John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"And don't forget," Max said, shaking his head, "while it was making love to the sheep it was running the whole College too, from teaching plane geometry to working out the payroll. That's some WESCAC, that is!"

Now, livestock was still managed much more cheaply and efficiently by knowledgeable students of animal husbandry, and would doubtless remain in their charge. The significance of "Operation Ramshorn," Max explained, lay not in the fact that WESCAC had fed and bred the sheep itself, instead of doing merely the eugenical brainwork — though goodness knew this fact was ominous enough when juxtaposed with "Operation Sheepskin"! It was two other aspects of the experiment that appalled my keeper, and made him not unhappy to be cut off from further news of the Cum Laude Project. First, a more sophisticated version of "Ramshorn," this one involving rats, had already been programmed with WESCAC's assistance. Asked by a cereal-grains professor to clear the college granaries of the pests, WESCAC displayed an unprecedented inefficiency: instead of formulating a better poison or designing a rat-proof grain elevator, it proposed to mate with enough cats to develop a spectacular rodent-hunter, and to miscegenate these Überkatzen with the rats themselves, to the end of evolving a species that would prey upon itself and choose no other mate but WESCAC, which then would breed them all sterile! A proposal fantastic in every respect: the professor of cereal-grains returned disenchanted to his old-fashioned poisons and ordinary pussycats; WESCAC's gaffe became a West-Campus joke and calmed the fears of many whom Max's gloomy warnings had disturbed. As the New Tammany Times asked in a playful editorial, "What has studentdom to dread from an intelligence that can't even build a better mousetrap?"

But Dr. Eierkopf and his associates had been neither disappointed nor amused. What the newspaper and cereal-grains people didn't know was that the rat-problem had been the first test of the NOCTIS system: WESCAC's thinking had been truly if crudely malinoctial, like a simple-minded undergraduate's; the very absurdity of the Überkatzen proposal was a sign of success, for it indicated plainly that WESCAC's reasoning had been influenced — nay, overmastered — by what could only be called lust. Significantly, its program was by no means illogical, however impracticable: but for the first time in its career it had been guilty of rationalizing. This meant that it now possessed a sort of subconsciousness — irrational, imperious, in a word noetic — - with which its malistic consciousness had to come to terms. Quite like a randy freshman, WESCAC had had little on its mind but sex; filled with amorous memories of the Dorset ewes, all it cared to do was mate, never mind with whom or at whose expense; Reason had become a pander for Desire. To be sure, there was nothing Grand-Tutorish in this — at least not apparently. Neither was there about the average undergraduate. But just as the frailest first-grader could be said to have more athletic potential than the mightiest bull in the pasture, just because he's human, so the ignorantest, most lecherous undergraduate, given proper managing, might one day become a Grand Tutor — which the best adding-machine on campus could never. Dr. Eierkopf's delight (and Max's despair) was that WESCAC had met this first prerequisite of Grand Tutorship: for better or worse its mind was now unmistakably, embarrassingly, irrevocably human.

"What happened next?" I demanded. "Can't we come to the part where I was born?"

"That's where we are," Max said. "What I mean, I don't know what happened next; I was herding the goats then and never saw anybody from the old days. All I know, what I found out years later, something must have happened to make the Tower Hall people see how dangerous the NOCTIS business was. Even before Lucius Rexford was elected, Chancellor Hector put an end to the Cum Laude Project and demoted Eblis Eierkopf to some job where he can't do any harm. The witch-hunting was over by then, and Dr. Rexford asked me would I come back to WESCAC, he was sorry I'd been sacked. But I'd seen enough of the student race to know that people was all I could love and all I could fear, while the goats I didn't feel nothing but simple affection for. And there was the new WESCAC: Mr. Rexford said it was all right, they got rid of the NOCTIS system and everything's under control. But I know WESCAC better than that. It don't forget anything it's ever learned, and if it really was noctic enough to desire things, even for a minute, then it desired to preserve and extend itself along with humping the sheep. It was always cunning, WESCAC was; now it's willful and passionate too, and it can EAT anybody that tries to change its mind against its will — all in the name of collegiate security, like a Bonifacist Kanzler! 'No thanks,' I told Dr. Rexford; 'I'm glad you been elected, your brain's in the right place, but I won't have anything to do with WESCAC no more. It's playing possum, is all,' I told him, 'or cat-and-mouse with the whole student body; let it come and EAT me, at least I won't serve myself up on a plate. Besides, I got Billy Bocksfuss to take care of, that's like my own son…' "

Just here George happened to click off his sweeper; I heard him sing again somewhere in the distance:

"Mister Tiger he roar, Mister Lion he shout —

But it's WESCAC'll EAT you if you don't watch out."

And now I thought I understood how he had come to his present pass, and what was the debt I owed him. I had turned in the direction of his voice; now I looked to Max, and saw my confirmation in the twist of his mouth.

"The dumbwaiter you were stuck in, Billy: it used to be a booklift, but then we used it to send Diet-tapes down to WESCAC. There was only half a dozen people allowed to operate it from upstairs, to feed in secret stuff about the Nikolayans and to read out WESCAC's defense orders — I mean people like the Joint Chairmen of Military Science, and the WESCAC Director, and the Vice-Chancellor for Riot Research. Whoever it was put you in there, he wanted you dead, because that dumbwaiter went where no human student would ever dare go — right down into WESCAC's Belly! This was after the Diet fight, when WESCAC was set to EAT anybody that even came near its Riot-storage. I don't know who your parents are, but I bet WESCAC does: you must have got the same Prenatal Aptitude-Tests that all New Tammany babies get, because when George opened the Belly door and fetched you out, there was this official PAT-card hung around your neck — the only thing you had on. No name was on it, and no IQ; just in the place where it usually says what a kid should major in, WESCAC had printed the words Pass All Fail All …"

"By George!" I exclaimed.

Max gestured with his open palms. "By George it didn't mean a thing, or by me either when I saw it. It don't make sense how one student could pass everything and flunk everything too. But if it meant you were going to do one or the other, like be a cum laude Graduate or flunk out altogether, there were plenty students like that in the old days, and nobody put them out to die on account of it."

The only likely hypothesis, he declared, was that my birth had been a threat of embarrassment to someone high in the administrative hierarchy of the College, who had chosen to commit an extraordinary infanticide in order to be rid of me. The scheme was feasible enough: I would be found dead by some other high official within a few days (assuming they were not all in on the plot): because of the delicate involvement of WESCAC there would be no publicity, lest the Administration be embarrassed or a valuable scientist lost; the Campus Security Police would make a secret investigation, which could be thwarted by any professor-general or vice-chancellor; the findings, if any, would be submitted to the Attorney-Dean, who if he weren't involved in the thing himself would anyhow not prosecute without the Chancellor's consent. What Max regarded as even more significant, however, was that there had been apparently no investigation at all, on the one hand, nor on the other any attempt by the culprit to follow through with his crime. It could be no secret to the guilty party that I had been spirited out of the dumbwaiter, though he might well not suspect I was still alive: poor George having heard my cries and been partially EATen by WESCAC for entering its Belly to rescue me, he was able afterwards neither to keep his brave deed secret nor to give a lucid account of it. That he was not made a hero of or even pensioned off, but quietly dismissed, argued that my enemy knew the deed was out — how must he have suffered then not to know further what George had done with me! Or if he did know me to be alive and in Max Spielman's hands (no friend then of the powers-that-were), and yet permitted George and me both to go on living, one of two oilier things must have been the case: Did he rather risk exposure by the mad book-sweep or the "crazy old Moishian" — as Max's foes called him — than repeat and compound his felony? Was it that the perpetrator of the deed, like Snow White's forestry-major, was not its instigator, but had only followed orders that he was glad to see miscarry, and had dared not then report or affirm the miscarriage? Or could it be, as Max himself chose to think, that while some influential personage or personages wanted me dead, some other of comparable influence did not, so that, the attempt having failed and come to light, my secret enemies were prevented by my secret friends from finishing the job — perhaps even from knowing it was unfinished? It was no coincidence, Max argued, that prior to my discovery he'd been a mere helper about the goat-barn, which was scheduled to be razed and the herd disposed of to make room for more poultry-pens; then not a month after he'd received me from George these plans had been changed without explanation: the Senior Goatherd was given a vice-chairmanship in Animal Husbandry, and Max had been allowed, almost unofficially, to manage the barn and herd until the Rexford administration took office and dignified his position with titles and a modest research-budget.