End Zone

'He doesn't know about the wolf spider,' Fife said. 'Tell him about the wolf spider and the little spiderlings. How they ride on her back.'

'The wolf spider has eight eyes. It spins no web. When the female's eggs hatch, the little spiderlings ride on her back for about a week.'

'The scavenger beetle,' Fife said. 'Tell him about the scavenger. I like the part where it lays the eggs.'

'The scavenger beetle is equipped with a set of digging claws. It can bury a dead mouse or a dead bird in two or three hours. Something many times its own size. The beetle then lays eggs on the dead carcass. These eggs hatch very quickly and the larvae come out and start eating the meat of the dead bird. The scarab beetle is of the scavenger type. It lives on dung. The scarab had been a symbol of immortality since the ancient Egyptians.'

Dennis Smee walked in.

'Somebody told me to ask you about radioactivity.'

'Insects are highly resistant to radioactivity,' Conway said. 'Man dies if he's exposed to six hundred units. Mr. Insect can survive one hundred thousand units and more. And he won't have birds feeding off him. He'll be able to reproduce freely. There won't be any balance in the sense we know it.'

'Balance,' Fife said. 'The equality of effective values with respect to the applied number of reduced symbolic quantities on each side of an equation, excluding combined derivatives.'

Terry Madden came in and congratulated me on my cocaptaincy. Everybody shook my hand and wished me well. Then Lee Roy Tyler and Ron Steeples came in to look at the insects. Steeples was wearing a red golf glove on his right hand.

'Where you going, Gary?' he said.

'Things to do.'

In my room I wrote a long hysterical letter on the subject of spacetime. Even though I knew nothing about spacetime, the letter was fairly easy to write. It practically wrote itself. When I was finished I tried to decide to whom it had been written. This itself seemed the most important thing about the letter. To whom was it going? Whose name would sail, unsuspecting, on that extended text? (Whichever name, it would be minus the word Dear and followed by a dour colon-overly formal perhaps but more unfeigned than the mockcasual comma.) I thought of a dozen, people and concluded that none was worthy. I left the six pieces of paper on the old brown saddle blanket atop Anatole's bed. Bing Jackmin walked in and took a chair.

'Did you hear?' he said.

'What?'

'He's wearing those sunglasses again. Shaved skull and dark glasses. What the hell does it mean?'

'I don't know,' I said. 'It probably doesn't mean anything. He's a remote individual. The dark glasses conceal him. Or conceal whatever's around him. I don't know.'

'What about the skull, Gary?'

'I don't know why he shaved. I have no idea.'

'Don't you care to speculate?'

'I leave that to the joint chiefs. I'm just a lowly captain.'

'I heard, Gary. Nice going. Although you'll probably regret it as soon as Coach starts in with the tonguelashings. He saves that stuff for the quarterback and the two captains.'

'I know,' I said. 'He told me to expect trouble.'

'Verbal tonguelashings. Public humiliation.'

'I know, Bing.'

'First time it happens you'll wish you never even saw a football. You'll experience total personality destructuring.'

'We're wasting spacetime,' I said. 'I have a lot to do.'

'I'll tell you why I came in here in the first place. I want to grow a beard. I want hair. It's a question of increasing my personal reality. I'm serious about this, Gary.'

'What color beard?'

'Gary, I'm serious now.'

'Because if you want it the same color as the hair on your head, you'll have a lot easier time growing it.'

'I'd like you to talk to Coach. You're one of the captains now. You've got a power base. There's no word out on excess hair. I want you to find out what the word is.'

'It's very curious,' I said. 'All these juxtapositions of hair and nonhair. I half expect Anatole to come walking in with a long white mane down over his shoulders.'

'Talk to Coach. Talk to him. It's just an ounce of hair but it'll mean a whole lot to me. I'm becoming too psychomythical in my orientation. I need a reality increment. Find out what the word is.'

'He'll ignore me, Bing. He'll just look away in disgust.'

'Keep after him. Hound the son of a bitch. I want some excess hair. I'm serious about this. Tell him I'm willing to shave it off when spring practice begins. But I need a beard now. Try to explain personalized reality to him.'

'These are subglacial matters,' I said. 'I can't just snap my fingers and decide. Besides I have no real power. He'll just look away in disgust. All I can do for the moment is think about it. I'll think about it.'

'Think about it,' Bing said. 'I'll be in Conway's room looking at the insects.'

I went for a walk. It had stopped snowing. The lamps were lit along the straight white paths. It was dinnertime and everyone was inside. I inhaled deeply, feeling the air enter and bite. My right shoulder ached from the game in the snow. I rotated my arm slowly. Then I saw Alan Zapalac coming down the library steps, an enormous yellow scarf circling his neck two or three times and terminating at his kneecap. He made his way carefully, using the heel of his right shoe to probe each step for ice beneath the stacked snow. I waited for him at the foot of the stairs. He wore an armband on which was printed the word trees, green on light blue.

'Escort me to the administration building,' he said. 'If I fall down and break my leg, I'll need somebody to tell the others not to move me. If you weren't here and if it happened, breaking my leg, they'd come along and move me, broken bone and all. If you yourself slip, which I doubt will happen with your athletic prowess and tremendous genetic advantages, make sure you don't reach out and grab for me. I know that's everybody's natural instinct but I want you to fight off the urge because if you take me with you with my delicate bone structure I'm as good as dead. They'd probably use me in one of their experiments with hogs or chickens. None of my organs would be safe. Tomorrow you'd go behind that white building that looks like somebody pinned a surgical gown over it and in that pen they've got out back for the inoculated animals you'd see a hog walking along with my kidneys inside it, urinating the last dregs of my life into the alfalfa.'

'I'm going that way anyway,' I said. 'Good, good, good. How's the lady friend?' 'Myna,' I said. 'Myna's fine as far as I know.' 'I'm no good at names. My students are catching on. In one of my classes there's an allout hoax being perpetrated, supposedly at my expense. They've invented a student. His name is Robert Reynolds. After class somebody always comes up to my desk to ask a question. Whoever it is, he makes it a point to identify himself by name. It's a different boy every day but the name is always Robert Reynolds. I get test papers from Robert Reynolds. Yesterday there was a new attendance card in my bunch, very authentic looking, full of IBM holes. It was Robert Reynolds' card. So I called out his name when I took the attendance. Naturally somebody answered. Everybody else said here. But the Robert Reynolds person, said present. You could sense the laughter being contained, the greatness of their mission, how they had banded together to perpetrate this thing at my expense, the teacher, the socalled font of wisdom. For the moment I'm playing dumb. I'm letting them get away with it. They think I don't know what's going on. But there are ploys and there are counterploys. Getting back for a second. Your lady friend. Why is she so fat?'

'The responsibilities of beauty,' I said. 'She thinks they'd be too much for her. They'd cause her to change. I think I tend to agree.'

'My wifetobe is a white Protestant fencepost. A very onedimensional bodyshape. She's rough and tough, a classic Midwest bitch. When we argue she squeezes the flesh on the back of my hand. She really twists it hard, pinching it simultaneously. Her face becomes very Protestant if you know what I mean. A Zurich theologian lives inside her.'

'I don't understand why you'd want to marry somebody like that. If somebody like that twisted my flesh, to be perfectly frank with you I think I'd hit her. I'd hate to have my flesh pinched and squeezed on any kind of recurring basis.'

'I've never punched or slapped a woman,' he said. 'I like to bodycheck them instead, like a hockey player. I