He hadn't long to wait. On the last Friday of September he received a note requesting his presence in the board room at three o'clock on Monday. He rushed home after his last class and told Alice about it.
"Let's hope their decision is favorable," she said.
"It has to be," Dr. MacNare answered with conviction.
He spent the week-end making plans. "They'll probably assign me a machinist and a couple of electronics experts from the hill," he told Alice. "I can use graduate students for work with the animals. I hope they give me Dr. Munitz from Psych as a consultant, because I like him much better than Veerhof. By early spring we should have things rolling."
Monday at three o'clock on the dot, Dr. MacNare knocked on the door of the board room, and entered. He was not unfamiliar with it, nor with the faces around the massive walnut conference table. Always before he had known what to expect—a brief commendation for the revisions in his textbook on calculus for its fifth printing, a nice speech from the president about his good work as a prelude to a salary raise—quiet, expected things. Nothing unanticipated had ever happened here.
Now, as he entered, he sensed a difference. All eyes were fixed on him, but not with admiration or friendliness. They were fixed more in the manner of a restaurateur watching the approach of a cockroach along the surface of the counter.
Suddenly the room seemed hot and stuffy. The confidence in Dr. MacNare's expression evaporated. He glanced back toward the door as though wishing to escape.
"So it's you!" the president said, setting the tone of what followed.
"This is yours?" the president added, picking up the neatly typed manuscript, glancing at it, and dropping it back on the table as though it were something unclean.
Dr. MacNare nodded, and cleared his throat nervously to say yes, but didn't get the chance.