!" he blurted, and she looked at him
oddly. She stood up and held out her hand again. Casimir scrambled up and
shook it gently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What about this budget? Is it acceptable?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What do you mean by that?"

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

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

"So what's the point?"

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

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

"Yeah? What's wrong with that?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I looked.

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

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

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

                                  GET A BUTT

                             FUCK JOHNNIE-WONNIE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Do you need a free dinner?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes it does!"

"Hell no it doesn't."

"Yes it does!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Well, it's a good idea."

"Why?"

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

"Like what?"

"Oh, electronics building things practical stuff."

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

"Yeah, I guess they can."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Casimir?"

"Mmmmm. Huh?"

"You asleep?"

"No."

"You want to talk?"

"Okay."

"Thanks for letting me sleep here."

"No problem. Anytime."

"Does this bother you?"

"You sleeping here? Nah."

"You seemed kind of bothered about something."

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

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

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

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

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

"Why should I have something on my mind?"

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

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

"So what's bothering you?"

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

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

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

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

"Sarah?"

"Huh?"

"I want to talk to you."

"What?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Since we met the first time."

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

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

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

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

"Not really."

Casimir sucked in his breath and flopped back down.

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

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

"What's wrong with me?"

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

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

"Then what is the problem?"

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


They sat in the dark for a while. Casimir was being open-minded, which was
good, but still had trouble catching on.  "It's none of my business, but just
out of curiosity, do you like sex?"

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

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

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

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

"I'll walk you home."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Isotropic."

"You saw what?"

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

She sighed. "Whatever you like."

"Why? What's it for?"

"Well-- what's your mass driver for?"

"Sanity."

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

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

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

                                 --December--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Sarah?"

"Huh?"

"Did I wake you up?"

"No. Hi."

"Let's talk."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Comfy?" said Hyacinth.

"Yeah. Mmm. Very."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"That's for sure."

"Why don't you stay a while?"

"That'd be nice."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Okay."

"Want to go to sleep?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The what?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM

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

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

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

* * *

The Computing Center was not far away. Though it had many rooms, its heart
was a cavernous square space with white walls and a white floor waxed to a
thick glossy sheen. The white ceiling was composed of square fluorescent light
panels in a checkerboard pattern. Practically all of the room was occupied by
disc memory units: brown-and-blue cubes, spaced in a grid to form a seemingly
endless matrix of six-foot aisles. At the center of the room was an open
circle, and at the center of that area stood the Central Processing Unit of
the Janus 64. A smooth triangular column five feet on a side and twelve feet
high, it would have touched the ceiling except that above was a circular
opening about forty feet across, encircled by a railing so that observers
could stand and look into the core of the Computing Center.

Around the CPU were a few other large machines: secondary computers to
organize the tasks being fed to the Janus 64, array processors, high-speed
laser printers, a central control panel and the like. But closest of all was
the Operator's Station, a single video terminal, and tonight the operator was
Consuela Gorm, high priestess of MARS. She had volunteered to do the job on
this night of partying, when the only people still using the computer in the
adjacent Terminal Room were the goners, the hopelessly addicted hackers who
had nothing else to live for.

The only sounds were the whine of the refrigeration units, which drew away the
heat thrown off by the tightly packed components of the Janus 64; the high
hum of the whirling memory discs, multiplied by hundreds; and the pitter-pat
of Consuela's fingertips across the keypad of the Operator's Station. She was
hunkered down there, staring hypnotized into the screen, and behind her Fred
Fine stood thin and straight as the CPU itself. Tonight they were testing
Shekondar Mark V, their state-of-the-art Sewers & Serpents simulation program.
Now, at a few minutes before midnight, they had worked out the few remaining
bugs and they stood transfixed as their program did exactly what it was
supposed to.

"Looks like a routine adventure," mumbled Consuela.

"But it looks like Shekondar might have generated a werewolf colony in this
party's vicinity. I'm seeing a lot of indications of lycanthropic activity."

"You'd want plenty of silver arrows on this campaign."

"With this level of activity, you'd want a cleric specialized in
lycanthropes," scoffed Consuela.

Fred Fine was perfectly aware of that. He was merely making conversation so
Consuela would not realize he was thinking intently about something, and try
to beat him to the punch. Yes, the werewolf colony was obvious-- it was a
large one, probably east-northeast in the Mountains of Krang. Only large-scale
organization could account for the lack of wolfsbane and garlic, which were
usually abundant in this biome. But Fred Fine was concerned with observations
on a far grander scale. Though nothing was catastrophically wrong, something
was very strange, and Fred Fine found that he was covered with goosebumps. He
tapped a foot nervously and scanned the descriptions scrolling past on the
screen.

"Listen for birds!" he hissed.

Consuela ordered an Aural Stimuli Report, specifying Avians as field of
interest.

NO AVIAN SOUNDS DETECTABLE, said Shekondar Mark V.

"Damn!" said Fred Fine. "Let's have the alchemist test one of his magical
substances-- say, some of the fire-starting fluid." MAGICAL COMBUSTIBLES AND
EXPLOSIVES FAIL TO FUNCTION.

"Uh-oh! All characters jettison all magical items immediately!" SMALL FIRES
AND EXPLOSIONS IN ALCHEMICAL SUBSTANCES.

"Good. We'll get farther away."

LARGE EXPLOSIONS. NOXIOUS SMOKE. NO INJURIES DUE TO WIND DIRECTION.

"Lucky! Forgot even to check for that. My character will try turning on his
pocket calculator."

ELECTRONIC DEVICES FAIL TO FUNCTION.

"Wait a minute," said the astonished Consuela. "What is this? I don't know
of anything that can cause disruption of magic and technology at the same
time! Some kind of psionics, maybe?" "I don't know. I don't know what it is.,,
"We wrote this thing. We have to know what's in it." "Aural Stimuli Report,
General. Quick!"

DEEP RUMBLING CONSISTENT WITH TEMBLOR OR LARGE SUBTERRANEAN MOVEMENT.

"Can't be an earthquake. We'll head for solid rock, that should protect us.
Head uphill!"

MOVEMENT SPEED HALVED BY TEMBLOR. ROCK OUTCROPPING REACHED IN SIX TURNS.
EXTREMELY LOUD HISSING. GASEOUS ODOR. GROUND BECOMES WARM.

"It's almost like a Dragon," said Consuela in a constricted, terrified voice,
"but from down in the earth."

"God! I can't think of what the hell this is!"

ONE HUNDRED METERS TO YOUR NORTH EARTH BULGES UPWARD. BULGE IS FIFTY METERS
IN DIAMETER AND RISING QUICKLY. EARTH CRACKS OPEN AND YOU SEE A GLISTENING
SURFACE....

The terminal went blank. From just behind them came a violent scream, like a
buzzsaw wrenching to a stop in a concrete block. They knew it though they had
never heard it before; it was the sound of a disc unit dying, the sound made
when the power was cut off and the automatic readers (similar to the tone-arms
of phonographs) sank into, and shredded, the hysterically spinning magnetic
discs. It was to them what the snapping of a horse's leg is to a jockey, and
when they spun around they were astonished and horrified to see a curtain of
water pouring onto the floor from the circular walkway overhead. Not more than
a dozen feet from the base of the Janus 64, the ring was spreading inward.

"Hey, Fred 'n' Con!" someone yelled. At one end of the room, at the window
that looked out into the Terminal Room, an overweight blond-bearded hacker
squinted at them. "What's going on? System problems? Oh, Jeeeezus!"

He turned to his comrades in the Terminal Room, screaming, "Head crash! Head
crash! Water on the brain!" Soon two dozen hackers had vaulted through the
window into the Center and were sprinting down the aisles as fast as their
atrophied legs could carry them, the men stripping off their shirts as they
ran. Another disc drive shorted out and sizzled to destruction. Abruptly Fred
Fine spun and grabbed the Operator's Key-chain, then ran through the circular
waterfall toward another wall of the Center, shouting for people to follow
him.

In seconds he had snapped open the door to the storage room, where tons of
accordion-fold computer paper were stored in boxes. As some of the hackers did
their best to sweep water away from the base of the Janus 64, the rest formed
a line from the storage room to the central circle. The boxes were passed down
the line as quickly as possible, slit open with Fred Fine's authentic Civil
War bayonet and their contents dumped out as big green-and-white cubes inside
the deadly water-ring. Though it did not entirely stem the flow, the paper
absorbed what It did not dam. Soon all space between the waterfall and the
CPU was covered with at least two feet of soggy computer paper. Meanwhile,
Consuela had shut down all the disc drives.

The danger was past. Fred Fine, still palpitating, noticed a small waterfall
in the corner of the storage room. Flicking on the lights for the first time,
he clambered over the stacked boxes to check it out. In the corner, three
pipes about ten inches in diameter ran from floor to ceiling. One was swathed
in the insulation used for hot water pipes. Water was running down one of the
bare pipes; higher up. above the ceiling, it must be leaking heavily. Fred
Fine put his hand on the third pipe and found that it was neither hot nor
cool, and did not seem to be carrying a current. A firehose supply pipe? No,
they were supposed to be bright red. He puzzled over it, rubbing his hand
over the long thin whiskers that straggled down his cheeks when he had been
computing for a week or more.

As he watched, the hiss of running water lowered and died away and a few
seconds later the leak from above was stemmed. There was the KLONK of an air
hammer in a pipe. Fred Fine put his hand on the mystery pipe, and began to
feel the gentle vibration of running water underneath, and a sensation of
coolness spreading out from the interior.

The hackers saw him wandering slowly toward the Janus, which rose like an
ancient glyph from the tumbled, sodden blocks of paper. He had a distant look,
and was consumed in thought.

"These are the End Times," he was heard to say. "The Age draws to a close."

He was no weirder than they were, so they ignored him.

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

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

                                 --January--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No. She's advancing slowly."

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

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

"TouchÉ. " So much for Tab.

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

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

"Me too," added Zippy the Dwarf.

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

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

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

"Then I aim for the right head."

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

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

"You miss."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I cut myself loose from the tongue."

"Done."

"Two more fireballs in the right head."

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

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

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

"Flail and Priest, give estimated distance from us." Klystron was concerned;
those two were the weakest members, even when they were together, and now
that one monster had been nois