Giles Goat Boy

by John Barth

  “Of course not,” Bray said grimly, and the women left. I myself was by no means so certain: a showdown between us, I now conceived, was what my whole day’s labor had been pointing to, as the final separation of Truth and Falsehood. And I had no real fear of him, though he was both taller and heavier than myself—only a kind of uneasiness inspired by his manner and smell, which however would not have stayed my hand had I chosen to take stick to him. But he proposed now, with a kind of dry distaste, that the surest and fittingest way to resolve our differences was to go down forthwith together into WESCAC’s Belly: not only could I take the Finals (which he would gladly administer himself), but the EATing of whichever of us was false, and the subsequent emergence of an unquestionably authentic Grand Tutor, might be just the thing to save New Tammany from pandemonium, and the whole West Campus from collapse in that grave hour. Galling as it was to be obliged once again to agree with him, I seconded this proposal at once.

  “I’ll send word of this to the crowd,” Bray said. “That should keep them quiet until one of us comes out.”

  I clenched my teeth and agreed; then, both to assert my own authority and to preserve the order of my Assignment-tasks, I insisted that the Scroll-case be unlocked, so that I could re-place its contents before passing the Finals.

  Bray clicked impatiently. “You’ve done harm enough, don’t you think? Besides, there’s no time, Goat-Boy!”

  “I can do it in no time,” I replied. “Give me the key.”

  A number of men rushed now into the Catalogue Room—library-scientists and campus patrolmen, it turned out, searching desperately for Bray to speak once more to the crowd before they stormed Tower Hall. They glared at me with bald hostility as Bray explained his strategy—our strategy—and instructed them to broadcast it.

  “Has the Chancellor appeared yet?” he asked. They answered that the current rumor was that Chancellor Rexford had lost his mind; that his wife was leaving him; that he’d admitted kinship to Maurice Stoker, which the latter now denied; and that all these catastrophes were somehow owing to the subversive influence of a false Grand Tutor. Their expressions left no doubt about whom they considered the pretender to be.

  Bray smiled at me. “We’d better get on with it.”

  Although I realized that any reluctance on my part could be interpreted as fear and thus as an admission of guilt—and that they could simply refuse me if they chose to—yet I showed them the order of my Assignment and repeated that I would enter the Belly-room when I had re-placed the Founder’s Scroll, and not before.

  “But it’s been replaced,” Bray pointed out. “There it stands.”

  Loath as I was to disclose my strategy to him before the fact, I declared then that Re-place meant “put in its proper place,” not necessarily its customary one: the Library’s difficulties in filing the Scroll stemmed from insufficiently clear distinctions—as did (I added pointedly) many other problems in the University, whose resolution must inevitably be attended with some upheaval. The fact was, I asserted, that the Founder’s Scroll, like the Old and New Syllabi, was unique; sui generis, of necessity, else it would be false. The CACAFILE needed then simply to be instructed to create unique categories for unique items, and the filing should proceed without difficulty.

  “Nonsense!” snorted a gentleman-librarian. His colleagues agreed, objecting that such “special categories” would in fact be classes of one member, an unacceptable paralogism.

  “So are Grand Tutorials,” I replied.

  “Now that was inspired!” Bray exclaimed with a sort of laugh, and though the library-scientists seemed far from delighted with my plan, he urged that it be transmitted to the catalogue-programmer and CACAFILEd as soon as practicable. “You don’t intend to stand here until it’s actually carried out, I suppose?” he asked me. “Quite enough to’ve solved the problem, I should think.”

  The crowd outside had commenced a rhythmic shout. To me it sounded like “Let’s go! Let’s go!” or perhaps “Let him go!” but Bray maintained, and the others agreed, that it was “Get the Goat! Get the Goat!” In any case it bespoke the urgency and peril of the situation.

  “Very well,” I said; “which way is the Belly?”

  6.

  “Do you know,” Bray announced to the library-scientists and policemen, “this Goat-Boy’s really a well-intentioned fellow at heart, I believe. And you can’t say he lacks courage.” Of me then he inquired, “You’re sure you really want to do this? I thought you’d back down when the time came.”

  “I’m sure you did,” I said. An elder official (the chief New Tammany Librarian, in fact), cautiously wondered whether news of an EATing mightn’t aggravate the student body’s unrest; the very legality of our entry into WESCAC’s Belly he was not sure of—though he did not doubt that in the case of Grand Tutors …

  “Grand Tutor,” I interrupted. “There can’t be two at a time.”

  “Quite so,” Bray agreed, still entirely cordial. “As for the legal matter, it’s of no consequence, actually. Thanks to the Spielman Proviso”—he made a little nodding bow to me—“the question of who may go into the Belly is beside the point. Only a Grand Tutor can, and come out alive. However …” He drew a paper from somewhere under his cape. “I took the trouble to prepare a release of sorts, just in case. We’ll sign it and leave it with you gentlemen, if Mr. Goat-Boy is agreeable.”

  The document, addressed To whom it may concern, declared that whichever of its signatories proved to be the Grand Tutor, He authorized the entry of the other into WESCAC’s Belly for the purpose of attesting His authenticity, and was fully and exclusively accountable for the consequences of such attestation; moreover, that whichever proved to be not the Grand Tutor, he consented to and held none but himself responsible for his being EATen in consequence of his error. The Chief Librarian was satisfied that the release protected him and his staff from liability; I too assumed its sufficiency in that respect, and suggested only that the word error be changed to imposture.

  Bray seemed to chuckle. “What about ‘error or imposture’? I’ve never called you a fraud, you know, young man; on the contrary, I believe you’re entirely sincere—and entirely misled.”

  I would not be put off by the desperate flattery of a frightened charlatan, I declared—but not to seem unbecomingly harsh I settled for “error and/or imposture,” and borrowing a pen from the elder librarian, printed GILES in bold capitals at the foot.

  “Ah,” Bray said, and declined the pen. “That does for both of us, in the nature of the case. I’d heard you were denying that it matters whether you’re the GILES or not; but since we both claim now that we are, let the loser be nameless. Eh?”

  The officials seemed less content than I with this development, but there was no time for negotiation. We set off down a corridor towards the central section of Tower Hall, where a special lift—the only one so routed—would take the two of us down into the Belly-room. But immense though the building was, and heavily guarded, elements of the mob outside had forced their way in; we heard shouting in a large room at the end of the hallway and were intercepted before we reached it by other uniformed patrolmen, who advised us to retreat.

  “Word just came in that the Power-Line guards are dropping like flies,” one of them reported. “Some crazy kind of thing they were ordered to wear around their necks on duty; makes them lose their balance.” He glared at me. “Flunking wolf in sheep’s clothing!”

  I was disturbed less by his shocking metaphor than by his news of the unfortunate border-guards and his obvious sympathy with the demonstrators: he informed us that this fresh calamity had infuriated them beyond restraint; they’d breached entryways all around the building in search of the man they held responsible for the day’s catastrophes—and Founder help me when they got hold of me, for he himself would not.

  “You should be ashamed of yourself,” Bray told him sharply, and seemed prepared to scold him further for dereliction of responsibility; but one of our own party, left behin
d at Bray’s suggestion to transfer the Founder’s Scroll to safer storage in the CACAFILE, rushed up to tell us that the card-file room was now also invaded. The students had so far destroyed nothing beyond the door-locks that impeded them, but their mood was ugly, and we were cut off: he feared that if they did not soon find their quarry they’d destroy the Library in search of me, and anyone they suspected of concealing me.

  “It’s one flunking goat-boy or all of us,” he appealed to the Chief Librarian; “and maybe the stacks too—some of them have torches.”

  If any scruple on my behalf lingered in the elder man’s mind, it gave way before the notion of fire in the stacks. He clutched Bray’s arm and said, “They mustn’t even light cigarettes in here! That settles it!”

  I perspired. Bray, on the other hand, smiled, not apparently ruffled by the danger. For once our relative fragrances were perhaps reversed.

  “No one’s going to be lynched,” he declared. Quickly then, but calmly, he issued orders for dealing with the crisis: word was to be spread that the crowd should reassemble at the impregnable Belly-exit at the rear of Tower Hall basement, whence very shortly the EATen impostor must issue with the true Grand Tutor. Thus they would see justice accomplished, and be safely outside the building. To reach the Belly-lift itself would require my cooperation in another stratagem, which he sincerely hoped I would find less repugnant than being dismembered:

  “Mrs. Stoker, in her mischievous way, loaned you a mask of my face this morning to get through Scrapegoat Grate with. Put it on, if you still have it, and we’ll go through the lobby together. If you’ve lost it, I’ll give you another—unless you’d rather take your chances …”

  A bitter pill, made no more palatable by the Oho’s of my enemies, who welcomed the insinuation that I’d got through the Grate by fraud! But consoling myself with the thought—and declaration—that WESCAC soon would end all masquerade, I did as bid: fished the odious silky vizard from my purse and donned it. As before, it fit so perfectly and lightly, like a second skin, that the officials were amazed; after a moment I couldn’t even feel it. The purse itself then we suspended from my stick, one end of which we each carried (since I refused to part with it), and in this manner we made for the lift to the central lobby. It was a terrifying progress: the large room at the end of the hall was packed with irate undergraduates, professors, and staff-people; their chant—it was, after all, “Get the Goat!”—broke rhythm as we approached, and though our vanguards announced our destination and circumstances, I trembled for all our lives. Triple pain—to hear them credit “the Grand Tutor” with countenancing, literally and figuratively, my descent into the fatal Belly; to see them give way, however muttersome, before the duplicated visage of their idol; and to feel on every hand the obtuse baleful scrutiny which, should it distinguish True from False, would rend to forcemeat its true Instructor!

  We gained the lift, went down, and met the same scene in the lobby, magnified. “Give us the Goat, the Goat, the Goat!” they cried, and though a few seemed more in carnival-spirits than in murderous—linking arms with their lady girls and lifting emblazoned steins—the most looked dangerous enough. A half-circle of riot-officers held them from the lift-doors as a man in a neat woolen suit explained our intention through a megaphone.

  “Please remain orderly,” he implored them. “Surely you don’t want to injure the Grand Tutor, and you can’t tell which is which. They’re going to the Belly now; you’ll see the results at the rear exit. Please remain orderly, and do be careful with fire …”

  I was startled to recognize the voice, and then the face, as Maurice Stoker’s. Anastasia’s report notwithstanding, it was difficult to believe that this tidy, bare-chinned chap—whom I now saw full on, quietly exhorting one of his men to remain calm in the face of the mob’s provocation—was not some pallid, obverse twin of the Power-Plant Director. The crowd paid little heed except to jeer him, and threatened at any moment to breach the line of guards who but the day before would have had at them with bayonets and cattle-prods. Yet Stoker delayed us for anxious seconds between the elevator we’d left and the one we sought, a few doors down.

  “Please excuse me for keeping you,” he said to the pair of us. “I realize how trivial this sounds in these circumstances, but I’m really quite concerned about my wife. Does either of you gentlemen happen to know where she might be?”

  His smile was polite, even abashed; his tone seemed perfectly sincere. Bray explained curtly that Anastasia had taken her mother next door to her grandfather’s offices; his tone suggested disapproval of Stoker’s new mien.

  “I’m relieved to hear that,” Stoker said. “She really wasn’t herself at lunch, and I was a bit concerned.” He turned to me now. “You must be George, then? Perfect disguise! And a very clever idea, too.” He offered his hand to shake. “Thanks ever so much for your advice this morning; I wish I had time to tell you what a campus of good it’s done me already. I do hope neither of you will be EATen …”

  “For Founder’s sake, man, be yourself!” Bray rebuked him. But we could tarry no longer; the crowd had pushed through. Before I could assess the genuineness of Stoker’s attitude we were obliged to retreat into the other lift—barely large enough for the two of us, since it was designed for large self-propelled tape-carts rather than for human passengers. The library-scientists fled to safety; the guards pressed tightly together to shield the lift a moment longer; Stoker I heard saying, “Do be reasonable, ladies and gentlemen …” Any moment I expected Bray to withdraw and either confess his imposture or attempt some excuse for not accompanying me—in which latter case I was resolved to denounce him and, if possible, force him to the consequences of his fraud. But when I asked, to taunt him, “Shall we go?” he himself touched a button marked Belly, the only one on the panel. The doors slid to at once, and as there was no light in the lift, we went down in darkness.

  For all my new assurance that I was not only the Grand Tutor but the GILES Himself, I was apprehensive; the descent seemed long, and for all I knew Bray might attack me in the dark and try to stop the lift somehow before it reached bottom. His odor, though faint, was particularly disagreeable in the closed compartment; what was more, he put a hard-boned arm about my shoulders and said in a friendly way, “You’re what they call in love with Anastasia, I presume.” When I didn’t answer—I was wondering, in fact, how a man about to die could concern himself with such a subject—he added: “One would think, to look at her, she’d be a first-rate breeder. Why do you suppose she’s borne no children?”

  The lift stopped at his last word. I grasped my stick, ready to strike should he assault me in his death-throes. But when the doors opened—on a red-glimmering chamber, lined with racks of flat round cans stacked edgewise from floor to ceiling—nothing happened.

  “This is what they call the Mouth,” Bray said, stepping out. He gave a little sigh, as if loath to end the other conversation. “We’ll use it for presenting our credentials. The Belly itself is through a little door over there, which WESCAC has to open.”

  “So that’s it!” I too stepped from the lift, whose doors closed at once behind us. “You knew you could come this far without being EATen!”

  He clucked his tongue. “Why are you so hostile? It makes you seem awfully defensive, for a Grand Tutor.” In fact, he confessed, he had no idea whether WESCAC’s “menu” for self-defense covered the Mouth-room or only the Belly, since none but himself had entered either. “I really advise you to be less critical of your colleagues and Tutees, George,” he concluded.

  “You advise me! But I see you’re assuming I’ll live to follow your advice. Don’t think you can flatter me now into letting you go back up in the lift!”

  He had gone to the inevitable console-panel beside a circular door on the far wall. “Flatter you?” he said. “My dear fellow: in the first place one can’t go back up in the lift: it returns automatically and can’t be summoned from down here. There’s no way out except through the Belly.”


  “Good.”

  “As to flattering you, I’ve no such intention, I hope. Praise, now, that’s another matter—but you’ll see shortly what a wrong idea you have of me. I’m not what people think I am.”

  “No need to tell me!”

  He smiled and pressed numerous buttons, as though typing out a message on the console. “But I’m not what you think I am, either.”

  I ordered him to stop temporizing and open the Belly-door—and wondered how I’d open it myself if he refused, for it seemed to have neither knob nor latch.

  “Just what I’m doing,” he said. “You’ll have to put your ID-card and Assignment-list in this slot now—mine’s in already, from last time.”

  “I’ll bet it is.” I foiled what I took to be his stratagem by producing the card I’d got that morning from Ira Hector. But if Bray was surprised at my having one after all, he managed to conceal the fact. Moreover, he ignored my sarcasm and merely remarked that inasmuch as WESCAC’s “Diet program” provided for scanning and evaluating trespassers into the Mouth-room like ourselves, he’d taken the opportunity to ask it a few questions on the matter of the GILES, which he thought I might be interested in having verified before we proceeded. I accused him once again of delaying his inevitable end; but it was satisfying nonetheless to see WESCAC affirm unequivocally (as it could not do through its other facilities, I gathered, or before I’d presented my ID-card for its inspection) that it had impregnated Virginia R. Hector twenty-two years past with the Grand-tutorial Ideal, Laboratory Eugenical Specimen, in accordance with a program-option developed malinoctically by itself. More specifically (this information was delivered us on cards the size of an Amphitheater-ticket, dropped one after another into a cup at the bottom of the console-panel as Bray pulled a lever beside it), the impregnation had been accomplished, stroke per stroke, as Tower Clock tolled midnight on the twenty-first of March of that year. A third card affirmed that WESCAC had PATted the fetus just prior to birth, which occurred two hundred seventy-five days after conception …