"Shit, what the fuck?" someone inquired.
Rather than trying to explain, we proceeded from the room. "I like that bitch," someone said as we were leaving, "but she's weird. I dunno what's wrong with her."
The Mailroom was an armistice zone between Hansen's Gang and the Journalism Department. The elevators here descended to the mail docks, making this one of the few ports of entry to the Plex. The publicity-minded Crotobaltislavonians had worked out an agreement with one of the networksyou know which, if you watched any news in this period allowing the camera crews to come and go through this room. The network's hired guards all toted machine guns. We counted twenty automatic weapons in this room alone, which probably meant that the network had the entire Axis outgunned.
In exchange for a brief interview, which was never aired, and for all the information we could provide about other parts of the Plex, we were allowed into the Journalism bloc. Here we picked up a three-man minicam crew who followed along for a while. Emeritus was magnificently embarrassed and insisted on walking behind the camera. One of the crew was an AM student, and I talked to him about the network's operations.
"You've got a hell of a lot of firepower. You guys are the most powerful force in the Plex. How are you using it?"
The student shrugged. "What do you mean? We protect our crews and equipment. All the barbarians are afraid of us." "Right, obviously," I said. "But I noticed recently that a lot of people around here are starving, being raped, murderedyou know, a lot of bum-out stuff. Do those guards try to help out? You can spare a few."
"Well, I don't know," he said uncomfortably. "That's kind of network-level policy. It goes against the agreement. We can go anywhere as long as we don't interfere. If we interfere, no agreement."
"But if you've already negotiated one agreement, can't you do more? Get some doctors into the building, maybe?"
"No way, man. No fucking way. We journalists have ethics." The camera crew turned back when we reached the border of the Geoanthropological Planning Science Department, a bloc with only two entrances. My office was here, and I hoped I could get us through to the other side. The heavy door was bullet-pocked, the lock had been shot at more than once, but it was blocked from the other side and we could hear a guard beyond. Nearby, in an alcove, under a pair of drinking fountains, stretched out straight and dead on the floor, was a middle-aged faculty member, his big stoneware coffee mug still clenched in his cold stiff fingers. He had apparently died of natural causes.
As it turned out, the guard was a grad student I knew, who let us in. He was tired and dirty, with several bandages, a bearded face, bleary red eyes and matted hairjust as he had always looked. Three other grads sat there in the reception room reading two-year-old U.S. News and World Reports and chomping hunks of beef jerky.
While my friends took a breather, I stopped by my office and checked my mailbox. On the way back I peeked into the Faculty Lounge.
The entire Geoanthropological Planning Science faculty was there, sitting around the big conference table, while a few favored grad students stood back against the walls. Several bowls of potato chips were scattered over the table and at least two kegs were active. The room was dark; they were having a slide show.
"Whoops! Looks like I tilted the camera again on this one," said Professor Longwood sheepishly, nearly drowned out by derisive whoops from the crowd. "How did this get in here? This is part of the Labrador tundra series. Anyway, it's not a bad shot, though I used the wrong film, which is why everything's pink. That corkscrew next to the caribou scat gives you some idea of scale" but my opening the door had spilled light onto the image, and everyone turned around to look at me.
"Bud!" cried the Chair. "Glad you could make it! Want some beer? It's dark beer."
"Sounds good," I said truthfully, "but I'm just stopping in."
"How are things?" asked Professor Longwood.
"Fine, fine. I see you're all doing well too. Have you been outside much? I mean, in the Plex?"
There was bawdy laughter and everyone looked at a sheepish junior faculty member, a heavyset man from Upper Michigan. "Bert here went out to shoot some slides," explained the Chair, "and ran into some of those hayseeds. He told them he was a journalist and they backed off, but then they saw he didn't have a press pass, so he had to kick one of them in the nuts and give the other his camera!"
"Don't feel bad, Bert," said a mustachioed man nearby. "Well get a grant and buy you a new one." We all laughed.
"So you're here for the duration?" I asked.
"Shouldn't last very long," said a heavily bearded professor who was puffing on a pipe. "We are working up a model to see how long the food needs of the population can last. We're using survival ratios from the 1782 Bulgarian famineactually quite similar to this situation. We're having a hell of a time getting data, but the model says it shouldn't last more than a week. As for us, we've got an absolute regional monopoly on beer, which we trade with the Journalism people for food."
"Have you taken into account the rats and bats?" I asked. Huh? Where?" The room was suddenly still.
"We've got giant rats downstairs, and billions of bats upstairs. The rats are this long. Eighty to a hundred pounds. No hearts. I hear they've worked their way up to the lower sublevels now, and they're climbing up through the stacks of garbage in the elevator shafts." "Shit!" cried Bert, beating his fists wildly on the table. "What a time to lose my fucking camera!"
"Let's catch one," said his biologist wife.
"Well, we could adjust the model to account for exogenous factors," said the bearded modeler.
"We'd have people eating rats, and rats eating people," said the mustachioed one.
"And rats eating bats."
"And bats eating bugs eating dead rats."
"The way to account for all that is with a standard input! output matrix," said the Chair commandingly.
"These rats sound similar to wolverines," said Longwood, cycling through the next few slides. "I think I have some wolverine scats a few slides ahead, if this is the series I think it is.,' Seeing that they had split into a slide and a modeling faction, I stepped out. A few minutes later we were back on the road. We were attacked by a hopeless twit who was trying to use a shotgun like a long-range rifle. I was nicked in the cheek by one ball. Hyacinth splashed him all over a piece of abstract sculpture made of welded-together lawn ornaments. The GASFers, who were humiliated that a female should carry the big gun, were looking as though they'd never have another erection.
We passed briefly through the Premed Center, which was filed with pale mutated undergrads dissecting war casualties and trying to gross each other out. I yelled at them to get outside and assist the wounded, but received mostly blank stares. "We can't," said one of them, scandalized, "we're not even in med school yet."
From here we entered the Medical Library, and from there, the Library proper.
Huge and difficult to guard, the Library was the land of the refugees. It had no desirable resources, but was a fine place in which to hide because the bookshelves divided into thousands of crannies. Waves of refugees made their way here and holed up, piling books into forts and rarely venturing out.
The first floor was unguarded and sparsely occupied. We stuck to the open areas and proceeded to the second floor. Here was a pleasant surprise. An organized relief effort had been formed, mostly by students in Nursing, Classics, History, Languages and Phys. Ed. By trading simple medical services to the barbarians they had obtained enough guns to guard the place. An incoming refugee would be checked out by a senior Nursing major or occasional premed volunteer, then given a place in the stacks"your place is DG 311 1851 and its vicinity" and so on. Most of the stragglers could then hide out between bulletproof walls of paper, while the seriously wounded could be lowered out the windows to the Red Cross people below. In the same way, food, supplies and brave doctors could be hoisted into the Plex. The atmosphere was remarkably quiet and humane, and all seemed in good humor.