The Rebel Angels

It was a name he had lifted from the joke-name of a rube undergraduate to the honoured pet-name of a first-rate footballer. In the great days when he and Boom-Boom Glazebrook were the stars of the University team the crowd used to sing a revised version of a song that had been popular years earlier –

Ozy Froats, and dozy doats
And little Lambsie divy –

and if he was injured in the game the cheerleaders, led by his own sweetheart, Peppy Peggy, brought him to his feet with the long, yearning cry, "Come o-o-o-o-n Ozy! Come O-O-O-O-N OZY!" But everybody knew that Ozy was a star in biology, as well as football, and a Very Big Man On Campus. What he had been doing since graduation, and a Rhodes Scholarship, only God and biologists knew, but the President had named him as another Ornament to the University. So I was glad he had not wholly forgotten me.

"Murray Brown is giving you a rough time, Ozy."

"Yes. You saw that there was a parade outside the Legislature yesterday. People wanting education grants cut. Some of the signs read, "Get the Shit Out of Our Varsity". That meant me. I'm Murray's great peeve."

"Well, do you actually work with –?"

"Sure I do. And a very good thing, too. Time somebody got to grips with it. – God, people are so stupid."

"They don't understand, and they're overtaxed and scared about inflation. The universities are always an easy mark. Cut the frills away from education. Teach students a trade so they can make a living. You can't persuade most of the public that education and making a living aren't the same thing. And when the public sees people happily doing what they like best and getting paid for it, they are envious, and want to put a stop to it. Fire the unprofitable professors. Education and religion are two subjects on which everybody considers himself an expert; everybody does what he calls using his common sense. – I suppose your work costs a lot of money?"

"Not as much as lots of things, but quite a bit. It isn't public money, most of it. I get grants from foundations, and the National Research Council, and so forth, but the University backs me, and pays me, and I suppose I'm a natural scapegoat for people like Brown."

"Your work is offensive because of what you work with. Though I should think it was cheap."

"Oh no, not at all. I'm not a night-soil man, Simon. The stuff has to be special, and it costs three dollars a bucket, and if you multiply that by a hundred to a hundred and twenty-five – and that's the smallest test-group I can use – it's three hundred dollars or more a day, seven days a week, just for starters."

"A hundred buckets a day! Quite a heap."

"If I was in cancer research you wouldn't hear a word said. Cancer's all the rage, you know, and has been for years. You can get any money for it."

"I don't suppose you could say this was related to cancer research?"

"Simon! And you a parson! That'd be a lie! I don't know what it's related to. That's what I'm trying to find out."

"Pure science?"

"Nearly. Of course I have an idea or two, but I'm working from the known towards the unknown. I'm in a neglected field and an unpopular one because nobody really likes messing with the stuff. But sooner or later somebody had to, and it turns out to be me. I suppose you want to hear about it?"

"I'd be delighted. But I didn't come to pry, you know. Just a friendly visit."

"I'm glad to tell you all I can. But will you wait a few minutes; there's somebody else coming – a girl Hollier wants to know about my work, because of something she's doing in his line, whatever that is. Anyway, she should be here soon."

Shortly she appeared, and it was my New Testament Greek student and the thorn in the flesh of Professor Hollier, that unexpected puritan: Miss Theotoky. A queer group we made: I was in my clerical clothes and back-to-front collar, because I had been at a committee dinner where it seemed appropriate, and Maria was looking like the Magdalen in a medieval illumination, though not so gloomy, and Ozias Froats looked like what was left of a great footballer who had been transformed into a controversial research scientist. He was still a giant and still very strong, but his hair was leaving him, and he had what seemed to be a melon concealed in the front of his trousers, when his white lab-coat revealed it. There were pleasantries, and then Ozy got down to his explanation.