back and mess with the giant rats.
Several days into the second semester, the Administration finally told the
truth about the Library, and allowed the media in to photograph the ranks upon
ranks of card catalog cabinets with their totally empty drawers.
The perpetrators had done it on Christmas Day. The Plex had been nearly
deserted, its entrance guarded by a single guard at a turnstile. At eight in
the morning, ten rather young and hairy-looking fellows in B-man uniforms had
arrived and haltingly explained that as Crotobaltislavonians they followed the
Julian calendar, and had already celebrated Christmas. Could they not come in
to perform needed plumbing repairs, and earn quadruple overtime for working on
Christmas Day? The skeptical guard let them in anyway; if he could not trust
the janitors, whom could he trust?
As reconstructed by the police, the burglars had gathered in the card catalog
area all the canvas carts they could find. They had taken these through the
catalog, pulling the lock-pins from each drawer and dumping the contents into
the carts. The Library's 4.8 million volumes were catalogued in 12,000 drawers
of three-by-five cards, and a simple calculation demonstrated that all of
these cards could be fitted into a dozen canvas carts by anyone not overly
fastidious about keeping them in perfect order. The carts had been taken
via freight elevator to the loading docks and wheeled onto a rented truck,
which according to the rental agency had now disappeared. Its borrower, a Mr.
Friedrich Engels, had failed to list a correct address and phone number and
proved difficult to track down. The only untouched drawer was number 11375,
STALIN, JOSEPH to STALLBAUM, JOHANN GOTTFRIED.
The Library turned to the computer system. During the previous five years,
a sweatshop of catalogers had begun to transfer the catalog into a computer
system, and the Administration hoped that ten percent of the catalog could be
salvaged in this way. Instead they found that a terrible computer malfunction
had munched through the catalog recently, erasing call numbers and main
entries and replacing them with knock-knock jokes, Burma-Shave ditties and
tracts on the sexual characteristics of the Computing Center senior staff.
The situation was not hopeless; at any rate, it did not deteriorate at first.
The books were still arranged in a rational order. This changed when people
began holding books hostage.
A Master's Candidate in Journalism had a few books she used over and over
again. After the loss of the catalog she found them by memory, carried them
to another part of the Library, and cached them behind twelve feet of bound
back issues of the Nepalese Journal of Bhutaruan Studies. A library employee
from Photoduplication then happened to take down a volume of Utah Review of
Theoretical Astrocosmology, shelved back-to-back with NJBS, and detected the
cache. She moved it to another place in the Library, dumping it behind a
fifty-volume facsimile edition of the ledgers of the Brisbane/Surabaya Steam
Packet Co. Ltd., which had been published in 1893 and whose pages had not
yet been cut. She then left a sign on the Library bulletin board saying that
if the user of such-and-such books wanted to know where they were, he or she
could put fifty dollars in the former stash, and she, the employee, would
leave in its place the new location. Several thousand people saw this note
and the scam was written up in the Monoplex Monitor; it was so obviously a
good idea that it rapidly became a large business. Some people took only a few
volumes, others hundreds, but in all cases the technique was basically the
same, and soon extra bulletin board capability was added outside the entrance
to the Library bloc. Of course, this practice had been possible before the
loss of the card catalog, but that event seemed to change everyone's scruples
about the Library. The central keying system was gone; what difference did it
make?
Free enterprise helped take up the slack, as students hired themselves out
as book-snoopers. The useless card catalog area took on the semblance of a
bazaar, each counter occupied by one or two businesses with signs identifying
their rates and services. The psychic book-snoopers stole and hid books,
then-- claiming to use psychic powers-- showed spectacular efficiency in
locating them. The psychics soon eclipsed the businesses of their nonspiritual
colleagues. In order to seem as mysterious as possible, the psychics engaged
in impressive rituals; one day, working alone on the top floor, I was
surprised to see Professor Emeritus Humphrey Batstone Forthcoming IV being led
blindfolded through the stacks by a leotarded witch swinging a censer.
Every week the people who had stolen the card catalog would take a card and
mail it to the Library. The conditions of ransom, as expressed on these cards
in a cramped hand, were that: (1) S. S. Krupp and the Trustees must be purged;
(2) the Megaversity must have open admissions and no room, board or tuition
fees; (3) the Plex must become a free zone with no laws or authority; (4) the
Megaversity must withdraw all investments in firms doing business in South
Africa, firms doing business with firms doing business in South Africa and
firms doing business with firms doing business with firms doing business in
South Africa; (5) recognize the PLO and the baby seals.
S. S. Krupp observed that card catalogs, a recent invention, had not existed
at the Library of Alexandria, and though he would have preferred, ceteris
paribus, to have the catalog, we didn't have one now, that was too bad, and
we were going to have to make do. There was dissent and profound shock over
his position, and righteous editorials in the Monitor, but after a week or two
most people decided that, though Krupp was an asshole, there wasn't any point
in arguing.
"Welcome and thanks for coming to the mass driver demonstration." Casimir
Radon swallowed some water and straightened his glacier glasses. "The physics
majors' organization Neutrino has put a lot of time and work into this device,
much of it over the Christmas holiday, and we think it is a good example of
what can be done with activities money used constructively. God damn it!"
He was cursing at the loudness of his Plex neighbor, Dex Fresser, whose stereo
was an electronic signal processor of industrial power. For once Casimir did
not restrain himself; he was so nervous over the upcoming demonstration that
he failed to consider the dire embarrassment, social rejection and personal
danger involved in going next door to ask this jerk-off to turn down his
music. He was pounding on Dex Fresser's door before his mind knew what his
body was doing, and for a moment he hoped his knocks had been drowned out by
the bass beats exploding from Fresser's eighteen-inch woofers. But the door
opened, and there was Dex Fresser, looking completely disoriented, "Could
you turn that down?" asked Casimir. Fresser, becoming aware of his presence,
looked Casimir over from head to foot. "It kind of disturbs me," Casimir added
apologetically.
Fresser thought it over. "But you're not even there that much, so how can
it disturb you?" He then peered oddly into Casimir's face, as though the
goggle-eyed Radon were the captain of a ship from a mirror Earth on the other
side of the sun, which was pretty much what he was thinking. Chagrined,
Casimir ground his teeth very loudly, generating so much heat that they became
white hot and glowed pinkly through his cheeks. He then receded off into
infinity like a starship making the jump into hyperspace, then came around
behind Fresser again in such a way as to make it appear (due to the mirror
effect) that he was actually coming from the same direction in which he'd
gone. Just as he arrived back in the doorway two years later, the space warp
snapped shut behind him; but at the last moment Dex Fresser glanced through
it, and saw lovely purple fields filled with flowers, chanting Brazilians,
leaky green ballpoint pens and thousands of empty tea boxes. He wanted very
much to visit that place.
"Well, it does disturb me when I do happen to be in my room. See how that
works?" The man who was running this tape, a lanky green tennis shoe with bad
acne and an elephant's trunk tied in a double Windsor knot around his waist,
stopped the tape and ran it back to Fresser's previous reply.
"But you're not even there that much, so how can it disturb you?" As Fresser
finished this, Casimir did exactly what he had done last time, except this
time the purple fields were being clusterbombed by flying garages. The
space warp closed off just in time to let a piece of shrapnel through. It
zoomed over Casimir's shoulder and embedded itself in the wall, and Fresser
recognized it as a Pershing 2 missile.
"Right," said Casimir, now. speaking through a sousaphone around his shoulder,
which bombarded Dex Fresser with white laser rays. "I know. But you see when I
am in my room I prefer not to be disturbed. That's the whole point."
Fresser suddenly realized that the Pershing 2 was actually the left front
quarter-panel of a '57 Buick that he had seen abandoned on a street in
Evanston on July 28, 1984, and that Casimir was actually John D. Rockefeller.
"How can you be so goddamn selfish, man? Don't you know how many people you've
killed?" And he slammed the door shut, knowing that the shock would cause the
piece of the Buick to fall on Rockefeller's head; since it was antimatter,
nothing would be left afterward.
The confrontation had worked out as badly as Casimir had feared. He went back
to his room, heart pounding irrationally, so upset that he did not practice
his speech at all.
The lack of rehearsal did not matter, as the only audience in Sharon's lab
was the Neutrino membership, Virgil, Sarah, a photographer from the Mortoplex
Monitor and I. Toward the end of the speech, though, S. S. Krupp walked in
with an official photographer and a small, meek-looking older man, causing
Casimir to whip off his glasses in agitation and destroying any trace of
calmness in his manner. Finally he mumbled something to the effect that it
was too bad Krupp had come in so late, seeing as how the best part of this
introduction was over, and concluded that we should stop jabbering and have a
look at this thing.
The mass driver was four meters long, built atop a pair of sturdy tables
bolted together. It was nothing more than a pair of long straight parallel
guides, each horseshoe-shaped in cross-section, the prongs of the horseshoes
pointed toward each other with a narrow gap in between. The bucket, which
would carry the payload, was lozenge-shaped in cross-section and almost filled
the oval tunnel created by the two guides. Most of the bucket was empty
payload space, but its outer jacket was of a special alloy supercooled by
liquid helium so that it became a perfect superconducting electromagnet. This
feature, combined with a force field generated in the two rails, suspended
the bucket on a frictionless magnetic cushion. Electromagnets in the rails,
artfully wound by Virgil, provided the acceleration, "kicking" the bucket and
its contents from one end of the mass driver to the other.
Casimir relaxed visibly as he began pointing out the technical details. With
long metal tongs he reached into a giant thermos flask and pulled out the
supercold bucket, which was about the size of two beer cans side by side. He
slid it into the breech of the mass driver. As it began to soak up warmth from
the room, a cascade of frigid white helium poured from a vent on its back and
spilled to the floor.
Krupp stood close by and asked questions. "What's the weight of the slug?"
"This," said Casimir, picking up a solid brass cylinder from the table, "is a
one-kilogram mass. That's pretty small, but-- " "No, it isn't." Krupp looked
over at his friend, who raised his eyebrows and nodded. "Nothing small about
it."
Casimir smiled weakly and nodded in thanks. Krupp continued, "What's the
muzzle velocity?"
Here Casimir looked sheepish and shifted nervously, looking at his Neutrino
friends.
"Oh," said Krupp, sounding let down, "not so fast, eh?"
"Oh, no no no. Don't get me wrong. The final velocity isn't bad." At this
the Neutrino members clapped their hands over their mouths and stifled
shrieks and laughs. "I was just going to let you see that for yourselves
instead of throwing a lot of numbers at you."
"Well, that's fine!" said Krupp, sounding more sanguine. "Don't let us
laymen interfere with your schedule. I'm sorry. Just go right ahead."
He stepped back and crossed his arms as though planning to shut up for hours.
Casimir gave the empty bucket a tap and there were oohs and aahs as it floated
smoothly and quietly down the rails, bounced off a stop at the end and floated
back with no change in speed. He reinserted the one-kilogram brass cylinder.
"Now let's try it. As you can see we have a momentum absorber set up at the
other end of the lab."
The "momentum absorber" was ten squares of 3/8-inch plywood held parallel in a
frame, spaced two inches apart to form a sandwich a couple of feet long. This
was securely braced against the wall of the lab at the same level as the mass
driver. had assumed that the intended target was a wastebasket floor beneath
the "muzzle" of the machine, but now realized that Casimir was expecting
the weight to fly about twenty feet without losing any altitude. "I suggest
you all stand back in case something goes wrong," said Casimir, and feeling
somewhat alarmed I stood way back and suggested that Sarah do likewise.
Casimir made a last check of the circuitry, then hit a big red button.
The sound was a whizz followed by a rapid series of staccato explosions. It
could be written as: ZZIKKH where the entire sound takes about a quarter of
a second. None of us really saw anything. Casimir was already running toward
the momentum absorber. When we got there, we saw that the first five layers
of plywood had perfectly clean round holes punched through them, two more had
messy holes, and the next layer had buckled, the brass cylinder wedged in
place at its bottom. Casimir pulled out the payload with tongs and dropped
it into an asbestos mitt he had donned. "It's pretty hot after all those
collisions," he explained.
Everyone but Casimir was electrified. Even the Neutrino observers, who had
seen it before, were awed, and laughed hysterically from time to time. Sarah
looked as though whatever distrust she had ever had in technology had been
dramatically confirmed. I stared at Casimir, realizing how smart he was.
Virgil left, smiling. Krupp's little friend paced between mass driver and
target, hands clasped behind back, a wide smile nestled in his silver-brown
beard, while Krupp himself was astonished.
"Jesus H. Christ!" he yelled, fingering the holes. "That is the damnedest
thing I've ever seen. Good lord, boy, how did you make this?"
Casimir seemed at a loss. "It's all done from Sharon's plans," he said
blankly. "He did all the magnetic fieldwork. I just plugged in the arithmetic.
The rest of it was machine-shop work. Nothing complicated about the machine."
"Does it have to be this powerful?" I said. "Don't get me wrong. I'm impressed
as hell. Wouldn't it have been a little easier to make a slower one?"
"Well, sure, but not as useful," said Casimir. "The technical challenges only
show up when you make it fast enough to be used for its practical purpose--
which is to shoot payloads of ore and minerals from the lunar surface to
an orbital processing station. For a low-velocity one we could've used air
cushions instead of magnetic fields to float the bucket but there's no
challenge in that."
"What's the muzzle velocity?" asked Krupp's guest, who had appeared next to
me. He spoke quietly and quickly in an Australian accent. When I looked down
at him, I realized he was Oswald Heimlich, Chairman of the Board of Trustees
of American Megaversity and one of the richest men in the city -- the founder
of Heimlich Freedom Industries a huge defense contractor. Casimir obviously
didn't know who he was.
"The final velocity of the bucket is one hundred meters per second, or about
two hundred twenty miles per hour."
"And how could you boost that?"
"Boost it?" Casimir looked at him, startled. "Well, for more velocity you
could build another just like this-- "
"Yes, and put them together. I know. They're interconnectible.
But how could you increase the acceleration of this device?"
"Well, that gets you into some big technical problems. You'd need expensive
electronic gear with the ability to kick out huge pulses of power very
quickly. Giant capacitors could do it, or a specialized power supply."
Heimlich followed all this, nodding incessantly. "Or a generator that gets its
power from a controlled explosion."
Casimir smiled. "It's funny you should mention that. Some people are
speculating about building small portable mass drivers with exactly that type
of power supply-- a chemical explosion-- and using them to throw explosive
shells and so on. That's what is called-- "
"A railgun. Precisely."
Things began to fall into place for Casimir. "Oh. I see. So you want to know
if I could build-- basically a railgun."
"Sure. Sure," said Heimlich in an aggressive, glinting voice. "What's
research without practical applications?" The question hung in the air.
Krupp took over, sounding much calmer. "You see, Casimir, in order to
continue with this research-- and you are off to an exceptionally fine
start-- you will need outside funding on a larger scale. Now, as good an
idea as lunar mining is, no one is ever going to fund that kind of research.
But railguns-- whether you like it or not, they have very immediate
significance that can really pull in the grants. I'm merely pointing out
that in today's climate relating your work to defense is the best way to
obtain funding. And I imagine that if you wanted to set up a specialized lab
here to advance this kind of work, you might be able to get all the funding
you'd want."
Casimir looked down at the shattered plywood in consternation. "I don't need
an answer now. But give it some careful thought, son. There's no reason for
you to be stuck in silly-ass classes if you can do this kind of work. Call
me anytime you like." He shook Casimir's hand, Heimlich made a brief smiling
spastic bow, and they walked out together.
--February--
Sarah quit the Presidency of the Student Government on the first of January.
At the mass-driver demonstration, S. S. Krupp had simply ignored her, which
was fine by Sarah as she had no desire to give the man a point-by-point
explanation.
As for the death of Tiny, here the other shoe never dropped, though Sarah
and Hyacinth kept waiting. His body was in especially poor condition when
found, and the bullet holes might not have been detected even if someone had
thought to look for them. The City police made a rare Plex visit and looked at
the broken window and the electrocuted man on the floor, but apparently the
Terrorists had cleaned up any blood or other evidence of conflict; in short,
they made it all look like a completely deranged drunken fuck-up, an archetype
familiar to the City cops.
The Terrorists wanted their own revenge. None of them had a coherent idea
of what had happened. Even the two surviving witnesses had dim, traumatized
memories of the event and could only say it had something to do with a woman
dressed as a clown. As soon as I heard that the Terrorists were looking for
someone called Clown Woman, I invited her over and we had a chat. I knew what
her costume had been. Though she understood why I was curious, she suddenly
adopted a sad, cold reserve I had never seen in her before.
"Some really terrible things happened that night. But I'm I Hyacinth is
safe-- okay? And we've been making plans to stay that way."
"Fine. I just-- "
"I know. I'd love to tell you more. I'm dying to. But I won't, because you
have some official responsibilities and you're the kind of person who carries
them out, and knowing anything would be a burden for you. You'd try to help--
but that's something you can't do. Can you understand that?"
I was a little scared by her lone strength. More, I was stunned that she was
protecting me. Finally I shrugged and said, "Sounds as though you know what
you're doing," because that was how it sounded.
"This has a lot to do with your resigning the Presidency?" I continued. Sarah
was a little annoyed by my diplomacy, for the same reason S. S. Krupp would
have been.
"Bud, I don't need some terrific reason for resigning. If I'm spending time on
a useless job I don't like, and I find there are better things to do with that
time, then I ought to resign." I nodded contritely, and for the first time she
was relaxed enough to laugh. On her way out she gave me a long platonic hug,
and I still remember it when I feel in need of warmth.
They got the wading pool and the garden hose on a two-hour bus ride to a
suburban K-Mart. Hyacinth inflated it in the middle of Sarah's room while
Sarah ran the hose down the hall to the bathroom to pipe in hot water. Once
the pool was acceptably full and foamy, they retrieved the hose, locked the
door and sealed off all windows with newspaper and all cracks around the door
with towels and tape. They lit a few candles but blew most of them out when
their eyes adjusted. The magnum of champagne was buried in ice, the water was
hot, the night was young. Hyacinth's .44 was very intrusive, and so Sarah
filed it under G for Gun and they had a good laugh.
Around 4:00 in the morning, to Sarah's satisfaction, Hyacinth passed out.
Sarah allowed herself to do likewise for a while. Then she dragged Hyacinth
out onto the rug, dried her and hoisted her into bed. They slept until 4:32
in the afternoon. Sleet was ticking against the window. Hyacinth cut a slit
in the window screen and they fed the hose outside and siphoned all the
bathwater out of the pool and down the side of the Plex. They ate all of
Sarah's mother's banana bread, thirty-two Chips Ahoys, three bowls of Captain
Crunch, a pint of strawberry ice cream and drank a great deal of water. They
then gave each other backrubs and went to sleep again.
"Keeping my .38 clean is a pain in the ass," said Sarah at one point. "It
picks up a lot of crud in my backpack pocket." "That's one reason to carry a
single-action," said Hyacinth. "Less to go wrong if it's dirty."
A long time later, Sarah added, "This is pretty macho. Talking about our
guns."
"I suppose it's true that they're macho. But they are also guns. In fact,
they're primarily guns."
"True."
They also discussed killing people, which had become an important subject with
them recently.
"Sometimes there isn't any choice," Sarah said to Hyacinth, as Hyacinth cried
calmly into her shoulder. "You know, Constantine punished rapists by pouring
molten lead down their throats. That was a premeditated, organized punishment.
What you did was on the spur of the moment."
"Yeah. Putting on protective clothes, loading my gun, tracking them down and
blowing one away was really on the spur of the moment."
"All I can say is that if anyone ever deserved it, he did." Three Terrorists
ambled down the hall past Sarah's door, chanting "Death to Clown Woman!"
"Okay, fine," said Hyacinth, and stopped crying. "Granted. I can't worry about
it forever. But sooner or later they're going to figure out who Clown Woman
is. Then there'll be even more violence."
"Better them to be violent against us," said Sarah, "than against people who
don't even understand what violence is."
Sarah was busy taking care of herself that semester. This made more sense than
what the rest of us were doing, but it did not make for an eventful life. At
the same time, a very different American Megaversity student was fighting the
same battle Sarah had just won. This student lost. The tale of his losing is
melancholy but much more interesting.
Every detail was important in assessing the situation, in determining just how
close to the brink Plexor was! The obvious things, the frequent transitions
from the Technological universe to the Magical universe, those were child's
play to detect; but the evidence of impending Breakdown was to be found only
in the minutiae. The extra cold-water pipe; that was significant. What had
suddenly caused such a leak to be sprung in the plumbing of Plexor, which
had functioned flawlessly for a thousand years? And what powerful benign
hand had made the switch from one pipe to the other? What prophecy was to be
found in the coming of the Thing of the Earth in the test run of Shekondar?
Was some great happening at hand? One could not be sure; the answer must
be nested among subtleties. So this one spent many days wandering like a
lone thaumaturge through the corridors of the Plex, watching and observing,
ignoring the classes and lectures that had become so trivial.
With the help of an obsequious MARS lieutenant he was allowed to inspect
the laboratory of the secret railgun experiments. Here he found advanced
specialized power supplies from Heimlich Freedom Industries. The lieutenant, a
Neutrino member of four years' standing, hooked the output of one power supply
to an oscilloscope and showed him the very high and sharp spike of current it
could punch out-- precisely the impulses a superfast mass driver would need
to keep its payload accelerating explosively right up to the end. This one
also observed a test of a new electromagnet. It was much larger than those
used for the first mass driver, wound with miles of hair-thin copper wire and
cooled by antifreeze-filled tubes. A short piece of rail had been made to
test the magnet. It was equipped with a bucket designed to carry a payload
ten centimeters across! This one watched as a violent invisible kick from the
magnet wrenched the bucket to high velocity and slammed it to the cushion
at the rail's end; the heavy payload shot out, boomed into a tarp suspended
about five feet away, and fell into a box of foam-rubber scraps. It was the
same pattern he saw everywhere. A peaceful lunar mining device had, under the
influence of Shekondar the Fearsome, metamorphosed into a potent weapon of
great value to the forces of Good.
He gave the lieutenant a battlefield promotion to Captain. He wanted to stay
and continue to watch, but it had been a long day; he was tired, and for a
moment his mind seemed to stop entirely as he stood by the exit.
Then came again the creeping sense of Leakage, impossible to ignore; his head
snapped up and to the right, and, speaking across the dimensional barrier,
Klystron the Impaler told him to go to dinner.
Klystron the Impaler was only Klystron the Impaler when he was in a Magical
universe. The rest of the time he was Chris the Systems Programmer-- a
brilliant, dashing, young, handsome terminal jockey considered to be the best
systems man on the giant self-contained universe-hopping colony, Plexor.
From time to time Plexor would pass through the Central Bifurcation, a giant
space warp, and enter a Magical universe, fundamentally altering all aspects
of reality. Though the structure of Plexor itself underwent little change at
these times, everything therein was converted to its magical, pretechnological
analog. Guns became swords, freshmen became howling savages, Time magazine
became a hand-lettered vellum tome and Chris the Systems Programmer-- well,
brilliant people like him became sorcerers, swordspeople and heroes. The
smarter they were-- the greater their stature in the Technological universe--
the more dazzling was their swordplay and the more penetrating their spells.
Needless to say, Klystron the Impaler was a very great hero-swordsman-magician
indeed.
Of course, Plexorians tended to be that way to begin with. Only the most
advanced had been admitted when Plexor was begun, and it was natural that
their distant offspring today should tend toward the exceptional. Of those
lucky enough to be selected for Plexor, only the most adaptable had any
stomach for the life once they got there and, every month or so, found their
waterbeds metamorphosing into heaps of bearskins. Klystron/Chris liked to
think of the place as a pressure cooker for the advancement of humanity.
But even the most perfect machine could not be insulated from the frailty and
stupidity of the human mind. In the early days of Plexor every inhabitant had
understood the Central Bifurcation, had respected the distinction between
technology and magic, and had shown enough discipline to ensure that division.
Within the past several generations, though, ignorance had come to this
perfect place and Breakdown had begun. Recent generations of Plexorians lacked
the enthusiasm and commitment of their forebears and displayed ignorance which
was often shocking; recently it had become common to suppose that Plexor was
not a free-drifting edosociosystem at all, that it was in fact a planetoidal
structure bound to a particular universe. Occasionally, it was true, Plexor
would materialize on the ground, in a giant city or a barbarian kingdom. Its
makers, a Guild of sorcerers and magicians operating in separate universes
through the mediation of Keldor, had created it to be self-sufficient and
life-supporting in any habitat, with a nuclear fuel source that would last
forever. But to believe that one particular world was always out there was a
blindness to reality so severe that it amounted to rank primitivism amidst
this sophisticated colony of technocrats. It was, in a word, Breakdown-- a
blurring of the boundary-- and such was the delicacy of that boundary between
the universes that mere ignorance of its existence, mere Breakdown-oriented
thinking and Breakdown-conducive behavior, was sufficient to open small
Leaks between Magic and Technology, to generate an unholy Mixture of the two
opposites. It was the duty of the remaining guardians of the Elder Knowledge.
such as Klystron/Chris, to expurgate such mixtures and restore the erstwhile
purity of the two existences of Plexor.
In just the past few weeks the Leaks had become rents, the Mixture ubiquitous.
Now Barbarians sat at computer terminals in the Computing Center unabashed,
pathetically trying, in broad daylight, to run programs that were so riddled
with bugs the damn things wouldn't even compile, their recent kills stretched
out bleeding between their feet awaiting the spit. Giant rats from another
plane of existence roamed free through the sewers of the mighty technological
civilization, and everywhere Chris the Systems Analyst found dirt and
marrow-sucked bones on the floor, broken light fixtures, graffiti, noise,
ignorance. He watched these happenings, not yet willing to believe in what
they portended, and soon developed a sixth sense for detecting Leakage. That
was in and of itself a case of Mixture; in a Technological universe, sixth
senses were scientifically impossible. His new intuition was a sign of the
Leakage of the powers of Klystron the Impaler into a universe where they did
not belong. In recognition of this, and to protect himself from the ignorant,
Klystron/Chris had thought it wise to adopt the informal code name of Fred
Fine.
He had denied what was coming for too long. Despite his supreme intelligence
he was hesitant to accept the hugeness of his own personal importance.
Until the day of the food fight: on that day he came to understand the somber
future of Plexor and of himself. It happened during dinner. To most of those
in the Cafeteria it was just a food fight, but to "Fred Fine" it was much more
significant, a preliminary skirmish to the upcoming war, a byte of strategic
data to be thoughtfully digested.
He had been contemplating an abstract type of program structure, absently
shuffling the nameless protein-starch substance from tray to mouth, when a
sense of strangeness had verged on his awareness and dispersed his thoughts.
As he looked up and became alert, he also became aware that (a) the food was
terrible; (b) the Caf was crowded and noisy; and (c) Leakage was all around.
His mind now as alert as that of Klystron before a melee, he scanned the
Cafeteria from his secure corner (one of only four corners in the Cafeteria
and therefore highly prized), stuffing his computer printout securely into his
big locking briefcase. Though his gaze traversed hundreds of faces in a few
seconds, something allowed him to fix his attention on a certain few: eight
or ten, with long hair and eccentric clothing, who were clearly looking at
one another and not at the gallons of food heaped on their Fiberglass trays.
The sixth sense of Klystron enabled Chris to glean from the whirl of people a
deeply hidden pattern he knew to be significant.
He stood up in the corner, memorizing the locations of those he had found, and
switched to long-range scan, assisting himself by following their own tense
stares. His eyes flicked down to the readout of his digital calcu-chronograph
and he noted that it was just seconds before 6:00. Impatiently he polled
his subjects and noted that they were now all looking toward one place: a
milk dispenser near the center of the Cafeteria, where an exceptionally tall
burnout stood with a small black box in his hand!
There was a sharp blue flash that made the ceiling glow briefly-- the black
box was an electronic flash unit-- and all hell broke loose. Missiles of
all shapes and colors whizzed through his field of vision and splathunked
starchily against tables, pillars and bodies. Amid sudden screaming an entire
long table was flipped over, causing a hundredweight of manicotti and French
fries to slide into the laps of the unfortunates on the wrong side. Seeing
the perpetrators break and dissolve into the milling dinnertime crowd, the
victims could only respond by slinging handfuls of steaming ricotta at their
disappearing backsides. At this first outbreak of noise and action the
Cafeteria quieted for a moment, as all turned toward the disturbance. Then,
seeing food flying past their own heads, most of the spectators united in
bedlam. The Terrorist sections seemed to have been expecting this and joined
in with beer-commercial rowdiness. Several tables of well-dressed young
women ran frantically for the exits, in most cases too slowly to prevent the
ruination of hundreds of dollars' worth of clothes a head. Many collapsed
squalling into the arms of their patron Terrorist organizations. The Droogs
opened a milk machine, pulled out a heavy poly-bag of Skim and slung it into
the midst of what had been an informal gathering of Classics majors, with
explosive results.
All was observed intently by Klystron/Chris, who stood calm and motionless in
his corner holding his briefcase as a shield. Though the progress of the fight
was interesting to watch, it was hardly as important as the behavior of the
instigators and the reactions of the Cafeteria staff.
Of the instigating organization, some were obliged to flee immediately
in order to protect themselves. These were the agents provocateurs, the
table-tippers and tray-slingers, whose part was already played. The remainder
were observers, and they stood in carefully planned stations around the walls
of the Cafeteria and watched, much as Chris did. Some snapped pictures with
cheap cameras.
This picture-taking began in earnest when, after about fifteen seconds, the
reactive strike began. The cooks and servers had instantly leapt to block
the doors of the serving bays, which in these circumstances had the same
value as ammunition dumps. Pairs of the larger male cooks now charged out
and drew shut the folding dividers which partitioned the Cafeteria into
twenty-four sections. Meanwhile, forty-eight more senior Cafeteria personnel
and guards fanned out in organized fashion, clothed in ponchos and facemasks.
In each section, one of them leapt up on a table with a megaphone to scream
righteousness at the students, while his partner confronted particularly
active types. Klystron/Chris's view of the fight was abruptly reduced to what
he could see in his own small section.
Among other things he saw eight of the Roy G Biv Terrorist Group overturn the
table on which the local official stood, sending him splaying on hands and
knees across the slick of grease and tomato sauce on the floor. His partner
skidded after him and swiveled to protect their backs from the Terrorists, who
had huddled and were mumbling menacingly. For the first time Klystron/Chris
felt the hysterical half-sick excitement of approaching violence, and he began
to edge along the wall toward a more strategically sound position.
One of the Terrorists went to the corner where the sliding partitions
intersected, blocking the only route of escape. The men in the room moved away
uneasily; the women pressed themselves against the wall and sat on the floor
and tried to get invisible. Then the Roy G Biv men broke; two went for the
still-standing official, one for the man who was just staggering to his feet
with the dented megaphone. Abruptly, Klystron/Chris stepped forward, took from
his briefcase a small weapon and pulled the trigger. The weapon was a flash
gun, a device for making an explosively intense flash of light that blinded
attackers. Everyone in front of the weapon froze. As they were putting their
hands to their eyes, he pulled out his Civil War bayonet, jammed it into a
fold in the sliding partition and pulled it down to open a six-foot rent. He
led the tactical retreat to the adjoining section, which was comparatively
under control.
The officials here were not amused. A stocky middle-aged man in a brown
suit stomped toward Klystron/Chris with death in his eye. He was stopped
by a chorus of protest from the refugees, who made it clear that the real
troublemakers were back there. And that was how Klystron/Chris avoided having
any of these seriously Mixed officials discover his informal code name.
But what was the strategic significance? He knew it had been done by
Barbarians. Despite the carefully tailored modern clothes they used to hide
their stooping forms and overly long arms, he recognized their true nature
from the ropy scars running along their heavy overhanging brows and the
garlands of rodent skulls they wore around their necks. Had it not been for
the cameramen, he would have concluded that this was nothing more than a
purposeless display of the savages' contempt for order. But the photographers
made it clear that this riot had been a reconnaissance-in-force, directed by
an advanced strategic mind with an crest in the Cafeteria's defenses. And
that, in turn, implied an upcoming offensive centered on the Cafeteria itself.
Of course! In here was enough grub to feed a good-sized commando force for
years, if rationed properly; it would therefore be a prime objective for
insurrectionists planning to seize and hold large portions of Plexor. But
why? Who was behind it? And how did it connect with the other harbingers of
catastrophe?
Once upon a time, a mathematically inclined friend of Sarah's, one Casimir
Radon, had estimated that her chances of running into a fellow Airhead at
dinner were no better than about one in twenty. As usual he was not trying to
be annoying or nerdish, but nevertheless Sarah wished for a more satisfying
explanation of why she could get no relief from her damned neighbors. One in
twenty was optimistic. At times she thought that they were planting spies in
her path to take down statistics on how many behavioral standards she broke,
or to drive her crazy by asking why she had really resigned the Presidency.
She was annoyed but not surprised to find herself eating dinner with Mari
Meegan, Mari's second cousin and Toni one night. Relaxed from a racquetball
game, she made no effort to scan her route through the Caf for telltale ski
masks. So as she danced and sideslipped her way toward what looked like an
open table, she was blindsided by a charming squeal from right next to her.
"Sarah!" Too slow even to think of pretending not to hear, she looked down to
see the three color-coordinated ski masks looking back at her expectantly.
She despised them and never wanted to see them again, ever, but she also knew
there was value in following social norms, once in a while, to forestall
hatred and God knows what kinds of retribution. The last thing she wanted was
to be connected with Clown Woman. So she smiled and sat down. It was not going
to be a great meal, but Sarah's conversation support system was working well
enough to get her at least through the salad.
The ski masks had become very popular since the beginning of second semester,
having proved spectacularly successful during fire drills. The Airheads found
that they could pull them on at the first ringing of the bell and make it
downstairs before all the bars filled up, and when they returned to their
rooms they did not have to remove any makeup before going back to bed. Then
one sartorially daring Airhead had worn her ski mask to a 9:00 class one
January morning, and pronounced it worthwhile, and other Airheads had begun to
experiment with the concept. The less wealthy found that ski masks saved heaps
of money on cosmetics and hair care, and everyone was impressed with their
convenience, ease of cleaning and unlimited mix-'n'-match color coordination
possibilities. Blousy, amorphous dresses had also become the style; why wear
something tight and uncomfortable when no one knew who you were?
Talking to Mari, Nicci and Toni was not that bad, of course, but Sarah felt
unusually refreshed and clean, was having one of her favorite dinners, was
going to a concert with Hyacinth that night and had hoped to make it a perfect
day. Worse than talking to them was having to smile and nod at the stream of
cologned and blow-dried Terrorists who came up behind the Airheads in their
strange bandy macho walk, homing in on those ski masks like heat-seeking
missiles on a house fire. Several sneaked up behind Mari and the others to
goose them while they ate. Sarah knew that they did not want to be warned, so
she merely rolled her manicotti around in her mouth and stared morosely over
Mari's shoulder as the young bucks crept forward with exaggerated stealth and
twitching fingers. So long as these people continued to lead segregated lives,
she knew, it was necessary to do such things in order to have any contact
with members of the other sex. They at least had more style than the freshman
Terrorists, who generally started conversations by dumping beverages over the
heads of freshman women. So there were many breaks in the conversation while
Terrorist fingers probed deep into Airhead tenderloins and the requisite
screaming and giggling followed.
Notwithstanding this, "the gals" did manage to have a conversation about
their majors. Sarah was majoring in English. Mari had a cousin who majored in
English too, and who had met a very nice Business student doing it. Mari was
majoring in Hobbies Education. Toni was Undecided. Nicci was in Sociology at
another school.
And then the food fight.
Between the opening salvo and the moment when their table was protectively
ringed by Terrorists, the others were quite dignified and hardly moved. Sarah
sat still momentarily, then came to her senses and slipped under the table.
From this point of view she saw many pairs of corduroy, khaki, designer jean
and chino pantlegs around the table, and saw too the folding partitions slide
across.
Once the partitions were closed she emerged, mostly because she wanted to see
who owned the brown polyester legs that had been dancing around the room in
such agitation. The Terrorists grabbed her arms solicitously and hauled her to
her feet, wanting to know if she had lost her ski mask in "all the action."
The man in the brown three-piecer was none other than Bartholomew (Wombat)
Forksplit, Dean of Dining Services, who had been promoted to Dean Emeritus
after his recovery from the nacho tortilla chip shard that had passed through
his brain. No one knew where he came from-- Tibet? Kurdistan? Abyssinia?
Circassia? Since the accident, he had become known as Wombat the Marauder to
his victims, mostly inconsiderate dorks who had broken Caf rules only to find
this man gripping them in an old Bosnian or Tunisian martial arts hold that
shorted out the major meridians of their nervous system, and shouting at them
in a percussive accent that crackled like fat ground beef on a red-hot steam
griddle. Some accused him of using the accident as an excuse to act like a
madman, but no one doubted that he was pissed off.
When he saw the ex-President half-dragged from under a table by the beaming
Terrorists, Forksplit released the knee of his current victim and speed-skated
across the stained linoleum toward her, his tomato-sauce-- spattered arms
outstretched as if in supplication. Sarah pulled her arms free and backed
up a step, but he stopped short of embracing her and cried, "Sarah! You,
here? Indicates this that you are part of these-- these asshole Terrorists?
Please say no!" He stared piteously into her eyes, the little white scar
on his forehead standing out vividly against his murderously flushed face.
Sarah swallowed and glanced around the room, conscious of many ski masks and
Terrorists looking at her.
"Oh, not really, I was just over here at another table. These guys were just
helping me up. This is a real shame. I hope the B-men don't go on strike now."
A look of agony came over Wombat the Marauder's face at the mere mention of
this idea, and he backed up, pirouetted and paced around their Cafeteria
subdivision directing a soliloquy of anger and frustration at Sarah. "I
joost-- I don't know what the hell to do. I do everything in the world to
deliver fine service. This is good food! No one believes that. They go off
to other places and eat, come back and say, 'Yes Mr. Forksplit let me shake
your hand your food is so good!! Best I have ever eaten!' But do these idiots
Several days into the second semester, the Administration finally told the
truth about the Library, and allowed the media in to photograph the ranks upon
ranks of card catalog cabinets with their totally empty drawers.
The perpetrators had done it on Christmas Day. The Plex had been nearly
deserted, its entrance guarded by a single guard at a turnstile. At eight in
the morning, ten rather young and hairy-looking fellows in B-man uniforms had
arrived and haltingly explained that as Crotobaltislavonians they followed the
Julian calendar, and had already celebrated Christmas. Could they not come in
to perform needed plumbing repairs, and earn quadruple overtime for working on
Christmas Day? The skeptical guard let them in anyway; if he could not trust
the janitors, whom could he trust?
As reconstructed by the police, the burglars had gathered in the card catalog
area all the canvas carts they could find. They had taken these through the
catalog, pulling the lock-pins from each drawer and dumping the contents into
the carts. The Library's 4.8 million volumes were catalogued in 12,000 drawers
of three-by-five cards, and a simple calculation demonstrated that all of
these cards could be fitted into a dozen canvas carts by anyone not overly
fastidious about keeping them in perfect order. The carts had been taken
via freight elevator to the loading docks and wheeled onto a rented truck,
which according to the rental agency had now disappeared. Its borrower, a Mr.
Friedrich Engels, had failed to list a correct address and phone number and
proved difficult to track down. The only untouched drawer was number 11375,
STALIN, JOSEPH to STALLBAUM, JOHANN GOTTFRIED.
The Library turned to the computer system. During the previous five years,
a sweatshop of catalogers had begun to transfer the catalog into a computer
system, and the Administration hoped that ten percent of the catalog could be
salvaged in this way. Instead they found that a terrible computer malfunction
had munched through the catalog recently, erasing call numbers and main
entries and replacing them with knock-knock jokes, Burma-Shave ditties and
tracts on the sexual characteristics of the Computing Center senior staff.
The situation was not hopeless; at any rate, it did not deteriorate at first.
The books were still arranged in a rational order. This changed when people
began holding books hostage.
A Master's Candidate in Journalism had a few books she used over and over
again. After the loss of the catalog she found them by memory, carried them
to another part of the Library, and cached them behind twelve feet of bound
back issues of the Nepalese Journal of Bhutaruan Studies. A library employee
from Photoduplication then happened to take down a volume of Utah Review of
Theoretical Astrocosmology, shelved back-to-back with NJBS, and detected the
cache. She moved it to another place in the Library, dumping it behind a
fifty-volume facsimile edition of the ledgers of the Brisbane/Surabaya Steam
Packet Co. Ltd., which had been published in 1893 and whose pages had not
yet been cut. She then left a sign on the Library bulletin board saying that
if the user of such-and-such books wanted to know where they were, he or she
could put fifty dollars in the former stash, and she, the employee, would
leave in its place the new location. Several thousand people saw this note
and the scam was written up in the Monoplex Monitor; it was so obviously a
good idea that it rapidly became a large business. Some people took only a few
volumes, others hundreds, but in all cases the technique was basically the
same, and soon extra bulletin board capability was added outside the entrance
to the Library bloc. Of course, this practice had been possible before the
loss of the card catalog, but that event seemed to change everyone's scruples
about the Library. The central keying system was gone; what difference did it
make?
Free enterprise helped take up the slack, as students hired themselves out
as book-snoopers. The useless card catalog area took on the semblance of a
bazaar, each counter occupied by one or two businesses with signs identifying
their rates and services. The psychic book-snoopers stole and hid books,
then-- claiming to use psychic powers-- showed spectacular efficiency in
locating them. The psychics soon eclipsed the businesses of their nonspiritual
colleagues. In order to seem as mysterious as possible, the psychics engaged
in impressive rituals; one day, working alone on the top floor, I was
surprised to see Professor Emeritus Humphrey Batstone Forthcoming IV being led
blindfolded through the stacks by a leotarded witch swinging a censer.
Every week the people who had stolen the card catalog would take a card and
mail it to the Library. The conditions of ransom, as expressed on these cards
in a cramped hand, were that: (1) S. S. Krupp and the Trustees must be purged;
(2) the Megaversity must have open admissions and no room, board or tuition
fees; (3) the Plex must become a free zone with no laws or authority; (4) the
Megaversity must withdraw all investments in firms doing business in South
Africa, firms doing business with firms doing business in South Africa and
firms doing business with firms doing business with firms doing business in
South Africa; (5) recognize the PLO and the baby seals.
S. S. Krupp observed that card catalogs, a recent invention, had not existed
at the Library of Alexandria, and though he would have preferred, ceteris
paribus, to have the catalog, we didn't have one now, that was too bad, and
we were going to have to make do. There was dissent and profound shock over
his position, and righteous editorials in the Monitor, but after a week or two
most people decided that, though Krupp was an asshole, there wasn't any point
in arguing.
"Welcome and thanks for coming to the mass driver demonstration." Casimir
Radon swallowed some water and straightened his glacier glasses. "The physics
majors' organization Neutrino has put a lot of time and work into this device,
much of it over the Christmas holiday, and we think it is a good example of
what can be done with activities money used constructively. God damn it!"
He was cursing at the loudness of his Plex neighbor, Dex Fresser, whose stereo
was an electronic signal processor of industrial power. For once Casimir did
not restrain himself; he was so nervous over the upcoming demonstration that
he failed to consider the dire embarrassment, social rejection and personal
danger involved in going next door to ask this jerk-off to turn down his
music. He was pounding on Dex Fresser's door before his mind knew what his
body was doing, and for a moment he hoped his knocks had been drowned out by
the bass beats exploding from Fresser's eighteen-inch woofers. But the door
opened, and there was Dex Fresser, looking completely disoriented, "Could
you turn that down?" asked Casimir. Fresser, becoming aware of his presence,
looked Casimir over from head to foot. "It kind of disturbs me," Casimir added
apologetically.
Fresser thought it over. "But you're not even there that much, so how can
it disturb you?" He then peered oddly into Casimir's face, as though the
goggle-eyed Radon were the captain of a ship from a mirror Earth on the other
side of the sun, which was pretty much what he was thinking. Chagrined,
Casimir ground his teeth very loudly, generating so much heat that they became
white hot and glowed pinkly through his cheeks. He then receded off into
infinity like a starship making the jump into hyperspace, then came around
behind Fresser again in such a way as to make it appear (due to the mirror
effect) that he was actually coming from the same direction in which he'd
gone. Just as he arrived back in the doorway two years later, the space warp
snapped shut behind him; but at the last moment Dex Fresser glanced through
it, and saw lovely purple fields filled with flowers, chanting Brazilians,
leaky green ballpoint pens and thousands of empty tea boxes. He wanted very
much to visit that place.
"Well, it does disturb me when I do happen to be in my room. See how that
works?" The man who was running this tape, a lanky green tennis shoe with bad
acne and an elephant's trunk tied in a double Windsor knot around his waist,
stopped the tape and ran it back to Fresser's previous reply.
"But you're not even there that much, so how can it disturb you?" As Fresser
finished this, Casimir did exactly what he had done last time, except this
time the purple fields were being clusterbombed by flying garages. The
space warp closed off just in time to let a piece of shrapnel through. It
zoomed over Casimir's shoulder and embedded itself in the wall, and Fresser
recognized it as a Pershing 2 missile.
"Right," said Casimir, now. speaking through a sousaphone around his shoulder,
which bombarded Dex Fresser with white laser rays. "I know. But you see when I
am in my room I prefer not to be disturbed. That's the whole point."
Fresser suddenly realized that the Pershing 2 was actually the left front
quarter-panel of a '57 Buick that he had seen abandoned on a street in
Evanston on July 28, 1984, and that Casimir was actually John D. Rockefeller.
"How can you be so goddamn selfish, man? Don't you know how many people you've
killed?" And he slammed the door shut, knowing that the shock would cause the
piece of the Buick to fall on Rockefeller's head; since it was antimatter,
nothing would be left afterward.
The confrontation had worked out as badly as Casimir had feared. He went back
to his room, heart pounding irrationally, so upset that he did not practice
his speech at all.
The lack of rehearsal did not matter, as the only audience in Sharon's lab
was the Neutrino membership, Virgil, Sarah, a photographer from the Mortoplex
Monitor and I. Toward the end of the speech, though, S. S. Krupp walked in
with an official photographer and a small, meek-looking older man, causing
Casimir to whip off his glasses in agitation and destroying any trace of
calmness in his manner. Finally he mumbled something to the effect that it
was too bad Krupp had come in so late, seeing as how the best part of this
introduction was over, and concluded that we should stop jabbering and have a
look at this thing.
The mass driver was four meters long, built atop a pair of sturdy tables
bolted together. It was nothing more than a pair of long straight parallel
guides, each horseshoe-shaped in cross-section, the prongs of the horseshoes
pointed toward each other with a narrow gap in between. The bucket, which
would carry the payload, was lozenge-shaped in cross-section and almost filled
the oval tunnel created by the two guides. Most of the bucket was empty
payload space, but its outer jacket was of a special alloy supercooled by
liquid helium so that it became a perfect superconducting electromagnet. This
feature, combined with a force field generated in the two rails, suspended
the bucket on a frictionless magnetic cushion. Electromagnets in the rails,
artfully wound by Virgil, provided the acceleration, "kicking" the bucket and
its contents from one end of the mass driver to the other.
Casimir relaxed visibly as he began pointing out the technical details. With
long metal tongs he reached into a giant thermos flask and pulled out the
supercold bucket, which was about the size of two beer cans side by side. He
slid it into the breech of the mass driver. As it began to soak up warmth from
the room, a cascade of frigid white helium poured from a vent on its back and
spilled to the floor.
Krupp stood close by and asked questions. "What's the weight of the slug?"
"This," said Casimir, picking up a solid brass cylinder from the table, "is a
one-kilogram mass. That's pretty small, but-- " "No, it isn't." Krupp looked
over at his friend, who raised his eyebrows and nodded. "Nothing small about
it."
Casimir smiled weakly and nodded in thanks. Krupp continued, "What's the
muzzle velocity?"
Here Casimir looked sheepish and shifted nervously, looking at his Neutrino
friends.
"Oh," said Krupp, sounding let down, "not so fast, eh?"
"Oh, no no no. Don't get me wrong. The final velocity isn't bad." At this
the Neutrino members clapped their hands over their mouths and stifled
shrieks and laughs. "I was just going to let you see that for yourselves
instead of throwing a lot of numbers at you."
"Well, that's fine!" said Krupp, sounding more sanguine. "Don't let us
laymen interfere with your schedule. I'm sorry. Just go right ahead."
He stepped back and crossed his arms as though planning to shut up for hours.
Casimir gave the empty bucket a tap and there were oohs and aahs as it floated
smoothly and quietly down the rails, bounced off a stop at the end and floated
back with no change in speed. He reinserted the one-kilogram brass cylinder.
"Now let's try it. As you can see we have a momentum absorber set up at the
other end of the lab."
The "momentum absorber" was ten squares of 3/8-inch plywood held parallel in a
frame, spaced two inches apart to form a sandwich a couple of feet long. This
was securely braced against the wall of the lab at the same level as the mass
driver. had assumed that the intended target was a wastebasket floor beneath
the "muzzle" of the machine, but now realized that Casimir was expecting
the weight to fly about twenty feet without losing any altitude. "I suggest
you all stand back in case something goes wrong," said Casimir, and feeling
somewhat alarmed I stood way back and suggested that Sarah do likewise.
Casimir made a last check of the circuitry, then hit a big red button.
The sound was a whizz followed by a rapid series of staccato explosions. It
could be written as: ZZIKKH where the entire sound takes about a quarter of
a second. None of us really saw anything. Casimir was already running toward
the momentum absorber. When we got there, we saw that the first five layers
of plywood had perfectly clean round holes punched through them, two more had
messy holes, and the next layer had buckled, the brass cylinder wedged in
place at its bottom. Casimir pulled out the payload with tongs and dropped
it into an asbestos mitt he had donned. "It's pretty hot after all those
collisions," he explained.
Everyone but Casimir was electrified. Even the Neutrino observers, who had
seen it before, were awed, and laughed hysterically from time to time. Sarah
looked as though whatever distrust she had ever had in technology had been
dramatically confirmed. I stared at Casimir, realizing how smart he was.
Virgil left, smiling. Krupp's little friend paced between mass driver and
target, hands clasped behind back, a wide smile nestled in his silver-brown
beard, while Krupp himself was astonished.
"Jesus H. Christ!" he yelled, fingering the holes. "That is the damnedest
thing I've ever seen. Good lord, boy, how did you make this?"
Casimir seemed at a loss. "It's all done from Sharon's plans," he said
blankly. "He did all the magnetic fieldwork. I just plugged in the arithmetic.
The rest of it was machine-shop work. Nothing complicated about the machine."
"Does it have to be this powerful?" I said. "Don't get me wrong. I'm impressed
as hell. Wouldn't it have been a little easier to make a slower one?"
"Well, sure, but not as useful," said Casimir. "The technical challenges only
show up when you make it fast enough to be used for its practical purpose--
which is to shoot payloads of ore and minerals from the lunar surface to
an orbital processing station. For a low-velocity one we could've used air
cushions instead of magnetic fields to float the bucket but there's no
challenge in that."
"What's the muzzle velocity?" asked Krupp's guest, who had appeared next to
me. He spoke quietly and quickly in an Australian accent. When I looked down
at him, I realized he was Oswald Heimlich, Chairman of the Board of Trustees
of American Megaversity and one of the richest men in the city -- the founder
of Heimlich Freedom Industries a huge defense contractor. Casimir obviously
didn't know who he was.
"The final velocity of the bucket is one hundred meters per second, or about
two hundred twenty miles per hour."
"And how could you boost that?"
"Boost it?" Casimir looked at him, startled. "Well, for more velocity you
could build another just like this-- "
"Yes, and put them together. I know. They're interconnectible.
But how could you increase the acceleration of this device?"
"Well, that gets you into some big technical problems. You'd need expensive
electronic gear with the ability to kick out huge pulses of power very
quickly. Giant capacitors could do it, or a specialized power supply."
Heimlich followed all this, nodding incessantly. "Or a generator that gets its
power from a controlled explosion."
Casimir smiled. "It's funny you should mention that. Some people are
speculating about building small portable mass drivers with exactly that type
of power supply-- a chemical explosion-- and using them to throw explosive
shells and so on. That's what is called-- "
"A railgun. Precisely."
Things began to fall into place for Casimir. "Oh. I see. So you want to know
if I could build-- basically a railgun."
"Sure. Sure," said Heimlich in an aggressive, glinting voice. "What's
research without practical applications?" The question hung in the air.
Krupp took over, sounding much calmer. "You see, Casimir, in order to
continue with this research-- and you are off to an exceptionally fine
start-- you will need outside funding on a larger scale. Now, as good an
idea as lunar mining is, no one is ever going to fund that kind of research.
But railguns-- whether you like it or not, they have very immediate
significance that can really pull in the grants. I'm merely pointing out
that in today's climate relating your work to defense is the best way to
obtain funding. And I imagine that if you wanted to set up a specialized lab
here to advance this kind of work, you might be able to get all the funding
you'd want."
Casimir looked down at the shattered plywood in consternation. "I don't need
an answer now. But give it some careful thought, son. There's no reason for
you to be stuck in silly-ass classes if you can do this kind of work. Call
me anytime you like." He shook Casimir's hand, Heimlich made a brief smiling
spastic bow, and they walked out together.
--February--
Sarah quit the Presidency of the Student Government on the first of January.
At the mass-driver demonstration, S. S. Krupp had simply ignored her, which
was fine by Sarah as she had no desire to give the man a point-by-point
explanation.
As for the death of Tiny, here the other shoe never dropped, though Sarah
and Hyacinth kept waiting. His body was in especially poor condition when
found, and the bullet holes might not have been detected even if someone had
thought to look for them. The City police made a rare Plex visit and looked at
the broken window and the electrocuted man on the floor, but apparently the
Terrorists had cleaned up any blood or other evidence of conflict; in short,
they made it all look like a completely deranged drunken fuck-up, an archetype
familiar to the City cops.
The Terrorists wanted their own revenge. None of them had a coherent idea
of what had happened. Even the two surviving witnesses had dim, traumatized
memories of the event and could only say it had something to do with a woman
dressed as a clown. As soon as I heard that the Terrorists were looking for
someone called Clown Woman, I invited her over and we had a chat. I knew what
her costume had been. Though she understood why I was curious, she suddenly
adopted a sad, cold reserve I had never seen in her before.
"Some really terrible things happened that night. But I'm I Hyacinth is
safe-- okay? And we've been making plans to stay that way."
"Fine. I just-- "
"I know. I'd love to tell you more. I'm dying to. But I won't, because you
have some official responsibilities and you're the kind of person who carries
them out, and knowing anything would be a burden for you. You'd try to help--
but that's something you can't do. Can you understand that?"
I was a little scared by her lone strength. More, I was stunned that she was
protecting me. Finally I shrugged and said, "Sounds as though you know what
you're doing," because that was how it sounded.
"This has a lot to do with your resigning the Presidency?" I continued. Sarah
was a little annoyed by my diplomacy, for the same reason S. S. Krupp would
have been.
"Bud, I don't need some terrific reason for resigning. If I'm spending time on
a useless job I don't like, and I find there are better things to do with that
time, then I ought to resign." I nodded contritely, and for the first time she
was relaxed enough to laugh. On her way out she gave me a long platonic hug,
and I still remember it when I feel in need of warmth.
They got the wading pool and the garden hose on a two-hour bus ride to a
suburban K-Mart. Hyacinth inflated it in the middle of Sarah's room while
Sarah ran the hose down the hall to the bathroom to pipe in hot water. Once
the pool was acceptably full and foamy, they retrieved the hose, locked the
door and sealed off all windows with newspaper and all cracks around the door
with towels and tape. They lit a few candles but blew most of them out when
their eyes adjusted. The magnum of champagne was buried in ice, the water was
hot, the night was young. Hyacinth's .44 was very intrusive, and so Sarah
filed it under G for Gun and they had a good laugh.
Around 4:00 in the morning, to Sarah's satisfaction, Hyacinth passed out.
Sarah allowed herself to do likewise for a while. Then she dragged Hyacinth
out onto the rug, dried her and hoisted her into bed. They slept until 4:32
in the afternoon. Sleet was ticking against the window. Hyacinth cut a slit
in the window screen and they fed the hose outside and siphoned all the
bathwater out of the pool and down the side of the Plex. They ate all of
Sarah's mother's banana bread, thirty-two Chips Ahoys, three bowls of Captain
Crunch, a pint of strawberry ice cream and drank a great deal of water. They
then gave each other backrubs and went to sleep again.
"Keeping my .38 clean is a pain in the ass," said Sarah at one point. "It
picks up a lot of crud in my backpack pocket." "That's one reason to carry a
single-action," said Hyacinth. "Less to go wrong if it's dirty."
A long time later, Sarah added, "This is pretty macho. Talking about our
guns."
"I suppose it's true that they're macho. But they are also guns. In fact,
they're primarily guns."
"True."
They also discussed killing people, which had become an important subject with
them recently.
"Sometimes there isn't any choice," Sarah said to Hyacinth, as Hyacinth cried
calmly into her shoulder. "You know, Constantine punished rapists by pouring
molten lead down their throats. That was a premeditated, organized punishment.
What you did was on the spur of the moment."
"Yeah. Putting on protective clothes, loading my gun, tracking them down and
blowing one away was really on the spur of the moment."
"All I can say is that if anyone ever deserved it, he did." Three Terrorists
ambled down the hall past Sarah's door, chanting "Death to Clown Woman!"
"Okay, fine," said Hyacinth, and stopped crying. "Granted. I can't worry about
it forever. But sooner or later they're going to figure out who Clown Woman
is. Then there'll be even more violence."
"Better them to be violent against us," said Sarah, "than against people who
don't even understand what violence is."
Sarah was busy taking care of herself that semester. This made more sense than
what the rest of us were doing, but it did not make for an eventful life. At
the same time, a very different American Megaversity student was fighting the
same battle Sarah had just won. This student lost. The tale of his losing is
melancholy but much more interesting.
Every detail was important in assessing the situation, in determining just how
close to the brink Plexor was! The obvious things, the frequent transitions
from the Technological universe to the Magical universe, those were child's
play to detect; but the evidence of impending Breakdown was to be found only
in the minutiae. The extra cold-water pipe; that was significant. What had
suddenly caused such a leak to be sprung in the plumbing of Plexor, which
had functioned flawlessly for a thousand years? And what powerful benign
hand had made the switch from one pipe to the other? What prophecy was to be
found in the coming of the Thing of the Earth in the test run of Shekondar?
Was some great happening at hand? One could not be sure; the answer must
be nested among subtleties. So this one spent many days wandering like a
lone thaumaturge through the corridors of the Plex, watching and observing,
ignoring the classes and lectures that had become so trivial.
With the help of an obsequious MARS lieutenant he was allowed to inspect
the laboratory of the secret railgun experiments. Here he found advanced
specialized power supplies from Heimlich Freedom Industries. The lieutenant, a
Neutrino member of four years' standing, hooked the output of one power supply
to an oscilloscope and showed him the very high and sharp spike of current it
could punch out-- precisely the impulses a superfast mass driver would need
to keep its payload accelerating explosively right up to the end. This one
also observed a test of a new electromagnet. It was much larger than those
used for the first mass driver, wound with miles of hair-thin copper wire and
cooled by antifreeze-filled tubes. A short piece of rail had been made to
test the magnet. It was equipped with a bucket designed to carry a payload
ten centimeters across! This one watched as a violent invisible kick from the
magnet wrenched the bucket to high velocity and slammed it to the cushion
at the rail's end; the heavy payload shot out, boomed into a tarp suspended
about five feet away, and fell into a box of foam-rubber scraps. It was the
same pattern he saw everywhere. A peaceful lunar mining device had, under the
influence of Shekondar the Fearsome, metamorphosed into a potent weapon of
great value to the forces of Good.
He gave the lieutenant a battlefield promotion to Captain. He wanted to stay
and continue to watch, but it had been a long day; he was tired, and for a
moment his mind seemed to stop entirely as he stood by the exit.
Then came again the creeping sense of Leakage, impossible to ignore; his head
snapped up and to the right, and, speaking across the dimensional barrier,
Klystron the Impaler told him to go to dinner.
Klystron the Impaler was only Klystron the Impaler when he was in a Magical
universe. The rest of the time he was Chris the Systems Programmer-- a
brilliant, dashing, young, handsome terminal jockey considered to be the best
systems man on the giant self-contained universe-hopping colony, Plexor.
From time to time Plexor would pass through the Central Bifurcation, a giant
space warp, and enter a Magical universe, fundamentally altering all aspects
of reality. Though the structure of Plexor itself underwent little change at
these times, everything therein was converted to its magical, pretechnological
analog. Guns became swords, freshmen became howling savages, Time magazine
became a hand-lettered vellum tome and Chris the Systems Programmer-- well,
brilliant people like him became sorcerers, swordspeople and heroes. The
smarter they were-- the greater their stature in the Technological universe--
the more dazzling was their swordplay and the more penetrating their spells.
Needless to say, Klystron the Impaler was a very great hero-swordsman-magician
indeed.
Of course, Plexorians tended to be that way to begin with. Only the most
advanced had been admitted when Plexor was begun, and it was natural that
their distant offspring today should tend toward the exceptional. Of those
lucky enough to be selected for Plexor, only the most adaptable had any
stomach for the life once they got there and, every month or so, found their
waterbeds metamorphosing into heaps of bearskins. Klystron/Chris liked to
think of the place as a pressure cooker for the advancement of humanity.
But even the most perfect machine could not be insulated from the frailty and
stupidity of the human mind. In the early days of Plexor every inhabitant had
understood the Central Bifurcation, had respected the distinction between
technology and magic, and had shown enough discipline to ensure that division.
Within the past several generations, though, ignorance had come to this
perfect place and Breakdown had begun. Recent generations of Plexorians lacked
the enthusiasm and commitment of their forebears and displayed ignorance which
was often shocking; recently it had become common to suppose that Plexor was
not a free-drifting edosociosystem at all, that it was in fact a planetoidal
structure bound to a particular universe. Occasionally, it was true, Plexor
would materialize on the ground, in a giant city or a barbarian kingdom. Its
makers, a Guild of sorcerers and magicians operating in separate universes
through the mediation of Keldor, had created it to be self-sufficient and
life-supporting in any habitat, with a nuclear fuel source that would last
forever. But to believe that one particular world was always out there was a
blindness to reality so severe that it amounted to rank primitivism amidst
this sophisticated colony of technocrats. It was, in a word, Breakdown-- a
blurring of the boundary-- and such was the delicacy of that boundary between
the universes that mere ignorance of its existence, mere Breakdown-oriented
thinking and Breakdown-conducive behavior, was sufficient to open small
Leaks between Magic and Technology, to generate an unholy Mixture of the two
opposites. It was the duty of the remaining guardians of the Elder Knowledge.
such as Klystron/Chris, to expurgate such mixtures and restore the erstwhile
purity of the two existences of Plexor.
In just the past few weeks the Leaks had become rents, the Mixture ubiquitous.
Now Barbarians sat at computer terminals in the Computing Center unabashed,
pathetically trying, in broad daylight, to run programs that were so riddled
with bugs the damn things wouldn't even compile, their recent kills stretched
out bleeding between their feet awaiting the spit. Giant rats from another
plane of existence roamed free through the sewers of the mighty technological
civilization, and everywhere Chris the Systems Analyst found dirt and
marrow-sucked bones on the floor, broken light fixtures, graffiti, noise,
ignorance. He watched these happenings, not yet willing to believe in what
they portended, and soon developed a sixth sense for detecting Leakage. That
was in and of itself a case of Mixture; in a Technological universe, sixth
senses were scientifically impossible. His new intuition was a sign of the
Leakage of the powers of Klystron the Impaler into a universe where they did
not belong. In recognition of this, and to protect himself from the ignorant,
Klystron/Chris had thought it wise to adopt the informal code name of Fred
Fine.
He had denied what was coming for too long. Despite his supreme intelligence
he was hesitant to accept the hugeness of his own personal importance.
Until the day of the food fight: on that day he came to understand the somber
future of Plexor and of himself. It happened during dinner. To most of those
in the Cafeteria it was just a food fight, but to "Fred Fine" it was much more
significant, a preliminary skirmish to the upcoming war, a byte of strategic
data to be thoughtfully digested.
He had been contemplating an abstract type of program structure, absently
shuffling the nameless protein-starch substance from tray to mouth, when a
sense of strangeness had verged on his awareness and dispersed his thoughts.
As he looked up and became alert, he also became aware that (a) the food was
terrible; (b) the Caf was crowded and noisy; and (c) Leakage was all around.
His mind now as alert as that of Klystron before a melee, he scanned the
Cafeteria from his secure corner (one of only four corners in the Cafeteria
and therefore highly prized), stuffing his computer printout securely into his
big locking briefcase. Though his gaze traversed hundreds of faces in a few
seconds, something allowed him to fix his attention on a certain few: eight
or ten, with long hair and eccentric clothing, who were clearly looking at
one another and not at the gallons of food heaped on their Fiberglass trays.
The sixth sense of Klystron enabled Chris to glean from the whirl of people a
deeply hidden pattern he knew to be significant.
He stood up in the corner, memorizing the locations of those he had found, and
switched to long-range scan, assisting himself by following their own tense
stares. His eyes flicked down to the readout of his digital calcu-chronograph
and he noted that it was just seconds before 6:00. Impatiently he polled
his subjects and noted that they were now all looking toward one place: a
milk dispenser near the center of the Cafeteria, where an exceptionally tall
burnout stood with a small black box in his hand!
There was a sharp blue flash that made the ceiling glow briefly-- the black
box was an electronic flash unit-- and all hell broke loose. Missiles of
all shapes and colors whizzed through his field of vision and splathunked
starchily against tables, pillars and bodies. Amid sudden screaming an entire
long table was flipped over, causing a hundredweight of manicotti and French
fries to slide into the laps of the unfortunates on the wrong side. Seeing
the perpetrators break and dissolve into the milling dinnertime crowd, the
victims could only respond by slinging handfuls of steaming ricotta at their
disappearing backsides. At this first outbreak of noise and action the
Cafeteria quieted for a moment, as all turned toward the disturbance. Then,
seeing food flying past their own heads, most of the spectators united in
bedlam. The Terrorist sections seemed to have been expecting this and joined
in with beer-commercial rowdiness. Several tables of well-dressed young
women ran frantically for the exits, in most cases too slowly to prevent the
ruination of hundreds of dollars' worth of clothes a head. Many collapsed
squalling into the arms of their patron Terrorist organizations. The Droogs
opened a milk machine, pulled out a heavy poly-bag of Skim and slung it into
the midst of what had been an informal gathering of Classics majors, with
explosive results.
All was observed intently by Klystron/Chris, who stood calm and motionless in
his corner holding his briefcase as a shield. Though the progress of the fight
was interesting to watch, it was hardly as important as the behavior of the
instigators and the reactions of the Cafeteria staff.
Of the instigating organization, some were obliged to flee immediately
in order to protect themselves. These were the agents provocateurs, the
table-tippers and tray-slingers, whose part was already played. The remainder
were observers, and they stood in carefully planned stations around the walls
of the Cafeteria and watched, much as Chris did. Some snapped pictures with
cheap cameras.
This picture-taking began in earnest when, after about fifteen seconds, the
reactive strike began. The cooks and servers had instantly leapt to block
the doors of the serving bays, which in these circumstances had the same
value as ammunition dumps. Pairs of the larger male cooks now charged out
and drew shut the folding dividers which partitioned the Cafeteria into
twenty-four sections. Meanwhile, forty-eight more senior Cafeteria personnel
and guards fanned out in organized fashion, clothed in ponchos and facemasks.
In each section, one of them leapt up on a table with a megaphone to scream
righteousness at the students, while his partner confronted particularly
active types. Klystron/Chris's view of the fight was abruptly reduced to what
he could see in his own small section.
Among other things he saw eight of the Roy G Biv Terrorist Group overturn the
table on which the local official stood, sending him splaying on hands and
knees across the slick of grease and tomato sauce on the floor. His partner
skidded after him and swiveled to protect their backs from the Terrorists, who
had huddled and were mumbling menacingly. For the first time Klystron/Chris
felt the hysterical half-sick excitement of approaching violence, and he began
to edge along the wall toward a more strategically sound position.
One of the Terrorists went to the corner where the sliding partitions
intersected, blocking the only route of escape. The men in the room moved away
uneasily; the women pressed themselves against the wall and sat on the floor
and tried to get invisible. Then the Roy G Biv men broke; two went for the
still-standing official, one for the man who was just staggering to his feet
with the dented megaphone. Abruptly, Klystron/Chris stepped forward, took from
his briefcase a small weapon and pulled the trigger. The weapon was a flash
gun, a device for making an explosively intense flash of light that blinded
attackers. Everyone in front of the weapon froze. As they were putting their
hands to their eyes, he pulled out his Civil War bayonet, jammed it into a
fold in the sliding partition and pulled it down to open a six-foot rent. He
led the tactical retreat to the adjoining section, which was comparatively
under control.
The officials here were not amused. A stocky middle-aged man in a brown
suit stomped toward Klystron/Chris with death in his eye. He was stopped
by a chorus of protest from the refugees, who made it clear that the real
troublemakers were back there. And that was how Klystron/Chris avoided having
any of these seriously Mixed officials discover his informal code name.
But what was the strategic significance? He knew it had been done by
Barbarians. Despite the carefully tailored modern clothes they used to hide
their stooping forms and overly long arms, he recognized their true nature
from the ropy scars running along their heavy overhanging brows and the
garlands of rodent skulls they wore around their necks. Had it not been for
the cameramen, he would have concluded that this was nothing more than a
purposeless display of the savages' contempt for order. But the photographers
made it clear that this riot had been a reconnaissance-in-force, directed by
an advanced strategic mind with an crest in the Cafeteria's defenses. And
that, in turn, implied an upcoming offensive centered on the Cafeteria itself.
Of course! In here was enough grub to feed a good-sized commando force for
years, if rationed properly; it would therefore be a prime objective for
insurrectionists planning to seize and hold large portions of Plexor. But
why? Who was behind it? And how did it connect with the other harbingers of
catastrophe?
Once upon a time, a mathematically inclined friend of Sarah's, one Casimir
Radon, had estimated that her chances of running into a fellow Airhead at
dinner were no better than about one in twenty. As usual he was not trying to
be annoying or nerdish, but nevertheless Sarah wished for a more satisfying
explanation of why she could get no relief from her damned neighbors. One in
twenty was optimistic. At times she thought that they were planting spies in
her path to take down statistics on how many behavioral standards she broke,
or to drive her crazy by asking why she had really resigned the Presidency.
She was annoyed but not surprised to find herself eating dinner with Mari
Meegan, Mari's second cousin and Toni one night. Relaxed from a racquetball
game, she made no effort to scan her route through the Caf for telltale ski
masks. So as she danced and sideslipped her way toward what looked like an
open table, she was blindsided by a charming squeal from right next to her.
"Sarah!" Too slow even to think of pretending not to hear, she looked down to
see the three color-coordinated ski masks looking back at her expectantly.
She despised them and never wanted to see them again, ever, but she also knew
there was value in following social norms, once in a while, to forestall
hatred and God knows what kinds of retribution. The last thing she wanted was
to be connected with Clown Woman. So she smiled and sat down. It was not going
to be a great meal, but Sarah's conversation support system was working well
enough to get her at least through the salad.
The ski masks had become very popular since the beginning of second semester,
having proved spectacularly successful during fire drills. The Airheads found
that they could pull them on at the first ringing of the bell and make it
downstairs before all the bars filled up, and when they returned to their
rooms they did not have to remove any makeup before going back to bed. Then
one sartorially daring Airhead had worn her ski mask to a 9:00 class one
January morning, and pronounced it worthwhile, and other Airheads had begun to
experiment with the concept. The less wealthy found that ski masks saved heaps
of money on cosmetics and hair care, and everyone was impressed with their
convenience, ease of cleaning and unlimited mix-'n'-match color coordination
possibilities. Blousy, amorphous dresses had also become the style; why wear
something tight and uncomfortable when no one knew who you were?
Talking to Mari, Nicci and Toni was not that bad, of course, but Sarah felt
unusually refreshed and clean, was having one of her favorite dinners, was
going to a concert with Hyacinth that night and had hoped to make it a perfect
day. Worse than talking to them was having to smile and nod at the stream of
cologned and blow-dried Terrorists who came up behind the Airheads in their
strange bandy macho walk, homing in on those ski masks like heat-seeking
missiles on a house fire. Several sneaked up behind Mari and the others to
goose them while they ate. Sarah knew that they did not want to be warned, so
she merely rolled her manicotti around in her mouth and stared morosely over
Mari's shoulder as the young bucks crept forward with exaggerated stealth and
twitching fingers. So long as these people continued to lead segregated lives,
she knew, it was necessary to do such things in order to have any contact
with members of the other sex. They at least had more style than the freshman
Terrorists, who generally started conversations by dumping beverages over the
heads of freshman women. So there were many breaks in the conversation while
Terrorist fingers probed deep into Airhead tenderloins and the requisite
screaming and giggling followed.
Notwithstanding this, "the gals" did manage to have a conversation about
their majors. Sarah was majoring in English. Mari had a cousin who majored in
English too, and who had met a very nice Business student doing it. Mari was
majoring in Hobbies Education. Toni was Undecided. Nicci was in Sociology at
another school.
And then the food fight.
Between the opening salvo and the moment when their table was protectively
ringed by Terrorists, the others were quite dignified and hardly moved. Sarah
sat still momentarily, then came to her senses and slipped under the table.
From this point of view she saw many pairs of corduroy, khaki, designer jean
and chino pantlegs around the table, and saw too the folding partitions slide
across.
Once the partitions were closed she emerged, mostly because she wanted to see
who owned the brown polyester legs that had been dancing around the room in
such agitation. The Terrorists grabbed her arms solicitously and hauled her to
her feet, wanting to know if she had lost her ski mask in "all the action."
The man in the brown three-piecer was none other than Bartholomew (Wombat)
Forksplit, Dean of Dining Services, who had been promoted to Dean Emeritus
after his recovery from the nacho tortilla chip shard that had passed through
his brain. No one knew where he came from-- Tibet? Kurdistan? Abyssinia?
Circassia? Since the accident, he had become known as Wombat the Marauder to
his victims, mostly inconsiderate dorks who had broken Caf rules only to find
this man gripping them in an old Bosnian or Tunisian martial arts hold that
shorted out the major meridians of their nervous system, and shouting at them
in a percussive accent that crackled like fat ground beef on a red-hot steam
griddle. Some accused him of using the accident as an excuse to act like a
madman, but no one doubted that he was pissed off.
When he saw the ex-President half-dragged from under a table by the beaming
Terrorists, Forksplit released the knee of his current victim and speed-skated
across the stained linoleum toward her, his tomato-sauce-- spattered arms
outstretched as if in supplication. Sarah pulled her arms free and backed
up a step, but he stopped short of embracing her and cried, "Sarah! You,
here? Indicates this that you are part of these-- these asshole Terrorists?
Please say no!" He stared piteously into her eyes, the little white scar
on his forehead standing out vividly against his murderously flushed face.
Sarah swallowed and glanced around the room, conscious of many ski masks and
Terrorists looking at her.
"Oh, not really, I was just over here at another table. These guys were just
helping me up. This is a real shame. I hope the B-men don't go on strike now."
A look of agony came over Wombat the Marauder's face at the mere mention of
this idea, and he backed up, pirouetted and paced around their Cafeteria
subdivision directing a soliloquy of anger and frustration at Sarah. "I
joost-- I don't know what the hell to do. I do everything in the world to
deliver fine service. This is good food! No one believes that. They go off
to other places and eat, come back and say, 'Yes Mr. Forksplit let me shake
your hand your food is so good!! Best I have ever eaten!' But do these idiots