Scanned and OCR'd by a loyal fan with a loose sense of ethics.
Death to the big-bucks "The Big U" auctions on Ebay!
Please submit all changes/fixes to bigwheel@hushmail.com
Buy Neal's other (reasonably priced) books.
From a recent (4/29/99) interview:
Lomax: Above, you said that you were "no damn good at writing short stories"
What about these days? Do you think you will write exclusively in the long
form? Oh, and what's the deal with the Big U. Will that ever see print
again?
Stephenson: I still find short stories very difficult to write, and I admire
people who can do that. At the moment, novels are working for me and so I
think I'll stick with them. Concerning the Big U... It is an okay novel,
but I'm in no hurry to put it back into the world. There is a lot of other
good stuff that people could be reading.
v0.9 - First public release. Missing introduction quotes/author info.
[bigwheel@hushmail.com]
v0.9.5 - Bugfix. Recreated proper paragraph breaks, formatted to 78 columns,
corrected OCR errors, replace 8-bit characters with 7-bit equivalents,
properly centered what should be, undid hyphenation.
[kmfahey@toast.net]
v0.9.7 - Update. Added introduction, author info and back cover. The newest
version should be found at http://www.geocities.com/thebigubook
[bigwheel@hushmail.com]
v0.9.8 - Bugfix. Further OCR and formatting errors corrected, run thru
a spellchecker. [thebigu@w.tf]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Big U
Neal Stephenson
----
"WHEN I THINK OF THE MEN WHO WERE MY TEACHERS, I REALIZED THAT MOST OF THEM
WERE SLIGHTLY MAD. THE MEN WHO COULD BE REGARDED AS GOOD TEACHERS WERE
EXCEPTIONAL. IT'S TRAGIC TO THINK THAT SUCH PEOPLE HAVE THE POWER TO BAR A
YOUNG MAN'S WAY."
--German political figure Adolf Hitler, 1889-1945 (from _Hitler's
Secret Conversations, 1941-44_, translated by Norman Cameron and R.H.
Stevens.)
----
I am indebted to the following people for the following things:
My parents for providing several kinds of support.
Edward Gibbon, for writing _The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_.
Julian Jaynes, for writing _The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of
the Bicameral Mind_.
William Blake and William Butler Yeats, for providing Pertinax with
inspiration.
Kathrin Day Lassila, for numerous and thoughtful disagreements.
Gordon Lish, for the most productive rejection slip of all time.
Gary Fisketjon, for buying me a beer in Top Hat in Missoula, Montana, on July
1, 1983, and other services beyond the call of editorial duty.
-----
------------------------
-- The Go Big Red Fan --
------------------------
The Go Big Red Fan was John Wesley Fenrick's, and when ventilating his System
it throbbed and crept along the floor with a rhythmic chunka-chunka-chunk.
Fenrick was a Business major and a senior. From the talk of my wingmates I
gathered that he was smart, yet crazy, which helped. The description weird was
also used, but admiringly. His roomie, Ephraim Klein of New Jersey, was in
Philosophy. Worse, he was found to be smart and weird and crazy, intolerably
so on all these counts and several others besides.
As for the Fan, it was old and square, with a heavy rounded design suitable
for the Tulsa duplex window that had been its station before John Wesley
Fenrick had brought It out to the Big U with him. Running up one sky-blue
side was a Go Big Red bumper sticker. When Fenrick ran his System-- that
is, bludgeoned the rest of the wing with a record or tape-- he used the Fan
to blow air over the back of the component rack to prevent the electronics
from melting down. Fenrick was tall and spindly, with a turkey-like head and
neck, and all of us in the east corridor of the south wing of the seventh
floor of E Tower knew him for three things: his seventies rock-'n'-roll
souvenir collection, his trove of preposterous electrical appliances, and his
laugh-- a screaming hysterical cackle that would ricochet down the long shiny
cinderblock corridor whenever something grotesque flashed across the 45-Inch
screen of his Video System or he did something especially humiliating to
Ephraim Klein.
Klein was a subdued, intellectual type. He reacted to his victories with a
contented smirk, and this quietness gave some residents of EO7S East the
impression that Fenrick, a roomie-buster with many a notch on his keychain,
had already cornered the young sage. In fact, Klein beat Fenrick at a rate of
perhaps sixty percent, or whenever he could reduce the conflict to a rational
discussion. He felt that he should be capable of better against a power-punker
Business major, but he was not taking into account the animal shrewdness that
enabled Fenrick to land lucrative oil-company internships to pay for the
modernization of his System.
Inveterate and cynical audio nuts, common at the Big U, would walk into their
room and freeze solid, such was Fenrick's System, its skyscraping rack of
obscure black slabs with no lights, knobs or switches, the 600-watt Black Hole
Hyperspace Energy Nexus Field Amp that sat alone like the Kaaba, the shielded
coaxial cables thrown out across the room to the six speaker stacks that made
it look like an enormous sonic slime mold in spawn. Klein himself knew a few
things about stereos, having a system that could reproduce Bach about as well
as the American Megaversity Chamber Orchestra, and it galled him.
To begin with there was the music. That was bad enough, but Klein had
associated with musical Mau Maus since junior high, and could inure himself
to it in the same way that he kept himself from jumping up and shouting back
at television commercials. It was the Go Big Red Fan that really got to him.
"Okay, okay, let's just accept as a given that your music is worth playing.
Now, even assuming that, why spend six thousand dollars on a perfect system
with no extraneous noises in it, and then, then, cool it with a noisy fan that
couldn't fetch six bucks at a fire sale?" Still, Fenrick would ignore him. "I
mean, you amaze me sometimes. You can't think at all, can you? I mean, you're
not even a sentient being, if you look at it strictly."
When Klein said something like this (I heard the above one night when going
down to the bathroom), Fenrick would look up at him from his Business
textbook, peering over the wall of bright, sto record-store displays he had
erected along the room's centerline; because his glasses had slipped down his
long thin nose, he would wrinkle it, forcing the lenses toward the desired
altitude, involuntarily baring his canine teeth in the process and causing the
stiff spiky hair atop his head to shift around as though inhabited by a band
of panicked rats.
"You don't understand real meaning," he'd say. "You don't have a monopsony
on meaning. I don't get meaning from books. My meaning means what it means
to me." He would say this, or something equally twisted, and watch Klein for
a reaction. After he had done it a few times, though, Klein figured out that
his roomie was merely trying to get him all bent out of shape-- to freak his
brain, as it were-- and so he would drop it, denying Fenrick the chance to
shriek his vicious laugh and tell the wing that he had scored again.
Klein was also annoyed by the fact that Fenrick, smoking loads of
parsley-spiked dope while playing his bad music, would forget to keep an eye
on the Go Big Red Fan. Klein, sitting with his back to the stereo, wads of
foam packed in his ears, would abruptly feel the Fan chunk into the back of
his chair, and as he spazzed out in hysterical surprise it would sit there
maliciously grinding away and transmitting chunka-chunka-chunks into his
pelvis like muffled laughs.
If it was not clear which of them had air rights, they would wage sonic wars.
They both got out of class at 3:30. Each would spend twenty minutes dashing
through the labyrinthine ways of the Monoplex, pounding fruitlessly on
elevator buttons and bounding up steps three at a time, palpitating at the
thought of having to listen to his roommate's music until at least midnight.
Often as not, one would explode from the elevator on EO7S, veer around to the
corridor, and with disgust feel the other's tunes pulsing victoriously through
the floor. Sometimes, though, they would arrive simultaneously and power up
their Systems together. The first time they tried this, about halfway through
September, the room's circuit breaker shut down. They sat in darkness and
silence for above half an hour, each knowing that if he left his stereo to
turn the power back on, the other would have his going full blast by the time
he returned. This impasse was concluded by a simultaneous two-tower fire drill
that kept both out of the room for three hours.
Subsequently John Wesley Fenrick ran a fifty-foot tin-lead extension cord
down the hallway and into the Social Lounge, and plugged his System into
that. This meant that he could now shut down Klein's stereo simply by turning
on his burger-maker, donut-maker, blow-dryer and bun-warmer simultaneously,
shutting off the room's circuit breaker. But Klein was only three feet from
the extension cord and thus could easily shut Fenrick down with a tug. So
these tactics were not resorted to; the duelists preferred, against all
reason, to wait each other out.
Klein used organ music, usually lush garbled Romantic masterpieces or what he
called Atomic Bach. Fenrick had the edge in system power, but most of that
year's music was not as dense as, say, Heavy Metal had been in its prime, and
so this difference was usually erased by the thinness of his ammunition. This
did not mean, however, that we had any trouble hearing him.
The Systems would trade salvos as the volume controls were brought up as high
as they could go, the screaming-guitars-from-Hell power chords on one side
matched by the subterranean grease-gun blasts of the 32-foot reed stops on
the other. As both recordings piled into the thick of things, the combatants
would turn to their long thin frequency equalizers and shove all channels up
to full blast like Mr. Spock beaming a live antimatter bomb into Deep Space.
Finally the filters would be thrown off and the loudness switches on, and the
speakers would distort and crackle with strain as huge wattages pulsed through
their magnet coils. Sometimes Klein would use Bach's "Passacaglia and Fugue in
C Minor," and at the end of each phrase the bass line would plunge back down
home to that old low C, and Klein's sub-woofers would pick up the temblor of
the 64-foot pipes and magnify it until he could watch the naked speaker cones
thrash away at in the air. This particular note happened to be the natural
resonating frequency of the main hallways, which were cut into 64-foot, 3-inch
halves by the fire doors (Klein and I measured one while drunk), and therefore
the resonant frequency of every other hall in every other wing of all the
towers of the Plex, and so at these moments everything in the world would
vibrate at sixteen cycles per second; beds would tremble, large objects would
float off the edges of tables, and tables and chairs themselves would buzz
around the rooms of their own volition. The occasional wandering bat who might
be in the hall would take off in random flight, his sensors jammed by the
noise, beating his wings against the standing waves in the corridor in an
effort to escape.
The Resident Assistant, or RA, was a reclusive Social Work major who,
intuitively knowing she was never going to get a job, spent her time locked in
her little room testing perfumes and watching MTV under a set of headphones.
She could not possibly help.
That made it my responsibility. I lived on EO7S that year as
faculty-in-residence. I had just obtained my Ph.D. from Ohio State in an
interdisciplinary field called Remote Sensing, and was a brand-shiny-new
associate professor at the Big U.
Now, at the little southern black college where I went to school, we had no
megadorms. We were cool at the right times and academic at the right times
and we had neither Kleins nor Fenricks. Boston University, where I did my
Master's, had pulled through its crisis when I got there; most students had no
time for sonic war, and the rest vented their humors in the city, not in the
dorms. Ohio State was nicely spread out, and I lived in an apartment complex
where noisy shit-for-brains undergrads were even less welcome than tweedy
black bachelors. I just did not know what to make of Klein and Fenrick; I did
not handle them well at all. As a matter of fact, most of my time at the Big U
was spent observing and talking, and very little doing, and I may bear some of
the blame.
This is a history, in that it intends to describe what happened and suggest
why. It is a work of the imagination in that by writing it I hope to purge the
Big U from my system, and with it all my bitterness and contempt. I may have
fooled around with a few facts. But I served as witness until as close to the
end as anyone could have, and I knew enough of the major actors to learn about
what I didn't witness, and so there is not so much art in this as to make it
irrelevant. What you are about to read is not an aberration: it can happen in
your local university too. The Big U, simply, was a few years ahead of the
rest.
--------------------
-- First Semester --
--------------------
--September--
On back-to-school day, Sarah Jane Johnson and Casimir Radon waited, for a
while, in line together. At the time they did not know each other. Sarah had
just found that she had no place to live, and was suffering that tense and
lonely feeling that sets in when you have no place to hide. Casimir was just
discovering that American Megaversity was a terrible place, and was not happy
either.
After they had worked their way down the hail and into the office of the Dean
of the College of Sciences and Humanities, they sat down next to each other on
the scratchy Dayglo orange chairs below the Julian Didius III Memorial Window.
The sunlight strained in greyly over their shoulders, and occasionally they
turned to look at the scene outside.
Below them on one of the Parkway off-ramps a rented truck from Maryland had
tried to pass under a low bridge, its student driver forgetting that he was
in a truck and not his Trans-Am. Upon impact, the steel molding that fastened
the truck's top to its sides had wrapped itself around the frame of a green
highway sign bolted to the bridge. Now the sign, which read:
AMERICAN MEGAVERSITY
VISITOR PARKING
SPORTS EVENTS
EXIT 500 FT
was suspended in the air at the end of a long strip of truck that had been
peeled up and aside.
A small crowd students, apparently finished with all their line-waiting, stood
on the bridge and beside the ramp, throwing Frisbees and debris into the
torn-open back of the truck, where its renters lounged in sofas and recliners
and drank beer, and threw the projectiles back. Sarah thought it was idiotic,
and Casimir couldn't understand it at all.
Out in the hallway, people behind them in the line were being verbally abused
by an old derelict who had penetrated the Plex security system. "The only
degree you kids deserve is the third degree!" he shouted, waving his arms and
staggering in place. He wore a ratty tweed jacket whose elbow patches flapped
like vestigial wings, and he drank in turns from a bottle of Happy's vodka and
a Schlitz tall-boy which he kept holstered in his pockets. He had the full
attention of the students, who were understandably bored, and most of them
laughed and tried to think of provocative remarks.
As the drunk was wading toward them, one asked another how her summer had
been. "What about it?" asked the derelict. "Fiscal conservatism? Fine in
theory! Tough, though! You have to be tough and humane together, you see, the
two opposites must unite in one great leader! Can't be a damn dictator like S.
S. Krupp!" This brought cheers and laughter from the upperclassmen, who had
just decided the drunk was a cool guy. Septimius Severus Krupp, the President
of American Megaversity, was not popular. "Jesus Christ!" he continued through
the laughter, "What the hell are they teaching you savages these days? You
need a spanking! No more circuses. Maybe a dictator is just what you need!
Alcibiades! Pompilius Numa! They'd straighten things out good and fast."
Sarah knew the man. He liked to break into classes at the Big U and lecture
the professors, who usually were at a loss as to how to deal with him. His
name was Bert Nix. He had taken quite a shine to Sarah: for her part, she did
not know whether or not to be scared of him. During the preceding spring's
student government campaign, Bert Nix had posed with Sarah for a campaign
photo which had then appeared on posters all over the Plex. This was just
the kind of thing that Megaversity students regarded as a sign of greatness,
so she had won, despite progressive political ideas which, as it turned out,
nobody was even aware of. This was all hard for Sarah to believe. She felt
that Bert Nix had been elected President, not the woman he had appeared with
on the campaign poster, and she felt obliged to listen to him even when he
simply jabbered for hours on end. He was a nice lunatic, but he was adrift in
the Bert Nix universe, and that stirred deep fears in Sarah's soul.
Casimir paid little attention to the drunk and a great deal to Sarah. He
could not help it, because she was the first nice-seeming person, concept or
thing he had found in his six hours at the Big U. During the ten years he had
spent saving up money to attend this school, Casimir had kept himself sane by
imagining it. Unfortunately, he had imagined quiet talks over brunch with old
professors, profound discussions in the bathrooms, and dazzling, sensitive
people everywhere just waiting to make new friends. What he had found, of
course, was American Megaversity. There was only one explanation for this
atmosphere that he was willing to believe: that these people were civilized,
and that for amusement they were acting out a parody of the squalor of high
school life, which parody Casimir had been too slow to get so far. The obvious
explanation-- that it was really this way-- was so horrible that it had not
even entered his mind.
When he saw the photo of her on the back page of the back-to-school edition
of the Monoplex Monitor, and read the caption identifying her as Sarah Jane
Johnson, Student Government President, he made the most loutish double take
between her and the photograph. He knew that she knew that he now knew who she
was, and that was no way to start a passionate love affair. All he could do
was to make a big show of reading about her in the Monitor, and wait for her
to make the first move. He nodded thoughtfully at the botched quotations and
oversimplifications in the article.
Sarah was aware of this; she had watched him page slowly and intensely through
the paper, waiting with mild dread for him to get to the back page, see the
picture and say something embarrassing. Instead-- even more embarrassing -- he
actually read the article, and before he reached the bottom of the page, the
student ahead of Sarah stomped out and she found herself impaled on the azure
gaze of the chief bureaucrat of the College of Sciences and Humanities. "How,"
said Mrs. Santucci crisply, "may I help you?"
Mrs. Santucci was polite. Her determination to be decent, and to make all
things decent, was like that of all the Iranian Revolutionary Guards combined.
Her policy of no-first-use meant that as long as we were objective and polite,
any conversation would slide pleasantly down greased iron rails into a pit
of despair. Any first strike by us, any remarks deemed improper by this
grandmother of twenty-six and player of two dozen simultaneous bingo cards,
would bring down massive retaliation. Sarah knew her. She arose primly and
moved to the front chair of the line to look across a barren desk at Mrs.
Santucci.
"I'm a senior in this college. I was lucky enough to get an out-of-Plex
apartment for this fall. When I got there today I found that the entire block
of buildings had been shut down for eight months by the Board of Health. I
went to Housing. Upon reaching the head of that line, I was told that it was
being handled by Student Affairs. Upon reaching the head of the line there, I
was given this form and told to get signatures at Housing and right here.
Mrs. Santucci reached out with the briskness that only old secretaries can
approach and seized the papers. "This form is already signed," she informed
Sarah.
"Right. I got that done at about one o'clock. But when I got to my new
temporary room assignment it turned out to be the B-men's coffee lounge and
storeroom for the northeast quad of the first sublevel. It is full of B-men
all the time. You know how they are-- they don't speak much English, and you
know what kinds of things they decorate their walls with"-- this attempt to
get Mrs. Santucci's sympathy by being prissy was not obviously successful--
"and I can't possibly live there. I returned to Housing. To change my room
assignment is a whole new procedure, and I need a form from you which says I'm
in good academic standing so far this semester."
"That form," Mrs. Santucci noted, "will require signatures from all your
instructors."
"I know," said Sarah. All was going according to plan and she was approaching
the center of her pitch. "But the semester hasn't started yet! And half my
courses don't even have teachers assigned! So, since I'm a senior and my GPA
is good, could the Dean okay my room change without the form? Doesn't that
make sense? Sort of?" Sarah sighed. She had broken at the end, her confidence
destroyed by Mrs. Santucci's total impassivity, by those arms folded across
a navy-blue bosom like the Hoover Dam, by a stare like the headlights of an
oncoming streetsweeper.
"I'm sure this is all unnecessary. Perhaps they don't know that their lounge
has been reassigned. If you can just explain matters to them, I'm sure that
Building Maintenance will be happy to accommodate you."
Sarah felt defeated. It had been a nice summer, and while away she had
forgotten how it was. She had forgotten that the people who ran this place
didn't have a clue as to how reality worked, that in their way they were all
as crazy as Bert Nix. She closed her eyes and tilted her tense head back, and
the man in the chair behind her intervened.
"Wait a minute," he said righteously. His voice was high, but carried
conviction and reasonable sensitivity. "She can't be expected to do that.
Those guys don't even speak English. All they speak is Bosnian or Moldavian or
something."
"Moravian," said Mrs. Santucci in her Distant Early Warning voice, which was
rumored to set off burglar alarms Within a quarter-mile radius.
"The language is Crotobaltislavonian, a modern dialect of Old Scythian,"
announced Sarah, hoping to end the conflict. The B-Men are refugees from
Crotobaltislavonia."
"Listen, I talk to Magrov all the time, and I say it's Moravian." Sarah felt
her body temperature begin to drop as she chanced a direct look at Mrs.
Santucci.
Trying to sound prim, Sarah said, "Have you ever considered the possibility
that you are confusing Magrov with Moravian?" Seeing the look on Mrs.
Santucci's face, she then inhaled sharply and shifted away. Just as the old
bureaucrat's jaw was starting to yawn, her chest rising like the return of
Atlantis, Casimir Radon leaned way across and yanked something out of Sarah's
lap and-- in a tone so arresting that it was answered by Bert Nix outside--
exclaimed, "Wait a minute!"
Casimir was meek and looked like a nerd and a wimp, but he was great in a
crisis. The lost continent subsided and Mrs. Santucci leaned forward with
a dangerous frown. Out in the hallway the exasperated Bert Nix cried, "But
there's no more minutes to wait! To save the Big U we've got to start now!"
Casimir had taken Sarah's room assignment card from the stack of ammunition
on her lap, and was peering at it like a scientific specimen. It was an IBM
card, golden yellow, with a form printed on it in yellow-orange ink. In the
center of the form was a vague illustration of the Monoplex, looking decrepit
and ruined because of the many rectangular holes punched through it. Along the
top was a row of boxes labeled with tiny blurred yellow-orange abbreviations
that were further abbreviated by rectangular holes. Numbers and letters were
printed in black ink in the vicinity of each box.
Bert Nix was still carrying on outside. "Then fell the fires of Eternity with
loud & shrill Sound of loud Trumpet thundering along from heaven to heaven,
A mighty sound articulate Awake ye dead & come To Judgment from the four
winds Awake & Come away Folding like scrolls of the Enormous volume of Heaven
& Earth With thunderous noises & dreadful shakings rocking to & fro: The
heavens are shaken & the Earth removed from its place; the foundations of the
eternal Hills discovered; The thrones of Kings are shaken they have lost their
robes and crowns ... and that's what poetry is! Not the caterwaulings of the
Unwise!"
Finally, Casimir looked relieved. "Yeah, I thought that might be it. You were
reading this number here. Right?" He got up and stood beside Sarah and pointed
to her temporary room number. "Sure," said Sarah, suddenly feeling dreadful.
"Well," said Casimir, sounding apologetic, "that's not what you want. Your
room is not identified by room number, because some rooms repeat. It's
identified by door number, which is unique for all doors. This number you
were looking at isn't either of those, it's your room ID number, which has to
do with data processing. That ID number refers to your actual door number,
incorrectly called room number. It is the middle six digits of this character
string here. See?" He masked the string of figures between the dirty backward
parenthesis of his thumbnails. "In your case we have E12S, giving tower, floor
and wing, and then 49, your actual room number."
Sarah did not know whether to scream, apologize or drop dead. She shoved
her forms into her knapsack and stood. "Thank you for your trouble, Mrs.
Santucci," she said quickly. "Thank you," she said to Casimir, then snapped
around and headed for the door, though not fast enough to escape a withering
harrrumph from Mrs. Santucci. But as she stepped into the hallway, which in
order to hold down utility costs was dimly lit, she saw a dark and ragged
figure out of the corner of her eye. She looked behind to see Bert Nix grab
the doorframe and swing around until he was leaning into the office.
"Listen, Genevieve," he said, "she doesn't need any of your phlegm! She's
President! She's my friend! You're just a doorstop!" As much as Sarah wanted
to hear the rest of this, she didn't have the energy.
Casimir was left inside, his last view of Sarah interrupted by the dangling
figure of the loony, caught in a crossfire he wanted no part of.
"I'll call the guards," said Mrs. Santucci, who for the first time was showing
uneasiness.
"Today?" Bert Nix found this a merry idea. "You think you can get a guard
today?"
"You'd better stop coming or we'll keep you from coming back."
His eyes widened in mock, crimson-rimmed awe, "Ooh," he sighed, "that were
terrible. I'd have no reason to live." He pulled himself erect, walked in and
climbed from the arm of Casimir's chair to the broad slate sill of the window.
As Mrs. Santucci watched with more terror than seemed warranted, the derelict
swung one window open like a door, letting in a gust of polluted steam.
By the time he was leaning far outside and grinning down the seventy-foot drop
to the Parkway and the interchange. she had resolved to try diplomacy-- though
she motioned that Casimir should try to grab his legs. Casimir ignored this;
it was obvious that the man was just trying to scare her. Casimir was from
Chicago and found that these Easterners had no sense of humor.
"Now, Bert," said Mrs. Santucci, "don't give an old lady a hard time."
Bert Nix dropped back to the sill. "Hard time! What do you know about hard
times?" He thrust his hand through a hole in his jacket, wiggling his long
fingers at her, and wagging his out-of-control tongue for a few seconds.
Finally he added, "Hard times make you strong."
"I've got work to do, Pert."
This seemed to remind him of something. He closed the window and cascaded to
the floor. "So do I," he said, then turned to Casimir and whispered, "That's
the Julian Didius III Memorial Window. That's what I call it, anyway. Like the
view?"
"Yeah, it's nice," said Casimir, hoping that this would not become a
conversation.
"Good," said the derelict, "so did J. D. It's the last view he ever saw.
Couldn't handle the job. That's why I call it that." The giggling Bert Nix
ambled back into the hail, satisfied, pausing only to steal the contents of
the office wastebasket. Through most of this Casimir sat still and stared at
the faded German ti 1 poster on the wall. Now he was really in the talons of
Mrs. Santucci, who had probably shifted into adrenaline overdrive and was
likely to fling her desk through the wall. Instead, she was perfectly calm and
professional. Casimir disliked her for it.
"I'm a junior physics major and I transferred in from a community college in
Illinois. I know the first two years of physics inside and out, but there's
a problem. The rules here say physics courses must include 'socioeconomic
contexts backgrounding,' which I guess means it has to explain how it fits in
with today's something or other.
"In order to context the learning experience with the real world," said Mrs.
Santucci gravely, "we must include socioeconomic backgrounding integral with
the foregrounded material." "Right. Anyway, my problem is that I don't think I
need it. I'm not here to give you my memoirs or anything, but my parents were
immigrants, I came from a slum, got started in electronics, sort of made my
own way, saw a lot of things, and so I don't think I really need this. It'd
be a shame if I had to start all over, learning, uh, foregrounded material I
already know."
Mrs. Santucci rolled her eyes so that the metal-flake blue eyeshadow on her
lids flashed intermittently like fishing lures drawn through a murky sea.
"Well, it has been done. It must be arranged with the curriculum chair of your
department."
"Who is that for physics?"
"Distinguished Professor Sharon," she said. Bulging her eyeballs at Casimir,
she made a respectful silence at the Professor's name, daring him to break it.
When Casimir returned to consciousness he was drifting down a hallway, still
mumbling to himself in astonishment. He had an appointment to meet the
Professor Sharon. He would have been ecstatic just to have sat in on one of
the man's lectures!
Casimir Radon was an odd one, as American Megaversity students went. This was
a good thing for him, as the Housing people simply couldn't match him up with
a reasonable roommate; he was assigned a rare single. It was in D Tower, close
to the sciences bloc where he would spend most of his time, on a floor of
single rooms filled by the old, the weird and the asinine who simply could not
live in pairs.
In order to find his room he would have to trace a mind-twisting path through
the lower floors until he found the elevators of D Tower. So before he got
himself lost, he went to the nearest flat surface, which was the top of a
large covered wastebasket. From it he cleared away a few Dorito bags and
a half-drained carton of FarmSun SweetFresh brand HomeLivin' Artificial
Chocolate-Flavored Dairy Beverage and forced them into the overflowing maw
below. He then removed his warped and sweat-soaked Plex map (the Plexus) from
his pocket and unfolded it on the woodtoned Fiberglass surface.
As was noted at the base of the Plexus, it had been developed by the AM
Advanced Graphics Workshop. Rather than presenting maps of each floor of the
Plex, they had used an Integrated Projection to show the entire Plex as a
network of brightly colored paths and intersections. The resulting tangle was
so convoluted and yet so clean and spare as to be essentially without meaning.
Casimir, however, could read it, because he was not like us. After applying
his large intelligence to the problem for several minutes he was able to find
the most efficient route, and following it with care, he quickly became lost.
The mistake was a natural one. The elevators, which were busy even in the dead
of night, were today clogged with catatonic parents from New Jersey clutching
beanbag chairs and giant stuffed animals. Fortunately (he thought), adjacent
to each elevator was an entirely unused stairwell.
Casimir discovered shortly afterward that in the lower floors of the Plex all
stairwell doors locked automatically from the outside. I discovered it myself
at about the same time. Unlike Casimir I had been a the Plex for ten days,
but I had spent them typing up notes for my classes, It is unwise to prepare
two courses in ten days, and I knew it. I hadn't gotten to it until the last
minute, for various reasons, and so I'd spent ten days sitting there in my
bicycling shorts, drinking beer, typing, and sweating monumentally in the
fetid Plex air. So my first exposure to the Plex and its people really came
that afternoon, when I wandered out into the elevator lobby and punched the
buttons. The desperate Tylenol-charged throngs in the elevators did not budge
when the doors opened, because they couldn't. They stared at me as though I
were Son of Godzilla, which I was used to, and I stared at them and tried to
figure out how they got that way, and the doors clunked shut. I discovered the
stairways, and once I got below the bottom of the tower and into the lower
levels, I also found that I was locked in.
For fifteen minutes I followed dimly lit stairs and corridors smelling of
graffiti solvent and superfluous floor wax, helplessly following the paths
that students would take if the Plex ever had to be evacuated. Through little
windows in the locked doors I peered out of this twilight zone and into the
different zones of the Plex-- Cafeteria, Union, gymnasia, offices-- but my
only choice was to follow the corridors, knowing they would dump me into the
ghetto outside. At last I turned a corner and saw the wall glistening with
noisy grey outside light. At the end of the line, a metal door swung silently
in the breeze, emblazoned thus: FIRE ESCAPE ONLY. WARNING-- ALARM WILL SOUND.
I stepped out the door and looked down along, steep slope into the canyon of
the Turnpike.
The American Megaversity Campustructure was three blocks on a side, and
squatted between the Megalopolitan Turnpike on the north and the Ronald Reagan
Parkway on the south. Megaversity Stadium, the only campus building not inside
the Plex proper, was to the west, and on the east was an elaborate multilevel
interchange interconnecting the Pike, the Parkway, the Plex and University
Avenue. The Pike ran well below the base of the Plex, and so as I emerged from
the north wall of the building I found myself atop a high embankment. Below me
the semis and the Audis shot past through the layered blue monoxide, and their
noises blended into a waterfall against the unyielding Plex wall. Aside from
a few wretched weeds growing from cracks in the embankment, no life was to be
seen, except for Casimir Radon.
He had just emerged from another emergency exit. We saw each other from a
hundred feet apart, waved and walked toward each other. As we converged,
I regarded a tall and very thin man with an angular face and a dense
five-o'clock shadow. He wore round rimless glasses. His black hair was in
disarray as usual; during the year it was to vary almost randomly between
close-cropped and shoulder-length. I soon observed that Casimir could grow a
shadow before lunch, and a beard in three days. He and I were the same age,
though I was a recent Ph.D. and he a junior.
Later I was to think it remarkable that Casimir and I should emerge from those
fire doors at nearly the same moment, and meet. On reflection I have changed
my mind. The Big U was an unnatural environment, a work of the human mind, not
of God or plate tectonics. If two strangers met in the rarely used stairways,
it was not unreasonable that they should turn out to be similar, and become
friends. I thought of it as an immense vending machine, cautiously crafted so
that any denomination too ancient or foreign or irregular would rattle about
randomly for a while, find its way into the stairway system, and inevitably
be deposited in the reject tray on the barren back side. Meanwhile, brightly
colored graduates with attractively packaged degrees were dispensed out front
every June, swept up by traffic on the Parkway and carried away for leisurely
consumption. Had I understood this earlier I might have come to my senses and
immediately resigned, but on that hot September day, with the exhaust abrading
our lungs and the noise squashing our conversation, it seemed worthwhile to
circle around to the Main Entrance and give it another try.
We headed east to avoid the stadium. On our right the wall stretched and away
for acres in a perfect cinderblock grid. After passing dozens of fire doors
we came to the corner and turned into the access lot that stretched along the
east wall. Above, at many altitudes, cars and trucks screeched and blasted
through the tight curves of the interchange. People called it the Death
Vortex, and some claimed that parts of it extended into the fourth dimension.
As soon as it had been planned, the fine old brownstone neighborhood that was
its site plummeted into slumhood; Haitians and Vietnamese filled the place up,
and the feds airproofed the buildings and installed giant electric air filters
before proceeding.
Here on the access lot we could look down a long line of loading docks,
the orifices of the Plex where food and supplies were ingested and trash
discharged, serviced by an endless queue of trucks. The first of these docks,
by the northern corner, was specially designed for the discharge of hazardous
wastes produced in Plex labs and was impressively surrounded by fences, red
lights and threatening signs. The next six loading docks were for garbage
trucks, and the rest, all the way down to the Parkway, for deliveries. We
swung way out from the Plex to avoid all this, and followed the fence at the
border of the lot, gazing into the no-man's-land of lost mufflers and shredded
fanbelts beyond, and sometimes staring up into the Plex itself.
The three-by-three block base had six stories above ground and three below.
Atop it sat eight 25-story towers where lived the 40,000 students of the
university. Each tower had four wings 160 feet long, thrown out at right
angles to make a Swiss cross. These towers sat at the four corners and four
sides of the base. The open space between them was a huge expanse of roof
called Tar City, inhabited by great machines, crushed furniture thrown from
above, rats, roaches, students out on dares, and the decaying corpses of
various things that had ventured out on hot summer days and become mired
in the tar. All we could see were the neutral light brown towers and their
thousands and thousands of identical windows reaching into the heavens. Even
for a city person, it was awesome. Compared to the dignified architecture of
the old brownstones, though, it caused me a nagging sense of embarrassment.
The Vortex whose coils were twined around those brown-stones threw out two
ramps which served as entrance and exit for the Plex parking ramp. These ran
into the side of the building at about third-story level. To us they were
useless, so we continued around toward the south side.
Here was actually some green: a strip of grass between the walk and the
Parkway. On this side the Plex was faced with darker brown brick and had many
picture windows and signs for the businesses of the built-in mall on the first
floor. The Main Entrance itself was merely eight revolving doors in a row, and
having swished through them we were drowned in conditioned air, Muzak, the
smell of Karmel Korn and the idiotic babble of penny-choked indoor fountains.
We passed through this as quickly as possible and rode the long escalators
("This must be what a ski lift is like," said Casimir) to the third floor,
where a rampart of security booths stretched across our path like a thruway
toll station. Several of the glass cages were occupied by ancient guards in
blue uniforms, who waved us wearily through the turnstiles as we waved our ID
cards at them. Casimir stopped on the other side, frowning.
"They shouldn't have let me in," he said.
"Why?" I asked. "Isn't that your ID?"
"Of course it is," said Casimir Radon, "but the photo is so bad they had no
way of telling." He was serious. We surveyed the rounded blue back of the
guard. Most of them had been recruited out of Korea or the Big One. The glass
cages of the Plex had ruined their bodies. Now they had become totally passive
in their outlook; but, by the same token, they had become impossible to faze
or surprise.
We stepped through more glass doors and were in the Main Lobby.
The Plex's environmental control system was designed so that anyone could
spend four years there wearing only a jockstrap and a pair of welding goggles
and yet never feel chilly or find the place too dimly lit. Many spent their
careers there without noticing this. Casimir Radon took less than a day to
notice the pitiless fluorescent light. Acres of light glanced off the Lobby's
polished floor like sun off the Antarctic ice, and a wave of pain now rolled
toward Casimir from near the broad vinyl information desk and washed over him,
draining through a small hole in the center of his skull and pooling coldly
behind his eyes. Great patches of yellow blindness appeared in the center of
his vision and he coasted to a stop, hands on eyes, mouth open. I knew enough
to know it was migraine, so I held his skinny arm and led him, blind, to his
room in D Tower. He lay cautiously down on the naked plastic mattress, put a
sock over his eyes and thanked me. I drew the blinds, sat there helplessly for
a while, then left him to finish his adjustment to the Big U.
After that he wore a uniform of sorts: old T-shirt, cutoffs or gym shorts,
hightop tennis shoes ("to keep the rats off my ankles") and round purple
mountain-climbing goggles with leather bellows on the sides to block out
peripheral light. He was planning such a costume as I left his room. More
painfully, he was beginning to question whether he could live in such a place
for even one semester, let alone four. He did not know that the question would
be decided for him, and so he felt the same edgy uncertainty that nagged at
me.
Some people, however, were quite at home in the Flex. At about this time,
below D Tower in the bottom sublevel, not far from the Computing Center,
several of them were crossing paths in a dusty little dead end of a hallway.
To begin with, three young men were standing by the only door in the area,
taking turns peering into the room beyond. The pen lights from their shirt
pockets illuminated a small windowless room containing a desk, a chair and a
computer terminal. The men stared wistfully at the latter, and had piled their
math and computer textbooks on the floor like sandbags, as though they planned
a siege. They had been discussing their tactical alternatives for getting past
the door, and had run the gamut from picking the lock to blowing it open with
automatic-weapon bursts, but so far none had made any positive moves.
"If we could remove that window," said one, a mole-faced individual smelling
of Brut and sweat and glowing in a light blue iridescent synthetic shirt and
hi-gloss dark blue loafers, "we could reach in and unlock it from inside."
"Some guy tried to get into my grandma's house that way one time," recalled
another, a skinny, long-haired, furtive fellow who was having trouble tracking
the conversation, "but she took a sixteen-ounce ball-peen hammer and smashed
his hand with it. He never came back." He delivered the last sentence like
the punchline to a Reader's Digest true anecdote, convulsing his pals with
laughter.
The third, a disturbingly 35-ish looking computer science major with tightly
permed blond hair, eventually calmed down enough to ask, "Hey, Gary, Gary!
Did she use the ball end or the peen end?" Gary was irked and confused, He
had hoped to impress them by specifying the weight of the hammer, but he was
stumped by this piece of one-upsmanship; he didn't know which end was which.
He radiated embarrassment for several seconds before saying, "Oh, gee, I don't
know, I think she probably used both of 'em before she was done with the guy.
But that guy never came back."
Their fun was cut short by a commanding voice. "A sixteen-ounce ball-peen
hammer isn't much good against a firearm. If I were a woman living alone I'd
carry a point thirty-eight revolver, minimum. Double action. Effective enough
for most purposes." The startling newcomer had their surprised attention.
He had stopped quite close to them and was surveying the door, and they
instinctively stepped out of his way. He was tall, thin and pale, with thin
brown Bryicreemed hair and dark red lips. The calculator on his hip was the
finest personal computing machine, and on the other hip, from a loop of
leather, hung a fencing foil, balanced so that its red plastic tip hung an
inch above the floor. It was Fred Fine.
"You're the guy who runs the Wargames Club, aren't you," asked the blond
student.
"I am Games Marshall, if that's the intent of your question. Administrative
and financial authority are distributed among the leadership cadre according