like the Plex on the nine blocks we retained.
But of course the demographics made it clear that times would be very rough
in the years to come. We could not compete for students, and so we had to run
a very tight ship and seek innovative sources for our operating funds. We
could have entered many small ventures-- high technology spinoffs, you see--
but this would have been extraordinarily complex, highly controversial and
unpredictable, besides raising questions about the proper function of the
university.
"It was then that we hit upon the nuclear waste idea. Here is something that
is not dependent on the economy; we will always have these wastes to dispose
of. It's highly profitable, as there is a desperate demand for disposal
facilities. The wastes must be stored for millennia, which means that they
are money in the bank-- the government, whatever form it takes, must continue
to pay us until their danger has died away. And by its very nature it must be
done secretly, so no controversy is generated, no discord disrupts the normal
functions of the academy-- there need be no relationship between the financial
foundation and the intellectual activities of the university. It's perfect."
"See, this city is on a real stable salt-dome area," added a heavy man in
an enormous grey suit, "and now that there's no more crude down there, it's
suitable for this kind of storage." "You," said the knight, pointing his sword
at the man who had just spoken, "must be in the oil business. Are you Ralph
Priestly?" "Ha! Well, yeah, that's me," said Ralph Priestly, unnerved. "We
have to talk later."
"How did you know about our disposal site?" asked Heimlich. "That doesn't
matter. What matters now is: how did the government of Crotobaltislavonia
find out about it?" "Oh," said Heimlich, shocked. "You know about that also."
"Yep."
After a pause, S. S. Krupp continued. "Now, don't go tell your honchos that we
did this out of greed. America had to start doing something with this waste--
that's a fact. You know what a fact is? That's something that has nothing
to do with politics. The site is as safe as could be. See, some things just
can't be handed over to political organizations, because they're so damned
unstable. But great universities can last for thousands of years. Hell, look
at the changes of government the University of Paris has survived in the
last century alone! This facility had to be built and it had to be done by a
university. The big steady cash flow makes us more stable, and that makes us
better qualified to be running the damn thing in the first place. Symbiosis,
son."
"Wait. If you're making so much money off of this, why are you so financially
tight-assed?"
"That's a very good question," said Heimlich. "As I said, it's imperative
that this facility remain secret. If we allowed the cash flow to show up on
our ledgers, this would be impossible. We've had to construct a scheme for
processing or laundering, as it were, our profits through various donors and
benefactors. In order to allay suspicion, we keep these 'donations' as small
as we can while meeting the university's basic needs."
"What about the excess money?"
"What's done with that depends on how long the site remains secret. Therefore
we hold the surplus in escrow and invest it in the name of American
Megaversity, so that in the meantime it is productively used."
"Invest it where? Don't tell me. Heimlich Freedom Industries. the Big Wheel
Petroleum Corporation
"
"Well," said Ralph Priestly, cutting the tip off a cigar. "Big Wheel's a hell
of an investment. I run a tight ship." "We don't deny that the investments
are in our best interests," said a very old Trustee with a kindly face. "But
there's nothing wrong with that, as long as we do not waste or steal the
money. Every investment we make in some way furthers the nation's economic
growth."
"But you're no different from the Crotobaltislavonians, in principle. You're
using your control over the wastes to blackmail whatever government comes
along."
"That's an excellent observation," said Krupp. "But the fact is, if you'll
just think about it, that as long as the waste exists, someone's going to
control them, and whoever does can blackmail whatever government there is, and
as long as someone's going to have that influence, it might as well be good
people like us."
The knight drummed his fingers on the table, and the Trustees peered at his
inscrutable silver mask. "I see from the obituaries that Bert Nix and Pertinax
Rushforth were one and the same. What happened to him?"
Heimlich continued. "Pertinax couldn't hack it. He was all for fiscal
conservatism, of course-- Bert was not a soft-headed man at any point. But
when he learned he was firing people and cutting programs just to maintain
this charade, he lost his strength of will. The faculty ruined his life
with their hatred, he had a nervous breakdown and we sacked him. Then the
MegaUnion began to organize a tuition strike, so the remaining old-guard
Trustees threw up their hands, caved in and installed Julian Didius as
President!" At the memory of this, several of the Trustees sighed or moaned
with contempt. "Well! After he had enjoyed those first three weeks of flying
in all his intelligentsia comrades for wine and cheese parties, we got him in
here and showed him the financial figures, which looked disastrous. Then he
met Pertinax after the electroshock, and realized what a bloody hell-hole he
was in. Three days later he went to the Dean's Office for a chat, and when
the Dean turned out to be addressing a conference in Hawaii, he blew his top
and hurled himself out the window, and then we brought in Septimius and he's
straightened things out wonderfully." There were admiring grins around the
table, though Krupp did not appear to be listening.
"Did Pertinax have master keys, then, or what? How did he keep from being
kicked out of the Plex?"
"We allowed the poor bastard to stay because we felt sorry for him," said
Krupp. "He wouldn't live anywhere else."
The angle of the knight's head dropped a little.
"So," said Heimlich briskly, "for some reason you knew our best-kept secrets.
We hope you will understand our actions now and not do anything rash. Do you
follow?"
"Yes," murmured the knight, "unfortunately."
"What is unfortunate about it?"
"The more thoughtful you people are, the worse you get. Why is that?"
"What do we do that is wrong, Casimir Radon?" said Krupp quietly.
The mask rose and gleamed at S. S. Krupp, and then its owner lifted off the
helmet to reveal his shaven head and permanently consternated face.
"Lie a hell of a lot. Fire people when you don't have to. Create-- create a
very complicated web of lies, to snare a simple, good ideal."
"I don't think it's a hell of a lot of fun," said Krupp, "and it hurts
sometimes, more than you can suppose. But great goals aren't attained with
ease or simplicity or pleasantry, or whatever you're looking for. If we gave
into the MegaUnion, we would tip our hand and cause ruination. As long as
we're putting on this little song-and-dance, we've got to make it a complete
song-and-dance, because if the orchestra's playing a march and the dancers are
waltzing, the audience riots. The theater burns."
"At least you could be more conciliatory."
"Conciliatory! Listen, son, when you've got snakes in the basement and the
water's rising, it's no time to conciliate. Someone's got to have some
principles in education, and it might as well be us. If this country's
educators hadn't had their heads in their asses for forty years, we wouldn't
have a faculty union, and more of our students might be sentient. I'll have
strap marks on my ass before I conciliate with those medicine men down there
on the picket lines."
"You're trying to fire everyone. That's a little extreme." "Not if we're to
be consistent," said Heimlich. "We can use the opportunity to rearrange our
financial platform, and hire new people. There are many talented academics
desperate for work these days, and the best faculty members here won't let
themselves be taken out en masse anyway."
"You're going to do it, aren't you!"
"It's evident that we have no choice."
"Don't you think-- " Casimir looked out at the clear blue sky.
"What?"
"That if the administration gets to be as powerful as you, you have killed the
university?"
"Look, son," said Ralph Priestly, rolling forward. "We never claimed this was
an ideal situation. We're just doing our best. We don't have much choice."
"We're rather busy, as you can imagine," said Heimlich finally. What do you
want? Something for the railgun?" He sat up abruptly. How is the railgun?"
"Safe."
Heimlich smiled for the first time in a week. "I'd like to know what a 'safe'
railgun is."
"Maybe you'll find out."
Everyone looked disturbed.
"We are prepared to remove the Terrorists from the waste disposal site," said
Casimir crisply, "as a public service. The estimated time will be one week.
Beforehand, we plan to evacuate the Plex. We require your cooperation in two
areas.
"First, we will need control of the Plex radio station. One of our group has
developed a scheme for evacuating the Plex which makes this necessary.
"The second requirement is for the consideration of you, Ralph Priestly. What
we want, Ralph, is for some person of yours to sit by the switch that controls
the Big Wheel sign. When we phone him and say, 'Fiat lux,' he is to turn it
on, and when we say, 'Fiat obscuritas,' off.
"That commando team you tried to send in through the sewers last night was
stopped by a RAT, or Rodent Assault Tactics team associated with us. Well be
releasing them soon, we can't do much more with first aid. The point is that
only we can get rid of the Terrorists. We just ask that you do not interfere."
Finished, Casimir sat back, hands clasped on breastplate, and stared calmly
at a skylight. The Board of Trustees moved down to the far end of the table.
After they had talked for a few minutes, S. S. Krupp walked over and shook
hands with Casimir.
"We're with you," Krupp said proudly. "Wish I knew what the hell you had in
mind. What's your timetable?"
"Don't know. You'll have plenty of warning."
"Can we supply men? Arms?" asked Heimlich.
"Nope. One gun is all we need." Casimir let go of Krupp's hand and walked
down the table, unclipping himself from the rope and throwing it out to
dangle there. A forest of pinstripes rushed up the other side, trying to
circumnavigate the table and shake Casimir's hand too. Casimir stopped by the
exit.
"I probably won't see you again. Bear in mind, after the university starts
running again, two things: we control the rats. And we control the Worm. You
no longer monopolize power in this institution."
The Trustees stopped dead at this breach of pleasantness and stared at
Casimir. Krupp looked on as though monitoring a field of battle from a high
tower. Casimir continued. "I just mention this because it makes a difference
in what is reasonable for you to do, and what is not. Good-bye." As he reached
for the doorknob, he found the door briskly opened by a guard; he nodded to
the man and strode out into an anteroom.
"Soldier," said Septimius Severus Krupp, "see that that man receives safe
passage back to his own sphere of influence."
Night fell, and Towers A, B, C, D, H and G began to flash on and off in
perfect unison. Every tower except for E and F-- homes of the Axis-- was
blinking in and out of existence every two seconds. As the Axis people saw it,
the entire Plex was disappearing into the night, then re-igniting, over and
over. It was much closer than the Big Wheel; it was far larger; it surrounded
them on three sides. The effect was stupefying.
Dex Fresser ran to his observation post. In the corridors of E13S, Terrorists
wandered like decapitated chickens. Some were hearing voices telling them to
look, some not to look, to run or stay, to panic or relax. The SUBbie who was
supposed to guard the lounge-headquarters had dropped his gun on the floor and
disappeared. Fresser burst into the lounge to consult with Big Wheel.
Big Wheel had gone dark.
He turned on the Little Wheel-- the Go Big Red Fan.
"Big Wheel must be mad at you or something. What the fuck did you do wrong?"
shouted the Fan, loud, omnipresent and angry. Dex Fresser shrank, got on his
knees and snuffled a little. Outside, a bewildered stereo-hearer was playing
with the knobs on his ghetto blaster, desperate for advice.
"The stereo! The stereo, dipshit, find that frequency! Find the frequency,"
said the Fan in the voice of Dex Fresser's old scoutmaster. Dex Fresser
tumbled over a chair in his haste to reach the stereo. The only light in the
room was cast by the glowing LEDs on his stereo that looked out like feral
eyes in the night. All systems were go for stereo energize. As Dex Fresser's
hands played over the controls, dozens of lights kicked in with important
systems data, and green digits glowed from the tuner to tell him his position
on the FM dial. Only dense static came from the speakers, meaningless to
anyone else; but he could hear Big Wheel guiding him in the voice of his
first-grade ballroom dance teacher.
"A little farther down, dear. Keep going right down the dial. You're certain
to get it eventually."
Dex Fresser punched buttons and a light came on, saying: "AUTO DOWNWARD
SCAN." He now heard many voices from the dark cones of the speakers: funky
jazz-playing fascists, "great huge savings now
Neil Young wailing into his
harmonica, a call-in guest suggesting that we load the Mexicans on giant space
barges and hurl them into the sun, a base hit by Chambliss, an ad for rat
poison, a teen, apoplectic about his acne... and then the voice he was looking
for.
"On. Off. On. Off. On. Off." It was a woman's voice, somehow familiar.
"It's Sarah, dumbshit," said the Go Big Red Fan. "She's on the campus
station."
Indeed. The other towers were going on and off just as Sarah told them to. He
knelt there for ten minutes, watching their reflection in the glassy surface
of the Big Wheel. On. Off. On. Off. "On," she said, and paused. "Most of you
did very well! But we've got some holdouts in E and F Towers. I'm sorry to
say that Big Wheel won't be showing up this evening. He will not be here to
give us his advice without cooperation from the E and F tower hearers. We'll
try later. I'll be back in an hour, at midnight, and by then I hope that
you SUBbies and Terrorists will have submitted to Big Wheel's will." Sarah
was replaced by Ephraim Klein, who started in with another solid hour of
pre-classical keyboard selections.
Dex Fresser was clutching his chest, which felt unbearably tight. "Oh, shit,"
he exclaimed, "it's us! We're keeping Big Wheel off! Everybody put your
stereos on ninety point three! Do as she says!" Down in Electrical Control,
deep in the Burrows, I and the other switch-throwers rested. The circuit
breakers that supply power to an entire tower are large items, not at all easy
to throw on and off every two seconds! By midnight we were rested up and ready
to go. Sarah resumed her broadcast.
"I sure hope we can get Big Wheel to come on. Let's hope E and F Towers
go along this time. Ready? Everyone standing by their light switch?
Okay
Off
On
Off
"
From his lounge-headquarters, Dex Fresser watched his towers flash raggedly
on and off. Some of the lights were not flashing; but within minutes the Wing
Commisars had swept through and shot out any strays, and Dex Fresser was
undescribably proud that his towers could flash like the others. Big Wheel
could not forsake them now.
"On!" cried Sarah, and stopped. Several lights went off again from habit, then
coyly flickered back on. There was an unbearable wait.
"I think we've done it," Sarah said. "Look at Big Wheel!" And the wheel of
fire cast its light over the Plex with all its former glory. Dex wept.
"Not bad for a fascist," observed Little Wheel.
The Big Wheel spun all night.
It was trickier to get the attention of the barbarians of the Base. Most
of them did not have bicameral minds and thus could not be made to hear
mysterious voices. We needed to impress them. Hence Sarah predicted that in
twenty-four hours a plague of rats would strike Journalism, unless all the
journalists cleared out of the Plex.
"Frank," said the reporter into the camera, "I'm here in the American
Megaversity mailroom, our operations center for the Plex war. It's been
quiet on all fronts tonight despite former Student President Sarah Jane
Johnson's prediction of a 'plague of rats.' Well, we've seen a few rats
here"-- his image is replaced by shot of small rat scurrying down empty
corridor, terrified by TV lights-- "but perhaps that's not unusual in these
very strange, very special circumstances. We toured the Plex today, looking
for plagues of rats, leaving no stone unturned to find the animals of which
Ms. Johnson spoke. We looked in garbage heaps"-- shot of journalist digging
in garbage with long stick; sees nothing, turns to camera, holds nose,
says "phew!"-- "but all we found were bugs. We toured the corridors"--
journalist alone in long empty corridor; camera swivels around to look in
other direction; nothing there either; back to journalist-- "but apparently
the rats were somewhere else. We checked the classrooms, but the only rats
there were on paper"-- journalist standing in stolen lab coat next to diagram
of rat's nervous system-- "Finally, though, we did manage to find one rat. In
a little-used lab, Frank, in a little cage, we found one very hungry white
rat"-- back to mailroom; journalist holds up wire cage containing furtive
white rat-- "but he's been well fed ever since, and we don't think he'll
attack."
"Sam, what do you think about Sarah Jane Johnson's pronouncement? Is it a
symbolic statement, or has she cracked?" "No one can be sure, Frank." Behind
journalist, door explodes open with a boom and a flash; strobe light is seen
beyond it. The journalist continues, trying to resist the temptation to turn
around and look; but the explosion has drowned out the audio part of the
camera. Dozens of giant rats storm the room
However, reliable sources have it
that
" His words are drowned out by mass machine-gun fire. In an unprecedented
breach of media etiquette, journalist turns around to look, and presently
disappears from view. Abruptly, the ceiling of the mailroom spins down to fill
the screen, and three great fuzzy out-of-focus rat snouts converge from the
edges of the screen, long teeth glistening in the TV lights; all goes dark.
We return to Network Control. Anchorman is in process of throwing his pen
at someone, but pauses to say, "Now, this," and is replaced by an animated
hemorrhoid.
All we wanted was to get everyone out of the Plex and end this thing. Once
rats roamed the Base and bats frolicked in the hallways, and smoke, flies
and filth were everywhere, those people were ready to go. The GASF would
leave whenever Virgil told them to. The administration would clear B and
C Towers as soon as we gave the word. The TUGgies claimed that they were
merely holding their three towers to fend off the Reds. Later, to no one's
surprise, we found that they had half-brainwashed the population of those
towers by the time Sarah kicked in with her pronouncements; and how could
oversweetened Kool-Aid, Manilow songs and lovebombing compete with her radical
power and grand demonstrations? After we shut off their electricity and water
for twelve hours, the TUG agreed to evacuate their towers at our command. The
SUB/Terrorist axis would do whatever they had to to keep the Big Wheel on.
As the days went by, Big Wheel grew more demanding. Everyone was to leave his
stereo tuned to 90.3 at all times. Everyone was to plan evacuation routes from
their towers and clear away any obstacles that might have been placed at the
exits. Dex Fresser's devotion to Sarah's words became complete, and after a
week we knew we could evacuate the Axis and everyone else whenever we were
ready.
In the meantime we were moving the railgun downstairs. To withstand the recoil
thrust, the machine's supports had to be bolted right into the concrete floor
of the sewer. We had to precision-fit a hundred and twenty bolts into the
concrete for the fifty-foot-long railgun, a dull and iffy task requiring great
precision. Once the holes were prepared, we began carrying the supports down.
It was a terrible, endless job. After a day of it, I decided I was going to
write a book-- that way, all of this drudgery was a fascinating contribution
to my artistic growth. Strength was not a requirement in the Grand Army of
Shekondar the Fearsome, so I had to torque all the bolts myself. During breaks
I would look down the tunnel at the wall of lights that guarded the Nuke
Dump's approach. What were the Crotobaltislavonians doing down there, and what
were they thinking?
Their plan-- the years of infiltration and the moments of violence-- had gone
perfectly. They had probably made their radioactive-waste bombs, only to find
that their only elevator shaft had been blocked by tons of concrete. They must
have thought they had lost, then; but the National Guard had not moved in and
the authorities had given in to all demands. Was this a trick?
They must have been unprepared for the resistance put up by the GASF and the
TUG. Still, their proxies had seized two towers and were holding their own.
That was fine, until they threw Marxism to the winds and began to worship a
giant neon sign. Dex Fresser must have worked closely with Magrov for years.
The cafeteria riot of April First had clearly been timed to coincide with the
seizure of the Nuke Dump, and the SUB had not bought their Kalashnikovs at the
7-11. Then-- a window fan! A fucking window fan! In a way, I sympathized with
the Crotobaltislavonians. Besides us, they were the only rational people here.
Like us, they must have wondered whether they had gone out of their minds. If
they had any dedication to their cause, though, they must have changed their
plans. They still had the waste, they were protected by the rats, they could
still wield plenty of clout. They could not see past the barrier of light,
where we were implanting the railgun.
During a breather upstairs I encountered Ephraim Klein, moving stiffly but on
his feet.
"Come here!" he yelled, grabbed my shirt, and began pulling me down a hallway.
I knew it must be something either very important or embarrassingly trivial.
"You won't believe this," he said, shuffling down the hail beside me. "We're
heading for Greathouse Chapel. We were there to broadcast some organ music--
guess what we found."
Ephraim had appointed himself Music Director for our radio station, and later
added Head Engineer and Producer. He knew that we could not spend twenty-four
hours a day on Big Wheel chatter, and that in the meantime he could damn
well play whatever he liked on what amounted to the world's largest stereo--
revenge at last. If Sarah had commanded all residents to play their radios
twenty-four hours a day, so much the better; they were going to hear music
that meant something. He was going to improve their minds, whether they
thanked him or not.
"Remember, listeners, a record is a little wheel. Any record at all is Big
Wheel's cousin. So whenever a record speaks, you had damn better listen."
Ephraim and I heard the music from hundreds of feet away. Someone was playing
the Greathouse Organ, and playing it well, though with a kind of inspired
abandon that led to occasional massive mistakes. Still, the great Bach fugue
lurched on with all parts intact, and no error caused the interweaving of
those voices to be confused.
"Your friend has a lot of stops pulled out today," I said. "That's not my
friend!" shouted Ephraim. "Well, he is now, but he's not that friend."
We reached the grand entrance and I looked far up the center aisle to the
console. A wide, darkly clad man sat there, blasting along happily toward
the climax. No music was on the console; the organist played from memory.
High up on the wall of the chapel, bright yellow light shone down from the
picture-windowed broadcast booth, where the organ's sound could be piped to
the radio station hundreds of meters away.
As we approached, I could see a ragged overcoat and the pink flashes of bare
feet on the pedals. The final chord was trumpeted, threatening to blow out the
rose window above, and the performer applauded himself. I climbed the dais and
gaped into the beaming face of Bert Nix.
His tongue was blooming from his mouth as usual; but when I arrived, he
retracted it and fixed a gaze at me that riveted me to the wall.
"Beware the Demon of the Wave," he said coldly. For a moment I was too scared
to breathe. Then the spell was broken as he removed a cup of beer from the
Ethereal keyboard and drained it. "I never was dead," he said defensively.
"You're actually Pertinax, aren't you?" I asked.
"I've always been more pertinent than you thought," he said and, giggling,
pounded out a few great chords that threatened to lift the top of my head off.
"Who was the dead man in your room?"
He rolled his eyes thoughtfully. "Bill Benson, born in nineteen-twenty. Joined
Navy in forty-two, five-inch gun loader in Pacific War, winning Bronze Star
and Purple Heart, discharged in forty-eight, hired by us as security guard.
That poor bastard had a stroke in the elevator, he was so worried about me!"
"How'd he get in that room?"
"I dragged him there! Otherwise, they don't close the lid of the little pine
box and your second cousins come in plastic clothes and put dead flowers on
you, a bad way to go!"
"I see. Uh, well, you're quite an organist."
"Yes. But a terrible administrator!" Pertinax now clapped his foot down on
the lowest pedal, sounding a rumble too low to hear. "But hark!" he screamed,
"there sounds an ominous undertone of warning!" He released the pedal and
looked around at Ephraim and me. "I shall now play the famous 'Toccata and
Fugue in D Minor.' This is clearly the work of a young and vigorous Bach,
almost ostentatious in his readiness to show virtuosity, reveling in the
instrument's ability to bounce mighty themes from the walls of the Kirche
but enough of this, my stops are selected." He looked suspiciously at the
ceiling. "This one brings out the bats. Prepare your tennis rackets therefore!
Ah. The nuptial song arose from all the thousand thousand spirits over the
joyful Earth & Sea, and ascended into the Heavens; for Elemental Gods there
thunderous Organs blew; creating delicious Viands. Demons of Waves their watry
Eccho's woke! Demons of Waves!" And throwing his head back, he hurled himself
into the Toccata. We stood mesmerized by his playing and his probing tongue,
until the fugue began; then we retreated to the broadcast booth.
"He's playing stop combinations I've never heard before," said Ephraim.
"Anyway, I'm broadcasting all this. He's great."
Down in the tunnels we always kept the radio on low, and so heard plenty of
Pertinax in the next few days.
Eventually we brought down the big power supplies from Heimlich Freedom
Industries, wrapped in plastic and packed with chemical dessicants to keep
them dry, surrounded with electric blankets to keep the electronics warm.
Casimir produced several microchips he had stolen from the supplies so that
Fred Fine could not use them, and plugged them into their proper spots. We
ran thousands of feet of heavy black power cables down into the tunnels to
power them. We tested each electromagnet; two were found wanting and had to
be sent back and remade. We energized the rail and slid the bucket up and
down it hundreds of times, using a small red laser to check for straightness,
laboriously adjusting for every defect. It took two days to carry down the
machine's parts, four days to adjust it and a day of testing before Casimir
was satisfied it would work on its first and only trial.
Virgil worked on the payload, a ten-kilogram high-explosive shell. He used
a computer program to design the shaped charge, an enormous program that
normally would have run for days, but now required only seconds. The weakened
Worm could only taunt him. AH, GOING TO BLOW SOMETHING UP? "I'm going to blow
you up."
THREATS OF PHYSICAL VIOLENCE ARE USELESS AGAINST THE WORM. This was its usual
response to what sounded like threats. YOU'RE VERY CLEVER, BUT I SHALL TRIUMPH
IN THE END.
"Wrong. I found where you are."
HUH? "I found the secret mini-disc drives that Paul Bennett hid above the
ceiling of his office. The drives where you've been hiding. It's all over
now."
I AM EVERYWHERE.
"You are most places, but not everywhere. I'm going to shut off your secret
disc drives as soon as I'm sure they aren't booby trapped."
I'M GOING TO BLOW YOU UP.
"I'm going to be careful."
THAT'S A LOT OF EXPLOSIVE FOR YOU TO FOOL AROUND WITH, LITTLE BOY.
"It'll do."
I WILL BLOCK YOUR CALCULATIONS.
"You're living in the past, Worm," typed Virgil, and executed his program. "I
have just executed my program. And next, I'm going to execute you."
THREATS OF PHYSICAL VIOLENCE ARE USELESS AGAINST THE WORM.
Lute turned the shell on a Science Shop lathe and packed the explosive with a
hydraulic press. Virgil carried it down an evacuated stairwell, placing each
foot very, very carefully.
Casimir put it on a clean table downstairs and weighed it; ten kilograms
precisely. He dusted it off with a lint-free rag and slid it into the bucket.
We checked the power sources, and they looked fine. Everyone was evacuated
except for me, Casimir and Fred Fine; Virgil led the remaining GASF forces
upstairs and commanded them to leave. It was 10:30 P.M.
We sat in the APPASMU for an hour and a half, until Sarah's program came on.
--May--
"Everyone look at Big Wheel!" she said. There was long silence and we sat
there on the APPASMU, protected by strobes, the rats chattering and grumbling
in the darkness around us, the HFI power sources looking oddly clean and shiny
as they flashed in and out of darkness in their own little strobe-pool.
"That's good," said Sarah. "As you can see, Big Wheel is shining tonight.
But he won't shine for long, because he is unhappy." Another wait. We knew
that, upstairs, Hyacinth had phoned the Big Wheel's controller and ordered him
to shut off the sign. "Big Wheel is not shining tonight," Sarah continued,
"because he wants you all out of the Plex. You are all to stop watching him
from a distance. The Big Wheel wants you to see him up close tonight. Everyone
get out of the building now and walk toward Big Wheel and stand under him.
Leave your radios on in case I have more instructions! You have an hour to
leave the Plex. When Big Wheel is happy, he will turn on again."
Organ music came on, obviously another live performance by a particularly
inspired Pertinax. We played cards atop the tank. "Should we evacuate too?"
asked Fred Fine. "Could Big Wheel be another face of Shekondar?"
"Sarah wants you here," said Casimir. This satisfied him. The music started
just after midnight and continued for three hours. Above, we supposed, the
evacuees were being loaded into ambulances or paddy-wagons, while Army fallout
emergency workers prepared the city for the worst. The Board of Trustees were
departing by helicopter from the top of C Tower, withdrawing to the HFI Tower
a mile away.
"This is really it," said Fred Fine, ready to black out. "This is the moment
of the heroes. The Apocalypse of Plexor. All will be unMixed in an instant."
"Yep," said Casimir, drawing another card. "I'll see that, and raise you four
chocolate chips."
The only problem so far was minor: the station's signal seemed to be dying
away. We had to keep turning up the volume to hear the music, and by 1:30 we
had it up all the way. Our batteries were fine, so we assumed it was a problem
at the station. As long as everyone else was turning up their volume too, it
should be fine.
Finally the organ music was phased out for a second and we heard Sarah. "Go
for it," she said, tense and breathless. "We're gone. See you outside." I
started sweating and trembling and had to get up and pace around to work off
energy, finally taking an emergency dump. We were in a sewer, who cared? We
gave Sarah, Hyacinth, Ephraim and Bert Nix half an hour to evacuate, but
the music kept on going. After twenty minutes, Ephraim's voice came in. "Go
ahead," he said, "we're staying."
So we went ahead. We had no choice.
The tunnel was four hundred feet long.
The first fifty feet were taken up by the railgun, set up on its supports
about five feet above the floor. There was a three-hundred-foot desert of
tinfoil shards, then the barrier of light, then, fifty feet beyond that, the
door to the Nuke Dump. We rolled the APPASMU to within twenty feet of the
light barrier and parked it against one of the tunnel sides. Through long
wires strung down the tunnel we controlled the firing of the railgun. When
we were ready, we entered the tank, shut off the strobe and turned on the
ultrasound. Within a minute we were surrounded by a thousand giant rats,
standing on one another's shoulders in their lust for that sweet tone, milling
about the APPASMU as though it were a dumpster.
Fred Fine and I aimed shotguns out the forward gun ports. Casimir hit the
button.
We could not see the shell as it shot past the vehicle. We heard the
explosion, though, and saw its flash. The rats milled back from the explosion.
Fred Fine and I opened fire and annihilated the light-wall in a few shots,
and with a chorus of joy the rat-army surged forward into its long-looked-at
Promised Land, followed by us. Our fear was that the shell would not suffice
to blow open the door, but even with our poor visibility we could see the
jagged circle of light and the boiling silhouette of the rat-stream pouring
through it. As we drew very near, some rats were blown back by machine-gun
fire, and a Crotobaltislavonian ducked through the hole and ran toward us in
his ghostly radiation suit, two rats hanging from his body.
Fred Fine opened the top hatch, whipped out his sword as he vaulted out and
leapt at him howling, "SHEKONDAR!" I grabbed at his legs on his way out but he
kicked free, jumped to the floor, smashed in a few rat skulls, and made toward
the Croto. I do not know whether he intended to save the man or kill him. A
rat tried to come in through the open hatch but I shoved it out, then stood up
through it with my shotgun. I damaged my hearing for life but did not change
the outcome. Once the rats started landing on my back and I could no longer
see Fred Fine, I could only give up. I sat down and closed the hatch, and we
waited for a while. But nothing happened; all we saw through our peepholes
were rats, and the clicking of our Geiger counter did not vary.
Casimir turned the APPASMU around, and we plowed through rats and followed
the tunnels until we joined up with the city sewer system. Pertinax continued
to play. From time to time he sang or shouted something, and the microphones
hanging back amid the pipes would dimly pick him up: "There is no City nor
Corn-field nor Orchard! all is Rock & Sand; There is no Sun nor Moon nor Star,
but rugged wintry rocks Justling together in the void suspended by inward
fires. Impatience now no longer can endure!"
We easily found the manhole we sought, because dim morning light was shining
down through it. The Guardsmen were waiting to haul us out, and emerging onto
the street, we saw civil authority around us again and, even better, our
friends. The Plex rose above us, about half a mile distant, beginning to glow
brownish-pink in the imminent dawn. All was quiet except for the distant hum
of the TUGgies, gathered just outside the police cordons and running their OM
generators full blast.
During our frantic reunion, two absurdly serious-looking men approached me
with complicated badges and questions. As they introduced themselves, we were
all startled by a hoarse blast of organ music that burst from all directions.
"Ephraim must have turned the broadcast volume way down, then back up again,"
said Casimir as soon as everyone in our area had turned down their radios.
Once the music was quiet enough to be recognized, I knew it as Ephraim's old
favorite, the "Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor"; and at the end of each
phrase, when the voice of the Greathouse Organ plunged back down home to that
old low C, it rumbled in concord with the OM generators across the street, and
the Plex itself seemed to vibrate as a single huge eight-tubed organ pipe.
And after all this, I was the only one to understand. "Get away!" I screamed,
tearing myself loose from an agent. "Get away!" I shouted, ripping a megaphone
from a policeman's hand, and "Get away!" I continued, stumbling to the roof of
a squad car and cranking up the volume.
"Get away!" all the other cops began to shout into their megaphones. "Get
away!" crackled from the PA systems of squad cars and helicopters. It was the
word of the hour, and mounted cops howled it at TUGgies and SUBbies and the
media, forcing them back with truncheons and horses. Someone flashed It to the
police teams who had entered the Plex, and they scrambled out and squealed
away in their cars. Perhaps it was shouted ten thousand times as the ring of
onlookers gradually expanded away from the Base.
The sound waxed. Ephraim kept turning it up and Bert Nix, building for the
climax, kept pulling out more stops. Casimir tried to phone Ephraim from a
booth, but he didn't answer. He probably couldn't even hear it ring.
He certainly heard nothing but organ as, at the end, he cranked the volume all
the way and Pertinax Rushforth pulled out all the stops.
The windows went first. They all burst from their frames at once. All 25,000
picture windows boomed out into trillions of safe little cubes in the red
dawn air. At first it seemed as though the Plex had suddenly grown fuzzy
and white, then as though a blizzard had enveloped the eight towers, and
finally as though It were rising up magnificently from a cloud of glinting
orange foam. As the cloud of glass dropped away from the towers with grand
deliberation, the millions of bats In the upper levels, driven crazy by the
terrible sound, imprisoned in a building with too few exits, stopped beating
their wings against the windows and exploded from the rooms in a black cloud
of unbelievable volume. The black cloud drifted forth and rose into the sky
and the white cloud sank into the depths, and Pertinax pushed the swell pedals
to the floor and coupled all the manuals to the pedalboard and pushed his bare
pink foot down on the first one, the low C, and held it down forever.
The building's steel frame was unaffected. The cinder-blocks laid within that
frame, though, stopped being walls and became a million individual blocks
of stone. Uncoupled, they began to dissolve away from the girders, and the
floors accordionned down with a boom and a concussion that obliterated the
sound of the organ. All the towers went together; and as those tons of debris
avalanched into the girders on which the towers rested, the steel finally
went too, and crumpled together and sagged and fell and snapped and tore with
painful slowness and explosive booms.
The hundred thousand people watching it plugged their ears, except for the
TUGgies, who watched serenely and shut off their OM generators. From the
enormous heap of rubble, broken water pipes shot fountains glistening white in
the rising sun. Crunches and aftershocks continued for days.
Not far away, Virgil Gabrielsen sat on a curbstone, his hair bright in the
sun, drinking water. Between his feet was a stack of mini-computer memory
discs in little black envelopes. The APPASMU is in the Smithsonian Institution
and may be visited 10:00 A.M.-- 5:30 P.M. seven days a week. And the Go Big
Red Fan was found unscathed, sitting miraculously upright on a crushed sofa on
a pile of junk, its painted blades rotating quietly and intermittently in the
fresh spring breeze.
The End
----- About the Author
NEAL STEPHENSON has no job and does not live anyplace in particular except in
summers, when he travels. This is his first published novel. In the past he
has worked as a library and hospital clerk, garbage-to-energy consultant,
vending-machine loader, physics research assistant, anti-perspirant test
subject, crystal grower, movie extra, tutor, funeral home driver, detasseler,
theatrical lighting technician, ditch digger, greeting-card salesman, fungus
farmer, paperboy, and Chinese restaurant food-chopper, which prepared him for
editing early drafts of _The Big U_.
----- Back Cover
One flew over the animal house...
If George Orwell had written a novel more like _Animal House_ (the movie)
than like _Animal Farm_ (the book), and if Orwell were a young American whose
early twenties were spent in the 1980s, and if Orwell counted among his
concerns the origins of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind,
Dungeons & Dragons, computer piracy, and heavy-metal rock versus Bach fugues,
the result would perhaps have been similar to _The Big U_.
Casimir Radon's introduction to American Megaversity is fraught with red
tape, Newspeak and enrollment procedures based on the catch-22 principle.
Having struggled long and hard to afford a college education, Casimir has come
up against the awful truth. What is he doing at the Big U? Meanwhile,
unhappy roommates John Wesley Fenrick and Ephraim Klein (Business and
Philosophy, respectively) wage sonic war with massive stereos; drug aficionado
Dex Fresser becomes the leader of a cult that worships a neon sign, a
dilapidated red fan, and other curious appliances; class president Sarah
Johnson locks horns with the Airheads and the Terrorists, her dorm's female
and male factions; Virgil Gabrielsen, resident genius, hunts down "the Worm,"
an insidious glitch in the all-important college computer system.
As the Apocalyptic plot thickens and boils, a small band of unlikely heroes
tries to foil the scheme of Crotobaltislavonian freedom-fighters who have
seized control of the radioactive waste dumped beneath the university, and to
survive a campus-wide live-ammo civil war, and to avoid the plague of bats and
mutant rats, and to get through the spring semester....
But of course the demographics made it clear that times would be very rough
in the years to come. We could not compete for students, and so we had to run
a very tight ship and seek innovative sources for our operating funds. We
could have entered many small ventures-- high technology spinoffs, you see--
but this would have been extraordinarily complex, highly controversial and
unpredictable, besides raising questions about the proper function of the
university.
"It was then that we hit upon the nuclear waste idea. Here is something that
is not dependent on the economy; we will always have these wastes to dispose
of. It's highly profitable, as there is a desperate demand for disposal
facilities. The wastes must be stored for millennia, which means that they
are money in the bank-- the government, whatever form it takes, must continue
to pay us until their danger has died away. And by its very nature it must be
done secretly, so no controversy is generated, no discord disrupts the normal
functions of the academy-- there need be no relationship between the financial
foundation and the intellectual activities of the university. It's perfect."
"See, this city is on a real stable salt-dome area," added a heavy man in
an enormous grey suit, "and now that there's no more crude down there, it's
suitable for this kind of storage." "You," said the knight, pointing his sword
at the man who had just spoken, "must be in the oil business. Are you Ralph
Priestly?" "Ha! Well, yeah, that's me," said Ralph Priestly, unnerved. "We
have to talk later."
"How did you know about our disposal site?" asked Heimlich. "That doesn't
matter. What matters now is: how did the government of Crotobaltislavonia
find out about it?" "Oh," said Heimlich, shocked. "You know about that also."
"Yep."
After a pause, S. S. Krupp continued. "Now, don't go tell your honchos that we
did this out of greed. America had to start doing something with this waste--
that's a fact. You know what a fact is? That's something that has nothing
to do with politics. The site is as safe as could be. See, some things just
can't be handed over to political organizations, because they're so damned
unstable. But great universities can last for thousands of years. Hell, look
at the changes of government the University of Paris has survived in the
last century alone! This facility had to be built and it had to be done by a
university. The big steady cash flow makes us more stable, and that makes us
better qualified to be running the damn thing in the first place. Symbiosis,
son."
"Wait. If you're making so much money off of this, why are you so financially
tight-assed?"
"That's a very good question," said Heimlich. "As I said, it's imperative
that this facility remain secret. If we allowed the cash flow to show up on
our ledgers, this would be impossible. We've had to construct a scheme for
processing or laundering, as it were, our profits through various donors and
benefactors. In order to allay suspicion, we keep these 'donations' as small
as we can while meeting the university's basic needs."
"What about the excess money?"
"What's done with that depends on how long the site remains secret. Therefore
we hold the surplus in escrow and invest it in the name of American
Megaversity, so that in the meantime it is productively used."
"Invest it where? Don't tell me. Heimlich Freedom Industries. the Big Wheel
Petroleum Corporation
"
"Well," said Ralph Priestly, cutting the tip off a cigar. "Big Wheel's a hell
of an investment. I run a tight ship." "We don't deny that the investments
are in our best interests," said a very old Trustee with a kindly face. "But
there's nothing wrong with that, as long as we do not waste or steal the
money. Every investment we make in some way furthers the nation's economic
growth."
"But you're no different from the Crotobaltislavonians, in principle. You're
using your control over the wastes to blackmail whatever government comes
along."
"That's an excellent observation," said Krupp. "But the fact is, if you'll
just think about it, that as long as the waste exists, someone's going to
control them, and whoever does can blackmail whatever government there is, and
as long as someone's going to have that influence, it might as well be good
people like us."
The knight drummed his fingers on the table, and the Trustees peered at his
inscrutable silver mask. "I see from the obituaries that Bert Nix and Pertinax
Rushforth were one and the same. What happened to him?"
Heimlich continued. "Pertinax couldn't hack it. He was all for fiscal
conservatism, of course-- Bert was not a soft-headed man at any point. But
when he learned he was firing people and cutting programs just to maintain
this charade, he lost his strength of will. The faculty ruined his life
with their hatred, he had a nervous breakdown and we sacked him. Then the
MegaUnion began to organize a tuition strike, so the remaining old-guard
Trustees threw up their hands, caved in and installed Julian Didius as
President!" At the memory of this, several of the Trustees sighed or moaned
with contempt. "Well! After he had enjoyed those first three weeks of flying
in all his intelligentsia comrades for wine and cheese parties, we got him in
here and showed him the financial figures, which looked disastrous. Then he
met Pertinax after the electroshock, and realized what a bloody hell-hole he
was in. Three days later he went to the Dean's Office for a chat, and when
the Dean turned out to be addressing a conference in Hawaii, he blew his top
and hurled himself out the window, and then we brought in Septimius and he's
straightened things out wonderfully." There were admiring grins around the
table, though Krupp did not appear to be listening.
"Did Pertinax have master keys, then, or what? How did he keep from being
kicked out of the Plex?"
"We allowed the poor bastard to stay because we felt sorry for him," said
Krupp. "He wouldn't live anywhere else."
The angle of the knight's head dropped a little.
"So," said Heimlich briskly, "for some reason you knew our best-kept secrets.
We hope you will understand our actions now and not do anything rash. Do you
follow?"
"Yes," murmured the knight, "unfortunately."
"What is unfortunate about it?"
"The more thoughtful you people are, the worse you get. Why is that?"
"What do we do that is wrong, Casimir Radon?" said Krupp quietly.
The mask rose and gleamed at S. S. Krupp, and then its owner lifted off the
helmet to reveal his shaven head and permanently consternated face.
"Lie a hell of a lot. Fire people when you don't have to. Create-- create a
very complicated web of lies, to snare a simple, good ideal."
"I don't think it's a hell of a lot of fun," said Krupp, "and it hurts
sometimes, more than you can suppose. But great goals aren't attained with
ease or simplicity or pleasantry, or whatever you're looking for. If we gave
into the MegaUnion, we would tip our hand and cause ruination. As long as
we're putting on this little song-and-dance, we've got to make it a complete
song-and-dance, because if the orchestra's playing a march and the dancers are
waltzing, the audience riots. The theater burns."
"At least you could be more conciliatory."
"Conciliatory! Listen, son, when you've got snakes in the basement and the
water's rising, it's no time to conciliate. Someone's got to have some
principles in education, and it might as well be us. If this country's
educators hadn't had their heads in their asses for forty years, we wouldn't
have a faculty union, and more of our students might be sentient. I'll have
strap marks on my ass before I conciliate with those medicine men down there
on the picket lines."
"You're trying to fire everyone. That's a little extreme." "Not if we're to
be consistent," said Heimlich. "We can use the opportunity to rearrange our
financial platform, and hire new people. There are many talented academics
desperate for work these days, and the best faculty members here won't let
themselves be taken out en masse anyway."
"You're going to do it, aren't you!"
"It's evident that we have no choice."
"Don't you think-- " Casimir looked out at the clear blue sky.
"What?"
"That if the administration gets to be as powerful as you, you have killed the
university?"
"Look, son," said Ralph Priestly, rolling forward. "We never claimed this was
an ideal situation. We're just doing our best. We don't have much choice."
"We're rather busy, as you can imagine," said Heimlich finally. What do you
want? Something for the railgun?" He sat up abruptly. How is the railgun?"
"Safe."
Heimlich smiled for the first time in a week. "I'd like to know what a 'safe'
railgun is."
"Maybe you'll find out."
Everyone looked disturbed.
"We are prepared to remove the Terrorists from the waste disposal site," said
Casimir crisply, "as a public service. The estimated time will be one week.
Beforehand, we plan to evacuate the Plex. We require your cooperation in two
areas.
"First, we will need control of the Plex radio station. One of our group has
developed a scheme for evacuating the Plex which makes this necessary.
"The second requirement is for the consideration of you, Ralph Priestly. What
we want, Ralph, is for some person of yours to sit by the switch that controls
the Big Wheel sign. When we phone him and say, 'Fiat lux,' he is to turn it
on, and when we say, 'Fiat obscuritas,' off.
"That commando team you tried to send in through the sewers last night was
stopped by a RAT, or Rodent Assault Tactics team associated with us. Well be
releasing them soon, we can't do much more with first aid. The point is that
only we can get rid of the Terrorists. We just ask that you do not interfere."
Finished, Casimir sat back, hands clasped on breastplate, and stared calmly
at a skylight. The Board of Trustees moved down to the far end of the table.
After they had talked for a few minutes, S. S. Krupp walked over and shook
hands with Casimir.
"We're with you," Krupp said proudly. "Wish I knew what the hell you had in
mind. What's your timetable?"
"Don't know. You'll have plenty of warning."
"Can we supply men? Arms?" asked Heimlich.
"Nope. One gun is all we need." Casimir let go of Krupp's hand and walked
down the table, unclipping himself from the rope and throwing it out to
dangle there. A forest of pinstripes rushed up the other side, trying to
circumnavigate the table and shake Casimir's hand too. Casimir stopped by the
exit.
"I probably won't see you again. Bear in mind, after the university starts
running again, two things: we control the rats. And we control the Worm. You
no longer monopolize power in this institution."
The Trustees stopped dead at this breach of pleasantness and stared at
Casimir. Krupp looked on as though monitoring a field of battle from a high
tower. Casimir continued. "I just mention this because it makes a difference
in what is reasonable for you to do, and what is not. Good-bye." As he reached
for the doorknob, he found the door briskly opened by a guard; he nodded to
the man and strode out into an anteroom.
"Soldier," said Septimius Severus Krupp, "see that that man receives safe
passage back to his own sphere of influence."
Night fell, and Towers A, B, C, D, H and G began to flash on and off in
perfect unison. Every tower except for E and F-- homes of the Axis-- was
blinking in and out of existence every two seconds. As the Axis people saw it,
the entire Plex was disappearing into the night, then re-igniting, over and
over. It was much closer than the Big Wheel; it was far larger; it surrounded
them on three sides. The effect was stupefying.
Dex Fresser ran to his observation post. In the corridors of E13S, Terrorists
wandered like decapitated chickens. Some were hearing voices telling them to
look, some not to look, to run or stay, to panic or relax. The SUBbie who was
supposed to guard the lounge-headquarters had dropped his gun on the floor and
disappeared. Fresser burst into the lounge to consult with Big Wheel.
Big Wheel had gone dark.
He turned on the Little Wheel-- the Go Big Red Fan.
"Big Wheel must be mad at you or something. What the fuck did you do wrong?"
shouted the Fan, loud, omnipresent and angry. Dex Fresser shrank, got on his
knees and snuffled a little. Outside, a bewildered stereo-hearer was playing
with the knobs on his ghetto blaster, desperate for advice.
"The stereo! The stereo, dipshit, find that frequency! Find the frequency,"
said the Fan in the voice of Dex Fresser's old scoutmaster. Dex Fresser
tumbled over a chair in his haste to reach the stereo. The only light in the
room was cast by the glowing LEDs on his stereo that looked out like feral
eyes in the night. All systems were go for stereo energize. As Dex Fresser's
hands played over the controls, dozens of lights kicked in with important
systems data, and green digits glowed from the tuner to tell him his position
on the FM dial. Only dense static came from the speakers, meaningless to
anyone else; but he could hear Big Wheel guiding him in the voice of his
first-grade ballroom dance teacher.
"A little farther down, dear. Keep going right down the dial. You're certain
to get it eventually."
Dex Fresser punched buttons and a light came on, saying: "AUTO DOWNWARD
SCAN." He now heard many voices from the dark cones of the speakers: funky
jazz-playing fascists, "great huge savings now
Neil Young wailing into his
harmonica, a call-in guest suggesting that we load the Mexicans on giant space
barges and hurl them into the sun, a base hit by Chambliss, an ad for rat
poison, a teen, apoplectic about his acne... and then the voice he was looking
for.
"On. Off. On. Off. On. Off." It was a woman's voice, somehow familiar.
"It's Sarah, dumbshit," said the Go Big Red Fan. "She's on the campus
station."
Indeed. The other towers were going on and off just as Sarah told them to. He
knelt there for ten minutes, watching their reflection in the glassy surface
of the Big Wheel. On. Off. On. Off. "On," she said, and paused. "Most of you
did very well! But we've got some holdouts in E and F Towers. I'm sorry to
say that Big Wheel won't be showing up this evening. He will not be here to
give us his advice without cooperation from the E and F tower hearers. We'll
try later. I'll be back in an hour, at midnight, and by then I hope that
you SUBbies and Terrorists will have submitted to Big Wheel's will." Sarah
was replaced by Ephraim Klein, who started in with another solid hour of
pre-classical keyboard selections.
Dex Fresser was clutching his chest, which felt unbearably tight. "Oh, shit,"
he exclaimed, "it's us! We're keeping Big Wheel off! Everybody put your
stereos on ninety point three! Do as she says!" Down in Electrical Control,
deep in the Burrows, I and the other switch-throwers rested. The circuit
breakers that supply power to an entire tower are large items, not at all easy
to throw on and off every two seconds! By midnight we were rested up and ready
to go. Sarah resumed her broadcast.
"I sure hope we can get Big Wheel to come on. Let's hope E and F Towers
go along this time. Ready? Everyone standing by their light switch?
Okay
Off
On
Off
"
From his lounge-headquarters, Dex Fresser watched his towers flash raggedly
on and off. Some of the lights were not flashing; but within minutes the Wing
Commisars had swept through and shot out any strays, and Dex Fresser was
undescribably proud that his towers could flash like the others. Big Wheel
could not forsake them now.
"On!" cried Sarah, and stopped. Several lights went off again from habit, then
coyly flickered back on. There was an unbearable wait.
"I think we've done it," Sarah said. "Look at Big Wheel!" And the wheel of
fire cast its light over the Plex with all its former glory. Dex wept.
"Not bad for a fascist," observed Little Wheel.
The Big Wheel spun all night.
It was trickier to get the attention of the barbarians of the Base. Most
of them did not have bicameral minds and thus could not be made to hear
mysterious voices. We needed to impress them. Hence Sarah predicted that in
twenty-four hours a plague of rats would strike Journalism, unless all the
journalists cleared out of the Plex.
"Frank," said the reporter into the camera, "I'm here in the American
Megaversity mailroom, our operations center for the Plex war. It's been
quiet on all fronts tonight despite former Student President Sarah Jane
Johnson's prediction of a 'plague of rats.' Well, we've seen a few rats
here"-- his image is replaced by shot of small rat scurrying down empty
corridor, terrified by TV lights-- "but perhaps that's not unusual in these
very strange, very special circumstances. We toured the Plex today, looking
for plagues of rats, leaving no stone unturned to find the animals of which
Ms. Johnson spoke. We looked in garbage heaps"-- shot of journalist digging
in garbage with long stick; sees nothing, turns to camera, holds nose,
says "phew!"-- "but all we found were bugs. We toured the corridors"--
journalist alone in long empty corridor; camera swivels around to look in
other direction; nothing there either; back to journalist-- "but apparently
the rats were somewhere else. We checked the classrooms, but the only rats
there were on paper"-- journalist standing in stolen lab coat next to diagram
of rat's nervous system-- "Finally, though, we did manage to find one rat. In
a little-used lab, Frank, in a little cage, we found one very hungry white
rat"-- back to mailroom; journalist holds up wire cage containing furtive
white rat-- "but he's been well fed ever since, and we don't think he'll
attack."
"Sam, what do you think about Sarah Jane Johnson's pronouncement? Is it a
symbolic statement, or has she cracked?" "No one can be sure, Frank." Behind
journalist, door explodes open with a boom and a flash; strobe light is seen
beyond it. The journalist continues, trying to resist the temptation to turn
around and look; but the explosion has drowned out the audio part of the
camera. Dozens of giant rats storm the room
However, reliable sources have it
that
" His words are drowned out by mass machine-gun fire. In an unprecedented
breach of media etiquette, journalist turns around to look, and presently
disappears from view. Abruptly, the ceiling of the mailroom spins down to fill
the screen, and three great fuzzy out-of-focus rat snouts converge from the
edges of the screen, long teeth glistening in the TV lights; all goes dark.
We return to Network Control. Anchorman is in process of throwing his pen
at someone, but pauses to say, "Now, this," and is replaced by an animated
hemorrhoid.
All we wanted was to get everyone out of the Plex and end this thing. Once
rats roamed the Base and bats frolicked in the hallways, and smoke, flies
and filth were everywhere, those people were ready to go. The GASF would
leave whenever Virgil told them to. The administration would clear B and
C Towers as soon as we gave the word. The TUGgies claimed that they were
merely holding their three towers to fend off the Reds. Later, to no one's
surprise, we found that they had half-brainwashed the population of those
towers by the time Sarah kicked in with her pronouncements; and how could
oversweetened Kool-Aid, Manilow songs and lovebombing compete with her radical
power and grand demonstrations? After we shut off their electricity and water
for twelve hours, the TUG agreed to evacuate their towers at our command. The
SUB/Terrorist axis would do whatever they had to to keep the Big Wheel on.
As the days went by, Big Wheel grew more demanding. Everyone was to leave his
stereo tuned to 90.3 at all times. Everyone was to plan evacuation routes from
their towers and clear away any obstacles that might have been placed at the
exits. Dex Fresser's devotion to Sarah's words became complete, and after a
week we knew we could evacuate the Axis and everyone else whenever we were
ready.
In the meantime we were moving the railgun downstairs. To withstand the recoil
thrust, the machine's supports had to be bolted right into the concrete floor
of the sewer. We had to precision-fit a hundred and twenty bolts into the
concrete for the fifty-foot-long railgun, a dull and iffy task requiring great
precision. Once the holes were prepared, we began carrying the supports down.
It was a terrible, endless job. After a day of it, I decided I was going to
write a book-- that way, all of this drudgery was a fascinating contribution
to my artistic growth. Strength was not a requirement in the Grand Army of
Shekondar the Fearsome, so I had to torque all the bolts myself. During breaks
I would look down the tunnel at the wall of lights that guarded the Nuke
Dump's approach. What were the Crotobaltislavonians doing down there, and what
were they thinking?
Their plan-- the years of infiltration and the moments of violence-- had gone
perfectly. They had probably made their radioactive-waste bombs, only to find
that their only elevator shaft had been blocked by tons of concrete. They must
have thought they had lost, then; but the National Guard had not moved in and
the authorities had given in to all demands. Was this a trick?
They must have been unprepared for the resistance put up by the GASF and the
TUG. Still, their proxies had seized two towers and were holding their own.
That was fine, until they threw Marxism to the winds and began to worship a
giant neon sign. Dex Fresser must have worked closely with Magrov for years.
The cafeteria riot of April First had clearly been timed to coincide with the
seizure of the Nuke Dump, and the SUB had not bought their Kalashnikovs at the
7-11. Then-- a window fan! A fucking window fan! In a way, I sympathized with
the Crotobaltislavonians. Besides us, they were the only rational people here.
Like us, they must have wondered whether they had gone out of their minds. If
they had any dedication to their cause, though, they must have changed their
plans. They still had the waste, they were protected by the rats, they could
still wield plenty of clout. They could not see past the barrier of light,
where we were implanting the railgun.
During a breather upstairs I encountered Ephraim Klein, moving stiffly but on
his feet.
"Come here!" he yelled, grabbed my shirt, and began pulling me down a hallway.
I knew it must be something either very important or embarrassingly trivial.
"You won't believe this," he said, shuffling down the hail beside me. "We're
heading for Greathouse Chapel. We were there to broadcast some organ music--
guess what we found."
Ephraim had appointed himself Music Director for our radio station, and later
added Head Engineer and Producer. He knew that we could not spend twenty-four
hours a day on Big Wheel chatter, and that in the meantime he could damn
well play whatever he liked on what amounted to the world's largest stereo--
revenge at last. If Sarah had commanded all residents to play their radios
twenty-four hours a day, so much the better; they were going to hear music
that meant something. He was going to improve their minds, whether they
thanked him or not.
"Remember, listeners, a record is a little wheel. Any record at all is Big
Wheel's cousin. So whenever a record speaks, you had damn better listen."
Ephraim and I heard the music from hundreds of feet away. Someone was playing
the Greathouse Organ, and playing it well, though with a kind of inspired
abandon that led to occasional massive mistakes. Still, the great Bach fugue
lurched on with all parts intact, and no error caused the interweaving of
those voices to be confused.
"Your friend has a lot of stops pulled out today," I said. "That's not my
friend!" shouted Ephraim. "Well, he is now, but he's not that friend."
We reached the grand entrance and I looked far up the center aisle to the
console. A wide, darkly clad man sat there, blasting along happily toward
the climax. No music was on the console; the organist played from memory.
High up on the wall of the chapel, bright yellow light shone down from the
picture-windowed broadcast booth, where the organ's sound could be piped to
the radio station hundreds of meters away.
As we approached, I could see a ragged overcoat and the pink flashes of bare
feet on the pedals. The final chord was trumpeted, threatening to blow out the
rose window above, and the performer applauded himself. I climbed the dais and
gaped into the beaming face of Bert Nix.
His tongue was blooming from his mouth as usual; but when I arrived, he
retracted it and fixed a gaze at me that riveted me to the wall.
"Beware the Demon of the Wave," he said coldly. For a moment I was too scared
to breathe. Then the spell was broken as he removed a cup of beer from the
Ethereal keyboard and drained it. "I never was dead," he said defensively.
"You're actually Pertinax, aren't you?" I asked.
"I've always been more pertinent than you thought," he said and, giggling,
pounded out a few great chords that threatened to lift the top of my head off.
"Who was the dead man in your room?"
He rolled his eyes thoughtfully. "Bill Benson, born in nineteen-twenty. Joined
Navy in forty-two, five-inch gun loader in Pacific War, winning Bronze Star
and Purple Heart, discharged in forty-eight, hired by us as security guard.
That poor bastard had a stroke in the elevator, he was so worried about me!"
"How'd he get in that room?"
"I dragged him there! Otherwise, they don't close the lid of the little pine
box and your second cousins come in plastic clothes and put dead flowers on
you, a bad way to go!"
"I see. Uh, well, you're quite an organist."
"Yes. But a terrible administrator!" Pertinax now clapped his foot down on
the lowest pedal, sounding a rumble too low to hear. "But hark!" he screamed,
"there sounds an ominous undertone of warning!" He released the pedal and
looked around at Ephraim and me. "I shall now play the famous 'Toccata and
Fugue in D Minor.' This is clearly the work of a young and vigorous Bach,
almost ostentatious in his readiness to show virtuosity, reveling in the
instrument's ability to bounce mighty themes from the walls of the Kirche
but enough of this, my stops are selected." He looked suspiciously at the
ceiling. "This one brings out the bats. Prepare your tennis rackets therefore!
Ah. The nuptial song arose from all the thousand thousand spirits over the
joyful Earth & Sea, and ascended into the Heavens; for Elemental Gods there
thunderous Organs blew; creating delicious Viands. Demons of Waves their watry
Eccho's woke! Demons of Waves!" And throwing his head back, he hurled himself
into the Toccata. We stood mesmerized by his playing and his probing tongue,
until the fugue began; then we retreated to the broadcast booth.
"He's playing stop combinations I've never heard before," said Ephraim.
"Anyway, I'm broadcasting all this. He's great."
Down in the tunnels we always kept the radio on low, and so heard plenty of
Pertinax in the next few days.
Eventually we brought down the big power supplies from Heimlich Freedom
Industries, wrapped in plastic and packed with chemical dessicants to keep
them dry, surrounded with electric blankets to keep the electronics warm.
Casimir produced several microchips he had stolen from the supplies so that
Fred Fine could not use them, and plugged them into their proper spots. We
ran thousands of feet of heavy black power cables down into the tunnels to
power them. We tested each electromagnet; two were found wanting and had to
be sent back and remade. We energized the rail and slid the bucket up and
down it hundreds of times, using a small red laser to check for straightness,
laboriously adjusting for every defect. It took two days to carry down the
machine's parts, four days to adjust it and a day of testing before Casimir
was satisfied it would work on its first and only trial.
Virgil worked on the payload, a ten-kilogram high-explosive shell. He used
a computer program to design the shaped charge, an enormous program that
normally would have run for days, but now required only seconds. The weakened
Worm could only taunt him. AH, GOING TO BLOW SOMETHING UP? "I'm going to blow
you up."
THREATS OF PHYSICAL VIOLENCE ARE USELESS AGAINST THE WORM. This was its usual
response to what sounded like threats. YOU'RE VERY CLEVER, BUT I SHALL TRIUMPH
IN THE END.
"Wrong. I found where you are."
HUH? "I found the secret mini-disc drives that Paul Bennett hid above the
ceiling of his office. The drives where you've been hiding. It's all over
now."
I AM EVERYWHERE.
"You are most places, but not everywhere. I'm going to shut off your secret
disc drives as soon as I'm sure they aren't booby trapped."
I'M GOING TO BLOW YOU UP.
"I'm going to be careful."
THAT'S A LOT OF EXPLOSIVE FOR YOU TO FOOL AROUND WITH, LITTLE BOY.
"It'll do."
I WILL BLOCK YOUR CALCULATIONS.
"You're living in the past, Worm," typed Virgil, and executed his program. "I
have just executed my program. And next, I'm going to execute you."
THREATS OF PHYSICAL VIOLENCE ARE USELESS AGAINST THE WORM.
Lute turned the shell on a Science Shop lathe and packed the explosive with a
hydraulic press. Virgil carried it down an evacuated stairwell, placing each
foot very, very carefully.
Casimir put it on a clean table downstairs and weighed it; ten kilograms
precisely. He dusted it off with a lint-free rag and slid it into the bucket.
We checked the power sources, and they looked fine. Everyone was evacuated
except for me, Casimir and Fred Fine; Virgil led the remaining GASF forces
upstairs and commanded them to leave. It was 10:30 P.M.
We sat in the APPASMU for an hour and a half, until Sarah's program came on.
--May--
"Everyone look at Big Wheel!" she said. There was long silence and we sat
there on the APPASMU, protected by strobes, the rats chattering and grumbling
in the darkness around us, the HFI power sources looking oddly clean and shiny
as they flashed in and out of darkness in their own little strobe-pool.
"That's good," said Sarah. "As you can see, Big Wheel is shining tonight.
But he won't shine for long, because he is unhappy." Another wait. We knew
that, upstairs, Hyacinth had phoned the Big Wheel's controller and ordered him
to shut off the sign. "Big Wheel is not shining tonight," Sarah continued,
"because he wants you all out of the Plex. You are all to stop watching him
from a distance. The Big Wheel wants you to see him up close tonight. Everyone
get out of the building now and walk toward Big Wheel and stand under him.
Leave your radios on in case I have more instructions! You have an hour to
leave the Plex. When Big Wheel is happy, he will turn on again."
Organ music came on, obviously another live performance by a particularly
inspired Pertinax. We played cards atop the tank. "Should we evacuate too?"
asked Fred Fine. "Could Big Wheel be another face of Shekondar?"
"Sarah wants you here," said Casimir. This satisfied him. The music started
just after midnight and continued for three hours. Above, we supposed, the
evacuees were being loaded into ambulances or paddy-wagons, while Army fallout
emergency workers prepared the city for the worst. The Board of Trustees were
departing by helicopter from the top of C Tower, withdrawing to the HFI Tower
a mile away.
"This is really it," said Fred Fine, ready to black out. "This is the moment
of the heroes. The Apocalypse of Plexor. All will be unMixed in an instant."
"Yep," said Casimir, drawing another card. "I'll see that, and raise you four
chocolate chips."
The only problem so far was minor: the station's signal seemed to be dying
away. We had to keep turning up the volume to hear the music, and by 1:30 we
had it up all the way. Our batteries were fine, so we assumed it was a problem
at the station. As long as everyone else was turning up their volume too, it
should be fine.
Finally the organ music was phased out for a second and we heard Sarah. "Go
for it," she said, tense and breathless. "We're gone. See you outside." I
started sweating and trembling and had to get up and pace around to work off
energy, finally taking an emergency dump. We were in a sewer, who cared? We
gave Sarah, Hyacinth, Ephraim and Bert Nix half an hour to evacuate, but
the music kept on going. After twenty minutes, Ephraim's voice came in. "Go
ahead," he said, "we're staying."
So we went ahead. We had no choice.
The tunnel was four hundred feet long.
The first fifty feet were taken up by the railgun, set up on its supports
about five feet above the floor. There was a three-hundred-foot desert of
tinfoil shards, then the barrier of light, then, fifty feet beyond that, the
door to the Nuke Dump. We rolled the APPASMU to within twenty feet of the
light barrier and parked it against one of the tunnel sides. Through long
wires strung down the tunnel we controlled the firing of the railgun. When
we were ready, we entered the tank, shut off the strobe and turned on the
ultrasound. Within a minute we were surrounded by a thousand giant rats,
standing on one another's shoulders in their lust for that sweet tone, milling
about the APPASMU as though it were a dumpster.
Fred Fine and I aimed shotguns out the forward gun ports. Casimir hit the
button.
We could not see the shell as it shot past the vehicle. We heard the
explosion, though, and saw its flash. The rats milled back from the explosion.
Fred Fine and I opened fire and annihilated the light-wall in a few shots,
and with a chorus of joy the rat-army surged forward into its long-looked-at
Promised Land, followed by us. Our fear was that the shell would not suffice
to blow open the door, but even with our poor visibility we could see the
jagged circle of light and the boiling silhouette of the rat-stream pouring
through it. As we drew very near, some rats were blown back by machine-gun
fire, and a Crotobaltislavonian ducked through the hole and ran toward us in
his ghostly radiation suit, two rats hanging from his body.
Fred Fine opened the top hatch, whipped out his sword as he vaulted out and
leapt at him howling, "SHEKONDAR!" I grabbed at his legs on his way out but he
kicked free, jumped to the floor, smashed in a few rat skulls, and made toward
the Croto. I do not know whether he intended to save the man or kill him. A
rat tried to come in through the open hatch but I shoved it out, then stood up
through it with my shotgun. I damaged my hearing for life but did not change
the outcome. Once the rats started landing on my back and I could no longer
see Fred Fine, I could only give up. I sat down and closed the hatch, and we
waited for a while. But nothing happened; all we saw through our peepholes
were rats, and the clicking of our Geiger counter did not vary.
Casimir turned the APPASMU around, and we plowed through rats and followed
the tunnels until we joined up with the city sewer system. Pertinax continued
to play. From time to time he sang or shouted something, and the microphones
hanging back amid the pipes would dimly pick him up: "There is no City nor
Corn-field nor Orchard! all is Rock & Sand; There is no Sun nor Moon nor Star,
but rugged wintry rocks Justling together in the void suspended by inward
fires. Impatience now no longer can endure!"
We easily found the manhole we sought, because dim morning light was shining
down through it. The Guardsmen were waiting to haul us out, and emerging onto
the street, we saw civil authority around us again and, even better, our
friends. The Plex rose above us, about half a mile distant, beginning to glow
brownish-pink in the imminent dawn. All was quiet except for the distant hum
of the TUGgies, gathered just outside the police cordons and running their OM
generators full blast.
During our frantic reunion, two absurdly serious-looking men approached me
with complicated badges and questions. As they introduced themselves, we were
all startled by a hoarse blast of organ music that burst from all directions.
"Ephraim must have turned the broadcast volume way down, then back up again,"
said Casimir as soon as everyone in our area had turned down their radios.
Once the music was quiet enough to be recognized, I knew it as Ephraim's old
favorite, the "Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor"; and at the end of each
phrase, when the voice of the Greathouse Organ plunged back down home to that
old low C, it rumbled in concord with the OM generators across the street, and
the Plex itself seemed to vibrate as a single huge eight-tubed organ pipe.
And after all this, I was the only one to understand. "Get away!" I screamed,
tearing myself loose from an agent. "Get away!" I shouted, ripping a megaphone
from a policeman's hand, and "Get away!" I continued, stumbling to the roof of
a squad car and cranking up the volume.
"Get away!" all the other cops began to shout into their megaphones. "Get
away!" crackled from the PA systems of squad cars and helicopters. It was the
word of the hour, and mounted cops howled it at TUGgies and SUBbies and the
media, forcing them back with truncheons and horses. Someone flashed It to the
police teams who had entered the Plex, and they scrambled out and squealed
away in their cars. Perhaps it was shouted ten thousand times as the ring of
onlookers gradually expanded away from the Base.
The sound waxed. Ephraim kept turning it up and Bert Nix, building for the
climax, kept pulling out more stops. Casimir tried to phone Ephraim from a
booth, but he didn't answer. He probably couldn't even hear it ring.
He certainly heard nothing but organ as, at the end, he cranked the volume all
the way and Pertinax Rushforth pulled out all the stops.
The windows went first. They all burst from their frames at once. All 25,000
picture windows boomed out into trillions of safe little cubes in the red
dawn air. At first it seemed as though the Plex had suddenly grown fuzzy
and white, then as though a blizzard had enveloped the eight towers, and
finally as though It were rising up magnificently from a cloud of glinting
orange foam. As the cloud of glass dropped away from the towers with grand
deliberation, the millions of bats In the upper levels, driven crazy by the
terrible sound, imprisoned in a building with too few exits, stopped beating
their wings against the windows and exploded from the rooms in a black cloud
of unbelievable volume. The black cloud drifted forth and rose into the sky
and the white cloud sank into the depths, and Pertinax pushed the swell pedals
to the floor and coupled all the manuals to the pedalboard and pushed his bare
pink foot down on the first one, the low C, and held it down forever.
The building's steel frame was unaffected. The cinder-blocks laid within that
frame, though, stopped being walls and became a million individual blocks
of stone. Uncoupled, they began to dissolve away from the girders, and the
floors accordionned down with a boom and a concussion that obliterated the
sound of the organ. All the towers went together; and as those tons of debris
avalanched into the girders on which the towers rested, the steel finally
went too, and crumpled together and sagged and fell and snapped and tore with
painful slowness and explosive booms.
The hundred thousand people watching it plugged their ears, except for the
TUGgies, who watched serenely and shut off their OM generators. From the
enormous heap of rubble, broken water pipes shot fountains glistening white in
the rising sun. Crunches and aftershocks continued for days.
Not far away, Virgil Gabrielsen sat on a curbstone, his hair bright in the
sun, drinking water. Between his feet was a stack of mini-computer memory
discs in little black envelopes. The APPASMU is in the Smithsonian Institution
and may be visited 10:00 A.M.-- 5:30 P.M. seven days a week. And the Go Big
Red Fan was found unscathed, sitting miraculously upright on a crushed sofa on
a pile of junk, its painted blades rotating quietly and intermittently in the
fresh spring breeze.
The End
----- About the Author
NEAL STEPHENSON has no job and does not live anyplace in particular except in
summers, when he travels. This is his first published novel. In the past he
has worked as a library and hospital clerk, garbage-to-energy consultant,
vending-machine loader, physics research assistant, anti-perspirant test
subject, crystal grower, movie extra, tutor, funeral home driver, detasseler,
theatrical lighting technician, ditch digger, greeting-card salesman, fungus
farmer, paperboy, and Chinese restaurant food-chopper, which prepared him for
editing early drafts of _The Big U_.
----- Back Cover
One flew over the animal house...
If George Orwell had written a novel more like _Animal House_ (the movie)
than like _Animal Farm_ (the book), and if Orwell were a young American whose
early twenties were spent in the 1980s, and if Orwell counted among his
concerns the origins of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind,
Dungeons & Dragons, computer piracy, and heavy-metal rock versus Bach fugues,
the result would perhaps have been similar to _The Big U_.
Casimir Radon's introduction to American Megaversity is fraught with red
tape, Newspeak and enrollment procedures based on the catch-22 principle.
Having struggled long and hard to afford a college education, Casimir has come
up against the awful truth. What is he doing at the Big U? Meanwhile,
unhappy roommates John Wesley Fenrick and Ephraim Klein (Business and
Philosophy, respectively) wage sonic war with massive stereos; drug aficionado
Dex Fresser becomes the leader of a cult that worships a neon sign, a
dilapidated red fan, and other curious appliances; class president Sarah
Johnson locks horns with the Airheads and the Terrorists, her dorm's female
and male factions; Virgil Gabrielsen, resident genius, hunts down "the Worm,"
an insidious glitch in the all-important college computer system.
As the Apocalyptic plot thickens and boils, a small band of unlikely heroes
tries to foil the scheme of Crotobaltislavonian freedom-fighters who have
seized control of the radioactive waste dumped beneath the university, and to
survive a campus-wide live-ammo civil war, and to avoid the plague of bats and
mutant rats, and to get through the spring semester....