Time out for Korea ... Chinese communists in quilted coats ... blood and iron and freezing death.
Well, at least it would pay for the rest of the doctorate, under the GI Bill.
If he lived through it.
The notice of the car crash reached him at Heartbreak Ridge.
No mother now, no father. Just an inheritance.
More courses, more digging, more Professor's letters, pulsing excitement and jubilation for all their veiled language.
Home again. Back to the university. The shock of seeing at first hand just how far The Professor had gone; how short a distance there remained to go.
And then, at last, The Girl, and the old line about passes and glasses turning out not always to be true after all.
More courses, more digging, more months slipping by. The discussions, increasingly acerbic, as it developed that The Director was a stiff-necked, belligerent bigot who classed Sir Arthur Evans and God in that order when it came to authority on matters Minoan.
The Girl, encouraging, all intellect and well-bred adoration. The Professor, designing a new-type radiation detector to help search out the truth about Knossos' fall, just in case they never did get the time inverter to work properly.