"I'd like to announce that I have caught a bat here in my hand, and now I'm going to bite the head off it right here as a sacrifice to the God of Communism."
Below, the SUBbie found himself in absolute darkness, and tripped over a power cord. Simultaneously the TUGgie squinted as all lights were swung around to bear on him. He smiled and began to talk in a calm chantlike voice. "Well, well, well. I've got a confession. I'm not really going to bite the head off a bat, because I don't even have one, and I'm not a Communist." There was now a patter of what sounded like canned TV laughter from the TUG section. "I just did that as a little demonstration, to show you folks how easy it is to get the attention of the media. We can come and talk about serious issues and do real things, but what gets TV coverage are violent eye-catching events, a thing which the Communists who wish to destroy our society understand very well. But I'm not here to give a speech, I'm here to propose an amendment. . ." Here he was dive-bombed by the bat, who veered away at the last moment; the speaker jumped back in horror, to the amusement of almost everyone. The TUGgies laughed too, showing that, yes, they did have a sense of humor no matter what people said. The speaker struggled to regain his composure.
"The speech! Resume the speech! The amendment!" shouted the older man.
"My budget proposal is that we take away all funding for the Stalinist Underground Battalion and distribute it among the other activities groups."
The lecture hall exploded in outraged chanting, uproarious applause, and OM. Sarah sat for about fifteen seconds with her chin in her hand, then began smashing the gavel again. I was seated off to the side of the stage, poised to act as the strong-but-lovable authority figure, but did not have to stand up; eventually things quieted down.
"Is there a second to the motion?" she asked wearily. The crowd screamed YES and NO.
The speaker yielded to another TUGgie, who stood rigidly with a stack of 3— x —5 cards and began to drone through them. "At one time the leftist organizations of American Megaversity could claim that they represented some of the students. But the diverse organizations of the Left soon found that they all had one member who was very strident and domineering and who would push the others around until he or she had risen to a position of authority within the organization. These all turned out to be secretly members of the Stalinist Underground Battalion who had worked themselves in organizations in order to merge the Left into a single bloc with no diversity or freedom of thought. The SUB took over a women's issues newsletter and turned it into the People's Truth Publication, a highly libelous so-called newspaper. In the same way "
He was eventually cut off by Sarah. SUB spokespersons stated their views passionately, then another TUGgie. Finally a skinny man in dark spectacles came to the mike, a man whom Sarah recognized but couldn't quite place. He identified himself as Casimir Radon and said he was president of the physics club Neutrino. He quieted the crowd down a bit, as his was the first speech of the evening that was not entirely predictable.
"I'd like to point out that you've only given us four hundred dollars," he said. "We need more. I've done some analysis of the way our activity money is budgeted, which I will just run through very quickly here— " he fumbled through papers as a disappointed murmur rose from the audience. How long was this nerd going to take? The cameramen put new film and tape in their equipment as lines formed outside by the restrooms.
"Here we go. I won't get too involved in the numerical details— it's all just arithmetic— but if you look at the current budget, you see that a small group of people is receiving a hugely disproportionate share of the money. In effect, the average funding per member of the Stalinist Underground Battalion is $114.00, while the figure for everyone else averages out to about $46.00, and only $33.00 for Neutrino. That's especially unfair because Neutrino needs to purchase things like books and equipment, while the expenses of a political organization are much lower. I don't think that's fair."
The SUB howled at this preposterous reasoning but everyone else listened respectfully.
"So I move we cut SUB funding to the bare minimum, say, twenty bucks per capita, and give Neutrino its full request for a scientific research project, $1500.00."
The rest of the evening, anyway, was bonkers, and I'll not go into detail. It was insignificant anyway, since the administration had the final say; the Student Government would have to keep passing budgets until they passed one that S. S. Krupp would sign, and the only question was how long it would take them to knuckle under. Time was against the SUB. As the members of the government got more bored, they became more interested in passing a budget that would go through the first time around. Eventually it became obvious that the SUB had lost out, and the only thing wanting was the final vote. The highlight of the evening came just before that vote: the speech of Yllas Freedperson.
Yllas, the very substantial and brilliant leader of the SUB, was a heavy black woman in her early thirties, in her fifth year of study at the Modern Political Art Workshop. She had a knack for turning out woodblock prints portraying anguished faces, burning tenements, and thick tortured hands reaching for the sky. Even her pottery was inspired by the work of wretched Central American peasants. She was also editor and illustrator of the People's Truth Publication, but her real talent was for public speaking, where she had the power of a gospel preacher and the fire of a revolutionary. She waited dignified for the TV lights, then launched into a speech that lasted at least a quarter of an hour. At just the right times she moaned, she chanted, she sang, she reasoned, she whispered, she bellowed, she just plain spoke in a fluid and hypnotically rhythmic voice. She talked about S. S. Krupp and the evil of the System, how the System turned good into bad, how this society was just like the one that caused the Holocaust, which was no excuse for Israel, about conservatism in Washington and how our environment, economic security, personal freedom, and safety from nuclear war were all threatened by the greedy action of cutting the SUB's budget. Finally out came the names of Martin Luther King, Jr., Marx, Gandhi, Che, Jesus Christ, Ronald Reagan, Hitler, S. S. Krupp, the KKK, Bob Avakian, Elijah Mohammed and Abraham Lincoln. Through it all, the bat was active, dipping and diving crazily through the auditorium, divebombing toward walls or lights or people but veering away at the last moment, flitting through the dense network of beams and cables and catwalks and light fixtures and hanging speakers and exposed pipes above us at great smooth speed, tracing a marvelously complicated path that never brushed against any solid object. All of it was absorbing and breathtaking, and when Yllas Freedperson was finished and the bat, perhaps no longer attracted by her voice. slipped up and disappeared into a corner, there was a long silence before the applause broke out.
"Thank you, Yllas," said Sarah respectfully. "Is there any particular motion you wanted to make or did you just want to inject your comments?"
"I move," shouted Yllas Freedperson, "that we put the budget the way it was."
The vote was close. The SUB lost. Recounting was no help. They took the dignified approach, forming into a sad line behind Yllas and singing "We Shall Overcome" in slow tones as they marched out. Above their heads they carried their big black-on-red posters of S. S. Krupp with a target drawn over his face, and they marched so slowly that it took two repetitions of the song before they made it out into the hallway to distribute leaflets and posters.
Sarah, three members of her cabinet and I gathered later in my suite for wine. After the frenzy of the meeting we were torpid, and hardly said anything for the first fifteen minutes or so. Then, as it commonly did those days, the conversation came around to the Terrorists.
"What's the story on those Terrorist guys?" asked Willy, a business major who acted as Treasurer. "Are they genuine Terrorists?"
"Not on my floor," said Sarah, "since they subjugated us. We're living in… the Pax Thirteenica."
"I've heard a number of stories," I said. Everyone looked at me and I shifted into my professor mode and lit my pipe. "Their major activity is the toll booth concept. They station Terrorists in the E13 elevator lobby who continually push the up and down buttons so that every passing elevator stops and opens automatically. If it doesn't contain any non-students or dangerous-looking people, they hold the door open until everyone gives them a quarter. They have also claimed a section of the Cafeteria, and there have been fights over it. But nothing I'd call true terrorism."
"How about gang rape?" asked Hillary, the Secretary, quietly. Everything got quiet and we looked at her.
"It's just a rumor," she said. "Don't get me wrong. It hasn't happened to me. The word is that a few of the hardcore Terrorists do it, kind of as an initiation. They go to big parties, or throw their own. You know how at a big party there are always a few women— typical freshmen— who get very drunk. Some nice-looking Terrorist approaches the woman— I hear that they're very good at identifying likely candidates— and gets into her confidence and invites her to another party. When they get to the other party, she turns out to be the only woman there, and you can imagine the rest. But the really terrible thing is that they go through her things and find out where she lives and who she is, then keep coming back whenever they feel like it. They have these women so scared and broken that they don't resist. Supposedly the Terrorists have kind of an invisible harem, a few terrified women all over the Plex, too dumb or scared to say anything."
I was sitting there with my eyes closed, like everyone else a little queasy. "I've heard of the same thing elsewhere," I said. "I wonder if it's happened to any Airheads," murmured Sarah. "God, I'll bet it has. I wonder if any of them know about it. I wonder if they even understand what is being done to them— some of them probably don't even understand they have a right to be angry."
"How could anyone not understand rape?" said Hillary.
"You don't know how mixed up these women are. You don't know what they did to me, without even understanding why I didn't like it. You can't imagine those people— they have no place to stand, no ideas of their own— if one is raped, and not one of her friends understands, where is she? She's cut loose, the Terrorists can tell her anything and make her into whatever they want. Shit, where are those animals going to stop? We're having a big costume party with them in December."
"There's a party to avoid," said Hillary.
"It's called Fantasy Island Nite. They've been planning it for months. But by the time the semester is over, those guys will be running wild."
"They've been running wild for a long time, it sounds like," said Willy. "You'd better get used to that, you know? I think you're living in the law of the jungle." That sounded a trifle melodramatic, but none of us could find a way to disagree.
Sarah and Casimir met in the Megapub, a vast pale airship hangar littered with uncertain plastic tables and chairs made of steel rods bent around into uncomfortable chairlike shapes that stabbed their occupants beneath the shoulder blades. At one end was a long bar, at the other a serving bay connected into the central kitchen complex. Casimir declined to eat Megapub food and lunched on a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich made from overpriced materials bought at the convenience store and a plastic cup of excessively carbonated beer. Sarah used the salad bar. They removed several trays from a window table and stacked them atop a nearby wastebasket, then sat down.
"Thanks for coming on short notice," said Sarah. "I need all the help I can get in selling this budget to Krupp, and your statistics might impress him."
Casimir, chewing vigorously on a big bite of generic white bread and generic chunkless peanut butter, drew a few computer-printed graphs from his backpack. "These are called Lorentz curves," he mumbled, "and they show equality of distribution. Perfect equality is this line here, at a forty-five degree angle. Anything less than equal comes out as a curve beneath the equality line. This is what we had with the old budget." He displayed a graph showing a deeply sagging curve, with the equality line above it for comparison. The graph had been produced by a computer terminal which had printed letters at various spots on the page, demonstrating in crude dotted-line fashion the curves and lines. "Now, here's the same analysis on our new budget." The new graph had a curve that nearly followed the equality line. "Each graph has a coefficient called the Gini coefficient, the ratio of the area between the line and curve to the area under the line. For perfect equality the Gini coefficient is zero. For the old budget it was very bad, about point eight, and for the new budget it is more like point two, which is pretty good."
Sarah listened politely. "You have a computer program that does this?"
"Yeah. Well, I do now, anyway. I just wrote it up."
"It's working okay?"
Casimir peered at her oddly, then at the graphs, then back at her. "I think so. Why?"
"Well, look at these letters in the curves." She pulled one of the graphs over and traced out the letters indicating the Lorentz curve: FELLATIOBUGGERYNECROPHILIACUNNILINGUSANALINGUSBESTIALITY….
"Oh," Casimir said quietly. The other curve read: CUNTFUCKSHITPISSCOCKASSHOLETITGIVEMEANENEMABEATMELICKMEOWNME…. Casimir's face waxed red and his tongue was protruding slightly. "I didn't do this. These are supposed to say, 'new budget' and 'old budget.' I didn't write this into the program. Uh, this is what we call a bug. They happen from time to time. Oh, Jeez, I'm really sorry." He covered his face with one hand and grabbed the graphs and crumpled them into his bag.
"I believe you," she said. "I don't know much about computers, but I know there have been problems with this one."
About halfway through his treatise on Lorentz curves it had occurred to Casimir that he was in the process of putting his foot deeply into his mouth. She was an English major; he had looked her up in the student directory to find out; what the hell did she care about Gini coefficients? Sarah was still smiling, so if she was bored she at least respected him enough not to show. He had told her that he'd just now written this program up, and that was bad, because it looked— oy! It looked as though he were trying to impress her, a sophisticated Humanities type, by writing computer programs on her behalf as though that were the closest he could come to real communication. And then obscene Lorentz curves!
He was saved by her ignorance of computers. The fact was, of course, that there was no way a computer error could do that— if she had ever run a computer program, she would have concluded that Casimir had done it on purpose. Suddenly he remembered his conversation with Virgil. The Worm! It must have been the Worm. He was about to tell her, to absolve himself, when he remembered it was a secret he was honor bound to protect.
He had to be honest. Could it be that he had actually written this just to impress her? Anything printed on a computer looked convincing. If that had been his motive, this served him right. Now was the time to say something witty, but he was no good at all with words— a fact he didn't doubt was more than obvious to her. She probably knew every smart, interesting man in the university, which meant he might as well forget about making any headway toward looking like anything other than an unkempt, poor, math-and-computer-obsessed nerd whose idea of intelligent conversation was to show off the morning's computer escapades.
"You didn't have to go to the trouble of writing a program."
"Ha! Well, no trouble. Easier to have the machine do it than work it out by hand. Once you get good on the computer, that is." He bit his up and looked out the window. "Which isn't to say I think I'm some kind of great programmer. I mean, I am, but that's not how I think of myself."
"You aren't a hacker," she suggested.
"Yeah! Exactly." Everyone knew the term "hacker," so why hadn't he just said it?
She looked at him carefully. "Didn't we meet somewhere before? I could swear I recognize you from somewhere." He had been hoping that she had forgotten, or that she would not recognize him through his glacier glasses. That first day, yes, he had read her computer card for her— a hacker's idea of a perfect introduction!
"Yeah. Remember Mrs. Santucci? That first day?" She nodded her head with a little smile; she remembered it all, for better or worse. He watched her intensely, trying to judge her reaction.
"Yes," she said, "sure. I guess I never properly thanked you for that, so— thank you." She held out her hand. Casimir stared at it, then put out his hand and shook it. He gripped her firmly— a habit from his business, where a crushing handshake was a sign of trustworthiness. To her he had probably felt like an orangutan trying to dislocate her shoulder. Besides which, some apple-blackberry jam had dripped out onto the first joint of his right index finger some minutes ago, and he had thoughtlessly sucked on it.
She was awfully nice. That was a dumb word, "nice," but he couldn't come up with anything better. She was bright, friendly and understanding, and kind to him, which was good of her considering his starved fanatical appearance and general fabulous ugliness. He hoped that this conversation would soon end and that they would come out of it with a wonderful relationship. Ha.
No one said anything; she was just watching him. Obviously she was! It was his turn to say something! How long had he been sitting there staring into the navy-blue maw of his mini-pie? "What's your major?" they said simultaneously. She laughed immediately, and belatedly he laughed also, though his laugh was sort of a gasp and sob that made him sound as if he were undergoing explosive decompression. Still, it relaxed him slightly. "Oh," she added, "I'm sorry. I forgot Neutrino was for physics majors."
"Don't be sorry." She was sorry?
"I'm an English major."
"Oh." Casimir reddened. "I guess you probably noticed that English is not my strong point."
"Oh, I disagree. When you were speaking last night, once you got rolling you did very well. Same goes for today, when you were describing your curves. A lot of the better scientists have an excellent command of language. Clear thought leads to clear speech."
Casimir's pulse went up to about twice the norm and he felt warmth in the lower regions. He gazed into the depths of his half-drained beer, not knowing what to say for fear of being ungrammatical. "I've only been here a few weeks, but I've heard that S. S. Krupp is quite the speaker. Is that so?"
Sarah smiled and rolled her eyes. At first Casimir had considered her just a typically nice-looking young woman, but at this instant it became obvious that he had been wrong; in fact she was spellbindingly lovely. He tried not to stare, and shoved the last three bites of pie into his mouth. As he chewed he tried to track what she was saying so that he wouldn't lose the thread of the conversation and end up looking like an absent-minded hacker with no ability to relate to anyone who wasn't destined to become a machine-language expert.
"He is quite a speaker," she said. "If you're ever on the opposite side of a question from S. S. Krupp, you can be sure he'll bring you around sooner or later. He can give you an excellent reason for everything he does that goes right back to his basic philosophy. It's awesome, I think."
At last he was done stuffing junk food into his unshaven face. "But when he out-argues you— is that a word?"
"Well let it slip by."
"When he does that, do you really agree, or do you think he's just outclassed you?"
"I've thought about that quite a bit. I don't know." She sat back pensively, was stabbed by her chair, and sat back up. "What am I saying? I'm an English major!" Casimir chuckled, not quite following this. "If he can justify it through a fair argument, and no one else can poke any holes in it, I can't very well disagree, can I? I mean, you have to have some kind of anchors for your beliefs, and if you don't trust clear, correct language, how do you know what to believe?"
'What about intuition?" asked Casimir, surprising himself. "You know the great discoveries of physics weren't made through argument. They were made in flashes of intuition, and the explanations and proofs thought up afterward."
"Okay." She drained her coffee and thought about it. "But those scientists still had to come up with verbal proofs to convince themselves that the discoveries were real."
So far, Casimir thought, she seemed more interested than peeved, so he continued to disagree. "Well, scientists don't need language to tell them what's real. Mathematics is the ultimate reality. That's all the anchor we need."
"That's interesting, but you can't use math to solve political problems— it's not useful in the real world."
"Neither is language. You have to use intuition. You have to use the right side of your brain."
She looked again at the clock. "I have to go now and get ready for Krupp." Now she was looking at him— appraisingly, he thought. She was going to leave! He desperately wanted to ask her out. But too many women had burst out laughing, and he couldn't take that. Yet there she sat, propped up on her elbows— was she waiting for him to ask? Impossible.
"Uh," he said, but at the same time she said, "Let's get together some other time. Would you like that?"
"Yeah."
"Fine!" With a little negotiation, they arranged to meet in the Megapub on Friday night.
"I can't believe you're free Friday night!" he blurted, and she looked at him oddly. She stood up and held out her hand again. Casimir scrambled up and shook it gently.
"See you later," she said, and left. Casimir remained standing, watched her all the way across the shiny floor of the Megapub, then telescoped into his seat and nearly blacked out.
She did not have to wait long amid the marble-and-mahogany splendor of Septimius Severus Krupp's anteroom. She would have been happy to wait there for days, especially if she could have brought some favorite music and maybe Hyacinth, taken off her shoes, lounged on the sofa and stared out the window over the lush row of healthy plants. The administrative bloc of the Plex was an anomaly, like a Victorian mansion airlifted from London and dropped whole into a niche beneath C Tower. Here was none of the spare geometry of the rest of the Plex, none of the anonymous monochromatic walls and bald rectangles and squares that seemed to drive the occupants bonkers. No plastic showed; the floors were wooden, the windows opened, the walls were paneled and the honest wood and intricate parquet floors gave the place something of nature's warmth and diversity. In the past month Sarah had seen almost no wood— even the pencils in the stores here were of blond plastic— and she stared dumbly at the paneling everywhere she went, as though the detailed grain was there for a reason and bore careful examination. All of this was an attempt to invest American Megaversity with the aged respectability of a real university; but she felt at home here.
"President Krupp will see you now," said the wonderful, witty, kind, civilized old secretary, and the big panel doors swung open and there was S. S. Krupp. "Good afternoon, Sarah, I'm sorry you had to wait," he said. "Please come in."
Three of the walls of Krupp's office were covered up to about nine feet high with bookshelves, and the fourth was all French windows. Above the bookshelves hung portraits of the founders and past presidents of American Megaversity. The founding fathers stared sullenly at Sarah through the gloom of a century and a half's accumulated tobacco smoke, and as she followed the row of dignitaries around to the other end of the room, their faces shone out brighter and brighter from the tar and nicotine of antiquity until she got to the last spaces remaining, where Tony Commodi, Pertinax Rushforth and Julian Didius III gleamed awkwardly in modern Suits and designer eyeglasses.
The glowing red-orange wooden floor was covered by three Persian rugs, and the ceiling was decorated with three concentric rings of elaborate plasterwork surrounding a great domed skylight. A large, carefully polished chandelier hung on a heavy chain from the center of the skylight. Sarah knew that the delicate leaded-glass skylight was protected from above by a squat geodesic dome covered with heavy steel grids and shatterproof Fiberglass panels, designed to keep everything out of S. S. Krupp's office except for the sunlight. Nothing short of a B-52 in a power dive could penetrate that grand silence, though a ring of shattered furniture and other shrapnel piled about the dome outside attested to the efforts of C Tower students to prove otherwise.
Krupp led her to a long low table under the windows, and they sat in old leather chairs and spread their papers out in the grey north light. Between them Krupp's ever-ready tape recorder was spinning away silently. Shortly the secretary came in with a silver tea service, and Krupp poured tea and offered Sarah tiny, cleverly made munchies on white linen napkins embroidered with the American Megaversity coat of arms.
Krupp was a sturdy man, his handsome cowboy face somewhat paled and softened by the East. "I understand," he said, "that you had some trouble with those playground communists last night." "Oh, they were the same as ever. No unusual problems." "Yes." Krupp sounded slightly impatient at her nonstatement. "I was pleased to see you disemboweled their budget."
"Oh? What if we'd stayed with the old one?"
"I'd have flushed it." He grinned brightly.
"What about this budget? Is it acceptable?"
"Oh, it's not bad. It's got some warts."
"Well, I want to point out at the beginning that it's easy for you to make minor adjustments in the budget until the warts are gone. It's much more difficult for the Student Government to handle. We almost had to call in the riot police to get this through, and any budget you have approved will be much harder."
"You're perfectly free to point that out, Sarah, and I don't disagree, doesn't make much difference."
"Well," said Sarah carefully, "the authority is obviously yours. I'm sure you can take whatever position you want and back it up very eloquently. But I hope you'll take into account certain practicalities." Knowing instantly she had made a mistake, she popped a munchie into her mouth and stared out the window, waiting.
Krupp snorted quietly and sipped tea, then sat back in his chair and regarded Sarah with dubious amusement. "Sarah, I didn't expect you, of all people, to try that one on me. Why is it that everyone finds eloquence so inauspicious? It's as though anyone who argues clearly can't be trusted— that's the opposite of what reasonable people ought to think. That attitude is common even among faculty here, and I'm just at a loss to understand. I can't talk like a mongoloid pig-sticker on a three-day drunk just so I'll sound like one of the boys. God knows I can't support any position, only the right position. If it's not right, the words won't make it so. That's the value of clear language."
This was the problem with Krupp. He assumed that everyone always said exactly what they thought. While this was true of him, it was rarely so with others. "Okay, sorry," said Sarah. "I agree. I just didn't make my point too well. I'm just hoping you'll take into account the practical aspects of the problem, such as how everyone's going to react. Some people say this is a blind spot of yours." This was a moderately daring thing for Sarah to say, but if she tried to mush around politely with Krupp, he would cut her to pieces.
"Sarah, it's obvious that people's reactions have to be accounted for. That's just horse sense. It's just that basic principles are far more important than a temporary political squabble in Student Government. To you, all those mono-maniacs and zombies seem more important than they are, and that's why we can't give you any financial authority. From my point of view I can see a much more complete picture of what is and isn't important, and one thing that isn't is a shouting match in that parody of a democratic institution that we call a government because we are all so idealistic in the university. What's important is principles."
Suddenly Sarah felt depressed; she sat limply back in her chair. For a while nothing was said— Krupp was surprisingly sensitive to her mood.
"Student Government is just a sham, isn't it?" she asked, surprised by her own bitterness.
"What do you mean by that?"
"It has nothing to do with the real world. We don't make any real decisions. It's just a bunch of imaginary responsibilities to argue about and put down on our rиsumиs."
Krupp thought it over. "It's kind of like a dude ranch. If you lose your dogies, there's someone there to round them up for you. But on the other hand, if you stand behind your horse you can still get wet. My Lord, Sarah, everything is real. There's no difference between the 'real' world and this one. The experience you're gaining is real. But it's true that the importance ascribed to Student Government is mostly imaginary."
"So what's the point?"
"The point is that we're here to go over this budget, and when I point out the warts, you tell me why they aren't warts. If you can justify them, you'll have a real effect on the budget." Krupp spread the pages of the budget out on the table, and Sarah saw alarming masses of red ink scrawled across them She felt like whipping out Casimir s graphs but she didn't have them with her and couldn't risk Krupp's seeing what she had seen.
"Now one item which caught my eye," said Krupp half an hour later, after Sarah had lost five arguments and won one, "was this money for this little group, Neutrino. I see they're wanting to build themselves a mass driver."
"Yeah? What's wrong with that?"
"Well," said Krupp patiently, "I didn't say there's anything wrong— just hold on, let's not get adverserial yet. You see, we don't often use activities funds to back research projects. Generally these people apply for a grant through the usual channels. You see, first estimates of the cost of something like this are often wildly low, especially when made by young fellows who aren't quite on top of things yet. This thing is certain to come in over budget, so we'll either end up with a useless, half-completed heap of junk or a Neutrino floundering around in red ink. It seems kind of hasty and ill-considered to me, so I'm just recommending that we strike this item from the budget, have the folks who want to do this project do a complete, faculty-supervised study, then try to get themselves a grant."
Sarah sighed and stared at a small ornament on the teapot's handle, thinking it over.
"Don't tell me," said Krupp. "It's my blind spot again, right?" But he sounded humorous rather than sarcastic.
"There are several good reasons why you should pass this item. The main factor is the man who is heading the project. I know him, and he's quite experienced with this sort of thing in the real world. I know you don't like that term, President Krupp, but it's true. He's brilliant, knows a lot of practical electronics— he had his own business— and he's deeply committed to the success of this project."
"That's a good start. But I'm reluctant to see funds given to small organizations with these charismatic, highly motivated leaders who have pet projects, because that amounts to just a personal gift to the leader. Broad interest in the funded activity is important."
"This is not a personal vendetta. The plans were provided for the most part by Professor Sharon. The organization is already putting together some of the electronics with their own money."
"Professor Sharon. What an abominable thing that was." Krupp stared into the light for a long time. "That was a load of rock salt in the butt. If my damn Residence Life Relations staff wasn't tenured and unionized I'd fire 'em, find the scum who did that and boot 'em onto the Turnpike. However. We should resist the temptation to do something we wouldn't otherwise do just because a peripherally involved figure has suffered. We all revere Professor Sharon, but this project would not erase his tragedy."
"Well, I can only go on my gut feelings," said Sarah, "but I don't think what you've said applies. I'm pretty confident about this project."
Krupp looked impressed. "If that's the case, Sarah, then I should meet this fellow and give him a fair hearing. Maybe I'll have the same gut reaction as you do."
"Should I have him contact you?" This was a reprieve, she thought; but if Casimir had been so obviously nervous in front of her, what would he do under rhetorical implosion from Krupp? It was only reasonable, though.
"Fine," said Krupp, and handed her his card.
Their other differences of opinion were hardly worth arguing over. Halving the funding for the Basque Eroticism Study Cluster was not going to make political waves. The meeting came to a civil and reasonable end. Krupp showed her out, and she smiled at the old secretary and maneuvered the scarlet carpets of the administration bloc and dawdled by each painting, finally exiting into a broad shiny electric-blue cinderblock corridor. By the time she made it back to her room she had adjusted to the Plex again, and taught herself to see and hear as little of it as possible.
Ephraim Klein and some of his friends occasionally gathered in his room to smoke cheap cigars, if only because they detested them slightly less than John Wesley Fenrick did. Fenrick set the Go Big Red Fan up in the vent window and blew chill November air across the room, forcing perhaps eighty percent of the fumes out the door. A defect of the Rules was that they made no provision for exchange of air pollution, unfortunately for Fenrick, who despite his tradition of chemically induced states of awareness was fanatically clean.
Caught in a random eddy blown up by the Fan, a cigar resting in a stolen Burger King tinfoil ashtray fell off one evening and rolled several inches, crossing the boundary line into Fenrick's side of the room. It burned there for a minute or two before its owner, a friend of Klein's, made bold to reach across and retrieve it. The result was a brief brown streak on Fenrick's linoleum. Fenrick did not notice it immediately, but after he did, he grew more enraged every day. Klein was obligated to clean up "that mess," in his view. Klein's opinion was that anything on Fenrick's side of the room was Fenrick's problem; Klein was not paying fifteen thousand dollars a year and studying philosophy so he could be a floor-scrubber for a rude asshole geek like John Wesley Fenrick. He pointed to a clause in the Rules which tentatively bore him out. They screamed across the boundary line on this issue for nearly a week. Then, one day, I heard Ephraim yelling through their open door.
"Jesus! What the hell are you— Ha! I don't believe this shit!" He stuck his head outside and yelled, "Hey, everybody, come look at what this dumb fucker's doing!"
I looked.
For reasons I do not care to think about, John Wesley Fenrick kept a milkbottle full of dirt. When I looked in, he had pulled its lid off and was scattering red Okie loam over the boundary line and all over Ephraim's side of the room. Ephraim appeared to be more amused than angry, though he was very angry, and insisted that as many people as possible come and witness. Fenrick sat down calmly to watch television, occasionally smiling a small, solitary smile.
Again the question of my responsibility comes up. But how could I know it was an event of great significance? I had also seen lovers' quarrels in the Cafeteria; why should I have known this was much more important? I had no authority to order these people around. Moreover, I had no desire to. I had done as much as I could. I had shown them how to be reasonable, and if they could not get the hang of it, it was not my problem.
The next time I spectated, Ephraim Klein was alone, studying on his bed with Gregorian chants filling the room. I had come to see why he had borrowed my broom. He had used it to make a welcome mat for his roomie. Right in front of the Go Big Red Fan— the movable portion of the wall that served as a gate— he had swept all the dirt into an even rectangle about one by two feet and half an inch thick. In the dirt he had inscribed with his finger:
GET A BUTT
FUCK JOHNNIE-WONNIE
When Fenrick got home I followed him discreetly to his room, to keep an eye on things. When I got to their doorway he was staring inscrutably at the welcome mat. He bent and opened the fan-gate, stepped through without disturbing the dirt and closed it. He turned, and looked for a while at the smirking Ephraim Klein. Then, with quiet dignity, John Wesley Fenrick reached down and set the Fan to HI, creating a small simulation of Oklahoma in the 1930's on the other side of the room.
Once I was satisfied that there would be no violence, I left and abandoned them to each other.
Septimius Severus Krupp stood behind a cheap plywood lectern in Lecture Hall 13 and spoke on Kant's Ethics. The fifty people in the audience listened or did not, depending on whether they (like Sarah and Casimir and Ephraim and I) had come to hear the lecture, or (like Yllas Freedperson) to see the Stalinist Underground Battalion Operative throw the banana-cream pie into S. S. Krupp's face.
I had come because I was fascinated by Krupp, and because opportunities to hear him speak were rare. Sarah, I think, had come for like reasons. Ephraim was a philosophy major, and Casimir came because this was the type of thing that you were supposed to do in a university. As for the SUBbies, they were getting edgy. What the fuck was wrong with the plan, man? they seemed to say, looking back and forth at one another sincerely and shaking their heads. The first phases had gone well. Operative 1 had gone out to the stageleft doorway, twenty feet to Krupp's side, opened the door and propped it, then made a show of smoking a cigarette and blowing smoke out the door. It was obvious that she had severe reality problems by the way she posed there, putting on a casual air so weirdly melodramatic that everyone could see she must be a guerilla mime, a psycho or simply luded out of her big spherical frizzy-haired bandanna-wrapped head. It was also odd that she would show so much concern for others' lungs, considering that her friends were making loud, sarcastic noises and distracting gestures, but unfortunately S. S. Krupp's aides were too straight to tell the difference between a loony and a loony with a plan, and so they suspected nothing when she returned to her seat and forgot to shut the door again.
Ten minutes later, right on time, Operative 2 had arrived late, entering via the stage-right doorway and leaving it, of course, propped open. He moved furtively, like a six-foot mouse with thallium phenoxide poisoning, jerking his head around as if to look for right-wing death squads and CIA snipers.
But Operative 3 did not appear with the banana-cream pie. Where was he? Everyone knew about Krupp's CIA connections, and it was quite possible— don't laugh, the CIA is everywhere, look at Iran— that he might have been intercepted by fascist goons and bastinadoed and wired to an old engine block and thrown into a river. Perhaps the death squads were waiting in their rooms now, test-firing their silenced UZIs into cartons of Stalinist pamphlets.
In fact, Operative 3, when making his plans for the evening, had forgotten that once he bought the banana-cream pie at the convenience store it would have to thaw out. There is little political relevance in bouncing a rock-hard disc of frozen custard off S. S. Krupp's face— the splatter is the point— and so for half an hour he had been in a Plex restroom, holding the pie underneath the automatic hand dryer as unobtrusively as possible. Whenever he heard approaching steps, he stopped and dropped the pie into his knapsack, and held his hands nonchalantly under the hot air; hence he had succeeded only in liquefying the top two millimeters of the pie and ruffling the ring of whipped cream. He then repaired to a spot not far from the lecture hall where he rested the pie on a hot water pipe. There should be plenty of time left in the lecture, though it was hard to judge these things when stoned: Krupp's voice droned on and on, incomprehensible as all that logic and philosophy.
Operative 3 snapped to attention. How long had he been spacing off? Only one way to tell. He stuck his finger in the pie: still kind of stiff, but not stiff enough to break a nose and wet enough to explode mediagenically.
The time was now. Operative 3 pulled on his ski mask, stole to the open stage-left door, and waited for the right moment. Shit! One of Krupp's CIA men had seen him! One of the Frosted Mini-Wheat types with the three-piece suits who ran Krupp's tape-recorder during speeches. No time to wait; the stun grenade might be lobbed at any moment.
To us he looked like a strange dexed-out bird, not running across the front of the hall so much as vibrating across at low frequency. He was tall, skinny, pale and wore an old Tshirt; he never seemed to plant any part of his nervous body firmly on the ground. He entered, bouncing off a doorjamb and losing his balance. He then caromed off a seat near a CIA man, who had not yet reacted, hopped three times to regain balance and, gaining some direction, scrambled toward S. S. Krupp, chased all the way by four bats driven into a frenzy by the aroma of the banana-cream pie.
"This means that the current vulgar usage of the word 'autonomous' to mean independent, i.e., free of external influence, sovereign, is not entirely correct," said Krupp, who glanced up from his notes to see what everybody was gasping at. "To be autonomous, as we can readily see by examining the Greek roots of the word— autos meaning self and nomos meaning law"— here he paused for a moment and ducked. The pie flew sideways over his head and exploded on the blackboard behind him. He straightened back up— "is to be self-ruling, to exercise a respect for the Law"— Operative 3 tottered out the door as the SUB groaned— "which in this case means not the law of a society or political system but rather the Law imposed by a rational man on his own actions." in the hallway there was scuffling, and Krupp paused. With much grunting and swearing, Operative 3, sans ski mask, was dragged back into the room by three clean-cut students in pastel sweaters, accompanied by an older, smiling man in a plaid flannel shirt.
"Here's your man, President Krupp, sir," said an earnest young Anglo-Saxon, brushing a strand of hair from his brow with his free hand. "We've placed this Communist under citizen's arrest. Shall we contact the authorities on your behalf?" Their mentor beamed even more broadly at this suggestion, his horsey, protruding bicuspids glaring like great white grain elevators on the Dakota plain.
Krupp regarded them warily, walking around to the other side of the lectern as though it were a shield. Then he turned to the audience. "Excuse me, please. Guess I'm the highest authority here, so just let me clear this up." He looked back at the group by the doorway, who watched respectfully, except for Operative 3, who shouted from his headlock: "See, man? This is what happens when you try to change the System!" Several SUBbies began to come to his aid, but were halted by Krupp's aides.
"Who the hell are you?" said Krupp. "Are you from that squalid North Dakotan cult thing?"
They were shocked, even Operative 3, and stared uncomprehendingly. Deep concern showed in the lined, earnest face of the man in the plaid flannel. Finally he stepped forward. "Yessirree. We are indeed followers of the Temple of Unlimited Godhead, and proud of it too. With all due respect, just what do you mean by 'squalid'?"
"It's like a dead dog in the sitting room, son. Look, why don't you all just let that boy go? That's right."