by James Gunn
He fell over on the hard bench, on his side, his knees drawn up toward his chest for warmth, and shook. A few moments later lava poured through his veins, and his body uncurled gratefully like a flower in the sun. But sweat sprang from his pores and trickled icily down his sides, and he shivered uncontrollably when his clothing touched his nervestudded skin.
The roomwomb closed around him, and he relaxed, grateful for protection, grateful for warmth, grateful for darkness, beset as it was with ice and fire, alternating like a glass figurine being tested to destruction.
Later he had a vague memory, like the vagrant snatches of a dream, of people around him, looming over him, their faces large and distorted, of voices rising and falling, booming and whispering, coming and going, buzzing and buzzing, and of movement, like dopefloating, only better, through bright and dark, stopping and starting, of a finger of ice that burned his arm and a finger of fire that cooled his body, and of sleep that came, not like the blackjack of unconsciousness, but softly, gently healing, like cool fingers across his eyelids.
He came awake slowly. At first he thought everything had been a dream, that he was still lying in his bed, and he reached out for Jenny, for the reassurance of her magnificent flesh, but his hopeful hand met nothing but empty air. And then he knew that the experience with Gregory and the power plant had not been a dream, that Jenny was gone and he was alone, and he thought he still was lying on the old wooden churchgoers’ bench in the onetime chapel where he had been interrogated and then taken on top of a mountain by StudEx, but he knew that was wrong, too. What he reclined on was too soft, too tacky, for wood; it felt like leather or vinyl, and he opened his eyes.
Looking down at him, close, concerned, was a face he liked instantly. It was a face that was older, kinder, and less competitive than those he had known for the past four years. The face was male, and it had gray at the temples and wrinkles in the forehead and around the mouth and nose, and Gavin realized what he had missed in the faces he had seen around him almost constantly for four years, all unlined, unformed, uncertain, unlivedin. Variety.
“You're better,” the face said as it drew back.
Gavin could see now that the face had a well-shaped body, perhaps a bit shorter than average height, clad in a two-piece dark suit with a white turtleneck beneath. What Gavin had taken to be a high forehead was a tanned bald area surrounded on three sides by a neat fringe, like a tonsure with territorial ambitions. “What was wrong with me?” Gavin asked.
“A serious case of pneumonia,” the old man said. He had a wide mouth with lips that moved with fascinating flexibility when he talked, and a nose that twitched when he sniffed. Gavin liked him even more. “But we shot you full of antibiotics. You'll be all right now.”
“Yes,” Gavin said, looking around him, “I think I will.” The ceiling was clean and white. Gavin swung himself upright. A wave of dizziness swiftly passed. He was in a medium-sized office with white walls and redleather chairs and a large dark wooden desk in front of him. The desktop was rough and splintered, as if people in hobnailed boots had danced on it, and the white walls were scrawled with slogans: “Kill the Motherfuckers!"..."Screw the Establishment!"..."Hang the Chancellor!"..."Workers of the World, Unite!"..."Victory or death!"..."No Treaty with Traitors"..."Keep the Faith!"..."For a great lay, call Maude—4-5130"..."Butcher the Butchers!"..."Sartre was a Fartre"..."Camus, too"..."Solidarity"..."Pigs against the wall!”
“You're the Chancellor,” Gavin said, “and this is the Chancellor's office.” He said it as if he had suddenly found himself in a place hallowed by history, like Jerusalem or the White House or Sproul Hall.
The older man nodded. He didn't seem formidable or evil, Gavin thought, but he knew he was in the presence of the Enemy, and his senses sharpened and looked for ways to escape. “How did I get here?” he asked.
“My officers picked you up at the old chapel,” the Chancellor said. He leaned against the front edge of the desk, half-sitting.
“Kampuskops?” Gavin said.
“That's your name for them,” the Chancellor said wistfully. “We prefer others.”
Gavin shrugged. “Kampuskops are Kampuskops.”
“Yes,” the Chancellor said, “and students are students. That's one of our problems. Anyway, they took you to the outpatient clinic, got you diagnosed, treated, and brought you here.”
Gavin looked at the windows on his left. They were set deep into terra-cotta walls. They framed black night. The only exit from the room was a door beside the leather-covered sofa on which he sat. “Why?” he asked.
“What did you do with the Professor?” the Chancellor asked.
“I don't know what you're talking about,” Gavin said automatically.
A note of weariness crept into the Chancellor's voice. “You don't have to play games. We know you abducted him. We know who was involved besides yourself.”
“If you knew all that and if what you knew were true, you wouldn't be asking me these questions,” Gavin said. “And you couldn't prove anything.” That was true, Gavin knew. No one would talk to the kops except under extreme duress, and anything like Ned's broken hands would invalidate any evidence he might be forced to give.
“Of course,” the Chancellor said. “There's this unreasoning hatred and distrust of authority. But we're not concerned with proving anything. We're not going o punish you for that. Not that we wouldn't like to, you understand. Many of us liked the Professor. But he waived his legal rights when he came on campus; he didn't have to, but that's what he wanted. ‘Don't punish anyone in my name,’ he told me once. ‘If something happens to me, it's one of two things: my own fault or my own doing.’ We just want to know what happened to him.”
Gavin heard the note of sorrow in the Chancellor's voice and what he would have considered in other circumstances an element of sincerity, but he hardened his heart. “If you think I'm going to tell you anything, you don't know students very well. We aren't going to cooperate with the authority that has been falsely placed over us.”
They sat there looking at each other, Gavin defiant, the Chancellor sad, until Gavin said, “If there's nothing else, I'll thank you for the medical care and be on...” He tried to get up, but his knees wouldn't hold him. He sat forward on the sofa, breathing hard, massaging his thighs.
“I'm afraid,” the Chancellor said, “it isn't that easy.”
“It wasn't easy at all,” Gavin said.
The Chancellor spread his hands helplessly. “You speak of authority. It isn't that way.” He nodded as if he had reached a decision. “I want you to understand how it is.”
“The Professor used to say,” Gavin said, “when somebody tells you, ‘I want you to understand how it is,’ he means he wants you to hear his excuses for why he has to behave abominably.”
The Chancellor nodded. “Quite right. Only, in this case I want you to know the situation not because I want your forgiveness, nor to absolve myself, but because you were the Professor's student and I think you respected him.”
“And you want me to tell you what happened to him,” Gavin added cynically. He shrugged. “If you won't let me go and I'm too weak to make a fight of it, I guess I'll have to listen.” But he thought he could feel the strength flowing back into his thighs. Perhaps soon he could make a fight of it, or a flight of it.
“In the first place,” the Chancellor said, “I have no authority. I have no power.”
Gavin laughed. “The Professor used to say, ‘Beware the power of people who say they have no power.'”
“And yet, in some cases it must be true. I am a figurehead, no better than a janitor—worse, really, because I serve no useful function. I neither govern nor direct. I do not admit, I do not grade, I do not dismiss or graduate.”
“The Kampuskops,” Gavin reminded him.
“My officers are actors in a play they do not understand. They do nothing important. They arrest nobody important. They play parts in this campus farce, and the fact that they do not know the
mselves as actors makes the farce even funnier.”
“They arrested me.”
“I was told where to find you by a student informer, who also told me who was responsible for the Professor's abduction.”
“Phil?” Gavin asked. Was the little sycophant playing a dangerous double game?
“That is his name.”
Why was the Chancellor telling him this? Was it a ploy to gain his confidence? “He works for StudEx.”
“I know,” the Chancellor said. “The orders to pick you up came from StudEx.”
Gavin didn't believe it. StudEx might exert its petty tyrannies over individual students, but it would never connive with authority. “Did they also tell you to treat my illness?” he asked.
“That was my idea, I'm afraid. I wasn't told that you were sick, so I was free to use my own initiative.”
It was all so ridiculous, and the most ridiculous part was that the Chancellor expected him to be taken in by it. “If you have no power, why are you here?”
“Call me a scapegoat,” the Chancellor said, choosing his words with apparent care. “Call me a hostage.”
“Not a Chancellor?”
“A hostage.”
“For what?”
“For the good behavior of society.”
Gavin laughed. “Why would society hesitate to act because of you?”
The Chancellor laughed too. Only, there was something hollow about it. “It wouldn't. That's funny, right? Not for me as me. But for the position, that's another matter. I have a title. Chancellor. And for someone uniquely on a spot, extraordinary efforts often will be exerted. Like an explorer in a cave or an astronaut headed for Mars. If they get into difficulties, hundreds of untitled men and women will risk their lives to save him. He's there alone, and I'm here alone. I'm a hostage for society, a scapegoat for the students.”
“Why you?”
The Chancellor looked thoughtful. “I was ... important, once. A physician. A scientist. An author. A teacher. A man with a name. And now I'm none of those things. The time I have spent here has eroded them completely away. I'm a title, a scapegoat, a hostage, and I'm here because while I'm here conditions may not get worse. Society still can exert some small restraints upon youthful excesses. I remind students of another world.”
“You're a target for every student with a grievance,” Gavin said.
“That, too. That goes with the office,” the Chancellor said. “But if they didn't have me, what other targets would they find?”
“You're being used,” Gavin said scornfully. “By the establishment you call society.”
“And just as much by the students, which you call the revolution.”
“You're just playing games.”
“That's what growing up is, right? Playing games, trying on different roles, practicing for life?”
Gavin thought about that for a moment. The Chancellor was beginning to remind him of a gentler Professor, and unconsciously he was beginning to accept what the Chancellor said as truth. “Maybe so, but if this"—he swept his hand to encompass the campus and all it implied—"is a game, all life is a game.”
“Many wise men have used that metaphor,” the Chancellor said. “But there's a difference between metaphor and reality. In a sense, the games of the child evolve into the reality of the adult along a continuum, so that at no point between the two is a participant able to say that this is all game and that is all reality. But there is a point when, in spite of role-playing in adult life, a mature individual knows that he is seriously engaged with life, that this is real, no game-playing involved.”
“That's just another ploy of the establishment,” Gavin said, “to keep young people from pressing their demands for justice and revolution—the promise of jam tomorrow.”
“Jam tomorrow?” the Chancellor asked.
“That's what the White Queen said to Alice: the pay is jam every other day—jam yesterday or jam tomorrow, but never jam today, because today isn't any other day.”
“You humanities types always have the better of me,” the Chancellor said, and sighed. “Never jam today. That's what it seems like when you're young and impatient, and the games seem real. So we have to isolate you....”
“What are you talking about?”
“The walls,” the Chancellor said. “I'm talking about the walls. That's what they're for. To keep you in.”
Who is inside the walls and who is outside? the Professor asked.
“After the uneasy quiet of the Apprehensive Decade,” the Chancellor said, “burned out by the riots of the sixties, alarmed by shortages and inflation and unemployment, the overall trend established in the late sixties resumed its progress toward anarchy—the energy problems were solved in a variety of ways; inflation was checked by cheap power and the increase in efficiency brought about by automation; unemployment subsided with the shortened workweek, student salaries, and early retirement; the guaranteed annual income took care of the poor; and the delayed adolescence of the middle-class young was further delayed.” The Chancellor grinned apologetically. “That, at least, is the way our best historians have summarized it for me.”
Increasingly Gavin began thinking of him as the Professor.
“On the other hand, the sociologists tell me,” the Chancellor said, “that the behavior of young people was predictable. They are the products of several generations of permissive childrearing, egalitarian homes, praise for childish creativity no matter how poverty-stricken the imagination or inadequate the execution, primary and secondary education from which the concepts of discipline and content have disappeared, and personal freedom of movement and sexual activity. We gave you liberty and deprived you of society's voice, the superego. No wonder you began to believe that life was all freedom and leisure.
“Those haven't been the only influences: sociologists have identified the growing glorification of youth and the diminishing respect for age, the overpowering numbers of young people, the creation of a youth identity by advertising in pursuit of a market, and a tradition of youthful rebellion reinforced by peer approval and pressures.”
“You've forgotten the law-and-order movement,” Gavin pointed out.
“No,” the Chancellor said, “this was as much a part of the youth movement as anything else, only it was an inevitable reaction to the pressures by youth to revolutionize society, and inevitably it only served to intensify the pressures. Inevitably, it led to the riots of eighty-five, and we realized—”
“Who realized?”
“Adults in general, but specifically Congress and the President and the electorate, which had consented in the law-and-order strategy, even if with misgivings—we all realized that we had been wrong. We had created a new breed of humanity—not just in the United States, but everywhere around the world as international travel and communication wiped out purely national cultures—a breed which like all newly created groups was sure that it had a monopoly upon virtue, that whatever it was was right, that whenever it wanted to know what was right it had only to consult its instincts. We had a choice of destroying it before it destroyed us, or of walling it off, encysting it. We couldn't destroy you. After all, you were our children—I myself lost two children to your Crusade—and we had created you, and there were new generations coming up behind, like you or worse. We had gone too far to change our theories and methods of childrearing. It is easy to loosen the reins of authority but difficult to tighten them again. That would have involved the kinds of effort we no longer were capable of making and would have revolutionized our society almost as much as you threatened. So we gave you the campuses. We walled you in. The serious scholars departed, and we left you here to play your games and survive, if you could, and maybe some of you would graduate.”
“What do you mean, graduate?”
“Into adulthood and responsibility.”
“You mean into surrender to the establishment,” Gavin said. But he was becoming confused. This could not be the Professor who was lecturing him
; the Professor was dead.
“No, that's what you mean,” the Chancellor said. He sniffed, and his nose twitched to one side. “Well, I came here as Chancellor in eighty-six. I've been here nearly ten years, and I've lost hope. I've seen few graduate. I've seen conditions deteriorate. I have seen campus life become so personally satisfying that no one wants to leave in spite of the petty tyrannies that make existence perilous—I'm afraid they only add spice to a life of license that might otherwise pall...”
“If there were an abduction on this campus such as you described earlier,” Gavin broke in, “and if, by accident, the Professor died, I think the students would have buried him under the library lawn.” Had that been only night before last? he thought.
“Under the library lawn?” The Chancellor considered it and then shook his head in admiration. “We would never have thought to look there. How did you manage...? Oh, well, never mind. I can't approve what you did, but your choice of a resting place shows more understanding than any of us would have expected. We thought he would end up among the cadavers. But you don't seem like the kind of young man to indulge in casual pranks. Why did you do it?”
“A person such as you describe,” Gavin said, “could have only one valid reason: admiration.”
“Admiration?”
“Well, love.”
“Love,” the Chancellor mused. “Imagine that.” He sighed. “Thank you for that. Now you may leave.”
“I may leave,” Gavin echoed.
“Let me put it a bit differently. You must leave.”
“Where am I going?” Gavin asked warily, his muscles tensing.
“You're being expelled.”
“You said you didn't expel students.”
“I don't. This is the action of StudEx.”
Gavin sprang at the Chancellor. The Chancellor tried to retreat, but the desk was behind him. Gavin hit him in the chest with his shoulder, and the Chancellor went back over the desk like an acrobat. Hope flickered that the middle-aged man wasn't hurt, even if he was a liar and a cheat, as Gavin turned toward the door. He tugged at the handle, and when the door didn't move, he searched for locks and hidden buttons. Nothing. He fumbled around the handle. As his fingers moved, the door clicked and then slid into the wall under his hands.
