John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

We gained the lift, went down, and met the same scene in the lobby, magnified. "Give us the Goat, the Goat, the Goat!" they cried, and though a few seemed more in carnival-spirits than in murderous — linking arms with their lady girls and lifting emblazoned steins — the most looked dangerous enough. A half-circle of riot-officers held them from the lift-doors as a man in a neat woolen suit explained our intention through a megaphone.

"Please remain orderly," he implored them. "Surely you don't want to injure the Grand Tutor, and you can't tell which is which. They're going to the Belly now; you'll see the results at the rear exit. Please remain orderly, and do be careful with fire…"

I was startled to recognize the voice, and then the face, as Maurice Stoker's. Anastasia's report notwithstanding, it was difficult to believe that this tidy, bare-chinned chap — whom I now saw full on, quietly exhorting one of his men to remain calm in the face of the mob's provocation — was not some pallid, obverse twin of the Power-Plant Director. The crowd paid little heed except to jeer him, and threatened at any moment to breach the line of guards who but the day before would have had at them with bayonets and cattle-prods. Yet Stoker delayed us for anxious seconds between the elevator we'd left and the one we sought, a few doors down.

"Please excuse me for keeping you," he said to the pair of us. "I realize how trivial this sounds in these circumstances, but I'm really quite concerned about my wife. Does either of you gentlemen happen to know where she might be?"

His smile was polite, even abashed; his tone seemed perfectly sincere. Bray explained curtly that Anastasia had taken her mother next door to her grandfather's office's; his tone suggested disapproval of Stoker's new mien.

"I'm relieved to hear that," Stoker said. "She really wasn't herself at lunch, and I was a bit concerned." He turned to me now. "You must be George, then? Perfect disguise! And a very clever idea, too." He offered his hand to shake. "Thanks ever so much for your advice this morning; I wish I had time to tell you what a campus of good it's done me already. I do hope neither of you will be EATen…"

"For Founder's sake, man, be yourself!" Bray rebuked him. But we could tarry no longer; the crowd had pushed through. Before I could assess the genuineness of Stoker's attitude we were obliged to retreat into the other lift — barely large enough for the two of us, since it was designed for large self-propelled tape-carts rather than for human passengers. The library-scientists fled to safety; the guards pressed tightly together to shield the lift a moment longer; Stoker I heard saying, "Do be reasonable, ladies and gentlemen…" Any moment I expected Bray to withdraw and either confess his imposture or attempt some excuse for not accompanying me — in which latter case I was resolved to denounce him and, if possible, force him to the consequences of his fraud. But when I asked, to taunt him, "Shall we go?" he himself touched a button marked Belly, the only one on the panel. The doors slid to at once, and as there was no light in the lift, we went down in darkness.

For all my new assurance that I was not only the Grand Tutor but the GILES Himself, I was apprehensive; the descent seemed long, and for all I knew Bray might attack me in the dark and try to stop the lift somehow before it reached bottom. His odor, though faint, was particularly disagreeable in the closed compartment; what was more, he put a hard-boned arm about my shoulders and said in a friendly way, "You're what they call in love with Anastasia, I presume." When I didn't answer — I was wondering, in fact, how a man about to die could concern himself with such a subject — he added: "One would think, to look at her, she'd be a first-rate breeder. Why do you suppose she's borne no children?"

The lift stopped at his last word. I grasped my stick, ready to strike should he assault me in his death-throes. But when the doors opened — on a red-glimmering chamber, lined with racks of flat round cans stacked edgewise from floor to ceiling — nothing happened.

"This is what they call the Mouth," Bray said, stepping out. He gave a little sigh, as if loath to end the other conversation. "We'll use it for presenting our credentials. The Belly itself is through a little door over there, which WESCAC has to open."

"So that's it!" I too stepped from the lift, whose doors closed at once behind us. "You knew you could come this far without being EATen!"

He clucked his tongue. "Why are you so hostile? It makes you seem awfully defensive, for a Grand Tutor." In fact, he confessed, he had no idea whether WESCAC's "menu" for self-defense covered the Mouth-room or only the Belly, since none but himself had entered either. "I really advise you to be less critical of your colleagues and Tutees, George," he concluded.

"You advise me! But I see you're assuming I'll live to follow your advice. Don't think you can flatter me now into letting you go back up in the lift!"

He had gone to the inevitable console-panel beside a circular door on the far wall. "Flatter you?" he said. "My dear fellow: in the first place one can't go back up in the lift: it returns automatically and can't be summoned from down here. There's no way out except through the Belly."

"Good."

"As to flattering you, I've no such intention, I hope. Praise, now, that's another matter — but you'll see shortly what a wrong idea you have of me. I'm not what people think I am."

"No need to tell me!"

He smiled and pressed numerous buttons, as though typing out a message on the console. "But I'm not what you think I am, either."

I ordered him to stop temporizing and open the Belly-door — and wondered how I'd open it myself if he refused, for it seemed to have neither knob nor latch.

"Just what I'm doing," he said. "You'll have to put your ID-card and Assignment-list in this slot now — mine's in already, from last time."

"I'll bet it is." I foiled what I took to be his strategem by producing the card I'd got that morning from Ira Hector. But if Bray was surprised at my having one after all, he managed to conceal the fact. Moreover, he ignored my sarcasm and merely remarked that inasmuch as WESCAC's "Diet program" provided for scanning and evaluating trespassers into the Mouth-room like ourselves, he'd taken the opportunity to ask it a few questions on the matter of the GILES, which he thought I might be interested in having verified before we proceeded. I accused him once again of delaying his inevitable end; but it was satisfying nonetheless to see WESCAC affirm unequivocally (as it could not do through its other facilities, I gathered, or before I'd presented my ID-card for its inspection) that it had impregnated Virginia R. Hector twenty-two years past with the Grand-Tutorial Ideal, Laboratory Eugenical Specimen, in accordance with a program-option developed malinoctically by itself. More specifically (this information was delivered us on cards the size of an Amphitheater-ticket, dropped one after another into a cup at the bottom of the console-panel as Bray pulled a lever beside it), the impregnation had been accomplished, stroke per stroke, as Tower Clock tolled midnight on the twenty-first of March of that year. A third card affirmed that WESCAC had PATted the fetus just prior to birth, which occurred two hundred seventy-five days after conception…

"Pass All Fail All!" I could not help exclaiming.

"Naturally," Bray said, and pulled the lever again. The fourth card-bearing, like the others, the smiling likeness of Chancellor Rexford on its obverse — verified not only that the infant GILES had been received into the tapelift but that WESCAC had arranged for a Library employee to rescue the child from its Belly, at the unavoidable sacrifice of some portion of the man's mental ability.