The housing provided by Columbia Medical School was quite good. Everyone had a private suite with a bedroom and a small living room. Of course, the rent was expensive, and parties were forbidden, so many people chose to rent nearby instead.
Schiller lived in the dormitory. The four roommates who shared the same common lounge with him had all moved out, so he had an entire dormitory to himself.
Schiller went back to change clothes and took his laptop. Laptops of this era were still fairly heavy, so he carried it in a computer bag.
The weather was not quite warm yet, so he wore a turtleneck sweater beneath a wool overcoat. It was a common outfit around campus; with a scarf added, he would disappear into any crowd.
Schiller left the dorm, went out through the school's eastern gate behind the building, took the subway to central Manhattan, wandered around nearby streets, and found a café to sit in.
He ordered a coffee, sat at a table, opened his laptop, and began looking through the documents he had saved, intending to see how far his research had progressed.
Schiller guessed there had originally been nothing on the computer, since such details could never have been covered in a comic. But the moment he opened it, he found numerous unfinished short research papers.
Schiller skimmed through them. They were all fairly basic. One had been edited most recently, and after opening the schedule, he found that it was due soon—there were a little over thirty hours left before the deadline.
Schiller began writing unhurriedly. This sort of thing came naturally to him. The only thing he needed to control was not making it too sophisticated; it had to match the level of a student who had just entered medical school.