Terry Madden seated himself at the end of the table. He broke a roll and began to butter it.

"What's the good word?" he said.

Jessup read aloud from his textbook on monolithic integrated circuitry.

"The pattern match begins with a search for a substring of a given string that has a specified structure in the stringmanipulation language."

Taft Robinson was sitting three tables away. I took my dessert over. He looked up, nodded, then looked down again and sliced a quivering ribbon of fat off the last piece of sirloin on his plate.

"That weakside sweep looked good today," I said. "I finally got in a good block for you."

"I saw it," he said.

"I wiped out that bastard Smee. He likes to hurt people, that son of a bitch."

"Which one is he?"

"Middle linebacker. He's the defensive captain. He 1 captains the defense." "I saw the block," Taft said. "I really wiped him out, that bastard. Hey, look, what are you doing here anyway?"

"Where-here?"

"Right," I said. "Here in this particular locale. This dude ranch."

"I'm here to play football. Same as you."

"You could be at almost any school in the country. Why would you want to leave a place like Columbia to come here? Granted, Columbia's not exactly a football colossus. But to come here. How the hell did you let Creed talk you into this place? It's not as though you're integrating the place. Technically you're integrating the place but that's only because nobody else ever wanted to come here. Who the hell would want to come to a place like this?"

"You came here."

"Hey, Robinson," Kimbrough said.

"I'm here because I'm a chronic ballbreaker. First, it's not likely any other school would have me. Second, I wanted to disappear."

"But you're here," he said. "We're all here."

"I can't argue with that. How's your milk? Jessup says the milk is putrid."

"Which one is he?"