nutes, ruffling through his notes
for a misplaced page. Consuela made a gradated series of noises intended to
convey rising impatience. "Listen, Chip, you're already way over the time
limit. Done?"

"Yeah, I guess."

"Any engagements?"

"No, not this turn. But wait 'til you see what's coming." Okay, Virgil, your
turn."

Virgil reached out with a long probe and quickly shoved stacks of cardboard
from place to place; from time to time a move would generate a gasp from the
crowd. He then ticked off a list of engagements, giving Consuela data on what
each stack contained, what its combat strength was, when it had last fought
and so forth. When it was over, an hour later, there was long applause from
the membership of MARS. Chip Dixon had sunk to the floor to sulk over a tepid
Cola.

"Incredible," someone yelled, "you conquered Stalingrad and Moscow and
defeated D-Day and landed in Scotland and Argentina all at the same time!"

At this point Chip Dixon, who had refused to concede, stood up and blew most
of the little cardboard squares away in a blizzard of military might. Fred
Fine was angry but controlled. "Chip, ten demerits for that. I ought to bust
you down to Second Looie for that display. Just for that, you get to put the
game away. And organize it right." Chastened, Chip and two of his admirers
set about sorting all of the pieces of cardboard and fitting them into the
appropriate recesses in the injection-molded World War II carrying case. Fred
Fine turned his attention to Virgil.

"A tremendous victory." He drew his fencing foil and tapped Virgil once on
each shoulder as Virgil looked on skeptically. "I name you a Colonel in MARS.
It's quite a jump, but a battlefield commission is obviously in order."

"Oh, not really," said Virgil, bored. "It's more a matter of a good memory
than anything else."

"You're modest. I like that in a man."

"No, just accurate. I like that."

Fred Fine now drew Virgil aside, away from the dozen or so wargame aficionados
who were still gaping at one another and pounding their heads dramatically
on the walls. The massively corpulent Consuela was helped down from her
eleven-hour perch by several straining MARS officials, and began to roll
toward them like a globule of quicksilver.

"Virgil," said Fred Fine quietly, "you're obviously a special kind of man.
We need men like you for our advanced games. These board games are actually
somewhat repetitive, as you pointed out. Want a little more excitement next
time?"

Virgil drew away. "What do you have in mind?"

"You've heard of Dungeons and Dragons?" A gleam came to Fred Fine's eye, and
he glanced conspiratorially at Consuela. "Sure. Someone designs a hypothetical
dungeon on graph paper, puts different monsters and treasure in the rooms, and
each player has a character which he sends through it, trying to take as much
treasure as possible. Right?"

"Oh, only in its crudest, simplest forms, Virgil," said Consuela. "This one
and his friends prefer a more active version." "Sewers and Serpents," said
Consuela, nodding happily. "The idea is the same as D & D, but we use a real
place, and real costumes, and act it all out. Much more realistic. You see,
beneath the Plex is a network of sewer tunnels."

"Yeah, I know," said Virgil. "I've got the blueprints for this place
memorized, remember."

Fred Fine was taken aback. "How?"

"Computer drew them for me."

"Well, we'd have to give you a character who had some good reason for knowing
his way around the tunnels."

"Like maybe, uh," said Consuela, eyes rolled up, "maybe he happened to see
a duel between some hero who had just come out of the Dungeon of Plexor"--
"That's what we call the tunnels," said Fred Fine.

-- "and some powerful nonsentient beast such as a gronth, and the gronth
killed the hero, and then Virgil's character came and found a map on his body
and memorized it."

"Or we could make him a computer expert in TechnoPlexor who got a peek at
the plans the same way Virgil did "Excuse me a sec, but what do you do for
monsters?" asked Virgil.

"Well we don t have real ones. We just have to pretend and use the official
S & S rules, developed by MARS through a constitutional process over several
years. We maintain two-way radio contact with our referee, Consuela, who
stays in the Plex and runs the adventure through a computer program we've
got worked out. The computer also performs statistical combat simulation."

"So you slog around in the shit, and the computer says you're being attacked
by monsters, and she reads it off the CRT and says that according to the
computer you've lost a finger, or the monster's dead, that sort of thing?"

"Well, it's more exciting than you make it sound, and the Dungeon Mistress
makes it better by amplifying the description generated by the computer. I
recommend you try it. We've got an outing in a couple of weeks."

"I don't know, Fred, it's not my cup of tea. I'll think about it, but don't
count on my coming."

"That's fine. Consuela just needs to know a few hours ahead of time so she can
have SHEKONDAR-- the computer program-- prepare a character for you."

Virgil assented to everything, nodded a lot, said he'd be getting back to them
and hurried out, shaking his head in amazed disgust. Unlikely as it seemed,
this place could still surprise him.

My involvement with Student Government was due to my being
faculty-in-residence. I served as a kind of minister without portfolio,
investigating whatever topic interested me at the moment, talking to students,
faculty and administrators, and contributing to governmental discussions the
point of view of an older, supposedly wiser observer. As I had no idea what
was going on at the Big U until much later, my contributions can't have done
much good. I did visit the Castle in the Air on several occasions, anyway, and
whenever I did I was presented with a visual display in three stages.

The first was a prominent mural on the wall of the Study Lounge, clearly
visible through the windows from the elevator lobby. Even if I had been
visiting one of E12's other wings, therefore, I couldn't have failed to
notice that E12S was a wing among wings. Here, as described, the Castle was
painted in yellow-- not a typical color for castles, but much nicer than
realistic gray or brown. The Castle, stolen directly from a book of Disney
illustrations, floated on a cloud that looked like a stomped marshmallow,
not a thunderhead, Seemingly too meager to support its load. Below, more
Disney characters frolicked on an undulating green lawn, a combined golf
course/cartoon character refuge with no sand traps, one water hazard and no
visible greens. The book of illustrations was not large, and each character
was shown in only one or two poses which had to be copied over and over again
in populating this great lawn. Monotony had rendered the painters somewhat
desperate-- what was that penguin doing there? And why had they included that
evil gray wolf, wagging his red tongue at the stiff cloned Bambis from behind
a spherical shrub? But most agreed that the mural was nice-- indeed, so nice
that "nice" was no longer adequate by itself; in describing it, Airheads had
to amplify the word by saying it many, many times and making large gestures
with their hands.

The second stage of the presentation was the entryways -- two identical
portals, one at the beginning of each of the wing's two hallways. Here, at
the fire doors by the Study Lounge, the halls had been framed in thick wooden
beams-- actually papier-máchèd boxes-- decorated with plastic flowers and
welcoming messages. The fire doors themselves had been covered with paper
and painted so that, when they were closed, I could see what looked like a
stairway of light yellow stone rising up from the floor and continuing skyward
until further view was blocked by the beam along the ceiling.

Going through these doors, and therefore up the symbolic stair, I found myself
in a light yellow corridor gridded with thin wavy black lines supposed to
represent joints between the great yellow building-stones of which the Castle
was constructed. These were closely spaced in the first part of the hallway,
but the crew had found this work tedious and decided that in the back sections
much larger stones were used to build the walls. Here and there, torches, fake
paintings, suits of armor and the like were painted on the walls.

Each individual room, then, was the province of the occupants, who could turn
it into any fantasy-land they wanted. One or two of them painted murals on
paper and pasted them to their doors. These murals purported to be windows
looking down on the scene below, an artistic challenge too great for most of
them.

On each visit to Sarah, then, I was introduced to the Castle in the Air in
the manner of a TV viewer. The elevator doors would fade out and there sat
the Castle on its cloud, viewed through a screen of glass. The view would
then switch to a traveling shot of the stairway leading up to the castle--
evidently a long one. Through the magic of video editing, the stair would
flatten, part and swing away, and I would be instantly jump-cut to the halls
of the Castle proper, where to confirm that it had all happened I could pause
at windows here and there and look down at the featureless plains from which I
had just ascended.

So much for the opening credits; what about the plot? The plot consisted
almost entirely of parties and tame sexual intrigue with the Terrorists.
The Airheads were not disturbed by the fact that their home was not much of
a castle -- the Terrorists or anyone else could invade at any time-- and
that far from being up in the air, it was squashed beneath nineteen other
Terrorist-infested floors. The Airheads got along by pretending that any man
who showed up on their floor was a white knight on beck and call. Certain evil
influences, though, could not be kept out by any amount of painting, and among
these was the fire alarm system.

Early in the morning of November the Fifth, Mari Meegan was ejected from her
chamber by three City firefighters investigating a full-tower fire alarm.
Versions differed as to whether the firefighters had used physical force, but
to the lawyers subsequently hired by Mari's father it did not matter; the
issue was the mental violence inflicted on Mari, who was forced to totter
down the stairway and join the sleepy throng below with only patches of
bright blue masque painted on her face.

This situation had not previously arisen because it usually took at least
half an hour between the ringing of the alarm and the arrival of the firemen
on their tour through the tower. Thirty minutes was time enough for Mari to
apply a quickie makeup job which would prevent her from looking "disgusting"
even during full moons outside, and, as the lawyers took pains to document
and photograph, her emergency thirty-minute face kit was set up and ready to
go on a corner of her dresser. Next to it was the masque container, which was
for "super emergencies"; given a severely limited time to prepare, she could
tear this open and paint a blue oval over her face that would serve partly to
disguise and partly to show those who recognized her that she cared about her
appearance. But on this particular morning, certain Terrorists from above had
demonstrated their mechanical aptitude by disabling the E12S alarm bell with
a pair of bolt cutters. The more distant ringing of the E12E bell had not
overborne the soft nocturnal beat of Mari's stereo, and by the time she had
realized what was happening, and energized the evening light simulation tubes
on her makeup center, the sirens were already wafting up from the Death Vortex
below.

The Fire Marshall was not amused. After a week's worth of rumors that
portrayed the Fire Marshall as a Nazi and a pervert, it was decreed that
henceforth during fire drills the RAs would go door-to-door with their master
keys and make sure everyone left their rooms immediately. This grim ruling
inspired a wing meeting at which Hyacinth wearily suggested they all purchase
ski masks, since it was getting cold outside anyway, and wear them down to the
street during fire drills. "Stay together and you will be totally anonymous,
by which I mean no one will know who you are, or what you look like at three
in the morning." The Airheads appointed Teri, a Fashion Merchandising major to
pick out ski masks with a suitable color scheme.

In private Hyacinth came up with an acronym for them: SWAMPers. This meant
that as a bare minimum they found it necessary to Shave Wash Anoint Make up
and Perfume all parts of their body at least once a day. Their insistence
on doing this often made Sarah wonder about her own appearance-- her use
of cosmetics was minimal-- but Hyacinth and I and everyone else assured
her she looked fine. When preparing for the long nasty Student Government
budget meeting in early November Sarah looked briefly through her shoebox of
miscellaneous cosmetics then shoved it under the bed again. She had greater
things to worry about.

As for clothes, it came down to a choice between her most businesslike outfit,
a grey wool skirt suit, and a somewhat brighter dress. She picked the suit,
though she knew it would lay her open to accusations of fascism from the
Stalinist Underground Battalion (SUB), wound her hair into a bun, and steeled
herself for madness.

The SUB got there an hour before anyone else and had their banners planted
and their rabid handouts sown before the Government even showed up. We met
in the only room we could find that was reasonably private. Behind us came
the TV crews, and then the reporters from the Monoplex Monitor and the
People's Truth Publication, who sat in the first row, right in front of the
Stalinists. Finally Lecture Auditorium 3 filled up with supplicants from
various organizations, all deeply shocked and dismayed at how little funding
they were receiving, all bearing proposed amendments.

First we slogged through the parliamentary trivia, including a bit of
"new business" in which the SUB introduced a resolution to condemn the
administration for massive human rights violations and to call for its
abolition. Then we came to the real purpose of the meeting: amendments to the
proposed budget. A line formed behind the microphone on the stage, and at its
head was a SUB member. "I move." he said, "that we pass no budget at all,
because the budget has to be approved by the administration, and so we haven't
got any control over our own activity money." On cue, behind the press corps,
eight SUBbies rose to their feet bearing a long banner: TAKE BACK CONTROL
OF STUDENT ACTIVITIES CAPITAL FROM THE KRUPP JUNTA. "The money's ours, the
money's ours, the money's ours . ."

We had expected all this and Sarah was undisturbed. She sat back from her
microphone and took a sip of water. letting the media record the event for
the ages. Once that was done she gaveled a few times and talked them back
into their seats. She was about to start talking again when the last standing
SUBbie shouted, "Student Government is a tool of the Krupp cadre!"

Behind him, most of the audience shouted things like "eat rocks" and "shut up"
and "shove it."

"If you're finished interfering with the democratic process," Sarah said,
"this tool would like to get on with the budget. We have a lot to do and
everyone needs to be very, very brief." Student Government was made up of the
Student Senate, which represented each of the 200 residential wings of the
Plex, and the Activities Council, comprising representatives from each. of the
funded student organizations, numbering about 150. The distribution of funds
among the Activities Council members was decided on by a joint session, which
was our goal for the evening.

The Student Senate was crammed with SUBbies and members of an outlaw Mormon
splinter group called the Temple of Unlimited Godhead (TUG). Each of these
groups claimed to represent all the students. As Sarah explained, no one in
his right mind was interested in running for Student Senate, explaining why it
was filled with fanatics and political science majors. Fortunately, SUB and
TUG canceled each other out almost perfectly.

"I'm tired of having all aspects of my life ruled by this administration that
doesn't give a shit for human rights, and I think it's time to do something
about it," said the first speaker. There was a little applause from the front
and lots of jeering. A hum filled the air as the TUG began to OMMMM
at middle
C-- a sort of sonic tonic which was said to clear the air of foul influences
and encourage spiritual peace; overhead, a solitary bat, attracted by the
hum, swooped down from a perch in the ceiling and flitted around, occasioning
shrieks and violent motion from the people it buzzed. "At this university we
don't have free speech, we don't have academic freedom, we don't even have
power over our own money!"

At the insistence of the audience, Sarah broke in after a few minutes. "If
you've got any specific human rights violations you're concerned about, there
are some international organizations you can go to, but there's not much the
Student Senate can do. So I suggest you go live somewhere else and let someone
else propose an amendment."

Shocked and devastated, the speaker gaped at Sarah as the TV lights slammed
into action. He held the stare for several seconds to allow the camera
operators to focus and adjust light level, then surveyed the cheering and
OMming crowd, face filled with bewilderment and shock.

"I don't believe this," he said, staring into the lenses. "Who says we have
freedom of speech? My God, I've come up here to express a free opinion, and
just because I am opposed to fascism, the President of the Student Government
tries to throw me out of the Plex! My home! That's right, if these different
people don't like being oppressed, just throw them out of their homes into
the dangerous city! I didn't think this kind of savagery was supposed to
exist in a university." He shook his head in noble sadness, surveyed the
derisive crowd defiantly, and marched away from the mike to grateful applause.
Below, he answered questions from the media while the next student came to the
microphone.

He looked like a male cheerleader for a parochial school football team, being
handsome, well groomed, and slightly pimpled. As he took possession of the
mike the OM stopped. He kept his eye on a middle-aged fellow standing in the
aisle not far away, who in turn watched the SUBbie's press conference in front
of the stage. Finally the older gentleman held up three fingers. The TUGgie
shoved his fist between his arm and body and spoke loudly and sharply into the
mike.

"I'd like to announce that I have caught a bat here in my hand, and now
I'm going to bite the head off it right here as a sacrifice to the God of
Communism."

Below, the SUBbie found himself in absolute darkness, and tripped over a power
cord. Simultaneously the TUGgie squinted as all lights were swung around to
bear on him. He smiled and began to talk in a calm chantlike voice. "Well,
well, well. I've got a confession. I'm not really going to bite the head off
a bat, because I don't even have one, and I'm not a Communist." There was now
a patter of what sounded like canned TV laughter from the TUG section. "I
just did that as a little demonstration, to show you folks how easy it is to
get the attention of the media. We can come and talk about serious issues and
do real things, but what gets TV coverage are violent eye-catching events, a
thing which the Communists who wish to destroy our society understand very
well. But I'm not here to give a speech, I'm here to propose an amendment. .
." Here he was dive-bombed by the bat, who veered away at the last moment;
the speaker jumped back in horror, to the amusement of almost everyone. The
TUGgies laughed too, showing that, yes, they did have a sense of humor no
matter what people said. The speaker struggled to regain his composure.

"The speech! Resume the speech! The amendment!" shouted the older man.

"My budget proposal is that we take away all funding for the Stalinist
Underground Battalion and distribute it among the other activities groups."

The lecture hall exploded in outraged chanting, uproarious applause, and OM.
Sarah sat for about fifteen seconds with her chin in her hand, then began
smashing the gavel again. I was seated off to the side of the stage, poised to
act as the strong-but-lovable authority figure, but did not have to stand up;
eventually things quieted down.

"Is there a second to the motion?" she asked wearily. The crowd screamed YES
and NO.

The speaker yielded to another TUGgie, who stood rigidly with a stack of
3- x -5 cards and began to drone through them. "At one time the leftist
organizations of American Megaversity could claim that they represented some
of the students. But the diverse organizations of the Left soon found that
they all had one member who was very strident and domineering and who would
push the others around until he or she had risen to a position of authority
within the organization. These all turned out to be secretly members of the
Stalinist Underground Battalion who had worked themselves in organizations in
order to merge the Left into a single bloc with no diversity or freedom of
thought. The SUB took over a women's issues newsletter and turned it into the
People's Truth Publication, a highly libelous so-called newspaper. In the same
way
"

He was eventually cut off by Sarah. SUB spokespersons stated their views
passionately, then another TUGgie. Finally a skinny man in dark spectacles
came to the mike, a man whom Sarah recognized but couldn't quite place. He
identified himself as Casimir Radon and said he was president of the physics
club Neutrino. He quieted the crowd down a bit, as his was the first speech of
the evening that was not entirely predictable.

"I'd like to point out that you've only given us four hundred dollars," he
said. "We need more. I've done some analysis of the way our activity money
is budgeted, which I will just run through very quickly here-- " he fumbled
through papers as a disappointed murmur rose from the audience. How long
was this nerd going to take? The cameramen put new film and tape in their
equipment as lines formed outside by the restrooms.

"Here we go. I won't get too involved in the numerical details-- it's all
just arithmetic-- but if you look at the current budget, you see that a small
group of people is receiving a hugely disproportionate share of the money. In
effect, the average funding per member of the Stalinist Underground Battalion
is $114.00, while the figure for everyone else averages out to about $46.00,
and only $33.00 for Neutrino. That's especially unfair because Neutrino needs
to purchase things like books and equipment, while the expenses of a political
organization are much lower. I don't think that's fair."

The SUB howled at this preposterous reasoning but everyone else listened
respectfully.

"So I move we cut SUB funding to the bare minimum, say, twenty bucks per
capita, and give Neutrino its full request for a scientific research project,
$1500.00."

The rest of the evening, anyway, was bonkers, and I'll not go into detail.
It was insignificant anyway, since the administration had the final say; the
Student Government would have to keep passing budgets until they passed one
that S. S. Krupp would sign, and the only question was how long it would
take them to knuckle under. Time was against the SUB. As the members of the
government got more bored, they became more interested in passing a budget
that would go through the first time around. Eventually it became obvious
that the SUB had lost out, and the only thing wanting was the final vote.
The highlight of the evening came just before that vote: the speech of Yllas
Freedperson.

Yllas, the very substantial and brilliant leader of the SUB, was a heavy
black woman in her early thirties, in her fifth year of study at the Modern
Political Art Workshop. She had a knack for turning out woodblock prints
portraying anguished faces, burning tenements, and thick tortured hands
reaching for the sky. Even her pottery was inspired by the work of wretched
Central American peasants. She was also editor and illustrator of the People's
Truth Publication, but her real talent was for public speaking, where she had
the power of a gospel preacher and the fire of a revolutionary. She waited
dignified for the TV lights, then launched into a speech that lasted at least
a quarter of an hour. At just the right times she moaned, she chanted, she
sang, she reasoned, she whispered, she bellowed, she just plain spoke in a
fluid and hypnotically rhythmic voice. She talked about S. S. Krupp and the
evil of the System, how the System turned good into bad, how this society
was just like the one that caused the Holocaust, which was no excuse for
Israel, about conservatism in Washington and how our environment, economic
security, personal freedom, and safety from nuclear war were all threatened
by the greedy action of cutting the SUB's budget. Finally out came the names
of Martin Luther King, Jr., Marx, Gandhi, Che, Jesus Christ, Ronald Reagan,
Hitler, S. S. Krupp, the KKK, Bob Avakian, Elijah Mohammed and Abraham
Lincoln. Through it all, the bat was active, dipping and diving crazily
through the auditorium, divebombing toward walls or lights or people but
veering away at the last moment, flitting through the dense network of beams
and cables and catwalks and light fixtures and hanging speakers and exposed
pipes above us at great smooth speed, tracing a marvelously complicated path
that never brushed against any solid object. All of it was absorbing and
breathtaking, and when Yllas Freedperson was finished and the bat, perhaps no
longer attracted by her voice. slipped up and disappeared into a corner, there
was a long silence before the applause broke out.

"Thank you, Yllas," said Sarah respectfully. "Is there any particular motion
you wanted to make or did you just want to inject your comments?"

"I move," shouted Yllas Freedperson, "that we put the budget the way it was."

The vote was close. The SUB lost. Recounting was no help. They took the
dignified approach, forming into a sad line behind Yllas and singing "We Shall
Overcome" in slow tones as they marched out. Above their heads they carried
their big black-on-red posters of S. S. Krupp with a target drawn over his
face, and they marched so slowly that it took two repetitions of the song
before they made it out into the hallway to distribute leaflets and posters.

Sarah, three members of her cabinet and I gathered later in my suite for wine.
After the frenzy of the meeting we were torpid, and hardly said anything for
the first fifteen minutes or so. Then, as it commonly did those days, the
conversation came around to the Terrorists.

"What's the story on those Terrorist guys?" asked Willy, a business major who
acted as Treasurer. "Are they genuine Terrorists?"

"Not on my floor," said Sarah, "since they subjugated us. We're living in...
the Pax Thirteenica."

"I've heard a number of stories," I said. Everyone looked at me and I
shifted into my professor mode and lit my pipe. "Their major activity is
the toll booth concept. They station Terrorists in the E13 elevator lobby
who continually push the up and down buttons so that every passing elevator
stops and opens automatically. If it doesn't contain any non-students or
dangerous-looking people, they hold the door open until everyone gives them
a quarter. They have also claimed a section of the Cafeteria, and there have
been fights over it. But nothing I'd call true terrorism."

"How about gang rape?" asked Hillary, the Secretary, quietly. Everything got
quiet and we looked at her.

"It's just a rumor," she said. "Don't get me wrong. It hasn't happened to
me. The word is that a few of the hardcore Terrorists do it, kind of as an
initiation. They go to big parties, or throw their own. You know how at a big
party there are always a few women-- typical freshmen-- who get very drunk.
Some nice-looking Terrorist approaches the woman-- I hear that they're very
good at identifying likely candidates-- and gets into her confidence and
invites her to another party. When they get to the other party, she turns
out to be the only woman there, and you can imagine the rest. But the really
terrible thing is that they go through her things and find out where she
lives and who she is, then keep coming back whenever they feel like it. They
have these women so scared and broken that they don't resist. Supposedly the
Terrorists have kind of an invisible harem, a few terrified women all over the
Plex, too dumb or scared to say anything."

I was sitting there with my eyes closed, like everyone else a little queasy.
"I've heard of the same thing elsewhere," I said. "I wonder if it's happened
to any Airheads," murmured Sarah. "God, I'll bet it has. I wonder if any of
them know about it. I wonder if they even understand what is being done to
them-- some of them probably don't even understand they have a right to be
angry."

"How could anyone not understand rape?" said Hillary.

"You don't know how mixed up these women are. You don't know what they did
to me, without even understanding why I didn't like it. You can't imagine
those people-- they have no place to stand, no ideas of their own-- if one
is raped, and not one of her friends understands, where is she? She's cut
loose, the Terrorists can tell her anything and make her into whatever they
want. Shit, where are those animals going to stop? We're having a big
costume party with them in December."

"There's a party to avoid," said Hillary.

"It's called Fantasy Island Nite. They've been planning it for months. But by
the time the semester is over, those guys will be running wild."

"They've been running wild for a long time, it sounds like," said Willy.
"You'd better get used to that, you know? I think you're living in the law of
the jungle." That sounded a trifle melodramatic, but none of us could find a
way to disagree.

Sarah and Casimir met in the Megapub, a vast pale airship hangar littered
with uncertain plastic tables and chairs made of steel rods bent around
into uncomfortable chairlike shapes that stabbed their occupants beneath
the shoulder blades. At one end was a long bar, at the other a serving bay
connected into the central kitchen complex. Casimir declined to eat Megapub
food and lunched on a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich made from overpriced
materials bought at the convenience store and a plastic cup of excessively
carbonated beer. Sarah used the salad bar. They removed several trays from a
window table and stacked them atop a nearby wastebasket, then sat down.

"Thanks for coming on short notice," said Sarah. "I need all the help I can
get in selling this budget to Krupp, and your statistics might impress him."

Casimir, chewing vigorously on a big bite of generic white bread and generic
chunkless peanut butter, drew a few computer-printed graphs from his backpack.
"These are called Lorentz curves," he mumbled, "and they show equality of
distribution. Perfect equality is this line here, at a forty-five degree
angle. Anything less than equal comes out as a curve beneath the equality
line. This is what we had with the old budget." He displayed a graph showing
a deeply sagging curve, with the equality line above it for comparison. The
graph had been produced by a computer terminal which had printed letters at
various spots on the page, demonstrating in crude dotted-line fashion the
curves and lines. "Now, here's the same analysis on our new budget." The new
graph had a curve that nearly followed the equality line. "Each graph has a
coefficient called the Gini coefficient, the ratio of the area between the
line and curve to the area under the line. For perfect equality the Gini
coefficient is zero. For the old budget it was very bad, about point eight,
and for the new budget it is more like point two, which is pretty good."

Sarah listened politely. "You have a computer program that does this?"

"Yeah. Well, I do now, anyway. I just wrote it up."

"It's working okay?"

Casimir peered at her oddly, then at the graphs, then back at her. "I think
so. Why?"

"Well, look at these letters in the curves." She pulled one of the
graphs over and traced out the letters indicating the Lorentz curve:
FELLATIOBUGGERYNECROPHILIACUNNILINGUSANALINGUSBESTIALITY....

"Oh," Casimir said quietly. The other curve read:
CUNTFUCKSHITPISSCOCKASSHOLETITGIVEMEANENEMABEATMELICKMEOWNME.... Casimir's
face waxed red and his tongue was protruding slightly. "I didn't do this.
These are supposed to say, 'new budget' and 'old budget.' I didn't write
this into the program. Uh, this is what we call a bug. They happen from time
to time. Oh, Jeez, I'm really sorry." He covered his face with one hand and
grabbed the graphs and crumpled them into his bag.

"I believe you," she said. "I don't know much about computers, but I know
there have been problems with this one."

About halfway through his treatise on Lorentz curves it had occurred to
Casimir that he was in the process of putting his foot deeply into his mouth.
She was an English major; he had looked her up in the student directory to
find out; what the hell did she care about Gini coefficients? Sarah was still
smiling, so if she was bored she at least respected him enough not to show.
He had told her that he'd just now written this program up, and that was bad,
because it looked-- oy! It looked as though he were trying to impress her, a
sophisticated Humanities type, by writing computer programs on her behalf as
though that were the closest he could come to real communication. And then
obscene Lorentz curves!

He was saved by her ignorance of computers. The fact was, of course, that
there was no way a computer error could do that-- if she had ever run a
computer program, she would have concluded that Casimir had done it on
purpose. Suddenly he remembered his conversation with Virgil. The Worm! It
must have been the Worm. He was about to tell her, to absolve himself, when he
remembered it was a secret he was honor bound to protect.

He had to be honest. Could it be that he had actually written this just to
impress her? Anything printed on a computer looked convincing. If that had
been his motive, this served him right. Now was the time to say something
witty, but he was no good at all with words-- a fact he didn't doubt was
more than obvious to her. She probably knew every smart, interesting
man in the university, which meant he might as well forget about making
any headway toward looking like anything other than an unkempt, poor,
math-and-computer-obsessed nerd whose idea of intelligent conversation was to
show off the morning's computer escapades.

"You didn't have to go to the trouble of writing a program."

"Ha! Well, no trouble. Easier to have the machine do it than work it out by
hand. Once you get good on the computer, that is." He bit his up and looked
out the window.  "Which isn't to say I think I'm some kind of great
programmer. I mean, I am, but that's not how I think of myself."

"You aren't a hacker," she suggested.

"Yeah! Exactly." Everyone knew the term "hacker," so why hadn't he just
said it?

She looked at him carefully. "Didn't we meet somewhere before? I could swear
I recognize you from somewhere." He had been hoping that she had forgotten,
or that she would not recognize him through his glacier glasses.  That first
day, yes, he had read her computer card for her-- a hacker's idea of a
perfect introduction!

"Yeah. Remember Mrs. Santucci? That first day?" She nodded her head with a
little smile; she remembered it all, for better or worse. He watched her
intensely, trying to judge her reaction.

"Yes," she said, "sure. I guess I never properly thanked you for that, so--
thank you." She held out her hand. Casimir stared at it, then put out his
hand and shook it. He gripped her firmly-- a habit from his business, where
a crushing handshake was a sign of trustworthiness. To her he had probably
felt like an orangutan trying to dislocate her shoulder. Besides which, some
apple-blackberry jam had dripped out onto the first joint of his right index
finger some minutes ago, and he had thoughtlessly sucked on it.

She was awfully nice. That was a dumb word, "nice," but he couldn't come up
with anything better. She was bright, friendly and understanding, and kind to
him, which was good of her considering his starved fanatical appearance and
general fabulous ugliness. He hoped that this conversation would soon end and
that they would come out of it with a wonderful relationship. Ha.

No one said anything; she was just watching him. Obviously she was! It was his
turn to say something! How long had he been sitting there staring into the
navy-blue maw of his mini-pie? "What's your major?" they said simultaneously.
She laughed immediately, and belatedly he laughed also, though his laugh was
sort of a gasp and sob that made him sound as if he were undergoing explosive
decompression. Still, it relaxed him slightly. "Oh," she added, "I'm sorry. I
forgot Neutrino was for physics majors."

"Don't be sorry." She was sorry?

"I'm an English major."

"Oh." Casimir reddened. "I guess you probably noticed that English is not my
strong point."

"Oh, I disagree. When you were speaking last night, once you got rolling you
did very well. Same goes for today, when you were describing your curves. A
lot of the better scientists have an excellent command of language. Clear
thought leads to clear speech."

Casimir's pulse went up to about twice the norm and he felt warmth in the
lower regions. He gazed into the depths of his half-drained beer, not knowing
what to say for fear of being ungrammatical. "I've only been here a few weeks,
but I've heard that S. S. Krupp is quite the speaker. Is that so?"

Sarah smiled and rolled her eyes. At first Casimir had considered her just
a typically nice-looking young woman, but at this instant it became obvious
that he had been wrong; in fact she was spellbindingly lovely. He tried not to
stare, and shoved the last three bites of pie into his mouth. As he chewed he
tried to track what she was saying so that he wouldn't lose the thread of the
conversation and end up looking like an absent-minded hacker with no ability
to relate to anyone who wasn't destined to become a machine-language expert.

"He is quite a speaker," she said. "If you're ever on the opposite side of a
question from S. S. Krupp, you can be sure he'll bring you around sooner or
later. He can give you an excellent reason for everything he does that goes
right back to his basic philosophy. It's awesome, I think."

At last he was done stuffing junk food into his unshaven face. "But when he
out-argues you-- is that a word?"

"Well let it slip by."

"When he does that, do you really agree, or do you think he's just outclassed
you?"

"I've thought about that quite a bit. I don't know." She sat back pensively,
was stabbed by her chair, and sat back up. "What am I saying? I'm an English
major!" Casimir chuckled, not quite following this. "If he can justify it
through a fair argument, and no one else can poke any holes in it, I can't
very well disagree, can I? I mean, you have to have some kind of anchors for
your beliefs, and if you don't trust clear, correct language, how do you know
what to believe?"

'What about intuition?" asked Casimir, surprising himself. "You know the
great discoveries of physics weren't made through argument. They were made in
flashes of intuition, and the explanations and proofs thought up afterward."

"Okay." She drained her coffee and thought about it. "But those scientists
still had to come up with verbal proofs to convince themselves that the
discoveries were real."

So far, Casimir thought, she seemed more interested than peeved, so he
continued to disagree. "Well, scientists don't need language to tell them
what's real. Mathematics is the ultimate reality. That's all the anchor we
need."

"That's interesting, but you can't use math to solve political problems-- it's
not useful in the real world."

"Neither is language. You have to use intuition. You have to use the right
side of your brain."

She looked again at the clock. "I have to go now and get ready for Krupp." Now
she was looking at him-- appraisingly, he thought. She was going to leave! He
desperately wanted to ask her out. But too many women had burst out laughing,
and he couldn't take that. Yet there she sat, propped up on her elbows-- was
she waiting for him to ask? Impossible.

"Uh," he said, but at the same time she said, "Let's get together some other
time. Would you like that?"

"Yeah."

"Fine!" With a little negotiation, they arranged to meet in the Megapub on
Friday night.

"I can't believe you're free Friday night