HYACINTH. No, no, she and her lover are getting along wonderfully. But I'm sure she'd appreciate knowing how concerned you are.

(Long silence.)

HYACINTH (slinging one arm around Casimir's waist, feeding Oreo into his mouth with other hand). Hey, it feels terrible, doesn't it? Look, Casimir, she likes you a hell of a lot. I mean it. And she hates to put you through this kind of pain— or she wishes you wouldn't put yourself through it. She thinks you're terrific.

CASIMIR (blubbering).Well what the hell does it take? All she does is say I'm wonderful. Am I unattractive? Oh, I forgot. Sorry, I've never talked to a, ah

HYACINTH. You can say it.

CASIMIR. Lesbian. Thanks.

HYACINTH. You're welcome.

CASIMIR. Why can she look at one guy and say, "He's a friend," and look at this other guy and say, "He's a lover?"

HYACINTH. Instinct. There's no way you can go against her instincts, Casimir, don't even think about it. As for you, I think you're kind of attractive, but then, I'm a dyke.

CASIMIR. Great. The only woman in the world, besides my mother, who thinks I'm good looking is a lesbian.

HYACINTH. Don't think about it. You're hurting yourself.

CASIMIR. God, I'm sorry to dump this on you. I don't even know you.

HYACINTH. It's a lot easier to talk when you don't have to worry about the sexual thing, isn't it?

CASIMIR. That's for sure. Good thing I've got my sunglasses, no one can tell I've been crying.

HYACINTH. Let's talk more later. We've abandoned Sarah with Fred Fine, you know.

CASIMIR. Shit.

Casimir pulled himself together and they went back to the living room. Shortly, Ephraim and I returned from the hallway with our announcement.

BUD. Isn't it interesting how the alcohol goes to your head when you get up and start moving around?

EPHRAIM. The hallway on each side of each wing is a hundred twenty-eight feet and a few inches long. But the fire doors in the middle cut it exactly in half— sixty-four feet!

BUD. And three inches.

EPHRAIM. So they resonate at low C.

FRED FINE. Very interesting.

VIRGIL. Casimir, when are you going to stop playing mum about Project Spike?

CASIMIR. What? Don't talk about that!

SARAH. What's Project Spike?

CASIMIR. Nothing much. I was playing with rats.

FRED FINE. What does this one hear about rats?

VIRGIL. Casimir was trying to prove the existence of rat parts or droppings in the Cafeteria food through a radioactive tracer system. He came up with some very interesting results. But he's naturally shy, so he hasn't mentioned them to anyone.

CASIMIR. The results were screwed up! Anyone can see that.

VIRGIL. No way. They weren't random enough to be considered as errors. Your results indicated a far higher level of Carbon-14 in the food than could be possible, because they could never eat that much poison. Right?

CASIMIR. Right. And they had other isotopes that couldn't possibly be in the rat poison, such as Cesium— 137. The entire thing was screwed up.

FRED FINE. How large are the rats in question?

CASIMIR. Oh, pretty much your average rats, I guess.

FRED FINE. But they are not— they were normal? Like this?

CASIMIR. About like that, yeah. What did you expect?

VIRGIL. Have you analyzed any other rats since Christmas?

CASIMIR. Yeah. Damn it.

VIRGIL. And they were just as contaminated.

CASIMIR. More so. Because of what i did,

SARAH. What's wrong, Casimir?

CASIMIR. Well, I sort of lost some plutonium down an elevator shaft in the Big Flush.

(Ephraim gives a strange hysterical laugh.)

FRED FINE. God. You've created a race of giant rats, Casimir. Giant rats the size of Dobermans.

BUD. Giant rats?

HYACINTH. Giant rats?

BUD. Virgil, explain everything to us, okay?

VIRGIL. I am sure that there are giant rats in the sewer tunnels beneath the Plex. I am sure that they're scared of strobe lights, and that strobes flashing faster than about sixteen per second drive them crazy. This may be related to the frequency of muzzle flashes produced by certain automatic weapons, but that's just a hypothesis. I know that there are organized activities going on at a place in the tunnels that are of a secret, highly technological, heavily guarded nature. As for the rats, I assume they were created by mutation from high levels of background radiation. This included Strontium-90 and Cesium— 137 and possibly an iodine isotope. The source of the radiation could possibly have been what Casimir lost down the elevator shaft, but I suspect it has more to do with this secret activity. In any case, we now have a responsibility. We need to discover the source of the radioactivity, look for ways to control the rats and, if possible, divine the nature of the secret activity. I have a plan of attack worked up, but I'll need help. I need people familiar with the tunnels, like Fred; people who know how to use guns— we have some here; big people in good physical condition, like Bud; people who understand the science, like Casimir; and maybe even someone who knows all about Remote Sensing, such as Professor Bud again.

An advantage of the Plex was that it taught you to accept any weirdness immediately. We did not question Virgil. He memorized a list of equipment he'd have to scrounge for us, and Hyacinth grilled us until we had settled on March 31 as our expedition date. Fred Fine said he knew where he could get authentic dumdums for our guns, and tried to tell us that the best way to kill a rat was with a sword, giving a lengthy demonstration until Virgil told him to sit down. Once we had mobilized into an amateur commando team, we found that our partying spirit was spent, and soon we were all home trying vainly to sleep.

The strike itself has been studied and analyzed to death, so I'm spared writing a full account. For the most part the picketers stayed within the Plex. Their intent was to hamper activities inside the Plex, not to seal it off, and they feared that once they went outside, S. S. Krupp would not let them back in again. Some protesters did work the entrances, though. A delegation of B-men and professors set up an informational picket at the Main Entrance, and another two dozen established a line to bar access to the loading docks. Most of these were Crotobaltislavonians who paraded tirelessly in their heavy wool coats and big fur hats; with them were some black and Hispanic workers, dressed more conventionally, and three political science professors, each wearing high-tech natural-tone synthetic-insulated expedition parkas computer-designed to keep the body dry while allowing perspiration to pass out. Most of the workers sported yellow or orange work gloves, but the professors opted for warm Icelandic wool mittens, presumably to keep their fingers supple in case they had to take notes.

The picket's first test came at 8:05 A.M., when the morning garbage truck convoy arrived. The trucks turned around and left with no trouble. Forcing garbage to build up inside the Plex seemed likely to make the administration more openminded. Therefore the only thing allowed to leave the Plex was the hazardous chemical waste from the laboratories; run-of-the-mill trash could only be taken out if the administration and Trustees hauled it away in their Cadillacs.

A little later, a refrigerated double-bottom semi cruised up, fresh and steaming from a two-day, 1500-mile trek from Iowa, loaded with enough rock-frozen beef to supply American Megaversity for two days. This was out of the question, as the people working in the Cafeteria now were all scabs. The political science professors failed to notice that their comrades had all dropped way back and split up into little groups and put their signs on the ground. They walked toward the semi, waving their arms over their heads and motioning it back, and finally the enormous gleaming machine sighed and slowed. An anarcho-Trotskyite with blow-dried hair and a thin blond mustache stepped up to the driver's side and squinted way up above his head at a size 25 black leather glove holding a huge chained rawhide wallet which had been opened to reveal a Teamsters card. The truck driver said nothing. The professor started to explain that this was a picket line, then paused to read the Teamsters card. Stepping back a little and craning his neck, he could see only black greased-back hair and the left lens of a pair of mirror sunglasses.

"Great!" said the professor. "Glad to see you're in solidarity with the rest of us workers. Can you get out of here with no problem, or shall I direct you?" He smiled at the left-hand lens of the driver's sunglasses, trying to make it a tough smile, not a cultured pansyish smile.

"You AFL-CIO," rumbled the trucker, sounding like a rough spot in the idle of the great diesel. "Me Teamsters. I'm late." The professor admired the no-nonsense speech of the common people, but sensed that he was failing to pick up on some message the trucker was trying to send him. He looked around for another worker who might be able to understand, but saw that the only people within shotgun-blast range of the truck had Ph.D.'s. Of these, one was jogging up to the truck with an impatient look on his face. He was a slightly gray-tinged man in his early forties, who in consultation with his orthopedist had determined that the running gait least damaging to his knees was a shuffling motion with the arms down to the sides. Thus he approached the truck. "Turn it around, buster, this is a strike. You're crossing a picket line."

There was another rumble from the truck window. This sounded more like laughter than words. The trucker withdrew his hand for a moment, then swung it back out like a wrecking ball. Balanced on the tip of his index finger was a quarter. "See this?" said the trucker.

"Yeah," said the professors in unison.

"This is a quarter. I put it in that pay phone and there's blood on the sidewalks."

The professors looked at each other, and at the third professor, who had stopped in his space-age hiking-boot tracks. They all retreated to the other end of the lot for a discussion of theory and praxis as the truck eased up to the loading dock. They watched the trucker carry his two-hundred pound steer pieces into the warehouse, then concluded that a policy decision should be made at a higher level. The real target of this picket ought to be the scabs working the warehouse and Cafeteria. All the Crotobaltislavonians had gone inside, and the professors, finding themselves in an empty lot with only the remains of a few dozen steers to keep them company, decided to re-deploy inside the Plex.

There things were noisier. People who never engage in violence are quick to talk about it, especially when the people they are arguing with are elderly Greek professors unlikely to be carrying tire chains or knives. Of course, the Greek professors, who tried to engage the picketers in Socratic dialogue as they broke the picket lines, were not subject to much more than occasional pushing. Among younger academics there were genuine fights. A monetarist from Connecticut finally came to blows with an Algerian Maoist with whom he'd been trading scathing articles ever since they had shared an office as grad students. This fight turned out to be of the tedious kind held by libidinous orthodontists' sons at suburban video arcades. The monetarist tried to break through the line around the Economics bloc, just happening to attack that part of the line where the Maoist was standing. After some pushing the monetarist fell down with the Algerian on top of him. They got up and the monetarist missed with some roundhouse kicks taken from an aerobic dance routine. The Maoist whipped off his designer belt and began to whirl the buckle around his head as though it were dangerous. The monetarist watched indecisively, then ran up and stuck out his arm so that the belt wrapped around it. As he had his eyes closed, he did not know where he was going, but as though guided by some invisible hand he rammed into the Algerian's belly with his head and they fell onto a stack of picket signs and received minor injuries. The Algerian grabbed the monetarist's Adam Smith tie and tried to strangle him, but the latter's gold collar pin prevented the knot from tightening. He grabbed the Maoist's all-natural-fiber earthtone slacks and yanked them down to midthigh, occasioning a strange cry from his opponent, who removed one hand from the Adam Smith tie to prevent the loss of further garments; the monetarist grasped the Algerian's pinkie and yanked the other hand free. Finding that they had made their way to the opposite side of the picket line, he got up and skipped away, though the Maoist hooked his foot with a picket sign and hindered him considerably.

Students wanting to attend classes in the ROTC bloc found that they need only assume fake Kung Fu positions and the skinny pale fanatics there would get out of their way. Otherwise, students going to classes taught by nonunion professors worried only about verbal abuse. Unless they were aggressively obnoxious, like Ephraim Klein, they were in no physical peril. Ephraim went out of his way to cross picket lines, and unleashed many awe-inspiring insults he had apparently been saving up for years. Fortunately for him he spent most of his time around the Philosophy bloc, where the few picketing professors devoted most of their time to smoking cigarettes, exchanging dirty jokes and discussing basketball.

The entrance to the Cafeteria was a mess. The MegaUnion could never agree on what to do about it, because to allow students inside was to support S. S. Krupp's scab labor, and to block the place off was to starve the students. Depriving the students of meals they had already paid for was no way to make friends. Finally the students were encouraged to prepare their own meals as a gesture of support. In an attempt at plausibility, some efforts were mounted to steal food from Caf warehouses, but to no avail. The radicals advocated conquering the kitchen by main force, but all entrances were guarded by private guards with cudgels, dark glasses and ominous bulges. The radicals therefore used aerial bombardment, hurling things from the towers in hopes that they would crash through Tar City and into the kitchens. This was haphazard, though, and moderate MegaUnion members opposed it violently; as a result, students who persisted in dining at the Caf were given merely verbal abuse. As for the scabs themselves, they were determined-looking people, and activists attempting to show them the error of their ways tried not to raise their voices or to make any fast moves.

Then, seven days into the strike, it really happened: what the union had never dreamed of, what I, sitting in my suite reading the papers and plunging into a bitter skepticism, had been awaiting with a sort of sardonic patience. The Board of Trustees announced that American Megaversity was shutting down for this year, that credit would be granted for unfinished courses and that an early graduation ceremony would take place in mid-April. Everyone was to be out of the Plex by the end of March.

"Well," said S. S. Krupp on the tube, "I don't know what all the confusion's about. Seems to me we are being quite straightforward. We can't afford our faculty and workers. We can't meet our commitment to our students for this semester. About all we can do is clean the place out, hire some new faculty, re-enroll and get going again. God knows there are enough talented academics out there who need jobs. So we're asking all those people in the Plex to clear out as soon as they can."

The infinite self-proclaimed cleverness of the students enabled them to dismiss it as a fabulous lie and a ham-fisted maneuver. Once this opinion was formed by the few, it was impossible for the many to disagree, because to believe Krupp was to proclaim yourself a dupe. Few students therefore planned to leave; those who did found it perilous.

The Terrorists had decided that leaving the Plex was too unusual an idea to go unchallenged, and the Big Wheel backed them up on it. So the U-Hauls and Jartrans stacked up in the access lot began to suffer dents, then craters, then cave-ins, as golf balls, chairs, bricks, barbell weights and flaming newspaper bundles zinged out of the smoggy morning sky at their terminal velocities and impacted on their shiny tops. Few rental firms in the City had lent vehicles to students in the first place; those that did quickly changed their policies, and became dour and pitiless as desperate sophomores paraded before their reception desks waving wads of cash and Mom-and-Dad's credit cards.

The Plexodus, as it was dubbed by local media, dwindled to a dribble of individual escapes in which students would sprint from the cover of the Main Entrance carrying whatever they could hold in their arms and dive into the back seats of cars idling by on the edge of the Parkway, cars which then would scurry off as fast as their meager four cylinders could drag them before the projectiles hurled from the towers above had had time to find their targets.

I had seen enough of Krupp to know that the man meant what he said. I also had seen enough of the Plex to know that no redemption was possible for the place— no last-minute injection of reason could save this patient from its overdose of LSD and morphine. Lucy agreed with me. You may vaguely remember her as Hyacinth's roommate. Lucy and I hit it off pretty well, especially as March went on. The shocks and chaos that took everyone else by surprise were just what we had been expecting, and both of us were surprised that our friends hadn't foreseen it. Of course our perspectives were different from theirs; we both had slaves for great-grandparents and the academic world was foreign to our backgrounds. Through decades of work our families had put us into universities because that was the place to be; when we finally arrived, we found we were just in time to witness the end result of years of dry rot. No surprise that things looked different to us.

Lucy and I began making long tours of the Plex to see what further deterioration had taken place. By this time the Terrorists outnumbered their would-be victims. The notion that the strike might be resolved restrained them for a while, but then came the pervasive sense that the Big U was dead and the rumor that it had already been slated for demolition. Obviously there was no point in maintaining the place if destruction loomed, so all the Terrorists had to worry about were the administration guards.

The Seritech Super Big-Window 1500 in Laundry soon disappeared, carted off by its worshipers. Unfortunately the machine didn't work on their wing, which lacked 240-volt outlets. Using easy step-by-step instructions provided by its voice, they tore open the back and arranged a way of rotating it by hand whenever they needed to know what to make for dinner or what to watch on TV.

In those last days of March it was difficult to make sense of anything. It was hinted that the union was splitting up, that the faculty had become exasperated by the implacable Crotobaltislavonians and planned to make a separate peace with the Trustees. This caused further infighting within the decaying MegaUnion and added to the confusion. Electricity and water were shut off, then back on again; students on the higher floors began to throw their garbage down the open elevator shafts, and fire alarms rang almost continuously until they were wrecked by infuriated residents. But we thought obsessively about Virgil's reference to secret activities in the sewers and developed the paranoid idea that everything around us was strictly superficial and based on a much deeper stratum of intrigue. It's hard enough to follow events such as these without having to keep the mind open for possible conspiracies and secrets behind every move. This uncertainty made it impossible for us to form any focused picture of the tapestry of events, and we became impatient for Saturday night, tired of having to withhold judgment until we knew all the facts. What had been conceived as an almost recreational visit to the Land of the Rats had become, in our minds, the search for the central fact of American Megaversity.

A hoarse command was shouted, and a dozen portable lamps shone out at once. Forty officers of MARS found themselves in a round low-ceilinged chamber that served as the intersection of two sewer mains. They stood at ease around the walls as Fred Fine, in the center, delivered his statement.

"We've never revealed the existence of this area before. It's our only Level Four Security Zone large enough for mass debriefings. "All of you have been in MARS for at least three years and have performed well. Most of you didn't understand why we included physical fitness standards as part of our promotion system. Things got a little clearer when we introduced you to live-action gaming. Now, this— this is the hard part to explain."

All watched respectfully as he stared at the ceiling. Finally he resumed his address, though his voice had become as harsh and loud as that of a barbarian warlord addressing his legions. The officers now began to concentrate; the game had begun, they must enter character.

"You know about the Central Bifurcation that separates Magic and Technology. Some of you have probably noticed that lately Leakage has been very bad. Well, I've got tough news. It's going to get a lot worse. We are approaching the most critical period in the history of Plexor. If we do what needs to be done, we can stop Leakage for all time and enter an eternal golden age. If we fail, the Leakage will become like a flood of water from a broken pipe. Mixture will be everywhere, Purification will be impossible, and mediocrity will cover the universes for all time like a dark cloud. Plexor will become a degenerate, pre-warp-drive society.

"That's right. The responsibility for this universe-wide task falls on our shoulders. We are the chosen band of warriors and heroes called for in the prophecies of Magic-Plexor, foretold by JANUS 64 itself. That means you'll need a crash course on Plexor and how it works. That's why we're here.

"Consuela, known in Magic-Plexor as the High Priestess Councilla, is a top-notch programmer in Techno-Plexor. She therefore knows all there is to know about the Two Faces of Shekondar. Councilla, over to you."

"Good evening," came the voice from Fred Fine's big old vacuum-tube radio receiver. She sounded very calm and soft, as though drugged. "This is Councilla, High Priestess of Shekondar the Fearsome, King of Two Faces. Prepare your minds for the Awful Secrets. Plexor was created by the Guild, a team consisting half of Technologists and half of Sorcerers who operated in separate universes through the devices of Keldor, the astral demigod whose brain hemispheres existed on either side of the Central Bifurcation. Under Keldor's guidance the colony of Plexor was created: a self-contained ecosystem capable of functioning in any environment, drawing energy and raw materials from any source, and resisting any magical or technological attack. When Plexor was completed, it was populated by selecting the best and the brightest from all the Thousand Galaxies and comparing them in a great tournament. The field of competition was split down the middle by the Central Bifurcation, and on one side the contestants fought with swords and sorcery, while on the other they vied in tests of intellectual skill. The champions were inputted to Plexor; we are their output.

"The Guild had to place an overseer over Plexor. It must be the Operating System for the Technological side, and the Prime Deity for the Magic side, and in Plexor it must be omniscient and all-powerful. Thus, the Guild generated Shekondar the Fearsome/JANUS 64, the Organism that inhabits and controls the colony. The creation of this system took twice as long as the building of Plexor itself, and in the end Keldor died, his mind overloaded by massive transfers of data from one hemisphere to the other, the Boundary within his mind destroyed and the contents Mixed hopelessly. But out of his death came the King of Two Faced, that which in Techno-Plexor is JANUS 64 and in Magic Plexor, Shekondar the Fearsome.

"Though the last member of the Guild died two thousand years ago, most Plexorians have revered the King of Two Faces. But in these dark days, at the close of this age, those who know the story of Shekondar/JANUS 64 are very few. We who have kept the flame alive have trained your bodies and minds to accept this responsibility. Today, our efforts output in batch. From this room will march the Grand Army celebrated in the prophecies and songs of Magic-Plexor, whose coming has been foretold even in the seemingly random errors of JANUS 64; the band of heroes which will debug Plexor, which will fight Mixture in the approaching crisis. And for those of you who have failed to detect Mixture, who scoff that Magic might have crossed the Central Bifurcation:

Behold!"

The listeners had now allowed themselves to sink deep into their characters, and Councilla's words had begun to mesmerize them. Though a few had grinned at the silliness spewing out of the big speakers, the oppressive seriousness and magical unity that filled this dank chamber had silenced them; soon, cut off from the normal world, they began to doubt themselves, and heeded the Priestess. As she built to a climax and revealed the most profound secrets of Plexor, many began to sweat and tingle, fidgeting with terrified energy. When she cried, "Behold!" the spell was bound up in a word. The room became silent with fear as all wondered what demonic demonstration she had conjured up.

A sssh! was heard, and it avalanched into a loud, general hiss. When that sound died away, it was easy to hear a soft, cacophonous noise, a jumble of sharp high tones that sounded like a distant kazoo band. The sound seemed to come from one of the tunnels, though echoes made it hard to tell which one. It was approaching quickly. Suddenly and rapidly, everyone cleared away from the four tunnel openings and plastered against the walls. Only when all the others had found places did Klystron the Impaler move. He walked calmly through the center of the room, leaving the radio receiver and speakers in the middle, and found himself a place in front of a hushed squadron of swordsmen. The roar swelled to a scream; a bat the size of an eagle pumped out of a tunnel, took a fast turn around the room, sending many of the men to their knees, then plunged decisively into another passage. As the roar exploded into the open, in the garish artificial light the Grand Army saw a swarm of enormous fat brown-grey lash-tailed bright-eyed screaming frothing rats vomit from the tunnel, veer through the middle of the room and compress itself into the opening through which the giant bat had flown. Some of them smashed headlong into the old boxy radio, sending it sprawling across the floor, and before it had come to rest, five rats had parted from the stream and demolished it, scything their huge gleaming rodent teeth through the plywood case as though it were an orange peel, prying the apparatus apart, munching into its glass-and-metal innards with insane passion. Their frenzy lasted for several seconds; their brothers had all gone; and they emitted piercing shrieks and scuttled off into the tunnel, one trailing behind a streak of twisted wire and metal.

Most everyone save Klystron sat on the floor in a fetal position, arms crossed over faces, though some had drawn swords or clubs, prepared to fight it out. None moved for two minutes, lest they draw another attack. When the warriors began to show life again, they moved with violent trembling and nauseated dizziness and the most perfect silence they could attain. No one strayed from the safety of the walls except for Klystron the Impaler/Chris the Systems Programmer, who paced to a spot where a thousand rat footprints had stomped a curving highway into the thin sludge. Hardly anyone here, he knew, had been convinced of the Central Bifurcation, much less of the danger of Mixture. That was understandable, given the badly Mixed environment which had twisted their minds. Klystron/Chris had done all he could to counter such base thinking, but the rise of the giant rats, and careful preparation by him and Councilla and Chip Dixon, had provided proof.

He let them think it over. It was not an easy thing, facing up to one's own importance; even he had found it difficult. Finally he spoke out in a clear and firm voice, and every head in the room snapped around to pay due respect to their leader.

"Do I have a Grand Army?"

The mumbled chorus sounded promising. Klystron snapped his sword from its scabbard and held it on high, making sure to avoid electrical cables. "All hail Shekondar the Fearsome!" he trumpeted.

Swords, knives, chains and clubs crashed out all around and glinted in the mist. "All hail Shekondar the Fearsome!" roared the army in reply, and four times it was answered by echoes from the tunnels. Klystron/Chris listened to it resonate, then spoke with cool resolve: "It is time to begin the Final Preparations."

An advantage of living in a decaying civilization was that nobody really cared if you chose to roam the corridors laden with armfuls of chest waders, flashlights, electrical equipment and weaponry. We did receive alarmed scrutiny from some, and boozy inquiries from friendly Terrorists, but were never in danger from the authorities. A thirty-minute trek through the deepening chaos of the Plex took us to the Burrows, which were still inhabited by people devoted to such peaceful pursuits as gaming, computer programming, research and Star Trek reruns.

From here a freight elevator took us to the lowest sublevel, where Fred Fine led us through dingy hallways plastered with photos of nude Crotobaltislavonian princesses until we came to a large room filled with plumbing. From here, Virgil used his master key to let us into a smaller room, from which a narrow spiral staircase led into the depths.