d your grade! But forget those fake excuses. A grade is actually a
form of poetry. It is a subjective reaction to a learner's work, distilled and
reduced down to its purest essence-- not a sonnet, not a haiku, but a single
letter. That's remarkable, isn't it?"

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

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

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

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

They sat there silent for a while.

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

"I did."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I see," the man said sympathetically.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Casimir said nothing.

"Huh?" said the strange guy.

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

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

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

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

"Who?"

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

"No."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"That's pedantic."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And they haven't caught anyone."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The what?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Helps to have the Operator memorized too."

"Oh, fuck! No!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yeah."

"Yeah."

"Yeah."

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

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

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

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

"Gag me green!"

"Barf me blue!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yep."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No kidding!"

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

"Okay, I get the idea."

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

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

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

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

"It means rats in the food."

"Either rats, or their hair or feces."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I should hope not."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                 --November--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yeah, I guess."

"Any engagements?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No, just accurate. I like that."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fred Fine was taken aback. "How?"

"Computer drew them for me."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It's working okay?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I'm an English major."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Well let it slip by."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yeah."

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

"I can't believe you're free Friday night