The Big U

by Neal Stephenson

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

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

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

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

  Krupp was a sturdy man, his handsome cowboy face somewhat paled and softened by the East. “I understand,” he said, “that you had some trouble with those playground communists last night.”

  “Oh, they were the same as ever. No unusual problems.”

  “Yes.” Krupp sounded slightly impatient at her nonstatement. “I was pleased to see you disemboweled their budget.”

  “Oh? What if we’d stayed with the old one?”

  “I’d have flushed it.” He grinned brightly.

  “What about this budget? Is it acceptable?”

  “Oh, it’s not bad. It’s got some warts.”

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

  “You’re perfectly free to point that out, Sarah, and I don’t disagree, but it doesn’t make much difference.”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Student Government is just a sham, isn’t it?” she asked, surprised by her own bitterness.

  “What do you mean by that?”

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

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

  “So what’s the point?”

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

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

  “Yeah? What’s wrong with that?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Fine,” said Krupp, and handed her his card.

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

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

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

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

  I looked.

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

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

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

  GET A BUTT

  FUCK JOHNNIE

  WONNIE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The time was now. Operative 3 pulled on his ski mask, stole to the open stage-left door, and waited for the right moment.