"Professor Sharon. What an abominable thing that was." Krupp stared into the light for a long time. "That was a load of rock salt in the butt. If my damn Residence Life Relations staff wasn't tenured and unionized I'd fire 'em, find the scum who did that and boot 'em onto the Turnpike. However. We should resist the temptation to do something we wouldn't otherwise do just because a peripherally involved figure has suffered. We all revere Professor Sharon, but this project would not erase his tragedy."
"Well, I can only go on my gut feelings," said Sarah, "but I don't think what you've said applies. I'm pretty confident about this project."
Krupp looked impressed. "If that's the case, Sarah, then I should meet this fellow and give him a fair hearing. Maybe I'll have the same gut reaction as you do."
"Should I have him contact you?" This was a reprieve, she thought; but if Casimir had been so obviously nervous in front of her, what would he do under rhetorical implosion from Krupp? It was only reasonable, though.
"Fine," said Krupp, and handed her his card.
Their other differences of opinion were hardly worth arguing over. Halving the funding for the Basque Eroticism Study Cluster was not going to make political waves. The meeting came to a civil and reasonable end. Krupp showed her out, and she smiled at the old secretary and maneuvered the scarlet carpets of the administration bloc and dawdled by each painting, finally exiting into a broad shiny electric-blue cinderblock corridor. By the time she made it back to her room she had adjusted to the Plex again, and taught herself to see and hear as little of it as possible.
Ephraim Klein and some of his friends occasionally gathered in his room to smoke cheap cigars, if only because they detested them slightly less than John Wesley Fenrick did. Fenrick set the Go Big Red Fan up in the vent window and blew chill November air across the room, forcing perhaps eighty percent of the fumes out the door. A defect of the Rules was that they made no provision for exchange of air pollution, unfortunately for Fenrick, who despite his tradition of chemically induced states of awareness was fanatically clean.
Caught in a random eddy blown up by the Fan, a cigar resting in a stolen Burger King tinfoil ashtray fell off one evening and rolled several inches, crossing the boundary line into Fenrick's side of the room. It burned there for a minute or two before its owner, a friend of Klein's, made bold to reach across and retrieve it. The result was a brief brown streak on Fenrick's linoleum. Fenrick did not notice it immediately, but after he did, he grew more enraged every day. Klein was obligated to clean up "that mess," in his view. Klein's opinion was that anything on Fenrick's side of the room was Fenrick's problem; Klein was not paying fifteen thousand dollars a year and studying philosophy so he could be a floor-scrubber for a rude asshole geek like John Wesley Fenrick. He pointed to a clause in the Rules which tentatively bore him out. They screamed across the boundary line on this issue for nearly a week. Then, one day, I heard Ephraim yelling through their open door.
"Jesus! What the hell are youHa! I don't believe this shit!" He stuck his head outside and yelled, "Hey, everybody, come look at what this dumb fucker's doing!"
I looked.
For reasons I do not care to think about, John Wesley Fenrick kept a milkbottle full of dirt. When I looked in, he had pulled its lid off and was scattering red Okie loam over the boundary line and all over Ephraim's side of the room. Ephraim appeared to be more amused than angry, though he was very angry, and insisted that as many people as possible come and witness. Fenrick sat down calmly to watch television, occasionally smiling a small, solitary smile.
Again the question of my responsibility comes up. But how could I know it was an event of great significance? I had also seen lovers' quarrels in the Cafeteria; why should I have known this was much more important? I had no authority to order these people around. Moreover, I had no desire to. I had done as much as I could. I had shown them how to be reasonable, and if they could not get the hang of it, it was not my problem.
The next time I spectated, Ephraim Klein was alone, studying on his bed with Gregorian chants filling the room. I had come to see why he had borrowed my broom. He had used it to make a welcome mat for his roomie. Right in front of the Go Big Red Fanthe movable portion of the wall that served as a gate he had swept all the dirt into an even rectangle about one by two feet and half an inch thick. In the dirt he had inscribed with his finger:
GET A BUTT
FUCK JOHNNIE-WONNIE
When Fenrick got home I followed him discreetly to his room, to keep an eye on things. When I got to their doorway he was staring inscrutably at the welcome mat. He bent and opened the fan-gate, stepped through without disturbing the dirt and closed it. He turned, and looked for a while at the smirking Ephraim Klein. Then, with quiet dignity, John Wesley Fenrick reached down and set the Fan to HI, creating a small simulation of Oklahoma in the 1930's on the other side of the room.
Once I was satisfied that there would be no violence, I left and abandoned them to each other.
Septimius Severus Krupp stood behind a cheap plywood lectern in Lecture Hall 13 and spoke on Kant's Ethics. The fifty people in the audience listened or did not, depending on whether they (like Sarah and Casimir and Ephraim and I) had come to hear the lecture, or (like Yllas Freedperson) to see the Stalinist Underground Battalion Operative throw the banana-cream pie into S. S. Krupp's face.
I had come because I was fascinated by Krupp, and because opportunities to hear him speak were rare. Sarah, I think, had come for like reasons. Ephraim was a philosophy major, and Casimir came because this was the type of thing that you were supposed to do in a university. As for the SUBbies, they were getting edgy. What the fuck was wrong with the plan, man? they seemed to say, looking back and forth at one another sincerely and shaking their heads. The first phases had gone well. Operative 1 had gone out to the stageleft doorway, twenty feet to Krupp's side, opened the door and propped it, then made a show of smoking a cigarette and blowing smoke out the door. It was obvious that she had severe reality problems by the way she posed there, putting on a casual air so weirdly melodramatic that everyone could see she must be a guerilla mime, a psycho or simply luded out of her big spherical frizzy-haired bandanna-wrapped head. It was also odd that she would show so much concern for others' lungs, considering that her friends were making loud, sarcastic noises and distracting gestures, but unfortunately S. S. Krupp's aides were too straight to tell the difference between a loony and a loony with a plan, and so they suspected nothing when she returned to her seat and forgot to shut the door again.
Ten minutes later, right on time, Operative 2 had arrived late, entering via the stage-right doorway and leaving it, of course, propped open. He moved furtively, like a six-foot mouse with thallium phenoxide poisoning, jerking his head around as if to look for right-wing death squads and CIA snipers.
But Operative 3 did not appear with the banana-cream pie. Where was he? Everyone knew about Krupp's CIA connections, and it was quite possibledon't laugh, the CIA is everywhere, look at Iran that he might have been intercepted by fascist goons and bastinadoed and wired to an old engine block and thrown into a river. Perhaps the death squads were waiting in their rooms now, test-firing their silenced UZIs into cartons of Stalinist pamphlets.
In fact, Operative 3, when making his plans for the evening, had forgotten that once he bought the banana-cream pie at the convenience store it would have to thaw out. There is little political relevance in bouncing a rock-hard disc of frozen custard off S. S. Krupp's facethe splatter is the point and so for half an hour he had been in a Plex restroom, holding the pie underneath the automatic hand dryer as unobtrusively as possible. Whenever he heard approaching steps, he stopped and dropped the pie into his knapsack, and held his hands nonchalantly under the hot air; hence he had succeeded only in liquefying the top two millimeters of the pie and ruffling the ring of whipped cream. He then repaired to a spot not far from the lecture hall where he rested the pie on a hot water pipe. There should be plenty of time left in the lecture, though it was hard to judge these things when stoned: Krupp's voice droned on and on, incomprehensible as all that logic and philosophy.