There was once a wealthy professor of astronomy who possessed a very fine observatory all his own, with a grand and well-stocked laboratory and many powerful computers, all housed beneath a powerful and keen telescope. But he worked there all alone and the great telescope stood idle much of the night, for he was cursed with an unsightly blue eye that was so peculiar to look upon that few could stomach the idea of sharing a telescope with him. At length his frustrations reached a peak, and so he called up a great academic conference at his observatory, where he brought forth his finest booze and his most abundant snacks and all of his beautiful, high-resolution star-charts and most intricate calculations, and such was the camaraderie and recklessness of the evening that just before morning came he found himself a principal coauthor for his latest paper at last.
“Are you sure of this decision?” inquired the coauthor’s best friend. “Not only does he bear a hideous blue eye, I’ve heard that this isn’t his first attempt at a collaborative work… but he still hasn’t published a single paper with a credited coauthor.”
“It’s a really good party though,” pointed out the coauthor. “And it’s absolute MURDER to get any telescope time around here.”
“Fair enough,” replied her friend, and the matter was thought of no more.
Come the morning (well, late afternoon, but these WERE astronomers), Blue Eye met his new partner in the observatory’s kitchenette, wincing, over shared coffee.
“I’m going to go into town and restock the fridge after last night,” declared Blue Eye, and he presented his coauthor with a little torn scrap of paper covered in crude scribbles. “From top to bottom these are the access codes to the telescope, the principal lab, the data banks, my minibar, and the basement. Do what you please with ‘em, but don’t go into the basement.”
“Why?” asked his coauthor.
“I said so,” said Blue Eye, so.
And he left.
As you might expect, the coauthor had a wonderful time exploring Blue Eye’s observatory. The laboratory equipment was shining and new and whole, the data on the computers propelled several of her own theories forward by leaps and bounds, and there was still half a bottle of vodka in the back of the minifridge both she and Blue Eye had missed. And perhaps it was the vodka, and perhaps it was something else, but even as she stood at the eyepiece of the great, beautiful telescope, with all the free time in the world to use it, her thoughts kept sinking from the heavens to the earth and just a little under it, to that small unobtrusive basement door.
“What the hell,” she thought. “I’ll have all the time in the world to use this telescope, but how many chances will I have to look down there?”
And so straight away Blue Eye’s coauthor marched down to the basement and punched in the barely-legible code at the bottom of her paper, and found inside no less than six separate coauthors within about six cubic feet of space, having suffered some amount of cutting and trimming to fit inside.
“Sweet jesus fuckhell,” declared Blue Eye’s coauthor, and the notepaper fell from her fingers in shock and landed in some of the coauthor juices. She snatched it up in a hurry and slammed the door at exactly the same moment Blue Eye did.
“Honey, I’m home!” called Blue Eye. “Hey, can I have my passwords back? I need to dispose of them safely.”
“I already did it,” said Blue Eye’s coauthor.
“Isn’t that them there in your hand?”
“No,” she said, cunningly.
“Gimme.”
She did, after some prying of fingers and whining, and Blue Eye glared at her most fiercely.
“There is blood on here – you’ve been in the basement, haven’t you!” he shouted.
“And YOU’VE chopped up all your past coauthors,” she retorted.
“That is besides the point,” said Blue Eye stiffly. “You have broken your promise, and now I’ll have no choice but to cut you up and fit you in the basement, which believe you me is going to be an absolute NIGHTMARE to make work. God it’s a pain. Now hold still so I can snip your noggin off with my kitchen knife.”
“Oh please, please, please,” wept Blue Eye’s coauthor, “might I at least look through the telescope one last time before I die?”
“Sure why not,” said Blue Eye genially.
So she climbed the little steps upp to the eyepiece, and she squinted very carefully into it, and said “Wow!”
“Pardon?” asked Blue Eye.
“Check it out! A supernova, what are the odds?”
“Let me see!” said Blue Eye, and as he hastily ran up the steps to the telescope his coauthor stuck her foot out and tripped him and he impaled himself on the eyepiece, blue eye-first.
Nobody asked much after Blue Eye, for he’d been an infrequent contributor to the academic community, and those who did never found out what happened to him.
His coauthor, in the meanwhile, had a pretty nice observatory. And once she cleaned out the basement there was plenty of room to fit a second minifridge too.
***
Once upon a time there was a beautiful and kind and lovely student of geology, who had the misfortune of being the junior-most graduate under a tyrannical and selfish professor. Furthermore, the professor’s two other grads were as arrogant and cruel as she was, and they put the junior grad to work cleaning up after their lab work, sifting through their soil samples, and conducting experiments for their benefit long into the night. All her labours went to support the papers of others, and in mockery of the countless hours she spent elbow-deep in their volcanic soils her senior grads named her ‘Cinderella,’ a title which her wicked professor took up with such enthusiasm that soon she was known by none other.
At length, after some years of this slavery, there came a notice in the mail that the university was to hold a great fundraiser. Anyone who was anyone with money and everyone who wanted that money would be there, and the wicked professor and her two senior grads were beside themselves with glee.
“I will bring my most eloquent speeches,” declared the wicked professor. “Cinderella! Write me some good stuff. I want it highbrow, but nothing too fancy for a layman.”
“I shall bring my most beautiful stratigraphic charts,” simpered the seniormost grad. “Cinderella, print them out in colour – and make sure the ink cartridges are fresh!”
“I’m going to bring my geodes,” cheered the second-seniormost grad. “Cinderella, get them all in the van this second – and if you drop one, I expect you to cushion its fall with your body, got it?!”
So Cinderella was kept running back and forth and forth and back and all over again until the evening of the fundraiser arrived and she found herself at the doorstep in stained clothing, watching her wicked professor and her two wicked senior grads getting into their van in their best suits.
“But what about me?” she asked.
“Stay at home and keep an eye on the seismograph,” said the wicked professor offhandedly. “We need to know if there’s any earthquakes.”
“We’re in Florida,” protested Cinderella, but the van had already left and she sat down on the stoop and sobbed.
“Why do you cry so?” inquired a passer-by.
“I want to go to the fundraiser,” cried Cinderella, “but I have no suit, and no car, and I’ve had no time to write any of my thesis!”
“Anything is possible if you believe in the impossible,” soothed the strange woman. “I am your fairy grantwriter, and I shall gift you with what you require to attend the fundraiser. Here are some clothes for you.” And lo, she pulled a fine fitted tuxedo from her purse, which fit Cinderella perfectly. “Now, here is a car.” And lo, she plucked a stretch limo from her wallet and placed it on the road, complete with driver. “And here is your paper!”
“This is just a bunch of dirty jokes and rambling anecdotes,” said Cinderella, skimming the sheets.
“Exactly,” said the fairy grantwriter. “I don’t want to encourage plagiarism. Now away with you, but be sure to be back before midnight or the magic will be broken.”
“Thank you,” said Cinderella, and set a little alarm on her phone before she departed in a roar of smouldering hydrocarbons.
At the fundraiser the wicked professor was in the midst of her speech when the door opened and an astonishingly smartly-dressed young geologist entered, chomping a cigar in her mouth the size of a baseball bat. All in attendance were awed and staggered and bemused as the donors flocked to her like flies to a carcass, attracted by her spectacular tux and kept in rapture by her seemingly endless stream of filthy knock-knock jokes and tales of how to capture scorpions in buckets.
“Who is this mysterious lady?” whispered the seniormost grad to her comrade.
“I don’t know, but I don’t like her!” fumed the second-seniormost grad. “Look at the junior chair of Exxon-Mobil, and how he hangs onto her every word! My geodes deserve that attention!”
Suddenly the university’s clocktower began to ring midnight and Cinderella jumped a mile, having been so surrounded with chortles and back-slaps that she was unable to hear her phone’s alarm. In haste and alarm she fled the door, leaving behind only her cigar, which the bereft junior chair clutched to his chest in mourning.
“Did anyone get her number?” he implored. “Anyone? A business card?”
When Cinderella woke the next morning her wicked professor and senior grads were in one big shared foul mood. “A fat lot of good your work did for us,” snorted her professor. “Some mysterious geologist kept the donors busy all night, and we didn’t get funding for so much as a dowsing-rod. What a waste of time! But there’s still hope: I hear the junior chair of Exxon-Mobil is going door to door, seeking the lady in question.”
There was a knock at their door and a man opened it. “Excuse me,” he said, “but I happen to be the junior chair of Exxon-Mobil and I’m going door to door, seeking a lady in question. Whosoever’s breath matches the scent of this cigar” – and here he produced a still-smouldering log of tobacco – “shall be hired by me.”
“GIMME!” squealed the wicked professor.
“HEEEERE!” wailed the wicked senior grads.
But the junior chair stuck a little breathalyzer in their faces and shook his head. “Cigarettes, marijuana, and a lot of cheap gin,” he said. “Close, but no cigar.”
“May I be tested?” inquired Cinderella.
“I don’t see why not,” said the junior chair, and the moment he placed the breathalyzer in front of her face the fumes almost made him black out before he could check the readings. “It’s you!” he gasped.
“It’s me!” replied Cinderella.
“I would like to employ you as an expert consultant to provide evidence on demand for my corporation to drill in protected wilderness areas, national parks, and animal sanctuaries!” cried the junior chair.
“Oh yes please!” wept Cinderella. “Also, can you hire my two fellow grad students over there? They can make good gophers and land surveyors.”
The wicked professor gnashed her teeth in despair at the loss of so much free labour, but there was nothing to be done, and the wicked senior grads were overjoyed to be forgiven so. And they all lived profitably ever after.
***
New year’s eve came bright and early to the halls of the university, and not a single body remained that wasn’t yet ready to get as drunk as a goddamned skunk. But as the crowd headed to the bar, they were there met by a strange figure: a tenured professor of gigantic stature, garbed all in green and bearing a green pen in one hand and a green sheaf of green paper in the other.
“Hello, feeble lesser beings!” shouted the green professor. “I am here for a bit of fun before the new year ends: who here wants some free peer review? I offer this thus: you may tear into my proof here as ferociously as you like, in front of all your peers, and in exchange I shall review you in return in one year and a day.
All were silent, but then the youngest adjunct professor – some guy called Dwayne who had yet to publish a single paper of his own, and saw a chance to prove himself the bravest of his fellows – leapt to his feet and took the giant’s pen.
“Strike well then,” said the green professor, proffering his paper, and with great vigor Dwayne did so, hacking through a dozen obsolete sources in a single sharp slice of the instrument. But before his eyes the green professor merely laughed and plucked the stricken manuscript from his chest, showing that despite his critique, the paper remained whole and sound.
“I implore you to meet me in the green room in a year and a day’s time,” chuckled the green professor. “And please: bring your very best work. I’d hate to not give you equal effort.” And he left, slamming the door behind him noisily.
There was a solemn moment of silence and then all present descended upon the bar like alcoholic locusts, none moreso than Dwayne.
Just after the following Christmas, Dwayne set on his way to the green room of the university, clutching a scant handful of a first-draft like it were his own child. He opened the door, but found no green professor: merely an avuncular librarian hard at work upon his desk and a shifty-looking TA.
“Ah, waiting for the green professor, eh?” smiled the librarian through a moustache ripped from a healthy walrus. “Well, not here yet, should be here soon. Need anything?”
Dwayne examined his thesis. “Maybe a little,” he admitted.
“Well, make free use of my services!” cried the librarian. “I’ll go find you some sources, on the condition that you tell me if anything happens when I’m out.”
“Fair,” said Dwayne.
“Fair!” said the librarian. And so he left and the shifty TA immediately sidled up to Dwayne and stuck out her hand.
“Name’s Bethany,” she muttered out of the corner of her mouth. Dwayne shook her hand carefully, as if it might bite. “You want some notes? I got some notes. You can write ‘em on your leg, they never check the legs.”
“Err… no thanks,” said Dwayne.
The librarian returned with a heaping helping of sources, which Dwayne frantically began incorporating into his central thesis. “Anything happen?” he asked.
Dwayne shook his hand. “Well then!” he said, pleased as punch, and headed back into the books.
“Psst,” said Bethany. “Ol’ buddy, ol’ pal, ol’ chum.” She slapped Dwayne on the back quickly. “Ol’ sock ol’ shoe ol’ chip-off-the-ol’-ol’-block. Y’want next year’s test scores? It’s some good stuff, and you can resell them for a LOT a lot.”
“No thanks,” said Dwayne.
“Your loss.”
The librarian came back with yet more books, all as helpful as the last. “Have I missed something?” he asked Dwayne.
“Nope!” replied Dwayne, slapping him heartily on the back. “All good!”
“Fantastic! Once more, unto the breach!”
“Psst. Dwayne. Dude.”
Dwayne looked once more at the shifty TA.
“Care to buy –”
“No,” he told her.
“Fiiiiine. Then, wanna at least take a plastic binder? That’s a nice paper there, be a shame if something happened to it. A nice plastic binder ‘ll prevent anyone from proofreading it too nasty, you get what I mean? The old fat-faced fuck has like forty thousand of them, he’ll never miss one.”
Dwayne thought upon his honor, then thought upon the green professor and his pen.
“Okay. Thanks.”
“Great. Mum’s the word to the walrus.”
“Hello!” said the walrus. “Anything happen?”
“Nope,” said Dwayne and Bethany.
“Great I trust you implicitly and completely.” And a bell rang from afar, and the door at the far end of the green room cracked open. “Go on in!”
Inside was a smaller room, damp and cramped and cramped further by a giant wooden writing desk. And behind it, looming over desk, room, and Dwayne, was the green professor, pen in hand.
“Well, let’s have at it!” he said happily, and even with the protective force of the nice plastic binder Dwayne felt his hands shake as he laid down his paper upon that dreadful ink-stained desk.
The green professor flipped through his work with one thumb, eyes racing, then stopped.
“AHA!” he yelled, and as that dreadful pen flashed down Dwayne twitched and jumped so badly that he fell out of his chair.
“Wuss!” hollered the green professor.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry, my bad,” muttered Dwayne, hauling himself upright.
“As it was. Now here we go again. Dum de dum de dum de dum de. Dum. De. Dum. De…. DUM,” and down came the pen again like a striking falcon, only to pause an inch from the paragraph.
“Just wanted to see if you’d fall over again,” said the green professor cheerfully.
“Fuck off,” said Dwayne.
“There’s a good academic! Well said. Now, now, now…hmmm. Hmm. Hm. Ah. AHA!” shouted the green professor, and down came the pen, striking a gentle, single underline where an errant hand had incorrectly turned ‘because’ into ‘becauses.’
“Boop,” said the green professor. “That was for chickening out and getting the binder.”
Dwayne stared at him. “This was a test, wasn’t it,” he said.
“Yep! I was the librarian, too.”
“And what,” asked Dwayne, “was the point of all this?”
“Wanted to see if anyone on the current faculty had any balls or not. Turns out it’s just you, even if you’re only mostly honest! Good job!”
“But I’m only an adjunct,” said Dwayne.
“Well, that’s life,” said the green professor. “See you later.” And he showed Dwayne the door.
Dwayne returned to be hailed as a hero, was absolved of his binder, and had it nailed above his cubicle as a warning to anyone who shied from peer review until he was let go due to budget cuts two years later.