I was sitting there with my eyes closed, like everyone else a little queasy. "I've heard of the same thing elsewhere," I said. "I wonder if it's happened to any Airheads," murmured Sarah. "God, I'll bet it has. I wonder if any of them know about it. I wonder if they even understand what is being done to them— some of them probably don't even understand they have a right to be angry."
"How could anyone not understand rape?" said Hillary.
"You don't know how mixed up these women are. You don't know what they did to me, without even understanding why I didn't like it. You can't imagine those people— they have no place to stand, no ideas of their own— if one is raped, and not one of her friends understands, where is she? She's cut loose, the Terrorists can tell her anything and make her into whatever they want. Shit, where are those animals going to stop? We're having a big costume party with them in December."
"There's a party to avoid," said Hillary.
"It's called Fantasy Island Nite. They've been planning it for months. But by the time the semester is over, those guys will be running wild."
"They've been running wild for a long time, it sounds like," said Willy. "You'd better get used to that, you know? I think you're living in the law of the jungle." That sounded a trifle melodramatic, but none of us could find a way to disagree.
Sarah and Casimir met in the Megapub, a vast pale airship hangar littered with uncertain plastic tables and chairs made of steel rods bent around into uncomfortable chairlike shapes that stabbed their occupants beneath the shoulder blades. At one end was a long bar, at the other a serving bay connected into the central kitchen complex. Casimir declined to eat Megapub food and lunched on a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich made from overpriced materials bought at the convenience store and a plastic cup of excessively carbonated beer. Sarah used the salad bar. They removed several trays from a window table and stacked them atop a nearby wastebasket, then sat down.
"Thanks for coming on short notice," said Sarah. "I need all the help I can get in selling this budget to Krupp, and your statistics might impress him."
Casimir, chewing vigorously on a big bite of generic white bread and generic chunkless peanut butter, drew a few computer-printed graphs from his backpack. "These are called Lorentz curves," he mumbled, "and they show equality of distribution. Perfect equality is this line here, at a forty-five degree angle. Anything less than equal comes out as a curve beneath the equality line. This is what we had with the old budget." He displayed a graph showing a deeply sagging curve, with the equality line above it for comparison. The graph had been produced by a computer terminal which had printed letters at various spots on the page, demonstrating in crude dotted-line fashion the curves and lines. "Now, here's the same analysis on our new budget." The new graph had a curve that nearly followed the equality line. "Each graph has a coefficient called the Gini coefficient, the ratio of the area between the line and curve to the area under the line. For perfect equality the Gini coefficient is zero. For the old budget it was very bad, about point eight, and for the new budget it is more like point two, which is pretty good."
Sarah listened politely. "You have a computer program that does this?"
"Yeah. Well, I do now, anyway. I just wrote it up."
"It's working okay?"
Casimir peered at her oddly, then at the graphs, then back at her. "I think so. Why?"
"Well, look at these letters in the curves." She pulled one of the graphs over and traced out the letters indicating the Lorentz curve: FELLATIOBUGGERYNECROPHILIACUNNILINGUSANALINGUSBESTIALITY….
"Oh," Casimir said quietly. The other curve read: CUNTFUCKSHITPISSCOCKASSHOLETITGIVEMEANENEMABEATMELICKMEOWNME…. Casimir's face waxed red and his tongue was protruding slightly. "I didn't do this. These are supposed to say, 'new budget' and 'old budget.' I didn't write this into the program. Uh, this is what we call a bug. They happen from time to time. Oh, Jeez, I'm really sorry." He covered his face with one hand and grabbed the graphs and crumpled them into his bag.
"I believe you," she said. "I don't know much about computers, but I know there have been problems with this one."
About halfway through his treatise on Lorentz curves it had occurred to Casimir that he was in the process of putting his foot deeply into his mouth. She was an English major; he had looked her up in the student directory to find out; what the hell did she care about Gini coefficients? Sarah was still smiling, so if she was bored she at least respected him enough not to show. He had told her that he'd just now written this program up, and that was bad, because it looked— oy! It looked as though he were trying to impress her, a sophisticated Humanities type, by writing computer programs on her behalf as though that were the closest he could come to real communication. And then obscene Lorentz curves!
He was saved by her ignorance of computers. The fact was, of course, that there was no way a computer error could do that— if she had ever run a computer program, she would have concluded that Casimir had done it on purpose. Suddenly he remembered his conversation with Virgil. The Worm! It must have been the Worm. He was about to tell her, to absolve himself, when he remembered it was a secret he was honor bound to protect.
He had to be honest. Could it be that he had actually written this just to impress her? Anything printed on a computer looked convincing. If that had been his motive, this served him right. Now was the time to say something witty, but he was no good at all with words— a fact he didn't doubt was more than obvious to her. She probably knew every smart, interesting man in the university, which meant he might as well forget about making any headway toward looking like anything other than an unkempt, poor, math-and-computer-obsessed nerd whose idea of intelligent conversation was to show off the morning's computer escapades.
"You didn't have to go to the trouble of writing a program."
"Ha! Well, no trouble. Easier to have the machine do it than work it out by hand. Once you get good on the computer, that is." He bit his up and looked out the window. "Which isn't to say I think I'm some kind of great programmer. I mean, I am, but that's not how I think of myself."
"You aren't a hacker," she suggested.
"Yeah! Exactly." Everyone knew the term "hacker," so why hadn't he just said it?
She looked at him carefully. "Didn't we meet somewhere before? I could swear I recognize you from somewhere." He had been hoping that she had forgotten, or that she would not recognize him through his glacier glasses. That first day, yes, he had read her computer card for her— a hacker's idea of a perfect introduction!
"Yeah. Remember Mrs. Santucci? That first day?" She nodded her head with a little smile; she remembered it all, for better or worse. He watched her intensely, trying to judge her reaction.
"Yes," she said, "sure. I guess I never properly thanked you for that, so— thank you." She held out her hand. Casimir stared at it, then put out his hand and shook it. He gripped her firmly— a habit from his business, where a crushing handshake was a sign of trustworthiness. To her he had probably felt like an orangutan trying to dislocate her shoulder. Besides which, some apple-blackberry jam had dripped out onto the first joint of his right index finger some minutes ago, and he had thoughtlessly sucked on it.
She was awfully nice. That was a dumb word, "nice," but he couldn't come up with anything better. She was bright, friendly and understanding, and kind to him, which was good of her considering his starved fanatical appearance and general fabulous ugliness. He hoped that this conversation would soon end and that they would come out of it with a wonderful relationship. Ha.
No one said anything; she was just watching him. Obviously she was! It was his turn to say something! How long had he been sitting there staring into the navy-blue maw of his mini-pie? "What's your major?" they said simultaneously. She laughed immediately, and belatedly he laughed also, though his laugh was sort of a gasp and sob that made him sound as if he were undergoing explosive decompression. Still, it relaxed him slightly. "Oh," she added, "I'm sorry. I forgot Neutrino was for physics
majors."
"Don't be sorry." She was sorry?
"I'm an English major."
"Oh." Casimir reddened. "I guess you probably noticed that English is not my strong point."
"Oh, I disagree. When you were speaking last night, once you got rolling you did very well. Same goes for today, when you were describing your curves. A lot of the better scientists have an excellent command of language. Clear thought leads to clear speech."
Casimir's pulse went up to about twice the norm and he felt warmth in the lower regions. He gazed into the depths of his half-drained beer, not knowing what to say for fear of being ungrammatical. "I've only been here a few weeks, but I've heard that S. S. Krupp is quite the speaker. Is that so?"
Sarah smiled and rolled her eyes. At first Casimir had considered her just a typically nice-looking young woman, but at this instant it became obvious that he had been wrong; in fact she was spellbindingly lovely. He tried not to stare, and shoved the last three bites of pie into his mouth. As he chewed he tried to track what she was saying so that he wouldn't lose the thread of the conversation and end up looking like an absent-minded hacker with no ability to relate to anyone who wasn't destined to become a machine-language expert.
"He is quite a speaker," she said. "If you're ever on the opposite side of a question from S. S. Krupp, you can be sure he'll bring you around sooner or later. He can give you an excellent reason for everything he does that goes right back to his basic philosophy. It's awesome, I think."
At last he was done stuffing junk food into his unshaven face. "But when he out-argues you— is that a word?"
"Well let it slip by."
"When he does that, do you really agree, or do you think he's just outclassed you?"
"I've thought about that quite a bit. I don't know." She sat back pensively, was stabbed by her chair, and sat back up. "What am I saying? I'm an English major!" Casimir chuckled, not quite following this. "If he can justify it through a fair argument, and no one else can poke any holes in it, I can't very well disagree, can I? I mean, you have to have some kind of anchors for your beliefs, and if you don't trust clear, correct language, how do you know what to believe?"
'What about intuition?" asked Casimir, surprising himself. "You know the great discoveries of physics weren't made through argument. They were made in flashes of intuition, and the explanations and proofs thought up afterward."
"Okay." She drained her coffee and thought about it. "But those scientists still had to come up with verbal proofs to convince themselves that the discoveries were real."
So far, Casimir thought, she seemed more interested than peeved, so he continued to disagree. "Well, scientists don't need language to tell them what's real. Mathematics is the ultimate reality. That's all the anchor we need."
"That's interesting, but you can't use math to solve political problems— it's not useful in the real world."
"Neither is language. You have to use intuition. You have to use the right side of your brain."
She looked again at the clock. "I have to go now and get ready for Krupp." Now she was looking at him— appraisingly, he thought. She was going to leave! He desperately wanted to ask her out. But too many women had burst out laughing, and he couldn't take that. Yet there she sat, propped up on her elbows— was she waiting for him to ask? Impossible.
"Uh," he said, but at the same time she said, "Let's get together some other time. Would you like that?"
"Yeah."
"Fine!" With a little negotiation, they arranged to meet in the Megapub on Friday night.
"I can't believe you're free Friday night!" he blurted, and she looked at him oddly. She stood up and held out her hand again. Casimir scrambled up and shook it gently.
"See you later," she said, and left. Casimir remained standing, watched her all the way across the shiny floor of the Megapub, then telescoped into his seat and nearly blacked out.
She did not have to wait long amid the marble-and-mahogany splendor of Septimius Severus Krupp's anteroom. She would have been happy to wait there for days, especially if she could have brought some favorite music and maybe Hyacinth, taken off her shoes, lounged on the sofa and stared out the window over the lush row of healthy plants. The administrative bloc of the Plex was an anomaly, like a Victorian mansion airlifted from London and dropped whole into a niche beneath C Tower. Here was none of the spare geometry of the rest of the Plex, none of the anonymous monochromatic walls and bald rectangles and squares that seemed to drive the occupants bonkers. No plastic showed; the floors were wooden, the windows opened, the walls were paneled and the honest wood and intricate parquet floors gave the place something of nature's warmth and diversity. In the past month Sarah had seen almost no wood— even the pencils in the stores here were of blond plastic— and she stared dumbly at the paneling everywhere she went, as though the detailed grain was there for a reason and bore careful examination. All of this was an attempt to invest American Megaversity with the aged respectability of a real university; but she felt at home here.
"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, 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 mono-maniacs 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.
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