Virgil opened the door and was met by a clamor of voices from several advanced academic figures. Casimir looked around the room: a firetrap stuffed with books and papers and every imaginable variety of electronic junk. A Geiger counter hung out the window into a deep air shaft, clicking every second or two. In one corner a 1940's radio was hooked up to a technical power supply and wired into the guts of a torn-open telephone so that Virgil could make hands-off phone calls. An old backless TV in another corner enabled Virgil to monitor the shop outside. Electronic parts, hunks of wire, junk-food wrappers and scraps of paper littered the floor. And in three separate places sat those little plastic trays Casimir saw everywhere, overflowing with tiny seedsrat poison.
"Damn!" spat Casimir as Virgil reentered. "There's enough of that poison in this room alone to kill every rat in this city. What's their problem with that stuff anyway?"
Virgil snorted. Everyone knew the rat poison was ubiquitous; the wastebaskets might go a month without emptying, but when it came to rat poison the B-men were fearsomely diligent, seeming to pass through walls and locked doors like Shaolin priests to scatter the poison-saturated kernels. "It's cultural," he explained. "They hate rats. You should read some Scythian mythology. In Crotobaltislavonia it's a capital crime to harbor them. That's why they had a revolution! The old regime stopped handing out free rat poison."
"I'm serious," said Casimir. "I've got an illegal kitten in my room, and If they keep breaking in to spread poison, they'll find it or let it out or poison it."
"Or eat it. Seriously, you should have mentioned it, Casimir. Let me help you out."
Casimir rested his face in his hand. "I suppose you also have an arrangement with the B-men."
"No, no, much too complicated. I do almost all my work at the computer terminal, Casimir. You can accomplish anything there. See, a few years ago a student had a boa constrictor in his room that got poisoned by the B-men, and even though it was illegal he sued the university for damages and won. There are still a lot of residents with pets whom the administration doesn't want to antagonize, because of connections or whatever. Some students are even allergic to the poison. So, they keep a list of rooms which are not to be given any poison. All I have to do is put your room on it."
Casimir was staring intently at Virgil. "Wait a minute. How did you get that kind of access? Aren't there locks? Access checks?" "There are some annoyances involved."
"I suppose with photographic memory you could do a lot on the computer."
"Helps to have the Operator memorized too."
"Oh, fuck! No!"
Casimir, I am sure, was just as surprised as I had been. The Operator was an immense computer program consisting entirely of numbersmachine code. Without it, the machine was a useless lump. With the Operator installed, it was a tool of nearly infinite power and flexibility. It was to the computer as memory, instinct and intelligence are to the human brain.
Virgil handed Casimir a canister of paper computer tape. The label read, "1843 SURINAM CENSUS DATA VOLUME 5. FIREWOOD USAGE ESTIMATES AND PROJECTIONS."
"Ignore that," said Virgil. "It's a program in machine code. It'll put your room on the no-poison list, and your cat will be safe, unless the B-men forget or decide to ignore the rule, which is a possibility." Casimir barely looked at the tape and stared distantly at Virgil. "What have you been doing with this knowledge?" he whispered. "You could get back at E13S."
Virgil smiled. "Tempting. But when you can do what I can, you don't go for petty revenge. All I do, really, is fight the Worm, which is really my only passion these days. It's why I stay around instead of getting a decent job. It's a sabotage program. It's probably the greatest intellectual achievement of the nineteen-eighties, and it's the only thing I've ever found that is so indescribably difficult and complex and beautiful that I haven't gotten bored with it."
"Why would anyone do such a thing? It must be costing the Megaversity millions."
"I don't know," said Virgil, "but it's great to have a challenge."
Sarah and I were in her room with my toolbox. Outside, the Terrorists were trying to get in. I sat on her bed, as she had commanded, silent and neutral.
"When did they start calling themselves the Terrorists," she asked during a lull.
"Who knows? Maybe Wild and Crazy Guys was too old-fashioned."
"Maybe the hijacking of that NATO tank yesterday gave them the idea. That got lots of coverage. Shit, here they are again." Cheerfully screaming, another Airhead was dragged down the hail to be given her upside-down cold shower. The original Terrorist plan had been to drag the Airheads to the bathroom by their hair, as in olden times, but after a few tries they were convinced that this really was painful, so now they were holding on to the feet.
"Terrorists, Terrorists, we're a mean, sonofabitch," came a hoarse chant as a new group gathered in front of Sarah's door. "Come on, Sarah," their leader shouted in a heavy New York accent. He was trying to sound fatherly and patient, but instead sounded anxious and not very bright. "It'll be a lot better for you if you just come out now. We're tickling Mitzi right now and she's going to tell us where the master key is, and once we get that we'll come in and you'll get ad-dition-al pun-ish-ment."
"God," Sarah whispered to me, "these dorks think I'm just playing hard-to-get. Hope they enjoy it."
"Give the word and I'll shoo them off," I said again.
"Wouldn't help. I have to deal with this myself. Don't be so macho."
"Sorry. Sometimes it works to be macho, you know."
Their previous effort to flash her out of her room had failed. "Flashing" was the technique of squirting lighter fluid Under a door and throwing in a match. It wasn't as dangerous as it sounded, but it invariably smoked the victim out. Powdering was a milder form of this: an envelope was filled with powder, its mouth slid under the door, and the envelope stomped on, exploding a cloud of powder into the room. Three days earlier this had been done to Sarah by some Air-heads. A regular vacuum cleaner just blew the powder out again, so we brought my wet-dry vacuum up and filled it with water and had better results, though she and her room still smelled like babies. She had purchased a heavy rubber weatherstrip from the Mall's hardware store and we had just finished installing it when the flashing attempt had taken place. From listening to the Terrorists on the other side of the door, I had now become as primitive as they hadit was no longer a negotiable situation and was itching to knock heads.
"Why don't you stop bothering me?" she yelled, trying too hard to sound strong and steady. "I really don't want to play this game with you. You got what you wanted from the others, so why don't you leave? You have no right to bother me."
At this, they roared. "Listen, bitch, this is our sister floor, we decide what our rights are! No one escapes from the rule of the Terrorists, Terrorists, we're a mean, sonofabitch! We'll get in sooner or laterface up to it!"
Another one played the nice guy. "Listen, Sarahhey, is that her name? Right. Uh, listen, Sarah. We can make life pretty hard on you. We're just trying to initiate you into our sister floor it's a new tradition. Remember, if you don't lock your door, we can come in; and if you do lock it, we can penny you in."
The Airheads had once pennied Sarah in. The doors opened inward and locked with deadbolts. If the deadbolt was locked and the door pushed inward with great force, the friction between the bolt and its rectangular hole in the jamb became so great that it was impossible for the occupant to withdraw the bolt to unlock the door. One could not push inward on the door all the time, of course, but it was possible to wedge pennies between the front of the door and the projecting member of the jamb so tightly that the occupant was sealed in helplessly. Since this maneuver only worked when the owner of the room was inside with the door locked, it was used discourage people from the unfriendly habit of locking their doors. Sarah was pennied in just before a Student Government meeting, and she had to call me so that I could run upstairs and throw myself against the door until the pennies fell out.