December

      "Sarah?"
      "Huh?"
      "Did I wake you up?"
      "No. Hi."
      "Let's talk."
      "Sure." Sarah rolled over on her stomach and propped herself up on her elbows. "I hope you're comfortable sleeping down there." "Listen. Anyplace is more comfortable than my room when a party's going on above it."
      I don't mind if you want to share a bed with me Hyacinth. My sister and I slept together until I was eleven and she was twelve." "Thanks. But I didn't decide to sleep down here because I don't like you, Sarah."
      "Well, that's nice. I guess it's a little small for two." There was a long silence. Hyacinth sat up on her sleeping bag, her crossed legs stretching out her nightgown to make a faint white diamond in the darkness of the room. Then, soundlessly, she got up and climbed into bed with Sarah. Sarah slid back against the wall to make room, and after much giggling, rolling around, rearrangement of covers and careful placement of limbs they managed to find comfortable positions.
      "Too hot," said Hyacinth, and got up again. She opened the window and a cold wind blew into the room. She scampered back and dove in next to Sarah.
      "Comfy?" said Hyacinth.
      "Yeah. Mmm. Very."
      "Really?" said Hyacinth skeptically. "More than before? Not just physically. You don't feel awkward, being tangled up with me like this?"
      "Not really," said Sarah dreamily. "It's kind of pleasant. It's just, you know, warm, and kind of comforting to have someone else around. I like you, you like me, why should it be awkward?" "Would it be any different if I told you I was a lesbian?" Sarah came wide awake but did not move. With one eye she gazed into the darkness above the soft white horizon of Hyacinth's shoulder, on which she had laid her head.
      "And that I was hoping we could do other nice things to each other? If you feel inspired to, that is." She gently, almost imperceptibly, stroked Sarah's hair. Sarah's heart was pumping rhythmically.
      "I wish you'd say something," said Hyacinth. "Are you not sure how you feel, or are you paralyzed with terror?"
      Sarah laughed softly and felt herself relaxing. "I'm pretty naive about this kind of thing. I mean, I don't think about it a lot. I sort of thought you might be. Is Lucy?"
      "Yes. Nowadays we don't sleep together that much. Sarah, do you want me to sleep on the floor?"
      Sarah thought about it but not very seriously. The room was pleasantly cold now and the closeness of her friend was something she had not felt in a very long time. "Of course not. This is great. I haven't slept with anyone in a while—a man, I mean. Sleeping with someone is one of my favorite things. But it's different with men. Not quite as . . . sweet."
      "That's for sure."
      "Why don't you stay a while?"
      "That'd be nice."
      "Do you mind if we don't do anything?" At this they laughed loudly, and that answered the question.
      But we are doing something you know added Hyacinth later.
      "Your nose is in my breast. You're stroking my shoulder. I'm afraid that all counts."
      "Oh. Gosh. Does that make me a lesbian?"
      "Oh, I don't know. I guess you're off to a promising start."
      "Hmmm. Doesn't feel like being a lesbian."
      Hyacinth squeezed Sarah tight. "Look, honey, don't worry about it. This is just great as it is. I just wanted you to know the opportunity was there. Okay?"
      "Okay."
      "Want to go to sleep?"
      "Take it easy, what's your hurry?"

Last Night was the night of the blue towers. A week before, the towers had glowed uniformly yellow as forty-two thousand students sat beneath their desk lamps and studied for finals. The next night, blue had replaced yellow here and there, as a few lucky ones, finished with their finals, switched on their TVs. This night, all eight towers were studded with blue, and whole patches of the Plex flickered in unison with the popular shows. The beer trucks were busy all day long down at the access lot, rolling kegs up the ramps to the Brew King in the Mall, whence they were dispersed in canvas carts and two-wheelers and Radio Flyers to rooms and lounges all over the Plex. As night fell and the last students came screaming in from their finals, suitcases full of dope moved through the Main Entrance and were quickly fragmented and distributed throughout the towers for quick combustion. By dinnertime the faucets ran cold water only as thousands lined up by the shower stalls, and the Caf was a desert as most students ate at restaurants or parties. After dark, spotlights and lasers crisscrossed the walls as partying students shone them into other towers, and when the Big Wheel sign blazed into life, bands of Big-Wheel—worshiping Terrorists all over the Plex launched a commemorative fireworks barrage that sent echoes crackling back and forth among the towers like bumper pool balls, punctuating the roar of the warring stereos.
      By 10:00 the parties were just warming up. At 10:30 the rumor circulated that a special police squad sent by S. S. Krupp was touring the Plex to bust up parties. At 11:06 a keg was thrown from A24N and exploded on the Turnpike, backing up traffic for an hour with a twelve-car chain-reaction smashup. By 11:30 forty students had been admitted to the Infirmary with broken noses, split cheeks and severe inebriation, and it was beginning to look as though the official estimate of one death from overintoxication and one from accident might be a little low. The Rape/Assault/Crisis Line handled a call every fifteen minutes.
      Precisely at 11:40:00 an unknown, uninvited, very clumsy student walked behind John Wesley Fenrick's chair at the big E31E end-of-semester bash and tripped, spilling a strawberry malt all over Fenrick's spiky blond hair.
      John Wesley Fenrick was in the shower with very hot water spraying onto his head to dissolve the sticky malt crud, dancing around loosely to a tune in his head and playing the air guitar. He wondered whether the malt had been the work of Ephraim Klein. This, however, was impossible; his new room and number were unlisted and you couldn't follow people home in an elevator. The only way for Klein to find him was by a freak of chance, or by bribing an administration person with access to the computer—very unlikely. Besides, a malt on the head was a bush-league retaliation even for a quiet little harpsichord-playing New Jersey fart like Klein, considering what Fenrick had so brilliantly accomplished.
      What made it even greater was that the administration had treated it like a hilarious college prank, a "concrete expression of malfunction in the cohabitant interaction, intended only as nonviolent emotional expression." Though they were after him to pay Klein's cleaning bills, Fenrick's brother was a lawyer and he knew they wouldn't push it in court. Even if they did, shit, he was going to be pulling down forty K in six months! A small price for triumph.
      With a snarl of disgust, Fenrick dumped another dose of honey- beer-aloe-grub-treebark shampoo on his hair, finding that the tenacious malt substance still had not come off. What's in this crap? Fenrick thought. Fuck up your stomach, for sure.
      Throughout E Tower, scores of Ephraim Klein's friends sat in the great shiny microwave bathrooms watching the Channel 25 Late Night Eyewitness InstaAction InvestiNews. Even during the most ghastly stories this program sounded like an encounter session among five recently canceled sitcom actors and developmentally disabled hairdressers' models. The weather, well, it was just as bad, but was relieved by its very bizarreness. The weatherman, a buffoon who knew nothing about weather and didn't care, was named Marvin DuZan the Weatherman and would broadcast in a negligee if it boosted ratings; his other gimmick was to tell an abominable joke at the conclusion of each forecast. After the devastating punchline was delivered, the picture of the guffawing pseudometeorologist and his writhing colleagues would be replaced by an animated short in which a crazy-looking bird tried to smash a tortoise over the head with a sledgehammer. At the last moment the tortoise would creep forward, causing the blow to rebound off his shell and crash back into the cranium of the bird. The bird would then assume a glazed expression and vibrate around in circles, much like a chair in Klein's room during the "Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor," finally to collapse at the feet of the smiling turtle, who would then peer slyly at the audience and wiggle his eyebrow ridges.
      During Marvin DuZan's forecast on Last Night, Ephraim Klein was standing outside his ex-roomie's shower stall, watching a portable TV and squirting Hyper Stik brand Humonga-Glue into the latch of the stall's door. He had turned down the volume, of course, and it seemed just as well, since from the reactions of the InvestiNews Strike Force (and the cameramen, who were always visible on the high-tech News Nexus set) it appeared that the joke tonight was a real turd. As the camera zoomed in on the goonishly beaming face of Marvin DuZan, Ephraim Klein's grip on the handles of two nearby urinals tightened and his heart beat wildly, as did the grips and the hearts of a small army of friends and hastily recruited deputies in many other E Tower bathrooms. Bird and Tortoise appeared, the hammer was brandished, and smash!
      As the hammer rebounded on the bird's head, scores of toilets throughout E Tower were flushed, causing a vacuum so sharp that pipes bent and tore and snapped and cold water ceased to flow. There was a short pause, and then a bloodcurdling scream emanated from Fenrick's shower stall as clouds of live steam burst out the top. After some fruitless handle-yanking and Plexiglass-banging, the steam was followed by Fenrick himself, who fell ungainly to the floor with a crisp splat and shook his head in pain as Ephraim Klein escaped with his TV. In his haste Fenrick had lacerated his scalp on the steel showerhead, and as he pawed at his face to clear away suds and blood he was distantly conscious of a cold draft that irritated his parboiled skin, and a familiar chunka-chunka-chünk that could be heard above the sounds of gasping pipes and white water. Finally prying one eye open, he looked into the wind to see it: the Go Big Red Fan, complacently revolving in front of his stall, set on HI and still somewhat gray with cigar ash. Unfortunately for John Wesley Fenrick, he did not soon enough see the puddle of water which surrounded him, and which was rapidly expanding toward The base of the old and poorly insulated Fan.
      This was also quite an evening for E17S. Ever since joining the Terrorists as the Flame Squad Faction, this all-male wing had suffered from the stigma of being mere copies of the Big Wheel Men, Cowboys and Droogs of E13. Tonight that was to change. The Christmas tree had been purchased three weeks ago, left in a shower until the fireproofing compound was washed away, and hung over a hot-air vent in the storage room; it was now a lovely shade of incendiary brown. They took it up to E3 1, the top floor, seized an elevator, and stuffed the tree inside. Someone pressed all the buttons for floors 30 through 6 while others squirted lighter fluid over the tree's dessicated boughs.
      Only one match was required. The door slid shut just as the smoke and flames began to billow forth, and with a cheer and a yell the Flame Squad Faction began to celebrate.
      Twenty-four floors below, Virgil and I were having a few slow ones in my suite. I had no time for partying because I was preparing for a long drive home to Atlanta. Virgil happened to be wandering the Plex that night, looking in on various people, and had paused for a while at my place. Things were pretty quiet—as they generally had been since John Wesley Fenrick had left—and except for the insistent and inevitable bass beat, the wing was peaceful.
      The fire alarm rang just before midnight. We cursed fluently and looked out my door to see what was up. As faculty-in-residence I didn't have to scurry out for every bogus fire drill, but it seemed prudent to check for smoke. The smoke was heavy when we opened the door, and we smelled the filthy odor of burning plastic. The source of the flame was near my room: one of the elevators, which had automatically stopped and opened once the fire alarm was triggered. I put a rag over my mouth and headed for the fire hose down the hall. Meanwhile Virgil prepared to soak some towels in my sink.
      Neither of us got any water. My fire hose valve just sucked air and howled.
      "God Almighty," Virgil called through the smoke. "Somebody pulled a Big Flush." He came out and joined the people running for the fire stairs. "No 'vators during fires so I'll have to take the stairs. I've got to get the parallel pipe system working."
      "The what?"
      "Parallel pipes," said Virgil, skipping into the stairwell. "Hang on! Find a keg! The architects weren't totally stupid!" And he was gone down the stairs.
      I locked my door in case of looting and went off in search of a keg. Naturally there was a superabundance that night, and with some help from the too-drunk-to-be-scared owners I hauled it to the lobby and began to pump clouds of generic light into the flaming Christmas tree.

Casimir Radon was in Sharon's lab, washing out a beaker. This was merely the first step of the Project Spike glassware procedure, which involved attack by two different alcohols and three different concentrated acid mixtures, but he was in no hurry. For him Christmas had started the day before. With Virgil's help he could get into this lab throughout the vacation, and that meant plenty of time to work on Project Spike, build the mass driver and suffer as he thought about Sarah.
      He was annoyed but not exasperated when the water stopped flowing. There was a gulp in the tapstream, followed by a hefty KLONK as the faucet handle jerked itself from his grasp. The flow of water stopped, and an ominous gurgling, sucking noise came from the faucet, like an entire municipal water system flushing its last. He listened as the symphony of hydraulic sound effects grew and spread to the dozens of pipes lining the lab's ceiling, the knocks and gurgles and hisses weaving together as though the pipes were having a wild Christmas party of their own. But Casimir was tired, and fairly absentminded to boot, and he shrugged it off as yet another example of the infinite variety of building and design defects in the Plex. The distilled water tap still worked, so he used it. Despite the drudgery of the task and his problems with Sarah, Casimir wore a little smile on his long unshaven face. Project Spike had worked. He had been sampling Cafeteria food for three weeks, and until tonight had come up with nothing. Turkey Quiche, Beef Pot Pies, Lefto Lasagne, Estonian Pasties, and even Deep-Fried Chicken Livers had drawn blanks, and Casimir had begun to wonder whether it was a waste of time. Then came Savory Meatloaf Night, an event which occurred every three weeks or so; despite the efforts of advanced minds such as Virgil's, no one had ever discerned any reliable pattern which might predict when this dish was to be served. Today, of course, the last of the semester, Savory Meatloaf Night had struck and Casimir had craftily smuggled a slice out in his sock (the Cafeteria exit guards could afford to take it easy on Savory Meatloaf Night).
      Not more than fifteen minutes ago, as he had been irradiating the next batch of rat poison, the computer terminal had zipped into life with the results of the analysis: high levels of Carbon- 14! There were rats in the meatloaf!
      That was a triumph for Casimir. It seemed likely to be a secret triumph, though. Sarah would never understand why he was doing this. Casimir wasn't even sure he understood it himself. S. S. Krupp had funded his mass driver, so why should he wish to damage the university now? He suspected that Project Spike was simply a challenge, an opportunity to prove that he was clever and self- sufficient in a sea of idiocy. He had accomplished that, but as a political tactic it was still pretty dumb. Sarah would certainly think so.
      Sarah had also thought it was dumb when he had decided to work in the lab all night instead of going to Fantasy Island Nite. She was right on that issue too, perhaps, but Casimir loathed parties of all sorts and would use any excuse to avoid one. Hence he was here on the bottom of the Plex, washing out rat-liver scum, while she was far above, dancing in the clown costume she had shown him—probably having a wonderful time as handsome Terrorists salivated on her. He observed he was leaning on the counter staring at the wall as though it were a screen beaming him live coverage of Sarah at the party. Maybe he would leave now, retaining a lab coat as a costume, and go up and surprise Sarah.
      Meanwhile water was squirting out of the wall, forcing its way through the cracks between the panels, running out from under the baseboards and trickling through the grommets in the sides of Casimir's tennis shoes. Abruptly brought back into the here and now, he looked around half-dazed and started unplugging things and moving them to higher ground. What the hell was happening? A broken pipe? He figured that if there was enough water pressure on the 31st floor to run a fire hose, the pressure down here must be phenomenal. This was going to be a hell of a mess.
      Water was now trickling through old nail holes high on the wall. Casimir covered the computer terminal with plastic and then ran out to search for B-men. They were not here now, of course—probably spreading rat poison or celebrating some Crotobaltislavonian radish festival.
      Across from Sharon's lab was a freight elevator closed off by a manually operated door. When he looked through its little window Casimir saw water falling down the shaft, and sparks spitting past. He got insulated gloves from the lab and hauled the door open. Several gallons of pent-up water rushed past his ankles and fell into the blackness. From below rose the harsh wet odor of the sewers. The sparks issued from the electrical control box on the shaft wall. Once Casimir was sure there was no danger of fire or electrocution he left, leaving the doors open so that water could drain out of this bottom level of the Plex.
      Oh, God. The rat poison. It was only supposed to stay in the radiation source for a minute at a time! Casimir had put it in an hour ago, then simply forgotten about it once the results of the analysis had come in. The damn stuff must be glowing in the dark. He sloshed back into the lab.
      Water poured and squirted from the walls and ceiling everywhere he looked. He shielded his face from spray and walked through a wall of water toward the neutron source, a garbage can full of paraffin with the plutonium button at its center. Stopping to listen, he sensed that the slow ticking noise which had been coming from one wall had sped up and was growing louder. He stood petrified as it grew into a rumble, then a groan. then a scream—and the wall crashed open and a torrent rushed through the lab. An adjacent storage room had filled with water from a large broken pipe, and Casimir was now knocked to the floor by a torrent of Fiberglass panels, aluminum studs, and janitorial supplies. He rolled just in time to see the neutron source, buoyed on the rush of water, bob through the doorway and across the hall.
      Taking care not to be swept along, he made his way to the shaft and looked down. All was dark, but from far below, under the waterfall sound, he thought he heard a buzz, or a ringing: the sound of an alarm. Maybe his ears were ringing, and maybe it was a fire alarm above. Nauseated, he returned to the lab, sat on a table and awaited the B-men.

Fantasy Island Nite was turning out to be not such a bad thing after all. Those Terrorists upstairs in their own lounge were making a lot of noise, but those down here on 12 were making an admirable effort to behave, per their agreement with the Airheads. Only this agreement had persuaded Sarah and Hyacinth to show up. It was potentially interesting, it was nice to be sociable once in a while and they could always leave if they didn't like it. Sarah wore a clown costume. This was her way of making fun of the fantasy theme of the party—most Airheads came as beauty queens or vamps—and had the extra advantage of making her totally unrecognizable. Hyacinth put together a smashing Fairy Godmother costume, as a joke only Sarah would get. Their plan was to drink so much it would become socially acceptable for them to dance together.
      While Sarah was working on the first stage of this plan she began to get a lot of attention from three Terrorists. These three—,a Cowboy, a Droog and a Commando—were obvious jerks, each one incensed that she would not reveal her name, but as long as they danced, fetched drinks and didn't try to converse they seemed like harmless fun. After a while she got a little boogied out, and withdrew from the action to look out over the city. Hyacinth had gone to visit another party and was expected back soon.
      Time twisted and she was no longer at the party; she was watching it from a place in her mind where she had not been for many years. She slid backward like an air hockey puck until she was high up in one corner of the room. The walls of the Plex fell away so that she could see in all directions at once.
      One of the picture windows had been replaced by a gate that opened to the sky. The gate was gaily festooned with shining pulsing color-blobs. All the other party-goers had lined up in front of it. On one side of the gate stood Mitzi, taking tickets; on the other, Mrs. Santucci, checking off their names on a clipboard. Each Airhead- Terrorist who passed through stepped out and sat down on a long slippery-slide made of blue light, and squealed with delight as they zoomed earthward. Sarah could not see all the way to the slide's end, but she could see that, below, the Death Vortex had turned into a whirlpool of multicolored fire. Forests and towns and families whirled around and around before gurling down the center to disappear. The Vortex was ringed with hundreds of fire trucks whose crews halfheartedly sprayed their tiny jets of water into its middle. When Sarah looked beyond the whirlpool she saw in its light a shattered landscape of rubble and corpses, where bawling dirty people scrabbled about aimlessly and squinted into the fire-glow. Nothing more than dust, solitary bricks, cockroaches and jagged glass was there, though Sarah's vision swooped across it for a thousand miles and a thousand years.
      Beyond its distant edge was a nonlandscape: a milky white vacuum where choking black clouds of static grew, split, re-formed, hurled themselves against one another, clashed with horrible dry violence and abated to grow and form again. Its slowness and its dryness made it the most awful thing Sarah had ever seen. Alter five millennia, when she thought she was entirely lost and crazy, she saw a piece of broken glass. then a rivulet of blood. Following them, she found herself in the terrible landscape again, with the Plex on the horizon erupting like a volcano. Blue beams of light shot from its top and wrapped around her and sucked her back through the air into the building. But she could no longer find herself there. She was no longer in the Lounge. The Lounge had been vacant for centuries and only dust and yellowed party favors remained. Following footprints in the dust she came to the hallway—brightly lit, loud, filled with shouting students and bats. She flew straight down the hail until four dots at its end grew into four people and she could slow down and follow them. There were three men: a Cowboy and a Commando held the arms of a woman dressed as a clown, hurrying her down the hall, while a Droog walked ahead of them carrying a paper punch cup which glowed with a green light from within. Sarah closed her eyes to the glow and shook her head, and when she opened them again she was the clown-woman—though she did not want to be.
      They were in an elevator filled with black water that rose and crept warmly up Sarah's thighs. Swimming in the water were bad hidden things, so she kicked as well as she could. Her hands were held up above her head by men ten feet high, lost in the glare of the overhead light where it was too bright to look.
      Then they were on a floor that reminded Sarah of the broken landscape. On the wall a giant mouth was chewing vigorously, drooling on the floor and smacking its disgusting lips. The men threw her through it and followed behind.
      "I won't go down the slide," she protested, but they did not really care. Inside all was red and blue; a neon beer emblem burned in the window and licked her with its hot rays. There stood a giant in a football costume who wore the head of Tiny, leader of the Terrorists.
      "Is Dex here?" she said, more out of habit than anything. It would be like Dex to slip her some LSD. But then she knew this was a stupid question. She felt the door being locked behind her and saw the music turned up until it was purest ruby red, causing her body to turn into fragile glass. To move now would be to shatter and die. "Handle with care," she murmured, "I'm glass now," but the words just dribbled down the front of her costume. They were ripping her costume away. She squirmed but felt herself cracking horribly. The beer sign cast grotesque red and blue light on the transparent flesh of her thighs.
      She knew what was going to happen next. Somehow her mind connected it all in a straight line, before the idea was swept away by the internal storm. The worst thing in the world. She should have gone down the slide.
      She made an effort of will. The sound and the light went away, it was spring; grass and flowers and blue sky were all around and she was not about to be raped. She was eating raspberries on the banks of a creek. Out of curiosity she scratched at the air with her fingernail. Red and blue rays stabbed out into her skin again, and peeking all the way through for a moment she could see that they had not yet started.
      No wonder; they were moving in slow motion. Sarah would have to spend many hours waiting on the banks of the creek. She drew back into the sunshine. Perhaps she could live here forever and have a perfect life.
      When she slept, she dreamed of those dry, unending wars in the land of milky white. She knew it was all an illusion. She tore it away and came back to the room. She was not going to sleep through anything. She was not going to imagine anything that didn't exist.
      The sign was wavy and upside down now, reflected in a puddle of water on the floor.
      A Terrorist was in the corner twisting a faucet handle. Sarah stood up. Tiny turned toward her and smashed her across the face. She was on the floor again, and over there a Terrorist groped in the scintillating ocean of red and blue for the sign's power cord. He was screaming like an electric guitar now. He was trying to swim in the shallow lake of blood and bile.
      Sarah was thrown onto a bed. Her arms and legs flailed, and one heel found a Terrorist's kneecap. The Droog got on top of her, and because he was in slow motion she kicked him in the nuts. He curled up on top of her and she looked through his hair at the ceiling, which sputtered in the failing sign-light. Tiny was unwinding a long piece of rope and its thin tendrils floated around him like black smoke. She rolled half out from under the Droog and curled into a fetal position so he could not take her arms and legs. As she did she peered down through the transparent floor and saw the Airheads, plastered with grotesque makeup, drinking LSD from crystal goblets and cheering. But where was Hyacinth?
      Hyacinth was standing in the doorway. An extremely loud explosion seeped into her ears. Smoke filled the room, catching the hallway light and forming hundreds of 3-D images from Sarah's past life.
      Hyacinth's fairy godmother costume was changed, for now she wore heavy leather gloves over her white cloth gloves, and bulky ear protectors under her conical hat, and a pair of goggles beneath her milky-white veil. In her hands she carried a giant revolver. Sarah knew that under her dress, Hyacinth was made of strong young oakwood.
      Hyacinth took one step into the room and shrugged on the main light switch. Tiny stood in the center, staring. The man who had been swimming on the floor was dead. Another clasped his knee and screamed at the ceiling. Sarah laid her head down restfully and put her hands on her ears.
      Cones of fire were spurting from the front and back of Hyacinth's gun and her hands were snapping rhythmically up and down. Tiny had his hands on his chest, and as he walked backward toward the window the back of his football jersey bulged and fluttered like a loose sail, darkness splashing away from it. The electrical cord was between his legs. His steps shortened and he fell backward through the picture window. The cord and plug trailed slowly behind him and snapped out room and were gone. The noise was so immense that Sarah heard nothing until much later. The blasts were synchronized with the music's beat:

WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM

with each WHAM followed by a high whine that shrieked through until the next WHAM, so that when Tiny was gone there remained a terrible high tone that resonated between the walls of the room, far too loud for Sarah to stand, filling her awareness like the blowing of the Last Trumpet and tormenting the injured Terrorists, who cried out in it and wrapped their arms around their heads. The Droog on, top of Sarah was pulled slowly away and Hyacinth yanked Sarah to her feet. Sarah did not even move her legs as the smoky doorway twisted past her, the corridor walls with their Big Wheels rolled on by, the landings of the fire stair rushed up toward her from blackness and her soft bed drifted up to envelop her face. Hyacinth was above her, probing, rubbing, kissing her. She would not stop until Sarah was well again.

Virgil used his master key eight times before attaining a dark, stained sub-sublevel of the Plex, where great water mains from the City entered from the depths and fed the giant pumps that pressurized the plumbing system overhead.
      In an uncharacteristic flash of foresightedness, the Plex's architects made allowances for the certainty that, once in a while, one group or another would flush hundreds of toilets simultaneously and damage the cold water system. So they installed two parallel, independent systems of main pipes to feed the distribution systems of the wings; to switch between them one need only close one set of valves and open another. This Virgil accomplished by grunting and straining at a few red iron wheels. Satisfied that things were settling back toward normal, he set out for Professor Sharon's old lab to see if Casimir Radon was still there.

* * *

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

Tiny landed on a burning sofa not far from my window. The impact forced much excess lighter fluid out of the foam cushions and created a burst of flame whose origin we did not know until later. Once the water had come back on, and we had soaked the elevator and the Christmas tree, we aimed the fire hose out my living-room window and drenched the heap of dimly burning furniture that was Tiny the Terrorist's funeral pyre. It was a few minutes past midnight, the second strangest midnight I have ever known, and my first semester at the Big U was at an end.