So far, Casimir thought, she seemed more interested than peeved, so he continued to disagree. 'Well, scientists don't need language to tell them what's real. Mathematics is the ultimate reality. That's all the anchor we need.'
'That's interesting, but you can't use math to solve political problems— it's not useful in the real world.'
'Neither is language. You have to use intuition. You have to use the right side of your brain.'
She looked again at the clock. 'I have to go now and get ready for Krupp.' Now she was looking at him — appraisingly, he thought. She was going to leave! He desperately wanted to ask her out. But too many women had burst out laughing, and he couldn't take that. Yet there she sat, propped up on her elbows— was she waiting for him to ask? Impossible.
'Uh,' he said, but at the same time she said, 'Let's get together some other time. Would you like that?'
'Yeah.'
'Fine!' With a little negotiation, they arranged to meet in the Megapub on Friday night.
'I can't believe you're free Friday night!' he blurted, and she looked at him oddly. She stood up and held out her hand again. Casimir scrambled up and shook it gently.
'See you later,' she said, and left. Casimir remained standing, watched her all the way across the shiny floor of the Megapub, then telescoped into his seat and nearly blacked out.
She did not have to wait long amid the marble-and-mahogany splendor of Septimius Severus Krupp's anteroom. She would have been happy to wait there for days, especially if she could have brought some favorite music and maybe Hyacinth, taken off her shoes, lounged on the sofa and stared out the window over the lush row of healthy plants. The administrative bloc of the Plex was an anomaly, like a Victorian mansion airlifted from London and dropped whole into a niche beneath C Tower. Here was none of the spare geometry of the rest of the Plex, none of the anonymous monochromatic walls and bald rectangles and squares that seemed to drive the occupants bonkers. No plastic showed; the floors were wooden, the windows opened, the walls were paneled and the honest wood and intricate parquet floors gave the place something of nature's warmth and diversity. In the past month Sarah had seen almost no wood— even the pencils in the stores here were of blond plastic— and she stared dumbly at the paneling everywhere she went, as though the detailed grain was there for a reason and bore careful examination. All of this was an attempt to invest American Megaversity with the aged respectability of a real university; but she felt at home here.
'President Krupp will see you now,' said the wonderful, witty, kind, civilized old secretary, and the big panel doors swung open and there was S. S. Krupp. 'Good afternoon, Sarah, I'm sorry you had to wait,' he said. 'Please come in.'
Three of the walls of Krupp's office were covered up to about nine feet high with bookshelves, and the fourth was all French windows. Above the bookshelves hung portraits of the founders and past presidents of American Megaversity. The founding fathers stared sullenly at Sarah through the gloom of a century and a half's accumulated tobacco smoke, and as she followed the row of dignitaries around to the other end of the room, their faces shone out brighter and brighter from the tar and nicotine of antiquity until she got to the last spaces remaining, where Tony Commodi, Pertinax Rushforth and Julian Didius III gleamed awkwardly in modern Suits and designer eyeglasses.
The glowing red-orange wooden floor was covered by three Persian rugs, and the ceiling was decorated with three concentric rings of elaborate plasterwork surrounding a great domed skylight. A large, carefully polished chandelier hung on a heavy chain from the center of the skylight. Sarah knew that the delicate leaded-glass skylight was protected from above by a squat geodesic dome covered with heavy steel grids and shatterproof Fiberglass panels, designed to keep everything out of S. S. Krupp's office except for the sunlight. Nothing short of a B-52 in a power dive could penetrate that grand silence, though a ring of shattered furniture and other shrapnel piled about the dome outside attested to the efforts of C Tower students to prove otherwise.
Krupp led her to a long low table under the windows, and they sat in old leather chairs and spread their papers out in the grey north light. Between them Krupp's ever-ready tape recorder was spinning away silently. Shortly the secretary came in with a silver tea service, and Krupp poured tea and offered Sarah tiny, cleverly made munchies on white linen napkins embroidered with the American Megaversity coat of arms.
Krupp was a sturdy man, his handsome cowboy face somewhat paled and softened by the East. 'I understand,' he said, 'that you had some trouble with those playground communists last night.' 'Oh, they were the same as ever. No unusual problems.' 'Yes.' Krupp sounded slightly impatient at her nonstatement. 'I was pleased to see you disemboweled their budget.'
'Oh? What if we'd stayed with the old one?'
'I'd have flushed it.' He grinned brightly.
'What about this budget? Is it acceptable?'
'Oh, it's not bad. It's got some warts.'
'Well, I want to point out at the beginning that it's easy for you to make minor adjustments in the budget until the warts are gone. It's much more difficult for the Student Government to handle. We almost had to call in the riot police to get this through, and any budget you have approved will be much harder.'
'You're perfectly free to point that out, Sarah, and I don't disagree, doesn't make much difference.'
'Well,' said Sarah carefully, 'the authority is obviously yours. I'm sure you can take whatever position you want and back it up very eloquently. But I hope you'll take into account certain practicalities.' Knowing instantly she had made a mistake, she popped a munchie into her mouth and stared out the window, waiting.
Krupp snorted quietly and sipped tea, then sat back in his chair and regarded Sarah with dubious amusement. 'Sarah, I didn't expect you, of all people, to try that one on me. Why is it that everyone finds eloquence so inauspicious? It's as though anyone who argues clearly can't be trusted— that's the opposite of what reasonable people ought to think. That attitude is common even among faculty here, and I'm just at a loss to understand. I can't talk like a mongoloid pig-sticker on a three-day drunk just so I'll sound like one of the boys. God knows I can't support any position, only the right position. If it's not right, the words won't make it so. That's the value of clear language.'
This was the problem with Krupp. He assumed that everyone always said exactly what they thought. While this was true of him, it was rarely so with others. 'Okay, sorry,' said Sarah. 'I agree. I just didn't make my point too well. I'm just hoping you'll take into account the practical aspects of the problem, such as how everyone's going to react. Some people say this is a blind spot of yours.' This was a moderately daring thing for Sarah to say, but if she tried to mush around politely with Krupp, he would cut her to pieces.
'Sarah, it's obvious that people's reactions have to be accounted for. That's just horse sense. It's just that basic principles are far more important than a temporary political squabble in Student Government. To you, all those mono-maniacs and zombies seem more important than they are, and that's why we can't give you any financial authority. From my point of view I can see a much more complete picture of what is and isn't important, and one thing that isn't is a shouting match in that parody of a democratic institution that we call a government because we are all so idealistic in the university. What's important is principles.'
Suddenly Sarah felt depressed; she sat limply back in her chair. For a while nothing was said— Krupp was surprisingly sensitive to her mood.
'Student Government is just a sham, isn't it?' she asked, surprised by her own bitterness.
'What do you mean by that?'
'It has nothing to do with the real world. We don't make any real decisions. It's just a bunch of imaginary responsibilities to argue about and put down on our rиsumиs.'
Krupp thought it over. 'It's kind of like a dude ranch. If you lose your dogies, there's someone there to round them up for you. But on the other hand, if you stand behind your horse you can still get wet. My Lord, Sarah, everything is real. There's no difference between the 'real' world and this one. The experience you're gaining is real. But it's true that the importance ascribed to Student Government is mostly imaginary.'
'So what's the point?'
'The point is that we're here to go over this budget, and when I point out the warts, you tell me why they aren't warts. If you can justify them, you'll have a real effect on the budget.' Krupp spread the pages of the budget out on the table, and Sarah saw alarming masses of red ink scrawled across them She felt like whipping out Casimir s graphs but she didn't have them with her and couldn't risk Krupp's seeing what she had seen.
