The rest of our journey was uneventful. We climbed to the fourth floor and wended our way toward Emeritus' study. Soon we could smell smoke, and see it hanging in front of the lights. To the relief of Emeritus, it came not from his office but from the open door of the one labeled "Embers, Archibald."
Three men and a woman, all unarmed, sat around a small fire, occasionally throwing on another book. They had broken out the window to vent the smoke.
The woman shrieked as I appeared in the door. "Jesus! If I had a gun, you'd be dead now. I react so uncontrollably."
"Good thing you don't," I observed.
"It's really none of your business," intoned a thin, pale man. "But I suppose that since you have that wretched gun, you're going to have us do what you want. Well, we don't have anything you could want here. And forget about Zelda here. She's a lousy lay." Zelda shrieked in amusement. "It's a good thing you're witty when you're a bastard, Terence, or I'd despise you." "Oh, do go ahead. I adore being despised. I really do. It's so inspiring."
"Society despises the artist," said Embers, lighting a Dunhill in the bookfire, "unless he panders to the masses. But society treats the artist civilly so he can't select specific targets for his hatred. Open personal hatred is so very honest."
"Now that's meaningful, Arch," said the other man, a brief lump with an uncertain goatee.
"How come you're burning books?" I asked.
"Oh, that, well," said Embers, "Terence wanted a fire." Terence piped up again. "This whole event is so very like camping out, don't you agree? Except without the dreadful ants and so forth. I thought a fire would be very— primal. But it smoked dreadfully, so we broke out the window, and now it's very cold and we must keep it going ceaselessly, of course. Is that adequate? Is that against Library rules?"
"We've been finding," added Embers, "that older books are much better. They burn more slowly. And with their thin pages, Bibles and dictionaries are quite effective. I'm taking some notes." He waved a legal pad at me.
"Also," added the small one, "old books are printed on acid-free paper, so we aren't getting acid inside of our lungs." "Why don't you just cover the window and put it out?" I asked. "Aren't we logical?" said Terence. "You people are all so tediously Western. We wanted a fire, you can't take it away! What happened to academic freedom? Say, are you quite finished with your bloody suggestions? I'm trying to read one of my fictions to these people, Mr. Spock."
I followed my friends into Emeritus' office. Behind me Terence resumed his reading. "The thin stream of boiling oil dribbled from the lip of the frying pan and seared into the boy's white flesh. As he squirmed against the bonds that were holding him down, unable to move, it ran into the bed of thorny roses underneath him; the petals began to wither like a dying western sunset at dusk."
A minute or two later, as we exited with Emeritus' papers, there was a patter of applause. "Ravishing, Terence. Quite frankly, it's similar to Erasmus T. Bowlware's Gulag Pederast. Especially the self-impalement of the heroine on the electric fencepost of the concentration camp as she is driven into a frenzy by psychic emanations from the possessed child in the nearby mansion where the defrocked epileptic priest gives up his life in order to get the high-technology secrets to the Jewish commandos. I do like it."
"When do I get to read my fiction?" asked Zelda.
"Is this from the novel about the female writer who is struggling to write a novel about a woman writer who is writing a novel about a woman artist in Nazi Germany with a possessed daughter?" asked Embers.
"Well, I decided to make her a liberated prostitute and psychic," said Zelda; and that was the last I heard of the conversation, or of the people.
We deposited Emeritus in the refugee camp on the second floor and made it back to the Science Shop in about an hour. There, Sarah and Casimir were deep in conversation, and Ephraim Klein was listening in.
Casimir's finished suit of armor used bulletproof fabric taken from a couple of associate deans. The administration was unhappy about that, but they could only get to Casimir by shooting their way through the Unified Pure Plexorian Realm. Underneath the fabric, Casimir wore various hard objects to protect his flesh from impact. On legs and knees he wore soccer shinguards and the anti-kneecapping armor favored by administration members. He wore a jockstrap with a plastic cup, and over his torso was a heavy, crude breastplate that he had endlessly and deafeningly hammered out of half a fifty-five gallon oil drum. Down his back he hung overlapping shingles of steel plate to protect his spine.
His head was protected by a converted defensive lineman's football helmet. He had cut the front out of a fencing mask and attached the wire mesh over the plastic bars of the helmet's facemask. Over the earholes he placed a pair of shooter's ear protectors. So that he would not overheat, he cut a hole in the back of the helmet and ran a flexible hose to it. The other end of the hose he connected to a battery-powered blower hung on his belt, and to get maximum cooling benefit he shaved his head. The helmet as a whole was draped with bulletproof fabric which hung down a foot on all sides to cover the neck. And as someone happened to notice, he took his snapshot of Sarah and Hyacinth and taped it to the inside of the helmet with grey duct tape.
When Casimir was in full battle garb, his only vulnerable points were feet, hands and eye-slit. Water could be had by sucking on a tube that ran down to a bicyclist's water bottle on his belt. And it should not go unmentioned that Casimir, draped in thick creamy-white fabric, with blazing yellow and blue running shoes, topped with an enormous shrouded neckless head, a faceless dome with bulges over the ears and a glittering silver slit for the eyes, a sword from the Museum in hand, looked indescribably terrible and fearsome, and for the first time in his life people moved to the walls to avoid him when he walked down the hallways.
It was a very smoke-filled room that Casimir ventilated by swinging in through the picture window on the end of a rope. Through the soft white tobacco haze, Oswald Heimlich saw his figure against the sky for an instant before it burst into the room and did a helpless triple somersault across the glossy parquet floor. Heimlich was already on his feet, snatching up his $4,000 engraved twelve-gauge shotgun and flicking off the safety. As the intruder staggered to his feet, Heimlich sighted over the head of the Trustee across from him (who reacted instinctively by falling into the lap of the honorable former mayor) and fired two loads of .00 buckshot into this strange Tarzan's lumpy abdomen. The intruder took a step back and remained standing as the shot plonked into his chest and clattered to the floor. Heimlich fired again with similar effects. By now the great carved door had burst open and five guards dispersed to strategic positions and pointed their UZIs at the suspicious visitor. S. S. Krupp watched keenly.
The guards made the obligatory orders to freeze. He slowly reached around and began to draw a dueling sword from the Megaversity historical collections out of a plastic pipe scabbard. Tied to its handle was a white linen napkin with the AM coat of arms, which he waved suggestively.
"I swear," said S. S. Krupp, "don't you have a phone, son?" No one laughed. These were white male Eastern businessmen, and they were serious. Heimlich in particular was not amused; this man looked very much like the radiation emergency workers who had been staggering through his nightmares for several nights running, and having him crash in out of a blue sky into a Board of Trustees meeting was not a healthy experience. He sat there with his eyes closed for several moments as waiters scurried in to sweep up the broken glass.
"I'll bet you want to do a little negotiating," said Krupp, annoyingly relaxed. "Who're you with?"
"I owe allegiance to no man," came the muffled voice from behind the mask, but "come on behalf of all."
"Well, that's good! That's a fine attitude," said Krupp. "Set yourself down and we'll see what we can do."
The intruder took an empty chair, laid his sword on the table and peeled off his hood of fabric to reveal the meshed-over football helmet, A rush of forced air was exhaled from his facemask and floated loose sheets of paper down the table.
"Why did you put a nuclear waste dump in the basement?" Everyone was surprised, if genteel, and they exchanged raised eyebrows for a while.
"Maybe Ozzie can tell you about that," suggested Krupp. "I was still in Wyoming at the time."
Heimlich scowled. "I won't deny its existence. Our reasons for wanting it must be evident. Perhaps if I tell you its history, you'll agree with us, whoever you are. Ahem. You may be aware that until recently we suffered from bad management at the presidential level. We had several good presidents in the seventies, but then we got Tony Commodi, who was irresponsible— an absolute mongoloid when it came to finance— insisted on teaching several classes himself, and so forth. He raised salaries while keeping tuition far too low. People became accustomed to it. At this time we Trustees were widely dispersed and made no effort to lead the university. Finally we were nearly bankrupt. Commodi was forced to resign by faculty and Trustees and was replaced by Pertinax Rushforth, who in those days was quite the renascence man, and widely respected. We Trustees were still faced with impossible financial problems, but we found that if we sold all the old campus— hundreds of acres of prime inner-city real estate— we could pull in enough capital to build something like the Plex on the nine blocks we retained.
But of course the demographics made it clear that times would be very rough in the years to come. We could not compete for students, and so we had to run a very tight ship and seek innovative sources for our operating funds. We could have entered many small ventures— high technology spinoffs, you see— but this would have been extraordinarily complex, highly controversial and unpredictable, besides raising questions about the proper function of the university.
"It was then that we hit upon the nuclear waste idea. Here is something that is not dependent on the economy; we will always have these wastes to dispose of. It's highly profitable, as there is a desperate demand for disposal facilities. The wastes must be stored for millennia, which means that they are money in the bank— the government, whatever form it takes, must continue to pay us until their danger has died away. And by its very nature it must be done secretly, so no controversy is generated, no discord disrupts the normal functions of the academy— there need be no relationship between the financial foundation and the intellectual activities of the university. It's perfect."
"See, this city is on a real stable salt-dome area," added a heavy man in an enormous grey suit, "and now that there's no more crude down there, it's suitable for this kind of storage." "You," said the knight, pointing his sword at the man who had just spoken, "must be in the oil business. Are you Ralph Priestly?" "Ha! Well, yeah, that's me," said Ralph Priestly, unnerved. "We have to talk later."
"How did you know about our disposal site?" asked Heimlich. "That doesn't matter. What matters now is: how did the government of Crotobaltislavonia find out about it?" "Oh," said Heimlich, shocked. "You know about that also." "Yep."
After a pause, S. S. Krupp continued. "Now, don't go tell your honchos that we did this out of greed. America had to start doing something with this waste— that's a fact. You know what a fact is? That's something that has nothing to do with politics. The site is as safe as could be. See, some things just can't be handed over to political organizations, because they're so damned unstable. But great universities can last for thousands of years. Hell, look at the changes of government the University of Paris has survived in the last century alone! This facility had to be built and it had to be done by a university. The big steady cash flow makes us more stable, and that makes us better qualified to be running the damn thing in the first place. Symbiosis, son."
"Wait. If you're making so much money off of this, why are you so financially tight-assed?"
"That's a very good question," said Heimlich. "As I said, it's imperative that this facility remain secret. If we allowed the cash flow to show up on our ledgers, this would be impossible. We've had to construct a scheme for processing or laundering, as it were, our profits through various donors and benefactors. In order to allay suspicion, we keep these 'donations' as small as we can while meeting the university's basic needs."
"What about the excess money?"
"What's done with that depends on how long the site remains secret. Therefore we hold the surplus in escrow and invest it in the name of American Megaversity, so that in the meantime it is productively used."
"Invest it where? Don't tell me. Heimlich Freedom Industries. the Big Wheel Petroleum Corporation "
"Well," said Ralph Priestly, cutting the tip off a cigar. "Big Wheel's a hell of an investment. I run a tight ship." "We don't deny that the investments are in our best interests," said a very old Trustee with a kindly face. "But there's nothing wrong with that, as long as we do not waste or steal the money. Every investment we make in some way furthers the nation's economic growth."
"But you're no different from the Crotobaltislavonians, in principle. You're using your control over the wastes to blackmail whatever government comes along."
"That's an excellent observation," said Krupp. "But the fact is, if you'll just think about it, that as long as the waste exists, someone's going to control them, and whoever does can blackmail whatever government there is, and as long as someone's going to have that influence, it might as well be good people like us."
The knight drummed his fingers on the table, and the Trustees peered at his inscrutable silver mask. "I see from the obituaries that Bert Nix and Pertinax Rushforth were one and the same. What happened to him?"
Heimlich continued. "Pertinax couldn't hack it. He was all for fiscal conservatism, of course— Bert was not a soft-headed man at any point. But when he learned he was firing people and cutting programs just to maintain this charade, he lost his strength of will. The faculty ruined his life with their hatred, he had a nervous breakdown and we sacked him. Then the MegaUnion began to organize a tuition strike, so the remaining old-guard Trustees threw up their hands, caved in and installed Julian Didius as President!" At the memory of this, several of the Trustees sighed or moaned with contempt. "Well! After he had enjoyed those first three weeks of flying in all his intelligentsia comrades for wine and cheese parties, we got him in here and showed him the financial figures, which looked disastrous. Then he met Pertinax after the electroshock, and realized what a bloody hell-hole he was in. Three days later he went to the Dean's Office for a chat, and when the Dean turned out to be addressing a conference in Hawaii, he blew his top and hurled himself out the window, and then we brought in Septimius and he's straightened things out wonderfully." There were admiring grins around the table, though Krupp did not appear to be listening.
"Did Pertinax have master keys, then, or what? How did he keep from being kicked out of the Plex?"
"We allowed the poor bastard to stay because we felt sorry for him," said Krupp. "He wouldn't live anywhere else."
The angle of the knight's head dropped a little.
"So," said Heimlich briskly, "for some reason you knew our best-kept secrets. We hope you will understand our actions now and not do anything rash. Do you follow?"
"Yes," murmured the knight, "unfortunately."
"What is unfortunate about it?"
"The more thoughtful you people are, the worse you get. Why is that?"
"What do we do that is wrong, Casimir Radon?" said Krupp quietly.
The mask rose and gleamed at S. S. Krupp, and then its owner lifted off the helmet to reveal his shaven head and permanently consternated face.
"Lie a hell of a lot. Fire people when you don't have to. Create— create a very complicated web of lies, to snare a simple, good ideal."
"I don't think it's a hell of a lot of fun," said Krupp, "and it hurts sometimes, more than you can suppose. But great goals aren't attained with ease or simplicity or pleasantry, or whatever you're looking for. If we gave into the MegaUnion, we would tip our hand and cause ruination. As long as we're putting on this little song-and-dance, we've got to make it a complete song-and-dance, because if the orchestra's playing a march and the dancers are waltzing, the audience riots. The theater burns."
"At least you could be more conciliatory."
"Conciliatory! Listen, son, when you've got snakes in the basement and the water's rising, it's no time to conciliate. Someone's got to have some principles in education, and it might as well be us. If this country's educators hadn't had their heads in their asses for forty years, we wouldn't have a faculty union, and more of our students might be sentient. I'll have strap marks on my ass before I conciliate with those medicine men down there on the picket lines."
"You're trying to fire everyone. That's a little extreme." "Not if we're to be consistent," said Heimlich. "We can use the opportunity to rearrange our financial platform, and hire new people. There are many talented academics desperate for work these days, and the best faculty members here won't let themselves be taken out en masse anyway."
"You're going to do it, aren't you!"
"It's evident that we have no choice."
"Don't you think— " Casimir looked out at the clear blue sky.
"What?"
"That if the administration gets to be as powerful as you, you have killed the university?"
"Look, son," said Ralph Priestly, rolling forward. "We never claimed this was an ideal situation. We're just doing our best. We don't have much choice."
"We're rather busy, as you can imagine," said Heimlich finally. What do you want? Something for the railgun?" He sat up abruptly. How is the railgun?"
"Safe."
Heimlich smiled for the first time in a week. "I'd like to know what a 'safe' railgun is."
"Maybe you'll find out."
Everyone looked disturbed.
"We are prepared to remove the Terrorists from the waste disposal site," said Casimir crisply, "as a public service. The estimated time will be one week. Beforehand, we plan to evacuate the Plex. We require your cooperation in two areas.
"First, we will need control of the Plex radio station. One of our group has developed a scheme for evacuating the Plex which makes this necessary.
"The second requirement is for the consideration of you, Ralph Priestly. What we want, Ralph, is for some person of yours to sit by the switch that controls the Big Wheel sign. When we phone him and say, 'Fiat lux,' he is to turn it on, and when we say, 'Fiat obscuritas,' off.
"That commando team you tried to send in through the sewers last night was stopped by a RAT, or Rodent Assault Tactics team associated with us. Well be releasing them soon, we can't do much more with first aid. The point is that only we can get rid of the Terrorists. We just ask that you do not interfere."
Finished, Casimir sat back, hands clasped on breastplate, and stared calmly at a skylight. The Board of Trustees moved down to the far end of the table. After they had talked for a few minutes, S. S. Krupp walked over and shook hands with Casimir.
"We're with you," Krupp said proudly. "Wish I knew what the hell you had in mind. What's your timetable?"
"Don't know. You'll have plenty of warning."
"Can we supply men? Arms?" asked Heimlich.
"Nope. One gun is all we need." Casimir let go of Krupp's hand and walked down the table, unclipping himself from the rope and throwing it out to dangle there. A forest of pinstripes rushed up the other side, trying to circumnavigate the table and shake Casimir's hand too. Casimir stopped by the exit.
"I probably won't see you again. Bear in mind, after the university starts running again, two things: we control the rats. And we control the Worm. You no longer monopolize power in this institution."
The Trustees stopped dead at this breach of pleasantness and stared at Casimir. Krupp looked on as though monitoring a field of battle from a high tower. Casimir continued. "I just mention this because it makes a difference in what is reasonable for you to do, and what is not. Good-bye." As he reached for the doorknob, he found the door briskly opened by a guard; he nodded to the man and strode out into an anteroom.
"Soldier," said Septimius Severus Krupp, "see that that man receives safe passage back to his own sphere of influence."
Night fell, and Towers A, B, C, D, H and G began to flash on and off in perfect unison. Every tower except for E and F— homes of the Axis— was blinking in and out of existence every two seconds. As the Axis people saw it, the entire Plex was disappearing into the night, then re-igniting, over and over. It was much closer than the Big Wheel; it was far larger; it surrounded them on three sides. The effect was stupefying.
Dex Fresser ran to his observation post. In the corridors of E13S, Terrorists wandered like decapitated chickens. Some were hearing voices telling them to look, some not to look, to run or stay, to panic or relax. The SUBbie who was supposed to guard the lounge-headquarters had dropped his gun on the floor and disappeared. Fresser burst into the lounge to consult with Big Wheel.
Big Wheel had gone dark.
He turned on the Little Wheel— the Go Big Red Fan.
"Big Wheel must be mad at you or something. What the fuck did you do wrong?" shouted the Fan, loud, omnipresent and angry. Dex Fresser shrank, got on his knees and snuffled a little. Outside, a bewildered stereo-hearer was playing with the knobs on his ghetto blaster, desperate for advice.
"The stereo! The stereo, dipshit, find that frequency! Find the frequency," said the Fan in the voice of Dex Fresser's old scoutmaster. Dex Fresser tumbled over a chair in his haste to reach the stereo. The only light in the room was cast by the glowing LEDs on his stereo that looked out like feral eyes in the night. All systems were go for stereo energize. As Dex Fresser's hands played over the controls, dozens of lights kicked in with important systems data, and green digits glowed from the tuner to tell him his position on the FM dial. Only dense static came from the speakers, meaningless to anyone else; but he could hear Big Wheel guiding him in the voice of his first-grade ballroom dance teacher.
"A little farther down, dear. Keep going right down the dial. You're certain to get it eventually."
Dex Fresser punched buttons and a light came on, saying: "AUTO DOWNWARD SCAN." He now heard many voices from the dark cones of the speakers: funky jazz-playing fascists, "great huge savings now Neil Young wailing into his harmonica, a call-in guest suggesting that we load the Mexicans on giant space barges and hurl them into the sun, a base hit by Chambliss, an ad for rat poison, a teen, apoplectic about his acne… and then the voice he was looking for.
"On. Off. On. Off. On. Off." It was a woman's voice, somehow familiar.
"It's Sarah, dumbshit," said the Go Big Red Fan. "She's on the campus station."
Indeed. The other towers were going on and off just as Sarah told them to. He knelt there for ten minutes, watching their reflection in the glassy surface of the Big Wheel. On. Off. On. Off. "On," she said, and paused. "Most of you did very well! But we've got some holdouts in E and F Towers. I'm sorry to say that Big Wheel won't be showing up this evening. He will not be here to give us his advice without cooperation from the E and F tower hearers. We'll try later. I'll be back in an hour, at midnight, and by then I hope that you SUBbies and Terrorists will have submitted to Big Wheel's will." Sarah was replaced by Ephraim Klein, who started in with another solid hour of pre-classical keyboard selections.
Dex Fresser was clutching his chest, which felt unbearably tight. "Oh, shit," he exclaimed, "it's us! We're keeping Big Wheel off! Everybody put your stereos on ninety point three! Do as she says!" Down in Electrical Control, deep in the Burrows, I and the other switch-throwers rested. The circuit breakers that supply power to an entire tower are large items, not at all easy to throw on and off every two seconds! By midnight we were rested up and ready to go. Sarah resumed her broadcast.
"I sure hope we can get Big Wheel to come on. Let's hope E and F Towers go along this time. Ready? Everyone standing by their light switch? Okay Off On Off "
From his lounge-headquarters, Dex Fresser watched his towers flash raggedly on and off. Some of the lights were not flashing; but within minutes the Wing Commisars had swept through and shot out any strays, and Dex Fresser was undescribably proud that his towers could flash like the others. Big Wheel could not forsake them now.
"On!" cried Sarah, and stopped. Several lights went off again from habit, then coyly flickered back on. There was an unbearable wait.
"I think we've done it," Sarah said. "Look at Big Wheel!" And the wheel of fire cast its light over the Plex with all its former glory. Dex wept.
"Not bad for a fascist," observed Little Wheel.
The Big Wheel spun all night.
It was trickier to get the attention of the barbarians of the Base. Most of them did not have bicameral minds and thus could not be made to hear mysterious voices. We needed to impress them. Hence Sarah predicted that in twenty-four hours a plague of rats would strike Journalism, unless all the journalists cleared out of the Plex.
"Frank," said the reporter into the camera, "I'm here in the American Megaversity mailroom, our operations center for the Plex war. It's been quiet on all fronts tonight despite former Student President Sarah Jane Johnson's prediction of a 'plague of rats.' Well, we've seen a few rats here"— his image is replaced by shot of small rat scurrying down empty corridor, terrified by TV lights— "but perhaps that's not unusual in these very strange, very special circumstances. We toured the Plex today, looking for plagues of rats, leaving no stone unturned to find the animals of which Ms. Johnson spoke. We looked in garbage heaps"— shot of journalist digging in garbage with long stick; sees nothing, turns to camera, holds nose, says "phew!"— "but all we found were bugs. We toured the corridors"— journalist alone in long empty corridor; camera swivels around to look in other direction; nothing there either; back to journalist— "but apparently the rats were somewhere else. We checked the classrooms, but the only rats there were on paper"— journalist standing in stolen lab coat next to diagram of rat's nervous system— "Finally, though, we did manage to find one rat. In a little-used lab, Frank, in a little cage, we found one very hungry white rat"— back to mailroom; journalist holds up wire cage containing furtive white rat— "but he's been well fed ever since, and we don't think he'll attack."
"Sam, what do you think about Sarah Jane Johnson's pronouncement? Is it a symbolic statement, or has she cracked?" "No one can be sure, Frank." Behind journalist, door explodes open with a boom and a flash; strobe light is seen beyond it. The journalist continues, trying to resist the temptation to turn around and look; but the explosion has drowned out the audio part of the camera. Dozens of giant rats storm the room However, reliable sources have it that " His words are drowned out by mass machine-gun fire. In an unprecedented breach of media etiquette, journalist turns around to look, and presently disappears from view. Abruptly, the ceiling of the mailroom spins down to fill the screen, and three great fuzzy out-of-focus rat snouts converge from the edges of the screen, long teeth glistening in the TV lights; all goes dark. We return to Network Control. Anchorman is in process of throwing his pen at someone, but pauses to say, "Now, this," and is replaced by an animated hemorrhoid.
All we wanted was to get everyone out of the Plex and end this thing. Once rats roamed the Base and bats frolicked in the hallways, and smoke, flies and filth were everywhere, those people were ready to go. The GASF would leave whenever Virgil told them to. The administration would clear B and C Towers as soon as we gave the word. The TUGgies claimed that they were merely holding their three towers to fend off the Reds. Later, to no one's surprise, we found that they had half-brainwashed the population of those towers by the time Sarah kicked in with her pronouncements; and how could oversweetened Kool-Aid, Manilow songs and lovebombing compete with her radical power and grand demonstrations? After we shut off their electricity and water for twelve hours, the TUG agreed to evacuate their towers at our command. The SUB/Terrorist axis would do whatever they had to to keep the Big Wheel on.
As the days went by, Big Wheel grew more demanding. Everyone was to leave his stereo tuned to 90.3 at all times. Everyone was to plan evacuation routes from their towers and clear away any obstacles that might have been placed at the exits. Dex Fresser's devotion to Sarah's words became complete, and after a week we knew we could evacuate the Axis and everyone else whenever we were ready.
In the meantime we were moving the railgun downstairs. To withstand the recoil thrust, the machine's supports had to be bolted right into the concrete floor of the sewer. We had to precision-fit a hundred and twenty bolts into the concrete for the fifty-foot-long railgun, a dull and iffy task requiring great precision. Once the holes were prepared, we began carrying the supports down. It was a terrible, endless job. After a day of it, I decided I was going to write a book— that way, all of this drudgery was a fascinating contribution to my artistic growth. Strength was not a requirement in the Grand Army of Shekondar the Fearsome, so I had to torque all the bolts myself. During breaks I would look down the tunnel at the wall of lights that guarded the Nuke Dump's approach. What were the Crotobaltislavonians doing down there, and what were they thinking?
Their plan— the years of infiltration and the moments of violence— had gone perfectly. They had probably made their radioactive-waste bombs, only to find that their only elevator shaft had been blocked by tons of concrete. They must have thought they had lost, then; but the National Guard had not moved in and the authorities had given in to all demands. Was this a trick?
They must have been unprepared for the resistance put up by the GASF and the TUG. Still, their proxies had seized two towers and were holding their own. That was fine, until they threw Marxism to the winds and began to worship a giant neon sign. Dex Fresser must have worked closely with Magrov for years. The cafeteria riot of April First had clearly been timed to coincide with the seizure of the Nuke Dump, and the SUB had not bought their Kalashnikovs at the 7-11. Then— a window fan! A fucking window fan! In a way, I sympathized with the Crotobaltislavonians. Besides us, they were the only rational people here. Like us, they must have wondered whether they had gone out of their minds. If they had any dedication to their cause, though, they must have changed their plans. They still had the waste, they were protected by the rats, they could still wield plenty of clout. They could not see past the barrier of light, where we were implanting the railgun.
During a breather upstairs I encountered Ephraim Klein, moving stiffly but on his feet.
"Come here!" he yelled, grabbed my shirt, and began pulling me down a hallway. I knew it must be something either very important or embarrassingly trivial.
"You won't believe this," he said, shuffling down the hail beside me. "We're heading for Greathouse Chapel. We were there to broadcast some organ music— guess what we found."
Ephraim had appointed himself Music Director for our radio station, and later added Head Engineer and Producer. He knew that we could not spend twenty-four hours a day on Big Wheel chatter, and that in the meantime he could damn well play whatever he liked on what amounted to the world's largest stereo— revenge at last. If Sarah had commanded all residents to play their radios twenty-four hours a day, so much the better; they were going to hear music that meant something. He was going to improve their minds, whether they thanked him or not.
"Remember, listeners, a record is a little wheel. Any record at all is Big Wheel's cousin. So whenever a record speaks, you had damn better listen."
Ephraim and I heard the music from hundreds of feet away. Someone was playing the Greathouse Organ, and playing it well, though with a kind of inspired abandon that led to occasional massive mistakes. Still, the great Bach fugue lurched on with all parts intact, and no error caused the interweaving of those voices to be confused.
"Your friend has a lot of stops pulled out today," I said. "That's not my friend!" shouted Ephraim. "Well, he is now, but he's not that friend."
We reached the grand entrance and I looked far up the center aisle to the console. A wide, darkly clad man sat there, blasting along happily toward the climax. No music was on the console; the organist played from memory. High up on the wall of the chapel, bright yellow light shone down from the picture-windowed broadcast booth, where the organ's sound could be piped to the radio station hundreds of meters away.
As we approached, I could see a ragged overcoat and the pink flashes of bare feet on the pedals. The final chord was trumpeted, threatening to blow out the rose window above, and the performer applauded himself. I climbed the dais and gaped into the beaming face of Bert Nix.
His tongue was blooming from his mouth as usual; but when I arrived, he retracted it and fixed a gaze at me that riveted me to the wall.
"Beware the Demon of the Wave," he said coldly. For a moment I was too scared to breathe. Then the spell was broken as he removed a cup of beer from the Ethereal keyboard and drained it. "I never was dead," he said defensively.
"You're actually Pertinax, aren't you?" I asked.
"I've always been more pertinent than you thought," he said and, giggling, pounded out a few great chords that threatened to lift the top of my head off.
"Who was the dead man in your room?"
He rolled his eyes thoughtfully. "Bill Benson, born in nineteen-twenty. Joined Navy in forty-two, five-inch gun loader in Pacific War, winning Bronze Star and Purple Heart, discharged in forty-eight, hired by us as security guard. That poor bastard had a stroke in the elevator, he was so worried about me!"
"How'd he get in that room?"
"I dragged him there! Otherwise, they don't close the lid of the little pine box and your second cousins come in plastic clothes and put dead flowers on you, a bad way to go!"
"I see. Uh, well, you're quite an organist."
"Yes. But a terrible administrator!" Pertinax now clapped his foot down on the lowest pedal, sounding a rumble too low to hear. "But hark!" he screamed, "there sounds an ominous undertone of warning!" He released the pedal and looked around at Ephraim and me. "I shall now play the famous 'Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.' This is clearly the work of a young and vigorous Bach, almost ostentatious in his readiness to show virtuosity, reveling in the instrument's ability to bounce mighty themes from the walls of the Kirche
but enough of this, my stops are selected." He looked suspiciously at the ceiling. "This one brings out the bats. Prepare your tennis rackets therefore! Ah. The nuptial song arose from all the thousand thousand spirits over the joyful Earth & Sea, and ascended into the Heavens; for Elemental Gods there thunderous Organs blew; creating delicious Viands. Demons of Waves their watry Eccho's woke! Demons of Waves!" And throwing his head back, he hurled himself into the Toccata. We stood mesmerized by his playing and his probing tongue, until the fugue began; then we retreated to the broadcast booth.
"He's playing stop combinations I've never heard before," said Ephraim. "Anyway, I'm broadcasting all this. He's great."
Down in the tunnels we always kept the radio on low, and so heard plenty of Pertinax in the next few days.
Eventually we brought down the big power supplies from Heimlich Freedom Industries, wrapped in plastic and packed with chemical dessicants to keep them dry, surrounded with electric blankets to keep the electronics warm. Casimir produced several microchips he had stolen from the supplies so that Fred Fine could not use them, and plugged them into their proper spots. We ran thousands of feet of heavy black power cables down into the tunnels to power them. We tested each electromagnet; two were found wanting and had to be sent back and remade. We energized the rail and slid the bucket up and down it hundreds of times, using a small red laser to check for straightness, laboriously adjusting for every defect. It took two days to carry down the machine's parts, four days to adjust it and a day of testing before Casimir was satisfied it would work on its first and only trial.
Virgil worked on the payload, a ten-kilogram high-explosive shell. He used a computer program to design the shaped charge, an enormous program that normally would have run for days, but now required only seconds. The weakened Worm could only taunt him. AH, GOING TO BLOW SOMETHING UP? "I'm going to blow you up."
THREATS OF PHYSICAL VIOLENCE ARE USELESS AGAINST THE WORM. This was its usual response to what sounded like threats. YOU'RE VERY CLEVER, BUT I SHALL TRIUMPH IN THE END.
"Wrong. I found where you are."
HUH? "I found the secret mini-disc drives that Paul Bennett hid above the ceiling of his office. The drives where you've been hiding. It's all over now."
I AM EVERYWHERE.
"You are most places, but not everywhere. I'm going to shut off your secret disc drives as soon as I'm sure they aren't booby trapped."
I'M GOING TO BLOW YOU UP.
"I'm going to be careful."
THAT'S A LOT OF EXPLOSIVE FOR YOU TO FOOL AROUND WITH, LITTLE BOY.
"It'll do."
I WILL BLOCK YOUR CALCULATIONS.
"You're living in the past, Worm," typed Virgil, and executed his program. "I have just executed my program. And next, I'm going to execute you."
THREATS OF PHYSICAL VIOLENCE ARE USELESS AGAINST THE WORM.
Lute turned the shell on a Science Shop lathe and packed the explosive with a hydraulic press. Virgil carried it down an evacuated stairwell, placing each foot very, very carefully.
Casimir put it on a clean table downstairs and weighed it; ten kilograms precisely. He dusted it off with a lint-free rag and slid it into the bucket. We checked the power sources, and they looked fine. Everyone was evacuated except for me, Casimir and Fred Fine; Virgil led the remaining GASF forces upstairs and commanded them to leave. It was 10:30 P.M.
We sat in the APPASMU for an hour and a half, until Sarah's program came on.
"Everyone look at Big Wheel!" she said. There was long silence and we sat there on the APPASMU, protected by strobes, the rats chattering and grumbling in the darkness around us, the HFI power sources looking oddly clean and shiny as they flashed in and out of darkness in their own little strobe-pool.
"That's good," said Sarah. "As you can see, Big Wheel is shining tonight. But he won't shine for long, because he is unhappy." Another wait. We knew that, upstairs, Hyacinth had phoned the Big Wheel's controller and ordered him to shut off the sign. "Big Wheel is not shining tonight," Sarah continued, "because he wants you all out of the Plex. You are all to stop watching him from a distance. The Big Wheel wants you to see him up close tonight. Everyone get out of the building now and walk toward Big Wheel and stand under him. Leave your radios on in case I have more instructions! You have an hour to leave the Plex. When Big Wheel is happy, he will turn on again."
Organ music came on, obviously another live performance by a particularly inspired Pertinax. We played cards atop the tank. "Should we evacuate too?" asked Fred Fine. "Could Big Wheel be another face of Shekondar?"
"Sarah wants you here," said Casimir. This satisfied him. The music started just after midnight and continued for three hours. Above, we supposed, the evacuees were being loaded into ambulances or paddy-wagons, while Army fallout emergency workers prepared the city for the worst. The Board of Trustees were departing by helicopter from the top of C Tower, withdrawing to the HFI Tower a mile away.
"This is really it," said Fred Fine, ready to black out. "This is the moment of the heroes. The Apocalypse of Plexor. All will be unMixed in an instant."
"Yep," said Casimir, drawing another card. "I'll see that, and raise you four chocolate chips."
The only problem so far was minor: the station's signal seemed to be dying away. We had to keep turning up the volume to hear the music, and by 1:30 we had it up all the way. Our batteries were fine, so we assumed it was a problem at the station. As long as everyone else was turning up their volume too, it should be fine.
Finally the organ music was phased out for a second and we heard Sarah. "Go for it," she said, tense and breathless. "We're gone. See you outside." I started sweating and trembling and had to get up and pace around to work off energy, finally taking an emergency dump. We were in a sewer, who cared? We gave Sarah, Hyacinth, Ephraim and Bert Nix half an hour to evacuate, but the music kept on going. After twenty minutes, Ephraim's voice came in. "Go ahead," he said, "we're staying."
So we went ahead. We had no choice.
The tunnel was four hundred feet long.
The first fifty feet were taken up by the railgun, set up on its supports about five feet above the floor. There was a three-hundred-foot desert of tinfoil shards, then the barrier of light, then, fifty feet beyond that, the door to the Nuke Dump. We rolled the APPASMU to within twenty feet of the light barrier and parked it against one of the tunnel sides. Through long wires strung down the tunnel we controlled the firing of the railgun. When we were ready, we entered the tank, shut off the strobe and turned on the ultrasound. Within a minute we were surrounded by a thousand giant rats, standing on one another's shoulders in their lust for that sweet tone, milling about the APPASMU as though it were a dumpster.
Fred Fine and I aimed shotguns out the forward gun ports. Casimir hit the button.
We could not see the shell as it shot past the vehicle. We heard the explosion, though, and saw its flash. The rats milled back from the explosion. Fred Fine and I opened fire and annihilated the light-wall in a few shots, and with a chorus of joy the rat-army surged forward into its long-looked-at Promised Land, followed by us. Our fear was that the shell would not suffice to blow open the door, but even with our poor visibility we could see the jagged circle of light and the boiling silhouette of the rat-stream pouring through it. As we drew very near, some rats were blown back by machine-gun fire, and a Crotobaltislavonian ducked through the hole and ran toward us in his ghostly radiation suit, two rats hanging from his body.
Fred Fine opened the top hatch, whipped out his sword as he vaulted out and leapt at him howling, "SHEKONDAR!" I grabbed at his legs on his way out but he kicked free, jumped to the floor, smashed in a few rat skulls, and made toward the Croto. I do not know whether he intended to save the man or kill him. A rat tried to come in through the open hatch but I shoved it out, then stood up through it with my shotgun. I damaged my hearing for life but did not change the outcome. Once the rats started landing on my back and I could no longer see Fred Fine, I could only give up. I sat down and closed the hatch, and we waited for a while. But nothing happened; all we saw through our peepholes were rats, and the clicking of our Geiger counter did not vary.
Casimir turned the APPASMU around, and we plowed through rats and followed the tunnels until we joined up with the city sewer system. Pertinax continued to play. From time to time he sang or shouted something, and the microphones hanging back amid the pipes would dimly pick him up: "There is no City nor Corn-field nor Orchard! all is Rock & Sand; There is no Sun nor Moon nor Star, but rugged wintry rocks Justling together in the void suspended by inward fires. Impatience now no longer can endure!"
We easily found the manhole we sought, because dim morning light was shining down through it. The Guardsmen were waiting to haul us out, and emerging onto the street, we saw civil authority around us again and, even better, our friends. The Plex rose above us, about half a mile distant, beginning to glow brownish-pink in the imminent dawn. All was quiet except for the distant hum of the TUGgies, gathered just outside the police cordons and running their OM generators full blast.
During our frantic reunion, two absurdly serious-looking men approached me with complicated badges and questions. As they introduced themselves, we were all startled by a hoarse blast of organ music that burst from all directions.
"Ephraim must have turned the broadcast volume way down, then back up again," said Casimir as soon as everyone in our area had turned down their radios. Once the music was quiet enough to be recognized, I knew it as Ephraim's old favorite, the "Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor"; and at the end of each phrase, when the voice of the Greathouse Organ plunged back down home to that old low C, it rumbled in concord with the OM generators across the street, and the Plex itself seemed to vibrate as a single huge eight-tubed organ pipe.
And after all this, I was the only one to understand. "Get away!" I screamed, tearing myself loose from an agent. "Get away!" I shouted, ripping a megaphone from a policeman's hand, and "Get away!" I continued, stumbling to the roof of a squad car and cranking up the volume.
"Get away!" all the other cops began to shout into their megaphones. "Get away!" crackled from the PA systems of squad cars and helicopters. It was the word of the hour, and mounted cops howled it at TUGgies and SUBbies and the media, forcing them back with truncheons and horses. Someone flashed It to the police teams who had entered the Plex, and they scrambled out and squealed away in their cars. Perhaps it was shouted ten thousand times as the ring of onlookers gradually expanded away from the Base.
The sound waxed. Ephraim kept turning it up and Bert Nix, building for the climax, kept pulling out more stops. Casimir tried to phone Ephraim from a booth, but he didn't answer. He probably couldn't even hear it ring.
He certainly heard nothing but organ as, at the end, he cranked the volume all the way and Pertinax Rushforth pulled out all the stops.
The windows went first. They all burst from their frames at once. All 25,000 picture windows boomed out into trillions of safe little cubes in the red dawn air. At first it seemed as though the Plex had suddenly grown fuzzy and white, then as though a blizzard had enveloped the eight towers, and finally as though It were rising up magnificently from a cloud of glinting orange foam. As the cloud of glass dropped away from the towers with grand deliberation, the millions of bats In the upper levels, driven crazy by the terrible sound, imprisoned in a building with too few exits, stopped beating their wings against the windows and exploded from the rooms in a black cloud of unbelievable volume. The black cloud drifted forth and rose into the sky and the white cloud sank into the depths, and Pertinax pushed the swell pedals to the floor and coupled all the manuals to the pedalboard and pushed his bare pink foot down on the first one, the low C, and held it down forever.
The building's steel frame was unaffected. The cinder-blocks laid within that frame, though, stopped being walls and became a million individual blocks of stone. Uncoupled, they began to dissolve away from the girders, and the floors accordionned down with a boom and a concussion that obliterated the sound of the organ. All the towers went together; and as those tons of debris avalanched into the girders on which the towers rested, the steel finally went too, and crumpled together and sagged and fell and snapped and tore with painful slowness and explosive booms.
The hundred thousand people watching it plugged their ears, except for the TUGgies, who watched serenely and shut off their OM generators. From the enormous heap of rubble, broken water pipes shot fountains glistening white in the rising sun. Crunches and aftershocks continued for days.
Not far away, Virgil Gabrielsen sat on a curbstone, his hair bright in the sun, drinking water. Between his feet was a stack of mini-computer memory discs in little black envelopes. The APPASMU is in the Smithsonian Institution and may be visited 10:00 A.M.— 5:30 P.M. seven days a week. And the Go Big Red Fan was found unscathed, sitting miraculously upright on a crushed sofa on a pile of junk, its painted blades rotating quietly and intermittently in the fresh spring breeze.
Credits
NEAL STEPHENSON has no job and does not live anyplace in particular except in summers, when he travels. This is his first published novel. In the past he has worked as a library and hospital clerk, garbage-to-energy consultant, vending-machine loader, physics research assistant, anti-perspirant test subject, crystal grower, movie extra, tutor, funeral home driver, detasseler, theatrical lighting technician, ditch digger, greeting-card salesman, fungus farmer, paperboy, and Chinese restaurant food-chopper, which prepared him for editing early drafts of The Big U.
One flew over the animal house…
If George Orwell had written a novel more like Animal House (the movie) than like Animal Farm (the book), and if Orwell were a young American whose early twenties were spent in the 1980s, and if Orwell counted among his concerns the origins of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind, Dungeons & Dragons, computer piracy, and heavy-metal rock versus Bach fugues, the result would perhaps have been similar to The Big U.
Casimir Radon's introduction to American Megaversity is fraught with red tape, Newspeak and enrollment procedures based on the catch-22 principle. Having struggled long and hard to afford a college education, Casimir has come up against the awful truth. What is he doing at the Big U? Meanwhile, unhappy roommates John Wesley Fenrick and Ephraim Klein (Business and Philosophy, respectively) wage sonic war with massive stereos; drug aficionado Dex Fresser becomes the leader of a cult that worships a neon sign, a dilapidated red fan, and other curious appliances; class president Sarah Johnson locks horns with the Airheads and the Terrorists, her dorm's female and male factions; Virgil Gabrielsen, resident genius, hunts down "the Worm," an insidious glitch in the all-important college computer system.
As the Apocalyptic plot thickens and boils, a small band of unlikely heroes tries to foil the scheme of Crotobaltislavonian freedom-fighters who have seized control of the radioactive waste dumped beneath the university, and to survive a campus-wide live-ammo civil war, and to avoid the plague of bats and mutant rats, and to get through the spring semester….