by John Barth
“And all the doors are open, Georgie,” he concluded. “You can’t go through every one at the same time, but they don’t ever close unless you close them yourself. I’m still finding out things about the violin.” He set about to discourse then upon the acoustical properties of a fiddle-box lacquer he had made from the whites of grouse-eggs, but I would not hear him out.
“Max—”
“You keep interrupting.” He seemed less annoyed than uneasy; indeed it appeared to me that he spoke to prevent me from speaking.
“I do know what I want to major in,” I pressed on. “It’s not anything you’ve ever studied.”
“Wunderbar! Now, well—” He cocked his head and pretended to search his memory. “That leaves open-channel hydraulics, school lunch management, coalmine ventilation … and the history of baseball. Unless they’ve changed the New Tammany Catalogue since I was fired. Which is it?”
“I’m going to be a hero.”
Max’s little gaiety vanished. Thrusting out his lips he turned away and plucked a straw of buckwheat.
“What’s this hero? What kind of hero?”
I wasn’t sure what he meant. Quietly, but with a kind of fierceness and still averting his eyes, Max explained that a lifeguard at the college pools, for example, was called a hero if he risked his life to save his fellow students, whereas a professor-general of military science might be similarly labeled for risking his life to destroy them. Which sort of hero-work did I plan to take up?
I admitted that I had no particular project in mind. “A hero doesn’t have to know ahead of time what he’ll do, does he? All he knows is who he is—”
“You don’t know that much yet,” Max grumbled.
“I don’t mean my name!” His strange ungentleness vexed me. “I mean he might know he’s a hero before he can prove it to anybody else. Then when he finds out the thing that needs doing, that nobody but the biggest hero can do, he goes there and does it. Like the old dons-errant and wandering scholars—they didn’t know what adventures they’d have when they started out, but they knew it was adventures they were starting out for, isn’t that right? Well, that’s how I feel.”
Max shook his head. “You’re wrong, George.”
“I’m not!”
“Na, please—” Gentle again, Max held up his hand. “What I mean, you’re wrong I haven’t studied herohood. I know more about herohood than anybody.” This remark my keeper made in the tone of a plain statement of fact—he never boasted. “I’m not a hero myself and wouldn’t want to be. But I sure do know what the hero-work is.”
“Well, I am one,” I declared. “That’s why I’m tired of studying everything: I want to get started on doing whatever has to be done. I’ll find out what it is.”
Max continued to shake his head, as if my words pained him. “I don’t believe in that kind of thing, Georgie.” There were, he said, two classes of heroes worthy of the name: one consisted of people who in pursuit of their normal business find themselves thrust into a situation calling for the risk of their welfare to insure that of others, and respond courageously; G. Herrold was of this sort, an entirely ordinary man who just once had done an extraordinarily selfless deed. The other class consisted of those men and women the fruit of whose endeavors is some hard-won victory over the sufferings of studentdom in general: discoverers of vaccines, for example, and authors of humane legislation. These latter, in Max’s view, were not more or less admirable than the former sort; the courage of the one was physical, of the other moral; the result in both instances was rescue from suffering, and in neither did the agent regard himself (before the fact, at least) as heroic. But the heroic professional—the riot-front doctor or the varsity pacifist—was nowise to be confused with what Max feared I had in mind: the professional hero. “It’s the misery that should make the hero; the problem comes first, and true heroism is a kind of side-effect. Moishe didn’t lead his people to the Promised Quad because he was a hero: he happens to be a hero because he did it. But this other kind, like in the Dean Arthur Cycle, they decide they’re heroes first and then go looking for trouble to prove it; often as not they end up causing trouble themselves.” How many luckless sophomores had perished, he asked me, in order that Anchisides might gratify his ambition to found Remus College, and Remus College to dominate West Campus? To what worthy end did the son of Amphitryon steal the horses of Diomedes and set them to murder that animal-husbander, who had done him no injury at all? “It’s perfectly plain when you read those stories that the hero’s not there for the sake of the dragon, but the other way around. I got no use for heroes like that.”
“But there always are plenty of dragons, aren’t there, Max? If a man knows he’s a hero, can’t he always find himself a dragon?”
Max agreed that he could indeed, and ruthlessly would—even if the dragon were minding its own business. For the sane man, he insisted, there were no dragons on the campus, only problems, which wanted not slaying but solving. If he was suspicious of adventuring heroes, it was because like that gentlest of dons, Quijote, they were wont at the very least to damage useful windmills in the name of dragomachy. “Heroes, bah,” he said.
I was then moved to argue (not entirely out of the captiousness I have confessed to) that aside from the matter of dragons, it was true by Max’s own assertion that different men were called to different work, and that studentdom stood presently in the gravest peril of its history; could not a man then feel called to this greatest hero-work imaginable, the rescue of all studentdom?
“Well, and what from?” my keeper demanded. “From EATing each other up, I suppose.”
“Yes!” For all their sarcasm, his words led me to an inspiration. “That place you told me about in WESCAC’s machinery—what did you call it?—where it decides who the enemy is and when to EAT …”
“The AIM,” Max said glumly: “Automatic Implementation Mechanism. It sets the College’s objectives and carries them out.”
My excitement grew. “Suppose a man found out how to get inside of WESCAC and EASCAC and change their AIMs so they couldn’t ever hurt anybody! Wouldn’t that be fit work for a hero?”
“This is enough,” Max declared very firmly. “Any man that steps inside the Belly-room, he gets EATen on the spot.”
“Anybody, Max?”
My friend’s face grew most stern. “I was in the Senate when they passed the bill, Georgie,” he reminded me, “and I was with the Chief Programmer when he read it in. Nobody changes WESCAC’s AIM.”
My heart beat fast indeed. “Nobody but a Grand Tutor, you told me once. Isn’t that what you got them to put in?”
“Now look here, my boy!” Max was moved to take me by the arm; his tone was impatient and severe, but a great agitation trembled through him. “You’re too old for this foolishness, verstehst? In the first place I don’t like Grand Tutors, if there ever really were any—”
I interrupted: “If Enos Enoch was alive he could change WESCAC’s AIM, couldn’t he? And he could Commence the whole student body.”
“Pfui on Commencement!” Max snapped. “Never mind Commencement! Your friend Enos Enoch cured a couple dozen sick students and brought one dead one back to life; how many millions do you think he’s been the death of? Anyhow you’re not Enos Enoch: you’re a plain boy like any other boy, and be glad if you can learn to be a man—that’s hero-work enough!”
But I insisted: “I’m not a boy. I’m a goat-boy.”
“Anyhow, you’re not a Grand Tutor.”
“Then I’m a freak, Max: those are my choices.”
Max shook his head vigorously, almost in my face. “They aren’t choices, Georgie; they’re the same thing. Now you get this Grand Tutor business out of your head. I can’t watch over you when you matriculate; you’re on your own then. But the man that sticks his head into WESCAC’s Belly—ach, he comes out like G. Herrold.”
“Not me,” I said. My voice was stubborn, but I thrilled at a recognition that made deep and sudden sense of my life.
Max let go my arm and demanded almost fearfully: “What’s this you’re saying, boy? Is it you don’t see how vain this is?”
Fist to brow, awed and laughing, I shook my head. “I just now realized, Max: I’ve been there before! I was practically born in WESCAC’s Belly, wasn’t I? So it must be I’m a Grand Tutor like Enos Enoch—or else I’ve been EATen already! Am I crazy, do you think?”
It seemed to me he paled at what I said. In any case, his efforts to account for this remarkable circumstance did not impress me. He admitted the extraordinariness of it—both that I had been spared my rescuer’s fate and that the problematical nature of this fact had never previously quite occurred to him. But nothing was known, he pointed out, of the events that led up to my abandonment in WESCAC’s tapelift, and the nature and identity of whoever put me there were equally mysterious. It could not even be said for certain whether the lift was meant to be my coffin or the Moishe’s-basket of my salvation; though he Max had once been the foremost authority on WESCAC’s programming, these things had taken place after his removal, when for all he knew the Menu might have been altered either by the computer itself or secretly by its new Director, Eblis Eierkopf. Neither had conclusive research been undertaken on the effects of Electroencephalic Amplification and Transmission on newborn children: while it was true that the Amaterasu infants EATen in C.R. II had not developed normally, investigators could not agree on how much of their psychic disorder was owing directly to the “EAT-waves” and how much to the general trauma of the catastrophe. Pacifists everywhere maintained that the children (now grown) were uniformly retarded to the point of idiocy, but at least one New Tammany scientist had asserted that their psychoses, while severe and organic, were of such a wide variety as possibly to include the syndromes associated with certain men of genius.
“What’s more,” Max argued, “the waves in the Belly must have been different from the ones we used on the Amaterasus, or G. Herrold wouldn’t have what little sense he’s got left. Na, Georgie—” He shook his head resolutely. “You aren’t any crazy-man and you aren’t any Grand Tutor! You’re ambitious, is all; you got a late start and you want to do something large to show you aren’t a freak. But you mustn’t want to be greater than your classmates in the hero-way: that’s vain and foolish—it’s wicked, even. Pfui on Enos Enoch!” And he reaffirmed his conviction (the same that got him into trouble in the Senate) that Grand Tutors and Kollegiumführers were two faces of a single coin; that what studentdom needed for its preservation was neither Founders nor Deans o’ Flunks but more patient researchers, more tolerant instructors, and better-educated Senate committees. “All Graduation means,” he said, “is learning not to kill students in the name of studentdom. And the only Examination that matters isn’t any Final; it’s a plain question that you got to answer every minute: Am I subtracting from the total misery, or adding to it? If I’d asked myself that question soon enough, I’d never have discovered the EAT-waves.”
I might mercifully have challenged him here, though we’d traversed the ground many times before: had he not developed WESCAC’s weaponry someone else surely would have sooner or later, perhaps the Bonifacists or the Student-Unionists, with much greater expense of student life; had New Tammany not EATen those Amaterasus there’d have been no quick end to C.R. II, and the necessary invasion of their campus would have cost many times more lives on both sides; science, moreover, was neutral: there was no turning back from Knowledge, however Wisdom might flag—and so forth. But I was too concerned with questions of my own to ask myself that searching one of Max’s.
“I knew you wouldn’t like the idea,” I said. “But you have to admit it’s possible, isn’t it? Even if there’s some chance I’m not a Grand Tutor, a lot of things make it seem possible that I am. And if I am, I’ve got important things to do.” Max’s attitude vexed me afresh. “Even if it was just an outside chance, I’d be flunkèd not to take it! If I’m mistaken, it’s nobody’s funeral but mine. But suppose I’m not mistaken! Think how much suffering you’d be the cause of if I was a Grand Tutor and you talked me into thinking I wasn’t!”
This last had a wrong ring to it, but before I could add that it was in any case impossible to change what was no mere conjecture but a certainty that deepened in me even as I spoke, Max asked, “Do you know what a Grand Tutor’s life is like? I mean a real one like Enos Enoch or Maios the Lykeionian, not the story-book kind. Do you know what has to happen to them in the end? When did you ever hear of a happy hero? They always suffer—it’s almost what they’re for …” He gave a little snort. “But you don’t care about that; all a youngster can see is how fine he’ll look out there on the hilltop, and what his last words will be; never mind what they do to him! And never mind that the lessons he meant to be helpful, his students always make people miserable with, and flunk anybody that disagrees with them!”
I stood up angrily. “Flunk it all, Max! A goat’s a goat and a hero’s a hero! Enos Enoch couldn’t help showing people how to Commence, any more than Brickett could help banging things with his horns. He wasn’t trying to do any damage; he was just being what he was!” It pained me to see that Max flinched ever so slightly at my sudden movement. “Don’t worry,” I said, affecting sarcasm: “I’m not going to hit you.”
He shrugged, but his eyes were flashing. “How do I know, if you can’t help being what you are? Maybe we shouldn’t blame the Bonifacists they burned up all the Moishians, okay? Well, Georgie, I could argue with you how it might be more heroic not to be a Grand Tutor even if you were born one. Or I could ask you why you’re arguing at all—Brickett never did.”
The same thought had occurred to me, too late not to be embarrassing. Hotly I declared, “Maybe it’s because I’ve got to make you believe in me before I can show you how to Graduate!” But my blush spoiled the effect, and I ended with a half-resentful grin, which my tutor returned.
“One thing, you got the spirit all right.” He squinted up at the sky, shading his eyes. “So, it’s near lunchtime already, and what have you learned?”
In a calmer if no less inflexible humor I replied that I’d learned what I was, or had at least begun to, which cardinal lesson seemed to me quite contrary to the Maxim he’d set out to teach: that self-knowledge is always bad news. Or (I teased as I helped him to his feet) we might merely add to it, “bad news for somebody,” inasmuch as the realization of my Grand-Tutorhood must prove unquestionably bad news for West-Campus trolldom.
We set out barnwards arm in arm, for the sake both of good-fellowship and of Max’s legs, which lately a little sitting would put to sleep. The contest, I knew, was not done, but it was no longer hostile.
“You’ll be all the hero we need without any mumbo-jumbo,” my teacher said. “You got spirit and you got ambition, and you got intelligence to do fine things with. Even when you get a spiteful notion in your head, like when you tell yourself Max is jealous of you—no, don’t say you weren’t thinking that; it’s okay, lots of heroes been just as unreasonable; it’s almost a prerequisite. But I’m not jealous, my boy. I don’t even envy you.” He patted my arm. “My work’s about done; I’ve made my messes; I don’t envy anybody that’s got them to make yet. What it comes to, there’s two reasons why I want you to forget this Grand Tutor business right away: the second one is that if you believe you’re something you aren’t, it’ll keep you from becoming what you could be …”
“Never mind that,” I said. “What’s the first one?” I felt my ire rising once more at his—I had almost said Moishian persistence. You’re not a Grand Tutor, was what he had in mind. Ah, I felt him shrink at my tone, and nearly wept with frustration. Not merely that his frailness made me conscious of my strength, or that, frailness notwithstanding, he’d provoke and reprovoke me; but precisely that he knew what he was provoking, flinched from what he must invite: he knew, did old Max, tense upon my arm, that I loved him, admired—and wished to strike him with all my force, even to death!
“No more today,” he muttered.
I was trembling with annoyance. At the barn-door I let go his arm and declared I wasn’t hungry.
“Ja, sure,” he nodded. “Me too. Please listen to this about Grand Tutors, Georgie: A Grand Tutor is good. A Grand Tutor is wise. If there’s just one grain of wickedness or folly in him—why, he’s not a Grand Tutor. Think of that. If you’re here tomorrow I got more to tell you.”
