Kampus

by James Gunn

  “The man who found this valley called it ‘the enchanted mountain,'” their guide said. He was standing beside them on a rock ledge. In front of them, white-marble steps led down to the valley floor, where red-tiled paths led through the fields and then through the gardens to the buildings. “He came across it when he was prospecting for uranium, and he resolved if he ever became rich to return here to build a mansion.”

  The big white building occupied a natural hill in the center of the valley. It had a single giant tower, six-sided at the top, adorned with filigreed Moorish windows, spires, carvings, globes, and balconies with wrought-iron railings. The building rambled massively through treetops, rising here and there to red-tiled towers and white chimneys. Around the big building were satellite structures with red roofs and arches and frillwork. Here and there among the greenery could be seen the white flash of statues and fountains and terraces.

  “He became one of the richest men in the world,” their guide said, “and he came back to build this place. He wanted it to be bigger and grander and more fabulous than the Hearst Castle at San Simeon. He spent nearly a billion dollars building and furnishing the big house and the various smaller places and the grounds.”

  Terraces and fountains and long, sweeping steps and balustrades and retaining walls cascaded down the hill from the mansion and the satellite buildings. On the side of the hill facing them, a gigantic swimming pool was a blue jewel set in a frame of white-marble colonnades and what appeared to be part of a Greek temple.

  “At one time he was said to be buying half of all the artworks being sold in the entire world,” their guide said.

  It was stunning.

  “And ostentatious,” the Professor added.

  Magnificent.

  “And vulgar,” the Professor said.

  A monument to what man can accomplish, to bring to this inaccessible spot all the art and grandeur...

  “Shows what God could do if He had money,” the Professor said.

  “And he didn't live to see it completed,” their guide said. “Since he was building it in relative secrecy—next to him, Howard Hughes was a social butterfly—word about this place never got out. Now it's quite different, of course. It's a research institute, and nobody cares about research anymore. Except a few scientists.”

  He started down the white-marble steps into the valley. Gavin hastened to catch up with him. “What do you mean, this is a research institute? What do you study?”

  “Anything anyone wants to study,” the young man said. “That's the most wonderful part of the enchanted mountain. It's an ivory tower, a haven for scientists and scholars of all kinds. You'll have a chance to meet most of them. This is one of the few places left in the world where they can do their thing. No question of expense or social utility.”

  Elaine was beside them. “But how did you get all this?” she asked. She sounded awed. It was the first time Gavin had seen her impressed.

  “When the builder died, considerable controversy broke out among the corporation lawyers over what to do about this place. None of them saw it. They were too busy with other matters. But they couldn't avoid seeing the huge hole in the old man's fortune, all of it pouring into the enchanted mountain. Even then there were big income and inheritance taxes, and although there were no immediate heirs, the corporate entity had to be protected. Some of the lawyers wanted to give this place to the state, but it was too far from everything to be of any use, and frightfully expensive to maintain. So it was turned over to some of the corporation scientists who were approaching retirement, and licensed as a nonprofit research institute.”

  “It's a retirement home for superannuated scientists,” Gavin said.

  The guide laughed. “That's one way to describe it. Of course, there are younger ones like me. People who had no place to go to do whatever it was we had to do. There's a worldwide recruitment service. Promising young scientists are spotted, contacted discreetly, invited here—and most never leave.”

  The smell of the rich vegetation was thicker here, like a kind of perfume. In combination with the conversation, it was heady stuff.

  “Don't you get restless sometimes, want to see the world outside?” Gavin asked.

  “Who would ever get tired of a place like this?” Elaine asked.

  “We aren't exactly cut off,” the guide said. “Some supplies are brought in—although we grow most of what we need—and people do leave on brief visits. There are more convenient routes than the one we took. But you're right,” he said to Elaine, “nobody leaves because he's tired of the enchanted mountain, and if they must leave for some purpose, they return as quickly as they can.”

  “But this place is ... incredible!” Gavin said. “Why doesn't word of it get out? Why aren't you deluged with visitors? Why is the air so warm at this altitude? If this place is so secret, why did you bring us here? What are you going to do with us now that we know about it? When can we leave?”

  Their guide held up one hand in a lighthearted gesture of helplessness. “You'll have all your questions answered, but one at a time—and later. Now I think you need to rest.”

  They had made their way up marble stairs and along tiled paths through trees and shrubs and flowers, including dozens of different kinds of roses, with statues and fountains scattered casually in the greenery or against retaining walls or in the middle of terraces or on the pedestals of staircases; and they had arrived at one of the red-roofed satellite buildings. From the distance they had looked like cottages; up close they were as big as mansions.

  If these were called cottages, Gavin wondered, how big was the white building on the summit of the hill?

  “This is one of the smaller houses,” the guide said. “We use it for visitors before they choose some more permanent form of housing. Some of our people are single and live in the big house or one of the other guesthouses. Many are married and have their own separate dwellings. You have your choice of rooms; the place is empty now. There's food in the kitchen, clothes in the closets. Use whatever you like; that's what it's for. If you want to wander around the grounds, feel free; if you want to take a swim in the pool, there's swimming gear in the dressing rooms on the terrace above the pool, if modesty's your thing; but nobody will feel offended if you don't wear anything. If you have any questions, just dial information; we have a voice-reading computer that's almost human. I've got some business to take care of now, but I'll be back to pick you up this evening at seven. Dinner is formal, for those who choose to take it at the big house; you'll find appropriate clothes for that in the closets also.”

  He paused and then grinned handsomely at them. “My name is Jackson, by the way. And I'm delighted to be the first to welcome you to the enchanted mountain.”

  And he was gone, still shouldering his levitator without effort.

  Gavin stared after him, questions dying on his lips, and then turned to the large bronze doors that opened outward easily, without protest. They entered a foyer with dark parquet floors and an ancient carved wooden ceiling; fragile antique chairs stood against tapestried walls. Beyond was a sitting room; it held several large modern easy chairs scattered casually over a colorful Persian carpet. The walls were covered with colorfully worked Spanish velvet hangings. A fascinating collection of sixteenth-century carved and metal-banded chests decorated the edges of the room. Old paintings hung on the walls, and a large time-worn wooden table held paper and pens.

  “Do you suppose all this is real?” Elaine asked.

  The bedrooms were just as magnificent in their ways. They contained carved wooden beds, tapestried and gilded four-poster beds, ornate window frames and wall moldings, ancient ceilings, old furniture, wall hangings, paintings ... Entire rooms, it seemed to Gavin, had been transported here intact out of their individual centuries, as if by some giant time machine, or as if they stepped from one century to another as they passed between rooms. Gavin felt an urge to act courtly in a seventeenth-century Spanish room, to swear great oaths in an Elizabethan
room, or to twirl a cape near the bed where Cardinal Richelieu may have slept.

  They found a modern kitchen and a lavish dining room with a scarred old polished walnut table, broad chairs with tooled leather backs, gold leaf on door frames, and statuary in niches. It was an incongruous place to eat cold roast beef and rolls and fruit, but the food was welcome and good, and they ate, not talking much but looking around them a great deal, and occasionally, in a kind of astonishment, at each other.

  Gavin bathed in a sunken marble tub with gold fixtures and dried himself on a thick towel. He found a pullover, open-necked shirt in the closet, and a pair of trousers, both of which fit him admirably, and he joined Elaine, who had found a pink sweater and a slightly darker skirt, for a walk through the park that surrounded the buildings. They admired the formal gardens, the terraces, the artwork. Some of the sculpture clearly was copied; much of it seemed weathered and battered enough to be genuine.

  They stood in front of the big house for a long time, looking up at its tower, tracing the intricate carving on its massive brass entrance and the limestone that formed its facade. They tried to imagine what lay behind it, but they did not dare to enter.

  Later they swam in the big, inlaid-marble pool. The water sparkled blue and clear in the afternoon sun. Then they lay on the sun-warmed marble terrace surrounding the pool, trying to restore a semblance of health to winter-white bodies.

  Neither of them had wanted swimming suits. Gavin looked frankly at Elaine. He had not seen her without clothes since that terrible moment with Chester, and she was not as boyish as he remembered. She was thin, but he was thin, too, from walking and running and missing meals. Her hips and shoulders were pleasingly rounded, though, and her breasts would have filled his hands.

  She was a remarkably attractive, even an exciting, woman; desire stirred in him, as he wondered why he had not realized it before. But she did not look at him except as her eyes passed by when she studied the marble colonnades or the ancient Greek temple whose entrance had been re-created at the far end of the pool, or its frieze of Neptune and Nereids riding mythical sea monsters, or the statue of Venus on a seashell at the terrace end of the pool, or the distant crater rim and the more distant peaks that loomed beyond the rim.

  She had always rebuffed him, and he was not ardent enough to pursue her across snowfields of indifference and glaciers of withdrawal. And now he could not break the pattern of sexless companionship into which their relationship had fallen.

  He stared at the walls of the crater, gray and unbroken, that surrounded them, and felt imprisoned.

  In the bathhouse they showered alone and dressed alone. In the guesthouse they each took a big bed—Elaine the one with the embroidered canopy, Gavin the walnut one with its deep and intricate carving—and they napped alone.

  When their guide returned promptly at seven, they were waiting for him. Jackson was dressed formally in a velvet jacket and dark trousers; he wore a medallion at the throat of a ruffled shirt. He led them through the evening along the tiled paths up to the intricate doors of the big house. The doors opened in front of him, and he led them up a short flight of marble steps to a gigantic room that extended the entire width of the great mansion, possibly more than one hundred feet; it was easily fifty feet wide and two stories tall. The room blazed with color and rich furnishings from the medieval choir stalls that formed a head-tall wainscoting to the statues in bronze and marble, the glowing old tables, the tapestries and huge paintings that covered parts of the marble walls, and the carved wooden ceiling.

  Gavin was dazzled; he stood still, taking it all in.

  Oriental rugs covered part of the polished woodblock floor; a fire built of logs as big as tree trunks blazed in the huge antique white-marble fireplace decorated with pedestaled busts and carved coat of arms. It seemed to Gavin that all the centuries of man were focused here upon this room; being here was like living with history. And yet the room was cheerful and bright, and large windows at each end looked out upon gardens and terraces.

  “This is the congregation room,” Jackson said, “where everybody meets at the end of the day for conversation and fellowship and the exchange of views before dinner.”

  The room already was partially filled with formally dressed men and women, sipping drinks, conversing in small groups, or sauntering between them. They varied in age between relatively young and distinguished elderly, but they were uniformly handsome. Here, Gavin thought, the best of humanity had gathered together to discuss the best of thoughts.

  He wished the Professor were here to join them. He himself did not feel worthy, even in the dark evening clothes he had selected from a variety hanging in a closet. They fit him well; he was stronger and slimmer than he had been a few months before. Perhaps privation was good for him.

  Elaine looked fit for the company, however. She had found a long golden gown which accentuated her slenderness into something willowy and sophisticated, and she had not spent all afternoon napping. She had done something to her hair, trimming it, shaping it, and it provided a frame for a face that had developed more character and more color than he had noticed before.

  He saw Jackson looking at her admiringly, and he felt a return of the desire that had washed over him this afternoon. He had to remind himself that it was not Elaine he loved. He loved someone who might well be dead, but until he knew that she was dead, he loved her still, and he might never love another.

  “Drink?” Jackson said. They soon had cold glasses in their hands.

  Gavin found himself talking to a tall, lean, middle-aged man with remarkable white hair, who seemed to know a great deal about engineering.

  “The warm air in this crater is held in place by a refinement of the old air-curtain principle,” the man said, looking intently at Gavin as if he really cared whether Gavin understood. “It has an additional advantage: a slight disturbance introduced into the air curtain makes the valley hard to see from above. I've been up, and from a height of a few thousand feet, this place looks like a snow field.”

  “What does everybody do here?” Gavin asked. “Besides enjoy themselves.”

  “Whatever they wish,” the other answered. “Which is, of course, the truest kind of enjoyment. They're selected, in the first place, for creative interest, and the thing that creative people enjoy most is being creative. I'm a biologist, for instance, and my passion is limb and organ regeneration.”

  “Any success?”

  “Oh, yes. Of course, the real work is being done in the basic studies of DNA. Let me show you around sometime.”

  Gavin blinked. Later he talked with a dramatically attractive brunette woman who said she was a physicist. “We don't go to unusual lengths to keep this place a secret,” she said. “But we don't advertise it, either. If people get the notion that this is a dull research operation, we accept the image. Maybe encourage it. And the people who come here come for a purpose, and once they see the place, they tend to keep quiet about it, if only to keep it unspoiled and to themselves.”

  Gavin looked around him at the congregation room. “I can see that. What about people like us, who just wander in?”

  “That depends upon them.”

  “What are you working on?”

  “You know that the working model for the thermonuclear generator and the practical solar cell came from our laboratories here,” she said.

  “No.” He was surprised, but he tried not to show it.

  “Well, I'm working on the theory of thermonuclear propulsion for space vehicles.”

  Gavin said, “That means interstellar travel, doesn't it?”

  She laughed. “You're more perceptive than some of my own colleagues. I suppose the answer is yes. If we could get someone to go.”

  “Wouldn't you go?”

  “Heavens no,” she said, and laughed. “I like it here.”

  Gavin listened to a young man talking to a young woman about the philosophy of engagement as opposed to the philosophy of detachment. He, it turned out, wa
s a chemist; she, a mathematician. Finally they asked for Gavin's opinion.

  “I've always been engaged,” he said.

  “Exactly,” said the mathematician. “What use is knowledge if you don't apply it?”

  “But increasingly,” Gavin went on, “I have begun to wonder what good it has done.”

  “Precisely,” said the chemist. “How can one retain one's objectivity if one is engaged in the turmoil of society? One becomes no better—”

  “And no worse,” interrupted the young woman.

  “Than the untrained citizen,” the young man completed.

  “Then what do you do with your discoveries?” Gavin asked.

  “That's up to the Director,” the young man said, and the young woman nodded.

  “Then you've decided for detachment.”

  “That's right,” the young woman said, as if he had revealed a truth.

  A middle-aged computer scientist told him about the computer that performed all the necessary scientific calculations for the institute, as well as directing most of the automated labor performed in the fields and on the grounds, except for what was taken on by botanists and horticulturists, and the avocational puttering of individuals.

  “We are one class here, you see,” the man said. “We have no serving class, no workers. Everything possible is automated, and what little can't be automated, we do for ourselves.”

  Elaine had made her own circuit of the room. Now she joined them. “What kind of computer is it?”

  The computer scientist told her. It didn't mean anything to Gavin, but Elaine was impressed. “Perhaps the most important feature, however,” he said, “is that this computer is in constant contact with virtually every other computer in the world through the satellite relay system.”