John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

It was young Dr. Eblis Eierkopf, the former Bonifacist, who first proposed that WESCAC be provided with a supplementary intelligence which he called NOCTIS (for Non-Conceptual Thinking and Intuitional Synthesis): this capacity, he maintained, if integrated with the formidable MALI system, would give WESCAC a truly miraculous potential, setting it as far above studentdom in every psychic particular as studentdom was above the insects. Wescacus malinoctis, as he called his projected creature, would pose and solve the subtlest problems not alone of scientists, mathematicians, and production managers, but as well of philosophers, poets, and professors of theology. Max himself had found the notion intriguing and had invited Eierkopf to pursue it further, though he cordially questioned both its wisdom and its feasibility: the crippled young Siegfrieder was regarded for all his brilliance as something of an unpleasant visionary, and at the time — Campus Riot II just having ended — everyone was busy finding peaceful employments for Wescacus mali . The debate, therefore, between the "Eierkopfians" and the "Spielman faction" had remained academic and good-humored. But when the Nikolayans fed EASCAC its first meal, proving their military equivalence to West Campus, Eierkopf pressed most vigorously for a crash program of the highest priority to develop NOCTIS, carrying his plea over Max's head directly to the Chancellor's office. It was our one hope, he had maintained, of regaining the electroencephalic advantage for West Campus: a malinoctial WESCAC not only would out-general its merely rational opponent in time of riot, but would be of inestimable value in the Quiet Riot too, possessed of a hundred times the art of Nikolay's whole Propaganda Institute. Indeed he went so far as to suggest it might prove the Commencement of all studentdom, a Grand Tutor such as this campus had never seen. What had been Enos Enoch's special quality, after all, and Sakhyan's, if not an extraordinary psychic endowment of the non-conceptual sort, combined with tremendously influential personality? But the WESCAC he envisioned would be as superior to those Grand Tutors in every such respect as it was already in, say mathematical prowess; founderlike was the only word for it, and like the Founder Himself it could well resolve, for good and all, the disharmonies that threatened studentdom.

High officers in the Hector administration grew interested — more in the military than in the moral promise — and supported the NOCTIS project: but Max and several others fought it with all their strength. "Noctility," they agreed with Eierkopf, was exactly the difference between WESCAC's mind and student's; but the limitations of malistic thinking, however many problems they occasioned, were what stood at last between a student body served by WESCAC and the reverse. To thoughtful believers, the notion of a student-made Founder must be utterly blasphemous; to high-minded secular studentists, on the other hand, even a campus ruled by Student-Unionists — who at least were men and as such might be appealed to, outwitted, and in time overthrown — was preferable to eternal and absolute submission to a supra-human power. In an impassioned speech — his last — to the College Senate, Max had declared: "Me, I don't want any Supermind, danke : just your mind and my mind. You want to make WESCAC your Founder and everybody get to Commencement Gate? Well, what I think, my friends, that's all poetry, and life is what I like better. The Riot's down here on campus, not up in the Belfry, and the enemy isn't Student-Unionism, but ignorance and suffering, that the WESCAC we got right now can help us fight. If you ask me, the medical student that invented ether did more for studentdom than Sakhyan and Enos Enoch together."

To these perhaps impolitic remarks a well-known senator from the Political Science Department had objected that they sounded to him neither reverent nor almamatriotic. It was no secret that his distinguished colleague — for what cause, the senator would not presume to guess — had opposed every measure to insure the defense of the Free Campus against Founderless Student-Unionism by strengthening WESCAC's deterrent capacity; that he had moreover "stood up" for the traitor Chementinski and sympathized openly with a number of organizations on the Attorney-Dean's List. But could not even an ivy-tower eccentric (who had better have stuck to his logarithms and left political science to professors of that specialty) see that pain and ignorance were but passing afflictions, mere diversions if he might say so from the true end of life on this campus? Had it not always been, and would it not be again, that when pain and ignorance were vanquished, studentdom turned ever to the Founder in hope of Commencement? And as it was the New Tammany Way to lead the fight against ignorance and pain, so must not our college lead too the Holy Riot against a-founderism and disbelief, with every weapon in its Armory?

So much at least was true: Max was no political scientist. At the first question he had merely snorted that ignorance would always be with us, even in the Senate. At the second he had cried out impatiently, "Flunk all your founders — it's the Losters I'll take sides with!"

His dismissal and exile followed this stormy session, which also approved the secret NOCTIS project and made Eblis Eierkopf director of the WESCAC Research Authority in Max's stead.

"Now mind you," my keeper said when I protested again at his ouster, "Eierkopf didn't hate me. He don't hate anybody, that's his trouble. Seek the Answers is his motto, just like New Tammany's, but he don't care what the Question is or how many students it costs to answer it. When he was in Siegfried College he went along with the Überschüler idea, not because he thought the Siegfrieders was the Genius-Class, but just he was interested in mathematical eugenics and thought he'd learn more with captured co-eds than he would with fruit-flies. Oh, Billy, I used to look at Eblis and think, 'There's Wescacus malinoctis right there: it'll be a super Eierkopf!' So, what you think was the last thing I heard before I left Tower Hall? The NOCTIS program was going to be combined with another secret one, that Eblis had got Chancellor Hector very excited about — what they called it the Cum Laude Project…"

For some semesters, it seemed, among its host of peacetime chores, WESCAC had served the Department of Animal Husbandry's Artificial Breeding Laboratory by analyzing the genetic characteristics and histories of all their livestock and selecting optimum matches for the long-range breeding goals of several species — much in the way it paired dormitory roommates and counseled newlyweds. So comparable indeed were these activities that Eierkopf wished to combine and extend them. The immediate objective of the Cum Laude Project seemed innocent enough: WESCAC would abstract from thousands of historical and biographical texts a sort of quintessential type of the ideal West-Campus Graduate, or a number of such ideal types; it would then formulate a genetic and psychological analysis of these models, and with reference to the similar analyses of every New Tammany undergraduate (already in its memory), it would indicate which young men, paired with which young women, could most quickly breed to some approximation of the ideal, and in how many generations. The actual mating, to be sure, would be voluntary and legalized by marriage (at least in the pilot experiment): the whole operation would amount to no more than a sophisticated and programmatic Courtship Counseling, already in its simpler form a popular WESCAC service, and should tend towards improvements in the student body of a sort no right-minded person could object to: better physical and mental health, higher IQ's, intellectual earnestness, Enochian humility, and the like. But along with "Operation Sheepskin," as this eugenical analysis was called, there was initiated a more radical and truly noctic series of experiments called "Operation Ramshorn," which suggested quite clearly to Max what his former subordinate was really up to. WESCAC's facilities in the Livestock Research Labs were so implemented that it could achieve a pre-selected eugenical objective almost without student assistance. A small sheep-barn was constructed to its specifications and stocked with fecund Dorset ewes; WESCAC was supplied with their genetic histories and with phials of semen from a variety of rams, and was given management also of every operation from feed-mixing to lamb-incubation: its instructions were to develop a ram short of neck and light of plate, with compact shoulders, a deep rack, firm-muscled loins, well-fleshed legs, and a fine short fleece — but with no horns at all. Left then to itself, WESCAC fastened upon the ewes it required and impregnated them in their stalls with what semen it chose; its automatic implements took blood-tests, gave hormone-and-vitamin injections, adjusted feed-mixtures, exercise-times, and incubator-heats; it tapped certain of the male lambs for new sperm when they came of age, bred a second generation and a third, and (at just about the time Max first wandered to the NTC goat-farm) turned out exactly the desired product: a ram whose single shortcoming — which one assumed would be easily remedied in further experiments — was that like mules and certain other hybrids it was sterile.