'I don't know,' said Casimir. 'Depends on what you want. Probably not.'
A grin gradually sprouted on the man's face and he turned around as though smirking with imaginary friends behind him. 'Oh, Jeez,' he said, and turned away. 'I hate fuckers like you!' he yelled, and ran to the lockers across from the sinks, running a few steps up the wall before sprawling back down on the floor again. Casimir watched him in the mirror as he went from locker to locker, finally finding an unlocked one. The strange guy pawed through it and selected a can of shaving cream. 'Hey,' he said, and looked at the back of Casimir's head. 'Hey, Wall.'
Casimir looked at him in the mirror. 'What is it?'
The strange guy did not understand that Casimir was looking right at him. 'Hey fucker! Cocksucker! Mr. Drug! You!' Rhythmic female shrieking began to emanate from a shower stall. 'What is it,' Casimir yelled back, refusing to turn. The strange guy approached him and Casimir turned half around defensively. He stood very close to Casimir. 'Your hearing isn't very good,' he shouted, 'you should take off your glasses.' 'Do you want something? If so, you should just tell me.' 'Do you think he'd mind if I used this?'
'Who?'
The strange guy smirked arid shook his head. 'Do you know anything about terriers?'
'No.'
'Ah, well.' The strange guy put the shaving cream on the shelf in front of Casimir, muttered something incomprehensible, laughed, and walked out of the bathroom.
Casimir dried the food bowl under an automatic hand dryer by the door. As he was on his third push of the button, a couple from one of the showers walked nude into the room, getting ten feet from cover before they saw Casimir.
The woman screamed, clapping her hands over her face. 'Oh Jeez, Kevin, there's a guy in here!' Kevin was too mellowed by sex and beer to do anything but smile wanly. Casimir walked out without saying anything, breathed deeply of the cool, dry air of the hallway, and returned to his room, where he filled Spike's water bowl with spring water from a bottle.
As soon as Casimir had heard about Neutrino, the official organization of physics majors, he had crashed a meeting and got himself elected President and Treasurer. Casimir was like that, meek most of the time with occasional bursts of effectiveness. He walked into the meeting, which so far consisted of six people, and said, 'Who's the president?'
The others, being physics majors and therefore accustomed to odd behavior of all sorts, had answered. 'He graduated,' said one. 'No, when he graduated, he stopped being our president. When the guy who was our president graduated, we instantaneously ceased to have one,' another countered.
'I agree,' a third added, 'but the proper term is 'was graduated.''
'That's pedantic.'
'That's correct. Where's the dictionary?'
'Who cares? Why do you want to know?' the first asked. As the other two consulted a dictionary, a fourth member held a calculator in his hand, gnawing absently on the charger cord, and the other two members argued loudly about an invisible diagram they were drawing with their fingers on a blank wall.
'I want to be president of this thing,' Casimir said. 'Any objections?'
'Oh, that's okay. We thought you were from the administration or something.'
Casimir's motivation for all this was that after the Sharon incident, it was impossible for him to escape from his useless courses. The grimness of what had happened, and the hopelessness of his situation, had left him quiet and listless for a couple of weeks to the point where I was beginning to feel alarmed. One night, then, from two to four in the morning, Casimir's neighbor had watched Rocky on cable and the sleeping Casimir had subconsciously listened in on the soundtrack. He awoke in the morning with a sense of mission, of destiny, a desire to go out and beat the fuckers at their own game. Neutrino provided a suitable power base, and since his classes only consumed about six hours a week he had all the time in the world.
Previous to Casimir's administration most of the money allotted to Neutrino had been dispersed among petty activities such as dinners, trips to nuclear reactors, insipid educational gadgets and the like. Casimir's plan was to spend all the money on a single project that would exercise the minds of the members and, in the end, produce something useful. Once he had convinced the pliable membership of Neutrino that this was a good idea, his suggestion for the actual project was not long in coming: construction of a mass driver.
The mass driver was a magnetic device for throwing things. It consisted of a long straight rail, a 'bucket' that slid along the rail on a magnetic cushion and powerful electromagnets that kicked the bucket down the rail When the bucket slammed to a halt at the rail's end, whatever was in it kept on going— theoretically, very, very fast. Recently this simple machine had become a pet project of Professor Sharon, who had advocated it as a lunar mining tool. Casimir argued that the idea was important and interesting in and of itself, and that Sharon's connection to it lent it sentimental value. As a tribute to Sharon, a fun project and a toy that would be a blast to play with when finished, the mass driver was irresistible to Neutrino. Which was just as well, because nothing was going to stop Casimir from building this son of a bitch.
Casimir had been drawing up a budget for it on this particular evening, because budget time for the Student Government was coming up soon. Not long after the exterminator's visit, Casimir got stuck. Many of the supplies he needed were standard components that were easy for him to get, but certain items, such as custom-wound electromagnets, were hard to budget for. This was the sort of fabrication that had to be done at the Science Shop, and that meant dealing with Virgil Gabrielsen. After nailing down as much as he could, Casimir gathered his things and set out on the half-hour elevator ride to the bottom of the Burrows.
In the interests of efficiency, security, ease of design and healthy interplay among the departments, the designers of the Campustructure had put all the science departments together in a single bloc. It was known as the Burrows because it was mostly below street level, and because of the allegedly Morlockian qualities of its inhabitants. At the top of the Burrows were the departmental libraries and conference rooms. Below were professors' offices and departmental headquarters, followed by classrooms, labs, stockrooms and at the very bottom, forty feet below ground level, the enormous CC— Computing Center— and the Science Shop. Any researcher wanting glass blown, metal shaped, equipment fixed, circuits designed or machines assembled, had to come down and beg for succor at the feet of the stony-hearted Science Shop staff. This meant trying to track down Lute, the hyperactive Norwegian technician, rumored to have the power of teleportation, who held smart people in disdain because of their helplessness in practical matters, or Zap, the electronics specialist, a motorcycle gang sergeant-at-arms who spent his working hours boring out engine blocks for his brothers and threatening professors with bizarre and deadly tortures. Zap was the cheapest technician the Science Shop steering committee had been able to find, Lute had been retained at high salary after dire threats from all faculty members and Virgil, to the immense relief of all, had been hired three years earlier as a part-time student helper and had turned the place around.
Science Shop was at the end of a dark unmarked hallway that smelled of machine oil and neoprene, half blocked by junked and broken equipment. When Casimir arrived he relaxed instantly in the softly lit, wildly varied squalor of the place, and soon found Virgil sipping an ale and twiddling painstakingly with wires and pulleys on an automatic plotter.
They went into his small office and Virgil provided himself and Casimir with more ale. 'What's the latest on Sharon?' he asked. 'The same. No word,' Casimir said, pushing the toes of his tennis shoes around in the sawdust and metal filings on the floor. Not quite in a coma, definitely not all there. Whatever he lost from oxygen starvation isn't coming back.'
'And they haven't caught anyone.'
'Well, E14 is the Performing Arts Floor. They used to have a room with a piano in It. The E13S people didn't like it because the Performing Artists were always tap dancing.'
'We know how sensitive those poor boys are to noise.' 'A couple of days before the piano crash, the piano was stolen from E14. Two of the tap-dancers had their doors ignited the same night. A couple of days later, E13S had a burning-furniture-throwing contest, and it just happens that at the same time a piano crashed through Sharon's ceiling. Circumstantial evidence only.'
Virgil clasped his hands over his flat belly and looked at the ceiling. 'Though a pattern of socio-heterodox behaviors has been exhibited by individuals associated with E13S, we find it preferable to keep them within the system and counsel them constructively rather than turn them over to damaging outside legal interference which
