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        Neal Stephenson. The Big U


Scanned and OCR'd by a loyal fan with a loose sense of ethics.
Death to the big-bucks "The Big U" auctions on Ebay!
Please submit all changes/fixes to bigwheel@hushmail.com
Buy Neal's other (reasonably priced) books.

From a recent (4/29/99) interview:

Lomax: Above, you said that you were "no damn good at writing short stories"
    What about these days? Do you think you will write exclusively in the long
    form? Oh, and what's the deal with the Big U. Will that ever see print
    again?

Stephenson: I still find short stories very difficult to write, and I admire
    people who can do that. At the moment, novels are working for me and so I
    think I'll stick with them. Concerning the Big U... It is an okay novel,
    but I'm in no hurry to put it back into the world. There is a lot of other
    good stuff that people could be reading.



v0.9    - First public release. Missing introduction quotes/author info.
        [bigwheel@hushmail.com]
v0.9.5  - Bugfix. Recreated proper paragraph breaks, formatted to 78 columns,
        corrected OCR errors, replace 8-bit characters with 7-bit equivalents,
        properly centered what should be, undid hyphenation.
        [kmfahey@toast.net]
v0.9.7  - Update. Added introduction, author info and back cover. The newest
        version should be found at http://www.geocities.com/thebigubook
        [bigwheel@hushmail.com]
v0.9.8  - Bugfix.  Further OCR and formatting errors corrected, run thru
        a spellchecker. [thebigu@w.tf]


------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Big U

Neal Stephenson

----

"WHEN I THINK OF THE MEN WHO WERE MY TEACHERS, I REALIZED THAT MOST OF THEM
WERE SLIGHTLY MAD.  THE MEN WHO COULD BE REGARDED AS GOOD TEACHERS WERE
EXCEPTIONAL.  IT'S TRAGIC TO THINK THAT SUCH PEOPLE HAVE THE POWER TO BAR A
YOUNG MAN'S WAY."
        --German political figure Adolf Hitler, 1889-1945 (from _Hitler's
Secret Conversations, 1941-44_, translated by Norman Cameron and R.H.
Stevens.)

----

I am indebted to the following people for the following things:

My parents for providing several kinds of support.

Edward Gibbon, for writing _The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_.

Julian Jaynes, for writing _The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of
the Bicameral Mind_.

William Blake and William Butler Yeats, for providing Pertinax with
inspiration.

Kathrin Day Lassila, for numerous and thoughtful disagreements.

Gordon Lish, for the most productive rejection slip of all time.

Gary Fisketjon, for buying me a beer in Top Hat in Missoula, Montana, on July
1, 1983, and other services beyond the call of editorial duty.

-----


                           ------------------------
                           -- 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 System-- that
is, bludgeoned the rest of the wing with a record or tape-- he 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
laugh-- a screaming hysterical cackle that would ricochet down the long shiny
cinderblock 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 shape-- to 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 tin-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 hall 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 Dayglo orange chairs below the Julian Didius III Memorial Window.
The sunlight strained in greyly over their shoulders, and occasionally they
turned to look at the scene outside.

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

AMERICAN MEGAVERSITY

VISITOR PARKING

SPORTS EVENTS

EXIT 500 FT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Who is that for physics?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Catch my drift? I dislike audiences."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"So much for his career, then."

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

"And that is-- ?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Really? You're a free lance?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I know. President of the Student Government."

Sarah shrugged and tried not to look stuck-up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The lounge gusted with oohs and aahs.

"I like that."

"You're so creative, Mari."

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

"That's nice! Really nice!"

"Wait a sec." This came from Hyacinth.

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

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

"I think it sounds nice."

"Like a Barry Manilow song."

"Like one of those little Chinese poems."

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

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

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

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

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

"Okay."

"Go to Room 103 when the alarm sounds."

"Alarm?" But Hyacinth was already gliding out.

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

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

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

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

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

"Ever done LSD?" asked Sarah.

"No. Why? Got some?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why'd you stop?"

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

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

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

"Student government?"

"Well, it beats MTV."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"That's ridiculous."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I think so."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh. Well, I doubt it."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Ja, I guess so."

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

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

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

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

He started away as a small bat fluttered past.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yeah? When will it be here?"

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

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

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

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

"Shut up!" shouted the gas freak.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Virgil! Did you hear that?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                  --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 machine-- grammar-- controls everything else. If you use the flippers
well, you make points. If you fail to image your concepts viably, your ball
drops into the black hole of nothingness. If you try to cheat, the machine
tilts and you lose-- that's like people not understanding your interactions.
That's why we have to learn Grammar here in Freshman. That, and because S. S.
Krupp says we have to."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"This is a very good question," said Embers. He took a long draw on his pipe.
"What is a grade? That is the question." He chuckled, but she apparently
didn't get it. "Some teachers grade on curves. You have to be a math major to
understan