to the Constitution."
"The Wargames Club?" asked Gary, his voice suffused with hope. "What, is there
one?"
"The correct title is the Megaversity Association for Reenactments and
Simulations, or MARS," snapped Fred Fine. Still almost breathless, Gary said,
"Say. Do you guys ever play 'Tactical Nuclear War in Greenland?'"
Fred Fine stared just over Gary's head, screwing up his face tremendously and
humming. "Is that the earlier version of 'Martians in Godthaab,' "he finally
asked, though his tone indicated that he already knew the answer.
Gary was hopelessly taken aback, and looked around a bit before allowing his
gaze to rest on Fred Fine's calculator. "Oh, yeah, I guess. I guess 'Martians
in Godthaab' must be new." "No," said Fred Fine clearly, "it came out six
months ago." To soften the humiliation he chucked Gary on the shoulder. "But
to answer your question. Some of our plebes-- our novice wargamers-- do enjoy
that game. It's interesting in its own way, I suppose, though I've only played
it a dozen times. Of course, it's a Simuconflict product, and their games
have left a lot to be desired since they lost their Pentagon connections, but
there's nothing really wrong with it."
The trio stared at him. How could he know so much? "Uh, do you guys," ventured
the blue one, "ever get into role-playing games? Like Dungeons and Dragons?"
"Those of us high in the experiential hierarchy find conventional D and D
stultifying and repetitive. We prefer to stage live-action role-playing
scenarios. But that's not for just anyone." They looked timidly at Fred Fine's
fencing foil and wondered if he were on his way to a live-action wargame
at this very moment. For an instant, as he stood in the dim recess of the
corridor, light flickering through a shattered panel above and playing on his
head like distant lightning, his feet spread apart, hand on sword pommel, it
seemed to them that they beheld some legendary hero of ancient times, returned
from Valhalla to try his steel against modern foes.
The mood was broken as another man suddenly came around the corner. He brushed
silently past Fred Fine and nearly impaled Gary on a key, but Gary moved just
in time and the new arrival shoved the key home and shot back the deadbolt. He
was tall, with nearly white blond hair, pale blue eyes and a lean but cherubic
face, dressed in cutoffs and a white dress shirt. Shouldering through them, he
entered the little room.
Fred Fine reacted with uncharacteristic warmth. "Well, well, well," he said,
starting in a high whine and dropping in pitch from there. I had Fred Fine
in one of my classes and when in a good mood he really did talk like Colonel
Klink; it took some getting used to. "So they haven't caught up with you and
your master key yet, eh, Virgil? Very interesting."
Virgil Gabrielsen turned smoothly while stepping through the doorway, and
stared transparently through Fred Fine's head. "No," he said, "but I have
plenty of copies anyway. They aren't about to change every lock in the Plex on
my account. The only doors this won't open are in the hazardous waste area,
the Administration Bloc, Doors 1253 through 1778 and 7899 to 8100, which
obviously no one cares about, and Doors 753, 10100 and the high 12,500's, and
I'm obviously not going to go ripping off vending-machine receipts, am I?" At
this the three friends frowned and looked back and forth. Virgil entered the
room and switched on the awesomely powerful battery of overhead fluorescent
lights. Everything was somewhat dusty inside.
"No rat poison on the floor," observed Fred Fine. "Dusty. Still keeping the
B-men out, eh?"
"Yeah," said Virgil, barely aware of them, and began to pull things from his
knapsack. "I told them I was doing werewolf experiments in here."
Fred Fine nodded soberly at this. Meanwhile, the three younger students
had invited themselves in and were gathered around the 'terminal, staring
raptly into its printing mechanism. "It's just an antique Teletype," said the
blue one. He had already said this once, but repeated it now for Fred Fine.
"However, I really like these. Real dependable, and lots of old-fashioned
class despite an inferior character menu." Fred Fine nodded approvingly.
Virgil shouldered through them, sat before the terminal and, without looking
up, announced, "I didn't invite any of you in, so you can all leave NOW.' They
did not quite understand.
"Catch my drift? I dislike audiences."
Fred Fine avoided this by shaking his head, smiling a red smile and chuckling.
The others were unmanned and stood still, waiting to be told that Virgil was
kidding.
"Couldn't we just sit in?" one finally asked. "I've just got to XEQ one
routine. It's debugged and bad data tested. It's fast, it outputs on batch. I
can wait till you're done."
"Forget it," said Virgil airily, scooting back and nudging him away. "I won't
be done for hours. It's all secret Science Shop data. Okay?"
"But turnover for terminals at CC is two hours to the minus one!"
"Try it at four in the morning. You know? Four in the morning is a great time
at American Megaversity. Everything is quiet, there are no lines even at the
laundry, you can do whatever you want without fucking with a mob of freshmen.
Put yourselves on second shift and you'll be fine. Okay?"
They left, sheeshing. Fred Fine stopped in the doorway, still grinning broadly
and shaking his head, as though leaving just for the hell of it.
"You're still the same old guy, Virgil. You still program in raw machine code,
still have that master key. Don't know where science at AM would be without
you. What a wiz."
Virgil stared patiently at the wall. "Fred. I told you I'd fix your MCA and I
will. Don't you believe me?"
"Sure I do. Say! That invitation I made you, to join MARS anytime you want, is
still open. You'll be a Sergeant right away, and we'll probably commission you
after your first night of gaming, from what I know of you."
"Thanks. I won't forget. Goodbye."
"Ciao." Fred Fine bowed his thin frame low and strode off. "What a creep,"
said Virgil, and ferociously snapped the deadbolt as soon as Fred Fine was
almost out of earshot. Removing supplies from the desk drawer, he stuffed a
towel under the door and taped black paper over the window. By the terminal he
set up a small lamp with gel over its mouth, which cast a dim pool of red once
he had shut off the room lights. He activated the terminal, and the computer
asked him for the number of his account, Instead of typing in an account
number, though, Virgil typed: FIAT LUX.
Later, Virgil and I got to know each other. I had problems with the computer
only he could deal with, and after our first contacts he seemed to find me
interesting enough to stay in touch, He began to show me parts of his secret
world, and eventually allowed me to sit in on one of these computer sessions.
Nothing at all made sense until he explained the Worm to me, and the story of
Paul Bennett.
"Paul Bennett was one of these computer geniuses. When he was a sophomore here
he waltzed through most of the secret codes and keys the Computing Center uses
to protect valuable data. Well, he really had the University by the short
hairs then. At any time he could have erased everything in the computer--
financial records, scientific data, expensive software, you name it. He could
have devastated this university just sitting there at his computer terminal--
that's how vulnerable computers are. Eventually the Center found out who
he was, and reprimanded him. Bennett was obviously a genius, and he wasn't
malicious, so the Center then went ahead and hired him to design better
security locks. That happens fairly often-- the best lock-designers are people
who have a talent for picking locks."
"They hired him right out of his sophomore year?" I asked. "Why not? He had
nothing more to learn. The people who were teaching his classes were the same
ones whose security programs he was defeating! What's the point of keeping
someone like that in school? Anyway, Bennett did very well at the Center, but
he was still a kid with some big problems, and no one got along with him.
Finally they fired him.
"When they fire a major Computing Center employee, they have to be sneaky. If
they give him two weeks' notice he might play havoc with the computer during
those two weeks, out of spite. So when they fire these people, it happens
overnight. They show up at work and all the locks have been changed, and they
have to empty out their desks while the senior staff watch them. That's what
they did to Paul Bennett, because they knew he was just screwed up enough to
frag the System for revenge."
"So much for his career, then."
"No. He was immediately hired by a firm in Massachusetts for four times his
old salary. And CC was happy, because they'd gotten good work out of him and
thought they were safe from reprisals. About a week later, though, the Worm
showed up."
"And that is-- ?"
"Paul Bennett's sabotage program. He put it into the computer before he was
fired, you see, and activated it, but every morning when he came to work he
entered a secret command that would put it on hold for another twenty-four
hours. As soon as he stopped giving the command, the Worm came out of hiding
and began to play hell with things."
"But what good did it do him? It didn't prevent his being fired,"
"Who the hell knows? I think he put it in to blackmail the CC staff and
hold on to his job. That must have been his original plan. But when you
make a really beautiful, brilliant program, the temptation to see it work
is just overwhelming. He must have been dying to see the Worm in action. So
when he was fired, he decided, what the hell, they deserve it, I'll unleash
the Worm. That was in the middle of last year. At first it did minor things
such as erasing student programs, shutting the System down at odd times,
et cetera. Then it began to worm its way deeper and deeper into the
Operator-- the master program that controls the entire System-- and wreak
vandalism on a larger scale. The Computing Center personnel fought it for
a while, but they were successful for only so long. The Operator is a huge
program and you have to know it all at once in order to understand what
the Worm is doing to it."
"Aha," I said, beginning to understand, "they needed someone with a
photographic memory. They needed another prodigy, didn't they? So they got
you? Is that it?"
At this Virgil shrugged. "It's true that I am the sort of person they needed,"
he said quietly. "But don't assume that they 'got' me."
"Really? You're a free lance?"
"I help them and they help me. It is a free exchange of services. You needn't
know the details."
I was willing to accept that restriction. Virgil had told me enough so
that what he was doing made sense to me. Still, it was very abstract work,
consisting mostly of reading long strings of numbers off the terminal and
typing new ones in. On the night I sat in, the Worm had eaten all of the
alumni records for people living in states beginning with "M." ("M!," said
Virgil, "the worst letter it could have picked.") Virgil was puttering around
in various files to see if the information had been stored elsewhere. He found
about half of Montana hidden between lines of an illegal video game program,
retrieved the data, erased the illegal program and caused the salvaged
information to be printed out on a string of payroll check forms in a machine
in the administrative bloc.
On this night, the first of the new school year, Virgil was not nobly saving
erased data from the clutches of the Worm. He was actually arranging his
living situation for the coming year. He had about five choice rooms around
the Plex, which he filled with imaginary students in order to keep them
vacant-- an easy matter on the computer. To support his marijuana and ale
habits he extracted a high salary from various sources, sending himself
paychecks when necessary. For this he felt neither reluctance nor guilt,
because Fred Fine was right: without Virgil, whose official job was to work
in the Science Shop, scientific research at the Big U would simply stop.
To support himself he took money from research accounts in proportion to
the extent they depended on him. This was only fair. An indispensable place
like the Science Shop needed a strong leader, someone bold enough to levy
appropriate taxes against its users and spend the revenues toward the ends
those users desired. Virgil had figured out how to do it, and made himself a
niche at the Big U more comfortable than anyone else's.
Sarah lived in a double room just five floors above me and Ephraim Klein
and John Wesley Fenrick, on E12S-- E Tower, twelfth floor, south wing. The
previous year she had luxuriated in a single, and resolved never to share her
private space again; this double made her very angry. In the end, though, she
lucked out. Her would-be roommate had only taken the space as a front, to fake
out her pay-rents, and was actually living in A Tower with her boyfriend. Thus
Sarah did not have to live four feet away from some bopper who would suffer an
emotional crisis every week and explore the standard uses of sex and drugs and
rock-and-roll in noisy experimental binges on the other side of the room.
Sarah's problem now was to redecorate what looked like the inside of a water
closet. The cinderblock walls were painted chocolate brown and absorbed most
light, shedding only the garish parts of the spectrum. The shattered tile
floor was gray and felt sticky no matter how hard she scrubbed. On each side
of the perfectly symmetrical room, long fluorescent light fixtures were bolted
to the walls over the beds, making a harsh light nearby but elsewhere only
a dull greenish glow. After some hasty and low-budget efforts at making it
decent, Sarah threw herself into other activities and resigned herself to
another year of ugliness.
On Wednesday of the term's second week there was a wing meeting. American
Megaversity's recruitment propaganda tried to make it look as though the
wings did everything as a jolly group, but this had not been true on any of
Sarah's previous wings. This place was different. When she had dragged her
duffel bags through the stairwell door on that first afternoon, a trio of
well-groomed junior matrons had risen from a lace-covered card table in the
lobby, helped her with the luggage, pinned a pink carnation on her sweaty
T-shirt and welcomed her to "our wing." Under her pillow she had found a
"starter kit" comprising a small teddy bear named Bobo, a white candle, a
GOLLYWHATAFACE-brand PERSONAL COLOUR SAMPLER PACQUET, a sack of lemon drops, a
red garter, six stick-on nametags with SARA written on them, a questionnaire
and a small calligraphied Xeroxed note inviting her to the wing meeting. All
had been wrapped in flowery pastel wrapping paper and cutely beribboned.
Most of it she had snarlingly punted into the nether parts of her closet. The
wing meeting, however, was quasi-political, and hence she ought to show up.
A quarter of an hour early, she pulled on a peasant blouse over presentable
jeans and walked barefoot down the hall to the study lounge by the elevator
lobby.
She was almost the last to arrive. She was also the only one not in a
bathrobe, which was so queer that she almost feared she was having one of
those LSD flashbacks people always warn you about. Her donut tasted like a
donut, though, and all seemed normal otherwise, so it was reality-- albeit a
strange and distant branch thereof.
Obviously they had not all been bathing, because their hair was dry and their
makeup fresh. There were terry robes, silk robes, Winnie-the-Pooh robes, long
plush robes, plain velvety robes, designer robes, kimonos and even a few
night-shirts on the cute and skinny. Also, many slippers, too many of them
high-heeled. Once she was sure her brain was okay, she edged up to a nearby
wingmate and mumbled, "Did I miss something? Everyone's in bathrobes!"
"Shit, don't ask me!" hissed the woman firmly. "I just took a shower, myself."
Looking down, Sarah saw that the woman was indeed clean of face and wet of
hair. She was shorter than average and compact but not overweight, with
pleasant strong features and black-brown hair that fell to her shoulders. Her
bathrobe was short, old and plain, with a clothesline for a sash.
"Oh, sorry," said Sarah. "So you did. Uh, I'm Sarah, and my bathrobe is blue."
"I know. President of the Student Government."
Sarah shrugged and tried not to look stuck-up.
"What's the story, you've never lived on one of these floors?" The other woman
seemed surprised.
"What do you mean, 'one of these floors?'"
She sighed. "Ah, look. I'm Hyacinth. I'll explain all this later. You want to
sit down? It'll be a long meeting." Hyacinth grasped Sarah's belt loop and led
her politely to the back row of chairs, where they sat a row behind the next
people up. Hyacinth turned sideways in her chair and examined Sarah minutely.
The Study Lounge was not a pretty place. Designed to be as cheery as a breath
mint commercial, it had aged into something not quite so nice. Windows ran
along one wall and looked out into the elevator lobby, where the four wings of
E12S came together. It was furnished with the standard public-area furniture
of the Plex: cubical chairs and cracker-box sofas made of rectangular beams
and slabs of foam covered in brilliant scratchy polyester. The carpet was a
membrane of compressed fibers, covered with the tats and cigarette-burns and
barfstains of years. Overhead, the ubiquitous banks of fluorescent lights
cheerfully beamed thousands of watts of pure bluish energy down onto the
inhabitants. Someone was always decorating the lounge, and this week the theme
was football; the decorations were cardboard cutouts of well-known cartoon
characters cavorting with footballs.
The only other nonrobed person in the place was the RA, Mitzi, who sat bolt
upright at the lace-covered card table in front, left hand still as a dead
bird In her lap, right hand three inches to the side of her jaw and bent back
parallel to the tabletop, fingers curled upward holding a ballpoint pen at a
jaunty but not vulgar forty-five-degree angle. She bore a fixed, almost manic
smile which as far as Sarah could tell had nothing to do with anything-- charm
school, perhaps, or strychnine poisoning. Mitzi wore an overly formal dress
and a kilogram of jewelry, and when she spoke, though not even her jawbone
moved, one mighty earring began to swing violently.
Among other things, Mitzi welcomed new "members." There were three: another
woman, Hyacinth and Sarah, introduced in that order. The first woman explained
that she was Sandi and she was into like education and stuff. Then came
Hyacinth; she was into apathy. She announced this loudly and they all laughed
and complimented Hyacinth on her sense of humor.
Sarah was introduced last, being famous. "What are you into, Sarah Jane?"
asked Mitzi. Sarah surveyed the glistening, fiercely smiling faces turned
round to aim at her.
"I'm into reality," she said. This brought delighted laughter, especially from
Hyacinth, who screamed like a sow.
The meeting then got underway. Hyacinth leaned back, crossed her arms and
tilted her head back until she was staring openmouthed at the ceiling. As the
meeting went on she combed her hair, bit her nails, played with loose threads
from her robe, cleaned her toes and so on. The thing was, Sarah found all
of this more interesting than the meeting itself. Sarah looked interested
until her face got tired. She had spoken in front of groups enough to know
that Mitzi could see them all clearly, and that to be obviously bored would
be rude. Sometimes politeness had to give way to sanity, though, and before
she knew it she found herself trying to swing the tassels at the ends of her
sleeves in opposite directions at the same time. Hyacinth watched this closely
and patted her on the back when she succeeded.
Mainly what they were doing was filling a huge social calendar with parties
and similar events. Sarah wanted to announce that she liked to do things by
herself or with a few friends, but she saw no diplomatic way of saying so. She
did resurface for the discussion of the theme for the Last Night party, the
social climax of the semester: Fantasy Island Nite.
"Wonder how they're going to tell it apart from all the other nights,"
grumbled Hyacinth. Nearby wingmates turned and smiled, failing to understand
but assuming that whatever Hyacinth said must be funny.
Another phase of the social master plan was to form an official sister/brother
relationship with the wing upstairs, known as the Wild and Crazy Guys. This in
turn led to the wing naming idea. After all, if E13S had a name for itself,
shouldn't E12S have one too? Mari Meegan, darling of the wing, made this
point, and "Yeah!"s zephyred up all around.
Sarah was feeling pretty sour by this point but said nothing. If they wanted a
name, fine. Then the ideas started coming out: Love Boat, for example.
"We could paint our lobby with a picture of the Love Boat like it looks at the
start of the show, and we could, you know, do everything, like parties and
stuff, with like that kind of a theme. Then on Fantasy Island Nite, we could
pretend the Boat was visiting Fantasy Island!"
This idea went over well and the meeting broke up into small discussions
about how to apply this theme to different phases of existence. Finally,
though, Sarah spoke up, and they all smiled and listened. "I'm not sure I like
that idea. There are plenty of creeps on the floor already, because we're
all-female. If we name it Love Boat, everyone will think it's some kind of
outcall massage service, and we'll never get a break."
Several seconds of silence. A few nods were seen, some "yeah"s heard, and Love
Boat was dead. More names were suggested, most of them obviously dumb, and
then Mari Meegan raised her hand. All quieted as her fingernails fluttered
like a burst of redhot flak above the crowd. "I know," she said.
There was silence save for the sound of Hyacinth's comb rushing through her
hair. Mari continued. "We can call ourselves 'Castle in the Air.' "
The lounge gusted with oohs and aahs.
"I like that."
"You're so creative, Mari."
"We could do a whole Dark Ages theme, you know, castles and knights and
shining armor."
"That's nice! Really nice!"
"Wait a sec." This came from Hyacinth.
At this some of the women were clearly exasperated, looking at the ceiling,
but most wore expressions of forced tolerance. Hyacinth continued flatly.
"Castle in the Air is derogatory. That means it's not-nice. When you talk
about a castle in the air, you mean something with no basis in reality. It's
like saying someone has her head in the clouds."
They all continued to stare morosely, as though she hadn't finished. Sarah
broke in. "You can call it anything you want. She is just making the point
that you're using an unflattering name." Mari was comforted by two friends. The
rest of them defended the name, nicely. "I never heard that."
"I think it sounds nice."
"Like a Barry Manilow song."
"Like one of those little Chinese poems."
"I always thought if your head was in the clouds, that was nice, like you were
really happy or something. Besides, castles are a neat theme for parties and
stuff-- can't you see Mark dressed up like a knight?" Giggles.
"And this way we can call ourselves the Airheads!" Screams of delight.
Hyacinth's objection having been thus obliterated, Castle In the Air was voted
In unanimously, with two abstentions, and it was decided that paints and
brushes would be bought and the wing would be painted in this theme during the
weeks to come. Presently the meeting adjourned.
"We've got forty minutes until the Candle Passing," observed Mitzi, "and until
then we can have a social hour. But not a whole hour"
The meeting dissolved into chattering fragments. Sarah leaned towards Hyacinth
to whisper in her ear, and Hyacinth tensed. They had been whispering to each
other in turns for the last half hour, and as both had ticklish ears this had
caused much hysterical lip-biting and snorting. Sarah did not really have to
whisper now, but it was her turn. "What candle passing?" she asked.
Hyacinth's attempt to whisper back was met by violent resistance from Sarah,
so they laughed and made a truce. "It's kind of complicated. It means
something personal happened between someone and her boyfriend, so everyone
else has to know about it. Listen. We've got to escape, okay?"
"Okay."
"Go to Room 103 when the alarm sounds."
"Alarm?" But Hyacinth was already gliding out.
Sarah was quickly trapped in a conversation group including Mitzi and Mari.
She accepted a cup of Kool-Aid/vodka punch and smiled when she could. Everyone
was being nice to her in case she felt like an idiot for having said those
things during the meeting. Mari asked if her boyfriend helped out with the
hard parts of being President and Sarah had to say that just now she didn't
have a boyfriend.
"Ahaa!" said everyone. "Don't worry, Sarah, we'll see what we can come up
with. No prob, now you're an Airhead."
Sarah was groping for an answer when the local smoke alarm howled and the
Airheads moaned in disappointment. As they all trooped off to their rooms
to make themselves a little more presentable, Sarah headed for Room 103,
following a heavy trail of marijuana smoke with her nose. As this was only the
smoke alarm, only the twelfth floor would be evacuated.
Hyacinth pulled Sarah into the room and carefully fitted a wet reefer to her
lips. It was dark, and a young black woman was slumped over a desk asleep,
stereo on loud. Hyacinth Went to the vent window and released an amazing
primal scream toward F Tower. After some prompting from her hostess, Sarah
gave back the joint and followed suit. Hyacinth's Sleeping roommate, Lucy, sat
up, sighed, then went over and lay down on her bed. Sarah and Hyacinth sat on
Hyacinth's bed and drank milk from an illegal mini-fridge in the closet.
They silently finished the joint, shaking their heads at each other and
laughing in disbelief.
"Ever done LSD?" asked Sarah.
"No. Why? Got some?"
"Oh. jeez, I wasn't suggesting it. I was going to say, for a minute there I
thought I was back on it. That's how unreal those people are to me."
"You think they're strange?" said Hyacinth. "I think they're very normal."
"That's what I'm afraid of. Your room is pretty nice; I feel very much at
home here." It was a nice room, one of the few Plex rooms I ever saw that was
pleasant to be in. It was full of illegal cooking appliances and stashes of
food, and the walls had been illegally painted white. Wall hangings and plants
were everywhere.
"Well, we were in the Army-- Lucy and me," said Hyacinth, carefully fitting a
roach clip. "That's almost like LSD." By now their wing had been evacuated,
and a couple of security guards were plodding up and down the hallways
pretending to inspect for sources of smoke. Sarah and Hyacinth leaned together
and spoke quietly.
"You're not real presidential," said Hyacinth. "People like you aren't
supposed to take LSD."
"I don't take it anymore. See, back when I was about fourteen, my older sister
was really into it, and I did it a few times."
"Why'd you stop?"
Sarah squinted into the milk carton and said nothing. Outside, the guards
cursed to each other about students in general. Sarah finally said, "I kept an
eye on my sister, and when she got cut loose completely-- lost track of what
was real and stopped caring-- I saw it wasn't a healthy thing."
"So now you're President. I don't get it."
"The important thing is to get your life anchored in something. I think
you have to make contact with the world in some way, and one way is to get
involved."
"Student government?"
"Well, it beats MTV."
A guard beat on their door, attracted by the stereo-noise. "Screw off," said
Hyacinth in a loud stage whisper, flipping the bird toward the door. Sarah
put her face in her hands and bent double with suppressed laughter. When she
recovered, the guard had left and Hyacinth was smiling brightly.
"Jeezus!" said Sarah, "you're pretty blatant, aren't you?"
"If it's the quiet, polite type you want, go see the Air-heads."
"You've lived with people like this before. Why don't they kick you off
the wing?"
"Tokenism. They have to have tokens. Lucy is their token black, I'm their
token individual. They love having a loudmouth around to disagree with them--
makes them feel diverse."
"You don't think diplomacy would be more effective?" I'm not a diplomat. I'm
me. Who are you?"
Instead of answering this difficult question, Sarah leaned back comfortably
against the wall and closed her eyes. They listened to music for a long time
as the Airheads breezed back onto the wing. "I'd feel relaxed," said Sarah,
"except I'm actually kind of guilty about missing the Candle Passing."
"That's ridiculous."
"You're right. You can say that and be totally sure of yourself, can't you? I
admire you, Hyacinth."
"I like you, Sarah," said Hyacinth, and that summed it up.
In the Physics Library, Casimir Radon read about quantum mechanics. The
digital watch on the wrist of the sleeping post-doc across the table read
8:00. That meant it was time to go upstairs and visit Professor Emeritus
Walter Abraham Sharon, who worked odd hours. Casimir was not leaving just
yet, though. He had found that Sharon was not the swiftest man in the world,
and though the professor was by no means annoyed when Casimir showed up on
time, Casimir preferred to come ten minutes late. Anyway, in the informal
atmosphere of the Physics Department, appointments were viewed with a certain
Heisenbergian skepticism, as though being in the right place at the right time
would involve breaking a natural law and was therefore impossible to begin
with. Outside the picture windows of the library, the ghettos of the City were
filled with smoky light, and occasionally a meteor streaked past and crashed
in flames in the access lot below. They were not actual meteors, but merely
various objects soaked in lighter fluid, ignited and thrown from a floor in E
Tower above, trailing fire and debris as they zoomed earthward.
Casimir found this perversely comforting. It was just the sort of insanity
he hadn't been able to get away from during his first week at American
Megaversity. Soon the miserable Casimir had taken me up on my offer to stop by
at any time, showing up at my door just before midnight, wanting to cry but
not about to. I took coffee, he took vodka, and soon we understood each other
a little better. As he explained it, no one here had the least consideration
for others, or the least ability to think for themselves, and this combination
was hard to take after having been an adult. Nor had academics given him any
solace; owing to the medieval tempo of the bureaucracy, he was still mired in
kindergarten-level physics. Of course he could speed these courses up just by
being there. Whenever a professor asked a question, rhetorical or not, Casimir
shouted the answer immediately. This earned him the hatred and awe of his
classmates, but it was his only source of satisfaction. As he waited for his
situation to become sensible, he sat in on the classes he really wanted to
take, in effect taking a double load.
"Because I'm sure Sharon is going to bring me justice," Casimir had declared,
raising his voice above a grumble for the first time. "This guy makes sense!
He's like you, and I can't understand how he ended up in this place. I never
thought I'd be surprised by someone just because he is a sensible and a good
guy, but in this place it's a miracle. He c. out me, asks questions about my
life-- it's as though discovering what's best for me is a research project
we're working on as a team. I can't believe a great man like him would care."
Long, somber pause. "But I don't think even he can make up for what's wrong
with this place. How about you, Bud? You're normal. What are you doing here?"
Lacking an answer, I changed the subject to basketball.
A trio of meteors streaked across the picture windows and it was 8:10. Casimir
returned his book and exited into the dark shiny hail. He was now at the upper
limit of the Burrows, the bloc of the Plex that housed the natural sciences.
Two floors above him, on the sixth and top floor of the base, was Emeritus
Row, the plush offices of the academic superstars. He made his way there
leisurely, knowing he was welcome.
Emeritus Row was dark and silent, illuminated only by the streak of warm
yellow splashed away from Sharon's door. Casimir removed his glacier glasses.
"Come in," came the melodious answer to his knock, and Casimir Radon entered
his favorite room in the world.
Sharon looked at him with raised eyebrows. "Veil! You haff made a decision?"
"I think so."
"Let's have it! Leaving or staying? For the sake of physics I hope the
latter."
Casimir abruptly realized he had not really made up his mind. He shoved his
hands into his pockets and breathed deeply, a little surprised by all this.
He could not keep a smile from his face, though, and could not ignore the
hominess of Sharon's chaotic office. He announced that he was going to stay.
"Good, good," Sharon said absently. "Clear a place to sit." He gestured at a
chair and Casimir set about removing thirty Pounds of high-energy physics from
it. Sharon said, "So you've decided to cross the Rubicon, eh?"
Casimir sat down, thought about it, and said with a half grin, "Or the Styx,
whichever the case may be."
Sharon nodded, and as he did a resounding thump issued from above. Casimir
jumped, but Sharon did not react.
"What was that?" Casimir asked. "Sounded big."
"Ach," said Sharon. "Throwing furniture again, I should guess. You know, don't
you, that many of our students are very interested in the physics of falling
bodies?" He delivered this, like all his bad jokes, slowly and solemnly, as
though working out long calculations in his head. Casimir chuckled. Sharon
winked and lit his pipe. "I am given to understand, from grapevine talk, that
you are smarter than all of our professors except for me." He winked again
through thick smoke.
"Oh. Well, I doubt it."
"Ach, I don't. No correlation between age and intelligence! You're just afraid
to use your smarts! That's right. You'd rather suffer-- it is your Polish
blood. Anyway, you have much practical experience. Our professors have only
book experience."
"Well, it's the book experience I want. It's handy to know electronics, but
what I really like is pure principles. I can make more money designing
circuits, if that's what I want."
"Exactly! You prefer to be a poor physicist. Well, I cannot argue with you
wanting to know pure things. After all, you are not naоve, your life has been
no more sheltered than mine."
Embarrassed, Casimir laughed. "I don't know about that. I haven't lived
through any world wars yet. You've lived through two. I may have escaped
from a slum, but you escaped from Peenemunde with a suitcase full of rocket
diagrams."
Sharon's eyes crinkled at the corners. "Yet. A very important word, nicht
wahr? You are not very old, yet."
"What do you mean? Do you expect a war?"
Sharon laughed deeply and slowly. "I have toured your residential towers with
certain students of mine, and I was reminded of certain, er, locations during
the occupation of the Sudetenland. I think from what I see"-- the ceiling
thumped again, and he gestured upward with his pipestem -- "and hear, that
perhaps you are in a war now."
Casimir laughed, but then sucked in his breath and sat back as Sharon glowered
at him morosely. The old professor was very complicated, and Casimir always
seemed to be taking missteps with him.
"War and violence are not very funny," said Sharon, "unless they happen to
you-- then they are funny because they haff to be. There is more violence up
there than you realize! Even speech today has become a form of violence-- even
in the university. So pay attention to that, and don't worry about a war in
Europe. Worry about it here, this is your home now."
"Yes, sir." After pausing respectfully, Casimir withdrew a clipboard from his
pack and put It on Sharon's desk. "Or it will be my home as soon as you sign
these forms. Mrs. Santucci will tear my arms off if I don't bring them in
tomorrow."
Sharon sat still until Casimir began to feel uncomfortable. "Ja," he finally
said, "I guess you need to worry about forms too. Forms and forms and forms.
Doesn't matter to me."
"Oh. It doesn't? You aren't retiring, are you?"
"Ja, I guess so."
Silently, Sharon separated the forms and laid them out on the Periodic Table
of the Elements that covered his desk. He examined them with care for a
few minutes, then selected a pen from a stein on his desk, which had been
autographed by Enrico Fermi and Niels Bohr, and signed them.
"There, you're in the good courses now," he concluded. "Good to see you are so
well Socioeconomically Integrated." The old man sat back in his chair, clasped
his fingers over his flat chest, and closed his eyes.
A thunderous crash and Casimir was on the floor, dust in his throat and pea
gravel on his back. Rubble thudded down from above and Casimir heard a loud
inharmonious piano chord, which held steady for a moment and moaned downward
in pitch until it was obliterated by an explosive splintering crack. More
rubble flew around the room and he was pelted with small blocks. Looking down
as he rubbed dust from his eyes he saw scores of strewn black and white piano
keys.
Sharon was slumped over on his desk, and a trickle of blood ran from his head
and onto the back of his hand and puddled on the class change form beside his
pipe. Gravel, rainwater and litter continued to slide down through the hole in
the ceiling. Casimir alternately screamed and gulped as he staggered to his
feet. lie waded through shattered ceiling panels and twisted books to Sharon's
side and saw with horror that the old man's side had been pierced by a shard
of piano frame shot out like an arrow in the explosion. With exquisite care
he helped him lean back, cleared the desk of books and junk, then picked up
his thin body and set him atop the desk. He propped up Sharon's head with the
1938 issues of the Physical Review and tried to ease his breathing. The head
wound was superficial and already clotting, but the side wound was ghastly
and Casimir did not even know whether to remove the splinter. Blood built up
at the corners of Sharon's mouth as he gasped and wheezed. Brushing tears and
dirt from his own face, Casimir looked for the phone.
He started away as a small bat fluttered past.
"Troglodyte! No manners! This is what you're supposed to see!" Casimir whirled
to see Bert Nix plunging from the open door toward Sharon's desk. Casimir
tried to head him off, fearing some kind of attack, but Bert Nix stopped short
and pointed triumphantly to Sharon. Casimir turned to look. Sharon was gazing
at him dully through half-shut eyes, and weakly pounding his finger into a
spot on the tabletop. Casimir leaned over and looked. Sharon was pointing at
the Table of the Elements, indicating the box for Oxygen.
"Oxygen! Oh two! Get it?" shouted Bert Nix.
Bill Benson, Security Guard 5, was arguing with a friend whether it was
possible that F.D.R. committed suicide when the emergency line rang. He let
it ring four times. Since ninety-nine calls out of a hundred were pranks, by
letting each one ring four times he was delaying the true emergency calls by
an average of only four one-hundredths of a ring apiece-- nothing compared
with the time it took to respond. Anyway, fed up with kids getting stoned
at parties and falling on the way out to barf and spraining their wrists,
then (through some miracle of temporary clearheadedness) calling Emergency
and trying to articulate their problems through a hallucinogenic miasma
while monster stereos in the background threatened to uncurl his phone cord.
Eventually, though, he did pick up the phone, holding the earpiece several
inches from his head in case it was another of those goddamn Stalinist
whistle-blasters.
"Listen," came the voice, sounding distant, "I've got to have some oxygen. Do
you have some there? It's an emergency!" Oh, shit, Did he have to get this
call every night? He listened for a few more seconds. "It's an oxygen freak,"
he said to his friend, covering the mouthpiece with his hand.
"Oxygen freak? What do they do with oxygen?"
Benson swung his feet down from the counter, put the receiver in his lap,
and explained. "See, nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, is the big thing. They
breathe it through masks, like for surgery. But if you breathe it pure you'll
kick in no time, because you got to have oxygen. And they are so crazy about
laughing gas they don't want to take off that mask even to breathe, so they
like to get some oxygen to mix with it so that they can sit there all goddamn
night long and breathe nothing else and get blasted out of their little minds.
So we always get these calls."
He picked up the receiver again, took a puff on his cigar, exhaled slowly.
"Hello?" he said, hoping the poor gas-crazed sap had hung up.
"Yeah? When will it be here?"
"Cripes!" Bill Benson shouted, "look, guy, hang it up. We don't have any and
you aren't allowed to have it."
"Well, shit then, come up here and help me. Call an ambulance! For God's sake,
a man's dying here."
Some of these kids were such cretins, how did they make it into college?
Money, probably. "Listen, use your head, kid," he said, not unkindly. "We're
the Emergency Services desk. We can't leave our posts. What would happen if
there was an emergency while we were gone?"
This was answered by silence; but in the background, Benson could just make
out another voice, which sounded familiar: "You should have listened to what
he was trying to tell you! He wasn't farting around! We had to sack the
Cartography Department to afford him. And you don't listen!"
"Shut up!" shouted the gas freak.
"Hey, is that Bert? Is that Bert Nix on the phone?" asked Bill Benson. "Where
are you, kid?"
"Emeritus Row!' shouted the kid, and dropped the phone. Bill Benson continued
to listen after the BONKITY-BONK of the phone's impact, trying to make sure
it was really good old Bert Nix. I think he heard this poem; on the news, he
claimed he heard a poem, and it could well have been this, which Bert Nix
quoted regularly and liked to write on the walls:
Tenuring and tenuring in the ivory tower!
The flagon cannot fill the flagoneers.
Krupp cuts a fart! The sphinxter cannot hold
Dear academe, our Lusitanta, recoils.
The time-limned dons are noosed. With airy webs
The cerebrally infarcted bring me down.
The East affects conscription, while the curst
Are gulled with Fashionate Propensities.
Shrilly, sum reevaluation is demanded.
Earlier-reckoned commencement is programmed!
What fecund mumming! Outly ward those words hard
When a glassed grimace on an animal Monday
Rumbles at night; unaware that the plans aren't deserved
Escapists' lie-panoply aims to head off the Fan.
A sign frank and witless as the Sun
Is mute in the skies, yet from it are shouted
Real shadows of endogenous deserted words.
The concrete drops down in; but know I now
That thirty-storied stone steel keeps
When next the might of Air are rooks unstable.
What buff be; its towers coming down deglassed
Slumps amid Bedlam in the morn?
"Holy shit!" cried Bill Benson. "Bert? Is that you? Hell, maybe something's
up. Sam, punch me onto line six there and Ill see if I can raise the folks
down at nine-one-one."
Casimir was careening through the halls, cursing himself for having had to
leave Sharon alone with a derelict, adrenaline blasting through him as he
imagined coming back to find the old man dead. He didn't know how he was going
to open the door when he got where he was going, but at the moment it did not
matter because no slab of wood and plastic, it seemed, could stand in his way.
He veered around a corner, smashing into a tail young man who had been coming
the other way. They both sprawled dazed on the floor, but Casimir rolled and
sprang to his feet and resumed running. The man he had collided with caught up
with him, and he realized that it was Virgil Gabrielsen, King of the Burrows.
"Virgil! Did you hear that?"
"Yeah, I was coming to check it out. What's up?"
"Piano fell into Sharon's office... pierced lung... oxygen." "Right," said
Virgil, and skidded to a stop, fishing a key from his pocket. He master-keyed
his way into a lab and they sent a grad student sprawling against a workbench
as they made for the gas canisters. Casimir grabbed a bottle-cart and they
feverishly strapped the big cylinder onto it, then wheeled it heavily out the
door and back toward Sharon.
"Shit," said Virgil, "no freight elevator. No way to get it upstairs." They
were at the base of the stairs, two floors below Sharon. The oxygen was
about five feet tall and one foot in diameter, and crammed with hundreds of
pounds of extremely high-pressure gas. Virgil was still thinking about it
when Casimir, a bony and unhealthy looking man, bear-hugged the canister,
straightened up, and hoisted it to his shoulder as he would a roll of carpet.
He took the stairs two at a time, Virgil bounding along behind.
Shortly, Casimir had slammed the cylinder down on the floor near Sharon. Bert
Nix was holding Sharon's hand, mumbling and occasionally making the sign of
the cross. As Virgil closed the door, Casimir held the top valve at arm's
length, buried one ear in his shoulder, and opened it up. Virgil just had time
to plug his ears.
"The Wargames Club?" asked Gary, his voice suffused with hope. "What, is there
one?"
"The correct title is the Megaversity Association for Reenactments and
Simulations, or MARS," snapped Fred Fine. Still almost breathless, Gary said,
"Say. Do you guys ever play 'Tactical Nuclear War in Greenland?'"
Fred Fine stared just over Gary's head, screwing up his face tremendously and
humming. "Is that the earlier version of 'Martians in Godthaab,' "he finally
asked, though his tone indicated that he already knew the answer.
Gary was hopelessly taken aback, and looked around a bit before allowing his
gaze to rest on Fred Fine's calculator. "Oh, yeah, I guess. I guess 'Martians
in Godthaab' must be new." "No," said Fred Fine clearly, "it came out six
months ago." To soften the humiliation he chucked Gary on the shoulder. "But
to answer your question. Some of our plebes-- our novice wargamers-- do enjoy
that game. It's interesting in its own way, I suppose, though I've only played
it a dozen times. Of course, it's a Simuconflict product, and their games
have left a lot to be desired since they lost their Pentagon connections, but
there's nothing really wrong with it."
The trio stared at him. How could he know so much? "Uh, do you guys," ventured
the blue one, "ever get into role-playing games? Like Dungeons and Dragons?"
"Those of us high in the experiential hierarchy find conventional D and D
stultifying and repetitive. We prefer to stage live-action role-playing
scenarios. But that's not for just anyone." They looked timidly at Fred Fine's
fencing foil and wondered if he were on his way to a live-action wargame
at this very moment. For an instant, as he stood in the dim recess of the
corridor, light flickering through a shattered panel above and playing on his
head like distant lightning, his feet spread apart, hand on sword pommel, it
seemed to them that they beheld some legendary hero of ancient times, returned
from Valhalla to try his steel against modern foes.
The mood was broken as another man suddenly came around the corner. He brushed
silently past Fred Fine and nearly impaled Gary on a key, but Gary moved just
in time and the new arrival shoved the key home and shot back the deadbolt. He
was tall, with nearly white blond hair, pale blue eyes and a lean but cherubic
face, dressed in cutoffs and a white dress shirt. Shouldering through them, he
entered the little room.
Fred Fine reacted with uncharacteristic warmth. "Well, well, well," he said,
starting in a high whine and dropping in pitch from there. I had Fred Fine
in one of my classes and when in a good mood he really did talk like Colonel
Klink; it took some getting used to. "So they haven't caught up with you and
your master key yet, eh, Virgil? Very interesting."
Virgil Gabrielsen turned smoothly while stepping through the doorway, and
stared transparently through Fred Fine's head. "No," he said, "but I have
plenty of copies anyway. They aren't about to change every lock in the Plex on
my account. The only doors this won't open are in the hazardous waste area,
the Administration Bloc, Doors 1253 through 1778 and 7899 to 8100, which
obviously no one cares about, and Doors 753, 10100 and the high 12,500's, and
I'm obviously not going to go ripping off vending-machine receipts, am I?" At
this the three friends frowned and looked back and forth. Virgil entered the
room and switched on the awesomely powerful battery of overhead fluorescent
lights. Everything was somewhat dusty inside.
"No rat poison on the floor," observed Fred Fine. "Dusty. Still keeping the
B-men out, eh?"
"Yeah," said Virgil, barely aware of them, and began to pull things from his
knapsack. "I told them I was doing werewolf experiments in here."
Fred Fine nodded soberly at this. Meanwhile, the three younger students
had invited themselves in and were gathered around the 'terminal, staring
raptly into its printing mechanism. "It's just an antique Teletype," said the
blue one. He had already said this once, but repeated it now for Fred Fine.
"However, I really like these. Real dependable, and lots of old-fashioned
class despite an inferior character menu." Fred Fine nodded approvingly.
Virgil shouldered through them, sat before the terminal and, without looking
up, announced, "I didn't invite any of you in, so you can all leave NOW.' They
did not quite understand.
"Catch my drift? I dislike audiences."
Fred Fine avoided this by shaking his head, smiling a red smile and chuckling.
The others were unmanned and stood still, waiting to be told that Virgil was
kidding.
"Couldn't we just sit in?" one finally asked. "I've just got to XEQ one
routine. It's debugged and bad data tested. It's fast, it outputs on batch. I
can wait till you're done."
"Forget it," said Virgil airily, scooting back and nudging him away. "I won't
be done for hours. It's all secret Science Shop data. Okay?"
"But turnover for terminals at CC is two hours to the minus one!"
"Try it at four in the morning. You know? Four in the morning is a great time
at American Megaversity. Everything is quiet, there are no lines even at the
laundry, you can do whatever you want without fucking with a mob of freshmen.
Put yourselves on second shift and you'll be fine. Okay?"
They left, sheeshing. Fred Fine stopped in the doorway, still grinning broadly
and shaking his head, as though leaving just for the hell of it.
"You're still the same old guy, Virgil. You still program in raw machine code,
still have that master key. Don't know where science at AM would be without
you. What a wiz."
Virgil stared patiently at the wall. "Fred. I told you I'd fix your MCA and I
will. Don't you believe me?"
"Sure I do. Say! That invitation I made you, to join MARS anytime you want, is
still open. You'll be a Sergeant right away, and we'll probably commission you
after your first night of gaming, from what I know of you."
"Thanks. I won't forget. Goodbye."
"Ciao." Fred Fine bowed his thin frame low and strode off. "What a creep,"
said Virgil, and ferociously snapped the deadbolt as soon as Fred Fine was
almost out of earshot. Removing supplies from the desk drawer, he stuffed a
towel under the door and taped black paper over the window. By the terminal he
set up a small lamp with gel over its mouth, which cast a dim pool of red once
he had shut off the room lights. He activated the terminal, and the computer
asked him for the number of his account, Instead of typing in an account
number, though, Virgil typed: FIAT LUX.
Later, Virgil and I got to know each other. I had problems with the computer
only he could deal with, and after our first contacts he seemed to find me
interesting enough to stay in touch, He began to show me parts of his secret
world, and eventually allowed me to sit in on one of these computer sessions.
Nothing at all made sense until he explained the Worm to me, and the story of
Paul Bennett.
"Paul Bennett was one of these computer geniuses. When he was a sophomore here
he waltzed through most of the secret codes and keys the Computing Center uses
to protect valuable data. Well, he really had the University by the short
hairs then. At any time he could have erased everything in the computer--
financial records, scientific data, expensive software, you name it. He could
have devastated this university just sitting there at his computer terminal--
that's how vulnerable computers are. Eventually the Center found out who
he was, and reprimanded him. Bennett was obviously a genius, and he wasn't
malicious, so the Center then went ahead and hired him to design better
security locks. That happens fairly often-- the best lock-designers are people
who have a talent for picking locks."
"They hired him right out of his sophomore year?" I asked. "Why not? He had
nothing more to learn. The people who were teaching his classes were the same
ones whose security programs he was defeating! What's the point of keeping
someone like that in school? Anyway, Bennett did very well at the Center, but
he was still a kid with some big problems, and no one got along with him.
Finally they fired him.
"When they fire a major Computing Center employee, they have to be sneaky. If
they give him two weeks' notice he might play havoc with the computer during
those two weeks, out of spite. So when they fire these people, it happens
overnight. They show up at work and all the locks have been changed, and they
have to empty out their desks while the senior staff watch them. That's what
they did to Paul Bennett, because they knew he was just screwed up enough to
frag the System for revenge."
"So much for his career, then."
"No. He was immediately hired by a firm in Massachusetts for four times his
old salary. And CC was happy, because they'd gotten good work out of him and
thought they were safe from reprisals. About a week later, though, the Worm
showed up."
"And that is-- ?"
"Paul Bennett's sabotage program. He put it into the computer before he was
fired, you see, and activated it, but every morning when he came to work he
entered a secret command that would put it on hold for another twenty-four
hours. As soon as he stopped giving the command, the Worm came out of hiding
and began to play hell with things."
"But what good did it do him? It didn't prevent his being fired,"
"Who the hell knows? I think he put it in to blackmail the CC staff and
hold on to his job. That must have been his original plan. But when you
make a really beautiful, brilliant program, the temptation to see it work
is just overwhelming. He must have been dying to see the Worm in action. So
when he was fired, he decided, what the hell, they deserve it, I'll unleash
the Worm. That was in the middle of last year. At first it did minor things
such as erasing student programs, shutting the System down at odd times,
et cetera. Then it began to worm its way deeper and deeper into the
Operator-- the master program that controls the entire System-- and wreak
vandalism on a larger scale. The Computing Center personnel fought it for
a while, but they were successful for only so long. The Operator is a huge
program and you have to know it all at once in order to understand what
the Worm is doing to it."
"Aha," I said, beginning to understand, "they needed someone with a
photographic memory. They needed another prodigy, didn't they? So they got
you? Is that it?"
At this Virgil shrugged. "It's true that I am the sort of person they needed,"
he said quietly. "But don't assume that they 'got' me."
"Really? You're a free lance?"
"I help them and they help me. It is a free exchange of services. You needn't
know the details."
I was willing to accept that restriction. Virgil had told me enough so
that what he was doing made sense to me. Still, it was very abstract work,
consisting mostly of reading long strings of numbers off the terminal and
typing new ones in. On the night I sat in, the Worm had eaten all of the
alumni records for people living in states beginning with "M." ("M!," said
Virgil, "the worst letter it could have picked.") Virgil was puttering around
in various files to see if the information had been stored elsewhere. He found
about half of Montana hidden between lines of an illegal video game program,
retrieved the data, erased the illegal program and caused the salvaged
information to be printed out on a string of payroll check forms in a machine
in the administrative bloc.
On this night, the first of the new school year, Virgil was not nobly saving
erased data from the clutches of the Worm. He was actually arranging his
living situation for the coming year. He had about five choice rooms around
the Plex, which he filled with imaginary students in order to keep them
vacant-- an easy matter on the computer. To support his marijuana and ale
habits he extracted a high salary from various sources, sending himself
paychecks when necessary. For this he felt neither reluctance nor guilt,
because Fred Fine was right: without Virgil, whose official job was to work
in the Science Shop, scientific research at the Big U would simply stop.
To support himself he took money from research accounts in proportion to
the extent they depended on him. This was only fair. An indispensable place
like the Science Shop needed a strong leader, someone bold enough to levy
appropriate taxes against its users and spend the revenues toward the ends
those users desired. Virgil had figured out how to do it, and made himself a
niche at the Big U more comfortable than anyone else's.
Sarah lived in a double room just five floors above me and Ephraim Klein
and John Wesley Fenrick, on E12S-- E Tower, twelfth floor, south wing. The
previous year she had luxuriated in a single, and resolved never to share her
private space again; this double made her very angry. In the end, though, she
lucked out. Her would-be roommate had only taken the space as a front, to fake
out her pay-rents, and was actually living in A Tower with her boyfriend. Thus
Sarah did not have to live four feet away from some bopper who would suffer an
emotional crisis every week and explore the standard uses of sex and drugs and
rock-and-roll in noisy experimental binges on the other side of the room.
Sarah's problem now was to redecorate what looked like the inside of a water
closet. The cinderblock walls were painted chocolate brown and absorbed most
light, shedding only the garish parts of the spectrum. The shattered tile
floor was gray and felt sticky no matter how hard she scrubbed. On each side
of the perfectly symmetrical room, long fluorescent light fixtures were bolted
to the walls over the beds, making a harsh light nearby but elsewhere only
a dull greenish glow. After some hasty and low-budget efforts at making it
decent, Sarah threw herself into other activities and resigned herself to
another year of ugliness.
On Wednesday of the term's second week there was a wing meeting. American
Megaversity's recruitment propaganda tried to make it look as though the
wings did everything as a jolly group, but this had not been true on any of
Sarah's previous wings. This place was different. When she had dragged her
duffel bags through the stairwell door on that first afternoon, a trio of
well-groomed junior matrons had risen from a lace-covered card table in the
lobby, helped her with the luggage, pinned a pink carnation on her sweaty
T-shirt and welcomed her to "our wing." Under her pillow she had found a
"starter kit" comprising a small teddy bear named Bobo, a white candle, a
GOLLYWHATAFACE-brand PERSONAL COLOUR SAMPLER PACQUET, a sack of lemon drops, a
red garter, six stick-on nametags with SARA written on them, a questionnaire
and a small calligraphied Xeroxed note inviting her to the wing meeting. All
had been wrapped in flowery pastel wrapping paper and cutely beribboned.
Most of it she had snarlingly punted into the nether parts of her closet. The
wing meeting, however, was quasi-political, and hence she ought to show up.
A quarter of an hour early, she pulled on a peasant blouse over presentable
jeans and walked barefoot down the hall to the study lounge by the elevator
lobby.
She was almost the last to arrive. She was also the only one not in a
bathrobe, which was so queer that she almost feared she was having one of
those LSD flashbacks people always warn you about. Her donut tasted like a
donut, though, and all seemed normal otherwise, so it was reality-- albeit a
strange and distant branch thereof.
Obviously they had not all been bathing, because their hair was dry and their
makeup fresh. There were terry robes, silk robes, Winnie-the-Pooh robes, long
plush robes, plain velvety robes, designer robes, kimonos and even a few
night-shirts on the cute and skinny. Also, many slippers, too many of them
high-heeled. Once she was sure her brain was okay, she edged up to a nearby
wingmate and mumbled, "Did I miss something? Everyone's in bathrobes!"
"Shit, don't ask me!" hissed the woman firmly. "I just took a shower, myself."
Looking down, Sarah saw that the woman was indeed clean of face and wet of
hair. She was shorter than average and compact but not overweight, with
pleasant strong features and black-brown hair that fell to her shoulders. Her
bathrobe was short, old and plain, with a clothesline for a sash.
"Oh, sorry," said Sarah. "So you did. Uh, I'm Sarah, and my bathrobe is blue."
"I know. President of the Student Government."
Sarah shrugged and tried not to look stuck-up.
"What's the story, you've never lived on one of these floors?" The other woman
seemed surprised.
"What do you mean, 'one of these floors?'"
She sighed. "Ah, look. I'm Hyacinth. I'll explain all this later. You want to
sit down? It'll be a long meeting." Hyacinth grasped Sarah's belt loop and led
her politely to the back row of chairs, where they sat a row behind the next
people up. Hyacinth turned sideways in her chair and examined Sarah minutely.
The Study Lounge was not a pretty place. Designed to be as cheery as a breath
mint commercial, it had aged into something not quite so nice. Windows ran
along one wall and looked out into the elevator lobby, where the four wings of
E12S came together. It was furnished with the standard public-area furniture
of the Plex: cubical chairs and cracker-box sofas made of rectangular beams
and slabs of foam covered in brilliant scratchy polyester. The carpet was a
membrane of compressed fibers, covered with the tats and cigarette-burns and
barfstains of years. Overhead, the ubiquitous banks of fluorescent lights
cheerfully beamed thousands of watts of pure bluish energy down onto the
inhabitants. Someone was always decorating the lounge, and this week the theme
was football; the decorations were cardboard cutouts of well-known cartoon
characters cavorting with footballs.
The only other nonrobed person in the place was the RA, Mitzi, who sat bolt
upright at the lace-covered card table in front, left hand still as a dead
bird In her lap, right hand three inches to the side of her jaw and bent back
parallel to the tabletop, fingers curled upward holding a ballpoint pen at a
jaunty but not vulgar forty-five-degree angle. She bore a fixed, almost manic
smile which as far as Sarah could tell had nothing to do with anything-- charm
school, perhaps, or strychnine poisoning. Mitzi wore an overly formal dress
and a kilogram of jewelry, and when she spoke, though not even her jawbone
moved, one mighty earring began to swing violently.
Among other things, Mitzi welcomed new "members." There were three: another
woman, Hyacinth and Sarah, introduced in that order. The first woman explained
that she was Sandi and she was into like education and stuff. Then came
Hyacinth; she was into apathy. She announced this loudly and they all laughed
and complimented Hyacinth on her sense of humor.
Sarah was introduced last, being famous. "What are you into, Sarah Jane?"
asked Mitzi. Sarah surveyed the glistening, fiercely smiling faces turned
round to aim at her.
"I'm into reality," she said. This brought delighted laughter, especially from
Hyacinth, who screamed like a sow.
The meeting then got underway. Hyacinth leaned back, crossed her arms and
tilted her head back until she was staring openmouthed at the ceiling. As the
meeting went on she combed her hair, bit her nails, played with loose threads
from her robe, cleaned her toes and so on. The thing was, Sarah found all
of this more interesting than the meeting itself. Sarah looked interested
until her face got tired. She had spoken in front of groups enough to know
that Mitzi could see them all clearly, and that to be obviously bored would
be rude. Sometimes politeness had to give way to sanity, though, and before
she knew it she found herself trying to swing the tassels at the ends of her
sleeves in opposite directions at the same time. Hyacinth watched this closely
and patted her on the back when she succeeded.
Mainly what they were doing was filling a huge social calendar with parties
and similar events. Sarah wanted to announce that she liked to do things by
herself or with a few friends, but she saw no diplomatic way of saying so. She
did resurface for the discussion of the theme for the Last Night party, the
social climax of the semester: Fantasy Island Nite.
"Wonder how they're going to tell it apart from all the other nights,"
grumbled Hyacinth. Nearby wingmates turned and smiled, failing to understand
but assuming that whatever Hyacinth said must be funny.
Another phase of the social master plan was to form an official sister/brother
relationship with the wing upstairs, known as the Wild and Crazy Guys. This in
turn led to the wing naming idea. After all, if E13S had a name for itself,
shouldn't E12S have one too? Mari Meegan, darling of the wing, made this
point, and "Yeah!"s zephyred up all around.
Sarah was feeling pretty sour by this point but said nothing. If they wanted a
name, fine. Then the ideas started coming out: Love Boat, for example.
"We could paint our lobby with a picture of the Love Boat like it looks at the
start of the show, and we could, you know, do everything, like parties and
stuff, with like that kind of a theme. Then on Fantasy Island Nite, we could
pretend the Boat was visiting Fantasy Island!"
This idea went over well and the meeting broke up into small discussions
about how to apply this theme to different phases of existence. Finally,
though, Sarah spoke up, and they all smiled and listened. "I'm not sure I like
that idea. There are plenty of creeps on the floor already, because we're
all-female. If we name it Love Boat, everyone will think it's some kind of
outcall massage service, and we'll never get a break."
Several seconds of silence. A few nods were seen, some "yeah"s heard, and Love
Boat was dead. More names were suggested, most of them obviously dumb, and
then Mari Meegan raised her hand. All quieted as her fingernails fluttered
like a burst of redhot flak above the crowd. "I know," she said.
There was silence save for the sound of Hyacinth's comb rushing through her
hair. Mari continued. "We can call ourselves 'Castle in the Air.' "
The lounge gusted with oohs and aahs.
"I like that."
"You're so creative, Mari."
"We could do a whole Dark Ages theme, you know, castles and knights and
shining armor."
"That's nice! Really nice!"
"Wait a sec." This came from Hyacinth.
At this some of the women were clearly exasperated, looking at the ceiling,
but most wore expressions of forced tolerance. Hyacinth continued flatly.
"Castle in the Air is derogatory. That means it's not-nice. When you talk
about a castle in the air, you mean something with no basis in reality. It's
like saying someone has her head in the clouds."
They all continued to stare morosely, as though she hadn't finished. Sarah
broke in. "You can call it anything you want. She is just making the point
that you're using an unflattering name." Mari was comforted by two friends. The
rest of them defended the name, nicely. "I never heard that."
"I think it sounds nice."
"Like a Barry Manilow song."
"Like one of those little Chinese poems."
"I always thought if your head was in the clouds, that was nice, like you were
really happy or something. Besides, castles are a neat theme for parties and
stuff-- can't you see Mark dressed up like a knight?" Giggles.
"And this way we can call ourselves the Airheads!" Screams of delight.
Hyacinth's objection having been thus obliterated, Castle In the Air was voted
In unanimously, with two abstentions, and it was decided that paints and
brushes would be bought and the wing would be painted in this theme during the
weeks to come. Presently the meeting adjourned.
"We've got forty minutes until the Candle Passing," observed Mitzi, "and until
then we can have a social hour. But not a whole hour"
The meeting dissolved into chattering fragments. Sarah leaned towards Hyacinth
to whisper in her ear, and Hyacinth tensed. They had been whispering to each
other in turns for the last half hour, and as both had ticklish ears this had
caused much hysterical lip-biting and snorting. Sarah did not really have to
whisper now, but it was her turn. "What candle passing?" she asked.
Hyacinth's attempt to whisper back was met by violent resistance from Sarah,
so they laughed and made a truce. "It's kind of complicated. It means
something personal happened between someone and her boyfriend, so everyone
else has to know about it. Listen. We've got to escape, okay?"
"Okay."
"Go to Room 103 when the alarm sounds."
"Alarm?" But Hyacinth was already gliding out.
Sarah was quickly trapped in a conversation group including Mitzi and Mari.
She accepted a cup of Kool-Aid/vodka punch and smiled when she could. Everyone
was being nice to her in case she felt like an idiot for having said those
things during the meeting. Mari asked if her boyfriend helped out with the
hard parts of being President and Sarah had to say that just now she didn't
have a boyfriend.
"Ahaa!" said everyone. "Don't worry, Sarah, we'll see what we can come up
with. No prob, now you're an Airhead."
Sarah was groping for an answer when the local smoke alarm howled and the
Airheads moaned in disappointment. As they all trooped off to their rooms
to make themselves a little more presentable, Sarah headed for Room 103,
following a heavy trail of marijuana smoke with her nose. As this was only the
smoke alarm, only the twelfth floor would be evacuated.
Hyacinth pulled Sarah into the room and carefully fitted a wet reefer to her
lips. It was dark, and a young black woman was slumped over a desk asleep,
stereo on loud. Hyacinth Went to the vent window and released an amazing
primal scream toward F Tower. After some prompting from her hostess, Sarah
gave back the joint and followed suit. Hyacinth's Sleeping roommate, Lucy, sat
up, sighed, then went over and lay down on her bed. Sarah and Hyacinth sat on
Hyacinth's bed and drank milk from an illegal mini-fridge in the closet.
They silently finished the joint, shaking their heads at each other and
laughing in disbelief.
"Ever done LSD?" asked Sarah.
"No. Why? Got some?"
"Oh. jeez, I wasn't suggesting it. I was going to say, for a minute there I
thought I was back on it. That's how unreal those people are to me."
"You think they're strange?" said Hyacinth. "I think they're very normal."
"That's what I'm afraid of. Your room is pretty nice; I feel very much at
home here." It was a nice room, one of the few Plex rooms I ever saw that was
pleasant to be in. It was full of illegal cooking appliances and stashes of
food, and the walls had been illegally painted white. Wall hangings and plants
were everywhere.
"Well, we were in the Army-- Lucy and me," said Hyacinth, carefully fitting a
roach clip. "That's almost like LSD." By now their wing had been evacuated,
and a couple of security guards were plodding up and down the hallways
pretending to inspect for sources of smoke. Sarah and Hyacinth leaned together
and spoke quietly.
"You're not real presidential," said Hyacinth. "People like you aren't
supposed to take LSD."
"I don't take it anymore. See, back when I was about fourteen, my older sister
was really into it, and I did it a few times."
"Why'd you stop?"
Sarah squinted into the milk carton and said nothing. Outside, the guards
cursed to each other about students in general. Sarah finally said, "I kept an
eye on my sister, and when she got cut loose completely-- lost track of what
was real and stopped caring-- I saw it wasn't a healthy thing."
"So now you're President. I don't get it."
"The important thing is to get your life anchored in something. I think
you have to make contact with the world in some way, and one way is to get
involved."
"Student government?"
"Well, it beats MTV."
A guard beat on their door, attracted by the stereo-noise. "Screw off," said
Hyacinth in a loud stage whisper, flipping the bird toward the door. Sarah
put her face in her hands and bent double with suppressed laughter. When she
recovered, the guard had left and Hyacinth was smiling brightly.
"Jeezus!" said Sarah, "you're pretty blatant, aren't you?"
"If it's the quiet, polite type you want, go see the Air-heads."
"You've lived with people like this before. Why don't they kick you off
the wing?"
"Tokenism. They have to have tokens. Lucy is their token black, I'm their
token individual. They love having a loudmouth around to disagree with them--
makes them feel diverse."
"You don't think diplomacy would be more effective?" I'm not a diplomat. I'm
me. Who are you?"
Instead of answering this difficult question, Sarah leaned back comfortably
against the wall and closed her eyes. They listened to music for a long time
as the Airheads breezed back onto the wing. "I'd feel relaxed," said Sarah,
"except I'm actually kind of guilty about missing the Candle Passing."
"That's ridiculous."
"You're right. You can say that and be totally sure of yourself, can't you? I
admire you, Hyacinth."
"I like you, Sarah," said Hyacinth, and that summed it up.
In the Physics Library, Casimir Radon read about quantum mechanics. The
digital watch on the wrist of the sleeping post-doc across the table read
8:00. That meant it was time to go upstairs and visit Professor Emeritus
Walter Abraham Sharon, who worked odd hours. Casimir was not leaving just
yet, though. He had found that Sharon was not the swiftest man in the world,
and though the professor was by no means annoyed when Casimir showed up on
time, Casimir preferred to come ten minutes late. Anyway, in the informal
atmosphere of the Physics Department, appointments were viewed with a certain
Heisenbergian skepticism, as though being in the right place at the right time
would involve breaking a natural law and was therefore impossible to begin
with. Outside the picture windows of the library, the ghettos of the City were
filled with smoky light, and occasionally a meteor streaked past and crashed
in flames in the access lot below. They were not actual meteors, but merely
various objects soaked in lighter fluid, ignited and thrown from a floor in E
Tower above, trailing fire and debris as they zoomed earthward.
Casimir found this perversely comforting. It was just the sort of insanity
he hadn't been able to get away from during his first week at American
Megaversity. Soon the miserable Casimir had taken me up on my offer to stop by
at any time, showing up at my door just before midnight, wanting to cry but
not about to. I took coffee, he took vodka, and soon we understood each other
a little better. As he explained it, no one here had the least consideration
for others, or the least ability to think for themselves, and this combination
was hard to take after having been an adult. Nor had academics given him any
solace; owing to the medieval tempo of the bureaucracy, he was still mired in
kindergarten-level physics. Of course he could speed these courses up just by
being there. Whenever a professor asked a question, rhetorical or not, Casimir
shouted the answer immediately. This earned him the hatred and awe of his
classmates, but it was his only source of satisfaction. As he waited for his
situation to become sensible, he sat in on the classes he really wanted to
take, in effect taking a double load.
"Because I'm sure Sharon is going to bring me justice," Casimir had declared,
raising his voice above a grumble for the first time. "This guy makes sense!
He's like you, and I can't understand how he ended up in this place. I never
thought I'd be surprised by someone just because he is a sensible and a good
guy, but in this place it's a miracle. He c. out me, asks questions about my
life-- it's as though discovering what's best for me is a research project
we're working on as a team. I can't believe a great man like him would care."
Long, somber pause. "But I don't think even he can make up for what's wrong
with this place. How about you, Bud? You're normal. What are you doing here?"
Lacking an answer, I changed the subject to basketball.
A trio of meteors streaked across the picture windows and it was 8:10. Casimir
returned his book and exited into the dark shiny hail. He was now at the upper
limit of the Burrows, the bloc of the Plex that housed the natural sciences.
Two floors above him, on the sixth and top floor of the base, was Emeritus
Row, the plush offices of the academic superstars. He made his way there
leisurely, knowing he was welcome.
Emeritus Row was dark and silent, illuminated only by the streak of warm
yellow splashed away from Sharon's door. Casimir removed his glacier glasses.
"Come in," came the melodious answer to his knock, and Casimir Radon entered
his favorite room in the world.
Sharon looked at him with raised eyebrows. "Veil! You haff made a decision?"
"I think so."
"Let's have it! Leaving or staying? For the sake of physics I hope the
latter."
Casimir abruptly realized he had not really made up his mind. He shoved his
hands into his pockets and breathed deeply, a little surprised by all this.
He could not keep a smile from his face, though, and could not ignore the
hominess of Sharon's chaotic office. He announced that he was going to stay.
"Good, good," Sharon said absently. "Clear a place to sit." He gestured at a
chair and Casimir set about removing thirty Pounds of high-energy physics from
it. Sharon said, "So you've decided to cross the Rubicon, eh?"
Casimir sat down, thought about it, and said with a half grin, "Or the Styx,
whichever the case may be."
Sharon nodded, and as he did a resounding thump issued from above. Casimir
jumped, but Sharon did not react.
"What was that?" Casimir asked. "Sounded big."
"Ach," said Sharon. "Throwing furniture again, I should guess. You know, don't
you, that many of our students are very interested in the physics of falling
bodies?" He delivered this, like all his bad jokes, slowly and solemnly, as
though working out long calculations in his head. Casimir chuckled. Sharon
winked and lit his pipe. "I am given to understand, from grapevine talk, that
you are smarter than all of our professors except for me." He winked again
through thick smoke.
"Oh. Well, I doubt it."
"Ach, I don't. No correlation between age and intelligence! You're just afraid
to use your smarts! That's right. You'd rather suffer-- it is your Polish
blood. Anyway, you have much practical experience. Our professors have only
book experience."
"Well, it's the book experience I want. It's handy to know electronics, but
what I really like is pure principles. I can make more money designing
circuits, if that's what I want."
"Exactly! You prefer to be a poor physicist. Well, I cannot argue with you
wanting to know pure things. After all, you are not naоve, your life has been
no more sheltered than mine."
Embarrassed, Casimir laughed. "I don't know about that. I haven't lived
through any world wars yet. You've lived through two. I may have escaped
from a slum, but you escaped from Peenemunde with a suitcase full of rocket
diagrams."
Sharon's eyes crinkled at the corners. "Yet. A very important word, nicht
wahr? You are not very old, yet."
"What do you mean? Do you expect a war?"
Sharon laughed deeply and slowly. "I have toured your residential towers with
certain students of mine, and I was reminded of certain, er, locations during
the occupation of the Sudetenland. I think from what I see"-- the ceiling
thumped again, and he gestured upward with his pipestem -- "and hear, that
perhaps you are in a war now."
Casimir laughed, but then sucked in his breath and sat back as Sharon glowered
at him morosely. The old professor was very complicated, and Casimir always
seemed to be taking missteps with him.
"War and violence are not very funny," said Sharon, "unless they happen to
you-- then they are funny because they haff to be. There is more violence up
there than you realize! Even speech today has become a form of violence-- even
in the university. So pay attention to that, and don't worry about a war in
Europe. Worry about it here, this is your home now."
"Yes, sir." After pausing respectfully, Casimir withdrew a clipboard from his
pack and put It on Sharon's desk. "Or it will be my home as soon as you sign
these forms. Mrs. Santucci will tear my arms off if I don't bring them in
tomorrow."
Sharon sat still until Casimir began to feel uncomfortable. "Ja," he finally
said, "I guess you need to worry about forms too. Forms and forms and forms.
Doesn't matter to me."
"Oh. It doesn't? You aren't retiring, are you?"
"Ja, I guess so."
Silently, Sharon separated the forms and laid them out on the Periodic Table
of the Elements that covered his desk. He examined them with care for a
few minutes, then selected a pen from a stein on his desk, which had been
autographed by Enrico Fermi and Niels Bohr, and signed them.
"There, you're in the good courses now," he concluded. "Good to see you are so
well Socioeconomically Integrated." The old man sat back in his chair, clasped
his fingers over his flat chest, and closed his eyes.
A thunderous crash and Casimir was on the floor, dust in his throat and pea
gravel on his back. Rubble thudded down from above and Casimir heard a loud
inharmonious piano chord, which held steady for a moment and moaned downward
in pitch until it was obliterated by an explosive splintering crack. More
rubble flew around the room and he was pelted with small blocks. Looking down
as he rubbed dust from his eyes he saw scores of strewn black and white piano
keys.
Sharon was slumped over on his desk, and a trickle of blood ran from his head
and onto the back of his hand and puddled on the class change form beside his
pipe. Gravel, rainwater and litter continued to slide down through the hole in
the ceiling. Casimir alternately screamed and gulped as he staggered to his
feet. lie waded through shattered ceiling panels and twisted books to Sharon's
side and saw with horror that the old man's side had been pierced by a shard
of piano frame shot out like an arrow in the explosion. With exquisite care
he helped him lean back, cleared the desk of books and junk, then picked up
his thin body and set him atop the desk. He propped up Sharon's head with the
1938 issues of the Physical Review and tried to ease his breathing. The head
wound was superficial and already clotting, but the side wound was ghastly
and Casimir did not even know whether to remove the splinter. Blood built up
at the corners of Sharon's mouth as he gasped and wheezed. Brushing tears and
dirt from his own face, Casimir looked for the phone.
He started away as a small bat fluttered past.
"Troglodyte! No manners! This is what you're supposed to see!" Casimir whirled
to see Bert Nix plunging from the open door toward Sharon's desk. Casimir
tried to head him off, fearing some kind of attack, but Bert Nix stopped short
and pointed triumphantly to Sharon. Casimir turned to look. Sharon was gazing
at him dully through half-shut eyes, and weakly pounding his finger into a
spot on the tabletop. Casimir leaned over and looked. Sharon was pointing at
the Table of the Elements, indicating the box for Oxygen.
"Oxygen! Oh two! Get it?" shouted Bert Nix.
Bill Benson, Security Guard 5, was arguing with a friend whether it was
possible that F.D.R. committed suicide when the emergency line rang. He let
it ring four times. Since ninety-nine calls out of a hundred were pranks, by
letting each one ring four times he was delaying the true emergency calls by
an average of only four one-hundredths of a ring apiece-- nothing compared
with the time it took to respond. Anyway, fed up with kids getting stoned
at parties and falling on the way out to barf and spraining their wrists,
then (through some miracle of temporary clearheadedness) calling Emergency
and trying to articulate their problems through a hallucinogenic miasma
while monster stereos in the background threatened to uncurl his phone cord.
Eventually, though, he did pick up the phone, holding the earpiece several
inches from his head in case it was another of those goddamn Stalinist
whistle-blasters.
"Listen," came the voice, sounding distant, "I've got to have some oxygen. Do
you have some there? It's an emergency!" Oh, shit, Did he have to get this
call every night? He listened for a few more seconds. "It's an oxygen freak,"
he said to his friend, covering the mouthpiece with his hand.
"Oxygen freak? What do they do with oxygen?"
Benson swung his feet down from the counter, put the receiver in his lap,
and explained. "See, nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, is the big thing. They
breathe it through masks, like for surgery. But if you breathe it pure you'll
kick in no time, because you got to have oxygen. And they are so crazy about
laughing gas they don't want to take off that mask even to breathe, so they
like to get some oxygen to mix with it so that they can sit there all goddamn
night long and breathe nothing else and get blasted out of their little minds.
So we always get these calls."
He picked up the receiver again, took a puff on his cigar, exhaled slowly.
"Hello?" he said, hoping the poor gas-crazed sap had hung up.
"Yeah? When will it be here?"
"Cripes!" Bill Benson shouted, "look, guy, hang it up. We don't have any and
you aren't allowed to have it."
"Well, shit then, come up here and help me. Call an ambulance! For God's sake,
a man's dying here."
Some of these kids were such cretins, how did they make it into college?
Money, probably. "Listen, use your head, kid," he said, not unkindly. "We're
the Emergency Services desk. We can't leave our posts. What would happen if
there was an emergency while we were gone?"
This was answered by silence; but in the background, Benson could just make
out another voice, which sounded familiar: "You should have listened to what
he was trying to tell you! He wasn't farting around! We had to sack the
Cartography Department to afford him. And you don't listen!"
"Shut up!" shouted the gas freak.
"Hey, is that Bert? Is that Bert Nix on the phone?" asked Bill Benson. "Where
are you, kid?"
"Emeritus Row!' shouted the kid, and dropped the phone. Bill Benson continued
to listen after the BONKITY-BONK of the phone's impact, trying to make sure
it was really good old Bert Nix. I think he heard this poem; on the news, he
claimed he heard a poem, and it could well have been this, which Bert Nix
quoted regularly and liked to write on the walls:
Tenuring and tenuring in the ivory tower!
The flagon cannot fill the flagoneers.
Krupp cuts a fart! The sphinxter cannot hold
Dear academe, our Lusitanta, recoils.
The time-limned dons are noosed. With airy webs
The cerebrally infarcted bring me down.
The East affects conscription, while the curst
Are gulled with Fashionate Propensities.
Shrilly, sum reevaluation is demanded.
Earlier-reckoned commencement is programmed!
What fecund mumming! Outly ward those words hard
When a glassed grimace on an animal Monday
Rumbles at night; unaware that the plans aren't deserved
Escapists' lie-panoply aims to head off the Fan.
A sign frank and witless as the Sun
Is mute in the skies, yet from it are shouted
Real shadows of endogenous deserted words.
The concrete drops down in; but know I now
That thirty-storied stone steel keeps
When next the might of Air are rooks unstable.
What buff be; its towers coming down deglassed
Slumps amid Bedlam in the morn?
"Holy shit!" cried Bill Benson. "Bert? Is that you? Hell, maybe something's
up. Sam, punch me onto line six there and Ill see if I can raise the folks
down at nine-one-one."
Casimir was careening through the halls, cursing himself for having had to
leave Sharon alone with a derelict, adrenaline blasting through him as he
imagined coming back to find the old man dead. He didn't know how he was going
to open the door when he got where he was going, but at the moment it did not
matter because no slab of wood and plastic, it seemed, could stand in his way.
He veered around a corner, smashing into a tail young man who had been coming
the other way. They both sprawled dazed on the floor, but Casimir rolled and
sprang to his feet and resumed running. The man he had collided with caught up
with him, and he realized that it was Virgil Gabrielsen, King of the Burrows.
"Virgil! Did you hear that?"
"Yeah, I was coming to check it out. What's up?"
"Piano fell into Sharon's office... pierced lung... oxygen." "Right," said
Virgil, and skidded to a stop, fishing a key from his pocket. He master-keyed
his way into a lab and they sent a grad student sprawling against a workbench
as they made for the gas canisters. Casimir grabbed a bottle-cart and they
feverishly strapped the big cylinder onto it, then wheeled it heavily out the
door and back toward Sharon.
"Shit," said Virgil, "no freight elevator. No way to get it upstairs." They
were at the base of the stairs, two floors below Sharon. The oxygen was
about five feet tall and one foot in diameter, and crammed with hundreds of
pounds of extremely high-pressure gas. Virgil was still thinking about it
when Casimir, a bony and unhealthy looking man, bear-hugged the canister,
straightened up, and hoisted it to his shoulder as he would a roll of carpet.
He took the stairs two at a time, Virgil bounding along behind.
Shortly, Casimir had slammed the cylinder down on the floor near Sharon. Bert
Nix was holding Sharon's hand, mumbling and occasionally making the sign of
the cross. As Virgil closed the door, Casimir held the top valve at arm's
length, buried one ear in his shoulder, and opened it up. Virgil just had time
to plug his ears.