by James Gunn
At the door he grabbed Jenny's hand and pulled her behind him from the room. Outside, the machine gun hammered. A riot gun roared. Gavin and Jenny looked at each other.
As they reached the door that looked out onto concrete stairways and broad expanses of open pavement facing the administration building, they saw masked students fading into the pedestrian traffic.
Many students were standing still, rubbing their eyes, or moving cautiously, stumbling, their hands held out in front of them as if they could not see.
The armored car pulled away, threading a path through masses of students; they fell back, seemingly startled by the noise. Several masked students passed by, supporting another. Above the administration building a helicopter swooped lower.
Blind eyes lifted toward the noise, and a cry of “Tear gas!” went up from several students. Many fumbled plastic masks from pouches at their hips and put them over their faces.
Gavin looked at the spot the armored car had stood and saw no sign that told him whether the abduction had been successful.
“Come on,” he said to Jenny, “let's get back to the house.”
When they left the humanities building, the students who had been facing the administration building when the light bomb exploded were beginning to regain their sight, and the machine gun in the administration building had started up again.
They walked the entire distance in silence, not touching, not looking at each other. For the moment their being together had no undertone of sex. They shared only the feelings of conspirators.
This day, successful or not, had changed his life, Gavin felt. He had never felt as alive, as much a thinking man, as he had felt in the classroom; he had been able to sense, almost, the Professor's thoughts as they had occurred, before they were phrased into those precise and witty words. He had even felt the emotions behind the thoughts, the moral force that drove the man to do what he should do rather than what was pleasant or easy or convenient...
“Wasn't it terrible?” Jenny said. “God, I can't stand that man!”
In the daylight, as they descended the hill, the wall was not shadowed mystery, but ugly, utilitarian reality made up of ill-fitting concrete blocks and old stones salvaged from fallen walls and broken foundations, the remnants of someone's shattered dreams of home and permanence now transformed into a barrier between the old and the new. The wall was ten feet high on their side, perhaps eleven on the city side, but they kept well away from it; in spite of the cleared hundred feet beyond, some kid or redneck was always sneaking up to the wall when a guard's back was turned—sometimes on purpose—laying his gun between the barbed wire and the broken glass, and practicing his marksmanship at the expense of the students. The freakshoot, they called it.
Gavin's room was in one of the older buildings; it was more than one hundred and twenty years old, and it should have fallen down years ago. Wire and faith held it together. Every few years a movement would get started to repair the place, and everybody would play games with nails and hammers for a day or two. But the enthusiasm burned out before any permanent improvements were accomplished.
The house was a two-story frame structure perched on the hillside like a boulder deposited there by a retreating glacier. Its paint had long ago weathered away, and the boards were gray streaked with black. The porch had fallen off many years ago and been burned in a bonfire protesting or celebrating some long-forgotten outcome. But they were lucky to have something so substantial. Many students were living in corrugated-metal favelas, and others had to endure the mass living in the crumbling dormitories on the other side of the campus.
They climbed concrete blocks to the front door and then up the worn, turning stairs, dusty and smeared in the gray light that fought its way through the cracked window partway up the stairs. Gavin unlocked their door and they went into the room, leaving the door open behind them. A closed door in the day meant you weren't home.
The room was neater now. The cans had been thrown away, the floor had been swept, and Gavin had built a framework to raise the mattress off the floor. Jenny laughed and called it Gavin's homebuilding instinct; she didn't care how the room looked. It made Gavin uneasy, as if she invested nothing in their relationship and preferred the impermanence of disarray and dirt, but he supposed his small improvements made her uneasy too.
He turned and looked at Jenny. She was looking at the doorway as if willing someone to appear in it, not thinking of him or of sex, and he felt suddenly lonely.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“We'll know soon enough.”
And footsteps pounded up the stairs, and Bob Marlin filled their doorway, beard bouncing. “You're a genius,” he shouted. “Better than Mario What's-his-name or Mark Rudd or Rubin or Hoffman or any of the old-timers.”
“Everything came off?” Gavin asked.
“Just like you laid it out, every step.”
“The guards?”
“Out cold in the armored car where we abandoned it on the other side of the campus. When the flash went off, we tapped them where the medic showed us, and they fell back into the car.”
“A riot gun went off.”
“Reflex. Nobody hurt.”
“The Professor?”
“Grabbed him as he came out just after the flash, clapped the mask on his face with the chloroform in it, and took him away as if he had been injured. He never said a word.”
“Where is he?”
Bob pointed a finger straight down.
Excitement filled Gavin's throat. The Professor was here. In this house.
“Where's the medic?”
“With him.”
“Let's go,” Gavin said.
The basement was dark and damp, filled with cobwebs and cockroaches, mousedroppings and mildew, and the old unidentifiable shapes of discarded furniture and implements and rotting things in cardboard boxes lurking in the shadows like ghouls.
Behind the old converted furnace was a small room that might once have been a coal room. It had been scrubbed recently and was lit by a single high-intensity lamp focused on the arm of the Professor. Everything else had been amputated by darkness.
The medical student looked up. His syringe was purple with blood. He withdrew the needle from the swollen vein in the Professor's arm and emptied the contents of the syringe into a test tube.
“You could have waited,” Gavin said.
“The longer we wait, the more danger of being discovered,” the medic said. He was a tall, thin boy with pimples and a prominent Adam's apple that went up and down when he talked, but his hands were thin and strong and sure. The fingers twitched as if, independently, they wished to be about their job.
“Who'd discover us?” Gavin said. Now that the planning and the execution were over, he felt a strange reluctance to hurry this moment to its conclusion. He took Jenny's hand and led her around the door set on sawhorses which held the Professor's body. “Put the lamp at his head,” he said. He wanted to look into the Professor's face. Jenny tried to hold back, but he pulled her along.
“Well,” the medic said, “there's the Kampuskops or another student group. We could be hijacked, you know. Or maybe even the townies might think it important enough to...”
“They'll never find us in time,” Gavin said absently. He was looking at the Professor's face. The shadows cast by the light at his head made the Professor's face look like a skull. He thought he saw a flicker of movement in the shadows that fell like eclipses from his eyebrows. “Is he awake?”
“I gave him a hypo that will keep him out until we're through with him,” the medic said. “If you don't waste too much time,” he added. “I've got to get blood out of the other arm if I'm going to have enough to analyze.”
“Don't rush it,” Gavin said. He looked the Professor over from his head to his shadowed feet. He seemed much smaller here, laid out. “Here we are, Professor,” he said softly, “come together for a rite more primitive, more traditional, than the rite of teacher and stude
nt. If you were awake, you would be the most interested person here. Speak of the fabled pelican!”
Again Gavin thought he saw a flicker of movement in the eyesockets. He leaned closer, but he did not see it again. “I wish you were awake so that you could truly share this moment with us,” he said. “We do like you. We like you better than any of our teachers. That is why we picked you to be part of our ceremony of learning.”
“Let's hurry it up,” the medic said nervously.
“It isn't enough just to have the words,” Gavin said.
“Not even the words and the peptides, if you had been willing to issue them. One is just a synthesis of ideas, and the other, a synthesis of molecules. We want the real thing. The real thing, Professor. The memory locked in the peptides of your own blood, Professor, not just a representation or an imitation.”
The Professor's arms flopped and fell outward on the improvised pallet. When they stopped moving, the Professor's body was different. Something had gone out of it. “What's happened?” Gavin asked.
The medic already was listening at the Professor's chest. He looked up, a face half-light, half-dark. “He's dead,” said the dark-light mouth.
“Dead?” Gavin echoed. “Dead? Do something!”
“Me?” the medic said, straightening into complete shadows. “Here? In his condition? With what? Anyway, he shouldn't have died. There must have been something wrong with him. I want to do an autopsy.”
“Let's dispose of the body,” someone else said. “Fast.” There was a grumble of agreement.
“No!” Gavin said. The whole thing was going wrong. It would be a disaster. He couldn't let it go wrong, be wrong. Not when it was so right. “You've got a drill,” he said.
“Yes.”
“And a blender?”
“Yes.”
“Open his head,” Gavin said. His voice didn't shake when he said it. “We respect you,” he said to the body stretched out upon the horizontal door, “the way the ancient warrior respected his fallen enemy, and we want you to be part of us. We want you to be part of us as long as we live, and this is the only way we can do it now.”
“He can't hear you,” the medic said.
“Let's get it over with,” Simpson said.
“Yes, let's get on with it,” said several other voices.
Gavin looked up. While he had been talking to the Professor, the little room had filled with people. He had difficulty recognizing them in the many-shadowed room, but he knew who they were—all the members of the class who had been involved in the project. All of them had gathered to get from the Professor his store of knowledge, his innermost thoughts, his wisdom, his wit...
“Fellow ghouls,” Gavin began, “vampires...”
“Shut up, Tom!” someone said.
Gavin looked down again, urgency rising in him as if he stood upon a hill waiting for nails to be driven into outstretched palms, waiting to see if death could conquer love, or if spirit could conquer death. “They're eager, Professor,” he thought. “Eager for their last supper at your table, impatient for the feast of ideas to begin. The class is ready to start. I wish you were here to share with us the mystery and the magic of this moment.”
“Are you ready, Professor?” he asked aloud.
He imagined he saw the Professor's lips twist upward, as if smiling, but it was only a shadow moving as the medic jostled the lamp.
“Let us begin,” he told the medic.
The scalpel descended, and a few moments later came the sound of a drill whining its way through bone.
Gavin continued to look at the Professor's face, refusing to think of him as dead, but he did not see or think he saw any other movement. He stared at the face as if he were trying to fix it in his memory forever. “I love you, Professor,” he thought. “Even more than Jenny. I love you in a way I could never love Jenny. I want to possess you in a way I never wanted to possess Jenny. I will grieve for you, but more than that, I will celebrate you.”
Then he heard the thin, high sound of the supersonic blender, and he knew the time had come.
“Who's got straws?” someone asked. “Didn't anybody think to bring straws?”
But straws suddenly were being passed around. As soon as they were inserted, the light was turned off so that no one had to look, although the medic had been skillful and there was remarkably little blood.
What Gavin drew through the straw was the consistency of malted milk, but not really like that, because it was lukewarm and salty. For a moment Gavin thought he would not be able to swallow, but he thought of the Professor and how wise he was, and wonderful, and he swallowed and swallowed again, and yet again.
And they were through, wiping their lips, not looking toward each other in the dark.
“I don't feel any smarter,” somebody said.
“You think it works in seconds?” someone else said.
“I'm sick,” Jenny said.
“You'll be all right,” Gavin said, and he put his arm around her, but he felt a little sick too. He knew he couldn't be sick. That would ruin everything, make everything wrong, and it was wrong enough as it was.
“Come on, fellows,” the medic said, “let's get this thing over to the anatomy lab. I can use the rest of the blood, and by the time we get it pickled and floating among the other cadavers, nobody will know the difference.”
“No,” Gavin heard himself say.
“What do you mean?” the medic said. “It's a good plan. Nobody ever looks at a cadaver.”
“No,” Gavin said again.
“Well, I guess I can cut it up here. A bit of a mess but—”
“No,” Gavin said.
“Then what's your idea?”
“You can take all the blood, but then we're going to bury him.”
“You're crazy!”
“Where?”
“In front of the library,” Gavin said, suddenly sure of himself again. This would make it right.
“We might as well dig up the middle of the boulevard,” someone protested. “The library lawn is as wide open as a billiard table.”
“We'll skin off the turf, dig the grave, cart off the extra dirt, and lay the grass back like it had never been touched,” Gavin said.
“How'll we do that?”
They were still objecting for form's sake, but they had accepted it, the way they always did. Gavin felt a choking sense of power and a strange new sense of moral right.
“It's right,” he said. “That's where he would want to be, where great thoughts are kept. It's the least we can do.” He was silent.
He felt Jenny's arm slide around his waist. She leaned her head and body against him as his arm encircled her shoulder. It was her first open demonstration of affection, and the thought exhilarated him.
“We'll create a diversion on the other side of the campus, a demonstration, a real confrontation. That will draw off the Kampuskops, the students, everybody. By the time it's over, the Professor will be in the ground.” He thought of it as sanctified ground, and if he arose on the third day, everyone would be there to see it.
“Bob,” Gavin said, “you're in charge of the diversion. “George,” he said, looking around in the shadows for Simpson, not finding him. “Sam, then, you're in charge of the burial detail. And, Fred, you'll have the Professor there at the proper moment. Any questions?”
“What time?”
“There's no moon tonight. Midnight, say. No, three-fifteen.”
There were no more questions.
As he and Jenny went toward the basement stairs, they heard somebody vomiting in the corner. It was Simpson.
In their room Jenny slowly detached herself from him, slowly closed the door, and slowly, as if she were listening to some distant music, removed her clothing. First she removed her peasant trousers and then her thin shirt, letting them drop unnoticed to the floor, and there she stood, weaving slightly in front of him, as beautiful as he had imagined, as his hands had told him she was. As he looked at her and the dreaming
smile upon her face, his hands trembled and his eyes burned, and he felt desire rise in him as he had never felt it before.
She moved toward him, for he seemed unable to move, and they made love in the light, seeing everything, the sights accentuating the touch and the smell and the taste, as they had never made love before, interminably, without satiety, like gods...
Later he lay quietly in the dark listening to her even breathing beside him, and he felt a great joy—remembering all that they had been to each other and the promise that this was not everything but only the beginning—and at the same time a great sadness. He did not know why he was sad, but he knew he had to think about it. He had to think about it until he figured it out, even if it took a long time.
Looking into the darkness, he felt as if he were looking into a tunnel that was so long he could see no glimmering of light at the end, but he knew he was going to have to go down that tunnel to its end, no matter how far.
3. The Raid
Wherever creatures have organized a society, the basic question is power. Among the social insects, instinct and diet determine who shall do what. In the hen yard and the rest of the animal world, a pecking order or its equivalent is soon established to minimize useless and disruptive battles over supremacy and mating rights. Among humanity, everyone seeks a situation where he or she can exercise power: the patriarch seeks the family; the matriarch, children; children, the schoolyard and eventually the campus. Some of them never want to leave.
—THE PROFESSOR'S NOTEBOOK
The Union was student country. No faculty, no Kampuskops, no civil authorities, no federal agents of any kind ever came there. That principle had been finally established in the riots of eighty-five which followed the law-and-order tyranny of eighty-four, when a choice had been made between the destruction of certain campus strongholds, and possibly the campuses themselves, and surrendering those buildings, and possibly the campuses as well, to the rioters.
“We are your children,” the students echoed, and the adults surrendered.
Once proudly called by its professional manager “the University's living room,” the Union now was sanctuary, flophouse, hash house, burger bar, co-op, and play pen. Students ran it for students, and if the food was greasy and the floors were dirty, the students didn't mind. Perhaps they didn't notice; it was theirs, and what was theirs was good.
