by John Barth
“There’s the U.C. building ahead,” the Chancellor observed. His voice was glum.
I begged him in that event to hear me out, as I’d only been illustrating what seemed to me to be the correct Entelechian approach to the Boundary Dispute.
“Our present policy isn’t Entelechian?” His tone was amused: New Tammany’s strategy, he said, had been to do business of every sort on as many fronts as possible with the Nikolayans; to involve the affairs of the two colleges so subtly and extensively that détente would be the actual state of intercollegiate affairs regardless of theoretical contradictions, and riot would become tantamount to economic as well as physical suicide. The long-standing Boundary Dispute—now virtually an institution, with its own budget, offices, officers, rituals, and publications—provided the occasion and machinery for innumerable other connections with Nikolay and the lesser Student-Unionist colleges: to name one cynical example, the Departments of Espionage and Counter-Intelligence on both sides would be seriously handicapped without such points of contact as the conference-table; and the secret diplomacy essential to any serious intercollege business would be unmanageable without a convenient “front” like the Boundary Dispute.
“If it didn’t exist we’d have to invent it,” Mr. Rexford said, only partly in jest. “But it’s much better to use a language that’s already been worked out, don’t you agree? The Nikolayan delegate, for example, the fellow who calls himself Classmate X—suppose he says his college will refuse to pay its dues to the University Council as long as New Tammany blocks the admission of T’ang College. What he means is, they don’t want T’ang in either, but it wouldn’t be nice to say so, so if we’ll keep blocking T’ang’s admission and let Nikolay save face by reneging on their debt, they won’t interfere with our extension-work in certain other colleges. We know this is what he means, and Classmate X knows we know it; so our delegate agrees by denouncing people who don’t pay their bills and by threatening not to pay our own—which means we will pay, since we’ve got more to lose than the Nikolayans do if the U.C. folds up, but it’ll be hard to push the appropriation through a conservative Senate, so they’ll have to lay low on the Power Line at least until after the next election.” He smiled. “All this must sound very cynical to somebody raised on a goat-farm by Dr. Spielman.”
“I’m afraid it does indeed!” I exclaimed. But the Chancellor maintained that, lamentable or not, such were the political realities; he declared that the best political scientists were those to whom these multiple meanings were so clear that they truly went without saying; to whom the symbolic use of varsity political language was such second nature that they felt neither cynical nor hypocritical about the disparity between their public statements and their actual policies: for them, and their fellow-initiates, there was no disparity; they never confused symbol with referent.
“That’s not Entelechian!” I protested. “Excuse me, sir: that’s Dean-o’-Flunkish! You sound like Maurice Stoker!”
He had for a moment put by the reserve that characteristically went with his good humor; now it was stiffly in place again. “I suppose, from a Grand Tutor’s point of view …”
“From Entelechus’s!” I insisted. “From your own, sir!” We had drawn up by this time before a many-storied glass slab, where throngs of students and policemen awaited the Chancellor’s arrival. A small herd of black-gowned dignitaries came down the entrance-steps towards us; a uniformed ROTC officer opened our sidecar door and snapped to attention with a fixed salute. But the Chancellor half-raised a hand to stay the greeters, smiled his most mischievous smile at me, and said, “Obviously we mustn’t EAT each other. How would you handle the Boundary Dispute? Take a whole minute if you need to.”
I drew a breath. “I’d separate the Power Lines.”
“What?” His expression was offended.
“Adjourn the Symposium,” I said. “Double the distance between the Power Lines. Tell WESCAC to separate its circuitry completely from EASCAC’s.”
He declared I was joking, but reclosed the sidecar door for a moment; those outside shifted about and consulted their wristwatches.
“It’s like Stoker, or the Dean o’ Flunks, or a terrible disease,” I argued; “if you do business with these things, they always win. Extreme in the mean is what you’ve got to be, and not compromise even for a second with Flunkage, or let opposites get confused. An arch won’t do between True and False; they’ve got to be cut with an edge as sharp as the Infinite Divisor, and separated.”
The Chancellor shook his head as I spoke, but his smile was grave, and he seemed after all to be listening, so I quickly enlarged upon my theme. To make concessions to the forces of Failure, I said—to this Classmate X fellow or to Stoker—was like conceding to malevolent bacteria: one might approve moderate exercise over athleticism, but not moderate illness over health. And the health of a college, it seemed evident to me, like the health of an orderly and passèd administration, came not from cooperation with its antithesis, but from real repudiation of it. The spirit and letter of Rexfordian law was order, intelligence, and light; let there then be no disorder in New Tammany, or unreason, or other darkness. If it was inescapable that the lights of Great Mall depended ultimately on what went on under Founder’s Hill, then let there at least be no converse between head and bowels, not to speak of envy and occasional emulation! Ban Maurice Stoker from Great Mall, I urged him, and deny his kinship from the rooftops; have no commerce with Ira Hector, much less Classmate X; let there be no negotiations with Nikolay College, overt or covert; disentangle WESCAC’s circuitry once and for all; separate the power-cables; draw a hard line between them—well on our side, if necessary; double the floodlighting; triple the guard …
“You said the guards fall now and then because they look down,” I finished pointedly; “They should wear a special collar like the ones we use on bad goats, so they can’t look down.”
As he smiled—tugging at his forelock somewhat wearily, I confess—and opened the sidecar door again, a commotion broke out upon the cordoned steps leading up to the hall. I had just time to glimpse a patch-eyed fellow struggling with policemen before two guards sprang, pistols in hand, to shield the Chancellor, and blocked my view.
“Another lunatic,” Lucius Rexford muttered. He still smiled, but his face had briefly lost its color. “Let’s go in,” he said to the guards.
“Just a second, sir,” one of them answered. “They’re having a little trouble with him.”
“He doesn’t seem to be armed,” the other guard observed. “Better play it safe, though.”
But the Chancellor would not remain in the sidecar. As he stepped out, guards hurried to encircle him. The watchers cheered; he grinned and gave a little wave of his hand to them, but I felt distinctly that for all his popularity and charm he did not quite trust the adoring student body, from whose extremities assassins and Grand Tutors sometimes sprang. The police struggling with the patch-eyed man looked worriedly in our direction; their quarry’s face lit up—I recognized him as that Nikolayan I’d seen through the electric mesh in the Control Room, and with whom Peter Greene had reportedly scuffled at Stoker’s Randy-Thursday party. Indeed he was hard to hold onto: though four or five had hands on him he slipped their grasp, cried, “Great and good man!” and flung himself onto his knees in our path just as the guards seemed ready to shoot.
“Am not assassin!” he declared to the Chancellor. “Am transfer out of Nikolay! Great lover of you! Hello, Grand Tutor! I don’t believe!”
Guards escorted the Chancellor rapidly towards the building; others slapped handcuffs onto the kneeling man’s wrists, which however he opened as if by magic in order to wave to Lucius Rexford.
“Goodbye, goodbye! Peace in University!”
I had been left behind in the confusion. “You know this guy?” a guard in plainclothes asked me. Others replaced the handcuffs on the Nikolayan’s wrists, which now he offered them smilingly.
“I know of him,” I began to say.
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“Alexandrov,” the prisoner volunteered. Again with ease he slipped one hand free to extend it to me, and with the other tugged at his black mustache. “Leonid Andreich Alexandrov, Doctor of Engineering. Lover of Anastasia Stoker. Admirer of you. But don’t believe in! Skepticismal!” His handshake, like his frame, was sturdy and powerful; his dark eye glistened cordially in a red face topped with black and handsome curls.
“Something wrong with them cuffs,” a guard said. But the Nikolayan grinned, shook his head, and explained proudly that it was his special talent with locks that had enabled him to slip through the charged screen of the Control Room, make his way to the U.C. building (where his father, he declared, was head of the Nikolayan delegation), and transfer in the sight of all. “Main Detention, please?” he requested in conclusion. “You take me there now, okay?”
“You’d better sit in on the interrogation,” I was told. The plainclothes-men were much aroused by the news that their man was the son of Classmate X; in view of the delicate diplomatic aspects of his defection, and my wish to rejoin the Chancellor in pursuit of my Assignment, it was agreed that the questioning should take place at once, in the U.C. offices of the New Tammany delegation; both NTC and Nikolay College would be likely to want the Symposium-opening delayed until the situation could be assessed.
“No,” the Nikolayan insisted. “Main Detention.” It was remarkable how with the merest twitch of a muscle he escaped their clutch. “Am not a transfer,” he said now. “Am a spy. Come to kidnap a scientist.” He grinned. “Long live Student Union! Down with Informationalist adventurismhood! You send me to Main Detention, okay?”
The guards exchanged looks. “Let’s talk it over inside,” they said, almost politely. “If you’re telling the truth, you’ll see Main Detention soon enough.”
Mr. Alexandrov considered for a second and then nodded assent. “You come along?” he asked me. “Mrs. Anastasia admires; I admire.”
“But don’t believe in,” I reminded him.
He undid his handcuffs—two pairs this time—to clap an arm affectionately about me. “Goat-Boys da; Grand Tutors nyet.”
We went inside, our agitated escorts fending off journalists and crowds of the curious. Arguments in several languages were in progress in the lobbies and corridors we hurried through; at our appearance they grew louder, and a herd of gesticulating dignified gentlemen collected behind us. Mr. Alexandrov waved to some of them, who glared back. At the door of the suite of offices we went into, a furious debate commenced, through interpreters, between what appeared to be representatives of the two colleges involved, over the question of who should be admitted to the room.
“How do you do that trick with the handcuffs?” I asked the prisoner, who for the moment was being ignored. “It’s very clever.”
He beamed and playfully punched my chest. “Big secrecy, Classmate! I don’t tell!” Then impulsively he laughed and added, “But Mrs. Anastasia’s good-friend, okay!” He collared me in order to whisper into my ear something I heard imperfectly, for our guards and the Nikolayan officials both jumped to end the confidence. But though I declared to them honestly enough that I’d not understood the message through the din, it seemed to me upon later reflection that Not locked must have been its puzzling burden, along with the words Let go!—which could however have been either a specific demand of the guards who drew us apart, or a kind of general injunction. The Nikolayan himself appeared certainly to follow some such policy: he flung his arms freely as he talked, undid the second button of his already open-necked shirt, and loosened his belt when he sat down.
“Big spy!” he said, thumbing his chest; but his eye-patch looked like a broad wink. The Nikolayan officials all harangued him at once; he rejected them with a sweep of the arm and a shake of the head.
“He surrenders absolutely, confesses his intention to kidnap, and rejects counsel,” a New Tammany official said to them, and added sternly that although he would clear the office of journalists and cameramen, and permit the Nikolayan representatives to remain, they must not interfere with the prisoner’s right to speak freely. On the other hand, he insisted that Mr. Alexandrov was under no obligation to make a statement, and that all he said would be recorded as possible evidence against him.
“That’s okay!” Alexandrov cried, and shouted down the Nikolayans’ protests in their own language. “I fail assignment, deserve Main Detention!”
A report came to the office that the opening of the Summit Symposium had been delayed and that Classmate X was on his way to join us; the New Tammany official invited the prisoner to wait, but Alexandrov—whose emotions changed frequently and dramatically—declared with tears in his eyes that he had once already disgraced his father, whom he revered, and could not bear to face him disgraced again. Briefly then, in elliptical exclamations, he told his story: Believed wholeheartedly in Classless Campus and similar Student-Unionist ideals. No masters, no pupils! Despised Ira Hector and other greedy Informationalists, but admired several individual New Tammanians: Professor-General Reginald Hector, liberator of Siegfrieder concentration campus where he’d been prisoner in Second Riot; Chancellor Rexford, lover of peace and man of goodwill; Mrs. Anastasia, who would be Graduate except Graduation was Informationalist lie, opiate of lower percentiles; myself, who had right respect for goats and other animals (Anastasia, it appeared, had spoken of me to him in not unflattering terms, on Randy-Thursday)—a virtue evidently outweighing in his eye my claim to Grand-Tutorhood. Which didn’t believe in, et cetera. But of all men on campus, admired most his father, for perfect selflessness exemplified in renouncing even a name …
“Greatnesshood!” he shouted, pounding the chair-arm. “Splendidacy!”
But now his eye sparkled with frustration: he could not help loving these people, yet he disapproved of his love, which smacked of Informationalist idolatry. Nor was this his only failing as a Student-Unionist: he was subject, he confessed, to fits of impulsive insubordination and independent behavior, which no amount of subsequent remorse appeared to cure. As a young riot-engineer in C.R. II, for example, he had been captured by the Siegfrieders early in the conflict when he’d stolen behind their lines one night, without authorization, to untether a nanny-goat abandoned by a fleeing farmer. Thereafter, in the Bonifacist concentration campus, he’d turned his engineering skill to the arts of unlocking and releasing; ashamed to return to his own unit, he proved so competent at arranging the escape of others that the Nikolayan professor-generals soon were sending him lists, via deliberately captured recruits, of prisoners whose escape was to have priority—generally officers. But time and again his emotions had the better of his self-discipline, and he would free the recruits instead, out of admiration for their selflessness. After the Riot he’d risen to prominence as a computer-programmer, specializing in the untanglement of knotty mathematical problems; but his old proclivity now and then came to the fore—especially when, as sometimes happened, he would meet a comrade from former terms and drink too many toasts to their fallen classmates. After one such bout he had found himself in the Nikolayan Zoological Gardens and, smitten with sympathy for its internees, had commenced a wholesale uncaging. So spectacular was the consequent furor, and difficult the job of constraining him, he might have been shot along with sundry bears and tigers had not his father been fetched to the scene to command him, by loudspeaker through a cloud of monkeys, to surrender himself.
“Humiliationship!” he exclaimed, and pressed one fist to his brooding brow. His captors, he said, had despaired of holding him, though when he’d seen what carnage ensued from his generous intentions, he’d declared himself willing to be jailed for life: not only had several of the beasts necessarily been shot, but some had eaten others, and many of the more exotic were doomed to perish for want of their customary food and environment. A debate had followed on how best to punish him (a regular court-trial was out of the question because of his father’s position), and seeing his superiors deadlocked, he generously volunteered th
em the means painfullest to himself—a cell lined with mirrors instead of bars. So strong was his aversion to any reflection—an antipathy he could not account for, at least in our language—that such a cell would need no lock at all to contain him: he would be frozen in its center with his eye shut.
I interrupted: “You have a thing about mirrors too! Isn’t that curious! Did you know that Peter Greene, the man you fought with at Stoker’s—”
Officials shushed me, lest the prisoner stop talking.
“Ha!” Alexandrov laughed. “A baby. But unselfish, Goat-Boy! And loves Mrs. Anastasia! But stupid! But okay, I like, and shouldn’t fight with. A good man! But bah!”
This sentiment, though I think I shared it, was beside my point, but I let the coincidence of the two men’s common aversion to mirrors go, as not worth the labor of articulating. Whatever the cause of Leonid Andreich’s, it was at least as intense as Greene’s, evidently, for after a day and night in the mirrored cell, which had been promptly constructed for him, he was seized by a kind of fit not unlike epilepsy, and, falling, struck with his head one of the hateful walls so forcefully that the glass shivered. He revived in a prison infirmary, minus his right eye and in such despair at ever becoming a credit to his college that when his father arranged him a position in the Founder’s Hill Control Room he at first refused it as an undeserved honor. His eventual acceptance was in order not further to disoblige the man he most admired, and to carry out a scheme of atonement that had occurred to him: his own father, it seemed (one of our translators remarked that the Nikolayan word used occasionally by the prisoner actually meant “stepfather,” and someone else explained that Classmate X had married Alexandrov’s mother, a Riot-widow, only a dozen or so years previously, after Leonid Andreich’s rematriculation), had been a computer-expert prior to his appearance on the diplomatic scene, and possibly had been involved at one time in counter-intelligence work as well—
