“Of course he will,” I said. “I’m sorry I can’t go with you, but I promised Dr. Verikovsky I’d be at his lecture on Boolean logic. And after Grauman’s Chinese, David can take you to the bra museum at Frederick’s of Hollywood.”

“And the Brown Derby?” Thibodeaux asked. “I have heard it is shaped like a chapeau.”

They dragged him off. I watched till they were safely out of the lobby and then ducked upstairs and into Dr Whedbee’s lecture on information theory. Dr. Whedbee wasn’t there.

“He went to find an overhead projector,” Dr. Takumi said. She had half a donut on a paper plate in one hand and a styrofoam cup in the other.

“Did you get that at the breakfast brunch?” I asked.

“Yes. It was the last one. And they ran out of coffee right after I got there. You weren’t in Abey Fields’s thing, were you?” She set the coffee cup down and took a bite of the donut.

“No,” I said, wondering if I should try to take her by surprise or just wrestle the donut away from her.

“You didn’t miss anything. He raved the whole time about how we should have had the meeting in Racine.” She popped the last piece of donut into her mouth. “Have you seen David yet?”

Friday, 9–10 A.M. “The Eureka Experiment: A Slide Presentation.” J. Lvov, Eureka College. Descriptions, results, and conclusions of Lvov’s delayed conscious/ randomed choice experiments. Cecil B. DeMille A.

Dr. Whedbee eventually came in carrying an overhead projector, the cord trailing behind him. He plugged it in. The light didn’t go on.

“Here,” Dr. Takumi said, handing me her plate and cup. “I have one of these at Caltech. It needs its fractal-basin boundaries adjusted.” She whacked the side of the projector.

There weren’t even any crumbs left of the donut. There was about a millimeter of coffee in the bottom of the cup. I was about to stoop to new depths when she hit it again. The light came on. “I learned that in the chaos seminar last night,” she said, grabbing the cup away from me and draining it. “You should have been there. The Clara Bow Room was packed.”