fucks!" She had let herself go, it was the only thing she could do. In a way
it felt great to bellow and cry and rage and scare the hell out of them; this
was the first contact with reality these women had had in years. "This is
rape! And I'm entitled to protect myself from it! And I will!"
She had stepped over the line. It was now okay to hate Sarah, and several took
the opportunity, laughing out loud to each other. Mari did not. "Sarah! Jeez,
you don't have to take it so serious! You'll feel better later on. We've got
some punch for you in the Lounge. We were just letting you in to the wing. We
didn't think you were going to get so upset."
"Yeah."
"Yeah."
"Yeah."
"Well, I'm real sorry, excuse me, but I am going to take it seriously because
anyone who can't see why it's serious has bad, bad problems and needs to get
straightened out. If you think you're doing this because it's natural and fun,
you aren't thinking too fucking hard."
"But, Jeez, Sarah," said Mari, hardly believing anyone could be so weird,
"it's for the better. We've all been through it together now and we're all
sisters. We're all an equal family together. We were just welcoming you in."
"The whole purpose of a fucking university is not so that you can come and be
just like everyone else. I'm not equal to you people, never will be, don't
want to be, I don't want to be anyone's sister, I don't want your activities,
all I want is a decent place to live where I can be Sarah Jane Johnson, and
not be equalized... by a mob.. . of little powderpuff terrorists... who just
can't stand differentness because they're too stupid to understand it! What
goes on in your heads? Haven't you ever seen the diversity of... of nature?
Stop laughing. Look, you think this is funny? The next time you do this,
someone is going to get hurt very badly." She looked down at the little drops
of blood on the floor, dripping from her hand, and suddenly felt cleansed. She
clenched the fist and held it up. "Understand?"
They had been smug at her wild anger. Now they were scared and disgusted
and their makeup lay on their appalled skin like blood on snow. Most fled,
hysterically grossed out.
"Gag me green!"
"Barf me blue!"
Mari averted her gaze from this gore. "Well, that's okay if you want to give
all of this up. But I don't think it's like rape. I mean, we all scream a lot
and stuff, and we don't really want them to do it, if you know what I mean,
but when they do it's fun after all. So for us it's just sort of wild and
exciting, and for the guys, it helps them work off steam. You know what I
mean?"
"No! Get out! Don't fuck with my life!" That was a lie-- she did know
exactly what Mari meant. But she had just realized she could never let herself
think that way again. Mari sadly floated out, sniffling. Sarah, alone now,
washed her hair again (though it had not been a "dirty swirlie") and retreated
to her room, a little ill in a gag-me-green sort of way, yet filled with a
tingling sense of sureness and power. She was not harassed anymore. Word had
gone out. Sarah had gotten additional punishment and was not to be bothered.
The door opened slightly, and a dazzling splinter of fluorescent light shot
out across the dusky linoleum. Within the room it was still. The door opened a
bit more. "Spike? It's me. Don't try to get out, kittycat."
Now the door opened all the way and a tall skinny figure stepped in quickly,
shut the door, and turned on a dim reading lamp. "Spike, are you sleeping?
What did you get into this time?" He found the kitten under his bed, next to
the overturned rat-poison tray that was not supposed to be there. Spike had
only been dead for a few minutes, and his body was still so warm that Casimir
thought he could be cuddled back to life. He sat on the floor by his bed and
rocked Spike for a while, then stopped and let the tiny corpse down into his
lap.
A convulsion took his diaphragm and his lungs emptied themselves in jolts.
He twisted around, breathless, hung on his elbows on the bed's edge, finally
sucked in a wisp of air and sobbed it out again. He rolled onto the bed and
the sobs came faster and louder. He pulled his pillow into his face and
screamed and sobbed for longer than he could keep track of. Into his lumpy
little standard-issue American Megaversity pillow he shuddered it all out:
Sharon, Spike, the desecration of his academic dream, his loneliness.
When he pulled himself together he was drained and queasy but curiously
relaxed. He put Spike in a garbage bag and slid him into an empty calculator
box, which he taped shut. Cradling it, he stared out the window. Around
him in even ranks rose the thousands of windows of the towers, and to his
tear-blurred vision it was as though he stood in a forest aflame "Spike," he
said, "What the hell should I do with myself?
"Yeah. Okay. That's what it's going to be.
"Well, Spike, now I have to do something unbelievably great. Something
impossible. Something these scum are too dumb even to imagine. To hell with
grades. There are much fairer ways of showing how smart you are. I'm smarter
than all of these fuckers, rules aside."
He cranked his vent window open. Outside a Tower War was raging: students
shouting to one another, shining lights and lasers into one another's rooms,
blaring their stereos across the gulfs. Now the countertenor cry of Casimir
Radon rode in above the tumult.
"You can make it as hard as you want, as hard as you can, but I'm going to be
the cleverest bastard this place has ever seen! I can make idiots of you all,
damn it!"
"Fuck you!" came a long-drawn-out scream from F Tower. It was precisely what
Casimir wanted to hear. He shut his window and sat in darkness to think.
At four in the morning the wing was quiet except for Sarah, who was up,
preparing her laundry. It was not necessary to do it at four in the morning--
one could find open machines as late as six or seven-- but this was Sarah's
time of day. At this time she could walk the halls like something supernatural
(or as she put it, "something natural, in a place that is sub-natural"). In
the corridors she would meet the stupid gotten-up-to-urinate, staggering
half-dead for the bathroom, and they'd squint at her-- clothed, up and
bright-- as though she were a moonbeam that had worked its way around their
room to splash upon their faces. The ultra-late partiers, crushed by alcohol,
floated, belched and slurred along in glitzy boogie dress, and the fresh and
sober Sarah, in soft clothes and tennis shoes, could dance through them before
they had even recognized her presence. The brightest nerds and premeds riding
the elevators home from all-nighters were so thick with sleep they could
hardly stand, much less appreciate the time of day. A dozen or so hard-core
athletes liked to rise as early as Sarah, and when she encountered them they
would nod happily and go their separate ways.
Being up at four in the morning was akin to being in the wilderness. It was as
close to the outside world as you could get without leaving the Plex. The rest
of the day, the harsh artificiality of the place ruled the atmosphere and the
unwitting inhabitants, but the calm purity of the predawn had a way of seeping
through the cinderblocks and pervading the place for an hour or so.
"Screw the laundry," is what she finally said. She had plenty of clean
clothes.
She was kneeling amid a heap of white cottons, and the grim brackishness of
her room was all around her. Suddenly she could not stand it. Laundry would
not make the room seem decent, and she had to do something that would.
Out in the wing it was easy to find the leftover paints and brushes. The
Castle in the Air paintings were just now getting their finishing touches. She
found the supplies in a storage closet and brought them to her room.
Normally this would have been a quick and dirty process, but the spirit of
four in the morning made her placid. She moved the furniture away from the
walls and in a few minutes had the floor, door, windows and furniture covered
with a Sunday New York Times. It looked better already.
The Castle in the Air, as will later be described, was a sickly yellow,
floating on white clouds in a blue sky. By mixing cloud-color with
Castle-color and a bit of Bambi-color (on the ground under the Castle, Bambis
cavorted) she made a mellow creamy paint. This she applied to the walls and
ceiling with a roller. It was breakfast-time. She wasn't hungry.
Sky-color and castle-color made green. She splayed open a cardboard box and
made it into a giant palette, mixing up every shade of green she could devise
and smearing them around to create an infinite variety. Then she began to dab
away on one wall with no particular plan or goal.
The light fixture was in the middle of the wall. She paused, thinking of the
dire consequences, then sighed blissfully and slapped it all over with thick
green daubs.
By noon the wall was covered with pied green splotches ranging from
almost-black to yellow. It was not a bad approximation of a forest in the sun,
but it lacked fine detail and branches. She had long since decided to cut all
her classes. She left her room for the first time since sunrise and started
riding the 'vators toward the shopping mall. She felt great.
"Doin' some paintin'?" asked a doe-eyed woman in leg warmers. Plastered with
paint, Sarah nodded, beaming. "Doin' your room?"
"Yep."
"Yeah. So did we. We did ours all really high-tech. Lots of glow-colors. How
bout you? Lotsa green?"
"Of course," said Sarah, "I'm making it look like the outside. So I don't
forget."
At the Sears in the Mall she got matte black paint and smaller brushes. She
returned to her room, passing the Cafeteria, where thousands stood in line for
something that smelled of onions and salt and hot fat, Sarah had not eaten in
twenty-four hours and felt great-- it was a day to fast. Back in her room she
cleared away a Times page announcing a coup in Africa and sat on her bed to
contemplate her forest. Infinitely better than the old wall, yet still just
a rude beginning-- every patch of color could be subdivided into a hundred
shades and crisscrossed with black branches to hold it all up. She knew she'd
never finish it, but that was fine. That was the idea.
Casimir immediately went into action. He had already daydreamed up this
plan, and to organize the first stages of Project Spike did not take long.
Since Sharon had sunk completely into a coma, Casimir had taken over the old
professor's lab in the Burrows, spending so much time there that he stored a
sleeping bag in the closet so he could stay overnight.
This evening-- Day Three-- he had found six rats crowded into his box trap
near the Cafeteria. Judging from the quantity of poison scattered around
this area, they were of a highly resistant strain. In the lab, he donned
heavy gloves, opened the trap, forced himself to grab a rat, pulled it out
and slammed shut the lid. This was a physics. not a biology, lab and so his
methods were crude. He pressed the rat against the counter and stunned it with
a piece of copper tubing, then held it underwater until dead.
He laid it on a bare plank and set before him an encyclopedia volume he had
stolen from the Library, opened to a page which showed a diagram of the rat's
anatomy. Weighing it open with a hunk of lead radiation shield, he took out
a single-edged razor and went to work on the little beast. In twenty minutes
he had the liver out. In an hour he had six rat livers in a beaker and six
liverless rat corpses in the wastebasket, swathed in plastic. He put the
livers in a mortar and ground them to a pulp, poured in some alcohol, and
filtered the resulting soup until it was clear.
Next morning he visited the Science Shop, where Virgil Gabrielsen was fixing
up a chromatograph that would enable Casimir to find out what chemicals were
contained in the rat liver extract. "We're ready for your mysterious test,"
said Virgil. "Hope you don't mind."
"I love working with mad scientists-- never dull. What's that?" "Mostly grain
alcohol. This machine will answer your question, though, if it's fixed."
A few hours later they had the results: a strip of paper with a line squiggled
across it by the machine. Virgil compared this graph with similar ones from a
long skinny book.
"Shit," said Virgil, showing rare surprise. "I didn't think anything could
live with this much Thalphene in its guts. Thalphene! These things have
incredible immunities."
"What is it? I don't know anything about chemistry." "Trade name for
thallium phenoxide." Virgil crossed his arms and looked at the ceiling.
"Dangerous Properties of Industrial Materials, my favorite bedtime reading,
says this about thallium compounds. I abbreviate. 'Used in rat poison and
depilatories ... results in swelling of feet and legs, arthralgia, vomiting.
insomnia, hyperaesthesia and paresthesia of hands and feet, mental confusion,
polyneuritis with severe pains in legs and loins, partial paralysis and
degeneration of legs, angina, nephritis, wasting, weakness ... complete loss
of hair . . ha! Fatal poisoning has been known to occur.'"
"No kidding!"
"Under phenols we have.. . 'where death is delayed, damage to kidneys, liver,
pancreas, spleen, edema of the lungs, headache, dizziness, weakness, dimness
of vision, loss of consciousness, vomiting, severe abdominal pain, corrosion
of lips, mouth, throat, esophagus and stomach'."
"Okay, I get the idea."
"And that doesn't account for synergistic effects. These rats eat the stuff
all the time."
"So they go through a lot of rat poison, these rats do."
"It looks to me," said Virgil, "as though they live on it. But if you don't
mind my prying, why do you care?"
Casimir was slightly embarrassed, but he knew Virgil's secret, so it was only
fair to bare his own. "In order for Project Spike to work, they have to be
heavy rat-poison eaters. I'm going to collect rat poison off the floors and
expose it to the slow neutron source in Sharon's lab. It's a little chunk of
a beryllium isotope on a piece of plutonium, heavily shielded in paraffin--
looks like a garbage can on wheels. Paraffin stops slow neutrons, see. Anyway,
when I expose the rat poison to the neutrons, some of the carbon in the poison
will turn to Carbon- 14. Carbon- 14 is used in dating. of course, so there are
plenty of machines around to detect small amounts of it. Anyway, I set this
tagged poison out near the Cafeteria. Then I analyze samples of Cafeteria food
for unusually high levels of Carbon- 14. If I get a high reading. .
"It means rats in the food."
"Either rats, or their hair or feces."
"That's awesome blackmail material, Casimir. I wouldn't have thought it of
you.
Casimir looked up at Virgil, shocked and confused. After a few seconds he
seemed to understand what Virgil had meant. "Oh, well, I guess that's true.
The thing is, I'm not that interested in blackmail. It wouldn't get me
anything. I just want to do this, and publicize the results. The main thing is
the challenge."
A rare full grin was on Virgil's face. "Damn good, Casimir, That's marvelous.
Nice work." He thought it over, taken with the idea. "You'll have the biggest
gun in the Plex, you know."
"That's not what I'm after with this project."
"Let me know if I can help. Hey, you want to go downstairs to the Denny's
for lunch? I don't want to eat in the Cafeteria while I'm thinking about the
nature of your experiment."
"I don't want to eat at all, after what I've just been doing," said Casimir.
"But maybe later on we can dissolve our own livers in ethanol." He put the
beaker of rat potion in a hazardous-waste bin, logged down its contents, and
they departed.
And lest anyone get the wrong idea, a disclaimer: I did not know about this
while it was going on. They told me about it later. The people who have
claimed I bear some responsibility for what happened later do not know the
facts.
"What makes you think you can just play a record?" said Ephraim Klein in a
keen, irritated voice. "I'm listening to harpsichord music,"
"Oh," John Wesley Fenrick said innocently. "I didn't hear it. I guess my ears
must have gone bad from all my terrible music, huh?" "Looks that way."
"But it's okay, I'm not going to play a record."
"I should hope not."
"I'm going to play a tape." Fenrick brushed his finger against an invisible
region on the surface of the System, and lights lit and meters wafted up and
down. The mere sound of Silence, reproduced by this machine, nearly drowned
out the harpsichord, a restored 1783 Prussian model with the most exquisite
lute stop Klein had ever heard. Fenrick turned on the Go Big Red Fan, which
began to chunk away as usual.
"Look," said Ephraim Klein, "I said I was playing something. You can't just
bust in."
"Well," said John Wesley Fenrick, "I said I can't hear it. If I don't hear any
evidence that you are playing something, there's no reason I should take your
word for it. You obviously have a distorted idea of reality."
"Prick! Asshole!" But Klein had already pulled out one of his war tapes,
the "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" as performed by Virgil Fox (what Fenrick
called "horror movie music") and snapped it into his own tape deck. He set the
tape rolling and prepared to switch from PHONO to TAPE at the first hint of
offensive action from Fenrick.
It was not long in coming. Fenrick had been sinking into a Heavy Metal
retrospective recently, and entered the competition with Back in Black by
AC/DC. Klein watched Fenrick's hands carefully and was barely able to squeeze
out a lead, the organist hitting the high mordant at the opening of the piece
before the ensuing fancy notes were stomped into the sonic dust by Back in
Black.
From there the battle raged typically. A hundred feet down the hall, I stuck
my head out the door to have a look. Angel, the enormous Cuban who lived
on our floor, had been standing out in the hallway for about half an hour
furiously pounding on the wall with his boxing gloves, laboriously lengthening
a crack he had started in the first week of the semester. When I looked, he
was just in the act of hurling open the door to Klein and Fenrick's room;
dense, choking clouds of music whirled down the corridor at Mach 1 and struck
me full in the face.
I started running. By the time I had arrived, Angel had wrapped Fenrick's
long extension cord around the doorknob, held it with his boxing gloves, put
his foot against the door, and pulled it apart with a thick blue spark and
a shower of fire. The extension cord shorted out and smoked briefly until
circuit breakers shut down all public-area power to the wing.
AC/DC went dead, clearing the air for the climax of the fugue. Angel walked
past the petrified Ephraim Klein and pawed at the tape deck, trying to get
at the tape. Frustrated by the boxing gloves, he turned and readied a mighty
kick into the cone of a sub-woofer, when finally I arrived and tackled him
onto a bed. Angel relaxed and sat up, occasionally pounding his bright-red
cinderblock-scarred gloves together with meaty thwats, sweating like the boxer
he was, glowering at the Go Big Red Fan.
The fugue ended and Ephraim shut off the tape. I went over and closed the
door. "Okay, guys, time for a little talk. Everyone want to have a little
talk?"
John Wesley Fenrick looked out the window, already bored, and nodded almost
imperceptibly. Ephraim Klein jumped to his feet and yelled, "Sure, sure,
anytime! I'm happy to be reasonable!" Angel, who was unlacing his right boxing
glove with his teeth, mumbled, "I been talking to them for two months and they
don't do shit about it."
"Hmm," I said, "I guess that tells the story, doesn't it? If you two refuse
to be reasonable, Angel doesn't have to be reasonable either. Now it seems to
me you need a set of rules that you can refer to when you're arguing about
stereo rights. For instance, if one guy goes to pee, the other can't seize air
rights. You can't touch each other's property, and so on. Ephraim, give me
your typewriter and we'll get this down."
So we made the Rules and I taped them to the wall, straddling the boundary
line of the room. "Does that mean I only have to follow the Rules on my half
of the page," asked Fenrick, so I took it down and made a new Rule saying that
these were merely typed representations of abstract Rules that were applicable
no matter where the typed representations were displayed. Then I had the two
sign the Rules, and hinted again that I just didn't know what Angel might do
if they made any more noise. Then Angel and I went down to my place and had
some beers. Law, and the hope of silence and order, had been established on
our wing.
--November--
Fred Fine was trying to decide whether to lob his last tactical nuke into
Novosibirsk or Tomsk when a frantic plebe bounced up and interrupted the
simulation with a Priority Five message. Of course it was Priority Five; how
else could a plebe have dared interrupt Fred Fine's march to the Ob'? "Fred,
sir," he gasped. "Come quick, you won't believe it." "What's the situation?"
"That new guy. He's about to win World War II!"
"He is? But I thought he was playing the Axis!"
Fred Fine brushed past the plebe and strode into the next room. In its center,
two Ping-Pong tables had been pushed together to make room for the eight-piece
World War II map. On one side stood the tall, aquiline Virgil Gabrielsen--
the "new guy"-- and on the other, Chip Dixon shifted from foot to foot and
snapped his fingers incessantly, Because this was the first wargame Virgil had
ever played, he was still only a Private, and held Plebe status. Chip Dixon, a
Colonel, had been gaming for six years and was playing the Allies, for God's
sake! Usually the only thing at question in this game was how many Allied
divisions the Axis could consume before Berlin inevitably fell.
At the end of the map, where the lines of longitude theoretically converged
to make the North Pole, Consuela Gorm, Referee, sat on a loveseat atop a
sturdy table. On the small stand before her she riffled occasionally through
the inch-thick rule book, punched away at her personal computer, made notes on
scratch paper and peered down at Europe with a tiny pair of opera glasses.
Surrounding the tables were twenty other garners who had come to observe the
carnage shortly after Virgil had V-2'd Birmingham into gravel. Many stood on
chairs, using field glasses of their own, and one geek was tottering around
the area on a pair of stilts, loudly and repeatedly joking that he was a Nazi
spy satellite. The attention of all was focused on tens of thousands of little
cardboard squares meticulously stacked on the hexagonally patterned playing
field. The game had been on for nine and a half hours and Chip Dixon was
obviously losing it fast, popping Cheetos into his mouth faster than he could
grind them into paste with his hyperactive yellow molars, often gulping Diet
Pepsi and hiccuping. Virgil was calm, surveying the board through half-closed
eyes, hands behind back, lips slightly parted, wandering around in a world
inside his head, oblivious to the surrounding nerds. A hell of a warrior,
thought Fred Fine, and this only his first game!
"Here comes the Commander," shouted the guy on stilts as he rounded the
Japanese-occupied Aleutians, and the observers' circle parted so Fred Fine
could enter. Chip Dixon blushed vividly and looked away, moving his lips as he
cursed to himself. "Very interesting," said Fred Fine.
Great stacks of red cardboard squares surrounded Stalin-grad and Moscow, which
were protected only by pitiable little heaps of green squares. In Normandy an
enormous Nazi tank force was hurling the D-Day invasion back into the Channel
so forcefully that Fred Fine could almost hear the howl of the Werfers and
see the bodies fall screaming into the scarlet brine. In Holland, a Nazi
amphibious force made ready to assault Britain. In front of Virgil, lined up
on the edge of the table as trophies, sat the four Iowa-class battleships, the
Hornet, and other major ships of the American navy.
Chip Dixon was increasingly manic, his blood pressure Pumped to the hemhorrage
point by massive overdoses of salt and Diet Pepsi, his thirst insatiable
because of the nearly empty Jumbo Paic of Cheetos. Sweat dripped from his brow
and fell like acid rain on Scandinavia. He bent over and tried to move a stack
of recently mobilized Russians toward Moscow, but as he shoved one point of
his tweezers under the stack he hiccupped violently and ended up scattering
them all over the Ukraine. "Shit!" he screamed, dashing a Cheeto to the floor.
"I'm sorry, Consuela, I forget which hex it was on."
Consuela did not react for several seconds, and the reflection of the rule
book in her glasses gave her an ominous, inscrutable look. Everyone was still
and apprehensive. "Okay," she said in soft, level tones, "that unit got lost
in the woods and can't find its way out for another turn."
"Wait!" yelled Chip Dixon. "That's not in the Rules!" "It's okay," said Virgil
patiently. "That stack contained units A2567, A2668, A4002, and 126789, and
was on hex number 1,254.908. However, unit A2567 clashed with Axis A1009 last
turn, so has only half movement this turn-- three hexes."
Cowed, Chip Dixon breathed deeply (Fred Fine's suggestion) and reassembled
the stack. Unit A2567 was left far behind to deal with a unit of about twenty
King Tiger Tanks which was blasting unopposed up the Dniepr. Chip Dixon then
straightened up and thought for about five minutes, ruffling through his notes
for a misplaced page. Consuela made a gradated series of noises intended to
convey rising impatience. "Listen, Chip, you're already way over the time
limit. Done?"
"Yeah, I guess."
"Any engagements?"
"No, not this turn. But wait 'til you see what's coming." Okay, Virgil, your
turn."
Virgil reached out with a long probe and quickly shoved stacks of cardboard
from place to place; from time to time a move would generate a gasp from the
crowd. He then ticked off a list of engagements, giving Consuela data on what
each stack contained, what its combat strength was, when it had last fought
and so forth. When it was over, an hour later, there was long applause from
the membership of MARS. Chip Dixon had sunk to the floor to sulk over a tepid
Cola.
"Incredible," someone yelled, "you conquered Stalingrad and Moscow and
defeated D-Day and landed in Scotland and Argentina all at the same time!"
At this point Chip Dixon, who had refused to concede, stood up and blew most
of the little cardboard squares away in a blizzard of military might. Fred
Fine was angry but controlled. "Chip, ten demerits for that. I ought to bust
you down to Second Looie for that display. Just for that, you get to put the
game away. And organize it right." Chastened, Chip and two of his admirers
set about sorting all of the pieces of cardboard and fitting them into the
appropriate recesses in the injection-molded World War II carrying case. Fred
Fine turned his attention to Virgil.
"A tremendous victory." He drew his fencing foil and tapped Virgil once on
each shoulder as Virgil looked on skeptically. "I name you a Colonel in MARS.
It's quite a jump, but a battlefield commission is obviously in order."
"Oh, not really," said Virgil, bored. "It's more a matter of a good memory
than anything else."
"You're modest. I like that in a man."
"No, just accurate. I like that."
Fred Fine now drew Virgil aside, away from the dozen or so wargame aficionados
who were still gaping at one another and pounding their heads dramatically
on the walls. The massively corpulent Consuela was helped down from her
eleven-hour perch by several straining MARS officials, and began to roll
toward them like a globule of quicksilver.
"Virgil," said Fred Fine quietly, "you're obviously a special kind of man.
We need men like you for our advanced games. These board games are actually
somewhat repetitive, as you pointed out. Want a little more excitement next
time?"
Virgil drew away. "What do you have in mind?"
"You've heard of Dungeons and Dragons?" A gleam came to Fred Fine's eye, and
he glanced conspiratorially at Consuela. "Sure. Someone designs a hypothetical
dungeon on graph paper, puts different monsters and treasure in the rooms, and
each player has a character which he sends through it, trying to take as much
treasure as possible. Right?"
"Oh, only in its crudest, simplest forms, Virgil," said Consuela. "This one
and his friends prefer a more active version." "Sewers and Serpents," said
Consuela, nodding happily. "The idea is the same as D & D, but we use a real
place, and real costumes, and act it all out. Much more realistic. You see,
beneath the Plex is a network of sewer tunnels."
"Yeah, I know," said Virgil. "I've got the blueprints for this place
memorized, remember."
Fred Fine was taken aback. "How?"
"Computer drew them for me."
"Well, we'd have to give you a character who had some good reason for knowing
his way around the tunnels."
"Like maybe, uh," said Consuela, eyes rolled up, "maybe he happened to see
a duel between some hero who had just come out of the Dungeon of Plexor"--
"That's what we call the tunnels," said Fred Fine.
-- "and some powerful nonsentient beast such as a gronth, and the gronth
killed the hero, and then Virgil's character came and found a map on his body
and memorized it."
"Or we could make him a computer expert in TechnoPlexor who got a peek at
the plans the same way Virgil did "Excuse me a sec, but what do you do for
monsters?" asked Virgil.
"Well we don t have real ones. We just have to pretend and use the official
S & S rules, developed by MARS through a constitutional process over several
years. We maintain two-way radio contact with our referee, Consuela, who
stays in the Plex and runs the adventure through a computer program we've
got worked out. The computer also performs statistical combat simulation."
"So you slog around in the shit, and the computer says you're being attacked
by monsters, and she reads it off the CRT and says that according to the
computer you've lost a finger, or the monster's dead, that sort of thing?"
"Well, it's more exciting than you make it sound, and the Dungeon Mistress
makes it better by amplifying the description generated by the computer. I
recommend you try it. We've got an outing in a couple of weeks."
"I don't know, Fred, it's not my cup of tea. I'll think about it, but don't
count on my coming."
"That's fine. Consuela just needs to know a few hours ahead of time so she can
have SHEKONDAR-- the computer program-- prepare a character for you."
Virgil assented to everything, nodded a lot, said he'd be getting back to them
and hurried out, shaking his head in amazed disgust. Unlikely as it seemed,
this place could still surprise him.
My involvement with Student Government was due to my being
faculty-in-residence. I served as a kind of minister without portfolio,
investigating whatever topic interested me at the moment, talking to students,
faculty and administrators, and contributing to governmental discussions the
point of view of an older, supposedly wiser observer. As I had no idea what
was going on at the Big U until much later, my contributions can't have done
much good. I did visit the Castle in the Air on several occasions, anyway, and
whenever I did I was presented with a visual display in three stages.
The first was a prominent mural on the wall of the Study Lounge, clearly
visible through the windows from the elevator lobby. Even if I had been
visiting one of E12's other wings, therefore, I couldn't have failed to
notice that E12S was a wing among wings. Here, as described, the Castle was
painted in yellow-- not a typical color for castles, but much nicer than
realistic gray or brown. The Castle, stolen directly from a book of Disney
illustrations, floated on a cloud that looked like a stomped marshmallow,
not a thunderhead, Seemingly too meager to support its load. Below, more
Disney characters frolicked on an undulating green lawn, a combined golf
course/cartoon character refuge with no sand traps, one water hazard and no
visible greens. The book of illustrations was not large, and each character
was shown in only one or two poses which had to be copied over and over again
in populating this great lawn. Monotony had rendered the painters somewhat
desperate-- what was that penguin doing there? And why had they included that
evil gray wolf, wagging his red tongue at the stiff cloned Bambis from behind
a spherical shrub? But most agreed that the mural was nice-- indeed, so nice
that "nice" was no longer adequate by itself; in describing it, Airheads had
to amplify the word by saying it many, many times and making large gestures
with their hands.
The second stage of the presentation was the entryways -- two identical
portals, one at the beginning of each of the wing's two hallways. Here, at
the fire doors by the Study Lounge, the halls had been framed in thick wooden
beams-- actually papier-mбchиd boxes-- decorated with plastic flowers and
welcoming messages. The fire doors themselves had been covered with paper
and painted so that, when they were closed, I could see what looked like a
stairway of light yellow stone rising up from the floor and continuing skyward
until further view was blocked by the beam along the ceiling.
Going through these doors, and therefore up the symbolic stair, I found myself
in a light yellow corridor gridded with thin wavy black lines supposed to
represent joints between the great yellow building-stones of which the Castle
was constructed. These were closely spaced in the first part of the hallway,
but the crew had found this work tedious and decided that in the back sections
much larger stones were used to build the walls. Here and there, torches, fake
paintings, suits of armor and the like were painted on the walls.
Each individual room, then, was the province of the occupants, who could turn
it into any fantasy-land they wanted. One or two of them painted murals on
paper and pasted them to their doors. These murals purported to be windows
looking down on the scene below, an artistic challenge too great for most of
them.
On each visit to Sarah, then, I was introduced to the Castle in the Air in
the manner of a TV viewer. The elevator doors would fade out and there sat
the Castle on its cloud, viewed through a screen of glass. The view would
then switch to a traveling shot of the stairway leading up to the castle--
evidently a long one. Through the magic of video editing, the stair would
flatten, part and swing away, and I would be instantly jump-cut to the halls
of the Castle proper, where to confirm that it had all happened I could pause
at windows here and there and look down at the featureless plains from which I
had just ascended.
So much for the opening credits; what about the plot? The plot consisted
almost entirely of parties and tame sexual intrigue with the Terrorists.
The Airheads were not disturbed by the fact that their home was not much of
a castle -- the Terrorists or anyone else could invade at any time-- and
that far from being up in the air, it was squashed beneath nineteen other
Terrorist-infested floors. The Airheads got along by pretending that any man
who showed up on their floor was a white knight on beck and call. Certain evil
influences, though, could not be kept out by any amount of painting, and among
these was the fire alarm system.
Early in the morning of November the Fifth, Mari Meegan was ejected from her
chamber by three City firefighters investigating a full-tower fire alarm.
Versions differed as to whether the firefighters had used physical force, but
to the lawyers subsequently hired by Mari's father it did not matter; the
issue was the mental violence inflicted on Mari, who was forced to totter
down the stairway and join the sleepy throng below with only patches of
bright blue masque painted on her face.
This situation had not previously arisen because it usually took at least
half an hour between the ringing of the alarm and the arrival of the firemen
on their tour through the tower. Thirty minutes was time enough for Mari to
apply a quickie makeup job which would prevent her from looking "disgusting"
even during full moons outside, and, as the lawyers took pains to document
and photograph, her emergency thirty-minute face kit was set up and ready to
go on a corner of her dresser. Next to it was the masque container, which was
for "super emergencies"; given a severely limited time to prepare, she could
tear this open and paint a blue oval over her face that would serve partly to
disguise and partly to show those who recognized her that she cared about her
appearance. But on this particular morning, certain Terrorists from above had
demonstrated their mechanical aptitude by disabling the E12S alarm bell with
a pair of bolt cutters. The more distant ringing of the E12E bell had not
overborne the soft nocturnal beat of Mari's stereo, and by the time she had
realized what was happening, and energized the evening light simulation tubes
on her makeup center, the sirens were already wafting up from the Death Vortex
below.
The Fire Marshall was not amused. After a week's worth of rumors that
portrayed the Fire Marshall as a Nazi and a pervert, it was decreed that
henceforth during fire drills the RAs would go door-to-door with their master
keys and make sure everyone left their rooms immediately. This grim ruling
inspired a wing meeting at which Hyacinth wearily suggested they all purchase
ski masks, since it was getting cold outside anyway, and wear them down to the
street during fire drills. "Stay together and you will be totally anonymous,
by which I mean no one will know who you are, or what you look like at three
in the morning." The Airheads appointed Teri, a Fashion Merchandising major to
pick out ski masks with a suitable color scheme.
In private Hyacinth came up with an acronym for them: SWAMPers. This meant
that as a bare minimum they found it necessary to Shave Wash Anoint Make up
and Perfume all parts of their body at least once a day. Their insistence
on doing this often made Sarah wonder about her own appearance-- her use
of cosmetics was minimal-- but Hyacinth and I and everyone else assured
her she looked fine. When preparing for the long nasty Student Government
budget meeting in early November Sarah looked briefly through her shoebox of
miscellaneous cosmetics then shoved it under the bed again. She had greater
things to worry about.
As for clothes, it came down to a choice between her most businesslike outfit,
a grey wool skirt suit, and a somewhat brighter dress. She picked the suit,
though she knew it would lay her open to accusations of fascism from the
Stalinist Underground Battalion (SUB), wound her hair into a bun, and steeled
herself for madness.
The SUB got there an hour before anyone else and had their banners planted
and their rabid handouts sown before the Government even showed up. We met
in the only room we could find that was reasonably private. Behind us came
the TV crews, and then the reporters from the Monoplex Monitor and the
People's Truth Publication, who sat in the first row, right in front of the
Stalinists. Finally Lecture Auditorium 3 filled up with supplicants from
various organizations, all deeply shocked and dismayed at how little funding
they were receiving, all bearing proposed amendments.
First we slogged through the parliamentary trivia, including a bit of
"new business" in which the SUB introduced a resolution to condemn the
administration for massive human rights violations and to call for its
abolition. Then we came to the real purpose of the meeting: amendments to the
proposed budget. A line formed behind the microphone on the stage, and at its
head was a SUB member. "I move." he said, "that we pass no budget at all,
because the budget has to be approved by the administration, and so we haven't
got any control over our own activity money." On cue, behind the press corps,
eight SUBbies rose to their feet bearing a long banner: TAKE BACK CONTROL
OF STUDENT ACTIVITIES CAPITAL FROM THE KRUPP JUNTA. "The money's ours, the
money's ours, the money's ours . ."
We had expected all this and Sarah was undisturbed. She sat back from her
microphone and took a sip of water. letting the media record the event for
the ages. Once that was done she gaveled a few times and talked them back
into their seats. She was about to start talking again when the last standing
SUBbie shouted, "Student Government is a tool of the Krupp cadre!"
Behind him, most of the audience shouted things like "eat rocks" and "shut up"
and "shove it."
"If you're finished interfering with the democratic process," Sarah said,
"this tool would like to get on with the budget. We have a lot to do and
everyone needs to be very, very brief." Student Government was made up of the
Student Senate, which represented each of the 200 residential wings of the
Plex, and the Activities Council, comprising representatives from each. of the
funded student organizations, numbering about 150. The distribution of funds
among the Activities Council members was decided on by a joint session, which
was our goal for the evening.
The Student Senate was crammed with SUBbies and members of an outlaw Mormon
splinter group called the Temple of Unlimited Godhead (TUG). Each of these
groups claimed to represent all the students. As Sarah explained, no one in
his right mind was interested in running for Student Senate, explaining why it
was filled with fanatics and political science majors. Fortunately, SUB and
TUG canceled each other out almost perfectly.
"I'm tired of having all aspects of my life ruled by this administration that
doesn't give a shit for human rights, and I think it's time to do something
about it," said the first speaker. There was a little applause from the front
and lots of jeering. A hum filled the air as the TUG began to OMMMM
at middle
C-- a sort of sonic tonic which was said to clear the air of foul influences
and encourage spiritual peace; overhead, a solitary bat, attracted by the
hum, swooped down from a perch in the ceiling and flitted around, occasioning
shrieks and violent motion from the people it buzzed. "At this university we
don't have free speech, we don't have academic freedom, we don't even have
power over our own money!"
At the insistence of the audience, Sarah broke in after a few minutes. "If
you've got any specific human rights violations you're concerned about, there
are some international organizations you can go to, but there's not much the
Student Senate can do. So I suggest you go live somewhere else and let someone
else propose an amendment."
Shocked and devastated, the speaker gaped at Sarah as the TV lights slammed
into action. He held the stare for several seconds to allow the camera
operators to focus and adjust light level, then surveyed the cheering and
OMming crowd, face filled with bewilderment and shock.
"I don't believe this," he said, staring into the lenses. "Who says we have
freedom of speech? My God, I've come up here to express a free opinion, and
just because I am opposed to fascism, the President of the Student Government
tries to throw me out of the Plex! My home! That's right, if these different
people don't like being oppressed, just throw them out of their homes into
the dangerous city! I didn't think this kind of savagery was supposed to
exist in a university." He shook his head in noble sadness, surveyed the
derisive crowd defiantly, and marched away from the mike to grateful applause.
Below, he answered questions from the media while the next student came to the
microphone.
He looked like a male cheerleader for a parochial school football team, being
handsome, well groomed, and slightly pimpled. As he took possession of the
mike the OM stopped. He kept his eye on a middle-aged fellow standing in the
aisle not far away, who in turn watched the SUBbie's press conference in front
of the stage. Finally the older gentleman held up three fingers. The TUGgie
shoved his fist between his arm and body and spoke loudly and sharply into the
mike.
"I'd like to announce that I have caught a bat here in my hand, and now
I'm going to bite the head off it right here as a sacrifice to the God of
Communism."
Below, the SUBbie found himself in absolute darkness, and tripped over a power
cord. Simultaneously the TUGgie squinted as all lights were swung around to
bear on him. He smiled and began to talk in a calm chantlike voice. "Well,
well, well. I've got a confession. I'm not really going to bite the head off
a bat, because I don't even have one, and I'm not a Communist." There was now
a patter of what sounded like canned TV laughter from the TUG section. "I
just did that as a little demonstration, to show you folks how easy it is to
get the attention of the media. We can come and talk about serious issues and
do real things, but what gets TV coverage are violent eye-catching events, a
thing which the Communists who wish to destroy our society understand very
well. But I'm not here to give a speech, I'm here to propose an amendment. .
." Here he was dive-bombed by the bat, who veered away at the last moment;
the speaker jumped back in horror, to the amusement of almost everyone. The
TUGgies laughed too, showing that, yes, they did have a sense of humor no
matter what people said. The speaker struggled to regain his composure.
"The speech! Resume the speech! The amendment!" shouted the older man.
"My budget proposal is that we take away all funding for the Stalinist
Underground Battalion and distribute it among the other activities groups."
The lecture hall exploded in outraged chanting, uproarious applause, and OM.
Sarah sat for about fifteen seconds with her chin in her hand, then began
smashing the gavel again. I was seated off to the side of the stage, poised to
act as the strong-but-lovable authority figure, but did not have to stand up;
it felt great to bellow and cry and rage and scare the hell out of them; this
was the first contact with reality these women had had in years. "This is
rape! And I'm entitled to protect myself from it! And I will!"
She had stepped over the line. It was now okay to hate Sarah, and several took
the opportunity, laughing out loud to each other. Mari did not. "Sarah! Jeez,
you don't have to take it so serious! You'll feel better later on. We've got
some punch for you in the Lounge. We were just letting you in to the wing. We
didn't think you were going to get so upset."
"Yeah."
"Yeah."
"Yeah."
"Well, I'm real sorry, excuse me, but I am going to take it seriously because
anyone who can't see why it's serious has bad, bad problems and needs to get
straightened out. If you think you're doing this because it's natural and fun,
you aren't thinking too fucking hard."
"But, Jeez, Sarah," said Mari, hardly believing anyone could be so weird,
"it's for the better. We've all been through it together now and we're all
sisters. We're all an equal family together. We were just welcoming you in."
"The whole purpose of a fucking university is not so that you can come and be
just like everyone else. I'm not equal to you people, never will be, don't
want to be, I don't want to be anyone's sister, I don't want your activities,
all I want is a decent place to live where I can be Sarah Jane Johnson, and
not be equalized... by a mob.. . of little powderpuff terrorists... who just
can't stand differentness because they're too stupid to understand it! What
goes on in your heads? Haven't you ever seen the diversity of... of nature?
Stop laughing. Look, you think this is funny? The next time you do this,
someone is going to get hurt very badly." She looked down at the little drops
of blood on the floor, dripping from her hand, and suddenly felt cleansed. She
clenched the fist and held it up. "Understand?"
They had been smug at her wild anger. Now they were scared and disgusted
and their makeup lay on their appalled skin like blood on snow. Most fled,
hysterically grossed out.
"Gag me green!"
"Barf me blue!"
Mari averted her gaze from this gore. "Well, that's okay if you want to give
all of this up. But I don't think it's like rape. I mean, we all scream a lot
and stuff, and we don't really want them to do it, if you know what I mean,
but when they do it's fun after all. So for us it's just sort of wild and
exciting, and for the guys, it helps them work off steam. You know what I
mean?"
"No! Get out! Don't fuck with my life!" That was a lie-- she did know
exactly what Mari meant. But she had just realized she could never let herself
think that way again. Mari sadly floated out, sniffling. Sarah, alone now,
washed her hair again (though it had not been a "dirty swirlie") and retreated
to her room, a little ill in a gag-me-green sort of way, yet filled with a
tingling sense of sureness and power. She was not harassed anymore. Word had
gone out. Sarah had gotten additional punishment and was not to be bothered.
The door opened slightly, and a dazzling splinter of fluorescent light shot
out across the dusky linoleum. Within the room it was still. The door opened a
bit more. "Spike? It's me. Don't try to get out, kittycat."
Now the door opened all the way and a tall skinny figure stepped in quickly,
shut the door, and turned on a dim reading lamp. "Spike, are you sleeping?
What did you get into this time?" He found the kitten under his bed, next to
the overturned rat-poison tray that was not supposed to be there. Spike had
only been dead for a few minutes, and his body was still so warm that Casimir
thought he could be cuddled back to life. He sat on the floor by his bed and
rocked Spike for a while, then stopped and let the tiny corpse down into his
lap.
A convulsion took his diaphragm and his lungs emptied themselves in jolts.
He twisted around, breathless, hung on his elbows on the bed's edge, finally
sucked in a wisp of air and sobbed it out again. He rolled onto the bed and
the sobs came faster and louder. He pulled his pillow into his face and
screamed and sobbed for longer than he could keep track of. Into his lumpy
little standard-issue American Megaversity pillow he shuddered it all out:
Sharon, Spike, the desecration of his academic dream, his loneliness.
When he pulled himself together he was drained and queasy but curiously
relaxed. He put Spike in a garbage bag and slid him into an empty calculator
box, which he taped shut. Cradling it, he stared out the window. Around
him in even ranks rose the thousands of windows of the towers, and to his
tear-blurred vision it was as though he stood in a forest aflame "Spike," he
said, "What the hell should I do with myself?
"Yeah. Okay. That's what it's going to be.
"Well, Spike, now I have to do something unbelievably great. Something
impossible. Something these scum are too dumb even to imagine. To hell with
grades. There are much fairer ways of showing how smart you are. I'm smarter
than all of these fuckers, rules aside."
He cranked his vent window open. Outside a Tower War was raging: students
shouting to one another, shining lights and lasers into one another's rooms,
blaring their stereos across the gulfs. Now the countertenor cry of Casimir
Radon rode in above the tumult.
"You can make it as hard as you want, as hard as you can, but I'm going to be
the cleverest bastard this place has ever seen! I can make idiots of you all,
damn it!"
"Fuck you!" came a long-drawn-out scream from F Tower. It was precisely what
Casimir wanted to hear. He shut his window and sat in darkness to think.
At four in the morning the wing was quiet except for Sarah, who was up,
preparing her laundry. It was not necessary to do it at four in the morning--
one could find open machines as late as six or seven-- but this was Sarah's
time of day. At this time she could walk the halls like something supernatural
(or as she put it, "something natural, in a place that is sub-natural"). In
the corridors she would meet the stupid gotten-up-to-urinate, staggering
half-dead for the bathroom, and they'd squint at her-- clothed, up and
bright-- as though she were a moonbeam that had worked its way around their
room to splash upon their faces. The ultra-late partiers, crushed by alcohol,
floated, belched and slurred along in glitzy boogie dress, and the fresh and
sober Sarah, in soft clothes and tennis shoes, could dance through them before
they had even recognized her presence. The brightest nerds and premeds riding
the elevators home from all-nighters were so thick with sleep they could
hardly stand, much less appreciate the time of day. A dozen or so hard-core
athletes liked to rise as early as Sarah, and when she encountered them they
would nod happily and go their separate ways.
Being up at four in the morning was akin to being in the wilderness. It was as
close to the outside world as you could get without leaving the Plex. The rest
of the day, the harsh artificiality of the place ruled the atmosphere and the
unwitting inhabitants, but the calm purity of the predawn had a way of seeping
through the cinderblocks and pervading the place for an hour or so.
"Screw the laundry," is what she finally said. She had plenty of clean
clothes.
She was kneeling amid a heap of white cottons, and the grim brackishness of
her room was all around her. Suddenly she could not stand it. Laundry would
not make the room seem decent, and she had to do something that would.
Out in the wing it was easy to find the leftover paints and brushes. The
Castle in the Air paintings were just now getting their finishing touches. She
found the supplies in a storage closet and brought them to her room.
Normally this would have been a quick and dirty process, but the spirit of
four in the morning made her placid. She moved the furniture away from the
walls and in a few minutes had the floor, door, windows and furniture covered
with a Sunday New York Times. It looked better already.
The Castle in the Air, as will later be described, was a sickly yellow,
floating on white clouds in a blue sky. By mixing cloud-color with
Castle-color and a bit of Bambi-color (on the ground under the Castle, Bambis
cavorted) she made a mellow creamy paint. This she applied to the walls and
ceiling with a roller. It was breakfast-time. She wasn't hungry.
Sky-color and castle-color made green. She splayed open a cardboard box and
made it into a giant palette, mixing up every shade of green she could devise
and smearing them around to create an infinite variety. Then she began to dab
away on one wall with no particular plan or goal.
The light fixture was in the middle of the wall. She paused, thinking of the
dire consequences, then sighed blissfully and slapped it all over with thick
green daubs.
By noon the wall was covered with pied green splotches ranging from
almost-black to yellow. It was not a bad approximation of a forest in the sun,
but it lacked fine detail and branches. She had long since decided to cut all
her classes. She left her room for the first time since sunrise and started
riding the 'vators toward the shopping mall. She felt great.
"Doin' some paintin'?" asked a doe-eyed woman in leg warmers. Plastered with
paint, Sarah nodded, beaming. "Doin' your room?"
"Yep."
"Yeah. So did we. We did ours all really high-tech. Lots of glow-colors. How
bout you? Lotsa green?"
"Of course," said Sarah, "I'm making it look like the outside. So I don't
forget."
At the Sears in the Mall she got matte black paint and smaller brushes. She
returned to her room, passing the Cafeteria, where thousands stood in line for
something that smelled of onions and salt and hot fat, Sarah had not eaten in
twenty-four hours and felt great-- it was a day to fast. Back in her room she
cleared away a Times page announcing a coup in Africa and sat on her bed to
contemplate her forest. Infinitely better than the old wall, yet still just
a rude beginning-- every patch of color could be subdivided into a hundred
shades and crisscrossed with black branches to hold it all up. She knew she'd
never finish it, but that was fine. That was the idea.
Casimir immediately went into action. He had already daydreamed up this
plan, and to organize the first stages of Project Spike did not take long.
Since Sharon had sunk completely into a coma, Casimir had taken over the old
professor's lab in the Burrows, spending so much time there that he stored a
sleeping bag in the closet so he could stay overnight.
This evening-- Day Three-- he had found six rats crowded into his box trap
near the Cafeteria. Judging from the quantity of poison scattered around
this area, they were of a highly resistant strain. In the lab, he donned
heavy gloves, opened the trap, forced himself to grab a rat, pulled it out
and slammed shut the lid. This was a physics. not a biology, lab and so his
methods were crude. He pressed the rat against the counter and stunned it with
a piece of copper tubing, then held it underwater until dead.
He laid it on a bare plank and set before him an encyclopedia volume he had
stolen from the Library, opened to a page which showed a diagram of the rat's
anatomy. Weighing it open with a hunk of lead radiation shield, he took out
a single-edged razor and went to work on the little beast. In twenty minutes
he had the liver out. In an hour he had six rat livers in a beaker and six
liverless rat corpses in the wastebasket, swathed in plastic. He put the
livers in a mortar and ground them to a pulp, poured in some alcohol, and
filtered the resulting soup until it was clear.
Next morning he visited the Science Shop, where Virgil Gabrielsen was fixing
up a chromatograph that would enable Casimir to find out what chemicals were
contained in the rat liver extract. "We're ready for your mysterious test,"
said Virgil. "Hope you don't mind."
"I love working with mad scientists-- never dull. What's that?" "Mostly grain
alcohol. This machine will answer your question, though, if it's fixed."
A few hours later they had the results: a strip of paper with a line squiggled
across it by the machine. Virgil compared this graph with similar ones from a
long skinny book.
"Shit," said Virgil, showing rare surprise. "I didn't think anything could
live with this much Thalphene in its guts. Thalphene! These things have
incredible immunities."
"What is it? I don't know anything about chemistry." "Trade name for
thallium phenoxide." Virgil crossed his arms and looked at the ceiling.
"Dangerous Properties of Industrial Materials, my favorite bedtime reading,
says this about thallium compounds. I abbreviate. 'Used in rat poison and
depilatories ... results in swelling of feet and legs, arthralgia, vomiting.
insomnia, hyperaesthesia and paresthesia of hands and feet, mental confusion,
polyneuritis with severe pains in legs and loins, partial paralysis and
degeneration of legs, angina, nephritis, wasting, weakness ... complete loss
of hair . . ha! Fatal poisoning has been known to occur.'"
"No kidding!"
"Under phenols we have.. . 'where death is delayed, damage to kidneys, liver,
pancreas, spleen, edema of the lungs, headache, dizziness, weakness, dimness
of vision, loss of consciousness, vomiting, severe abdominal pain, corrosion
of lips, mouth, throat, esophagus and stomach'."
"Okay, I get the idea."
"And that doesn't account for synergistic effects. These rats eat the stuff
all the time."
"So they go through a lot of rat poison, these rats do."
"It looks to me," said Virgil, "as though they live on it. But if you don't
mind my prying, why do you care?"
Casimir was slightly embarrassed, but he knew Virgil's secret, so it was only
fair to bare his own. "In order for Project Spike to work, they have to be
heavy rat-poison eaters. I'm going to collect rat poison off the floors and
expose it to the slow neutron source in Sharon's lab. It's a little chunk of
a beryllium isotope on a piece of plutonium, heavily shielded in paraffin--
looks like a garbage can on wheels. Paraffin stops slow neutrons, see. Anyway,
when I expose the rat poison to the neutrons, some of the carbon in the poison
will turn to Carbon- 14. Carbon- 14 is used in dating. of course, so there are
plenty of machines around to detect small amounts of it. Anyway, I set this
tagged poison out near the Cafeteria. Then I analyze samples of Cafeteria food
for unusually high levels of Carbon- 14. If I get a high reading. .
"It means rats in the food."
"Either rats, or their hair or feces."
"That's awesome blackmail material, Casimir. I wouldn't have thought it of
you.
Casimir looked up at Virgil, shocked and confused. After a few seconds he
seemed to understand what Virgil had meant. "Oh, well, I guess that's true.
The thing is, I'm not that interested in blackmail. It wouldn't get me
anything. I just want to do this, and publicize the results. The main thing is
the challenge."
A rare full grin was on Virgil's face. "Damn good, Casimir, That's marvelous.
Nice work." He thought it over, taken with the idea. "You'll have the biggest
gun in the Plex, you know."
"That's not what I'm after with this project."
"Let me know if I can help. Hey, you want to go downstairs to the Denny's
for lunch? I don't want to eat in the Cafeteria while I'm thinking about the
nature of your experiment."
"I don't want to eat at all, after what I've just been doing," said Casimir.
"But maybe later on we can dissolve our own livers in ethanol." He put the
beaker of rat potion in a hazardous-waste bin, logged down its contents, and
they departed.
And lest anyone get the wrong idea, a disclaimer: I did not know about this
while it was going on. They told me about it later. The people who have
claimed I bear some responsibility for what happened later do not know the
facts.
"What makes you think you can just play a record?" said Ephraim Klein in a
keen, irritated voice. "I'm listening to harpsichord music,"
"Oh," John Wesley Fenrick said innocently. "I didn't hear it. I guess my ears
must have gone bad from all my terrible music, huh?" "Looks that way."
"But it's okay, I'm not going to play a record."
"I should hope not."
"I'm going to play a tape." Fenrick brushed his finger against an invisible
region on the surface of the System, and lights lit and meters wafted up and
down. The mere sound of Silence, reproduced by this machine, nearly drowned
out the harpsichord, a restored 1783 Prussian model with the most exquisite
lute stop Klein had ever heard. Fenrick turned on the Go Big Red Fan, which
began to chunk away as usual.
"Look," said Ephraim Klein, "I said I was playing something. You can't just
bust in."
"Well," said John Wesley Fenrick, "I said I can't hear it. If I don't hear any
evidence that you are playing something, there's no reason I should take your
word for it. You obviously have a distorted idea of reality."
"Prick! Asshole!" But Klein had already pulled out one of his war tapes,
the "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" as performed by Virgil Fox (what Fenrick
called "horror movie music") and snapped it into his own tape deck. He set the
tape rolling and prepared to switch from PHONO to TAPE at the first hint of
offensive action from Fenrick.
It was not long in coming. Fenrick had been sinking into a Heavy Metal
retrospective recently, and entered the competition with Back in Black by
AC/DC. Klein watched Fenrick's hands carefully and was barely able to squeeze
out a lead, the organist hitting the high mordant at the opening of the piece
before the ensuing fancy notes were stomped into the sonic dust by Back in
Black.
From there the battle raged typically. A hundred feet down the hall, I stuck
my head out the door to have a look. Angel, the enormous Cuban who lived
on our floor, had been standing out in the hallway for about half an hour
furiously pounding on the wall with his boxing gloves, laboriously lengthening
a crack he had started in the first week of the semester. When I looked, he
was just in the act of hurling open the door to Klein and Fenrick's room;
dense, choking clouds of music whirled down the corridor at Mach 1 and struck
me full in the face.
I started running. By the time I had arrived, Angel had wrapped Fenrick's
long extension cord around the doorknob, held it with his boxing gloves, put
his foot against the door, and pulled it apart with a thick blue spark and
a shower of fire. The extension cord shorted out and smoked briefly until
circuit breakers shut down all public-area power to the wing.
AC/DC went dead, clearing the air for the climax of the fugue. Angel walked
past the petrified Ephraim Klein and pawed at the tape deck, trying to get
at the tape. Frustrated by the boxing gloves, he turned and readied a mighty
kick into the cone of a sub-woofer, when finally I arrived and tackled him
onto a bed. Angel relaxed and sat up, occasionally pounding his bright-red
cinderblock-scarred gloves together with meaty thwats, sweating like the boxer
he was, glowering at the Go Big Red Fan.
The fugue ended and Ephraim shut off the tape. I went over and closed the
door. "Okay, guys, time for a little talk. Everyone want to have a little
talk?"
John Wesley Fenrick looked out the window, already bored, and nodded almost
imperceptibly. Ephraim Klein jumped to his feet and yelled, "Sure, sure,
anytime! I'm happy to be reasonable!" Angel, who was unlacing his right boxing
glove with his teeth, mumbled, "I been talking to them for two months and they
don't do shit about it."
"Hmm," I said, "I guess that tells the story, doesn't it? If you two refuse
to be reasonable, Angel doesn't have to be reasonable either. Now it seems to
me you need a set of rules that you can refer to when you're arguing about
stereo rights. For instance, if one guy goes to pee, the other can't seize air
rights. You can't touch each other's property, and so on. Ephraim, give me
your typewriter and we'll get this down."
So we made the Rules and I taped them to the wall, straddling the boundary
line of the room. "Does that mean I only have to follow the Rules on my half
of the page," asked Fenrick, so I took it down and made a new Rule saying that
these were merely typed representations of abstract Rules that were applicable
no matter where the typed representations were displayed. Then I had the two
sign the Rules, and hinted again that I just didn't know what Angel might do
if they made any more noise. Then Angel and I went down to my place and had
some beers. Law, and the hope of silence and order, had been established on
our wing.
--November--
Fred Fine was trying to decide whether to lob his last tactical nuke into
Novosibirsk or Tomsk when a frantic plebe bounced up and interrupted the
simulation with a Priority Five message. Of course it was Priority Five; how
else could a plebe have dared interrupt Fred Fine's march to the Ob'? "Fred,
sir," he gasped. "Come quick, you won't believe it." "What's the situation?"
"That new guy. He's about to win World War II!"
"He is? But I thought he was playing the Axis!"
Fred Fine brushed past the plebe and strode into the next room. In its center,
two Ping-Pong tables had been pushed together to make room for the eight-piece
World War II map. On one side stood the tall, aquiline Virgil Gabrielsen--
the "new guy"-- and on the other, Chip Dixon shifted from foot to foot and
snapped his fingers incessantly, Because this was the first wargame Virgil had
ever played, he was still only a Private, and held Plebe status. Chip Dixon, a
Colonel, had been gaming for six years and was playing the Allies, for God's
sake! Usually the only thing at question in this game was how many Allied
divisions the Axis could consume before Berlin inevitably fell.
At the end of the map, where the lines of longitude theoretically converged
to make the North Pole, Consuela Gorm, Referee, sat on a loveseat atop a
sturdy table. On the small stand before her she riffled occasionally through
the inch-thick rule book, punched away at her personal computer, made notes on
scratch paper and peered down at Europe with a tiny pair of opera glasses.
Surrounding the tables were twenty other garners who had come to observe the
carnage shortly after Virgil had V-2'd Birmingham into gravel. Many stood on
chairs, using field glasses of their own, and one geek was tottering around
the area on a pair of stilts, loudly and repeatedly joking that he was a Nazi
spy satellite. The attention of all was focused on tens of thousands of little
cardboard squares meticulously stacked on the hexagonally patterned playing
field. The game had been on for nine and a half hours and Chip Dixon was
obviously losing it fast, popping Cheetos into his mouth faster than he could
grind them into paste with his hyperactive yellow molars, often gulping Diet
Pepsi and hiccuping. Virgil was calm, surveying the board through half-closed
eyes, hands behind back, lips slightly parted, wandering around in a world
inside his head, oblivious to the surrounding nerds. A hell of a warrior,
thought Fred Fine, and this only his first game!
"Here comes the Commander," shouted the guy on stilts as he rounded the
Japanese-occupied Aleutians, and the observers' circle parted so Fred Fine
could enter. Chip Dixon blushed vividly and looked away, moving his lips as he
cursed to himself. "Very interesting," said Fred Fine.
Great stacks of red cardboard squares surrounded Stalin-grad and Moscow, which
were protected only by pitiable little heaps of green squares. In Normandy an
enormous Nazi tank force was hurling the D-Day invasion back into the Channel
so forcefully that Fred Fine could almost hear the howl of the Werfers and
see the bodies fall screaming into the scarlet brine. In Holland, a Nazi
amphibious force made ready to assault Britain. In front of Virgil, lined up
on the edge of the table as trophies, sat the four Iowa-class battleships, the
Hornet, and other major ships of the American navy.
Chip Dixon was increasingly manic, his blood pressure Pumped to the hemhorrage
point by massive overdoses of salt and Diet Pepsi, his thirst insatiable
because of the nearly empty Jumbo Paic of Cheetos. Sweat dripped from his brow
and fell like acid rain on Scandinavia. He bent over and tried to move a stack
of recently mobilized Russians toward Moscow, but as he shoved one point of
his tweezers under the stack he hiccupped violently and ended up scattering
them all over the Ukraine. "Shit!" he screamed, dashing a Cheeto to the floor.
"I'm sorry, Consuela, I forget which hex it was on."
Consuela did not react for several seconds, and the reflection of the rule
book in her glasses gave her an ominous, inscrutable look. Everyone was still
and apprehensive. "Okay," she said in soft, level tones, "that unit got lost
in the woods and can't find its way out for another turn."
"Wait!" yelled Chip Dixon. "That's not in the Rules!" "It's okay," said Virgil
patiently. "That stack contained units A2567, A2668, A4002, and 126789, and
was on hex number 1,254.908. However, unit A2567 clashed with Axis A1009 last
turn, so has only half movement this turn-- three hexes."
Cowed, Chip Dixon breathed deeply (Fred Fine's suggestion) and reassembled
the stack. Unit A2567 was left far behind to deal with a unit of about twenty
King Tiger Tanks which was blasting unopposed up the Dniepr. Chip Dixon then
straightened up and thought for about five minutes, ruffling through his notes
for a misplaced page. Consuela made a gradated series of noises intended to
convey rising impatience. "Listen, Chip, you're already way over the time
limit. Done?"
"Yeah, I guess."
"Any engagements?"
"No, not this turn. But wait 'til you see what's coming." Okay, Virgil, your
turn."
Virgil reached out with a long probe and quickly shoved stacks of cardboard
from place to place; from time to time a move would generate a gasp from the
crowd. He then ticked off a list of engagements, giving Consuela data on what
each stack contained, what its combat strength was, when it had last fought
and so forth. When it was over, an hour later, there was long applause from
the membership of MARS. Chip Dixon had sunk to the floor to sulk over a tepid
Cola.
"Incredible," someone yelled, "you conquered Stalingrad and Moscow and
defeated D-Day and landed in Scotland and Argentina all at the same time!"
At this point Chip Dixon, who had refused to concede, stood up and blew most
of the little cardboard squares away in a blizzard of military might. Fred
Fine was angry but controlled. "Chip, ten demerits for that. I ought to bust
you down to Second Looie for that display. Just for that, you get to put the
game away. And organize it right." Chastened, Chip and two of his admirers
set about sorting all of the pieces of cardboard and fitting them into the
appropriate recesses in the injection-molded World War II carrying case. Fred
Fine turned his attention to Virgil.
"A tremendous victory." He drew his fencing foil and tapped Virgil once on
each shoulder as Virgil looked on skeptically. "I name you a Colonel in MARS.
It's quite a jump, but a battlefield commission is obviously in order."
"Oh, not really," said Virgil, bored. "It's more a matter of a good memory
than anything else."
"You're modest. I like that in a man."
"No, just accurate. I like that."
Fred Fine now drew Virgil aside, away from the dozen or so wargame aficionados
who were still gaping at one another and pounding their heads dramatically
on the walls. The massively corpulent Consuela was helped down from her
eleven-hour perch by several straining MARS officials, and began to roll
toward them like a globule of quicksilver.
"Virgil," said Fred Fine quietly, "you're obviously a special kind of man.
We need men like you for our advanced games. These board games are actually
somewhat repetitive, as you pointed out. Want a little more excitement next
time?"
Virgil drew away. "What do you have in mind?"
"You've heard of Dungeons and Dragons?" A gleam came to Fred Fine's eye, and
he glanced conspiratorially at Consuela. "Sure. Someone designs a hypothetical
dungeon on graph paper, puts different monsters and treasure in the rooms, and
each player has a character which he sends through it, trying to take as much
treasure as possible. Right?"
"Oh, only in its crudest, simplest forms, Virgil," said Consuela. "This one
and his friends prefer a more active version." "Sewers and Serpents," said
Consuela, nodding happily. "The idea is the same as D & D, but we use a real
place, and real costumes, and act it all out. Much more realistic. You see,
beneath the Plex is a network of sewer tunnels."
"Yeah, I know," said Virgil. "I've got the blueprints for this place
memorized, remember."
Fred Fine was taken aback. "How?"
"Computer drew them for me."
"Well, we'd have to give you a character who had some good reason for knowing
his way around the tunnels."
"Like maybe, uh," said Consuela, eyes rolled up, "maybe he happened to see
a duel between some hero who had just come out of the Dungeon of Plexor"--
"That's what we call the tunnels," said Fred Fine.
-- "and some powerful nonsentient beast such as a gronth, and the gronth
killed the hero, and then Virgil's character came and found a map on his body
and memorized it."
"Or we could make him a computer expert in TechnoPlexor who got a peek at
the plans the same way Virgil did "Excuse me a sec, but what do you do for
monsters?" asked Virgil.
"Well we don t have real ones. We just have to pretend and use the official
S & S rules, developed by MARS through a constitutional process over several
years. We maintain two-way radio contact with our referee, Consuela, who
stays in the Plex and runs the adventure through a computer program we've
got worked out. The computer also performs statistical combat simulation."
"So you slog around in the shit, and the computer says you're being attacked
by monsters, and she reads it off the CRT and says that according to the
computer you've lost a finger, or the monster's dead, that sort of thing?"
"Well, it's more exciting than you make it sound, and the Dungeon Mistress
makes it better by amplifying the description generated by the computer. I
recommend you try it. We've got an outing in a couple of weeks."
"I don't know, Fred, it's not my cup of tea. I'll think about it, but don't
count on my coming."
"That's fine. Consuela just needs to know a few hours ahead of time so she can
have SHEKONDAR-- the computer program-- prepare a character for you."
Virgil assented to everything, nodded a lot, said he'd be getting back to them
and hurried out, shaking his head in amazed disgust. Unlikely as it seemed,
this place could still surprise him.
My involvement with Student Government was due to my being
faculty-in-residence. I served as a kind of minister without portfolio,
investigating whatever topic interested me at the moment, talking to students,
faculty and administrators, and contributing to governmental discussions the
point of view of an older, supposedly wiser observer. As I had no idea what
was going on at the Big U until much later, my contributions can't have done
much good. I did visit the Castle in the Air on several occasions, anyway, and
whenever I did I was presented with a visual display in three stages.
The first was a prominent mural on the wall of the Study Lounge, clearly
visible through the windows from the elevator lobby. Even if I had been
visiting one of E12's other wings, therefore, I couldn't have failed to
notice that E12S was a wing among wings. Here, as described, the Castle was
painted in yellow-- not a typical color for castles, but much nicer than
realistic gray or brown. The Castle, stolen directly from a book of Disney
illustrations, floated on a cloud that looked like a stomped marshmallow,
not a thunderhead, Seemingly too meager to support its load. Below, more
Disney characters frolicked on an undulating green lawn, a combined golf
course/cartoon character refuge with no sand traps, one water hazard and no
visible greens. The book of illustrations was not large, and each character
was shown in only one or two poses which had to be copied over and over again
in populating this great lawn. Monotony had rendered the painters somewhat
desperate-- what was that penguin doing there? And why had they included that
evil gray wolf, wagging his red tongue at the stiff cloned Bambis from behind
a spherical shrub? But most agreed that the mural was nice-- indeed, so nice
that "nice" was no longer adequate by itself; in describing it, Airheads had
to amplify the word by saying it many, many times and making large gestures
with their hands.
The second stage of the presentation was the entryways -- two identical
portals, one at the beginning of each of the wing's two hallways. Here, at
the fire doors by the Study Lounge, the halls had been framed in thick wooden
beams-- actually papier-mбchиd boxes-- decorated with plastic flowers and
welcoming messages. The fire doors themselves had been covered with paper
and painted so that, when they were closed, I could see what looked like a
stairway of light yellow stone rising up from the floor and continuing skyward
until further view was blocked by the beam along the ceiling.
Going through these doors, and therefore up the symbolic stair, I found myself
in a light yellow corridor gridded with thin wavy black lines supposed to
represent joints between the great yellow building-stones of which the Castle
was constructed. These were closely spaced in the first part of the hallway,
but the crew had found this work tedious and decided that in the back sections
much larger stones were used to build the walls. Here and there, torches, fake
paintings, suits of armor and the like were painted on the walls.
Each individual room, then, was the province of the occupants, who could turn
it into any fantasy-land they wanted. One or two of them painted murals on
paper and pasted them to their doors. These murals purported to be windows
looking down on the scene below, an artistic challenge too great for most of
them.
On each visit to Sarah, then, I was introduced to the Castle in the Air in
the manner of a TV viewer. The elevator doors would fade out and there sat
the Castle on its cloud, viewed through a screen of glass. The view would
then switch to a traveling shot of the stairway leading up to the castle--
evidently a long one. Through the magic of video editing, the stair would
flatten, part and swing away, and I would be instantly jump-cut to the halls
of the Castle proper, where to confirm that it had all happened I could pause
at windows here and there and look down at the featureless plains from which I
had just ascended.
So much for the opening credits; what about the plot? The plot consisted
almost entirely of parties and tame sexual intrigue with the Terrorists.
The Airheads were not disturbed by the fact that their home was not much of
a castle -- the Terrorists or anyone else could invade at any time-- and
that far from being up in the air, it was squashed beneath nineteen other
Terrorist-infested floors. The Airheads got along by pretending that any man
who showed up on their floor was a white knight on beck and call. Certain evil
influences, though, could not be kept out by any amount of painting, and among
these was the fire alarm system.
Early in the morning of November the Fifth, Mari Meegan was ejected from her
chamber by three City firefighters investigating a full-tower fire alarm.
Versions differed as to whether the firefighters had used physical force, but
to the lawyers subsequently hired by Mari's father it did not matter; the
issue was the mental violence inflicted on Mari, who was forced to totter
down the stairway and join the sleepy throng below with only patches of
bright blue masque painted on her face.
This situation had not previously arisen because it usually took at least
half an hour between the ringing of the alarm and the arrival of the firemen
on their tour through the tower. Thirty minutes was time enough for Mari to
apply a quickie makeup job which would prevent her from looking "disgusting"
even during full moons outside, and, as the lawyers took pains to document
and photograph, her emergency thirty-minute face kit was set up and ready to
go on a corner of her dresser. Next to it was the masque container, which was
for "super emergencies"; given a severely limited time to prepare, she could
tear this open and paint a blue oval over her face that would serve partly to
disguise and partly to show those who recognized her that she cared about her
appearance. But on this particular morning, certain Terrorists from above had
demonstrated their mechanical aptitude by disabling the E12S alarm bell with
a pair of bolt cutters. The more distant ringing of the E12E bell had not
overborne the soft nocturnal beat of Mari's stereo, and by the time she had
realized what was happening, and energized the evening light simulation tubes
on her makeup center, the sirens were already wafting up from the Death Vortex
below.
The Fire Marshall was not amused. After a week's worth of rumors that
portrayed the Fire Marshall as a Nazi and a pervert, it was decreed that
henceforth during fire drills the RAs would go door-to-door with their master
keys and make sure everyone left their rooms immediately. This grim ruling
inspired a wing meeting at which Hyacinth wearily suggested they all purchase
ski masks, since it was getting cold outside anyway, and wear them down to the
street during fire drills. "Stay together and you will be totally anonymous,
by which I mean no one will know who you are, or what you look like at three
in the morning." The Airheads appointed Teri, a Fashion Merchandising major to
pick out ski masks with a suitable color scheme.
In private Hyacinth came up with an acronym for them: SWAMPers. This meant
that as a bare minimum they found it necessary to Shave Wash Anoint Make up
and Perfume all parts of their body at least once a day. Their insistence
on doing this often made Sarah wonder about her own appearance-- her use
of cosmetics was minimal-- but Hyacinth and I and everyone else assured
her she looked fine. When preparing for the long nasty Student Government
budget meeting in early November Sarah looked briefly through her shoebox of
miscellaneous cosmetics then shoved it under the bed again. She had greater
things to worry about.
As for clothes, it came down to a choice between her most businesslike outfit,
a grey wool skirt suit, and a somewhat brighter dress. She picked the suit,
though she knew it would lay her open to accusations of fascism from the
Stalinist Underground Battalion (SUB), wound her hair into a bun, and steeled
herself for madness.
The SUB got there an hour before anyone else and had their banners planted
and their rabid handouts sown before the Government even showed up. We met
in the only room we could find that was reasonably private. Behind us came
the TV crews, and then the reporters from the Monoplex Monitor and the
People's Truth Publication, who sat in the first row, right in front of the
Stalinists. Finally Lecture Auditorium 3 filled up with supplicants from
various organizations, all deeply shocked and dismayed at how little funding
they were receiving, all bearing proposed amendments.
First we slogged through the parliamentary trivia, including a bit of
"new business" in which the SUB introduced a resolution to condemn the
administration for massive human rights violations and to call for its
abolition. Then we came to the real purpose of the meeting: amendments to the
proposed budget. A line formed behind the microphone on the stage, and at its
head was a SUB member. "I move." he said, "that we pass no budget at all,
because the budget has to be approved by the administration, and so we haven't
got any control over our own activity money." On cue, behind the press corps,
eight SUBbies rose to their feet bearing a long banner: TAKE BACK CONTROL
OF STUDENT ACTIVITIES CAPITAL FROM THE KRUPP JUNTA. "The money's ours, the
money's ours, the money's ours . ."
We had expected all this and Sarah was undisturbed. She sat back from her
microphone and took a sip of water. letting the media record the event for
the ages. Once that was done she gaveled a few times and talked them back
into their seats. She was about to start talking again when the last standing
SUBbie shouted, "Student Government is a tool of the Krupp cadre!"
Behind him, most of the audience shouted things like "eat rocks" and "shut up"
and "shove it."
"If you're finished interfering with the democratic process," Sarah said,
"this tool would like to get on with the budget. We have a lot to do and
everyone needs to be very, very brief." Student Government was made up of the
Student Senate, which represented each of the 200 residential wings of the
Plex, and the Activities Council, comprising representatives from each. of the
funded student organizations, numbering about 150. The distribution of funds
among the Activities Council members was decided on by a joint session, which
was our goal for the evening.
The Student Senate was crammed with SUBbies and members of an outlaw Mormon
splinter group called the Temple of Unlimited Godhead (TUG). Each of these
groups claimed to represent all the students. As Sarah explained, no one in
his right mind was interested in running for Student Senate, explaining why it
was filled with fanatics and political science majors. Fortunately, SUB and
TUG canceled each other out almost perfectly.
"I'm tired of having all aspects of my life ruled by this administration that
doesn't give a shit for human rights, and I think it's time to do something
about it," said the first speaker. There was a little applause from the front
and lots of jeering. A hum filled the air as the TUG began to OMMMM
at middle
C-- a sort of sonic tonic which was said to clear the air of foul influences
and encourage spiritual peace; overhead, a solitary bat, attracted by the
hum, swooped down from a perch in the ceiling and flitted around, occasioning
shrieks and violent motion from the people it buzzed. "At this university we
don't have free speech, we don't have academic freedom, we don't even have
power over our own money!"
At the insistence of the audience, Sarah broke in after a few minutes. "If
you've got any specific human rights violations you're concerned about, there
are some international organizations you can go to, but there's not much the
Student Senate can do. So I suggest you go live somewhere else and let someone
else propose an amendment."
Shocked and devastated, the speaker gaped at Sarah as the TV lights slammed
into action. He held the stare for several seconds to allow the camera
operators to focus and adjust light level, then surveyed the cheering and
OMming crowd, face filled with bewilderment and shock.
"I don't believe this," he said, staring into the lenses. "Who says we have
freedom of speech? My God, I've come up here to express a free opinion, and
just because I am opposed to fascism, the President of the Student Government
tries to throw me out of the Plex! My home! That's right, if these different
people don't like being oppressed, just throw them out of their homes into
the dangerous city! I didn't think this kind of savagery was supposed to
exist in a university." He shook his head in noble sadness, surveyed the
derisive crowd defiantly, and marched away from the mike to grateful applause.
Below, he answered questions from the media while the next student came to the
microphone.
He looked like a male cheerleader for a parochial school football team, being
handsome, well groomed, and slightly pimpled. As he took possession of the
mike the OM stopped. He kept his eye on a middle-aged fellow standing in the
aisle not far away, who in turn watched the SUBbie's press conference in front
of the stage. Finally the older gentleman held up three fingers. The TUGgie
shoved his fist between his arm and body and spoke loudly and sharply into the
mike.
"I'd like to announce that I have caught a bat here in my hand, and now
I'm going to bite the head off it right here as a sacrifice to the God of
Communism."
Below, the SUBbie found himself in absolute darkness, and tripped over a power
cord. Simultaneously the TUGgie squinted as all lights were swung around to
bear on him. He smiled and began to talk in a calm chantlike voice. "Well,
well, well. I've got a confession. I'm not really going to bite the head off
a bat, because I don't even have one, and I'm not a Communist." There was now
a patter of what sounded like canned TV laughter from the TUG section. "I
just did that as a little demonstration, to show you folks how easy it is to
get the attention of the media. We can come and talk about serious issues and
do real things, but what gets TV coverage are violent eye-catching events, a
thing which the Communists who wish to destroy our society understand very
well. But I'm not here to give a speech, I'm here to propose an amendment. .
." Here he was dive-bombed by the bat, who veered away at the last moment;
the speaker jumped back in horror, to the amusement of almost everyone. The
TUGgies laughed too, showing that, yes, they did have a sense of humor no
matter what people said. The speaker struggled to regain his composure.
"The speech! Resume the speech! The amendment!" shouted the older man.
"My budget proposal is that we take away all funding for the Stalinist
Underground Battalion and distribute it among the other activities groups."
The lecture hall exploded in outraged chanting, uproarious applause, and OM.
Sarah sat for about fifteen seconds with her chin in her hand, then began
smashing the gavel again. I was seated off to the side of the stage, poised to
act as the strong-but-lovable authority figure, but did not have to stand up;