The Big U

Second Semester

The fog of war was real down here. The knee-deep gloom on the tunnel floor exhaled it in sheets and columns, never disturbed by a clean wind or a breath of dryness. Through its darkness moved a flickering cloud of light, and at the center walked a tall thin figure with headphones sprouting long antennae. He carried an eight-foot wizard's staff in one hand, a Loyal Order of Caledonian Comrades ceremonial sword in the other, and wore hip waders, a raincoat, and a gas mask. His headlamp's beam struck the fog in front of his eyes and stopped dead, limiting his visibility to what he could see through occasional holes in the atmosphere. From the twin filters of his gas mask came labored hissing sighs as he panted with an effort of wading through the muck.

"I've come to the intersection of the Tunnel of Goblins and the Tunnel of Dragon Blood," he announced. "This is my turnaround point and I will now return to rendezvous with Zippy the Dwarf, Lord Flail and the White Priest in the Hall of the Idols of Zarzang-Zed." True to his word, Klystron the Impaler laboriously reversed direction by gripping his staff and making a five-point turn, then paused for a rest.

A voice crackled from his headphones, a lush, tense introvert's voice made tinny by the poor transmission quality.

"Roger, Klystron the Impaler, This is Liaison. Please hold." There was a brief silence, but the flickering of her fingers on the computer keys up there, and her ruffling of papers, kept her voice-operated mike open. She snickered, unaware that Klystron, Zippy, Flail and the White Priest could hear her. "Oh ho," she gloated, "are you in for trouble now. You don't hear anything yet." More fingers on the keyboard. Klystron concluded that Shekondar had generated a monster with many statistics and at least three attack modes, a monster with which Consuela was not entirely familiar. Perhaps, for once, a worthy opponent.

Klystron the Impaler drew his mask down to dangle on his chest. Taking care not to breathe through his nose, he brought out his wineskin, opened the plastic spigot and shot a long stream of warm Tab onto his tongue. God, it stank down here. But Klystron could deal with far worse. Anything was better than doing this in a safe light place, like the D & D players, and never experiencing the darkness, claustrophobia and terror of reality.

Liaison was ready. "Klystron the Impaler, known to' –his allies as the Heroic, High Lord of Plexor, Mage of the CeePeeYu and Tamer of the Purple Worm of Longtunnel, is attacked by the ELECTRIC MICROWAVE LIZARD OF QUIZZYXAR!" She nearly shrieked the last part of this, as frenzied as a priestess during a solar eclipse. "You are not surprised, you have one turn to prepare defense. Statement of intent, please."

Klystron corked the wineskin with his thumb and let it drop to his side, sliding the mask back over his face. So, it was the electric microwave lizard of Quizzyxar. Consuela's reaction had hinted it was something big. He was ready.

"As you will recall, I took an anti-microwave potion six months ago, before the Siege of Dud, and that has not worn off yet. As he will probably attack with microwaves first, this gives me an extra turn. I begin by flipping down the visor on my Helm of Courage. Is he charging?"

"No. She's advancing slowly."

"I stand my ground on the left side of the tunnel and fire a freeze-blast from my Staff of Cold." He wheeled his staff into firingposition as though it were a SAM-7 shoulder-fired antiaircraft missile launcher and his body shook with imagined recoil as he CHOONGed a couple of sound effects into the mike.

But why had Consuela specified the lizard was a she? With Consuela it could not have been a mere Freudian slip. "Okay," Con said slowly, typing in Klystron's actions, "your freeze-blast strikes home, hitting her in the left head. It has no effect. The lizard's microwave blast does not hurt you but explodes your wineskin, causing you two points of concussion damage. It continues to advance at a walk."

"Touchи. " So much for Tab.

"Liaison, do we know about this yet?" It was Lord Flail. Liaison asked Shekondar. "Yes. The lizard makes a lot of noise and you hear it."

"Okay!" cried Lord Flail. "We'll proceed at top speed toward the melee."

"Me too," added Zippy the Dwarf.

"It'll take us forever to get there," said the White Priest, who did not seem to be very far into his character. "We're at least a thousand feet away."

Klystron the Impaler took advantage of these negotiations to do some planning. Obviously the female type was immune to cold– highly obnoxious to the male type.

"In my quiver I have a fire arrow which I took from the dying Elf-Lord during that one time when we space-warped into Middle Earth. I'll fire that. Which head is it leading with?" "Left."

"Then I aim for the right head."

"The arrow finds its mark and burns fiercely," announced Consuela with relish. "The lizard bites you on your left arm, which is now useless until the White Priest can heal it. While you switch back to your sword it claws you with a tentacle! claw appendage, doing five points of damage to your chest. The claw is poisoned but… you make your saving throw."

"Good. I'll take a swipe at the appendage as it attacks."

"You miss."

"Okay, I'll make for the right head."

"The lizard has succeeded in clawing the fire arrow out of its hide. Now it makes a right tongue strike, sticking you, and begins drawing you into its mouth. Will you attack the tongue, or parry the poison claw attacks?"

Klystron considered it. This was a hell of a situation. As a last resort he could use a wish from his wishing sword, but that could be risky, especially with Consuela.

"I will defend myself from the claws, and deal with the mouth when I get to it. I've been swallowed before."

"You parry three swipes. But now you are just inside the mouth and it is exhaling poison gas, and you have lost half your strength." "Oh, all right," said Klystron in disgust. "I'll make a wish on my wishing sword. I'll say "

"Wait a minute!" came the feminine squeal of Zippy the Dwarf. I just spotted him!"

Snapping to attention, Klystron scanned the surrounding mist with the beam of his headlamp and picked out Zippy's red chest waders. "Confirm contact with Zippy the Dwarf. Estimated range ten meters."

"In that case," observed Consuela, "she is right behind the lizard. Your action, Zippy?"

"Three double fireballs from my fireball-shooting tiara." "I duck," said Klystron hastily. Shekondar was just clever enough to generate an accidental hit on him. He sighed in relief and his pulse became leaden. It was going to be fine.

"All fireballs strike in abdominal area. Lizard is now in bad shape and moving slowly."

"I cut myself loose from the tongue."

"Done."

"Two more fireballs in the right head."

"As soon as I'm out of the way, that is."

"Okay. The lizard dies, Congratulations, people. That's ten thousand experience points apiece."

Klystron and Zippy joined up, edging together against the tunnel wall to avoid the imaginary lizard corpse sprawled between them. They shook hands robustly, though Klystron had some reservations about being saved by a female dwarf, "Good going, guys!" shouted Lord Flail, overloading his mike. "Yeah. Way to go," the White Priest added glumly.

"Flail and Priest, give estimated distance from us." Klystron was concerned; those two were the weakest members, even when they were together, and now that one monster had been noisily eliminated others were sure to converge on the area to clean up. "To be frank, I'm not sure," answered the White Priest. "I kind of thought we'd be getting to an intersection near you by now, but apparently not. The layout of these tunnels isn't what I saw on the Plex blueprints."

Klystron winced at this gross violation of game ethics and exchanged exasperated glances with Zippy. "You mean that the secret map you found was incorrect," he said. "Well, don't continue if you're lost. We will proceed in the direction of the Sepulchre of Keldor and hope to meet you there." He and Zippy plugged off down the tunnel.

They wandered for ten minutes looking for one another, and every sixty seconds Liaison had them stop while Shekondar checked for prowling monsters. Shortly, Klystron overheard an exchange between the Priest and the Lord, who apparently had removed their masks to talk.

"Take it easy! It doesn't take very long, you know," said the White Priest. "I'll be right back. Stay here."

"I don't think we should separate, Your Holiness," pleaded Lord Flail. "Not after a melee that'll attract other monsters." Klystron turned up the gain on his mike and shouted, "He's right! Don't split up," in hopes that they would hear it without earphones.

The Priest and Lord Flail conversed inaudibly for a few seconds. Then Flail came back on, having apparently replaced his mask. "Uh, this is to notify Shekondar that the White Priest has gone aside," he said, using the code phrase for taking a leak. Klystron chuckled. A few seconds later came another prowling monster check. Everyone tensed and waited for Shekondar's decree.

"Okay," said Liaison triumphantly, "we've got a monster, Lord Flail, now solo, is attacked by… giant sewer rats! There are twelve of them, and they take him by surprise."

"Well listen for his battle cry and try to locate him that way," announced Klystron immediately, and pulled his headphones down to listen. Oddly, Flail had not responded.

"Statement of intent! Move it!" snapped Consuela.

But no statement of intent was forthcoming from Flail. Instead, a ghastly series of sound effects was transmitted through his mike. First came a whoosh of surprise, followed by a short pause, and some confused interjections. Then nothing was heard for a few seconds save ragged panting; and then came a long, loud scream which obliged them to turn down the volume. The screaming continued, swamping the others' efforts to make themselves heard on the line.

Finally Consuela's voice came through, angry and hurt. "You're jumping the gun. The melee hasn't started yet." But Lord Flail was no longer screaming, and the only sounds coming over his mike were an occasional scraping and shuffling mixed with odd squeals that might have been radio trouble.

Klystron and Zippy, headphones down, could hear the screams echoing down the tunnel a second after they came in on the radio. Flail's plan was clear; he was making a god-awful lot of noise to assist the better fighters in tracking him down. A good plan for a character with a fighting level of three and a courage/psychostability index of only eight, but it was a little overdone.

The odd noises continued for several minutes as they tramped toward the scene of the melee, which was in a higher tunnel with a much drier floor.

Ahead of them, Flail's headlamp cast an unmoving yellow blotch on the ceiling. On the fringes of that cone of light moved great swift shadows. Klystron slowed down and drew his sword. Zippy had dropped back several feet. "Making final approach to Flail's location," Klystron mumbled, edging forward, falling unconsciously into the squatting stance of the sabre fighter. At the end of his lamp's beam he could see quickly moving gray and brown fur, and blood.

"At your approach the rats get scared and flee," said Consuela, franticly typing, "though not without persuasion."

He could see them clearly now. They were dogs, like German shepherds, though rather fat, and they had long, long bare tails. And round ears. And pointy quivering snouts. Oh, my God. Several scurried away, some stood their ground staring at his headlamp with beady black and red eyes, and one rushed him. Reacting frantically he split the top of its skull with a blow of the dull sword. The rest of the giant sewer rats turned and ran squealing down the tunnel. Lord Flail was not going anywhere, and what remained of him, as battle-hardened as Klystron was, was too disgusting to look at.

"You are too late," said Consuela. "Lord Flail has been gnawed to death by the giant sewer rats."

"I know," said Klystron. Hearing nothing from Zippy, he turned around to see her sitting there staring dumbly at the corpse. "Uh, request permission to temporarily leave character."

"Granted. What's going on down there?"

"Consuela, this is Fred. It's Steve. Steven has been, uh, I supposed you could say, uh, eaten, by a bunch of"

Fred Fine stepped forward and swept his beam over the brained animal at his feet. "By giant sewer rats."

"Oh, golly!" said Zippy. "What about Virgil? He went off to go tinkle!"

"Jeez," said Fred Fine, and started looking around for footprints. "Liaison, White Priest is solo in unknown location." The twelve giant sewer rats had run right past the White Priest and ignored him. He was standing with his chest waders around his thighs, relieving himself onto a decaying toilet paper core, when the mass of squealing rodent fervor had hurtled out of the fog, parted down the middle to pass around him, rejoined behind, their long tails lashing inquisitively around his knees, and shot onward toward their rendezvous with Lord Flail.

He stood there almost absentmindedly and finished his task, staring into the swirling lights in front of his face, breathing deeply and thinking. Then the screaming started, and he pulled up his waders and got himself together, unslinging the Sceptre of Cosmic Force from its handy shoulder strap and brandishing it. Fred Fine and Consuela had insisted he bring along convincing props, so he had manufactured the Sceptre, an iron re-rod wrapped in aluminum foil, topped with a xenon flash tube in a massive glass ball that was wired to a power supply in the handle. When they had mustered for the expedition, he had switched off the lights and "convinced" them by turning it on and bouncing a few explosive purple flashes off their unprepared retinas. After he had explained the circuitry to Fred Fine, they entered character and descended a long spiral stair into the tunnels. In the ensuing three hours the White Priest had used the Sceptre of Cosmic Force to blind, disorient and paralyze three womp rats, a samurai, a balrog, Darth Vader and a Libyan hit squad.

He began to slog back toward Steven, and the screaming ended. Either the rats had left or Steven was dead or someone had helped the poor bastard out. Tramping down the tunnel, his lamp beam bounding over the discarded feminine-hygiene products, condoms, shampoo-bottle lids and Twinkie wrappers, Virgil tried to decide whether this was really happening or was simply part of the game. The tunnels and the chanting of Consuela had made a few inroads on his sense of reality, and now he was not so sure he had seen those rats. The screams, however, had not sounded like the dramaturgical improvisations of an escapist Information Systems major.

He stopped. The rats were coming back! He looked around for a ladder, or something to climb up on, but the walls of the tunnel were smooth and featureless. He turned and ran as quickly as he could in the heavy rubberized leggings, soon discarding the gas mask and headphones so he could take deep breaths of the fetid ammonia-ridden air.

The rats were gaining on him. Virgil searched his memory, trying to visualize where this tunnel was and where it branched off; if he were right, there were no branches at all– it was a dead end. But the blueprints had been wrong before.

A branch? He swept the left wall with his lamp, and discerned a dark patch ten paces ahead. He made for it. The rats were lunging for his ankles. He kept his left hand on the wall as he ran, flailing with the Sceptre in his right. Then his left hand abruptly felt air and he dove in that direction, tripping over his own feet and falling on his side within the branch tunnel.

A rat was on top of him before he had come to rest, and he stood up wildly, using his body to throw the screaming beast against the wall. Grabbing the Sceptre in both hands he swung it like a scythe. Whatever else it was, it was first and foremost a rod with a heavy globe at one end, a fine mace.

Virgil stood with his back to the wall, kicking alternately with his feet like a Crotobaltislavonian folk dancer to shake off the bites of the rats, lashing out with the Sceptre at the same time. He was then blinded as his hand touched the toggle switch that activated the powerful flasher at the end. He cringed and looked away, and at the same time the rats fell back squealing. He shook sweat and condensation from his eyes, snapped his wet hair back and waved the Sceptre around at arms' length, surveying his opponents in the exploding light. They were gathered around him in a semicircle, about ten feet away, and with every flash their fur glistened for an instant and their eyeballs sparked like distant brakelights. They were hissing and muttering to one another now, their number constantly growing, watching with implacable hostility– but none dared approach.

Continuing to wave the Sceptre of Cosmic Force, Virgil felt down with his other hand to the butt of the weapon, where he had installed a dial to adjust the speed of the flashing. Turning it carefully up and down, he found that as the flashes became less frequent, the circle tightened around him unanimously so that he must frantically spin the dial up to a higher frequency. At this the rats reacted in pain arid backed away in the flickering light in stop-action. Now Virgil's vision was composed of a succession of still images, each slightly different from the last, and all he saw was rats. dozens of rats, and each shining purple rat-image was fixed permanently into his perfect memory until he could remember little else. Encouraged by their fear, he grasped the knob again and sped up the flasher, until suddenly they reached some breaking-point; then they dissolved into perfect chaotic frenzy and turned upon one another with hysterical ferocity, charging lustily together into a great stop-action melee at the tunnel intersection. Bewildered and disgusted, Virgil closed his eyes to shut it out, so that all he saw was the red veins in his eyelids jumping out repeatedly against a yellow-pink background.

Some of the rats were colliding with his legs. He lowered the Sceptre so that the flasher was between his ankles, and, guiding himself by sound and touch, moved away from the obstructed intersection and down the unmapped passageway. He opened his eyes and began to run, holding the flasher out in front of him like a blind man's cane. From time to time he encountered a rat who had approached the source of the sound and fury and then gone into convulsions upon encountering the sprinting electronics technician with his Sceptre. Soon, though, there were no more rats, and he turned it off.

Something was tugging at his belt. Feeling cautiously, he found that it was the power cord of the headlamp, which had been knocked off his head and had been bouncing along behind him ever since. He found that the lens, once he had wiped crud from it, cast an intermittent light– a connection was weakened somewhere– that did, however, enable him to see.

This unmapped tunnel was relatively narrow. Its ceiling, to his shock, was thick with bats, while its floor was clean of the stinking glom that covered most of the tunnels in varying depths. Instead there was a thin layer of slimy fluid and fuzzy white bat guano which stank but did not hinder. This was probably a good sign; the passage must lead somewhere. He noted the position of the Sceptre's dial that had caused the rats to blow their stacks, then slung the weapon over his shoulder and continued down the passage, his feet curiously light and free in the absence of deep sludge.

Before long he discerned a light at the end of the tunnel. He broke into a jog, and soon he could see it clearly, about a hundred and fifty feet away: a region at the end of the passage that was clean and white and fluorescently lit. Nothing in the blueprints corresponded to this.

He was still at least a hundred feet away when a pair of sliding doors on the right wall at the very end of the tunnel slid open. He stopped, sank to a squat against the tunnel wall and then lay on his stomach as he heard shouting.

"Ho! Heeeeyah! Gitska!" Making these and similar noises, three B-men peeked out the door and up the passageway, then emerged, carrying weapons– not just pistols, but small machine guns. Two of them assumed a kneeling position on the floor, facing up the tunnel, and their leader, an enormous B-man foreman named Magrov, stood behind them and sighted down the tunnel through the bulky infrared sight of his weapon. About halfway between Virgil and the B-men, a giant rat had turned and was scuttling toward Virgil. There was a roar and a flickering light not unlike that of Virgil's Sceptre, and two dozen automatic rounds dissolved the rat into a long streak on the floor. Magrov shone a powerful flashlight over the wreckage of the rodent, but apparently Virgil was too small, distant and filthy to be noticed. Magrov belched loudly in a traditional Croto expression of profound disgust, and the other two murmured their agreement. He signaled to whoever was waiting beyond the sliding doors.

A large metal cylinder about a foot and a half in diameter and six feet long, strapped to a heavy four-wheeled cart, was carefully pushed sideways into the passage. Magrov walked to a box on the wall, punched a button with the barrel of his weapon and spoke. "Control, Magrov once again. We have put it in normal place like usual, and today only one of those goddamn pink-tailed ones, you know. We taking off now. I guess we be back in a few hours."

"That's an A-OK. All clear to reascend, team." came the unaccented answer from the box. The B-men walked through the sliding doors, which closed behind them, and Virgil was barely able to make out a hum which sounded like an elevator.

After a few seconds, the end wall of the tunnel parted slowly and Virgil saw that it wasn't the end at all, it was a pair of thick steel slabs that retracted into the floor and ceiling. Beyond the doors was a large room, brightly lit, containing several men walking around in what looked like bright yellow rainsuits and long loose hoods with black plastic windows over the eyes. Three of these figures emerged and quickly slid cart and cylinder through the doors while two others stood guard with submachine guns. Then all retreated behind the doors, and the steel slabs slid back together and sealed the tunnel.

He remained motionless for a few minutes more, and noticed some other things: wall-mounted TV cameras that incessantly swiveled back and forth on power gimbals; chemical odors that wafted down the tunnel after the doors were closed; and the many gnawed and broken rat bones scattered across the nearby floor. Then Virgil Gabrielsen concluded that the wisest thing to do was to go back and mess with the giant rats.

Several days into the second semester, the Administration finally told the truth about the Library, and allowed the media in to photograph the ranks upon ranks of card catalog cabinets with their totally empty drawers.

The perpetrators had done it on Christmas Day. The Plex had been nearly deserted, its entrance guarded by a single guard at a turnstile. At eight in the morning, ten rather young and hairy-looking fellows in B-man uniforms had arrived and haltingly explained that as Crotobaltislavonians they followed the Julian calendar, and had already celebrated Christmas. Could they not come in to perform needed plumbing repairs, and earn quadruple overtime for working on Christmas Day? The skeptical guard let them in anyway; if he could not trust the janitors, whom could he trust?

As reconstructed by the police, the burglars had gathered in the card catalog area all the canvas carts they could find. They had taken these through the catalog, pulling the lock-pins from each drawer and dumping the contents into the carts. The Library's 4.8 million volumes were catalogued in 12,000 drawers of three-by-five cards, and a simple calculation demonstrated that all of these cards could be fitted into a dozen canvas carts by anyone not overly fastidious about keeping them in perfect order. The carts had been taken via freight elevator to the loading docks and wheeled onto a rented truck, which according to the rental agency had now disappeared. Its borrower, a Mr. Friedrich Engels, had failed to list a correct address and phone number and proved difficult to track down. The only untouched drawer was number 11375, STALIN, JOSEPH to STALLBAUM, JOHANN GOTTFRIED.

The Library turned to the computer system. During the previous five years, a sweatshop of catalogers had begun to transfer the catalog into a computer system, and the Administration hoped that ten percent of the catalog could be salvaged in this way. Instead they found that a terrible computer malfunction had munched through the catalog recently, erasing call numbers and main entries and replacing them with knock-knock jokes, Burma-Shave ditties and tracts on the sexual characteristics of the Computing Center senior staff.

The situation was not hopeless; at any rate, it did not deteriorate at first. The books were still arranged in a rational order. This changed when people began holding books hostage.

A Master's Candidate in Journalism had a few books she used over and over again. After the loss of the catalog she found them by memory, carried them to another part of the Library, and cached them behind twelve feet of bound back issues of the Nepalese Journal of Bhutaruan Studies. A library employee from Photoduplication then happened to take down a volume of Utah Review of Theoretical Astrocosmology, shelved back-to-back with NJBS, and detected the cache. She moved it to another place in the Library, dumping it behind a fifty-volume facsimile edition of the ledgers of the Brisbane/Surabaya Steam Packet Co. Ltd., which had been published in 1893 and whose pages had not yet been cut. She then left a sign on the Library bulletin board saying that if the user of such-and-such books wanted to know where they were, he or she could put fifty dollars in the former stash, and she, the employee, would leave in its place the new location. Several thousand people saw this note and the scam was written up in the Monoplex Monitor; it was so obviously a good idea that it rapidly became a large business. Some people took only a few volumes, others hundreds, but in all cases the technique was basically the same, and soon extra bulletin board capability was added outside the entrance to the Library bloc. Of course, this practice had been possible before the loss of the card catalog, but that event seemed to change everyone's scruples about the Library. The central keying system was gone; what difference did it make?

Free enterprise helped take up the slack, as students hired themselves out as book-snoopers. The useless card catalog area took on the semblance of a bazaar, each counter occupied by one or two businesses with signs identifying their rates and services. The psychic book-snoopers stole and hid books, then– claiming to use psychic powers– showed spectacular efficiency in locating them. The psychics soon eclipsed the businesses of their nonspiritual colleagues. In order to seem as mysterious as possible, the psychics engaged in impressive rituals; one day, working alone on the top floor, I was surprised to see Professor Emeritus Humphrey Batstone Forthcoming IV being led blindfolded through the stacks by a leotarded witch swinging a censer.

Every week the people who had stolen the card catalog would take a card and mail it to the Library. The conditions of ransom, as expressed on these cards in a cramped hand, were that: (1) S. S. Krupp and the Trustees must be purged; (2) the Megaversity must have open admissions and no room, board or tuition fees; (3) the Plex must become a free zone with no laws or authority; (4) the Megaversity must withdraw all investments in firms doing business in South Africa, firms doing business with firms doing business in South Africa and firms doing business with firms doing business with firms doing business in South Africa; (5) recognize the PLO and the baby seals.

S. S. Krupp observed that card catalogs, a recent invention, had not existed at the Library of Alexandria, and though he would have preferred, ceteris paribus, to have the catalog, we didn't have one now, that was too bad, and we were going to have to make do. There was dissent and profound shock over his position, and righteous editorials in the Monitor, but after a week or two most people decided that, though Krupp was an asshole, there wasn't any point in arguing.

"Welcome and thanks for coming to the mass driver demonstration." Casimir Radon swallowed some water and straightened his glacier glasses. "The physics majors' organization Neutrino has put a lot of time and work into this device, much of it over the Christmas holiday, and we think it is a good example of what can be done with activities money used constructively. God damn it!"

He was cursing at the loudness of his Plex neighbor, Dex Fresser, whose stereo was an electronic signal processor of industrial power. For once Casimir did not restrain himself; he was so nervous over the upcoming demonstration that he failed to consider the dire embarrassment, social rejection and personal danger involved in going next door to ask this jerk-off to turn down his music. He was pounding on Dex Fresser's door before his mind knew what his body was doing, and for a moment he hoped his knocks had been drowned out by the bass beats exploding from Fresser's eighteen-inch woofers. But the door opened, and there was Dex Fresser, looking completely disoriented, "Could you turn that down?" asked Casimir. Fresser, becoming aware of his presence, looked Casimir over from head to foot. "It kind of disturbs me," Casimir added apologetically.

Fresser thought it over. "But you're not even there that much, so how can it disturb you?" He then peered oddly into Casimir's face, as though the goggle-eyed Radon were the captain of a ship from a mirror Earth on the other side of the sun, which was pretty much what he was thinking. Chagrined, Casimir ground his teeth very loudly, generating so much heat that they became white hot and glowed pinkly through his cheeks. He then receded off into infinity like a starship making the jump into hyperspace, then came around behind Fresser again in such a way as to make it appear (due to the mirror effect) that he was actually coming from the same direction in which he'd gone. Just as he arrived back in the doorway two years later, the space warp snapped shut behind him; but at the last moment Dex Fresser glanced through it, and saw lovely purple fields filled with flowers, chanting Brazilians, leaky green ballpoint pens and thousands of empty tea boxes. He wanted very much to visit that place.

"Well, it does disturb me when I do happen to be in my room. See how that works?" The man who was running this tape, a lanky green tennis shoe with bad acne and an elephant's trunk tied in a double Windsor knot around his waist, stopped the tape and ran it back to Fresser's previous reply.

"But you're not even there that much, so how can it disturb you?" As Fresser finished this, Casimir did exactly what he had done last time, except this time the purple fields were being clusterbombed by flying garages. The space warp closed off just in time to let a piece of shrapnel through. It zoomed over Casimir's shoulder and embedded itself in the wall, and Fresser recognized it as a Pershing 2 missile.

"Right," said Casimir, now. speaking through a sousaphone around his shoulder, which bombarded Dex Fresser with white laser rays. "I know. But you see when I am in my room I prefer not to be disturbed. That's the whole point."

Fresser suddenly realized that the Pershing 2 was actually the left front quarter-panel of a '57 Buick that he had seen abandoned on a street in Evanston on July 28, 1984, and that Casimir was actually John D. Rockefeller. "How can you be so goddamn selfish, man? Don't you know how many people you've killed?" And he slammed the door shut, knowing that the shock would cause the piece of the Buick to fall on Rockefeller's head; since it was antimatter, nothing would be left afterward.

The confrontation had worked out as badly as Casimir had feared. He went back to his room, heart pounding irrationally, so upset that he did not practice his speech at all.

The lack of rehearsal did not matter, as the only audience in Sharon's lab was the Neutrino membership, Virgil, Sarah, a photographer from the Mortoplex Monitor and I. Toward the end of the speech, though, S. S. Krupp walked in with an official photographer and a small, meek-looking older man, causing Casimir to whip off his glasses in agitation and destroying any trace of calmness in his manner. Finally he mumbled something to the effect that it was too bad Krupp had come in so late, seeing as how the best part of this introduction was over, and concluded that we should stop jabbering and have a look at this thing.

The mass driver was four meters long, built atop a pair of sturdy tables bolted together. It was nothing more than a pair of long straight parallel guides, each horseshoe-shaped in cross-section, the prongs of the horseshoes pointed toward each other with a narrow gap in between. The bucket, which would carry the payload, was lozenge-shaped in cross-section and almost filled the oval tunnel created by the two guides. Most of the bucket was empty payload space, but its outer jacket was of a special alloy supercooled by liquid helium so that it became a perfect superconducting electromagnet. This feature, combined with a force field generated in the two rails, suspended the bucket on a frictionless magnetic cushion. Electromagnets in the rails, artfully wound by Virgil, provided the acceleration, "kicking" the bucket and its contents from one end of the mass driver to the other.

Casimir relaxed visibly as he began pointing out the technical details. With long metal tongs he reached into a giant thermos flask and pulled out the supercold bucket, which was about the size of two beer cans side by side. He slid it into the breech of the mass driver. As it began to soak up warmth from the room, a cascade of frigid white helium poured from a vent on its back and spilled to the floor.

Krupp stood close by and asked questions. "What's the weight of the slug?"

"This," said Casimir, picking up a solid brass cylinder from the table, "is a one-kilogram mass. That's pretty small, but– " "No, it isn't." Krupp looked over at his friend, who raised his eyebrows and nodded. "Nothing small about it."

Casimir smiled weakly and nodded in thanks. Krupp continued, "What's the muzzle velocity?"

Here Casimir looked sheepish and shifted nervously, looking at his Neutrino friends.

"Oh," said Krupp, sounding let down, "not so fast, eh?"

"Oh, no no no. Don't get me wrong. The final velocity isn't bad." At this the Neutrino members clapped their hands over their mouths and stifled shrieks and laughs. "I was just going to let you see that for yourselves instead of throwing a lot of numbers at you."

"Well, that's fine!" said Krupp, sounding more sanguine. "Don't let us laymen interfere with your schedule. I'm sorry. Just go right ahead." He stepped back and crossed his arms as though planning to shut up for hours.

Casimir gave the empty bucket a tap and there were oohs and aahs as it floated smoothly and quietly down the rails, bounced off a stop at the end and floated back with no change in speed. He reinserted the one-kilogram brass cylinder. "Now let's try it. As you can see we have a momentum absorber set up at the other end of the lab."

The "momentum absorber" was ten squares of 3/8-inch plywood held parallel in a frame, spaced two inches apart to form a sandwich a couple of feet long. This was securely braced against the wall of the lab at the same level as the mass driver. had assumed that the intended target was a wastebasket floor beneath the "muzzle" of the machine, but now realized that Casimir was expecting the weight to fly about twenty feet without losing any altitude. "I suggest you all stand back in case something goes wrong," said Casimir, and feeling somewhat alarmed I stood way back and suggested that Sarah do likewise. Casimir made a last check of the circuitry, then hit a big red button.

The sound was a whizz followed by a rapid series of staccato explosions. It could be written as: ZZIKKH where the entire sound takes about a quarter of a second. None of us really saw anything. Casimir was already running toward the momentum absorber. When we got there, we saw that the first five layers of plywood had perfectly clean round holes punched through them, two more had messy holes, and the next layer had buckled, the brass cylinder wedged in place at its bottom. Casimir pulled out the payload with tongs and dropped it into an asbestos mitt he had donned. "It's pretty hot after all those collisions," he explained.

Everyone but Casimir was electrified. Even the Neutrino observers, who had seen it before, were awed, and laughed hysterically from time to time. Sarah looked as though whatever distrust she had ever had in technology had been dramatically confirmed. I stared at Casimir, realizing how smart he was. Virgil left, smiling. Krupp's little friend paced between mass driver and target, hands clasped behind back, a wide smile nestled in his silver-brown beard, while Krupp himself was astonished.

"Jesus H. Christ!" he yelled, fingering the holes. "That is the damnedest thing I've ever seen. Good lord, boy, how did you make this?"

Casimir seemed at a loss. "It's all done from Sharon's plans," he said blankly. "He did all the magnetic fieldwork. I just plugged in the arithmetic. The rest of it was machine-shop work. Nothing complicated about the machine."

"Does it have to be this powerful?" I said. "Don't get me wrong. I'm impressed as hell. Wouldn't it have been a little easier to make a slower one?"

"Well, sure, but not as useful," said Casimir. "The technical challenges only show up when you make it fast enough to be used for its practical purpose– which is to shoot payloads of ore and minerals from the lunar surface to an orbital processing station. For a low-velocity one we could've used air cushions instead of magnetic fields to float the bucket but there's no challenge in that."

"What's the muzzle velocity?" asked Krupp's guest, who had appeared next to me. He spoke quietly and quickly in an Australian accent. When I looked down at him, I realized he was Oswald Heimlich, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of American Megaversity and one of the richest men in the city – the founder of Heimlich Freedom Industries a huge defense contractor. Casimir obviously didn't know who he was.

"The final velocity of the bucket is one hundred meters per second, or about two hundred twenty miles per hour."

"And how could you boost that?"

"Boost it?" Casimir looked at him, startled. "Well, for more velocity you could build another just like this– "

"Yes, and put them together. I know. They're interconnectible. But how could you increase the acceleration of this device?"

"Well, that gets you into some big technical problems. You'd need expensive electronic gear with the ability to kick out huge pulses of power very quickly. Giant capacitors could do it, or a specialized power supply."

Heimlich followed all this, nodding incessantly. "Or a generator that gets its power from a controlled explosion."

Casimir smiled. "It's funny you should mention that. Some people are speculating about building small portable mass drivers with exactly that type of power supply– a chemical explosion– and using them to throw explosive shells and so on. That's what is called– "

"A railgun. Precisely."

Things began to fall into place for Casimir. "Oh. I see. So you want to know if I could build– basically a railgun."

"Sure. Sure," said Heimlich in an aggressive, glinting voice. "What's research without practical applications?" The question hung in the air.

Krupp took over, sounding much calmer. "You see, Casimir, in order to continue with this research– and you are off to an exceptionally fine start– you will need outside funding on a larger scale. Now, as good an idea as lunar mining is, no one is ever going to fund that kind of research. But railguns– whether you like it or not, they have very immediate significance that can really pull in the grants. I'm merely pointing out that in today's climate relating your work to defense is the best way to obtain funding. And I imagine that if you wanted to set up a specialized lab here to advance this kind of work, you might be able to get all the funding you'd want."

Casimir looked down at the shattered plywood in consternation. "I don't need an answer now. But give it some careful thought, son. There's no reason for you to be stuck in silly-ass classes if you can do this kind of work. Call me anytime you like." He shook Casimir's hand, Heimlich made a brief smiling spastic bow, and they walked out together.

Sarah quit the Presidency of the Student Government on the first of January. At the mass-driver demonstration, S. S. Krupp had simply ignored her, which was fine by Sarah as she had no desire to give the man a point-by-point explanation.

As for the death of Tiny, here the other shoe never dropped, though Sarah and Hyacinth kept waiting. His body was in especially poor condition when found, and the bullet holes might not have been detected even if someone had thought to look for them. The City police made a rare Plex visit and looked at the broken window and the electrocuted man on the floor, but apparently the Terrorists had cleaned up any blood or other evidence of conflict; in short, they made it all look like a completely deranged drunken fuck-up, an archetype familiar to the City cops.

The Terrorists wanted their own revenge. None of them had a coherent idea of what had happened. Even the two surviving witnesses had dim, traumatized memories of the event and could only say it had something to do with a woman dressed as a clown. As soon as I heard that the Terrorists were looking for someone called Clown Woman, I invited her over and we had a chat. I knew what her costume had been. Though she understood why I was curious, she suddenly adopted a sad, cold reserve I had never seen in her before.

"Some really terrible things happened that night. But I'm I Hyacinth is safe– okay? And we've been making plans to stay that way."

"Fine. I just– "

"I know. I'd love to tell you more. I'm dying to. But I won't, because you have some official responsibilities and you're the kind of person who carries them out, and knowing anything would be a burden for you. You'd try to help– but that's something you can't do. Can you understand that?"

I was a little scared by her lone strength. More, I was stunned that she was protecting me. Finally I shrugged and said, "Sounds as though you know what you're doing," because that was how it sounded.

"This has a lot to do with your resigning the Presidency?" I continued. Sarah was a little annoyed by my diplomacy, for the same reason S. S. Krupp would have been.

"Bud, I don't need some terrific reason for resigning. If I'm spending time on a useless job I don't like, and I find there are better things to do with that time, then I ought to resign." I nodded contritely, and for the first time she was relaxed enough to laugh. On her way out she gave me a long platonic hug, and I still remember it when I feel in need of warmth.

They got the wading pool and the garden hose on a two-hour bus ride to a suburban K-Mart. Hyacinth inflated it in the middle of Sarah's room while Sarah ran the hose down the hall to the bathroom to pipe in hot water. Once the pool was acceptably full and foamy, they retrieved the hose, locked the door and sealed off all windows with newspaper and all cracks around the door with towels and tape. They lit a few candles but blew most of them out when their eyes adjusted. The magnum of champagne was buried in ice, the water was hot, the night was young. Hyacinth's .44 was very intrusive, and so Sarah filed it under G for Gun and they had a good laugh.

Around 4:00 in the morning, to Sarah's satisfaction, Hyacinth passed out. Sarah allowed herself to do likewise for a while. Then she dragged Hyacinth out onto the rug, dried her and hoisted her into bed. They slept until 4:32 in the afternoon. Sleet was ticking against the window. Hyacinth cut a slit in the window screen and they fed the hose outside and siphoned all the bathwater out of the pool and down the side of the Plex. They ate all of Sarah's mother's banana bread, thirty-two Chips Ahoys, three bowls of Captain Crunch, a pint of strawberry ice cream and drank a great deal of water. They then gave each other backrubs and went to sleep again.

"Keeping my .38 clean is a pain in the ass," said Sarah at one point. "It picks up a lot of crud in my backpack pocket." "That's one reason to carry a single-action," said Hyacinth. "Less to go wrong if it's dirty."

A long time later, Sarah added, "This is pretty macho. Talking about our guns."

"I suppose it's true that they're macho. But they are also guns. In fact, they're primarily guns."

"True."

They also discussed killing people, which had become an important subject with them recently.

"Sometimes there isn't any choice," Sarah said to Hyacinth, as Hyacinth cried calmly into her shoulder. "You know, Constantine punished rapists by pouring molten lead down their throats. That was a premeditated, organized punishment. What you did was on the spur of the moment."

"Yeah. Putting on protective clothes, loading my gun, tracking them down and blowing one away was really on the spur of the moment."

"All I can say is that if anyone ever deserved it, he did." Three Terrorists ambled down the hall past Sarah's door, chanting "Death to Clown Woman!"

"Okay, fine," said Hyacinth, and stopped crying. "Granted. I can't worry about it forever. But sooner or later they're going to figure out who Clown Woman is. Then there'll be even more violence."

"Better them to be violent against us," said Sarah, "than against people who don't even understand what violence is."

Sarah was busy taking care of herself that semester. This made more sense than what the rest of us were doing, but it did not make for an eventful life. At the same time, a very different American Megaversity student was fighting the same battle Sarah had just won. This student lost. The tale of his losing is melancholy but much more interesting.

Every detail was important in assessing the situation, in determining just how close to the brink Plexor was! The obvious things, the frequent transitions from the Technological universe to the Magical universe, those were child's play to detect; but the evidence of impending Breakdown was to be found only in the minutiae. The extra cold-water pipe; that was significant. What had suddenly caused such a leak to be sprung in the plumbing of Plexor, which had functioned flawlessly for a thousand years? And what powerful benign hand had made the switch from one pipe to the other? What prophecy was to be found in the coming of the Thing of the Earth in the test run of Shekondar? Was some great happening at hand? One could not be sure; the answer must be nested among subtleties. So this one spent many days wandering like a lone thaumaturge through the corridors of the Plex, watching and observing, ignoring the classes and lectures that had become so trivial.

With the help of an obsequious MARS lieutenant he was allowed to inspect the laboratory of the secret railgun experiments. Here he found advanced specialized power supplies from Heimlich Freedom Industries. The lieutenant, a Neutrino member of four years' standing, hooked the output of one power supply to an oscilloscope and showed him the very high and sharp spike of current it could punch out– precisely the impulses a superfast mass driver would need to keep its payload accelerating explosively right up to the end. This one also observed a test of a new electromagnet. It was much larger than those used for the first mass driver, wound with miles of hair-thin copper wire and cooled by antifreeze-filled tubes. A short piece of rail had been made to test the magnet. It was equipped with a bucket designed to carry a payload ten centimeters across! This one watched as a violent invisible kick from the magnet wrenched the bucket to high velocity and slammed it to the cushion at the rail's end; the heavy payload shot out, boomed into a tarp suspended about five feet away, and fell into a box of foam-rubber scraps. It was the same pattern he saw everywhere. A peaceful lunar mining device had, under the influence of Shekondar the Fearsome, metamorphosed into a potent weapon of great value to the forces of Good.

He gave the lieutenant a battlefield promotion to Captain. He wanted to stay and continue to watch, but it had been a long day; he was tired, and for a moment his mind seemed to stop entirely as he stood by the exit.

Then came again the creeping sense of Leakage, impossible to ignore; his head snapped up and to the right, and, speaking across the dimensional barrier, Klystron the Impaler told him to go to dinner.

Klystron the Impaler was only Klystron the Impaler when he was in a Magical universe. The rest of the time he was Chris the Systems Programmer– a brilliant, dashing, young, handsome terminal jockey considered to be the best systems man on the giant self-contained universe-hopping colony, Plexor. From time to time Plexor would pass through the Central Bifurcation, a giant space warp, and enter a Magical universe, fundamentally altering all aspects of reality. Though the structure of Plexor itself underwent little change at these times, everything therein was converted to its magical, pretechnological analog. Guns became swords, freshmen became howling savages, Time magazine became a hand-lettered vellum tome and Chris the Systems Programmer– well, brilliant people like him became sorcerers, swordspeople and heroes. The smarter they were– the greater their stature in the Technological universe– the more dazzling was their swordplay and the more penetrating their spells. Needless to say, Klystron the Impaler was a very great hero-swordsman-magician indeed.

Of course, Plexorians tended to be that way to begin with. Only the most advanced had been admitted when Plexor was begun, and it was natural that their distant offspring today should tend toward the exceptional. Of those lucky enough to be selected for Plexor, only the most adaptable had any stomach for the life once they got there and, every month or so, found their waterbeds metamorphosing into heaps of bearskins. Klystron/Chris liked to think of the place as a pressure cooker for the advancement of humanity.

But even the most perfect machine could not be insulated from the frailty and stupidity of the human mind. In the early days of Plexor every inhabitant had understood the Central Bifurcation, had respected the distinction between technology and magic, and had shown enough discipline to ensure that division. Within the past several generations, though, ignorance had come to this perfect place and Breakdown had begun. Recent generations of Plexorians lacked the enthusiasm and commitment of their forebears and displayed ignorance which was often shocking; recently it had become common to suppose that Plexor was not a free-drifting edosociosystem at all, that it was in fact a planetoidal structure bound to a particular universe. Occasionally, it was true, Plexor would materialize on the ground, in a giant city or a barbarian kingdom. Its makers, a Guild of sorcerers and magicians operating in separate universes through the mediation of Keldor, had created it to be self-sufficient and life-supporting in any habitat, with a nuclear fuel source that would last forever. But to believe that one particular world was always out there was a blindness to reality so severe that it amounted to rank primitivism amidst this sophisticated colony of technocrats. It was, in a word, Breakdown– a blurring of the boundary– and such was the delicacy of that boundary between the universes that mere ignorance of its existence, mere Breakdown-oriented thinking and Breakdown-conducive behavior, was sufficient to open small Leaks between Magic and Technology, to generate an unholy Mixture of the two opposites. It was the duty of the remaining guardians of the Elder Knowledge. such as Klystron/Chris, to expurgate such mixtures and restore the erstwhile purity of the two existences of Plexor.

In just the past few weeks the Leaks had become rents, the Mixture ubiquitous. Now Barbarians sat at computer terminals in the Computing Center unabashed, pathetically trying, in broad daylight, to run programs that were so riddled with bugs the damn things wouldn't even compile, their recent kills stretched out bleeding between their feet awaiting the spit. Giant rats from another plane of existence roamed free through the sewers of the mighty technological civilization, and everywhere Chris the Systems Analyst found dirt and marrow-sucked bones on the floor, broken light fixtures, graffiti, noise, ignorance. He watched these happenings, not yet willing to believe in what they portended, and soon developed a sixth sense for detecting Leakage. That was in and of itself a case of Mixture; in a Technological universe, sixth senses were scientifically impossible. His new intuition was a sign of the Leakage of the powers of Klystron the Impaler into a universe where they did not belong. In recognition of this, and to protect himself from the ignorant, Klystron/Chris had thought it wise to adopt the informal code name of Fred Fine.

He had denied what was coming for too long. Despite his supreme intelligence he was hesitant to accept the hugeness of his own personal importance.

Until the day of the food fight: on that day he came to understand the somber future of Plexor and of himself. It happened during dinner. To most of those in the Cafeteria it was just a food fight, but to "Fred Fine" it was much more significant, a preliminary skirmish to the upcoming war, a byte of strategic data to be thoughtfully digested.

He had been contemplating an abstract type of program structure, absently shuffling the nameless protein-starch substance from tray to mouth, when a sense of strangeness had verged on his awareness and dispersed his thoughts. As he looked up and became alert, he also became aware that (a) the food was terrible; (b) the Caf was crowded and noisy; and (c) Leakage was all around. His mind now as alert as that of Klystron before a melee, he scanned the Cafeteria from his secure corner (one of only four corners in the Cafeteria and therefore highly prized), stuffing his computer printout securely into his big locking briefcase. Though his gaze traversed hundreds of faces in a few seconds, something allowed him to fix his attention on a certain few: eight or ten, with long hair and eccentric clothing, who were clearly looking at one another and not at the gallons of food heaped on their Fiberglass trays. The sixth sense of Klystron enabled Chris to glean from the whirl of people a deeply hidden pattern he knew to be significant.

He stood up in the corner, memorizing the locations of those he had found, and switched to long-range scan, assisting himself by following their own tense stares. His eyes flicked down to the readout of his digital calcu-chronograph and he noted that it was just seconds before 6:00. Impatiently he polled his subjects and noted that they were now all looking toward one place: a milk dispenser near the center of the Cafeteria, where an exceptionally tall burnout stood with a small black box in his hand!

There was a sharp blue flash that made the ceiling glow briefly– the black box was an electronic flash unit– and all hell broke loose. Missiles of all shapes and colors whizzed through his field of vision and splathunked starchily against tables, pillars and bodies. Amid sudden screaming an entire long table was flipped over, causing a hundredweight of manicotti and French fries to slide into the laps of the unfortunates on the wrong side. Seeing the perpetrators break and dissolve into the milling dinnertime crowd, the victims could only respond by slinging handfuls of steaming ricotta at their disappearing backsides. At this first outbreak of noise and action the Cafeteria quieted for a moment, as all turned toward the disturbance. Then, seeing food flying past their own heads, most of the spectators united in bedlam. The Terrorist sections seemed to have been expecting this and joined in with beer-commercial rowdiness. Several tables of well-dressed young women ran frantically for the exits, in most cases too slowly to prevent the ruination of hundreds of dollars' worth of clothes a head. Many collapsed squalling into the arms of their patron Terrorist organizations. The Droogs opened a milk machine, pulled out a heavy poly-bag of Skim and slung it into the midst of what had been an informal gathering of Classics majors, with explosive results.

All was observed intently by Klystron/Chris, who stood calm and motionless in his corner holding his briefcase as a shield. Though the progress of the fight was interesting to watch, it was hardly as important as the behavior of the instigators and the reactions of the Cafeteria staff.

Of the instigating organization, some were obliged to flee immediately in order to protect themselves. These were the agents provocateurs, the table-tippers and tray-slingers, whose part was already played. The remainder were observers, and they stood in carefully planned stations around the walls of the Cafeteria and watched, much as Chris did. Some snapped pictures with cheap cameras.

This picture-taking began in earnest when, after about fifteen seconds, the reactive strike began. The cooks and servers had instantly leapt to block the doors of the serving bays, which in these circumstances had the same value as ammunition dumps. Pairs of the larger male cooks now charged out and drew shut the folding dividers which partitioned the Cafeteria into twenty-four sections. Meanwhile, forty-eight more senior Cafeteria personnel and guards fanned out in organized fashion, clothed in ponchos and facemasks. In each section, one of them leapt up on a table with a megaphone to scream righteousness at the students, while his partner confronted particularly active types. Klystron/Chris's view of the fight was abruptly reduced to what he could see in his own small section.

Among other things he saw eight of the Roy G Biv Terrorist Group overturn the table on which the local official stood, sending him splaying on hands and knees across the slick of grease and tomato sauce on the floor. His partner skidded after him and swiveled to protect their backs from the Terrorists, who had huddled and were mumbling menacingly. For the first time Klystron/Chris felt the hysterical half-sick excitement of approaching violence, and he began to edge along the wall toward a more strategically sound position.

One of the Terrorists went to the corner where the sliding partitions intersected, blocking the only route of escape. The men in the room moved away uneasily; the women pressed themselves against the wall and sat on the floor and tried to get invisible. Then the Roy G Biv men broke; two went for the still-standing official, one for the man who was just staggering to his feet with the dented megaphone. Abruptly, Klystron/Chris stepped forward, took from his briefcase a small weapon and pulled the trigger. The weapon was a flash gun, a device for making an explosively intense flash of light that blinded attackers. Everyone in front of the weapon froze. As they were putting their hands to their eyes, he pulled out his Civil War bayonet, jammed it into a fold in the sliding partition and pulled it down to open a six-foot rent. He led the tactical retreat to the adjoining section, which was comparatively under control.

The officials here were not amused. A stocky middle-aged man in a brown suit stomped toward Klystron/Chris with death in his eye. He was stopped by a chorus of protest from the refugees, who made it clear that the real troublemakers were back there. And that was how Klystron/Chris avoided having any of these seriously Mixed officials discover his informal code name.

But what was the strategic significance? He knew it had been done by Barbarians. Despite the carefully tailored modern clothes they used to hide their stooping forms and overly long arms, he recognized their true nature from the ropy scars running along their heavy overhanging brows and the garlands of rodent skulls they wore around their necks. Had it not been for the cameramen, he would have concluded that this was nothing more than a purposeless display of the savages' contempt for order. But the photographers made it clear that this riot had been a reconnaissance-in-force, directed by an advanced strategic mind with an crest in the Cafeteria's defenses. And that, in turn, implied an upcoming offensive centered on the Cafeteria itself. Of course! In here was enough grub to feed a good-sized commando force for years, if rationed properly; it would therefore be a prime objective for insurrectionists planning to seize and hold large portions of Plexor. But why? Who was behind it? And how did it connect with the other harbingers of catastrophe?

Once upon a time, a mathematically inclined friend of Sarah's, one Casimir Radon, had estimated that her chances of running into a fellow Airhead at dinner were no better than about one in twenty. As usual he was not trying to be annoying or nerdish, but nevertheless Sarah wished for a more satisfying explanation of why she could get no relief from her damned neighbors. One in twenty was optimistic. At times she thought that they were planting spies in her path to take down statistics on how many behavioral standards she broke, or to drive her crazy by asking why she had really resigned the Presidency.

She was annoyed but not surprised to find herself eating dinner with Mari Meegan, Mari's second cousin and Toni one night. Relaxed from a racquetball game, she made no effort to scan her route through the Caf for telltale ski masks. So as she danced and sideslipped her way toward what looked like an open table, she was blindsided by a charming squeal from right next to her. "Sarah!" Too slow even to think of pretending not to hear, she looked down to see the three color-coordinated ski masks looking back at her expectantly. She despised them and never wanted to see them again, ever, but she also knew there was value in following social norms, once in a while, to forestall hatred and God knows what kinds of retribution. The last thing she wanted was to be connected with Clown Woman. So she smiled and sat down. It was not going to be a great meal, but Sarah's conversation support system was working well enough to get her at least through the salad.

The ski masks had become very popular since the beginning of second semester, having proved spectacularly successful during fire drills. The Airheads found that they could pull them on at the first ringing of the bell and make it downstairs before all the bars filled up, and when they returned to their rooms they did not have to remove any makeup before going back to bed. Then one sartorially daring Airhead had worn her ski mask to a 9:00 class one January morning, and pronounced it worthwhile, and other Airheads had begun to experiment with the concept. The less wealthy found that ski masks saved heaps of money on cosmetics and hair care, and everyone was impressed with their convenience, ease of cleaning and unlimited mix-'n'-match color coordination possibilities. Blousy, amorphous dresses had also become the style; why wear something tight and uncomfortable when no one knew who you were?

Talking to Mari, Nicci and Toni was not that bad, of course, but Sarah felt unusually refreshed and clean, was having one of her favorite dinners, was going to a concert with Hyacinth that night and had hoped to make it a perfect day. Worse than talking to them was having to smile and nod at the stream of cologned and blow-dried Terrorists who came up behind the Airheads in their strange bandy macho walk, homing in on those ski masks like heat-seeking missiles on a house fire. Several sneaked up behind Mari and the others to goose them while they ate. Sarah knew that they did not want to be warned, so she merely rolled her manicotti around in her mouth and stared morosely over Mari's shoulder as the young bucks crept forward with exaggerated stealth and twitching fingers. So long as these people continued to lead segregated lives, she knew, it was necessary to do such things in order to have any contact with members of the other sex. They at least had more style than the freshman Terrorists, who generally started conversations by dumping beverages over the heads of freshman women. So there were many breaks in the conversation while Terrorist fingers probed deep into Airhead tenderloins and the requisite screaming and giggling followed.

Notwithstanding this, "the gals" did manage to have a conversation about their majors. Sarah was majoring in English. Mari had a cousin who majored in English too, and who had met a very nice Business student doing it. Mari was majoring in Hobbies Education. Toni was Undecided. Nicci was in Sociology at another school.

And then the food fight.

Between the opening salvo and the moment when their table was protectively ringed by Terrorists, the others were quite dignified and hardly moved. Sarah sat still momentarily, then came to her senses and slipped under the table. From this point of view she saw many pairs of corduroy, khaki, designer jean and chino pantlegs around the table, and saw too the folding partitions slide across.

Once the partitions were closed she emerged, mostly because she wanted to see who owned the brown polyester legs that had been dancing around the room in such agitation. The Terrorists grabbed her arms solicitously and hauled her to her feet, wanting to know if she had lost her ski mask in "all the action."

The man in the brown three-piecer was none other than Bartholomew (Wombat) Forksplit, Dean of Dining Services, who had been promoted to Dean Emeritus after his recovery from the nacho tortilla chip shard that had passed through his brain. No one knew where he came from– Tibet? Kurdistan? Abyssinia? Circassia? Since the accident, he had become known as Wombat the Marauder to his victims, mostly inconsiderate dorks who had broken Caf rules only to find this man gripping them in an old Bosnian or Tunisian martial arts hold that shorted out the major meridians of their nervous system, and shouting at them in a percussive accent that crackled like fat ground beef on a red-hot steam griddle. Some accused him of using the accident as an excuse to act like a madman, but no one doubted that he was pissed off.

When he saw the ex-President half-dragged from under a table by the beaming Terrorists, Forksplit released the knee of his current victim and speed-skated across the stained linoleum toward her, his tomato-sauce– spattered arms outstretched as if in supplication. Sarah pulled her arms free and backed up a step, but he stopped short of embracing her and cried, "Sarah! You, here? Indicates this that you are part of these– these asshole Terrorists? Please say no!" He stared piteously into her eyes, the little white scar on his forehead standing out vividly against his murderously flushed face. Sarah swallowed and glanced around the room, conscious of many ski masks and Terrorists looking at her.

"Oh, not really, I was just over here at another table. These guys were just helping me up. This is a real shame. I hope the B-men don't go on strike now."

A look of agony came over Wombat the Marauder's face at the mere mention of this idea, and he backed up, pirouetted and paced around their Cafeteria subdivision directing a soliloquy of anger and frustration at Sarah. "I joost– I don't know what the hell to do. I do everything in the world to deliver fine service. This is good food! No one believes that. They go off to other places and eat, come back and say, 'Yes Mr. Forksplit let me shake your hand your food is so good!! Best I have ever eaten!' But do these idiots understand? No, they throw barbells through the ceiling! All they can do with good food is throw it, like it is being a sports implement or something. You!"

Forksplit sprinted toward a tall thin fellow who had just slit one of the sliding partitions almost in half with a bayonet and plunged through, pulling a briefcase behind him. Under his arm this man carried a pistol-shaped flashlight, which he tried to pull out; but before Forksplit was able to reach him, several more people exploded through the slit, pointing back and complaining about high rudeness levels in the next room. With a bloodcurdling battle cry Forksplit flung his body through the breach and into the next compartment, where much loud smashing and yelling commenced.

Mari turned to Sarah, a big smile visible through her mouth-hole. "That was very nice of you, Sarah. It was sweet to think about Dean Forksplit's feelings."

"He put me in a hell of a spot," said Sarah, who was looking at Fred Fine and his light-gun and his bayonet. "I mean, what was I supposed to say?"

Mari did not follow, and laughed. "It was neat the way you didn't say something bad about the Terrorists just on his account." Fred Fine was stashing his armaments in his briefcase and staring at them. Sarah concluded that he had just come over to eavesdrop on their conversation and look at their secondary sex characteristics.

"Diplomatic? There's nothing I could say, Mari, that could be nasty enough to describe those assholes, and the sooner you realize that the better off you'll be."

"Oh, no, Sarah. That's not true. The Terrorists are nice guys, really."

"They are assholes."

"But they're nice. You said so yourself at Fantasy Island Nite, remember? You should get to know some of them."

Sarah nearly snapped that she had almost gotten to know some of them quite well on Fantasy Island Nite, but held her tongue, suddenly apprehensive. Had she said that on Fantasy Island Nite? And had Mar! known who she was? "Man, it is possible to be nice and be an asshole at the same time. Ninety-nine percent of all people are nice. Not very many are decent."

"Well, sometimes you don't seem terribly nice."

"Well, I don't wish to be nice. I don't care about nice. I've got more important things on my mind, like happiness."

"I don't understand you, Sarah. I like you so much, but I just don't understand you." Mari backed away a couple of paces on her spikes, gazing coolly at Sarah through her eye-holes. "Sometimes I get the feeling you're nothing but a clown." She stood and watched Sarah triumphantly.

DEATH TO CLOWN WOMAN! hung before Sarah's eyes. A knifing chill struck her and she was suddenly nauseated and lightheaded. She sat down on a table, assisted needlessly by Fred Fine.

"You'll be fine," he said confidently. "Just routine shock. Lie back here and we'll take care of you." He began making a clear space for her on the table.

Somehow, Sarah had managed to unzip the back pocket of her knapsack and wrap her fingers around the concealed grip of the revolver. Shocked, she forced herself to relax and think clearly. To scare the hell out of Mari was

neighborhood, the square had degenerated meteorically and become a chaotic intersection lined with dangerous discos, greasy spoons, tiny weedlike businesses, fast-food joints with armed guards and vacant buildings covered with acres of graffiti-festooned plywood and smelling of rats and derelicts' urine. The home office of the Big Wheel Petroleum Corporation had moved out some years ago to a Sunbelt location. It had retained ownership of its old twelve-story office building, and on its roof, thrust into the heavens on a dirty web of steel and wooden beams, the Big Wheel sign continued to beam out its pulsating message to everyone within five miles every evening. One of the five largest neon signs ever built, it was double-sided and square, a great block of lovely saturated cherry red with a twelve-spoked wagon wheel of azure and blinding white rotating eternally in the middle, underscored by heavy block letters saying BIG WHEEL that changed, letter by letter, from white to blue and back again, once every two revolutions. Despite the fact that the only things the corporation still owned in this area were eight gas stations, the building and the sign, some traditionalist in the corporate hierarchy made sure that the sign was perfectly maintained and that it went on every evening.

During the daytime the Big Wheel sign looked more or less like a billboard, unless you looked closely enough to catch the glinting of the miles of glass tubing bracketed to its surface. As night fell on the city, though, some mysterious hand, automatic or human, would throw the switch. Lights would dim for miles around and anchormen's faces would bend as enough electricity to power Fargo at dinnertime was sent glowing and incandescing through the glass tracery to beam out the Big Wheel message to the city. This was a particularly impressive sight from the social lounges on the east side of the Plex, because the sign was less than a quarter mile away and stood as the only structure between it and the horizon. On cloudless nights, when the sky over the water was deep violet and the stars had not yet appeared, the Big Wheel sign as seen from the Plex would first glow orange as its tubes caught the light of the sunset. Then the sun would set, and the sign would sit, a dull inert square against the heavens, and the headlights of the cars below would flicker on and the weak lights of the discos and the diners would come to life. Just when the sign was growing difficult to make out, the switch would be thrown and the Big Wheel would blaze out of the East like the face of God, causing thousands of scholarly heads to snap around and thousands of conversations to stop for a moment. Although Plex people had few opportunities to purchase gasoline, and many did not even know what the sign was advertising, it had become the emblem of a university without emblems and was universally admired. Art students created series of paintings called, for example, "Thirty-eight views of the Big Wheel sign," the Terrorists adopted it as their symbol and its illumination was used as the starting point for many parties. Even during the worst years of the energy crisis, practically no one at AM had protested against the idea of nightly beaming thousands of red-white-and-blue kilowatt-hours out into deep space while a hundred feet below derelicts lost their limbs to the cold.

The summit conference, the Meeting of Hearers, the Conclave of the Terrorist Superstars, was therefore held in the D24E lounge around sunset. About a dozen figures from various Terrorist factions came, including eight stereo hearers, two Big Wheel hearers, a laundry-machine hearer and a TV test-pattern hearer. Hudson Rayburn, Tiny's successor, got there last, and did not have a chair. So he went to the nearest room and walked in without knocking. The inhabitant was seated cross-legged on the bed, smoking a fluorescent red plastic bong and staring into a color-bar test pattern on a 21-inch TV. This was the wing of the TV test-pattern hearers, a variation which Rayburn's group found questionable. There were some things you could say about test patterns, though.

"The entire spectrum," observed Hudson Rayburn.

"Hail Roy G Biv," quoth the hearer in his floor's ritual greeting. Rayburn grabbed a chair, causing the toaster oven it was supporting to slide off onto the bed. "I must have this chair," he said. The hearer cocked his head and was motionless for several seconds, then spoke in a good-natured monotone. "Roy G Biv speaks with the voice of Ward Cleaver, a voice of great power. Yes. You are to take the chair. You are to bring it back, or I will not have a place for putting my toaster oven."

"I will bring it back," answered Rayburn, and carried it out. The hosts of the meeting had set up a big projection TV on one wall of the lounge, and the representatives of the Roy G Biv faction stared at the test pattern. One of them, tonight's emcee, spoke to the assembled Terrorists, glancing at the screen and pausing from time to time.

"The problem with the stereo-hearers is that everybody has stereos and so there are many different voices saying different things, and that is bad, because they cannot act together. Only a few have color TV5 that can show Roy G Biv, and only some have cable, which carries Roy G Biv on Channel 34 all the time, so we are unified."

"But there is only one Big Wheel. It is the most unified of all," observed Hudson Rayburn, staring out at the Big Wheel, glinting orange in the setting sun.

There was silence for a minute or so. A stereo-hearer, holding a large ghetto blaster on his lap, spoke up. "Ah, but it can be seen from many windows. So it's no better at all."

"The same is true of the stereo," said a laundry-machine hearer. "But there is only one dryer, the Seritech Super Big-Window 1500 in Laundry, which is numbered twenty-three and catches the reflection of the Astro-Nuke video game, and only a few can see it at a time, and I think it told me just the other day how we could steal it."

"So what?" said Hudson Rayburn. "The dryer is just a little cousin of the Big Wheel. The Big Wheel is the Father of all Speakers. Two years ago, before there were any hearers, Fred and I– Fred was the founder of the Wild and Crazy Guys, he is now a bond analyst– we sat in our lounge during a power blackout and smoked much fine peyote. And we looked out over the city and it was totally dark except for a few headlights. And then the power came back on, like with no warning, out of nowhere, just like that, and instantly, the streets, buildings, signs, everything, were there, and there is the Big Wheel hanging in space and god it just freaked our brains and we just sat there going 'Whooo!' and just being blown away and stuff! And then Big Wheel spoke to me! He spoke in the voice of Hannibal Smith on the A-Team and said, 'Son, you should come out here every time there is a blackout. This is fun. And if you buy some more of that peyote, you'll have more when you run out of what you have. Your fly is open and you should write to your mother, and I suggest that you drop that pre-calculus course before it saps your GPA and knocks you out of the running for law school.' And it was all exactly right! I did just what he said, he's been talking to me and my friends ever since, and he's always given great advice. Any other Speakers are just related to the Big Wheel."

There was another minute or two of silence. A stereo cult member finally said, "I just heard my favorite deejay from Youngstown. He says what we need is one hearer who can hear all the different speakers, who we can follow"

"Stop! The time comes!" cried Hudson Rayburn. He ran to the window and knelt, putting his elbows on the sill and clasping his hands. Just as he came to rest, the Big Wheel sign blazed out of the violet sky like a neutron bomb, its light mixing with that of Roy G Biv to make the lounge glow with unnatural colors. There was a minute or two of stillness, and then several people spoke at once.

"Someone's coming."

"Our leader is here."

"Let's see what this guy has to say."

Everyone now heard footsteps and a rhythmic slapping sound. The door opened and a tall thin scruffy figure strode in confidently. In one hand he was lugging a large old blue window fan which had a Go Big Red sticker stuck to its side. The grilles had been removed, exposing the blades, which had been painted bright colors, and as the man walked, the power cord slapped against the blades, making the sound that had alerted them. Wordlessly, he walked to the front of the group, put the fan up on the windowsill, drew the shades behind it to close off the view of the Big Wheel, and plugged it in. Another person had shut off Roy G Biv, and soon the room was mostly dark, inspiring a sleeping bat to wake up and flit around.

Once the fan was plugged in, they saw that its inside walls had been lined with deep purple black-light tubes, which caused the paint on the blades to glow fluorescently.

"Lo!" said the scruffy man, and rotated the fan's control to LO. The glowing blades began to spin and a light breeze blew into their faces. Those few who still bore stereos set them on the floor, and all stared mesmerized into the Fan.

"My name is Dex Fresser," said the new guy. "I am to tell you my story. Last semester, before Christmas break, I was at a big party on E31E. I was there to drink and smoke and stare down into the Big Wheel, which spoke to me regularly. At about midnight, Big Wheel spoke in the voice of the alien commander on my favorite video game. 'Better go pee before you lose it,' is what he said. So I went to pee. As I was standing in the bathroom peeing, the after-image of Big Wheel continued to hang in front of me, spinning on the wall over the urinal.

"I heard a noise and looked over toward the showers. There was a naked man with blood coming from his head. He was flopping around in the water. There was much steam, but the Go Big Red Fan blew the steam away, creeping toward him and making smoke and sparks of power. The alien commander spoke again, because I didn't know what to do. 'You'd better finish what you're doing,' it said, so I finished. Then I looked at the Fan again and the afterimage of the Big Wheel and the Fan became one in my sight and I knew that the Fan was the incarnation of the Big Wheel, come to lead us. I started for it, but it said, 'Better unplug me first. I could kill you, as I killed this guy. He used to be my priest but he was too independent.' So I unplugged Little Wheel and picked it up.

"It said, 'Get me out of here. I am smoking and the firemen will think I set off the alarm.' Yes, the fire alarm was ringing. So I took Little Wheel away and modified it as it told me, and today it told me I am to be your leader. Join me or your voices will become silent."

They had all listened spellbound, and when he was done, they jumped up with cheers and whoops. Dex Fresser bowed, smiling, and then, hearing a command, whirled around. The Fan had almost crept its way off the windowsill, and he saved it with a swoop of the hand.

In the middle of the month, as the ridges of packed grey snow around the Plex were beginning to settle and melt, negotiations between the administration and the MegaUnion froze solid and all B-men, professors, cletical workers and librarians went on strike. To detail the politics and posturings that led to this is nothing I'd like to do. Let's just say that when negotiations had begun six months before, the Union had sworn in the names of God, Death and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse that unless granted a number of wild, vast demands they would all perform hara kiri in President Krupp's bedroom. The administration negotiators had replied that before approaching to within a mile of the bargaining table they would prefer to drink gasoline, drop their grandchildren into volcanoes, convert the operation into a pasta factory and move it to Spokane.

Nothing unusual so far; all assumed that they would compromise from those positions. All except for the B-men, that is. After some minor compromising on both sides, the Crotobaltislavonian bloc, which was numerous enough to control the Union, apparently decided to stand their ground. As the clock ticked to within thirty minutes of the deadline, the Administration people just stared at them, while the other MegaUnion people watched with sweaty lunatic grins, waiting for the B-men to show signs of reason. But no.

Krupp came on the tube and said that American Megaversity could not afford its union, and that there was no choice but to let the strike proceed. The corridors vibrated with whooping and dancing for a few hours, and the strike was on.

As the second semester lurched and staggered onward, I noted that my friends had a greater tendency to drop by my suite at odd times, insist they didn't want to bother me and sit around reading old magazines, examining my plants, leafing through cookbooks and so on. My suite was not exactly Grandma's house, but it had become the closest thing they had to a home. After the strike began, I saw even more of them. Living in the Plex was tolerable when you could stay busy with school and keep reminding yourself that you were just a student, but it was a slough of despond when your purpose in life was to wait for May.

I threw a strike party for them. Sarah, Casimir, Hyacinth, Virgil and Ephraim made up the guest list, and Fred Fine happened to stop by so that he could watch a Dr. Who rerun on my TV. We all knew that Fred Fine was weird, but at this point only Virgil knew how weird. Only Virgil knew that an S & S player had died in the sewers during one of Fred Fine's games, and that the young nerd-lord had simply disregarded it. The late Steven Wilson was still a Missing Person as far as the authorities were concerned.

Ephraim Klein was just as odd in his own way. We knew that his hated ex-roommate had died of a freak heart attack on the night of the Big Flush, but we didn't know Ephraim had anything to do with it. We were not alarmed by his strange personality because it was useful in parties– he would allow no conversation to flag or fail.

Virgil sat in a corner, sipping Jack Daniels serenely and staring through the floor. Casimir stayed near Sarah, who stayed near Hyacinth. Other people stopped in from time to time, but I haven't written them into the following transcript– which has been rearranged and guessed at quite a bit anyway.

HYACINTH. The strike will get rid of Krupp. After that everything will be fine.

EPHRAIM. How can you say that! You think the problem with this place is just S. S. Krupp?

BUD. Sarah, how's your forest coming along?

EPHRAIM. Everywhere you look you see the society coming apart. How do you blame S. S. Krupp alone for that?

SARAH. I haven't done much with it lately. It's just nice to have it there.

CASIMIR. Do you really think the place is getting worse? I think you're just seeing it more clearly now that classes are shut down.

HYACINTH. You were in Professor Sharon's office during the piano incident, weren't you?

FRED FINE. What do you propose we do, Ephraim?

EPHRAIM. Blow it up.

CASIMIR. Yeah, I was right there.

HYACINTH. So for you this place has seemed terrible right from the beginning. You've got a different perspective.

SARAH. Ephraim! What do you mean? How would it help any-thing to blow up the Big U?

EPHRAIM. I didn't say it would help, I said it would prevent further deterioration.

SARAH. What could be more deteriorated than a destroyed Plex?

EPHRAIM. Nothing! Get it?

SARAH. You do have a point. This building, and the bureaucracy here, can drive people crazy– divorce them from reality so they don't know what to do. Somehow the Plex has to go. But I don't think it should be blown up.

FRED FINE. Have you ever computed the explosive power necessary to destabilize the Plex?

EPHRAIM. Of course not!

CASIMIR. He's talking to me. No, I haven't.

HYACINTH. Is that nerd as infatuated with you as he looks?

SARAH. Uh… you mean Fred Fine?

HYACINTH. Yeah.

SARAH. I think so. Please, it's too disgusting.

HYACINTH. No shit.

FRED FINE. I have computed where to place the charges.

CASIMIR. It'd be a very complicated setup, wouldn't it? Lots of timed detonations?

BUD (drunk). So do you think that the decay of the society is actually built into the actual building itself?

SARAH. The reason he likes me is because he knows I carry a gun. He saw it in the Caf.

EPHRAIM. Of course! How else can you explain all this? It's too big and it's too uniform. Every room, every wing is just the same as the others. It's a giant sensory deprivation experiment.

HYACINTH. A lot of those science-fiction types have big sexual hangups. You ever look at a science-fiction magazine? All these women in brass bras with whips and chains and so on– dominatrices. But the men who read that stuff don't even know it.

EPHRAIM. Did you know that whenever I play anything in the key of C, the entire Wing vibrates?

FRED FINE. This one worked out the details from the blueprints. All you need is to find the load-bearing columns and make some simple calculations.

EPHRAIM. Hey! Casimir!

CASIMIR. Yeah?

SARAH. What's scary is that all of these fucked-up people, who have problems and don't even know it, are going to go out and make thirty thousand dollars a year and be important. Well all be clerk-typists.

EPHRAIM. You're in physics. What's the frequency of a low C? Like in a sixty-four-foot organ pipe?

CASIMIR. Hell, I don't know. That's music theory.

EPHRAIM. Shit. Hey, Bud, you got a tape measure?

CASIMIR. I'd like to take music theory sometime. One of my professors has interesting things to say about the similarity between the way organ pipes are controlled by keys and stops, and the way random-access memory bits are read by computers.

BUD. I've got an eight-footer.

FRED FINE. This one doesn't listen to that much music. It would be pleasant to have time for the luxuries of life. In some D & D scenarios, musicians are given magical abilities. Einstein and Planck used to play violin sonatas together.

EPHRAIM. We have to measure the length of the hallways!

The conversation split up into three parts. Ephraim and I went out to measure the hallway. Hyacinth was struck by a craving for Oreos and repaired to the kitchen with a fierce determination that none dared question. Casimir followed her. Sarah, Fred Fine and Virgil stayed in the living room.

FRED FINE. What's your major?

SARAH. English.

FRED FINE. Ah, very interesting. This one thought you were in Forestry.

SARAH. Why?

FRED FINE. Didn't host mention your forest?

SARAH. That's different. It's what I painted on my wall.

FRED FINE. Well, well, well. A little illegal room painting, eh? Don't worry, I wouldn't report you. Is this part of an other-world scenario, by any chance? SARAH. Hell, no, it's for the opposite. Look, this place is already an other-world scenario.

FRED FINE. No. That's where you're wrong. This is reality. It is a self-sustaining ecosociosystem powered by inter-universe warp generators.

(There is a long silence.)

VIRGIL. Fred, what did you think of Merriam's Math Physics course?

(There is another long silence.)

FRED FINE. Well. Very good. Fascinating. I would recommend it.

SARAH. Where's the bathroom?

FRED FINE. Ever had to pull that pepper grinder of yours on one of those Terrorist guys?

SARAH. Maybe we can discuss it some other time.

FRED FINE. I'd recommend more in the way of a large-gauge shotgun.

SARAH. I'll be back.

FRED FINE. Of course, in a magical universe it would turn into a two-handed broadsword, which would be difficult for a petite type to wield.

Meanwhile Casimir and Hyacinth talked in the kitchen. They had met once before, when they had stopped by my suite on the same evening; they didn't know each other well, but Casimir had heard enough to suspect that she was not particularly heterosexual. She knew a fair amount about him through Sarah.

HYACINTH. You want some Oreos too?

CASIMIR. No, not really. Thanks.

HYACINTH. Did you want to talk about something?

CASIMIR. How did you know?

HYACINTH (scraping Oreo filling with front teeth). Well, sometimes some things are easy to figure out.

CASIMIR. Well, I'm really worried about Sarah. I think there's something wrong with her. It's really strange that she resigned as President when she was doing so well. And ever since then, she's been kind of hard to get along with.

HYACINTH. Kind of bitchy?

CASIMIR. Yeah, that's it.

HYACINTH. I don't think she's bitchy at all. I think she's just got a lot on her mind, and all her good friends have to be patient with her while she works it out.

CASIMIR. Oh, yeah, I agree. What I was thinking– well, this is none of my business.

HYACINTH. What?

CASIMIR. Oh, last semester I figured out that she was dating some other guy, you know? Though she wouldn't tell me anything about him. Did she have some kind of a breakup that's been painful for her?

HYACINTH. No, no, she and her lover are getting along wonderfully. But I'm sure she'd appreciate knowing how concerned you are.

(Long silence.)

HYACINTH (slinging one arm around Casimir's waist, feeding Oreo into his mouth with other hand). Hey, it feels terrible, doesn't it? Look, Casimir, she likes you a hell of a lot. I mean it. And she hates to put you through this kind of pain– or she wishes you wouldn't put yourself through it. She thinks you're terrific.

CASIMIR (blubbering).Well what the hell does it take? All she does is say I'm wonderful. Am I unattractive? Oh, I forgot. Sorry, I've never talked to a, ah

HYACINTH. You can say it.

CASIMIR. Lesbian. Thanks.

HYACINTH. You're welcome.

CASIMIR. Why can she look at one guy and say, "He's a friend," and look at this other guy and say, "He's a lover?"

HYACINTH. Instinct. There's no way you can go against her instincts, Casimir, don't even think about it. As for you, I think you're kind of attractive, but then, I'm a dyke.

CASIMIR. Great. The only woman in the world, besides my mother, who thinks I'm good looking is a lesbian.

HYACINTH. Don't think about it. You're hurting yourself.

CASIMIR. God, I'm sorry to dump this on you. I don't even know you.

HYACINTH. It's a lot easier to talk when you don't have to worry about the sexual thing, isn't it?

CASIMIR. That's for sure. Good thing I've got my sunglasses, no one can tell I've been crying.

HYACINTH. Let's talk more later. We've abandoned Sarah with Fred Fine, you know.

CASIMIR. Shit.

Casimir pulled himself together and they went back to the living room. Shortly, Ephraim and I returned from the hallway with our announcement.

BUD. Isn't it interesting how the alcohol goes to your head when you get up and start moving around?

EPHRAIM. The hallway on each side of each wing is a hundred twenty-eight feet and a few inches long. But the fire doors in the middle cut it exactly in half– sixty-four feet!

BUD. And three inches.

EPHRAIM. So they resonate at low C.

FRED FINE. Very interesting.

VIRGIL. Casimir, when are you going to stop playing mum about Project Spike?

CASIMIR. What? Don't talk about that!

SARAH. What's Project Spike?

CASIMIR. Nothing much. I was playing with rats.

FRED FINE. What does this one hear about rats?

VIRGIL. Casimir was trying to prove the existence of rat parts or droppings in the Cafeteria food through a radioactive tracer system. He came up with some very interesting results. But he's naturally shy, so he hasn't mentioned them to anyone.

CASIMIR. The results were screwed up! Anyone can see that.

VIRGIL. No way. They weren't random enough to be considered as errors. Your results indicated a far higher level of Carbon-14 in the food than could be possible, because they could never eat that much poison. Right?

CASIMIR. Right. And they had other isotopes that couldn't possibly be in the rat poison, such as Cesium– 137. The entire thing was screwed up.

FRED FINE. How large are the rats in question?

CASIMIR. Oh, pretty much your average rats, I guess.

FRED FINE. But they are not– they were normal? Like this?

CASIMIR. About like that, yeah. What did you expect?

VIRGIL. Have you analyzed any other rats since Christmas?

CASIMIR. Yeah. Damn it.

VIRGIL. And they were just as contaminated.

CASIMIR. More so. Because of what i did,

SARAH. What's wrong, Casimir?

CASIMIR. Well, I sort of lost some plutonium down an elevator shaft in the Big Flush.

(Ephraim gives a strange hysterical laugh.)

FRED FINE. God. You've created a race of giant rats, Casimir. Giant rats the size of Dobermans.

BUD. Giant rats?

HYACINTH. Giant rats?

BUD. Virgil, explain everything to us, okay?

VIRGIL. I am sure that there are giant rats in the sewer tunnels beneath the Plex. I am sure that they're scared of strobe lights, and that strobes flashing faster than about sixteen per second drive them crazy. This may be related to the frequency of muzzle flashes produced by certain automatic weapons, but that's just a hypothesis. I know that there are organized activities going on at a place in the tunnels that are of a secret, highly technological, heavily guarded nature. As for the rats, I assume they were created by mutation from high levels of background radiation. This included Strontium-90 and Cesium– 137 and possibly an iodine isotope. The source of the radiation could possibly have been what Casimir lost down the elevator shaft, but I suspect it has more to do with this secret activity. In any case, we now have a responsibility. We need to discover the source of the radioactivity, look for ways to control the rats and, if possible, divine the nature of the secret activity. I have a plan of attack worked up, but I'll need help. I need people familiar with the tunnels, like Fred; people who know how to use guns– we have some here; big people in good physical condition, like Bud; people who understand the science, like Casimir; and maybe even someone who knows all about Remote Sensing, such as Professor Bud again.

An advantage of the Plex was that it taught you to accept any weirdness immediately. We did not question Virgil. He memorized a list of equipment he'd have to scrounge for us, and Hyacinth grilled us until we had settled on March 31 as our expedition date. Fred Fine said he knew where he could get authentic dumdums for our guns, and tried to tell us that the best way to kill a rat was with a sword, giving a lengthy demonstration until Virgil told him to sit down. Once we had mobilized into an amateur commando team, we found that our partying spirit was spent, and soon we were all home trying vainly to sleep.

The strike itself has been studied and analyzed to death, so I'm spared writing a full account. For the most part the picketers stayed within the Plex. Their intent was to hamper activities inside the Plex, not to seal it off, and they feared that once they went outside, S. S. Krupp would not let them back in again. Some protesters did work the entrances, though. A delegation of B-men and professors set up an informational picket at the Main Entrance, and another two dozen established a line to bar access to the loading docks. Most of these were Crotobaltislavonians who paraded tirelessly in their heavy wool coats and big fur hats; with them were some black and Hispanic workers, dressed more conventionally, and three political science professors, each wearing high-tech natural-tone synthetic-insulated expedition parkas computer-designed to keep the body dry while allowing perspiration to pass out. Most of the workers sported yellow or orange work gloves, but the professors opted for warm Icelandic wool mittens, presumably to keep their fingers supple in case they had to take notes.

The picket's first test came at 8:05 A.M., when the morning garbage truck convoy arrived. The trucks turned around and left with no trouble. Forcing garbage to build up inside the Plex seemed likely to make the administration more openminded. Therefore the only thing allowed to leave the Plex was the hazardous chemical waste from the laboratories; run-of-the-mill trash could only be taken out if the administration and Trustees hauled it away in their Cadillacs.

A little later, a refrigerated double-bottom semi cruised up, fresh and steaming from a two-day, 1500-mile trek from Iowa, loaded with enough rock-frozen beef to supply American Megaversity for two days. This was out of the question, as the people working in the Cafeteria now were all scabs. The political science professors failed to notice that their comrades had all dropped way back and split up into little groups and put their signs on the ground. They walked toward the semi, waving their arms over their heads and motioning it back, and finally the enormous gleaming machine sighed and slowed. An anarcho-Trotskyite with blow-dried hair and a thin blond mustache stepped up to the driver's side and squinted way up above his head at a size 25 black leather glove holding a huge chained rawhide wallet which had been opened to reveal a Teamsters card. The truck driver said nothing. The professor started to explain that this was a picket line, then paused to read the Teamsters card. Stepping back a little and craning his neck, he could see only black greased-back hair and the left lens of a pair of mirror sunglasses.

"Great!" said the professor. "Glad to see you're in solidarity with the rest of us workers. Can you get out of here with no problem, or shall I direct you?" He smiled at the left-hand lens of the driver's sunglasses, trying to make it a tough smile, not a cultured pansyish smile.

"You AFL-CIO," rumbled the trucker, sounding like a rough spot in the idle of the great diesel. "Me Teamsters. I'm late." The professor admired the no-nonsense speech of the common people, but sensed that he was failing to pick up on some message the trucker was trying to send him. He looked around for another worker who might be able to understand, but saw that the only people within shotgun-blast range of the truck had Ph.D.'s. Of these, one was jogging up to the truck with an impatient look on his face. He was a slightly gray-tinged man in his early forties, who in consultation with his orthopedist had determined that the running gait least damaging to his knees was a shuffling motion with the arms down to the sides. Thus he approached the truck. "Turn it around, buster, this is a strike. You're crossing a picket line."

There was another rumble from the truck window. This sounded more like laughter than words. The trucker withdrew his hand for a moment, then swung it back out like a wrecking ball. Balanced on the tip of his index finger was a quarter. "See this?" said the trucker.

"Yeah," said the professors in unison.

"This is a quarter. I put it in that pay phone and there's blood on the sidewalks."

The professors looked at each other, and at the third professor, who had stopped in his space-age hiking-boot tracks. They all retreated to the other end of the lot for a discussion of theory and praxis as the truck eased up to the loading dock. They watched the trucker carry his two-hundred pound steer pieces into the warehouse, then concluded that a policy decision should be made at a higher level. The real target of this picket ought to be the scabs working the warehouse and Cafeteria. All the Crotobaltislavonians had gone inside, and the professors, finding themselves in an empty lot with only the remains of a few dozen steers to keep them company, decided to re-deploy inside the Plex.

There things were noisier. People who never engage in violence are quick to talk about it, especially when the people they are arguing with are elderly Greek professors unlikely to be carrying tire chains or knives. Of course, the Greek professors, who tried to engage the picketers in Socratic dialogue as they broke the picket lines, were not subject to much more than occasional pushing. Among younger academics there were genuine fights. A monetarist from Connecticut finally came to blows with an Algerian Maoist with whom he'd been trading scathing articles ever since they had shared an office as grad students. This fight turned out to be of the tedious kind held by libidinous orthodontists' sons at suburban video arcades. The monetarist tried to break through the line around the Economics bloc, just happening to attack that part of the line where the Maoist was standing. After some pushing the monetarist fell down with the Algerian on top of him. They got up and the monetarist missed with some roundhouse kicks taken from an aerobic dance routine. The Maoist whipped off his designer belt and began to whirl the buckle around his head as though it were dangerous. The monetarist watched indecisively, then ran up and stuck out his arm so that the belt wrapped around it. As he had his eyes closed, he did not know where he was going, but as though guided by some invisible hand he rammed into the Algerian's belly with his head and they fell onto a stack of picket signs and received minor injuries. The Algerian grabbed the monetarist's Adam Smith tie and tried to strangle him, but the latter's gold collar pin prevented the knot from tightening. He grabbed the Maoist's all-natural-fiber earthtone slacks and yanked them down to midthigh, occasioning a strange cry from his opponent, who removed one hand from the Adam Smith tie to prevent the loss of further garments; the monetarist grasped the Algerian's pinkie and yanked the other hand free. Finding that they had made their way to the opposite side of the picket line, he got up and skipped away, though the Maoist hooked his foot with a picket sign and hindered him considerably.

Students wanting to attend classes in the ROTC bloc found that they need only assume fake Kung Fu positions and the skinny pale fanatics there would get out of their way. Otherwise, students going to classes taught by nonunion professors worried only about verbal abuse. Unless they were aggressively obnoxious, like Ephraim Klein, they were in no physical peril. Ephraim went out of his way to cross picket lines, and unleashed many awe-inspiring insults he had apparently been saving up for years. Fortunately for him he spent most of his time around the Philosophy bloc, where the few picketing professors devoted most of their time to smoking cigarettes, exchanging dirty jokes and discussing basketball.

The entrance to the Cafeteria was a mess. The MegaUnion could never agree on what to do about it, because to allow students inside was to support S. S. Krupp's scab labor, and to block the place off was to starve the students. Depriving the students of meals they had already paid for was no way to make friends. Finally the students were encouraged to prepare their own meals as a gesture of support. In an attempt at plausibility, some efforts were mounted to steal food from Caf warehouses, but to no avail. The radicals advocated conquering the kitchen by main force, but all entrances were guarded by private guards with cudgels, dark glasses and ominous bulges. The radicals therefore used aerial bombardment, hurling things from the towers in hopes that they would crash through Tar City and into the kitchens. This was haphazard, though, and moderate MegaUnion members opposed it violently; as a result, students who persisted in dining at the Caf were given merely verbal abuse. As for the scabs themselves, they were determined-looking people, and activists attempting to show them the error of their ways tried not to raise their voices or to make any fast moves.

Then, seven days into the strike, it really happened: what the union had never dreamed of, what I, sitting in my suite reading the papers and plunging into a bitter skepticism, had been awaiting with a sort of sardonic patience. The Board of Trustees announced that American Megaversity was shutting down for this year, that credit would be granted for unfinished courses and that an early graduation ceremony would take place in mid-April. Everyone was to be out of the Plex by the end of March.

"Well," said S. S. Krupp on the tube, "I don't know what all the confusion's about. Seems to me we are being quite straightforward. We can't afford our faculty and workers. We can't meet our commitment to our students for this semester. About all we can do is clean the place out, hire some new faculty, re-enroll and get going again. God knows there are enough talented academics out there who need jobs. So we're asking all those people in the Plex to clear out as soon as they can."

The infinite self-proclaimed cleverness of the students enabled them to dismiss it as a fabulous lie and a ham-fisted maneuver. Once this opinion was formed by the few, it was impossible for the many to disagree, because to believe Krupp was to proclaim yourself a dupe. Few students therefore planned to leave; those who did found it perilous.

The Terrorists had decided that leaving the Plex was too unusual an idea to go unchallenged, and the Big Wheel backed them up on it. So the U-Hauls and Jartrans stacked up in the access lot began to suffer dents, then craters, then cave-ins, as golf balls, chairs, bricks, barbell weights and flaming newspaper bundles zinged out of the smoggy morning sky at their terminal velocities and impacted on their shiny tops. Few rental firms in the City had lent vehicles to students in the first place; those that did quickly changed their policies, and became dour and pitiless as desperate sophomores paraded before their reception desks waving wads of cash and Mom-and-Dad's credit cards.

The Plexodus, as it was dubbed by local media, dwindled to a dribble of individual escapes in which students would sprint from the cover of the Main Entrance carrying whatever they could hold in their arms and dive into the back seats of cars idling by on the edge of the Parkway, cars which then would scurry off as fast as their meager four cylinders could drag them before the projectiles hurled from the towers above had had time to find their targets.

I had seen enough of Krupp to know that the man meant what he said. I also had seen enough of the Plex to know that no redemption was possible for the place– no last-minute injection of reason could save this patient from its overdose of LSD and morphine. Lucy agreed with me. You may vaguely remember her as Hyacinth's roommate. Lucy and I hit it off pretty well, especially as March went on. The shocks and chaos that took everyone else by surprise were just what we had been expecting, and both of us were surprised that our friends hadn't foreseen it. Of course our perspectives were different from theirs; we both had slaves for great-grandparents and the academic world was foreign to our backgrounds. Through decades of work our families had put us into universities because that was the place to be; when we finally arrived, we found we were just in time to witness the end result of years of dry rot. No surprise that things looked different to us.

Lucy and I began making long tours of the Plex to see what further deterioration had taken place. By this time the Terrorists outnumbered their would-be victims. The notion that the strike might be resolved restrained them for a while, but then came the pervasive sense that the Big U was dead and the rumor that it had already been slated for demolition. Obviously there was no point in maintaining the place if destruction loomed, so all the Terrorists had to worry about were the administration guards.

The Seritech Super Big-Window 1500 in Laundry soon disappeared, carted off by its worshipers. Unfortunately the machine didn't work on their wing, which lacked 240-volt outlets. Using easy step-by-step instructions provided by its voice, they tore open the back and arranged a way of rotating it by hand whenever they needed to know what to make for dinner or what to watch on TV.

In those last days of March it was difficult to make sense of anything. It was hinted that the union was splitting up, that the faculty had become exasperated by the implacable Crotobaltislavonians and planned to make a separate peace with the Trustees. This caused further infighting within the decaying MegaUnion and added to the confusion. Electricity and water were shut off, then back on again; students on the higher floors began to throw their garbage down the open elevator shafts, and fire alarms rang almost continuously until they were wrecked by infuriated residents. But we thought obsessively about Virgil's reference to secret activities in the sewers and developed the paranoid idea that everything around us was strictly superficial and based on a much deeper stratum of intrigue. It's hard enough to follow events such as these without having to keep the mind open for possible conspiracies and secrets behind every move. This uncertainty made it impossible for us to form any focused picture of the tapestry of events, and we became impatient for Saturday night, tired of having to withhold judgment until we knew all the facts. What had been conceived as an almost recreational visit to the Land of the Rats had become, in our minds, the search for the central fact of American Megaversity.

A hoarse command was shouted, and a dozen portable lamps shone out at once. Forty officers of MARS found themselves in a round low-ceilinged chamber that served as the intersection of two sewer mains. They stood at ease around the walls as Fred Fine, in the center, delivered his statement.

"We've never revealed the existence of this area before. It's our only Level Four Security Zone large enough for mass debriefings. "All of you have been in MARS for at least three years and have performed well. Most of you didn't understand why we included physical fitness standards as part of our promotion system. Things got a little clearer when we introduced you to live-action gaming. Now, this– this is the hard part to explain."

All watched respectfully as he stared at the ceiling. Finally he resumed his address, though his voice had become as harsh and loud as that of a barbarian warlord addressing his legions. The officers now began to concentrate; the game had begun, they must enter character.

"You know about the Central Bifurcation that separates Magic and Technology. Some of you have probably noticed that lately Leakage has been very bad. Well, I've got tough news. It's going to get a lot worse. We are approaching the most critical period in the history of Plexor. If we do what needs to be done, we can stop Leakage for all time and enter an eternal golden age. If we fail, the Leakage will become like a flood of water from a broken pipe. Mixture will be everywhere, Purification will be impossible, and mediocrity will cover the universes for all time like a dark cloud. Plexor will become a degenerate, pre-warp-drive society.

"That's right. The responsibility for this universe-wide task falls on our shoulders. We are the chosen band of warriors and heroes called for in the prophecies of Magic-Plexor, foretold by JANUS 64 itself. That means you'll need a crash course on Plexor and how it works. That's why we're here.

"Consuela, known in Magic-Plexor as the High Priestess Councilla, is a top-notch programmer in Techno-Plexor. She therefore knows all there is to know about the Two Faces of Shekondar. Councilla, over to you."

"Good evening," came the voice from Fred Fine's big old vacuum-tube radio receiver. She sounded very calm and soft, as though drugged. "This is Councilla, High Priestess of Shekondar the Fearsome, King of Two Faces. Prepare your minds for the Awful Secrets. Plexor was created by the Guild, a team consisting half of Technologists and half of Sorcerers who operated in separate universes through the devices of Keldor, the astral demigod whose brain hemispheres existed on either side of the Central Bifurcation. Under Keldor's guidance the colony of Plexor was created: a self-contained ecosystem capable of functioning in any environment, drawing energy and raw materials from any source, and resisting any magical or technological attack. When Plexor was completed, it was populated by selecting the best and the brightest from all the Thousand Galaxies and comparing them in a great tournament. The field of competition was split down the middle by the Central Bifurcation, and on one side the contestants fought with swords and sorcery, while on the other they vied in tests of intellectual skill. The champions were inputted to Plexor; we are their output.

"The Guild had to place an overseer over Plexor. It must be the Operating System for the Technological side, and the Prime Deity for the Magic side, and in Plexor it must be omniscient and all-powerful. Thus, the Guild generated Shekondar the Fearsome/JANUS 64, the Organism that inhabits and controls the colony. The creation of this system took twice as long as the building of Plexor itself, and in the end Keldor died, his mind overloaded by massive transfers of data from one hemisphere to the other, the Boundary within his mind destroyed and the contents Mixed hopelessly. But out of his death came the King of Two Faced, that which in Techno-Plexor is JANUS 64 and in Magic Plexor, Shekondar the Fearsome.

"Though the last member of the Guild died two thousand years ago, most Plexorians have revered the King of Two Faces. But in these dark days, at the close of this age, those who know the story of Shekondar/JANUS 64 are very few. We who have kept the flame alive have trained your bodies and minds to accept this responsibility. Today, our efforts output in batch. From this room will march the Grand Army celebrated in the prophecies and songs of Magic-Plexor, whose coming has been foretold even in the seemingly random errors of JANUS 64; the band of heroes which will debug Plexor, which will fight Mixture in the approaching crisis. And for those of you who have failed to detect Mixture, who scoff that Magic might have crossed the Central Bifurcation:

Behold!"

The listeners had now allowed themselves to sink deep into their characters, and Councilla's words had begun to mesmerize them. Though a few had grinned at the silliness spewing out of the big speakers, the oppressive seriousness and magical unity that filled this dank chamber had silenced them; soon, cut off from the normal world, they began to doubt themselves, and heeded the Priestess. As she built to a climax and revealed the most profound secrets of Plexor, many began to sweat and tingle, fidgeting with terrified energy. When she cried, "Behold!" the spell was bound up in a word. The room became silent with fear as all wondered what demonic demonstration she had conjured up.

A sssh! was heard, and it avalanched into a loud, general hiss. When that sound died away, it was easy to hear a soft, cacophonous noise, a jumble of sharp high tones that sounded like a distant kazoo band. The sound seemed to come from one of the tunnels, though echoes made it hard to tell which one. It was approaching quickly. Suddenly and rapidly, everyone cleared away from the four tunnel openings and plastered against the walls. Only when all the others had found places did Klystron the Impaler move. He walked calmly through the center of the room, leaving the radio receiver and speakers in the middle, and found himself a place in front of a hushed squadron of swordsmen. The roar swelled to a scream; a bat the size of an eagle pumped out of a tunnel, took a fast turn around the room, sending many of the men to their knees, then plunged decisively into another passage. As the roar exploded into the open, in the garish artificial light the Grand Army saw a swarm of enormous fat brown-grey lash-tailed bright-eyed screaming frothing rats vomit from the tunnel, veer through the middle of the room and compress itself into the opening through which the giant bat had flown. Some of them smashed headlong into the old boxy radio, sending it sprawling across the floor, and before it had come to rest, five rats had parted from the stream and demolished it, scything their huge gleaming rodent teeth through the plywood case as though it were an orange peel, prying the apparatus apart, munching into its glass-and-metal innards with insane passion. Their frenzy lasted for several seconds; their brothers had all gone; and they emitted piercing shrieks and scuttled off into the tunnel, one trailing behind a streak of twisted wire and metal.

Most everyone save Klystron sat on the floor in a fetal position, arms crossed over faces, though some had drawn swords or clubs, prepared to fight it out. None moved for two minutes, lest they draw another attack. When the warriors began to show life again, they moved with violent trembling and nauseated dizziness and the most perfect silence they could attain. No one strayed from the safety of the walls except for Klystron the Impaler/Chris the Systems Programmer, who paced to a spot where a thousand rat footprints had stomped a curving highway into the thin sludge. Hardly anyone here, he knew, had been convinced of the Central Bifurcation, much less of the danger of Mixture. That was understandable, given the badly Mixed environment which had twisted their minds. Klystron/Chris had done all he could to counter such base thinking, but the rise of the giant rats, and careful preparation by him and Councilla and Chip Dixon, had provided proof.

He let them think it over. It was not an easy thing, facing up to one's own importance; even he had found it difficult. Finally he spoke out in a clear and firm voice, and every head in the room snapped around to pay due respect to their leader.

"Do I have a Grand Army?"

The mumbled chorus sounded promising. Klystron snapped his sword from its scabbard and held it on high, making sure to avoid electrical cables. "All hail Shekondar the Fearsome!" he trumpeted.

Swords, knives, chains and clubs crashed out all around and glinted in the mist. "All hail Shekondar the Fearsome!" roared the army in reply, and four times it was answered by echoes from the tunnels. Klystron/Chris listened to it resonate, then spoke with cool resolve: "It is time to begin the Final Preparations."

An advantage of living in a decaying civilization was that nobody really cared if you chose to roam the corridors laden with armfuls of chest waders, flashlights, electrical equipment and weaponry. We did receive alarmed scrutiny from some, and boozy inquiries from friendly Terrorists, but were never in danger from the authorities. A thirty-minute trek through the deepening chaos of the Plex took us to the Burrows, which were still inhabited by people devoted to such peaceful pursuits as gaming, computer programming, research and Star Trek reruns.

From here a freight elevator took us to the lowest sublevel, where Fred Fine led us through dingy hallways plastered with photos of nude Crotobaltislavonian princesses until we came to a large room filled with plumbing. From here, Virgil used his master key to let us into a smaller room, from which a narrow spiral staircase led into the depths.

"I go first," said Virgil quietly, "with the Sceptre. Hyacinth follows with her .44. Bud follows her with the heavy gloves, then Sarah and Casimir with the backpacks, and Fred in the rear with his sixteen-gauge. No noise."

After one or two turns of the stair we had to switch on our headlamps. The trip down was long and tense, and we seemed to make a hellacious racket on the echoing metal treads. I kept my beam on the blazing white-gold beacon of Virgil's hair and listened to the breathing and the footsteps behind me. The air had a harsh damp smell that told me I was sucking in billions of microbes of all descriptions with each breath. Toward the bottom we slipped on our gas masks, and I found I was breathing much faster than I needed to.

The rats were waiting a full fifty feet above the bottom. One had his mouth clamped over Virgil's lower leg before he had switched on the Sceptre of Cosmic Force. The flashing drove away the rest of the rats, who tumbled angrily down the stair on top of one another, but the first beast merely clamped down harder and hung on, too spazzed out to move. Fortunately, Hyacinth did not try to shoot it on the spot. I slipped past, flexed my big elbow-length padded gloves, and did battle with the rat. The rodent teeth had not penetrated the soccer shinguards Virgil wore beneath his waders, so I took my time, relaxing and squatting down to look into the animal's glowering white-rimmed eye. His bared chisel teeth, a few inches long and an inch wide, flickered purple-yellow with each flash of the strobe. Having sliced through Virgil's waders to expose the colorful plastic shinguard, the rat now tried to gnaw its way through the obstacle without letting go. I did not have the strength to pull its mouth open.

"A German shepherd can exert hundreds of pounds of jaw force," said Fred Fine, standing above and peering over Casimir's shoulder with scientific coolness.

The rat was not impressed by any of this.

"Let's go for a clean kill," suggested its victim with a trace of strain, "and then we'll have our sample."

I bashed in the back of its head with an oaken leg I had foresightedly unscrewed from my kitchen table for the occasion. The rat just barely fit into a large heavy-duty leaf bag; Virgil twist-tied it shut and we left it there.

And so into the tunnels. The sewers were unusually fluid that night as thousands of cubic feet of beer made its traditional way through the digestive tracks of the degenerates upstairs and into the sanitary system. Hence we stuck to the catwalks along the sides of the larger tunnels– as did the rats. The Sceptre was hard on our eyes, so Virgil waited until they were perilously close before switching it on and driving them in squalling bunches into the stream below. We did not have to use the guns, though Fred Fine insisted on shooting his flash gun at a rat to see how they liked it. Not at all, as it happened, and Fred Fine pronounced it "very interesting."

Casimir said, "Where did my radioactive source fall to? Are we going anywhere near there?"

"Good point," said Fred Fine. "Let's steer clear of that. Don't want blasted 'nads."

"I know where it went, but it's not there now," said Virgil. "The rats ate everything. Some rat obviously got a free surprise in with his paraffin, but I don't know where he ended up.' Fred Fine began to point out landmarks: where he had left the corpse of the Microwave Lizard, long since eaten by you know what; where Steven Wilson had experienced his last and biggest surprise; the tunnel that led to the Sepulchre of Keldor. His voice alternated between the pseudo-scientific dynamo hum of Fred Fine and the guttural baritone of the war hero. We had heard this stuff from him for a couple of weeks now, but down in the tunnels it really started to perturb us. Most people, on listening to a string of nonsense, will tend to doubt their own sanity before they realize that the person who is jabbering at them is really the one with the damaged brain. That night, tramping through offal, attacking giant rats with a strobe light and listening to the bizarre memoirs of Klystron, most of us were independently wondering whether or not we were crazy. So when we asked Fred Fine for explanations, it was not because we wanted to hear more Klystron stories (as he assumed); it was because we wanted to get an idea of what other people were thinking. We were quickly able to realize that the world was indeed okay, that Fred Fine was bonkers and we were fine.

Hundreds of cracked and gnawed bones littered one intersection, and Virgil identified it as where he had discovered the useful properties of the Sceptre. This area was high and dry, as these things went, and many rats lurked about. Virgil switched the Sceptre on for good, forcing them back to the edge of the dark, where they chattered and flashed their red eyes. Hyacinth stuffed wads of cotton in her ears, apparently in case of a shootout.

"Let's set up the 'scope," Virgil suggested. Casimir swung off his pack and withdrew a heavily padded box, from which he took a small portable oscilloscope. This device had a tiny TV screen which would display sound patterns picked up by a shotgun microphone which was also in the pack. As the 'scope warmed up, Casimir plugged the microphone cord into a socket on its front. A thin luminous green line traced across the middle of the screen.

Virgil aimed the mike down the main passageway and turned it on. The line on the screen split into a chaotic tangle of dim green static. Casimir played with various knobs, and quickly the wild flailing of the signal was compressed into a pattern of random vibes scrambling across the screen. "White noise," said Fred Fine. "Static to you laymen."

"Keep an eye on it," said Virgil, and pointed the mike down the smaller side tunnel. The white noise was abruptly replaced by nearly vertical lines marching across the screen. Casimir compressed the signal down again, and we saw that it was nothing more than a single stationary sine wave, slightly unruly but basically stable.

"Very interesting," said Fred Fine.

"What's going on?" Sarah asked.

"This is a continuous ultrasonic tone," said Virgil. "It's like an unceasing dog whistle. It comes from some artificial source down that tunnel. You see, when I point the mike in most directions we get white noise, which is normal. But this is a loud sound at a single pitch. To the rats it would sound like a drawn-out note on an organ. That explains why they cluster in this particular area; it's music to their ears, though it's very simple music. In fact, it's monotonous."

"How did you know to look for this?" asked Sarah.

Virgil shrugged. "It was plausible that an installation as modern and carefully guarded as the one I saw would have some kind of ultrasonic alarm system. It's pretty standard."

"Very interesting," said Fred Fine.

"It's like sonar. Anything that disturbs the echo, within a certain range, sets off the alarm. Here's the question: why don't the rats set it off?"

"Some kind of barrier keeps them away," said Casimir.

"I agree. But I didn't see any barrier. When I was here before, they could run right up to the door– they had to be fought off with machine guns. They must have put up a barrier since I was last down here. What that means to us is this: we can go as far as the barrier, whatever it may be, without any fear of setting off the alarm system."

We moved down the tunnel in a flying wedge, making use of table leg, Sceptre and sword as necessary. Soon we arrived at the barrier, which turned out to be insubstantial but difficult to miss: a frame of angle-irons welded together along the walls and ceiling, hung with dozens of small, brilliant spotlights. At this point, any rat would find itself bathed in blinding light and turn back in terror and pain. Beyond this wall of light there was only a single line of footprints– human– in the bat guano. "Someone's been changing the light bulbs," concluded Sarah.

The fifty feet of corridor preceding the light-wall were littered almost knee-deep in glittering scraps of tinfoil and other bright objects, including the remains of Fred Fine's radio. "This is their hangout," said Hyacinth. "They must like the music."

"They want to make a nice, juicy meal out of whoever changes those light bulbs," suggested Fred Fine.

Sarah's pack contained a tripod and a pair of fine binoculars. Once we had set these up in the middle of the tunnel we could see the heavy doors, TV cameras, lights and so on at the tunnel's end. As we took turns looking and speculating, Virgil set up a Geiger counter from Sarah's pack.

"Normally a Geiger counter would just pick up a lot of background and cosmic radiation and anything meaningful would be drowned out. But we're so well shielded in these tunnels that the only thing getting to us should be a few very powerful cosmic rays, and neutrinos, which this won't pick up anyway." The Geiger counter began to click, perhaps once every four seconds.

Sarah had the best eyes; she sat crosslegged on the layers of foil and gazed into the binoculars. "In a few minutes a hazardous waste pickup is scheduled for the loading dock upstairs," said Virgil, checking his watch. "My theory is that, in addition to taking hazardous wastes out of the Plex, those trucks have been bringing something even more hazardous into the Plex, and down into this tunnel."

We waited.

"Okay," said Sarah, "Elevator door opening on the right." We all heard it.

"Long metal cylinder thingie on a cart. Now the end of the tunnel is opening up– big doors, like jaws. Now some guys in yellow are rolling the cylinder into a large room back there." The Geiger counter shouted. I looked at Casimir.

"Skip your next chest X-ray," he said. "If this place is what it looks like, it's just Iodine-131. Half-life of eight days. It'll end up in your thyroid, which you don't really need anyway."

"I'm pretty fond of my thyroid," said Hyacinth. "It made me big and strong."

"Doors closing," said Sarah over the chatter of us and the Geiger counter. "Elevator's gone. All doors closed now." "Well! Congratulations, Virgil," said Fred Fine, shaking his hand. "You've discovered the only permanent high-level radioactive waste disposal facility in the United States."

Most of us didn't have anything to say about it. We mainly wanted to get back home.

"Fascinating, brilliant," continued Fred Fine, as we headed back. "In today's competitive higher education market, there has to be some way for universities to support themselves. What better way than to enter lucrative high-technology sectors?"

"Don't have to grovel for the alumni anymore," said Sarah. "You really think universities should be garbage dumps for the worst by-products of civilization?" asked Hyacinth.

"It's not such a bad idea, in a way," said Casimir. "Better the universities than anyone else. Oxford, Heidelberg, Paris, all those places have lasted for centuries longer than any government. Only the Church has lasted longer, and the Vatican doesn't need the money."

We paused for a rest in the spiral staircase, near our rat body. Casimir, Fred Fine and Virgil went back down to the bottom for an experiment. Virgil had brought an ultrasonic tone generator with him, and they used it to prove– very conclusively– that the rats loved the ultrasound as much as they hated the strobe. They ran back upstairs, Sceptre flashing, and I slung the rat over my shoulder and we all proceeded up the stairs as fast as our lungs would allow.

The dissection of the rat was most informal. We did it in the sink of Professor Sharon's old lab, amid the pieces of the railgun. Fred Fine laid into the thorax with a kitchen knife and a single-edged razor. We were quick and crude; only Casimir had seen the inside of a rat before. The skin peeled back easily along with thick pink layers of fat, and we looked at the intestines that could digest such amazing meals. Casimir scrounged a pair of heavy tin snips and used them to cut the breastbone in half so we could get under the ribcage. I shoved my hands between the halves of the breastbone and pulled as hard as I could, and finally with a crack and a spray of blood one side snapped open like a stubborn cabinet door and we looked at the lungs and vital organs. The heart was not immediately visible.

"Maybe it's hidden under this organ here," suggested Fred Fine, pointing to something between the lungs.

"That's not an organ," said Casimir. "It's an intersection of several major vessels."

"So where's the heart?" asked Hyacinth, just beginning to get interested.

"Those major vessels are the ones that ought to go into, and come out of, the heart," said Casimir uncertainly. He reached down and slid his hand under the bundle of vessels, and pulling it up and aside, revealed– nothing.

"Holy Mother of God," he whispered. "This animal doesn't have a heart."

Our own thumped violently. For a long time we were frozen, disturbed beyond reason; then a piercing beep emanated from Fred Fine and we jumped and gasped angrily.

Unconcerned, he pressed a button on his digital calculator/watch, halting the beep. "Sorry. That's my watch alarm."

We looked at him; he looked at his watch, We were all sweating.

"I set it to go off like that at midnight, the beginning of April first, every year. It's sort of a warning, so that this one remembers, hey, April Fools' Day, anything could happen now."

While we sewer-slogged, E13S held a giant party in honor of Big Wheel. It was conceived as your basic formless beer blowout, but the ever-spunky Airheads had insisted upon a theme: Great Partiers of the Past. The major styles in evidence were Disco, Sixties, Fifties and Toga. A team of sturdy Terrorists had lugged Dex Fresser's stereo up to the social lounge, which was the center of Disco activity. A darkened room down the hail featured a Sixties party, at which participants roughed up their perms, wore T-shirts, smoked more dope than usual and said "groovy" at the drop of a hat. The study lounge was Fifties headquarters, and was identical to all the other Fifties parties which had been held since about 1963 by people who didn't know anything about the Fifties. The Toga people were forced to adopt a wandering, nomadic partying existence; they had no authentic toga music to boogie to, though someone did experiment by playing an electronic version of the "1812 Overture" at full blast. Mostly these people just stood sheepishly in the hallways, draped in their designer bedsheets, clutching cups of beer and yelling "toga!" from time to time.

The Disco lounge was filled with women in lollipop plastic dresses and thick metallic lipstick under ski masks, and heavily scented young men in pastel three-piecers and shiny hardware-laden shoes. The smell was deafening, and when the doors were open, excess music spilled out and filled nearby rooms to their corners. These partiers were a generation whose youth had been stolen. They had prepared all through their adolescence for the day when they could go to college and attend real discos, adult discos where they had alcohol and sex partners you could take home with no pay-rental hassles. Their hopes had been dashed in the early eighties when Disco had flamed out somewhere over New Jersey, like a famous dirigible. But the nostalgic air here made them feel young again. Dex Fresser even showed up in a white three-piecer and took several opportunities to boogie right down to the ground with shapely females in clingy synthetic wraps.

On the windowsill, the Go Big Red Fan, held in place with bricks, spun and glowed in its self-made halo of black light. Overhead, a mirrored ball cast revolving dots of light on the walls, and more stoned or imaginative dancers could imagine that they were actually standing inside a giant Big Wheel. Whoooo! The picture windows were covered with newspaper, as the panes had long since been smashed and the curtains long since burned.

After Dex Fresser had consumed sixteen hits of acid (his supplier had never really grasped the idea of powers of two), five bongloads of hashish rolled in mescaline, a square of peyote Jell-O, a lude, four tracks, a small handful of street-legal caffeine pep pills, twelve tablespoons of cough syrup, half a can of generic light wine and a pack of Gaulois cigarettes, he began to toy with a strobe light that was being used to establish the Disco atmosphere. He turned it up faster and faster until the lounge was wracked with delighted freakedout screams and the dancers had begun to hop randomly and smash into one another, as though they had been time-warped into Punk. Meanwhile, what passed for Dex's mind wandered over to the Go Big Red Fan, and though the time-warp effect was really blowing his tubes, he thought the fan might be slowing down; continuing to turn up the strobe, he was able to make the Little Wheel stop revolving altogether– either that, or time itself had come to a halt! Dex spazzed out to the max. All became quiet as the propulsion reactors of a passing Sirian space cruiser damped out his stereo (the DJ had turned down the volume), and all heard Dex announce that at midnight Big Wheel would say something very important to him. He relaxed, the music was cranked back up, the strobe light hurled out a nearby window and the Fan began to rotate again.

Midnight could hardly come soon enough. The partiers packed into the social lounge, sitting in rows facing the window. Dex Fresser stood before the shrouded window with his back to the crowd, and priests stood ready to tear the papers away. A few minutes before midnight, the DJ put on "Stairway to Heaven," timed so that the high-energy sonic blast section would begin at 12:00 sharp.

The newspapers ripped apart, the red-white-and-blue power beams of Big Wheel exploded into the room, and the heavy beat of the rock and roll made their thoraxes boom like empty kegs. But Dex Fresser was impressively still. He stared into the naked face of the Big Wheel for fifteen minutes before he moved a muscle. Then he relayed the message to the huddled students. Speaking through a mike hooked to his stereo, he sounded loud and quadraphonic. "Tonight the Big Wheel has plans for us, man. We're going to have a fucking war." The Terrorists cheered and whooped and the Airheads oohed and aahed. "The outside people, who are all hearing-impaired to the voice of Big Wheel and Roy G Biv and our other leaders, will come tomorrow to the Plex with guns to kill us. They want to put short-range tactical nuclear weapons on the roof of D Tower in order to threaten Big Wheel and make him do as they wish.

"We have friends, though, like Astarte, the Goddess, who is the sister of Big Wheel and who is going to like help us out and stuff. The Terrorists and the SUB will cooperate just like Big Wheel and Astarte do. Also, the B-men are our friends too.

"We've got shitloads of really powerful enemies, says Big Wheel. Like the Administration and the Temple of Unlimited Godhead and a bunch of nerds and some other people. We have to kill all of them.

"This is going to take cooperation and we have to have perfect loyalty from everyone. See, even if you think you have friends among our enemies, you're wrong, because Big Wheel decides who our friends are, and if he says they're your enemies, they're your enemies, just like that. Everything's very simple with Big Wheel, that's how you can be sure he's telling the truth. So we've got to join together now and there can't be any secrets and we can't cover up for our enemies or have mercy for them."

Mari Meegan, sitting in the front row, legs tucked demurely to the side, listened intensely, eyes slitted and lips parted as she thought about how this applied to her.

At this point a few people came to their senses and made a run for it. One of these, a none-too-bright advisee of mine who had been going along for the good times, realized that these people were nuts, sprinted to the nearest fire stair, and escaped unharmed, later to tell me this story. What happened after his exit is vague; apparently, Yllas Freedperson, High Priestess of Astarte, showed up, and the leaders of the SUB and of the Terrorists did a lot of planning and organizing in those next few hours.

By contrast, Bert Nix celebrated the evening by incinerating himself in a storage room on C22W. He had been using it as a hideout for some time, and had gotten along well with the students, except for one problem: Bert Nix's obsession with collecting garbage. It was partly a practical habit, as he got most of his food and clothing from the trash. Far beyond that, however, he could not bring himself to throw out anything, and so in his little rooms scattered around the Plex the garbage was packed in to the ceiling, leaving only a little aisle to the door. Out of gratitude to his protectors, Bert Nix stuffed oily rags under the doors to seal the odor in.

This sufficed until the evening of March 31, when he happened to open the door while a fastidious student from Saskatoon was walking by. She watched as half a dozen cockroaches over three inches long lumbered out between the derelict's bare feet and approached her, waving their antennae affably. No Airhead, she stomped them to splinters and called Security on the nearest telephone. Between then and the time they arrived five hours later, however, the fire started. It could have been spontaneous combustion, it could have been the heating system, or a suicidal whim or wayward cigarette from Bert Nix. In any event, the room became a tightly sealed furnace, and when the flames had died, all that remained were a charred corpse in the aisle and drifts of cockroach bodies piled up in front of the door.

At the northern corner of the Plex's east wall, north of the Mall loading docks, the docks for student use, the mail, Cafeteria, general supply, Burrows and wide-load docks was the Refuse Area. Six loading docks opened on an enormous room with six giant trash compactors and six great steel chutes which expelled tons of garbage from their foul, stained sphincters every few minutes. When there wasn't a strike on, the compactors would grind away around the clock and a great truck would be at one dock or another at any given time, bringing back an empty container and hauling off a full one.

North of the Refuse Area, in the very corner of the Flex, was the Hazardous Waste Area with its steel doors and explosion-proof walls. When scientists produced any waste that was remotely hazardous, they would seal it into an orange container, mark down its contents and take it to the Refuse Area, where they could deposit it in a chute that led into the HWA. If the container was too large for this, they could simply leave it on a dolly by the door, and the specially trained B-men would then wheel it through when it was time for a pickup. When the Hazardous Waste truck arrived, three times a day, all the containers were then loaded into its armor-plated back and hauled away. This was usually done in the dead of night, to lessen the danger of traffic accidents. So extraordinary was this disposal system that American Megaversity had won awards from environmental groups and acclaim from scientists.

At 4:30 on the morning of April 1, when I should have been drinking or sleeping, I was sitting in my suite staring at the telephone. Virgil Gabrielsen, even more ambitious, was sitting by the door to the HWA in a huge orange crate about the shape of a telephone booth. "HANDLE WITH EXTREME CARE," its label read, "CONTAINS UNIVERSAL SOLVENT. DO NOT PUT ON SIDE OR EXPLOSION WILL RESULT." The same concepts were repeated by means of ideograms which we had hastily painted on the sides, showing a Crotobaltislavonian stick figure being blown to bits after putting the crate on its side. Instructions to telephone Dr. Redfield, and giving my telephone number, were added in several places.

"The nuke waste has to be coming in through the HWA," Virgil had insisted, as he and I and the disemboweled rat relaxed in Sharon's lab. "I counted my steps down there in the tunnels. As far as I can tell, that elevator shaft should go right up into the northeast corner of the building. The HWA is locked and alarmed within an inch of its life, but I know how to get inside."

At quarter to five, the enormous Magrov and half a dozen other Crotobaltislavonians entered the Refuse Area. As Virgil watched through strategically placed peepholes, they began with some unusual procedures. First they opened the southernmost of the six metal doors to the Access Lot. Shortly after, an old van backed up to this dock and threw open its rear doors. Two men jumped out into the Refuse Area in protective clothing, gas masks dangling on their chests, and exchanged hearty Scythian greetings with the B-men. Much equipment was now hauled out of the van, including a long metal cylinder– an exact replica of a nuclear waste container– and a huge tripod-mounted machine gun. Then came numerous small machine guns, what appeared to be electronic equipment and crates of supplies. These were piled on a cart and wheeled over to Virgil's position.

Virgil had realized by now that this was not a business-as-usual day. At least the situation appealed to his sense of humor. The fake nuke waste cylinder opened like a casket and the two gas-masked men climbed in and lay one atop the other. The others handed them weapons and closed the lid. This cylinder was also placed next to Virgil. In the meantime, B-men bolted the big gun's tripod directly into the concrete floor at the loading dock, apparently having already drilled the holes in preparation. The weapon was aimed into the Access Lot, and loaded and checked over with an experienced air unusual among janitors.

Virgil's crate was the source of a long and emotional discussion in Scythian. Occasionally Magrov or one of the others would shout something about telefon while pounding on the crate with his index finger.

"Hoy!" shouted a B-man back at the machine gun. Virgil saw a glint of headlights outside. It was 4:59. A hellacious roar ensued as the determined janitors sprayed several thousand rounds per minute out the door. Magrov cut off debate by seizing Virgil's crate and wheeling it into the HWA.

The gunfire was over before Virgil was all the way through the door. Once the crate was stopped and he was able to get his bearings again, he could see that he was in a somewhat smaller room with a segmented metal door in the outside wall and a large red rectangle painted in the middle of the floor. A dozen or so bright orange waste containers had been slid through the chute and were waiting on a counter to be hauled away.

My phone rang at 5:01.

"Profyessor Rettfeelt? Sorry, getting you up early in mornink. Magrov here. You put humongous waste container by HWA, correct?"