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of the knife that those who cured should also be stricken.
    ___________
    As for Nat, he endured; he did the best he could. He sat patiently with her in the waiting rooms when she needed him; he heldher hand. Other times, when Danny was visiting, as he did at least every three months, he took over for Nat and went with her to the radiation center. There was a homey, almost suburban feel to the place, Louise greeting her friend Leona as casually as if they were passing in the supermarket.
    Nat was having a hard time. A student had recently written on an anonymous course evaluation form that he was “an old fart.” He had always thought of himself as being on the forefront of things, belonging to the future. Now the dean asked him every few weeks if he was thinking about early retirement.
    What had happened was simple. He had been hopelessly sidetracked by a series of wrongheaded and visionary notions—all too arcanely theoretical for anyone outside his academic circle to understand—and, in laboring to perfect these notions, had let the true innovations of the day pass him by. Thus he had dismissed home computers as a trivial sideline; he was nowhere near the microchip, though it was being invented down the hall from him; he hadn’t heard of Steven Jobs when the Macintosh was introduced. Trapped in his laboratory, he had become an old fart—an idea he didn’t like, but what could he do? Knowing he was kept on only because of the ironies of tenure, his younger colleagues laughing at him behind his back, behaving cordially and eating lunch with him only because they knew he was now on the tenure committee and could have some influence on their futures. They were a far cry from his own youth. They wore Calvin Klein underwear and worked out at the gym on their lunch hours. Their futures were very brilliant. They commanded five-thousand-dollar fees for speaking engagements. Still, he accepted their flattery, their sycophantic attentions at lunch. He let them let him pick up the bill. And when it came time for the tenure committee meetings, he was generous. He voted yes more than no.
    But slowly, as their power grew, these younger colleagues had taken a more condescending position. They suggested that he of all people would be best suited to teach the giant introductory undergraduate course “Applications of Computer Engineering”—nicknamed by the students Tools for Fools—because of his great knowledge, his sense of history. Previously the youngest, least experienced members of the department had taught that course, but now, it seemed, they were needed for other things. The graduate students were demanding theattentions of the young stars;
they
were the power of the department; they—not Nat—were the basis of its, and hence the university’s, reputation. Indeed, no one was interested in what Nat had to say except for the woman from History of Science who was writing her dissertation on the origins of the discipline of computer science. Her name was Lillian Rubenstein-Kraft, and she was the provost’s ex-wife; she had gone back for her Ph.D. after her children had left home. Each week Nat sat with her at the faculty club and told her stories about the “old days”—he was finally getting used to calling them the “old days”—and she took notes with that peculiar zeal that only historians can manage to muster. She was forty-seven, very thin and elegant-looking, with short-cropped, frosted hair and painted nails. She told him about her divorce, how ugly it had been, how Leon had hired a bastard lawyer and fought her every step of the way. “Trying to convince the judge that I’d been adulterous when he was popping every little coed who went by his office,” she said. “Disgusting, if you ask me. But justice prevailed, I’m glad to say. The judge saw the truth, and granted in my favor. Mental cruelty, physical cruelty,