"That's right. The responsibility for this universe-wide task falls on our
shoulders. We are the chosen band of warriors and heroes called for in the
prophecies of Magic-Plexor, foretold by JANUS 64 itself. That means you'll
need a crash course on Plexor and how it works. That's why we're here.
"Consuela, known in Magic-Plexor as the High Priestess Councilla, is a
top-notch programmer in Techno-Plexor. She therefore knows all there is to
know about the Two Faces of Shekondar. Councilla, over to you."
"Good evening," came the voice from Fred Fine's big old vacuum-tube radio
receiver. She sounded very calm and soft, as though drugged. "This is
Councilla, High Priestess of Shekondar the Fearsome, King of Two Faces.
Prepare your minds for the Awful Secrets. Plexor was created by the Guild, a
team consisting half of Technologists and half of Sorcerers who operated in
separate universes through the devices of Keldor, the astral demigod whose
brain hemispheres existed on either side of the Central Bifurcation. Under
Keldor's guidance the colony of Plexor was created: a self-contained ecosystem
capable of functioning in any environment, drawing energy and raw materials
from any source, and resisting any magical or technological attack. When
Plexor was completed, it was populated by selecting the best and the brightest
from all the Thousand Galaxies and comparing them in a great tournament. The
field of competition was split down the middle by the Central Bifurcation,
and on one side the contestants fought with swords and sorcery, while on the
other they vied in tests of intellectual skill. The champions were inputted to
Plexor; we are their output.
"The Guild had to place an overseer over Plexor. It must be the Operating
System for the Technological side, and the Prime Deity for the Magic side, and
in Plexor it must be omniscient and all-powerful. Thus, the Guild generated
Shekondar the Fearsome/JANUS 64, the Organism that inhabits and controls the
colony. The creation of this system took twice as long as the building of
Plexor itself, and in the end Keldor died, his mind overloaded by massive
transfers of data from one hemisphere to the other, the Boundary within his
mind destroyed and the contents Mixed hopelessly. But out of his death came
the King of Two Faced, that which in Techno-Plexor is JANUS 64 and in Magic
Plexor, Shekondar the Fearsome.
"Though the last member of the Guild died two thousand years ago, most
Plexorians have revered the King of Two Faces. But in these dark days, at
the close of this age, those who know the story of Shekondar/JANUS 64 are
very few. We who have kept the flame alive have trained your bodies and
minds to accept this responsibility. Today, our efforts output in batch.
From this room will march the Grand Army celebrated in the prophecies and
songs of Magic-Plexor, whose coming has been foretold even in the seemingly
random errors of JANUS 64; the band of heroes which will debug Plexor, which
will fight Mixture in the approaching crisis. And for those of you who have
failed to detect Mixture, who scoff that Magic might have crossed the Central
Bifurcation:
Behold!"
The listeners had now allowed themselves to sink deep into their characters,
and Councilla's words had begun to mesmerize them. Though a few had grinned
at the silliness spewing out of the big speakers, the oppressive seriousness
and magical unity that filled this dank chamber had silenced them; soon, cut
off from the normal world, they began to doubt themselves, and heeded the
Priestess. As she built to a climax and revealed the most profound secrets of
Plexor, many began to sweat and tingle, fidgeting with terrified energy. When
she cried, "Behold!" the spell was bound up in a word. The room became silent
with fear as all wondered what demonic demonstration she had conjured up.
A sssh! was heard, and it avalanched into a loud, general hiss. When that
sound died away, it was easy to hear a soft, cacophonous noise, a jumble of
sharp high tones that sounded like a distant kazoo band. The sound seemed to
come from one of the tunnels, though echoes made it hard to tell which one. It
was approaching quickly. Suddenly and rapidly, everyone cleared away from the
four tunnel openings and plastered against the walls. Only when all the others
had found places did Klystron the Impaler move. He walked calmly through the
center of the room, leaving the radio receiver and speakers in the middle,
and found himself a place in front of a hushed squadron of swordsmen. The
roar swelled to a scream; a bat the size of an eagle pumped out of a tunnel,
took a fast turn around the room, sending many of the men to their knees,
then plunged decisively into another passage. As the roar exploded into the
open, in the garish artificial light the Grand Army saw a swarm of enormous
fat brown-grey lash-tailed bright-eyed screaming frothing rats vomit from
the tunnel, veer through the middle of the room and compress itself into the
opening through which the giant bat had flown. Some of them smashed headlong
into the old boxy radio, sending it sprawling across the floor, and before
it had come to rest, five rats had parted from the stream and demolished
it, scything their huge gleaming rodent teeth through the plywood case as
though it were an orange peel, prying the apparatus apart, munching into its
glass-and-metal innards with insane passion. Their frenzy lasted for several
seconds; their brothers had all gone; and they emitted piercing shrieks and
scuttled off into the tunnel, one trailing behind a streak of twisted wire and
metal.
Most everyone save Klystron sat on the floor in a fetal position, arms crossed
over faces, though some had drawn swords or clubs, prepared to fight it out.
None moved for two minutes, lest they draw another attack. When the warriors
began to show life again, they moved with violent trembling and nauseated
dizziness and the most perfect silence they could attain. No one strayed from
the safety of the walls except for Klystron the Impaler/Chris the Systems
Programmer, who paced to a spot where a thousand rat footprints had stomped a
curving highway into the thin sludge. Hardly anyone here, he knew, had been
convinced of the Central Bifurcation, much less of the danger of Mixture. That
was understandable, given the badly Mixed environment which had twisted their
minds. Klystron/Chris had done all he could to counter such base thinking, but
the rise of the giant rats, and careful preparation by him and Councilla and
Chip Dixon, had provided proof.
He let them think it over. It was not an easy thing, facing up to one's own
importance; even he had found it difficult. Finally he spoke out in a clear
and firm voice, and every head in the room snapped around to pay due respect
to their leader.
"Do I have a Grand Army?"
The mumbled chorus sounded promising. Klystron snapped his sword from its
scabbard and held it on high, making sure to avoid electrical cables. "All
hail Shekondar the Fearsome!" he trumpeted.
Swords, knives, chains and clubs crashed out all around and glinted in the
mist. "All hail Shekondar the Fearsome!" roared the army in reply, and four
times it was answered by echoes from the tunnels. Klystron/Chris listened to
it resonate, then spoke with cool resolve: "It is time to begin the Final
Preparations."
An advantage of living in a decaying civilization was that nobody really
cared if you chose to roam the corridors laden with armfuls of chest waders,
flashlights, electrical equipment and weaponry. We did receive alarmed
scrutiny from some, and boozy inquiries from friendly Terrorists, but were
never in danger from the authorities. A thirty-minute trek through the
deepening chaos of the Plex took us to the Burrows, which were still inhabited
by people devoted to such peaceful pursuits as gaming, computer programming,
research and Star Trek reruns.
From here a freight elevator took us to the lowest sublevel, where
Fred Fine led us through dingy hallways plastered with photos of nude
Crotobaltislavonian princesses until we came to a large room filled with
plumbing. From here, Virgil used his master key to let us into a smaller room,
from which a narrow spiral staircase led into the depths.
"I go first," said Virgil quietly, "with the Sceptre. Hyacinth follows with
her .44. Bud follows her with the heavy gloves, then Sarah and Casimir with
the backpacks, and Fred in the rear with his sixteen-gauge. No noise."
After one or two turns of the stair we had to switch on our headlamps. The
trip down was long and tense, and we seemed to make a hellacious racket on
the echoing metal treads. I kept my beam on the blazing white-gold beacon of
Virgil's hair and listened to the breathing and the footsteps behind me. The
air had a harsh damp smell that told me I was sucking in billions of microbes
of all descriptions with each breath. Toward the bottom we slipped on our gas
masks, and I found I was breathing much faster than I needed to.
The rats were waiting a full fifty feet above the bottom. One had his mouth
clamped over Virgil's lower leg before he had switched on the Sceptre of
Cosmic Force. The flashing drove away the rest of the rats, who tumbled
angrily down the stair on top of one another, but the first beast merely
clamped down harder and hung on, too spazzed out to move. Fortunately,
Hyacinth did not try to shoot it on the spot. I slipped past, flexed my big
elbow-length padded gloves, and did battle with the rat. The rodent teeth had
not penetrated the soccer shinguards Virgil wore beneath his waders, so I
took my time, relaxing and squatting down to look into the animal's glowering
white-rimmed eye. His bared chisel teeth, a few inches long and an inch wide,
flickered purple-yellow with each flash of the strobe. Having sliced through
Virgil's waders to expose the colorful plastic shinguard, the rat now tried
to gnaw its way through the obstacle without letting go. I did not have the
strength to pull its mouth open.
"A German shepherd can exert hundreds of pounds of jaw force," said Fred Fine,
standing above and peering over Casimir's shoulder with scientific coolness.
The rat was not impressed by any of this.
"Let's go for a clean kill," suggested its victim with a trace of strain, "and
then we'll have our sample."
I bashed in the back of its head with an oaken leg I had foresightedly
unscrewed from my kitchen table for the occasion. The rat just barely fit into
a large heavy-duty leaf bag; Virgil twist-tied it shut and we left it there.
And so into the tunnels. The sewers were unusually fluid that night as
thousands of cubic feet of beer made its traditional way through the digestive
tracks of the degenerates upstairs and into the sanitary system. Hence we
stuck to the catwalks along the sides of the larger tunnels-- as did the rats.
The Sceptre was hard on our eyes, so Virgil waited until they were perilously
close before switching it on and driving them in squalling bunches into the
stream below. We did not have to use the guns, though Fred Fine insisted on
shooting his flash gun at a rat to see how they liked it. Not at all, as it
happened, and Fred Fine pronounced it "very interesting."
Casimir said, "Where did my radioactive source fall to? Are we going anywhere
near there?"
"Good point," said Fred Fine. "Let's steer clear of that. Don't want blasted
'nads."
"I know where it went, but it's not there now," said Virgil. "The rats ate
everything. Some rat obviously got a free surprise in with his paraffin, but I
don't know where he ended up.' Fred Fine began to point out landmarks: where
he had left the corpse of the Microwave Lizard, long since eaten by you know
what; where Steven Wilson had experienced his last and biggest surprise; the
tunnel that led to the Sepulchre of Keldor. His voice alternated between the
pseudo-scientific dynamo hum of Fred Fine and the guttural baritone of the war
hero. We had heard this stuff from him for a couple of weeks now, but down
in the tunnels it really started to perturb us. Most people, on listening
to a string of nonsense, will tend to doubt their own sanity before they
realize that the person who is jabbering at them is really the one with the
damaged brain. That night, tramping through offal, attacking giant rats with
a strobe light and listening to the bizarre memoirs of Klystron, most of us
were independently wondering whether or not we were crazy. So when we asked
Fred Fine for explanations, it was not because we wanted to hear more Klystron
stories (as he assumed); it was because we wanted to get an idea of what other
people were thinking. We were quickly able to realize that the world was
indeed okay, that Fred Fine was bonkers and we were fine.
Hundreds of cracked and gnawed bones littered one intersection, and Virgil
identified it as where he had discovered the useful properties of the Sceptre.
This area was high and dry, as these things went, and many rats lurked about.
Virgil switched the Sceptre on for good, forcing them back to the edge of the
dark, where they chattered and flashed their red eyes. Hyacinth stuffed wads
of cotton in her ears, apparently in case of a shootout.
"Let's set up the 'scope," Virgil suggested. Casimir swung off his pack
and withdrew a heavily padded box, from which he took a small portable
oscilloscope. This device had a tiny TV screen which would display sound
patterns picked up by a shotgun microphone which was also in the pack. As the
'scope warmed up, Casimir plugged the microphone cord into a socket on its
front. A thin luminous green line traced across the middle of the screen.
Virgil aimed the mike down the main passageway and turned it on. The line on
the screen split into a chaotic tangle of dim green static. Casimir played
with various knobs, and quickly the wild flailing of the signal was compressed
into a pattern of random vibes scrambling across the screen. "White noise,"
said Fred Fine. "Static to you laymen."
"Keep an eye on it," said Virgil, and pointed the mike down the smaller
side tunnel. The white noise was abruptly replaced by nearly vertical lines
marching across the screen. Casimir compressed the signal down again, and we
saw that it was nothing more than a single stationary sine wave, slightly
unruly but basically stable.
"Very interesting," said Fred Fine.
"What's going on?" Sarah asked.
"This is a continuous ultrasonic tone," said Virgil. "It's like an unceasing
dog whistle. It comes from some artificial source down that tunnel. You see,
when I point the mike in most directions we get white noise, which is normal.
But this is a loud sound at a single pitch. To the rats it would sound like a
drawn-out note on an organ. That explains why they cluster in this particular
area; it's music to their ears, though it's very simple music. In fact, it's
monotonous."
"How did you know to look for this?" asked Sarah.
Virgil shrugged. "It was plausible that an installation as modern and
carefully guarded as the one I saw would have some kind of ultrasonic alarm
system. It's pretty standard."
"Very interesting," said Fred Fine.
"It's like sonar. Anything that disturbs the echo, within a certain range,
sets off the alarm. Here's the question: why don't the rats set it off?"
"Some kind of barrier keeps them away," said Casimir.
"I agree. But I didn't see any barrier. When I was here before, they could
run right up to the door-- they had to be fought off with machine guns. They
must have put up a barrier since I was last down here. What that means to us
is this: we can go as far as the barrier, whatever it may be, without any
fear of setting off the alarm system."
We moved down the tunnel in a flying wedge, making use of table leg, Sceptre
and sword as necessary. Soon we arrived at the barrier, which turned out to be
insubstantial but difficult to miss: a frame of angle-irons welded together
along the walls and ceiling, hung with dozens of small, brilliant spotlights.
At this point, any rat would find itself bathed in blinding light and turn
back in terror and pain. Beyond this wall of light there was only a single
line of footprints-- human-- in the bat guano. "Someone's been changing the
light bulbs," concluded Sarah.
The fifty feet of corridor preceding the light-wall were littered almost
knee-deep in glittering scraps of tinfoil and other bright objects, including
the remains of Fred Fine's radio. "This is their hangout," said Hyacinth.
"They must like the music."
"They want to make a nice, juicy meal out of whoever changes those light
bulbs," suggested Fred Fine.
Sarah's pack contained a tripod and a pair of fine binoculars. Once we had
set these up in the middle of the tunnel we could see the heavy doors, TV
cameras, lights and so on at the tunnel's end. As we took turns looking and
speculating, Virgil set up a Geiger counter from Sarah's pack.
"Normally a Geiger counter would just pick up a lot of background and cosmic
radiation and anything meaningful would be drowned out. But we're so well
shielded in these tunnels that the only thing getting to us should be a few
very powerful cosmic rays, and neutrinos, which this won't pick up anyway."
The Geiger counter began to click, perhaps once every four seconds.
Sarah had the best eyes; she sat crosslegged on the layers of foil and gazed
into the binoculars. "In a few minutes a hazardous waste pickup is scheduled
for the loading dock upstairs," said Virgil, checking his watch. "My theory
is that, in addition to taking hazardous wastes out of the Plex, those trucks
have been bringing something even more hazardous into the Plex, and down into
this tunnel."
We waited.
"Okay," said Sarah, "Elevator door opening on the right." We all heard it.
"Long metal cylinder thingie on a cart. Now the end of the tunnel is opening
up-- big doors, like jaws. Now some guys in yellow are rolling the cylinder
into a large room back there." The Geiger counter shouted. I looked at
Casimir.
"Skip your next chest X-ray," he said. "If this place is what it looks like,
it's just Iodine-131. Half-life of eight days. It'll end up in your thyroid,
which you don't really need anyway."
"I'm pretty fond of my thyroid," said Hyacinth. "It made me big and strong."
"Doors closing," said Sarah over the chatter of us and the Geiger counter.
"Elevator's gone. All doors closed now." "Well! Congratulations, Virgil," said
Fred Fine, shaking his hand. "You've discovered the only permanent high-level
radioactive waste disposal facility in the United States."
Most of us didn't have anything to say about it. We mainly wanted to get back
home.
"Fascinating, brilliant," continued Fred Fine, as we headed back. "In today's
competitive higher education market, there has to be some way for universities
to support themselves. What better way than to enter lucrative high-technology
sectors?"
"Don't have to grovel for the alumni anymore," said Sarah. "You really
think universities should be garbage dumps for the worst by-products of
civilization?" asked Hyacinth.
"It's not such a bad idea, in a way," said Casimir. "Better the universities
than anyone else. Oxford, Heidelberg, Paris, all those places have lasted for
centuries longer than any government. Only the Church has lasted longer, and
the Vatican doesn't need the money."
We paused for a rest in the spiral staircase, near our rat body. Casimir, Fred
Fine and Virgil went back down to the bottom for an experiment. Virgil had
brought an ultrasonic tone generator with him, and they used it to prove--
very conclusively-- that the rats loved the ultrasound as much as they hated
the strobe. They ran back upstairs, Sceptre flashing, and I slung the rat over
my shoulder and we all proceeded up the stairs as fast as our lungs would
allow.
The dissection of the rat was most informal. We did it in the sink of
Professor Sharon's old lab, amid the pieces of the railgun. Fred Fine laid
into the thorax with a kitchen knife and a single-edged razor. We were
quick and crude; only Casimir had seen the inside of a rat before. The skin
peeled back easily along with thick pink layers of fat, and we looked at the
intestines that could digest such amazing meals. Casimir scrounged a pair of
heavy tin snips and used them to cut the breastbone in half so we could get
under the ribcage. I shoved my hands between the halves of the breastbone and
pulled as hard as I could, and finally with a crack and a spray of blood one
side snapped open like a stubborn cabinet door and we looked at the lungs and
vital organs. The heart was not immediately visible.
"Maybe it's hidden under this organ here," suggested Fred Fine, pointing to
something between the lungs.
"That's not an organ," said Casimir. "It's an intersection of several major
vessels."
"So where's the heart?" asked Hyacinth, just beginning to get interested.
"Those major vessels are the ones that ought to go into, and come out of, the
heart," said Casimir uncertainly. He reached down and slid his hand under the
bundle of vessels, and pulling it up and aside, revealed-- nothing.
"Holy Mother of God," he whispered. "This animal doesn't have a heart."
Our own thumped violently. For a long time we were frozen, disturbed beyond
reason; then a piercing beep emanated from Fred Fine and we jumped and gasped
angrily.
Unconcerned, he pressed a button on his digital calculator/watch, halting the
beep. "Sorry. That's my watch alarm."
We looked at him; he looked at his watch, We were all sweating.
"I set it to go off like that at midnight, the beginning of April first, every
year. It's sort of a warning, so that this one remembers, hey, April Fools'
Day, anything could happen now."
--April--
While we sewer-slogged, E13S held a giant party in honor of Big Wheel. It was
conceived as your basic formless beer blowout, but the ever-spunky Airheads
had insisted upon a theme: Great Partiers of the Past. The major styles in
evidence were Disco, Sixties, Fifties and Toga. A team of sturdy Terrorists
had lugged Dex Fresser's stereo up to the social lounge, which was the center
of Disco activity. A darkened room down the hail featured a Sixties party,
at which participants roughed up their perms, wore T-shirts, smoked more
dope than usual and said "groovy" at the drop of a hat. The study lounge was
Fifties headquarters, and was identical to all the other Fifties parties which
had been held since about 1963 by people who didn't know anything about the
Fifties. The Toga people were forced to adopt a wandering, nomadic partying
existence; they had no authentic toga music to boogie to, though someone did
experiment by playing an electronic version of the "1812 Overture" at full
blast. Mostly these people just stood sheepishly in the hallways, draped in
their designer bedsheets, clutching cups of beer and yelling "toga!" from time
to time.
The Disco lounge was filled with women in lollipop plastic dresses and thick
metallic lipstick under ski masks, and heavily scented young men in pastel
three-piecers and shiny hardware-laden shoes. The smell was deafening, and
when the doors were open, excess music spilled out and filled nearby rooms to
their corners. These partiers were a generation whose youth had been stolen.
They had prepared all through their adolescence for the day when they could
go to college and attend real discos, adult discos where they had alcohol and
sex partners you could take home with no pay-rental hassles. Their hopes had
been dashed in the early eighties when Disco had flamed out somewhere over
New Jersey, like a famous dirigible. But the nostalgic air here made them
feel young again. Dex Fresser even showed up in a white three-piecer and took
several opportunities to boogie right down to the ground with shapely females
in clingy synthetic wraps.
On the windowsill, the Go Big Red Fan, held in place with bricks, spun and
glowed in its self-made halo of black light. Overhead, a mirrored ball cast
revolving dots of light on the walls, and more stoned or imaginative dancers
could imagine that they were actually standing inside a giant Big Wheel.
Whoooo! The picture windows were covered with newspaper, as the panes had long
since been smashed and the curtains long since burned.
After Dex Fresser had consumed sixteen hits of acid (his supplier had never
really grasped the idea of powers of two), five bongloads of hashish rolled
in mescaline, a square of peyote Jell-O, a lude, four tracks, a small handful
of street-legal caffeine pep pills, twelve tablespoons of cough syrup, half a
can of generic light wine and a pack of Gaulois cigarettes, he began to toy
with a strobe light that was being used to establish the Disco atmosphere. He
turned it up faster and faster until the lounge was wracked with delighted
freakedout screams and the dancers had begun to hop randomly and smash into
one another, as though they had been time-warped into Punk. Meanwhile, what
passed for Dex's mind wandered over to the Go Big Red Fan, and though the
time-warp effect was really blowing his tubes, he thought the fan might be
slowing down; continuing to turn up the strobe, he was able to make the Little
Wheel stop revolving altogether-- either that, or time itself had come to a
halt! Dex spazzed out to the max. All became quiet as the propulsion reactors
of a passing Sirian space cruiser damped out his stereo (the DJ had turned
down the volume), and all heard Dex announce that at midnight Big Wheel would
say something very important to him. He relaxed, the music was cranked back
up, the strobe light hurled out a nearby window and the Fan began to rotate
again.
Midnight could hardly come soon enough. The partiers packed into the social
lounge, sitting in rows facing the window. Dex Fresser stood before the
shrouded window with his back to the crowd, and priests stood ready to tear
the papers away. A few minutes before midnight, the DJ put on "Stairway to
Heaven," timed so that the high-energy sonic blast section would begin at
12:00 sharp.
The newspapers ripped apart, the red-white-and-blue power beams of Big Wheel
exploded into the room, and the heavy beat of the rock and roll made their
thoraxes boom like empty kegs. But Dex Fresser was impressively still. He
stared into the naked face of the Big Wheel for fifteen minutes before he
moved a muscle. Then he relayed the message to the huddled students. Speaking
through a mike hooked to his stereo, he sounded loud and quadraphonic.
"Tonight the Big Wheel has plans for us, man. We're going to have a fucking
war." The Terrorists cheered and whooped and the Airheads oohed and aahed.
"The outside people, who are all hearing-impaired to the voice of Big Wheel
and Roy G Biv and our other leaders, will come tomorrow to the Plex with guns
to kill us. They want to put short-range tactical nuclear weapons on the roof
of D Tower in order to threaten Big Wheel and make him do as they wish.
"We have friends, though, like Astarte, the Goddess, who is the sister of Big
Wheel and who is going to like help us out and stuff. The Terrorists and the
SUB will cooperate just like Big Wheel and Astarte do. Also, the B-men are our
friends too.
"We've got shitloads of really powerful enemies, says Big Wheel. Like the
Administration and the Temple of Unlimited Godhead and a bunch of nerds and
some other people. We have to kill all of them.
"This is going to take cooperation and we have to have perfect loyalty from
everyone. See, even if you think you have friends among our enemies, you're
wrong, because Big Wheel decides who our friends are, and if he says they're
your enemies, they're your enemies, just like that. Everything's very simple
with Big Wheel, that's how you can be sure he's telling the truth. So we've
got to join together now and there can't be any secrets and we can't cover up
for our enemies or have mercy for them."
Mari Meegan, sitting in the front row, legs tucked demurely to the side,
listened intensely, eyes slitted and lips parted as she thought about how this
applied to her.
At this point a few people came to their senses and made a run for it. One
of these, a none-too-bright advisee of mine who had been going along for the
good times, realized that these people were nuts, sprinted to the nearest
fire stair, and escaped unharmed, later to tell me this story. What happened
after his exit is vague; apparently, Yllas Freedperson, High Priestess of
Astarte, showed up, and the leaders of the SUB and of the Terrorists did a lot
of planning and organizing in those next few hours.
By contrast, Bert Nix celebrated the evening by incinerating himself in a
storage room on C22W. He had been using it as a hideout for some time, and
had gotten along well with the students, except for one problem: Bert Nix's
obsession with collecting garbage. It was partly a practical habit, as he
got most of his food and clothing from the trash. Far beyond that, however,
he could not bring himself to throw out anything, and so in his little rooms
scattered around the Plex the garbage was packed in to the ceiling, leaving
only a little aisle to the door. Out of gratitude to his protectors, Bert Nix
stuffed oily rags under the doors to seal the odor in.
This sufficed until the evening of March 31, when he happened to open the
door while a fastidious student from Saskatoon was walking by. She watched
as half a dozen cockroaches over three inches long lumbered out between the
derelict's bare feet and approached her, waving their antennae affably. No
Airhead, she stomped them to splinters and called Security on the nearest
telephone. Between then and the time they arrived five hours later, however,
the fire started. It could have been spontaneous combustion, it could have
been the heating system, or a suicidal whim or wayward cigarette from Bert
Nix. In any event, the room became a tightly sealed furnace, and when the
flames had died, all that remained were a charred corpse in the aisle and
drifts of cockroach bodies piled up in front of the door.
At the northern corner of the Plex's east wall, north of the Mall loading
docks, the docks for student use, the mail, Cafeteria, general supply, Burrows
and wide-load docks was the Refuse Area. Six loading docks opened on an
enormous room with six giant trash compactors and six great steel chutes
which expelled tons of garbage from their foul, stained sphincters every few
minutes. When there wasn't a strike on, the compactors would grind away around
the clock and a great truck would be at one dock or another at any given time,
bringing back an empty container and hauling off a full one.
North of the Refuse Area, in the very corner of the Flex, was the Hazardous
Waste Area with its steel doors and explosion-proof walls. When scientists
produced any waste that was remotely hazardous, they would seal it into an
orange container, mark down its contents and take it to the Refuse Area, where
they could deposit it in a chute that led into the HWA. If the container was
too large for this, they could simply leave it on a dolly by the door, and
the specially trained B-men would then wheel it through when it was time for
a pickup. When the Hazardous Waste truck arrived, three times a day, all
the containers were then loaded into its armor-plated back and hauled away.
This was usually done in the dead of night, to lessen the danger of traffic
accidents. So extraordinary was this disposal system that American Megaversity
had won awards from environmental groups and acclaim from scientists.
At 4:30 on the morning of April 1, when I should have been drinking or
sleeping, I was sitting in my suite staring at the telephone. Virgil
Gabrielsen, even more ambitious, was sitting by the door to the HWA in a huge
orange crate about the shape of a telephone booth. "HANDLE WITH EXTREME CARE,"
its label read, "CONTAINS UNIVERSAL SOLVENT. DO NOT PUT ON SIDE OR EXPLOSION
WILL RESULT." The same concepts were repeated by means of ideograms which we
had hastily painted on the sides, showing a Crotobaltislavonian stick figure
being blown to bits after putting the crate on its side. Instructions to
telephone Dr. Redfield, and giving my telephone number, were added in several
places.
"The nuke waste has to be coming in through the HWA," Virgil had insisted, as
he and I and the disemboweled rat relaxed in Sharon's lab. "I counted my steps
down there in the tunnels. As far as I can tell, that elevator shaft should
go right up into the northeast corner of the building. The HWA is locked and
alarmed within an inch of its life, but I know how to get inside."
At quarter to five, the enormous Magrov and half a dozen other
Crotobaltislavonians entered the Refuse Area. As Virgil watched through
strategically placed peepholes, they began with some unusual procedures. First
they opened the southernmost of the six metal doors to the Access Lot. Shortly
after, an old van backed up to this dock and threw open its rear doors. Two
men jumped out into the Refuse Area in protective clothing, gas masks dangling
on their chests, and exchanged hearty Scythian greetings with the B-men. Much
equipment was now hauled out of the van, including a long metal cylinder-- an
exact replica of a nuclear waste container-- and a huge tripod-mounted machine
gun. Then came numerous small machine guns, what appeared to be electronic
equipment and crates of supplies. These were piled on a cart and wheeled over
to Virgil's position.
Virgil had realized by now that this was not a business-as-usual day. At least
the situation appealed to his sense of humor. The fake nuke waste cylinder
opened like a casket and the two gas-masked men climbed in and lay one atop
the other. The others handed them weapons and closed the lid. This cylinder
was also placed next to Virgil. In the meantime, B-men bolted the big gun's
tripod directly into the concrete floor at the loading dock, apparently having
already drilled the holes in preparation. The weapon was aimed into the
Access Lot, and loaded and checked over with an experienced air unusual among
janitors.
Virgil's crate was the source of a long and emotional discussion in Scythian.
Occasionally Magrov or one of the others would shout something about telefon
while pounding on the crate with his index finger.
"Hoy!" shouted a B-man back at the machine gun. Virgil saw a glint of
headlights outside. It was 4:59. A hellacious roar ensued as the determined
janitors sprayed several thousand rounds per minute out the door. Magrov cut
off debate by seizing Virgil's crate and wheeling it into the HWA.
The gunfire was over before Virgil was all the way through the door. Once the
crate was stopped and he was able to get his bearings again, he could see that
he was in a somewhat smaller room with a segmented metal door in the outside
wall and a large red rectangle painted in the middle of the floor. A dozen or
so bright orange waste containers had been slid through the chute and were
waiting on a counter to be hauled away.
My phone rang at 5:01.
"Profyessor Rettfeelt? Sorry, getting you up early in mornink. Magrov here.
You put humongous waste container by HWA, correct?"
"Yes, that's correct. Universal Solvent. Very dangerous."
"Ees too tall for goink inside of vaste truck. Ve must put on her side."
"No! That's dangerous. You will be blown to little bits."
"Then what to do with it?"
"I'll have to put it in a different container. You must leave it in the HWA
overnight. I will come to the Refuse Area tomorrow night, at the time of the
next pickup, and get the crate and take it away." "Good." Magrov hung up.
Back in the HWA, Magrov checked his watch, then turned and shouted at a
swiveling TV camera on the wall. "Ha! Those profyessors! Say! Where is truck?
Very late today."
"Roger, team leader, we read four minutes late," said an Anglo voice over a
loudspeaker. "Maybe some trouble with those strikers. Hey! Let's cut the idle
chitchat."
Finally the great steel door rolled open. Through one of his peepholes, Virgil
could see a hazardous waste truck backing into the brilliantly lit, fenced-in
area outside. He could also see a pair of half-inch bullet holes through the
outside rear-view mirror. The tiny black-and-white monitors, he knew, would
never pick up this detail. When it had come to rest, the B-men unlocked the
back with Magrov's keys and pulled open armored doors to reveal a stainless
steel cylinder on a cart. This they rolled into the HWA, placing it in the
middle of the red rectangle on the floor.
Other B-men set about hauling the small orange containers into the back of the
truck and strapping them down. Magrov removed guns from a locked cabinet and
distributed them to himself and two others. There three took up positions in
the red area around the cylinder. "Hokay, ready for little ride," said Magrov.
"Roger, team leader. Stand by." A deep hum and vibration commenced. The men
and the cylinder began to sink, and Virgil could see that the red rectangle
was actually an elevator platform. Within seconds only a black hole remained.
In five minutes the platform returned, with the B-men but without the
cylinder. Displaying frank contempt for safety regulations, the B-men began to
smoke profusely.
The intercom crackled alive. "Crotobaltislavonia aiwa!" came the exhilarated
shout.
"Crotobaltislavonia aiwa!" howled the B-men, leaping to their feet. There was
much whoopee-making and cigarette-throwing, and then they opened the door to
the Refuse Area and carried in crate after crate of supplies and put them on
the elevator platform. The platform, laden with Crotobaltislavonians, guns and
food, sank into the earth once again, then returned in a few minutes carrying
nine bleeding bodies in yellow radiation suits.
Virgil had been expecting TV cameras. If they had them down in the tunnels,
they must have them upstairs in the HWA. So after a few minutes, when Virgil
was sure that the B-men were down there for the long haul, he opened a small
panel in the side of his crate and stuck out a long iron rod with a magnesium
tip. The important thing about the magnesium rod was that Virgil had just set
it on fire, and when magnesium burns, it makes an intolerably brilliant light.
Virgil soon squirmed out through the panel, a welding mask strapped over his
face. Even through the dark glass, everything in the room was blindingly
lit-- certainly bright enough to overload, or even burn out, the television
cameras. Any camera turned his way would show nothing but purest white. To
make sure, he lit two more magnesium rods and placed them on the floor around
the room. Satisfied that all three cameras were now blinded, he withdrew a
can of spray paint from his crate and used it to paint over their lenses.
The mikes were easy to find and he destroyed these simply by shoving burning
magnesium rods into them. Then he called me on the phone. "I was right," he
said, "I'm safe, and you can go to sleep. But look out. Trouble is brewing."
Alas, I was already asleep before he got to that last part.
While the magnesium rods burned themselves out, Virgil climbed into the cab
of the truck, where the corpses of its late drivers had been stretched out on
the floor. The Crotos' plan was daring and their aim excellent; they needed to
penetrate the truck's armored cab and kill the occupants without wiping out
the engine or the gas tank. The driver's window was splattered all over the
seat, the door itself deeply buckled and perforated by the thumb-sized shells.
Virgil hit the ignition and drove it far enough out to wedge the electrical
gates open while leaving enough space for other vehicles to pass.
Back in the Plex, he made phone calls to several readymix concrete companies.
Returning to the Burrows, he found a cutting torch and wheeled it back to the
HWA. The red platform was nothing more than thick steel plate, and once he had
gotten the torch fired up and the red paint burned away, it cut like butter.
As he sliced a hole in the platform, he reviewed his reasoning: 1) Law is
opinion of guy with biggest gun.
2) Biggest "gun" in U.S. held by police and armed forces. 3) Hypothesis:
someone wants to break the law, or more generally, render U.S. law null and
void in a certain zone. 4) This necessitates a bigger gun.
5) Threat of contamination of urban area with nuclear waste ought to fill the
bill.
6) This provides a motive for taking over Nuke Dump. 7) Crotobaltislavonians
have taken over Nuke Dump.
8) They either want to contaminate the city, or take over this area-- the
Plex-- by threat of same.
9) Either we will all be poisoned, or else representatives of the People's
Free Social Existence Node of Crotobaltislavonia will dictate their own law to
people in this area.
10) This does not sound very nice either way.
11) Maybe we can destroy their gun by blocking the possible contamination
routes. The elevator would be their preferred route, as it would provide
direct access to the atmosphere.
A rough steel circle about two feet across pulled loose and dropped into the
blackness. Virgil pulled back his mask and peered down. The circle's edge was
still red hot, and as it fell through the blackness, he could see it spinning
and diminishing until it smashed into the bottom. The clang reached his ears a
moment later. Through the hole he could smell the odor of the sewers and hear
occasional arguments among rats.
Hearing the whine of a down-shifting truck, he shut off the torch and ran out
into the Access Lot. Virgil directed the cement truck through the jammed gate
and up to the loading dock. He directed the driver to swing his chute around
and dump the entire load into the freshly cut hole.
The driver was young, a philosophy Ph.D. only two years out of the Big U. He
obviously knew Virgil was asking him to commit an illegal act. "Give me a
rational reason to dump my cement down that hole," he demanded.
Virgil thought it over. "The reasons are very unusual, and if I were to
explain them, you would only be justified in thinking I was crazy."
"Which doesn't give me my rational reason."
"True," admitted Virgil. "However, let's not forget the conventional view of
craziness. Our media are filled with images of the crazy segment of society
as being an exceptionally dangerous, unpredictable group. Look at Hinckley!
Watch any episode of T. J. Hooker! So if you thought I was crazy, the reaction
consistent with your social training would be to do as I say in order to
preserve your own safety."
"That would be true with your run-of-the-mill truck driver," said the truck
driver after agonized contemplation, "who tends to be an M.A. in sociology or
something. But I can't make an excuse based on failure to think independently
of the media."
"True. Follow me." Virgil walked across the HWA, leading the truck driver over
to the heavy door that led into the Refuse Area. Here he paused, allowing
the truck driver to notice the long red streaks on the floor. Virgil then
opened the door and pointed at the nine bloody corpses, which he had dragged
there to get them off the platform. "Having seen the remains of several
savagely murdered people, you might conclude that my showing them to you so
dramatically constituted a nonverbal threat. You might then decide-- " but the
truck driver had already decided, and was running for the controls at the back
of the truck. The concrete was down the hole in no time. The truck driver did
not even wait to be given an official American Megaversity voucher.
After that, trucks arrived every fifteen minutes or so for the rest of
the morning. Subsequent truckers, seeing wet cement slopped all over the
place, impressed by Virgil's official vouchers, were much less skeptical. By
lunchtime, twenty truckloads of cement were piled up behind the sliding doors
at the bottom of the elevator shaft.
The first Refuse Area dock was still open. After blowing the crap out of
the hazardous waste truck, the B-men had hauled the real radioactive waste
cylinder out and left it there in the doorway. Virgil had the last driver bury
the cylinder in cement where it sat. He smoothed out a flat place with his
hand and inscribed: DANGER. HIGH LEVEL RADIOACTIVE WASTE. TRESPASSERS WILL BE
STERILIZED. His day's work was done.
Unbeknownst to anyone else, the two most important battles of the war had
already been fought. The Crotobaltislavonians had won the first, and Virgil
the second.
Once the actual war got started, things happened quickly. In fact, between the
time that S. S. Krupp and two of his associates and I had got on an elevator
and the time we escaped from it, the situation had changed completely.
S. S. Krupp felt compelled to visit E13S after its riot/party of the night
before, somewhat in the spirit of Jimmy Carter visiting Mount Saint Helens.
Naturally, as faculty-in-residence for E Tower, I was asked to serve as tour
guide. It was preferable to washing dung off my boots, but only just.
Krupp arrived at the base of E Tower at 11:35 A.M., fresh from a tour of Bert
Nix's cremation site. Considering the gruesome circumstances, not to mention
the journalists and the SUBbie screaming directly into his ear, he looked
relaxed. With him were Hyman Hotchkiss, Dean of Student Life, and Wilberforce
(Tex) Bracewill, Administrator of Student Health Services. Hyman looked young,
pale and ill. Tex had seen too much gonorrhea in too many strange places to
be shocked by anything. They were so civilized that they viewed my Number 27
BILL'S BREWS softball jersey as though it were a jacket and vest, and shook my
hand as though I had saved their families from death sometime in the distant
past.
Here in the lobby the sixteen elevators and four fire stairs of E Tower
emptied together into a desert of vandalized furniture, charred bulletin
boards and overflowing wastebaskets. I didn't know about events on E13S yet,
and my guests were doubtless still considering the charred remains of Bert
Nix, so we were not suspicious when elevators 2, 4 and 1 remained frozen
at the thirteenth floor for ten minutes. Only number 3 moved. When it got
shoulders. We are the chosen band of warriors and heroes called for in the
prophecies of Magic-Plexor, foretold by JANUS 64 itself. That means you'll
need a crash course on Plexor and how it works. That's why we're here.
"Consuela, known in Magic-Plexor as the High Priestess Councilla, is a
top-notch programmer in Techno-Plexor. She therefore knows all there is to
know about the Two Faces of Shekondar. Councilla, over to you."
"Good evening," came the voice from Fred Fine's big old vacuum-tube radio
receiver. She sounded very calm and soft, as though drugged. "This is
Councilla, High Priestess of Shekondar the Fearsome, King of Two Faces.
Prepare your minds for the Awful Secrets. Plexor was created by the Guild, a
team consisting half of Technologists and half of Sorcerers who operated in
separate universes through the devices of Keldor, the astral demigod whose
brain hemispheres existed on either side of the Central Bifurcation. Under
Keldor's guidance the colony of Plexor was created: a self-contained ecosystem
capable of functioning in any environment, drawing energy and raw materials
from any source, and resisting any magical or technological attack. When
Plexor was completed, it was populated by selecting the best and the brightest
from all the Thousand Galaxies and comparing them in a great tournament. The
field of competition was split down the middle by the Central Bifurcation,
and on one side the contestants fought with swords and sorcery, while on the
other they vied in tests of intellectual skill. The champions were inputted to
Plexor; we are their output.
"The Guild had to place an overseer over Plexor. It must be the Operating
System for the Technological side, and the Prime Deity for the Magic side, and
in Plexor it must be omniscient and all-powerful. Thus, the Guild generated
Shekondar the Fearsome/JANUS 64, the Organism that inhabits and controls the
colony. The creation of this system took twice as long as the building of
Plexor itself, and in the end Keldor died, his mind overloaded by massive
transfers of data from one hemisphere to the other, the Boundary within his
mind destroyed and the contents Mixed hopelessly. But out of his death came
the King of Two Faced, that which in Techno-Plexor is JANUS 64 and in Magic
Plexor, Shekondar the Fearsome.
"Though the last member of the Guild died two thousand years ago, most
Plexorians have revered the King of Two Faces. But in these dark days, at
the close of this age, those who know the story of Shekondar/JANUS 64 are
very few. We who have kept the flame alive have trained your bodies and
minds to accept this responsibility. Today, our efforts output in batch.
From this room will march the Grand Army celebrated in the prophecies and
songs of Magic-Plexor, whose coming has been foretold even in the seemingly
random errors of JANUS 64; the band of heroes which will debug Plexor, which
will fight Mixture in the approaching crisis. And for those of you who have
failed to detect Mixture, who scoff that Magic might have crossed the Central
Bifurcation:
Behold!"
The listeners had now allowed themselves to sink deep into their characters,
and Councilla's words had begun to mesmerize them. Though a few had grinned
at the silliness spewing out of the big speakers, the oppressive seriousness
and magical unity that filled this dank chamber had silenced them; soon, cut
off from the normal world, they began to doubt themselves, and heeded the
Priestess. As she built to a climax and revealed the most profound secrets of
Plexor, many began to sweat and tingle, fidgeting with terrified energy. When
she cried, "Behold!" the spell was bound up in a word. The room became silent
with fear as all wondered what demonic demonstration she had conjured up.
A sssh! was heard, and it avalanched into a loud, general hiss. When that
sound died away, it was easy to hear a soft, cacophonous noise, a jumble of
sharp high tones that sounded like a distant kazoo band. The sound seemed to
come from one of the tunnels, though echoes made it hard to tell which one. It
was approaching quickly. Suddenly and rapidly, everyone cleared away from the
four tunnel openings and plastered against the walls. Only when all the others
had found places did Klystron the Impaler move. He walked calmly through the
center of the room, leaving the radio receiver and speakers in the middle,
and found himself a place in front of a hushed squadron of swordsmen. The
roar swelled to a scream; a bat the size of an eagle pumped out of a tunnel,
took a fast turn around the room, sending many of the men to their knees,
then plunged decisively into another passage. As the roar exploded into the
open, in the garish artificial light the Grand Army saw a swarm of enormous
fat brown-grey lash-tailed bright-eyed screaming frothing rats vomit from
the tunnel, veer through the middle of the room and compress itself into the
opening through which the giant bat had flown. Some of them smashed headlong
into the old boxy radio, sending it sprawling across the floor, and before
it had come to rest, five rats had parted from the stream and demolished
it, scything their huge gleaming rodent teeth through the plywood case as
though it were an orange peel, prying the apparatus apart, munching into its
glass-and-metal innards with insane passion. Their frenzy lasted for several
seconds; their brothers had all gone; and they emitted piercing shrieks and
scuttled off into the tunnel, one trailing behind a streak of twisted wire and
metal.
Most everyone save Klystron sat on the floor in a fetal position, arms crossed
over faces, though some had drawn swords or clubs, prepared to fight it out.
None moved for two minutes, lest they draw another attack. When the warriors
began to show life again, they moved with violent trembling and nauseated
dizziness and the most perfect silence they could attain. No one strayed from
the safety of the walls except for Klystron the Impaler/Chris the Systems
Programmer, who paced to a spot where a thousand rat footprints had stomped a
curving highway into the thin sludge. Hardly anyone here, he knew, had been
convinced of the Central Bifurcation, much less of the danger of Mixture. That
was understandable, given the badly Mixed environment which had twisted their
minds. Klystron/Chris had done all he could to counter such base thinking, but
the rise of the giant rats, and careful preparation by him and Councilla and
Chip Dixon, had provided proof.
He let them think it over. It was not an easy thing, facing up to one's own
importance; even he had found it difficult. Finally he spoke out in a clear
and firm voice, and every head in the room snapped around to pay due respect
to their leader.
"Do I have a Grand Army?"
The mumbled chorus sounded promising. Klystron snapped his sword from its
scabbard and held it on high, making sure to avoid electrical cables. "All
hail Shekondar the Fearsome!" he trumpeted.
Swords, knives, chains and clubs crashed out all around and glinted in the
mist. "All hail Shekondar the Fearsome!" roared the army in reply, and four
times it was answered by echoes from the tunnels. Klystron/Chris listened to
it resonate, then spoke with cool resolve: "It is time to begin the Final
Preparations."
An advantage of living in a decaying civilization was that nobody really
cared if you chose to roam the corridors laden with armfuls of chest waders,
flashlights, electrical equipment and weaponry. We did receive alarmed
scrutiny from some, and boozy inquiries from friendly Terrorists, but were
never in danger from the authorities. A thirty-minute trek through the
deepening chaos of the Plex took us to the Burrows, which were still inhabited
by people devoted to such peaceful pursuits as gaming, computer programming,
research and Star Trek reruns.
From here a freight elevator took us to the lowest sublevel, where
Fred Fine led us through dingy hallways plastered with photos of nude
Crotobaltislavonian princesses until we came to a large room filled with
plumbing. From here, Virgil used his master key to let us into a smaller room,
from which a narrow spiral staircase led into the depths.
"I go first," said Virgil quietly, "with the Sceptre. Hyacinth follows with
her .44. Bud follows her with the heavy gloves, then Sarah and Casimir with
the backpacks, and Fred in the rear with his sixteen-gauge. No noise."
After one or two turns of the stair we had to switch on our headlamps. The
trip down was long and tense, and we seemed to make a hellacious racket on
the echoing metal treads. I kept my beam on the blazing white-gold beacon of
Virgil's hair and listened to the breathing and the footsteps behind me. The
air had a harsh damp smell that told me I was sucking in billions of microbes
of all descriptions with each breath. Toward the bottom we slipped on our gas
masks, and I found I was breathing much faster than I needed to.
The rats were waiting a full fifty feet above the bottom. One had his mouth
clamped over Virgil's lower leg before he had switched on the Sceptre of
Cosmic Force. The flashing drove away the rest of the rats, who tumbled
angrily down the stair on top of one another, but the first beast merely
clamped down harder and hung on, too spazzed out to move. Fortunately,
Hyacinth did not try to shoot it on the spot. I slipped past, flexed my big
elbow-length padded gloves, and did battle with the rat. The rodent teeth had
not penetrated the soccer shinguards Virgil wore beneath his waders, so I
took my time, relaxing and squatting down to look into the animal's glowering
white-rimmed eye. His bared chisel teeth, a few inches long and an inch wide,
flickered purple-yellow with each flash of the strobe. Having sliced through
Virgil's waders to expose the colorful plastic shinguard, the rat now tried
to gnaw its way through the obstacle without letting go. I did not have the
strength to pull its mouth open.
"A German shepherd can exert hundreds of pounds of jaw force," said Fred Fine,
standing above and peering over Casimir's shoulder with scientific coolness.
The rat was not impressed by any of this.
"Let's go for a clean kill," suggested its victim with a trace of strain, "and
then we'll have our sample."
I bashed in the back of its head with an oaken leg I had foresightedly
unscrewed from my kitchen table for the occasion. The rat just barely fit into
a large heavy-duty leaf bag; Virgil twist-tied it shut and we left it there.
And so into the tunnels. The sewers were unusually fluid that night as
thousands of cubic feet of beer made its traditional way through the digestive
tracks of the degenerates upstairs and into the sanitary system. Hence we
stuck to the catwalks along the sides of the larger tunnels-- as did the rats.
The Sceptre was hard on our eyes, so Virgil waited until they were perilously
close before switching it on and driving them in squalling bunches into the
stream below. We did not have to use the guns, though Fred Fine insisted on
shooting his flash gun at a rat to see how they liked it. Not at all, as it
happened, and Fred Fine pronounced it "very interesting."
Casimir said, "Where did my radioactive source fall to? Are we going anywhere
near there?"
"Good point," said Fred Fine. "Let's steer clear of that. Don't want blasted
'nads."
"I know where it went, but it's not there now," said Virgil. "The rats ate
everything. Some rat obviously got a free surprise in with his paraffin, but I
don't know where he ended up.' Fred Fine began to point out landmarks: where
he had left the corpse of the Microwave Lizard, long since eaten by you know
what; where Steven Wilson had experienced his last and biggest surprise; the
tunnel that led to the Sepulchre of Keldor. His voice alternated between the
pseudo-scientific dynamo hum of Fred Fine and the guttural baritone of the war
hero. We had heard this stuff from him for a couple of weeks now, but down
in the tunnels it really started to perturb us. Most people, on listening
to a string of nonsense, will tend to doubt their own sanity before they
realize that the person who is jabbering at them is really the one with the
damaged brain. That night, tramping through offal, attacking giant rats with
a strobe light and listening to the bizarre memoirs of Klystron, most of us
were independently wondering whether or not we were crazy. So when we asked
Fred Fine for explanations, it was not because we wanted to hear more Klystron
stories (as he assumed); it was because we wanted to get an idea of what other
people were thinking. We were quickly able to realize that the world was
indeed okay, that Fred Fine was bonkers and we were fine.
Hundreds of cracked and gnawed bones littered one intersection, and Virgil
identified it as where he had discovered the useful properties of the Sceptre.
This area was high and dry, as these things went, and many rats lurked about.
Virgil switched the Sceptre on for good, forcing them back to the edge of the
dark, where they chattered and flashed their red eyes. Hyacinth stuffed wads
of cotton in her ears, apparently in case of a shootout.
"Let's set up the 'scope," Virgil suggested. Casimir swung off his pack
and withdrew a heavily padded box, from which he took a small portable
oscilloscope. This device had a tiny TV screen which would display sound
patterns picked up by a shotgun microphone which was also in the pack. As the
'scope warmed up, Casimir plugged the microphone cord into a socket on its
front. A thin luminous green line traced across the middle of the screen.
Virgil aimed the mike down the main passageway and turned it on. The line on
the screen split into a chaotic tangle of dim green static. Casimir played
with various knobs, and quickly the wild flailing of the signal was compressed
into a pattern of random vibes scrambling across the screen. "White noise,"
said Fred Fine. "Static to you laymen."
"Keep an eye on it," said Virgil, and pointed the mike down the smaller
side tunnel. The white noise was abruptly replaced by nearly vertical lines
marching across the screen. Casimir compressed the signal down again, and we
saw that it was nothing more than a single stationary sine wave, slightly
unruly but basically stable.
"Very interesting," said Fred Fine.
"What's going on?" Sarah asked.
"This is a continuous ultrasonic tone," said Virgil. "It's like an unceasing
dog whistle. It comes from some artificial source down that tunnel. You see,
when I point the mike in most directions we get white noise, which is normal.
But this is a loud sound at a single pitch. To the rats it would sound like a
drawn-out note on an organ. That explains why they cluster in this particular
area; it's music to their ears, though it's very simple music. In fact, it's
monotonous."
"How did you know to look for this?" asked Sarah.
Virgil shrugged. "It was plausible that an installation as modern and
carefully guarded as the one I saw would have some kind of ultrasonic alarm
system. It's pretty standard."
"Very interesting," said Fred Fine.
"It's like sonar. Anything that disturbs the echo, within a certain range,
sets off the alarm. Here's the question: why don't the rats set it off?"
"Some kind of barrier keeps them away," said Casimir.
"I agree. But I didn't see any barrier. When I was here before, they could
run right up to the door-- they had to be fought off with machine guns. They
must have put up a barrier since I was last down here. What that means to us
is this: we can go as far as the barrier, whatever it may be, without any
fear of setting off the alarm system."
We moved down the tunnel in a flying wedge, making use of table leg, Sceptre
and sword as necessary. Soon we arrived at the barrier, which turned out to be
insubstantial but difficult to miss: a frame of angle-irons welded together
along the walls and ceiling, hung with dozens of small, brilliant spotlights.
At this point, any rat would find itself bathed in blinding light and turn
back in terror and pain. Beyond this wall of light there was only a single
line of footprints-- human-- in the bat guano. "Someone's been changing the
light bulbs," concluded Sarah.
The fifty feet of corridor preceding the light-wall were littered almost
knee-deep in glittering scraps of tinfoil and other bright objects, including
the remains of Fred Fine's radio. "This is their hangout," said Hyacinth.
"They must like the music."
"They want to make a nice, juicy meal out of whoever changes those light
bulbs," suggested Fred Fine.
Sarah's pack contained a tripod and a pair of fine binoculars. Once we had
set these up in the middle of the tunnel we could see the heavy doors, TV
cameras, lights and so on at the tunnel's end. As we took turns looking and
speculating, Virgil set up a Geiger counter from Sarah's pack.
"Normally a Geiger counter would just pick up a lot of background and cosmic
radiation and anything meaningful would be drowned out. But we're so well
shielded in these tunnels that the only thing getting to us should be a few
very powerful cosmic rays, and neutrinos, which this won't pick up anyway."
The Geiger counter began to click, perhaps once every four seconds.
Sarah had the best eyes; she sat crosslegged on the layers of foil and gazed
into the binoculars. "In a few minutes a hazardous waste pickup is scheduled
for the loading dock upstairs," said Virgil, checking his watch. "My theory
is that, in addition to taking hazardous wastes out of the Plex, those trucks
have been bringing something even more hazardous into the Plex, and down into
this tunnel."
We waited.
"Okay," said Sarah, "Elevator door opening on the right." We all heard it.
"Long metal cylinder thingie on a cart. Now the end of the tunnel is opening
up-- big doors, like jaws. Now some guys in yellow are rolling the cylinder
into a large room back there." The Geiger counter shouted. I looked at
Casimir.
"Skip your next chest X-ray," he said. "If this place is what it looks like,
it's just Iodine-131. Half-life of eight days. It'll end up in your thyroid,
which you don't really need anyway."
"I'm pretty fond of my thyroid," said Hyacinth. "It made me big and strong."
"Doors closing," said Sarah over the chatter of us and the Geiger counter.
"Elevator's gone. All doors closed now." "Well! Congratulations, Virgil," said
Fred Fine, shaking his hand. "You've discovered the only permanent high-level
radioactive waste disposal facility in the United States."
Most of us didn't have anything to say about it. We mainly wanted to get back
home.
"Fascinating, brilliant," continued Fred Fine, as we headed back. "In today's
competitive higher education market, there has to be some way for universities
to support themselves. What better way than to enter lucrative high-technology
sectors?"
"Don't have to grovel for the alumni anymore," said Sarah. "You really
think universities should be garbage dumps for the worst by-products of
civilization?" asked Hyacinth.
"It's not such a bad idea, in a way," said Casimir. "Better the universities
than anyone else. Oxford, Heidelberg, Paris, all those places have lasted for
centuries longer than any government. Only the Church has lasted longer, and
the Vatican doesn't need the money."
We paused for a rest in the spiral staircase, near our rat body. Casimir, Fred
Fine and Virgil went back down to the bottom for an experiment. Virgil had
brought an ultrasonic tone generator with him, and they used it to prove--
very conclusively-- that the rats loved the ultrasound as much as they hated
the strobe. They ran back upstairs, Sceptre flashing, and I slung the rat over
my shoulder and we all proceeded up the stairs as fast as our lungs would
allow.
The dissection of the rat was most informal. We did it in the sink of
Professor Sharon's old lab, amid the pieces of the railgun. Fred Fine laid
into the thorax with a kitchen knife and a single-edged razor. We were
quick and crude; only Casimir had seen the inside of a rat before. The skin
peeled back easily along with thick pink layers of fat, and we looked at the
intestines that could digest such amazing meals. Casimir scrounged a pair of
heavy tin snips and used them to cut the breastbone in half so we could get
under the ribcage. I shoved my hands between the halves of the breastbone and
pulled as hard as I could, and finally with a crack and a spray of blood one
side snapped open like a stubborn cabinet door and we looked at the lungs and
vital organs. The heart was not immediately visible.
"Maybe it's hidden under this organ here," suggested Fred Fine, pointing to
something between the lungs.
"That's not an organ," said Casimir. "It's an intersection of several major
vessels."
"So where's the heart?" asked Hyacinth, just beginning to get interested.
"Those major vessels are the ones that ought to go into, and come out of, the
heart," said Casimir uncertainly. He reached down and slid his hand under the
bundle of vessels, and pulling it up and aside, revealed-- nothing.
"Holy Mother of God," he whispered. "This animal doesn't have a heart."
Our own thumped violently. For a long time we were frozen, disturbed beyond
reason; then a piercing beep emanated from Fred Fine and we jumped and gasped
angrily.
Unconcerned, he pressed a button on his digital calculator/watch, halting the
beep. "Sorry. That's my watch alarm."
We looked at him; he looked at his watch, We were all sweating.
"I set it to go off like that at midnight, the beginning of April first, every
year. It's sort of a warning, so that this one remembers, hey, April Fools'
Day, anything could happen now."
--April--
While we sewer-slogged, E13S held a giant party in honor of Big Wheel. It was
conceived as your basic formless beer blowout, but the ever-spunky Airheads
had insisted upon a theme: Great Partiers of the Past. The major styles in
evidence were Disco, Sixties, Fifties and Toga. A team of sturdy Terrorists
had lugged Dex Fresser's stereo up to the social lounge, which was the center
of Disco activity. A darkened room down the hail featured a Sixties party,
at which participants roughed up their perms, wore T-shirts, smoked more
dope than usual and said "groovy" at the drop of a hat. The study lounge was
Fifties headquarters, and was identical to all the other Fifties parties which
had been held since about 1963 by people who didn't know anything about the
Fifties. The Toga people were forced to adopt a wandering, nomadic partying
existence; they had no authentic toga music to boogie to, though someone did
experiment by playing an electronic version of the "1812 Overture" at full
blast. Mostly these people just stood sheepishly in the hallways, draped in
their designer bedsheets, clutching cups of beer and yelling "toga!" from time
to time.
The Disco lounge was filled with women in lollipop plastic dresses and thick
metallic lipstick under ski masks, and heavily scented young men in pastel
three-piecers and shiny hardware-laden shoes. The smell was deafening, and
when the doors were open, excess music spilled out and filled nearby rooms to
their corners. These partiers were a generation whose youth had been stolen.
They had prepared all through their adolescence for the day when they could
go to college and attend real discos, adult discos where they had alcohol and
sex partners you could take home with no pay-rental hassles. Their hopes had
been dashed in the early eighties when Disco had flamed out somewhere over
New Jersey, like a famous dirigible. But the nostalgic air here made them
feel young again. Dex Fresser even showed up in a white three-piecer and took
several opportunities to boogie right down to the ground with shapely females
in clingy synthetic wraps.
On the windowsill, the Go Big Red Fan, held in place with bricks, spun and
glowed in its self-made halo of black light. Overhead, a mirrored ball cast
revolving dots of light on the walls, and more stoned or imaginative dancers
could imagine that they were actually standing inside a giant Big Wheel.
Whoooo! The picture windows were covered with newspaper, as the panes had long
since been smashed and the curtains long since burned.
After Dex Fresser had consumed sixteen hits of acid (his supplier had never
really grasped the idea of powers of two), five bongloads of hashish rolled
in mescaline, a square of peyote Jell-O, a lude, four tracks, a small handful
of street-legal caffeine pep pills, twelve tablespoons of cough syrup, half a
can of generic light wine and a pack of Gaulois cigarettes, he began to toy
with a strobe light that was being used to establish the Disco atmosphere. He
turned it up faster and faster until the lounge was wracked with delighted
freakedout screams and the dancers had begun to hop randomly and smash into
one another, as though they had been time-warped into Punk. Meanwhile, what
passed for Dex's mind wandered over to the Go Big Red Fan, and though the
time-warp effect was really blowing his tubes, he thought the fan might be
slowing down; continuing to turn up the strobe, he was able to make the Little
Wheel stop revolving altogether-- either that, or time itself had come to a
halt! Dex spazzed out to the max. All became quiet as the propulsion reactors
of a passing Sirian space cruiser damped out his stereo (the DJ had turned
down the volume), and all heard Dex announce that at midnight Big Wheel would
say something very important to him. He relaxed, the music was cranked back
up, the strobe light hurled out a nearby window and the Fan began to rotate
again.
Midnight could hardly come soon enough. The partiers packed into the social
lounge, sitting in rows facing the window. Dex Fresser stood before the
shrouded window with his back to the crowd, and priests stood ready to tear
the papers away. A few minutes before midnight, the DJ put on "Stairway to
Heaven," timed so that the high-energy sonic blast section would begin at
12:00 sharp.
The newspapers ripped apart, the red-white-and-blue power beams of Big Wheel
exploded into the room, and the heavy beat of the rock and roll made their
thoraxes boom like empty kegs. But Dex Fresser was impressively still. He
stared into the naked face of the Big Wheel for fifteen minutes before he
moved a muscle. Then he relayed the message to the huddled students. Speaking
through a mike hooked to his stereo, he sounded loud and quadraphonic.
"Tonight the Big Wheel has plans for us, man. We're going to have a fucking
war." The Terrorists cheered and whooped and the Airheads oohed and aahed.
"The outside people, who are all hearing-impaired to the voice of Big Wheel
and Roy G Biv and our other leaders, will come tomorrow to the Plex with guns
to kill us. They want to put short-range tactical nuclear weapons on the roof
of D Tower in order to threaten Big Wheel and make him do as they wish.
"We have friends, though, like Astarte, the Goddess, who is the sister of Big
Wheel and who is going to like help us out and stuff. The Terrorists and the
SUB will cooperate just like Big Wheel and Astarte do. Also, the B-men are our
friends too.
"We've got shitloads of really powerful enemies, says Big Wheel. Like the
Administration and the Temple of Unlimited Godhead and a bunch of nerds and
some other people. We have to kill all of them.
"This is going to take cooperation and we have to have perfect loyalty from
everyone. See, even if you think you have friends among our enemies, you're
wrong, because Big Wheel decides who our friends are, and if he says they're
your enemies, they're your enemies, just like that. Everything's very simple
with Big Wheel, that's how you can be sure he's telling the truth. So we've
got to join together now and there can't be any secrets and we can't cover up
for our enemies or have mercy for them."
Mari Meegan, sitting in the front row, legs tucked demurely to the side,
listened intensely, eyes slitted and lips parted as she thought about how this
applied to her.
At this point a few people came to their senses and made a run for it. One
of these, a none-too-bright advisee of mine who had been going along for the
good times, realized that these people were nuts, sprinted to the nearest
fire stair, and escaped unharmed, later to tell me this story. What happened
after his exit is vague; apparently, Yllas Freedperson, High Priestess of
Astarte, showed up, and the leaders of the SUB and of the Terrorists did a lot
of planning and organizing in those next few hours.
By contrast, Bert Nix celebrated the evening by incinerating himself in a
storage room on C22W. He had been using it as a hideout for some time, and
had gotten along well with the students, except for one problem: Bert Nix's
obsession with collecting garbage. It was partly a practical habit, as he
got most of his food and clothing from the trash. Far beyond that, however,
he could not bring himself to throw out anything, and so in his little rooms
scattered around the Plex the garbage was packed in to the ceiling, leaving
only a little aisle to the door. Out of gratitude to his protectors, Bert Nix
stuffed oily rags under the doors to seal the odor in.
This sufficed until the evening of March 31, when he happened to open the
door while a fastidious student from Saskatoon was walking by. She watched
as half a dozen cockroaches over three inches long lumbered out between the
derelict's bare feet and approached her, waving their antennae affably. No
Airhead, she stomped them to splinters and called Security on the nearest
telephone. Between then and the time they arrived five hours later, however,
the fire started. It could have been spontaneous combustion, it could have
been the heating system, or a suicidal whim or wayward cigarette from Bert
Nix. In any event, the room became a tightly sealed furnace, and when the
flames had died, all that remained were a charred corpse in the aisle and
drifts of cockroach bodies piled up in front of the door.
At the northern corner of the Plex's east wall, north of the Mall loading
docks, the docks for student use, the mail, Cafeteria, general supply, Burrows
and wide-load docks was the Refuse Area. Six loading docks opened on an
enormous room with six giant trash compactors and six great steel chutes
which expelled tons of garbage from their foul, stained sphincters every few
minutes. When there wasn't a strike on, the compactors would grind away around
the clock and a great truck would be at one dock or another at any given time,
bringing back an empty container and hauling off a full one.
North of the Refuse Area, in the very corner of the Flex, was the Hazardous
Waste Area with its steel doors and explosion-proof walls. When scientists
produced any waste that was remotely hazardous, they would seal it into an
orange container, mark down its contents and take it to the Refuse Area, where
they could deposit it in a chute that led into the HWA. If the container was
too large for this, they could simply leave it on a dolly by the door, and
the specially trained B-men would then wheel it through when it was time for
a pickup. When the Hazardous Waste truck arrived, three times a day, all
the containers were then loaded into its armor-plated back and hauled away.
This was usually done in the dead of night, to lessen the danger of traffic
accidents. So extraordinary was this disposal system that American Megaversity
had won awards from environmental groups and acclaim from scientists.
At 4:30 on the morning of April 1, when I should have been drinking or
sleeping, I was sitting in my suite staring at the telephone. Virgil
Gabrielsen, even more ambitious, was sitting by the door to the HWA in a huge
orange crate about the shape of a telephone booth. "HANDLE WITH EXTREME CARE,"
its label read, "CONTAINS UNIVERSAL SOLVENT. DO NOT PUT ON SIDE OR EXPLOSION
WILL RESULT." The same concepts were repeated by means of ideograms which we
had hastily painted on the sides, showing a Crotobaltislavonian stick figure
being blown to bits after putting the crate on its side. Instructions to
telephone Dr. Redfield, and giving my telephone number, were added in several
places.
"The nuke waste has to be coming in through the HWA," Virgil had insisted, as
he and I and the disemboweled rat relaxed in Sharon's lab. "I counted my steps
down there in the tunnels. As far as I can tell, that elevator shaft should
go right up into the northeast corner of the building. The HWA is locked and
alarmed within an inch of its life, but I know how to get inside."
At quarter to five, the enormous Magrov and half a dozen other
Crotobaltislavonians entered the Refuse Area. As Virgil watched through
strategically placed peepholes, they began with some unusual procedures. First
they opened the southernmost of the six metal doors to the Access Lot. Shortly
after, an old van backed up to this dock and threw open its rear doors. Two
men jumped out into the Refuse Area in protective clothing, gas masks dangling
on their chests, and exchanged hearty Scythian greetings with the B-men. Much
equipment was now hauled out of the van, including a long metal cylinder-- an
exact replica of a nuclear waste container-- and a huge tripod-mounted machine
gun. Then came numerous small machine guns, what appeared to be electronic
equipment and crates of supplies. These were piled on a cart and wheeled over
to Virgil's position.
Virgil had realized by now that this was not a business-as-usual day. At least
the situation appealed to his sense of humor. The fake nuke waste cylinder
opened like a casket and the two gas-masked men climbed in and lay one atop
the other. The others handed them weapons and closed the lid. This cylinder
was also placed next to Virgil. In the meantime, B-men bolted the big gun's
tripod directly into the concrete floor at the loading dock, apparently having
already drilled the holes in preparation. The weapon was aimed into the
Access Lot, and loaded and checked over with an experienced air unusual among
janitors.
Virgil's crate was the source of a long and emotional discussion in Scythian.
Occasionally Magrov or one of the others would shout something about telefon
while pounding on the crate with his index finger.
"Hoy!" shouted a B-man back at the machine gun. Virgil saw a glint of
headlights outside. It was 4:59. A hellacious roar ensued as the determined
janitors sprayed several thousand rounds per minute out the door. Magrov cut
off debate by seizing Virgil's crate and wheeling it into the HWA.
The gunfire was over before Virgil was all the way through the door. Once the
crate was stopped and he was able to get his bearings again, he could see that
he was in a somewhat smaller room with a segmented metal door in the outside
wall and a large red rectangle painted in the middle of the floor. A dozen or
so bright orange waste containers had been slid through the chute and were
waiting on a counter to be hauled away.
My phone rang at 5:01.
"Profyessor Rettfeelt? Sorry, getting you up early in mornink. Magrov here.
You put humongous waste container by HWA, correct?"
"Yes, that's correct. Universal Solvent. Very dangerous."
"Ees too tall for goink inside of vaste truck. Ve must put on her side."
"No! That's dangerous. You will be blown to little bits."
"Then what to do with it?"
"I'll have to put it in a different container. You must leave it in the HWA
overnight. I will come to the Refuse Area tomorrow night, at the time of the
next pickup, and get the crate and take it away." "Good." Magrov hung up.
Back in the HWA, Magrov checked his watch, then turned and shouted at a
swiveling TV camera on the wall. "Ha! Those profyessors! Say! Where is truck?
Very late today."
"Roger, team leader, we read four minutes late," said an Anglo voice over a
loudspeaker. "Maybe some trouble with those strikers. Hey! Let's cut the idle
chitchat."
Finally the great steel door rolled open. Through one of his peepholes, Virgil
could see a hazardous waste truck backing into the brilliantly lit, fenced-in
area outside. He could also see a pair of half-inch bullet holes through the
outside rear-view mirror. The tiny black-and-white monitors, he knew, would
never pick up this detail. When it had come to rest, the B-men unlocked the
back with Magrov's keys and pulled open armored doors to reveal a stainless
steel cylinder on a cart. This they rolled into the HWA, placing it in the
middle of the red rectangle on the floor.
Other B-men set about hauling the small orange containers into the back of the
truck and strapping them down. Magrov removed guns from a locked cabinet and
distributed them to himself and two others. There three took up positions in
the red area around the cylinder. "Hokay, ready for little ride," said Magrov.
"Roger, team leader. Stand by." A deep hum and vibration commenced. The men
and the cylinder began to sink, and Virgil could see that the red rectangle
was actually an elevator platform. Within seconds only a black hole remained.
In five minutes the platform returned, with the B-men but without the
cylinder. Displaying frank contempt for safety regulations, the B-men began to
smoke profusely.
The intercom crackled alive. "Crotobaltislavonia aiwa!" came the exhilarated
shout.
"Crotobaltislavonia aiwa!" howled the B-men, leaping to their feet. There was
much whoopee-making and cigarette-throwing, and then they opened the door to
the Refuse Area and carried in crate after crate of supplies and put them on
the elevator platform. The platform, laden with Crotobaltislavonians, guns and
food, sank into the earth once again, then returned in a few minutes carrying
nine bleeding bodies in yellow radiation suits.
Virgil had been expecting TV cameras. If they had them down in the tunnels,
they must have them upstairs in the HWA. So after a few minutes, when Virgil
was sure that the B-men were down there for the long haul, he opened a small
panel in the side of his crate and stuck out a long iron rod with a magnesium
tip. The important thing about the magnesium rod was that Virgil had just set
it on fire, and when magnesium burns, it makes an intolerably brilliant light.
Virgil soon squirmed out through the panel, a welding mask strapped over his
face. Even through the dark glass, everything in the room was blindingly
lit-- certainly bright enough to overload, or even burn out, the television
cameras. Any camera turned his way would show nothing but purest white. To
make sure, he lit two more magnesium rods and placed them on the floor around
the room. Satisfied that all three cameras were now blinded, he withdrew a
can of spray paint from his crate and used it to paint over their lenses.
The mikes were easy to find and he destroyed these simply by shoving burning
magnesium rods into them. Then he called me on the phone. "I was right," he
said, "I'm safe, and you can go to sleep. But look out. Trouble is brewing."
Alas, I was already asleep before he got to that last part.
While the magnesium rods burned themselves out, Virgil climbed into the cab
of the truck, where the corpses of its late drivers had been stretched out on
the floor. The Crotos' plan was daring and their aim excellent; they needed to
penetrate the truck's armored cab and kill the occupants without wiping out
the engine or the gas tank. The driver's window was splattered all over the
seat, the door itself deeply buckled and perforated by the thumb-sized shells.
Virgil hit the ignition and drove it far enough out to wedge the electrical
gates open while leaving enough space for other vehicles to pass.
Back in the Plex, he made phone calls to several readymix concrete companies.
Returning to the Burrows, he found a cutting torch and wheeled it back to the
HWA. The red platform was nothing more than thick steel plate, and once he had
gotten the torch fired up and the red paint burned away, it cut like butter.
As he sliced a hole in the platform, he reviewed his reasoning: 1) Law is
opinion of guy with biggest gun.
2) Biggest "gun" in U.S. held by police and armed forces. 3) Hypothesis:
someone wants to break the law, or more generally, render U.S. law null and
void in a certain zone. 4) This necessitates a bigger gun.
5) Threat of contamination of urban area with nuclear waste ought to fill the
bill.
6) This provides a motive for taking over Nuke Dump. 7) Crotobaltislavonians
have taken over Nuke Dump.
8) They either want to contaminate the city, or take over this area-- the
Plex-- by threat of same.
9) Either we will all be poisoned, or else representatives of the People's
Free Social Existence Node of Crotobaltislavonia will dictate their own law to
people in this area.
10) This does not sound very nice either way.
11) Maybe we can destroy their gun by blocking the possible contamination
routes. The elevator would be their preferred route, as it would provide
direct access to the atmosphere.
A rough steel circle about two feet across pulled loose and dropped into the
blackness. Virgil pulled back his mask and peered down. The circle's edge was
still red hot, and as it fell through the blackness, he could see it spinning
and diminishing until it smashed into the bottom. The clang reached his ears a
moment later. Through the hole he could smell the odor of the sewers and hear
occasional arguments among rats.
Hearing the whine of a down-shifting truck, he shut off the torch and ran out
into the Access Lot. Virgil directed the cement truck through the jammed gate
and up to the loading dock. He directed the driver to swing his chute around
and dump the entire load into the freshly cut hole.
The driver was young, a philosophy Ph.D. only two years out of the Big U. He
obviously knew Virgil was asking him to commit an illegal act. "Give me a
rational reason to dump my cement down that hole," he demanded.
Virgil thought it over. "The reasons are very unusual, and if I were to
explain them, you would only be justified in thinking I was crazy."
"Which doesn't give me my rational reason."
"True," admitted Virgil. "However, let's not forget the conventional view of
craziness. Our media are filled with images of the crazy segment of society
as being an exceptionally dangerous, unpredictable group. Look at Hinckley!
Watch any episode of T. J. Hooker! So if you thought I was crazy, the reaction
consistent with your social training would be to do as I say in order to
preserve your own safety."
"That would be true with your run-of-the-mill truck driver," said the truck
driver after agonized contemplation, "who tends to be an M.A. in sociology or
something. But I can't make an excuse based on failure to think independently
of the media."
"True. Follow me." Virgil walked across the HWA, leading the truck driver over
to the heavy door that led into the Refuse Area. Here he paused, allowing
the truck driver to notice the long red streaks on the floor. Virgil then
opened the door and pointed at the nine bloody corpses, which he had dragged
there to get them off the platform. "Having seen the remains of several
savagely murdered people, you might conclude that my showing them to you so
dramatically constituted a nonverbal threat. You might then decide-- " but the
truck driver had already decided, and was running for the controls at the back
of the truck. The concrete was down the hole in no time. The truck driver did
not even wait to be given an official American Megaversity voucher.
After that, trucks arrived every fifteen minutes or so for the rest of
the morning. Subsequent truckers, seeing wet cement slopped all over the
place, impressed by Virgil's official vouchers, were much less skeptical. By
lunchtime, twenty truckloads of cement were piled up behind the sliding doors
at the bottom of the elevator shaft.
The first Refuse Area dock was still open. After blowing the crap out of
the hazardous waste truck, the B-men had hauled the real radioactive waste
cylinder out and left it there in the doorway. Virgil had the last driver bury
the cylinder in cement where it sat. He smoothed out a flat place with his
hand and inscribed: DANGER. HIGH LEVEL RADIOACTIVE WASTE. TRESPASSERS WILL BE
STERILIZED. His day's work was done.
Unbeknownst to anyone else, the two most important battles of the war had
already been fought. The Crotobaltislavonians had won the first, and Virgil
the second.
Once the actual war got started, things happened quickly. In fact, between the
time that S. S. Krupp and two of his associates and I had got on an elevator
and the time we escaped from it, the situation had changed completely.
S. S. Krupp felt compelled to visit E13S after its riot/party of the night
before, somewhat in the spirit of Jimmy Carter visiting Mount Saint Helens.
Naturally, as faculty-in-residence for E Tower, I was asked to serve as tour
guide. It was preferable to washing dung off my boots, but only just.
Krupp arrived at the base of E Tower at 11:35 A.M., fresh from a tour of Bert
Nix's cremation site. Considering the gruesome circumstances, not to mention
the journalists and the SUBbie screaming directly into his ear, he looked
relaxed. With him were Hyman Hotchkiss, Dean of Student Life, and Wilberforce
(Tex) Bracewill, Administrator of Student Health Services. Hyman looked young,
pale and ill. Tex had seen too much gonorrhea in too many strange places to
be shocked by anything. They were so civilized that they viewed my Number 27
BILL'S BREWS softball jersey as though it were a jacket and vest, and shook my
hand as though I had saved their families from death sometime in the distant
past.
Here in the lobby the sixteen elevators and four fire stairs of E Tower
emptied together into a desert of vandalized furniture, charred bulletin
boards and overflowing wastebaskets. I didn't know about events on E13S yet,
and my guests were doubtless still considering the charred remains of Bert
Nix, so we were not suspicious when elevators 2, 4 and 1 remained frozen
at the thirteenth floor for ten minutes. Only number 3 moved. When it got