“Not really. It’s just that fear engenders cynicism.” Jonathan Relevant provided Jonathan Relevant with another piece of the puzzle which was Jonathan Relevant.
As the ground rushed up to meet them, he observed a few of the tougher athletes trying to form a bulwark against the blacks assaulting the trampoline-holders. For a long moment, this aspect of the battle remained at an impasse. But when Chancellor Hardlign looked down and saw the danger, his body became even stiffer than it had the first time. Having picked up velocity, he and Jonathan Relevant, arms still locked, struck the trampoline with tremendous impact. Immediately, they rocketed skyward again like an activated Siamese-twin jet.
A split second later Jonathan Relevant looked down to see the impasse broken as the whites gave way before the blacks’ assault. The trampoline fell to the ground and those who had been holding it retreated. There was nothing to break the eventual fall of the two hurtling bodies now.
Jonathan Relevant perceived the blur of the chancellor’s office window passing at top speed as they rose. He saw the roof go past. He watched the stars coming closer with still no sign that the ascent was approaching its apex. And he looked down to note again that the trampoline was no longer being held to catch them.
It was a long way down, and they were still rising. They were zooming up . . . up . . . up. . . .
Jonathan Relevant recalled his first instant of awareness on the iceberg, his first feeling—-that it was good to be alive! It had certainly been a short life, but a merry enough one, he supposed. After all—-
“Easy come, easy go-o-o-o-o-o-o-. . . .”
CHAPTER SIX
It had been a very disturbing day for Miss Judith Uptyte, the college librarian. First the depraved desecration of the Angel Gabriel, then the violence between the students and the campus security police, and finally the outrage of that naked officer leaping out at her from the shrubbery. To be subjected to such events!—it was really too much for a delicately reared maiden lady in her sixties!
Some time after her unsatisfactory telephone conversation with Chancellor Hardlign, still overwrought, Miss Uptyte walked to the drugstore to renew her tranquilizer prescription. Returning, she passed directly behind the main building of the Science Research Institute. It proved an unfortunate route.
Rounding the corner of the building, Miss Uptyte stopped in her tracks and froze. Her eyes popped and she was forced to squint as her breath flogged her pince-nez. There, hanging out of the window, spotlighted by the rays from the overhead bulb within the room, hung the all-too-naked backside of Big Dick Eberhard.
Miss Uptyte bolted. It was only when she was safe in her fourth-floor walkup, with the door double-locked behind her, that the initial shock subsided into outrage. She picked up the telephone and dialed the number of Chancellor Hardlign with shaking fingers.
“Chancellor! . . . The Science Research Institute! . . . There was someone deliberately mooning at me when I . . .”
“I yam sor-ree. The number you have caw-uld is not a wor-king num-ber. The li-yun has been dis-con-nec-ted.”
“You don’t understand! I’ve been assaulted by a naked fundament! And this is the second—”
“Thi-yus is a re-cor-ded an-nounce-ment. I yam sor—ree. The num-ber you have caw-uld . . .”
“What is happening to this university?” Miss Uptyte hung up the phone and collapsed in tears. In her forty years at Harnell, her virtue had never suffered such a visual assault! And twice in one day! With an effort, she banished the vision of that bare male bottom from her mind only to have it instantly replaced by the earlier memory of the outrageous organ so nakedly flaunted by that unclothed campus police officer. Miss Uptyte tried, but she couldn’t dispel the picture of all that naked fuzz flesh bounding across the campus in broad daylight.
She took a cold shower. She took a milk bath. She took a hot shower. She took a sitz bath. Nothing helped. Miss Uptyte had a bad case of Menopause Revisited. Hot flushes, cold fiushes—and blushes, blotches, and blisters to boot!
Finally the distraught librarian swallowed a tranquilizer and two aspirins, donned her sensible flannel nighty, and slipped into bed with her hot water bottle. She closed her eyes and steadfastly kept reminding herself that the hot water bottle was just that—a hot water bottle. Each time it crawled up her varicose thighs, she determinedly pushed it back down to her feet again. But sleep eluded her. Her tormented brain was too well lit by the moon of Big Dick Eberhard’s trapped tookus. . . .
That moon was still shining when the jocks marched to the rescue of Chancellor Hardlign. The coach was in the lead as they approached the rear of the Science Research Institute on their way to the Administration Building. The athletes carrying the trampoline were brought up short when the coach espied the Eberhard bare bottom and braked to a shocked halt.
He stared for a long moment, and then his voice exploded out of him with a mighty bellow. “Eberhard!” he screamed. “Mooning!”
“I didn’t mean no harm,” Big Dick Eberhard pleaded.
“Get down from there!”
“I can’t. My legs are stuck between the bars. Honest.” Big Dick whimpered. “Help me.”
“You broke training, Eberhard!”
“I know.” Big Dick hung his head contritely.
“You’re a disgrace to the Harnell team uniform!”
“I didn’t mean no harm. Honest I didn’t.”
“You’re through, Eberhard!” The coach lowered his head in disdain and motioned to the others to resume the march to the Administration Building. “Turn in your key to the shower room,” he called back to Eberhard.
_“I didn’t mean no harm, Ghaw-urge.” Big Dick spotted his teammate in the rear ranks of the jocks. “Help me, Ghaw-urge. My legs are stuck in the bars. Please, Ghaw- urge. I'll never do it again.”
But George ignored him. With the other jocks, he vanished from Big Dick’s sight. “He’s not my friend,” Big Dick muttered to himself. “None of them fellers are my friend!”
He was still mumbling to himself a while later when the sound of chanting reached his ears: “WE WANT HARDLIGN! FREE THE CHANCELLOR! . . .” More time passed and the chant died away. It was quite still, and then the silence suddenly erupted into the sounds of a pitched battle. Automatically, Big Dick craned his head toward the noise. He saw two figures, arms locked, zooming toward the heavens, then plummeting downward. They shot skyward a second time, faster, rising higher than before, twin rockets in human form, hands outstretched and reaching for the stars. . . .
As Jonathan Relevant and Chancellor Hardlign approached the zenith of their upward flight, Jonathan’s realization that the trampoline was gone finally spurred him to action. He flexed the muscle of the arm locked with the chancellor’s arm, forcing both their upper torsos to arch forward. Their bodies no longer rose straight up, but rather described an ascending curve. As this arc approached its apex, from which point they must descend, Jonathan computed the downward course most likely to end in a landing place where they might not break their necks. . . .
Miss Judith Uptyte’s eyes snapped open when the four feet struck the window of her fourth-floor bedroom and shattered it. An instant later the bodies of the two men hit the bed. The slats gave way and the spring and mattress crashed to the floor. The three of them formed a tangle of arms and legs with the hot water bottle sticking straight up out of the center like the whirling spout of a tornado.
Miss Uptyte took a deep breath, intending to loose a scream designed to give a banshee an inferiority complex. But before she could release it, her eyes met those of Jonathan Relevant. The megadecibel holler froze in her throat.