Second Semester: January

The fog of war was real down here. The knee-deep glom on the tunnel floor exhaled it in sheets and columns, never disturbed by a clean wind or a breath of dryness. Through its darkness moved a flickering cloud of light, and at the center walked a tall thin figure with headphones sprouting long antennae. He carried an eight-foot wizard's staff in one hand, a Loyal Order of Caledonian Comrades ceremonial sword in the other, and wore hip waders, a raincoat, and a gas mask. His headlamp's beam struck the fog in front of his eyes and stopped dead, limiting his visibility to what he could see through occasional holes in the atmosphere. From the twin filters of his gas mask came labored hissing sighs as he panted with an effort of wading through the muck.
      "I've come to the intersection of the Tunnel of Goblins and the Tunnel of Dragon Blood," he announced. "This is my turnaround point and I will now return to rendezvous with Zippy the Dwarf, Lord Flail and the White Priest in the Hall of the Idols of Zarzangzed." True to his word, Klystron the Impaler laboriously reversed direction by gripping his staff and making a five-point turn, then paused for a rest.
      A voice crackled from his headphones, a lush, tense introvert's voice made tinny by the poor transmission quality.
      "Roger, Klystron the Impaler, This is Liaison. Please hold." There was a brief silence, but the flickering of her fingers on the computer keys up there, and her ruffling of papers, kept her voice- operated mike open. She snickered, unaware that Klystron, Zippy, Flail and the White Priest could hear her. "Oh ho," she gloated, "are you in for trouble now. You don't hear anything yet." More fingers on the keyboard. Klystron concluded that Shekondar had generated a monster with many statistics and at least three attack modes, a monster with which Consuela was not entirely familiar. Perhaps, for once, a worthy opponent.
      Klystron the Impaler drew his mask down to dangle on his chest. Taking care not to breathe through his nose, he brought out his wineskin, opened the plastic spigot and shot a long stream of warm Tab onto his tongue. God, it stank down here. But Klystron could deal with far worse. Anything was better than doing this in a safe light place, like the D & D players, and never experiencing the darkness, claustrophobia and terror of reality.
      Liaison was ready. "Klystron the Impaler, known to his allies as the Heroic, High Lord of Plexor, Mage of the CeePeeYu and Tamer of the Purple Worm of Longtunnel, is attacked by the ELECTRIC MICROWAVE LIZARD OF QUIZZYXAR!" She nearly shrieked the last part of this, as frenzied as a priestess during a solar eclipse. "You are not surprised, you have one turn to prepare defense. Statement of intent, please."
      Klystron corked the wineskin with his thumb and let it drop to his side, sliding the mask back over his face. So, it was the electric microwave lizard of Quizzyxar. Consuela's reaction had hinted it was something big. He was ready.
      "As you will recall, I took an anti-microwave potion six months ago, before the Siege of Dud, and that has not worn off yet. As he will probably attack with microwaves first, this gives me an extra turn. I begin by flipping down the visor on my Helm of Courage. Is he charging?"
      "No. She's advancing slowly."
      "I stand my ground on the left side of the tunnel and fire a freeze-blast from my Staff of Cold." He wheeled his staff into firing position as though it were a SAM-7 shoulder-fired antiaircraft missile launcher and his body shook with imagined recoil as he CHOONGed a couple of sound effects into the mike.
      But why had Consuela specified the lizard was a she? With Consuela it could not have been a mere Freudian slip.
      "Okay," Con said slowly, typing in Klystron's actions, "your freeze-blast strikes home, hitting her in the left head. It has no effect. The lizard's microwave blast does not hurt you but explodes your wineskin, causing you two points of concussion damage. It continues to advance at a walk."
      "Touché. " So much for Tab.
      "Liaison, do we know about this yet?" It was Lord Flail.
      Liaison asked Shekondar. "Yes. The lizard makes a lot of noise and you hear it."
      "Okay!" cried Lord Flail. "We'll proceed at top speed toward the melee."
      "Me too," added Zippy the Dwarf.
      "It'll take us forever to get there," said the White Priest, who did not seem to be very far into his character. "We're at least a thousand feet away."
      Klystron the Impaler took advantage of these negotiations to do some planning. Obviously the female type was immune to cold— highly obnoxious to the male type.
      "In my quiver I have a fire arrow which I took from the dying Elf-Lord during that one time when we space-warped into Middle Earth. I'll fire that. Which head is it leading with?"
      "Left."
      "Then I aim for the right head."
      "The arrow finds its mark and burns fiercely," announced Consuela with relish. "The lizard bites you on your left arm, which is now useless until the White Priest can heal it. While you switch back to your sword it claws you with a tentacle claw appendage, doing five points of damage to your chest. The claw is poisoned but. . . you make your saving throw."
      "Good. I'll take a swipe at the appendage as it attacks."
      "You miss."
      "Okay, I'll make for the right head."
      "The lizard has succeeded in clawing the fire arrow out of its hide. Now it makes a right tongue strike, sticking you, and begins drawing you into its mouth. Will you attack the tongue, or parry the poison claw attacks?"
      Klystron considered it. This was a hell of a situation. As a last resort he could use a wish from his wishing sword, but that could be risky, especially with Consuela.
      "I will defend myself from the claws, and deal with the mouth when I get to it. I've been swallowed before."
      "You parry three swipes. But now you are just inside the mouth and it is exhaling poison gas, and you have lost half your strength."
      "Oh, all right," said Klystron in disgust. "I'll make a wish on my wishing sword. I'll say…"
      "Wait a minute!" came the feminine squeal of Zippy the Dwarf.
      "I just spotted him!"
      Snapping to attention, Klystron scanned the surrounding mist with the beam of his headlamp and picked out Zippy's red chest waders. "Confirm contact with Zippy the Dwarf. Estimated range ten meters."
      "In that case," observed Consuela, "she is right behind the lizard. Your action, Zippy?"
      "Three double fireballs from my fireball-shooting tiara."
      "I duck," said Klystron hastily. Shekondar was just clever enough to generate an accidental hit on him. He sighed in relief and his pulse became leaden. It was going to be fine.
      "All fireballs strike in abdominal area. Lizard is now in bad shape and moving slowly."
      "I cut myself loose from the tongue."
      "Done."
      "Two more fireballs in the right head."
      "As soon as I'm out of the way, that is."
      "Okay. The lizard dies. Congratulations, people. That's ten thousand experience points apiece."
      Klystron and Zippy joined up, edging together against the tunnel wall to avoid the imaginary lizard corpse sprawled between them. They shook hands robustly, though Klystron had some reservations about being saved by a female dwarf.
      "Good going, guys!" shouted Lord Flail, overloading his mike.
      "Yeah. Way to go," the White Priest added glumly.
      "Flail and Priest, give estimated distance from us." Klystron was concerned; those two were the weakest members, even when they were together, and now that one monster had been noisily eliminated others were sure to converge on the area to clean up.
      "To be frank, I'm not sure," answered the White Priest. "I kind of thought we'd be getting to an intersection near you by now, but apparently not. The layout of these tunnels isn't what I saw on the Plex blueprints."
      Klystron winced at this gross violation of game ethics and exchanged exasperated glances with Zippy. "You mean that the secret map you found was incorrect," he said. "Well, don't continue if you're lost. We will proceed in the direction of the Sepulchre of Keldor and hope to meet you there." He and Zippy plugged off down the tunnel.
      They wandered for ten minutes looking for one another, and every sixty seconds Liaison had them stop while Shekondar checked for prowling monsters. Shortly, Klystron overheard an exchange between the Priest and the Lord, who apparently had removed their masks to talk.
      "Take it easy! It doesn't take very long, you know," said the White Priest. "I'll be right back. Stay here."
      "I don't think we should separate, Your Holiness," pleaded Lord Flail. "Not after a melee that'll attract other monsters." Klystron turned up the gain on his mike and shouted, "He's right! Don't split up," in hopes that they would hear it without earphones.
      The Priest and Lord Flail conversed inaudibly for a few seconds. Then Flail came back on, having apparently replaced his mask. "Uh, this is to notify Shekondar that the White Priest has gone aside," he said, using the code phrase for taking a leak. Klystron chuckled. A few seconds later came another prowling monster check.
      Everyone tensed and waited for Shekondar's decree.
      "Okay," said Liaison triumphantly, "we've got a monster, Lord Flail, now solo, is attacked by. . . giant sewer rats! There are twelve of them, and they take him by surprise."
      "We'll listen for his battle cry and try to locate him that way," announced Kiystron immediately, and pulled his headphones down to listen. Oddly, Flail had not responded.
      "Statement of intent! Move it!" snapped Consuela.
      But no statement of intent was forthcoming from Flail. Instead, a ghastly series of sound effects was transmitted through his mike. First came a whoosh of surprise, followed by a short pause, and some confused interjections. Then nothing was heard for a few seconds save ragged panting; and then came a long, loud scream which obliged them to turn down the volume. The screaming continued, swamping the others' efforts to make themselves heard on the line.
      Finally Consuela's voice came through, angry and hurt. "You're jumping the gun. The melee hasn't started yet." But Lord Flail was no longer screaming, and the only sounds coming over his mike were an occasional scraping and shuffling mixed with odd squeals that might have been radio trouble.
      Klystron and Zippy, headphones down, could hear the screams echoing down the tunnel a second after they came in on the radio. Flail's plan was clear; he was making a god-awful lot of noise to assist the better fighters in tracking him down. A good plan for a character with a fighting level of three and a courage/psychostability index of only eight, but it was a little overdone.
      The odd noises continued for several minutes as they tramped toward the scene of the melee, which was in a higher tunnel with a much drier floor.
      Ahead of them, Flail's headlamp cast an unmoving yellow blotch on the ceiling. On the fringes of that cone of light moved great swift shadows. Klystron slowed down and drew his sword. Zippy had dropped back several feet. "Making final approach to Flail's location," Klystron mumbled, edging forward, falling unconsciously into the squatting stance of the sabre fighter. At the end of his lamp's beam he could see quickly moving gray and brown fur, and blood.
      "At your approach the rats get scared and flee," said Consuela, frantically typing, "though not without persuasion."
      He could see them clearly now. They were dogs, like German shepherds, though rather fat, and they had long, long bare tails. And round ears. And pointy quivering snouts. Oh, my God.
      Several scurried away, some stood their ground staring at his headlamp with beady black and red eyes, and one rushed him.
      Reacting frantically he split the top of its skull with a blow of the dull sword. The rest of the giant sewer rats turned and ran squealing down the tunnel. Lord Flail was not going anywhere, and what remained of him, as battle-hardened as Klystron was, was too disgusting to look at.
      "You are too late," said Consuela. "Lord Flail has been gnawed to death by the giant sewer rats."
      "I know," said Klystron. Hearing nothing from Zippy, he turned around to see her sitting there staring dumbly at the corpse. "Uh, request permission to temporarily leave character." "Granted. What's going on down there?"
      "Consuela, this is Fred. It's Steve. Steven has been, uh, I supposed you could say, uh, eaten, by a bunch of…" Fred Fine stepped forward and swept his beam over the brained animal at his feet. "By giant sewer rats."
      "Oh, golly!" said Zippy. "What about Virgil? He went off to go tinkle!"
      "Jeez," said Fred Fine, and started looking around for footprints.
      "Liaison, White Priest is solo in unknown location."
      The twelve giant sewer rats had run right past the White Priest and ignored him. He was standing with his chest waders around his thighs, relieving himself onto a decaying toilet paper core, when the mass of squealing rodent fervor had hurtled out of the fog, parted down the middle to pass aroung him, rejoined behind, their long tails lashing inquisitively around his knees, and shot onward toward their rendezvous with Lord Flail.
      He stood there almost absentmindedly and finished his task, staring into the swirling lights in front of his face, breathing deeply and thinking. Then the screaming started, and he pulled up his waders and got himself together, unslinging the Sceptre of Cosmic Force from its handy shoulder strap and brandishing it. Fred Fine and Consuela had insisted he bring along convincing props, so he had manufactured the Sceptre, an iron re-rod wrapped in aluminum foil, topped with a xenon flash tube in a massive glass ball that was wired to a power supply in the handle. When they had mustered for the expedition, he had switched off the lights and "convinced" them by turning it on and bouncing a few explosive purple flashes off their unprepared retinas. After he had explained the circuitry to Fred Fine, they entered character and descended a long spiral stair into the tunnels. In the ensuing three hours the White Priest had used the Sceptre of Cosmic Force to blind, disorient and paralyze three womp rats, a samurai, a balrog, Darth Vader and a Libyan hit squad.
      He began to slog back toward Steven, and the screaming ended. Either the rats had left or Steven was dead or someone had helped the poor bastard out. Tramping down the tunnel, his lamp beam bounding over the discarded feminine-hygiene products, condoms, shampoo-bottle lids and Twinkie wrappers, Virgil tried to decide whether this was really happening or was simply part of the game. The tunnels and the chanting of Consuela had made a few inroads on his sense of reality, and now he was not so sure he had seen those rats. The screams, however, had not sounded like the dramaturgical improvisations of an escapist Information Systems major.
      He stopped. The rats were coming back! He looked around for a ladder, or something to climb up on, but the walls of the tunnel were smooth and featureless. He turned and ran as quickly as he could in the heavy rubberized leggings, soon discarding the gas mask and headphones so he could take deep breaths of the fetid ammonia- ridden air.
      The rats were gaining on him. Virgil searched his memory, trying to visualize where this tunnel was and where it branched off; if he were right, there were no branches at all—it was a dead end. But the blueprints had been wrong before.
      A branch? He swept the left wall with his lamp, and discerned a dark patch ten paces ahead. He made for it. The rats were lunging for his ankles. He kept his left hand on the wall as he ran, flailing with the Sceptre in his right. Then his left hand abruptly felt air and he dove in that direction, tripping over his own feet and falling on his side within the branch tunnel.
      A rat was on top of him before he had come to rest, and he stood up wildly, using his body to throw the screaming beast against the wall. Grabbing the Sceptre in both hands he swung it like a scythe. Whatever else it was, it was first and foremost a rod with a heavy globe at one end, a fine mace.
      Virgil stood with his back to the wall, kicking alternately with his feet like a Crotobaltislavonian folk dancer to shake off the bites of the rats, lashing out with the Sceptre at the same time. He was then blinded as his hand touched the toggle switch that activated the powerful flasher at the end. He cringed and looked away, and at the same time the rats fell back squealing. He shook sweat and condensation from his eyes, snapped his wet hair back and waved the Sceptre around at arms' length, surveying his opponents in the exploding light. They were gathered around him in a semicircle, about ten feet away, and with every flash their fur glistened for an instant and their eyeballs sparked like distant brakelights. They were hissing and muttering to one another now, their number constantly growing, watching with implacable hostility—but none dared approach.
      Continuing to wave the Sceptre of Cosmic Force, Virgil felt down with his other hand to the butt of the weapon, where he had installed a dial to adjust the speed of the flashing. Turning it carefully up and down, he found that as the flashes became less frequent, the circle tightened around him unanimously so that he must frantically spin the dial up to a higher frequency. At this the rats reacted in pain and backed away in the flickering light in stop- action. Now Virgil's vision was composed of a succession of still images, each slightly different from the last, and all he saw was rats. dozens of rats, and each shining purple rat-image was fixed permanently into his perfect memory until he could remember little else. Encouraged by their fear, he grasped the knob again and sped up the flasher, until suddenly they reached some breaking-point; then they dissolved into perfect chaotic frenzy and turned upon one another with hysterical ferocity, charging lustily together into a great stop-action melee at the tunnel intersection. Bewildered and disgusted, Virgil closed his eyes to shut it out, so that all he saw was the red veins in his eyelids jumping out repeatedly against a yellow- pink background.
      Some of the rats were colliding with his legs. He lowered the Sceptre so that the flasher was between his ankles, and, guiding himself by sound and touch, moved away from the obstructed intersection and down the unmapped passageway. He opened his eyes and began to run, holding the flasher out in front of him like a blind man's cane. From time to time he encountered a rat who had approached the source of the sound and fury and then gone into convulsions upon encountering the sprinting electronics technician with his Sceptre. Soon, though, there were no more rats, and he turned it off.
      Something was tugging at his belt. Feeling cautiously, he found that it was the power cord of the headlamp, which had been knocked off his head and had been bouncing along behind him ever since. He found that the lens, once he had wiped crud from it, cast an intermittent light—a connection was weakened somewhere—that did, however, enable him to see.
      This unmapped tunnel was relatively narrow. Its ceiling, to his shock, was thick with bats, while its floor was clean of the stinking glom that covered most of the tunnels in varying depths. Instead there was a thin layer of slimy fluid and fuzzy white bat guano which stank but did not hinder. This was probably a good sign; the passage must lead somewhere. He noted the position of the Sceptre's dial that had caused the rats to blow their stacks, then slung the weapon over his shoulder and continued down the passage, his feet curiously light and free in the absence of deep sludge. Before long he discerned a light at the end of the tunnel. He broke into a jog, and soon he could see it clearly, about a hundred and fifty feet away: a region at the end of the passage that was clean and white and fluorescently lit. Nothing in the blueprints corresponded to this.
      He was still at least a hundred feet away when a pair of sliding doors on the right wall at the very end of the tunnel slid open. He stopped, sank to a squat against the tunnel wall and then lay on his stomach as he heard shouting.
      "Ho! Heeeeyah! Gitska!" Making these and similar noises, three B-men peeked out the door and up the passageway, then emerged, carrying weapons—not just pistols, but small machine guns. Two of them assumed a kneeling position on the floor, facing up the tunnel, and their leader, an enormous B-man foreman named Magrov, stood behind them and sighted down the tunnel through the bulky infrared sight of his weapon. About halfway between Virgil and the B-men, a giant rat had turned and was scuttling toward Virgil. There was a roar and a flickering light not unlike that of Virgil's Sceptre, and two dozen automatic rounds dissolved the rat into a long streak on the floor. Magrov shone a powerful flashlight over the wreckage of the rodent, but apparently Virgil was too small, distant and filthy to be noticed. Magrov belched loudly in a traditional Croto expression of profound disgust, and the other two murmured their agreement. He signaled to whoever was waiting beyond the sliding doors.
      A large metal cylinder about a foot and a half in diameter and six feet long, strapped to a heavy four-wheeled cart, was carefully pushed sideways into the passage. Magrov walked to a box on the wall, punched a button with the barrel of his weapon and spoke. "Control, Magrov once again. We have put it in normal place like usual, and today only one of those goddamn pink-tailed ones, you know. We taking off now. I guess we be back in a few hours." "That's an A-OK. All clear to reascend, team." came the unaccented answer from the box. The B-men walked through the sliding doors, which closed behind them, and Virgil was barely able to make out a hum which sounded like an elevator.
      After a few seconds, the end wall of the tunnel parted slowly and Virgil saw that it wasn't the end at all, it was a pair of thick steel slabs that retracted into the floor and ceiling. Beyond the doors was a large room, brightly lit, containing several men walking around in what looked like bright yellow rainsuits and long loose hoods with black plastic windows over the eyes. Three of these figures emerged and quickly slid cart and cylinder through the doors while two others stood guard with submachine guns. Then all retreated behind the doors, and the steel slabs slid back together and sealed the tunnel. He remained motionless for a few minutes more, and noticed some other things: wall-mounted TV cameras that incessantly swiveled back and forth on power gimbals; chemical odors that wafted down the tunnel after the doors were closed; and the many gnawed and broken rat bones scattered across the nearby floor. Then Virgil Gabrielsen concluded that the wisest thing to do was to go back and mess with the giant rats.

Several days into the second semester, the Administration finally told the truth about the Library, and allowed the media in to photograph the ranks upon ranks of card catalog cabinets with their totally empty drawers.
      The perpetrators had done it on Christmas Day. The Plex had been nearly deserted, its entrance guarded by a single guard at a turnstile. At eight in the morning, ten rather young- and hairy- looking fellows in B-man uniforms had arrived and haltingly explained that as Crotobaltislavonians they followed the Julian calendar, and had already celebrated Christmas. Could they not come in to perform needed plumbing repairs, and earn quadruple overtime for working on Christmas Day? The skeptical guard let them in anyway; if he could not trust the janitors, whom could he trust?
      As reconstructed by the police, the burglars had gathered in the card catalog area all the canvas carts they could find. They had taken these through the catalog, pulling the lock-pins from each drawer and dumping the contents into the carts. The Library's 4.8 million volumes were catalogued in 12,000 drawers of three-by-five cards, and a simple calculation demonstrated that all of these cards could be fitted into a dozen canvas carts by anyone not overly fastidious about keeping them in perfect order. The carts had been taken via freight elevator to the loading docks and wheeled onto a rented truck, which according to the rental agency had now disappeared. Its borrower, a Mr. Friedrich Engels, had failed to list a correct address and phone number and proved difficult to track down. The only untouched drawer was number
      11375, STALIN, JOSEPH to STALLBAUM, JOHANN GOTT- FRIED.
      The Library turned to the computer system. During the previous five years, a sweatshop of catalogers had begun to transfer the catalog into a computer system, and the Administration hoped that ten percent of the catalog could be salvaged in this way. Instead they found that a terrible computer malfunction had munched through the catalog recently, erasing call numbers and main entries and replacing them with knock-knock jokes, Burma-Shave ditties and tracts on the sexual characteristics of the Computing Center senior staff.
      The situation was not hopeless; at any rate, it did not deteriorate at first. The books were still arranged in a rational order. This changed when people began holding books hostage.
      A Master's Candidate in Journalism had a few books she used over and over again. After the loss of the catalog she found them by memory, carried them to another part of the Library, and cached them behind twelve feet of bound back issues of the Nepalese Journal of Bhutaruan Studies. A library employee from Photoduplication then happened to take down a volume of Utah Review of Theoretical Astrocosmology, shelved back-to-back with NJBS, and detected the cache. She moved it to another place in the Library, dumping it behind a fifty-volume facsimile edition of the ledgers of the Brisbane/Surabaya Steam Packet Co. Ltd., which had been published in 1893 and whose pages had not yet been cut. She then left a sign on the Library bulletin board saying that if the user of such-and-such books wanted to know where they were, he or she could put fifty dollars in the former stash, and she, the employee, would leave in its place the new location. Several thousand people saw this note and the scam was written up in the Monoplex Monitor; it was so obviously a good idea that it rapidly became a large business. Some people took only a few volumes, others hundreds, but in all cases the technique was basically the same, and soon extra bulletin board capability was added outside the entrance to the Library bloc. Of course, this practice had been possible before the loss of the card catalog, but that event seemed to change everyone's scruples about the Library. The central keying system was gone; what difference did it make?
      Free enterprise helped take up the slack, as students hired themselves out as book-snoopers. The useless card catalog area took on the semblance of a bazaar, each counter occupied by one or two businesses with signs identifying their rates and services. The psychic book-snoopers stole and hid books, then—claiming to use psychic powers—showed spectacular efficiency in locating them. The psychics soon eclipsed the businesses of their nonspiritual colleagues. In order to seem as mysterious as possible, the psychics engaged in impressive rituals; one day, working alone on the top floor, I was surprised to see Professor Emeritus Humphrey Batstone Forthcoming IV being led blindfolded through the stacks by a leotarded witch swinging a censer.
      Every week the people who had stolen the card catalog would take a card and mail it to the Library. The conditions of ransom, as expressed on these cards in a cramped hand, were that: (1) S. S. Krupp and the Trustees must be purged; (2) the Megaversity must have open admissions and no room, board or tuition fees; (3) the Plex must become a free zone with no laws or authority; (4) the Megaversity must withdraw all investments in firms doing business in South Africa, firms doing business with firms doing business in South Africa and firms doing business with firms doing business with firms doing business in South Africa; (5) recognize the PLO and the baby seals.
      S. S. Krupp observed that card catalogs, a recent invention, had not existed at the Library of Alexandria, and though he would have preferred, ceteris paribus, to have the catalog, we didn't have one now, that was too bad, and we were going to have to make do. There was dissent and profound shock over his position, and righteous editorials in the Monitor, but after a week or two most people decided that, though Krupp was an asshole, there wasn't any point in arguing.

"Welcome and thanks for coming to the mass driver demonstration." Casimir Radon swallowed some water and straightened his glacier glasses. "The physics majors' organization Neutrino has put a lot of time and work into this device, much of it over the Christmas holiday, and we think it is a good example of what can be done with activities money used constructively. God damn it!"
      He was cursing at the loudness of his Plex neighbor, Dex Fresser, whose stereo was an electronic signal processor of industrial power. For once Casimir did not restrain himself; he was so nervous over the upcoming demonstration that he failed to consider the dire embarrassment, social rejection and personal danger involved in going next door to ask this jerk-off to turn down his music. He was pounding on Dex Fresser's door before his mind knew what his body was doing, and for a moment he hoped his knocks had been drowned out by the bass beats exploding from Fresser's eighteen-inch woofers. But the door opened, and there was Dex Fresser, looking completely disoriented,
      "Could you turn that down?" asked Casimir. Fresser, becoming aware of his presence, looked Casimir over from head to foot. "It kind of disturbs me," Casimir added apologetically. Fresser thought it over. "But you're not even there that much, so how can it disturb you?" He then peered oddly into Casimir's face, as though the goggle-eyed Radon were the captain of a ship from a mirror Earth on the other side of the sun, which was pretty much what he was thinking. Chagrined, Casimir ground his teeth very loudly, generating so much heat that they became white hot and glowed pinkly through his cheeks. He then receded off into infinity like a starship making the jump into hyperspace, then came around behind Fresser again in such a way as to make it appear (due to the mirror effect) that he was actually coming from the same direction in which he'd gone. Just as he arrived back in the doorway two years later, the space warp snapped shut behind him; but at the last moment Dex Fresser glanced through it, and saw lovely purple fields filled with flowers, chanting Brazilians, leaky green ballpoint pens and thousands of empty tea boxes. He wanted very much to visit that place.
      "Well, it does disturb me when I do happen to be in my room. See how that works?" The man who was running this tape, a lanky green tennis shoe with bad acne and an elephant's trunk tied in a double Windsor knot around his waist, stopped the tape and ran it back to Fresser's previous reply.
      "But you're not even there that much, so how can it disturb you?" As Fresser finished this, Casimir did exactly what he had done last time, except this time the purple fields were being cluster- bombed by flying garages. The space warp closed off just in time to let a piece of shrapnel through. It zoomed over Casimir's shoulder and embedded itself in the wall, and Fresser recognized it as a Pershing 2 missile.
      "Right," said Casimir, now. speaking through a sousaphone around his shoulder, which bombarded Dex Fresser with white laser rays. "I know. But you see when I am in my room I prefer not to be disturbed. That's the whole point."
      Fresser suddenly realized that the Pershing 2 was actually the left front quarter-panel of a '57 Buick that he had seen abandoned on a street in Evanston on July 28, 1984, and that Casimir was actually John D. Rockefeller. "How can you be so goddamn selfish, man? Don't you know how many people you've killed?" And he slammed the door shut, knowing that the shock would cause the piece of the Buick to fall on Rockefeller's head; since it was antimatter, nothing would be left afterward.
      The confrontation had worked out as badly as Casimir had feared. He went back to his room, heart pounding irrationally, so upset that he did not practice his speech at all.
      The lack of rehearsal did not matter, as the only audience in Sharon's lab was the Neutrino membership, Virgil, Sarah, a photographer from the Mortoplex Monitor and I. Toward the end of the speech, though, S. S. Krupp walked in with an official photographer and a small, meek-looking older man, causing Casimir to whip off his glasses in agitation and destroying any trace of calmness in his manner. Finally he mumbled something to the effect that it was too bad Krupp had come in so late, seeing as how the best part of this introduction was over, and concluded that we should stop jabbering and have a look at this thing.
      The mass driver was four meters long, built atop a pair of sturdy tables bolted together. It was nothing more than a pair of long straight parallel guides, each horseshoe-shaped in cross-section, the prongs of the horseshoes pointed toward each other with a narrow gap in between. The bucket, which would carry the payload, was lozenge-shaped in cross-section and almost filled the oval tunnel created by the two guides. Most of the bucket was empty payload space, but its outer jacket was of a special alloy supercooled by liquid helium so that it became a perfect superconducting electromagnet. This feature, combined with a force field generated in the two rails, suspended the bucket on a frictionless magnetic cushion. Electromagnets in the rails, artfully wound by Virgil, provided the acceleration, "kicking" the bucket and its contents from one end of the mass driver to the other.
      Casimir relaxed visibly as he began pointing out the technical details. With long metal tongs he reached into a giant thermos flask and pulled out the supercold bucket, which was about the size of two beer cans side by side. He slid it into the breech of the mass driver. As it began to soak up warmth from the room, a cascade of frigid white helium poured from a vent on its back and spilled to the floor. Krupp stood close by and asked questions. "What's the weight of the slug?"
      "This," said Casimir, picking up a solid brass cylinder from the table, "is a one-kilogram mass. That's pretty small, but—"
      "No, it isn't." Krupp looked over at his friend, who raised his eyebrows and nodded. "Nothing small about it."
      Casimir smiled weakly and nodded in thanks. Krupp continued, "What's the muzzle velocity?"
      Here Casimir looked sheepish and shifted nervously, looking at his Neutrino friends.
      "Oh," said Krupp, sounding let down, "not so fast, eh?"
      "Oh, no no no. Don't get me wrong. The final velocity isn't bad." At this the Neutrino members clapped their hands over their mouths and stifled shrieks and laughs. "I was just going to let you see that for yourselves instead of throwing a lot of numbers at you." "Well, that's fine!" said Krupp, sounding more sanguine. "Don't let us laymen interfere with your schedule. I'm sorry. Just go right ahead." He stepped back and crossed his arms as though planning to shut up for hours.
      Casimir gave the empty bucket a tap and there were oohs and aahs as it floated smoothly and quietly down the rails, bounced off a stop at the end and floated back with no change in speed. He reinserted the one-kilogram brass cylinder. "Now let's try it. As you can see we have a momentum absorber set up at the other end of the lab."
      The "momentum absorber" was ten squares of 3/8-inch plywood held parallel in a frame, spaced two inches apart to form a sandwich a couple of feet long. This was securely braced against the wall of the lab at the same level as the mass driver. I had assumed that the intended target was a wastebasket floor beneath the "muzzle" of the machine, but now realized that Casimir was expecting the weight to fly about twenty feet without losing any altitude. "I suggest you all stand back in case something goes wrong," said Casimir, and feeling somewhat alarmed I stood way back and suggested that Sarah do likewise. Casimir made a last check of the circuitry, then hit a big red button.
      The sound was a whizz followed by a rapid series of staccato explosions. It could be written as:
ZZIKKH
where the entire sound takes about a quarter of a second. None of us really saw anything. Casimir was already running toward the momentum absorber. When we got there, we saw that the first five layers of plywood had perfectly clean round holes punched through them, two more had messy holes, and the next layer had buckled, the brass cylinder wedged in place at its bottom. Casimir pulled out the payload with tongs and dropped it into an asbestos mitt he had donned. "It's pretty hot after all those collisions," he explained. Everyone but Casimir was electrified. Even the Neutrino observers, who had seen it before, were awed, and laughed hysterically from time to time. Sarah looked as though whatever distrust she had ever had in technology had been dramatically confirmed. I stared at Casimir, realizing how smart he was. Virgil left, smiling. Krupp's little friend paced between mass driver and target, hands clasped behind back, a wide smile nestled in his silver- brown beard, while Krupp himself was astonished.
      "Jesus H. Christ!" he yelled, fingering the holes. "That is the damnedest thing I've ever seen. Good lord, boy, how did you make this?"
      Casimir seemed at a loss. "It's all done from Sharon's plans," he said blankly. "He did all the magnetic fieldwork. I just plugged in the arithmetic. The rest of it was machine-shop work. Nothing complicated about the machine."
      "Does it have to be this powerful?" I said. "Don't get me wrong. I'm impressed as hell. Wouldn't it have been a little easier to make a slower one?"
      "Well, sure, but not as useful," said Casimir. "The technical challenges only show up when you make it fast enough to be used for its practical purpose—which is to shoot payloads of ore and minerals from the lunar surface to an orbital processing station. For a low-velocity one we could've used air cushions instead of magnetic fields to float the bucket but there's no challenge in that."
      "What's the muzzle velocity?" asked Krupp's guest, who had appeared next to me. He spoke quietly and quickly in an Australian accent. When I looked down at him, I realized he was Oswald Heimlich, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of American Megaversity and one of the richest men in the city —the founder of Heimlich Freedom Industries a huge defense contractor. Casimir obviously didn't know who he was.
      "The final velocity of the bucket is one hundred meters per second, or about two hundred twenty miles per hour."
      "And how could you boost that?"
      "Boost it?" Casimir looked at him, startled. "Well, for more velocity you could build another just like this—"
      "Yes, and put them together. I know. They're interconnectible. But how could you increase the acceleration of this device?"
      "Well, that gets you into some big technical problems. You'd need expensive electronic gear with the ability to kick out huge pulses of power very quickly. Giant capacitors could do it, or a specialized power supply."
      Heimlich followed all this, nodding incessantly. "Or a generator that gets its power from a controlled explosion."
      Casimir smiled. "It's funny you should mention that. Some people are speculating about building small portable mass drivers with exactly that type of power supply—a chemical explosion—and using them to throw explosive shells and so on. That's what is called—"
      "A railgun. Precisely."
      Things began to fall into place for Casimir. "Oh. I see. So you want to know if I could build—basically a railgun."
      "Sure. Sure," said Heimlich in an aggressive, glinting voice.
      "What's research without practical applications?"
      The question hung in the air. Krupp took over, sounding much calmer. "You see, Casimir, in order to continue with this research— and you are off to an exceptionally fine start—you will need outside funding on a larger scale. Now, as good an idea as lunar mining is, no one is ever going to fund that kind of research. But railguns— whether you like it or not, they have very immediate significance that can really pull in the grants. I'm merely pointing out that in today's climate relating your work to defense is the best way to obtain funding. And I imagine that if you wanted to set up a specialized lab here to advance this kind of work, you might be able to get all the funding you'd want."
      Casimir looked down at the shattered plywood in consternation. "I don't need an answer now. But give it some careful thought, son. There's no reason for you to be stuck in silly-ass classes if you can do this kind of work. Call me anytime you like." He shook Casimir's hand, Heimlich made a brief smiling spastic bow, and they walked out together.

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