Neal Stephenson

The Big U


------------------------
---The Go Big Red Fan---
------------------------

The Go Big Red Fan was John Wesley Fenrick's, and when 
ventilating his System it throbbed and crept along the floor with a 
rhythmic chunka-chunka-chunk. Fenrick was a Business major and a 
senior. From the talk of my wingmates I gathered that he was smart, 
yet crazy, which helped. The description weird was also used, but 
admiringly. His roomie, Ephraim Klein of New Jersey, was in 
Philosophy. Worse, he was found to be smart and weird and crazy, 
intolerably so on all these counts and several others besides.
As for the Fan, it was old and square, with a heavy rounded 
design suitable for the Tulsa duplex window that had been its station 
before John Wesley Fenrick had brought It out to the Big U with 
him. Running up one sky-blue side was a Go Big Red bumper 
sticker. When Fenrick ran his System—that is, bludgeoned the rest 
of the wing with a record or tape—he used the Fan to blow air over 
the back of the component rack to prevent the electronics from 
melting down. Fenrick was tall and spindly, with a turkey-like head 
and neck, and all of us in the east corridor of the south wing of the 
seventh floor of E Tower knew him for three things: his seventies 
rock-'n'-roll souvenir collection, his trove of preposterous electrical 
appliances, and his laugh—a screaming hysterical cackle that would 
ricochet down the long shiny cinderbiock corridor whenever 
something grotesque flashed across the 45-Inch screen of his Video 
System or he did something especially humiliating to Ephraim Klein.
Klein was a subdued, intellectual type. He reacted to his 
victories with a contented smirk, and this quietness gave some 
residents of EO7S East the impression that Fenrick, a roomie-buster 
with many a notch on his keychain, had already cornered the young 
sage. In fact, Klein beat Fenrick at a rate of perhaps sixty percent, or 
whenever he could reduce the conflict to a rational discussion. He 
felt that he should be capable of better against a power-punker 
Business major, but he was not taking into account the animal 
shrewdness that enabled Fenrick to land lucrative oil-company 
internships to pay for the modernization of his System.
Inveterate and cynical audio nuts, common at the Big U, would 
walk into their room and freeze solid, such was Fenrick's System, its 
skyscraping rack of obscure black slabs with no lights, knobs or 
switches, the 600-watt Black Hole Hyperspace Energy Nexus Field 
Amp that sat alone like the Kaaba, the shielded coaxial cables 
thrown out across the room to the six speaker stacks that made it 
look like an enormous sonic slime mold in spawn. Klein himself 
knew a few things about stereos, having a system that could 
reproduce Bach about as well as the American Megaversity 
Chamber Orchestra, and it galled him.
To begin with there was the music. That was bad enough, but 
Klein had associated with musical Mau Maus since junior high, and 
could inure himself to it in the same way that he kept himself from 
jumping up and shouting back at television commercials. It was the 
Go Big Red Fan that really got to him. "Okay, okay, let's just accept 
as a given that your music is worth playing. Now, even assuming 
that, why spend six thousand dollars on a perfect system with no 
extraneous noises in it, and then, then, cool it with a noisy fan that 
couldn't fetch six bucks at a fire sale?" Still, Fenrick would ignore 
him. "I mean, you amaze me sometimes. You can't think at all, can 
you? I mean, you're not even a sentient being, if you look at it 
strictly."
When Klein said something like this (I heard the above one 
night when going down to the bathroom), Fenrick would look up at 
him from his Business textbook, peering over the wall of bright, sto 
record-store displays he had erected along the room's centerline; 
because his glasses had slipped down his long thin nose, he would 
wrinkle it, forcing the lenses toward the desired altitude, 
involuntarily baring his canine teeth in the process and causing the 
stiff spiky hair atop his head to shift around as though inhabited by a 
band of panicked rats.
"You don't understand real meaning," he'd say. "You don't 
have a monopsony on meaning. I don't get meaning from books. My 
meaning means what it means to me." He would say this, or 
something equally twisted, and watch Klein for a reaction. After he 
had done it a few times, though, Klein figured out that his roomie 
was merely trying to get him all bent out of shape—to freak his 
brain, as it were— and so he would drop it, denying Fenrick the 
chance to shriek his vicious laugh and tell the wing that he had 
scored again.
Klein was also annoyed by the fact that Fenrick, smoking loads 
of parsley-spiked dope while playing his bad music, would forget to 
keep an eye on the Go Big Red Fan. Klein, sitting with his back to 
the stereo, wads of foam packed in his ears, would abruptly feel the 
Fan chunk into the back of his chair, and as he spazzed out in 
hysterical surprise it would sit there maliciously grinding away and 
transmitting chunka-chunka-chunks into his pelvis like muffled 
laughs.
If it was not clear which of them had air rights, they would wage 
sonic wars.
They both got out of class at 3:30. Each would spend twenty 
minutes dashing through the labyrinthine ways of the Monoplex, 
pounding fruitlessly on elevator buttons and bounding up steps three 
at a time, palpitating at the thought of having to listen to his 
roommate's music until at least midnight. Often as not, one would 
explode from the elevator on EO7S, veer around to the corridor, and 
with disgust feel the other's tunes pulsing victoriously through the 
floor. Sometimes, though, they would arrive simultaneously and 
power up their Systems together. The first time they tried this, about 
halfway through September, the room's circuit breaker shut down. 
They sat in darkness and silence for above half an hour, each 
knowing that if he left his stereo to turn the power back on, the other 
would have his going full blast by the time he returned. This impasse 
was concluded by a simultaneous two-tower fire drill that kept both 
out of the room for three hours.
Subsequently John Wesley Fenrick ran a fifty-foot tn-lead 
extension cord down the hallway and into the Social Lounge, and 
plugged his System into that. This meant that he could now shut 
down Klein's stereo simply by turning on his burger-maker, donut-
maker, blow-dryer and bun-warmer simultaneously, shutting off the 
room's circuit breaker. But Klein was only three feet from the 
extension cord and thus could easily shut Fenrick down with a tug. 
So these tactics were not resorted to; the duelists preferred, against 
all reason, to wait each other out.
Klein used organ music, usually lush garbled Romantic 
masterpieces or what he called Atomic Bach. Fenrick had the edge in 
system power, but most of that year's music was not as dense as, 
say, Heavy Metal had been in its prime, and so this difference was 
usually erased by the thinness of his ammunition. This did not mean, 
however, that we had any trouble hearing him.
The Systems would trade salvos as the volume controls were 
brought up as high as they could go, the screaming-guitars-from-Hell 
power chords on one side matched by the subterranean grease-gun 
blasts of the 32-foot reed stops on the other. As both recordings piled 
into the thick of things, the combatants would turn to their long thin 
frequency equalizers and shove all channels up to full blast like Mr. 
Spock beaming a live antimatter bomb into Deep Space. Finally the 
filters would be thrown off and the loudness switches on, and the 
speakers would distort and crackle with strain as huge wattages 
pulsed through their magnet coils. Sometimes Klein would use 
Bach's "Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor," and at the end of each 
phrase the bass line would plunge back down home to that old low 
C, and Klein's sub-woofers would pick up the temblor of the 64-foot 
pipes and magnify it until he could watch the naked speaker cones 
thrash away at in the air. This particular note happened to be the 
natural resonating frequency of the main hallways, which were cut 
into 64-foot, 3-inch halves by the fire doors (Klein and I measured 
one while drunk), and therefore the resonant frequency of every 
other hail in every other wing of all the towers of the Plex, and so at 
these moments everything in the world would vibrate at sixteen 
cycles per second; beds would tremble, large objects would float off 
the edges of tables, and tables and chairs themselves would buzz 
around the rooms of their own volition. The occasional wandering 
bat who might be in the hall would take off in random flight, his 
sensors jammed by the noise, beating his wings against the standing 
waves in the corridor in an effort to escape.
The Resident Assistant, or RA, was a reclusive Social Work 
major who, intuitively knowing she was never going to get a job, 
spent her time locked in her little room testing perfumes and 
watching MTV under a set of headphones. She could not possibly 
help.
That made it my responsibility. I lived on EO7S that year as 
faculty-in-residence. I had just obtained my Ph.D. from Ohio State in 
an interdisciplinary field called Remote Sensing, and was a brand-
shiny-new associate professor at the Big U.
Now, at the little southern black college where I went to school, 
we had no megadorms. We were cool at the right times and 
academic at the right times and we had neither Kleins nor Fenricks. 
Boston University, where I did my Master's, had pulled through its 
crisis when I got there; most students had no time for sonic war, and 
the rest vented their humors in the city, not in the dorms. Ohio State 
was nicely spread out, and I lived in an apartment complex where 
noisy shit-for-brains undergrads were even less welcome than 
tweedy black bachelors. I just did not know what to make of Klein 
and Fenrick; I did not handle them well at all. As a matter of fact, 
most of my time at the Big U was spent observing and talking, and 
very little doing, and I may bear some of the blame.
This is a history, in that it intends to describe what happened 
and suggest why. It is a work of the imagination in that by writing it 
I hope to purge the Big U from my system, and with it all my 
bitterness and contempt. I may have fooled around with a few facts. 
But I served as witness until as close to the end as anyone could 
have, and I knew enough of the major actors to learn about what I 
didn't witness, and so there is not so much art in this as to make it 
irrelevant. What you are about to read is not an aberration: it can 
happen in your local university too. The Big U, simply, was a few 
years ahead of the rest.

--------------------
---First Semester---
--------------------

--September--

On back-to-school day, Sarah Jane Johnson and Casimir Radon 
waited, for a while, in line together. At the time they did not know 
each other. Sarah had just found that she had no place to live, and 
was suffering that tense and lonely feeling that sets in when you 
have no place to hide. Casimir was just discovering that American 
Megaversity was a terrible place, and was not happy either.
After they had worked their way down the hail and into the 
office of the Dean of the College of Sciences and Humanities, they 
sat down next to each other on the scratchy Daygb orange chairs 
below the Julian Didius III Memorial Window. The sunlight strained 
in greyly over their shoulders, and occasionally they turned to look 
at the scene outside.
Below them on one of the Parkway off-ramps a rented truck 
from Maryland had tried to pass under a low bridge, its student 
driver forgetting that he was in a truck and not his Trans-Am. Upon 
impact, the steel molding that fastened the truck's top to its sides had 
wrapped itself around the frame of a green highway sign bolted to 
the bridge. Now the sign, which read:

AMERICAN MEGAVERSITY

VISITOR PARKING

SPORTS EVENTS

EXIT 500 FT.

was suspended in the air at the end of a long strip of truck that 
had been peeled up and aside.
A small crowd students, apparently finished with all their line-
waiting, stood on the bridge and beside the ramp, throwing Frisbees 
and debris into the torn-open back of the truck, where its renters 
lounged in sofas and recliners and drank beer, and threw the 
projectiles back. Sarah thought it was idiotic, and Casimir couldn't 
understand it at all.
Out in the hallway, people behind them in the line were being 
verbally abused by an old derelict who had penetrated the Plex 
security system. "The only degree you kids deserve is the third 
degree!" he shouted, waving his arms and staggering in place. He 
wore a ratty tweed jacket whose elbow patches flapped like vestigial 
wings, and he drank in turns from a bottle of Happy's vodka and a 
Schlitz tall-boy which he kept holstered in his pockets. He had the 
full attention of the students, who were understandably bored, and 
most of them laughed and tried to think of provocative remarks.
As the drunk was wading toward them, one asked another how 
her summer had been. "What about it?" asked the derelict. "Fiscal 
conservatism? Fine in theory! Tough, though! You have to be tough 
and humane together, you see, the two opposites must unite in one 
great leader! Can't be a damn dictator like S. S. Krupp!"
This brought cheers and laughter from the upperclassmen, who 
had just decided the drunk was a cool guy. Septimius Severus 
Krupp, the President of American Megaversity, was not popular. 
"Jesus Christ!" he continued through the laughter, "What the hell are 
they teaching you savages these days? You need a spanking! No 
more circuses. Maybe a dictator is just what you need! Alcibiades! 
Pompilius Numa! They'd straighten things out good and fast."
Sarah knew the man. He liked to break into classes at the Big U 
and lecture the professors, who usually were at a loss as to how to 
deal with him. His name was Bert Nix. He had taken quite a shine to 
Sarah: for her part, she did not know whether or not to be scared of 
him. During the preceding spring's student government compaign, 
Bert Nix had posed with Sarah for a campaign photo which had then 
appeared on posters all over the Plex. This was just the kind of thing 
that Megaversity students regarded as a sign of greatness, so she had 
won, despite progressive political ideas which, as it turned out, 
nobody was even aware of. This was all hard for Sarah to believe. 
She felt that Bert Nix had been elected President, not the woman he 
had appeared with on the campaign poster, and she felt obliged to 
listen to him even when he simply jabbered for hours on end. He was 
a ntce lunatic, but he was adrift in the Bert Nix universe, and that 
stirred deep fears in Sarah's soul.
Casimir paid little attention to the drunk and a great deal to 
Sarah. He could not help it, because she was the first nice-seeming 
person, concept or thing he had found in his six hours at the Big U. 
During the ten years he had spent saving up money to attend this 
school, Casimir had kept himself sane by imagining it. 
Unfortunately, he had imagined quiet talks over brunch with old 
professors, profound discussions in the bathrooms, and dazzling, 
sensitive people everywhere just waiting to make new friends. What 
he had found, of course, was American Megaversity. There was only 
one explanation for this atmosphere that he was willing to believe:
that these people were civilized, and that for amusement they 
were acting out a parody of the squalor of high school life, which 
parody Casimir had been too slow to get so far. The obvious 
explanation—that it was really this way—was so horrible that it had 
not even entered his mind.
When he saw the photo of her on the back page of the back-to-
school edition of the Monoplex Monitor, and read the caption 
identifying her as Sarah Jane Johnson, Student Government 
President, he made the most loutish double take between her and the 
photograph. He knew that she knew that he now knew who she was, 
and that was no way to start a passionate love affair. All he could do 
was to make a big show of reading about her in the Monitor, and 
wait for her to make the first move. He nodded thoughtfully at the 
botched quotations and oversimplifications in the article.
Sarah was aware of this; she had watched him page slowly and 
intensely through the paper, waiting with mild dread for him to get 
to the back page, see the picture and say something embarrassing. 
Instead—even more embarrassing
—he actually read the article, and before he reached the bottom 
of the page, the student ahead of Sarah stomped out and she found 
herself impaled on the azure gaze of the chief bureaucrat of the 
College of Sciences and Humanities. "How," said Mrs. Santucci 
crisply, "may I help you?"
Mrs. Santucci was polite. Her determination to be decent, and to 
make all things decent, was like that of all the Iranian Revolutionary 
Guards combined. Her policy of no-first-use meant that as long as 
we were objective and polite, any conversation would slide 
pleasantly down greased iron rails into a pit of despair. Any first 
strike by us, any remarks deemed improper by this grandmother of 
twenty-six and player of two dozen simultaneous bingo cards, would 
bring down massive retaliation. Sarah knew her. She arose primly 
and moved to the front chair of the line to look across a barren desk 
at Mrs. Santucci.
"I'm a senior in this college. I was lucky enough to get an out-
of-Plex apartment for this fall. When I got there today I found that 
the entire block of buildings had been shut down for eight months by 
the Board of Health. I went to Housing. Upon reaching the head of 
that line, I was told that it was being handled by Student Affairs. 
Upon reaching the head of the line there, I was given this form and 
told to get signatures at Housing and right here.
Mrs. Santucci reached out with the briskness that only old 
secretaries can approach and seized the papers. "This form is already 
signed," she informed Sarah.
"Right. I got that done at about one o'clock. But when I got to 
my new temporary room assignment it turned out to be the B-men's 
coffee lounge and storeroom for the northeast quad of the first 
sublevel. It is full of B-men all the time. You know how they are—
they don't speak much English, and you know what kinds of things 
they decorate their walls with"— this attempt to get Mrs. Santucci's 
sympathy by being prissy was not obviously successful—"and I 
can't possibly live there. I returned to Housing. To change my room 
assignment is a whole new procedure, and I need a form from you 
which says I'm in good academic standing so far this semester."
"That form," Mrs. Santucci noted, "will require signatures from 
all your instructors."
"I know," said Sarah. All was going according to plan and she 
was approaching the center of her pitch. "But the semester hasn't 
started yet! And half my courses don't even have teachers assigned! 
So, since I'm a senior and my GPA is good, could the Dean okay my 
room change without the form? Doesn't that make sense? Sort of?" 
Sarah sighed. She had broken at the end, her confidence destroyed 
by Mrs. Santucci's total impassivity, by those arms folded across a 
navy-blue bosom like the Hoover Dam, by a stare like the headlights 
of an oncoming streetsweeper.
"I'm sure this is all unnecessary. Perhaps they don't know that 
their lounge has been reassigned. If you can just explain matters to 
them, I'm sure that Building Maintenance will be happy to 
accommodate you."
Sarah felt defeated. It had been a nice summer, and while away 
she had forgotten how it was. She had forgotten that the people who 
ran this place didn't have a clue as to how reality worked, that in 
their way they were all as crazy as Bert Nix. She closed her eyes and 
tilted her tense head back, and the man in the chair behind her 
intervened.
"Wait a minute," he said righteously. His voice was high, but 
carried conviction and reasonable sensitivity. "She can't be expected 
to do that. Those guys don't even speak English. All they speak is 
Bosnian or Moldavian or something."
"Moravian," said Mrs. Santucci in her Distant Early Warning 
voice, which was rumored to set off burglar alarms Within a quarter-
mile radius.
"The language is Crotobaltislavonian, a modern dialect of Old 
Scythian," announced Sarah, hoping to end the conflict. The B-Men 
are refugees from Crotobaltislavonia."
"Listen, I talk to Magrov all the time, and I say it's MoraVian." 
Sarah felt her body temperature begin to drop as she chanced a direct 
look at Mrs. Santucci.
Trying to sound prim, Sarah said, "Have you ever considered 
the possibility that you are confusing Magrov with Moravian?" 
Seeing the look on Mrs. Santucci's face, she then inhaled sharply 
and shifted away. Just as the old bureaucrat's jaw was starting to 
yawn, her chest rising like the return of Atlantis, Casimir Radon 
leaned way across and yanked something out of Sarah's lap and—in 
a tone so arresting that it was answered by Bert Nix outside—
exclaimed, "Wait a minute!"
Casimir was meek and looked like a nerd and a wimp, but he 
was great in a crisis. The lost continent subsided and Mrs. Santucci 
leaned forward with a dangerous frown. Out in the hallway the 
exasperated Bert Nix cried, "But there's no more minutes to wait! To 
save the Big U we've got to start now!"
Casimir had taken Sarah's room assignment card from the stack 
of ammunition on her lap, and was peering at it like a scientific 
specimen. It was an IBM card, golden yellow, with a form printed on 
it in yellow-orange ink. In the center of the form was a vague 
illustration of the Monoplex, looking decrepit and ruined because of 
the many rectangular holes punched through it. Along the top was a 
row of boxes labeled with tiny blurred yellow-orange abbreviations 
that were further abbreviated by rectangular holes. Numbers and 
letters were printed in black ink in the vicinity of each box.
Bert Nix was still carrying on outside. "Then fell the fires of 
Eternity with loud & shrill Sound of loud Trumpet thundering along 
from heaven to heaven, A mighty sound articulate Awake ye dead & 
come To Judgement from the four winds Awake & Come away 
Folding like scrolls of the Enourmous volume of Heaven & Earth 
With thunderous noises & dreadful shakings rocking to & fro: The 
heavens are shaken & the Earth removed from its place; the 
foundations of the eternal Hills discovered; The thrones of Kings are 
shaken they have lost their robes and crowns . . . and that's what 
poetry is! Not the caterwaulings of the Unwise!"
Finally, Casimir looked relieved. "Yeah, I thought that might be 
it. You were reading this number here. Right?" He got up and stood 
beside Sarah and pointed to her temporary room number.
"Sure," said Sarah, suddenly feeling dreadful.
"Well," said Casimir, sounding apologetic, "that's not what you 
want. Your room is not identified by room number, because some 
rooms repeat. It's identified by door number, which is unique for all 
doors. This number you were looking at isn't either of those, it's 
your room ID number, which has to do with data processing. That ID 
number refers to your actual door number, incorrectly called room 
number. It is the middle six digits of this character string here. See?" 
He masked the string of figures between the dirty backward par-
enthesis of his thumbnails. "In your case we have E12S, giving 
tower, floor and wing, and then 49, your actual room number."
Sarah did not know whether to scream, apologize or drop dead. 
She shoved her forms into her knapsack and stood. "Thank you for 
your trouble, Mrs. Santucci," she said quickly. "Thank you," she 
said to Casimir, then snapped around and headed for the door, 
though not fast enough to escape a withering harrrumph from Mrs. 
Santucci. But as she stepped into the hallway, which in order to hold 
down utility costs was dimly lit, she saw a dark and ragged figure 
out of the corner of her eye. She looked behind to see Bert Nix grab 
the doorframe and swing around until he was leaning into the office.
"Listen, Genevieve," he said, "she doesn't need any of your 
phlegm! She's President! She's my friend! You're just a doorstop!" 
As much as Sarah wanted to hear the rest of this, she didn't have the 
energy.
Casimir was left inside, his last view of Sarah interrupted by the 
dangling figure of the loony, caught in a crossfire he wanted no part 
of.
"I'll call the guards," said Mrs. Santucci, who for the first time 
was showing uneasiness.
"Today?" Bert Nix found this a merry idea. "You think you can 
get a guard today?"
"You'd better stop coming or we'll keep you from coming 
back."
His eyes widened in mock, crimson-rimmed awe, "Ooh," he 
sighed, "that were terrible. I'd have no reason to live." He pulled 
himself erect, walked in and climbed from the arm of Casimir's chair 
to the broad slate sill of the window. As Mrs. Santucci watched with 
more terror than seemed warranted, the derelict swung one window 
open like a door, letting in a gust of polluted steam.
By the time he was leaning far outside and grinning down the 
seventy-foot drop to the Parkway and the interchange. she had 
resolved to try diplomacy—though she motioned that Casimir should 
try to grab his legs. Casimir ignored this; it was obvious that the man 
was just trying to scare her. Casimir was from Chicago and found 
that these Easterners had no sense of humor.
"Now, Pert," said Mrs. Santucci, "don't give an old lady a hard 
time."
Bert Nix dropped back to the sill. "Hard timet What do you 
know about hard times?" He thrust his hand through a hole in his 
jacket, wiggling his long fingers at her, and wagging his out-of-
control tongue for a few seconds. Finally he added, "Hard times 
make you strong."
"I've got work to do, Pert."
This seemed to remind him of something. He closed the window 
and cascaded to the floor. "So do I," he said, then turned to Casimir 
and whispered, "That's the Julian Didlus III Memorial Window. 
That's what I call it, anyway. Like the view?"
"Yeah, it's nice," said Casimir, hoping that this would not 
become a conversation.
"Good," said the derelict, "so did J. D. It's the last view he ever 
saw. Couldn't handle the job. That's why I call it that."
The giggling Bert Nix ambled back into the hail, satisfied, 
pausing only to steal the contents of the office wastebasket.
Through most of this Casimir sat still and stared at the faded 
German ti 1 poster on the wall. Now he was really in the talons of 
Mrs. Santucci, who had probably shifted into adrenaline overdrive 
and was likely to fling her desk through the wall. Instead, she was 
perfectly calm and professional. Casimir disliked her for it.
"I'm a junior physics major and I transferred in from a 
community college in Illinois. I know the first two years of physics 
inside and out, but there's a problem. The rules here say physics 
courses must include 'socioeconomic contexts backgrounding,' 
which I guess means it has to explain how it fits in with today's 
something or other.
"In order to context the learning experience with the real 
world," said Mrs. Santucci gravely, "we must include socioeconomic 
backgrounding integral with the foregrounded material."
"Right. Anyway, my problem is that I don't think I need it. I'm 
not here to give you my memoirs or anything, but my parents were 
immigrants, I came from a slum, got started in electronics, sort of 
made my own way, saw a lot of things, and so I don't think I really 
need this. It'd be a shame if I had to start all over, learning, uh, 
foregrounded material I already know."
Mrs. Santucci rolled her eyes so that the metal-flake blue 
eyeshadow on her lids flashed intermittently like fishing lures drawn 
through a murky sea. "Well, it has been done. It must be arranged 
with the curriculum chair of your department."
"Who is that for physics?"
"Distinguished Professor Sharon," she said. Bulging her 
eyeballs at Casimir, she made a respectful silence at the Professor's 
name, daring him to break it.
When Casimir returned to consciousness he was drifting down a 
hallway, still mumbling to himself in astonishment. He had an 
appointment to meet the Professor Sharon. He would have been 
ecstatic just to have sat in on one of the man's lectures!


Casimir Radon was an odd one, as American Megaversity 
students went. This was a good thing for him, as the Housing people 
simply couldn't match him up with a reasonable roommate; he was 
assigned a rare single. It was in D Tower, close to the sciences bloc 
where he would spend most of his time, on a floor of single rooms 
filled by the old, the weird and the asinine who simply could not live 
in pairs.
ln order to find his room he would have to trace a mind-twisting 
path through the lower floors until he found the elevators of D 
Tower. So before he got himself lost, he went to the nearest flat 
surface, which was the top of a large covered wastebasket. From it 
he cleared away a few Dorito bags and a half-drained carton of 
FarmSun SweetFresh brand HomeLivin' Artificial Chocolate-
Flavored Dairy Beverage and forced them into the overflowing maw 
below. He then removed his warped and sweat-soaked Plex map (the 
Plexus) from his pocket and unfolded it on the woodtoned Fiberglass 
surface.
As was noted at the base of the Plexus, it had been developed by 
the AM Advanced Graphics Workshop. Rather than presenting maps 
of each floor of the Plex, they had used an Integrated Projection to 
show the entire Plex as a network of brightly colored paths and 
intersections. The resulting tangle was so convoluted and yet so 
clean and spare as to be essentially without meaning. Casimir, 
however, could read it, because he was not like us. After applying 
his large intelligence to the problem for several minutes he was able 
to find the most efficient route, and following it with care, he quickly 
became lost.
The mistake was a natural one. The elevators, which were busy 
even in the dead of night, were today clogged with catatonic parents 
from New Jersey clutching beanbag chairs and giant stuffed animals. 
Fortunately (he thought), adjacent to each elevator was an entirely 
unused stairwell.
Casimir discovered shortly afterward that in the lower floors of 
the Plex all stairwell doors locked automatically from the outside.
I discovered it myself at about the same time. Unlike Casimir I 
had been a the Plex for ten days, but I had spent them typing up 
notes for my classes, It is unwise to prepare two courses in ten days, 
and I knew it. I hadn't gotten to it until the last minute, for various 
reasons, and so I'd spent ten days sitting there in my bicycling 
shorts, drinking beer, typing, and sweating monumentally in the fetid 
Plex air. So my first exposure to the Plex and its people really came 
that afternoon, when I wandered out into the elevator lobby and 
punched the buttons. The desperate Tylenol-charged throngs in the 
elevators did not budge when the doors opened, because they 
couldn't. They stared at me as though I were Son of Godzilla, which 
I was used to, and I stared at them and tried to figure out how they 
got that way, and the doors clunked shut. I discovered the stairways, 
and once I got below the bottom of the tower and into the lower 
levels, I also found that I was locked in.
For fifteen minutes I followed dimly lit stairs and corridors 
smelling of graffiti solvent and superfluous floor wax, helplessly 
following the paths that students would take if the Plex ever had to 
be evacuated. Through little windows in the locked doors I peered 
out of this twilight zone and into the different zones of the Plex—
Cafeteria, Union, gymnasia, offices—but my only choice was to 
follow the corridors, knowing they would dump me into the ghetto 
outside. At last I turned a corner and saw the wall glistening with 
noisy grey outside light. At the end of the line, a metal door swung 
silently in the breeze, emblazoned thus: FIRE ESCAPE ONLY. 
WARNING—ALARM WILL SOUND.
I stepped out the door and looked down along, steep slope into 
the canyon of the Turnpike.
The American Megaversity Campustructure was three blocks on 
a side, and squatted between the Megalopolitan Turnpike on the 
north and the Ronald Reagan Parkway on the south. Megaversity 
Stadium, the only campus building not inside the Plex proper, was to 
the west, and on the east was an elaborate multilevel interchange 
interconnecting the Pike, the Parkway, the Plex and University 
Avenue. The Pike ran well below the base of the Plex, and so as I 
emerged from the north wall of the building I found myself atop a 
high embankment. Below me the semis and the Audis shot past 
through the layered blue monoxide, and their noises blended into a 
waterfall against the unyielding Plex wall. Aside from a few 
wretched weeds growing from cracks in the embankment, no life 
was to be seen, except for Casimir Radon.
He had just emerged from another emergency exit. We saw each 
other from a hundred feet apart, waved and walked toward each 
other. As we converged, I regarded a tall and very thin man with an 
angular face and a dense five-o'clock shadow. He wore round 
rimless glasses. His black hair was in disarray as usual; during the 
year it was to vary almost randomly between close-cropped and 
shoulder-length. I soon observed that Casimir could grow a shadow 
before lunch, and a beard in three days. He and I were the same age, 
though I was a recent Ph.D. and he a junior.
Later I was to think it remarkable that Casimir and I should 
emerge from those fire doors at nearly the same moment, and meet. 
On reflection I have changed my mind. The Big U was an unnatural 
environment, a work of the human mind, not of God or plate 
tectonics. If two strangers met in the rarely used stairways, it was not 
unreasonable that they should turn out to be similar, and become 
friends. I thought of it as an immense vending machine, cautiously 
crafted so that any denomination too ancient or foreign or irregular 
would rattle about randomly for a while, find its way into the 
stairway system, and inevitably be deposited in the reject tray on the 
barren back side. Meanwhile, brightly colored graduates with 
attractively packaged degrees were dispensed out front every June, 
swept up by traffic on the Parkway and carried away for leisurely 
consumption. Had I understood this earlier I might have come to my 
senses and immediately resigned, but on that hot September day, 
with the exhaust abrading our lungs and the noise squashing our 
conversation, it seemed worthwhile to circle around to the Main En-
trance and give it another try.
We headed east to avoid the stadium. On our right the wall 
stretche and away for acres in a perfect cinderblock grid. Alter 
passing dozens of fire doors we came to the corner and turned into 
the access lot that stretched along the east wall. Above, at many 
altitudes, cars and trucks screeched and blasted through the tight 
curves of the interchange. People called it the Death Vortex, and 
some claimed that parts of it extended into the fourth dimension. As 
soon as it had been planned, the fine old brownstone neighborhood 
that was its site plummeted into slumhood; Haitians and Vietnamese 
filled the place up, and the feds airproofed the buildings and installed 
giant electric air filters before proceeding.
Here on the access lot we could look down a long line of 
loading docks, the orifices of the Plex where food and supplies were 
ingested and trash discharged, serviced by an endless queue of 
trucks. The first of these docks, by the northern corner, was specially 
designed for the discharge of hazardous wastes produced in Plex labs 
and was impressively surrounded by fences, red lights and 
threatening signs. The next six loading docks were for garbage 
trucks, and the rest, all the way down to the Parkway, for deliveries. 
We swung way out from the Plex to avoid all this, and followed the 
fence at the border of the lot, gazing into the no-man's-land of lost 
mufflers and shredded fanbelts beyond, and sometimes staring up 
into the Plex itself.
The three-by-three block base had six stories above ground and 
three below. Atop it sat eight 25-story towers where lived the 40,000 
students of the university. Each tower had four wings 160 feet long, 
thrown out at right angles to make a Swiss cross. These towers sat at 
the four corners and four sides of the base. The open space between 
them was a huge expanse of roof called Tar City, inhabited by great 
machines, crushed furniture thrown from above, rats, roaches, 
students out on dares, and the decaying corpses of various things that 
had ventured out on hot summer days and become mired in the tar. 
All we could see were the neutral light brown towers and their 
thousands and thousands of identical windows reaching into the 
heavens. Even for a city person, it was awesome. Compared to the 
dignified architecture of the old brownstones, though, it caused me a 
nagging sense of embarrassment.
The Vortex whose coils were twined around those brown-stones 
threw out two ramps which served as entrance and exit for the Plex 
parking ramp. These ran into the side of the building at about third-
story level. To us they were useless, so we continued around toward 
the south side.
Here was actually some green: a strip of grass between the walk 
and the Parkway. On this side the Plex was faced with darker brown 
brick and had many picture windows and signs for the businesses of 
the built-in mall on the first floor. The Main Entrance itself was 
merely eight revolving doors in a row, and having swished through 
them we were drowned in conditioned air, Muzak, the smell of 
Karmel Korn and the idiotic babble of penny-choked indoor 
fountains. We passed through this as quickly as possible and rode the 
long escalators ("This must be what a ski lift is like," said Casimir) 
to the third floor, where a rampart of security booths stretched across 
our path like a thruway toll station. Several of the glass cages were 
occupied by ancient guards in blue uniforms, who waved us wearily 
through the turnstiles as we waved our ID cards at them. Casimir 
stopped on the other side, frowning.
"They shouldn't have let me in," he said.
"Why?" I asked. "Isn't that your ID?"
"Of course it is," said Casimir Radon, "but the photo is so bad 
they had no way of telling." He was serious. We surveyed the 
rounded blue back of the guard. Most of them had been recruited out 
of Korea or the Big One. The glass cages of the Plex had ruined their 
bodies. Now they had become totally passive in their outlook; but, 
by the same token, they had become impossible to faze or surprise.
We stepped through more glass doors and were in the Main 
Lobby.
The Plex's environmental control system was designed so that 
anyone could spend four years there wearing only a jockstrap and a 
pair of welding goggles and yet never feel chilly or find the place too 
dimly lit. Many spent their careers there without noticing this. 
Casimir Radon took less than a day to notice the pitiless fluorescent 
light. Acres of light glanced off the Lobby's poiished floor like sun 
off the Antarctic ice, and a wave of pain now rolled toward Casimir 
from near the broad vinyl information desk and washed over him, 
draining through a small hole in the center of his skull and pooling 
coldly behind his eyes. Great patches of yellow blindness appeared 
in the center of his vision and he coasted to a stop, hands on eyes, 
mouth open. I knew enough to know it was migraine, so I held his 
skinny arm and led him, blind, to his room in D Tower. He lay 
cautiously down on the naked plastic mattress, put a sock over his 
eyes and thanked me. I drew the blinds, sat there helplessly for a 
while, then left him to finish his adjustment to the Big U.
Alter that he wore a uniform of sorts: old T-shirt, cutoffs or gym 
shorts, hightop tennis shoes ("to keep the rats off my ankles") and 
round purple mountain-climbing goggles with leather bellows on the 
sides to block out peripheral light. He was planning such a costume 
as I left his room. More painfully, he was beginning to question 
whether he could live in such a place for even one semester, let alone 
four. He did not know that the question would be decided for him, 
and so he felt the same edgy uncertainty that nagged at me.


Some people, however, were quite at home in the Flex. At about 
this time, below D Tower in the bottom sublevel, not far from the 
Computing Center, several of them were crossing paths in a dusty 
little dead end of a hallway. To begin with, three young men were 
standing by the only door in the area, taking turns peering into the 
room beyond. The pen lights from their shirt pockets illuminated a 
small windowless room containing a desk, a chair and a computer 
terminal. The men stared wistfully at the latter, and had piled their 
math and computer textbooks on the floor like sandbags, as though 
they planned a siege. They had been discussing their tactical 
alternatives for getting past the door, and had run the gamut from 
picking the lock to blowing it open with automatic-weapon bursts, 
but so far none had made any positive moves.
"If we could remove that window," said one, a mole-faced 
individual smelling of Brut and sweat and glowing in a light blue 
iridescent synthetic shirt and hi-gloss dark blue loafers, "we could 
reach in and unlock it from inside."
"Some guy tried to get into my grandma's house that way one 
time," recalled another, a skinny, long-haired, furtive fellow who 
was having trouble tracking the conversation, "but she took a 
sixteen-ounce ball-peen hammer and smashed his hand with it. He 
never came back." He delivered the last sentence like the punchline 
to a Reader's Digest true anecdote, convulsing his pals with 
laughter.
The third, a disturbingly 35-ish looking computer science major 
with tightly permed blond hair, eventually calmed down enough to 
ask, "Hey, Gary, Gary! Did she use the ball end or the peen end?"
Gary was irked and confused, He had hoped to impress them by 
specif~ring the weight of the hammer, but he was stumped by this 
piece of one-upsmanship; he didn't know which end was which. He 
radiated embarrassment for several seconds before saying, "Oh, gee, 
I don't know, I think she probably used both of 'em before she was 
done with the guy. But that guy never came back."
Their fun was cut short by a commanding voice. "A sixteen-
ounce ball-peen hammer isn't much good against a firearm. If I were 
a woman living alone I'd carry a point thirty-eight revolver, 
minimum. Double action. Effective enough for most purposes."
The startling newcomer had their surprised attention. He had 
stopped quite close to them and was surveying the door, and they 
instinctively stepped out of his way. He was tall, thin and pale, with 
thin brown Bryicreemed hair and dark red lips. The calculator on his 
hip was the finest personal computing machine, and on the other hip, 
from a loop of leather, hung a fencing foil, balanced so that its red 
plastic tip hung an inch above the floor. It was Fred Fine.
"You're the guy who runs the Wargames Club, aren't you," 
asked the blond student.
"I am Games Marshall, if that's the intent of your question. 
Administrative and financial authority are distributed among the 
leadership cadre according to the Constitution."
"The Wargames Club?" asked Gary, his voice suffused with 
hope. "What, is there one?"
"The correct title is the Megaversity Association for Reen-
actments and Simulations, or MARS," snapped Fred Fine. Still 
almost breathless, Gary said, "Say. Do you guys ever play 'Tactical 
Nuclear War in Greenland?'"
Fred Fine stared just over Gary's head, screwing up his face 
tremendously and humming. "Is that the earlier version of 'Martians 
in Godthaab,' "he finally asked, though his tone indicated that he 
already knew the answer.
Gary was hopelessly taken aback, and looked around a bit 
before allowing his gaze to rest on Fred Fine's calculator. "Oh, yeah, 
I guess. I guess 'Martians in Godthaab' must be new."
"No," said Fred Fine clearly, "it came out six months ago." To 
soften the humiliation he chucked Gary on the shoulder. "But to 
answer your question. Some of our plebes—our novice wargamers—
do enjoy that game. It's interesting in its own way, I suppose, though 
I've only played it a dozen times. Of course, it's a Simuconflict 
product, and their games have left a lot to be desired since they lost 
their Pentagon connections, but there's nothing really wrong with 
it."
The trio stared at him. How could he know so much?
"Uh, do you guys," ventured the blue one, "ever get into role-
playing games? Like Dungeons and Dragons?"
"Those of us high in the experiential hierarchy find conventional 
D and D stultifying and repetitive. We prefer to stage live-action 
role-playing scenarios. But that's not for just anyone."
They looked timidly at Fred Fine's fencing foil and wondered if 
he were on his way to a live-action wargame at this very moment. 
For an instant, as he stood in the dim recess of the corridor, light 
flickering through a shattered panel above and playing on his head 
like distant lightning, his feet spread apart, hand on sword pommel, 
it seemed to them that they beheld some legendary hero of ancient 
times, returned from Valhalla to try his steel against modern foes.
The mood was broken as another man suddenly came around 
the corner. He brushed silently past Fred Fine and nearly impaled 
Gary on a key, but Gary moved just in time and the new arrival 
shoved the key home and shot back the deadbolt. He was tall, with 
nearly white blond hair, pale blue eyes and a lean but cherubic face, 
dressed in cutoffs and a white dress shirt. Shouldering through them, 
he entered the little room.
Fred Fine reacted with uncharacteristic warmth. "Well, well, 
well," he said, starting in a high whine and dropping in pitch from 
there. I had Fred Fine in one of my classes and when in a good mood 
he really did talk like Colonel Klink; it took some getting used to. 
"So they haven't caught up with you and your master key yet, eh, 
Virgil? Very interesting."
Virgil Gabrielsen turned smoothly while stepping through the 
doorway, and stared transparently through Fred Fine's head. "No," 
he said, "but I have plenty of copies anyway. They aren't about to 
change every lock in the Plex on my account. The only doors this 
won't open are in the hazardous waste area, the Administration Bloc, 
Doors 1253 through 1778 and 7899 to 8100, whIch obviously no one 
cares about, and Doors 753, 10100 and the high 12,500's, and I'm 
obviously not going to go ripping off vending-machine receipts, am 
I?" At this the three friends frowned and looked back and forth. 
Virgil entered the room and switched on the awesomely powerful 
battery of overhead fluorescent lights. Everything was somewhat 
dusty inside.
"No rat poison on the floor," observed Fred Fine. "Dusty. Still 
keeping the B-men out, eh?"
"Yeah," said Virgil, barely aware of them, and began to pull 
things from his knapsack. "I told them I was doing werewolf 
experiments in here."
Fred Fine nodded soberly at this. Meanwhile, the three younger 
students had invited themselves in and were gathered around the 
'terminal, staring raptly into its printing mechanism. "It's just an 
antique Teletype," said the blue one. He had already said this once, 
but repeated it now for Fred Fine. "However, I really like these. Real 
dependable, and lots of old-fashioned class despite an inferior 
character menu." Fred Fine nodded approvingly. Virgil shouldered 
through them, sat before the terminal and, without looking up, 
announced, "I didn't invite any of you in, so you can all leave flOW.'
They did not quite understand.
"Catch my drift? I dislike audiences."
Fred Fine avoided this by shaking his head, smiling a red smile 
and chuckling. The others were unmanned and stood still, waiting to 
be told that Virgil was kidding.
"Couldn't we just sit in?" one finally asked. "I've just got to 
XEQ one routine. It's debugged and bad data tested. It's fast, it 
outputs on batch. I can wait till you're done."
"Forget it," said Virgil airily, scooting back and nudging him 
away. "I won't be done for hours. It's all secret Science Shop data. 
Okay?"
"But turnover for terminals at CC is two hours to the minus 
one!"
"Try it at four in the morning. You know? Four in the morning 
is a great time at American Megaversity. Everything is quiet, there 
are no lines even at the laundry, you can do whatever you want 
without fucking with a mob of freshmen. Put yourselves on second 
shift and you'll be fine. Okay?"
They left, sheeshing. Fred Fine stopped in the doorway, still 
grinning broadly and shaking his head, as though leaving just for the 
hell of it.
"You're still the same old guy, Virgil. You still program in raw 
machine code, still have that master key. Don't know where science 
at AM would be without you. What a wiz."
Virgil stared patiently at the wall. "Fred. I told you I'd fix your 
MCA and I will. Don't you believe me?"
"Sure I do. Say! That invitation I made you, to join MARS 
anytime you want, is still open. You'll be a Sergeant right away, and 
we'll probably commission you after your first night of gaming, 
from what I know of you."
"Thanks. I won't forget. Goodbye."
"Ciao." Fred Fine bowed his thin frame low and strode off.
"What a creep," said Virgil, and ferociously snapped the 
deadbolt as soon as Fred Fine was almost out of earshot.
Removing supplies from the desk drawer, he stuffed a towel 
under the door and taped black paper over the window. By the 
terminal he set up a small lamp with gel over its mouth, which cast a 
dim pool of red once he had shut off the room lights.
He activated the terminal, and the computer asked him for the 
number of his account, Instead of typing in an account number, 
though, Virgil typed: FIAT LUX.


Later, Virgil and I got to know each other. I had problems with 
the computer only he could deal with, and after our first contacts he 
seemed to find me interesting enough to stay in touch, He began to 
show me parts of his secret world, and eventually allowed me to sit 
in on one of these computer sessions. Nothing at all made sense until 
he explained the Worm to me, and the story of Paul Bennett.
"Paul Bennett was one of these computer geniuses. When he 
was a sophomore here he waltzed through most of the secret codes 
and keys the Computing Center uses to protect valuable data. Well, 
he really had the University by the short hairs then. At any time he 
could have erased everything in the computer—financial records, 
scientific data, expensive software, you name it. He could have 
devastated this university just sitting there at his computer 
terminal—that's how vulnerable computers are. Eventually the 
Center fOund out who he was, and reprimanded him. Bennett was 
obviously a genius, and he wasn't malicious, so the Center then went 
ahead and hired him to design better security locks. That happens 
fairly often—the best lock-designers are people who have a talent for 
picking locks."
"They hired him right out of his sophomore year?" I asked.
"Why not? He had nothing more to learn. The people who were 
teaching his classes were the same ones whose security programs he 
was defeating! What's the point of keeping someone like that in 
school? Anyway, Bennett did very well at the Center, but he was still 
a kid with some big problems, and no one got along with him. 
Finally they fired him.
"When they fire a major Computing Center employee, they have 
to be sneaky. If they give him two weeks' notice he might play 
havoc with the computer during those two weeks, out of spite. So 
when they fire these people, it happens overnight. They show up at 
work and all the locks have been changed, and they have to empty 
out their desks while the senior staff watch them. That's what they 
did to Paul Bennett, because they knew he was just screwed up 
enough to frag the System for revenge."
"So much for his career, then."
"No. He was immediately hired by a firm in Massachusetts for 
four times his old salary. And CC was happy, because they'd gotten 
good work out of him and thought they were safe from reprisals. 
About a week later, though, the Worm showed up."
"And that is—?"
"Paul Bennett's sabotage program. He put it into the computer 
before he was fired, you see, and activated it, but every morning 
when he came to work he entered a secret command that would put 
it on hold for another twenty-four hours. As soon as he stopped 
giving the command, the Worm came out of hiding and began to 
play hell with things."
"But what good did it do him? It didn't prevent his being fired,"
"Who the hell knows? I think he put it in to blackmail the CC 
staff and hold on to his job. That must have been his original plan. 
But when you make a really beautiful, brilliant program, the 
temptation to see it work is just overwhelming. He must have been 
dying to see the Worm in action. So when he was fired, he decided, 
what the hell, they deserve it, I'll unleash the Worm. That was in the 
middle of last year. At first it did minor things such as erasing 
student programs, shutting the System down at odd times, et cetera. 
Then it began to worm its way deeper and deeper into the 
Operator—the master program that controls the entire System—and 
wreak vandalism on a larger scale. The Computing Center personnel 
fought it for a while, but they were successful for only so long. The 
Operator is a huge program and you have to know it all at once in 
order to understand what the Worm is doing to it."
"Aha," I said, beginning to understand, "they needed someone 
with a photographic memory. They needed another prodigy, didn't 
they? So they got you? Is that it?"
At this Virgil shrugged. "It's true that I am the sort of person 
they needed," he said quietly. "But don't assume that they 'got' me."
"Really? You're a free lance?"
"I help them and they help me. It is a free exchange of services. 
You needn't know the details."
I was willing to accept that restriction. Virgil had told me 
enough so that what he was doing made sense to me. Still, it was 
very abstract work, consisting mostly of reading long strings of 
numbers off the terminal and typing new ones in. On the night I sat 
in, the Worm had eaten all of the alumni records for people living in 
states beginning with "M." ("M!," said Virgil, "the worst letter it 
could have picked.") Virgil was puttering around in various files to 
see if the information had been stored elsewhere. He found about 
half of Montana hidden between lines of an illegal video game 
program, retrieved the data, erased the illegal program and caused 
the salvaged information to be printed out on a string of payroll 
check forms in a machine in the administrative bloc.
On this night, the first of the new school year, Virgil was not 
nobly saving erased data from the clutches of the Worm. He was 
actually arranging his living situation for the coming year. He had 
about five choice rooms around the Plex, which he filled with 
imaginary students in order to keep them vacant—an easy matter on 
the computer. To support his marijuana and ale habits he extracted a 
high salary from various sources, sending himself paychecks when 
necessary. For this he felt neither reluctance nor guilt, because Fred 
Fine was right: without Virgil, whose official job was to work in the 
Science Shop, scientific research at the Big U would simply stop. To 
support himseIf he took money from research accounts in proportion 
to the extent they depended on him. This was only fair. An 
indispensable place like the Science Shop needed a strong leader, 
someone bold enough to levy appropriate taxes against its users and 
spend the revenues toward the ends those users desired. Virgil had 
figured out how to do it, and made himself a niche at the Big U more 
comfortable than anyone else's.


Sarah lived in a double room just five floors above me and 
Ephraim Klein and John Wesley Fenrick, on E12S—E Tower, 
twelfth floor, south wing. The previous year she had luxuriated in a 
single, and resolved never to share her private space again; this 
double made her very angry. In the end, though, she lucked out. Her 
would-be roommate had only taken the space as a front, to fake out 
her pay-rents, and was actually living in A Tower with her 
boyfriend. Thus Sarah did not have to live four feet away from some 
bopper who would suffer an emotional crisis every week and explore 
the standard uses of sex and drugs and rock-and-roll in noisy exper-
imental binges on the other side of the room.
Sarah's problem now was to redecorate what looked like the 
inside of a water closet. The cinderblock walls were painted 
chocolate brown and absorbed most light, shedding only the garish 
parts of the spectrum. The shattered tile floor was gray and felt 
sticky no matter how hard she scrubbed. On each side of the 
perfectly symmetrical room, long fluorescent light fixtures were 
bolted to the walls over the beds, making a harsh light nearby but 
elsewhere only a dull greenish glow. After some hasty and low-
budget efforts at making it decent, Sarah threw herself into other 
activities and resigned herself to another year of ugliness.
On Wednesday of the term's second week there was a wing 
meeting. American Megaversity's recruitment propaganda tried to 
make it look as though the wings did everything as a jolly group, but 
this had not been true on any of Sarah's previous wings. This place 
was different
When she had dragged her duffel bags through the stairwell 
door on that first afternoon, a trio of well-groomed junior matrons 
had risen from a lace-covered card table in the lobby, helped her 
with the luggage, pinned a pink carnation on her sweaty T-shirt and 
welcomed her to "our wing." Under her pillow she had found a 
"starter kit" comprising a small teddy bear named Bobo, a white 
candle, a GOLLYWHATAFACE-brand PERSONAL COLOUR 
SAMPLER PACQUET, a sack of lemon drops, a red garter, six 
stick-on nametags with SARA written on them, a questionnaire and 
a small calligraphied Xeroxed note inviting her to the wing meeting. 
All had been wrapped in flowery pastel wrapping paper and cutely 
beribboned.
Most of it she had snarlingly punted into the nether parts of her 
closet. The wing meeting, however, was quasi-political, and hence 
she ought to show up. A quarter of an hour early, she pulled on a 
peasant blouse over presentable jeans and walked barefoot down the 
hall to the study lounge by the elevator lobby.
She was almost the last to arrive. She was also the only one not 
in a bathrobe, which was so queer that she almost feared she was 
having one of those LSD flashbacks people always warn you about. 
Her donut tasted like a donut, though, and all seemed normal 
otherwise, so it was reality— albeit a strange and distant branch 
thereof.
Obviously they had not all been bathing, because their hair was 
dry and their makeup fresh. There were terry robes, silk robes, 
Winnie-the-Pooh robes, long plush robes, plain velvety robes, 
designer robes, kimonos and even a few night-shirts on the cute and 
skinny. Also, many slippers, too many of them high-heeled. Once 
she was sure her brain was okay, she edged up to a nearby wingmate 
and mumbled, "Did I miss something? Everyone's in bathrobes!"
"Shit, don't ask me!" hissed the woman firmly. "I just took a 
shower, nwself."
Looking down, Sarah saw that the woman was indeed clean of 
face and wet of hair. She was shorter than average and compact but 
not overweight, with pleasant strong features and black-brown hair 
that fell to her shoulders. Her bathrobe was short, old and plain, with 
a clothesline for a sash.
"Oh, sorry," said Sarah. "So you did. Uh, I'm Sarah, and my 
bathrobe is blue."
"I know. President of the Student Government."
Sarah shrugged and tried not to look stuck-up.
"What's the story, you've never lived on one of these floors?" 
The other woman seemed surprised.
"What do you mean, 'one of these floors?'"
She sighed. "Ah, look. I'm Hyacinth. I'll explain all this later. 
You want to sit down? It'll be a long meeting." Hyacinth grasped 
Sarah's belt loop and led her politely to the back row of chairs, 
where they sat a row behind the next people up. Hyacinth turned 
sideways in her chair and examined Sarah minutely.
The Study Lounge was not a pretty place. Designed to be as 
cheery as a breath mint commercial, it had aged into something not 
quite so nice. Windows ran along one wall and looked out into the 
elevator lobby, where the four wings of E12S came together. It was 
furnished with the standard public-area furniture of the Plex: cubical 
chairs and cracker-box sofas made of rectangular beams and slabs of 
foam covered in brilliant scratchy polyester. The carpet was a 
membrane of compressed fibers, covered with the tats and cigarette-
burns and barfstains of years. Overhead, the ubiquitous banks of 
fluorescent lights cheerfully beamed thousands of watts of pure 
bluish energy down onto the inhabitants. Someone was always 
decorating the lounge, and this week the theme was football; the 
decorations were cardboard cutouts of well-known cartoon 
characters cavorting with footballs.
The only other nonrobed person in the place was the RA, Mitzi, 
who sat bolt upright at the lace-covered card table in front, left hand 
still as a dead bird In her lap, right hand three inches to the side of 
her jaw and bent back parallel to the tabletop, fingers curled upward 
holding a ballpoint pen at a jaunty but not vulgar forty-five-degree 
angle. She bore a fixed, almost manic smile which as far as Sarah 
could tell had nothing to do with anything—charm school, perhaps, 
or strychnine poisoning. Mitzi wore an overly formal dress and a 
kilogram of jewelry, and when she spoke, though not even her 
jawbone moved, one mighty earring began to swing violently.
Among other things, Mitzi welcomed new "members." There 
were three: another woman, Hyacinth and Sarah, introduced in that 
order. The first woman explained that she was Sandi and she was 
into like education and stuff. Then came Hyacinth; she was into 
apathy. She announced this loudly and they all laughed and 
complimented Hyacinth on her sense of humor.
Sarah was introduced last, being famous. "What are you into, 
Sarah Jane?" asked Mitzi. Sarah surveyed the glistening, fiercely 
smiling faces turned round to aim at her.
"I'm into reality," she said. This brought delighted laughter, 
especially from Hyacinth, who screamed like a sow.
The meeting then got underway. Hyacinth leaned back, crossed 
her arms and tilted her head back until she was staring openmouthed 
at the ceiling. As the meeting went on she combed her hair, bit her 
nails, played with loose threads from her robe, cleaned her toes and 
so on. The thing was, Sarah found all of this more interesting than 
the meeting itself. Sarah looked interested until her face got tired. 
She had spoken in front of groups enough to know that Mitzi could 
see them all clearly, and that to be obviously bored would be rude. 
Sometimes politeness had to give way to sanity, though, and before 
she knew it she found herself trying to swing the tassels at the ends 
of her sleeves in opposite directions at the same time. Hyacinth 
watched this closely and patted her on the back when she succeeded.
Mainly what they were doing was filling a huge social calendar 
with parties and similar events. Sarah wanted to an
anounce that she liked to do things by herself or with a few 
friends, but she saw no diplomatic way of saying so. She did 
resurface for the discussion of the theme for the Last Night party, the 
social climax of the semester: Fantasy Island Nite.
"Wonder how they're going to tell it apart from all the other 
nights," grumbled Hyacinth. Nearby wingmates turned and smiled, 
failing to understand but assuming that whatever Hyacinth said must 
be funny.
Another phase of the social master plan was to form an official 
sister/brother relationship with the wing upstairs, lmown as the Wild 
and Crazy Guys. This in turn led to the wing naming idea. After all, 
if E13S had a name for itself, shouldn't E12S have one too? Mari 
Meegan, darling of the wing, made this point, and "Yeah!"s 
zephyred up all around.
Sarah was feeling pretty sour by this point but said nothing. If 
they wanted a name, fine. Then the ideas started coming out: Love 
Boat, for example.
"We could paint our lobby with a picture of the Love Boat like 
it looks at the start of the show, and we could, you know, do 
everything, like parties and stuff, with like that kind of a theme. 
Then on Fantasy Island Nite, we could pretend the Boat was visiting 
Fantasy Island!"
This idea went over well and the meeting broke up into small 
discussions about how to apply this theme to different phases of 
existence. Finally, though, Sarah spoke up, and they all smiled and 
listened. "I'm not sure I like that idea. There are plenty of creeps on 
the floor already, because we're all-female. If we name it Love Boat, 
everyone will think it's some kind of outcall massage service, and 
we'll never get a break."
Several seconds of silence. A few nods were seen, some "yeah"s 
heard, and Love Boat was dead. More names were suggested, most 
of them obviously dumb, and then Mari Meegan raised her hand. All 
quieted as her fingernails fluttered like a burst of redhot flak above 
the crowd. "I know," she said.
There was silence save for the sound of Hyacinth's comb 
rushing through her hair. Man continued. "We can call ourselves 
'Castle in the Air.' "
The lounge gusted with oohs and aahs.
"I like that."
"You're so creative, Mari."
"We could do a whole Dark Ages theme, you know, castles and 
knights and shining armor."
"That's nice! Really nice!"
"Wait a sec." This came from Hyacinth.
At this some of the women were clearly exasperated, looking at 
the ceiling, but most wore expressions of forced tolerance.
Hyacinth continued flatly. "Castle in the Air is derogatory. That 
mean's it's not-nice. When you talk about a castle in the air, you 
mean something with no basis in reality. It's like saying someone 
has her head in the clouds."
They all continued to stare morosely, as though she hadn't 
finished. Sarah broke in. "You can call it anything you want. She is 
just making the point that you're using an unflattering name."
Man was comforted by two friends. The rest of them defended 
the name, nicely. "I never heard that."
"I think it sounds nice."
"Like a Barry Manilow song."
"Like one of those little Chinese poems."
"I always thought if your head was in the clouds, that was nice, 
like you were really happy or something. Besides, caslies are a neat 
theme for parties and stuff—can't you see Mark dressed up like a 
knight?" Giggles.
"And this way we can call ourselves the Atrheads!" Screams of 
delight. Hyacinth's objection having been thus obliterated, Castle In 
the Air was voted In unanimously, with two abstentions, and it was 
decided that paints and brushes would be bought and the wing would 
be painted in this theme during the weeks to come. Presently the 
meeting adjourned.
"We've got forty minutes until the Candle Passing," observed 
Mitzi, "and until then we can have a social hour. But not a whole 
hour"
The meeting dissolved into chattering fragments. Sarah leaned 
towards Hyacinth to whisper in her ear, and Hyacinth tensed. They 
had been whispering to each other in turns for the last half hour, and 
as both had ticklish ears this had caused much hysterical lip-biting 
and snorting. Sarah did not really have to whisper now, but it was 
her turn. "What candle passing?" she asked.
Hyacinth's attempt to whisper back was met by violent 
resistance from Sarah, so they laughed and made a truce. "It's kind 
of complicated. It means something personal happened between 
someone and her boyfriend, so everyone else has to know about it. 
Listen. We've got to escape, okay?"
"Okay."
"Go to Room 103 when the alarm sounds."
"Alarm?" But Hyacinth was already gliding out.
Sarah was quickly trapped in a conversation group including 
Mitzi and Mari. She accepted a cup of Kool-Aid/vodka punch and 
smiled when she could. Everyone was being nice to her in case she 
felt like an idiot for having said those things during the meeting. 
Mari asked if her boyfriend helped out with the hard parts of being 
President and Sarah had to say that just now she didn't have a 
boyfriend.
"Ahaa!" said everyone. "Don't worry, Sarah, we'll see what we 
can come up with. No prob, now you're an Airhead."
Sarah was groping for an answer when the local smoke alarm 
howled and the Airheads moaned in disappointment. As they all 
trooped off to their rooms to make themselves a little more 
presentable, Sarah headed for Room 103, following a heavy trail of 
marijuana smoke with her nose. As this was only the smoke alarm, 
only the twelfth floor would be evacuated.
Hyacinth pulled Sarah into the room and carefully fitted a wet 
reefer to her lips. It was dark, and a young black woman was 
slumped over a desk asleep, stereo on loud. Hyacinth Went to the 
vent window and released an amazing primal scream toward F 
Tower. Alter some prompting from her hostess, Sarah gave back the 
joint and followed suit. Hyacinth's Sleeping roommate, Lucy, sat up, 
sighed, then went over and lay down on her bed. Sarah and Hyacinth 
sat on Hyacinth's bed and drank milk from an illegal mini-fridge in 
the closet.
They silently finished the joint, shaking their heads at each other 
and laughing in disbelief.
"Ever done LSD?" asked Sarah.
"No. Why? Got some?"
"Oh. jeez, I wasn't suggesting it. I was going to say, for a 
minute there I thought I was back on it. That's how unreal those 
people are to me."
"You think they're strange?" said Hyacinth. "I think they're 
very normal."
"That's what I'm afraid of. Your room is pretty nice; I feel very 
much at home here." It was a nice room, one of the few Plex rooms I 
ever saw that was pleasant to be in. It was full of illegal cooking 
appliances and stashes of food, and the walls had been illegally 
painted white. Wall hangings and plants were everywhere.
"Well, we were in the Army—Lucy and me," said Hyacinth, 
carefully fitting a roach clip. "That's almost like LSD."
By now their wing had been evacuated, and a couple of security 
guards were plodding up and down the hallways pretending to 
inspect for sources of smoke. Sarah and Hyacinth leaned together 
and spoke quietly.
"You're not real presidential," said Hyacinth. "People like you 
aren't supposed to take LSD."
"I don't take it anymore. See, back when I was about fourteen, 
my older sister was really into it, and I did it a few times."
"Why'd you stop?"
Sarah squinted into the milk carton and said nothing. Outside, 
the guards cursed to each other about students in general. Sarah 
finally said, "I kept an eye on my sister, and when she got cut loose 
completely—lost track of what was real and stopped caring—I saw it 
wasn't a healthy thing."
"So now you're President. I don't get it."
"The important thing is to get your life anchored in something. I 
think you have to make contact with the world in
some way, and one way is to get involved."
"Student government?"
"Well, it beats MTV."

A guard beat on their door, attracted by the stereo-noise.
"Screw off," said Hyacinth in a loud stage whisper, flipping the 
bird toward the door. Sarah put her face in her hands and bent double 
with suppressed laughter. When she recovered, the guard had left 
and Hyacinth was smiling brightly.
"Jeezus!" said Sarah, "you're pretty blatant, aren't you?"
"If it's the quiet, polite type you want, go see the Air-heads."
"You've lived with people like this before. Why don't they kick 
you off the wing?"
"Tokenism. They have to have tokens. Lucy is their token black, 
I'm their token individual. They love having a loudmouth around to 
disagree with them—makes them feel diverse."
"You don't think diplomacy would be more effective?"
"I'm not a diplomat. I'm me. Who are you?"
Instead of answering this difficult question, Sarah leaned back 
comfortably against the wall and closed her eyes. They listened to 
music for a long time as the Airheads breezed back onto the wing.
"I'd feel relaxed," said Sarah, "except I'm actually kind of 
guilty about missing the Candle Passing."
"That's ridiculous."
"You're right. You can say that and be totally sure of yourself, 
can't you? I admire you, Hyacinth."
"I like you, Sarah," said Hyacinth, and that summed it up.


In the Physics Library, Casimir Radon read about quantum 
mechanics. The digital watch on the wrist of the sleeping post-doc 
across the table read 8:00. That meant it was time to go upstairs and 
visit Professor Emeritus Walter Abraham Sharon, who worked odd 
hours. Casimir was not leaving just yet, though. He had found that 
Sharon was not the swiftest man in the world, and though the 
professor was by no means annoyed when Casimir showed up on 
time, Casimir preferred to come ten minutes late. Anyway, in the 
informal atmosphere of the Physics Department, appointments were 
viewed with a certain Heisenbergian skepticism, as though being in 
the right place at the right time would involve breaking a natural law 
and was therefore impossible to begin with. Outside the picture 
windows of the library, the ghettos of the City were filled with 
smoky light, and occasionally a meteor streaked past and crashed in 
flames in the access lot below. They were not actual meteors, but 
merely various objects soaked in lighter fluid, ignited and thrown 
from a floor in E Tower above, trailing fire and debris as they 
zoomed earthward.
Casimir found this perversely comforting. It was just the sort of 
insanity he hadn't been able to get away from during his first week 
at American Megaversity. Soon the miserable Casimir had taken me 
up on my offer to stop by at any time, showing up at my door just 
before midnight, wanting to cry but not about to. I took coffee, he 
took vodka, and soon we understood each other a little better. As he 
explained it, no one here had the least consideration for others, or the 
least ability to think for themselves, and this combination was hard 
to take after having been an adult. Nor had academics given him any 
solace; owing to the medieval tempo of the bureaucracy, he was still 
mired in kindergarten-level physics. Of course he could speed these 
courses up just by being there. Whenever a professor asked a 
question, rhetorical or not, Casimir shouted the answer immediately. 
This earned him the hatred and awe of his classmates, but it was his 
only source of satisfaction. As he waited for his situation to become 
sensible, he sat in on the classes he really wanted to take, in effect 
taking a double load.
"Because I'm sure Sharon is going to bring me justice," Casimir 
had declared, raising his voice above a grumble for the first time. 
"This guy makes sense! He's like you, and I can't understand how 
he ended up in this place. I never thought I'd be surprised by 
someone just because he is a sensible and a good guy, but in this 
place it's a miracle. He c. out me, asks questions about my life—it's 
as though aiscovering what's best for me is a research project we're 
working on as a team. i can't believe a great man like him would 
care." Long, somber pause. "But I don't think even he can make up 
for what's wrong with this place. How about you, Bud? You're 
normal. What are you doing here?" Lacking an answer, I changed 
the subject to basketball.
A trio of meteors streaked across the picture windows and it was 
8:10. Casimir returned his book and exited into the dark shiny hail. 
He was now at the upper limit of the Burrows, the bloc of the Plex 
that housed the natural sciences. Two floors above him, on the sixth 
and top floor of the base, was Emeritus Row, the plush offices of the 
academic superstars. He made his way there leisurely, knowing he 
was welcome.
Emeritus Row was dark and silent, illuminated only by the 
streak of warm yellow splashed away from Sharon's door. Casimir 
removed his glacier glasses. "Come in," came the melodious answer 
to his knock, and Casimir Radon entered his favorite room in the 
world.
Sharon looked at him with raised eyebrows. "Veil! You haff 
made a decision?"
"I think so."
"Let's have it! Leaving or staying? For the sake of physics I 
hope the latter."
Casimir abruptly realized he had not really made up his mind. 
He shoved his hands into his pockets and breathed deeply, a little 
surprised by all this. He could not keep a smile from his face, 
though, and could not ignore the hominess of Sharon's chaotic 
office. He announced that he was going to stay.
"Good, good," Sharon said absently. "Clear a place to sit." He 
gestured at a chair and Casimir set about removing thirty Pounds of 
high-energy physics from it. Sharon said, "So you've decided to 
cross the Rubicon, eh?"
Casimir sat down, thought about it, and said with a half grin, 
"Or the Styx, whichever the case may be."
Sharon nodded, and as he did a resounding thump issued from 
above. Casimir jumped, but Sharon did not react.
"What was that?" Casimir asked. "Sounded big."
 "Ach," said Sharon. "Trowing furniture again, I should guess. 
You know, don't you, that many of our students are very interested 
in the physics of falling bodies?" He delivered this, like all his bad 
jokes, slowly and solemnly, as though working out long calculations 
in his head. Casimir chuckled. Sharon winked and lit his pipe. "I am 
given to understand, from grapevine talk, that you are smarter than 
all of our professors except for me." He winked again through thick 
smoke.
"Oh. Well, I doubt it."
"Ach, I don't. No correlation between age and intelligence! 
You're just afraid to use your smarts! That's right. You'd rather 
suffer—it is your Polish blood. Anyway, you have much practical 
experience. Our professors have only book experience."
"Well, it's the book experience I want. It's handy to know 
electronics, but what I really like is pure principles. I can make more 
money designing circuits, if that's what I want."
"Exactly! You prefer to be a poor physicist. Well, I cannot argue 
with you wanting to know pure things. Alter all, you are not naïve, 
your life has been no more sheltered than mine."
Embarrassed, Casimir laughed. "I don't know about that. I 
haven't lived through any world wars yet. You've lived through two. 
I may have escaped from a slum, but you escaped from Peenemunde 
with a suitcase full of rocket diagrams."
Sharon's eyes crinkled at the corners. "Yet. A very important 
word, nicht wahr? You are not very old, yet."
"What do you mean? Do you expect a war?"
Sharon laughed deeply and slowly. "I have toured your 
residential towers with certain students of mine, and I was reminded 
of certain, er, locations during the occupation of the Sudetenland. I 
think from what I see"—the ceiling thumped again, and he gestured 
upward with his pipestem
—"and hear, that perhaps you are in a war now."
Casimir laughed, but then sucked in his breath and sat back as 
Sharon glowered at him morosely. The old professor was very 
complicated, and Casimir always seemed to be taking missteps with 
him.
"War and violence are not very funny," said Sharon, "unless 
they happen to you—then they are funny because they haff to be. 
There is more violence up there than you realize! Even speech today 
has become a form of violence—even in the university. So pay 
attention to that, and don't worry about a war in Europe. Worry 
about it here, this is your home now."
"Yes, sir." Alter pausing respectfully, Casimir withdrew a 
clipboard from his pack and put It on Sharon's desk. "Or it will be 
my home as soon as you sign these forms. Mrs. Santucci will tear 
my arms off if I don't bring them in tomorrow."
Sharon sat still until Casimir began to feel uncomfortable. "Ja," 
he finally said, "I guess you need to worry about forms too. Forms 
and forms and forms. Doesn't matter to me."
"Oh. It doesn't? You aren't retiring, are you?"
"Ja, I guess so."
Silently, Sharon separated the forms and laid them out on the 
Periodic Table of the Elements that covered his desk. He examined 
them with care for a few minutes, then selected a pen from a stein on 
his desk, which had been autographed by Enrico Fermi and Niels 
Bohr, and signed them.
"There, you're in the good courses now," he concluded. "Good 
to see you are so well Socioeconomically Integrated." The old man 
sat back in his chair, clasped his fingers over his flat chest, and 
closed his eyes.
A thunderous crash and Casimir was on the floor, dust in his 
throat and pea gravel on his back. Rubble thudded down from above 
and Casimir heard a loud inharmonious piano chord, which held 
steady for a moment and moaned downward in pitch until it was 
obliterated by an explosive splintering crack. More rubble flew 
around the room and he was pelted with small blocks. Looking down 
as he rubbed dust from his eyes he saw scores of strewn black and 
white piano keys.
Sharon was slumped over on his desk, and a trickle of blood ran 
from his head and onto the back of his hand and puddled on the class 
change form beside his pipe. Gravel, rainwater and litter continued 
to slide down through the hole in the ceiling. Casimir alternately 
screamed and gulped as he staggered to his feet. lie waded through 
shattered ceiling panels and twisted books to Sharon's side and saw 
with horror that the old man's side had been pierced by a shard of 
piano frame shot out like an arrow in the explosion. With exquisite 
care he helped him lean back, cleared the desk of books and junk, 
then picked up his thin body and set him atop the desk. He propped 
up Sharon's head with the 1938 issues of the Physical Review and 
tried to ease his breathing. The head wound was superficial and 
already clotting, but the side wound was ghastly and Casimir did not 
even know whether to remove the splinter. Blood built up at the 
corners of Sharon's mouth as he gasped and wheezed. Brushing tears 
and dirt from his own face, Casimir looked for the phone.
He started away as a small bat fluttered past.
"Troglodyte! No manners! This is what you're supposed to 
see!" Casimir whirled to see Bert Nix plunging from the open door 
toward Sharon's desk. Casimir tried to head him off, fearing some 
kind of attack, but Bert Nix stopped short and pointed triumphantly 
to Sharon. Casimir turned to look. Sharon was gazing at him dully 
through half-shut eyes, and weakly pounding his finger into a spot 
on the tabletop. Casimir leaned over and looked. Sharon was 
pointing at the Table of the Elements, indicating the box for Oxygen.
"Oxygen! Oh two! Get it?" shouted Bert Nix.
Bill Benson, Security Guard 5, was arguing with a friend 
whether it was possible that F.D.R. committed suicide when the 
emergency line rang. He let it ring four times. Since ninety-nine calls 
out of a hundred were pranks, by letting each one ring four times he 
was delaying the true emergency calls by an average of only four 
one-hundredths of a ring apiece—nothing compared with the time it 
took to respond. Anyway, fed up with kids getting stoned at parties 
and fallii on the way out to barf and spraining their wrists, then 
(through some miracle of temporary clearheadedness) calling 
Emergency and trying to articulate their problems through a 
hallucinogenic miasma while monster stereos in the background 
threatened to uncurl his phone cord. Eventually, though, he did pick 
up the phone, holding the earpiece several inches from his head in 
case it was another of those goddamn Stalinist whistle-blasters.
"Listen," came the voice, sounding distant, "I've got to have 
some oxygen. Do you have some there? It's an emergency!"
Oh, shit, Did he have to get this call every night? He listened for 
a few more seconds. "It's an oxygen freak," he said to his friend, 
covering the mouthpiece with his hand.
"Oxygen freak? What do they do with oxygen?"
Benson swung his feet down from the counter, put the receiver 
in his lap, and explained. "See, nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, is the 
big thing. They breathe it through masks, like for surgery. But if you 
breathe it pure you'll kick in no time, because you got to have 
oxygen. And they are so crazy about laughing gas they don't want to 
take off that mask even to breathe, so they like to get some oxygen 
to mix with it so that they can sit there all goddamn night long and 
breathe nothing else and get blasted out of their little minds. So we 
always get these calls."
He picked up the receiver again, took a puff on his cigar, 
exhaled slowly. "Hello?" he said, hoping the poor gas-crazed sap 
had hung up.
"Yeah? When will it be here?"
"Cripes!" Bill Benson shouted, "look, guy, hang it up. We don't 
have any and you aren't allowed to have it."
"Well, shit then, come up here and help me. Call an ambulance! 
For God's sake, a man's dying here."
Some of these kids were such cretins, how did they make it into 
college? Money, probably. "Listen, use your head, kid," he said, not 
unkindly. "We're the Emergency Services desk. We can't leave our 
posts. What would happen if there was an emergency while we were 
gone?"
This was answered by silence; but in the background, Benson 
could just make out another voice, which sounded familiar: "You 
should have listened to what he was trying to tell you! He wasn't 
farting around! We had to sack the Cartography Department to 
afford him. And you don't listen!"
"Shut up!" shouted the gas freak.
"Hey, is that Bert? Is that Bert Nix on the phone?" asked Bill 
Benson. "Where are you, kid?"
"Emeritus Row!' shouted the kid, and dropped the phone. Bill 
Benson continued to listen after the BONKITY-BONK of the phone's 
impact, trying to make sure it was really good old Bert Nix. I think 
he heard this poem; on the news, he claimed he heard a poem, and it 
could well have been this, which Bert Nix quoted regularly and liked 
to write on the walls:

Tenuring and tenuring in the ivory tower!
The flagon cannot fill the flagoneers.
Krupp cuts a fart! The sphinxter cannot hold
Dear academe, our Lusitanta, recoils.
The time-limned dons are noosed. With airy webs
The cerebrally infarcted bring me down.
The East affects conscription, while the curst
Are gulled with Fashionate Propensities.

Shrilly, sum reevaluation is demanded.
Earlier-reckoned commencement is programmed!
What fecund mumming! Outly ward those words hard
When a glassed grimace on an animal Monday
Rumbles at night; unaware that the plans aren't deserved
Escapists' lie-panoply aims to head off the Fan.
A sign frank and witless as the Sun
Is mute in the skies, yet from it are shouted
Real shadows of endogenous deserted words.
The concrete drops down in; but know I now
That thirty-storied stone steel keeps
When next the might of Air are rooks unstable.
What buff be; its towers coming down deglassed
Slumps amid Bedlam in the morn?

"Holy shit!" cried Bill Benson. "Bert? Is that you? Hell, maybe 
something's up. Sam, punch me onto line six there and Ill see if I can 
raise the folks down at nine-one-one."
Casimir was careening through the halls, cursing himself for 
having had to leave Sharon alone with a derelict, adrenaline blasting 
through him as he imagined coming back to find the old man dead. 
He didn't know how he was going to open the door when he got 
where he was going, but at the moment it did not matter because no 
slab of wood and plastic, it seemed, could stand in his way. He 
veered around a corner, smashing into a tail young man who had 
been coming the other way. They both sprawled dazed on the floor, 
but Casimir rolled and sprang to his feet and resumed running. The 
man he had collided with caught up with him, and he realized that it 
was Virgil Gabrielsen, King of the Burrows.
"Virgil! Did you hear that?"
"Yeah, I was coming to check it out. What's up?"
"Piano fell into Sharon's office. . . pierced lung. . . oxygen."
"Right," said Virgil, and skidded to a stop, fishing a key from 
his pocket. He master-keyed his way into a lab and they sent a grad 
student sprawling against a workbench as they made for the gas 
canisters. Casimir grabbed a bottle-cart and they feverishly strapped 
the big cylinder onto it, then wheeled it heavily out the door and 
back toward Sharon.
"Shit," said Virgil, "no freight elevator. No way to get it 
upstairs." They were at the base of the stairs, two floors below 
Sharon. The oxygen was about five feet tall and one foot in diameter, 
and crammed with hundreds of pounds of extremely high-pressure 
gas. Virgil was still thinking about it when Casimir, a bony and 
unhealthy looking man, bear-hugged the canister, straightened up, 
and hoisted it to his shoulder as he would a roll of carpet. He took 
the stairs two at a time, Virgil bounding along behind.
Shortly, Casimir had slammed the cylinder down on the floor 
near Sharon. Bert Nix was holding Sharon's hand, mumbling and 
occasionally making the sign of the cross. As Virgil closed the door, 
Casimir held the top valve at arm's length, buried one ear in his 
shoulder, and opened it up. Virgil just had time to plug his ears.
The room was inundated in a devastating hiss, like the shriek of 
an injured dragon. Casimir's hands were knocked aside by the 
fabulously high pressure of the escaping oxygen. Papers blizzarded 
and piano keys skittered across the floor. Ignoring it, Bert Nix 
stuffed Kleenex into Sharon's ears, then into his own.
In a minute Sharon began to breathe easier. At the same time his 
pipe-ashes burst into a small bonfire, ignited by the high oxygen 
levels. Casimir was making ready to stomp it out when Virgil pushed 
him gently aside; he had been wise enough to yank a fire 
extinguisher from the wall on their way up. Once the fire was 
smothered, Virgil commenced what first aid was possible on Sharon. 
Casimir returned to the Burrows and, finding an elevator, brought up 
more oxygen and a regulator. Using a garbage bag they were able to 
rig a crude oxygen tent.
The ambulance crew arrived in an hour. The technicians loaded 
Sharon up and wheeled him away, Bert Nix advising them on 
Sharon's favorite foods.
I passed this procession on my way there—Casimir had called 
to give me the news. When I arrived in the doorway of Sharon's 
office, I beheld an unforgettable scene: Virgil and Casimir knee-deep 
in wreckage; a desk littered with the torn-open wrappers of medical 
supplies; Virgil holding up a sheaf of charred, bloodstained, fire-
extinguisher-caked forms; and Casimir laughing loudly beneath the 
opened sky.



--October--

At the front of the auditorium, Professor Embers spoke. He 
never lectured; he spoke. In the middle of the auditorium his 
audience of five hundred sat back in their seats, staring up 
openmouthed into the image of the Professor on the nearest color TV 
monitor. In the back of the auditorium, Sarah sat in twilight, trying 
to balance the Student Government budget.
"So grammar is just the mode in which we image concepts," the 
professor was saying. "Grammar is like the walls and bumpers of a 
pinball machine. Rhetoric is like the flippers of a pinball machine. 
You control the flippers. The rest of the machine—grammar—
controls everything else. If you use the flippers well, you make 
points. If you fail to image your concepts viably, your ball drops into 
the black hole of nothingness. If you try to cheat, the machine tilts 
and you lose—that's like people not understanding your interactions. 
That's why we have to learn Grammar here in Freshman. That, and 
because S. S. Krupp says we have to."
There was a pause of several seconds, and then a hundred or so 
people laughed. Sarah did not. Unlike the freshmen in the class, who 
thought Professor Embers was a cool guy, Sarah thought he was a 
bore and a turkey. He continued to speak, and she continued to 
balance.
This was the budget for this semester, and it was supposed to 
have been done last semester. But last semester the records had been 
gulped by a mysterious computer error, and now Sarah had to 
reconstruct them so that the government could resume debate. She 
had some help from me in this, though I don't know how much good 
it did. We had met early in the year, at a reception for faculty-in-
residence, arid later had a lunch or two together and talked about 
American Megaversity. If nothing else, my suite was a quiet and 
pleasant enough place where she could spread her papers out and 
work uninterrupted when she needed to.
She could also work uninterrupted in her Freshman English 
class, because she was a senior English major with a 3.7 average and 
didn't need to pay much attention.
Her first inkling that something was wrong had been in 
midsummer, when the megaversity's computer scheduling system 
had scheduled her for Freshman English automatically, warning that 
she had failed to meet this requirement during her first year.
"Look," she had said to the relevant official when she arrived in 
the fall, "I'm an English major. I know this stuff. Why are you 
putting me in Freshman English?"
The General Curriculum Advisor consulted little codes printed 
by the computer, and looked them up in a huge computer-printed 
book. "Ah," he said, "was one of your parents a foreign national?"
"My stepmother is from Wales."
"That explains it. You see." The official had swung around 
toward her and assumed a frank, open body-language posture. 
"Statistical analysis shows that children of one or more foreign 
nationals are often gifted with Special Challenges."
Sarah's spine arched back and she set her jaw. "You're saying I 
can't speak English because my stepmother was Welsh?"
"Special Challenges are likely in your case. You were mis-
takenly exempted from Freshmen English because of your high test 
scores. This exemption option has now been retroactively waived for 
your convenience."
"I don't want it waived. It's not convenient."
"To ensure maintenance of high academic standards, the waiver 
is avolitional."
"Well, that's bullshit." This was not a very effective thing to 
say. Sarah wished that Hyacinth could come talk for her; Hyacinth 
would not be polite, Hyacinth would say completely outrageous 
things and they would scatter in terror. "There's no way I can accept 
that." Drawn to the noise like scavengers, two young clean-cut 
advisors looked in the door with open and understanding smiles. 
Everyone smiled except for Sarah. But she knew she was right this 
time—she knew damn well what language was spoken in Wales 
these days. They could smile stupidly until blue in the face. When 
the advisor hinted that she was asking for special treatment because 
she was President, she gave him a look that snapped his composure 
for a second, a small but helpful triumph.
She had done it by the books, filing a petition requesting to be 
discharged from Freshman English. But her petition was rejected 
because of a computer error which made it appear that she had 
gotten 260 instead of 660 on her SATs. By the time an extra score 
report from the testing company proved that she was smart after all, 
it was too late to drop or add classes—so, Freshman English it was.
The end of the class approached at last, and Professor Embers 
handed back this week's essays. The assignment was to select a 
magazine ad and write about how it made you feel.
"I've been epiphanied by the quality of your essays this week," 
said Professor Embers. "We hardly had to give out any C's this time 
around. I have them alphabetized by your first names up here in 
sixteen stacks, one for each section."
All five hundred students went down at once to get theirs. Sarah 
worked for ten minutes. then gathered her things and headed for the 
front, dawdling on purpose. Clustered around the stack of papers for 
her section she could see five of the Stalinists—for some reason they 
had all ended up in her section. Since she never attended section 
meetings, this was no problem, but she did not want to encounter 
them at times like this either. Standing there tall and straight as a 
burned-out sapling in a field was Dexter Fresser, an important figure 
in the Stalinist Underground Battalion. Most of all, she Wanted to 
avoid him. Sarah and Dex had gone to the same high school in Ohio, 
ridden the same bus to school, slept in the same bed thirteen times 
and shared the same LSD on three occasions. Since then, Dex had 
hardly ever not taken lots of acid. Sarah had taken none. Now he was 
a weird rattle-minded radical who nevertheless remembered her, and 
she avoided him scrupulously.
About halfway down the aisle she found a television monitor 
displaying an image of Dex. She sank deeply into a seat and watched 
him and his comrades. Dex was reading a paper desultorily and she 
knew it was hers. He flipped aimlessly through it, as though 
searching for a particular word or phrase, then shook his head 
helplessly and dropped it back on the stack. Finally the last of them 
excavated his paper and they were collectively gone, leaving behind 
several dozen essays no one had bothered to pick up.


Associate Professor Archibald Embers, Learning Facilitator of 
Freshman English G Group, was regarding a young woman on his 
sofa and endeavoring to keep his pipe lit. This required a lot of 
upside-down work with his butane lighter and he thought the burn on 
his thumb might be second-degree. This particular woman was 
definitely confrontational, though, and it was no time to show pain. 
He held the pipe cautiously and reached out with the other hand to 
drape his thumb casually over the rim of a potted plant, thrusting the 
roasted region deeply into the cool humus. I am Antaeus, he thought, 
and yet I am Prometheus, singed by my own flame. They were sitting 
in the conversation pit he had installed so as to avoid talking to 
students across his desk like some kind of authoritarian. Or was it 
totalitarian? He could never remember the distinction.
This woman was clearly high voltage, Type A, low-alpha and 
left-hemisphere, with very weird resonances. Seeing her through to 
the end of her crisis would be painful. She had ripped off a lot of 
papers from the auditorium and had brought thei tere into his space 
to fine-tooth comb them. She had a problem with her grade, a B.
"Now," she continued, whipping over another page, "let's look 
at page two of this one, which is about an advertisement for Glans 
Essence Cologne. 'The point of this is about these foxes. He has a 
bunch. On him. He a secret agent, like Bond James Bond or 
something. Or some other person with lots of foxes. Why he has 
foxes? Is Glans Essence Cologne. They hope you figuring that out, 
will buy some of it. Which is what they are selling.' Now, next to 
that in the margin you wrote, 'excellent analysis of the working of 
the ad.' Then at the end you wrote, 'Your understanding of how the 
System brainwashes us is why I gave you an A on this paper.' Now 
really, if you want to give him an A for that it's up to you, but you 
can you then give me a B? Mine was three times as long, I had an 
introduction, conclusion, an outline, no grammatical errors, no 
misspelled words—what do you expect?"
"This is a very good question," said Embers. He took a long 
draw on his pipe. "What is a grade? That is the question." He 
chuckled, but she apparently didn't get it. "Some teachers grade on 
curves. You have to be a math major to understand your grade! But 
forget those fake excuses. A grade is actually a form of poetry. It is a 
subjective reaction to a learner's work, distilled and reduced down to 
its purest essence—not a sonnet, not a haiku, but a single letter. 
That's remarkable, isn't it?"
"Look, that's just groovy. But you have to grade in such a way 
that I'm shown to be a better writer than he is. Otherwise it's unfair 
and unrealistic."
Embers recrossed his legs and spent a while sucking his pipe 
back into a blaze. His learner picked up a paper and fanned smoke 
away from her face. "Mind if I smoke?" he said.
"Your office," she said in a strangled voice.
Fine, if she didn't want to assert herself. He finally decided on 
the best approach. "You aren't necessarily a better Writer. You 
called some of them functional illiterates. Well those illiterates, as 
you called them, happen to have very expressive prose voices. 
Remember that in each person's own dialect he or she is perfectly 
literate. So in the sense of having escaped orthodoxy to be truly 
creative, they are highly advanced wordsmiths, while you are still 
struggling to break free of grammatical rules systems. They express 
themselves to me and I react with little one-letter poems of my 
own—the essence of grading! Poetry! And being a poet I'm 
particularly well suited for it. Your idea of tearing down these proto-
artists because they aren't just like you smacks of a kind of 
absolutism which is very disturbing in a temple of academic 
freedom."
They sat there silent for a while.
"You really said that, didn't you?" she finally asked.
"I did."
"Huh. So we're just floating around without any standards at 
all."
"You could put it that way. You should interact with the 
department chairman on this. Look, there is no absolute reality, 
right? We can't force everyone to express themselves through the 
same absolute rules."
When the young woman left she seemed curiously drained and 
quiet. Indeed, absorbing new world-views could be a sobering 
experience. Embers found a blister on his thumb, and was inspired to 
write a haiku.


There came the sound of a massive ring of keys being slapped 
against the outside of Casimir Radon's door. He looked up from the 
papers on his desk, and in his lap Spike the illicit kitten followed 
suit, scrambling to red-alert status and scything sixteen claws into 
his thigh. Before Casimir had opened his mouth to say "Who is it" or 
Spike could spring forward to engage the foe, the door was unlocked 
and thrown open. A short, heavy man with a disconcerting 
resemblance to Leonid Brezhnev stepped into the room.
"Stermnator," he mumbled, rolling the r's on his tongue like 
Black Sea caviar. Casimir covered Spike with his hand, hoping to 
prevent detection, and the kitten grasped a finger between its 
forepaws and began to rasp with its tongue.
Behind the man was a small wiry old guy with chloracne, who 
bore metal canister with a pump on top and a tube leading to a 
nozzle in his hand. Before Casimir could even grunt in response, this 
man had stepped crisply into the room and begun to apply a heavy 
mist to the baseboards. The B-man glowered darkly at Casimir, who 
sat in silence and watched as the exterminator walked around the 
room, nozzle to wall, spraying everything near the baseboards, in-
cluding shoes, Spike's food and water dishes, a typewriter, two 
unmatched socks, a book and a calculator charger. Both the strangers 
looked around the inside of his nearly barren room with faint 
expressions of incomprehension or disdain.
By the time Casimir got around to saying, "That's okay, I 
haven't seen any bugs in here since I moved in," the sprayer was 
bearing down on him inexorably. Casimir pushed the kitten up 
against his stomach, grasped the hem of his extra-long seven-year-
old Wall Drug T-shirt, and pulled it up to form a little sling for the 
struggling creature, crossing his arms over the resulting bulge in an 
effort to hold and conceal. At the same time he stood and scampered 
out of the path of the exterminator, who bumped into him and 
knocked him off balance onto the bed, arms still crossed. He 
bounced back up, weaved past the exterminator, and stood with his 
back to the door, staring nonchalantly out the window at the view of 
E Tower outside. Behind him, the exterminator paused near the exit 
to soak the straps of an empty duffel bag. As Casimir watched the 
reflection of the two men closing the door he was conscious of a 
revolting chemical odor. Immediately he whirled and tossed Spike 
onto the bed, then took his food and water dishes out to wash them 
in the bathroom.
Casimir had seen his first illicit kitten on the floor above his, 
when he had forgotten to push his elevator button. He got off on the 
floor above to take the stairs down one flight, and saw some students 
playing with the animal in the hallway. After some careful inquiries 
he made contact with a kitten pusher over the phone. Two weeks 
later Casimir, his directions memorized, went to the Library at 4:15 
in the morning. He proceeded to the third floor and pulled down the 
January—March 1954 volume of the Soviet Asphalt Journal and 
placed two twenty-dollar bills inside the cover. He then went to the 
serials desk, where he was waited on by a small, dapper librarian in 
his forties.
"I would like to report," he said, opening the volume, "that 
pages 1738 through 1752 of this volume have been razored out, and 
they are exactly the pages I need."
"I see," the man said sympathetically.
"And while I'm here, I have some microfilms to pick up, which 
I got on interlibrary loan."
"An, yes, I know the ones you're talking about. Just a moment, 
please." The librarian disappeared into a back office and emerged a 
minute later with a large box filled with microfilm reel boxes. 
Casimir picked it up, finding it curiously light, smiled at the librarian 
and departed. A pass had already been made out for him, and the exit 
guard waved him through. Back in his room, he pulled out the top 
layer of microffim boxes to find, curled up on a towel, a kitten re-
covering from a mild tranquilizer.
Since then Spike had been neither mild nor tranquil, but that at 
least provided Casimir with some of the unpredictability that Plex 
life so badly lacked. He almost didn't mind having a kitten run 
around the obstacle course of his room at high speed for hours at a 
time in the middle of the night, because it gave his senses something 
not utterly flat to perceive. Even though Spike tried to sleep on his 
face, and hid all small important articles in odd places, Casimir was 
charmed.
He pulled on his glacier glasses in a practiced motion and 
stepped out into the hail. Casimir's wing was only two floors away 
from allies of the Wild and Crazy Guys, best partiers in the Plex, and 
two Saturdays ago they had come down with their spray paint and 
painted giant red, white and blue twelve-spoked wheels between 
each pair of doors. These were crude representations of the Big 
Wheel, a huge neon sign outside the Plex, which the Wild and Crazy 
Guys pretended to worship as a joke and initiation ritual. This year 
they had become aggressive graffitists, painting Big Wheels almost 
every in the Plex. Casimir, used to it, walked down this gallery of 
giant wheels to the bathroom, Spike's dishes in hand.
The bathrooms in the wings looked on the inside like 
microwave ovens or autoclaves, with glossy green tile on the walls, 
brilliant lighting, overwaxed floors and so much steam that entering 
one was like entering a hallucination. At one end of the bathroom, 
three men and their girlfriends were taking showers, drinking, 
shouting a lot and generally being Wild and Crazy. They were less 
than coherent, but most of what Casimir could make out dealt with 
Anglo-Saxon anatomical terms and variations on "what do you think 
of this" followed by prolonged yelling from the partner. Casimir was 
tempted to stay and listen, but reasoned that since he was still a 
virgin anyway there was no point in trying to learn anything 
advanced, especially by eavesdropping. He went down the line of 
closely spaced sinks until he found one that had not been stuffed 
with toilet paper or backed up with drain crud.
As he was washing Spike's dishes, a guy came in the door with 
a towel around his waist. He looked conventional, though somewhat 
blocky, athletic and hairless. He came up and stood very close to 
Casimir, staring at him wordlessly for a long time as though 
nearsighted; Casimir ignored him, but glanced at him from time to 
time in the mirror, looking between two spokes of a Big Wheel that 
had been drawn on it with shaving cream.
After a while, he tugged on Casimir's sleeve. "Hey," he 
mumbled, "can I borrow your"
Casimir said nothing.
"Huh?" said the strange guy.
"I don't know," said Casimir. "Depends on what you want. 
Probably not."
A grin gradually sprouted on the man's face and he turned 
around as though smirking with imaginary friends behind him. "Oh, 
Jeez," he said, and turned away. "I hate fuckers like you!" he yelled, 
and ran to the lockers across from the sinks, running a few steps up 
the wall before sprawling back down on the floor again. Casimir 
watched him in the mirror as he went from locker to locker, finally 
finding an unlocked one. The strange guy pawed through it and 
selected a can of shaving cream. "Hey," he said, and looked at the 
back of Casimir's head. "Hey, Wall."
Casimir looked at him in the mirror. "What is it?"
The strange guy did not understand that Casimir was looking 
right at him. "Hey fucker! Cocksucker! Mr. Drug! You!" Rhythmic 
female shrieking began to emanate from a shower stall.
"What is it," Casimir yelled back, refusing to turn.
The strange guy approached him and Casimir turned half around 
defensively. He stood very close to Casimir. "Your hearing isn't 
very good," he shouted, "you should take off your glasses."
"Do you want something? If so, you should just tell me."
"Do you think he'd mind if I used this?"
"Who?"
The strange guy smirked arid shook his head. "Do you know 
anything about terriers?"
"No."
"Ah, well." The strange guy put the shaving cream on the shelf 
in front of Casimir, muttered something incomprehensible, laughed, 
and walked out of the bathroom.
Casimir dried the food bowl under an automatic hand dryer by 
the door. As he was on his third push of the button, a couple from 
one of the showers walked nude into the room, getting ten feet from 
cover before they saw Casimir.
The woman screamed, clapping her hands over her face. "Oh 
Jeez, Kevin, there's a guy in here!" Kevin was too mellowed by sex 
and beer to do anything but smile wanly. Casimir walked out without 
saying anything, breathed deeply of the cool, dry air of the hallway, 
and returned to his room, where he filled Spike's water bowl with 
spring water from a bottle.

As soon as Casimir had heard about Neutrino, the official 
organization of physics majors, he had crashed a meeting and got 
himself elected President and Treasurer. Casimir was like that, meek 
most of the time with occasional bursts of effectiveness. He walked 
into the meeting, which so far consisted of six people, and said, 
"Who's the president?"
The others, being physics majors and therefore accustomed to 
odd behavior of all sorts, had answered. "He graduated," said one.
"No, when he graduated, he stopped being our president.
When the guy who was our president graduated, we instan-
taneously ceased to have one," another countered.
"I agree," a third added, "but the proper term is 'was grad-
uated.'"
"That's pedantic."
"That's correct. Where's the dictionary?"
"Who cares? Why do you want to know?" the first asked. As the 
other two consulted a dictionary, a fourth member held a calculator 
in his hand, gnawing absently on the charger cord, and the other two 
members argued loudly about an invisible diagram they were 
drawing with their fingers on a blank wall.
"I want to be president of this thing," Casimir said. "Any 
objections?"
"Oh, that's okay. We thought you were from the administration 
or something."
Casimir's motivation for all this was that after the Sharon 
incident, it was impossible for him to escape from his useless 
courses. The grimness of what had happened, and the hopelessness 
of his situation, had left him quiet and listless for a couple of weeks 
to the point where I was beginning to feel alarmed. One night, then, 
from two to four in the morning, Casimir's neighbor had watched 
Rocky on cable and the sleeping Casimir had subconsciously listened 
in on the soundtrack. He awoke in the morning with a sense of mis-
sion, of destiny, a desire to go out and beat the fuckers at their own 
game. Neutrino provided a suitable power base, and since his classes 
only consumed about six hours a week he had all the time in the 
world.
Previous to Casimir's administration most of the money allotted 
to Neutrino had been dispersed among petty activities such as 
dinners, trips to nuclear reactors, insipid educational gadgets and the 
like. Casimir's plan was to spend all the money on a single project 
that would exercise the minds of the members and, in the end, 
produce something useful. Once he had convinced the pliable 
membership of Neutrino that this was a good idea, his suggestion for 
the actual project was not long in coming: construction of a mass 
driver.
The mass driver was a magnetic device for throwing things. It 
consisted of a long straight rail, a "bucket" that slid along the rail on 
a magnetic cushion and powerful electromagnets that kicked the 
bucket down the rail When the bucket slammed to a halt at the rail's 
end, whatever was in it kept on going—theoretically, very, very fast. 
Recently this simple machine had become a pet project of Professor 
Sharon, who had advocated it as a lunar mining tool. Casimir argued 
that the idea was important and interesting in and of itself, and that 
Sharon's connection to it lent it sentimental value. As a tribute to 
Sharon, a fun project and a toy that would be a blast to play with 
when finished, the mass driver was irresistible to Neutrino. Which 
was just as well, because nothing was going to stop Casimir from 
building this son of a bitch.
Casimir had been drawing up a budget for it on this particular 
evening, because budget time for the Student Government was 
coming up soon. Not long after the exterminator's visit, Casimir got 
stuck. Many of the supplies he needed were standard components 
that were easy for him to get, but certain items, such as custom-
wound electromagnets, were hard to budget for. This was the sort of 
fabrication that had to be done at the Science Shop, and that meant 
dealing with Virgil Gabrielsen. After nailing down as much as he 
could, Casimir gathered his things and set out on the half-hour 
elevator ride to the bottom of the Burrows.
In the interests of efficiency, security, ease of design and 
healthy interplay among the departments, the designers of the 
Campustructure had put all the science departments together in a 
single bloc. It was known as the Burrows because it was mostly 
below street level, and because of the allegedly Morlockian qualities 
of its inhabitants. At the top of the Burrows were the departmental 
libraries and conference rooms. Below were professors' offices and 
departmental headquarters, followed by classrooms, labs, 
stockrooms and at the very bottom, forty feet below ground level, 
the enormous CC— Computing Center—and the Science Shop. Any 
researcher wanting glass blown, metal shaped, equipment fixed, cir-
cuits designed or machines assembled, had to come down and beg 
for succor at the feet of the stony-hearted Science Shop staff. This 
meant trying to track down Lute, the hyperactive Norwegian 
technician, rumored to have the power of teleportation, who held 
smart people in disdain because of their helplessness in practical 
matters, or Zap, the electronics specialist, a motorcycle gang 
sergeant-at-arms who spent his working hours boring out engine 
blocks for his brothers and threatening professors with bizarre and 
deadly tortures. Zap was the cheapest technician the Science Shop 
steering committee had been able to find, Lute had been retained at 
high salary after dire threats from all faculty members and Virgil, to 
the immense relief of all, had been hired three years earlier as a part-
time student helper and had turned the place around.
Science Shop was at the end of a dark unmarked hallway that 
smelled of machine oil and neoprene, half blocked by junked and 
broken equipment. When Casimir arrived he relaxed instantly in the 
softly lit, wildly varied squalor of the place, and soon found Virgil 
sipping an ale and twiddling painstakingly with wires and pulleys on 
an automatic plotter.
They went into his small office and Virgil provided himself and 
Casimir with more ale. "What's the latest on Sharon?" he asked.
"The same. No word," Casimir said, pushing the toes of his 
tennis shoes around in the sawdust and metal filings on the floor. 
Not quite in a coma, definitely not all there. Whatever he lost from 
oxygen starvation isn't coming back."
"And they haven't caught anyone."
"Well, E14 is the Performing Arts Floor. They used to have a 
room with a piano in It. The E13S people didn't like it because the 
Performing Artists were always tap dancing."
"We know how sensitive those poor boys are to noise."
"A couple of days before the piano crash, the piano was stolen 
from E14. Two of the tap-dancers had their doors ignited the same 
night. A couple of days later, E13S had a burning-furniture-throwing 
contest, and it just happens that at the same time a piano crashed 
through Sharon's ceiling. Circumstantial evidence only."
Virgil clasped his hands over his flat belly and looked at the 
ceiling. "Though a pattern of socio-heterodox behaviors has been 
exhibited by individuals associated with E13S, we find it preferable 
to keep them within the system and counsel them constructively 
rather than turn them over to damaging outside legal interference 
which would hinder resocialization. The Megaversity is a free 
community of individuals seeking to grow together toward a more 
harmonious and enlightened future, and introduction of external 
coercion merely stifles academic freedom and—"
"How did you know that?" asked Casimir, amazed. "That's 
word for word what they said the other day."
Virgil shrugged. "Official policy statement. They used it two 
years ago, in the barbell incident. E13 dropped a two-hundred-pound 
barbell through the roof of the Cafeteria's main kitchen area. It 
crashed into a pressure vat and caused a tuna-nacho casserole 
explosion that wounded fifteen. And the pressure is so high in those 
vats, you know, that Dr. Forksplit, the Dean of Dining Services, who 
was standing nearby, had a nacho tortilla chip shard driven all the 
way through his skull. He recovered, but they've called him Wombat 
ever since. The people who handle this in the Administration don't 
understand how deranged these students are. Now, Kruno and his 
people would like to pour molten lead down their throats, but they 
can't do anything about it—the decisions are made by a committee 
of tenured faculty."
Casimir resisted an impulse to scream, got up and paced around 
talking through clenched teeth. "This shit really, really pisses me off. 
It's incredible, Law doesn't exist here, you can do what you please."
"Well," said Virgil, still blasé, "I disagree. There's always law. 
Law is just the opinion of the guy with the biggest gun. Since outside 
law rarely matters in the Plex, we make our own law, using whatever 
power—whatever guns—we have. We've been very successful in 
the Science Shop."
"Oh, yeah? I suppose this was something to do with what you 
said the other day about some unofficial work here for me."
"That's a perfect example. The researchers of American 
Megaversity need your services. It's illegal, but the scientific faculty 
have more power than the rule-enforcers, so we make our own law 
regarding technical work. You keep track of what you do, and I pay 
you through the vitality fund.
"The what?"
"The fund made up of donations from various professors and 
firms who have a vested interest in keeping the Science Shop 
running smoothly. Hell, it's all just grant money. In the egalitarian 
system we had before, nobody got anything done."
"Look." Casimir shook his head and sat back down. "I don't 
want even to hear all this. You know, all I've ever wanted to be is a 
normal student. They won't let me take decent classes, okay, so I 
work on the mass driver. Now I come here to get your help and you 
start talking about local law and free enterprise. I just want some 
estimates from you on getting these electromagnets wound for the 
mass driver. Okay? Forget free enterprise." Casimir dropped a page 
of diagrams and specifications on Virgil's desk.
Virgil looked it over. "Well, it depends," he finally said. "If we 
pretend you're just a normal student, then I will charge you, oh, 
about ten thousand dollars for this stuff and have it done by the time 
you graduate. Now, unofficially, I could log it in as something much 
simpler and charge you less. But you can't put that into a formal 
budget proposal. Very unofficially, I might do it for a small bribe, 
like some help from you around the Shop. But that's really abnormal 
to put in a budget. Looks like you're stuck."
"It wouldn't really take you three years."
"It would take me." Virgil waved at the door. "Zap could do it 
in a week. Want to ask him? He's not hard to wake up."
Casimir brooded momentarily. "Well, look. I don't really care 
how it gets done. But it's necessary to have something on paper, you 
know?"
Virgil shook his head, smiling. "Casimir. You don't think 
anyone pays any attention to those budgets, do you?"
"Aw, shit. This is too weird for me."
"It's not weird, you're just not used to it yet. Here is what we'll 
do. We work out a friendly gentlemen's agreement by which I make 
the magnets for you, probably over Christmas vacation, in exchange 
for a little of your expert help around the Science Shop. When I'm 
done with the magnets I put them in an old box and mark it, say, 
'SPARE PARTS, 1932 AUTOMATIC BOMBSIGHT 
PROTOTYPE.' I dump it in the storeroom. When budget time 
comes around you say, 'Oh, gee, it happens I've designed this thing 
to use existing parts, I know just where they are.' Ridiculous, but no 
one knows that, and those who understand won't want to meddle in 
any arrangement of mine."
"Okay!" Casimir threw up his hands. "Okay. Fine. Ill do it. Just 
tell me what to do and don't let me see any of this illegal stuff."
"It's not illegal, I said it was legal. Hang on a sec while I Xerox 
these pages."
Virgil opened the door and was met by a clamor of voices from 
several advanced academic figures. Casimir looked around the room: 
a firetrap stuffed with books and papers and every imaginable 
variety of electronic junk. A Geiger counter hung out the window 
into a deep air shaft, clicking every second or two. In one corner a 
1940's radio was hooked up to a technical power supply and wired 
into the guts of a torn-open telephone so that Virgil could make 
hands-off phone calls. An old backless TV in another corner enabled 
Virgil to monitor the shop outside. Electronic parts, hunks of wire, 
junk-food wrappers and scraps of paper littered the floor. And in 
three separate places sat those little plastic trays Casimir saw 
everywhere, overflowing with tiny seeds—rat poison.
"Damn!" spat Casimir as Virgil reentered. "There's enough of 
that poison in this room alone to kill every rat in this city. What's 
their problem with that stuff anyway?"
Virgil snorted. Everyone knew the rat poison was ubiquitous; 
the wastebaskets might go a month without emptying, but when it 
came to rat poison the B-men were fearsomely diligent, seeming to 
pass through walls and locked doors like Shaolin priests to scatter 
the poison-saturated kernels. "It's cultural," he explained. "They 
hate rats. You should read some Scythian mythology. In 
Crotobaltislavonia it's a capital crime to harbor them. That's why 
they had a revolution! The old regime stopped handing out free rat 
poison."
"I'm serious," said Casimir. "I've got an illegal kitten in my 
room, and If they keep breaking in to spread poison, they'll find it or 
let it out or poison it."
"Or eat it. Seriously, you should have mentioned it, Casimir. Let 
me help you out."
Casimir rested his face in his hand. "I suppose you also have an 
arrangement with the B-men."
"No, no, much too complicated. I do almost all my work at the 
computer terminal, Casimir. You can accomplish anything there. 
See, a few years ago a student had a boa constrictor in his room that 
got poisoned by the B-men, and even though it was illegal he sued 
the university for damages and won. There are still a lot of residents 
with pets whom the administration doesn't want to antagonize, be-
cause of connections or whatever. Some students are even allergic to 
the poison. So, they keep a list of rooms which are not to be given 
any poison. All I have to do is put your room on it."
Casimir was staring intently at Virgil. "Wait a minute. How did 
you get that kind of access? Aren't there locks? Access checks?"
"There are some annoyances involved."
"I suppose with photographic memory you could do a lot on the 
computer."
"Helps to have the Operator memorized too."
"Oh, fuck! No!"
Casimir, I am sure, was just as surprised as I had been. The 
Operator was an immense computer program consisting entirely of 
numbers—machine code. Without it, the machine was a useless 
lump. With the Operator installed, it was a tool of nearly infinite 
power and flexibility. It was to the computer as memory, instinct and 
intelligence are to the human brain.
Virgil handed Casimir a canister of paper computer tape. The 
label read, "1843 SURINAM CENSUS DATA VOLUME 5. 
FIREWOOD USAGE ESTIMATES AND PROJECTIONS."
"Ignore that," said Virgil. "It's a program in machine code. It'll 
put your room on the no-poison list, and your cat will be safe, unless 
the B-men forget or decide to ignore the rule, which is a possibility."
Casimir barely looked at the tape and stared distantly at Virgil. 
"What have you been doing with this knowledge?" he whispered. 
"You could get back at E13S."
Virgil smiled. "Tempting. But when you can do what I can, you 
don't go for petty revenge. All I do, really, is fight the Worm, which 
is really my only passion these days. It's why I stay around instead 
of getting a decent job. It's a sabotage program. It's probably the 
greatest intellectual achievement of the nineteen-eighties, and it's the 
only thing I've ever found that is so indescribably difficult and 
complex and beautiful that I haven't gotten bored with it."
"Why would anyone do such a thing? It must be costing the 
Megaversity millions."
"I don't know," said Virgil, "but it's great to have a challenge."


Sarah and I were in her room with my toolbox. Outside, the 
Terrorists were trying to get in. I sat on her bed, as she had 
commanded, silent and neutral.
"When did they start calling themselves the Terrorists," she 
asked during a lull.
"Who knows? Maybe Wild and Crazy Guys was too old-
fashioned."
"Maybe the hijacking of that NATO tank yesterday gave them 
the idea. That got lots of coverage. Shit, here they are again."
Cheerfully screaming, another Airhead was dragged down the 
hail to be given her upside-down cold shower. The original Terrorist 
plan had been to drag the Airheads to the bathroom by their hair, as 
in olden times, but after a few tries they were convinced that this 
really was painful, so now they were holding on to the feet.
"Terrorists, Terrorists, we're a mean, sonofabitch," came a 
hoarse chant as a new group gathered in front of Sarah's door. 
"Come on, Sarah," their leader shouted in a heavy New York accent. 
He was trying to sound fatherly and patient, but instead sounded 
anxious and not very bright. "It'll be a lot better for you if you just 
come out now. We're tickling Mitzi right now and she's going to tell 
us where the master key is, and once we get that we'll come in and 
you'll get ad-dition-al pun-ish-ment."
"God," Sarah whispered to me, "these dorks think I'm just 
playing hard-to-get. Hope they enjoy it."
"Give the word and I'll shoo them off," I said again.
"Wouldn't help. I have to deal with this myself. Don't be so 
mach."
"Sorry. Sometimes it works to be