Krupp answered immediately. "So you mean to say that the right hemisphere is the source of what I call the inner Law, and that rather than being a Law per se it is merely a set of inclinations rooted in past experience which tells the left hemisphere what it should do."
   "That's right– in advanced, conscious people. In primitive unconscious bicameral people, it would verbally speak to the left hemisphere, coming as a voice from nowhere in times of decision. The left hemisphere would be unable to do otherwise. There would be no decision at all– so you would have perfect adherence to the Law of the right hemisphere voice, absolute autonomy, though the voice would be attributed to gods or angels."
   Krupp nodded all the way through this, squinting at Klein. "You're one of those, eh?" he asked. "I've never been convinced by Jaynes' theory myself, though he has some interesting points about metaphors. I don't think an ignorant carpenter like Jesus had all that flawless theology pumped into the left half of his brain by stray neural currents." He thought about it for a moment. "Though it would be a lot quieter around here if everyone were carrying his stereo around in his skull."
   "Jesus," said Ephraim Klein, "you don't believe in God, do you? You?"
   "Well, I don't want to spend too much time on this freshman material, uh– what's your name? Ezekiel? Ephraim. But you ought to grapple sometime with the fact that this materialistic monism of yours is self-refuting and thus totally bankrupt. I guess it's attractive to someone who's just discovered he's an intellectual– sure was to me thirty years ago– but sometime you've got to stop boxing yourself in with this intellectual hubris."
   Klein nearly rocketed from his chair and for a moment I said nothing. He was bolt upright, supporting his weight on i one fist thrust down between his thighs into the seat, chewing deeply on his lower lip and staring, to use a Krupp ~ phrase, "like a coon on the runway." "Non sequitur! Ad hominem!" he cried.
   "I know, I know. Tell you what. Stick around and I'll listen to your Latin afterward, we're losing our audience." Krupp began looking for a new questioner. From the back of the hall came the sound of a fold-down seat bounding back up into position, and we turned to make out the ragged figure of Bert Nix.
   "Krupp cuts a fart! The sphinxter cannot hold!" he bellowed hoarsely, and sat back down again Krupp mainly ignored this, as his aides strode up the aisle to show Mr. Nix where the exit was and turned his attention to the next questioner, a tall redheaded SUBbie who accused Krupp of accepting bribes to let wealthy idiots into the law school. Red added, "I keep asking you this question, Septimius, and you've never answered it yet. When are you going to pay some attention to my question?"
   Krupp looked disgusted and puffed rapidly, staring at him coldly. Bert Nix paused in the doorway to shout: "My journey is o'er rocks & Mountains, not in pleasant vales; I must not sleep nor rest because of madness & dismay."
   "Yeah," said Krupp, "and I give you the same answer every time, too. I didn't do that. There's no evidence I did. What more can I say? I genuinely want to satisfy you."
   "You just keep slinging the same bullshit!" shouted the SUBbie, and slammed back down into his seat.
   Casimir Radon listened to these exchanges with consuming interest. This was what he had dreamed of finding at college: small lectures on pure ideas from the president of the university, with discussion afterward. That the SUBbies had disrupted it with a pie-throwing made him sick; he had stared at them through a haze of anger for the last part of the meeting. Had he been sitting by the side door he could have tripped that bastard. Which would have been good, because Sarah Jane Johnson was sitting there three rows in front of him, totally unaware of his existence as usual.
   Sarah's entrance, several minutes before the start of the lecture, had thrown Casimir into a titanic intellectual struggle. He now had to decide whether or not to say "hi" to her. After all, they had had a date, if you could call stammering in the Megapub for two hours a date. Later he had realized how dull it must have been for her, and was profoundly mortified. Now Sarah was sitting just twenty feet away, and he hated to disrupt her thoughts by just crashing in uninvited; better for her not to know he was there. But in case she happened to notice him, and wondered why he hadn't said "hi," he made up a story: he had come in late through the back doors.
   He also wanted to ask Krupp a question, a dazzling and perceptive question that would take fifteen minutes to ask, but he couldn't think of one. This was regrettable, because Krupp was a man he wanted to know, and he needed to impress him before making his sales pitch for the mass driver.
   At the same time, he was working on a grandiose plan for gathering damaging information on the university, but this seemed stupid; seen from this lecture hall, American Megaversity looked pretty much the way it had in the recruiting literature. He would continue with Project Spike until it gave him satisfaction. Whether or not he released the information depended on what happened at the Big U between now and then.
   Sarah's voice sounded in one ear. "Casimir. Earth to Casimir. Come in, Casimir Radon." Shocked and suddenly breathless, he sat up, looking astonished.
   "Oh," he said casually. "Sarah. Hi. How're you doing?" Fine," she answered, "didn't you see me?"
   Eventually they went into the hallway, where S. S. Krupp was down to the last inch of his cigar and having a complicated discussion with Ephraim Klein. His aides stood to the sides brushing hairs off their suits, various alien-looking philosophy majors listened intently and I leaned against a nearby wall watching it all, "Well, why didn't you say so?" Krupp was saying. "You're a Jaynesian and a materialistic monist. In which case you've got no reason to believe anything you think, because anything you think is just a predetermined neural event which can't be considered true or logical. Self-refuting, son. Think about it."
   "But now you've gotten off on a totally different argument!" cried Klein. "Even if we presume dualism, you've got to admit that intellectual processes reflect neural events in some way." "Well, sure."
   "Right! And since the bicameral mind theory explains human behavior so well, there's no reason, even if you are a dualist, to reject it."
   "In some cases, okay," said Krupp, "but that doesn't support your original proposition, which is that Kant was just trying to rationalize brain events through some kind of semantic necromancy."
   "Yes it does!"
   "Hell no it doesn't."
   "Yes it does!"
   "No it doesn't. Sarah!" said Krupp warmly. He shook her hand, and the philosophy majors, seeing that the intelligent part of the conversation was done, vaporized. "Glad you could come tonight."
   "Hello, President Krupp. I wish you'd do this more often."
   "Wait a minute," yelled Klein, "I just figured out how to reconcile Western religion and the bicameral mind."
   "Well, take some notes quick, son, there's other people here, well get to it. Who's your date, Sarah?"
   "This is Casimir Radon," said Sarah proudly, as Casimir reflexively shoved out his right hand.
   "Well! That's fine," said Krupp. "That's two conversations I have to finish now. If we bring Bud here along with us to keep things from getting out of hand we ought to be safe."
   "Look out. I'm not the diplomat you're hoping I am," I mumbled, not knowing what I was expected to say.
   "What say we go down to the Faculty Pub and have some brews? I'm buying."
   Our party got quite a few stares in the Faculty Pub. The three students were not even supposed to be in the place, but the bouncer wasn't very keen on asking Mr. Krupp's guests to show their IDs. This place bore the same relation to the Megapub as Canterbury Cathedral to a parking ramp. The walls were covered with wood that looked five inches thick, the floor was bottomless carpet and the tables were spotless slabs of rich solid wood. Enough armaments were nailed to the walls to defend a small medieval castle, and ancient portraits of the fat and pompous were interspersed with infinitely detailed coats of arms. The President ordered a pitcher of Guinness and chose a booth near the corner.
   Ephraim had been talking the entire way. "So if you were the religious type, you know, you could say that the right side of the brain is the 'spiritual' side, the part that comes into contact with spiritual influences or God or whatever– it has a dimension that protrudes into the spiritual plane, if you want to look at it that way– while the left half is monistic and nonspiritual and mechanical. We conscious unicamerals accept the spiritual information coming in from the right side mixed in subtly with the natural inputs. But a bicameral person would receive that information in the form of a voice from nowhere which spoke with great authority. Now, that doesn't contradict the biblical accounts of the prophets– it merely gives us a new basis for their interpretation by suggesting that their communication with the Deity was done subconsciously by a particular hemisphere of the brain."
   Krupp thought that was very good. Sarah and Casimir listened politely. Eventually, though, the conversation worked its way around to the subject of the mass driver.
   "Tell me exactly why this university should fund your project there, Casimir," said Krupp, and watched expectantly.
   "Well, it's a good idea."
   "Why?"
   "Because its relevant and we the people who do it will learn stuff from it."
   "Like what?"
   "Oh, electronics building things practical stuff."
   "Can't they already learn that from doing conventional research under the supervision of the faculty."
   "Yeah, I guess they can."
   "So that leaves only the rationale that it is relevant, which I don't deny but I don't see why it's more relevant than a faculty research project."
   "Well, mass drivers could be very important someday!"
   Krupp shook his head. "Sure, I don't deny that. There are all kinds of relevant things which could be very important someday. What I need to be shown is how funding of your project would he consistent with the basic mission of a great institution of higher learning. You see? We're talking basic principles here."
   Casimir had removed his glasses in the dim light, and his strangely naked-looking eyes darted uncertainly around the tabletop. "Well"
   "Aw, shit, it's obvious!" shouted Ephraim Klein, drawing looks from everyone in the pub. "This university, let's face it, is for average people. The smart people from around here go to the Ivy League, right? So American Megaversity doesn't get many of the bright people the way, say, a Big Ten university would. But there are some very bright people here, for whatever reasons. They get frustrated in this environment because the university is tailored for averagely bright types and there is very little provision for the extra-talented. So in order to fulfill the basic mission of allowing all corners to realize their full potential– to avoid stultifying the best minds here– you have to make allowances for them, recognize their special creativity by giving them more freedom and self-direction than the typical student has. This is your chance to have something you can point to as an example of the opportunities here for people of all levels of ability."
   Krupp listened intently through this, lightly tapping the edge of a potato chip on the table. When Klein finally stopped, he nodded for a while.
   "Yep. Yeah, I'd say you have an excellent point there, Isaiah. Casimir, looks as though you're going to get your funding." He raised an eyebrow.
   Casimir stood up, yelled "Great!" and pumped Krupp's hand. "This is a great investment. When this thing is done it will be the most incredible machine you've ever seen. There's no end to what you can do with a mass driver."
   There was a commotion behind Krupp, and suddenly, larger than life, standing on the bench in the next booth down, Bert Nix had risen to his full bedraggled height and was suspending a heavy broadsword (stolen from a suit of armor by the restroom) over Krupp's head. "O fortunate Damocles, thy reign began and ended with the same dinner!"
   After Krupp saw who it was he turned back around without response. His two aides staggered off their barstools across the room and charged over to grab the sword from Bert Nix's hand. He had held it by the middle of the blade, which made it seem considerably less threatening, but the aides didn't necessarily see it this way and were not as gentle in showing Mr. Nix out as they could have been. He was docile except for some cheerful obscenities; but as he was dragged past a prominent painting, he pulled away and pointed to it. "Don't you think we have the same nose?" he asked, and soon was out the door.
   Krupp got up and brought the conversation to a quick close. After distributing cigars to Ephraim and Casimir and me, he left. Finding ourselves in an exhilarated mood and with what amounted to a free ticket to the Faculty Pub, we stayed long enough to close it down.
   Earlier, however, on his fifth trip to the men's room, Casimir stopped to look at the plaque under the portrait to which Bert Nix had pointed. "WILBERFORCE PERTINAX RUSHFORTH-GREATHOUSE, 1799– 1862, BENEFACTOR, GREATHOUSE CHAPEL AND ORGAN." Casimir tried to focus on the face. As a matter of fact, the Roman nose did resemble Bert Nix's; they might be distant relatives. It was queer that a derelict, who couldn't spend that much time in the Faculty Pub, would notice this quickly enough to point it out. But Bert Nix's mind ran along mysterious paths. Casimir retrieved the broadsword from where it had fallen, and laughingly slapped it down on the bar as a deposit for the fourth pitcher of Dark. The bartender regarded Casimir with mild alarm, and Casimir considered, for a moment, carrying a sword all the time, a la Fred Fine. But as he observed to us, why carry a sword when you own a mass driver?
   "Casimir?"
   "Mmmmm. Huh?"
   "You asleep?"
   "No."
   "You want to talk?"
   "Okay."
   "Thanks for letting me sleep here."
   "No problem. Anytime."
   "Does this bother you?"
   "You sleeping here? Nah."
   "You seemed kind of bothered about something."
   "No. It's really fine, Sarah. I don't care."
   "If it'd make you feel better, I can go back and sleep in my room. I just didn't feel like a half-hour elevator hassle, and my wing is likely to be noisy."
   "I know. All that barf on the floors, rowdy people, sticky beer crud all over the place. I don't blame you. It's perfectly reasonable to stay at someone's place at a time like this."
   "I get the impression you have something you're not saying. Do you want to talk about it?"
   The pile of sheets and blankets that was Casimir moved around, and he leaned up on one elbow and peered down at her. The light shining in from the opposite tower made his wide eyes just barely visible. She knew something was wrong with him, but she also knew better than to try to imagine what was going on inside Casimir Radon's mind.
   "Why should I have something on my mind?"
   "Well, I don't see anything unusual about my staying here, but a lot of people would, and you seemed uptight."
   "Oh, you're talking about sex? Oh, no. No problem." His voice was tense and hurried.
   "So what's bothering you?"
   For a while there was just ragged breathing from atop the bed, and then he spoke again. "You're going to think this is stupid, because I know you're a Women's Libber, but it really bothers me that you're on the floor in a sleeping bag while I'm up here in a bed. That bothers me."
   Sarah laughed. "Don't worry, Casimir. I'm not going to beat you up for it."
   "Good. Let's trade places, then."
   "If you insist." Within a few seconds they had traded places and Sarah was up in a warm bed that smelled of mothballs and mildew. They lay there for an hour.
   "Sarah?"
   "Huh?"
   "I want to talk to you."
   "What?"
   "I lied. I want to sleep with you so bad it's killing me. Oh, Jeez. I love you. A lot."
   "Oh, damn. I knew it. I was afraid of this. I'm sorry."
   "No, don't be. My fault. I'm really, really sorry."
   "Should I leave? Do you want me out?"

   "No. I want you to sleep with me," he said, as though this answer was obvious.
   "How long have you been thinking about me this way?"
   "Since we met the first time."
   "Really? Casimir! Why? We didn't even know each other!"
   "What does that have to do with it?" He sounded genuinely mystified.
   "I think we've got a basic difference in the way we think about sex, Casimir." She had forgotten how they were when it came to this sort of thing.
   "What does that mean? Did you ever think about me that way?"
   "Not really."
   Casimir sucked in his breath and flopped back down.
   "Now, look, don't take it that way. Casimir, I hardly know you. We've only had one or two good conversations. Look, Casimir, I only think about sex every one or two days– it's not a big topic with me right now."
   "Jeez. Are you okay? Did you have a bad experience?" "Don't put me on the defensive. Casimir, our friendship has been just fine as it is. Why should I fantasize about what a friendship might turn into, when the friendship is fine as is? You've got to live in the real world, Casimir."
   "What's wrong with me?"
   The poor guy just did not understand at all. There was no way to help him; Sarah went ahead and spoke her lines.
   "Nothing's wrong with you. You're fine."
   "Then what is the problem?"
   "Look. I sleep with people because there's nothing wrong with them. I don't fantasize about relationships that will never exist. We're fine as we are. Sex would just mess it up. We have a good friendship, Casimir. Don't screw it up by thinking unrealistically."

   They sat in the dark for a while. Casimir was being open-minded, which was
   good, but still had trouble catching on. "It's none of my business, but just
   out of curiosity, do you like sex?"
   "Definitely. It's a blast with the right person."
   "I'm just not the right person, huh?"
   "I've already answered that six times." She considered telling him about herself and Dex Fresser in high school. In ways– especially in appearance– Casimir was similar to Dex. The thing with Dex was a perfect example of what happened when a man got completely divorced from reality. But Sarah didn't want the Dex story to get around, and she supposed that Casimir would be horrified by this high school saga of sex and drugs.
   "I think I'll do my laundry now, since I'm up," she said.
   "I'll walk you home."
   A few minutes later they emerged into a hall as bright as the interior of a small sun. The dregs of a party in the Social Lounge examined them as they awaited an elevator, and Sarah was bothered by what they were assuming. Maybe it would boost Casimir's rep among his neighbors.
   An elevator opened and fifty gallons of water poured into the lobby. Someone had filled a garbage can with water, tilted it up on one corner just inside the elevator, held it in place as the doors closed, and pulled his hand out at the last minute so that it leaned against the inside of the doors. Not greatly surprised, Sarah and Casimir stepped back to let the water swirl around their feet, then threw the garbage can into the lobby and boarded the elevator.
   "That's the nice thing about this time of day," said Casimir. "Easy to get elevators."
   As they made their way toward the Castle in the Air, they spoke mostly of Casimir's mass driver. With the new funding and with the assistance of Virgil, it was moving along quite well. Casimir repeatedly acknowledged his debt to Ephraim for having done the talking.
   They took an E Tower elevator up to the Castle in the Air. A nine-leaved marijuana frond was scotch-taped over the number 13 on the elevator panel so that it would light up symbolically when that floor was passed. In the corridors of the Castle the Terrorists were still running wild and hurling their custom Big Wheel Frisbees with great violence.
   Casimir had never seen Sarah's room. He stood shyly outside as she walked into the darkness. "The light?" he said. She switched on her table lamp.
   "Oh." He entered uncertainly, swiveling his bottle-bottom glasses toward the wall. Conscious of being in an illegally painted room, he shut the door, then removed his glasses and let them hang around his neck on their safety cord. Without them, Sarah thought he looked rather old, sensitive, and human. He rubbed his stubble and blinked at the forest with a sort of awed amusement. By now it was very detailed.
   "Isotropic."
   "You saw what?"
   "Isotropic. This forest is isotropic It s the same in all directions. It doesn't tend in any way. A real forest is anisotropic thicker on the bottom thinner on the top. This doesn't grow in any direction it just is."
   She sighed. "Whatever you like."
   "Why? What's it for?"
   "Well– what's your mass driver for?"
   "Sanity."
   "You've got your mass driver. I've got this."
   He looked at her in the same way he had been staring at the forest. "Wow," he said, "I think I get it."
   "Don't go overboard on this," she said, "but how would you like to attend something dreadful called Fantasy Island Nite?"

December
   So nervous was Ephraim Klein, so primed for flight or combat, that he barely felt his suitcases in his hands as he carried them toward his room. What awaited him? He had left a week ago for Thanksgiving vacation. He had waited as long as he could– but not long enough to outwait John Wesley Fenrick and three of his ugly punker friends, who leered hungrily at him as he walked out. The question was not whether a prank had been played, but how bad it was going to be. Hyperventilating with anticipation, he stopped before the door. The cracks all the way around its edges had been sealed with heavy grey duct tape. This prank did not rely on surprise. He pressed his ear to the door, but all he could hear was a familiar chunka-chunka-chunk. With great care he peeled back a bit of tape.
   Nothing poured out. Standing to the side, he unlocked the door with surgical care. There was a cracking sound as the tape peeled away under his impetus. Finally he kicked it fully open, waited for a moment, then stepped around to look inside.
   He could see nothing. He took another step and then, only then, was enveloped in a cloud of rancid cheap cigar smoke that oozed out the doorway like a moribund genie under the propulsion of the Go Big Red Fan.
   Incandescently furious, he retreated to the bathroom and wet a T-shirt to put over his face. Thus protected he strode squinting down the foggy hallway into the lifeless room.
   The only remaining possessions of John Wesley Fenrick's were the Go Big Red Fan and most of a jumbo roll of foil. He had moved out of the room and then covered his half of the room with the foil, then spread out on it what must have been several hundred generic cigars– it must have taken half an hour just to light them. The cigars had all burned away to ash, which had been whipped into a blizzard by the Go Big Red Fan on its slow creep across the floor to Ephraim's side. The room now looked like Yakima after Mount Saint Helens. The Fan had ground to a halt against a large potted plant of Ephraim's and for the rest of the week had sat there chunk-ing mindlessly.
   He checked a record. To his relief, the ash had not penetrated to the grooves. It had penetrated everything else, though, and even the Rules had taken on a brown parchmentlike tinge. Ephraim Klein took little comfort in the fact that his ex-roommate had not broken any of them.
   He cranked open the vent window, set the Go Big Red Fan into it, cleared ash from his chair, and sat down to think.
   Klein preferred to live a controlled life. He never liked to pull out all the stops until the final chord. But Fenrick had forced him to turn revenge into a major project and Klein did not plan to fail. He began to tidy his room, and to unleash his imagination on John Wesley Fenrick.
   "Sarah?"
   "Huh?"
   "Did I wake you up?"
   "No. Hi."
   "Let's talk."
   "Sure." Sarah rolled over on her stomach and propped ~ herself up on her elbows.
   "I hope you're comfortable sleeping down there."
   "Listen. Anyplace is more comfortable than my room when a party's going on above it."
   "I don't mind if you want to share a bed with me Hyacinth. My sister and I slept together until I was eleven and she was twelve."
   "Thanks. But I didn't decide to sleep down here because I don't like you, Sarah."
   "Well, that's nice. I guess it's a little small for two." There was a long silence. Hyacinth sat up on her sleeping bag, her crossed legs stretching out her nightgown to make a faint white diamond in the darkness of the room. Then, soundlessly, she got up and climbed into bed with Sarah. Sarah slid back against the wall to make room, and after much giggling, rolling around, rearrangement of covers and careful placement of limbs they managed to find comfortable positions.
   "Too hot," said Hyacinth, and got up again. She opened the window and a cold wind blew into the room. She scampered back and dove in next to Sarah.
   "Comfy?" said Hyacinth.
   "Yeah. Mmm. Very."
   "Really?" said Hyacinth skeptically. "More than before? Not just physically. You don't feel awkward, being tangled up with me like this?"
   "Not really," said Sarah dreamily. "It's kind of pleasant. It's just, you know, warm, and kind of comforting to have someone else around. I like you, you like me, why should it be awkward?"
   "Would it be any different if I told you I was a lesbian?" Sarah came wide awake but did not move. With one eye she gazed into the darkness above the soft white horizon of Hyacinth's shoulder, on which she had laid her head.
   "And that I was hoping we could do other nice things to each other? If you feel inspired to, that is." She gently, almost imperceptibly, stroked Sarah's hair. Sarah's heart was pumping rhythmically.
   "I wish you'd say something," said Hyacinth. "Are you not sure how you feel, or are you paralyzed with terror?"
   Sarah laughed softly and felt herself relaxing. "I'm pretty naive about this kind of thing. I mean, I don't think about it a lot. I sort of thought you might be. Is Lucy?"
   "Yes. Nowadays we don't sleep together that much. Sarah, do you want me to sleep on the floor?"
   Sarah thought about it but not very seriously. The room was pleasantly cold now and the closeness of her friend was something she had not felt in a very long time. "Of course not. This is great. I haven't slept with anyone in a while– a man, I mean. Sleeping with someone is one of my favorite things. But it's different with men. Not quite as… sweet."
   "That's for sure."
   "Why don't you stay a while?"
   "That'd be nice."
   "Do you mind if we don't do anything?" At this they laughed loudly, and that answered the question.
   "But we are doing something you know" added Hyacinth later. "Your nose is in my breast. You're stroking my shoulder. I'm afraid that all counts."
   "Oh. Gosh. Does that make me a lesbian?"
   "Oh, I don't know. I guess you're off to a promising start."
   "Hmmm. Doesn't feel like being a lesbian."
   Hyacinth squeezed Sarah tight. "Look, honey, don't worry about it. This is just great as it is. I just wanted you to know the opportunity was there. Okay?"
   "Okay."
   "Want to go to sleep?"
   "Take it easy, what's your hurry?"
   Last Night was the night of the blue towers. A week before, the towers had glowed uniformly yellow as forty-two thousand students sat beneath their desk lamps and studied for finals. The next night, blue had replaced yellow here and there, as a few lucky ones, finished with their finals, switched on their TVs. This night, all eight towers were studded with blue, and whole patches of the Plex flickered in unison with the popular shows. The beer trucks were busy all day long down at the access lot, rolling kegs up the ramps to the Brew King in the Mall, whence they were dispersed in canvas carts and two-wheelers and Radio Flyers to rooms and lounges all over the Plex. As night fell and the last students came screaming in from their finals, suitcases full of dope moved through the Main Entrance and were quickly fragmented and distributed throughout the towers for quick combustion. By dinnertime the faucets ran cold water only as thousands lined up by the shower stalls, and the Caf was a desert as most students ate at restaurants or parties. After dark, spotlights and lasers crisscrossed the walls as partying students shone them into other towers, and when the Big Wheel sign blazed into life, bands of Big-Wheel-worshiping Terrorists all over the Plex launched a commemorative fireworks barrage that sent echoes crackling back and forth among the towers like bumper pool balls, punctuating the roar of the warring stereos.
   By 10:00 the parties were just warming up. At 10:30 the rumor circulated that a special police squad sent by S. S. Krupp was touring the Plex to bust up parties. At 11:06 a keg was thrown from A24N and exploded on the Turnpike, backing up traffic for an hour with a twelve-car chain-reaction smashup. By 11:30 forty students had been admitted to the Infirmary with broken noses, split cheeks and severe inebriation, and it was beginning to look as though the official estimate of one death from overintoxication and one from accident might be a little low. The Rape/Assault/Crisis Line handled a call every fifteen minutes.
   Precisely at 11:40:00 an unknown, uninvited, very clumsy student walked behind John Wesley Fenrick's chair at the big E31E end-of-semester bash and tripped, spilling a strawberry malt all over Fenrick's spiky blond hair.
   John Wesley Fenrick was in the shower with very hot water spraying onto his head to dissolve the sticky malt crud, dancing around loosely to a tune in his head and playing the air guitar. He wondered whether the malt had been the work of Ephraim Klein. This, however, was impossible; his new room and number were unlisted and you couldn't follow people home in an elevator. The only way for Klein to find him was by a freak of chance, or by bribing an administration person with access to the computer– very unlikely. Besides, a malt on the head was a bush-league retaliation even for a quiet little harpsichord-playing New Jersey fart like Klein, considering what Fenrick had so brilliantly accomplished.
   What made it even greater was that the administration had treated it like a hilarious college prank, a "concrete expression of malfunction in the cohabitant interaction, intended only as nonviolent emotional expression." Though they were after him to pay Klein's cleaning bills, Fenrick's brother was a lawyer and he knew they wouldn't push it in court. Even if they did, shit, he was going to be pulling down forty K in six months! A small price for triumph.
   With a snarl of disgust, Fenrick dumped another dose of honey-beer-aloe-grub-treebark shampoo on his hair, finding that the tenacious malt substance still had not come off. What's in this crap? Fenrick thought. Fuck up your stomach, for sure.
   Throughout E Tower, scores of Ephraim Klein's friends sat in the great shiny microwave bathrooms watching the Channel 25 Late Night Eyewitness InstaAction InvestiNews. Even during the most ghastly stories this program sounded like an encounter session among five recently canceled sitcom actors and developmentally disabled hairdressers' models. The weather, well, it was just as bad, but was relieved by its very bizarreness. The weatherman, a buffoon who knew nothing about weather and didn't care, was named Marvin DuZan the Weatherman and would broadcast in a negligee if it boosted ratings; his other gimmick was to tell an abominable joke at the conclusion of each forecast. After the devastating punchline was delivered, the picture of the guffawing pseudometeorologist and his writhing colleagues would be replaced by an animated short in which a crazy-looking bird tried to smash a tortoise over the head with a sledgehammer. At the last moment the tortoise would creep forward, causing the blow to rebound off his shell and crash back into the cranium of the bird. The bird would then assume a glazed expression and vibrate around in circles, much like a chair in Klein's room during the "Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor," finally to collapse at the feet of the smiling turtle, who would then peer slyly at the audience and wiggle his eyebrow ridges.
   During Marvin DuZan's forecast on Last Night, Ephraim Klein was standing outside his ex-roomie's shower stall, watching a portable TV and squirting Hyper Stik brand Humonga-Glue into the latch of the stall's door. He had turned down the volume, of course, and it seemed just as well, since from the reactions of the InvestiNews Strike Force (and the cameramen, who were always visible on the high-tech News Nexus set) it appeared that the joke tonight was a real turd. As the camera zoomed in on the goonishly beaming face of Marvin DuZan, Ephraim Klein's grip on the handles of two nearby urinals tightened and his heart beat wildly, as did the grips and the hearts of a small army of friends and hastily recruited deputies in many other E Tower bathrooms. Bird and Tortoise appeared, the hammer was brandished, and smash!
   As the hammer rebounded on the bird's head, scores of toilets throughout E Tower were flushed, causing a vacuum so sharp that pipes bent and tore and snapped and cold water ceased to flow. There was a short pause, and then a bloodcurdling scream emanated from Fenrick's shower stall as clouds of live steam burst out the top. After some fruitless handle-yanking and Plexiglass-banging, the steam was followed by Fenrick himself, who fell ungainly to the floor with a crisp splat and shook his head in pain as Ephraim Klein escaped with his TV. In his haste Fenrick had lacerated his scalp on the steel showerhead, and as he pawed at his face to clear away suds and blood he was distantly conscious of a cold draft that irritated his parboiled skin, and a familiar chunka-chunka-chunk that could be heard above the sounds of gasping pipes and white water. Finally prying one eye open, he looked into the wind to see it: the Go Big Red Fan, complacently revolving in front of his stall, set on HI and still somewhat gray with cigar ash. Unfortunately for John Wesley Fenrick, he did not soon enough see the puddle of water which surrounded him, and which was rapidly expanding toward The base of the old and poorly insulated Fan.
   This was also quite an evening for E17S. Ever since joining the Terrorists as the Flame Squad Faction, this all-male wing had suffered from the stigma of being mere copies of the Big Wheel Men, Cowboys and Droogs of E13. Tonight that was to change. The Christmas tree had been purchased three weeks ago, left in a shower until the fireproofing compound was washed away, and hung over a hot-air vent in the storage room; it was now a lovely shade of incendiary brown. They took it up to E3 1, the top floor, seized an elevator, and stuffed the tree inside. Someone pressed all the buttons for floors 30 through 6 while others squirted lighter fluid over the tree's dessicated boughs.
   Only one match was required. The door slid shut just as the smoke and flames began to billow forth, and with a cheer and a yell the Flame Squad Faction began to celebrate.
   Twenty-four floors below, Virgil and I were having a few slow ones in my suite. I had no time for partying because I was preparing for a long drive home to Atlanta. Virgil happened to be wandering the Plex that night, looking in on various people, and had paused for a while at my place. Things were pretty quiet– as they generally had been since John Wesley Fenrick had left– and except for the insistent and inevitable bass beat, the wing was peaceful.
   The fire alarm rang just before midnight. We cursed fluently and looked out my door to see what was up. As faculty-in-residence I didn't have to scurry out for every bogus fire drill, but it seemed prudent to check for smoke. The smoke was heavy when we opened the door, and we smelled the filthy odor of burning plastic. The source of the flame was near my room: one of the elevators, which had automatically stopped and opened once the fire alarm was triggered. I put a rag over my mouth and headed for the fire hose down the hall. Meanwhile Virgil prepared to soak some towels in my sink.
   Neither of us got any water. My fire hose valve just sucked air and howled.
   "God Almighty," Virgil called through the smoke. "Somebody pulled a Big Flush." He came out and joined the people running for the fire stairs. "No 'vators during fires so Ill have to take the stairs. I've got to get the parallel pipe system working."
   "The what?"
   "Parallel pipes," said Virgil, skipping into the stairwell. "Hang on! Find a keg! The architects weren't totally stupid!" And he was gone down the stairs.
   I locked my door in case of looting and went off in search of a keg. Naturally there was a superabundance that night, and with some help from the too-drunk-to-be-scared owners I hauled it to the lobby and began to pump clouds of generic light into the flaming Christmas tree.
   Casimir Radon was in Sharon's lab, washing out a beaker. This was merely the first step of the Project Spike glassware procedure, which involved attack by two different alcohols and three different concentrated acid mixtures, but he was in no hurry. For him Christmas had started the day before. With Virgil's help he could get into this lab throughout the vacation, and that meant plenty of time to work on Project Spike, build the mass driver and suffer as he thought about Sarah.
   He was annoyed but not exasperated when the water stopped flowing. There was a gulp in the tapstream, followed by a hefty KLONK as the faucet handle jerked itself from his grasp. The flow of water stopped, and an ominous gurgling, sucking noise came from the faucet, like an entire municipal water system flushing its last. He listened as the symphony of hydraulic sound effects grew and spread to the dozens of pipes lining the lab's ceiling, the knocks and gurgles and hisses weaving together as though the pipes were having a wild Christmas party of their own. But Casimir was tired, and fairly absentminded to boot, and he shrugged it off as yet another example of the infinite variety of building and design defects in the Plex. The distilled water tap still worked, so he used it. Despite the drudgery of the task and his problems with Sarah, Casimir wore a little smile on his long unshaven face. Project Spike had worked.
   He had been sampling Cafeteria food for three weeks, and until tonight had come up with nothing. Turkey Quiche, Beef Pot Pies, Lefto Lasagne, Estonian Pasties, and even Deep-Fried Chicken Livers had drawn blanks, and Casimir had begun to wonder whether it was a waste of time. Then came Savory Meatloaf Night, an event which occurred every three weeks or so; despite the efforts of advanced minds such as Virgil's, no one had ever discerned any reliable pattern which might predict when this dish was to be served. Today, of course, the last of the semester, Savory Meatloaf Night had struck and Casimir had craftily smuggled a slice out in his sock (the Cafeteria exit guards could afford to take it easy on Savory Meatloaf Night).

   Not more than fifteen minutes ago, as he had been irradiating the next batch of rat poison, the computer terminal had zipped into life with the results of the analysis: high levels of Carbon– 14! There were rats in the meatloaf! That was a triumph for Casimir. It seemed likely to be a secret triumph, though. Sarah would never understand why he was doing this. Casimir wasn't even sure he understood it himself. S. S. Krupp had funded his mass driver, so why should he wish to damage the university now? He suspected that Project Spike was simply a challenge, an opportunity to prove that he was clever and self-sufficient in a sea of idiocy. He had accomplished that, but as a political tactic it was still pretty dumb. Sarah would certainly think so.
   Sarah had also thought it was dumb when he had decided to work in the lab all night instead of going to Fantasy Island Nite. She was right on that issue too, perhaps, but Casimir loathed parties of all sorts and would use any excuse to avoid one. Hence he was here on the bottom of the Plex, washing out rat-liver scum, while she was far above, dancing in the clown costume she had shown him– probably having a wonderful time as handsome Terrorists salivated on her.
   He observed he was leaning on the counter staring at the wall as though it were a screen beaming him live coverage of Sarah at the party. Maybe he would leave now, retaining a lab coat as a costume, and go up and surprise Sarah.
   Meanwhile water was squirting out of the wall, forcing its way through the cracks between the panels, running out from under the baseboards and trickling through the grommets in the sides of Casimir's tennis shoes. Abruptly brought back into the here and now, he looked around half-dazed and started unplugging things and moving them to higher ground. What the hell was happening? A broken pipe? He figured that if there was enough water pressure on the 31st floor to run a fire hose, the pressure down here must be phenomenal. This was going to be a hell of a mess.
   Water was now trickling through old nail holes high on the wall. Casimir covered the computer terminal with plastic and then ran out to search for B-men. They were not here now, of course– probably spreading rat poison or celebrating some Crotobaltislavonian radish festival.
   Across from Sharon's lab was a freight elevator closed off by a manually operated door. When he looked through its little window Casimir saw water falling down the shaft, and sparks spitting past. He got insulated gloves from the lab and hauled the door open. Several gallons of pent-up water rushed past his ankles and fell into the blackness. From below rose the-harsh wet odor of the sewers.
   The sparks issued from the electrical control box on the shaft wall. Once Casimir was sure there was no danger of fire or electrocution he left, leaving the doors open so that water could drain out of this bottom level of the Plex.
   Oh, God. The rat poison. It was only supposed to stay in the radiation source for a minute at a time! Casimir had put it in an hour ago, then simply forgotten about it once the results of the analysis had come in. The damn stuff must be glowing in the dark. He sloshed back into the lab.
   Water poured and squirted from the walls and ceiling everywhere he looked. He shielded his face from spray and walked through a wall of water toward the neutron source, a garbage can full of paraffin with the plutonium button at its center. Stopping to listen, he sensed that the slow ticking noise which had been coming from one wall had sped up and was growing louder. He stood petrified as it grew into a rumble, then a groan. then a scream– and the wall crashed open and a torrent rushed through the lab. An adjacent storage room had filled with water from a large broken pipe, and Casimir was now knocked to the floor by a torrent of Fiberglass panels, aluminum studs, and janitorial supplies. He rolled just in time to see the neutron source, buoyed on the rush of water, bob through the doorway and across the hall.
   Taking care not to be swept along, he made his way to the shaft and looked down. All was dark, but from far below, under the waterfall sound, he thought he heard a buzz, or a ringing: the sound of an alarm. Maybe his ears were ringing, and maybe it was a fire alarm above. Nauseated, he returned to the lab, sat on a table and awaited the B-men.
   Fantasy Island Nite was turning out to be not such a bad thing after all. Those Terrorists upstairs in their own lounge were making a lot of noise, but those down here on 12 were making an admirable effort to behave, per their agreement with the Airheads. Only this agreement had persuaded Sarah and Hyacinth to show up. It was potentially interesting, it was nice to be sociable once in a while and they could always leave if they didn't like it. Sarah wore a clown costume. This was her way of making fun of the fantasy theme of the party– most Airheads came as beauty queens or vamps– and had the extra advantage of making her totally unrecognizable. Hyacinth put together a smashing Fairy Godmother costume, as a joke only Sarah would get. Their plan was to drink so much it would become socially acceptable for them to dance together.
   While Sarah was working on the first stage of this plan she began g a lot of attention from three Terrorists. These three– ,a Cowboy, a Droog and a Commando– were obvious jerks, each one incensed that she would not reveal her name, but as long as they danced, fetched drinks and didn't try to converse they seemed like harmless fun. After a while she got a little boogied out, and withdrew from the action to look out over the city. Hyacinth had gone to visit another party and was expected back soon.
   Time twisted and she was no longer at the party; she was watching it from a place in her mind where she had not been for many years. She slid backward like an air hockey puck until she was high up in one corner of the room. The walls of the Plex fell away so that she could see in all directions at once.
   One of the picture windows had been replaced by a gate that opened to the sky. The gate was gaily festooned with shining pulsing color-blobs. All the other party-goers had lined up in front of it. On one side of the gate stood Mitzi, taking tickets; on the other, Mrs. Saritucci, checking off their names on a clipboard. Each Airhead-Terrorist who passed through stepped out and sat down on a long slippery-slide made of blue light, and squealed with delight as they zoomed earthward. Sarah could not see all the way to the slide's end, but she could see that, below, the Death Vortex had turned into a whirlpool of multicolored fire. Forests and towns and families whirled around and around before gurling down the center to disappear. The Vortex was ringed with hundreds of fire trucks whose crews halfheartedly sprayed their tiny jets of water into its middle.
   When Sarah looked beyond the whirlpool she saw in its light a shattered landscape of rubble and corpses, where bawling dirty people scrabbled about aimlessly and squinted into the fire-glow. Nothing more than dust, solitary bricks, cockroaches and jagged glass was there, though Sarah's vision swooped across it for a thousand miles and a thousand years.
   Beyond its distant edge was a nonlandscape: a milky white vacuum where choking black clouds of static grew, split, re-formed, hurled themselves against one another, clashed with horrible dry violence and abated to grow and form again. Its slowness and its dryness made it the most awful thing Sarah had ever seen. After five millennia, when she thought she was entirely lost and crazy, she saw a piece of broken glass. then a rivulet of blood. Following them, she found herself in the terrible landscape again, with the Plex on the horizon erupting like a volcano. Blue beams of light shot from its top and wrapped around her and sucked her back through the air into the building. But she could no longer find herself there. She was no longer in the Lounge. The Lounge had been vacant for centuries and only dust and yellowed party favors remained. Following footprints in the dust she came to the hallway– brightly lit, loud, filled with shouting students and bats. She flew straight down the hail until four dots at its end grew into four people and she could slow down and follow them. There were three men: a Cowboy and a Commando held the arms of a woman dressed as a clown, hurrying her down the hall, while a Droog walked ahead of them carrying a paper punch cup which glowed with a green light from within. Sarah closed her eyes to the glow and shook her head, and when she opened them again she was the clown-woman– though she did not want to be.
   They were in an elevator filled with black water that rose and crept warmly up Sarah's thighs. Swimming in the water were bad hidden things, so she kicked as well as she could. Her hands were held up above her head by men ten feet high, lost in the glare of the overhead light where it was too bright to look.
   Then they were on a floor that reminded Sarah of the broken landscape. On the wall a giant mouth was chewing vigorously, drooling on the floor and smacking its disgusting lips. The men threw her through it and followed behind.
   "I won't go down the slide," she protested, but they did not really care. Inside all was red and blue; a neon beer emblem burned in the window and licked her with its hot rays. There stood a giant in a football costume who wore the head of Tiny, leader of the Terrorists.
   "Is Dex here?" she said, more out of habit than anything. It would be like Dex to slip her some LSD. But then she knew this was a stupid question. She felt the door being locked behind her and saw the music turned up until it was purest ruby red, causing her body to turn into fragile glass. To move now would be to shatter and die.
   "Handle with care," she murmured, "I'm glass now," but the words just dribbled down the front of her costume. They were ripping her costume away. She squirmed but felt herself cracking horribly. The beer sign cast grotesque red and blue light on the transparent flesh of her thighs.
   She knew what was going to happen next. Somehow her mind connected it all in a straight line, before the idea was swept away by the internal storm. The worst thing in the world. She should have gone down the slide.
   She made an effort of will. The sound and the light went away, it was spring; grass and flowers and blue sky were all around and she was not about to be raped. She was eating raspberries on the banks of a creek. Out of curiosity she scratched at the air with her fingernail. Red and blue rays stabbed out into her skin again, and peeking all the way through for a moment she could see that they had not yet started.
   No wonder; they were moving in slow motion. Sarah would have to spend many hours waiting on the banks of the creek. She drew back into the sunshine. Perhaps she could live here forever and have a perfect life.
   When she slept, she dreamed of those dry, unending wars in the land of milky white. She knew it was all an illusion. She tore it away and came back to the room. She was not going to sleep through anything. She was not going to imagine anything that didn't exist.
   The sign was wavy and upside down now, reflected in a puddle of water on the floor.
   A Terrorist was in the corner twisting a faucet handle. Sarah stood up. Tiny turned toward her and smashed her across the face. She was on the floor again, and over there a Terrorist groped in the scintillating ocean of red and blue for the sign's power cord. He was screaming like an electric guitar now. He was trying to swim in the shallow lake of blood and bile.
   Sarah was thrown onto a bed. Her arms and legs flailed, and one heel found a Terrorist's kneecap. The Droog got on top of her, and because he was in slow motion she kicked him in the nuts. He curled up on top of her and she looked through his hair at the ceiling, which sputtered in the failing sign-light. Tiny was unwinding a long piece of rope and its thin tendrils floated around him like black smoke. She rolled half out from under the Droog and curled into a fetal position so he could not take her arms and legs. As she did she peered down through the transparent floor and saw the Airheads, plastered with grotesque makeup, drinking LSD from crystal goblets and cheering. But where was Hyacinth?
   Hyacinth was standing in the doorway. An extremely loud explosion seeped into her ears. Smoke filled the room, catching the hallway light and forming hundreds of 3-D images from Sarah's past life.
   Hyacinth's fairy godmother costume was changed, for now she wore heavy leather gloves over her white cloth gloves, and bulky ear protectors under her conical hat, and a pair of goggles beneath her milky-white veil. In her hands she carried a giant revolver. Sarah knew that under her dress, Hyacinth was made of strong young oakwood.
   Hyacinth took one step into the room and shrugged on the main light switch. Tiny stood in the center, staring. The man who had been swimming on the floor was dead. Another clasped his knee and screamed at the ceiling. Sarah laid her head down restfully and put her hands on her ears.
   Cones of fire were spurting from the front and back of Hyacinth's gun and her hands were snapping rhythmically up and down. Tiny had his hands on his chest, and as he walked backward toward the window the back of his football jersey bulged and fluttered like a loose sail, darkness splashing away from it. The electrical cord was between his legs. His steps shortened and he fell backward through the picture window. The cord and plug trailed slowly behind him and snapped out room and were gone. The noise was so immense that Sarah heard nothing until much later. The blasts were synchronized with the music's beat:
   WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM
   with each WHAM followed by a high whine that shrieked through until the next WHAM, so that when Tiny was gone there remained a terrible high tone that resonated between the walls of the room, far too loud for Sarah to stand, filling her awareness like the blowing of the Last Trumpet and tormenting the injured Terrorists, who cried out in it and wrapped their arms around their heads. The Droog on, top of Sarah was pulled slowly away and Hyacinth yanked Sarah to her feet. Sarah did not even move her legs as the smoky doorway twisted past her, the corridor walls with their Big Wheels rolled on by, the landings of the fire stair rushed up toward her from blackness and her soft bed drifted up to envelop her face. Hyacinth was above her, probing, rubbing, kissing her. She would not stop until Sarah was well again.
   Virgil used his master key eight times before attaining a dark, stained sub-sublevel of the Plex, where great water mains from the City entered from the depths and fed the giant pumps that pressurized the plumbing system overhead.
   In an uncharacteristic flash of foresightedness, the Plex's architects made allowances for the certainty that, once in a while, one group or another would flush hundreds of toilets simultaneously and damage the cold water system. So they installed two parallel, independent systems of main pipes to feed the distribution systems of the wings; to switch between them one need only close one set of valves and open another. This Virgil accomplished by grunting and straining at a few red iron wheels. Satisfied that things were settling back toward normal, he set out for Professor Sharon's old lab to see if Casimir Radon was still there.

* * *

   The Computing Center was not far away. Though it had many rooms, its heart was a cavernous square space with white walls and a white floor waxed to a thick glossy sheen. The white ceiling was composed of square fluorescent light panels in a checkerboard pattern. Practically all of the room was occupied by disc memory units: brown-and-blue cubes, spaced in a grid to form a seemingly endless matrix of six-foot aisles. At the center of the room was an open circle, and at the center of that area stood the Central Processing Unit of the Janus 64. A smooth triangular column five feet on a side and twelve feet high, it would have touched the ceiling except that above was a circular opening about forty feet across, encircled by a railing so that observers could stand and look into the core of the Computing Center.
   Around the CPU were a few other large machines: secondary computers to organize the tasks being fed to the Janus 64, array processors, high-speed laser printers, a central control panel and the like. But closest of all was the Operator's Station, a single video terminal, and tonight the operator was Consuela Gorm, high priestess of MARS. She had volunteered to do the job on this night of partying, when the only people still using the computer in the adjacent Terminal Room were the goners, the hopelessly addicted hackers who had nothing else to live for.
   The only sounds were the whine of the refrigeration units, which drew away the heat thrown off by the tightly packed components of the Janus 64; the high hum of the whirling memory discs, multiplied by hundreds; and the pitter-pat of Consuela's fingertips across the keypad of the Operator's Station. She was hunkered down there, staring hypnotized into the screen, and behind her Fred Fine stood thin and straight as the CPU itself. Tonight they were testing
   Shekondar Mark V, their state-of-the-art Sewers & Serpents simulation program.
   Now, at a few minutes before midnight, they had worked out the few remaining
   bugs and they stood transfixed as their program did exactly what it was
   supposed to.
   "Looks like a routine adventure," mumbled Consuela.
   "But it looks like Shekondar might have generated a werewolf colony in this party's vicinity. I'm seeing a lot of indications of lycanthropic activity."
   "You'd want plenty of silver arrows on this campaign."
   "With this level of activity, you'd want a cleric specialized in lycanthropes," scoffed Consuela.
   Fred Fine was perfectly aware of that. He was merely making conversation so Consuela would not realize he was thinking intently about something, and try to beat him to the punch. Yes, the werewolf colony was obvious– it was a large one, probably east-northeast in the Mountains of Krang. Only large-scale organization could account for the lack of wolfsbane and garlic, which were usually abundant in this biome. But Fred Fine was concerned with observations on a far grander scale. Though nothing was catastrophically wrong, something was very strange, and Fred Fine found that he was covered with goosebumps. He tapped a foot nervously and scanned the descriptions scrolling past on the screen.
   "Listen for birds!" he hissed.
   Consuela ordered an Aural Stimuli Report, specifying Avians as field of interest.
   NO AVIAN SOUNDS DETECTABLE, said Shekondar Mark V.
   "Damn!" said Fred Fine. "Let's have the alchemist test one of his magical substances– say, some of the fire-starting fluid." MAGICAL COMBUSTIBLES AND EXPLOSIVES FAIL TO FUNCTION.
   "Uh-oh! All characters jettison all magical items immediately!" SMALL FIRES AND EXPLOSIONS IN ALCHEMICAL SUBSTANCES.
   "Good. We'll get farther away."
   LARGE EXPLOSIONS. NOXIOUS SMOKE. NO INJURIES DUE TO WIND DIRECTION.
   "Lucky! Forgot even to check for that. My character will try turning on his pocket calculator."
   ELECTRONIC DEVICES FAIL TO FUNCTION.
   "Wait a minute," said the astonished Consuela. "What is this? I don't know of anything that can cause disruption of magic and technology at the same time! Some kind of psionics, maybe?" "I don't know. I don't know what it is.,, "We wrote this thing. We have to know what's in it." "Aural Stimuli Report, General. Quick!"
   DEEP RUMBLING CONSISTENT WITH TEMBLOR OR LARGE SUBTERRANEAN MOVEMENT.
   "Can't be an earthquake. We'll head for solid rock, that should protect us. Head uphill!"
   MOVEMENT SPEED HALVED BY TEMBLOR. ROCK OUTCROPPING REACHED IN SIX TURNS. EXTREMELY LOUD HISSING. GASEOUS ODOR. GROUND BECOMES WARM.
   "It's almost like a Dragon," said Consuela in a constricted, terrified voice, "but from down in the earth."
   "God! I can't think of what the hell this is!"
   ONE HUNDRED METERS TO YOUR NORTH EARTH BULGES UPWARD. BULGE IS FIFTY METERS IN DIAMETER AND RISING QUICKLY. EARTH CRACKS OPEN AND YOU SEE A GLISTENING SURFACE….
   The terminal went blank. From just behind them came a violent scream, like a buzzsaw wrenching to a stop in a concrete block. They knew it though they had never heard it before; it was the sound of a disc unit dying, the sound made when the power was cut off and the automatic readers (similar to the tone-arms of phonographs) sank into, and shredded, the hysterically spinning magnetic discs. It was to them what the snapping of a horse's leg is to a jockey, and when they spun around they were astonished and horrified to see a curtain of water pouring onto the floor from the circular walkway overhead. Not more than a dozen feet from the base of the Janus 64, the ring was spreading inward.
   "Hey, Fred 'n' Con!" someone yelled. At one end of the room, at the window that looked out into the Terminal Room, an overweight blond-bearded hacker squinted at them. "What's going on? System problems? Oh, Jeeeezus!"
   He turned to his comrades in the Terminal Room, screaming, "Head crash! Head crash! Water on the brain!" Soon two dozen hackers had vaulted through the window into the Center and were sprinting down the aisles as fast as their atrophied legs could carry them, the men stripping off their shirts as they ran. Another disc drive shorted out and sizzled to destruction. Abruptly Fred Fine spun and grabbed the Operator's Key-chain, then ran through the circular waterfall toward another wall of the Center, shouting for people to follow him.
   In seconds he had snapped open the door to the storage room, where tons of accordion-fold computer paper were stored in boxes. As some of the hackers did their best to sweep water away from the base of the Janus 64, the rest formed a line from the storage room to the central circle. The boxes were passed down the line as quickly as possible, slit open with Fred Fine's authentic Civil War bayonet and their contents dumped out as big green-and-white cubes inside the deadly water-ring. Though it did not entirely stem the flow, the paper absorbed what It did not dam. Soon all space between the waterfall and the CPU was covered with at least two feet of soggy computer paper. Meanwhile, Consuela had shut down all the disc drives.
   The danger was past. Fred Fine, still palpitating, noticed a small waterfall in the corner of the storage room. Flicking on the lights for the first time, he clambered over the stacked boxes to check it out. In the corner, three pipes about ten inches in diameter ran from floor to ceiling. One was swathed in the insulation used for hot water pipes. Water was running down one of the bare pipes; higher up. above the ceiling, it must be leaking heavily. Fred Fine put his hand on the third pipe and found that it was neither hot nor cool, and did not seem to be carrying a current. A firehose supply pipe? No, they were supposed to be bright red. He puzzled over it, rubbing his hand over the long thin whiskers that straggled down his cheeks when he had been computing for a week or more.
   As he watched, the hiss of running water lowered and died away and a few seconds later the leak from above was stemmed. There was the KLONK of an air hammer in a pipe. Fred Fine put his hand on the mystery pipe, and began to feel the gentle vibration of running water underneath, and a sensation of coolness spreading out from the interior.
   The hackers saw him wandering slowly toward the Janus, which rose like an ancient glyph from the tumbled, sodden blocks of paper. He had a distant look, and was consumed in thought.
   "These are the End Times," he was heard to say. "The Age draws to a close."
   He was no weirder than they were, so they ignored him.
   Tiny landed on a burning sofa not far from my window. The impact forced much excess lighter fluid out of the foam cushions and created a burst of flame whose origin we did not know until later. Once the water had come back on, and we had soaked the elevator and the Christmas tree, we aimed the fire hose out my living-room window and drenched the heap of dimly burning furniture that was Tiny the Terrorist's funeral pyre. It was a few minutes past midnight, the second strangest midnight I have ever known, and my first semester at the Big U was at an end.

Second Semester

January
   The fog of war was real down here. The knee-deep gloom on the tunnel floor exhaled it in sheets and columns, never disturbed by a clean wind or a breath of dryness. Through its darkness moved a flickering cloud of light, and at the center walked a tall thin figure with headphones sprouting long antennae. He carried an eight-foot wizard's staff in one hand, a Loyal Order of Caledonian Comrades ceremonial sword in the other, and wore hip waders, a raincoat, and a gas mask. His headlamp's beam struck the fog in front of his eyes and stopped dead, limiting his visibility to what he could see through occasional holes in the atmosphere. From the twin filters of his gas mask came labored hissing sighs as he panted with an effort of wading through the muck.
   "I've come to the intersection of the Tunnel of Goblins and the Tunnel of Dragon Blood," he announced. "This is my turnaround point and I will now return to rendezvous with Zippy the Dwarf, Lord Flail and the White Priest in the Hall of the Idols of Zarzang-Zed." True to his word, Klystron the Impaler laboriously reversed direction by gripping his staff and making a five-point turn, then paused for a rest.
   A voice crackled from his headphones, a lush, tense introvert's voice made tinny by the poor transmission quality.
   "Roger, Klystron the Impaler, This is Liaison. Please hold." There was a brief silence, but the flickering of her fingers on the computer keys up there, and her ruffling of papers, kept her voice-operated mike open. She snickered, unaware that Klystron, Zippy, Flail and the White Priest could hear her. "Oh ho," she gloated, "are you in for trouble now. You don't hear anything yet." More fingers on the keyboard. Klystron concluded that Shekondar had generated a monster with many statistics and at least three attack modes, a monster with which Consuela was not entirely familiar. Perhaps, for once, a worthy opponent.
   Klystron the Impaler drew his mask down to dangle on his chest. Taking care not to breathe through his nose, he brought out his wineskin, opened the plastic spigot and shot a long stream of warm Tab onto his tongue. God, it stank down here. But Klystron could deal with far worse. Anything was better than doing this in a safe light place, like the D & D players, and never experiencing the darkness, claustrophobia and terror of reality.
   Liaison was ready. "Klystron the Impaler, known to' –his allies as the Heroic, High Lord of Plexor, Mage of the CeePeeYu and Tamer of the Purple Worm of Longtunnel, is attacked by the ELECTRIC MICROWAVE LIZARD OF QUIZZYXAR!" She nearly shrieked the last part of this, as frenzied as a priestess during a solar eclipse. "You are not surprised, you have one turn to prepare defense. Statement of intent, please."
   Klystron corked the wineskin with his thumb and let it drop to his side, sliding the mask back over his face. So, it was the electric microwave lizard of Quizzyxar. Consuela's reaction had hinted it was something big. He was ready.
   "As you will recall, I took an anti-microwave potion six months ago, before the Siege of Dud, and that has not worn off yet. As he will probably attack with microwaves first, this gives me an extra turn. I begin by flipping down the visor on my Helm of Courage. Is he charging?"
   "No. She's advancing slowly."
   "I stand my ground on the left side of the tunnel and fire a freeze-blast from my Staff of Cold." He wheeled his staff into firingposition as though it were a SAM-7 shoulder-fired antiaircraft missile launcher and his body shook with imagined recoil as he CHOONGed a couple of sound effects into the mike.
   But why had Consuela specified the lizard was a she? With Consuela it could not have been a mere Freudian slip. "Okay," Con said slowly, typing in Klystron's actions, "your freeze-blast strikes home, hitting her in the left head. It has no effect. The lizard's microwave blast does not hurt you but explodes your wineskin, causing you two points of concussion damage. It continues to advance at a walk."
   "Touchи. " So much for Tab.
   "Liaison, do we know about this yet?" It was Lord Flail. Liaison asked Shekondar. "Yes. The lizard makes a lot of noise and you hear it."
   "Okay!" cried Lord Flail. "We'll proceed at top speed toward the melee."
   "Me too," added Zippy the Dwarf.
   "It'll take us forever to get there," said the White Priest, who did not seem to be very far into his character. "We're at least a thousand feet away."
   Klystron the Impaler took advantage of these negotiations to do some planning. Obviously the female type was immune to cold– highly obnoxious to the male type.
   "In my quiver I have a fire arrow which I took from the dying Elf-Lord during that one time when we space-warped into Middle Earth. I'll fire that. Which head is it leading with?" "Left."
   "Then I aim for the right head."
   "The arrow finds its mark and burns fiercely," announced Consuela with relish. "The lizard bites you on your left arm, which is now useless until the White Priest can heal it. While you switch back to your sword it claws you with a tentacle! claw appendage, doing five points of damage to your chest. The claw is poisoned but… you make your saving throw."
   "Good. I'll take a swipe at the appendage as it attacks."
   "You miss."
   "Okay, I'll make for the right head."
   "The lizard has succeeded in clawing the fire arrow out of its hide. Now it makes a right tongue strike, sticking you, and begins drawing you into its mouth. Will you attack the tongue, or parry the poison claw attacks?"
   Klystron considered it. This was a hell of a situation. As a last resort he could use a wish from his wishing sword, but that could be risky, especially with Consuela.
   "I will defend myself from the claws, and deal with the mouth when I get to it. I've been swallowed before."
   "You parry three swipes. But now you are just inside the mouth and it is exhaling poison gas, and you have lost half your strength." "Oh, all right," said Klystron in disgust. "I'll make a wish on my wishing sword. I'll say "
   "Wait a minute!" came the feminine squeal of Zippy the Dwarf. I just spotted him!"
   Snapping to attention, Klystron scanned the surrounding mist with the beam of his headlamp and picked out Zippy's red chest waders. "Confirm contact with Zippy the Dwarf. Estimated range ten meters."
   "In that case," observed Consuela, "she is right behind the lizard. Your action, Zippy?"
   "Three double fireballs from my fireball-shooting tiara." "I duck," said Klystron hastily. Shekondar was just clever enough to generate an accidental hit on him. He sighed in relief and his pulse became leaden. It was going to be fine.
   "All fireballs strike in abdominal area. Lizard is now in bad shape and moving slowly."
   "I cut myself loose from the tongue."
   "Done."
   "Two more fireballs in the right head."
   "As soon as I'm out of the way, that is."
   "Okay. The lizard dies, Congratulations, people. That's ten thousand experience points apiece."
   Klystron and Zippy joined up, edging together against the tunnel wall to avoid the imaginary lizard corpse sprawled between them. They shook hands robustly, though Klystron had some reservations about being saved by a female dwarf, "Good going, guys!" shouted Lord Flail, overloading his mike. "Yeah. Way to go," the White Priest added glumly.
   "Flail and Priest, give estimated distance from us." Klystron was concerned; those two were the weakest members, even when they were together, and now that one monster had been noisily eliminated others were sure to converge on the area to clean up. "To be frank, I'm not sure," answered the White Priest. "I kind of thought we'd be getting to an intersection near you by now, but apparently not. The layout of these tunnels isn't what I saw on the Plex blueprints."
   Klystron winced at this gross violation of game ethics and exchanged exasperated glances with Zippy. "You mean that the secret map you found was incorrect," he said. "Well, don't continue if you're lost. We will proceed in the direction of the Sepulchre of Keldor and hope to meet you there." He and Zippy plugged off down the tunnel.
   They wandered for ten minutes looking for one another, and every sixty seconds Liaison had them stop while Shekondar checked for prowling monsters. Shortly, Klystron overheard an exchange between the Priest and the Lord, who apparently had removed their masks to talk.
   "Take it easy! It doesn't take very long, you know," said the White Priest. "I'll be right back. Stay here."
   "I don't think we should separate, Your Holiness," pleaded Lord Flail. "Not after a melee that'll attract other monsters." Klystron turned up the gain on his mike and shouted, "He's right! Don't split up," in hopes that they would hear it without earphones.
   The Priest and Lord Flail conversed inaudibly for a few seconds. Then Flail came back on, having apparently replaced his mask. "Uh, this is to notify Shekondar that the White Priest has gone aside," he said, using the code phrase for taking a leak. Klystron chuckled. A few seconds later came another prowling monster check. Everyone tensed and waited for Shekondar's decree.
   "Okay," said Liaison triumphantly, "we've got a monster, Lord Flail, now solo, is attacked by… giant sewer rats! There are twelve of them, and they take him by surprise."
   "Well listen for his battle cry and try to locate him that way," announced Klystron immediately, and pulled his headphones down to listen. Oddly, Flail had not responded.
   "Statement of intent! Move it!" snapped Consuela.
   But no statement of intent was forthcoming from Flail. Instead, a ghastly series of sound effects was transmitted through his mike. First came a whoosh of surprise, followed by a short pause, and some confused interjections. Then nothing was heard for a few seconds save ragged panting; and then came a long, loud scream which obliged them to turn down the volume. The screaming continued, swamping the others' efforts to make themselves heard on the line.
   Finally Consuela's voice came through, angry and hurt. "You're jumping the gun. The melee hasn't started yet." But Lord Flail was no longer screaming, and the only sounds coming over his mike were an occasional scraping and shuffling mixed with odd squeals that might have been radio trouble.
   Klystron and Zippy, headphones down, could hear the screams echoing down the tunnel a second after they came in on the radio. Flail's plan was clear; he was making a god-awful lot of noise to assist the better fighters in tracking him down. A good plan for a character with a fighting level of three and a courage/psychostability index of only eight, but it was a little overdone.
   The odd noises continued for several minutes as they tramped toward the scene of the melee, which was in a higher tunnel with a much drier floor.
   Ahead of them, Flail's headlamp cast an unmoving yellow blotch on the ceiling. On the fringes of that cone of light moved great swift shadows. Klystron slowed down and drew his sword. Zippy had dropped back several feet. "Making final approach to Flail's location," Klystron mumbled, edging forward, falling unconsciously into the squatting stance of the sabre fighter. At the end of his lamp's beam he could see quickly moving gray and brown fur, and blood.
   "At your approach the rats get scared and flee," said Consuela, franticly typing, "though not without persuasion."
   He could see them clearly now. They were dogs, like German shepherds, though rather fat, and they had long, long bare tails. And round ears. And pointy quivering snouts. Oh, my God. Several scurried away, some stood their ground staring at his headlamp with beady black and red eyes, and one rushed him. Reacting frantically he split the top of its skull with a blow of the dull sword. The rest of the giant sewer rats turned and ran squealing down the tunnel. Lord Flail was not going anywhere, and what remained of him, as battle-hardened as Klystron was, was too disgusting to look at.
   "You are too late," said Consuela. "Lord Flail has been gnawed to death by the giant sewer rats."
   "I know," said Klystron. Hearing nothing from Zippy, he turned around to see her sitting there staring dumbly at the corpse. "Uh, request permission to temporarily leave character."
   "Granted. What's going on down there?"
   "Consuela, this is Fred. It's Steve. Steven has been, uh, I supposed you could say, uh, eaten, by a bunch of"
   Fred Fine stepped forward and swept his beam over the brained animal at his feet. "By giant sewer rats."
   "Oh, golly!" said Zippy. "What about Virgil? He went off to go tinkle!"
   "Jeez," said Fred Fine, and started looking around for footprints. "Liaison, White Priest is solo in unknown location." The twelve giant sewer rats had run right past the White Priest and ignored him. He was standing with his chest waders around his thighs, relieving himself onto a decaying toilet paper core, when the mass of squealing rodent fervor had hurtled out of the fog, parted down the middle to pass around him, rejoined behind, their long tails lashing inquisitively around his knees, and shot onward toward their rendezvous with Lord Flail.
   He stood there almost absentmindedly and finished his task, staring into the swirling lights in front of his face, breathing deeply and thinking. Then the screaming started, and he pulled up his waders and got himself together, unslinging the Sceptre of Cosmic Force from its handy shoulder strap and brandishing it. Fred Fine and Consuela had insisted he bring along convincing props, so he had manufactured the Sceptre, an iron re-rod wrapped in aluminum foil, topped with a xenon flash tube in a massive glass ball that was wired to a power supply in the handle. When they had mustered for the expedition, he had switched off the lights and "convinced" them by turning it on and bouncing a few explosive purple flashes off their unprepared retinas. After he had explained the circuitry to Fred Fine, they entered character and descended a long spiral stair into the tunnels. In the ensuing three hours the White Priest had used the Sceptre of Cosmic Force to blind, disorient and paralyze three womp rats, a samurai, a balrog, Darth Vader and a Libyan hit squad.
   He began to slog back toward Steven, and the screaming ended. Either the rats had left or Steven was dead or someone had helped the poor bastard out. Tramping down the tunnel, his lamp beam bounding over the discarded feminine-hygiene products, condoms, shampoo-bottle lids and Twinkie wrappers, Virgil tried to decide whether this was really happening or was simply part of the game. The tunnels and the chanting of Consuela had made a few inroads on his sense of reality, and now he was not so sure he had seen those rats. The screams, however, had not sounded like the dramaturgical improvisations of an escapist Information Systems major.
   He stopped. The rats were coming back! He looked around for a ladder, or something to climb up on, but the walls of the tunnel were smooth and featureless. He turned and ran as quickly as he could in the heavy rubberized leggings, soon discarding the gas mask and headphones so he could take deep breaths of the fetid ammonia-ridden air.
   The rats were gaining on him. Virgil searched his memory, trying to visualize where this tunnel was and where it branched off; if he were right, there were no branches at all– it was a dead end. But the blueprints had been wrong before.
   A branch? He swept the left wall with his lamp, and discerned a dark patch ten paces ahead. He made for it. The rats were lunging for his ankles. He kept his left hand on the wall as he ran, flailing with the Sceptre in his right. Then his left hand abruptly felt air and he dove in that direction, tripping over his own feet and falling on his side within the branch tunnel.
   A rat was on top of him before he had come to rest, and he stood up wildly, using his body to throw the screaming beast against the wall. Grabbing the Sceptre in both hands he swung it like a scythe. Whatever else it was, it was first and foremost a rod with a heavy globe at one end, a fine mace.
   Virgil stood with his back to the wall, kicking alternately with his feet like a Crotobaltislavonian folk dancer to shake off the bites of the rats, lashing out with the Sceptre at the same time. He was then blinded as his hand touched the toggle switch that activated the powerful flasher at the end. He cringed and looked away, and at the same time the rats fell back squealing. He shook sweat and condensation from his eyes, snapped his wet hair back and waved the Sceptre around at arms' length, surveying his opponents in the exploding light. They were gathered around him in a semicircle, about ten feet away, and with every flash their fur glistened for an instant and their eyeballs sparked like distant brakelights. They were hissing and muttering to one another now, their number constantly growing, watching with implacable hostility– but none dared approach.

   Continuing to wave the Sceptre of Cosmic Force, Virgil felt down with his other hand to the butt of the weapon, where he had installed a dial to adjust the speed of the flashing. Turning it carefully up and down, he found that as the flashes became less frequent, the circle tightened around him unanimously so that he must frantically spin the dial up to a higher frequency. At this the rats reacted in pain arid backed away in the flickering light in stop-action. Now Virgil's vision was composed of a succession of still images, each slightly different from the last, and all he saw was rats. dozens of rats, and each shining purple rat-image was fixed permanently into his perfect memory until he could remember little else. Encouraged by their fear, he grasped the knob again and sped up the flasher, until suddenly they reached some breaking-point; then they dissolved into perfect chaotic frenzy and turned upon one another with hysterical ferocity, charging lustily together into a great stop-action melee at the tunnel intersection. Bewildered and disgusted, Virgil closed his eyes to shut it out, so that all he saw was the red veins in his eyelids jumping out repeatedly against a yellow-pink background.
   Some of the rats were colliding with his legs. He lowered the Sceptre so that the flasher was between his ankles, and, guiding himself by sound and touch, moved away from the obstructed intersection and down the unmapped passageway. He opened his eyes and began to run, holding the flasher out in front of him like a blind man's cane. From time to time he encountered a rat who had approached the source of the sound and fury and then gone into convulsions upon encountering the sprinting electronics technician with his Sceptre. Soon, though, there were no more rats, and he turned it off.
   Something was tugging at his belt. Feeling cautiously, he found that it was the power cord of the headlamp, which had been knocked off his head and had been bouncing along behind him ever since. He found that the lens, once he had wiped crud from it, cast an intermittent light– a connection was weakened somewhere– that did, however, enable him to see.
   This unmapped tunnel was relatively narrow. Its ceiling, to his shock, was thick with bats, while its floor was clean of the stinking glom that covered most of the tunnels in varying depths. Instead there was a thin layer of slimy fluid and fuzzy white bat guano which stank but did not hinder. This was probably a good sign; the passage must lead somewhere. He noted the position of the Sceptre's dial that had caused the rats to blow their stacks, then slung the weapon over his shoulder and continued down the passage, his feet curiously light and free in the absence of deep sludge.
   Before long he discerned a light at the end of the tunnel. He broke into a jog, and soon he could see it clearly, about a hundred and fifty feet away: a region at the end of the passage that was clean and white and fluorescently lit. Nothing in the blueprints corresponded to this.
   He was still at least a hundred feet away when a pair of sliding doors on the right wall at the very end of the tunnel slid open. He stopped, sank to a squat against the tunnel wall and then lay on his stomach as he heard shouting.
   "Ho! Heeeeyah! Gitska!" Making these and similar noises, three B-men peeked out the door and up the passageway, then emerged, carrying weapons– not just pistols, but small machine guns. Two of them assumed a kneeling position on the floor, facing up the tunnel, and their leader, an enormous B-man foreman named Magrov, stood behind them and sighted down the tunnel through the bulky infrared sight of his weapon. About halfway between Virgil and the B-men, a giant rat had turned and was scuttling toward Virgil. There was a roar and a flickering light not unlike that of Virgil's Sceptre, and two dozen automatic rounds dissolved the rat into a long streak on the floor. Magrov shone a powerful flashlight over the wreckage of the rodent, but apparently Virgil was too small, distant and filthy to be noticed. Magrov belched loudly in a traditional Croto expression of profound disgust, and the other two murmured their agreement. He signaled to whoever was waiting beyond the sliding doors.
   A large metal cylinder about a foot and a half in diameter and six feet long, strapped to a heavy four-wheeled cart, was carefully pushed sideways into the passage. Magrov walked to a box on the wall, punched a button with the barrel of his weapon and spoke. "Control, Magrov once again. We have put it in normal place like usual, and today only one of those goddamn pink-tailed ones, you know. We taking off now. I guess we be back in a few hours."
   "That's an A-OK. All clear to reascend, team." came the unaccented answer from the box. The B-men walked through the sliding doors, which closed behind them, and Virgil was barely able to make out a hum which sounded like an elevator.
   After a few seconds, the end wall of the tunnel parted slowly and Virgil saw that it wasn't the end at all, it was a pair of thick steel slabs that retracted into the floor and ceiling. Beyond the doors was a large room, brightly lit, containing several men walking around in what looked like bright yellow rainsuits and long loose hoods with black plastic windows over the eyes. Three of these figures emerged and quickly slid cart and cylinder through the doors while two others stood guard with submachine guns. Then all retreated behind the doors, and the steel slabs slid back together and sealed the tunnel.
   He remained motionless for a few minutes more, and noticed some other things: wall-mounted TV cameras that incessantly swiveled back and forth on power gimbals; chemical odors that wafted down the tunnel after the doors were closed; and the many gnawed and broken rat bones scattered across the nearby floor. Then Virgil Gabrielsen concluded that the wisest thing to do was to go back and mess with the giant rats.
   Several days into the second semester, the Administration finally told the truth about the Library, and allowed the media in to photograph the ranks upon ranks of card catalog cabinets with their totally empty drawers.
   The perpetrators had done it on Christmas Day. The Plex had been nearly deserted, its entrance guarded by a single guard at a turnstile. At eight in the morning, ten rather young and hairy-looking fellows in B-man uniforms had arrived and haltingly explained that as Crotobaltislavonians they followed the Julian calendar, and had already celebrated Christmas. Could they not come in to perform needed plumbing repairs, and earn quadruple overtime for working on Christmas Day? The skeptical guard let them in anyway; if he could not trust the janitors, whom could he trust?
   As reconstructed by the police, the burglars had gathered in the card catalog area all the canvas carts they could find. They had taken these through the catalog, pulling the lock-pins from each drawer and dumping the contents into the carts. The Library's 4.8 million volumes were catalogued in 12,000 drawers of three-by-five cards, and a simple calculation demonstrated that all of these cards could be fitted into a dozen canvas carts by anyone not overly fastidious about keeping them in perfect order. The carts had been taken via freight elevator to the loading docks and wheeled onto a rented truck, which according to the rental agency had now disappeared. Its borrower, a Mr. Friedrich Engels, had failed to list a correct address and phone number and proved difficult to track down. The only untouched drawer was number 11375, STALIN, JOSEPH to STALLBAUM, JOHANN GOTTFRIED.
   The Library turned to the computer system. During the previous five years, a sweatshop of catalogers had begun to transfer the catalog into a computer system, and the Administration hoped that ten percent of the catalog could be salvaged in this way. Instead they found that a terrible computer malfunction had munched through the catalog recently, erasing call numbers and main entries and replacing them with knock-knock jokes, Burma-Shave ditties and tracts on the sexual characteristics of the Computing Center senior staff.
   The situation was not hopeless; at any rate, it did not deteriorate at first. The books were still arranged in a rational order. This changed when people began holding books hostage.
   A Master's Candidate in Journalism had a few books she used over and over again. After the loss of the catalog she found them by memory, carried them to another part of the Library, and cached them behind twelve feet of bound back issues of the Nepalese Journal of Bhutaruan Studies. A library employee from Photoduplication then happened to take down a volume of Utah Review of Theoretical Astrocosmology, shelved back-to-back with NJBS, and detected the cache. She moved it to another place in the Library, dumping it behind a fifty-volume facsimile edition of the ledgers of the Brisbane/Surabaya Steam Packet Co. Ltd., which had been published in 1893 and whose pages had not yet been cut. She then left a sign on the Library bulletin board saying that if the user of such-and-such books wanted to know where they were, he or she could put fifty dollars in the former stash, and she, the employee, would leave in its place the new location. Several thousand people saw this note and the scam was written up in the Monoplex Monitor; it was so obviously a good idea that it rapidly became a large business. Some people took only a few volumes, others hundreds, but in all cases the technique was basically the same, and soon extra bulletin board capability was added outside the entrance to the Library bloc. Of course, this practice had been possible before the loss of the card catalog, but that event seemed to change everyone's scruples about the Library. The central keying system was gone; what difference did it make?
   Free enterprise helped take up the slack, as students hired themselves out as book-snoopers. The useless card catalog area took on the semblance of a bazaar, each counter occupied by one or two businesses with signs identifying their rates and services. The psychic book-snoopers stole and hid books, then– claiming to use psychic powers– showed spectacular efficiency in locating them. The psychics soon eclipsed the businesses of their nonspiritual colleagues. In order to seem as mysterious as possible, the psychics engaged in impressive rituals; one day, working alone on the top floor, I was surprised to see Professor Emeritus Humphrey Batstone Forthcoming IV being led blindfolded through the stacks by a leotarded witch swinging a censer.
   Every week the people who had stolen the card catalog would take a card and mail it to the Library. The conditions of ransom, as expressed on these cards in a cramped hand, were that: (1) S. S. Krupp and the Trustees must be purged; (2) the Megaversity must have open admissions and no room, board or tuition fees; (3) the Plex must become a free zone with no laws or authority; (4) the Megaversity must withdraw all investments in firms doing business in South Africa, firms doing business with firms doing business in South Africa and firms doing business with firms doing business with firms doing business in South Africa; (5) recognize the PLO and the baby seals.
   S. S. Krupp observed that card catalogs, a recent invention, had not existed at the Library of Alexandria, and though he would have preferred, ceteris paribus, to have the catalog, we didn't have one now, that was too bad, and we were going to have to make do. There was dissent and profound shock over his position, and righteous editorials in the Monitor, but after a week or two most people decided that, though Krupp was an asshole, there wasn't any point in arguing.
   "Welcome and thanks for coming to the mass driver demonstration." Casimir Radon swallowed some water and straightened his glacier glasses. "The physics majors' organization Neutrino has put a lot of time and work into this device, much of it over the Christmas holiday, and we think it is a good example of what can be done with activities money used constructively. God damn it!"
   He was cursing at the loudness of his Plex neighbor, Dex Fresser, whose stereo was an electronic signal processor of industrial power. For once Casimir did not restrain himself; he was so nervous over the upcoming demonstration that he failed to consider the dire embarrassment, social rejection and personal danger involved in going next door to ask this jerk-off to turn down his music. He was pounding on Dex Fresser's door before his mind knew what his body was doing, and for a moment he hoped his knocks had been drowned out by the bass beats exploding from Fresser's eighteen-inch woofers. But the door opened, and there was Dex Fresser, looking completely disoriented, "Could you turn that down?" asked Casimir. Fresser, becoming aware of his presence, looked Casimir over from head to foot. "It kind of disturbs me," Casimir added apologetically.
   Fresser thought it over. "But you're not even there that much, so how can it disturb you?" He then peered oddly into Casimir's face, as though the goggle-eyed Radon were the captain of a ship from a mirror Earth on the other side of the sun, which was pretty much what he was thinking. Chagrined, Casimir ground his teeth very loudly, generating so much heat that they became white hot and glowed pinkly through his cheeks. He then receded off into infinity like a starship making the jump into hyperspace, then came around behind Fresser again in such a way as to make it appear (due to the mirror effect) that he was actually coming from the same direction in which he'd gone. Just as he arrived back in the doorway two years later, the space warp snapped shut behind him; but at the last moment Dex Fresser glanced through it, and saw lovely purple fields filled with flowers, chanting Brazilians, leaky green ballpoint pens and thousands of empty tea boxes. He wanted very much to visit that place.
   "Well, it does disturb me when I do happen to be in my room. See how that works?" The man who was running this tape, a lanky green tennis shoe with bad acne and an elephant's trunk tied in a double Windsor knot around his waist, stopped the tape and ran it back to Fresser's previous reply.
   "But you're not even there that much, so how can it disturb you?" As Fresser finished this, Casimir did exactly what he had done last time, except this time the purple fields were being clusterbombed by flying garages. The space warp closed off just in time to let a piece of shrapnel through. It zoomed over Casimir's shoulder and embedded itself in the wall, and Fresser recognized it as a Pershing 2 missile.

   "Right," said Casimir, now. speaking through a sousaphone around his shoulder, which bombarded Dex Fresser with white laser rays. "I know. But you see when I am in my room I prefer not to be disturbed. That's the whole point."
   Fresser suddenly realized that the Pershing 2 was actually the left front quarter-panel of a '57 Buick that he had seen abandoned on a street in Evanston on July 28, 1984, and that Casimir was actually John D. Rockefeller. "How can you be so goddamn selfish, man? Don't you know how many people you've killed?" And he slammed the door shut, knowing that the shock would cause the piece of the Buick to fall on Rockefeller's head; since it was antimatter, nothing would be left afterward.
   The confrontation had worked out as badly as Casimir had feared. He went back to his room, heart pounding irrationally, so upset that he did not practice his speech at all.
   The lack of rehearsal did not matter, as the only audience in Sharon's lab was the Neutrino membership, Virgil, Sarah, a photographer from the Mortoplex Monitor and I. Toward the end of the speech, though, S. S. Krupp walked in with an official photographer and a small, meek-looking older man, causing Casimir to whip off his glasses in agitation and destroying any trace of calmness in his manner. Finally he mumbled something to the effect that it was too bad Krupp had come in so late, seeing as how the best part of this introduction was over, and concluded that we should stop jabbering and have a look at this thing.
   The mass driver was four meters long, built atop a pair of sturdy tables bolted together. It was nothing more than a pair of long straight parallel guides, each horseshoe-shaped in cross-section, the prongs of the horseshoes pointed toward each other with a narrow gap in between. The bucket, which would carry the payload, was lozenge-shaped in cross-section and almost filled the oval tunnel created by the two guides. Most of the bucket was empty payload space, but its outer jacket was of a special alloy supercooled by liquid helium so that it became a perfect superconducting electromagnet. This feature, combined with a force field generated in the two rails, suspended the bucket on a frictionless magnetic cushion. Electromagnets in the rails, artfully wound by Virgil, provided the acceleration, "kicking" the bucket and its contents from one end of the mass driver to the other.
   Casimir relaxed visibly as he began pointing out the technical details. With long metal tongs he reached into a giant thermos flask and pulled out the supercold bucket, which was about the size of two beer cans side by side. He slid it into the breech of the mass driver. As it began to soak up warmth from the room, a cascade of frigid white helium poured from a vent on its back and spilled to the floor.
   Krupp stood close by and asked questions. "What's the weight of the slug?"
   "This," said Casimir, picking up a solid brass cylinder from the table, "is a one-kilogram mass. That's pretty small, but– " "No, it isn't." Krupp looked over at his friend, who raised his eyebrows and nodded. "Nothing small about it."
   Casimir smiled weakly and nodded in thanks. Krupp continued, "What's the muzzle velocity?"
   Here Casimir looked sheepish and shifted nervously, looking at his Neutrino friends.
   "Oh," said Krupp, sounding let down, "not so fast, eh?"
   "Oh, no no no. Don't get me wrong. The final velocity isn't bad." At this the Neutrino members clapped their hands over their mouths and stifled shrieks and laughs. "I was just going to let you see that for yourselves instead of throwing a lot of numbers at you."
   "Well, that's fine!" said Krupp, sounding more sanguine. "Don't let us laymen interfere with your schedule. I'm sorry. Just go right ahead." He stepped back and crossed his arms as though planning to shut up for hours.
   Casimir gave the empty bucket a tap and there were oohs and aahs as it floated smoothly and quietly down the rails, bounced off a stop at the end and floated back with no change in speed. He reinserted the one-kilogram brass cylinder. "Now let's try it. As you can see we have a momentum absorber set up at the other end of the lab."
   The "momentum absorber" was ten squares of 3/8-inch plywood held parallel in a frame, spaced two inches apart to form a sandwich a couple of feet long. This was securely braced against the wall of the lab at the same level as the mass driver. had assumed that the intended target was a wastebasket floor beneath the "muzzle" of the machine, but now realized that Casimir was expecting the weight to fly about twenty feet without losing any altitude. "I suggest you all stand back in case something goes wrong," said Casimir, and feeling somewhat alarmed I stood way back and suggested that Sarah do likewise. Casimir made a last check of the circuitry, then hit a big red button.
   The sound was a whizz followed by a rapid series of staccato explosions. It could be written as: ZZIKKH where the entire sound takes about a quarter of a second. None of us really saw anything. Casimir was already running toward the momentum absorber. When we got there, we saw that the first five layers of plywood had perfectly clean round holes punched through them, two more had messy holes, and the next layer had buckled, the brass cylinder wedged in place at its bottom. Casimir pulled out the payload with tongs and dropped it into an asbestos mitt he had donned. "It's pretty hot after all those collisions," he explained.
   Everyone but Casimir was electrified. Even the Neutrino observers, who had seen it before, were awed, and laughed hysterically from time to time. Sarah looked as though whatever distrust she had ever had in technology had been dramatically confirmed. I stared at Casimir, realizing how smart he was. Virgil left, smiling. Krupp's little friend paced between mass driver and target, hands clasped behind back, a wide smile nestled in his silver-brown beard, while Krupp himself was astonished.
   "Jesus H. Christ!" he yelled, fingering the holes. "That is the damnedest thing I've ever seen. Good lord, boy, how did you make this?"
   Casimir seemed at a loss. "It's all done from Sharon's plans," he said blankly. "He did all the magnetic fieldwork. I just plugged in the arithmetic. The rest of it was machine-shop work. Nothing complicated about the machine."
   "Does it have to be this powerful?" I said. "Don't get me wrong. I'm impressed as hell. Wouldn't it have been a little easier to make a slower one?"
   "Well, sure, but not as useful," said Casimir. "The technical challenges only show up when you make it fast enough to be used for its practical purpose– which is to shoot payloads of ore and minerals from the lunar surface to an orbital processing station. For a low-velocity one we could've used air cushions instead of magnetic fields to float the bucket but there's no challenge in that."
   "What's the muzzle velocity?" asked Krupp's guest, who had appeared next to me. He spoke quietly and quickly in an Australian accent. When I looked down at him, I realized he was Oswald Heimlich, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of American Megaversity and one of the richest men in the city – the founder of Heimlich Freedom Industries a huge defense contractor. Casimir obviously didn't know who he was.
   "The final velocity of the bucket is one hundred meters per second, or about two hundred twenty miles per hour."
   "And how could you boost that?"
   "Boost it?" Casimir looked at him, startled. "Well, for more velocity you could build another just like this– "
   "Yes, and put them together. I know. They're interconnectible. But how could you increase the acceleration of this device?"
   "Well, that gets you into some big technical problems. You'd need expensive electronic gear with the ability to kick out huge pulses of power very quickly. Giant capacitors could do it, or a specialized power supply."
   Heimlich followed all this, nodding incessantly. "Or a generator that gets its power from a controlled explosion."
   Casimir smiled. "It's funny you should mention that. Some people are speculating about building small portable mass drivers with exactly that type of power supply– a chemical explosion– and using them to throw explosive shells and so on. That's what is called– "
   "A railgun. Precisely."
   Things began to fall into place for Casimir. "Oh. I see. So you want to know if I could build– basically a railgun."
   "Sure. Sure," said Heimlich in an aggressive, glinting voice. "What's research without practical applications?" The question hung in the air.
   Krupp took over, sounding much calmer. "You see, Casimir, in order to continue with this research– and you are off to an exceptionally fine start– you will need outside funding on a larger scale. Now, as good an idea as lunar mining is, no one is ever going to fund that kind of research. But railguns– whether you like it or not, they have very immediate significance that can really pull in the grants. I'm merely pointing out that in today's climate relating your work to defense is the best way to obtain funding. And I imagine that if you wanted to set up a specialized lab here to advance this kind of work, you might be able to get all the funding you'd want."
   Casimir looked down at the shattered plywood in consternation. "I don't need an answer now. But give it some careful thought, son. There's no reason for you to be stuck in silly-ass classes if you can do this kind of work. Call me anytime you like." He shook Casimir's hand, Heimlich made a brief smiling spastic bow, and they walked out together.

February
   Sarah quit the Presidency of the Student Government on the first of January. At the mass-driver demonstration, S. S. Krupp had simply ignored her, which was fine by Sarah as she had no desire to give the man a point-by-point explanation.
   As for the death of Tiny, here the other shoe never dropped, though Sarah and Hyacinth kept waiting. His body was in especially poor condition when found, and the bullet holes might not have been detected even if someone had thought to look for them. The City police made a rare Plex visit and looked at the broken window and the electrocuted man on the floor, but apparently the Terrorists had cleaned up any blood or other evidence of conflict; in short, they made it all look like a completely deranged drunken fuck-up, an archetype familiar to the City cops.
   The Terrorists wanted their own revenge. None of them had a coherent idea of what had happened. Even the two surviving witnesses had dim, traumatized memories of the event and could only say it had something to do with a woman dressed as a clown. As soon as I heard that the Terrorists were looking for someone called Clown Woman, I invited her over and we had a chat. I knew what her costume had been. Though she understood why I was curious, she suddenly adopted a sad, cold reserve I had never seen in her before.
   "Some really terrible things happened that night. But I'm I Hyacinth is safe– okay? And we've been making plans to stay that way."
   "Fine. I just– "
   "I know. I'd love to tell you more. I'm dying to. But I won't, because you have some official responsibilities and you're the kind of person who carries them out, and knowing anything would be a burden for you. You'd try to help– but that's something you can't do. Can you understand that?"
   I was a little scared by her lone strength. More, I was stunned that she was protecting me. Finally I shrugged and said, "Sounds as though you know what you're doing," because that was how it sounded.
   "This has a lot to do with your resigning the Presidency?" I continued. Sarah was a little annoyed by my diplomacy, for the same reason S. S. Krupp would have been.
   "Bud, I don't need some terrific reason for resigning. If I'm spending time on a useless job I don't like, and I find there are better things to do with that time, then I ought to resign." I nodded contritely, and for the first time she was relaxed enough to laugh. On her way out she gave me a long platonic hug, and I still remember it when I feel in need of warmth.
   They got the wading pool and the garden hose on a two-hour bus ride to a suburban K-Mart. Hyacinth inflated it in the middle of Sarah's room while Sarah ran the hose down the hall to the bathroom to pipe in hot water. Once the pool was acceptably full and foamy, they retrieved the hose, locked the door and sealed off all windows with newspaper and all cracks around the door with towels and tape. They lit a few candles but blew most of them out when their eyes adjusted. The magnum of champagne was buried in ice, the water was hot, the night was young. Hyacinth's .44 was very intrusive, and so Sarah filed it under G for Gun and they had a good laugh.
   Around 4:00 in the morning, to Sarah's satisfaction, Hyacinth passed out. Sarah allowed herself to do likewise for a while. Then she dragged Hyacinth out onto the rug, dried her and hoisted her into bed. They slept until 4:32 in the afternoon. Sleet was ticking against the window. Hyacinth cut a slit in the window screen and they fed the hose outside and siphoned all the bathwater out of the pool and down the side of the Plex. They ate all of Sarah's mother's banana bread, thirty-two Chips Ahoys, three bowls of Captain Crunch, a pint of strawberry ice cream and drank a great deal of water. They then gave each other backrubs and went to sleep again.
   "Keeping my .38 clean is a pain in the ass," said Sarah at one point. "It picks up a lot of crud in my backpack pocket." "That's one reason to carry a single-action," said Hyacinth. "Less to go wrong if it's dirty."
   A long time later, Sarah added, "This is pretty macho. Talking about our guns."
   "I suppose it's true that they're macho. But they are also guns. In fact, they're primarily guns."
   "True."
   They also discussed killing people, which had become an important subject with them recently.
   "Sometimes there isn't any choice," Sarah said to Hyacinth, as Hyacinth cried calmly into her shoulder. "You know, Constantine punished rapists by pouring molten lead down their throats. That was a premeditated, organized punishment. What you did was on the spur of the moment."
   "Yeah. Putting on protective clothes, loading my gun, tracking them down and blowing one away was really on the spur of the moment."
   "All I can say is that if anyone ever deserved it, he did." Three Terrorists ambled down the hall past Sarah's door, chanting "Death to Clown Woman!"
   "Okay, fine," said Hyacinth, and stopped crying. "Granted. I can't worry about it forever. But sooner or later they're going to figure out who Clown Woman is. Then there'll be even more violence."
   "Better them to be violent against us," said Sarah, "than against people who don't even understand what violence is."
   Sarah was busy taking care of herself that semester. This made more sense than what the rest of us were doing, but it did not make for an eventful life. At the same time, a very different American Megaversity student was fighting the same battle Sarah had just won. This student lost. The tale of his losing is melancholy but much more interesting.
   Every detail was important in assessing the situation, in determining just how close to the brink Plexor was! The obvious things, the frequent transitions from the Technological universe to the Magical universe, those were child's play to detect; but the evidence of impending Breakdown was to be found only in the minutiae. The extra cold-water pipe; that was significant. What had suddenly caused such a leak to be sprung in the plumbing of Plexor, which had functioned flawlessly for a thousand years? And what powerful benign hand had made the switch from one pipe to the other? What prophecy was to be found in the coming of the Thing of the Earth in the test run of Shekondar? Was some great happening at hand? One could not be sure; the answer must be nested among subtleties. So this one spent many days wandering like a lone thaumaturge through the corridors of the Plex, watching and observing, ignoring the classes and lectures that had become so trivial.
   With the help of an obsequious MARS lieutenant he was allowed to inspect the laboratory of the secret railgun experiments. Here he found advanced specialized power supplies from Heimlich Freedom Industries. The lieutenant, a Neutrino member of four years' standing, hooked the output of one power supply to an oscilloscope and showed him the very high and sharp spike of current it could punch out– precisely the impulses a superfast mass driver would need to keep its payload accelerating explosively right up to the end. This one also observed a test of a new electromagnet. It was much larger than those used for the first mass driver, wound with miles of hair-thin copper wire and cooled by antifreeze-filled tubes. A short piece of rail had been made to test the magnet. It was equipped with a bucket designed to carry a payload ten centimeters across! This one watched as a violent invisible kick from the magnet wrenched the bucket to high velocity and slammed it to the cushion at the rail's end; the heavy payload shot out, boomed into a tarp suspended about five feet away, and fell into a box of foam-rubber scraps. It was the same pattern he saw everywhere. A peaceful lunar mining device had, under the influence of Shekondar the Fearsome, metamorphosed into a potent weapon of great value to the forces of Good.
   He gave the lieutenant a battlefield promotion to Captain. He wanted to stay and continue to watch, but it had been a long day; he was tired, and for a moment his mind seemed to stop entirely as he stood by the exit.
   Then came again the creeping sense of Leakage, impossible to ignore; his head snapped up and to the right, and, speaking across the dimensional barrier, Klystron the Impaler told him to go to dinner.
   Klystron the Impaler was only Klystron the Impaler when he was in a Magical universe. The rest of the time he was Chris the Systems Programmer– a brilliant, dashing, young, handsome terminal jockey considered to be the best systems man on the giant self-contained universe-hopping colony, Plexor. From time to time Plexor would pass through the Central Bifurcation, a giant space warp, and enter a Magical universe, fundamentally altering all aspects of reality. Though the structure of Plexor itself underwent little change at these times, everything therein was converted to its magical, pretechnological analog. Guns became swords, freshmen became howling savages, Time magazine became a hand-lettered vellum tome and Chris the Systems Programmer– well, brilliant people like him became sorcerers, swordspeople and heroes. The smarter they were– the greater their stature in the Technological universe– the more dazzling was their swordplay and the more penetrating their spells. Needless to say, Klystron the Impaler was a very great hero-swordsman-magician indeed.
   Of course, Plexorians tended to be that way to begin with. Only the most advanced had been admitted when Plexor was begun, and it was natural that their distant offspring today should tend toward the exceptional. Of those lucky enough to be selected for Plexor, only the most adaptable had any stomach for the life once they got there and, every month or so, found their waterbeds metamorphosing into heaps of bearskins. Klystron/Chris liked to think of the place as a pressure cooker for the advancement of humanity.
   But even the most perfect machine could not be insulated from the frailty and stupidity of the human mind. In the early days of Plexor every inhabitant had understood the Central Bifurcation, had respected the distinction between technology and magic, and had shown enough discipline to ensure that division. Within the past several generations, though, ignorance had come to this perfect place and Breakdown had begun. Recent generations of Plexorians lacked the enthusiasm and commitment of their forebears and displayed ignorance which was often shocking; recently it had become common to suppose that Plexor was not a free-drifting edosociosystem at all, that it was in fact a planetoidal structure bound to a particular universe. Occasionally, it was true, Plexor would materialize on the ground, in a giant city or a barbarian kingdom. Its makers, a Guild of sorcerers and magicians operating in separate universes through the mediation of Keldor, had created it to be self-sufficient and life-supporting in any habitat, with a nuclear fuel source that would last forever. But to believe that one particular world was always out there was a blindness to reality so severe that it amounted to rank primitivism amidst this sophisticated colony of technocrats. It was, in a word, Breakdown– a blurring of the boundary– and such was the delicacy of that boundary between the universes that mere ignorance of its existence, mere Breakdown-oriented thinking and Breakdown-conducive behavior, was sufficient to open small Leaks between Magic and Technology, to generate an unholy Mixture of the two opposites. It was the duty of the remaining guardians of the Elder Knowledge. such as Klystron/Chris, to expurgate such mixtures and restore the erstwhile purity of the two existences of Plexor.
   In just the past few weeks the Leaks had become rents, the Mixture ubiquitous. Now Barbarians sat at computer terminals in the Computing Center unabashed, pathetically trying, in broad daylight, to run programs that were so riddled with bugs the damn things wouldn't even compile, their recent kills stretched out bleeding between their feet awaiting the spit. Giant rats from another plane of existence roamed free through the sewers of the mighty technological civilization, and everywhere Chris the Systems Analyst found dirt and marrow-sucked bones on the floor, broken light fixtures, graffiti, noise, ignorance. He watched these happenings, not yet willing to believe in what they portended, and soon developed a sixth sense for detecting Leakage. That was in and of itself a case of Mixture; in a Technological universe, sixth senses were scientifically impossible. His new intuition was a sign of the Leakage of the powers of Klystron the Impaler into a universe where they did not belong. In recognition of this, and to protect himself from the ignorant, Klystron/Chris had thought it wise to adopt the informal code name of Fred Fine.

   He had denied what was coming for too long. Despite his supreme intelligence he was hesitant to accept the hugeness of his own personal importance.
   Until the day of the food fight: on that day he came to understand the somber future of Plexor and of himself. It happened during dinner. To most of those in the Cafeteria it was just a food fight, but to "Fred Fine" it was much more significant, a preliminary skirmish to the upcoming war, a byte of strategic data to be thoughtfully digested.
   He had been contemplating an abstract type of program structure, absently shuffling the nameless protein-starch substance from tray to mouth, when a sense of strangeness had verged on his awareness and dispersed his thoughts. As he looked up and became alert, he also became aware that (a) the food was terrible; (b) the Caf was crowded and noisy; and (c) Leakage was all around. His mind now as alert as that of Klystron before a melee, he scanned the Cafeteria from his secure corner (one of only four corners in the Cafeteria and therefore highly prized), stuffing his computer printout securely into his big locking briefcase. Though his gaze traversed hundreds of faces in a few seconds, something allowed him to fix his attention on a certain few: eight or ten, with long hair and eccentric clothing, who were clearly looking at one another and not at the gallons of food heaped on their Fiberglass trays. The sixth sense of Klystron enabled Chris to glean from the whirl of people a deeply hidden pattern he knew to be significant.
   He stood up in the corner, memorizing the locations of those he had found, and switched to long-range scan, assisting himself by following their own tense stares. His eyes flicked down to the readout of his digital calcu-chronograph and he noted that it was just seconds before 6:00. Impatiently he polled his subjects and noted that they were now all looking toward one place: a milk dispenser near the center of the Cafeteria, where an exceptionally tall burnout stood with a small black box in his hand!
   There was a sharp blue flash that made the ceiling glow briefly– the black box was an electronic flash unit– and all hell broke loose. Missiles of all shapes and colors whizzed through his field of vision and splathunked starchily against tables, pillars and bodies. Amid sudden screaming an entire long table was flipped over, causing a hundredweight of manicotti and French fries to slide into the laps of the unfortunates on the wrong side. Seeing the perpetrators break and dissolve into the milling dinnertime crowd, the victims could only respond by slinging handfuls of steaming ricotta at their disappearing backsides. At this first outbreak of noise and action the Cafeteria quieted for a moment, as all turned toward the disturbance. Then, seeing food flying past their own heads, most of the spectators united in bedlam. The Terrorist sections seemed to have been expecting this and joined in with beer-commercial rowdiness. Several tables of well-dressed young women ran frantically for the exits, in most cases too slowly to prevent the ruination of hundreds of dollars' worth of clothes a head. Many collapsed squalling into the arms of their patron Terrorist organizations. The Droogs opened a milk machine, pulled out a heavy poly-bag of Skim and slung it into the midst of what had been an informal gathering of Classics majors, with explosive results.
   All was observed intently by Klystron/Chris, who stood calm and motionless in his corner holding his briefcase as a shield. Though the progress of the fight was interesting to watch, it was hardly as important as the behavior of the instigators and the reactions of the Cafeteria staff.
   Of the instigating organization, some were obliged to flee immediately in order to protect themselves. These were the agents provocateurs, the table-tippers and tray-slingers, whose part was already played. The remainder were observers, and they stood in carefully planned stations around the walls of the Cafeteria and watched, much as Chris did. Some snapped pictures with cheap cameras.
   This picture-taking began in earnest when, after about fifteen seconds, the reactive strike began. The cooks and servers had instantly leapt to block the doors of the serving bays, which in these circumstances had the same value as ammunition dumps. Pairs of the larger male cooks now charged out and drew shut the folding dividers which partitioned the Cafeteria into twenty-four sections. Meanwhile, forty-eight more senior Cafeteria personnel and guards fanned out in organized fashion, clothed in ponchos and facemasks. In each section, one of them leapt up on a table with a megaphone to scream righteousness at the students, while his partner confronted particularly active types. Klystron/Chris's view of the fight was abruptly reduced to what he could see in his own small section.
   Among other things he saw eight of the Roy G Biv Terrorist Group overturn the table on which the local official stood, sending him splaying on hands and knees across the slick of grease and tomato sauce on the floor. His partner skidded after him and swiveled to protect their backs from the Terrorists, who had huddled and were mumbling menacingly. For the first time Klystron/Chris felt the hysterical half-sick excitement of approaching violence, and he began to edge along the wall toward a more strategically sound position.
   One of the Terrorists went to the corner where the sliding partitions intersected, blocking the only route of escape. The men in the room moved away uneasily; the women pressed themselves against the wall and sat on the floor and tried to get invisible. Then the Roy G Biv men broke; two went for the still-standing official, one for the man who was just staggering to his feet with the dented megaphone. Abruptly, Klystron/Chris stepped forward, took from his briefcase a small weapon and pulled the trigger. The weapon was a flash gun, a device for making an explosively intense flash of light that blinded attackers. Everyone in front of the weapon froze. As they were putting their hands to their eyes, he pulled out his Civil War bayonet, jammed it into a fold in the sliding partition and pulled it down to open a six-foot rent. He led the tactical retreat to the adjoining section, which was comparatively under control.
   The officials here were not amused. A stocky middle-aged man in a brown suit stomped toward Klystron/Chris with death in his eye. He was stopped by a chorus of protest from the refugees, who made it clear that the real troublemakers were back there. And that was how Klystron/Chris avoided having any of these seriously Mixed officials discover his informal code name.
   But what was the strategic significance? He knew it had been done by Barbarians. Despite the carefully tailored modern clothes they used to hide their stooping forms and overly long arms, he recognized their true nature from the ropy scars running along their heavy overhanging brows and the garlands of rodent skulls they wore around their necks. Had it not been for the cameramen, he would have concluded that this was nothing more than a purposeless display of the savages' contempt for order. But the photographers made it clear that this riot had been a reconnaissance-in-force, directed by an advanced strategic mind with an crest in the Cafeteria's defenses. And that, in turn, implied an upcoming offensive centered on the Cafeteria itself. Of course! In here was enough grub to feed a good-sized commando force for years, if rationed properly; it would therefore be a prime objective for insurrectionists planning to seize and hold large portions of Plexor. But why? Who was behind it? And how did it connect with the other harbingers of catastrophe?
   Once upon a time, a mathematically inclined friend of Sarah's, one Casimir Radon, had estimated that her chances of running into a fellow Airhead at dinner were no better than about one in twenty. As usual he was not trying to be annoying or nerdish, but nevertheless Sarah wished for a more satisfying explanation of why she could get no relief from her damned neighbors. One in twenty was optimistic. At times she thought that they were planting spies in her path to take down statistics on how many behavioral standards she broke, or to drive her crazy by asking why she had really resigned the Presidency.
   She was annoyed but not surprised to find herself eating dinner with Mari Meegan, Mari's second cousin and Toni one night. Relaxed from a racquetball game, she made no effort to scan her route through the Caf for telltale ski masks. So as she danced and sideslipped her way toward what looked like an open table, she was blindsided by a charming squeal from right next to her. "Sarah!" Too slow even to think of pretending not to hear, she looked down to see the three color-coordinated ski masks looking back at her expectantly. She despised them and never wanted to see them again, ever, but she also knew there was value in following social norms, once in a while, to forestall hatred and God knows what kinds of retribution. The last thing she wanted was to be connected with Clown Woman. So she smiled and sat down. It was not going to be a great meal, but Sarah's conversation support system was working well enough to get her at least through the salad.
   The ski masks had become very popular since the beginning of second semester, having proved spectacularly successful during fire drills. The Airheads found that they could pull them on at the first ringing of the bell and make it downstairs before all the bars filled up, and when they returned to their rooms they did not have to remove any makeup before going back to bed. Then one sartorially daring Airhead had worn her ski mask to a 9:00 class one January morning, and pronounced it worthwhile, and other Airheads had begun to experiment with the concept. The less wealthy found that ski masks saved heaps of money on cosmetics and hair care, and everyone was impressed with their convenience, ease of cleaning and unlimited mix-'n'-match color coordination possibilities. Blousy, amorphous dresses had also become the style; why wear something tight and uncomfortable when no one knew who you were?
   Talking to Mari, Nicci and Toni was not that bad, of course, but Sarah felt unusually refreshed and clean, was having one of her favorite dinners, was going to a concert with Hyacinth that night and had hoped to make it a perfect day. Worse than talking to them was having to smile and nod at the stream of cologned and blow-dried Terrorists who came up behind the Airheads in their strange bandy macho walk, homing in on those ski masks like heat-seeking missiles on a house fire. Several sneaked up behind Mari and the others to goose them while they ate. Sarah knew that they did not want to be warned, so she merely rolled her manicotti around in her mouth and stared morosely over Mari's shoulder as the young bucks crept forward with exaggerated stealth and twitching fingers. So long as these people continued to lead segregated lives, she knew, it was necessary to do such things in order to have any contact with members of the other sex. They at least had more style than the freshman Terrorists, who generally started conversations by dumping beverages over the heads of freshman women. So there were many breaks in the conversation while Terrorist fingers probed deep into Airhead tenderloins and the requisite screaming and giggling followed.
   Notwithstanding this, "the gals" did manage to have a conversation about their majors. Sarah was majoring in English. Mari had a cousin who majored in English too, and who had met a very nice Business student doing it. Mari was majoring in Hobbies Education. Toni was Undecided. Nicci was in Sociology at another school.
   And then the food fight.
   Between the opening salvo and the moment when their table was protectively ringed by Terrorists, the others were quite dignified and hardly moved. Sarah sat still momentarily, then came to her senses and slipped under the table. From this point of view she saw many pairs of corduroy, khaki, designer jean and chino pantlegs around the table, and saw too the folding partitions slide across.
   Once the partitions were closed she emerged, mostly because she wanted to see who owned the brown polyester legs that had been dancing around the room in such agitation. The Terrorists grabbed her arms solicitously and hauled her to her feet, wanting to know if she had lost her ski mask in "all the action."
   The man in the brown three-piecer was none other than Bartholomew (Wombat) Forksplit, Dean of Dining Services, who had been promoted to Dean Emeritus after his recovery from the nacho tortilla chip shard that had passed through his brain. No one knew where he came from– Tibet? Kurdistan? Abyssinia? Circassia? Since the accident, he had become known as Wombat the Marauder to his victims, mostly inconsiderate dorks who had broken Caf rules only to find this man gripping them in an old Bosnian or Tunisian martial arts hold that shorted out the major meridians of their nervous system, and shouting at them in a percussive accent that crackled like fat ground beef on a red-hot steam griddle. Some accused him of using the accident as an excuse to act like a madman, but no one doubted that he was pissed off.
   When he saw the ex-President half-dragged from under a table by the beaming Terrorists, Forksplit released the knee of his current victim and speed-skated across the stained linoleum toward her, his tomato-sauce– spattered arms outstretched as if in supplication. Sarah pulled her arms free and backed up a step, but he stopped short of embracing her and cried, "Sarah! You, here? Indicates this that you are part of these– these asshole Terrorists? Please say no!" He stared piteously into her eyes, the little white scar on his forehead standing out vividly against his murderously flushed face. Sarah swallowed and glanced around the room, conscious of many ski masks and Terrorists looking at her.
   "Oh, not really, I was just over here at another table. These guys were just helping me up. This is a real shame. I hope the B-men don't go on strike now."
   A look of agony came over Wombat the Marauder's face at the mere mention of this idea, and he backed up, pirouetted and paced around their Cafeteria subdivision directing a soliloquy of anger and frustration at Sarah. "I joost– I don't know what the hell to do. I do everything in the world to deliver fine service. This is good food! No one believes that. They go off to other places and eat, come back and say, 'Yes Mr. Forksplit let me shake your hand your food is so good!! Best I have ever eaten!' But do these idiots understand? No, they throw barbells through the ceiling! All they can do with good food is throw it, like it is being a sports implement or something. You!"
   Forksplit sprinted toward a tall thin fellow who had just slit one of the sliding partitions almost in half with a bayonet and plunged through, pulling a briefcase behind him. Under his arm this man carried a pistol-shaped flashlight, which he tried to pull out; but before Forksplit was able to reach him, several more people exploded through the slit, pointing back and complaining about high rudeness levels in the next room. With a bloodcurdling battle cry Forksplit flung his body through the breach and into the next compartment, where much loud smashing and yelling commenced.
   Mari turned to Sarah, a big smile visible through her mouth-hole. "That was very nice of you, Sarah. It was sweet to think about Dean Forksplit's feelings."
   "He put me in a hell of a spot," said Sarah, who was looking at Fred Fine and his light-gun and his bayonet. "I mean, what was I supposed to say?"
   Mari did not follow, and laughed. "It was neat the way you didn't say something bad about the Terrorists just on his account." Fred Fine was stashing his armaments in his briefcase and staring at them. Sarah concluded that he had just come over to eavesdrop on their conversation and look at their secondary sex characteristics.
   "Diplomatic? There's nothing I could say, Mari, that could be nasty enough to describe those assholes, and the sooner you realize that the better off you'll be."
   "Oh, no, Sarah. That's not true. The Terrorists are nice guys, really."
   "They are assholes."
   "But they're nice. You said so yourself at Fantasy Island Nite, remember? You should get to know some of them."
   Sarah nearly snapped that she had almost gotten to know some of them quite well on Fantasy Island Nite, but held her tongue, suddenly apprehensive. Had she said that on Fantasy Island Nite? And had Mar! known who she was? "Man, it is possible to be nice and be an asshole at the same time. Ninety-nine percent of all people are nice. Not very many are decent."
   "Well, sometimes you don't seem terribly nice."
   "Well, I don't wish to be nice. I don't care about nice. I've got more important things on my mind, like happiness."
   "I don't understand you, Sarah. I like you so much, but I just don't understand you." Mari backed away a couple of paces on her spikes, gazing coolly at Sarah through her eye-holes. "Sometimes I get the feeling you're nothing but a clown." She stood and watched Sarah triumphantly.
   DEATH TO CLOWN WOMAN! hung before Sarah's eyes. A knifing chill struck her and she was suddenly nauseated and lightheaded. She sat down on a table, assisted needlessly by Fred Fine.
   "You'll be fine," he said confidently. "Just routine shock. Lie back here and we'll take care of you." He began making a clear space for her on the table.
   Somehow, Sarah had managed to unzip the back pocket of her knapsack and wrap her fingers around the concealed grip of the revolver. Shocked, she forced herself to relax and think clearly. To scare the hell out of Mari was