The Case of S T Nikos

Nikos loses tenure then disappears!

It was getting worse. Nikos could be irritatingly arrogant but he could also be remarkably patient. One was often conscious of being patronised but in just that kind way that the word grew up�as a father would patronise a child. He could be much worse to people he did not respect. Politically he seemed to be extremely right-wing in his attitude to the ordinary man-in-the-street who he usually disdainfully dismissed as the hoi polloi. In his ideas of class and racial superiority, he felt himself to be of a higher breed. He described the poor and the immigrants as retarded, pock-marked jabberers with vulgar manners and crude beliefs whom his innermost being despises and detests as the mammal has instinctively despised and detested the reptile since time immemorial. It is ironic therefore that the Govvy Men should brand him a communist.

The establishment was closing in. Tino Nikos, a doctor and qualified research worker with degrees in anatomy and physiology, and in palaeontology, who joined a US university as a lecturer and became its director of Extinct Physiology, whose credentials were admirable, and who for ten years was highly respected in his field, was sacked. Then Tino Nikos began to criticise openly the scientific community for their attitude to the earth as the fountain of life, and his scientific peers for ignoring the possibility that he had privately advocated that the dinosaurs had evolved intelligence. Nikos also began to question Nasa and the US government for their policies on space and the environment.

Nikos was removed from teaching�even of topics unconnected with his criticisms. He was told that his work was unorthodox and of little general merit, that there were insufficient funds to support it and that he should retire, or find the funds himself. Nikos protested but found an independent source of funds for a year. Not enough, said the authorities�he had to find funding for three to five years. He could not do it. He was too unfashionable for wealthy sponsors.

Tino Nikos’s views might be thought damaging by those whose profits depend upon a rapacious exploitation of mother earth or whose interests are vested in a nice set of comfortable theories funded by the exploiters, but that is not the point. The UK Sloman report, which was published in response to a different case of academic disagreement, said quite forcefully, academic staff must not be inhibited by any tradition of accepted views. They have the right to be unorthodox.

I shall add, for the record, that his views were more complicated than at first they might seem. Three points in particular should be understood. First, that so soon as any one of these pock-marked jaberrers that he despised proved his intellectual worth, Nikos had nothing but respect for them. Essentially he seemed to hate the whole human race, unless they were able to prove themselves intellectually his equal or superior. Second, that he was not selective in his distaste for people except on the grounds of intellect�he was no racist. Third, that though he despised them for their squalor and underachievement, he above all realised that they were a vital pool of genetic material that was essential for human survival in adverse circumstances. So, however disdainful he might have been of the lower classes, he was no Nazi.

Though no one can agree with his general sentiments, his choice of simile seems curiously significant, as though he was distancing himself from the reptilian creatures that he thought preceded us as masters of the world. And yet the mammal’s despising and detesting of the reptile reflects the equal or greater despising and detesting of the mammal by the reptile. I wondered whether S T Nikos could have been voicing the views of his sleeping inheritors, but subconsciously expressed in the sense appropriate to his situation as a mammal. I began to consider again that perhaps he was not quite sane, despite the sense that his letters made generally. I asked myself: Is it possible that he is allowing himself to become obsessive about his ideas? Or are his dreams and ideas symptomatic of an underlying insanity? Or was it worse still: Was he in reality being influenced psychicly by the sleepers? Indeed was it affecting his own physiology?

I wrote immediately to Nikos concerned for his wellbeing and enquiring about the role of the Govvy men. In his reply he made no reference to it, unless it be: "Regarding our other interests, we must be patient for the time being. When the results are available, I shall let you know." I took him to mean the business of the Govvy men.

Nikos apologised for not being able to continue, saying he had just had an important telephone call and would have to abandon letter writing for the time being, but would write again in a few days. He had been called to an important meeting at Arlington but before that he was taking a few days holiday in New England where he had to research vital matters in the Lovecraft archive in Cambridge.

We know Nikos went to Cambridge and spent three days diligently inspecting the dusty shelves of the Lovecraft Bequest in the Literary Curiosities Room of Harvard University. He checked out of his hotel and�

There is no record of any meeting with Pentagon officials or with any government servants in Washington. Had Nikos found something in the archives, something that completed the jigsaw puzzle? Or had he been set up by the Govvy men?

A week after his disappearance, a man fishing off Cape Cod caught a shark which promptly coughed up the contents of its stomach. Among the stuff it couldn’t digest was a bony human arm, with no fingers! Was this the last the world was to see of S Tino Nikos, a scholar who learned too much?

Michaela Magi Griffiths, Bloomsbury, September, 1993
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