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may appeal of course.”
    Of course . It had been a year since Popper had died of a massive coronary. Within the department, Starke was feared, respected and liked—in that order—and a logical successor to his position. She was, however, not only deeply critical of Popper’s work but disliked him personally. Within a month of her appointment, she’d begun purging the graduate program of his students while moving her cronies into positions of power. He wouldn’t have a chance in such a kangaroo court.
    He had expected Starke to demand something like global revisions accompanied by an impossible deadline. She hadn’t disappointed. This was it. Now or never. He took a deep mental breath and gave it a shot. “I’ll need more time. Give me a month.”
     

A Midnight Transcranial Expedition
     
    P opper’s death a year earlier had left Woody in uneasy possession of his final work on the brain, and he didn’t know what to do with it. His son Karl, a CPA and top executive with a big European accounting firm, flew in from Austria to wrap up the estate. He had little interest in neuroscience and gratefully accepted the university’s offer to take his father’s papers. Woody had debated whether to give the unpublished manuscript to him, but ultimately decided to keep it. Karl would likely hand it off to the university, which would go about getting it published by an academic press. Popper had been very nervous about the book falling into “deh wrong hands,” as he sometimes melodramatically put it. Woody owed it to the old man to keep it safe from prying eyes.
    Little worry of that. The fact was that neuroscience had moved on since Popper’s day. He was an important historical figure but no longer one of influence.
    Woody had only finished half the book, which was slow going. In the classroom, Otto Popper was an engaging teacher, fleshing out points with anecdotes and leavening his lectures with humor. As a writer, he was stodgy and colorless, and his premise—mind reading and mind control—was so fantastic that if Woody had not a personal demonstration, he would have called it nonsensical – or as Dr. Starke would say, “loopy.”
    The truth was that he’d been so engrossed in finishing his dissertation and then defending it from Starke’s relentless attacks, that he’d given little thought to the book’s topic. It was only two weeks ago, when he finally realized the hopelessness of ever satisfying Starke, that he entertained the notion of changing her mind by stealth.
    Only desperation could have impelled him to such a course, but his career was hanging by a thread. Kicked out of Templeton, no other reputable grad school would take him. He’d wind up with a dubious degree from some Florida for-profit college and end his days teaching high school science classes.
    He reread the book’s key chapters and one morning actually tried out a “transcranial exploratory expedition” of his own. He went to a nearby park and sat on a bench with an old lady feeding pigeons. Except for a polite nod, she paid no attention to him. He calmed his mind and after a while entered a mild trance state. He imagined a sort of suspension bridge between the woman’s head and his own and saw himself crossing over. To his amazement he found himself in a misty landscape full of celebrities and songs from the 1950s and 1960s, “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away.” Kids that he assumed were the woman’s children and grandchildren, since their ages kept changing, wandered in and out of various doorways, usually demanding a meal. There was also a handsome young rogue with an Elvis haircut whose pompadour grew gradually grayer and thinner until it was gone altogether. Woody slipped out of her mind when he wandered into a space filled with caskets, all occupied.
    He’d left the bench and roamed to the park playground, where he got inside the mind of a preschooler on a swing. He’d just begun exploring when the child suddenly