Professor Kappa's Killer Quizzes (short story 20)

Over a year ago, as an exercise, I started writing one short story a week. This was something Harlan Ellison (I think) suggested to one of his fans, his reasoning being "You can't write 52 bad short stories in a row." I'm not sure about that, but here's one of those stories.



*It was the moronic answer that did it.

With a gin and tonic on the side and a King Crimson song playing low in the background, Professor Kappa grades a quiz from his calculus class with a green pen. Not red but green, because he'd a nice guy and someone said red adds to math phobias. His sensitive brain froze on seeing the answer, written by an overly confident student in blue pen, in pen for Pete's sake:

As if the "+C" made up for the horrid stupidity of the answer. "So stupid. I swear they get dumber every year!" He'd told his students over and over again that the integral of the exponential function is that function back again. He'd told them ad nauseum that the only function whose integral was x times that function was the constant function. Is the exponential function a constant function? No!

So, when Kappa gave the quiz question,

he thought it was about the kindest question he could create. Who couldn't get that correct? The answer to Professor Kappa was clear: Only someone who knew that his end of the year teacher rating was dependent on their test scores being "above average." Only someone who knew that the midterm and final were machine-graded, then automatically entered into a database, the same database that determined his end of the year rating. Only someone who thought that his kindness and generosity in asking such a brain-dead simple question was a weakness to be exploited and twisted to their own evil student ends. Yes, the devious student who would give such an answer clearly hated him. Such a student was obviously self-centered beyond measure, and undoubtedly evil to the core of their being. That student must die.

But how? What's a fitting way for an evil idiot, who knows nothing of calculus, to die? They don't know how to compute an area or a volume, a standard calculus application, so they could be smashed to death. He smiled at that. Satisfied with his solution, he gulped his gin. They don't know how to compute speed or acceleration, another use of calculus, so they could die in a car accident. He smiled at that too. Another gulp. But eventually that smile turned into a frown. The problem with those methods of murder, the eminent Professor Kappa reasoned, was that they were disconnected from the question itself. The question involved an exponential function. Being smashed to death, or dying in a car accident, didn't seem to be associated with the exponential function in any way. The kinds of applications one naturally connects with the exponential function are things like grown of a bacteria population. The astute reader will know that the decay of a radio-active substance, balance in a bank account with a fixed interest rate, and heat dissipation are also exponential. (If you don't know that, you could die as well, but finish this story first.) Professor Kappa imagined poisoning the student with a deadly virus, a thought that brought a smug, satisfied smile to his face. Of course, it has to be administered carefully to avoid killing any students who got the correct quiz answer, but he'll worry about those minutia later. Prof Kappa took another sip of his gin and went to grade the next quiz question. Eventually, Professor Kappa finished grading that student's quiz and gave the student a big red F. On Kappa's killer quiz, the F was usually stood for Fatal.

By the end of the semester, the F was indeed fatal, but that student was not the only one in the class that died. There were a few other Fs on Kappa's quiz. However, none of them survived long enough to take the machine-graded midterm whose grade would determine Prof Kappa's end of the year rating. Of course, these deaths were carefully planned out, to avoid attracting attention and raising suspicions. But one student, Alice was her name, did grow suspicious. Alice was the best of the best, getting 100 percent on every quiz. So good, in fact, that the weaker students often asked her for help. And she was so kind that, in fact, she tried to help them. Some she helped learned the material, while others she helped just didn't. She noticed who was learning and who wasn't and who died mysteriously and who didn't. It was a pretty straightforward correlation, so naturally Alice's suspicions grew (but not exponentially, ha, ha).

After the final example for the class, Alice calls up her bestie Becky to touch base. Becky went the police academy route, instead of the college student one that Alice took. Becky takes off her badge, puts on a preppy outfit, tells her supervisor she's visiting her sick grandma for a few days, and drives to the sleepy university town that Alice calls home.

Becky learns from Alice that Prof Kappa is teaching a calculus course at night that is still open for late enrollment. The next day, Becky is a student in Professor Kappa's class. She finds a cute little one-room log cabin for rent at a local resort. It's so cute she has to brag about it out loud just before the bell rings to start Prof Kappa's class. The bell rings and he announces a quiz in a few days then starts to lecture them on logarithmic integrals. "Remember, the integral of one over cabin dee cabin is log cabin, ha, ha!" Yes, he's very funny when he wants to be. (Yes, that's sarcasm.)

Later, bestie Alice comes over to the log cabin rental and helps Becky cram for the quiz. A few days later, on that fateful quiz there's this question:

Becky and Alice have prepared for this. Becky thinks carefully and the writes, in bold pen stokes,

Becky turns in her quiz and goes back to her cute little cabin.

That night, Becky tosses and turns and, around midnight, realizes she can't sleep, so she turns on the lights, puts on a light jacket, and wanders around the resort. Around that time Alice decided to visit her (what a coincidence!) and, together, they roam the resort. As they wander back in view of Becky's front door, they sees, in the moon light, Professor Kappa, wearing dark clothes and a black ski mask, sneaking into her cabin. Sadly, he trips over the cans of gasoline and falls into the fireplace. "Look at that," Alice says. "Clumsy me," Becky says dramatically. They smile at each other. "Did you buy accidental fire insurance?" Alice asks. "Of course. With a log cabin, one can never be too careful," Becky says.

The town newspaper's headline told the story the next day: "Calculus professor cremated in cabin combustion."

The moral of the story: calculus quizzes can kill in more ways that you can count.