Something Going Around by Harry Turtledove

 
    Â 
    It’s twenty minutes, maybe a half hour, from my office to Mandelbaum’s. My office is in the Languages Building—excuse me, the Randall J. Simonson Foundation Languages Building. You lose points if you forget to name the benefactor. The university knows which side its bread is buttered on. Oh, you bet it does. When there’s butter. Hell, when there’s bread.
    By the time I got to the bar, I needed a beer a lot more than I had when I set out. Somebody a couple of blocks from the campus side of Mandelbaum’s had walked in front of a car. Not just any car, either. A Lincoln Navigator. Dead, of course. Never knew what hit him, I hope.
    Cops and paramedics couldn’t have pulled up more than half a minute before I walked by. They’d thrown a sheet over him, but it was still pretty bad. Worse than you see on the news, ’cause the news cleans up the gore or cuts away. You didn’t only see it there. You could smell it, all thick and rusty. Made my stomach turn over.
    A couple of little animals or birds were scurrying around the edge of the pool. I couldn’t tell what they were up to—maybe scouting for chunks of meat in the soup. Believe me, I didn’t check it out too close.
    The woman who’d been driving the Navigator was talking to a cop. She was sleek and blonde and middle-aged: plainly part of the one percent, not the ninety-nine. Things like this weren’t supposed to happen to people like her. But one had. She still sounded stunned, not horrified. “I couldn’t do a thing, Officer,” she was saying. “Not a thing. He didn’t even look. He just walked out in front of me—and bam! ” Bam! was right.
    When I walked into Mandelbuam’s, Victor drew me a Sam Adams and slid it across the bar. Then he eyed me and said, “You okay, Stan? You’re kinda green around the gills.”
    So I told him why I was green around the gills.
    â€œOh, Jesus!” He pointed to the beer. “On the house, man. That same thing happened to me last month. Still creeps me out—I’ve woke up from nightmares in a cold sweat, like, two or three times. Mine was a gal.”
    â€œMakes it even worse somehow,” I said.
    â€œIt totally does.” Victor nodded. Then he did it again, in a different way—toward the pint of beer. “So get yourself outside of that right away. It’ll take the edge off. Then have another one, slower, and you oughta be good to go.”
    â€œSounds like the right prescription, Doc,” I said, and set to work on the first part of it.
    There were only a couple of other people at the bar, but it was early yet. Things would perk up. They always did. Mandelbaum’s is a good place. It’s half town, half gown, you might say. Not a meat market bar, though there are a gay one and a straight one within a few blocks. Mandelbaum’s is more like a permanent floating cocktail party. You run into all kinds of people there, some fascinating, some … well, not so much.
    But you do hear some out-of-the-ordinary answers when you get around to asking, “So what do you do, then?”
    I started talking with somebody who came in a little while after I did. By then, I was halfway down the second Sam Adams. I definitely had a little buzz. I wasn’t smashed or anywhere close—I’m a big guy (six-three, two-twenty—oh, all right, two-forty, but I am gonna start working out again RSN). Still, the alcohol put a transparent shield between me and that poor damn fool dead on the asphalt. Smashed on the asphalt. Puddled on the asphalt. I might need one more to firm up the transparent shield a bit.
    â€œSo what do you do?” he asked.
    â€œGermanic languages at the U,” I said. “Specialize in Gothic.”
    â€œIn what?” he said.
    Which was the same thing everybody said, including my mother. Well, except for a few who said Never heard of it . But the ones who