Campbell stared around the room, glaring darkly at the assembled youths before him. "Anyone else care to comment?" The audience rippled and bowed like waves of grass as they adjusted their papers and books, avoiding his eyes. The vacant seat that Rogers had so recently occupied stared at Campbell vacuously. "No one? Good. Now where were we?" Campbell launched back into his lecture on prehistory. He tried to. As his brain rolled back the years to those first mud-daub huts on the fertile soils of the Mesopotamian deltas—Rogers had claimed Campbell’s eurocentric attitude skimmed over the early civilizations of Egypt and Africa—as the years rolled by, his mind ground to a stop in his own history. He stumbled.

He continued to speak to his students, though he began to hear snickers as he hemmed and hawed over his information. He hadn’t had this much trouble speaking since the early days of his professorship. He once cared what each and every student thought of him and frowns from the back rows disturbed him, but he learned to manage. Facts are indisputable. It couldn’t be that one upstart rabid youth with one foot planted in outrage and the other in needless effrontery could have startled him out of his stolid rut of well-researched stoicism.

In his mind, he looked at himself. Opinionated old bastard? Surely he was not old. He had spent so little time learning of life. True, he had refined himself into a cultured, well-tailored man with a thatch of dignified silver, but that was a necessary balance against people like Rogers. Rogers was a blow to civilization; he might as well have been living in those African wilds and Egyptian sands that he so dearly protected. Knowledge should be respected. With a satisfied nod, he found his place in his notes.

There was a sharp giggle in the back of the class, as two young athletic men, plastered ear to ear with grins, stood and walked out the door. The field of students rippled again. A river of murmuring voices flowed across the room.

Campbell gathered up the shards of his dignity and the edge in his voice was just as sharp as his worry. He had dropped the reins. "Are we all quite finished?" he snapped.

The river trickled away and the rebellious wind died down. The field stilled. Campbell tried again. This time, he was able to roll back to his youth. In a heated discussion, he yelled at his professor. Ah, but he had yelled respectfully. It wasn’t that the professor was wrong, he had been uninformed. Campbell’s job was to make things right. Pass along the facts. The evidence is indisputable. Respectfully, Campbell informed the professor that he was an ignorant donkey. He smiled. Opinionated old bastard. Wouldn’t admit that he was wrong. The man was so afraid that he would lose credibility. Campbell shook his head. He was nothing like his old professor. The facts were on his side.

He gathered up the reins and drove his mind back once more, to the plains and valleys that teemed with life. The banks of the blue Tigris and the winding Euphrates were green and lush in the delta by the Persian Gulf. The Sumerians blithely developed their civilization, ignorant of the dissention stemming from their endeavors.

On the soft soil of the Euphratean riverbank, an old man leaned on a stick and stared at the dwellings that his sons had built. They were wasting their time chasing herds of cattle and meddling with nature, trying to make plants grow where none grew before. He shook his head in wonder. Opinionated old bastard. Was he really all that old?