by John Barth
“Well … I guess so. Yes.” As I spoke I moved away from the Assignment Printer and found that my watch-chain had caught somehow on the panel of it. But before I could look to free it I was alarmed by the sound of a buzzer and the sight of several blinking red lights, in whose flash Anastasia urgently shook her head. It dawned on me that Bray’s apparently preliminary question had been the real one, tricked out in disguise, and that WESCAC was recording and rejecting my answer!
“No!” I cried. “Wait!”
More lights and buzzers. I was furious at having fallen twice into so simple a trap. “That doesn’t count! That’s not my answer!”
Bray made a clicking chuckle. But as he shrugged his shoulders (bony, like his hands), ready to dismiss me, Anastasia said meekly to him, “Actually it didn’t count, Sir …”
He tutted. “Of course it did. That was the Candidacy Question, and he flunked it.”
Humbly she smiled. “But we didn’t have a Ready on my panel, I’m afraid. Do You think his watch-chain might have short-circuited something?”
“Flunk it all!” Bray cursed.
“Give me a second,” I said. “I’ll get it loose.” I bent to see how the chain was fouled, doubly happy for the second chance and the evidence that Anastasia was after all loyal. Alas, the chain-end had got into a slot in the panel and would not come free; above it an orange light glowed. I fumbled to employ one of Eierkopf’s lenses, thinking to magnify the problem, but my hands were too full.
“Here,” Anastasia said. “Take this purse to keep your things in. It’s just an old bag of Mother’s; you can put everything on campus in it.” She slipped off the stool to hold it open near me—was the touch of her breast against my shoulder accidental, or a sign? “That little bottle that The Living Sakhyan gave you is in there.”
I thanked her, dropped in my flashlight and the shophar, and put Eierkopf’s lens to my eye. But I had difficulty focusing it.
“I have a Ready-light now, Sir,” Anastasia reported to Bray. “Do You want to repeat the same question, or what?”
“Well,” Bray clicked in my direction—chagrined, I thought: “What’s your Answer?”
But I was not to be tricked that way again. “My answer to your first question or my Answer to the Finals?” I demanded to know. “And what did you mean by commence before?” I turned from my fruitless inspection to see how he’d react. Again red lights flashed and buzzers buzzed, as if, though I hadn’t really answered, I’d answered wrong. But what dismayed me more, Anastasia was fondling the scoundrel’s neck! Where was her loyalty, that directly my back was turned she’d run a teasing finger around the collar of his tunic? Nor give over even when I looked, and he caught at her to stop!
“Mustn’t, mustn’t,” he said.
“Tickee-tickee,” teased the shameless girl.
I cried, “Flunk you, Anastasia!”
Bray said impatiently, “Look here, Goat-Boy …”
Ah, I was looking there, where yet she tickeed, with Eierkopf’s high-resolution lens still at my eye, and marked how her finger-end ran somehow as beneath the skin half down his neck. But what mattered that small oddness when my heart was stabbed? Flunk his Candidacy Question; I leaped lump-throated at the pair of them, breaking my chain.
“Oh!”
“ZZZ!” It was Bray himself that alarmingly buzzed; but dwarfing that wonder, when I batted her hand from him Anastasia’s nail snapped his neck-skin like a garter! To mind sprang the image of Bray’s advent, when he’d tossed a mask aside …
“Baa!” With a Brickett-bleat I seized his scalp—it peeled off like a glove, mustache and all! Anastasia squealed; I stood struck dumb. Bray buzzed no more, but coldly glared at me from a face not different from the one I’d snatched, only perhaps a shade less slack, a bit more moist.
Then, “Put it on!” cried Anastasia.
“Goat-Boy!” Bray warned, rising from his stool. “Do you want to Graduate, or not?”
I slipped the silk-dry mask over my head, snatched up the purse of Anastasia’s mother, and charged at Scrapegoat Grate as I had used to charge the fence in kidly days. A scanner scanned and disappeared, blue sparks and smoke shot from the panel where my watch-chain was; when I hit the Grate its grid-irons slipped in slots, I was through before I knew it, they clacked behind me but I would not look.
Even as I sticked myself up from the threshold and doffed the mask, out of a pipe in the Grate-wall popped a paper, to unroll at my feet. A circle it was, size of a cheeseburger-plate; around its edge in tall block capitals my PAT-phrase, thus:
And on the verso-top, when I’d retrieved it, the heading ASSIGNMENT, followed by a list.
With a grin I pursed my watch—chainless now—and falseface, and conned the Mall. I was registered! Few were about; the Carnival-structures were no more. Why was it dark? I had forgot: but for a flashing ring the sun was eclipsed. A fat man in a yellow robe sat on the grass some elms along. Beyond him, benched, one old and thin, a dark-suit stranger. The rest of studentdom was in class, I did not doubt, hard at Assignments of their own. And I—a Registered, Matriculated, Qualified by George Candidate for Graduation—I read mine:
ASSIGNMENT
To Be Done At Once, In No Time
1) Fix the Clock
2) End the Boundary Dispute
3) Overcome Your Infirmity
4) See Through Your Ladyship
5) Re-place the Founder’s Scroll
6) Pass the Finals
7) Present Your ID-card, Appropriately Signed, to the Proper Authority
Founder, Founder! Those I thought I grasped, I gasped at; most signified not a thing to me. What ID-card? Which infirmity? When had the Founder’s Scroll got misplaced? And ay, and ay, so short a term! Fist to brow I told them over, faintful list, and struck at each. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven!
So too did Tower Clock. But was it right?
Volume Two
First Reel
1.
My own timepiece, when I fetched it out, said something earlier, but I’d been so careless in the winding and setting way that I’d scarcely have dared trust its accuracy even had the River George not got to it. On the other hand, my first Assignment-task confirmed that not all was well with Tower Clock. I stepped to consult the dark-suit oldster, as more likely than The Living Sakhyan to own a watch. Lo, as I did, half a dozen young ragged fellows gathered to him from the shadows, uncordially. They jostled and threatened.
“Let’s have it, old man.”
“If you want it,” I heard him reply, “pay for it.” But his molesters were plainly ready to have by force what they were after. I cried stop to them and gimped to the man’s assistance.
“Look what’s coming,” said one of their number.
They were too many; as I passed The Living Sakhyan’s elm I rapped His shoulder, less than reverently it may be, and bade Him help me help. T. L. Sakhyan’s palms were pressed together under His breast, fingers upward, and His eyes gently shut; yet I knew Him to be awake by that tranquil smile He’d borne across the torrent at our last encounter, and with which He’d favored Anastasia’s ravishment. It put me in a sweat of ire.
“At least call a patrolman!” I shouted in His ear, then dashed the more rashly, for my exasperation, to aid the old man, whose two chief botherers now turned to me. The others had only stood by—shaggy lads mostly, out at elbows—and seemed inclined to withdraw when I challenged. I heard one say, “It’s that goat-boy,” in a tone that, oddly, did not mock. Others grinned; a few looked sheepish, and I took heart.
“Shoo!” I commanded, wishing that their old victim would fly to safety while he might. But he held his ground; worse, he called them scamps and beggars deserving of the horsewhip, a judgment he might have rendered at a better hour.
“Shameless!” one of them cried, more outraged than wrathful. Indeed, when the old man charged them further to go steal a watch if they wanted the time, as they’d not get free from him what others paid for, even the more ag
gressive pair seemed disarmed by the force of their own indignation, and called on the Founder to witness to what flunkèd depths of meanness the student mind could sink. I too was startled out of countenance.
“You only wanted the time of day?”
That, it developed, was their sole craving. Indigent scholarship-students all, they had not a watch among them, yet needed to measure the exact duration of the current eclipse in connection with some astronomy assignment. Understanding Tower Clock to be out of order, they had approached the “Old Man of the Mall,” who I now learned was a kind of institution in New Tammany College, famous for his store of information and his ability to tell the time of day, to the second, by the length of people’s shadows on the path.
“Not for free, though,” the old man said. “I don’t sit here for my health.” Now I could see it, his face was horny-beaked and sere-eyed like a turtle’s, and his neck as corded, loose in the carapace of his collar. I was amazed. A tattered, glaring chap turned to me.
“He’s the stingiest man on campus! Let’s shake it out of him!”
And indeed they might have laid hands on him, but I was inspired to point out that until after the eclipse there would be no clear shadows for the Old Man of the Mall to reckon from.
“I wouldn’t’ve told ’em anyhow,” he said.
“You are stingy!” I scolded him. The young men granted my point, but were incensed enough by the fellow’s meanness—as almost was I—to offer him a roughing in any case. I forestalled it by giving them the reading of my own timepiece, the best I could manage, for which they thanked me and withdrew, not without grumbled threats to return with the sun.
“Don’t come empty-handed,” the old man called after them. “I’m not Reg Hector.”
“You’re mad!” I cried. “Why didn’t you tell them yourself you didn’t know the right time?”
He rubbed his thumb against the tips of two fingers. “What’s it worth to you to find that out?”
I wished him loudly to the Dean o’ Flunks and promised next time to look on smiling, like The Living Sakhyan, while he got what his miserliness deserved; then I declared that it was to check my own watch I’d approached him, and that, he being in my debt already, I meant to have the time of day from him as soon as the eclipse ended (it was passing already) or call back the shabby young men to finish what I’d interrupted.
“I owe you nothing,” he said. “Did I hire you to help me?” However, he added, since I’d given him something he hadn’t asked for, he’d repay me with something I didn’t need: a blank ID-card and enough indelible ink to sign it with my name. Forged cards, he pointed out, were much in demand among undergraduates too young to purchase liquor legally; in fact, it was not for interfering in his private affairs that he was rewarding me with so salable a piece of goods, but for teaching him a new way to drive off the beggar-students who forever importuned him. Thitherto he’d been obliged to give the more threatening ones what they wanted, in order to insure his own safety, and he had been thoughtless enough to give them correct information. But thanks to my example (now there was sun enough to cast shadows, he could tell by the length of mine that my watch was slow) thenceforth he would buy his safety with false coin, seeing to it that any answers extorted from him were not quite accurate. He could hardly contain his satisfaction at learning this business-trick, the more pleasing to him since he had it from me gratis; nor much better could I at being rewarded, unbeknownst to him, with something I very much needed after all. If I was able to take the ID-card and ink with a show of indifference, it was only because my delight was pinched by bad conscience at having in a manner sharped him—and, himlike, savoring the cheat.
“You don’t get the whole bottle,” he grumbled. “Just enough to sign your name.”
I had no pen, but struck a bargain for the loan of his in return for what ink I saved him by having one name instead of three. Then, as I wrote George on the proper line, I saw that the card was after all not a new one; nor was the ink, it seemed, absolutely indelible: dimly could be made out there, after mine, the previous owner’s name: Ira Hector. “You stole this card!”
He closed his eyes, thrust out his underlip, shook his head.
“Look here: it says Ira Hector! It’s a used card!”
“You don’t want it, give it back. But no refunds.”
I saw his eye glint so at that prospect that shrewdly I promised to have him taken up for theft if he didn’t give me at once the accurate time of day, which I needed to proceed with my Assignment.
“Call a cop,” he dared me. “He’ll arrest you as an accessory. In fact, I’ll say you stole it: your name’s on it! And I’ll charge you with extortion besides.”
Improvising swiftly and in anger, I declared myself willing to match a prospective Grand Tutor’s word against a nameless vagrant’s, or used-card dealer’s, especially since Mr. Ira Hector, when I should return his card to him, would doubtless apply his famous wealth and influence in my just behalf.
“Don’t count on it,” the old man chuckled. “I’m Ira Hector.”
I denied it.
“Of course I am, you great ninny. Everybody knows the Old Man of the Mall.”
Alas, he did quite fit the impression of her uncle I’d got from Anastasia’s narrative, and I was the more appalled at such petty avarice in the wealthiest man on campus. But I challenged him to prove his identity without a card.
He blinked like an old testudinate Peter Greene. “You should be a business major, Goat-Boy!” However, it was his notoriety in the College, he told me, that rendered his ID-card superfluous and induced him to sell it. Everybody recognized him, he was sorry to say, and pestered him for handouts which they no more deserved than did those young beggars the free tuition provided them by Chancellor Rexford’s new grant-in-aid program. Creeping Student-Unionism was what it was, to Mr. Hector’s mind: the tyranny of the have-nots, of the ignorant over the schooled. The only thing to be said for the Administration’s reckless giveaways was that, the untutored being always (and justly) more numerous than the learned, Rexford was buying political power with other people’s wealth. But it was bad business in the long term, Ira Hector was sure, and must lead the College’s economy to bankruptcy.
“Nobody paid my way!” he concluded with heat. “All I know today I learned the hard way, by myself. Coddle the crowd, they’ll trample you down!” The proper use of charity on the administrative level, he asserted, corresponded to his personal practice: just enough sops and doles to prevent revolution. Beyond that, individual initiative like his own would serve those who had it; the rest deserved their lot, and it was the responsibility of Tower Hall and the Campus Patrol to see to it they got no more than their desert.
“Caveat emptor!” he snapped. “Laissez-faire! Sauve qui peut!”
“I beg your pardon?”
He offered to translate the mottoes for me at a cut rate, the three of them for the price of two. The sun had emerged now from eclipse; my sharp shadow made me impatient to get on with my Assignment and other concerns, and I begged him for Founder’s sake to tell me the time and be done with it, if only in repayment for hearing out his grasping diatribe. The insult had no visible effect.
“What’s in it for me if I tell you?” he chuckled, squinting at my shadow. “It’s later than you think.”
Angrily I reminded him that I was no ignorant beggar, deserving or otherwise, but a registered bonafide Candidate for Graduation and a Grand Tutor in posse, who could certainly give him a much-needed Tutorial word or two if I so chose—the which by tradition and common fame were pearls of so great price that all the information in all the encyclopedias of the University was as nothing beside the least of them.
“No deal,” Ira Hector replied. “I’ve been Certified already.” From a worn leather snap-purse in his vest pocket he pinched out a much-folded parchment, of a kind familiar: under the usual certificatory formulations, Harold Bray’s signature and a penned subscription: “Founder helps those who h
elp themselves.”
“I’ve helped myself to everything in reach!” he admitted gleefully, adding that while he personally regarded Graduation as the daydream of fools and bankrupts, worth nothing on the informational market, he’d offered to support Bray’s Grand-Tutorship in Tower Hall in return for Certification, both because he frankly enjoyed possessing anything that other people craved, and because he wanted to assure himself that even a Grand Tutor has His price.
“That diploma’s worthless,” I told him. “Bray’s no Grand Tutor.”
“So it’s worthless. Didn’t cost me anything.”
Out of patience, I harangued him on the subjects both of his miserliness and of his contempt for Graduation, declaring that even if Bray were a genuine Grand Tutor and the ground of his Certification valid—neither of which was the case—he Ira Hector was flunked nonetheless. It might be argued, I admitted, that Commencement, always necessarily of the Self, was the highest form of self-preservation, and therefore of greater value to the selfish man than to the unselfish; likewise, that if the greed for Passage was a passèd greed, it passed by extension the greedy principle whereof it was the passèdest example, in the fashion of legal precedents or the single combats of ancient terms, on which the fate of whole quads hung. But endeavor as he doubtless had, Ira Hector had not achieved perfect selfishness, I maintained; had not looked out unremittingly for Number One; indeed he must answer for a quite uncommon generosity! “Poppycock! Balderdash!”
