Affair of Honor by Unknown

man who walked in on a scene like that would have reacted in the same manner.”
    “Any man who makes it a habit to indulge his physical, violent reactions to a situation, you mean!”
    He lifted one shoulder dismissingly. “If you think that was bad, you ought to see what I would have done if I’d walked in and found him kissing you, instead! Besides, if I may take the liberty of saying so, the man was engaging in a little violence himself!”
    Brenna squeezed her eyes shut in pained memory and seemed to sag a little in despair. “Oh, Ryder, you should have heard what I said to him!”
    “I did hear some of it but I didn’t understand it all. What was going on, Brenna?” he prompted quietly as he poured tea.
    She looked up at him bleakly. “The man came up here to help me. He’s concerned about me, my career. I’m…I’m in the middle of a major decision, you see. Whatever I decide to do will affect my whole future. Poor Damon was only trying to make me see the reasonable side of the situation…” She gave a muffled exclamation and reached for the tea he had poured. “Never mind, it’s complicated and I doubt that you’d really be interested—”
    “You know damn well I’m interested,” he interrupted grimly. “Go on.”
    Brenna hesitated a moment longer and then gave in. What did it matter if she told him the tale? “You must have heard how it is in the academic world when it comes to the importance of faculty members getting published in their field?”
    “Publish or perish?”
    “I’m afraid it truly is that bad. If you want to advance and gain tenure, it’s an absolute necessity. I have been working for months on a major paper on the subject of computer ethics…”
    “Computer ethics!” Ryder appeared startled for the first time.
    Brenna smiled a tiny, wan smile. “It’s a hot new field for philosophy as a whole. Practically speaking, philosophy departments have fallen out of favor on a lot of campuses. Not everyone still sees the study of philosophy as critical to a modern education. The issue of the ethics of computer use and abuse in the modern world is a way for philosophy to get back into the mainstream and help keep itself alive as an intellectual field. It’s kind of an applied philosophy.” She paused and looked at him uncertainly.
    “Okay, I’ll take your word for it,” he muttered, peering closely at me scrambled eggs in the frying pan.
    “At any rate, I’ve put a lot of work into a paper that assesses the logic and ethics of computers in the light of historical philosophical thinking. Relating what people like Aristotle and Kant and others have written to the modern problem of computer use is fascinating, Ryder. It provides all sorts of new insights, opens up all kinds of questions…” For a few seconds the enthusiasm she felt for her subject wiped out the dull anxiety in her amber eyes.
    Ryder half smiled. “Again, I’ll take your word for it.”
    Brenna gave herself a slight mental shake and returned to the main issue. “I had a lot of notes and a rough outline of what I wanted to say in my office. It was no secret that I was preparing the paper in order to submit it to a major journal in the field. One weekend I went into my office on a Sunday, which is something I rarely do. I had intended to put a little extra time in on the project. When I arrived, the whole file of my notes and the outline were gone.”
    “Stolen?” he demanded, obviously intrigued by the turn of events.
    “They were back in my desk drawer on Monday morning,” she told him flatly. “I couldn’t figure out what in the world was going on. I got paranoid and started taking the file home with me, but by then the damage had already been done. Lord only knows how many Sundays the file had spent out of my desk and on someone else’s!”
    “Whose?”
    “The head of my department, that’s who!” Brenna proclaimed with renewed anger. “The eminent Dr.
    Paul Humphrey, who wanted to mark his