ily eliminated others were sure to converge on
the area to clean up. "To be frank, I'm not sure," answered the White Priest.
"I kind of thought we'd be getting to an intersection near you by now, but
apparently not. The layout of these tunnels isn't what I saw on the Plex
blueprints."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And how could you boost that?"

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

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

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

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

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

"A railgun. Precisely."

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

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

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

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

                                 --February--

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

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

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

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

"Fine. I just-- "

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"True."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then the food fight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"They are assholes."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[...] <FIXME> (missing text)

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

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

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

"The entire spectrum," observed Hudson Rayburn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Someone's coming."

"Our leader is here."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EPHRAIM. Blow it up.

CASIMIR. Yeah, I was right there.

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

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

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

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

EPHRAIM. Nothing! Get it?

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

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

EPHRAIM. Of course not!

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

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

SARAH. Uh... you mean Fred Fine?

HYACINTH. Yeah.

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

HYACINTH. No shit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EPHRAIM. Hey! Casimir!

CASIMIR. Yeah?

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

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

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

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

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

BUD. I've got an eight-footer.

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

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

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

FRED FINE. What's your major?

SARAH. English.

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

SARAH. Why?

FRED FINE. Didn't host mention your forest?

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

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

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

(There is a long silence.)

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

(There is another long silence.)

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

SARAH. Where's the bathroom?

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

SARAH. Maybe we can discuss it some other time.

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

SARAH. I'll be back.

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

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

HYACINTH. You want some Oreos too?

CASIMIR. No, not really. Thanks.

HYACINTH. Did you want to talk about something?

CASIMIR. How did you know?

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

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

HYACINTH. Kind of bitchy?

CASIMIR. Yeah, that's it.

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

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

HYACINTH. What?

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

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

(Long silence.)

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

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

HYACINTH. You can say it.

CASIMIR. Lesbian. Thanks.

HYACINTH. You're welcome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CASIMIR. Shit.

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

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

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

BUD. And three inches.

EPHRAIM. So they resonate at low C.

FRED FINE. Very interesting.

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

CASIMIR. What? Don't talk about that!

SARAH. What's Project Spike?

CASIMIR. Nothing much. I was playing with rats.

FRED FINE. What does this one hear about rats?

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

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

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

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

FRED FINE. How large are the rats in question?

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

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

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

VIRGIL. Have you analyzed any other rats since Christmas?

CASIMIR. Yeah. Damn it.

VIRGIL. And they were just as contaminated.

CASIMIR. More so. Because of what i did,

SARAH. What's wrong, Casimir?

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

(Ephraim gives a strange hysterical laugh.)

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

BUD. Giant rats?

HYACINTH. Giant rats?

BUD. Virgil, explain everything to us, okay?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yeah," said the professors in unison.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Plexodus, as it was dubbed by local media, dwindled to a dribble of
individual escapes in which students would spri