installed giant electric air filters before proceeding.
Here on the access lot we could look down a long line of loading docks, the orifices of the Plex where food and supplies were ingested and trash discharged, serviced by an endless queue of trucks. The first of these docks, by the northern corner, was specially designed for the discharge of hazardous wastes produced in Plex labs and was impressively surrounded by fences, red lights and threatening signs. The next six loading docks were for garbage trucks, and the rest, all the way down to the Parkway, for deliveries. We swung way out from the Plex to avoid all this, and followed the fence at the border of the lot, gazing into the no-man's-land of lost mufflers and shredded fanbelts beyond, and sometimes staring up into the Plex itself.
The three-by-three block base had six stories above ground and three below. Atop it sat eight 25-story towers where lived the 40,000 students of the university. Each tower had four wings 160 feet long, thrown out at right angles to make a Swiss cross. These towers sat at the four corners and four sides of the base. The open space between them was a huge expanse of roof called Tar City, inhabited by great machines, crushed furniture thrown from above, rats, roaches, students out on dares, and the decaying corpses of various things that had ventured out on hot summer days and become mired in the tar. All we could see were the neutral light brown towers and their thousands and thousands of identical windows reaching into the heavens. Even for a city person, it was awesome. Compared to the dignified architecture of the old brownstones, though, it caused me a nagging sense of embarrassment.
The Vortex whose coils were twined around those brown-stones threw out two ramps which served as entrance and exit for the Plex parking ramp. These ran into the side of the building at about third-story level. To us they were useless, so we continued around toward the south side.
Here was actually some green: a strip of grass between the walk and the Parkway. On this side the Plex was faced with darker brown brick and had many picture windows and signs for the businesses of the built-in mall on the first floor. The Main Entrance itself was merely eight revolving doors in a row, and having swished through them we were drowned in conditioned air, Muzak, the smell of Karmel Korn and the idiotic babble of penny-choked indoor fountains. We passed through this as quickly as possible and rode the long escalators ('This must be what a ski lift is like,' said Casimir) to the third floor, where a rampart of security booths stretched across our path like a thruway toll station. Several of the glass cages were occupied by ancient guards in blue uniforms, who waved us wearily through the turnstiles as we waved our ID cards at them. Casimir stopped on the other side, frowning.
'They shouldn't have let me in,' he said.
'Why?' I asked. 'Isn't that your ID?'
'Of course it is,' said Casimir Radon, 'but the photo is so bad they had no way of telling.' He was serious. We surveyed the rounded blue back of the guard. Most of them had been recruited out of Korea or the Big One. The glass cages of the Plex had ruined their bodies. Now they had become totally passive in their outlook; but, by the same token, they had become impossible to faze or surprise.
We stepped through more glass doors and were in the Main Lobby.
The Plex's environmental control system was designed so that anyone could spend four years there wearing only a jockstrap and a pair of welding goggles and yet never feel chilly or find the place too dimly lit. Many spent their careers there without noticing this. Casimir Radon took less than a day to notice the pitiless fluorescent light. Acres of light glanced off the Lobby's polished floor like sun off the Antarctic ice, and a wave of pain now rolled toward Casimir from near the broad vinyl information desk and washed over him, draining through a small hole in the center of his skull and pooling coldly behind his eyes. Great patches of yellow blindness appeared in the center of his vision and he coasted to a stop, hands on eyes, mouth open. I knew enough to know it was migraine, so I held his skinny arm and led him, blind, to his room in D Tower. He lay cautiously down on the naked plastic mattress, put a sock over his eyes and thanked me. I drew the blinds, sat there helplessly for a while, then left him to finish his adjustment to the Big U.
After that he wore a uniform of sorts: old T-shirt, cutoffs or gym shorts, hightop tennis shoes ('to keep the rats off my ankles') and round purple mountain-climbing goggles with leather bellows on the sides to block out peripheral light. He was planning such a costume as I left his room. More painfully, he was beginning to question whether he could live in such a place for even one semester, let alone four. He did not know that the question would be decided for him, and so he felt the same edgy uncertainty that nagged at me.
Some people, however, were quite at home in the Flex. At about this time, below D Tower in the bottom sublevel, not far from the Computing Center, several of them were crossing paths in a dusty little dead end of a hallway. To begin with, three young men were standing by the only door in the area, taking turns peering into the room beyond. The pen lights from their shirt pockets illuminated a small windowless room containing a desk, a chair and a computer terminal. The men stared wistfully at the latter, and had piled their math and computer textbooks on the floor like sandbags, as though they planned a siege. They had been discussing their tactical alternatives for getting past the door, and had run the gamut from picking the lock to blowing it open with automatic-weapon bursts, but so far none had made any positive moves.
'If we could remove that window,' said one, a mole-faced individual smelling of Brut and sweat and glowing in a light blue iridescent synthetic shirt and hi-gloss dark blue loafers, 'we could reach in and unlock it from inside.'
'Some guy tried to get into my grandma's house that way one time,' recalled another, a skinny, long- haired, furtive fellow who was having trouble tracking the conversation, 'but she took a sixteen-ounce ball-peen hammer and smashed his hand with it. He never came back.' He delivered the last sentence like the punchline to a Reader's Digest true anecdote, convulsing his pals with laughter.
The third, a disturbingly 35-ish looking computer science major with tightly permed blond hair, eventually calmed down enough to ask, 'Hey, Gary, Gary! Did she use the ball end or the peen end?' Gary was irked and confused, He had hoped to impress them by specifying the weight of the hammer, but he was stumped by this piece of one-upsmanship; he didn't know which end was which. He radiated embarrassment for several seconds before saying, 'Oh, gee, I don't know, I think she probably used both of 'em before she was done with the guy. But that guy never came back.'
Their fun was cut short by a commanding voice. 'A sixteen-ounce ball-peen hammer isn't much good against a firearm. If I were a woman living alone I'd carry a point thirty-eight revolver, minimum. Double action. Effective enough for most purposes.' The startling newcomer had their surprised attention. He had stopped quite close to them and was surveying the door, and they instinctively stepped out of his way. He was tall, thin and pale, with thin brown Bryicreemed hair and dark red lips. The calculator on his hip was the finest personal computing machine, and on the other hip, from a loop of leather, hung a fencing foil, balanced so that its red plastic tip hung an inch above the floor. It was Fred Fine.
'You're the guy who runs the Wargames Club, aren't you,' asked the blond student.
'I am Games Marshall, if that's the intent of your question. Administrative and financial authority are distributed among the leadership cadre according to the Constitution.'
'The Wargames Club?' asked Gary, his voice suffused with hope. 'What, is there one?'
'The correct title is the Megaversity Association for Reenactments and Simulations, or MARS,' snapped Fred Fine. Still almost breathless, Gary said, 'Say. Do you guys ever play 'Tactical Nuclear War in Greenland?''
Fred Fine stared just over Gary's head, screwing up his face tremendously and humming. 'Is that the earlier version of 'Martians in Godthaab,' 'he finally asked, though his tone indicated that he already knew the answer.
Gary was hopelessly taken aback, and looked around a bit before allowing his gaze to rest on Fred Fine's calculator. 'Oh, yeah, I guess. I guess 'Martians in Godthaab' must be new.' 'No,' said Fred Fine clearly, 'it came out six months ago.' To soften the humiliation he chucked Gary on the shoulder. 'But to answer your question. Some of our plebes— our novice wargamers— do enjoy that game. It's interesting in its own way, I suppose, though I've only played it a dozen times. Of course, it's a Simuconflict product, and their games have left a lot to be desired since they lost their Pentagon connections, but there's nothing really wrong with it.'
The trio stared at him. How could he know so much? 'Uh, do you guys,' ventured the blue one, 'ever get into role-playing games? Like Dungeons and Dragons?'
'Those of us high in the experiential hierarchy find conventional D and D stultifying and repetitive. We prefer to stage live-action role-playing scenarios. But that's not for just anyone.' They looked timidly at Fred Fine's fencing foil and wondered if he were on his way to a live-action wargame at this very moment. For an instant, as he stood in the dim recess of the corridor, light flickering through a shattered panel above and playing on his head like
