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  NO FENCES AGAINST THE PEOPLE

  - Euphoric State Daily

  NO BULLDOZERS

  BE MASTERS OF SILENCE, MASTERS OF THE

  NIGHT WITH SHOVELS AND GUNS

  POWER TO THE PEOPLE AND THEIR GUNS

  RUMMIDGE SIT-IN CONTINUES

  The Gardeners

  An extraordinary meeting of the Rummidge University

  - Manifesto distributed on the streets of Plotinus Students' Union, attended by over 1000 students, voted today to endorse and continue the 'sit-in' already initiated by 150 left-wing extremists yesterday evening. At the end of their meeting the students went in a body to the Assembly SUPPORT THE OCCUPATION

  Hall and a number of them forced their way into the office of the Vice-Chancellor's secretary and demanded that the Students of Rummidge! Support the Occupation at today's Vice-Chancellor Mr Stewart Stroud appear to hear their Meeting, then join us in the Assembly Hall. Show the grievances.

  Administration that this is your University, not theirs.

  'It was a waste of time,' one of the students present com-

  - Flysheet issued by the Occupation Steering Committee mented afterwards. 'He showed no understanding of the 158

  159

  legitimate demands of students for democratic participation UNIVERSITY AT WAR,

  in university decision-making.'

  RUMMIDGE PROFESSOR WARNS

  The students occupied several offices in the Administra-Gordon Masters, Professor of English Literature at the Uni-tion Block, causing 'considerable alarm' among the secre-versity of Rummidge, has condemned the present sit-in by tarial staff, according to a senior official.

  students in strong terms.

  - Rummidge Evening Mail

  'The situation closely resembles that of Europe in 1940,'

  he said yesterday. 'The unacceptable ultimatum, followed by a Blitzkrieg and occupation of neighbouring territory, was Hitler's basic strategy. But we did not yield then and we GARDENERS AND COPS,

  shall not yield now.'

  GUARDSMEN CLASH IN DOWNTOWN PLOTINUS

  On the wall of his office, Professor Masters has a large Supporters of the fenced-off People's Garden played cat-map showing the plan of the University's central heating and-mouse with police and National Guardsmen over the system. ' The heating pipes are conveyed through a maze of weekend. On Saturday they invaded the shopping area of tunnels,' he explained, 'which would make an excellent downtown Plotinus. Milling over a three block area on base for resistance activity should Senate and the Adminis-Shamrock Ave, they were confronted by a line of guardsmen tration have to go underground. I don't doubt that the who herded them back at bayonet point.

  Vice-Chancellor has a secret bunker to which he can retreat At approximately I pm, Miranda County Sheriff's at short notice.'

  Deputies jumped and clubbed a young man spraying The Vice-Chancellor's Office declined to comment.

  WELCOME TO PRAOUE on a window of Cooper's Depart-

  - Rummidge Morning Post

  ment Store with an aerosol paint container. He was dragged off to the police station bleeding profusely, and was later identified as Wily Smith, 21, a black student at Euphoric RIOT VICTIM ROBERTS DIES

  State.

  STUDENT REFERENDUM TO BE HELD

  On Sunday a huge procession of Garden supporters coiled ACADEMIC SENATE SETS MEETING ON GARDEN

  its way through the streets of Plotinus, planting miniature

  ' People's Gardens' on every vacant lot they passed. Asked

  - Headlines, Euphoric State Daily

  why he had instructed his men to remove the grass and flowers, Sheriff O'Keene said, 'They're a violation of property.'

  W E A C C U S E ! W E S H A L L O V E R C O M E !

  - Esseph Chronicle

  The People of Plotinus know who was responsible for the death of John Roberts.

  Chancellor Binde, who declared war on the people over a piece of land.

  Sheriff O'Keene, who armed his blue meanies with shotguns and let them loose on the streets.

  The nameless pig who pumped two rounds of buckshot t6o

  161

  into the back of a defenceless young man at pointblank cession of 3000 mourners marching in memory of John Roberts. Wind blew the gas and carried it hundreds of range.

  yards away. It blanketed residential houses, entered uni-Our land is desecrated, but the spirit of the Garden is versity classrooms and offices, seeped into the wards of the alive on Shamrock Avenue and Howie Plaza. The people of University Hospital. Faculty wives and children in the Plotinus are united against the pigs and tyrants. The bull-Blueberry Creek swimming pool J mile away were affected shit barriers are coming down, the barricades of love are by the gas. A group of faculty have lodged a strong protest going up against the pigs. Street freaks, politicos, frat rats, with Chancellor Binde against the indiscriminate use of gas sallys and jocks and mommas for peace are pulling off their by the law enforcement agencies.

  masks of isolation and touching each other's hearts.

  - Esseph Chronicle

  - Euphoric Times

  AN E I G H T - Y E A R - O L D ' S VIEW OF THE CRISIS

  PROFESSOR RESIGNS

  I didn't get to see the People's Garden really, but I could Professor Gordon H. Masters, Professor of English at feel that it was beautiful. In the Garden it was made of Rummidge University, yesterday tendered his resignation people's feelings, not just their hands, they made it with to the Vice-Chancellor, who has accepted it' with regret'.

  their heart, who knew if they made it to stay, there are It is well known that Professor Masters, who was due to hundreds of people that built that garden, and so we'll never retire in a few years' time, has not enjoyed good health lately, know if they meant it to stay.

  and friends close to him say that the current student troubles The police are just ruining their lives by being police, at the University have been a source of severe strain for they're also keeping themselves from being a person. They him.

  act like they are some kind of nervous creatures.

  Professor Masters' resignation takes effect from next

  - Submitted by Plotinus schoolteacher

  October, but he has already left Rummidge for a period of to Euphoric State Daily

  rest and recuperation.

  - Rummidge Morning Post

  ASSEMBLY HALL TEACH-IN

  This weekend the organizers of the sit-in have arranged a CHOPPER SPRAYS DEMONSTRATORS -

  teach-in on the subject of THE UNIVERSITY AND THE

  TEAR GAS BLANKETS CAMPUS

  COMMUNITY.

  A National Guard helicopter clattered over the Euphoric What is the role of the University in modern society ?

  State campus yesterday, spraying white tear gas over some What is the social justification of University Education ?

  700 students and faculty trapped in Howie Plaza by a tight What do ordinary people really think about Universities and Students ?

  ring of guardsmen.

  These are some of the questions we shall be discussing.

  The gas attack was authorized by Miranda County

  - Handout, Rummidge University

  Sheriff Hank O'Keene, to disperse the remnants of a pro-163

  16a

  RUMMIDOE SCHOOLKIDS ON STUDENTS

  RUMMIDGE DONS PROPOSE MEDIATOR

  most students don,t like the way colleges and universitys The non-professorial staff association at Rummidge Uni-are run tats why they have protested and sit-in. When stu-versity has proposed that a mediator be nominated to chair dents are older they will find it was ran in a good way.

  negotiations between the University Administration and the Students waste people and police-mens time, i think just for Students' Union Executive, to try and bring the sit-in to a laff. Most of them are hippeys and act like big fools and an end. Earlier today, the students voted to continue the waste thier brain when someone else would be pr
oud to be sit-in.

  brainy.

  Professor Morris J. Zapp, a visiting professor from the State University of Euphoria, U S A, has been suggested as a I think students are stupid they throw stink bombs at possible candidate for the job of mediator.

  people on purpose ony because they want to be noticed.

  - Rummidge Evening Mail

  They are a load of old tramps with their long dirty hair.

  They look like they haven't had a wash. Their clothes are disgraceful and they don,t have any money. They go on the television and smoke drugs in front of the viewers. They EARTHQUAKE CURE

  cause riots in the streets fighting and destroying everything that comes their way. Some students are sensable they wear Earthquakes, said a speaker at yesterday's Euphoric State nice clothes and got nice hair, they have a nice home and are teach-in on Ecology and Politics, were nature's way of pro-not stupid.

  testing all the concrete that had been laid on top of the good earth. By planting things, one was liberating the ground, and if a student came to me and said something i would walk on.

  therefore preventing earthquakes.

  Lets say you are a cat and the students pick you up and you

  - Plotinus GazstU

  think he is kind, but they cut you up and experiment on you. Some students are all right but they are stuck up noses.

  I don,t like students cos they all follow each other in what CHANCELLOR PROPOSES LEASE OF GARDEN.

  they do they all wear the same clothes and they all talk like MAYOR HAS DOUBTS. GIANT MARCH PLANNED

  americans, and they smoke drugs and have injections to FOR MEMORIAL DAY

  make themselves happy and they talk about love and peace when their unhappy.

  Chancellor Harold Binde told a press conference yesterday that he thought the vexed problem of the People's Garden if i was the police i would hang them.

  could be solved if the University leased part of the land to

  - submitted to Rumble by Education student the City of Plotinus for development as a park, incorporating the present arrangements as far as possible.

  Plotinus City Council will probably consider the proposal at its next meeting, but Mayor Holmes is known not to favour it. There is doubt, too, whether Governor Duck, an ex officio member of the University Council, would allow the 164

  165

  lease to be approved, as he is bitterly opposed to any con-5. Changing

  cession to the Gardeners.

  Meanwhile the latter are making plans for an enormous march through the streets of Plotinus on Memorial Day. It is to be a peaceful, non-violent protest, organizers insist; but local citizens, hearing estimates that 50,000 may converge on Plotinus for the occasion, from places as far away as Madison and New York, are apprehensive.

  CA permit for a march has been applied for,' a spokesman

  'You don't think it's on the small side?'

  confirmed at the City Hall today, ' and is being studied by

  ' It looks fine to me.'

  the appropriate officials.'

  'I've been thinking lately it was rather small.'

  - Esseph Chronicle

  'A recent survey showed that ninety per cent of American men think their penises are less than average size.'

  'I suppose it's only natural to want to be in the top ten per c e n t . . . '

  ICE CUBE DAMAGES ROOF

  'They aren't the top ten per cent, stupid, they're the ten A block of green ice one cubic foot in size fell through the per cent who aren't worried about it. The point is you can't roof of a house in south Rummidge last night, damaging a have ninety per cent who are less than average.'

  room on the top floor. The room was unoccupied and no

  'Ah. I never was any good at statistics.'

  one was hurt.

  'I'm disappointed in you, Philip, really I am. I thought Scientists called in to examine the ice, at first thought to you didn't have a virility hangup. That's what I like about be a freak hailstone, quickly established that it was frozen you.'

  urine. It is thought to have been illegally discharged from

  'My small penis ?'

  an airliner flying at high altitude.

  'Your not demanding applause for your potency all the The owner of the house, Dr Brendan O'Shea, said this time. Like with Morris it had to be a four-star fuck every morning, 'I'm flabbergasted. I don't even know if I'm time. If I didn't groan and roll my eyes and foam at the insured against this kind of thing. Some people might say it mouth at climax he would accuse me of going frigid on him,'

  was an act of God.'

  ' Was he one of the ninety per cent too ?'

  - Rummidge Evening Mail

  'Well, no.'

  'Ah.'

  'Anyway, it looks smaller to you, because you're always looking down on it. It gets foreshortened.*

  "That's a thought.'

  'Go take a look in the mirror.'

  'No, I'll take your word for it.'

  But the next morning, drying off after his shovrer, Philip stood on a chair to examine his torso in the mirror above the handbasin. It was true that one's normal angle of vision 167

  entailed a certain foreshortening effect, though not as much

  ' I expect you're right.'

  as one might have wished. Forty was admittedly a rather

  'How would you like it if you had to wear a codpiece all advanced age at which to begin worrying on this score, but it the time?'

  was only recently that he had acquired any standards of

  • I'd hate it, but I bet you could sell them if you advertised comparison. Not since he was at school, probably, had he in Euphoric Times*

  taken a good look at another male organ until he came to

  ' Morris was always a big-tit man. I don't know why he Euphoria. Since then penises had been flaunted at him married me. I don't know why I married him. Why do from all sides. First there was Charles Boon, who scorned py-people marry people? Why did you marry Hilary?'

  jamas and was often to be encountered walking about the

  ' I don't know. I was lonely at the time.'

  apartment on Pythagoras Drive in a state of nature. Then

  'Yes. That's about it. If you ask me, loneliness has a lot the record stores along Cable Avenue began displaying the to answer for.'

  John Lennon/Yoko Ono album with the full-frontal nude Philip climbed down from the chair and finished drying photo of the famous couple on the sleeve. There was the off. He rubbed talcum into his skin, feeling with a certain hero of / am Curious Yellow, which they had gone to see in narcissistic pleasure the new cushions of tissue that had Esseph, queuing two hours with what D6sir6e had described appeared on his hips and chest. Since giving up smoking he as a couple of hundred other middle-aged voyeurs hoping had begun to put on weight, and he thought it rather suited it would turn them on (which, one had to admit, it did); him. His rib-cage was now covered by a smooth sheath of and the young man in the audience of an avant-garde theatre flesh, and his collar-bone no longer stood out with a group who upstaged the actors by"" taking off his clothes be-frightening starkness that suggested he had swallowed a fore they did. These displays had impressed Philip with a coat-hanger.

  sense of his own inferiority. Desirde was unsympathetic.

  He shrugged on the cotton happi-coat that De'sire'e had

  ' Now you know what it was like growing up flat-chested in a loaned him. His own bathrobe had been left behind at big-tit culture,' she said.

  Pythagoras Drive and Charles Boon had borrowed it so

  ' I think your chest is very nice.'

  often that Philip no longer cared to recover it. If Boon

  ' What about your wife ?'

  wasn't walking about the apartment ostentatiously naked,

  •Hilary?'

  he was forever pinching your clothes. How much nicer life

  ' Is she well-stacked ?'

  was on Socrates Avenue. How providential, in retrospect,

&n
bsp; 'A good figure, yes. Mind y o u . . . '

  the landslip that had pitched him out of one address and

  •What?'

  into the other. The happi-coat was patterned in marine

  ' She couldn't do without a bra, like you.'

  shades of blue and green, lined with white towelling and was

  'Why not?'

  immensely comfortable. It made him look, and even feel,

  'Well, you know, it would be flopping about all over the vaguely athletic and masterful, like an oriental wrestler. He place.'

  frowned at his reflection in the mirror, narrowing his eyes and dilating his nostrils. He did a lot of looking into mirrors 4 It ? Don't you mean them ?'

  lately. Hoping to surprise himself, perhaps, in some re-

  'Well, all right, them.'

  vealing, explanatory attitude or expression.

  •Who says they shouldn't flop? Who says they have to He padded into his bedroom, pulled back the covers on stick out like cantilevered terraces? I'll tell you who, the his bed and dented the pillow a little. It was his one, vestigial brassiere industry.'

  168

  169

  gesture towards the conventions: when he slept with Desiree, in the state God left it at the creation. What was that to rise early and come into his room to rumple the bed-passage in The Great Gatsby ? 'A fresh, green breast of the new clothes. Whom he was supposed to be fooling, he couldn't world... for a transitory enchanted moment man must have imagine. Not the twins, surely, because Desiree, in the held his breath in the presence of this continent. . . ' As Philip terrifying way of progressive American parents, believed in hunted the quotation through his mind the tranquillity of the treating children like adults and had undoubtedly explained morning was shattered by a hideous noise as of a gigantic to them the precise nature of her relationship with himself.

  lawn-mower passing overhead, and a dark spidery shadow I wish she would explain it to me, he thought wryly, gazing flashed across the gardens on the hillside. The first heli-into another mirror, I'm damned if I can make head or tail copter of the day swooped down upon the Euphoric State campus.

  ofit.

  Though not one of Nature's early risers, Philip found it no Philip returned to the house. Elizabeth and Darcy were hardship to be up betimes these sunny mornings in 3462

 

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