on the radio to hear
if any of his key grad students had been greased.

No, said Fred Fine, the APPASMU was not available for raids on the Library.
But we could have some soldiers and one AK-47, on the condition that, given
the choice between abandoning the quest and abandoning the assault rifle, we
would abandon the quest. I loudly agreed to this before Emeritus could sputter
any disagreements. Our party was me, Hyacinth, Emeritus, four GASF soldiers
and the Science Shop technician Lute. Sarah stayed behind reading The Origin
of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

Our route took us through fairly stable academic blocs, and other areas
controlled by gangs. We could not avoid passing through the area controlled by
Hansen's Gang, the smalltowners of the Great Plains. They were not well armed,
but neither was anyone else in the base, and they had jumped into the fray
with the glee of any rural in an informal blunt-instruments fight and come
out winners. This was their idiom. Our negotiations with their leader were
straightforward: we showed them our AK-47 and offered not to massacre them if
they let us pass without hassle. Their leader had no trouble grasping this,
but many of the members seemed to have a bizarre mental block: they could not
see the AK-47 in Hyacinth's hands. All they saw was Hyacinth, the first clean
healthy female they had seen in a week, and they came after her as though
she were unarmed. "Hey! She's mine!" yelled one of these as we entered their
largest common area.

"Fuck you," said another, swinging a motorcycle chain past his brother's eyes
at high speed. He turned and began to trudge toward Hyacinth, hitching up
his pants. "Hey, bitch, I'm gonna breed you," he said cheerfully. Hyacinth
aimed the gun at him; he looked at her face. She pulled the bolt into firing
position and squared off; he kept coming. When I stepped forward he brandished
his chain, then changed course as Hyacinth stepped out from behind me.

"Go for it," and "All right, for sure, Combine," yelled his pals.

"Hyacinth, please don't do that," I said, plugging my ears. She fired off
half a clip in one burst and pulverized a few square feet of cinderblock
wall right next to the man's head. The lights went out as a power cable was
severed. Courtesy of a window, we could still see.

"Shit, what the fuck?" someone inquired.

Rather than trying to explain, we proceeded from the room. "I like that
bitch," someone said as we were leaving, "but she's weird. I dunno what's
wrong with her."

The Mailroom was an armistice zone between Hansen's Gang and the Journalism
Department. The elevators here descended to the mail docks, making this one of
the few ports of entry to the Plex. The publicity-minded Crotobaltislavonians
had worked out an agreement with one of the networks-- you know which, if
you watched any news in this period-- allowing the camera crews to come and
go through this room. The network's hired guards all toted machine guns. We
counted twenty automatic weapons in this room alone, which probably meant that
the network had the entire Axis outgunned.

In exchange for a brief interview, which was never aired, and for all the
information we could provide about other parts of the Plex, we were allowed
into the Journalism bloc. Here we picked up a three-man minicam crew who
followed along for a while. Emeritus was magnificently embarrassed and
insisted on walking behind the camera. One of the crew was an AM student, and
I talked to him about the network's operations.

"You've got a hell of a lot of firepower. You guys are the most powerful force
in the Plex. How are you using it?"

The student shrugged. "What do you mean? We protect our crews and equipment.
All the barbarians are afraid of us."
"Right, obviously," I said. "But I noticed recently that a lot of people
around here are starving, being raped, murdered-- you know, a lot of
bum-out stuff. Do those guards try to help out?  You can spare a few."

"Well, I don't know," he said uncomfortably. "That's kind of network-level
policy. It goes against the agreement. We can go anywhere as long as we don't
interfere. If we interfere, no agreement."

"But if you've already negotiated one agreement, can't you do more? Get some
doctors into the building, maybe?"

"No way, man. No fucking way. We journalists have ethics." The camera crew
turned back when we reached the border of the Geoanthropological Planning
Science Department, a bloc with only two entrances. My office was here,
and I hoped I could get us through to the other side. The heavy door was
bullet-pocked, the lock had been shot at more than once, but it was blocked
from the other side and we could hear a guard beyond. Nearby, in an alcove,
under a pair of drinking fountains, stretched out straight and dead on the
floor, was a middle-aged faculty member, his big stoneware coffee mug still
clenched in his cold stiff fingers. He had apparently died of natural causes.

As it turned out, the guard was a grad student I knew, who let us in. He was
tired and dirty, with several bandages, a bearded face, bleary red eyes and
matted hair-- just as he had always looked. Three other grads sat there in the
reception room reading two-year-old U.S. News and World Reports and chomping
hunks of beef jerky.

While my friends took a breather, I stopped by my office and checked my
mailbox. On the way back I peeked into the Faculty Lounge.

The entire Geoanthropological Planning Science faculty was there, sitting
around the big conference table, while a few favored grad students stood back
against the walls. Several bowls of potato chips were scattered over the table
and at least two kegs were active. The room was dark; they were having a slide
show.

"Whoops! Looks like I tilted the camera again on this one," said Professor
Longwood sheepishly, nearly drowned out by derisive whoops from the crowd.
"How did this get in here? This is part of the Labrador tundra series. Anyway,
it's not a bad shot, though I used the wrong film, which is why everything's
pink. That corkscrew next to the caribou scat gives you some idea of scale-- "
but my opening the door had spilled light onto the image, and everyone turned
around to look at me.

"Bud!" cried the Chair. "Glad you could make it! Want some beer? It's dark
beer."

"Sounds good," I said truthfully, "but I'm just stopping in."

"How are things?" asked Professor Longwood.

"Fine, fine. I see you're all doing well too. Have you been outside much? I
mean, in the Plex?"

There was bawdy laughter and everyone looked at a sheepish junior faculty
member, a heavyset man from Upper Michigan. "Bert here went out to shoot some
slides," explained the Chair, "and ran into some of those hayseeds. He told
them he was a journalist and they backed off, but then they saw he didn't have
a press pass, so he had to kick one of them in the nuts and give the other his
camera!"

"Don't feel bad, Bert," said a mustachioed man nearby. "Well get a grant and
buy you a new one." We all laughed.

"So you're here for the duration?" I asked.

"Shouldn't last very long," said a heavily bearded professor who was puffing
on a pipe. "We are working up a model to see how long the food needs of the
population can last. We're using survival ratios from the 1782 Bulgarian
famine-- actually quite similar to this situation. We're having a hell of a
time getting data, but the model says it shouldn't last more than a week. As
for us, we've got an absolute regional monopoly on beer, which we trade with
the Journalism people for food."

"Have you taken into account the rats and bats?" I asked. Huh? Where?" The
room was suddenly still.

"We've got giant rats downstairs, and billions of bats upstairs. The rats are
this long. Eighty to a hundred pounds. No hearts. I hear they've worked their
way up to the lower sublevels now, and they're climbing up through the stacks
of garbage in the elevator shafts." "Shit!" cried Bert, beating his fists
wildly on the table. "What a time to lose my fucking camera!"

"Let's catch one," said his biologist wife.

"Well, we could adjust the model to account for exogenous factors," said the
bearded modeler.

"We'd have people eating rats, and rats eating people," said the mustachioed
one.

"And rats eating bats."

"And bats eating bugs eating dead rats."

"The way to account for all that is with a standard input! output matrix,"
said the Chair commandingly.

"These rats sound similar to wolverines," said Longwood, cycling through the
next few slides. "I think I have some wolverine scats a few slides ahead, if
this is the series I think it is.,' Seeing that they had split into a slide
and a modeling faction, I stepped out. A few minutes later we were back on
the road. We were attacked by a hopeless twit who was trying to use a shotgun
like a long-range rifle. I was nicked in the cheek by one ball. Hyacinth
splashed him all over a piece of abstract sculpture made of welded-together
lawn ornaments. The GASFers, who were humiliated that a female should carry
the big gun, were looking as though they'd never have another erection.

We passed briefly through the Premed Center, which was filed with pale mutated
undergrads dissecting war casualties and trying to gross each other out. I
yelled at them to get outside and assist the wounded, but received mostly
blank stares. "We can't," said one of them, scandalized, "we're not even in
med school yet."

From here we entered the Medical Library, and from there, the Library proper.

Huge and difficult to guard, the Library was the land of the refugees. It had
no desirable resources, but was a fine place in which to hide because the
bookshelves divided into thousands of crannies. Waves of refugees made their
way here and holed up, piling books into forts and rarely venturing out.

The first floor was unguarded and sparsely occupied. We stuck to the open
areas and proceeded to the second floor. Here was a pleasant surprise. An
organized relief effort had been formed, mostly by students in Nursing,
Classics, History, Languages and Phys. Ed. By trading simple medical services
to the barbarians they had obtained enough guns to guard the place. An
incoming refugee would be checked out by a senior Nursing major or occasional
premed volunteer, then given a place in the stacks-- "your place is DG 311
1851 and its vicinity"-- and so on. Most of the stragglers could then hide
out between bulletproof walls of paper, while the seriously wounded could be
lowered out the windows to the Red Cross people below. In the same way, food,
supplies and brave doctors could be hoisted into the Plex. The atmosphere was
remarkably quiet and humane, and all seemed in good humor.

The rest of our journey was uneventful. We climbed to the fourth floor and
wended our way toward Emeritus' study. Soon we could smell smoke, and see it
hanging in front of the lights. To the relief of Emeritus, it came not from
his office but from the open door of the one labeled "Embers, Archibald."

Three men and a woman, all unarmed, sat around a small fire, occasionally
throwing on another book. They had broken out the window to vent the smoke.

The woman shrieked as I appeared in the door. "Jesus! If I had a gun, you'd be
dead now. I react so uncontrollably."

"Good thing you don't," I observed.

"It's really none of your business," intoned a thin, pale man. "But I suppose
that since you have that wretched gun, you're going to have us do what you
want. Well, we don't have anything you could want here. And forget about Zelda
here. She's a lousy lay." Zelda shrieked in amusement. "It's a good thing
you're witty when you're a bastard, Terence, or I'd despise you." "Oh, do go
ahead. I adore being despised. I really do. It's so inspiring."

"Society despises the artist," said Embers, lighting a Dunhill in the
bookfire, "unless he panders to the masses. But society treats the artist
civilly so he can't select specific targets for his hatred. Open personal
hatred is so very honest."

"Now that's meaningful, Arch," said the other man, a brief lump with an
uncertain goatee.

"How come you're burning books?" I asked.

"Oh, that, well," said Embers, "Terence wanted a fire." Terence piped up
again. "This whole event is so very like camping out, don't you agree? Except
without the dreadful ants and so forth. I thought a fire would be very--
primal. But it smoked dreadfully, so we broke out the window, and now it's
very cold and we must keep it going ceaselessly, of course. Is that adequate?
Is that against Library rules?"

"We've been finding," added Embers, "that older books are much better. They
burn more slowly. And with their thin pages, Bibles and dictionaries are quite
effective. I'm taking some notes." He waved a legal pad at me.

"Also," added the small one, "old books are printed on acid-free paper, so
we aren't getting acid inside of our lungs." "Why don't you just cover the
window and put it out?" I asked. "Aren't we logical?" said Terence. "You
people are all so tediously Western. We wanted a fire, you can't take it away!
What happened to academic freedom? Say, are you quite finished with your
bloody suggestions? I'm trying to read one of my fictions to these people, Mr.
Spock."

I followed my friends into Emeritus' office. Behind me Terence resumed his
reading. "The thin stream of boiling oil dribbled from the lip of the frying
pan and seared into the boy's white flesh. As he squirmed against the bonds
that were holding him down, unable to move, it ran into the bed of thorny
roses underneath him; the petals began to wither like a dying western sunset
at dusk."

A minute or two later, as we exited with Emeritus' papers, there was a patter
of applause. "Ravishing, Terence. Quite frankly, it's similar to Erasmus T.
Bowlware's Gulag Pederast. Especially the self-impalement of the heroine on
the electric fencepost of the concentration camp as she is driven into a
frenzy by psychic emanations from the possessed child in the nearby mansion
where the defrocked epileptic priest gives up his life in order to get the
high-technology secrets to the Jewish commandos. I do like it."

"When do I get to read my fiction?" asked Zelda.

"Is this from the novel about the female writer who is struggling to write a
novel about a woman writer who is writing a novel about a woman artist in Nazi
Germany with a possessed daughter?" asked Embers.

"Well, I decided to make her a liberated prostitute and psychic," said Zelda;
and that was the last I heard of the conversation, or of the people.

We deposited Emeritus in the refugee camp on the second floor and made it back
to the Science Shop in about an hour. There, Sarah and Casimir were deep in
conversation, and Ephraim Klein was listening in.

Casimir's finished suit of armor used bulletproof fabric taken from a couple
of associate deans. The administration was unhappy about that, but they could
only get to Casimir by shooting their way through the Unified Pure Plexorian
Realm. Underneath the fabric, Casimir wore various hard objects to protect
his flesh from impact. On legs and knees he wore soccer shinguards and the
anti-kneecapping armor favored by administration members. He wore a jockstrap
with a plastic cup, and over his torso was a heavy, crude breastplate that he
had endlessly and deafeningly hammered out of half a fifty-five gallon oil
drum. Down his back he hung overlapping shingles of steel plate to protect his
spine.

His head was protected by a converted defensive lineman's football helmet.
He had cut the front out of a fencing mask and attached the wire mesh over
the plastic bars of the helmet's facemask. Over the earholes he placed a pair
of shooter's ear protectors. So that he would not overheat, he cut a hole in
the back of the helmet and ran a flexible hose to it. The other end of the
hose he connected to a battery-powered blower hung on his belt, and to get
maximum cooling benefit he shaved his head. The helmet as a whole was draped
with bulletproof fabric which hung down a foot on all sides to cover the neck.
And as someone happened to notice, he took his snapshot of Sarah and Hyacinth
and taped it to the inside of the helmet with grey duct tape.

When Casimir was in full battle garb, his only vulnerable points were feet,
hands and eye-slit. Water could be had by sucking on a tube that ran down to
a bicyclist's water bottle on his belt. And it should not go unmentioned that
Casimir, draped in thick creamy-white fabric, with blazing yellow and blue
running shoes, topped with an enormous shrouded neckless head, a faceless dome
with bulges over the ears and a glittering silver slit for the eyes, a sword
from the Museum in hand, looked indescribably terrible and fearsome, and for
the first time in his life people moved to the walls to avoid him when he
walked down the hallways.

It was a very smoke-filled room that Casimir ventilated by swinging in through
the picture window on the end of a rope. Through the soft white tobacco haze,
Oswald Heimlich saw his figure against the sky for an instant before it burst
into the room and did a helpless triple somersault across the glossy parquet
floor. Heimlich was already on his feet, snatching up his $4,000 engraved
twelve-gauge shotgun and flicking off the safety. As the intruder staggered
to his feet, Heimlich sighted over the head of the Trustee across from him
(who reacted instinctively by falling into the lap of the honorable former
mayor) and fired two loads of .00 buckshot into this strange Tarzan's lumpy
abdomen. The intruder took a step back and remained standing as the shot
plonked into his chest and clattered to the floor. Heimlich fired again with
similar effects. By now the great carved door had burst open and five guards
dispersed to strategic positions and pointed their UZIs at the suspicious
visitor. S. S. Krupp watched keenly.

The guards made the obligatory orders to freeze. He slowly reached around and
began to draw a dueling sword from the Megaversity historical collections out
of a plastic pipe scabbard. Tied to its handle was a white linen napkin with
the AM coat of arms, which he waved suggestively.

"I swear," said S. S. Krupp, "don't you have a phone, son?" No one laughed.
These were white male Eastern businessmen, and they were serious. Heimlich
in particular was not amused; this man looked very much like the radiation
emergency workers who had been staggering through his nightmares for several
nights running, and having him crash in out of a blue sky into a Board of
Trustees meeting was not a healthy experience. He sat there with his eyes
closed for several moments as waiters scurried in to sweep up the broken
glass.

"I'll bet you want to do a little negotiating," said Krupp, annoyingly
relaxed. "Who're you with?"

"I owe allegiance to no man," came the muffled voice from behind the mask, but
"come on behalf of all."

"Well, that's good! That's a fine attitude," said Krupp. "Set yourself down
and we'll see what we can do."

The intruder took an empty chair, laid his sword on the table and peeled off
his hood of fabric to reveal the meshed-over football helmet, A rush of forced
air was exhaled from his facemask and floated loose sheets of paper down the
table.

"Why did you put a nuclear waste dump in the basement?" Everyone was
surprised, if genteel, and they exchanged raised eyebrows for a while.

"Maybe Ozzie can tell you about that," suggested Krupp. "I was still in
Wyoming at the time."

Heimlich scowled. "I won't deny its existence. Our reasons for wanting it must
be evident. Perhaps if I tell you its history, you'll agree with us, whoever
you are. Ahem. You may be aware that until recently we suffered from bad
management at the presidential level. We had several good presidents in the
seventies, but then we got Tony Commodi, who was irresponsible-- an absolute
mongoloid when it came to finance-- insisted on teaching several classes
himself, and so forth. He raised salaries while keeping tuition far too low.
People became accustomed to it. At this time we Trustees were widely dispersed
and made no effort to lead the university. Finally we were nearly bankrupt.
Commodi was forced to resign by faculty and Trustees and was replaced by
Pertinax Rushforth, who in those days was quite the renascence man, and widely
respected. We Trustees were still faced with impossible financial problems,
but we found that if we sold all the old campus-- hundreds of acres of prime
inner-city real estate-- we could pull in enough capital to build something
like the Plex on the nine blocks we retained.

But of course the demographics made it clear that times would be very rough
in the years to come. We could not compete for students, and so we had to run
a very tight ship and seek innovative sources for our operating funds. We
could have entered many small ventures-- high technology spinoffs, you see--
but this would have been extraordinarily complex, highly controversial and
unpredictable, besides raising questions about the proper function of the
university.

"It was then that we hit upon the nuclear waste idea. Here is something that
is not dependent on the economy; we will always have these wastes to dispose
of. It's highly profitable, as there is a desperate demand for disposal
facilities. The wastes must be stored for millennia, which means that they
are money in the bank-- the government, whatever form it takes, must continue
to pay us until their danger has died away. And by its very nature it must be
done secretly, so no controversy is generated, no discord disrupts the normal
functions of the academy-- there need be no relationship between the financial
foundation and the intellectual activities of the university. It's perfect."

"See, this city is on a real stable salt-dome area," added a heavy man in
an enormous grey suit, "and now that there's no more crude down there, it's
suitable for this kind of storage." "You," said the knight, pointing his sword
at the man who had just spoken, "must be in the oil business. Are you Ralph
Priestly?" "Ha! Well, yeah, that's me," said Ralph Priestly, unnerved. "We
have to talk later."

"How did you know about our disposal site?" asked Heimlich. "That doesn't
matter. What matters now is: how did the government of Crotobaltislavonia
find out about it?" "Oh," said Heimlich, shocked. "You know about that also."
"Yep."

After a pause, S. S. Krupp continued. "Now, don't go tell your honchos that we
did this out of greed. America had to start doing something with this waste--
that's a fact. You know what a fact is? That's something that has nothing
to do with politics. The site is as safe as could be. See, some things just
can't be handed over to political organizations, because they're so damned
unstable. But great universities can last for thousands of years. Hell, look
at the changes of government the University of Paris has survived in the
last century alone! This facility had to be built and it had to be done by a
university. The big steady cash flow makes us more stable, and that makes us
better qualified to be running the damn thing in the first place. Symbiosis,
son."

"Wait. If you're making so much money off of this, why are you so financially
tight-assed?"

"That's a very good question," said Heimlich. "As I said, it's imperative
that this facility remain secret. If we allowed the cash flow to show up on
our ledgers, this would be impossible. We've had to construct a scheme for
processing or laundering, as it were, our profits through various donors and
benefactors. In order to allay suspicion, we keep these 'donations' as small
as we can while meeting the university's basic needs."

"What about the excess money?"

"What's done with that depends on how long the site remains secret. Therefore
we hold the surplus in escrow and invest it in the name of American
Megaversity, so that in the meantime it is productively used."

"Invest it where? Don't tell me. Heimlich Freedom Industries. the Big Wheel
Petroleum Corporation
"

"Well," said Ralph Priestly, cutting the tip off a cigar. "Big Wheel's a hell
of an investment. I run a tight ship." "We don't deny that the investments
are in our best interests," said a very old Trustee with a kindly face. "But
there's nothing wrong with that, as long as we do not waste or steal the
money. Every investment we make in some way furthers the nation's economic
growth."

"But you're no different from the Crotobaltislavonians, in principle. You're
using your control over the wastes to blackmail whatever government comes
along."

"That's an excellent observation," said Krupp. "But the fact is, if you'll
just think about it, that as long as the waste exists, someone's going to
control them, and whoever does can blackmail whatever government there is, and
as long as someone's going to have that influence, it might as well be good
people like us."

The knight drummed his fingers on the table, and the Trustees peered at his
inscrutable silver mask. "I see from the obituaries that Bert Nix and Pertinax
Rushforth were one and the same. What happened to him?"

Heimlich continued. "Pertinax couldn't hack it. He was all for fiscal
conservatism, of course-- Bert was not a soft-headed man at any point. But
when he learned he was firing people and cutting programs just to maintain
this charade, he lost his strength of will. The faculty ruined his life
with their hatred, he had a nervous breakdown and we sacked him. Then the
MegaUnion began to organize a tuition strike, so the remaining old-guard
Trustees threw up their hands, caved in and installed Julian Didius as
President!" At the memory of this, several of the Trustees sighed or moaned
with contempt. "Well! After he had enjoyed those first three weeks of flying
in all his intelligentsia comrades for wine and cheese parties, we got him in
here and showed him the financial figures, which looked disastrous. Then he
met Pertinax after the electroshock, and realized what a bloody hell-hole he
was in. Three days later he went to the Dean's Office for a chat, and when
the Dean turned out to be addressing a conference in Hawaii, he blew his top
and hurled himself out the window, and then we brought in Septimius and he's
straightened things out wonderfully." There were admiring grins around the
table, though Krupp did not appear to be listening.

"Did Pertinax have master keys, then, or what? How did he keep from being
kicked out of the Plex?"

"We allowed the poor bastard to stay because we felt sorry for him," said
Krupp. "He wouldn't live anywhere else."

The angle of the knight's head dropped a little.

"So," said Heimlich briskly, "for some reason you knew our best-kept secrets.
We hope you will understand our actions now and not do anything rash. Do you
follow?"

"Yes," murmured the knight, "unfortunately."

"What is unfortunate about it?"

"The more thoughtful you people are, the worse you get. Why is that?"

"What do we do that is wrong, Casimir Radon?" said Krupp quietly.

The mask rose and gleamed at S. S. Krupp, and then its owner lifted off the
helmet to reveal his shaven head and permanently consternated face.

"Lie a hell of a lot. Fire people when you don't have to. Create-- create a
very complicated web of lies, to snare a simple, good ideal."

"I don't think it's a hell of a lot of fun," said Krupp, "and it hurts
sometimes, more than you can suppose. But great goals aren't attained with
ease or simplicity or pleasantry, or whatever you're looking for. If we gave
into the MegaUnion, we would tip our hand and cause ruination. As long as
we're putting on this little song-and-dance, we've got to make it a complete
song-and-dance, because if the orchestra's playing a march and the dancers are
waltzing, the audience riots. The theater burns."

"At least you could be more conciliatory."

"Conciliatory! Listen, son, when you've got snakes in the basement and the
water's rising, it's no time to conciliate. Someone's got to have some
principles in education, and it might as well be us. If this country's
educators hadn't had their heads in their asses for forty years, we wouldn't
have a faculty union, and more of our students might be sentient. I'll have
strap marks on my ass before I conciliate with those medicine men down there
on the picket lines."

"You're trying to fire everyone. That's a little extreme." "Not if we're to
be consistent," said Heimlich. "We can use the opportunity to rearrange our
financial platform, and hire new people. There are many talented academics
desperate for work these days, and the best faculty members here won't let
themselves be taken out en masse anyway."

"You're going to do it, aren't you!"

"It's evident that we have no choice."

"Don't you think-- " Casimir looked out at the clear blue sky.

"What?"

"That if the administration gets to be as powerful as you, you have killed the
university?"

"Look, son," said Ralph Priestly, rolling forward. "We never claimed this was
an ideal situation. We're just doing our best. We don't have much choice."

"We're rather busy, as you can imagine," said Heimlich finally. What do you
want? Something for the railgun?" He sat up abruptly. How is the railgun?"

"Safe."

Heimlich smiled for the first time in a week. "I'd like to know what a 'safe'
railgun is."

"Maybe you'll find out."

Everyone looked disturbed.

"We are prepared to remove the Terrorists from the waste disposal site," said
Casimir crisply, "as a public service. The estimated time will be one week.
Beforehand, we plan to evacuate the Plex. We require your cooperation in two
areas.

"First, we will need control of the Plex radio station. One of our group has
developed a scheme for evacuating the Plex which makes this necessary.

"The second requirement is for the consideration of you, Ralph Priestly. What
we want, Ralph, is for some person of yours to sit by the switch that controls
the Big Wheel sign. When we phone him and say, 'Fiat lux,' he is to turn it
on, and when we say, 'Fiat obscuritas,' off.

"That commando team you tried to send in through the sewers last night was
stopped by a RAT, or Rodent Assault Tactics team associated with us. Well be
releasing them soon, we can't do much more with first aid. The point is that
only we can get rid of the Terrorists. We just ask that you do not interfere."

Finished, Casimir sat back, hands clasped on breastplate, and stared calmly
at a skylight. The Board of Trustees moved down to the far end of the table.
After they had talked for a few minutes, S. S. Krupp walked over and shook
hands with Casimir.

"We're with you," Krupp said proudly. "Wish I knew what the hell you had in
mind. What's your timetable?"

"Don't know. You'll have plenty of warning."

"Can we supply men? Arms?" asked Heimlich.

"Nope. One gun is all we need." Casimir let go of Krupp's hand and walked
down the table, unclipping himself from the rope and throwing it out to
dangle there. A forest of pinstripes rushed up the other side, trying to
circumnavigate the table and shake Casimir's hand too. Casimir stopped by the
exit.

"I probably won't see you again. Bear in mind, after the university starts
running again, two things: we control the rats. And we control the Worm. You
no longer monopolize power in this institution."

The Trustees stopped dead at this breach of pleasantness and stared at
Casimir. Krupp looked on as though monitoring a field of battle from a high
tower. Casimir continued. "I just mention this because it makes a difference
in what is reasonable for you to do, and what is not. Good-bye." As he reached
for the doorknob, he found the door briskly opened by a guard; he nodded to
the man and strode out into an anteroom.

"Soldier," said Septimius Severus Krupp, "see that that man receives safe
passage back to his own sphere of influence."

Night fell, and Towers A, B, C, D, H and G began to flash on and off in
perfect unison. Every tower except for E and F-- homes of the Axis-- was
blinking in and out of existence every two seconds. As the Axis people saw it,
the entire Plex was disappearing into the night, then re-igniting, over and
over. It was much closer than the Big Wheel; it was far larger; it surrounded
them on three sides. The effect was stupefying.

Dex Fresser ran to his observation post. In the corridors of E13S, Terrorists
wandered like decapitated chickens. Some were hearing voices telling them to
look, some not to look, to run or stay, to panic or relax. The SUBbie who was
supposed to guard the lounge-headquarters had dropped his gun on the floor and
disappeared. Fresser burst into the lounge to consult with Big Wheel.

Big Wheel had gone dark.

He turned on the Little Wheel-- the Go Big Red Fan.

"Big Wheel must be mad at you or something. What the fuck did you do wrong?"
shouted the Fan, loud, omnipresent and angry. Dex Fresser shrank, got on his
knees and snuffled a little. Outside, a bewildered stereo-hearer was playing
with the knobs on his ghetto blaster, desperate for advice.

"The stereo! The stereo, dipshit, find that frequency! Find the frequency,"
said the Fan in the voice of Dex Fresser's old scoutmaster. Dex Fresser
tumbled over a chair in his haste to reach the stereo. The only light in the
room was cast by the glowing LEDs on his stereo that looked out like feral
eyes in the night. All systems were go for stereo energize. As Dex Fresser's
hands played over the controls, dozens of lights kicked in with important
systems data, and green digits glowed from the tuner to tell him his position
on the FM dial. Only dense static came from the speakers, meaningless to
anyone else; but he could hear Big Wheel guiding him in the voice of his
first-grade ballroom dance teacher.

"A little farther down, dear. Keep going right down the dial. You're certain
to get it eventually."

Dex Fresser punched buttons and a light came on, saying: "AUTO DOWNWARD
SCAN." He now heard many voices from the dark cones of the speakers: funky
jazz-playing fascists, "great huge savings now
Neil Young wailing into his
harmonica, a call-in guest suggesting that we load the Mexicans on giant space
barges and hurl them into the sun, a base hit by Chambliss, an ad for rat
poison, a teen, apoplectic about his acne... and then the voice he was looking
for.

"On. Off. On. Off. On. Off." It was a woman's voice, somehow familiar.

"It's Sarah, dumbshit," said the Go Big Red Fan. "She's on the campus
station."

Indeed. The other towers were going on and off just as Sarah told them to. He
knelt there for ten minutes, watching their reflection in the glassy surface
of the Big Wheel. On. Off. On. Off. "On," she said, and paused. "Most of you
did very well! But we've got some holdouts in E and F Towers. I'm sorry to
say that Big Wheel won't be showing up this evening. He will not be here to
give us his advice without cooperation from the E and F tower hearers. We'll
try later. I'll be back in an hour, at midnight, and by then I hope that
you SUBbies and Terrorists will have submitted to Big Wheel's will." Sarah
was replaced by Ephraim Klein, who started in with another solid hour of
pre-classical keyboard selections.

Dex Fresser was clutching his chest, which felt unbearably tight. "Oh, shit,"
he exclaimed, "it's us! We're keeping Big Wheel off! Everybody put your
stereos on ninety point three! Do as she says!" Down in Electrical Control,
deep in the Burrows, I and the other switch-throwers rested. The circuit
breakers that supply power to an entire tower are large items, not at all easy
to throw on and off every two seconds! By midnight we were rested up and ready
to go. Sarah resumed her broadcast.

"I sure hope we can get Big Wheel to come on. Let's hope E and F Towers
go along this time. Ready? Everyone standing by their light switch?
Okay
Off
On
Off
"

From his lounge-headquarters, Dex Fresser watched his towers flash raggedly
on and off. Some of the lights were not flashing; but within minutes the Wing
Commisars had swept through and shot out any strays, and Dex Fresser was
undescribably proud that his towers could flash like the others. Big Wheel
could not forsake them now.

"On!" cried Sarah, and stopped. Several lights went off again from habit, then
coyly flickered back on. There was an unbearable wait.

"I think we've done it," Sarah said. "Look at Big Wheel!" And the wheel of
fire cast its light over the Plex with all its former glory. Dex wept.

"Not bad for a fascist," observed Little Wheel.

The Big Wheel spun all night.

It was trickier to get the attention of the barbarians of the Base. Most
of them did not have bicameral minds and thus could not be made to hear
mysterious voices. We needed to impress them. Hence Sarah predicted that in
twenty-four hours a plague of rats would strike Journalism, unless all the
journalists cleared out of the Plex.

"Frank," said the reporter into the camera, "I'm here in the American
Megaversity mailroom, our operations center for the Plex war. It's been
quiet on all fronts tonight despite former Student President Sarah Jane
Johnson's prediction of a 'plague of rats.' Well, we've seen a few rats
here"-- his image is replaced by shot of small rat scurrying down empty
corridor, terrified by TV lights-- "but perhaps that's not unusual in these
very strange, very special circumstances. We toured the Plex today, looking
for plagues of rats, leaving no stone unturned to find the animals of which
Ms. Johnson spoke. We looked in garbage heaps"-- shot of journalist digging
in garbage with long stick; sees nothing, turns to camera, holds nose,
says "phew!"-- "but all we found were bugs. We toured the corridors"--
journalist alone in long empty corridor; camera swivels around to look in
other direction; nothing there either; back to journalist-- "but apparently
the rats were somewhere else. We checked the classrooms, but the only rats
there were on paper"-- journalist standing in stolen lab coat next to diagram
of rat's nervous system-- "Finally, though, we did manage to find one rat. In
a little-used lab, Frank, in a little cage, we found one very hungry white
rat"-- back to mailroom; journalist holds up wire cage containing furtive
white rat-- "but he's been well fed ever since, and we don't think he'll
attack."

"Sam, what do you think about Sarah Jane Johnson's pronouncement? Is it a
symbolic statement, or has she cracked?" "No one can be sure, Frank." Behind
journalist, door explodes open with a boom and a flash; strobe light is seen
beyond it. The journalist continues, trying to resist the temptation to turn
around and look; but the explosion has drowned out the audio part of the
camera. Dozens of giant rats storm the room
 However, reliable sources have it
that
" His words are drowned out by mass machine-gun fire. In an unprecedented
breach of media etiquette, journalist turns around to look, and presently
disappears from view. Abruptly, the ceiling of the mailroom spins down to fill
the screen, and three great fuzzy out-of-focus rat snouts converge from the
edges of the screen, long teeth glistening in the TV lights; all goes dark.
We return to Network Control. Anchorman is in process of throwing his pen
at someone, but pauses to say, "Now, this," and is replaced by an animated
hemorrhoid.

All we wanted was to get everyone out of the Plex and end this thing. Once
rats roamed the Base and bats frolicked in the hallways, and smoke, flies
and filth were everywhere, those people were ready to go. The GASF would
leave whenever Virgil told them to. The administration would clear B and
C Towers as soon as we gave the word. The TUGgies claimed that they were
merely holding their three towers to fend off the Reds. Later, to no one's
surprise, we found that they had half-brainwashed the population of those
towers by the time Sarah kicked in with her pronouncements; and how could
oversweetened Kool-Aid, Manilow songs and lovebombing compete with her radical
power and grand demonstrations? After we shut off their electricity and water
for twelve hours, the TUG agreed to evacuate their towers at our command. The
SUB/Terrorist axis would do whatever they had to to keep the Big Wheel on.

As the days went by, Big Wheel grew more demanding. Everyone was to leave his
stereo tuned to 90.3 at all times. Everyone was to plan evacuation routes from
their towers and clear away any obstacles that might have been placed at the
exits. Dex Fresser's devotion to Sarah's words became complete, and after a
week we knew we could evacuate the Axis and everyone else whenever we were
ready.

In the meantime we were moving the railgun downstairs. To withstand the recoil
thrust, the machine's supports had to be bolted right into the concrete floor
of the sewer. We had to precision-fit a hundred and twenty bolts into the
concrete for the fifty-foot-long railgun, a dull and iffy task requiring great
precision. Once the holes were prepared, we began carrying the supports down.
It was a terrible,