“What’s the prize structure in the contest?” Bibleman asked.
At once the printout posted all the odds, from first prize down to last. Naturally, the robot blanked out the display before Bibleman could read it.
“What is first prize?” Bibleman said.
“I can’t tell you that,” the robot said. From its slot came a hamburger, french fries, and a strawberry shake. “That’ll be one thousand dollars in cash.”
“Give me a hint,” Bibleman said as he paid.
“It’s everywhere and nowhere. It’s existed since the seventeenth century. Originally it was invisible. Then it became royal. You can’t get it unless you’re smart, although cheating helps and so does being rich. What does the word ‘heavy’ suggest to you?”
“Profound.”
“No, the literal meaning.”
“Mass.” Bibleman pondered. “What is this, a contest to see who can figure out what the prize is? I give up.”
“Pay the six dollars,” the robot said, “to cover our costs, and you’ll receive an—”
“Gravity,” Bibleman broke in. “Sir Isaac Newton. The Royal College of England. Am I right?”
“Right,” the robot said. “Six dollars entitles you to a chance to go to college—a statistical chance, at the posted odds. What’s six dollars? Prat-fare.”
Bibleman handed over a six-dollar coin.
“You win,” the robot said. “You get to go to college. You beat the odds, which were two trillion to one against. Let me be the first to congratulate you. If I had a hand, I’d shake hands with you. This will change your life. This has been your lucky day.”
“It’s a setup,” Bibleman said, feeling a rush of anxiety.
“You’re right,” the robot said, and it looked Bibleman right in the eye. “It’s also mandatory that you accept your prize. The college is a military college located in Buttfuck, Egypt, so to speak. But that’s no problem; you’ll be taken there. Go home and start packing.”
“Can’t I eat my hamburger and drink—”
“I’d suggest you start packing right away.”
Behind Bibleman a man and woman had lined up; reflexively he got out of their way, trying to hold on to his tray of food, feeling dizzy.
“A charbroiled steak sandwich,” the man said, “onion rings, root beer, and that’s it.”
The robot said, “Care to buy into the contest? Terrific prizes.” It flashed the odds on its display panel.
When Bob Bibleman unlocked the door of his one-room apartment, his telephone was on. It was looking for him.
“There you are,” the telephone said.
“I’m not going to do it,” Bibleman said.
“Sure you are,” the phone said. “Do you know who this is? Read over your certificate, your first-prize legal form. You hold the rank of shavetail. I’m Major Casals. You’re under my jurisdiction. If I tell you to piss purple, you’ll piss purple. How soon can you be on a transplan rocket? Do you have friends you want to say goodbye to? A sweetheart, perhaps? Your mother?”
“Am I coming back?” Bibleman said with anger. “I mean, who are we fighting, this college? For that matter, what college is it? Who is on the faculty? Is it a liberal arts college or does it specialize in the hard sciences? Is it government-sponsored? Does it offer—”
“Just calm down,” Major Casals said quietly.
Bibleman seated himself. He discovered that his hands were shaking. To himself he thought, I was born in the wrong century. A hundred years ago this wouldn’t have happened and a hundred years from now it will be illegal. What I need is a lawyer.
His life had been a quiet one. He had, over the years, advanced to the modest position of floating-home salesman. For a man twenty-two years old, that wasn’t bad. He almost owned his one-room apartment; that is, he rented with an option to buy. It was a small life, as lives went; he did not ask too much and he did not complain—normally—at what he received. Although he did not understand the tax structure that cut through his income, he accepted it; he accepted a modified state of penury the same way he accepted it when a girl would not go to bed with him. In a sense this defined him; this was his measure. He submitted to what he did not like, and he regarded this attitude as a virtue. Most people in authority over him considered him a good person. As to those over whom he had authority, that was a class with zero members. His boss at Cloud Nine Homes told him what to do and his customers, really, told him what to do. The government told everyone what to do, or so he assumed. He had very few dealings with the government. That was neither a virtue nor a vice; it was simply good luck.
Once he had experienced vague dreams. They had to do with giving to the poor. In high school he had read Charles Dickens and a vivid idea of the oppressed had fixed itself in his mind to the point where he could see them: all those who did not have a one-room apartment and a job and a high school education. Certain vague place names had floated through his head, gleaned from TV, places like India, where heavy-duty machinery swept up the dying. Once a teaching machine had told him, You have a good heart. That amazed him—not that a machine would say so, but that it would say it to him. A girl had told him the same thing. He marveled at this. Vast forces colluding to tell him that he was not a bad person! It was a mystery and a delight.
But those days had passed. He no longer read novels, and the girl had been transferred to Frankfurt. Now he had been set up by a robot, a cheap machine, to shovel shit in the boonies, dragooned by a mechanical scam that was probably pulling citizens off the streets in record numbers. This was not a college he was going to; he had won nothing. He had won a stint at some kind of forced-labor camp, most likely. The exit door leads in, he thought to himself. Which is to say, when they want you they already have you; all they need is the paperwork. And a computer can process the forms at the touch of a key. The H key for hell and the S key for slave, he thought. And the Y key for you.
Don’t forget your toothbrush, he thought. You may need it.
On the phone screen Major Casals regarded him, as if silently estimating the chances that Bob Bibleman might bolt. Two trillion to one I will, Bibleman thought. But the one will win, as in the contest; I’ll do what I’m told.
“Please,” Bibleman said, “let me ask you one thing, and give me an honest answer.”
“Of course,” Major Casals said.
“If I hadn’t gone up to that Earl’s Senior robot and—”
“We’d have gotten you anyhow,” Major Casals said.
“Okay,” Bibleman said, nodding. “Thanks. It makes me feel better. I don’t have to tell myself stupid stuff like, If only I hadn’t felt like a hamburger and fries. If only—” He broke off. “I’d better pack.”
Major Casals said, “We’ve been running an evaluation on you for several months. You’re overly endowed for the kind of work you do. And undereducated. You need more education. You’re entitled to more education.”
Astonished, Bibleman said, “You’re talking about it as if it’s a genuine college!”
“It is. It’s the finest in the system. It isn’t advertised; something like this can’t be. No one selects it; the college selects you. Those were not joke odds that you saw posted. You can’t really imagine being admitted to the finest college in the system by this method, can you, Mr. Bibleman? You have a lot to learn.”
“How long will I be at the college?” Bibleman said.
Major Casals said, “Until you have learned.”
They gave him a physical, a haircut, a uniform, and a place to bunk down, and many psychological tests. Bibleman suspected that the true purpose of the tests was to determine if he were a latent homosexual, and then he suspected that his suspicions indicated that he was a latent homosexual, so he abandoned the suspicions and supposed instead that they were sly intelligence and aptitude tests, and he informed himself that he was showing both: intelligence and aptitude. He also informed himself that he looked great in his uniform, even though it was the same uniform that everyone
else wore. That is why they call it a uniform, he reminded himself as he sat on the edge of his bunk reading his orientation pamphlets.
The first pamphlet pointed out that it was a great honor to be admitted to the College. That was its name—the one word. How strange, he thought, puzzled. It’s like naming your cat Cat and your dog Dog. This is my mother, Mrs. Mother, and my father, Mr. Father. Are these people working right? he wondered. It had been a phobia of his for years that someday he would fall into the hands of madmen—in particular, madmen who seemed sane up until the last moment. To Bibleman this was the essence of horror.
As he sat scrutinizing the pamphlets, a red-haired girl, wearing the College uniform, came over and seated herself beside him. She seemed perplexed.
“Maybe you can help me,” she said. “What is a syllabus? It says here that we’ll be given a syllabus. This place is screwing up my head.”
Bibleman said, “We’ve been dragooned off the streets to shovel shit.”
“You think so?”
“I know so.”
“Can’t we just leave?”
“You leave first,” Bibleman said. “And I’ll wait and see what happens to you.”
The girl laughed. “I guess you don’t know what a syllabus is.”
“Sure I do. It’s an abstract of courses or topics.”
“Yes, and pigs can whistle.”
He regarded her. The girl regarded him.
“We’re going to be here forever,” the girl said.
Her name, she told him, was Mary Lorne. She was, he decided, pretty, wistful, afraid, and putting up a good front. Together they joined the other new students for a showing of a recent Herbie the Hyena cartoon which Bibleman had seen; it was the episode in which Herbie attempted to assassinate the Russian monk Rasputin. In his usual fashion, Herbie the Hyena poisoned his victim, shot him, blew him up six times, stabbed him, tied him up with chains and sank him in the Volga, tore him apart with wild horses, and finally shot him to the moon strapped to a rocket. The cartoon bored Bibleman. He did not give a damn about Herbie the Hyena or Russian history and he wondered if this was a sample of the College’s level of pedagogy. He could imagine Herbie the Hyena illustrating Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle. Herbie—in Bibleman’s mind—chased after by a subatomic particle fruitlessly, the particle bobbing up at random here and there… Herbie making wild swings at it with a hammer; then a whole flock of subatomic particles jeering at Herbie, who was doomed as always to fuck up.
“What are you thinking about?” Mary whispered to him.
The cartoon ended; the hall lights came on. There stood Major Casals on the stage, larger than on the phone. The fun is over, Bibleman said to himself. He could not imagine Major Casals chasing subatomic particles fruitlessly with wild swings of a sledgehammer. He felt himself grow cold and grim and a little afraid.
The lecture had to do with classified information. Behind Major Casals a giant hologram lit up with a schematic diagram of a homeostatic drilling rig. Within the hologram the rig rotated so that they could see it from all angles. Different stages of the rig’s interior glowed in various colors.
“I asked what you were thinking,” Mary whispered.
“We have to listen,” Bibleman said quietly.
Mary said, equally quietly, “It finds titanium ore on its own. Big deal. Titanium is the ninth most abundant element in the crust of the planet. I’d be impressed if it could seek out and mine pure wurtzite, which is found only at Potosi, Bolivia; Butte, Montana; and Goldfield, Nevada.”
“Why is that?” Bibleman said.
“Because,” Mary said, “wurtzite is unstable at temperatures below one thousand degrees centigrade. And further—” She broke off. Major Casals had ceased talking and was looking at her.
“Would you repeat that for all of us, young woman?” Major Casals said.
Standing, Mary said, “Wurtzite is unstable at temperatures below one thousand degrees centigrade.” Her voice was steady.
Immediately the hologram behind Major Casals switched to a readout of data on zinc-sulfide minerals.
“I don’t see ‘wurtzite’ listed,” Major Casals said.
“It’s given on the chart in its inverted form,” Mary said, her arms folded. “Which is sphalerite. Correctly, it is ZnS, of the sulfide group of the AX type. It’s related to greenockite.”
“Sit down,” Major Casals said. The readout within the hologram now showed the characteristics of greenockite.
As she seated herself, Mary said, “I’m right. They don’t have a homeostatic drilling rig for wurtzite because there is no—”
“Your name is?” Major Casals said, pen and pad poised.
“Mary Wurtz.” Her voice was totally without emotion. “My father was Charles-Adolphe Wurtz.”
“The discoverer of wurtzite?” Major Casals said uncertainly; his pen wavered.
“That’s right,” Mary said. Turning toward Bibleman, she winked.
“Thank you for the information,” Major Casals said. He made a motion and the hologram now showed a flying buttress and, in comparison to it, a normal buttress.
“My point,” Major Casals said, “is simply that certain information such as architectural principles of long-standing—”
“Most architectural principles are long-standing,” Mary said.
Major Casals paused.
“Otherwise they’d serve no purpose,” Mary said.
“Why not?” Major Casals said, and then he colored.
Several uniformed students laughed.
“Information of that type,” Major Casals continued, “is not classified. But a good deal of what you will be learning is classified. This is why the college is under military charter. To reveal or transmit or make public classified information given you during your schooling here falls under the jurisdiction of the military. For a breech of these statues you would be tried by a military tribunal.”
The students murmured. To himself Bibleman thought, Banged, ganged, and then some. No one spoke. Even the girl beside him was silent. A complicated expression had crossed her face, however; a deeply introverted look, somber and—he thought—unusually mature. It made her seem older, no longer a girl. It made him wonder just how old she really was. It was as if in her features a thousand years had surfaced before him as he scrutinized her and pondered the officer on the stage and the great information hologram behind him. What is she thinking? he wondered. Is she going to say something more? How can she be not afraid to speak up? We’ve been told we are under military law.
Major Casals said, “I am going to give you an instance of a strictly classified cluster of data. It deals with the Panther Engine.” Behind him the hologram, surprisingly, became blank.
“Sir,” one of the students said, “the hologram isn’t showing anything.”
“This is not an area that will be dealt with in your studies here,” Major Casals said. “The Panther Engine is a two-rotor system, opposed rotors serving a common main shaft. Its main advantage is a total lack of centrifugal torque in the housing. A cam chain is thrown between the opposed rotors, which permits the main shaft to reverse itself without hysteresis.”
Behind him the big hologram remained blank. Strange, Bibleman thought. An eerie sensation: information without information, as if the computer had gone blind.
Major Casals said, “The College is forbidden to release any information about the Panther Engine. It cannot be programmed to do otherwise. In fact, it knows nothing about the Panther Engine; it is programmed to destroy any information it receives in that sector.”
Raising his hand, a student said, “So even if someone fed information into the College about the Panther—”
“It would eject the data,” Major Casals said.
“Is this a unique situation?” another student asked.
“No,” Major Casals said.
“Then there’re a number of areas we can’t get printouts for,” a student murmured.
“Nothing of import
ance,” Major Casals said. “At least as far as your studies are concerned.”
The students were silent.
“The subjects which you will study,” Major Casals said, “will be assigned to you, based on your aptitude and personality profiles. I’ll call off your names and you will come forward for your allocation of topic assignment. The College itself has made the final decision for each of you, so you can be sure no error has been made.”
What if I get proctology? Bibleman asked himself. In panic he thought, Or podiatry. Or herpetology. Or suppose the College in its infinite computeroid wisdom decides to ram into me all the information in the universe pertaining to or resembling herpes labialis… or things even worse. If there is anything worse.
“What you want,” Mary said, as the names were read alphabetically, “is a program that’ll earn you a living. You have to be practical. I know what I’ll get; I know where my strong point lies. It’ll be chemistry.”
His name was called; rising, he walked up the aisle to Major Casals. They looked at each other, and then Casals handed him an unsealed envelope.
Stiffly, Bibleman returned to his seat.
“You want me to open it?” Mary said.
Wordlessly, Bibleman passed the envelope to her. She opened it and studied the printout.
“Can I earn a living with it?” he said.
She smiled. “Yes, it’s a high-paying field. Almost as good as—well, let’s just say that the colony planets are really in need of this. You could go to work anywhere.”
Looking over her shoulder, he saw the words on the page.
Cosmology Cosmogony Pre-Socratics
“Pre-Socratic philosophy,” Mary said. “Almost as good as structural engineering.” She passed him the paper. “I shouldn’t kid you. No, it’s not really something you can make a living at, unless you teach… but maybe it interests you. Does it interest you?”
The Eye of the Sibyl and Other Classic Strories Page 42