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Normally, the ebb and flow of students gave life to the old buildings, giving them a charm beyond the lifeless red bricks and the white wooden window frames staring back at him. Without students, the physics hall seemed more of a museum than a university.

The main door was locked.

Jason shook both doors, testing them for any give.

“Fuck!”

Why the hell didn’t Professor Lachlan allow him to email his paper? How could such a brilliant mind be so backwards in regards to technology? What was wrong with email? What plausible reason could there be for not allowing papers to be submitted electronically? Especially on a holiday! Why did the professor insist on coming into the university on his day off? Professor Lachlan needs to get a life, Jason decided.

Damn, he thought, Lachlan is probably sitting in his office waiting. How the hell am I going to get in there? He peered through the thick glass, trying to see if there was anyone inside the hallway, perhaps a security guard.

Jason took a deep breath, trying not to get frustrated.

Lachlan loved working with paper. He would use three different colored pens to mark his papers: blue for general comments, green for praise, and red for everything in between, showing his disdain for anything out of the ordinary. Jason tended to get a lot of red. Paper was the soapbox upon which Professor Lachlan proclaimed his disdain for change.

“The 1930s called,” Jason muttered. “They’d like their slide rules back.”

“Sorry,” a voice said from behind him. “I didn’t catch that?”

“Professor!” he cried, jumping at the sound of Lachlan’s voice. Jason’s eyes were wide with surprise. He turned to see Professor Lachlan standing behind him smiling.

“Ah, nothing,” Jason continued, almost dropping his paper. The loose sheets slid in the manila folder and he grabbed at them, catching them before they fell.

The professor was of Asian descent, and Jason had often wondered how a Scottish surname had entered the mix. There had to be quite a story behind that union. A warm smile lit up a kind face. Well, Jason thought, a kind face if you were doing what you were told. Deviate from the norm and Professor Lachlan could be as tyrannical as Joseph Stalin. Ah, that was an exaggeration, he thought, but Jason did wonder if his various professors knew how intimidating they could be with their vast intellects. It seemed decades of lectures to snotty nosed teens had shortened the fuse of everyone on the faculty. Today, though, the professor seemed delighted to see Jason, greeting him with a hearty handshake as though he were catching up with a student from years past.

Jason stood there awkwardly, not sure how to respond. In the background, a teenaged girl rode by on a bicycle as a young guy chased her playfully on roller blades. They called to each other, laughing and smiling. At least someone was enjoying the holiday.

Lachlan pulled a set of keys from his pocket and fiddled with the lock on the door.

“Come in,” he said, stepping into the lobby and punching a key code to disable the alarm. He was holding a cardboard tray with two drinks in styrofoam cups. White plastic lids hid the content. “Mocha Latte, right?”

“Oh,” Jason said, accepting the cup from the professor. “I’m quite fussy, sticking only to high-brow brands like International Roast, but … I’m sure I can make an exception.”

Lachlan grinned.

They walked along the polished wooden floor, past the staircase and over to the professor’s office at the back of the physics lecture hall. Lachlan opened the door and signaled for Jason to step in ahead of him. The office was unusually cramped, being wedged between two lecture halls and was shared with another professor as a prep room.

Jason knew Lachlan had a more luxurious main office on the second floor, one that was spacious, with green palms and brown leather seats, the kind of plush seats with brass buttons pinning the stiff leather in place at regular intervals. He liked that office, it had an air of importance about it, but this room between the lecture halls was little more than a long storage room or a tiny corridor. A mop and bucket wouldn’t have been out of place.

The chairs inside the long room had to be pushed into the desks before he could squeeze past. For such a narrow room, the ceiling was absurdly high, reaching up over thirty feet. The ceiling height matched the lecture halls on either side with their raised, theater seating, and made the prep room seem even more claustrophobic than it already was, as though it were modeled after a deep desert canyon from an old western. The dust on the shelves reinforced that notion.

“Grab a seat,” Lachlan said warmly.