It was said that he was an expert on meteors and comets yet to be discovered (in the next millennium), this ability mathematically to project future trajectories owing to his favorite pastime: the perturbational analysis of celestial bodies. And precisely this prodigious knowledge of his made him cantankerous among those whose own knowledge was microscopic by comparison. But Pirx was not the least bit intimidated by him, for he had discovered his Achilles’ heel. The professor had his own terminology, one uniquely his in the world of scientific scholarship. Guided by his own innate cunning, Pirx went to the library and got out all of Merinus’s major works. Not to read them, of course. Oh, no. He only thumbed through them, jotting down some two hundred of the Merino’s favorite verbal eccentricities. Once he had committed them to memory, he felt sure of passing. He was not disappointed. The old professor, attending closely to the style of his delivery, fidgeted and squirmed, twitched his scraggly brows, and hung on every word as if harking to the trills of a nightingale. The clouds that normally darkened his face scattered. He looked almost young again. Pirx, spurred on by this sudden transformation, and by his own pluck, really poured it on. And even though he completely flubbed the last question—it presumed a knowledge of a four-part formula, unobtainable even with the help of Merinosian rhetoric—the professor, somewhat apologetically, awarded him with a big fat B.

But the taming of Professor Merinus was nothing compared to the anxiety aroused by what was known as the “loony dip,” the last and final phase of his qualifying exam.

There was no bluffing one’s way through the “loony dip.” The candidate first reported to Albert, officially employed as janitor in the Department of Behavioral Astropsychology, but in reality the chairman’s right-hand man, whose word carried more weight than the combined wisdom of the tenured faculty.