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shouldn't be too hard. Mostly just a seminar to write my thesis in."
    "Nice, calm, uneventful term to cap off the college career," George said. "I approve. Though you'd have been done and gone and working at a nice lucrative job by now if you had taken my advice and not changed your major."
    "But he'd have been bored," Stanny pointed out. "Being bored is the worst."
    *~*~*
    Rob was used to cracks from relatives and acquaintances about how long it was taking him to graduate but it wasn't that bad. He was a "super senior," yes, but it was only his fifth year, and at his school, a lot of science majors took that long at least. And, as his stepfather said, he had changed his major late. It wasn't until junior year that he'd decided to throw off the shackles of a mere geology major and take up the banner of environmental science. But he hadn't slacked off. He was looking forward to a semester where all he had to do was write a fat paper about something that interested him.
    The seminar met in a room that was dominated by a large window overlooking the scrub oak margin of a vast meadow. At this time of year the desperate deer came right up to the building, expressing no disappointment in the lushness of the plantings there. The first day of class the professor was late and Rob counted twelve deer before a man Rob had supposed to be one of the students spoke up.
    "Dr. Fleischmann is apparently still in Baja," he said. "So I'll just get us started. I'm Jack, I'll be your reader and sometimes a substitute for Dr. Fleischmann. Since the class is meant to be mainly peer revision and discussion, you aren't really missing anything with Dr. Fleischmann gone."
    Rob couldn't help the grin that broke out as he watched Jack and listened to him speak. He had to be a new graduate student: he couldn't be any older than Rob.  His soft voice held surprising authority, though, and in a few minutes he had the class at ease and ready to work. Rob couldn't help noticing his tan and outdoorsman's posture, and warming up to his welcoming ways.
    As the first class went, so went most of the rest. Apparently, Dr. Fleischmann was too busy to make it to most of his own classes. More often than not Jack presided. They met together for a half hour and then broke into small groups to discuss the science of their projects and the work of writing them up. Rob just as glad Dr. Fleischmann didn't make it most of the time, because Jack's leadership was better.
    One day he let it slip that the topic of his thesis had been similar to Rob's. Rob was delighted. They were interested in the same things—that was promising! Because now Rob had a new reason to count down the days till the end of his last semester: as soon as Jack wasn't his reader anymore, Rob was going to ask him out, at least for coffee.
    Jack was even helpful when it came to the numbers. The overall plan of Rob's thesis was a meta-analysis of research on pesticide persistence in agricultural soils. This involved some pretty fancy statistics, since the methodology had changed pretty drastically over time. Since Jack's had been a similar analysis of studies on the persistence of lead in urban soils, he had encountered the same problems in comparing studies, and hacked a couple of methods for doing it which he was happy to share with Rob, even sitting with him for an hour while Rob worked out how to hack the hacks for his own purposes.
    But the friendly expression on Jack's countenance faded whenever Rob inserted even the slightest off-topic remark into their conversation. Even a comment about the weather (almost always gorgeous in the spring, occasionally oppressively hot as the semester lumbered along), or the purple plum blossoms blooming on every street, caused Jack to withdraw. Rob wondered if this was Jack's general way with the students, or whether he was just that way with him. Jack was not so standoffish with the others. At least it seemed that way to Rob. He saw Jack have a three-minute exchange