John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

For just an instant he uncovered his blank gray eyes, then hid behind his hat again and said tersely: "He is no more then, this stranger you mention."

I replied that Leonid was, fortunately, "more" indeed — more than his stepfather and more than he himself had ever been before, thanks to the less-than-perfect effectiveness of the eradicator; for though he'd not decided yet whether to rescue Max and perish in his stead or defect in truth to New Tammany, he most certainly would use no force on my keeper, who loved him as a son; nor would he be likely to try suicide again, now he saw its selfishness.

"Sentimental mid-percentilism. Petty-Informationalist logic-chopping." But X's voice was thick. "If Leonid Andreich — was that the name you mentioned? — if he failed at suicide it's because a perfect Student-Unionist has no self. Let the Union order his suicide and see whether he fails!"

"You call him a perfect Student-Unionist," I pointed out. "You must be very proud of him."

"Bah." He turned away. "He'll never learn."

"But you want him to! You're ambitious for him, like any father!"

I thought I detected a color in what I could see of his face. In the metallest tone he said: "Listen, Goat-Boy: A man sacrifices his only son — the only thing he loves — exactly to keep from being selfish. That man is no father." He snapped something in Nikolayan, and the party moved gatewards.

"Self-discipline is selfish, too!" I called after. "You can't escape yourself, Dr. Chementinski! You couldn't even if you could!"

"Did he say Chementinski?" one reporter asked another, and then asked me directly, while his colleague hurried after Classmate X. I confirmed that the Nikolayan representative to the U.C. and the famous defector Chementinski were the same man, and explained briefly how I knew, insisting that Max was wholly innocent of the plot and that Leonid, while guilty of intent to kidnap, had altogether repudiated that intention, as witness his remaining in a cell which he could easily walk out of if he chose to. Everyone pressed after Classmate X then, despite his refusal to comment or uncover his face. Even some of his colleagues, it seemed to me, scowled now as questioningly at him and each other as hostilely at the press. At last he lost his temper, jammed his hat upon his head, and reached inside his coat. Reporters scrambled for cover; aides went for their weapons — but it was an ID-card instead of a pistol that X whipped forth. He waved it at the Telerama lenses.

"Does it say Chementinski? Nyet!"

Those who were near enough admitted that only an X was visible on the card, though obviously that fact in itself proved little. Coming up behind, I flipped out the magnifying lens on my stick and thrust it over the shoulders of several reporters, bidding them look again closely.

"Nyet!" Classmate X snatched the card away, but not before two reporters saw, or claimed to have seen, imperfectly eradicated characters on both sides of the X. Moreover, examining his glitter-eyed, fierce-beaked face, for once publicly uncovered, a cameraman was moved to recall that though the features were otherwise much altered, Chementinski the traitor-scientist had had metal-capped bicuspids like Classmate X.

"The better to EAT you with!" X shouted, as impassioned as his stepson now. "This means Riot!" It was his aides then who led him, one at each arm, out to the motorcade on the mall. I entered the Light House.

A number of the Chancellor's assistants were in the entrance-hall; they wore gray suits and had similar youthful faces, but their forelocks were combed back now, and instead of bustling they lounged about in leather chairs and window-seats. I approached the nearest and announced my wish to see Chancellor Rexford at once. He turned from the window, smiling slightly, and congratulated me upon my release from Main Detention. The voice, though lifeless, was unmistakable.

"You're the Chancellor!" I couldn't conceal my surprise: without his grin, his white suit, his springy force and forelock, he seemed blander than his aides. His face was tired but placid; he looked ten years older.

"I won't be, next term, if the polls mean anything," he said, shaking my hand. "Assuming there is a next term."

I'd expected a less cordial reception, in view of the consequences of my former advice, but though no one actually welcomed me into the Chancellor's office, no one forbade my entering it, either. And Rexford, while neither pleased or displeased to see me, was polite, even respectful. He dismissed his aides and postponed several appointments at my request, so that we could talk.

"You needn't tell me," he sighed from behind his desk. "Bray had no business Certifying me, and you were right to call me flunked." He stared gloomily at a photograph of his wife upon the mantelpiece. "But I feel even flunkèder now — not that it matters, extremely. You talked to X?"

I affirmed that I had, but as I prepared to disclose Classmate X's true identity, two telephones on the desk rang simultaneously, a red and a white. He answered the red first, listened gravely to the message, and said, "Again? You're sure? Well, we'll have to think about that. Don't want to do anything rash." He made a memorandum — what appeared to be a tally.

"Another guard fell off the Line," he told me, and picked up the white telephone. "We're pretty sure the Nikolayans are tapping our power at night, too. They may even be advancing their line."

To the white telephone he made similar responses, though more personal. "Please be reasonable, dear," he said. "You really ought to give this more thought…" But his caller hung up.

He tisked ruefully and put back the receiver. "I guess that's that. Either your advice about women was wrong or it came too late." He'd been skeptical at first of my sundry counsels, he said, but they'd stuck in his mind, and though it went against the grain of his temperament to eschew compromise, he'd had to acknowledge himself guilty of occasional secret "deals" with Classmate X, Ira Hector, and Maurice Stoker; he had, moreover, tolerated moderate amounts of graft, academic dishonesty, prostitution, and other campus vices as unavoidable in a large college, and very infrequently had allowed himself a fit of anger, a drink too many, or an extracurricular night of love, usually with Anastasia Stoker. Upon his return from our ill-fated trip to the U.C. building last spring, his wife had announced plans for a short vacation, alone; and smitten with bad conscience (as well as distraught by the failure of the Summit Symposium), he'd confessed these past errors, begged her pardon, and vowed to lapse from passèd fidelity no more. When word reached him (during his wife's absence) that Bray had passed me for flunking his own diplomates, Rexford determined to follow my advice to the letter: to purge himself of every trace of immoderation and renounce absolutely all traffic with flunkèdness — if his administration could not pass the "Open Book Test," let it fall! His subsequent measures I'd heard about in Main Detention, and their unhappy consequences, all except one: when Mrs. Rexford had at last returned from her long holiday he'd not even scolded her, much less struck her, though everything suggested she'd been unfaithful. On the contrary, he'd proposed they attend together a course of lectures called The Problems of Marriage in a Changing University.

But while he prided himself on having achieved perfect reasonableness and self-control, he did not feel Commenced. Not because things were going wretchedly — he knew that Right was right and Wrong wrong regardless of consequences — but because his heart's desires hid yet from the light of reason. That the Powerhouse threatened to explode from overproduction while Great Mall flickered and WESCAC flagged for want of power; that West Campus was losing the Quiet Riot, and his administration its popularity; that people suspected him of kinship with Stoker since Stoker had ceased to oppose him; that Classmate X had just announced a new advance of the Nikolayan Power Line and Mrs. Rexford a new vacation, perhaps with a friend and perhaps permanent — all these he might accept as the price of Truth. But the truth was, when he saw Stoker lounging at the gate in a motorcycle-jacket he had the strongest wish to hear him taunt as in the old days, "Flunk you, Brother!" When he saw Anastasia, despite her recent coldness and his perfect restraint, he still tumesced; yet he loved his wife so, her disaffection notwithstanding, that the rumors of her infidelity smote him with jealous rage; gladly would he strike her down — and pick her up, and madly kiss away her bruises…