John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"How about Maurice Stoker? Do you believe he's as flunkèd as people say?"

"Well," he said judiciously, "you know how folks are, supposing-the-worst-instead-of-the-bestwise. Me, I never met a man I didn't like."

We were drawing near Tower Hall, where I meant to have at my first task.

" 'Which ain't to say,' " I mocked.

"How's that? Which ain't to say what?"

I took his sleeve then, smiling for all my exasperation (we had parked in a lot beside the great hall), and begged him to hear me out for a quarter-hour without interrupting, as a Grand-Tutor-to-be with no motive but his welfare and eventual true Candidacy.

He blinked and bobbed. "Say what you want. I can tell by looking you're no slicker."

Without mitigation or abridgement then I reviewed for him what I knew of Anastasia, her husband, and others of our mutual acquaintance, both first-hand and by hearsay. I told him of the wondrous spankings, the boys in Uncle Ira's house, the rape in George's Gorge, and the Memorial Service. I repeated Stoker's avowed suspicion, which I myself could not entirely discredit, that Anastasia like Max had a talent for being victimized, possibly even throve on it; and further recounted what I'd witnessed and heard of Stoker's own diversions and abominations: his malice towards all, his delight in subverting every order and indulging every flunkèd impulse of the student mind. I described Dr. Sear's amusements and Dr. Eierkopf's, what I had seen in the buckwheat-meadow and done with dear departed G. Herrold; how I had bit Anastasia in the sidecar and watched her tickee the false Grand Tutor. Next I enlarged upon the divers failings of New Tammany College, past and present, as revealed to me by Max and partially confirmed by my own reading and observation: its oppression of Frumentians, its lawless Informationalism, its staggering wastefulness, its pillage of natural resource and despoil of natural beauty, its hostility to learning and refinement, its apotheosis of the lowest percentile, its vulgarity, inflated self-esteem, self-righteousness, self-deception, sentimentality, hypocrisy, artificiality, simple-mindedness, naïve optimism, concupiscence, avarice, self-contradiction, ignorance, and general fatuity…

"Which ain't to say!" Greene could not help crying out; but his face had passed from crimson to white.

"Which isn't to say other colleges don't have their failings," I agreed. "Or that NTC doesn't have its passèd aspects too." What mattered, I declared, was that one not confuse the passèd with the flunkèd, or see no failure where failure was. All very well to Certify someone's Candidacy on the ground of Innocence, a no doubt passèd opposite to Culpability; I too might make such a Certification; but not unless the innocence were truly innocent, purified as well of ignorance as of guilt. "If I were your advisor, Mr. Greene — "

"Pete," he said dejectedly.

"My advice would be to get a pair of high-resolution glasses like the ones Dr. Eierkopf gave me, to help you see the difference between things. And Dr. Sear's mirror, to take a closer look at yourself in."

He picked glumly at a pimple. "I got a thing about mirrors."

"Let Dr. Sear be your mirror, then," I suggested. "If there's anybody who sees the other side of things, it's Dr. Sear." To Greene's objection that his previous connection with Dr. Sear had been profitless, I replied that this time his aim would not be therapy, but sophistication, and that for Knowledge of the Campus Dr. Sear was reputed to have no equal. I repeated Dr. Sear's observation in the Amphitheater: that while Commencement no doubt involved vision, it had nothing to do with illusions, which must be got rid of absolutely.

Greene swallowed a vitamin-pill and scratched his head. "I don't know."

"Then you ought to find out," I said, and urged him further to drop in on the doctor immediately, as I would need no more chauffeuring for the present: when I'd fixed the clock I meant to call on Chancellor Rexford, just across the Mall, to see what might be done about the Boundary Dispute; thereafter I'd most probably stop at the Infirmary myself to seek Dr. Sear's interpretation of my third and fourth tasks, which I did not clearly understand; I could meet Greene there if he wished to assist me further.

"Hey, that's where Miss Stacey works, isn't it?" I affirmed with a sigh that Mrs. Stoker was indeed Dr. Sear's chief assistant, and wondered whether her presence — which I'd forgotten to take into account — would preclude or assure the success of my little project for him. He was all enthusiasm for it now: vowed to cleave to Dr. Sear night and day and clasp to heart his every word. "I'll tell him you sent me," he said. "Better yet, you write me a note — like I'm your student, sort of." The idea delighted him, as if he were indeed a child given special permission to leave the classroom; with little hope now of results I borrowed his ball-point pen and scribbled an explanation to Dr. Sear on the only available paper, the back of his spurious diploma. Seeing Bray's inscription again, I could not resist amending it to read Passèd are the Kindergarteners — - into First Grade.

"You sure you don't want some good old New Tammany know-how up there in the Clock-tower?" But though he cheerfully insisted he'd like nothing better than to "take 'er apart and see what makes 'er tick," he was clearly impatient to be off. I declined the offer. He roared away then with a "Yi-hoo!" and spray of gravel, saluted a mailman whom he evidently took for some professor-general, and turned onto a path marked PEDESTRIANS ONLY, which however quickly cleared before his powerful machine.

I showed my ID-card to an attendant in the marble lobby of Tower Hall and to another at a lift marked belfry, to which I was directed. This latter, like the horn-rimmed man at the orientation lecture, consulted a clipboard and discovered (to our mutual surprise) that thanks to WESCAC and Chancellor Rexford I was among those persons authorized to ascend into the clockworks — the list of names was not a large one.

"Why can't everyone go up there?" I asked him. He wrinkled his forehead, smiled cautiously, and instructed me to push the Up -button when I was ready; the elevator made no stops between lobby and Belfry. I shrugged and pressed. The ascent was long, or the lift slow; my ears clicked, clicked again, and then the automatic doors opened on a formidable scene. The Belfry was floored and walled in rough cement, grease-stained and inscribed with the names of visitors and curious messages; the sides were open to the air above a breast-high wall, and afforded a splendid prospect of Great Mall — on which, however, it was difficult to concentrate, for what seized eye, ear, and nose was the huge machinery of the clockworks that almost filled the place. It seemed essentially a mesh of gearwheels of every size, from bright brass ones small as saucers to greased black cast-iron monsters, apparently motionless, of which only the topmost arc thrust through the floor; their shafts turned or were turned by drums of steel cable that disappeared through roof and floor. Great bells hung about, the smallest as large as a feed-bucket; their clappers were mounted outside them and connected by rods to various parts of the machinery. Everything clacked, clicked, creaked, and whirred together; rocker-arms and escapements teetered, governors whirled, circuit-boxes cracked and thudded, the middle-sized gears turned leisurely and the smaller ones spun into a shining blur. The place smelled of oil and iron despite the cool air that breezed through at that height.

"Halte dich dazu!" Dr. Eierkopf cried as the doors parted. I didn't see him at once, perched on Croaker's shoulders near a worktable to my left, but recognized the piped accent and could translate the tone of his command, if not its words. The spectacle anyhow held me for the second it took to see what I must beware of: the shaft of a great pendulum, fixed near the ceiling, swung noiselessly through a slot in the floor half a meter from the lift-sill; it rushed by even as Eierkopf spoke, hung weightily an instant, and rushed back.