The Big U

by Neal Stephenson

  From here a freight elevator took us to the lowest sublevel, where Fred Fine led us through dingy hallways plastered with photos of nude Crotobaltislavonian princesses until we came to a large room filled with plumbing. From here, Virgil used his master key to let us into a smaller room, from which a narrow spiral staircase led into the depths.

  “I go first,” said Virgil quietly, “with the Sceptre. Hyacinth follows with her .44. Bud follows her with the heavy gloves, then Sarah and Casimir with the backpacks, and Fred in the rear with his sixteen-gauge. No noise.”

  After one or two turns of the stair we had to switch on our headlamps. The trip down was long and tense, and we seemed to make a hellacious racket on the echoing metal treads. I kept my beam on the blazing white-gold beacon of Virgil’s hair and listened to the breathing and the footsteps behind me. The air had a harsh damp smell that told me I was sucking in billions of microbes of all descriptions with each breath. Toward the bottom we slipped on our gas masks, and I found I was breathing much faster than I needed to.

  The rats were waiting a full fifty feet above the bottom. One had his mouth clamped over Virgil’s lower leg before he had switched on the Sceptre of Cosmic Force. The flashing drove away the rest of the rats, who tumbled angrily down the stair on top of one another, but the first beast merely clamped down harder and hung on, too spazzed out to move. Fortunately, Hyacinth did not try to shoot it on the spot. I slipped past, flexed my big elbow-length padded gloves, and did battle with the rat. The rodent teeth had not penetrated the soccer shinguards Virgil wore beneath his waders, so I took my time, relaxing and squatting down to look into the animal’s glowering white-rimmed eye. His bared chisel teeth, a few inches long and an inch wide, flickered purple-yellow with each flash of the strobe. Having sliced through Virgil’s waders to expose the colorful plastic shinguard, the rat now tried to gnaw its way through the obstacle without letting go. I did not have the strength to pull its mouth open.

  “A German shepherd can exert hundreds of pounds of jaw force,” said Fred Fine, standing above and peering over Casimir’s shoulder with scientific coolness.

  The rat was not impressed by any of this.

  “Let’s go for a clean kill,” suggested its victim with a trace of strain, “and then we’ll have our sample.”

  I bashed in the back of its head with an oaken leg I had foresightedly unscrewed from my kitchen table for the occasion. The rat just barely fit into a large heavy-duty leaf bag; Virgil twist-tied it shut and we left it there.

  And so into the tunnels. The sewers were unusually fluid that night as thousands of cubic feet of beer made its traditional way through the digestive tracts of the degenerates upstairs and into the sanitary system. Hence we stuck to the catwalks along the sides of the larger tunnels—as did the rats. The Sceptre was hard on our eyes, so Virgil waited until they were perilously close before switching it on and driving them in squalling bunches into the stream below. We did not have to use the guns, though Fred Fine insisted on shooting his flash gun at a rat to see how they liked it. Not at all, as it happened, and Fred Fine pronounced it “very interesting.”

  Casimir said, “Where did my radioactive source fall to? Are we going anywhere near there?”

  “Good point,” said Fred Fine. “Let’s steer clear of that. Don’t want blasted ’nads.”

  “I know where it went, but it’s not there now,” said Virgil. “The rats ate everything. Some rat obviously got a free surprise in with his paraffin, but I don’t know where he ended up.”

  Fred Fine began to point out landmarks: where he had left the corpse of the Microwave Lizard, long since eaten by you know what; where Steven Wilson had experienced his last and biggest surprise; the tunnel that led to the Sepulchre of Keldor. His voice alternated between the pseudo-scientific dynamo hum of Fred Fine and the guttural baritone of the war hero. We had heard this stuff from him for a couple of weeks now, but down in the tunnels it really started to perturb us. Most people, on listening to a string of nonsense, will tend to doubt their own sanity before they realize that the person who is jabbering at them is really the one with the damaged brain. That night, tramping through offal, attacking giant rats with a strobe light and listening to the bizarre memoirs of Klystron, most of us were independently wondering whether or not we were crazy. So when we asked Fred Fine for explanations, it was not because we wanted to hear more Klystron stories (as he assumed); it was because we wanted to get an idea of what other people were thinking. We were quickly able to realize that the world was indeed okay, that Fred Fine was bonkers and we were fine.

  Hundreds of cracked and gnawed bones littered one intersection, and Virgil identified it as where he had discovered the useful properties of the Sceptre. This area was high and dry, as these things went, and many rats lurked about. Virgil switched the Sceptre on for good, forcing them back to the edge of the dark, where they chattered and flashed their red eyes. Hyacinth stuffed wads of cotton in her ears, apparently in case of a shootout.

  “Let’s set up the ’scope,” Virgil suggested. Casimir swung off his pack and withdrew a heavily padded box, from which he took a small portable oscilloscope. This device had a tiny TV screen which would display sound patterns picked up by a shotgun microphone which was also in the pack. As the ’scope warmed up, Casimir plugged the microphone cord into a socket on its front. A thin luminous green line traced across the middle of the screen.

  Virgil aimed the mike down the main passageway and turned it on. The line on the screen split into a chaotic tangle of dim green static. Casimir played with various knobs, and quickly the wild flailing of the signal was compressed into a pattern of random vibes scrambling across the screen. “White noise,” said Fred Fine. “Static to you laymen.”

  “Keep an eye on it,” said Virgil, and pointed the mike down the smaller side tunnel. The white noise was abruptly replaced by nearly vertical lines marching across the screen. Casimir compressed the signal down again, and we saw that it was nothing more than a single stationary sine wave, slightly unruly but basically stable.

  “Very interesting,” said Fred Fine.

  “What’s going on?” Sarah asked.

  “This is a continuous ultrasonic tone,” said Virgil. “It’s like an unceasing dog whistle. It comes from some artificial source down that tunnel. You see, when I point the mike in most directions we get white noise, which is normal. But this is a loud sound at a single pitch. To the rats it would sound like a drawn-out note on an organ. That explains why they cluster in this particular area; it’s music to their ears, though it’s very simple music. In fact, it’s monotonous.”

  “How did you know to look for this?” asked Sarah.

  Virgil shrugged. “It was plausible that an installation as modern and carefully guarded as the one I saw would have some kind of ultrasonic alarm system. It’s pretty standard.”

  “Very interesting,” said Fred Fine.

  “It’s like sonar. Anything that disturbs the echo, within a certain range, sets off the alarm. Here’s the question: why don’t the rats set it off?”

  “Some kind of barrier keeps them away,” said Casimir.

  “I agree. But I didn’t see any barrier. When I was here before, they could run right up to the door—they had to be fought off with machine guns. They must have put up a barrier since I was last down here. What that means to us is this: we can go as far as the barrier, whatever it may be, without any fear of setting off the alarm system.”

  We moved down the tunnel in a flying wedge, making use of table leg, Sceptre and sword as necessary. Soon we arrived at the barrier, which turned out to be insubstantial but difficult to miss: a frame of angle-irons welded together along the walls and ceiling, hung with dozens of small, brilliant spotlights. At this point, any rat would find itself bathed in blinding light and turn back in terror and pain. Beyond this wall of light there was only a single line of footprints—human—in the bat guano. “Someone’s been changing the light bulbs,” concluded Sarah.

/>   The fifty feet of corridor preceding the light-wall were littered almost knee-deep in glittering scraps of tinfoil and other bright objects, including the remains of Fred Fine’s radio.

  “This is their hangout,” said Hyacinth. “They must like the music.”

  “They want to make a nice, juicy meal out of whoever changes those light bulbs,” suggested Fred Fine.

  Sarah’s pack contained a tripod and a pair of fine binoculars. Once we had set these up in the middle of the tunnel we could see the heavy doors, TV cameras, lights and so on at the tunnel’s end. As we took turns looking and speculating, Virgil set up a Geiger counter from Sarah’s pack.

  “Normally a Geiger counter would just pick up a lot of background and cosmic radiation and anything meaningful would be drowned out. But we’re so well shielded in these tunnels that the only thing getting to us should be a few very powerful cosmic rays, and neutrinos, which this won’t pick up anyway.” The Geiger counter began to click, perhaps once every four seconds.

  Sarah had the best eyes; she sat crosslegged on the layers of foil and gazed into the binoculars. “In a few minutes a hazardous waste pickup is scheduled for the loading dock upstairs,” said Virgil, checking his watch. “My theory is that, in addition to taking hazardous wastes out of the Plex, those trucks have been bringing something even more hazardous into the Plex, and down into this tunnel.”

  We waited.

  “Okay,” said Sarah, “Elevator door opening on the right.”

  We all heard it.

  “Long metal cylinder thingie on a cart. Now the end of the tunnel is opening up—big doors, like jaws. Now some guys in yellow are rolling the cylinder into a large room back there.”

  The Geiger counter shouted. I looked at Casimir.

  “Skip your next chest X-ray,” he said. “If this place is what it looks like, it’s just Iodine-131. Half-life of eight days. It’ll end up in your thyroid, which you don’t really need anyway.”

  “I’m pretty fond of my thyroid,” said Hyacinth. “It made me big and strong.”

  “Doors closing,” said Sarah over the chatter of us and the Geiger counter. “Elevator’s gone. All doors closed now.”

  “Well! Congratulations, Virgil,” said Fred Fine, shaking his hand. “You’ve discovered the only permanent high-level radioactive waste disposal facility in the United States.”

  Most of us didn’t have anything to say about it. We mainly wanted to get back home.

  “Fascinating, brilliant,” continued Fred Fine, as we headed back. “In today’s competitive higher education market, there has to be some way for universities to support themselves. What better way than to enter lucrative high-technology sectors?”

  “Don’t have to grovel for the alumni anymore,” said Sarah.

  “You really think universities should be garbage dumps for the worst by-products of civilization?” asked Hyacinth.

  “It’s not such a bad idea, in a way,” said Casimir. “Better the universities than anyone else. Oxford, Heidelberg, Paris, all those places have lasted for centuries longer than any government. Only the Church has lasted longer, and the Vatican doesn’t need the money.”

  We paused for a rest in the spiral staircase, near our rat body. Casimir, Fred Fine and Virgil went back down to the bottom for an experiment. Virgil had brought an ultrasonic tone generator with him, and they used it to prove—very conclusively—that the rats loved the ultrasound as much as they hated the strobe. They ran back upstairs, Sceptre flashing, and I slung the rat over my shoulder and we all proceeded up the stairs as fast as our lungs would allow.

  The dissection of the rat was most informal. We did it in the sink of Professor Sharon’s old lab, amid the pieces of the railgun.

  Fred Fine laid into the thorax with a kitchen knife and a single-edged razor. We were quick and crude; only Casimir had seen the inside of a rat before. The skin peeled back easily along with thick pink layers of fat, and we looked at the intestines that could digest such amazing meals. Casimir scrounged a pair of heavy tin snips and used them to cut the breastbone in half so we could get under the ribcage. I shoved my hands between the halves of the breastbone and pulled as hard as I could, and finally with a crack and a spray of blood one side snapped open like a stubborn cabinet door and we looked at the lungs and vital organs. The heart was not immediately visible.

  “Maybe it’s hidden under this organ here,” suggested Fred Fine, pointing to something between the lungs.

  “That’s not an organ,” said Casimir. “It’s an intersection of several major vessels.”

  “So where’s the heart?” asked Hyacinth, just beginning to get interested.

  “Those major vessels are the ones that ought to go into, and come out of, the heart,” said Casimir uncertainly. He reached down and slid his hand under the bundle of vessels, and pulling it up and aside, revealed—nothing.

  “Holy Mother of God,” he whispered. “This animal doesn’t have a heart.”

  Our own thumped violently. For a long time we were frozen, disturbed beyond reason; then a piercing beep emanated from Fred Fine and we jumped and gasped angrily.

  Unconcerned, he pressed a button on his digital calculator/watch, halting the beep. “Sorry. That’s my watch alarm.”

  We looked at him; he looked at his watch. We were all sweating.

  “I set it to go off like that at midnight, the beginning of April first, every year. It’s sort of a warning, so that this one remembers, hey, April Fools’ Day, anything could happen now.”

  APRIL

  While we sewer-slogged, E13S held a giant party in honor of Big Wheel. It was conceived as your basic formless beer blowout, but the ever-spunky Airheads had insisted upon a theme: Great Partiers of the Past. The major styles in evidence were Disco, Sixties, Fifties and Toga. A team of sturdy Terrorists had lugged Dex Fresser’s stereo up to the social lounge, which was the center of Disco activity. A darkened room down the hall featured a Sixties party, at which participants roughed up their perms, wore T-shirts, smoked more dope than usual and said “groovy” at the drop of a hat. The study lounge was Fifties headquarters, and was identical to all the other Fifties parties which had been held since about 1963 by people who didn’t know anything about the Fifties. The Toga people were forced to adopt a wandering, nomadic partying existence: they had no authentic toga music to boogie to, though someone did experiment by playing an electronic version of the “1812 Overture” at full blast. Mostly these people just stood sheepishly in the hallways, draped in their designer bedsheets, clutching cups of beer and yelling “toga!” from time to time.

  The Disco lounge was filled with women in lollipop plastic dresses and thick metallic lipstick under ski masks, and heavily scented young men in pastel three-piecers and shiny hardware-laden shoes. The smell was deafening, and when the doors were open, excess music spilled out and filled nearby rooms to their corners. These partiers were a generation whose youth had been stolen. They had prepared all through their adolescence for the day when they could go to college and attend real discos, adult discos where they had alcohol and sex partners you could take home with no pay-rental hassles. Their hopes had been dashed in the early eighties when Disco had flamed out somewhere over New Jersey, like a famous dirigible. But the nostalgic air here made them feel young again. Dex Fresser even showed up in a white three-piecer and took several opportunities to boogie right down to the ground with shapely females in clingy synthetic wraps.

  On the windowsill, the Go Big Red Fan, held in place with bricks, spun and glowed in its self-made halo of black light. Overhead, a mirrored ball cast revolving dots of light on the walls, and more stoned or imaginative dancers could imagine that they were actually standing inside a giant Big Wheel. Whoooo! The picture windows were covered with newspaper, as the panes had long since been smashed and the curtains long since burned.

  After Dex Fresser had consumed sixteen hits of acid (his supplier had never really grasped the idea of powers of two), five bong-loads of
hashish rolled in mescaline, a square of peyote Jell-O, a lude, four tracks, a small handful of street-legal caffeine pep pills, twelve tablespoons of cough syrup, half a can of generic light wine and a pack of Gaulois cigarettes, he began to toy with a strobe light that was being used to establish the Disco atmosphere. He turned it up faster and faster until the lounge was wracked with delighted freaked-out screams and the dancers had begun to hop randomly and smash into one another, as though they had been time-warped into Punk. Meanwhile, what passed for Dex’s mind wandered over to the Go Big Red Fan, and though the time-warp effect was really blowing his tubes, he thought the fan might be slowing down; continuing to turn up the strobe, he was able to make the Little Wheel stop revolving altogether—either that, or time itself had come to a halt! Dex spazzed out to the max. All became quiet as the propulsion reactors of a passing Sirian space cruiser damped out his stereo (the DJ had turned down the volume), and all heard Dex announce that at midnight Big Wheel would say something very important to him. He relaxed, the music was cranked back up, the strobe light hurled out a nearby window and the Fan began to rotate again.

  Midnight could hardly come soon enough. The partiers packed into the social lounge, sitting in rows facing the window. Dex Fresser stood before the shrouded window with his back to the crowd, and priests stood ready to tear the papers away. A few minutes before midnight, the DJ put on “Stairway to Heaven,” timed so that the high-energy sonic blast section would begin at 12:00 sharp.

  The newspapers ripped apart, the red-white-and-blue power beams of Big Wheel exploded into the room, and the heavy beat of the rock and roll made their thoraxes boom like empty kegs.

  But Dex Fresser was impressively still. He stared into the naked face of the Big Wheel for fifteen minutes before he moved a muscle. Then he relayed the message to the huddled students.

  Speaking through a mike hooked to his stereo, he sounded loud and quadraphonic. “Tonight the Big Wheel has plans for us, man. We’re going to have a fucking war.” The Terrorists cheered and whooped and the Airheads oohed and aahed. “The outside people, who are all hearing-impaired to the voice of Big Wheel and Roy G Biv and our other leaders, will come tomorrow to the Plex with guns to kill us. They want to put short-range tactical nuclear weapons on the roof of D Tower in order to threaten Big Wheel and make him do as they wish.