John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

Reluctantly I did and lowered my stick, still however hostile.

"Then let's not contend, shall we?"

"All those Certifications of yours are false," I charged. "Those people aren't Candidates yet. I'll bet you even Certified Stoker!"

Bray put his fingers together and once more quoted the Founder's Scroll: "Passèd are the Founder's fools, and flunkèd they who hold His ways make sense. But I'm not here to Certify you as a regular undergraduate, George; simply to read out your Assignment so that you can pass it or fail it, as may be. Think of it as WESCAC's Assignment, since you seem not to care for me; that's what it is, actually."

I hesitated. His reasoning seemed unexceptionable, but I was loath to acknowledge it.

"It's just like regular Matriculation," Anastasia said. Her tears were wiped, her voice was soothing again. "Except in your case — because of the Turnstile and no ID-card and all — it's… irregular."

"Everything that's happened since you came to Main Gate has been fed into WESCAC," Bray said briskly; "all that's known about your background, plus what Eierkopf's scanners picked up at the Powerhouse, the Turnstile, and the Assembly just now. All I have to do is ask you the Candidacy Question so that WESCAC can evaluate your Answer: if it's right, you pass-through Scrapegoat Grate, presumably. If it's wrong, you don't. Please don't lean against that panel: it's part of the Assignment Printer." He pressed a number of buttons on the console and new whirrings began, behind my back and elsewhere. "Do you want to commence now?"

"Well… I guess so. Yes." As I spoke I moved away from the Assignment Printer and found that my watch-chain had caught somehow on the panel of it. But before I could look to free it I was alarmed by the sound of a buzzer and the sight of several blinking red lights, in whose flash Anastasia urgently shook her head. It dawned on me that Bray's apparently preliminary question had been the real one, tricked out in disguise, and that WESCAC was recording and rejecting my answer!

"No!" I cried. "Wait!"

More lights and buzzers. I was furious at having fallen twice into so simple a trap. "That doesn't count! That's not my answer!"

Bray made a clicking chuckle. But as he shrugged his shoulders (bony, like his hands), ready to dismiss me, Anastasia said meekly to him, "Actually it didn't count, Sir…"

He tutted. "Of course it did. That was the Candidacy Question, and he flunked it."

Humbly she smiled. "But we didn't have a Ready on my panel, I'm afraid. Do You think his watch-chain might have short-circuited something?"

"Flunk it all!" Bray cursed.

"Give me a second," I said. "I'll get it loose." I bent to see how the chain was fouled, doubly happy for the second chance and the evidence that Anastasia was after all loyal. Alas, the chain-end had got into a slot in the panel and would not come free; above it an orange light glowed. I fumbled to employ one of Eierkopf's lenses, thinking to magnify the problem, but my hands were too full.

"Here," Anastasia said. "Take this purse to keep your things in. It's just an old bag of Mother's; you can put everything on campus in it." She slipped off the stool to hold it open near me — was the touch of her breast against my shoulder accidental, or a sign? "That little bottle that The Living Sakhyan gave you is in there."

I thanked her, dropped in my flashlight and the shophar, and put Eierkopf's lens to my eye. But I had difficulty focusing it.

"I have a Ready -light now, Sir," Anastasia reported to Bray. "Do You want to repeat the same question, or what?"

"Well," Bray clicked in my direction — chagrined, I thought: "What's your Answer?"

But I was not to be tricked that way again. "My answer to your first question or my Answer to the Finals?" I demanded to know. "And what did you mean by commence before?" I turned from my fruitless inspection to see how he'd react. Again red lights flashed and buzzers buzzed, as if, though I hadn't really answered, I'd answered wrong. But what dismayed me more, Anastasia was fondling the scoundrel's neck! Where was her loyalty, that directly my back was turned she'd run a teasing finger around the collar of his tunic? Nor give over even when I looked, and he caught at her to stop!

"Mustn't, mustn't," he said.

"Tickee-tickee," teased the shameless girl.

I cried, "Flunk you, Anastasia!"

Bray said impatiently, "Look here, Goat-Boy…"

Ah, I was looking there, where yet she tickeed, with Eierkopf's high-resolution lens still at my eye, and marked how her finger-end ran somehow as beneath the skin half down his neck. But what mattered that small oddness when my heart was stabbed? Flunk his Candidacy Question; I leaped lump-throated at the pair of them, breaking my chain.

"Oh!"

"ZZZ!" It was Bray himself that alarmingly buzzed; but dwarfing that wonder, when I batted her hand from him Anastasia's nail snapped his neck-skin like a garter! To mind sprang the image of Bray's advent, when he'd tossed a mask aside…

"Baa!" With a Brickett-bleat I seized his scalp — it peeled off like a glove, mustache and all! Anastasia squealed; I stood struck dumb. Bray buzzed no more, but coldly glared at me from a face not different from the one I'd snatched, only perhaps a shade less slack, a bit more moist.

Then, "Put it on!" cried Anastasia.

"Goat-Boy!" Bray warned, rising from his stool. "Do you want to Graduate, or not?"

I slipped the silk-dry mask over my head, snatched up the purse of Anastasia's mother, and charged at Scrapegoat Grate as I had used to charge the fence in kidly days. A scanner scanned and disappeared, blue sparks and smoke shot from the panel where my watch-chain was; when I hit the Grate its grid-irons slipped in slots, I was through before I knew it, they clacked behind me but I would not look.

Even as I sticked myself up from the threshold and doffed the mask, out of a pipe in the Grate-wall popped a paper, to unroll at my feet. A circle it was, size of a cheeseburger-plate; around its edge in tall block capitals my PAT-phrase, thus:

And on the verso -top, when I'd retrieved it, the heading assignment, followed by a list.

With a grin I pursed my watch — chainless now — and false-face, and conned the Mall. I was registered! Few were about; the Carnival-structures were no more. Why was it dark? I had forgot: but for a flashing ring the sun was eclipsed. A fat man in a yellow robe sat on the grass some elms along. Beyond him, benched, one old and thin, a dark-suit stranger. The rest of studentdom was in class, I did not doubt, hard at Assignments of their own. And I — a Registered, Matriculated, Qualified by George Candidate for Graduation — I read mine:

ASSIGNMENT

To Be Done At Once, In No Time

1) Fix the Clock

2) End the Boundary Dispute

3) Overcome Your Infirmity

4) See Through Your Ladyship

5) Re-place the Founder's Scroll

6) Pass the Finals

7) Present Your ID-card, Appropriately Signed, to the Proper Authority

Founder, Founder! Those I thought I grasped, I gasped at; most signified not a thing to me. What ID-card? Which infirmity? When had the Founder's Scroll got misplaced? And ay, and ay, so short a term! Fist to brow I told them over, faintful list, and struck at each. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven!

So too did Tower Clock. But was it right?