th fire that was
enticingly masked behind her conventional calm sober behavioral mode. He
wondered if she were the type of woman who would tie a man up, just for the
fun of it, and tickle him. These things Shekondar did not reveal; and yet he
had told him that they matched! And that meant she could be nothing other than
the fulfilment of his unique sexual desires!

The group approached their perimeter. Klystron/Chris staggered boldly into the
open, hindered by a massive erection, hitched up his pants with the butt of
the Kalashnikov and waved the group to a halt. She dipped behind a pillar and
covered him with a small arm-- a primitive chemical-powered lead-thrower that
was nevertheless dangerous. Then, seeing many automatic weapons, she pointed
her gun at the ceiling. Her troop slowed to a confused and apprehensive halt.
They were disorganized, undisciplined, obviously typical refugee residue, led
by a handful of Alpha types with guns-- not a minor force in this theater, but
helpless against the GASF.

"Hi, Fred," she said, and the obvious sexual passion in her voice was to his
ears like the soothing globular tones of the harp-speakers of Iliafharxhlind.
"We were headed for the Burrows. How are things between here and there?"

It was easiest to explain it in math terms. "We've secured a continuous convex
region which includes both this point and the region called the Burrows,
ma'am. It's all under my command. How can we help you?"

"We need places to stay. And the three of us here need to get to the Science
Shop."

So! Friends of the White Priest! She was very crafty, very coy, but made
no bones about what she was after. These women thought of only one thing.
Klystron/Chris liked that-- she was quite a little enticer, but subtle as she
was, he knew just what the audacious minx was up to! Shekondar tuned in again
with unnecessary advice: "Please her and you will have a fine opportunity for
sexual intercourse. Do as she asks in all matters."

He straightened up from his awkward position and smiled the broadest,
friendliest smile he could manage without exceeding the elastic limit of his
lip tissue. "Men," he said to his soldiers, "it's been a secret up to now, but
this woman is a Colonelette in the Grand Army of Shekondar the Fearsome and a
priestess of great stature. I'm putting Werewolf Platoon under her command.
She'll need passage into the Secured Region-- unless she changes her mind
first!" Women often changed their minds; he glanced at her to see if she had
caught this gentle ribbing. She put on an emotionless act that was almost
convincing.

"Well, gee. It's kind of a surprise to me too. Can we just go, then?"

"Permission granted, Colonelette Sarah Jane Johnson!" he snapped, saluting.
She threw him a strange look, no doubt of awe, thanks and general
indebtedness, and after giving a few cutely tentative orders to her men,
headed into the Secured Region. Fired with new zest for action, Klystron/Chris
wheeled and led his men toward the next outpost of the Purified Empire.

I declined Fred Fine's offer and waited below E Tower for my friends. Before
long it became obvious that I would never meet anyone in that madhouse of a
lobby, and so I set out for the Science Shop.

The safest route took me down Emeritus Row, quiet as always. I checked each
door as I went along. Sharon's office had long since been ransacked by
militants looking for rail-gun information. Other than the sound of dripping
water falling into the wastecans below the poorly patched hole in Sharon's
ceiling, all I heard on Emeritus Row was an old man crying alone.

He was in the office marked: PROFESSOR EMERITUS HUMPHREY BATSTONE FORTHCOMING
IV. Without knocking (for the room was dark and the door ajar) I walked in and
saw the professor himself. He leaned over the desk with his silvery dome on
the blotter as though it were the only thing that could soak up his tears, his
hands flung uselessly to the side. The rounded tweed shoulders occasionally
humped with sobs, and little strangled gasps made their way out and died in
the musty air of the office.

Though I intentionally banged my way in, he did not look up. Eventually he sat
up, red eyes closed. He opened them to slits and peered at me.

"I-- " he said, and broke again. After a few more tries he was able to speak
in a high, strangled voice.

"I am in a very bad situation, you see. I think I may have suffered ruination.
I have just ... have just been sitting here"-- his voice began to clear and
his wet eyes scanned the desk-- "and preparing to tender my resignation."

"But why," I asked. "You're not that old. You seem healthy. In your field,
it's not as though you have equipment or data that's been destroyed in the
fighting. What's wrong?"

He gave a taut, clenched smile and avoided my eyes, looking around at the
stacks of manuscript boxes and old books that lined the room. "You don't
understand. I seem to have left my lecture notes in my private study in the
Library bloc. As you can appreciate, it will be rather difficult for a man of
my years to retrieve them under these conditions."

This clearly meant a lot to him, and I did not say "So? Write up some new
ones!" For him, apparently, it was a fatal blow. "You see," he continued,
sounding stronger now that his secret was out. "Ahem. There is in my field a
large corpus of basic knowledge, absolutely fundamental. It must be learned
by any new student, which is why it appears in my courses and so forth. I,
er, I've forgotten it entirely. Somehow. With my engagements and editorial
positions, conferences, trips, consultations, et cetera, and of course all
my writing-- well, there's simply no room for trivia. So if I am hired away
by another university and asked to teach, or some dreadful thing-- you can
imagine my embarrassment."

I was embarrassed myself, remembering now a snatch of overheard conversation
among three grad students, one of whom referred contemptuously to "Emeritus
Home-free Etcetera," who apparently was making him do a great deal of
pointless research, check out books for him and pay the fines, put money
in his parking meters and so on. If that was Forthcoming's style, I could
understand what this break in routine would do to his career. He was only a
scholar when there was a university to say he was.

A distant machine-gun blast echoed down the hallway. "Mr. Forthcoming," I said
firmly. "I'd like to help you out, but for the moment it's not possible. I
guess what I'm trying to say is
 let's get the hell out of here!"

He wouldn't move.

"Look. Maybe if we get down to a safe place, we can see about getting your
lecture notes back."

He looked up with such relief and hope that I wanted to spit. My unfortunate
statement had given him new life. He stood up shakily, began to chatter
happily and set about packing pipes and manuscripts into his briefcase.

As ever, the Burrows were calm. The GASF guards let us past the border after
quick checks over their intercoms, and we were suddenly in a place unchanged
since the days of old, where students roamed the hallways wild and free and
research and classes continued obliviously. Most of the Burrows folk regarded
the entire war/riot as a challenge for their ingenuity, and those who had
not been sucked into Fred Fine's vortex of fantasy and paranoia set about
preserving the ancient comforts with the enthusiasm of Boy Scouts lost in the
woods.

The Science Shop was an autonomous dependency of Fred Fine's United Pure
Plexorian Realm, and the hallway that led there was guarded, mostly
symbolically, by Zap with his sawed-off shotgun and his favorite blunt
instrument. He waved us through and we came to our haven for the war.

The vacuum of authority that filled the Plex for the first two weeks of
April resulted from events in the Nuke Dump. The occupying terrorists warned
that any attempt by authorities to approach the building would be met by the
release of radioactive poisons into the city. The city police who ringed
the Plex late on April First had no idea of how to deal with such a threat
and called the Feds. The National Guard showed up a day later with armored
personnel carriers, helicopters and tanks, but they, too, kept their distance.
The Crotobaltislavonians had obviously intended to establish their own
martial law in the Flex, enforcing it through their SUB proxies and the SUB's
Terrorist proxies. But the blocked elevator shaft and the giant rats made
their authority tenuous, and unbelievably fierce resistance from GASF and TUG
kept the SUB/Terrorist Axis from seizing any more than E and F Towers. Instead
of National Guard authority or Crotobaltislavonian authority, we ended up with
no central authority at all.

The Towers were held by the best-armed groups. The Axis held E and F, the GASF
held D, the administration anti-Terrorist squads B and C, and TUG held A, H,
and G, prompting Hyacinth to remark that if this were tic-tac-toe the TUG
would have won. The towers were easy to hold because access was limited; if
you blocked shut the four outer fire stairs of each wing, you could control
the only entrances to the tower with a handful of soldiers in the sixth-floor
lobby. The base of the Plex was a bewildering 3-D labyrinth. Here things were
much less stable as several groups struggled for control of useful ground,
such as bathrooms, strategic stairways, rooms with windows and so forth. Many
of these were factions that had split away from the Terrorists, finding the
strict hierarchy and tight restrictions intolerable. Other important groups
were made up of inner-city financial-aid students, who at least knew how to
take care of themselves; one gang of small-towners from the Great Plains, also
adept at mass violence; the hockey-wrestling coalition; and the Explorer post,
which had a large interlocking membership with the ROTC students.

Those who were not equipped or inclined to fight fared poorly. Most ended up
trapped in the towers for the duration, where all they could do was watch
TV and reproduce. Escape from the Plex was impossible, because the nuclear
Terrorists allowed no one to approach it, and snipers in the Axis towers made
perilous the dash from the Main Entrance. Those who could not make it to the
safety of a tower were not wanted by the bands of fighters in the Base, and
so had to wander as refugees, most ending up in the Library. It was a very,
very bad time to be an unescorted woman. We tried to make raids against weaker
bands in order to rescue some of these unfortunates, but only retrieved thirty
or so.

Fire in the Plex was not the problem it had been feared to be. The plumbing
still worked reasonably well and most people had enough sense to use the fire
hoses. Many areas were smoky for days, though, to the point of being hostile
to life, and bands driven from their own countries by smoke accounted for a
good deal of the fighting. The food problem was minor because the Red Cross
was allowed to distribute it in the building. Unfortunately there was no way
to remove garbage, so it piled up in lobbies and stairwells and elevator
shafts. Insects, invading through windows that had been broken out or removed
to vent smoke, grew fruitful and multiplied; but this plague then abated, as
the bat population swelled enormously to take advantage of the explosion in
their food supply. By the end of the crisis, the top five floors of E Tower
had been evacuated to make room for bats, who were moving down the tower at
the rate of one floor every three days.

There were stable areas where well-armed people settled in and organized
themselves. The Burrows were exceptionally stable, brilliantly organized by
Fred Fine, and Virgil's Science Shop was an enclave of stability within that.
About twenty people lived in the Shop; we slept on floors and workbenches,
and cooked communally on lab burners. Fred Fine allowed us this autonomy for
one reason: Shekondar the Fearsome/JANUS 64 had selected Virgil as his sole
prophet.

Of course it was not really so simple. It was actually the Worm, and Virgil's
countermeasures. As Virgil explained it, he had signed on to his terminal on
March 31 to find a message waiting: WELL MET WORM-HUNTING MERCENARY. YOU ARE
ADEPT. LET US HOPE YOU ARE WELL PAID. SO FAR I HAVE ONLY FLEXED MY MUSCLES.
NOW BEGINS THE DUEL.

The next day, of course, civilization had fallen. As soon as Virgil had been
sure of this, he had signed on to find that his terminal had been locked
out of the system by the Worm. This he had anticipated, and so he calmly
proceeded to the Operator's Station, ejected Consuela and signed on there
under a fake ID. Virgil had then commandeered six tape drives (to the dismay
of the hackers who were using them) and mounted six tapes he had prepared for
this day. He went to the Terminal Room, where sat hundreds of terminals in
individual carrels. Here Virgil signed on to eighteen terminals at once, using
fake accounts and passwords he had been keeping in reserve. On each terminal
he set in motion a different program-- using information stored on the six
special tapes. Each of these programs looked like a rather long but basically
routine student effort, the sort of thing the Worm had long since stopped
trifling with. But each did contain lengthy sections of machine code that had
no relevance to the program proper.

Virgil returned to the Operator's Station and entered a single command. Its
effect was to draw together the reins of the eighteen sham programs, to lift
out, as it were, all those long machine code sections and interleave them
into one huge powerful program that seemed to coalesce out of nowhere, having
already penetrated the Worm's locks and defenses. This monster program,
then, had calmly proceeded to wipe out all administrative memory and all
student and academic software, and then to restructure the Operator to suit
Virgil's purposes. It all went-- payroll records, library overdues, video-game
programs. From the computer's point of view, American Megaversity ceased to
exist in the time it took for a micro-transistor to flip from one state to the
other.

A mortal wound for the university, but the university was already mortally
wounded. This was the only way to prevent the Worm from seizing the entire
computer within the next week or so. Virgil's insight had been that although
the Worm had been designed to take into account any conceivable action on the
Computing Center's part, it had not anticipated the possibility that someone
might destroy all the records and dismantle the Operator simply to fight the
Worm.

The Worm's message to Virgil had been the key: it had identified him as
an employee of the Computing Center, a hired hit man. That was not an
unreasonable assumption, considering Virgil's power. But it was wrong anyway,
proving that the Worm could only take into account reasonably predictable
events. The downfall of the university wasn't predictable, at least not to
sociopath Paul Bennett, so he hadn't foreseen that anyone would take Virgil's
pyrrhic approach.

Virgil now had enough processing power to run a large airline or a small
developing country. The Worm could only loop back and start over and try to
retake what it had lost, and this time against a much more formidable foe. So
on hummed the CPU of the Janus 64, spending one picosecond performing a task
for the Worm, the next a task for Virgil. The opponents met and mingled on
the central chip of the CPU, which evenhandedly did the work of both at once,
impassively computing out its own fate. Fred Fine noticed that no one could
sign on now except Virgil, and concluded the obvious: Virgil was the Prophet
of Shekondar, the Mage. So we saw little of Virgil, who had absorbed himself
completely in the computer, who mumbled in machine language as he stirred his
soup and spent fifteen hours a day sitting alone before the black triangular
obelisk staring at endless columns of numbers.

Sarah, Hyacinth, Lucy and friends showed up late in the evening of the First,
giddy and triumphant, and we had a delighted reunion. Ephraim Klein showed
up at five in the morning bleeding from many small birdshot wounds, moving
with incredible endurance for such a small, unhealthy-looking person. After
establishing that the shot in his legs was steel, not lead, we sent him to
Nirvana on laughing gas and generic beer and sucked out the balls with a large
electromagnet. Casimir turned up suddenly, late on April second, slipping in
so quietly that he seemed just to beam down. He dumped a load of clothing and
sporting gear on a bench and set to work in a white creative heat we did not
care to disturb.

"I told you," Ephraim said to Sarah, as he recovered. "We should blow this
place up. Look what's happened."

"Yeah," said Sarah, "it's a bad situation."

"Bad situation! A fucking war! How many other universities do you know where a
civil war closes off the academic year?" Sarah shrugged. "Not too many."

"So why do you think we're having one? These people are a totally normal
cross-section of the population, caught in a giant building that drives them
crazy."

"Okay. Lie down and stop moving around so much, okay?" She wandered around
the shop watching a goggled Casimir slice into a fencing mask with a plate
grinder. In one corner, Hyacinth was teaching the joys of Bunsen-burner
cuisine to a small child who had been caught up in the fighting and sent down
here by grace of the Red Cross. Sarah suddenly walked back to Ephraim.

"You're wrong," she said. "It's nothing to do with the Plex. What people do
isn't determined by where they live. It happens to be their damned fault. They
decided to watch TV instead of thinking when they were in high school. They
decided to take blow-off courses and drink beer instead of reading and trying
to learn something. They decided to chicken out and be intolerant bastards
instead of being openminded, and finally they decided to go along with their
buddies and do things that were terribly wrong when there was no reason they
had to. Anyone who hurts someone else decides to hurt them, goes out of their
way to do it."

"But the pressures! The social pressures here are irresistible. How
"

"I resisted them. You resisted them. The fact that it's hard to be a good
person doesn't excuse going along and being an asshole. If they can't overcome
their own fear of being unusual, it's not my fault, because any idiot ought
to be able to see that if he just acts reasonably and makes a point of not
hurting others, he'll be happier."

"You don't even have to try to hurt people here. The place forces it on you.
You can't sit up in bed without waking up your goddamn neighbor. You can't
take a shower without sucking off the hot water and freezing the next one
down. You can't go to eat without making the people behind you wait a little
longer, and even by eating the food you increase the amount they have to make,
and decrease the quality."

"That's all crap! That's the way life is, Ephraim. It has nothing to do with
the architecture of the Plex."

"Look at the sexism in this place. Doesn't that ever bother you? Don't you
think that if people weren't so packed together in this space, the bars and
the parties wouldn't be such meat markets? Maybe there would be fewer rapes if
we could teach people how to get along with the other sex."

"If you want to prevent rapes, you should make a justice system that protects
our right not to be raped. Education? How do you pull off that kind of
education? How do you design a rape-proof dorm? Look, Ephraim, all we can do
is protect people's rights. We wouldn't get a change in attitude by moving to
another building. The education you're talking about is just a pipe dream."

"I still think we should blow this fucker up."

"Good. Work on it. In the meantime I'll continue to carry a gun."

Professor Forthcoming, or "Emeritus" as Hyacinth called him, followed me
around a great deal, jabbering about his lecture notes, prodding my latissimus
muscles and marveling at how easy it would be for me, a former first-string
college nose guard with a gun, to rescue them from the Library. I did not
have the heart to discourage him. In the end, all I could do was make sure he
paid for it: made him promise that he would sit down and study those notes so
that he could rewrite them if he had to. He promised unashamedly, but by the
time we organized the quest he was already looking forward to a conference in
Monaco in the fall, and listening to the casualty reports on the radio to hear
if any of his key grad students had been greased.

No, said Fred Fine, the APPASMU was not available for raids on the Library.
But we could have some soldiers and one AK-47, on the condition that, given
the choice between abandoning the quest and abandoning the assault rifle, we
would abandon the quest. I loudly agreed to this before Emeritus could sputter
any disagreements. Our party was me, Hyacinth, Emeritus, four GASF soldiers
and the Science Shop technician Lute. Sarah stayed behind reading The Origin
of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

Our route took us through fairly stable academic blocs, and other areas
controlled by gangs. We could not avoid passing through the area controlled by
Hansen's Gang, the smalltowners of the Great Plains. They were not well armed,
but neither was anyone else in the base, and they had jumped into the fray
with the glee of any rural in an informal blunt-instruments fight and come
out winners. This was their idiom. Our negotiations with their leader were
straightforward: we showed them our AK-47 and offered not to massacre them if
they let us pass without hassle. Their leader had no trouble grasping this,
but many of the members seemed to have a bizarre mental block: they could not
see the AK-47 in Hyacinth's hands. All they saw was Hyacinth, the first clean
healthy female they had seen in a week, and they came after her as though
she were unarmed. "Hey! She's mine!" yelled one of these as we entered their
largest common area.

"Fuck you," said another, swinging a motorcycle chain past his brother's eyes
at high speed. He turned and began to trudge toward Hyacinth, hitching up
his pants. "Hey, bitch, I'm gonna breed you," he said cheerfully. Hyacinth
aimed the gun at him; he looked at her face. She pulled the bolt into firing
position and squared off; he kept coming. When I stepped forward he brandished
his chain, then changed course as Hyacinth stepped out from behind me.

"Go for it," and "All right, for sure, Combine," yelled his pals.

"Hyacinth, please don't do that," I said, plugging my ears. She fired off
half a clip in one burst and pulverized a few square feet of cinderblock
wall right next to the man's head. The lights went out as a power cable was
severed. Courtesy of a window, we could still see.

"Shit, what the fuck?" someone inquired.

Rather than trying to explain, we proceeded from the room. "I like that
bitch," someone said as we were leaving, "but she's weird. I dunno what's
wrong with her."

The Mailroom was an armistice zone between Hansen's Gang and the Journalism
Department. The elevators here descended to the mail docks, making this one of
the few ports of entry to the Plex. The publicity-minded Crotobaltislavonians
had worked out an agreement with one of the networks-- you know which, if
you watched any news in this period-- allowing the camera crews to come and
go through this room. The network's hired guards all toted machine guns. We
counted twenty automatic weapons in this room alone, which probably meant that
the network had the entire Axis outgunned.

In exchange for a brief interview, which was never aired, and for all the
information we could provide about other parts of the Plex, we were allowed
into the Journalism bloc. Here we picked up a three-man minicam crew who
followed along for a while. Emeritus was magnificently embarrassed and
insisted on walking behind the camera. One of the crew was an AM student, and
I talked to him about the network's operations.

"You've got a hell of a lot of firepower. You guys are the most powerful force
in the Plex. How are you using it?"

The student shrugged. "What do you mean? We protect our crews and equipment.
All the barbarians are afraid of us."
"Right, obviously," I said. "But I noticed recently that a lot of people
around here are starving, being raped, murdered-- you know, a lot of
bum-out stuff. Do those guards try to help out?  You can spare a few."

"Well, I don't know," he said uncomfortably. "That's kind of network-level
policy. It goes against the agreement. We can go anywhere as long as we don't
interfere. If we interfere, no agreement."

"But if you've already negotiated one agreement, can't you do more? Get some
doctors into the building, maybe?"

"No way, man. No fucking way. We journalists have ethics." The camera crew
turned back when we reached the border of the Geoanthropological Planning
Science Department, a bloc with only two entrances. My office was here,
and I hoped I could get us through to the other side. The heavy door was
bullet-pocked, the lock had been shot at more than once, but it was blocked
from the other side and we could hear a guard beyond. Nearby, in an alcove,
under a pair of drinking fountains, stretched out straight and dead on the
floor, was a middle-aged faculty member, his big stoneware coffee mug still
clenched in his cold stiff fingers. He had apparently died of natural causes.

As it turned out, the guard was a grad student I knew, who let us in. He was
tired and dirty, with several bandages, a bearded face, bleary red eyes and
matted hair-- just as he had always looked. Three other grads sat there in the
reception room reading two-year-old U.S. News and World Reports and chomping
hunks of beef jerky.

While my friends took a breather, I stopped by my office and checked my
mailbox. On the way back I peeked into the Faculty Lounge.

The entire Geoanthropological Planning Science faculty was there, sitting
around the big conference table, while a few favored grad students stood back
against the walls. Several bowls of potato chips were scattered over the table
and at least two kegs were active. The room was dark; they were having a slide
show.

"Whoops! Looks like I tilted the camera again on this one," said Professor
Longwood sheepishly, nearly drowned out by derisive whoops from the crowd.
"How did this get in here? This is part of the Labrador tundra series. Anyway,
it's not a bad shot, though I used the wrong film, which is why everything's
pink. That corkscrew next to the caribou scat gives you some idea of scale-- "
but my opening the door had spilled light onto the image, and everyone turned
around to look at me.

"Bud!" cried the Chair. "Glad you could make it! Want some beer? It's dark
beer."

"Sounds good," I said truthfully, "but I'm just stopping in."

"How are things?" asked Professor Longwood.

"Fine, fine. I see you're all doing well too. Have you been outside much? I
mean, in the Plex?"

There was bawdy laughter and everyone looked at a sheepish junior faculty
member, a heavyset man from Upper Michigan. "Bert here went out to shoot some
slides," explained the Chair, "and ran into some of those hayseeds. He told
them he was a journalist and they backed off, but then they saw he didn't have
a press pass, so he had to kick one of them in the nuts and give the other his
camera!"

"Don't feel bad, Bert," said a mustachioed man nearby. "Well get a grant and
buy you a new one." We all laughed.

"So you're here for the duration?" I asked.

"Shouldn't last very long," said a heavily bearded professor who was puffing
on a pipe. "We are working up a model to see how long the food needs of the
population can last. We're using survival ratios from the 1782 Bulgarian
famine-- actually quite similar to this situation. We're having a hell of a
time getting data, but the model says it shouldn't last more than a week. As
for us, we've got an absolute regional monopoly on beer, which we trade with
the Journalism people for food."

"Have you taken into account the rats and bats?" I asked. Huh? Where?" The
room was suddenly still.

"We've got giant rats downstairs, and billions of bats upstairs. The rats are
this long. Eighty to a hundred pounds. No hearts. I hear they've worked their
way up to the lower sublevels now, and they're climbing up through the stacks
of garbage in the elevator shafts." "Shit!" cried Bert, beating his fists
wildly on the table. "What a time to lose my fucking camera!"

"Let's catch one," said his biologist wife.

"Well, we could adjust the model to account for exogenous factors," said the
bearded modeler.

"We'd have people eating rats, and rats eating people," said the mustachioed
one.

"And rats eating bats."

"And bats eating bugs eating dead rats."

"The way to account for all that is with a standard input! output matrix,"
said the Chair commandingly.

"These rats sound similar to wolverines," said Longwood, cycling through the
next few slides. "I think I have some wolverine scats a few slides ahead, if
this is the series I think it is.,' Seeing that they had split into a slide
and a modeling faction, I stepped out. A few minutes later we were back on
the road. We were attacked by a hopeless twit who was trying to use a shotgun
like a long-range rifle. I was nicked in the cheek by one ball. Hyacinth
splashed him all over a piece of abstract sculpture made of welded-together
lawn ornaments. The GASFers, who were humiliated that a female should carry
the big gun, were looking as though they'd never have another erection.

We passed briefly through the Premed Center, which was filed with pale mutated
undergrads dissecting war casualties and trying to gross each other out. I
yelled at them to get outside and assist the wounded, but received mostly
blank stares. "We can't," said one of them, scandalized, "we're not even in
med school yet."

From here we entered the Medical Library, and from there, the Library proper.

Huge and difficult to guard, the Library was the land of the refugees. It had
no desirable resources, but was a fine place in which to hide because the
bookshelves divided into thousands of crannies. Waves of refugees made their
way here and holed up, piling books into forts and rarely venturing out.

The first floor was unguarded and sparsely occupied. We stuck to the open
areas and proceeded to the second floor. Here was a pleasant surprise. An
organized relief effort had been formed, mostly by students in Nursing,
Classics, History, Languages and Phys. Ed. By trading simple medical services
to the barbarians they had obtained enough guns to guard the place. An
incoming refugee would be checked out by a senior Nursing major or occasional
premed volunteer, then given a place in the stacks-- "your place is DG 311
1851 and its vicinity"-- and so on. Most of the stragglers could then hide
out between bulletproof walls of paper, while the seriously wounded could be
lowered out the windows to the Red Cross people below. In the same way, food,
supplies and brave doctors could be hoisted into the Plex. The atmosphere was
remarkably quiet and humane, and all seemed in good humor.

The rest of our journey was uneventful. We climbed to the fourth floor and
wended our way toward Emeritus' study. Soon we could smell smoke, and see it
hanging in front of the lights. To the relief of Emeritus, it came not from
his office but from the open door of the one labeled "Embers, Archibald."

Three men and a woman, all unarmed, sat around a small fire, occasionally
throwing on another book. They had broken out the window to vent the smoke.

The woman shrieked as I appeared in the door. "Jesus! If I had a gun, you'd be
dead now. I react so uncontrollably."

"Good thing you don't," I observed.

"It's really none of your business," intoned a thin, pale man. "But I suppose
that since you have that wretched gun, you're going to have us do what you
want. Well, we don't have anything you could want here. And forget about Zelda
here. She's a lousy lay." Zelda shrieked in amusement. "It's a good thing
you're witty when you're a bastard, Terence, or I'd despise you." "Oh, do go
ahead. I adore being despised. I really do. It's so inspiring."

"Society despises the artist," said Embers, lighting a Dunhill in the
bookfire, "unless he panders to the masses. But society treats the artist
civilly so he can't select specific targets for his hatred. Open personal
hatred is so very honest."

"Now that's meaningful, Arch," said the other man, a brief lump with an
uncertain goatee.

"How come you're burning books?" I asked.

"Oh, that, well," said Embers, "Terence wanted a fire." Terence piped up
again. "This whole event is so very like camping out, don't you agree? Except
without the dreadful ants and so forth. I thought a fire would be very--
primal. But it smoked dreadfully, so we broke out the window, and now it's
very cold and we must keep it going ceaselessly, of course. Is that adequate?
Is that against Library rules?"

"We've been finding," added Embers, "that older books are much better. They
burn more slowly. And with their thin pages, Bibles and dictionaries are quite
effective. I'm taking some notes." He waved a legal pad at me.

"Also," added the small one, "old books are printed on acid-free paper, so
we aren't getting acid inside of our lungs." "Why don't you just cover the
window and put it out?" I asked. "Aren't we logical?" said Terence. "You
people are all so tediously Western. We wanted a fire, you can't take it away!
What happened to academic freedom? Say, are you quite finished with your
bloody suggestions? I'm trying to read one of my fictions to these people, Mr.
Spock."

I followed my friends into Emeritus' office. Behind me Terence resumed his
reading. "The thin stream of boiling oil dribbled from the lip of the frying
pan and seared into the boy's white flesh. As he squirmed against the bonds
that were holding him down, unable to move, it ran into the bed of thorny
roses underneath him; the petals began to wither like a dying western sunset
at dusk."

A minute or two later, as we exited with Emeritus' papers, there was a patter
of applause. "Ravishing, Terence. Quite frankly, it's similar to Erasmus T.
Bowlware's Gulag Pederast. Especially the self-impalement of the heroine on
the electric fencepost of the concentration camp as she is driven into a
frenzy by psychic emanations from the possessed child in the nearby mansion
where the defrocked epileptic priest gives up his life in order to get the
high-technology secrets to the Jewish commandos. I do like it."

"When do I get to read my fiction?" asked Zelda.

"Is this from the novel about the female writer who is struggling to write a
novel about a woman writer who is writing a novel about a woman artist in Nazi
Germany with a possessed daughter?" asked Embers.

"Well, I decided to make her a liberated prostitute and psychic," said Zelda;
and that was the last I heard of the conversation, or of the people.

We deposited Emeritus in the refugee camp on the second floor and made it back
to the Science Shop in about an hour. There, Sarah and Casimir were deep in
conversation, and Ephraim Klein was listening in.

Casimir's finished suit of armor used bulletproof fabric taken from a couple
of associate deans. The administration was unhappy about that, but they could
only get to Casimir by shooting their way through the Unified Pure Plexorian
Realm. Underneath the fabric, Casimir wore various hard objects to protect
his flesh from impact. On legs and knees he wore soccer shinguards and the
anti-kneecapping armor favored by administration members. He wore a jockstrap
with a plastic cup, and over his torso was a heavy, crude breastplate that he
had endlessly and deafeningly hammered out of half a fifty-five gallon oil
drum. Down his back he hung overlapping shingles of steel plate to protect his
spine.

His head was protected by a converted defensive lineman's football helmet.
He had cut the front out of a fencing mask and attached the wire mesh over
the plastic bars of the helmet's facemask. Over the earholes he placed a pair
of shooter's ear protectors. So that he would not overheat, he cut a hole in
the back of the helmet and ran a flexible hose to it. The other end of the
hose he connected to a battery-powered blower hung on his belt, and to get
maximum cooling benefit he shaved his head. The helmet as a whole was draped
with bulletproof fabric which hung down a foot on all sides to cover the neck.
And as someone happened to notice, he took his snapshot of Sarah and Hyacinth
and taped it to the inside of the helmet with grey duct tape.

When Casimir was in full battle garb, his only vulnerable points were feet,
hands and eye-slit. Water could be had by sucking on a tube that ran down to
a bicyclist's water bottle on his belt. And it should not go unmentioned that
Casimir, draped in thick creamy-white fabric, with blazing yellow and blue
running shoes, topped with an enormous shrouded neckless head, a faceless dome
with bulges over the ears and a glittering silver slit for the eyes, a sword
from the Museum in hand, looked indescribably terrible and fearsome, and for
the first time in his life people moved to the walls to avoid him when he
walked down the hallways.

It was a very smoke-filled room that Casimir ventilated by swinging in through
the picture window on the end of a rope. Through the soft white tobacco haze,
Oswald Heimlich saw his figure against the sky for an instant before it burst
into the room and did a helpless triple somersault across the glossy parquet
floor. Heimlich was already on his feet, snatching up his $4,000 engraved
twelve-gauge shotgun and flicking off the safety. As the intruder staggered
to his feet, Heimlich sighted over the head of the Trustee across from him
(who reacted instinctively by falling into the lap of the honorable former
mayor) and fired two loads of .00 buckshot into this strange Tarzan's lumpy
abdomen. The intruder took a step back and remained standing as the shot
plonked into his chest and clattered to the floor. Heimlich fired again with
similar effects. By now the great carved door had burst open and five guards
dispersed to strategic positions and pointed their UZIs at the suspicious
visitor. S. S. Krupp watched keenly.

The guards made the obligatory orders to freeze. He slowly reached around and
began to draw a dueling sword from the Megaversity historical collections out
of a plastic pipe scabbard. Tied to its handle was a white linen napkin with
the AM coat of arms, which he waved suggestively.

"I swear," said S. S. Krupp, "don't you have a phone, son?" No one laughed.
These were white male Eastern businessmen, and they were serious. Heimlich
in particular was not amused; this man looked very much like the radiation
emergency workers who had been staggering through his nightmares for several
nights running, and having him crash in out of a blue sky into a Board of
Trustees meeting was not a healthy experience. He sat there with his eyes
closed for several moments as waiters scurried in to sweep up the broken
glass.

"I'll bet you want to do a little negotiating," said Krupp, annoyingly
relaxed. "Who're you with?"

"I owe allegiance to no man," came the muffled voice from behind the mask, but
"come on behalf of all."

"Well, that's good! That's a fine attitude," said Krupp. "Set yourself down
and we'll see what we can do."

The intruder took an empty chair, laid his sword on the table and peeled off
his hood of fabric to reveal the meshed-over football helmet, A rush of forced
air was exhaled from his facemask and floated loose sheets of paper down the
table.

"Why did you put a nuclear waste dump in the basement?" Everyone was
surprised, if genteel, and they exchanged raised eyebrows for a while.

"Maybe Ozzie can tell you about that," suggested Krupp. "I was still in
Wyoming at the time."

Heimlich scowled. "I won't deny its existence. Our reasons for wanting it must
be evident. Perhaps if I tell you its history, you'll agree with us, whoever
you are. Ahem. You may be aware that until recently we suffered from bad
management at the presidential level. We had several good presidents in the
seventies, but then we got Tony Commodi, who was irresponsible-- an absolute
mongoloid when it came to finance-- insisted on teaching several classes
himself, and so forth. He raised salaries while keeping tuition far too low.
People became accustomed to it. At this time we Trustees were widely dispersed
and made no effort to lead the university. Finally we were nearly bankrupt.
Commodi was forced to resign by faculty and Trustees and was replaced by
Pertinax Rushforth, who in those days was quite the renascence man, and widely
respected. We Trustees were still faced with impossible financial problems,
but we found that if we sold all the old campus-- hundreds of acres of prime
inner-city real estate-- we could pull in enough capital to build something
like the Plex on the nine blocks we retained.

But of course the demographics made it clear that times would be very rough
in the years to come. We could not compete for students, and so we had to run
a very tight ship and seek innovative sources for our operating funds. We
could have entered many small ventures-- high technology spinoffs, you see--
but this would have been extraordinarily complex, highly controversial and
unpredictable, besides raising questions about the proper function of the
university.

"It was then that we hit upon the nuclear waste idea. Here is something that
is not dependent on the economy; we will always have these wastes to dispose
of. It's highly profitable, as there is a desperate demand for disposal
facilities. The wastes must be stored for millennia, which means that they
are money in the bank-- the government, whatever form it takes, must continue
to pay us until their danger has died away. And by its very nature it must be
done secretly, so no controversy is generated, no discord disrupts the normal
functions of the academy-- there need be no relationship between the financial
foundation and the intellectual activities of the university. It's perfect."

"See, this city is on a real stable salt-dome area," added a heavy man in
an enormous grey suit, "and now that there's no more crude down there, it's
suitable for this kind of storage." "You," said the knight, pointing his sword
at the man who had just spoken, "must be in the oil business. Are you Ralph
Priestly?" "Ha! Well, yeah, that's me," said Ralph Priestly, unnerved. "We
have to talk later."

"How did you know about our disposal site?" asked Heimlich. "That doesn't
matter. What matters now is: how did the government of Crotobaltislavonia
find out about it?" "Oh," said Heimlich, shocked. "You know about that also."
"Yep."

After a pause, S. S. Krupp continued. "Now, don't go tell your honchos that we
did this out of greed. America had to start doing something with this waste--
that's a fact. You know what a fact is? That's something that has nothing
to do with politics. The site is as safe as could be. See, some things just
can't be handed over to political organizations, because they're so damned
unstable. But great universities can last for thousands of years. Hell, look
at the changes of government the University of Paris has survived in the
last century alone! This facility had to be built and it had to be done by a
university. The big steady cash flow makes us more stable, and that makes us
better qualified to be running the damn thing in the first place. Symbiosis,
son."

"Wait. If you're making so much money off of this, why are you so financially
tight-assed?"

"That's a very good question," said Heimlich. "As I said, it's imperative
that this facility remain secret. If we allowed the cash flow to show up on
our ledgers, this would be impossible. We've had to construct a scheme for
processing or laundering, as it were, our profits through various donors and
benefactors. In order to allay suspicion, we keep these 'donations' as small
as we can while meeting the university's basic needs."

"What about the excess money?"

"What's done with that depends on how long the site remains secret. Therefore
we hold the surplus in escrow and invest it in the name of American
Megaversity, so that in the meantime it is productively used."

"Invest it where? Don't tell me. Heimlich Freedom Industries. the Big Wheel
Petroleum Corporation
"

"Well," said Ralph Priestly, cutting the tip off a cigar. "Big Wheel's a hell
of an investment. I run a tight ship." "We don't deny that the investments
are in our best interests," said a very old Trustee with a kindly face. "But
there's nothing wrong with that, as long as we do not waste or steal the
money. Every investment we make in some way furthers the nation's economic
growth."

"But you're no different from the Crotobaltislavonians, in principle. You're
using your control over the wastes to blackmail whatever government comes
along."

"That's an excellent observation," said Krupp. "But the fact is, if you'll
just think about it, that as long as the waste exists, someone's going to
control them, and whoever does can blackmail whatever government there is, and
as long as someone's going to have that influence, it might as well be good
people like us."

The knight drummed his fingers on the table, and the Trustees peered at his
inscrutable silver mask. "I see from the obituaries that Bert Nix and Pertinax
Rushforth were one and the same. What happened to him?"

Heimlich continued. "Pertinax couldn't hack it. He was all for fiscal
conservatism, of course-- Bert was not a soft-headed man at any point. But
when he learned he was firing people and cutting programs just to maintain
this charade, he lost his strength of will. The faculty ruined his life
with their hatred, he had a nervous breakdown and we sacked him. Then the
MegaUnion began to organize a tuition strike, so the remaining old-guard
Trustees threw up their hands, caved in and installed Julian Didius as
President!" At the memory of this, several of the Trustees sighed or moaned
with contempt. "Well! After he had enjoyed those first three weeks of flying
in all his intelligentsia comrades for wine and cheese parties, we got him in
here and showed him the financial figures, which looked disastrous. Then he
met Pertinax after the electroshock, and realized what a bloody hell-hole he
was in. Three days later he went to the Dean's Office for a chat, and when
the Dean turned out to be addressing a conference in Hawaii, he blew his top
and hurled himself out the window, and then we brought in Septimius and he's
straightened things out wonderfully." There were admiring grins around the
table, though Krupp did not appear to be listening.

"Did Pertinax have master keys, then, or what? How did he keep from being
kicked out of the Plex?"

"We allowed the poor bastard to stay because we felt sorry for him," said
Krupp. "He wouldn't live anywhere else."

The angle of the knight's head dropped a little.

"So," said Heimlich briskly, "for some reason you knew our best-kept secrets.
We hope you will understand our actions now and not do anything rash. Do you
follow?"

"Yes," murmured the knight, "unfortunately."

"What is unfortunate about it?"

"The more thoughtful you people are, the worse you get. Why is that?"

"What do we do that is wrong, Casimir Radon?" said Krupp quietly.

The mask rose and gleamed at S. S. Krupp, and then its owner lifted off the
helmet to reveal his shaven head and permanently consternated face.

"Lie a hell of a lot. Fire people when you don't have to. Create-- create a
very complicated web of lies, to snare a simple, good ideal."

"I don't think it's a hell of a lot of fun," said Krupp, "and it hurts
sometimes, more than you can suppose. But great goals aren't attained with
ease or simplicity or pleasantry, or whatever you're looking for. If we gave
into the MegaUnion, we would tip our hand and cause ruination. As long as
we're putting on this little song-and-dance, we've got to make it a complete
song-and-dance, because if the orchestra's playing a march and the dancers are
waltzing, the audience riots. The theater burns."

"At least you could be more conciliatory."

"Conciliatory! Listen, son, when you've got snakes in the basement and the
water's rising, it's no time to conciliate. Someone's got to have some
principles in education, and it might as well be us. If this country's
educators hadn't had their heads in their asses for forty years, we wouldn't
have a faculty union, and more of our students might be sentient. I'll have
strap marks on my ass before I conciliate with those medicine men down there
on the picket lines."

"You're trying to fire everyone. That's a little extreme." "Not if we're to
be consistent," said Heimlich. "We can use the opportunity to rearrange our
financial platform, and hire new people. There are many talented academics
desperate for work these days, and the best faculty members here won't let
themselves be taken out en masse anyway."

"You're going to do it, aren't you!"

"It's evident that we have no choice."

"Don't you think-- " Casimir looked out at the clear blue sky.

"What?"

"That if the administration gets to be as powerful as you, you have killed the
university?"

"Look, son," said Ralph Priestly, rolling forward. "We never claimed this was
an ideal situation. We're just doing our best. We don't have much choice."

"We're rather busy, as you can imagine," said Heimlich finally. What do you
want? Something for the railgun?" He sat up abruptly. How is the railgun?"

"Safe."

Heimlich smiled for the first time in a week. "I'd like to know what a 'safe'
railgun is."

"Maybe you'll find out."

Everyone looked disturbed.

"We are prepared to remove the Terrorists from the waste disposal site," said
Casimir crisply, "as a public service. The estimated time will be one week.
Beforehand, we plan to evacuate the Plex. We require your cooperation in two
areas.

"First, we will need control of the Plex radio station. One of our group has
developed a scheme for evacuating the Plex which makes this necessary.

"The second requirement is for the consideration of you, Ralph Priestly. What
we want, Ralph, is for some person of yours to sit by the switch that controls
the Big Wheel sign. When we phone him and say, 'Fiat lux,' he is to turn it
on, and when we say, 'Fiat obscuritas,' off.

"That commando team you tried to send in through the sewers last night was
stopped by a RAT, or Rodent Assault Tactics team associated with us. Well be
releasing them soon, we can't do much more with first aid. The point is that
only we can get rid of the Terrorists. We just ask that you do not interfere."

Finished, Casimir sat back, hands clasped on breastplate, and stared calmly
at a skylight. The Board of Trustees moved down to the far end of the table.
After they had talked for a few minutes, S. S. Krupp walked over and shook
hands with Casimir.

"We're with you," Krupp said proudly. "Wish I knew what the hell you had in
mind. What's your timetable?"

"Don't know. You'll have plenty of warning."

"Can we supply men? Arms?" asked Heimlich.

"Nope. One gun is all we need." Casimir let go of Krupp's hand and walked
down the table, unclipping himself from the rope and throwing it out to
dangle there. A forest of pinstripes rushed up the other side, trying to
circumnavigate the table and shake Casimir's hand too. Casimir stopped by the
exit.

"I probably won't see you again. Bear in mind, after the university starts
running again, two things: we control the rats. And we control the Worm. You
no longer monopolize power in this institution."

The Trustees stopped dead at this breach of pleasantness and stared at
Casimir. Krupp looked on as though monitoring a field of battle from a high
tower. Casimir continued. "I just mention this because it makes a difference
in what is reasonable for you to do, and what is not. Good-bye." As he reached
for the doorknob, he found the door briskly opened by a guard; he nodded to
the man and strode out into an anteroom.

"Soldier," said Septimius Severus Krupp, "see that that man receives safe
passage back to his own sphere of influence."

Night fell, and Towers A, B, C, D, H and G began to flash on and off in
perfect unison. Every tower except for E and F-- homes of the Axis-- was
blinking in and out of existence every two seconds. As the Axis people saw it,
the entire Plex was disappearing into the night, then re-igniting, over and
over. It was much closer than the Big Wheel; it was far larger; it surrounded
them on three sides. The effect was stupefying.

Dex Fresser ran to his observation post. In the corridors of E13S, Terrorists
wandered like decapitated chickens. Some were hearing voices telling them to
look, some not to look, to run or stay, to panic or relax. The SUBbie who was
supposed to guard the lounge-headquarters had dropped his gun on the floor and
disappeared. Fresser burst into the lounge to consult with Big Wheel.

Big Wheel had gone dark.

He turned on the Little Wheel-- the Go Big Red Fan.

"Big Wheel must be mad at you or something. What the fuck did you do wrong?"
shouted the Fan, loud, omnipresent and angry. Dex Fresser shrank, got on his
knees and snuffled a little. Outside, a bewildered stereo-hearer was playing
with the knobs on his ghetto blaster, desperate for advice.

"The stereo! The stereo, dipshit, find that frequency! Find the frequency,"
said the Fan in the voice of Dex Fresser's old scoutmaster. Dex Fresser
tumbled over a chair in his haste to reach the stereo. The only light in the
room was cast by the glowing LEDs on his stereo that looked out like feral
eyes in the night. All systems were go for stereo energize. As Dex Fresser's
hands played over the controls, dozens of lights kicked in with important
systems data, and green digits glowed from the tuner to tell him his position
on the FM dial. Only dense static came from the speakers, meaningless to
anyone else; but he could hear Big Wheel guiding him in the voice of his
first-grade ballroom dance teacher.

"A little farther down, dear. Keep going right down the dial. You're certain
to get it eventually."

Dex Fresser punched buttons and a light came on, saying: "AUTO DOWNWARD
SCAN." He now heard many voices from the dark cones of the speakers: funky
jazz-playing fascists, "great huge savings now
Neil Young wailing into his
harmonica, a call-in guest suggesting that we load the Mexicans on giant space
barges and hurl them into the sun, a base hit by Chambliss, an ad for rat
poison, a teen, apoplectic about his acne... and then the voice he was looking
for.

"On. Off. On. Off. On. Off." It was a woman's voice, somehow familiar.

"It's Sarah, dumbshit," said the Go Big Red Fan. "She's on the campus
station."

Indeed. The other towers were going on and off just as Sarah told them to. He
knelt there for ten minutes, watching their reflection in the glassy surface
of the Big Wheel. On. Off. On. Off. "On," she said, and paused. "Most of you
did very well! But we've got some holdouts in E and F Towers. I'm sorry to
say that Big Wheel won't be showing up this evening. He will not be here to
give us his advice without cooperation from the E and F tower hearers. We'll
try later. I'll be back in an hour, at midnight, and by then I hope that
you SUBbies and Terrorists will have submitted to Big Wheel's will." Sarah
was replaced by Ephraim Klein, who started in with another solid hour of
pre-classical keyboard selections.

Dex Fresser was clutching his chest, which felt unbearably tight. "Oh, shit,"
he exclaimed, "it's us! We're keeping Big Wheel off! Everybody put your
stereos on ninety point three! Do as she says!" Down in Electrical Control,
deep in the Burrows, I and the other switch-throwers rested. The circuit
breakers that supply power to an entire tower are large items, not at all easy
to throw on and off every two seconds! By midnight we were rested up and ready
to go. Sarah resumed her broadcast.

"I sure hope we can get Big Wheel to come on. Let's hope E and F Towers
go along this time. Ready? Everyone standing by their light switch?
Okay
Off
On
Off
"

From his lounge-headquarters, Dex Fresser watched his towers flash raggedly
on and off. Some of the lights were not flashing; but within minutes the Wing
Commisars had swept through and shot out any strays, and Dex Fresser was
undescribably proud that his towers could flash like the others. Big Wheel
could not forsake them now.

"On!" cried Sarah, and stopped. Several lights went off again from habit, then
coyly flickered back on. There was an unbearable wait.

"I think we've done it," Sarah said. "Look at Big Wheel!" And the wheel of
fire cast its light over the Plex with all its former glory. Dex wept.

"Not bad for a fascist," observed Little Wheel.

The Big Wheel spun all night.

It was trickier to get the attention of the barbarians of the Base. Most
of them did not have bicameral minds and thus could not be made to hear
mysterious voices. We needed to impress them. Hence Sarah predicted that in
twenty-four hours a plague of rats would strike Journalism, unless all the
journalists cleared out of the Plex.

"Frank," said the reporter into the camera, "I'm here in the American
Megaversity mailroom, our operations center for the Plex war. It's been
quiet on all fronts tonight despite former Student President Sarah Jane
Johnson's prediction of a 'plague of rats.' Well, we've seen a few rats
here"-- his image is replaced by shot of small rat scurrying down empty
corridor, terrified by TV lights-- "but perhaps that's not unusual in these
very strange, very special circumstances. We toured the Plex today, looking
for plagues of rats, leaving no stone unturned to find the animals of which
Ms. Johnson spoke. We looked in garbage heaps"-- shot of journalist digging
in garbage with long stick; sees nothing, turns to camera, holds nose,
says "phew!"-- "but all we found were bugs. We toured the corridors"--
journalist alone in long empty corridor; camera swivels around to look in
other direction; nothing there either; back to journalist-- "but apparently
the rats were somewhere else. We checked the classrooms, but the only rats
there were on paper"-- journalist standing in stolen lab coat next to diagram
of rat's nervous system-- "Finally, though, we did manage to find one rat. In
a little-used lab, Frank, in a little cage, we found one very hungry white
rat"-- back to mailroom; journalist holds up wire cage containing furtive
white rat-- "but he's been well fed ever since, and we don't think he'll
attack."

"Sam, what do you think about Sarah Jane Johnson's pronouncement? Is it a
symbolic statement, or has she cracked?" "No one can be sure, Frank." Behind
journalist, door explodes open with a boom and a flash; strobe light is seen
beyond it. The journalist continues, trying to resist the temptation to turn
around and look; but the explosion has drowned out the audio part of the
camera. Dozens of giant rats storm the room
 However, reliable sources have it
that
" His words are drowned out by mass machine-gun fire. In an unprecedented
breach of media etiquette, journalist turns around to look, and presently
disappears from view. Abruptly, the ceiling of the mailroom spins down to fill
the screen, and three great fuzzy out-of-focus rat snouts converge from the
edges of the screen, long teeth glistening in the TV lights; all goes dark.
We return to Network Control. Anchorman is in process of throwing his pen
at someone, but pauses to say, "Now, this," and is replaced by an animated
hemorrhoid.

All we wanted was to get everyone out of the Plex and end this thing. Once
rats roamed the Base and bats frolicked in the hallways, and smoke, flies
and filth were everywhere, those people were ready to go. The GASF would
leave whenever Virgil told them to. The administration would clear B and
C Towers as soon as we gave the word. The TUGgies claimed that they were
merely holding their three towers to fend off the Reds. Later, to no one's
surprise, we found that they had half-brainwashed the population of those
towers by the time Sarah kicked in with her pronouncements; and how could
oversweetened Kool-Aid, Manilow songs and lovebombing compete with her radical
power and grand demonstrations? After we shut off their electricity and water
for twelve hours, the TUG agreed to evacuate their towers at our command. The
SUB/Terrorist axis would do whatever they had to to keep the Big Wheel on.

As the days went by, Big Wheel grew more demanding. Everyone was to leave his
stereo tuned to 90.3 at all times. Everyone was to plan evacuation routes from
their towers and clear away any obstacles that might have been placed at the
exits. Dex Fresser's devotion to Sarah's words became complete, and after a
week we knew we could evacuate the Axis and everyone else whenever we were
ready.

In the meantime we were moving the railgun downstairs. To withstand the recoil
thrust, the machine's supports had to be bolted right into the concrete floor
of the sewer. We had to precision-fit a hundred and twenty bolts into the
concrete for the fifty-foot-long railgun, a dull and iffy task requiring great
precision. Once the holes were prepared, we began carrying the supports down.
It was a terrible, endless job. After a day of it, I decided I was going to
write a book-- that way, all of this drudgery was a fascinating contribution
to my artistic growth. Strength was not a requirement in the Grand Army of
Shekondar the Fearsome, so I had to torque all the bolts myself. During breaks
I would look down the tunnel at the wall of lights that guarded the Nuke
Dump's approach. What were the Crotobaltislavonians doing down there, and what
were they thinking?

Their plan-- the years of infiltration and the moments of violence-- had gone
perfectly. They had probably made their radioactive-waste bombs, only to find
that their only elevator shaft had been blocked by tons of concrete. They must
have thought they had lost, then; but the National Guard had not moved in and
the authorities had given in to all demands. Was this a trick?

They must have been unprepared for the resistance put up by the GASF and the
TUG. Still, their proxies had seized two towers and were holding their own.
That was fine, until they threw Marxism to the winds and began to worship a
giant neon sign. Dex Fresser must have worked closely with Magrov for years.
The cafeteria riot of April First had clearly been timed to coincide with the
seizure of the Nuke Dump, and the SUB had not bought their Kalashnikovs at the
7-11. Then-- a window fan! A fucking window fan! In a way, I sympathized with
the Crotobaltislavonians. Besides us, they were the only rational people here.
Like us, they must have wondered whether they had gone out of their minds. If
they had any dedication to their cause, though, they must have changed their
plans. They still had the waste, they were protected by the rats, they could
still wield plenty of clout. They could not see past the barrier of light,
where we were implanting the railgun.

During a breather upstairs I encountered Ephraim Klein, moving stiffly but on
his feet.

"Come here!" he yelled, grabbed my shirt, and began pulling me down a hallway.
I knew it must be something either very important or embarrassingly trivial.

"You won't believe this," he said, shuffling down the hail beside me. "We're
heading for Greathouse Chapel. We were there to broadcast some organ music--
guess what we found."

Ephraim had appointed himself Music Director for our radio station, and later
added Head Engineer and Producer. He knew that we could not spend twenty-four
hours a day on Big Wheel chatter, and that in the meantime he could damn
well play whatever he liked on what amounted to the world's largest stereo--
revenge at last. If Sarah had commanded all residents to play their radios
twenty-four hours a day, so much the better; they were going to hear music
that meant something. He was going to improve their minds, whether they
thanked him or not.

"Remember, listeners, a record is a little wheel. Any record at all is Big
Wheel's cousin. So whenever a record speaks, you had damn better listen."

Ephraim and I heard the music from hundreds of feet away. Someone was playing
the Greathouse Organ, and playing it well, though with a kind of inspired
abandon that led to occasional massive mistakes. Still, the great Bach fugue
lurched on with all parts intact, and no error caused the interweaving of
those voices to be confused.

"Your friend has a lot of stops pulled out today," I said. "That's not my
friend!" shouted Ephraim. "Well, he is now, but he's not that friend."

We reached the grand entrance and I looked far up the center aisle to the
console. A wide, darkly clad man sat there, blasting along happily toward
the climax. No music was on the console; the organist played from memory.
High up on the wall of the chapel, bright yellow light shone down from the
picture-windowed broadcast booth, where the organ's sound could be piped to
the radio station hundreds of meters away.

As we approached, I could see a ragged overcoat and the pink flashes of bare
feet on the pedals. The final chord was trumpeted, threatening to blow out the
rose window above, and the performer applauded himself. I climbed the dais and
gaped into the beaming face of Bert Nix.

His tongue was blooming from his mouth as usual; but when I arrived, he
retracted it and fixed a gaze at me that riveted me to the wall.

"Beware the Demon of the Wave," he said coldly. For a moment I was too scared
to breathe. Then the spell was broken as he removed a cup of beer from the
Ethereal keyboard and drained it. "I never was dead," he said defensively.

"You're actually Pertinax, aren't you?" I asked.

"I've always been more pertinent than you thought," he said and, giggling,
pounded out a few great chords that threatened to lift the top of my head off.

"Who was the dead man in your room?"

He rolled his eyes thoughtfully. "Bill Benson, born in nineteen-twenty. Joined
Navy in forty-two, five-inch gun loader in Pacific War, winning Bronze Star
and Purple Heart, discharged in forty-eight, hired by us as security guard.
That poor bastard had a stroke in the elevator, he was so worried about me!"

"How'd he get in that room?"

"I dragged him there! Otherwise, they don't close the lid of the little pine
box and your second cousins come in plastic clothes and put dead flowers on
you, a bad way to go!"

"I see. Uh, well, you're quite an organist."

"Yes. But a terrible administrator!" Pertinax now clapped his foot down on
the lowest pedal, sounding a rumble too low to hear. "But hark!" he screamed,
"there sounds an ominous undertone of warning!" He released the pedal and
looked around at Ephraim and me. "I shall now play the famous 'Toccata and
Fugue in D Minor.' This is clearly the work of a young and vigorous Bach,
almost ostentatious in his readiness to show virtuosity, reveling in the
instrument's ability to bounce mighty themes from the walls of the Kirche

but enough of this, my stops are selected." He looked suspiciously at the
ceiling. "This one brings out the bats. Prepare your tennis rackets therefore!
Ah. The nuptial song arose from all the thousand thousand spirits over the
joyful Earth & Sea, and ascended into the Heavens; for Elemental Gods there
thunderous Organs blew; creating delicious Viands. Demons of Waves their watry
Eccho's woke! Demons of Waves!" And throwing his head back, he hurled himself
into the Toccata. We stood mesmerized by his playing and his probing tongue,
until the fugue began; then we retreated to the broadcast booth.

"He's playing stop combinations I've never heard before," said Ephraim.
"Anyway, I'm broadcasting all this. He's great."

Down in the tunnels we always kept the radio on low, and so heard plenty of
Pertinax in the next few days.

Eventually we brought down the big power supplies from Heimlich Freedom
Industries, wrapped in plastic and packed with chemical dessicants to keep
them dry, surrounded with electric blankets to keep the electronics warm.
Casimir produced several microchips he had stolen from the supplies so that
Fred Fine could not use them, and plugged them into their proper spots. We
ran thousands of feet of heavy black power cables down into the tunnels to
power them. We tested each electromagnet; two were found wanting and had to
be sent back and remade. We energized the rail and slid the bucket up and
down it hundreds of times, using a small red laser to check for straightness,
laboriously adjusting for every defect. It took two days to carry down the
machine's parts, four days to adjust it and a day of testing before Casimir
was satisfied it would work on its first and only trial.

Virgil worked on the payload, a ten-kilogram high-explosive shell. He used
a computer program to design the shaped charge, an enormous program that
normally would have run for days, but now required only seconds. The weakened
Worm could only taunt him. AH, GOING TO BLOW SOMETHING UP? "I'm going to blow
you up."

THREATS OF PHYSICAL VIOLENCE ARE USELESS AGAINST THE WORM. This was its usual
response to what sounded like threats. YOU'RE VERY CLEVER, BUT I SHALL TRIUMPH
IN THE END.

"Wrong. I found where you are."

HUH? "I found the secret mini-disc drives that Paul Bennett hid above the
ceiling of his office. The drives where you've been hiding. It's all over
now."

I AM EVERYWHERE.

"You are most places, but not everywhere. I'm going to shut off your secret
disc drives as soon as I'm sure they aren't booby trapped."

I'M GOING TO BLOW YOU UP.

"I'm going to be careful."

THAT'S A LOT OF EXPLOSIVE FOR YOU TO FOOL AROUND WITH, LITTLE BOY.

"It'll do."

I WILL BLOCK YOUR CALCULATIONS.

"You're living in the past, Worm," typed Virgil, and executed his program. "I
have just executed my program. And next, I'm going to execute you."

THREATS OF PHYSICAL VIOLENCE ARE USELESS AGAINST THE WORM.

Lute turned the shell on a Science Shop lathe and packed the explosive with a
hydraulic press. Virgil carried it down an evacuated stairwell, placing each
foot very, very carefully.

Casimir put it on a clean table downstairs and weighed it; ten kilograms
precisely. He dusted it off with a lint-free rag and slid it into the bucket.
We checked the power sources, and they looked fine. Everyone was evacuated
except for me, Casimir and Fred Fine; Virgil led the remaining GASF forces
upstairs and commanded them to leave. It was 10:30 P.M.

We sat in the APPASMU for an hour and a half, until Sarah's program came on.

                                    --May--

"Everyone look at Big Wheel!" she said. There was long silence and we sat
there on the APPASMU, protected by strobes, the rats chattering and grumbling
in the darkness around us, the HFI power sources looking oddly clean and shiny
as they flashed in and out of darkness in their own little strobe-pool.

"That's good," said Sarah. "As you can see, Big Wheel is shining tonight.
But he won't shine for long, because he is unhappy." Another wait. We knew
that, upstairs, Hyacinth had phoned the Big Wheel's controller and ordered him
to shut off the sign. "Big Wheel is not shining tonight," Sarah continued,
"because he wants you all out of the Plex. You are all to stop watching him
from a distance. The Big Wheel wants you to see him up close tonight. Everyone
get out of the building now and walk toward Big Wheel and stand under him.
Leave your radios on in case I have more instructions! You have an hour to
leave the Plex. When Big Wheel is happy, he will turn on again."

Organ music came on, obviously another live performance by a particularly
inspired Pertinax. We played cards atop the tank. "Should we evacuate too?"
asked Fred Fine. "Could Big Wheel be another face of Shekondar?"

"Sarah wants you here," said Casimir. This satisfied him. The music started
just after midnight and continued for three hours. Above, we supposed, the
evacuees were being loaded into ambulances or paddy-wagons, while Army fallout
emergency workers prepared the city for the worst. The Board of Trustees were
departing by helicopter from the top of C Tower, withdrawing to the HFI Tower
a mile away.

"This is really it," said Fred Fine, ready to black out. "This is the moment
of the heroes. The Apocalypse of Plexor. All will be unMixed in an instant."

"Yep," said Casimir, drawing another card. "I'll see that, and raise you four
chocolate chips."

The only problem so far was minor: the station's signal seemed to be dying
away. We had to keep turning up the volume to hear the music, and by 1:30 we
had it up all the way. Our batteries were fine, so we assumed it was a problem
at the station. As long as everyone else was turning up their volume too, it
should be fine.

Finally the organ music was phased out for a second and we heard Sarah. "Go
for it," she said, tense and breathless. "We're gone. See you outside." I
started sweating and trembling and had to get up and pace around to work off
energy, finally taking an emergency dump. We were in a sewer, who cared? We
gave Sarah, Hyacinth, Ephraim and Bert Nix half an hour to evacuate, but
the music kept on going. After twenty minutes, Ephraim's voice came in. "Go
ahead," he said, "we're staying."

So we went ahead. We had no choice.

The tunnel was four hundred feet long.

The first fifty feet were taken up by the railgun, set up on its supports
about five feet above the floor. There was a three-hundred-foot desert of
tinfoil shards, then the barrier of light, then, fifty feet beyond that, the
door to the Nuke Dump. We rolled the APPASMU to within twenty feet of the
light barrier and parked it against one of the tunnel sides. Through long
wires strung down the tunnel we controlled the firing of the railgun. When
we were ready, we entered the tank, shut off the strobe and turned on the
ultrasound. Within a minute we were surrounded by a thousand giant rats,
standing on one another's shoulders in their lust for that sweet tone, milling
about the APPASMU as though it were a dumpster.

Fred Fine and I aimed shotguns out the forward gun ports. Casimir hit the
button.

We could not see the shell as it shot past the vehicle. We heard the
explosion, though, and saw its flash. The rats milled back from the explosion.
Fred Fine and I opened fire and annihilated the light-wall in a few shots,
and with a chorus of joy the rat-army surged forward into its long-looked-at
Promised Land, followed by us. Our fear was that the shell would not suffice
to blow open the door, but even with our poor visibility we could see the
jagged circle of light and the boiling silhouette of the rat-stream pouring
through it. As we drew very near, some rats were blown back by machine-gun
fire, and a Crotobaltislavonian ducked through the hole and ran toward us in
his ghostly radiation suit, two rats hanging from his body.

Fred Fine opened the top hatch, whipped out his sword as he vaulted out and
leapt at him howling, "SHEKONDAR!" I grabbed at his legs on his way out but he
kicked free, jumped to the floor, smashed in a few rat skulls, and made toward
the Croto. I do not know whether he intended to save the man or kill him. A
rat tried to come in through the open hatch but I shoved it out, then stood up
through it with my shotgun. I damaged my hearing for life but did not change
the outcome. Once the rats started landing on my back and I could no longer
see Fred Fine, I could only give up. I sat down and closed the hatch, and we
waited for a while. But nothing happened; all we saw through our peepholes
were rats, and the clicking of our Geiger counter did not vary.

Casimir turned the APPASMU around, and we plowed through rats and followed
the tunnels until we joined up with the city sewer system. Pertinax continued
to play. From time to time he sang or shouted something, and the microphones
hanging back amid the pipes would dimly pick him up: "There is no City nor
Corn-field nor Orchard! all is Rock & Sand; There is no Sun nor Moon nor Star,
but rugged wintry rocks Justling together in the void suspended by inward
fires. Impatience now no longer can endure!"

We easily found the manhole we sought, because dim morning light was shining
down through it. The Guardsmen were waiting to haul us out, and emerging onto
the street, we saw civil authority around us again and, even better, our
friends. The Plex rose above us, about half a mile distant, beginning to glow
brownish-pink in the imminent dawn. All was quiet except for the distant hum
of the TUGgies, gathered just outside the police cordons and running their OM
generators full blast.

During our frantic reunion, two absurdly serious-looking men approached me
with complicated badges and questions. As they introduced themselves, we were
all startled by a hoarse blast of organ music that burst from all directions.

"Ephraim must have turned the broadcast volume way down, then back up again,"
said Casimir as soon as everyone in our area had turned down their radios.
Once the music was quiet enough to be recognized, I knew it as Ephraim's old
favorite, the "Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor"; and at the end of each
phrase, when the voice of the Greathouse Organ plunged back down home to that
old low C, it rumbled in concord with the OM generators across the street, and
the Plex itself seemed to vibrate as a single huge eight-tubed organ pipe.

And after all this, I was the only one to understand. "Get away!" I screamed,
tearing myself loose from an agent. "Get away!" I shouted, ripping a megaphone
from a policeman's hand, and "Get away!" I continued, stumbling to the roof of
a squad car and cranking up the volume.

"Get away!" all the other cops began to shout into their megaphones. "Get
away!" crackled from the PA systems of squad cars and helicopters. It was the
word of the hour, and mounted cops howled it at TUGgies and SUBbies and the
media, forcing them back with truncheons and horses. Someone flashed It to the
police teams who had entered the Plex, and they scrambled out and squealed
away in their cars. Perhaps it was shouted ten thousand times as the ring of
onlookers gradually expanded away from the Base.

The sound waxed. Ephraim kept turning it up and Bert Nix, building for the
climax, kept pulling out more stops. Casimir tried to phone Ephraim from a
booth, but he didn't answer. He probably couldn't even hear it ring.

He certainly heard nothing but organ as, at the end, he cranked the volume all
the way and Pertinax Rushforth pulled out all the stops.

The windows went first. They all burst from their frames at once. All 25,000
picture windows boomed out into trillions of safe little cubes in the red
dawn air. At first it seemed as though the Plex had suddenly grown fuzzy
and white, then as though a blizzard had enveloped the eight towers, and
finally as though It were rising up magnificently from a cloud of glinting
orange foam. As the cloud of glass dropped away from the towers with grand
deliberation, the millions of bats In the upper levels, driven crazy by the
terrible sound, imprisoned in a building with too few exits, stopped beating
their wings against the windows and exploded from the rooms in a black cloud
of unbelievable volume. The black cloud drifted forth and rose into the sky
and the white cloud sank into the depths, and Pertinax pushed the swell pedals
to the floor and coupled all the manuals to the pedalboard and pushed his bare
pink foot down on the first one, the low C, and held it down forever.

The building's steel frame was unaffected. The cinder-blocks laid within that
frame, though, stopped being walls and became a million individual blocks
of stone. Uncoupled, they began to dissolve away from the girders, and the
floors accordionned down with a boom and a concussion that obliterated the
sound of the organ. All the towers went together; and as those tons of debris
avalanched into the girders on which the towers rested, the steel finally
went too, and crumpled together and sagged and fell and snapped and tore with
painful slowness and explosive booms.

The hundred thousand people watching it plugged their ears, except for the
TUGgies, who watched serenely and shut off their OM generators. From the
enormous heap of rubble, broken water pipes shot fountains glistening white in
the rising sun. Crunches and aftershocks continued for days.

Not far away, Virgil Gabrielsen sat on a curbstone, his hair bright in the
sun, drinking water. Between his feet was a stack of mini-computer memory
discs in little black envelopes. The APPASMU is in the Smithsonian Institution
and may be visited 10:00 A.M.-- 5:30 P.M. seven days a week. And the Go Big
Red Fan was found unscathed, sitting miraculously upright on a crushed sofa on
a pile of junk, its painted blades rotating quietly and intermittently in the
fresh spring breeze.

The End

----- About the Author

NEAL STEPHENSON has no job and does not live anyplace in particular except in
summers, when he travels.  This is his first published novel.  In the past he
has worked as a library and hospital clerk, garbage-to-energy consultant,
vending-machine loader, physics research assistant, anti-perspirant test
subject, crystal grower, movie extra, tutor, funeral home driver, detasseler,
theatrical lighting technician, ditch digger, greeting-card salesman, fungus
farmer, paperboy, and Chinese restaurant food-chopper, which prepared him for
editing early drafts of _The Big U_.

----- Back Cover

One flew over the animal house...

If George Orwell had written a novel more like _Animal House_ (the movie)
than like _Animal Farm_ (the book), and if Orwell were a young American whose
early twenties were spent in the 1980s, and if Orwell counted among his
concerns the origins of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind,
Dungeons & Dragons, computer piracy, and heavy-metal rock versus Bach fugues,
the result would perhaps have been similar to _The Big U_.
  Casimir Radon's introduction to American Megaversity is fraught with red
tape, Newspeak and enrollment procedures based on the catch-22 principle.
Having struggled long and hard to afford a college education, Casimir has come
up against the awful truth.  What is he doing at the Big U?  Meanwhile,
unhappy roommates John Wesley Fenrick and Ephraim Klein (Business and
Philosophy, respectively) wage sonic war with massive stereos; drug aficionado
Dex Fresser becomes the leader of a cult that worships a neon sign, a
dilapidated red fan, and other curious appliances;  class president Sarah
Johnson locks horns with the Airheads and the Terrorists, her dorm's female
and male factions; Virgil Gabrielsen, resident genius, hunts down "the Worm,"
an insidious glitch in the all-important college computer system.
   As the Apocalyptic plot thickens and boils, a small band of unlikely heroes
tries to foil the scheme of Crotobaltislavonian freedom-fighters who have
seized control of the radioactive waste dumped beneath the university, and to
survive a campus-wide live-ammo civil war, and to avoid the plague of bats and
mutant rats, and to get through the spring semester....