The rest of our journey was uneventful. We climbed to the fourth floor and wended our way toward Emeritus' study. Soon we could smell smoke, and see it hanging in front of the lights. To the relief of Emeritus, it came not from his office but from the open door of the one labeled "Embers, Archibald."
Three men and a woman, all unarmed, sat around a small fire, occasionally throwing on another book. They had broken out the window to vent the smoke.
The woman shrieked as I appeared in the door. "Jesus! If I had a gun, you'd be dead now. I react so uncontrollably."
"Good thing you don't," I observed.
"It's really none of your business," intoned a thin, pale man. "But I suppose that since you have that wretched gun, you're going to have us do what you want. Well, we don't have anything you could want here. And forget about Zelda here. She's a lousy lay." Zelda shrieked in amusement. "It's a good thing you're witty when you're a bastard, Terence, or I'd despise you." "Oh, do go ahead. I adore being despised. I really do. It's so inspiring."
"Society despises the artist," said Embers, lighting a Dunhill in the bookfire, "unless he panders to the masses. But society treats the artist civilly so he can't select specific targets for his hatred. Open personal hatred is so very honest."
"Now that's meaningful, Arch," said the other man, a brief lump with an uncertain goatee.
"How come you're burning books?" I asked.
"Oh, that, well," said Embers, "Terence wanted a fire." Terence piped up again. "This whole event is so very like camping out, don't you agree? Except without the dreadful ants and so forth. I thought a fire would be veryprimal. But it smoked dreadfully, so we broke out the window, and now it's very cold and we must keep it going ceaselessly, of course. Is that adequate? Is that against Library rules?"
"We've been finding," added Embers, "that older books are much better. They burn more slowly. And with their thin pages, Bibles and dictionaries are quite effective. I'm taking some notes." He waved a legal pad at me.
"Also," added the small one, "old books are printed on acid-free paper, so we aren't getting acid inside of our lungs." "Why don't you just cover the window and put it out?" I asked. "Aren't we logical?" said Terence. "You people are all so tediously Western. We wanted a fire, you can't take it away! What happened to academic freedom? Say, are you quite finished with your bloody suggestions? I'm trying to read one of my fictions to these people, Mr. Spock."
I followed my friends into Emeritus' office. Behind me Terence resumed his reading. "The thin stream of boiling oil dribbled from the lip of the frying pan and seared into the boy's white flesh. As he squirmed against the bonds that were holding him down, unable to move, it ran into the bed of thorny roses underneath him; the petals began to wither like a dying western sunset at dusk."
A minute or two later, as we exited with Emeritus' papers, there was a patter of applause. "Ravishing, Terence. Quite frankly, it's similar to Erasmus T. Bowlware's Gulag Pederast. Especially the self-impalement of the heroine on the electric fencepost of the concentration camp as she is driven into a frenzy by psychic emanations from the possessed child in the nearby mansion where the defrocked epileptic priest gives up his life in order to get the high-technology secrets to the Jewish commandos. I do like it."
"When do I get to read my fiction?" asked Zelda.
"Is this from the novel about the female writer who is struggling to write a novel about a woman writer who is writing a novel about a woman artist in Nazi Germany with a possessed daughter?" asked Embers.
"Well, I decided to make her a liberated prostitute and psychic," said Zelda; and that was the last I heard of the conversation, or of the people.
We deposited Emeritus in the refugee camp on the second floor and made it back to the Science Shop in about an hour. There, Sarah and Casimir were deep in conversation, and Ephraim Klein was listening in.
Casimir's finished suit of armor used bulletproof fabric taken from a couple of associate deans. The administration was unhappy about that, but they could only get to Casimir by shooting their way through the Unified Pure Plexorian Realm. Underneath the fabric, Casimir wore various hard objects to protect his flesh from impact. On legs and knees he wore soccer shinguards and the anti-kneecapping armor favored by administration members. He wore a jockstrap with a plastic cup, and over his torso was a heavy, crude breastplate that he had endlessly and deafeningly hammered out of half a fifty-five gallon oil drum. Down his back he hung overlapping shingles of steel plate to protect his spine.
His head was protected by a converted defensive lineman's football helmet. He had cut the front out of a fencing mask and attached the wire mesh over the plastic bars of the helmet's facemask. Over the earholes he placed a pair of shooter's ear protectors. So that he would not overheat, he cut a hole in the back of the helmet and ran a flexible hose to it. The other end of the hose he connected to a battery-powered blower hung on his belt, and to get maximum cooling benefit he shaved his head. The helmet as a whole was draped with bulletproof fabric which hung down a foot on all sides to cover the neck. And as someone happened to notice, he took his snapshot of Sarah and Hyacinth and taped it to the inside of the helmet with grey duct tape.
When Casimir was in full battle garb, his only vulnerable points were feet, hands and eye-slit. Water could be had by sucking on a tube that ran down to a bicyclist's water bottle on his belt. And it should not go unmentioned that Casimir, draped in thick creamy-white fabric, with blazing yellow and blue running shoes, topped with an enormous shrouded neckless head, a faceless dome with bulges over the ears and a glittering silver slit for the eyes, a sword from the Museum in hand, looked indescribably terrible and fearsome, and for the first time in his life people moved to the walls to avoid him when he walked down the hallways.
It was a very smoke-filled room that Casimir ventilated by swinging in through the picture window on the end of a rope. Through the soft white tobacco haze, Oswald Heimlich saw his figure against the sky for an instant before it burst into the room and did a helpless triple somersault across the glossy parquet floor. Heimlich was already on his feet, snatching up his $4,000 engraved twelve-gauge shotgun and flicking off the safety. As the intruder staggered to his feet, Heimlich sighted over the head of the Trustee across from him (who reacted instinctively by falling into the lap of the honorable former mayor) and fired two loads of .00 buckshot into this strange Tarzan's lumpy abdomen. The intruder took a step back and remained standing as the shot plonked into his chest and clattered to the floor. Heimlich fired again with similar effects. By now the great carved door had burst open and five guards dispersed to strategic positions and pointed their UZIs at the suspicious visitor. S. S. Krupp watched keenly.
The guards made the obligatory orders to freeze. He slowly reached around and began to draw a dueling sword from the Megaversity historical collections out of a plastic pipe scabbard. Tied to its handle was a white linen napkin with the AM coat of arms, which he waved suggestively.
"I swear," said S. S. Krupp, "don't you have a phone, son?" No one laughed. These were white male Eastern businessmen, and they were serious. Heimlich in particular was not amused; this man looked very much like the radiation emergency workers who had been staggering through his nightmares for several nights running, and having him crash in out of a blue sky into a Board of Trustees meeting was not a healthy experience. He sat there with his eyes closed for several moments as waiters scurried in to sweep up the broken glass.