!" he blurted, and she looked at him
oddly. She stood up and held out her hand again. Casimir scrambled up and
shook it gently.

"See you later," she said, and left. Casimir remained standing, watched her
all the way across the shiny floor of the Megapub, then telescoped into his
seat and nearly blacked out.

She did not have to wait long amid the marble-and-mahogany splendor of
Septimius Severus Krupp's anteroom. She would have been happy to wait there
for days, especially if she could have brought some favorite music and maybe
Hyacinth, taken off her shoes, lounged on the sofa and stared out the window
over the lush row of healthy plants. The administrative bloc of the Plex was
an anomaly, like a Victorian mansion airlifted from London and dropped whole
into a niche beneath C Tower. Here was none of the spare geometry of the rest
of the Plex, none of the anonymous monochromatic walls and bald rectangles and
squares that seemed to drive the occupants bonkers. No plastic showed; the
floors were wooden, the windows opened, the walls were paneled and the honest
wood and intricate parquet floors gave the place something of nature's warmth
and diversity. In the past month Sarah had seen almost no wood-- even the
pencils in the stores here were of blond plastic-- and she stared dumbly at
the paneling everywhere she went, as though the detailed grain was there for
a reason and bore careful examination. All of this was an attempt to invest
American Megaversity with the aged respectability of a real university; but
she felt at home here.

"President Krupp will see you now," said the wonderful, witty, kind, civilized
old secretary, and the big panel doors swung open and there was S. S. Krupp.
"Good afternoon, Sarah, I'm sorry you had to wait," he said. "Please come in."

Three of the walls of Krupp's office were covered up to about nine feet
high with bookshelves, and the fourth was all French windows. Above the
bookshelves hung portraits of the founders and past presidents of American
Megaversity. The founding fathers stared sullenly at Sarah through the gloom
of a century and a half's accumulated tobacco smoke, and as she followed the
row of dignitaries around to the other end of the room, their faces shone out
brighter and brighter from the tar and nicotine of antiquity until she got to
the last spaces remaining, where Tony Commodi, Pertinax Rushforth and Julian
Didius III gleamed awkwardly in modern Suits and designer eyeglasses.

The glowing red-orange wooden floor was covered by three Persian rugs,
and the ceiling was decorated with three concentric rings of elaborate
plasterwork surrounding a great domed skylight. A large, carefully polished
chandelier hung on a heavy chain from the center of the skylight. Sarah knew
that the delicate leaded-glass skylight was protected from above by a squat
geodesic dome covered with heavy steel grids and shatterproof Fiberglass
panels, designed to keep everything out of S. S. Krupp's office except for
the sunlight. Nothing short of a B-52 in a power dive could penetrate that
grand silence, though a ring of shattered furniture and other shrapnel piled
about the dome outside attested to the efforts of C Tower students to prove
otherwise.

Krupp led her to a long low table under the windows, and they sat in old
leather chairs and spread their papers out in the grey north light. Between
them Krupp's ever-ready tape recorder was spinning away silently. Shortly the
secretary came in with a silver tea service, and Krupp poured tea and offered
Sarah tiny, cleverly made munchies on white linen napkins embroidered with the
American Megaversity coat of arms.

Krupp was a sturdy man, his handsome cowboy face somewhat paled and softened
by the East. "I understand," he said, "that you had some trouble with those
playground communists last night." "Oh, they were the same as ever. No unusual
problems." "Yes." Krupp sounded slightly impatient at her nonstatement. "I was
pleased to see you disemboweled their budget."

"Oh? What if we'd stayed with the old one?"

"I'd have flushed it." He grinned brightly.

"What about this budget? Is it acceptable?"

"Oh, it's not bad. It's got some warts."

"Well, I want to point out at the beginning that it's easy for you to make
minor adjustments in the budget until the warts are gone. It's much more
difficult for the Student Government to handle. We almost had to call in the
riot police to get this through, and any budget you have approved will be much
harder."

"You're perfectly free to point that out, Sarah, and I don't disagree, doesn't
make much difference."

"Well," said Sarah carefully, "the authority is obviously yours. I'm sure you
can take whatever position you want and back it up very eloquently. But I hope
you'll take into account certain practicalities." Knowing instantly she had
made a mistake, she popped a munchie into her mouth and stared out the window,
waiting.

Krupp snorted quietly and sipped tea, then sat back in his chair and regarded
Sarah with dubious amusement. "Sarah, I didn't expect you, of all people, to
try that one on me. Why is it that everyone finds eloquence so inauspicious?
It's as though anyone who argues clearly can't be trusted-- that's the
opposite of what reasonable people ought to think. That attitude is common
even among faculty here, and I'm just at a loss to understand. I can't talk
like a mongoloid pig-sticker on a three-day drunk just so I'll sound like one
of the boys. God knows I can't support any position, only the right position.
If it's not right, the words won't make it so. That's the value of clear
language."

This was the problem with Krupp. He assumed that everyone always said exactly
what they thought. While this was true of him, it was rarely so with others.
"Okay, sorry," said Sarah. "I agree. I just didn't make my point too well. I'm
just hoping you'll take into account the practical aspects of the problem,
such as how everyone's going to react. Some people say this is a blind spot of
yours." This was a moderately daring thing for Sarah to say, but if she tried
to mush around politely with Krupp, he would cut her to pieces.

"Sarah, it's obvious that people's reactions have to be accounted for. That's
just horse sense. It's just that basic principles are far more important
than a temporary political squabble in Student Government. To you, all those
mono-maniacs and zombies seem more important than they are, and that's why
we can't give you any financial authority. From my point of view I can see a
much more complete picture of what is and isn't important, and one thing that
isn't is a shouting match in that parody of a democratic institution that we
call a government because we are all so idealistic in the university. What's
important is principles."

Suddenly Sarah felt depressed; she sat limply back in her chair. For a while
nothing was said-- Krupp was surprisingly sensitive to her mood.

"Student Government is just a sham, isn't it?" she asked, surprised by her own
bitterness.

"What do you mean by that?"

"It has nothing to do with the real world. We don't make any real decisions.
It's just a bunch of imaginary responsibilities to argue about and put down on
our rèsumès."

Krupp thought it over. "It's kind of like a dude ranch. If you lose your
dogies, there's someone there to round them up for you. But on the other
hand, if you stand behind your horse you can still get wet. My Lord, Sarah,
everything is real. There's no difference between the 'real' world and this
one. The experience you're gaining is real. But it's true that the importance
ascribed to Student Government is mostly imaginary."

"So what's the point?"

"The point is that we're here to go over this budget, and when I point out
the warts, you tell me why they aren't warts. If you can justify them, you'll
have a real effect on the budget." Krupp spread the pages of the budget out on
the table, and Sarah saw alarming masses of red ink scrawled across them She
felt like whipping out Casimir s graphs but she didn't have them with her and
couldn't risk Krupp's seeing what she had seen.

"Now one item which caught my eye," said Krupp half an hour later, after Sarah
had lost five arguments and won one, "was this money for this little group,
Neutrino. I see they're wanting to build themselves a mass driver."

"Yeah? What's wrong with that?"

"Well," said Krupp patiently, "I didn't say there's anything wrong-- just hold
on, let's not get adverserial yet. You see, we don't often use activities
funds to back research projects. Generally these people apply for a grant
through the usual channels. You see, first estimates of the cost of something
like this are often wildly low, especially when made by young fellows who
aren't quite on top of things yet. This thing is certain to come in over
budget, so we'll either end up with a useless, half-completed heap of junk
or a Neutrino floundering around in red ink. It seems kind of hasty and
ill-considered to me, so I'm just recommending that we strike this item
from the budget, have the folks who want to do this project do a complete,
faculty-supervised study, then try to get themselves a grant."

Sarah sighed and stared at a small ornament on the teapot's handle, thinking
it over.

"Don't tell me," said Krupp. "It's my blind spot again, right?" But he sounded
humorous rather than sarcastic.

"There are several good reasons why you should pass this item. The main factor
is the man who is heading the project. I know him, and he's quite experienced
with this sort of thing in the real world. I know you don't like that term,
President Krupp, but it's true. He's brilliant, knows a lot of practical
electronics-- he had his own business-- and he's deeply committed to the
success of this project."

"That's a good start. But I'm reluctant to see funds given to small
organizations with these charismatic, highly motivated leaders who have
pet projects, because that amounts to just a personal gift to the leader.
Broad interest in the funded activity is important."

"This is not a personal vendetta. The plans were provided for the most part
by Professor Sharon. The organization is already putting together some of
the electronics with their own money."

"Professor Sharon. What an abominable thing that was." Krupp stared into the
light for a long time. "That was a load of rock salt in the butt. If my damn
Residence Life Relations staff wasn't tenured and unionized I'd fire 'em,
find the scum who did that and boot 'em onto the Turnpike. However. We
should resist the temptation to do something we wouldn't otherwise do just
because a peripherally involved figure has suffered. We all revere Professor
Sharon, but this project would not erase his tragedy."

"Well, I can only go on my gut feelings," said Sarah, "but I don't think what
you've said applies. I'm pretty confident about this project."

Krupp looked impressed. "If that's the case, Sarah, then I should meet this
fellow and give him a fair hearing. Maybe I'll have the same gut reaction as
you do."

"Should I have him contact you?" This was a reprieve, she thought; but if
Casimir had been so obviously nervous in front of her, what would he do under
rhetorical implosion from Krupp? It was only reasonable, though.

"Fine," said Krupp, and handed her his card.

Their other differences of opinion were hardly worth arguing over. Halving the
funding for the Basque Eroticism Study Cluster was not going to make political
waves. The meeting came to a civil and reasonable end. Krupp showed her out,
and she smiled at the old secretary and maneuvered the scarlet carpets of the
administration bloc and dawdled by each painting, finally exiting into a broad
shiny electric-blue cinderblock corridor. By the time she made it back to her
room she had adjusted to the Plex again, and taught herself to see and hear as
little of it as possible.

Ephraim Klein and some of his friends occasionally gathered in his room to
smoke cheap cigars, if only because they detested them slightly less than John
Wesley Fenrick did. Fenrick set the Go Big Red Fan up in the vent window and
blew chill November air across the room, forcing perhaps eighty percent of
the fumes out the door. A defect of the Rules was that they made no provision
for exchange of air pollution, unfortunately for Fenrick, who despite his
tradition of chemically induced states of awareness was fanatically clean.

Caught in a random eddy blown up by the Fan, a cigar resting in a stolen
Burger King tinfoil ashtray fell off one evening and rolled several inches,
crossing the boundary line into Fenrick's side of the room. It burned there
for a minute or two before its owner, a friend of Klein's, made bold to reach
across and retrieve it. The result was a brief brown streak on Fenrick's
linoleum. Fenrick did not notice it immediately, but after he did, he grew
more enraged every day. Klein was obligated to clean up "that mess," in his
view. Klein's opinion was that anything on Fenrick's side of the room was
Fenrick's problem; Klein was not paying fifteen thousand dollars a year
and studying philosophy so he could be a floor-scrubber for a rude asshole
geek like John Wesley Fenrick. He pointed to a clause in the Rules which
tentatively bore him out. They screamed across the boundary line on this issue
for nearly a week. Then, one day, I heard Ephraim yelling through their open
door.

"Jesus! What the hell are you-- Ha! I don't believe this shit!" He stuck his
head outside and yelled, "Hey, everybody, come look at what this dumb fucker's
doing!"

I looked.

For reasons I do not care to think about, John Wesley Fenrick kept a
milkbottle full of dirt. When I looked in, he had pulled its lid off and was
scattering red Okie loam over the boundary line and all over Ephraim's side of
the room. Ephraim appeared to be more amused than angry, though he was very
angry, and insisted that as many people as possible come and witness. Fenrick
sat down calmly to watch television, occasionally smiling a small, solitary
smile.

Again the question of my responsibility comes up. But how could I know it
was an event of great significance? I had also seen lovers' quarrels in the
Cafeteria; why should I have known this was much more important? I had no
authority to order these people around. Moreover, I had no desire to. I had
done as much as I could. I had shown them how to be reasonable, and if they
could not get the hang of it, it was not my problem.

The next time I spectated, Ephraim Klein was alone, studying on his bed with
Gregorian chants filling the room. I had come to see why he had borrowed my
broom. He had used it to make a welcome mat for his roomie. Right in front of
the Go Big Red Fan-- the movable portion of the wall that served as a gate--
he had swept all the dirt into an even rectangle about one by two feet and
half an inch thick. In the dirt he had inscribed with his finger:

                                  GET A BUTT

                             FUCK JOHNNIE-WONNIE

When Fenrick got home I followed him discreetly to his room, to keep an eye on
things. When I got to their doorway he was staring inscrutably at the welcome
mat. He bent and opened the fan-gate, stepped through without disturbing the
dirt and closed it. He turned, and looked for a while at the smirking Ephraim
Klein. Then, with quiet dignity, John Wesley Fenrick reached down and set the
Fan to HI, creating a small simulation of Oklahoma in the 1930's on the other
side of the room.

Once I was satisfied that there would be no violence, I left and abandoned
them to each other.

Septimius Severus Krupp stood behind a cheap plywood lectern in Lecture Hall
13 and spoke on Kant's Ethics. The fifty people in the audience listened or
did not, depending on whether they (like Sarah and Casimir and Ephraim and I)
had come to hear the lecture, or (like Yllas Freedperson) to see the Stalinist
Underground Battalion Operative throw the banana-cream pie into S. S. Krupp's
face.

I had come because I was fascinated by Krupp, and because opportunities to
hear him speak were rare. Sarah, I think, had come for like reasons. Ephraim
was a philosophy major, and Casimir came because this was the type of thing
that you were supposed to do in a university. As for the SUBbies, they were
getting edgy. What the fuck was wrong with the plan, man? they seemed to say,
looking back and forth at one another sincerely and shaking their heads. The
first phases had gone well. Operative 1 had gone out to the stageleft doorway,
twenty feet to Krupp's side, opened the door and propped it, then made a
show of smoking a cigarette and blowing smoke out the door. It was obvious
that she had severe reality problems by the way she posed there, putting on
a casual air so weirdly melodramatic that everyone could see she must be a
guerilla mime, a psycho or simply luded out of her big spherical frizzy-haired
bandanna-wrapped head. It was also odd that she would show so much concern
for others' lungs, considering that her friends were making loud, sarcastic
noises and distracting gestures, but unfortunately S. S. Krupp's aides were
too straight to tell the difference between a loony and a loony with a plan,
and so they suspected nothing when she returned to her seat and forgot to shut
the door again.

Ten minutes later, right on time, Operative 2 had arrived late, entering via
the stage-right doorway and leaving it, of course, propped open. He moved
furtively, like a six-foot mouse with thallium phenoxide poisoning, jerking
his head around as if to look for right-wing death squads and CIA snipers.

But Operative 3 did not appear with the banana-cream pie. Where was he?
Everyone knew about Krupp's CIA connections, and it was quite possible--
don't laugh, the CIA is everywhere, look at Iran-- that he might have been
intercepted by fascist goons and bastinadoed and wired to an old engine block
and thrown into a river. Perhaps the death squads were waiting in their rooms
now, test-firing their silenced UZIs into cartons of Stalinist pamphlets.

In fact, Operative 3, when making his plans for the evening, had forgotten
that once he bought the banana-cream pie at the convenience store it would
have to thaw out. There is little political relevance in bouncing a rock-hard
disc of frozen custard off S. S. Krupp's face-- the splatter is the point--
and so for half an hour he had been in a Plex restroom, holding the pie
underneath the automatic hand dryer as unobtrusively as possible. Whenever he
heard approaching steps, he stopped and dropped the pie into his knapsack, and
held his hands nonchalantly under the hot air; hence he had succeeded only in
liquefying the top two millimeters of the pie and ruffling the ring of whipped
cream. He then repaired to a spot not far from the lecture hall where he
rested the pie on a hot water pipe. There should be plenty of time left in the
lecture, though it was hard to judge these things when stoned: Krupp's voice
droned on and on, incomprehensible as all that logic and philosophy.

Operative 3 snapped to attention. How long had he been spacing off? Only one
way to tell. He stuck his finger in the pie: still kind of stiff, but not
stiff enough to break a nose and wet enough to explode mediagenically.

The time was now. Operative 3 pulled on his ski mask, stole to the open
stage-left door, and waited for the right moment. Shit! One of Krupp's CIA
men had seen him! One of the Frosted Mini-Wheat types with the three-piece
suits who ran Krupp's tape-recorder during speeches. No time to wait; the stun
grenade might be lobbed at any moment.

To us he looked like a strange dexed-out bird, not running across the front of
the hall so much as vibrating across at low frequency. He was tall, skinny,
pale and wore an old Tshirt; he never seemed to plant any part of his nervous
body firmly on the ground. He entered, bouncing off a doorjamb and losing his
balance. He then caromed off a seat near a CIA man, who had not yet reacted,
hopped three times to regain balance and, gaining some direction, scrambled
toward S. S. Krupp, chased all the way by four bats driven into a frenzy by
the aroma of the banana-cream pie.

"This means that the current vulgar usage of the word 'autonomous' to mean
independent, i.e., free of external influence, sovereign, is not entirely
correct," said Krupp, who glanced up from his notes to see what everybody was
gasping at. "To be autonomous, as we can readily see by examining the Greek
roots of the word-- autos meaning self and nomos meaning law"-- here he paused
for a moment and ducked. The pie flew sideways over his head and exploded on
the blackboard behind him. He straightened back up-- "is to be self-ruling,
to exercise a respect for the Law"-- Operative 3 tottered out the door as the
SUB groaned-- "which in this case means not the law of a society or political
system but rather the Law imposed by a rational man on his own actions." in
the hallway there was scuffling, and Krupp paused. With much grunting and
swearing, Operative 3, sans ski mask, was dragged back into the room by three
clean-cut students in pastel sweaters, accompanied by an older, smiling man in
a plaid flannel shirt.

"Here's your man, President Krupp, sir," said an earnest young Anglo-Saxon,
brushing a strand of hair from his brow with his free hand. "We've placed this
Communist under citizen's arrest. Shall we contact the authorities on your
behalf?" Their mentor beamed even more broadly at this suggestion, his horsey,
protruding bicuspids glaring like great white grain elevators on the Dakota
plain.

Krupp regarded them warily, walking around to the other side of the lectern as
though it were a shield. Then he turned to the audience. "Excuse me, please.
Guess I'm the highest authority here, so just let me clear this up." He
looked back at the group by the doorway, who watched respectfully, except for
Operative 3, who shouted from his headlock: "See, man? This is what happens
when you try to change the System!" Several SUBbies began to come to his aid,
but were halted by Krupp's aides.

"Who the hell are you?" said Krupp. "Are you from that squalid North Dakotan
cult thing?"

They were shocked, even Operative 3, and stared uncomprehendingly. Deep
concern showed in the lined, earnest face of the man in the plaid flannel.
Finally he stepped forward. "Yessirree. We are indeed followers of the Temple
of Unlimited Godhead, and proud of it too. With all due respect, just what do
you mean by 'squalid'?"

"It's like a dead dog in the sitting room, son. Look, why don't you all just
let that boy go? That's right."

Regretfully, they released him. Operative 3 stood up, shivering violently. He
could not exactly thank Krupp. After hopping from foot to foot he spun and
continued his flight down the hall as though nothing had happened.

"Look," Krupp continued. "We've got a security force here. We've got organized
religions that have been doing just fine for millennia. Now what we don't need
is a brainwashing franchise, or any of your Kool-Aid-- stoned outlaw Mormon
Jesuits. I know times are hard in North Dakota but they're hard everywhere and
it doesn't call for new religions. Of course, you have some very fine points
on the subject of Communism. Now, this does not mean we will in any way fail
to extend you full religious and political freedoms as with the old-fashioned
nonprofit religions."

The SUB hooted at Krupp's wicked intolerance for religious diversity while the
rest of the audience applauded. The TUGgies were galvanized, and spoke up for
their renegade sect as eloquently as they knew how.

"But that man was a Communist! We found his card."

"Look at it this way. If TUG brainwashes people, how do you explain the great
diversity of our membership, which comes from towns and farms of all sizes all
over the Dakotas and Saskatchewan?"

"TUG is fully consistent with Judeo-Christo-Mohammedan-Bahaism."

Communism is the greatest threat in the world today." "The goals of Messiah
Jorgenson Five are fully consistent with the aims of American higher
education."

"Our church is noncoercive. We believe of our own free, uh, pamphlet.. .
explains our ideas in layman's language." "Visit North Dakota this summer for
fun in the sun. Temple Camp."

"Who is the brainwasher, our church, which teaches that we may all be
Messiah/Buddhas together, or today's media society with its constant emphasis
on materialism?"

"If you'll accept this free book it will reveal truths you may never have
thought about before."

"I couldn't help noticing that you were looking a little down and out, kinda
lonely. You know, sometimes it helps to talk to a stranger."

"Do you need a free dinner?"

Krupp watched skeptically. The older man was silent, but finally touched each
student lightly on the shoulder, silencing one and all. They left, smiling.

Looking disgusted, Krupp returned to the microphone. "Where was I, talking
about autonomy?"

He surveyed his notes and concluded his lecture in another twenty minutes.
He paused then to light his cigar, which he had been fingering, twiddling,
stroking and sniffing exquisitely for several minutes, and was answered
by exaggerated coughing from the SUB section. "I'm free to answer some
questions," he announced, surveying the room and squinting into his cigar
smoke like a cowboy into the setting sun.

Nearly everyone in the SUB raised his/her hand, but Yllas Freedperson,
Operatives 1 and 2 and two others arose and made their loud way up to the
back of the hall for an emergency conference. They were deeply concerned;
they stopped short of being openly suspicious, a deeply fascist trait, but
it occurred to them that what had just happened might strongly suggest the
presence of a TUG deep-cover mole in the SUB!

Meanwhile, question time went on down below. As was his custom, Krupp called
on two people with serious questions before resorting to the SUB. Eventually
he did so, looking carefully through that section and stabbing his finger at
its middle.

By SUB custom, any call for a question was communal property and was
distributed by consensus to a member of the group. This time, Dexter Fresser,
Sarah's hometown ex-beau, number 2 person in the SUB and its chief political
theorist, got the nod. Shaking his head, he pushed himself up in his seat
until he could see Krupp's face hovering malevolently above the dome of the
next person's bandanna. He took a deep breath, preparing for intellectual
combat, and began.

"You were talking about autonomy. Well, then you were talking about Greek
words of roots. I want to talk about Greek too because we have our roots
in Greece, just like, you know, our words do-- that is, most of us do, our
culture does, even if our ethnicity doesn't. But Rome was much, much more
powerful than Greece, and that was after most of the history of the human
race, which we don't know anything about. And you know in Greece they had
gayness all over the place. I'm saying that nice and loud even though you hate
it, but even though. uh, you know, fascist? But you can't keep me from saying
it. Did you ever think about the concentration camps? How all those people
were killed by fascists? And also in Haiti. which we annexed in 1904. And did
you ever 1 think about the socialist revolution in France that was crushed
by D-Day because the socialists were fighting off the Nazis single-handedly.
Where's the good in that? Bela Lugosi was ugly, but he had a great mind. I
mean, some of the greatest works of art were done by Satan-worshipers like
Shakespeare and Michelangelo! And the next time your car throws a rod on I-90
between Presho and Kennebec because you lost your dipstick you should think,
even if it is a hundred and ten in the shade forty-four Celsius and there are
red winged blackbirds coming at you like Bell AH-64s or something. Put the
goddamn zucchini in later next time and it won't get so mushy! I know this is
strong and direct and undiplomatical, but this is real life and I can't be
like you and phrase it like blue tennis-shoe laces hanging from the rear-view
mirror. See?"

Here he stopped. Krupp had listened patiently, occasionally looking away
to restack his notes or puff on his cigar. "No," he said. "Do you have a
question. son?"

Emotionally wounded, Dex Fresser shook his head back and forth and gestured
around it as though tearing off a heavy layer of tar. While his companions
supported him, another SUBbie rose to take his place. She was of average
height, with terribly pale skin and a safety pin through her septum. She rose
like a zeppelin on power takeoff and began to read in a singsong voice from a
page covered with arithmetic.

"Mister Krupp, sir. Last year. According, to the Monoplex Monitor, you, I
mean the Megaversity Corporation ruling clique, spent ten thousand dollars on
legal fees for union-busting firms. Now. There are forty thousand students at.
American Megaversity. This means that on the average, you spent
 four thousand
million dollars on legal fees for union-busting alone! How do you justify
that, when in this very city people have to pay for their own abortions?"

Krupp simply stared in her direction and took three long slow puffs on his
cigar without saying anything. Then he turned to the blackboard. "This
weather's not getting any better," he said, quickly drawing a rough outline of
the United States. "It's this low pressure center up here. See, the air coming
into it turns around counterclockwise because of the Coriolis effect. That
makes it pump cold air from Canada into our area. And we can't do squat about
it. It's a hell of a thing." He turned back to the audience. "Next question!"

The SUB wanted to erupt at this, but they were completely nonplussed and
hardly said anything. "I've taken too many questions from the
kill-babies-not-seals crowd," Krupp announced. He called on Ephraim Klein,
who had been waving his hand violently. "President Krupp, I think the
question of adherence to an inner Law is just a semantic smokescreen around
the real issue, which is neurological. Our brains have two hemispheres with
different functions. The left one handles the day-to-day thinking,
conventional logical thought, while the right one handles synthesis of
incoming information and subconsciously processes it to form conclusions about
what the basic decisions should be-- it converts experience into subconscious
awareness of basic patterns and cause-and-effect relationships and gives us
general direction and a sense of conscience. So this stuff about autonomy is
nothing more than an effort by neurologically ignorant metaphysicists to
develop, by groping around in the dark, an explanation for behavior patterns
rooted in the structure of the brain."

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 n