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everything else, the argument would be: 'Well, he hasn't worked much because he hasn't had to, but when he finally decided to buckle down, he showed fire-cracking ability.'
    "He and I took chemical kinetics together and I was running and sweating and snorting every day of that course. But Lance sat in the seat next to me and never stopped smiling. He took notes carefully, and I know he studied them, because when I found him in the library it was always chemical kinetics he was working on. It went down to the wire like that. St. George didn't give quizzes. He let everything hang on the discussion periods and on the final examination, which lasted three hours— a full three hours.
    "In the last week of the course, there were no lectures and the students had their last chance to pull themselves together before finals week. Lance was still smiling. His work in the other courses had been usual Lance quality, but that didn't bother him. We would say, 'How are you doing in kinetics, Lance?' and he would say, 'No sweat!' and sound cheerful, damn it.
    "Then came the day of the finals—" Drake paused, and his lips tightened.
    "Well?" said Trumbull.
    Drake said, his voice a little lower, "Lance Faron passed. He did more than pass. He got a 96. No one had ever gotten over 90 before in one of St. George's finals. I doubt somehow that anyone ever did afterward."
    "I never heard of anyone getting it in recent times," said Stacey.
    "What did you get?" asked Gonzalo.
    "I got 82," said Drake. "And except for Lance's, it was the best mark in the class. Except for Lance's."
    "What happened to the fellow?" asked Avalon.
    "He went on for his Ph.D., of course. The faculty qualified him without trouble and the story was that St. George himself went to bat for him.
    "I left after that," Drake went on. "I worked on isotope separation during the war and eventually shifted to Wisconsin for my doctoral research. But I would hear about Lance sometimes from old friends. The last I heard he was down in Maryland somewhere, running a private lab of his own. About ten years ago, I remember I looked up his name in Chemical Abstracts and found the record of a few papers he turned out. Run of the mill. Typically Lance."
    "He's still independently wealthy?" asked Trumbull.
    "I suppose so."
    Trumbull leaned back. "If that's your story, Jim, then what the hell is biting you?"
    Drake looked about the table, first at one and then at another. Then he brought his fist down so that the coffee cups jumped and clattered. "Because he cheated, damn his hide. That was not a legitimate final exam and as long as he has his Ph.D., mine is cheapened by that much—and yours, too," he said to Stacey.
    Stacey murmured, "Phony doctor."
    "What?" said Drake, a little wildly.
    "Nothing," said Stacey, "I was just thinking of a colleague who did a stint at a medical school where the students regarded the M.D. as the only legitimate doctor's degree in the universe. To them, a Ph.D. stood for 'phony doctor.' "
    Drake snorted.
    "Actually," began Rubin, with the typical air of argumentativeness he could put into even a casual connective, "if you—"
    Avalon cut in from his impressive height, "Well, see here, Jim, if he cheated, how did he get through?"
    "Because there was nothing to show he cheated."
    "Did it ever occur to you," said Gonzalo, "that maybe he didn't cheat? Maybe it was really true that when he buckled down, he had fire-cracking ability."
    "No," said Drake, with another coffee cup-rattling fist on the table. "That's impossible. He never showed the ability before and he never showed it afterward. Besides he had that confidence all through the course. He had the confidence that could only mean he had worked out a foolproof plan to get his A."
    Trumbull said heavily, "All right, say he did. He got his Ph.D. but he didn't do so well. From what you say, he's just off in a corner somewhere, poking along. You know damn well, Jim, that lots of guys get through to all kinds of