John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

The Chancellor shook his head as I spoke, but his smile was grave, and he seemed after all to be listening, so I quickly enlarged upon my theme. To make concessions to the forces of Failure, I said — to this Classmate X fellow or to Stoker — was like conceding to malevolent bacteria: one might approve moderate exercise over athleticism, but not moderate illness over health. And the health of a college, it seemed evident to me, like the health of an orderly and passèd administration, came not from cooperation with its antithesis, but from real repudiation of it. The spirit and letter of Rexfordian law was order, intelligence, and light; let there then be no disorder in New Tammany, or unreason, or other darkness. If it was inescapable that the lights of Great Mall depended ultimately on what went on under Founder's Hill, then let there at least be no converse between head and bowels, not to speak of envy and occasional emulation! Ban Maurice Stoker from Great Mall, I urged him, and deny his kinship from the rooftops; have no commerce with Ira Hector, much less Classmate X; let there be no negotiations with Nikolay College, overt or covert; disentangle WESCAC's circuitry once and for all; separate the power-cables; draw a hard line between them — well on our side, if necessary; double the floodlighting; triple the guard…

"You said the guards fall now and then because they look down," I finished pointedly; "They should wear a special collar like the ones we use on bad goats, so they can't look down."

As he smiled — tugging at his forelock somewhat wearily, I confess — and opened the sidecar door again, a commotion broke out upon the cordoned steps leading up to the hall. I had just time to glimpse a patch-eyed fellow struggling with policemen before two guards sprang, pistols in hand, to shield the Chancellor, and blocked my view.

"Another lunatic," Lucius Rexford muttered. He still smiled, but his face had briefly lost its color. "Let's go in," he said to the guards.

"Just a second, sir," one of them answered. "They're having a little trouble with him."

"He doesn't seem to be armed," the other guard observed. "Better play it safe, though."

But the Chancellor would not remain in the sidecar. As he stepped out, guards hurried to encircle him. The watchers cheered; he grinned and gave a little wave of his hand to them, but I felt distinctly that for all his popularity and charm he did not quite trust the adoring student body, from whose extremities assassins, and Grand Tutors sometimes sprang. The police struggling with the patch-eyed man looked worriedly in our direction; their quarry's face lit up — I recognized him as that Nikolayan I'd seen through the electric mesh in the Control Room, and with whom Peter Greene had reportedly scuffled at Stoker's Randy-Thursday party. Indeed he was hard to hold onto: though four or five had hands on him he slipped their grasp, cried, "Great and good man!" and flung himself onto his knees in our path just as the guards seemed ready to shoot.

"Am not assassin!" he declared to the Chancellor. "Am transfer out of Nikolay! Great lover of you! Hello, Grand Tutor! I don't believe!"

Guards escorted the Chancellor rapidly towards the building; others slapped handcuffs onto the kneeling man's wrists, which however he opened as if by magic in order to wave to Lucius Rexford.

"Goodbye, goodbye! Peace in University!"

I had been left behind in the confusion. "You know this guy?" a guard in plainclothes asked me. Others replaced the handcuffs on the Nikolayan's wrists, which now he offered them smilingly.

"I know of him," I began to say.

"Alexandrov," the prisoner volunteered. Again with ease he slipped one hand free to extend it to me, and with the other tugged at his black mustache. "Leonid Andreich Alexandrov, Doctor of Engineering. Lover of Anastasia Stoker. Admirer of you. But don't believe in! Skepticismal!" His handshake, like his frame, was sturdy and powerful; his dark eye glistened cordially in a red face topped with black and handsome curls.

"Something wrong with them cuffs," a guard said. But the Nikolayan grinned, shook his head, and explained proudly that it was his special talent with locks that had enabled him to slip through the charged screen of the Control Room, make his way to the U.C. building (where his father, he declared, was head of the Nikolayan delegation), and transfer in the sight of all. "Main Detention, please?" he requested in conclusion. "You take me there now, okay?"

"You'd better sit in on the interrogation," I was told. The plainclothesmen were much aroused by the news that their man was the son of Classmate X; in view of the delicate diplomatic aspects of his defection, and my wish to rejoin the Chancellor in pursuit of my Assignment, it was agreed that the questioning should take place at once, in the U.C. offices of the New Tammany delegation; both NTC and Nikolay College would be likely to want the Symposium-opening delayed until the situation could be assessed.

"No," the Nikolayan insisted. "Main Detention." It was remarkable how with the merest twitch of a muscle he escaped their clutch. "Am not a transfer," he said now. "Am a spy. Come to kidnap a scientist." He grinned. "Long live Student Union! Down with Informationalist adventurismhood! You send me to Main Detention, okay?"

The guards exchanged looks. "Let's talk it over inside," they said, almost politely. "If you're telling the truth, you'll see Main Detention soon enough."

Mr. Alexandrov considered for a second and then nodded assent. "You come along?" he asked me. "Mrs. Anastasia admires, I admire."

"But don't believe in," I reminded him.

He undid his handcuffs — two pairs this time — to clap an arm affectionately about me. "Goat-Boys da; Grand Tutors nyet."

We went inside, our agitated escorts fending off journalists and crowds of the curious. Arguments in several languages were in progress in the lobbies and corridors we hurried through; at our appearance they grew louder, and a herd of gesticulating dignified gentlemen collected behind us. Mr. Alexandrov waved to some of them, who glared back. At the door of the suite of offices we went into, a furious debate commenced, through interpreters, between what appeared to be representatives of the two colleges involved, over the question of who should be admitted to the room.

"How do you do that trick with the handcuffs?" I asked the prisoner, who for the moment was being ignored. "It's very clever."

He beamed and playfully punched my chest. "Big secrecy, Classmate! I don't tell!" Then impulsively he laughed and added, "But Mrs. Anastasia's good-friend, okay!" He collared me in order to whisper into my ear something I heard imperfectly, for our guards and the Nikolayan officials both jumped to end the confidence. But though I declared to them honestly enough that I'd not understood the message through the din, it seemed to me upon later reflection that Not locked must have been its puzzling burden, along with the words Let go! — — which could however have been either a specific demand of the guards who drew us apart, or a kind of general injunction. The Nikolayan himself appeared certainly to follow some such policy: he flung his arms freely as he talked, undid the second button of his already open-necked shirt, and loosened his belt when he sat down.

"Big spy!" he said, thumbing his chest; but his eye-patch looked like a broad wink. The Nikolayan officials all harangued him at once; he rejected them with a sweep of the arm and a shake of the head.

"He surrenders absolutely, confesses his intention to kidnap, and rejects counsel," a New Tammany official said to them, and added sternly that although he would clear the office of journalists and cameramen, and permit the Nikolayan representatives to remain, they must not interfere with the prisoner's right to speak freely. On the other hand, he insisted that Mr. Alexandrov was under no obligation to make a statement, and that all he said would be recorded as possible evidence against him.