John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"So," he said, Z-ing the sibilant as Max did. But his voice was a furry pipe. Croaker at once set to whining.

"He wants you off so he gets his work done," the strange man said, with a faint smile. I dismounted and leaned on my stick, confounded. At once Croaker hurried to a metal locker nearby, took a white robe out, and draped it about the man's shoulders; our host bared his gums, and Croaker hurried to another room, returning presently with a set of false dentures in his hand. Accepting and inserting them, the man sighed and said, more clearly: "It was good not to have the brute around, but I do need him." He addressed Croaker then in a flurry of some unfamiliar speech, which the black man evidently understood, for he sprang to a cupboard and set about some task.

"You're the famous Goat-Boy, nein ?" He tapped a long metal cylinder beside him, thrust into a slit in the wall. "I saw you through the night-glass while I was adjusting the main telescopes. There's an annular solar eclipse tomorrow. I'm Eblis Eierkopf." He smiled at my alarm and fluttered a hand. "Don't believe all Herr Spielman tells you." Here he managed an actual chuckle. "That dumbhead, shooting Herman Hermann! He thinks with his ventricles!" He had, he explained, heard the news bulletins about Max's arrest and Harold Bray's appearance in the Amphitheater, as earlier he'd heard reports from the Powerhouse of Croaker's having been subdued by the Ag-Hill Goat-Boy, et cetera. I was still too disconcerted by his identity and appearance to make a proper reply. This was the man responsible for the Cum Laude Project, and Miss Virginia R. Hector's undoing? This was Max's arch-enemy? Anastasia's father?

"Sit down," he invited. There was another stool near the eyepiece of a huge telescope aimed through a vertical opening in the dome. "Croaker brings beer as soon as my pablum's ready."

This my former ally did, clearly now emancipated from my direction; not only beer he brought me — excellent stuff in a pewter-topped stein — but boiled chicken-eggs, which he sliced with a clever wire gadget.

"Not those!" Dr. Eierkopf wailed when he caught sight of him. "They're for research!"

But it was too late, the eggs were sliced; whatever scientific work they'd been meant for would have to be begun afresh. Croaker served them round and spoon-fed Dr. Eierkopf his gruel — insisting, with grunts and throaty babble, that he eat every bit of it.

"So," Dr. Eierkopf sighed again. "When he ran off I could think undistracted, just as your friend Stoker promised, but I starved to death. Now I eat and don't get my work done, and he spoils my research. Drink up! Don't be afraid of me."

"I'm not afraid," I said. "I — believe I should despise you, sir."

This news he merely nodded at. "Of course you should, after all Spielman told you! The old man is plenty mixed up."

Sternly I declared that my keeper and advisor was the passèdest man on campus as far as I was concerned —

"As far as you know, you mean."

As far as I knew, then; that he most certainly had been cashiered unjustly, thanks in part to the bad offices of Eblis Eierkopf; that nothing could be more false than the present charge against him, inasmuch as all his life he'd affirmed the principle of non-violence — whereas his rival had been, if not actively a Bonifacist himself, at least a leading enemy scientist during Campus Riot II, who had contemplated without protest the combustion of numberless Moishian civilians in the furnaces of Siegfrieder College, and after the Riot had agreed without qualm to do EAT-research for New Tammany. And so forth. My harangue lasted some while, fueled by an actual twinkle in Dr. Eierkopf's eyes. Croaker meanwhile was peering through the smaller telescope, the one identified as a "night-glass"; he moved it slightly, gave a croak, and offered the eyepiece to his master, who begged me to excuse him for a moment.

"Ja, that's nice," he remarked a second later, and I was not too indignant to be astonished at Croaker's fondling the man's tiny organs while he peered. "Want to look?" he invited me. "Young ladies' dormitory across the way. But you're too agitated. No matter." He pushed Croaker's hand away. "Ach, that's enough. He is droll, don't you think?" he asked me. "Flunking nuisance, all the same. Now, Goat-Boy, let's see where to start on these notions of yours and Spielman's. I really am obliged to you for bringing Croaker home." He laughed aloud, as if struck by an extraordinarily amusing thought. "Do you know, your distinguished keeper went so far once as to accuse me of making his girlfriend pregnant. Imagine!"

"You deny it?"

He opened his robe with a kind of giggle, and Croaker tickled him at once. "Do I need to? Stop that, Croaker! So." More seriously he said to me, "Let's start there. You see how I'm made; I had early a kind of infantile paralysis; it left my legs and the rest as you observe. And young Mrs. Stoker does not call me her father."

I acknowledged that she did not.

"Then one of two things is true," Dr. Eierkopf reasoned lightly: "Max Spielman is Anastasia's father — "

"No!" I repeated indignantly what Max had told me about his accidental exposure to EAT-radiation, which had destroyed his fertility. Dr. Eierkopf smiled and nodded.

"Is that so? Very amusing! Well then, if Spielman isn't lying — by the way, Dr. Kennard Sear could verify that…"

"Dr. Sear!"

Expressing his agreeable surprise that I knew the man he spoke of, Dr. Eierkopf affirmed that certain classified files under Dr. Sear's jurisdiction could attest the fertility and potency of any male in New Tammany College who had been of spermatogenic age twenty-odd years ago. At that time, as part of the culminating phase of the Cum Laude Project, semen samples had been taken from all New Tammany males between puberty and senility. These had then been analyzed, classified, and culled under Dr. Sear's supervision to the standards evolved by WESCAC for the Grand-Tutorial Ideal: Laboratory Eugenical Specimen, and although then-Chancellor Reginald Hector had curtailed the whole project shortly afterwards, the donor-data files from "Operation Sheepskin" were still intact and under seal somewhere in the Infirmary's research laboratories — as well, of course, as in WESCAC's memory-banks.

"So maybe Max is lying and maybe not," he went on.

"And maybe you are," I interrupted — not unimpressed, however, by the information.

Dr. Eierkopf made a high sound. "Very good! That's very good. Indeed, I might be lying. But suppose everybody's telling the truth; so your keeper is potent but sterile, and I'm fertile but impotent. Now what's left? Maybe Virginia Hector's telling the truth, how WESCAC was the father? How one night she goes into the Cum Laude Room to meet a boyfriend, and WESCAC grabs hold and fertilizes her with the GILES, yes?"

I was up off my stool. "Is that true? Is that why the project was stopped?"

Dr. Eierkopf raised the skin where eyebrows usually are. "So Miss Hector said. And ja, that's what made her poppa so angry he stopped the Cum Laude Project. A very great pity, when we were so close to success. A greater pity than any of those dumbsticks in Tower Hall can understand."

I demanded to know whether Miss Hector had been telling the truth. Dr. Eierkopf's tone suggested that he knew more than he cared to tell at the moment — and he openly acknowledged that many details of the Cum Laude Project were still secret, for various reasons — but certain facts, he maintained, were beyond doubt and could be spoken of: the GILES, he would stake his life on it, had been successfully developed, at least in prototypical form, and had been so to speak in WESCAC's hands, awaiting the selection of a volunteer "mother" and permission from Tower Hall and the Enochist lobbies to proceed with an experimental insemination. Second, WESCAC had, in Operation Ramshorn and the much-maligned Überkatzen experiment, demonstrated its capacity to take initiative and implement its resolves; for just that reason the Cum Laude Room had been designated temporarily off-limits to female employees, to prevent untimely accidents. Third, the precious original GILES had undeniably disappeared on the night in question, and was never found. Finally, a secret obstetrical report, which Eierkopf had seen just prior to his demotion, affirmed that Miss Virginia R. Hector quite definitely had been impregnated.