Here he stopped. Krupp had listened patiently, occasionally looking away to restack his notes or puff on his cigar. "No," he said. "Do you have a question. son?"
Emotionally wounded, Dex Fresser shook his head back and forth and gestured around it as though tearing off a heavy layer of tar. While his companions supported him, another SUBbie rose to take his place. She was of average height, with terribly pale skin and a safety pin through her septum. She rose like a zeppelin on power takeoff and began to read in a singsong voice from a page covered with arithmetic.
"Mister Krupp, sir. Last year. According, to the Monoplex Monitor, you, I mean the Megaversity Corporation ruling clique, spent ten thousand dollars on legal fees for union-busting firms. Now. There are forty thousand students at. American Megaversity. This means that on the average, you spent four thousand million dollars on legal fees for union-busting alone! How do you justify that, when in this very city people have to pay for their own abortions?"
Krupp simply stared in her direction and took three long slow puffs on his cigar without saying anything. Then he turned to the blackboard. "This weather's not getting any better," he said, quickly drawing a rough outline of the United States. "It's this low pressure center up here. See, the air coming into it turns around counterclockwise because of the Coriolis effect. That makes it pump cold air from Canada into our area. And we can't do squat about it. It's a hell of a thing." He turned back to the audience. "Next question!"
The SUB wanted to erupt at this, but they were completely nonplussed and hardly said anything. "I've taken too many questions from the kill-babies-not-seals crowd," Krupp announced. He called on Ephraim Klein, who had been waving his hand violently. "President Krupp, I think the question of adherence to an inner Law is just a semantic smokescreen around the real issue, which is neurological. Our brains have two hemispheres with different functions. The left one handles the day-to-day thinking, conventional logical thought, while the right one handles synthesis of incoming information and subconsciously processes it to form conclusions about what the basic decisions should beit converts experience into subconscious awareness of basic patterns and cause-and-effect relationships and gives us general direction and a sense of conscience. So this stuff about autonomy is nothing more than an effort by neurologically ignorant metaphysicists to develop, by groping around in the dark, an explanation for behavior patterns rooted in the structure of the brain."
Krupp answered immediately. "So you mean to say that the right hemisphere is the source of what I call the inner Law, and that rather than being a Law per se it is merely a set of inclinations rooted in past experience which tells the left hemisphere what it should do."
"That's rightin advanced, conscious people. In primitive unconscious bicameral people, it would verbally speak to the left hemisphere, coming as a voice from nowhere in times of decision. The left hemisphere would be unable to do otherwise. There would be no decision at all so you would have perfect adherence to the Law of the right hemisphere voice, absolute autonomy, though the voice would be attributed to gods or angels."
Krupp nodded all the way through this, squinting at Klein. "You're one of those, eh?" he asked. "I've never been convinced by Jaynes' theory myself, though he has some interesting points about metaphors. I don't think an ignorant carpenter like Jesus had all that flawless theology pumped into the left half of his brain by stray neural currents." He thought about it for a moment. "Though it would be a lot quieter around here if everyone were carrying his stereo around in his skull."
"Jesus," said Ephraim Klein, "you don't believe in God, do you? You?"
"Well, I don't want to spend too much time on this freshman material, uhwhat's your name? Ezekiel? Ephraim. But you ought to grapple sometime with the fact that this materialistic monism of yours is self-refuting and thus totally bankrupt. I guess it's attractive to someone who's just discovered he's an intellectual sure was to me thirty years ago but sometime you've got to stop boxing yourself in with this intellectual hubris."
Klein nearly rocketed from his chair and for a moment I said nothing. He was bolt upright, supporting his weight on i one fist thrust down between his thighs into the seat, chewing deeply on his lower lip and staring, to use a Krupp ~ phrase, "like a coon on the runway." "Non sequitur! Ad hominem!" he cried.
"I know, I know. Tell you what. Stick around and I'll listen to your Latin afterward, we're losing our audience." Krupp began looking for a new questioner. From the back of the hall came the sound of a fold-down seat bounding back up into position, and we turned to make out the ragged figure of Bert Nix.
"Krupp cuts a fart! The sphinxter cannot hold!" he bellowed hoarsely, and sat back down again Krupp mainly ignored this, as his aides strode up the aisle to show Mr. Nix where the exit was and turned his attention to the next questioner, a tall redheaded SUBbie who accused Krupp of accepting bribes to let wealthy idiots into the law school. Red added, "I keep asking you this question, Septimius, and you've never answered it yet. When are you going to pay some attention to my question?"
Krupp looked disgusted and puffed rapidly, staring at him coldly. Bert Nix paused in the doorway to shout: "My journey is o'er rocks & Mountains, not in pleasant vales; I must not sleep nor rest because of madness & dismay."
"Yeah," said Krupp, "and I give you the same answer every time, too. I didn't do that. There's no evidence I did. What more can I say? I genuinely want to satisfy you."
"You just keep slinging the same bullshit!" shouted the SUBbie, and slammed back down into his seat.
Casimir Radon listened to these exchanges with consuming interest. This was what he had dreamed of finding at college: small lectures on pure ideas from the president of the university, with discussion afterward. That the SUBbies had disrupted it with a pie-throwing made him sick; he had stared at them through a haze of anger for the last part of the meeting. Had he been sitting by the side door he could have tripped that bastard. Which would have been good, because Sarah Jane Johnson was sitting there three rows in front of him, totally unaware of his existence as usual.
Sarah's entrance, several minutes before the start of the lecture, had thrown Casimir into a titanic intellectual struggle. He now had to decide whether or not to say "hi" to her. After all, they had had a date, if you could call stammering in the Megapub for two hours a date. Later he had realized how dull it must have been for her, and was profoundly mortified. Now Sarah was sitting just twenty feet away, and he hated to disrupt her thoughts by just crashing in uninvited; better for her not to know he was there. But in case she happened to notice him, and wondered why he hadn't said "hi," he made up a story: he had come in late through the back doors.