Giles Goat Boy (65 page)

The close of his address was received with another cheering demonstration, which required some minutes to spend itself. When it was done an aide announced that the Chancellor, as was his custom, would answer a few questions from the floor before turning the registration-procedure over to WESCAC. The man had much impressed me, in particular that cheerful energy which saw WESCAC merely as a useful tool, and spiritedly denied that the student condition was in essence tragic—as Dr. Sear for example had held it to be. To one as subject as myself to fits of doubt, to buckwheat ecstasies and hemlock glooms; who, fed on hero-tales, conceived the Answer as a thing fetched up from Troll-lands of the spirit, Lucius Rexford’s image was refreshment. Sweet to imagine a Graduation attained by sunny zest; by smiling common sense at work in bright-lit classrooms;
by decent wholesome men well groomed and well intelligenced, eminently likable, with handsome wives and pretty children, whose life was unshadowed pleasure to themselves and others! While the demonstration was in progress I regarded Lucky Rexford’s sapphire eyes and thought grimly of Taliped’s—dark in the sockets of his mask and then bloodily extinguished. And Maurice Stoker’s, black-flashing as he bellowed through the Furnace Room, fired by disorder and every flunkèd thing. Even Harold Bray’s, that weirdly glinted when he flunked Dean Taliped from the stage and bid all follow him through the mystery to Commencement. Sear’s mirror then gave back to me my own—brown and burning in an unwashed face, shagged by unbarbered brows, passionate with uncertainty—and moved me to a clear and complex vision: I saw that however gimped and pleasureless my way, rough my manner, crude my tuition, outlandish my behavior and appearance, profound my doubts—I was nearer Graduation than Lucky Rexford, whose lot was so brighter! I could not say what passèd meant, but in an instant I saw that neither he nor Sear nor Greene, nor Stoker, Croaker, or Eierkopf, nor even Max or Anastasia, was passed; they all were failed! Dean Taliped, in the horror of his knowledge, was passèder than they, as was I in my clear confoundment; he was as passèd as one can be who understands and accepts that in studentdom is only failure. If anything lay beyond that awful Answer; if Commencement was indeed attainable by human students; then the way led through the dark and bloody Deanery of Cadmus, there was no getting round it; not through the clean, well-windowed halls of Rexford’s Chancellory. Alas for that!

“Mr. Chancellor!” I stood and rapped my stick for attention, perhaps interrupting a question in progress. People snickered, guards scowled, Lucius Rexford frowned at the irregularity of my outburst, but then accepted it with patient amusement.

“Yes?”

Lights and cameras turned my way. I had been going to declare my identity and aim, Bray’s necessary fraudulence, my ignorance of the nature of Commencement but conviction that I would discover it—this and more; but there were no words; I was a fool; who was I anyhow? Tears stung me, of embarrassment and doubt, but I would not shed them or sit down, I bleated a question after all: “If it’s your brother—if it’s your brother you’re playing against—” I saw his handsome jaw set. “Why not forget about the game and hug him? Why not let him have all the pieces, if he wants them, and then embrace?”

An unfriendly murmur rose as I spoke; I scarcely understood the question
myself; I heard Max Spielman’s name whispered, and the word
Student-Unionist
. Lucius Rexford reddened, much less than I, but replied good-naturedly.

“As I think I said earlier, I don’t have any brothers myself. But it was a
competition
I meant—sibling rivalry, if you like!” He smiled. Admiration for his reasonableness filled the room. “If we’re all brothers, then we’re all rivals, aren’t we? And so surrender would mean submission, obviously. I don’t think we New Tammanians are the submissive type.”

His words were of course applauded, but I pressed on despite the antagonism I felt in the hall.

“What’s wrong with submitting to your brother?”

He stayed with a little gesture the guards who approached me, and joked that to heckle administrators was an honorable sport in a democratic college. Then briskly he declared, in response to my question, that I was carrying the analogy too far. “Submission—to some kinds of brothers, if not all—means annihilation, at least in the Boundary Dispute; and annihilation isn’t my idea of University Brotherhood. You’re the fellow who brought Mr. Croaker back to Dr. Eierkopf, aren’t you? A thing we’re all grateful to you for, by the way. Well then, you’ve seen the famous relationship between them. Would it be brotherly of Dr. Eierkopf to let Croaker eat him up?”

The point was merrily applauded: Croaker and Eierkopf were proverbial figures on the campus. “Seriously,” Rexford went on, “I’m quite aware that Enos Enoch teaches us to love our opponent and give him our gown if he snatches our cap. But Enochist submission assumes a Commencing hereafter—otherwise it would just be suicide, which the Enochists say is flunking!” He happened to be an Enochist himself, he said, though perhaps not in perfect standing, and so he subscribed, as a personal principle, to the teachings of the New Syllabus. But he could not in good conscience impose his private convictions on the whole College; he had no intention of embracing an alleged Brother whose declared intent was to destroy him.

It occurred to me to ask him then whether the case was that one struggled to control one’s brother because he was dedicated to one’s destruction, or that he was thus dedicated because one struggled to control him; my own wrestle with Croaker in George’s Gorge seemed in some way pertinent to the question. But the Chancellor had had enough of interrogation; an aide whispered to him, he nodded assent, someone called as if on signal, “Thank you, Mr. Chancellor,” and amid general applause he yielded the rostrum with a grin to the man who’d first introduced him.

“We’ll turn the meeting over to WESCAC now,” this man said. “As I
understand the new procedure, all regular matriculees will go on with their scheduling, and Candidates for Graduation—if there
are
any!—will proceed to the Grateway Exit to be congratulated by Chancellor Rexford and get their Assignment from the Grand Tutor.”

He nodded then to someone in a balcony behind us; there was a sharp click and a whine which I’d come to recognize as of loudspeakers warming. A mechanically inflected voice, more neutral than Bray’s, said crisply:
“Hear this: all holders of ID-cards please exit through the side doors and enroll in the regular curricula. No one with an ID-card is a Candidate for Graduation.”

I thrilled. There was general amusement and much headshaking. “I swan!” cried Peter Greene. “Can’t matriculate without and can’t Graduate with!” Among the forelocked fellows near the rostrum the consternation appeared more grave. As WESCAC repeated its announcement I thought I heard one say, “Don’t tell
me
the flunking thing’s not haywire …” but that idea was so surprising I could not be sure I’d heard correctly. At the exit behind them, which I took to be the Grateway, Lucius Rexford was deep in conference with other aides, who, it seemed to me, glanced pensively from time to time in my direction. All except myself moved a-murmur towards the side doors. Then every light in the Assembly-hall suddenly went out.

“Durn them Student-Unionists!” I heard Greene exclaim. “Chess-game my foot!” Others soberly agreed that the power-failure might be due to another Nikolayan provocation at the East-West border; my own first thought, recalling the Furnace Room, was that the whole Power Plant had finally exploded. But a ringing laugh from the back of the hall—which I recognized as Stoker’s—changed some people’s minds.

“That’s going too far!” I heard one say.

“He’s getting even for that speech.”

I had been ready to go onstage to the Grateway when the lights went out; now I could see nothing. But a host of little clickings all about the hall reminded me that
my
pocket-torch was not empty. I pressed its switch, and a beam of light aimed past the rostrum. Someone enviously said, “Lucky!” Stoker laughed again. I climbed onstage, went directly to where the Chancellor waited with his party, and offered my hand to be shaken. Guards seized me.

“He’s okay,” an aide said.

“The flunk he is,” said another.

“Spielman’s kid, isn’t it?”

“So?”

They spoke virtually at once: things were balled up altogether; the newspapers mustn’t get wind of it, or there’d be the Dunce to pay; first Bray, then Spielman, then the Turnstile mess, now
this
; what the flunk next?

“Tell Bray to make a statement,” Rexford ordered. “
No panic, everything’s in order
, that sort of thing. Somebody find out if my flunking brother has anything to do with this. Let’s get back to the Chancellory.”

“Take that guy’s light,” someone told someone else.

I clicked it off before anyone could take it. “Beg pardon, Mr. Chancellor—”

“Turn it on!” Rexford said sharply.

I did so, bidding him please not to take it, as I needed it to get through Scrapegoat Grate.

“See here,” said the youthful Chancellor, coming close to the light. He put his hand straightforwardly on my shoulder. “Are you working for the Nikolayans? Or for Maurice Stoker?”

“He
is
your brother, then?”

“Never mind! This is a college crisis.”

I swore by the Founder I was working for no one but studentdom and had no intention save the Grand-Tutorial one of passing the Finals and discovering the way to Commencement Gate, for myself and my classmates,

“Another nut,” somebody said.

But the Chancellor himself, after turning my light-beam on me for a moment, said, “He might be okay.” He asked what name I went by, where I’d got the batteries from, and how I happened not to have an ID-card. As I answered, briefly and frankly, the lights came on again, just enough to see by.

“Now listen carefully, George,” said the Chancellor, his manner friendly but concerned: “We’re not sure what’s going on with WESCAC lately—maybe nothing to worry about, maybe something serious. But we don’t want anyone to start blowing the EAT-whistle about it, you understand? I want you to cooperate with us, for the good of the College.”

No need to tell him that my loyalty lay not with any college but with general studentdom. Clearly accustomed to making important decisions in a hurry, he declared his confidence in me and told me some surprising things in an even tone: The Power Line controversy was more critical than was generally supposed, and West Campus’s position in the border negotiations was weakened by recent odd behavior on WESCAC’s part. Whether Bray was in fact a Grand Tutor, Rexford said he had no idea,
though all the rational-skeptic in him resisted such a notion. But for some time past WESCAC had in truth been reading out equivocal predictions of some such happening as Bray’s advent in the Amphitheater; and the computer’s affirmation of Bray’s descent into its Belly was an indisputable fact. Happily, the man seemed eager to assist the Administration. He’d already Certified Rexford himself, and alarming as was his connection with Stoker, for example, he apparently had none but benevolent motives. It had been decided in the best interest of NTC to acknowledge him officially (that is, to acknowledge WESCAC’s acknowledgment of him) and give him Cabinet status; some professor-generals worried that WESCAC’s AIM might no longer be protecting its Belly from intruders as formerly—but who wanted to test it?—while others feared Bray might “pull some pacifist trick,” Grand Tutor or not. Most, though, had been reassured by his pledge to render unto Remus that which was Remus’s, and unto the Founder
etc
.

“Now
you
claim to be a Grand Tutor too, and got through the Turnstile somehow, and you tell me Bray’s a fake!” It made no difference to him personally one way or the other, Rexford declared; his business was to run the College and do what he could to strengthen the West-Campus academic complex. To these ends he thought it most prudent to acknowledge my claim to Candidacy, not to shake the public’s faith in WESCAC; should I manage somehow to pass through Scrapegoat Grate (which had never been penetrated and was now strictly scanned by WESCAC), he would give me free run of the campus and top clearance as a Special Student, and Tower Hall would defray my expenses for the term of my Assignment. In return, he trusted I would do nothing to subvert New Tammany in general and his administration in particular; he hoped he might count further upon my being prudent enough not to alarm the College with accusations of fraud against Bray unless I was prepared to make them stick—but of course it was a free college. If beyond this I felt inclined actually to
support
Administration policies, intramural or varsity, he guaranteed reciprocal support for me of any kind that Tower Hall could in good conscience offer.

“What do you say, George?”

His manner quite pleased me. There was no suggestion of bribery in his proposition, merely an open, cheerful request to cooperate in the common weal, which inspired me to reply in the same spirit.

“Let’s wait until I’ve passed Scrapegoat Grate,” I proposed. “Maybe you won’t have to do business with me at all.”

This answer was well received: one aide admitted that the same thing
had occurred to him, another praised my grasp of “the political facts of life—the flunkèd realities,” and the Chancellor himself smilingly confessed that he’d assumed I was some sort of charlatanical pedagogue, whether hypocritical or sincerely fanatic, of the sort that always appeared in turbulent semesters, and with which the most idealistic chancellors had sometimes to come to terms if the college was to be administered.

“Of course, you might be yet!” He grinned. “But at least Dr. Spielman brought you up to play on the first string. Very pleased to’ve met you.”

We shook hands as might two athletes before a match. I was invited to call at the Chancellory on Max’s behalf—if and when I’d passed the Grate—as the Hermann case had serious implications for public opinion towards Siegfrieder College, an important member of the West-Campus complex. The Chancellor then excused himself to return to the urgent business of his office and left through a side door with a phalanx of his aides—one of whom, however, he deputed on the spot to follow my fortunes at the Grate and report to him directly afterwards. I was escorted down a short dark hall behind the Assembly-stage to a door whereon my flashlight showed the word G
RATEWAY
; it opened of itself at our approach. From the dim interior beyond, a clicking voice said “Prospective Candidates only, please,” and a second—familiar also, but huskily, womanly human—added, “It’s all right, George; He means you.”