’s a UFO convention, but you want me to give an academic address on document authentication?”  Annie rose from the chair and went to peer down the hallway toward the closet.  The door slowly opened an inch, gaped darkly for a few seconds and then slowly closed with a gentle creak.  It was like a two-bit commonplace in a shoddy horror film of the thirties, an exhausted cliché. But it alarmed her all the same.

    “Professor Sinclair?  Are you still there?”

    “I’ll have to get back to you.”

    “Our symposium is coming right up, Professor.  I hate to press for an answer, but…”

    “Sorry, Mr. Perdue, but I need to put the phone down.  I need to get a poker.”

    “A poker?”

    “That’s right.  There’s someone hiding in the hall closet.  I think a poker will do.”  Crossing the kitchen in a few rapid steps, she returned the phone to its cradle and then stepped swiftly into the living room, where she snatched up a sooty poker from the fireplace.  She hefted it a time or two to get the feel of it and advanced on the closet door.

    “Is that you in the closet, Charles?  Because if it’s not, you’re in real trouble.” She heard a muffled thumping from behind the door and an odd, disconcerting scratching.  “And if it is you, I think you’re in real trouble anyway for scaring the daylights out of me.”  She raised the poker a few inches.

    The door opened a crack and Charles’s voice came out of the dark.  “It’s me, Annie.  

    “What on earth are you doing in there, Charles?  Come out right now.”  She widened her stance and raised the poker another inch.  

    “I’m not alone.”

    “There’s someone with you in the closet? This is getting even stranger.”

    “No— everything’s fine.  Really.  It’s just that I have a little friend in here-- for you, actually.”

    “A little friend? For me? You’re wrong, Charles--everything isn’t fine.  In fact, it’s getting worse by the minute.”  She heard further scuffling inside the closet.

    “So don’t hit him when he comes out.  And if you’re going to hit me when I come out, be sure to do it in the hall so you don’t get blood on the carpet.”

    “Whom I hit--and where I do it--depends on what I see when that door opens. Come out one at a time so that I can get a good swing.”

    The door sprang open, and a fuzzy brown-and-white bundle flew out towards her in a clatter of toenails.  She recoiled a step and then recognized it as a wire-haired terrier.   Annie gasped in surprise.  “Hey! What’s this?” She lowered the poker, but, to judge from her stance, a swing wasn’t yet out of the question.

     Charles stepped out of the closet. “As Nick Charles said, don’t move or he’ll tear you to shreds.”

     Speechless, Annie looked from Charles to the little terrier curveting around her feet, frantically wagging its stumpy tail.  

     “Your very own Asta,” Charles announced.  “Happy anniversary, Professor Sinclair.” When she still didn’t speak, he added, “Unless you’d rather call him Skippy?”

     “No, no—it should be Asta, absolutely,” Annie said.  She stooped to pat the dog’s wriggling hindquarters. “You’re just right, aren’t you? Just what I need to cheer me up.”  She straightened up, threw an arm around Charles and kissed him, the blackened poker still in the other hand.     

     “Thank you.  He’s wonderful.” Then she added, “and happy anniversary to you, too, Professor Renaud.”

     “I’ve known you to show more enthusiasm,” Charles said. 

     “I’m just recovering from the shock, that’s all.  I’ll introduce Asta to the house beyond the front hall. He’ll need to learn his way around.  Did you buy any food for him? Come on, Asta; I’ll get you something to drink right away.”

     “If you really loved me, you’d be saying that to me.”

     “I’ll put a second bowl out for you,” Annie said over her shoulder. 

     “What a world,” Charles called down the hallway.  “My anniversary, and you abandon me for a dog.  And without even fixing me a drink. ”

     “You’re being inconsistent,” Annie called back from the kitchen.  “You brought him. And nearly gave me heart failure doing it, I might add.  But come in here and I’ll get you a drink too.”

Charles shrugged off his trench coat and hung it next to the neat tan fedora on the brass hat-and-coat tree in the hall and walked past the set of framed pages from a medieval manuscript displayed on one wall. He stopped briefly to straighten the pair of diplomas that flanked a black-and-white wedding photograph at the end of the little gallery: Charles Alexander Renaud, D.Mus., Cincinnati Conservatory.  Anna Frederica Sinclair, Ph.D. English Language and Literature, University of York.

     From the kitchen door he regarded the domestic scene with suspicion.  Perched on a stool at the brightly tiled counter, Asta, already quite at home, was happily snatching pieces of roast beef from Annie’s hand.  “That wouldn’t be our dinner he’s eating?” 

     “You deserve that, but no, it’s the meat from your lunch— which you forgot again.  We’re having duck.”

     “A l’orange?”

     “No, we were out of Grand Marnier.”

     “How could we be out of Grand Marnier?  No one actually drinks it— oh, yes, I remember now. Uncle Frederick polished off the bottle after dinner last month.  He claims it brightens his aura, doesn’t he? After his third glass, not to mention a good snort of cognac for me, I could see his aura, too.  It set off his tie rather nicely.”

     Annie ignored him.  “So, I invented a new sauce, sort of like one Fritz made. It’s on page 92 of The Nero Wolfe Cookbook, I think. It has walnuts, vinegar, and tarragon, sort of like a Bearnaise.”

     “Bearnaise?  How about ‘Burnoose’?  We could call it ‘Duck and Cover.’”

     “Here,” Annie said, handing him a glass.  “Take your scotch and go do something useful, like lighting a fire.”

     “A fire?  In April? Oh, well—if you like.  Come on, Asta, you can help. Sticks are involved.”  The terrier, happily compliant, trotted after him as he left the kitchen.  

In the living room, Charles glanced quickly at the pile of books beside Annie’s chair.  The Lord Peter Omnibus lay open face-down on the stack, and below it a couple of academic journals, an envelope thrust as a bookmark into the middle of one, and two thick volumes with lengthy titles he couldn’t make out sideways.  Studies in something…semantics? semiotics? If that’s what she was spending her afternoon on, no wonder she seems a little out of sorts. He laid the fire, a base of fatwood at the bottom and hickory logs stacked neatly above, and looked around for something to start the flame. Hmmm…would anyone miss a few pages of a semiotics journal? No, better not.  He settled instead for the front page of the Woburn College Clarion, an assemblage of syntactical errors and unintentional humor delivered, requested or not, to the entire college community.  He struck a match and touched it to the edge. As the flame began creeping across the front page, he spotted a prominently placed headline:  “Red Tape Holds Up New Field House.” Charles entertained himself for a moment picturing the scene.  Just before the flame had consumed the rest of the front page, he spotted another breathless head:       “Woburn Astronomy Prof Claims Intelligent Life On Other Planets Certain.”

Annie entered, carrying her glass and a tray of hors d’oeuvres. “Did you see today’s lead story?” he asked her, pointing at the remains of the paper, rapidly blackening and curling as the fatwood caught.

     “Typical Kelli Aufderheide reportage,” Annie said. “I do wish she’d sign up for one of my writing classes. I’d straighten her out on a few things.”

     “I’m feeling charitable today— after all, it’s our anniversary. Let’s give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she’s right, and wouldn’t some intelligent life out there be a good thing? As the song says, there’s bugger-all here on earth.” The logs began to catch, and flames leapt up the chimney. 

     Annie set the glass and tray on the low table between the two armchairs that flanked the fire.      “Here. Have some ballast with your Pinch— dinner won’t be ready for a while.” She fell silent and stood gazing at the fire.

     Not quite our usual happy hour, Charles reflected.  Something’s wrong.  Well, let’s have it, whatever it is.  He settled himself more comfortably in his chair and took a slice of Gruyere from the tray.  Asta turned pleading black eyes to him.  He tried to resist, but after mere seconds he yielded and tossed the cheese to the dog. He took a swallow of his scotch instead. “What did you mean, cheer you up?  What’s wrong?”  

     “You know I had a meeting with Sheff this afternoon.” Annie paused for a sip of her drink, and Charles leaned forward.  “About my tenure file.”

     “Yes…so what did he have to say?”

     “Nothing very good.  He didn’t come right out and say it, but he pretty much gave me to understand that the Tenure Committee wasn’t going to get a very strong letter from him.           

     “Unless?

      "Unless...”

     “Unless I can come up with some work he likes better than what I’ve been doing. Otherwise I’m in trouble. Even if my book on those Bodley manuscripts gets accepted for publication, he’s hinting, I might as well forget tenure.”

     Charles digested this unwelcome information in silence.

     “He doesn’t actually think my stuff is bad, you know.  It just isn’t trendy enough. Medieval stuff is dull and boring, he says— nobody wants to study fourteenth century texts in 2005. Pop culture studies are the big draw now.”

     “He's an idiot.” Charles said.  “Does he go for all the new fads in education?  Or does he limit himself to the most inane?”

     “What—you don’t think a semiotic analysis of the signed high-school yearbook is a significant contribution to literary scholarship? You wouldn’t call that trivial, would you?”

Charles reflected a moment. “Trivial? No, monumental— monumentally moronic. You are joking about that, aren’t you?”   

     “I’m not.  I thought I’d told you this story.  His first big conference paper was called ‘Stay As Sweet as You Are.’ Charles set down his drink and blinked at her. “It reproduced what a bunch of small-town kids wrote in their high-school yearbooks, right down to the little hearts for i-dots, and made some grandiose argument about how the stuff reflected indeterminate gender roles and subversive subtexts, or something like that.  He gave it as a grad student and everybody swooned over it. They hired him to teach at Yale on the strength of it.”

     “Of course that’s Yale.  Still, the rot seems to have started setting in earlier than I’d thought. And now he’s a cheerleader for it here.”  

     “Well,” Annie said, with a sigh, “everyone wrote a few stupid papers in grad school.  But some of us at least have the dignity to be embarrassed about them.”

     “Almost nobody in that department is as embarrassed as they ought to be,” Charles said.          “Especially Sheff Boren.  Bragging about being known for his work in the ‘poetry of grunge rock.’  That line he spouted at the last department party:  ‘Emo music is the perfect vehicle for a poetry of longing for existential validation…’  He lacks the insight to feel embarrassment.  I’m sure it’s helped his career.” 

     Annie smiled briefly. “He’d just be gratified that you can quote him,” she said. 

     “He doesn’t know me very well, does he?”

     Annie smiled again, more briefly still.  “But he may be right; stupid or not, pop culture studies attract the students these days.”  

     “And by ‘students,’ of course, Sheff means ‘money’.” 

     “Higher enrollment is what the department wants. And Sheff made it very clear that he’s unhappy about seeing nothing on my CV that contributes to it.”  

     “But he’s still going to let you teach the senior seminar, isn’t he?”

     “Yes, because it meets the majors’ requirement for a class in pre-Romantic literature. Some kids take it kicking and screaming, but they take it.  And like I said, there are still a few old-fashioned ones who want to learn paleography and codicology, and Sheff knows it’s unusual for an undergrad program to offer them.  That’s probably the only reason he’s not circling job postings in the Chronicle and leaving it on my desk.” 

     “So,” Charles said, “we’re going to have to do something to impress him, then, aren’t we? There must be something that sounds trendy but isn’t ridiculous.  I’m all in favor of maintaining your intellectual integrity, you understand-- but it’s just not a convenient time for you to lose your job.”

     “Agreed,” Annie said.  “If I can wait another year or so to lose it, we can be in the middle of your tenure review when I land on the street.” 

     “Hmmm. Yes.  This year is better than next from that perspective.  Preserving high standards of scholarship is fine, but all the same, I need to finish my opera, and I’d have trouble doing that if we had to start looking for new positions. Not to mention the mortgage, and the odd bill or two. Have you noticed that the Jaguar could use a new set of tires?”

     “Speaking of odd bills, look what the mailman brought us today.”  She handed him the envelope that she’d been using as a bookmark. “What do you make of this?”

Charles read in silence for a moment.  “Well,” he said. “Fifteen hundred dollars’ assessment from the city for repaving the front walk—which, I’ll admit, does need it; I almost sprained an ankle when I was casing the joint with Asta under my arm.  But it’s certainly another argument against standing on principle, as I was prepared to do a moment ago." 

“Were you advocating standing on principle?  I wasn’t sure. I thought I was hearing something about your not wanting to move. And a suggestion that I should do whatever was necessary for me to keep my job.”

     “What a blow you deal to my self-image as a man of integrity.  And on our anniversary, too,” Charles said, lowering his brows and raising his glass. 

     Annie gave him an ironic look. “You know I regard you as a man of impeccable honor, Dr. Renaud.  But weren’t you just now saying you’re prepared to throw academic standards overboard in the face of these new developments?

     “Not at all. I was merely suggesting that you compromise:  you’re in a better position to do it than I am.”

     “Thanks, Sir Galahad. So much for my honor.”  

     “Of course we don’t want you to do anything really disreputable.”

     “Such as?”

     Charles took a sip of scotch and looked up at the ceiling.  “Oh, deconstruction, post-modernism, post-structuralism.  That sort of thing.”

     “You’re narrowing the field.”

      “But surely you can write something that will charm the pop-culturists. Let’s think...what can you offer him that he can’t refuse?” 

      “Actually, I spent some time on that very question today.” She leaned toward him and spoke quickly.  “Here’s what I came up with: I was thinking about writing something on authentication of documents supposedly produced in séances as spirit-writing—” She faltered at the sight of Charles’ dubious expression.  

     “You mean proving that the messages people think are coming from Cleopatra are actually coming from some local Madame Blavatsky?  You’ve been talking to Uncle Frederick, haven’t you?”

     “Well,” Annie began. “I—“ 

     “I knew it. Did you use the telephone or a Ouija board?” 

     “Ouija boards are only for talking to dead people. Anyway, I can see that you don’t appreciate my resourcefulness.”

     “No, that’s not it. But seances are pretty messy— all that ectoplasm floating around.  And you don’t really want to hold hands with some unbalanced stranger in the dark, do you? It sounds like sort of a nightmare blind date.” Charles paused and looked thoughtfully at the fire.          

     “Besides, if you think about it, spiritism was the pop culture of the 1890s, so you’re actually behind the times as usual, Dr. Sinclair. I approve of that, of course, but we’ve got to come up with something that hasn’t passed its sell-by date.”

     The ringer of the kitchen phone went off, and Annie stood up. “It’s probably Mother, wishing us a happy anniversary.” 

     “Yes, of course.  I recall how delighted she was when we got engaged,” Charles said.  “In fact, she almost decided to come to the wedding, I heard.”  

     “You were playing the piano in jazz clubs at the time.”  

     “A perfectly good way to support myself in grad school—"

     “And there was a snowstorm.”

     “In mid-April? In Charlotte?”

     “She claims one was forecast.  But she likes you now. I think.  Anyway, I’d better find out who it is.”  

     Asta yipped helpfully as the phone continued to ring and followed Annie into the kitchen.   Charles, left to muse on the current state of affairs, decided instead to glance at a page of the opera score spread across the top of the brown baby grand Baldwin in the corner of the parlor. He carried his nearly-empty glass over to the piano and scanned the manuscript for a moment but found himself half-listening to Annie’s voice in the next room.  She was clearly not talking to her mother— it was not the somewhat resigned tone Annie typically used with her.  He heard her say:  “Yes, I’m fine.  Everything’s fine here.  Thank you for calling back.”  Then her voice dropped just enough that he couldn’t make out the words.  When she returned, he looked curiously at her mildly puckish expression.  “Well?” he asked. “What was that about?”

     “Do we have plans for next weekend?”  Annie asked, instead of answering.

     “I was going to sketch out the final trio for the ‘Bridge of Sighs’ scene and then lounge around listening to some of Bill Evans’s Blue Note sessions. We talked about a cookout with Keith and Darcy.  Why? What’s on the horizon?”

     “We’re going to a conference. Well, a symposium, I mean.”

     “Not semiotics again? What was the keynote address at the last one--‘Spellings as Foci of Power-Relations’?  Tell you what:  I’ll join you for drinks and dinner after, but I’ll spend the day relaxing at the hotel and see you after the ontological echoes have died away.” 

     “That was the president of UFODARC.”

     “You-foe-dark?  What? Sounds like pidgin.” Charles finished the last of his scotch.

     “UFO Description, Analysis, and Research Consortium. It’s an Ohio organization dedicated to research on extra-terrestrial phenomena.  His name’s Lincoln Perdue. He wants me to present a paper on the authentication of documents at a big do they’re having in Columbus.”

     “My first inclination is to plead with you to decline. Not only do you have plenty to do already, you’ve got enough eccentrics in the family, and I’d like you to remain an outlier.”

Charles saw Annie tense slightly; he pretended a sudden renewed interest in his score. “Oh, leave Uncle Frederick out of this,” she said, a slight edge in her voice. “It’s not as if he were dangerous; he’s just a little—“

      “Eccentric. As I said.”

      “And he did help us make the down payment on the house.”

       “After getting the directive from your Aunt Alice on the Other Side.  She deserves some credit too. But never mind that. I can tell from the glint in your eye that you have a plan of some kind.” 

     “I do. I’m not going to write a paper. But I am going to use this opportunity to beat Sheff at his own game.”  

     “I’m in favor of that,” Charles said warily, “but if you’re not going to write a paper, where’s this presentation going to come from, and how's it going to trump Boren?”  

     “I’m going to retread that seminar paper I did in graduate school.”

     “Oh,” Charles said, as light dawned.  “The embarrassing one. Or trivial, anyway. Wasn’t there something about a dripping claw?”

     “Talon.”

     “Yes.  The one where the murderer had a trained…”

     “Yes, yes!” Annie interjected, cutting him off.  “The one I was too mortified to put on my CV when I applied for this job.”

     “Even though, as it turns out, it’s the one thing you’ve done that Boren would actually like.”

     “The subject matter, maybe. Not some of the conclusions.”

     “Remind me …it was on the authenticity of a bunch of pulp detective stories purportedly written under pen names by writers who became big in the genre later on?” 

     “That’s right.   Some of them, anyway.  Three of the stories were in a trashy pulp called Dark Felony, but there were a couple of others in another magazine that got me in trouble later.  I used some simple techniques of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis to establish authorship. For a test case, I showed that Dash Hammett probably wrote a couple of lurid early hard-boiled stories under another name. Of course, it also showed that Lillian Hellman probably didn’t write a story she published under her own name.”

     “And some devoted Hellman fans in the department were hysterical about that, I think you said?”

     “Very. I nearly got shown the door. Some of them still weren’t speaking to me when I graduated.”  She shrugged.  “Anyway, we’re getting off on a tangent.  We’ll be dealing with a very different audience here.”

      “To say the least.  How exactly are you planning to retread that old seminar paper so that it’ll suit UFO chasers?”

     “I can talk about how they could use the same methods to establish or disprove common authorship of documents that they claim were written independently by government officials, or abductees, or something.  You know how UFO fanatics are always quarreling about who wrote Top Secret Government Documents…”

     “No, actually I don’t. Do you? And if you do, how? But carry on.”

     “This man Perdue said something about some government papers— they’re called the Regal Nine documents, I think he said, or maybe he was just describing them. Anyway, it doesn’t have to be very detailed— I can write it up in a couple of evenings.”

     “I would think so.  Chances are, the standards of scholarship among the Roswell and Area 51 crowd aren’t inordinately high.”   

     “Absolutely.  It’ll be easy.  And here’s the best part:  after the talk, I can submit a short paper about it to some post-modernist journal like Social Constructs.  They go for all sorts of nonsense—I saw a paper called “The Tragic Duality of Ed Wood’s Cinematic Opus” in an issue a few years back--so why not this? If Sheff wants pop culture, I’ll give it to him in spades.” She paused a moment, chin in hand, and then looked up at Charles with a wicked smile.  “We can think of this approach as ‘Plan 9 for Tenure’.” 

     Charles smiled back, more than half won over.  “Well, give it a go, Dr. Sinclair. It may be a little…what? Underhanded? Disingenuous?  I think I like it.”

     “And we’ll get a weekend at the Capitol House on the department’s nickel.”

     “Better and better.  It's just off High Street, isn’t it?”

     “That’s the one.  It’s a bit well-worn, but it’s got a famous restaurant, the kind of place our parents would go to for dinner in the eighties.”

     “Sturdy wine glasses and a basket of breadsticks on the table.  Heavy white napkins, poly-cotton blend, and a carving stand against the wall with roast beef under red heat lamps?”

     “You sound like you’ve been there.”

     “I just know that kind of place.  In fact, I’ve got a lot of fondness for establishments like that.  But then, I’m out of date. “

     “It’s part of your charm.” 

     “And at the department’s expense it’ll do very nicely.”

     “Uncle Frederick and Aunt Alice took me to dinner there when I was a girl.  I remember I had to wear a dress with a starched collar.  Uncle Frederick argued with the waiter because they wouldn’t serve me sherry before dinner.”

     “How old were you?”

     “Oh, thirteen, fourteen.  Uncle Frederick said to the waiter ‘Time is a mere illusion.’  The waiter said maybe so, but that was between him and the legislature.”  Annie smiled, thinking back.  

     “Typical Uncle Frederick!”  Charles raised his glass in a salute.

The kitchen timer buzzed.  Asta yipped, and Annie jumped to her feet.  “The duck,” she said.           “I’d better see if it’s done.”  The dog trailed behind her to the kitchen, and after a minute Charles joined them.  Annie was bending over, pulling a blue-enameled roasting pan out of the oven.

     “Asta’s nostrils are quivering,” Charles said.

     “So are yours.”  

     “What’s the verdict?”  Charles asked, as she set the roaster on the counter.

     “Done,” she said.  “But it has to stand till it reaches the right temperature before you carve it, and I have to fix the potatoes…what’s so funny?”  

     “I just thought of something…how could you have known how perfectly this duck would embody tonight’s theme?”

     “Charles, you’ve finally gone completely mad,” Annie said.  “What are you talking about?”  

“It’s the perfect entrée for celebrating your upcoming presentation to UFODARC,” he said, gesturing at the tent of foil she’d draped over the pan to keep the duck from browning too rapidly.

     “How so?” she asked. 

     “It’s stewed in its own juices, it’s full of nuts; and, it’s wearing a tinfoil hat. Voila --UFODUCK.” 

Annie laughed.  “I commend you; that’s very good. But you missed one, Professor. Here.” She handed him the instant-read thermometer.  “Give it a probe.”

 

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