John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"They will indeed!" Bray chuckled. "The Scroll, by the way, you can forget about: it's back in place now. I took it out front at Chancellor Rexford's suggestion and read off a few Certifications to reassure the crowd. But you can't be serious about this GILES nonsense…"

I turned my back on him and bade Lady Creamhair and Anastasia to come with me. If there was an unruly herd of undergraduates to be calmed, their Grand Tutor was the man to calm them, and I would leave no mother or sister of mine in the odious, if not criminal, company of a base impostor.

Bray pursed his lips and shook his head. "If you choose to deliver yourself up to a mob which wants nothing better than to tear you to pieces, I suppose that's your affair. But I most certainly won't permit my mother and sister to be lynched with you."

"Your mother and sister!" I exploded. At the same time Anastasia cried, "Lynched!" and Lady Creamhair laid two fingers to her cheek and said, "Oh. Well."

Bray assured me levelly that I had a fair chance yet of escaping with my life if I listened to reason; it was to that end exactly he'd stopped at sight of me instead of returning at once to the work of calming the crowd. To Anastasia then, who asked him what the trouble was, he reported dryly that Tower Clock had stopped, for one thing, thanks to some disastrous move of Dr. Eierkopf's of which it was known only that I had advised it; further, that Eierkopf himself was reportedly paralyzed from head to toe, that Croaker was once again amok, that the Power Plant was in grave trouble for want of supervision, that the Nikolayans were threatening riot at the Boundary, that WESCAC was rumored to be in danger of failing for lack of power, and that Chancellor Rexford, so far from making an appearance to calm the student body's alarm, would see no one, not even his highest advisors. General panic and breakdown of the College seemed imminent, and as my presence appeared to be the single common factor in these several crises, the crowd's fear was turning to wrath against me.

"Ridiculous!" I protested. But the lights winked again, and my heart misgave me. "You stirred them up yourself!"

Bray ignored me. "As for the rest," he said to Anastasia: "it's good you know now I'm your brother and the GILES, but that fact changes nothing between us — do you understand me?"

Anastasia objected faintly, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, and I very loudly. He'd said nothing of their kinship thitherto, Bray explained, out of concern for Miss Hector's state of mind, which was known to be precarious — witness her agreeing that he and Anastasia were twins, when in fact they were of different ages and had different fathers. Nor did he approve of proclaiming the truth thus bluntly to her now, but my pretenses forced his hand — another item in my daysworth of ill deeds.

"I won't hear this!" I shouted. "Get on out of here!"

"We'd all best get out," he said flatly, "before they come in after you. Tell Anastasia I'm the GILES, Mother, so she'll believe it. We'll try the Chancellor's Exit."

Lady Creamhair (so I still thought of her, and would ever think) hemmed and chirped, quite glazed now; then she said with surprising distinctness: "He's my Gilesey. Yes he is." And lest anyone mistake her reference she shook her finger at me and added: "Not you."

"Mom!" Anastasia cried.

Lady Creamhair shook her head firmly. "That's a naughty young man."

Bray beamed.

"She's upset," I said to Anastasia. "And no wonder! But just look here…" I lifted my infirmary-gown enough to display the dark disc on my leg. "Look here, Mother: there's proof, if you need it."

Now the dear lady's murmurs became a plaint: "Oh. Oh." Anastasia clapped and bounced. I glared at Bray, and was pleased to take his expression for chagrin. But in fact it proved a curious concentration, like a man's at stool; he even grunted and grew red. Then he sniffed and smiled — I am obliged to say sweetly — - and turning up the back hem of his cape and tunic, exposed a brown left knee, gaunt and hairless, in the crook of which however was undeniably a browner spot. Too low, surely, and something wanting in definition — but a round brown birthmark after all! Anastasia caught her breath; Virginia Hector whimpered; I could have wept for frustration.

"Flunk you! Flunk you! Flunk you!" I shouted.

"Please," he said: "Not in front of Mother. I'm still ready to help you."

Poor Lady Creamhair now grew quite incapable; I flunked the hour I had agreed to this confrontation. Anastasia — no less confounded but still in command of her faculties — led her away toward the Chancellor's Exit and Reginald Hector's offices, next door to Tower Hall. This was Bray's suggestion, and further to infuriate me he asked whether I did not affirm its prudence.

"You should go with them," he advised me. "I'll try to pacify the crowd till you're safely out."

Angrily I replied that neither he nor I was going anywhere until the issue between us was resolved.

"You go ahead," I told Anastasia. "I'm going to end this right now, one way or the other."

Bray bristled and said: "Pah."

Virginia Hector's growing delirium permitted no tarrying; Anastasia cast us a troubled last glance from the doorway. "You won't fight?"

"Of course not," Bray said grimly, and the women left. I myself was by no means so certain: a showdown between us, I now conceived, was what my whole day's labor had been pointed to, as the final separation of Truth and Falsehood. And I had no real fear of him, though he was both taller and heavier than myself — only a kind of uneasiness inspired by his manner and smell, which however would not have stayed my hand had I chosen to take stick to him. But he proposed now, with a kind of dry distaste, that the surest and fittingest way to resolve our differences was to go down forthwith together into WESCAC's Belly: not only could I take the Finals (which he would gladly administer himself), but the EATing of whichever of us was false, and the subsequent emergence of an unquestionably authentic Grand Tutor, might be just the thing to save New Tammany from pandemonium, and the whole West Campus from collapse in that grave hour. Galling as it was to be obliged once again to agree with him, I seconded this proposal at once.

"I'll send word of this to the crowd," Bray said. "That should keep them quiet until one of us comes out."

I clenched my teeth and agreed; then, both to assert my own authority and to preserve the order of my Assignment-tasks, I insisted that the Scroll-case be unlocked, so that I could re-place its contents before passing the Finals.

Bray clicked impatiently. "You've done harm enough, don't you think? Besides, there's no time, Goat-Boy!"

"I can do it in no time," I replied. "Give me the key."

A number of men rushed now into the Catalogue Room — library-scientists and campus patrolmen, it turned out, searching desperately for Bray to speak once more to the crowd before they stormed Tower Hall. They glared at me with bald hostility as Bray explained his strategy — our strategy — and instructed them to broadcast it.

"Has the Chancellor appeared yet?" he asked. They answered that the current rumor was that Chancellor Rexford had lost his mind; that his wife was leaving him; that he'd admitted kinship to Maurice Stoker, which the latter now denied; and that all these catastrophes were somehow owing to the subversive influence of a false Grand Tutor. Their expressions left no doubt about whom they considered the pretender to be.

Bray smiled at me. "We'd better get on with it." Although I realized that any reluctance on my part could be interpreted as fear and thus as an admission of guilt — and that they could simply refuse me if they chose to — yet I showed them the order of my Assignment and repeated that I would enter the Belly-room when I had re-placed the Founder's Scroll, and not before.