A Princess of The Linear Jungle

sides of the old the old building mapped a centuries-old gradient of caked Train soot. Its rearmost windows had been rendered more or less permanently opaque.
    The front façade of the “NikThek,” as its staff fondly called the old grand dame, was kept better cleaned, being the plane-tree-shaded public face of the museum, familiar to generations of school children and casual visitors. And while the NikThek maintained a quasi-independent existence, with its own fund-raising, programming, publicity, and Board of Directors, it was still officially affiliated with proud and prestigious Swazeycape University. As a pendant of that sprawling chandelier of a school, whose buildings occupied fully forty percent of the Borough of Wharton, the NikThek had to uphold a certain level of virtue and pomp.
    Early on this rain-washed, bright July morning, before its opening hour, the NikThek seemed simultaneously antique and youthful, as if its high-minded and not entirely sane or practical dedication to cataloguing and presenting the oddities of the Linear City had kept the museum young beyond its actual age.
    Or so Merritt Abraham fancifully imagined, as she approached her place of work, a convenient three-Block stroll from the nearest Subway exit. (And that exit itself only a half-hour Subway commute from her studio apartment down in the Wharton 20’s.)
    She stopped at the foot of the wide set of time-worn stairs leading up to the multiple doors of the main entrance. Listening to the wind-stirred leaves of the famous plane trees, she once again pondered the words of the founder engraved above the broad lintel:

    YOU MUST HAVE THE PIGEON IN YOUR HEART
    BEFORE YOU CAN FIND IT IN THE GUTTER

    Quite a character, that Milyutin, one of the founders of polypolisology, and yet something of a mystic to boot. She wondered if that metaphysical strain did not still lurk below the skin of her chosen discipline, like a subliminal tattoo.
    As Merritt broke her moment of still introspection and moved toward the employees’ entrance on 73rd, she was startled by the urgent chiming of a small bell, and she darted to one side just in time to avoid being run over by a commuting cyclist illegally using the sidewalk, as he sought to outmaneuver a big delivery van blocking his path on Broadway.
    The incident caused Merritt to hark back to the last time she had seen Dan Peart. The wheelman had been the first one off the Samuel Smallhorne upon its May seventeenth arrival at Wharton Slip 18. After offering perfunctory good wishes to the others, he had ushered his precious Calloway Tempesta down the gangplank, whereupon he had been engulfed by a small claque of autograph-seeking cycling fans.
    Cady Rachis had enlisted Ransome Pivot to carry her extensive luggage and to engage a pedicab. Complying somewhat reluctantly, Ransome kept casting apologetic backward glances at Merritt, but she haughtily ignored them.
    That morning she had impulsively engineered a decisive blowup with Balsam Troutwine, complaining of his maddening combination of insincerity and fawning over-attentiveness, and the lovers were no longer on speaking terms. Seemingly uninjured, the liquor distributor had swaggered complacently away with his veteran salesman’s small daypack, leaving Merritt to shuffle her own bags and trunks off the ship and to her new, unseen home.
    Since then, Merritt had encountered neither Peart nor Troutwine nor Rachis (though the last-named simpered down in effigy from posters everywhere, advertising her exclusive stint at Topandy’s Song Loft). As for Ransome Pivot—well, it was impossible not to bump into the irritating overgrown juvenile now and again, when visiting various Swazeycape University offices and facilities. And he had shown up once or twice in the NikThek cafeteria during her lunch hour….
    But these old acquaintances meant nothing to her, really. Merritt was intent on immersing herself in her new milieu, making fresh friends and impressing smart people in vital positions with her own brilliance and talents. (And, oh yes, honing that native brilliance with scads of new knowledge.) Lacking the money and easy entrée of her more privileged peers—Ransome Pivot, for instance—she had to utilize her wiles and brains if she ever wished to get ahead.
    And now, passing through the employees’ entrance, she winced as she realized that doing so this morning primarily meant satisfying her exacting boss, Edgar Chambless. And she had not met