One Coffee With Read Online Free Page A

text. He probably wouldn’t think of the coffee again until it was stone-cold, Sandy thought.
    She turned and almost collided with Mike Szabo, who now carried a battered wooden armchair over his head. One of the legs had come unglued and was hanging by its stretchers, the result of some too strenuous roughhousing among the teaching fellows and graduate assistants.
    “I have it fixed good for this afternoon,” Szabo promised, and Sandy smiled her thanks.
    Leaving the nursery, she skirted the mail rack and paused by a long, waist-high bookcase beside the chairman’s door. It was another castoff—battered looking but sturdy and capacious enough to hold the department’s Britannicas, an unabridged dictionary, several art encyclopedias and a dozen or so other reference works. Szabo had left the tray on the end nearer the door to Professor Nauman’s office, and Sandy picked up Vance’s CHOC and continued on around the corner with it.
    Lemuel Vance was a vigorous fifty, with thick black hair only lightly sprinkled with gray. He was more of a technician than an intellectual, but he knew as much as any man living about how to achieve every subtle effect possible in the realm of graphics. He raged, bellowed, cursed, had even been known to deliver a stinging smack to the backsides of his most talented students when they slacked their standards; but he was an effective, respected teacher, and he got results. Over the years many of his former students had carved out quite respectable niches in the art world.
    Sandy found the barrel-shaped printer lusting over a glossy catalog of heavy equipment and preparing his annual raid on the department’s budget.
    “You could type up the requisition order, slip it in with some other stuff, and Oscar’d never notice he’d signed it,” Vance said, continuing an earlier argument.
    “I still don’t see what’s wrong with the printing press you have,” Sandy smiled.
    “Are you kidding? Eighteen inches—that’s the biggest plate that antediluvian junk heap can take. Now this beauty,” he crooned, touching a picture in the catalog with inkstained fingers, “can take plates twice that big.”
    Sandy studied the description. Most of the technical terms were beyond her. The astronomical price she could understand, though, as well as the machine’s gross shipping weight. “Could the floor support that much extra weight?”
    “So they have to put jacks under it, so what?” Vance said impatiently, dismissing what would certainly be screams of outrage from Modern Languages directly beneath the printmaking workshop. “Come on, Sandy, help me talk Oscar into it. How can I teach etching without a decent press?”
    “Professor Nauman isn’t a dictator, Lem. Something this expensive he’d want the whole department to vote on. Anyhow, you know Professor Quinn doesn’t feel the historians have been getting their fair share of the budget. Haven’t you heard him? He thinks the slide collection should be doubled, and that’ll mean new file cabinets and probably remodeling, and there goes this year’s budget.”
    “Those parasites! Without artists where would those damn historians be?” he asked darkly. “Riley Quinn won’t be happy till he’s bought a slide of every piece of art that’s ever been photographed. To hell with buying necessities to teach new artists! You think he cares that I’ve got kids waiting in line half the period to use a press?”
    Vance was still griping at 10:43 when Sandy slipped down the hall to wash her hands. Considering the lavatory’s location and clientele, the caricatures and graffiti decorating its walls weren’t too pornographic. Figure classes increased one’s draftsmanship but took a lot of fun and spice out of anatomical nudes. Of course, someone had rather wittily combined Piers Leyden’s reputation for romantic dalliance with a well-known Pompeian wall painting of Priapus; and some else’s despairing scrawl “I hate periods!” had been