The Big U

by Neal Stephenson

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “You’re right. You can say that and be totally sure of yourself, can’t you? I admire you, Hyacinth.”

  “I like you, Sarah,” said Hyacinth and that summed it up.

  In the Physics Library, Casimir Radon read about quantum mechanics. The digital watch on the wrist of the sleeping post-doc across the table read 8:00. That meant it was time to go upstairs and visit Professor Emeritus Walter Abraham Sharon, who worked odd hours. Casimir was not leaving just yet, though. He had found that Sharon was not the swiftest man in the world, and though the professor was by no means annoyed when Casimir showed up on time, Casimir preferred to come ten minutes late. Anyway, in the informal atmosphere of the Physics Department, appointments were viewed with a certain Heisenbergian skepticism, as though being in the right place at the right time would involve breaking a natural law and was therefore impossible to begin with. Outside the picture windows of the library, the ghettos of the City were filled with smoky light, and occasionally a meteor streaked past and crashed in flames in the access lot below. They were not actual meteors, but merely various objects soaked in lighter fluid, ignited and thrown from a floor in E Tower above, trailing fire and debris as they zoomed earthward.

  Casimir found this perversely comforting. It was just the sort of insanity he hadn’t been able to get away from during his first week at American Megaversity. Soon the miserable Casimir had taken me up on my offer to stop by at any time, showing up at my door just before midnight, wanting to cry but not about to. I took coffee, he took vodka, and soon we understood each other a little better. As he explained it, no one here had the least consideration for others, or the least ability to think for themselves, and this combination was hard to take after having been an adult. Nor had academics given him any solace; owing to the medieval tempo of the bureaucracy, he was still mired in kindergarten-level physics. Of course he could speed these courses up just by being there. Whenever a professor asked a question, rhetorical or not, Casimir shouted the answer immediately. This earned him the hatred and awe of his classmates, but it was his only source of satisfaction. As he waited for his situation to become sensible, he sat in on the classes he really wanted to take, in effect taking a double load.

  “Because I’m sure Sharon is going to bring me justice,” Casimir had declared, raising his voice above a grumble for the first time. “This guy makes sense! He’s like you, and I can’t understand how he ended up in this place. I never thought I’d be surprised by someone just because he is a sensible person and a good guy, but in this place it’s a miracle. He cares about me, asks questions about my life—it’s as though discovering what’s best for me is a research project we’re working on as a team. I can’t believe a great man like him would care.” Long, somber pause. “But I don’t think even he can make up for what’s wrong with this place. How about you, Bud? You’re normal. What are you doing here?” Lacking an answer, I changed the subject to basketball.

  A trio of meteors streaked across the picture windows and it was 8:10. Casimir returned his book and exited into the dark shiny hall. He was now at the upper limit of the Burrows, the bloc of the Plex that housed the natural sciences. Two floors above him, on the sixth and top floor of the base, was Emeritus Row, the plush offices of the academic superstars. He made his way there leisurely, knowing he was welcome.

  Emeritus Row was dark and silent, illuminated only by the streak of warm yellow splashed away from Sharon’s door. Casimir removed his glacier glasses. “Come in,” came the melodious answer to his knock, and Casimir Radon entered his favorite room in the world.

  Sharon looked at him with raised eyebrows. “Vell! You half made a decision?”

  “I think so.”

  “Let’s have it! Leaving or staying? For the sake of physics I hope the latter.”

  Casimir abruptly realized he had not really made up his mind. He shoved his hands into his pockets and breathed deeply, a little surprised by all this. He could not keep a smile from his face, though, and could not ignore the hominess of Sharon’s chaotic office. He announced that he was going to stay.

  “Good, good,” Sharon said absently. “Clear a place to sit.” He gestured at a chair and Casimir set about removing thirty pounds of high-energy physics from it. Sharon said, “So you’ve decided to cross the Rubicon, eh?”

  Casimir sat down, thought about it, and said with a half grin, “Or the Styx, whichever the case may be.”

  Sharon nodded, and as he did a resounding thump issued from above. Casimir jumped, but Sharon did not react.

  “What was that?” Casimir asked. “Sounded big.”

  “Ach,” said Sharon. “Trowing furniture again, I should guess. You know, don’t you, that many of our students are very interested in the physics of falling bodies?” He delivered this, like all his bad jokes, slowly and solemnly, as though working out long calculations in his head. Casimir chuckled. Sharon winked and lit his pipe. “I am given to understand, from grapevine talk, that you are smarter than all of our professors except for me.” He winked again through thick smoke.

  “Oh. Well, I doubt it.”

  “Ach, I don’t. No correlation between age and intelligence! You’re just afraid to use your smarts! That’s right. You’d rather suffer—it is your Polish blood. Anyway, you have much practical experience. Our professors have only book experience.”

  “Well, it’s the book experience I want. It’s handy to know electronics, but what I really like is pure principles. I can make more money designing circuits, if that’s what I want.”

  “Exactly! You prefer to be a poor physicist. Well, I cannot argue with you wanting to know pure things. After all, you are not naïve, your life has been no more sheltered that mine.”

  Embarrassed, Casimir laughed. “I don’t know about that. I haven’t lived through any world wars yet. You’ve lived through two. I may have escaped from a slum, but you escaped from Peenemunde with a suitcase full of rocket diagrams.”

  Sharon’s eyes crinkled at the corners. “Yet. A very important word, nicht wahr? You are not very old, yet.”

  “What do you mean? Do you expect a war?”

  Sharon laughed deeply and slowly. “I have toured your residential towers with certain students of mine, and I was reminded of certain, er, locations during the occupation of the Sudetenland. I think from what I see”—the ceiling thumped again, and he gestured upward with his pipestem—“and hear, that perhaps you are in a war now.”

  Casimir laughed, but then sucked in his breath and sat back as Sharon glowered at him morosely. The old professor was very complicated, and Casimir always seemed to be taking missteps with him.

  “War and violence are not very funny,” said Sharon, “unless they happen to you—then they are funny because they haff to be. There is more violence up there than you realize! Even speech today has become a form of violence—even in the university. So pay attention to that, and don’t worry about a war in Europe. Worry about it here, this is your home now.”

  “Yes, sir.” After pausing respectfully, Casimir withdrew a clipboard from his pack and put it on Sharon’s desk. “Or it will be my home as soon as you sign these forms. Mrs. Santucci will tear my arms off if I don’t bring them in tomorrow.”

  Sharon sat still until Casimir began to feel uncomfortable. “Ja,” he finally said, “I guess you need to worry about forms too. Forms and forms and forms. Doesn’t matter to me.”

  “Oh. It doesn’t? You aren’t retiring, are you?”

  “Ja, I guess so.”

  Silently, Sharon separated the forms and laid them out on the Periodic Table of the Elements that covered his desk. He examined them with care for a few minutes, then selected a pen from a stein on his desk, which had been autographed by Enrico Fermi and Niels Bohr, and signed them.

  “There, you’re in the good courses now,” he concluded. “Good to see you are so well Socioeconomically Integrated.” The old man sat back in his chair, clasped his fingers over his f
lat chest, and closed his eyes.

  A thunderous crash and Casimir was on the floor, dust in his throat and pea gravel on his back. Rubble thudded down from above and Casimir heard a loud inharmonious piano chord, which held steady for a moment and moaned downward in pitch until it was obliterated by an explosive splintering crack. More rubble flew around the room and he was pelted with small blocks. Looking down as he rubbed dust from his eyes he saw scores of strewn black and white piano keys.

  Sharon was slumped over on his desk, and a trickle of blood ran from his head and onto the back of his hand and puddled on the class change form beside his pipe. Gravel, rainwater and litter continued to slide down through the hole in the ceiling. Casimir alternately screamed and gulped as he staggered to his feet. He waded through shattered ceiling panels and twisted books to Sharon’s side and saw with horror that the old man’s side had been pierced by a shard of piano frame shot out like an arrow in the explosion. With exquisite care he helped him lean back, cleared the desk of books and junk, then picked up his thin body and set him atop the desk. He propped up Sharon’s head with the 1938 issues of the Physical Review and tried to ease his breathing. The head wound was superficial and already clotting, but the side wound was ghastly and Casimir did not even know whether to remove the splinter. Blood built up at the corners of Sharon’s mouth as he gasped and wheezed. Brushing tears and dirt from his own face, Casimir looked for the phone.

  He started away as a small bat fluttered past.

  “Troglodyte! No manners! This is what you’re supposed to see!” Casimir whirled to see Bert Nix plunging from the open door toward Sharon’s desk. Casimir tried to head him off, fearing some kind of attack, but Bert Nix stopped short and pointed triumphantly to Sharon. Casimir turned to look. Sharon was gazing at him dully through half-shut eyes, and weakly pounding his finger into a spot on the tabletop. Casimir leaned over and looked. Sharon was pointing at the Table of the Elements, indicating the box for Oxygen.

  “Oxygen! Oh two! Get it?” shouted Bert Nix.

  Bill Benson, Security Guard 5, was arguing with a friend whether it was possible that F.D.R. committed suicide when the emergency line rang. He let it ring four times. Since ninety-nine calls out of a hundred were pranks, by letting each one ring four times he was delaying the true emergency calls by an average of only four one-hundredths of a ring apiece—nothing compared with the time it took to respond. Anyway, he was fed up with kids getting stoned at parties and falling down on the way out to barf and spraining their wrists, then (through some miracle of temporary clearheadedness) calling Emergency and trying to articulate their problems through a hallucinogenic miasma while monster stereos in the background threatened to uncurl his phone cord. Eventually, though, he did pick up the phone, holding the earpiece several inches from his head in case it was another of those goddamn Stalinist whistle-blasters.

  “Listen,” came the voice, sounding distant, “I’ve got to have some oxygen. Do you have some there? It’s an emergency!”

  Oh, shit, did he have to get this call every night? He listened for a few more seconds. “It’s an oxygen freak,” he said to his friend, covering the mouthpiece with his hand.

  “Oxygen freak? What do they do with oxygen?”

  Benson swung his feet down from the counter, put the receiver in his lap, and explained. “See, nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, is the big thing. They breathe it through masks, like for surgery. But if you breathe it pure you’ll kick in no time, because you got to have oxygen. And they are so crazy about laughing gas they don’t want to take off that mask even to breathe, so they like to get some oxygen to mix with it so that they can sit there all goddamn night long and breathe nothing else and get blasted out of their little minds. So we always get these calls.”

  He picked up the receiver again, took a puff on his cigar, exhaled slowly. “Hello?” he said, hoping the poor gas-crazed sap had hung up.

  “Yeah? When will it be here?”

  “Cripes!” Bill Benson shouted, “look, guy, hang it up. We don’t have any and you aren’t allowed to have it.”

  “Well, shit then, come up here and help me. Call an ambulance! For God’s sake, a man’s dying here.”

  Some of these kids were such cretins, how did they make it into college? Money, probably. “Listen, use your head, kid,” he said, not unkindly. “We’re the Emergency Services desk. We can’t leave our posts. What would happen if there was an emergency while we were gone?”

  This was answered by silence; but in the background, Benson could just make out another voice, which sounded familiar: “You should have listened to what he was trying to tell you! He wasn’t farting around! We had to sack the Cartography Department to afford him. And you don’t listen!”

  “Shut up!” shouted the gas freak.

  “Hey, is that Bert? Is that Bert Nix on the phone?” asked Bill Benson. “Where are you, kid?”

  “Emeritus Row!” shouted the kid, and dropped the phone. Bill Benson continued to listen after the BONKITY-BONK of the phone’s impact, trying to make sure it was really good old Bert Nix. I think he heard this poem; on the news, he claimed he heard a poem, and it could well have been this, which Bert Nix quoted regularly and liked to write on the walls:

  Tenuring and tenuring in the ivory tower!

  The flagon cannot fill the flagoneers.

  Krupp cuts a fart! The sphinxter cannot hold

  Dear academe, our Lusitania, recoils.

  The time-limned dons are noosed. With airy webs

  The cerebrally infarcted bring me down.

  The East affects conscription, while the curst

  Are gulled with Fashionate Propensities.

  Shrilly, sum reevaluation is demanded.

  Earlier-reckoned commencement is programmed!

  What fecund mumming! Outly ward those words hard

  When a glassed grimace on an animal Monday

  Rumbles at night; unaware that the plans aren’t deserved

  Escapists’ lie-panoply aims to head off the Fan.

  A sign frank and witless as the Sun

  Is mute in the skies, yet from it are shouted

  Real shadows of endogenous deserted words.

  The concrete drops down in; but know I now

  That thirty-storied stone steel keeps

  When next the might of Air are rooks unstable.

  What buff beast, its towers coming down deglassed

  Slumps amid Bedlam in the morn?

  “Holy shit!” cried Bill Benson. “Bert? Is that you? Hell, maybe something’s up. Sam, punch me onto line six there and I’ll see if I can raise the folks down at nine-one-one.”

  Casimir was careening through the halls, cursing himself for having had to leave Sharon alone with a derelict, adrenaline blasting through him as he imagined coming back to find the old man dead. He didn’t know how he was going to open the door when he got where he was going, but at the moment it did not matter because no slab of wood and plastic, it seemed, could stand in his way. He veered around a corner, smashing into a tall young man who had been coming the other way. They both sprawled dazed on the floor, but Casimir rolled and sprang to his feet and resumed running. The man he had collided with caught up with him, and he realized that it was Virgil Gabrielsen, King of the Burrows.

  “Virgil! Did you hear that?”

  “Yeah, I was coming to check it out. What’s up?”

  “Piano fell into Sharon’s office…pierced lung…oxygen.”

  “Right,” said Virgil, and skidded to a stop, fishing a key from his pocket. He master-keyed his way into a lab and they sent a grad student sprawling against a workbench as they made for the gas canisters. Casimir grabbed a bottle-cart and they feverishly strapped the big cylinder onto it, then wheeled it heavily out the door and back toward Sharon.

  “Shit,” said Virgil, “no freight elevator. No way to get it upstairs.” They were at the base of the stairs, two floors below Sharon. The oxygen was about five feet tall and one foot in diameter, an
d crammed with hundreds of pounds of extremely high-pressure gas. Virgil was still thinking about it when Casimir, a bony and unhealthy looking man, bear-hugged the canister, straightened up, and hoisted it to his shoulder as he would a roll of carpet. He took the stairs two at a time, Virgil bounding along behind.

  Shortly, Casimir had slammed the cylinder down on the floor near Sharon. Bert Nix was holding Sharon’s hand, mumbling and occasionally making the sign of the cross. As Virgil closed the door, Casimir held the top valve at arm’s length, buried one ear in his shoulder, and opened it up. Virgil just had time to plug his ears.

  The room was inundated in a devastating hiss, like the shriek of an injured dragon. Casimir’s hands were knocked aside by the fabulously high pressure of the escaping oxygen. Papers blizzarded and piano keys skittered across the floor. Ignoring it, Bert Nix stuffed Kleenex into Sharon’s ears, then into his own.

  In a minute Sharon began to breathe easier. At the same time his pipe-ashes burst into a small bonfire, ignited by the high oxygen levels. Casimir was making ready to stomp it out when Virgil pushed him gently aside; he had been wise enough to yank a fire extinguisher from the wall on their way up. Once the fire was smothered, Virgil commenced what first aid was possible on Sharon. Casimir returned to the Burrows and, finding an elevator, brought up more oxygen and a regulator. Using a garbage bag they were able to rig a crude oxygen tent.

  The ambulance crew arrived in an hour. The technicians loaded Sharon up and wheeled him away, Bert Nix advising them on Sharon’s favorite foods.

  I passed this procession on my way there—Casimir had called to give me the news. When I arrived in the doorway of Sharon’s office, I beheld an unforgettable scene: Virgil and Casimir knee-deep in wreckage; a desk littered with the torn-open wrappers of medical supplies; Virgil holding up a sheaf of charred, bloodstained, fire extinguisher-caked forms; and Casimir laughing loudly beneath the opened sky.

  OCTOBER