(Susan Whitlow)

The air conditioner was still not working.

Susan Whitlow wiped sweat from her brow before any more drops spotted the papers she was grading. Bad enough to have to come in on a Saturday, but to spend it grading papers in this hellhole of an office without air conditioning compounded the agony to ridiculous levels.

Heaving a great sigh, Susan pushed back her chair and turned off the struggling air conditioner. Her office was not large--a mere cubby forgotten in a corner of the third floor of ancient Purnell Hall--but at least she'd had the presence of mind to pick the office with two windows. She wrenched the second open as far as it would go, and winced at the blast of humid air that washed into the room.

Damn, damn. Middle of September already, and summer heat had still not broken. Susan leaned against the windowsill, looked out across tree-spotted grass to the thick growth that led down to the Patapsco River. Aged oaks and an occasional willow soared skyward from tangled leafy underbrush, stirring only a bit in the hot wind. The air hung heavy with humidity and the cloying perfume of honeysuckle.

Susan wiped her face again and reached for a glass of iced tea on the corner of her cluttered desk. The ice had long since melted, and only a few beads of perspiration clung to the outside of the glass--yet warm and diluted as it was, the tea still tasted good. There was a refrigerator in the faculty lounge down the hall ... she supposed she should go down and get some more. It would make this grading session go much more easily.

Still she stood by the window. Two students, a boy and a girl, tossed a Frisbee back and forth behind Purnell; now and again their laughter made its way to Susan's ears. The boy was dressed only in tattered gym shorts; the girl wore shorts and a green-and-black Patapsco University tee shirt. Green and black--what had possessed the University to choose such a depressing combination of colors?

For that matter, Susan sighed, what had possessed them to build the school in this benighted location? Oh, Spring and Autumn were beautiful enough, when the entire Patapsco Valley celebrated the age-old rhythms of life all for the amazement and amusement of the young people who frequented the campus. But Winter was treacherous, with ice and snow that could seal off this isolated area, with week after unendurable week of grey clouds and dreary cold rain. And Summer--well, no one had ever claimed to enjoy a Maryland Summer. In mid-June the Chesapeake Bay evaporated, and hung around as humidity until mid-September when it took its place once again. Or so it seemed.

Susan counted by tapping her fingers, the old wood of the windowsill rough beneath them. This was the tenth Maryland Summer she had endured here at Patapsco. Each year she swore it would be the last. And each year, somehow, she found herself staying on another year rather than go through the hassle of finding a new position.

She looked back at her desk, and couldn't help a grin. Face it, girl, one of the reasons you don't move away is that you can't contemplate the immense task of sorting through all these papers and packing them up to go to another school. There was a stack on top of the file cabinet, laden with a layer of dust, that Susan was sure dated from her Coptic Theology class six years ago. An imposing heap of professional journals awaited indexing under a chair in the far corner--Susan had looked at it faithfully every three weeks for the past five years and had yet to do anything except make it deeper.

She forced herself to sit back down at her desk and face the jumble of loose-leaf sheets that occupied the center of her faded blue blotter. First year Comparative Religion. Susan made it a practice to give an in-depth quiz at the end of the first week of classes, just so she could tell which students were really paying attention and which were trying to get an easy "A."

Why did this particular heresy continue, that Comp Rel was a cake course? Especially Comparative Religion at Patapsco University, where Susan Whitlow and her fellow faculty members were experts in those particular mystical beliefs usually lumped together as "magic" by the general population?

To be sure, most students who finished her course left with good marks. That was because the uninterested ones, the ones who couldn't meet Susan's high standards, tended to drop the course early in the game. She had already lost twenty percent during the first week--but the quizzes on her desk showed that she could easily afford to lose another quarter of the class.

This one, for example. Susan held the paper closer--when would these kids learn to write in pen rather than pencil? She'd never worn glasses before becoming a professor; rotten handwriting and light pencils were at least half the reason that she now had thick plastic lenses perched atop her nose. Or, rather, starting to slide down her nose.

Damn, it was hot!

Susan looked at the phone, almost hidden beneath creeping papers on the left-hand corner of her desk. David was coming today for an interview regarding his most recent paper--maybe she should call him and ask him to come in early and get the quizzes graded. After all, what were graduate students for if they couldn't take these odious tasks away from the instructor?

She reached for the phone, then withdrew her hand. No, Susan. That's a dirty trick to play on David. Besides, the young man has enough to keep him busy with his own work.