ver.
Now I come here to get your help and you start talking about local law
and free enterprise. I just want some estimates from you on getting these
electromagnets wound for the mass driver. Okay? Forget free enterprise."
Casimir dropped a page of diagrams and specifications on Virgil's desk.

Virgil looked it over. "Well, it depends," he finally said. "If we pretend
you're just a normal student, then I will charge you, oh, about ten thousand
dollars for this stuff and have it done by the time you graduate. Now,
unofficially, I could log it in as something much simpler and charge you less.
But you can't put that into a formal budget proposal. Very unofficially, I
might do it for a small bribe, like some help from you around the Shop. But
that's really abnormal to put in a budget. Looks like you're stuck."

"It wouldn't really take you three years."

"It would take me." Virgil waved at the door. "Zap could do it in a week.
Want to ask him? He's not hard to wake up." Casimir brooded momentarily.
"Well, look. I don't really care how it gets done. But it's necessary to have
something on paper, you know?"

Virgil shook his head, smiling. "Casimir. You don't think anyone pays any
attention to those budgets, do you?"

"Aw, shit. This is too weird for me."

"It's not weird, you're just not used to it yet. Here is what we'll do. We
work out a friendly gentlemen's agreement by which I make the magnets for you,
probably over Christmas vacation, in exchange for a little of your expert help
around the Science Shop. When I'm done with the magnets I put them in an old
box and mark it, say, 'SPARE PARTS, 1932 AUTOMATIC BOMBSIGHT PROTOTYPE.' I
dump it in the storeroom. When budget time comes around you say, 'Oh, gee, it
happens I've designed this thing to use existing parts, I know just where they
are.' Ridiculous, but no one knows that, and those who understand won't want
to meddle in any arrangement of mine."

"Okay!" Casimir threw up his hands. "Okay. Fine. Ill do it. Just tell me what
to do and don't let me see any of this illegal stuff." "It's not illegal, I
said it was legal. Hang on a sec while I Xerox these pages."

Virgil opened the door and was met by a clamor of voices from several advanced
academic figures. Casimir looked around the room: a firetrap stuffed with
books and papers and every imaginable variety of electronic junk. A Geiger
counter hung out the window into a deep air shaft, clicking every second or
two. In one corner a 1940's radio was hooked up to a technical power supply
and wired into the guts of a torn-open telephone so that Virgil could make
hands-off phone calls. An old backless TV in another corner enabled Virgil to
monitor the shop outside. Electronic parts, hunks of wire, junk-food wrappers
and scraps of paper littered the floor. And in three separate places sat those
little plastic trays Casimir saw everywhere, overflowing with tiny seeds-- rat
poison.

"Damn!" spat Casimir as Virgil reentered. "There's enough of that poison in
this room alone to kill every rat in this city. What's their problem with that
stuff anyway?"

Virgil snorted. Everyone knew the rat poison was ubiquitous; the wastebaskets
might go a month without emptying, but when it came to rat poison the B-men
were fearsomely diligent, seeming to pass through walls and locked doors like
Shaolin priests to scatter the poison-saturated kernels. "It's cultural,"
he explained. "They hate rats. You should read some Scythian mythology. In
Crotobaltislavonia it's a capital crime to harbor them. That's why they had a
revolution! The old regime stopped handing out free rat poison."

"I'm serious," said Casimir. "I've got an illegal kitten in my room, and If
they keep breaking in to spread poison, they'll find it or let it out or
poison it."

"Or eat it. Seriously, you should have mentioned it, Casimir. Let me help you
out."

Casimir rested his face in his hand. "I suppose you also have an arrangement
with the B-men."

"No, no, much too complicated. I do almost all my work at the computer
terminal, Casimir. You can accomplish anything there. See, a few years ago a
student had a boa constrictor in his room that got poisoned by the B-men, and
even though it was illegal he sued the university for damages and won. There
are still a lot of residents with pets whom the administration doesn't want
to antagonize, because of connections or whatever. Some students are even
allergic to the poison. So, they keep a list of rooms which are not to be
given any poison. All I have to do is put your room on it."

Casimir was staring intently at Virgil. "Wait a minute. How did you get that
kind of access? Aren't there locks? Access checks?" "There are some annoyances
involved."

"I suppose with photographic memory you could do a lot on the computer."

"Helps to have the Operator memorized too."

"Oh, fuck! No!"

Casimir, I am sure, was just as surprised as I had been. The Operator was
an immense computer program consisting entirely of numbers-- machine code.
Without it, the machine was a useless lump. With the Operator installed, it
was a tool of nearly infinite power and flexibility. It was to the computer as
memory, instinct and intelligence are to the human brain.

Virgil handed Casimir a canister of paper computer tape. The label read, "1843
SURINAM CENSUS DATA VOLUME 5. FIREWOOD USAGE ESTIMATES AND PROJECTIONS."

"Ignore that," said Virgil. "It's a program in machine code. It'll put your
room on the no-poison list, and your cat will be safe, unless the B-men forget
or decide to ignore the rule, which is a possibility." Casimir barely looked
at the tape and stared distantly at Virgil. "What have you been doing with
this knowledge?" he whispered. "You could get back at E13S."

Virgil smiled. "Tempting. But when you can do what I can, you don't go for
petty revenge. All I do, really, is fight the Worm, which is really my only
passion these days. It's why I stay around instead of getting a decent job.
It's a sabotage program. It's probably the greatest intellectual achievement
of the nineteen-eighties, and it's the only thing I've ever found that is so
indescribably difficult and complex and beautiful that I haven't gotten bored
with it."

"Why would anyone do such a thing? It must be costing the Megaversity
millions."

"I don't know," said Virgil, "but it's great to have a challenge."

Sarah and I were in her room with my toolbox. Outside, the Terrorists were
trying to get in. I sat on her bed, as she had commanded, silent and neutral.

"When did they start calling themselves the Terrorists," she asked during a
lull.

"Who knows? Maybe Wild and Crazy Guys was too old-fashioned."

"Maybe the hijacking of that NATO tank yesterday gave them the idea. That got
lots of coverage. Shit, here they are again." Cheerfully screaming, another
Airhead was dragged down the hail to be given her upside-down cold shower. The
original Terrorist plan had been to drag the Airheads to the bathroom by their
hair, as in olden times, but after a few tries they were convinced that this
really was painful, so now they were holding on to the feet.

"Terrorists, Terrorists, we're a mean, sonofabitch," came a hoarse chant
as a new group gathered in front of Sarah's door. "Come on, Sarah," their
leader shouted in a heavy New York accent. He was trying to sound fatherly
and patient, but instead sounded anxious and not very bright. "It'll be a lot
better for you if you just come out now. We're tickling Mitzi right now and
she's going to tell us where the master key is, and once we get that we'll
come in and you'll get ad-dition-al pun-ish-ment."

"God," Sarah whispered to me, "these dorks think I'm just playing hard-to-get.
Hope they enjoy it."

"Give the word and I'll shoo them off," I said again.

"Wouldn't help. I have to deal with this myself. Don't be so macho."

"Sorry. Sometimes it works to be macho, you know."

Their previous effort to flash her out of her room had failed. "Flashing" was
the technique of squirting lighter fluid Under a door and throwing in a match.
It wasn't as dangerous as it sounded, but it invariably smoked the victim out.
Powdering was a milder form of this: an envelope was filled with powder, its
mouth slid under the door, and the envelope stomped on, exploding a cloud of
powder into the room. Three days earlier this had been done to Sarah by some
Air-heads. A regular vacuum cleaner just blew the powder out again, so we
brought my wet-dry vacuum up and filled it with water and had better results,
though she and her room still smelled like babies. She had purchased a heavy
rubber weatherstrip from the Mall's hardware store and we had just finished
installing it when the flashing attempt had taken place. From listening to the
Terrorists on the other side of the door, I had now become as primitive as
they had-- it was no longer a negotiable situation-- and was itching to knock
heads.

"Why don't you stop bothering me?" she yelled, trying too hard to sound strong
and steady. "I really don't want to play this game with you. You got what you
wanted from the others, so why don't you leave? You have no right to bother
me."

At this, they roared. "Listen, bitch, this is our sister floor, we decide what
our rights are! No one escapes from the rule of the Terrorists, Terrorists,
we're a mean, sonofabitch! We'll get in sooner or later-- face up to it!"

Another one played the nice guy. "Listen, Sarah-- hey, is that her name?
Right. Uh, listen, Sarah. We can make life pretty hard on you. We're just
trying to initiate you into our sister floor-- it's a new tradition. Remember,
if you don't lock your door, we can come in; and if you do lock it, we can
penny you in."

The Airheads had once pennied Sarah in. The doors opened inward and locked
with deadbolts. If the deadbolt was locked and the door pushed inward with
great force, the friction between the bolt and its rectangular hole in the
jamb became so great that it was impossible for the occupant to withdraw the
bolt to unlock the door. One could not push inward on the door all the time,
of course, but it was possible to wedge pennies between the front of the door
and the projecting member of the jamb so tightly that the occupant was sealed
in helplessly. Since this maneuver only worked when the owner of the room was
inside with the door locked, it was used discourage people from the unfriendly
habit of locking their doors. Sarah was pennied in just before a Student
Government meeting, and she had to call me so that I could run upstairs and
throw myself against the door until the pennies fell out.

"Look," said Sarah, also taking a reasonable tack, "When are you going to
accept that I'm not coming out? I don't want to play, I just want peace and
quiet." She knew her voice was wavering now, and she threw me an exasperated
look.

"Sarah," said the righteously perturbed Terrorist, "you're being very childish
about this. You know we don't want that much. It doesn't hurt. You just have
one more chance to be reasonable, and then it's ad-dition-al pun-ish-ment."

"Swirlie! Swirlie! Swirlie!" chanted the Terrorists. "Fuck yourselves!" she
yelled. Realizing what was about to happen, she yanked my pliers out of my
toolbox and clamped their serrated jaws down on the lock handle just as
Mitzi's master key was slid into the keyhole outside.

She held it firm. The Terrorists found the lock frozen. The key-turner called
for help, but only one hand can grip a key at a time. The handle did rotate a
few degrees in the tussle, and the Terrorists then found they could not pull
the key from the lock. Sarah continued to hold it at a slight twist as the
Terrorists mumbled outside.

"Listen, Sarah, you got a good point. We'll just leave you alone from now on."

"Yeah," said the others, "Sorry, Sarah."

Looking at me, Sarah snorted with contempt and held on to the pliers. A minute
or so after the Terrorists noisily walked away, an unsuccessful yank came on
the key.

"Shit! Fuck you!" The Terrorist kicked and pounded viciously on the door,
raging.

After a few minutes I got on my belly and pried up the rubber strip and
verified that the Terrorists were no longer waiting outside. Sarah opened
her door, pulled out the master key, and pocketed it. She smiled a lot, but
she was also shaking, and wanted no comfort from me. I was about to say she
could sleep on my Sofa for a few days. Sometimes, though, I can actually be
sensitive about these things. Sarah was obviously tired of needing my help.
I felt she needed my protection, but that was my problem. Suddenly feeling
that dealing with me might have been as difficult for her as dealing with the
Terrorists, I made the usual obligatory offers of further assistance, and
went home. Fortunately for what Sarah would call my macho side, I was on an
intramural football team. So were all of the Terrorists. We met three times.
I am big, they were average; they suffered; I had a good time and did not
feel so proud of myself afterward. The Terrorists did not even understand
that I didn't like them. Like a lot of whites, they didn't care much for
blacks unless they were athletic blacks, in which case we could do whatever we
wanted. To knock Terrorist heads for two hours, then have them pat me on the
butt in admiration, was frustrating. As for Sarah, she had no such outlets for
her feelings.

She lay on her bed for the rest of the afternoon, unable to think about
anything else, desperate for the company of Hyacinth, who was out of town for
the weekend. Ultra-raunch rock-'n'-roll pounded through from the room above.
The Terrorists figured out her number and she had to take her phone off the
hook. She ignored the Airheads knocking on her door. Finally, late in the
evening, when things had been quiet for a couple of hours, she slipped out to
take a shower-- a right-side-up, hot shower.

This was not very relaxing. She had to keep her eyes and ears open as much as
she could. As she rinsed her hair, though, a klunk sounded from the showerhead
and the water wavered, then turned bitterly cold. She yelped and swung the
hot-water handle around, to no effect, and then she couldn't stand it and had
to yank open the door and get out of there.

They were all waiting for her-- not the Terrorists, but the Airheads in their
bathrobes. One stood at every sink, smiling, hot water on full blast, and one
stood by every shower stall, smiling, steam pouring out of the door. With huge
smiles and squeals of joy, they actually grabbed her by the arms, shouting
Swirlie!, Swirlie!, took her to one of the toilets, stuck her head in, and
flushed.

She was standing there naked, toilet water running in thin cold ribbons down
her body, and they were in their bathrobes, smiling sympathetically and
applauding. Apologies came from all directions. Somehow she didn't scream, she
didn't hit anyone; she grabbed her bathrobe-- tearing her hand on the corner
of the shower door in her spastic fury-- wrapped it around herself and tied
it so tightly she could hardly breathe. Her pulse fluttered like a bird in
an iron box and tingles of hyperventilation ran down her arms and into her
fingertips.

"What the fuck is wrong with you? Are you crazy?"

They mostly tittered nervously and tried to ignore the way she had flown off
the handle. They were leaving her a social escape route; she could still
smooth it over. But she was not interested. "Listen to me good, you dumb
fucks!" She had let herself go, it was the only thing she could do. In a way
it felt great to bellow and cry and rage and scare the hell out of them; this
was the first contact with reality these women had had in years. "This is
rape! And I'm entitled to protect myself from it! And I will!"

She had stepped over the line. It was now okay to hate Sarah, and several took
the opportunity, laughing out loud to each other. Mari did not. "Sarah! Jeez,
you don't have to take it so serious! You'll feel better later on. We've got
some punch for you in the Lounge. We were just letting you in to the wing. We
didn't think you were going to get so upset."

"Yeah."

"Yeah."

"Yeah."

"Well, I'm real sorry, excuse me, but I am going to take it seriously because
anyone who can't see why it's serious has bad, bad problems and needs to get
straightened out. If you think you're doing this because it's natural and fun,
you aren't thinking too fucking hard."

"But, Jeez, Sarah," said Mari, hardly believing anyone could be so weird,
"it's for the better. We've all been through it together now and we're all
sisters. We're all an equal family together. We were just welcoming you in."

"The whole purpose of a fucking university is not so that you can come and be
just like everyone else. I'm not equal to you people, never will be, don't
want to be, I don't want to be anyone's sister, I don't want your activities,
all I want is a decent place to live where I can be Sarah Jane Johnson, and
not be equalized... by a mob.. . of little powderpuff terrorists... who just
can't stand differentness because they're too stupid to understand it! What
goes on in your heads? Haven't you ever seen the diversity of... of nature?
Stop laughing. Look, you think this is funny? The next time you do this,
someone is going to get hurt very badly." She looked down at the little drops
of blood on the floor, dripping from her hand, and suddenly felt cleansed. She
clenched the fist and held it up. "Understand?"

They had been smug at her wild anger. Now they were scared and disgusted
and their makeup lay on their appalled skin like blood on snow. Most fled,
hysterically grossed out.

"Gag me green!"

"Barf me blue!"

Mari averted her gaze from this gore. "Well, that's okay if you want to give
all of this up. But I don't think it's like rape. I mean, we all scream a lot
and stuff, and we don't really want them to do it, if you know what I mean,
but when they do it's fun after all. So for us it's just sort of wild and
exciting, and for the guys, it helps them work off steam. You know what I
mean?"

"No! Get out! Don't fuck with my life!" That was a lie-- she did know
exactly what Mari meant. But she had just realized she could never let herself
think that way again. Mari sadly floated out, sniffling. Sarah, alone now,
washed her hair again (though it had not been a "dirty swirlie") and retreated
to her room, a little ill in a gag-me-green sort of way, yet filled with a
tingling sense of sureness and power. She was not harassed anymore. Word had
gone out. Sarah had gotten additional punishment and was not to be bothered.

The door opened slightly, and a dazzling splinter of fluorescent light shot
out across the dusky linoleum. Within the room it was still. The door opened a
bit more. "Spike? It's me. Don't try to get out, kittycat."

Now the door opened all the way and a tall skinny figure stepped in quickly,
shut the door, and turned on a dim reading lamp. "Spike, are you sleeping?
What did you get into this time?" He found the kitten under his bed, next to
the overturned rat-poison tray that was not supposed to be there. Spike had
only been dead for a few minutes, and his body was still so warm that Casimir
thought he could be cuddled back to life. He sat on the floor by his bed and
rocked Spike for a while, then stopped and let the tiny corpse down into his
lap.

A convulsion took his diaphragm and his lungs emptied themselves in jolts.
He twisted around, breathless, hung on his elbows on the bed's edge, finally
sucked in a wisp of air and sobbed it out again. He rolled onto the bed and
the sobs came faster and louder. He pulled his pillow into his face and
screamed and sobbed for longer than he could keep track of. Into his lumpy
little standard-issue American Megaversity pillow he shuddered it all out:
Sharon, Spike, the desecration of his academic dream, his loneliness.

When he pulled himself together he was drained and queasy but curiously
relaxed. He put Spike in a garbage bag and slid him into an empty calculator
box, which he taped shut. Cradling it, he stared out the window. Around
him in even ranks rose the thousands of windows of the towers, and to his
tear-blurred vision it was as though he stood in a forest aflame "Spike," he
said, "What the hell should I do with myself?

"Yeah. Okay. That's what it's going to be.

"Well, Spike, now I have to do something unbelievably great. Something
impossible. Something these scum are too dumb even to imagine. To hell with
grades. There are much fairer ways of showing how smart you are. I'm smarter
than all of these fuckers, rules aside."

He cranked his vent window open. Outside a Tower War was raging: students
shouting to one another, shining lights and lasers into one another's rooms,
blaring their stereos across the gulfs. Now the countertenor cry of Casimir
Radon rode in above the tumult.

"You can make it as hard as you want, as hard as you can, but I'm going to be
the cleverest bastard this place has ever seen! I can make idiots of you all,
damn it!"

"Fuck you!" came a long-drawn-out scream from F Tower. It was precisely what
Casimir wanted to hear. He shut his window and sat in darkness to think.

At four in the morning the wing was quiet except for Sarah, who was up,
preparing her laundry. It was not necessary to do it at four in the morning--
one could find open machines as late as six or seven-- but this was Sarah's
time of day. At this time she could walk the halls like something supernatural
(or as she put it, "something natural, in a place that is sub-natural"). In
the corridors she would meet the stupid gotten-up-to-urinate, staggering
half-dead for the bathroom, and they'd squint at her-- clothed, up and
bright-- as though she were a moonbeam that had worked its way around their
room to splash upon their faces. The ultra-late partiers, crushed by alcohol,
floated, belched and slurred along in glitzy boogie dress, and the fresh and
sober Sarah, in soft clothes and tennis shoes, could dance through them before
they had even recognized her presence. The brightest nerds and premeds riding
the elevators home from all-nighters were so thick with sleep they could
hardly stand, much less appreciate the time of day. A dozen or so hard-core
athletes liked to rise as early as Sarah, and when she encountered them they
would nod happily and go their separate ways.

Being up at four in the morning was akin to being in the wilderness. It was as
close to the outside world as you could get without leaving the Plex. The rest
of the day, the harsh artificiality of the place ruled the atmosphere and the
unwitting inhabitants, but the calm purity of the predawn had a way of seeping
through the cinderblocks and pervading the place for an hour or so.

"Screw the laundry," is what she finally said. She had plenty of clean
clothes.

She was kneeling amid a heap of white cottons, and the grim brackishness of
her room was all around her. Suddenly she could not stand it. Laundry would
not make the room seem decent, and she had to do something that would.

Out in the wing it was easy to find the leftover paints and brushes. The
Castle in the Air paintings were just now getting their finishing touches. She
found the supplies in a storage closet and brought them to her room.

Normally this would have been a quick and dirty process, but the spirit of
four in the morning made her placid. She moved the furniture away from the
walls and in a few minutes had the floor, door, windows and furniture covered
with a Sunday New York Times. It looked better already.

The Castle in the Air, as will later be described, was a sickly yellow,
floating on white clouds in a blue sky. By mixing cloud-color with
Castle-color and a bit of Bambi-color (on the ground under the Castle, Bambis
cavorted) she made a mellow creamy paint. This she applied to the walls and
ceiling with a roller. It was breakfast-time. She wasn't hungry.

Sky-color and castle-color made green. She splayed open a cardboard box and
made it into a giant palette, mixing up every shade of green she could devise
and smearing them around to create an infinite variety. Then she began to dab
away on one wall with no particular plan or goal.

The light fixture was in the middle of the wall. She paused, thinking of the
dire consequences, then sighed blissfully and slapped it all over with thick
green daubs.

By noon the wall was covered with pied green splotches ranging from
almost-black to yellow. It was not a bad approximation of a forest in the sun,
but it lacked fine detail and branches. She had long since decided to cut all
her classes. She left her room for the first time since sunrise and started
riding the 'vators toward the shopping mall. She felt great.

"Doin' some paintin'?" asked a doe-eyed woman in leg warmers. Plastered with
paint, Sarah nodded, beaming. "Doin' your room?"

"Yep."

"Yeah. So did we. We did ours all really high-tech. Lots of glow-colors. How
bout you? Lotsa green?"

"Of course," said Sarah, "I'm making it look like the outside. So I don't
forget."

At the Sears in the Mall she got matte black paint and smaller brushes. She
returned to her room, passing the Cafeteria, where thousands stood in line for
something that smelled of onions and salt and hot fat, Sarah had not eaten in
twenty-four hours and felt great-- it was a day to fast. Back in her room she
cleared away a Times page announcing a coup in Africa and sat on her bed to
contemplate her forest. Infinitely better than the old wall, yet still just
a rude beginning-- every patch of color could be subdivided into a hundred
shades and crisscrossed with black branches to hold it all up. She knew she'd
never finish it, but that was fine. That was the idea.

Casimir immediately went into action. He had already daydreamed up this
plan, and to organize the first stages of Project Spike did not take long.
Since Sharon had sunk completely into a coma, Casimir had taken over the old
professor's lab in the Burrows, spending so much time there that he stored a
sleeping bag in the closet so he could stay overnight.

This evening-- Day Three-- he had found six rats crowded into his box trap
near the Cafeteria. Judging from the quantity of poison scattered around
this area, they were of a highly resistant strain. In the lab, he donned
heavy gloves, opened the trap, forced himself to grab a rat, pulled it out
and slammed shut the lid. This was a physics. not a biology, lab and so his
methods were crude. He pressed the rat against the counter and stunned it with
a piece of copper tubing, then held it underwater until dead.

He laid it on a bare plank and set before him an encyclopedia volume he had
stolen from the Library, opened to a page which showed a diagram of the rat's
anatomy. Weighing it open with a hunk of lead radiation shield, he took out
a single-edged razor and went to work on the little beast. In twenty minutes
he had the liver out. In an hour he had six rat livers in a beaker and six
liverless rat corpses in the wastebasket, swathed in plastic. He put the
livers in a mortar and ground them to a pulp, poured in some alcohol, and
filtered the resulting soup until it was clear.

Next morning he visited the Science Shop, where Virgil Gabrielsen was fixing
up a chromatograph that would enable Casimir to find out what chemicals were
contained in the rat liver extract. "We're ready for your mysterious test,"
said Virgil. "Hope you don't mind."

"I love working with mad scientists-- never dull. What's that?" "Mostly grain
alcohol. This machine will answer your question, though, if it's fixed."

A few hours later they had the results: a strip of paper with a line squiggled
across it by the machine. Virgil compared this graph with similar ones from a
long skinny book.

"Shit," said Virgil, showing rare surprise. "I didn't think anything could
live with this much Thalphene in its guts. Thalphene! These things have
incredible immunities."

"What is it? I don't know anything about chemistry." "Trade name for
thallium phenoxide." Virgil crossed his arms and looked at the ceiling.
"Dangerous Properties of Industrial Materials, my favorite bedtime reading,
says this about thallium compounds. I abbreviate. 'Used in rat poison and
depilatories ... results in swelling of feet and legs, arthralgia, vomiting.
insomnia, hyperaesthesia and paresthesia of hands and feet, mental confusion,
polyneuritis with severe pains in legs and loins, partial paralysis and
degeneration of legs, angina, nephritis, wasting, weakness ... complete loss
of hair . . ha! Fatal poisoning has been known to occur.'"

"No kidding!"

"Under phenols we have.. . 'where death is delayed, damage to kidneys, liver,
pancreas, spleen, edema of the lungs, headache, dizziness, weakness, dimness
of vision, loss of consciousness, vomiting, severe abdominal pain, corrosion
of lips, mouth, throat, esophagus and stomach'."

"Okay, I get the idea."

"And that doesn't account for synergistic effects. These rats eat the stuff
all the time."

"So they go through a lot of rat poison, these rats do."

"It looks to me," said Virgil, "as though they live on it. But if you don't
mind my prying, why do you care?"

Casimir was slightly embarrassed, but he knew Virgil's secret, so it was only
fair to bare his own. "In order for Project Spike to work, they have to be
heavy rat-poison eaters. I'm going to collect rat poison off the floors and
expose it to the slow neutron source in Sharon's lab. It's a little chunk of
a beryllium isotope on a piece of plutonium, heavily shielded in paraffin--
looks like a garbage can on wheels. Paraffin stops slow neutrons, see. Anyway,
when I expose the rat poison to the neutrons, some of the carbon in the poison
will turn to Carbon- 14. Carbon- 14 is used in dating. of course, so there are
plenty of machines around to detect small amounts of it. Anyway, I set this
tagged poison out near the Cafeteria. Then I analyze samples of Cafeteria food
for unusually high levels of Carbon- 14. If I get a high reading. .

"It means rats in the food."

"Either rats, or their hair or feces."

"That's awesome blackmail material, Casimir. I wouldn't have thought it of
you.

Casimir looked up at Virgil, shocked and confused. After a few seconds he
seemed to understand what Virgil had meant. "Oh, well, I guess that's true.
The thing is, I'm not that interested in blackmail. It wouldn't get me
anything. I just want to do this, and publicize the results. The main thing is
the challenge."

A rare full grin was on Virgil's face. "Damn good, Casimir, That's marvelous.
Nice work." He thought it over, taken with the idea. "You'll have the biggest
gun in the Plex, you know."

"That's not what I'm after with this project."

"Let me know if I can help. Hey, you want to go downstairs to the Denny's
for lunch? I don't want to eat in the Cafeteria while I'm thinking about the
nature of your experiment."

"I don't want to eat at all, after what I've just been doing," said Casimir.
"But maybe later on we can dissolve our own livers in ethanol." He put the
beaker of rat potion in a hazardous-waste bin, logged down its contents, and
they departed.

And lest anyone get the wrong idea, a disclaimer: I did not know about this
while it was going on. They told me about it later. The people who have
claimed I bear some responsibility for what happened later do not know the
facts.

"What makes you think you can just play a record?" said Ephraim Klein in a
keen, irritated voice. "I'm listening to harpsichord music,"

"Oh," John Wesley Fenrick said innocently. "I didn't hear it. I guess my ears
must have gone bad from all my terrible music, huh?" "Looks that way."

"But it's okay, I'm not going to play a record."

"I should hope not."

"I'm going to play a tape." Fenrick brushed his finger against an invisible
region on the surface of the System, and lights lit and meters wafted up and
down. The mere sound of Silence, reproduced by this machine, nearly drowned
out the harpsichord, a restored 1783 Prussian model with the most exquisite
lute stop Klein had ever heard. Fenrick turned on the Go Big Red Fan, which
began to chunk away as usual.

"Look," said Ephraim Klein, "I said I was playing something. You can't just
bust in."

"Well," said John Wesley Fenrick, "I said I can't hear it. If I don't hear any
evidence that you are playing something, there's no reason I should take your
word for it. You obviously have a distorted idea of reality."

"Prick! Asshole!" But Klein had already pulled out one of his war tapes,
the "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" as performed by Virgil Fox (what Fenrick
called "horror movie music") and snapped it into his own tape deck. He set the
tape rolling and prepared to switch from PHONO to TAPE at the first hint of
offensive action from Fenrick.

It was not long in coming. Fenrick had been sinking into a Heavy Metal
retrospective recently, and entered the competition with Back in Black by
AC/DC. Klein watched Fenrick's hands carefully and was barely able to squeeze
out a lead, the organist hitting the high mordant at the opening of the piece
before the ensuing fancy notes were stomped into the sonic dust by Back in
Black.

From there the battle raged typically. A hundred feet down the hall, I stuck
my head out the door to have a look. Angel, the enormous Cuban who lived
on our floor, had been standing out in the hallway for about half an hour
furiously pounding on the wall with his boxing gloves, laboriously lengthening
a crack he had started in the first week of the semester. When I looked, he
was just in the act of hurling open the door to Klein and Fenrick's room;
dense, choking clouds of music whirled down the corridor at Mach 1 and struck
me full in the face.

I started running. By the time I had arrived, Angel had wrapped Fenrick's
long extension cord around the doorknob, held it with his boxing gloves, put
his foot against the door, and pulled it apart with a thick blue spark and
a shower of fire. The extension cord shorted out and smoked briefly until
circuit breakers shut down all public-area power to the wing.

AC/DC went dead, clearing the air for the climax of the fugue. Angel walked
past the petrified Ephraim Klein and pawed at the tape deck, trying to get
at the tape. Frustrated by the boxing gloves, he turned and readied a mighty
kick into the cone of a sub-woofer, when finally I arrived and tackled him
onto a bed. Angel relaxed and sat up, occasionally pounding his bright-red
cinderblock-scarred gloves together with meaty thwats, sweating like the boxer
he was, glowering at the Go Big Red Fan.

The fugue ended and Ephraim shut off the tape. I went over and closed the
door. "Okay, guys, time for a little talk. Everyone want to have a little
talk?"

John Wesley Fenrick looked out the window, already bored, and nodded almost
imperceptibly. Ephraim Klein jumped to his feet and yelled, "Sure, sure,
anytime! I'm happy to be reasonable!" Angel, who was unlacing his right boxing
glove with his teeth, mumbled, "I been talking to them for two months and they
don't do shit about it."

"Hmm," I said, "I guess that tells the story, doesn't it? If you two refuse
to be reasonable, Angel doesn't have to be reasonable either. Now it seems to
me you need a set of rules that you can refer to when you're arguing about
stereo rights. For instance, if one guy goes to pee, the other can't seize air
rights. You can't touch each other's property, and so on. Ephraim, give me
your typewriter and we'll get this down."

So we made the Rules and I taped them to the wall, straddling the boundary
line of the room. "Does that mean I only have to follow the Rules on my half
of the page," asked Fenrick, so I took it down and made a new Rule saying that
these were merely typed representations of abstract Rules that were applicable
no matter where the typed representations were displayed. Then I had the two
sign the Rules, and hinted again that I just didn't know what Angel might do
if they made any more noise. Then Angel and I went down to my place and had
some beers. Law, and the hope of silence and order, had been established on
our wing.

                                 --November--

Fred Fine was trying to decide whether to lob his last tactical nuke into
Novosibirsk or Tomsk when a frantic plebe bounced up and interrupted the
simulation with a Priority Five message. Of course it was Priority Five; how
else could a plebe have dared interrupt Fred Fine's march to the Ob'? "Fred,
sir," he gasped. "Come quick, you won't believe it." "What's the situation?"

"That new guy. He's about to win World War II!"

"He is? But I thought he was playing the Axis!"

Fred Fine brushed past the plebe and strode into the next room. In its center,
two Ping-Pong tables had been pushed together to make room for the eight-piece
World War II map. On one side stood the tall, aquiline Virgil Gabrielsen--
the "new guy"-- and on the other, Chip Dixon shifted from foot to foot and
snapped his fingers incessantly, Because this was the first wargame Virgil had
ever played, he was still only a Private, and held Plebe status. Chip Dixon, a
Colonel, had been gaming for six years and was playing the Allies, for God's
sake! Usually the only thing at question in this game was how many Allied
divisions the Axis could consume before Berlin inevitably fell.

At the end of the map, where the lines of longitude theoretically converged
to make the North Pole, Consuela Gorm, Referee, sat on a loveseat atop a
sturdy table. On the small stand before her she riffled occasionally through
the inch-thick rule book, punched away at her personal computer, made notes on
scratch paper and peered down at Europe with a tiny pair of opera glasses.
Surrounding the tables were twenty other garners who had come to observe the
carnage shortly after Virgil had V-2'd Birmingham into gravel. Many stood on
chairs, using field glasses of their own, and one geek was tottering around
the area on a pair of stilts, loudly and repeatedly joking that he was a Nazi
spy satellite. The attention of all was focused on tens of thousands of little
cardboard squares meticulously stacked on the hexagonally patterned playing
field. The game had been on for nine and a half hours and Chip Dixon was
obviously losing it fast, popping Cheetos into his mouth faster than he could
grind them into paste with his hyperactive yellow molars, often gulping Diet
Pepsi and hiccuping. Virgil was calm, surveying the board through half-closed
eyes, hands behind back, lips slightly parted, wandering around in a world
inside his head, oblivious to the surrounding nerds. A hell of a warrior,
thought Fred Fine, and this only his first game!

"Here comes the Commander," shouted the guy on stilts as he rounded the
Japanese-occupied Aleutians, and the observers' circle parted so Fred Fine
could enter. Chip Dixon blushed vividly and looked away, moving his lips as he
cursed to himself. "Very interesting," said Fred Fine.

Great stacks of red cardboard squares surrounded Stalin-grad and Moscow, which
were protected only by pitiable little heaps of green squares. In Normandy an
enormous Nazi tank force was hurling the D-Day invasion back into the Channel
so forcefully that Fred Fine could almost hear the howl of the Werfers and
see the bodies fall screaming into the scarlet brine. In Holland, a Nazi
amphibious force made ready to assault Britain. In front of Virgil, lined up
on the edge of the table as trophies, sat the four Iowa-class battleships, the
Hornet, and other major ships of the American navy.

Chip Dixon was increasingly manic, his blood pressure Pumped to the hemhorrage
point by massive overdoses of salt and Diet Pepsi, his thirst insatiable
because of the nearly empty Jumbo Paic of Cheetos. Sweat dripped from his brow
and fell like acid rain on Scandinavia. He bent over and tried to move a stack
of recently mobilized Russians toward Moscow, but as he shoved one point of
his tweezers under the stack he hiccupped violently and ended up scattering
them all over the Ukraine. "Shit!" he screamed, dashing a Cheeto to the floor.
"I'm sorry, Consuela, I forget which hex it was on."

Consuela did not react for several seconds, and the reflection of the rule
book in her glasses gave her an ominous, inscrutable look. Everyone was still
and apprehensive. "Okay," she said in soft, level tones, "that unit got lost
in the woods and can't find its way out for another turn."

"Wait!" yelled Chip Dixon. "That's not in the Rules!" "It's okay," said Virgil
patiently. "That stack contained units A2567, A2668, A4002, and 126789, and
was on hex number 1,254.908. However, unit A2567 clashed with Axis A1009 last
turn, so has only half movement this turn-- three hexes."

Cowed, Chip Dixon breathed deeply (Fred Fine's suggestion) and reassembled
the stack. Unit A2567 was left far behind to deal with a unit of about twenty
King Tiger Tanks which was blasting unopposed up the Dniepr. Chip Dixon then
straightened up and thought for about five mi