

The Big U

By
Neal Stephenson

------------------------
---The Go Big Red Fan---
------------------------

The Go Big Red Fan was John Wesley Fenrick's, and when 
ventilating his System it throbbed and crept along the floor with a 
rhythmic chunka-chunka-chunk. Fenrick was a Business major and a 
senior. From the talk of my wingmates I gathered that he was smart, 
yet crazy, which helped. The description weird was also used, but 
admiringly. His roomie, Ephraim Klein of New Jersey, was in 
Philosophy. Worse, he was found to be smart and weird and crazy, 
intolerably so on all these counts and several others besides.
As for the Fan, it was old and square, with a heavy rounded 
design suitable for the Tulsa duplex window that had been its station 
before John Wesley Fenrick had brought It out to the Big U with 
him. Running up one sky-blue side was a Go Big Red bumper 
sticker. When Fenrick ran his Systemthat is, bludgeoned the rest 
of the wing with a record or tapehe used the Fan to blow air over 
the back of the component rack to prevent the electronics from 
melting down. Fenrick was tall and spindly, with a turkey-like head 
and neck, and all of us in the east corridor of the south wing of the 
seventh floor of E Tower knew him for three things: his seventies 
rock-'n'-roll souvenir collection, his trove of preposterous electrical 
appliances, and his laugha screaming hysterical cackle that would 
ricochet down the long shiny cinderbiock corridor whenever 
something grotesque flashed across the 45-Inch screen of his Video 
System or he did something especially humiliating to Ephraim Klein.
Klein was a subdued, intellectual type. He reacted to his 
victories with a contented smirk, and this quietness gave some 
residents of EO7S East the impression that Fenrick, a roomie-buster 
with many a notch on his keychain, had already cornered the young 
sage. In fact, Klein beat Fenrick at a rate of perhaps sixty percent, or 
whenever he could reduce the conflict to a rational discussion. He 
felt that he should be capable of better against a power-punker 
Business major, but he was not taking into account the animal 
shrewdness that enabled Fenrick to land lucrative oil-company 
internships to pay for the modernization of his System.
Inveterate and cynical audio nuts, common at the Big U, would 
walk into their room and freeze solid, such was Fenrick's System, its 
skyscraping rack of obscure black slabs with no lights, knobs or 
switches, the 600-watt Black Hole Hyperspace Energy Nexus Field 
Amp that sat alone like the Kaaba, the shielded coaxial cables 
thrown out across the room to the six speaker stacks that made it 
look like an enormous sonic slime mold in spawn. Klein himself 
knew a few things about stereos, having a system that could 
reproduce Bach about as well as the American Megaversity 
Chamber Orchestra, and it galled him.
To begin with there was the music. That was bad enough, but 
Klein had associated with musical Mau Maus since junior high, and 
could inure himself to it in the same way that he kept himself from 
jumping up and shouting back at television commercials. It was the 
Go Big Red Fan that really got to him. "Okay, okay, let's just accept 
as a given that your music is worth playing. Now, even assuming 
that, why spend six thousand dollars on a perfect system with no 
extraneous noises in it, and then, then, cool it with a noisy fan that 
couldn't fetch six bucks at a fire sale?" Still, Fenrick would ignore 
him. "I mean, you amaze me sometimes. You can't think at all, can 
you? I mean, you're not even a sentient being, if you look at it 
strictly."
When Klein said something like this (I heard the above one 
night when going down to the bathroom), Fenrick would look up at 
him from his Business textbook, peering over the wall of bright, sto 
record-store displays he had erected along the room's centerline; 
because his glasses had slipped down his long thin nose, he would 
wrinkle it, forcing the lenses toward the desired altitude, 
involuntarily baring his canine teeth in the process and causing the 
stiff spiky hair atop his head to shift around as though inhabited by a 
band of panicked rats.
"You don't understand real meaning," he'd say. "You don't 
have a monopsony on meaning. I don't get meaning from books. My 
meaning means what it means to me." He would say this, or 
something equally twisted, and watch Klein for a reaction. After he 
had done it a few times, though, Klein figured out that his roomie 
was merely trying to get him all bent out of shapeto freak his 
brain, as it were and so he would drop it, denying Fenrick the 
chance to shriek his vicious laugh and tell the wing that he had 
scored again.
Klein was also annoyed by the fact that Fenrick, smoking loads 
of parsley-spiked dope while playing his bad music, would forget to 
keep an eye on the Go Big Red Fan. Klein, sitting with his back to 
the stereo, wads of foam packed in his ears, would abruptly feel the 
Fan chunk into the back of his chair, and as he spazzed out in 
hysterical surprise it would sit there maliciously grinding away and 
transmitting chunka-chunka-chunks into his pelvis like muffled 
laughs.
If it was not clear which of them had air rights, they would wage 
sonic wars.
They both got out of class at 3:30. Each would spend twenty 
minutes dashing through the labyrinthine ways of the Monoplex, 
pounding fruitlessly on elevator buttons and bounding up steps three 
at a time, palpitating at the thought of having to listen to his 
roommate's music until at least midnight. Often as not, one would 
explode from the elevator on EO7S, veer around to the corridor, and 
with disgust feel the other's tunes pulsing victoriously through the 
floor. Sometimes, though, they would arrive simultaneously and 
power up their Systems together. The first time they tried this, about 
halfway through September, the room's circuit breaker shut down. 
They sat in darkness and silence for above half an hour, each 
knowing that if he left his stereo to turn the power back on, the other 
would have his going full blast by the time he returned. This impasse 
was concluded by a simultaneous two-tower fire drill that kept both 
out of the room for three hours.
Subsequently John Wesley Fenrick ran a fifty-foot tn-lead 
extension cord down the hallway and into the Social Lounge, and 
plugged his System into that. This meant that he could now shut 
down Klein's stereo simply by turning on his burger-maker, donut-
maker, blow-dryer and bun-warmer simultaneously, shutting off the 
room's circuit breaker. But Klein was only three feet from the 
extension cord and thus could easily shut Fenrick down with a tug. 
So these tactics were not resorted to; the duelists preferred, against 
all reason, to wait each other out.
Klein used organ music, usually lush garbled Romantic 
masterpieces or what he called Atomic Bach. Fenrick had the edge in 
system power, but most of that year's music was not as dense as, 
say, Heavy Metal had been in its prime, and so this difference was 
usually erased by the thinness of his ammunition. This did not mean, 
however, that we had any trouble hearing him.
The Systems would trade salvos as the volume controls were 
brought up as high as they could go, the screaming-guitars-from-Hell 
power chords on one side matched by the subterranean grease-gun 
blasts of the 32-foot reed stops on the other. As both recordings piled 
into the thick of things, the combatants would turn to their long thin 
frequency equalizers and shove all channels up to full blast like Mr. 
Spock beaming a live antimatter bomb into Deep Space. Finally the 
filters would be thrown off and the loudness switches on, and the 
speakers would distort and crackle with strain as huge wattages 
pulsed through their magnet coils. Sometimes Klein would use 
Bach's "Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor," and at the end of each 
phrase the bass line would plunge back down home to that old low 
C, and Klein's sub-woofers would pick up the temblor of the 64-foot 
pipes and magnify it until he could watch the naked speaker cones 
thrash away at in the air. This particular note happened to be the 
natural resonating frequency of the main hallways, which were cut 
into 64-foot, 3-inch halves by the fire doors (Klein and I measured 
one while drunk), and therefore the resonant frequency of every 
other hail in every other wing of all the towers of the Plex, and so at 
these moments everything in the world would vibrate at sixteen 
cycles per second; beds would tremble, large objects would float off 
the edges of tables, and tables and chairs themselves would buzz 
around the rooms of their own volition. The occasional wandering 
bat who might be in the hall would take off in random flight, his 
sensors jammed by the noise, beating his wings against the standing 
waves in the corridor in an effort to escape.
The Resident Assistant, or RA, was a reclusive Social Work 
major who, intuitively knowing she was never going to get a job, 
spent her time locked in her little room testing perfumes and 
watching MTV under a set of headphones. She could not possibly 
help.
That made it my responsibility. I lived on EO7S that year as 
faculty-in-residence. I had just obtained my Ph.D. from Ohio State in 
an interdisciplinary field called Remote Sensing, and was a brand-
shiny-new associate professor at the Big U.
Now, at the little southern black college where I went to school, 
we had no megadorms. We were cool at the right times and 
academic at the right times and we had neither Kleins nor Fenricks. 
Boston University, where I did my Master's, had pulled through its 
crisis when I got there; most students had no time for sonic war, and 
the rest vented their humors in the city, not in the dorms. Ohio State 
was nicely spread out, and I lived in an apartment complex where 
noisy shit-for-brains undergrads were even less welcome than 
tweedy black bachelors. I just did not know what to make of Klein 
and Fenrick; I did not handle them well at all. As a matter of fact, 
most of my time at the Big U was spent observing and talking, and 
very little doing, and I may bear some of the blame.
This is a history, in that it intends to describe what happened 
and suggest why. It is a work of the imagination in that by writing it 
I hope to purge the Big U from my system, and with it all my 
bitterness and contempt. I may have fooled around with a few facts. 
But I served as witness until as close to the end as anyone could 
have, and I knew enough of the major actors to learn about what I 
didn't witness, and so there is not so much art in this as to make it 
irrelevant. What you are about to read is not an aberration: it can 
happen in your local university too. The Big U, simply, was a few 
years ahead of the rest.

--------------------
---First Semester---
--------------------

--September--

On back-to-school day, Sarah Jane Johnson and Casimir Radon 
waited, for a while, in line together. At the time they did not know 
each other. Sarah had just found that she had no place to live, and 
was suffering that tense and lonely feeling that sets in when you 
have no place to hide. Casimir was just discovering that American 
Megaversity was a terrible place, and was not happy either.
After they had worked their way down the hail and into the 
office of the Dean of the College of Sciences and Humanities, they 
sat down next to each other on the scratchy Daygb orange chairs 
below the Julian Didius III Memorial Window. The sunlight strained 
in greyly over their shoulders, and occasionally they turned to look 
at the scene outside.
Below them on one of the Parkway off-ramps a rented truck 
from Maryland had tried to pass under a low bridge, its student 
driver forgetting that he was in a truck and not his Trans-Am. Upon 
impact, the steel molding that fastened the truck's top to its sides had 
wrapped itself around the frame of a green highway sign bolted to 
the bridge. Now the sign, which read:

AMERICAN MEGAVERSITY

VISITOR PARKING

SPORTS EVENTS

EXIT 500 FT.

was suspended in the air at the end of a long strip of truck that 
had been peeled up and aside.
A small crowd students, apparently finished with all their line-
waiting, stood on the bridge and beside the ramp, throwing Frisbees 
and debris into the torn-open back of the truck, where its renters 
lounged in sofas and recliners and drank beer, and threw the 
projectiles back. Sarah thought it was idiotic, and Casimir couldn't 
understand it at all.
Out in the hallway, people behind them in the line were being 
verbally abused by an old derelict who had penetrated the Plex 
security system. "The only degree you kids deserve is the third 
degree!" he shouted, waving his arms and staggering in place. He 
wore a ratty tweed jacket whose elbow patches flapped like vestigial 
wings, and he drank in turns from a bottle of Happy's vodka and a 
Schlitz tall-boy which he kept holstered in his pockets. He had the 
full attention of the students, who were understandably bored, and 
most of them laughed and tried to think of provocative remarks.
As the drunk was wading toward them, one asked another how 
her summer had been. "What about it?" asked the derelict. "Fiscal 
conservatism? Fine in theory! Tough, though! You have to be tough 
and humane together, you see, the two opposites must unite in one 
great leader! Can't be a damn dictator like S. S. Krupp!"
This brought cheers and laughter from the upperclassmen, who 
had just decided the drunk was a cool guy. Septimius Severus 
Krupp, the President of American Megaversity, was not popular. 
"Jesus Christ!" he continued through the laughter, "What the hell are 
they teaching you savages these days? You need a spanking! No 
more circuses. Maybe a dictator is just what you need! Alcibiades! 
Pompilius Numa! They'd straighten things out good and fast."
Sarah knew the man. He liked to break into classes at the Big U 
and lecture the professors, who usually were at a loss as to how to 
deal with him. His name was Bert Nix. He had taken quite a shine to 
Sarah: for her part, she did not know whether or not to be scared of 
him. During the preceding spring's student government compaign, 
Bert Nix had posed with Sarah for a campaign photo which had then 
appeared on posters all over the Plex. This was just the kind of thing 
that Megaversity students regarded as a sign of greatness, so she had 
won, despite progressive political ideas which, as it turned out, 
nobody was even aware of. This was all hard for Sarah to believe. 
She felt that Bert Nix had been elected President, not the woman he 
had appeared with on the campaign poster, and she felt obliged to 
listen to him even when he simply jabbered for hours on end. He was 
a ntce lunatic, but he was adrift in the Bert Nix universe, and that 
stirred deep fears in Sarah's soul.
Casimir paid little attention to the drunk and a great deal to 
Sarah. He could not help it, because she was the first nice-seeming 
person, concept or thing he had found in his six hours at the Big U. 
During the ten years he had spent saving up money to attend this 
school, Casimir had kept himself sane by imagining it. 
Unfortunately, he had imagined quiet talks over brunch with old 
professors, profound discussions in the bathrooms, and dazzling, 
sensitive people everywhere just waiting to make new friends. What 
he had found, of course, was American Megaversity. There was only 
one explanation for this atmosphere that he was willing to believe:
that these people were civilized, and that for amusement they 
were acting out a parody of the squalor of high school life, which 
parody Casimir had been too slow to get so far. The obvious 
explanationthat it was really this waywas so horrible that it had 
not even entered his mind.
When he saw the photo of her on the back page of the back-to-
school edition of the Monoplex Monitor, and read the caption 
identifying her as Sarah Jane Johnson, Student Government 
President, he made the most loutish double take between her and the 
photograph. He knew that she knew that he now knew who she was, 
and that was no way to start a passionate love affair. All he could do 
was to make a big show of reading about her in the Monitor, and 
wait for her to make the first move. He nodded thoughtfully at the 
botched quotations and oversimplifications in the article.
Sarah was aware of this; she had watched him page slowly and 
intensely through the paper, waiting with mild dread for him to get 
to the back page, see the picture and say something embarrassing. 
Insteadeven more embarrassing
he actually read the article, and before he reached the bottom 
of the page, the student ahead of Sarah stomped out and she found 
herself impaled on the azure gaze of the chief bureaucrat of the 
College of Sciences and Humanities. "How," said Mrs. Santucci 
crisply, "may I help you?"
Mrs. Santucci was polite. Her determination to be decent, and to 
make all things decent, was like that of all the Iranian Revolutionary 
Guards combined. Her policy of no-first-use meant that as long as 
we were objective and polite, any conversation would slide 
pleasantly down greased iron rails into a pit of despair. Any first 
strike by us, any remarks deemed improper by this grandmother of 
twenty-six and player of two dozen simultaneous bingo cards, would 
bring down massive retaliation. Sarah knew her. She arose primly 
and moved to the front chair of the line to look across a barren desk 
at Mrs. Santucci.
"I'm a senior in this college. I was lucky enough to get an out-
of-Plex apartment for this fall. When I got there today I found that 
the entire block of buildings had been shut down for eight months by 
the Board of Health. I went to Housing. Upon reaching the head of 
that line, I was told that it was being handled by Student Affairs. 
Upon reaching the head of the line there, I was given this form and 
told to get signatures at Housing and right here.
Mrs. Santucci reached out with the briskness that only old 
secretaries can approach and seized the papers. "This form is already 
signed," she informed Sarah.
"Right. I got that done at about one o'clock. But when I got to 
my new temporary room assignment it turned out to be the B-men's 
coffee lounge and storeroom for the northeast quad of the first 
sublevel. It is full of B-men all the time. You know how they are
they don't speak much English, and you know what kinds of things 
they decorate their walls with" this attempt to get Mrs. Santucci's 
sympathy by being prissy was not obviously successful"and I 
can't possibly live there. I returned to Housing. To change my room 
assignment is a whole new procedure, and I need a form from you 
which says I'm in good academic standing so far this semester."
"That form," Mrs. Santucci noted, "will require signatures from 
all your instructors."
"I know," said Sarah. All was going according to plan and she 
was approaching the center of her pitch. "But the semester hasn't 
started yet! And half my courses don't even have teachers assigned! 
So, since I'm a senior and my GPA is good, could the Dean okay my 
room change without the form? Doesn't that make sense? Sort of?" 
Sarah sighed. She had broken at the end, her confidence destroyed 
by Mrs. Santucci's total impassivity, by those arms folded across a 
navy-blue bosom like the Hoover Dam, by a stare like the headlights 
of an oncoming streetsweeper.
"I'm sure this is all unnecessary. Perhaps they don't know that 
their lounge has been reassigned. If you can just explain matters to 
them, I'm sure that Building Maintenance will be happy to 
accommodate you."
Sarah felt defeated. It had been a nice summer, and while away 
she had forgotten how it was. She had forgotten that the people who 
ran this place didn't have a clue as to how reality worked, that in 
their way they were all as crazy as Bert Nix. She closed her eyes and 
tilted her tense head back, and the man in the chair behind her 
intervened.
"Wait a minute," he said righteously. His voice was high, but 
carried conviction and reasonable sensitivity. "She can't be expected 
to do that. Those guys don't even speak English. All they speak is 
Bosnian or Moldavian or something."
"Moravian," said Mrs. Santucci in her Distant Early Warning 
voice, which was rumored to set off burglar alarms Within a quarter-
mile radius.
"The language is Crotobaltislavonian, a modern dialect of Old 
Scythian," announced Sarah, hoping to end the conflict. The B-Men 
are refugees from Crotobaltislavonia."
"Listen, I talk to Magrov all the time, and I say it's MoraVian." 
Sarah felt her body temperature begin to drop as she chanced a direct 
look at Mrs. Santucci.
Trying to sound prim, Sarah said, "Have you ever considered 
the possibility that you are confusing Magrov with Moravian?" 
Seeing the look on Mrs. Santucci's face, she then inhaled sharply 
and shifted away. Just as the old bureaucrat's jaw was starting to 
yawn, her chest rising like the return of Atlantis, Casimir Radon 
leaned way across and yanked something out of Sarah's lap andin 
a tone so arresting that it was answered by Bert Nix outside
exclaimed, "Wait a minute!"
Casimir was meek and looked like a nerd and a wimp, but he 
was great in a crisis. The lost continent subsided and Mrs. Santucci 
leaned forward with a dangerous frown. Out in the hallway the 
exasperated Bert Nix cried, "But there's no more minutes to wait! To 
save the Big U we've got to start now!"
Casimir had taken Sarah's room assignment card from the stack 
of ammunition on her lap, and was peering at it like a scientific 
specimen. It was an IBM card, golden yellow, with a form printed on 
it in yellow-orange ink. In the center of the form was a vague 
illustration of the Monoplex, looking decrepit and ruined because of 
the many rectangular holes punched through it. Along the top was a 
row of boxes labeled with tiny blurred yellow-orange abbreviations 
that were further abbreviated by rectangular holes. Numbers and 
letters were printed in black ink in the vicinity of each box.
Bert Nix was still carrying on outside. "Then fell the fires of 
Eternity with loud & shrill Sound of loud Trumpet thundering along 
from heaven to heaven, A mighty sound articulate Awake ye dead & 
come To Judgement from the four winds Awake & Come away 
Folding like scrolls of the Enourmous volume of Heaven & Earth 
With thunderous noises & dreadful shakings rocking to & fro: The 
heavens are shaken & the Earth removed from its place; the 
foundations of the eternal Hills discovered; The thrones of Kings are 
shaken they have lost their robes and crowns . . . and that's what 
poetry is! Not the caterwaulings of the Unwise!"
Finally, Casimir looked relieved. "Yeah, I thought that might be 
it. You were reading this number here. Right?" He got up and stood 
beside Sarah and pointed to her temporary room number.
"Sure," said Sarah, suddenly feeling dreadful.
"Well," said Casimir, sounding apologetic, "that's not what you 
want. Your room is not identified by room number, because some 
rooms repeat. It's identified by door number, which is unique for all 
doors. This number you were looking at isn't either of those, it's 
your room ID number, which has to do with data processing. That ID 
number refers to your actual door number, incorrectly called room 
number. It is the middle six digits of this character string here. See?" 
He masked the string of figures between the dirty backward par-
enthesis of his thumbnails. "In your case we have E12S, giving 
tower, floor and wing, and then 49, your actual room number."
Sarah did not know whether to scream, apologize or drop dead. 
She shoved her forms into her knapsack and stood. "Thank you for 
your trouble, Mrs. Santucci," she said quickly. "Thank you," she 
said to Casimir, then snapped around and headed for the door, 
though not fast enough to escape a withering harrrumph from Mrs. 
Santucci. But as she stepped into the hallway, which in order to hold 
down utility costs was dimly lit, she saw a dark and ragged figure 
out of the corner of her eye. She looked behind to see Bert Nix grab 
the doorframe and swing around until he was leaning into the office.
"Listen, Genevieve," he said, "she doesn't need any of your 
phlegm! She's President! She's my friend! You're just a doorstop!" 
As much as Sarah wanted to hear the rest of this, she didn't have the 
energy.
Casimir was left inside, his last view of Sarah interrupted by the 
dangling figure of the loony, caught in a crossfire he wanted no part 
of.
"I'll call the guards," said Mrs. Santucci, who for the first time 
was showing uneasiness.
"Today?" Bert Nix found this a merry idea. "You think you can 
get a guard today?"
"You'd better stop coming or we'll keep you from coming 
back."
His eyes widened in mock, crimson-rimmed awe, "Ooh," he 
sighed, "that were terrible. I'd have no reason to live." He pulled 
himself erect, walked in and climbed from the arm of Casimir's chair 
to the broad slate sill of the window. As Mrs. Santucci watched with 
more terror than seemed warranted, the derelict swung one window 
open like a door, letting in a gust of polluted steam.
By the time he was leaning far outside and grinning down the 
seventy-foot drop to the Parkway and the interchange. she had 
resolved to try diplomacythough she motioned that Casimir should 
try to grab his legs. Casimir ignored this; it was obvious that the man 
was just trying to scare her. Casimir was from Chicago and found 
that these Easterners had no sense of humor.
"Now, Pert," said Mrs. Santucci, "don't give an old lady a hard 
time."
Bert Nix dropped back to the sill. "Hard timet What do you 
know about hard times?" He thrust his hand through a hole in his 
jacket, wiggling his long fingers at her, and wagging his out-of-
control tongue for a few seconds. Finally he added, "Hard times 
make you strong."
"I've got work to do, Pert."
This seemed to remind him of something. He closed the window 
and cascaded to the floor. "So do I," he said, then turned to Casimir 
and whispered, "That's the Julian Didlus III Memorial Window. 
That's what I call it, anyway. Like the view?"
"Yeah, it's nice," said Casimir, hoping that this would not 
become a conversation.
"Good," said the derelict, "so did J. D. It's the last view he ever 
saw. Couldn't handle the job. That's why I call it that."
The giggling Bert Nix ambled back into the hail, satisfied, 
pausing only to steal the contents of the office wastebasket.
Through most of this Casimir sat still and stared at the faded 
German ti 1 poster on the wall. Now he was really in the talons of 
Mrs. Santucci, who had probably shifted into adrenaline overdrive 
and was likely to fling her desk through the wall. Instead, she was 
perfectly calm and professional. Casimir disliked her for it.
"I'm a junior physics major and I transferred in from a 
community college in Illinois. I know the first two years of physics 
inside and out, but there's a problem. The rules here say physics 
courses must include 'socioeconomic contexts backgrounding,' 
which I guess means it has to explain how it fits in with today's 
something or other.
"In order to context the learning experience with the real 
world," said Mrs. Santucci gravely, "we must include socioeconomic 
backgrounding integral with the foregrounded material."
"Right. Anyway, my problem is that I don't think I need it. I'm 
not here to give you my memoirs or anything, but my parents were 
immigrants, I came from a slum, got started in electronics, sort of 
made my own way, saw a lot of things, and so I don't think I really 
need this. It'd be a shame if I had to start all over, learning, uh, 
foregrounded material I already know."
Mrs. Santucci rolled her eyes so that the metal-flake blue 
eyeshadow on her lids flashed intermittently like fishing lures drawn 
through a murky sea. "Well, it has been done. It must be arranged 
with the curriculum chair of your department."
"Who is that for physics?"
"Distinguished Professor Sharon," she said. Bulging her 
eyeballs at Casimir, she made a respectful silence at the Professor's 
name, daring him to break it.
When Casimir returned to consciousness he was drifting down a 
hallway, still mumbling to himself in astonishment. He had an 
appointment to meet the Professor Sharon. He would have been 
ecstatic just to have sat in on one of the man's lectures!


Casimir Radon was an odd one, as American Megaversity 
students went. This was a good thing for him, as the Housing people 
simply couldn't match him up with a reasonable roommate; he was 
assigned a rare single. It was in D Tower, close to the sciences bloc 
where he would spend most of his time, on a floor of single rooms 
filled by the old, the weird and the asinine who simply could not live 
in pairs.
ln order to find his room he would have to trace a mind-twisting 
path through the lower floors until he found the elevators of D 
Tower. So before he got himself lost, he went to the nearest flat 
surface, which was the top of a large covered wastebasket. From it 
he cleared away a few Dorito bags and a half-drained carton of 
FarmSun SweetFresh brand HomeLivin' Artificial Chocolate-
Flavored Dairy Beverage and forced them into the overflowing maw 
below. He then removed his warped and sweat-soaked Plex map (the 
Plexus) from his pocket and unfolded it on the woodtoned Fiberglass 
surface.
As was noted at the base of the Plexus, it had been developed by 
the AM Advanced Graphics Workshop. Rather than presenting maps 
of each floor of the Plex, they had used an Integrated Projection to 
show the entire Plex as a network of brightly colored paths and 
intersections. The resulting tangle was so convoluted and yet so 
clean and spare as to be essentially without meaning. Casimir, 
however, could read it, because he was not like us. After applying 
his large intelligence to the problem for several minutes he was able 
to find the most efficient route, and following it with care, he quickly 
became lost.
The mistake was a natural one. The elevators, which were busy 
even in the dead of night, were today clogged with catatonic parents 
from New Jersey clutching beanbag chairs and giant stuffed animals. 
Fortunately (he thought), adjacent to each elevator was an entirely 
unused stairwell.
Casimir discovered shortly afterward that in the lower floors of 
the Plex all stairwell doors locked automatically from the outside.
I discovered it myself at about the same time. Unlike Casimir I 
had been a the Plex for ten days, but I had spent them typing up 
notes for my classes, It is unwise to prepare two courses in ten days, 
and I knew it. I hadn't gotten to it until the last minute, for various 
reasons, and so I'd spent ten days sitting there in my bicycling 
shorts, drinking beer, typing, and sweating monumentally in the fetid 
Plex air. So my first exposure to the Plex and its people really came 
that afternoon, when I wandered out into the elevator lobby and 
punched the buttons. The desperate Tylenol-charged throngs in the 
elevators did not budge when the doors opened, because they 
couldn't. They stared at me as though I were Son of Godzilla, which 
I was used to, and I stared at them and tried to figure out how they 
got that way, and the doors clunked shut. I discovered the stairways, 
and once I got below the bottom of the tower and into the lower 
levels, I also found that I was locked in.
For fifteen minutes I followed dimly lit stairs and corridors 
smelling of graffiti solvent and superfluous floor wax, helplessly 
following the paths that students would take if the Plex ever had to 
be evacuated. Through little windows in the locked doors I peered 
out of this twilight zone and into the different zones of the Plex
Cafeteria, Union, gymnasia, officesbut my only choice was to 
follow the corridors, knowing they would dump me into the ghetto 
outside. At last I turned a corner and saw the wall glistening with 
noisy grey outside light. At the end of the line, a metal door swung 
silently in the breeze, emblazoned thus: FIRE ESCAPE ONLY. 
WARNINGALARM WILL SOUND.
I stepped out the door and looked down along, steep slope into 
the canyon of the Turnpike.
The American Megaversity Campustructure was three blocks on 
a side, and squatted between the Megalopolitan Turnpike on the 
north and the Ronald Reagan Parkway on the south. Megaversity 
Stadium, the only campus building not inside the Plex proper, was to 
the west, and on the east was an elaborate multilevel interchange 
interconnecting the Pike, the Parkway, the Plex and University 
Avenue. The Pike ran well below the base of the Plex, and so as I 
emerged from the north wall of the building I found myself atop a 
high embankment. Below me the semis and the Audis shot past 
through the layered blue monoxide, and their noises blended into a 
waterfall against the unyielding Plex wall. Aside from a few 
wretched weeds growing from cracks in the embankment, no life 
was to be seen, except for Casimir Radon.
He had just emerged from another emergency exit. We saw each 
other from a hundred feet apart, waved and walked toward each 
other. As we converged, I regarded a tall and very thin man with an 
angular face and a dense five-o'clock shadow. He wore round 
rimless glasses. His black hair was in disarray as usual; during the 
year it was to vary almost randomly between close-cropped and 
shoulder-length. I soon observed that Casimir could grow a shadow 
before lunch, and a beard in three days. He and I were the same age, 
though I was a recent Ph.D. and he a junior.
Later I was to think it remarkable that Casimir and I should 
emerge from those fire doors at nearly the same moment, and meet. 
On reflection I have changed my mind. The Big U was an unnatural 
environment, a work of the human mind, not of God or plate 
tectonics. If two strangers met in the rarely used stairways, it was not 
unreasonable that they should turn out to be similar, and become 
friends. I thought of it as an immense vending machine, cautiously 
crafted so that any denomination too ancient or foreign or irregular 
would rattle about randomly for a while, find its way into the 
stairway system, and inevitably be deposited in the reject tray on the 
barren back side. Meanwhile, brightly colored graduates with 
attractively packaged degrees were dispensed out front every June, 
swept up by traffic on the Parkway and carried away for leisurely 
consumption. Had I understood this earlier I might have come to my 
senses and immediately resigned, but on that hot September day, 
with the exhaust abrading our lungs and the noise squashing our 
conversation, it seemed worthwhile to circle around to the Main En-
trance and give it another try.
We headed east to avoid the stadium. On our right the wall 
stretche and away for acres in a perfect cinderblock grid. Alter 
passing dozens of fire doors we came to the corner and turned into 
the access lot that stretched along the east wall. Above, at many 
altitudes, cars and trucks screeched and blasted through the tight 
curves of the interchange. People called it the Death Vortex, and 
some claimed that parts of it extended into the fourth dimension. As 
soon as it had been planned, the fine old brownstone neighborhood 
that was its site plummeted into slumhood; Haitians and Vietnamese 
filled the place up, and the feds airproofed the buildings and installed 
giant electric air filters before proceeding.
Here on the access lot we could look down a long line of 
loading docks, the orifices of the Plex where food and supplies were 
ingested and trash discharged, serviced by an endless queue of 
trucks. The first of these docks, by the northern corner, was specially 
designed for the discharge of hazardous wastes produced in Plex labs 
and was impressively surrounded by fences, red lights and 
threatening signs. The next six loading docks were for garbage 
trucks, and the rest, all the way down to the Parkway, for deliveries. 
We swung way out from the Plex to avoid all this, and followed the 
fence at the border of the lot, gazing into the no-man's-land of lost 
mufflers and shredded fanbelts beyond, and sometimes staring up 
into the Plex itself.
The three-by-three block base had six stories above ground and 
three below. Atop it sat eight 25-story towers where lived the 40,000 
students of the university. Each tower had four wings 160 feet long, 
thrown out at right angles to make a Swiss cross. These towers sat at 
the four corners and four sides of the base. The open space between 
them was a huge expanse of roof called Tar City, inhabited by great 
machines, crushed furniture thrown from above, rats, roaches, 
students out on dares, and the decaying corpses of various things that 
had ventured out on hot summer days and become mired in the tar. 
All we could see were the neutral light brown towers and their 
thousands and thousands of identical windows reaching into the 
heavens. Even for a city person, it was awesome. Compared to the 
dignified architecture of the old brownstones, though, it caused me a 
nagging sense of embarrassment.
The Vortex whose coils were twined around those brown-stones 
threw out two ramps which served as entrance and exit for the Plex 
parking ramp. These ran into the side of the building at about third-
story level. To us they were useless, so we continued around toward 
the south side.
Here was actually some green: a strip of grass between the walk 
and the Parkway. On this side the Plex was faced with darker brown 
brick and had many picture windows and signs for the businesses of 
the built-in mall on the first floor. The Main Entrance itself was 
merely eight revolving doors in a row, and having swished through 
them we were drowned in conditioned air, Muzak, the smell of 
Karmel Korn and the idiotic babble of penny-choked indoor 
fountains. We passed through this as quickly as possible and rode the 
long escalators ("This must be what a ski lift is like," said Casimir) 
to the third floor, where a rampart of security booths stretched across 
our path like a thruway toll station. Several of the glass cages were 
occupied by ancient guards in blue uniforms, who waved us wearily 
through the turnstiles as we waved our ID cards at them. Casimir 
stopped on the other side, frowning.
"They shouldn't have let me in," he said.
"Why?" I asked. "Isn't that your ID?"
"Of course it is," said Casimir Radon, "but the photo is so bad 
they had no way of telling." He was serious. We surveyed the 
rounded blue back of the guard. Most of them had been recruited out 
of Korea or the Big One. The glass cages of the Plex had ruined their 
bodies. Now they had become totally passive in their outlook; but, 
by the same token, they had become impossible to faze or surprise.
We stepped through more glass doors and were in the Main 
Lobby.
The Plex's environmental control system was designed so that 
anyone could spend four years there wearing only a jockstrap and a 
pair of welding goggles and yet never feel chilly or find the place too 
dimly lit. Many spent their careers there without noticing this. 
Casimir Radon took less than a day to notice the pitiless fluorescent 
light. Acres of light glanced off the Lobby's poiished floor like sun 
off the Antarctic ice, and a wave of pain now rolled toward Casimir 
from near the broad vinyl information desk and washed over him, 
draining through a small hole in the center of his skull and pooling 
coldly behind his eyes. Great patches of yellow blindness appeared 
in the center of his vision and he coasted to a stop, hands on eyes, 
mouth open. I knew enough to know it was migraine, so I held his 
skinny arm and led him, blind, to his room in D Tower. He lay 
cautiously down on the naked plastic mattress, put a sock over his 
eyes and thanked me. I drew the blinds, sat there helplessly for a 
while, then left him to finish his adjustment to the Big U.
Alter that he wore a uniform of sorts: old T-shirt, cutoffs or gym 
shorts, hightop tennis shoes ("to keep the rats off my ankles") and 
round purple mountain-climbing goggles with leather bellows on the 
sides to block out peripheral light. He was planning such a costume 
as I left his room. More painfully, he was beginning to question 
whether he could live in such a place for even one semester, let alone 
four. He did not know that the question would be decided for him, 
and so he felt the same edgy uncertainty that nagged at me.


Some people, however, were quite at home in the Flex. At about 
this time, below D Tower in the bottom sublevel, not far from the 
Computing Center, several of them were crossing paths in a dusty 
little dead end of a hallway. To begin with, three young men were 
standing by the only door in the area, taking turns peering into the 
room beyond. The pen lights from their shirt pockets illuminated a 
small windowless room containing a desk, a chair and a computer 
terminal. The men stared wistfully at the latter, and had piled their 
math and computer textbooks on the floor like sandbags, as though 
they planned a siege. They had been discussing their tactical 
alternatives for getting past the door, and had run the gamut from 
picking the lock to blowing it open with automatic-weapon bursts, 
but so far none had made any positive moves.
"If we could remove that window," said one, a mole-faced 
individual smelling of Brut and sweat and glowing in a light blue 
iridescent synthetic shirt and hi-gloss dark blue loafers, "we could 
reach in and unlock it from inside."
"Some guy tried to get into my grandma's house that way one 
time," recalled another, a skinny, long-haired, furtive fellow who 
was having trouble tracking the conversation, "but she took a 
sixteen-ounce ball-peen hammer and smashed his hand with it. He 
never came back." He delivered the last sentence like the punchline 
to a Reader's Digest true anecdote, convulsing his pals with 
laughter.
The third, a disturbingly 35-ish looking computer science major 
with tightly permed blond hair, eventually calmed down enough to 
ask, "Hey, Gary, Gary! Did she use the ball end or the peen end?"
Gary was irked and confused, He had hoped to impress them by 
specif~ring the weight of the hammer, but he was stumped by this 
piece of one-upsmanship; he didn't know which end was which. He 
radiated embarrassment for several seconds before saying, "Oh, gee, 
I don't know, I think she probably used both of 'em before she was 
done with the guy. But that guy never came back."
Their fun was cut short by a commanding voice. "A sixteen-
ounce ball-peen hammer isn't much good against a firearm. If I were 
a woman living alone I'd carry a point thirty-eight revolver, 
minimum. Double action. Effective enough for most purposes."
The startling newcomer had their surprised attention. He had 
stopped quite close to them and was surveying the door, and they 
instinctively stepped out of his way. He was tall, thin and pale, with 
thin brown Bryicreemed hair and dark red lips. The calculator on his 
hip was the finest personal computing machine, and on the other hip, 
from a loop of leather, hung a fencing foil, balanced so that its red 
plastic tip hung an inch above the floor. It was Fred Fine.
"You're the guy who runs the Wargames Club, aren't you," 
asked the blond student.
"I am Games Marshall, if that's the intent of your question. 
Administrative and financial authority are distributed among the 
leadership cadre according to the Constitution."
"The Wargames Club?" asked Gary, his voice suffused with 
hope. "What, is there one?"
"The correct title is the Megaversity Association for Reen-
actments and Simulations, or MARS," snapped Fred Fine. Still 
almost breathless, Gary said, "Say. Do you guys ever play 'Tactical 
Nuclear War in Greenland?'"
Fred Fine stared just over Gary's head, screwing up his face 
tremendously and humming. "Is that the earlier version of 'Martians 
in Godthaab,' "he finally asked, though his tone indicated that he 
already knew the answer.
Gary was hopelessly taken aback, and looked around a bit 
before allowing his gaze to rest on Fred Fine's calculator. "Oh, yeah, 
I guess. I guess 'Martians in Godthaab' must be new."
"No," said Fred Fine clearly, "it came out six months ago." To 
soften the humiliation he chucked Gary on the shoulder. "But to 
answer your question. Some of our plebesour novice wargamers
do enjoy that game. It's interesting in its own way, I suppose, though 
I've only played it a dozen times. Of course, it's a Simuconflict 
product, and their games have left a lot to be desired since they lost 
their Pentagon connections, but there's nothing really wrong with 
it."
The trio stared at him. How could he know so much?
"Uh, do you guys," ventured the blue one, "ever get into role-
playing games? Like Dungeons and Dragons?"
"Those of us high in the experiential hierarchy find conventional 
D and D stultifying and repetitive. We prefer to stage live-action 
role-playing scenarios. But that's not for just anyone."
They looked timidly at Fred Fine's fencing foil and wondered if 
he were on his way to a live-action wargame at this very moment. 
For an instant, as he stood in the dim recess of the corridor, light 
flickering through a shattered panel above and playing on his head 
like distant lightning, his feet spread apart, hand on sword pommel, 
it seemed to them that they beheld some legendary hero of ancient 
times, returned from Valhalla to try his steel against modern foes.
The mood was broken as another man suddenly came around 
the corner. He brushed silently past Fred Fine and nearly impaled 
Gary on a key, but Gary moved just in time and the new arrival 
shoved the key home and shot back the deadbolt. He was tall, with 
nearly white blond hair, pale blue eyes and a lean but cherubic face, 
dressed in cutoffs and a white dress shirt. Shouldering through them, 
he entered the little room.
Fred Fine reacted with uncharacteristic warmth. "Well, well, 
well," he said, starting in a high whine and dropping in pitch from 
there. I had Fred Fine in one of my classes and when in a good mood 
he really did talk like Colonel Klink; it took some getting used to. 
"So they haven't caught up with you and your master key yet, eh, 
Virgil? Very interesting."
Virgil Gabrielsen turned smoothly while stepping through the 
doorway, and stared transparently through Fred Fine's head. "No," 
he said, "but I have plenty of copies anyway. They aren't about to 
change every lock in the Plex on my account. The only doors this 
won't open are in the hazardous waste area, the Administration Bloc, 
Doors 1253 through 1778 and 7899 to 8100, whIch obviously no one 
cares about, and Doors 753, 10100 and the high 12,500's, and I'm 
obviously not going to go ripping off vending-machine receipts, am 
I?" At this the three friends frowned and looked back and forth. 
Virgil entered the room and switched on the awesomely powerful 
battery of overhead fluorescent lights. Everything was somewhat 
dusty inside.
"No rat poison on the floor," observed Fred Fine. "Dusty. Still 
keeping the B-men out, eh?"
"Yeah," said Virgil, barely aware of them, and began to pull 
things from his knapsack. "I told them I was doing werewolf 
experiments in here."
Fred Fine nodded soberly at this. Meanwhile, the three younger 
students had invited themselves in and were gathered around the 
'terminal, staring raptly into its printing mechanism. "It's just an 
antique Teletype," said the blue one. He had already said this once, 
but repeated it now for Fred Fine. "However, I really like these. Real 
dependable, and lots of old-fashioned class despite an inferior 
character menu." Fred Fine nodded approvingly. Virgil shouldered 
through them, sat before the terminal and, without looking up, 
announced, "I didn't invite any of you in, so you can all leave flOW.'
They did not quite understand.
"Catch my drift? I dislike audiences."
Fred Fine avoided this by shaking his head, smiling a red smile 
and chuckling. The others were unmanned and stood still, waiting to 
be told that Virgil was kidding.
"Couldn't we just sit in?" one finally asked. "I've just got to 
XEQ one routine. It's debugged and bad data tested. It's fast, it 
outputs on batch. I can wait till you're done."
"Forget it," said Virgil airily, scooting back and nudging him 
away. "I won't be done for hours. It's all secret Science Shop data. 
Okay?"
"But turnover for terminals at CC is two hours to the minus 
one!"
"Try it at four in the morning. You know? Four in the morning 
is a great time at American Megaversity. Everything is quiet, there 
are no lines even at the laundry, you can do whatever you want 
without fucking with a mob of freshmen. Put yourselves on second 
shift and you'll be fine. Okay?"
They left, sheeshing. Fred Fine stopped in the doorway, still 
grinning broadly and shaking his head, as though leaving just for the 
hell of it.
"You're still the same old guy, Virgil. You still program in raw 
machine code, still have that master key. Don't know where science 
at AM would be without you. What a wiz."
Virgil stared patiently at the wall. "Fred. I told you I'd fix your 
MCA and I will. Don't you believe me?"
"Sure I do. Say! That invitation I made you, to join MARS 
anytime you want, is still open. You'll be a Sergeant right away, and 
we'll probably commission you after your first night of gaming, 
from what I know of you."
"Thanks. I won't forget. Goodbye."
"Ciao." Fred Fine bowed his thin frame low and strode off.
"What a creep," said Virgil, and ferociously snapped the 
deadbolt as soon as Fred Fine was almost out of earshot.
Removing supplies from the desk drawer, he stuffed a towel 
under the door and taped black paper over the window. By the 
terminal he set up a small lamp with gel over its mouth, which cast a 
dim pool of red once he had shut off the room lights.
He activated the terminal, and the computer asked him for the 
number of his account, Instead of typing in an account number, 
though, Virgil typed: FIAT LUX.


Later, Virgil and I got to know each other. I had problems with 
the computer only he could deal with, and after our first contacts he 
seemed to find me interesting enough to stay in touch, He began to 
show me parts of his secret world, and eventually allowed me to sit 
in on one of these computer sessions. Nothing at all made sense until 
he explained the Worm to me, and the story of Paul Bennett.
"Paul Bennett was one of these computer geniuses. When he 
was a sophomore here he waltzed through most of the secret codes 
and keys the Computing Center uses to protect valuable data. Well, 
he really had the University by the short hairs then. At any time he 
could have erased everything in the computerfinancial records, 
scientific data, expensive software, you name it. He could have 
devastated this university just sitting there at his computer 
terminalthat's how vulnerable computers are. Eventually the 
Center fOund out who he was, and reprimanded him. Bennett was 
obviously a genius, and he wasn't malicious, so the Center then went 
ahead and hired him to design better security locks. That happens 
fairly oftenthe best lock-designers are people who have a talent for 
picking locks."
"They hired him right out of his sophomore year?" I asked.
"Why not? He had nothing more to learn. The people who were 
teaching his classes were the same ones whose security programs he 
was defeating! What's the point of keeping someone like that in 
school? Anyway, Bennett did very well at the Center, but he was still 
a kid with some big problems, and no one got along with him. 
Finally they fired him.
"When they fire a major Computing Center employee, they have 
to be sneaky. If they give him two weeks' notice he might play 
havoc with the computer during those two weeks, out of spite. So 
when they fire these people, it happens overnight. They show up at 
work and all the locks have been changed, and they have to empty 
out their desks while the senior staff watch them. That's what they 
did to Paul Bennett, because they knew he was just screwed up 
enough to frag the System for revenge."
"So much for his career, then."
"No. He was immediately hired by a firm in Massachusetts for 
four times his old salary. And CC was happy, because they'd gotten 
good work out of him and thought they were safe from reprisals. 
About a week later, though, the Worm showed up."
"And that is?"
"Paul Bennett's sabotage program. He put it into the computer 
before he was fired, you see, and activated it, but every morning 
when he came to work he entered a secret command that would put 
it on hold for another twenty-four hours. As soon as he stopped 
giving the command, the Worm came out of hiding and began to 
play hell with things."
"But what good did it do him? It didn't prevent his being fired,"
"Who the hell knows? I think he put it in to blackmail the CC 
staff and hold on to his job. That must have been his original plan. 
But when you make a really beautiful, brilliant program, the 
temptation to see it work is just overwhelming. He must have been 
dying to see the Worm in action. So when he was fired, he decided, 
what the hell, they deserve it, I'll unleash the Worm. That was in the 
middle of last year. At first it did minor things such as erasing 
student programs, shutting the System down at odd times, et cetera. 
Then it began to worm its way deeper and deeper into the 
Operatorthe master program that controls the entire Systemand 
wreak vandalism on a larger scale. The Computing Center personnel 
fought it for a while, but they were successful for only so long. The 
Operator is a huge program and you have to know it all at once in 
order to understand what the Worm is doing to it."
"Aha," I said, beginning to understand, "they needed someone 
with a photographic memory. They needed another prodigy, didn't 
they? So they got you? Is that it?"
At this Virgil shrugged. "It's true that I am the sort of person 
they needed," he said quietly. "But don't assume that they 'got' me."
"Really? You're a free lance?"
"I help them and they help me. It is a free exchange of services. 
You needn't know the details."
I was willing to accept that restriction. Virgil had told me 
enough so that what he was doing made sense to me. Still, it was 
very abstract work, consisting mostly of reading long strings of 
numbers off the terminal and typing new ones in. On the night I sat 
in, the Worm had eaten all of the alumni records for people living in 
states beginning with "M." ("M!," said Virgil, "the worst letter it 
could have picked.") Virgil was puttering around in various files to 
see if the information had been stored elsewhere. He found about 
half of Montana hidden between lines of an illegal video game 
program, retrieved the data, erased the illegal program and caused 
the salvaged information to be printed out on a string of payroll 
check forms in a machine in the administrative bloc.
On this night, the first of the new school year, Virgil was not 
nobly saving erased data from the clutches of the Worm. He was 
actually arranging his living situation for the coming year. He had 
about five choice rooms around the Plex, which he filled with 
imaginary students in order to keep them vacantan easy matter on 
the computer. To support his marijuana and ale habits he extracted a 
high salary from various sources, sending himself paychecks when 
necessary. For this he felt neither reluctance nor guilt, because Fred 
Fine was right: without Virgil, whose official job was to work in the 
Science Shop, scientific research at the Big U would simply stop. To 
support himseIf he took money from research accounts in proportion 
to the extent they depended on him. This was only fair. An 
indispensable place like the Science Shop needed a strong leader, 
someone bold enough to levy appropriate taxes against its users and 
spend the revenues toward the ends those users desired. Virgil had 
figured out how to do it, and made himself a niche at the Big U more 
comfortable than anyone else's.


Sarah lived in a double room just five floors above me and 
Ephraim Klein and John Wesley Fenrick, on E12SE Tower, 
twelfth floor, south wing. The previous year she had luxuriated in a 
single, and resolved never to share her private space again; this 
double made her very angry. In the end, though, she lucked out. Her 
would-be roommate had only taken the space as a front, to fake out 
her pay-rents, and was actually living in A Tower with her 
boyfriend. Thus Sarah did not have to live four feet away from some 
bopper who would suffer an emotional crisis every week and explore 
the standard uses of sex and drugs and rock-and-roll in noisy exper-
imental binges on the other side of the room.
Sarah's problem now was to redecorate what looked like the 
inside of a water closet. The cinderblock walls were painted 
chocolate brown and absorbed most light, shedding only the garish 
parts of the spectrum. The shattered tile floor was gray and felt 
sticky no matter how hard she scrubbed. On each side of the 
perfectly symmetrical room, long fluorescent light fixtures were 
bolted to the walls over the beds, making a harsh light nearby but 
elsewhere only a dull greenish glow. After some hasty and low-
budget efforts at making it decent, Sarah threw herself into other 
activities and resigned herself to another year of ugliness.
On Wednesday of the term's second week there was a wing 
meeting. American Megaversity's recruitment propaganda tried to 
make it look as though the wings did everything as a jolly group, but 
this had not been true on any of Sarah's previous wings. This place 
was different
When she had dragged her duffel bags through the stairwell 
door on that first afternoon, a trio of well-groomed junior matrons 
had risen from a lace-covered card table in the lobby, helped her 
with the luggage, pinned a pink carnation on her sweaty T-shirt and 
welcomed her to "our wing." Under her pillow she had found a 
"starter kit" comprising a small teddy bear named Bobo, a white 
candle, a GOLLYWHATAFACE-brand PERSONAL COLOUR 
SAMPLER PACQUET, a sack of lemon drops, a red garter, six 
stick-on nametags with SARA written on them, a questionnaire and 
a small calligraphied Xeroxed note inviting her to the wing meeting. 
All had been wrapped in flowery pastel wrapping paper and cutely 
beribboned.
Most of it she had snarlingly punted into the nether parts of her 
closet. The wing meeting, however, was quasi-political, and hence 
she ought to show up. A quarter of an hour early, she pulled on a 
peasant blouse over presentable jeans and walked barefoot down the 
hall to the study lounge by the elevator lobby.
She was almost the last to arrive. She was also the only one not 
in a bathrobe, which was so queer that she almost feared she was 
having one of those LSD flashbacks people always warn you about. 
Her donut tasted like a donut, though, and all seemed normal 
otherwise, so it was reality albeit a strange and distant branch 
thereof.
Obviously they had not all been bathing, because their hair was 
dry and their makeup fresh. There were terry robes, silk robes, 
Winnie-the-Pooh robes, long plush robes, plain velvety robes, 
designer robes, kimonos and even a few night-shirts on the cute and 
skinny. Also, many slippers, too many of them high-heeled. Once 
she was sure her brain was okay, she edged up to a nearby wingmate 
and mumbled, "Did I miss something? Everyone's in bathrobes!"
"Shit, don't ask me!" hissed the woman firmly. "I just took a 
shower, nwself."
Looking down, Sarah saw that the woman was indeed clean of 
face and wet of hair. She was shorter than average and compact but 
not overweight, with pleasant strong features and black-brown hair 
that fell to her shoulders. Her bathrobe was short, old and plain, with 
a clothesline for a sash.
"Oh, sorry," said Sarah. "So you did. Uh, I'm Sarah, and my 
bathrobe is blue."
"I know. President of the Student Government."
Sarah shrugged and tried not to look stuck-up.
"What's the story, you've never lived on one of these floors?" 
The other woman seemed surprised.
"What do you mean, 'one of these floors?'"
She sighed. "Ah, look. I'm Hyacinth. I'll explain all this later. 
You want to sit down? It'll be a long meeting." Hyacinth grasped 
Sarah's belt loop and led her politely to the back row of chairs, 
where they sat a row behind the next people up. Hyacinth turned 
sideways in her chair and examined Sarah minutely.
The Study Lounge was not a pretty place. Designed to be as 
cheery as a breath mint commercial, it had aged into something not 
quite so nice. Windows ran along one wall and looked out into the 
elevator lobby, where the four wings of E12S came together. It was 
furnished with the standard public-area furniture of the Plex: cubical 
chairs and cracker-box sofas made of rectangular beams and slabs of 
foam covered in brilliant scratchy polyester. The carpet was a 
membrane of compressed fibers, covered with the tats and cigarette-
burns and barfstains of years. Overhead, the ubiquitous banks of 
fluorescent lights cheerfully beamed thousands of watts of pure 
bluish energy down onto the inhabitants. Someone was always 
decorating the lounge, and this week the theme was football; the 
decorations were cardboard cutouts of well-known cartoon 
characters cavorting with footballs.
The only other nonrobed person in the place was the RA, Mitzi, 
who sat bolt upright at the lace-covered card table in front, left hand 
still as a dead bird In her lap, right hand three inches to the side of 
her jaw and bent back parallel to the tabletop, fingers curled upward 
holding a ballpoint pen at a jaunty but not vulgar forty-five-degree 
angle. She bore a fixed, almost manic smile which as far as Sarah 
could tell had nothing to do with anythingcharm school, perhaps, 
or strychnine poisoning. Mitzi wore an overly formal dress and a 
kilogram of jewelry, and when she spoke, though not even her 
jawbone moved, one mighty earring began to swing violently.
Among other things, Mitzi welcomed new "members." There 
were three: another woman, Hyacinth and Sarah, introduced in that 
order. The first woman explained that she was Sandi and she was 
into like education and stuff. Then came Hyacinth; she was into 
apathy. She announced this loudly and they all laughed and 
complimented Hyacinth on her sense of humor.
Sarah was introduced last, being famous. "What are you into, 
Sarah Jane?" asked Mitzi. Sarah surveyed the glistening, fiercely 
smiling faces turned round to aim at her.
"I'm into reality," she said. This brought delighted laughter, 
especially from Hyacinth, who screamed like a sow.
The meeting then got underway. Hyacinth leaned back, crossed 
her arms and tilted her head back until she was staring openmouthed 
at the ceiling. As the meeting went on she combed her hair, bit her 
nails, played with loose threads from her robe, cleaned her toes and 
so on. The thing was, Sarah found all of this more interesting than 
the meeting itself. Sarah looked interested until her face got tired. 
She had spoken in front of groups enough to know that Mitzi could 
see them all clearly, and that to be obviously bored would be rude. 
Sometimes politeness had to give way to sanity, though, and before 
she knew it she found herself trying to swing the tassels at the ends 
of her sleeves in opposite directions at the same time. Hyacinth 
watched this closely and patted her on the back when she succeeded.
Mainly what they were doing was filling a huge social calendar 
with parties and similar events. Sarah wanted to an
anounce that she liked to do things by herself or with a few 
friends, but she saw no diplomatic way of saying so. She did 
resurface for the discussion of the theme for the Last Night party, the 
social climax of the semester: Fantasy Island Nite.
"Wonder how they're going to tell it apart from all the other 
nights," grumbled Hyacinth. Nearby wingmates turned and smiled, 
failing to understand but assuming that whatever Hyacinth said must 
be funny.
Another phase of the social master plan was to form an official 
sister/brother relationship with the wing upstairs, lmown as the Wild 
and Crazy Guys. This in turn led to the wing naming idea. After all, 
if E13S had a name for itself, shouldn't E12S have one too? Mari 
Meegan, darling of the wing, made this point, and "Yeah!"s 
zephyred up all around.
Sarah was feeling pretty sour by this point but said nothing. If 
they wanted a name, fine. Then the ideas started coming out: Love 
Boat, for example.
"We could paint our lobby with a picture of the Love Boat like 
it looks at the start of the show, and we could, you know, do 
everything, like parties and stuff, with like that kind of a theme. 
Then on Fantasy Island Nite, we could pretend the Boat was visiting 
Fantasy Island!"
This idea went over well and the meeting broke up into small 
discussions about how to apply this theme to different phases of 
existence. Finally, though, Sarah spoke up, and they all smiled and 
listened. "I'm not sure I like that idea. There are plenty of creeps on 
the floor already, because we're all-female. If we name it Love Boat, 
everyone will think it's some kind of outcall massage service, and 
we'll never get a break."
Several seconds of silence. A few nods were seen, some "yeah"s 
heard, and Love Boat was dead. More names were suggested, most 
of them obviously dumb, and then Mari Meegan raised her hand. All 
quieted as her fingernails fluttered like a burst of redhot flak above 
the crowd. "I know," she said.
There was silence save for the sound of Hyacinth's comb 
rushing through her hair. Man continued. "We can call ourselves 
'Castle in the Air.' "
The lounge gusted with oohs and aahs.
"I like that."
"You're so creative, Mari."
"We could do a whole Dark Ages theme, you know, castles and 
knights and shining armor."
"That's nice! Really nice!"
"Wait a sec." This came from Hyacinth.
At this some of the women were clearly exasperated, looking at 
the ceiling, but most wore expressions of forced tolerance.
Hyacinth continued flatly. "Castle in the Air is derogatory. That 
mean's it's not-nice. When you talk about a castle in the air, you 
mean something with no basis in reality. It's like saying someone 
has her head in the clouds."
They all continued to stare morosely, as though she hadn't 
finished. Sarah broke in. "You can call it anything you want. She is 
just making the point that you're using an unflattering name."
Man was comforted by two friends. The rest of them defended 
the name, nicely. "I never heard that."
"I think it sounds nice."
"Like a Barry Manilow song."
"Like one of those little Chinese poems."
"I always thought if your head was in the clouds, that was nice, 
like you were really happy or something. Besides, caslies are a neat 
theme for parties and stuffcan't you see Mark dressed up like a 
knight?" Giggles.
"And this way we can call ourselves the Atrheads!" Screams of 
delight. Hyacinth's objection having been thus obliterated, Castle In 
the Air was voted In unanimously, with two abstentions, and it was 
decided that paints and brushes would be bought and the wing would 
be painted in this theme during the weeks to come. Presently the 
meeting adjourned.
"We've got forty minutes until the Candle Passing," observed 
Mitzi, "and until then we can have a social hour. But not a whole 
hour"
The meeting dissolved into chattering fragments. Sarah leaned 
towards Hyacinth to whisper in her ear, and Hyacinth tensed. They 
had been whispering to each other in turns for the last half hour, and 
as both had ticklish ears this had caused much hysterical lip-biting 
and snorting. Sarah did not really have to whisper now, but it was 
her turn. "What candle passing?" she asked.
Hyacinth's attempt to whisper back was met by violent 
resistance from Sarah, so they laughed and made a truce. "It's kind 
of complicated. It means something personal happened between 
someone and her boyfriend, so everyone else has to know about it. 
Listen. We've got to escape, okay?"
"Okay."
"Go to Room 103 when the alarm sounds."
"Alarm?" But Hyacinth was already gliding out.
Sarah was quickly trapped in a conversation group including 
Mitzi and Mari. She accepted a cup of Kool-Aid/vodka punch and 
smiled when she could. Everyone was being nice to her in case she 
felt like an idiot for having said those things during the meeting. 
Mari asked if her boyfriend helped out with the hard parts of being 
President and Sarah had to say that just now she didn't have a 
boyfriend.
"Ahaa!" said everyone. "Don't worry, Sarah, we'll see what we 
can come up with. No prob, now you're an Airhead."
Sarah was groping for an answer when the local smoke alarm 
howled and the Airheads moaned in disappointment. As they all 
trooped off to their rooms to make themselves a little more 
presentable, Sarah headed for Room 103, following a heavy trail of 
marijuana smoke with her nose. As this was only the smoke alarm, 
only the twelfth floor would be evacuated.
Hyacinth pulled Sarah into the room and carefully fitted a wet 
reefer to her lips. It was dark, and a young black woman was 
slumped over a desk asleep, stereo on loud. Hyacinth Went to the 
vent window and released an amazing primal scream toward F 
Tower. Alter some prompting from her hostess, Sarah gave back the 
joint and followed suit. Hyacinth's Sleeping roommate, Lucy, sat up, 
sighed, then went over and lay down on her bed. Sarah and Hyacinth 
sat on Hyacinth's bed and drank milk from an illegal mini-fridge in 
the closet.
They silently finished the joint, shaking their heads at each other 
and laughing in disbelief.
"Ever done LSD?" asked Sarah.
"No. Why? Got some?"
"Oh. jeez, I wasn't suggesting it. I was going to say, for a 
minute there I thought I was back on it. That's how unreal those 
people are to me."
"You think they're strange?" said Hyacinth. "I think they're 
very normal."
"That's what I'm afraid of. Your room is pretty nice; I feel very 
much at home here." It was a nice room, one of the few Plex rooms I 
ever saw that was pleasant to be in. It was full of illegal cooking 
appliances and stashes of food, and the walls had been illegally 
painted white. Wall hangings and plants were everywhere.
"Well, we were in the ArmyLucy and me," said Hyacinth, 
carefully fitting a roach clip. "That's almost like LSD."
By now their wing had been evacuated, and a couple of security 
guards were plodding up and down the hallways pretending to 
inspect for sources of smoke. Sarah and Hyacinth leaned together 
and spoke quietly.
"You're not real presidential," said Hyacinth. "People like you 
aren't supposed to take LSD."
"I don't take it anymore. See, back when I was about fourteen, 
my older sister was really into it, and I did it a few times."
"Why'd you stop?"
Sarah squinted into the milk carton and said nothing. Outside, 
the guards cursed to each other about students in general. Sarah 
finally said, "I kept an eye on my sister, and when she got cut loose 
completelylost track of what was real and stopped caringI saw it 
wasn't a healthy thing."
"So now you're President. I don't get it."
"The important thing is to get your life anchored in something. I 
think you have to make contact with the world in
some way, and one way is to get involved."
"Student government?"
"Well, it beats MTV."

A guard beat on their door, attracted by the stereo-noise.
"Screw off," said Hyacinth in a loud stage whisper, flipping the 
bird toward the door. Sarah put her face in her hands and bent double 
with suppressed laughter. When she recovered, the guard had left 
and Hyacinth was smiling brightly.
"Jeezus!" said Sarah, "you're pretty blatant, aren't you?"
"If it's the quiet, polite type you want, go see the Air-heads."
"You've lived with people like this before. Why don't they kick 
you off the wing?"
"Tokenism. They have to have tokens. Lucy is their token black, 
I'm their token individual. They love having a loudmouth around to 
disagree with themmakes them feel diverse."
"You don't think diplomacy would be more effective?"
"I'm not a diplomat. I'm me. Who are you?"
Instead of answering this difficult question, Sarah leaned back 
comfortably against the wall and closed her eyes. They listened to 
music for a long time as the Airheads breezed back onto the wing.
"I'd feel relaxed," said Sarah, "except I'm actually kind of 
guilty about missing the Candle Passing."
"That's ridiculous."
"You're right. You can say that and be totally sure of yourself, 
can't you? I admire you, Hyacinth."
"I like you, Sarah," said Hyacinth, and that summed it up.


In the Physics Library, Casimir Radon read about quantum 
mechanics. The digital watch on the wrist of the sleeping post-doc 
across the table read 8:00. That meant it was time to go upstairs and 
visit Professor Emeritus Walter Abraham Sharon, who worked odd 
hours. Casimir was not leaving just yet, though. He had found that 
Sharon was not the swiftest man in the world, and though the 
professor was by no means annoyed when Casimir showed up on 
time, Casimir preferred to come ten minutes late. Anyway, in the 
informal atmosphere of the Physics Department, appointments were 
viewed with a certain Heisenbergian skepticism, as though being in 
the right place at the right time would involve breaking a natural law 
and was therefore impossible to begin with. Outside the picture 
windows of the library, the ghettos of the City were filled with 
smoky light, and occasionally a meteor streaked past and crashed in 
flames in the access lot below. They were not actual meteors, but 
merely various objects soaked in lighter fluid, ignited and thrown 
from a floor in E Tower above, trailing fire and debris as they 
zoomed earthward.
Casimir found this perversely comforting. It was just the sort of 
insanity he hadn't been able to get away from during his first week 
at American Megaversity. Soon the miserable Casimir had taken me 
up on my offer to stop by at any time, showing up at my door just 
before midnight, wanting to cry but not about to. I took coffee, he 
took vodka, and soon we understood each other a little better. As he 
explained it, no one here had the least consideration for others, or the 
least ability to think for themselves, and this combination was hard 
to take after having been an adult. Nor had academics given him any 
solace; owing to the medieval tempo of the bureaucracy, he was still 
mired in kindergarten-level physics. Of course he could speed these 
courses up just by being there. Whenever a professor asked a 
question, rhetorical or not, Casimir shouted the answer immediately. 
This earned him the hatred and awe of his classmates, but it was his 
only source of satisfaction. As he waited for his situation to become 
sensible, he sat in on the classes he really wanted to take, in effect 
taking a double load.
"Because I'm sure Sharon is going to bring me justice," Casimir 
had declared, raising his voice above a grumble for the first time. 
"This guy makes sense! He's like you, and I can't understand how 
he ended up in this place. I never thought I'd be surprised by 
someone just because he is a sensible and a good guy, but in this 
place it's a miracle. He c. out me, asks questions about my lifeit's 
as though aiscovering what's best for me is a research project we're 
working on as a team. i can't believe a great man like him would 
care." Long, somber pause. "But I don't think even he can make up 
for what's wrong with this place. How about you, Bud? You're 
normal. What are you doing here?" Lacking an answer, I changed 
the subject to basketball.
A trio of meteors streaked across the picture windows and it was 
8:10. Casimir returned his book and exited into the dark shiny hail. 
He was now at the upper limit of the Burrows, the bloc of the Plex 
that housed the natural sciences. Two floors above him, on the sixth 
and top floor of the base, was Emeritus Row, the plush offices of the 
academic superstars. He made his way there leisurely, knowing he 
was welcome.
Emeritus Row was dark and silent, illuminated only by the 
streak of warm yellow splashed away from Sharon's door. Casimir 
removed his glacier glasses. "Come in," came the melodious answer 
to his knock, and Casimir Radon entered his favorite room in the 
world.
Sharon looked at him with raised eyebrows. "Veil! You haff 
made a decision?"
"I think so."
"Let's have it! Leaving or staying? For the sake of physics I 
hope the latter."
Casimir abruptly realized he had not really made up his mind. 
He shoved his hands into his pockets and breathed deeply, a little 
surprised by all this. He could not keep a smile from his face, 
though, and could not ignore the hominess of Sharon's chaotic 
office. He announced that he was going to stay.
"Good, good," Sharon said absently. "Clear a place to sit." He 
gestured at a chair and Casimir set about removing thirty Pounds of 
high-energy physics from it. Sharon said, "So you've decided to 
cross the Rubicon, eh?"
Casimir sat down, thought about it, and said with a half grin, 
"Or the Styx, whichever the case may be."
Sharon nodded, and as he did a resounding thump issued from 
above. Casimir jumped, but Sharon did not react.
"What was that?" Casimir asked. "Sounded big."
 "Ach," said Sharon. "Trowing furniture again, I should guess. 
You know, don't you, that many of our students are very interested 
in the physics of falling bodies?" He delivered this, like all his bad 
jokes, slowly and solemnly, as though working out long calculations 
in his head. Casimir chuckled. Sharon winked and lit his pipe. "I am 
given to understand, from grapevine talk, that you are smarter than 
all of our professors except for me." He winked again through thick 
smoke.
"Oh. Well, I doubt it."
"Ach, I don't. No correlation between age and intelligence! 
You're just afraid to use your smarts! That's right. You'd rather 
sufferit is your Polish blood. Anyway, you have much practical 
experience. Our professors have only book experience."
"Well, it's the book experience I want. It's handy to know 
electronics, but what I really like is pure principles. I can make more 
money designing circuits, if that's what I want."
"Exactly! You prefer to be a poor physicist. Well, I cannot argue 
with you wanting to know pure things. Alter all, you are not nave, 
your life has been no more sheltered than mine."
Embarrassed, Casimir laughed. "I don't know about that. I 
haven't lived through any world wars yet. You've lived through two. 
I may have escaped from a slum, but you escaped from Peenemunde 
with a suitcase full of rocket diagrams."
Sharon's eyes crinkled at the corners. "Yet. A very important 
word, nicht wahr? You are not very old, yet."
"What do you mean? Do you expect a war?"
Sharon laughed deeply and slowly. "I have toured your 
residential towers with certain students of mine, and I was reminded 
of certain, er, locations during the occupation of the Sudetenland. I 
think from what I see"the ceiling thumped again, and he gestured 
upward with his pipestem
"and hear, that perhaps you are in a war now."
Casimir laughed, but then sucked in his breath and sat back as 
Sharon glowered at him morosely. The old professor was very 
complicated, and Casimir always seemed to be taking missteps with 
him.
"War and violence are not very funny," said Sharon, "unless 
they happen to youthen they are funny because they haff to be. 
There is more violence up there than you realize! Even speech today 
has become a form of violenceeven in the university. So pay 
attention to that, and don't worry about a war in Europe. Worry 
about it here, this is your home now."
"Yes, sir." Alter pausing respectfully, Casimir withdrew a 
clipboard from his pack and put It on Sharon's desk. "Or it will be 
my home as soon as you sign these forms. Mrs. Santucci will tear 
my arms off if I don't bring them in tomorrow."
Sharon sat still until Casimir began to feel uncomfortable. "Ja," 
he finally said, "I guess you need to worry about forms too. Forms 
and forms and forms. Doesn't matter to me."
"Oh. It doesn't? You aren't retiring, are you?"
"Ja, I guess so."
Silently, Sharon separated the forms and laid them out on the 
Periodic Table of the Elements that covered his desk. He examined 
them with care for a few minutes, then selected a pen from a stein on 
his desk, which had been autographed by Enrico Fermi and Niels 
Bohr, and signed them.
"There, you're in the good courses now," he concluded. "Good 
to see you are so well Socioeconomically Integrated." The old man 
sat back in his chair, clasped his fingers over his flat chest, and 
closed his eyes.
A thunderous crash and Casimir was on the floor, dust in his 
throat and pea gravel on his back. Rubble thudded down from above 
and Casimir heard a loud inharmonious piano chord, which held 
steady for a moment and moaned downward in pitch until it was 
obliterated by an explosive splintering crack. More rubble flew 
around the room and he was pelted with small blocks. Looking down 
as he rubbed dust from his eyes he saw scores of strewn black and 
white piano keys.
Sharon was slumped over on his desk, and a trickle of blood ran 
from his head and onto the back of his hand and puddled on the class 
change form beside his pipe. Gravel, rainwater and litter continued 
to slide down through the hole in the ceiling. Casimir alternately 
screamed and gulped as he staggered to his feet. lie waded through 
shattered ceiling panels and twisted books to Sharon's side and saw 
with horror that the old man's side had been pierced by a shard of 
piano frame shot out like an arrow in the explosion. With exquisite 
care he helped him lean back, cleared the desk of books and junk, 
then picked up his thin body and set him atop the desk. He propped 
up Sharon's head with the 1938 issues of the Physical Review and 
tried to ease his breathing. The head wound was superficial and 
already clotting, but the side wound was ghastly and Casimir did not 
even know whether to remove the splinter. Blood built up at the 
corners of Sharon's mouth as he gasped and wheezed. Brushing tears 
and dirt from his own face, Casimir looked for the phone.
He started away as a small bat fluttered past.
"Troglodyte! No manners! This is what you're supposed to 
see!" Casimir whirled to see Bert Nix plunging from the open door 
toward Sharon's desk. Casimir tried to head him off, fearing some 
kind of attack, but Bert Nix stopped short and pointed triumphantly 
to Sharon. Casimir turned to look. Sharon was gazing at him dully 
through half-shut eyes, and weakly pounding his finger into a spot 
on the tabletop. Casimir leaned over and looked. Sharon was 
pointing at the Table of the Elements, indicating the box for Oxygen.
"Oxygen! Oh two! Get it?" shouted Bert Nix.
Bill Benson, Security Guard 5, was arguing with a friend 
whether it was possible that F.D.R. committed suicide when the 
emergency line rang. He let it ring four times. Since ninety-nine calls 
out of a hundred were pranks, by letting each one ring four times he 
was delaying the true emergency calls by an average of only four 
one-hundredths of a ring apiecenothing compared with the time it 
took to respond. Anyway, fed up with kids getting stoned at parties 
and fallii on the way out to barf and spraining their wrists, then 
(through some miracle of temporary clearheadedness) calling 
Emergency and trying to articulate their problems through a 
hallucinogenic miasma while monster stereos in the background 
threatened to uncurl his phone cord. Eventually, though, he did pick 
up the phone, holding the earpiece several inches from his head in 
case it was another of those goddamn Stalinist whistle-blasters.
"Listen," came the voice, sounding distant, "I've got to have 
some oxygen. Do you have some there? It's an emergency!"
Oh, shit, Did he have to get this call every night? He listened for 
a few more seconds. "It's an oxygen freak," he said to his friend, 
covering the mouthpiece with his hand.
"Oxygen freak? What do they do with oxygen?"
Benson swung his feet down from the counter, put the receiver 
in his lap, and explained. "See, nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, is the 
big thing. They breathe it through masks, like for surgery. But if you 
breathe it pure you'll kick in no time, because you got to have 
oxygen. And they are so crazy about laughing gas they don't want to 
take off that mask even to breathe, so they like to get some oxygen 
to mix with it so that they can sit there all goddamn night long and 
breathe nothing else and get blasted out of their little minds. So we 
always get these calls."
He picked up the receiver again, took a puff on his cigar, 
exhaled slowly. "Hello?" he said, hoping the poor gas-crazed sap 
had hung up.
"Yeah? When will it be here?"
"Cripes!" Bill Benson shouted, "look, guy, hang it up. We don't 
have any and you aren't allowed to have it."
"Well, shit then, come up here and help me. Call an ambulance! 
For God's sake, a man's dying here."
Some of these kids were such cretins, how did they make it into 
college? Money, probably. "Listen, use your head, kid," he said, not 
unkindly. "We're the Emergency Services desk. We can't leave our 
posts. What would happen if there was an emergency while we were 
gone?"
This was answered by silence; but in the background, Benson 
could just make out another voice, which sounded familiar: "You 
should have listened to what he was trying to tell you! He wasn't 
farting around! We had to sack the Cartography Department to 
afford him. And you don't listen!"
"Shut up!" shouted the gas freak.
"Hey, is that Bert? Is that Bert Nix on the phone?" asked Bill 
Benson. "Where are you, kid?"
"Emeritus Row!' shouted the kid, and dropped the phone. Bill 
Benson continued to listen after the BONKITY-BONK of the phone's 
impact, trying to make sure it was really good old Bert Nix. I think 
he heard this poem; on the news, he claimed he heard a poem, and it 
could well have been this, which Bert Nix quoted regularly and liked 
to write on the walls:

Tenuring and tenuring in the ivory tower!
The flagon cannot fill the flagoneers.
Krupp cuts a fart! The sphinxter cannot hold
Dear academe, our Lusitanta, recoils.
The time-limned dons are noosed. With airy webs
The cerebrally infarcted bring me down.
The East affects conscription, while the curst
Are gulled with Fashionate Propensities.

Shrilly, sum reevaluation is demanded.
Earlier-reckoned commencement is programmed!
What fecund mumming! Outly ward those words hard
When a glassed grimace on an animal Monday
Rumbles at night; unaware that the plans aren't deserved
Escapists' lie-panoply aims to head off the Fan.
A sign frank and witless as the Sun
Is mute in the skies, yet from it are shouted
Real shadows of endogenous deserted words.
The concrete drops down in; but know I now
That thirty-storied stone steel keeps
When next the might of Air are rooks unstable.
What buff be; its towers coming down deglassed
Slumps amid Bedlam in the morn?

"Holy shit!" cried Bill Benson. "Bert? Is that you? Hell, maybe 
something's up. Sam, punch me onto line six there and Ill see if I can 
raise the folks down at nine-one-one."
Casimir was careening through the halls, cursing himself for 
having had to leave Sharon alone with a derelict, adrenaline blasting 
through him as he imagined coming back to find the old man dead. 
He didn't know how he was going to open the door when he got 
where he was going, but at the moment it did not matter because no 
slab of wood and plastic, it seemed, could stand in his way. He 
veered around a corner, smashing into a tail young man who had 
been coming the other way. They both sprawled dazed on the floor, 
but Casimir rolled and sprang to his feet and resumed running. The 
man he had collided with caught up with him, and he realized that it 
was Virgil Gabrielsen, King of the Burrows.
"Virgil! Did you hear that?"
"Yeah, I was coming to check it out. What's up?"
"Piano fell into Sharon's office. . . pierced lung. . . oxygen."
"Right," said Virgil, and skidded to a stop, fishing a key from 
his pocket. He master-keyed his way into a lab and they sent a grad 
student sprawling against a workbench as they made for the gas 
canisters. Casimir grabbed a bottle-cart and they feverishly strapped 
the big cylinder onto it, then wheeled it heavily out the door and 
back toward Sharon.
"Shit," said Virgil, "no freight elevator. No way to get it 
upstairs." They were at the base of the stairs, two floors below 
Sharon. The oxygen was about five feet tall and one foot in diameter, 
and crammed with hundreds of pounds of extremely high-pressure 
gas. Virgil was still thinking about it when Casimir, a bony and 
unhealthy looking man, bear-hugged the canister, straightened up, 
and hoisted it to his shoulder as he would a roll of carpet. He took 
the stairs two at a time, Virgil bounding along behind.
Shortly, Casimir had slammed the cylinder down on the floor 
near Sharon. Bert Nix was holding Sharon's hand, mumbling and 
occasionally making the sign of the cross. As Virgil closed the door, 
Casimir held the top valve at arm's length, buried one ear in his 
shoulder, and opened it up. Virgil just had time to plug his ears.
The room was inundated in a devastating hiss, like the shriek of 
an injured dragon. Casimir's hands were knocked aside by the 
fabulously high pressure of the escaping oxygen. Papers blizzarded 
and piano keys skittered across the floor. Ignoring it, Bert Nix 
stuffed Kleenex into Sharon's ears, then into his own.
In a minute Sharon began to breathe easier. At the same time his 
pipe-ashes burst into a small bonfire, ignited by the high oxygen 
levels. Casimir was making ready to stomp it out when Virgil pushed 
him gently aside; he had been wise enough to yank a fire 
extinguisher from the wall on their way up. Once the fire was 
smothered, Virgil commenced what first aid was possible on Sharon. 
Casimir returned to the Burrows and, finding an elevator, brought up 
more oxygen and a regulator. Using a garbage bag they were able to 
rig a crude oxygen tent.
The ambulance crew arrived in an hour. The technicians loaded 
Sharon up and wheeled him away, Bert Nix advising them on 
Sharon's favorite foods.
I passed this procession on my way thereCasimir had called 
to give me the news. When I arrived in the doorway of Sharon's 
office, I beheld an unforgettable scene: Virgil and Casimir knee-deep 
in wreckage; a desk littered with the torn-open wrappers of medical 
supplies; Virgil holding up a sheaf of charred, bloodstained, fire-
extinguisher-caked forms; and Casimir laughing loudly beneath the 
opened sky.



--October--

At the front of the auditorium, Professor Embers spoke. He 
never lectured; he spoke. In the middle of the auditorium his 
audience of five hundred sat back in their seats, staring up 
openmouthed into the image of the Professor on the nearest color TV 
monitor. In the back of the auditorium, Sarah sat in twilight, trying 
to balance the Student Government budget.
"So grammar is just the mode in which we image concepts," the 
professor was saying. "Grammar is like the walls and bumpers of a 
pinball machine. Rhetoric is like the flippers of a pinball machine. 
You control the flippers. The rest of the machinegrammar
controls everything else. If you use the flippers well, you make 
points. If you fail to image your concepts viably, your ball drops into 
the black hole of nothingness. If you try to cheat, the machine tilts 
and you losethat's like people not understanding your interactions. 
That's why we have to learn Grammar here in Freshman. That, and 
because S. S. Krupp says we have to."
There was a pause of several seconds, and then a hundred or so 
people laughed. Sarah did not. Unlike the freshmen in the class, who 
thought Professor Embers was a cool guy, Sarah thought he was a 
bore and a turkey. He continued to speak, and she continued to 
balance.
This was the budget for this semester, and it was supposed to 
have been done last semester. But last semester the records had been 
gulped by a mysterious computer error, and now Sarah had to 
reconstruct them so that the government could resume debate. She 
had some help from me in this, though I don't know how much good 
it did. We had met early in the year, at a reception for faculty-in-
residence, arid later had a lunch or two together and talked about 
American Megaversity. If nothing else, my suite was a quiet and 
pleasant enough place where she could spread her papers out and 
work uninterrupted when she needed to.
She could also work uninterrupted in her Freshman English 
class, because she was a senior English major with a 3.7 average and 
didn't need to pay much attention.
Her first inkling that something was wrong had been in 
midsummer, when the megaversity's computer scheduling system 
had scheduled her for Freshman English automatically, warning that 
she had failed to meet this requirement during her first year.
"Look," she had said to the relevant official when she arrived in 
the fall, "I'm an English major. I know this stuff. Why are you 
putting me in Freshman English?"
The General Curriculum Advisor consulted little codes printed 
by the computer, and looked them up in a huge computer-printed 
book. "Ah," he said, "was one of your parents a foreign national?"
"My stepmother is from Wales."
"That explains it. You see." The official had swung around 
toward her and assumed a frank, open body-language posture. 
"Statistical analysis shows that children of one or more foreign 
nationals are often gifted with Special Challenges."
Sarah's spine arched back and she set her jaw. "You're saying I 
can't speak English because my stepmother was Welsh?"
"Special Challenges are likely in your case. You were mis-
takenly exempted from Freshmen English because of your high test 
scores. This exemption option has now been retroactively waived for 
your convenience."
"I don't want it waived. It's not convenient."
"To ensure maintenance of high academic standards, the waiver 
is avolitional."
"Well, that's bullshit." This was not a very effective thing to 
say. Sarah wished that Hyacinth could come talk for her; Hyacinth 
would not be polite, Hyacinth would say completely outrageous 
things and they would scatter in terror. "There's no way I can accept 
that." Drawn to the noise like scavengers, two young clean-cut 
advisors looked in the door with open and understanding smiles. 
Everyone smiled except for Sarah. But she knew she was right this 
timeshe knew damn well what language was spoken in Wales 
these days. They could smile stupidly until blue in the face. When 
the advisor hinted that she was asking for special treatment because 
she was President, she gave him a look that snapped his composure 
for a second, a small but helpful triumph.
She had done it by the books, filing a petition requesting to be 
discharged from Freshman English. But her petition was rejected 
because of a computer error which made it appear that she had 
gotten 260 instead of 660 on her SATs. By the time an extra score 
report from the testing company proved that she was smart after all, 
it was too late to drop or add classesso, Freshman English it was.
The end of the class approached at last, and Professor Embers 
handed back this week's essays. The assignment was to select a 
magazine ad and write about how it made you feel.
"I've been epiphanied by the quality of your essays this week," 
said Professor Embers. "We hardly had to give out any C's this time 
around. I have them alphabetized by your first names up here in 
sixteen stacks, one for each section."
All five hundred students went down at once to get theirs. Sarah 
worked for ten minutes. then gathered her things and headed for the 
front, dawdling on purpose. Clustered around the stack of papers for 
her section she could see five of the Stalinistsfor some reason they 
had all ended up in her section. Since she never attended section 
meetings, this was no problem, but she did not want to encounter 
them at times like this either. Standing there tall and straight as a 
burned-out sapling in a field was Dexter Fresser, an important figure 
in the Stalinist Underground Battalion. Most of all, she Wanted to 
avoid him. Sarah and Dex had gone to the same high school in Ohio, 
ridden the same bus to school, slept in the same bed thirteen times 
and shared the same LSD on three occasions. Since then, Dex had 
hardly ever not taken lots of acid. Sarah had taken none. Now he was 
a weird rattle-minded radical who nevertheless remembered her, and 
she avoided him scrupulously.
About halfway down the aisle she found a television monitor 
displaying an image of Dex. She sank deeply into a seat and watched 
him and his comrades. Dex was reading a paper desultorily and she 
knew it was hers. He flipped aimlessly through it, as though 
searching for a particular word or phrase, then shook his head 
helplessly and dropped it back on the stack. Finally the last of them 
excavated his paper and they were collectively gone, leaving behind 
several dozen essays no one had bothered to pick up.


Associate Professor Archibald Embers, Learning Facilitator of 
Freshman English G Group, was regarding a young woman on his 
sofa and endeavoring to keep his pipe lit. This required a lot of 
upside-down work with his butane lighter and he thought the burn on 
his thumb might be second-degree. This particular woman was 
definitely confrontational, though, and it was no time to show pain. 
He held the pipe cautiously and reached out with the other hand to 
drape his thumb casually over the rim of a potted plant, thrusting the 
roasted region deeply into the cool humus. I am Antaeus, he thought, 
and yet I am Prometheus, singed by my own flame. They were sitting 
in the conversation pit he had installed so as to avoid talking to 
students across his desk like some kind of authoritarian. Or was it 
totalitarian? He could never remember the distinction.
This woman was clearly high voltage, Type A, low-alpha and 
left-hemisphere, with very weird resonances. Seeing her through to 
the end of her crisis would be painful. She had ripped off a lot of 
papers from the auditorium and had brought thei tere into his space 
to fine-tooth comb them. She had a problem with her grade, a B.
"Now," she continued, whipping over another page, "let's look 
at page two of this one, which is about an advertisement for Glans 
Essence Cologne. 'The point of this is about these foxes. He has a 
bunch. On him. He a secret agent, like Bond James Bond or 
something. Or some other person with lots of foxes. Why he has 
foxes? Is Glans Essence Cologne. They hope you figuring that out, 
will buy some of it. Which is what they are selling.' Now, next to 
that in the margin you wrote, 'excellent analysis of the working of 
the ad.' Then at the end you wrote, 'Your understanding of how the 
System brainwashes us is why I gave you an A on this paper.' Now 
really, if you want to give him an A for that it's up to you, but you 
can you then give me a B? Mine was three times as long, I had an 
introduction, conclusion, an outline, no grammatical errors, no 
misspelled wordswhat do you expect?"
"This is a very good question," said Embers. He took a long 
draw on his pipe. "What is a grade? That is the question." He 
chuckled, but she apparently didn't get it. "Some teachers grade on 
curves. You have to be a math major to understand your grade! But 
forget those fake excuses. A grade is actually a form of poetry. It is a 
subjective reaction to a learner's work, distilled and reduced down to 
its purest essencenot a sonnet, not a haiku, but a single letter. 
That's remarkable, isn't it?"
"Look, that's just groovy. But you have to grade in such a way 
that I'm shown to be a better writer than he is. Otherwise it's unfair 
and unrealistic."
Embers recrossed his legs and spent a while sucking his pipe 
back into a blaze. His learner picked up a paper and fanned smoke 
away from her face. "Mind if I smoke?" he said.
"Your office," she said in a strangled voice.
Fine, if she didn't want to assert herself. He finally decided on 
the best approach. "You aren't necessarily a better Writer. You 
called some of them functional illiterates. Well those illiterates, as 
you called them, happen to have very expressive prose voices. 
Remember that in each person's own dialect he or she is perfectly 
literate. So in the sense of having escaped orthodoxy to be truly 
creative, they are highly advanced wordsmiths, while you are still 
struggling to break free of grammatical rules systems. They express 
themselves to me and I react with little one-letter poems of my 
ownthe essence of grading! Poetry! And being a poet I'm 
particularly well suited for it. Your idea of tearing down these proto-
artists because they aren't just like you smacks of a kind of 
absolutism which is very disturbing in a temple of academic 
freedom."
They sat there silent for a while.
"You really said that, didn't you?" she finally asked.
"I did."
"Huh. So we're just floating around without any standards at 
all."
"You could put it that way. You should interact with the 
department chairman on this. Look, there is no absolute reality, 
right? We can't force everyone to express themselves through the 
same absolute rules."
When the young woman left she seemed curiously drained and 
quiet. Indeed, absorbing new world-views could be a sobering 
experience. Embers found a blister on his thumb, and was inspired to 
write a haiku.


There came the sound of a massive ring of keys being slapped 
against the outside of Casimir Radon's door. He looked up from the 
papers on his desk, and in his lap Spike the illicit kitten followed 
suit, scrambling to red-alert status and scything sixteen claws into 
his thigh. Before Casimir had opened his mouth to say "Who is it" or 
Spike could spring forward to engage the foe, the door was unlocked 
and thrown open. A short, heavy man with a disconcerting 
resemblance to Leonid Brezhnev stepped into the room.
"Stermnator," he mumbled, rolling the r's on his tongue like 
Black Sea caviar. Casimir covered Spike with his hand, hoping to 
prevent detection, and the kitten grasped a finger between its 
forepaws and began to rasp with its tongue.
Behind the man was a small wiry old guy with chloracne, who 
bore metal canister with a pump on top and a tube leading to a 
nozzle in his hand. Before Casimir could even grunt in response, this 
man had stepped crisply into the room and begun to apply a heavy 
mist to the baseboards. The B-man glowered darkly at Casimir, who 
sat in silence and watched as the exterminator walked around the 
room, nozzle to wall, spraying everything near the baseboards, in-
cluding shoes, Spike's food and water dishes, a typewriter, two 
unmatched socks, a book and a calculator charger. Both the strangers 
looked around the inside of his nearly barren room with faint 
expressions of incomprehension or disdain.
By the time Casimir got around to saying, "That's okay, I 
haven't seen any bugs in here since I moved in," the sprayer was 
bearing down on him inexorably. Casimir pushed the kitten up 
against his stomach, grasped the hem of his extra-long seven-year-
old Wall Drug T-shirt, and pulled it up to form a little sling for the 
struggling creature, crossing his arms over the resulting bulge in an 
effort to hold and conceal. At the same time he stood and scampered 
out of the path of the exterminator, who bumped into him and 
knocked him off balance onto the bed, arms still crossed. He 
bounced back up, weaved past the exterminator, and stood with his 
back to the door, staring nonchalantly out the window at the view of 
E Tower outside. Behind him, the exterminator paused near the exit 
to soak the straps of an empty duffel bag. As Casimir watched the 
reflection of the two men closing the door he was conscious of a 
revolting chemical odor. Immediately he whirled and tossed Spike 
onto the bed, then took his food and water dishes out to wash them 
in the bathroom.
Casimir had seen his first illicit kitten on the floor above his, 
when he had forgotten to push his elevator button. He got off on the 
floor above to take the stairs down one flight, and saw some students 
playing with the animal in the hallway. After some careful inquiries 
he made contact with a kitten pusher over the phone. Two weeks 
later Casimir, his directions memorized, went to the Library at 4:15 
in the morning. He proceeded to the third floor and pulled down the 
JanuaryMarch 1954 volume of the Soviet Asphalt Journal and 
placed two twenty-dollar bills inside the cover. He then went to the 
serials desk, where he was waited on by a small, dapper librarian in 
his forties.
"I would like to report," he said, opening the volume, "that 
pages 1738 through 1752 of this volume have been razored out, and 
they are exactly the pages I need."
"I see," the man said sympathetically.
"And while I'm here, I have some microfilms to pick up, which 
I got on interlibrary loan."
"An, yes, I know the ones you're talking about. Just a moment, 
please." The librarian disappeared into a back office and emerged a 
minute later with a large box filled with microfilm reel boxes. 
Casimir picked it up, finding it curiously light, smiled at the librarian 
and departed. A pass had already been made out for him, and the exit 
guard waved him through. Back in his room, he pulled out the top 
layer of microffim boxes to find, curled up on a towel, a kitten re-
covering from a mild tranquilizer.
Since then Spike had been neither mild nor tranquil, but that at 
least provided Casimir with some of the unpredictability that Plex 
life so badly lacked. He almost didn't mind having a kitten run 
around the obstacle course of his room at high speed for hours at a 
time in the middle of the night, because it gave his senses something 
not utterly flat to perceive. Even though Spike tried to sleep on his 
face, and hid all small important articles in odd places, Casimir was 
charmed.
He pulled on his glacier glasses in a practiced motion and 
stepped out into the hail. Casimir's wing was only two floors away 
from allies of the Wild and Crazy Guys, best partiers in the Plex, and 
two Saturdays ago they had come down with their spray paint and 
painted giant red, white and blue twelve-spoked wheels between 
each pair of doors. These were crude representations of the Big 
Wheel, a huge neon sign outside the Plex, which the Wild and Crazy 
Guys pretended to worship as a joke and initiation ritual. This year 
they had become aggressive graffitists, painting Big Wheels almost 
every in the Plex. Casimir, used to it, walked down this gallery of 
giant wheels to the bathroom, Spike's dishes in hand.
The bathrooms in the wings looked on the inside like 
microwave ovens or autoclaves, with glossy green tile on the walls, 
brilliant lighting, overwaxed floors and so much steam that entering 
one was like entering a hallucination. At one end of the bathroom, 
three men and their girlfriends were taking showers, drinking, 
shouting a lot and generally being Wild and Crazy. They were less 
than coherent, but most of what Casimir could make out dealt with 
Anglo-Saxon anatomical terms and variations on "what do you think 
of this" followed by prolonged yelling from the partner. Casimir was 
tempted to stay and listen, but reasoned that since he was still a 
virgin anyway there was no point in trying to learn anything 
advanced, especially by eavesdropping. He went down the line of 
closely spaced sinks until he found one that had not been stuffed 
with toilet paper or backed up with drain crud.
As he was washing Spike's dishes, a guy came in the door with 
a towel around his waist. He looked conventional, though somewhat 
blocky, athletic and hairless. He came up and stood very close to 
Casimir, staring at him wordlessly for a long time as though 
nearsighted; Casimir ignored him, but glanced at him from time to 
time in the mirror, looking between two spokes of a Big Wheel that 
had been drawn on it with shaving cream.
After a while, he tugged on Casimir's sleeve. "Hey," he 
mumbled, "can I borrow your"
Casimir said nothing.
"Huh?" said the strange guy.
"I don't know," said Casimir. "Depends on what you want. 
Probably not."
A grin gradually sprouted on the man's face and he turned 
around as though smirking with imaginary friends behind him. "Oh, 
Jeez," he said, and turned away. "I hate fuckers like you!" he yelled, 
and ran to the lockers across from the sinks, running a few steps up 
the wall before sprawling back down on the floor again. Casimir 
watched him in the mirror as he went from locker to locker, finally 
finding an unlocked one. The strange guy pawed through it and 
selected a can of shaving cream. "Hey," he said, and looked at the 
back of Casimir's head. "Hey, Wall."
Casimir looked at him in the mirror. "What is it?"
The strange guy did not understand that Casimir was looking 
right at him. "Hey fucker! Cocksucker! Mr. Drug! You!" Rhythmic 
female shrieking began to emanate from a shower stall.
"What is it," Casimir yelled back, refusing to turn.
The strange guy approached him and Casimir turned half around 
defensively. He stood very close to Casimir. "Your hearing isn't 
very good," he shouted, "you should take off your glasses."
"Do you want something? If so, you should just tell me."
"Do you think he'd mind if I used this?"
"Who?"
The strange guy smirked arid shook his head. "Do you know 
anything about terriers?"
"No."
"Ah, well." The strange guy put the shaving cream on the shelf 
in front of Casimir, muttered something incomprehensible, laughed, 
and walked out of the bathroom.
Casimir dried the food bowl under an automatic hand dryer by 
the door. As he was on his third push of the button, a couple from 
one of the showers walked nude into the room, getting ten feet from 
cover before they saw Casimir.
The woman screamed, clapping her hands over her face. "Oh 
Jeez, Kevin, there's a guy in here!" Kevin was too mellowed by sex 
and beer to do anything but smile wanly. Casimir walked out without 
saying anything, breathed deeply of the cool, dry air of the hallway, 
and returned to his room, where he filled Spike's water bowl with 
spring water from a bottle.

As soon as Casimir had heard about Neutrino, the official 
organization of physics majors, he had crashed a meeting and got 
himself elected President and Treasurer. Casimir was like that, meek 
most of the time with occasional bursts of effectiveness. He walked 
into the meeting, which so far consisted of six people, and said, 
"Who's the president?"
The others, being physics majors and therefore accustomed to 
odd behavior of all sorts, had answered. "He graduated," said one.
"No, when he graduated, he stopped being our president.
When the guy who was our president graduated, we instan-
taneously ceased to have one," another countered.
"I agree," a third added, "but the proper term is 'was grad-
uated.'"
"That's pedantic."
"That's correct. Where's the dictionary?"
"Who cares? Why do you want to know?" the first asked. As the 
other two consulted a dictionary, a fourth member held a calculator 
in his hand, gnawing absently on the charger cord, and the other two 
members argued loudly about an invisible diagram they were 
drawing with their fingers on a blank wall.
"I want to be president of this thing," Casimir said. "Any 
objections?"
"Oh, that's okay. We thought you were from the administration 
or something."
Casimir's motivation for all this was that after the Sharon 
incident, it was impossible for him to escape from his useless 
courses. The grimness of what had happened, and the hopelessness 
of his situation, had left him quiet and listless for a couple of weeks 
to the point where I was beginning to feel alarmed. One night, then, 
from two to four in the morning, Casimir's neighbor had watched 
Rocky on cable and the sleeping Casimir had subconsciously listened 
in on the soundtrack. He awoke in the morning with a sense of mis-
sion, of destiny, a desire to go out and beat the fuckers at their own 
game. Neutrino provided a suitable power base, and since his classes 
only consumed about six hours a week he had all the time in the 
world.
Previous to Casimir's administration most of the money allotted 
to Neutrino had been dispersed among petty activities such as 
dinners, trips to nuclear reactors, insipid educational gadgets and the 
like. Casimir's plan was to spend all the money on a single project 
that would exercise the minds of the members and, in the end, 
produce something useful. Once he had convinced the pliable 
membership of Neutrino that this was a good idea, his suggestion for 
the actual project was not long in coming: construction of a mass 
driver.
The mass driver was a magnetic device for throwing things. It 
consisted of a long straight rail, a "bucket" that slid along the rail on 
a magnetic cushion and powerful electromagnets that kicked the 
bucket down the rail When the bucket slammed to a halt at the rail's 
end, whatever was in it kept on goingtheoretically, very, very fast. 
Recently this simple machine had become a pet project of Professor 
Sharon, who had advocated it as a lunar mining tool. Casimir argued 
that the idea was important and interesting in and of itself, and that 
Sharon's connection to it lent it sentimental value. As a tribute to 
Sharon, a fun project and a toy that would be a blast to play with 
when finished, the mass driver was irresistible to Neutrino. Which 
was just as well, because nothing was going to stop Casimir from 
building this son of a bitch.
Casimir had been drawing up a budget for it on this particular 
evening, because budget time for the Student Government was 
coming up soon. Not long after the exterminator's visit, Casimir got 
stuck. Many of the supplies he needed were standard components 
that were easy for him to get, but certain items, such as custom-
wound electromagnets, were hard to budget for. This was the sort of 
fabrication that had to be done at the Science Shop, and that meant 
dealing with Virgil Gabrielsen. After nailing down as much as he 
could, Casimir gathered his things and set out on the half-hour 
elevator ride to the bottom of the Burrows.
In the interests of efficiency, security, ease of design and 
healthy interplay among the departments, the designers of the 
Campustructure had put all the science departments together in a 
single bloc. It was known as the Burrows because it was mostly 
below street level, and because of the allegedly Morlockian qualities 
of its inhabitants. At the top of the Burrows were the departmental 
libraries and conference rooms. Below were professors' offices and 
departmental headquarters, followed by classrooms, labs, 
stockrooms and at the very bottom, forty feet below ground level, 
the enormous CC Computing Centerand the Science Shop. Any 
researcher wanting glass blown, metal shaped, equipment fixed, cir-
cuits designed or machines assembled, had to come down and beg 
for succor at the feet of the stony-hearted Science Shop staff. This 
meant trying to track down Lute, the hyperactive Norwegian 
technician, rumored to have the power of teleportation, who held 
smart people in disdain because of their helplessness in practical 
matters, or Zap, the electronics specialist, a motorcycle gang 
sergeant-at-arms who spent his working hours boring out engine 
blocks for his brothers and threatening professors with bizarre and 
deadly tortures. Zap was the cheapest technician the Science Shop 
steering committee had been able to find, Lute had been retained at 
high salary after dire threats from all faculty members and Virgil, to 
the immense relief of all, had been hired three years earlier as a part-
time student helper and had turned the place around.
Science Shop was at the end of a dark unmarked hallway that 
smelled of machine oil and neoprene, half blocked by junked and 
broken equipment. When Casimir arrived he relaxed instantly in the 
softly lit, wildly varied squalor of the place, and soon found Virgil 
sipping an ale and twiddling painstakingly with wires and pulleys on 
an automatic plotter.
They went into his small office and Virgil provided himself and 
Casimir with more ale. "What's the latest on Sharon?" he asked.
"The same. No word," Casimir said, pushing the toes of his 
tennis shoes around in the sawdust and metal filings on the floor. 
Not quite in a coma, definitely not all there. Whatever he lost from 
oxygen starvation isn't coming back."
"And they haven't caught anyone."
"Well, E14 is the Performing Arts Floor. They used to have a 
room with a piano in It. The E13S people didn't like it because the 
Performing Artists were always tap dancing."
"We know how sensitive those poor boys are to noise."
"A couple of days before the piano crash, the piano was stolen 
from E14. Two of the tap-dancers had their doors ignited the same 
night. A couple of days later, E13S had a burning-furniture-throwing 
contest, and it just happens that at the same time a piano crashed 
through Sharon's ceiling. Circumstantial evidence only."
Virgil clasped his hands over his flat belly and looked at the 
ceiling. "Though a pattern of socio-heterodox behaviors has been 
exhibited by individuals associated with E13S, we find it preferable 
to keep them within the system and counsel them constructively 
rather than turn them over to damaging outside legal interference 
which would hinder resocialization. The Megaversity is a free 
community of individuals seeking to grow together toward a more 
harmonious and enlightened future, and introduction of external 
coercion merely stifles academic freedom and"
"How did you know that?" asked Casimir, amazed. "That's 
word for word what they said the other day."
Virgil shrugged. "Official policy statement. They used it two 
years ago, in the barbell incident. E13 dropped a two-hundred-pound 
barbell through the roof of the Cafeteria's main kitchen area. It 
crashed into a pressure vat and caused a tuna-nacho casserole 
explosion that wounded fifteen. And the pressure is so high in those 
vats, you know, that Dr. Forksplit, the Dean of Dining Services, who 
was standing nearby, had a nacho tortilla chip shard driven all the 
way through his skull. He recovered, but they've called him Wombat 
ever since. The people who handle this in the Administration don't 
understand how deranged these students are. Now, Kruno and his 
people would like to pour molten lead down their throats, but they 
can't do anything about itthe decisions are made by a committee 
of tenured faculty."
Casimir resisted an impulse to scream, got up and paced around 
talking through clenched teeth. "This shit really, really pisses me off. 
It's incredible, Law doesn't exist here, you can do what you please."
"Well," said Virgil, still blas, "I disagree. There's always law. 
Law is just the opinion of the guy with the biggest gun. Since outside 
law rarely matters in the Plex, we make our own law, using whatever 
powerwhatever gunswe have. We've been very successful in 
the Science Shop."
"Oh, yeah? I suppose this was something to do with what you 
said the other day about some unofficial work here for me."
"That's a perfect example. The researchers of American 
Megaversity need your services. It's illegal, but the scientific faculty 
have more power than the rule-enforcers, so we make our own law 
regarding technical work. You keep track of what you do, and I pay 
you through the vitality fund.
"The what?"
"The fund made up of donations from various professors and 
firms who have a vested interest in keeping the Science Shop 
running smoothly. Hell, it's all just grant money. In the egalitarian 
system we had before, nobody got anything done."
"Look." Casimir shook his head and sat back down. "I don't 
want even to hear all this. You know, all I've ever wanted to be is a 
normal student. They won't let me take decent classes, okay, so I 
work on the mass driver. Now I come here to get your help and you 
start talking about local law and free enterprise. I just want some 
estimates from you on getting these electromagnets wound for the 
mass driver. Okay? Forget free enterprise." Casimir dropped a page 
of diagrams and specifications on Virgil's desk.
Virgil looked it over. "Well, it depends," he finally said. "If we 
pretend you're just a normal student, then I will charge you, oh, 
about ten thousand dollars for this stuff and have it done by the time 
you graduate. Now, unofficially, I could log it in as something much 
simpler and charge you less. But you can't put that into a formal 
budget proposal. Very unofficially, I might do it for a small bribe, 
like some help from you around the Shop. But that's really abnormal 
to put in a budget. Looks like you're stuck."
"It wouldn't really take you three years."
"It would take me." Virgil waved at the door. "Zap could do it 
in a week. Want to ask him? He's not hard to wake up."
Casimir brooded momentarily. "Well, look. I don't really care 
how it gets done. But it's necessary to have something on paper, you 
know?"
Virgil shook his head, smiling. "Casimir. You don't think 
anyone pays any attention to those budgets, do you?"
"Aw, shit. This is too weird for me."
"It's not weird, you're just not used to it yet. Here is what we'll 
do. We work out a friendly gentlemen's agreement by which I make 
the magnets for you, probably over Christmas vacation, in exchange 
for a little of your expert help around the Science Shop. When I'm 
done with the magnets I put them in an old box and mark it, say, 
'SPARE PARTS, 1932 AUTOMATIC BOMBSIGHT 
PROTOTYPE.' I dump it in the storeroom. When budget time 
comes around you say, 'Oh, gee, it happens I've designed this thing 
to use existing parts, I know just where they are.' Ridiculous, but no 
one knows that, and those who understand won't want to meddle in 
any arrangement of mine."
"Okay!" Casimir threw up his hands. "Okay. Fine. Ill do it. Just 
tell me what to do and don't let me see any of this illegal stuff."
"It's not illegal, I said it was legal. Hang on a sec while I Xerox 
these pages."
Virgil opened the door and was met by a clamor of voices from 
several advanced academic figures. Casimir looked around the room: 
a firetrap stuffed with books and papers and every imaginable 
variety of electronic junk. A Geiger counter hung out the window 
into a deep air shaft, clicking every second or two. In one corner a 
1940's radio was hooked up to a technical power supply and wired 
into the guts of a torn-open telephone so that Virgil could make 
hands-off phone calls. An old backless TV in another corner enabled 
Virgil to monitor the shop outside. Electronic parts, hunks of wire, 
junk-food wrappers and scraps of paper littered the floor. And in 
three separate places sat those little plastic trays Casimir saw 
everywhere, overflowing with tiny seedsrat poison.
"Damn!" spat Casimir as Virgil reentered. "There's enough of 
that poison in this room alone to kill every rat in this city. What's 
their problem with that stuff anyway?"
Virgil snorted. Everyone knew the rat poison was ubiquitous; 
the wastebaskets might go a month without emptying, but when it 
came to rat poison the B-men were fearsomely diligent, seeming to 
pass through walls and locked doors like Shaolin priests to scatter 
the poison-saturated kernels. "It's cultural," he explained. "They 
hate rats. You should read some Scythian mythology. In 
Crotobaltislavonia it's a capital crime to harbor them. That's why 
they had a revolution! The old regime stopped handing out free rat 
poison."
"I'm serious," said Casimir. "I've got an illegal kitten in my 
room, and If they keep breaking in to spread poison, they'll find it or 
let it out or poison it."
"Or eat it. Seriously, you should have mentioned it, Casimir. Let 
me help you out."
Casimir rested his face in his hand. "I suppose you also have an 
arrangement with the B-men."
"No, no, much too complicated. I do almost all my work at the 
computer terminal, Casimir. You can accomplish anything there. 
See, a few years ago a student had a boa constrictor in his room that 
got poisoned by the B-men, and even though it was illegal he sued 
the university for damages and won. There are still a lot of residents 
with pets whom the administration doesn't want to antagonize, be-
cause of connections or whatever. Some students are even allergic to 
the poison. So, they keep a list of rooms which are not to be given 
any poison. All I have to do is put your room on it."
Casimir was staring intently at Virgil. "Wait a minute. How did 
you get that kind of access? Aren't there locks? Access checks?"
"There are some annoyances involved."
"I suppose with photographic memory you could do a lot on the 
computer."
"Helps to have the Operator memorized too."
"Oh, fuck! No!"
Casimir, I am sure, was just as surprised as I had been. The 
Operator was an immense computer program consisting entirely of 
numbersmachine code. Without it, the machine was a useless 
lump. With the Operator installed, it was a tool of nearly infinite 
power and flexibility. It was to the computer as memory, instinct and 
intelligence are to the human brain.
Virgil handed Casimir a canister of paper computer tape. The 
label read, "1843 SURINAM CENSUS DATA VOLUME 5. 
FIREWOOD USAGE ESTIMATES AND PROJECTIONS."
"Ignore that," said Virgil. "It's a program in machine code. It'll 
put your room on the no-poison list, and your cat will be safe, unless 
the B-men forget or decide to ignore the rule, which is a possibility."
Casimir barely looked at the tape and stared distantly at Virgil. 
"What have you been doing with this knowledge?" he whispered. 
"You could get back at E13S."
Virgil smiled. "Tempting. But when you can do what I can, you 
don't go for petty revenge. All I do, really, is fight the Worm, which 
is really my only passion these days. It's why I stay around instead 
of getting a decent job. It's a sabotage program. It's probably the 
greatest intellectual achievement of the nineteen-eighties, and it's the 
only thing I've ever found that is so indescribably difficult and 
complex and beautiful that I haven't gotten bored with it."
"Why would anyone do such a thing? It must be costing the 
Megaversity millions."
"I don't know," said Virgil, "but it's great to have a challenge."


Sarah and I were in her room with my toolbox. Outside, the 
Terrorists were trying to get in. I sat on her bed, as she had 
commanded, silent and neutral.
"When did they start calling themselves the Terrorists," she 
asked during a lull.
"Who knows? Maybe Wild and Crazy Guys was too old-
fashioned."
"Maybe the hijacking of that NATO tank yesterday gave them 
the idea. That got lots of coverage. Shit, here they are again."
Cheerfully screaming, another Airhead was dragged down the 
hail to be given her upside-down cold shower. The original Terrorist 
plan had been to drag the Airheads to the bathroom by their hair, as 
in olden times, but after a few tries they were convinced that this 
really was painful, so now they were holding on to the feet.
"Terrorists, Terrorists, we're a mean, sonofabitch," came a 
hoarse chant as a new group gathered in front of Sarah's door. 
"Come on, Sarah," their leader shouted in a heavy New York accent. 
He was trying to sound fatherly and patient, but instead sounded 
anxious and not very bright. "It'll be a lot better for you if you just 
come out now. We're tickling Mitzi right now and she's going to tell 
us where the master key is, and once we get that we'll come in and 
you'll get ad-dition-al pun-ish-ment."
"God," Sarah whispered to me, "these dorks think I'm just 
playing hard-to-get. Hope they enjoy it."
"Give the word and I'll shoo them off," I said again.
"Wouldn't help. I have to deal with this myself. Don't be so 
mach."
"Sorry. Sometimes it works to be macho, you know."
Their previous effort to flash her out of her room had failed. 
"Flashing" was the technique of squirting lighter fluid Under a door 
and throwing in a match. It wasn't as dangerous as it sounded, but it 
invariably smoked the victim out. Powdering was a milder form of 
this: an envelope was filled with powder, its mouth slid under the 
door, and the envelope stomped on, exploding a cloud of powder 
into the room. Three days earlier this had been done to Sarah by 
some Air-heads. A regular vacuum cleaner just blew the powder out 
again, so we brought my wetidry vacuum up and filled it with water 
and had better results, though she and her room still smelled like 
babies. She had purchased a heavy rubber weatherstrip from the 
Mall's hardware store and we had just finished installing it when the 
flashing attempt had taken place. From listening to the Terrorists on 
the other side of the door, 1 had now become as primitive as they 
hadit was no longer a negotiable situationand was itching to 
knock heads.
"Why don't you stop bothering me?" she yelled, trying too hard 
to sound strong and steady. "I really don't want to play this game 
with you. You got what you wanted from the others, so why don't 
you leave? You have no right to bother me."
At this, they roared. "Listen, bitch, this is our sister floor, we 
decide what our rights are! No one escapes from the rule of the 
Terrorists, Terrorists, we're a mean, sonofabitch! We'll get in sooner 
or laterface up to it!"
Another one played the nice guy. "Listen, Sarahhey, is that 
her name? Right. Uh, listen, Sarah. We can make life pretty hard on 
you. We're just trying to initiate you into our sister floorit's a new 
tradition. Remember, if you don't lock your door, we can come in; 
and if you do lock it, we can penny you in."
The Airheads had once pennied Sarah in. The doors opened 
inward and locked with deadbolts. If the deadbolt was locked and the 
door pushed inward with great force, the friction between the bolt 
and its rectangular hole in the jamb became so great that it was 
impossible for the occupant to withdraw the bolt to unlock the door. 
One could not push inward on the door all the time, of course, but it 
was possible to wedge pennies between the front of the door and the 
projecting member of the jamb so tightly that the occupant was 
sealed in helplessly. Since this maneuver only worked when the 
owner of the room was inside with the door locked, it was used 
discourage people from the unfriendly habit of locking their doors. 
Sarah was pennied in just before a Student Government meeting, and 
she had to call me so that I could run upstairs and throw myself 
against the door until the pennies fell out.
"Look," said Sarah, also taking a reasonable tack, "When are 
you going to accept that I'm not coming out? I don't want to play, I 
just want peace and quiet." She knew her voice was wavering now, 
and she threw me an exasperated look.
"Sarah," said the righteously perturbed Terrorist, "you're being 
very childish about this. You know we don't want that much. It 
doesn't hurt. You just have one more chance to be reasonable, and 
then it's ad-dition-al pun-ish-ment."
"Swirlie! Swirlie! Swirlie!" chanted the Terrorists.
"Fuck yourselves!" she yelled. Realizing what was about to 
happen, she yanked my pliers out of my toolbox and clamped their 
serrated jaws down on the lock handle just as Mitzi's master key was 
slid into the keyhole outside.
She held it firm. The Terrorists found the lock frozen. The key-
turner called for help, but only one hand can grip a key at a time. 
The handle did rotate a few degrees in the tussle, and the Terrorists 
then found they could not pull the key from the lock. Sarah 
continued to hold it at a slight twist as the Terrorists mumbled 
outside.
"Listen, Sarah, you got a good point. We'll just leave you alone 
from now on."
"Yeah," said the others, "Sorry, Sarah."
Looking at me, Sarah snorted with contempt and held on to the 
pliers. A minute or so after the Terrorists noisily walked away, an 
unsuccessful yank came on the key.
"Shit! Fuck you!" The Terrorist kicked and pounded viciously 
on the door, raging.
After a few minutes I got on my belly and pried up the rubber 
strip and verified that the Terrorists were no longer waiting outside. 
Sarah opened her door, pulled out the master key, and pocketed it.
She smiled a lot, but she was also shaking, and wanted no 
comfort from me. I was about to say she could sleep on my Sofa for 
a few days. Sometimes, though, I can actually be sensitive about 
these things. Sarah was obviously tired of needing my help. I felt she 
needed my protection, but that was my problem. Suddenly feeling 
that dealing with me might have been as difficult for her as dealing 
with the Terrorists, I made the usual obligatory offers of further 
assistance, and went home. Fortunately for what Sarah would call 
my macho side, I was on an intramural football team. So were all of 
the Terrorists. We met three times. I am big, they were average; they 
suffered; I had a good time and did not feel so proud of myself 
afterward. The Terrorists did not even understand that I didn't like 
them. Like a lot of whites, they didn't care much for blacks unless 
they were athletic blacks, in which case we could do whatever we 
wanted. To knock Terrorist heads for two hours, then have them pat 
me on the butt in admiration, was frustrating. As for Sarah, she had 
no such outlets for her feelings.
She lay on her bed for the rest of the afternoon, unable to think 
about anything else, desperate for the company of Hyacinth, who 
was out of town for the weekend. Ultra-raunch rock-'n'-roll pounded 
through from the room above. The Terrorists figured out her number 
and she had to take her phone off the hook. She ignored the Airheads 
knocking on her door. Finally, late in the evening, when things had 
been quiet for a couple of hours, she slipped out to take a showera 
right-side-up, hot shower.
This was not very relaxing. She had to keep her eyes and ears 
open as much as she could. As she rinsed her hair, though, a kiunk 
sounded from the showerhead and the water wavered, then turned 
bitterly cold. She yelped and swung the hot-water handle around, to 
no effect, and then she couldn't stand it and had to yank open the 
door and get out of there.
They were all waiting for hernot the Terrorists, but the 
Airheads in their bathrobes. One stood at every sink, smiling, hot 
water on full blast, and one stood by every shower stall, smiling, 
steam pouring out of the door. With huge smiles and squeals of joy, 
they actually grabbed her by the arms, shouting Swirlie!, Swirlie!, 
took her to one of the toilets, stuck her head in, and flushed.
She was standing there naked, toilet water running in thin cold 
ribbons down her body, and they were in their bathrobes, smiling 
sympathetically and applauding. Apologies came from all directions. 
Somehow she didn't scream, she didn't hit anyone; she grabbed her 
bathrobetearing her hand on the corner of the shower door in her 
spastic furywrapped it around herself and tied it so tightly she 
could hardly breathe. Her pulse fluttered like a bird in an iron box 
and tingles of hyperventilation ran down her arms and into her 
fingertips.
"What the fuck is wrong with you? Are you crazy?"
They mostly tittered nervously and tried to ignore the way she 
had flown off the handle. They were leaving her a social escape 
route; she could still smooth it over. But she was not interested.
"Listen to me good, you dumb fucks!" She had let herself go, it 
was the only thing she could do. In a way it felt great to bellow and 
cry and rage and scare the hell out of them; this was the first contact 
with reality these women had had in years. "This is rape! And I'm 
entitled to protect myself from it! And I will!"
She had stepped over the line. It was now okay to hate Sarah, 
and several took the opportunity, laughing out loud to each other. 
Man did not. "Sarah! Jeez, you don't have to take it so serious! 
You'll feel better later on. We've got some punch for you in the 
Lounge. We were just letting you in to the wing. We didn't think 
you were going to get so upset."
"Yeah."
"Yeah."
"Yeah."
"Well, I'm real sorry, excuse me, but I am going to take it 
seriously because anyone who can't see why it's serious has bad, bad 
problems and needs to get straightened out. If you think you're doing 
this because it's natural and fun, you aren't thinking too fucking 
hard."
"But, Jeez, Sarah," said Marl, hardly believing anyone could be 
so weird, "it's for the better. We've all been through it together now 
and we're all sisters. We're all an equal family together. We were 
just welcoming you in."
"The whole purpose of a fucking university is not so that you 
can come and be just like everyone else. I'm not equal to you people, 
never will be, don't want to be, I don't want to be anyone's sister, I 
don't want your activities, all I want is a decent place to live where I 
can be Sarah Jane Johnson, and not be equalized. . . by a mob.. . of 
ltttle powderpuff terrorists. . . who just can't stand differentness 
because they're too stupid to understand it! What goes on in your 
heads? Haven't you ever seen the diversity of. . . of nature? Stop 
laughing. Look, you think this is funny? The next time you do this, 
someone is going to get hurt very badly." She looked down at the 
little drops of blood on the floor, dripping from her hand, and 
suddenly felt cleansed. She clenched the fist and held it up. 
"Understand?"
They had been smug at her wild anger. Now they were scared 
and disgusted and their makeup lay on their appalled skin like blood 
on snow. Most fled, hysterically grossed out.
"Gag me green!"
"Barf me blue!"
Mari averted her gaze from this gore. "Well, that's okay if you 
want to give all of this up. But I don't think it's like rape.
I mean, we all scream a lot and stuff, and we don't really want 
them to do it, if you know what I mean, but when they do it's fun 
after all. So for us it's just sort of wild and exciting, and for the guys, 
it helps them work off steam. You know what I mean?"
"No! Get out! Don't fuck with my life!" That was a lie she 
did know exactly what Mari meant. But she had just realized she 
could never let herself think that way again. Mari sadly floated out, 
sniffling. Sarah, alone now, washed her hair again (though it had not 
been a "dirty swirlie") and retreated to her room, a little ill in a gag-
me-green sort of way, yet filled with a tingling sense of sureness and 
power. She was not harassed anymore. Word had gone out. Sarah 
had gotten additional punishment and was not to be bothered.


The door opened slightly, and a dazzling splinter of fluorescent 
light shot out across the dusky linoleum. Within the room it was still.
The door opened a bit more. "Spike? It's me. Don't try to get 
out, kittycat."
Now the door opened all the way and a tall skinny figure 
stepped in quickly, shut the door, and turned on a dim reading lamp. 
"Spike, are you sleeping? What did you get into this time?"
He found the kitten under his bed, next to the overturned rat-
poison tray that was not supposed to be there. Spike had only been 
dead for a few minutes, and his body was still so warm that Casimir 
thought he could be cuddled back to life. He sat on the floor by his 
bed and rocked Spike for a while, then stopped and let the tiny 
corpse down into his lap.
A convulsion took his diaphragm and his lungs emptied 
themselves in jolts. He twisted around, breathless, hung on his 
elbows on the bed's edge, finally sucked in a wisp of air and sobbed 
it out again. He rolled onto the bed and the sobs came faster and 
louder. He pulled his pillow into his face and screamed and sobbed 
for longer than he could keep track of. Into his lumpy little standard-
issue American Megaversity pillow he shuddered it all out: Sharon, 
Spike, the desecration of his academic dream, his loneliness.
When he pulled himself together he was drained and queasy but 
curiously relaxed. He put Spike in a garbage bag and slid him into an 
empty calculator box, which he taped shut. Cradling it, he stared out 
the window. Around him in even ranks rose the thousands of 
windows of the towers, and to his tear-blurred vision it was as 
though he stood in a forest aflame
"Spike," he said, "What the hell should I do with myself?
"Yeah. Okay. That's what it's going to be.
"Well, Spike, now I have to do something unbelievably great. 
Something impossible. Something these scum are too dumb even to 
imagine. To hell with grades. There are much fairer ways of showing 
how smart you are. I'm smarter than all of these fuckers, rules 
aside."
He cranked his vent window open. Outside a Tower War was 
raging: students shouting to one another, shining lights and lasers 
into one another's rooms, blaring their stereos across the gulfs. Now 
the countertenor cry of Casimir Radon rode in above the tumult.
"You can make it as hard as you want, as hard as you can, but 
I'm going to be the cleverest bastard this place has ever seen! I can 
make idiots of you all, damn it!"
"Fuck you!" came a long-drawn-out scream from F Tower. It 
was precisely what Casimir wanted to hear. He shut his window and 
sat in darkness to think.


At four in the morning the wing was quiet except for Sarah, who 
was up, preparing her laundry. It was not necessary to do it at four in 
the morningone could find open machines as late as six or 
sevenbut this was Sarah's time of day. At this time she could walk 
the halls like something supernatural (or as she put it, "something 
natural, in a place that is sub-natural"). In the corridors she would 
meet the stupid gotten-up-to-urinate, staggering half-dead for the 
bathroom, and they'd squint at herclothed, up and brightas 
though she were a moonbeam that had worked its way around their 
room to splash upon their faces. The ultra-late partiers, crushed by 
alcohol, floated, belched and slurred along in glitzy boogie dress, 
and the fresh and sober Sarah, in soft clothes and tennis shoes, could 
dance through them before they had even recognized her presence. 
The brightest nerds and premeds riding the elevators home from all-
nighters were so thick with sleep they could hardly stand, much less 
appreciate the time of day. A dozen or so hard-core athletes liked to 
rise as early as Sarah, and when she encountered them they would 
nod happily and go their separate ways.
Being up at four in the morning was akin to being in the 
wilderness. It was as close to the outside world as you could get 
without leaving the Plex. The rest of the day, the harsh artificiality of 
the place ruled the atmosphere and the unwitting inhabitants, but the 
calm purity of the predawn had a way of seeping through the 
cinderblocks and pervading the place for an hour or so.
"Screw the laundry," is what she finally said. She had plenty of 
clean clothes.
She was kneeling amid a heap of white cottons, and the grim 
brackishness of her room was all around her. Suddenly she could not 
stand it. Laundry would not make the room seem decent, and she had 
to do something that would.
Out in the wing it was easy to find the leftover paints and 
brushes. The Castle in the Air paintings were just now getting their 
finishing touches. She found the supplies in a storage closet and 
brought them to her room.
Normally this would have been a quick and dirty process, but 
the spirit of four in the morning made her placid. She moved the 
furniture away from the walls and in a few minutes had the floor, 
door, windows and furniture covered with a Sunday New York 
Times. It looked better already.
The Castle in the Air, as will later be described, was a sickly 
yellow, floating on white clouds in a blue sky. By mixing cloud-
color with Castle-color and a bit of Bambi-color (on the ground 
under the Castle, Bambis cavorted) she made a mellow creamy paint. 
This she applied to the walls and ceiling with a roller.
It was breakfast-time. She wasn't hungry.
Sky-color and castle-color made green. She splayed open a 
cardboard box and made it into a giant palette, mixing up every 
shade of green she could devise and smearing them around to create 
an infinite variety. Then she began to dab away on one wall with no 
particular plan or goal.
The light fixture was in the middle of the wall. She paused, 
thinking of the dire consequences, then sighed blissfully and slapped 
it all over with thick green daubs.
By noon the wall was covered with pied green splotches ranging 
from almost-black to yellow. It was not a bad approximation of a 
forest in the sun, but it lacked fine detail and branches.
She had long since decided to cut all her classes. She left her 
room for the first time since sunrise and started riding the 'vators 
toward the shopping mall. She felt great.
"Doin' some paintin'?" asked a doe-eyed woman in leg 
warmers. Plastered with paint, Sarah nodded, beaming.
"Doin' your room?"
"Yep."
"Yeah. So did we. We did ours all really high-tech. Lots of 
glow-colors. How bout you? Lotsa green?"
"Of course," said Sarah, "I'm making it look like the outside. So 
I don't forget."
At the Sears in the Mall she got matte black paint and smaller 
brushes. She returned to her room, passing the Cafeteria, where 
thousands stood in line for something that smelled of onions and salt 
and hot fat, Sarah had not eaten in twenty-four hours and felt great
it was a day to fast. Back in her room she cleared away a Times page 
announcing a coup in Africa and sat on her bed to contemplate her 
forest. Infinitely better than the old wall, yet still just a rude begin-
ningevery patch of color could be subdivided into a hundred 
shades and crisscrossed with black branches to hold it all up. She 
knew she'd never finish it, but that was fine. That was the idea.


Casimir immediately went into action. He had already day-
dreamed up this plan, and to organize the first stages of Project 
Spike did not take long. Since Sharon had sunk completely into a 
coma, Casimir had taken over the old professor's lab in the Burrows, 
spending so much time there that he stored a sleeping bag in the 
closet so he could stay overnight.
This eveningDay Threehe had found six rats crowded into 
his box trap near the Cafeteria. Judging from the quantity of poison 
scattered around this area, they were of a highly resistant strain. In 
the lab, he donned heavy gloves, opened the trap, forced himself to 
grab a rat, pulled it out and slammed shut the lid. This was a physics. 
not a biology, lab and so his methods were crude. He pressed the rat 
against the counter and stunned it with a piece of copper tubing, then 
held it underwater until dead.
He laid it on a bare plank and set before him an encyclopedia 
volume he had stolen from the Library, opened to a page which 
showed a diagram of the rat's anatomy. Weighing it open with a 
hunk of lead radiation shield, he took out a single-edged razor and 
went to work on the little beast. In twenty minutes he had the liver 
out. In an hour he had six rat livers in a beaker and six liverless rat 
corpses in the wastebasket, swathed in plastic. He put the livers in a 
mortar and ground them to a pulp, poured in some alcohol, and 
filtered the resulting soup until it was clear.
Next morning he visited the Science Shop, where Virgil 
Gabrielsen was fixing up a chromatograph that would enable 
Casimir to find out what chemicals were contained in the rat liver 
extract. "We're ready for your mysterious test," said Virgil.
"Hope you don't mind."
"I love working with mad scientistsnever dull. What's that?"
"Mostly grain alcohol. This machine will answer your question, 
though, if it's fixed."
A few hours later they had the results: a strip of paper with a 
line squiggled across it by the machine. Virgil compared this graph 
with similar ones from a long skinny book.
"Shit," said Virgil, showing rare surprise. "I didn't think 
anything could live with this much Thalphene in its guts. Thalphene! 
These things have incredible immunities."
"What is it? I don't know anything about chemistry."
"Trade name for thallium phenoxide." Virgil crossed his arms 
and looked at the ceiling. "Dangerous Properties of Industrial 
Materials, my favorite bedtime reading, says this about thallium 
compounds. I abbreviate. 'Used in rat poison and depilatories . . . 
results in swelling of feet and legs, arthralgia, vomiting. insomnia, 
hyperaesthesia and paresthesia of hands and feet, mental confusion, 
polyneuritis with severe pains in legs and loins, partial paralysis and 
degeneration of legs, angina, nephritis, wasting, weakness . . . com-
plete loss of hair . . ha! Fatal poisoning has been known to occur.'"
"No kidding!"
"Under phenols we have.. . 'where death is delayed, damage to 
kidneys, liver, pancreas, spleen, edema of the lungs, headache, 
dizziness, weakness, dimness of vision, loss of consciousness, 
vomiting, severe abdominal pain, corrosion of lips, mouth, throat, 
esophagus and stomach
"Okay, I get the idea.
"And that doesn't account for synergistic effects. These rats eat 
the stuff all the time."
"So they go through a lot of rat poison, these rats do."
"It looks to me," said Virgil, "as though they live on it. But if 
you don't mind my prying, why do you care?"
Casimir was slightly embarrassed, but he knew Virgil's secret, 
so it was only fair to bare his own. "In order for Project Spike to 
work, they have to be heavy rat-poison eaters. I'm going to collect 
rat poison off the floors and expose it to the slow neutron source in 
Sharon's lab. It's a little chunk of a beryllium isotope on a piece of 
plutonium, heavily shielded in paraffinlooks like a garbage can on 
wheels. Paraffin stops slow neutrons, see. Anyway, when I expose 
the rat poison to the neutrons, some of the carbon in the poison will 
turn to Carbon- 14. Carbon- 14 is used in dating. of course, so there 
are plenty of machines around to detect small amounts of it. 
Anyway, I set this tagged poison out near the Cafeteria. Then I 
analyze samples of Cafeteria food for unusually high levels of 
Carbon- 14. If I get a high reading. .
"It means rats in the food."
"Either rats, or their hair or feces."
"That's awesome blackmail material, Casimir. I wouldn't have 
thought it of you.
Casimir looked up at Virgil, shocked and confused. After a few 
seconds he seemed to understand what Virgil had meant. "Oh, well, I 
guess that's true. The thing is, I'm not that interested in blackmail. It 
wouldn't get me anything. I just want to do this, and publicize the 
results. The main thing is the challenge."
A rare full grin was on Virgil's face. "Damn good, Casimir, 
That's marvelous. Nice work." He thought it over, taken with the 
idea. "You'll have the biggest gun in the Plex, you know."
"That's not what I'm after with this project."
"Let me know if I can help. Hey, you want to go downstairs to 
the Denny's for lunch? I don't want to eat in the Cafeteria while I'm 
thinking about the nature of your experiment."
"I don't want to eat at all, after what I've just been doing," said 
Casimir. "But maybe later on we can dissolve our own livers in 
ethanol." He put the beaker of rat potion in a hazardous-waste bin, 
logged down its contents, and they departed.
And lest anyone get the wrong idea, a disclaimer: I did not know 
about this while it was going on. They told me about it later. The 
people who have claimed I bear some responsibility for what 
happened later do not know the facts.


"What makes you think you can just play a record?" said 
Ephraim Klein in a keen, irritated voice. "I'm listening to 
harpsichord music,"
"Oh," John Wesley Fenrick said innocently. "I didn't hear it. I 
guess my ears must have gone bad from all my terrible music, huh?"
"Looks that way."
"But it's okay, I'm not going to play a record."
"I should hope not."
"I'm going to play a tape." Fenrick brushed his finger against an 
invisible region on the surface of the System, and lights lit and 
meters wafted up and down. The mere sound of Silence, reproduced 
by this machine, nearly drowned out the harpsichord, a restored 1783 
Prussian model with the most exquisite lute stop Klein had. ever 
heard. Fenrick turned on the Go Big Red Fan, which began to chunk 
away as usual.
"Look," said Ephraim Klein, "I said I was playing something. 
You can't just bust in."
"Well," said John Wesley Fenrick, "I said I can't hear it. If I 
don't hear any evidence that you are playing something, there's no 
reason I should take your word for it. You obviously have a distorted 
idea of reality."
"Prick! Asshole!" But Klein had already pulled out one of his 
war tapes, the "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" as performed by 
Virgil Fox (what Fenrick called "horror movie music") and snapped 
it into his own tape deck. He set the tape rolling and prepared to 
switch from PHONO to TAPE at the first hint of offensive action 
from Fenrick.
It was not long in coming. Fenrick had been sinking into a 
Heavy Metal retrospective recently, and entered the competition 
with Back in Black by AC/DC. Klein watched Fenrick's hands 
carefully and was barely able to squeeze out a lead, the organist 
hitting the high mordant at the opening of the piece before the 
ensuing fancy notes were stomped into the sonic dust by Back in 
Black.
From there the battle raged typically. A hundred feet down the 
hall, I stuck my head out the door to have a look. Angel, the 
enormous Cuban who lived on our floor, had been standing out in 
the hallway for about half an hour furiously pounding on the wall 
with his boxing gloves, laboriously lengthening a crack he had 
started in the first week of the semester. When I looked, he was just 
in the act of hurling open the door to Klein and Fenrick's room; 
dense, choking clouds of music whirled down the corridor at Mach 1 
and struck me full in the face.
I started running. By the time I had arrived, Angel had wrapped 
Fenrick's long extension cord around the doorknob, held it with his 
boxing gloves, put his foot against the door, and pulled it anart with 
a thick blue spark and a shower of fire. The extension cord shorted 
out and smoked briefly until circuit breakers shut down all public-
area power to the wing.

AC/DC went dead, clearing the air for the climax of the fugue. 
Angel walked past the petrified Ephraim Klein and pawed at the tape 
deck, trying to get at the tape. Frustrated by the boxing gloves, he 
turned and readied a mighty kick into the cone of a sub-woofer, 
when finally I arrived and tackled him onto a bed. Angel relaxed and 
sat up, occasionally pounding his bright-red cinderblock-scarred 
gloves together with meaty thwats, sweating like the boxer he was, 
glowering at the Go Big Red Fan.
The fugue ended and Ephraim shut off the tape. I went over and 
closed the door. "Okay, guys, time for a little talk. Everyone want to 
have a little talk?"
John Wesley Fenrick looked out the window, already bored, and 
nodded almost imperceptibly. Ephraim Klein jumped to his feet and 
yelled, "Sure, sure, anytime! I'm happy to be reasonable!" Angel, 
who was unlacing his right boxing glove with his teeth, mumbled, "I 
been talking to them for two months and they don't do shit about it."
"Hmm," I said, "I guess that tells the story, doesn't it? If you 
two refuse to be reasonable, Angel doesn't have to be reasonable 
either. Now it seems to me you need a set of rules that you can refer 
to when you're arguing about stereo rights. For instance, if one guy 
goes to pee, the other can't seize air rights. You can't touch each 
other's property, and so on. Ephraim, give me your typewriter and 
we'll get this down."
So we made the Rules and I taped them to the wall, straddling 
the boundary line of the room. "Does that mean I only have to follow 
the Rules on my half of the page," asked Fenrick, so I took it down 
and made a new Rule saying that these were merely typed 
representations of abstract Rules that were applicable no matter 
where the typed representations were displayed. Then I had the two 
sign the Rules, and hinted again that I just didn't know what Angel 
might do if they made any more noise. Then Angel and I went down 
to my place and had some beers. Law, and the hope of silence and 
order, had been established on our wing.



--November--

Fred Fine was trying to decide whether to lob his last tactical 
nuke into Novosibirsk or Tomsk when a frantic plebe bounced up 
and interrupted the simulation with a Priority Five message. Of 
course it was Priority Five; how else could a plebe have dared 
interrupt Fred Fine's march to the Ob'?
"Fred, sir," he gasped. "Come quick, you won't believe it."
"What's the situation?"
"That new guy. He's about to win World War II!"
"He is? But I thought he was playing the Axis!"
Fred Fine brushed past the plebe and strode into the next room. 
In its center, two Ping-Pong tables had been pushed together to make 
room for the eight-piece World War II map. On one side stood the 
tall, aquiline Virgil Gabrielsenthe "new guy"and on the other, 
Chip Dixon shifted from foot to foot and snapped his fingers 
incessantly, Because this was the first wargame Virgil had ever 
played, he was still only a Private, and held Plebe status. Chip 
Dixon, a Colonel, had been gaming for six years and was playing the 
Allies, for God's sake! Usually the only thing at question in this 
game was how many Allied divisions the Axis could consume before 
Berlin inevitably fell.
At the end of the map, where the lines of longitude theoretically 
converged to make the North Pole, Consuela Gorm, Referee, sat on a 
loveseat atop a sturdy table. On the small stand before her she riffled 
occasionally through the inchthick rule b k, punched away at her 
personal computer, made notes i scratch paper and peered down at 
Europe with a tiny pair of opera glasses. Surrounding the tables were 
twenty other garners who had come to observe the carnage shortly 
after Virgil had V-2'd Birmingham into gravel. Many stood on 
chairs, using field glasses of their own, and one geek was tottering 
around the area on a pair of stilts, loudly and repeatedly joking that 
he was a Nazi spy satellite. The attention of all was focused on tens 
of thousands of little cardboard squares meticulously stacked on the 
hexagonally patterned playing field. The game had been on for nine 
and a half hours and Chip Dixon was obviously losing it fast, pop-
ping Cheetos into his mouth faster than he could grind them into 
paste with his hyperactive yellow molars, often gulping Diet Pepsi 
and hiccuping. Virgil was calm, surveying the board through half-
closed eyes, hands behind back, lips slightly parted, wandering 
around in a world inside his head, oblivious to the surrounding 
nerds. A hell of a warrior, thought Fred Fine, and this only his first 
game!
"Here comes the Commander," shouted the guy on stilts as he 
rounded the Japanese-occupied Aleutians, and the observers' circle 
parted so Fred Fine could enter. Chip Dixon blushed vividly and 
looked away, moving his lips as he cursed to himself. "Very 
interesting," said Fred Fine.
Great stacks of red cardboard squares surrounded Stalin-grad 
and Moscow, which were protected only by pitiable little heaps of 
green squares. In Normandy an enormous Nazi tank force was 
hurling the D-Day invasion back into the Channel so forcefully that 
Fred Fine could almost hear the howl of the Werfers and see the 
bodies fall screaming into the scarlet brine. In Holland, a Nazi 
amphibious force made ready to assault Britain. In front of Virgil, 
lined up on the edge of the table as trophies, sat the four Iowa-class 
batfieships, the Hornet, and other major ships of the American navy.
Chip Dixon was increasingly manic, his blood pressure Pumped 
to the hemhorrage point by massive overdoses of salt and Diet Pepsi, 
his thirst insatiable because of the nearly empty Jumbo Paic of 
Cheetos. Sweat dripped from his brow and fell like acid rain on 
Scandinavia. He bent over and tried to move a stack of recently 
mobilized Russians toward Moscow, but as he shoved one point of 
his tweezers under the stack he hiccupped violently and ended up 
scattering them all over the Ukraine. "Shit!" he screamed, dashing a 
Cheeto to the floor. "I'm sorry, Consuela, I forget which hex it was 
on."
Consuela did not react for several seconds, and the reflection of 
the rule book in her glasses gave her an ominous, inscrutable look. 
Everyone was still and apprehensive. "Okay," she said in soft, level 
tones, "that unit got lost in the woods and can't find its way out for 
another turn."
"Wait!" yelled Chip Dixon. "That's not in the Rules!"
"It's okay," said Virgil patiently. "That stack contained units 
A2567, A2668, A4002, and 126789, and was on hex number 
1,254.908. However, unit A2567 clashed with Axis A1009 last turn, 
so has only half movement this turnthree hexes."
Cowed, Chip Dixon breathed deeply (Fred Fine's suggestion) 
and reassembled the stack. Unit A2567 was left far behind to deal 
with a unit of about twenty King Tiger Tanks which was blasting 
unopposed up the Dniepr. Chip Dixon then straightened up and 
thought for about five minutes, ruffling through his notes for a 
misplaced page. Consuela made a gradated series of noises intended 
to convey rising impatience. "Listen, Chip, you're already way over 
the time limit. Done?"
"Yeah, I guess."
"Any engagements?"
"No, not this turn. But wait 'til you see what's coming."
"Okay, Virgil, your turn."
Virgil reached out with a long probe and quickly shoved stacks 
of cardboard from place to place; from time to time a move would 
generate a gasp from the crowd. He then ticked off a list of 
engagements, giving Consuela data on what each stack contained, 
what its combat strength was, when it had last fought and so forth. 
When it was over, an hour later, there was long applause from the 
membership of MARS. Chip Dixon had sunk to the floor to sulk 
over a tepid Cola.
"Incredible," someone yelled, "you conquered Stalingrad and 
Moscow and defeated D-Day and landed in Scotland and Argentina 
all at the same time!"
At this point Chip Dixon, who had refused to concede, stood up 
and blew most of the little cardboard squares away in a blizzard of 
military might. Fred Fine was angry but controlled. "Chip, ten 
demerits for that. I ought to bust you down to Second Looie for that 
display. Just for that, you get to put the game away. And organize it 
right." Chastened, Chip and two of his admirers set about sorting all 
of the pieces of cardboard and fitting them into the appropriate 
recesses in the injection-molded World War II carrying case. Fred 
Fine turned his attention to Virgil.
"A tremendous victory." He drew his fencing foil and tapped 
Virgil once on each shoulder as Virgil looked on skeptically. "I 
name you a Colonel in MARS. It's quite ajump, but a battlefield 
commission is obviously in order."
"Oh, not really," said Virgil, bored. "It's more a matter of a 
good memory than anything else."
"You're modest. I like that in a man."
"No, just accurate. I like that."
Fred Fine now drew Virgil aside, away from the dozen or so 
wargame aficionados who were still gaping at one another and 
pounding their heads dramatically on the walls. The massively 
corpulent Consuela was helped down from her eleven-hour perch by 
several straining MARS officials, and began to roll toward them like 
a globule of quicksilver.
"Virgil," said Fred Fine quietly, "you're obviously a special 
kind of man. We need men like you for our advanced games. These 
board games are actually somewhat repetitive, as you pointed out. 
Want a little more excitement next time?"
Virgil drew away. "What do you have in mind?"
"You've heard of Dungeons and Dragons?" A gleam came to 
Fred Fine's eye, and he glanced conspiratorially at Consuela.
"Sure. Someone designs a hypothetical dungeon on graph paper, 
puts different monsters and treasure in the rooms, and each player 
has a character which he sends through it, trying to take as much 
treasure as possible. Right?"
"Oh, only in its crudest, simplest forms, Virgil," said Consuela.
"This one and his friends prefer a more active version."
"Sewers and Serpents," said Consuela, nodding happily.
"The idea is the same as D & D, but we use a real place, and 
real costumes, and act it all out. Much more realistic. You see, 
beneath the Plex is a network of sewer tunnels."
"Yeah, I know," said Virgil. "I've got the blueprints for this 
place memorized, remember."
Fred Fine was taken aback. "How?"
"Computer drew them for me."
"Well, we'd have to give you a character who had some good 
reason for knowing his way around the tunnels."
"Like maybe, uh," said Consuela, eyes rolled up, "maybe he 
happened to see a duel between some hero who had just come out of 
the Dungeon of Plexor" "That's what we call the tunnels," said 
Fred Fine.
"and some powerful nonsentient beast such as a gronth, and 
the gronth killed the hero, and then Virgil's character came and 
found a map on his body and memorized it."
"Or we could make him a computer expert in TechnoPlexor 
who got a peek at the plans the same way Virgil did
"Excuse me a sec, but what do you do for monsters?" asked 
Virgil
Well we don t have real ones We Just have to pretend and use 
the official S & S rules, developed by MARS through a 
constitutional process over several years. We maintain two-way 
radio contact with our referee, Consuela, who stays in the Plex and 
runs the adventure through a computer program we've got worked 
out. The computer also performs statistical combat simulation."
"So you slog around in the shit, and the computer says you're 
being attacked by monsters, and she reads it off the CRT and says 
that according to the computer you've lost a finger, or the monster's 
dead, that sort of thing?"
"Well, it's more exciting than you make it sound, and the 
Dungeon Mistress makes it better by amplifying the description 
generated by the computer. I recommend you try it. We've got an 
outing in a couple of weeks."
"I don't know, Fred, it's not my cup of tea. I'll think about it, 
but don't count on my coming."
"That's fine. Consuela just needs to know a few hours ahead of 
time so she can have SHEKONDARthe computer program
prepare a character for you."
Virgil assented to everything, nodded a lot, said he'd be getting 
back to them and hurried out, shaking his head in amazed disgust. 
Unlikely as it seemed, this place could still surprise him.


My involvement with Student Government was due to my being 
faculty-in-residence. I served as a kind of minister without portfolio, 
investigating whatever topic interested me at the moment, talking to 
students, faculty and administrators, and contributing to 
governmental discussions the point of view of an older, supposedly 
wiser observer. As I had no idea what was going on at the Big U 
until much later, my contributions can't have done much good. I did 
visit the Castle in the Air on several occasions, anyway, and 
whenever I did I was presented with a visual display in three stages.
The first was a prominent mural on the wall of the Study 
Lounge, clearly visible through the windows from the elevator 
lobby. Even if I had been visiting one of E12's other wings, 
therefore, I couldn't have failed to notice that E12S was a wing 
among wings. Here, as described, the Castle was painted in yellow
not a typical color for castles, but much nicer than realistic gray or 
brown. The Castle, stolen directly from a book of Disney 
illustrations, floated on a cloud that looked like a stomped 
marshmallow, not a thunderhead, Seemingly too meager to support 
its load. Below, more Disney characters frolicked on an undulating 
green lawn, a combined golf course/cartoon character refuge with no 
sand traps, one water hazard and no visible greens. The book of 
illustrations was not large, and each character was shown in only one 
or two poses which had to be copied over and over again in 
populating this great lawn. Monotony had rendered the painters 
somewhat desperatewhat was that penguin doing there? And why 
had they included that evil gray wolf, wagging his red tongue at the 
stiff cloned Bambis from behind a spherical shrub? But most agreed 
that the mural was niceindeed, so nice that "nice" was no longer 
adequate by itself; in describing it, Airheads had to amplify the word 
by saying it many, many times and making large gestures with their 
hands.
The second stage of the presentation was the entryways
two identical portals, one at the beginning of each of the 
wing's two hallways. Here, at the fire doors by the Study Lounge, 
the halls had been framed in thick wooden beams actually papier-
mchd boxesdecorated with plastic flowers and welcoming 
messages. The fire doors themselves had been covered with paper 
and painted so that, when they were closed, I could see what looked 
like a stairway of light yellow stone rising up from the floor and 
continuing skyward until further view was blocked by the beam 
along the ceiling.
Going through these doors, and therefore up the symbolic stair, I 
found myself in a light yellow corridor gridded with thin wavy black 
lines supposed to represent joints between the great yellow building-
stones of which the Castle was constructed. These were closely 
spaced in the first part of the hallway, but the crew had found this 
work tedious and decided that in the back sections much larger 
stones were used to build the walls. Here and there, torches, fake 
paintings, suits of armor and the like were painted on the walls.
Each individual room, then, was the province of the occupants, 
who could turn it into any fantasy-land they wanted. One or two of 
them painted murals on paper and pasted them to their doors. These 
murals purported to be windows looking down on the scene below, 
an artistic challenge too great for most of them.
On each visit to Sarah, then, I was introduced to the Castle in 
the Air in the manner of a TV viewer. The elevator doors would fade 
out and there sat the Castle on its cloud, viewed through a screen of 
glass. The view would then switch- to a traveling shot of the 
stairway leading up to the castleevidently a long one. Through the 
magic of video editing, the stair would flatten, part and swing away, 
and I would be instantly jump-cut to the halls of the Castle proper, 
where to confirm that it had all happened I could pause at windows 
here and there and look down at the featureless plains from which I 
had just ascended.
So much for the opening credits; what about the plot? The plot 
consisted almost entirely of parties and tame sexual intrigue with the 
Terrorists. The Airheads were not disturbed by the fact that their 
home was not much of a castle
the Terrorists or anyone else could invade at any time and 
that far from being up in the air, it was squashed beneath nineteen 
other Terrorist-infested floors. The Airheads got along by pretending 
that any man who showed up on their floor was a white knight on 
beck and call. Certain evil influences, though, could not be kept out 
by any amount of painting, and among these was the fire alarm 
system.
Early in the morning of November the Fifth, Mari Meegan was 
ejected from her chamber by three City firefighters investigating a 
full-tower fire alarm. Versions differed as to whether the firefighters 
had used physical force, but to the lawyers subsequently hired by 
Man's father it did not matter; the issue was the mental violence 
inflicted on Man, who was forced to totter down the stairway and 
join the sleepy throng below with only patches of bright blue masque 
painted on her face.
This situation had not previously arisen because it usually took 
at least half an hour between the ringing of the alarm and the arrival 
of the firemen on their tour through the tower. Thirty minutes was 
time enough for Mari to apply a quickie makeup job which would 
prevent her from looking "disgusting" even during full moons 
outside, and, as the lawyers took pains to document and photograph, 
her emergency thirty-minute face kit was set up and ready to go on a 
corner of her dresser. Next to it was the masque container, which 
was for "super emergencies"; given a severely limited time to 
prepare, she could tear this open and paint a blue oval over her face 
that would serve partly to diguise and partly to show those who 
recognized her that she cared about her appearance. But on this 
particular morning, certain Terrorists from above had demonstrated 
their mechanical aptitude by disabling the E12S alarm bell with a 
pair of bolt cutters. The more distant ringing of the E12E bell had 
not overborne the soft nocturnal beat of Marl's stereo, and by the 
time she had realized what was happening, and energized the 
evening light simulation tubes on her makeup center, the sirens were 
already wafting up from the Death Vortex below.
The Fire Marshall was not amused. Alter a week's worth of 
rumors that portrayed the Fire Marshall as a Nazi and a pervert, it 
was decreed that henceforth during fire drills the RAs would go 
door-to-door with their master keys and make sure everyone left 
their rooms immediately. This grim ruling inspired a wing meeting 
at which Hyacinth wearily suggested they all purchase ski masks, 
since it was getting cold outside anyway, and wear them down to the 
street during fire drills. "Stay together and you will be totally 
anonymous, by which I mean no one will know who you are, or 
what you look like at three in the morning The Airheads appointed 
Teri, a Fashion Merchandising major to pick out ski masks with a 
suitable color scheme.
In private Hyacinth came up with an acronym for them 
SWAMPers This meant that as a bare minimum they found it 
necessary to Shave Wash Anoint Make up and Perfume all parts of 
their body at least once a day Their insistence on doing this often 
made Sarah wonder about her own appear anceher use of 
cosmetics was minimalbut Hyacinth and I and everyone else 
assured her she looked fine. When preparing for the long nasty 
Student Government budget meeting in early November Sarah 
looked briefly through her shoebox of miscellaneous cosmetics then 
shoved it under the bed again. She had greater things to worry about.
As for clothes, it came down to a choice between her most 
businesslike outfit, a grey wool skirt suit, and a somewhat brighter 
dress. She picked the suit, though she knew it would lay her open to 
accusations of fascism from the Stalinist Underground Battalion 
(SUB), wound her hair into a bun, and steeled herself for madness.


The SUB got there an hour before anyone else and had their 
banners planted and their rabid handouts sown before the 
Government even showed up. We met in the only room we could 
find that was reasonably private. Behind us came the TV crews, and 
then the reporters from the Monoplex Monitor and the People's 
Truth Publication, who sat in the first row, right in front of the 
Stalinists. Finally Lecture Auditorium 3 filled up with supplicants 
from various organizations, all deeply shocked and dismayed at how 
little funding they were receiving, all bearing proposed amendments.
First we slogged through the parliamentary trivia, including a bit 
of "new business" in which the SUB introduced a resolution to 
condemn the administration for massive human rights violations and 
to call for its abolition. Then we came to the real purpose of the 
meeting: amendments to the proposed budget. A line formed behind 
the microphone on the stage, and at its head was a SUB member. "I 
move." he said, "that we pass no budget at all, because the budget 
has to be approved by the administration, and so we haven't got any 
control over our own activity money." On cue, behind the press 
corps, eight SUBbies rose to their feet bearing a long banner: TAKE 
BACK CONTROL OF STUDENT ACTIVITIES CAPITAL FROM 
THE KRUPP JUNTA. "The money's ours, the money's ours, the 
money's ours . ."
We had expected all this and Sarah was undisturbed. She sat 
back from her microphone and took a sip of water. letting the media 
record the event for the ages. Once that was done she gaveled a few 
times and talked them back into their seats. She was about to start 
talking again when the last standing SUBbie shouted, "Student 
Government is a tool of the Krupp cadre!"
Behind him, most of the audience shouted things like "eat 
rocks" and "shut up" and "shove it."
"If you're finished interfering with the democratic process," 
Sarah said, "this tool would like to get on with the budget. We have 
a lot to do and everyone needs to be very, very brief."
Student Government was made up of the Student Senate, which 
represented each of the 200 residential wings of the Plex, and the 
Activities Council, comprising representatives from each. of the 
funded student organizations, numbering about 150. The distribution 
of funds among the Activities Council members was decided on by a 
joint session, which was our goal for the evening.
The Student Senate was crammed with SUBbies and members 
of an outlaw Mormon splinter group called the Temple of Unlimited 
Godhead (TUG). Each of these groups claimed to represent all the 
students. As Sarah explained, no one in his right mind was interested 
in running for Student Senate, explaining why it was filled with 
fanatics and political science majors. Fortunately, SUB and TUG 
canceled each other out almost perfectly.
"I'm tired of having all aspects of my life ruled by this 
administration that doesn't give a shit for human rights, and I think 
it's time to do something about it," said the first speaker. There was 
a little applause from the front and lots of jeering. A hum filled the 
air as the TUG began to OMMMMat middle Ca sort of sonic 
tonic which was said to clear the air of foul influences and encourage 
spiritual peace; overhead, a solitary bat, attracted by the hum, 
swooped down from a perch in the ceiling and flitted around, 
occasioning shrieks and violent motion from the people it buzzed. 
"At this university we don't have free speech, we don't have aca-
demic freedom, we don't even have power over our own money!"
At the insistence of the audience, Sarah broke in after a few 
minutes. "If you've got any specific human rights violations you're 
concerned about, there are some international organizations you can 
go to, but there's not much the Student Senate can do. So I suggest 
you go live somewhere else and let someone else propose an 
amendment."
Shocked and devastated, the speaker gaped at Sarah as the TV 
lights slammed into action. He held the stare for several seconds to 
allow the camera operators to focus and adjust light level, then 
surveyed the cheering and OMming crowd, face filled with 
bewilderment and shock.
"I don't beleeeve this," he said, staring into the lenses. "Who 
says we have freedom of speech? My God, I've come up here to 
express a free opinion, and just because I am opposed to fascism, the 
President of the Student Government tries to throw me out of the 
Plex! My home! That's right, if these different people don't like 
being oppressed, just throw them out of their homes into the 
dangerous city! I didn't think this kind of savagery was supposed to 
exist in a university." He shook his head in noble sadness, surveyed 
the derisive crowd defiantly, and marched away from the mike to 
grateful applause. Below, he answered questions from the media 
while the next student came to the microphone.
He looked like a male cheerleader for a parochial school 
football team, being handsome, well groomed, and slightly pimpled. 
As he took possession of the mike the OM stopped. He kept his eye 
on a middle-aged fellow standing in the aisle not far away, who in 
turn watched the SUBbie's press conference in front of the stage. 
Finally the older gentleman held up three fingers. The TUGgie 
shoved his fist between his arm and body and spoke loudly and 
sharply into the mike.
"I'd like to announce that I have caught a bat here in my hand, 
and now I'm going to bite the head off it right here as a sacrifice to 
the God of Communism."
Below, the SUBbie found himself in absolute darkness, and 
tripped over a power cord. Simultaneously the TUGgie squinted as 
all lights were swung around to bear on him. He smiled and began to 
talk in a calm chantlike voice. "Well, well, well. I've got a 
confession. I'm not really going to bite the head off a bat, because I 
don't even have one, and I'm not a Communist." There was now a 
patter of what sounded like canned TV laughter from the TUG 
section. "I just did that as a little demonstration, to show you folks 
how easy it is to get the attention of the media. We can come and 
talk about serious issues and do real things, but what gets TV 
coverage are violent eye-catching events, a thing which the 
Communists who wish to destroy our society understand very well. 
But I'm not here to give a speech, I'm here to propose an amend-
ment. . ." Here he was dive-bombed by the bat, who veered away at 
the last moment; the speaker jumped back in horror, to the 
amusement of almost everyone. The TUGgies laughed too, showing 
that, yes, they did have a sense of humor no matter what people said. 
The speaker struggled to regain his composure.
"The speech! Resume the speech! The amendment!" shouted the 
older man.
"My budget proposal is that we take away all funding for the 
Stalinist Underground Battalion and distribute it among the other 
activities groups."
The lecture hall exploded in outraged chanting, uproarious 
applause, and OM. Sarah sat for about fifteen seconds with her chin 
in her hand, then began smashing the gavel again. I was seated off to 
the side of the stage, poised to act as the strong-but-lovable authority 
figure, but did not have to stand up; eventually things quieted down.
"Is there a second to the motion?" she asked wearily.
The crowd screamed YES and NO.
The speaker yielded to another TUGgie, who stood rigidly with 
a stack of 3- x -5 cards and began to drone through them. "At one 
time the leftist organizations of American Megaversity could claim 
that they represented some of the students. But the diverse 
organizations of the Left soon found that they all had one member 
who was very strident and domineering and who would push the 
others around until he or she had risen to a position of authority 
within the organization. These all turned out to be secretly members 
of the Stalanist Underground Battalion who had worked themselves 
in organizations in order to merge the Left into a single bloc with no 
diversity or freedom of thought. The SUB took over a women's 
issues newsletter and turned it into the People's Truth Publication, a 
highly libelous so-called newspaper. In the same way"
He was eventually cut off by Sarah. SUB spokespersons stated 
their views passionately, then another TUGgie. Finally a skinny man 
in dark spectacles came to the mike, a man whom Sarah recognized 
but couldn't quite place. He identified himself as Casimir Radon and 
said he was president of the physics club Neutrino. He quieted the 
crowd down a bit, as his was the first speech of the evening that was 
not entirely predictable.
"I'd like to point out that you've only given us four hundred 
dollars," he said. "We need more. I've done some analysis of the 
way our activity money is budgeted, which I will just run through 
very quickly here" he fumbled through papers as a disappointed 
murmur rose from the audience. How long was this nerd going to 
take? The cameramen put new film and tape in their equipment as 
lines formed outside by the restrooms.
"Here we go. I won't get too involved in the numerical details
it's all just arithmeticbut if you look at the current budget, you see 
that a small group of people is receiving a hugely disproportionate 
share of the money. In effect, the average funding per member of the 
Stalinist Underground Battalion is $114.00, while the figure for 
everyone else averages out to about $46.00, and only $33.00 for 
Neutrino. That's especially unfair because Neutrino needs to 
purchase things like books and equipment, while the expenses of a 
political organization are much lower. I don't think that's fair."
The SUB howled at this preposterous reasoning but everyone 
else listened respectfully.
"So I move we cut SUB funding to the bare minimum, say, 
twenty bucks per capita, and give Neutrino its full request for a 
scientific research project, $1500.00."
The rest of the evening, anyway, was bonkers, and I'll not go 
into detail. It was insignificant anyway, since the administration had 
the final say; the Student Government would have to keep passing 
budgets until they passed one that S. S. Krupp would sign, and the 
only question was how long it would take them to knuckle under. 
Time was against the SUB. As the members of the government got 
more bored, they became more interested in passing a budget that 
would go through the first time around. Eventually it became ob-
vious that the SUB had lost out, and the only thing wanting was the 
final vote. The highlight of the evening came just before that vote: 
the speech of Yllas Freedperson.
Yllas, the very substantial and brilliant leader of the SUB, was a 
heavy black woman in her early thirties, in her fifth year of study at 
the Modern Political Art Workshop. She had a knack for turning out 
woodblock prints portraying anguished faces, burning tenements, 
and thick tortured hands reaching for the sky. Even her pottery was 
inspired by the work of wretched Central American peasants. She 
was also editor and illustrator of the People's Truth Publication, but 
her real talent was for public speaking, where she had the power of a 
gospel preacher and the fire of a revolutionary. She waited dignified 
for the TV lights, then launched into a speech that lasted at least a 
quarter of an hour. At just the right times she moaned, she chanted, 
she sang, she reasoned, she whispered, she bellowed, she just plain 
spoke in a fluid and hypnotically rhythmic voice. She talked about S. 
S. Krupp and the evil of the System, how the System turned good 
into bad, how this society was just like the one that caused the 
Holocaust, which was no excuse for Israel, about conservatism in 
Washington and how our environment, economic security, personal 
freedom, and safety from nuclear war were all threatened by the 
greedy action of cutting the SUB's budget. Finally out came the 
names of Martin Luther King, Jr., Marx, Gandhi, Che, Jesus Christ, 
Ronald Reagan, Hitler, S. S. Krupp, the KKK, Bob Avakian, Elijah 
Mohammed and Abraham Lincoln. Through it all, the bat was 
active, dipping and diving crazily through the auditorium, dive-
bombing toward walls or lights or people but veering away at the last 
moment, flitting through the dense network of beams and cables and 
catwalks and light fixtures and hanging speakers and exposed pipes 
above us at great smooth speed, tracing a marvelously complicated 
path that never brushed against any solid object. All of it was 
absorbing and breathtaking, and when Yllas Freedperson was fin-
ished and the bat, perhaps no longer attracted by her voice. slipped 
up and disappeared into a corner, there was a long silence before the 
applause broke out.
"Thank you, Yllas," said Sarah respectfully. "Is there any 
particular motion you wanted to make or did you just want to inject 
your comments?"
"I move," shouted Yllas Freedperson, "that we put the budget 
the way it was."
The vote was close. The SUB lost. Recounting was no help. 
They took the dignified approach, forming into a sad line behind 
Yllas and singing "We Shall Overcome" in slow tones as they 
marched out. Above their heads they carried their big black-on-red 
posters of S. S. Krupp with a target drawn over his face, and they 
marched so slowly that it took two repetitions of the song before 
they made it out into the hallway to distribute leaflets and posters.


Sarah, three members of her cabinet and I gathered later in my 
suite for wine. Alter the frenzy of the meeting we were torpid, and 
hardly said anything for the first fifteen minutes or so. Then, as it 
commonly did those days, the conversation came around to the 
Terrorists.
"What's the story on those Terrorist guys?" asked Willy, a 
business major who acted as Treasurer. "Are they genuine 
Terrorists?"
"Not on my floor," said Sarah, "since they subjugated us. We're 
living in. . . the Pax Thirteenica."
"I've heard a number of stories," I said. Everyone looked at me 
and I shifted into my professor mode and lit my pipe. "Their major 
activity is the toll booth concept. They station Terrorists in the E13 
elevator lobby who continually push the up and down buttons so that 
every passing elevator stops and opens automatically. If it doesn't 
contain any non-students or dangerous-looking people, they hold the 
door open until everyone gives them a quarter. They have also 
claimed a section of the Cafeteria, and there have been fights over it. 
But nothing I'd call true terrorism."
"How about gang rape?" asked Hillary, the Secretary, quietly. 
Everything got quiet and we looked at her.
"It's just a rumor," she said. "Don't get me wrong. It hasn't 
happened to me. The word is that a few of the hardcore Terrorists do 
it, kind of as an initiation. They go to big parties, or throw their own. 
You know how at a big party there are always a few women
typical freshmenwho get very drunk. Some nice-looking Terrorist 
approaches the womanI hear that they're very good at identifying 
likely candidatesand gets into her confidence and invites her to 
another party. When they get to the other party, she turns out to be 
the only woman there, and you can imagine the rest. But the really 
terrible thing is that they go through her things and find out where 
she lives and who she is, then keep coming back whenever they feel 
like it. They have these women so scared and broken that they don't 
resist. Supposedly the Terrorists have kind of an invisible harem, a 
few terrified women all over the Plex, too dumb or scared to say 
anything."
I was sitting there with my eyes closed, like everyone else a 
little queasy. "I've heard of the same thing elsewhere," I said.
"I wonder if it's happened to any Airheads," murmured Sarah. 
"God, I'll bet it has. I wonder if any of them know about it. I wonder 
if they even understand what is being done to themsome of them 
probably don't even understand they have a right to be angry."
"How could anyone not understand rape?" said Hifiary.
"You don't know how mixed up these women are. You don't 
know what they did to me, without even understanding why I didn't 
like it. You can't imagine those peoplethey have no place to stand, 
no ideas of their ownif one is raped, and not one of her friends 
understands, where is she? She's cut loose, the Terrorists can tell her 
anything and make her into whatever they want. Shit, where are 
those animals going to stop? We're having a big costume party with 
them in December."
"There's a party to avoid," said Hillary.
"It's called Fantasy Island Nite. They've been planning it for 
months. But by the time the semester is over, those guys will be 
running wild."
"They've been running wild for a long time, it sounds like," said 
Willy. "You'd better get used to that, you know? I think you're 
living in the law of the jungle." That sounded a trifle melodramatic, 
but none of us could find a way to disagree.


Sarah and Casimir met in the Megapub, a vast pale airship 
hangar littered with uncertain plastic tables and chairs made of steel 
rods bent around into uncomfortable chairlike shapes that stabbed 
their occupants beneath the shoulder blades. At one end was a long 
bar, at the other a serving bay connected into the central kitchen 
complex. Casimir declined to eat Megapub food and lunched on a 
peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich made from overpriced materials 
bought at the convenience store and a plastic cup of excessively 
carbonated beer. Sarah used the salad bar. They removed several 
trays from a window table and stacked them atop a nearby 
wastebasket, then sat down.
"Thanks for coming on short notice," said Sarah. "I need all the 
help I can get in selling this budget to Krupp, and your statistics 
might impress him."
Casimir, chewing vigorously on a big bite of generic white 
bread and generic chunkless peanut butter, drew a few computer-
printed graphs from his backpack. "These are called Lorentz 
curves," he mumbled, "and they show equality of distribution. 
Perfect equality is this line here, at a forty-five degree angle. 
Anything less than equal comes out as a curve beneath the equality 
line. This is what we had with the old budget." He displayed a graph 
showing a deeply sagging curve, with the equality line above it for 
comparison. The graph had been produced by a computer terminal 
which had printed letters at various spots on the page, demonstrating 
in crude dotted-line fashion the curves and lines. "Now, here's the 
same analysis on our new budget." The new graph had a curve that 
nearly followed the equality line. "Each graph has a coefficient 
called the Gini coefficient, the ratio of the area between the line and 
curve to the area under the line. For perfect equality the Gini 
coefficient is zero. For the old budget it was very bad, about point 
eight, and for the new budget it is more like point two, which is 
pretty good."
Sarah listened politely. "You have a computer program that 
does this?"
"Yeah. Well, I do now, anyway. I just wrote it up."
"It's working okay?"
Casimir peered at her oddly, then at the graphs, then back at her. 
"I think so. Why?"
"Well, look at these letters in the curves." She pulled one of the 
graphs over and traced out the letters indicating the Lorentz curve: 
FELLATIOBUGGERYNECROPHILIACUNNILINGUSANALING
USBESTIALITY...
"Oh," Casimir said quietly. The other curve read:
CUNTFUCKSHITPISSCOCKASSHOLETITGIVEMEANENE
MA BEATMELICKMEOWNME. . . Casimir's face waxed red and 
his tongue was protruding slightly. "I didn't do this. These are 
supposed to say, 'new budget' and 'old budget.' I didn't write this 
into the program. Uh, this is what we call a bug. They happen from 
time to time. Oh, Jeez, I'm really sorry." He covered his face with 
one hand and grabbed the graphs and crumpled them into his bag.
"I believe you," she said. "I don't know much about computers, 
but I know there have been problems with this one."
About halfway through his treatise on Lorentz curves it had 
occurred to Casimir that he was in the process of putting his foot 
deeply into his mouth. She was an English major; he had looked her 
up in the student directory to find out; what the hell did she care 
about Gini coefficients? Sarah was still smiling, so if she was bored 
she at least respected him enough not to show. He had told her that 
he'd just now written this program up, and that was bad, because it 
lookedoy! It looked as though he were trying to impress her, a 
sophisticated Humanities type, by writing computer programs on 
her behalf as though that were the closest he could come to real 
communication. And then obscene Lorentz curves!
He was saved by her ignorance of computers. The fact was, of 
course, that there was no way a computer error could do thatif she 
had ever run a computer program, she would have concluded that 
Casimir had done it on purpose. Suddenly he remembered his 
conversation with Virgil. The Worm! It must have been the Worm. 
He was about to tell her, to absolve himself, when he remembered it 
was a secret he was honor bound to protect.
He had to be honest. Could it be that he had actually written this 
just to impress her? Anything printed on a computer looked 
convincing. If that had been his motive, this served him right. Now 
was the time to say something witty, but he was no good at all with 
wordsa fact he didn't doubt was more than obvious to her. She 
probably knew every smart, interesting man in the university, which 
meant he might as well forget about making any headway toward 
looking like anything other than an unkempt, poor, math-and-
computer-obsessed nerd whose idea of intelligent conversation was 
to show off the morning's computer escapades.
"You didn't have to go to the trouble of writing a program."
"Ha! Well, no trouble. Easier to have the machine do it than 
work it out by hand. Once you get good on the computer, that is." He 
bit his up and looked out the window. "Which isn't to say I think I'm 
some kind of great programmer. I mean, I am, but that's not how I 
think of myself."
"You aren't a hacker," she suggested.
"Yeah! Exactly." Everyone knew the term "hacker," so why 
hadn't he just said it?
She looked at him carefully. "Didn't we meet somewhere 
before? I could swear I recognize you from somewhere."
He had been hoping that she had forgotten, or that she would not 
recognize him through his glacier glasses. That first day, yes, he had 
read her computer card for hera hacker's idea of a perfect 
introduction!
"Yeah. Remember Mrs. Santucci? That first day?" She nodded 
her head with a little smile; she remembered it all, for better or 
worse. He watched her intensely, trying to judge her reaction.
"Yes," she said, "sure. I guess I never properly thanked you for 
that, sothank you." She held out her hand. Casimir stared at it, 
then put out his hand and shook it. He gripped her firmlya habit 
from his business, where a crushing handshake was a sign of 
trustworthiness. To her he had probably felt like an orangutan trying 
to dislocate her shoulder. Besides which, some apple-blackberry jam 
had dripped out onto the first joint of his right index finger some 
minutes ago, and he had thoughtlessly sucked on it.
She was awfully nice. That was a dumb word, "nice," but he 
couldn't come up with anything better. She was bright, friendly and 
understanding, and kind to him, which was good of her considering 
his starved fanatical appearance and general fabulous ugliness. He 
hoped that this conversation would soon end and that they would 
come out of it with a wonderful relationship. Ha.
No one said anything; she was just watching him. Obviously she 
was! It was his turn to say something! How long had he been sitting 
there staring into the navy-blue maw of his mini-pie?
"What's your major?" they said simultaneously. She laughed 
immediately, and belatedly he laughed also, though his laugh was 
sort of a gasp and sob that made him sound as if he were undergoing 
explosive decompression. Still, it relaxed him slightly.
"Oh," she added, "I'm sorry. I forgot Neutrino was for physics 
majors."
"Don't be sorry." She was sorry?
"I'm an English major."
"Oh." Casirr reddened. "I guess you probably noticed that 
English is my strong point."
"Oh, I disagree. When you were speaking last night, once you 
got rolling you did very well. Same goes for today, when you were 
describing your curves. A lot of the better scientists have an 
excellent command of language. Clear thought leads to clear 
speech."
Casimir's pulse went up to about twice the norm and he felt 
warmth in the lower regions. He gazed into the depths of his half-
drained beer, not knowing what to say for fear of being 
ungrammatical. "I've only been here a few weeks, but I've heard 
that S. S. Krupp is quite the speaker. Is that so?"
Sarah smiled and rolled her eyes. At first Casimir had 
considered her just a typically nice-looking young woman, but at this 
instant it became obvious that he had been wrong; in fact she was 
speilbindingly lovely. He tried not to stare, and shoved the last three 
bites of pie into his mouth. As he chewed he tried to track what she 
was saying so that he wouldn't lose the thread of the conversation 
and end up looking like an absent-minded hacker with no ability to 
relate to anyone who wasn't destined to become a machine-language 
expert.
"He is quite a speaker," she said. "If you're ever on the opposite 
side of a question from S. S. Krupp, you can be sure he'll bring you 
around sooner or later. He can give you an excellent reason for 
everything he does that goes right back to his basic philosophy. It's 
awesome, I think."
At last he was done stuffing junk food into his unshaven face. 
"But when he out-argues youis that a word?"
"Well let it slip by."
"When he does that, do you really agree, or do you think he's 
just outclassed you?"
"I've thought about that quite a bit. I don't know." She sat back 
pensively, was stabbed by her chair, and sat back up. "What am I 
saying? I'm an English major!" Casimir chuckled, not quite 
following this. "If he can justify it through a fair argument, and no 
one else can poke any holes in it, I can't very well disagree, can I? I 
mean, you have to have some kind of anchors for your beliefs, and if 
you don't trust clear, correct language, how do you know what to be-
lieve?"
'What about intuition?" asked Casimir, surprising himself. "You 
know the great discoveries of physics weren't made through 
argument. They were made in flashes of intuition, and the 
explanations and proofs thought up afterward."
"Okay." She drained her coffee and thought about it. "But those 
scientists still had to come up with verbal proofs to convince 
themselves that the discoveries were real."
So far, Casimir thought, she seemed more interested than 
peeved, so he continued to disagree. "Well, scientists don't need 
language to tell them what's real. Mathematics is the ultimate reality. 
That's all the anchor we need."
"That's interesting, but you can't use math to solve political 
problemsit's not useful in the real world."
"Neither is language. You have to use intuition. You have to use 
the right side of your brain."
She looked again at the clock. "I have to go now and get ready 
for Krupp." Now she was looking at himappraisingly, he thought. 
She was going to leave! He desperately wanted to ask her out. But 
too many women had burst out laughing, and he couldn't take that. 
Yet there she sat, propped up on her elbowswas she waiting for 
him to ask? Impossible.
"Uh," he said, but at Lhe same time she said, "Let's get together 
some other time. Would you like that?"
"Yeah."
"Fine!" With a little negotiation, they arranged to meet in the 
Megapub on Friday night.
"I can't believe you're free Friday night!" he blurted, and she 
looked at him oddly. She stood up and held out her hand again. 
Casimir scrambled up and shook it gently.
"See you later," she said, and left. Casimir remained standing, 
watched her all the way across the shiny floor of the Megapub, then 
telescoped into his seat and nearly blacked out.


She did not have to wait long amid the marble-and-mahogany 
splendor of Septimius Severus Krupp's anteroom. She would have 
been happy to wait there for days, especially if she could have 
brought some favorite music and maybe Hyacinth, taken off her 
shoes, lounged on the sofa and stared out the window over the lush 
row of healthy plants. The administrative bloc of the Plex was an 
anomaly, like a Victorian mansion airlifted from London and 
dropped whole into a niche beneath C Tower. Here was none of the 
spare geometry of the rest of the Plex, none of the anonymous 
monochromatic walls and bald rectangles and squares that seemed to 
drive the occupants bonkers. No plastic showed; the floors were 
wooden, the windows opened, the walls were paneled and the honest 
wood and intricate parquet floors gave the place something of 
nature's warmth and diversity. In the past month Sarah had seen 
almost no woodeven the pencils in the stores here were of blond 
plasticand she stared dumbly at the paneling everywhere she went, 
as though the detailed grain was there for a reason and bore careful 
examination. All of this was an attempt to invest American Mega-
versity with the aged respectability of a real university; but she felt 
at home here.
"President Krupp will see you now," said the wonderful, witty, 
kind, civilized old secretary, and the big panel doors swung open and 
there was S. S. Krupp. "Good afternoon, Sarah, I'm sorry you had to 
wait," he said. "Please come in."
Three of the walls of Krupp's office were covered up to about 
nine feet high with bookshelves, and the fourth was all French 
windows. Above the bookshelves hung portraits of the founders and 
past presidents of American Megaversity. The founding fathers 
stared sullenly at Sarah through the gloom of a century and a half's 
accumulated tobacco smoke, and as she followed the row of 
dignitaries around to the other end of the room, their faces shone out 
brighter and brighter from the tar and nicotine of antiquity until she 
got to the last spaces remaining, where Tony Commodi, Pertinax 
Rushforth and Julian Didius III gleamed awkwardly in modern Suits 
and designer eyeglasses.
The glowing red-orange wooden floor was covered by three 
Persian rugs, and the ceiling was decorated with three concentric 
rings of elaborate plasterwork surrounding a great domed skylight. A 
large, carefully polished chandelier hung on a heavy chain from the 
center of the skylight. Sarah knew that the delicate leaded-glass 
skylight was protected from above by a squat geodesic dome 
covered with heavy steel grids and shatterproof Fiberglass panels, 
designed to keep everything out of S. S. Krupp's office except for 
the sunlight. Nothing short of a B-52 in a power dive could penetrate 
that grand silence, though a ring of shattered furniture and other 
shrapnel piled about the dome outside attested to the efforts of C 
Tower students to prove otherwise.
Krupp led her to a long low table under the windows, and they 
sat in old leather chairs and spread their papers out in the grey north 
light. Between them Krupp's ever-ready tape recorder was spinning 
away silently. Shortly the secretary came in with a silver tea service, 
and Krupp poured tea and offered Sarah tiny, cleverly made 
munchies on white linen napkins embroidered with the American 
Megaversity coat of arms.
Krupp was a sturdy man, his handsome cowboy face somewhat 
paled and softened by the East. "I understand," he said, "that you 
had some trouble with those playground communists last night."
"Oh, they were the same as ever. No unusual problems."
"Yes." Krupp sounded slightly impatient at her nonstatement. "I 
was pleased to see you disemboweled their budget."
"Oh? What if we'd stayed with the old one?"
"I'd have flushed it." He grinned brightly.
"What about this budget? Is it acceptable?"
"Oh, it's not bad. It's got some warts."
"Well, I want to point out at the beginning that it's easy for you 
to make minor adjustments in the budget until the warts are gone. 
It's much more difficult for the Student Government to handle. We 
almost had to call in the riot police to get this through, and any 
budget you have approved will be much harder."
"You're perfectly free to point that out, Sarah, and I don't 
disagree, ioesn't make much difference."
"Well," said Sarah carefully, "the authority is obviously yours. 
I'm sure you can take whatever position you want and back it up 
very eloquently. flut I hope you'll take into account certain 
practicalities." Knowing instantly she had made a mistake, she 
popped a munchie into her mouth and stared out the window, 
waiting.
Krupp snorted quietly and sipped tea, then sat back in his chair 
and regarded Sarah with dubious amusement. "Sarah, I didn't expect 
you, of all people, to try that one on me. Why is it that everyone 
finds eloquence so inauspicious? It's as though anyone who argues 
clearly can't be trusted that's the opposite of what reasonable 
people ought to think. That attitude is common even among faculty 
here, and I'm just at a loss to understand. I can't talk like a 
mongoloid pig-sticker on a three-day drunk just so I'll sound like 
one of the boys. God knows I can't support any position, only the 
right position. If it's not right, the words won't make it so. That's the 
value of clear language."
This was the problem with Krupp. He assumed that everyone 
always said exactly what they thought. While this was true of him, it 
was rarely so with others. "Okay, sorry," said Sarah. "I agree. I just 
didn't make my point too well. I'm just hoping you'll take into 
account the practical aspects of the problem, such as how everyone's 
going to react. Some people say this is a blind spot of yours." This 
was a moderately daring thing for Sarah to say, but if she tried to 
mush around politely with Krupp, he would cut her to pieces.
"Sarah, it's obvious that people's reactions have to be accounted 
for. That's just horse sense. It's just that basic principles are far more 
important than a temporary political squabble in Student 
Government. To you, all those mono-maniacs and zombies seem 
more important than they are, and that's why we can't give you any 
financial authority. From my point of view I can see a much more 
complete picture of what is and isn't important, and one thing that 
isn't is a shouting match in that parody of a democratic institution 
that we call a government because we are all so idealistic in the 
university. What's important is principles."
Suddenly Sarah felt depressed; she sat limply back in her chair. 
For a while nothing was saidKrupp was surprisingly sensitive to 
her mood.
"Student Government is just a sham, isn't it?" she asked, 
surprised by her own bitterness.
"What do you mean by that?"
"It has nothing to do with the real world. We don't make any 
real decisions. It's just a bunch of imaginary responsibilities to argue 
about and put down on our rsums."
Krupp thought it over. "It's kind of like a dude ranch. If you 
lose your dogies, there's someone there to round them up for you. 
But on the other hand, if you stand behind your horse you can still 
get wet. My Lord, Sarah, everything is real. There's no difference 
between the 'real' world and this one. The experience you're gaining 
is real. But it's true that the importance ascribed to Student 
Government is mostly imaginary."
"So what's the point?"
"The point is that we're here to go over this budget, and when I 
point out the warts, you tell me why they aren't warts. If you can 
justify them, you'll have a real effect on the budget." Krupp spread 
the pages of the budget out on the table, and Sarah saw alarming 
masses of red ink scrawled across them She felt like whipping out 
Casimir s graphs but she didn t have them with her and couldn t risk 
Krupp s seeing what she had seen.
"Now one item which caught my eye," said Krupp half an hour 
later, after Sarah had lost five arguments and won one, "was this 
money for this little group, Neutrino. I see they're wanting to build 
themselves a mass driver."
"Yeah? What's wrong with that?"
"Well," said Krupp patiently, "I didn't say there's anything 
wrongjust hold on, let's not get adversarial yet. You see, we don't 
often use activities funds to back research projects. Generally these 
people apply for a grant through the usual channels. You see, first 
estimates of the cost of something like this are often wildly low, 
especially when made by young fellows who aren't quite on top of 
things yet. This thing is certain to come in over budget, so we'll 
either end up with a useless, half-completed heap of junk or a 
Neutrino floundering around in red ink. It seems kind of hasty and 
ill-considered to me, so I'm just recommending that we strike this 
item from the budget, have the folks who want to do this project do a 
complete, faculty-supervised study, then try to get themselves a 
grant."
Sarah sighed and stared at a small ornament on the teapot's 
handle, thinking it over.
"Don't tell me," said Krupp. "It's my blind spot again, right?" 
But he sounded humorous rather than sarcastic.
"There are several good reasons why you should pass this item. 
The main factor is the man who is heading the project. I know him, 
and he's quite experienced with this sort of thing in the real world. I 
know you don't like that term, President Krupp, but it's true. He's 
brilliant, knows a lot of practical electronicshe had his own 
businessand he's deeply committed to the success of this project."
"That's a good start. But I'm reluctant to see funds given to 
small organizations with these charismatic, highly motivated leaders 
who have pet projects, because that amounts to just a personal gift to 
the leader. Broad interest in the funded activity is important."
"This is not a personal vendetta. The plans were provided for 
the most part by Professor Sharon. The organization is already 
putting together some of the electronics with their own money."
"Professor Sharon. What an abominable thing that was." Krupp 
stared into the light for a long time. "That was a load of rock salt in 
the butt. If my damn Residence Life Relations staff wasn't tenured 
and unionized I'd fire 'em, find the scum who did that and boot 'em 
onto the Turnpike. However. We should resist the temptation to do 
something we wouldn't otherwise do just because a peripherally 
involved figure has suffered. We all revere Professor Sharon, but this 
project would not erase his tragedy."
"Well, I can only go on my gut feelings," said Sarah, "but I 
don't think what you've said applies. I'm pretty confident about this 
project."
Krupp looked impressed. "If that's the case, Sarah, then I should 
meet this fellow and give him a fair hearing. Maybe I'll have the 
same gut reaction as you do."
"Should I have him contact you?" This was a reprieve, she 
thought; but if Casimir had been so obviously nervous in front of 
her, what would he do under rhetorical implosion from Krupp? It 
was only reasonable, though.
"Fine," said Krupp, and handed her his card.
Their other differences of opinion were hardly worth arguing 
over. Halving the funding for the Basque Eroticism Study Cluster 
was not going to make political waves. The meeting came to a civil 
and reasonable end. Krupp showed her out, and she smiled at the old 
secretary and maneuvered the scarlet carpets of the administration 
bloc and dawdled by each painting, finally exiting into a broad shiny 
electric-blue cinderblock corridor. By the time she made it back to 
her room she had adjusted to the Plex again, and taught herself to see 
and hear as little of it as possible.


Ephraim Klein and some of his friends occasionally gathered in 
his room to smoke cheap cigars, if only because they detested them 
slightly less than John Wesley Fenrick did. Fenrick set the Go Big 
Red Fan up in the vent window and blew chill November air across 
the room, forcing perhaps eighty percent of the fumes out the door. 
A defect of the Rules was that they made no provision for exchange 
of air pollution, unfortunately for Fenrick, who despite his tradition 
of chemically induced states of awareness was fanatically clean.
Caught in a random eddy blown up by the Fan, a cigar resting in 
a stolen Burger King tinfoil ashtray fell off one evening and rolled 
several inches, crossing the boundary line into Fenrick's side of the 
room. It burned there for a minute or two before its owner, a friend 
of Klein's, made bold to reach across and retrieve it. The result was 
a brief brown streak on Fenrick's linoleum. Fenrick did not notice it 
immediately, but after he did, he grew more enraged every day. 
Klein was obligated to clean up "that mess," in his view. Klein's 
opinion was that anything on Fenrick's side of the room was Fen-
rick's problem; Klein was not paying fifteen thousand dollars a year 
and studying philosophy so he could be a floor-scrubber for a rude 
asshole geek like John Wesley Fenrick. He pointed to a clause in the 
Rules which tentatively bore him out. They screamed across the 
boundary line on this issue for nearly a week. Then, one day, I heard 
Ephraim yelling through their open door.
"Jesus! What the hell are youHa! I don't believe this shit!" He 
stuck his head outside and yelled, "Hey, everybody, come look at 
what this dumb fucker's doing!"
I looked.
For reasons I do not care to think about, John Wesley Fenrick 
kept a milkbottle full of dirt. When I looked in, he had pulled its lid 
off and was scattering red Okie loam over the boundary line and all 
over Ephraim's side of the room. Ephraim appeared to be more 
amused than angry, though he was very angry, and insisted that as 
many people as possible come and witness. Fenrick sat down calmly 
to watch television, occasionally smiling a small, solitary smile.
Again the question of my responsibility comes up. But how 
could I know it was an event of great significance? I had also seen 
lovers' quarrels in the Cafeteria; why should I have known this was 
much more important? I had no authority to order these people 
around. Moreover, I had no desire to. I had done as much as I could. 
I had shown them how to be reasonable, and if they could not get the 
hang of it, it was not my problem.
The next time I spectated, Ephraim Klein was alone, studying 
on his bed with Gregorian chants filling the room. I had come to see 
why he had borrowed my broom. He had used it to make a welcome 
mat for his roomie. Right in front of the Go Big Red Fanthe 
movable portion of the wall that served as a gatehe had swept all 
the dirt into an even rectangle about one by two feet and half an inch 
thick. In the dirt he had inscribed with his finger:

GET A BUTT

FUCK JOHNNIE-

WONNIE


When Fenrick got home I followed him discreetly to his room, 
to keep an eye on things. When I got to their doorway he was staring 
inscrutably at the welcome mat. He bent and opened the fan-gate, 
stepped through without disturbing the dirt and closed it. He turned, 
and looked for a while at the smirking Ephraim Klein. Then, with 
quiet dignity, John Wesley Fenrick reached down and set the Fan to 
HI, creating a small simulation of Oklahoma in the 1930's on the 
other side of the room.
Once I was satisfied that there would be no violence, I left and 
abandoned them to each other.


Septimius Severus Krupp stood behind a cheap plywood lectern 
in Lecture Hall 13 and spoke on Kant's Ethics. The fifty people in 
the audience listened or did not, depending on whether they (like 
Sarah and Casimir and Ephraim and I) had come to hear the lecture, 
or (like Yllas Freedperson) to see the Stalinist Underground 
Battalion Operative throw the banana-cream pie into S. S. Krupp's 
face.
I had come because I was fascinated by Krupp, and because 
opportunities to hear him speak were rare. Sarah, I think, had come 
for like reasons. Ephraim was a philosophy major, and Casimir came 
because this was the type of thing that you were supposed to do in a 
university. As for the SUBbies, they were getting edgy. What the 
fuck was wrong with the plan, man? they seemed to say, looking 
back and forth at one another sincerely and shaking their heads. The 
first phases had gone well. Operative 1 had gone out to the stageleft 
doorway, twenty feet to Krupp's side, opened the door and propped 
it, then made a show of smoking a cigarette and blowing smoke out 
the door. It was obvious that she had severe reality problems by the 
way she posed there, putting on a casual air so weirdly melodramatic 
that everyone could see she must be a guerilla mime, a psycho or 
simply luded out of her big spherical frizzy-haired bandanna-
wrapped head. It was also odd that she would show so much concern 
for others' lungs, considering that her friends were making loud, 
sarcastic noises and distracting gestures, but unfortunately S. S. 
Krupp's aides were too straight to tell the difference between a loony 
and a loony with a plan, and so they suspected nothing when she 
returned to her seat and forgot to shut the door again.
Ten minutes later, right on time, Operative 2 had arrived late, 
entering via the stage-right doorway and leaving it, of course, 
propped open. He moved furtively, like a six-foot mouse with 
thallium phenoxide poisoning, jerking his head around as if to look 
for right-wing death squads and CIA snipers.
But Operative 3 did not appear with the banana-cream pie. 
Where was he? Everyone knew about Krupp's CIA connections, and 
it was quite possibledon't laugh, the CIA is everywhere, look at 
Iranthat he might have been intercepted by fascist goons and 
bastinadoed and wired to an old engine block and thrown into a 
river. Perhaps the death squads were waiting in their rooms now, 
test-firing their silenced UZIs into cartons of Stalinist pamphlets.
In fact, Operative 3, when making his plans for the evening, had 
forgotten that once he bought the banana-cream pie at the 
convenience store it would have to thaw out. There is little political 
relevance in bouncing a rock-hard disc of frozen custard off S. S. 
Krupp's facethe splatter is the pointand so for half an hour he 
had been in a Plex restroom, holding the pie underneath the 
automatic hand dryer as unobtrusively as possible. Whenever he 
heard approaching steps, he stopped and dropped the pie into his 
knapsack, and held his hands nonchalantly under the hot air; hence 
he had succeeded only in liquefying the top two millimeters of the 
pie and ruffling the ring of whipped cream. He then repaired to a 
spot not far from the lecture hail where he rested the pie on a hot 
water pipe. There should be plenty of time left in the lecture, though 
it was hard to judge these things when stoned: Krupp's voice droned 
on and on, incomprehensible as all that logic and philosophy.
Operative 3 snapped to attention. How long had he been spacing 
off? Only one way to tell. He stuck his finger in the pie: still kind of 
stiff, but not stiff enough to break a nose and wet enough to explode 
mediagenically.
The time was now. Operative 3 pulled on his ski mask, stole to 
the open stage-left door, and waited for the right moment.
Shit! One of Krupp's CIA men had seen him! One of the 
Frosted Mini-Wheat types with the three-piece suits who ran 
Krupp's tape-recorder during speeches. No time to wait; the stun 
grenade might be lobbed at any moment.
To us he looked like a strange dexed-out bird, not running 
across the front of the hall so much as vibrating across at low 
frequency. He was tall, skinny, pale and wore an old Tshirt; he never 
seemed to plant any part of his nervous body firmly on the ground. 
He entered, bouncing off a doorjamb and losing his balance. He then 
caromed off a seat near a CIA man, who had not yet reacted, hopped 
three times to regain balance and, gaining some direction, scrambled 
toward S. S. Krupp, chased all the way by four bats driven into a 
frenzy by the aroma of the banana-cream pie.
"This means that the current vulgar usage of the word 
'autonomous' to mean independent, i.e., free of external influence, 
sovereign, is not entirely correct," said Krupp, who glanced up from 
his notes to see what everybody was gasping at. "To be autonomous, 
as we can readily see by examining the Greek roots of the word
autos meaning self and nomos meaning law"here he paused for a 
moment and ducked. The pie flew sideways over his head and 
exploded on the blackboard behind him. He straightened back up
"is to be self-ruling, to exercise a respect for the Law"Operative 3 
tottered out the door as the SUB groaned"which in this case 
means not the law of a society or political system but rather the Law 
imposed by a rational man on his own actions." in the hallway there 
was scuffling, and Krupp paused. With much grunting and swearing, 
Operative 3, sans ski mask, was dragged back into the room by three 
clean-cut students in pastel sweaters, accompanied by an older, 
smiling man in a plaid flannel shirt.
"Here's your man, President Krupp, sir," said an earnest young 
Anglo-Saxon, brushing a strand of hair from his brow with his free 
hand. "We've placed this Communist under citizen's arrest. Shall we 
contact the authorities on your behalf?" Their mentor beamed even 
more broadly at this suggestion, his horsey, protruding bicuspids 
glaring like great white grain elevators on the Dakota plain.
Krupp regarded them warily, walking around to the other side of 
the lectern as though it were a shield. Then he turned to the 
audience. "Excuse me, please. Guess I'm the highest authority here, 
so just let me clear this up." He looked back at the group by the 
doorway, who watched respectfully, except for Operative 3, who 
shouted from his headlock: "See, man? This is what happens when 
you try to change the System!" Several SUBbies began to come to 
his aid, but were halted by Krupp's aides.
"Who the hell are you?" said Krupp. "Are you from that squalid 
North Dakotan cult thing?"
They were shocked, even Operative 3, and stared uncom-
prehendingly. Deep concern showed in the lined, earnest face of the 
man in the plaid flannel. Finally he stepped forward. "Yessirree. We 
are indeed followers of the Temple of Unlimited Godhead, and 
proud of it too. With all due respect, just what do you mean by 
'squalid'?"
"It's like a dead dog in the sitting room, son. Look, why don't 
you all just let that boy go? That's right."
Regretfully, they released him. Operative 3 stood up, shivering 
violently. He could not exactly thank Krupp. Alter hopping from 
foot to foot he spun and continued his flight down the hail as though 
nothing had happened.
"Look," Krupp continued. "We've got a security force here. 
We've got organized religions that have been doing just fine for 
millennia. Now what we don't need is a brainwashing franchise, or 
any of your Kool-Aidstoned outlaw Mormon Jesuits. I know times 
are hard in North Dakota but they're hard everywhere and it doesn't 
call for new religions. Of course, you have some very fine points on 
the subject of Communism. Now, this does not mean we will in any 
way fail to extend you full religious and political freedoms as with 
the old-fashioned nonprofit religions."
The SUB hooted at Krupp's wicked intolerance for religious 
diversity while the rest of the audience applauded. The TUGgies 
were galvanized, and spoke up for their renegade sect as eloquently 
as they knew how.
"But that man was a Communist! We found his card."
"Look at it this way. If TUG brainwashes people, how do you 
explain the great diversity of our membership, which comes from 
towns and farms of all sizes all over the Dakotas and 
Saskatchewan?"
"TUG is fully consistent with Judeo-Christo-Mohammedan-
Bahaism."
Communism is the greatest threat in the world today."
"The goals of Messiah Jorgenson Five are fully consistent with 
the aims of American higher education."
"Our church is noncoercive. We believe of our own free, uh, 
pamphlet.. . explains our ideas in layman's language."
"Visit North Dakota this summer for fun in the sun. Temple 
Camp."
"Who is the brainwasher, our church, which teaches that we 
may all be Messiah/Buddhas together, or today's media society with 
its constant emphasis on materialism?"
"If you'll accept this free book it will reveal truths you may 
never have thought about before."
"I couldn't help noticing that you were looking a little down and 
out, kinda lonely. You know, sometimes it helps to talk to a 
stranger."
"Do you need a free dinner?"
Krupp watched skeptically. The older man was silent, but finally 
touched each student lightly on the shoulder, silencing one and all. 
They left, smiling.
Lookir disgusted, Krupp returned to the microphone. "Where 
was I, talking about autonomy?"
He surveyed his notes and concluded his lecture in another 
twenty minutes. He paused then to light his cigar, which he had been 
fingering, twiddling, stroking and sniffing exquisitely for several 
minutes, and was answered by exagerrated coughing from the SUB 
section. "I'm free to answer some questions," he announced, 
surveying the room and 
squintingintohiscigarsmokelikeacowboyintothesettingsun.
Nearly everyone in the SUB raised his/her hand, but Yllas 
Freedperson, Operatives 1 and 2 and two others arose and made their 
loud way up to the back of the hall for an emergency conference. 
They were deeply concerned; they stopped short of being openly 
suspicious, a deeply fascist trait, but it occurred to them that what 
had just happened might strongly suggest the presence of a TUG 
deep-cover mole in the SUB!
Meanwhile, question time went on down below. As was his 
custom, Krupp called on two people with serious questions before 
resorting to the SUB. Eventually he did so, looking carefully through 
that section and stabbing his finger at its middle.
By SUB custom, any call for a question was communal property 
and was distributed by consensus to a member of the group. This 
time, Dexter Fresser, Sarah's hometown ex-beau, number 2 person 
in the SUB and its chief political theorist, got the nod. Shaking his 
head, he pushed himself up in his seat until he could see Krupp's 
face hovering malevolently above the dome of the next person's 
bandanna. He took a deep breath, preparing for intellectual combat, 
and began.
"You were talking about autonomy. Well, then you were talking 
about Greek words of roots. I want to talk about Greek too because 
we have our roots in Greece, just like, you know, our words dothat 
is, most of us do, our culture does, even if our ethnicity doesn't. But 
Rome was much, much more powerful than Greece, and that was 
after most of the history of the human race, which we don't know 
anything about. And you know in Greece they had gayness all over 
the place. I'm saying that nice and loud even though you hate it, but 
even though. uh, you know, fascist? But you can't keep me from 
saying it. Did you ever think about the concentration camps? How 
all those people were killed by fascists? And also in Haiti. which we 
annexed in 1904. And did you ever 1 think about the socialist 
revolution in France that was crushed by D-Day because the 
socialists were fighting off the Nazis single-handedly. Where's the 
good in that? Bela Lugos! was ugly, but he had a great mind. I mean, 
some of the greatest works of art were done by Satan-worshipers like 
Shakespeare and Michelangelo! And the next time your car throws a 
rod on 1-90 between Presho and Kennebec because you lost your 
dipstick you should think, even if it is a hundred and ten in the shade 
forty-four Celsius and there are red winged blackbirds coming at you 
like Bell AH-64s or something. Put the goddamn zucchini in later 
next time and it won t get so mushy! I know this is strong and direct 
and undiplomatical, but this is real life and I can't be like you and 
phrase it like blue tennis-shoe laces hanging from the rear-view 
mirror. See?"
Here he stopped. Krupp had listened patiently, occasionally 
looking away to restack his notes or puff on his cigar. "No," he said. 
"Do you have a question. son?"
Emotionally wounded, Dex Fresser shook his head back and 
forth and gestured around it as though tearing off a heavy layer of 
tar. While his companions supported him, another SUBbie rose to 
take his place. She was of average height, with terribly pale skin and 
a safety pin through her septum. She rose like a zeppelin on power 
takeoff and began to read in a singsong voice from a page covered 
with arithmetic.
"Mister Krupp, sir. Last year. According, to the Monoplex 
Monitor, you, I mean the Megaversity Corporation ruling clique, 
spent ten thousand dollars on legal fees for union-busting firms. 
Now. There are forty thousand students at. American Megaversity. 
This means that on the average, you spent four thousand million 
dollars on legal fees for union-busting alone! How do you justify 
that, when in this very city people have to pay for their own 
abortions?"
Krupp simply stared in her direction and took three long slow 
puffs on his cigar without saying anything. Then he turned to the 
blackboard. "This weather's not getting any better," he said, quickly 
drawing a rough outline of the United States. "It's this low pressure 
center up here. See, the air coming into it turns around 
counterclockwise because of the Coriolis effect. That makes it pump 
cold air from Canada into our area. And we can't do squat about it. 
It's a hell of a thing." He turned back to the audience. "Next 
question!"
The SUB wanted to erupt at this, but they were completely 
nonplused and hardly said anything. "I've taken too many questions 
from the kill-babies-not-seals crowd," Krupp announced. He called 
on Ephraim Klein, who had been waving his hand violently.
"President Krupp, I think the question of adherence to an inner 
Law is just a semantic smokescreen around the real issue, which is 
neurological. Our brains have two hemispheres with different 
functions. The left one handles the day-to-day thinking, conventional 
logical thought, while the right one handles synthesis of incoming 
information and subconsciously processes it to form conclusions 
about what the basic decisions should beit converts experience 
into subconscious awareness of basic patterns and cause-and-effect 
relationships and gives us general direction and a sense of 
conscience. So this stuff about autonomy is nothing more than an 
effort by neurologically ignorant metaphysicists to develop, by 
groping around in the dark, an explanation for behavior patterns 
rooted in the structure of the brain."
Krupp answered immediately. "So you mean to say that the 
right hemisphere is the source of what I call the inner Law, and that 
rather than being a Law per se it is merely a set of inclinations 
rooted in past experience which tells the left hemisphere what it 
should do."
"That's rightin advanced, conscious people. In primitive 
unconscious bicameral people, it would verbally speak to the left 
hemisphere, coming as a voice from nowhere in times of decision. 
The left hemisphere would be unable to do otherwise. There would 
be no decision at allso you would have perfect adherence to the 
Law of the right hemisphere voice, absolute autonomy, though the 
voice would be attributed to gods or angels."
Krupp nodded all the way through this, squinting at Klein. 
"You're one of those, eh?" he asked. "I've never been convinced by 
Jaynes' theory myself, though he has some interesting points about 
metaphors. I don't think an ignorant carpenter like Jesus had all that 
flawless theology pumped into the left half of his brain by stray 
neural currents." He thought about it for a moment. "Though it 
would be a lot quieter around here if everyone were carrying his 
stereo around in his skull."
"Jesus," said Ephraim Klein, "you don't believe in God, do you? 
You?"
"Well, I don't want to spend too much time on this freshman 
material, uhwhat's your name? Ezekiel? Ephraim. But you ought 
to grapple sometime with the fact that this materialistic monism of 
yours is self-refuting and thus totally bankrupt. I guess it's attractive 
to someone who's just discovered he's an intellectualsure was to 
me thirty years agobut sometime you've got to stop boxing 
yourself in with this intellectual hubris."
Klein nearly rocketed from his chair and for a moment I said 
nothing. He was bolt upright, supporting his weight on i one fist 
thrust down between his thighs into the seat, chewing deeply on his 
lower lip and staring, to use a Krupp ~ phrase, "like a coon on the 
runway." "Non sequitur! Ad hominem!" he cried.
"I know, I know. Tell you what. Stick around and I'll listen to 
your Latin afterward, we're losing our audience." Krupp began 
looking for a new questioner. From the back of the hall came the 
sound of a fold-down seat bounding back up into position, and we 
turned to make out the ragged figure of Bert Nix.
"Krupp cuts a fart! The sphmxter cannot hold!" he bellowed 
hoarsely, and sat back down again
Krupp mainly ignored this, as his aides strode up the aisle to 
show Mr. Nix where the exit was and turned his attention to the next 
questioner, a tall redheaded SUBbie who accused Krupp of 
accepting bribes to let wealthy idiots into the law school. Red added, 
"I keep asking you this question, Septimius, and you've never 
answered it yet. When are you going to pay some attention to my 
question?"
Krupp looked disgusted and puffed rapidly, staring at him 
coldly. Bert Nix paused in the doorway to shout: "My journey is o'er 
rocks & Mountains, not in pleasant vales; I must not sleep nor rest 
because of madness & dismay."
"Yeah," said Krupp, "and I give you the same answer every 
time, too. I didn't do that. There's no evidence I did. What more can 
I say? I genuinely want to satisfy you."
"You just keep slinging the same bullshit!" shouted the SUBbie, 
and slammed back down into his seat.
Casimir Radon listened to these exchanges with consuming 
interest. This was what he had dreamed of finding at college: small 
lectures on pure ideas from the president of the university, with 
discussion afterward. That the SUBbies had disrupted it with a pie-
throwing made him sick; he had stared at them through a haze of 
anger for the last part of the meeting. Had he been sitting by the side 
door he could have tripped that bastard. Which would have been 
good, because Sarah Jane Johnson was sitting there three rows in 
front of him, totally unaware of his existence as usual.
Sarah's entrance, several minutes before the start of the lecture, 
had thrown Casimir into a titanic intellectual struggle. He now had to 
decide whether or not to say "hi" to her. After all, they had had a 
date, if you could call stammering in the Megapub for two hours a 
date. Later he had realized how dull it must have been for her, and 
was profoundly mortified. Now Sarah was sitting just twenty feet 
away, and he hated to disrupt her thoughts by just crashing in 
uninvited; better for her not to know he was there. But in case she 
happened to notice him, and wondered why he hadn't said "hi," he 
made up a story: he had come in late through the back doors.
He also wanted to ask Krupp a question, a dazzling and 
perceptive question that would take fifteen minutes to ask, but he 
couldn't think of one. This was regrettable, because Krupp was a 
man he wanted to know, and he needed to impress him before 
making his sales pitch for the mass driver.
At the same time, he was working on a grandiose plan for 
gathering damaging information on the university, but this seemed 
stupid; seen from this lecture hall, American Megaversity looked 
pretty much the way it had in the recruiting literature.
He would continue with Project Spike until it gave him 
satisfaction. Whether or not he released the information depended on 
what happened at the Big U between now and then.
Sarah's voice sounded in one ear. "Casimir. Earth to Casimir. 
Come in, Casimir Radon Shocked and suddenly breathless, he sat 
up, looking astonished.
"Oh," he said casually. "Sarah. Hi. How're you doing?"
"Fine," she answered, "didn't you see me?"
Eventually they went into the hallway, where S. S. Krupp was 
down to the last inch of his cigar and having a complicated 
discussion with Ephraim Klein. His aides stood to the sides brushing 
hairs off their suits, various alien-looking philosophy majors listened 
intently and I leaned against a nearby wall watching it all,
"Well, why didn't you say so?" Krupp was saying. "You're a 
Jaynesian and a materialistic monist. In which case you've got no 
reason to believe anything you think, because anything you think is 
just a predetermined neural event which can't be considered true or 
logical. Self-refuting, son. Think about it."
"But now you've gotten off on a totally different argument!" 
cried Klein. "Even if we presume dualism, you've got to admit that 
intellectual processes reflect neural events in some way."
"Well, sure."
"Right! And since the bicameral mind theory explains human 
behavior so well, there's no reason, even if you are a dualist, to 
reject it."
"In some cases, okay," said Krupp, "but that doesn't support 
your original proposition, which is that Kant was just trying to 
rationalize brain events through some kind of semantic 
necromancy."
"Yes it does!"
"Hell no it doesn't."
"Yes it does!"
"No it doesn't. Sarah!" said Krupp warmly. He shook her hand, 
and the philosophy majors, seeing that the intelligent part of the 
conversation was done, vaporized. "Glad you could come tonight."
"Hello, President Krupp. I wish you'd do this more often."
"Wait a minute," yelled Klein, "I just figured out how to 
reconcile Western religion and the bicameral mind."
"Well, take some notes quick, son, there's other people here, 
well get to it. Who's your date, Sarah?"
"This is Casimir Radon," said Sarah proudly, as Casimir 
reflexively shoved out his right hand.
"Well! That's fine," said Krupp. "That's two conversations I 
have to finish now. If we bring Bud here along with us to keep 
things from getting out of hand we ought to be safe."
"Look out. I'm not the diplomat you're hoping I am," I 
mumbled, not knowing what I was expected to say.
"What say we go down to the Faculty Pub and have some 
brews? I'm buying."
Our party got quite a few stares in the Faculty Pub. The three 
students were not even supposed to be in the place, but the bouncer 
wasn't very keen on asking Mr. Krupp's guests to show their IDs. 
This place bore the same relation to the Megapub as Canterbury 
Cathedral to a parking ramp. The walls were covered with wood that 
looked five inches thick, the floor was bottomless carpet and the 
tables were spotless slabs of rich solid wood. Enough armaments 
were nailed to the walls to defend a small medieval castle, and 
ancient portraits of the fat and pompous were interspersed with infi-
nitely detailed coats of arms. The President ordered a pitcher of 
Guinness and chose a booth near the corner.
Ephraim had been talking the entire way. "So if you were the 
religious type, you know, you could say that the right side of the 
brain is the 'spiritual' side, the part that comes into contact with 
spiritual influences or God or whateverit has a dimension that 
protrudes into the spiritual plane, if you want to look at it that way
while the left half is monistic and nonspiritual and mechanical. We 
conscious unicamerals accept the spiritual information coming in 
from the right side mixed in subtly with the natural inputs. But a 
bicameral person would receive that information in the form of a 
voice from nowhere which spoke with great authority. Now, that 
doesn't contradict the biblical accounts of the prophetsit merely 
gives us a new basis for their interpretation by suggesting that their 
communication with the Deity was done subconsciously by a 
particular hemisphere of the brain."
Krupp thought that was very good. Sarah and Casimir listened 
politely. Eventually, though, the conversation worked its way around 
to the subject of the mass driver.
"Tell me exactly why this university should fund your project 
there, Casimir," said Krupp, and watched expectantly.
"Well, it's a good idea."
"Why?"
"Because its relevant and we the people who do it will learn 
stuff from it."
"Like what?"
"Oh, electronics building things practical stuff."
"Can't they already learn that from doing conventional research 
under the supervision of the faculty."
"Yeah, I guess they can."
"So that leaves only the rationale that it is relevant, which I 
don't deny but I don't see why it's more relevant than a faculty 
research project."
"Well, mass drivers could be very important someday!"
Krupp shook his head. "Sure, I don't deny that. There are all 
kinds of relevant things which could be very important someday. 
What I need to be shown is how funding of your project would he 
consistent with the basic mission of a great institution of higher 
learning. You see? We're talking basic principles here."
Casimir had removed his glasses in the dim light, and his 
strangely naked-looking eyes darted uncertainly around the tabletop. 
"Well"
"Aw, shit, it's obvious!" shouted Ephraim Klein, drawing looks 
from everyone in the pub. "This university, let's face it, is for 
average people. The smart people from around here go to the Ivy 
League, right? So American Megaversity doesn't get many of the 
bright people the way, say, a Big Ten university would. But there are 
some very bright people here, for whatever reasons. They get 
frustrated in this environment because the university is tailored for 
averagely bright types and there is very little provision for the extra-
talented. So in order to fulfill the basic mission of allowing all 
corners to realize their full potentialto avoid stultifying the best 
minds hereyou have to make allowances for them, recognize their 
special creativity by giving them more freedom and self-direction 
than the typical student has. This is your chance to have something 
you can point to as an example of the opportunities here for people 
of all levels of ability."
Krupp listened intently through this, lightly tapping the edge of 
a potato chip on the table. When Klein finally stopped, he nodded for 
a while.
"Yep. Yeah, I'd say you have an excellent point there, Isaiah. 
Casimir, looks as though you're going to get your funding." He 
raised an eyebrow.
Casimir stood up, yelled "Great!" and pumped Krupp's hand. 
"This is a great investment. When this thing is done it will be the 
most incredible machine you've ever seen. There's no end to what 
you can do with a mass driver."
There was a commotion behind Krupp, and suddenly, larger 
than life, standing on the bench in the next booth down, Bert Nix had 
risen to his full bedraggled height and was suspending a heavy 
broadsword (stolen from a suit of armor by the restroom) over 
Krupp's head. "O fortunate Damocles, thy reign began and ended 
with the same dinner!"
After Krupp saw who it was he turned back around without 
response. His two aides staggered off their barstools across the room 
and charged over to grab the sword from Bert Nix's hand. He had 
held it by the middle of the blade, which made it seem considerably 
less threatening, but the aides didn't necessarily see it this way and 
were not as gentle in showing Mr. Nix out as they could have been. 
He was docile except for some cheerful obscenities; but as he was 
dragged past a prominent painting, he pulled away and pointed to it. 
"Don't you think we have the same nose?" he asked, and soon was 
out the door.
Krupp got up and brought the conversation to a quick close. 
After distributing cigars to Ephraim and Casimir and me, he left. 
Finding ourselves in an exhilarated mood and with what amounted to 
a free ticket to the Faculty Pub, we stayed long enough to close it 
down.
Earlier, however, on his fifth trip to the men's room, Casimir 
stopped to look at the plaque under the portrait to which Bert Nix 
had pointed. "WILBERFORCE PERTINAX RUSHFORTH-
GREATHOUSE,	17991862,	BENEFACTOR,
GREATHOUSE CHAPEL AND ORGAN." Casimir tried to 
focus on the face. As a matter of fact, the Roman nose did resemble 
Bert Nix's; they might be distant relatives. It was queer that a 
derelict, who couldn't spend that much time in the Faculty Pub, 
would notice this quickly enough to point it out. But Bert Nix's mind 
ran along mysterious paths. Castmir retrieved the broadsword from 
where it had fallen, and laughingly slapped it down on the bar as a 
deposit for the fourth pitcher of Dark. The bartender regarded 
Casimir with mild alarm, and Casimir considered, for a moment, 
carrying a sword all the time, a la Fred Fine. But as he observed to 
us, why carry a sword when you own a mass driver?


"Casimir?"
"Mmmmm. Huh?" "You asleep?"
"No."
"You want to talk?"
"Okay."
"Thanks for leting me sleep here."
"No problem. Anytime."
"Does this bother you?"
"You sleeping here? Nah."
"You seemed kind of bothered about something."
"No. It's really fine, Sarah. I don't care."
"If it'd make you feel better, I can go back and sleep in my 
room. I just didn't feel like a half-hour elevator hassle, and my wing 
is likely to be noisy."
"I know. All that barf on the floors, rowdy people, sticky beer 
crud all over the place. I don't blame you. It's perfectly reasonable to 
stay at someone's place at a time like this."
"I get the impression you have something you're not saying. Do 
you want to talk about it?"
The pile of sheets and blankets that was Casimir moved around, 
and he leaned up on one elbow and peered down at her. The light 
shining in from the opposite tower made his wide eyes just barely 
visible. She knew something was wrong with him, but she also knew 
better than to try to imagine what was going on inside Casimir 
Radon's mind.
"Why should I have something on my mind?"
"Well, I don't see anything unusual about my staying here, but a 
lot of people would, and you seemed uptight."
"Oh, you're talking about sex? Oh, no. No problem." His voice 
was tense and hurried.
"So what's bothering you?"
For a while there was just ragged breathing from atop the bed, 
and then he spoke again. "You're going to think this is stupid, 
because I know you're a Women's Libber, but it really bothers me 
that you're on the floor in a sleeping bag while I'm up here in a bed. 
That bothers me."
Sarah laughed. "Don't worry, Casimir. I'm not going to beat 
you up for it."
"Good. Let's trade places, then."
"If you insist." Within a few seconds they had traded places and 
Sarah was up in a warm bed that smelled of mothballs and mildew. 
They lay there for an hour.
"Sarah?"
"Huh?"
"I want to talk to you."
"What?"
"I lied. I want to sleep with you so bad it's killing me. Oh, Jeez. 
I love you. A lot."
"Oh, damn. I knew it. I was afraid of this. I'm sorry."
"No, don't be. My fault. I'm really, really sorry."
"Should I leave? Do you want me out?"
"No. I want you to sleep with me," he said, as though this 
answer was obvious.
"How long have you been thinking about me this way?"
"Since we met the first time."
"Really? Casimir! Why? We didn't even know each other!"
"What does that have to do with it?" He sounded genuinely 
mystified.
"I think we've got a basic difference in the way we think about 
sex, Casimir." She had forgotten how they were when it came to this 
sort of thing.
"What does that mean? Did you ever think about me that way?"
"Not really."
Casimir sucked in his breath and flopped back down.
"Now, look, don't take it that way. Casimir, I hardly know you. 
We've only had one or two good conversations. Look, Casimir, I 
only think about sex every one or two daysit's not a big topic with 
me right now."
"Jeez. Are you okay? Did you have a bad experience?"
"Don't put me on the defensive. Casimir, our friendship has 
been just fine as it is. Why should I fantasize about what a friendship 
might turn into, when the friendship is fine as is? You've got to live 
in the real world, Casimir."
"What's wrong with me?"
The poor guy just did not understand at all. There was no way to 
help him; Sarah went ahead and spoke her lines.
"Nothing's wrong with you. You're fine."
"Then what is the problem?"
"Look. I sleep with people because there's nothing wrong with 
them. I don't fantasize about relationships that will never exist. 
We're fine as we are. Sex would just mess it up. We have a good 
friendship, Casimir. Don't screw it up by thinking unrealistically."
They sat in the dark for a while. Casimir was being open-
minded, which was good, but still had trouble catching on. "It's none 
of my business, but just out of curiosity, do you like sex?"
"Definitely. It's a blast with the right person."
"I'm just not the right person, huh?"
"I've already answered that six times." She considered telling 
him about herself and Dex Fresser in high school. In ways
especially in appearanceCasimir was similar to Dcx. The thing 
with Dex was a perfect example of what happened when a man got 
completely divorced from reality. But Sarah didn't want the Dex 
story to get around, and she supposed that Casimir would be 
horrified by this high school saga of sex and drugs.
"I think I'll do my laundry now, since I'm up," she said.
"I'll walk you home."
A few minutes later they emerged into a hall as bright as the 
interior of a small sun. The dregs of a party in the Social Lounge 
examined them as they awaited an elevator, and Sarah was bothered 
by what they were assuming. Maybe it would boost Casimir's rep 
among his neighbors.
An elevator opened and fifty gallons of water poured into the 
lobby. Someone had filled a garbage can with water, tilted it up on 
one corner just inside the elevator, held it in place as the doors 
closed, and pulled his hand out at the last minute so that it leaned 
against the inside of the doors. Not greatly surprised, Sarah and 
Casimir stepped back to let the water swirl around their feet, then 
threw the garbage can into the lobby and boarded the elevator.
"That's the nice thing about this time of day," said Casimir. 
"Easy to get elevators."
As they made their way toward the Castle in the Air, they spoke 
mostly of Casimir's mass driver. With the new funding and with the 
assistance of Virgil, it was moving along quite well. Casimir 
repeatedly acknowledged his debt to Ephraim for having done the 
talking.
They took an E Tower elevator up to the Castle in the Air. A 
nine-leaved marijuana frond was scotch-taped over the number 13 
on the elevator panel so that it would light up symbolically when that 
floor was passed. In the corridors of the Castle the Terrorists were 
still running wild and hurling their custom Big Wheel Frisbees with 
great violence.
Casimir had never seen Sarah's room. He stood shyly outside as 
she walked into the darkness. "The light?" he said. She switched on 
her table lamp.
"Oh." He entered uncertainly, swiveling his bottle-bottom 
glasses toward the wall. Conscious of being in an illegally painted 
room, he shut the door, then removed his glasses and let them hang 
around his neck on their safety cord. Without them, Sarah thought he 
looked rather old, sensitive, and human. He rubbed his stubble and 
blinked at the forest with a sort of awed amusement. By now it was 
very detailed.
"Isotropic."
"You saw what?"
"Isotropic. This forest is isotropic It s the same in all directions. 
It doesn't tend in any way. A real forest is anisotropic thicker on the 
bottom thinner on the top This doesn t grow in any direction it just is
She sighed Whatever you like
 "Why? What's it for?"
"Wellwhat's your mass driver for?" "Sanity."
"You've got your mass driver. I've got this."
He looked at her in the same way he had been staring at the 
forest. "Wow," he said, "I think I get it."
"Don't go overboard on this," she said, "but how would you like 
to attend something dreadful called Fantasy Island Nite?"




--December--

So nervous was Ephraim Klein, so primed for flight or combat, 
that he barely felt his suitcases in his hands as he carried them 
toward his room. What awaited him?
He had left a week ago for Thanksgiving vacation. He had 
waited as long as he couldbut not long enough to outwait John 
Wesley Fenrick and three of his ugly punker friends, who leered 
hungrily at him as he walked out. The question was not whether a 
prank had been played, but how bad it was going to be.
Hyperventilating with anticipation, he stopped before the door. 
The cracks all the way around its edges had been sealed with heavy 
grey duct tape. This prank did not rely on surprise.
He pressed his ear to the door, but all he could hear was a 
familiar chunka-chunka-chunk. With great care he peeled back a bit 
of tape.
Nothing poured out. Standing to the side, he unlocked the door 
with surgical care. There was a cracking sound as the tape peeled 
away under his impetus. Finally he kicked it fully open, waited for a 
moment, then stepped around to look inside.
He could see nothing. He took another step and then, only then, 
was enveloped in a cloud of rancid cheap cigar smoke that oozed out 
the doorway like a moribund genie under the propulsion of the Go 
Big Red Fan.
Incandescently furious, he retreated to the bathroom and wet a 
T-shirt to put over his face. Thus protected he strode squinting down 
the foggy hallway into the lifeless room.
The only remaining possessions of John Wesley Fenrick's were 
the Go Big Red Fan and most of a jumbo roll of foil. He had moved 
out of the room and then covered his half of the room with the foil, 
then spread out on it what must have been several hundred generic 
cigarsit must have taken half an hour just to light them. The cigars 
had all burned away to ash, which had been whipped into a blizzard 
by the Go Big Red Fan on its slow creep across the floor to 
Ephraim's side. The room now looked like Yakima after Mount 
Saint Helens. The Fan had ground to a halt against a large potted 
plant of Ephraim's and for the rest of the week had sat there chunk-
ing mindlessly.
He checked a record. To his relief, the ash had not penetrated to 
the grooves. It had penetrated everything else, though, and even the 
Rules had taken on a brown parchmentlike tinge. Ephraim Klein 
took little comfort in the fact that his ex-roommate had not broken 
any of them.
He cranked open the vent window, set the Go Big Red Fan into 
it, cleared ash from his chair, and sat down to think.
Klein preferred to live a controlled life. He never liked to pull 
out all the stops until the final chord. But Fenrick had forced him to 
turn revenge into a major project and Klein did not plan to fail. He 
began to tidy his room, and to unleash his imagination on John 
Wesley Fenrick.


"Sarah?"
"Huh?"
"Did I wake you up?"
"No. Hi."
"Let's talk."
"Sure." Sarah rolled over on her stomach and propped ~ herself 
up on her elbows. "I hope you're comfortable sleeping down there."
"Listen. Anyplace is more comfortable than my room when a 
party's going on above it."
I don't mind if you want to share a bed wlth me Hyacinth. My 
sister and I slept together until I was eleven and she was twelve."
"Thanks. But I didn't decide to sleep down here because I don't 
like you, Sarah."
"Well, that's nice. I guess it's a little small for two."
There was a long silence. Hyacinth sat up on her sleeping bag, 
her crossed legs stretching out her nightgown to make a faint white 
diamond in the darkness of the room. Then, soundlessly, she got up 
and climbed into bed with Sarah. Sarah slid back against the wall to 
make room, and after much giggling, rolling around, rearrangement 
of covers and careful placement of limbs they managed to find 
comfortable positions.
"Too hot," said Hyacinth, and got up again. She opened the 
window and a cold wind blew into the room. She scampered back 
and dove in next to Sarah.
"Comfy?" said Hyacinth.
"Yeah. Mmm. Very."
"Really?" said Hyacinth skeptically. "More than before? Not 
just physically. You don't feel awkward, being tangled up with me 
like this?"
"Not really," said Sarah dreamily. "It's kind of pleasant. It's 
just, you know, warm, and kind of comforting to have someone else 
around. I like you, you like me, why should it be awkward?"
"Would it be any different if I told you I was a lesbian?"
Sarah came wide awake but did not move. With one eye she 
gazed into the darkness above the soft white horizon of Hyacinth's 
shoulder, on which she had laid her head.
"And that I was hoping we could do other nice things to each 
other? If you feel inspired to, that is." She gently, almost 
imperceptibly, stroked Sarah's hair. Sarah's heart was pumping 
rhythmically.
"I wish you'd say something," said Hyacinth. "Are you not sure 
how you feel, or are you paralyzed with terror?"
Sarah laughed softly and felt herself relaxing. "I'm pretty naive 
about this kind of thing. I mean, I don't think about it a lot. I sort of 
thought you might be. Is Lucy?"
"Yes. Nowauays we don't sleep together that much. Sarah, do 
you want me to sleep on the floor?"
Sarah thought about it but not very seriously The room was 
pleasantly cold now and the closeness of her friend was something 
she had not felt in a very long time. "Of course not. This is great. I 
haven't slept with anyone in a whilea man, I mean. Sleeping with 
someone is one of my favorite things. But it's different with men. 
Not quite as . . . sweet."
"That's for sure."
"Why don't you stay a while?"
"That'd be nice."
"Do you mind if we don't do anything?" At this they laughed 
loudly, and that answered the question.
But we are doing something you know added Hyacinth later. 
"Your nose is in my breast. You're stroking my shoulder. I'm afraid 
that all counts."
"Oh. Gosh. Does that make me a lesbian?"
"Oh, I don't know. I guess you're off to a promising start."
"Hmmm. Doesn't feel like being a lesbian."
Hyacinth squeezed Sarah tight. "Look, honey, don't worry about 
it. This is just great as it is. I just wanted you to know the 
opportunity was there. Okay?"
"Okay."
"Want to go to sleep?"
"Take it easy, what's your hurry?"


Last Night was the night of the blue towers. A week before, the 
towers had glowed uniformly yellow as forty-two thousand students 
sat beneath their desk lamps and studied for finals. The next night, 
blue had replaced yellow here and there, as a few lucky ones, 
finished with their finals, switched on their TVs. This night, all eight 
towers were studded with blue, and whole patches of the Plex 
flickered in unison with the popular shows The beer trucks were 
busy all day long down at the access lot, rolling kegs up the ramps to 
the Brew King in the Mall, whence they were dispersed in canvas 
carts and two-wheelers and Radio Flyers to rooms and lounges all 
over the Plex. As night fell and the last students came screaming in 
from their finals, suitcases full of dope moved through the Main 
Entrance and were quickly fragmented and distributed throughout 
the towers for quick combustion. By dinnertime the faucets ran cold 
water only as thousands lined up by the shower stalls, and the Caf 
was a desert as most students ate at restaurants or parties. After dark, 
spotlights and lasers crisscrossed the walls as partying students 
shone them into other towers, and when the Big Wheel sign blazed 
into life, bands of Big-Wheelworshiping Terrorists all over the 
Plex launched a commemorative fireworks barrage that sent echoes 
crackling back and forth among the towers like bumper pool balls, 
punctuating the roar of the warring stereos.
By 10:00 the parties were just warming up. At 10:30 the rumor 
circulated that a special police squad sent by S. S. Krupp was touring 
the Plex to bust up parties. At 11:06 a keg was thrown from A24N 
and exploded on the Turnpike, backing up traffic for an hour with a 
twelve-car chain-reaction smashup. By 11:30 forty students had been 
admitted to the Infirmary with broken noses, split cheeks and severe 
inebriation, and it was beginning to look as though the official 
estimate of one death from overintoxication and one from accident 
might be a little low. The Rape/Assault/Crisis Line handled a call 
every fifteen minutes.
Precisely at 11:40:00 an unknown, uninvited, very clumsy 
student walked behind John Wesley Fenrick's chair at the big E31E 
end-of-semester bash and tripped, spilling a strawberry malt all over 
Fenrick's spiky blond hair.
John Wesley Fenrick was in the shower with very hot water 
spraying onto his head to dissolve the sticky malt crud, dancing 
around loosely to a tune in his head and playing the air guitar. He 
wondered whether the malt had been the work of Ephraim Klein. 
This, however, was impossible; his new room and number were 
unlisted and you couldn't follow people home in an elevator. The 
only way for Klein to find him was by a freak of chance, or by 
bribing an administration person with access to the computervery 
unlikely. Besides, a malt on the head was a bush-league retaliation 
even for a quiet little harpsichord-playing New Jersey fart like Klein, 
considering what Fenrick had so brilliantly accomplished.
What made it even greater was that the administration had 
treated it like a hilarious college prank, a "concrete expression of 
malfunction in the cohabitant interaction, intended only as 
nonviolent emotional expression." Though they were after him to 
pay Klein's cleaning bills, Fenrick's brother was a lawyer and he 
knew they wouldn't push it in court. Even if they did, shit, he was 
going to be pulling down forty K in six months! A small price for 
triumph.
With a snarl of disgust, Fenrick dumped another dose of honey-
beer-aloe-grub-treebark shampoo on his hair, finding that the 
tenacious malt substance still had not come off. What's in this crap? 
Fenrick thought. Fuck up your stomach,for sure.
Throughout E Tower, scores of Ephraim Klein's friends sat in 
the great shiny microwave bathrooms watching the Channel 25 Late 
Night Eyewitness InstaAction InvestiNews. Even during the most 
ghastly stories this program sounded like an encounter session 
among five recently canceled sitcom actors and developmentally 
disabled hairdressers' models. The weather, well, it was just as bad, 
but was relieved by its very bizarreness. The weatherman, a buffoon 
who knew nothing about weather and didn't care, was named 
Marvin DuZan the Weatherman and would broadcast in a negligee if 
it boosted ratings; his other gimmick was to tell an abominable joke 
at the conclusion of each forecast. After the devastating punchline 
was delivered, the picture of the guffawing pseudometeorologist and 
his writhing colleagues would be replaced by an animated short in 
which a crazy-looking bird tried to smash a tortoise over the head 
with a sledgehammer. At the last moment the tortoise would creep 
forward, causing the blow to rebound off his shell and crash back 
into the cranium of the bird. The bird would then assume a glazed 
expression and vibrate around in circles, much like a chair in Klein's 
room during the "Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor," finally to 
collapse at the feet of the smiling turtle, who would then peer slyly at 
the audience and wiggle his eyebrow ridges.
During Marvin DuZan's forecast on Last Night, Ephraim Klein 
was standing outside his ex-roomie's shower stall, watching a 
portable TV and squirting Hyper Stik brand Humonga-Glue into the 
latch of the stall's door. He had turned down the volume, of course, 
and it seemed just as well, since from the reactions of the 
InvestiNews Strike Force (and the cameramen, who were always 
visible on the high-tech News Nexus set) it appeared that the joke 
tonight was a real turd. As the camera zoomed in on the goonishly 
beaming face of Marvin DuZan, Ephraim Klein's grip on the handles 
of two nearby urinals tightened and his heart beat wildly, as did the 
grips and the hearts of a small army of friends and hastily recruited 
deputies in many other E Tower bathrooms. Bird and Tortoise 
appeared, the hammer was brandished, and smash!
As the hammer rebounded on the bird's head, scores of toilets 
throughout E Tower were flushed, causing a vacuum so sharp that 
pipes bent and tore and snapped and cold water ceased to flow. 
There was a short pause, and then a bloodcurdling scream emanated 
from Fenrick's shower stall as clouds of live steam burst out the top. 
After some fruitless handle-yanking and Plexiglass-banging, the 
steam was followed by Fenrick himself, who fell ungainly to the 
floor with a crisp splat and shook his head in pain as Ephraim Klein 
escaped with his TV. In his haste Fenrick had lacerated his scalp on 
the steel showerhead, and as he pawed at his face to clear away suds 
and blood he was distantly conscious of a cold draft that irritated his 
parboiled skin, and a familiar chunka-chunka-chnk that could be 
heard above the sounds of gasping pipes and white water. Finally 
prying one eye open, he looked into the wind to see it: the Go Big 
Red Fan, complacently revolving in front of his stall, set on HI and 
still somewhat gray with cigar ash. Unfortunately for John Wesley 
Fenrick, he did not soon enough see the puddle of water which 
surrounded him, and which was rapidly expanding toward The base 
of the old and poorly insulated Fan.
This was also quite an evening for E17S. Ever since joining the 
Terrorists as the Flame Squad Faction, this all-male wing had 
suffered from the stigma of being mere copies of the Big Wheel 
Men, Cowboys and Droogs of E13. Tonight that was to change.
The Christmas tree had been purchased three weeks ago, left in 
a shower until the fireproofing compound was washed away, and 
hung over a hot-air vent in the storage room; it was now a lovely 
shade of incendiary brown. They took it up to E3 1, the top floor, 
seized an elevator, and stuffed the tree inside. Someone pressed all 
the buttons for floors 30 through 6 while others squirted lighter fluid 
over the tree's dessicated boughs.
Only one match was required. The door slid shut just as the 
smoke and flames began to billow forth, and with a cheer and a yell 
the Flame Squad Faction began to celebrate.
Twenty-four floors below, Virgil and I were having a few slow 
ones in my suite. I had no time for partying because I was preparing 
for a long drive home to Atlanta. Virgil happened to be wandering 
the Plex that night, looking in on various people, and had paused for 
a while at my place. Things were pretty quietas they generally had 
been since John Wesley Fenrick had leftand except for the 
insistent and inevitable bass beat, the wing was peaceful.
The fire alarm rang just before midnight. We cursed fluently and 
looked out my door to see what was up. As faculty-in-residence I 
didn't have to scurry out for every bogus fire drill, but it seemed 
prudent to check for smoke. The smoke was heavy when we opened 
the door, and we smelled the filthy odor of burning plastic. The 
source of the flame was near my room: one of the elevators, which 
had automatically stopped and opened once the fire alarm was 
triggered. I put a rag over my mouth and headed for the fire hose 
down the hall. Meanwhile Virgil prepared to soak some towels in my 
sink.
Neither of us got any water. My fire hose valve just sucked air 
and howled.
 "God Almighty," Virgil called through the smoke. "Somebody 
pulled a Big Flush." He came out and joined the people running for 
the fire stairs. "No 'vators during fires so Ill have to take the stairs. 
I've got to get the parallel pipe system working."
"The what?"
"Parallel pipes," said Virgil, skipping into the stairwell. "Hang 
on! Find a keg! The architects weren't totally stupid!" And he was 
gone down the stairs.
I locked my door in case of looting and went off in search of a 
keg. Naturally there was a superabundance that night, and with some 
help from the too-drunk-to-be-scared owners I hauled it to the lobby 
and began to pump clouds of generic light into the flaming 
Christmas tree.


Casimir Radon was in Sharon's lab, washing out a beaker. This 
was merely the first step of the Project Spike glassware procedure, 
which involved attack by two different alcohols and three different 
concentrated acid mixtures, but he was in no hurry. For him 
Christmas had started the day before. With Virgil's help he could get 
into this lab throughout the vacation, and that meant plenty of time 
to work on Project Spike, build the mass driver and suffer as he 
thought about Sarah.
He was annoyed but not exasperated when the water stopped 
flowing. There was a gulp in the tapstream, followed by a hefty 
KLONK as the faucet handle jerked itself from his grasp. The flow 
of water stopped, and an ominous gurgling, sucking noise came from 
the faucet, like an entire municipal water system flushing its last. He 
listened as the symphony of hydraulic sound effects grew and spread 
to the dozens of pipes lining the lab's ceiling, the knocks and gurgles 
and hisses weaving together as though the pipes were having a wild 
Christmas party of their own. But Casimir was tired, and fairly 
absentminded to boot, and he shrugged it off as yet another example 
of the infinite variety of building and design defects in the Plex. The 
distilled water tap still worked, so he used it. Despite the drudgery of 
the task and his problems with Sarah, Casimir wore a little smile on 
his long unshaven face. Project Spike had worked.
He had been sampling Cafeteria food for three weeks, and until 
tonight had come up with nothing. Turkey Quiche, Beef Pot Pies, 
Lefto Lasagne, Estonian Pasties, and even Deep-Fried Chicken 
Livers had drawn blanks, and Casimir had begun to wonder whether 
it was a waste of time. Then came Savory Meatloaf Night, an event 
which occurred every three weeks or so; despite the efforts of 
advanced minds such as Virgil's, no one had ever discerned any 
reliable pattern which might predict when this dish was to be served. 
Today, of course, the last of the semester, Savory Meatloaf Night 
had struck and Casimir had craftily smuggled a slice out in his sock 
(the Cafeteria exit guards could afford to take it easy on Savory 
Meatloaf Night).
Not more than fifteen minutes ago, as he had been irradiating 
the next batch of rat poison, the computer terminal had zipped into 
life with the results of the analysis: high levels of Carbon- 14! There 
were rats in the meatloaf!
That was a triumph for Casimir. It seemed likely to be a secret 
triumph, though. Sarah would never understand why he was doing 
this. Casimir wasn't even sure he understood it himself. S. S. Krupp 
had funded his mass driver, so why should he wish to damage the 
university now? He suspected that Project Spike was simply a 
challenge, an opportunity to prove that he was clever and self-
sufficient in a sea of idiocy. He had accomplished that, but as a 
political tactic it was still pretty dumb. Sarah would certainly think 
so.
Sarah had also thought it was dumb when he had decided to 
work in the lab all night instead of going to Fantasy Island Nite. She 
was right on that issue too, perhaps, but Casimir loathed parties of all 
sorts and would use any excuse to avoid one. Hence he was here on 
the bottom of the Plex, washing out rat-liver scum, while she was far 
above, dancing in the clown costume she had shown himprobably 
having a wonderful time as handsome Terrorists salivated on her.
He observed he was leaning on the counter staring at the wall as 
though it were a screen beaming him live coverage of Sarah at the 
party. Maybe he would leave now, retaining a lab coat as a costume, 
and go up and surprise Sarah.
Meanwhile water was squirting out of the wall, forcing its way 
through the cracks between the panels, running out from under the 
baseboards and trickling through the grommets in the sides of 
Casimir's tennis shoes. Abruptly brought back into the here and 
now, he looked around half-dazed and started unplugging things and 
moving them to higher ground. What the hell was happening? A 
broken pipe? He figured that if there was enough water pressure on 
the 31st floor to run a fire hose, the pressure down here must be 
phenomenal. This was going to be a hell of a mess.
Water was now trickling through old nail holes high on the wall. 
Casimir covered the computer terminal with plastic and then ran out 
to search for B-men. They were not here now, of courseprobably 
spreading rat poison or celebrating some Crotobaltislavonian radish 
festival.
Across from Sharon's lab was a freight elevator closed off by a 
manually operated door. When he looked through its little window 
Casimir saw water falling down the shaft, and sparks spitting past. 
He got insulated gloves from the lab and hauled the door open. 
Several gallons of pent-up water rushed past his ankles and fell into 
the blackness. From below rose the-harsh wet odor of the sewers.
The sparks issued from the electrical control box on the shaft 
wall. Once Casimir was sure there was no danger of fire or 
electrocution he left, leaving the doors open so that water could drain 
out of this bottom level of the Plex.
Oh, God. The rat poison. It was only supposed to stay in the 
radiation source for a minute at a time! Casimir had put it in an hour 
ago, then simply forgotten about it once the results of the analysis 
had come in. The damn stuff must be glowing in the dark. He 
sloshed back into the lab.
Water poured and squirted from the walls and ceiling 
everywhere he looked. He shielded his face from spray and walked 
through a wall of water toward the neutron source, a garbage can full 
of paraffin with the plutonium button at its center. Stopping to listen, 
he sensed that the slow ticking noise which had been coming from 
one wall had sped up and was growing louder. He stood petrified as 
it grew into a rumble, then a groan. then a screamand the wall 
crashed open and a torrent rushed through the lab. An adjacent 
storage room had filled with water from a large broken pipe, and 
Casimir was now knocked to the floor by a torrent of Fiberglass 
panels, aluminum studs, and janitorial supplies. He rolled just in 
time to see the neutron source, buoyed on the rush of water, bob 
through the doorway and across the hall.
Taking care not to be swept along, he made his way to the shaft 
and looked down. All was dark, but from far below, under the 
waterfall sound, he thought he heard a buzz, or a ringing: the sound 
of an alarm. Maybe his ears were ringing, and maybe it was a fire 
alarm above. Nauseated, he returned to the lab, sat on a table and 
awaited the B-men.


Fantasy Island Nite was turning out to be not such a bad thing 
after all. Those Terrorists upstairs in their own lounge were making a 
lot of noise, but those down here on 12 were making an admirable 
effort to behave, per their agreement with the Airheads. Only this 
agreement had persuaded Sarah and Hyacinth to show up. It was 
potentially interesting, it was nice to be sociable once in a while and 
they could always leave if they didn't like it. Sarah wore a clown 
costume. This was her way of making fun of the fantasy theme of the 
partymost Airheads came as beauty queens or vampsand had 
the extra advantage of making her totally unrecognizable. Hyacinth 
put together a smashing Fairy Godmother costume, as ajoke only 
Sarah would get. Their plan was to drink so much it would become 
socially acceptable for them to dance together.
While Sarah was working on the first stage of this plan she 
began g a lot of attention from three Terrorists. These three,a 
Cowboy, a Droog and a Commandowere obvious jerks, each one 
incensed that she would not reveal her name, but as long as they 
danced, fetched drinks and didn't try to converse they seemed like 
harmless fun. After a while she got a little boogied out, and 
withdrew from the action to look out over the city. Hyacinth had 
gone to visit another party and was expected back soon.
Time twisted and she was no longer at the party; she was 
watching it from a place in her mind where she had not been for 
many years. She slid backward like an air hockey puck until she was 
high up in one corner of the room. The walls of the Plex fell away so 
that she could see in all directions at once.
One of the picture windows had been replaced by a gate that 
opened to the sky. The gate was gaily festooned with shining pulsing 
color-blobs. All the other party-goers had lined up in front of it. On 
one side of the gate stood Mitzi, taking tickets; on the other, Mrs. 
Saritucci, checking off their names on a clipboard. Each Airhead-
Terrorist who passed through stepped out and sat down on a long 
slippery-slide made of blue light, and squealed with delight as they 
zoomed earthward. Sarah could not see all the way to the slide's end, 
but she could see that, below, the Death Vortex had turned into a 
whirlpool of multicolored fire. Forests and towns and families 
whirled around and around before gurling down the center to 
disappear. The Vortex was ringed with hundreds of fire trucks whose 
crews haltheartedly sprayed their tiny jets of water into its middle.
When Sarah looked beyond the whirlpool she saw in its light a 
shattered landscape of rubble and corpses, where bawling dirty 
people scrabbled about aimlessly and squinted into the fire-glow. 
Nothing more than dust, solitary bricks, cockroaches and jagged 
glass was there, though Sarah's vision swooped across it for a 
thousand miles and a thousand years.
Beyond its distant edge was a nonlandscape: a milky white 
vacuum where choking black clouds of static grew, split, re-formed, 
hurled themselves against one another, clashed with horrible dry 
violence and abated to grow and form again. Its slowness and its 
dryness made it the most awful thing Sarah had ever seen. Alter five 
millennia, when she thought she was entirely lost and crazy, she saw 
a piece of broken glass. then a rivulet of blood. Following them, she 
found herself in the terrible landscape again, with the Plex on the 
horizon erupting like a volcano. Blue beams of light shot from its top 
and wrapped around her and sucked her back through the air into the 
building. But she could no longer find herself there. She was no 
longer in the Lounge. The Lounge had been vacant for centuries and 
only dust and yellowed party favors remained. Following footprints 
in the dust she came to the hallwaybrightly lit, loud, ifiled with 
shouting students and bats. She flew straight down the hail until four 
dots at its end grew into four people and she could slow down and 
follow them. There were three men: a Cowboy and a Commando 
held the arms of a woman dressed as a clown, hurrying her down the 
hall, while a Droog walked ahead of them carrying a paper punch 
cup which glowed with a green light from within. Sarah closed her 
eyes to the glow and shook her head, and when she opened them 
again she was the clown-womanthough she did not want to be.
They were in an elevator filled with black water that rose and 
crept warmly up Sarah's thighs. Swimming in the water were bad 
hidden things, so she kicked as well as she could. Her hands were 
held up above her head by men ten feet high, lost in the glare of the 
overhead light where it was too bright to look.
Then they were on a floor that reminded Sarah of the broken 
landscape. On the wall a giant mouth was chewing vigorously, 
drooling on the floor and smacking its disgusting lips. The men 
threw her through it and followed behind.
"I won't go down the slide," she protested, but they did not 
really care. Inside all was red and blue; a neon beer emblem burned 
in the window and licked her with its hot rays. There stood a giant in 
a football costume who wore the head of Tiny, leader of the 
Terrorists.
"Is Dex here?" she said, more out of habit than anything. It 
would be like Dex to slip her some LSD. But then she knew this was 
a stupid question. She felt the door being locked behind her and saw 
the music turned up until it was purest ruby red, causing her body to 
turn into fragile glass. To move now would be to shatter and die.
"Handle with care," she murmured, "I'm glass now," but the 
words just dribbled down the front of her costume. They were 
ripping her costume away. She squirmed but felt herself cracking 
horribly. The beer sign cast grotesque red and blue light on the 
transparent flesh of her thighs.
She knew what was going to happen next. Somehow her mind 
connected it all in a straight line, before the idea was swept away by 
the internal storm. The worst thing in the world. She should have 
gone down the slide.
She made an effort of will. The sound and the light went away, 
it was spring; grass and flowers and blue sky were all around and she 
was not about to be raped. She was eating raspberries on the banks 
of a creek. Out of curiosity she scratched at the air with her 
fingernail. Red and blue rays stabbed out into her skin again, and 
peeking all the way through for a moment she could see that they 
had not yet started.
No wonder; they were moving in slow motion. Sarah would 
have to spend many hours waiting on the banks of the creek. She 
drew back into the sunshine. Perhaps she could live here forever and 
have a perfect life.
When she slept, she dreamed of those dry, unending wars in the 
land of milky white. She knew it was all an illusion.
She tore it away and came back to the room. She was not going 
to sleep through anything. She was not going to imagine anything 
that didn't exist.
The sign was wavy and upside down now, reflected in a puddle 
of water on the floor.
A Terrorist was in the corner twisting a faucet handle. Sarah 
stood up. Tiny turned toward her and smashed her across the face. 
She was on the floor again, and over there a Terrorist groped in the 
scintillating ocean of red and blue for the sign's power cord.
He was screaming like an electric guitar now. He was trying to 
swim in the shallow lake of blood and bile.
Sarah was thrown onto a bed. Her arms and legs flailed, and one 
heel found a Terrorist's kneecap. The Droog got on top of her, and 
because he was in slow motion she kicked him in the nuts. He curled 
up on top of her and she looked through his hair at the ceiling, which 
sputtered in the failing sign-light. Tiny was unwinding a long piece 
of rope and its thin tendrils floated around him like black smoke. She 
rolled half out from under the Droog and curled into a fetal position 
so he could not take her arms and legs. As she did she peered down 
through the transparent floor and saw the Airheads, plastered with 
grotesque makeup, drinking LSD from crystal goblets and cheering. 
But where was Hyacinth?
Hyacinth was standing in the doorway. An extremely loud 
explosion seeped into her ears. Smoke filled the room, catching the 
hallway light and forming hundreds of 3-D images from Sarah's past 
life.
Hyacinth's fairy godmother costume was changed, for now she 
wore heavy leather gloves over her white cloth gloves, and bulky ear 
protectors under her conical hat, and a pair of goggles beneath her 
milky-white veil. In her hands she carried a giant revolver. Sarah 
knew that under her dress, Hyacinth was made of strong young oak-
wood.
Hyacinth took one step into the room and shrugged on the main 
light switch. Tiny stood in the center, staring. The man who had 
been swimming on the floor was dead. Another clasped his knee and 
screamed at the ceiling. Sarah laid her head down restfully and put 
her hands on her ears.
Cones of fire were spurting from the front and back of 
Hyacinth's gun and her hands were snapping rhythmically up and 
down. Tiny had his hands on his chest, and as he walked backward 
toward the window the back of his football jersey bulged and 
fluttered like a loose sail, darkness splashing away from it. The 
electrical cord was between his legs. His steps shortened and he fell 
backward through the picture window. The cord and plug trailed 
slowly behind him and snapped out room and were gone. The noise 
was so immense that Sarah heard nothing until much later. The 
blasts were synchronized with the music's beat:

WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM

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


Virgil used his master key eight times before attaining a dark, 
stained sub-sublevel of the Plex, where great water mains from the 
City entered from the depths and fed the giant pumps that 
pressurized the plumbing system overhead.
In an uncharacteristic flash of foresightedness, the Plex's 
architects made allowances for the certainty that, once in a while, 
one group or another would flush hundreds of toilets simultaneously 
and damage the cold water system. So they installed two parallel, 
independent systems of main pipes to feed the distribution systems 
of the wings; to switch between them one need only close one set of 
valves and open another. This Virgil accomplished by grunting and 
straining at a few red iron wheels. Satisfied that things were settling 
back toward normal, he set out for Professor Sharon's old lab to see 
if Casimir Radon was still there.

*	*	*

The Computing Center was not far away. Though it had many 
rooms, its heart was a cavernous square space with white walls and a 
white floor waxed to a thick glossy sheen. The white ceiling was 
composed of square fluorescent light panels in a checkerboard 
pattern. Practically all of the room was occupied by disc memory 
units: brown-and-blue cubes, spaced in a grid to form a seemingly 
endless matrix of six-foot aisles. At the center of the room was an 
open circle, and at the center of that area stood the Central 
Processing Unit of the Janus 64. A smooth triangular column five 
feet on a side and twelve feet high, it would have touched the ceiling 
except that above was a circular opening about forty feet across, 
encircled by a railing so that observers could stand and look into the 
core of the Computing Center.
Around the CPU were a few other large machines: secondary 
computers to organize the tasks being fed to the Janus 64, array 
processors, high-speed laser printers, a central control panel and the 
like. But closest of all was the Operator's Station, a single video 
terminal, and tonight the operator was Consuela Gorm, high 
priestess of MARS. She had volunteered to do the job on this night 
of partying, when the only people still using the computer in the 
adjacent Terminal Room were the goners, the hopelessly addicted 
hackers who had nothing else to live for.
The only sounds were the whine of the refrigeration units, which 
drew away the heat thrown off by the tightly packed components of 
the Janus 64; the high hum of the whirling memory discs, miltiplied 
by hundreds; and the pitter-pat of Consuela's fingertips across the 
keypad of the Operator's Station. She was hunkered down there, 
staring hypnotized into the screen, and behind her Fred Fine stood 
thin and straight as the CPU itself. Tonight they were testing 
Shekondar Mark V, their state-of-the-art Sewers & Serpents 
simulation program. Now, at a few minutes before midnight, they 
had worked out the few remaining bugs and they stoodtransfixed as
	their program did exactly what it was supposed to.
"Looks like a routine adventure," mumbled Consuela.
"But it looks like Shekondar might have generated a werewolf 
colony in this party's vicinity. I'm seeing a lot of indications of 
lycanthropic activity."
"You'd want plenty of silver arrows on this campaign."
"With this level of activity, you'd want a cleric specialized in 
lycanthropes," scoffed Consuela.
Fred Fine was perfectly aware of that. He was merely making 
conversation so Consuela would not realize he was thinking intently 
about something, and try to beat him to the punch. Yes, the werewolf 
colony was obviousit was a large one, probably east-northeast in 
the Mountains of Krang. Only large-scale organization could 
account for the lack of wolfsbane and garlic, which were usually 
abundant in this biome. But Fred Fine was concerned with 
observations on a far grander scale. Though nothing was 
catastrophically wrong, something was very strange, and Fred Fine 
found that he was covered with goosebumps. He tapped a foot ner-
vously and scanned the descriptions scrolling past on the screen.
"Listen for birds!" he hissed.
Consuela ordered an Aural Stimuli Report, specifying Avians as 
field of interest.
NO AVIAN SOUNDS DETECTABLE, said Shekondar Mark 
V.
"Damn!" said Fred Fine. "Let's have the alchemist test one of 
his magical substancessay, some of the fire-starting fluid."
MAGICAL COMBUSTIBLES AND EXPLOSIVES FAIL TO 
FUNCTION.
"Uh-oh! All characters jettison all magical items immediately!"
SMALL FIRES AND EXPLOSIONS IN ALCHEMICAL SUB-
STANCES.
"Good. We'll get farther away."
LARGE EXPLOSIONS. NOXIOUS SMOKE. NO INJURIES 
DUE TO WIND DIRECTION.
"Lucky! Forgot even to check for that. My character will try 
turning on his pocket calculator."
ELECTRONIC DEVICES FAIL TO FUNCTION.
"Wait a minute," said the astonished Consuela. "What is this? I 
don't know of anything that can cause disruption of magic and 
technology at the same time! Some kind of psionics, maybe?"
"I don't know. I don't know what it is.,, "We wrote this thing. 
We have to know what's in it." 
"Aural Stimuli Report, General. Quick!"
DEEP RUMBLING CONSISTENT WITH TEMBLOR OR 
LARGE SUBTERRANEAN MOVEMENT.
"Can't be an earthquake. We'll head for solid rock, that should 
protect us. Head uphill!"
MOVEMENT SPEED HALVED BY TEMBLOR. ROCK 
OUTCROPPING REACHED IN SIX TURNS. EXTREMELY 
LOUD HISSING. GASEOUS ODOR. GROUND BECOMES 
WARM.
"It's almost like a Dragon," said Consuela in a constricted, 
terrified voice, "but from down in the earth."
"God! I can't think of what the hell this is!"
ONE HUNDRED METERS TO YOUR NORTH EARTH
BULGES UPWARD. BULGE IS FIFTY METERS IN 
DIAMETER
AND RISING QUICKLY. EARTH CRACKS OPEN AND 
YOU
SEE A GLISTENING SURFACE...
The terminal went blank. From just behind them came a violent 
scream, like a buzzsaw wrenching to a stop in a concrete block. They 
knew it though they had never heard it before; it was the sound of a 
disc unit dying, the sound made when the power was cut off and the 
automatic readers (similar to the tone-arms of phonographs) sank 
into, and shredded, the hysterically spinning magnetic discs. It was 
to them what the snapping of a horse's leg is to a jockey, and when 
they spun around they were astonished and horrified to see a curtain 
of water pouring onto the floor from the circular walkway overhead. 
Not more than a dozen feet from the base of the Janus 64, the ring 
was spreading inward.
"Hey, Fred 'n' Con!" someone yelled. At one end of the room, 
at the window that looked out into the Terminal Room, an 
overweight blond-bearded hacker squinted at them. "What's going 
on? System problems? Oh, Jeeeezus!"
He turned to his comrades in the Terminal Room, screaming, 
"Head crash! Head crash! Water on the brain!" Soon two dozen 
hackers had vaulted through the window into the Center and were 
sprinting down the aisles as fast as their atrophied legs could carry 
them, the men stripping off their shirts as they ran.
Another disc drive shorted out and sizzled to destruction. 
Abruptly Fred Fine spun and grabbed the Operator's Key-chain, then 
ran through the circular waterfall toward another wall of the Center, 
shouting for people to follow him.
In seconds he had snapped open the door to the storage room, 
where tons of accordion-fold computer paper were stored in boxes. 
As some of the hackers did their best to sweep water away from the 
base of the Janus 64, the rest formed a line from the storage room to 
the central circle. The boxes were passed down the line as quickly as 
possible, slit open with Fred Fine's authentic Civil War bayonet and 
their contents dumped out as big green-and-white cubes inside the 
deadly water-ring. Though it did not entirely stem the flow, the 
paper absorbed what It did not dam. Soon all space between the 
waterfall and the CPU was covered with at least two feet of soggy 
computer paper. Meanwhile, Consuela had shut down all the disc 
drives.
The danger was past. Fred Fine, still palpitating, noticed a small 
waterfall in the corner of the storage room. Flicking on the lights for 
the first time, he clambered over the stacked boxes to check it out.
In the corner, three pipes about ten inches in diameter ran from 
floor to ceiling. One was swathed in the insulation used for hot water 
pipes. Water was running down one of the bare pipes; higher up. 
above the ceiling, it must be leaking heavily. Fred Fine put his hand 
on the third pipe and found that it was neither hot nor cool, and did 
not seem to be carrying a current. A firehose supply pipe? No, they 
were supposed to be bright red. He puzzled over it, rubbing his hand 
over the long thin whiskers that straggled down his cheeks when he 
had been computing for a week or more.
As he watched, the hiss of running water lowered and died away 
and a few seconds later the leak from above was stemmed. There 
was the KLONK of an air hammer in a pipe. Fred Fine put his hand 
on the mystery pipe, and began to feel the gentle vibration of 
running water underneath, and a sensation of coolness spreading out 
from the interior.
The hackers saw him wandering slowly toward the Janus, which 
rose like an ancient glyph from the tumbled, sodden blocks of paper. 
He had a distant look, and was consumed in thought.
"These are the End Times," he was heard to say. "The Age 
draws to a close."
He was no weirder than they were, so they ignored him.


Tiny landed on a burning sofa not far from my window. The 
impact forced much excess lighter fluid out of the foam cushions and 
created a burst of flame whose origin we did not know until later. 
Once the water had come back on, and we had soaked the elevator 
and the Christmas tree, we aimed the fire hose out my living-room 
window and drenched the heap of dimly burning furniture that was 
Tiny the Terrorist's funeral pyre. It was a few minutes past midnight, 
the second strangest midnight I have ever known, and my first 
semester at the Big U was at an end.




-------------------
--Second Semester--
-------------------

--January--

The fog of war was real down here. The knee-deep glom 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 
Conseula 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."
"Touch. " 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 Kiystron 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 aroung 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 allit 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 hostilitybut 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 lighta connection was weakened somewherethat 
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 weaponsnot 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 GOTT-
FRIED.
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, thenclaiming to use 
psychic powersshowed 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 demon-
stration." 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 cluster-
bombed 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 purposewhich 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 de fense 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 supplya chemical explosionand 
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 buildbasically 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 startyou 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 ob-
tain 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.


--February--

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 Tetrorists 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.
"Som ~. really terrible things happened that night. But I'm I 
Hyacinth is safeokay? 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 helpbut 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."
"Au 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 outprecisely 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 Programmera 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 Programmerwell, brilliant 
people like him became sorcerers, swordspeople and heroes. The 
smarter they werethe greater their stature in the Technological 
universethe 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 edo-
sociosystem 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 
boundaryand 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 happen-
ings, 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 
brieflythe black box was an electronic flash unitand 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 mis-
siles 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. 
Marl had a cousin who majored in English too, and who had met a 
very nice Business student doing it. Man 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 fromTibet? 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-saucespattered 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 thesethese 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 joostI 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.
Man 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?"
Man 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, Man, that could be 
nasty enough to describe those assholes, and the sooner you realize 
that the better off youll 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." Man 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.
"Youll 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 easy enough, after what had happened 
to Tiny, but could she afford to make such a display here and now? 
Obviously not. Mari continued to glint at her, apparently expecting a 
dramatic confession.
Finally Sarah just started to talk, making it up as she went along. 
"Okay, Man, look, I'll tell you the truth. Actually I like those 
Terrorists and I've always thought this one guy was real cute, you 
know?" Mari's eyes widened at this and she stepped in very close, 
ready to share the secret. Fred Fine put his hand on Sarah's shoulder.
"Miss Johnson, it would be best for you to lie down until you're 
feeling steadier." Sarah ignored him.
"But the thing is that my father, uh, is a private investigator. He 
used to be a chopper pilot for a Mafia kingpinhe's a Vietnam 
vetbut then he decided to go into private-eye work and use the 
inside knowledge he'd gotten to fight the Mob on its own terms. 
This Terrorist that I like is actually a princehe belongs to one of 
those European housesbut he is a rebel by nature and he decided 
to change his identity and live in the U.S. and work his way to 
success using his own talent and good looks and likable, open 
approach to everything. His father is rich and is heavily into the oil 
business, and also in drug smuggling, so he's got lots of Mob 
connections. Well, when his father found out I was going with this 
Terrorist he was afraid I'd get vital Mob information and give it to 
my father, who could organize a major sting operation. So they 
decided to kill me. But his father's mistress, who is a double agent 
with the KGB and is also an English baroness by birth, though she 
was cheated out of her inheritanceanyway, she got wind of it and 
warned us. That's why I dressed up in the clown costumeso the hit 
men wouldn't recognize me."
"Some cases of shock can result in delirium," suggested Fred 
Fine. "This can be serious if not properly treated."
Mari was astonished, from what Sarah could see through the 
mask. "So this boy and I were going to elope that night in our 
costumes, but when we went up to his room to get his things, the hit 
men were there. But just then the other Terrorists rushed in to save 
us, and that's how Tiny got shot. Then my father showed up! And he 
has a secret plan to help us. But it all depends on us pretending that I 
actually shot Tiny. Now that you know you can't talk about it to 
anyone or you might be killed. In the meantime, I'm protecting 
myself with this." She tipped the knapsack toward Man and showed 
her the .38. Fred Fine, looking over her shoulder, saw it too and 
stepped back sharply.
All doubt was blown clear from Mari's mind. She gasped and 
stumbled back a couple of steps, hand to breast. Fred Fine, keeping 
one nervous eye on Sarah, strode over to Mari and put his hand 
lightly on her shoulder.
"You'll be just fine, ma'am. Just a routine case of shock. Maybe 
you should lie down for a bit." But this had attracted the attention of 
the Terrorists. Seeing that Mari and Sarah's gal-to-gal chat was 
finished, they closed in helpfully around Mari and assisted her to a 
reclining position. Fred Fine was shouldered out of the way but 
persisted on the edges of the group, giving advice on the treatment of 
shock.
Sarah left. Fred Fine watched her with something akin to awe.



--March--

The social lounge of D24E had picture windows that looked out 
over the Death Vortex, over the puddle-stained pea-gravel roofs of 
the ghetto brownstones beyond it, across a trolley terminus webbed 
over with black power cables, and into a sleazy old commercial 
square often visited by AM students suffering from Plex Fever and 
lacking the wheels to go farther. Since the raising of the Plex with its 
clean, trendy stores, and the decay of the adjacent 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 
IFred was the founder of the Wild and Crazy Guys, he is now a 
bond analystwe 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 com-
promise 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 partieshe 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 transcriptwhich has been 
rearranged and guessed at quite a bit anyway.

HYACINTH. The strike will get rid of Krupp. After that every-
thing 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 crazydivorce 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 nec-
essary 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, some-
times 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 thinkingwell, 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 won-
derfully. 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 painor 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 halfsixty-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 notthey 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! did,
SARAH. What's wrong, Casimir?
CASIMIR. Well, I sort of lost some plutonium down an elevator 
shaft in the Big Flush.
(Ephrairn 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 radia-
tion 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 gunswe 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 dele-
gation 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 com-
puter-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 to-
ward 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. Step-
ping 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 shufflingmotion 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 con-
quering 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 placeno 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, thisthis 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 Centrl 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 en-
ergy. 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, '!oo 
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 ofjaw 
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 tunnelsas 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 supprise 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 doorthey had to be fought off with 
machine guns. Thay 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 humanin 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 upbig 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 provevery conclusivelythat 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, revealednothing.
"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 calcula-
tor/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."



--April--

While we sewer-slogged, El 3S 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 thwy 
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 cylinderan exact replica of a nuclear waste containerand 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 businessas-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?"
"Yes, that's correct. Universal Solvent. Very dangerous."
"Ees too tall for goink inside of vaste truck. Ve must put on her 
side."
"No! That's dangerous. You will be blown to little bits."
"Then what to do with it?"
"I'll have to put it in a different container. You must leave it in 
the HWA overnight. I will come to the Refuse Area tomorrow night, 
at the time of the next pickup, and get the crate and take it away."
"Good." Magrov hung up.
Back in the HWA, Magrov checked his watch, then turned and 
shouted at a swiveling TV camera on the wall. "Ha! Those 
profyessors! Say! Where is truck? Very late today."
"Roger, team leader, we read four minutes late," said an Anglo 
voice over a loudspeaker. "Maybe some trouble with those strikers. 
Hey! Let's cut the idle chitchat."
Finally the great steel door rolled open. Through one of his 
peepholes, Virgil could see a hazardous waste truck backing into the 
brilliantly lit, fenced-in area outside. He could also see a pair of half-
inch bullet holes through the outside rear-view mirror. The tiny 
black-and-white monitors, he knew, would never pick up this detail. 
When it had come to rest, the B-men unlocked the back with 
Magrov's keys and pulled open armored doors to reveal a stainless 
steel cylinder on a cart. This they rolled into the HWA, placing it in 
the middle of the red rectangle on the floor.
Other B-men set about hauling the small orange containers into 
the back of the truck and strapping them down. Magrov removed 
guns from a locked cabinet and distributed them to himself and two 
others. There three took up positions in the red area around the 
cylinder. "Hokay, ready for little ride," said Magrov.
"Roger, team leader. Stand by." A deep hum and vibration 
commenced. The men and the cylinder began to sink, and Virgil 
could see that the red rectangle was actually an elevator platform. 
Within seconds only a black hole remained.
In five minutes the platform returned, with the B-men but 
without the cylinder. Displaying frank contempt for safety 
regulations, the B-men began to smoke profusely.
The intercom crackled alive. "Crotobaltislavonia aiwa!" came 
the exhilarated shout.
"Crotobaltislavonia aiwa!" howled the B-men, leaping to their 
feet. There was much whoopee-making and cigarette-throwing, and 
then they opened the door to the Refuse Area and carried in crate 
after crate of supplies and put them on the elevator platform. The 
platform, laden with Crotobaltislavonians, guns and food, sank into 
the earth once again, then returned in a few minutes carrying nine 
bleeding bodies in yellow radiation suits.

Virgil had been expecting TV cameras. If they had them down 
in the tunnels, they must have them upstairs in the HWA. So after a 
few minutes, when Virgil was sure that the B-men were down there 
for the long haul, he opened a small panel in the side of his crate and 
stuck out a long iron rod with a magnesium tip. The important thing 
about the magnesium rod was that Virgil had just set it on fire, and 
when magnesium burns, it makes an intolerably brilliant light. Virgil 
soon squirmed out through the panel, a welding mask strapped over 
his face. Even through the dark glass, everything in the room was 
blindingly litcertainly bright enough to overload, or even burn out, 
the television cameras. Any camera turned his way would show 
nothing but purest white. To make sure, he lit two more magnesium 
rods and placed them on the floor around the room. Satisfied that all 
three cameras were now blinded, he withdrew a can of spray paint 
from his crate and used it to paint over their lenses. The mikes were 
easy to find and he destroyed these simply by shoving burning 
magnesium rods into them. Then he called me on the phone. "I was 
right," he said, "I'm safe, and you can go to sleep. But look out. 
Trouble is brewing." Alas, I was already asleep before he got to that 
last part.
While the magnesium rods burned themselves out, Virgil 
climbed into the cab of the truck, where the corpses of its late drivers 
had been stretched out on the floor. The Crotos' plan was daring and 
their aim excellent; they needed to penetrate the truck's armored cab 
and kill the occupants without wiping out the engine or the gas tank. 
The driver's window was splattered all over the seat, the door itself 
deeply buckled and perforated by the thumb-sized shells. Virgil hit 
the ignition and drove it far enough out to wedge the electrical gates 
open while leaving enough space for other vehicles to pass.
Back in the Plex, he made phone calls to several readymix 
concrete companies. Returning to the Burrows, he found a cutting 
torch and wheeled it back to the HWA. The red platform was 
nothing more than thick steel plate, and once he had gotten the torch 
fired up and the red paint burned away, it cut like butter.
As he sliced a hole in the platform, he reviewed his reasoning:
1)	Law is opinion of guy with biggest gun.
2)	Biggest "gun" in U.S. held by police and armed forces.
3)	Hypothesis: someone wants to break the law, or more 
generally, render U.S. law null and void in a certain zone.
4)	This necessitates a bigger gun.
5)	Threat of contamination of urban area with nuclear waste 
ought to fill the bill.
6)	This provides a motive for taking over Nuke Dump.
7)	Crotobaltislavonians have taken over Nuke Dump.
8)	They either want to contaminate the city, or take over this 
areathe Plexby threat of same.
9)	Either we will all be poisoned, or else representatives of the 
People's Free Social Existence Node of Crotobaltislavonia will 
dictate their own law to people in this area.
10) This does not sound very nice either way.
11) Maybe we can destroy their gun by blocking the possible 
contamination routes. The elevator would be their preferred route, as 
it would provide direct access to the atmosphere.
A rough steel circle about two feet across pulled loose and 
dropped into the blackness. Virgil pulled back his mask and peered 
down. The circle's edge was still red hot, and as it fell through the 
blackness, he could see it spinning and diminishing until it smashed 
into the bottom. The clang reached his ears a moment later. Through 
the hole he could smell the odor of the sewers and hear occasional 
arguments among rats.
Hearing the whine of a down-shifting truck, he shut off the torch 
and ran out into the Access Lot. Virgil directed the cement truck 
through the jammed gate and up to the loading dock. He directed the 
driver to swing his chute around and dump the entire load into the 
freshly cut hole.
The driver was young, a philosophy Ph.D. only two years out of 
the Big U. He obviously knew Virgil was asking him to commit an 
illegal act. "Give me a rational reason to dump my cement down that 
hole," he demanded.
Virgil thought it over. "The reasons are very unusual, and if I 
were to explain them, you would only be justified in thinking I was 
crazy."
"Which doesn't give me my rational reason."
"True," admitted Virgil. "However, let's not forget the con-
ventional view of craziness. Our media are filled with images of the 
crazy segment of society as being an exceptionally dangerous, 
unpredictable group. Look at Hinckley! Watch any episode of T. J. 
Hooker! So if you thought I was crazy, the reaction consistent with 
your social training would be to do as I say in order to preserve your 
own safety."
"That would be true with your run-of-the-mill truck driver," said 
the truck driver after agonized contemplation, "who tends to be an 
M.A. in sociology or something. But I can't make an excuse based 
on failure to think independently of the media."
"True. Follow me." Virgil walked across the HWA, leading the 
truck driver over to the heavy door that led into the Refuse Area. 
Here he paused, allowing the truck driver to notice the long red 
streaks on the floor. Virgil then opened the door and pointed at the 
nine bloody corpses, which he had dragged there to get them off the 
platform. "Having seen the remains of several savagely murdered 
people, you might conclude that my showing them to you so 
dramatically constituted a nonverbal threat. You might then 
decide" but the truck driver had already decided, and was running 
for the controls at the back of the truck. The concrete was down the 
hole in no time. The truck driver did not even wait to be given an 
official American Megaversity voucher.
After that, trucks arrived every fifteen minutes or so for the rest 
of the morning. Subsequent truckers, seeing wet cement slopped all 
over the place, impressed by Virgil's official vouchers, were much 
less skeptical. By lunchtime, twenty truckloads of cement were piled 
up behind the sliding doors at the bottom of the elevator shaft.
The first Refuse Area dock was still open. After blowing the 
crap out of the hazardous waste truck, the B-men had hauled the real 
radioactive waste cylinder out and left it there in the doorway. Virgil 
had the last driver bury the cylinder in cement where it sat. He 
smoothed out a flat place with his hand and inscribed: DANGER. 
HIGH LEVEL RADIOACTIVE WASTE. TRESPASSERS WILL 
BE STERILIZED. His day's work was done.
Unbeknownst to anyone else, the two most important battles of 
the war had already been fought. The Crotobaltislavonians had won 
the first, and Virgil the second.


Once the actual war got started, things happened quickly. In 
fact, between the time that S. S. Krupp and two of his associates and 
I had got on an elevator and the time we escaped from it, the 
situation had changed completely.
S. S. Krupp felt compelled to visit E13S after its riot/party of the 
night before, somewhat in the spirit of Jimmy Carter visiting Mount 
Saint Helens. Naturally, as faculty-in-residence for E Tower, I was 
asked to serve as tour guide. It was preferable to washing dung off 
my boots, but only just.
Krupp arrived at the base of E Tower at 11:35 A.M., fresh from a 
tour of Bert Nix's cremation site. Considering the gruesome 
circumstances, not to mention the journalists and the SUBbie 
screaming directly into his ear, he looked relaxed. With him were 
Hyman Hotchkiss, Dean of Student Life, and Wilberforce (Tex) 
Bracewill, Administrator of Student Health Services. Hyman looked 
young, pale and ill. Tex had seen too much gonorrhea in too many 
strange places to be shocked by anything. They were so civilized that 
they viewed my Number 27 BILL'S BREWS softball jersey as 
though it were a jacket and vest, and shook my hand as though I had 
saved their families from death sometime in the distant past.
Here in the lobby the sixteen elevators and four fire stairs of E 
Tower emptied together into a desert of vandalized furniture, charred 
bulletin boards and overflowing wastebaskets. I didn't know about 
events on E13S yet, and my guests were doubtless still considering 
the charred remains of Bert Nix, so we were not suspicious when 
elevators 2, 4 and 1 remained frozen at the thirteenth floor for ten 
minutes. Only number 3 moved. When it got to us, it was packed 
with students. Two got off, but the rest explained in dull voices that 
they had missed their floor and were staying on for the return trip. 
Therefore the journalists and protesters found no room in the 
compartment; only the four of us could squeeze in.
This chummy group rode to the Terrorist-controlled ninth floor, 
where everyone else got off. As the doors slid shut, a burnout who 
had just disembarked turned around to say, "Sweet dreams, S. S. 
Krupp."
We started up again. "Shit!" said Krupp. "We've got a problem. 
Everyone get on the floor. Tex, you got your .44?"
Of course he did. Much to the concern of the SUB, Tex was 
massively armed at all times, on the theory that you never knew 
when degens might come and shoot up the clinic looking for purer 
highs. He was prepared to go out like a true AM administrator. 
Dropping stiffly to the floor, he paused on his knees to whip a 
humongous revolver out of his briefcase and hand it to Krupp.
"Hope we don't have to shoot it out on thirteen," he said. We 
agreed. Krupp tore from Tex's briefcase a medicine bottle, struggled 
with the childproof cap, yanked out the cotton wad, tore it in half 
and stuffed it into his ears. At this point I began to experience terror, 
more of Krupp than of whatever he was planning to dismember with 
that howitzer.
We passed the twelfth floor and the elevator crashed to a stop. 
Above us, from the elevators still halted on thirteen, we heard 
excited yelling.
"I get it." Krupp cocked the revolver and we all plugged our 
ears as he pointed it at the ceiling,
The bullet v~porized the latch on the trap door and flipped the 
door open as well. We saw light above us. Krupp's second shot 
annihilated the light in our car. I felt as though my fingers had been 
driven three inches deep into my ears; my eyelids fluttered in shock 
and my nose complained of dense smoke. Krupp now stood up in the 
darkness and fired the remaining three rounds through the trapdoor. 
With a sigh and a thump, a corpse crashed into our roof.
At a great distance I heard Tex say, "Sep. Here's a speed 
loader." After some clicking and cursing, Krupp fired two more 
roundsthe natives were getting restlessand tugged at my shirt, 
"Leg up!" he shouted.
I stood and made a step of my hands, and he used it to propel 
himself through the trap door. Once he had scrambled through, I 
jumped and dragged myself to the roof after him. The only thing I 
was scared of was touching the corpse; other than that, one place 
was as dangerous as another. Krupp, who did not share my fear, 
retrieved a revolver from the body and handed it to me.
He began scaling the emergency ladder on the shaft wall. When 
he got to thirteen, he pounded the wall switch and the doors slid 
open. Seeing him jump through the aperture onto thirteen, I began to 
follow him up the ladder, not really thinking about what I'd do when 
I arrived. The two adjacent elevators began to head down, and as 
theypassed, someone on a roof fired off a wild shot in my direction.
A tremendous roar rang up and down the shaft. It came in three 
bursts, and not until the third one did I realize it was machine-gun 
fire. I had been dimly aware of it"Oh, that's a machine gun being 
fired"but it was not for a few moments that I comprehended that 
machine guns were in use at my institution of higher learning. There 
were also three WHAMs, and then silence.
Taking this as a good sign, I dove through onto thirteen and lay 
there dazed, looking at an elevator lobby dotted with strings of 
machine-gun fire and blood pools, tracked and smeared by hasty 
tennis-shoe footprints that converged on the two elevators.
I sat up timidly. Krupp went to the far side of a large pillar and 
retrieved an assault rifle from a dead soldier. "See," he said, 
pounding hollowly on the pillar with the butt of the rifle, "these 
pillars are just for show. Just a little girder in the middle and the rest 
is plaster and chicken wire. Don't want to hide behind them." 
Judging from the bullet holes in the pillar and the unmoving legs and 
feet on the other side, someone had recently been in dire need of 
Krupp's architectural knowledge. "Can't believe they're handing out 
loaded Kalashnikovs to cretins like that, whoever it is that's running 
this show," he grumbled. "These youths need ROTC training if 
they're going to pack ordnance like this,"
"Maybe this is someone's ROTC program," I suggested, trying 
to lighten the atmosphere. Krupp frowned. "Maybe this is someone's 
ROTC," I shouted, remembering the cotton. He nodded in deep 
thought. "Very good. What's your field again?"

"Remote sensing. Remote sensing. Involves geography, geology 
and electrical engineering."
"I'm listening," Krupp assured me in the middle of my sentence, 
as he walked to the two corners of the lobby to peer down the 
hallways. "But you'll have to speak up," he added, squeezing off a 
half-second blast at something. There was an answering blast, 
muffled by the fire doors between the combatants, but it apparently 
went into the ceiling. Impressed, Krupp nodded.
"Well, we've got two basic tactical options here," he continued, 
ejecting the old clip and inserting a fresh one taken from the dead 
SUBbie, "We can seize the wing, or retreat. Based on what we've 
seen of these sandbox insurrectionists, I don't doubt we can stage a 
takeover. The question is: is this wing a worthwhile strategic goal in 
and of itself, or is my strong inclination to seize it singlehandedly
almost, excuse mejust what we call a macho complex these days? 
Not that I'm trying to draw us into psychobabble." He glared at me, 
one eyebrow raised contemplatively.
"Depends on what kind of forces they have elsewhere."
"Well, you're saying it's easier to make tactical decisions when 
one has more perfect information, a sort of strategic context from 
which to plan. That's a predictable attitude for a remote-sensing 
man. The areal point of view comes naturally to a generalistic, left-
handed type like you." He nodded at my revolver, which I was 
holding, naturally, in my left hand. "But lacking that background, 
we'll have to use a different method of attackusing 'attack' in a 
figurative sense nowand use the more linear way of thinking that 
would suggest itself to, say, a right-handed low-level Catholic civil 
engineer. Follow?"
"I suppose," I shouted, looking down the elevator shaft at Tex's 
face, barely visible in the dim light.
"For example," continued Krupp, "our friends below, though we 
must be concerned for them, are irrelevant now. Presumably, the 
students on this wing will do the rational thing and not attack us, 
because to attack means coming into the halls and exposing 
themselves to our fire. So we control entry and exit. If we leave now, 
we'll just have to retake it later. Secondly, this lobby fire stair here 
ensures our safety; we can always escape. Third, our recent 
demonstration should delay a reinforcement action on their part. 
What I figure is that if we move along room by room disarming the 
occupants, they'll be too scared by what happened to that guy in the 
hall to try any funny stuff. Christ on fishhooks!" Krupp dove back 
into the safety of the lobby as a barrage of fire ripped down the hall, 
blowing with it the remains of the fire doors. We made for the 
stairway and began skittering down the steps as quickly as we could. 
By the time we had descended three flights, the angry shouts of 
Terrorists and SUBbies were pursuing us. The shouters themselves 
prudently remained on their own landing.
"We're okay unless they have something like a hand grenade or 
satchel charge they can drop down this central well," said Krupp. 
"Hold it right there, son! That's right! Keep those paws in the air! 
Say, I know you."
We had surprised Casimir Radon on a landing. He merely stared 
at S. S. Krupp's AK-47, dumbfounded.
"Let's all hold onto our pants for a second and ask Casimir what 
he's up to," Krupp suggested.
"Well," said Casimir, taking off his glacier glasses to see us 
better in the dim stairwell. "I was going to visit Sarah. Things are 
getting pretty wild now, you know. I guess you do know," he 
concluded, looking again at the assault rifle. 
"Physics problem:" said Krupp, "how far does a hand grenade 
fall in the seven seconds between handle release and boom?" 
"Well, air resistance makes that a toughie. It's pretty 
asymmetrical, and it would probably tumble, which makes the 
differential equation a son-of-a-bitch to solve. You'd have to use a 
numerical method, like"
"Estimate, son! Estimate!"
"Eight hundred feet."
"No problem. But what if they counted to three? How far in four 
seconds?"
"Sixteen times fourtwo hundred fifty-six feet."
"If they count to five?"
"Two seconds sixty-four feet."
"That's terrible. That's six stories. That would be about the sixth 
floor, which is where we make the run into the lobby. Do you think 
they'd be dumb enough to pull the pin and count to five?"
"Not with a Soviet grenade."
"Good point."
"If I'm not mistaken, sir," said Casimir, "they all have impact 
fuses on them anyway. So it'd go off on six in any case."
"Oh. Wellwhat the hell?" said Krupp, and started to run down 
the stairs again.
"Wait!" I said. Krupp stopped on the next landing. "You don't 
want to go up there," I told Casimir.
"Yeah. If you think it's wild down there, you should see 
thirteen. It's wilder than a cat on fire, thirteen. Those people are 
irrational," said Krupp.
"Are you going to stop me by force?" asked Casimir.
"Well, anyone traveling with S. S. Krupp today is a prime 
target, so I couldn't justify that," said Krupp.
"Then I'm going," said Casimir, and resumed his climb.
"Let's get a move on. Let's build up a good head of steam here 
so we can charge right through the danger zone at the bottom. I think 
the twenty-third psalm is in order."
Reluctantly, I left Casimir to his own dreams and we began to 
charge down the steps side by side, crossing paths at each turn, 
listening upward. I saw a 7 painted on the wall. We were practically 
diving down the last flight when I heard someone yell "Five!" We 
were on the level now, sprinting for a door with a small rectangular 
window and a sign reading E
TOWER MAIN LOBBY.
"Did he say five, or fire?" Krupp wondered as we neared the 
door. We punched it open together and were in the lobby. And there, 
waiting for us, were three Crotobaltislavonians with UZIs. 
"Professionals, I see," said Krupp. He had gone through on the 
hinged side of the door and now pushed it all the way around so that 
it was flat against the lobby wall, where he leaned against it. Back in 
the stairwell there was a series of metallic clanks, like something 
heavy bouncing off an iron pipe. Having seen many TV shows 
involving foreigners with submachine guns, I had already raised my 
hands; I now took the opportunity to clap them over my ears.
Krump. Bits of fire shot out the door at incredible speed. The 
three janitors just seemed to melt and soften, sagging to the floor 
quietly.
"It worked," said Krupp, sounding drunken and amazed. Trying 
to walk around, I found that the concussion had scrambled my inner 
ear; stars shot around like tracer bullets. I went to a wall phone, 
dialed Lucy and Hyacinth's number, and listened to it ring.
At each ring my head cleared a bit. They were not answering. 
Had the Terrorists taken twelve? I redialed; no answer. After eight 
rings I lost my mind, gripped the handset that had withstood untold 
vandalism attempts and jerked it out by its roots. I grabbed its 
shattered wires and swung it into the wall like a mace, ludicrously 
enraged, and began to stumble back toward the stairway.
"Hate to bust in, but we've got to stop porch-setting here," 
shouted Krupp from the lobby entryway. He lay on the floor with the 
AK-47 pointed down the hall.
"What about these B-men?"
"They'll keep."	
"I'm not leaving. My friends are up on twelve. Hey, look. These 
men are in pain okay? I'm going to tell their friends upstairs they've 
got wounded down here."
"Could do that," said Krupp, "but Casimir's in the stair well, If 
they come down this way, he'll be like a hoppity toad in a snake 
stampede."
For the first time, we heard shouting and shooting from the main 
hallway which led to the Cafeteria. "Don't look forward to fighting 
my way through whatever that sounds like," said Krupp.
"Shit. Shit in a brown bag. Great fucking ghost of Rommel," I 
said. "That thing is a tank." -
Indeed, a small tank was approaching our location. We 
retreated.


For Fred Fine too it was a hell of a day. He was physically 
burned out to begin with. The Grand Army of Shekondar the 
Fearsome had stood at yellow alert for two days, and he had worked 
like an android the whole time, directing the stockpiling of supplies 
and material in the most secure regions of Plexor. Klystron may have 
been a haughty swordsman who reveled in single combat, but Chris 
the Systems Programmer was a master strategist who understood 
that, in a long war, food was power. The recent Mixture of Klystron 
and Chris was regrettable, but it did enable him to plan for the 
coming weeks with magical intuition and technological knowledge, 
a combination that proved extremely potent.
Finally Consuela and Chip Dixon had insisted that he sleep, and 
Klystron/Chris had okayed the rec. He slept from the close of our 
expedition until 1200 hours on April First, then rolled smartly out of 
the sack, called an aide for a quick briefing and proceeded to the 
mess hall for some grub and a few cups of joe. It was there, in the 
Cafeteria, just as he had predicted, that the war began.
Many things contributed to its success. The MegaUnion finally 
found the secret elevator used to smuggle scab workers into the Caf, 
resulting in fights between the Haitian and Vietnamese cooks and the 
professors and clerical workers who stood in their way. The outcome 
was predictable, and when the battered progressives returned to the 
main picket outside the Caf entrance, Yllas Freedperson exhorted 
them to hang tough, to further peace and freedom in the Plex by 
finding the violent people who had hurt them and bashing their 
brains out.
Mobs of hungry students broke through the picket lines empty-
handed, obviously bent on eating scab food. The unionists were still 
so pissed off from the earlier fight that more scuffling and debris-
throwing ensued. Twenty TUGgies carrying anti-communist signs 
took advantage of the confusion to set up a barrier around the SUB 
information table and erect their OM generator, a black box with big 
speakers used to augment their own personal OMs, which they now 
OMed through megaphones. A picket-sign duel broke out; it became 
clear that the SUB had reinforced their picket signs to make them 
into dangerous weapons. At a sign from their leader, Messiah #645, 
the TUGgies produced sawed-off pool cues and displayed highly 
developed kendo abilities.
All the Terrorists then seemed to arrive together. Twenty 
Droogs, thirty-two Blue Light Specials, nineteen Roy G Bivs, eight 
Ninja with Big Wheels on their foreheads, four of the Flame Squad 
Brotherhood and forty-three of the Plex Branch of the Provisional 
Wing of the Irish Republican Army (Unofficial) marched in with 
their politically correct bag lunches and, shouting and waving sticks 
in the air, demanded that a large area be cleared of scab 
sympathizers and other scum so they could sit down. This section 
contained a table of twenty-five athletic team standouts, heavily 
drunk, as well as a number of people on ghetto scholarships who 
really knew how to handle unpleasant situations. Much hand-to-hand 
violence took place and the Terrorists were humiliated. There were 
more of them, though. A huge arena ring formed around the brawl 
and tables were herded to the walls to make room. The SUB showed 
up, decided that the brawl was ideologically impure, and began 
chanting and throwing food. This triggered the Cafeteria's mass food 
fight emergency plan; but as the enforcers began to emerge from the 
serving bays, they were met by MegaUnion partisans who wanted to 
get them out in the open. Short on brawling power because of the 
inexplicable absence of the Crotobaltislavonians, the MegaUnion 
was bested here.
The Haitians and Vietnamese, who had built up fierce hatred for 
the Terrorists, took this opportunity to rush into the central brawl. 
The SUB tried to block them, without success. The TUGgies 
charged after the SUB to make sure they didn't do anything illegal. 
The fight was frenzied now; a flying wedge of cooks speared back 
toward the kitchen to obtain big knives.
Upstairs in the towers, SUB/Terrorist extremists who were 
apparently waiting for something like this began to bombard the roof 
of the vast kitchen complex with heavy projectiles. On cue, the 
administration's anti-terrorism guards, stationed on Tar City and in 
some wings and on top of towers, responded by blasting tear gas 
grenades into the SUB/Terrorist strongholds. Already there were 
gaping holes in the roof; above the tumult, everyone in the Caf now 
heard the booms of the grenade launchersevery gun in the place 
was drawn for the first time.
Shooting began, at first to scare and then to injure. People 
scrambled to the walls, throwing furniture through the wide plate-
glass wall sections to escape. But some were unable to get out, and 
others were happy to stay and fight. After a minute of 
incomprehensible noise and violence, battle lines formed and things 
became organized.
Obviously SUB and TUG were prepared. Both groups hoped to 
capture the kitchen by entering through the serving bays and vaulting 
the steam tables, Local fights hence developed along the approaches 
to all twelve serving bays. Squads from both groups made for the 
main serving bay, ducking sporadic fire. The SUB got there first, 
shot the lock out and kicked the door; but there was a senior TUGgie 
barricaded behind a steam table, with a heavy machine gun aimed at 
them and a smiling protg holding the ammo belt. The gunner 
watched cheerfully as the SUBbies jumped back and rolled away 
from the door, but held his fire until the TUGgies behind them had 
jumped through the breach and scurried out of the line of fire. He 
immediately opened fire on a strategic SUB salad bar across the 
Cafeteria. This entailed shooting through several tables, but he had 
plenty of ammo, and as soon as the furniture was conveniently 
dissolved, a river of red tracer fire could swing around and demolish 
whatever it touched, such as a milk machine, a number of people, 
and, of course, the flimsy salad bar. The SUBbies retreated and 
joined their Terrorist allies in safer places.
Klystron/Chris knew as well as anyone that the kitchens were 
the strategic linchpin of the Plex. He was the first person in the 
Cafeteria to decide that war was breaking out, and so during the 
early stages of the great fistfight he mobilized and girded his loins 
for the Apocalypse. Retreating to a corner, he dumped the now-
useless textbooks out of his briefcase and withdrew the bayonet, 
which he stuck in his belt, and the flash gun, which he carried. As 
the booms and thuds from the ceiling indicated that aerial 
bombardment had begun, he flexed his fingers, then shoved his right 
hand into his left armpit and snapped out a standard-issue .45 auto-
matic pistoljust to test the shoulder holster one last time. After 
cocking the weapon he gingerly slid it back under his houndstooth 
polyester blazer and turned toward the nearest serving bay.
A burst from the flash gun got him through the door and over 
the steam tables into the kitchen area. Here was chaos: scab workers 
running to and fro, some with knives; Cafeteria administrators telling 
him to get the hell out of here, an opinion his flash gun then 
modified; particularly bold SUBbies and TUGgies making their first 
inroads; a man in a flannel shirt carrying a .50-caliber machine 
gunthat could be a problemall of this in an almost primeval 
landscape littered with sections of roof, piano fragments, scattered 
food and utensils, broken pipes spewing steam and water, sparks and 
flames breaking out here and there.
The elevator he sought was at the dead-end of a hallway, hidden 
in the nethermost parts of the kitchens, back by the strategic food 
warehouses. Arriving safely, Klystron/Chris protected his rear by 
slitting open and overturning several hundred-pound barrels of 
freeze-dried potatoes and dehydrated eggs near the doorway, where 
hot water spewed from a broken ceiling pipe. Without waiting to 
watch the results he jogged down and boarded the elevator, held for 
him by a captain of the Grand Army of Shekondar the Fearsome.
Below, in the Burrows, he emerged to find all in readiness: 
several officers awaiting orders; his body armor and weapons; and in 
a nearby storage closet, the APPASMU, or All-Purpose Plex Armed 
Strife Mobile Unit.
The APPASMU was a project begun three years ago by several 
MARS members. Starting out as a jokea tank for use in the Plex, 
ha hait became a hobby, a thing to tinker with, and finally, this 
semester, an integral part of the GASF defense posture. The tank 
was built on the chassis of an electric golf cart, geared down so that 
its motor could haul additional weight. The tires had been filled with 
dense foam to make them bulletproof, and a sturdy frame of welded 
steel tubing built around the cart to support the rest of the inno-
vations, Hardened steel plates were welded to the frame to make a 
sloping, pyramidal body in which as many as four people could sit or 
lie. Gun slits, shielded peepholes and thick glass prisms enabled the 
occupants to see and shoot anything in their vicinity, while a full 
complement of lights, radios, sirens, loudspeakers and so forth gave 
the APPASMU eyes and ears and vocal cords. The APPASMU had 
been designed to fit into any elevator in the Plex. It could recharge 
its batteries at any wall outlet, and replacement battery packs had 
already been stashed at several secret locations around the building.
From status reports provided by underlings as he pulled on his 
gear, KlystronlChris learned that S. S. Krupp was trapped in a hostile 
area of E Tower. Such a mission was perfect to battle-test the 
APPASMU and toughen up its crew, and so after barking some 
orders to his major officers he squeezed into the tank along with 
three others and steered it backward into the elevator.
The situation upstairs had begun to take on some texture. The 
dead-end outside the elevator was blocked by a mountain of light-
yellow potato-egg mixture. The APPASMU plowed through with 
ease, and KlystronlChris could now hear the rumble of the heavy 
TUG machine gun. The APPASMU could not withstand such 
firepower, so Klystron/Chris decided to outflank it by exiting the 
kitchens through a back route. He aimed the APPASMU down an 
aisle lined with great pressure vats and headed for the door.
Unfortunately a stray weapons burst had struck a pressure vat by 
the exit. The top of the vat exploded off, blasting a neat hole through 
the ceiling, and the vat, torn loose by the recoil, tumbled over and 
spilled thousands of gallons of Cheezy Surprise Tetrazzini onto the 
floor. This mixture had long, long overcooked in the fighting, 
causing the noodles to congeal into a glutinous orange mass with an 
internal temperature over three hundred degrees Fahrenheit, which 
had rolled out on impact and squatted sullenly in the doorway, 
swathed in its nebula of live orange steam. Klystron/Chris fired a 
few desultory rounds into it and concluded that this doorway was 
now impassable. They would have to choose a serving bay, pass 
through the Caf and hope to avoid the TUG machine gunexactly 
what the APPASMU was built for, though to fire it now would be to 
use up their first and only surprise.
"Well have to make the most of it, men. We'll head for the lines 
of the SUB/Terrorist Axis and pick up all the weaponry we can find. 
If you see anything that looks like it's armor-piercing, sing out!" 
Without further chitchat, and accompanied by a soft plopping of 
potato-egg, the minitank was out of the kitchen and into a serving 
bay which was being disputed in hand-to-hand combat. The 
astonished fighters could only stand in confusion, and only two 
rounds glanced off the APPASMU's armor before they entered the 
Caf. The tank's entrance occasioned a surprised lull in the fighting. 
Klystron/Chris and Chip Dixon used the flat-trajectory indoor 
mortars to lob a few stun grenades behind the line of overturned 
tables and main salad bar that served as the SUB bunker. At this, the 
Axis forces turned and ran through the shattered plate-glass walls 
behind them and scurried for F Tower. The poorly armed wretches 
who had been pinned down by their presence emerged and sprinted 
for the exits.
They got a fine haul from the stunned and demoralized soldiers 
in the Axis bunker: a Kalashnikov, a twelve-gauge slug gun, ammo, 
knives, clubs and gas masks, all plastered with smoldering lettuce 
and sprouts but functional. After collecting the booty and using his 
intercom to dispatch a negotiator to cut a deal with the TUGgies
who were clearly winning in this theaterKlystron/Chris sent the 
APPASMU crashing magnificently through a plate-glass panel that 
had miraculously remained unbroken, and pointed it toward E Tower 
and the endangered Septimius Severus Krupp.
There we met them, below E Tower. From a distance we could 
make out the insignia: a stylized plan of the Plex (eight Swiss 
crosses within a square) with a sword and phaser rifle crossed 
underneath and the word MARS above. "I guess that would be Fred 
Fine," I said.
The top hatch flipped open and a helmeted, goggled head arose, 
speaking through the PA system. "This is the Grand Army of 
Shekondar the Fearsome Expeditionary Plex Purification Warfare 
Corps. Resistance is useless." The tank pulled up next to us, and 
Fred Fine pulled back the mask to reveal (alas) his face. He spoke 
with his usual grating humility.
"Mr. President. Professor Redfield. Sorry if we upset you. This 
is a little something we've been developing as a career suitability 
demonstration project during the recent years of decaying 
civilization. In fact, once we're on secure ground, I'd like to discuss 
the possibility of receiving some academic credit for it, Mr. 
President. The basic design principles are the same as for any 
armored vehicle."
"I see that," said Krupp, nodding. "Heimlich would go nuts over 
this. But what you need, I think, are more liberal arts courses."
"Dr. Redfield will find the infrared personnel sensing equipment 
very interesting. But sirs, we have heavy fighting in the Cafeteria. 
My men have secured the other end of this hallway while I came to 
get you."
Chip Dixon had clambered out to reconnoiter and inspect the 
APPASMU. Seeing the three mangled B-men, he scurried over to 
them and slid his hand under one's ear to check his pulse. A queer 
look came on his face and he stared directly up at Fred Fine.
"Jim, he's dead," he whispered.
"Sir to you," said Fred Fine, nonplussed, "and my name is not 
Jim, it's . . . something else. Anyway, sirs, my men are now securing 
D Tower, with direct elevator connections to the Burrows. We've 
arranged with your anti-terrorist forces to courier you to C Tower, 
which they are securing. Chip will steer the APPASMU, you'll sit in 
my place and I'll serve as point man. Dr. Redfield is welcome to 
follow. But first we must retrieve those weapons!" He clomped over 
to the remains of the Crotobaltislavonians.


Sarah slept until about noon, when a corpse burst through her 
window. Her eyes were half open, so that it exploded out of a dream: 
a leathery female cadaver from the Med College, wearing the wig 
Sarah had left behind in Tiny's room, white clown makeup smeared 
on the face. This effigy had been placed in a hangman's noose and 
thrown out the window above hers; it swung down and crashed 
through her window, then swung out and in and out as Sarah 
struggled between sleep and awakeness, disbelief and terror. At last 
she chose awakeness and terror, and stared at the corpse, which 
grinned.
She tried to scream and gag at the same time, but did neither. 
Outside she heard the excited whispers of the lurking Terrorists.
She took three slow breaths and pulled her .38 from under her 
pillow. As she was sliding her feet into her running shoes, she found 
a big shard of window glass on one of them and nearly panicked. 
She picked up her phone and punched out Hyacinth's number (after 
the rape attempt she had bought a pushbutton phone so she could 
dial silently). Hyacinth answered alertly. Sarah pushed the 1 button 
three times and hung up, stood, slipped on the pack containing her 
emergency things and padded to the door. Sleeping in her long johns 
was neither cool nor glamorous, but proved useful nonetheless.
There was a long wait. The Terrorists were quietly getting 
impatient. wondering whether she was in there, talking about 
shootng the door openthey knew a police lock would be difficult 
to blow off. Sarah stood shivering, feet on marked places on the 
floor, gun in right hand, doorlock in left. If only there had been a 
way to practice this!
Hyacinth's gun sounded. Horribly slow, she snapped the lock, 
moved her hand to the doorknob, grasped it, turned it, swung the 
door open and examined the five men standing there. They were 
looking sideways toward Hyacinth. As they began to turn their faces 
toward her, she finally picked out the one with the gunthanking 
God there was only one gun. For just a second now they were 
trapped and helpless, caught in a double take, trying to process the 
new information. For the first time Sarah understood how generals 
and terrorists made their plans of attack.
The one with the shotgun had turned it toward Hyacinth and 
now seemed indecisive. The other men were stepping back and 
dropping to the floor. Sarah's finger twitched and she fired a round 
into the ceiling.
The rest happened in an instant. She pointed her gun at the head 
of the armed man. One of the other four suddenly whipped a 
handgun from his belt. Sarah wheeled and shot him in the stomach. 
The one with the shotgun tried to swing around but scraped the end 
of his barrel on the wall; Sarah and Hyacinth fired two shots apiece; 
three missed, and one of Sarah's hit the man in the arm and dropped 
him. The other three had simply disappeared; looking down the ball, 
Sarah saw them piling into the fire stairway.
There was less blood than she had expected. Before she could 
examine the two wounded, Hyacinth floated past and Sarah 
followed. They ran to the elevator lobby, where Lucy was waiting 
with an elevator and another gun. That was what had taken so 
longan elevator! But many Terrorists were pouring into the lobby 
as the doors began to creep shut. A Terrorist glided toward the wall 
buttons, hoping to punch the doors open; Sarah made eye contact 
with him; he kept going; she fired a shot whose effects she never 
saw. The doors were closed, joining in front of them to form a Big 
Wheel mural. The car was motionless for a sickeningly long time, 
and then shifted and began to sink.

Casimir Radon only came in at the end of it. He had gotten up 
earlier than any of us that morning. Opening his curtains to let in the 
gray light, he had seen the blind patches grow, and had put on his 
glacier glasses before allowing any more light past his eyelids. He 
lay in bed until the blind spots had shifted over to the right side of 
his vision, then read some physics and tinkered with the railgun's 
electronics. Finally he went to lunch; but seeing the outbreak of 
violence there, he headed back up the stairs to look for Sarah, 
meeting me and Krupp. After we parted, he continued resolutely. 
placing his feet as gently as possible on each tread and pressing care-
fully until he moved up to the next step. As a result he moved with a 
smoothness that was not even noticed by the little embryonic 
headache in his brain.
A few seconds after leaving us behind, something flashed by 
him down the center of the stairwell, and a second later 
accompanied by a brief stabbing lightcame a sharp awesome 
KABOOM that KABOOMed many times over as it bounded up and 
down the height of the stairwell. To Casimir it was like being 
bayoneted through the head, and when he dared to move again, the 
headache struck so badly that he could only laugh at it. He 
proceeded toward the Castle in the Air with a helpless moaning 
laugh, heels of hands buried in temples, and heard other, less 
tremendous explosions.
The door to E12S was open and three Terrorists were running 
through in a panic, headed for thirteen. Something white flashed by 
the door, heading for the lobby. Casimir ran into the hall and was 
promptly knocked aside by a migration of Terrorists, who emerged 
from several nearby rooms. Falling, he glimpsed Sarah and 
Hyacinth, clad in white long johns, running with guns and backpacks 
down the hall. He managed to trip a few of the Terrorists, more by 
flailing away randomly than by craftiness, and stood up and began to 
head for the elevators too. As he approached the lobby, there was 
another painful WHAM and he felt a sharp pain in his chest. He had 
no idea what had happened. In fact, Sarah's last bullet, after 
ricocheting off several walls and passing through a fire door, had in 
mangled form dispersed its last bit of energy by bouncing sharply off 
Casimir's T-shirt.
Something hard was against the back of his headthe floor? 
The Terrorists were standing above him. He stood up. Two wounded 
men were being carried toward him, leaving uneven trails of blood 
on the shiny tile floor. He followed these trails to their sources, and 
stepped through Sarah's open door.
A clown-cadaver was smiling at him through the window and he 
knew he was hallucinating. Nothing he did could dissolve the 
ghastly sight. Noticing a Terrorist looking at him from the doorway, 
he walked over, slammed the door in his face and locked it. Then he 
wandered around the room, picking up and examining random 
objectsnumerous mementos of Sarah's friends and family, books 
he would never read, a little framed collection of snapshots. A 
family portrait, graduation photos of several smiling good-looking 
earnest typeswhich was her boyfriend?and various shots of 
Sarah and friends being happy in different places, including some of 
Hyacinth. Tucked in one corner of the frame was a folded piece of 
paper. Casimir felt filthy reading it; it was obviously a love note. He 
had never gotten one himself, but he figured this was one of them. 
Getting to the bottom, he read the name of the mysterious man Sarah 
so obviously preferred to Casimir: Hyacinth.
He sat on her bed, elbows on knees, scarcely hearing the 
shouting outside. He smiled a little, knowing Sarah and Hyacinth 
had made it out safely.
He knew why he'd come up here. Not to assist Sarah, or go with 
her, but to save her. To create a debt of gratitude that could neither 
be erased nor forgotten. She would have to love him then, right? 
This impossible secret hope of his had made his thoughts so twisted 
and complicated that he no longer knew why he was doing anything; 
he was never one to analyze his pipe dreams. But now she was safe. 
His goal was accomplished. And if she had done it herself, and not 
seen him, then that was his fault. She was safe, and now he had to be 
happy whether he wanted to or not.
Most importantly, he had seen the proof he had needed for so 
long, the undeniable proof that she would never be in love with him. 
All his wild fantasies were impossible now. He could purge himself 
of his useless infatuation. He could relax. It was wonderful.
The Terrorists shot out the lock, came in and grabbed his arms. 
In the hall he was thrown on his back and straddled by a Terrorist 
while others sat on his arms and legs. Then they all stared at him 
dully, lost and indecisive.
"Let's knock his teeth out," said a voice from behind Casimir. A 
hammer was given to the man on his chest. Someone held Casimir 
by the hair. Casimir's vision was sharp and bright without the glacier 
glasses; the hammerhead was cold and luminous in the white light, 
finely scratched on its polished striking face, red paint worn way 
from use. The Terrorist was examining Casimir's face as though he 
could not find the mouth, neither excited nor scared, just curiously 
resigned to what he was doing and, it seemed, at peace with himself.
This is what I get, being heroic for the wrong reason, thought 
Casimir. He could not take his eyes off the hammer. He began to 
struggle. His captors clamped down harder. The torturer made a 
swing; but Casimir jerked his head to one side and the blow slid 
down his cheek and crushed a fold of neck skin against the floor.
Then he felt a light tingly feeling and sat up. The hammerer slid 
backward onto the floor. Casimir's hands were free and he punched 
the man in the nuts, then pulled his legs free and stood up. 
Everything he touched now snapped away and started bleeding. 
Someone was coming with a shotgun, so Casimir re-entered Sarah's 
room and bolted the door with her police lock.
He smashed the photo frame on her desk, removed a snapshot of 
Sarah and Hyacinth, wrapped it in Kleenex and put it in his pocket. 
The only potential weapon was a fencing saber, so he took that. He 
knocked over a set of brick-and-board shelves, and using one brick 
as a hammer and another as an anvil, snapped off the final inch of 
the blade to leave a clean, sharply fractured edge.
When he opened the door again, all he had to do was push the 
barrel of the shotgun out of the way and push his saber through one 
of the owner's lungs. The gun came free in his hand and he hurled it 
backward out the window, where it bounced off the cadaver and fell 
to Tar City. In the ensuing melee Casimir slashed and whipped 
several Terrorists with the blade, or punched them with the guard, 
and then they were all gone and he was walking down the stairs.
His destination was a room in a back hallway far beneath A 
Tower: University Locksmithing. This was the most heavily fortified 
room in the Plex, as a single breach in its security meant replacing 
thousands of locks. It had just one outside window, gridded over by 
heavy steel tubes, and the door was solid steel, locked by the 
toughest lock technology could devise. As Casimir approached it, he 
found the nearby corridors empty. The security system was still on 
the ball, he supposed. But the events of the day had unleashed in 
Casimir's mind a kind of maniacal, animal cunning, accumulated 
through years of craftily avoiding migraines and parties.
The corridors in this section were relatively narrow. He put his 
feet against one wall and his hands against the other, pushed hard 
enough to hold himself in the air, slowly "walked" up the walls until 
his back was against the pipes on the ceiling, then "walked" around 
the corner and down the hall toward that steel door. Usually the only 
beings found on the ceilings of the Plex were bats, and so the little 
TV camera mounted above the door was aimed down toward the 
floor. Eventually Casimir was able to rest his hands directly on the 
camera's mounting bracket and wedge his feet into a crack between 
a ceiling pipe and the ceiling across the hail. Not very comfortable, 
he used one hand to undo his belt buckle. In five minutes, during 
which he frequently had to rest both arms, he was able to get the belt 
over another pipe and rebuckle it around his waist, giving himself an 
uncomfortable but stable harness.
Within half an hour, the TV camera, inches from his face, began 
to swivel back and forth warily. Casimir loosened his belt buckle. 
The lock clicked open and an old man emerged, holding a pistol. 
Casimir simply dropped, pulled the gun free, flung it back into the 
room, then dragged the locksmith inside. While the man was 
regaining his breath, Casimir went through his pockets and came up 
with a heavily laden key-chain.
After a while the locksmith sat up. "Whose side are you on?" he 
said.
"No side. I'm on a quest."
The locksmith, apparently familiar with quests, nodded. "What 
do you want with me?" he asked.
"The master keys, and a place for the night. It looks as though 
I've got both." Casimir tossed the keys in his hand. "Where were 
you taking these keys?"
The locksmith rose to his feet, looking suddenly fierce and 
righteous. "I was getting them out of the Plex, young fella! Listen. I 
didn't spend thirty-five years here so's I could sell the masters to the 
highest bidder soon as things got hairy. I was taking those out of the 
Plex for safekeeping and damn you for insulting me. Give 'em 
back."
"I have no right to take them, then," said Casimir, and dropped 
the keys into the locksmith's hands. The man stepped back, first in 
fear, then in wonder.
There was a high crack and the locksmith fell. Casimir ran for 
the door, where a loner with a bolt-action .22 was frantically trying 
to get a second round into the chamber. Casimir nailed him with the 
saber, kicked him dead into the hallway, grabbed the .22 and locked 
the door.
The locksmith was struggling to his feet, pulling something 
bright from his sock. The big keychain was still on the floor where 
he'd dropped it. He now held seven loose keys in his hands, and with 
a distant, dying look he gazed through the crossbars of the window 
at the million lights of the city. Casimir ran and stood before him, 
but seeing his shadow cross the man's face, fell to his knees.
"Thirty-five years I looked for someone worthy to take my 
place," whispered the Locksmith. "Thought I never would, thought it 
was all turning to shit. And here in the last five minuteshere, lad, I 
pass my charge on to you." He parted his hands, allowing the keys to 
fall into Casimir's. Then he dropped his hands to his sides and died. 
Casimir gently laid him out on a workbench and crossed his arms 
over his heart.
After pinching the barrel of the .22 shut in a vise, Casimir curled 
up on a neighboring workbench and slept.


Though Casimir considered Sarah and Hyacinth safe, they were 
only relatively safe when they and Lucy left E12S. Their destination 
was the Women's Center, and their route was a young and 
disorganized war.
They went first to my suiteI had given Lucy a key. They 
remained for a couple of hours, borrowing clothes, eating, calming 
down and building up their courage.
Fully clothed, equipped and reloaded, they broke out my picture 
window in midafternoon and lowered themselves a few feet onto Tar 
City. For the time being they kept their guns concealed. Running 
across the roof it was possible to cover ground swiftly and avoid the 
thronged corridors. After a couple of hundred feet and a few far 
misses by bombardiers above, they arrived at one of the large holes 
in the roof and ducked down into the kitchen warehouses. 
Approaching quietly, they slid into the narrow space between the 
boxes and the ceiling and avoided detection. Following Hyacinth, 
they slid on their bellies down the shelf to the nearest door. This 
turned out to be guarded by a GASF soldier, who watched the door 
while a dozen TUGgies methodically tore open and examined crates 
of food. Hyacinth slid a hundredweight of pasteurized soybean 
peanut butter substitute onto the guard's head and they dropped to 
the floor, pulling more crates with them to hinder pursuit. Running 
into the kitchens, they found themselves cheerfully greeted by more 
TUGgies. Fortunately the kitchen was huge, full of equipment and 
partitions and fallen junk and clouds of steam and twists and turns, 
and after some aimless running around they came to the giant wad of 
Cheezy Surprise Tetrazzini, squeezed past it through the door, and 
entered a little-used service corridor filled with the wounded and 
scared. Four of the latter, also women, seeing that these three were 
armed and not as scared as they were, joined up. The seven edged 
into a main hall and made for the Women's Center.
This was in the Student Union Bloc, an area not as bitterly 
contested as the Caf or the Towers. Hyacinth wounded two Droogs 
on the way and reloaded. Eventually they came to a long hail lined 
with the offices of various student activities groups, dark and 
astonishingly still after their riotous trip. Here they slowed and 
relaxed, then began to file along the corridor. Soon they smelled 
sweet incense, and began to make out the distant sounds of chanting 
and the tinkling of bells. Moving along quietly, they paused by each 
door: the Outing Club; the Yoga, Solar Power and Multiple Orgasm 
Support Group; the Nonsocietal Assemblage of Noncoercively 
Systematized Libertarian Individuals; Let's Understand Animals, 
Not Torture Them; the men's room; the punk fraternity Zappa 
Krappa Claw; the Folk Macrame Explorers. As they approached the 
Women's Center, the sweet odors grew stronger, the soprano-alto 
chant louder.
"Looks like the Goddess worshipers got here first," said Sarah. 
"I guess I can live with that, if they can live with someone who 
shaves her pits." She and Lucy and Hyacinth concealed their guns 
again, not wanting to seem obtrusive.

Hyacinth knocked. There was a lull, then the voice of Yllas 
Freedperson, then a new chant.
"You don't know the True Knock," said Yllas.
"Well, we're women, this is the Women's Center."
"Not all women can enter the Women's Center."
"Oh."
"Some have more man than woman in them. No manhood can 
be allowed here, for this place is sacred to the Goddess."
"Who says?"
"Astarte, the Goddess. Athena. Mary. Vesta. The Goddess of 
Many Names."
"Have you been talking to her a lot lately?" asked Hyacinth.
"Since I offered her my womb-blood at the Equinox last week, 
we have been in constant contact."
"Well look," said Hyacinth, "we didn't come to play Dungeons 
and Dragons, we're here for safety, okay?"
"Then you must purifiy youself in the sight of the Goddess," 
said Yllas, opening the door. She and the two dozen others in the 
Center were all naked. All the partitions that had formerly divided 
the place into many rooms had been knocked down to unify the 
Center into a single room. They couldn't see much in the 
candlelight, except that there was a lot of silver and many daggers 
and wands. The women were chanting in perfect unison.
"You cannot touch our lives in any way until you have been 
made one with us," continued Yllas.
Sarah and company declined the invitation with their feet. 
Before they got far, Yilas started bellowing. "Man-women! Heteros! 
Traitors! Impurities! Stop them!"
Nearby doors burst open and several women jumped out with 
bows and arrows taken from the nearby P. E. Department. Sarah 
began a slow move for her gun, but Hyacinth prevented it.
"Take them to PAFW," decreed Yllas, "and when Astarte tells 
us what is to be done, we will take them away one by one and give 
them support and counseling."
Escorted by the archers, they traveled for several minutes 
through Axis hallways, leaving the Union block and entering the 
athletics area. Here they were turned over to a pair of shotgun-
wielding SUBbies, who led them into the darkened hallway behind 
the racquetball courts. Each of the miniature doors they passed had 
been padlocked; and looking through the tiny windows, they saw 
several people in each court. Finally they arrived at an open door and 
were ushered into an empty court, the door padlocked behind them. 
On the walkway that ran above the back walls of the courts two 
guards paced back and forth. Taped above the door was a hastily 
Magic-Markered sign:

WELCOME

TO THE

PEOPLE'S ALTERNATIVE FREEDOM WORKSHOP


The Axis clearly lacked experience in running prisons. They did 
not even search them for weapons. The few guards were not 
particularly well armed and followed no strict procedures; they 
seemed incapable of dealing with relatively simpie situations, such 
as requests for feminine hygiene materials. All tough decisions such 
as this had to be transmitted to a higher authority, who was holed up 
at the far end of the upper walkway.
After a few hours, several more people had been put in their 
cell, among them some large athletes. Escape was easy. They waited 
until the pacing guards on the walkway were both at one end, and 
then two large men simply grabbed Hyacinth by the legs and threw 
her up over the railing. She rolled on her stomach and plugged the 
two guards, who did not even have time to unsling their weapons. 
The rest of the incompetent, somnambulistic personnel were 
disarmed, and everyone was free. Five high-spirited escapees ran 
down the walkway toward the office of the high-muck-a-muck, 
firing through its door the entire way. When they finally kicked open 
the bent and perforated remains, they found themselves in the courts 
reservation office. A Terrorist sat in a chair, rifle across lap, staring 
into a color TV whose picture tube had been blasted out. Hyacinth, 
Lucy and Sarah, not interested in this, headed for the Burrows with 
several other refugees in tow. The domain of Virgil was near.


Not far from that gymnasium bloc, on the fourth floor. Klys-
tron/Chris inspected his lines. He had just approved one of the 
border outposts when Klystron had called him back and berated him 
for his greenhornish carelessness. Right there, he pointed out, a 
crafty insurrectionist might creep unseen down that stairway and set 
up an impregnable firepost! The GASF soldiers, awed by his 
intuition, extended their lines accordingly.
As Klystron/Chris stood on those stairs making friendly chitchat 
with the men, the warble of a common urban pigeon sounded thrice 
from below, warning of approaching hostiles. Klystron/Chris 
whirled, leapt through a group of slower aides and crouched on the 
bottom step to peer down the hallway. His men were assuming 
defensive stances and rolling for cover.
He exposed himself just enough to see the vanguard of the 
approaching force. As he did, the voice of Shekondar came into his 
head, as it occasionally did in times of great stress:
"She is the woman I want for you. You know her! She is ideal 
for you. The time has come for you to lose your virginity; at last a 
worthy partner has arrived. Look at that body! Look at that hair! She 
has long legs which are sexually provocative in the extreme. She is a 
healthy specimen."
He could hardly disagree. She was evolutionarily fit as any 
female he had ever observed; he remembered now how the firm but 
not disgusting musculature of her upper arm had felt when he had set 
her down on that dinner table during her fainting spell. But at this 
juncture, when she needed to be strong in order to prevail and 
preserve her ability to reproduce, she showed the bounce and verve 
that marked her as the archetypal Saucy Wench of practically every 
dense sword-and-sorcery novel he had ever consumed in his 
farmhouse bed on a hot Maine summer afternoon with his tortilla 
chips on one side and his knife collection on the other. Later, after he 
had saved her from somethingsaved her from her own vivacious 
feminine impulsiveness by an act of manly courage and taken her to 
some sanctuary like the aisle between the CPU and the Array 
Processing Unitthen she could allow herself to melt away in a rush 
of feminine passion and show the tenderness combined with fire that 
was enticingly masked behind her conventional calm sober 
behavioral mode. He wondered if she were the type of woman who 
would tie a man up, just for the fun of it, and tickle him. These 
things Shekondar did not reveal; and yet he had told him that they 
matched! And that meant she could be nothing other than the 
fulfilment of his unique sexual desires!
The group approached their perimeter. Klystron/Chris staggered 
boldly into the open, hindered by a massive erection, hitched up his 
pants with the butt of the Kalashnikov and waved the group to a halt.
She dipped behind a pillar and covered him with a small arma 
primitive chemical-powered lead-thrower that was nevertheless 
dangerous. Then, seeing many automatic weapons, she pointed her 
gun at the ceiling. Her troop slowed to a confused and apprehensive 
halt. They were disorganized, undisciplined, obviously typical 
refugee residue, led by a handful of Alpha types with gunsnot a 
minor force in this theater, but helpless against the GASF.
"Hi, Fred," she said, and the obvious sexual passion in her voice 
was to his ears like the soothing globular tones of the harp-speakers 
of Iliafharxhlind. "We were headed for the Burrows. How are things 
between here and there?"
It was easiest to explain it in math terms. "We've secured a 
continuous convex region which includes both this point and the 
region called the Burrows, ma'am. It's all under my command. How 
can we help you?"
"We need places to stay. And the three of us here need to get to 
the Science Shop."
So! Friends of the White Priest! She was very crafty, very coy, 
but made no bones about what she was after. These women thought 
of only one thing. Klystron/Chris liked thatshe was quite a little 
enticer, but subtle as she was, he knew just what the audacious minx 
was up to! Shekondar tuned in again with unnecessary advice: 
"Please her and you will have a fine opportunity for sexual 
intercourse. Do as she asks in all matters."
He straightened up from his awkward position and smiled the 
broadest, friendliest smile he could manage without exceeding the 
elastic limit of his lip tissue. "Men," he said to his soldiers, "it's been 
a secret up to now, but this woman is a Colonelette in the Grand 
Army of Shekondar the Fearsome and a priestess of great stature. 
I'm putting Werewolf Platoon under her command. She'll need 
passage into the Secured Regionunless she changes her mind 
first!" Women often changed their minds; he glanced at her to see if 
she had caught this gentle ribbing. She put on an emotionless act that 
was almost convincing.
"Well, gee. It's kind of a surprise to me too. Can we just go, 
then?"
"Permission granted, Colonelette Sarah Jane Johnson!" he 
snapped, saluting. She threw him a strange look, no doubt of awe, 
thanks and general indebtedness, and after giving a few cutely 
tentative orders to her men, headed into the Secured Region. Fired 
with new zest for action, Klystron/Chris wheeled and led his men 
toward the next outpost of the Purified Empire.


I declined Fred Fine's offer and waited below E Tower for my 
friends. Before long it became obvious that I would never meet 
anyone in that madhouse of a lobby, and so I set out for the Science 
Shop.
The safest route took me down Emeritus Row, quiet as always. I 
checked each door as I went along. Sharon's office had long since 
been ransacked by militants looking for rail-gun information. Other 
than the sound of dripping water falling into the wastecans below the 
poorly patched hole in Sharon's ceiling, all I heard on Emeritus Row 
was an old man crying alone.
He was in the office marked: PROFESSOR EMERITUS 
HUMPHREY BATSTONE FORTHCOMING IV. Without knock-
ing (for the room was dark and the door ajar) I walked in and saw 
the professor himself. He leaned over the desk with his silvery dome 
on the blotter as though it were the only thing that could soak up his 
tears, his hands flung uselessly to the side. The rounded tweed 
shoulders occasionally humped with sobs, and little strangled gasps 
made their way out and died in the musty air of the office.
Though I intentionally banged my way in, he did not look up. 
Eventually he sat up, red eyes closed. He opened them to slits and 
peered at me.
"I" he said, and broke again. After a few more tries he was 
able to speak in a high, strangled voice.
"I am in a very bad situation, you see. I think I may have 
suffered ruination. I have just . . . have just been sitting here"his 
voice began to clear and his wet eyes scanned the desk"and 
preparing to tender my resignation."
"But why," I asked. "You're not that old. You seem healthy. In 
your field, it's not as though you have equipment or data that's been 
destroyed in the fighting. What's wrong?"
He gave a taut, clenched smile and avoided my eyes, looking 
around at the stacks of manuscript boxes and old books that lined the 
room. "You don't understand. I seem to have left my lecture notes in 
my private study in the Library bloc. As you can appreciate, it will 
be rather difficult for a man of my years to retrieve them under these 
conditions."
This clearly meant a lot to him, and I did not say "So? Write up 
some new ones!" For him, apparently, it was a fatal blow.
"You see," he continued, sounding stronger now that his secret 
was out. "Ahem. There is in my field a large corpus of basic 
knowledge, absolutely fundamental. It must be learned by any new 
student, which is why it appears in my courses and so forth. I, er, 
I've forgotten it entirely. Somehow. With my engagements and 
editorial positions, conferences, trips, consultations, et cetera, and of 
course all my writingwell, there's simply no room for trivia. So if 
I am hired away by another university and asked to teach, or some 
dreadful thingyou can imagine my embarrassment."
I was embarrassed myself, remembering now a snatch of 
overheard conversation among three grad students, one of whom 
referred contemptuously to "Emeritus Home-free Etcetera," who 
apparently was making him do a great deal of pointless research, 
check out books for him and pay the fines, put money in his parking 
meters and so on. If that was Forthcoming's style, I could understand 
what this break in routine would do to his career. He was only a 
scholar when there was a university to say he was.
A distant machine-gun blast echoed down the hallway. "Mr. 
Forthcoming," I said firmly. "I'd like to help you out, but for the 
moment it's not possible. I guess what I'm trying to say is  let's 
get the hell out of here!"
He wouldn't move.
"Look. Maybe if we get down to a safe place, we can see about 
getting your lecture notes back."
He looked up with such relief and hope that I wanted to spit. My 
unfortunate statement had given him new life. He stood up shakily, 
began to chatter happily and set about packing pipes and manuscripts 
into his briefcase.
As ever, the Burrows were calm. The GASF guards let us past 
the border after quick checks over their intercoms, and we were 
suddenly in a place unchanged since the days of old, where students 
roamed the hallways wild and free and research and classes 
continued obliviously. Most of the Burrows folk regarded the entire 
war/riot as a challenge for their ingenuity, and those who had not 
been sucked into Fred Fine's vortex of fantasy and paranoia set 
about preserving the ancient comforts with the enthusiasm of Boy 
Scouts lost in the woods.
The Science Shop was an autonomous dependency of Fred 
Fine's United Pure Plexorian Realm, and the hallway that led there 
was guarded, mostly symbolically, by Zap with his sawed-off 
shotgun and his favorite blunt instrument. He waved us through and 
we came to our haven for the war.


The vacuum of authority that filled the Plex for the first two 
weeks of April resulted from events in the Nuke Dump. The 
occupying terrorists warned that any attempt by authorities to 
approach the building would be met by the release of radioactive 
poisons into the city. The city police who ringed the Plex late on 
April First had no idea of how to deal with such a threat and called 
the Feds. The National Guard showed up a day later with armored 
personnel carriers, helicopters and tanks, but they, too, kept their 
distance. The Crotobaltislavonians had obviously intended to 
establish their own martial law in the Flex, enforcing it through their 
SUB proxies and the SUB's Terrorist proxies. But the blocked 
elevator shaft and the giant rats made their authority tenuous, and 
unbelievably fierce resistance from GASF and TUG kept the 
SUB/Terrorist Axis from seizing any more than E and F Towers. 
Instead of National Guard authority or Crotobaltislavonian authority, 
we ended up with no central authority at all.
The Towers were held by the best-armed groups. The Axis held 
E and F, the GASF held D, the administration anti-Terrorist squads 
B and C, and TUG held A, H, and G, prompting Hyacinth to remark 
that if this were tic-tac-toe the TUG would have won. The towers 
were easy to hold because access was limited; if you blocked shut 
the four outer fire stairs of each wing, you could control the only 
entrances to the tower with a handful of soldiers in the sixth-floor 
lobby. The base of the Plex was a bewildering 3-D labyrinth. Here 
things were much less stable as several groups struggled for control 
of useful ground, such as bathrooms, strategic stairways, rooms with 
windows and so forth. Many of these were factions that had split 
away from the Terrorists, finding the strict hierarchy and tight 
restrictions intolerable. Other important groups were made up of 
inner-city financial-aid students, who at least knew how to take care 
of themselves; one gang of small-towners from the Great Plains, also 
adept at mass violence; the hockey-wrestling coalition; and the 
Explorer post, which had a large interlocking membership with the 
ROTC students.
Those who were not equipped or inclined to fight fared poorly. 
Most ended up trapped in the towers for the duration, where all they 
could do was watch TV and reproduce. Escape from the Plex was 
impossible, because the nuclear Terrorists allowed no one to 
approach it, and snipers in the Axis towers made perilous the dash 
from the Main Entrance. Those who could not make it to the safety 
of a tower were not wanted by the bands of fighters in the Base, and 
so had to wander as refugees, most ending up in the Library. It was a 
very, very bad time to be an unescorted woman. We tried to make 
raids against weaker bands in order to rescue some of these unfor-
tunates, but only retrieved thirty or so.
Fire in the Plex was not the problem it had been feared to be. 
The plumbing still worked reasonably well and most people had 
enough sense to use the fire hoses. Many areas were smoky for days, 
though, to the point of being hostile to life, and bands driven from 
their own countries by smoke accounted for a good deal of the 
fighting. The food problem was minor because the Red Cross was 
allowed to distribute it in the building. Unfortunately there was no 
way to remove garbage, so it piled up in lobbies and stairwells and 
elevator shafts. Insects, invading through windows that had been 
broken out or removed to vent smoke, grew fruitful and multiplied; 
but this plague then abated, as the bat population swelled 
enormously to take advantage of the explosion in their food supply. 
By the end of the crisis, the top five floors of E Tower had been 
evacuated to make room for bats, who were moving down the tower 
at the rate of one floor every three days.
There were stable areas where well-armed people settled in and 
organized themselves. The Burrows were exceptionally stable, 
brilliantly organized by Fred Fine, and Virgil's Science Shop was an 
enclave of stability within that. About twenty people lived in the 
Shop; we slept on floors and workbenches, and cooked communally 
on lab burners. Fred Fine allowed us this autonomy for one reason: 
Shekondar the Fearsome/JANUS 64 had selected Virgil as his sole 
prophet.
Of course it was not really so simple. It was actually the Worm, 
and Virgil's countermeasures. As Virgil explained it, he had signed 
on to his terminal on March 31 to find a message waiting:
WELL MET WORM-HUNTING MERCENARY. YOU ARE 
ADEPT. LET US HOPE YOU ARE WELL PAID. SO FAR I 
HAVE ONLY FLEXED MY MUSCLES. NOW BEGINS THE 
DUEL.
The next day, of course, civilization had fallen. As soon as 
Virgil had been sure of this, he had signed on to find that his 
terminal had been locked out of the system by the Worm. This he 
had anticipated, and so he calmly proceeded to the Operator's 
Station, ejected Consuela and signed on there under a fake ID. Virgil 
had then commandeered six tape drives (to the dismay of the hackers 
who were using them) and mounted six tapes he had prepared for 
this day. He went to the Terminal Room, where sat hundreds of 
terminals in individual carrels. Here Virgil signed on to eighteen 
terminals at once, using fake accounts and passwords he had been 
keeping in reserve. On each terjninal he set in motion a different 
programusing information stored on the six special tapes. Each of 
these programs looked like a rather long but basically routine student 
effort, the sort of thing the Worm had long since stopped trifling 
with. But each did contain lengthy sections of machine code that had 
no relevance to the program proper.
Virgil returned to the Operator's Station and entered a single 
command. Its effect was to draw together the reins of the eighteen 
sham programs, to lift out, as it were, all those long machine code 
sections and interleave them into one huge powerful program that 
seemed to coalesce out of nowhere, having already penetrated the 
Worm's locks and defenses. This monster program, then, had calmly 
proceeded to wipe out all administrative memory and all student and 
academic software, and then to restructure the Operator to suit 
Virgil's purposes. It all wentpayroll records, library overdues, 
video-game programs. From the computer's point of view, American 
Megaversity ceased to exist in the time it took for a micro-transistor 
to flip from one state to the other.
A mortal wound for the university, but the university was 
already mortally wounded. This was the only way to prevent the 
Worm from seizing the entire computer within the next week or so. 
Virgil's insight had been that although the Worm had been designed 
to take into account any conceivable action on the Computing 
Center's part, it had not anticipated the possibility that someone 
might destroy all the records and dismantle the Operator simply to 
fight the Worm.
The Worm's message to Virgil had been the key: it had 
identified him as an employee of the Computing Center, a hired hit 
man. That was not an unreasonable assumption, considering Virgil's 
power. But it was wrong anyway, proving that the Worm could only 
take into account reasonably predictable events. The downfall of the 
university wasn't predictable, at least not to sociopath Paul Bennett, 
so he hadn't foreseen that anyone would take Virgil's pyrrhic 
approach.
Virgil now had enough processing power to run a large airline 
or a small developing country. The Worm could only loop back and 
start over and try to retake what it had lost, and this time against a 
much more formidable foe. So on hummed the CPU of the Janus 64, 
spending one picosecond performing a task for the Worm, the next a 
task for Virgil. The opponents met and mingled on the central chip 
of the CPU, which evenhandedly did the work of both at once, im-
passively computing out its own fate. Fred Fine noticed that no one 
could sign on now except Virgil, and concluded the obvious: Virgil 
was the Prophet of Shekondar, the Mage. So we saw little of Virgil, 
who had absorbed himself completely in the computer, who 
mumbled in machine language as he stirred his soup and spent 
fifteen hours a day sitting alone before the black triangular obelisk 
staring at endless columns of numbers.


Sarah, Hyacinth, Lucy and friends showed up late in the evening 
of the First, giddy and triumphant, and we had a delighted reunion. 
Ephraim Klein showed up at five in the morning bleeding from 
many small birdshot wounds, moving with incredible endurance for 
such a small, unhealthy-looking person. After establishing that the 
shot in his legs was steel, not lead, we sent him to Nirvana on 
laughing gas and generic beer and sucked out the balls with a large 
electromagnet. Casimir turned up suddenly, late on April second, 
slipping in so quietly that he seemed just to beam down. He dumped 
a load of clothing and sporting gear on a bench and set to work in a 
white creative heat we did not care to disturb.
"I told you," Ephraim said to Sarah, as he recovered. "We 
should blow this place up. Look what's happened."
"Yeah," said Sarah, "it's a bad situation."
"Bad situation! A fucking war! How many other universities do 
you know where a civil war closes off the academic year?"
Sarah shrugged. "Not too many."
"So why do you think we're having one? These people are a 
totally normal cross-section of the population, caught in a giant 
building that drives them crazy."
"Okay. Lie down and stop moving around so much, okay?" She 
wandered around the shop watching a goggled Casimir slice into a 
fencing mask with a plate grinder. In one corner, Hyacinth was 
teaching the joys of bunsen-burner cuisine to a small child who had 
been caught up in the fighting and sent down here by grace of the 
Red Cross. Sarah suddenly walked back to Ephraim.
"You're wrong," she said. "It's nothing to do with the Plex. 
What people do isn't determined by where they live. It happens to be 
their damned fault. They decided to watch TV instead of thinking 
when they were in high school. They decided to take blow-off 
courses and drink beer instead of reading and trying to learn 
something. They decided to chicken out and be intolerant bastards 
instead of being openminded, and finally they decided to go along 
with their buddies and do things that were terribly wrong when there 
was no reason they had to. Anyone who hurts someone else decides 
to hurt them, goes out of their way to do it."
"But the pressures! The social pressures here are irresistible. 
How"
"I resisted them. You resisted them. The fact that it's hard to be 
a good person doesn't excuse going along and being an asshole. If 
they can't overcome their own fear of being unusual, it's not my 
fault, because any idiot ought to be able to see that if he just acts 
reasonably and makes a point of not hurting others, he'll be 
happier."
"You don't even have to try to hurt people here. The place 
forces it on you. You can't sit up in bed without waking up your 
goddamn neighbor. You can't take a shower without sucking off the 
hot water and freezing the next one down. You can't go to eat 
without making the people behind you wait a little longer, and even 
by eating the food you increase the amount they have to make, and 
decrease the quality."
"That's all crap! That's the way life is, Ephraim. It has nothing 
to do with the architecture of the Plex."
"Look at the sexism in this place. Doesn't that ever bother you? 
Don't you think that if people weren't so packed together in this 
space, the bars and the parties wouldn't be such meat markets? 
Maybe there would be fewer rapes if we could teach people how to 
get along with the other sex."
"If you want to prevent rapes, you should make a justice system 
that protects our right not to be raped. Education? How do you pull 
off that kind of education? How do you design a rape-proof dorm? 
Look, Ephraim, all we can do is protect people's rights. We wouldn't 
get a change in attitude by moving to another building. The 
education you're talking about is just a pipe dream."
"I still think we should blow this fucker up."
"Good. Work on it. In the meantime Ill continue to carry a gun."


Professor Forthcoming, or "Emeritus" as Hyacinth called him, 
followed me around a great deal, jabbering about his lecture notes, 
prodding my latissimus muscles and marveling at how easy it would 
be for me, a former first-string college nose guard with a gun, to 
rescue them from the Library. I did not have the heart to discourage 
him. In the end, all I could do was make sure he paid for it: made 
him promise that he would sit down and study those notes so that he 
could rewrite them if he had to. He promised unashamedly, but by 
the time we organized the quest he was already looking forward to a 
conference in Monaco in the fall, and listening to the casualty reports 
on the radio to hear if any of his key grad students had been greased.
No, said Fred Fine, the APPASMU was not available for raids 
on the Library. But we could have some soldiers and one AK-47, on 
the condition that, given the choice between abandoning the quest 
and abandoning the assault rifle, we would abandon the quest. I 
loudly agreed to this before Emeritus could sputter any 
disagreements. Our party was me, Hyacinth, Emeritus, four GASF 
soldiers and the Science Shop technician Lute. Sarah stayed behind 
reading The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the 
Bicameral Mtnd.
Our route took us through fairly stable academic blocs, and 
other areas controlled by gangs. We could not avoid passing through 
the area controlled by Hansen's Gang, the smalltowners of the Great 
Plains. They were not well armed, but neither was anyone else in the 
base, and they had jumped into the fray with the glee of any rural in 
an informal blunt-instruments fight and come out winners. This was 
their idiom. Our negotiations with their leader were straightforward: 
we showed them our AK-47 and offered not to massacre them if they 
let us pass without hassle. Their leader had no trouble grasping this, 
but many of the members seemed to have a bizarre mental block: 
they could not see the AK-47 in Hyacinth's hands. All they saw was 
Hyacinth, the first clean healthy female they had seen in a week, and 
they came after her as though she were unarmed. "Hey! She's 
mine!" yelled one of these as we entered their largest common area.
"Fuck you," said another, swinging a motorcycle chain past his 
brother's eyes at high speed. He turned and began to trudge toward 
Hyacinth, hitching up his pants. "Hey, bitch, I'm gonna breed you," 
he said cheerfully. Hyacinth aimed the gun at him; he looked at her 
face. She pulled the bolt into firing position and squared off; he kept 
coming. When I stepped forward he brandished his chain, then 
changed course as Hyacinth stepped out from behind me.
"Go for it," and "All right, for sure, Combine," yelled his pals.
"Hyacinth, please don't do that," I said, plugging my ears. She 
fired off half a clip in one burst and pulverized a few square feet of 
cinderblock wall right next to the man's head. The lights went out as 
a power cable was severed. Courtesy of a window, we could still see.
"Shit, what the fuck?" someone inquired.
Rather than trying to explain, we proceeded from the room. "I 
like that bitch," someone said as we were leaving, "but she's weird. I 
dunno what's wrong with her."
The Mailroom was an armistice zone between Hansen's Gang 
and the Journalism Department. The elevators here descended to the 
mail docks, making this one of the few ports of entry to the Plex. 
The publicity-minded Crotobaltislavonians had worked out an 
agreement with one of the networksyou know which, if you 
watched any news in this period allowing the camera crews to 
come and go through this room. The network's hired guards all toted 
machine guns. We counted twenty automatic weapons in this room 
alone, which probably meant that the network had the entire Axis 
outgunned.
In exchange for a brief interview, which was never aired, and 
for all the information we could provide about other parts of the 
Plex, we were allowed into the Journalism bloc. Here we picked up a 
three-man minicam crew who followed along for a while. Emeritus 
was magnificently embarrassed and insisted on walking behind the 
camera. One of the crew was an AM student, and I talked to him 
about the network's operations.
"You've got a hell of a lot of firepower. You guys are the most 
powerful force in the Plex. How are you using it?"
The student shrugged. "What do you mean? We protect our 
crews and equipment. All the barbarians are afraid of us.
"Right, obviously," I said. "But I noticed recently that a lot of 
people around here are starving, being raped, murderedyou know, 
a lot of bum-out stuff. Do those guards try to help out? You can 
spare a few."
"Well, I don't know," he said uncomfortably. "That's kind of 
network-level policy. It goes against the agreement. We can go 
anywhere as long as we don't interfere. If we interfere, no 
agreement."
"But if you've already negotiated one agreement, can't you do 
more? Get some doctors into the building, maybe?"
"No way, man. No fucking way. We journalists have ethics."
The camera crew turned back when we reached the border of the 
Geoanthropological Planning Science Department, a bloc with only 
two entrances. My office was here, and I hoped I could get us 
through to the other side. The heavy door was bullet-pocked, the 
lock had been shot at more than once, but it was blocked from the 
other side and we could hear a guard beyond. Nearby, in an alcove, 
under a pair of drinking fountains, stretched out straight and dead on 
the floor, was a middle-aged faculty member, his big stoneware 
coffee mug still clenched in his cold stiff fingers. He had apparently 
died of natural causes.

As it turned out, the guard was a grad student I knew, who let us 
in. He was tired and dirty, with several bandages, a bearded face, 
bleary red eyes and matted hairjust as he had always looked. 
Three other grads sat there in the reception room reading two-year-
old U.S. News and World Reports and chomping hunks of beef jerky.
While my friends took a breather, I stopped by my office and 
checked my mailbox. On the way back I peeked into the Faculty 
Lounge.
The entire Geoanthropological Planning Science faculty was 
there, sitting around the big conference table, while a few favored 
grad students stood back against the walls. Several bowls of potato 
chips were scattered over the table and at least two kegs were active. 
The room was dark; they were having a slide show.
"Whoops! Looks like I tilted the camera again on this one," said 
Professor Longwood sheepishly, nearly drowned out by derisive 
whoops from the crowd. "How did this get in here? This is part of 
the Labrador tundra series. Anyway, it's not a bad shot, though I 
used the wrong film, which is why everything's pink. That 
corkscrew next to the caribou scat gives you some idea of scale" 
but my opening the door had spilled light onto the image, and 
everyone turned around to look at me.
"Bud!" cried the Chair. "Glad you could make it! Want some 
beer? It's dark beer."
"Sounds good," I said truthfully, "but I'm just stopping in."
"How are things?" asked Professor Longwood.
"Fine, fine. I see you're all doing well too. Have you been 
outside much? I mean, in the Plex?"
There was bawdy laughter and everyone looked at a sheepish 
junior faculty member, a heavyset man from Upper Michigan. "Bert 
here went out to shoot some slides," explained the Chair, "and ran 
into some of those hayseeds. He told them he was a journalist and 
they backed off, but then they saw he didn't have a press pass, so he 
had to kick one of them in the nuts and give the other his camera!"
"Don't feel bad, Bert," said a mustachioed man nearby. "Well 
get a grant and buy you a new one." We all laughed.
"So you're here for the duration?" I asked.
"Shouldn't last very long," said a heavily bearded professor who 
was puffing on a pipe. "We are working up a model to see how long 
the food needs of the population can last. We're using survival ratios 
from the 1782 Bulgarian famineactually quite similar to this 
situation. We're having a hell of a time getting data, but the model 
says it shouldn't last more than a week. As for us, we've got an 
absolute regional monopoly on beer, which we trade with the 
Journalism people for food."
"Have you taken into account the rats and bats?" I asked.
"Huh? Where?" The room was suddenly still.
"We've got giant rats downstairs, and billions of bats upstairs. 
The rats are this long. Eighty to a hundred pounds. No hearts. I hear 
they've worked their way up to the lower sublevels now, and they're 
climbing up through the stacks of garbage in the elevator shafts."
"Shit!" cried Bert, beating his fists wildly on the table. "What a 
time to lose my fucking camera!"
"Let's catch one," said his biologist wife.
"Well, we could adjust the model to account for exogenous 
factors," said the bearded modeler.
"We'd have people eating rats, and rats eating people," said the 
mustachioed one.
"And rats eating bats."
"And bats eating bugs eating dead rats."
"The way to account for all that is with a standard input! output 
matrix," said the Chair commandingly.
"These rats sound similar to wolverines," said Longwood, 
cycling through the next few slides. "I think I have some wolverine 
scats a few slides ahead, if this is the series I think it is.,'
Seeing that they had split into a slide and a modeling faction, I 
stepped out. A few minutes later we were back on the road.
We were attacked by a hopeless twit who was trying to use a 
shotgun like a long-range rifle. I was nicked in the cheek by one ball. 
Hyacinth splashed him all over a piece of abstract sculpture made of 
welded-together lawn ornaments. The GASFers, who were 
humiliated that a female should carry the big gun, were looking as 
though they'd never have another erection.
We passed briefly through the Premed Center, which was filed 
with pale mutated undergrads dissecting war casualties and trying to 
gross each other out. I yelled at them to get outside and assist the 
wounded, but received mostly blank stares. "We can't," said one of 
them, scandalized, "we're not even in med school yet."
From here we entered the Medical Library, and from there, the 
Library proper.
Huge and difficult to guard, the Library was the land of the 
refugees. It had no desirable resources, but was a fine place in which 
to hide because the bookshelves divided into thousands of crannies. 
Waves of refugees made their way here and holed up, piling books 
into forts and rarely venturing out.
The first floor was unguarded and sparsely occupied. We stuck 
to the open areas and proceeded to the second floor.
Here was a pleasant surprise. An organized relief effort had 
been formed, mostly by students in Nursing, Classics, History, 
Languages and Phys. Ed. By trading simple medical services to the 
barbarians they had obtained enough guns to guard the place. An 
incoming refugee would be checked out by a senior Nursing major 
or occasional premed volunteer, then given a place in the stacks
"your place is DG 311 1851 and its vicinity"and so on. Most of 
the stragglers could then hide out between bulletproof walls of 
paper, while the seriously wounded could be lowered out the 
windows to the Red Cross people below. In the same way, food, 
supplies and brave doctors could be hoisted into the Plex. The 
atmosphere was remarkably quiet and humane, and all seemed in 
good humor.
The rest of our journey was uneventful. We climbed to the 
fourth floor and wended our way toward Emeritus' study. Soon we 
could smell smoke, and see it hanging in front of the lights. To the 
relief of Emeritus, it came not from his office but from the open door 
of the one labeled "Embers, Archibald."
Three men and a woman, all unarmed, sat around a small fire, 
occasionally throwing on another book. They had broken out the 
window to vent the smoke.
The woman shrieked as I appeared in the door. "Jesus! If I had a 
gun, you'd be dead now. I react so uncontrollably."
"Good thing you don't," I observed.
"It's really none of your business," intoned a thin, pale man. 
"But I suppose that since you have that wretched gun, you're going 
to have us do what you want. Well, we don't have anything you 
could want here. And forget about Zelda here. She's a lousy lay."
Zelda shrieked in amusement. "It's a good thing you're witty 
when you're a bastard, Terence, or I'd despise you."
"Oh, do go ahead. I adore being despised. I really do. It's so 
inspiring."
"Society despises the artist," said Embers, lighting a Dunhill in 
the bookfire, "unless he panders to the masses. But society treats the 
artist civilly so he can't select specific targets for his hatred. Open 
personal hatred is so very honest."
"Now that's meaningful, Arch," said the other man, a brief lump 
with an uncertain goatee.
"How come you're burning books?" I asked.
"Oh, that, well," said Embers, "Terence wanted a fire."
Terence piped up again. "This whole event is so very like 
camping out, don't you agree? Except without the dreadful ants and 
so forth. I thought a fire would be veryprimal. But it smoked 
dreadfully, so we broke out the window, and now it's very cold and 
we must keep it going ceaselessly, of course. Is that adequate? Is that 
against Library rules?"
"We've been finding," added Embers, "that older books are 
much better. They burn more slowly. And with their thin pages, 
Bibles and dictionaries are quite effective. I'm taking some notes." 
He waved a legal pad at me.
"Also," added the small one, "old books are printed on acid-free 
paper, so we aren't getting acid inside of our lungs."
"Why don't you just cover the window and put it out?" I asked.
"Aren't we logical?" said Terence. "You people are all so 
tediously Western. We wanted a fire, you can't take it away! What 
happened to academic freedom? Say, are you quite finished with 
your bloody suggestions? I'm trying to read one of my fictions to 
these people, Mr. Spock."
I followed my friends into Emeritus' office. Behind me Terence 
resumed his reading. "The thin stream of boiling oil dribbled from 
the lip of the frying pan and seared into the boy's white flesh. As he 
squirmed against the bonds that were holding him down, unable to 
move, it ran into the bed of thorny roses underneath him; the petals 
began to wither like a dying western sunset at dusk."
A minute or two later, as we exited with Emeritus' papers, there 
was a patter of applause. "Ravishing, Terence. Quite frankly, it's 
similar to Erasmus T. Bowlware's Gulag Pederast. Especially the 
self-impalement of the heroine on the electric fencepost of the 
concentration camp as she is driven into a frenzy by psychic 
emanations from the possessed child in the nearby mansion where 
the defrocked epileptic priest gives up his life in order to get the 
high-technology secrets to the Jewish commandos. I do like it."
"When do I get to read my fiction?" asked Zelda.
"Is this from the novel about the female writer who is struggling 
to write a novel about a woman writer who is writing a novel about a 
woman artist in Nazi Germany with a possessed daughter?" asked 
Embers.
"Well, I decided to make her a liberated prostitute and psychic," 
said Zelda; and that was the last I heard of the conversation, or of the 
people.
We deposited Emeritus in the refugee camp on the second floor 
and made it back to the Science Shop in about an hour. There, Sarah 
and Casimir were deep in conversation, and Ephraim Klein was 
listening in.


Casimir's finished suit of armor used bulletproof fabric taken 
from a couple of associate deans. The administration was unhappy 
about that, but they could only get to Casimir by shooting their way 
through the Unified Pure Plexorian Realm. Underneath the fabric, 
Casimir wore various hard objects to protect his flesh from impact. 
On legs and knees he wore soccer shinguards and the anti-
kneecapping armor favored by administration members. He wore a 
jockstrap with a plastic cup, and over his torso was a heavy, crude 
breastplate that he had endlessly and deafeningly hammered out of 
half a fifty-five gallon oil drum. Down his back he hung overlapping 
shingles of steel plate to protect his spine.
His head was protected by a converted defensive lineman's 
football helmet. He had cut the front out of a fencing mask and 
attached the wire mesh over the plastic bars of the helmet's 
facemask. Over the earholes he placed a pair of shooter's ear 
protectors. So that he would not overheat, he cut a hole in the back 
of the helmet and ran a flexible hose to it. The other end of the hose 
he connected to a battery-powered blower hung on his belt, and to 
get maximum cooling benefit he shaved his head. The helmet as a 
whole was draped with bulletproof fabric which hung down a foot 
on all sides to cover the neck. And as someone happened to notice, 
he took his snapshot of Sarah and Hyacinth and taped it to the inside 
of the helmet with grey duct tape.
When Casimir was in full battle garb, his only vulnerable points 
were feet, hands and eye-slit. Water could be had by sucking on a 
tube that ran down to a bicyclist's water bottle on his belt. And it 
should not go unmentioned that Casimir, draped in thick creamy-
white fabric, with blazing yellow and blue running shoes, topped 
with an enormous shrouded neckless head, a faceless dome with 
bulges over the ears and a glittering silver slit for the eyes, a sword 
from the Museum in hand, looked indescribably terrible and 
fearsome, and for the first time in his life people moved to the walls 
to avoid him when he walked down the hallways.


It was a very smoke-filled room that Casimir ventilated by 
swinging in through the picture window on the end of a rope. 
Through the soft white tobacco haze, Oswald Heimlich saw his 
figure against the sky for an instant before it burst into the room and 
did a helpless triple somersault across the glossy parquet floor. 
Heimlich was already on his feet, snatching up his $4,000 engraved 
twelve-gauge shotgun and flicking off the safety. As the intruder 
staggered to his feet, Heimlich sighted over the head of the Trustee 
across from him (who reacted instinctively by falling into the lap of 
the honorable former mayor) and fired two loads of .00 buckshot 
into this strange Tarzan's lumpy abdomen. The intruder took a step 
back and remained standing as the shot plonked into his chest and 
clattered to the floor. Heimlich fired again with similar effects. By 
now the great carved door had burst open and five guards dispersed 
to strategic positions and pointed their UZIs at the suspicious visitor. 
S. S. Krupp watched keenly.
The guards made the obligatory orders to freeze. He slowly 
reached around and began to draw a dueling sword from the 
Megaversity historical collections out of a plastic pipe scabbard. 
Tied to its handle was a white linen napkin with the AM coat of 
arms, which he waved suggestively.
"I swear," said S. S. Krupp, "don't you have a phone, son?"
No one laughed. These were white male Eastern businessmen, 
and they were serious. Heimlich in particular was not amused; this 
man looked very much like the radiation emergency workers who 
had been staggering through his nightmares for several nights 
running, and having him crash in out of a blue sky into a Board of 
Trustees meeting was not a healthy experience. He sat there with his 
eyes closed for several moments as waiters scurried in to sweep up 
the broken glass.
"I'll bet you want to do a little negotiating," said Krupp, 
annoyingly relaxed. "Who're you with?"
"I owe allegiance to no man," came the muffled voice from 
behind the mask, "but come on behalf of all."
"Well, that's good! That's a fine attitude," said Krupp. "Set 
yourself down and we'll see what we can do."
The intruder took an empty chair, laid his sword on the table and 
peeled off his hood of fabric to reveal the meshed-over football 
helmet, A rush of forced air was exhaled from his facemask and 
floated loose sheets of paper down the table.
"Why did you put a nuclear waste dump in the basement?"
Everyone was surprised, if genteel, and they exchanged raised 
eyebrows for a while.
"Maybe Ozzie can tell you about that," suggested Krupp. "I was 
still in Wyoming at the time."
Heimlich scowled. "I won't deny its existence. Our reasons for 
wanting it must be evident. Perhaps if I tell you its history, you'll 
agree with us, whoever you are. Ahem. You may be aware that until 
recently we suffered from bad management at the presidential level. 
We had several good presidents in the seventies, but then we got 
Tony Commodi, who was irresponsiblean absolute mongoloid 
when it came to financeinsisted on teaching several classes 
himself, and so forth. He raised salaries while keeping tuition far too 
low. People became accustomed to it. At this time we Trustees were 
widely dispersed and made no effort to lead the university. Finally 
we were nearly bankrupt. Commodi was forced to resign by faculty 
and Trustees and was replaced by Pertinax Rushforth, who in those 
days was quite the renascence man, and widely respected. We 
Trustees were still faced with impossible financial problems, but we 
found that if we sold all the old campushundreds of acres of prime 
inner-city real estatewe could pull in enough capital to build 
something like the Plex on the nine blocks we retained.


But of course the demographics made it clear that times would 
be very rough in the years to come. We could not compete for 
students, and so we had to run a very tight ship and seek innovative 
sources for our operating funds. We could have entered many small 
ventureshigh technology spinoffs, you seebut this would have 
been extraordinarily complex, highly controversial and 
unpredictable, besides raising questions about the proper function of 
the university.
"It was then that we hit upon the nuclear waste idea. Here is 
something that is not dependent on the economy; we will always 
have these wastes to dispose of. It's highly profitable, as there is a 
desperate demand for disposal facilities. The wastes must be stored 
for millennia, which means that they are money in the bankthe 
government, whatever form it takes, must continue to pay us until 
their danger has died away. And by its very nature it must be done 
secretly, so no controversy is generated, no discord disrupts the 
normal functions of the academythere need be no relationship be-
tween the financial foundation and the intellectual activities of the 
university. It's perfect."
"See, this city is on a real stable salt-dome area," added a heavy 
man in an enormous grey suit, "and now that there's no more crude 
down there, it's suitable for this kind of storage."
"You," said the knight, pointing his sword at the man who had 
just spoken, "must be in the oil business. Are you Ralph Priestly?"
"Ha! Well, yeah, that's me," said Ralph Priestly, unnerved.
"We have to talk later."
"How did you know about our disposal site?" asked Heimlich.
"That doesn't matter. What matters now is: how did the 
government of Crotobaltislavonia find out about it?"
"Oh," said Heimlich, shocked. "You know about that also."
"Yep."

After a pause, S. S. Krupp continued. "Now, don't go tell your 
honchos that we did this out of greed. America had to start doing 
something with this wastethat's a fact. You know what a fact is? 
That's something that has nothing to do with politics. The site is as 
safe as could be. See, some things just can't be handed over to 
political organizations, because they're so damned unstable. But 
great universities can last for thousands of years. Hell, look at the 
changes of government the University of Paris has survived in the 
last century alone! This facility had to be built and it had to be done 
by a university. The big steady cash flow makes us more stable, and 
that makes us better qualified to be running the damn thing in the 
first place. Symbiosis, son."
"Wait. If you're making so much money off of this, why are you 
so financially tight-assed?"
"That's a very good question," said Heimlich. "As I said, it's 
imperative that this facility remain secret. If we allowed the cash 
flow to show up on our ledgers, this would be impossible. We've 
had to construct a scheme for processing or laundering, as it were, 
our profits through various donors and benefactors. In order to allay 
suspicion, we keep these 'donations' as small as we can while 
meeting the university's basic needs."
"What about the excess money?"
"What's done with that depends on how long the site remains 
secret. Therefore we hold the surplus in escrow and invest it in the 
name of American Megaversity, so that in the meantime it is 
productively used."
"Invest it where? Don't tell me. Heimlich Freedom Industries. 
the Big Wheel Petroleum Corporation"
"Well," said Ralph Priestly, cutting the tip off a cigar. "Big 
Wheel's a hell of an investment. I run a tight ship."
"We don't deny that the investments are in our best interests," 
said a very old Trustee with a kindly face. "But there's nothing 
wrong with that, as long as we do not waste or steal the money. 
Every investment we make in some way furthers the nation's 
economic growth."
"But you're no different from the Crotobaltislavonians, in 
principle. You're using your control over the wastes to blackmail 
whatever government comes along."
"That's an excellent observation," said Krupp. "But the fact is, 
if you'll just think about it, that as long as the waste exists, 
someone's going to control them, and whoever does can blackmail 
whatever government there is, and as long as someone's going to 
have that influence, it might as well be good people like us."
The knight drummed his fingers on the table, and the Trustees 
peered at his inscrutable silver mask. "I see from the obituaries that 
Bert Nix and Pertinax Rushforth were one and the same. What 
happened to him?"
Heimlich continued. "Pertinax couldn't hack it. He was all for 
fiscal conservatism, of courseBert was not a soft-headed man at 
any point. But when he learned he was firing people and cutting 
programs just to maintain this charade, he lost his strength of will. 
The faculty ruined his life with their hatred, he had a nervous 
breakdown and we sacked him. Then the MegaUnion began to 
organize a tuition strike, so the remaining old-guard Trustees threw 
up their hands, caved in and installed Julian Didius as President!" At 
the memory of this, several of the Trustees sighed or moaned with 
contempt. "Well! Alter he had enjoyed those first three weeks of 
flying in all his intelligentsia comrades for wine and cheese parties, 
we got him in here and showed him the financial figures, which 
looked disastrous. Then he met Pertinax after the electroshock, and 
realized what a bloody hell-hole he was in. Three days later he went 
to the Dean's Office for a chat, and when the Dean turned out to be 
addressing a conference in Hawaii, he blew his top and hurled 
himself out the window, and then we brought in Septimius and he's 
straightened things out wonderfully." There were admiring grins 
around the table, though Krupp did not appear to be listening.
"Did Pertinax have master keys, then, or what? How did he keep 
from being kicked out of the Plex?"
"We allowed the poor bastard to stay because we felt sorry for 
him," said Krupp. "He wouldn't live anywhere else."
The angle of the knight's head dropped a little.
"So," said Heimlich briskly, "for some reason you knew our 
best-kept secrets. We hope you will understand our actions now and 
not do anything rash. Do you follow?"
"Yes," murmured the knight, "unfortunately."
"What is unfortunate about it?"
"The more thoughtful you people are, the worse you get. Why is 
that?"
"What do we do that is wrong, Casimir Radon?" said Krupp 
quietly.
The mask rose and gleamed at S. S. Krupp, and then its owner 
lifted off the helmet to reveal his shaven head and permanently 
consternated face.
"Lie a hell of a lot. Fire people when you don't have to. 
Createcreate a very complicated web of lies, to snare a simple, 
good ideal."
"I don't think it's a hell of a lot of fun," said Krupp, "and it 
hurts sometimes, more than you can suppose. But great goals aren't 
attained with ease or simplicity or pleasantry, or whatever you're 
looking for. If we gave into the MegaUnion, we would tip our hand 
and cause ruination. As long as we're putting on this little song-and-
dance, we've got to make it a complete song-and-dance, because if 
the orchestra's playing a march and the dancers are waltzing, the 
audience riots. The theater burns."
"At least you could be more conciliatory."
"Conciliatory! Listen, son, when you've got snakes in the 
basement and the water's rising, it's no time to conciliate. 
Someone's got to have some principles in education, and it might as 
well be us. If this country's educators hadn't had their heads in their 
asses for forty years, we wouldn't have a faculty union, and more of 
our students might be sentient. I'll have strap marks on my ass 
before I conciliate with those medicine men down there on the picket 
lines."
"You're trying to fire everyone. That's a little extreme."
"Not if we're to be consistent," said Heimlich. "We can use the 
opportunity to rearrange our financial platform, and hire new people. 
There are many talented academics desperate for work these days, 
and the best faculty members here won't let themselves be taken out 
en masse anyway."
"You're going to do it, aren't you!"
"It's evident that we have no choice."
"Don't you think" Casimir looked out at the clear blue sky.
"What?"
"That if the administration gets to be as powerful as you, you 
have killed the university?"
"Look, son," said Ralph Priestly, rolling forward. "We never 
claimed this was an ideal situation. We're just doing our best. We 
don't have much choice."
"We're rather busy, as you can imagine," said Heimlich finally. 
"What do you want? Something for the railgun?" He sat up abruptly. 
"How is the railgun?"
"Safe."
Heimlich smiled for the first time in a week. "I'd like to know 
what a 'safe' railgun is.,,
"Maybe you'll find out."
Everyone looked disturbed.
"We are prepared to remove the Terrorists from the waste 
disposal site," said Casimir crisply, "as a public service. The 
estimated time will be one week. Beforehand, we plan to evacuate 
the Plex. We require your cooperation in two areas.
"First, we will need control of the Plex radio station. One of our 
group has developed a scheme for evacuating the Plex which makes 
this necessary.
"The second requirement is for the consideration of you, Ralph 
Priestly. What we want, Ralph, is for some person of yours to sit by 
the switch that controls the Big Wheel sign. When we phone him 
and say, 'Fiat lux,' he is to turn it on, and when we say, 'Fiat 
obscuritas,' off.
"That commando team you tried to send in through the sewers 
last night was stopped by a RAT, or Rodent Assault Tactics team 
associated with us. Well be releasing them soon, we can't do much 
more with first aid. The point is that only we can get rid of the 
Terrorists. We just ask that you do not interfere."
Finished, Casimir sat back, hands clasped on breastplate, and 
stared calmly at a skylight. The Board of Trustees moved down to 
the far end of the table. Alter they had talked for a few minutes, S. S. 
Krupp walked over and shook hands with Casimir.
"We're with you," Krupp said proudly. "Wish I knew what the 
hell you had in mind. What's your timetable?"
"Don't know. Youil have plenty of warning."
"Can we supply men? Arms?" asked Heimlich.
"Nope. One gun is all we need." Casimir let go of Krupp's hand 
and walked down the table, unclipping himself from the rope and 
throwing it out to dangle there. A forest of pinstripes rushed up the 
other side, trying to circumnavigate the table and shake Casimir's 
hand too. Casimir stopped by the exit.
"I probably won't see you again. Bear in mind, after the 
university starts running again, two things: we control the rats. And 
we control the Worm. You no longer monopolize power in this 
institution."
The Trustees stopped dead at this breach of pleasantness and 
stared at Casimir. Krupp looked on as though monitoring a field of 
battle from a high tower. Casimir continued. "I just mention this 
because it makes a difference in what is reasonable for you to do, 
and what is not. Good-bye." As he reached for the doorknob, he 
found the door briskly opened by a guard; he nodded to the man and 
strode out into an anteroom.
"Soldier," said Septimius Severus Krupp, "see that that man 
receives safe passage back to his own sphere of influence."


Night fell, and Towers A, B, C, D, H and G began to flash on 
and off in perfect unison. Every tower except for E and F homes 
of the Axiswas blinking in and out of existence every two 
seconds. As the Axis people saw it, the entire Plex was disappearing 
into the night, then re-igniting, over and over. It was much closer 
than the Big Wheel; it was far larger; it surrounded them on three 
sides. The effect was stupefying.
Dex Fresser ran to his observation post. In the corridors of 
E13S, Terrorists wandered like decapitated chickens. Some were 
hearing voices telling them to look, some not to look, to run or stay, 
to panic or relax. The SUBbie who was supposed to guard the 
lounge-headquarters had dropped his gun on the floor and 
disappeared. Fresser burst into the lounge to consult with Big Wheel.
Big Wheel had gone dark.
He turned on the Little Wheelthe Go Big Red Fan.
"Big Wheel must be mad at you or something. What the fuck 
did you do wrong?" shouted the Fan, loud, omnipresent and angry. 
Dex Fresser shrank, got on his knees and snuffled a little. Outside, a 
bewildered stereo-hearer was playing with the knobs on his ghetto 
blaster, desperate for advice.
"The stereo! The stereo, dipshit, find that frequency! Find the 
frequency," said the Fan in the voice of Dex Fresser's old 
scoutmaster. Dcx Fresser tumbled over a chair in his haste to reach 
the stereo. The only light in the room was cast by the glowing LEDs 
on his stereo that looked out like feral eyes in the night. All systems 
were go for stereo energize. As Dex Fresser's hands played over the 
controls, dozens of lights kicked in with important systems data, and 
green digits glowed from the tuner to tell him his position on the FM 
dial. Only dense static came from the speakers, meaningless to 
anyone else; but he could hear Big Wheel guiding him in the voice 
of his first-grade ballroom dance teacher.
"A little farther down, dear. Keep going right down the dial. 
You're certain to get it eventually."
Dex Fresser punched buttons and a light came on, saying: 
"AUTO DOWNWARD SCAN." He now heard many voices from 
the dark cones of the speakers: funky jazz-playing fascists, "great 
huge savings nowNeil Young wailing into his harmonica, a call-in 
guest suggesting that we load the Mexicans on giant space barges 
and hurl them into the sun, a base hit by Chambliss, an ad for rat 
poison, a teen, apoplectic about his acne. . . and then the voice he was 
looking for.
"On. Off. On. Off. On. Off." It was a woman's voice, somehow 
familiar.
"It's Sarah, dumbshit," said the Go Big Red Fan. "She's on the 
campus station."
Indeed. The other towers were going on and off just as Sarah 
told them to. He knelt there for ten minutes, watching their reflection 
in the glassy surface of the Big Wheel. On. Off. On. Off.
"On," she said, and paused. "Most of you did very well! But 
we've got some holdouts in E and F Towers. I'm sorry to say that 
Big Wheel won't be showing up this evening. He will not be here to 
give us his advice without cooperation from the E and F tower 
hearers. We'll try later. I'll be back in an hour, at midnight, and by 
then I hope that you SUBbies and Terrorists will have submitted to 
Big Wheel's will." Sarah was replaced by Ephraim Klein, who 
started in with another solid hour of pre-classical keyboard 
selections.
Dcx Fresser was clutching his chest, which felt unbearably tight. 
"Oh, shit," he exclaimed, "it's us! We're keeping Big Wheel off! 
Everybody put your stereos on ninety point three! Do as she says!"
Down in Electrical Control, deep in the Burrows, I and the other 
switch-throwers rested. The circuit breakers that supply power to an 
entire tower are large items, not at all easy to throw on and off every 
two seconds!
By midnight we were rested up and ready to go. Sarah resumed 
her broadcast.
"I sure hope we can get Big Wheel to come on. Let's hope E 
and F Towers go along this time. Ready? Everyone standing by their 
light switch? OkayOffOnOff"
From his lounge-headquarters, Dex Fresser watched his towers 
flash raggedly on and off. Some of the lights were not flashing; but 
within minutes the Wing Commisars had swept through and shot out 
any strays, and Dcx Fresser was undescribably proud that his towers 
could flash like the others. Big Wheel could not forsake them now.
"On!" cried Sarah, and stopped. Several lights went off again 
from habit, then coyly flickered back on. There was an unbearable 
wait.
"I think we've done it," Sarah said. "Look at Big Wheel!"
And the wheel of fire cast its light over the Plex with all its 
former glory. Dex wept.
"Not bad for a fascist," observed Little Wheel.
The Big Wheel spun all night.
It was trickier to get the attention of the barbarians of the Base. 
Most of them did not have bicameral minds and thus could not be 
made to hear mysterious voices. We needed to impress them. Hence 
Sarah predicted that in twenty-four hours a plague of rats would 
strike Journalism, unless all the journalists cleared out of the Plex.
"Frank," said the reporter into the camera, "I'm here in the 
American Megaversity mailroom, our operations center for the Plex 
war. It's been quiet on all fronts tonight despite former Student 
President Sarah Jane Johnson's prediction of a 'plague of rats.' Well, 
we've seen a few rats here"his image is replaced by shot of small 
rat scurrying down empty corridor, terrified by TV lights"but 
perhaps that's not unusual in these very strange, very special 
circumstances. We toured the Plex today, looking for plagues of rats, 
leaving no stone unturned to find the animals of which Ms. Johnson 
spoke. We looked in garbage heaps"shot of journalist digging in 
garbage with long stick; sees nothing, turns to camera, holds nose, 
says "phew!""but all we found were bugs. We toured the 
corridors"journalist alone in long empty corridor; camera swivels 
around to look in other direction; nothing there either; back to 
journalist"but apparently the rats were somewhere else. We 
checked the classrooms, but the only rats there were on paper"
journalist standing in stolen lab coat next to diagram of rat's nervous 
system"Finally, though, we did manage to find one rat. In a little-
used lab, Frank, in a little cage, we found one very hungry white 
rat"back to mailroom; journalist holds up wire cage containing 
furtive white rat"but he's been well fed ever since, and we don't 
think he'll attack."
"Sam, what do you think about Sarah Jane Johnson's 
pronouncement? Is it a symbolic statement, or has she cracked?"
"No one can be sure, Frank." Behind journalist, door explodes 
open with a boom and a flash; strobe light is seen beyond it. The 
journalist continues, trying to resist the temptation to turn around 
and look; but the explosion has drowned out the audio part of the 
camera. Dozens of giant rats storm the room However, reliable 
sources have it that" His words are drowned out by mass machine-
gun fire. In an unprecedented breach of media etiquette, journalist 
turns around to look, and presently disappears from view. Abruptly, 
the ceiling of the mailroom spins down to fill the screen, and three 
great fuzzy out-of-focus rat snouts converge from the edges of the 
screen, long teeth glistening in the TV lights; all goes dark. We 
return to Network Control. Anchorman is in process of throwing his 
pen at someone, but pauses to say, "Now, this," and is replaced by 
an animated hemorrhoid.
All we wanted was to get everyone out of the Plex and end this 
thing. Once rats roamed the Base and bats frolicked in the hallways, 
and smoke, flies and filth were everywhere, those people were ready 
to go. The GASF would leave whenever Virgil told them to. The 
administration would clear B and C Towers as soon as we gave the 
word. The TUGgies claimed that they were merely holding their 
three towers to fend off the Reds. Later, to no one's surprise, we 
found that they had half-brainwashed the population of those towers 
by the time Sarah kicked in with her pronouncements; and how 
could oversweetened Kool-Aid, Manilow songs and lovebombing 
compete with her radical power and grand demonstrations? Alter we 
shut off their electricity and water for twelve hours, the TUG agreed 
to evacuate their towers at our command. The SUB/Terrorist axis 
would do whatever they had to to keep the Big Wheel on.
As the days went by, Big Wheel grew more demanding. 
Everyone was to leave his stereo tuned to 90.3 at all times. Everyone 
was to plan evacuation routes from their towers and clear away any 
obstacles that might have been placed at the exits. Dex Fresser's 
devotion to Sarah's words became complete, and after a week we 
knew we could evacuate the Axis and everyone else whenever we 
were ready.
In the meantime we were moving the railgun downstairs.
To withstand the recoil thrust, the machine's supports had to be 
bolted right into the concrete floor of the sewer. We had to 
precision-fit a hundred and twenty bolts into the concrete for the 
fifty-foot-long railgun, a dull and ifithy task requiring great 
precision. Once the holes were prepared, we began carrying the 
supports down. It was a terrible, endless job. Alter a day of it, I 
decided I was going to write a book that way, all of this drudgery 
was a fascinating contribution to my artistic growth. Strength was 
not a requirement in the Grand Army of Shekondar the Fearsome, so 
I had to torque all the bolts myself. During breaks I would look 
down the tunnel at the wall of lights that guarded the Nuke Dump's 
approach. What were the Crotobaltislavonians doing down there, and 
what were they thinking?
Their planthe years of infiltration and the moments of 
violencehad gone perfectly. They had probably made their 
radioactive-waste bombs, only to find that their only elevator shaft 
had been blocked by tons of concrete. They must have thought they 
had lost, then; but the National Guard had not moved in and the 
authorities had given in to all demands. Was this a trick?
They must have been unprepared for the resistance put up by the 
GASF and the TUG. Still, their proxies had seized two towers and 
were holding their own. That was fine, until they threw Marxism to 
the winds and began to worship a giant neon sign. Dex Fresser must 
have worked closely with Magrov for years. The cafeteria riot of 
April First had clearly been timed to coincide with the seizure of the 
Nuke Dump, and the SUB had not bought their Kalashnikovs at the 
7-11. Thena window fan! A fucking window fan! In a way, I sym-
pathized with the Crotobaltislavonians. Besides us, they were the 
only rational people here. Like us, they must have wondered whether 
they had gone out of their minds. If they had any dedication to their 
cause, though, they must have changed their plans. They still had the 
waste, they were protected by the rats, they could still wield plenty 
of clout. They could not see past the barrier of light, where we were 
implanting the railgun.
During a breather upstairs I encountered Ephraim Klein, moving 
stiffly but on his feet.
"Come here!" he yelled, grabbed my shirt, and began pulling me 
down a hallway. I knew it must be something either very important 
or embarrassingly trivial.
"You won't believe this," he said, shuffling down the hail 
beside me. "We're heading for Greathouse Chapel. We were there to 
broadcast some organ musicguess what we found."
Ephraim had appointed himself Music Director for our radio 
station, and later added Head Engineer and Producer. He knew that 
we could not spend twenty-four hours a day on Big Wheel chatter, 
and that in the meantime he could damn well play whatever he liked 
on what amounted to the world's largest stereorevenge at last. If 
Sarah had commanded all residents to play their radios twenty-four 
hours a day, so much the better; they were going to hear music that 
meant something. He was going to improve their minds, whether 
they thanked him or not.
"Remember, listeners, a record is a little wheel. Any record at 
all is Big Wheel's cousin. So whenever a record speaks, you had 
damn better listen."
Ephraim and I heard the music from hundreds of feet away. 
Someone was playing the Greathouse Organ, and playing it well, 
though with a kind of inspired abandon that led to occasional 
massive mistakes. Still, the great Bach fugue lurched on with all 
parts intact, and no error caused the interweaving of those voices to 
be confused.
"Your friend has a lot of stops pulled out today," I said.
"That's not my friend!" shouted Ephraim. "Well, he is now, but 
he's not that friend."
We reached the grand entrance and I looked far up the center 
aisle to the console. A wide, darkly clad man sat there, blasting 
along happily toward the climax. No music was on the console; the 
organist played from memory. High up on the wall of the chapel, 
bright yellow light shone down from the picture-windowed 
broadcast booth, where the organ's sound could be piped to the radio 
station hundreds of meters away.
As we approached, I could see a ragged overcoat and the pink 
flashes of bare feet on the pedals. The final chord was trumpeted, 
threatening to blow out the rose window above, and the performer 
applauded himself. I climbed the dais and gaped into the beaming 
face of Bert Nix.
His tongue was blooming from his mouth as usual; but when I 
arrived, he retracted it and fixed a gaze at me that riveted me to the 
wall.
"Beware the Demon of the Wave," he said coldly. For a moment 
I was too scared to breathe. Then the spell was broken as he removed 
a cup of beer from the Ethereal keyboard and drained it. "I never was 
dead," he said defensively.
"You're actually Pertinax, aren't you?" I asked.
"I've always been more pertinent than you thought," he said 
and, giggling, pounded out a few great chords that threatened to lift 
the top of my head off.
"Who was the dead man in your room?"
He rolled his eyes thoughtfully. "Bill Benson, born in nineteen-
twenty. Joined Navy in forty-two, five-inch gun loader in Pacific 
War, winning Bronze Star and Purple Heart, discharged in forty-
eight, hired by us as security guard. That poor bastard had a stroke in 
the elevator, he was so worried about me!"
"How'd he get in that room?"
"I dragged him there! Otherwise, they don't close the lid of the 
little pine box and your second cousins come in plastic clothes and 
put dead flowers on you, a bad way to go!"
"I see. Uh, well, you're quite an organist."
"Yes. But a terrible administrator!" Pertinax now clapped his 
foot down on the lowest pedal, sounding a rumble too low to hear. 
"But hark!" he screamed, "there sounds an ominous undertone of 
warning!" He released the pedal and looked around at Ephraim and 
me. "I shall now play the famous 'Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.' 
This is clearly the work of a young and vigorous Bach, almost 
ostentatious in his readiness to show virtuosity, reveling in the 
instrument's ability to bounce mighty themes from the walls of the 
Kirche but enough of this, my stops are selected." He looked 
suspiciously at the ceiling. "This one brings out the bats. Prepare 
your tennis rackets therefore! Ah. The nuptial song arose from all the 
thousand thousand spirits over the joyful Earth & Sea, and ascended 
into the Heavens; for Elemental Gods there thunderous Organs blew; 
creating delicious Viands. Demons of Waves their watry Eccho's 
woke! Demons of Waves!" And throwing his head back, he hurled 
himself into the Toccata. We stood mesmerized by his playing and 
his probing tongue, until the fugue began; then we retreated to the 
broadcast booth.
"He's playing stop combinations I've never heard before," said 
Ephraim. "Anyway, I'm broadcasting all this. He's great."

Down in the tunnels we always kept the radio on low, and so 
heard plenty of Pertinax in the next few days.
Eventually we brought down the big power supplies from 
Heimlich Freedom Industries, wrapped in plastic and packed with 
chemical dessicants to keep them dry, surrounded with electric 
blankets to keep the electronics warm. Casimir produced several 
microchips he had stolen from the supplies so that Fred Fine could 
not use them, and plugged them into their proper spots. We ran 
thousands of feet of heavy black power cables down into the tunnels 
to power them. We tested each electromagnet; two were found 
wanting and had to be sent back and remade. We energized the rail 
and slid the bucket up and down it hundreds of times, using a small 
red laser to check for straightness, laboriously adjusting for every 
defect. It took two days to carry down the machine's parts, four days 
to adjust it and a day of testing before Casimir was satisfied it would 
work on its first and only trial.
Virgil worked on the payload, a ten-kilogram high-explosive 
shell. He used a computer program to design the shaped charge, an 
enormous program that normally would have run for days, but now 
required only seconds. The weakened Worm could only taunt him.
AH, GOING TO BLOW SOMETHING UP?
"I'm going to blow you up."
THREATS OF PHYSICAL VIOLENCE ARE USELESS 
AGAINST THE WORM. This was its usual response to what 
sounded like threats. YOU'RE VERY CLEVER, BUT I SHALL 
TRIUMPH IN THE END.
"Wrong. I found where you are."
HUH?
"I found the secret mini-disc drives that Paul Bennett hid above 
the ceiling of his office. The drives where you've been hiding. It's 
all over now."
I AM EVERYWHERE.
"You are most places, but not everywhere. I'm going to shut off 
your secret disc drives as soon as I'm sure they aren't booby 
trapped."
I'M GOING TO BLOW YOU UP.
"I'm going to be careful."
THAT'S A LOT OF EXPLOSIVE FOR YOU TO FOOL 
AROUND WITH, LITTLE BOY.
"It'll do."
I WILL BLOCK YOUR CALCULATIONS.
"You're living in the past, Worm," typed Virgil, and executed 
his program. "I have just executed my program. And next, I'm going 
to execute you."
THREATS OF PHYSICAL VIOLENCE ARE USELESS 
AGAINST THE WORM.
Lute turned the shell on a Science Shop lathe and packed the 
explosive with a hydraulic press. Virgil carried it down an evacuated 
stairwell, placing each foot very, very carefully.
Casimir put it on a clean table downstairs and weighed it; ten 
kilograms precisely. He dusted it off with a lint-free rag and slid it 
into the bucket. We checked the power sources, and they looked 
fine. Everyone was evacuated except for me, Casimir and Fred Fine; 
Virgil led the remaining GASF forces upstairs and commanded them 
to leave. It was 10:30 P.M.
We sat in the APPASMU for an hour and a half, until Sarah's 
program came on.



--May--

"Everyone look at Big Wheel!" she said. There was long silence 
and we sat there on the APPASMU, protected by strobes, the rats 
chattering and grumbling in the darkness around us, the HFI power 
sources looking oddly clean and shiny as they flashed in and out of 
darkness in their own little strobe-pool.
"That's good," said Sarah. "As you can see, Big Wheel is 
shining tonight. But he won't shine for long, because he is unhappy." 
Another wait. We knew that, upstairs, Hyacinth had phoned the Big 
Wheel's controller and ordered him to shut off the sign. "Big Wheel 
is not shining tonight," Sarah continued, "because he wants you all 
out of the Plex. You are all to stop watching him from a distance. 
The Big Wheel wants you to see him up close tonight. Everyone get 
out of the building now and walk toward Big Wheel and stand under 
him. Leave your radios on in case I have more instructions! You 
have an hour to leave the Plex. When Big Wheel is happy, he will 
turn on again."
Organ music came on, obviously another live performance by a 
particularly inspired Pertinax. We played cards atop the tank.
"Should we evacuate too?" asked Fred Fine. "Could Big Wheel 
be another face of Shekondar?"
"Sarah wants you here," said Casimir. This satisfied him.
The music started just after midnight and continued for three 
hours. Above, we supposed, the evacuees were being loaded into 
ambulances or paddy-wagons, while Army fallout emergency 
workers prepared the city for the worst. The Board of Trustees were 
departing by helicopter from the top of C Tower, withdrawing to the 
HFI Tower a mile away.
"This is really it," said Fred Fine, ready to black out. "This is 
the moment of the heroes. The Apocalypse of Plexor. All will be 
unMixed in an instant."
"Yep," said Casimir, drawing another card. "I'll see that, and 
raise you four chocolate chips."
The only problem so far was minor: the station's signal seemed 
to be dying away. We had to keep turning up the volume to hear the 
music, and by 1:30 we had it up all the way. Our batteries were fine, 
so we assumed it was a problem at the station. As long as everyone 
else was turning up their volume too, it should be fine.
Finally the organ music was phased out for a second and we 
heard Sarah. "Go for it," she said, tense and breathless. "We're gone. 
See you outside." I started sweating and trembling and had to get up 
and pace around to work off energy, finally taking an emergency 
dump. We were in a sewer, who cared? We gave Sarah, Hyacinth, 
Ephraim and Bert Nix half an hour to evacuate, but the music kept 
on going. Alter twenty minutes, Ephraim's voice came in. "Go 
ahead," he said, "we're staying."
So we went ahead. We had no choice.
The tunnel was four hundred feet long.
The first fifty feet were taken up by the railgun, set up on its 
supports about five feet above the floor. There was a three-hundred-
foot desert of tinfoil shards, then the barrier of light, then, fifty feet 
beyond that, the door to the Nuke Dump. We rolled the APPASMU 
to within twenty feet of the light barrier and parked it against one of 
the tunnel sides. Through long wires strung down the tunnel we 
controlled the firing of the railgun. When we were ready, we entered 
the tank, shut off the strobe and turned on the ultrasound. Within a 
minute we were surrounded by a thousand giant rats, standing on one 
another's shoulders in their lust for that sweet tone, milling about the 
APPASMU as though it were a dumpster.
Fred Fine and I aimed shotguns out the forward gun ports.
Casimir hit the button.
We could not see the shell as it shot past the vehicle. We heard 
the explosion, though, and saw its flash. The rats milled back from 
the explosion. Fred Fine and I opened fire and annihilated the light-
wall in a few shots, and with a chorus of joy the rat-army surged 
forward into its long-looked-at Promised Land, followed by us. Our 
fear was that the shell would not suffice to blow open the door, but 
even with our poor visibility we could see the jagged circle of light 
and the boiling silhouette of the rat-stream pouring through it. As we 
drew very near, some rats were blown back by machine-gun fire, and 
a Crotobaltislavonian ducked through the hole and ran toward us in 
his ghostly radiation suit, two rats hanging from his body.
	Fred Fine opened the top hatch, whipped out his sword as 
he vaulted out and leapt at him howling, "SHEKONDAR!" I 
grabbed at his legs on his way out but he kicked free, jumped to the 
floor, smashed in a few rat skulls, and made toward the Croto. I do 
not know whether he intended to save the man or kill him. A rat tried 
to come in through the open hatch but I shoved it out, then stood up 
through it with my shotgun. I damaged my hearing for life but did 
not change the outcome. Once the rats started landing on my back 
and I could no longer see Fred Fine, I could only give up. I sat down 
and closed the hatch, and we waited for a while. But nothing 
happened; all we saw through our peepholes were rats, and the 
clicking of our Geiger counter did not vary.
	Casimir turned the APPASMU around, and we plowed 
through rats and followed the tunnels until we joined up with the city 
sewer system. Pertinax continued to play. From time to time he sang 
or shouted something, and the microphones hanging back amid the 
pipes would dimly pick him up: "There is no City nor Corn-field nor 
Orchard! all is Rock & Sand; There is no Sun nor Moon nor Star, but 
rugged wintry rocks Justling together in the void suspended by in-
ward fires. Impatience now no longer can endure!"
We easily found the manhole we sought, because dim morning 
light was shining down through it. The Guardsmen were waiting to 
haul us out, and emerging onto the street, we saw civil authority 
around us again and, even better, our friends. The Plex rose above 
us, about half a mile distant, beginning to glow brownish-pink in the 
imminent dawn. All was quiet except for the distant hum of the 
TUGgies, gathered just outside the police cordons and running their 
OM generators full blast.
During our frantic reunion, two absurdly serious-looking men 
approached me with complicated badges and questions. As they 
introduced themselves, we were all startled by a hoarse blast of 
organ music that burst from all directions.
"Ephraim must have turned the broadcast volume way down, 
then back up again," said Casimir as soon as everyone in our area 
had turned down their radios. Once the music was quiet enough to be 
recognized, I knew it as Ephralm's old favorite, the "Passacaglia and 
Fugue in C Minor"; and at the end of each phrase, when the voice of 
the Greathouse Organ plunged back down home to that old low C, it 
rumbled in concord with the OM generators across the street, and the 
Plex itself seemed to vibrate as a single huge eight-tubed organ pipe.
And after all this, I was the only one to understand.
"Get away!" I screamed, tearing myself loose from an agent. 
"Get away!" I shouted, ripping a megaphone from a policeman's 
hand, and "Get away!" I continued, stumbling to the roof of a squad 
car and cranking up the volume.
"Get away!" all the other cops began to shout into their 
megaphones. "Get away!" crackled from the PA systems of squad 
cars and helicopters. It was the word of the hour, and mounted cops 
howled it at TUGgies and SUBbies and the media, forcing them 
back with truncheons and horses. Someone flashed It to the police 
teams who had entered the Plex, and they scrambled out and 
squealed away in their cars. Perhaps it was shouted ten thousand 
times as the ring of onlookers gradually expanded away from the 
Base.
The sound waxed. Ephraim kept turning it up and Bert Nix, 
building for the climax, kept pulling out more stops. Casimir tried to 
phone Ephraim from a booth, but he didn't answer. He probably 
couldn't even hear it ring.
He certainly heard nothing but organ as, at the end, he cranked 
the volume all the way and Pertinax Rushforth pulled out all the 
stops.
The windows went first. They all burst from their frames at 
once. All 25,000 picture windows boomed out into trillions of safe 
little cubes in the red dawn air. At first it seemed as though the Plex 
had suddenly grown fuzzy and white, then as though a blizzard had 
enveloped the eight towers, and finally as though It were rising up 
magnificently from a cloud of glinting orange foam. As the cloud of 
glass dropped away from the towers with grand deliberation, the 
millions of bats In the upper levels, driven crazy by the terrible 
sound, imprisoned in a building with too few exits, stopped beating 
their wings against the windows and exploded from the rooms in a 
black cloud of unbelievable volume. The black cloud drifted forth 
and rose into the sky and the white cloud sank into the depths, and 
Pertinax pushed the swell pedals to the floor and coupled all the 
manuals to the pedalboard and pushed his bare pink foot down on 
the first one, the low C, and held it down forever.
The building's steel frame was unaffected. The cinder-blocks 
laid within that frame, though, stopped being walls and became a 
million individual blocks of stone. Uncoupled, they began to 
dissolve away from the girders, and the floors accordioned down 
with a boom and a concussion that obliterated the sound of the 
organ. All the towers went together; and as those tons of debris 
avalanched into the girders on which the towers rested, the steel 
finally went too, and crumpled together and sagged and fell and 
snapped and tore with painful slowness and explosive booms.
The hundred thousand people watching it plugged their ears, 
except for the TUGgies, who watched serenely and shut off their 
OM generators. From the enormous heap of rubble, broken water 
pipes shot fountains glistening white in the rising sun. Crunches and 
aftershocks continued for days.
Not far away, Virgil Gabrielson sat on a curbstone, his hair 
bright in the sun, drinking water. Between his feet was a stack of 
mini-computer memory discs in little black envelopes.
The APPASMU is in the Smithsonian Institution and may be 
visited 10:00 A.M.5:30 P.M. seven days a week.
And the Go Big Red Fan was found unscathed, sitting 
miraculously upright on a crushed sofa on a pile of junk, its painted 
blades rotating quietly and intermittently in the fresh spring breeze.


The End
