"I'll bet you want to do a little negotiating," said Krupp, annoyingly relaxed. "Who're you with?"
"I owe allegiance to no man," came the muffled voice from behind the mask, but "come on behalf of all."
"Well, that's good! That's a fine attitude," said Krupp. "Set yourself down and we'll see what we can do."
The intruder took an empty chair, laid his sword on the table and peeled off his hood of fabric to reveal the meshed-over football helmet, A rush of forced air was exhaled from his facemask and floated loose sheets of paper down the table.
"Why did you put a nuclear waste dump in the basement?" Everyone was surprised, if genteel, and they exchanged raised eyebrows for a while.
"Maybe Ozzie can tell you about that," suggested Krupp. "I was still in Wyoming at the time."
Heimlich scowled. "I won't deny its existence. Our reasons for wanting it must be evident. Perhaps if I tell you its history, you'll agree with us, whoever you are. Ahem. You may be aware that until recently we suffered from bad management at the presidential level. We had several good presidents in the seventies, but then we got Tony Commodi, who was irresponsiblean absolute mongoloid when it came to finance insisted on teaching several classes himself, and so forth. He raised salaries while keeping tuition far too low. People became accustomed to it. At this time we Trustees were widely dispersed and made no effort to lead the university. Finally we were nearly bankrupt. Commodi was forced to resign by faculty and Trustees and was replaced by Pertinax Rushforth, who in those days was quite the renascence man, and widely respected. We Trustees were still faced with impossible financial problems, but we found that if we sold all the old campus hundreds of acres of prime inner-city real estate we could pull in enough capital to build something like the Plex on the nine blocks we retained.
But of course the demographics made it clear that times would be very rough in the years to come. We could not compete for students, and so we had to run a very tight ship and seek innovative sources for our operating funds. We could have entered many small ventureshigh technology spinoffs, you see but this would have been extraordinarily complex, highly controversial and unpredictable, besides raising questions about the proper function of the university.
"It was then that we hit upon the nuclear waste idea. Here is something that is not dependent on the economy; we will always have these wastes to dispose of. It's highly profitable, as there is a desperate demand for disposal facilities. The wastes must be stored for millennia, which means that they are money in the bankthe government, whatever form it takes, must continue to pay us until their danger has died away. And by its very nature it must be done secretly, so no controversy is generated, no discord disrupts the normal functions of the academy there need be no relationship between the financial foundation and the intellectual activities of the university. It's perfect."
"See, this city is on a real stable salt-dome area," added a heavy man in an enormous grey suit, "and now that there's no more crude down there, it's suitable for this kind of storage." "You," said the knight, pointing his sword at the man who had just spoken, "must be in the oil business. Are you Ralph Priestly?" "Ha! Well, yeah, that's me," said Ralph Priestly, unnerved. "We have to talk later."
"How did you know about our disposal site?" asked Heimlich. "That doesn't matter. What matters now is: how did the government of Crotobaltislavonia find out about it?" "Oh," said Heimlich, shocked. "You know about that also." "Yep."
After a pause, S. S. Krupp continued. "Now, don't go tell your honchos that we did this out of greed. America had to start doing something with this wastethat's a fact. You know what a fact is? That's something that has nothing to do with politics. The site is as safe as could be. See, some things just can't be handed over to political organizations, because they're so damned unstable. But great universities can last for thousands of years. Hell, look at the changes of government the University of Paris has survived in the last century alone! This facility had to be built and it had to be done by a university. The big steady cash flow makes us more stable, and that makes us better qualified to be running the damn thing in the first place. Symbiosis, son."
"Wait. If you're making so much money off of this, why are you so financially tight-assed?"
"That's a very good question," said Heimlich. "As I said, it's imperative that this facility remain secret. If we allowed the cash flow to show up on our ledgers, this would be impossible. We've had to construct a scheme for processing or laundering, as it were, our profits through various donors and benefactors. In order to allay suspicion, we keep these 'donations' as small as we can while meeting the university's basic needs."
"What about the excess money?"
"What's done with that depends on how long the site remains secret. Therefore we hold the surplus in escrow and invest it in the name of American Megaversity, so that in the meantime it is productively used."
"Invest it where? Don't tell me. Heimlich Freedom Industries. the Big Wheel Petroleum Corporation "
"Well," said Ralph Priestly, cutting the tip off a cigar. "Big Wheel's a hell of an investment. I run a tight ship." "We don't deny that the investments are in our best interests," said a very old Trustee with a kindly face. "But there's nothing wrong with that, as long as we do not waste or steal the money. Every investment we make in some way furthers the nation's economic growth."
"But you're no different from the Crotobaltislavonians, in principle. You're using your control over the wastes to blackmail whatever government comes along."
"That's an excellent observation," said Krupp. "But the fact is, if you'll just think about it, that as long as the waste exists, someone's going to control them, and whoever does can blackmail whatever government there is, and as long as someone's going to have that influence, it might as well be good people like us."
The knight drummed his fingers on the table, and the Trustees peered at his inscrutable silver mask. "I see from the obituaries that Bert Nix and Pertinax Rushforth were one and the same. What happened to him?"
Heimlich continued. "Pertinax couldn't hack it. He was all for fiscal conservatism, of courseBert was not a soft-headed man at any point. But when he learned he was firing people and cutting programs just to maintain this charade, he lost his strength of will. The faculty ruined his life with their hatred, he had a nervous breakdown and we sacked him. Then the MegaUnion began to organize a tuition strike, so the remaining old-guard Trustees threw up their hands, caved in and installed Julian Didius as President!" At the memory of this, several of the Trustees sighed or moaned with contempt. "Well! After he had enjoyed those first three weeks of flying in all his intelligentsia comrades for wine and cheese parties, we got him in here and showed him the financial figures, which looked disastrous. Then he met Pertinax after the electroshock, and realized what a bloody hell-hole he was in. Three days later he went to the Dean's Office for a chat, and when the Dean turned out to be addressing a conference in Hawaii, he blew his top and hurled himself out the window, and then we brought in Septimius and he's straightened things out wonderfully." There were admiring grins around the table, though Krupp did not appear to be listening.
"Did Pertinax have master keys, then, or what? How did he keep from being kicked out of the Plex?"
"We allowed the poor bastard to stay because we felt sorry for him," said Krupp. "He wouldn't live anywhere else."
The angle of the knight's head dropped a little.
"So," said Heimlich briskly, "for some reason you knew our best-kept secrets. We hope you will understand our actions now and not do anything rash. Do you follow?"