By SUB custom, any call for a question was communal property and was distributed by consensus to a member of the group. This time, Dexter Fresser, Sarah's hometown ex-beau, number 2 person in the SUB and its chief political theorist, got the nod. Shaking his head, he pushed himself up in his seat until he could see Krupp's face hovering malevolently above the dome of the next person's bandanna. He took a deep breath, preparing for intellectual combat, and began.
"You were talking about autonomy. Well, then you were talking about Greek words of roots. I want to talk about Greek too because we have our roots in Greece, just like, you know, our words do— that is, most of us do, our culture does, even if our ethnicity doesn't. But Rome was much, much more powerful than Greece, and that was after most of the history of the human race, which we don't know anything about. And you know in Greece they had gayness all over the place. I'm saying that nice and loud even though you hate it, but even though. uh, you know, fascist? But you can't keep me from saying it. Did you ever think about the concentration camps? How all those people were killed by fascists? And also in Haiti. which we annexed in 1904. And did you ever 1 think about the socialist revolution in France that was crushed by D-Day because the socialists were fighting off the Nazis single-handedly. Where's the good in that? Bela Lugosi was ugly, but he had a great mind. I mean, some of the greatest works of art were done by Satan-worshipers like Shakespeare and Michelangelo! And the next time your car throws a rod on I-90 between Presho and Kennebec because you lost your dipstick you should think, even if it is a hundred and ten in the shade forty-four Celsius and there are red winged blackbirds coming at you like Bell AH-64s or something. Put the goddamn zucchini in later next time and it won't get so mushy! I know this is strong and direct and undiplomatical, but this is real life and I can't be like you and phrase it like blue tennis-shoe laces hanging from the rear-view mirror. See?"
Here he stopped. Krupp had listened patiently, occasionally looking away to restack his notes or puff on his cigar. "No," he said. "Do you have a question. son?"
Emotionally wounded, Dex Fresser shook his head back and forth and gestured around it as though tearing off a heavy layer of tar. While his companions supported him, another SUBbie rose to take his place. She was of average height, with terribly pale skin and a safety pin through her septum. She rose like a zeppelin on power takeoff and began to read in a singsong voice from a page covered with arithmetic.
"Mister Krupp, sir. Last year. According, to the Monoplex Monitor, you, I mean the Megaversity Corporation ruling clique, spent ten thousand dollars on legal fees for union-busting firms. Now. There are forty thousand students at. American Megaversity. This means that on the average, you spent four thousand million dollars on legal fees for union-busting alone! How do you justify that, when in this very city people have to pay for their own abortions?"
Krupp simply stared in her direction and took three long slow puffs on his cigar without saying anything. Then he turned to the blackboard. "This weather's not getting any better," he said, quickly drawing a rough outline of the United States. "It's this low pressure center up here. See, the air coming into it turns around counterclockwise because of the Coriolis effect. That makes it pump cold air from Canada into our area. And we can't do squat about it. It's a hell of a thing." He turned back to the audience. "Next question!"
The SUB wanted to erupt at this, but they were completely nonplussed and hardly said anything. "I've taken too many questions from the kill-babies-not-seals crowd," Krupp announced. He called on Ephraim Klein, who had been waving his hand violently. "President Krupp, I think the question of adherence to an inner Law is just a semantic smokescreen around the real issue, which is neurological. Our brains have two hemispheres with different functions. The left one handles the day-to-day thinking, conventional logical thought, while the right one handles synthesis of incoming information and subconsciously processes it to form conclusions about what the basic decisions should be— it converts experience into subconscious awareness of basic patterns and cause-and-effect relationships and gives us general direction and a sense of conscience. So this stuff about autonomy is nothing more than an effort by neurologically ignorant metaphysicists to develop, by groping around in the dark, an explanation for behavior patterns rooted in the structure of the brain."
Krupp answered immediately. "So you mean to say that the right hemisphere is the source of what I call the inner Law, and that rather than being a Law per se it is merely a set of inclinations rooted in past experience which tells the left hemisphere what it should do."
"That's right— in advanced, conscious people. In primitive unconscious bicameral people, it would verbally speak to the left hemisphere, coming as a voice from nowhere in times of decision. The left hemisphere would be unable to do otherwise. There would be no decision at all— so you would have perfect adherence to the Law of the right hemisphere voice, absolute autonomy, though the voice would be attributed to gods or angels."
Krupp nodded all the way through this, squinting at Klein. "You're one of those, eh?" he asked. "I've never been convinced by Jaynes' theory myself, though he has some interesting points about metaphors. I don't think an ignorant carpenter like Jesus had all that flawless theology pumped into the left half of his brain by stray neural currents." He thought about it for a moment. "Though it would be a lot quieter around here if everyone were carrying his stereo around in his skull."
"Jesus," said Ephraim Klein, "you don't believe in God, do you? You?"
"Well, I don't want to spend too much time on this freshman material, uh— what's your name? Ezekiel? Ephraim. But you ought to grapple sometime with the fact that this materialistic monism of yours is self-refuting and thus totally bankrupt. I guess it's attractive to someone who's just discovered he's an intellectual— sure was to me thirty years ago— but sometime you've got to stop boxing yourself in with this intellectual hubris."
Klein nearly rocketed from his chair and for a moment I said nothing. He was bolt upright, supporting his weight on i one fist thrust down between his thighs into the seat, chewing deeply on his lower lip and staring, to use a Krupp ~ phrase, "like a coon on the runway." "Non sequitur! Ad hominem!" he cried.
"I know, I know. Tell you what. Stick around and I'll listen to your Latin afterward, we're losing our audience." Krupp began looking for a new questioner. From the back of the hall came the sound of a fold-down seat bounding back up into position, and we turned to make out the ragged figure of Bert Nix.
"Krupp cuts a fart! The sphinxter cannot hold!" he bellowed hoarsely, and sat back down again Krupp mainly ignored this, as his aides strode up the aisle to show Mr. Nix where the exit was and turned his attention to the next questioner, a tall redheaded SUBbie who accused Krupp of accepting bribes to let wealthy idiots into the law school. Red added, "I keep asking you this question, Septimius, and you've never answered it yet. When are you going to pay some attention to my question?"
Krupp looked disgusted and puffed rapidly, staring at him coldly. Bert Nix paused in the doorway to shout: "My journey is o'er rocks & Mountains, not in pleasant vales; I must not sleep nor rest because of madness & dismay."
"Yeah," said Krupp, "and I give you the same answer every time, too. I didn't do that. There's no evidence I did. What more can I say? I genuinely want to satisfy you."
"You just keep slinging the same bullshit!" shouted the SUBbie, and slammed back down into his seat.
Casimir Radon listened to these exchanges with consuming interest. This was what he had dreamed of finding at college: small lectures on pure ideas from the president of the university, with discussion afterward. That the SUBbies had disrupted it with a pie-throwing made him sick; he had stared at them through a haze of anger for the last part of the meeting. Had he been sitting by the side door he could have tripped that bastard. Which would have been good, because Sarah Jane Johnson was sitting there three rows in front of him, totally unaware of his existence as usual.
Sarah's entrance, se
veral minutes before the start of the lecture, had thrown Casimir into a titanic intellectual struggle. He now had to decide whether or not to say "hi" to her. After all, they had had a date, if you could call stammering in the Megapub for two hours a date. Later he had realized how dull it must have been for her, and was profoundly mortified. Now Sarah was sitting just twenty feet away, and he hated to disrupt her thoughts by just crashing in uninvited; better for her not to know he was there. But in case she happened to notice him, and wondered why he hadn't said "hi," he made up a story: he had come in late through the back doors.
He also wanted to ask Krupp a question, a dazzling and perceptive question that would take fifteen minutes to ask, but he couldn't think of one. This was regrettable, because Krupp was a man he wanted to know, and he needed to impress him before making his sales pitch for the mass driver.
At the same time, he was working on a grandiose plan for gathering damaging information on the university, but this seemed stupid; seen from this lecture hall, American Megaversity looked pretty much the way it had in the recruiting literature. He would continue with Project Spike until it gave him satisfaction. Whether or not he released the information depended on what happened at the Big U between now and then.
Sarah's voice sounded in one ear. "Casimir. Earth to Casimir. Come in, Casimir Radon." Shocked and suddenly breathless, he sat up, looking astonished.
"Oh," he said casually. "Sarah. Hi. How're you doing?" Fine," she answered, "didn't you see me?"
Eventually they went into the hallway, where S. S. Krupp was down to the last inch of his cigar and having a complicated discussion with Ephraim Klein. His aides stood to the sides brushing hairs off their suits, various alien-looking philosophy majors listened intently and I leaned against a nearby wall watching it all, "Well, why didn't you say so?" Krupp was saying. "You're a Jaynesian and a materialistic monist. In which case you've got no reason to believe anything you think, because anything you think is just a predetermined neural event which can't be considered true or logical. Self-refuting, son. Think about it."
"But now you've gotten off on a totally different argument!" cried Klein. "Even if we presume dualism, you've got to admit that intellectual processes reflect neural events in some way." "Well, sure."
"Right! And since the bicameral mind theory explains human behavior so well, there's no reason, even if you are a dualist, to reject it."
"In some cases, okay," said Krupp, "but that doesn't support your original proposition, which is that Kant was just trying to rationalize brain events through some kind of semantic necromancy."
"Yes it does!"
"Hell no it doesn't."
"Yes it does!"
"No it doesn't. Sarah!" said Krupp warmly. He shook her hand, and the philosophy majors, seeing that the intelligent part of the conversation was done, vaporized. "Glad you could come tonight."
"Hello, President Krupp. I wish you'd do this more often."
"Wait a minute," yelled Klein, "I just figured out how to reconcile Western religion and the bicameral mind."
"Well, take some notes quick, son, there's other people here, well get to it. Who's your date, Sarah?"
"This is Casimir Radon," said Sarah proudly, as Casimir reflexively shoved out his right hand.
"Well! That's fine," said Krupp. "That's two conversations I have to finish now. If we bring Bud here along with us to keep things from getting out of hand we ought to be safe."
"Look out. I'm not the diplomat you're hoping I am," I mumbled, not knowing what I was expected to say.
"What say we go down to the Faculty Pub and have some brews? I'm buying."
Our party got quite a few stares in the Faculty Pub. The three students were not even supposed to be in the place, but the bouncer wasn't very keen on asking Mr. Krupp's guests to show their IDs. This place bore the same relation to the Megapub as Canterbury Cathedral to a parking ramp. The walls were covered with wood that looked five inches thick, the floor was bottomless carpet and the tables were spotless slabs of rich solid wood. Enough armaments were nailed to the walls to defend a small medieval castle, and ancient portraits of the fat and pompous were interspersed with infinitely detailed coats of arms. The President ordered a pitcher of Guinness and chose a booth near the corner.
Ephraim had been talking the entire way. "So if you were the religious type, you know, you could say that the right side of the brain is the 'spiritual' side, the part that comes into contact with spiritual influences or God or whatever— it has a dimension that protrudes into the spiritual plane, if you want to look at it that way— while the left half is monistic and nonspiritual and mechanical. We conscious unicamerals accept the spiritual information coming in from the right side mixed in subtly with the natural inputs. But a bicameral person would receive that information in the form of a voice from nowhere which spoke with great authority. Now, that doesn't contradict the biblical accounts of the prophets— it merely gives us a new basis for their interpretation by suggesting that their communication with the Deity was done subconsciously by a particular hemisphere of the brain."
Krupp thought that was very good. Sarah and Casimir listened politely. Eventually, though, the conversation worked its way around to the subject of the mass driver.
"Tell me exactly why this university should fund your project there, Casimir," said Krupp, and watched expectantly.
"Well, it's a good idea."
"Why?"
"Because its relevant and we the people who do it will learn stuff from it."
"Like what?"
"Oh, electronics building things practical stuff."
"Can't they already learn that from doing conventional research under the supervision of the faculty."
"Yeah, I guess they can."
"So that leaves only the rationale that it is relevant, which I don't deny but I don't see why it's more relevant than a faculty research project."
"Well, mass drivers could be very important someday!"
Krupp shook his head. "Sure, I don't deny that. There are all kinds of relevant things which could be very important someday. What I need to be shown is how funding of your project would he consistent with the basic mission of a great institution of higher learning. You see? We're talking basic principles here."
Casimir had removed his glasses in the dim light, and his strangely naked-looking eyes darted uncertainly around the tabletop. "Well"
"Aw, shit, it's obvious!" shouted Ephraim Klein, drawing looks from everyone in the pub. "This university, let's face it, is for average people. The smart people from around here go to the Ivy League, right? So American Megaversity doesn't get many of the bright people the way, say, a Big Ten university would. But there are some very bright people here, for whatever reasons. They get frustrated in this environment because the university is tailored for averagely bright types and there is very little provision for the extra-talented. So in order to fulfill the basic mission of allowing all corners to realize their full potential— to avoid stultifying the best minds here— you have to make allowances for them, recognize their special creativity by giving them more freedom and self-direction than the typical student has. This is your chance to have something you can point to as an example of the opportunities here for people of all levels of ability."
Krupp listened intently through this, lightly tapping the edge of a potato chip on the table. When Klein finally stopped, he nodded for a while.
"Yep. Yeah, I'd say you have an excellent point there, Isaiah. Casimir, looks as though you're going to get your funding." He raised an eyebrow.
Casimir stood up, yelled "Great!" and pumped Krupp's hand. "This is a great investment. When this thing is done it will be the most incredible machine you've ever seen. There's no end to what you can do with a mass driver."
There was a commotion behind Krupp, and suddenly, larger than life, standing on the bench in the next booth down, Bert Nix had risen to his full bedraggled height and was suspending a heavy broadsword (stolen from a
suit of armor by the restroom) over Krupp's head. "O fortunate Damocles, thy reign began and ended with the same dinner!"
After Krupp saw who it was he turned back around without response. His two aides staggered off their barstools across the room and charged over to grab the sword from Bert Nix's hand. He had held it by the middle of the blade, which made it seem considerably less threatening, but the aides didn't necessarily see it this way and were not as gentle in showing Mr. Nix out as they could have been. He was docile except for some cheerful obscenities; but as he was dragged past a prominent painting, he pulled away and pointed to it. "Don't you think we have the same nose?" he asked, and soon was out the door.
Krupp got up and brought the conversation to a quick close. After distributing cigars to Ephraim and Casimir and me, he left. Finding ourselves in an exhilarated mood and with what amounted to a free ticket to the Faculty Pub, we stayed long enough to close it down.
Earlier, however, on his fifth trip to the men's room, Casimir stopped to look at the plaque under the portrait to which Bert Nix had pointed. "WILBERFORCE PERTINAX RUSHFORTH-GREATHOUSE, 1799— 1862, BENEFACTOR, GREATHOUSE CHAPEL AND ORGAN." Casimir tried to focus on the face. As a matter of fact, the Roman nose did resemble Bert Nix's; they might be distant relatives. It was queer that a derelict, who couldn't spend that much time in the Faculty Pub, would notice this quickly enough to point it out. But Bert Nix's mind ran along mysterious paths. Casimir retrieved the broadsword from where it had fallen, and laughingly slapped it down on the bar as a deposit for the fourth pitcher of Dark. The bartender regarded Casimir with mild alarm, and Casimir considered, for a moment, carrying a sword all the time, a la Fred Fine. But as he observed to us, why carry a sword when you own a mass driver?
"Casimir?"
"Mmmmm. Huh?"
"You asleep?"
"No."
"You want to talk?"
"Okay."
"Thanks for letting me sleep here."
The Big U Page 13