'We need places to stay. And the three of us here need to get to the Science Shop.'
So! Friends of the White Priest! She was very crafty, very coy, but made no bones about what she was after. These women thought of only one thing. Klystron/Chris liked that— she was quite a little enticer, but subtle as she was, he knew just what the audacious minx was up to! Shekondar tuned in again with unnecessary advice: 'Please her and you will have a fine opportunity for sexual intercourse. Do as she asks in all matters.'
He straightened up from his awkward position and smiled the broadest, friendliest smile he could manage without exceeding the elastic limit of his lip tissue. 'Men,' he said to his soldiers, 'it's been a secret up to now, but this woman is a Colonelette in the Grand Army of Shekondar the Fearsome and a priestess of great stature. I'm putting Werewolf Platoon under her command. She'll need passage into the Secured Region— unless she changes her mind first!' Women often changed their minds; he glanced at her to see if she had caught this gentle ribbing. She put on an emotionless act that was almost convincing.
'Well, gee. It's kind of a surprise to me too. Can we just go, then?'
'Permission granted, Colonelette Sarah Jane Johnson!' he snapped, saluting. She threw him a strange look, no doubt of awe, thanks and general indebtedness, and after giving a few cutely tentative orders to her men, headed into the Secured Region. Fired with new zest for action, Klystron/Chris wheeled and led his men toward the next outpost of the Purified Empire.
I declined Fred Fine's offer and waited below E Tower for my friends. Before long it became obvious that I would never meet anyone in that madhouse of a lobby, and so I set out for the Science Shop.
The safest route took me down Emeritus Row, quiet as always. I checked each door as I went along. Sharon's office had long since been ransacked by militants looking for rail-gun information. Other than the sound of dripping water falling into the wastecans below the poorly patched hole in Sharon's ceiling, all I heard on Emeritus Row was an old man crying alone.
He was in the office marked: PROFESSOR EMERITUS HUMPHREY BATSTONE FORTHCOMING IV. Without knocking (for the room was dark and the door ajar) I walked in and saw the professor himself. He leaned over the desk with his silvery dome on the blotter as though it were the only thing that could soak up his tears, his hands flung uselessly to the side. The rounded tweed shoulders occasionally humped with sobs, and little strangled gasps made their way out and died in the musty air of the office.
Though I intentionally banged my way in, he did not look up. Eventually he sat up, red eyes closed. He opened them to slits and peered at me.
'I— ' he said, and broke again. After a few more tries he was able to speak in a high, strangled voice.
'I am in a very bad situation, you see. I think I may have suffered ruination. I have just … have just been sitting here'— his voice began to clear and his wet eyes scanned the desk— 'and preparing to tender my resignation.'
'But why,' I asked. 'You're not that old. You seem healthy. In your field, it's not as though you have equipment or data that's been destroyed in the fighting. What's wrong?'
He gave a taut, clenched smile and avoided my eyes, looking around at the stacks of manuscript boxes and old books that lined the room. 'You don't understand. I seem to have left my lecture notes in my private study in the Library bloc. As you can appreciate, it will be rather difficult for a man of my years to retrieve them under these conditions.'
This clearly meant a lot to him, and I did not say 'So? Write up some new ones!' For him, apparently, it was a fatal blow. 'You see,' he continued, sounding stronger now that his secret was out. 'Ahem. There is in my field a large corpus of basic knowledge, absolutely fundamental. It must be learned by any new student, which is why it appears in my courses and so forth. I, er, I've forgotten it entirely. Somehow. With my engagements and editorial positions, conferences, trips, consultations, et cetera, and of course all my writing— well, there's simply no room for trivia. So if I am hired away by another university and asked to teach, or some dreadful thing— you can imagine my embarrassment.'
I was embarrassed myself, remembering now a snatch of overheard conversation among three grad students, one of whom referred contemptuously to 'Emeritus Home-free Etcetera,' who apparently was making him do a great deal of pointless research, check out books for him and pay the fines, put money in his parking meters and so on. If that was Forthcoming's style, I could understand what this break in routine would do to his career. He was only a scholar when there was a university to say he was.
A distant machine-gun blast echoed down the hallway. 'Mr. Forthcoming,' I said firmly. 'I'd like to help you out, but for the moment it's not possible. I guess what I'm trying to say is let's get the hell out of here!'
He wouldn't move.
'Look. Maybe if we get down to a safe place, we can see about getting your lecture notes back.'
He looked up with such relief and hope that I wanted to spit. My unfortunate statement had given him new life. He stood up shakily, began to chatter happily and set about packing pipes and manuscripts into his briefcase.
As ever, the Burrows were calm. The GASF guards let us past the border after quick checks over their intercoms, and we were suddenly in a place unchanged since the days of old, where students roamed the hallways wild and free and research and classes continued obliviously. Most of the Burrows folk regarded the entire war/riot as a challenge for their ingenuity, and those who had not been sucked into Fred Fine's vortex of fantasy and paranoia set about preserving the ancient comforts with the enthusiasm of Boy Scouts lost in the woods.
The Science Shop was an autonomous dependency of Fred Fine's United Pure Plexorian Realm, and the hallway that led there was guarded, mostly symbolically, by Zap with his sawed-off shotgun and his favorite blunt instrument. He waved us through and we came to our haven for the war.
The vacuum of authority that filled the Plex for the first two weeks of April resulted from events in the Nuke Dump. The occupying terrorists warned that any attempt by authorities to approach the building would be met by the release of radioactive poisons into the city. The city police who ringed the Plex late on April First had no idea of how to deal with such a threat and called the Feds. The National Guard showed up a day later with armored personnel carriers, helicopters and tanks, but they, too, kept their distance. The Crotobaltislavonians had obviously intended to establish their own martial law in the Flex, enforcing it through their SUB proxies and the SUB's Terrorist proxies. But the blocked elevator shaft and the giant rats made their authority tenuous, and unbelievably fierce resistance from GASF and TUG kept the SUB/Terrorist Axis from seizing any more than E and F Towers. Instead of National Guard authority or Crotobaltislavonian authority, we ended up with no central authority at all.
The Towers were held by the best-armed groups. The Axis held E and F, the GASF held D, the administration anti-Terrorist squads B and C, and TUG held A, H, and G, prompting Hyacinth to remark that if this were tic-tac-toe the TUG would have won. The towers were easy to hold because access was limited; if you blocked shut the four outer fire stairs of each wing, you could control the only entrances to the tower with a handful of soldiers in the sixth-floor lobby. The base of the Plex was a bewildering 3-D labyrinth. Here things were much less stable as several groups struggled for control of useful ground, such as bathrooms, strategic stairways, rooms with windows and so forth. Many of these were factions that had split away from the Terrorists, finding the strict hierarchy and tight restrictions intolerable. Other important groups were made up of inner-city financial-aid students, who at least knew how to take care of themselves; one gang of small-towners from the Great Plains, also adept at mass violence; the hockey-wrestling coalition; and the Explorer post, which had a large interlocking membership with the ROTC students.
Those who were not equipped or inclined to fight fared poorly. Most ended up trapped in the towers for the duration, where all they could do was watch TV and reproduce. Escape from the Plex was impossible, because the nuclear Terrorists allowed no one to approach it, and snipers in the Axis towers made perilous the dash from the Main Entrance. Those who could not make it to the safety of a tower were not wanted by the bands of fighters in the Base, and so had to wander as refugees, most ending up in the Library. It was a very, very bad time to be an unescorted woman. We tried to make raids against weaker bands in order to rescue some of these unfortunates, but only retrieved thirty or so.
Fire in the Plex was not the problem it had been feared to be. The plumbing still worked reasonably well and most people had enough sense to use the fire hoses. Many areas were smoky for days, though, to the point of being hostile to life, and bands driven from their own countries by smoke accounted for a good deal of the fighting. The food problem was minor because the Red Cross was allowed to distribute it in the building. Unfortunately there was no way to remove garbage, so it piled up in lobbies and stairwells and elevator shafts. Insects, invading
