Leaning on the push broom on the back patio of the Centroid Café, Alec was a Norman Rockwell picture of a young man day dreaming—now transposed to his Ancient Philosophy of the Western World class. Alec saw himself jotting notes furiously to keep up with  the almost insufferably energetic lectures of the notorious Dr. Max Catania. As the current holder of the Chair of Computational Linguistics at Sundance, Dr. Max, as he was usually called, was one of Sundance College’s faculty crown jewels. Alec envisioned him as a cross between a skinny, hyperactive Santa Claus with an indelible smile, and an owl that can sit absolutely still while intensely watching for the next mouse move. Dr. Max was suddenly staring at Alec.
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"Mr. Booner, perhaps you did not hear the question? Again, then. What does Socrates think his questioning of Meno’s slave boy, Anytus, will prove to the skeptical Meno?"

"Well, I don’t think that Socrates…"

"No, no, no," interjected a wild-eyed Dr. Catania swinging his arms in what looked like an epileptic fit. "I did not ask you what you don’t think Socrates thought, I asked what you do think Socrates thought about this."

Alec remembered how he stammered, his mind racing to find even a small fragment of a plausible answer. The great owl folded its blue cardigan wings and a scowl slowly replaced the perpetual smile. Alec heard himself answering that "Socrates thought the slave boy was a good mouse for testing his latest theory of..." 

With a jolt of consciousness, as if Dr. Max had suddenly splashed him with a pail of cold water, Alec returned abruptly to the café's patio. Something was swiftly sailing in for a landing very near where he was standing.  He spun to face a silently approaching sphere. Without doubt, he knew that what he was watching was not the result of salt deprivation or the pound of garlic in every Big Angel. This was something real. And it was new and strange. It felt like a Distracto Field thing—only without the holo goggles.
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