John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"Same with my Infinite Divisor," he lamented. "The blueprints are drawn, the computations are computed, but Croaker keeps dropping the pieces! What good's a right-hand man that's all thumbs?" And in a sudden access of dejection, as once before in the Observatory, he wondered aloud whether brutes like his roommate, altogether free of reason and discernment, were not after all the truly passèd.

"I'm not sure about that yet," I replied, assuming he'd put the question to me. "But even if Bray's citations for both of you are right — and like yourself I don't see how they could both be — it doesn't seem to me that either one of you has qualified for Candidacy yet on the grounds he cited."

Dr. Eierkopf was turning a fresh egg sadly in his fingers. "If I told him once about high sol, I told him twenty times." Now he brightened and tittered. "Did you know your friend Anastasia can break these with her levator ani? I had her do a dozen Grade-A Large with a stress-gauge on, for Volume Nine. I show you the readings…"

"Right there, sir," I said, shaking my head at the invitation; "that kind of thing, and the night-glass and all…" My point, which I tried to make tactfully, was that if he believed passèdness to be the sort of rationality that WESCAC (at least in pre-"noctic" terms) exemplified, then he was by no means a Graduate, or even a Candidate, so long as he indulged even vicariously such Croakerish appetites as I had seen signs of. Nor could Croaker, on the other hand, be said to be passed by the standards of his Certification, it seemed to me: what beast of the woods would so obligingly fetch and carry, not to mention taking scientific measurements?

"He always gets them wrong," Dr. Eierkopf said hopefully.

"But he gets them. And he cleans up messes — "

"His own."

"What beast of the woods does that? Not even a goat can cook pablum, or chew designs on a stick, or focus lenses…"

Eierkopf sniffed. "He busts as many as he focuses."

The point was, I insisted, that neither of them met strictly the terms of their Certifications, any more than Peter Greene or Max, in my estimation, met the terms of theirs; contrary as the roommates clearly were, there was still a flunking measure of Eierkopfishness in Croaker, and of Croakeriety in Eierkopf, which came no doubt from their close and constant association. And this was the more pointed failing in Dr. Eierkopf (I tried to suggest), because it went against his life's activity and principle: the differentiation of this from that . Let him but perfect and add a mirror to his high-resolution lenses; apply to himself as it were his Infinite Divisor (of which I heartily approved): he would see how far he stood from Commencement Gate.

"You want me to turn loose Croaker, like before? You got a screw loose, Goat-Boy?"

I reminded him politely that I had no clear conviction that Graduation was what he believed it to be; only that if it was, it behooved him to discern and repudiate everything about him to the contrary. Not to seem disrespectful of his age and genius (but also to drive my point home), I declared myself in his debt for this position of mine: surely the blurring of distinctions, especially between contraries, was flunking — hence Maurice Stoker's devotion to that activity. And just as the first step to Commencement Gate must be the differentiation of Passage and Failure, so (it seemed increasingly to me) the several steps thereafter — in the completion of my Assignment, for example — must depend upon corollary distinctions.

"I'll need the lenses you gave me for my next chore," I concluded as agreeably as possible; "I wish I could borrow your Divisor too."

Dr. Eierkopf seemed neither angered, as I had feared, nor chastened, as I had hoped, by my advice. "You still believe you're the Grand Tutor!" he marveled, and pensively gave Croaker instructions about the mounting of another egg. Then he repeated what he'd said the night before: "I half wish you were, to prove I was right about the GILES."

I smiled. "If I have to be the GILES to be the Grand Tutor, then I must be the GILES, somehow: it's a simple syllogism." However, I added, I couldn't very well be Virginia Hector's child, inasmuch as I had it from Ira Hector's own lips that Anastasia was.

Eierkopf turned up his palms. "Then you aren't the Grand Tutor, any more than Bray. Look once, I prove it on WESCAC." He gave a further string of undecipherable instructions to Croaker, who turned several switches on one of those consoles that seemed to be everywhere in the College. I watched with sharp attention.

"The child born from the GILES would be a Grand Tutor," he declared. Croaker punched certain buttons. "Miss Anastasia Hector isn't a Grand Tutor, we agree." More buttons. "But no woman except Virginia Hector could have got in where WESCAC had the GILES. Since Anastasia is the one that got born, it couldn't have been the GILES that Virginia got fertilized by, and you couldn't be the Grand Tutor. Now WESCAC reads it out." Croaker had pressed buttons after each of these propositions; he pulled a long lever now on the side of the console, things dinged and whirred, and from an opening down in the front a strip of paper began clicking out, which Dr. Eierkopf perused with satisfied nods and peeps. I would have objected that his initial premise, even if granted, seemed to me inadequate to the case — it was no GILES that had engendered Enos Enoch, or the original Sakhyan, nor need one have engendered me: if the GILES could be shown to have come to naught, that fact cost me nothing but a handy proof of my authenticity, which however was contingent on no such proofs. But Dr. Eierkopf, having said, "Ja … ja … just so… that's that…" at points along the paper tape, suddenly pushed his eyeglasses up on his nose and whipped out the lens that bore his name.

"Unless!" he cried. He grinned at me slyly and winked his left eye. "Maybe you and Anastasia are twins, hey?"

Owing to the liberal circumstances of my kidship I was more interested in the relevance of this possibility to my claim of Grand-Tutorhood than appalled by its retroactive implications about the G. Herrold Memorial Service. But I was not ignorant of studentdom's attitude towards incest; I chided Dr. Eierkopf for salivating at the idea that I'd serviced my sister, and firmly declined his offer to rerun the tape he'd made two nights before on the Safety Surveillance monitor.

"That's just what I meant a while ago," I said. "You've got more of Croaker in you than you'll admit."

"When I find out you're Stacey's twin brother, I take your advice," he promised merrily.

A little cross, I bade him goodbye and called the lift. My first chore, so far as I could see, was accomplished by forfeit, and I must get on with the second, at the same time foraging some lunch if I could; if Dr. Eierkopf would not heed my suggestions, it was his own flunkage.

"Don't fuss, Zickelchen," he said; "I just tease you a little."

"It's yourself you're teasing, sir; I don't care either way." What I did care about, I declared, was Bray's false Certifications, and I urged him to consider, for his own and Croaker's sake, my suggestion. He promised to do so; and further to placate me (for I had no great faith in his pledge) he offered to run a similar logical-possibility test for me on my other chores.

"To me, for instance, there's just three ways to end the Boundary Dispute," he said. "We EAT them; they EAT us; or we all link arms and sing Wir wollen unseren alten Dekan Siegfried wiederhaben. But WESCAC maybe knows another way…"

"So do I," I replied. The lift came. I assured Dr. Eierkopf I wasn't angry, requested him at least to relay to Croaker, if possible, my sentiments and advice about Bray's Certification, and thanked him for teaching me, intentionally or otherwise, the relevance to my Assignment of his lens-principle, which I'd already been applying unawares in my criticisms of Max, Peter Greene, himself, and even Maurice Stoker.