much in the candlelight, except that there was a lot of silver and many
daggers and wands. The women were chanting in perfect unison.
"You cannot touch our lives in any way until you have been made one with us,"
continued Yllas.
Sarah and company declined the invitation with their feet. Before they got
far, Yllas started bellowing. "Man-women! Heteros! Traitors! Impurities! Stop
them!"
Nearby doors burst open and several women jumped out with bows and arrows
taken from the nearby P. E. Department. Sarah began a slow move for her gun,
but Hyacinth prevented it. "Take them to PAFW," decreed Yllas, "and when
Astarte tells us what is to be done, we will take them away one by one and
give them support and counseling."
Escorted by the archers, they traveled for several minutes through Axis
hallways, leaving the Union block and entering the athletics area. Here they
were turned over to a pair of shotgunwielding SUBbies, who led them into the
darkened hallway behind the racquetball courts. Each of the miniature doors
they passed had been padlocked; and looking through the tiny windows, they saw
several people in each court. Finally they arrived at an open door and were
ushered into an empty court, the door padlocked behind them. On the walkway
that ran above the back walls of the courts two guards paced back and forth.
Taped above the door was a hastily Magic-Markered sign:
WELCOME
TO THE
PEOPLE'S ALTERNATIVE FREEDOM WORKSHOP
The Axis clearly lacked experience in running prisons. They did not even
search them for weapons. The few guards were not particularly well armed
and followed no strict procedures; they seemed incapable of dealing with
relatively simple situations, such as requests for feminine hygiene materials.
All tough decisions such as this had to be transmitted to a higher authority,
who was holed up at the far end of the upper walkway.
After a few hours, several more people had been put in their cell, among them
some large athletes. Escape was easy. They waited until the pacing guards
on the walkway were both at one end, and then two large men simply grabbed
Hyacinth by the legs and threw her up over the railing. She rolled on her
stomach and plugged the two guards, who did not even have time to unsling
their weapons. The rest of the incompetent, somnambulistic personnel were
disarmed, and everyone was free. Five high-spirited escapees ran down the
walkway toward the office of the high-muck-a-muck, firing through its door the
entire way. When they finally kicked open the bent and perforated remains,
they found themselves in the courts reservation office. A Terrorist sat in a
chair, rifle across lap, staring into a color TV whose picture tube had been
blasted out. Hyacinth, Lucy and Sarah, not interested in this, headed for the
Burrows with several other refugees in tow. The domain of Virgil was near.
Not far from that gymnasium bloc, on the fourth floor. Klystron/Chris
inspected his lines. He had just approved one of the border outposts
when Klystron had called him back and berated him for his greenhornish
carelessness. Right there, he pointed out, a crafty insurrectionist might
creep unseen down that stairway and set up an impregnable firepost! The GASF
soldiers, awed by his intuition, extended their lines accordingly.
As Klystron/Chris stood on those stairs making friendly chitchat with the men,
the warble of a common urban pigeon sounded thrice from below, warning of
approaching hostiles. Klystron/Chris whirled, leapt through a group of slower
aides and crouched on the bottom step to peer down the hallway. His men were
assuming defensive stances and rolling for cover.
He exposed himself just enough to see the vanguard of the approaching force.
As he did, the voice of Shekondar came into his head, as it occasionally did
in times of great stress: "She is the woman I want for you. You know her! She
is ideal for you. The time has come for you to lose your virginity; at last
a worthy partner has arrived. Look at that body! Look at that hair! She has
long legs which are sexually provocative in the extreme. She is a healthy
specimen."
He could hardly disagree. She was evolutionarily fit as any female he had ever
observed; he remembered now how the firm but not disgusting musculature of
her upper arm had felt when he had set her down on that dinner table during
her fainting spell. But at this juncture, when she needed to be strong in
order to prevail and preserve her ability to reproduce, she showed the bounce
and verve that marked her as the archetypal Saucy Wench of practically every
dense sword-and-sorcery novel he had ever consumed in his farmhouse bed on
a hot Maine summer afternoon with his tortilla chips on one side and his
knife collection on the other. Later, after he had saved her from something--
saved her from her own vivacious feminine impulsiveness by an act of manly
courage and taken her to some sanctuary like the aisle between the CPU and
the Array Processing Unit-- then she could allow herself to melt away in a
rush of feminine passion and show the tenderness combined with 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
daggers and wands. The women were chanting in perfect unison.
"You cannot touch our lives in any way until you have been made one with us,"
continued Yllas.
Sarah and company declined the invitation with their feet. Before they got
far, Yllas started bellowing. "Man-women! Heteros! Traitors! Impurities! Stop
them!"
Nearby doors burst open and several women jumped out with bows and arrows
taken from the nearby P. E. Department. Sarah began a slow move for her gun,
but Hyacinth prevented it. "Take them to PAFW," decreed Yllas, "and when
Astarte tells us what is to be done, we will take them away one by one and
give them support and counseling."
Escorted by the archers, they traveled for several minutes through Axis
hallways, leaving the Union block and entering the athletics area. Here they
were turned over to a pair of shotgunwielding SUBbies, who led them into the
darkened hallway behind the racquetball courts. Each of the miniature doors
they passed had been padlocked; and looking through the tiny windows, they saw
several people in each court. Finally they arrived at an open door and were
ushered into an empty court, the door padlocked behind them. On the walkway
that ran above the back walls of the courts two guards paced back and forth.
Taped above the door was a hastily Magic-Markered sign:
WELCOME
TO THE
PEOPLE'S ALTERNATIVE FREEDOM WORKSHOP
The Axis clearly lacked experience in running prisons. They did not even
search them for weapons. The few guards were not particularly well armed
and followed no strict procedures; they seemed incapable of dealing with
relatively simple situations, such as requests for feminine hygiene materials.
All tough decisions such as this had to be transmitted to a higher authority,
who was holed up at the far end of the upper walkway.
After a few hours, several more people had been put in their cell, among them
some large athletes. Escape was easy. They waited until the pacing guards
on the walkway were both at one end, and then two large men simply grabbed
Hyacinth by the legs and threw her up over the railing. She rolled on her
stomach and plugged the two guards, who did not even have time to unsling
their weapons. The rest of the incompetent, somnambulistic personnel were
disarmed, and everyone was free. Five high-spirited escapees ran down the
walkway toward the office of the high-muck-a-muck, firing through its door the
entire way. When they finally kicked open the bent and perforated remains,
they found themselves in the courts reservation office. A Terrorist sat in a
chair, rifle across lap, staring into a color TV whose picture tube had been
blasted out. Hyacinth, Lucy and Sarah, not interested in this, headed for the
Burrows with several other refugees in tow. The domain of Virgil was near.
Not far from that gymnasium bloc, on the fourth floor. Klystron/Chris
inspected his lines. He had just approved one of the border outposts
when Klystron had called him back and berated him for his greenhornish
carelessness. Right there, he pointed out, a crafty insurrectionist might
creep unseen down that stairway and set up an impregnable firepost! The GASF
soldiers, awed by his intuition, extended their lines accordingly.
As Klystron/Chris stood on those stairs making friendly chitchat with the men,
the warble of a common urban pigeon sounded thrice from below, warning of
approaching hostiles. Klystron/Chris whirled, leapt through a group of slower
aides and crouched on the bottom step to peer down the hallway. His men were
assuming defensive stances and rolling for cover.
He exposed himself just enough to see the vanguard of the approaching force.
As he did, the voice of Shekondar came into his head, as it occasionally did
in times of great stress: "She is the woman I want for you. You know her! She
is ideal for you. The time has come for you to lose your virginity; at last
a worthy partner has arrived. Look at that body! Look at that hair! She has
long legs which are sexually provocative in the extreme. She is a healthy
specimen."
He could hardly disagree. She was evolutionarily fit as any female he had ever
observed; he remembered now how the firm but not disgusting musculature of
her upper arm had felt when he had set her down on that dinner table during
her fainting spell. But at this juncture, when she needed to be strong in
order to prevail and preserve her ability to reproduce, she showed the bounce
and verve that marked her as the archetypal Saucy Wench of practically every
dense sword-and-sorcery novel he had ever consumed in his farmhouse bed on
a hot Maine summer afternoon with his tortilla chips on one side and his
knife collection on the other. Later, after he had saved her from something--
saved her from her own vivacious feminine impulsiveness by an act of manly
courage and taken her to some sanctuary like the aisle between the CPU and
the Array Processing Unit-- then she could allow herself to melt away in a
rush of feminine passion and show the tenderness combined with 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