The Big U

First Semester

On back-to-school day, Sarah Jane Johnson and Casimir Radon waited, for a while, in line together. At the time they did not know each other. Sarah had just found that she had no place to live, and was suffering that tense and lonely feeling that sets in when you have no place to hide. Casimir was just discovering that American Megaversity was a terrible place, and was not happy either.

After they had worked their way down the hail and into the office of the Dean of the College of Sciences and Humanities, they sat down next to each other on the scratchy Dayglo orange chairs below the Julian Didius III Memorial Window. The sunlight strained in greyly over their shoulders, and occasionally they turned to look at the scene outside.

Below them on one of the Parkway off-ramps a rented truck from Maryland had tried to pass under a low bridge, its student driver forgetting that he was in a truck and not his Trans-Am. Upon impact, the steel molding that fastened the truck's top to its sides had wrapped itself around the frame of a green highway sign bolted to the bridge. Now the sign, which read:

AMERICAN MEGAVERSITY

VISITOR PARKING

SPORTS EVENTS

EXIT 500 FT

was suspended in the air at the end of a long strip of truck that had been peeled up and aside.

A small crowd students, apparently finished with all their line-waiting, stood on the bridge and beside the ramp, throwing Frisbees and debris into the torn-open back of the truck, where its renters lounged in sofas and recliners and drank beer, and threw the projectiles back. Sarah thought it was idiotic, and Casimir couldn't understand it at all.

Out in the hallway, people behind them in the line were being verbally abused by an old derelict who had penetrated the Plex security system. "The only degree you kids deserve is the third degree!" he shouted, waving his arms and staggering in place. He wore a ratty tweed jacket whose elbow patches flapped like vestigial wings, and he drank in turns from a bottle of Happy's vodka and a Schlitz tall-boy which he kept holstered in his pockets. He had the full attention of the students, who were understandably bored, and most of them laughed and tried to think of provocative remarks.

As the drunk was wading toward them, one asked another how her summer had been. "What about it?" asked the derelict. "Fiscal conservatism? Fine in theory! Tough, though! You have to be tough and humane together, you see, the two opposites must unite in one great leader! Can't be a damn dictator like S. S. Krupp!" This brought cheers and laughter from the upperclassmen, who had just decided the drunk was a cool guy. Septimius Severus Krupp, the President of American Megaversity, was not popular. "Jesus Christ!" he continued through the laughter, "What the hell are they teaching you savages these days? You need a spanking! No more circuses. Maybe a dictator is just what you need! Alcibiades! Pompilius Numa! They'd straighten things out good and fast."

Sarah knew the man. He liked to break into classes at the Big U and lecture the professors, who usually were at a loss as to how to deal with him. His name was Bert Nix. He had taken quite a shine to Sarah: for her part, she did not know whether or not to be scared of him. During the preceding spring's student government campaign, Bert Nix had posed with Sarah for a campaign photo which had then appeared on posters all over the Plex. This was just the kind of thing that Megaversity students regarded as a sign of greatness, so she had won, despite progressive political ideas which, as it turned out, nobody was even aware of. This was all hard for Sarah to believe. She felt that Bert Nix had been elected President, not the woman he had appeared with on the campaign poster, and she felt obliged to listen to him even when he simply jabbered for hours on end. He was a nice lunatic, but he was adrift in the Bert Nix universe, and that stirred deep fears in Sarah's soul.

Casimir paid little attention to the drunk and a great deal to Sarah. He could not help it, because she was the first nice-seeming person, concept or thing he had found in his six hours at the Big U. During the ten years he had spent saving up money to attend this school, Casimir had kept himself sane by imagining it. Unfortunately, he had imagined quiet talks over brunch with old professors, profound discussions in the bathrooms, and dazzling, sensitive people everywhere just waiting to make new friends. What he had found, of course, was American Megaversity. There was only one explanation for this atmosphere that he was willing to believe: that these people were civilized, and that for amusement they were acting out a parody of the squalor of high school life, which parody Casimir had been too slow to get so far. The obvious explanation– that it was really this way– was so horrible that it had not even entered his mind.

When he saw the photo of her on the back page of the back-to-school edition of the Monoplex Monitor, and read the caption identifying her as Sarah Jane Johnson, Student Government President, he made the most loutish double take between her and the photograph. He knew that she knew that he now knew who she was, and that was no way to start a passionate love affair. All he could do was to make a big show of reading about her in the Monitor, and wait for her to make the first move. He nodded thoughtfully at the botched quotations and oversimplifications in the article.

Sarah was aware of this; she had watched him page slowly and intensely through the paper, waiting with mild dread for him to get to the back page, see the picture and say something embarrassing. Instead– even more embarrassing – he actually read the article, and before he reached the bottom of the page, the student ahead of Sarah stomped out and she found herself impaled on the azure gaze of the chief bureaucrat of the College of Sciences and Humanities. "How," said Mrs. Santucci crisply, "may I help you?"

Mrs. Santucci was polite. Her determination to be decent, and to make all things decent, was like that of all the Iranian Revolutionary Guards combined. Her policy of no-first-use meant that as long as we were objective and polite, any conversation would slide pleasantly down greased iron rails into a pit of despair. Any first strike by us, any remarks deemed improper by this grandmother of twenty-six and player of two dozen simultaneous bingo cards, would bring down massive retaliation. Sarah knew her. She arose primly and moved to the front chair of the line to look across a barren desk at Mrs. Santucci.

"I'm a senior in this college. I was lucky enough to get an out-of-Plex apartment for this fall. When I got there today I found that the entire block of buildings had been shut down for eight months by the Board of Health. I went to Housing. Upon reaching the head of that line, I was told that it was being handled by Student Affairs. Upon reaching the head of the line there, I was given this form and told to get signatures at Housing and right here.

Mrs. Santucci reached out with the briskness that only old secretaries can approach and seized the papers. "This form is already signed," she informed Sarah.

"Right. I got that done at about one o'clock. But when I got to my new temporary room assignment it turned out to be the B-men's coffee lounge and storeroom for the northeast quad of the first sublevel. It is full of B-men all the time. You know how they are– they don't speak much English, and you know what kinds of things they decorate their walls with"– this attempt to get Mrs. Santucci's sympathy by being prissy was not obviously successful– "and I can't possibly live there. I returned to Housing. To change my room assignment is a whole new procedure, and I need a form from you which says I'm in good academic standing so far this semester."

"That form," Mrs. Santucci noted, "will require signatures from all your instructors."

"I know," said Sarah. All was going according to plan and she was approaching the center of her pitch. "But the semester hasn't started yet! And half my courses don't even have teachers assigned! So, since I'm a senior and my GPA is good, could the Dean okay my room change without the form? Doesn't that make sense? Sort of?" Sarah sighed. She had broken at the end, her confidence destroyed by Mrs. Santucci's total impassivity, by those arms folded across a navy-blue bosom like the Hoover Dam, by a stare like the headlights of an oncoming streetsweeper.

"I'm sure this is all unnecessary. Perhaps they don't know that their lounge has been reassigned. If you can just explain matters to them, I'm sure that Building Maintenance will be happy to accommodate you."

Sarah felt defeated. It had been a nice summer, and while away she had forgotten how it was. She had forgotten that the people who ran this place didn't have a clue as to how reality worked, that in their way they were all as crazy as Bert Nix. She closed her eyes and tilted her tense head back, and the man in the chair behind her intervened.

"Wait a minute," he said righteously. His voice was high, but carried conviction and reasonable sensitivity. "She can't be expected to do that. Those guys don't even speak English. All they speak is Bosnian or Moldavian or something."

"Moravian," said Mrs. Santucci in her Distant Early Warning voice, which was rumored to set off burglar alarms Within a quarter-mile radius.

"The language is Crotobaltislavonian, a modern dialect of Old Scythian," announced Sarah, hoping to end the conflict. The B-Men are refugees from Crotobaltislavonia."

"Listen, I talk to Magrov all the time, and I say it's Moravian." Sarah felt her body temperature begin to drop as she chanced a direct look at Mrs. Santucci.

Trying to sound prim, Sarah said, "Have you ever considered the possibility that you are confusing Magrov with Moravian?" Seeing the look on Mrs. Santucci's face, she then inhaled sharply and shifted away. Just as the old bureaucrat's jaw was starting to yawn, her chest rising like the return of Atlantis, Casimir Radon leaned way across and yanked something out of Sarah's lap and– in a tone so arresting that it was answered by Bert Nix outside– exclaimed, "Wait a minute!"

Casimir was meek and looked like a nerd and a wimp, but he was great in a crisis. The lost continent subsided and Mrs. Santucci leaned forward with a dangerous frown. Out in the hallway the exasperated Bert Nix cried, "But there's no more minutes to wait! To save the Big U we've got to start now!"

Casimir had taken Sarah's room assignment card from the stack of ammunition on her lap, and was peering at it like a scientific specimen. It was an IBM card, golden yellow, with a form printed on it in yellow-orange ink. In the center of the form was a vague illustration of the Monoplex, looking decrepit and ruined because of the many rectangular holes punched through it. Along the top was a row of boxes labeled with tiny blurred yellow-orange abbreviations that were further abbreviated by rectangular holes. Numbers and letters were printed in black ink in the vicinity of each box.

Bert Nix was still carrying on outside. "Then fell the fires of Eternity with loud & shrill Sound of loud Trumpet thundering along from heaven to heaven, A mighty sound articulate Awake ye dead & come To Judgment from the four winds Awake & Come away Folding like scrolls of the Enormous volume of Heaven & Earth With thunderous noises & dreadful shakings rocking to & fro: The heavens are shaken & the Earth removed from its place; the foundations of the eternal Hills discovered; The thrones of Kings are shaken they have lost their robes and crowns … and that's what poetry is! Not the caterwaulings of the Unwise!"

Finally, Casimir looked relieved. "Yeah, I thought that might be it. You were reading this number here. Right?" He got up and stood beside Sarah and pointed to her temporary room number. "Sure," said Sarah, suddenly feeling dreadful.

"Well," said Casimir, sounding apologetic, "that's not what you want. Your room is not identified by room number, because some rooms repeat. It's identified by door number, which is unique for all doors. This number you were looking at isn't either of those, it's your room ID number, which has to do with data processing. That ID number refers to your actual door number, incorrectly called room number. It is the middle six digits of this character string here. See?" He masked the string of figures between the dirty backward parenthesis of his thumbnails. "In your case we have E12S, giving tower, floor and wing, and then 49, your actual room number."

Sarah did not know whether to scream, apologize or drop dead. She shoved her forms into her knapsack and stood. "Thank you for your trouble, Mrs. Santucci," she said quickly. "Thank you," she said to Casimir, then snapped around and headed for the door, though not fast enough to escape a withering harrrumph from Mrs. Santucci. But as she stepped into the hallway, which in order to hold down utility costs was dimly lit, she saw a dark and ragged figure out of the corner of her eye. She looked behind to see Bert Nix grab the doorframe and swing around until he was leaning into the office.

"Listen, Genevieve," he said, "she doesn't need any of your phlegm! She's President! She's my friend! You're just a doorstop!" As much as Sarah wanted to hear the rest of this, she didn't have the energy.

Casimir was left inside, his last view of Sarah interrupted by the dangling figure of the loony, caught in a crossfire he wanted no part of.

"I'll call the guards," said Mrs. Santucci, who for the first time was showing uneasiness.

"Today?" Bert Nix found this a merry idea. "You think you can get a guard today?"

"You'd better stop coming or we'll keep you from coming back."

His eyes widened in mock, crimson-rimmed awe, "Ooh," he sighed, "that were terrible. I'd have no reason to live." He pulled himself erect, walked in and climbed from the arm of Casimir's chair to the broad slate sill of the window. As Mrs. Santucci watched with more terror than seemed warranted, the derelict swung one window open like a door, letting in a gust of polluted steam.

By the time he was leaning far outside and grinning down the seventy-foot drop to the Parkway and the interchange. she had resolved to try diplomacy– though she motioned that Casimir should try to grab his legs. Casimir ignored this; it was obvious that the man was just trying to scare her. Casimir was from Chicago and found that these Easterners had no sense of humor.

"Now, Bert," said Mrs. Santucci, "don't give an old lady a hard time."

Bert Nix dropped back to the sill. "Hard time! What do you know about hard times?" He thrust his hand through a hole in his jacket, wiggling his long fingers at her, and wagging his out-of-control tongue for a few seconds. Finally he added, "Hard times make you strong."

"I've got work to do, Pert."

This seemed to remind him of something. He closed the window and cascaded to the floor. "So do I," he said, then turned to Casimir and whispered, "That's the Julian Didius III Memorial Window. That's what I call it, anyway. Like the view?"

"Yeah, it's nice," said Casimir, hoping that this would not become a conversation.

"Good," said the derelict, "so did J. D. It's the last view he ever saw. Couldn't handle the job. That's why I call it that." The giggling Bert Nix ambled back into the hail, satisfied, pausing only to steal the contents of the office wastebasket. Through most of this Casimir sat still and stared at the faded German ti 1 poster on the wall. Now he was really in the talons of Mrs. Santucci, who had probably shifted into adrenaline overdrive and was likely to fling her desk through the wall. Instead, she was perfectly calm and professional. Casimir disliked her for it.

"I'm a junior physics major and I transferred in from a community college in Illinois. I know the first two years of physics inside and out, but there's a problem. The rules here say physics courses must include 'socioeconomic contexts backgrounding,' which I guess means it has to explain how it fits in with today's something or other.

"In order to context the learning experience with the real world," said Mrs. Santucci gravely, "we must include socioeconomic backgrounding integral with the foregrounded material." "Right. Anyway, my problem is that I don't think I need it. I'm not here to give you my memoirs or anything, but my parents were immigrants, I came from a slum, got started in electronics, sort of made my own way, saw a lot of things, and so I don't think I really need this. It'd be a shame if I had to start all over, learning, uh, foregrounded material I already know."

Mrs. Santucci rolled her eyes so that the metal-flake blue eyeshadow on her lids flashed intermittently like fishing lures drawn through a murky sea. "Well, it has been done. It must be arranged with the curriculum chair of your department."

"Who is that for physics?"

"Distinguished Professor Sharon," she said. Bulging her eyeballs at Casimir, she made a respectful silence at the Professor's name, daring him to break it.

When Casimir returned to consciousness he was drifting down a hallway, still mumbling to himself in astonishment. He had an appointment to meet the Professor Sharon. He would have been ecstatic just to have sat in on one of the man's lectures!

Casimir Radon was an odd one, as American Megaversity students went. This was a good thing for him, as the Housing people simply couldn't match him up with a reasonable roommate; he was assigned a rare single. It was in D Tower, close to the sciences bloc where he would spend most of his time, on a floor of single rooms filled by the old, the weird and the asinine who simply could not live in pairs.

In order to find his room he would have to trace a mind-twisting path through the lower floors until he found the elevators of D Tower. So before he got himself lost, he went to the nearest flat surface, which was the top of a large covered wastebasket. From it he cleared away a few Dorito bags and a half-drained carton of FarmSun SweetFresh brand HomeLivin' Artificial Chocolate-Flavored Dairy Beverage and forced them into the overflowing maw below. He then removed his warped and sweat-soaked Plex map (the Plexus) from his pocket and unfolded it on the woodtoned Fiberglass surface.

As was noted at the base of the Plexus, it had been developed by the AM Advanced Graphics Workshop. Rather than presenting maps of each floor of the Plex, they had used an Integrated Projection to show the entire Plex as a network of brightly colored paths and intersections. The resulting tangle was so convoluted and yet so clean and spare as to be essentially without meaning. Casimir, however, could read it, because he was not like us. After applying his large intelligence to the problem for several minutes he was able to find the most efficient route, and following it with care, he quickly became lost.

The mistake was a natural one. The elevators, which were busy even in the dead of night, were today clogged with catatonic parents from New Jersey clutching beanbag chairs and giant stuffed animals. Fortunately (he thought), adjacent to each elevator was an entirely unused stairwell.

Casimir discovered shortly afterward that in the lower floors of the Plex all stairwell doors locked automatically from the outside. I discovered it myself at about the same time. Unlike Casimir I had been a the Plex for ten days, but I had spent them typing up notes for my classes, It is unwise to prepare two courses in ten days, and I knew it. I hadn't gotten to it until the last minute, for various reasons, and so I'd spent ten days sitting there in my bicycling shorts, drinking beer, typing, and sweating monumentally in the fetid Plex air. So my first exposure to the Plex and its people really came that afternoon, when I wandered out into the elevator lobby and punched the buttons. The desperate Tylenol-charged throngs in the elevators did not budge when the doors opened, because they couldn't. They stared at me as though I were Son of Godzilla, which I was used to, and I stared at them and tried to figure out how they got that way, and the doors clunked shut. I discovered the stairways, and once I got below the bottom of the tower and into the lower levels, I also found that I was locked in.

For fifteen minutes I followed dimly lit stairs and corridors smelling of graffiti solvent and superfluous floor wax, helplessly following the paths that students would take if the Plex ever had to be evacuated. Through little windows in the locked doors I peered out of this twilight zone and into the different zones of the Plex– Cafeteria, Union, gymnasia, offices– but my only choice was to follow the corridors, knowing they would dump me into the ghetto outside. At last I turned a corner and saw the wall glistening with noisy grey outside light. At the end of the line, a metal door swung silently in the breeze, emblazoned thus: FIRE ESCAPE ONLY. WARNING– ALARM WILL SOUND.

I stepped out the door and looked down along, steep slope into the canyon of the Turnpike.

The American Megaversity Campustructure was three blocks on a side, and squatted between the Megalopolitan Turnpike on the north and the Ronald Reagan Parkway on the south. Megaversity Stadium, the only campus building not inside the Plex proper, was to the west, and on the east was an elaborate multilevel interchange interconnecting the Pike, the Parkway, the Plex and University Avenue. The Pike ran well below the base of the Plex, and so as I emerged from the north wall of the building I found myself atop a high embankment. Below me the semis and the Audis shot past through the layered blue monoxide, and their noises blended into a waterfall against the unyielding Plex wall. Aside from a few wretched weeds growing from cracks in the embankment, no life was to be seen, except for Casimir Radon.

He had just emerged from another emergency exit. We saw each other from a hundred feet apart, waved and walked toward each other. As we converged, I regarded a tall and very thin man with an angular face and a dense five-o'clock shadow. He wore round rimless glasses. His black hair was in disarray as usual; during the year it was to vary almost randomly between close-cropped and shoulder-length. I soon observed that Casimir could grow a shadow before lunch, and a beard in three days. He and I were the same age, though I was a recent Ph.D. and he a junior.

Later I was to think it remarkable that Casimir and I should emerge from those fire doors at nearly the same moment, and meet. On reflection I have changed my mind. The Big U was an unnatural environment, a work of the human mind, not of God or plate tectonics. If two strangers met in the rarely used stairways, it was not unreasonable that they should turn out to be similar, and become friends. I thought of it as an immense vending machine, cautiously crafted so that any denomination too ancient or foreign or irregular would rattle about randomly for a while, find its way into the stairway system, and inevitably be deposited in the reject tray on the barren back side. Meanwhile, brightly colored graduates with attractively packaged degrees were dispensed out front every June, swept up by traffic on the Parkway and carried away for leisurely consumption. Had I understood this earlier I might have come to my senses and immediately resigned, but on that hot September day, with the exhaust abrading our lungs and the noise squashing our conversation, it seemed worthwhile to circle around to the Main Entrance and give it another try.

We headed east to avoid the stadium. On our right the wall stretched and away for acres in a perfect cinderblock grid. After passing dozens of fire doors we came to the corner and turned into the access lot that stretched along the east wall. Above, at many altitudes, cars and trucks screeched and blasted through the tight curves of the interchange. People called it the Death Vortex, and some claimed that parts of it extended into the fourth dimension. As soon as it had been planned, the fine old brownstone neighborhood that was its site plummeted into slumhood; Haitians and Vietnamese filled the place up, and the feds airproofed the buildings and installed giant electric air filters before proceeding.

Here on the access lot we could look down a long line of loading docks, the orifices of the Plex where food and supplies were ingested and trash discharged, serviced by an endless queue of trucks. The first of these docks, by the northern corner, was specially designed for the discharge of hazardous wastes produced in Plex labs and was impressively surrounded by fences, red lights and threatening signs. The next six loading docks were for garbage trucks, and the rest, all the way down to the Parkway, for deliveries. We swung way out from the Plex to avoid all this, and followed the fence at the border of the lot, gazing into the no-man's-land of lost mufflers and shredded fanbelts beyond, and sometimes staring up into the Plex itself.

The three-by-three block base had six stories above ground and three below. Atop it sat eight 25-story towers where lived the 40,000 students of the university. Each tower had four wings 160 feet long, thrown out at right angles to make a Swiss cross. These towers sat at the four corners and four sides of the base. The open space between them was a huge expanse of roof called Tar City, inhabited by great machines, crushed furniture thrown from above, rats, roaches, students out on dares, and the decaying corpses of various things that had ventured out on hot summer days and become mired in the tar. All we could see were the neutral light brown towers and their thousands and thousands of identical windows reaching into the heavens. Even for a city person, it was awesome. Compared to the dignified architecture of the old brownstones, though, it caused me a nagging sense of embarrassment.

The Vortex whose coils were twined around those brown-stones threw out two ramps which served as entrance and exit for the Plex parking ramp. These ran into the side of the building at about third-story level. To us they were useless, so we continued around toward the south side.

Here was actually some green: a strip of grass between the walk and the Parkway. On this side the Plex was faced with darker brown brick and had many picture windows and signs for the businesses of the built-in mall on the first floor. The Main Entrance itself was merely eight revolving doors in a row, and having swished through them we were drowned in conditioned air, Muzak, the smell of Karmel Korn and the idiotic babble of penny-choked indoor fountains. We passed through this as quickly as possible and rode the long escalators ("This must be what a ski lift is like," said Casimir) to the third floor, where a rampart of security booths stretched across our path like a thruway toll station. Several of the glass cages were occupied by ancient guards in blue uniforms, who waved us wearily through the turnstiles as we waved our ID cards at them. Casimir stopped on the other side, frowning.

"They shouldn't have let me in," he said.

"Why?" I asked. "Isn't that your ID?"

"Of course it is," said Casimir Radon, "but the photo is so bad they had no way of telling." He was serious. We surveyed the rounded blue back of the guard. Most of them had been recruited out of Korea or the Big One. The glass cages of the Plex had ruined their bodies. Now they had become totally passive in their outlook; but, by the same token, they had become impossible to faze or surprise.

We stepped through more glass doors and were in the Main Lobby.

The Plex's environmental control system was designed so that anyone could spend four years there wearing only a jockstrap and a pair of welding goggles and yet never feel chilly or find the place too dimly lit. Many spent their careers there without noticing this. Casimir Radon took less than a day to notice the pitiless fluorescent light. Acres of light glanced off the Lobby's polished floor like sun off the Antarctic ice, and a wave of pain now rolled toward Casimir from near the broad vinyl information desk and washed over him, draining through a small hole in the center of his skull and pooling coldly behind his eyes. Great patches of yellow blindness appeared in the center of his vision and he coasted to a stop, hands on eyes, mouth open. I knew enough to know it was migraine, so I held his skinny arm and led him, blind, to his room in D Tower. He lay cautiously down on the naked plastic mattress, put a sock over his eyes and thanked me. I drew the blinds, sat there helplessly for a while, then left him to finish his adjustment to the Big U.

After that he wore a uniform of sorts: old T-shirt, cutoffs or gym shorts, hightop tennis shoes ("to keep the rats off my ankles") and round purple mountain-climbing goggles with leather bellows on the sides to block out peripheral light. He was planning such a costume as I left his room. More painfully, he was beginning to question whether he could live in such a place for even one semester, let alone four. He did not know that the question would be decided for him, and so he felt the same edgy uncertainty that nagged at me.

Some people, however, were quite at home in the Flex. At about this time, below D Tower in the bottom sublevel, not far from the Computing Center, several of them were crossing paths in a dusty little dead end of a hallway. To begin with, three young men were standing by the only door in the area, taking turns peering into the room beyond. The pen lights from their shirt pockets illuminated a small windowless room containing a desk, a chair and a computer terminal. The men stared wistfully at the latter, and had piled their math and computer textbooks on the floor like sandbags, as though they planned a siege. They had been discussing their tactical alternatives for getting past the door, and had run the gamut from picking the lock to blowing it open with automatic-weapon bursts, but so far none had made any positive moves.

"If we could remove that window," said one, a mole-faced individual smelling of Brut and sweat and glowing in a light blue iridescent synthetic shirt and hi-gloss dark blue loafers, "we could reach in and unlock it from inside."

"Some guy tried to get into my grandma's house that way one time," recalled another, a skinny, long-haired, furtive fellow who was having trouble tracking the conversation, "but she took a sixteen-ounce ball-peen hammer and smashed his hand with it. He never came back." He delivered the last sentence like the punchline to a Reader's Digest true anecdote, convulsing his pals with laughter.

The third, a disturbingly 35-ish looking computer science major with tightly permed blond hair, eventually calmed down enough to ask, "Hey, Gary, Gary! Did she use the ball end or the peen end?" Gary was irked and confused, He had hoped to impress them by specifying the weight of the hammer, but he was stumped by this piece of one-upsmanship; he didn't know which end was which. He radiated embarrassment for several seconds before saying, "Oh, gee, I don't know, I think she probably used both of 'em before she was done with the guy. But that guy never came back."

Their fun was cut short by a commanding voice. "A sixteen-ounce ball-peen hammer isn't much good against a firearm. If I were a woman living alone I'd carry a point thirty-eight revolver, minimum. Double action. Effective enough for most purposes." The startling newcomer had their surprised attention. He had stopped quite close to them and was surveying the door, and they instinctively stepped out of his way. He was tall, thin and pale, with thin brown Bryicreemed hair and dark red lips. The calculator on his hip was the finest personal computing machine, and on the other hip, from a loop of leather, hung a fencing foil, balanced so that its red plastic tip hung an inch above the floor. It was Fred Fine.

"You're the guy who runs the Wargames Club, aren't you," asked the blond student.

"I am Games Marshall, if that's the intent of your question. Administrative and financial authority are distributed among the leadership cadre according to the Constitution."

"The Wargames Club?" asked Gary, his voice suffused with hope. "What, is there one?"

"The correct title is the Megaversity Association for Reenactments and Simulations, or MARS," snapped Fred Fine. Still almost breathless, Gary said, "Say. Do you guys ever play 'Tactical Nuclear War in Greenland?'"

Fred Fine stared just over Gary's head, screwing up his face tremendously and humming. "Is that the earlier version of 'Martians in Godthaab,' "he finally asked, though his tone indicated that he already knew the answer.

Gary was hopelessly taken aback, and looked around a bit before allowing his gaze to rest on Fred Fine's calculator. "Oh, yeah, I guess. I guess 'Martians in Godthaab' must be new." "No," said Fred Fine clearly, "it came out six months ago." To soften the humiliation he chucked Gary on the shoulder. "But to answer your question. Some of our plebes– our novice wargamers– do enjoy that game. It's interesting in its own way, I suppose, though I've only played it a dozen times. Of course, it's a Simuconflict product, and their games have left a lot to be desired since they lost their Pentagon connections, but there's nothing really wrong with it."

The trio stared at him. How could he know so much? "Uh, do you guys," ventured the blue one, "ever get into role-playing games? Like Dungeons and Dragons?"

"Those of us high in the experiential hierarchy find conventional D and D stultifying and repetitive. We prefer to stage live-action role-playing scenarios. But that's not for just anyone." They looked timidly at Fred Fine's fencing foil and wondered if he were on his way to a live-action wargame at this very moment. For an instant, as he stood in the dim recess of the corridor, light flickering through a shattered panel above and playing on his head like distant lightning, his feet spread apart, hand on sword pommel, it seemed to them that they beheld some legendary hero of ancient times, returned from Valhalla to try his steel against modern foes.

The mood was broken as another man suddenly came around the corner. He brushed silently past Fred Fine and nearly impaled Gary on a key, but Gary moved just in time and the new arrival shoved the key home and shot back the deadbolt. He was tall, with nearly white blond hair, pale blue eyes and a lean but cherubic face, dressed in cutoffs and a white dress shirt. Shouldering through them, he entered the little room.

Fred Fine reacted with uncharacteristic warmth. "Well, well, well," he said, starting in a high whine and dropping in pitch from there. I had Fred Fine in one of my classes and when in a good mood he really did talk like Colonel Klink; it took some getting used to. "So they haven't caught up with you and your master key yet, eh, Virgil? Very interesting."

Virgil Gabrielsen turned smoothly while stepping through the doorway, and stared transparently through Fred Fine's head. "No," he said, "but I have plenty of copies anyway. They aren't about to change every lock in the Plex on my account. The only doors this won't open are in the hazardous waste area, the Administration Bloc, Doors 1253 through 1778 and 7899 to 8100, which obviously no one cares about, and Doors 753, 10100 and the high 12,500's, and I'm obviously not going to go ripping off vending-machine receipts, am I?" At this the three friends frowned and looked back and forth. Virgil entered the room and switched on the awesomely powerful battery of overhead fluorescent lights. Everything was somewhat dusty inside.

"No rat poison on the floor," observed Fred Fine. "Dusty. Still keeping the B-men out, eh?"

"Yeah," said Virgil, barely aware of them, and began to pull things from his knapsack. "I told them I was doing werewolf experiments in here."

Fred Fine nodded soberly at this. Meanwhile, the three younger students had invited themselves in and were gathered around the 'terminal, staring raptly into its printing mechanism. "It's just an antique Teletype," said the blue one. He had already said this once, but repeated it now for Fred Fine. "However, I really like these. Real dependable, and lots of old-fashioned class despite an inferior character menu." Fred Fine nodded approvingly. Virgil shouldered through them, sat before the terminal and, without looking up, announced, "I didn't invite any of you in, so you can all leave NOW.' They did not quite understand.

"Catch my drift? I dislike audiences."

Fred Fine avoided this by shaking his head, smiling a red smile and chuckling. The others were unmanned and stood still, waiting to be told that Virgil was kidding.

"Couldn't we just sit in?" one finally asked. "I've just got to XEQ one routine. It's debugged and bad data tested. It's fast, it outputs on batch. I can wait till you're done."

"Forget it," said Virgil airily, scooting back and nudging him away. "I won't be done for hours. It's all secret Science Shop data. Okay?"

"But turnover for terminals at CC is two hours to the minus one!"

"Try it at four in the morning. You know? Four in the morning is a great time at American Megaversity. Everything is quiet, there are no lines even at the laundry, you can do whatever you want without fucking with a mob of freshmen. Put yourselves on second shift and you'll be fine. Okay?"

They left, sheeshing. Fred Fine stopped in the doorway, still grinning broadly and shaking his head, as though leaving just for the hell of it.

"You're still the same old guy, Virgil. You still program in raw machine code, still have that master key. Don't know where science at AM would be without you. What a wiz."

Virgil stared patiently at the wall. "Fred. I told you I'd fix your MCA and I will. Don't you believe me?"

"Sure I do. Say! That invitation I made you, to join MARS anytime you want, is still open. You'll be a Sergeant right away, and we'll probably commission you after your first night of gaming, from what I know of you."

"Thanks. I won't forget. Goodbye."

"Ciao." Fred Fine bowed his thin frame low and strode off. "What a creep," said Virgil, and ferociously snapped the deadbolt as soon as Fred Fine was almost out of earshot. Removing supplies from the desk drawer, he stuffed a towel under the door and taped black paper over the window. By the terminal he set up a small lamp with gel over its mouth, which cast a dim pool of red once he had shut off the room lights. He activated the terminal, and the computer asked him for the number of his account, Instead of typing in an account number, though, Virgil typed: FIAT LUX.

Later, Virgil and I got to know each other. I had problems with the computer only he could deal with, and after our first contacts he seemed to find me interesting enough to stay in touch, He began to show me parts of his secret world, and eventually allowed me to sit in on one of these computer sessions. Nothing at all made sense until he explained the Worm to me, and the story of Paul Bennett.

"Paul Bennett was one of these computer geniuses. When he was a sophomore here he waltzed through most of the secret codes and keys the Computing Center uses to protect valuable data. Well, he really had the University by the short hairs then. At any time he could have erased everything in the computer– financial records, scientific data, expensive software, you name it. He could have devastated this university just sitting there at his computer terminal– that's how vulnerable computers are. Eventually the Center found out who he was, and reprimanded him. Bennett was obviously a genius, and he wasn't malicious, so the Center then went ahead and hired him to design better security locks. That happens fairly often– the best lock-designers are people who have a talent for picking locks."

"They hired him right out of his sophomore year?" I asked. "Why not? He had nothing more to learn. The people who were teaching his classes were the same ones whose security programs he was defeating! What's the point of keeping someone like that in school? Anyway, Bennett did very well at the Center, but he was still a kid with some big problems, and no one got along with him. Finally they fired him.

"When they fire a major Computing Center employee, they have to be sneaky. If they give him two weeks' notice he might play havoc with the computer during those two weeks, out of spite. So when they fire these people, it happens overnight. They show up at work and all the locks have been changed, and they have to empty out their desks while the senior staff watch them. That's what they did to Paul Bennett, because they knew he was just screwed up enough to frag the System for revenge."

"So much for his career, then."

"No. He was immediately hired by a firm in Massachusetts for four times his old salary. And CC was happy, because they'd gotten good work out of him and thought they were safe from reprisals. About a week later, though, the Worm showed up."

"And that is– ?"

"Paul Bennett's sabotage program. He put it into the computer before he was fired, you see, and activated it, but every morning when he came to work he entered a secret command that would put it on hold for another twenty-four hours. As soon as he stopped giving the command, the Worm came out of hiding and began to play hell with things."

"But what good did it do him? It didn't prevent his being fired,"

"Who the hell knows? I think he put it in to blackmail the CC staff and hold on to his job. That must have been his original plan. But when you make a really beautiful, brilliant program, the temptation to see it work is just overwhelming. He must have been dying to see the Worm in action. So when he was fired, he decided, what the hell, they deserve it, I'll unleash the Worm. That was in the middle of last year. At first it did minor things such as erasing student programs, shutting the System down at odd times, et cetera. Then it began to worm its way deeper and deeper into the Operator– the master program that controls the entire System– and wreak vandalism on a larger scale. The Computing Center personnel fought it for a while, but they were successful for only so long. The Operator is a huge program and you have to know it all at once in order to understand what the Worm is doing to it."

"Aha," I said, beginning to understand, "they needed someone with a photographic memory. They needed another prodigy, didn't they? So they got you? Is that it?"

At this Virgil shrugged. "It's true that I am the sort of person they needed," he said quietly. "But don't assume that they 'got' me."

"Really? You're a free lance?"

"I help them and they help me. It is a free exchange of services. You needn't know the details."

I was willing to accept that restriction. Virgil had told me enough so that what he was doing made sense to me. Still, it was very abstract work, consisting mostly of reading long strings of numbers off the terminal and typing new ones in. On the night I sat in, the Worm had eaten all of the alumni records for people living in states beginning with "M." ("M!," said Virgil, "the worst letter it could have picked.") Virgil was puttering around in various files to see if the information had been stored elsewhere. He found about half of Montana hidden between lines of an illegal video game program, retrieved the data, erased the illegal program and caused the salvaged information to be printed out on a string of payroll check forms in a machine in the administrative bloc.

On this night, the first of the new school year, Virgil was not nobly saving erased data from the clutches of the Worm. He was actually arranging his living situation for the coming year. He had about five choice rooms around the Plex, which he filled with imaginary students in order to keep them vacant– an easy matter on the computer. To support his marijuana and ale habits he extracted a high salary from various sources, sending himself paychecks when necessary. For this he felt neither reluctance nor guilt, because Fred Fine was right: without Virgil, whose official job was to work in the Science Shop, scientific research at the Big U would simply stop. To support himself he took money from research accounts in proportion to the extent they depended on him. This was only fair. An indispensable place like the Science Shop needed a strong leader, someone bold enough to levy appropriate taxes against its users and spend the revenues toward the ends those users desired. Virgil had figured out how to do it, and made himself a niche at the Big U more comfortable than anyone else's.

Sarah lived in a double room just five floors above me and Ephraim Klein and John Wesley Fenrick, on E12S– E Tower, twelfth floor, south wing. The previous year she had luxuriated in a single, and resolved never to share her private space again; this double made her very angry. In the end, though, she lucked out. Her would-be roommate had only taken the space as a front, to fake out her pay-rents, and was actually living in A Tower with her boyfriend. Thus Sarah did not have to live four feet away from some bopper who would suffer an emotional crisis every week and explore the standard uses of sex and drugs and rock-and-roll in noisy experimental binges on the other side of the room.

Sarah's problem now was to redecorate what looked like the inside of a water closet. The cinderblock walls were painted chocolate brown and absorbed most light, shedding only the garish parts of the spectrum. The shattered tile floor was gray and felt sticky no matter how hard she scrubbed. On each side of the perfectly symmetrical room, long fluorescent light fixtures were bolted to the walls over the beds, making a harsh light nearby but elsewhere only a dull greenish glow. After some hasty and low-budget efforts at making it decent, Sarah threw herself into other activities and resigned herself to another year of ugliness.

On Wednesday of the term's second week there was a wing meeting. American Megaversity's recruitment propaganda tried to make it look as though the wings did everything as a jolly group, but this had not been true on any of Sarah's previous wings. This place was different. When she had dragged her duffel bags through the stairwell door on that first afternoon, a trio of well-groomed junior matrons had risen from a lace-covered card table in the lobby, helped her with the luggage, pinned a pink carnation on her sweaty T-shirt and welcomed her to "our wing." Under her pillow she had found a "starter kit" comprising a small teddy bear named Bobo, a white candle, a GOLLYWHATAFACE-brand PERSONAL COLOUR SAMPLER PACQUET, a sack of lemon drops, a red garter, six stick-on nametags with SARA written on them, a questionnaire and a small calligraphied Xeroxed note inviting her to the wing meeting. All had been wrapped in flowery pastel wrapping paper and cutely beribboned.

Most of it she had snarlingly punted into the nether parts of her closet. The wing meeting, however, was quasi-political, and hence she ought to show up. A quarter of an hour early, she pulled on a peasant blouse over presentable jeans and walked barefoot down the hall to the study lounge by the elevator lobby.

She was almost the last to arrive. She was also the only one not in a bathrobe, which was so queer that she almost feared she was having one of those LSD flashbacks people always warn you about. Her donut tasted like a donut, though, and all seemed normal otherwise, so it was reality– albeit a strange and distant branch thereof.

Obviously they had not all been bathing, because their hair was dry and their makeup fresh. There were terry robes, silk robes, Winnie-the-Pooh robes, long plush robes, plain velvety robes, designer robes, kimonos and even a few night-shirts on the cute and skinny. Also, many slippers, too many of them high-heeled. Once she was sure her brain was okay, she edged up to a nearby wingmate and mumbled, "Did I miss something? Everyone's in bathrobes!"

"Shit, don't ask me!" hissed the woman firmly. "I just took a shower, myself."

Looking down, Sarah saw that the woman was indeed clean of face and wet of hair. She was shorter than average and compact but not overweight, with pleasant strong features and black-brown hair that fell to her shoulders. Her bathrobe was short, old and plain, with a clothesline for a sash.

"Oh, sorry," said Sarah. "So you did. Uh, I'm Sarah, and my bathrobe is blue."

"I know. President of the Student Government."

Sarah shrugged and tried not to look stuck-up.

"What's the story, you've never lived on one of these floors?" The other woman seemed surprised.

"What do you mean, 'one of these floors?'"

She sighed. "Ah, look. I'm Hyacinth. I'll explain all this later. You want to sit down? It'll be a long meeting." Hyacinth grasped Sarah's belt loop and led her politely to the back row of chairs, where they sat a row behind the next people up. Hyacinth turned sideways in her chair and examined Sarah minutely.

The Study Lounge was not a pretty place. Designed to be as cheery as a breath mint commercial, it had aged into something not quite so nice. Windows ran along one wall and looked out into the elevator lobby, where the four wings of E12S came together. It was furnished with the standard public-area furniture of the Plex: cubical chairs and cracker-box sofas made of rectangular beams and slabs of foam covered in brilliant scratchy polyester. The carpet was a membrane of compressed fibers, covered with the tats and cigarette-burns and barfstains of years. Overhead, the ubiquitous banks of fluorescent lights cheerfully beamed thousands of watts of pure bluish energy down onto the inhabitants. Someone was always decorating the lounge, and this week the theme was football; the decorations were cardboard cutouts of well-known cartoon characters cavorting with footballs.

The only other nonrobed person in the place was the RA, Mitzi, who sat bolt upright at the lace-covered card table in front, left hand still as a dead bird In her lap, right hand three inches to the side of her jaw and bent back parallel to the tabletop, fingers curled upward holding a ballpoint pen at a jaunty but not vulgar forty-five-degree angle. She bore a fixed, almost manic smile which as far as Sarah could tell had nothing to do with anything– charm school, perhaps, or strychnine poisoning. Mitzi wore an overly formal dress and a kilogram of jewelry, and when she spoke, though not even her jawbone moved, one mighty earring began to swing violently.

Among other things, Mitzi welcomed new "members." There were three: another woman, Hyacinth and Sarah, introduced in that order. The first woman explained that she was Sandi and she was into like education and stuff. Then came Hyacinth; she was into apathy. She announced this loudly and they all laughed and complimented Hyacinth on her sense of humor.

Sarah was introduced last, being famous. "What are you into, Sarah Jane?" asked Mitzi. Sarah surveyed the glistening, fiercely smiling faces turned round to aim at her.

"I'm into reality," she said. This brought delighted laughter, especially from Hyacinth, who screamed like a sow.

The meeting then got underway. Hyacinth leaned back, crossed her arms and tilted her head back until she was staring openmouthed at the ceiling. As the meeting went on she combed her hair, bit her nails, played with loose threads from her robe, cleaned her toes and so on. The thing was, Sarah found all of this more interesting than the meeting itself. Sarah looked interested until her face got tired. She had spoken in front of groups enough to know that Mitzi could see them all clearly, and that to be obviously bored would be rude. Sometimes politeness had to give way to sanity, though, and before she knew it she found herself trying to swing the tassels at the ends of her sleeves in opposite directions at the same time. Hyacinth watched this closely and patted her on the back when she succeeded.

Mainly what they were doing was filling a huge social calendar with parties and similar events. Sarah wanted to announce that she liked to do things by herself or with a few friends, but she saw no diplomatic way of saying so. She did resurface for the discussion of the theme for the Last Night party, the social climax of the semester: Fantasy Island Nite.

"Wonder how they're going to tell it apart from all the other nights," grumbled Hyacinth. Nearby wingmates turned and smiled, failing to understand but assuming that whatever Hyacinth said must be funny.

Another phase of the social master plan was to form an official sister/brother relationship with the wing upstairs, known as the Wild and Crazy Guys. This in turn led to the wing naming idea. After all, if E13S had a name for itself, shouldn't E12S have one too? Mari Meegan, darling of the wing, made this point, and "Yeah!"s zephyred up all around.

Sarah was feeling pretty sour by this point but said nothing. If they wanted a name, fine. Then the ideas started coming out: Love Boat, for example.

"We could paint our lobby with a picture of the Love Boat like it looks at the start of the show, and we could, you know, do everything, like parties and stuff, with like that kind of a theme. Then on Fantasy Island Nite, we could pretend the Boat was visiting Fantasy Island!"

This idea went over well and the meeting broke up into small discussions about how to apply this theme to different phases of existence. Finally, though, Sarah spoke up, and they all smiled and listened. "I'm not sure I like that idea. There are plenty of creeps on the floor already, because we're all-female. If we name it Love Boat, everyone will think it's some kind of outcall massage service, and we'll never get a break."

Several seconds of silence. A few nods were seen, some "yeah"s heard, and Love Boat was dead. More names were suggested, most of them obviously dumb, and then Mari Meegan raised her hand. All quieted as her fingernails fluttered like a burst of redhot flak above the crowd. "I know," she said.

There was silence save for the sound of Hyacinth's comb rushing through her hair. Mari continued. "We can call ourselves 'Castle in the Air.' "

The lounge gusted with oohs and aahs.

"I like that."

"You're so creative, Mari."

"We could do a whole Dark Ages theme, you know, castles and knights and shining armor."

"That's nice! Really nice!"

"Wait a sec." This came from Hyacinth.

At this some of the women were clearly exasperated, looking at the ceiling, but most wore expressions of forced tolerance. Hyacinth continued flatly. "Castle in the Air is derogatory. That means it's not-nice. When you talk about a castle in the air, you mean something with no basis in reality. It's like saying someone has her head in the clouds."

They all continued to stare morosely, as though she hadn't finished. Sarah broke in. "You can call it anything you want. She is just making the point that you're using an unflattering name." Mari was comforted by two friends. The rest of them defended the name, nicely. "I never heard that."

"I think it sounds nice."

"Like a Barry Manilow song."

"Like one of those little Chinese poems."

"I always thought if your head was in the clouds, that was nice, like you were really happy or something. Besides, castles are a neat theme for parties and stuff– can't you see Mark dressed up like a knight?" Giggles.

"And this way we can call ourselves the Airheads!" Screams of delight. Hyacinth's objection having been thus obliterated, Castle In the Air was voted In unanimously, with two abstentions, and it was decided that paints and brushes would be bought and the wing would be painted in this theme during the weeks to come. Presently the meeting adjourned.

"We've got forty minutes until the Candle Passing," observed Mitzi, "and until then we can have a social hour. But not a whole hour"

The meeting dissolved into chattering fragments. Sarah leaned towards Hyacinth to whisper in her ear, and Hyacinth tensed. They had been whispering to each other in turns for the last half hour, and as both had ticklish ears this had caused much hysterical lip-biting and snorting. Sarah did not really have to whisper now, but it was her turn. "What candle passing?" she asked.

Hyacinth's attempt to whisper back was met by violent resistance from Sarah, so they laughed and made a truce. "It's kind of complicated. It means something personal happened between someone and her boyfriend, so everyone else has to know about it. Listen. We've got to escape, okay?"

"Okay."

"Go to Room 103 when the alarm sounds."

"Alarm?" But Hyacinth was already gliding out.

Sarah was quickly trapped in a conversation group including Mitzi and Mari. She accepted a cup of Kool-Aid/vodka punch and smiled when she could. Everyone was being nice to her in case she felt like an idiot for having said those things during the meeting. Mari asked if her boyfriend helped out with the hard parts of being President and Sarah had to say that just now she didn't have a boyfriend.

"Ahaa!" said everyone. "Don't worry, Sarah, we'll see what we can come up with. No prob, now you're an Airhead."

Sarah was groping for an answer when the local smoke alarm howled and the Airheads moaned in disappointment. As they all trooped off to their rooms to make themselves a little more presentable, Sarah headed for Room 103, following a heavy trail of marijuana smoke with her nose. As this was only the smoke alarm, only the twelfth floor would be evacuated.

Hyacinth pulled Sarah into the room and carefully fitted a wet reefer to her lips. It was dark, and a young black woman was slumped over a desk asleep, stereo on loud. Hyacinth Went to the vent window and released an amazing primal scream toward F Tower. After some prompting from her hostess, Sarah gave back the joint and followed suit. Hyacinth's Sleeping roommate, Lucy, sat up, sighed, then went over and lay down on her bed. Sarah and Hyacinth sat on Hyacinth's bed and drank milk from an illegal mini-fridge in the closet.

They silently finished the joint, shaking their heads at each other and laughing in disbelief.

"Ever done LSD?" asked Sarah.

"No. Why? Got some?"

"Oh. jeez, I wasn't suggesting it. I was going to say, for a minute there I thought I was back on it. That's how unreal those people are to me."

"You think they're strange?" said Hyacinth. "I think they're very normal."

"That's what I'm afraid of. Your room is pretty nice; I feel very much at home here." It was a nice room, one of the few Plex rooms I ever saw that was pleasant to be in. It was full of illegal cooking appliances and stashes of food, and the walls had been illegally painted white. Wall hangings and plants were everywhere.

"Well, we were in the Army– Lucy and me," said Hyacinth, carefully fitting a roach clip. "That's almost like LSD." By now their wing had been evacuated, and a couple of security guards were plodding up and down the hallways pretending to inspect for sources of smoke. Sarah and Hyacinth leaned together and spoke quietly.

"You're not real presidential," said Hyacinth. "People like you aren't supposed to take LSD."

"I don't take it anymore. See, back when I was about fourteen, my older sister was really into it, and I did it a few times."

"Why'd you stop?"

Sarah squinted into the milk carton and said nothing. Outside, the guards cursed to each other about students in general. Sarah finally said, "I kept an eye on my sister, and when she got cut loose completely– lost track of what was real and stopped caring– I saw it wasn't a healthy thing."

"So now you're President. I don't get it."

"The important thing is to get your life anchored in something. I think you have to make contact with the world in some way, and one way is to get involved."

"Student government?"

"Well, it beats MTV."

A guard beat on their door, attracted by the stereo-noise. "Screw off," said Hyacinth in a loud stage whisper, flipping the bird toward the door. Sarah put her face in her hands and bent double with suppressed laughter. When she recovered, the guard had left and Hyacinth was smiling brightly.

"Jeezus!" said Sarah, "you're pretty blatant, aren't you?"

"If it's the quiet, polite type you want, go see the Air-heads."

"You've lived with people like this before. Why don't they kick you off the wing?"

"Tokenism. They have to have tokens. Lucy is their token black, I'm their token individual. They love having a loudmouth around to disagree with them– makes them feel diverse."

"You don't think diplomacy would be more effective?" I'm not a diplomat. I'm me. Who are you?"

Instead of answering this difficult question, Sarah leaned back comfortably against the wall and closed her eyes. They listened to music for a long time as the Airheads breezed back onto the wing. "I'd feel relaxed," said Sarah, "except I'm actually kind of guilty about missing the Candle Passing."

"That's ridiculous."

"You're right. You can say that and be totally sure of yourself, can't you? I admire you, Hyacinth."

"I like you, Sarah," said Hyacinth, and that summed it up.

In the Physics Library, Casimir Radon read about quantum mechanics. The digital watch on the wrist of the sleeping post-doc across the table read 8:00. That meant it was time to go upstairs and visit Professor Emeritus Walter Abraham Sharon, who worked odd hours. Casimir was not leaving just yet, though. He had found that Sharon was not the swiftest man in the world, and though the professor was by no means annoyed when Casimir showed up on time, Casimir preferred to come ten minutes late. Anyway, in the informal atmosphere of the Physics Department, appointments were viewed with a certain Heisenbergian skepticism, as though being in the right place at the right time would involve breaking a natural law and was therefore impossible to begin with. Outside the picture windows of the library, the ghettos of the City were filled with smoky light, and occasionally a meteor streaked past and crashed in flames in the access lot below. They were not actual meteors, but merely various objects soaked in lighter fluid, ignited and thrown from a floor in E Tower above, trailing fire and debris as they zoomed earthward.

Casimir found this perversely comforting. It was just the sort of insanity he hadn't been able to get away from during his first week at American Megaversity. Soon the miserable Casimir had taken me up on my offer to stop by at any time, showing up at my door just before midnight, wanting to cry but not about to. I took coffee, he took vodka, and soon we understood each other a little better. As he explained it, no one here had the least consideration for others, or the least ability to think for themselves, and this combination was hard to take after having been an adult. Nor had academics given him any solace; owing to the medieval tempo of the bureaucracy, he was still mired in kindergarten-level physics. Of course he could speed these courses up just by being there. Whenever a professor asked a question, rhetorical or not, Casimir shouted the answer immediately. This earned him the hatred and awe of his classmates, but it was his only source of satisfaction. As he waited for his situation to become sensible, he sat in on the classes he really wanted to take, in effect taking a double load.

"Because I'm sure Sharon is going to bring me justice," Casimir had declared, raising his voice above a grumble for the first time. "This guy makes sense! He's like you, and I can't understand how he ended up in this place. I never thought I'd be surprised by someone just because he is a sensible and a good guy, but in this place it's a miracle. He c. out me, asks questions about my life– it's as though discovering what's best for me is a research project we're working on as a team. I can't believe a great man like him would care." Long, somber pause. "But I don't think even he can make up for what's wrong with this place. How about you, Bud? You're normal. What are you doing here?" Lacking an answer, I changed the subject to basketball.

A trio of meteors streaked across the picture windows and it was 8:10. Casimir returned his book and exited into the dark shiny hail. He was now at the upper limit of the Burrows, the bloc of the Plex that housed the natural sciences. Two floors above him, on the sixth and top floor of the base, was Emeritus Row, the plush offices of the academic superstars. He made his way there leisurely, knowing he was welcome.

Emeritus Row was dark and silent, illuminated only by the streak of warm yellow splashed away from Sharon's door. Casimir removed his glacier glasses. "Come in," came the melodious answer to his knock, and Casimir Radon entered his favorite room in the world.

Sharon looked at him with raised eyebrows. "Veil! You haff made a decision?"

"I think so."

"Let's have it! Leaving or staying? For the sake of physics I hope the latter."

Casimir abruptly realized he had not really made up his mind. He shoved his hands into his pockets and breathed deeply, a little surprised by all this. He could not keep a smile from his face, though, and could not ignore the hominess of Sharon's chaotic office. He announced that he was going to stay.

"Good, good," Sharon said absently. "Clear a place to sit." He gestured at a chair and Casimir set about removing thirty Pounds of high-energy physics from it. Sharon said, "So you've decided to cross the Rubicon, eh?"

Casimir sat down, thought about it, and said with a half grin, "Or the Styx, whichever the case may be."

Sharon nodded, and as he did a resounding thump issued from above. Casimir jumped, but Sharon did not react.

"What was that?" Casimir asked. "Sounded big."

"Ach," said Sharon. "Throwing furniture again, I should guess. You know, don't you, that many of our students are very interested in the physics of falling bodies?" He delivered this, like all his bad jokes, slowly and solemnly, as though working out long calculations in his head. Casimir chuckled. Sharon winked and lit his pipe. "I am given to understand, from grapevine talk, that you are smarter than all of our professors except for me." He winked again through thick smoke.

"Oh. Well, I doubt it."

"Ach, I don't. No correlation between age and intelligence! You're just afraid to use your smarts! That's right. You'd rather suffer– it is your Polish blood. Anyway, you have much practical experience. Our professors have only book experience."

"Well, it's the book experience I want. It's handy to know electronics, but what I really like is pure principles. I can make more money designing circuits, if that's what I want."

"Exactly! You prefer to be a poor physicist. Well, I cannot argue with you wanting to know pure things. After all, you are not naоve, your life has been no more sheltered than mine."

Embarrassed, Casimir laughed. "I don't know about that. I haven't lived through any world wars yet. You've lived through two. I may have escaped from a slum, but you escaped from Peenemunde with a suitcase full of rocket diagrams."

Sharon's eyes crinkled at the corners. "Yet. A very important word, nicht wahr? You are not very old, yet."

"What do you mean? Do you expect a war?"

Sharon laughed deeply and slowly. "I have toured your residential towers with certain students of mine, and I was reminded of certain, er, locations during the occupation of the Sudetenland. I think from what I see"– the ceiling thumped again, and he gestured upward with his pipestem – "and hear, that perhaps you are in a war now."

Casimir laughed, but then sucked in his breath and sat back as Sharon glowered at him morosely. The old professor was very complicated, and Casimir always seemed to be taking missteps with him.

"War and violence are not very funny," said Sharon, "unless they happen to you– then they are funny because they haff to be. There is more violence up there than you realize! Even speech today has become a form of violence– even in the university. So pay attention to that, and don't worry about a war in Europe. Worry about it here, this is your home now."

"Yes, sir." After pausing respectfully, Casimir withdrew a clipboard from his pack and put It on Sharon's desk. "Or it will be my home as soon as you sign these forms. Mrs. Santucci will tear my arms off if I don't bring them in tomorrow."

Sharon sat still until Casimir began to feel uncomfortable. "Ja," he finally said, "I guess you need to worry about forms too. Forms and forms and forms. Doesn't matter to me."

"Oh. It doesn't? You aren't retiring, are you?"

"Ja, I guess so."

Silently, Sharon separated the forms and laid them out on the Periodic Table of the Elements that covered his desk. He examined them with care for a few minutes, then selected a pen from a stein on his desk, which had been autographed by Enrico Fermi and Niels Bohr, and signed them.

"There, you're in the good courses now," he concluded. "Good to see you are so well Socioeconomically Integrated." The old man sat back in his chair, clasped his fingers over his flat chest, and closed his eyes.

A thunderous crash and Casimir was on the floor, dust in his throat and pea gravel on his back. Rubble thudded down from above and Casimir heard a loud inharmonious piano chord, which held steady for a moment and moaned downward in pitch until it was obliterated by an explosive splintering crack. More rubble flew around the room and he was pelted with small blocks. Looking down as he rubbed dust from his eyes he saw scores of strewn black and white piano keys.

Sharon was slumped over on his desk, and a trickle of blood ran from his head and onto the back of his hand and puddled on the class change form beside his pipe. Gravel, rainwater and litter continued to slide down through the hole in the ceiling. Casimir alternately screamed and gulped as he staggered to his feet. lie waded through shattered ceiling panels and twisted books to Sharon's side and saw with horror that the old man's side had been pierced by a shard of piano frame shot out like an arrow in the explosion. With exquisite care he helped him lean back, cleared the desk of books and junk, then picked up his thin body and set him atop the desk. He propped up Sharon's head with the 1938 issues of the Physical Review and tried to ease his breathing. The head wound was superficial and already clotting, but the side wound was ghastly and Casimir did not even know whether to remove the splinter. Blood built up at the corners of Sharon's mouth as he gasped and wheezed. Brushing tears and dirt from his own face, Casimir looked for the phone.

He started away as a small bat fluttered past.

"Troglodyte! No manners! This is what you're supposed to see!" Casimir whirled to see Bert Nix plunging from the open door toward Sharon's desk. Casimir tried to head him off, fearing some kind of attack, but Bert Nix stopped short and pointed triumphantly to Sharon. Casimir turned to look. Sharon was gazing at him dully through half-shut eyes, and weakly pounding his finger into a spot on the tabletop. Casimir leaned over and looked. Sharon was pointing at the Table of the Elements, indicating the box for Oxygen.

"Oxygen! Oh two! Get it?" shouted Bert Nix.

Bill Benson, Security Guard 5, was arguing with a friend whether it was possible that F.D.R. committed suicide when the emergency line rang. He let it ring four times. Since ninety-nine calls out of a hundred were pranks, by letting each one ring four times he was delaying the true emergency calls by an average of only four one-hundredths of a ring apiece– nothing compared with the time it took to respond. Anyway, fed up with kids getting stoned at parties and falling on the way out to barf and spraining their wrists, then (through some miracle of temporary clearheadedness) calling Emergency and trying to articulate their problems through a hallucinogenic miasma while monster stereos in the background threatened to uncurl his phone cord. Eventually, though, he did pick up the phone, holding the earpiece several inches from his head in case it was another of those goddamn Stalinist whistle-blasters.

"Listen," came the voice, sounding distant, "I've got to have some oxygen. Do you have some there? It's an emergency!" Oh, shit, Did he have to get this call every night? He listened for a few more seconds. "It's an oxygen freak," he said to his friend, covering the mouthpiece with his hand.

"Oxygen freak? What do they do with oxygen?"

Benson swung his feet down from the counter, put the receiver in his lap, and explained. "See, nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, is the big thing. They breathe it through masks, like for surgery. But if you breathe it pure you'll kick in no time, because you got to have oxygen. And they are so crazy about laughing gas they don't want to take off that mask even to breathe, so they like to get some oxygen to mix with it so that they can sit there all goddamn night long and breathe nothing else and get blasted out of their little minds. So we always get these calls."

He picked up the receiver again, took a puff on his cigar, exhaled slowly. "Hello?" he said, hoping the poor gas-crazed sap had hung up.

"Yeah? When will it be here?"

"Cripes!" Bill Benson shouted, "look, guy, hang it up. We don't have any and you aren't allowed to have it."

"Well, shit then, come up here and help me. Call an ambulance! For God's sake, a man's dying here."

Some of these kids were such cretins, how did they make it into college? Money, probably. "Listen, use your head, kid," he said, not unkindly. "We're the Emergency Services desk. We can't leave our posts. What would happen if there was an emergency while we were gone?"

This was answered by silence; but in the background, Benson could just make out another voice, which sounded familiar: "You should have listened to what he was trying to tell you! He wasn't farting around! We had to sack the Cartography Department to afford him. And you don't listen!"

"Shut up!" shouted the gas freak.

"Hey, is that Bert? Is that Bert Nix on the phone?" asked Bill Benson. "Where are you, kid?"

"Emeritus Row!' shouted the kid, and dropped the phone. Bill Benson continued to listen after the BONKITY-BONK of the phone's impact, trying to make sure it was really good old Bert Nix. I think he heard this poem; on the news, he claimed he heard a poem, and it could well have been this, which Bert Nix quoted regularly and liked to write on the walls:

Tenuring and tenuring in the ivory tower!

The flagon cannot fill the flagoneers.

Krupp cuts a fart! The sphinxter cannot hold

Dear academe, our Lusitanta, recoils.

The time-limned dons are noosed. With airy webs

The cerebrally infarcted bring me down.

The East affects conscription, while the curst

Are gulled with Fashionate Propensities.

Shrilly, sum reevaluation is demanded.

Earlier-reckoned commencement is programmed!

What fecund mumming! Outly ward those words hard

When a glassed grimace on an animal Monday

Rumbles at night; unaware that the plans aren't deserved

Escapists' lie-panoply aims to head off the Fan.

A sign frank and witless as the Sun

Is mute in the skies, yet from it are shouted

Real shadows of endogenous deserted words.

The concrete drops down in; but know I now

That thirty-storied stone steel keeps

When next the might of Air are rooks unstable.

What buff be; its towers coming down deglassed

Slumps amid Bedlam in the morn?

"Holy shit!" cried Bill Benson. "Bert? Is that you? Hell, maybe something's up. Sam, punch me onto line six there and Ill see if I can raise the folks down at nine-one-one."

Casimir was careening through the halls, cursing himself for having had to leave Sharon alone with a derelict, adrenaline blasting through him as he imagined coming back to find the old man dead. He didn't know how he was going to open the door when he got where he was going, but at the moment it did not matter because no slab of wood and plastic, it seemed, could stand in his way. He veered around a corner, smashing into a tail young man who had been coming the other way. They both sprawled dazed on the floor, but Casimir rolled and sprang to his feet and resumed running. The man he had collided with caught up with him, and he realized that it was Virgil Gabrielsen, King of the Burrows.

"Virgil! Did you hear that?"

"Yeah, I was coming to check it out. What's up?"

"Piano fell into Sharon's office… pierced lung… oxygen." "Right," said Virgil, and skidded to a stop, fishing a key from his pocket. He master-keyed his way into a lab and they sent a grad student sprawling against a workbench as they made for the gas canisters. Casimir grabbed a bottle-cart and they feverishly strapped the big cylinder onto it, then wheeled it heavily out the door and back toward Sharon.

"Shit," said Virgil, "no freight elevator. No way to get it upstairs." They were at the base of the stairs, two floors below Sharon. The oxygen was about five feet tall and one foot in diameter, and crammed with hundreds of pounds of extremely high-pressure gas. Virgil was still thinking about it when Casimir, a bony and unhealthy looking man, bear-hugged the canister, straightened up, and hoisted it to his shoulder as he would a roll of carpet. He took the stairs two at a time, Virgil bounding along behind.

Shortly, Casimir had slammed the cylinder down on the floor near Sharon. Bert Nix was holding Sharon's hand, mumbling and occasionally making the sign of the cross. As Virgil closed the door, Casimir held the top valve at arm's length, buried one ear in his shoulder, and opened it up. Virgil just had time to plug his ears.

The room was inundated in a devastating hiss, like the shriek of an injured dragon. Casimir's hands were knocked aside by the fabulously high pressure of the escaping oxygen. Papers blizzarded and piano keys skittered across the floor. Ignoring it, Bert Nix stuffed Kleenex into Sharon's ears, then into his own. In a minute Sharon began to breathe easier. At the same time his pipe-ashes burst into a small bonfire, ignited by the high oxygen levels. Casimir was making ready to stomp it out when Virgil pushed him gently aside; he had been wise enough to yank a fire extinguisher from the wall on their way up. Once the fire was smothered, Virgil commenced what first aid was possible on Sharon. Casimir returned to the Burrows and, finding an elevator, brought up more oxygen and a regulator. Using a garbage bag they were able to rig a crude oxygen tent.

The ambulance crew arrived in an hour. The technicians loaded Sharon up and wheeled him away, Bert Nix advising them on Sharon's favorite foods.

I passed this procession on my way there– Casimir had called to give me the news. When I arrived in the doorway of Sharon's office, I beheld an unforgettable scene: Virgil and Casimir knee-deep in wreckage; a desk littered with the torn-open wrappers of medical supplies; Virgil holding up a sheaf of charred, bloodstained, fire-extinguisher-caked forms; and Casimir laughing loudly beneath the opened sky.

At the front of the auditorium, Professor Embers spoke. He never lectured; he spoke. In the middle of the auditorium his audience of five hundred sat back in their seats, staring up openmouthed into the image of the Professor on the nearest color TV monitor. In the back of the auditorium, Sarah sat in twilight, trying to balance the Student Government budget.

"So grammar is just the mode in which we image concepts," the professor was saying. "Grammar is like the walls and bumpers of a pinball machine. Rhetoric is like the flippers of a pinball machine. You control the flippers. The rest of the machine– grammar– controls everything else. If you use the flippers well, you make points. If you fail to image your concepts viably, your ball drops into the black hole of nothingness. If you try to cheat, the machine tilts and you lose– that's like people not understanding your interactions. That's why we have to learn Grammar here in Freshman. That, and because S. S. Krupp says we have to."

There was a pause of several seconds, and then a hundred or so people laughed. Sarah did not. Unlike the freshmen in the class, who thought Professor Embers was a cool guy, Sarah thought he was a bore and a turkey. He continued to speak, and she continued to balance.

This was the budget for this semester, and it was supposed to have been done last semester. But last semester the records had been gulped by a mysterious computer error, and now Sarah had to reconstruct them so that the government could resume debate. She had some help from me in this, though I don't know how much good it did. We had met early in the year, at a reception for faculty-in-residence, arid later had a lunch or two together and talked about American Megaversity. If nothing else, my suite was a quiet and pleasant enough place where she could spread her papers out and work uninterrupted when she needed to.

She could also work uninterrupted in her Freshman English class, because she was a senior English major with a 3.7 average and didn't need to pay much attention.

Her first inkling that something was wrong had been in midsummer, when the megaversity's computer scheduling system had scheduled her for Freshman English automatically, warning that she had failed to meet this requirement during her first year. "Look," she had said to the relevant official when she arrived in the fall, "I'm an English major. I know this stuff. Why are you putting me in Freshman English?"

The General Curriculum Advisor consulted little codes printed by the computer, and looked them up in a huge computer-printed book. "Ah," he said, "was one of your parents a foreign national?" "My stepmother is from Wales."

"That explains it. You see." The official had swung around toward her and assumed a frank, open body-language posture. "Statistical analysis shows that children of one or more foreign nationals are often gifted with Special Challenges." Sarah's spine arched back and she set her jaw. "You're saying I can't speak English because my stepmother was Welsh?" "Special Challenges are likely in your case. You were mistakenly exempted from Freshmen English because of your high test scores. This exemption option has now been retroactively waived for your convenience."

"I don't want it waived. It's not convenient."

"To ensure maintenance of high academic standards, the waiver is avolitional."

"Well, that's bullshit." This was not a very effective thing to say. Sarah wished that Hyacinth could come talk for her; Hyacinth would not be polite, Hyacinth would say completely outrageous things and they would scatter in terror. "There's no way I can accept that." Drawn to the noise like scavengers, two young clean-cut advisors looked in the door with open and understanding smiles. Everyone smiled except for Sarah. But she knew she was right this time– she knew damn well what language was spoken in Wales these days. They could smile stupidly until blue in the face. When the advisor hinted that she was asking for special treatment because she was President, she gave him a look that snapped his composure for a second, a small but helpful triumph.

She had done it by the books, filing a petition requesting to be discharged from Freshman English. But her petition was rejected because of a computer error which made it appear that she had gotten 260 instead of 660 on her SATs. By the time an extra score report from the testing company proved that she was smart after all, it was too late to drop or add classes– so, Freshman English it was.

The end of the class approached at last, and Professor Embers handed back this week's essays. The assignment was to select a magazine ad and write about how it made you feel.

"I've been epiphanied by the quality of your essays this week," said Professor Embers. "We hardly had to give out any C's this time around. I have them alphabetized by your first names up here in sixteen stacks, one for each section."

All five hundred students went down at once to get theirs. Sarah worked for ten minutes. then gathered her things and headed for the front, dawdling on purpose. Clustered around the stack of papers for her section she could see five of the Stalinists– for some reason they had all ended up in her section. Since she never attended section meetings, this was no problem, but she did not want to encounter them at times like this either. Standing there tall and straight as a burned-out sapling in a field was Dexter Fresser, an important figure in the Stalinist Underground Battalion. Most of all, she wanted to avoid him. Sarah and Dex had gone to the same high school in Ohio, ridden the same bus to school, slept in the same bed thirteen times and shared the same LSD on three occasions. Since then, Dex had hardly ever not taken lots of acid. Sarah had taken none. Now he was a weird rattle-minded radical who nevertheless remembered her, and she avoided him scrupulously.

About halfway down the aisle she found a television monitor displaying an image of Dex. She sank deeply into a seat and watched him and his comrades. Dex was reading a paper desultorily and she knew it was hers. He flipped aimlessly through it, as though searching for a particular word or phrase, then shook his head helplessly and dropped it back on the stack. Finally the last of them excavated his paper and they were collectively gone, leaving behind several dozen essays no one had bothered to pick up.

Associate Professor Archibald Embers, Learning Facilitator of Freshman English G Group, was regarding a young woman on his sofa and endeavoring to keep his pipe lit. This required a lot of upside-down work with his butane lighter and he thought the burn on his thumb might be second-degree. This particular woman was definitely confrontational, though, and it was no time to show pain. He held the pipe cautiously and reached out with the other hand to drape his thumb casually over the rim of a potted plant, thrusting the roasted region deeply into the cool humus. I am Antaeus, he thought, and yet I am Prometheus, singed by my own flame. They were sitting in the conversation pit he had installed so as to avoid talking to students across his desk like some kind of authoritarian. Or was it totalitarian? He could never remember the distinction.

This woman was clearly high voltage, Type A, low-alpha and left-hemisphere, with very weird resonances. Seeing her through to the end of her crisis would be painful. She had ripped off a lot of papers from the auditorium and had brought them into his space to fine-tooth comb them. She had a problem with her grade, a B.

"Now," she continued, whipping over another page, "let's look at page two of this one, which is about an advertisement for Glans Essence Cologne. 'The point of this is about these foxes. He has a bunch. On him. He a secret agent, like Bond James Bond or something. Or some other person with lots of foxes. Why he has foxes? Is Glans Essence Cologne. They hope you figuring that out, will buy some of it. Which is what they are selling.' Now, next to that in the margin you wrote, 'excellent analysis of the working of the ad.' Then at the end you wrote, 'Your understanding of how the System brainwashes us is why I gave you an A on this paper.' Now really, if you want to give him an A for that it's up to you, but you can you then give me a B? Mine was three times as long, I had an introduction, conclusion, an outline, no grammatical errors, no misspelled words– what do you expect?"

"This is a very good question," said Embers. He took a long draw on his pipe. "What is a grade? That is the question." He chuckled, but she apparently didn't get it. "Some teachers grade on curves. You have to be a math major to understand your grade! But forget those fake excuses. A grade is actually a form of poetry. It is a subjective reaction to a learner's work, distilled and reduced down to its purest essence– not a sonnet, not a haiku, but a single letter. That's remarkable, isn't it?"

"Look, that's just groovy. But you have to grade in such a way that I'm shown to be a better writer than he is. Otherwise it's unfair and unrealistic."

Embers recrossed his legs and spent a while sucking his pipe back into a blaze. His learner picked up a paper and fanned smoke away from her face. "Mind if I smoke?" he said.

"Your office," she said in a strangled voice.

Fine, if she didn't want to assert herself. He finally decided on the best approach. "You aren't necessarily a better Writer. You called some of them functional illiterates. Well those illiterates, as you called them, happen to have very expressive prose voices. Remember that in each person's own dialect he or she is perfectly literate. So in the sense of having escaped orthodoxy to be truly creative, they are highly advanced wordsmiths, while you are still struggling to break free of grammatical rules systems. They express themselves to me and I react with little one-letter poems of my own– the essence of grading! Poetry! And being a poet I'm particularly well suited for it. Your idea of tearing down these proto-artists because they aren't just like you smacks of a kind of absolutism which is very disturbing in a temple of academic freedom."

They sat there silent for a while.

"You really said that, didn't you?" she finally asked.

"I did."

"Huh. So we're just floating around without any standards at all."

"You could put it that way. You should interact with the department chairman on this. Look, there is no absolute reality, right? We can't force everyone to express themselves through the same absolute rules."

When the young woman left she seemed curiously drained and quiet. Indeed, absorbing new world-views could be a sobering experience. Embers found a blister on his thumb, and was inspired to write a haiku.

There came the sound of a massive ring of keys being slapped against the outside of Casimir Radon's door. He looked up from the papers on his desk, and in his lap Spike the illicit kitten followed suit, scrambling to red-alert status and scything sixteen claws into his thigh. Before Casimir had opened his mouth to say "Who is it" or Spike could spring forward to engage the foe, the door was unlocked and thrown open. A short, heavy man with a disconcerting resemblance to Leonid Brezhnev stepped into the room.

"Stermnator," he mumbled, rolling the r's on his tongue like Black Sea caviar. Casimir covered Spike with his hand, hoping to prevent detection, and the kitten grasped a finger between its forepaws and began to rasp with its tongue.

Behind the man was a small wiry old guy with chloracne, who bore metal canister with a pump on top and a tube leading to a nozzle in his hand. Before Casimir could even grunt in response, this man had stepped crisply into the room and begun to apply a heavy mist to the baseboards. The B-man glowered darkly at Casimir, who sat in silence and watched as the exterminator walked around the room, nozzle to wall, spraying everything near the baseboards, including shoes, Spike's food and water dishes, a typewriter, two unmatched socks, a book and a calculator charger. Both the strangers looked around the inside of his nearly barren room with faint expressions of incomprehension or disdain.

By the time Casimir got around to saying, "That's okay, I haven't seen any bugs in here since I moved in," the sprayer was bearing down on him inexorably. Casimir pushed the kitten up against his stomach, grasped the hem of his extra-long seven-year-old Wall Drug T-shirt, and pulled it up to form a little sling for the struggling creature, crossing his arms over the resulting bulge in an effort to hold and conceal. At the same time he stood and scampered out of the path of the exterminator, who bumped into him and knocked him off balance onto the bed, arms still crossed. He bounced back up, weaved past the exterminator, and stood with his back to the door, staring nonchalantly out the window at the view of E Tower outside. Behind him, the exterminator paused near the exit to soak the straps of an empty duffel bag. As Casimir watched the reflection of the two men closing the door he was conscious of a revolting chemical odor. Immediately he whirled and tossed Spike onto the bed, then took his food and water dishes out to wash them in the bathroom.

Casimir had seen his first illicit kitten on the floor above his, when he had forgotten to push his elevator button. He got off on the floor above to take the stairs down one flight, and saw some students playing with the animal in the hallway. After some careful inquiries he made contact with a kitten pusher over the phone. Two weeks later Casimir, his directions memorized, went to the Library at 4:15 in the morning. He proceeded to the third floor and pulled down the January– March 1954 volume of the Soviet Asphalt Journal and placed two twenty-dollar bills inside the cover. He then went to the serials desk, where he was waited on by a small, dapper librarian in his forties.

"I would like to report," he said, opening the volume, "that pages 1738 through 1752 of this volume have been razored out, and they are exactly the pages I need."

"I see," the man said sympathetically.

"And while I'm here, I have some microfilms to pick up, which I got on interlibrary loan."

"An, yes, I know the ones you're talking about. Just a moment, please." The librarian disappeared into a back office and emerged a minute later with a large box filled with microfilm reel boxes. Casimir picked it up, finding it curiously light, smiled at the librarian and departed. A pass had already been made out for him, and the exit guard waved him through. Back in his room, he pulled out the top layer of microfilm boxes to find, curled up on a towel, a kitten recovering from a mild tranquilizer.

Since then Spike had been neither mild nor tranquil, but that at least provided Casimir with some of the unpredictability that Plex life so badly lacked. He almost didn't mind having a kitten run around the obstacle course of his room at high speed for hours at a time in the middle of the night, because it gave his senses something not utterly flat to perceive. Even though Spike tried to sleep on his face, and hid all small important articles in odd places, Casimir was charmed.

He pulled on his glacier glasses in a practiced motion and stepped out into the hail. Casimir's wing was only two floors away from allies of the Wild and Crazy Guys, best partiers in the Plex, and two Saturdays ago they had come down with their spray paint and painted giant red, white and blue twelve-spoked wheels between each pair of doors. These were crude representations of the Big Wheel, a huge neon sign outside the Plex, which the Wild and Crazy Guys pretended to worship as a joke and initiation ritual. This year they had become aggressive graffitists, painting Big Wheels almost every in the Plex. Casimir, used to it, walked down this gallery of giant wheels to the bathroom, Spike's dishes in hand.

The bathrooms in the wings looked on the inside like microwave ovens or autoclaves, with glossy green tile on the walls, brilliant lighting, overwaxed floors and so much steam that entering one was like entering a hallucination. At one end of the bathroom, three men and their girlfriends were taking showers, drinking, shouting a lot and generally being Wild and Crazy. They were less than coherent, but most of what Casimir could make out dealt with Anglo-Saxon anatomical terms and variations on "what do you think of this" followed by prolonged yelling from the partner. Casimir was tempted to stay and listen, but reasoned that since he was still a virgin anyway there was no point in trying to learn anything advanced, especially by eavesdropping. He went down the line of closely spaced sinks until he found one that had not been stuffed with toilet paper or backed up with drain crud.

As he was washing Spike's dishes, a guy came in the door with a towel around his waist. He looked conventional, though somewhat blocky, athletic and hairless. He came up and stood very close to Casimir, staring at him wordlessly for a long time as though nearsighted; Casimir ignored him, but glanced at him from time to time in the mirror, looking between two spokes of a Big Wheel that had been drawn on it with shaving cream.

After a while, he tugged on Casimir's sleeve. "Hey," he mumbled, "can I borrow your"

Casimir said nothing.

"Huh?" said the strange guy.

"I don't know," said Casimir. "Depends on what you want. Probably not."

A grin gradually sprouted on the man's face and he turned around as though smirking with imaginary friends behind him. "Oh, Jeez," he said, and turned away. "I hate fuckers like you!" he yelled, and ran to the lockers across from the sinks, running a few steps up the wall before sprawling back down on the floor again. Casimir watched him in the mirror as he went from locker to locker, finally finding an unlocked one. The strange guy pawed through it and selected a can of shaving cream. "Hey," he said, and looked at the back of Casimir's head. "Hey, Wall."

Casimir looked at him in the mirror. "What is it?"

The strange guy did not understand that Casimir was looking right at him. "Hey fucker! Cocksucker! Mr. Drug! You!" Rhythmic female shrieking began to emanate from a shower stall. "What is it," Casimir yelled back, refusing to turn. The strange guy approached him and Casimir turned half around defensively. He stood very close to Casimir. "Your hearing isn't very good," he shouted, "you should take off your glasses." "Do you want something? If so, you should just tell me." "Do you think he'd mind if I used this?"

"Who?"

The strange guy smirked arid shook his head. "Do you know anything about terriers?"

"No."

"Ah, well." The strange guy put the shaving cream on the shelf in front of Casimir, muttered something incomprehensible, laughed, and walked out of the bathroom.

Casimir dried the food bowl under an automatic hand dryer by the door. As he was on his third push of the button, a couple from one of the showers walked nude into the room, getting ten feet from cover before they saw Casimir.

The woman screamed, clapping her hands over her face. "Oh Jeez, Kevin, there's a guy in here!" Kevin was too mellowed by sex and beer to do anything but smile wanly. Casimir walked out without saying anything, breathed deeply of the cool, dry air of the hallway, and returned to his room, where he filled Spike's water bowl with spring water from a bottle.

As soon as Casimir had heard about Neutrino, the official organization of physics majors, he had crashed a meeting and got himself elected President and Treasurer. Casimir was like that, meek most of the time with occasional bursts of effectiveness. He walked into the meeting, which so far consisted of six people, and said, "Who's the president?"

The others, being physics majors and therefore accustomed to odd behavior of all sorts, had answered. "He graduated," said one. "No, when he graduated, he stopped being our president. When the guy who was our president graduated, we instantaneously ceased to have one," another countered.

"I agree," a third added, "but the proper term is 'was graduated.'"

"That's pedantic."

"That's correct. Where's the dictionary?"

"Who cares? Why do you want to know?" the first asked. As the other two consulted a dictionary, a fourth member held a calculator in his hand, gnawing absently on the charger cord, and the other two members argued loudly about an invisible diagram they were drawing with their fingers on a blank wall.

"I want to be president of this thing," Casimir said. "Any objections?"

"Oh, that's okay. We thought you were from the administration or something."

Casimir's motivation for all this was that after the Sharon incident, it was impossible for him to escape from his useless courses. The grimness of what had happened, and the hopelessness of his situation, had left him quiet and listless for a couple of weeks to the point where I was beginning to feel alarmed. One night, then, from two to four in the morning, Casimir's neighbor had watched Rocky on cable and the sleeping Casimir had subconsciously listened in on the soundtrack. He awoke in the morning with a sense of mission, of destiny, a desire to go out and beat the fuckers at their own game. Neutrino provided a suitable power base, and since his classes only consumed about six hours a week he had all the time in the world.

Previous to Casimir's administration most of the money allotted to Neutrino had been dispersed among petty activities such as dinners, trips to nuclear reactors, insipid educational gadgets and the like. Casimir's plan was to spend all the money on a single project that would exercise the minds of the members and, in the end, produce something useful. Once he had convinced the pliable membership of Neutrino that this was a good idea, his suggestion for the actual project was not long in coming: construction of a mass driver.

The mass driver was a magnetic device for throwing things. It consisted of a long straight rail, a "bucket" that slid along the rail on a magnetic cushion and powerful electromagnets that kicked the bucket down the rail When the bucket slammed to a halt at the rail's end, whatever was in it kept on going– theoretically, very, very fast. Recently this simple machine had become a pet project of Professor Sharon, who had advocated it as a lunar mining tool. Casimir argued that the idea was important and interesting in and of itself, and that Sharon's connection to it lent it sentimental value. As a tribute to Sharon, a fun project and a toy that would be a blast to play with when finished, the mass driver was irresistible to Neutrino. Which was just as well, because nothing was going to stop Casimir from building this son of a bitch.

Casimir had been drawing up a budget for it on this particular evening, because budget time for the Student Government was coming up soon. Not long after the exterminator's visit, Casimir got stuck. Many of the supplies he needed were standard components that were easy for him to get, but certain items, such as custom-wound electromagnets, were hard to budget for. This was the sort of fabrication that had to be done at the Science Shop, and that meant dealing with Virgil Gabrielsen. After nailing down as much as he could, Casimir gathered his things and set out on the half-hour elevator ride to the bottom of the Burrows.

In the interests of efficiency, security, ease of design and healthy interplay among the departments, the designers of the Campustructure had put all the science departments together in a single bloc. It was known as the Burrows because it was mostly below street level, and because of the allegedly Morlockian qualities of its inhabitants. At the top of the Burrows were the departmental libraries and conference rooms. Below were professors' offices and departmental headquarters, followed by classrooms, labs, stockrooms and at the very bottom, forty feet below ground level, the enormous CC– Computing Center– and the Science Shop. Any researcher wanting glass blown, metal shaped, equipment fixed, circuits designed or machines assembled, had to come down and beg for succor at the feet of the stony-hearted Science Shop staff. This meant trying to track down Lute, the hyperactive Norwegian technician, rumored to have the power of teleportation, who held smart people in disdain because of their helplessness in practical matters, or Zap, the electronics specialist, a motorcycle gang sergeant-at-arms who spent his working hours boring out engine blocks for his brothers and threatening professors with bizarre and deadly tortures. Zap was the cheapest technician the Science Shop steering committee had been able to find, Lute had been retained at high salary after dire threats from all faculty members and Virgil, to the immense relief of all, had been hired three years earlier as a part-time student helper and had turned the place around.

Science Shop was at the end of a dark unmarked hallway that smelled of machine oil and neoprene, half blocked by junked and broken equipment. When Casimir arrived he relaxed instantly in the softly lit, wildly varied squalor of the place, and soon found Virgil sipping an ale and twiddling painstakingly with wires and pulleys on an automatic plotter.

They went into his small office and Virgil provided himself and Casimir with more ale. "What's the latest on Sharon?" he asked. "The same. No word," Casimir said, pushing the toes of his tennis shoes around in the sawdust and metal filings on the floor. Not quite in a coma, definitely not all there. Whatever he lost from oxygen starvation isn't coming back."

"And they haven't caught anyone."

"Well, E14 is the Performing Arts Floor. They used to have a room with a piano in It. The E13S people didn't like it because the Performing Artists were always tap dancing."

"We know how sensitive those poor boys are to noise." "A couple of days before the piano crash, the piano was stolen from E14. Two of the tap-dancers had their doors ignited the same night. A couple of days later, E13S had a burning-furniture-throwing contest, and it just happens that at the same time a piano crashed through Sharon's ceiling. Circumstantial evidence only."

Virgil clasped his hands over his flat belly and looked at the ceiling. "Though a pattern of socio-heterodox behaviors has been exhibited by individuals associated with E13S, we find it preferable to keep them within the system and counsel them constructively rather than turn them over to damaging outside legal interference which would hinder resocialization. The Megaversity is a free community of individuals seeking to grow together toward a more harmonious and enlightened future, and introduction of external coercion merely stifles academic freedom and– "

"How did you know that?" asked Casimir, amazed. "That's word for word what they said the other day."

Virgil shrugged. "Official policy statement. They used it two years ago, in the barbell incident. E13 dropped a two-hundred-pound barbell through the roof of the Cafeteria's main kitchen area. It crashed into a pressure vat and caused a tuna-nacho casserole explosion that wounded fifteen. And the pressure is so high in those vats, you know, that Dr. Forksplit, the Dean of Dining Services, who was standing nearby, had a nacho tortilla chip shard driven all the way through his skull. He recovered, but they've called him Wombat ever since. The people who handle this in the Administration don't understand how deranged these students are. Now, Kruno and his people would like to pour molten lead down their throats, but they can't do anything about it– the decisions are made by a committee of tenured faculty."

Casimir resisted an impulse to scream, got up and paced around talking through clenched teeth. "This shit really, really pisses me off. It's incredible, Law doesn't exist here, you can do what you please." "Well," said Virgil, still blasи, "I disagree. There's always law. Law is just the opinion of the guy with the biggest gun. Since outside law rarely matters in the Plex, we make our own law, using whatever power– whatever guns– we have. We've been very successful in the Science Shop."

"Oh, yeah? I suppose this was something to do with what you said the other day about some unofficial work here for me." "That's a perfect example. The researchers of American Megaversity need your services. It's illegal, but the scientific faculty have more power than the rule-enforcers, so we make our own law regarding technical work. You keep track of what you do, and I pay you through the vitality fund.

"The what?"

"The fund made up of donations from various professors and firms who have a vested interest in keeping the Science Shop running smoothly. Hell, it's all just grant money. In the egalitarian system we had before, nobody got anything done."

"Look." Casimir shook his head and sat back down. "I don't want even to hear all this. You know, all I've ever wanted to be is a normal student. They won't let me take decent classes, okay, so I work on the mass driver. Now I come here to get your help and you start talking about local law and free enterprise. I just want some estimates from you on getting these electromagnets wound for the mass driver. Okay? Forget free enterprise." Casimir dropped a page of diagrams and specifications on Virgil's desk.

Virgil looked it over. "Well, it depends," he finally said. "If we pretend you're just a normal student, then I will charge you, oh, about ten thousand dollars for this stuff and have it done by the time you graduate. Now, unofficially, I could log it in as something much simpler and charge you less. But you can't put that into a formal budget proposal. Very unofficially, I might do it for a small bribe, like some help from you around the Shop. But that's really abnormal to put in a budget. Looks like you're stuck."

"It wouldn't really take you three years."

"It would take me." Virgil waved at the door. "Zap could do it in a week. Want to ask him? He's not hard to wake up." Casimir brooded momentarily. "Well, look. I don't really care how it gets done. But it's necessary to have something on paper, you know?"

Virgil shook his head, smiling. "Casimir. You don't think anyone pays any attention to those budgets, do you?"

"Aw, shit. This is too weird for me."

"It's not weird, you're just not used to it yet. Here is what we'll do. We work out a friendly gentlemen's agreement by which I make the magnets for you, probably over Christmas vacation, in exchange for a little of your expert help around the Science Shop. When I'm done with the magnets I put them in an old box and mark it, say, 'SPARE PARTS, 1932 AUTOMATIC BOMBSIGHT PROTOTYPE.' I dump it in the storeroom. When budget time comes around you say, 'Oh, gee, it happens I've designed this thing to use existing parts, I know just where they are.' Ridiculous, but no one knows that, and those who understand won't want to meddle in any arrangement of mine."

"Okay!" Casimir threw up his hands. "Okay. Fine. Ill do it. Just tell me what to do and don't let me see any of this illegal stuff." "It's not illegal, I said it was legal. Hang on a sec while I Xerox these pages."

Virgil opened the door and was met by a clamor of voices from several advanced academic figures. Casimir looked around the room: a firetrap stuffed with books and papers and every imaginable variety of electronic junk. A Geiger counter hung out the window into a deep air shaft, clicking every second or two. In one corner a 1940's radio was hooked up to a technical power supply and wired into the guts of a torn-open telephone so that Virgil could make hands-off phone calls. An old backless TV in another corner enabled Virgil to monitor the shop outside. Electronic parts, hunks of wire, junk-food wrappers and scraps of paper littered the floor. And in three separate places sat those little plastic trays Casimir saw everywhere, overflowing with tiny seeds– rat poison.

"Damn!" spat Casimir as Virgil reentered. "There's enough of that poison in this room alone to kill every rat in this city. What's their problem with that stuff anyway?"

Virgil snorted. Everyone knew the rat poison was ubiquitous; the wastebaskets might go a month without emptying, but when it came to rat poison the B-men were fearsomely diligent, seeming to pass through walls and locked doors like Shaolin priests to scatter the poison-saturated kernels. "It's cultural," he explained. "They hate rats. You should read some Scythian mythology. In Crotobaltislavonia it's a capital crime to harbor them. That's why they had a revolution! The old regime stopped handing out free rat poison."

"I'm serious," said Casimir. "I've got an illegal kitten in my room, and If they keep breaking in to spread poison, they'll find it or let it out or poison it."

"Or eat it. Seriously, you should have mentioned it, Casimir. Let me help you out."

Casimir rested his face in his hand. "I suppose you also have an arrangement with the B-men."

"No, no, much too complicated. I do almost all my work at the computer terminal, Casimir. You can accomplish anything there. See, a few years ago a student had a boa constrictor in his room that got poisoned by the B-men, and even though it was illegal he sued the university for damages and won. There are still a lot of residents with pets whom the administration doesn't want to antagonize, because of connections or whatever. Some students are even allergic to the poison. So, they keep a list of rooms which are not to be given any poison. All I have to do is put your room on it."

Casimir was staring intently at Virgil. "Wait a minute. How did you get that kind of access? Aren't there locks? Access checks?" "There are some annoyances involved."

"I suppose with photographic memory you could do a lot on the computer."

"Helps to have the Operator memorized too."

"Oh, fuck! No!"

Casimir, I am sure, was just as surprised as I had been. The Operator was an immense computer program consisting entirely of numbers– machine code. Without it, the machine was a useless lump. With the Operator installed, it was a tool of nearly infinite power and flexibility. It was to the computer as memory, instinct and intelligence are to the human brain.

Virgil handed Casimir a canister of paper computer tape. The label read, "1843 SURINAM CENSUS DATA VOLUME 5. FIREWOOD USAGE ESTIMATES AND PROJECTIONS."

"Ignore that," said Virgil. "It's a program in machine code. It'll put your room on the no-poison list, and your cat will be safe, unless the B-men forget or decide to ignore the rule, which is a possibility." Casimir barely looked at the tape and stared distantly at Virgil. "What have you been doing with this knowledge?" he whispered. "You could get back at E13S."

Virgil smiled. "Tempting. But when you can do what I can, you don't go for petty revenge. All I do, really, is fight the Worm, which is really my only passion these days. It's why I stay around instead of getting a decent job. It's a sabotage program. It's probably the greatest intellectual achievement of the nineteen-eighties, and it's the only thing I've ever found that is so indescribably difficult and complex and beautiful that I haven't gotten bored with it."

"Why would anyone do such a thing? It must be costing the Megaversity millions."

"I don't know," said Virgil, "but it's great to have a challenge."

Sarah and I were in her room with my toolbox. Outside, the Terrorists were trying to get in. I sat on her bed, as she had commanded, silent and neutral.

"When did they start calling themselves the Terrorists," she asked during a lull.

"Who knows? Maybe Wild and Crazy Guys was too old-fashioned."

"Maybe the hijacking of that NATO tank yesterday gave them the idea. That got lots of coverage. Shit, here they are again." Cheerfully screaming, another Airhead was dragged down the hail to be given her upside-down cold shower. The original Terrorist plan had been to drag the Airheads to the bathroom by their hair, as in olden times, but after a few tries they were convinced that this really was painful, so now they were holding on to the feet.

"Terrorists, Terrorists, we're a mean, sonofabitch," came a hoarse chant as a new group gathered in front of Sarah's door. "Come on, Sarah," their leader shouted in a heavy New York accent. He was trying to sound fatherly and patient, but instead sounded anxious and not very bright. "It'll be a lot better for you if you just come out now. We're tickling Mitzi right now and she's going to tell us where the master key is, and once we get that we'll come in and you'll get ad-dition-al pun-ish-ment."

"God," Sarah whispered to me, "these dorks think I'm just playing hard-to-get. Hope they enjoy it."

"Give the word and I'll shoo them off," I said again.

"Wouldn't help. I have to deal with this myself. Don't be so macho."

"Sorry. Sometimes it works to be macho, you know."

Their previous effort to flash her out of her room had failed. "Flashing" was the technique of squirting lighter fluid Under a door and throwing in a match. It wasn't as dangerous as it sounded, but it invariably smoked the victim out. Powdering was a milder form of this: an envelope was filled with powder, its mouth slid under the door, and the envelope stomped on, exploding a cloud of powder into the room. Three days earlier this had been done to Sarah by some Air-heads. A regular vacuum cleaner just blew the powder out again, so we brought my wet-dry vacuum up and filled it with water and had better results, though she and her room still smelled like babies. She had purchased a heavy rubber weatherstrip from the Mall's hardware store and we had just finished installing it when the flashing attempt had taken place. From listening to the Terrorists on the other side of the door, I had now become as primitive as they had– it was no longer a negotiable situation– and was itching to knock heads.

"Why don't you stop bothering me?" she yelled, trying too hard to sound strong and steady. "I really don't want to play this game with you. You got what you wanted from the others, so why don't you leave? You have no right to bother me."

At this, they roared. "Listen, bitch, this is our sister floor, we decide what our rights are! No one escapes from the rule of the Terrorists, Terrorists, we're a mean, sonofabitch! We'll get in sooner or later– face up to it!"

Another one played the nice guy. "Listen, Sarah– hey, is that her name? Right. Uh, listen, Sarah. We can make life pretty hard on you. We're just trying to initiate you into our sister floor– it's a new tradition. Remember, if you don't lock your door, we can come in; and if you do lock it, we can penny you in."

The Airheads had once pennied Sarah in. The doors opened inward and locked with deadbolts. If the deadbolt was locked and the door pushed inward with great force, the friction between the bolt and its rectangular hole in the jamb became so great that it was impossible for the occupant to withdraw the bolt to unlock the door. One could not push inward on the door all the time, of course, but it was possible to wedge pennies between the front of the door and the projecting member of the jamb so tightly that the occupant was sealed in helplessly. Since this maneuver only worked when the owner of the room was inside with the door locked, it was used discourage people from the unfriendly habit of locking their doors. Sarah was pennied in just before a Student Government meeting, and she had to call me so that I could run upstairs and throw myself against the door until the pennies fell out.

"Look," said Sarah, also taking a reasonable tack, "When are you going to accept that I'm not coming out? I don't want to play, I just want peace and quiet." She knew her voice was wavering now, and she threw me an exasperated look.

"Sarah," said the righteously perturbed Terrorist, "you're being very childish about this. You know we don't want that much. It doesn't hurt. You just have one more chance to be reasonable, and then it's ad-dition-al pun-ish-ment."

"Swirlie! Swirlie! Swirlie!" chanted the Terrorists. "Fuck yourselves!" she yelled. Realizing what was about to happen, she yanked my pliers out of my toolbox and clamped their serrated jaws down on the lock handle just as Mitzi's master key was slid into the keyhole outside.

She held it firm. The Terrorists found the lock frozen. The key-turner called for help, but only one hand can grip a key at a time. The handle did rotate a few degrees in the tussle, and the Terrorists then found they could not pull the key from the lock. Sarah continued to hold it at a slight twist as the Terrorists mumbled outside.

"Listen, Sarah, you got a good point. We'll just leave you alone from now on."

"Yeah," said the others, "Sorry, Sarah."

Looking at me, Sarah snorted with contempt and held on to the pliers. A minute or so after the Terrorists noisily walked away, an unsuccessful yank came on the key.

"Shit! Fuck you!" The Terrorist kicked and pounded viciously on the door, raging.

After a few minutes I got on my belly and pried up the rubber strip and verified that the Terrorists were no longer waiting outside. Sarah opened her door, pulled out the master key, and pocketed it. She smiled a lot, but she was also shaking, and wanted no comfort from me. I was about to say she could sleep on my Sofa for a few days. Sometimes, though, I can actually be sensitive about these things. Sarah was obviously tired of needing my help. I felt she needed my protection, but that was my problem. Suddenly feeling that dealing with me might have been as difficult for her as dealing with the Terrorists, I made the usual obligatory offers of further assistance, and went home. Fortunately for what Sarah would call my macho side, I was on an intramural football team. So were all of the Terrorists. We met three times. I am big, they were average; they suffered; I had a good time and did not feel so proud of myself afterward. The Terrorists did not even understand that I didn't like them. Like a lot of whites, they didn't care much for blacks unless they were athletic blacks, in which case we could do whatever we wanted. To knock Terrorist heads for two hours, then have them pat me on the butt in admiration, was frustrating. As for Sarah, she had no such outlets for her feelings.

She lay on her bed for the rest of the afternoon, unable to think about anything else, desperate for the company of Hyacinth, who was out of town for the weekend. Ultra-raunch rock-'n'-roll pounded through from the room above. The Terrorists figured out her number and she had to take her phone off the hook. She ignored the Airheads knocking on her door. Finally, late in the evening, when things had been quiet for a couple of hours, she slipped out to take a shower– a right-side-up, hot shower.

This was not very relaxing. She had to keep her eyes and ears open as much as she could. As she rinsed her hair, though, a klunk sounded from the showerhead and the water wavered, then turned bitterly cold. She yelped and swung the hot-water handle around, to no effect, and then she couldn't stand it and had to yank open the door and get out of there.

They were all waiting for her– not the Terrorists, but the Airheads in their bathrobes. One stood at every sink, smiling, hot water on full blast, and one stood by every shower stall, smiling, steam pouring out of the door. With huge smiles and squeals of joy, they actually grabbed her by the arms, shouting Swirlie!, Swirlie!, took her to one of the toilets, stuck her head in, and flushed.

She was standing there naked, toilet water running in thin cold ribbons down her body, and they were in their bathrobes, smiling sympathetically and applauding. Apologies came from all directions. Somehow she didn't scream, she didn't hit anyone; she grabbed her bathrobe– tearing her hand on the corner of the shower door in her spastic fury– wrapped it around herself and tied it so tightly she could hardly breathe. Her pulse fluttered like a bird in an iron box and tingles of hyperventilation ran down her arms and into her fingertips.

"What the fuck is wrong with you? Are you crazy?"

They mostly tittered nervously and tried to ignore the way she had flown off the handle. They were leaving her a social escape route; she could still smooth it over. But she was not interested. "Listen to me good, you dumb fucks!" She had let herself go, it was the only thing she could do. In a way it felt great to bellow and cry and rage and scare the hell out of them; this was the first contact with reality these women had had in years. "This is rape! And I'm entitled to protect myself from it! And I will!"

She had stepped over the line. It was now okay to hate Sarah, and several took the opportunity, laughing out loud to each other. Mari did not. "Sarah! Jeez, you don't have to take it so serious! You'll feel better later on. We've got some punch for you in the Lounge. We were just letting you in to the wing. We didn't think you were going to get so upset."

"Yeah."

"Yeah."

"Yeah."

"Well, I'm real sorry, excuse me, but I am going to take it seriously because anyone who can't see why it's serious has bad, bad problems and needs to get straightened out. If you think you're doing this because it's natural and fun, you aren't thinking too fucking hard."

"But, Jeez, Sarah," said Mari, hardly believing anyone could be so weird, "it's for the better. We've all been through it together now and we're all sisters. We're all an equal family together. We were just welcoming you in."

"The whole purpose of a fucking university is not so that you can come and be just like everyone else. I'm not equal to you people, never will be, don't want to be, I don't want to be anyone's sister, I don't want your activities, all I want is a decent place to live where I can be Sarah Jane Johnson, and not be equalized… by a mob.. . of little powderpuff terrorists… who just can't stand differentness because they're too stupid to understand it! What goes on in your heads? Haven't you ever seen the diversity of… of nature? Stop laughing. Look, you think this is funny? The next time you do this, someone is going to get hurt very badly." She looked down at the little drops of blood on the floor, dripping from her hand, and suddenly felt cleansed. She clenched the fist and held it up. "Understand?"

They had been smug at her wild anger. Now they were scared and disgusted and their makeup lay on their appalled skin like blood on snow. Most fled, hysterically grossed out.

"Gag me green!"

"Barf me blue!"

Mari averted her gaze from this gore. "Well, that's okay if you want to give all of this up. But I don't think it's like rape. I mean, we all scream a lot and stuff, and we don't really want them to do it, if you know what I mean, but when they do it's fun after all. So for us it's just sort of wild and exciting, and for the guys, it helps them work off steam. You know what I mean?"

"No! Get out! Don't fuck with my life!" That was a lie– she did know exactly what Mari meant. But she had just realized she could never let herself think that way again. Mari sadly floated out, sniffling. Sarah, alone now, washed her hair again (though it had not been a "dirty swirlie") and retreated to her room, a little ill in a gag-me-green sort of way, yet filled with a tingling sense of sureness and power. She was not harassed anymore. Word had gone out. Sarah had gotten additional punishment and was not to be bothered.

The door opened slightly, and a dazzling splinter of fluorescent light shot out across the dusky linoleum. Within the room it was still. The door opened a bit more. "Spike? It's me. Don't try to get out, kittycat."

Now the door opened all the way and a tall skinny figure stepped in quickly, shut the door, and turned on a dim reading lamp. "Spike, are you sleeping? What did you get into this time?" He found the kitten under his bed, next to the overturned rat-poison tray that was not supposed to be there. Spike had only been dead for a few minutes, and his body was still so warm that Casimir thought he could be cuddled back to life. He sat on the floor by his bed and rocked Spike for a while, then stopped and let the tiny corpse down into his lap.

A convulsion took his diaphragm and his lungs emptied themselves in jolts. He twisted around, breathless, hung on his elbows on the bed's edge, finally sucked in a wisp of air and sobbed it out again. He rolled onto the bed and the sobs came faster and louder. He pulled his pillow into his face and screamed and sobbed for longer than he could keep track of. Into his lumpy little standard-issue American Megaversity pillow he shuddered it all out: Sharon, Spike, the desecration of his academic dream, his loneliness.

When he pulled himself together he was drained and queasy but curiously relaxed. He put Spike in a garbage bag and slid him into an empty calculator box, which he taped shut. Cradling it, he stared out the window. Around him in even ranks rose the thousands of windows of the towers, and to his tear-blurred vision it was as though he stood in a forest aflame "Spike," he said, "What the hell should I do with myself?

"Yeah. Okay. That's what it's going to be.

"Well, Spike, now I have to do something unbelievably great. Something impossible. Something these scum are too dumb even to imagine. To hell with grades. There are much fairer ways of showing how smart you are. I'm smarter than all of these fuckers, rules aside."

He cranked his vent window open. Outside a Tower War was raging: students shouting to one another, shining lights and lasers into one another's rooms, blaring their stereos across the gulfs. Now the countertenor cry of Casimir Radon rode in above the tumult.

"You can make it as hard as you want, as hard as you can, but I'm going to be the cleverest bastard this place has ever seen! I can make idiots of you all, damn it!"

"Fuck you!" came a long-drawn-out scream from F Tower. It was precisely what Casimir wanted to hear. He shut his window and sat in darkness to think.

At four in the morning the wing was quiet except for Sarah, who was up, preparing her laundry. It was not necessary to do it at four in the morning– one could find open machines as late as six or seven– but this was Sarah's time of day. At this time she could walk the halls like something supernatural (or as she put it, "something natural, in a place that is sub-natural"). In the corridors she would meet the stupid gotten-up-to-urinate, staggering half-dead for the bathroom, and they'd squint at her– clothed, up and bright– as though she were a moonbeam that had worked its way around their room to splash upon their faces. The ultra-late partiers, crushed by alcohol, floated, belched and slurred along in glitzy boogie dress, and the fresh and sober Sarah, in soft clothes and tennis shoes, could dance through them before they had even recognized her presence. The brightest nerds and premeds riding the elevators home from all-nighters were so thick with sleep they could hardly stand, much less appreciate the time of day. A dozen or so hard-core athletes liked to rise as early as Sarah, and when she encountered them they would nod happily and go their separate ways.

Being up at four in the morning was akin to being in the wilderness. It was as close to the outside world as you could get without leaving the Plex. The rest of the day, the harsh artificiality of the place ruled the atmosphere and the unwitting inhabitants, but the calm purity of the predawn had a way of seeping through the cinderblocks and pervading the place for an hour or so.

"Screw the laundry," is what she finally said. She had plenty of clean clothes.

She was kneeling amid a heap of white cottons, and the grim brackishness of her room was all around her. Suddenly she could not stand it. Laundry would not make the room seem decent, and she had to do something that would.

Out in the wing it was easy to find the leftover paints and brushes. The Castle in the Air paintings were just now getting their finishing touches. She found the supplies in a storage closet and brought them to her room.

Normally this would have been a quick and dirty process, but the spirit of four in the morning made her placid. She moved the furniture away from the walls and in a few minutes had the floor, door, windows and furniture covered with a Sunday New York Times. It looked better already.

The Castle in the Air, as will later be described, was a sickly yellow, floating on white clouds in a blue sky. By mixing cloud-color with Castle-color and a bit of Bambi-color (on the ground under the Castle, Bambis cavorted) she made a mellow creamy paint. This she applied to the walls and ceiling with a roller. It was breakfast-time. She wasn't hungry.

Sky-color and castle-color made green. She splayed open a cardboard box and made it into a giant palette, mixing up every shade of green she could devise and smearing them around to create an infinite variety. Then she began to dab away on one wall with no particular plan or goal.

The light fixture was in the middle of the wall. She paused, thinking of the dire consequences, then sighed blissfully and slapped it all over with thick green daubs.

By noon the wall was covered with pied green splotches ranging from almost-black to yellow. It was not a bad approximation of a forest in the sun, but it lacked fine detail and branches. She had long since decided to cut all her classes. She left her room for the first time since sunrise and started riding the 'vators toward the shopping mall. She felt great.

"Doin' some paintin'?" asked a doe-eyed woman in leg warmers. Plastered with paint, Sarah nodded, beaming. "Doin' your room?"

"Yep."

"Yeah. So did we. We did ours all really high-tech. Lots of glow-colors. How bout you? Lotsa green?"

"Of course," said Sarah, "I'm making it look like the outside. So I don't forget."

At the Sears in the Mall she got matte black paint and smaller brushes. She returned to her room, passing the Cafeteria, where thousands stood in line for something that smelled of onions and salt and hot fat, Sarah had not eaten in twenty-four hours and felt great– it was a day to fast. Back in her room she cleared away a Times page announcing a coup in Africa and sat on her bed to contemplate her forest. Infinitely better than the old wall, yet still just a rude beginning– every patch of color could be subdivided into a hundred shades and crisscrossed with black branches to hold it all up. She knew she'd never finish it, but that was fine. That was the idea.

Casimir immediately went into action. He had already daydreamed up this plan, and to organize the first stages of Project Spike did not take long. Since Sharon had sunk completely into a coma, Casimir had taken over the old professor's lab in the Burrows, spending so much time there that he stored a sleeping bag in the closet so he could stay overnight.

This evening– Day Three– he had found six rats crowded into his box trap near the Cafeteria. Judging from the quantity of poison scattered around this area, they were of a highly resistant strain. In the lab, he donned heavy gloves, opened the trap, forced himself to grab a rat, pulled it out and slammed shut the lid. This was a physics. not a biology, lab and so his methods were crude. He pressed the rat against the counter and stunned it with a piece of copper tubing, then held it underwater until dead.

He laid it on a bare plank and set before him an encyclopedia volume he had stolen from the Library, opened to a page which showed a diagram of the rat's anatomy. Weighing it open with a hunk of lead radiation shield, he took out a single-edged razor and went to work on the little beast. In twenty minutes he had the liver out. In an hour he had six rat livers in a beaker and six liverless rat corpses in the wastebasket, swathed in plastic. He put the livers in a mortar and ground them to a pulp, poured in some alcohol, and filtered the resulting soup until it was clear.

Next morning he visited the Science Shop, where Virgil Gabrielsen was fixing up a chromatograph that would enable Casimir to find out what chemicals were contained in the rat liver extract. "We're ready for your mysterious test," said Virgil. "Hope you don't mind."

"I love working with mad scientists– never dull. What's that?" "Mostly grain alcohol. This machine will answer your question, though, if it's fixed."

A few hours later they had the results: a strip of paper with a line squiggled across it by the machine. Virgil compared this graph with similar ones from a long skinny book.

"Shit," said Virgil, showing rare surprise. "I didn't think anything could live with this much Thalphene in its guts. Thalphene! These things have incredible immunities."

"What is it? I don't know anything about chemistry." "Trade name for thallium phenoxide." Virgil crossed his arms and looked at the ceiling. "Dangerous Properties of Industrial Materials, my favorite bedtime reading, says this about thallium compounds. I abbreviate. 'Used in rat poison and depilatories … results in swelling of feet and legs, arthralgia, vomiting. insomnia, hyperaesthesia and paresthesia of hands and feet, mental confusion, polyneuritis with severe pains in legs and loins, partial paralysis and degeneration of legs, angina, nephritis, wasting, weakness … complete loss of hair . . ha! Fatal poisoning has been known to occur.'"

"No kidding!"

"Under phenols we have.. . 'where death is delayed, damage to kidneys, liver, pancreas, spleen, edema of the lungs, headache, dizziness, weakness, dimness of vision, loss of consciousness, vomiting, severe abdominal pain, corrosion of lips, mouth, throat, esophagus and stomach'."

"Okay, I get the idea."

"And that doesn't account for synergistic effects. These rats eat the stuff all the time."

"So they go through a lot of rat poison, these rats do."

"It looks to me," said Virgil, "as though they live on it. But if you don't mind my prying, why do you care?"

Casimir was slightly embarrassed, but he knew Virgil's secret, so it was only fair to bare his own. "In order for Project Spike to work, they have to be heavy rat-poison eaters. I'm going to collect rat poison off the floors and expose it to the slow neutron source in Sharon's lab. It's a little chunk of a beryllium isotope on a piece of plutonium, heavily shielded in paraffin– looks like a garbage can on wheels. Paraffin stops slow neutrons, see. Anyway, when I expose the rat poison to the neutrons, some of the carbon in the poison will turn to Carbon– 14. Carbon– 14 is used in dating. of course, so there are plenty of machines around to detect small amounts of it. Anyway, I set this tagged poison out near the Cafeteria. Then I analyze samples of Cafeteria food for unusually high levels of Carbon– 14. If I get a high reading. .

"It means rats in the food."

"Either rats, or their hair or feces."

"That's awesome blackmail material, Casimir. I wouldn't have thought it of you.

Casimir looked up at Virgil, shocked and confused. After a few seconds he seemed to understand what Virgil had meant. "Oh, well, I guess that's true. The thing is, I'm not that interested in blackmail. It wouldn't get me anything. I just want to do this, and publicize the results. The main thing is the challenge."

A rare full grin was on Virgil's face. "Damn good, Casimir, That's marvelous. Nice work." He thought it over, taken with the idea. "You'll have the biggest gun in the Plex, you know."

"That's not what I'm after with this project."

"Let me know if I can help. Hey, you want to go downstairs to the Denny's for lunch? I don't want to eat in the Cafeteria while I'm thinking about the nature of your experiment."

"I don't want to eat at all, after what I've just been doing," said Casimir. "But maybe later on we can dissolve our own livers in ethanol." He put the beaker of rat potion in a hazardous-waste bin, logged down its contents, and they departed.

And lest anyone get the wrong idea, a disclaimer: I did not know about this while it was going on. They told me about it later. The people who have claimed I bear some responsibility for what happened later do not know the facts.

"What makes you think you can just play a record?" said Ephraim Klein in a keen, irritated voice. "I'm listening to harpsichord music,"

"Oh," John Wesley Fenrick said innocently. "I didn't hear it. I guess my ears must have gone bad from all my terrible music, huh?" "Looks that way."

"But it's okay, I'm not going to play a record."

"I should hope not."

"I'm going to play a tape." Fenrick brushed his finger against an invisible region on the surface of the System, and lights lit and meters wafted up and down. The mere sound of Silence, reproduced by this machine, nearly drowned out the harpsichord, a restored 1783 Prussian model with the most exquisite lute stop Klein had ever heard. Fenrick turned on the Go Big Red Fan, which began to chunk away as usual.

"Look," said Ephraim Klein, "I said I was playing something. You can't just bust in."

"Well," said John Wesley Fenrick, "I said I can't hear it. If I don't hear any evidence that you are playing something, there's no reason I should take your word for it. You obviously have a distorted idea of reality."

"Prick! Asshole!" But Klein had already pulled out one of his war tapes, the "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" as performed by Virgil Fox (what Fenrick called "horror movie music") and snapped it into his own tape deck. He set the tape rolling and prepared to switch from PHONO to TAPE at the first hint of offensive action from Fenrick.

It was not long in coming. Fenrick had been sinking into a Heavy Metal retrospective recently, and entered the competition with Back in Black by AC/DC. Klein watched Fenrick's hands carefully and was barely able to squeeze out a lead, the organist hitting the high mordant at the opening of the piece before the ensuing fancy notes were stomped into the sonic dust by Back in Black.

From there the battle raged typically. A hundred feet down the hall, I stuck my head out the door to have a look. Angel, the enormous Cuban who lived on our floor, had been standing out in the hallway for about half an hour furiously pounding on the wall with his boxing gloves, laboriously lengthening a crack he had started in the first week of the semester. When I looked, he was just in the act of hurling open the door to Klein and Fenrick's room; dense, choking clouds of music whirled down the corridor at Mach 1 and struck me full in the face.

I started running. By the time I had arrived, Angel had wrapped Fenrick's long extension cord around the doorknob, held it with his boxing gloves, put his foot against the door, and pulled it apart with a thick blue spark and a shower of fire. The extension cord shorted out and smoked briefly until circuit breakers shut down all public-area power to the wing.

AC/DC went dead, clearing the air for the climax of the fugue. Angel walked past the petrified Ephraim Klein and pawed at the tape deck, trying to get at the tape. Frustrated by the boxing gloves, he turned and readied a mighty kick into the cone of a sub-woofer, when finally I arrived and tackled him onto a bed. Angel relaxed and sat up, occasionally pounding his bright-red cinderblock-scarred gloves together with meaty thwats, sweating like the boxer he was, glowering at the Go Big Red Fan.

The fugue ended and Ephraim shut off the tape. I went over and closed the door. "Okay, guys, time for a little talk. Everyone want to have a little talk?"

John Wesley Fenrick looked out the window, already bored, and nodded almost imperceptibly. Ephraim Klein jumped to his feet and yelled, "Sure, sure, anytime! I'm happy to be reasonable!" Angel, who was unlacing his right boxing glove with his teeth, mumbled, "I been talking to them for two months and they don't do shit about it."

"Hmm," I said, "I guess that tells the story, doesn't it? If you two refuse to be reasonable, Angel doesn't have to be reasonable either. Now it seems to me you need a set of rules that you can refer to when you're arguing about stereo rights. For instance, if one guy goes to pee, the other can't seize air rights. You can't touch each other's property, and so on. Ephraim, give me your typewriter and we'll get this down."

So we made the Rules and I taped them to the wall, straddling the boundary line of the room. "Does that mean I only have to follow the Rules on my half of the page," asked Fenrick, so I took it down and made a new Rule saying that these were merely typed representations of abstract Rules that were applicable no matter where the typed representations were displayed. Then I had the two sign the Rules, and hinted again that I just didn't know what Angel might do if they made any more noise. Then Angel and I went down to my place and had some beers. Law, and the hope of silence and order, had been established on our wing.

Fred Fine was trying to decide whether to lob his last tactical nuke into Novosibirsk or Tomsk when a frantic plebe bounced up and interrupted the simulation with a Priority Five message. Of course it was Priority Five; how else could a plebe have dared interrupt Fred Fine's march to the Ob'? "Fred, sir," he gasped. "Come quick, you won't believe it." "What's the situation?"

"That new guy. He's about to win World War II!"

"He is? But I thought he was playing the Axis!"

Fred Fine brushed past the plebe and strode into the next room. In its center, two Ping-Pong tables had been pushed together to make room for the eight-piece World War II map. On one side stood the tall, aquiline Virgil Gabrielsen– the "new guy"– and on the other, Chip Dixon shifted from foot to foot and snapped his fingers incessantly, Because this was the first wargame Virgil had ever played, he was still only a Private, and held Plebe status. Chip Dixon, a Colonel, had been gaming for six years and was playing the Allies, for God's sake! Usually the only thing at question in this game was how many Allied divisions the Axis could consume before Berlin inevitably fell.

At the end of the map, where the lines of longitude theoretically converged to make the North Pole, Consuela Gorm, Referee, sat on a loveseat atop a sturdy table. On the small stand before her she riffled occasionally through the inch-thick rule book, punched away at her personal computer, made notes on scratch paper and peered down at Europe with a tiny pair of opera glasses. Surrounding the tables were twenty other garners who had come to observe the carnage shortly after Virgil had V-2'd Birmingham into gravel. Many stood on chairs, using field glasses of their own, and one geek was tottering around the area on a pair of stilts, loudly and repeatedly joking that he was a Nazi spy satellite. The attention of all was focused on tens of thousands of little cardboard squares meticulously stacked on the hexagonally patterned playing field. The game had been on for nine and a half hours and Chip Dixon was obviously losing it fast, popping Cheetos into his mouth faster than he could grind them into paste with his hyperactive yellow molars, often gulping Diet Pepsi and hiccuping. Virgil was calm, surveying the board through half-closed eyes, hands behind back, lips slightly parted, wandering around in a world inside his head, oblivious to the surrounding nerds. A hell of a warrior, thought Fred Fine, and this only his first game!

"Here comes the Commander," shouted the guy on stilts as he rounded the Japanese-occupied Aleutians, and the observers' circle parted so Fred Fine could enter. Chip Dixon blushed vividly and looked away, moving his lips as he cursed to himself. "Very interesting," said Fred Fine.

Great stacks of red cardboard squares surrounded Stalin-grad and Moscow, which were protected only by pitiable little heaps of green squares. In Normandy an enormous Nazi tank force was hurling the D-Day invasion back into the Channel so forcefully that Fred Fine could almost hear the howl of the Werfers and see the bodies fall screaming into the scarlet brine. In Holland, a Nazi amphibious force made ready to assault Britain. In front of Virgil, lined up on the edge of the table as trophies, sat the four Iowa-class battleships, the Hornet, and other major ships of the American navy.

Chip Dixon was increasingly manic, his blood pressure Pumped to the hemhorrage point by massive overdoses of salt and Diet Pepsi, his thirst insatiable because of the nearly empty Jumbo Paic of Cheetos. Sweat dripped from his brow and fell like acid rain on Scandinavia. He bent over and tried to move a stack of recently mobilized Russians toward Moscow, but as he shoved one point of his tweezers under the stack he hiccupped violently and ended up scattering them all over the Ukraine. "Shit!" he screamed, dashing a Cheeto to the floor. "I'm sorry, Consuela, I forget which hex it was on."

Consuela did not react for several seconds, and the reflection of the rule book in her glasses gave her an ominous, inscrutable look. Everyone was still and apprehensive. "Okay," she said in soft, level tones, "that unit got lost in the woods and can't find its way out for another turn."

"Wait!" yelled Chip Dixon. "That's not in the Rules!" "It's okay," said Virgil patiently. "That stack contained units A2567, A2668, A4002, and 126789, and was on hex number 1,254.908. However, unit A2567 clashed with Axis A1009 last turn, so has only half movement this turn– three hexes."

Cowed, Chip Dixon breathed deeply (Fred Fine's suggestion) and reassembled the stack. Unit A2567 was left far behind to deal with a unit of about twenty King Tiger Tanks which was blasting unopposed up the Dniepr. Chip Dixon then straightened up and thought for about five minutes, ruffling through his notes for a misplaced page. Consuela made a gradated series of noises intended to convey rising impatience. "Listen, Chip, you're already way over the time limit. Done?"

"Yeah, I guess."

"Any engagements?"

"No, not this turn. But wait 'til you see what's coming." Okay, Virgil, your turn."

Virgil reached out with a long probe and quickly shoved stacks of cardboard from place to place; from time to time a move would generate a gasp from the crowd. He then ticked off a list of engagements, giving Consuela data on what each stack contained, what its combat strength was, when it had last fought and so forth. When it was over, an hour later, there was long applause from the membership of MARS. Chip Dixon had sunk to the floor to sulk over a tepid Cola.

"Incredible," someone yelled, "you conquered Stalingrad and Moscow and defeated D-Day and landed in Scotland and Argentina all at the same time!"

At this point Chip Dixon, who had refused to concede, stood up and blew most of the little cardboard squares away in a blizzard of military might. Fred Fine was angry but controlled. "Chip, ten demerits for that. I ought to bust you down to Second Looie for that display. Just for that, you get to put the game away. And organize it right." Chastened, Chip and two of his admirers set about sorting all of the pieces of cardboard and fitting them into the appropriate recesses in the injection-molded World War II carrying case. Fred Fine turned his attention to Virgil.

"A tremendous victory." He drew his fencing foil and tapped Virgil once on each shoulder as Virgil looked on skeptically. "I name you a Colonel in MARS. It's quite a jump, but a battlefield commission is obviously in order."

"Oh, not really," said Virgil, bored. "It's more a matter of a good memory than anything else."

"You're modest. I like that in a man."

"No, just accurate. I like that."

Fred Fine now drew Virgil aside, away from the dozen or so wargame aficionados who were still gaping at one another and pounding their heads dramatically on the walls. The massively corpulent Consuela was helped down from her eleven-hour perch by several straining MARS officials, and began to roll toward them like a globule of quicksilver.

"Virgil," said Fred Fine quietly, "you're obviously a special kind of man. We need men like you for our advanced games. These board games are actually somewhat repetitive, as you pointed out. Want a little more excitement next time?"

Virgil drew away. "What do you have in mind?"

"You've heard of Dungeons and Dragons?" A gleam came to Fred Fine's eye, and he glanced conspiratorially at Consuela. "Sure. Someone designs a hypothetical dungeon on graph paper, puts different monsters and treasure in the rooms, and each player has a character which he sends through it, trying to take as much treasure as possible. Right?"

"Oh, only in its crudest, simplest forms, Virgil," said Consuela. "This one and his friends prefer a more active version." "Sewers and Serpents," said Consuela, nodding happily. "The idea is the same as D & D, but we use a real place, and real costumes, and act it all out. Much more realistic. You see, beneath the Plex is a network of sewer tunnels."

"Yeah, I know," said Virgil. "I've got the blueprints for this place memorized, remember."

Fred Fine was taken aback. "How?"

"Computer drew them for me."

"Well, we'd have to give you a character who had some good reason for knowing his way around the tunnels."

"Like maybe, uh," said Consuela, eyes rolled up, "maybe he happened to see a duel between some hero who had just come out of the Dungeon of Plexor"– "That's what we call the tunnels," said Fred Fine.

– "and some powerful nonsentient beast such as a gronth, and the gronth killed the hero, and then Virgil's character came and found a map on his body and memorized it."

"Or we could make him a computer expert in TechnoPlexor who got a peek at the plans the same way Virgil did "Excuse me a sec, but what do you do for monsters?" asked Virgil.

"Well we don t have real ones. We just have to pretend and use the official S & S rules, developed by MARS through a constitutional process over several years. We maintain two-way radio contact with our referee, Consuela, who stays in the Plex and runs the adventure through a computer program we've got worked out. The computer also performs statistical combat simulation."

"So you slog around in the shit, and the computer says you're being attacked by monsters, and she reads it off the CRT and says that according to the computer you've lost a finger, or the monster's dead, that sort of thing?"

"Well, it's more exciting than you make it sound, and the Dungeon Mistress makes it better by amplifying the description generated by the computer. I recommend you try it. We've got an outing in a couple of weeks."

"I don't know, Fred, it's not my cup of tea. I'll think about it, but don't count on my coming."

"That's fine. Consuela just needs to know a few hours ahead of time so she can have SHEKONDAR– the computer program– prepare a character for you."

Virgil assented to everything, nodded a lot, said he'd be getting back to them and hurried out, shaking his head in amazed disgust. Unlikely as it seemed, this place could still surprise him.

My involvement with Student Government was due to my being faculty-in-residence. I served as a kind of minister without portfolio, investigating whatever topic interested me at the moment, talking to students, faculty and administrators, and contributing to governmental discussions the point of view of an older, supposedly wiser observer. As I had no idea what was going on at the Big U until much later, my contributions can't have done much good. I did visit the Castle in the Air on several occasions, anyway, and whenever I did I was presented with a visual display in three stages.

The first was a prominent mural on the wall of the Study Lounge, clearly visible through the windows from the elevator lobby. Even if I had been visiting one of E12's other wings, therefore, I couldn't have failed to notice that E12S was a wing among wings. Here, as described, the Castle was painted in yellow– not a typical color for castles, but much nicer than realistic gray or brown. The Castle, stolen directly from a book of Disney illustrations, floated on a cloud that looked like a stomped marshmallow, not a thunderhead, Seemingly too meager to support its load. Below, more Disney characters frolicked on an undulating green lawn, a combined golf course/cartoon character refuge with no sand traps, one water hazard and no visible greens. The book of illustrations was not large, and each character was shown in only one or two poses which had to be copied over and over again in populating this great lawn. Monotony had rendered the painters somewhat desperate– what was that penguin doing there? And why had they included that evil gray wolf, wagging his red tongue at the stiff cloned Bambis from behind a spherical shrub? But most agreed that the mural was nice– indeed, so nice that "nice" was no longer adequate by itself; in describing it, Airheads had to amplify the word by saying it many, many times and making large gestures with their hands.

The second stage of the presentation was the entryways – two identical portals, one at the beginning of each of the wing's two hallways. Here, at the fire doors by the Study Lounge, the halls had been framed in thick wooden beams– actually papier-mбchиd boxes– decorated with plastic flowers and welcoming messages. The fire doors themselves had been covered with paper and painted so that, when they were closed, I could see what looked like a stairway of light yellow stone rising up from the floor and continuing skyward until further view was blocked by the beam along the ceiling.

Going through these doors, and therefore up the symbolic stair, I found myself in a light yellow corridor gridded with thin wavy black lines supposed to represent joints between the great yellow building-stones of which the Castle was constructed. These were closely spaced in the first part of the hallway, but the crew had found this work tedious and decided that in the back sections much larger stones were used to build the walls. Here and there, torches, fake paintings, suits of armor and the like were painted on the walls.

Each individual room, then, was the province of the occupants, who could turn it into any fantasy-land they wanted. One or two of them painted murals on paper and pasted them to their doors. These murals purported to be windows looking down on the scene below, an artistic challenge too great for most of them.

On each visit to Sarah, then, I was introduced to the Castle in the Air in the manner of a TV viewer. The elevator doors would fade out and there sat the Castle on its cloud, viewed through a screen of glass. The view would then switch to a traveling shot of the stairway leading up to the castle– evidently a long one. Through the magic of video editing, the stair would flatten, part and swing away, and I would be instantly jump-cut to the halls of the Castle proper, where to confirm that it had all happened I could pause at windows here and there and look down at the featureless plains from which I had just ascended.

So much for the opening credits; what about the plot? The plot consisted almost entirely of parties and tame sexual intrigue with the Terrorists. The Airheads were not disturbed by the fact that their home was not much of a castle – the Terrorists or anyone else could invade at any time– and that far from being up in the air, it was squashed beneath nineteen other Terrorist-infested floors. The Airheads got along by pretending that any man who showed up on their floor was a white knight on beck and call. Certain evil influences, though, could not be kept out by any amount of painting, and among these was the fire alarm system.

Early in the morning of November the Fifth, Mari Meegan was ejected from her chamber by three City firefighters investigating a full-tower fire alarm. Versions differed as to whether the firefighters had used physical force, but to the lawyers subsequently hired by Mari's father it did not matter; the issue was the mental violence inflicted on Mari, who was forced to totter down the stairway and join the sleepy throng below with only patches of bright blue masque painted on her face.

This situation had not previously arisen because it usually took at least half an hour between the ringing of the alarm and the arrival of the firemen on their tour through the tower. Thirty minutes was time enough for Mari to apply a quickie makeup job which would prevent her from looking "disgusting" even during full moons outside, and, as the lawyers took pains to document and photograph, her emergency thirty-minute face kit was set up and ready to go on a corner of her dresser. Next to it was the masque container, which was for "super emergencies"; given a severely limited time to prepare, she could tear this open and paint a blue oval over her face that would serve partly to disguise and partly to show those who recognized her that she cared about her appearance. But on this particular morning, certain Terrorists from above had demonstrated their mechanical aptitude by disabling the E12S alarm bell with a pair of bolt cutters. The more distant ringing of the E12E bell had not overborne the soft nocturnal beat of Mari's stereo, and by the time she had realized what was happening, and energized the evening light simulation tubes on her makeup center, the sirens were already wafting up from the Death Vortex below.

The Fire Marshall was not amused. After a week's worth of rumors that portrayed the Fire Marshall as a Nazi and a pervert, it was decreed that henceforth during fire drills the RAs would go door-to-door with their master keys and make sure everyone left their rooms immediately. This grim ruling inspired a wing meeting at which Hyacinth wearily suggested they all purchase ski masks, since it was getting cold outside anyway, and wear them down to the street during fire drills. "Stay together and you will be totally anonymous, by which I mean no one will know who you are, or what you look like at three in the morning." The Airheads appointed Teri, a Fashion Merchandising major to pick out ski masks with a suitable color scheme.

In private Hyacinth came up with an acronym for them: SWAMPers. This meant that as a bare minimum they found it necessary to Shave Wash Anoint Make up and Perfume all parts of their body at least once a day. Their insistence on doing this often made Sarah wonder about her own appearance– her use of cosmetics was minimal– but Hyacinth and I and everyone else assured her she looked fine. When preparing for the long nasty Student Government budget meeting in early November Sarah looked briefly through her shoebox of miscellaneous cosmetics then shoved it under the bed again. She had greater things to worry about.

As for clothes, it came down to a choice between her most businesslike outfit, a grey wool skirt suit, and a somewhat brighter dress. She picked the suit, though she knew it would lay her open to accusations of fascism from the Stalinist Underground Battalion (SUB), wound her hair into a bun, and steeled herself for madness.

The SUB got there an hour before anyone else and had their banners planted and their rabid handouts sown before the Government even showed up. We met in the only room we could find that was reasonably private. Behind us came the TV crews, and then the reporters from the Monoplex Monitor and the People's Truth Publication, who sat in the first row, right in front of the Stalinists. Finally Lecture Auditorium 3 filled up with supplicants from various organizations, all deeply shocked and dismayed at how little funding they were receiving, all bearing proposed amendments.

First we slogged through the parliamentary trivia, including a bit of "new business" in which the SUB introduced a resolution to condemn the administration for massive human rights violations and to call for its abolition. Then we came to the real purpose of the meeting: amendments to the proposed budget. A line formed behind the microphone on the stage, and at its head was a SUB member. "I move." he said, "that we pass no budget at all, because the budget has to be approved by the administration, and so we haven't got any control over our own activity money." On cue, behind the press corps, eight SUBbies rose to their feet bearing a long banner: TAKE BACK CONTROL OF STUDENT ACTIVITIES CAPITAL FROM THE KRUPP JUNTA. "The money's ours, the money's ours, the money's ours . ."

We had expected all this and Sarah was undisturbed. She sat back from her microphone and took a sip of water. letting the media record the event for the ages. Once that was done she gaveled a few times and talked them back into their seats. She was about to start talking again when the last standing SUBbie shouted, "Student Government is a tool of the Krupp cadre!"

Behind him, most of the audience shouted things like "eat rocks" and "shut up" and "shove it."

"If you're finished interfering with the democratic process," Sarah said, "this tool would like to get on with the budget. We have a lot to do and everyone needs to be very, very brief." Student Government was made up of the Student Senate, which represented each of the 200 residential wings of the Plex, and the Activities Council, comprising representatives from each. of the funded student organizations, numbering about 150. The distribution of funds among the Activities Council members was decided on by a joint session, which was our goal for the evening.

The Student Senate was crammed with SUBbies and members of an outlaw Mormon splinter group called the Temple of Unlimited Godhead (TUG). Each of these groups claimed to represent all the students. As Sarah explained, no one in his right mind was interested in running for Student Senate, explaining why it was filled with fanatics and political science majors. Fortunately, SUB and TUG canceled each other out almost perfectly.

"I'm tired of having all aspects of my life ruled by this administration that doesn't give a shit for human rights, and I think it's time to do something about it," said the first speaker. There was a little applause from the front and lots of jeering. A hum filled the air as the TUG began to OMMMM at middle C– a sort of sonic tonic which was said to clear the air of foul influences and encourage spiritual peace; overhead, a solitary bat, attracted by the hum, swooped down from a perch in the ceiling and flitted around, occasioning shrieks and violent motion from the people it buzzed. "At this university we don't have free speech, we don't have academic freedom, we don't even have power over our own money!"

At the insistence of the audience, Sarah broke in after a few minutes. "If you've got any specific human rights violations you're concerned about, there are some international organizations you can go to, but there's not much the Student Senate can do. So I suggest you go live somewhere else and let someone else propose an amendment."

Shocked and devastated, the speaker gaped at Sarah as the TV lights slammed into action. He held the stare for several seconds to allow the camera operators to focus and adjust light level, then surveyed the cheering and OMming crowd, face filled with bewilderment and shock.

"I don't believe this," he said, staring into the lenses. "Who says we have freedom of speech? My God, I've come up here to express a free opinion, and just because I am opposed to fascism, the President of the Student Government tries to throw me out of the Plex! My home! That's right, if these different people don't like being oppressed, just throw them out of their homes into the dangerous city! I didn't think this kind of savagery was supposed to exist in a university." He shook his head in noble sadness, surveyed the derisive crowd defiantly, and marched away from the mike to grateful applause. Below, he answered questions from the media while the next student came to the microphone.

He looked like a male cheerleader for a parochial school football team, being handsome, well groomed, and slightly pimpled. As he took possession of the mike the OM stopped. He kept his eye on a middle-aged fellow standing in the aisle not far away, who in turn watched the SUBbie's press conference in front of the stage. Finally the older gentleman held up three fingers. The TUGgie shoved his fist between his arm and body and spoke loudly and sharply into the mike.

"I'd like to announce that I have caught a bat here in my hand, and now I'm going to bite the head off it right here as a sacrifice to the God of Communism."

Below, the SUBbie found himself in absolute darkness, and tripped over a power cord. Simultaneously the TUGgie squinted as all lights were swung around to bear on him. He smiled and began to talk in a calm chantlike voice. "Well, well, well. I've got a confession. I'm not really going to bite the head off a bat, because I don't even have one, and I'm not a Communist." There was now a patter of what sounded like canned TV laughter from the TUG section. "I just did that as a little demonstration, to show you folks how easy it is to get the attention of the media. We can come and talk about serious issues and do real things, but what gets TV coverage are violent eye-catching events, a thing which the Communists who wish to destroy our society understand very well. But I'm not here to give a speech, I'm here to propose an amendment. . ." Here he was dive-bombed by the bat, who veered away at the last moment; the speaker jumped back in horror, to the amusement of almost everyone. The TUGgies laughed too, showing that, yes, they did have a sense of humor no matter what people said. The speaker struggled to regain his composure.

"The speech! Resume the speech! The amendment!" shouted the older man.

"My budget proposal is that we take away all funding for the Stalinist Underground Battalion and distribute it among the other activities groups."

The lecture hall exploded in outraged chanting, uproarious applause, and OM. Sarah sat for about fifteen seconds with her chin in her hand, then began smashing the gavel again. I was seated off to the side of the stage, poised to act as the strong-but-lovable authority figure, but did not have to stand up; eventually things quieted down.

"Is there a second to the motion?" she asked wearily. The crowd screamed YES and NO.

The speaker yielded to another TUGgie, who stood rigidly with a stack of 3– x –5 cards and began to drone through them. "At one time the leftist organizations of American Megaversity could claim that they represented some of the students. But the diverse organizations of the Left soon found that they all had one member who was very strident and domineering and who would push the others around until he or she had risen to a position of authority within the organization. These all turned out to be secretly members of the Stalinist Underground Battalion who had worked themselves in organizations in order to merge the Left into a single bloc with no diversity or freedom of thought. The SUB took over a women's issues newsletter and turned it into the People's Truth Publication, a highly libelous so-called newspaper. In the same way "

He was eventually cut off by Sarah. SUB spokespersons stated their views passionately, then another TUGgie. Finally a skinny man in dark spectacles came to the mike, a man whom Sarah recognized but couldn't quite place. He identified himself as Casimir Radon and said he was president of the physics club Neutrino. He quieted the crowd down a bit, as his was the first speech of the evening that was not entirely predictable.

"I'd like to point out that you've only given us four hundred dollars," he said. "We need more. I've done some analysis of the way our activity money is budgeted, which I will just run through very quickly here– " he fumbled through papers as a disappointed murmur rose from the audience. How long was this nerd going to take? The cameramen put new film and tape in their equipment as lines formed outside by the restrooms.

"Here we go. I won't get too involved in the numerical details– it's all just arithmetic– but if you look at the current budget, you see that a small group of people is receiving a hugely disproportionate share of the money. In effect, the average funding per member of the Stalinist Underground Battalion is $114.00, while the figure for everyone else averages out to about $46.00, and only $33.00 for Neutrino. That's especially unfair because Neutrino needs to purchase things like books and equipment, while the expenses of a political organization are much lower. I don't think that's fair."

The SUB howled at this preposterous reasoning but everyone else listened respectfully.

"So I move we cut SUB funding to the bare minimum, say, twenty bucks per capita, and give Neutrino its full request for a scientific research project, $1500.00."

The rest of the evening, anyway, was bonkers, and I'll not go into detail. It was insignificant anyway, since the administration had the final say; the Student Government would have to keep passing budgets until they passed one that S. S. Krupp would sign, and the only question was how long it would take them to knuckle under. Time was against the SUB. As the members of the government got more bored, they became more interested in passing a budget that would go through the first time around. Eventually it became obvious that the SUB had lost out, and the only thing wanting was the final vote. The highlight of the evening came just before that vote: the speech of Yllas Freedperson.

Yllas, the very substantial and brilliant leader of the SUB, was a heavy black woman in her early thirties, in her fifth year of study at the Modern Political Art Workshop. She had a knack for turning out woodblock prints portraying anguished faces, burning tenements, and thick tortured hands reaching for the sky. Even her pottery was inspired by the work of wretched Central American peasants. She was also editor and illustrator of the People's Truth Publication, but her real talent was for public speaking, where she had the power of a gospel preacher and the fire of a revolutionary. She waited dignified for the TV lights, then launched into a speech that lasted at least a quarter of an hour. At just the right times she moaned, she chanted, she sang, she reasoned, she whispered, she bellowed, she just plain spoke in a fluid and hypnotically rhythmic voice. She talked about S. S. Krupp and the evil of the System, how the System turned good into bad, how this society was just like the one that caused the Holocaust, which was no excuse for Israel, about conservatism in Washington and how our environment, economic security, personal freedom, and safety from nuclear war were all threatened by the greedy action of cutting the SUB's budget. Finally out came the names of Martin Luther King, Jr., Marx, Gandhi, Che, Jesus Christ, Ronald Reagan, Hitler, S. S. Krupp, the KKK, Bob Avakian, Elijah Mohammed and Abraham Lincoln. Through it all, the bat was active, dipping and diving crazily through the auditorium, divebombing toward walls or lights or people but veering away at the last moment, flitting through the dense network of beams and cables and catwalks and light fixtures and hanging speakers and exposed pipes above us at great smooth speed, tracing a marvelously complicated path that never brushed against any solid object. All of it was absorbing and breathtaking, and when Yllas Freedperson was finished and the bat, perhaps no longer attracted by her voice. slipped up and disappeared into a corner, there was a long silence before the applause broke out.

"Thank you, Yllas," said Sarah respectfully. "Is there any particular motion you wanted to make or did you just want to inject your comments?"

"I move," shouted Yllas Freedperson, "that we put the budget the way it was."

The vote was close. The SUB lost. Recounting was no help. They took the dignified approach, forming into a sad line behind Yllas and singing "We Shall Overcome" in slow tones as they marched out. Above their heads they carried their big black-on-red posters of S. S. Krupp with a target drawn over his face, and they marched so slowly that it took two repetitions of the song before they made it out into the hallway to distribute leaflets and posters.

Sarah, three members of her cabinet and I gathered later in my suite for wine. After the frenzy of the meeting we were torpid, and hardly said anything for the first fifteen minutes or so. Then, as it commonly did those days, the conversation came around to the Terrorists.

"What's the story on those Terrorist guys?" asked Willy, a business major who acted as Treasurer. "Are they genuine Terrorists?"

"Not on my floor," said Sarah, "since they subjugated us. We're living in… the Pax Thirteenica."

"I've heard a number of stories," I said. Everyone looked at me and I shifted into my professor mode and lit my pipe. "Their major activity is the toll booth concept. They station Terrorists in the E13 elevator lobby who continually push the up and down buttons so that every passing elevator stops and opens automatically. If it doesn't contain any non-students or dangerous-looking people, they hold the door open until everyone gives them a quarter. They have also claimed a section of the Cafeteria, and there have been fights over it. But nothing I'd call true terrorism."

"How about gang rape?" asked Hillary, the Secretary, quietly. Everything got quiet and we looked at her.

"It's just a rumor," she said. "Don't get me wrong. It hasn't happened to me. The word is that a few of the hardcore Terrorists do it, kind of as an initiation. They go to big parties, or throw their own. You know how at a big party there are always a few women– typical freshmen– who get very drunk. Some nice-looking Terrorist approaches the woman– I hear that they're very good at identifying likely candidates– and gets into her confidence and invites her to another party. When they get to the other party, she turns out to be the only woman there, and you can imagine the rest. But the really terrible thing is that they go through her things and find out where she lives and who she is, then keep coming back whenever they feel like it. They have these women so scared and broken that they don't resist. Supposedly the Terrorists have kind of an invisible harem, a few terrified women all over the Plex, too dumb or scared to say anything."

I was sitting there with my eyes closed, like everyone else a little queasy. "I've heard of the same thing elsewhere," I said. "I wonder if it's happened to any Airheads," murmured Sarah. "God, I'll bet it has. I wonder if any of them know about it. I wonder if they even understand what is being done to them– some of them probably don't even understand they have a right to be angry."

"How could anyone not understand rape?" said Hillary.

"You don't know how mixed up these women are. You don't know what they did to me, without even understanding why I didn't like it. You can't imagine those people– they have no place to stand, no ideas of their own– if one is raped, and not one of her friends understands, where is she? She's cut loose, the Terrorists can tell her anything and make her into whatever they want. Shit, where are those animals going to stop? We're having a big costume party with them in December."

"There's a party to avoid," said Hillary.

"It's called Fantasy Island Nite. They've been planning it for months. But by the time the semester is over, those guys will be running wild."

"They've been running wild for a long time, it sounds like," said Willy. "You'd better get used to that, you know? I think you're living in the law of the jungle." That sounded a trifle melodramatic, but none of us could find a way to disagree.

Sarah and Casimir met in the Megapub, a vast pale airship hangar littered with uncertain plastic tables and chairs made of steel rods bent around into uncomfortable chairlike shapes that stabbed their occupants beneath the shoulder blades. At one end was a long bar, at the other a serving bay connected into the central kitchen complex. Casimir declined to eat Megapub food and lunched on a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich made from overpriced materials bought at the convenience store and a plastic cup of excessively carbonated beer. Sarah used the salad bar. They removed several trays from a window table and stacked them atop a nearby wastebasket, then sat down.

"Thanks for coming on short notice," said Sarah. "I need all the help I can get in selling this budget to Krupp, and your statistics might impress him."

Casimir, chewing vigorously on a big bite of generic white bread and generic chunkless peanut butter, drew a few computer-printed graphs from his backpack. "These are called Lorentz curves," he mumbled, "and they show equality of distribution. Perfect equality is this line here, at a forty-five degree angle. Anything less than equal comes out as a curve beneath the equality line. This is what we had with the old budget." He displayed a graph showing a deeply sagging curve, with the equality line above it for comparison. The graph had been produced by a computer terminal which had printed letters at various spots on the page, demonstrating in crude dotted-line fashion the curves and lines. "Now, here's the same analysis on our new budget." The new graph had a curve that nearly followed the equality line. "Each graph has a coefficient called the Gini coefficient, the ratio of the area between the line and curve to the area under the line. For perfect equality the Gini coefficient is zero. For the old budget it was very bad, about point eight, and for the new budget it is more like point two, which is pretty good."

Sarah listened politely. "You have a computer program that does this?"

"Yeah. Well, I do now, anyway. I just wrote it up."

"It's working okay?"

Casimir peered at her oddly, then at the graphs, then back at her. "I think so. Why?"

"Well, look at these letters in the curves." She pulled one of the graphs over and traced out the letters indicating the Lorentz curve: FELLATIOBUGGERYNECROPHILIACUNNILINGUSANALINGUSBESTIALITY….

"Oh," Casimir said quietly. The other curve read: CUNTFUCKSHITPISSCOCKASSHOLETITGIVEMEANENEMABEATMELICKMEOWNME…. Casimir's face waxed red and his tongue was protruding slightly. "I didn't do this. These are supposed to say, 'new budget' and 'old budget.' I didn't write this into the program. Uh, this is what we call a bug. They happen from time to time. Oh, Jeez, I'm really sorry." He covered his face with one hand and grabbed the graphs and crumpled them into his bag.

"I believe you," she said. "I don't know much about computers, but I know there have been problems with this one."

About halfway through his treatise on Lorentz curves it had occurred to Casimir that he was in the process of putting his foot deeply into his mouth. She was an English major; he had looked her up in the student directory to find out; what the hell did she care about Gini coefficients? Sarah was still smiling, so if she was bored she at least respected him enough not to show. He had told her that he'd just now written this program up, and that was bad, because it looked– oy! It looked as though he were trying to impress her, a sophisticated Humanities type, by writing computer programs on her behalf as though that were the closest he could come to real communication. And then obscene Lorentz curves!

He was saved by her ignorance of computers. The fact was, of course, that there was no way a computer error could do that– if she had ever run a computer program, she would have concluded that Casimir had done it on purpose. Suddenly he remembered his conversation with Virgil. The Worm! It must have been the Worm. He was about to tell her, to absolve himself, when he remembered it was a secret he was honor bound to protect.

He had to be honest. Could it be that he had actually written this just to impress her? Anything printed on a computer looked convincing. If that had been his motive, this served him right. Now was the time to say something witty, but he was no good at all with words– a fact he didn't doubt was more than obvious to her. She probably knew every smart, interesting man in the university, which meant he might as well forget about making any headway toward looking like anything other than an unkempt, poor, math-and-computer-obsessed nerd whose idea of intelligent conversation was to show off the morning's computer escapades.

"You didn't have to go to the trouble of writing a program."

"Ha! Well, no trouble. Easier to have the machine do it than work it out by hand. Once you get good on the computer, that is." He bit his up and looked out the window. "Which isn't to say I think I'm some kind of great programmer. I mean, I am, but that's not how I think of myself."

"You aren't a hacker," she suggested.

"Yeah! Exactly." Everyone knew the term "hacker," so why hadn't he just said it?

She looked at him carefully. "Didn't we meet somewhere before? I could swear I recognize you from somewhere." He had been hoping that she had forgotten, or that she would not recognize him through his glacier glasses. That first day, yes, he had read her computer card for her– a hacker's idea of a perfect introduction!

"Yeah. Remember Mrs. Santucci? That first day?" She nodded her head with a little smile; she remembered it all, for better or worse. He watched her intensely, trying to judge her reaction.

"Yes," she said, "sure. I guess I never properly thanked you for that, so– thank you." She held out her hand. Casimir stared at it, then put out his hand and shook it. He gripped her firmly– a habit from his business, where a crushing handshake was a sign of trustworthiness. To her he had probably felt like an orangutan trying to dislocate her shoulder. Besides which, some apple-blackberry jam had dripped out onto the first joint of his right index finger some minutes ago, and he had thoughtlessly sucked on it.

She was awfully nice. That was a dumb word, "nice," but he couldn't come up with anything better. She was bright, friendly and understanding, and kind to him, which was good of her considering his starved fanatical appearance and general fabulous ugliness. He hoped that this conversation would soon end and that they would come out of it with a wonderful relationship. Ha.

No one said anything; she was just watching him. Obviously she was! It was his turn to say something! How long had he been sitting there staring into the navy-blue maw of his mini-pie? "What's your major?" they said simultaneously. She laughed immediately, and belatedly he laughed also, though his laugh was sort of a gasp and sob that made him sound as if he were undergoing explosive decompression. Still, it relaxed him slightly. "Oh," she added, "I'm sorry. I forgot Neutrino was for physics majors."

"Don't be sorry." She was sorry?

"I'm an English major."

"Oh." Casimir reddened. "I guess you probably noticed that English is not my strong point."

"Oh, I disagree. When you were speaking last night, once you got rolling you did very well. Same goes for today, when you were describing your curves. A lot of the better scientists have an excellent command of language. Clear thought leads to clear speech."

Casimir's pulse went up to about twice the norm and he felt warmth in the lower regions. He gazed into the depths of his half-drained beer, not knowing what to say for fear of being ungrammatical. "I've only been here a few weeks, but I've heard that S. S. Krupp is quite the speaker. Is that so?"

Sarah smiled and rolled her eyes. At first Casimir had considered her just a typically nice-looking young woman, but at this instant it became obvious that he had been wrong; in fact she was spellbindingly lovely. He tried not to stare, and shoved the last three bites of pie into his mouth. As he chewed he tried to track what she was saying so that he wouldn't lose the thread of the conversation and end up looking like an absent-minded hacker with no ability to relate to anyone who wasn't destined to become a machine-language expert.

"He is quite a speaker," she said. "If you're ever on the opposite side of a question from S. S. Krupp, you can be sure he'll bring you around sooner or later. He can give you an excellent reason for everything he does that goes right back to his basic philosophy. It's awesome, I think."

At last he was done stuffing junk food into his unshaven face. "But when he out-argues you– is that a word?"

"Well let it slip by."

"When he does that, do you really agree, or do you think he's just outclassed you?"

"I've thought about that quite a bit. I don't know." She sat back pensively, was stabbed by her chair, and sat back up. "What am I saying? I'm an English major!" Casimir chuckled, not quite following this. "If he can justify it through a fair argument, and no one else can poke any holes in it, I can't very well disagree, can I? I mean, you have to have some kind of anchors for your beliefs, and if you don't trust clear, correct language, how do you know what to believe?"

'What about intuition?" asked Casimir, surprising himself. "You know the great discoveries of physics weren't made through argument. They were made in flashes of intuition, and the explanations and proofs thought up afterward."

"Okay." She drained her coffee and thought about it. "But those scientists still had to come up with verbal proofs to convince themselves that the discoveries were real."

So far, Casimir thought, she seemed more interested than peeved, so he continued to disagree. "Well, scientists don't need language to tell them what's real. Mathematics is the ultimate reality. That's all the anchor we need."

"That's interesting, but you can't use math to solve political problems– it's not useful in the real world."

"Neither is language. You have to use intuition. You have to use the right side of your brain."

She looked again at the clock. "I have to go now and get ready for Krupp." Now she was looking at him– appraisingly, he thought. She was going to leave! He desperately wanted to ask her out. But too many women had burst out laughing, and he couldn't take that. Yet there she sat, propped up on her elbows– was she waiting for him to ask? Impossible.

"Uh," he said, but at the same time she said, "Let's get together some other time. Would you like that?"

"Yeah."

"Fine!" With a little negotiation, they arranged to meet in the Megapub on Friday night.

"I can't believe you're free Friday night!" he blurted, and she looked at him oddly. She stood up and held out her hand again. Casimir scrambled up and shook it gently.

"See you later," she said, and left. Casimir remained standing, watched her all the way across the shiny floor of the Megapub, then telescoped into his seat and nearly blacked out.

She did not have to wait long amid the marble-and-mahogany splendor of Septimius Severus Krupp's anteroom. She would have been happy to wait there for days, especially if she could have brought some favorite music and maybe Hyacinth, taken off her shoes, lounged on the sofa and stared out the window over the lush row of healthy plants. The administrative bloc of the Plex was an anomaly, like a Victorian mansion airlifted from London and dropped whole into a niche beneath C Tower. Here was none of the spare geometry of the rest of the Plex, none of the anonymous monochromatic walls and bald rectangles and squares that seemed to drive the occupants bonkers. No plastic showed; the floors were wooden, the windows opened, the walls were paneled and the honest wood and intricate parquet floors gave the place something of nature's warmth and diversity. In the past month Sarah had seen almost no wood– even the pencils in the stores here were of blond plastic– and she stared dumbly at the paneling everywhere she went, as though the detailed grain was there for a reason and bore careful examination. All of this was an attempt to invest American Megaversity with the aged respectability of a real university; but she felt at home here.

"President Krupp will see you now," said the wonderful, witty, kind, civilized old secretary, and the big panel doors swung open and there was S. S. Krupp. "Good afternoon, Sarah, I'm sorry you had to wait," he said. "Please come in."

Three of the walls of Krupp's office were covered up to about nine feet high with bookshelves, and the fourth was all French windows. Above the bookshelves hung portraits of the founders and past presidents of American Megaversity. The founding fathers stared sullenly at Sarah through the gloom of a century and a half's accumulated tobacco smoke, and as she followed the row of dignitaries around to the other end of the room, their faces shone out brighter and brighter from the tar and nicotine of antiquity until she got to the last spaces remaining, where Tony Commodi, Pertinax Rushforth and Julian Didius III gleamed awkwardly in modern Suits and designer eyeglasses.

The glowing red-orange wooden floor was covered by three Persian rugs, and the ceiling was decorated with three concentric rings of elaborate plasterwork surrounding a great domed skylight. A large, carefully polished chandelier hung on a heavy chain from the center of the skylight. Sarah knew that the delicate leaded-glass skylight was protected from above by a squat geodesic dome covered with heavy steel grids and shatterproof Fiberglass panels, designed to keep everything out of S. S. Krupp's office except for the sunlight. Nothing short of a B-52 in a power dive could penetrate that grand silence, though a ring of shattered furniture and other shrapnel piled about the dome outside attested to the efforts of C Tower students to prove otherwise.

Krupp led her to a long low table under the windows, and they sat in old leather chairs and spread their papers out in the grey north light. Between them Krupp's ever-ready tape recorder was spinning away silently. Shortly the secretary came in with a silver tea service, and Krupp poured tea and offered Sarah tiny, cleverly made munchies on white linen napkins embroidered with the American Megaversity coat of arms.

Krupp was a sturdy man, his handsome cowboy face somewhat paled and softened by the East. "I understand," he said, "that you had some trouble with those playground communists last night." "Oh, they were the same as ever. No unusual problems." "Yes." Krupp sounded slightly impatient at her nonstatement. "I was pleased to see you disemboweled their budget."

"Oh? What if we'd stayed with the old one?"

"I'd have flushed it." He grinned brightly.

"What about this budget? Is it acceptable?"

"Oh, it's not bad. It's got some warts."

"Well, I want to point out at the beginning that it's easy for you to make minor adjustments in the budget until the warts are gone. It's much more difficult for the Student Government to handle. We almost had to call in the riot police to get this through, and any budget you have approved will be much harder."

"You're perfectly free to point that out, Sarah, and I don't disagree, doesn't make much difference."

"Well," said Sarah carefully, "the authority is obviously yours. I'm sure you can take whatever position you want and back it up very eloquently. But I hope you'll take into account certain practicalities." Knowing instantly she had made a mistake, she popped a munchie into her mouth and stared out the window, waiting.

Krupp snorted quietly and sipped tea, then sat back in his chair and regarded Sarah with dubious amusement. "Sarah, I didn't expect you, of all people, to try that one on me. Why is it that everyone finds eloquence so inauspicious? It's as though anyone who argues clearly can't be trusted– that's the opposite of what reasonable people ought to think. That attitude is common even among faculty here, and I'm just at a loss to understand. I can't talk like a mongoloid pig-sticker on a three-day drunk just so I'll sound like one of the boys. God knows I can't support any position, only the right position. If it's not right, the words won't make it so. That's the value of clear language."

This was the problem with Krupp. He assumed that everyone always said exactly what they thought. While this was true of him, it was rarely so with others. "Okay, sorry," said Sarah. "I agree. I just didn't make my point too well. I'm just hoping you'll take into account the practical aspects of the problem, such as how everyone's going to react. Some people say this is a blind spot of yours." This was a moderately daring thing for Sarah to say, but if she tried to mush around politely with Krupp, he would cut her to pieces.

"Sarah, it's obvious that people's reactions have to be accounted for. That's just horse sense. It's just that basic principles are far more important than a temporary political squabble in Student Government. To you, all those mono-maniacs and zombies seem more important than they are, and that's why we can't give you any financial authority. From my point of view I can see a much more complete picture of what is and isn't important, and one thing that isn't is a shouting match in that parody of a democratic institution that we call a government because we are all so idealistic in the university. What's important is principles."

Suddenly Sarah felt depressed; she sat limply back in her chair. For a while nothing was said– Krupp was surprisingly sensitive to her mood.

"Student Government is just a sham, isn't it?" she asked, surprised by her own bitterness.

"What do you mean by that?"

"It has nothing to do with the real world. We don't make any real decisions. It's just a bunch of imaginary responsibilities to argue about and put down on our rиsumиs."

Krupp thought it over. "It's kind of like a dude ranch. If you lose your dogies, there's someone there to round them up for you. But on the other hand, if you stand behind your horse you can still get wet. My Lord, Sarah, everything is real. There's no difference between the 'real' world and this one. The experience you're gaining is real. But it's true that the importance ascribed to Student Government is mostly imaginary."

"So what's the point?"

"The point is that we're here to go over this budget, and when I point out the warts, you tell me why they aren't warts. If you can justify them, you'll have a real effect on the budget." Krupp spread the pages of the budget out on the table, and Sarah saw alarming masses of red ink scrawled across them She felt like whipping out Casimir s graphs but she didn't have them with her and couldn't risk Krupp's seeing what she had seen.

"Now one item which caught my eye," said Krupp half an hour later, after Sarah had lost five arguments and won one, "was this money for this little group, Neutrino. I see they're wanting to build themselves a mass driver."

"Yeah? What's wrong with that?"

"Well," said Krupp patiently, "I didn't say there's anything wrong– just hold on, let's not get adverserial yet. You see, we don't often use activities funds to back research projects. Generally these people apply for a grant through the usual channels. You see, first estimates of the cost of something like this are often wildly low, especially when made by young fellows who aren't quite on top of things yet. This thing is certain to come in over budget, so we'll either end up with a useless, half-completed heap of junk or a Neutrino floundering around in red ink. It seems kind of hasty and ill-considered to me, so I'm just recommending that we strike this item from the budget, have the folks who want to do this project do a complete, faculty-supervised study, then try to get themselves a grant."

Sarah sighed and stared at a small ornament on the teapot's handle, thinking it over.

"Don't tell me," said Krupp. "It's my blind spot again, right?" But he sounded humorous rather than sarcastic.

"There are several good reasons why you should pass this item. The main factor is the man who is heading the project. I know him, and he's quite experienced with this sort of thing in the real world. I know you don't like that term, President Krupp, but it's true. He's brilliant, knows a lot of practical electronics– he had his own business– and he's deeply committed to the success of this project."

"That's a good start. But I'm reluctant to see funds given to small organizations with these charismatic, highly motivated leaders who have pet projects, because that amounts to just a personal gift to the leader. Broad interest in the funded activity is important."

"This is not a personal vendetta. The plans were provided for the most part by Professor Sharon. The organization is already putting together some of the electronics with their own money."

"Professor Sharon. What an abominable thing that was." Krupp stared into the light for a long time. "That was a load of rock salt in the butt. If my damn Residence Life Relations staff wasn't tenured and unionized I'd fire 'em, find the scum who did that and boot 'em onto the Turnpike. However. We should resist the temptation to do something we wouldn't otherwise do just because a peripherally involved figure has suffered. We all revere Professor Sharon, but this project would not erase his tragedy."

"Well, I can only go on my gut feelings," said Sarah, "but I don't think what you've said applies. I'm pretty confident about this project."

Krupp looked impressed. "If that's the case, Sarah, then I should meet this fellow and give him a fair hearing. Maybe I'll have the same gut reaction as you do."

"Should I have him contact you?" This was a reprieve, she thought; but if Casimir had been so obviously nervous in front of her, what would he do under rhetorical implosion from Krupp? It was only reasonable, though.

"Fine," said Krupp, and handed her his card.

Their other differences of opinion were hardly worth arguing over. Halving the funding for the Basque Eroticism Study Cluster was not going to make political waves. The meeting came to a civil and reasonable end. Krupp showed her out, and she smiled at the old secretary and maneuvered the scarlet carpets of the administration bloc and dawdled by each painting, finally exiting into a broad shiny electric-blue cinderblock corridor. By the time she made it back to her room she had adjusted to the Plex again, and taught herself to see and hear as little of it as possible.

Ephraim Klein and some of his friends occasionally gathered in his room to smoke cheap cigars, if only because they detested them slightly less than John Wesley Fenrick did. Fenrick set the Go Big Red Fan up in the vent window and blew chill November air across the room, forcing perhaps eighty percent of the fumes out the door. A defect of the Rules was that they made no provision for exchange of air pollution, unfortunately for Fenrick, who despite his tradition of chemically induced states of awareness was fanatically clean.

Caught in a random eddy blown up by the Fan, a cigar resting in a stolen Burger King tinfoil ashtray fell off one evening and rolled several inches, crossing the boundary line into Fenrick's side of the room. It burned there for a minute or two before its owner, a friend of Klein's, made bold to reach across and retrieve it. The result was a brief brown streak on Fenrick's linoleum. Fenrick did not notice it immediately, but after he did, he grew more enraged every day. Klein was obligated to clean up "that mess," in his view. Klein's opinion was that anything on Fenrick's side of the room was Fenrick's problem; Klein was not paying fifteen thousand dollars a year and studying philosophy so he could be a floor-scrubber for a rude asshole geek like John Wesley Fenrick. He pointed to a clause in the Rules which tentatively bore him out. They screamed across the boundary line on this issue for nearly a week. Then, one day, I heard Ephraim yelling through their open door.

"Jesus! What the hell are you– Ha! I don't believe this shit!" He stuck his head outside and yelled, "Hey, everybody, come look at what this dumb fucker's doing!"

I looked.

For reasons I do not care to think about, John Wesley Fenrick kept a milkbottle full of dirt. When I looked in, he had pulled its lid off and was scattering red Okie loam over the boundary line and all over Ephraim's side of the room. Ephraim appeared to be more amused than angry, though he was very angry, and insisted that as many people as possible come and witness. Fenrick sat down calmly to watch television, occasionally smiling a small, solitary smile.

Again the question of my responsibility comes up. But how could I know it was an event of great significance? I had also seen lovers' quarrels in the Cafeteria; why should I have known this was much more important? I had no authority to order these people around. Moreover, I had no desire to. I had done as much as I could. I had shown them how to be reasonable, and if they could not get the hang of it, it was not my problem.

The next time I spectated, Ephraim Klein was alone, studying on his bed with Gregorian chants filling the room. I had come to see why he had borrowed my broom. He had used it to make a welcome mat for his roomie. Right in front of the Go Big Red Fan– the movable portion of the wall that served as a gate– he had swept all the dirt into an even rectangle about one by two feet and half an inch thick. In the dirt he had inscribed with his finger:

GET A BUTT

FUCK JOHNNIE-WONNIE

When Fenrick got home I followed him discreetly to his room, to keep an eye on things. When I got to their doorway he was staring inscrutably at the welcome mat. He bent and opened the fan-gate, stepped through without disturbing the dirt and closed it. He turned, and looked for a while at the smirking Ephraim Klein. Then, with quiet dignity, John Wesley Fenrick reached down and set the Fan to HI, creating a small simulation of Oklahoma in the 1930's on the other side of the room.

Once I was satisfied that there would be no violence, I left and abandoned them to each other.

Septimius Severus Krupp stood behind a cheap plywood lectern in Lecture Hall 13 and spoke on Kant's Ethics. The fifty people in the audience listened or did not, depending on whether they (like Sarah and Casimir and Ephraim and I) had come to hear the lecture, or (like Yllas Freedperson) to see the Stalinist Underground Battalion Operative throw the banana-cream pie into S. S. Krupp's face.

I had come because I was fascinated by Krupp, and because opportunities to hear him speak were rare. Sarah, I think, had come for like reasons. Ephraim was a philosophy major, and Casimir came because this was the type of thing that you were supposed to do in a university. As for the SUBbies, they were getting edgy. What the fuck was wrong with the plan, man? they seemed to say, looking back and forth at one another sincerely and shaking their heads. The first phases had gone well. Operative 1 had gone out to the stageleft doorway, twenty feet to Krupp's side, opened the door and propped it, then made a show of smoking a cigarette and blowing smoke out the door. It was obvious that she had severe reality problems by the way she posed there, putting on a casual air so weirdly melodramatic that everyone could see she must be a guerilla mime, a psycho or simply luded out of her big spherical frizzy-haired bandanna-wrapped head. It was also odd that she would show so much concern for others' lungs, considering that her friends were making loud, sarcastic noises and distracting gestures, but unfortunately S. S. Krupp's aides were too straight to tell the difference between a loony and a loony with a plan, and so they suspected nothing when she returned to her seat and forgot to shut the door again.

Ten minutes later, right on time, Operative 2 had arrived late, entering via the stage-right doorway and leaving it, of course, propped open. He moved furtively, like a six-foot mouse with thallium phenoxide poisoning, jerking his head around as if to look for right-wing death squads and CIA snipers.

But Operative 3 did not appear with the banana-cream pie. Where was he? Everyone knew about Krupp's CIA connections, and it was quite possible– don't laugh, the CIA is everywhere, look at Iran– that he might have been intercepted by fascist goons and bastinadoed and wired to an old engine block and thrown into a river. Perhaps the death squads were waiting in their rooms now, test-firing their silenced UZIs into cartons of Stalinist pamphlets.

In fact, Operative 3, when making his plans for the evening, had forgotten that once he bought the banana-cream pie at the convenience store it would have to thaw out. There is little political relevance in bouncing a rock-hard disc of frozen custard off S. S. Krupp's face– the splatter is the point– and so for half an hour he had been in a Plex restroom, holding the pie underneath the automatic hand dryer as unobtrusively as possible. Whenever he heard approaching steps, he stopped and dropped the pie into his knapsack, and held his hands nonchalantly under the hot air; hence he had succeeded only in liquefying the top two millimeters of the pie and ruffling the ring of whipped cream. He then repaired to a spot not far from the lecture hall where he rested the pie on a hot water pipe. There should be plenty of time left in the lecture, though it was hard to judge these things when stoned: Krupp's voice droned on and on, incomprehensible as all that logic and philosophy.

Operative 3 snapped to attention. How long had he been spacing off? Only one way to tell. He stuck his finger in the pie: still kind of stiff, but not stiff enough to break a nose and wet enough to explode mediagenically.

The time was now. Operative 3 pulled on his ski mask, stole to the open stage-left door, and waited for the right moment. Shit! One of Krupp's CIA men had seen him! One of the Frosted Mini-Wheat types with the three-piece suits who ran Krupp's tape-recorder during speeches. No time to wait; the stun grenade might be lobbed at any moment.

To us he looked like a strange dexed-out bird, not running across the front of the hall so much as vibrating across at low frequency. He was tall, skinny, pale and wore an old Tshirt; he never seemed to plant any part of his nervous body firmly on the ground. He entered, bouncing off a doorjamb and losing his balance. He then caromed off a seat near a CIA man, who had not yet reacted, hopped three times to regain balance and, gaining some direction, scrambled toward S. S. Krupp, chased all the way by four bats driven into a frenzy by the aroma of the banana-cream pie.

"This means that the current vulgar usage of the word 'autonomous' to mean independent, i.e., free of external influence, sovereign, is not entirely correct," said Krupp, who glanced up from his notes to see what everybody was gasping at. "To be autonomous, as we can readily see by examining the Greek roots of the word– autos meaning self and nomos meaning law"– here he paused for a moment and ducked. The pie flew sideways over his head and exploded on the blackboard behind him. He straightened back up– "is to be self-ruling, to exercise a respect for the Law"– Operative 3 tottered out the door as the SUB groaned– "which in this case means not the law of a society or political system but rather the Law imposed by a rational man on his own actions." in the hallway there was scuffling, and Krupp paused. With much grunting and swearing, Operative 3, sans ski mask, was dragged back into the room by three clean-cut students in pastel sweaters, accompanied by an older, smiling man in a plaid flannel shirt.

"Here's your man, President Krupp, sir," said an earnest young Anglo-Saxon, brushing a strand of hair from his brow with his free hand. "We've placed this Communist under citizen's arrest. Shall we contact the authorities on your behalf?" Their mentor beamed even more broadly at this suggestion, his horsey, protruding bicuspids glaring like great white grain elevators on the Dakota plain.

Krupp regarded them warily, walking around to the other side of the lectern as though it were a shield. Then he turned to the audience. "Excuse me, please. Guess I'm the highest authority here, so just let me clear this up." He looked back at the group by the doorway, who watched respectfully, except for Operative 3, who shouted from his headlock: "See, man? This is what happens when you try to change the System!" Several SUBbies began to come to his aid, but were halted by Krupp's aides.

"Who the hell are you?" said Krupp. "Are you from that squalid North Dakotan cult thing?"

They were shocked, even Operative 3, and stared uncomprehendingly. Deep concern showed in the lined, earnest face of the man in the plaid flannel. Finally he stepped forward. "Yessirree. We are indeed followers of the Temple of Unlimited Godhead, and proud of it too. With all due respect, just what do you mean by 'squalid'?"

"It's like a dead dog in the sitting room, son. Look, why don't you all just let that boy go? That's right."

Regretfully, they released him. Operative 3 stood up, shivering violently. He could not exactly thank Krupp. After hopping from foot to foot he spun and continued his flight down the hall as though nothing had happened.

"Look," Krupp continued. "We've got a security force here. We've got organized religions that have been doing just fine for millennia. Now what we don't need is a brainwashing franchise, or any of your Kool-Aid– stoned outlaw Mormon Jesuits. I know times are hard in North Dakota but they're hard everywhere and it doesn't call for new religions. Of course, you have some very fine points on the subject of Communism. Now, this does not mean we will in any way fail to extend you full religious and political freedoms as with the old-fashioned nonprofit religions."

The SUB hooted at Krupp's wicked intolerance for religious diversity while the rest of the audience applauded. The TUGgies were galvanized, and spoke up for their renegade sect as eloquently as they knew how.

"But that man was a Communist! We found his card."

"Look at it this way. If TUG brainwashes people, how do you explain the great diversity of our membership, which comes from towns and farms of all sizes all over the Dakotas and Saskatchewan?"

"TUG is fully consistent with Judeo-Christo-Mohammedan-Bahaism."

Communism is the greatest threat in the world today." "The goals of Messiah Jorgenson Five are fully consistent with the aims of American higher education."

"Our church is noncoercive. We believe of our own free, uh, pamphlet.. . explains our ideas in layman's language." "Visit North Dakota this summer for fun in the sun. Temple Camp."

"Who is the brainwasher, our church, which teaches that we may all be Messiah/Buddhas together, or today's media society with its constant emphasis on materialism?"

"If you'll accept this free book it will reveal truths you may never have thought about before."

"I couldn't help noticing that you were looking a little down and out, kinda lonely. You know, sometimes it helps to talk to a stranger."

"Do you need a free dinner?"

Krupp watched skeptically. The older man was silent, but finally touched each student lightly on the shoulder, silencing one and all. They left, smiling.

Looking disgusted, Krupp returned to the microphone. "Where was I, talking about autonomy?"

He surveyed his notes and concluded his lecture in another twenty minutes. He paused then to light his cigar, which he had been fingering, twiddling, stroking and sniffing exquisitely for several minutes, and was answered by exaggerated coughing from the SUB section. "I'm free to answer some questions," he announced, surveying the room and squinting into his cigar smoke like a cowboy into the setting sun.

Nearly everyone in the SUB raised his/her hand, but Yllas Freedperson, Operatives 1 and 2 and two others arose and made their loud way up to the back of the hall for an emergency conference. They were deeply concerned; they stopped short of being openly suspicious, a deeply fascist trait, but it occurred to them that what had just happened might strongly suggest the presence of a TUG deep-cover mole in the SUB!

Meanwhile, question time went on down below. As was his custom, Krupp called on two people with serious questions before resorting to the SUB. Eventually he did so, looking carefully through that section and stabbing his finger at its middle.

By SUB custom, any call for a question was communal property and was distributed by consensus to a member of the group. This time, Dexter Fresser, Sarah's hometown ex-beau, number 2 person in the SUB and its chief political theorist, got the nod. Shaking his head, he pushed himself up in his seat until he could see Krupp's face hovering malevolently above the dome of the next person's bandanna. He took a deep breath, preparing for intellectual combat, and began.

"You were talking about autonomy. Well, then you were talking about Greek words of roots. I want to talk about Greek too because we have our roots in Greece, just like, you know, our words do– that is, most of us do, our culture does, even if our ethnicity doesn't. But Rome was much, much more powerful than Greece, and that was after most of the history of the human race, which we don't know anything about. And you know in Greece they had gayness all over the place. I'm saying that nice and loud even though you hate it, but even though. uh, you know, fascist? But you can't keep me from saying it. Did you ever think about the concentration camps? How all those people were killed by fascists? And also in Haiti. which we annexed in 1904. And did you ever 1 think about the socialist revolution in France that was crushed by D-Day because the socialists were fighting off the Nazis single-handedly. Where's the good in that? Bela Lugosi was ugly, but he had a great mind. I mean, some of the greatest works of art were done by Satan-worshipers like Shakespeare and Michelangelo! And the next time your car throws a rod on I-90 between Presho and Kennebec because you lost your dipstick you should think, even if it is a hundred and ten in the shade forty-four Celsius and there are red winged blackbirds coming at you like Bell AH-64s or something. Put the goddamn zucchini in later next time and it won't get so mushy! I know this is strong and direct and undiplomatical, but this is real life and I can't be like you and phrase it like blue tennis-shoe laces hanging from the rear-view mirror. See?"

Here he stopped. Krupp had listened patiently, occasionally looking away to restack his notes or puff on his cigar. "No," he said. "Do you have a question. son?"

Emotionally wounded, Dex Fresser shook his head back and forth and gestured around it as though tearing off a heavy layer of tar. While his companions supported him, another SUBbie rose to take his place. She was of average height, with terribly pale skin and a safety pin through her septum. She rose like a zeppelin on power takeoff and began to read in a singsong voice from a page covered with arithmetic.

"Mister Krupp, sir. Last year. According, to the Monoplex Monitor, you, I mean the Megaversity Corporation ruling clique, spent ten thousand dollars on legal fees for union-busting firms. Now. There are forty thousand students at. American Megaversity. This means that on the average, you spent four thousand million dollars on legal fees for union-busting alone! How do you justify that, when in this very city people have to pay for their own abortions?"

Krupp simply stared in her direction and took three long slow puffs on his cigar without saying anything. Then he turned to the blackboard. "This weather's not getting any better," he said, quickly drawing a rough outline of the United States. "It's this low pressure center up here. See, the air coming into it turns around counterclockwise because of the Coriolis effect. That makes it pump cold air from Canada into our area. And we can't do squat about it. It's a hell of a thing." He turned back to the audience. "Next question!"

The SUB wanted to erupt at this, but they were completely nonplussed and hardly said anything. "I've taken too many questions from the kill-babies-not-seals crowd," Krupp announced. He called on Ephraim Klein, who had been waving his hand violently. "President Krupp, I think the question of adherence to an inner Law is just a semantic smokescreen around the real issue, which is neurological. Our brains have two hemispheres with different functions. The left one handles the day-to-day thinking, conventional logical thought, while the right one handles synthesis of incoming information and subconsciously processes it to form conclusions about what the basic decisions should be– it converts experience into subconscious awareness of basic patterns and cause-and-effect relationships and gives us general direction and a sense of conscience. So this stuff about autonomy is nothing more than an effort by neurologically ignorant metaphysicists to develop, by groping around in the dark, an explanation for behavior patterns rooted in the structure of the brain."

Krupp answered immediately. "So you mean to say that the right hemisphere is the source of what I call the inner Law, and that rather than being a Law per se it is merely a set of inclinations rooted in past experience which tells the left hemisphere what it should do."

"That's right– in advanced, conscious people. In primitive unconscious bicameral people, it would verbally speak to the left hemisphere, coming as a voice from nowhere in times of decision. The left hemisphere would be unable to do otherwise. There would be no decision at all– so you would have perfect adherence to the Law of the right hemisphere voice, absolute autonomy, though the voice would be attributed to gods or angels."

Krupp nodded all the way through this, squinting at Klein. "You're one of those, eh?" he asked. "I've never been convinced by Jaynes' theory myself, though he has some interesting points about metaphors. I don't think an ignorant carpenter like Jesus had all that flawless theology pumped into the left half of his brain by stray neural currents." He thought about it for a moment. "Though it would be a lot quieter around here if everyone were carrying his stereo around in his skull."

"Jesus," said Ephraim Klein, "you don't believe in God, do you? You?"

"Well, I don't want to spend too much time on this freshman material, uh– what's your name? Ezekiel? Ephraim. But you ought to grapple sometime with the fact that this materialistic monism of yours is self-refuting and thus totally bankrupt. I guess it's attractive to someone who's just discovered he's an intellectual– sure was to me thirty years ago– but sometime you've got to stop boxing yourself in with this intellectual hubris."

Klein nearly rocketed from his chair and for a moment I said nothing. He was bolt upright, supporting his weight on i one fist thrust down between his thighs into the seat, chewing deeply on his lower lip and staring, to use a Krupp ~ phrase, "like a coon on the runway." "Non sequitur! Ad hominem!" he cried.

"I know, I know. Tell you what. Stick around and I'll listen to your Latin afterward, we're losing our audience." Krupp began looking for a new questioner. From the back of the hall came the sound of a fold-down seat bounding back up into position, and we turned to make out the ragged figure of Bert Nix.

"Krupp cuts a fart! The sphinxter cannot hold!" he bellowed hoarsely, and sat back down again Krupp mainly ignored this, as his aides strode up the aisle to show Mr. Nix where the exit was and turned his attention to the next questioner, a tall redheaded SUBbie who accused Krupp of accepting bribes to let wealthy idiots into the law school. Red added, "I keep asking you this question, Septimius, and you've never answered it yet. When are you going to pay some attention to my question?"

Krupp looked disgusted and puffed rapidly, staring at him coldly. Bert Nix paused in the doorway to shout: "My journey is o'er rocks & Mountains, not in pleasant vales; I must not sleep nor rest because of madness & dismay."

"Yeah," said Krupp, "and I give you the same answer every time, too. I didn't do that. There's no evidence I did. What more can I say? I genuinely want to satisfy you."

"You just keep slinging the same bullshit!" shouted the SUBbie, and slammed back down into his seat.

Casimir Radon listened to these exchanges with consuming interest. This was what he had dreamed of finding at college: small lectures on pure ideas from the president of the university, with discussion afterward. That the SUBbies had disrupted it with a pie-throwing made him sick; he had stared at them through a haze of anger for the last part of the meeting. Had he been sitting by the side door he could have tripped that bastard. Which would have been good, because Sarah Jane Johnson was sitting there three rows in front of him, totally unaware of his existence as usual.

Sarah's entrance, several minutes before the start of the lecture, had thrown Casimir into a titanic intellectual struggle. He now had to decide whether or not to say "hi" to her. After all, they had had a date, if you could call stammering in the Megapub for two hours a date. Later he had realized how dull it must have been for her, and was profoundly mortified. Now Sarah was sitting just twenty feet away, and he hated to disrupt her thoughts by just crashing in uninvited; better for her not to know he was there. But in case she happened to notice him, and wondered why he hadn't said "hi," he made up a story: he had come in late through the back doors.

He also wanted to ask Krupp a question, a dazzling and perceptive question that would take fifteen minutes to ask, but he couldn't think of one. This was regrettable, because Krupp was a man he wanted to know, and he needed to impress him before making his sales pitch for the mass driver.

At the same time, he was working on a grandiose plan for gathering damaging information on the university, but this seemed stupid; seen from this lecture hall, American Megaversity looked pretty much the way it had in the recruiting literature. He would continue with Project Spike until it gave him satisfaction. Whether or not he released the information depended on what happened at the Big U between now and then.

Sarah's voice sounded in one ear. "Casimir. Earth to Casimir. Come in, Casimir Radon." Shocked and suddenly breathless, he sat up, looking astonished.

"Oh," he said casually. "Sarah. Hi. How're you doing?" Fine," she answered, "didn't you see me?"

Eventually they went into the hallway, where S. S. Krupp was down to the last inch of his cigar and having a complicated discussion with Ephraim Klein. His aides stood to the sides brushing hairs off their suits, various alien-looking philosophy majors listened intently and I leaned against a nearby wall watching it all, "Well, why didn't you say so?" Krupp was saying. "You're a Jaynesian and a materialistic monist. In which case you've got no reason to believe anything you think, because anything you think is just a predetermined neural event which can't be considered true or logical. Self-refuting, son. Think about it."

"But now you've gotten off on a totally different argument!" cried Klein. "Even if we presume dualism, you've got to admit that intellectual processes reflect neural events in some way." "Well, sure."

"Right! And since the bicameral mind theory explains human behavior so well, there's no reason, even if you are a dualist, to reject it."

"In some cases, okay," said Krupp, "but that doesn't support your original proposition, which is that Kant was just trying to rationalize brain events through some kind of semantic necromancy."

"Yes it does!"

"Hell no it doesn't."

"Yes it does!"

"No it doesn't. Sarah!" said Krupp warmly. He shook her hand, and the philosophy majors, seeing that the intelligent part of the conversation was done, vaporized. "Glad you could come tonight."

"Hello, President Krupp. I wish you'd do this more often."

"Wait a minute," yelled Klein, "I just figured out how to reconcile Western religion and the bicameral mind."

"Well, take some notes quick, son, there's other people here, well get to it. Who's your date, Sarah?"

"This is Casimir Radon," said Sarah proudly, as Casimir reflexively shoved out his right hand.

"Well! That's fine," said Krupp. "That's two conversations I have to finish now. If we bring Bud here along with us to keep things from getting out of hand we ought to be safe."

"Look out. I'm not the diplomat you're hoping I am," I mumbled, not knowing what I was expected to say.

"What say we go down to the Faculty Pub and have some brews? I'm buying."

Our party got quite a few stares in the Faculty Pub. The three students were not even supposed to be in the place, but the bouncer wasn't very keen on asking Mr. Krupp's guests to show their IDs. This place bore the same relation to the Megapub as Canterbury Cathedral to a parking ramp. The walls were covered with wood that looked five inches thick, the floor was bottomless carpet and the tables were spotless slabs of rich solid wood. Enough armaments were nailed to the walls to defend a small medieval castle, and ancient portraits of the fat and pompous were interspersed with infinitely detailed coats of arms. The President ordered a pitcher of Guinness and chose a booth near the corner.

Ephraim had been talking the entire way. "So if you were the religious type, you know, you could say that the right side of the brain is the 'spiritual' side, the part that comes into contact with spiritual influences or God or whatever– it has a dimension that protrudes into the spiritual plane, if you want to look at it that way– while the left half is monistic and nonspiritual and mechanical. We conscious unicamerals accept the spiritual information coming in from the right side mixed in subtly with the natural inputs. But a bicameral person would receive that information in the form of a voice from nowhere which spoke with great authority. Now, that doesn't contradict the biblical accounts of the prophets– it merely gives us a new basis for their interpretation by suggesting that their communication with the Deity was done subconsciously by a particular hemisphere of the brain."

Krupp thought that was very good. Sarah and Casimir listened politely. Eventually, though, the conversation worked its way around to the subject of the mass driver.

"Tell me exactly why this university should fund your project there, Casimir," said Krupp, and watched expectantly.

"Well, it's a good idea."

"Why?"

"Because its relevant and we the people who do it will learn stuff from it."

"Like what?"

"Oh, electronics building things practical stuff."

"Can't they already learn that from doing conventional research under the supervision of the faculty."

"Yeah, I guess they can."

"So that leaves only the rationale that it is relevant, which I don't deny but I don't see why it's more relevant than a faculty research project."

"Well, mass drivers could be very important someday!"

Krupp shook his head. "Sure, I don't deny that. There are all kinds of relevant things which could be very important someday. What I need to be shown is how funding of your project would he consistent with the basic mission of a great institution of higher learning. You see? We're talking basic principles here."

Casimir had removed his glasses in the dim light, and his strangely naked-looking eyes darted uncertainly around the tabletop. "Well"

"Aw, shit, it's obvious!" shouted Ephraim Klein, drawing looks from everyone in the pub. "This university, let's face it, is for average people. The smart people from around here go to the Ivy League, right? So American Megaversity doesn't get many of the bright people the way, say, a Big Ten university would. But there are some very bright people here, for whatever reasons. They get frustrated in this environment because the university is tailored for averagely bright types and there is very little provision for the extra-talented. So in order to fulfill the basic mission of allowing all corners to realize their full potential– to avoid stultifying the best minds here– you have to make allowances for them, recognize their special creativity by giving them more freedom and self-direction than the typical student has. This is your chance to have something you can point to as an example of the opportunities here for people of all levels of ability."

Krupp listened intently through this, lightly tapping the edge of a potato chip on the table. When Klein finally stopped, he nodded for a while.

"Yep. Yeah, I'd say you have an excellent point there, Isaiah. Casimir, looks as though you're going to get your funding." He raised an eyebrow.

Casimir stood up, yelled "Great!" and pumped Krupp's hand. "This is a great investment. When this thing is done it will be the most incredible machine you've ever seen. There's no end to what you can do with a mass driver."

There was a commotion behind Krupp, and suddenly, larger than life, standing on the bench in the next booth down, Bert Nix had risen to his full bedraggled height and was suspending a heavy broadsword (stolen from a suit of armor by the restroom) over Krupp's head. "O fortunate Damocles, thy reign began and ended with the same dinner!"

After Krupp saw who it was he turned back around without response. His two aides staggered off their barstools across the room and charged over to grab the sword from Bert Nix's hand. He had held it by the middle of the blade, which made it seem considerably less threatening, but the aides didn't necessarily see it this way and were not as gentle in showing Mr. Nix out as they could have been. He was docile except for some cheerful obscenities; but as he was dragged past a prominent painting, he pulled away and pointed to it. "Don't you think we have the same nose?" he asked, and soon was out the door.

Krupp got up and brought the conversation to a quick close. After distributing cigars to Ephraim and Casimir and me, he left. Finding ourselves in an exhilarated mood and with what amounted to a free ticket to the Faculty Pub, we stayed long enough to close it down.

Earlier, however, on his fifth trip to the men's room, Casimir stopped to look at the plaque under the portrait to which Bert Nix had pointed. "WILBERFORCE PERTINAX RUSHFORTH-GREATHOUSE, 1799– 1862, BENEFACTOR, GREATHOUSE CHAPEL AND ORGAN." Casimir tried to focus on the face. As a matter of fact, the Roman nose did resemble Bert Nix's; they might be distant relatives. It was queer that a derelict, who couldn't spend that much time in the Faculty Pub, would notice this quickly enough to point it out. But Bert Nix's mind ran along mysterious paths. Casimir retrieved the broadsword from where it had fallen, and laughingly slapped it down on the bar as a deposit for the fourth pitcher of Dark. The bartender regarded Casimir with mild alarm, and Casimir considered, for a moment, carrying a sword all the time, a la Fred Fine. But as he observed to us, why carry a sword when you own a mass driver?

"Casimir?"

"Mmmmm. Huh?"

"You asleep?"

"No."

"You want to talk?"

"Okay."

"Thanks for letting me sleep here."

"No problem. Anytime."

"Does this bother you?"

"You sleeping here? Nah."

"You seemed kind of bothered about something."

"No. It's really fine, Sarah. I don't care."

"If it'd make you feel better, I can go back and sleep in my room. I just didn't feel like a half-hour elevator hassle, and my wing is likely to be noisy."

"I know. All that barf on the floors, rowdy people, sticky beer crud all over the place. I don't blame you. It's perfectly reasonable to stay at someone's place at a time like this."

"I get the impression you have something you're not saying. Do you want to talk about it?"

The pile of sheets and blankets that was Casimir moved around, and he leaned up on one elbow and peered down at her. The light shining in from the opposite tower made his wide eyes just barely visible. She knew something was wrong with him, but she also knew better than to try to imagine what was going on inside Casimir Radon's mind.

"Why should I have something on my mind?"

"Well, I don't see anything unusual about my staying here, but a lot of people would, and you seemed uptight."

"Oh, you're talking about sex? Oh, no. No problem." His voice was tense and hurried.

"So what's bothering you?"

For a while there was just ragged breathing from atop the bed, and then he spoke again. "You're going to think this is stupid, because I know you're a Women's Libber, but it really bothers me that you're on the floor in a sleeping bag while I'm up here in a bed. That bothers me."

Sarah laughed. "Don't worry, Casimir. I'm not going to beat you up for it."

"Good. Let's trade places, then."

"If you insist." Within a few seconds they had traded places and Sarah was up in a warm bed that smelled of mothballs and mildew. They lay there for an hour.

"Sarah?"

"Huh?"

"I want to talk to you."

"What?"

"I lied. I want to sleep with you so bad it's killing me. Oh, Jeez. I love you. A lot."

"Oh, damn. I knew it. I was afraid of this. I'm sorry."

"No, don't be. My fault. I'm really, really sorry."

"Should I leave? Do you want me out?"

"No. I want you to sleep with me," he said, as though this answer was obvious.

"How long have you been thinking about me this way?"

"Since we met the first time."

"Really? Casimir! Why? We didn't even know each other!"

"What does that have to do with it?" He sounded genuinely mystified.

"I think we've got a basic difference in the way we think about sex, Casimir." She had forgotten how they were when it came to this sort of thing.

"What does that mean? Did you ever think about me that way?"

"Not really."

Casimir sucked in his breath and flopped back down.

"Now, look, don't take it that way. Casimir, I hardly know you. We've only had one or two good conversations. Look, Casimir, I only think about sex every one or two days– it's not a big topic with me right now."

"Jeez. Are you okay? Did you have a bad experience?" "Don't put me on the defensive. Casimir, our friendship has been just fine as it is. Why should I fantasize about what a friendship might turn into, when the friendship is fine as is? You've got to live in the real world, Casimir."

"What's wrong with me?"

The poor guy just did not understand at all. There was no way to help him; Sarah went ahead and spoke her lines.

"Nothing's wrong with you. You're fine."

"Then what is the problem?"

"Look. I sleep with people because there's nothing wrong with them. I don't fantasize about relationships that will never exist. We're fine as we are. Sex would just mess it up. We have a good friendship, Casimir. Don't screw it up by thinking unrealistically."

They sat in the dark for a while. Casimir was being open-minded, which was

good, but still had trouble catching on. "It's none of my business, but just

out of curiosity, do you like sex?"

"Definitely. It's a blast with the right person."

"I'm just not the right person, huh?"

"I've already answered that six times." She considered telling him about herself and Dex Fresser in high school. In ways– especially in appearance– Casimir was similar to Dex. The thing with Dex was a perfect example of what happened when a man got completely divorced from reality. But Sarah didn't want the Dex story to get around, and she supposed that Casimir would be horrified by this high school saga of sex and drugs.

"I think I'll do my laundry now, since I'm up," she said.

"I'll walk you home."

A few minutes later they emerged into a hall as bright as the interior of a small sun. The dregs of a party in the Social Lounge examined them as they awaited an elevator, and Sarah was bothered by what they were assuming. Maybe it would boost Casimir's rep among his neighbors.

An elevator opened and fifty gallons of water poured into the lobby. Someone had filled a garbage can with water, tilted it up on one corner just inside the elevator, held it in place as the doors closed, and pulled his hand out at the last minute so that it leaned against the inside of the doors. Not greatly surprised, Sarah and Casimir stepped back to let the water swirl around their feet, then threw the garbage can into the lobby and boarded the elevator.

"That's the nice thing about this time of day," said Casimir. "Easy to get elevators."

As they made their way toward the Castle in the Air, they spoke mostly of Casimir's mass driver. With the new funding and with the assistance of Virgil, it was moving along quite well. Casimir repeatedly acknowledged his debt to Ephraim for having done the talking.

They took an E Tower elevator up to the Castle in the Air. A nine-leaved marijuana frond was scotch-taped over the number 13 on the elevator panel so that it would light up symbolically when that floor was passed. In the corridors of the Castle the Terrorists were still running wild and hurling their custom Big Wheel Frisbees with great violence.

Casimir had never seen Sarah's room. He stood shyly outside as she walked into the darkness. "The light?" he said. She switched on her table lamp.

"Oh." He entered uncertainly, swiveling his bottle-bottom glasses toward the wall. Conscious of being in an illegally painted room, he shut the door, then removed his glasses and let them hang around his neck on their safety cord. Without them, Sarah thought he looked rather old, sensitive, and human. He rubbed his stubble and blinked at the forest with a sort of awed amusement. By now it was very detailed.

"Isotropic."

"You saw what?"

"Isotropic. This forest is isotropic It s the same in all directions. It doesn't tend in any way. A real forest is anisotropic thicker on the bottom thinner on the top. This doesn't grow in any direction it just is."

She sighed. "Whatever you like."

"Why? What's it for?"

"Well– what's your mass driver for?"

"Sanity."

"You've got your mass driver. I've got this."

He looked at her in the same way he had been staring at the forest. "Wow," he said, "I think I get it."

"Don't go overboard on this," she said, "but how would you like to attend something dreadful called Fantasy Island Nite?"

So nervous was Ephraim Klein, so primed for flight or combat, that he barely felt his suitcases in his hands as he carried them toward his room. What awaited him? He had left a week ago for Thanksgiving vacation. He had waited as long as he could– but not long enough to outwait John Wesley Fenrick and three of his ugly punker friends, who leered hungrily at him as he walked out. The question was not whether a prank had been played, but how bad it was going to be. Hyperventilating with anticipation, he stopped before the door. The cracks all the way around its edges had been sealed with heavy grey duct tape. This prank did not rely on surprise. He pressed his ear to the door, but all he could hear was a familiar chunka-chunka-chunk. With great care he peeled back a bit of tape.

Nothing poured out. Standing to the side, he unlocked the door with surgical care. There was a cracking sound as the tape peeled away under his impetus. Finally he kicked it fully open, waited for a moment, then stepped around to look inside.

He could see nothing. He took another step and then, only then, was enveloped in a cloud of rancid cheap cigar smoke that oozed out the doorway like a moribund genie under the propulsion of the Go Big Red Fan.

Incandescently furious, he retreated to the bathroom and wet a T-shirt to put over his face. Thus protected he strode squinting down the foggy hallway into the lifeless room.

The only remaining possessions of John Wesley Fenrick's were the Go Big Red Fan and most of a jumbo roll of foil. He had moved out of the room and then covered his half of the room with the foil, then spread out on it what must have been several hundred generic cigars– it must have taken half an hour just to light them. The cigars had all burned away to ash, which had been whipped into a blizzard by the Go Big Red Fan on its slow creep across the floor to Ephraim's side. The room now looked like Yakima after Mount Saint Helens. The Fan had ground to a halt against a large potted plant of Ephraim's and for the rest of the week had sat there chunk-ing mindlessly.

He checked a record. To his relief, the ash had not penetrated to the grooves. It had penetrated everything else, though, and even the Rules had taken on a brown parchmentlike tinge. Ephraim Klein took little comfort in the fact that his ex-roommate had not broken any of them.

He cranked open the vent window, set the Go Big Red Fan into it, cleared ash from his chair, and sat down to think.

Klein preferred to live a controlled life. He never liked to pull out all the stops until the final chord. But Fenrick had forced him to turn revenge into a major project and Klein did not plan to fail. He began to tidy his room, and to unleash his imagination on John Wesley Fenrick.

"Sarah?"

"Huh?"

"Did I wake you up?"

"No. Hi."

"Let's talk."

"Sure." Sarah rolled over on her stomach and propped ~ herself up on her elbows.

"I hope you're comfortable sleeping down there."

"Listen. Anyplace is more comfortable than my room when a party's going on above it."

"I don't mind if you want to share a bed with me Hyacinth. My sister and I slept together until I was eleven and she was twelve."

"Thanks. But I didn't decide to sleep down here because I don't like you, Sarah."

"Well, that's nice. I guess it's a little small for two." There was a long silence. Hyacinth sat up on her sleeping bag, her crossed legs stretching out her nightgown to make a faint white diamond in the darkness of the room. Then, soundlessly, she got up and climbed into bed with Sarah. Sarah slid back against the wall to make room, and after much giggling, rolling around, rearrangement of covers and careful placement of limbs they managed to find comfortable positions.

"Too hot," said Hyacinth, and got up again. She opened the window and a cold wind blew into the room. She scampered back and dove in next to Sarah.

"Comfy?" said Hyacinth.

"Yeah. Mmm. Very."

"Really?" said Hyacinth skeptically. "More than before? Not just physically. You don't feel awkward, being tangled up with me like this?"

"Not really," said Sarah dreamily. "It's kind of pleasant. It's just, you know, warm, and kind of comforting to have someone else around. I like you, you like me, why should it be awkward?"

"Would it be any different if I told you I was a lesbian?" Sarah came wide awake but did not move. With one eye she gazed into the darkness above the soft white horizon of Hyacinth's shoulder, on which she had laid her head.

"And that I was hoping we could do other nice things to each other? If you feel inspired to, that is." She gently, almost imperceptibly, stroked Sarah's hair. Sarah's heart was pumping rhythmically.

"I wish you'd say something," said Hyacinth. "Are you not sure how you feel, or are you paralyzed with terror?"

Sarah laughed softly and felt herself relaxing. "I'm pretty naive about this kind of thing. I mean, I don't think about it a lot. I sort of thought you might be. Is Lucy?"

"Yes. Nowadays we don't sleep together that much. Sarah, do you want me to sleep on the floor?"

Sarah thought about it but not very seriously. The room was pleasantly cold now and the closeness of her friend was something she had not felt in a very long time. "Of course not. This is great. I haven't slept with anyone in a while– a man, I mean. Sleeping with someone is one of my favorite things. But it's different with men. Not quite as… sweet."

"That's for sure."

"Why don't you stay a while?"

"That'd be nice."

"Do you mind if we don't do anything?" At this they laughed loudly, and that answered the question.

"But we are doing something you know" added Hyacinth later. "Your nose is in my breast. You're stroking my shoulder. I'm afraid that all counts."

"Oh. Gosh. Does that make me a lesbian?"

"Oh, I don't know. I guess you're off to a promising start."

"Hmmm. Doesn't feel like being a lesbian."

Hyacinth squeezed Sarah tight. "Look, honey, don't worry about it. This is just great as it is. I just wanted you to know the opportunity was there. Okay?"

"Okay."

"Want to go to sleep?"

"Take it easy, what's your hurry?"

Last Night was the night of the blue towers. A week before, the towers had glowed uniformly yellow as forty-two thousand students sat beneath their desk lamps and studied for finals. The next night, blue had replaced yellow here and there, as a few lucky ones, finished with their finals, switched on their TVs. This night, all eight towers were studded with blue, and whole patches of the Plex flickered in unison with the popular shows. The beer trucks were busy all day long down at the access lot, rolling kegs up the ramps to the Brew King in the Mall, whence they were dispersed in canvas carts and two-wheelers and Radio Flyers to rooms and lounges all over the Plex. As night fell and the last students came screaming in from their finals, suitcases full of dope moved through the Main Entrance and were quickly fragmented and distributed throughout the towers for quick combustion. By dinnertime the faucets ran cold water only as thousands lined up by the shower stalls, and the Caf was a desert as most students ate at restaurants or parties. After dark, spotlights and lasers crisscrossed the walls as partying students shone them into other towers, and when the Big Wheel sign blazed into life, bands of Big-Wheel-worshiping Terrorists all over the Plex launched a commemorative fireworks barrage that sent echoes crackling back and forth among the towers like bumper pool balls, punctuating the roar of the warring stereos.

By 10:00 the parties were just warming up. At 10:30 the rumor circulated that a special police squad sent by S. S. Krupp was touring the Plex to bust up parties. At 11:06 a keg was thrown from A24N and exploded on the Turnpike, backing up traffic for an hour with a twelve-car chain-reaction smashup. By 11:30 forty students had been admitted to the Infirmary with broken noses, split cheeks and severe inebriation, and it was beginning to look as though the official estimate of one death from overintoxication and one from accident might be a little low. The Rape/Assault/Crisis Line handled a call every fifteen minutes.

Precisely at 11:40:00 an unknown, uninvited, very clumsy student walked behind John Wesley Fenrick's chair at the big E31E end-of-semester bash and tripped, spilling a strawberry malt all over Fenrick's spiky blond hair.

John Wesley Fenrick was in the shower with very hot water spraying onto his head to dissolve the sticky malt crud, dancing around loosely to a tune in his head and playing the air guitar. He wondered whether the malt had been the work of Ephraim Klein. This, however, was impossible; his new room and number were unlisted and you couldn't follow people home in an elevator. The only way for Klein to find him was by a freak of chance, or by bribing an administration person with access to the computer– very unlikely. Besides, a malt on the head was a bush-league retaliation even for a quiet little harpsichord-playing New Jersey fart like Klein, considering what Fenrick had so brilliantly accomplished.

What made it even greater was that the administration had treated it like a hilarious college prank, a "concrete expression of malfunction in the cohabitant interaction, intended only as nonviolent emotional expression." Though they were after him to pay Klein's cleaning bills, Fenrick's brother was a lawyer and he knew they wouldn't push it in court. Even if they did, shit, he was going to be pulling down forty K in six months! A small price for triumph.

With a snarl of disgust, Fenrick dumped another dose of honey-beer-aloe-grub-treebark shampoo on his hair, finding that the tenacious malt substance still had not come off. What's in this crap? Fenrick thought. Fuck up your stomach, for sure.

Throughout E Tower, scores of Ephraim Klein's friends sat in the great shiny microwave bathrooms watching the Channel 25 Late Night Eyewitness InstaAction InvestiNews. Even during the most ghastly stories this program sounded like an encounter session among five recently canceled sitcom actors and developmentally disabled hairdressers' models. The weather, well, it was just as bad, but was relieved by its very bizarreness. The weatherman, a buffoon who knew nothing about weather and didn't care, was named Marvin DuZan the Weatherman and would broadcast in a negligee if it boosted ratings; his other gimmick was to tell an abominable joke at the conclusion of each forecast. After the devastating punchline was delivered, the picture of the guffawing pseudometeorologist and his writhing colleagues would be replaced by an animated short in which a crazy-looking bird tried to smash a tortoise over the head with a sledgehammer. At the last moment the tortoise would creep forward, causing the blow to rebound off his shell and crash back into the cranium of the bird. The bird would then assume a glazed expression and vibrate around in circles, much like a chair in Klein's room during the "Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor," finally to collapse at the feet of the smiling turtle, who would then peer slyly at the audience and wiggle his eyebrow ridges.

During Marvin DuZan's forecast on Last Night, Ephraim Klein was standing outside his ex-roomie's shower stall, watching a portable TV and squirting Hyper Stik brand Humonga-Glue into the latch of the stall's door. He had turned down the volume, of course, and it seemed just as well, since from the reactions of the InvestiNews Strike Force (and the cameramen, who were always visible on the high-tech News Nexus set) it appeared that the joke tonight was a real turd. As the camera zoomed in on the goonishly beaming face of Marvin DuZan, Ephraim Klein's grip on the handles of two nearby urinals tightened and his heart beat wildly, as did the grips and the hearts of a small army of friends and hastily recruited deputies in many other E Tower bathrooms. Bird and Tortoise appeared, the hammer was brandished, and smash!

As the hammer rebounded on the bird's head, scores of toilets throughout E Tower were flushed, causing a vacuum so sharp that pipes bent and tore and snapped and cold water ceased to flow. There was a short pause, and then a bloodcurdling scream emanated from Fenrick's shower stall as clouds of live steam burst out the top. After some fruitless handle-yanking and Plexiglass-banging, the steam was followed by Fenrick himself, who fell ungainly to the floor with a crisp splat and shook his head in pain as Ephraim Klein escaped with his TV. In his haste Fenrick had lacerated his scalp on the steel showerhead, and as he pawed at his face to clear away suds and blood he was distantly conscious of a cold draft that irritated his parboiled skin, and a familiar chunka-chunka-chunk that could be heard above the sounds of gasping pipes and white water. Finally prying one eye open, he looked into the wind to see it: the Go Big Red Fan, complacently revolving in front of his stall, set on HI and still somewhat gray with cigar ash. Unfortunately for John Wesley Fenrick, he did not soon enough see the puddle of water which surrounded him, and which was rapidly expanding toward The base of the old and poorly insulated Fan.

This was also quite an evening for E17S. Ever since joining the Terrorists as the Flame Squad Faction, this all-male wing had suffered from the stigma of being mere copies of the Big Wheel Men, Cowboys and Droogs of E13. Tonight that was to change. The Christmas tree had been purchased three weeks ago, left in a shower until the fireproofing compound was washed away, and hung over a hot-air vent in the storage room; it was now a lovely shade of incendiary brown. They took it up to E3 1, the top floor, seized an elevator, and stuffed the tree inside. Someone pressed all the buttons for floors 30 through 6 while others squirted lighter fluid over the tree's dessicated boughs.

Only one match was required. The door slid shut just as the smoke and flames began to billow forth, and with a cheer and a yell the Flame Squad Faction began to celebrate.

Twenty-four floors below, Virgil and I were having a few slow ones in my suite. I had no time for partying because I was preparing for a long drive home to Atlanta. Virgil happened to be wandering the Plex that night, looking in on various people, and had paused for a while at my place. Things were pretty quiet– as they generally had been since John Wesley Fenrick had left– and except for the insistent and inevitable bass beat, the wing was peaceful.

The fire alarm rang just before midnight. We cursed fluently and looked out my door to see what was up. As faculty-in-residence I didn't have to scurry out for every bogus fire drill, but it seemed prudent to check for smoke. The smoke was heavy when we opened the door, and we smelled the filthy odor of burning plastic. The source of the flame was near my room: one of the elevators, which had automatically stopped and opened once the fire alarm was triggered. I put a rag over my mouth and headed for the fire hose down the hall. Meanwhile Virgil prepared to soak some towels in my sink.

Neither of us got any water. My fire hose valve just sucked air and howled.

"God Almighty," Virgil called through the smoke. "Somebody pulled a Big Flush." He came out and joined the people running for the fire stairs. "No 'vators during fires so Ill have to take the stairs. I've got to get the parallel pipe system working."

"The what?"

"Parallel pipes," said Virgil, skipping into the stairwell. "Hang on! Find a keg! The architects weren't totally stupid!" And he was gone down the stairs.

I locked my door in case of looting and went off in search of a keg. Naturally there was a superabundance that night, and with some help from the too-drunk-to-be-scared owners I hauled it to the lobby and began to pump clouds of generic light into the flaming Christmas tree.

Casimir Radon was in Sharon's lab, washing out a beaker. This was merely the first step of the Project Spike glassware procedure, which involved attack by two different alcohols and three different concentrated acid mixtures, but he was in no hurry. For him Christmas had started the day before. With Virgil's help he could get into this lab throughout the vacation, and that meant plenty of time to work on Project Spike, build the mass driver and suffer as he thought about Sarah.

He was annoyed but not exasperated when the water stopped flowing. There was a gulp in the tapstream, followed by a hefty KLONK as the faucet handle jerked itself from his grasp. The flow of water stopped, and an ominous gurgling, sucking noise came from the faucet, like an entire municipal water system flushing its last. He listened as the symphony of hydraulic sound effects grew and spread to the dozens of pipes lining the lab's ceiling, the knocks and gurgles and hisses weaving together as though the pipes were having a wild Christmas party of their own. But Casimir was tired, and fairly absentminded to boot, and he shrugged it off as yet another example of the infinite variety of building and design defects in the Plex. The distilled water tap still worked, so he used it. Despite the drudgery of the task and his problems with Sarah, Casimir wore a little smile on his long unshaven face. Project Spike had worked.

He had been sampling Cafeteria food for three weeks, and until tonight had come up with nothing. Turkey Quiche, Beef Pot Pies, Lefto Lasagne, Estonian Pasties, and even Deep-Fried Chicken Livers had drawn blanks, and Casimir had begun to wonder whether it was a waste of time. Then came Savory Meatloaf Night, an event which occurred every three weeks or so; despite the efforts of advanced minds such as Virgil's, no one had ever discerned any reliable pattern which might predict when this dish was to be served. Today, of course, the last of the semester, Savory Meatloaf Night had struck and Casimir had craftily smuggled a slice out in his sock (the Cafeteria exit guards could afford to take it easy on Savory Meatloaf Night).

Not more than fifteen minutes ago, as he had been irradiating the next batch of rat poison, the computer terminal had zipped into life with the results of the analysis: high levels of Carbon– 14! There were rats in the meatloaf! That was a triumph for Casimir. It seemed likely to be a secret triumph, though. Sarah would never understand why he was doing this. Casimir wasn't even sure he understood it himself. S. S. Krupp had funded his mass driver, so why should he wish to damage the university now? He suspected that Project Spike was simply a challenge, an opportunity to prove that he was clever and self-sufficient in a sea of idiocy. He had accomplished that, but as a political tactic it was still pretty dumb. Sarah would certainly think so.

Sarah had also thought it was dumb when he had decided to work in the lab all night instead of going to Fantasy Island Nite. She was right on that issue too, perhaps, but Casimir loathed parties of all sorts and would use any excuse to avoid one. Hence he was here on the bottom of the Plex, washing out rat-liver scum, while she was far above, dancing in the clown costume she had shown him– probably having a wonderful time as handsome Terrorists salivated on her.

He observed he was leaning on the counter staring at the wall as though it were a screen beaming him live coverage of Sarah at the party. Maybe he would leave now, retaining a lab coat as a costume, and go up and surprise Sarah.

Meanwhile water was squirting out of the wall, forcing its way through the cracks between the panels, running out from under the baseboards and trickling through the grommets in the sides of Casimir's tennis shoes. Abruptly brought back into the here and now, he looked around half-dazed and started unplugging things and moving them to higher ground. What the hell was happening? A broken pipe? He figured that if there was enough water pressure on the 31st floor to run a fire hose, the pressure down here must be phenomenal. This was going to be a hell of a mess.

Water was now trickling through old nail holes high on the wall. Casimir covered the computer terminal with plastic and then ran out to search for B-men. They were not here now, of course– probably spreading rat poison or celebrating some Crotobaltislavonian radish festival.

Across from Sharon's lab was a freight elevator closed off by a manually operated door. When he looked through its little window Casimir saw water falling down the shaft, and sparks spitting past. He got insulated gloves from the lab and hauled the door open. Several gallons of pent-up water rushed past his ankles and fell into the blackness. From below rose the-harsh wet odor of the sewers.

The sparks issued from the electrical control box on the shaft wall. Once Casimir was sure there was no danger of fire or electrocution he left, leaving the doors open so that water could drain out of this bottom level of the Plex.

Oh, God. The rat poison. It was only supposed to stay in the radiation source for a minute at a time! Casimir had put it in an hour ago, then simply forgotten about it once the results of the analysis had come in. The damn stuff must be glowing in the dark. He sloshed back into the lab.

Water poured and squirted from the walls and ceiling everywhere he looked. He shielded his face from spray and walked through a wall of water toward the neutron source, a garbage can full of paraffin with the plutonium button at its center. Stopping to listen, he sensed that the slow ticking noise which had been coming from one wall had sped up and was growing louder. He stood petrified as it grew into a rumble, then a groan. then a scream– and the wall crashed open and a torrent rushed through the lab. An adjacent storage room had filled with water from a large broken pipe, and Casimir was now knocked to the floor by a torrent of Fiberglass panels, aluminum studs, and janitorial supplies. He rolled just in time to see the neutron source, buoyed on the rush of water, bob through the doorway and across the hall.

Taking care not to be swept along, he made his way to the shaft and looked down. All was dark, but from far below, under the waterfall sound, he thought he heard a buzz, or a ringing: the sound of an alarm. Maybe his ears were ringing, and maybe it was a fire alarm above. Nauseated, he returned to the lab, sat on a table and awaited the B-men.

Fantasy Island Nite was turning out to be not such a bad thing after all. Those Terrorists upstairs in their own lounge were making a lot of noise, but those down here on 12 were making an admirable effort to behave, per their agreement with the Airheads. Only this agreement had persuaded Sarah and Hyacinth to show up. It was potentially interesting, it was nice to be sociable once in a while and they could always leave if they didn't like it. Sarah wore a clown costume. This was her way of making fun of the fantasy theme of the party– most Airheads came as beauty queens or vamps– and had the extra advantage of making her totally unrecognizable. Hyacinth put together a smashing Fairy Godmother costume, as a joke only Sarah would get. Their plan was to drink so much it would become socially acceptable for them to dance together.

While Sarah was working on the first stage of this plan she began g a lot of attention from three Terrorists. These three– ,a Cowboy, a Droog and a Commando– were obvious jerks, each one incensed that she would not reveal her name, but as long as they danced, fetched drinks and didn't try to converse they seemed like harmless fun. After a while she got a little boogied out, and withdrew from the action to look out over the city. Hyacinth had gone to visit another party and was expected back soon.

Time twisted and she was no longer at the party; she was watching it from a place in her mind where she had not been for many years. She slid backward like an air hockey puck until she was high up in one corner of the room. The walls of the Plex fell away so that she could see in all directions at once.

One of the picture windows had been replaced by a gate that opened to the sky. The gate was gaily festooned with shining pulsing color-blobs. All the other party-goers had lined up in front of it. On one side of the gate stood Mitzi, taking tickets; on the other, Mrs. Saritucci, checking off their names on a clipboard. Each Airhead-Terrorist who passed through stepped out and sat down on a long slippery-slide made of blue light, and squealed with delight as they zoomed earthward. Sarah could not see all the way to the slide's end, but she could see that, below, the Death Vortex had turned into a whirlpool of multicolored fire. Forests and towns and families whirled around and around before gurling down the center to disappear. The Vortex was ringed with hundreds of fire trucks whose crews halfheartedly sprayed their tiny jets of water into its middle.

When Sarah looked beyond the whirlpool she saw in its light a shattered landscape of rubble and corpses, where bawling dirty people scrabbled about aimlessly and squinted into the fire-glow. Nothing more than dust, solitary bricks, cockroaches and jagged glass was there, though Sarah's vision swooped across it for a thousand miles and a thousand years.

Beyond its distant edge was a nonlandscape: a milky white vacuum where choking black clouds of static grew, split, re-formed, hurled themselves against one another, clashed with horrible dry violence and abated to grow and form again. Its slowness and its dryness made it the most awful thing Sarah had ever seen. After five millennia, when she thought she was entirely lost and crazy, she saw a piece of broken glass. then a rivulet of blood. Following them, she found herself in the terrible landscape again, with the Plex on the horizon erupting like a volcano. Blue beams of light shot from its top and wrapped around her and sucked her back through the air into the building. But she could no longer find herself there. She was no longer in the Lounge. The Lounge had been vacant for centuries and only dust and yellowed party favors remained. Following footprints in the dust she came to the hallway– brightly lit, loud, filled with shouting students and bats. She flew straight down the hail until four dots at its end grew into four people and she could slow down and follow them. There were three men: a Cowboy and a Commando held the arms of a woman dressed as a clown, hurrying her down the hall, while a Droog walked ahead of them carrying a paper punch cup which glowed with a green light from within. Sarah closed her eyes to the glow and shook her head, and when she opened them again she was the clown-woman– though she did not want to be.

They were in an elevator filled with black water that rose and crept warmly up Sarah's thighs. Swimming in the water were bad hidden things, so she kicked as well as she could. Her hands were held up above her head by men ten feet high, lost in the glare of the overhead light where it was too bright to look.

Then they were on a floor that reminded Sarah of the broken landscape. On the wall a giant mouth was chewing vigorously, drooling on the floor and smacking its disgusting lips. The men threw her through it and followed behind.

"I won't go down the slide," she protested, but they did not really care. Inside all was red and blue; a neon beer emblem burned in the window and licked her with its hot rays. There stood a giant in a football costume who wore the head of Tiny, leader of the Terrorists.

"Is Dex here?" she said, more out of habit than anything. It would be like Dex to slip her some LSD. But then she knew this was a stupid question. She felt the door being locked behind her and saw the music turned up until it was purest ruby red, causing her body to turn into fragile glass. To move now would be to shatter and die.

"Handle with care," she murmured, "I'm glass now," but the words just dribbled down the front of her costume. They were ripping her costume away. She squirmed but felt herself cracking horribly. The beer sign cast grotesque red and blue light on the transparent flesh of her thighs.

She knew what was going to happen next. Somehow her mind connected it all in a straight line, before the idea was swept away by the internal storm. The worst thing in the world. She should have gone down the slide.

She made an effort of will. The sound and the light went away, it was spring; grass and flowers and blue sky were all around and she was not about to be raped. She was eating raspberries on the banks of a creek. Out of curiosity she scratched at the air with her fingernail. Red and blue rays stabbed out into her skin again, and peeking all the way through for a moment she could see that they had not yet started.

No wonder; they were moving in slow motion. Sarah would have to spend many hours waiting on the banks of the creek. She drew back into the sunshine. Perhaps she could live here forever and have a perfect life.

When she slept, she dreamed of those dry, unending wars in the land of milky white. She knew it was all an illusion. She tore it away and came back to the room. She was not going to sleep through anything. She was not going to imagine anything that didn't exist.

The sign was wavy and upside down now, reflected in a puddle of water on the floor.

A Terrorist was in the corner twisting a faucet handle. Sarah stood up. Tiny turned toward her and smashed her across the face. She was on the floor again, and over there a Terrorist groped in the scintillating ocean of red and blue for the sign's power cord. He was screaming like an electric guitar now. He was trying to swim in the shallow lake of blood and bile.

Sarah was thrown onto a bed. Her arms and legs flailed, and one heel found a Terrorist's kneecap. The Droog got on top of her, and because he was in slow motion she kicked him in the nuts. He curled up on top of her and she looked through his hair at the ceiling, which sputtered in the failing sign-light. Tiny was unwinding a long piece of rope and its thin tendrils floated around him like black smoke. She rolled half out from under the Droog and curled into a fetal position so he could not take her arms and legs. As she did she peered down through the transparent floor and saw the Airheads, plastered with grotesque makeup, drinking LSD from crystal goblets and cheering. But where was Hyacinth?

Hyacinth was standing in the doorway. An extremely loud explosion seeped into her ears. Smoke filled the room, catching the hallway light and forming hundreds of 3-D images from Sarah's past life.

Hyacinth's fairy godmother costume was changed, for now she wore heavy leather gloves over her white cloth gloves, and bulky ear protectors under her conical hat, and a pair of goggles beneath her milky-white veil. In her hands she carried a giant revolver. Sarah knew that under her dress, Hyacinth was made of strong young oakwood.

Hyacinth took one step into the room and shrugged on the main light switch. Tiny stood in the center, staring. The man who had been swimming on the floor was dead. Another clasped his knee and screamed at the ceiling. Sarah laid her head down restfully and put her hands on her ears.

Cones of fire were spurting from the front and back of Hyacinth's gun and her hands were snapping rhythmically up and down. Tiny had his hands on his chest, and as he walked backward toward the window the back of his football jersey bulged and fluttered like a loose sail, darkness splashing away from it. The electrical cord was between his legs. His steps shortened and he fell backward through the picture window. The cord and plug trailed slowly behind him and snapped out room and were gone. The noise was so immense that Sarah heard nothing until much later. The blasts were synchronized with the music's beat:

WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM

with each WHAM followed by a high whine that shrieked through until the next WHAM, so that when Tiny was gone there remained a terrible high tone that resonated between the walls of the room, far too loud for Sarah to stand, filling her awareness like the blowing of the Last Trumpet and tormenting the injured Terrorists, who cried out in it and wrapped their arms around their heads. The Droog on, top of Sarah was pulled slowly away and Hyacinth yanked Sarah to her feet. Sarah did not even move her legs as the smoky doorway twisted past her, the corridor walls with their Big Wheels rolled on by, the landings of the fire stair rushed up toward her from blackness and her soft bed drifted up to envelop her face. Hyacinth was above her, probing, rubbing, kissing her. She would not stop until Sarah was well again.

Virgil used his master key eight times before attaining a dark, stained sub-sublevel of the Plex, where great water mains from the City entered from the depths and fed the giant pumps that pressurized the plumbing system overhead.

In an uncharacteristic flash of foresightedness, the Plex's architects made allowances for the certainty that, once in a while, one group or another would flush hundreds of toilets simultaneously and damage the cold water system. So they installed two parallel, independent systems of main pipes to feed the distribution systems of the wings; to switch between them one need only close one set of valves and open another. This Virgil accomplished by grunting and straining at a few red iron wheels. Satisfied that things were settling back toward normal, he set out for Professor Sharon's old lab to see if Casimir Radon was still there.