Giles Goat-Boy

1

My own timepiece, when I fetched it out, said something earlier, but I'd been so careless in the winding and setting way that I'd scarcely have dared trust its accuracy even had the River George not got to it. On the other hand, my first Assignment-task confirmed that not all was well with Tower Clock. I stepped to consult the dark-suit oldster, as more likely than The Living Sakhyan to own a watch. Lo, as I did, half a dozen young ragged fellows gathered to him from the shadows, uncordially. They jostled and threatened.

"Let's have it, old man."

"If you want it," I heard him reply, "pay for it." But his molesters were plainly ready to have by force what they were after. I cried stop to them and gimped to the man's assistance.

"Look what's coming," said one of their number.

They were too many; as I passed The Living Sakhyan's elm I rapped His shoulder, less than reverently it may be, and bade Him help me help. T. L. Sakhyan's palms were pressed together under His breast, fingers upward, and His eyes gently shut; yet I knew Him to be awake by that tranquil smile He'd borne across the torrent at our last encounter, and with which He'd favored Anastasia's ravishment. It put me in a sweat of ire.

"At least call a patrolman!" I shouted in His ear, then dashed the more rashly, for my exasperation, to aid the old man, whose two chief botherers now turned to me. The others had only stood by — shaggy lads mostly, out at elbows — and seemed inclined to withdraw when I challenged. I heard one say, "It's that goat-boy," in a tone that, oddly, did not mock. Others grinned; a few looked sheepish, and I took heart.

"Shoo!" I commanded, wishing that their old victim would fly to safety while he might. But he held his ground; worse, he called them scamps and beggars deserving of the horsewhip, a judgment he might have rendered at a better hour.

"Shameless!" one of them cried, more outraged than wrathful. Indeed, when the old man charged them further to go steal a watch if they wanted the time, as they'd not get free from him what others paid for, even the more aggressive pair seemed disarmed by the force of their own indignation, and called on the Founder to witness to what flunkèd depths of meanness the student mind could sink. I too was startled out of countenance.

"You only wanted the time of day?"

That, it developed, was their sole craving. Indigent scholarship-students all, they had not a watch among them, yet needed to measure the exact duration of the current eclipse in connection with some astronomy assignment. Understanding Tower Clock to be out of order, they had approached the "Old Man of the Mall," who I now learned was a kind of institution in New Tammany College, famous for his store of information and his ability to tell the time of day, to the second, by the length of people's shadows on the path. "Not for free, though," the old man said. "I don't sit here for my health." Now I could see it, his face was horny-beaked and sere-eyed like a turtle's, and his neck as corded, loose in the carapace of his collar. I was amazed. A tattered, glaring chap turned to me.

"He's the stingiest man on campus! Let's shake it out of him!"

And indeed they might have laid hands on him, but I was inspired to point out that until after the eclipse there would be no clear shadows for the Old Man of the Mall to reckon from.

"I wouldn't've told 'em anyhow," he said.

"You are stingy!" I scolded him. The young men granted my point, but were incensed enough by the fellow's meanness — as almost was I — to offer him a roughing in any case. I forestalled it by giving them the reading of my own timepiece, the best I could manage, for which they thanked me and withdrew, not without grumbled threats to return with the sun.

"Don't come empty-handed," the old man called after them. "I'm not Reg Hector."

"You're mad!" I cried. "Why didn't you tell them yourself you didn't know the right time?"

He rubbed his thumb against the tips of two fingers. "What's it worth to you to find that out?"

I wished him loudly to the Dean o' Flunks and promised next time to look on smiling, like The Living Sakhyan, while he got what his miserliness deserved; then I declared that it was to check my own watch I'd approached him, and that, he being in my debt already, I meant to have the time of day from him as soon as the eclipse ended (it was passing already) or call back the shabby young men to finish what I'd interrupted.

"I owe you nothing," he said. "Did I hire you to help me?" However, he added, since I'd given him something he hadn't asked for, he'd repay me with something I didn't need: a blank ID-card and enough indelible ink to sign it with my name. Forged cards, he pointed out, were much in demand among undergraduates too young to purchase liquor legally; in fact, it was not for interfering in his private affairs that he was rewarding me with so salable a piece of goods, but for teaching him a new way to drive off the beggar-students who forever importuned him. Thitherto he'd been obliged to give the more threatening ones what they wanted, in order to insure his own safety, and he had been thoughtless enough to give them correct information. But thanks to my example (now there was sun enough to cast shadows, he could tell by the length of mine that my watch was slow) thenceforth he would buy his safety with false coin, seeing to it that any answers extorted from him were not quite accurate. He could hardly contain his satisfaction at learning this business-trick, the more pleasing to him since he had it from me gratis; nor much better could I at being rewarded, unbeknownst to him, with something I very much needed after all. If I was able to take the ID-card and ink with a show of indifference, it was only because my delight was pinched by bad conscience at having in a manner sharped him — and, himlike, savoring the cheat.

"You don't get the whole bottle," he grumbled. "Just enough to sign your name."

I had no pen, but struck a bargain for the loan of his in return for what ink I saved him by having one name instead of three. Then, as I wrote George on the proper line, I saw that the card was after all not a new one; nor was the ink, it seemed, absolutely indelible: dimly could be made out there, after mine, the previous owner's name: Ira Hector.

"You stole this card!"

He closed his eyes, thrust out his underlip, shook his head.

"Look here: it says Ira Hector! It's a used card!"

"You don't want it, give it back. But no refunds."

I saw his eye glint so at that prospect that shrewdly I promised to have him taken up for theft if he didn't give me at once the accurate time of day, which I needed to proceed with my Assignment.

"Call a cop," he dared me. "He'll arrest you as an accessory. In fact, I'll say you stole it: your name's on it! And I'll charge you with extortion besides."

Improvising swiftly and in anger, I declared myself willing to match a prospective Grand Tutor's word against a nameless vagrant's, or used-card dealer's, especially since Mr. Ira Hector, when I should return his card to him, would doubtless apply his famous wealth and influence in my just behalf. "Don't count on it," the old man chuckled. "I'm Ira Hector."

I denied it.

"Of course I am, you great ninny. Everybody knows the Old Man of the Mall."

Alas, he did quite fit the impression of her uncle I'd got from Anastasia's narrative, and I was the more appalled at such petty avarice in the wealthiest man on campus. But I challenged him to prove his identity without a card.

He blinked like an old testudinate Peter Greene. "You should be a business major, Goat-Boy!" However, it was his notoriety in the College, he told me, that rendered his ID-card superfluous and induced him to sell it. Everybody recognized him, he was sorry to say, and pestered him for handouts which they no more deserved than did those young beggars the free tuition provided them by Chancellor Rexford's new grant-in-aid program. Creeping Student-Unionism was what it was, to Mr, Hector's mind: the tyranny of the have-nots, of the ignorant over the schooled. The only thing to be said for the Administration's reckless giveaways was that, the untutored being always (and justly) more numerous than the learned, Rexford was buying political power with other people's wealth. But it was bad business in the long term, Ira Hector was sure, and must lead the College's economy to bankruptcy.

"Nobody paid my way!" he concluded with heat. "All I know today I learned the hard way, by myself. Coddle the crowd, they'll trample you down!" The proper use of charity on the administrative level, he asserted, corresponded to his personal practice: just enough sops and doles to prevent revolution. Beyond that, individual initiative like his own would serve those who had it; the rest deserved their lot, and it was the responsibility of Tower Hall and the Campus Patrol to see to it they got no more than their desert.

"Caveat emptor!" he snapped. "Laissez-faire! Sauve qui peut!"

"I beg your pardon?"

He offered to translate the mottoes for me at a cut rate, the three of them for the price of two. The sun had emerged now from eclipse; my sharp shadow made me impatient to get on with my Assignment and other concerns, and I begged him for Founder's sake to tell me the time and be done with it, if only repayment for hearing out his grasping diatribe. The insult had no visible effect.

"What's in it for me if I tell you?" he chuckled, squinting at my shadow. "It's later than you think."

Angrily I reminded him that I was no ignorant beggar, deserving or otherwise, but a registered bonafide Candidate for Graduation and a Grand Tutor in posse, who could certainly give him a much-needed Tutorial word or two if I so chose — the which by tradition and common fame were pearls of so great price that all the information in all the encyclopedias of the University was as nothing beside the least of them.

"No deal," Ira Hector replied. "I've been Certified already." From a worn leather snap-purse in his vest pocket he pinched out a much-folded parchment, of a kind familiar: under the usual certificatory formulations, Harold Bray's signature and a penned subscription: "Founder helps those who help themselves."

"I've helped myself to everything in reach!" he admitted gleefully, adding that while he personally regarded Graduation as the daydream of fools and bankrupts, worth nothing on the informational market, he'd offered to support Bray's Grand-Tutorship in Tower Hall in return for Certification, both because he frankly enjoyed possessing anything that other people craved, and because he wanted to assure himself that even a Grand Tutor has His price.

"That diploma's worthless," I told him. "Bray's no Grand Tutor."

"So it's worthless. Didn't cost me anything." Out of patience, I harangued him on the subjects both of his miserliness and of his contempt for Graduation, declaring that even if Bray were a genuine Grand Tutor and the ground of his Certification valid — neither of which was the case — he Ira Hector was flunked nonetheless. It might be argued, I admitted, that Commencement, always necessarily of the Self, was the highest form of self-preservation, and therefore of greater value to the selfish man than to the unselfish; likewise, that if the greed for Passage was a passèd greed, it passed by extension the greedy principle whereof it was the passèdest example, in the fashion of legal precedents or the single combats of ancient terms, on which the fate of whole quads hung. But endeavor as he doubtless had, Ira Hector had not achieved perfect selfishness, I maintained; had not looked out unremittingly for Number One; indeed he must answer for a quite uncommon generosity!

"Poppycock! Balderdash!"

How did he account then, I demanded, bending near his beak, for his adoption of Anastasia and the open-handedness, so to speak, with which he'd reared her? For his readiness to sacrifice a golden business-opportunity in order to spare her a fate worse than flunking? There was no getting around it: his claim to have spanked his ward for fun and Stokered her for profit — like his claim to have endowed the Unwed Co-ed's Hospital to gratify his lecherous curiosity and lower his taxes — had an inauthentic ring; whatever other motives were involved, such behavior had in it a streak of magnanimity, even of philanthropy!

"All lies!" Ira Hector cried. But I had quicked him. He demanded to know where I'd heard those slanders, yet rejected my offer to sell him that information in return for the correct time. Then, wonderfully agitated, he insisted that although he and his brother Reginald were the abandoned get of an unwed freshman girl and some drunken janitor, his establishment of the New Tammany Lying-in and any favors he'd done his brother were purely selfish. Granted he'd fed and clothed young Reginald, pulled strings to get him a cadetship in the NTCROTC, arranged his marriage to the woman whom Ira himself had been courting, financed his campaign for the chancellorship after C.R. II, and appointed him director of the Philophilosophical Fund: his end from the beginning had been simply to profit from his brother's offices and connections, and profit he had.

These disclosures were surprising news to me; even so I failed to see what gain there was in losing his fiancée, for example, or endowing the Philophilosophical Fund.

His smile was chelonian: "Why should I pay for the woman's keep, when I could get her for nothing anytime I wanted?" Referring to Reginald's wife, Anastasia's grandmother.

"Is that what you did?"

"It's what I would have done; but she died when Stacey's mother was born. There's always a few investments don't pay off." As for the P.P.F. and the lying-in hospital, they were manifold assets, he insisted, providing him with tax write-offs, opportunities for graft and patronage, and such entertainments as playing doctor with patient young ladies when the whim took him. He had, for example, assisted in the delivery-room when his niece, Virginia R. Hector, gave birth, and had quite enjoyed the show even though she'd brought forth neither monster nor GILES, as had been predicted in some quarters, but only Anastasia, a normal baby girl whom he then raised to serve his pleasures.

"But you did try to help Anastasia," I said, no longer certain however of my point. "She told me so."

Ira Hector winked and licked his lips. "I helped myself, like everybody else! Stoker says he gets a commission on her; I used to get her whole price!"

Repellent as I found this remark, and its maker, I was skeptical of its truth. For one thing, Anastasia had confessed worse things unabashedly in George's Gorge, but had made no mention of fees and commissions. For another, I observed that Ira Hector could not speak painlessly of her connection with Maurice Stoker: his neck-cords flexed at the man's name, and his voice shelled over.

"You pity her!" I accused him. "You pitied her mother, too, and your own brother when you were kids."

"Rot!"

"And all those unwed co-eds! I think you pity everybody, and you're ashamed to say so!"

Now his eyes gleamed. "I pity you, you nincompoop!"

"I bet you did business with Bray for the same reason Anastasia did," I said. "Out of charity! You taught her to be the way she is!"

"Charity be flunked!" Ira hollered. "Every man for himself!"

It occurred to me to argue, then, more out of spite than out of conviction, that even his vaunted miserliness might be passèd, and its opposite flunked. Enos Enoch, it was true, bade men give all their wealth of information to poor students and become as unlettered kindergarteners, if they would Pass; but it seemed to me that this was to pass at the expense of others, those to whom one's wealth was given, for nowhere did the Founder's Scroll say "Passèd are the wealthy." What nobler martyrdom, then, than to keep from men that which it would flunk them to possess, and hoarding it to oneself, flunk like a scapegoat in their stead?

"You're demented," Ira said. "You think I'm going to pay you for clap-trap like that?"

"I'm not Harold Bray," I replied. "I can't be bought." And seeing I would not get from him what I needed, I walked off.

"Nobody has to buy you!" Ira cackled after me. "You give yourself away for free! Like Anastasia!"

His taunt relieved me, giving as it did the lie to his talk of prices and commissions. I walked on. Students were beginning to throng Great Mall now, en route I presently learned to first-period classes, having eaten their breakfast.

"You got nothing from me!" Ira called again. "I got all you had to offer!" His voice was triumphant, but when I turned to him his old face was fiercely anxious.

"Then maybe you've helped me to pass," I said, "and yourself to flunk. Thanks."

The Living Sakhyan, I observed, smiled as ever from the foot of His elm. I might have upbraided Him for failing me once again (indeed, His condition, reputedly a kind of Commencement, seemed to me little different from Eierkopf's infantile paralysis. The one was unhelpful, the other helpless; for those in need of help it came to the same thing, and Eierkopf's at least was not wholly voluntary, though he affirmed it in his relationship with Croaker and his unconcern for the welfare of studentdom); but before I could speak I was hailed by several of the unshaven botherers who'd precipitated the whole encounter. Their attitude was friendly: though indigent, they were not ordinary beggars, I was to understand, but vagabond scholars — "Beists," in fact, who accepted tuition from Rexford's grant-in-aid program but contemned the whole academic establishment as mid-percentile and conformist, committed to the intercollegiate power struggle, hostile to art, sex, and the human spirit, and generally, in their vernacular, a drag. They inferred from my appearance that I was of their fraternity; were frankly envious, in fact, of my garment, stick, and bagful of tokens; and while their position, as I understood it, struck me as something wanting in consistency, they were clearly earnest, and I was grateful for their goodwill. However, there was no clarity between us. They knew who I was, but would not accept it that I had truly only one name, for example, and was literally half goat by training. "We dig those symbols," they assured me. And when I confessed that I couldn't make out their argot, they thanked me for reminding them that the Answer lay in wordless Being rather than in verbal formulas. Yet their own inclination was plainly towards the latter.

"How do you go about doing your Assignments?" I asked them. "Mine says Complete at once…" Some homely practical advice was what I sought, as one undergraduate to another; but they responded with disputation as passionate and abstruse as if I'd posed Dean Taliped's riddle.

"What is studentdom's Assignment, when all's said and done?" they demanded of one another; one asserted that there was none, as there was no Assignor; another, that each student was his own sole Tutor and Examiner; and so forth.

"Please," I said. "What I mean is, didn't WESCAC give you an Assignment? It gave me one."

"What He means is the analytical, conceptualizing consciousness," said one of my new classmates, as if speaking of someone not present.

"The flunk He does!" another objected. "He's putting us on, to remind us to be like Sakhyan."

"No, man!" insisted the first. "It's the Form-is-the-Void thing. Like the categories aren't real, but there they are, and we're in them even though there's really no us."

A third intently scratched his crotch. "But does WESCAC symbolize Differentiated Reality or the Differentiating Principle?"

"Neither!" Number Two said contemptuously. "WESCAC symbolizes Symbolization. What He means — "

"Please," I said. At once they were respectfully silent. "The Assignment I'm talking about is a list of things I have to do to Pass…"

"See?" One said delightedly.

"I'm supposed to Fix the Clock, for example, and End the Boundary Dispute…"

"I'm with you!" Two muttered: "Space/Time thing!"

"And I'm supposed to Overcome My Infirmity and See Through My Ladyship, whatever all that means…"

"The Transcendence bit!" Three whispered.

But they could not decide whether I was exhorting them to attack their Assignment (whatever it happened to be) on its own terms, or the terms of the Assignment, or the very concepts of Assignor and Assignee. And did my aphorisms signify that the "Wheel of Passage and Failure" — their term — was to be affirmed, denied, ignored, or transcended? Specifically, for example, should they go to class and take respectful notes, go to class and quarrel with their professors, or cut class altogether? I left them contending beard to beard so heatedly that they took no notice of my departure. For though their debate was incomprehensible to me, and I despaired of getting usable advice from them, their illustration had suggested something to me for the first time: as young Enos Enoch had enrolled in the manual-training course taught by His mother's humble husband, so would I audit some ordinary professor, the first I came to, in hopes of learning something germane to my task. I would go to class! Great numbers of students were hurrying into a large hall not far distant, I joined them — rather, they made way for me, some mocking, others amused, most of them indifferent — in a vast low-ceilinged room divided into stalls by chest-high partitions. Each stall contained one chair and a console of sorts, far simpler-appearing than the ones in the Control Room and the Grateway. I saw no professor, humble or otherwise, but a number of young men in slope-shouldered worsteds and horn-rimmed spectacles were directing students into the stalls and explaining how to operate the consoles.

"Who's hazing you, frosh?" one asked me good-naturedly. I found the question meaningless, but identified myself with the aid of my new used card and asked whether I might sit in on the lecture, if there was to be one. The instructor leafed doubtfully through a roster of names on his clipboard, warning me that the class-rolls had just been read out on WESCAC's printers and might be incomplete, especially in the case of special or irregular students.

"George your first or last name?" His confidence was not bolstered by my reply; but as it happened there I was, under G: George. "I guess it's you," he said. "How the flunk can I tell? Not even a matric-number!" There was, however, a notation after my name to the effect that I was authorized by the Chancellor's Office to audit any courses offered in the College, though not for credit. The man addressed me more respectfully:

"Exchange-student, are you? Visiting this campus?"

I supposed he might put it thus, and he kindly showed me into a stall. The machines were teaching-machines, he explained, one of many varieties in the College, all wired to WESCAC's Central Instructional Facility. As a rule one addressed the device with one's "matric-number" and was then instructed individually, the subject-matter, pace, and method being determined by WESCAC's analysis of the student's record and current performance, as well as his academic objective. The machines in this particular hall, however, were designed for the orientation of new registrants; the morning's program consisted of a lecture recorded by the new Grand Tutor for that purpose. Doubtless noting some change of my expression, the instructor acknowledged rather sharply that attendance was voluntary: but he certainly thought it prudent for any new undergraduate to avail himself of the Grand Tutor's wisdom before commencing his regular course-work and assignments, especially as it was Dr. Bray's first formal lecture to the public. I had only to address the console (he did it for me, in fact, using the number on my ID-card, before I could decide to leave), don the earphones ready to hand, and press the Lecture-button to begin the recording. Should I desire elaboration of any particular point I was to press a button marked Hold, which stopped the lecture-tape, and another marked Gloss, which provided footnotes, as it were, to the text. Having explained this, he left the stall, a bit ruffled still at the idea that anyone could be uninterested in what after all was a historic event (he was himself a new instructor in the History Department), and went to give instruction to respectfuller students. But for all my disdain I pushed the Lecture-button, curious to hear what my rival conceived to be Grand Tutoring, and wondering too how he'd found time to put together a recorded lecture while partying at the Powerhouse and allegedly going into WESCAC's Belly. I hadn't managed yet even to visit Max in Main Detention! Through my headset came the clicking voice I knew — speaking, however, in a somewhat archaic style reminiscent of Enochist harangues:

"My text today, Classmates," Bray began, "is the First Principle of Life in the University, which you must clasp to your hearts during Freshman Orientation and never lose sight of after, not for an eyeblink of time, how clamorous or brave soever the voices that deny it…"

I tossed my head impatiently, considered throwing down the earphones and leaving — but decided to hear what false principle the rascal had sharked up, what platitude or half-truth, the more substantially to contemn him.

"On all sides," he was saying, "you will hear platitudes and half-truths — - as that the unexamined life is not worth living; that the truth shall make you free; that understanding is its own reward. Cum laude diplomates, even full professors, are not above urging you to greater efforts with such slogans, wherefore I conclude that either like all virtuosi — artists, athletes, yea Croaker himself — - they ill understand the secret of their own greatness, or else they find it practical pedagogy to dissemble with you, as a child may best be lured from the cliff-edge by promise of sweets, when in fact his rescuers are candyless and want only to save his life…"

I endeavored to sneer at the simile, but found it alas rather apt, if elaborate.

"For whatever the case in Academies of fancy, one thing alone matters in the real University: to avoid the torture of remedial programs, and the irrevocable disgrace of flunking out! In short, to Pass!"

Obviously.

"Except this, what has importance? Very well to preach the therapy of swimming for injured legs, or its intrinsic pleasure: thrown overboard, one cares only to reach the shore, whether by sidestroke or astride a dolphin!"

Which didn't mean one ought to care for nothing but self-preservation, I thought to myself — but knew I was simply being captious, and recognized besides, not comfortably, a point like one I'd made to Ira Hector. Yet wasn't Bray as much as inviting dishonesty?

"To be sure," he went on, "the Examiners are above corruption and intimidation; no Candidate ever bribed or threatened his way to glory; to attain it he must know the Answers, nothing else will serve: There is the sole and sufficient ground for prizing knowledge: all other preachments are, if not mere sentimentality, hollow consolation for the failed — - who are ipso facto inconsolable…"

I considered demanding a Gloss on ipso facto, a term of whose meaning I was not entirely sure; but my hand was stayed by both the brazenness of Bray's piety (who had himself made deals with Ira Hector, Lucius Rexford, and Founder knew who else!) and the force of his next remark:

"Get the Answers, by any means at all: that is the undergraduate's one imperative! Don't speak to me of cheating — -" The word, I confess, was on my tongue. "To cheat can only mean to Pass in ignorance of the Answers, which is impossible. Otherwise the term is empty…"

Experimentally, and also as a kind of impudence, I pushed the Hold and Gloss buttons. Instantly a matter-of-fact female voice said, "The term is otherwise empty inasmuch as the end of Passing, on the Grand Tutor's view, determines all morality: what tends thereto is good, all else evil or indifferent. This Gloss was prepared by your Department of Logic and Philosophical Semantics. Remember: 'The mind that can philosophize, never ossifies.' "

Automatically the two buttons popped out again at her last word, and Bray's voice resumed: "As you see, then, nothing could be simpler in theory than the ethics of Studentensleben…"

I let the term go.

"But I don't suggest that the practice is without its difficulties! In the first place none of you knows for sure what you'll be asked, or whether your Answers will be acceptable. No two Candidates are quite alike, however similarly trained, and no Graduate, should you find one to consult, can say more than that he himself was asked so-and-so, to which on that occasion and such-and-such reply proved acceptable…"

The point had not occurred to me, and reluctantly I granted its validity, even its value. And despite my hostility I found myself attending Bray's next remarks closely.

"In consequence, you will discover in the terms ahead numerous hypotheses about the nature of Examination, which can be sorted into two general categories: one holds that while the Questions are different for each Candidate, the Answer is the same for all; the other, that while the Question never varies, the Answers do. Whether, in either case, the variation is from term to term or Candidate to Candidate; whether it's a difference in formulation only, or actual substance; whether it's radical or infinitesimal; whether the matter or the manner of the Candidate's response is of more significance, the general tenor or the precise phrasing — - these and a thousand like considerations are much debated among your professors, many of whom, one sadly concludes, are more interested in academic questions of this sort than in the ultimate ones which in principle they should prepare you to confront. You undergraduates are to be pardoned (but alas, not necessarily Passed) for being in the main more realistic, if sometimes pitifully wrong-headed. Snatching at straws, you will badger your professors with down-to-campus queries: 'Will we be asked this on the Finals?' 'Does attendance count?' 'How much credit is given for class participation, for extracurricular activity, for washing blackboards and beating erasers, for a neat appearance and respectful demeanor, for improvement over bad beginnings?' Not a few of you are persuaded that independent thinking is the sine qua non, even when naïve or erroneous; others that verbatim responses from your lecture-notes are what most pleases. Some, of a cynic or obsequious temper, will openly flatter your instructor's vanity, hang on his words as on a Grand Tutor's, turn the discussion to his private specialty, slap your knees at his donnish wit, and rush to his lectern at the hour's end. 'What other courses do you teach, sir?' 'Is your book out yet in paperback?' You co-eds, particularly, are often inclined to hope that a bright smile may make up for a dull intelligence, a firm bosom for a flabby argument, a clear peep for a cloudy insight. And (more's the justice) not one of these gambits but has succeeded — - in some cases and to some extent! Given two young ladies of equal merit and unequal beauty, who has not seen the fairer prosper? Who has not observed how renegade genius goes a-begging, is actually punished, while the sycophant's every doltishness is pardoned? A term's hard labor in the stacks, an hour's dalliance in Teacher's sidecar — - they come to the same. Who opens her placket may close her books; she lifts her standing with her skirts; the A goes on her Transcript that should be branded in her palm…"

Ah, I was moved, so immediately likely seemed this review of the student condition — flunkèd, flunkèd! And, black as surely had to be the heart of any false Grand Tutor, the art of Bray's imposture watered my eyes.

"Yet all this is vanity," he said, and his voice despite its click was heavy with compassion. "The Examiners care nothing for transcripts, only for Answers. Campus legend is peopled with model students who never passed and mavericks who did; of those tightly fleshed and loosely moraled queans, some go dressed in white gown and mortarboard to be diploma'd out of hand, others are led shrieking down the Nether Mall to be thrust beyond the pale forever. No theses so contrary that history won't feed both, and a chosen few of you with both eyes open may soon induce that our whole collegiate establishment — - our schools, departments, and courses of study, our professorial rank and tenure, our administrative apparatus, our seminars, turkeypens, elms, and alma maters, even our WESCAC — - is but one more or less hopeful means. The most organized, surely, and hallowed by custom, but a mere alternative for all that. And the very advantages of organization are not without their own perniciousness: faced with a Department of Moral Science and one of Swine Research, each with budget, offices, and journals, one comes inevitably to believe in the real separateness of those subjects — - as if one could fathom hogs without knowing metaphysics, or set up as a practicing ontologist in ignorance of Porcinity! Worse, within the same department one finds the Duroc-Jersey men at odds with the Poland-Chinas; the Deontological Intuitionalists and the Axiological Realists go to separate cocktail parties. Yet one must choose curriculum and major, ally oneself with this circle or that, dissertate upon The Navigation of Sinking Vessels, Coastwise and Celestial, or Foundation Planting for Crooken Campaniles…"

It was true, all true; I knew it at once despite my inexperience of the campus and the accidental fact that we in the goat-barns had been spared the intellectual degeneration of those pig-men. I peeped over the partition: some of my classmates slept, some furiously took notes, some picked their noses, some played cards, but none save myself seemed distressed by what I assumed we all were hearing.

"Alas," went on the firm sad voice in my ears, "the Finals are comprehensive; the Examiners care not a fig for your Sub-Department of Rot Research; one wonders whether they know of its existence! Our Schools and Divisions — - what are they but seams in the seamless? Our categories change with the weather; not so our fates. In vain our less myopic faculty preaches general education: they have not only the mass of their colleagues to contend with, but the very nature of great institutions. Bravely today one devises something 'interdisciplinary': perhaps a pilot survey of Postlapsarian Herpetology and Pomegranate Culture. 'Dilettantism!' cry the pomologists; the natural-historians, 'Thin soup!' By tomorrow there is a Division of General Education, with a separate Department of P.H.P.C., and in time an additional Department of P.H.P.C. Education to train instructors for the first. There's no end to it."

How was it, I wondered, an impostor dared speak so heretically against the Administration — all administrations? His next assertion — "Now mind, I mean no disrespect for the colleges, certainly not for old New Tammany, which I love as only an adopted child can love its mother" — - enabled me to revive for some moments the contempt for him I wanted to feel. "A wart on Miss University," he said warmly, "were nonetheless a wart; and if I will not call it a beauty-mark, neither would 1 turn her out of bed on its account." It was all a pose, then, that subversive compassion: a stance he took in order to abandon it, as a lover feigns displeasure to gain a kiss! But Bray went on then to speak of institutionalized education in terms so affecting, hypocritical or not, that it was much not to weep outright:

"We teachers forget our business; the University does not. There is a spirit in our old West-Campus halls, a wisdom in the stones as it were, that no amount of pedantry or folly quite dispels. I hear the pledges singing in their cups truths deeper than they know:

The Gate is strait,

And Great Mall is not all…

Strait is the Gate;

Great Mall, not all.

"For those with eyes to see, New Tammany abounds with voiceless admonitions to humility. Not for nothing are 'Staff' and 'Faculty' equally privileged, so that groundskeepers and dormitory-cooks are affluent as new professors; not for nothing does custom decree that our trustees be unlettered folk, and that our chancellor be selected not from the intelligentsia but by ballot, from the lower percentiles: tinkers and tillers and keepers of shops. For the same reason one observes among the faculty not graybeard scholars only, their cowls ablazon with exotic marks of honor, but men of the people: former business-majors, public-relations clerks, gentle carpenters and husbandmen. It is fit that our libraries be more modest than our cow-barns, our cow-barns than our skating-rinks, our skating-rinks than our stadiums. Was not Enos Enoch, the Founder's Boy, by nature an outdoor type, a do-it-Himselfer who chose as His original Tutees the first dozen people He met; who never took degree or published monograph or stood behind lectern, but gathered about Him whoever would listen, in the buckwheat valleys or the wild rhododendron of the slope, and taught them by simple fictions and maxims proof against time, which now are graved in the limestone friezes of our halls?

Not the cut of your coat, but the cut of your jib.

Milo did not pass in class,

Nor did he fail in jail…"

Blinking back tears (and recognizing neither of the alleged Maxims as my former keeper's) I Held and Glossed. A crisp male voice, refreshingly passionless, explained that the allusion in the latter epigram was to an early diplomate of Lykeion College from whom Milo Park, New Tammany's largest stadium, took its name:

"Book One of The Acts of the Chancellors," the glosser proceeded, "tells us that Milo matriculated in a provincial Lykeionian Ag-school during the so-called 'Golden Chancellory' of Xanthippides, with the modest aim of studying dairy husbandry; but though he covered himself and the Lykeionian Complex with glory for his athletic prowess, and became the inspiration of a dozen sculptors, he repeatedly failed to qualify for Candidacy, for the reason that a certain heifer named Sophie, assigned to his care, refused to eat the experimental feed-mixtures he prepared for it. Certain of failure, Milo turned on the animal one evening in a rage, dispatched it with a single sock, and carried it on his shoulders across most of Lykeion from the old Doric Stock-Barns to the Chancellor's Palace, where he left it high in a young red oak. For this outrage he was fetched to detention by the campus patrol, who however were unable to remove the dead beast from its perch. Seeing it next morning, the Chancellor asked how a heifer had contrived to climb his oak, and, told of Milo's offense, so far from exhibiting anger, he smiled and remarked: 'There is one way to raise a cow.' He then convoked the entire Department of Animal Husbandry and inquired whether the ablest among them had ever got a heifer up a tree, or knew how to coax one down. When none replied, he ordered Milo released from Detention Hall, dismissed the charges against him, and passed him without further examination — - the power of Summary Bond and Loosement being still vested in the Chancellory in that place and term. This gloss was prepared by your Department of Agricultural History. May we remind you that — -"

Impatiently I jabbed at the Hold-button, not to have to hear another advertisement. Owing to some characteristic of the machinery the gloss Held, but the lecture did not recommence; therefore I depressed Gloss again, and learned of a new dimension in the program: instead of the interrupted advertisement I heard a third voice, energetic and intense, apparently glossing the gloss:

"The Milo incident, and thus the later Enochist epigram, has been variously explained. Philocaster the Younger (in his Commentary on the Actae Cancellorum, Volume Two, pages four thirty-eight ff.) formulates the classical interpretation: 'Excellence is non-departmental' — - that is, greatness is what counts, irrespective of its particular nature. Opposed is the influential little treatise by Yussuf Khadrun, De Vacae in Arbores, which holds that ends, rather than means, are the Examiners' primary concern: that the excellence for which Milo was rewarded lay not in his athletic record but in his radical (and in the final sense practical) solution of an apparently flunking predicament. To the objection that treeing the cow was not a solution of anything until the Chancellor made it so by rewarding it, later Khadrunians have asserted that Milo's victory was not over the problem on its own terms, but over the terms of the problem — - that is to say, over the directive 'Raise this heifer' in its conventional interpretation. As Fanshaw and Smart ask (in The Higher Pragmatism): 'What did the Examiners care about experimental pasturage or the physical well-being of Sophie the heifer? In one sense everything, in another nothing. Milo's bold gesture made his failure the Department's failure. As one of Sakhyan's "footnotes" reminds us, too eager pursuit of solutions may blind us to the Answers, which are at least in some cases to be discovered by strange means indeed, and in strange places.' End of quote…"

I listened amazed. Though the quotation was ended, the gloss-upon-the-gloss evidently was not:

"Hugo Krafft takes a similar stand in his brilliant and exhaustive (if sometimes oppressive) West-Campus Cattle-Barns from Pre-History to the Thirty-Seventh Remusian Chancellory, and, like other semantically oriented interpreters, makes much of Xanthippides's fondness for word-play as a pedagogical device. The Neo-Philocastrians, to be sure, like the Scapulists they derive from, have never sympathized with pragmatism, higher or lower, and are inclined to be skeptical of the close textual analysis made popular by Krafft's followers; in general they still maintain that virtuosity, rather than net achievement, is the key to Commencement Gate — - whether the performance wherein it is manifest be in itself 'admirable' or not. Thus Bongiovanni cites the examples of Carpo the Fool, an early freshman who knocked himself senseless in a fall from the parallel bars and was for some terms thereafter the butt of campus humor, and Gaffer McKeon, 'The Perfect Cheat,' who confessed to never having given an uncribbed answer during his brilliant undergraduate career. Both men passed.

"But the West-Campus Philocastrians identify virtuosity with particular excellencies, while their East-Campus counterparts (if so various a group may be thought of collectively) tend to speak of it with a capital V, as something distinguishable from virtuoso performances. Thus the old East-Campus table-grace quoted by Dharhalal Panda:

With Milo, Carpo, and Gaffer,

I live alone alone:

Four fingers of a hand.

May I, with Sophie or some other thumb,

Grasp Answers as I grasp this food;

Eat Truth; and on the Finals know

I feed myself myself.

"Among the rash of modern researches into the political and economic life of the early West-Campus colleges one finds frequent mention of Milo and the heifer — - for example, in E. J. B. Sundry's scholarly analysis of the old enmity between the Divisions of Agriculture and Athletics in the Lykeionian Academy. Yet while one welcomes new light on studentdom's history from whatever source, one cannot but regret the deprecatory tone of these investigators and the glib iconoclasm especially manifest in their handling of traditional anecdotes. Sundry's suggestion, for example, that Xanthippides saw in 'the Milo affair' an opportunity to '…pull the collective beard of the Ag Hill Lobby [sic}' as a gesture of mollification to Coach Glaucon, who was miffed at the large appropriation for new mushroom-houses, is more exasperating by reason of its partial truth than are plainly lunatic hypotheses (e.g., that the Chancellor's hand was forced, there being no other way to unoak the cow; or that the whole incident was cynically pre-arranged by Milo and the Chancellor, or by the School of Athletics, or by some Lykeionian equivalent to the Office of Public Information, for publicity purposes)."

Surely, I thought, that must end both gloss and gloss-gloss. But the indefatigable scholiast went on to recommend as perhaps the best general work on the whole matter a recently-taped study by one V. Shirodkar, called There Is One Way:

"As the title suggests, Shirodkar approaches 'Khadrunianism' and 'Philoeastrianism' (which is to say, in a special sense, Entelechism and Scapulism) by way of the ambiguity of Xanthippides's famous observation, and he attempts to combine, or at least subsume, the major traditions into what he calls Mystical Pragmatism. The result, alas, is more syncretion than synthesis, but Shirodkar's historico-semantic schema belongs in every undergraduate notebook. Please Hold and Gloss."

Appalled, I did, and from a slot in the console issued, in the form of a printed diagram, this gloss upon the gloss upon the gloss upon Bray's quotation from Enos Enoch's allusion to Xanthippides's remark upon Milo's misdemeanor:

Even as I endeavored to make sense out of the diagram, the Hold-button popped out and the recentest speaker concluded primly:

"Pragmatic Monism, for example, Shirodkar maintains, comes to quite the same thing as Equipollent Pluralism, and Valuational Monism to the same as Disquiparent Pluralism. That this correspondence (which may be merely verbal) is ground for synthesis seems doubtful: the position of the old Lykeionian Sub-Department of Dairy Husbandry may, it is true, be assigned with equal justice either to Negative Valuational Monism or to Negative-Superlative Disquiparent Pluralism; but what meeting of minds can be hoped for between Negative Valuational Monism and Positive Valuational Monism, or between Mystical Monism and any of the others? These secondary and tertiary glosses were prepared by your Sub-Department of Comparative Philosophical History."

I chewed nervously on Shirodkar's historico-semantic schema, waiting to see what would happen next. The Gloss-button popped up and automatically redepressed itself, whereupon the voice of the earlier commentator, the Agricultural-History man, resumed his own conclusion — no advertisement after all:

"… Heifer House, which generations of exchange-students have been surprised to find is no stock-barn but the ancient headquarters of the Lykeionian Campus Patrol, stands where Sophie's Oak reputedly stood. The exact site of the tree is marked by a bronze disc let into the floor of what was formerly an auxiliary detention-chamber. Thank you."

Up came Gloss and Hold simultaneously, down went Lecture, and at once into my headset Bray's voice rang, more impassioned even than before:

"Learned Founder! Liberal Artist! Dean of deans and Coach of coaches, to whose memos we still turn in time of doubt: stand by us through these dark hours in Academe! Teach me, that am Thy least professor, to profess no thing but truth; that am Thy newest freshman advisor, not to misadvise those minds — - so free of guile and information — - Thou has committed to my trust. Help me to grasp Thy rules; make clear Thy curricular patterns as the day; Thy prerequisites unknot for me to broadcast with the chimes. Enlighten the stupid; fire with zeal the lowest percentile; have mercy on the recreant in Main Detention and the strayed in Remedial Wisdom; be as a beacon in the Senate, a gadfly in the dorms. Be keg and tap behind the bar of every order, that the brothers may chug-a-lug Thy lore, see Truth in the bottom of their steins, and find their heads a-crack with insight. Be with each co-ed at the evening's close: paw her with facts, make vain her protests against learning's advances; take her to Thy mind's backseat, strip off preconceptions, let down illusions, unharness her from error — - that she may ere the curfew be infused with Knowledge. Above all, Sir, stand by me at my lectern; be chalk and notes to me; silence the mowers and stay the traffic that I may speak; awaken the drowsy, confound the heckler; bring him to naught who would digress when I would not, and would not when I would; take my words from his mouth who would take them from mine; save me from slip of tongue and lapse of memory, from twice-told joke and unzippered fly. Doctor of doctors, vouchsafe unto me examples of the Unexampled, words to speak the Wordless; be now and ever my visual aid, that upon the empty slate of these young minds I may inscribe, bold and squeaklessly, the Answers!"

I shucked the earphones and left the stall — moved to the pasterns by his rhetoric, dazed with envy at the force of his imposture. No one else seemed to be leaving: perhaps the orientation-lecture was not ended, or perhaps they had availed themselves of more glosses than had I. But I could hear no more; I left the hall despite my horn-rimmed helper's information that one could select questions from a prepared list to ask the commentators by remote control. Aside from my distress, I saw no help for my Assignment in that learned chatter, and sad to relate, Bray not only had reminded me, with the Milo epigram, of my responsibility to Max, but had tutored me as well. More accurately, his description of class- and course-work as merely one among a number of possible means to Commencement (a sentiment so recognizably Affirmative-Eclectic-Disquiparent-Pluralistic that I never doubted he had lifted it from some old Hierarchical Adverbialist, probably without permission) gave a rationale to what had been my inclination since leaving the barn: to waste no further time on books and lectures. Matriculation yes, class-attendance no; I must wrest my Answers like swede-roots by main strength from their holes.

I flung away the schema, unpalatable even literally, and fetched a morning newspaper from a trashcan near the exit, thinking to tide myself over until lunch with its inklesser pages. But bannered across the top was the headline SPIELMAN CONFESSES, followed by two columns that confirmed what Stoker had told me: Max had surrendered himself to the Campus Patrol and declared himself guilty of the murder of Herman Hermann, substantiating the confession with exact details of the scene, time, and circumstances of the crime. He had been sitting by the roadside not far from Founder's Hill, the news-report said, when he was accosted by a man in the uniform of a Powerhouse guard, astride a motorcycle, who offered him a ride. The two shortly afterwards fell to quarreling over political matters, and upon recognizing the guard as Herman Hermann, the Bonifacist Moishiocaust, Max had been so overmastered with desire for revenge that he had shot the man with his own pistol. Nay, further: "according to the Grand Tutor," who had interviewed him at some length in Main Detention, Max admitted to having harbored for years a secret yen not merely to settle a part of the Moishian score against the Bonifacists, but, for a change, to be the persecutor instead of the victim. Yet once he had arrogated this position (so Bray claimed) a wondrous change had come over my advisor's heart. "The fact that Dr. Spielman cannot, by his own admission, repent of the murder, has had a remarkable effect on his spirit," Bray was quoted as saying. "The secular-studentism which he had always formerly espoused assumes that the heart is essentially educable and ultimately Passable; faced with the revelation of his own failing, however, Dr. Spielman now sees that the heart is flunkèd, desperately flunkèd; that what it needs is not instruction but Commencement; not a professor but a Grand Tutor, to Graduate it out of hand and with no Examination; otherwise all is lost, for however we may aspire to the state of Graduateship, we may never hope to deserve it." And Max himself had allegedly said to Bray, "By me the only way to pass is to pass away," and had requested capital punishment "as a Make-Up for his failure." Campus sentiment, I read, was even more sharply divided than before; the old issues of Max's former leftish connections and his opposition to the "Malinoctis" program had been revived, though with far less virulence than when they had led to his dismissal. Liberal sentiment, as always pretty generally in his favor, was embarrassed by his confession of violence; right-wingers, on the other hand, while inclined to despise him on principle (and to view the murder as evidence of a Student-Unionist conspiracy to assassinate all ex-Bonifacists now doing important work for New Tammany), were much impressed by the humble tone of his confession, in which they seemed to hear a recantation not only of Student-Unionism in favor of Informationalism, but of Moishianism in favor of Enochism. "Go now, and flunk no more," appeared to be their net reaction, whereas the liberals' was just the contrary: that Max had formerly been among the persecuted Passed, but now had flunked himself. The argument had grown intenser, I read, since early morning, when the prisoner had been Certified for Candidacy by the new Grand Tutor — who, however, emphasized to reporters that the Certification by no means implied that Max was innocent of the murder or deserving of mitigated punishment: "Passèd are the flunked," Bray had quoted from the Founder's Scroll, "who repent and suffer for their failings."

What alarmed me, other than Max's confession itself, was not that Bray had Certified him — he seemed to be Certifying everyone — but that Max had evidently accepted the Certification, as if Bray were qualified to give it! And how had Bray found time to visit Main Detention in addition to the hundred other things he seemed to have got done since the previous evening? Pressing as was the deadline for my Assignment, I resolved to go to Main Detention at once and hear from Max's lips that all these allegations were false. For that matter, he might advise me how to attack most efficiently my list of labors, as he had pre-counseled me so valuably through the Turnstile and Scrapegoat Grate.

How to get to Main Detention? My first impulse was to look up and down the mall for Peter Greene. Had I appreciated the size and populousness of New Tammany I'd never have bothered — but I did not, and espied him at once. Four elms up and one over, he was doing calisthenics on the grass, almost the only person in sight. A kind of stationary jog: I heard him panting "Right! Right! Right!" in rhythm with his step as I approached, not alone to mark the cadence, it turned out, but in some wise to reassure himself as well; it was in fact the motto he'd lent me at Turnstile-time, reaccented for its present use:

"I'malright! I'malright! I'malright!"

It developed, however — when I saluted him and hove in range of his working eye — that he was not all right. From the Assembly-Before-the-Grate, where I'd last seen him, he had proceeded dutifully to a first-period lecture in a course very close to his concerns, Problems of Modern Marriage, hoping to learn something useful; for though he was still resolved to put by Miss Sally Ann and pay court to Anastasia, he was much afflicted with bad conscience and wanted to satisfy himself that his union really was unsalvageable — and that his wife was chiefly to blame for its disintegration. But he'd "plumb fergot," he told me, how tiresome it was to be a schoolboy. As the lecturer (on closed-circuit Telerama) had droned on about such matters as "contemporary role-confusion and attendant anxieties," he had first fallen asleep, then diverted himself by making spitballs and carving initials in his desktop, and finally left the building on the pretext of visiting the toilet.

"It's over my head," he complained to me. "Burn if it ain't!" How ever he would pass without going to school, he confessed he had no idea, any more than he knew how he could live without the woman he loved but could not live with. "Weren't for Bray's diploma I'd swear I was flunked, interpersonal-relationwise," he admitted. "Figured I'd come out and get me a breath of air, take a little pill, try 'er again."

I could not discern whether by The Woman He Loved But etc. he meant his wife or Anastasia; I did not inquire. Indeed, for all my good fortune at finding him so readily, it was with some misgiving that I asked him to transport me to Main Detention, for I feared he'd hold me to my promise of intercession with Anastasia's mother. But though he was delighted by the errand and "the chance to get to know Stacey's family better" — as if Maurice Stoker were her father! — he made no mention of that mad embassy; it did his spirits a campus of good, he declared, to learn that I too had cut my first class. Much of his eagerness to oblige me, I presently observed, stemmed from his pride in a new motorcycle he'd acquired just after registration, and had yet to try out on the open road. He showed me it, parked nearby: an astonishing contraption, all chromium plated, larger-engined than any of Stoker's, and equipped with every manner of accessory: headlights, fog-lights, spotlights, signal-lights, Telerama, air-horns that blasted the opening phrase of Alma Mater Dolorosa, a liquor cabinet, three dozen dials and control-knobs, an air-conditioned sidecar, and upholstery of striped fur. It was so new he'd not had time even to remove the mirrors (of which there were half a dozen); they were merely turned away from him. He bobbed his head happily.

"Pisscutter, ain't she?"

I agreed that it was an extraordinary machine, if that was what he meant. It proved a shocking fast one, too, and happily so loud (thanks to a lever marked Cut-Out) that he couldn't speak of Anastasia or anything else during the dash to Main Detention. Greene knew the route, and by means of simple gestures which we agreed upon before we started, I was able to distinguish for him between the few actual stop-signs along the way and the many he imagined he saw, and to function as his rear-view mirror also. We were halted at the somber gate of the outside wall by a uniformed guard, recognizable as one of Stoker's by his beard and dog, though sootless. I requested an audience with Max, identifying myself and explaining that I had Chancellor Rexford's authorization to go anywhere on the campus. The guard prepared to unleash the dog.

"Hold on!" Greene cried. "Pete Greene's my name: 'Keep-Our-Forests Greene,' you know? This here's a pal of mine. Look at my ID-card."

To prove that his card was not forged or stolen he wrote out a matching signature, this one on a personal check payable to the bearer, and insisted the guard retain it "as proof." Before this evidence the man relented and telephoned a companion inside the walls, who, given a similar affidavit of our sincerity, ushered us to the Warden's Office. For all my unease in those bleak courts and gray stone corridors, I might have voiced my doubt about the correctness of Greene's procedure; but the sound of Maurice Stoker's laugh distracted me. It issued from an inner office into the empty outer one where we were told to wait until the Warden was finished dictating letters to his secretary, and did not sound terribly businesslike. A female voice said something indistinct. The guard winked and left us. Peter Greene — chuckling, blinking, blushing — supposed aloud that a fellow with a stick with a mirror on its point could peer over the transom without being seen, if he had a mind to and no thing about mirrors. I didn't reply. More impatient at the delay than annoyed or intrigued by what Stoker might be up to, I tapped my sandal-toes and frowned at the floor-plan of the building, framed on one wall. It revealed Main Detention to be much larger in fact than I had supposed, for in addition to the single floor at ground-level there were three successively smaller ones beneath. The ground floor, as best I could discern, was given over mainly to adminstrative offices and living-quarters for the staff, but included combination detention-and-counseling facilities for two sorts of mild offenders as well: a large exercise-room for loafers, procrastinators, and students who refused to choose a major or whose transcripts showed straight C's; and a courtyard for the mentally defective and the invincibly wrong-headed. On the floor below were detained four classes of miscreants: first, students who spent their evenings amusing themselves with classmates of the opposite sex instead of studying, and professors who turned their sabbatical leaves into honeymoons or participated in faculty wife-swapping parties; second, those who abused their dining-hall privileges, scheduled more than the normal credit-load, or stayed awake all night reading; third, those who read and researched but would neither teach nor publish, and contrariwise those who spent so much time publishing and lecturing that none was left over for reading and research; and fourth, professors who browbeat their students and students who circulated angry petitions against their professors. The second subterranean floor was divided into three cell-blocks, smaller than the ones above but like them containing chambers for both students and instructors: one block was reserved for anti-intellectuals, insubordinates, and those who refused to sign the College loyalty-oath; a second was for textbook writers who published revised editions to undercut the used-book market, padders of essay examinations, proliferators of unnecessary footnotes and research, and unscrupulous dispensers of grants-in-aid; the third was itself divided into sub-blocks: one (where I guessed Max was held) for murderers, rapists, extorters of answers by duress, and destroyers of library-books; another for droppers of courses and leapers from dormitory windows; the third for faggots, dykes, and teachers employed in the same departments from which they held degrees. The bottom floor, though smallest in area, was most complexly laid out: in wedge-shaped sections around a central sinkhole were incarcerated (clockwise from the top of the floor-plan) "make-out artists" (sic); "apple-polishers and brownies"; purveyors of "cribs" and "ponies"; impostors and charlatans; sellers of rank, tenure, absentee-excuses, and false ID-cards; users of academic distinction for social, political, or mercenary ends; cribbers and plagiarists; malicious faculty advisors and dormitory counselors; organizers of panty-raids, interfraternity brawls, and departmental cliques; and what the chart called "bullslingers and snowmen." In rings around the sinkhole itself were ranked those who'd tattled on classmates, roommates, or colleagues; who'd given classified military-science data to hostile colleges; and who'd exploited the naïveté of exchange-students or visiting professors. Finally, poised as it seemed over the sinkhole itself, was a single cell reserved for any who undid in flunkèd wise his professor, department-head, dean, chancellor, or — most heinous treason! — his Grand Tutor.

Though not all of the penciled labels were meaningful to me, I was much impressed by the size and layout of the institution — much more orderly, at least on paper, than the Powerhouse. Had not other matters pressed, I'd have asked Maurice Stoker to guide me through the place and explain how the several sorts of malefactors were punished, and for what term. Specifically I wondered whether Stoker determined and administered their sentences on his own authority or as agent for the Chancellor, and fervently hoped that the latter was the case.

The inner-office door opened behind me, and a handsome dark-skinned woman came forth, tucking in her blouse.

"You all have an appointment with Mr. Stoker?"

Even as she asked — patting her hair into place the while — Stoker bellowed greetings at me from inside and emerged, also tucking his shirt-tails in. But now the secretary and Peter Greene had noticed each other, and he clutched his orange hair and cried, "Flunk my heart!"

"I beg your pardon?" the Frumentian young woman said. Stoker grinned.

"What you doing here, gal?" Greene exclaimed. "You're s'posed to be home taking care of Sally Ann!"

She donned a pair of glasses and looked questioningly at Stoker. "Should I know this gentleman? I don't understand what he's talking about."

"This is Georgina," Stoker said. "My new secretary. Georgina, Mr. George, the Goat-Boy." We exchanged polite greetings. "And Mr. Greene," Stoker added.

"That ain't her name!" Peter Greene said indignantly. "She's old O.B.G.'s daughter! You get on back to the house, doggone it; Sally Ann might need you!"

Georgina smiled and appealed to us: "He must be mistaking me for someone else…"

"Don't set there and deny you're O.B.G.'s daughter!"

"I'm sure I don't know those initials at all," she said a little impatiently. "My father's name was the same as this gentleman's."

Peter Greene would be durned if it was. "His name was O.B.G., and you know it!" To us he declared, "Him and me was thick as thieves when I was a boy — built us a raft together!"

Stoker's secretary replied that her father had been an assistant librarian until his recent death, and that that was that. Then Stoker added gaily, just as I was coming to it myself, that Georgina's maiden name had been Herrold. Having heard news of her long-lost father's death and cremation, she had sought out Stoker for more details; the conversation had turned into an interview — which our arrival had interrupted — and finding her qualifications satisfactory, Stoker had employed her on the spot. His teeth flashed in his beard. "Small campus, isn't it?"

"You gosh-durn hussy!" Greene exclaimed to Georgina, who having coolly replaced her lipstick was making room for her purse in a desk drawer. But his tone now seemed as much impressed as angered. Stoker suggested with amusement that perhaps Mr. Herrold had had two daughters — if indeed he'd been the man whom Greene called O.B.G. I myself was uncertain what to think: the woman's composure appeared more deliberate than natural, and she either was ignorant of G. Herrold's actual job or chose to exaggerate its importance; on the other hand I had small confidence in Peter Greene's eyesight, though his indignation was convincing. In any case her identity mattered little to me, much as I grieved the loss of my companion; I stated my business to Stoker, who knew it already, and proposed with a wink that Georgina and Peter Greene clear up their misunderstanding over coffee, in his inner office, while he took me down to see Max. They were both reluctant, but Stoker insisted; he would serve the coffee himself; something stronger, perhaps, if they wanted it; the guard in the corridor could take me to the Visitation Room as well as he.

"Maxie's coming on so with the 'Choose me' business, it makes me sick to hear him anyway," he said. "The old fool can't wait till we Shaft him." He summoned the hall-guard and gave him instructions, pinching Georgina as he passed behind her. She pursed her mouth; Peter Greene snickered. I went out with the guard, first offering condolence to the young woman for her bereavement, and Stoker closed the door behind us.

We passed along a balcony overlooking the exercise-court, where the Procrastinators and C-students appeared to be playing some sort of tag or chasing-game under the supervision of their guards; thence to a small empty room divided by steel screens into three parallel sections: in the first was a row of stools, on one of which I sat; the guard then entered the middle one to see that nothing except conversation passed between me and Max, whom another guard presently escorted into the third. A small bleat of pity escaped me at sight of him: thin to begin with, he had lost more weight overnight, and in the ill-fitting garb of detention looked frail as straw. Yet his face, so troubled all the previous day, was tranquil, even serene. He ignored my inquiries after his condition and commended me for having passed successfully through the Turnstile and Scrapegoat Grate. His tone was more polite than truly interested; he asked what courses I had enrolled in, as one might ask the casualest acquaintance, and when I described my encounter with Bray at the Grateway Exit and my perplexing Assignment, his mild comment was that my watch-chain had possibly short-circuited WESCAC's Assignment-Printer, for better or worse. Or possibly not.

"You sound as if you don't care!" I cried. Formerly he might have shrugged, or scolded me; now he said serenely:

"My boy, remember who I am, and why I'm here."

"You didn't do anything!" I said. "You're here because Stoker or somebody is out to get you!"

Max shook his head. Stoker was beyond doubt a flunkèd man, he said, and a flunking influence on everyone about him, myself included; yet his flunkèdness was necessary, for like the legendary Dunce he revealed to those with eyes to see the failings of their own minds and hearts — an invaluable if fatal lesson.

"You didn't kill Herman Hermann!"

But he nodded, "Ja, I did, George. In the woods that night by Founder's Hill. It was his motorcycle Croaker found."

"You couldn't kill anybody!" I insisted. "You're too passèd!"

But as the news-report had said, Max declared he was not passèd, never had been — until just a few hours previously. True, he had thought himself a charitable man and a gentle lover of studentdom, to whose welfare he had ostensibly dedicated all his works: thus he had invented the EATer, to protect men from being EATen; sheltered and raised me as a goat, lest I succumb to human failings; rejected Grand Tutors in favor of ordinary schoolteachers, believing education could lead men from their misery to a better life on campus. And he had been proud to be a member of the class least subject as he thought to hating, because most often hated.

"That's all true!" I protested. "You're a hate-hater! You're a love-lover!"

"I used to think," Max went on quietly, as if dictating a confession, "if Graduation meant anything at all, it meant relieving human suffering. Not so. Suffering is Graduation."

"Bray's been talking to you!" I charged. "Why didn't you send him away?"

"The Moishians have a name for Shafting Grand Tutors," Max replied. "That's one of the things I want to be Shafted for." He went on to say, as sadly and serenely as ever, that whereas he once had believed in the rejection of Grand Tutors whether "true" or "false," it now appeared to him to make little difference how questionable might be the authenticity of Bray, for example: the important thing was to see one's own abysmal flunkèdness. Since conversing with Harold Bray he had come to see clearly that nothing in his life had been done altogether passèdly: hating hatred, from which passion no man was free, he had perforce hated all studentdom, thinking he loved them. Thus his work with WESCAC and the consequent Amaterasuphage —

"Self-defense!" I broke in. "That was collegiate self-defense!"

But the self must not be defended by the suffering of others' selves, Max responded. And his foster-fathering of me, so apparently praiseworthy: was it not to revenge himself on Virginia R. Hector — nay, on studentdom in general — that he had raised me as a goat? And to revenge himself on New Tammany that he had at the last encouraged my delusion of Grand Tutorhood? Bray having confirmed for him these flunkèd possibilities and certified that only suffering could expiate them, he must believe that Bray was after all what He claimed to be (with stinging heart I heard the pronoun shift to upper-case); Max's encouragement of me, a mere common foundling, must be but one more instance of his perverse Moishianism…

"Stop this!" I said. "This is hateful!"

He shrugged. "So hate me, I got it coming."

Stoker thrust his grin through a small square panel at one end of the middle space. "Got so there was a crowd upstairs," he said, as if confidentially. "Mind if I sit in? Maxie breaks me up."

I was too hurt and appalled by my erstwhile advisor's declarations to acknowledge the intrusion, though as always Stoker's grin filled the room like a sound, or odor, or change of temperature.

"I do hate it when you talk that way!" I cried to Max. "You make people hate you. It's like Anastasia, and people taking advantage of her!"

"That's what Herm used to say," Stoker offered. "About the Moishians in his extermination campuses."

"So hate, hate," Max invited us.

"That diploma from Bray is a fake!" I said angrily.

"All along I hated the Bonifacists," Max repeated. "I wanted to burn them up, and never realized it. We Moishians, we suffer and suffer, and then we Shaft us a Grand Tutor to get even. I want them to Shaft me instead."

Stoker chuckled. "Didn't I tell you?"

In a wondrous exasperation then, I declared to Max that not only his Certification but his whole view of things was false and flunking, the effect I could only hope of his age, and the shock of false arrest, and Stoker's perverse influence. The very grounds on which Bray had Certified his Candidacy, I maintained, were in fact the flunking of him: it was not any hidden urge to persecute studentdom's persecutors that he must atone for, but his pride in suffering — a scapegoatery as misconceived as Enos Enoch's, to my mind, and vainglorious as well.

"Give it to him," Stoker urged.

"I don't have to be a Grand Tutor to know a false goat from a real one," I went on. It was the motive that made the true scapegoat, I said, not the deed, and it might be that Max's motive lifelong had in truth been selfish, but not in the manner he confessed to. Vanity was his failing: the vanity of choosing himself to suffer for the failings of others, and of believing that his own flunkèd aspects (overrated, in my estimation) could be made good by that suffering. "You say I should hate you for falsely encouraging me," I concluded; "but the truth is, you're calling your encouragement false because you want to be hated!"

This accusation, which I thought rather acute, did not move him. "So add that on the bill."

"Flunk you!" I shouted. "You're not a Candidate yet, and you never will be if you let yourself be Shafted with that attitude! Passèd are the passed and flunkèd are the flunked, and that's that! I am the Grand Tutor — I will be, anyhow — and I will do my Assignment! I'll pass everything and not fail anything, and then I'll run Bray off the campus!"

I might have said more — I could in fact have re-reviewed my keeper's whole life for him from my new and unexpectedly clear view of it, and showed him that his conception of the amulet-of-Freddie, for example, was quite mistaken — but he had got up from his stool and was indicating to the guard his wish to return to his cell.

"Max," I pleaded, "I need advice, and I want to get you out of here, and all you can think about is your old suffering. That's selfish!"

For just a moment his irritating calm gave way, and I heard him say, "Ach, I hate it too." Then the guard led him out and Stoker came around to fetch me.

"Didn't I tell you?"

"It's your doing as much as Bray's, I'll bet," I said. "Passèd are the flunked! What kind of an idea is that?"

He shook his head sympathetically. "Isn't it a scream? You and I, George — we're the only ones who see what a phony Bray is. He's even Certified me!" From his jacket pocket he drew the inevitable sheepskin, on which over Bray's signature was, as always, a quotation from the Founder's Scroll — in this case, Verily the railer against Me shall fetch himself in fury to My feet, while the light yea-sayer standeth off a respectful way. Presume, if ye would Pass.

"Doesn't that beat all?"

I turned away. "You're no Candidate."

Stoker laughed and herded me to the lift. "Of course I'm not! I'm the flunkèdest flunker on campus! So Bray's a fake, right? Or else" — he swatted me in the back — "only the flunkèd are really passed, hey? And the passèd are all flunked!"

I remarked grimly, as we ascended, that passage by so cynical a pretender as Bray, at least, was most certainly failure; and in my discomfort at being so of a mind with Stoker I added that he tempted out his own failings as well as other people's. "I've seen how it pleases you when people call you the Dean o' Flunks. I'll bet you hope there really is a Founder, and that He'll pass you for driving so many people to disagree with you. You want to pass by acting so flunked that you pass other people."

"Oh, come on!" he teased. "You're as balled up as Max is."

We went up and down a number of times, for Stoker liked to push the elevator buttons and close the automatic doors in his employees' faces. I continued to challenge him, mainly from the surplus of my distress at Max's condition: his hope, I charged, was that Failure, deliberately elected, would somehow be equivalent to Passage, as the considered choice of a negative could be said to be an affirmation. But there was only Failure in the human university, so far as I had seen, and thus it would remain unless I could in some wise complete my Assignment and bring order and Answers to the campus.

"There is order!" Stoker scoffed. "Everywhere but in my brother's head!" His argument (which I assumed was meant simply to bait me) seemed to be that the opposition and tension of extremes — East and West Campuses, Passage and Failure — was itself a kind of harmony, and that moderationists like Chancellor Rexford, who regarded themselves as realistic, were actually deluded ("Not that Lucky's really what he pretends to be," he added with a wink: "If he'd let me get near him I'd show you his wild side!") But Stoker's reasoning was no more orderly than the rest of his character: having asserted in effect that Disorder was the only true order, and Contradiction the only harmony, he went on to maintain, always grinning, that in fact the alleged passèdness of such people as his "brother," his wife, and my advisor, if true, was false, inasmuch as it not only gave meaning and reality to his own flunkèdness, for example, but induced it into being — as I had myself admitted. Anastasia's submissiveness was a vacuum into which the air of his abuse had no choice but to press; and inasmuch as that which causes flunkèdness is flunkèd, to be passèd, as everyone agreed she was, must be to be failed!

"That's nonsense," I said. "What you really hope is just the opposite. You hope your flunkèdness will pass you because it gives Anastasia a chance to be passèd. You call Chancellor Rexford your brother so that nobody'll believe he is."

"Right!" Stoker cried delightedly. "So Failure is Passage and Passage is Failure! Let's have a drink on it after we spy on Greene and Georgina."

I shifted my ground then (not quite certain whether the argument was still intelligible, and more in hopes of unsettling my adversary than of instructing either him or myself): refusing to peep through the keyhole of the outer-office door, whence issued muffled noises of pursuit, I declared that the first reality of life on campus must be the clear distinction between Passage and Failure, the former of which was always and only passèd, the latter flunked. "The truth about you is that you're not the Dean o' Flunks," I said. "You act like him because you have such a high opinion of Commencement that you're afraid you can't make the grade."

"Ha!"

But I believed I had touched him, as in the Assembly, and thanks to Max's tutelage in logical manipulation I was able to press home my purely improvised position. The real ground of Stoker's failure, I told him (he was squatting at the keyhole now, pretending not to hear me), was this equation of Passage and Failure; but even by his own paradoxical reasoning he was not "truly" flunked, and was therefore truly flunked. By this I meant that if he really believed that Rexford's calm reasonableness and Anastasia's submission to abuse were flunkèd — because of their passèdness or however — and also that he himself could in a manner pass from very flunkèdness, then he should pursue a policy just contrary to his present one: deny that Lucky Rexford was his brother, but emulate the ordered normalcy that he regarded as a perilous delusion; be a gentle loving husband to Anastasia, even a submissive one; give over his sprees and orgies, all his mad mischief — in short, turn his personality inside out, and flunk by his own transvaluated terms instead of by the usual ones. It was a challenge born of my distress and bad temper, and riddled with equivocations; yet giving it voice I felt once again some murky, valid point in Stoker's life, which I could not as yet assimilate: obscurely I suspected that however flunking were his treatment of Anastasia and his repudiation of every passèd thing, there was another side to them.

Georgina burst into the hall, nearly upsetting her new employer, and took indignant cover behind him. After her came Peter Greene, but stopped short and reddened at the sight of us.

"For pity's sake leave her alone," I said crossly — as if I were the forty-year-old and he the twenty-. And he responded appropriately:

"Shucks, I was only playing I'd paddle her if she didn't 'fess up who she is."

"I declare," Georgina said — not very upset. "Some people's children!"

I advised him testily to leave such games to Stoker — if Stoker still cared to play them — and drive me back to Great Mall, as I had work to do: in addition to my Assignment I meant to take up that very day, if possible, the Chancellor's invitation to discuss Max's case with him; and I had business with Anastasia also, if and when my third task took me to the Infirmary. The truth was (though I didn't care to discuss it further before Stoker), I felt an urgent need to show everyone whom Bray had Certified the invalidity of their Certification, lest like patients falsely prescribed for they turn their backs on honest medicine. And I meant to begin with Greene himself, whose case seemed grave enough. As if to illustrate my simile, while agreeing eagerly to chauffeur me anywhere if Anastasia was along the route, he popped a flaming pimple on his chin, and then complained that the salve Stoker had loaned him the night before had made his acne worse instead of better.

"Is that a fact?" Stoker said. "It does a fine job of scaling our boilers." I heard distraction in his gibe, and hoped that my sarcastic words to him, if they were striking some unsuspected target, had more point than I could find in them. He ushered Georgina back inside without wink or pinch, and though he answered with a fart my parting plea that Max be treated gently, I thought it significant that he made no promise to the contrary.

"I swear if that ain't O.B.G.'s daughter!" Greene marveled as we crossed the stone courtyard. "Couldn't be two such uppity ones in the entire cottonpicking College!" He prodded an elbow into my side. "Ain't she a hot one, though — what you might say teasewise?"

2

"Indeed she is not," I said. "Excuse me, but I wonder sometimes about the way you see things."

"You don't believe her, do you?" At my request he forwent the Cut-Out lever so that we could talk as we returned to Great Mall. I replied that the issue of whether or not Georgina was "O.B.G.'s daughter" seemed less to the point in my opinion than his appraisal of her, which struck me as altogether unwarranted.

"A durn floozy's what she is," he insisted. "Tease the bejeepers out of a feller."

"Not sweet and modest like your wife, I suppose."

"I should hope to kiss a pig!"

"And not pure, like Anastasia?"

Greene closed his eyes and bade me please not to speak in the same breath of darky harlots and passèd maiden girls. "Speaking of which," he added slyly, "don't forget what you promised me, Stacey's-motherwise; I'll see if I can fix up Dr. Spielman's prosecutor."

"For pity's sake!" I cried. "Look here, now — " He did, beaming and squinting, and very nearly steered us into a horse-chestnut tree. "No no! Look where you're going!" He returned his attention to the road in time to misread a sign directing us leftwards. He was sure it had pointed right, and turned that way; when I insisted it had pointed left, he reminded me that Stoker was a great hand at altering direction-signs, and that in any case the motorcycle's speed and power would compensate for misdirections. He opened the throttle to demonstrate his point, and cried, "Yippee!" as we swept through a busy intersection. I told him sharply to stop behaving like a kid.

"Dr. Bray says be like a kindergartener if you want to pass," he answered — pouting a little, but to my great relief halving our speed. I pointed out to him that Enos Enoch's advice had been to become as a kindergartener, not to remain one, and that Bray was anyhow wrong to Certify him on that ground.

"You're plain jealous," Greene teased.

"Never mind that," I said. "Whatever it is that's passèd about kindergarteners, it isn't their childishness. Or their ignorance."

Here he grew stubborn, if no less cheerful: "Say what you want how I'm just a simple-head country boy; there's a thing or two I know for sure. I'd rather be me than a educated slicker like Dr. Sear."

I agreed that Enos Enoch might have had in mind a certain kind of innocent simplicity such as Dr. Sear could not be said to share. "But you're not innocent or simple either, it seems to me. You just like to see yourself that way."

"I guess I'm okay," he grumbled. "What the heck anyhow."

"You might be," I declared, "if you'd open your eyes a little. Pardon me for criticizing you like this, but I hate to see everybody believing what Bray tells them."

"It's a free college, George. Say what you want." Now he pouted in earnest, and flushed red as his fresher pimples. "I'm right used to getting knocked, imagewise, by Sally Ann and everybody else." His manner suggested nevertheless that he was curious to hear what I had to say, even eager, though apprehensive.

"Tell me one thing honestly," I said; "you did used to service O.B.G.'s daughter, didn't you?"

He snorted. "Which ain't to say, mind you! Durn uppity woman! Said she'd tell Sally Ann if not!"

"Tell her what?"

"That I'd been in the woods with her." He squinted his eye at me. "Which ain't to say!"

"But you did service her, didn't you? And put her in kid?"

"That don't matter!" He thumped the handlegrip with his fist. "It's the principle of the thing. Could just as well been one of them redskins."

"The ones you let service her, so they wouldn't scalp you?"

He jerked his head. "I soon learnt them a lesson: Only good red's a dead red! Who d'you suppose opened up the New Tammany Forest Preserve?"

"And drove out the redskins…"

"Yeah!"

"And cut down the trees, and ruined the rivers…"

"Say what you want! Say what you want!" I did just that, all the way to Great Mall, but in a cordialer tone. First I laid his hostility by assuring him that unlike his wife and some other of his critics I did not regard him as a hopeless flunker, but rather admired what evidence I'd seen of his magnanimity, industriousness, efficiency, and ingenuity.

"Good old New Tammany know-how," he declared; and as I had expected, once sincerely praised he began to condemn himself: he had done wrong by O.B.G. and O.B.G.'s daughter, especially in terms gone by, and had yet to make right amends; he had laid waste the wilderness, exploited his mill-hands, sneered at book-learned folk and art-majors, been rude to exchange-students, played hooky from school, bribed traffic-policemen and legislators, serviced his private secretary (who however was as flunkèd a durn tease in the first place as O.B.G.'s daughter), subscribed to lewd magazines in plain wrappers, made a fortune in the Second Campus Riot, and cheated on his income tax; and though he'd made efforts lately to redeem in some measure this poor past, he had replaced old failings with new: he manufactured packages intended to disguise and mislead as well as to contain, and plastics designed to break upon the expiration of their guarantee; he spent too much time watching Telerama, for the low quality of which his own Department of Promotional Research was largely responsible; and it was he (that is to say, his staff) who had invented the premium-stamps with which rival departments now lured students into their curricula. But of all the failings for which he had to answer — and he dared say there was no article in the Junior Enochist Pledge that he had left unbroken — he counted none so vile as the desecration of his marriage-vows in the hot-chocolate arms of O.B.G.'s daughter. As well spit on the NTC pennant, become a Founderless Student-Unionist, or be disrespectful of your passèd mother like that immigrant Dean Taliped in the play, as defile purity with impurity! Which, however, wasn't to say.

"That's the only thing keeps Miss Anastasia and me apart, marriage-wise," he concluded.

I was astonished. "You mean she's said she'd let you service her if it weren't for deceiving your wife? Or what?"

"I beg you mind what you say!" he said angrily. What he meant, I discovered, had nothing to do with his wife at all (whose existence, like Stoker's, he seemed unable to keep in mind when his beloved's name was mentioned): he simply felt so unworthy of Anastasia's pristine favors, sullied as his conscience was, that he could not bring himself to speak to her, much less make the proposal he yearned to make.

I bleated with mirth. "Oh, for Founder's sake!"

"Laugh if you want, doggone it," he said. "When a man's sunk down to the likes of O.B.G.'s daughter, it plain unstarches him for good girls like Chickie Ann and Miss Anastasia."

I assumed his tongue had slipped; it turned out, however, that he'd used one of his pet-names for Mrs. Greene. Unlikelihood! But that memory from buckwheat-days made me dizzy. Sorely I was tempted to inquire about Mrs. Greene's tastes in verse; judging from Greene's view of certain people whom I knew also, and my recollection of his tale at the Pedal Inn, I began to wonder whether Miss Sally Ann was quite as guiltless as her husband made her out. But I had no clear evidence, and it seemed more tactful in any case to bring him indirectly to that consideration. Where to begin!

"Do you think Max is innocent or guilty?" I asked him.

He considered for a moment — not at all disturbed by the change of subject — and then replied: "You got to have faith."

"How about Maurice Stoker? Do you believe he's as flunkèd as people say?"

"Well," he said judiciously, "you know how folks are, supposing-the-worst-instead-of-the-bestwise. Me, I never met a man I didn't like."

We were drawing near Tower Hall, where I meant to have at my first task.

" 'Which ain't to say,' " I mocked.

"How's that? Which ain't to say what?"

I took his sleeve then, smiling for all my exasperation (we had parked in a lot beside the great hall), and begged him to hear me out for a quarter-hour without interrupting, as a Grand-Tutor-to-be with no motive but his welfare and eventual true Candidacy.

He blinked and bobbed. "Say what you want. I can tell by looking you're no slicker."

Without mitigation or abridgement then I reviewed for him what I knew of Anastasia, her husband, and others of our mutual acquaintance, both first-hand and by hearsay. I told him of the wondrous spankings, the boys in Uncle Ira's house, the rape in George's Gorge, and the Memorial Service. I repeated Stoker's avowed suspicion, which I myself could not entirely discredit, that Anastasia like Max had a talent for being victimized, possibly even throve on it; and further recounted what I'd witnessed and heard of Stoker's own diversions and abominations: his malice towards all, his delight in subverting every order and indulging every flunkèd impulse of the student mind. I described Dr. Sear's amusements and Dr. Eierkopf's, what I had seen in the buckwheat-meadow and done with dear departed G. Herrold; how I had bit Anastasia in the sidecar and watched her tickee the false Grand Tutor. Next I enlarged upon the divers failings of New Tammany College, past and present, as revealed to me by Max and partially confirmed by my own reading and observation: its oppression of Frumentians, its lawless Informationalism, its staggering wastefulness, its pillage of natural resource and despoil of natural beauty, its hostility to learning and refinement, its apotheosis of the lowest percentile, its vulgarity, inflated self-esteem, self-righteousness, self-deception, sentimentality, hypocrisy, artificiality, simple-mindedness, naïve optimism, concupiscence, avarice, self-contradiction, ignorance, and general fatuity…

"Which ain't to say!" Greene could not help crying out; but his face had passed from crimson to white.

"Which isn't to say other colleges don't have their failings," I agreed. "Or that NTC doesn't have its passèd aspects too." What mattered, I declared, was that one not confuse the passèd with the flunkèd, or see no failure where failure was. All very well to Certify someone's Candidacy on the ground of Innocence, a no doubt passèd opposite to Culpability; I too might make such a Certification; but not unless the innocence were truly innocent, purified as well of ignorance as of guilt. "If I were your advisor, Mr. Greene — "

"Pete," he said dejectedly.

"My advice would be to get a pair of high-resolution glasses like the ones Dr. Eierkopf gave me, to help you see the difference between things. And Dr. Sear's mirror, to take a closer look at yourself in."

He picked glumly at a pimple. "I got a thing about mirrors."

"Let Dr. Sear be your mirror, then," I suggested. "If there's anybody who sees the other side of things, it's Dr. Sear." To Greene's objection that his previous connection with Dr. Sear had been profitless, I replied that this time his aim would not be therapy, but sophistication, and that for Knowledge of the Campus Dr. Sear was reputed to have no equal. I repeated Dr. Sear's observation in the Amphitheater: that while Commencement no doubt involved vision, it had nothing to do with illusions, which must be got rid of absolutely.

Greene swallowed a vitamin-pill and scratched his head. "I don't know."

"Then you ought to find out," I said, and urged him further to drop in on the doctor immediately, as I would need no more chauffeuring for the present: when I'd fixed the clock I meant to call on Chancellor Rexford, just across the Mall, to see what might be done about the Boundary Dispute; thereafter I'd most probably stop at the Infirmary myself to seek Dr. Sear's interpretation of my third and fourth tasks, which I did not clearly understand; I could meet Greene there if he wished to assist me further.

"Hey, that's where Miss Stacey works, isn't it?" I affirmed with a sigh that Mrs. Stoker was indeed Dr. Sear's chief assistant, and wondered whether her presence — which I'd forgotten to take into account — would preclude or assure the success of my little project for him. He was all enthusiasm for it now: vowed to cleave to Dr. Sear night and day and clasp to heart his every word. "I'll tell him you sent me," he said. "Better yet, you write me a note — like I'm your student, sort of." The idea delighted him, as if he were indeed a child given special permission to leave the classroom; with little hope now of results I borrowed his ball-point pen and scribbled an explanation to Dr. Sear on the only available paper, the back of his spurious diploma. Seeing Bray's inscription again, I could not resist amending it to read Passèd are the Kindergarteners — - into First Grade.

"You sure you don't want some good old New Tammany know-how up there in the Clock-tower?" But though he cheerfully insisted he'd like nothing better than to "take 'er apart and see what makes 'er tick," he was clearly impatient to be off. I declined the offer. He roared away then with a "Yi-hoo!" and spray of gravel, saluted a mailman whom he evidently took for some professor-general, and turned onto a path marked PEDESTRIANS ONLY, which however quickly cleared before his powerful machine.

I showed my ID-card to an attendant in the marble lobby of Tower Hall and to another at a lift marked belfry, to which I was directed. This latter, like the horn-rimmed man at the orientation lecture, consulted a clipboard and discovered (to our mutual surprise) that thanks to WESCAC and Chancellor Rexford I was among those persons authorized to ascend into the clockworks — the list of names was not a large one.

"Why can't everyone go up there?" I asked him. He wrinkled his forehead, smiled cautiously, and instructed me to push the Up-button when I was ready; the elevator made no stops between lobby and Belfry. I shrugged and pressed. The ascent was long, or the lift slow; my ears clicked, clicked again, and then the automatic doors opened on a formidable scene. The Belfry was floored and walled in rough cement, grease-stained and inscribed with the names of visitors and curious messages; the sides were open to the air above a breast-high wall, and afforded a splendid prospect of Great Mall — on which, however, it was difficult to concentrate, for what seized eye, ear, and nose was the huge machinery of the clockworks that almost filled the place. It seemed essentially a mesh of gearwheels of every size, from bright brass ones small as saucers to greased black cast-iron monsters, apparently motionless, of which only the topmost arc thrust through the floor; their shafts turned or were turned by drums of steel cable that disappeared through roof and floor. Great bells hung about, the smallest as large as a feed-bucket; their clappers were mounted outside them and connected by rods to various parts of the machinery. Everything clacked, clicked, creaked, and whirred together; rocker-arms and escapements teetered, governors whirled, circuit-boxes cracked and thudded, the middle-sized gears turned leisurely and the smaller ones spun into a shining blur. The place smelled of oil and iron despite the cool air that breezed through at that height.

"Halte dich dazu!" Dr. Eierkopf cried as the doors parted. I didn't see him at once, perched on Croaker's shoulders near a worktable to my left, but recognized the piped accent and could translate the tone of his command, if not its words. The spectacle anyhow held me for the second it took to see what I must beware of: the shaft of a great pendulum, fixed near the ceiling, swung noiselessly through a slot in the floor half a meter from the lift-sill; it rushed by even as Eierkopf spoke, hung weightily an instant, and rushed back.

"So: der Ziegenbübe." Eierkopf squinted through his eyeglasses; Croaker grinned and grunted. "Step here then. Look sharp." As I made my way to them between the wall and the pendulum-slot, Dr. Eierkopf had Croaker place him on a high stool. The great Frumentian then bounced up and down, fetched up his shirt (he was dressed now in his usual garb, the gray cotton sweatsuit worn by varsity athletes, with NTC across chest and shoulders) and pointed happily to his belly, where I saw a livid pattern of fresh-looking scars below his navel.

"He wants you to congratulate him on his Certification," Dr. Eierkopf mocked. "You want evidence that Dr. Bray's a faker? There you are." Bray it seemed had left the Belfry not a quarter-hour past, having visited it to make an official inspection of the clockworks, and before proceeding to the Chancellor's mansion had Certified both Croaker and Dr. Eierkopf.

"Both of you?" I could not conceal my incredulity. Dr. Eierkopf agreed that Commencement Gate, whatever and wherever it might be, could not imaginably be wide enough to admit contraries: Entelechus's Second and Third Logical Laws forbade the possibility. That he himself was a Candidate, if not indeed a Graduate, he needed no Grand Tutor to tell him: Scapulas's motto Graduation is a state of mind had long hung on the walls of Observatory and Belfry; it was a conclusion he had reached, like Scapulas, by inexorable logic, and confirmed to his satisfaction on WESCAC. He had explained it politely to Bray out of deference to the administration in which he hoped to recoup his former high position, not out of any reverence for the man himself; and the self-styled Grand Tutor had had the good sense merely to write Q.E.D. under that motto, making it a certificate of Eierkopf's Candidacy.

"What else could he do?" Dr. Eierkopf smiled over his gums. "Even Scapulas was a brute compared to me." Which made it the more absurd, he scoffed, that Bray should also Certify the shoulders, so to speak, on which the head perched. Scornfully he quoted Bray's quotation from the Founder's Scroll: "Consider the beasts of the woods, that never fail." Whatever Enos Enoch might have meant by that advice, He surely wouldn't have Certified an animal who couldn't even read the Certification. But Bray, apparently determined to pass absolutely everyone, had first translated the Certificate of Candidacy into a Frumentian pictogram (a matriculation and procreation symbol, so he'd claimed) and then, somehow gaining Croaker's confidence, had engraved it on the black man's belly. Eierkopf himself was unfamiliar with the emblem; whether the bearer understood its significance was questionable, but he was most pathetically proud to display it in spite of the discomfort he no doubt suffered.

I did not denounce these Certifications, but concurred with Dr. Eierkopf's sentiments regarding the Certifier. Croaker's incisions certainly did look tender; however, I could discern no subscription of any sort on Eierkopf's Scapulist motto, which hung over a worktable littered with files, lenses, grindstones, calipers, micrometers, high-intensity lamps, and cartons of eggs.

"I don't see those initials you mentioned," I said.

His head lolled, apparently in amusement. "I can't see them either! Except through this glass." He pointed to a thick-ringed lens on the table and explained that Bray — whose ingenuity he did have to admire — had thought it appropriate to inscribe his Certification in letters of a sort and size that only an Eierkopfian Lens (a mated pair of lenses, actually, the one "synthetic," or panoramical, the other "analytic," or microscopical) could resolve and focus — and that inconsistently, so it seemed, for when he held the device for me I could see nothing.

"Oh well," Eierkopf said; "at least my Certification makes sense, even if not everybody sees it all the time. Croaker is seeing his, but nobody understands it!"

I was about to reply that Croaker could at least feel his. But as Eierkopf made a gesture of contempt with the hand that held the lens, I. thought I glimpsed the missing initials on its objective face. I pointed them out to him, a bit triumphantly it may be, as further evidence of Bray's deceitfulness; but although Dr. Eierkopf himself could not see the reversed letters.D.E.Q on the glass (owing to some feature of his spectacles), he was undisturbed by the disclosure.

"The point's the same," he said. "Anyhow, I told you I don't believe in Grand Tutors till I see once a miracle." He was pleased, however, to clear up the somewhat puzzling detail of the image's inconstancy, as he was convinced that for better or worse all phenomena were ultimately intelligible. Contrary to what one might suppose, he said, an image twice refracted in certain complementary ways was not always thereby restored to its original state, any more than a cat dissected and reassembled in the zoology laboratories was the same cat afterwards: sometimes it came out doubly distorted (as it always was in theory); sometimes it seemed to vanish altogether, especially when the characteristics of his own extraordinary eyeglasses and the astigmatism they compensated for were added to the optical equation, or the light was wrong.

"But," he smiled, "take away my lenses, I'm blind as Dean Taliped." However, I was not to infer that because all lenses distorted ("Your own included," he said, perhaps unable to see that I wore none), nothing could be truly seen; all that was necessary was to compensate for optical error, and for this he relied, in his own work, on the lens in his hand, which he knew to be accurate.

I asked him how he knew. His round eyes twinkled. "I like you, Goat-Boy! Croaker fixes you a lunch, you can eat it around behind the clockworks." But my question, which I'd thought to be serious and difficult as well as perceptive, he disposed of lightly, perhaps facetiously. The lens affirmed his Graduatehood, did it not? And since he was in fact a Graduate, he affirmed the accuracy of the lens.

"Wait a minute!" I protested. "Bray Certified your Candidacy, but you don't believe in him."

He wagged a hairless little digit at me. "I won't affirm Dr. Bray, but I can't deny him, because it must be the same with Grand Tutors, if they really exist, as it is with Graduates: it takes one to know one, not so?" I readily agreed.

"And a Grand Tutor would know Graduates from non-Graduates, ja? But not vice-versa. Well, just so with this lens: I know it's correct because a Graduate like me can tell correct lenses from incorrect ones." The case was analogous, he argued, to the interdependent relation between WESCAC and the Tower Hall Clock, which he had explained to me in the observatory, and was reflected also in the problem of the clock's accuracy, which, like all problems involving final standards and first principles, could be only academic.

"You claim you're the Grand Tutor yourself, and Bray's not," he said, "but you can't prove it — without a miracle. You can only know it, just as I know I'm a Graduate."

I very much wanted to pursue the matter of the clock, my reason for being there, but I could not resist declaring to him that his position seemed to me not only circularly reasoned (which might indeed, as his analogies showed, be strictly a logical problem, not a practical one), but inconsistent with itself: he had deduced his Graduateship, on his own admission, by an operation of formal logic, and denied Croaker's by the same procedure; yet when the logic led him into a bind he waved it away, freely interchanging conclusions and premises. "Is that a fact, Geissbübchen!" he said indulgently. "Then please Grand-Tutor me while Croaker and I do our work. You still don't think I'm a Graduate?"

Croaker all this while had been hanging by one hand from a steel rafter near the machinery of the clock, with a light attached to his forehead and what looked like a whetstone in his other hand. Before him rocked an anchor-shaped escapement several meters tall, which served in turn to actuate the great pendulum, or be actuated by it; its impulse- and locking-pallets engaged and released the teeth of the last gear in the train, and the escapement itself rocked on a knife-edged bright steel bar that ran through a ring in the top of its shaft. Between tick and tock Croaker dextrously would swipe one side of this bar's edge with his stone, between tock and tick the other; then without ever touching the escapement itself he'd make some sort of measurement through a lens fixed onto the bar, and croak the reading down to Dr. Eierkopf. His noises were unintelligible to me, but Dr. Eierkopf would jot figures in a notebook, say "Ja ja." or "Pfui," and return to measurements of his own, which he seemed to be taking with great delicacy from a white hen's-egg mounted in a nest of elaborate apparatus.

"May I speak frankly, sir?" I asked. "Presumptuous as it may seem to you, I do have a suggestion to make, and then I'd like to ask your advice about repairing this clock…"

His pink eyes rolled behind the glasses. "You lost your mind, Goat-Boy?"

I showed him my Assignment and told him how I'd come by it. "If it says to fix the clock, then the clock must be broken, mustn't it? I believe you told me WESCAC always reasons correctly."

Very much concerned, Dr. Eierkopf affirmed that the computer was normally incapable of faulty reasoning; he pointed out, however, that in the absence of any actual malfunction in the works, to speak of Tower Clock's being inaccurate was to speak unintelligibly, as who should accuse the Standard Meter of being short.

"But you told me yourself last night that the clock needed working on," I reminded him, adding that my own selfwinding watch (by which term I meant, innocently, that I wound it myself) showed a different hour, whereto with his permission and Croaker's help I'd thought to make Tower Clock conform.

"Don't talk so!" Eierkopf cried. "You don't touch anything! It's bad enough Croaker, he's such a clumsy!" He squinted at my Assignment-list again, this time through his lens, and suddenly clapped his hands. "I got it, Goat-Boy!"

Croaker dropped from the rafter at once, mistaking the signal, and lifted Dr. Eierkopf onto his shoulders; the scientist was too pleased with his new idea to protest.

"It says Complete in no time, ja? So: the clock's not kaput, it takes you no time to fix it! You're done already."

This reasoning, though I could not refute it, satisfied me less completely than it did Dr. Eierkopf, who declared it at once a fulfillment of my task, an explanation of the troublesome due-date of my Assignment, and a vindication of WESCAC's "malistic" dependability. To my inquiry, Why was he himself tinkering with the clockworks if no repairs were needed? he replied that standards of reference were sometimes improvable though never logically subject to challenge; thus the University Standard Meter, for example, was originally one ten-millionth of the campus's quadrant, later the distance at 0 °Centigrade between two particular scratches on a platinum-iridium bar in the Intercollegiate Department of Standards, and presently one million five hundred fifty-three thousand one hundred sixty-four and thirteen one-hundredths wave-lengths of red light from the element cadmium. In like manner the accuracy of Tower Clock was from time to time improved — though only by comparison to its own past accuracy, never ("… Q.E.D., Goat-Boy…") by comparison to the accuracy of other timepieces. Current work in the field, I was told, centered around escapement-theory, and had led to opposing points of view. One group of researchers (whom Eierkopf referred to contemptuously as "Everlasting Now-niks") would abolish all forms of escapement in favor of what they — or their detractors — called "tickless time"; the other, led by Dr. Eierkopf, hoped with the aid of special lenses and micromilling techniques to perfect the edge on which the present escapement pivoted — or the theory, I was not sure which.

"Here you got Tick, nicht wahr?" he said, and pointed to one pallet-point of the anchor-shaped escapement. "Over there you got Tock. So pretend all the Ticks is coming and the Tocks is already gone: what I want to do is measure the point exactly between, where Tick becomes Tock. Last term we got it down past millimicroseconds; pretty soon we lick it altogether." His labor was complicated by several factors: the two schools of thought, though not politically based, happened to divide roughly along East-West lines, the "Everlasting Now-niks" being in general associated with Sakhyanist curricula; and the political connotations which escapement-theory thus unfortunately took on were compounded — and confused — by the fact that Tower Hall Tower was a reference-point for cartographic as well as temporal measurements: that keen-edged fulcrum which Croaker had been honing happened to run north and south on the meridian of longitude which, higher up towards Founder's Hill, divided East from West Campus, and had been used as a coordinate in laying down the Power Line; moreover, the weathercock atop the Belfry marked the center of New Tammany's Great Mall area — a point indicated by brass discs on every floor of Tower Hall: both North-South avenues and East-West streets were numbered from the shaft whence its four arms extended. In consequence of all this it was difficult even for Eierkopf as official Clockwatcher to get permission to move or modify any part of the works, the more so as his critics (some sincerely concerned, some merely venting their anti-Bonifacism) charged that his method was self-defeating.

"I've gone from ticks to milliseconds to microseconds to millimicroseconds," he said, "and the dumbsticks say I just make bigger and bigger words for smaller and smaller things, but never get to the place between Tick and Tock." What their ignorance left out of account — and mine too, which saw no reply to their objection — was a technical breakthrough he'd recently achieved and was about to put to use: a precision honing device he called the Infinite Divisor. Attached to one end of the fulcrum-bar, its two opposed milling-heads — tiny diamond-dust affairs — would dart along the upper knife-edge, honing it as they went; during their approach to the hole in the escapement-shaft (the point on which the whole assembly pivoted) automatic calibrators would halve and halve again, ad infinitum, the width of the edge, until theoretically it reached a perfect point at the center of the hole and the midpoint of the Tick-Tock swing — a point whose measurement would incidentally be recorded on the calibrator-gauges.

"One moment, sir!" I protested, dizzied by this conception. Croaker held his sweatshirt-front out from his scars and whimpered a little. "It seems to me-"

"Pretty smart, ja?" He may have been addressing Croaker, whose head he patted, or myself. I agreed that the idea was striking, but wondered about certain theoretical problems which I sensed more than saw articulably: a riddle Max had posed me once about Peleides and the Tortoise…

"Pfui," Dr. Eierkopf said. "That's why two grinding-heads instead of one: we tackle the problem from both sides. Better hold your ears now."

He inserted a pinky in each of Croaker's, and Croaker clapped a giant palm over each of his, just as a new set of whirs and clackings shot through the works. I didn't catch his meaning until the first clapper swung against its bell, big as the lift I'd ascended in, and shuddered me to the marrow. Others followed, a tooth-jarring sequence even with ears held, until a four-phrase melody signaling the hour had been chimed: then a series of bells ascended diatonically a scale-and-a-half. The eighth brought a little cry from Dr. Eierkopf, either despite Croaker's pressing harder or because of it; the last shivered the egg in its calipered nest.

"Durchfall und Vertreibung!" Dr. Eirkopf squeaked, and pounded Croaker feebly on the pate. "You set the egg-clamp for high sol again! Put me down and clean up!" Croaker perched him obligingly back upon a stool and set to licking the apparatus.

"Didn't I tell you, Goat-Boy? It's the Schwarzer-work that flunks me, not the brainwork." His oölogical researches, of which I'd seen other evidence in the Observatory, were, like his clock-work, designed to restore him to favor in the administrative and general-student eye: having been told many terms ago by WESCAC, in the course of his ill-fated eugenical investigations, that "Commencement commences ab avo," he had launched into a grand historico-chemico-mathematico-biologico-mythophysical treatise upon the egg in all its aspects (excepting the culinary, which he dismissed in a long footnote to the title as intellectually unpalatable); its fourteen volumes were complete, as well as their prefaces, plates, paste-ins, fold-outs, glossaries, indices, appendices, bibliographies, celebratory sonnets, statistical supplements, epistles dedicatory, tape-recorded musical accompaniment, and jacket-copy; all that stood in the way of its publication (and proof of the author's own Commencement, if any was required) was a single little exercise in comparative oömetry which he'd planned to include as a footnote to zygote, the final index-entry. But so clumsy had been Croaker's measurement of long and short oöic axes, and so irrepressible his appetite for the subject of their researches, they'd already missed the Spring-Carnival target-date for publication, selected by the press for its obvious promotional tie-ins.

"Same with my Infinite Divisor," he lamented. "The blueprints are drawn, the computations are computed, but Croaker keeps dropping the pieces! What good's a right-hand man that's all thumbs?" And in a sudden access of dejection, as once before in the Observatory, he wondered aloud whether brutes like his roommate, altogether free of reason and discernment, were not after all the truly passèd.

"I'm not sure about that yet," I replied, assuming he'd put the question to me. "But even if Bray's citations for both of you are right — and like yourself I don't see how they could both be — it doesn't seem to me that either one of you has qualified for Candidacy yet on the grounds he cited."

Dr. Eierkopf was turning a fresh egg sadly in his fingers. "If I told him once about high sol, I told him twenty times." Now he brightened and tittered. "Did you know your friend Anastasia can break these with her levator ani? I had her do a dozen Grade-A Large with a stress-gauge on, for Volume Nine. I show you the readings…"

"Right there, sir," I said, shaking my head at the invitation; "that kind of thing, and the night-glass and all…" My point, which I tried to make tactfully, was that if he believed passèdness to be the sort of rationality that WESCAC (at least in pre-"noctic" terms) exemplified, then he was by no means a Graduate, or even a Candidate, so long as he indulged even vicariously such Croakerish appetites as I had seen signs of. Nor could Croaker, on the other hand, be said to be passed by the standards of his Certification, it seemed to me: what beast of the woods would so obligingly fetch and carry, not to mention taking scientific measurements?

"He always gets them wrong," Dr. Eierkopf said hopefully.

"But he gets them. And he cleans up messes — "

"His own."

"What beast of the woods does that? Not even a goat can cook pablum, or chew designs on a stick, or focus lenses…"

Eierkopf sniffed. "He busts as many as he focuses."

The point was, I insisted, that neither of them met strictly the terms of their Certifications, any more than Peter Greene or Max, in my estimation, met the terms of theirs; contrary as the roommates clearly were, there was still a flunking measure of Eierkopfishness in Croaker, and of Croakeriety in Eierkopf, which came no doubt from their close and constant association. And this was the more pointed failing in Dr. Eierkopf (I tried to suggest), because it went against his life's activity and principle: the differentiation of this from that. Let him but perfect and add a mirror to his high-resolution lenses; apply to himself as it were his Infinite Divisor (of which I heartily approved): he would see how far he stood from Commencement Gate.

"You want me to turn loose Croaker, like before? You got a screw loose, Goat-Boy?"

I reminded him politely that I had no clear conviction that Graduation was what he believed it to be; only that if it was, it behooved him to discern and repudiate everything about him to the contrary. Not to seem disrespectful of his age and genius (but also to drive my point home), I declared myself in his debt for this position of mine: surely the blurring of distinctions, especially between contraries, was flunking — hence Maurice Stoker's devotion to that activity. And just as the first step to Commencement Gate must be the differentiation of Passage and Failure, so (it seemed increasingly to me) the several steps thereafter — in the completion of my Assignment, for example — must depend upon corollary distinctions.

"I'll need the lenses you gave me for my next chore," I concluded as agreeably as possible; "I wish I could borrow your Divisor too."

Dr. Eierkopf seemed neither angered, as I had feared, nor chastened, as I had hoped, by my advice. "You still believe you're the Grand Tutor!" he marveled, and pensively gave Croaker instructions about the mounting of another egg. Then he repeated what he'd said the night before: "I half wish you were, to prove I was right about the GILES."

I smiled. "If I have to be the GILES to be the Grand Tutor, then I must be the GILES, somehow: it's a simple syllogism." However, I added, I couldn't very well be Virginia Hector's child, inasmuch as I had it from Ira Hector's own lips that Anastasia was.

Eierkopf turned up his palms. "Then you aren't the Grand Tutor, any more than Bray. Look once, I prove it on WESCAC." He gave a further string of undecipherable instructions to Croaker, who turned several switches on one of those consoles that seemed to be everywhere in the College. I watched with sharp attention.

"The child born from the GILES would be a Grand Tutor," he declared. Croaker punched certain buttons. "Miss Anastasia Hector isn't a Grand Tutor, we agree." More buttons. "But no woman except Virginia Hector could have got in where WESCAC had the GILES. Since Anastasia is the one that got born, it couldn't have been the GILES that Virginia got fertilized by, and you couldn't be the Grand Tutor. Now WESCAC reads it out." Croaker had pressed buttons after each of these propositions; he pulled a long lever now on the side of the console, things dinged and whirred, and from an opening down in the front a strip of paper began clicking out, which Dr. Eierkopf perused with satisfied nods and peeps. I would have objected that his initial premise, even if granted, seemed to me inadequate to the case — it was no GILES that had engendered Enos Enoch, or the original Sakhyan, nor need one have engendered me: if the GILES could be shown to have come to naught, that fact cost me nothing but a handy proof of my authenticity, which however was contingent on no such proofs. But Dr. Eierkopf, having said, "Ja… ja… just so… that's that…" at points along the paper tape, suddenly pushed his eyeglasses up on his nose and whipped out the lens that bore his name.

"Unless!" he cried. He grinned at me slyly and winked his left eye. "Maybe you and Anastasia are twins, hey?"

Owing to the liberal circumstances of my kidship I was more interested in the relevance of this possibility to my claim of Grand-Tutorhood than appalled by its retroactive implications about the G. Herrold Memorial Service. But I was not ignorant of studentdom's attitude towards incest; I chided Dr. Eierkopf for salivating at the idea that I'd serviced my sister, and firmly declined his offer to rerun the tape he'd made two nights before on the Safety Surveillance monitor.

"That's just what I meant a while ago," I said. "You've got more of Croaker in you than you'll admit."

"When I find out you're Stacey's twin brother, I take your advice," he promised merrily.

A little cross, I bade him goodbye and called the lift. My first chore, so far as I could see, was accomplished by forfeit, and I must get on with the second, at the same time foraging some lunch if I could; if Dr. Eierkopf would not heed my suggestions, it was his own flunkage.

"Don't fuss, Zickelchen," he said; "I just tease you a little."

"It's yourself you're teasing, sir; I don't care either way." What I did care about, I declared, was Bray's false Certifications, and I urged him to consider, for his own and Croaker's sake, my suggestion. He promised to do so; and further to placate me (for I had no great faith in his pledge) he offered to run a similar logical-possibility test for me on my other chores.

"To me, for instance, there's just three ways to end the Boundary Dispute," he said. "We EAT them; they EAT us; or we all link arms and sing Wir wollen unseren alten Dekan Siegfried wiederhaben. But WESCAC maybe knows another way…"

"So do I," I replied. The lift came. I assured Dr. Eierkopf I wasn't angry, requested him at least to relay to Croaker, if possible, my sentiments and advice about Bray's Certification, and thanked him for teaching me, intentionally or otherwise, the relevance to my Assignment of his lens-principle, which I'd already been applying unawares in my criticisms of Max, Peter Greene, himself, and even Maurice Stoker.

He waggled his head. "You're a wonder, Goat-Boy! Maybe WESCAC tells me what to make of you. You don't want me to ask it anything?"

I replied that while I no longer regarded WESCAC as essentially Trollish (on the contrary, I rather respected it now as the embodiment of Differentiation, which I'd come to think the very principle of Passage), nevertheless I trusted myself to find my own Answers. I wished him success with his great oölogical treatise, promised to consult it on the day of its appearance to find out whether chicken or egg had paleoontological priority, and pressed the Down-button.

3

My plan for dealing with the Boundary Dispute was necessarily tentative, more a principle than a program; but its wisdom seemed to me confirmed by my luncheon-briefing in the history of the problem. Leaving Tower Hall I had crossed Great Mall to the Chancellor's Mansion ("Lucky's Light House," wags had dubbed it, because of Mr. Rexford's installation of floodlights all about the grounds and his custom of leaving the interior-lights burning all night in virtually every room), where, on the strength of my special Candidacy, I was admitted — not directly to Lucius Rexford, as I had hoped, but to the office of one of his advisors, a gentleman whose skin was the rich fawn color of Redfearn's Tom's coat, and whose knowledgeable, crisp analysis belied my assumption that all Frumentians were either brutes like Croaker or gentle servitors like G. Herrold. His dress was impeccable, his mind and tongue were quick, and though he could not affect the Rexfordian forelock, his accent was closer to the Chancellor's than to Peter Greene's, for example. An elegant meal was sent in, of which I ate the salad- and vegetable-courses while it was explained to me that the Chancellor was about to depart for a Summit Symposium at the University Council that afternoon, where he was expected to censure the Nikolayans for breaking the "Provisional Fast" agreement and provoking fresh incidents at the Power Line.

"Originally that boundary was defined jointly by EASCAC and WESCAC," the advisor said; "our only experiment so far in cooperative computation. The principal sightings were made just after Campus Riot Two from the Tower Clock fulcrum on our end and a similar reference-point in the Nikolayan Control Room in Founder's Hill, and the main power-cables for East and West Campuses were laid side by side along most of the boundary." For many terms, he said, students and staff from the westernmost East-Campus colleges had "transferred" freely in large numbers, without authorization, across the line to West Campus. More recently, however, EASCAC had read out that any further unauthorized transferees would be EATen at the line — and only the sick or feeble-minded were ever authorized. WESCAC's reply had been a threat to EAT Nikolay College automatically the instant any Nikolayan EAT-wave crossed the west side of the Power Line, and EASCAC had read out an identical counter-threat. There the dangerous situation stood: a few determined East-Campusers still managed to slip across; a few more were EATen in the attempt by "short-order" waves designed to fade out just a hairsbreadth from NTC's line. A few border-guards on each side — those intrepid fellows who walked the great cables like armed acrobats — had fallen to their deaths in the no-man's land between East and West or been shot from their perches by unidentified snipers. Any such incident, both sides feared, might touch off Campus Riot III, the end of the University. Yet it was contended in New Tammany that the Nikolayans were covertly advancing their line towards NTC's to exploit an ambiguous clause in the original read-out ("The Boundary shall be midway between the East and West Power Lines"); the Western position was that this clause was intended to locate the cables with reference to the Boundary, not vice-versa, and they demanded a resurvey from Tower Hall and Founder's Hill. But the Nikolayans refused to admit outside surveyors, even from "neutral" colleges, to enter their Control Room, calling the proposal a mere pretext for cribbing secrets, and argued besides (though not officially) that it was the Power Lines that determined the location of the Boundary. Thus the dispute, which had been being debated continuously in the University Council for at least six terms, and had come to involve the equally thorny question of "fasting" (the popular term for abstention from EAT-tests): on the one side, pacifists like Max advocated unilateral fasting; on the other, "preventive rioters" like Eblis Eierkopf taunted, "He who fasts first fasts last," and counseled, "He who fasts last, lasts." In between was every shade of military- and political-science opinion: Chancellor Rexford's own, as affirmed in the Assembly-Before-the-Grate, was that the debate must continue, however meager its yield or exasperating the harrassments, inasmuch as the hope of effective compromise, though slim, was in his judgment the only hope of studentdom.

"I expect we'll test as long as they do," my host concluded; "but we won't break off the Summit Symposium or leave the U.C., even if it's proved that they're moving their cable."

"I'm not so sure that's a good idea," I ventured.

"Pity." He patted his lips on a linen napkin. "The Political Science Department, after years of study, seems rather to approve of it."

"What I want to suggest to Mr. Rexford is a different principle entirely," I said. "I thought of it a few minutes ago."

"Ah. Care for a cigar?"

"No, thank you, sir. You see, I was discussing a different matter this morning with Dr. Eierkopf, and before that I'd been talking with Mr. Maurice Stoker…"

His eyes turned up from the end of his cigar. "I see. Eierkopf and Stoker."

I would have bade him please not to misunderstand me, that my strategy for the Quiet Riot was not derived from those gentlemen, though my conversation with them had inspired it. But as he repeated their names his eyes flashed over my shoulder and he jumped smiling to his feet, jamming the fresh cigar into an ashtray. I glanced doorwards and had presence enough of mind to rise quickly also as the Chancellor himself strode in, unannounced. His forelocked entourage pressed just outside, some with concerned expressions, others grinning like Rexford himself, whose visit to the office was apparently not expected.

"Did I hear someone say a naughty word?" He shook hands with me, waved off his assistant's apology in my behalf, and congratulated me on my penetration of Scrapegoat Grate; I thanked him in turn for his prompt action in clearing my entry into various College buildings.

"It's not Maurice Stoker's idea I wanted to tell you about," I said; "it's my own. My second Assignment-task is to end the Boundary Dispute, and I thought — "

"Look here," he interrupted, obviously enjoying his associates' discomfiture; "want to ride along with us to the Symposium? You can tell me your plan on the way, and we'll wrap up the whole Quiet Riot by dinner-time."

Though I knew the prediction for a tease, the invitation seemed sincere, and I accepted it eagerly. With the train of guards and assistants I gimped after him through elegant corridors, pleased to be photographed in his presence, though I knew that the mightiest deans and chancellors were as pallid candleflames beside the radiance of Truth, which from the sun of Grand-Tutorhood warmed and lit the University. On another impulse he turned onto a verandah, where, from a respectful distance, we saw a handsome young woman turn her cheek to him for kissing; she was sitting with a group of similarly comely young men and women, all of whom except herself rose at his approach; he chatted for some moments, more with them than with her, and then led us to a row of white motorcycles with large closed sidecars, along the curb. I found myself honored with a seat in the first of these, along with the Chancellor; the remainder of the party paired off in the others.

"I told Mrs. Rexford I hoped you could help us with the East-Campus Transfer problem," he joked as we started off. The sidecars were elegantly appointed, and virtually soundproof. "Since you made it through the Turnstile and Scrapegoat Grate, maybe you can find a way for people to slip through the Power Line." He asked me then how I was faring, and I recounted briefly my morning's travels and my concern at Harold Bray's promiscuous Certifications. He tisked sympathetic disapproval of Max's attitude. If only Max would leave all pleading to the lawyers, he said, there would be no trouble getting an acquittal, or at worst a suspended sentence; Siegfried-New Tammany relations would not be threatened, and Max would be free to punish himself in any way he saw fit. The problem was especially vexing at the present time, Rexford added, when NTC was counting on the support of its former adversary in a number of controversial programs which would be handicapped, even spoiled, by any general resurgence of anti-Siegfrieder sentiment in West Campus. At my mention of Maurice Stoker I felt him bristle and knew I was being undiplomatic, but as it bore upon my plan for the Boundary Dispute I explained my conviction that Stoker claimed kinship with him in order that none might believe the claim; thus that the flunkèd libel had a passèd effect, if not a passèd motive: the polar distinguishing of Passage and Failure, which never for an instant must be confused.

Mr. Rexford was cordially skeptical. "Earlier this morning you wanted me to admit he was my brother."

"If I did I shouldn't have," I apologized. "I think you should be as opposite to him as you can be. You should deny him once and for all, publicly. By name."

"Oh well…" He waved cheerfully from the sidecar to throngs of well-wishers along the seedy campus streets through which we happened to be passing. Many were garishly dressed women — prostitute ladies, in fact, as I presently learned, or "campus-followers," who throve in the rougher quadrangles of the College. They all waved back, as did their pimps and the other toughs of the quad. "That would be going a little far, if you mean refuse to do business with him at all."

"Then you won't like my plan for ending the Boundary Dispute, I'm sure," I said; "my notion about opposites is that they ought to be kept as distinct and far apart as possible."

The Chancellor assured me that he quite agreed. We were passing now through an equally squalid quadrangle: the paths and steps were littered with drunks; youths loitered in mean-looking knots; posters advertised erotic films; a man punched a woman in the mouth with such force that she almost dropped the baby she was nursing. This last scene particularly arrested Mr. Rexford, who turned to watch the pair over his shoulder when we had passed, and tisked his tongue when the lady's assailant kissed her contusions.

"It seems to me," I went on, "that making clear distinctions must be the first step to Graduation: not confusing one thing with another, especially the passèd with the flunked."

"I couldn't agree more," Mr. Rexford smiled. "That's why I think of WESCAC as our colleague instead of our enemy: the only cure for knowledge is more knowledge." However, he added (speaking as though in a rehearsed interview, but growing clearly interested in the subject as he talked), there were two distinctions in particular which he felt must be insisted on when speaking of the importance of Distinctions in general. One was the difference between scientific and human affairs: in the former, though all might be precise in theory, seldom was anything in fact, and in consequence — as Dr. Eierkopf's frustrations illustrated — real nature could only approximate the orderliness of theoretical nature, and often contradicted it. In the areas of studentdom's morals and government, on the other hand, all theories soon led to impossible contradictions — hence the typical despair of advanced students in those fields — but in practical fact much could be achieved. East and West Campuses, he reminded me before I could remind him, were ideologically irreconcilable — thus the conservative insistence that negotiation between them must be fruitless — yet the record showed, to his satisfaction at least, that constant negotiation backed by flexible strength and firm leadership had brought New Tammany and Nikolay Colleges closer together in fact, if not in theory. "Remember what I said this morning about the two sides of the arch," he said; "their opposition supports the whole building. Look how influential the small colleges are getting in the U.C. because we and the Nikolayans are deadlocked. It's a constructive state of affairs."

The second distinction he'd also mentioned in his speech of the morning: the difference between questioning means and questioning ends; between the criticism of operations and the challenging of first principles. The University, he insisted again, made what sense it made only when one accepted certain first principles without question. "You remember the old story about the Chancellor's New Gown, that the tailors claimed was invisible to cuckolds? Well, I say the truth of it is that he was robed until that kindergartener said he wasn't. The people laughed at him then and punished the tailors for fraud, because the alternative was to admit that they were all cuckolds, every one, including the Chancellor himself." I noticed that he blushed at this point. "As for the child: if he was too young to be cuckolded, he was too young to understand a robe invisible to cuckolds. That doesn't make him right. There are plenty of things on campus that can't be seen until you've learned to see them, and some of the most important disappear when you look at them directly, or too closely. It doesn't follow that they aren't there." He reaffirmed his criticism of the author of Taliped Decanus: "The fact is, Taliped was a good father and husband and a good dean until he let his basic research go too far: the playwright cheats by pretending that a flunking situation can exist without anyone's knowing it, and then choosing one that everybody in the theater knows about except the characters in the play! So the idea of Taliped's not finding out is as horrifying to us as his discovery." He blushed again. "But look at you; look at me; look at all of us — we're getting along, aren't we? Was Cadmus College any better off at the end of the play? Why didn't Taliped leave well enough alone? People ought to mind their own business, and get their work done, and not ask basic questions like whether anything's worth doing!"

This last was said with such surprising heat, even bitterness, that the Chancellor noticed my dismay and apologized. "I get as carried away as Maurice Stoker sometimes," he confessed with a little laugh. "It's a great temptation to say 'Flunk all this responsibility and reasonableness.' It would be awfully easy to go home and get drunk, and beat your wife like that fellow back there instead of living reasonably with her; or say any mad thing you feel like saying instead of weighing all the consequences."

He admitted then that his unwonted vociferousness was due to his certainty that I'd challenge the ground of his recent Certification by "the Grand Tutor," which now he showed me. Passèd are the riot-quellers, it read: if order is better than disorder, Lucius Rexford is a Candidate for Graduation.

"My assumption is that order is better than disorder," he said. "I don't question that for a second, and frankly I don't care to hear it questioned."

I assured him that I had no quarrel with the proposition; on the contrary, I was ready to affirm (as I would not have been on the previous day) that order and disorder were like Passage and Failure, not to be confused either in fact or in value. I kept to myself certain reservations about his comment on the Taliped play (had he forgotten that Cadmus College was rotting and dying from the poison of the Dean's secret flunkage? And that Gynander, the Cadmusian equivalent of a Grand Tutor, had not been ignorant of the awful answer?) and commended sincerely both his distinction between theory and practice in science and in politics and his general position vis-à-vis first principles, which I rather shared: would I not otherwise have despaired long since of my undemonstrable Grand-Tutorhood? Of all humans I had met on campus, I told him, there was none whose Candidacy it would more delight me to affirm than his…

"But," he grinned sadly. I had indeed a but or two, not unrelated to my program for ending the Boundary Dispute, but before I could think of a respectful way to voice them the Chancellor said, "They tell me you've seen a bit of Mr. and Mrs. Stoker recently." I acknowledged I had, remembering suddenly and with interest an insinuation of Stoker's: that Lucius Rexford was among those to whom Anastasia had granted — more accurately, not denied — her favors. The image of Mrs. Rexford's coolness on the verandah recurred to me. "Excuse the personal question," the Chancellor went on: "we've all heard how he abuses his wife; even beats her. Did you get the impression that she loves him?"

I considered for a moment — not so much the yes or no demanded by the question, but how I might turn my response to more pertinent account.

"Do you think it's ever right for a man to strike his wife, sir?"

"What?" He frowned sharply. "Well, no. No, of course not." Whether or not he saw the difference between his question and mine, he answered at once, blushing vigorously, and added before I could think how to ask it: "Or be unfaithful to her, either. It's indefensible — especially if his wife is loyal and affectionate."

"And Stoker's not your brother, is he, sir? You agree that his way of life is flunkèd, don't you?"

Because I saw his eyes begin to flash dangerfully, I hastened to modulate to a less personal and particular application of my general point, the same I'd endeavored to make to Max, Peter Greene, Dr. Eierkopf, and Croaker — even, half-wittingly, to Anastasia, and perversely to Ira Hector and Stoker himself: that apart from the question of whether the grounds of their Certifications were valid or the Certifier was authorized, I was not convinced that themselves quite measured up to those several standards after all. Just as I'd found on the one hand Stoker's Dean-o'-Flunkhood and Ira Hector's selfishness equivocal, and likewise on the other Anastasia's vulnerable magnanimity, Max's scapegoatery, Greene's innocence, Eierkopf's asceticism, and Croaker's appetitiveness, so I suspected that Lucius Rexford was not so entirely free of Stokerishness, so to speak, as we both might wish: I dared guess he had lost his temper with Mrs. Rexford on occasion, perhaps even had struck her — surely not more than once or twice — as well as sampled at least upon one occasion the extracurricular pleasure of Anastasia. Obversely, his condemnation of extremism and disorder, as manifest in Stoker, had never been more than mild; it was his partisans and associates who shouted down the gossip of their fraternity.

Not to speak of these things directly, I praised instead his speech of the morning and the philosopher Entelechus on whom he'd drawn, and with whose thought I had a passing acquaintance, thanks to Max. Then I made bold to suggest that the principle of moderation and compromise lost its meaning if it too was compromised and moderated. Entelechus himself, I happened to recall, had warned against "means in the extremes" — by which he meant that one was not to lie, cheat, steal, rape, or murder even discreetly, but to eschew those vices altogether. Just so (I spoke in as objectively illustrative a tone as I could manage) with adultery, wife-beating, drunkenness, and violence of all sorts; the question was not when, with whom, how much, or how often, but whether at all in any case; and the answer was No.

"There's the U.C. building ahead," the Chancellor observed. His voice was glum.

I begged him in that event to hear me out, as I'd only been illustrating what seemed to me to be the correct Entelechian approach to the Boundary Dispute.

"Our present policy isn't Entelechian?" His tone was amused: New Tammany's strategy, he said, had been to do business of every sort on as many fronts as possible with the Nikolayans; to involve the affairs of the two colleges so subtly and extensively that détente would be the actual state of intercollegiate affairs regardless of theoretical contradictions, and riot would become tantamount to economic as well as physical suicide. The long-standing Boundary Dispute — now virtually an institution, with its own budget, offices, officers, rituals, and publications — provided the occasion and machinery for innumerable other connections with Nikolay and the lesser Student-Unionist colleges: to name one cynical example, the Departments of Espionage and Counterintelligence on both sides would be seriously handicapped without such points of contact as the conference-table; and the secret diplomacy essential to any serious intercollege business would be unmanageable without a convenient "front" like the Boundary Dispute.

"If it didn't exist we'd have to invent it," Mr. Rexford said, only partly in jest. "But it's much better to use a language that's already been worked out, don't you agree? The Nikolayan delegate, for example, the fellow who calls himself Classmate X — suppose he says his college will refuse to pay its dues to the University Council as long as New Tammany blocks the admission of T'ang College. What he means is, they don't want T'ang in either, but it wouldn't be nice to say so, so if we'll keep blocking T'ang's admission and let Nikolay save face by reneging on their debt, they won't interfere with our extension-work in certain other colleges. We know this is what he means, and Classmate X knows we know it; so our delegate agrees by denouncing people who don't pay their bills and by threatening not to pay our own — which means we will pay, since we've got more to lose than the Nikolayans do if the U.C. folds up, but it'll be hard to push the appropriation through a conservative Senate, so they'll have to lay low on the Power Line at least until after the next election." He smiled. "All this must sound very cynical to somebody raised on a goat-farm by Dr. Spielman."

"I'm afraid it does indeed!" I exclaimed. But the Chancellor maintained that, lamentable or not, such were the political realities; he declared that the best political scientists were those to whom these multiple meanings were so clear that they truly went without saying; to whom the symbolic use of varsity political language was such second nature that they felt neither cynical nor hypocritical about the disparity between their public statements and their actual policies: for them, and their fellow-initiates, there was no disparity; they never confused symbol with referent.

"That's not Entelechian!" I protested. "Excuse me, sir: that's Dean-o'-Flunkish! You sound like Maurice Stoker!"

He had for a moment put by the reserve that characteristically went with his good humor; now it was stiffly in place again. "I suppose, from a Grand Tutor's point of view…"

"From Entelechus's!" I insisted. "From your own, sir!" We had drawn up by this time before a many-storied glass slab, where throngs of students and policemen awaited the Chancellor's arrival. A small herd of black-gowned dignitaries came down the entrance-steps towards us; a uniformed ROTC officer opened our sidecar door and snapped to attention with a fixed salute. But the Chancellor half-raised a hand to stay the greeters, smiled his most mischievous smile at me, and said, "Obviously we mustn't EAT each other. How would you handle the Boundary Dispute? Take a whole minute if you need to."

I drew a breath. "I'd separate the Power Lines."

"What?" His expression was offended.

"Adjourn the Symposium," I said. "Double the distance between the Power Lines. Tell WESCAC to separate its circuitry completely from EASCAC's."

He declared I was joking, but reclosed the sidecar door for a moment; those outside shifted about and consulted their wristwatches.

"It's like Stoker, or the Dean o' Flunks, or a terrible disease," I argued; "if you do business with these things, they always win. Extreme in the mean is what you've got to be, and not compromise even for a second with Flunkage, or let opposites get confused. An arch won't do between True and False; they've got to be cut with an edge as sharp as the Infinite Divisor, and separated."

The Chancellor shook his head as I spoke, but his smile was grave, and he seemed after all to be listening, so I quickly enlarged upon my theme. To make concessions to the forces of Failure, I said — to this Classmate X fellow or to Stoker — was like conceding to malevolent bacteria: one might approve moderate exercise over athleticism, but not moderate illness over health. And the health of a college, it seemed evident to me, like the health of an orderly and passèd administration, came not from cooperation with its antithesis, but from real repudiation of it. The spirit and letter of Rexfordian law was order, intelligence, and light; let there then be no disorder in New Tammany, or unreason, or other darkness. If it was inescapable that the lights of Great Mall depended ultimately on what went on under Founder's Hill, then let there at least be no converse between head and bowels, not to speak of envy and occasional emulation! Ban Maurice Stoker from Great Mall, I urged him, and deny his kinship from the rooftops; have no commerce with Ira Hector, much less Classmate X; let there be no negotiations with Nikolay College, overt or covert; disentangle WESCAC's circuitry once and for all; separate the power-cables; draw a hard line between them — well on our side, if necessary; double the floodlighting; triple the guard…

"You said the guards fall now and then because they look down," I finished pointedly; "They should wear a special collar like the ones we use on bad goats, so they can't look down."

As he smiled — tugging at his forelock somewhat wearily, I confess — and opened the sidecar door again, a commotion broke out upon the cordoned steps leading up to the hall. I had just time to glimpse a patch-eyed fellow struggling with policemen before two guards sprang, pistols in hand, to shield the Chancellor, and blocked my view.

"Another lunatic," Lucius Rexford muttered. He still smiled, but his face had briefly lost its color. "Let's go in," he said to the guards.

"Just a second, sir," one of them answered. "They're having a little trouble with him."

"He doesn't seem to be armed," the other guard observed. "Better play it safe, though."

But the Chancellor would not remain in the sidecar. As he stepped out, guards hurried to encircle him. The watchers cheered; he grinned and gave a little wave of his hand to them, but I felt distinctly that for all his popularity and charm he did not quite trust the adoring student body, from whose extremities assassins, and Grand Tutors sometimes sprang. The police struggling with the patch-eyed man looked worriedly in our direction; their quarry's face lit up — I recognized him as that Nikolayan I'd seen through the electric mesh in the Control Room, and with whom Peter Greene had reportedly scuffled at Stoker's Randy-Thursday party. Indeed he was hard to hold onto: though four or five had hands on him he slipped their grasp, cried, "Great and good man!" and flung himself onto his knees in our path just as the guards seemed ready to shoot.

"Am not assassin!" he declared to the Chancellor. "Am transfer out of Nikolay! Great lover of you! Hello, Grand Tutor! I don't believe!"

Guards escorted the Chancellor rapidly towards the building; others slapped handcuffs onto the kneeling man's wrists, which however he opened as if by magic in order to wave to Lucius Rexford.

"Goodbye, goodbye! Peace in University!"

I had been left behind in the confusion. "You know this guy?" a guard in plainclothes asked me. Others replaced the handcuffs on the Nikolayan's wrists, which now he offered them smilingly.

"I know of him," I began to say.

"Alexandrov," the prisoner volunteered. Again with ease he slipped one hand free to extend it to me, and with the other tugged at his black mustache. "Leonid Andreich Alexandrov, Doctor of Engineering. Lover of Anastasia Stoker. Admirer of you. But don't believe in! Skepticismal!" His handshake, like his frame, was sturdy and powerful; his dark eye glistened cordially in a red face topped with black and handsome curls.

"Something wrong with them cuffs," a guard said. But the Nikolayan grinned, shook his head, and explained proudly that it was his special talent with locks that had enabled him to slip through the charged screen of the Control Room, make his way to the U.C. building (where his father, he declared, was head of the Nikolayan delegation), and transfer in the sight of all. "Main Detention, please?" he requested in conclusion. "You take me there now, okay?"

"You'd better sit in on the interrogation," I was told. The plainclothesmen were much aroused by the news that their man was the son of Classmate X; in view of the delicate diplomatic aspects of his defection, and my wish to rejoin the Chancellor in pursuit of my Assignment, it was agreed that the questioning should take place at once, in the U.C. offices of the New Tammany delegation; both NTC and Nikolay College would be likely to want the Symposium-opening delayed until the situation could be assessed.

"No," the Nikolayan insisted. "Main Detention." It was remarkable how with the merest twitch of a muscle he escaped their clutch. "Am not a transfer," he said now. "Am a spy. Come to kidnap a scientist." He grinned. "Long live Student Union! Down with Informationalist adventurismhood! You send me to Main Detention, okay?"

The guards exchanged looks. "Let's talk it over inside," they said, almost politely. "If you're telling the truth, you'll see Main Detention soon enough."

Mr. Alexandrov considered for a second and then nodded assent. "You come along?" he asked me. "Mrs. Anastasia admires, I admire."

"But don't believe in," I reminded him.

He undid his handcuffs — two pairs this time — to clap an arm affectionately about me. "Goat-Boys da; Grand Tutors nyet."

We went inside, our agitated escorts fending off journalists and crowds of the curious. Arguments in several languages were in progress in the lobbies and corridors we hurried through; at our appearance they grew louder, and a herd of gesticulating dignified gentlemen collected behind us. Mr. Alexandrov waved to some of them, who glared back. At the door of the suite of offices we went into, a furious debate commenced, through interpreters, between what appeared to be representatives of the two colleges involved, over the question of who should be admitted to the room.

"How do you do that trick with the handcuffs?" I asked the prisoner, who for the moment was being ignored. "It's very clever."

He beamed and playfully punched my chest. "Big secrecy, Classmate! I don't tell!" Then impulsively he laughed and added, "But Mrs. Anastasia's good-friend, okay!" He collared me in order to whisper into my ear something I heard imperfectly, for our guards and the Nikolayan officials both jumped to end the confidence. But though I declared to them honestly enough that I'd not understood the message through the din, it seemed to me upon later reflection that Not locked must have been its puzzling burden, along with the words Let go! — — which could however have been either a specific demand of the guards who drew us apart, or a kind of general injunction. The Nikolayan himself appeared certainly to follow some such policy: he flung his arms freely as he talked, undid the second button of his already open-necked shirt, and loosened his belt when he sat down.

"Big spy!" he said, thumbing his chest; but his eye-patch looked like a broad wink. The Nikolayan officials all harangued him at once; he rejected them with a sweep of the arm and a shake of the head.

"He surrenders absolutely, confesses his intention to kidnap, and rejects counsel," a New Tammany official said to them, and added sternly that although he would clear the office of journalists and cameramen, and permit the Nikolayan representatives to remain, they must not interfere with the prisoner's right to speak freely. On the other hand, he insisted that Mr. Alexandrov was under no obligation to make a statement, and that all he said would be recorded as possible evidence against him.

"That's okay!" Alexandrov cried, and shouted down the Nikolayans' protests in their own language. "I fail assignment, deserve Main Detention!"

A report came to the office that the opening of the Summit Symposium had been delayed and that Classmate X was on his way to join us; the New Tammany official invited the prisoner to wait, but Alexandrov — whose emotions changed frequently and dramatically — declared with tears in his eyes that he had once already disgraced his father, whom he revered, and could not bear to face him disgraced again. Briefly then, in elliptical exclamations, he told his story: Believed wholeheartedly in Classless Campus and similar Student-Unionist ideals. No masters, no pupils! Despised Ira Hector and other greedy Informationalists, but admired several individual New Tammanians: Professor-General Reginald Hector, liberator of Siegfrieder concentration campus where he'd been prisoner in Second Riot; Chancellor Rexford, lover of peace and man of goodwill; Mrs. Anastasia, who would be Graduate except Graduation was Informationalist lie, opiate of lower percentiles; myself, who had right respect for goats and other animals (Anastasia, it appeared, had spoken of me to him in not unflattering terms, on Randy-Thursday) — a virtue evidently outweighing in his eye my claim to Grand-Tutorhood. Which didn't believe in, et cetera. But of all men on campus, admired most his father, for perfect selflessness exemplified in renouncing even a name…

"Greatnesshood!" he shouted, pounding the chair-arm. "Splendidacy!"

But now his eye sparkled with frustration: he could not help loving these people, yet he disapproved of his love, which smacked of Informationalist idolatry. Nor was this his only failing as a Student-Unionist: he was subject, he confessed, to fits of impulsive insubordination and independent behavior, which no amount of subsequent remorse appeared to cure. As a young riot-engineer in C.R. II, for example, he had been captured by the Siegfrieders early in the conflict when he'd stolen behind their lines one night, without authorization, to untether a nannny-goat abandoned by a fleeing farmer. Thereafter, in the Bonifacist concentration campus, he'd turned his engineering skill to the arts of unlocking and releasing; ashamed to return to his own unit, he proved so competent at arranging the escape of others that the Nikolayan professor-generals soon were sending him lists, via deliberately captured recruits, of prisoners whose escape was to have priority — generally officers. But time and again his emotions had the better of his self-discipline, and he would free the recruits instead, out of admiration for their selflessness. After the Riot he'd risen to prominence as a computer-programmer, specializing in the untanglement of knotty mathematical problems; but his old proclivity now and then came to the fore — especially when, as sometimes happened, he would meet a comrade from former terms and drink too many toasts to their fallen classmates. After one such bout he had found himself in the Nikolayan Zoological Gardens and, smitten with sympathy for its internees, had commenced a wholesale uncaging. So spectacular was the consequent furor, and difficult the job of constraining him, he might have been shot along with sundry bears and tigers had not his father been fetched to the scene to command him, by loudspeaker through a cloud of monkeys, to surrender himself.

"Humiliationship!" he exclaimed, and pressed one fist of his brooding brow. His captors, he said, had despaired of holding him, though when he'd seen what carnage ensued from his generous intentions, he'd declared himself willing to be jailed for life: not only had several of the beasts necessarily been shot, but some had eaten others, and many of the more exotic were doomed to perish for want of their customary food and environment. A debate had followed on how best to punish him (a regular court-trial was out of the question because of his father's position); and seeing his superiors deadlocked, he generously volunteered them the means painfullest to himself — a cell lined with mirrors instead of bars. So strong was his aversion to any reflection — an antipathy he could not account for, at least in our language — that such a cell would need no lock at all to contain him: he would be frozen in its center with his eye shut.

I interrupted: "You have a thing about mirrors too! Isn't that curious! Did you know that Peter Greene, the man you fought with at Stoker's — "

Officials shushed me, lest the prisoner stop talking.

"Ha!" Alexandrov laughed. "A baby. But unselfish, Goat-Boy! And loves Mrs. Anastasia! But stupid! But okay, I like, and shouldn't fight with. A good man! But bah!"

This sentiment, though I think I shared it, was beside my point, but I let the coincidence of the two men's common aversion to mirrors go, as not worth the labor of articulating. Whatever the cause of Leonid Andreich's, it was at least as intense as Greene's, evidently, for after a day and night in the mirrored cell, which had been promptly constructed for him, he was seized by a kind of fit not unlike epilepsy, and, falling, struck with his head one of the hateful walls so forcefully that the glass shivered. He revived in a prison infirmary, minus his right eye and in such despair at ever becoming a credit to his college that when his father arranged him a position in the Founder's Hill Control Room he at first refused it as an undeserved honor. His eventual acceptance was in order not further to disoblige the man he most admired, and to carry out a scheme of atonement that had occurred to him: his own father, it seemed (one of our translators remarked that the Nikolayan word used occasionally by the prisoner actually meant "stepfather," and someone else explained that Classmate X had married Alexandrov's mother, a Riot-widow, only a dozen or so years previously, after Leonid Andreich's rematriculation), had been a computer-expert prior to his appearance on the diplomatic scene, and possibly had been involved at one time in counter-intelligence work as well —

"How's that?" cried the NTC official. "Have him say that again!" The consternation was equally great among the Nikolayans, who drowned out the prisoner's voice with protests and demanded that no more be said until they'd had time to consult their superiors. Angrily they denounced Alexandrov, who blushed and apologized for speaking thoughtlessly. He sprang up from his chair, shrugging off all hands; men hurried to block windows and doorways in case he meant to flee or destroy himself — but he was merely restless, and strode now vigorously about the room, waving his arms. He ignored his classmates' orders to say no more until their chief arrived; the New Tammanians delightedly scribbled notes.

"Forget I said about father," he laughed. "A stupidacy in my head!"

In any case, he said, he was aware how close and crucial was the race between Nikolay College and NTC to perfect the "dreadfulship" of their respective EATing capacities; realizing also that a man with his peculiar talent for "releaseness" would be in an advantageous position in the Control Room to aid the cause of his alma mater, he had resolved to slip through the electrified screen, kidnap some eminent computer-scientist from the West-Campus side, and by spiriting him over the Power Line put the Nikolayans ahead in the EAT-race, redeem his past failings, and become an honored and respected member of the Student Union like his father.

"But!" He gave a vast sly shrug. "I come here to say goodbye to father, I see instead Rexford — I admire! A forgetness; you catch me; I'm disgrace!" He seemed altogether pleased with himself. The New Tammany officials glanced at one another.

"You should be ashamed of yourself," I told him. One official frowned and asked another who the flunk I was anyhow; some reply was whispered into his ear. Leonid Andreich, as if reminded by my words that a man in disgrace did not ordinarily cross his arms and smile, quickly clutched his hair and agreed that Classmate X, himself so perfectly disciplined, would of course despise him for his "incompetencehood" in getting himself arrested. But for a man whose desire to please his father was as obviously sincere as was Leonid's, this profession of disgrace had a counterfeit ring. In any case his arrest was not what I'd been referring to, I told him, but his motive and intention. I conceded at the outset that Informationalism was based on a kind of flunking avarice, and that particular Informationalists like Ira Hector were to all appearances irredeemably greedy: Flunkèd are the selfish, it was written in the Founder's Scroll, and nowise might flunked mean passed.

"Da! Da!" the Nikolayan cried happily. "Even other Grand Tutor — I don't believe, I don't like either! — he says too!"

Very well, then, I said (concealing my chagrin), it was agreed on both sides of the Power Line that selfishness was reprehensible. But Leonid's behavior seemed to me selfish — in the sense of vanity more than of avarice — both in its intention and its motive. Recalling some of Max's observations on the subject, I declared that if to be a perfect Student-Unionist meant to efface one's personal self and identify absolutely with the "student self" or the "self of the college," then to wish to be a perfect Student-Unionist, or even a great Nikolayan, must "flunk" the wisher in the eyes of Classmate X, for example. Leonid's dilemma was thus not unlike mine, or any right-thinking undergraduate's, and I spoke of it therefore with compassion: the wish to achieve perfect self-suppression, like the yen to Graduate, was finally a prideful wish and thus self-defeating; to achieve it, not only the self must be suppressed, but the selfish wish itself. Aspiration, it seemed to me, by the logic of Studeflt-Unionism, was permissible only in the College Self…

"I like you, Goat-Boy!" Leonid shouted — fortunately, for others in the room were not pleased by my words and chiding tone, and would have terminated our conversation if Leonid hadn't embraced me and insisted I continue.

"Well," I said, "you won't agree, I suppose, but my former keeper, Dr. Spielman, used to say that what the Student-Unionists do is transfer their normal selfishness onto the College Self, which then becomes more selfish than an Informationalist college, even though the people in it may be less selfish individually…"

Whether he understood my position, to say nothing of agreeing with it, seemed doubtful; he colored at the mention of Max's name and released me in order to pace again about the room. But I gimped beside him (most of the others were huddled in conferences against the arrival of Classmate X) and insisted he agree that the competition for supremacy between East and West Campuses was essentially a selfish competition, in which New Tammany and Nikolay Colleges each were guilty of seeking advantage over the other in every sphere and extending their hegemonies in the name of self-defense. Why else would the Nikolayans want the computer-scientist whom he had planned to abduct, or the New Tammanians not want to lose him? The colleges were all Ira Hectors…

"Goat-Boy, Goat-Boy!" Leonid groaned — in what spirit I could not quite tell.

A little dismayed, I said, "I guess it's a real problem to be a good Student-Unionist, isn't it?" and from the doorway a voice like polished steel replied, "Not at all. A proper Student-Unionist can have no problems. Only the College may have problems."

The newcomer I guessed at once to be Classmate X: as slight and pinched a man as Ira Hector, though less determinate of age, he had too Ira's cold bright eyes, which glinted however more of metal than of gems. He wore an ill-cut suit of coarse material, was hairless, had much metal in his teeth, and spoke almost tonelessly. Two words he said to Leonid, in their tongue, and his stepson sprang to him. They regarded each other, Leonid clasping and unclasping his hands, Classmate X without gesture or expression. Then the older man asked a New Tammany official to explain why Classmate Alexandrov was being detained, and having listened impassively to the reply, and to his son's tape-recorded confession, he asked Leonid (according to our interpreters) to affirm or deny the charge of intent to kidnap. Leonid affirmed it, adding ardently that his motive had been to atone for the errors of his past, and declaring that he would find a way yet to make himself worthy of membership in the Student Union and of his father's respect.

Classmate X gave the slightest shrug of the shoulders. "The fool is yours," he said to the chief of the New Tammany officials, and turned on his heel. Leonid leaped after him, wet-eyed, then stopped and flung himself into a chair. Two Nikolayans left the room with their superior, and after a second's consideration I followed them into the corridor.

"Mr. X?" I called. "Mr. Classmate X, sir!" He stopped and precisely turned his leathern skull. His associates glared, even counseled him (so I gathered from their expressions) to ignore me; but he shook his head, as slightly as he had shrugged earlier, and permitted me to overtake them.

"Dr. Spielman's protégé," he murmured with the faintest of smiles. "No use trying to Graduate us, Classmate Goat-Boy: until everyone can pass, we won't believe in Passage. Too bad your Dr. Spielman's turned mid-percentile — he used to have more sense."

His accent, I noticed, was very slight, and closer to Max's, for example, than to any Nikolayan's I had heard. I asked whether he knew my former keeper personally, promising to pass along his regards when next I visited his cell.

"No use in that," he said quickly. "One knows Dr. Spielman by reputation, of course. Let's speak no more of him." And so we moved on down the corridor towards a reception-room where he was to confer informally with Chancellor Rexford prior to the opening of the Summit Symposium (at which, his college being currently administered by a committee instead of one man, he was temporarily empowered to deal on equal footing with the NTC Chancellor); but he returned at once to the forbidden subject, expressing his skepticism that Max had really murdered Herman Hermann and his disapproval of the deed. That Bonifacists should be exterminated he quite agreed, but not in so laissez-faire a manner, at the whim of amateur individuals; programs of liquidation, like programs of "charity," were best left to ad hoc committees of experts like those which eliminated the counterrevolutionary elements in Nikolay College and directed the supply of food and "educational material" to certain famine-ridden Frumentian campuses some terms past — in both which operations, as he put it, "some of us participated." Otherwise, private feelings of hatred or compassion were liable at least to supplant the suprapersonal spirit in which the ends of collegiate policy ought properly to be served, if they did not actually interfere with the attainment of those ends.

I was ready to assure him from habit that Max couldn't possibly be guilty of the murder, but checked myself with the painful memory that he had confessed to the contrary, and affirmed to me his confession. So instead, with an aching throat, I briefly rehearsed my objections to the Student-Unionist doctrines of self-suppression and the insignificance of the individual student, and he heard me out impassively.

"I'm not speaking as a New Tammanian or an Informationalist," I declared.

"Really."

"Honestly. I've seen how selfish life in this college is, in lots of ways; and anyhow a Grand Tutor doesn't take sides in varsity politics."

"Ah."

But Commencement, I insisted, was always of the individual student, never of studentdom as such — a mere abstraction, in my opinion — and so while I condemned selfishness as heartily as he, it seemed to me that its passing opposite was not the unnatural and unfeeling selflessness of the dedicated Student-Unionist, but the warm unselfishness apparent in men like Leonid Andreich Alexandrov, whom I took to be more representative of Nikolayan studentdom than was his stepfather. "I felt more sympathy for him than you did," I charged. "Even the guards who arrested him were kinder than you!"

"Students are not important," Classmate X replied crisply. "Studentdom is all that matters." The Student Union embodied the general will of studentdom, he said, and Nikolay College had been appointed by history to lead the Student Union in the implementation of that will. If Leonid Andreich, or any or all of the rest of us, happened to obstruct this implementation, we must be sacrified in its behalf. A willingness to make that sacrifice was the first condition of membership in the Union, whose will must be done; and making it the best validation of that willingness.

"But what about sacrificing other people?" I demanded. "Suppose you decide that the College Self calls for an EATing-riot?"

Classmate X cocked his head a very little. "If every living student in the University had to be EATen in the name of studentdom," he said politely, "still the will of the Union would be done."

I protested that he couldn't possibly be serious, yet was chilled to realize that he was. "Would you push the EAT-button yourself?"

We were at the entrance to a crowded reception-chamber; many heads turned at our approach. Classmate X covered his face with his hat when photographic lamps began flashing.

"To be the agent of the general will," he asserted through the felt, "is an honor exceeded only by being its instrument. If the will of the Union is that the button be pressed, then the one thing better than being the presser is to be the button." He made a scarcely perceptible bow, presumably by way of taking leave of me, and entered the room. But I pressed after.

"That's just plain vanity!" I protested. Several large Nikolayans moved towards me when I raised my voice, but I went on. "It's as bad as Max saying he wants to be Shafted in the name of studentdom! You're not really selfless at all!"

"Max is a fool!" Classmate X said sharply — his first betrayal of any emotion. But though my taunt evidently angered him, he motioned aside the aides who scowled between us and said in a small, hard voice — still covering his face: "One's original family was murdered by the Bonifacists, except for a single son, who fled with oneself to be killed in action later in the Riot. One's second wife died this year. And so Leonid Andreich is one's sole surviving relative…" Only when he mentioned Leonid's name did I understand that by "one" he referred to himself. "One is not displeased with such a relative," he went on; "not at all displeased! One feels one could do a great deal worse indeed than to have such a son as Leonid Andreich…" He actually tapped my arm, an unprecedented display of feeling. "And yet, Classmate Goat-Boy, and yet" — his eyes shone briefly over the brim of his hat — "because it is the wish of the Student Union that a certain party be admitted to its ranks, let us say, from the Other Side, and because no one is more suited to the work of escorting this party to us than Leonid Andreich… Because of these things, Goat-Boy, and despite the likelihood that the escort will never be permitted by the Other Side to return to his alma mater and his father's house, one suggests to Leonid Andreich that he expend himself in that sacrificial work. Do you understand my meaning? One even orders him to do so, giving him to believe that so unresponsive has he proved to the discipline of selflessness, he can earn his father's esteem in no other wise. Posthumously, you might as well say! As if — " But he whipped around in mid-blurt, choking off the clause.

"As if he had to earn it!" I cried after him. "I think you love your stepson very much!" Classmate X strode away — plunged, really, still hatting his visage — and hands restrained me from following, but I called at his retreating back: "I'll bet you sent him to New Tammany so he wouldn't have to suppress his self!"

What held him in range of my mad declarations — taunts they were, as much as insights, made in despair now of ending the Boundary Dispute by reasoning with the principals — was that an agitated group not unlike ours had come across the room to meet us, at its center Chancellor Rexford. Classmate X's pate had gone quite white; Rexford's face was uncharacteristically grim. Photographic lights flashed all about us now; plainclothes guards and other officials on both sides conferred in furious whispers, pointed to me, consulted papers, shrugged their shoulders angrily. We were a large ring now, enclosing Chancellor Rexford and Classmate X, myself to one side. Neither leader seemed willing to initiate the ceremonial handshake; both turned severely to their aides. Still inspired by desperation, I asserted to Classmate X, "That kidnap-story was only a pretext; you were hoping Leonid would transfer!"

After a silent moment (during which cameramen and microphoned reporters edged into my end of the circle) everyone began shouting at the same time, and the ring became a little mob that pressed the three of us together. Chancellor Rexford, flushing red, made some expostulation in which I caught the phrases "privileged visitor," "special credentials," and "no harm done"; his tone seemed at first pacificatory, but changed when Classmate X waved his fist and shouted that there would be no Symposium; that the space between the Power Lines would be widened, the guard increased, and all communication between East and West Campuses terminated absolutely.

"You can't mean that!" Rexford said angrily, and demanded of an aide, "Can he speak for his college this way? What's the matter with him?"

I offered an explanation which both or neither of the parties may have heard: "He's identifying the College Self with his own self, instead of vice-versa. It's a flunking thing to do, by his own standards…"

"Shut that shaggy idiot up!" someone cried, and with a chorus of abuse I was hustled from the principals, who too had separated, or been separated by their respective aides. There was much excited talk of "insults," "loss of face," "torpedoed negotiations." Having got me out of reach of their leaders, no one knew what to do with me, for though their distress and indignation were evident, they had gathered I enjoyed some special status in the Chancellor's party.

"Founder help you if you're the one who upset X," snarled a forelocked fellow. "You've shot down the whole flunking Boundary Conference!"

Until that moment, distracted by my sympathy for Leonid Alexandrov and the ideological exchanges with him and his stepfather, I hadn't realized the significance of my achievement.

"By George, you're right!" I exclaimed. "I guess I've ended the Boundary Dispute!"

The aide conjectured disagreeably that it might prove the end of the University as well. Now the Chancellor's party came by, still waving hands and frantically conferring; only Lucius Rexford himself was silent, his face somewhat gray and his jaw set: the speech he was to have delivered had been canceled, the Summit Symposium indefinitely postponed, the entire business of the University Council suspended for the day. At sight of me he stopped, seemed to hesitate between denouncing me and going on his way, and at last said tersely: "New Tammany looked pretty foolish just then. It's lucky this mess looks like their doing and not ours — or yours."

"No, no, sir," I protested; "that's the only thing wrong with it. You've got to take back the initiative! This justifies all those other measures I suggested." Rexford moved on towards the entrance-lobby, walking swiftly, and I trotted as best I could beside him; his aides neither disguised their hostility nor dared restrain me.

"Do the same thing with Maurice Stoker that you did here!" I urged him. "Go the whole way, sir!"

He made no reply. I didn't venture to enter the sidecar with him uninvited — and in fact an aide sprang into the second seat, as if to forestall me — but before the door closed I called encouragement from the curb: "Light up everything! Make New Tammany an open book!" His motorcycle went off then (down the middle of the pavement, I was pleased to observe), and his party dispersed, still buzzing gravely, among the other official vehicles. As no one invited my company on the one hand, or on the other denied me the privilege of returning to Great Mall as I'd come, I found a seat alone in the last sidecar of the motorcade, and modestly dissembling my elation at having accomplished two formidable Assignment-tasks in just a few hours, I instructed my driver (an unnecessarily sarcastic fellow) to deliver me to the NTC General Infirmary.

Though entirely sensible of the edge in his inquiry, whether it was the Infirmary proper or the Psychiatric Annex I wanted chauffeuring to, I ignored it and supposed aloud that my friend Dr. Sear, being a practicing radiologist and psychotherapist as well as director of the Psych Clinic, might have offices in both places. I would try the main building first, in hopes of a directory; he need not wait.

"Need not need not," the surly fellow grumbled, and sped off almost before I'd climbed out onto the sidewalk in front of the Infirmary. But I was in too fine spirits to report him. By contrast with the first two articles of my Assignment, this third seemed to me now light work both to interpret and to satisfy: having seen such demonstration in the past few days of the infirmities of others, moral and intellectual as well as physical, I could quite agree that a bonafide Graduate must be free of them, and a Grand Tutor exemplify their opposites. The injunction to overcome my infirmity had thus a ready allegorical sense, such as I'd sought in vain to discern in its fellows: just as passage was passage and failure failure, defined each by strict distinction from the other, so was it with their corporal emblems, health and infirmity. That I was physically in good condition my Clean Bill of Health would be proof enough, which Dr. Sear had written for me early that same day; I needed but to fetch it from his office, or a copy if Mrs. Sear had delivered the original to Harold Bray at Scrapegoat Grate. As there was no infirmity to be remedied, I could be said to have overcome at least that part of the Assignment at once, in no time. But not to leave anything to chance, I went so far as to acknowledge that the term might be regarded metaphorically, or that WESCAC's standards might be narrowly human — in which cases any residual "goatliness" in my character, say, might by an effort of bigoted imagination be considered an infirmity; or my "limp," though it ceased to exist when I reverted to all fours. With the former I could not reasonably be taxed, it seemed to me: I'd left the herd in spirit long before my physical departure. But as I floated up to Dr. Sear's offices in the Psychiatric Annex, I resolved to consult him about my old leg-injuries, if only for an affidavit that they were neither "correctable" nor "crippling," properly regarded.

This aim fled before confusion a moment later, when I stepped from the lift into a dim hallway down which a young man scrabbled at me on hands and knees — in itself no very alarming spectacle to one of my history, but the fellow barked most savagely besides, and growled, and bared his teeth. Old instincts seized me: with a panic bleat I sprang onto the back of an upholstered chair nearby, and when the creature nipped at my ankles I flung my stick at him. At once he scrambled after it, clamped it in his jaws, and trotted back (the word is a flattery: his gait had neither grace nor rhythm), waggling his hindquarters. He seemed content enough; indeed, as if in invitation to further romp, he dropped the stick before the chair and sat up bright-eyed, lolling his tongue. But I was too frightened yet to give up my perch. There were two others seated along the hallway, to whom I appealed for help now I had a moment: alas, the one (an elder gentleman) sprang down on all fours himself and darted for the stick as soon as my harasser dropped it; and when the ensuing barky tussle fetched them up against the chair of the other (a co-ed lady girl), she turned side to them, arched her back, threatened with her nails, and hissed.

I made use of the diversion to dash across the corridor (on all fours myself, for speed's sake, being stickless) into an office marked with Dr. Sear's name. It was a Receiving Room, empty, at the rear of which a little hallway was, opening, I presently learned, into the doctor's treatment- and observation-chambers. To this latter I retreated from the dog-men, who tumbled through the entrance-door I'd neglected to close, and I was distressed to find the dim room occupied by a long lean lunatic: what but madness would lead one to stand with his face cupped against a wall? Even as I called to him for help my heart misgave me — then leaped up, when he turned my way, to behold that he was Peter Greene, and that he had been peering through a little window into the adjacent room. My pursuers bounded at him; I cried warning; but Greene, undismayed, said, "Down, fellows," and pacified them with bone-shaped biscuits from his pocket. The creatures retired each into a corner to gnaw their prizes, and I retrieved my stick, which they'd fetched in.

"They don't bite," Greene assured me — in an offhand tone, as though preoccupied. They and the female in the hall, he said, were patients of Dr. Sear's awaiting diagnoses, whom Anastasia had asked Greene to mind for a moment while she assisted the doctor with an emergency case. To this end he'd been supplied with dog-biscuits — the cat-young-lady was not troublesome, it seemed, unless rubbed the wrong way — and instructions to keep the patients in sight; but the alarming behavior of Mrs. Sear, whose appearance in the office constituted the emergency, had so intrigued him that he'd neglected his duty in order to watch through the one-way glass of the Observation Room.

"Sear's going to have a chat with me soon's he finds time," he reported. "But he's been busy all afternoon, so I been sitting here watching Miss Stacey work, and too durn love-struck to say a word to her, conversationwise."

"Mrs. Stoker," I reminded him. I had been going to wonder aloud how came it that human studentdom considered it a sign of madness for one of their number to behave caninely, and a sign of intelligence in a dog to act like a human, for though I had no love at all for dogdom, I suspected a snobbery in this attitude that for aught I knew might extend even to goats. However, Greene's invincible obtuseness provoked such annoyance in me, and the news of Mrs. Sear's condition such curiosity, I put that wonder by and went to the observation-window, less dim now than formerly.

"She come in a-flailin' and a-flounderin'," Greene confided, "and a-sayin' things would curl your hair. First off I took her for some kind of nut, the way she carried on — said the durnedest things to me you ever heard! But Miss Stacey explained it was Sear's own wife, that had a mental illness, and they took her in there to calm her down."

The square of glass I had pre-empted was too small to serve us both. Greene added hopefully, "Last I looked, they couldn't hold her still on the sofa."

A glance revealed to me that this objective had now been attained; Hedwig Sear lay calmly on the leather couch embracing Anastasia, while the doctor petted them both. A sexualler connection was plainly to come, and I was a little stung, not by jealousy, disgust, or indignation, such as a normal undergraduate might have been, but by unhappy surprise that it was Anastasia who seemed to be taking the initiative. Fidgeting beside me, Peter Greene flipped a wall-switch, and voices from the Treatment Room rustled through a loudspeaker above us.

"I'll get the door," Dr. Sear said briskly, "before some idiot barges in."

Anastasia called over her shoulder: "Better see that Mr. Greene's all right, too, don't you think?" Her voice, at least, was mild as always.

Peter Greene jubilantly punched my shoulder. "What's that if it ain't pure love?"

"Look here, Greene…"

"Pete. Okay?"

I had meant expostulation, not invitation to the window — indeed, though I turned to him, wondering how the situation was to be handled, I endeavored to block the scene from his view with my head. Then above Mrs. Sear's moans, ever more amorous, Anastasia nervously asked, "What about the window, Kennard? Do you think anybody might look in?" and the doctor's wry response — that it would disabuse Greene of an illusion or two if he did happen to watch — inspired me to turn the uncomfortable situation to pedagogical account.

"I think you should stay here and keep your eyes and ears open," I told him, as if I were the doctor and he my patient. "I have an idea." He consented readily, and I made haste to leave the observation-chamber, closing its door behind me as he stepped to the window and Dr. Sear into the Receiving Room.

"Founder's sake, George!" The doctor's brows drew down around his little bandage at sight of me, but his frown was amused. He looked back quickly to assure himself that he'd closed the door, and glanced about at the empty office.

"Greene's in there with the dog-people," I said; "I'm not sure about the cat-girl." As he searched my expression for a hint of how much I knew, I smiled and apologized for once again interrupting his wife's therapy. Hastily then I explained why I had sent Greene to him for sophisticating, especially in the matter of Anastasia's innocence, and echoed his own suggestion that the treatment-in-progress might be as therapeutic for Greene to witness as it no doubt was for Mrs. Sear to receive — the more so in view of Mrs. Stoker's new forwardness.

"Frightfully irregular," Dr. Sear said, apropos equally of my proposal and Anastasia's behavior. "Officeful of patients…" But when I volunteered to assist the proceedings in any way I could, in return for his advice on the matter of my alleged infirmity, he admitted that the idea was too entertaining to resist, therapeutic or not.

"It's five o'clock anyhow," he said; "I'll send for an orderly to take the patients back to their wards." He proposed further, in an offhand tone, that I join his wife and Anastasia in the Treatment Room while he shared the observation-chamber with Greene, the better to interpret for him what he saw and translate his reaction into therapy. It wanted no great sophistication to discern something more in this suggestion than disinterested goodwill: so much the better, I decided, for Greene's education in the ways of the campus. As for me, inhibition in matters erotic was one infirmity, at least, which kidship had spared me: though my experience was small, shame and shyness in such affairs were emotions I knew chiefly at secondhand, from books and hearsay. Leaving Dr. Sear to his business, I strode therefore unabashedly into the Treatment Room, bid the ladies a very good evening, and inquired of Anastasia, not without irony, whether I could assist in any wise her charitable nurse-work.

She made a sound and leaped from her labors; batted at her blouse and Mrs. Sear's skirt; snatched up a cast-off underthing — then reddened and defied me, balling the dainty in her hand.

"The nerve, George!"

She would have bolted, I daresay, but that she felt responsibility for Mrs. Sear, who, still upon the couch, groggily bade her back to love. I begged her to continue the therapy as if I were Dr. Sear; I quite understood, I assured her, that in medical emergencies common restraints must be put by, and that her present connection with the patient was as impersonal as mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, for example.

Mrs. Sear raised her head to squint at me and said: "Balls." Then she flopped chuckling onto her belly and thrust up her haunches. "I'm a nanny!"

"Oh, Heddy!" On the edge of tears, Anastasia hastened to pull the woman's skirt-hem down; but Hedwig frisked it up again and bleated into the couch-cushion.

"Please go!" Anastasia cried to me.

Dr. Sear spoke from a loudspeaker: "No no, Stace, it's quite all right. Would you just service Hed once, please, George? Do her a campus of good."

"Ba-a-a, ba-a-a," said Mrs. Sear — presumably mimicking a doe, though the noises were meaningless. Anastasia looked with nervous indignation at a dark mirror on one wall, which I took to be the observation-window.

"I'd really rather not," I said in that direction. "I'm not a goat, you know: that's one of the things I wanted to discuss with you. Shouldn't Mrs. Stoker go on with the treatment?"

"Ba-a-a!" Mrs. Sear now wriggled; and bald as was her rump compared to any doe's, and gaunt next to supple Anastasia's, I had not unlearnt my buckish indiscrimination, and was stirred a little.

"This is awful!" Anastasia cried. "I'm going home, Kennard!"

But I caught her elbow as she swept doorwards. "Please don't leave. I'm sorry if I spoke unkindly; it surprised me a little to see you taking the lead for a change."

Perhaps forgetting that what she held was no handkerchief, she dabbed with the underthing at her splendid eyes and declared: "It's your fault; I've never done it before." By it I assumed she meant taking the initiative, since the therapy itself I understood to have been common practice in Mrs. Sear's case. And I was the more inclined to believe her because she so readily now gave over the initiative to me: made no attempt to break my light hold on her and even permitted me to stroke her flank with my stick-hand until I remembered to put that pastoral habit behind me. Two things (she sniffled through the silk) had prompted her present shamelessness: my rebuke to her before Scrapegoat Grate, when she'd only been trying to distract Harold Bray for my sake, and her husband's "behavior at luncheon." Upon this latter she did not then elaborate — I supposed Stoker had put her to some fresh indignity. In any case, coming on the hooves of my reprimand, it had led her in despair, she said, to become what we'd unjustly taxed her with being: a flunkèd nymphomane.

"Bah," said Mrs. Sear — more impatient now than lustful, as I thought. "Some stud you are." Indeed her obscene waggling was so deliberate as to have finally chilled me — as did her strange advances at our previous encounter — had not Anastasia's fine person been so near. When I comforted that girl's hair upon my shoulder, my arousement grew.

In vain Dr. Sear entreated his wife from the Observation Room to respect my anticaprine sentiments (a misrepresentation, but I let it pass) and either couple with me in some humaner fashion or permit Anastasia to resume the original therapy: she stubbornly rejected both alternatives, and Anastasia seconded her, declaring them equally repugnant. I was flattered to imagine a note of jealousy in her veto — but it fretted me to see so little getting done in the way of Peter Greene's education. For that reason I was receptive to Dr. Sear's next suggestion despite the prurience of his tone, which the intercom did not conceal.

"About this goat-business, George: you want some sort of voucher from me that you're strictly human, is that it?"

"I think that's what I want," I said. "My Assignment says Overcome Your Infirmity, and it might just be that — "

"Conscious depravity," Dr. Sear said crisply. I begged his pardon.

"Conscious depravity," he repeated. "What could be humaner?" I believed he must be alluding — with a tisk of the tongue, as it were — to the behavior of his wife, who now besides waving her brittle posteriors was nibbling a memorandum-pad between bleats, and winking lewdly. But he went on to ask, rhetorically, when a goat, or any other animal than Homo sapiens, had ever done a flunkèd deed from simple relish of its flunkèdness. If in the history of studentdom, he maintained by way of illustration, a goat had ever humped a lady girl (as Halicarnassides records in his old Histories, for instance), it was no naughtiness on the stud's part, but mere unconscious lust. The girl, however, must needs have been queer of appetite — unless like Anastasia with Stoker's dogs, her motives were uncommonly benevolent, or (as when Croaker beached her) she'd had no option…

I started to protest: was even a man of Dr. Sear's intelligence and wide experience too bigoted to allow for simple love between the species? But I saw the principle beyond his misapplication of it, and supposed besides that among his motives was the exposition of Anastasia's past. Therefore I agreed, for Greene's benefit, that of the scores of males and females with whom the dear girl beside me had coupled, some at least had surely been inspired not alone by lust but by the conscious urge to exploit her submissiveness — a pleasure unknown outside the human species.

"Go on and say it!" Anastasia challenged me. "Tell me I'm flunked, like Maurice does!" She shook off my arm and went to Mrs. Sear, who in a fresh fit of disequilibrium seemed about to roll off the couch.

"That isn't what I meant," I assured her, though privately I was not at all convinced that it wasn't at least partly true: when she bent to steady Mrs. Sear, for example, and that surprising person at once thrust a hand into her crotch, Anastasia wept for sheer distress at this new unpleasantness, but would neither leave the importunate woman nor remove the hand.

"Demonstrate your humanity, George," urged Dr. Sear. "If the goat-thing's not to your taste, do something à trois. Mrs. Stoker will let you."

I saw his point, and was not unwilling to implement it in some measure for the sake of my several objectives. But I was less assured than he of Anastasia's readiness to cooperate in a display of Conscious Depravity, and therefore I told her straightforwardly what was ahoof:

"Peter Greene's watching along with Dr. Sear, Anastasia." At this news she would indeed have fled had I not gripped her pretty shoulders from behind, and Mrs. Sear her escutcheon from before.

"Peter schmeeter," said Mrs. Sear.

I held Anastasia long enough (against Mrs. Sear's best efforts to tumble us onto the couch) to tell her of Greene's mad conviction that she was virginal; his resolve to wed her despite both their spouses, and his inability to see the flunkèd aspects of his own nature — such as the "innocent" voyeurism he was enjoying presently as on certain past occasions. In addition I informed her of the third and fourth articles of my Assignment — Overcome Your Infirmity and See Through Your Ladyship — - and declared she could abet my completion of both projects, and do Peter Greene an ultimate service as well, by granting me a certain immediate license in the Conscious-Depravity way. All this in her ear, as I gripped her around the chest.

"Oh, George!" she complained — and pinched, perhaps, by Mrs. Sear, she jerked back against me. Very nearly I ejaculated, at touch of those perfections; feeling me against them she flinched away, but did not otherwise endeavor to wrest free. "I don't understand!" she wailed.

But I understood a number of things, some for the first time. It was clear to me now that I (and alas, not I alone!) could do virtually anything I pleased with Anastasia, not because she was a passèd martyr to the needs of others, on the one hand, or on the other a self-deluding nymphomane, but because she simply had not the will to assert her wishes over another's. Protest she might, refuse never — at least in the matter of carnal demands. This revelation (for so it was to me, however banal or evident, perhaps, to one raised since birth among humans) illumined in a flash not only the aforementioned articles of my Assignment, but the present situation. My "infirmity," I saw, was neither gimp nor goatness, but the limited insight into human natures unavoidable in one so late discovering his own. "Overcoming" it, then, must consist in just such illuminations as the present. Nay, the two labors were one: to "see through My Ladyship" could only mean to understand Anastasia; that is, to divine the inmost heart of one fellow human — a task impossible without the gift of insight. Divination now achieved, it was I felt certain the accomplishment — "at once, in no time" — of both parts of my Assignment, Q.E.D. Though I might still, for the record, ask a Clean Bill of Health from Dr. Sear (and perhaps a professional confirmation of my analysis of Anastasia), it seemed to me that my principal business there was finished, most satisfactorily. It remained only to demonstrate my thesis to Peter Greene and my "humanity" to Dr. Sear. In a friendly way I said, "Let's undress you, Anastasia," and fetched her firmly couchwards.

She fretted: "I don't want to, George!" But Mrs. Sear, in better reach of her now, said, "Hot dog," joined me with a will in the couching, and, kneeling over her on the cushion, attacked the fasteners of her uniform.

"This is awful!" Anastasia said crossly, and covered her eyes. "I don't see the need of this at all!"

I implored her to trust me, as she had once before at the Memorial Service. My plan was a token mounting of Hedwig Sear, for though I sharply craved Maurice Stoker's wife (the more at sight of her darling flanks again) and had no appetite whatever for Kennard Sear's, WESCAC's suggestion that I might be Anastasia's brother restrained me from following my desire — for her sake, who I imagined would share the prevailing undergraduate view of incest. To service a female person whom I found repellent was surely enough to prove my humanity; more so in my own estimation than to embrace one whom — despite our possible consanguinity and the obligations of Grand-Tutorhood — I had almost said, I loved.

"What Mr. Greene must think!" Anastasia moaned. As Hedwig Sear bent to bite her I remarked with an ardent pang the welt of my own teeth on her belly. Ah, it was true. Once hatched, the thought would not take wing, but stayed a-fledge there in my fancy: I loved Anastasia! And not as my relative or Tutee, but as a human lady girl. And I suddenly dreaded not only that we might be kin but that I might for aught I knew be… not lovable. Horrid possibility! That she admired me was evident; alas, her admiration like her sweet legs embraced many another, and had little to do with love. And Founder pass me, in the yearbooks of campus history what Grand Tutor ever took a mistress?

"George?" It was a rebuke, timid but positive. Anastasia's eyes were on my hands, which I had laid upon Hedwig's haunches. Whether by my problematical insights (How my infirmity was overcome!) or Mrs. Sear's aggressiveness, I had found myself unmanned, so to speak, and been obliged to temporize with idle foreplay. The woman ignored me, but Anastasia sat up now sharply and declared she didn't like what was happening at all and intended to leave.

"Oh, not now!" Dr. Sear entreated — from the doorway, where he appeared unaccompanied. "I was just about to join you."

Relieved enough at the interruption, nevertheless I frowned as I lowered my vestment and asked where Peter Greene was.

"Poor chap couldn't take it, I'm afraid," the doctor said pleasantly. "White as a sheet when I went in, and your remark about his voyeurisme did the trick. I gave him a sedative for fear he'd faint or commit mayhem, and he went right off to sleep. Like a five-year-old, actually. Very low threshold." He touched the small of my back with one hand and patted Anastasia's troubled cheek with the other. "Fine of you to help," he told her: "I think we really might have jarred some foolishness out of the fellow." Smiling at his wife he said then, "Mind if I cut in? Then we'll all have dinner."

Mrs. Sear did not reply: upon Anastasia's sitting up she had gone glassy-eyed, and slumped now quite insensible upon the dark beacon of George's Gorge, that had called G. Herrold to his end.

Anastasia shook her head. "I don't like this Conscious Depravity business. It's been a very upsetting day!" Awed by my feelings, I watched her fasten up her clothes once more. Dr. Sear gave me an amiable wry look — an invitation, as I thought, to exercise my will upon her as I knew I could. But I said that I too had spent a toilsome day, by no means over, and had no appetite except for food. He shrugged, lit a cigarette, and repeated his dinner invitation.

"A drink will perk Heddy up, and we'll ask Greene to come along if we can wake him."

Anastasia at first declined on the grounds that her husband, who "hadn't been himself at all" during lunch, might be expecting her at home, and that she would anyhow be ashamed to face Peter Greene for some time. But I pressed her to come with us, as I had serious matters to discuss with her: Max's predicament, her Certification by Bray — and our relationship. At this last she raised her eyes, as did Dr. Sear his far less liqueous ones. I blushed.

"It isn't what you think… I'll explain later."

"Oh." She fingered a bracelet. "Well." She agreed at least to go as far as the Sears' apartment with us, since it was on her homeward way, and to telephone the Power Plant from there. Dr. Sear welcomed my acceptance of his invitation, declaring I could prove my humanity as easily after filet mignon as before, and with a wink expressed his readiness to be de-Certified if I thought it necessary. He busied himself then with reviving his wife, while Anastasia put her clothes in order; and pleased at the chance to delay my reply I went to attend Peter Greene. Truth to tell, the mention of meat worked counter to all my appetites, as did the recognition that I was beginning to be in love. Though my testicles hurt and my stomach rumbled, I could scarce abide the ideas of sex and food; it was only to speak with Anastasia and Dr. Sear (on the very matter he'd just brought up, among others) that I wanted to dine with them: else I had withdrawn to some private place to examine my heart's state and what it portended.

It transpired that we ate neither at the Sears' apartment nor in a restaurant, but had dinner sent up to the office from the hospital kitchens, for both Mrs. Sear and Peter Greene were in no condition to leave the building. The latter, whom I found just waking up on a couch in the Reception Room, greeted me with as woeful a groan as ever I'd heard; he rose to hug or hit me, choked into tears instead, and sat down again, shaking his head.

"Oh, Founder!" he said, with an affecting hoarseness. "She's the flunkèdest of all!" What he had witnessed from the observation-chamber, it appeared, had shocked him more profoundly than I'd allowed for. As previously he had seemed to believe that the human heart was essentially passèd, so now he declared it essentially flunked; no good my suggesting it was but desperately human. Anastasia was a whore, he vowed, worse than O.B.G.'s daughter, who at least had confined her harlotry to male humans; Dr. Sear and his wife were unspeakable perverts; me he spared, as entering the debauch purely for his benefit — indeed, he thanked me bitterly for opening his eye to the truth as only a Grand Tutor might — but the rest of studentdom, himself included, he now agreed must be as failed as I had described.

"I been a blind durn fool!" he cried. So far did he carry his black despisal, I feared it was wrong-headed as his former optimism. His displeasure with himself, in particular, was intense enough to make him shudder while he spoke, as might a fever. Clearly he was not fit to drive: when Anastasia entered the room to beg his pardon, he vomited explosively into a smoking-stand, to her great distress, and it was necessary for Dr. Sear to resedate him into unconsciousness. Hedwig too, the doctor said coolly as he withdrew the syringe, was more than usually hors de combat; her also he had sedated.

"Rotten shame," he tisked, having telephoned our dinner orders. I wasn't certain whether he alluded to his wife's condition, the change in our dining-plans, or Anastasia's having to clean up Peter Greene's mess, until he added a moment later, "Pity you didn't know Hed before she got this way, George: ready for anything then, she was! Full of spirit; nothing fazed her; put Stacey in the shade…" He shook his head and relaxed with a slender cigar on the couch, near Greene's feet. "What times we used to have! Lately, of course, she hasn't been herself. Terrible pressures. But it's still the most genuine marriage I know of. Ideal, in fact."

I could not conceal my incredulity. Anastasia paused too, paper towel in hand, then went on with her scrubbing. Dr. Sear smiled.

"What I mean is, it's the only authentic and meaningful kind of marriage, for educated people in modern terms, because it's based on freedom, frankness, equality, and no illusions whatever. It may not work, but even if it turns out to be impossible, nothing else is worth trying." He wrinkled his brow in a cordial tease. "I saw through my ladyship from the first, in every respect; and Heddy did likewise."

"And were you pleased by what you saw?" I asked him.

I had been thinking of my own ambivalent insight into Anastasia, but Dr. Sear took the question as a challenge and amiably replied, "You mean her lesbianism, I suppose, and my own homosexual tendencies…"

"No no, sir! What I — "

"Don't apologize," he insisted. "I enjoy looking things straight in the eye." He went on to declare that while these same tendencies (the confrontation whereof in myself, he suggested, might well be the real purport of my fourth Assignment-task) were not inherently either passing or failing in his opinion, he readily seconded the Maxim that self-knowledge is generally bad news, and would yield to none in the degree of his own self-loathing. "By George, there's another possibility!" he exclaimed, interrupting his confession with a laugh: "Why don't you just masturbate?"

"Sir?"

"Really, Kennard!" Anastasia's scold was serious; she was still red-eyed with unhappiness over the events in the Treatment Room, and but half attended our conversation. "Enough is enough."

"Sorry," the doctor said lightly. "What I meant to say is that if See Through Your Ladyship means 'Understand the female elements in your psyche,' it's just another way of saying Know thyself, don't you agree, George? But since this whole Grand-Tutor business has such a Founder's-Scroll air about it, maybe know should be understood in the Old-Syllabus sense of carnal knowledge. In other words, Fornicate thyself."

I was not sure to what extent this interpretation was a jeu d'esprit; the earlier part of it struck me as reasonable enough, the more as it didn't really contradict my own speculations. But Anastasia said he ought to be ashamed of himself.

"Honestly, sometimes I think you like naughtiness," she declared, and went to take our dinner-cart from the maid at the door. Her remark (which seemed banal to me, love or no love) delighted the doctor.

"I do, as you know," he said to me. "And I do despise myself, of course. What other feeling is there, for a man both intelligent and honest? I can't take anybody seriously who doesn't loathe himself. That's why I admire Taliped."

I accepted a salad from the cart, blanched at the fragments of bloody steer-muscle on the plates, and took up the conversation to keep from imagining the bovicide that must be daily wrought to feed carnivorous studentdom its evening meal.

"You say you admire Dean Taliped's self-loathing, sir. Don't you actually just envy him his reasons?" The question was sincere enough but I confess it gave me an un-Grand-Tutorish satisfaction to defend what I knew was Anastasia's position. Throughout the meal — while Dr. Sear with mild good humor acknowledged his perversions and his wife's, agreed that her present condition was partly the cumulative effect, on her homely spirit, of their years of libertinism, but defended his biography on the grounds that "total experience," while ruinous, is requisite to Understanding — I was unnaturally aware of my beloved's presence in the room. She said little during our harangue, but as I endeavored to point out to Dr. Sear (first begging his leave) how much of illusion and innocence could still be said to be in his thinking, self-deception in his confessions, and pride in his self-loathing, I watched her flashing eyes from the corner of mine and glowed in the certainty of their approval.

"Admit it, sir: you find your self-hatred… interesting, don't you?"

He cocked his head judiciously, a bit of flesh impaled on his fork. "Let's say piquant. Yes, piquant, definitely. Which is, I suppose, just that much more ground for self-hatred, as you term it."

"That much more piquant, you mean."

"Very good, George! Really, you amaze me."

But I was too desirous of Anastasia's esteem (not to mention Dr. Sear's final welfare) to be content with bland compliments. What I wanted, I told him, was not that he should be amazed, but that he should Pass, and prerequisite to that end was his real conviction, not merely that he was not passèd (despite Bray's Certification, which I sensed Sear had no final faith in), but that he was failed.

"Wait now," he protested more firmly; "you forget what Gynander — "

I interrupted: "Gynander was a proph-prof, sir. Excuse me, but that makes all the difference on campus. Gynander didn't do things just out of curiosity; he didn't especially even want to see everything he saw. But he did things; he had… a power. He wasn't just a spectator."

Dr. Sear allowed I had a point, and this time his expression of surprise at what he called my "native discernment" was more sincere, and less composed.

"But see here, George," he said, making a little grimace; "there's one factor in Hedwig's condition, and my attitude, that you're leaving out of account — naturally enough, since I've told no one about it except my wife." He contemplated the ash of his cigar. "The fact is, I won't be on campus much longer…"

Though he touched the little bandage on his brow as he spoke, I mistook his meaning until Anastasia, with a small compassionate exclamation, put by her tray and hurried to his chair-arm. Pressing his distinguished head at once to her chest, she declared she'd known there was more to "that sore place" than he'd let on. Her tears ran freely into his silver hair; I could almost envy him the squamous-cell carcinoma that provoked such sympathy. It had begun, he told us quietly, as a small growth upon the bridge of his nose, which had commenced to fester, as he'd thought, from daily contact with the frames of his eyeglasses. He himself had subsequently diagnosed it as malignant and arranged for its removal, but the surgeon-friend who excised it had discovered preliminary invasions of both orbits as well as of the paranasal sinuses.

"You've noticed," he said, almost with embarrassment, "that my breath is often foul. The cause of that, happily, also prevents my being able to smell it myself — or anything else." He attempted to turn this circumstance into a wry example of Tragic Compensation; but Anastasia, who knew the import of his words as I did not, weepingly implored him to cease making light of it, to have the cancer dealt with at once, before his eyesight and very life should go the way of his sense of smell.

"Nonsense, my dear." He patted her arm. "I have a twenty percent chance of living another decade if I let them cut my nose off; maybe thirty percent if they take the eyes out too. No thank you!" He had, he said, devoted his life to the admiration of beauty and the enlargement of his experience and understanding; he saw no reason literally to deface himself for the sake of a few horrid extra semesters. Moreover, though there was he supposed no end to art and knowledge, he could not but feel surfeited with both. He regarded his life as having been pleasant and rich in variety; for that very reason he was lately bored with it; nothing had for him any longer the delight of genuine novelty, and he confessed to looking forward to his dying with the temperate enthusiasm of a connoisseur, as the one experience he'd yet to try. To his mind, the only choice was aesthetic: whether to take his own life forthwith or let the cancer make a blind purulent madman of him before it killed him, a year or two hence. The latter course appealed to him, as the more passive and exquisite; he had always rather let experience write upon him than play the role of author. On the other hand he loathed monstrosity and unawareness, particularly in combination; even before the carcinoma reached his brain he would be stupefied with suffering or narcotized against it, and of what value was an experience one didn't experience?

"Oh well," he concluded — actually yawning, as if this subject too had begun to bore him; "naturally all this has been a trial for Heddy; she never was much of a philosopher."

Anastasia kissed him all about the face, but especially upon the fatal bandage; nor would Sear's tuts and pats assuage her concern.

"If I could help you somehow!" she grieved, and I knew with a sting that had the doctor been a man of normal appetites she'd gratefully close his sorrow in her honey limbs. I too was touched with pity and begged his pardon for my earlier criticisms, though I couldn't help feeling that the fact of his disease, however grave in itself, had no bearing on our argument. It pleased and chastened me that Dr. Sear acknowledged as much himself a moment later, when Anastasia had gone to the washroom to compose herself.

"I'm aware," he said, "that my attitude toward dying is quite as perverse as my other attitudes. Contemptibly effete, if you like. And so I'm properly contemptuous of it — which is more effete yet, and so on."

I asked him to excuse my tactlessness, as I'd had little experience of human attitudes towards dying (the goats, it goes without saying, have no opinions on the subject); no doubt it was presumptuous of me to advise him at all, and particularly in these circumstances…

"No no no," he insisted, more cheerfully. "You're quite right; the cancer's beside the point; you must help me teach Hedwig that. So, you have a prescription for me, do you? A tip for the Finals?"

I saw he was ironical, but set forth anyhow a notion that had occurred to me when I considered his Certification in the light of the others I'd challenged. It came to this: that so long as he relished his self-loathing and found his failings piquant, he was by no means being "nothing ignorant"; on the contrary, his failure to see the vital difference between Gynander and himself — between the mantic and the connoisseur — argued to me that he was after all naïve.

"Naïve!" He very nearly tapped his cigar into his coffee-cup. "Naïve!" He could say no more. I blushed, but insisted on the term. What fundamentaller innocence was there, I asked him, than the inability to distinguish passage from failure? Hadn't he himself alluded, in the Amphitheater, to those verses in the Old Syllabus condemning fallen studentdom to "knowledge of truth and falsehood" — which was to say, awareness of their failure? Yet he still believed — naïvely, in my opinion — not only that total awareness of failure was somehow tantamount to passage, but that experience was synonymous with depravity. In short, he confused innocence and experience, self-knowledge and self-delusion, passage and failure.

"I see," Dr. Sear said coolly. "And how do you suggest I correct this lamentable ingenuousness?"

What I suggested, stubbornly, was that he learn to loathe his self-loathing in fact, and not just in the voluptuous way, by taking true measure of his perversion…

"Ah," he said, brightening up at once. I hastened to add that what I had in mind was no elaboration of his usual amusements; depravity à quatre was not perverser than depravity à trois, I argued, any more than voyeurism by fluoroscope was naughtier than Eierkopf's night-glass watches. No, the consummate perversion for a man of his temper, as I saw it, lay on the opposite hand: let him eschew the piquant and exotic, if he would taste the full flunkèdness of his life; let him pursue instead the humblest and most commonplace of satisfactions…

"What do you mean, exactly?" he demanded. "Eat my beef well-done? Drink beer from a can with dinner? Watch Telerama-shows all evening?" Even as he told over these suggestions I saw his fine nostrils begin to quiver, and was the more persuaded of my good judgment. I shook my head.

"It's your sex-life I had in mind, sir. I believe you should freshen Mrs. Sear."

He had been going to sip his coffee, and looked up with the cup poised before his mouth. "I beg your pardon?"

"Service Mrs. Sear yourself, sir, in the ordinary way. Breed her again. She's not past bearing age, I suppose?"

He was too astonished to reply, but as I was considering whether I'd possibly got the terms wrong for human husbandry, Anastasia came exclaiming from the hallway.

"That's a perfect idea!" she cried, and made it so with a kiss on my temple. "It's just what Hedwig needs, Kennard! Especially now!"

Dr. Sear scoffed: his wife's infirmities, her imminent widowhood, her beginning menopause — not to mention the parlous state of the University, ever worsening, and the general absurdity of existence… Anastasia clung to his arm, nestled into his shoulder, clasped his dry hand for very rapture at the thought of procreation; for such a coaxing I'd have studded Mrs. Sear myself, and I knew as well — so transparent to me now was My Ladyship — that Anastasia would gladly have taken the man's seed into her own unfruited womb, from sheer access of solicitude, or permitted any husband or most-treasured lover of her own to impregnant Mrs. Sear, if the doctor could not.

"Just imagine, Kennard!" she fairly wept; "a baby for Hedwig!" She rushed to me again; her excitement stirred even Peter Greene to grunt through his stupor. I drew her boldly to my lap this time, confident in my knowledge; sure enough, she let herself be set upon me, as she would upon any other who knew how to touch her, and my heart flagged even as my blood bucked at the feel of her.

Dr. Sear put down his cup with a clatter and strode this way and that.

"Ridiculous! It's unthinkable!" He laughed harshly. "Why do you suppose we've had no children all these years, for pity's sake? Besides — but what difference does it make! Absurd!" So he expostulated, slapped his arms to his sides, sniffed and fulminated, laughed and adjusted his spectacles atop the little bandage, while Anastasia wept and hugged me for delight: quite the most reaction I'd provoked thus far by my Tutoring (for Tutoring it was, I recognized now with a stir of awe, that I'd been at since Scrapegoat Grate, no less than completing my Assignment).

"Mom and Dad Sear!" he snorted, and bit on his foreknuckle.

"Yes!" Anastasia clapped her hands. "It's the absolute answer! You're a genius, George!"

Sear stopped pacing and narrowed his eyes at me with whimsical respect. "He's a tougher man to please than Harold Bray, I'll vouch for that. Hedwig and I!"

At every such allusion to my proposal, Anastasia bounced; I was relieved now that Peter Greene showed signs of rewaking, for had she not got off me (anxious to begone lest the sight of her do him further harm), I must soon have bespermed myself. She would telephone her husband from downstairs, she said — should have done earlier, he'd behaved so queerly at lunch — and either hail a taxi or wait for a Powerhouse-guard if Stoker cared to dispatch one to the Infirmary. Dr. Sear, it was hurriedly agreed, should keep Greene under his surveillance, either there or at home, until the man's trauma could be assessed and directed to the positive end of mature self-knowledge.

"Nothing à trois, I promise," he said to me, and shook his head once more in dismay at what I'd proposed. "You're quite welcome to spend the night too, you know; we never did get to talk about Max and the rest, and I want to look at that mad Assignment you mentioned… or were you going with Stacey?"

I had not of course considered my next move, much less where I'd spend the night; a clock on Dr. Sear's wall showed seven, my own watch six — in either case it was early evening, and tired as I was there were tasks remaining to be accomplished. I stood up and fished the Assignment from my purse.

"There are some important things I want to discuss with you," I told Anastasia. "Very important. Let me see what's next on my list… It says Re-place the Founder's Scroll. Have they lost it, do you suppose?"

Dr. Sear and Anastasia agreed that the so-called Founder's Scroll (a recently-excavated assortment of Old- and New-Syllabus fragments presented to New Tammany by the Chancellor of New Moishe College, where the parchments had been discovered, in gratitude for the help New Tammany's Moishians had given their symbolic alma mater) was not to their knowledge missing from its temporary display-case in the Central Library. Dr. Sear, however, remembered having read that the Cataloguing Office was experiencing some difficulty in the matter of filing it permanently: CACAFILE, WESCAC's automatic classification and filing facilities, he recalled, which operated from definitions originally programmed into it by various scholars and then improved by its own self-scanning techniques, could not decide (as it were) whether the precious relic should be classified under Religion, Philosophy, Literature, Archeology, Art, or History — each of which departments claimed it. When Library officials had presented it physically to the CACAFILE as a last resort, hoping to force a mechanical arbitration, the Scroll had disappeared for some anxious hours into the automatic book-stacks and been finally returned as unclassifiable.

"Yet it says re-place, doesn't it?" he mused. "Not just place. Intriguing task." His mind was not much on the matter, I perceived; though he remembered to give me the Clean Bill of Health I'd asked for, and suggested to Anastasia that she direct me to the Library on her way out, it was my advice that still absorbed him.

"Have a nice weekend," Anastasia bade him pointedly as we left.

His vellum cheeks actually colored. "Ridiculous!"

"Please, Kennard: Heddy'd love it, I know!" Even more, I saw, would she, who as our lift came was inspired with a further proposal: "Take her to the Honeymoon Lodge Motel, Kennard!"

"Oh, Stacey!" He turned away and closed the office door, for Greene was stirring loudly now. But even Anastasia acknowledged with a giggle that his impatience with us was of the embarrassed kind, and that what disconcerted him was his real fascination with the idea.

"You're a darling to think of it!" she said, and hugged my arm. Her plain arousement did nothing for my buckly cramps of love; but though I re-entered the lift more gimpish than I'd left it some time earlier, I rejoiced at being two steps nearer Commencement Gate.

5

Once we were alone in the little compartment her self-consciousness returned: she let go my elbow and turned her eyes from the poked-out front of my gown. To put her at ease I said, "Pardon my erection," and assured her that despite my obvious desire, to which Love must positively now be added, I did not intend to mount her.

"Don't talk that way!" she pleaded.

"There's no help for it," I declared sadly; "in fact, I doubt very much that we'll ever mate again. Not because you're married — I haven't decided quite what to make of marriage yet. But I think we might be brother and sister, so we probably shouldn't copulate."

I had been going to recommend in addition that she forsake all other bedmates as well, in order to remove any doubts about the motives of her famous sympathy; but she paled so at mention of our possible relation that I judged it prudenter to postpone further counsel. Her lovely face was stricken; with welling eyes she heard WESCAC's account: that inasmuch as she was Virginia R. Hector's daughter, if I was truly the GILES we must have the same mother; and that if, as was the common report, Miss Hector had had but a single accouchement, we were actually twins.

She clutched the handrail and shook her head. The door opened upon a virtually empty lobby. I was obliged to lead her from the lift, and we stood uncertainly under the eyes of a distant receptionist and two orderlies at the revolving exit-door. Unease dispelled my cramps and detumesced me.

"Mind," I said to reassure her, "the only thing that's certain is that I'm the Grand Tutor and you're Miss Hector's daughter. All the rest, even this GILES business, is only conjecture."

"Oh, George, this is awful!" Her voice was faint with horror; yet even on the verge of swooning she evidently saw how my expression clouded — as I feared, against my better judgment, that she might be simply loath to own a goat-boy for a brother — and she begged me to believe that it was purely the memory of our public "union," as she called it, that appalled her. "All those people!"

I thought it perceptive of me to observe: "If I understand human propriety, they're scandalized already by our Memorial Service, aren't they? A little extra scandal won't much matter. Besides — I don't want to sound vain, but I am the Grand Tutor…"

Her eyes swam now with appreciation of this comfort, instead of shame. Warmly she said — and I thrilled to hear it — that she could think of no man on campus whom she'd prefer as a brother, though she knew herself unworthy of sistership to a Grand-Tutor-to-be… I bade her end such deprecation of herself; of course she was worthy, I insisted — or would be if she'd but accept from me a single bit of Tutelage; to wit: let no man, woman, or other beast mount her or in any wise know her carnally, not even her husband, from that hour forth, that no invidious double-entendre be read into the motto on her spurious diploma: Love thy classmate.

"Ordinarily I wouldn't include your husband," I said, as if I dispensed such prohibitions daily. "But your marriage is such an… unusual one that your motive in mating with him might be the same as your motive in mating with Croaker, or Mrs. Sear, or — or Harold Bray, for all I know…"

This last I tossed in off-handedly, but I was unspeakably pleased to hear her protest that she had not "united" with Bray even once, whatever he might have said to the contrary.

"He hasn't said anything, as far as I know," I confessed.

"He'd better not. I know he's a great man and all, but ugh!"

I was emboldened to add, less from vanity than by way of firming my own resolve, that even if I should summon her myself, in my capacity as Grand Tutor of the Western Campus, and bid her conceive a child by me, say, to carry on my work when I should pass away — even then, and knowing as she must that such undergraduate whimsies as the incest-taboo were void before that grand imperative, she was to refuse me.

Wide-eyed she whispered: "Okay."

"I do love you, you know, Anastasia," I said, not at all abashed now. "And I'm not a bit sorry about the Memorial Service in the Living Room…"

"You aren't?"

"Of course not. You were perfectly beautiful, I thought; and, needless to say, it was delightful to climb you. It doesn't matter whether Stoker was baiting me or not, or whether we're related: we were innocent. I swear to you as Grand Tutor: it was an okay service."

The color returned to her face now; she dabbed with a tissue at her eyes and thanked me wholeheartedly for clearing her conscience on that point. I admitted to her finally that, being above human prejudices by virtue of my calling as well as my background, I could not but continue to lust for her on sight, as the most serviceable lady girl I'd ever seen; at the same time I judged it improper for a Grand Tutor to play favorites among his Tutees — as my becoming her particular lover would surely be interpreted. Therefore I welcomed, albeit with a pang of regret, the possibility of brotherly love between us, and the added constraint that siblingship would impose (however artificially) upon our intercourse.

Anastasia listened with glowing eyes. "You're sweet," she murmured, and rising impulsively on tiptoes, bussed my cheek. "I've needed a brother to straighten me out, from the beginning!"

The prospect which had so alarmed her only a few moments previously seemed now to delight her quite as much as that of Dr. Sear's connubial husbandry. "I can't wait to see Mom!" she exclaimed. "I'll make her 'fess up this time!" Her face was alight. "I know what! Friday's her night to work: I'll go with you to the Library, and we'll kill two birds with one stone!" Her mother, she reminded me, was an assistant director of filing and cataloguing in the Central Library: an office she'd attained on her own merits before the misfortune of her illegitimate pregnancy and subsequent instability, and held since as a kind of sinecure thanks to the influence of her father, the ex-Chancellor. Thus it was she whom I'd be applying to in any case for authorization to re-place the Founder's Scroll. Anastasia proposed to accompany me there and take the opportunity to "get to the bottom of this sister-thing," as she put it. Already she was a-bubble with questions and conjectures: if we were twins, or even just siblings, she couldn't imagine why I hadn't been raised along with herself; how could anybody not want their own little baby? On the other hand, if something had "taken me away" at birth (of one thing Anastasia was certain: it could never have been our mother's wish), that circumstance went far, she thought, to explain Virginia Hector's subsequent lapses of reason, and even her rejection of Anastasia — by what mechanism of psychology I did not grasp. But why had "Uncle Ira" and "Grandpa Reg" never mentioned a brother? And if, as it now appeared, neither Dr. Spielman nor Dr. Eierkopf was our father, who on campus did I suppose was? And whatever could have happened to spirit me away?

"Let's hurry, George! Aren't you thrilled to pieces? Oh, darn…" She snapped her fingers. "I really must call Maurice. Only take a sec."

She hurried off to telephone the Powerhouse from the receptionist's desk, and I availed myself of the respite to herd my scattered thoughts and address them to the work at hand — more important by far, to my mind, than the details of my genealogy. Mother or no mother, sister or no sister, I had Finals to pass, an impostor to rout, and studentdom to tutor from its error. Re-place the Founder's Scroll. With humble pride, not unmixed with awe, I remarked how clearly each new task, so far from exhausting me, left me stronger for the next; how, for the man of sure vocation, nothing is gratuitous, and the merest happenstance is fraught with meaning. Dr. Sear's observation about the Library's classification-problem, now I considered it, pointed clearly to the sense of my task — a sense altogether harmonious (as Sear could never have guessed) with the rest of the Assignment. What had my day's work proved, if not the necessity of clear distinction? And what were my labors but a series of paradigms, or emblems of this necessity? To distinguish Tick from Tock, East Campus from West, Grand Tutor from goat, appearance from reality (or whatever contraries were involved in seeing through My Ladyship) — all these tasks, like my sundry concomitant advisings, were but ways of saying, "Passage is Passage, Failure Failure: let none confuse them." All that was wanted to put the Founder's Scroll in its place was sharper definition, I was confident — and eager to tackle the problem, I grew impatient at the little delay, for it began to seem not impossible that I might request Examination that same evening, and thus complete my Assignment in a single day — as close to "no time," surely, as anyone could demand!

After a few minutes Anastasia reported, with some concern, that Stoker had not appeared at the Powerhouse all day, nor had his new secretary at Main Detention seen him since mid-morning; the former office was particularly alarmed because of some threatening situation in the Furnace Room — I trembled to imagine it — that required his management. At least, however, she was free to go with me; we left the Infirmary after a brief dispute with the orderlies (who wanted proof of my discharge from custody and only reluctantly accepted my Clean Bill of Health and Anastasia's endorsement in lieu of the regular form), and as we rode Librarywards in a double-sidecar taxi, Anastasia explained what had disturbed her at luncheon.

"Maurice has never done anything like it before!" she said. "Coming right to the Infirmary and taking me out to eat! He'd even shaved, and bought a necktie!" Moreover — what I agreed was unimaginable — he had treated her with courtesy; had opened doors for her, praised her coiffure (as she reported this she touched her hair, still incredulous), dined with her in almost gentlemanly fashion, and finally announced that he wanted her advice: Didn't she agree that he should drop in at the Light House and publicly deny kinship with Lucky Rexford?

"I swear that's what he said, George — and so mildly!" Any moment, she declared, she had expected him to end the cruel pretense and become his normal self again. Had he but smashed even a little porcelain, called out a few obscenities, or pinched the waitress's behind, she might have dined with some small appetite despite the novelty of the occasion. As it was, she could eat nothing, and trembled with worry that she had displeased him in some way. His question she could scarcely comprehend; not until they rose from table did she venture to say, "Whatever you think, dear" — and that only to terminate the suspense, for she was certain that as soon as she took the bait of his polite inquiry he'd perpetrate some characteristic outrage in the tea-room. He had been drawing out her chair as she replied, and when he took her elbows then she'd closed her eyes and waited, almost with relief, to be assaulted upon the table or otherwise indignified — but he had gently ushered her out, expressing his pleasure in her company and his hope that they might have lunch together more often.

"Did he go to the Chancellor's Mansion then?" I asked.

She closed her eyes and pressed her fingertips to her temples. "I was so rattled, I can't remember what he said after that." Seeing my sharp interest, she asked whether I knew what might have "come over" her husband.

"I have an idea," I admitted. "He and I had a little conversation this morning…" I considered whether to tell her that Maurice Stoker's apparent good behavior, if it was the result of our talk in Main Detention, was more flunkèd in its way than his former immoderacies; but I wasn't certain I could rehearse that difficult argument clearly, and so I simply cautioned her instead not to be seduced, by his new gentleness, out of her new chastity.

She frowned. "But suppose he… wants me for something, George? Or asks me to… do something for somebody? I am his wife…"

Upon consideration I agreed that she might permit him a limited amount of dignified sexual converse with her person, so long as it was with her express consent and involved no force, degradation, perversion, or other abuse. "But not with anyone else, Anastasia," I repeated firmly. "And not just to please him. If you're in heat, or want to breed a child, then okay."

"I don't seem able to have children," she reminded me. "I guess it's lucky, considering." But the thought — of either her barrenness or her past promiscuity — so saddened her that for the rest of the ride she fiddled with a strand of her hair and contemplated the evening traffic. The lights along the boulevards were less bright than they'd been the night before; they appeared at times even to flicker. As we passed the Light House I saw people gathered along the iron fence, some bearing placards whose messages I couldn't make out in the poor light. A black wedge of motorcycles roared from one of the entrance-drives and sped by us; I was almost certain that the leader was Stoker himself — but bare-chinned, and wearing a light-colored suit! Anastasia happened to be staring glumly in the opposite direction, and I said nothing lest at sight of him she change her mind about going with me.

On the esplanade before Tower Hall was another crowd, standing about as if in expectation; one could hear a common buzz of displeasure every time the streetlights winked.

"Something screwy going on," our driver ventured. He took us around to the rear of the building; Anastasia put by her melancholy reverie to pay our fare (which I'd not understood was required) and brightened a little as we approached the enormous wing that housed New Tammany's Central Library stacks and offices.

"I can hardly wait for you to meet Mom after all these terms!" she said, taking my arm. We went through an entrance-door over which was engraved THE TRUE UNIVERSITY IS A COLLECTION OF BOOKS, and made our way through vast high-ceilinged reading rooms, sparsely peopled by reason of the uncertain light.

"I know something's wrong at the Powerhouse," Anastasia fretted. A lone student rushed past us in the corridor which led to the Cataloguing Office; as we looked behind to see where he might be going in such haste, he caught himself up for a second and glanced back at me with an expression of indignant disbelief, as if angry at having to credit his eyes. I blushed, not knowing why I should, and gave Anastasia's hand a brotherly pat.

At the end of the corridor was a large domed room entirely given over to rows of catalogue-files laid out like the spokes of a wheel. In its hub, beneath a suspended sign which declared THE FINAL SCIENCE IS LIBRARY SCIENCE, a large metal-cornered glass case stood empty but for its black-velvet bed. Anastasia gasped. "It is gone!"

She meant the Scroll, ordinarily exhibited there. I twinged with distress: if it had been lost or stolen, to restore it to its place could take Founder knew how long! I insisted we learn what happened to it before pursuing our private business — which might have to be put aside anyhow if duty called.

"Maybe that's what the excitement's about," I suggested unhappily.

There being however no one in the room except ourselves, Anastasia pointed out that her mother was in the best position to answer this question as well as the other, since her office was adjacent to the card-files; she proposed we go to her at once, before she too should join the apparent exodus from Tower Hall; Anastasia would introduce me merely as the new Candidate for Grand-Tutorhood, and I could interview our mother undistracted on the matter of the Scroll before we disclosed our other concerns. I saw no alternative and so agreed, though with some misgivings; the gossip one had heard about Virginia Hector's unhappy condition inspired no confidence in her as an accurate reporter.

"Wait." I caught her arm. "Here comes someone else." A door from the corridor had opened and shut, and sharp heels clicked down the aisle next to ours. The lights blinked out entirely for two seconds; in the pause one heard a surge from the crowd outside. The clicking hesitated also, then resumed with the light. But I laid a finger to my lips and drew Anastasia two steps back into our aisle, because while the sound bespoke a woman's tread, it called to my mind the clickish voice of Harold Bray, and I wanted a moment to consider a half-formed notion that accompanied his hateful image: the texts of his false Certificates were cited by their bearers as coming not simply from the Old or New Syllabus, but specifically from the Founder's Scroll; assuredly there were transcriptions of the document which he might have consulted, but my antipathy put nothing past him. If one began with the assumption that he was a fraud and then looked for the motive of his imposture, it seemed far from unimaginable to me that he might make use of his position to deliver secret information to the Nikolayans, for example, or to steal a priceless treasure like the Founder's Scroll…

The interloper — in fact a female person of a certain age — emerged now into the center; Anastasia left off regarding me quizzically and smiled.

"Come on: it's Mom."

She would have hailed or gone to her, but when the elder woman paused beside the case at sound of us and peered to see who we were, adjusting a pencil in her silver hair, light flashed from the point-cornered lenses of her eyeglasses. I gripped Anastasia's arm and very nearly swooned.

"Founder Omniscient!" I groaned, and ran with chill perspiration; was obliged to squat and feign interest in a low drawer of cards until I mastered my shivering. No mistaking her: it was Lady Creamhair, however drawn and silvered by unhappy terms!

Anastasia bent to me, frightened. "What is it, George?" I shook my head. Lady Creamhair's eyes — Virginia Hector's, it staggered me to understand! — had evidently not improved since our dim dear days in the hemlock-grove; seeing nothing familiar about us or untoward, she went on to her office.

"You're sure that's Virginia Hector, Anastasia?"

"Of course it is! What on campus — "

"And… she's your mother?" I leaned against the cardfile for support.

"Our mother, I hope!" She drew me hubwards. "Let's find out for sure, before she goes off somewhere."

But I held back yet a moment, flabbergast with memory and surprise. Poor dear Creamie! How I understood now your unwillingness to meet my keeper, or tell me your name; how I trembled at your old interest in me, your yen to pluck me from the herd, and — Founder, Founder! — your appall at my lust to Be, that drove you watchless from the grove!

"Anastasia…" I could scarcely speak. It was the empty Scroll-case now I leaned on, and drew her to me. Dutifully she resisted — until assured that it was a brotherly embrace. "I won't explain now, but… I've known that lady before, and I–I really think that you and I might be twins."

She hugged me enthusiastically — confounding my poor blood, which knew no longer what permissibly might rouse it. I suggested then that the shock of seeing me after so many terms might do her mother — our mother! — more harm than good unless properly prepared for; we agreed that Anastasia would go to her at first alone, draw her out upon the matters of our twinship and paternity while I listened from the doorway, and gently then introduce the facts of our acquaintance and my presence in the College proper. If Miss Hector found the news too distressing, I could present myself another time; if not, Anastasia would summon and introduce me. I stationed myself outside the door, and Anastasia knocked.

"Come in, please? Oh, it's you, dear."

I closed my eyes; her voice had still the querulous resolve in it that had fetched me in kiddish fury once at the fence, and soothed my adolescent stormings in the hemlock. Anastasia greeted her with a cheeriness perhaps exaggerated by the situation, declaring that she had a few daughterly matters to discuss, and that it had anyhow been too long since they'd last chatted.

"Oh. Well. Yes. Well. All this commotion lately…" Lady Creamhair clucked and fussed, not incordially, but as if permanently rattled. She seemed indeed in less possession of her faculties than formerly, and with rue I wondered how much hurt my ignorant assault might have done her. The two women exchanged commonplaces for a while — rather formally it seemed to me, for a mother and daughter, but at least with none of the ill-will that had rejected Anastasia in her childhood. Then presently, with apologies for "bringing up a sore subject," Anastasia declared that the recent appearance in New Tammany of two claimants to the title of Grand Tutor had revived many people's curiosity about the old Cum Laude Project and brought up again the unhappy matters of the "Hector scandal" and her illegitimate paternity —

"That's nobody's business," I heard Virginia Hector say firmly. From the sound I guessed that Anastasia went to embrace her then and declared affectionately that indeed it wasn't the business of anyone outside the family; but that she herself, of age now and a married woman, was surely entitled to the whole truth of her begetting.

"You know I've always loved you, Mother, and you must know it doesn't matter to me what the truth is; I just want to get it straight! One person comes along and says Dr. Eierkopf's my father — "

"Ha," Miss Hector said scornfully.

"— then another person says it's Dr. Spielman — "

The import of her "Hmp" at mention of this name I could not assess, though I listened closely.

"And you've said different things at different times yourself," Anastasia went on. "Even that I'm not your daughter…" Her voice grew less steady.

"Oh, now," Virginia Hector said. Anastasia repeated that her affection for her mother could not be diminished by the facts, whatever they were — at least she began to repeat some such sentiment, but was overtaken midway by tears.

"Now, now, now…" So like was that voice to the one that had gentled my two-score weepings in terms gone by, I could have wept again at sound of it. I yearned to burst in and beg my Lady Creamhair's pardon; must press my forehead to the frosted door-glass to calm me. Some minutes the ladies wept together. Then there was a snap of purses and blow of noses upon tissues, after which Virginia Hector said: "I have much to be forgiven, dear, Founder knows… No, no, don't be so kind; you've every right to hate me for the way I behaved when you were little. I flunk myself a hundred times over just to remember it, and when I think of you married to that beast…"

The thought brought more tears, as well it might, despite Anastasia's reassurances that none but herself was accountable for her choice of husbands. Happily, Miss Hector seemed unaware of the details of her daughter's life, before as well as after marriage, understanding only in a general way that it was less than serene and respectable. She was able therefore to recompose herself sooner than she doubtless would have had she known the hard particulars of Anastasia's history.

"I was awfully upset, you know," she went on presently, referring to the period of her daughter's infancy. "You can't imagine how it is to know that nobody will ever believe the truth, no matter what. Not even you. Not even now…"

Anastasia vowed she would, if only her mother would produce it; and so, after a number of unconvinced hums and clucks, Virginia Hector said clearly, almost wryly: "The truth is, I have never in my life… gone all the way with a man. Not once, to this day."

If I was slower to come to incredulity than Anastasia (whom I heard make an instant noise of dismay), it was not because I misinterpreted the phrase "gone all the way," but rather because my origin, my experiences, and my knowledge of Anastasia's past, for example, prevented me from grasping at once that by "never with a man" Miss Hector meant "never with a male of any species."

"When I learned I was pregnant, I blamed it on Max Spielman," she went on to say, "because I knew nobody would believe the truth, and I thought Dr. Spielman might love me enough to take the blame and marry me, even though he'd think it was another man's child. But he didn't, and that was that."

How I longed to tell her immediately the truth of Max's love and honor, so great that it was just her refusal to admit infidelity that had kept him from wedding her! But Anastasia — with a kind of tired incuriosity now, as if she knew in advance what the reply would be — asked then who was her father.

"Your father?" The question appeared to surprise Miss Hector; I tried to recall which word she'd accented, and couldn't. She announced then, as one might read from a page: "Max never would, and Eblis couldn't've if I'd wanted him to. It was WESCAC."

To hear this confirmation from the lady's own lips made me thrill; but Anastasia said disgustedly: "Oh, Mother!"

Miss Hector went on undaunted — indeed, unhearing: "Eblis warned me it could happen, and when they fed in the finished GILES he told me I was one of the ones WESCAC had in mind, you might say. I was in love with Max then, and as I said, I'd never gone all the way with anyone, though I suppose I would have with Max if he'd wanted to. Wait, let me finish…" Anastasia had made a little rustle of despair. "I'd been Miss NTC and Miss University, you know, just as you were — and, my sakes, weren't you lovely the day they capped you! Well…"

She herself had been a vain creature, Miss Hector was afraid, as flattered by WESCAC's election as by the student body's in terms before; and though she wouldn't for a minute consent to the sort of thing that "Eblis" hinted at, any more than any self-respecting girl would have, she'd found herself feeling self-conscious and a little proud whenever she walked past WESCAC's facility in the laboratories of the Cum Laude Project — as if the computer knew it was she and would have whistled if it could. Then one fateful spring evening she'd stayed late to file some data-papers for Dr. Eierkopf at the laboratory (where she'd worked during a temporary furlough from her Library post), and being the last to leave except for the night security-guards, had crossed the hall from her office to make certain that the door to the computer-room was locked…

"It was, just as it should have been," she said. "And I started to go; but then — maybe I thought I heard something peculiar, a singing-noise or something; maybe not, I don't know. Anyhow I came back to the door, and for some reason or other I unlocked it and went inside… just to check, I suppose; or maybe some impulse… I was upset about Max's attitude, I remember…"

Her narrative grew less coherent here, until she'd got herself inside the computer-room and closed the door behind her — for what reason, she didn't recall or couldn't articulate, any more than she could explain why she'd not turned the lights on, or why she'd left the doorway and approached the main console, which whirred quietly as always, day and night, and winked on every side its warm gold lights, as if in greeting.

"I thought I'd just sit in the control-chair a minute," she said; "it was awfully peaceful in there; you've no idea. I could've dozed right off — maybe I did, for a second or two. But then… oh dear, it's not easy to describe how it was!"

The task indeed was difficult, and though her voice rose with a quiet joy as she spoke, so that every word came clearly through the door (despite an increased noise, like cheering, from the crowd outside), I cannot say I followed precisely her account. She had felt a kind of warmth, it seemed — penetrating, almost electrical — that tingled through every limb and joint and relaxed her utterly, as though all the muscles in her body had melted. This sensation had come on quickly, I gathered, but so subtly that she'd not at first realized it was external, and credited it to her fatigue and the extraordinary comfort of the molded chair. Only when the panel-lights ceased to wink and began instead to pulse together in a golden ring did she associate her sensation with WESCAC; even then she failed to comprehend its significance: her first thought was to move lest the tingling be some accidental radiation. But she did not, or could not, even when the whir changed pitch and timbre, grew croonish, and a scanner swung noiselessly down before her; even when, as best I could make out, the general warmth commenced to focus, until she'd thought her lap must burn.

"It seems gradual when I tell it," she said, "but it must have been very quick. Because just when I opened my mouth — to call for help, I guess, because I felt fastened, even though I guess I wasn't — anyhow, I just had time to draw one deep breath… and it was over."

"Over?" Anastasia echoed my own surprise; though she'd heard the story all her life, and assumed it was some unhappy delusion of her mother's, she'd evidently not heard it till now in such detail.

"It was all over," her mother repeated. "In no time at all. The scanner went away; the panel-lights and the humming went back to normal; I could move my arms and legs again. I'd have thought I dreamt the whole thing — just as everyone else thinks I did, if they believe I was there at all — but I still felt tender from the heat. You know. And when I went to get up I felt some wetness there — all of a sudden, this wetness. And as soon as I felt it, and moved, and felt it clear on up, I realized something had gone all the way — - and it would have to be the GILES."

Despite her certainty, however — which I was in better position to share than Anastasia — Miss Hector had said nothing of the marvelous incident to anyone, even when the GILES was found missing next morning and Dr. Eierkopf had pressed her closely on her evening's work. Not until the fact of her pregnancy was unquestionable — and unconcealable — had she confessed it in a panic to her father, the then Chancellor; and not until he insisted that an abortion be performed at once, lest the scandal bring down his administration, had she realized the extraordinary value of what she carried. She'd told Reginald Hector the truth then, and been denounced as a liar; had persisted and been accused of hysteria; and finally, with the consequences I'd heard of from their victim, had chosen to name Max as the man responsible.

"But it wasn't Max, and it wasn't Eblis, or any other human person," she said quietly, when Anastasia voiced a discreet incredulity. "It was WESCAC. And it was the GILES, Founder pass us! Your Grandpa Reg knew it, too, in his heart — why else would he fire Eblis and end the Cum Laude Project? But he'd never admit it — even though the doctor had to dilate the hymen to examine me."

"He didn't!"

"Indeed he did," she insisted. "If he hadn't passed on he'd tell you himself: old Dr. Mayo. It was the baby itself that finally broke it, being born; before that it was just stretched a little — not near enough for a man, you know."

In response to further questions from Anastasia, she affirmed what I knew already: that the birth had taken place secretly one winter night in Ira Hector's hospital for unwed co-eds, with Ira himself presiding. And then, to my unspeakable delight, she went on to confirm what Max and I had once imagined (along with many an alternative) long before, out in the barns:

"Your Grandpa Reg was so afraid of the scandal, he didn't know what to do! When I wouldn't have an abortion, he kept changing his mind, all the time I was pregnant: one day I'd have to give it out for adoption anonymously; the next day we'd have to put it away secretly somehow; then it was no, there'd be worse trouble if that ever got out: we'd have to keep it and take the consequences, or call it Uncle Ira's foster-child…" So mercurial was he on the subject, she said, and desperate to avoid exposure of their shame, she came to fear he might take measures to destroy the child without her knowledge…

"Grandpa Reg?" Anastasia cried. "I can't believe he'd do such a thing!"

No more could she, Miss Hector replied, until he'd announced a few days after she gave birth his decision to do exactly that.

"I found out then it wasn't just the scandal," she explained. "It had to do with his own mother abandoning him and Uncle Ira, and how hard their childhood was; and my mother dying when I was born, you know, and Papa afraid some fellow would take advantage of me, like they had his mother…" Anastasia made a sympathetic noise. "He didn't want my child to go through what he'd gone through. Maybe there were other reasons, too."

In any case she'd pled vainly with him to relent, and scarcely dared let the infant out of her sight lest it be made away with. Then, just before the Cum Laude facility was dismantled at the Chancellor's order, a message for her had been brought to the New Tammany Lying-in by an unidentified person who said only that it had been read out on one of WESCAC's printers.

"It was just three words," Virginia Hector said: "Replace the GILES! I thought and thought, and finally I decided that since WESCAC knows everything, it must know how to solve my problem too. So the night Papa came to get the baby I told him he could have it, that I'd changed my mind — but I said he'd have to get rid of it the way I wanted him to." Having disclosed her plan, she said — but not her motive — and convinced Reginald Hector of its expediency, she'd bundled the baby in the blanket, left the hospital, and entered Tower Hall by the Chancellor's private door.

"Old Dr. Mayo had passed on during my pregnancy," she said, "and in the mix-up afterwards I'd had the WESCAC-man at the hospital do the regular Prenatal Aptitude Test on the baby. He thought it hadn't worked, because all the PAT-card said was Pass All Fail All; and I didn't understand it either, but when Papa and I went into the military-science stacks in the Library — to the part where nobody's allowed except chancellors and professor-generals? — I took the PAT-card along, in case it meant something. I folded it up in the baby's blanket, so Papa wouldn't know it was there; then I gave him the baby, and he put it in the Diet-tape lift and pressed the Belly-button so that WESCAC would EAT it."

"He didn't!" Anastasia cried. Then her appall gave way to confusion: "How is it I wasn't EATen, then, if you sent me down into the Belly?"

It took some while for Virginia Hector to comprehend the nature of her daughter's misunderstanding, which was of course quite apparent to me; what wasn't evident however, even when her mother made it clear that she'd been speaking of a male child, the GILES Himself, I was pleased to see Anastasia question next: how came it that she had been spared, and I condemned? Miss Hector grew vague; seemed not readily to understand the question…

"It had to be twins you had, didn't it?" Anastasia persisted. "Uncle Ira never mentioned any brother of mine — I see why, now! — but he always liked to tell how he'd helped deliver me himself…"

"Well. Yes. Naturally." But Miss Hector's tone bespoke a fuddledness.

"Then how come we weren't both EATen?"

Instead of replying directly to the question, Lady Creamhair declared sharply that no one had been EATen: the whole hope of her strategy, she said, was that WESCAC would recognize its own and not only desist but contrive my preservation when she restored me to it.

"It was a terrible risk," she admitted proudly. "An awful risk! But I was right: they never found him, dead or alive! And I happen to know for a fact he didn't die: my Gilesey's alive, this very minute! Of course, we mustn't ever tell Papa…"

Forgetting her original question now in her excitement — as did I, quickened to the heart by these disclosures! — Anastasia flung her arms about her mother (as I inferred) and confessed that she'd not only learned of her brother's existence, just that day, but had actually met him. "He's on Great Mall right now!"

"No, no," Virginia Hector protested, distracted into an odd air of serenity. "That isn't so, you see."

Anastasia laughed. "It is so, Mom! If you ever watched Telerama you'd have seen him yourself this morning, at the Turnstile Trials."

Her mother still declined to believe her — I knew well why — and began to ramble. Anastasia demanded good-humoredly to know whether she'd recognize me if she saw me.

"Well, yes, my, no, gracious. Children change so… Dear me, yes! No, I'd know my little Giles, yes indeedy; a mother doesn't forget. There was even a birthmark under his little hiney, down on his leg, a little dark circle. No sirree!"

As she went on in this vein I made use of the mirror on my stick to examine the back of my legs, and though the light was poor, and my hands unsteady, I satisfied myself that there was indeed, on the back of my left thigh, about halfway to the knee, a mark such as she described!

"I brought him with me, Mom!" Anastasia said triumphantly. "He's right outside!"

"Oh my, dear me, no…"

"Dear me, yes! And wait'll you see who he is! George?"

Considering Lady Creamhair's obvious distress, I thought it imprudent to reveal myself before she'd had time to assimilate the news of my presence in the College proper; but Anastasia, ignorant of our sore past, summoned me again. Even so I might have fled, for the present: but I heard a sound behind me and saw at the Scroll-case the white-caped figure of Harold Bray. Luckily he seemed not to have observed me. My hands perspired with anger at the sight of him. How he had got in so silently I couldn't imagine; the noise that alerted me proved to be the clack of a key against the glass case as he unlocked it. There was a large black cylinder in his other hand — the Founder's Scroll, I did not doubt, or some false copy which he meant stealthily to put in its place! Yet so brazen was he, Anastasia's call seemed not in the least to alarm him; he didn't even glance our way. The lights flickered, the crowd hummed; for half a second I considered whether to challenge him, exhibit myself to Lady Creamhair, or hide from both until a better moment. Then Anastasia opened the door, our mother clucking behind her, and said, "There you are! Did you hear it all?" She hugged my arm. "Here he is, Mom: hug each other!" That same moment she saw Bray, and joyfully invited him to witness our reunion. No help for it then: I turned to Miss Hector… Lady Creamhair… my mother… put out a hand to shake, and said, "How d'you do, ma'am. Nice seeing you again."

I might have gone on to apologize once more for having tried to mount her at our last meeting, but clearly she was hearing nothing. She opened and closed her eyes, smiled and squinted, shook her head.

"Oh no, indeed. No indeedy," she said, stunned into mildness.

"Billy Bocksfuss," I reminded her tersely, and glanced to see where Bray was. "The Goat-Boy, you know. George nowadays. I apologize — "

"Kiss her!" Anastasia insisted, drawing us together. Bray's voice clicked jovially towards us down the aisle: "What is it, Anastasia? Reunion, did you say?"

"Oh my, no," Virginia Hector said. "Oh well! My!"

"The Goat-Boy himself," Bray said. "Good evening to you, Miss Hector; I hope the noise outside hasn't disturbed you. A most upsetting situation."

He put his arm familiarly about Anastasia's waist as he spoke; even whispered something in her ear, whereat she quickly lowered her eyes and drew in her lips.

"Stop touching her!" I demanded. "Take your hands off my sister!" I blushed, whether at the term or from anger at Bray. Anastasia colored also, but clearly with pleasure, and went obediently to her mother's side.

"What's this I hear?" Bray's tone I judged to be amused.

"Goodness me," Miss Hector sighed at the same time; but the whimsicality in her voice verged upon hysteria.

"Lady Creamhair — " I began again. At once she shut her eyes fast, and set her mouth against the name. "You know who I am. You knew all along!"

"Oh no sirree Bob…"

Touching her arm I reminded her, as Anastasia looked on amazed, of our seasons in the hemlock-grove, of her endless patience and wondrous solicitude; I fully understood, I declared, why she'd done what she'd done in my infancy, and so far from thinking ill of it, thanked her from the heart for having saved my life. What grief I'd occasioned I begged her to charge to my want of sophistication, especially to my ignorance of our true relationship.

She wouldn't open her eyes. "Oh. Gracious. Hm. Well."

"But we both know who I am now!" I said warmly, and turned to defy the pretender. "I'm the GILES, and this is my passèd lady mother!" I looked to her to tell him so; but though tears started now behind her pert spectacles, she smiled and shook her head still.

"Well. Now. No. I don't suppose — "

"Really," Bray tisked at me, "you go too far! We've all been much too patient with you, I'm afraid; if you only knew what trouble you've caused today! The clockworks, and the Power Lines… Enough's enough!"

I heartily agreed, adding that directly I'd seen to the Founder's Scroll's re-placing and had passed the Finals, I meant to present my ID-card to my mother for signing, and the campus would know once for all who was the GILES and who the impostor.

"They will indeed!" Bray chuckled. "The Scroll, by the way, you can forget about: it's back in place now. I took it out front at Chancellor Rexford's suggestion and read off a few Certifications to reassure the crowd. But you can't be serious about this GILES nonsense…"

I turned my back on him and bade Lady Creamhair and Anastasia to come with me. If there was an unruly herd of undergraduates to be calmed, their Grand Tutor was the man to calm them, and I would leave no mother or sister of mine in the odious, if not criminal, company of a base impostor.

Bray pursed his lips and shook his head. "If you choose to deliver yourself up to a mob which wants nothing better than to tear you to pieces, I suppose that's your affair. But I most certainly won't permit my mother and sister to be lynched with you."

"Your mother and sister!" I exploded. At the same time Anastasia cried, "Lynched!" and Lady Creamhair laid two fingers to her cheek and said, "Oh. Well."

Bray assured me levelly that I had a fair chance yet of escaping with my life if I listened to reason; it was to that end exactly he'd stopped at sight of me instead of returning at once to the work of calming the crowd. To Anastasia then, who asked him what the trouble was, he reported dryly that Tower Clock had stopped, for one thing, thanks to some disastrous move of Dr. Eierkopf's of which it was known only that I had advised it; further, that Eierkopf himself was reportedly paralyzed from head to toe, that Croaker was once again amok, that the Power Plant was in grave trouble for want of supervision, that the Nikolayans were threatening riot at the Boundary, that WESCAC was rumored to be in danger of failing for lack of power, and that Chancellor Rexford, so far from making an appearance to calm the student body's alarm, would see no one, not even his highest advisors. General panic and breakdown of the College seemed imminent, and as my presence appeared to be the single common factor in these several crises, the crowd's fear was turning to wrath against me.

"Ridiculous!" I protested. But the lights winked again, and my heart misgave me. "You stirred them up yourself!"

Bray ignored me. "As for the rest," he said to Anastasia: "it's good you know now I'm your brother and the GILES, but that fact changes nothing between us — do you understand me?"

Anastasia objected faintly, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, and I very loudly. He'd said nothing of their kinship thitherto, Bray explained, out of concern for Miss Hector's state of mind, which was known to be precarious — witness her agreeing that he and Anastasia were twins, when in fact they were of different ages and had different fathers. Nor did he approve of proclaiming the truth thus bluntly to her now, but my pretenses forced his hand — another item in my daysworth of ill deeds.

"I won't hear this!" I shouted. "Get on out of here!"

"We'd all best get out," he said flatly, "before they come in after you. Tell Anastasia I'm the GILES, Mother, so she'll believe it. We'll try the Chancellor's Exit."

Lady Creamhair (so I still thought of her, and would ever think) hemmed and chirped, quite glazed now; then she said with surprising distinctness: "He's my Gilesey. Yes he is." And lest anyone mistake her reference she shook her finger at me and added: "Not you."

"Mom!" Anastasia cried.

Lady Creamhair shook her head firmly. "That's a naughty young man."

Bray beamed.

"She's upset," I said to Anastasia. "And no wonder! But just look here…" I lifted my infirmary-gown enough to display the dark disc on my leg. "Look here, Mother: there's proof, if you need it."

Now the dear lady's murmurs became a plaint: "Oh. Oh." Anastasia clapped and bounced. I glared at Bray, and was pleased to take his expression for chagrin. But in fact it proved a curious concentration, like a man's at stool; he even grunted and grew red. Then he sniffed and smiled — I am obliged to say sweetly — - and turning up the back hem of his cape and tunic, exposed a brown left knee, gaunt and hairless, in the crook of which however was undeniably a browner spot. Too low, surely, and something wanting in definition — but a round brown birthmark after all! Anastasia caught her breath; Virginia Hector whimpered; I could have wept for frustration.

"Flunk you! Flunk you! Flunk you!" I shouted.

"Please," he said: "Not in front of Mother. I'm still ready to help you."

Poor Lady Creamhair now grew quite incapable; I flunked the hour I had agreed to this confrontation. Anastasia — no less confounded but still in command of her faculties — led her away toward the Chancellor's Exit and Reginald Hector's offices, next door to Tower Hall. This was Bray's suggestion, and further to infuriate me he asked whether I did not affirm its prudence.

"You should go with them," he advised me. "I'll try to pacify the crowd till you're safely out."

Angrily I replied that neither he nor I was going anywhere until the issue between us was resolved.

"You go ahead," I told Anastasia. "I'm going to end this right now, one way or the other."

Bray bristled and said: "Pah."

Virginia Hector's growing delirium permitted no tarrying; Anastasia cast us a troubled last glance from the doorway. "You won't fight?"

"Of course not," Bray said grimly, and the women left. I myself was by no means so certain: a showdown between us, I now conceived, was what my whole day's labor had been pointed to, as the final separation of Truth and Falsehood. And I had no real fear of him, though he was both taller and heavier than myself — only a kind of uneasiness inspired by his manner and smell, which however would not have stayed my hand had I chosen to take stick to him. But he proposed now, with a kind of dry distaste, that the surest and fittingest way to resolve our differences was to go down forthwith together into WESCAC's Belly: not only could I take the Finals (which he would gladly administer himself), but the EATing of whichever of us was false, and the subsequent emergence of an unquestionably authentic Grand Tutor, might be just the thing to save New Tammany from pandemonium, and the whole West Campus from collapse in that grave hour. Galling as it was to be obliged once again to agree with him, I seconded this proposal at once.

"I'll send word of this to the crowd," Bray said. "That should keep them quiet until one of us comes out."

I clenched my teeth and agreed; then, both to assert my own authority and to preserve the order of my Assignment-tasks, I insisted that the Scroll-case be unlocked, so that I could re-place its contents before passing the Finals.

Bray clicked impatiently. "You've done harm enough, don't you think? Besides, there's no time, Goat-Boy!"

"I can do it in no time," I replied. "Give me the key."

A number of men rushed now into the Catalogue Room — library-scientists and campus patrolmen, it turned out, searching desperately for Bray to speak once more to the crowd before they stormed Tower Hall. They glared at me with bald hostility as Bray explained his strategy — our strategy — and instructed them to broadcast it.

"Has the Chancellor appeared yet?" he asked. They answered that the current rumor was that Chancellor Rexford had lost his mind; that his wife was leaving him; that he'd admitted kinship to Maurice Stoker, which the latter now denied; and that all these catastrophes were somehow owing to the subversive influence of a false Grand Tutor. Their expressions left no doubt about whom they considered the pretender to be.

Bray smiled at me. "We'd better get on with it." Although I realized that any reluctance on my part could be interpreted as fear and thus as an admission of guilt — and that they could simply refuse me if they chose to — yet I showed them the order of my Assignment and repeated that I would enter the Belly-room when I had re-placed the Founder's Scroll, and not before.

"But it's been replaced," Bray pointed out. "There it stands."

Loath as I was to disclose my strategy to him before the fact, I declared then that Re-place meant "put in its proper place," not necessarily its customary one: the Library's difficulties in filing the Scroll stemmed from insufficiently clear distinctions — as did (I added pointedly) many other problems in the University, whose resolution must inevitably be attended with some upheaval. The fact was, I asserted, that the Founder's Scroll, like the Old and New Syllabi, was unique; sui generis, of necessity, else it would be false. The CACAFILE needed then simply to be instructed to create unique categories for unique items, and the filing should proceed without difficulty.

"Nonsense!" snorted a gentleman-librarian. His colleagues agreed, objecting that such "special categories" would in fact be classes of one member, an unacceptable paralogism.

"So are Grand Tutorials," I replied.

"Now that was inspired!" Bray exclaimed with a sort of laugh, and though the library-scientists seemed far from delighted with my plan, he urged that it be transmitted to the catalogue-programmer and CACAFILEd as soon as practicable. "You don't intend to stand here until it's actually carried out, I suppose?" he asked me. "Quite enough to've solved the problem, I should think."

The crowd outside had commenced a rhythmic shout. To me it sounded like "Let's go! Let's go!" or perhaps "Let him go!" but Bray maintained, and the others agreed, that it was "Get the Goat! Get the Goat!" In any case it bespoke the urgency and peril of the situation.

"Very well," I said; "which way is the Belly?"

6

"Do you know," Bray announced to the library-scientists and policemen, "this Goat-Boy's really a well-intentioned fellow at heart, I believe. And you can't say he lacks courage." Of me then he inquired, "You're sure you really want to do this? I thought you'd back down when the time came."

"I'm sure you did," I said. An elder official (the chief New Tammany Librarian, in fact), cautiously wondered whether news of an EATing mightn't aggravate the student body's unrest; the very legality of our entry into WESCAC's Belly he was not sure of — though he did not doubt that in the case of Grand Tutors…

"Grand Tutor," I interrupted. "There can't be two at a time."

"Quite so," Bray agreed, still entirely cordial. "As for the legal matter, it's of no consequence, actually. Thanks to the Spielman Proviso" — he made a little nodding bow to me — "the question of who may go into the Belly is beside the point. Only a Grand Tutor can, and come out alive. However…" He drew a paper from somewhere under his cape. "I took the trouble to prepare a release of sorts, just in case. We'll sign it and leave it with you gentlemen, if Mr. Goat-Boy is agreeable."

The document, addressed To Whom it may concern, declared that whichever of its signatories proved to be the Grand Tutor, He authorized the entry of the other into WESCAC's Belly for the purpose of attesting His authenticity, and was fully and exclusively accountable for the consequences of such attestation; moreover, that whichever proved to be not the Grand Tutor, he consented to and held none but himself responsible for his being EATen in consequence of his error. The Chief Librarian was satisfied that the release protected him and his staff from liability; I too assumed its sufficiency in that respect, and suggested only that the word error be changed to imposture.

Bray seemed to chuckle. "What about 'error or imposture'? I've never called you a fraud, you know, young man; on the contrary, I believe you're entirely sincere — and entirely misled."

I would not be put off by the desperate flattery of a frightened charlatan, I declared — but not to seem unbecomingly harsh I settled for "error and/or imposture," and borrowing a pen from the elder librarian, printed GILES in bold capitals at the foot.

"Ah," Bray said, and declined the pen. "That does for both of us, in the nature of the case. I'd heard you were denying that it matters whether you're the GILES or not; but since we both claim now that we are, let the loser be nameless. Eh?"

The officials seemed less content than I with this development, but there was no time for negotiation. We set off down a corridor towards the central section of Tower Hall, where a special lift — the only one so routed — would take the two of us down into the Belly-room. But immense though the building was, and heavily guarded, elements of the mob outside had forced their way in; we heard shouting in a large room at the end of the hallway and were intercepted before we reached it by other uniformed patrolmen, who advised us to retreat.

"Word just came in that the Power-Line guards are dropping like flies," one of them reported. "Some crazy kind of thing they were ordered to wear around their necks on duty; makes them lose their balance." He glared at me. "Flunking wolf in sheep's clothing!"

I was disturbed less by his shocking metaphor than by his news of the unfortunate border-guards and his obvious sympathy with the demonstrators: he informed us that this fresh calamity had infuriated them beyond restraint; they'd breached entryways all around the building in search of the man they held responsible for the day's catastrophes — and Founder help me when they got hold of me, for he himself would not.

"You should be ashamed of yourself," Bray told him sharply, and seemed prepared to scold him further for dereliction of responsibility; but one of our own party, left behind at Bray's suggestion to transfer the Founder's Scroll to safer storage in the CACAFILE, rushed up to tell us that the card-file room was now also invaded. The students had so far destroyed nothing beyond the door-locks that impeded them, but their mood was ugly, and we were cut off: he feared that if they did not soon find their quarry they'd destroy the Library in search of me, and anyone they suspected of concealing me.

"It's one flunking goat-boy or all of us," he appealed to the Chief Librarian; "and maybe the stacks too — some of them have torches."

If any scruple on my behalf lingered in the elder man's mind, it gave way before the notion of fire in the stacks. He clutched Bray's arm and said, "They mustn't even light cigarettes in here! That settles it!"

I perspired. Bray, on the other hand, smiled, not apparently ruffled by the danger. For once our relative fragrances were perhaps reversed.

"No one's going to be lynched," he declared. Quickly then, but calmly, he issued orders for dealing with the crisis: word was to be spread that the crowd should reassemble at the impregnable Belly-exit at the rear of Tower Hall basement, whence very shortly the EATen impostor must issue with the true Grand Tutor. Thus they would see justice accomplished, and be safely outside the building. To reach the Belly-lift itself would require my cooperation in another stratagem, which he sincerely hoped I would find less repugnant than being dismembered:

"Mrs. Stoker, in her mischievous way, loaned you a mask of my face this morning to get through Scrapegoat Grate with. Put it on, if you still have it, and we'll go through the lobby together. If you've lost it, I'll give you another — unless you'd rather take your chances…"

A bitter pill, made no more palatable by the Oho's of my enemies, who welcomed the insinuation that I'd got through the Grate by fraud! But consoling myself with the thought — and declaration — that WESCAC soon would end all masquerade, I did as bid: fished the odious silky vizard from my purse and donned it. As before, it fit so perfectly and lightly, like a second skin, that the officials were amazed; after a moment I couldn't even feel it. The purse itself then we suspended from my stick, one end of which we each carried (since I refused to part with it), and in this manner we made for the lift to the central lobby. It was a terrifying progress: the large room at the end of the hall was packed with irate undergraduates, professors, and staff-people; their chant — it was, after all, "Get the Goat!" — broke rhythm as we approached, and though our vanguards announced our destination and circumstances, I trembled for all our lives. Triple pain — to hear them credit "the Grand Tutor" with countenancing, literally and figuratively, my descent into the fatal Belly; to see them give way, however muttersome, before the duplicated visage of their idol; and to feel on every hand the obtuse baleful scrutiny which, should it distinguish True from False, would rend to forcemeat its true Instructor!

We gained the lift, went down, and met the same scene in the lobby, magnified. "Give us the Goat, the Goat, the Goat!" they cried, and though a few seemed more in carnival-spirits than in murderous — linking arms with their lady girls and lifting emblazoned steins — the most looked dangerous enough. A half-circle of riot-officers held them from the lift-doors as a man in a neat woolen suit explained our intention through a megaphone.

"Please remain orderly," he implored them. "Surely you don't want to injure the Grand Tutor, and you can't tell which is which. They're going to the Belly now; you'll see the results at the rear exit. Please remain orderly, and do be careful with fire…"

I was startled to recognize the voice, and then the face, as Maurice Stoker's. Anastasia's report notwithstanding, it was difficult to believe that this tidy, bare-chinned chap — whom I now saw full on, quietly exhorting one of his men to remain calm in the face of the mob's provocation — was not some pallid, obverse twin of the Power-Plant Director. The crowd paid little heed except to jeer him, and threatened at any moment to breach the line of guards who but the day before would have had at them with bayonets and cattle-prods. Yet Stoker delayed us for anxious seconds between the elevator we'd left and the one we sought, a few doors down.

"Please excuse me for keeping you," he said to the pair of us. "I realize how trivial this sounds in these circumstances, but I'm really quite concerned about my wife. Does either of you gentlemen happen to know where she might be?"

His smile was polite, even abashed; his tone seemed perfectly sincere. Bray explained curtly that Anastasia had taken her mother next door to her grandfather's office's; his tone suggested disapproval of Stoker's new mien.

"I'm relieved to hear that," Stoker said. "She really wasn't herself at lunch, and I was a bit concerned." He turned to me now. "You must be George, then? Perfect disguise! And a very clever idea, too." He offered his hand to shake. "Thanks ever so much for your advice this morning; I wish I had time to tell you what a campus of good it's done me already. I do hope neither of you will be EATen…"

"For Founder's sake, man, be yourself!" Bray rebuked him. But we could tarry no longer; the crowd had pushed through. Before I could assess the genuineness of Stoker's attitude we were obliged to retreat into the other lift — barely large enough for the two of us, since it was designed for large self-propelled tape-carts rather than for human passengers. The library-scientists fled to safety; the guards pressed tightly together to shield the lift a moment longer; Stoker I heard saying, "Do be reasonable, ladies and gentlemen…" Any moment I expected Bray to withdraw and either confess his imposture or attempt some excuse for not accompanying me — in which latter case I was resolved to denounce him and, if possible, force him to the consequences of his fraud. But when I asked, to taunt him, "Shall we go?" he himself touched a button marked Belly, the only one on the panel. The doors slid to at once, and as there was no light in the lift, we went down in darkness.

For all my new assurance that I was not only the Grand Tutor but the GILES Himself, I was apprehensive; the descent seemed long, and for all I knew Bray might attack me in the dark and try to stop the lift somehow before it reached bottom. His odor, though faint, was particularly disagreeable in the closed compartment; what was more, he put a hard-boned arm about my shoulders and said in a friendly way, "You're what they call in love with Anastasia, I presume." When I didn't answer — I was wondering, in fact, how a man about to die could concern himself with such a subject — he added: "One would think, to look at her, she'd be a first-rate breeder. Why do you suppose she's borne no children?"

The lift stopped at his last word. I grasped my stick, ready to strike should he assault me in his death-throes. But when the doors opened — on a red-glimmering chamber, lined with racks of flat round cans stacked edgewise from floor to ceiling — nothing happened.

"This is what they call the Mouth," Bray said, stepping out. He gave a little sigh, as if loath to end the other conversation. "We'll use it for presenting our credentials. The Belly itself is through a little door over there, which WESCAC has to open."

"So that's it!" I too stepped from the lift, whose doors closed at once behind us. "You knew you could come this far without being EATen!"

He clucked his tongue. "Why are you so hostile? It makes you seem awfully defensive, for a Grand Tutor." In fact, he confessed, he had no idea whether WESCAC's "menu" for self-defense covered the Mouth-room or only the Belly, since none but himself had entered either. "I really advise you to be less critical of your colleagues and Tutees, George," he concluded.

"You advise me! But I see you're assuming I'll live to follow your advice. Don't think you can flatter me now into letting you go back up in the lift!"

He had gone to the inevitable console-panel beside a circular door on the far wall. "Flatter you?" he said. "My dear fellow: in the first place one can't go back up in the lift: it returns automatically and can't be summoned from down here. There's no way out except through the Belly."

"Good."

"As to flattering you, I've no such intention, I hope. Praise, now, that's another matter — but you'll see shortly what a wrong idea you have of me. I'm not what people think I am."

"No need to tell me!"

He smiled and pressed numerous buttons, as though typing out a message on the console. "But I'm not what you think I am, either."

I ordered him to stop temporizing and open the Belly-door — and wondered how I'd open it myself if he refused, for it seemed to have neither knob nor latch.

"Just what I'm doing," he said. "You'll have to put your ID-card and Assignment-list in this slot now — mine's in already, from last time."

"I'll bet it is." I foiled what I took to be his strategem by producing the card I'd got that morning from Ira Hector. But if Bray was surprised at my having one after all, he managed to conceal the fact. Moreover, he ignored my sarcasm and merely remarked that inasmuch as WESCAC's "Diet program" provided for scanning and evaluating trespassers into the Mouth-room like ourselves, he'd taken the opportunity to ask it a few questions on the matter of the GILES, which he thought I might be interested in having verified before we proceeded. I accused him once again of delaying his inevitable end; but it was satisfying nonetheless to see WESCAC affirm unequivocally (as it could not do through its other facilities, I gathered, or before I'd presented my ID-card for its inspection) that it had impregnated Virginia R. Hector twenty-two years past with the Grand-Tutorial Ideal, Laboratory Eugenical Specimen, in accordance with a program-option developed malinoctically by itself. More specifically (this information was delivered us on cards the size of an Amphitheater-ticket, dropped one after another into a cup at the bottom of the console-panel as Bray pulled a lever beside it), the impregnation had been accomplished, stroke per stroke, as Tower Clock tolled midnight on the twenty-first of March of that year. A third card affirmed that WESCAC had PATted the fetus just prior to birth, which occurred two hundred seventy-five days after conception…

"Pass All Fail All!" I could not help exclaiming.

"Naturally," Bray said, and pulled the lever again. The fourth card-bearing, like the others, the smiling likeness of Chancellor Rexford on its obverse — verified not only that the infant GILES had been received into the tapelift but that WESCAC had arranged for a Library employee to rescue the child from its Belly, at the unavoidable sacrifice of some portion of the man's mental ability.

"G. Herrold, pass him!"

Bray clicked sympathetically. "Afraid I never met the chap."

On card number five, in reply to a question Bray had put about Anastasia's relation to the GILES, WESCAC disclaimed any knowledge one way or the other of multiple or serial impregnations of Virginia Hector; but on the sixth it confirmed Dr. Eierkopf's earlier hypothesis that no female sibling, even a twin, could be the GILES, either also or instead; that possibility was precluded by both the Cum Laude program and the fact that twins of different sexes are not genetically identical.

"That's enough," I declared. "Open the Belly."

"One more," Bray said, and handed me a card which WESCAC produced without his pulling the lever. As if he knew its message already (though he'd not apparently read it), he added, "Most important of all, eh?"

The card made three plain statements: that the GILES was a true Grand Tutor in posse; that WESCAC could discern Him upon scanning, and had done so already; that any other person who entered the Belly would be EATen at once. Even as I read this terse pronouncement the small door opened — a round port with a lap-leaved shutter that enlarged octagonally like a camera's. The chamber beyond was entirely dark. To forestall any trickery I snatched Bray's cape — stiffer and slipperier than it looked to be — and declared we would go in together.

"Why not? I should tell you the examining procedure in advance, though, since you're sure I'm about to be EATen." We would be scanned, he said, the instant we stepped through the port, and Electroencephalic Amplification and Transmission should ensue, if it was called for, either immediately or after I'd replied to one preliminary question and three main questions which would appear successively on a small central display-screen. Each was to be answered simply yes or no by pressing either the right or left button respectively of a two-button box suspended over the screen.

"Just a formality, I think," he said. "If you're able to take the Finals at all it's because you're a Grand Tutor already — which means you can't fail them, wouldn't you say?"

For reply I drew him grimly portwards, sure he'd resist at last: but he came to it readily as I. Together we stepped through and slid or tumbled down a short inclined tunnel to land feet-first in a padded chamber. There was an instant snap above and behind us. I started involuntarily, stuck out an arm to keep my balance, and found that the floor and walls of the chamber were lined with a warm, damp, spongy material (humidified and heated, I later learned, to preserve the tapes). Moreover, the room had the feel of an irregular hollow sphere, at least where I stood; it was difficult to maintain balance on its springy floor, which also pulsed and rumbled slightly as though adjacent to great machinery. Was Bray's brain EATen, then, I wondered, or was it only the port and scanners that had snapped? I neither felt nor heard him, and the room was black but for a small horizontal bar glowing some meters away, which I took to be the face of the display-screen. No matter: though I exulted at the recognition that I was unharmed — indeed, relief made me feel strangely at home in that fearful place, as if I were nestled at Mary Appenzeller's flank — I lost no time confirming my rival's fate, but went at once to the lambent bar. No longer than my index finger, and as wide, it floated green and fuzzy as though in mid-chamber — projected there, I assumed, by some optical means. I could only suppose it to be the preliminary question; and surely enough, through the lenses on my stick it resolved into five words:

ARE YOU MALE OR FEMALE

Curious inquiry! Had it not been established already that the GILES could not be female? But as I felt for the answer-button-box I realized that the question was more cunning than superfluous; I pressed the right-hand button. At once a different, longer question shimmered in my glass:

HAVE YOU COMPLETED YOUR ASSIGNMENT

AT ONCE, IN NO TIME

Reluctantly I answered no, thinking that I had after all been at work since dawn, and though my achievement was by no means inconsiderable, I had yet to get certain signatures on my ID-card and determine to what authorities it should be presented. Yet even as I pressed the left-hand button I thought better of it and pressed its mate by way of correction: Founder knew I'd done more than any normal undergraduate human could have hoped to, and what remained was obviously un-doable until I'd passed the Finals, whereof the question itself was part. Trusting that my hasty change of answers had been understood and accepted — since I remained unEATen — I addressed myself to resolving the next item on the screen:

GILES, SON OF WESCAC

At once, and in perfect confidence, I answered yes — - or rather, affirmed what my father was declaring.

DO YOU WISH TO PASS

Triumphantly at this query too I pressed the right-hand button, for though I knew it to be held in certain quads that he who seeks Commencement Gate has perforce not found it, nor can the while he seeks, three instant and simultaneous counter-considerations overbalanced that one: first, it appeared that the Finals were designed for a series of affirmative responses — and aptly, for what could be more affirmative than Commencement? Second (and thus), those same aforementioned esoterics held that he is passed who knows himself passed, and so my yes was in fact a declaration of achievement more than an acknowledgment of desire. Finally, alerted by the curious sense of the preliminary question (whose function, I saw now, was just that alerting), I was not blind to the double meaning of this last one; and comfortable as the Belly oddly was, I did indeed wish to pass now through its exit and calm the anxious student body.

Lo, as if to confirm that third significance, when I pressed yes the bar disappeared, a new rumbling commenced round about, and the floor-walls seemed to pulse in slow waves towards the far end of the chamber. I saw a flicker there, heard a cry of many voices, and understood that the exit-port must be enlarging in the manner of the entry. I scrambled for it on hands and knees, assisted by the undulations; the crowd had seen the portal opening and pressed now nearer with flaming torches, by whose light I saw rise up before me, just inside the exit, the foe I had thought EATen!

Choked with dismay I cried, "Flunk you!"

"And Pass you, sir!" Bray exclaimed, as though joyously. "Pass you to the end of terms! Take these, Grand Tutor of the Western Campus, and go to the head of your class!"

He pressed into my hand what turned out to be my ID-card and Assignment-list.

"You admit you're a fraud!" I challenged him. Outside, the crowd commenced to chant again: "Give us the Goat! All the way with Bray!" Knees to knees now on the floor, facing each other across the exit, we shouldered against the outward-pressing waves. "How come you're not EATen?"

"I'm not a fraud, sir!" he said happily, and even wiped an eye. "Oh, pass you, pass you!" He owed his preservation, he declared, to the fact of WESCAC's having chosen him, some time past, for the work now all but accomplished: the role of proph-prof, foil, and routed antigiles. As John the Bursar had been necessary to declare Enos Enoch's matriculation and administer to him the rites of enrollment, so he Bray had been appointed not only to Certify my passage of the Finals (which he had done, he said, on the documents now in my hand), but to pretend to Grand-Tutorhood himself, in order that I might drive him out at last from Great Mall in proof of my authenticity. "I don't believe you," I said.

"You never did, pass your heart!" He would have embraced me, but I drew back. "You weren't supposed to — until now, of course." He went on: "Every one of my Certifications is false, and by failing all the people I pass, you prove your own passèdness. WESCAC spared me from EATing so that you could turn me over to the crowd — either now or after you've presented your ID-card to Reginald Hector. Then (you don't mind my suggesting this, do you, sir? Your father's suggestion, actually) the Grand-Tutorial thing to do would be to stop the lynching and merely expel me from the College forever." He motioned towards the porthole. "Shall we get on with it?"

Plausible as was his explanation (indeed, how else account for his not being EATen?), and sweet the prospect of accomplishing his fall, I was riven with doubts and perplexities. To reconceive him so abruptly, from foe into accomplice of my destiny, was beyond my managing, the more for the Stokerish air of his invitation, which seemed to me fraught with guile. Did he tempt me, then, like Stoker, in order to be refused? And if so, was it refusal that would flunk me, or refusal to refuse? The Abyss yawned under me, as in the Assembly-Before-the-Grate; I resisted it by yielding, not to the temptation to denounce him, but to an especially strong contraction of the chamber-walls, which virtually ejected me, headlong, through the port. It winked shut instantly behind, like an eye, or the drawstrung mouth of Virginia Hector's purse, slung over my shoulder. Even as I picked myself up — from a small grassplot luckily situated under the aperture — the crowd pressed to me, torches in hand, and lights from a mobile Telerama-unit flooded the scene.

"Hooray for Bray!" they seemed to be shouting. I had time for one glance behind me; he had contrived by some means to remain in the Belly. Then the vanguard was upon me, laughing and cheering; my heart quailed. But it was in victory they hoist me, stick in one hand, papers in the other, to their shoulders. Not until a microphone was thrust at me, and a reporter asked whether the Goat-Boy was indeed EATen for good and all, did I remember what face I wore. Chagrin! But I thought better than to proclaim the truth from so shaky a platform.

"All's well," I told the questioner — and was pleased to hear my voice amplified from the Telerama-vehicle. "The false Tutor's in the Belly; he'll trouble this campus no more."

There was great applause. Handfuls of confetti and streamers of toilet-tissue filled the air; klaxons and bugles sounded; undergraduate young men in ROTC uniforms seized and kissed the nearest co-eds — who willingly submitted, standing on one foot and raising the other behind them.

"Take me to your former chancellor," I exhorted them, "and wait for me outside his office. There'll be a surprise, I promise!"

What I designed, of course, was to present to ex-Chancellor Hector my ID-card, in fulfillment of the final article of my Assignment (since Mother was not herself, and among Grandfather's sinecures was the directorship of New Tammany's idle Office of Commencement); having secured his official endorsement that my Assignment was complete and my ID-card in order, I would unmask myself to him and to the student body, display my credentials, proclaim my indisputable Grand-Tutorhood, and then drive Bray from Great Mall if his expulsion seemed appropriate. The throng took up my promise with a right good will, brandished their torches exultantly now and hymned out the Varsity Anthem as they bore me forth:

Dear old New Tammany,

The University

On thee depends…

Through I approved neither the narrow alma-matriotism of that sentiment nor the general notion that the weal of studentdom was politically contingent, I could not but be moved, in those circumstances, by the fitness of their appeal, directed as it seemed not to their college but to me:

Teach us thy Answers bright;

Lead us from flunkèd Night;

Commence us to the Light

When our School-Term ends!

7

Reginald Hector's several offices — as Commencement Director, Executive Secretary of the Philophilosophical Fund, and Board Chairman of his brother's reference-book cartel — were housed, along with his living-quarters, in a smaller version of Lucius Rexford's Light House, just across Great Mall. As it had originally served the latter's purpose, it was now appropriately called the Old Chancellor's Mansion. Inappropriately, however, its white-brick facade and gracious windows were lit more brightly than those of its larger counterpart: either the Power-Plant trouble was localized, or Lucky Rexford had altered his ways indeed! The respect still felt by New Tammanians for their old professor-general was evidenced by the fact that whereas half a hundred guards had not kept them out of Tower Hall, the sight of one — a white-helmeted and — gloved ROTCMP — was enough to halt my bearers a respectful way from the porch. The fellow was armed, of course; yet surely it was not his rifle (held anyhow at Parade Rest) that stayed them, but their esteem for the man whose door he ceremonially protected. Much impressed at this contradiction of Max's contempt, and Dr. Sear's, for the former Chancellor, I asked to be set down, declared again into a row of microphones that important announcements would soon be forthcoming, perhaps from Reginald Hector as well as myself, and insisted that no one accompany me into the building. As I strode porchwards (gimplessly as possible) campus patrolmen assembled to contain the crowd — which I was gratified to see make no effort to push past them. A number of photographers and journalism-majors were rude enough to press after me up the walk, and though I respected their professional persistence, I was pleased when the military doorman, having inspected my ID-card and saluted me, obliged them to remain without.

"The P.-G's in the P.P.P.O., sir," he informed me; and so satisfying was his brisk courtesy I thanked him and stepped inside before considering what his message signified. Happily, another like him, only female, came forward from a desk in the reception-hall as I entered, and inquired politely whether it was the P.-G. I sought; if so, she was sure he would interrupt his P.P.F.-work for another audience with the Grand Tutor — especially in view of the shocking news, which she daresaid had brought me to the P.P.P.O. I understood then the several initials and, reminded of the general crisis by a dimming of the lights, bid her not fear the alarming reports from Founder's Hill and the Light House, since all radical progress entailed some temporary disorder.

"Oh no, sir," she said — a pert thing she, in her olive skirt and blouse and her dark-rimmed spectacles — "I meant what that Ira Hector's gone and done." She'd led me down a short hall to a glass-paned double door labeled PHILOSOPHICAL FUND: EXECUTIVE SECRETARY. "None of my business, I'm sure," she declared, opening the door with a fetching thrust of her hip, "but I still think Ira Hector's a nasty old man and the P-G.'s a sweetie. I'll tell him you're here."

Curious as I was to know what news she alluded to, I was more so at the sight, in the P.P.F. Office, of what appeared to be the same shaggy band of indigent scholars I'd rescued Ira Hector from in the morning. Beggars now as then, and no less disdainful, they seemed however to be meeting with more success. The man they importuned, pressing round the desktop where he sat, I gathered was Reginald Hector, my maternal grandfather and would-be assassin. A strong-jawed, hairless man in conservative worsted, he dispensed largesse with an even hand and a steady smile. Though his perch was informal, his back was as straight as the guard's outside; his eyes, blue, seemed now to twinkle, now to glint like mica; at each beneficence he said, "Take this!" or, "There, by golly!" in a tone of level satisfaction, as if delivering a counter-thrust. To one man he gave a check, to another a set of drafting-instruments boxed in blue velvet, to another a reference-book bound in half-morocco, to another three tins of corned beef; his own fountain-pen he took from his inside pocket and bestowed upon a long-haired woolly girl, who kissed his hand; his pocket-watch and chain, his desk-barometer and appointment-calendar, even his striped cravat and cufflinks went the same charitable way. And though two aides behind him replaced these items, including the personal ones, from a stock in cartons at their side, I was pleased by the spectacle of such philanthropy, stirred by the contrast between the brothers Hector, and not a little incensed at the students' want of gratitude; even the hand-kisser I suspected of a smirk, which happily her hair hid from her benefactor.

Out of his notice, I observed that the supply of goods in the cartons ran out as the receptionist approached. Ex-Chancellor Hector frowned, shrugged, smiled, cleared his throat, and deftly rolled himself a cigarette.

"That's the end, boys," he said briskly. "No more to hand out."

There was a chorus of complaints, but the aides sharply marshaled the supplicants past me into the hall, reminding them to call a final Thank-you-sir as they left. Few did, except mockingly. Me they regarded with expressions of suspicion, contempt, or hostility — a reassuring surprise, considering my mask. One called me a charlatan, another a "square," another a "company man"; they were, it was clear, disaffiliated from the mainstream of New Tammany sentiment, and my heart warmed to them. Indeed, I privately resolved to seek them out, once I'd proclaimed myself, and enlist them among my first Tutees, as they were beyond doubt the goatliest of undergraduates. Mightily tempted to reveal myself, I urged them to wait with their classmates outside, as I had good tidings concerning their friend the Goat-Boy. Naturally they sniffed at this news; the aides rallied them along then, despite their threats to "go limp" if anyone laid a hand on them.

"Flunking ingrates," one aide muttered to me. "We'll see how they holler with no more handouts from the P.-G."

I began to declare to him that their number included, in my opinion, the very salt of the campus, but by this time the receptionist had informed "the P.-G." of my presence, and he came over to me shaking his head.

"Good to see you, G.T.!" he said warmly. His handshake was strong, his tone friendly, but his smile grave. "Everything's going to the Dunce, eh?"

The receptionist excused herself, but Reginald Hector asked her to look in once more on "Miss Virginia in the next room" instead of returning to the entrance-hall, as he feared his daughter was still half-hysterical.

"The things she's been saying…" He scratched his pate ruefully. "And there's always a flunking reporter around, you know." He cast a brief sharp eye at me, wondering no doubt how aware I might be of his daughter's new distress, and how much of her raving was true.

"Naturally Miss Hector's upset," I said. "Most unfortunate business back there in the Library."

"Unfortunate! I'd like to get my hands on that freak of a Goat-Boy!" He seemed unsure of his ground — as I could well imagine he might be, whomever his daughter was presently claiming to be the GILES. Gruffly he thanked me — that is, Bray — for having Certified him earlier in the day: the quotation on his diploma — No class shall pass — - he deemed so apt a summary of his philosophy that he meant to propose it as a motto for his favorite club, the Brotherhood of Independent Men. Rather, he hoped to do so if he had the wherewithal to maintain his own membership in that society, now that his brother had "pulled the rug from under the P.P.F.," and the Executive Secretary's salary with it.

"More of that flunking Goat-Boy's meddling, so I hear," he said crossly. "Not that I think half those rascals deserve a hand-out anyhow! But better dole it out privately than turn New Tammany into a welfare-college, the way Rexford's been doing."

"Your brother's changed his mind about philanthropy?" I asked.

"Changed his mind! He's lost it!" It had always been his own policy, he declared, to be beholden to no man; to look out for himself in order to be able to look out for others. In this he differed from his brother Ira, who gave alms in self-defense, as it were, or to further his own interests. They shared the opinion that the ignorant mass of studentdom by and large deserved its wretched lot; their own example proved that ambition and character could overcome any handicap; but there was no reason, Reginald felt, not to pity one's inferiors. He thought it important that the College administration keep out of the charity-business, lest the worthless masses — already too dependent and lazy — come to think of free board and tuition as their due; and nothing would militate more favorably for Lucius Rexford's sweeping grant-in-aid bill than the curtailment of the Philophilosophical Fund.

I could not help smiling. "Maybe the Goat-Boy will get to Chancellor Rexford, too," I suggested. Reginald Hector declared with a sniff that he'd heard disturbing rumors to just that effect, adding that back in the days of C.R. II such a dangerous subversive would have been shot, at least under his command. Nowadays it was coddle, coddle — and look at the crime-rate, and the drop-out rate, and the illegitimate birthrate, and the varsity situation!

"The Goat-Boy won't meddle any more," one of the aides said from the hallway, and reported what he'd just heard from the crowd outside: that I had left the impostor EATen in WESCAC's Belly.

"No!" Reginald Hector exclaimed happily, and slapped me on the back. "Why didn't You say so, doggone You!" I confirmed that the false Grand Tutor was no longer a menace to studentdom, and explained the object of my visit: a final endorsement of my Passage and Grand-Tutorship now that the pretender had been put down.

"Gladly, gladly! Give Your card here, sir: I'll be glad to okay it!" He fished for a pen, found he'd given his away, and borrowed one from an aide. "I knew he was a phony — GILES indeed! As if there ever was such a thing!"

I smiled and handed him my Assignment-sheet. Within the circle of its motto, I observed, Bray had written Passage is Failure — - alluding, I supposed, to those Certifications of his which I'd shown to be false. The presumption annoyed me until I remembered his dubious claim to accessoryhood back in the Belly, which I'd not had time to consider and evaluate.

"Mm-hm," the ex-Chancellor said, holding it at various distances from his eyes. Perhaps he couldn't make it out at all; in any case he only glanced at it hastily, nodding all the while. "Oh, yes, this is quite in order. Hum! I can sign it anywhere, I suppose?"

Calling his attention to the seventh and final task, I observed that no signatures on the Assignment-list itself seemed called for, only on the matriculation- (i.e., ID-) card — which too there was apparently no need for him to sign, only to inspect.

"Sure, sure," he agreed at once, as if he'd known that fact as well as his own name, but had forgot it for half a second. "Unless You want me to initial it just for form's sake…"

Inspecting the card myself as he talked, I saw that Bray had printed WESCAC in the "Father" blank and signed his own name as "Examiner." I borrowed Reginald Hector's borrowed pen, scratched through the name George I'd signed earlier, and after it, on the same line, printed GILES.

"Keep it, keep it," he said of the pen, and took the card. Instantly he reddened. "What's this?"

I offered the pen to its first owner, who, however, stepped back with a little embarrassed sign.

"Something wrong?" I asked the ex-Chancellor. "Here — initial it after my title, if you like."

"I see," he said, drawing the words out as if he'd caught on to a tease. "You examined Yourself! Why not? And You're going to call Yourself the GILES because You are the Grand Tutor." He scribbled RH at the end of the line. "Don't blame You a bit! Darned clever idea, in fact — help put an end to that Goat-Boy nonsense. There You are, sir!"

Retrieving the two documents I said, "I am the GILES, Mr. Hector."

"Of course You are!" he cried indignantly. "You've got every right to be! I was trying to tell that daughter of mine just a while ago, when Stacey brought her in all upset: she's got to get that nonsense out of her head — "

"That she's my mother?" I interrupted. "She is, Mr. Hector. I'm the real GILES, that you put in the tapelift twenty-one years ago."

"Ridiculous." He had been looking a rattled and somewhat fatuous old man; now his jaw set, and his eyes flashed in a way that must once have intimidated ranks of junior officers. In fact, the two aides withdrew at once. He was a military-scientist, he told me then curtly, not a fancy-talk politician or a philosopher with thick eyeglasses, and there were plenty of things over his head, he did not doubt: but be flunked if he didn't know a racket when he smelled one, and in his nose, so to speak, this Grand-Tutor business stank from Belly to Belfrey. What was my angle? he wanted to know. He'd gone along with Rexford and the others in recognizing my Grand-Tutorhood (which was to say, Bray's) for the same reason he'd joined the Enochist Fraternity during his campaign for the Chancellorship; because he knew it was as important for "the common herd" to believe in Commencement as it was for riot-troopers to believe in their alma mater, true or false — a consolation for and justification of their inferior rank. And he'd hoped I was merely a clever opportunist; in fact he'd rather admired my "get up and git," as he put it, and assumed I'd got what I was after: fame, influence, campus-wide respect, and a lucrative berth in the Rexford administration. But apparently I was after bigger, more dangerous game; had gone digging into great men's pasts in search of paydirt, as it were, and turning up that libelous old gossip about his daughter and the GILES, had thought to extort something from him with it…

"So lay it on the line, Dunce flunk you, or I'll break you in two!"

Despite the menace of his words and tone I saw he was alarmed — he was, for example, asking my price instead of calling a patrolman — and so I gathered he'd got the drift of his daughter's and granddaughter's recent experience in the Catalogue Room. In short, he knew the GILES was alive and about — whether in Bray's person or in George the Goat-Boy's — and had every reason to fear being brought to account for his old infanticide-attempt. I might have unmasked myself then; but a strategy occurred to me for gaining more truth from him before giving any in return. I was the GILES, I repeated, by WESCAC out of Virginia R. Hector: rescued from the tapelift by G. Herrold the booksweep, reared by Max Spielman as Billy Bocksfuss the Ag-Hill Goat-Boy, and come to Great Mall to change WESCAC's AIM and Pass All or Fail All.

"No!" he protested — but in awe now more than in denial.

"Oh yes." However, I declared, he was not to suppose I sought either wealth or fame for myself or retribution for him; I had left the barn to Pass All or Fail All, and having that same day passed all my tests and the Finals, I wanted nothing from him but a true accounting of my birth and infancy before I went forth to my larger work.

He rubbed his strong chin suspiciously. "What about that George fellow, crashed the Grate this morning?"

"An impostor," I said. "A false goat-boy."

"I heard from Maurice Stoker he was out to make trouble. Founder knows he's made plenty!"

"But not for you," I pointed out. "Anyhow, I've taken care of him."

He squinted at me afresh. "You're really Virginia's son? She was saying crazy things about that George fellow…"

My heart glowed; she had acknowledged me then, at last, after the shock of my old blind assault, and of seeing me again, had led her to deny me! My gratitude for this overcame any lingering grudge against Reginald Hector; I sat beside him on the desktop and laid a friendly hand on his shoulder.

"Mother's not well," I reminded him. "It upset her to see me again, after all these terms, and two of us claiming to be the GILES." But could he really imagine, I asked him gently, that a Grand Tutor harbored vengeance in His heart for an act that could only have been misguided?

"You're really Him?" he demanded once more. "That other fellow — I don't know; I was almost afraid…"

Speaking from my heart, not from my mask, I assured him once more that he was looking at the same Grand Tutor he'd committed to the Belly, and asked him why he'd done it. Surely one didn't murder to avoid a scandal? He shook his head and replied, glum with doubt and shame, that though "the scandal-thing" was no light matter when the reputation of leaders was at stake (since "men won't die for a fellow they don't respect"), two other considerations had led him — and me — to the fatal tapelift. The first was the strange device of my PAT-card, which he took to mean that I would pass or fail not everything, but everybody: in other words, that I'd be the Commencement or Flunkage of all studentdom, as the late Kanzler of Siegfrieder College, his adversary in C.R. II, had vowed to be. Considering Eblis Eierkopf's role in the Cum Laude Project and past affiliation with Bonifacism, he'd adjudged it an unbearable risk that his own daughter might have given birth to another Kollegiumführer. Moreover, even supposing that she had not, he could not abide the thought of his grandson's growing up as he had grown, and Ira, and to some extent Virginia also; better die ignorant than be an orphan in the University: nameless, by nameless parents got, and furtively brought to light!

"Never had a proper daddy myself, and never was one to Virginia," he admitted; "her mother dead a-bearing and mine a tramp… I did what I could to keep the same from happening to Virginia. And I don't know that I blame her, mind — but there she was: raped by a flunking Moishian, a flunking Bonifacist, or a flunking machine, one or the other, and half out of her head from it…"

"It was WESCAC," I put in, "not Max or Dr. Eierkopf. And it wasn't what you'd call a rape. You did put me in the lift, then, and push the Belly-button?"

"I did that," he acknowledged firmly. "Founder forgive me if I shouldn't have." To a professor-general in time of riot, he declared, responsibility for the death of others was no novelty. The blood of hundreds of thousands could be said to be on his hands, he supposed, if one chose to look at it that way; flunk him if I would, he'd done his duty as he saw it, was beholden to none, would take his medicine with head held high. I assured him I had no mind to flunk him, not on that account at least; his deed was wrong, but I quite understood what led him to it and did not think his motives dishonorable, only wrong-headed, like his opinions.

He began to color.

"What I mean," I said, "everybody speaks of your generosity and your brother's selfishness, and I see their point, but it is his wealth behind the Unwed Co-ed's Hospital and the P.P.F. - or was, anyhow. And behind you too, all your life…"

"Now, look here, young fellow! I beg Your doggone pardon — "

But, good officer that he was, he must have felt that Grand Tutors somehow outranked professor-generals, for when I raised my hand he fell silent. I was not condemning him or calling him a hypocrite, I explained, and would as leave save the matter for another conversation — but valid as was Enos Enoch's dictum that students Commence or fail individually, never by classes, and admirable as was the virtue of self-reliance, I could not see that Reginald Hector exemplified either very well. How could he regard himself as beholden to none, when his brother had made possible his whole career, his famous philanthropy, even his marriage? Very possibly he had been a good professor-general and chancellor; very possibly his liberality was authentic — but those talents and virtues were empty abstractions without Ira Hector's wherewithal and influence. "You Certified me Yourself!" he said angrily.

I smiled. "But that was before you'd Certified me, so it isn't quite valid." If he really wished to show his self-reliance, I suggested — now that he was out of a job anyway — why did he not chuck all sinecures and go to the goats, as Max had done? I was speaking half in jest (and half seriously, for G. Herrold's death, Max's arrest, and my departure left the goats much in need of herding), but the ex-Chancellor clearly believed I was baiting him, and looking ready to strike me. His Tutoring, I decided, must wait, since the crowd outside would not. I reassured him that I had no intent to denounce him publicly or otherwise reveal either his old attempt on my life or his various dependencies on Ira Hector. The one I forgave, the other was his affair. Neither did I want anything from him, except possibly the answer to a final question…

"Ask it," he grumbled. "I won't stand for blackmail, but I'm obliged to You for letting sleeping dogs lie. What I mean, I'm not beholden, You understand, but when a fellow needs a hand, why, I'll give him the shirt off my back."

I thought of the hungry undergraduates upon whom he'd bestowed cufflinks and desk-barometers, but contented myself with inquiring whether Anastasia was my sister.

"Aha," he said, as if spying some ulterior motive in the question, and his expression turned fatuous again. "I'd heard you two were sweet on each other! Well, don't You worry, lad — Sir — - I don't believe Stoker's filthy talk about her and that George fellow. He says Pete Greene's lost his head over her too — fellow served under me in C.R. Two, heck of a fine Joe. But I'd never believe that flunking Stoker!"

Disturbing as was the suggestion that Anastasia was known to be "sweet on" Harold Bray, I merely demanded to know whether he meant then that she was not Virginia Hector's daughter. He sighed and rolled another cigarette, shaking his head.

"She only had the one, poor Ginny: just Yourself. Me and Ira stood by in the delivery-room, hoping You'd be stillborn. I figured You'd be some kind of monster, if Ginny hadn't been lying about the GILES-thing…"

Unaccountably my heart thrilled to the news that "My Ladyship" and I (so I began from that moment forth to regard her) were no kin. But I repeated Ira Hector's assertion that he'd helped deliver her himself.

"I wouldn't put it past him," Reginald chuckled. "That's Ira all over." But the truth, he declared, was that Ira regularly "helped out" at the Unwed Co-ed's Hospital simply to be helpful, and thus had taken part in a great many deliveries — it was, after all, his building. Anastasia's parentage, however, would never be known: "The hospital records are confidential anyhow, and when we decided Ira should adopt a girl we had her papers destroyed. Ginny's doctor was the only one who might have known, and he passed away twenty-some years ago." In other words, Anastasia was an orphan, born to some luckless co-ed, left for adoption at the New Tammany Lying-in. When my disappearance from the tape-lift, and G. Herrold's garbled talk of finding a baby in the Belly, had led Reginald Hector to fear that his plan had misfired, he'd judged the scandal of illicit pregnancy less dangerous than that of infanticide, actual or attempted. The fortunate coincidence of Dr. Mayo's death at about that same time had made it possible to enter on the records that Virginia Hector had borne a daughter, Anastasia — whom Ira raised when Virginia refused to. Scandal there'd been, when the news gradually became known, but on the whole it had not much damaged the public image of Reginald Hector; people pitied him and censured Virginia (a double injustice of which he seemed yet oblivious), whose subsequent deterioration they were pleased to regard as her due; Max was got rid of, the Cum Laude Project quietly scrapped, and Eblis Eierkopf demoted to less sensitive researches. Anastasia had proved a delightful grandchild, and but for an occasional nagging fear that the GILES had not really perished (if the baby had been the GILES), Reginald Hector had put the unpleasant episode out of mind — until yesterday, when it had suddenly come back to haunt him.

"But look here," he said at last, patting my shoulder, "if You really promise to let bygones be bygones, You can count on me to put in a good word for You with Stacey."

When I asked what exactly he meant, he winked. "She had no business marrying that dirty-minded draft-dodger in the first place! But Stacey listens to her Grandpa Reg, and if I was to tell her the G.T. loves her… Not that You haven't told her so already, eh?" He nudged me with his elbow.

"A Grand Tutor loves the whole student body," I told him coldly, adding that if he felt so beholden to me as to pimp for his married granddaughter, he was flunkèd indeed, and had better heed my counsel about herding goats. Not to lose my temper further at his pandering to the image of Harold Bray, I turned my back on his expostulations and left the office. At that very moment, as if to remind me of urgenter business, the crowd outside set up a shout. But another came from behind me, like an answer to the first: a woman's cry: "You're not my Giles!"

It was Mother, crazy-eyed and pointing from behind the ex-Chancellor. In vain the young receptionist tried to coax her back into the farther room; in vain Reginald Hector said, "Whoa down, Gin" — his own eyes still flashing wrath at me. She pushed past him with her claws out and would have attacked me if they'd not caught her arms.

"You're not my Billy!" she cried. I froze before the hatred in her face. More shouts came from outside, disorganized and fearsome. She struggled now not at me but towards the office window, shrieking, "They're killing him!"

"What's she talking about?" her father demanded. The receptionist, herself verging on hysteria, replied that it was that George-fellow, the so-called Goat-Boy, that the crowd had discovered somewhere and dragged to the front gate. "She says it's her son, sir! And I think — they're lynching him…"

I ran for the porch, flunking myself for not having put off all disguise long since. The doorguard snapped to attention, ignoring the horror at the gate. There on hands and knees in the torchlight some poor wretch was indeed not long for this campus: blows and kicks rained upon him; the host of his attackers snarled like Border Collies at a wolf; those not near enough to strike with briefcase, umbrella, or slide-rule shouted imprecations and threw weighty textbooks. Already a noose was being rigged from a lamp-post, and Telerama crews were exhorting the crowd not to block their cameras. The victim's tunic, though rent now and bloodied, I recognized as Bray's; but his hair was gold and curled, not black and straight — and the face he raised, when the mob hailed the sight of me, was my own!

"Stop!" I commanded. "Stop in the name of the GILES!" They did actually pause for a moment, weapons poised, and Reginald Hector (a more seasoned hand than I at giving orders) bellowed at them from the doorway to fall back before he horsewhipped the lot of them. "You heard your Grand Tutor: let the bastard go!"

"Billikins!" my mother screamed behind me, and had I not caught hold of her, would have run to the gore-smeared likeness of her son. "You're not the GILES!" she shrieked at me, and strove ferocious at my eyes. "Billy is!"

Did I see Bray smile through his mad disguise? A half-second I had to wonder what, if not an EATen mind, could have led him to so fatal a mask, and where anyhow he'd got it. In that same half-second, as the mob faltered, another woman squealed forth round a shrubberied corner of the mansion. I let go my mother in horror at sight of Anastasia herself, scarcely less abused than Bray: her sandals were gone; her hair was wild, her cheek bloody, her white uniform ripped down the front and everywhere grimed!

"What in thunder!" Reg Hector shouted. My mother, instead of assaulting me, ran weeping to embrace whom she thought her son. Like the crowd, I stood dumbfounded; Reginald Hector, half-mad with alarm, caught his granddaughter in his arms and shouted questions at her: What had happened? Who had attacked her? But she shook away and ran to me. Forgetting my mask I held out my arms — ah, Founder, she was worse mauled than on the night Croaker beached her! — but she halted just before me and screamed at me to "keep my promise." Men with microphones came running.

"You swore!" she cried. "You swore you'd pass Him if I slept with you!" Beside herself, she snatched a microphone and pointed to the man she thought was I, his wounds being kissed by my mother. "That man is a passèd Grand Tutor!" she shouted into it. "Don't dare kill your own Grand Tutor!" To me again then she cried, "I kept my promise! You keep yours!"

I was dizzy with shock. Reginald Hector ran in small circles with his hands upon his ears. The Telerama people signaled one another furiously, and spotlights fingered all about us. To perfect the confusion a squad of Stoker's motorcycle-guards now roared around the corner of the house whence Anastasia had appeared; they drew up near the gate, sirens a-growl, cursing the crowd from their way. Stoker himself led them, black-jacketed, booted, and grinning as of old, soot on chin and teeth a-flash. In his sidecar — manacled, disheveled, bruised, and glum — Peter Greene, with Stoker's pistol at his head! Anastasia ran from him, to hug my knees. Everyone milled about; the lynching was temporarily forgot.

"Please don't let them hurt George!" My Ladyship begged me. "We'll try again tonight, if you want to. The whole night!"

A dreadful thought occurred to me as she spoke, so that only later did I realize what she'd said.

"Did Greene attack you?" Even as I asked I groaned with the certainty that he had, brought to it by disillusionment at my hands.

She pounded my kneecaps with her fists. "It doesn't matter! Please do what you promised, Mr. Bray! I'll find some way to have a baby with you; I swear it!"

My eyes blinded — with tears of chagrin that would not, however, fall — and I pushed through to where my mother knelt kissing the semblance of myself. Restive now, the crowd were arguing with Stoker's men and unabashedly restringing the noose. I tried to say "Wait!" but the cry lodged in my throat. Bray smiled through his bloody mask expectantly; upon his chest my mother wept. I pointed at him and managed at last to say: "That man's an impostor!"

"You're telling us, sir?" his captors laughed, and made to fetch him noosewards. I blocked their way.

"Look!" I seized his hair and my own-which was to say, my own and his — and yanked both masks away, wondering what face Bray would show beneath. It was his own — that is, a semblance of the one I doffed — and people cried astonishment. My mother looked wailing from one to the other of us and clutched her head.

"I'm George the Goat-Boy!" I declared bitterly to the crowd. "My diploma's false; I've failed everything — "

I could say no more for grief; anyhow they were upon me — seized me by the hair, and, seeing it was real, commenced to kick and pummel. Mother screamed, and was fetched from me. My diploma (the erstwhile Assignment-list) they stuffed into my mouth and bade me eat — as willingly I would have, in self-despite, had it not been retchy sheepskin. When they hoist me to a sidecar-top and readied the noose, I could see Bray moving porchwards on the shoulders of the faithful. From the mansion-steps Reginald Hector held out his arms to welcome the true Grand Tutor — nay, more, tore off his own shirt to staunch Bray's wounds, nor would accept the new one his aides fetched forth, until the spotlights swung from him to My perjured, ruined, ruinous Ladyship. Anastasia tugged at Bray's ankle, tore at her already open blouse as if to show him his reward, and screamed to him what she'd screamed to me, I did not doubt; he made a circle of his thumb and forefinger but could not calm her, nor moved at all to stay the lynch.

Neither did the guards: Peter Greene they held from the crowd (who were inspired to hang us both), on the ground that no formal charge of rape had yet been brought against him; but they only grinned and stood by as I was beaten with my own stick, my black purse pulled like a death-mask over my head without regard for its contents, and the tip of the shophar thrust into my rump. No matter: I yearned for the end; welcomed the hemp onto my neck; stepped off the sidecar before they could push me. A vile cheer rose; I heard Stoker laugh at my strangling. "Blow it!" someone yelled — and I thought I might have, so fiercely did I strain to die; indeed there came a far-off shrieking whistle, blast upon blast from Founder's Hill; a sound I knew. As I let go reins and breath and all I heard a man cry, "Founder help us; we'll all be EATen!" And another, almost matter-of-factly: "It's the end of the University."

1

Students pass away; not so studentdom, until the campus itself shall perish. And at that term of terms, when the student body is no more, shall its mind not persist, in other universities than ours?

I couldn't at once adjudge, from where I woke beyond the noose, whether the EAT-whistle had blown for my sole succumbing or all studentdom's, as my chamber was isolate except from the cry and reek of fellow flunks. But that I was in Nether Campus I could not doubt: the heat, the shrieks and mad laughter, the stink — all attested it. I lay in foul straw in an iron stall with padded walls, lit by the red-orange glow from a port in the ceiling — the one apparent aperture. That I should abide there among the flunked forever I did not question: I had failed everything, everyone, in every sense; was as flunked as any other of Bray's passees; had flunked myself as I had flunked them; was flunked at the outset for craving ardently to pass, just as that patch-eyed Nikolayan had been selfish in his yen for perfect selflessness. "Passage is failure": I saw now in my black box what truth was in that remark, and prepared to suffer till the end of terms.

Two things alone surprised me: that the old West-Campus images of the mind's fate after death should turn out, evidently, to be literal truth instead of vivid metaphor — real iron, real dung, real fire and screams, and elsewhere, I presumed, real harps and passèd madrigals! — and that my punishment, so far at least, was in strictly human wise. I had been raised in straiter stalls than this, had slept for years in urinouser peat; surely the Founder knew I must find these quarters less loathesome than another human would. Was it that under the aspect of eternity all punishments were equal, being infinite every one? Or that in His wisdom the Founder chose so goat a lot for mine the smartlier to sting me for playing at human Tutorhood? No matter, these or any things: it was finished. My neck hurt; otherwise I was comfortable, sweetly tired in every limb. Naked, besmeared, I rested in the black heat and balmy absoluteness of my fall. I had failed all, then, passed nothing! Relief — from aspiration, doubt, responsibility, fear of failure — it flooded through me, drowned remorse and dread, swept me into the most delicious sleep.

Hours later — semesters, centuries — I woke to earnest conversation and realized I'd been hearing two male voices for some time.

"He wouldn't!"

"Excuse, Classmate sir: wouldhood!"

"Indeed, I think he would not…"

"Impossibleness not!"

"You truly believe he would, my boy?"

"Yes. No! Bah, I give it up!"

The latter voice, its accent and locutions, was exotic, much in the matter of that same Nikolayan defector's. The former — exotic too, but gentle, old, and wondrously familiar — was Max's. Had they been Shafted, then, and was there company in Dunce's College? I opened my eyes: I was on a bed now, of sorts — a sweet straw tick on an iron-wire platform — in a chamber better lighted than the one before, though no less warm. The floor and ceiling were of concrete, and the wall to which my steel-pipe bedframe was attached; the other walls were comprised of parallel vertical bars in the manner of detention-cells I'd read of. It was, after all, Max and Leonid Alexandrov I heard: they faced each other on the cell-floor, gesticulating as they argued.

"What about the other question?" Max demanded.

"Same like, turned around," Leonid said: "Would go."

"Maios didn't, when he had a chance to."

"Was vanity, then. Playing heroness."

"Playing! He died for it!"

"More famous so! Big advertise, name in historybooks!"

I feared to speak, lest the vision of my keeper vanish; for aught I knew, dear dreams might be my torment. But they saw me stir; Max hurried to me; real tears dropped into his beard and onto mine; material the arms that hugged me, mortal the hand that felt my brow, and I learned I was alive, in Main Detention. Leonid, though we'd met only once before, embraced me also, in the Nikolayan manner, and seemed as pleased as Max to see me wake. They had become friends, it appeared — as were too the Nikolayan and his former adversary Peter Greene, who saluted me glumly from the next cell!

"Thank the Founder you're okay!" Max cried. His late reserve with me was gone; beside my cot he closed his eyes and thumped his forehead against my chest.

"Nothing's okay," grumbled Peter Greene, and was cheerily bid by Classmate Alexandrov to go flunk himself.

"I didn't mean him," Greene said. "Y'know durn well what I mean."

I didn't, nor cared just then to learn. Enough to be alive and on campus, however incarcerate and disgraced. Responsibility! Remorse! Dishonor! I welcomed their sting now as evidence that, among my other failures, I had failed to pass away.

There is no time in Main Detention — under Stoker's wardenship, not even night and day. We slept or woke irregularly without regard to the lights, which went on and off at unpredictable intervals. Meals were served at any hour, apparently, sometimes in such close succession that one had no appetite, sometimes at so great a lapse of time that chants of protest rose from the detained. One had the impression that there was in theory a fixed routine, which however was whimsically administered: we would be routed out for exercise after "lunch," say, and find ourselves doing push-ups under the stars; or we might go for (what seemed like) days without leaving our cells, then be sent to the prison shops or reading-room for so long a stretch that we'd sleep and eat upon the work- or library-tables. In this disorder I saw Stoker's hand, as in our random assignment to cells. Main Detention itself, as I'd gathered from that chart in Stoker's office, was scrupulously laid out as to the location among its tiers of the several sorts of offenders; there was evidence, even, of a moral logic in its architecture. But in practice we were assorted by no discernible plan: I for example had been taken from the noose at Stoker's direction and detained for impersonating a Grand Tutor; the cells for that species of error were in the fourth block of the third, or bottom, tier, counting downwards; yet I had waked first in an observation-chamber for the criminally mad and later in the company of an alleged murderer, an alleged spy, and an alleged rapist (such was the charge against Peter Greene, who after reviving from Dr. Sear's sedation had on the evening of my fall tracked Anastasia into an alleyway behind the Old Chancellor's Mansion and there, by his own dour admission, flung My Ladyship upon the pavement and forced her virtue "redskin style"), no two of whom belonged in the same stratum. Moreover, at each return from work or exercise there was no telling where one would be confined, or with whom: I might be lodged alone or crammed into a cell with ten others in an empty tier; my companions might be fellow-impostors — false dons and pretended sophomores — or some of the many grafters, gamblers, pornographers, and prostitute co-eds detained under Lucius Rexford's far-reaching program of campus reform (of which more presently), or any other combination of the flunked.

Yet among the inconsistencies of our detention, by the logic of our warden's illogicality, we were not invariably assigned a cell at all. On occasion it was every man for himself at lock-up time; my objectives then would be to elude the predatory faggots (who collared the unwary to ruthless buggering) and share a cell with Max, Leonid, Peter Greene — or Croaker, when soon afterwards he joined our company. From them, from Stoker himself, who now and then toured his domain, and from the regular visits of Anastasia and my mother, I learned the unhappy state of things among my erstwhile Tutees, as well as in the upper campus generally. And that news, those developments, were my one real punishment in this interval of my life: sad postings in a desert of dead time.

I was not uncomfortable. When meat was served, or cows-milk, I contented myself with water and mattress-straw, and gained strength and trim from that buckly fare. I cannot say that I was never abused by guards and prisoners, who sometimes took advantage of my sticklessness, or that I never made use of the restless whores who climbed upon the bars to sport. In general, however, except for the pleasure of atonement with Max and the pain of learning what catastrophe my Tutorship had wrought, my season in Main Detention was as numb as it was timeless. So much so, I reconstruct with confidence neither the order of the several disclosures and events which follow nor my reaction to them. They took place, I see now, over a period of some forty weeks, but for aught I felt or valued time it might have been forty years, forty days — or one long night.

The EAT-whistle that had postponed my end was a false alarm — rather, a true alarm falsely construed. When Classmate X had broken off the Summit Symposium and in such dudgeon left the U.C. building, the Nikolayan and New Tammanian border-guards were each alerted to expect trouble from the other. Later that same day, on Lucius Rexford's orders, units from the School of Engineering had moved up to begin the task of relocating the NTC Power Line a full kilometer west of its former position and mounting extra floodlight-towers in the widened gap between East and West Campus. The Nikolayans, thinking themselves menaced by this activity, had actually sent short-order EAT-waves crackling to the very Boundary (at least EASCAC had transmitted them; whether at its own discretion or on orders from the Student-Unionist First Secretary was not clear), which WESCAC had detected and duly reported. Ordinarily in such circumstances no general alarm would have been sounded until the enemy's hostile intentions were unmistakable; but Chancellor Rexford being unavailable for consultation (he was in fact drafting the first of his "Open-Book Test" bills, and refused to be disturbed), the New Tammany professor-generals had blown the whistle. They may or may not have ordered a counter-attack as well: they themselves denied it, but the Nikolayans claimed — predictably, yet perhaps not incorrectly — that New Tammany was calling EASCAC's defense-transmissions aggressive in order to justify counter-aggression; and Stoker himself (from whom I learned all this) maintained that WESCAC had indeed set about to EAT Nikolay College, either by its own AIM or at the direction of the professor-generals; only the drain on its power-supply — caused by Stoker's unwonted absence from the Furnace Room and a sudden frenzy of power-consumption by the Library CACAFILE — had prevented Campus Riot III. The situation remained critical: Chancellor Rexford's sudden insistence on "open-book diplomacy" had made practical negotiation impossible between East and West; the separation of the Power Lines ended the defection of malcontents; the Nikolayans maintained that NTC's apparent retreat was a prelude to "loudening" the Quiet Riot, and Tower Hall replied that the Nikolayans were advancing their Power Line under cover of darkness — the new floodlights were barely usable for want of power. The only casualties thus far were among New Tammany's border-guards, numbers of whom fell to their deaths each week from the Power Line because of the poor light and the new "heads-up" collars which the Chancellor obliged them to wear on duty; but pressures were mounting and tempers shortening on both sides, and at any hour the EAT-whistle might sound again, this time in earnest.

Nor was the grave varsity situation the only cause of Rexford's declining popularity. Stoker had returned to the Powerhouse with raped Anastasia after rescuing me from the noose, and in time had restored Furnace-Room output to three-quarters of its normal level; better than that he could not inspire Madge and the rest to do, by reason perhaps of his own loss of energy; even so, a part of the production was stored, or went up the Shaft in smoke, because New Tammany's power-consumption had dropped to fifty percent of normal. The decrease was owing not to reduced demands for power in the College — they had never been higher — but to the problems of distribution raised by Rexford's refusal to have any commerce with Maurice Stoker, whose presence he also forbade in the Great Mall area. This was the first of a series of prohibitions enacted by his administration in the following months: the ill-famed and short-lived "Open-Book Tests" designed to eliminate flunkèdness from New Tammany College. Dormitory-brothels were shut down, their madams prosecuted. Adultery was made a criminal misdemeanor and rape a capital felony on the one hand, while celibacy on the other — at least as represented by bachelor- and spinster-hood — was penalized by fines increased annually after age twenty-one. Homosexuals were flogged, irrespective of gender; flagellants were not. Although one glass of light wine was served with the evening meal in every dining-hall, drunkenness, even in the home, was punished severely, as were fights of any sort and even domestic altercations — wifebeating, in particular, was made punishable by long detention. Tower-Hall patronage was abolished; macing, graft, division of interest, and other abuses of office became grounds for expulsion from the College. Censorship was imposed upon all media of entertainment, communication, instruction, and artistic expression, with the aim of suppressing excess. Exotic dress, grooming, and behavior were condemned from all sides by billboards and Telerama messages, and — what was perhaps the most controversial measure of all — it was proposed that psychotherapy be made obligatory for extreme or intemperate personalities, to the end of schooling them in moderation. This last proposal the Chancellor ultimately vetoed as immoderate, though he himself had drafted it; but the press criticized him all the same — in guarded terms, out of respect for the censorship. So also did the rank and file of New Tammany undergraduates, who had used to adore him; they removed his sunny likeness from their walls and smirked at the rumors that Mrs. Rexford's vacation from Great Mall would be permanent. Yet they submitted to the Open-Book reforms to a degree bespeaking some basic sympathy with their spirit. Criminal violence became rare; so too did loud merrymaking. Sharp cheeses and unsliced rye bread disappeared from menus. Nearly everyone had a C average. Greene Timber and Plastics (in the owner's absence) developed a synthetic material said to be almost indistinguishable from real plastic, and a more efficient way of packaging containers. It was with a faint smile, a faint sigh, or a faint shrug that people nicknamed Tower Hall "Dead Center." No one was happy; on the other hand, no demonstrations were mounted or measures proposed to repeal the new laws.

The Chancellor himself was only moderately concerned about these developments; neither did it stir him to hear that the Founder's Scroll had got lost in the CACAFILE — which, reprogrammed by Mother's office in accordance with my directive, seemed to have declared every volume in the Library sui generis and would file no two in the same category. The evidence of student-opinion polls, the complaints of his party-leaders and lieutenants that he'd never win the next election, the declining wattage of the Light House itself — nothing much troubled him.

"He's not right bright these days," Stoker said. But he said it languidly, with none of his old high-spirited contempt, and though he had regrown his beard and reverted to his motorcycle-costume, his hair was barbered, his leather jacket greaseless — and a curly black forelock hung upon his brow. "I'm glad he's no kin of mine."

This as he returned me to my cell — to some cell, anyhow — from one of his offices, early in my confinement. I had testified in Max's behalf during his trial for the murder of Herman Hermann and conversed afterwards with Stoker for several hours, during which he told me most of the foregoing and other things as well, with a kind of bored persistence. He had been convinced, he said, that I was as much a fraud as Bray; for that very reason he'd taken my advice and ceased to define passage by his wholesale flunkèdness. His aim — which he pursued because he had no faith in it — was, I gathered, to lead the Chancellor and others to failure by no longer exemplifying and tempting them to it (thereby himself to fail, I suspected, and thus, by his inverted logic, to pass — the same end he'd originally pursued, only essayed now by transvaluated means); and he supposed he had succeeded. Shaven and suited, he'd gone to the Light House in order at once to embrace and to deny kinship with Lucius Rexford, whom he met returning from the aborted Summit Symposium. The two had made polite, if distracted, conversation, even toasted each other's health in Dry Sack; but though the Chancellor was astonished to see him there and gratified to hear that the claim of their fraternity would need be denied no more, Stoker had distinctly felt that for the first time Lucky Rexford disliked him in addition to repudiating him. To be sure, the Chancellor was distraught by the events at the University Council, by Mrs. Rexford's chilly announcement that she'd be dining out that evening, and (what Stoker hadn't been aware of) not least by my several counsels to him, which though he'd scoffed at them he couldn't forget. Nevertheless Stoker felt so clearly the distaste that took the place of Rexford's former envious rejection, he himself cut the interview short, and readily agreed to the Chancellor's suggestion that they meet no more. In a curious heat then, he had throttled through the Light-House gate with his company — not in excess of the posted speed-limits — just as Anastasia and I had happened to taxi past en route to the Library from Dr. Sear's. When shortly afterwards the crowd had gathered before Tower Hall, and he learned their purpose, he'd put his new persona to the further test I'd witnessed, soothing the demonstrators instead of inciting and clubbing them at once as was his wont. Bray's admonition there in the lobby — to "be himself, for Founder's sake" — accounted for his subsequent partial regression: who was himself? and for Whose sake did he do anything? Confused, he had retired to Main Detention, exchanged the business-suit for his customary garb, and returned to Great Mall just in time to stop the lynching.

"But why'd you stop it?" I asked him. "If you'd decided my Tutoring was false and Bray's was true…"

He shrugged. "Stacey's orders."

I could scarcely believe him. "You took orders from Anastasia?"

"I couldn't decide what was what," he said listlessly. "And Peter Greene humping her like that, it kind of upset me…"

I remarked that My Ladyship's sexual misfortunes had never previously dismayed him; he was even responsible for not a few of them.

He sighed. "That was before. You've seen how she is lately. I don't know, George: I think there's something wrong with our marriage."

I believed I knew what he meant, for though I'd seen Anastasia several times since being detained, and accounted for some features of her behavior as owing to my counsel and others to her misguided faith in my Grand-Tutorhood, I couldn't finally say I understood My Ladyship at all. Her permitting Harold Bray to service her in exchange for Certifying me I comprehended, revolting as was the idea; his later amnesty-offer and invitation to me to set right the damage I'd done I refused, assuming they were bought with the same coin. But when she brought my mother to visit me she was cold, even priggish, far beyond the simple chastity I'd enjoined on her. She was unsympathetic not only to the vulgar prisoners who shouted obscenities and exposed themselves to her in the Visitation Room — and whom she once must passively have comforted with her sex — but also to her husband, despite his having ceased to abuse her. If formerly she had embraced the hateful as well as the dear in studentdom, accepting indiscriminately lust with love and receiving upon her with equal compassion police-dogs and Grand Tutors, now she seemed as catholic in her rejection: would no more of me or even of Leonid (who truly, passionately loved her) than of Peter Greene, who professed disgust with her and all her gender.

Anastasia's character, in fact, was one of two chief subjects of debate among my friends in Main Detention; it always came up when Peter Greene and Leonid were within talking distance of each other.

"Keep-her-legs-together-wise," Greene would declare to him, "I used to think she was a durn nice girl, same as you do now. I'd of swore she was the GILES her own self if you'd of stepped up and asked me! Didn't I sock you one in the Living Room for saying she weren't no virgin? But it's no use her putting on airs now, by golly: I've seen what I've saw!"

"And done what you did," Max would remind him.

Leonid then would shout "Irrelevanceness!" or "Dumbnicity!" and, seizing his new friend by the hair (if they were in a common cell) or shaking a cordial fist, would harangue him on his blindness to the real nature of Anastasia's virtues.

"Is the GILES!" he would declare of her. "Excuse, George: you know what! Virgins bah! All this chastehood, all this niceship — what's the word it is, Dr. Spielman, sir?"

"Schmata," Max would offer, who had grown fond of Moishian terms since his detention. "Dreck."

"I love!" Leonid then would roar, with reference equally to the words, his idol Max who supplied them, his grumbling and perhaps pinioned cellmate (who had given up exercise and vitamin-pills), and My Ladyship. "Never mind goodity! Pfui! Pfui!"

What he meant I can more easily paraphrase than reproduce in his idiom: to believe in Grand Tutors and Founders was against his curriculum, but he would not dismiss as did everyone else the notion that the GILES could possibly be female or that Anastasia, despite her sexual history, might be it. On the contrary, it was just that aspect of her biography and former nature that Commenced her in Leonid's eye; he loved her as blindly (it seemed to me) as earlier had Peter Greene, but for just contrary reasons: as a quintessential rapee, an absolutely unselfish martyr to studentdom's lust — his own included, for he'd once knelt before her in a corner of the Powerhouse, confessed an overmastering desire, and not been denied its satisfaction. He would none of my suggestion that her very docility perhaps aroused the lust that made her its victim. "Nyet!" he would shout, slamming one fist into the other and plunging as always about the cell. So far from learning the flunkèdness of her innocence, he would school me in the passèdness of her guilt.

"Lustily I spit on!" he cried. "Chastiness same like!" Celibate co-eds, in his view, were a kind of misers, Ira Hectors of the flesh, and rapists a kind of burglars or book-pirates: flunkèd men whose flunkèdness was made possible by the corresponding flunkèdness of private property. Neither would Graduate if he were Grand Tutor; none save the generous should pass. "But nyet!" he would then avow further. Had he called her a mere rapee? Insufficienthood! There was no merit in being robbed; that mischance befell miser and philanthropist alike. Anastasia, he maintained, was like a man who not only gives alms to the poor and greedy but bestows his whole wealth among them, share and share alike, lest they be led to steal it: "A Reginald Hector of sexness!"

I smiled at this analogy, ironically more telling than he knew, but declined to argue the point or disabuse him of his esteem for the former chancellor. It was between him and Greene that the argument raged, as it had since their first encounter at Stoker's Randy-Thursday party; only now, thanks to Greene's disillusionment, it was flunkèd versus passèd promiscuity rather than the latter versus passèd maidenhood. Otherwise they were the cordialest companions — except when Greene's bitter hallucinations and Leonid's epileptoid fits made one or the other unapproachable.

"No durn good," was Greene's new refrain, whether he was speaking of Anastasia, "Miss Sally Ann," New Tammany College, or himself. "No gosh durn good! What I mean, Truth-Beauty-and-Goodnesswise, y'know?" Though convinced that Anastasia had got what she deserved from him ("Flunking hussy, leading me on she hadn't never been touched, and all the time selling it faster'n O.B.G.'s daughter!"), he did not excuse himself of the felony. He was flunked, he saw plainly now; had always been flunked, in every wise. He had despoiled the forests and destroyed their aboriginal inhabitants, vaunted his uncouthness, ridden roughshod with his vulgar wealth; he had been no husband to his wife (who however he was sure now had betrayed him many times over), no father to his children (wastrels and delinquents though they were). Let them Shaft him; he deserved no less a penalty, even from a college he saw now to be corrupt from Belfry to Basement. Or, if the whore he'd alleyed and her pimp the false Grand Tutor chose to hush the thing up, let them acquit him: once free he'd divorce his wife, resign from his enterprises, quit the Junior Enochist League and all it stood for, perhaps even defect to the East Campus — or blow his brains out, he was not sure which. In earnest of these resolves he had already abandoned razor and soap: his chin bushed orange; his scent approached the late Redfearn's Tom's.

It turned out that he was neither convicted nor acquitted. In the morning of the day at hand — the first of Max's trial — the case against him was dismissed, and he left Main Detention.

"She wouldn't testify!" Stoker exclaimed to me, referring to his wife. I was only slightly less baffled than he. My Ladyship had decided to press no charges — so the prosecuting barrister had announced, plainly chagrined — because "mature reflection" had led her to believe that she'd doubtless invited and provoked Mr. Greene's assault, and doubtless been gratified by it in some flunkèd wise. As her statement was read, Anastasia regarded me coolly across the court-room, where I sat with other prospective witnesses in the Spielman case.

"Generostness!" Leonid wept later, when he heard the news. "GILES-hoodhood!"

At the counsel-table Greene muttered: "I knew she weren't no better'n she should be, drive-a-man-to-drinkwise. They're all of a feather."

But Stoker, like myself, could accept neither of these interpretations.

"It's what you've said about her all along," I reminded him; and he agreed, but pointed out with a troubled sigh the same irony that puzzled me: her admission was — perhaps for the first time! — not true at all.

"Flunk if I know what's come over everybody," Stoker said. "Maybe you are the Grand Tutor." I observed him narrowly: there was in his tone and expression no trace of his usual tease — nor did he lately, as of old, prompt one's least-passèd aspects to the fore. For example, his remark did not tickle my vanity or ambition, as formerly it would have, but rather shamed me, and I answered calmly: "I don't know any more whether Bray's the Grand Tutor or not; there's something extraordinary about him. But I know I'm not. I'm a total failure."

My warden smiled. "Maybe Failure is Passage."

The cell that Peter Greene had vacated I found occupied now by Croaker, fetched there from the Infirmary while I'd been in court.

"He's diplomatically immune," Stoker said. "We're just boarding him till they fetch him back home."

My black friend did not look well. Max and Leonid held his head as best they could while he vomited through the bars. He too was charged with rape, Stoker explained to us, and though he could not be prosecuted he had been declared non gratis in New Tammany College and was being held against his recall at the request of his Frumentian alma mater. Following my advice, it seemed, he had mutinied against Dr. Eierkopf: eaten every egg in the Tower Hall Belfry, fresh and otherwise, then jammed home the Infinite Divisor into the escapement of the clockworks and abandoned his master between Tick and Tock. Putting by all restraint, he had deflowered two co-eds, one male freshman, a trustee's maiden aunt, a blue-ribbon gilt, and a cast-bronze allegorical statue in heroic scale of Truth Unveiled. In addition he had consumed indiscriminately raw chipmunks, aspen catkins, toadstools, dog-stools, and the looseleaf lecture-notes of his third victim, an economics major. The campus patrol had overtaken him at the Honeymoon Lodge Motel; yet they doubted they'd ever have subdued him, unless fatally, had not a remarkable occurrence quite nonplussed him.

"A certain married couple known to us both," Stoker said, still with no sarcasm at all, "were spending the weekend at that motel, it seems, on the advice of the Grand Tutor. What happened between them isn't very clear — Kennard's in the Infirmary now, and Hedwig's in the Asylum — "

I groaned.

"— but whatever it was, it must've unhinged poor Heddy entirely. Ever heard of a woman attacking a man?" Mrs. Sear, it appeared, had accosted Croaker in the motel lobby (whose occupants had fled when he strode naked through the glass door and commenced to make love to a soft-drink dispenser), removed her clothing, and leaped upon him, shouting lewd encouragements. Alas, what the vending-machine had mustered, she dismayed; so addled and unmanned him (of course, his stomach was troubling him by this time too) that he stood like ravished Truth while patrolmen shackled and sedated him. Mrs. Sear, altogether distraught, skipped circles about the lobby, chanting He was my bashful, barefoot beau in uncertain contralto, until the white ambulance-cycle arrived. It had been summoned in fact for Dr. Sear, who during the furor in the lobby was found by a chambermaid to be unconscious and discolored in his room, overdosed with sleeping-capsules. Thus husband and wife had left the motel together, neither aware of the fact. Mrs. Sear was committed and had subsequently regressed to the behavior of a five-year-old girl, according to Stoker; Dr. Sear had his stomach pumped in the out-patient wing of the Infirmary and so was spared for the Cancer Ward, where he presently languished in preparation for palliative surgery. Croaker himself, once subdued, became ill, incontinent, and helpless: went on all fours, forgot how to feed himself, and finally huddled day and night in one corner like a distempered beast. When presently the fever had passed and his appetites began to re-waken, he'd been transferred to Main Detention rather than to the NTC Asylum because of a dispute among the psychiatric faculty as to whether insanity was possible in sub-rational animals. The alternative proposed by the negative faction, composed largely of South New Tammanians — that he be exhibited in the Zoologipal Gardens — was rejected by the Office of Intercollegiate Relations lest it give offense to the emerging colleges of Frumentius, whose political support the Office was courting. Of Dr. Eierkopf's fate there was no word.

I touched the head of my sick black classmate, who, weak from regurgitating mattress-straw, collapsed now between his supporters. Yet before the pupils of his eyes rolled up he smiled at me and grunted.

"He's worse off now than he was the time I turned him loose," Stoker observed. "Even a wild animal won't eat what's not good for him."

"My fault," I said, and shook my head. In counseling Croaker to put by all things Eierkopfian and become indeed a beast of the woods, I'd not allowed for the atrophy of instinct, I suppose; or perhaps student rationality and brute unconscious will were not separable, so that plucking the blossom killed the root. My heart I had thought too numbed by other failures to feel new grief, but so formidable a wreck stung it afresh. Mistutoring Croaker in such wise, I had I felt subverted my own origin and base: the easy beasthood that must have accounted for our rapport.

"He might be dangerous when he gets well," Stoker said to Max and Leonid. "Want to move next door?"

Those two glanced at each other.

"You go on," Max grumbled. "Me he knows already; I should stay here in case."

Leonid considered, flung his arms about for some moments, then replied as if casually: "Not."

"More heroics," Max said. Stoker, who saw what was coming as clearly as I, shrugged and departed, leaving me (as sometimes happened) the barred aisle for my cell — small boon, as its length was cotless and potless. He was not enough reformed to insist on removing my friends from danger; the old Stoker, so far from even suggesting it, would have stayed to watch the mayhem.

"Vice-versity!" Leonid shouted at my keeper. "You're the heroics, sir!"

They took up then the other great topic of debate: the one they'd waked me with at the first and put me to sleep with many times since — and which, after Greene's release, entirely supplanted the issue of My Ladyship's character. It took numerous forms, or rather was provoked by several particular questions like the one here disputed — which of them would risk his welfare by attending Croaker — but inevitably it reduced to the same terms. Max I had accused of a special vanity, the yen for martyrdom; Leonid of a selfish ambition not dissimilar to my former craving for Commencement: the desire to be a perfect Student-Unionist. No good my withdrawing those criticisms now, as bad-tempered, specious, logic-chopping; no good my repudiating all of that flunkèd March-day's work, false counsels of a false Grand Tutor. What they'd denied when I proposed it, they all affirmed, every one of my "Tutees," it seemed, now I would recant; and the more I disavowed Grand-Tutorhood, the strongerly they countered, by word and deed, that disavowal. Max, Leonid, Anastasia, Peter Greene, the Sears, Croaker, Chancellor Rexford — and for aught I knew, Eblis Eierkopf, the brothers Hector, and Classmate X — all seemed to agree now that they had been flunked, Bray's Certification to the contrary notwithstanding, even as in my ignorance I had declared — and that Stoker had been less so, or less truly aspirant to that condition, than he'd claimed to be. In the cases of Max and Leonid this had led to a bind. As to principle they were agreed: if the desire to sacrifice oneself, whether by martyrdom or in perfect selflessness, was selfish, and thus self-contradictory, then to attain that end one must not aspire to it. Further, they agreed — sometimes, at least — that not-aspiring, if conceived as a means to the same end, was morally identical with aspiring, and that imperfect selflessness, when deliberately practiced to avoid the vanity of perfection, became itself perfect, itself vain. Therefore, as best I could infer, they aspired to not-aspire to an imperfect imperfection, each in his way — and found themselves at odds. Would an unvain martyr stay on in Main Detention, Maios-like, even unto the Shaft, as Max was inclined to, or escape, given the chance, to continue his work in studentdom's behalf? Leonid insisted, most often, that the slightly selfish (and thus truly selfless) choice was the latter, and offered "daily" to effect my keeper's freedom by secret means.

To do this, I came to learn, was part of the assignment given him by his stepfather; but our conversation in the U.C. building and his discussions with Max had impaired Leonid's singleness of purpose. His mission had been first to feign defection and then to get himself detained as a Nikolayan agent by discovering, as though inadvertently, an intent to kidnap some unnamed New Tammany scientist; this much he had accomplished before my eyes, on the Black Friday of my Tutorhood. But this apparent frustration of his objective was part of the plan — for it was Max they wanted! Reasoning that his arrest for Moishiocausticide would turn Max against New Tammany, if his original cashiering hadn't, the Nikolayan Department of Intelligence had chosen Leonid Alexandrov, because of his notorious way with locks, to rescue him from the Shaft and transport him across the Power Lines — yielding up his own life, if necessary, in the process. Not only had Leonid accepted the task enthusiastically, seeing in it a chance to redeem his errant past and earn Classmate X's respect by proving his selflessness; he still maintained that the idea had been his own. But my remarks and Max's moral speculations had led him to doubt. Leaving aside the merits of the collective Student Self and its ambitions, ought a truly selfless agent of that Self to carry out its wishes, knowing the vanity and selfishness of his motives in so doing? Or ought he to spoil the assignment, by merely setting Max free in New Tammany or returning empty-handed, and thereby achieve the selflessness of self-disgrace? That Max himself, whom he'd come to love second only to Classmate X, had no desire to work for Nikolay College or even to leave Main Detention, compounded the difficulty.

The truth was, neither doubted the way of his inclination, only its ultimate passèdness. Seeing liberty and the Shaft as equally vain, Max obviously preferred the Shaft — witness his remaining in jail even after he was convicted and sentenced. Leonid just as obviously wanted to rescue him, for all his concession that the wish might not be unselfish. Similarly, each claimed now that the other should have withdrawn to safety and left Croaker's care to him, while freely acknowledging that it might be being "selfish" (that is, unselfish) to take the risk alone.

"For Founder's sake, stop!" I cried to them when I could bear no more of this casuistry. "You're both locked in anyhow. What difference does it make?"

"Bah, Goat-Boy!" Leonid shouted back at once. "Excuse! I love! But bah to you!" He was not angry, only vehement as always. For it must not be imagined that these endless debates were conducted coolly, in a spirit of logical exercise: Max, though calm, was intensely serious — it was, after all, a question of life or death for him — and Leonid was given to crushing embraces, respectful pummelings, shouts, tears, and loving lurches to accompany his reasoning. Now, in demonstration of his contempt for locks (they it was he bah'ed), he sprang to the cell-door and instantly had it open — the first such exercise of his talent in Main Detention. He stepped into my aisle, red-faced and triumphant.

"So!"

At once the other prisoners set up a clamor.

"Could release all!" he roared at them. "Simplicity! Would like! But not!" Because, he confided to me at the top of his voice, he was merely a visitor in New Tammany College, and much as he objected to its curricular policies, he did not wish to act discourteously — besides, he'd not forgotten the consequence of his spree in the Nikolayan Zoo. "Come out, Dr. Spielman! Escapeness!"

Max shook his head, and in the end all three of us ministered to Croaker until his strength and appetites returned, whereupon we fled for safety to an adjoining cell. Thereafter Croaker alternated between reasonless animality and mindless vegetability. In the latter intervals we fed him his meals; in the former we bewore lest he make a meal of us. But whether because, stickless, I had no authority with him, or because like the others he'd taken to heart my disastrous first lesson, I could by no means control or even communicate with him. And so ill-ordered was Main Detention, we all might have perished at Croaker's hands between lock-up times had there not been hosts of passive pederasts and suicidal drop-outs eager for abuse, who diverted him at great cost of limbs and fundaments, not all which Max's skill could repair without medical equipment.

No point now in sifting causes why my old advisor was convicted of first-degree murder in the shooting of Herman Hermann and sentenced to the maximum penalty. True it is that while Max himself would plead neither guilty nor otherwise to the charge (which would have gone uncontested but for our protests to his court-appointed lawyer), he affirmed in court his full confession, not only of the deed but of what he called "virtual" premeditation — by which adjective, lost I fear upon the jury, he seemed to mean a prior yen to persecute unknown to him until the crime (and whereof the deed was the single proof, I vainly testified). Moreover, he asked for the Shaft as the only palliative of his conscience — of the Moishian conscience! — which, he told the court, had centuries of flunkèd pride to atone for…

"We Moishians," he testified, "we've had it coming, on account we've known all the time we are the Chosen Class!" Protests rose among the spectators, Moishians and non-Moishians alike. The Judge rapped his gavel. "Why passèder than the rest?" Max demanded, unimpressed. He touched his fingertips together and rocked his head. "On account we're the only class knows how flunked we are!" The irony was too nice for most to follow and exasperating to the others; absent-minded with impatience, I chewed the straw fans issued us against the summer heat. The effect of such testimony as this was that reactionary, even Bonifacist elements in West Campus, who approved of capital punishment and had little use for Moishians, rallied to Max's defense, arguing in effect that having condemned himself and his class, he might be let go. Their sympathy, of course, Max repudiated, and since only the most self-flagellant liberals could accept his notions of "guilty victimship" and "flunkèd passèdness," he was left without effectual supporters — almost without sympathizers — and may be said to this extent to have chosen his fate.

But it is also true, alas, that both the issue of capital punishment itself and the question of Moishiocausticide had been being hotly argued in New Tammany just prior to the Hermann killing: the former on account of the then-rising crime-rate, which some attributed to "coddling the flunks"; the latter because two other former Bonifacists had been mysteriously kidnaped and killed since the expiration of Siegfrieder College's statute of limitations for the trial of "crimes against studentdom." Chancellor Rexford himself had formerly been inclined against the ancient practice of Shafting condemned men, but since initiating his Open Book reforms he'd ceased to press for repeal of that penalty. Conservative opinion, slow to condemn the Moishiocausts themselves and skeptical of the post-facto law forbidding "crimes against studentdom," was quick to condemn the Moishiocausticides. The liberals — pro-Moishian and anti-Bonifacist — were deeply divided, for though they abhorred capital punishment generally and lynching in particular, they could not bear that the legal safeguards they themselves had struggled for over the terms should make it possible for Moishiocausts to escape retribution for their awful crimes. Much as they revered Max from terms gone by, they deplored his deed, and the manner of his "defense" even more; the whole matter anguished and embarrassed them; they fell out among themselves, husband and wife, teacher and pupil; in the end they stood by painfully, rather hoping Max would be acquitted, or at least not Shafted, but unable to come to his defense when he would not defend himself.

At the trial's end everyone expected a verdict of guilty and the minimum sentence, in view of the defendant's age and fame: a few terms' detention followed by parole. Before the summation Max's lawyer once again begged him to plead insanity and was of course refused. The jury retired, deliberated only a minute or two, and returned the expected verdict. Max stroked his beard, nodding assent; his lawyer, long out of patience with so uncooperative a client, clicked and clicked his ball-point pen. We looked Judgewards and were horrified to see him raise the black cowl, emblematic of capital sentence. Mildly, as if making a procedural point or recessing for lunch, he said to Max: "It is the sentence of this Court that you be taken from here to Main Detention and thence to Founder's Hill, and the life Shafted out of you. Founder have mercy on your mind."

Most were surprised; a few shocked. But who (Leonid excluded) could protest, when the defendant himself had asked for that sentence?

"Beside-the-pointcy!" Leonid shouted at me, back in our cells. "He wants Shaft like Mrs. Anastasia wants rapeness! Inside-outhood! Passitude!"

Before my own failure I would have agreed, and wept Leonidlike with frustrate love. But I could no longer judge anyone — except myself — or hold opinions on any head, or feel strongly any emotion but a dumb acknowledgment that I'd Failed All. "I don't know what to say," I said.

"Selfish, pfui!" Leonid cried at Max, in the idiom learned from him. "I take you to Classmate X! Old friend of you; him you listen! I take Shaft! Exchangeness!"

Max shook his head, adding that he'd never met Leonid's stepfather.

"Don't say!" the Nikolayan bellowed, grinning hugely, and commenced to flap his arms and pound us all upon the back. Was saving, he declared, for big surprisehood or last resortity, as the case should warrant: his stepfather was no native Nikolayan (Had we thought? Ha ha on us!), but a New Tammany Moishian whose parents had transferred out of Nikolay in the bad old days before Student-Unionism. What his original name was, no one knew except the Department of Intelligence, but as best Leonid could infer, he had worked with automatic computers in their infancy, during Campus Riot II; and subsequently, when New Tammany refused to share its electroencephalic secrets with its colleagues, he had defected to Nikolay College, liquidated his former self, and designed a counter-computer to preserve studentdom's peace of mind from aggressive Informationalism.

Max's face clouded as he listened, and my skin tingled; recalling now Classmate X's curious emotion in the U.C. building at mention of my keeper's name, I realized who he must be.

"Your old friend What's-his-name!" I exclaimed to Max. "The one that helped you EAT the Amaterasus and then defected…"

"Chementinski?" Max frowned and plucked angrily at his beard. "Ach, impossible! Chementinski had no head for politics: a smart scientist, but a silly man."

"Not silly!" Leonid shouted, and plunged to his knees before the bunk where Max lay resting.

"Silly and flunkèd, Leonid," Max insisted quietly. "If he is your stepfather, and he sent you here to take my place, so I could defect like him — pfui, that proves it!"

"Untruthery!" Leonid's protest was more distressèd than indignant. That Classmate X was indeed Max's former colleague seemed beyond dispute: no one else in East Campus had had the practical knowledge required for EASCAC's development, which Leonid knew his stepfather had directed. His later forsaking of mathematical for political science, and his formidable success in that department, was to be explained by the utter eradication of his earlier self (which might indeed have been silly and flunkèd); the successful replacement of his personal, fallible will with the Will of the Student Body, impersonal and infallible. So Leonid explained it, roaring earnestly; that one of his idols should dislike the other clearly anguished him as much as the capital sentence had, and I was surprised at the sternness with which Max refused to soften his opinion.

"What does Chementinski want me for?" he demanded. "He knows I've been out of Tower Hall all these years. I got no secrets any more; he knows that too. Why do you think he told you to get me instead of somebody useful, like Eblis Eierkopf?"

Tears streamed from Leonid's eyes. "Loveship, sir! He loves, like me! Like George! Never mind Eierkopf!"

Max shook his head. "It's not love." More gently then, but uncompromisingly, he declared that the principal difference between himself and Chementinski was that the latter, while professing to love studentdom, had always been more or less repelled by individual students; whereas Max, devoted as he was to individual people, had always regarded studentdom in general as more stupid, brutal, and vulgar than otherwise — or else a meaningless abstraction. The weakness of Max's position, as he readily admitted, was that, since EATing the Amaterasus, he was unable to sacrifice anybody to the Common Good, in which he could no longer believe; thus he was unfit for administration. "But your Chementinski, this Classmate X: he could sacrifice everybody, himself too!"

"Not!" Leonid objected; but I confirmed Max's opinion with Classmate X's own statement to that effect, made to me in the U.C. building.

"How else could he sacrifice you?" Max demanded. "A son he should kill his own self for!"

"Good of the Union! My idea! Make-up test, for past!"

Max put a hand on Leonid's shoulder and once more shook his head. Chementinski, he said sorrowfully, had ever been a most unstable fellow, driven by a succession of ideals in which he'd passionately wished to believe, and never satisfied with the genuineness of his commitment. His whole attitude during the EAT-project, Max remembered, had been a fierce self-justification: It was EAT or be EATen, wasn't it? Better a few thousand Amaterasus in ten minutes than another two years of riot! It was for the sake of peace, freedom, and culture, wasn't it? Not to mention pure science, and the deterrent against future campus riots… The effect of this constant questioning was that he'd talked himself out of his beliefs, come to regret his contribution to WESCAC (as had Max, for other reasons), and decided that only by arming both schools of thought with ultimate weaponry could peace of mind now be preserved. Hence his defection.

"What happened since, I don't know," Max concluded. "But he knew I didn't believe what he did, and it always upset him when I thought he was wrong. If Chementinski thinks we got to EAT the Amaterasus once, he can't stand it anybody smart should disagree; if he defects to East Campus, we all got to defect, so he shouldn't wonder was it flunked or passed. That's why he wants me there, Leonid; he can't convince himself he did right."

"Unselfnessness!" Leonid bawled. "He's most unvainestest there is!" He glared imploringly at me. "Talk once, George!"

"I think Max is right," I said. I told him then what I'd learned from Classmate X himself: that he had deliberately led his stepson to believe that he was not forgiven for the zoo-escapade, and could redeem himself in his stepfather's eyes only by expending himself to capture Max. I expected angry denials — would scarce have dared the information had we not been in separate cells, and was prepared, in self-defense, to force his agreement, if necessary, by reminding him that it would be vain to claim the inspiration himself. But Leonid came to the bars, cheeks wet, and asked merely: "Is it true, Goat-Boy? He didn't hate? Ever since?"

"I swear it. He only pretended. He knew you'd do anything to please him…"

"His own son!" Max snorted. "To prove his selflessness! Ach, that Chementinski!"

But Leonid cried, "Passèdhoodness!" and, indifferent to his gulling, danced a wild step about the cell, so relieved was he that his stepfather had not been angry with him after all. It was some time before Max could declare his conviction that any man who sacrificed his own son thus calculatingly, for whatever cause, was incapable not only of anger but of any emotion whatever, especially love. I might have agreed, with some reservations (for while Classmate X had revealed himself to me as far from cold-blooded with regard to his stepson, the deliberate sacrifice of him in the name of Selflessness seemed to me therefore all the more monstrously vain) — but Leonid was seized at this point with a new violent emotion.

"I love!" he shouted tearfully. "Full of selfity, me!" His problem, from what I could make of his exclamations, was that despite his best efforts he was yet a million versts from the impersonality he aspired to, and of which Classmate X was the faultless exemplar. He loved his stepfather, Max, Anastasia, me — he loved everyone he'd ever met, except a few whom he hated, and thus despaired of ever earning Classmate X's love — which of course it was but further selfishness for him to crave!

"Hopelesshood!" From the pocket of his prison-trousers he suddenly snatched a little bottle, not unlike the container of disappeared ink bestowed on me by Sakhyan's colleagues. But this was full of a realer fluid, some of which he swallowed and began at once to strangle triumphantly upon.

"Hooray! Eradicationness! Goodbye me!"

Max made feeble haste to stay him as soon as we realized what he was doing, but Leonid worked his skill upon the doorlock and deftly slipped out into the aisle, where once again he tipped the bottle to his lips. His face purpled.

"No more me!" he croaked. "Tell Mrs. Anastasia I love!" Max and other prisoners shouted for a guard; as was sometimes the case, none was about. Leonid fell; yet even curling on the floor he made to drink again that deadly draught, to insure his end.

"Verboten!" Max pleaded, hopping like a caged dwarf. "Stop him once, George, he shouldn't swallow!"

Leonid, supine, had decided to wave one arm and sing as he expired. "Releasedom! Freehood! Death to Selfity!" He put the bottle to his mouth.

Distressed as I was to see him perish, I would I fear have only watched, and that not merely because I was locked in. But something in his words, more than the emergency itself, got through the torpor I had dwelt in since my noosing. My head cleared miraculously; I saw not just Leonid's plight but his error — and more! In no time at all I was beside him in the aisle; had seized the bottle and was forcing air into his mouth — for he had ceased to breathe. Then, thinking better, I released Max for that work and went to fetch help, running four-footed for speed and letting myself without hesitation through half a dozen barred doors on the way. No guards were on duty; so lax was their warden's discipline, and so many the obstacles to our freedom, they often loitered in the exercise-yard or gathered in the cells of wanton lady girls. The first official I encountered was Stoker himself, and that not until I'd climbed to the highest tier of cells, at ground-level: those reserved theoretically for apathetic C-students and professors too open-minded to have opinions. At sight of me Stoker smiled, stepped aside, and indicated with his arm the final gate, which opened into the Visitation Room and thence to the offices and freedom, as if inviting me to continue on my way.

"It's you I was looking for," I said.

"How droll. I was just coming for you. You have visitors." I explained the emergency. Amused, Stoker sniffed the deadly bottle, now only half full, and returned it to me.

"Ink eradicator," he scoffed. "How'd you ever get past all those locks, George?"

I dashed impatiently to the barred door of the Visitation Room, resolved to find a doctor myself if Stoker would not send one. Inside I saw my mother, accompanied as always by Anastasia. But whether because this last lock was different from the others or because Stoker's question made me realize that I had no idea how I'd got where I was, I found myself unable to pass through.

"Help me, man!" I demanded. "Were those other doors unlocked?"

Stoker winked and replied lightly, "No door's locked if you've got the key." He found the correct one on his ring. "Stop fidgeting: my wife knows what to do until the doctor comes."

I had forgot My Ladyship was a nurse. Gravely she greeted me, coolly Stoker, who reported the news and solicited her aid in a manner so full of dears and pleases that I thought he mocked her. But her reply was frosty and overbearing — "Don't just stand there while the fool dies; get him up here!" — and Stoker hastened so to oblige her, I could only conclude that their relations really had changed character. She took charge of the situation, ordering Stoker to bring Leonid to the prison infirmary while she prepared an emetic and summoned a physician. I was told to stay with "Mother" (as Anastasia still called Lady Creamhair, out of habit) and reluctantly consented: someone had to be with her, her mind had failed so, and Anastasia was grown very cross indeed when opposed, especially by a male. Besides which, I was the only one of us not necessary to Leonid's rescue — a sore consideration, as I had got him into his bind and felt on the verge now of understanding how he might be set free of it. Off went the pair of them on their errands, Anastasia scolding her husband out of earshot. The barred partitions of the Visitation Room were left open; I might have exited from Main Detention even without that gift of Leonid's which momentarily I'd seemed to possess, or Bray's proffered amnesty. But though my new clarity persisted, like a light in an empty room where something is about to appear, and my intellectual coma happily showed no signs of returning, I did not leave, not just then, but sighed and turned to Mother, whom I knew I would find watching me with reverent joy. Cross-legged on the floor, black-shawled and — dressed, the New Syllabus on her lap as always, she flapped at me her thrice-weekly peanut-butter sandwich and crooned, "Come, Billy! Come, love! Come!"

Anxious as I was for my Nikolayan cellmate, I laid my head in her lap, pretended to hunger for the ritual food, and chewed the pages of antique wisdom she tore out for me, though they tasted sourly of much thumbing.

"Now then, love, let me see…" She adjusted her spectacles, brightly licked her forefingertip, and opened the book to a dogeared page. "People ought to use bookmarks!" she fussed. "And there's a verse marked, too. People shouldn't mark in library-books." Her tone softened. "Oh, but look what it is, Billikins: I'm so proud of the things you write!"

Such was her gentle madness, she thought me at once Billy Bocksfuss in the hemlock-grove, the baby GILES she'd Bellied — and, alas, the long-Commencèd Enos Enoch.

"Passèd are the flunked," she read, very formally. "My, but that's a nice thought. Don't you think?"

I didn't answer, not alone because my tongue was peanut-buttered, but because those dark and famous words from the Seminar-on-the-Hill brought me upright. As lightning might a man bewildered, they showed me in one flash the source and nature of my fall, the way to the Way, and, so I imagined, the far gold flicker of Commencement Gate.

2

I sprang from Mother's lap. "Passèd are the flunked, Mom!"

Like an old Enochist at the end of a petition, she touched her temples, closed her eyes, and murmured, "A-plus, dear Founder!"

Commencèd woman; womb that bore me! No matter, how much she grasped of her own wisdom: Truth's vessel needn't understand its contents. When I said — to myself, really — "Bray's not the enemy; WESCAC is!" she replied, "Your passèd father, Gilesey; and He loves me yet," as if I'd praised instead of blamed that root and fruit of Differentiation. Yet when I exclaimed, "They were all passed, every one, and didn't know it — but I failed them!" she repeated, "Passèd are the flunked. A-plus!" and one more scale fell from my eyes. I yearned to be alone, to study the paradox of my new Answer; then to begone, that I might set right my false first Tutoring. Frustrate, I hugged her whom I could not leave, and she bade me comfortably: "Never mind Pass and Fail. Hug your mother."

Commencèd dame! I laughed and groaned at once. There in a word was the Way: Embrace! What I had bid my Tutees shuck — false lines in their pictures of themselves, which Bray in his wisdom had Certified — I saw now to be unshuckable: nay, unreal, because falsely distinguished from their contraries. Failure is passage: Stoker had said wiselier than he knew that dire March morning; had spoken truth, and thus had lured me to my error — that distinction of Passage and Failure from which depended all my subsequent mistakes. Even him I'd failed, then, by his own dark lights, inasmuch as the receipt for flunkage I'd laid on him, opposite of my other counsels, was perforce the one true Passage-Way. Embrace!

When at last My Ladyship and Stoker returned, he skulking long-faced as she nagged, I hurried to embrace them both at once. Stoker grunted; Anastasia was as unbending as a herdsman's crook. When I bussed at her she turned her cheek; I let go her husband and kissed her full in the mouth, pricked with desire for the first time since my failure. She struck my face — as I rather expected she might in her recent character — and I cuffed her in return such an instant smiling square one, to her whole surprise, that she whooped and lost all poise: wet her uniform, and went slack when I hugged her soft again.

"Really, old man," Stoker complained. "My wife, you know. What's come over you?"

Intoned my mother: "A-plus!"

"I've been wrong about everything!" I declared happily. "Never mind! Is Leonid all right?" Before anyone could answer I kissed whimpering Anastasia again — she was quite glasseyed now and limp — and might even have mounted her, so full I was of yen and new plans for her passage. But her menses were on her, my buckly nose reported, and other business pressed, so I forwent lust for exposition. Leonid's drink, Stoker said, was a multipurpose eradicator used by spies in the falsification of credentials and the elimination of either their enemies or themselves, as the case should warrant. It had been pumped out of him in time, and except for a headache, and the delusion that Anastasia had kissed him back from death, he was quite recovered.

"Some nerve!" Stoker said. "I had to talk her into doing that mouth-to-mouth business, and then he says a thing like that."

Anastasia, dumb, now sat in her pissed dress beside my mother. I seized and kissed her hand, whereat she wept for very fuddlement.

"Leonid's right about you!" I told her warmly. "You were passèd before I Tutored you. You should love him!" She shook her head. "You should love everybody, even more than before! Never mind what they're after! Forget what I said last time!"

She shut her eyes and wailed.

"Open your legs again, like the old days!" I commanded her. "Let the whole student body in! I thought I saw through you before, but I've got to start from scratch!"

Stoker protested that I'd have to scratch someone else's wedded roommate, not his — unless of course Anastasia wanted to oblige me, in which case he must regretfully defer to her wishes.

"Stop that passèd talk!" I cried, and laughed and struck his arm. "That bad advice I gave you was the best on campus! Passage is failure, just as you told me — but Passèd are the flunked, too! Thinking they're different is what flunked me!" He was far from convinced, but I would say no more on the matter then. I asked whether Bray's offer to pardon me still stood.

"I should say not," Stoker answered. There had been, it seemed, two conditions attached to my release, one presumably impossible for me, the other repugnant to Stoker: all the signatures would need to be deleted from my ID-card, including those in indelible ink, and Anastasia would have not only to submit to the "Grand Tutor" (I used the imaginary quotation-marks uncynically now) but to bear a child by him. " 'A real little human kindergartener,' he said he wanted," Stoker said angrily. "I should've horsewhipped him!"

"You should have!" I cried joyfully. "And you would have, before I misled you. But listen — " I knelt and embraced My Ladyship once more, despite her wails and wet. "I was as wrong about Bray as I was about you. There is something special about him… In any case you must let him service you, no matter what his terms are — and everybody else, too! Take on the whole University!"

She may not have heard me above her bawling. Mother clapped her hands and cried "A-plus!" after each of my injunctions, rocking in a rhythm. Stoker fussed.

"Don't act so passèd!" I exhorted him. "Hit me, if you want to! Pimp for your wife! Set dogs on Mother!"

"A-plus!" that lady said, whom I would not for the campus have seen harmed.

"You're stir-crazy," Stoker grumbled, nonetheless plainly unsettled. "You talk as if True and False were different Answers."

"And they're not!" I cried. "That's the Answer! My whole mistake was to think they were different — so that's what you've got to think, if you really want to flunk!"

We spoke no more then, because Stoker, to my great satisfaction, lost his temper and collared me cellwards. "Pass All Fail All!" I cried to the tiers of flunks. "It's the same thing!"

Stoker took a billy from a passing guard and clubbed me dumb.

As if, in that timeless cave, time's lost track had doubled on itself, I woke again to the voices of Max and Leonid arguing:

"Would-notship, Classmate, sir!"

"Na, my boy, you're mistaken…"

"But you think was wrong, that suicideness?"

"That's what George thought, Leonid. Why else should he stop you? And I agree: to kill yourself it's selfish."

"Flunkhoodship, then! I be a big selfish! I defection! Big spy for Informationalists, Ira Hector pays me! And bribe Lucky Rexford you don't get Shaft!"

"You see, my friend? Still being unselfish! And if I escaped I'd still be playing the Moishian martyr, like Georgie said."

"So bah!" Leonid cried. "So I be vain my own self; you defect, I get Shaft, my name in all Nikolayan historybooks! Hooray me!"

"By you it wouldn't be vanity, never mind how you say. By me it would, whether I take the Shaft or don't. I got Moishian motives either way. Ach, I hate this!"

"Me too."

I rubbed my head and sat up. "Never mind motives."

As before, they welcomed me back to the waking campus. Max especially was devoted thereafter, and respectful in a way I found unsettling as much as gratifying: as if, now I no longer thought myself Grand Tutor, he was finally able to imagine I was. My other Tutees, those I'd seen and heard of who had inclined to Bray and doubted me, appeared to have reversed their attitudes in view of the flunkèd state I'd led them to, or led them to see, and doubted now the one who'd called them passed. Their problem, as some saw and others didn't, was complex: if Bray's Certifications were false, how reconcile his Certifying me for having declared them so? And if I was true, how assimilate my self-flunkage and late defense of Bray? Only Max was untroubled by the conundrum: "All the better it don't make sense," he would say to Leonid, My chill Ladyship, or Peter Greene, who sometimes now visited. "So it's a mystery, you shouldn't analyze."

He was become my best apologist, if not my best Tutee. For though Anastasia wept and protested my new counsel, especially regarding her connection with Bray, it was not long before Stoker told me (with a wink, as in former times) that the two conditions of my release might soon be reduced to one: he'd observed his wife against the bars on another level, tearfully urging the foul-mouthed imates to have at her, and while they'd been too awed and suspicious to go to it, there could be no doubt but her attitude had changed. Whereas Max, who explained me better than I could myself, had trouble practicing the new preachment he so well glossed, Stoker I was pleased to see become once more a kind of Dunce's advocate; he came down frequently now to bait us and found in Max a willing fish, who however was by no means easy to land.

"They're both fakes," Stoker would declare of Bray and me.

"Falseness!" Leonid would reply. "WESCAC didn't EAT, yes?"

"They fooled it with masks."

"Masks can't fool it," Max would then point out, and review the possible explanations of my passage through the Belly with Bray: "It might be Georgie was spared because Bray was with him, or vice-versa. It might be they're both Grand Tutors, different kinds. Or it might be they both were EATen — but only crazy, not to death. Or it might be the Grand Tutor wasn't EATen and the other was, so one's crazy and the other not…"

"Or they're both fakes and WESCAC's on the fritz," Stoker taunted. "Or it changed its own mind about the Spielman Proviso and doesn't EAT anybody these days. Maybe it's in love with EASCAC and lost its appetite."

But Max would cheerfully agree instead of arguing, and point out moreover that either Harold Bray or the defector Chementinski might in some wise have altered WESCAC's AIM, recently or many terms ago, if the computer hadn't "noctically" reprogrammed itself. Nor could one query WESCAC on the matter, as it might have grown quite capable of lying to or misleading an interrogator.

"Which all proves," he would conclude, "you take or leave on faith a Grand Tutor, don't ask it should be on His ID-card who He is. Even if He says His own self He's a fake, and people call Him crazy, He might be the real thing, you got to decide. I believe in George."

Stoker feigned disgust. "Then you must believe he's not the Grand Tutor and Bray is, since that's what George says himself."

Undismayed, Max explained what I'd not fully realized I felt until I heard him: first, that all I claimed for Bray was that he wasn't simply flunked, as I'd previously believed: there was something extraordinary, out of the merely human, about him — as about myself, in both my parentage and my kidship. Second, that my admitted failure applied only to my efforts at Tutoring before I myself had passed the Finals and thus had no bearing on my present authenticity. If indeed those efforts were failures, which had successfully revealed to my Tutees such flunkèd aspects of themselves…

"Me it sure did!" Leonid cried dolefully. "Such a selfiness I never thought! But I don't care!"

"Nuts," said Stoker. "A man that tells me I should pimp for my wife is a Grand Tutor? And tells her to spread her legs for the whole campus?"

Max nodded, unimpressed. "You he tells that, you should do like the Dean o' Flunks, and hope to pass on account you show others what is it to be flunked. Only you'll flunk on account you lead them to think Pass and Fail aren't two sides the same page. Which they are. So dear Anastasia, that she has a little touch nymphomaniac, she's got to express it instead of suppress, she should Commence. Not so, George?"

And I would merely nod, for though I followed these explications with care and often saw flaws in them (which I couldn't always have articulated), I did not choose to defend or explain myself to Stoker — or to anyone else except myself. My whole concern was to feel a way through the contradictions of my new Answer, in order to apply it to the several problems of my Tutees when I should leave Main Detention. Therefore I gravely listened, but spoke only now and then to clarify a point or correct a misunderstanding. When for example Stoker asked why I didn't simply walk out of his prison, since I seemed able to open any door, Max's reply was that I wouldn't work wonders at the tempting of the Dean o' Flunks.

"That's not quite so," I corrected him, "as Stoker knows. If it were, he could control me absolutely by tempting me to do the right thing." The fact was, I said, I hadn't the least idea how I'd opened those doors, though I felt obliged to Leonid for the ability. All I knew was that for me, just then, they'd been unlocked, as for Leonid all locks ever seemed to be, and that once I wondered how the thing was done, I couldn't do it. It was Anastasia who would set me free, I said… and Classmate X.

"What's this?" Max exclaimed. "Chementinski sets you loose?"

Leonid happily squeezed the breath from me, thinking I planned to defect, then frowned and wondered if such "selfishness" (his current interpretation of the move, and a term of approval by his recentest transvaluation) weren't flunkèdly unselfish: "Like I, I can't get rid of selfish, I'm wear it like a uniform: hooray Me! Spy for New Tammany or take Shaft for Max sir, whichever is selfestest."

I praised his resolve, which like the contradiction of his suicide-attempt had lit the way for my late insight into the secret of the University. But he must not worry, I added, whether my program or his own might lead to "failure": as the author of Taliped Decanus understood, there is only failure on this campus — but as Enos Enoch and the original Sakhyan knew further, Failure is Passage.

In any case, I wasn't thinking of defection. I didn't suppose I could defect, actually, since I was only a kind of visitor in New Tammany in the first place. What I was thinking of I demonstrated some time later, when Stoker came down with my stick, my purse, Peter Greene, and pieces of news.

"It won't do you any good," he said, "but I'm supposed to give you your things and turn you loose if you clear your ID-card. Which of course you can't."

I took my possessions joyfully. The other condition, then, had been met?

"It's been arranged," Stoker said dryly. "My wife will meet Bray in the Belfry at eleven o'clock tonight."

Max groaned, but nodded affirmation. "Failure is Passage. A-plus!"

Tears stood in Leonid's eyes. "Commencedomship!" He put his arm around me and declared that while he could not but adore, with each breath he drew, the woman who'd inspired him from the grave, he would no longer dream that she might requite him, but rather that she and I would one day wed. "Never mind you!" he roared at Stoker, whose grin suggested to me that he himself might have arranged My Ladyship's engagement. Anastasia, said Leonid, deserved no less a husband than the very GILES, whom in turn no mate would serve but the passèdest.

I listened uncomfortably. "The fact is, Leonid — "

"You mean the flunkèdest," Peter Greene interrupted. "Durnedest floozy in the whole flunking College. Not that I care!"

The change in Peter Greene's manner, which had begun with his attack on Anastasia and grown during his detention, was now in full flower. So far from admiring My Ladyship for not pressing the charge of rape, he took her admissions as proof of her depravity, and had decided that all women were trollops at heart, and he himself an "All-U failure, know-thyselfwise." Thus persuaded, he'd advised his wife's attorneys of his intention to forsake her permanently, and invited her to divorce him on the grounds of adultery if she preferred not to wait the required two semesters; he supplied her with full particulars not only of his rape of Anastasia but also of his current activities, sexual and otherwise, and that catalogue, perhaps, had fetched her back into the Infirmary. Though he'd not after all defected to the Nikolayans, he was become a Student-Unionist "fellow scholar" and something of a Beist as well. He smoked hempen cigarettes, went barefoot and unbarbered, carried a guitar on which with rude skill he played songs of lower-form protest, and said of The Living Sakhyan: "Man, he's got the gosh-durn most, what I mean wisewise." He had even taken a Frumentian lady roommate, Stoker's secretary Georgina, whom he claimed to admire for her straightforwardness: she enjoyed fornication for its own flunkèd sake, he said, but loathed him personally, as he loathed himself, and slept with him mainly to relish the spectacle of his impotence. For where in the past he had been of limp manhood with Miss Sally Ann (so much so that he now feared their children were of extramarital paternity), and potent only with "the likes of O.B.G.'s daughter," currently he found himself prone to failure with the wanton Georgina, but tumesced at the mere idea of a proper faithful wife, such as once he'd fondly thought was his.

"She weren't nothing but a floozy, though," he would declare, "like Stacey Stoker and all the rest. Onliest decent gal I ever knew was old O.B.G.'s daughter — which I went and drug her in the muck anyhow, back in the old days. She'd of been pure as snow, that gal, if I hadn't made a black whore of her."

Whether Georgina was G. Herrold's daughter, and G. Herrold and "Old Black George" were the same person, was still unclear, as was the extent to which the woman's present motives were actual admissions of hers or Greene's own conjecture. For though he declared himself pleased "to of had his eyes opened," as he put it, to the flunkèdness of New Tammany, the female sex, and his own sorry past, he was an unhappy man, become sullen and surly; and his grudgy speech was laced with slang so pied and shifting, I shook my head as much at his words as at what I gathered of their sense. Withal, though, he seemed more changed in mood than substance: his soap- and shoelessness, beard and guitar, said Billy-of-the-Hills as much as Beist; and the disenchantment was clearly but a change of spells. His acne, which he had hoped to cure with dirt, was purulent as ever; hemp-smoke but guaranteed what had used to visit him unsought. Bray he called now an outright fraud for having passed him as a "kindergartener"; me he credited with "true-blue Beistic vision" for having shown him his former blindness. Leonid he regarded, with glum goodwill, as half mistaken, eye-to-eye-with-himselfwise: right about New Tammany's decadence, wrong about Nikolay's superiority; right about My Ladyship's unchastity, wrong about her passèdness, and so forth.

"Balonicy!" scoffed Leonid. "She's passèd Graduate! If I believed in!" He shook his fist then at our warden, who was idly prodding Croaker with my stick through the bars of an adjacent cell, where the huge Frumentian lay bloat and helpless from overeating. "You turning flunked again, like before! Let go Mrs. Anastasia, should marry George! I don't mind!"

Stoker replied, with a measure of his former energy, that Leonid had never had a mind to mind with, or he'd have walked out of prison long since instead of trying to get himself Shafted in Max's place. As to divorcing his flunkèd wife —

"Not flunkèd!" Leonid shouted. "Is Passessness!"

"Be durn if she is!" Greene shouted back.

"Who cares?" Max cried. "Fail is pass, altogether!"

Croaker set up a clamor next door, prompted either by the argument or by sight of my stick, which he snatched from Stoker's hand and examined with a deal of lick and jabber. I let them all shout on, attending their debate but not joining it, and measured their several stances against the Answer until I'd found what I sought and done what I desired. From the bottom of my purse — under Sakhyan's phial, the shophar, my damaged watch, the pocket-torch, and my partly chewed Assignment — I fished forth my ID-card, wrongly signed, and from my jail-coat the bottle of Classmate X's all-round eradicator, snatched from Leonid in the nick of time. A few drops were undrunk; I poured them on the card.

"Argue while you can," Stoker said to Greene and Leonid, as if casually. "Two halfwits make a whole wit. Pity we can't Shaft the lot of you tomorrow, instead of just Max."

Leonid blanched; Greene also. Max clutched his beard and sat down quickly on a bunk. Only Croaker continued to gibber, in my direction, as if having seen the stick he recollected who I was.

"Did you say tomorrow?" Greene asked.

Stoker grinned. "Four-thirty in the afternoon." The appeal had been rejected, he announced, on the ground that Max, though refusing to plead, had affirmed his confession of the crime. The only recourse left was petitioning the Chancellor to commute the sentence to permanent detention; unless such petition was made (by the prisoner himself) and granted — against all odds, considering Rexford's late sentiments — Max would be executed at next day's dusk. "Makes a pretty light as the sun goes down," Stoker said. "Especially an old dry Moishian."

"Pig dog monkey!" Leonid shouted. Stoker chided him for using such language in the presence of other animals: a goat, an ape, and three jackasses. This taunt so got to the Nikolayan that he was seized by one of his fits and had to be bunked. When he had ceased to flail I inspected my card and said to Stoker: "Open the door."

He cheerfully replied, "Go flunk yourself."

"I intend to," I assured him, "as soon as I'm free. Here's the card."

The remarkable liquid had caused to vanish entirely every name on the card except the George I'd penned in Ira Hector's ink, and even that had been eradicated to the point where none but myself could mark its traces.

"I'll thank your stepfather for his help when I see him," I promised Leonid. "I'm going to complete my Assignment now."

Overjoyed for my sake, Leonid sprang from his bunk, threw open the cell-door, kissed Max, shook both hands with Peter Greene, snarled at Stoker (who had no keys with him), and opened his arms to welcome me into the aisle. "Love Mrs. Anastasia!" he roared to me. "Defect her to Nikolay College, have lots rebyata! Peace to whole Universtity!"

But I insisted that Stoker fetch keys and release me, to make the thing official. In the meanwhile I bade Leonid come in and relock the door, and Peter Greene linger, as I had things to say to them.

"Don't matter none," Greene said, and even joined us in the cell. "Whole durn campus is a jail, far's I'm concerned."

So it was, Max agreed, if one thought it so; but he declared his joyful suspicion that just as freedom might be detention to the flunkèd of mind, so to the passèd might detention be true freedom — the more so since failure, understood rightly, was passage.

"You want to stay there and rot, that's your business," Stoker said, and went away.

"Bring the key yourself!" I called after him. "I have advice for you, too."

His answer-fart rather heartened than dismayed me, as proof of his ripeness for new counsel. When Max, concerned for Greene's and my sake, urged me to employ Leonid's secret, or let Leonid himself usher me through the bars, I expressed perfect confidence in Stoker's return, and saw no need to add that I had none of my ability to repeat the trick, or in the mercy of the guards, who were permitted to shoot escaping prisoners.

"I hate cops," Greene muttered, and, thumbing his guitar, began to sing a tune he called Greene's Blues:

Self-pitying as were the sentiments, and wrong-headed, the melody was affecting. I embraced and bade farewell to Max.

"What I told you before was all wrong," I said.

He nodded gently. "You're telling me?" By which he meant no sarcasm, but an affirmation of what we both now understood. He had been a love-lover, hating hate, and I'd thought him flunked for being not free of that latter passion after all, and vain in his choice to suffer.

"Don't worry you made a mistake your first time Tutoring," Max said, "A beginner is bound to." And holding his testicles he vowed thenceforward to eschew the delusion that Love and Hate were separable; he would affirm them both; he'd be a love/hate lover — more accurately, a love/hate lover/hater — if he could.

"Then you mustn't regret killing Herman Hermann," I advised him.

"Who regrets?"

What I had wrongly flunked him for — that secret yen to be for once the aggressor, the persecutor — I now exhorted him to acknowledge, to embrace, even to assert. Greene and Leonid frowned their doubts, but Max agreed.

"Because what's the difference, pass and fail?" he asked rhetorically. "A trick of the mind, like it says in Sakhyan."

"Pass you, Max!" I exclaimed, stirred to the heart. "You know what I mean."

"Pfui on categories!" cried my keeper. "Not only I don't regret killing the Moishiocaustnik: I wish I'd shot him myself!"

Peter Greene and Leonid had resumed their favorite quarrel, about My Ladyship, but at this remark of Max's Leonid leaped to us.

"What's this words, sir! You didn't shot?"

"Not my own self," Max admitted.

I too was astonished. At our insistence he confessed what had really happened in the woods near Founder's Hill that night — though he and I agreed that such distinctions as Guilt and Innocence, Truth and Falsehood, were as flunking as the distinction between Passage and Failure. The point-faced guard, he declared, upon overtaking him on the road, had steered and throttled his motorcycle with the plain intent of running him down, and drawn his pistol as well, no doubt to guarantee the murder. But attempting to steer and shoot at the same time, in the dark, he'd lost control of the vehicle and crashed into the ditch.

"So I go look is he hurt," Max said, "and there's the pistol in the mud, and the Bonifacist he's got his boot caught under the sidecar, he can't get loose. So I pick up the gun, it shouldn't get rusty — he shouldn't shoot me either! — and I say to him, Tell me where's Georgie, did Maurice Stoker flunk him yet?" He smiled at me. "Such a dummy I was, about pass and fail!"

He had guessed, Max went on, that Stoker's aide was a former Bonifacist, by his manner and speech, and had surmised further that he must have been a man of some flunkèd consequence to choose exile and disguise at the Riot's end, when so many who surrendered were prosperous again soon after. But he didn't imagine the guard's identity even when he said, in Siegfrieder accents, "Shoot straight, old man; you don't kill professor-generals every night." Pfui on kill, Max had replied; that was not his line, whatever his inclinations.

"So I get him loose and tell him go home, he should drop dead without my help. This makes him angry; he says he won't be patronized by a flunkèd old Moishian, that he wouldn't have used to light a cigarette with back in his extermination-campuses: I should shoot him or he'll set fire my beard. Then he walks at me with his cigarette-lighter, I can see his face by it, and I realize he's Herman Hermann the Moishiocaustnik!" Whereupon, instead of shooting, Max had been smitten with despair, not alone because of the Bonifacist slaughter, but for the fate of studentdom in a university where Grand Tutors falter, and the flunkèd thrive. Assuming that the last slim hope of the campus had been traduced by Stoker's blandishments, and remembering the countless Amaterasus who'd not have been EATen had he himself stayed behind to die in Siegfrieder College with Chaim Schultz and the rest, Max could imagine no fitter end than to perish, however belatedly, at the same grim hand that had sent the Chosen Class to Commencement Gate.

Two paces from him Hermann had halted, put his hands on his hips, and said, "Shoot, Moishian!" But Max with a shrug had returned the pistol, butt-foremost, and replied, "Shoot your own self."

"What I meant," he told us now, "he should kill me, he wants a killing. It's a Moishian way of talking…"

Peter Greene nodded admiringly. "You Moishians are the most, what I mean inwise. Moishians and darkies, y'know?"

But either this final charity from Max had driven Hermann mad, or his Siegfrieder training made it impossible for him to flout a direct order from any source. He'd muttered, "Ja wohl," clicked his boot-heels, and shot himself accurately through the head.

"Magnificence!" Leonid cried, and did a hopak. "George tells this Rexford, you don't get Shaft!" He hugged Max carefully. "Stupidly, sir, you didn't say before!"

Max shook his head. When the shock had passed, he said, he'd seen his guilt. Even if he'd not directly ordered Hermann's suicide, he was the cause of it; moreover, so far from feeling remorse, he found himself trembling with satisfaction over the dead Moishiocaust. Having dragged the body into the woods, he would even have burned it, to complete his revenge, but Hermann's lighter had got soaked in blood and refused to catch. He'd gone then to the roadside and brooded until Croaker and I overtook him next day, by which time he'd come round to seeing he was flunked, and choosing to suffer for the crime of murder.

He smiled. "Then Georgie told me what he told me, up in the Visitation Room, and I wouldn't listen, I didn't believe him since the Powerhouse, also since Bray." Nevertheless, my criticism of his motives had taken root in his mind and grown, further nourished by debate with Leonid, until he'd despaired of choosing either death or liberty for the right reason.

"Ah, Max!" I said warmly. "You're passed already, Shaft or no Shaft! You see that now, don't you?"

He did. "So it's vanity I take the Shaft or I don't: so flunk me! What matters is the right choice, not the right reason. Pfui on Entelechus."

"Pfui on the right choice, too," I said, and he saw my point at once, so clearly that his application of it to Leonid left me little to add:

"You should stay or go, which you please," Max told him; "go back to Chementinski or transfer to New Tammany, and don't worry what's selfish what's not. Assert your self! Embrace! You got to suppress something, suppress unselfishness."

Leonid objected that he had in his late frustration tried just that course, but felt no passèder than before.

"Forget Passèder!" Max advised.

Leonid scratched his beard, but I affirmed Max's counsel enthusiastically. Their recent bind I compared to the cell in which the Nikolayans had once detained him, pointing out that in this case too the door was open; he need but shut his eye to Reason and stride forth. Hadn't he given me the Pass-key himself?

"It mysteries me, that talk!" he said. "But never mind! You I open door for; go make wife of Mrs. Anastasia!"

I replied that he must put by self-effacement and vie for her himself, without scruple or restraint; certainly without deference to me. For not only was marriage incompatible with Grand Tutorhood, in my opinion; passionate love was too, adulterous or not, by reason of its exclusiveness. If I had allowed myself any such emotion in the past (especially on discovering that My Ladyship was not my sister), I was to that extent flunked; if I should in the future, it would be purely because failure is passage. In any case, let all try for her who would, and the best man win; I was too sensible now of my faults to join the contest.

"By George!" Leonid cried — a kind of pensive shout. "My head spin! I'm such a dumb, I have to think about!"

No less did I — about my last words in particular, whose truth I realized only as I spoke them. Desire I understood, and Camaraderie; to Friendship, Respect, and Loyalty I was no stranger, either in the goat-pens or on Great Mall; certainly not to buckly Rut. I had "loved" Hedda and Redfearn's Tom, Lady Creamhair, Max my keeper, dead G. Herrold; I "loved" studentdom and Truth, and Anastasia's dear escutcheon. But what did I know of Love between human men and women, that emotion held to include and yet transcend these others? My connection with Anastasia — the sidecar-bite, our Memorial Service, my former jealousy on Bray's account, and the rest — seemed merely odd to me now: at best an intimation of what that much-sung Love might be, and a flunking measure of my distance from it. What she "saw in me," had ever seen, I could not see, since failure had opened my eyes. Anastasia: the name, like the lady girl, went stranger and more dark as I considered it. What thing was Anastasia? The mystery's nub, it seemed to me now, was a phenomenon I'd taken for granted before my fall, but which since baffled, even appalled me: I mean her continuing high regard for me, however indiscriminate and quirked. Why did she heed my flunkèd counsels? Why had she mated with Harold Bray, or pledged to — on my account but against my wish — back when she'd thought him the true Grand Tutor and but pitied me? Why had she pledged to now again, to free me, and declared belief in me against my own denial? I couldn't fathom her at all, not at all. And under my assertion, however sincere, that a Grand Tutor (not that I was one) oughtn't to permit himself the luxuries either of loving or of being loved, in the passion-way, there lay a dark suspicion that I was incapable of both.

"She needs a proper human man, not a goat-boy," I said to Max, who acknowledged the possibility with a shrug of his hand.

Peter Greene said "Haw," and popped a pimple. Since the night of the rape his aversion to mirrors had changed into gloomy fascination. Throughout his detainment he had used to stare at his reflection in anything shiny, growling oaths and making horrid faces. Now he had managed to get my stick from Croaker, and aided by the mirror near its tip was bursting pustules on his cheek, cursing himself with every pinch. "Y'all don't see through her the way I do. (There, you ugly bastard!) Didn't she admit she brought it on her own self, out in the alley? A flunker like me!"

He would have embarked then on his usual lament: that all his life he'd been a gosh-durn baby, knowledge-of-the-campuswise; that he'd thought himself a fine fellow, even a Graduate, his marriage a success, his self-education and career things to be proud of, his alma mater the gem of the University, Anastasia the flower and pattern of maiden girlship — until I and Dr. Sear had opened his eye to the truth. But as he began that drear recital, Max made inquiry of me with a glance, as if to ask "Him too?" I nodded, and broke into Greene's complaint.

"Look here… Pete," I said, "you're okay."

"You durn tootin'," he grumbled, thinking I'd affirmed his condemnation-in-progress of New Tammany's Quiet-Riot policies. "Lawless academical adventurism, is what it is."

"I mean you," I persisted. "I was wrong before. You were okay, until you took my advice."

"And what the heck altogether?" Max said smiling. "Like you used to say, it doesn't matter nothing."

Greene regarded us suspiciously, yet with a rueful expression, as if afraid we were baiting him but admitting he deserved no better use. I took my stick from him and suggested cordially that it was time he stopped looking in mirrors.

"Can't see much in that one anyhow," he admitted. "All pussed up."

Leonid grunted amiably. "You got face like old whore's behind."

"Say what you want," Greene sadly invited us. "I know I'm flunked."

I declared then my conviction that he was not — or hadn't been until I'd flunked him. My interpretation of Bray's Certificate, I wanted to tell him, had been as mistaken in his case as in the others. Enos Enoch said Become as a kindergartener, and I'd flunked Peter Greene on the grounds that beneath his sentimental illusions lay much guile, much guilt, much that was failed. How tell him now that he was blinder than before — or as blind, but faileder? Better to deceive himself about the worth of things than about their want of it! That Miss Sally Ann had several times horned him I was fairly sure; but that she was no "floozy" I was certain. New Tammany College, as best I could judge from much reading and a little observation, was neither a Graduate School on the one hand nor a Dunce's College on the other; in its history and present state there was much to wince at — and much to take pride in: a few Ira Hectors, a few Lucky Rexfords, and many Peter Greenes, for better and worse. Whom too I thought him wronger about than before: he was not "all right," surely not "all wrong," but in his former error he'd at least been generous, cheerful, energetic, and on the whole more agreeable than not, whereas now…

But there was no time for such analysis, nor did I think it would much touch him. Stoker approached with a jingle of keys and a mocking whistle. Therefore I repeated Bray's quotation from the Founder's Scroll — Passèd are the kindergarteners — and declared my suspicion that kindergarteners were neither innocent nor simple except to sentimental eyes; only ingenuous, as Greene had been, was yet, and doubtless ever would be.

Max rolled his eyes. "You said that right."

Greene squinted. "You're pulling my leg, George. Not that I don't have it coming, 'As-ye-sow'wise."

I assured him of my sincerity, though in fact I used a small lie to make my point. Didn't he know, I asked him, that his acne had actually been clearing up before he overcame his thing-about-mirrors? "When you saw your own pimples you started squeezing them all the time" — so much was true — "and that made more of them. Even so they're not as bad as you think; you see the spots on the mirror as spots on your face."

This unpleasant argument impressed him; he would clean Sear's mirror and make a count. But I insisted he have no more to do either with mirrors or with Kennard Sear, should that unfortunate man survive.

"I don't get you," Greene protested. "You told me your own self — "

"Never mind what I told you. I was wrong." Of two false arguments that came to mind then, I chose one and was pleased to see Greene supply the other himself.

"Suppose a man's nearsighted," I said. "Things two meters off will be twice as blurred as things one meter off. Right?" I hurried on before he could answer. "So he learns to allow for that error, and he's okay. Now he looks in a mirror from one meter's distance he corrects the image for a meter of error, either in his head or with his eyeglasses, and thinks he's seeing clearly — but he's not, because the image he sees is really two meters distant, a meter each way…"

Max closed his eyes until Leonid began to make noises of dissent, whereupon he went to confer with him in whispers. Greene frowned. Stoker had paused a few cells from ours to accept certain bribes from a shameless co-ed, before whose eyes he dangled the key-ring. I pressed on to the shakiest part of my argument before he should overhear it.

"So anything he sees in a mirror twenty meters from him will be distorted forty times. He couldn't recognize it at all! Put a mirror up to life, you get a double distortion."

"Quadruple," Max corrected, very gravely. "On account the image is also backwards."

"I hate!" Leonid said, and although his glare suggested he meant deception as well as distortion, he shook Greene's shoulder with rough goodwill. "You wrong about you! I like okay!"

Greene cocked his head, much moved. "I don't know. I swear to Pete… That durn window by the funhouse that I told you-all about — you know what I decided a while back, when I was in jail here?" He looked from one to the other of us. "Come to me it weren't any window at all, but a gosh-durn mirror!"

Max pretended astonishment.

"It was me talking dirty to Sally Ann!" Greene said bitterly. "I chunked that rock at my own self, that I thought was the Peeping Tom!"

Leonid feigned horror. "Impossity, Peter Greene!"

"Sure it is!" Greene laughed and sprang up with more vigor than he'd displayed since the rape. "Couldn't nobody see their own reflection so far off, all that distortion!"

"Night-time too," I reminded him — relieved, but not unappalled, that he'd taken my bait so readily and swallowed it whole.

"Plus a funhouse mirror yet," Max added, "that it's made to distort things."

This too Greene seized uncritically, disregarding its implications. "I could've been right in the first place!"

"You were," I encouraged him. "Till I misled you."

Leonid pounded his back. "Okayship! No more hate! Mrs. Anastasia too!"

Stoker had come to our door at last, and grinned malevolently through the bars — waiting, I guessed, to refuse to unlock me. But I saw in Leonid's reference to My Ladyship a chance to complete the re-Tutoring of Peter Greene, in whose eye stood tears already of relief; and Stoker's mock, I was willing to gamble, would abet me.

"Don't you realize," I said to Greene, "that Anastasia dismissed the complaint because she loves you? She knows how much you admired her, and how upset you were at what you saw in Dr. Sear's office — or thought you saw, through the one-way mirror…"

Greene blinked strongly. "By jimmy gumbo, George! Do you mean to stand there on your two hind legs and tell me — "

Thinking he saw what was afoot, Stoker joined in happily: "You didn't think it was really Stacey you jumped on, did you? My wife's a virgin, Greene!"

"I be durn," Greene said stiffly. "You can't fool me."

"No, I swear it!" Stoker cried, and feigned a whisper. "I was born with no balls, see, and Stacey's got a thing about dildos. Look, I'll show you." He seemed prepared to open his trousers for our inspection — whether in earnest or not I never learned, for Greene professed disbelief and disgust, at the same time blushing with hopeful doubt.

"You can't tell me she's a virgin!" he said. "Not after what I done to her!"

His tone implied that he could nonetheless entertain the fantastic idea of her having been unserviced thitherto — despite what he'd seen and heard! I considered suggesting that he himself had deflowered her in the alley. But I hesitated, uncertain whether that notion would please him or burden him with new guilt. Either way, I decided, the responsibility might involve him with My Ladyship in a manner not conducive to restoring his marriage, and my object was merely to revive his esteem for Anastasia, as for himself and the other things he'd valued in time past. While I considered the problem, Stoker solved it, thinking only to make further sport.

"I know you're the Dunce's own cocksman," he said, "despite what Georgina tells me. But if you really believe it was Stacey in that alley, you're blind as a bat."

"Who was it then?" Greene said angrily. "And who was it owned up in court it was her own durn fault? Her twin sister?"

Stoker laughed. "Of course! Didn't George think once that he and Stacey were twins? Well she did have a twin, back in the Unwed Co-ed's Hospital where Ira Hector got her; but it was a twin sister…"

Greene held his ears. "Y'all quit, now!" But Stoker, inspired, went on to declare that Anastasia and her twin sister, though alike in appearance as his right eye to his left, were of contrary dispositions, to My Ladyship's frequent mortification. For while Anastasia was not only chaste but downright frigid — as Greene himself had observed, surely, by her demeanor in court and in the Visitation Room — her twin sister, raised in an orphanage, had early turned to vice, and was in fact a floozy!

"It's the Founder's truth," he vowed with a grin. "She's a hot one, that Lacey — Lacey's what they call her, from her black lace drawers — "

"She weren't wearing any drawers!" Greene cried — triumphantly but wretchedly, for despite his scorn he had begun to listen with a wincing care.

"Naturally she wasn't," Stoker replied, and as Leonid, Max, and I looked on astonished, he improvised a remarkable story: "Lacey's" notorious promiscuity, he declared, was commonly attributed to resentment of her luckier twin, whose reputation had indeed been damaged by Lacey's playing whore in her name. But in his own estimation — and he called on me, with a wink, to support his analysis — the unhappy girl's motives were more complex: indeed, it seemed to him that "Lacey's" wantonness but confirmed Anastasia's virgin chastity, and he wondered (that is, pretended to wonder) whether the girl didn't flunk herself deliberately — out of some hopeless love for her sister, say, or to set an instructive bad example.

I regarded Stoker sharply. "What a very curious idea. Like the Dean o' Flunks, you mean?"

"In black panties!" Stoker laughed. "Except when she doesn't wear any at all, to make Stacey look flunkèder."

"Foolishnish!" Leonid shouted, who had heard enough. "Stop this!"

But Stoker maintained with the same earnestness that his wife, for all her protestations of contempt for "Lacey's" misconduct, often took the blame for her errant twin — whether out of love, or guilt for her own comfortable childhood, or some perverse envy, he wouldn't venture to say, though he inclined to the last hypothesis.

"Pass her heart!" Leonid cried, tearful himself now with compassion. "That Mrs. Anastasia, all the time takes blame! I love, George!"

I nodded approval. He shook his great fist then at Stoker. "Dog pig! And falsifer!" Max and me also he accused of exploiting Greene's "stupihood," and declared that my account of Anastasia's behavior in court was the only true thing we'd said to his blue-eyed friend. "All these mirror, and virginicy, and Lacey-pant — bah! Stop this sisterness!"

Greene rubbed his orange beard. "I don't know, Leo. I don't much trust a durn mirror, one-way or two — . And it was kind of dark there, back of the Old Chancellor's Mansion…"

Leonid clutched him by the shirt-front. "Don't believe, Peter Greene! I have done! What word? My own self… 1 have love Mrs. Anastasia! No Lacey-pant!"

Greene choked and flung himself away. "Doggone you! You watch how you talk, now, Alexandrov!"

But Leonid pointed with great emotion to his trouserfly and said distinctly: "I have screw Mrs. Anastasia my own self! Passèdness her! Flunkhood me!"

Greene leaped at him with a groan and they wrestled to the floor, Leonid cursing Greene for a blindness fool and Greene Leonid for a patch-eyed liar, nose-on-his-facewise. In vain Max and I hauled at them, lest they carry their new Tutoring too far; despite his recent fat and sloth Greene was formidably strong, as was his adversary. By the time Stoker unlocked the cell and nonchalantly fired his pistol near their heads, each had a thumb at the other's good eye.

"No-good Student-Unionist!" Greene muttered as we drew them apart. "Telling filthy lies about the sweetest gal in New Tammany College!"

"Oy," Max said.

"Blind other eye!" Leonid jeered. "Can't see anyhow!"

"You're the one's blind," Greene retorted. "Can't tell a virgin from a flunking floozy!"

They would have set to again, but Stoker and I got between them and pushed Greene into the aisleway. Not that he gave a flunk which fool killed which, Stoker assured them; but he thought it a pity to waste the spectacle on so small an audience. "It's time I threw another party at the Powerhouse," he said. "I'll let you fellows entertain us with an eye-gouging contest. Winner gets Stacey, loser gets Lacey."

"He couldn't tell the difference nohow!" Greene said. "I wish I could give him my gosh-durn eyeball, let him see how blind he is!"

Leonid glared from the cell. "Me too you, if George didn't say selfish like Ira Hector."

"Say what you want!" Greene shouted. "Anyhow he's not a Founderless Student-Unionist. Ira's okay, when all's said and done!"

"Like you, hah?"

"When you come right down to it! What the heck anyhow!"

"Goodbye, Georgie," Max interrupted, and I realized that the cell was relocked, with only him and Leonid inside, "Founder help you, you should pass all now and don't fail anything."

I pressed the hand that fetched my purse and stick to me, urged him to remember that Failure and Passage were inseparable and equally unreal, and exhorted him to choose between the Shaft and freedom without considering the purity of his motives. Leonid too, his quick wrath gone, I shook warm hands with, and repeated my advice to him.

"All confuse," he sighed. "But I ask Dr. Spielman. Good luck you, Goat-Boy!"

Stoker acted surprised. "Did you think you were going somewhere, George?"

I smiled. "I'm going to visit your brother Lucky, among other things, to show him how to pass. Will you drive me to the Light House?"

Stoker threw his head back to hoot as in term past, but his laugh, owing perhaps to the iron acoustics, rang shrill. And he strode off, Greene trudging after, without attempting to rejail me. I wished Max and Leonid final peace of mind, and requested of them also that they do what they could to curb Croaker's appetites, either by instruction or by directly intercepting his food. For I saw the error of my flunking the "Eierkopf" in him and the "Croaker" in Eierkopf — as if the seamless University knew aught of such distinctions! — and therefore I would that he embrace and affirm what I'd bade him suppress, if he could be taught to.

"Yes, well," Max said dryly. "I think of something. I got a whole day."

3

"Want me to stick him in Solitary on bread and water?" Stoker had come part-way back after all, smirking, to hear me. I waved bye-bye to my cellmates and walked past him towards Peter Greene, who waited in the open gate at the end of the aisle.

"That's not a bad idea," I said over my shoulder. "But you shouldn't do it." In fact, I added lightly when he overtook me, he should rather try to thwart my plans for Croaker than further them, just as he should refuse the embrace which I hoped the Chancellor would soon proffer him.

"You don't need a pardon," Stoker said. "You need a strait-jacket, like Heddy Sear's!"

I smiled. "You shouldn't even drive me to the Light House, actually. Pete can do it. Anyhow, your brother will come to you, if you take my advice."

Greene allowed as how he'd count it an honor to chauffeur me, I'd so eased his mind; but he begged leave to seek out Anastasia first and apologize for having confused her with her flunkèd twin. As for Georgina —

"Bugger Georgina!" Stoker said impatiently.

Greene drew a pill from his jeans, swallowed it with dignity, and replied that he was happy he'd not sunk to such unnatural practices, nor for that matter succumbed in any other wise to the carnal blandishments of O.B.G.'s naughty daughter, since he knew it to be written somewhere in the Old or New Syllabus that whites and blacks belonged in different classes. Did we suppose he could look his Sally Ann straight in the eye, reconciliationwise, or salute the College pennant at the next Junior Enochist cookout, if his conscience weren't clean as a hound's tooth? Sure, he'd raised his share of heck, as what fellow hadn't, but —

Stoker fired a bullet into the air (we were crossing now the twilit exercise-yard) and promised to put another between Greene's eyes should he not at once close his mouth and vanish. He then reminded me — as Greene sprinted zigzag toward the main gate — that he himself was neither blind like Gynander nor half-blind and half-witted like my former cellmates; he saw quite clearly what my game was and had no mind to play it.

I wiped my stick-mirror clean with the sleeve of my detention-coat and pretended to hide a smile. "You mean my playing Dean o' Flunks with you back in March? I didn't expect that old trick to work once, much less twice." I took him to mean that I was advising him not to chauffeur me to Great Mall in order to tempt him, Dean-o'-Flunks-like, to do it, since to follow my counsel would pass him, presumably, and I knew he wished to flunk. No such idea had in fact occurred to me; but once he suggested it I decided to pretend I'd done the like (that is, the opposite) in my earlier "Tutorship" — as truly I had, but by no means a-purpose.

Guards opened the gate for us, and I prickled with joy to step outside the walls for the first time in I knew not yet how long. Greene's motorcycle roared from a row of parked ones and up the road-in what seemed to me the wrong direction, though I couldn't read the roadsign in the dim light.

Stoker squinted. "You're telling me you tricked me before so I'll think you didn't," he said carefully. "But the joke's on you."

"Oh?"

"I knew all along that Pass and Fail aren't opposites — didn't I tell you Passage is Failure? — but I also knew you knew I'd try to trick you into flunking. So I told you they were the same so you'd believe I thought they were different and come to think so yourself. Why else do you think I pretended to take your advice?"

"I know why you took it," I replied, and grinned, hoping to confuse him with inversions-of-inversions long enough to work out the right ones for myself. "What you don't know, when I tell you Failure is Passage, is whether I want you to believe it is because it isn't or isn't because it is."

Stoker grinned also — not easily, it seemed to me — and added as though carelessly: "- or is because it is, eh? Or isn't because it isn't…"

I perspired, and he exploited his advantage at once. "Don't forget, boy: whichever you believe, you may believe because I tricked you into it."

Grimly I retorted: "And if you did, the joke may be on you." But it was not a confident riposte, and I could only hope he'd think its lameness deliberately feigned.

"Always assuming I don't want the joke to be on me," he mocked. I'd have lost my hold entirely at this point had it not swept suddenly, bracingly through me, like the frigid breeze we stood in, that if Failure and Passage was in truth a false distinction, as I'd come to believe, then it made no difference whether that belief was true or false, as either way it was neither. How hopelessly innocent I'd used to be! Instead of trying to outwit Stoker, therefore — by replying "Exactly," for example — I resolved to outwit him by not trying to. I paused beside the first parked motorcycle and said without expression or emotion: "Take me to Great Mall."

He hesitated for the briefest moment — during which, I imagined, a herd of pluses and minuses locked horns — then he mounted the cycle, started the engine… and surprised me after all by moving off, not only impassively but without a word! In a cold sweat of doubt I sprang on behind him, and desperately bet everything on candor.

"You've got me so mixed up I'm sweating!" I called as we throttled away. He said nothing. But a few seconds later I smelled another sweat besides my own.

The air was freezing, the campus brown and bare; I shivered for want of fleece. I'd thought it dusk, but a pale day dawned as we raced along: a winter's morning, then, and Max had thirty-six hours of life unless he defected. Had I been three seasons in Main Detention, or three-years-and-three? An hour we rode, without a word, through fallow research-arable and shuttered residential quads. Few people were about. Preoccupied with wondering whether I was headed for Great Mall or being taken deliberately out of my way, I gave no thought to any order of business until a familiar scene surprised me: under a great bare elm sat The Living Sakhyan, oblivious to the weather, looking for all the campus as though He'd not moved since the day of my fiasco. And a few trees on, a black-furred man upon a bench alternately cowered and shook his thin fist at a gang of male students, who pressed about him in sheepfleece coats and belabored him with placards stuck on sticks.

I tapped Stoker's back. "Stop here a minute, would you?"

He would not, until I accused him of trying mistakenly to flunk me because he mistakenly believed in my Grand-Tutorhood — "As if you weren't right!" I added with a chuckle, just in case. He slowed down, perhaps only to deliberate, but when I jumped off he stopped the engine and waited, a-scowl and a-twitch.

"Help!" Ira Hector called. But I went directly to The Living Sakhyan, squatted before Him in His wise, and unpursed my chewed Assignment.

"Robbery!" Ira cried.

"Excuse me, sir," I said to The Living Sakhyan. "I want to thank You for the disappeared ink You gave me some terms ago, and apologize for criticizing You before."

His expression did not change, nor did He give any other indication of having heard me. Except for His smile, and my vast new understanding, I might have thought Him dead.

"Help me, Goat-Boy!" Ira shrieked.

"I know this sounds foolish," I went on, "but I actually used to think I was the Grand Tutor! And I couldn't understand why You didn't try to save my friend G. Herrold — remember the fellow in George's Gorge? — or why You didn't help Anastasia when Croaker was attacking her, or Ira Hector when those Beists were bothering him. I thought You must be as bad off as Dr. Eierkopf, up in the Belfry; that's how naïve I used to be!"

The Living Sakhyan made no sign, even when I leaned closer and explained that I understood Him now that I'd abandoned my claim to Grand-Tutorship. Since Passage and Failure were not different except as the deluded mind of Studentdom made them so, what booted it to snatch a man from the torrent, a woman from the tup? As if passèd works brought the mind any closer to Truth! To withdraw from the trials and errors of this campus, sit under an elm, and meditate upon the unutterable Answer — that was the way to Commencement Gate, I saw now, the sole Way, and I meant to follow His example as soon as I flunked WESCAC.

"That's why I've come to You, sir," I declared: "I suspect Dr. Bray might be a Grand Tutor, but I know You are, and I'd like to check out my Assignment with You, if You don't mind. I think I see why I failed it before…"

I took His silence for permission. Behind me I heard running footsteps and Ira Hector's feeble curses. "Did you get it?" a student called, and another shouted that he had: "When the sun comes up it'll be 7 a.m., Saturday, December 20!"

"It's a lie!" cried Ira. "Arrest them, Stoker!"

"Hey, a cop!" the same student warned, apparently seeing Stoker for the first time. "Go limp!" The others rebuked him for having extorted by force the information they needed, not because robbery was against the law — everybody knew that the laws were made to protect the privileged — but because the use of force was contrary to the principles of their group. "So I'm a Student-Unionist infiltrator," the fellow laughed. "We got what we wanted, didn't we?" He warned Stoker not to touch him or he'd shout Brutality.

"Go flunk yourself," Stoker growled, still evidently preoccupied with our debate. "The day I touch you, you'll have plenty to holler about."

Some of the students then fell to arguing whether the forcible expulsion of violent elements from their ranks would violate the principle of non-violence; others, whether nonviolence as a means had not become an end in itself with them, and thus a contradiction of its own premise that ends never justified means. The dispute was heated but peaceful; no agreement was reached.

"Hey, look," someone interrupted: "it's the GILES! Let's go limp over there and ask Him."

It seemed that my lynching and detention, so far from shaking their confidence in me, had redoubled it. In fact (as I observed when they flopped around The Living Sakhyan's elm), I was now as much their hero as He — perhaps more so, considering their emulation. Beards they'd had before, but now they all wore sandals like mine and fleecy coats — sheepskin, admittedly, and cut too short to be worn without trousers, but the closest they could come to a mohair wrapper. What's more, they leaned upon their staves as upon a crook, as well as using them to carry placards. These last were blank.

They greeted me respectfully but enthusiastically. Had the Administration seen its error and pardoned me? they wanted to know. Was I aware how many folksongs and free-verse poems my lynching had inspired, despite the Administration's efforts to suppress them on grounds of obscenity? Did I know of the "sleep-ins" staged in my behalf and wrongfully slandered by the right-wing press as "sleep-arounds," though the only fornication had been by neo-Bonifacist provocateurs of both sexes? Did I approve of Carte-blanchisme, their current cause, which aimed at nothing less than Freedom From Everything?

"That's not what it means to me," objected one of their number. "To me, Carte-blanchisme is a blanket protest against the great Nothing."

This interpretation struck many of his classmates as heretical and was therefore warmly applauded, though one bright fellow remarked that "the great Nothing" was exactly what Sakhyanism aimed at, and a brighter observed that, since the great Nothing was equivalent to Everything, and Freedom From Everything meant Freedom For Everything the two interpretations of their cause were not mutually exclusive.

"Syncretist," someone muttered.

"Look here," I said cordially, and they fell silent at once. "I'm much obliged for your good opinion of me, even though you're mistaken. I'm not the Grand Tutor; I failed my Assignment before because I took WESCAC on its own terms. That's what I want to consult The Living Sakhyan about, if you'll excuse me…"

They withdrew a little way, but begged permission to listen in on the dialogue, and I found the lot of them too lively and agreeable, on the whole, and their admiration too nattering, to refuse them. I was surprised to see that my denial of Grand-Tutorhood disturbed them not at all; of course I denied it, they exclaimed in whispers; Grand-Tutorhood was a concept, like any other; if I didn't deny it I wouldn't be Grand Tutor! Didn't my criticism of WESCAC make that clear? They alluded to the parable of Milo and Sophie the heifer: to pass, one must flunk the Examiner…

As at our previous encounter, I was impressed by their acuteness; indeed, I remembered now that some of their remarks in that earlier term could be said to have anticipated my present position. They'd understood some things better than I — though perhaps less well than I did now — and their commentary on my remarks invariably enlarged my understanding — to the point where I felt that same commentary vaguely deficient.

"It seems to me, sir," I said to The Living Sakhyan, "that WESCAC really is the Dean o' Flunks, as I used to think when I was a kid…"

"Didn't I tell you?" someone whispered triumphantly. "Attack the terms of the problem!" And before his classmates could shush him he alarmed me (since the slogan he quoted was exactly what I had in mind) by adding, "But isn't it only WESCAC's old MALI circuitry that that would apply to? How can Wescacus malinoctis be a symbol of Differentiation?" It was an objection I'd not myself considered. Fortunately another student hissed, "So what's this MALI and NOCTIS? Another set of arbitrary categories!"

This silenced the troubled one, and eased my own mind. "He'll reinterpret the terms of His Assignment," the same fellow said confidently. I decided to do just that, with The Living Sakhyan's aid.

"It says Fix the Clock," I began. "Before, I thought fix meant 'repair,' but Dr. Eierkopf's gadget seems to have stopped the clock completely, so I guess I was mistaken. What does it mean?"

My admirers fell again into the disputation they could never resist, and with the help of The Living Sakhyan's silence I was able to overhear them. My spring-term fiasco, they understood, had been a deliberate bad example, for pedagogical purposes; it went without saying that I'd known all along that fix could as easily mean "fix in position," for example, to one not bound by conventional assumptions — was that not what my pretended failure to repair the clock had in fact accomplished? I listened amazed. Moreover, they pointed out to each other, by thus fixing the escapement in position I'd been able to complete my Assignment "in no time," so to speak; surely the implications of the metaphor were clear!

"But if it goes without saying that He knew all this," the troubled fellow inquired, "why's He asking The Living Sakhyan?"

"Because it does go without saying!" another said. "You don't hear The Sakhyan answering, do you?"

Delightedly I pressed on: "End the Boundary Dispute: Now obviously I was wrong to think that meant make our Power Lines clearer, wasn't I? Did WESCAC mean some other kind of Boundary?"

I managed to catch just the words"… all arbitrary" behind me, but that was enough. I demanded of The Living Sakhyan ("Rhetorically, man," they said, "rhetorically!"): "Could it mean that the boundary between East and West Campuses is arbitrary and artificial, and ought to be denied? Should we abolish the Power Line?"

They applauded this suggestion as vigorously as limpness permitted. I was emboldened to ask whether they understood that had The Living Sakhyan answered either yes or no, He'd have affirmed the Boundary's reality, and thus answered falsely. Several nodded, and were at once rebuked by their cleverer classmates, who snapped, "Don't answer!" I had just presence enough of mind to smile and say no more.

In like manner I reviewed the whole of my Assignment with T. L. Sakhyan's aid. Overcome Your Infirmity, we decided, must mean affirm my limp and goatliness — a happy imperative! See Through Your Ladyship was more difficult, since the students knew nothing of my connection with Anastasia; but their whispers of "revisionist psychology" and "normal bisexuality," though meaningless to me, put me in mind of Dr. Sear and his fluoroscopic diversions. Should I literally make My Ladyship transparent? In any case, when I said, "I'll see Dr. Sear about that one," they laughed knowingly. In theory, the fifth task was also problematical: Re-place, because of its curious hyphen, seemed still to me to mean "Return the Founder's Scroll to its place" and not, as the students suggested, "Replace it with something better" — though "its place" clearly meant its source rather than its proper location in the Library stacks. However, by interpreting source to mean, not the sandy Moishian cave where the Scroll was found, but the mind and body of studentdom whence its teachings sprang, I was able to satisfy both the students and myself: recalling to them the East-Campus table-grace about "eating Truth," I asked The Living Sakhyan whether I should make a meal of the Founder's words!

Someone whispered, " '…not bread alone'!" Another, "To make way for the new!" And a third asked, "Eat instead of EAT; is that it?" I did not reply.

The sixth and seventh tasks, on the other hand, were clear: to Pass the Finals could only mean to by-pass WESCAC; perhaps not to destroy it, as the students urged (who regarded it as the emblem of much that they objected to in the University), but certainly to frustrate or circumvent it by way of denying its authority. This established, the final task, like the first, was already accomplished: I myself was my Examiner; I had no proper father, nor was there anyone save myself to whom my ID-card need be presented. I read the seventh task aloud and asked The Living Sakhyan: "What signatures do I need on my card? And who are the 'proper authorities'?" His silence was my Answer.

I bid goodbye to the students then, who thanked me for Tutoring them and hoped I wouldn't judge their group by its non-non-violent members; they'd needed the time of day from the "Old Man of the Mall" in order to schedule a protest march to Main Detention in behalf of Max and me.

"That's not what I was protesting," said one of them. "I was protesting Saturday-morning classes and the Open Book rules."

Some applauded his deviation and maintained that both protests could be served by a general demonstration in the name of Carte-blanchisme. Others protested this indiscrimination, but most certainly didn't want to be thought to favor the opposite; still others contended that repudiating such distinctions was the first principle of Beism (as well as the last, since All was One). And so I left them, some protesting, some protesting the protest, and a few protesting that to protest protest was either to affirm Carte-blanchisme and hence (by Beistic paradox) to deny it, or to deny it and hence affirm it — which was perhaps to say, deny it…

Stoker slouched beside Ira Hector on the bench. Ignoring the old man's scolding, he grinned contemptuously as I approached.

"You're supposed to protect the right of private information!" Ira berated him. "What do I pay taxes for?"

"You never paid taxes in your life," Stoker said, not bothering to look at him. "Did you think they'd thank you for cutting off their scholarships?"

Drawing his head into the collar of his topcoat, Ira retorted that he didn't give a fact for their opinion of him, but he did have more right to be protected from robbery than anyone else in New Tammany College; precisely because he had withdrawn all support from his former tax write-offs, the Philophilosophical Fund and the Unwed Co-ed's Hospital, he now paid the highest taxes on campus. In fact, he declared (glaring at me with his shelled eyes) the Administration was bleeding the golden goose to death, and thus cooking its own; he was on the verge of intellectual bankruptcy, thanks to my bad advice, and the daily robberies and copyright infringements perpetrated on him would soon put him over the edge if the campus patrol refused him the help he'd bought and paid for — with his ward Anastasia as well as with his ruinous taxes.

"Buy your own bodyguard," Stoker said. "You can afford it."

"Why didn't you help me, Goat-Boy?" he demanded.

"Help yourself," I answered. "That's what you were Certified for doing."

He thrust a bony fist at me from his coatsleeve and accused me of having given him false advice nine months previously. I reminded him that, as he hadn't paid the Tutor, he shouldn't complain of the Tutoring.

"But my advice to you might have been good, after all," I added with a smile. "I told you that wealth was flunking and that the passèd thing to do was to flunk yourself to help others pass — "

"Don't believe him," Stoker said behind his hand. "He told me the same thing."

"I don't believe him," Ira snapped. "You should've heard the claptrap he was retailing! But I don't believe you, either! I'm my own man, sir!"

"What I meant," I put in, "was that selfishness was flunking, but that to keep your wealth from others would actually be unselfish…"

"Rot!"

"So it turns out," I agreed. "Now I think you ought to be selfish, because Failure is Passage."

Ira thrust out his neck and blinked his lashless lids. "You talk like those fool Beists."

"Exactly. The question is, which is selfish: the miser or the philanthropist? Take me to the Light House, Stoker."

"Flunk you," Stoker cursed amiably. But when I thanked him for doing just that, he sneered off towards the motorcycle.

"Well, which is it?" Ira demanded. "Not that I'd believe you."

"Let go my sleeve, please," I said. "I don't Grand-Tutor for my health."

"You can't Tutor at all!" he reminded me angrily. "You're not the Grand Tutor!"

We struck up a bargain then, to exchange bad advice for the wrong time of day.

"Be greedy," I counseled him. "Give all you have to the P.P.F. and the New Tammany Lying-in! Then you'll have nothing, and pass at other people's expense. That's the flunking thing to do, you see, and Failure is Passage. When those Beist-fellows come around, don't just give them the time of day; give them all they want. Give them the shirt off your back."

Ira considered my shadow and squinted at me cunningly. "It's exactly eight o'clock."

However, as I mounted the motorcycle and Stoker throttled its engine, he cackled from the depths of his coat-collar: "I can turn your bad advice inside out, Goat-Boy, but you can't do that with the time of day! I got the best of you again!"

But I smiled — and not merely to worry him, as I'd done with Stoker. For the fact was, I hadn't the slightest idea whether reversing my advice would flunk and therefore pass him, or vice-versa, and whether in either case he'd be passed or failed. Whereas I suspected he'd given me the correct time in order to mislead me, for an hour did seem to have elapsed since I'd heard that student say seven o'clock. But if he'd lied to his molesters too, I was no worse off, for Ira Hector desperately needed Grand-Tutoring, but I had no use at all for the time of day. Let him shriek after me (as he did), "It's later than you think!" How could it be, when I had no thought upon the matter?

We came in sight of that grand square where Tower Hall stands like a dean at the head of a committee-table, flanked on one side by the Light House, on the other by the Old Chancellor's Mansion. There was traffic now; I checked the Clock, also my watch: neither was running. A flutter of blackbirds from the Belfry reminded me of Eblis Eierkopf. Again I tapped my chauffeur's shoulder.

"What ever happened to Dr. Eierkopf? Do you suppose he's still in the Belfry?"

Stoker shook his head. "I got him running the hamburg concession out at the Powerhouse. All he can eat and seconds on Madgie."

I recognized that he was speaking sarcastically. "I'm going to see him before I call on the Chancellor," I said. "But I'll need a ride later to the Infirmary. Would you rather have lunch with your brother in the Light House or have him out to dinner at the Power Plant?"

Stoker snorted and opened the throttle; I barely managed to land on my feet. Newsboys hawked the morning paper on the Tower Hall esplanade, calling out that Max's Shaft-time had been set for next day at sunset, and that in consequence of grave new incidents at the Power Lines, Classmate X had arrived on Great Mall, presumably to sever the remaining diplomatic ties between East and West Campus. I half expected Stoker to wait for me, but as I entered the lobby of Tower Hall I saw him drive off towards a squadron of his troopers roaring up in ragged files from the direction of Main Gate.

The elevator-guard frowned at my detention-suit, consulted an empty clipboard, and forbade me the Belfry-lift.

"Don't you remember me?" I asked pleasantly.

"I remember you, all right." His tone was not cordial. "But your name ain't on my list any more. In fact, there ain't any list, since you flunked up the College. Nobody's allowed up there."

I asked where Dr. Eierkopf was, in that case — for I'd assumed Stoker was lying to me — and was told that he was indeed still in the Belfry — or at least his skeleton must be: the lift had not been summoned since Croaker's desertion, the guard said (not without grim satisfaction); as nobody was allowed access to the Clockworks without the Chancellor's authorization, not even repairmen, and since the Chancellor seemed not to care any more about lists or anything else, one could only suppose that Dr. Eierkopf had starved to death and rotted many months ago — if he'd not been killed when Croaker went berserk. "Serves the Bonifacist right, either way," he concluded.

Alarmed, I sprang liftwards, though there was no hope of saving one so long abandoned. The guard drew his pistol, threatened to shoot if I touched a button, and repeated, for the benefit of startled bystanders, that nobody could use the Belfry-lift.. Perspiring, I bethought me of the trick old Laertides had played upon the one-eyed shepherd. I handed him my ID-card, and, hoping he'd miss the one not-quite-eradicated name, I said, "I'm Nobody," and pushed the Belfry-button. The doors began to close.

"Oh no you don't!" the guard cried, and would have leaped me, but his classmates-in-arms restrained him on the grounds that while my authority to use the lift was questionable, he unquestionably had none at all. Too late then to shoot; the doors clicked shut and I was lofting.

Though I dreaded what I'd find of Eblis Eierkopf, I was prepared this time for the din and spectacle of the Clockworks. But when the lift stopped, all was silence. The gears, large and small, were still; the awful pendulum hung fast before my nose, perpendicular between Tick and Tock. Round about was a strew of papers, eggshells, calipers, and lenses: the birdlimed, dusty ruins, I feared, of oölogical research. High in the center of the works, struck face-on by the rising sun, sat Dr. Eierkopf — dead or alive, I could not at once tell, but at least not quite a skeleton. He was perched — one might even say poised — on the escapement, just under the butt of the weathervane-shaft: one shriveled leg hung on either side of the knife-edged pivot, and the crown of his head thrust up into a smallish bell, as far as to his browless eyebrows. Had he been planted there by Croaker, or climbed there to escape him? His lab-coat and spectacles were smeared with droppings of the blackbirds that flew in and out of the Belfry, hopped upon his shoulders, and squatted on his pate beneath the skirt of the bell. They or other birds had woven a nest of straw around his neck and under his chin. Most had food in their beaks when they entered the tower-bread-crusts, sunflower seeds, or kernels of dry field-corn — and I was astonished to see that now and then one would drop a morsel into Dr. Eierkopf's open mouth. He chewed and swallowed without other motion.

"Are you all right?" I cried.

He showed no sign of having heard me. I scrambled up through gears and cables to examine him more closely. Two Eierkopfian lenses, each inscribed.D.E.Q were clipped onto his spectacles; behind them his eyes were open and glazed. No question but he was alive — a drop of dew ran off the bell and he caught it neatly upon his tongue — but he either could not or would not hear me, how anxiously soever I begged him to ignore my old advice.

"Everything I told you before was wrong!" I shouted in his ear. "Be like you used to be — even worse! Be like Croaker!" My cries resounded in the bell and flushed out several blackbirds; but assert as I might that he must embrace what I'd bid him eschew, I could not stir him.

"Don't sit there like T. L. Sakhyan!" I implored. I was standing on the teeth of two giant gears; as I leaned forward to shout "Wake up!" I caught at a nearby cable to save my balance. It ran to the outside clapper of that central bell, second smallest of the lot, which now was struck one mighty stroke. The Eierkopfian lenses shivered; every bird rushed from the Belfry; Eblis's hands flew to his ears, and he piped a little squeak of pain. More, the after-swing of the bell disturbed his long equilibrium: the escapement teetered back and forth until its passenger fell, just beyond my reach. His lab-coat caught on the knife-edged fulcrum; for a moment I thought him saved; then fulcrum and coat both gave way — the latter sliced through, the former snapped off where the Infinite Divisor had shaved it almost to nothing — and he tumbled head-first to the floor, breaking his eyeglass-frames and, I feared, his skull. I sprang down. Tears stood in Dr. Eierkopf's eyes; he rubbed his cranium and spat out a sunflower seed.

"Ech," he said weakly. "Be glad you're not a bird, Goat-Boy."

I propped him against a lab-stool and wiped guano off his head with a page of old graph-paper. At sight of it he wept. It was not Croaker's rampage that had undone him and his great research, he managed to declare, but my parting remark about chicken and egg. He had, incredibly, forgot to deal with that ancient question in his otherwise exhaustive treatise, and though stunned by my reminder, he'd been so confident of reasoning out the answer on the basis of his other findings that he'd bid Croaker proceed with the application of the Infinite Divisor. Not to miss the triumphant sight of its operation, he'd donned his high-resolution lenses and had Croaker balance him atop the escapement; as the Divisor's twin milling-heads shaved towards him, ever-halving the thickness of the fulcrum's edge, he had rocked joyously from Tick to Tock, which in his head became chicken and egg. And it was precisely at the instant when the Divisor had disappeared between his legs, into the center-hole of the escapement, that he'd seen the problem to be insoluble. What had transpired between that moment and the striking of the bell, he had no idea, and his tears, it turned out, were not for smashed lenses, ruined papers, his months of starvation, or his injured head: what difference did any of those make, when the fundamental question of chicken versus egg could not be resolved?

I seized his tapered shoulders. "That's the answer, sir!"

He groaned. "Goat-Boy, Goat-Boy!"

"There isn't any problem!" I insisted, shaking him eagerly until the straw fell from his neck. "Chicken and egg, tick and tock, Croaker and Eierkopf — - they're false distinctions, every one!"

He squinted through his empty spectacle-frames. "You hit your head too?"

But I told him happily that he was better off for the breaking of his lenses and the failure of the Infinite Divisor. What the Founder had joined, who could put asunder? Or resolve the One into many? Had the escapement fallen now into the gears and locked them fast? Then let Infinite Divisors and Everlasting-Nowniks embrace: they were proved brothers, and the Clock was fixed! Let there be no brooding among eggs or crowing of chickens; neither had seniority over the other; they were one, like Day and Night. In short, let him rejoice over the failure of his enterprises, inasmuch as, failing, he had passed!

Dr. Eierkopf said: "Goat-Boy, go home."

"I'm leaving," I replied. "But take my advice, sir: forget about WESCAC; forget about logic. Go out and live!"

"Now you tell me," he said sarcastically. "My head's kaput."

"Don't measure eggs," I exhorted him, "eat them!"

"Eggs, blah." He made a sour face.

"Don't watch co-eds undressing in your night-glass — "

"You said that last time."

"Go undress them yourself! You can't help being an animal: so be one! Be a beast of the woods!"

"I should be a beast of the woods?" he asked skeptically. Inspired by Stoker's earlier sarcasm, I advised him to gratify his appetites directly instead of vicariously: to go to the Powerhouse, debauch himself with Anastasia in the Living Room, or with Madge if My Ladyship happened to be engaged with Harold Bray.

"Eat meat," I said, though my own stomach heaved at the idea no less than his. "Raw meat. You might even try some prepared mustard on Madge."

"You lost your mind," Eierkopf muttered.

Only my Reason, I replied: the flunking Reason that distinguished him from Croaker, and denied that contradictories could both be passèd at the same time, in the same respect.

"Entelechus or no Entelechus," he said, "a man can't diddle except he's got a diddler, not so? You're cracked in the head!"

His objection had the tone of a complaint, as if he wished to be refuted. I stood up confidently. "You're still being logical," I said. "Anastasia will find a way. Want me to help you get your papers together?"

He waved away the offer, declaring glumly that all the dean's assistants could not restore his oölogical masterwork, so hopelessly had Croaker and the four winds scrambled it.

"Come on, then," I urged him. "Leave all this. The campus is your oyster!"

He gagged at the figure, but admitted I'd been right in calling him flunked before, when he'd thought himself passed, and he agreed to consider my strange new counsel. However, after nine months of intense meditation he was too weak to leave the Belfry just that instant. Moreover, he had scores to settle with certain blackbirds who maliciously had fed him angleworms all summer…

"Catch them and eat them!" I suggested remembering the meal once offered me by Croaker. "Bake them in a pie!"

His head shook limply. "I'm a failure, Goat-Boy."

"Failure is Passage," I said, and returned to the lift, hoping to rouse him to action. "Go find Anastasia; bite her in the belly."

But he bared his toothless gums. "Mit was? I'm a broken man, Goat-Boy."

"No, sir," I said firmly, and pushed the Down-button, "You're a chicken."

4

I feared the lift-guard might detain me, and indeed I found him and his fellows conferring in a worried cluster — but not about my ID-card, which I spied in the sand of an ash-tray near the lift. They appeared more anxious than threatening; I decided that my bluff had worked and might be made use of. Boldly I retrieved and pursed my card and said, "Dr. Eierkopf wants his lunch. Right away."

Neither my effrontery nor the news of Eierkopf's survival moved them much. "No use him eating," one guard said gruffly. "Way things look, we'll all be EATen before long." Alarming rumors, it appeared, were coming from the Light House every few minutes: that WESCAC was out of order; that Classmate X had declared Riot; that Lucky Rexford had taken an overdose of tranquilizers and was in a coma. Who cared whether Eierkopf was alive, or whether unauthorized persons got into the Clockworks? The subject of their conversation was not how to deal with me, but whether to perish at their posts or at home with their families.

"Stay where you are," I advised them. "I'm on my way now to end the Boundary Dispute."

"That settles it," the lift-guard said. "I'm going home." He cursed remarkably when I congratulated him for seeing that, in effect, the dispute was settled already, since it had never properly existed — but neither he nor his steadfaster colleagues prevented my leaving Tower Hall. The sun, far in the south, I guessed halfway towards its meridian, but the sky was overcast now and the Light House gray. A sheep-fleeced band of students picketed the gate, some bearing the wordless placards of Carte-blanchisme, others crossing arms, joining hands, and singing in doleful measure:

E plu-ri-bus u-u-nu-um…

Despite the stunning aptness of that sentiment, there was small spirit in their demonstration. Indeed, the whole scene was listless: Stoker's troopers slouched about, some asleep in their sidecars, some hunkered idly on the curb. Now and then one clubbed a student, but so half-heartedly I couldn't always judge whether their victims fell unconscious or merely "went limp." The few passersby who stopped to watch seemed scarcely more interested than the throngs who ambled past without a glance. Even the hecklers sounded bored: yet when languidly one called, "Hurrah for apathy," two pickets shrugged and wandered off.

My approach was greeted by three or four with pale applause and by the rest with so mild jeers I could scarcely credit that a like crowd had once lynched me. The same lassitude appeared to have infected Stoker, who lounged against the Light-House gate with Rexford's Frumentian aide. I thanked him for waiting.

"Don't flatter yourself," he said. "Ignition trouble."

The aide chuckled lazily, not at all the brisk chap I'd lunched with last time around. "At least you've got fuel in your tank; that's more than the Chief has."

I advised Stoker not to accompany me inside, as I thought it fitter his brother come out to him. He yawned and scratched his armpit.

"Forget it."

"Nobody's allowed in while X is there," the aide explained. No use, I knew, to try Laertides's trick on them. "Unless you happen to know the password," he added with a smile. "Which you don't."

I considered. "Could it be Nothing in excess?"

Stoker frowned. "What kind of talk is that?"

"How about Pass All Fail All?"

The brown man shook his head slightly, not very interested.

"E pluribus unum? Failure is Passage?"

"Those sound like flunkwords to me," Stoker said.

I searched my memory for Maxims. "Veritas vos liberabit? Gnothi seauton? Don't burn your bridges at both ends?"

"Give it up," the aide advised.

A little angrily I said, "I don't think there is any password!"

He shrugged and laid his hand on the gate-latch as a party issued from the Light-House door. "You're probably right. Run along, now."

What happened then is somewhat equivocal. I recognized a number of the exiting visitors as Nikolayan officials from the University Council — all of them, in fact, except one who covered his face with his hat, and whom I therefore took to be Classmate X. At the same time I chose to think that I'd hit upon the right response to the aide (it suited my general Answer, certainly), and that his directive and gesture with the latch were invitations to pass through. It's true he said "Stop" when I entered, and that Stoker drew and clicked his pistol, cursing when it failed to fire. But it was not unlike Stoker to frighten people thus for sport, and I was gating the aide aside somewhat roughly in my haste. In any case no one restrained me, whether because I'd chanced upon the password or because no one finally cared.

Not so Classmate X's colleagues: I saw a number of hands fly into coat-breasts as I slicked up the walk.

"Dr. Chementinski!" I called. "It's George Giles, the Goat-Boy! I have news from Leonid Andreich."

As his face was concealed I could not gauge X's reaction, but he muttered something in cold Nikolayan to his colleagues, and no weapons were drawn, though the hands stayed fast. Cameras clicked about us.

"Mistaken identity," he said to me through his hat. "These names mean nothing." But he did not press on at once. His aides immediately ringed us to keep off the journalism-majors who sought a statement about his interview with Chancellor Rexford.

"I know who you are and why you wanted your son arrested," I said.

"There are no sons in Nikolay College," he replied; "all men are brothers."

"Then you may be interested to hear that your brother Leonid took poison recently — nearly a whole bottle of eradicator."

For just an instant he uncovered his blank gray eyes, then hid behind his hat again and said tersely: "He is no more then, this stranger you mention."

I replied that Leonid was, fortunately, "more" indeed — more than his stepfather and more than he himself had ever been before, thanks to the less-than-perfect effectiveness of the eradicator; for though he'd not decided yet whether to rescue Max and perish in his stead or defect in truth to New Tammany, he most certainly would use no force on my keeper, who loved him as a son; nor would he be likely to try suicide again, now he saw its selfishness.

"Sentimental mid-percentilism. Petty-Informationalist logic-chopping." But X's voice was thick. "If Leonid Andreich — was that the name you mentioned? — if he failed at suicide it's because a perfect Student-Unionist has no self. Let the Union order his suicide and see whether he fails!"

"You call him a perfect Student-Unionist," I pointed out. "You must be very proud of him."

"Bah." He turned away. "He'll never learn."

"But you want him to! You're ambitious for him, like any father!"

I thought I detected a color in what I could see of his face. In the metallest tone he said: "Listen, Goat-Boy: A man sacrifices his only son — the only thing he loves — exactly to keep from being selfish. That man is no father." He snapped something in Nikolayan, and the party moved gatewards.

"Self-discipline is selfish, too!" I called after. "You can't escape yourself, Dr. Chementinski! You couldn't even if you could!"

"Did he say Chementinski?" one reporter asked another, and then asked me directly, while his colleague hurried after Classmate X. I confirmed that the Nikolayan representative to the U.C. and the famous defector Chementinski were the same man, and explained briefly how I knew, insisting that Max was wholly innocent of the plot and that Leonid, while guilty of intent to kidnap, had altogether repudiated that intention, as witness his remaining in a cell which he could easily walk out of if he chose to. Everyone pressed after Classmate X then, despite his refusal to comment or uncover his face. Even some of his colleagues, it seemed to me, scowled now as questioningly at him and each other as hostilely at the press. At last he lost his temper, jammed his hat upon his head, and reached inside his coat. Reporters scrambled for cover; aides went for their weapons — but it was an ID-card instead of a pistol that X whipped forth. He waved it at the Telerama lenses.

"Does it say Chementinski? Nyet!"

Those who were near enough admitted that only an X was visible on the card, though obviously that fact in itself proved little. Coming up behind, I flipped out the magnifying lens on my stick and thrust it over the shoulders of several reporters, bidding them look again closely.

"Nyet!" Classmate X snatched the card away, but not before two reporters saw, or claimed to have seen, imperfectly eradicated characters on both sides of the X. Moreover, examining his glitter-eyed, fierce-beaked face, for once publicly uncovered, a cameraman was moved to recall that though the features were otherwise much altered, Chementinski the traitor-scientist had had metal-capped bicuspids like Classmate X.

"The better to EAT you with!" X shouted, as impassioned as his stepson now. "This means Riot!" It was his aides then who led him, one at each arm, out to the motorcade on the mall. I entered the Light House.

A number of the Chancellor's assistants were in the entrance-hall; they wore gray suits and had similar youthful faces, but their forelocks were combed back now, and instead of bustling they lounged about in leather chairs and window-seats. I approached the nearest and announced my wish to see Chancellor Rexford at once. He turned from the window, smiling slightly, and congratulated me upon my release from Main Detention. The voice, though lifeless, was unmistakable.

"You're the Chancellor!" I couldn't conceal my surprise: without his grin, his white suit, his springy force and forelock, he seemed blander than his aides. His face was tired but placid; he looked ten years older.

"I won't be, next term, if the polls mean anything," he said, shaking my hand. "Assuming there is a next term."

I'd expected a less cordial reception, in view of the consequences of my former advice, but though no one actually welcomed me into the Chancellor's office, no one forbade my entering it, either. And Rexford, while neither pleased or displeased to see me, was polite, even respectful. He dismissed his aides and postponed several appointments at my request, so that we could talk.

"You needn't tell me," he sighed from behind his desk. "Bray had no business Certifying me, and you were right to call me flunked." He stared gloomily at a photograph of his wife upon the mantelpiece. "But I feel even flunkèder now — not that it matters, extremely. You talked to X?"

I affirmed that I had, but as I prepared to disclose Classmate X's true identity, two telephones on the desk rang simultaneously, a red and a white. He answered the red first, listened gravely to the message, and said, "Again? You're sure? Well, we'll have to think about that. Don't want to do anything rash." He made a memorandum — what appeared to be a tally.

"Another guard fell off the Line," he told me, and picked up the white telephone. "We're pretty sure the Nikolayans are tapping our power at night, too. They may even be advancing their line."

To the white telephone he made similar responses, though more personal. "Please be reasonable, dear," he said. "You really ought to give this more thought…" But his caller hung up.

He tisked ruefully and put back the receiver. "I guess that's that. Either your advice about women was wrong or it came too late." He'd been skeptical at first of my sundry counsels, he said, but they'd stuck in his mind, and though it went against the grain of his temperament to eschew compromise, he'd had to acknowledge himself guilty of occasional secret "deals" with Classmate X, Ira Hector, and Maurice Stoker; he had, moreover, tolerated moderate amounts of graft, academic dishonesty, prostitution, and other campus vices as unavoidable in a large college, and very infrequently had allowed himself a fit of anger, a drink too many, or an extracurricular night of love, usually with Anastasia Stoker. Upon his return from our ill-fated trip to the U.C. building last spring, his wife had announced plans for a short vacation, alone; and smitten with bad conscience (as well as distraught by the failure of the Summit Symposium), he'd confessed these past errors, begged her pardon, and vowed to lapse from passèd fidelity no more. When word reached him (during his wife's absence) that Bray had passed me for flunking his own diplomates, Rexford determined to follow my advice to the letter: to purge himself of every trace of immoderation and renounce absolutely all traffic with flunkèdness — if his administration could not pass the "Open Book Test," let it fall! His subsequent measures I'd heard about in Main Detention, and their unhappy consequences, all except one: when Mrs. Rexford had at last returned from her long holiday he'd not even scolded her, much less struck her, though everything suggested she'd been unfaithful. On the contrary, he'd proposed they attend together a course of lectures called The Problems of Marriage in a Changing University.

But while he prided himself on having achieved perfect reasonableness and self-control, he did not feel Commenced. Not because things were going wretchedly — he knew that Right was right and Wrong wrong regardless of consequences — but because his heart's desires hid yet from the light of reason. That the Powerhouse threatened to explode from overproduction while Great Mall flickered and WESCAC flagged for want of power; that West Campus was losing the Quiet Riot, and his administration its popularity; that people suspected him of kinship with Stoker since Stoker had ceased to oppose him; that Classmate X had just announced a new advance of the Nikolayan Power Line and Mrs. Rexford a new vacation, perhaps with a friend and perhaps permanent — all these he might accept as the price of Truth. But the truth was, when he saw Stoker lounging at the gate in a motorcycle-jacket he had the strongest wish to hear him taunt as in the old days, "Flunk you, Brother!" When he saw Anastasia, despite her recent coldness and his perfect restraint, he still tumesced; yet he loved his wife so, her disaffection notwithstanding, that the rumors of her infidelity smote him with jealous rage; gladly would he strike her down — and pick her up, and madly kiss away her bruises…

"But that's lunacy, of course," he finished dryly. "I'll do nothing of the sort. If she and X won't debate these things with me, reasonably and openly — that's that. I'll sit here and wait for the EAT-whistle."

"Assuming there's power enough to blow it," I reminded him. "And somebody worried enough to pull the cord."

He laughed a little sheepishly. "There's plenty of power. The trick is to get it to Great Mall without dealing with Stoker. Nothing to lose our heads about, I suppose…"

"But it is!" I asserted. "All these things are, sir! Stoker is your brother! And I'm no Grand Tutor! I was completely wrong before!"

The Chancellor frowned and glanced towards the door. "Calm down, now…"

"No! That's just what you shouldn't do!" I strode about the office, gesturing with my stick. "There isn't really any boundary between East and West Campuses: all students are classmates! This nonsense about Informationalism and Student-Unionism — "

"Look here, now, Mr. Giles; I insist you calm yourself." Rexford fiddled nervously with a combination paperweight-flashlight on his desk, clicking the switch on and off. It didn't light. "Maybe from the Founder's viewpoint the Power Line is artificial and unreal, but we're not the Founder. Remarks like those may be harmless in the classroom, but out on the campus things aren't so simple."

"Exactly!" I agreed. "That's why it was a mistake to be absolutely reasonable, and the rest."

"I admit it's not easy. All the same-"

"That's the Answer!" I cried. "East and West, temperate and intemperate — - they're all the same!"

"Mr. Giles," the Chancellor protested, consulting his wrist-watch. "I'm the chief executive of a busy college, and much as I'd like to reason these things out with you — "

"There isn't time!" I finished for him. "And besides, you don't feel like being reasonable! That's splendid!"

He saw nothing very splendid about it, Rexford declared; but as he did not after all order me out, I explained to him briefly what I took to be the essence of my former error, and how I'd come to understand that East and West Campuses, goat and Grand Tutor, even Passage and Failure, were inseparable and ultimately indistinguishable.

"You talk like The Living Sakhyan," the Chancellor scoffed. "Be reasonable now: what do you propose?"

My first proposal, I told him, was to cease being reasonable — as if there were a floodlit Boundary between Reason and Unreason! Did his stubborn insistence upon reason at any price not prove the fallacy of such distinctions?

"So we should surrender to the Nikolayans?"

"Not surrender," I said, "embrace."

"Nonsense."

"Right!" I cried again. "Embrace nonsense! Be moderate when you feel like it! Don't always be reasonable with your wife! Make the guards look down so they can see what thin air they're standing on, just like Entelechus! Go hug your brother!"

"Hug my brother!" Rexford blushed hotly — but not, I thought, in anger.

"You know as well as I do that he is your brother. Go have a drink with him! And next time you see Anastasia — "

"He's not actually my brother," the Chancellor put in hastily. "Some kind of half-brother or foster-brother, I think…"

"What's the difference? Embrace him!" It occurred to me that the difference, in Rexford's mind, might be between adultery with a blood-brother's wife and adultery with an adopted brother's wife, and so I didn't press the indistinction further. Nor did I itemize the ways in which I'd have him repudiate my former Tutelage and assert its contrary. He was, I saw, strongly tempted by Stoker's presence just outside the gate, and by despair, which flooded in on him almost visibly once I'd got through his equilibrium. Therefore I contented myself with advising that the "Open Book" be shut forthwith, and that an amnesty be declared for everyone detained under its reforms.

It was the Chancellor now who strode about, shaking his head. "This is crazy!" He stopped and grinned; the famous forelock fell. "I know: it's supposed to be crazy. All the same — " He laughed aloud at this additional irony, throwing back his head and flashing his fine teeth. "Wouldn't that make them sit up, though, if I went out there and called Maury Brother! Or told X to bring his Line as close as he wants!"

Unsettled by the tempting outrageousness of that idea, he flung open the curtains of a double glass door leading from the office onto a terrace, and squinted and chuckled in the glare. Beyond the low wall of the terrace was the driveway-gate where Stoker lingered with some of his sooty crew and a few reporters.

"One thing at a time," I cautioned. He caught me up brightly: who was being the prudent one now? But delighted as I was by his respiriting, I felt obliged to warn him that there were photographers about.

His blue eyes twinkled. "What difference does that make? Anyway their pictures haven't been turning out lately. No flashgun batteries." But he grew grave for just a moment at the terrace door. "You say you're not the Grand Tutor, George; but I understand you really are the GILES." I shrugged. "That's what WESCAC says." He smiled again. "I'm not as crazy as you might wish. But I take you seriously, and I think I see your point: it's worth risking some kind of long-shot to change my luck and brighten up my image a little. It had better not fail, though." Before one could say "Failure is Passage" he stepped outside, topcoatless in the winter air, and vaulted lightly over the terrace wall. I saw the reporters rap one another's arms as he strode up, brisk as a sophomore track man, and Stoker scowl at the wrought-iron gate. Aides burst into the office, looked about in wonder, and thrust past me without a word. Then, shedding their topcoats and rumpling their hair, they vaulted after him. What the Chancellor said I couldn't hear from the terrace, but he grabbed Stoker's hand through the gate and pumped it vigorously. Once only he seemed to wince, then flashbulbs popped after all — the Powerhouse-Director had no doubt been horsetrading — then he grinned his grin, flung open the gate, and clapped an arm about Stoker's leathern shoulder. Reporters and cameramen tumbled and called; microphones appeared; Stoker glowered and shook his fist at a Telerama-boom. But Lucky Rexford laughed, would not un-hug him, and saying something into the microphones, pointed first to Stoker's black forelock and then to his own sand-white one. His hand was sooty.

More than content, I went back into the entrance-hall; rather than disturb the reunion I would walk the few kilometers to the Infirmary, where I hoped to find Dr. Sear and perhaps Anastasia as well. There was a bustle on the wide central staircase: Mrs. Rexford, crisp and elegant, came down with a gaggle of scribbling ladies and a phalanx of suitcase-bearing young men. Coolly she moved in their van, a slim-legged, doe-eyed, soft-mouthed beauty, with the high-strung grace of careful breeding — truly a Hedda among lady girls (though deficient of udder). She regarded me and my detention-suit with brief disdain while one of her female companions informed her that her husband was at the front gate, and that the press wanted to photograph them together before she left on her vacation-trip. She glanced somewhat petulantly towards a fellow in her retinue, who, though dressed like a chancellor's aide, had not gone with the others; I thought I saw him nod.

"All right," she said, daintily vexed. I considered warning her of Mr. Rexford's changed attitude — but her cool and powdered elegance I found not approachable. I felt ungroomed, less washed even than I was, a stinkish bill-buck: and though a moment later I put by that feeling with some annoy, I let her go uncautioned, a-whisper in the gray-suit fellow's ear, and left the Light House by a different path. Crossing Great Mall I heard lady-shrieks and other commotion behind me, and was tempted to run with the others to the Light-House gate, to see what was happening. But already my faint shadow fell east of north; the hour was later than I'd supposed, and work remained to do.

Gimping hospitalwards, I scolded myself further for having let human upperclassness put me down. GILES, son of WESCAC, maternal grandson of Reginald Hector; laboratory eugenical specimen of the Grand-Tutorial ideal (no less rare even if false); protégé of Maximilian Spielman — and a goat, by George: a brawny-bearded bigballed buck! Stepkid of Mary Appenzeller; stallmate of Redfearn's Tom; lover of Hedda of the Speckled Teats; familiar of that late legendary sire of sires, Brickett Ranunculus, the very dean of studs — I should deny my pedigree and heritage, my gait my garb my scent? Infirmity! My one infirmity, I saw now, was having thought such goatly gifts in need of cure, and that infirmity was overcome. Studentdom it was that limped: hobbled by false distinction, crippled by categories! I returned unflinchingly the stares of male and female undergraduates thronging the sidewalks, and reasoned one strong step further: my infirmity was that I had thought myself first goat, then wholly human boy, when in fact I was a goat-boy, both and neither: a walking refutation of such false conceits. If I chose, withal, to comport me goatly now awhile, it was not to deny my humanness (of what was the GILES decocted if not the seed of the whole student body?) but to correct it, in the spirit of my new advisings. To that end, as I drew near the Psychiatric Annex of the great Infirmary I goated it the more — "went to the bathroom" where no bathroom was, as in pasture days; bleated twice or thrice at the passersby's dismay; and skipped up the marble entrance steps on all fours — the point being that I wasn't just Capra hircus, any more than the white-coat pair of watchers at the top were simply Homo sapiens.

"A wise guy," one of them said.

"I don't know, Bill," said the other.

"George Giles the Goat-Boy," I announced, rising proudly to shake hands.

They exchanged glances. "Come off it, pal," Bill said. "Let's see your matric card."

Pleased at the chance to demonstrate my point, I displayed the blank ID-card with a smile. "What difference does a name make, classmates? I am, that's all."

"What'd I tell you," his colleague said to him. Bill grunted.

I was surprised and pleased. "You've thought of it before? That none of us really has a name?"

"Some stinks worse'n others, though," Bill said. The two each took an elbow, and they led me inside. When I understood that the jacket they called for was for me, and strait, I protested I'd only come to visit Dr. Sear. Bill acknowledged again, grudgingly, that his companion's guess had been correct. "I knew he treated lots of them animal ones," he said in his own defense. "But I thought that there goat one was in Main Detention."

"He is," the other said, and explained patiently; "what there is, though, Bill, there's some thinks they're the ones that thinks they're animals! It's in their heads."

"You reckon Sear treats them ones too?"

Proud of his knowledge, Bill's companion pointed out that Dr. Sear was a diagnostician, not a therapist. "He just sees what bin they belong in, is all."

The waistcoat was fetched — a cross-armed canvas thing — but they offered not to bind me in it if I'd come quietly to Dr. Sear's office. I agreed, delighted to infer that the doctor had recovered from his dread affliction as well as from his suicide-attempt, and I endeavored to Tutor my gruff escorts no further.

Other orderlies waited with patients in Dr. Sear's corridor. One of the latter growled and snapped at me as he and his keeper took our place in the lift; I lowered my head to butt, bleated a warning, and hoofed the terrazzo floor. The disturbance brought Anastasia hurrying from the Reception Room with dog-biscuits.

"George!" Her eyes widened at sight of the strait-jacket. Refusing to hear the orderlies' story, she scolded them sharply for treating the Grand Tutor as a madman; they were flunkèd as her husband, she said, who'd detained me as a common felon. They grumbled apologies and unhanded me, cowed by her temper if not persuaded by her representation; still flushed with outrage, she nevertheless agreed not to report their misjudgment to Dr. Sear, and dismissed them.

"A regular nut-house," Bill said disgustedly to his colleague.

Anastasia led me into the Reception Room (where I was surprised to see my mother, placidly knitting) and at once hugged me and made tears — not at all the chilly woman she had been being! "I'm so glad You're out of Detention," she exclaimed, and although she added, "everything's so mixed up, I don't know what to do!" I was pleased to believe her glad of my release apart from any aid she might require. And her recaptured warmth so gratified me that I kissed her mouth. Nibbled her even, ardently, whereupon she drew back with her usual wonder, but did not oppose my doing it again. "Don't just allow me!" I rebuked her — still holding her against me. "Either stop me or join in."

She looked fretfully to Mother, who however regarded us with blank benignity and went on knitting.

"It doesn't come naturally to me, George," she complained. "And I'm all upset just now…"

Bracing my heart I asked whether Bray had serviced her. More tears ensued, and blushes; she wrung in her hands the forgotten biscuits. He had not, she thanked the Founder, summoned her as yet, owing to his busy schedule of appointments for Certification. But their rendezvous was set for the coming midnight, in the Belfry; he was to fetch her from the Living Room at eleven o'clock.

"No," I said. At once she flung her arms about my neck for joy. But I continued: "You go to him, Anastasia. You do the servicing."

She wept: she could not, not ever. Task enough to submit to every creature's lust, as I had bid her; if she could manage it at all, it was only at my order, and because I'd taught her how responsible she was for the lust she helplessly provoked; but she besought me not to make her take the initiative.

"You must," I said. "And not only with Bray. I want you to seduce people — even Stoker."

"Maurice?" If she was anguished before, now she was simply shocked. "You mean… make love to my husband? What would he think!"

His thoughts, I told her, were not important; her Commencement was, and it depended on her overcoming the false distinctions I had formerly burdened her with. Yes, she must seduce her own husband, overwhelm him with carnalities of every description, even Conscious Depravities. Moreover, for both their sakes she must cuckold him; commit fornications without his knowledge and against his wishes.

"That's impossible!" she protested. "You know how Maurice is!" But her eyes refilled as she remembered, visibly, that he'd been neither brute nor pander since my first false Tutoring, but so chaste and docile a spouse he'd often made her cross. "That would be adultery, George!"

This last was more than refusal, and setting the teeth of my spirit I insisted she deceive her husband, not only with Bray but with for example Dr. Eierkopf and any other creature who crossed her fancy or her path — male or female, human or hound-dog, even animate or inanimate. All discrimination must go by the board.

She shook her head. "That's flunkèd!"

"Failure is Passage," I reminded her. She objected no more, but admitted tearfully that Dr. Sear had just finished telling her the very same thing, apropos of "the Peter Greene business," and though she'd understood it from him no more clearly than from me, even when he applied my reasoning to his own case, she guessed she had no choice but to acknowledge her stupidity and try to obey without understanding, repugnant as was the notion of such lewdness. I asked what business of or with Greene she meant, as she seemed not to be alluding to the spring-term rape — and also how my advice to her had applied to Dr. Sear, for while I was pleased to see he saw my point about her "charity" and the need to invert my former Tutoring, I had not myself considered what ought to be his new prescription. By way of answer, she locked the hall-door and bade me come with her into the Observation Room. As we passed in front of my mother, that lady caught and kissed my hand, the first indication that she knew I was there, and smiled slyly to herself as always. I kissed her hair, and she put down her knitting to make Enos Enoch's hand-sign on her fallen chest.

"What are you knitting, Mother?" I asked gently, and looked to Anastasia for reply; between her spells of reliving our season in the hemlocks, my poor Lady Creamhair spoke not at all except in confidential whispers to My Ladyship, whom she stayed with constantly, as it seemed.

Anastasia colored. "It's a baby-sweater, George. Mom — Your mother thinks I'm going to have a baby."

I considered her belly. "Are you?"

"Of course not!"

Mother nodded to the wee blue wrapper. "Bye Baby Billikins."

Anastasia colored further. "Sometimes she thinks it's that WESCAC business again, and her that's pregnant."

But my mother resolutely shook her head.

"You do, sometimes!" Anastasia scolded her; but then confessed what I took to be Mother's commoner delusion; "other times she seems to think I'm Your wife or something…"

I smiled and kissed again Mother's poor mad hair, and to humor her folly drew Anastasia near, patted her fine flat gut and nodded.

"That's cruel, George!" In a little temper My Ladyship went into the Observation Room. "I'm not even able to have babies, and You know it!"

My apology seemed rather to encourage than to mollify her petulance; she maintained a more or less injured air while recounting Peter Greene's strange forenoon invasion of the office. But though I was much interested in her tale I forgot her vexed tone when I looked through the oneway glass into the Treatment Room and saw a shirtsleeved man his head swathed in bandages, lying on the leathern couch — and Peter Greene, white-coated, in the chair at its head!

5

"Don't ask me," Anastasia said, before I'd thought to. "Kennard took him in there to calm him down, and next thing I knew it was like that. They've been at it since before lunch."

From her account I gathered that the bandaged man was Dr. Sear; his malady was no curabler than before, but surgical excision of his nose had abated its progress, temporarily, enough for him to resume a limited practice. Anastasia had returned to assist him on the conditions that she be obliged no longer to offer sexual therapy to anyone, even Mrs. Sear, and that her "mother" be permitted to stay with her in the Reception Room. Indeed, it was Mother, I was startled to learn, who in her own recent therapy-sessions had by some means conveyed to Dr. Sear the first reports of my new programme — perhaps by the same fortuitous quotations from the Syllabi that she'd inspired me with. In any case, with his usual acuity Sear had seen my point, and when shortly afterwards Anastasia had come to him, distraught, with word of my strange new advice, he'd not only approved it, but fortified my paradoxical argument with a dozen quotations from Footnotes to Sakhyan and other works of "unitary expletivism," none of which My Ladyship could make heads or tails of.

" 'He is a Grand Tutor!' " she said he'd said of me. "I told him You said You weren't, and he said, 'That's the point! That's what I mean!' " She sighed (still a little poutish): thereafter Sear had pressed her in vain to return to the practice of sexual therapy; and it was he, I now learned, who had suggested that she might secure my release by promising to become Bray's mistress (he'd also persuaded Bray to release me on the strength of her pledge without waiting for its consummation — not to mention the siring upon her of the child Bray craved). Further, Sear had acknowledged to her that he himself had been desperately flunkèd thitherto, even as I'd said; was flunkèd still, as he'd seen too plainly at the Honeymoon Lodge Motel. Hence the decision to end his life. Rescued willynilly from the sleeping-capsules, he'd tried to relish the horror of his disease, but the physical decay, it seemed, drove out the intellectual, and he'd found himself terrified instead of diverted by death's approach. Anosmia was followed by exophthalmos, and as his eyeballs began to pop, the cancer spread to and obstructed his lacrimal ducts, with the result that tears ran from them almost constantly. But it was as much for as from his condition that he wept. Greatly as he loathed mutilation, now he feared death more, and consented to radical surgery: the tears disappeared, along with his nose and a portion of the sight of both eyes.

With what vision remained to him he'd striven to imagine how my new Answer fit his case. Clearly I would not advise him to refine his amusements or otherwise attempt to become more campusly — the end of that road he'd reached already, at the Honeymoon Lodge Motel. From my advice to Anastasia he inferred correctly that he should assert whatever it was he had vainly tried to rid himself of; further, he'd concluded that that must necessarily be some kind of ingenuousness or ignorance of himself, inasmuch as he'd devoted his whole life to their opposites. That he could see no defect in his insight proved to him that the defect existed, since perfect insight would see its imperfections; had he not been naïve to think himself not naïve? His first prescription, therefore, had been to commit himself to the custody of his wife, who had regressed to the psychological age of five. But much as he'd enjoyed playing "Doctor" with her in the sandbox of the chronic-ward playground, he'd come to realize that however correct his diagnosis and prescription, they were invalid perforce, as he'd arrived at them himself.

"So this morning he asked me to tell him what to do!" Anastasia exclaimed. "As if I were the doctor! I said he'd better talk to You, that I didn't understand this crazy business — and the way he thanked me, you'd think that was exactly what he wanted to hear! As if he couldn't have thought of it himself!"

"I see." And I did see, dimly, his general reasoning, I believed: Sear needed to come to me at the behest of someone else, preferably someone who didn't understand the situation. It had seemed to bother him, though, Anastasia continued, when she reminded him that she was only a nurse. But before she could suggest that he consult a professional colleague, their conversation had been interrupted by Greene's visit.

"You won't believe what he came to tell me!" The memory so renewed her astonishment, she forgot her pique at my having pretended she was pregnant.

I smiled. "He apologized for confusing you with your flunkèd twin sister."

"How did You know? He's crazy, George! And I hate to say it, but I'm afraid Kennard's mind has been affected, too. By the cancer…"

I followed her account as well as I could, for it was more arresting and suggestive than I'd anticipated. But my attention was sorely divided: not only was I listening at the same time to the conversation in the Treatment Room, which I'd remembered could be overheard at the flip of a switch; I was also sharply interested in observing through the glass what appeared to be a new development in the strange relation between Greene and Sear.

"I thought he wanted to apologize for last spring," Anastasia said. "In fact, I was going to offer to explain the whole thing to his wife, in case she thought it was his fault, what he'd done to me. But when he started in on this sister business, and how he was sorry he'd ever thought it was me that wasn't a virgin…! He got more excited all the time, saying his wife was the dearest little wifey on the Founder's green campus and I was the dearest little sister, and women like Maurice's secretary and my sister were floozies that ought to be horsewhipped! Kennard was right there listening to the whole thing, and when Mr. Greene started saying he'd defend my honor to the death, and pawing me at the same time, I thought Kennard would help me! Because it wasn't the first time, You know, that a patient ever got fresh, and I really think Mr. Greene thought he was protecting me, or something… But do You think Kennard helped? He was listening to Mr. Greene as if it were the Grand Tutor talking, and when Mr. Greene tried to lay me down on the desktop, all Kennard said was 'Remember what George told you, Stacey'!"

In the Treatment Room, as she spoke, Greene had been inveighing against the decline of moral standards in "the present modern campus of today" and recommending that the dunce-cap and birch-rod be restored to their place of honor in New Tammany kindergartens; Sear interrupted him to ask whether, when he played Doctor with Mrs. Sear in the Asylum sandbox, he ought to pretend to be the doctor and Hedwig the patient, or vice-versa: to his mind, taking make-believe rectal temperatures with a forest-green crayon was an apt symbolic affirmation of the element of childish perversity which had always underlain his sophisticated medical researches; on the other hand, he could see that assuming the "patient's" role not only in the office, as he was doing presently, but also in the sandbox — baring his bum to Hedwig's popsicle-stick — might be said to combine inversion, perversion, reversion, and reversal.

"What do you suggest, Doctor?" he inquired.

"Now that's enough!" Greene said angrily. "That's just plain dirty talk, is all it is!"

"I know," Sear admitted. "But the fact is, you see, I was a very naughty five-year-old. I peeked up the little girls' dresses and tasted my b.m.'s and showed me my pee-tom to the teacher. So what I hope you'll tell me is whether 'becoming as a kindergartener' means returning innocently to childish perversions or pervertedly feigning a childish innocence…"

"Did Greene actually service you, then?" I asked Anastasia.

"He would have, I'm sure," she said, "and thought he was defending my virginity the whole time! But when Kennard reminded me of what You'd told me I got all mixed up, because I don't like Mr. Greene — not that way, especially since last spring — and yet I do believe in You, George, even if You don't. But it's so hard for me to act like a… a floozy, You know…"

"That's just more smut, Dr. Sear!" Greene was declaring. "You know durn well I'm not any sawbones, say what you want, nor a headshrinker either — excuse the expression! I'm a simple country boy that's trying to do the right thing by his wife and family and his alma mater. Don't think I don't see you're up to some naughtiness with this playing-doctor business, pull-the-wool-over-my-eyeswise."

"What did you do?" I was wondering vaguely whether the net effect of a seduction of Greene by My Ladyship would be therapeutic or antitherapeutic, so to speak, in their separate cases; likewise a repetition, under present circumstances, of her previous forcible allaying. At the same time, the conversation in the Treatment Room I found more absorbing, and relevant to my Assignment as well as to Greene's and Sear's.

"All I could think of was how crazy that sister idea was," Anastasia said. "He was trying to take my clothes off, and Kennard was taking Mr. Greene's clothes off — You know Kennard! I was squirming around on the desk, and Kennard thought I was trying to be sexy — - so did Mr. Greene, I guess. But really I was trying to be loose and get loose at the same time, I was so mixed up by what You'd told me. Anyhow, I was shouting in Mr. Greene's ear that I was Maurice Stoker's wife and hadn't been a virgin since I was twelve, and between that and my wiggling around he decided I was the flunkèd sister! So he got off me, thank the Founder — in fact, I could see he couldn't do anything then, even if he'd wanted to; You know what I mean — and he started lecturing me about disgracing my sister Stacey. Honestly! Then Kennard took him into the Treatment Room to calm him down, even though Mr. Greene said he wouldn't listen to any more of Kennard's talk, because he was okay and it didn't matter anyhow. But Kennard spoke to him very respectfully and said he wanted to ask advice instead of giving it…"

At this point, though my mind remained much on My Ladyship, I stopped listening to her story (which was growing somewhat hysterical anyway) in order to hear with delighted surprise Greene's counsel to Dr. Sear.

"You ought to quit this playing Doctor and Patient," he was saying severely. "It don't become an educated man like yourself, that kind of smartness. And it don't show proper respect for your wife, neither, that I'm sure is a good upstanding woman…"

"It was her idea," Dr. Sear complained. His voice grew stubborn as a pre-schooler's. "It was her crayons and popsicle-sticks, too."

"That don't matter," Greene insisted. "You ought to have a proper self-respect for her. Take yourself, now: except for that there cancer you're a healthy man! So don't let your wife's craziness fool you, all that drinking and messing around with floozies like Lacey — you got to learn to see through a woman like that."

"I've seen," Dr. Sear insisted half-heartedly.

"I wonder," Greene chided. "Why, take away her failings and you've got a passèd wife and mother!"

"We have no children," Dr. Sear dryly pointed out.

Greene was not abashed. "Get busy and have some, then! What's a marriage without children?" Tears rose in his eyes; he fetched out his wallet. "Take a look at these kiddies here and tell me you don't want a passel of your own! Aren't they the passèdest little scapers you ever laid eyes on? They're grown up now, of course…"

Though presumably he could not weep, Dr. Sear wiped the bandages near his eyes with a handkerchief and waved away the photographs as if the sight of them was more than he could bear. Greene sniffled and declared that, fool and flunker though he was in other respects, he'd been a loving father to his children, and Miss Sally Ann a loving mother, nobody could take that away from them, and in this conviction they could go to the Gate content, fulfill-their-natural-purpose-on-this-campuswise. Satisfied, even inspired, I turned to Anastasia, and was surprised to observe that she too was in tears. I recalled her emotion on the occasion of my own recommending, for very different reasons, that Dr. and Mrs. Sears beget a child, and assumed that now, as then, she was weeping with pleasure for their sakes.

"Out of the mouths of babes," I said cheerfully. "That's about what I was going to tell Dr. Sear myself, with maybe one qualification; but it's even better for him to hear it from Greene." I gave her pretty rump a pat, and by way of a cordial tease declared it was high time she herself was bred; if Stoker wasn't stud enough and Bray should miss his appointment, maybe I'd service her myself…

She cried, "You're hateful!" and fled into the Reception Room. I followed after.

"I was only joking, Anastasia."

"You don't understand anything!" She turned on Mother, who was silently making the Enochist sign with her knitwork. "Will you stop that?"

Shocked as I was, I believed I saw through her anger then: so rare a thing was barrenness among the does, I could not keep in mind that My Ladyship was infertile. I had been tactless; no doubt she'd wanted to breed with Stoker, if only for the improvement that lactation would work upon her udder. I apologized sincerely, and by way of consoling her pointed out that Mrs. Lucius Rexford, for example, was all but flat-chested despite her having been freshened once or twice by the Chancellor; also that I'd heard it claimed (by the free-speaking inmates of Main Detention) that there were men who actually preferred rather udderless women. For all I knew, Maurice Stoker might belong to that fraternity.

She pummeled at my head.

"Stop it, Anastasia! I don't understand this at all!"

Our scuffling brought Greene and Sear from the Treatment Room; as soon as they opened the door My Ladyship fled inside, turning her face from them. Greene curled his lip, even spat in her direction. Dr. Sear's reaction I couldn't observe, owing to the bandages, but we greeted each other warmly. He was delighted to learn I'd overheard his conversation with Greene and approved his reasoning; he embraced us by turns, nowise amorously, and though he was unable to weep or sniffle, his voice caught at the notion of fathering a child.

"We tried last time, George, as you know," he said with difficulty. "It was so outrageous, taking Heddy to bed — and at the Honeymoon Lodge Motel, of all places, like freshman newlyweds! It should've been marvelously perverse, just as you intended, but when Hed put on her bridal nightie, and I thought of the incredible things we'd done over the semesters…" It was then, he said huskily, that the ceaseless flow of tears had commenced, and instead of mounting his wife, perversely, in the ordinary way, he had been smitten with the hopeless wish that they could be free, if only for an hour, of the burden of all they'd seen and done, and could come together in simple, bashful love. Impossible, of course: not distaste or disinclination but shame unmanned him; what kind of parents would they be, anyway? they sneered, and contemning each other and themselves they'd gone, she to the bottle and to Croaker in the lobby, he to the sleeping-capsules.

"It weren't no proper way," Greene said stoutly.

"Founder help me, George!" Sear exclaimed. "What a blind dunce I've been! If a man could only wipe the slate clean!"

"A fresh start," Greene affirmed. "Being smart never made a man happy. Where there's life there's hope."

The awful triteness of these sentiments made Sear sob. But dared he imagine, he asked me, that even with the aid of what he called "self-hypnotic autoamnesis" he could ever achieve enough unselfconsciousness to make love to his wife — not to mention begetting a child in the Honeymoon Lodge Motel?

"If a person wishes hard enough," Greene solemnly declared, "his wishes'll come true. Say what you want."

I smiled. "You might try, anyway, I think, if they'll let Mrs. Sear leave the Asylum." In his case, I decided, it was inadvisable to add that he needn't worry if the plan misfired again, since failure and passage, rightly conceived, were not different. Judging from what he'd told Anastasia, he was acquainted with the truth of that paradox. "Forget about Taliped and Gynander as well as yourself," I advised him. "Keep telling yourself that you'll live happily ever after."

"What I always say to myself," Greene said: "I'm okay. And what the heck anyhow."

Sear shook his head, unable to speak.

"I have some business with My Ladyship," I said. "May I use the Treatment Room for a while?"

When he understood to whom the term referred, Dr. Sear readily granted permission, he being too unsettled to see more patients that day. But for all his absorption in his own "Assignment" (as he called the wife-bedding project), he ventured the opinion that "seeing through my ladyship" must mean denying my male sexuality — or better, affirming and embracing the female aspects which he claimed no male was without — in order to demonstrate that male and female were no realer than any other categories. Was that not the sense of my new Answer? And "overcoming my infirmity," if he understood Sakhyanism correctly, ought similarly to mean denying either the difference between sick and well or the reality of the "I" alleged to be ill — an attitude he himself meant to take toward his squamous-cell carcinoma if he could. "After all," he said, "if I'm dying of cancer, then cancer is living of me: in the Founder's eyes it's all the same, isn't it?"

I shrugged. "You may be right, sir. But what the heck anyhow."

He put a fist to his bandaged brow. "I see, I see!" He might have embraced me again, but Greene held up a finger and said, "Ah-ah."

"Flunk me for ever doubting You, George! You really are the Grand Tutor!"

I shook my head, but Mother in the corner said, "A-plus."

"A-plus indeedy," Greene agreed, but added that in his opinion Grand Tutors should have no traffic with the flunked likes of Lacey Stoker.

"I'll be okay," I assured him, and pointed out that even Enos Enoch in His term had passed a floozy or two. "It's a curious thing," I said to Dr. Sear, more seriously; "I think I understand you two pretty well, for instance, and Max and Dr. Eierkopf and the rest. Even Maurice Stoker I can see through, more or less. But My Ladyship's a mystery; I never know what to make of her."

"I feel the same durn way about Sally Ann," Greene confessed.

"I used to think I knew Hedwig inside out," said Dr. Sear. "But now sometimes I wonder whether I've ever known her at all. Or anything, for that matter."

We may not have been thinking of the same thing: Anastasia's mysteriousness, I felt, was not just the famous unpredictability of human women or the celebrated difference between male and female points of view; it had rather to do with the insufficiency of any notion I entertained of her. I was reminded of a time long past, in the barns, when Max, more familiar to me than my own face, had seemed suddenly, unbearably other than myself: a stranger, alien and distinct; as who would find that his arm or leg has a will not his, a personality of its own. But in the case of Anastasia this foreignness was the more conspicuous for its contrast with our obscure intimacy: I had never bit Max in a sidecar, after all, or serviced him memorially, or declared to him despite myself (strange words) "I love you!" or chosen him, in the days of my error, as my first Tutee. Bright as Anastasia's eyes shone on me, I could not see what lay behind their luminosity, or account for her behavior.

"In any case," I said, "I've felt for some time that until I see through My Ladyship I can't be sure I understand anyone, myself included. That's the only thing I believed last spring that I still believe."

"I see your point," Dr. Sear said. "I may question your definition of the term, but I certainly agree with the principle."

"If you'll excuse me, then…" I smiled. "I'm going to try to learn all there is to know about My Ladyship."

He opened and closed his hands and admitted he'd like nothing better than to watch us from the Observation Room, but acceded to Greene's veto of that idea. He could not refrain from pointing out, however, that the Treatment Room was soundproof; that if Anastasia had truly become her old obliging self again, one could do what one pleased with her; but that a closet near the couch was stocked with manacles, whips, and other instruments of sportive interrogation should I need or desire them.

"Now you quit that," Greene scolded. But he bade me anxiously to be careful for though he was sure I'd never step out of line, take-advantage-of-the-weaker-sexwise, we would be durned if a floozy like Lacey couldn't lead The Living Sakhyan Himself astray — look what she'd done to him behind the Old Chancellor's Mansion! I promised to keep both eyes open, reminded Dr. Sear that I sought merely illumination, not gratification of any appetite, normal or abnormal, and went into the Treatment Room, closing the door behind me.

Anastasia sat half-turned on the leathern couch, hiding her face in its arm and her own. I sat down to apologize for any hurt I'd done her feelings unintentionally; but as soon as I touched her hip in a conciliatory way, she flung herself upon me and wailed into my chest that she was the unhappiest woman on campus, and wished herself passed and gone.

I was freshly confounded. "Then you aren't angry at me for teasing you about being sterile? It was thoughtless."

She sniffled into my jail-coat that she knew I hadn't meant to be tactless, and that anyhow her infertility had been attested by Dr. Sear to be psychological rather than physiological, and thus perhaps not a permanent condition. She drew back to look at me, blushing and grave. "Human women don't have heats, You know, George — I remember Maurice telling You something silly about that at the Powerhouse — but we're supposed to have orgasms, and for some reason I don't. Kennard says there might be a connection between that and not having babies."

This seemed doubtful to me, since the fertilest and most amorous does in the herd, to my knowledge, were strangers to the phenomenon she described: wag their pretty tails they might to call for love, and hunch some seconds after service (maiden goatlings in particular) if the buck was strong; but of "transports" and "climaxes" they knew nothing, I was certain. Mary Appenzeller, to cite but one example, an infallible breeder, was inclined to munch hay calmly even when topped by Brickett Ranunculus himself! As for infertility, there had been few cases of it in the barns that could not be "cured" by two dessertspoonfuls of soda dissolved in a liter of warm water and administered vaginally prior to mating, to neutralize uterine acidity — and I would have told Anastasia so forthwith, but I had come to learn, not to teach.

"Why are you unhappy, then?" I asked her. "What do you want to be dead for? If there's nothing wrong with your organs you'll surely be in kid one of these terms, by somebody…"

"George…" She drew the name out protestingly, and seemed about to weep again. To forestall her I acknowledged the truth of what she'd charged earlier — that with regard to human ladies, at least, I understood nothing. I asked her to remedy my ignorance with plain statements.

"Is there anything you have to do this afternoon? Dr. Sear's closed the office."

She glanced apprehensively at the one-way mirror. I assured her that no one was watching, and wondered why she cared, since we were only talking.

"Your mother wants to be home when Uncle Reg arrives," she said. "But that won't be until dinnertime."

"Then I'm going to get to know you," I said. "Inside out, in every way. Even if it takes the rest of the afternoon."

Her eyes doubted. "I've told You my whole flunkèd past, George: all the terrible things I've done thinking they were right. You know as much about me as I do."

"I don't know why you wish you were dead," I observed. "Stoker isn't cruel to you any more. And he could inseminate you artificially if you can't conceive in the normal way. Out in the barns, we — "

She shook her head. "I don't want to have a baby! Not by him. George…" Her expression was awed. "There's something wrong with my marriage."

Recalling that Stoker had expressed a similar apprehension, I asked her what might be their trouble.

"I don't really love my husband!" she said, as if frightened by her own candor. And then all reticence left her; in a tearful rush she confessed herself more flunkèd than I supposed. Her lack of love for her husband, she declared, was not new, and had nothing to do with his pleasure in seeing her serviced by other men, not to mention women, dogs, inanimate objects, and Dr. Eierkopf's eggs, Grade-A Large; the truth was, she had never loved him; indeed, she feared she'd never loved anyone — - male, female, or whatever. Of all Bray's Certifications, she felt hers to be the falsest, for though she most certainly had sympathized with her classmates and done her utmost to gratify their needs, loved them she had never, she knew now. And the proof of it was that while she'd never said "no" (except since my spring-term directive), she'd never said "yes," either. With her sex, perhaps, but not with her heart of hearts.

"That's very interesting," I said. "I think I'm getting to know you better already." What she said fit nicely too with my recent advice to her, I pointed out: saying yes to her classmates was, in effect, what I meant by actively servicing rather than passively receiving them.

"You don't understand!" she wailed. "How can I say it? I'm not supposed to have to say it!"

I frowned. "Say what, Anastasia? If I don't understand, teach me."

She closed her eyes and pounded the couch-cushion with one fist. "Why do You think I see these things about myself now, and never did before?"

I admitted that I hadn't any idea, unless it was that my mistaken first counsel to her and Stoker had led her to see that his abuses had nothing to do with her want of feeling for him.

"No, You idiot!" She gasped at her outcry, then wept freely and pounded the cushion with both fists. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry! Oh, Founder, You of all people… I can't say any more…"

"Now listen here, Anastasia," I said; "I'm a little tired of all this mystery. I'm not the Grand Tutor, but — "

"You are, George!"

I shook my head firmly. "I'm not; that's almost certain. But either way, I want you to take my advice and assert yourself. If I'm not the Grand Tutor, then what I tell you now is right because it's the opposite of what I said before, when I thought I was; if I am (which I doubt), then it's right because I am. You must assert yourself."

"I want to," she said, "because that's what You want…"

"Then stop beating around the bush. What is it you can't tell me?"

She looked at me, stricken. "I love You, George!"

I sat up. Her eyes brimmed over again.

"I don't understand it any more than You do; we hardly know each other…"

"What do you mean, love?" I demanded, much unsettled. She asked me shamefacèdly what I had meant when I'd said I loved her. "I don't know!" I cried. "The words just came out. I don't even know what it means!" She began to weep. I apologized for hurting her feelings again — but, flunk it all, I was alarmed, dismayed, I could not myself have said why; titillated of course, and flattered, certainly flattered — but equally appalled, oddly frightened, and for some reason cross. "In the herd, it means being in heat. For anybody. Everybody."

She whipped her head from side to side.

"Don't you really mean you're just convinced I'm the Grand Tutor?" I asked gruffly. "You loved Bray, too…"

"No!" It was true she had once believed in Harold Bray's Grand-Tutorship as well as mine, she said indignantly, and that now she believed in me exclusively, whether I did or not; but she had never loved Bray, only honored and obeyed him, and her love for me had nothing to do with her acknowledgment of my Tutorhood. In fact, the two sentiments were at cross-purposes: "I want to do what You tell me to, much as I hate the idea of other men," she said, "because You're the Grand Tutor, and what You say must be right. But the reason why I hate the idea is that I love You, George!" She looked at me straight, and took a breath. "I want You to make love to me!"

I strode about the Treatment Room, greatly excited.

"You told me to assert myself," she said.

"I know! I know!"

"I want to do what we did in the Living Room!" she cried. "You shouldn't just say 'I know, I know'!"

"I understand, Anastasia. The trouble is — "

"You think I'm a — floozy!" she exclaimed.

"No, no, no." I could not myself say why her profession of love, so gratifying to my vanity and destructive of my composure, did not also infuse me with desire.

"Service me!" Covered with shame and desperation she took the position she'd once assumed in the Powerhouse. "Don't make me beg You!"

"Please, you don't understand." Nervously I stroked her cleft with the tips of my fingers. But roused as I was, at last, by the dainties thereabouts and her pretty sounds when I touched them, my mind grew clearer. I nuzzled her in the way of the friendly goats; but I would not mount her, I declared, love or no love, until she'd carried out my new directive. She kissed my mouth.

"Can't I start with You?"

Though her heat was real, taking the initiative was plainly an effort for her, and her attempts to provoke my ardor rather cooled than fired it.

"I do want to know you carnally too," I said, "but not until you've serviced your husband and Bray, at least…"

"I don't want them." On her knees upon the cushion now, she would assert herself further, draw my face into her bosom, offer her navel to my nose — all which I craved, detumescent as I was. Speaking with difficulty into her lower abdomen, I declared that that was exactly why we would not mate until she'd fulfilled her Assignment and made good the pledge that freed me.

"But even then you shouldn't love me the way you mean," I added. "If by some chance I turn out to be a Grand Tutor, I doubt if I ought to have a particular mistress, especially someone else's wife. And if I'm not — I won't be here to love." The idea disclosed itself to me in an instant, fullblown; I took my gold beard from her darling dark and addressed her gravely: "I left Main Detention for two reasons, Anastasia: to correct the mistakes I made last spring, and to flunk WESCAC. That's why I'm here — to Overcome My Infirmity and See Through My Ladyship. In a little while I'm going to find Harold Bray and go down to the Belly with him, without any mask on, and if WESCAC doesn't EAT me first, I'm going to destroy it."

She had started to protest; then she listened, her face stricken as when she'd said she loved me. At the end she drew her uniform together and kissed me chastely on the brow.

"Excuse me for acting so crazy, George," she said. "You see how hard it is for me to be aggressive." She sat down and smoothed her skirt. "If You get EATen, I'll get EATen too. I'm going with You."

"No."

She smiled firmly. "Yes I am. If I can't be Your sweetheart, I'll pass and be Your first protégée. You promised me that."

At once now I was inflamed with desire, by her return to demureness more than by her words, which were troubling enough. Now she didn't press it on me, the idea that I was loved stirred me to the bowels with warm amazement. To keep her from WESCAC's Belly was one thing; could I keep her from my heart as well? What in Founder's name was this thing from Sub-Departments of Sentimental Literature, this love? I was baffled, and felt now towards myself the same queer strangership I'd felt towards Anastasia, and erst towards Max: a loveless, gingerly, wrinkle-nosed curiosity.

"Is there something else You need to do with me for Your Assignment-task?" she asked determinedly. "Or shall I go home and service Maurice right now?" Her mind was made up, I saw, and my backbone tickled. My voice would not come; I shook my head. Her eyes shone with a kind of passionate reservation; she was mine, they said, in all particulars save one: I could not will her out of love.

"What else is there to learn about me, then?" she asked herself brightly, for my benefit. "You know my history, and how I feel about things. I know what!" She jumped up and rummaged through a filing-cabinet. "I can show You my medical records and my psychological profile! My academic transcript's on file in Tower Hall, of course; I'll send for a photocopy. Let me think…"

"Anastasia — " My voice was thick. She turned from the file.

"It's not — I don't want just information." She ignored my emotion and pretended to consider deeply. "Let's see, then: See Through Your Ladyship." She snapped her fingers. "The fluoroscope!"

I waved my hand, but she turned switches and stepped behind the ground-glass screen. Within the supple shadows of her flesh I saw dark bones and dusky organs.

"I'm not anything to love," I found myself saying. "I don't even know what I am…"

"This is my duodenum," she said crisply, as if lecturing, and pointed with a finger-bone. "These are my right and left kidneys here, and down here somewhere You may be able to see my ovaries. Come closer if You can't."

"Stop, Anastasia."

"I want You to see everything, George. It's all Yours." She turned sideways; despite my odd anguish I gazed fascinated at her innards. "I'm asserting myself," she reminded me. "Hold on: I'll use a light the way Heddy used to; You can see right through to it. Is that flunkèd enough?" There was no sarcasm in her tone, only lovingest resolve.

"Please, Anastasia!"

She applied to herself despite my murmurs an illuminated Lucite rod.

"Do you want to work it? Kennard likes to…"

"I'm not Kennard!" I cried. I took her hand and put an end to the illumination. "I'm not anybody!"

"You're the person I love," she replied, and laying aside the rod, hugged me softly. Notwithstanding her queer behavior, she seemed altogether at ease. I was most uncomfortable! "I'm sorry I complained about Your advice," she said calmly. "I kept thinking of it in the ordinary way, as Kennard or Maurice would, instead of seeing that the idea is to test my love, the way the Founder tested people in the Old Syllabus."

"Anastasia…" The name seemed strange to me now, and her hair's rich smell. What was it I held, and called Anastasia? A slender bagful of meaty pipes and pouches, grown upon with hairs, soaked through with juices, strung up on jointed sticks, the whole thing pulsing, squirting, bubbling, flexing, combusting, and respiring in my arms; doomed soon enough to decompose into its elements, yet afflicted in the brief meanwhile with mad imaginings, so that, not content to jelly through the night and meld, ingest, divide, it troubled its sleep with dreams of passèdness, of love…

She squeezed more tightly; I felt the blood-muscle pumping behind her teat, through no governance of Anastasia. My penis rose, unbid by George; was it a George of its own? A quarter-billion beasties were set to swarm therefrom and thrash like salmon up the mucous of her womb; were they little Georges all?

I groaned. "I don't understand anything!"

6

"I'm asserting myself," she said quietly. "I think that the Ladyship part of Your Assignment means You're supposed to know me so well that we'll be the same person."

These words so fit my recent Answer, I could not protest when she disrobed. But coitus was not necessarily what she had in mind, ready as she was (and saw the nether George to be) for that ultimate merger of two into one. She removed not only her uniform and underclothing but the pins from her hair, the wedding-ring from her finger, and the cosmetic from her face, then turned from the wash-basin to face me. Her legs were slightly apart, her hands on her hips, her cheeks flaming. Inspired no doubt by Dr. Sear's new relation to Peter Greene, she ordered me to make her person as familiar to me as my own. I asked her what she meant.

"Examine me," she said. Her voice wavered, but not for an instant her extraordinary resolution. She was a changed woman.

"Examine you how, Anastasia? If you mean play Doctor, I don't see — "

"Let me do the seeing." She closed her eyes for some moments, as if gathering strength to proceed with her remarkable, nonplussing self-assertion. Lifting herself onto an examination-table near the fluoroscope, she said grimly, "Come here, George."

I went. She leaned back on her arms.

"Look me over," she ordered. "Don't mind if I blush or act embarrassed. Examine me, every square millimeter. Don't touch me yet; just look."

I am not made of stone: breathing heavily, and assisted by my flashlight and the various lenses of my stick, I inspected every pore, hair, fold, crease, protuberance, process, and orifice of her. I learned that the hairs of Anastasia's limbs, head, armpits, and pubes grew darker and thicker in that order; that her brown irises were flecked with black and green; that her scalp was more white, her labia minora more tan, than I'd have supposed. Her nostrils were not quite a pair; there were silver fillings in three of her molars and one bicuspid. Her nipples, examined closely, were mottled, and more cylindrical than hemispheric. A total of seventy-four tiny moles, all brown, were disposed about her epidermis, five of them bearing at least one hair. Her earlobes were extremely small, scarcely pendant; a thumbnail-size café-au-lait birthmark was half concealed, when she stood, in the crease below her right buttock. Her anus — unlike her lips, tongue, nipples, clitoris, and urethra — was neither rosy nor granular, but of the same smooth beige-pink as the skin of her hams. Her navel, shallowly recessed, was bilobular, not unlike the East-Campus symbol for polarity.

"Measure me," she said. With the aid of several kinds of scales, a tape, calipers, and other devices lying about the room, I discovered that the total weight of Anastasia's body was 50.4 kilograms, of which her head and neck accounted for 2.25, her arms for a kilo apiece, her breasts for less than a half-kilo each, and her legs for almost six together. Her height was 1.63 meters standing, about six millimeters more reclining; an average hair on her head was twenty-three centimeters in length, on her armpit (not recently shaven, she said) one centimeter, on her mons veneris three. The girth of her forehead was fifty-nine centimeters, of her neck thirty-one, of her chest ninety, of her waist sixty-five, of her hips eighty-eight, of her upper arms twenty-three. Her forehead was seven centimeters high. The maximum arch of her eyebrows was half a centimeter; she could elevate them by three times that amount. Her eyes measured 1.7 by 3.2 centimeters and were set eight centimeters apart from pupil to pupil. The span of her smile was six centimeters, of her shoulders forty-one, of her fingers twenty, of her arms one hundred sixty-seven. Her right arm was longer than her left by a centimeter, measured from armpit to fingertip. Her lips projected from the plane of her face by the same amount; her ears from the side of her head by slightly more. Her breasts were not easy to measure, owing to their resiliency; their projection from the plane of her chest, for example, varied from four and a half centimeters supine through six standing to nine bent over, and there appeared to be a centimeter's difference in pendulosity between them, as between the length of her arms; the distance from nipple to clavicle was seventeen centimeters when she stood with her arms at her sides, not quite fifteen when she raised them; from nipple to nipple, twenty-three standing and twenty-five reclining. Finally, what one might call the standing compressibility of her udder was five centimeters, and their side-to-side play twelve. Her nipples when aroused had a diameter of seven millimeters and a projection of fifteen; their tranquil dimensions, though visibly smaller, I could not measure accurately, for they sprang to attention at sight, so to speak, of the calipers' approach, as did the erectile tissue of her clitoris. Nor could I, lacking Dr. Eierkopf's gauges, measure in real numbers the strength of her anal and vaginal sphincters, though my digital impression was that the former had easily twice the constrictive power of the latter.

That impression, and others equally subjective and qualitative, I gained principally during the tactile stage of my examination, which followed upon the metrical. "Feel me," Anastasia directed, and closing my eyes at her instruction, I explored with my fingertips all her surfaces and apertures, comparing their textures, temperatures, moistnesses, firmnesses, viscosities, and the like; then I covered the same ground, as it were, with the soles and toes of my bare feet, a curious sensation, and finally disrobed myself for maximum-surface contacts, at the first of which (my back to her front) I ejaculated approximately two meters across the Treatment Room.

I would have proceeded then to mount her, in defiance of my own programme, but that some of my senses had yet to make her complete acquaintance; and having ejaculated I was able to put by lust and do her bidding with more clinical detachment. Once I'd come to know her from head to foot with my elbows, knees, ears, hams, testicles, and shoulderblades, I sniffed and tasted her, in that order, with similar thoroughness. These final researches were less novel to me, inasmuch as the goats make liberal use of nose and tongue, both to greet old acquaintances and make new ones, and to investigate their general environs. But of course they are without toes and recessed navels, for example, and use neither soap nor artificial scents; obviously too the difference between their diet and a lady human co-ed's (more than the difference in species) made my degustation of Anastasia no mere repetition of my former converse with Hedda O.T.S.T. or Redfearn's Tom. I familiarized myself, olfactorially and gustatorially, with her hair-oil, earwax, tears, saliva, snot, sweat, blood (from a pinprick on her left forefinger), lymph, urine, feces, skin-oil, vaginal secretion, and finger- and toenail parings — I had had no lunch, and my stomach rumbled loudly — and then stood by for further instruction.

"Biographical knowledge, psychological knowledge, medical knowledge…" She sat cross-legged upon the examination-table and told the list on her fingers. "Fluoroscopic knowledge, physiometrical knowledge, visual, tactile, olfactory, gustatory… We forgot auditory! Use Kennard's stethoscope." She fetched it from a countertop and prettily gave me to listen in upon her heartbeat, respiration, and intestinal chucklings, all more subdued than my own. She strained but could not fart; on the other hand, she had a surprising knack for bringing up belches at will, a trick she'd learned at ten and never forgotten. All the while she chattered matter-of-factly about the question of carnal knowledge, the last item on her improvised list. Many of our investigations, she acknowledged, were distinguishable from amatory foreplay only by their motive, and though she intended to postpone actual copulation with me until she'd asserted herself with Stoker and Bray, she knew that Dr. Sear's bookshelves contained a library of erotica wherein was catalogued such a staggering variety of sexual practices, stunts, and exquisitries as to make ordinary genital intromission seem as tame as shaking hands; would it be out of order, she wondered, for me to acquaint myself with her by means of fellatio, cunnilingus, heterosexual sodomy, flagellation, reciprocal transvestism, and whatever like refinements and experiments we could discover or invent, other than simple coitus?

"Let me be the man," her chest boomed into the stethoscope, "and You be the woman."

But I put down the instrument and shook my head. "I don't know, Anastasia. I don't see — "

I was interrupted by a vigorous pounding on the one-way mirror. Anastasia first gasped and snatched about her for cover, then thought better of it, let go the sheet she'd half torn from the examination-table, and beckoned with her finger at the unknown pounder, with the other hand displaying her pudenda in the manner of those carven shelah-na-gigs — which she must have noted upon my stick. Peter Greene burst into the room, all crimson face and orange hair and blinking eyes; he it was who'd pounded; but he'd not come at her beck — nor to berate her, though he cried, "I seen what you was up to, Lacey Stoker, what I mean lewdwise! Trying to flunk the Grand Tutor!" Anastasia blushed red as Greene, either at his rebuke or at her nakedness before him; but she contrived to stay her ground, put her hands on her hips, and regard him with her eyes half closed and her head half turned — a really quite provocative stance, considering how unnaturally it came to her. Greene got to the point of his alarum.

"The whole durn place has gone kerflooey!" he announced to me. "Crooks and loonies running all over! It's the end of the University!"

Dr. Sear, it appeared, had gone to the Women's Chronic Ward to arrange a weekend leave for his wife, and Greene had gone with him as far as the Infirmary lobby, intending to visit his own wife's suite of rooms. But they'd found the place in uproar over an astonishing executive order just issued by Chancellor Rexford: not only had a general amnesty been declared for everyone in Main Detention, but the Infirmary had been directed to turn loose every mental patient who was not also a physical invalid. The consensus of the Infirmary staff was that Rexford himself had lost his mind — there was talk, for example, that not only the Open Book Tests were going to be repealed, as most people wished, but every administrative regulation concerning gambling, prostitution, cheating in the classroom, narcotics, homosexuality, and pornographic literature and films. They shook their heads — but there was the order, and to everyone's surprise Dr. Sear, so far from countermanding it, had declared he understood and approved of the Chancellor's position; orderlies and campus patrolmen he'd directed to protect the bedridden (like Mrs. Greene); then he'd gone personally to see to it that every door and gate in the Psychiatric Annex was put open. Many of the staff had fled; the halls and lounges, Greene reported, were a pandemonium; the patrolmen had several times been obliged to pistol the violent, in self-defense. Of Dr. and Mrs. Sear, Greene had heard no more; having bribed the police to double their guard at Miss Sally Ann's door, he'd returned at considerable risk to apprise me of the danger.

"And your mom, too, pass her mind," he added; "ain't her fault she's touched in the head. A fellow's got a duty to his mom." But at Anastasia he curled his lip. "They can have the likes of you, for all I care. Serve you right!"

Too alarmed by the news to heed his insult, Anastasia rushed into the Reception Room to see that Mother was safe, and then began hastily redonning her white uniform. "Those poor patients!" she exclaimed. "Maybe I can tranquilize some of them."

Indeed the situation seemed perilous. Mad bangs and screams came from the hallway; a chap, white-gowned, galloped sideways into the office, scratching under his ribs, and made hooting water on the wall-to-wall carpet.

"Oh, yes, well," my mother murmured. He sprang at her even as I at him, but changed course at sight of me and leaped through the window instead, smashing first the pane and presently himself, as the office was many stories high. Mother resumed her knitting. Other unfortunates thrashed about in the vicinity of the doorway.

"Lock the door," I bade Greene. He stiffened.

" 'Scuse me, George, sir. No disrespect intended, but I can't go against the Chancellor of my native college, true or false. My only regret, alma-materwise, is that I don't have but one life to give for — "

"Let's get out, then," I said, for pleased as I was at Rexford's following my advice, I recalled Leonid's fiasco in the Nikolayan Zoo and feared for our safety. My Ladyship protested that her first responsibility was to the patients, and Greene that the likes of her were disgraces to their uniforms, say what one would. I bade the former to keep in mind that everyone's first responsibility was to the Founder — which was to say, to one's own passage, not always to be attained by charitable works — and declared to the latter my wish that he escort Mrs. Stoker not only out of the Infirmary but all the way to the Powerhouse.

"No!" Anastasia objected. "If everything's going to pieces, then I don't care about my Assignment! I'm going with You." And Greene muttered that I should not ought to take him from Miss Sally Ann's bedside for the sake of no floozy.

"It's for Miss Sally Ann's sake you have to," I said; "for the sake of all the patients. I want this floozy out in the Powerhouse where she belongs, so she won't take advantage of helpless people. Do you think you'll be okay with her?"

Anastasia saw my motive and protested.

"I'll be okay," Greene said, and wiped his palms grimly on his trouser-thighs.

"No, please, George…" said Anastasia.

"She may try to seduce you," I warned him, for her benefit. "She's awfully aggressive. Not like her sister."

"George…"

With a fierce squint Greene took her arm. "You come along with me. Don't try to flooze me none, neither."

More gently I took my mother's elbow; clucking and smiling, she bagged her yarn and obediently rose.

"At least give me a minute to fix my hair!" Anastasia said. Her tone had changed, was newly resolute and guileful, as was her face. I surmised, not without mixed feelings, that what had been at odds — her wish to assert herself as I'd advised and her wish to go to Tower Hall with me instead of to her home with Greene — were now in league: she would attempt to bribe Greene with her favors. And though I myself had urged such initiative upon her, the twinge I felt was not owing entirely to the danger of her succeeding and thus following me into the Belly. To assure myself that I was not jealous, or envious of Greene, I smiled and winked at her, as if to say, "I see right through you, and wish you luck."

She saw and understood me, I'm sure, but regarded me coolly.

"Watch out for the nuts," Greene advised me.

Anastasia patted her hair, and slipped her arm primly under his. "He hasn't any. I'm glad I've got a man to take home."

Greene blushed, no less than I, who was shocked by her unwonted coarseness as well as stung by the insult. Certainly it was but part of her strategy! Yet when I pretended to suppress a grin, she turned from me coldly and whispered something in Greene's ear that did nothing to lighten his color. As I bade them goodbye I found myself reminding her, against my better judgment, that if things turned out badly in the Belly she might not be seeing me again.

"You don't say," she said. "Bye-bye, then. Oh, Peter, would you fasten me in back? I can't reach the hooks." She turned her lovely nape to him.

"Hmp," Greene said.

"And I've mislaid my darned purse in the Treatment Room somewhere! Would you help me find it?"

Full of confusion I ushered Mother from the office; and the womanly chuckle I heard behind me, and Greene's half-hearted complaint, as he shut the hall door, that he wasn't supposed to shut any doors, it was against orders, smote me with an ireful doubt which — small comfort! — abetted our safe exit. For the first madman who loped up, unfortunately woofing, I butted with such force that he knocked a second down, and our way was clear to the lift. And in the lobby, where demented undergraduates and faculty of both sexes swung from light-fixtures, raced in wheelchairs, coupled on the carpet, shat in typewriters, or merely stood transfixed in curious attitudes, I laid about ruthlessly with my stick, cut an angry swath, and roughly gimped through bedlam with my mother. I could not have explained my fury, or told why, when it occurred to me that Love and Hate must be in truth distinctions as false as True and False, that sagacious reflection nowise clarified my mind or calmed my spirit.

I hailed the only taxi at the Annex door and bade the driver take us to Tower Hall. Newsboys hawked in the fading afternoon: Power Lines Moving Together: Fear Riot Near; Rexford Raps Mrs., Raises Roof. The tidings brought me no pleasure. Through a small loudspeaker in our sidecar came further news: so-called "Moderate" elements were resigning from the Administration to protest the Chancellor's recognition of extremists; Ira Hector for example had been offered the post of Comptroller, and Rexford had not only acknowledged Maurice Stoker as his half-brother, but gone to spend the weekend with him at the Power Plant. " 'It may be necessary to have these people around,' complained one resigning official, 'like spies and grafters — - but one mustn't officially approve of them…' " The new corrective headgear issued to Power-Line guards, the reporter went on to say, was intended to remedy the faults of the "heads-up" collar by fixing the wearer's eyes down at his feet; but looking down from that height seemed to make the guards dizzy, and the drop-off rate was as high as before.

"What the heck anyhow," I said, snapping off the speaker: "Failure is Passage."

"A-plus," said Mother.

Not until we drew in sight of the Library did I realize that I had no means to pay our fare. I glanced at the driver, hoping to gauge his charitableness, and saw what I'd been too disconcerted to observe before, why he was the only cabbie in the madhouse drive. His uniform was white, beltless and buttonless, his eyes were aglint, his grin was euphrasic. Alarmed, I commanded him to stop the motorcycle.

"Stop the cycle," he squawked like a parrot. "Stop the cycle." His grip on the handlebar was fixed now as his expression; the Mall-street fetched us straight over a curbstone, across Tower Hall Plaza, through clusters of alarmed undergraduates, and into a yew-hedge flanking the entrance, where we came to rest. The engine stalled.

"Yes, well," Mother remarked. The driver sat erect and beaming as ever, though yew-twigs pressed against his face, even into his mouth.

"Thtop the thycle," he repeated. I helped Mother out and left him to iterate his message to the gathering crowd — the sight of which, understandably, caused a small shudder in me.

In the Library things were more calm: I composed my wits and reviewed the situation. That My Ladyship and I had exchanged roles in the Treatment Room — she the Tutor, I the Tutee — was not displeasing. But her final behavior mystified me, and behind the turmoil of my heart stood a stiller but impenetrabler mystery, that I had felt briefly in my arms: what was it that looked through the optics of that respiring female organism and said "I love you"? And to what did those voweled noises speak? To what refer? I. Love. You. The idea was as preposterous as it was dark! No, I'd not seen through My Ladyship, no more myself, and if that was my infirmity, it was yet to be overcome; indeed, it had overcome me. Very well (I reminded myself as we went up to the Cataloguing Office, Mother pressing the lift-button out of habit), then I had failed that part of my Assignment, even on my own terms, and Failure is Passage. But elation was fled, even grim satisfaction; I began to feel desolate. If only Mother were not demented, I thought, and Max not detained (if indeed he still was, after the amnesty): how good it would be to discuss the problem with them!

We passed through the spoke-filed room, in whose hub the empty Scroll-case stood. It being Saturday afternoon and nearly dinnertime, only a few scholars were about. The door to Mother's former office was locked, and bore a small sign that read CACAFILE OUT OF ORDER. It occurred to that I had no clear reason for coming there anyhow: it was Bray I wanted; no, not even Bray: WESCAC. No, not even WESCAC: death. So far had my spirits, unaccountably, plunged! To Re-place the Founder's Scroll, to Pass the Finals, to do single combat with WESCAC and what it represented — it was of no importance, I could not even think, my mind was on My obscure Ladyship. I had come from Infirmary to Library out of habit, like Mother, following the order of my spring-term Tutorship. Humming, she fetched from her knitting-bag a key — someone must have forgot to collect it from her — and unlocked the door. The faulty console in the corner began winking, as if roused from sleep.

"Would you care for something to read?" Mother asked automatically.

"No — no thank you, ma'am."

She ignored the new nameplate on her desk and eased herself into the swivel-chair as though ready for work, though the office lights were out and she still had her coat on. "Well, you look around and let me know if you want anything, sonny. There's nothing like a good book."

My heart lifted not a little; I kissed her hair. Again, from her innocent darkness, she had illumined me!

"Listen carefully, Mom," I said; "Can you call for the Founder's Scroll? I want to put it back in its case." Whatever fugitive notion I'd had earlier concerning this item of my Assignment gave way before a true inspiration: Had not Enos Enoch and a hundred other wayfaring dons of fact and fiction taught, by their own example, that the Way to Commencement Gate led through Nether Campus? Was not my answer, Failure is Passage, but an epigrammatic form of that same truth? Re-place the Founder's Scroll had seemed, in the spring, the simplest and clearest imperative of all, and yet the bafflingest, since the Scroll had not been lost; and my response to it had seemed, even at the time, the most specious of my Tutorhood — though to be sure they'd all been incorrect. It was fitting, then — stirringly so! — that on this round, so to speak, when I'd "solved" the first five problems with a deliberate speciousness, the rule of inversion would hold equally for the sixth, and make my re-placement of the Scroll not only bonafide but profoundly significant. It had not been misplaced, that was the point; but it was now, for I had misplaced it last time around — and so could re-place it! Things had to be lost before they could be found, broken before they could be fixed, infirm before they could be well, opaque before they could be clear — in short, failed before they could be passed! True, I could not at once discern how this remarkable insight quite applied to Ending the Boundary Dispute, which I'd not begun; nor had I truly "fixed" the Clock I'd broken, for example, or seen to my satisfaction through My Ladyship — but these doubts were nothing, shadows cast by the very brilliance of my illumination; I ignored them. Failure was Passage! No past fiasco, no present triumph; the spring made possible the fall!

"Well, hum," Mother said, going to the console. "Founder's Scroll, is it? Is that the title?"

"Yes'm. Founder's Scroll."

Still flustered by my kiss, she fiddled with her hairpins and the switches of the CACAFILE."…o-l-l," she murmured, pressing buttons. "Who did you say the author was, dear?"

I hesitated. "The Founder."

She did not: "…n-d-e-r. No first name?"

"Just one name, Mother."

The CACAFILE seemed to purr at her touch. "Please step into the next room," she said, still in her office voice. "The volume or volumes you called for will be delivered to the Circulation Desk in approximately one minute."

As soon as I took her arm the manner vanished; she minced and colored like a shy schoolgirl. The CACAFILE-console gave a little snarl, then lapsed into its previous torpid blink.

"Let's go to the Circulation Desk, Mother."

"Oh. Well."

But at the empty Scroll-case we were arrested by a double commotion: from the Circulation Desk, next door to the Catalogue Room, feminine squeals as alarmed as merry; from behind us, at the door we'd first entered through, an angry male voice: "There you are, flunk you!"

A half-dozen scholars in the spokes of the card-file raised their heads.

"Hello, Daddy," Mother said placidly.

It was indeed Reginald Hector, but much changed: the fringe of hair around his bald pate was grown shoulder-long; his body, that had been sleek, was brown and wiry, and wrapped in fleece of Angora; his feet were sandaled, and under his right arm (apparently hurt, for he clasped it with his left) was a goat-herd's crook! This last he tried to raise with his better arm as she approached, and my surprise gave way to apprehension. I put the case between us.

"P.-G.!" A young dark-spectacled woman rushed in from the Circulation Room with a double handful of long white shreds. Behind her, from the desk-chute, more of the same blew forth, like paper streamers from a fan. "Thank the Founder you're here, P.-G.! Look at this!"

I recognized her as Professor-General Hector's receptionist, now out of uniform and evidently employed by the Library, perhaps in Mother's former capacity. She showed no surprise at her previous employer's costume, whether because she'd seen it before or because of her present agitation. The "P.-G." paused and scowled, crook high. Mother clucked her tongue, nowise discomposed. The young woman held out the tangled skein and wailed: "It's the Founder's Scroll!"

The ex-Chancellor clutched his ailing arm. "The Dunce you say!"

"A-plus," Mother affirmed.

"The CACAFILE's gone crazy!" the young woman cried. "All these months the Scroll's been lost in it somewhere, and now it's spitting it out in ribbons!"

There was consternation among the scholars: one snatched a handful of the shreds, examined them, and groaned; others raced to the Cataloguing Office to pound on its locked door, and yet others to the Circulation Desk, where they clenched and hopped in vain to see the wisdom of the ages shredding forth.

"You!" my grandfather roared, thrusting a fistful of tatters under my nose. I closed my eyes, nodded, and took a mouthful of the ruins.

"What's he doing?" the receptionist shrieked.

Mother smiled benignly and said, as if interrogated by a library-clerk: "Just browsing, thanks." At the same time a dim memory of our readings in the hemlock must have stirred in her, for she took it upon herself to feed me more of the Scroll. Though I'd had no lunch to speak of and was quite famished, the old vellum was bitter on my tongue, like dung dried in the sun of desert centuries — quite apart from the anguish I flavored it with, compounded of doubt and desolation. For either my insight of a few moments earlier was false, in which case I was as much in the dark as ever, or else it was true, in which case I was failing by my own terms. What was the use of restoring those shreds to the Scroll-case? I was not blind to the possibility that failing all, on my own terms as well as WESCAC's, might be the deeper sense of my answer; that is to say, that the failure truly equal to passage might be the failure to understand truly that Failure is Passage. Even as I chewed, that proposition flickered through my head as on a dim translux but did not console me. No, I was as snarled and wrecked as the Founder's Scroll: never mind P.-G. Hector's crook (now belaboring my shoulders) and the alarums of bystanders; never mind that the lights began to flicker again, as they had upon my spring-term disaster, bespeaking another crisis at the Power Lines; never mind that the College was in anarchy, that lunatics and flunkees ranged the quads — all I could think of, strangely enough, was My Ladyship. I envisioned her beneath — no, atop — Peter Greene, or Maurice Stoker, or Eblis Eierkopf, or Lucky Rexford, in some lubricious exhibition on the Living-Room dais. No, no, after all it was none of them; or having serviced them to exhaustion, now she stood, slack-mouthed with love; expelled their mingled seed with a tricky jerk, and stretched forth her arms to her fated, fateful lover, who rose up glitter-eyed upon the dais and enfolded her body in his hard black cloak. And I was no longer jealous, no, I was relieved; joyous, even, for her sake, when I heard the muffled cry of her delight and knew she was infused for good and all with the germ of Passage. I wanted to die.

"You can't eat that!" a scholar shouted, clawing at the strips that hung like pasta from my jaws.

"He can shove it!" my grandfather snapped. "Independence, he calls it!" He grabbed at his wrapper. "Where's my aides?" he demanded of his former receptionist. "Get this flunkèd hair-shirt off me!"

"Weren't they with you at the barns, sir?" she said.

"Oh, the Dunce, I forgot I sent 'em out there." Suddenly defensive, he glared at me and asked how the flunk a man could mix a batch of goat-dip by himself and keep his eye on a young buck like Triple-T at the same time. At mention of that name tears sprang to my eyes; I swallowed a great cud of Scroll; the rest fell to the floor and was scrabbled up by scholars. For a moment my despair gave place to a sweeter if no less painful emotion.

"Tommy's Tommy's Tom? Have you been with the herd, Grandpa?"

"Don't Grandpa me, Dunce flunk you! If that buck hadn't banged up my arm — "

He would crook me a harder one despite his infirmity; I lowered my head to take the blow and die like Redfearn's Tom, grandsire of the buck he spoke of. There were cries from receptionist and bystanders, quite a number of whom had been attracted by the disturbance.

"Stop." It was a voice I knew that pierced the clamor, and my heart: hard, clickèd, like a thumbnailed flea, a hoof-cracked tick. Asafoetida, the very smell of my impotent vision some moments before, was faint now in the literal air. Like Bray's voice, it came from the Circulation Desk, whither all eyes turned. He stood upon the desktop, as if flushed forth by the CACAFILE: a taller, leaner-jawed Bray than the last I'd seen, less hirsute, more commanding, stronger of voice and odor. His skin shone as if varnished, and even as I had dreamed, he now affected over his white tunic a stiff black cloak, as of hard-shined gabardine. Everyone fell silent. My grandfather humphed, but lowered the crook. Mother made a baleful sound and whipped a knitting-needle from her bag, undoing all her purlings in one stroke; but she permitted me to disarm her. I patted her hand.

"Thank you, George." Bray stepped from the desk and came hubwards.

"Look at this, sir!" an old scholar cried, wetting with his tears a handful of vellum tatters. "It's destroyed!"

Everyone spoke at once then: it was my fault more than the CACAFILE's, they said, whose original breakdown I'd also caused with my spring-term program; rather, it was Lucky Rexford's fault, for they assumed that my freedom, and Mother's, was owing to the flunkèd general amnesty. The ex-Chancellor's former receptionist was especially vociferous: she had mistrusted me the minute she'd first set eyes on me, she declared to Bray (forgetting, I presume, that I'd been at that time disguised as him), and her suspicions had been borne out catastrophically: not only had I, in addition to my more famous crimes, driven my mother mad, ruined the CACAFILE, and caused the Founder's Scroll to be first lost and then destroyed; I was also responsible for the undoing of New Tammany's most beloved alma-matriot, chancellor emeritus, and professor-general (retired). Not content to destroy the Philophilosophical Fund and thus move the College another step closer to Student-Unionism (of which Founderless ideology she had no doubt I was an agent), I had by some sinister means arranged for the transfer of its former director, the greatest of p.-g.'s and most considerate of employers, out of Great Mall and all posts of honor, to the managership of a bunch of stinking goats — probably in reprisal for the well-deserved punishment of the "pink pedagogue" and traitor Max Spielman.

"There, there," the P.-G. muttered, blushing gratefully and patting with his good hand first her corseted, indignant rump and then, catching himself up, her back, in a classmately way.

"A-plus," my mother said, impressed I think by the righteously wrathful tone of the woman's accusations, and glaring at Bray as if they were directed at him. The bystanders murmured; cameras clicked, and their wielders cursed the flashbulb shortage — for which too my denouncer called me to blame. Only the scholars paid us no heed; possessing themselves of what shards and tatters had been fetched into the Catalogue Room, they withdrew to the Circulation Desk to salvage the rest, curiosity supplanting their dismay. Bray himself heard the charges patiently, without expression, as nothing new, and I indifferently, bristling only at her insult to the herd. Then he raised his hand to silence her and the assemblage.

"Professor-General Hector's retirement to the goat-barns was his own decision," he said. "He wished to be 'beholden to no man,' I believe he told me. Isn't that true, sir?"

Gruffly my grandfather admitted it was — not to be obliged, I suppose, for advice either, even bad advice. It was a poor professor-general, he declared, who didn't know when he was licked, and he would not deny that his objectives — utter independence and complete self-reliance — which thitherto he'd thought of as synonymous, had turned out to be contradictory. Managing the herd without the help of his aides, he'd found himself dependent absolutely on himself — a dependence so oppressively time-consuming, he'd had no opportunity to "be himself" at all. Isolated from classmates and staff, absorbed from morning till night with the tending of goats, the preparation of his food, the maintenance of the barns, even the manufacture and repair of his clothing, he'd scarcely had time to roll himself a cigarette, much less assert his independence and enjoy his individualism.

"And that was when I had two hands," he said.

"You poor thing, sir!" the receptionist exclaimed, touching the injured arm. "Let me tie it up for you."

But he refused permission, declaring he'd bind the wound himself, as he'd done more than once in time of riot, as soon as he located his goldbricking aides — on whom obviously it was folly to depend; he pitied the goats, now he remembered he'd dispatched his aides to tend them in his stead. But no: Dunce flunk those stinking brutes!

"Then you weren't beholden to the Goat-Boy for that idea," Bray asked again. "Is that correct?"

"I make my own decisions," the ex-Chancellor grumbled. "I don't pass the buck. I'm my own man. An officer's responsible for the mistakes of his subordinates."

Touched by his sense of honor, however confused it was, I apologized for the counsel he now denied I'd given him, and agreed that it had been mistaken, though for other reasons than his.

"Every man for himself," he snapped,

"Hear hear!" his loyal former receptionist applauded, taking his good arm and flashing her glasses at me defiantly, as if I'd been put in my place. I turned to Bray and explained, with a mixture of new respect and old resentment, the fault I'd found with his Certification of Reginald Hector: reading the citation "No class shall pass" to mean that his famous self-reliance was my grandfather's key to Commencement Gate, I had bid him cast off his lifelong unacknowledged dependency upon his brother, the Old Man of the Mall, and single-handed herd the goats. But I saw now, not merely that he was more dependent than ever, only upon himself instead of upon Ira and the aides, but also that my counsel was self-contradictory: I'd held Passage (Reginald's at least) to depend on independence, whereas to be consistent with itself it ought to be independent of independence.

"Balls!" said Grandfather.

"May we quote you, sir?" inquired a reporter, but retreated before the former receptionist, who had commandeered her former employer's crook and brandished it menacingly.

Bray may have smiled. "I believe Mr. Ira Hector intends to restore the original endowment of the P.P.F. He's doubling it, in fact…" This announcement caused much stir among the bystanders and the reporters who had found their way to the scene, or perhaps arrived in Bray's company. "Do you suggest," he asked me politely, "that Chancellor Hector apply to his brother for reappointment to the directorship?"

"I don't take favors from any man," snapped the P.-G.; but the proposal was clearly not unwelcome to him, for he added with a growl: "Besides, Ira's gone kerflooey, from what I hear; he'd probably turn me down. Not that I'd go begging, mind!"

I assured him that if Bray's report about the P.P.F. was true, then Ira had repudiated my former advice, as I'd latterly advised him to, and could be depended upon to reinstate him.

"I wouldn't take his word for it, sir," the receptionist said.

"I think you can depend on your grandson this time," Bray interposed with a level click. I could not but be comforted by his support, not alone for the sake of my grandfather, whom I'd long since forgiven his attempted nepocide and wished only well, but also because, as Bray's subsequent speech indicated, he had apparently more confidence in me than I'd had for the last quarter-hour in myself.

"Grandson my foot," the P.-G. said. "No bearded Beist is any grandson of mine. If he is, I disown him."

"A-plus," Mother said in her unhappy ignorance.

Bray raised both arms, spreading his cloak impressively, and addressed the company. "Now hear this," he demanded; "George Giles, alias the Ag-Hill Goat-Boy, alias Billy Bocksfuss, was released from Main Detention early this morning at my request. I believe he is the true, authentic GILES." A great commotion greeted this pronouncement: reporters dashed for telephones; Grandfather and his former receptionist frowned and gasped, respectively; Mother wept and kissed the hem of Bray's cloak. I remained suspicious, but my heart stirred.

"However," Bray continued, "he may or may not be a Grand Tutor." The reporters halted in their tracks; everyone seemed reassured, even myself, by the possibility that I might yet be false. "Now hear this, classmates and Tutees: you did right to lynch him last spring, but I did right also to stop the lynching, and grant him now a probationary pardon. This is his opportunity to redeem his former failings, complete his Assignment correctly, and thus verify the Answer he claims to have discovered. Very soon he and I will go as before into WESCAC's Belly, but unmasked this time, and we shall see who emerges unEATen. Perhaps we both shall; perhaps neither. Or perhaps George Giles is the true Grand Tutor, and Yours Truly is false…"

He waved down a chorus of No's; clearly his popularity was undiminished outside the small circle of my acquaintances. Mother remained kneeling before him as if he were still praising me. The former receptionist bitterly, but not disrespectfully, objected that my second day on Great Mall, from all reports, was proving at least as disastrous as the first. Look what I'd done to the Founder's Scroll…

"His Assignment was to re-place it," Bray said calmly. "But what is the origin of the Founder's Scroll? Not the Founder, Who surely inspired it, but the minds and hearts of His protégés — which is to say, of studentdom! If a Grand Tutor eats His words, is He not feeding Himself Himself?"

The woman was quieted, if not satisfied. Grandfather scowled at me uncertainly. I myself attended Bray's apology with interest, for though I could not remember that it was he who'd ordered the EAT-whistle sounded and stopped the lynching, and though I was aware of his ulterior motive in freeing me, and though I had no intention of submitting to WESCAC's examination as before, his defense of my sixth Assignment-task was ingenious and straightforwardly offered. Moreover, the phrase "eating my words" suggested yet another interpretation, whether meant by him or not: what else had my day's work consisted of?

"Consider too," Bray enjoined them, "that the Scroll was torn to pieces by the CACAFILE in its efforts to file it at once in many different categories, as I believe George Giles instructed it to do last spring. But he now denies the reality of all such categories; of all categories. According to his present teaching, the distinction between one book and another, and between books and non-books, is illusory, inasmuch as the Founder is One, and the Founder is All! Possibly his destruction and partial consumption of the Founder's Scroll is meant to demonstrate that teaching. Possibly not."

I was much impressed with this analysis, and with Bray's surprising grasp of my position, derived as it must have been from sketchy reports and observations of my long day's labor. The others appeared less convinced, but respectful of Bray's magnanimity and explicatory prowess. I regarded him closely for signs of guile, and found none.

"Understand," he concluded, "I don't say that this is the case, or that George Giles's teaching is my teaching…" There were murmurs of agreement. "But is it for students to correct and discipline their masters? And until we have gone through the Belly unmasked, who dares say which is the student and which the master?" His expression seemed to grow sad, and his next words much moved me: the fact was, he declared, studentdom inevitably did judge its Tutors, and being less than Tutors, inevitably judged wrong, for which reason it was written in the Founder's Scroll: A proph-prof is never cum laude in his own quad. That this was so was the failing of studentdom; yet there was no help for it; it was the nature of the student condition that one was obliged to honor one's Tutors as true or condemn them as false, and yet such a judgment could not be made truly except by a true Grand Tutor. Had he said that studentdom necessarily judged wrong? The truth was, they might honor the true and condemn the false as easily as the reverse, but in either case they judged ignorantly. Yet did he say "as easily"? Nay, not as easily, for the false more often pleased than the true; wherefore it followed that the true Grand Tutor was almost invariably condemned as false, and the false celebrated as true — but not always.

"Assemble at the Belly-exit," he exhorted them. "In a little while I will pass judgment on George Giles, and he on me, and WESCAC on us both. And for all mere studentdom can know, one of us may judge falsely, or mistakenly; or both of us may; or neither. For a false Grand Tutor is no wiser than his Tutees, and may in his ignorance sincerely believe himself to be what he is not — or flunkèdly pretend to be. And even WESCAC may be wrong! What is WESCAC, that it should be exempt from error? Why might it not protect and affirm the GILES — truly, falsely, or mistakenly — or confuse a false GILES with the true, or choose by confusion, preference, or error a GILES who is not a Grand Tutor over a Grand Tutor who is not the GILES, or make any other of the varieties of wrong judgments you can imagine, or no judgment at all? Go to the Belly door and wait! See who emerges; hear what he says — then believe and do as you will. Very possibly you will be mistaken, wherefore it is written in the Founder's Scroll: Many take the Finals, but few Commence. Dear, dear classmates: the flunkèd must always outnumber the passed! A-plus."

"A-plus!" many of his auditors responded, and though Bray's elucidation of their plight perhaps dismayed them, they obediently dispersed, the journalists excepted, who lingered to see what might happen next. Bray raised my mother from her knees, listening politely, even with interest, to her prattle of the passèd grandchild she believed to be in Anastasia's womb.

"Yes," he went so far as to tell her: "That will come to pass, lady. Without fail." He then commended her to the keeping of her father, whom he also welcomed back to Great Mall, saying that the chancellory might well require his good offices in the terms ahead, in view of Lucius Rexford's abdication of responsibility.

"Beardless youth," Grandfather muttered, not altogether consistently. "Founder knows what they're coming to; it's coddle, coddle. If you want a thing done right, you've got to do it yourself."

Bray patted his shoulder and bade him think well of my recommendation concerning the P.P.P. directorship, among the virtues of accepting which would be the opportunity to re-employ his former receptionist. Then he turned to me.

"Shall we go down into the Belly, classmate?"

7

Rank as was his reek, even in my tolerant nostrils, I asked his pardon with as much humility as was compatible with dignity.

"As you know, Dr. Bray," I said, "I used to believe you were a flunkèd impostor. I don't think you're flunkèd any longer."

"But I may yet be an impostor?" he inquired, I think lightly. "No matter. Is it true you no longer regard yourself as a Grand Tutor? You could make a public statement to that effect, you know, and not go through the Belly. I say this purely from concern for your safety; I have no grudge against you."

I believed him. For one thing, he had no further cause to regard me as a rival, either to his office or to Anastasia's favors, which I would not seek. But some lingering pride forbade me to do quite as he suggested. He might not be what he claimed to be, I told him, but he was not simply an impostor, as I'd formerly maintained; there was something more to him, I could not say what. And while it was true that I no longer regarded myself as a Grand Tutor, I was not blind to the possibility that this opinion, like others I'd held, was erroneous, or that in my heart of hearts I might be holding it alongside the conviction that Failure is Passage.

"Ah," he said. "To the Belly, then, by all means!"

I then explained that while I had no fear of WESCAC's EATing me — which it well might do — I would not acknowledge its right to examine me, or anyone else's save my own, for reasons that I'd readily set forth to him, but did not regard as the affair of the popular press. To the chagrin therefore of the reporters (some of whom intimated openly that they would "get even" with me) we made our way to the main lobby of Tower Hall, where, as on that fateful night some terms before, a crowd was collecting in the flickerish light, their anxiety nourished by alarums and rumors. Them too Bray urged to wait at the Belly-exit; he and I then took the special lift to WESCAC's Mouth — a lift guarded now by a squad of ROTC cadets in riot-uniform on account of the general emergency.

"What were you saying?" Bray inquired, utterly composed, and pressed the single, recessed button. We went down the dark shaft. During the descent, and in the red-lit antechamber, I described for him my day's Assignment-work and my present intentions, in a neutral voice, neither asking approval nor inviting argument. I reviewed the conditions of Max, Leonid, Croaker, Stoker, Peter Greene, Ira Hector, Chancellor Rexford, Dr. Eierkopf, Dr. Sear, and Anastasia, my new advice to them and the reasoning behind it, and my confidence that, being all now confirmed in their failings, they were Candidates for Passage.

"I see," said Bray. "Shall we present our credentials now?"

That was another thing, I declared: it was as inconsistent with the Answer to let WESCAC pass upon my credentials as to take my Assignment or the Finals on its terms. My ID-card was blank, virtually, and the faint GEORGE that a careful eye might discern yet upon it would serve, in my estimation, as well to identify Father and Examiner as Self: I was not born George; I was not born anything; I had invented myself as I'd elected my name, and it was to myself I'd present my card (already "properly signed") when I had passed by the Finals.

"Passed them by, you say?"

"I'm going to flunk WESCAC," I said. "Where's the plug? I'll pull it."

Bray very likely smiled as he went to the scanning console among the tape-racks. "Don't be silly, George; there isn't any plug. You'd have to cut the Power Lines, or short-circuit them. But do you really think it's worthwhile to take WESCAC so seriously? It's only a symbol."

This assertion I might have quarreled with: had Mother been impregnated by a symbol? Was it a symbol that had EATen the Amaterasus and G. Herrold, and would in all likelihood soon EAT me, if not the entire University? That incorporated in its circuitry all the dreams and definitions that tricked studentdom into believing in its own existence, and in the reality of its flunkage? Some symbol! But Bray clicked his tongue (and sundry buttons on the console) and forestalled these objections by reminding me that, the lift having automatically reascended, there was no way out of the Mouth except through the Belly, and no way into the Belly, as far as he knew, save by WESCAC's admittance, upon inspection of our credentials. "Why not put your card in the slot?" he suggested. "That doesn't commit you to anything, especially since you've eradicated the signatures. It's as good a way as any to challenge the computer, if you take that so seriously. Mine's already in."

I'd not seen him insert it; no matter; I deliberately jammed my card into the slot, upside down and backwards with reference to its spring-term presentation.

"It seems quite reasonable to me," Bray said, pulling the side-lever, "that the nature of the card doesn't influence the opening of the port, but determines what happens afterwards. If we were Nikolayan agents, for example, I imagine the port would still open, but then we'd be EATen. Don't you agree?"

I was too sobered by the dilation of the iris-shuttered port, like a great black pupil, to reply. I tried to think of My Ladyship, as appropriate to what might be my last moments on campus — but my mind and heart were blank as my ID-card; if Anastasia's image appeared there at all, I regarded it without emotion. Nothing happened. Bray handed me my card, which had been returned into the console-cup in lieu of reply-cards, I presumed, we having made no inquiries. He pointed out as I pursed it that the exit-port was likewise impregnable; I had, alas, no choice but to reply to WESCAC's questions — always assuming I was not EATen before they were posed. Naturally I was free to make deliberately "false" replies, to demonstrate either my contempt for the examiner or my conviction that Failure is Passage; he supposed too I might choose to push no buttons at all. He could not but imagine, however, that in that event I would remain in the Belly forever.

If I felt chagrin at this hitch in my plans, or suspected Bray of tricking me after all into changing them, or wondered how he himself would leave the Belly, if I chose not to — I can't recall it. Neither did I care, as before, whether he came with me or escaped by some secret means, without examination. I stepped through the port and flung myself down the entrance-tube into the warm black chamber, its spongy surfaces athrob. Bray tumbled after and against me at once, identified by his foetor, but we spoke no more. I slicked my way to the little display-screen, already phosphorescent with the inquiry ARE YOU MALE OR FEMALE. They would be, then, the same questions as before. I considered answering Yes, as I had last spring, on the ground that all those previous responses, like their maker, had perforce been wrong, and Failure is Passage. But on second thought I decided to reply more strictly in terms of my new point of view, itself an implicit denial of WESCAC's authority and the presuppositions of its terminology. Therefore I found and pressed the left-hand button — the No, if Bray's earlier instructions were correct, and my memory of them was accurate, and the button-box had not been reversed or otherwise altered in the interim — for what were male and female if not the most invidious of the false polarities into which undergraduate reason was wont to sunder Truth?

I think Bray sighed, or else the chamber-lining squished when I stepped to answer.

HAVE YOU COMPLETED YOUR ASSIGNMENT

AT ONCE, IN NO TIME

Readily I answered Yes, for the triple reasons that I'd fixed Tower Clock in position, that the passage of time was anyhow a flunkèd delusion, and that, Failure being Passage, my non-completion of the Assignment, last time or this, was not ultimately differentiable from its completion. But after a moment's further reflection I pressed the other button to change my answer, for on the loftiest view of all there was no I to complete the Assignment, as distinct from an Assignment to be completed, in the timeless, seamless University — which University itself, et cetera. The same reasoning led me, not without trepidation despite my convictions, to press No at appearance of the epithet GILES SON OF WESCAC; for not only were GILES and WESCAC distinctions as spurious as son and father, but, viewed rightly (if after all through the finally false lenses of student reason), the eugenical specimen whereof I was the issue had been drawn as it were from all studentdom, whose scion therefore I was; WESCAC's role had been merely that of an inseminatory instrument, the tool of the student body. I braced myself to be EATen, and was not.

DO YOU WISH TO PASS, the computer asked finally, and ready for that basic, that ultimate question, with closed eyes and held breath I answered No, and again No, and No No No No No, as though pounding blow by blow into WESCAC's heart the stake of my refutation! The screen blinked out at the first press and snapped sparks at the others; machinery behind the walls convulsed and roared, pitching me now to the floor, now against the tight-shut exit. Bray it must have been I heard groan. Indeed it looked to be the end, for though I felt nothing as yet in the way of brain-piercing rays (which I imagined must be the pain of electroencephalic amplification), there were arcs and sparks at both ports, which now sprang open; a stench as of burning rubber filled the Belly, and its walls constricted to grip me like Bill's strait-waistcoat, only bent double. But before I could give last voice to despair, or commend to the Founder my twice-flunkèd mind, a convulsion of the acrid chamber expelled me thunderously, breech-foremost, through the port, out onto the frozen ground. A second blast put Bray beside me; then the port, instead of snapping shut, hung wide and still, quietly smoking. Co-eds squealed and clutched their escorts. The upheavel was not confined to WESCAC: every streetlight I could see behind Tower Hall was sparking, flashing over-bright and then popping out like a photographic lamp. The Telerama-crews cursed and scurried, issuing free torches to the crowd. Two of their number came forward with microphones as I picked myself up (Bray had landed on his feet), still dazed by the force of my ejection, the confusion of the scene, and the fact that I had once more, evidently, come through unEATen. There were no anthems this time; the crowd was too alarmed to sing.

Of the first reporter to reach us Bray demanded, "What's the trouble?" and was told that the East- and West-Campus Power Lines, according to sketchy reports from the scene, had either touched at some point or been moved to such proximity that an arc had flashed between them, short-circuiting at least temporarily the entire Powerhouse and causing no one knew how much damage to WESCAC and the campus generally.

"I see," Bray said, undisturbed. Light from a mobile generator now fell upon us, and while I endeavored to assess my position — what the net import was of the day's events, and what I ought to do next — he took the man's microphone and called for attention.

"Now hear this, ladies and gentlemen! Now hear this, Tutees and classmates! George Giles the Goat-Boy, by his own admission and intent, has Failed All!" An angry cry came from the crowd, but as they moved to seize me Bray bade them stay and drew me to his side, asking cordially behind his hand to borrow my stick for a brief but necessary ritual. I understood: as I had formerly declared myself passed and he me failed, now that I owned myself flunked he would pass and Certify me to the student body, even dub me Grand Tutor with a rap on the scapula — his Assignment on this campus (as he'd told me in March, when things had gone badly) and the explanation of his survival! To be sure, not all was clear; indeed I was assailed by doubts and questions; but my troubled heart surged like the torched crowd. Granted, it was for me and no one else to decide my condition, nature, and policy, when circumstances should permit reflection; yet whether in failing I had passed or in thus passing failed, official public Certification would do no violence to the paradox and might serve in that parlous hour to pacify the crowd, for whom difficult truths were best expressed in simple mottoes, simple rites. I surrendered my stick.

"Thank you," Bray said. "Please kneel." The crowd hushed; likewise my spirit, strait-waistcoated in contradictions of which, not impossibly, one tap of the stick might free me at last. I knelt.

"This is how it must be," Bray said, and smote me flat. Over me then, as I fought for breath (the blow had struck me full in the back, else my head would have been crushed), he declared through the public loudspeakers: "George Giles the Goat-Boy, cause and embodiment of all our ills: you are hereby denied admission to the student body. No probation; no reinstatement; no clemency. You shall be deported to the goat-barns at once, forever." The crowd shouted approval. Still stunned, I was snatched up. "Tomorrow morning," Bray announced to them, "I go to Founder's Hill to work certain miracles on the occasion of the scheduled Shafting, which you are all invited to witness. Now I shall retire into the Belly of WESCAC to meditate, but presently I shall come forth, ascend to the Belfry, and beget a son." He paused. "The Goat-Boy is yours."

Each of these extraordinary declarations was greeted with astonished hurrahs. At the last of them the crowd set upon me, ignoring my proper sentence, and I saw Bray no more. My jail clothes were torn off, either deliberately or in the general pull and haul. My male equipment, shrinking from the cold, was made rude fun of, and I was pummeled — about the head, in particular, by two short-skirt co-eds whose heavy sweaters bore the initials NTC, as did the megaphones they beat me with. My hair and beard were cruelly pulled by knowledgeable skeptics suspicious of disguise. As in a horrid dream I was fetched round again to the dooryard of the Old Chancellor's Mansion: already a sidecar was drawn up to the familiar streetlamp (now extinguished), from whose top the noose was rigged. Grandfather Hector shouted orders from the porch, gesturing with his crook at the Telerama-crew already established there, while his loyal receptionist (who had contrived to exchange her library-clothes for military uniform) made checks on a clipboard with a series of pencils which she drew from and returned to her hair. Whether the P.-G. was opposing or directing the lynch I could not tell. I wondered why Mother was not in her place. Stoker's guards were rowdy as ever; I saw no sign of their leader, nor any indication that they meant to thwart the mob. The monogrammed co-eds had left off clubbing me in order to lead the procession; reaching the lamp-post they wheeled about smartly, went down on one knee, and with the aid of their megaphones and practiced gestures, set the crowd to chanting, "Get the Goat! Get the Goat!" As I was lifted to the sidecar-top and prodded with my own stick, I even heard, as in the spring, a voice cry "Rape!" and the familiar consternation at the Mansion-corner. With a bitter sigh and no prompting from my captors I thrust my buckhorn into place and put my head in the noose. Why wait to see My Ladyship rogered yet again, en route to her Belfry-tryst, by a once-more-fallen Peter Greene, and hear the EAT-whistle blow, this time no doubt in earnest? An end to my tiresome history, and the University's! Once more I'd been all wrong, in what wise I was too miserable to care. What the heck anyhow!

Yet I paused a moment before committing suicide, for it was Hedwig Sear instead of Anastasia who shrieked round from the alley. Dressed in a thin infirmary-gown and clutching a rag-doll, she was pursued not by Peter Greene but by Croaker, whose cure had apparently not taken before Rexford's amnesty freed them both. And clinging to Croaker's trouser-top, half running, half dragging, was Dr. Sear himself, identifiable by his white tunic and gauze-bound head. He it was who cried "Rape! Rape!" At sight of the crowd Mrs. Sear stopped short, and as if smitten by modesty, pressed the rag-doll to the bosom of her gown and put a finger in her mouth. At once Croaker overtook her; to my further surprise, Dr. Sear fought — heroically! — in her behalf, but alas, succeeded only in facilitating the assault. For as the three tumbled campuswards his tugging brought down Croaker's detention-pants. Even so the doctor was not done; he picked himself up, and heedless of the difference in their strength and of his own safety, struck Croaker with both fists. The dread Frumentian had fetched up his quarry's gown and aimed his weapon; propped on one elbow, Mrs. Sear began to play with the doll, oblivious to her peril. One backhand swat felled the plucky doctor; he lay unconscious. Bucklike then, with a grunt and single slam that the tardy guards could not arrest, Croaker studded Mrs. Sear — back into awareness, one gathered from her cry.

I closed my eyes. No matter that accessory features of the denouement were changed; it was the same old plot. As Croaker croaked and Hedwig wailed, I shrugged and swung myself off the sidecar, to make an end of it. No such luck: even before my death-wrench could sound the horn, I was hoist on mighty shoulders. The shophar flew; the rope went slack. I opened my eyes and found myself astride Croaker's neck, as once in the Living Room. A swath of tumbled undergraduates marked his path from me to Hedwig, who now embraced upon the ground her comatose if not deceased spouse.

"Everybody keep your shirts on!" ex-Chancellor Hector cried over the loudspeakers. But the unfelled bystanders clambered over one another to safety. Several sooty guards had drawn their pistols and were advancing towards us; armed with my stick, which he must have espied near the side-car, Croaker growled and made ready for combat. A young man whose dress and forelock suggested administrative responsibility stepped between us to warn the guards about intercollegiate repercussions and New Tammany's varsity image. My mother, to perfect the scene, found her way at last onto the porch from somewhere inside the Old Chancellor's Mansion, took one look about, and swooned; a ball of blue yarn rolled from her knitting-bag almost to Grandfather's feet.

"For pete's sake give me a hand, somebody!" he shouted, still in possession of the public-address system, if not his composure. "Flunk this arm of mine! Give me something to tie it up with!" This last, though broadcast, was snarled at his receptionist, who, despite the cold, at once began unbuttoning her uniform-blouse. The P.-G. snatched it from her before she could offer it, and ordered the doorguard to tie the sleeves behind his neck in the fashion of a sling. The fore-locked vice-chancellor or administrative assistant, meanwhile, had commandeered a megaphone left behind by the fled cruel co-eds, and having begged the guards to hold their fire yet a minute, now implored me to check Croaker if I could: emissaries of his Frumentian alma mater were to fetch him next day, I was told, and with the University on the verge of C.R. III (if not already beyond it!), New Tammany needed all the colleagues it could get. Reports had it, he said, that Dr. Eierkopf was at the Powerhouse with Chancellor Rexford: would I guide Croaker thither, escorted by the guards, and arrange with Eierkopf to manage him until his recall?

"I'm busy being lynched," I reminded him. The aide apologized for that miscarriage of justice, acknowledging that even New Tammany had its imperfections, and promised that if I'd steer Croaker safely off Great Mall and retire myself to the goat-barn for the time being, he'd do everything he could to get me reinstated, appealing Bray's decision if necessary to the highest committees in Tower Hall.

The mob had retreated to a safe distance. Croaker croaked and handed me my stick, as if inviting governance; the guards stood ready to pistol him at the first threatening move. A white infirmary-vehicle with flashing headlight had swung into the dooryard, and medical-school functionaries hurried to attend the Sears and my mother. Reginald Hector had gone into the Mansion with his receptionist, but the latter now reappeared, an ROTC overcoat cloaking her bare shoulders; she flung in our direction her employer's former wrapper, and pertly withdrew.

Forelock's diplomacy gave way at last; fetching up the wrapper, he either tossed it to me or threw it at me, and cried, "Won't this day ever end? Flunk everything!"

The wrapper was of fine Angora, but ill-cut and worse-stitched. I smiled despite all at Granddad's goatsmanship and Forelock's distress — then put the noose from my neck, slipped into the familiar hide, and with a farewell glance at my swooned mom, slicked Croaker homewards.

1

In fact — so our driver guessed as we sped in convoy from Great Mall — it was probably no later than half-past six. He hoped not, anyhow, for his detail was to go off duty at seven, and riot or no riot, he'd heard that the maddest party in the history of the Powerhouse was in progress, and he wanted not to miss the fun. Croaker I'd induced to ride in the sidecar, but I was obliged to remain on his shoulders. The streets and public buildings were dark, owing to the power-failure, and almost vacant because of the general emergency; despite the ragged navigation of the guards we made good time. My neck was sore, my stomach empty, my bladder full, and the wind of that longest night in the year chilled me through; but my heart was so entirely spent, my spirit sunk, that their despair was indistinguishable from peace. I felt no further pain at abandoning Max, Mother, and my hopes, nor chagrin at being spared yet again from lynching, nor pleasure at the thought of rejoining the herd. I felt concern no more for studentdom's predicament, or my own. I felt nothing; was full of that positive sensation.

In perhaps an hour, so rapidly we traveled, we came to the top of that gorge where G. Herrold had expired — decades ago, it seemed. The moon shone cold on the beach and stream (which ran still now) and reflected upon a new span built on the old one's piers. Its design was different, its termini the same — and so for all I knew or cared might be its fate, come next spring's torrents. At the intersection where a right turn led down over it and thence to the barns, a left to the Powerhouse, pistol-shots rang out ahead. Our troop made a ragged halt and answered in kind, firing into the air. Then other shots sounded on the left, and almost simultaneously three headlights jiggled into view, one from before us and two from the left: motorcycles racing full-throttle. Nowise alarmed, the guards fell to wagering: their odds favored "the boss" (some called him "der Hauptmann"), who approached from the front, to reach the crossroads first, although the pair coming up on our left seemed rather nearer. And they knew their man, for with a recklessness that bespoke Maurice Stoker, "the boss" suddenly began shooting not into the air but at his competition — at the road ahead of them, in any case, where dust-puffs rose in their headlamp-beams and bullets rang from stones. The lead cyclist of the pair swerved for his life and spun into a shallow ditch, as Herman Hermann must once have done; the other slowed his pace appreciably, with the result that Maurice Stoker skidded into the crossroads, lit by our headlights, three or four seconds before his rival, another Powerhouse guard. Our detachment applauded their leader and hooted at their colleague's timidity.

"See if Fritz is kaput," Stoker bade the nearest of them, and pointed out with a laugh that not only had his "short-cut" from the Powerhouse been a potholed road, but he'd had two prisoners in his sidecar, whereas his competitors, on the better road, had had but one between them — fortunately not in Fritz's vehicle. He glared up at me in the swirling dust, as if he'd been expecting to meet me, on Croaker's shoulders, along his way (and indeed he had been, I later learned, my escorts having wirelessed the news ahead). His voice took an edge. "All's fair in love and riot, hey, Goat-Boy?"

I had nothing to reply and was anyhow distracted, as were my escorts, by the sight of his passengers. Slumped in the sidecar and blindfolded, they started up at mention of my name. Pocket-torches focused on them, and I was doubly surprised: Peter Greene it was, and Leonid Alexandrov, handcuffed together; their coats and faces were as bloodstained as the linen that bound their eyes — not blindfolds after all, but bandages.

"Aren't they a pair?" Stoker demanded of his troopers, but with a smolder in his tone meant for me. "And look at Hans's."

"Verdummt," the other driver reported, flashlighting his unconscious passenger. Dr. Eierkopf's head lolled over the side-car-wale, a new pair of eyeglasses hanging from one ear. "Out-passed." Hans held his nose and pointed to stains on the prisoner's lab-coat, not of blood. The company laughed. Croaker stirred under me and sniffed the air, but seemed not to recognize his old roommate in that fallen state.

"Drunk and disorderly in the Living Room," Stoker said. He cut his engine, dismounted, and aimed his torch to observe my expression. "Ate a kilo of Blutwurst, tried to force my wife's virtue, and gummed the mustard off Madge's rear end till the blood came. Then he threw up and passed out. But your pal Rexford's still at it."

"Untruthness," Leonid Andreich said calmly from the side-car.

"Leonid's right, George," Peter Greene seconded — his voice uncharacteristically quiet also. "It was her took advantage of Doc Eierkopf — not that he give a durn. Lacey it was: the floozy-one."

Awed by the bloody pair, the troopers listened silently, their engines stilled.

"Lacey no," Leonid countered. "Mrs. Anastasia yes. Self-sacrificehood to needs of classmates." Like Greene's, his voice remained subdued, and both faced straight ahead as they spoke.

"Might be I was wrong about that Lacey business," Greene admitted. "But Lacey or Stacey, it weren't no sacrificeness. It was plumb floozihood."

"Possible," Leonid granted. "But I don't think, how do you say, all-said-and-donewise."

"I do," Greene said. "Might be mistaken, though."

"Also."

Stoker heard them out with his hands on his hips, but when they fell silent he exploded with disgust. "Two hours ago it was fight to the death; now they're buggering sweethearts!" He began to recount the fracas — ostensibly for the troopers' amusement, but still with a sarcasm that I knew was for my benefit. He hadn't felt like a party in the first place, he declared; he was sick of parties; it was the flunkèd Chancellor's idea, who having punched his own wife in the mouth had kicked over the traces entirely and directed that an orgy be commenced at once in the Powerhouse Living Room, so that he might, in his own phrase, fiddle while New Tammany burned. And it was Anastasia whom he'd chiefly fiddled with, drunkenly calling her his sister-in-law…

"Don't believe it, George," Greene interrupted. "Mr. Rexford was drunk all right, and claimed Stoker was his brother; but it was Lacey floozied him."

"Yes," Leonid affirmed. "But Mrs. Anastasia. And not floozied."

"All right!" Stoker shouted, and now glared directly at me. "Disgustingest thing I ever saw: Chancellor of the College boozing and wenching like a flunkèd sophomore! Bragging how he'd socked his wife! Telling everybody he's my brother! And Stacey carrying on like a Furnace-Room whore!"

"Even with him," Greene confirmed.

Leonid shook his head at the memory. "Even with us. Compassioncy!"

"Hot pants," Greene corrected. "But what the heck anyhow."

"Da. Irrelevanceness."

That, Stoker went on, had been the matter of the quarrel between his prisoners, presently so amicable: Greene had chauffeured Anastasia to the Powerhouse at my request, and, eager as he was to reunite with his family at the Pedal Inn, had lingered on to drink a farewell toast or two with Leonid. The Nikolayan, determined to act selfishly but uncertain how, had left Main Detention not by his own skill but, like Croaker, under Rexford's amnesty, which he'd judged it selfish to take advantage of, and made his way to the Powerhouse resolved to be a double agent for East and West. Encountering Greene at the orgy-in-process, he had clinked glasses with his former cellmate, the one drinking vodka, the other corn. First they'd toasted Max, who'd elected not to leave Main Detention: "Decent a Moishan as ever deserved Shafting," Greene had called him, and Leonid "the unselfnessest martyrty." Next, with increasing sharpness, they'd saluted each other: "A durn fine Joe, for a Founderless Student-Unie"; "Lawlest Informationaler blind-bat, but I like okay!" And finally they'd drunk to Anastasia, who with tearful eyes and liquorous breath had offered to service both at once. "Passèdèdity!" Leonid had declared; "she make men classmates in love!" "You're the blind one!" Greene had charged, "tell-a-floozy-from-a-Founderwise! This ain't even Stacey!" Thereupon the toasts had turned to plain invective, so heated that neither availed himself of Anastasia's offer or even noticed when she left the bar, "flung herself" (in Stoker's words) again at the Chancellor, and finding him tabled with Madge, declared she was "running off" to meet another lover in the Tower Hall Belfry.

"Don't think I don't know who," Stoker growled at me. "Not that I give a flunk!"

"He gives a flunk," Greene said, surprisingly, and Leonid agreed.

"The flunk I do!" Stoker cried. "Any more than you wise-guys, or you'd have talked her out of leaving!" All they'd been concerned with, he said bitterly, was that his wife be seen as a Commencèd martyr (in Leonid's case) or (in Greene's) as a flunkèd floozy with a passèd virgin twin; the debate between them on this head, fired by alcohol, had grown so hot that it flared at last into a duel: they would fight to the death, they vowed, and the winner's prize would be the loser's good eye. The Living-Room bartender put their agreement in writing, the disputants each grasped a bottle by the neck and broke off its bottom, and armed with these ugly weapons they set to. For a time it was crouch and feint; the combatants, Stoker had to admit, were equally fearless, resolute, wary, and strong of arm, so that it seemed they might come to a bloodless impasse. Then Leonid had cried something in passionate Nikolayan and flung wide his arms, and Greene, believing himself insulted and attacked, had slashed in with the bottle. But even as he thrust he realized that his opponent was impulsively yielding the victory and offering his throat to be cut: the barkeep (himself a defected Nikolayan and rabid anti-Student-Unionist) reported later that Leonid's exclamation had been "Better you should see the truth than I" or something to that effect — which he interpreted to mean that Leonid was afraid of what he might see about his alma mater with two good eyes.

"Not so," Leonid here commented from the sidecar. "I meant Mrs. Anastasia, he should see her through my eyes."

"I figured that," Greene said. "And soon's I figured it, I felt the same durn way about him, Stacey/Laceywise."

He had tried therefore to pull his cut short, and Leonid to thrust himself upon the glass, but one or both misjudging the distance, the stroke had fallen on Leonid's face instead of his throat, and unfortunately slashed his patchless eye. Whereupon, stricken with remorse, Greene had snatched the vodka-bottle and stabbed out his own.

"The way they bloodied up the Living Room," Stoker said, "you'd have thought it was the Amphitheater!"

He had arrested them both and administered first aid; amnesty or no amnesty, he declared, he was fetching them to Main Detention, where he meant to stay himself until Rexford should sober up and go "back where he belongs." As for Anastasia, she might breed a barnful of billy-goat bastards for all he cared.

Leonid said flatly: "He cares."

"Yep," said Greene. "Anybody can see that."

Stoker responded with a jeer. "So there they sit, Goat-Boy: two blind bats! Are they passed or failed?"

Affecting as the grim tale was despite its teller's sarcasm, and shocking the bloody sight of my former cellmates, I listened and looked without comment, if no longer without emotion. Yet it wasn't pity I felt, or terror, not even responsibility for their present wretchedness. Stoker's question had been mine since early on in his narrative, and had absorbed me entirely well before he asked it, fetching me from apathy into the intensest concentration of my life. Indeed, my spirit was seized: it was not I concentrating, but something concentrating upon me, taking me over, like the spasms of defecation or labor-pains. Leonid Andreich and Peter Greene — their estates were rather the occasion than the object of this concentration, whose real substance was the fundamental contradictions of failure and passage. Truly now those paradoxes became paroxysms: I shut my eyes, swayed on Croaker's shoulders, trembled and sweated. All things converged: I understood what I had done to Dr. Eierkopf with my innocent question about paleoooontological priority. That circular device on my Assignment-sheet —

beginningless, endless, infinite equivalence — constricted my reason like a torture-tool from the Age of Faith. Passage was Failure, and Failure Passage; yet Passage was Passage, Failure Failure! Equally true, none was the Answer; the two were not different, neither were they the same; and true and false, and same and different — unspeakable! Unnamable! Unimaginable! Surely my mind must crack!

"What is it?" Greene asked. "What's going on, Leo?"

"I can't see, classmate."

The troopers murmured at my strange countenance and behavior; Croaker rumbled, feeling my thigh-grip on his neck, and stood up in the sidecar.

"Don't try to get loose!" No doubt it was Leonid Stoker warned, but his words struck my heart, and I gave myself up utterly to that which bound, possessed, and bore me. I let go, I let all go; relief went through me like a purge. And as if in signal of my freedom, over the reaches of the campus the bells of Tower Clock suddenly rang out, somehow unjammed: their first full striking since the day I'd passed through Scrapegoat Grate. As all listened astonished, the strokes mounted — one, two, three, four — - each bringing from my pressed eyes the only tears they'd spilled since a fateful late-June morn many terms past, out in the barns. Sol, la, ti, each a tone higher than its predecessor, unbinding, releasing me — then do: my eyes were opened; I was delivered.

Dr. Eierkopf too the bells revived; at first sound of them he had sat up and clutched his head. On the sixth stroke he'd snatched off his new eyeglasses just in time, for the seventh shattered them, as earlier in the Belfry. On that eighth and last, blood spurted from his nose, his eyes rolled up out of sight, he shrieked, "Ach, mein Grunder, ist geborsten der Schädelknocken!" and collapsed again. Croaker bounded to his side, and I sprang down. The handcuffs fell at my feet.

"Halt!" a guard warned; Stoker drew his pistol. But I went in perfect sureness past him to the sidecar, and caught up his prisoners' hands.

"Leonid Andreich!" I said. "Pete! Thank you and pass you!"

"It is George," Greene said joyfully. "Hi there, George."

"Hi," I said. "Listen, Leonid: why are you going to Main Detention?"

"Because he's under arrest!" Stoker snapped.

Leonid shrugged. "I talk again to Dr. Spielman; maybe turn him looseness yet."

I gripped his hand. "Max doesn't want that, classmate. But you: look — " I tapped his handcuff. "You're free!"

He shook his head.

"Go back to Nikolay College!" I urged him. "That's where you have to pass!"

"Selfishly, George."

"Yes! And when you're passèd, try to help Classmate X."

"Forget it," Stoker said dryly. "This afternoon Chementinski declared himself a failure to the Union and asked for execution. Said he loved his son more than he loved the brotherhood of students. I imagine they'll oblige him."

"What is this!" Leonid cried.

"Never mind," I said. "Look: you and Pete have ended your quarrel. Re-defect! Tell your stepfather his confession was selfish: he wants them to kill him so he won't have to kill himself. Then tell him that's all right! Do you see?"

"George!" Leonid's forehead wrinkled above the bandage. "Passness of me, that's nothing! Even Classmate X, I love so, that's nothing to pass! But the self of Studentness — He matters! And you teach me He's flunkèd selfish! How He's pass?"

"Probably He can't," I said. "Try and see."

Red tears oozed into his bandage. "Failure is Passage, yes? No?"

I clapped him on the shoulder; the handcuff fell from his wrist.

"See here, now!" Stoker protested.

"Da!" Leonid cried. "Tomorrow, after Max: redefectness!"

"I'll take you to Founder's Hill," Peter Greene said, suddenly determined. "Look here: we'll meet my daughter at the Pedal Inn and stay the night; tomorrow we'll go to the Shafting together, for old Doc Spielman's sake."

"The flunk you will!" Stoker said. "You stay where you are!"

I took Greene's hand. "What then, Pete?"

He swallowed a number of times. "I got right smart of work to do back home, George. Finish up inventory; try and set things right with Sally Ann…"

"Do you really think your marriage can be saved?"

He set his chin, and would I think have blinked had his eyes been unbound. "Prob'ly not. But what the heck anyhow, George! I'm going to start from scratch, what I mean understanding-wise. Things look different to a fellow's been through what I been through. I got a long ways to go."

"Pass you!" I declared.

"Into first grade," he added wryly. "I might Graduate yet, one of these days. But the odds ain't much."

"They never are! Look for me at Founder's Hill tomorrow."

He now wept freely, and his wounded eye bled a little onto his cheeks. He supposed with a laugh that he'd have no more hallucinations, at least, and wondered aloud whether a mixture of blood and tears might be good for acne. "Come on," he said then to Leonid; "I'll show you the way to the Pedal Inn."

"Nyet, friend; I know the way. I show you."

"I'll show you both," I said; "I'm going back to Great Mall."

Stoker fired his pistol into the air. "Flunk all this! Who the Dunce do you think you are, Goat-Boy? The Grand Tutor Himself?"

I regarded him closely. "Have your men drive them to the Infirmary first and then to the Pedal Inn. If Dr. Eierkopf's all right, he and Croaker can wait in the Powerhouse until the Frumentians come tomorrow. Why don't you take me to Tower Hall yourself?"

"You're coming with me, all right," he said, "but not to Tower Hall! Get in that sidecar!" He commanded his men to ignore what I'd said; Greene and Leonid were to be delivered to the Infirmary for treatment of their wounds and then left at the Pedal Inn — but not at my direction, only because that had been his plan all along. The amnesty, he explained crossly, forbade him the use of Main Detention. Similarly, Croaker and Eierkopf (who was stirring now as his roommate licked his head) were to be taken to the Living Room, but purely because he, Stoker, hoped thereby to chase Rexford out; the guards were to see to it that Eierkopf directed Croaker to that end. As for me, if I thought he meant to chauffeur me to a tryst in the Belfry with his tramp of a wife, I had another think coming…

"I'm not the one she's to meet there," I interrupted pleasantly; "it's Harold Bray."

He managed to accuse me of jealousy and mendacity, but I saw he was alarmed.

"I'm going to drive Bray out," I told him. "Among other things."

"I'll bet you are. So you can take his place!"

I shrugged. "One thing at a time."

He glared at me furiously. "You're as false as he is!"

"Bray's not exactly a phony," I said. "But he must be driven out. Would you like to do it yourself, before your wife services him?"

There I had him: except during his extraordinary "reform" back in March, Stoker had an aversion to Great Mall generally and a positive abhorrence of Tower Hall, its hub and crown. Yet for all his present soot and bluster he was not quite the Stoker of old: clearly he was distressed by My Ladyship's new aggressiveness, and jealous of lovers she chose herself; he wanted the Belfry-tryst prevented, but could not deal himself with Bray (who I pointed out might well retreat with Anastasia into the Belly), and distrusted her with me. On the other hand he doubtless understood that if I were the Grand Tutor, I alone might manage Bray; and (less assuredly) of all healthy men on campus I alone might be the one not interested in cuckolding him at his wife's invitation. Therefore he found himself, so I imagined, in the position of having to hope that I was what he declared I was not, and that I would overcome the temptations and obstacles he'd surely put in my way. His face grew livid with contradictions. As I gimped firmly into his sidecar, which Greene and Leonid had vacated, Tower Clock struck the half-hour.

"It's getting on," I observed. The troopers stood about expectantly.

"Move!" Stoker shouted at them. "Achtung! Dunkelbier! Sauerbraten!" He fired his pistol at the ground near their feet, and they scrambled cursing for their vehicles. Stoker swung onto his own, not neglecting to fart as he kicked the starter. As if in reply his powerful engine barked and spat. He let out the clutch, spun our drive-wheel in the dust, howled an obscenity at the troopers leaping clear of us, and threw back his head as we snarled down the road. But it was I who laughed.

2

I had come from Great Mall rapidly enough; returning, we fairly flew, by every trick and short-cut in the book: crossed through woods and fields and private lawns, took corners without a pause and stop-signs at full throttle. As if energized by our speed, Stoker resumed his usual baiting and other stratagems.

"So you still want to be Grand Tutor!" he shouted. "Now's the time to make your play, while Rexford's out of commission and everything's upset!"

I smiled.

"Why not work together?" he suggested, and outlined at the top of his voice a plan for "taking over the College": the Chancellor was in political disgrace and therefore vulnerable; only some extraordinary stroke of fortune — such as absolute Commencement by an undisputed Grand Tutor — might redeem his public image; but if Stoker himself had been disgusted by Rexford's conduct in the Living Room, surely Bray would be more so, and would revoke his Certification. The thing to do, then, was get rid of Bray — for example, by exposing his intended adultery with Anastasia — and establish me as Grand Tutor; Ira Hector's wealth and Stoker's secret influence (but he would deny me publicly and affirm Bray, to sway student opinion contrariwise) could promote me to that office easily, given the present disorder and uncertainty in West Campus. Then I would declare Lucky Rexford reinstated and Commencèd, and we three could run New Tammany as we wished.

"What you really want," I said, "is to see your brother Commence."

Stoker flushed and cursed. "Brother my arse! You should've seen him carrying on! Not that I care!"

I listened carefully to the quarter-hour chimes far in the distance and pointed when we came to a fork. "Bear left."

Stoker bore right. We soon drew up to Main Gate, passed through and down the dim-lit Mall to where indigent students, as always, were badgering Ira Hector, even swatting him with their various placards. Goalless and shirtless in the cold night air, Ira sneezed and feebly called for help. Stoker paused nearby, at the bole of a leafless elm where The Living Sakhyan sat upon the ground.

"Why not help old Ira?" he challenged. "Then he'll owe you a favor, and someday you can use him."

I smiled and got off the motorcycle. "Is that a dare?" But before I went to Ira's aid I bowed to The Living Sakhyan.

"Thank You for the disappeared ink, sir," I said. "I signed my ID-card with it when I completed my Assignment at once, in no time." He appeared to be smiling.

"For pity's sake, help!" Ira called.

"Excuse me, sir," I said to The Living Sakhyan. "I'm going to go help the Old Man of the Mall."

"Goat-Boy!" Stoker shouted from the motorcycle. "I dare you to help him! Understand? I'm daring you!"

To him also I bowed, but then waded into the circle of angry young students, most of whom "went limp" until they recognized me and then stood by while their spokesman explained their grievance. But a few, who had previously been standing on the fringe of the group with their backs turned, now moved in and commenced to swat Ira, not very violently, with their placards, perhaps in protest against the general détente.

"He's as stingy as ever!" the spokesman said angrily. "He poisons the whole West Campus."

"Didn't he give everything to the P.P.F.?" I asked.

"Gave 'em the shirt off my back!" Ira cried. "Why d'ye think I can't see to tell time? I'm a sick man!" He sneezed again and wiped his eyes, which were clotted with rheum. "Gesundheit," said a student beating him.

"It's night-time anyhow," I observed to the group. "He can't see our shadows to tell time by."

"Ha!" Ira cried.

"That's not the whole point," said the student spokesman. "He's pulled the rug out from under the Rexford administration. Ruined the economy."

"Who cares?" another challenged. "The Administration's corrupt anyhow. All power corrupts."

"And knowledge is power," said a third, whose sign bore the one word Ignorabimus. "So absolute knowledge corrupts absolutely. Look at Dr. Faustus. Look at Dr. Bray."

They fell to arguing then whether Lucius Rexford was a liberal conservative or a conservative liberal, and became so preoccupied, I was able to spare Ira Hector further swats, for the present, simply by sliding him half a meter down the bench, out from under the swinging placards.

"I don't owe you a thing," he wheezed at once. "You owed me, for taking your fool advice this morning." He had, I learned, instructed his agents to make over his entire estate and divers incomes to the Philophilosophical Fund, with the declared intention of Passing through poverty and ignorance, and burdening others with his wealth. But the result was that he stood to become wealthier than ever from tax-refunds, while the College went bankrupt for want of tax revenues. Half the student body would subsist on tax-free scholarships, all deductible by the Hector cartel. Moreover, his agents were abandoning him to take service with his brother, lately back from the goat-farms, in the mistaken conviction that Reginald was independently wealthy: why else would he have "resigned" from the P.P.F. directorship? Finally, the students whose tuition had been going to be paid by Lucius Rexford's tax-supported grant-in-aid program now despised Ira, and had apparently stripped the clothes from his back when he offered them, gratis, the time of night.

"You said you gave them your shirt," I reminded him.

He sneezed and cursed. "I'd like to see 'em try to get along without me!"

"They can't," I said.

"Tell them that!"

I bent close to his ear. "Listen, Old Man: forget what I told you both times before. It was mistaken advice."

He glittered his eyes. "Swindled me, did you? I figured you for a sharper! What's your line this time?"

I smiled and bade him good evening.

"Hold on!" he called after me. "Don't you think these rapscallions'll start right in once you've gone? What kind of help is that? You owe me!"

It was indeed evident that at least some of the indigents only waited my withdrawal to resume their molestations — and a very few, of course, had never really left off. But though I'd deemed it flunkèd, in West Campus anyhow, not to assist him, I also recognized the final futility of assistance, and so tarried no longer.

"Wait!" he cried more desperately. "It's earlier than you think; I can tell by the moonshadows! It's only quarter till ten!"

Sure enough, Tower Clock sounded the three-quarter melody as he spoke, and if the coming hour was indeed ten, it was not so late as I'd have supposed. But that fact was of no importance to me.

"Ha!" the student leader exclaimed. "Hear that? Quarter till! Much obliged, old man!" And laughing at their adversary's inadvertent gift, which it plainly chagrined him to have bestowed, they left him in peace, for the time being at least — except one small faction opposed to private charity and another to the forcible extortion of information, both of whom now laid on with their placards.

"Aren't you going to re-advise him?" Stoker demanded sarcastically.

I knew what reply to make; but just then the Great-Mall streetlights — those not burned out earlier in the evening — flared momentarily, and I saw Reginald Hector, flanked by aides and receptionist, striding towards his brother's bench. I stepped between them.

"You!" the ex-Chancellor cried, and his surprise at the sight of me quickly turned to irritation. "Look out of my way, boy; I got to save Ira from those beggars!"

"Your brother can't really be helped, Grandpa," I declared. "His case is hopeless."

"Nuts," he said, pushing past me. "That's no-win talk. Nothing's impossible!"

"Check," the receptionist affirmed. "Up and at 'em, P.-G."

"You have some begging of your own to do, is that it?" My gibe fetched him up, though I knew it to be no more than half true. He ordered his aides to proceed to Ira's rescue, directing them with his slinged arm, and then turned to me like a professor-general to a wayward freshman recruit, his chin thrust dangerously forth.

"I withdraw the remark, sir," I said, before he could speak. "Your brother Ira can't pass, but I do have some final advice for you. If you want it."

"Hmp!" He glared at me squint-eyed for a moment, stroking his jaw. His aides, having driven off Ira's three or four lingering molesters, found themselves beset now by the whole original company of demonstrators, almost united in their opposition to uniformed intervention.

"Contingency Three-A?" the receptionist called.

"Affirmative," said the P.-G., and at her direction the aides began issuing articles of cold-weather clothing, warm though ill-fitting, to the demonstrators.

"Three-A Sub One!" Grandfather barked. At once the receptionist offered to deputize the bearded student leader as an assistant aide, or field supervisor of P.P.F. disbursements, at a high salary. He hesitated, considered the jeers of his out-of-classmates, but finally accepted the post, protesting to his fellows that one had to see the undergraduate revolution in its larger perspective, if one was not to be after all an ivory-tower naïf. "Even Sakhyan — " he started to explain.

"Three-A Sub Two!" the ex-Chancellor shouted triumphantly. His receptionist whispered something into the new aide's ear, whereupon he exchanged his soiled-sheepskin jacket for a heavy olive topcoat with epaulets, bestowing the fleece upon Ira Hector. The students booed.

"Losers weepers!" Ira cackled. "Sauve qui peut! Possession is nine points of the law!"

"Keep your advice, boy," Grandfather told me proudly. "I'll get to Commencement Gate on my own two feet! Beholden to none!"

I made no objection. The students now were pelting their former spokesman with the gold cufflinks, desk-calendars, and ball-point pens distributed among them by the aides, and Reginald Hector went to issue fresh directives for this contingency.

"Tower Hall," I said to Stoker.

He twitched his mouth. "I'll bet you didn't have any advice for the P.-G."

"Better hurry," I suggested, climbing into the sidecar. "It's not getting any earlier."

He started the motor, but deliberately tarried, watching the ex-Chancellor efficiently put down the demonstrators.

"Why didn't you Certify him, if he's passed?"

"I didn't say he was passed."

He grinned. "So Reg is as flunked as Ira."

I smiled. "I didn't say that either."

"Nepotism!" Stoker taunted. "Same old story — not what you know, but who." Tower Clock tolled ten.

"Your wife's assignation is scheduled for eleven," I reminded him, "but she may be there already. You know how it is when a woman's in love. For that matter, Tower Clock may be wrong."

With a loud oath he wrenched open the throttle; our acceleration pressed me into the seat. Moreover he sounded the siren, and the crowd on Tower Hall Plaza looked around in grave alarm as we raced up. Above the great clockfaces the Belfry was floodlit by mobile searchlight-units of the NTCROTC and the various Telerama departments. Agitated pigeons flew in and out. I saw Stoker's face grow grim.

"Go around to the back," I said. "I'm going up through the Library."

"The flunk you are!" he exploded, and jammed on the brakes. "I'm not going anywhere!"

I considered a moment, shrugged, and climbed out of the sidecar.

"Neither are you!" he insisted. But I obviously was.

3

Just then the crowd sighed; looking up with them I saw a white-tunicked, black-cloaked figure waving from the Belfry. Beside him, all in white, was a smaller, whom partially he caped.

"Did you see it, Jo Anne?" one co-ed demanded of another. "He walked right up the wall, with her on His shoulder!"

"Nonsense," a young man sneered. "He was up there all along. I saw the whole thing."

"So did I," said the girl on his arm indignantly. "And you're both wrong: He flew down, from higher up." And this opinion she defended stoutly against the most cynical objections: maybe it was a publicity stunt, or a Telerama trick; she neither knew or cared; but that Bray had by one means or another flown into the Belfry with his girlfriend she was as absolutely certain as was her beau that he'd done nothing of the sort and the first girl that he'd scaled the tower barehanded and — footed. Strongly I gimped through, sticking and butting my way in some circumstances, politely begging leave to pass in others. Once, recognizing a knot of my erstwhile lynchers, I slipped into my Bray-mask till I was by them; in another instance I declared I was on official Chancellory business; in yet another, that I was George Giles, Goat-Boy and true Grand Tutor, en route to rescue my distressed Ladyship.

"From what?" Stoker demanded, puttering behind me on the motorcycle. "Who said she wants rescuing?"

A few male students chuckled. Others whispered to their female companions. I gimped on, around to the Library entrance, followed by a small but growing throng. The figures in the Belfry disappeared.

"Flunk it all, listen here!" Stoker yelled, throttling up beside me. "Do you think she'd be up there if I hadn't ordered her to go? I arranged it!"

I smiled.

"Call me a cuckold!" Stoker challenged. "You can bet I have my reasons!" His tone grew more fretful as we came near the Library door. "But that doesn't give you permission, Goat-Boy! You're staying right here!"

I positively grinned at him, whereupon his voice at once turned guileful.

"How about Maxie? We could still spring him, if we work fast…" He raced his engine angrily. "Some Grand Tutorl You want her yourself!"

The students cheered. I motioned Stoker with my stick to get behind me; he was obliged in any case to do so, or leave his vehicle, as we'd arrived at the Library steps.

"Keep your hands off my wife!" he cried, heedless of bystanders — who seemed anyhow to assume that he was as usual playing a part. "If you even touch her without my say-so, I'll fix you both!"

But I went on up, and he didn't follow.

"You can say goodbye to Spielman!" he shouted at last. "You've condemned him to death!" He added something else, which the closing of the door cut off. Students clustered after me, some drinking from their steins, other heckling, a very few shouting threats of a fresh lynching, a roughly equal number defending me verbally against them, and most simply curious. All were halted, as was I, by armed cadets at the door of the Catalogue Room.

"No admittance," they declared. The students angrily reminded them that it was a public library in a presumably free college. "Open stacks! Open stacks!" they began to chant. The cadets, in beautiful unison, fixed their bayonets. Everyone waited to see what I would do. But the noise fetched out an elder library-scientist from the Catalogue Room, where in the erratic light one could see numbers of his colleagues poring over a tablesful of documents.

"Quiet!" he demanded. "We will have quiet in the Library!" To the students, who seemed to respect him, he explained that all of New Tammany had just been put under martial law by order of the Chancellor (who I therefore gathered must have come "back where he belonged") and would remain so until the general emergency passed and order was restored. He exhorted them to return to their dormitories in the meanwhile and do their homework, by candlelight if necessary, inasmuch as varsity political crises came and went, as indeed did colleges and curricula, but the research after Answers must unflaggingly persist. Follow his own example, he bade us, and that of his colleagues, who would continue to piece together as best they could the scattered fragments of the Founder's Scroll, though the very University rend itself into even smithiereens.

"My own coinage," he chuckled at this last. "Comparative diminutive after smiodar: a piece of flinder. The substantive een is spurious, it goes without saying…" As he spoke, a special lens attached to the side of his spectacles like a mineralogist's loup fell down into place and focused his attention on me: he asked excitedly whether I was not George Giles, the Goat-Boy and alleged Grand Tutor indirectly responsible for the shredding of the Founder's Scroll.

"Yes, sir," I said. "Sorry about that."

But he bore me no grudge; indeed he seemed almost grateful to me for having in a way occasioned his current research. He insisted that the door-guards admit me, unless they had specific orders to the contrary, as he and his colleagues needed to consult me on a matter of textual restoration. "Understand," he said to them and the students, "we're not necessarily intimating any support of Mr. Giles's claims or ambitions, which frankly don't interest us one way or the other. Even the Dean o' Flunks can quote the Scroll to his purpose, they say, and an accurate quotation is our only concern."

A few students laughed politely at the little joke; the guards clicked their rifle-bolts as one. But I was permitted to enter.

"A little humor there," the library-scientist told me modestly. "Shows them we're not all dry-as-dust." His associates looked up from a circular central table where the Scroll-case had formerly stood. Some had magnifiers in their hands, or Eierkopfian lenses, or scissors and paste. The manuscript-fragments, carefully laid out on the table-top, were surrounded by photographic equipment and bottles of chemicals; the floor round about was littered with longer, more modern scrolls: coded read-outs from WESCAC's automatic printers.

I was introduced around to philologists, archaeologists, historical anthropologists, comparative linguists, philosophers, chemists, and cyberneticists, the last on hand both to lend WESCAC's analytical assistance to the project and to apply their genius with codes and ciphers to the restoration of the priceless text. I nodded to each, explained to the group that I was merely passing through the Catalogue Room en route to the Belfry, and excused myself.

"Oh no." My escort, a model of donnish affability thitherto, spoke sharply and seized my arm. His colleagues too, whom one had thought to be gentle, preoccupied academicians, closed ranks between me and the exit, their expressions firm. I regarded them thoughtfully.

"Accuracy of text is all we care about," declared my warden. His voice was polite again; he even chuckled. "After the first shock of seeing the Scrolls destroyed, we realized you'd actually given us a unique opportunity. All the texts are corrupt, you know, even these — copies of copies of copies, full of errata and lacunae — - but we never could agree on a common reading, and of course the old Scrolls acquired a great spurious authority for sentimental reasons, even though they contradict each other and themselves." At an interdepartmental faculty luncheon that same day, therefore, a committee of experts from various relevant disciplines had been established to reconstruct, from the shards of the Founder's Scroll (actually several scrolls, overlapping, redundant, discrepant), the parent text, until then hypothetical, from which all known variants had descended and on which their authority was ultimately based.

"A radical project, to be sure," said the library-scientist, who was also chairman of the ad hoc committee. "But we like to think of ourselves as avant-garde classicists, so to speak. Little paradox there…" After a small digression then on the etymology of the word lacuna, and a more extravagant one on the word digression (which he justified with the chuckled preface that digression and extravagance were "etymological kissing cousins, you might say"), he came to the point. With WESCAC's aid and the committee's pooled learning, the groundwork for restoring the Scroll had proceeded very swiftly, and an "analogue model" of the proposed Urschrift had actually been roughed out on the computer. But before the work of assembling the Scroll-fragments after that pattern could really get under way, a fundamental issue had to be resolved. As much a question of personal philosophy as of historical philology, it involved whole complexes of argument, ideological as well as scholarly; but the Committee agreed that for convenience' sake it could be symbolized by a practical question about the translation of a single sentence — a mere two words in the original language of the Scrolls. The "etymons," as he called them, were the root terms for Pass and Fail, but inflected with prefixes, infixes, suffixes, and diacritical marks to such an extent, and so variously from fragment to fragment, that conflicting interpretations were possible; indeed, the history of certain such interpretations, in his opinion, could be said to figure the intellectual biography of studentdom, as had been amply demonstrated in a wealth of what he called Geistesgeschichten…

"Here's what it comes down to," one of his younger colleagues interrupted; "the existing texts of the sentence are grammatically discrepant, and where it's supposed to appear in the most reliable context we've got lacunae: the missing fragments are either in the CACAFILE somewhere or among the ones you ate this morning." He happened to brandish a pair of library-shears as he spoke, and I gripped my stick to parry any move to disembowel me. But all they wanted, even as his senior colleague had declared, was an opinion from me on the question whether to the best of my knowledge the crucial sentence ought to be translated Flunkèd who would Pass or Passèd are the Flunked. On that question, obviously, depended whole systems of others, perhaps even the overall sense of the Founder's Scroll.

"Mind you, we agree on what each version means," the young man said briskly. "What we call the A reading means that one ought to desire to fail, since the desire to pass is vain and vanity's flunkèd — not to mention the famous tradition that Passage is to be found only in the knowledge of Failure, et cetera et cetera."

The older man adjusted his glasses and cleared his throat. "Well, now…"

"The B reading," his protégé continued quickly, "is a way of saying that while to desire passage is to fail, to desire failure on that account is also to fail, since it equals desiring to pass. But despite the fact that Passage and Failure aren't different, they're not the same either; and for that reason if one wants to pass one should desire neither Failure nor Passage — yet one shouldn't desire neither because one wants to pass, obviously…"

"Obviously," several of his colleagues agreed, and even his mentor nodded with a slight cock of the head, as if to say that while details of the young man's gloss were not unexceptionable, as a rough-and-ready formulation it would do.

"But we can't agree whether A or B is correct," he concluded, "and so we're collecting expert opinions, weighting them appropriately, and programming WESCAC to arbitrate the whole question." He winked and chuckled. "You may be interested to know that your colleague Dr. Bray has already obliged us with his judgment — though you understand I'm not at liberty to confide it, or what his weighting is on our little scale."

They waited for me to speak. "Gentlemen," I said, "your problem is most interesting in itself. What's more it's of the first practical importance, clearly. Now, if you'll excuse me…"

But they blocked my way.

"A or B?" the young scholar demanded. "If you can't remember what you ate, boy, tell us what you think, and we'll let you go." His superior tut-tutted at this show of coerciveness, but my inquisitor frankly declared that accuracy and thoroughness in scholarly matters were his only values in this flunkèd University, and that as a truly revolutionary researcher he would not hesitate to resort to terrorism if necessary to gain his ends. He didn't give a flunk, he said, whether A or B was "true" in the philosophical sense — all such mystical formulations, in fact, he regarded as superstitious mumbo-jumbo: their authors knaves, their Tutees fools — but upon their like was constructed the whole mad edifice of campus history, for a clear understanding whereof it was absolutely essential to have accurate texts, "believe" them or not.

"Do you have an opinion?" he asked me wryly.

I smiled, as I had done through the whole episode. "Yes."

"Then let's have it." He clacked the shears grimly. "We'll let WESCAC decide what it's worth."

Reluctant for some reason to use the library-scientist's term, I asked, "where is this famous 'pit'?"

The young man smiled and carefully indicated with the point of his shears a ragged hole near the center of the assembled shards. I opened a lens on my stick-end and leaned close over.

"Why magnify it if you don't know the script?" he asked unpleasantly. "That just makes a big riddle out of a little one."

But I was not inspecting the lacuna, nor was my lens a magnifier, but Dr. Sear's mirror, with the aid of which I observed that the Committee had forsaken the aisle to gather close about.

"What's your answer?" one of them demanded.

I huffed a great puff, sending vellum flinders in all directions, and with a sweep of my stick scattered fragments, chemicals, note-cards, shears, and scholars. Before they could recover themselves enough to decide whether stopping me or re-retrieving the smithered eens was of immediater importance, I had dashed into the Circulation Room and was gimping it headlong for the lobby. Halfway down a flickering corridor it occurred to me that if two riot-troopers were guarding the Catalogue Room, whole platoons must be on duty in the main lobby, especially at the lifts that serviced Belfry and Belly. Somewhere overhead the clock once again struck the three-quarter-hour; unless it was in error, there was no time to waste debating with a phalanx of bayonets. I retraced my steps to the Circulation Room (no one seemed to be pursuing me) and having noticed from a corner of my eye a few moments earlier its single occupant — a longhaired pallid girl, un-cosmeticked and — washed, reading behind a desk marked INFORMATION — I took a long hazard.

"Excuse me, miss: is there any way up besides the lift?"

Next door the scholars fussed and clamored, scrambling after fragments on all fours like awkward kids, but the Circulation Room was still. The pimpled maid, thin and udderless as Mrs. Rexford but infinitely less prepossessing, looked over her spectacles from the large novel she was involved in and said with careful clarity — as if that question, from a fleeced goat-boy at just that moment, were exactly what she'd expected — "Yes. A stairway goes up to the Clockworks from this floor. You may enter it through the little door behind me."

All the while she marked with her finger her place in the book, to which she returned at once upon delivering her line. Mild, undistinguished creature, never seen before or since, whose homely face I forgot in two seconds; whose name, if she bore one, I never knew; whose history and fate, if any she had, must be lacunae till the end of terms in my life's story — Passage be yours, for that in your moment of my time you did enounce, clearly as from a written text, your modest information! Simple answer to a simple question, but lacking which this tale were truncate as the Scroll, an endless fragment!

"— less fragment," I thought I heard her murmur as I stooped through the little door she'd pointed out. I paused and frowned; but though her lips moved on, as did her finger across the page, her words were drowned now by the bells of Tower Clock.

4

In jerky leaps I sticked up stairs, around and around the shaft in which the mighty pendulum swung. Four nights there were, which I ascended as the bells phrased out their tune, and then a vertical ladder from the topmost landing up to a square trap-door in the Belfry floor. This ladder had ten rungs, I happen to know, for as I hiked myself up to each, the bells tolled an hour and over my head Anastasia screeched — a little higher each time, the three of us. Upon the eighth, bane of Dr. Eierkopf's head, my own was through the trap-door, and in the reflected glare of plaza searchlights I saw My Ladyship a-humped upon the floor. On hands and knees she was, face slack, shift high; standing behind her, black cape spread and face a-glint, Harold Bray — quite older-visaged than thitherto, also hairier. Though his tup was hid (the pair were facing me) it must needs have been brutish long and sore applied: he was not mounted, only standing with bent knees aft of her 'scutcheon, and his cassock was raised in front no higher than his shin-tops; moreover he did not thrust like any buck but only stood connected, opening and closing his eyes and cape; yet on each peal (high — re and — mi were the two I witnessed) Anastasia shrieked as if impaled, and on fa — - which last stroke fetched me through the trap-door altogether — she collapsed upon the bird-limed floor, among broken eggshells and pigeon-straw. I was obliged to leap over her, the way being strait between Eierkopf's work-tables and the busy gears of the clock; my stick-stroke, consequently, fell short of Bray's head and but thwacked his cape, raising a silky dust that made me sneeze. He sprang behind the pendulum-shaft into the lift, and so escaped — but I had meant anyhow only to drive him off My Ladyship just then. To her, sitting up now fucked in the strew, I turned.

"How are you, Anastasia?"

She palmed her brow. On the floor between her legs, a thick green puddle.

"George…"

"Ma'am?"

She caught her breath; her eyes grew awed. "It wasn't what You think. I know now why Dr. Bray never tried before! He's… different!"

"Different how, Anastasia?" I'd squatted before her; now with a wail she flung her arms about my neck and wept into my fleece. Once she'd managed between shudders to explain, as best she grasped it, that her ravisher was altogether lustless, craving only her reproductive assistance; that his private construction was not like that of any male in her large experience; and that in the nature of his case it was highly doubtful, even unimaginable, that she would conceive by those glaucous gouts of his rank stuff — most of which, thanks to my timely appearance and her collapse, had anyhow missed their mark — I advised her that she needn't loathe him. She wiped her eyes.

"I guess I don't, George, now that I know. But, ugh!"

"I have to drive him out of the Belly now," I said, "and sooner or later off the campus. Part of my work. But I don't have any feeling about him, one way or the other."

She sniffed and shivered. "Me neither. But, George…"

"Yes?"

Again she hugged and wailed. "I love You!" Then at once she drew away. "What are we going to do?"

I begged her pardon. Three hours and eight minutes previously, when so much had suddenly come clear in George's Gorge, I'd seen — as it were in the general light — that marriage was not for such as I, nor any amorous relationship; the bonds of desire, the ties of wife, mistress, children, like every other bond, I would cast off, eschew, abjure — eradicate, if necessary, like the names on my ID-card. And adultery, in particular, I perceived — given the student situation and the fabric of campus life — was flunkèd in the Founder's eyes, so to speak, at least for His Grand Tutors. Of these things I no longer held opinions; I knew them to be the case, as I'd been given in that instant to know much else. Yet in all this clarity — which so surely had lit my way back to Great Mall and up to the Belfry, and would beyond, from Tock to Tick, where presently I must go — one shadow remained. I detected it most plainly in the pupils of Anastasia's eyes, and inferred therefore that what it shrouded was myself.

"You must love your husband," I earnestly advised her. "Stoker's in critical shape just now. He's actually jealous."

"I'm a complete failure!" Anastasia cried, and repeated what she'd told me earlier, on, and which her Living-Room debauchery had confirmed for her: she still felt compassion for the student body's needs and a particular obligation to please her husband (for whom she had discovered in herself that day, for the first time, a kind of affection, when she'd seen his distress in the Living Room); moreover, she craved with all her heart to practice my instructions, as she believed absolutely in my Grand-Tutorhood. But she had failed, she wept; was failed, because what her deliberate promiscuities and self-servicings had taught her was that she was in love — - an entirely novel experience! And the object of her passion was myself.

I fretted. "Anastasia…"

"I don't care about anything," she said quietly. "I don't care what Maurice thinks, or You think, or even the Founder thinks. I know I'm flunked, and I don't even care." She'd come to the Belfry, she declared, against her husband's express prohibition (the first such of their marriage), knowing she might have to submit to Bray and then letting him do his will upon her even when she saw the horror of it, all in the conviction that I would appear — as indeed I had, though I'd not decided to until three hours and fifteen minutes past (the clock chimed as she spoke), and had even supposed in the Treatment Room that we'd see each other no more. Thus was her faith vindicated. What she wanted now, and was resolved upon with the same formidable confidence, was to engender and bear a child by me — an idea obviously planted by Mother — and to this end she was prepared to flunk herself forever with the prerequisite adultery. If I refused (and she would not "assert herself," she said; no more of that; I must come to her), she meant to go down in the Belly with me and there expire.

"I know You don't love me," she concluded. "I guess You can't, and still be a Grand Tutor. But I love You."

Her manner was the more disturbing for its perfect calm. I was touched with wonder and, at first, a really dispassionate curiosity. My nature and function, it seemed to me, I understood (since eight o'clock) quite clearly and disinterestedly. Certain misconceptions and imperfect notions had fallen from me, like blindfolds from the eyes or handcuffs from the wrists; I knew now I was meant for Grand-Tutorhood, and saw my way, work, and fate with sure indifference — as, for instance, that I would drive out Harold Bray, but with neither rancor nor relish, only as part of my larger Assignment. A knife cuts; a fish swims; a Grand Tutor, among other things, drives from the campus such as Bray. There was no glamour to the work, nor any longer to the term: Grand Tutor, WESCAC, fountain-pen — - all names of neutral instrumentalities. Thus also even Bray, impostor, troll: as he himself had once suggested, albeit guilefully, it was his function to be driven out; on the Founder's transcript, so to speak, his A and mine would be of equal value.

"Anastasia," I began again, and would have told her of these things — that the fact of my Grand-Tutorhood, for example, in itself made me no more lovable than the fact of assistant-professorship, say; and that for pointing the way to Commencement Gate, as surely I would do, studentdom owed my person no more love than one owed an Amphitheater-usher, for instance, or museum-guide, who also merely discharged their functions. To be sure, a certain kind of love for studentdom was prerequisite to my work — but so was a love of plants to the horticulturalist's, whose crop was nowise obliged thereby to reciprocation. Love me? I didn't love myself!

But I got no further than her name, at sound whereof she opened to me her fine clear eyes. They gave back my image, luminous, and another shadow disappeared — the last but one.

"Show me the way to the Belly, Anastasia."

She understood, evidently, that the lobby-lifts were under guard, and that in any case we could not resummon the elevator Bray had used. My hope was that like the nameless Information-girl, she would know of a hidden stair or other seldom-used route: her "mother," after all, had worked in Tower Hall throughout her adult life. But under this hope and conjecture was a certain knowledge, in view whereof I directed instead of asking her. She paled a little, then quietly got up. We went through the trap-door and down the ladder and stairs to the bottom landing — one level below the Circulation Room, but still a long way from the Belly. Taking my hand then, she led me through a low door into a maze of unlit bookstacks, through which she threaded as surely as if she dwelt there. More than once our way was barred by locked mesh doors, increasingly formidable, marked RESTRICTED: NO ADMITTANCE — which however she opened easily with a hairpin by the light of my pocket-torch. At last we came to a cul-de-sac, in whose blind wall was a large dumbwaiter in a steel-screen shaft. A sign above it warned the few whose rank in the College might open all those intervening doors. DANGER: DIET-TAPES ONLY. I understood where I was, that I had been there once before. She gripped my hand.

The tapelift door was bossed with assorted keyholes and combination-dials, proof equally against hairpins and blows of stick. But when in exasperation I merely pulled, it swung open, as if unlatched from the beginning. A steel box one meter square at most, scarcely large enough for one person; however, Anastasia climbed in at once, unhesitant, and drew me after. Knees to chin and arsy-turvy — like two shoes in a box, or that East-Campus sign of which her navel had reminded me — we had not room to move a muscle; yet in some fashion I crooked the door shut with my stick, and Anastasia, using flashlight, mirror, and magnifying lens from my purse, and the curved tip of the shophar, contrived to reach through the mesh and press the red button marked Belly. The lift gave a jerk, shearing off many centimeters of horn-tip and further tangling My Ladyship and myself; we began a slow descent in total darkness. Yet had there shone upon us all the lights of the Power Line, I'd have been blind as Greene or Leonid, blind as Gynander; for such was my involvement with Anastasia, my eyes pressed into what had been my first sight of her (G. Herrold's last), upon the broken bridge. Hers me likewise, and through my curly blindfold I began to see a light.

"Adultery is flunkèd," I declared into her. "Also the deception of spouses." She whispered, "A-plus." "Hypocrisy, too," I said. "And yet — there's a riddle here somewhere, Anastasia; something fundamental. It's as if the Answer were right under my nose! And yet I don't quite have it…"

So cramped were our quarters, she could but murmur acknowledgment. Yet respond she did to my impassioned ruminations, vouchsafing me in wordless tongue a foretaste of ultimate Solution.

We reached bottom.

"This is just the Mouth," I said when the lift-door and my eyes opened on the familiar ruby glow. Able now to move her head, Anastasia tensed at my words and declared: "Then this is the end, I guess. But I don't mind being EATen, George…" Indeed, she slipped out before I could and gave me her hand, saying, "I love You."

Again those words! I swung my legs out of the tapelift and thoughtfully rubbed my chin. Bray was gone before me, I perceived, leaving only the faintest trace of himself behind: perhaps he lurked in the Belly proper; on the other hand he may have gone on towards Founder's Hill. No matter. All that counted was that final shadow, which, like My Ladyship's mighty night-fleck in the Gorge, appeared no larger than a man's hand, and yet enveloped the University. I, beloved! I frowned and squinted, blinked like Peter Greene. Anastasia's face was all entreaty; and yet, having said, "I love You," she would say no more: she waited with eyes closed and hand extended.

"Assert yourself, Anastasia," I ordered huskily, to test her.

In a very positive small voice she answered: "No."

I stepped to her, stirred to the marrow, and kissed her lips. Like Truth's last veils our wrappers rose: her eyes opened; I closed mine, and saw the Answer.

"Pass you!" I whispered. She nodded.

Supporting her under the buttocks with my stick, I lifted her upon me; she twined me round.

"In the purse," I said. "Bray's mask. For the scanner."

From the bag strung about my neck she withdrew and donned the mask. Then I bade her empty the purse itself of its sundry contents, invert it over my head, and draw the strings. At my direction she directed me to the entry-port.

"Wait," I said. "Do you see a control-panel nearby? Some sort of console?"

"Yes. There's a row of black buttons on it and a place marked Input. But the only jack I see says Output."

"Put it in," I instructed. She did, and pulled the lever beside the console. There were hums and snaps. At once the port opened, and in I went. The scanner clicked: as one, we tumbled past it and slid deep into the Belly.

"Wonderful!" I cried. For though the place was lightless, and my head pursed, in Anastasia I discovered the University whole and clear. Mother of my soul, its pulse throbbed all around us; my Father's eye it was glowed near, whose loving inquiry I perceived through My Ladyship.

"It says ARE YOU MALE OR FEMALE," she whispered. We rose up joined, found the box, and joyously pushed the buttons, both together, holding them fast as we held each other.

"HAVE YOU COMPLETED YOUR ASSIGNMENT

AT ONCE, IN NO TIME"

Was it Anastasia's voice? Mother's? Mine? In the sweet place that contained me there was no East, no West, but an entire, single, seamless campus: Turnstile, Scrapegoat Grate, the Mall, the barns, the awful fires of the Powerhouse, the balmy heights of Founder's Hill — I saw them all; rank jungles of Frumentius, Nikolay's cold fastness, teeming T'ang — all one, and one with me. Here lay with there, tick clipped took, all serviced nothing; I and My Ladyship, all, were one.

"GILES, SON OF WESCAC"

Milk of studentdom; nipple inexhaustible! I was the Founder; I was WESCAC; I was not. I hung on those twin buttons; I fed myself myself.

"DO YOU WISH TO PASS"

I the passer, she the passage, we passEd together, and together cried, "Oh, wonderful!" Yes and No. In the darkness, blinding light! The end of the University! Commencement Day!

5

How long we lay embraced none can tell: no bells toll where we were. After the shock, the Belly was still as we: asleep, passed away. In no time at all we lay there forever.

"A-plus."

We embraced the more tightly, not to wake.

"Pass All Fail All!" The voice, some meters off, was familiar: a cheerful lady croon. Loath to return from the farther side of Commencement Gate, I tried not to recognize it, and in that effort — alas! — came to myself. Anastasia, herself now too, moaned into my pursed ear and stirred her legs.

"Come, Billikins! Come, Bill!" Dear Founder, it was Mother: my sigh was not for passèd bliss, but for bliss past. What was she doing in that fell, Commencèd place? And — Founder — why had I to leave it? Anastasia, unmasked already herself, unpursed me, kissed my brow. Tears in my eyes, I rose up on my knees, looked over Truth's warm shoulder at the cold and flunkèd campus I must return to. Day was about to dawn: how loath I was to leave that bright, consummate, hourless night! Then my heart softened: it was Mother, leaning in through the slackened exit-port. In one hand, a peanut-butter sandwich, which she flapped at me as she crooned; in the other, a carefully folded garment. Compassion lightened hopeless duty; the campus wind was chill, but Knowledge warmed me. I knew what must be done, and that I would do it; all that would come to pass was clear, hence my tears — but now they were for studentdom, not for me.

Anastasia's eyes shone still with love; my own I think with neutral Truth, dispassionate compassion. Calm of heart, I kissed her thrice: once on the brow, in gratitude for her having been to me Truth's vessel, and declared her Passèd; once on the navel, sign of the lightless place where I had seen, become myself, issued from to my post-Graduate Assignment; once finally on the Mount of Love where I'd Commenced, and upon whose counterpart I'd one day meet my end. The Cyclological Hypothesis, Spielman's Law: at last I understood it, as Max perhaps could never, and kissed its sign.

Beyond the port now, commotion. Anastasia rubbed her belly, sighed, and said she loved me. I sighed too — but not, as she was pleased to think, in simple reciprocity, though I saw no need to disabuse her of that conviction — and went to Mother. Alas, she had been EATen in the flash, when at the final question I'd caused both buttons to be pressed: her once-cream hair was singed, her babble less lucid even than before. How she'd known to come to the Belly-exit, and how got her head in through it at the crucial moment, I was not to learn for some while. Happily, her mental estate had been already so grievous (a circumstance made much of subsequently by WESCAC's riot-researchers) that the EAT-wave hadn't been fatal: it was as if the scar-tissue, so to speak, of her former wounds, some inflicted by myself, shielded her mind from fresh assaults; already destroyed, she was invulnerable, and WESCAC's worst had but chipped like a grape-shot at the ruins. I ate the sandwich from her hand. The folded garment, it turned out, was my matriculation-fleece, left behind me in the Turnstile months before. How she came by it I cannot imagine, unless she and WESCAC maintained a secret intimacy from terms gone by. Torn as it was, I received it from her joyfully, and donning it in place of Reginald Hector's, discovered in its fold a second treasure, lost with the first: the amulet-of-Freddie!

"Pass you, Mother!" I kissed her hands and joined them to Anastasia's, who had come to the port. "Pass you both, in the name of the Founder, summa cum laude!"

Mother fluttered, and in her soft madness mixed a Maxim: "First served, first come."

Now sirens growled and motorcycles crowded up. Computer-scientists, professor-generals, and Light-House aides, alarmed by signs of trouble in the Belly, swarmed about; student-demonstrators chanted, I could not hear what, "Give us the Goat," I supposed; a disorderly motorcade roared around from Great Mall and paused at the confusion. Commending Mother to Anastasia's care, I girdled my ragged fleece with the amulet-of-Freddie and issued forth. Shouts went up: it was indeed "Give us the Goat" that certain bearded chaps and longhaired lasses cried — but not in anger. They were no more than half a dozen, fraction of a remnant of a minority, and clouted even by their sandaled classmates as they cheered; but their signs, I wept with gratitude to see, read AWAY WITH BRAY! Their elders beset me at once with questions, threats, and mock. If I had ruined WESCAC, the military-scientists warned, I could expect a traitor's fate…

"I made a short circuit," I admitted calmly, drawing strength from my half a dozen. "But I don't think WESCAC's damaged." I actually hoped not, I added for my classmates' benefit; for although it stood between Failure and Passage, WESCAC therefore partook of both, served both, and was in itself true emblem of neither. I had been wrong, I said, to think it Troll. Black cap and gown of naked Truth, it screened from the general eye what only the few, Truth's lovers and tutees, might look on bare and not be blinded.

The six took frownish notes, shaking their heads; the rest hooted me down. How to speak the unspeakable? I said no more. One forelocked aide winked at a stern professor-general, tapped his temple, and said, "Probably EATen, like the old lady."

I sighed and contented myself with a suggestion they could understand: that they unplug WESCAC's Output from its Input, to restore the normal circuit. Exchanging glances of surmise, they hurried off. I looked about then for my usual lynchers, and was surprised to see none in evidence, until I observed that the approaching motorcade was led by Stoker, and that Max was in his sidecar: the mass of studentdom had gone to Founder's Hill, I realized grimly, to watch the Shafting. It was against capital punishment, among other things, that the sheep-skinned band had assembled to demonstrate, all but the faction protesting protest. Stoker skidded up and snarled at Anastasia; his crew piled up their rowdy vehicles behind him.

"Get in here, woman! I'm taking you home!"

Demurely she refused; she would stay with me, whether I wished her to or not. She apologized for having forsaken her wifely vows and tried to explain that while she sympathized with Stoker and was even beginning in a way to love him, she had a higher obligation as a Grand Tutee; a higher love, not in conflict with her marriage, she declared, but transcending it; a passèd Assignment from the Founder, scarcely dreamed of even by myself, to the fulfillment whereof she was now utterly dedicate…

"Hogwash!" Stoker raged. All this while I'd been contemplating Max, who, wizeneder than ever, sat oblivious to the fuss. But at Stoker's oath, unfamiliar to me, I started, for it put a notion into my head, or rather disclosed to me in an instant one that had grown unnoticed there almost to ripeness. In half a second I was studying Max again (who also studied me), ignoring Stoker's jealous oaths and the general furor; but it was as if the Founder had seen to it he would cry Hogwash on that occasion rather than Horse-manure or Sheep-shit (other of his pet ejaculations), just in order to inspire me with a plan.

Max held out a thin hand. "Bye-bye, Georgie."

How to tell him that I grasped now, among much else, the hub of his Cyclology; that I had completed my Assignment, passed the Finals, and come through to bonafide Grand-Tutorship? There was no need: he saw what I'd seen and had become; from his eyes, hid deep behind their brows like an owl's in snowy brake, understanding glowed. I gripped his hand. "You don't have to die this afternoon, Max. I've got a secret: Leonid's key. I can take you right out of this." I studied his face as I spoke. He touched the amulet-of-Freddie. The true scapegoatery, I reminded him, was not to die for studentdom's sake, but to take their failings upon oneself and live. "You misunderstood the amulet-of-Freddie."

"Ach," he said, "not only that. You know why I been an all-round genius, George?" He smiled. "Because I never knew my real major. But I found out now what my life's-work is."

I asked what.

"To die," he said, delighted by the joke. "In studentdom's behalf, selfish or not, and even if it don't make sense."

"Are you a love-lover nowadays, Max?" I earnestly inquired. "Or a hate-hater, or what?"

Promptly, as if he'd expected the question, he replied: "Na, I don't hate hate any more. But I love love more than I don't hate hate."

"You're going to the Shaft?"

He nodded.

"Even though you might be playing martyr?"

He shrugged. "So I'm playing. The game's for keeps."

I placed my fingertips on both his temples and declared him a Candidate for Graduation.

"Ach!" he said, hoarse with pride. "You know what's ahead for you, Georgie? At the end of the circle?"

I smiled and gently mocked his accent. "A circle has an end? Auf wiedersehen, Max."

Yet a moment he clung to my amulet. "One favor you can do me, Georgie: blow your horn when the time comes, I want to hear it on the Shaft."

I promised I would, thrilling again at the way all chance seemed fraught with meaning and instruction. The original shophar, no longer blowable, I'd left in the Belly with Mother's purse and all my collected tokens except the stick and watch, the rest having done their job; but its mate (old Freddie's left) still lay, I trusted, in a certain tool-locker out in the barns, where I meant to go anyway before the Shafting.

"I'll drive you out," Anastasia said firmly, turning from her husband. "We'll use one of Maurice's cycles." I glowed at the miracle in her words, and agreed. Unable to speak for rage, Stoker fired both pistols into the air and raced his motor. His troopers laughed at his discomfiture. I beamed at him.

"You!" he roared at me, and turning then to the demonstrating students he shouted that the Grand Tutor was Harold Bray, who even then was on Founder's Hill preparing to do wonders at the Shafting, while I was a gross and treacherous impostor whom no committee in the College would condemn them for lynching. The half-dozen grinned appreciatively, and some of their classmates looked at me now with a new respect, which infuriated Stoker the more. As he harangued them I touched his temples from behind and declared him a Candidate for Graduation. My six were startled; even Max and Anastasia looked surprised.

"Wah!" Stoker bellowed, too paroxysed now to speak intelligently. "Wah! Wo! Wah!" Anastasia being nearest his reach, he clouted her with his helmet, knocking her into my arms. The sight drove him wild; actual tears stood in his eyes; he seemed about to shoot the pair of us.

"Maurice," Anastasia warned. "Don't you dare shoot. I'm pregnant."

"Wah! Wo!"

"I'm eight hours pregnant," she affirmed, in utter earnest. "By the Grand Tutor."

The troopers and students guffawed and cheered; Mother murmured, "A-plus." I marveled at My Ladyship's extraordinary conviction, wondering all the same whether the EAT-wave mightn't have got to her after all. As for Stoker, this declaration on the heels of my Certifying his Candidacy made him truly berserk: he wrenched the motorcycle into gear, cursing, babbling, snarling at once, while tears coursed over his grimed cheeks. Demonstrators sprang in all directions as he tore through; Max clutched the sidecar-wales. The rest of the troop, still laughing, straggled after — all save one, whose vehicle Anastasia commandeered by the simple expedient of threatening to tell Stoker that he'd forced her virtue. The trooper sneered, shrugged, growled something about Pantoffelheldentum — - but climbed up behind a smirking colleague, leaving his own motorcycle idling. Anastasia donned the helmet her spouse had swatted her with, passed Mother into the keeping of the forelocked aide (who seemed, like most of the student body, on familiar terms with My Ladyship), and bade me mount behind her, the vehicle being sidecarless.

"All's fair that ends well," Mother murmured to the air.

6

Stoker meanwhile, hurtling cornerwards, careered into a second motorcade — this one in perfect file, upon white engines — which had wheeled round from the Mall. The confusion obliged both parties to halt.

"Oh dear," Anastasia said, and blushed. "It's Mr. and Mrs. Rexford."

An expert driver, she would thread us out of the traffic-jam and away from the scene. But I directed her to take me to the Chancellor, whom Stoker, springing from his vehicle, had found shrill speech enough to mock.

"Wife-beater!" I heard him jeer, among other things. The Chancellor's white-helmeted escorts drew polished pistols, and two or three professor-generals came running from the Belly-port, which I noticed had reclosed. Rexford, though he reddened at the taunt, seemed in control of himself again, and showed little sign of last evening's debauch: his eyes were bright, if slightly bloodshot; his hair was groomed but for the one unruly lock, his face clean-shaved, his light coat pressed and spotless. His wife, though her left cheekbone was something moused, seemed not displeased to contradict with her presence the reports of their separation; she glared at Stoker angrily, as if he were responsible for her husband's truancy as well as for the present embarrassment. The Chancellor himself, though he frowned at the disorder, seemed not alarmed, and vetoed the request of his professor-generals to have Stoker shot.

"Put him in irons, then," one of them ordered the Chancellor's escorts. "We'll get him for disorderly conduct and conspiracy to overthrow."

"No no," Rexford said. "I'll let him go on to the Powerhouse."

Stoker beamed contemptuously. "That's my brother!"

The professor-generals, who, it was rumored, had been talking anyhow of impeaching the Chancellor on charges of conduct unbecoming a Commander-in-Chief, exchanged meaning looks, which Rexford obviously saw and was as amused by as was Stoker, if for different reasons.

"He'll be allowed to pass outside Main Gate between the Powerhouse and Main Detention," he said — addressing the p.-g.'s but observing Stoker. "If he sets foot on Great Mall again, arrest him. If he enters Tower Hall or the Light House, shoot him."

Stoker laughed as if in mocking triumph, but his effect was diminished by the tear-tracks still on his face. He thrust out his hand. "Put her there, Brother!"

At that moment the Chancellor remarked our presence, Anastasia having drawn us near at my insistence. He flashed us a quick smile before returning to deal with Stoker; his wife stared dangerously at My Ladyship, who lowered her head. Calmly, almost respectfully, Rexford pushed away the proffered hand, wiping his own afterwards on a white linen handkerchief. Good-humoredly he scoffed, "Brother indeed! Go back where you belong."

The professor-generals brightened. "You deny he's your brother, Mr. Chancellor? Once and for all?"

Rexford coolly reminded them that professor-generals did not address their Commander-in-Chief as if he were a miscreant recruit. Then he added with a wink: "Do I look like the rascal's brother?"

Stoker flung back his head and laughed, again as if meaning to mock; but I thought I detected wet streaks among the dry. Catching sight then of us, he bellowed, "Wah! Wow!" leaped back upon his motor, and throttled off. The professor-generals took counsel with one another; one of them I saw slip a Light Up With Lucky button out of his pocket and repin it on his tunic, above the riot-ribbons. Stoker's men having left to try to overtake him, the white-helmeted escorts realigned their positions, discreetly raced their engines, and made ready to proceed. But the Chancellor had turned to me, with a kind of bright hesitation, as if certain of his desire but not of protocol. I dismounted and stepped towards him, whereupon with a grin he sprang from the Chancellory sidecar and met me halfway.

"Glad to see you without the rope," he said, and expressed his regret that my former keeper had chosen not to take advantage of the recent general amnesty, as his freedom would have been its one happy consequence. "The way the varsity situation is," he confided sadly, "and the way I've carried on the last few months, I don't dare stay his execution now; I'd have a mutiny in the Military Science Department. But I love that old man. It's things like this that make you wish you weren't the flunkèd Chancellor."

I listened attentively, studying his bright eyes. His admiration for Max was entirely sincere, and his regret for the Shafting; but that he wished not to be Chancellor, his whole presence denied.

"How is it you're not angry with me for the trouble I've caused, Mr. Rexford?"

"Who says I'm not?" His smile was shrewd. "I think I see what you were trying to teach me. But I guess Commencement isn't for administrators." In painful sobriety after his debauch, he said, he had resolved to abandon his yen for Graduation and merely "do his flunkèd best" for his alma mater, by his own lights, however benighted. To this end he had reopened secret economic dealings with Ira Hector, much as he deplored that necessity, and made covert overtures to new negotiations with the Student-Unionists. The Power Lines would in all likelihood be restored to their "original" locations, and the Boundary Dispute, he hoped, resumed on its former terms without too great loss to West Campus because of his recent vacillation. Having learned, thanks to me, that Classmate X was the defector Chementinski, he supposed he would put that knowledge to use less passèd than I would approve of: blackmailing the Nikolayans back to the conference-table. "It's all very well for proph-profs to be above these things," he said amiably; "but the man with the power can't always keep his hands as clean as he'd like to." Folding his handkerchief neatly as he spoke, he caught sight of the Stoker-smudge on it and laughed.

"What about the Power-Line guards?" I asked carefully. Stepping back into the sidecar, he declared he'd given orders that all special head- and neck-gear be made optional for them, if not discarded altogether.

"If they look down, they fall," he said cheerfully; "if they don't look down, they fall too. They'll have to learn to see without looking!"

My heart rejoiced. But I administered a final test by greeting his wife (who regarded me chillily) and expressing my regret for the accidental injury to her cheek. Her face flashed anger, as for an instant did the Chancellor's.

"For a man to strike his wife is a flunkèd thing," he declared firmly. "We don't live in the Dark Semesters any more. And we're not Furnace-Room mechanics."

"I should say not," Mrs. Rexford snapped. "And I'll tell you something else, Mr. Giles, while we're on the subject: my husband might be the Chancellor, but — "

She stopped with a look of fright, for Rexford had suddenly raised his hand. In fact he only signaled the advance-guard to proceed, but even Anastasia gasped, and Mrs. Rexford never finished her sentence.

Her husband grinned. "See you on Founder's Hill this afternoon, Mr. Giles."

I reached to touch his temples, declaring him a Candidate for Passage and Commencement. But he shook his head and cordially declined. For one thing, he said, the gesture might be looked upon by his political enemies as some sort of bribe, or at least an endorsement of my authenticity, a matter too controversial for him to take a public stand on unless he had to; for another — his grin was melancholy — he reminded me that as Chancellor his first allegiance was to the College, whose best interests he would pursue at whatever cost — enlightenedly, he hoped, and in the final service of all the Free Campus, even all studentdom. But if circumstances forced the choice ("Which Founder forfend!") between repudiating me and breaching the vows of his office, he would consent even to my Shafting, as he had to Max's. That Remusian vice-administrator of the Moishian quads in terms gone by, who had winked at Enos Enoch's lynching, was to Rexford's mind a tragic figure, unjustly maligned by simplistic Enochists unaware of the responsibilities of power.

"You'd Shaft me if you had to, sir? For teaching administrative subversion, say, if I had to?"

He gave me a level look. "It might flunk me forever. But I'd do it."

The professor-generals clapped one another on the back; the military escort cheered. For just a moment Rexford surveyed them with an expression of distaste, even loathing; then he flashed the famous grin, mischievously winked at Anastasia while embracing Mrs. Rexford, and sped away.

"Is he a Candidate or not?" Anastasia asked me.

"You're a Graduate," I replied; "what do you think?"

Flushing with pride, she considered the matter at length as she steered us out onto the highway, through the dormitory-quads and faculty-residence areas, and along the Founder's Hill road towards George's Gorge. In that vicinity, having grappled with the pluses and minuses of the case for more than an hour, she said at last, "I think he is, George. Not a Graduate, but a real Candidate for Graduation."

"I see. Why is that, Anastasia?"

"I'm not good at words," she reminded me seriously. "But embarrassed as I was to see him, after last evening (especially with Mrs. Rexford, who must hate me, much as I like her), it seemed to me there was something important about that hitting-her business. You know?" After a pause she tried again: for the Chancellor of a college to disavow and deplore such things as espionage, cheating, and secret negotiations, she seemed in her fashion to be saying, while yet not disallowing them, was in itself doubtless mere hypocrisy, like condemning wife-beating on principle while striking one's wife; yet she could imagine an elevated version of this modus operandi, so sincere and second-natural that what had been flunkèd Contradiction became passèd Paradox. And she believed that should Lucius Rexford attain that state — which was betrayed and falsified even by talking about it, as she was doing — he would be Commenced.

"Is that right, George?" she asked at the end. Inasmuch as I was obliged in any case to clasp her from behind in order to keep my seat, I smiled, patted her belly, and called her my first Graduate Assistant.

"You're teasing me!" she said, a little crossly, but abandoned the throttle to press my hand against her a moment. "If what I said is wrong, tell me so!"

But we had come to a fork in our road, some kilometers beyond George's Gorge; I caught my breath, recognizing suddenly where we were and what lay just past the next bend. A moment later my heart leaped up, and over My Ladyship's shoulder I pointed out the gambrels and cupolas of home.

The day being fine, though chill, the herd was outside in the pounds, officially supervised by one of Reginald Hector's aides. But that fellow (chosen by lot, I learned later, when the ex-Chancellor forsook the independent life) was either irresponsible or incompetent, and nowhere in sight. Once I'd got over my surprise at how much smaller everything seemed than in my kidship, I groaned at the evidences of neglect: the barn and fences needed whitewash; the pounds were filthy, the feed-cribs bare. Worst of all, the herd itself was depleted by half — owing, I could only hope, to ignorant neglect and not some keeper's bloody appetite — and the survivors were ragged and pinched as inmates of a concentration-campus. In vain I looked about for Hedda O.T.S.T., for Becky's Pride Sue or Tommy's Thomas: I recognized no one. Anastasia hung back, not to intrude upon my grief. With smarting eyes I rushed into the pound; the does scattered like wild things. Could that be B.'s P. Sue, a pinched and gimpy crone? As I wept at the likelihood, and with chagrin that they knew me no more than I them, a strong bleat came from the barn, a bucky challenge; and after it — head couched and hooves a-pound — Redfearn's Tom, charging from the dead! Stick in hand I stood, as years before, transfixed this time as much by wonder as by fright. I had retraced my way; had I also, in some wise, rewound the very tape of time? The buck was young and full of juice, despite his leanness — younger than R.'s Tom had been on the day I slew him, or Tommy's Thomas when I'd set out for Great Mall. In the instant before he was upon me I guessed he was no ghost, but Tommy's Tommy's Tom: that Triple-T who saw the light not long before my departure! Joyfully I sprang aside; he cracked the fence-rail — splendid son of splendid sires! — and neither dazed by the collision nor tempted to escape through the broken fence, spun about and recharged me at once. Anastasia squealed. Out of practice as I was, slackened by my terms in Main Detention and the life of human studentdom, I durstn't try to pin him; I parried, passed, and fended as I could, calling him all the while by name and giving him to smell, between charges, my wrapper and the amulet-of-Freddie. These intrigued him, and when at last I stripped myself (retying the a.-of-F. about my loins) and flung the wrapper over his head, its scent stirred in him some deep ancestral memory. His mood changed altogether; he permitted me to scratch his head, licked Anastasia's hand when I introduced them, and appreciatively snuffled her escutcheon.

"He's a darling, George!" she cried. "I love animals!" I smiled. But delightsome as was reunion with Triple-T and the does — who wandered up now in twos and threes, smelt of the hide, and bleated to me as to a keeper — I had come to do works of preparation. Hedda alone I lingered awhile in communion with: unbelievably aged and infirm, her beauty flown, she tottered from the barn last of all, sniffed my amulet suspiciously, then nearly wept for joy upon realizing who I was. For some minutes we nuzzled wordlessly — shocking how sere and shrunk her once-peerless udder, whose freckled daint had fired my youthful dreams! When at length I introduced her to My Ladyship, the two appraised each other without expression; then Anastasia took my arm and leaned against me, whereupon dear Hedda, with a feeble snort, gimped back into the barn, nor stirred from her rank old straw again.

I set about my work. First I fed the herd, forking hay down from the loft and refilling the stagnant water-troughs. Then, with Anastasia's help, I drenched them all with copper sulphate to de-worm them, milked the few who needed that relief (the number of kids was heartbreakingly small), and trimmed everyone's hooves. Next — what Stoker's oath had suggested — I filled the dipping-tank with creosote solution, bathed the entire herd, and then (though neither I nor my wrapper was literally verminous, as were the others) cleansed myself in that potent bath, immersing even my head, until no trace of my term on Great Mall remained. Anastasia scrubbed my back; she would join me in the dip, cold as was the air and free of lice her fleecy parts; I knew why, was well pleased, but told her it was unnecessary. We did however wash her body with saddle-soap, and groomed each other when we had brushed and combed the herd. It being then noon, and she and I both roused by the brisk shampoo of our private parts, we repaired to a bed of fresh-forked straw. Warmed by the huddling does (all save Hedda), for two hours we drowsed and coupled — but knew better than to strive for last night's wonders. She remained she, I I; in a campus of thats and thises we sweetly napped and played, and were content: not every day can be Commencement Day. Lunch, like breakfast, we forwent.

At two (I could read a goat-crook's shadow in any season quite as accurately as Ira Hector a man's, and set Lady Creamhair's watch with perfect confidence) I rose refreshed from My full-friggèd Ladyship, re-cleansed my organ in the dip, and donned my wrap. Fetching the spare horn from the gear-chest I nipped its point to mouthpiece-size with a docking-tool and fashioned for it a stout sling of binder-twine. Then to all the herd, save two, I bade farewell, pledging to return one day and to send a better keeper to them in the meanwhile. Hedda and Tommy's Tommy's Tom were the exceptions: the latter because I meant to take him with me; the former because when I bent into her lousy pen I found her passed away. I closed her glassed eyes, touched my lips to those withered teats once prouder and more speckled than my dam's, and left her, trusting that even Grandfather's aide would not deny her a respectful grave. Triple-T we tethered behind the motorcycle; a handsome buckling he was now, dipped and groomed, with a proper lunch in him; he pranced and snorted and butted without fear the very fender! Anastasia (who not only declined the syringe of vinegar I offered to douche her with, but plugged her privity with sterile gauze to retain the insemination) put on her helmet and released the clutch, and we headed west.

Our progress, however, with Tommy's Tommy's Tom in tow, proved poor. I was obliged at length to hogtie him — revolting term — with the tether and truss him behind me athwart the fender, much as I sympathized with his fright. By this arrangement, though his bleats would have moved to pity Ira Hector himself, we tripled our speed; once past the Gorge and crossroads, moreover, Anastasia displayed a skill at short-cuts equal to her husband's, and a truly Stokerish capacity for the speed that had so alarmed her as his passenger. The sun hung still a fair half-hour from the horizon when we hove in sight of Founder's Hill.

7

Set free but for a leash wrapped thrice about my wrist, Triple-T opened us a walkway through the crowd. On every slope they'd gathered through the day — students, professors, administrators, trustees, groundskeepers, clerks, all wearing holiday best. Despite the gravity of the occasion (Shafting had only recently been made public again — by Rexfordian liberals, interestingly enough, who hoped thereby to shock the student body into abolishing capital punishment) there was excitement in the air, even a certain festivity. As the execution happened to coincide with other ceremonies and observances traditionally scheduled for that day of week and time of year, Founder's Hill had been a busy place since morning. A kind of intermission seemed now in progress: martial music could be heard from loudspeakers, and strolling vendors offered food, drink, pennants, and large white flowers to the crowd. Newspaper extras were being hawked around; the one I fed to T.T.T. bore headlines about Bray's promised wonders, the full restoration of WESCAC's strength under Dr. Eierkopf's supervision from the Powerhouse Control Room, the apparent disappearance of Classmate X, the expected resumption of the Boundary Dispute on last term's terms. On all the front pages were photographs of Lucius Rexford embracing his wife in the Chancellory sidecar and winking, so it seemed, at the camera, as if to indicate that all was in hand at home as well as abroad. Indeed, despite the seriousness of the varsity situation and the great disruptions of normalcy that still prevailed in New Tammany, the captions were optimistic: LUCKY DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN; "LIGHT LIGHTS," LAUGHS LUCKY. Roving photojournalism-majors prowled with cameras and Telerama-packs, interviewing the student-in-the-path and campus celebrities on such topics as capital punishment, Grand-Tutorial impostors, and what they called the "new look" of the Rexford administration. Me too they would approach for a statement, and Anastasia, when we left the motorcycle and started up: they trotted about, asking what I thought of Bray's mid-day "miracles" on the Hilltop, and whether I intended to "top his performance" or "have it out" with him. But thanks to the plunging horns and knife-edged hooves of Tommy's Tommy's Tom, they kept their distance, as did hecklers, applauders, and the hosts of the indifferent, through whose ranks we made our way.

Towards the summit, where the rocky hill flattened into a kind of park around the Shaft, the crowd was thinner; Stoker's guards had erected a great circle of barriers, several hundred meters across, past which none but high officials and their guests were permitted. Stoker himself stalked the far perimeter all ascowl, threatening would-be gate-crashers with his billy and passing upon credentials: some he admitted whose ID-cards showed them to be nobodies; others he refused whose eminence entitled them to pass. At the consequent uproar he laughed — a harsh echo of his old hilarity. Anastasia was admitted at once by the guard at our barrier, who recognized her with a lick of his lips, and at her coax he reholstered his pistol instead of shooting Triple-T. Espying us from several meters off, Stoker shouted an obscenity and ordered the guard to refuse me admittance. People in the dignitaries' stands near the Shaft turned to look.

"Go to him now," I bade My Ladyship. I might have added certain further directions, thanking her too for having fetched me where I had to go; but she agreed this time so readily, and with so knowing a smile, I said no more. Triple-T, once out of the crowd, browsed placidly; I handed his leash to Anastasia and stepped past the guard.

"Achtung, Stinkkäfer!" he cried. He referred of course to the goat-dip on me, mighty indeed the perfume whereof; but his epithet was so exactly inapposite, I laughed aloud. He swung his billy; I parried with my stick and hoofed him a clean one in the balls. Before he could let go of himself to shoot, a pair of white helmets came over from the dignitaries' stand. One intervened in the names of the Chancellor and Harold Bray, both of whom he declared had authorized my admission — murmurs went through the near bystanders at this news, and the fallen guard put by his pistol with a curse.

"You call that Grand-Tutoring?" Stoker shouted. He had started for My Ladyship, but paused when T.'s T.'s Tom bucked at him. Anastasia too seemed shocked by my deed. "Violence!" Stoker appealed to the crowd. "No respect for law and order!" People stirred; even White-helmet, though he'd come between us in my behalf, bent to assist his sooted comrade and grumbled that the man had after all been simply doing his duty.

"Tomorrow the Revised New Syllabus," I said to My Ladyship. "Today the stick."

The other white helmet now escorted to me Hedwig Sear — at her request, it turned out, who had observed from the viewing-stand my entry. She was gowned in black, her face veiled; Anastasia hurried to her, and they wept together as Three-T grazed. The shock of Croaker's assault, it seemed, had cleared Hedwig's mind; she spoke lucidly and quietly, impeded only by her grief at the critical condition of her husband. Dr. Sear lay in the Infirmary, she told me, at the point of death. Her one wish was to join him, but she'd come to Founder's Hill at his request in order to honor Max and give me a message. The circumstances of her attack she recounted with extraordinary calm — despite the fact that Croaker, with Dr. Eierkopf aboard, was present in the visitors' stand. She could even smile, mournfully enough, at the irony of her rape: that when she'd tried to provoke him to it once before, in the Honeymoon Lodge Motel, he had rejected her in favor of an automatic soft-drink dispenser. There had followed her return to childishness, of which I'd heard, and when Croaker's path and hers had crossed again, following their separate releases in yesterday's amnesty, she had fled him with the fright of a five-year-old girl.

"Which is just what turned him on," she said ruefully. "He couldn't help it; he was just being Croaker. But poor Kennard — " She chuckled and wept. "In the old days he'd have taken pictures, and I'd have been showing Croaker naughty tricks. But Kennard's changed, too, since last spring — the different things you've told him, and his cancer and all…" She blew her nose. Perhaps it was no more than a metastasis of the cancer to his brain, she said; in any case, he'd been escorting her from the Asylum to Great Mall (so he told her afterwards) to get a taxi to the Honeymoon Lodge Motel, not this time to mount her in Position One as the consummate perversion, but to come to her in simple love, in hope (her voice grew awed even now at the notion; she doubted I would believe her) that he could leave a child behind him upon his death! The rest I had witnessed from my noose: how, seeing her attacked, Dr. Sear had leaped — spontaneously, instantly, one could only say heroically — to her defense, and been felled by Croaker with a backhand smite. The blow had struck his bandaged tumor; though entirely blind now and basically, mercifully unconscious, he still had moments of lucidity, during which, in the night just past, she'd told him of her own astonishing recovery, begged his forgiveness for her part in their sorry past, professed her devotion to him, and announced her intention to undergo surgical curettage, against the unlikely chance that Croaker had accomplished what her husband had aspired to.

"But Kennard said I mustn't," she declared. "He says we have to be grateful to Croaker for bringing us together after all these years, and that we ought to hope I'm pregnant! No matter what the baby looks like, he says, it's our child — Kennard's and mine — because of what Kennard did without stopping to think."

"Oh, Heddy!" Anastasia wept with delight and embraced her again, clearly as convinced of the fact and nature of Mrs. Sear's pregnancy as of her own — though neither was two dozen hours past! Time was getting on; I asked Mrs. Sear directly whether her husband was pleased to be dying.

She shook her head at once. "That's what I'm supposed to tell you, George. He says he doesn't regret for a minute doing what he did. He says that what he'd never seen till Croaker hit him, even though he thought he'd seen everything, was that a certain kind of spiritedness was absolutely good, no matter what a person's other Answers are. It doesn't have anything to do with education, he said to tell you, and it's the most valuable thing in the University. Something about Dean Taliped's energy, even at the end… He wants to know whether he's right."

"Oh, George!" Anastasia cried. "Pass him now, so Heddy can tell him!"

Stoker huffed. "He's out of his head."

I smiled at tearful Hedwig. "Please tell Dr. Sear that in my opinion his attitude is certainly sentimental, and that his cancer may very well have damaged his mind as well as his eyesight. But tell him also that he's a Candidate for Graduation, and congratulate him for me on being a father."

"Only a Candidate?" Stoker jeered.

I nodded. "Like yourself."

This retort so infuriated Stoker that Anastasia, still holding Triple-T, was obliged to step between us and command him to behave himself. Taking Mrs. Sear's arm I slipped away to the viewing stand, and added en route: "Of course, some Candidates are much closer to Commencement than others. Give your husband my love, Mrs. Sear."

"Goat-Boy!" It was Dr. Eierkopf calling, from the dignitaries' bleachers. There also I saw Chancellor and Mrs. Rexford, holding hands; the brothers Hector, amply coated; and Leonid Alexandrov, fidgeting as usual and looking restlessly to westward (though he could not see), where the sun fast sank upon the distant reaches of East Campus. Peter Greene was on the right, similarly bandaged, and flanked, to my surprise, by Stoker's secretary Georgina and a pretty young white girl whom I concluded must be Greene's daughter. But she was the very image of Chickie, that co-ed girl I'd watched disporting years ago with the Beist-in-the-buckwheat! The same uncombed locks; the taunty eyes! And if anything younger, though I her witness had aged seven years in body, thrice that in spirit, since the night I'd heard her beg to Be. She could not be the original Chickie, then; wry speculations came to mind once again about Miss Sally Ann — but I put them aside as immaterial to Greene's Candidacy and Assignment; also to attend Dr. Eierkopf, who, despite the bandage around his forehead and his general want of robustness, was fairly bouncing on Croaker's shoulders. Round about them, come to retrieve their errant colleague, sat the delegation of visiting scholars from Frumentius, in the colorful garb of their alma maters. Outfitted with cameras and clipboards, they appeared to be making a careful record of the proceedings.

"I'm Übertrittig, Goat-Boy!" he cried. "My eyes have been opened!" While Croaker croaked croaks of greeting and the Frumentian scholars sniffed my air, felt of my fleece, and made pictogrammatic notes, he reported shrilly that he was a skeptic no more in the matter of Grand-Tutoriality. For he had seen with his own two eyes (abetted, to be sure, by corrective lenses) wonders unexplainable by natural law and student reason: Harold Bray, not two hours past, had appeared on the Hill as it seemed from nowhere; he had changed color and physiognomy before their eyes, leaped over the reflecting pool — a distance of some dozen meters — in a single bound, walked up the vertical face of the Founder's Shaft as if it were a sidewalk, to rig ropes and pulleys for the main event, and then vanished, declaring from nowhere over the loudspeakers that he'd reappear at sunset.

"Wunderbar, Goat-Boy!" he exclaimed. "No tricks! No mirrors! Excuse you: that Bray, He's a real Grand Tutor!"

I smiled. "You believe you've seen a miracle, Dr. Eierkopf?"

"Ja wohl, boy! I believe because I saw one! Five-and-twenty, yet!"

From behind me, where I'd not observed his approach, Stoker scoffed. "You haven't seen anything, Doc. If it's miracles you want, George here can do better." He clapped my shoulder in feigned affection.

"Dean o' Flunks!" cried Eierkopf. "Heraus!"

"He's going to rescue Spielman off the tip of the Shaft at the crucial moment," Stoker announced to the stand at large, pointing at me with his index finger. "That'll prove he's the real Grand Tutor! He might even save the whole University in one whiz-bang, and Pass us all! Why not?"

With the exception of some of my Tutees, whose admission Bray seemed to have arranged for reasons of his own, the privileged spectators in the stands were people of position and influence, many of whom had sniffed disapprovingly at my aroma when I came near; they made it plain now that Stoker's rowdiness offended them on the sober occasion at hand, and called upon the Chancellor to have us both removed from the Hill. Rexford looked with some concern in our direction; his wife whispered something in his ear that made him frown. He let go her hand and consulted a forelock behind him, who glanced at us and nodded.

"Come on!" Stoker taunted me at the top of his voice. "Do some tricks! Show us you're the real G.T.!"

"Down in front!" someone called. At the same moment drums rolled, and I saw that the sun's lower limb had touched the horizon. A marching-band struck up a grave processional; way was made at the barricades for a vee of three black motorcycles, behind the foremost of which walked Max. Bent under the weight of a block-and-tackle rig, he moved with difficulty, but his face was alight. A gasp came from the stands: not at that pitiful spectacle, but at a sudden apparition at the base of the Shaft. One would have sworn its marble lines had been unbroken except for ominous ropes and pulleys; there were certainly no doors or other apertures in the masonry, or hiding-places on the little ledge around its base, and the whole monument was ringed by a moat or reflecting-pool said to be a meter deep and twelve wide — yet in an instant on that empty ledge stood Harold Bray, black-cloaked, his arms held out to the approaching victim!

"How does he do it, Goat-Boy? Show us the trick!" Stoker's tone was half jeer and half dare, but perhaps there was something else in his eyes. I turned my back on him and the others who now looked to see my reaction; bidding Anastasia to remain where she was with T.'s T.'s T., I made my way around to the opposite viewing-stand. Though not inconspicuously attired and scented, I was able to move without attracting great notice, owing to the crowd's preoccupation. As the guards led Max forth, Bray's cloak changed color with each rich chord the trumpets sounded: black to brown, brown to iridescent green, green to a white so like the Shaft's that the cloak seemed transparent, if not vanished — even the mortar-lines were replicated on it! Next he stepped from the ledge onto the surface of the pool and with a kind of sliding gait, as if the water were frozen, walked across to meet my keeper. The guards, no less amazed than the spectators, dismounted and examined the pool, even poked it with their billies to prove that there was no walkway just under the surface.

"Ja ja!" I heard Dr. Eierkopf cry, and his applause was taken up by the others. Even the Chancellor shook his head, much impressed; the professor-generals behind him elbowed each other excitedly; Telerama-men chattered wide-eyed into their microphones. Max looked about under his burden, perhaps for me, as the guards placed a portable walkway over the moat. Catching his eye or nose, I waved a discreet bye-bye and held up the shophar to reassure him that his last request would be honored. He nodded, but some dismay at Bray's performance still wrinkled his brow. Bray saw me then, if he had not before, and as if to taunt me with his prowess, uttered a sound not unlike choiring brass. The musicians put by their instruments, dumbfounded; everyone murmured astonishment except Anastasia and myself, who exchanged calm glances across the space between us, and Tommy's Tommy's Tom, browsing contentedly among discarded candy wrappers and cola cups.

Max was now strapped by his escorts into a kind of canvas diaper or bosun's-breeches on the ledge, his tackle-ropes rigged to those that ran up the face of the Shaft to its flaming tip. His seat-belt was secured, the gangplank removed; the crowd grew still. Again drums rolled; the Chancellor gave a reluctant signal; and as two of the guards hauled upon the halyards to the stroke-call of the third, Max slowly rose. Even the professor-generals most pleased to see him go, like my grandfather, were hushed by the sight.

Bray then glided, as it seemed, to the central space between the stands, turned to face the Shaft, and raised his arms. Though the light was failing fast (shadow, in fact, went up the column as the sun went down, and determined the rate of Max's ascent), he began another series of metamorphoses more remarkable even than the earlier: not only did the color and apparent cut of his vestments change at each halyard-heave, but his face and form as well. Stroke: he was Max himself! Stroke: pretty Anastasia! Stroke: the late G. Herrold! At every transformation the crowd roared Hurrah (sometimes Olé), the band saluted, and Max went up another measure on the Shaft, blowing kisses and pulling his beard. Now Bray was The Living Sakhyan, now great black Croaker, and then in rhythmic series Maurice Stoker, Kennard Sear, Eblis Eierkopf, Lucius Rexford, the brothers Hector (both at once), hat-faced Classmate X, Leonid Alexandrov, and my passèd lady mother! Last of all he assumed the semblance of myself, complete with stick and shophar — and in this guise, as Max neared the blazing tip, proclaimed: "Dear Founder, pass our classmate Maximilian Spielman, who has finished his course in faith and would rest from his labors." Though no public-address system was in sight, his voice carried as if amplified. "A-plus," he said at the end, resoundingly, and from somewhere Mother's voice gave back the echo: "A-plus!"

The moment was at hand. As Max went waving to the peak I put the buckhorn to my lips and blew with all my strength. Teruah! Teruah! Teruah! My keeper, whose dear wise like this campus will not soon see again, combusted in a glorious flare — by the light whereof I saw Tommy's Tommy's Tom race unleashed toward my semblance. His hand was high; joyously he bleat! Bray buzzed and flapped; literally he shed my guise (stick and horn attached), and holding his nose, flung the limp shed at Triple-T. Underneath he was gleaming black, his face hid under a cowl; seeing it was not I, T.'s T.'s Tom lowered horns and charged. Dreadful the hum, horrid the foetor Bray now gave out! He bounded mewards from Tom's creosoted horns; I drove him back with horn and odor of my own. Thus caught between us, he spread his cloak for half a second; more loud his hum than Stokerish engine! Then from under his tunic-front a thing shot forth, shortswordlike, as Tommy struck. The buck shrieked, fell kicking, lay still. I snatched the black vestment, slick as oilskin; Bray flapped it off, face and all (underneath was a blacker), and fled — nay, vanished — in the crowding dark. A glance told me there was no helping T.'s T.'s T. - his legs stuck out stiff, his eyes were filmed over, his belly swelled. I had at shadow, ground, and moat with my stick, lest Bray be camouflaged against them; waded through the icy pool (at great cost of goat-dip) and attacked the Shaft itself. The crowd had watched, dumbstruck; now as I thwacked the pillar they seemed to wake. A voice very like Peter Greene's cried, "What's that I hear a-flapping and a-flying, Leo?"

"Nothingcy!" a Nikolayan voice replied. "I don't hear!"

"Look once by the Shaft-tip!" squealed Dr. Eierkopf. "Der Grosslehrer ist jetzt ein Fliegender!"

I looked up. In the pall above my flaming keeper something large and obscure appeared to rise, rolling and spreading like the smoke itself. The crowd's dismay turned into panic: people leaped from the stands, swarmed over the barricades in both directions, fell upon their knees and girlfriends, clouted neighbors, clutched loved ones. Bravely the band played New Tammany's anthem until overrun. Guards scrambled into the moat, either to arrest or to protect me; at their head grinned Stoker, cursing as he came. His wife I discerned high up in the bleachers, one hand upon her belly, watching with anxious love above the crowd; Mother knitted placidly beside her. And upon us all, gentle ashes — whose if not my gentler keeper's? — commenced to fall. Another term, surely, they would be mine; not now, for though my youthful work was done, that of my manhood remained to do. What it was I clearly saw, and what it would come to. Nonetheless I smiled, leaned on my stick, and, no troubleder than Mom, gimped in to meet the guards halfway.

POSTTAPE

Today, at thirty-three and a third, I record indirectly into WESCAC's storage the last of these tapes — at my protégée's behest, as always, but not, this final time, in her presence. She awaits my coming daily in the Visitation Room, with a pair of youngsters who had far rather be out romping in the lovely spring than languishing in this caged, sunless place. Let her wait.

My self-wound watch runs fast; anyhow I have small time left, and so futile is this work now approaching its end, I am sore tempted to abandon it unfinished and go gambol in the April air myself. She thinks it done already, whose notion it was I render my tale during this my recentest and last detention. Her great nagging faith has alone sustained me, for better or worse, through the monstrous work — this "Revised New Syllabus," as she calls it, which she is convinced will supersede the Founder's Scroll. I smile at that idea, as at the olive lad she calls our son, and in whom I see as much of Stoker, of Croaker, indeed of Bray, as of myself. Supposing even that the Scroll were replaced by these endless tapes, one day to feed Him who will come after me, as I fed once on that old sheepskin — what then? Cycles on cycles, ever unwinding: like my watch; like the reels of this machine she got past her spouse; like the University itself.

Unwind, rewind, replay.

No matter. Futility and Purpose, like Pass and Fail, themselves have meaning only for her sort, and her son's (in whose dark eyes I see already his mother's single-mindedness). For me, Sense and Nonsense lost their meaning on a night twelve years four months ago, in WESCAC's Belly — as did every such distinction, including that between Same and Different. Thus it is, and in no other wise, I have lingered on the campus these dozen years, in the humblest capacity, advising one at a time undergraduates to whom my words convey nothing. Thus it is I accept without much grumble their failings and my own: the abuse of my enemies, the lapses of my friends; the growing pains in both my legs, my goatly seizures, my errors of fact and judgment, my failures of resolve — all these and more, the ineluctable shortcomings of mortal studenthood. And thus it is — empowered as it were by impotence, driven by want of motive — I record this posttape (which she will not know of), in order to speak of the interval between my "triumph" of twelve years back, just recounted, and my present pass. Perhaps too to speak to myself of what is to come: the end Max saw from the beginning; the "Commencement" I saw at the end.

To begin with, my original "Tutees": of the two I Graduated out of hand — my mother "Lady Creamhair" and "My Ladyship" Anastasia — the latter I've spoken of already and will surely return to (as I will return to the Visitation Room where she waits, go out released with her once again into New Tammany, and abide with her until that last release of all, whose imminence she little dreams); the former passed away not long after her grandson's birth, the EAT-rays having got to her more sorely than at first appeared. She died smiling, I understand, with Reginald Hector, Anastasia, and the infant named Giles Stoker at her bedside — but then, she had lived smiling, too, since the day I shocked her out of sense, and, as the effect of her EATing spread, had lapsed unhappily into a more or less constant chuckle. Anastasia's conviction, therefore, that Mother died happy in the knowledge of her "gift to studentdom," I take in the spirit of her other convictions: that "Gilesianism" (her term, for her invention) will cure the student body's ills, and that "our" son will establish "the New Curriculum" on every campus in the University. I long since ceased attempting to explain — never mind what. It is terms now since I raised an eyebrow or even sighed. Not impossibly dear Anastasia was a little EATen herself, that gorgeous night; not impossibly I was too, either in infancy or in one or more of my descents into the Belly. How would I know? Not impossibly (as Dr. Sear once speculated) all studentdom was EATen terms ago — by WESCAC, EASCAC, or both — and its fear of Campus Riot III is but one ironic detail of a mad collective dream.

No matter.

Sear himself is dead too, of course; was so, it turned out, even as I affirmed his Candidacy that afternoon on Founder's Hill. It was his cancer killed him — but alas, not directly. Persuaded, in his clear delirium, that he had achieved not only fatherhood but total illumination, his old sympathy with Gynander became obsessive: blind already, he saw his generative organs as all that stood, as it were, between him and proph-profhood, removed them in the nurse's absence with a shard of tumbler, and expired of massive hemorrhage. No doubt he would have smiled like Mother at the end, had he not lacked at the time a great part of his face. Hedwig, too old and weakened by their past to bear children safely, did indeed prove to be impregnated (as did Anastasia: a circumstance I keep in mind when tempted to protest her extremer convictions); but the birth of her child — a fine strapping girl the hue of dark honey — ruined both her health and her brief lucidity. She and Mother died a week apart in the room they shared for their last term on campus, in the NTC Asylum. Stoker even has it they were sweethearts at the end — but that's Stoker. One never knows. When he says with a grin, "What the flunk, George, love's where you find it," I neither agree nor disagree.

Of the others whose Candidacies I affirmed — or would affirm, or was held to have affirmed — three more are dead now also, not counting Max: Reginald Hector, Classmate X, and Leonid Alexandrov. Of Grandfather the fact was that I neither affirmed nor denied him: were it not for him I'd never have been born; on the other hand, had his will been done I'd have perished at birth — I regard both circumstances with mixed feelings, but in any mood they cancel each other. Reciprocally, as it were, he neither affirmed nor denied my Grand-Tutorship, for though his real preference, like most other people's, was for Bray (insofar as he concerned himself at all with such questions), he never openly supported those who called for my expulsion on the grounds of Grand-Tutorcide. Family loyalty it was, I suppose, or the kind of affection sometimes displayed by old professor-generals for those they once tried and failed to kill. He passed away not long ago, after an extended invalidity, with his belief unshaken that he was beholden to none. His faithful receptionist — who for many years had written all his speeches, managed his affairs, and warmed his old flesh with her young — arranged a splendid funeral at the joint expense of the Military Science Department and the Philophilosophical Fund.

Leonid Alexandrov redefected immediately after Max's Shafting, making his way by some unknown means, blind though he was, through the steel-mesh partition in the Control Room. I never saw him again, nor heard anything of his activities for some years after, during which the Boundary Dispute alternated (as indeed it does yet) between crisis and stalemate — each crisis a little more critical, each stalemate a quantum uneasier, than the last. Then one day two Nikolayans, one old and one not, were caught wrestling at midnight in the Control Room. How they'd managed to open the locked and electrified partition, no one knew. Their tussle gave the alarm; guards from both sides ran to the scene in time to see the younger man push the older through to the NTC side, intentionally or not, and electrocute himself in the process. The older man — who turned out to be Classmate X — might then have made good his own defection, if that was his object, had he not attempted to reclose the door behind him. But the Nikolayan guards were at his heels, and Chementinski (as he called himself again thereafter), uncertain whether they meant to shoot him or defect themselves, kicked the mesh-gate shut, and was immediately shocked to the point of death. Summoning me to the Infirmary before he expired (I was working, between detentions, as a freelance freshman advisor), he told me among other things that his stepson had helped dozens of undergraduates on each side of the Power Line to transfer illicitly to the other, risking his life in the two-way enterprise again and again without remuneration; in the end he had given his life to save that of a secret agent assigned to kill him, but who in fact so admired him that he'd resolved to kill himself instead. The agent, you will have guessed, was Classmate X, to whom Leonid had repeated a hundred times in vain my advice, as he understood it: that the special vanity of suicide was, in X's case, permissible, even passèd, affirming as it did the self that destroyed itself — which self, being anyhow inescapable, had to be got beyond instead of suppressed. The nature of the conflict in the gate I never did get clear — who was trying to do what to whom, and why — but Chementinski seemed convinced of two things: that his stepson perished in his behalf, wrongheadedly or not; and that he himself, in closing the gate on guards from both sides who possibly meant to defect, had committed suicide twice over (because the act was impulsively selfish, and hence fatal to the selfless character called X; and because Chementinski, whose self was thus reaffirmed, was dying of the consequent shock — "by his own hand," he vowed, not altogether consistently or accurately). His final word to me, as he expired, he declared had been Leonid's to him, upon their recognizing each other and themselves on that fatal threshold: "Gratituditynesshoodshipcy!"

When I repeated this story to Stoker during my next term in Main Detention, he pointed out with a sneer that the dying man had been as delirious as Kennard Sear, and consequently that his account, whatever it signified, was probably mistaken. The young man in the mesh had been burned beyond recognition; his older classmate, also badly seared, was bandaged as a mummy. One had only his feverish word for both their identities, and Nikolayan administrators, for example, maintained that Classmate Alexandrov had never redefected in the first place, and that Classmate X had been executed many terms earlier for membership in a forbidden ID-cult.

"That's all quite possible," I agreed — but no longer with a smile, as I would have in terms gone by. Anastasia at once took up the cudgels in behalf of Chementinski's and Leonid's Graduation, and so browbeat us both upon that head (her tongue grew wondrous sharper every year), I was as glad to leave the Visitation Room as was Stoker to fetch me to a cell.

My confinement on that occasion had to do with the tenth anniversary of Bray's rout (others called it his Elevation), just as my present one, ending today, had to do with the twelfth of his initial appearance in the Amphitheater. Both times I had been sought out, in my obscurity, by journalism-majors with long memories, who asked whether I still maintained that I was the Grand Tutor; that I knew the "Way to Commencement Gate" (one could hear quotation-marks in their tone); and that Harold Bray, in whom hundreds and thousands believed as against the handful of my own Tutees, had been a flunkèd impostor. Patiently both times I had replied: yes, I was the Grand Tutor, for better or worse, there was no help for it; yes, I knew what studentdom was pleased to call "the Answer," though that term — indeed the whole proposition — was as misleading as any other (and thus as satisfactory), since what I "knew" neither "I" nor anyone could "teach," not even to my own Tutees. As for Bray, I had not called him flunkèd, I declared: his nature and origin were extraordinary and mysterious as my own; all that could be said was that he was my adversary, as necessary to me as Failure is to Passage. I.e., not only contrary and interdependent, but finally undifferentiable.

"You say you're Bray in a way, hey?" the reporter would ask, in the flip idiom of his fraternity. I would say no more, having said too much already; but the interviews, when broadcast, so inflamed the mass of studentdom against me that my loyalest Tutees (including Lucius Rexford) had me detained for my own protection. I was indifferent — Freedom and Bondage being etc. - so long as I might meet with my current advisees in the Visitation Room. But I shall answer no more questions, even from closest protégés. That much is dark is clear. Did Bray really fly away? they ask me. Who or what was he, and will he reappear? (Some of his many followers believe him still on campus, in one or other of his infinite guises; because at the Maxicaust he took my semblance, some — like Grandfather in his dotage — have even alleged that I am he, and it is by exploiting this uncertainty that Lucius Rexford preserves my life.) Was WESCAC really bested, they want to know, or did it plan the whole thing, including its own short-circuiting? Could there have been two or several "Brays," whereof one was a true Grand Tutor, who for that matter might have taken my semblance to rout me in his? If the GILES is WESCAC's son, and a Grand Tutor, is not WESCAC in a sense the Founder? Might being EATen not be equivalent to "becoming as a kindergartener," and hence the Way to Commencement Gate? Perhaps WESCAC doesn't EAT anyone; or if, as Sear conjectured, everyone has been EATen already, might not everyone be a Graduate, even a Grand Tutor? These things they ask in faith, despair, or hecklish taunt; I make no reply.

Three who aspired to Candidacy I denied. Ira Hector for years pretended not to mind, so long as Reginald was a Candidate — their own conclusion. At his brother's death he seemed more concerned; declaring at once that Grand Tutors are humbugs and that I'm holding out on him for a better price, he has determined to outwait me — to outlive me, if necessary. And he shall, Old Man of the Mall; hornier, wrinkleder, and stingier term by term, he will blink and snap there on his bench when I am no more. Rumor has it — perhaps fostered by him — that I owe my survival as much to his covert influence as to Lucky Rexford's. But he can never pass.

Neither, I fear, can Croaker and Dr. Eierkopf, though the latter, following my rout of Harold Bray (whom now Eierkopf vowed he'd called ein Fliehender, not ein Fliegender), declared himself converted by the testimony of his eyes to my "cause." My advice to him was to join Croaker in darkest Frumentius, where together they might accomplish much, despite the imperfections of their partnership. The idea pleased him: certain Frumentian birds, for example, laid eggs the size of a man's head; he might even rewrite his great treatise, once the fracture in his skull had mended. But in the meanwhile, could I not affirm the Candidacy at least of his roommate? What about the passage from the Scrolls, cut into Croaker's gut: Be ye as the beasts of the woods, that never fail?

"They never fail," I replied, "because they're never Candidates." Gently as I could then I denied them, not failing however to thank them for their assistance, without which I could not have passed myself. They went off together to emergent jungle quads and have not since been seen — though I suspect they may be in terms to come.

Two on the other hand to whom I offered affirmation of their Candidacy refused it: Stoker and Lucius Rexford. Of Stoker little need be said: had he not refused me, I should have had to refuse him; denial is his affirmation, and from that contradiction he — indeed, the campus — draws strength. The Chancellor, to be sure, denies this, along with Stoker's imputation of their fraternity. Partly therefore, his image in New Tammany and around the University remains bright, though there are those who maintain that his administration, however brilliant, has accomplished little of practical consequence. The Boundary Dispute continues unresolved, they point out, and the Chancellory has failed to take a clear position on many grave issues — for example, the vexing question of what really happened at Max Spielman's Shafting. Popular opinion supports Bray's authenticity and holds me guilty of Grand-Tutorcide; conservatives want me Shafted; even the liberals, though generally skeptical of Grand-Tutorship and opposed to Shafting, wonder at my never being brought to trial, if only to "clear the air." Having thus alienated both ends of the Tower-Hall spectrum, Rexford finds it harder every term to keep me from the courts and disciplinary committees. His fastidious official neutrality, combined with much tacit support of my hard-oppressed "followers," has given rise to an ominous coalition of far-left and — right. Not that they care in their heart of hearts about Bray or me; but they see in the "Founder's Hill affair" an opportunity to lever Rexford out of office. Already the Senate has extended New Tammany's statute of limitations for "crimes against studentdom," among the number whereof Grand-Tutorcide is specifically included. My release this time may well spring their trap, and I have not forgotten Rexford's smiling words on the day I offered to affirm him.

From the host of my first Tutees, then, only Peter Greene and Anastasia remain to me. Between them they have assumed and divided the work of "spreading the word of GILES" — Anastasia about Great Mall, Greene to the outlying quads of New Tammany and abroad. A fervid enthusiast, Greene has found in extempore lecturing his true vocation, especially among the lower percentiles of the student body. Impressive he is, too, in his beautiful goatskins and fine red beard, when he points to his patchèd eyes and declares, "I have seen Him, brothers and sisters, and woe to them that drop His course! But I'm here to tell every flunkèd one of you today that it's not too late, reach-Commencement-Gate-the-Gilesian-way-no-matter-how-black-your-transcriptwise! A-plus!" His optimism is boundless; in his mind, "Gilesianism" is already inseparable from "New-Tammanianism," and he would make enrollment in the "New Curriculum" obligatory for all West-Campus studentdom. His wife, I understand, supports him in this endeavor; is in fact the organizing spirit of the "Gilesian Academy," that fugitive society of drop-outs, cranks, and idealists which meets clandestinely out in the tracts of the Forestry Department, and into which Greene has put all his wealth and managerial know-how.

Yet his labors have gained him little except contempt and vilification; even Anastasia, though she openly professes sympathy with his group, declares in private that what he calls "GILES's Answers" are flunkèd misrepresentations. Her own hopes, more and more, are centered in her son. She has brought him up (in the face of Stoker's derision) to believe that his mission on campus is one day to drive out what she ominously calls "the false proph-profs," without mentioning any names, as his "father" once drove out Bray, and to establish "true Gilesianism" in every quad.

How arbitrate between them? Greene has the advantage of a certain charisma and naïve force, as well as an efficient and affluent organization; Anastasia on the other hand makes much of the fact that while he may claim Candidacy, she is the sole living "Gilesian" Graduate on the campus, not to mention being bearer of "His" son. Daily their points of difference grow; their uneasy alliance, should their influence really spread, might someday turn into a schism as profound as that between East and West Campus. Thus far, my presence in the College, if nothing else, has deterred them from open denunciation of each other, and it was with an affecting display of classmateship that they jointly sponsored the "Revised New Syllabus" — even coerced me, with every show of respect, into this vain, inescapable labor, by threatening to send Tombo "off to school" should I not cooperate. I consented at once.

Tombo, Tombo! How they hate to bring you to the Visitation Room! How it galls them to see us together, we who know nothing of Gilesianism, New Curriculum, or Revised New Syllabus, but see termless Truth in each other's eyes! Watch out for Auntie Stacey, Tombo, apparently so doting, actually so jealous on her son's behalf, who bullies you cruelly in pretended play. Beware Uncle Peter, whom you so resemble: don't go with him to visit his sawmills; let him not lure you to the tapelift with all-day suckers! "Old Black George's" daughter's son, Tombo is; abandoned by his mother the fickle ex-secretary; raised in the Unwed Co-ed's Nursery of the New Tammany Lying-in; named by me what time I plucked him from that heartless, well-meaning fold and made him my errand-boy. Despite his red hair, it is G. Herrold I hear calling in his fleeced voice, so deep for a lad's; his mother to my knowledge never numbered buck-goats among her paramours, but Tombo's eyes are of the cast of Redfearn's Tom's and his noble line — hence my name for him. In those eyes alone upon this campus — not Greene's, gone; not Anastasia's, grown so hard; not "Giles Stoker's," all gleam and no vision — I see the reflection of myself, my hard history and my fate. He does not know, nor can I teach him, preciousest Tutee though he is; but if fate grant him time enough (he has, alas, neither Greene's nor G. Herrold's robust health, nor the wiry hardness of his namesakes or myself), and grant me to spirit him out of peril into some obscure pasturage — he will learn, will my Tombo! Yes, and one day hear, in his far sanctuary, a call, a summons…

No matter. Tombo's end is not given me to know, but I know my own, that rushes towards me like Triple-T. The wheel must come full circle; Fate's pans, tipped a brief while mewards, will tip back, like the pans of history. No one these days need die for the curriculum of his choice, as in terms gone by; alas, would anyone be willing to? The passion that exalts is the same that persecutes; if New Tammany's new Auditorium has no flogging-room beneath it, neither has it a soaring campanile above. Never was enrollment greater, or the average student less concerned for the Finals. Professors have ceased to kick the child who fidgets while they lecture: is it not that they also care less strongly than they ought whether he Passes, or believe less strongly that their words will be his Answers? The present Chancellory — by this one praised, by that condemned — has like any other the vices of its virtues, precisely. To gain this, one sacrifices that; the pans remain balanced for better and worse…

Nay, rather, for worse, always for worse. Late or soon, we lose. Sudden or slow, we lose. The bank exacts its charge for each redistribution of our funds. There is an entropy to time, a tax on change: four nickels for two dimes, but always less silver; our books stay reconciled, but who in modern terms can tell heads from tails?

And as with the profession, so with the professor; so even with Grand Tutors. I go this final time to teach the unteachable, and shall fail. A handful will attend me, and they in vain. The rest will snore in the aisles as always, make paper airplanes from my notes, break wind in reply to my questions. I know they will steal my lunch, expose their privates in the cloakroom, traffic in comic-books under the seminar-table. My voice grows hoarse; the chalk will break in my hand. I know what Seniors will murmur in the stacks and Juniors chant at their torchlight rallies. A day approaches when the clerks in Tower Hall will draw up forms; Stoker's iron tools are oiled and ready; it will want but a nod from the Chancellor to set my "advisees" on me in a pack. They will not remember who ordered their schedules out of chaos and put right their college; who routed the false Grand Tutor, showed the Way to Commencement Gate, and set down this single hope of studentdom, The Revised New Syllabus. Those same hands that lovingly one term put off my rags, sponged me in dip — will they not flip a penny for the golden fleece they dressed me in? My humble rank and tenure will be stripped from me, as were Max's; my protégés — aye, Tombo, even you, even you! — will curse the hour I named them beneficiaries of my poor policy. Naked, blind, dishonored, I shall be coasted on a rusty bicycle from Great Mall. Past Observatory and Amphitheater, Turnstile and Scrapegoat Grate, George's Gorge and intersection — yea, past the remotest Model Silo, beyond the Forestry Camps and the weirs of the Watershed Researchers — I shall make my way, in lowest gear, to the first spring of the last freshet on the highest rise of Founder's Hill. There, in a riven grove beyond the Shaft, one oak stands in the rock: its top is crowned with vine, its tap-root cleaves to the spring beneath and drives I think to the fiery bowels of the campus. At that day's dusking, when lights come on in Faculty Row and my enemies raise their liquor, I'll make a goblet of my hands, drink hot toddies from that spring. My parts will be hung with mistletoe, my cleft hold the shophar fast; the oak will yield, the rock know my embrace. Three times will lightning flash at a quarter after seven, all the University respeaking my love's thunder — Teruah! Tekiah! Shebarim! — and it will be finished. The claps will turn me off. Passed, but not forgotten, I shall rest.

POSTSCRIPT TO THE POSTTAPE

Anticlimax, a vice in dramatic fictions, is clearly no failing in a work of the nature of R.N.S., whereas textual integrity is of the first importance. As agent for Stoker Giles (or "Giles Stoker"), therefore, and aspirant professor of Gilesianism in whatever college may see fit to appoint me, I must observe — reluctantly — that however affecting here and there might be the rhetoric of the document entitled "Posttape" (I myself am unmoved), there is every reason to believe it spurious. An interpolation of later Gilesians, perhaps — more likely of antigilesians — or an improvisation of Wescacus malinoctis, but not the scripture, so to speak, of George Giles, Goat-Boy and Grand Tutor. Nor of His son, whom the document so unfairly and uncharacteristically maligns. I include the "Posttape" with the manuscript proper only because I found it (much soiled and creased) stuck among the pages left in my trust by the Grand Tutor's son, and feel unauthorized to delete what he so magnanimously let stand. That is, if he even knew of its existence; it was folded crudely and inserted between two random pages, as though in haste. Quite possibly it is the work of some crank or cynic among Stoker Giles's contemporaries; indeed, the typescript languished unguarded so long on my desk, the "Posttape" might even be some former colleague's idea of a practical joke.

In any case, one ought not to take it seriously. Consider the internal evidence against its authenticity: in the "Post-tape" the "Grand Tutor" puts quotation-marks around such terms as "My Ladyship" and "Lady Creamhair," a practice followed nowhere else in the manuscript; also around "Revised New Syllabus" and "Gilesianism" — as if he had grown contemptuous of the terms! More revealingly, he mentions technological and cultural phenomena whose existence is never previously alluded to, such as airplanes and comicbooks; and his references to nickels, dimes, and pennies, for example, seem flatly discrepant with the economic system of New Tammany College implied by the rest of the chronicle — and so important to an understanding of the Boundary Dispute. It may be objected by ingenious apologists that in one instance a reference of this sort is preceded by the ambiguous phrase "in modern terms," which, though it patently means "nowadays," might be said to suggest in addition a translation — by WESCAC or the Grand Tutor — of His University into our terms. Indeed, there is a sense in which the same may be said of the entire Syllabus — of all artistic and pedagogical conceit, for that matter, especially of the parable kind. But suffice it to say, in reply to this objection, that the Grand Tutor seems nowhere else in the vast record of His life and teachings to resort to this device — only in the gloomy "Posttape."

Which brings us to the real proof of its spurious character. Even if none of the above-mentioned discrepancies existed, the hopeless, even nihilistical tone of those closing pages militates against our believing them to be the Grand Tutor's own. Having brought us to the heart of Mystery, "He" suddenly shifts to what can most kindly be called a tragic view of His life and of campus history. Where are the joy, the hope, the knowledge, and the confident strength of the man who routed Harold Bray, affirmed the Candidacies of His Tutees and readied Himself to teach all studentdom the Answer? "Not teachable" indeed! And the unpardonable rejection of Greene, of Anastasia, of His own son, in favor of a sickly mulatto boy with the improbable name of Tombo — -

But no, the idea is ridiculous. Some impostor and antigiles composed the "Posttape," to gainsay and weaken faith in Giles's Way. Even the type of those flunkèd pages is different!

J.B.

FOOTNOTE TO THE POSTSCRIPT

TO THE POSTTAPE

The type of the typescript pages of the document entitled "Postscript to the Posttape" is not the same as that of the "Cover-Letter to the Editors and Publisher."

ED.

Scan Notes v3.0:

Proofed this very thoroughly. There are many made-up and compound words in the story — any word that was questionable was looked up in the DT. There are 9 or 10 images embedded in this RTF file, most of them musical scores that fall in the midst of action in the book. Since the file is only approx 5.5MB with them, I decided to keep them embedded despite the extra size it lends the file.

The few annotations near the beginning are included directly below the paragraph that indicates them, and are done in 10pt to contrast against the regular 12pt text.

Checked Paragraphs carefully since there were so many that seemed to run on forever — all are now correct.

Checked every occurance of commenced/commencèd, passed/passèd, and flunked/flunkèd against the DT to ensure that the special character was always used where appropriate, and not used when it was not indicated in the DT. On a couple of occaisions it seemed that the DT might be mistaken, but I always deferred to it and not my own judgement when they did not concur.

As far as the play in the middle of the novel goes, I spent about 6 hours formatting just that. It is done in Arial 10pt, italicised. In many cases, the rhyme is completed by another character, or after interruption by another character. I reproduced this effect with white space, as it was represented in the book. Example:

TALIPED: I never took the trouble to find out.

BROTHER-IN-LAW: / noticed.

TALIPED: Excellent. But if the lout

END