John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"Don't you remember me?" I asked pleasantly.

"I remember you, all right." His tone was not cordial. "But your name ain't on my list any more. In fact, there ain't any list, since you flunked up the College. Nobody's allowed up there."

I asked where Dr. Eierkopf was, in that case — for I'd assumed Stoker was lying to me — and was told that he was indeed still in the Belfry — or at least his skeleton must be: the lift had not been summoned since Croaker's desertion, the guard said (not without grim satisfaction); as nobody was allowed access to the Clockworks without the Chancellor's authorization, not even repairmen, and since the Chancellor seemed not to care any more about lists or anything else, one could only suppose that Dr. Eierkopf had starved to death and rotted many months ago — if he'd not been killed when Croaker went berserk. "Serves the Bonifacist right, either way," he concluded.

Alarmed, I sprang liftwards, though there was no hope of saving one so long abandoned. The guard drew his pistol, threatened to shoot if I touched a button, and repeated, for the benefit of startled bystanders, that nobody could use the Belfry-lift.. Perspiring, I bethought me of the trick old Laertides had played upon the one-eyed shepherd. I handed him my ID-card, and, hoping he'd miss the one not-quite-eradicated name, I said, "I'm Nobody," and pushed the Belfry -button. The doors began to close.

"Oh no you don't!" the guard cried, and would have leaped me, but his classmates-in-arms restrained him on the grounds that while my authority to use the lift was questionable, he unquestionably had none at all. Too late then to shoot; the doors clicked shut and I was lofting.

Though I dreaded what I'd find of Eblis Eierkopf, I was prepared this time for the din and spectacle of the Clockworks. But when the lift stopped, all was silence. The gears, large and small, were still; the awful pendulum hung fast before my nose, perpendicular between Tick and Tock. Round about was a strew of papers, eggshells, calipers, and lenses: the birdlimed, dusty ruins, I feared, of oölogical research. High in the center of the works, struck face-on by the rising sun, sat Dr. Eierkopf — dead or alive, I could not at once tell, but at least not quite a skeleton. He was perched — one might even say poised — on the escapement, just under the butt of the weathervane-shaft: one shriveled leg hung on either side of the knife-edged pivot, and the crown of his head thrust up into a smallish bell, as far as to his browless eyebrows. Had he been planted there by Croaker, or climbed there to escape him? His lab-coat and spectacles were smeared with droppings of the blackbirds that flew in and out of the Belfry, hopped upon his shoulders, and squatted on his pate beneath the skirt of the bell. They or other birds had woven a nest of straw around his neck and under his chin. Most had food in their beaks when they entered the tower-bread-crusts, sunflower seeds, or kernels of dry field-corn — and I was astonished to see that now and then one would drop a morsel into Dr. Eierkopf's open mouth. He chewed and swallowed without other motion.

"Are you all right?" I cried.

He showed no sign of having heard me. I scrambled up through gears and cables to examine him more closely. Two Eierkopfian lenses, each inscribed.D.E.Q were clipped onto his spectacles; behind them his eyes were open and glazed. No question but he was alive — a drop of dew ran off the bell and he caught it neatly upon his tongue — but he either could not or would not hear me, how anxiously soever I begged him to ignore my old advice.

"Everything I told you before was wrong!" I shouted in his ear. "Be like you used to be — even worse! Be like Croaker!" My cries resounded in the bell and flushed out several blackbirds; but assert as I might that he must embrace what I'd bid him eschew, I could not stir him.

"Don't sit there like T. L. Sakhyan!" I implored. I was standing on the teeth of two giant gears; as I leaned forward to shout "Wake up!" I caught at a nearby cable to save my balance. It ran to the outside clapper of that central bell, second smallest of the lot, which now was struck one mighty stroke. The Eierkopfian lenses shivered; every bird rushed from the Belfry; Eblis's hands flew to his ears, and he piped a little squeak of pain. More, the after-swing of the bell disturbed his long equilibrium: the escapement teetered back and forth until its passenger fell, just beyond my reach. His lab-coat caught on the knife-edged fulcrum; for a moment I thought him saved; then fulcrum and coat both gave way — the latter sliced through, the former snapped off where the Infinite Divisor had shaved it almost to nothing — and he tumbled head-first to the floor, breaking his eyeglass-frames and, I feared, his skull. I sprang down. Tears stood in Dr. Eierkopf's eyes; he rubbed his cranium and spat out a sunflower seed.

"Ech," he said weakly. "Be glad you're not a bird, Goat-Boy."

I propped him against a lab-stool and wiped guano off his head with a page of old graph-paper. At sight of it he wept. It was not Croaker's rampage that had undone him and his great research, he managed to declare, but my parting remark about chicken and egg. He had, incredibly, forgot to deal with that ancient question in his otherwise exhaustive treatise, and though stunned by my reminder, he'd been so confident of reasoning out the answer on the basis of his other findings that he'd bid Croaker proceed with the application of the Infinite Divisor. Not to miss the triumphant sight of its operation, he'd donned his high-resolution lenses and had Croaker balance him atop the escapement; as the Divisor's twin milling-heads shaved towards him, ever-halving the thickness of the fulcrum's edge, he had rocked joyously from Tick to Tock, which in his head became chicken and egg. And it was precisely at the instant when the Divisor had disappeared between his legs, into the center-hole of the escapement, that he'd seen the problem to be insoluble. What had transpired between that moment and the striking of the bell, he had no idea, and his tears, it turned out, were not for smashed lenses, ruined papers, his months of starvation, or his injured head: what difference did any of those make, when the fundamental question of chicken versus egg could not be resolved?

I seized his tapered shoulders. "That's the answer, sir!"

He groaned. "Goat-Boy, Goat-Boy!"

"There isn't any problem!" I insisted, shaking him eagerly until the straw fell from his neck. "Chicken and egg, tick and tock, Croaker and Eierkopf — - they're false distinctions, every one!"

He squinted through his empty spectacle-frames. "You hit your head too?"

But I told him happily that he was better off for the breaking of his lenses and the failure of the Infinite Divisor. What the Founder had joined, who could put asunder? Or resolve the One into many? Had the escapement fallen now into the gears and locked them fast? Then let Infinite Divisors and Everlasting-Nowniks embrace: they were proved brothers, and the Clock was fixed! Let there be no brooding among eggs or crowing of chickens; neither had seniority over the other; they were one, like Day and Night. In short, let him rejoice over the failure of his enterprises, inasmuch as, failing, he had passed!

Dr. Eierkopf said: "Goat-Boy, go home."

"I'm leaving," I replied. "But take my advice, sir: forget about WESCAC; forget about logic. Go out and live!"

"Now you tell me," he said sarcastically. "My head's kaput."

"Don't measure eggs," I exhorted him, "eat them!"

"Eggs, blah." He made a sour face.

"Don't watch co-eds undressing in your night-glass — "

"You said that last time."

"Go undress them yourself! You can't help being an animal: so be one! Be a beast of the woods!"