Giles Goat Boy (56 page)

“You’re the famous Goat-Boy,
nein?
” He tapped a long metal cylinder beside him, thrust into a slit in the wall. “I saw you through the night-glass while I was adjusting the main telescopes. There’s an annular solar eclipse tomorrow. I’m Eblis Eierkopf.” He smiled at my alarm and fluttered a hand. “Don’t believe all Herr Spielman tells you.” Here he managed an actual chuckle. “That dumbhead, shooting Herman Hermann! He thinks with his ventricles!” He had, he explained, heard the news bulletins about Max’s arrest and Harold Bray’s appearance in the Amphitheater, as earlier he’d heard reports from the Powerhouse of Croaker’s having been subdued by the Ag-Hill Goat-Boy,
et cetera
. I was still too disconcerted by his identity and appearance to make a proper reply. This was the man responsible for the Cum Laude Project, and Miss Virginia R. Hector’s undoing? This was Max’s arch-enemy? Anastasia’s father?

“Sit down,” he invited. There was another stool near the eyepiece of a huge telescope aimed through a vertical opening in the dome. “Croaker brings beer as soon as my pablum’s ready.”

This my former ally did, clearly now emancipated from my direction; not only beer he brought me—excellent stuff, in a pewter-topped stein—but boiled chicken-eggs, which he sliced with a clever wire gadget.

“Not those!” Dr. Eierkopf wailed when he caught sight of him. “They’re for research!”

But it was too late, the eggs were sliced; whatever scientific work they’d been meant for would have to be begun afresh. Croaker served them round and spoon-fed Dr. Eierkopf his gruel—insisting, with grunts and throaty babble, that he eat every bit of it.

“So,” Dr. Eierkopf sighed again. “When he ran off I could think undistracted, just as your friend Stoker promised, but I starved to death. Now I eat and don’t get my work done, and he spoils my research. Drink up! Don’t be afraid of me.”

“I’m not afraid,” I said. “I—believe I should despise you, sir.”

This news he merely nodded at. “Of course you should, after all Spielman told you! The old man is plenty mixed up.”

Sternly I declared that my keeper and advisor was the passèdest man on campus as far as I was concerned—

“As far as you
know
, you mean.”

As far as I knew, then; that he most certainly had been cashiered unjustly, thanks in part to the bad offices of Eblis Eierkopf; that nothing could be more false than the present charge against him, inasmuch as all his life he’d affirmed the principle of non-violence—whereas his rival had been, if not actively a Bonifacist himself, at least a leading enemy scientist during Campus Riot II, who had contemplated without protest the combustion of numberless Moishian civilians in the furnaces of Siegfrieder College, and after the Riot had agreed without qualm to do EAT-research for New Tammany. And so forth. My harangue lasted some while, fueled by an actual twinkle in Dr. Eierkopf’s eyes. Croaker meanwhile was peering through the smaller telescope, the one identified as a “night-glass”; he moved it slightly, gave a croak, and offered the eyepiece to his master, who begged me to excuse him for a moment.

“
Ja
, that’s nice,” he remarked a second later, and I was not too indignant to be astonished at Croaker’s fondling the man’s tiny organs while he peered. “Want to look?” he invited me. “Young ladies’ dormitory across the way. But you’re too agitated. No matter.” He pushed Croaker’s hand away. “
Ach
, that’s enough. He
is
droll, don’t you think?” he asked me. “Flunking nuisance, all the same. Now, Goat-Boy, let’s see where to start on these notions of yours and Spielman’s. I really am obliged to you for bringing Croaker home.” He laughed aloud, as if struck by an extraordinarily amusing thought. “Do you know, your distinguished keeper went so far once as to accuse me of making his girlfriend pregnant. Imagine!”

“You deny it?”

He opened his robe with a kind of giggle, and Croaker tickled him at once. “Do I need to? Stop that, Croaker! So.” More seriously he said to me, “Let’s start there. You see how I’m made; I had early a kind of infantile paralysis; it left my legs and the rest as you observe. And young Mrs. Stoker does not call me her father.”

I acknowledged that she did not.

“Then one of two things is true,” Dr. Eierkopf reasoned lightly: “Max Spielman is Anastasia’s father—”

“No!” I repeated indignantly what Max had told me about his accidental exposure to EAT-radiation, which had destroyed his fertility. Dr. Eierkopf smiled and nodded.

“Is that so? Very amusing! Well then, if Spielman isn’t lying—by the way, Dr. Kennard Sear could verify that …”

“Dr. Sear!”

Expressing his agreeable surprise that I knew the man he spoke of, Dr. Eierkopf affirmed that certain classified files under Dr. Sear’s jurisdiction could attest the fertility and potency of any male in New Tammany College who had been of spermatogenic age twenty-odd years ago. At that time, as part of the culminating phase of the Cum Laude Project, semen-samples had been taken from all New Tammany males between puberty and senility. These had then been analyzed, classified, and culled under Dr. Sear’s supervision to the standards evolved by WESCAC for the Grand-tutorial Ideal: Laboratory Eugenical Specimen, and although then-Chancellor Reginald Hector had curtailed the whole project shortly afterwards, the donor-data files from “Operation Sheepskin” were still intact and under seal somewhere in the Infirmary’s research laboratories—as well, of course, as in WESCAC’s memory-banks.

“So maybe Max is lying and maybe not,” he went on.

“And maybe you are,” I interrupted—not unimpressed, however, by the information.

Dr. Eierkopf made a high sound. “Very good! That’s very good. Indeed, I might be lying. But suppose everybody’s telling the truth; so your keeper is potent but sterile, and I’m fertile but impotent. Now what’s left? Maybe Virginia Hector’s telling the truth, how WESCAC was the father? How one night she goes into the Cum Laude Room to meet a boyfriend, and WESCAC grabs hold and fertilizes her with the GILES, yes?”

I was up off my stool. “Is that true? Is that why the project was stopped?”

Dr. Eierkopf raised the skin where eyebrows usually are. “So Miss Hector said. And
ja
, that’s what made her poppa so angry he stopped the Cum Laude Project. A very great pity, when we were so close to success. A greater pity than any of those dumbsticks in Tower Hall can understand.”

I demanded to know whether Miss Hector had been telling the truth. Dr. Eierkopf’s tone suggested that he knew more than he cared to tell at the moment—and he openly acknowledged that many details of the Cum Laude Project were still secret, for various reasons—but certain facts, he maintained, were beyond doubt and could be spoken of: the GILES, he would stake his life on it,
had
been successfully developed, at least in prototypical form, and had been so to speak in WESCAC’s hands, awaiting
the selection of a volunteer “mother” and permission from Tower Hall and the Enochist lobbies to proceed with an experimental insemination. Second, WESCAC had, in Operation Ramshorn and the much-maligned
Überkatzen
experiment, demonstrated its capacity to take initiative and implement its resolves; for just that reason the Cum Laude Room had been designated temporarily off-limits to female employees, to prevent untimely accidents. Third, the precious original GILES had undeniably disappeared on the night in question, and was never found. Finally, a secret obstetrical report, which Eierkopf had seen just prior to his demotion, affirmed that Miss Virginia R. Hector quite definitely had been impregnated.

“So she’s telling the truth!” I cried. So wondrous a notion then occurred to me that I stood speechless: the entire mystery of myself seemed in an instant brought to light, in a way that confirmed my hopes beyond my dreams! Enormous moment—which Dr. Eierkopf, alas, soon dashed to campus.

“Impossible,” he said. “I don’t say she’s lying, but her story can’t be correct.” The logic of the case, he insisted, was this: WESCAC had been programmed to inseminate solely with the GILES; but the GILES would by definition produce a male child, the future Grand Tutor. Inasmuch as Miss Hector’s baby had been female—the present Mrs. Maurice Stoker, among whose unquestionable attributes Grand-Tutorhood was surely not included—one of two things must be true: either WESCAC did in fact impregnate Virginia Hector, but
ad libitum
, on a self-programmed “malinoctial” impulse, and not with the GILES but with an ordinary semen-specimen acquired in some unknown wise; or else it was not WESCAC but some human male who clipped her in the Cum Laude Room. Assuming the latter, and further that both Max and he were speaking truthfully, then Miss Hector either had another lover or fell afoul of some unidentified rapist.

“For me,” he concluded, “I happen to believe that she did have the great privilege of being chosen by WESCAC, just as she says. But then the computer must have decided not to honor her with the GILES, and either fertilized her with a different specimen or merely … 
enjoyed
her, you know, without fertilizing her at all. For practice,
ja?
Or just for the malinoctial sport. And then later she happened to conceive by some ordinary lover.” He appeared to wink. “She was quite a fetching person in those days … I myself used to wish sometimes that I were fashioned like other men, for her sake … But bah! I never was one-tenth the fool that Spielman was, with his flunking Compassion, and his Honor, and his
Dignity of Studentdom! Scratch a liberal Moishian, Goat-Boy; you’ll find a sentimentalist, every time.”

Croaker made to refill my stein, leaving his vigil at the night-glass for the purpose. At first I declined, declaring to Dr. Eierkopf my resolve to go to Main Detention and do what I could towards Max’s release. But he assured me that nothing could be done that night in any case—even telephoned a Main-Detention office on my behalf to confirm the fact—and that despite Maurice Stoker’s unsavory reputation, the New Tammany judicial system was, in the main, fair.

“If Max didn’t kill Hermann, they’re not likely to convict him,” he insisted. “If he did—as I suspect—there’ll be a great deal of sentiment in his favor anyhow.”

I asked him what, if not general malevolence, led him to believe that Max was guilty.

“You are a witty fellow,” he replied, and excused himself at Croaker’s summons to watch a co-ed undress in her darkened room a quarter-mile away. “But you are confusing malevolence with malificence.” He spoke from the side of his mouth. “I like watching people in the night-glass; that may be naughty-minded, but it doesn’t hurt anybody.” As for his affiliation with the Bonifacist riot-effort and his later work on EAT-weaponry and the Cum Laude Project, it was not the fault either of himself or of science that men used the fruits of his research for flunkèd purposes; he was but a toiler in the field, an explorer of nature’s possibilities; his sole allegiance was to his work; he had no interest in intercollege rivalries—petty, to his mind, even if they led to the destruction of the University. No, he declared, the evil on campus was done not by disengaged intelligences like his, which amused themselves between prodigious intellectual feats by spying on naked sophomore girls with an infra-red telescope; it was done by principled people like Max Spielman, who prided themselves on having hearts as well as brains; who committed themselves with a passion to high-minded middlebrow causes; in short, who claimed or aspired to membership in the human fraternity.

“Especially these self-sacrificial ones!” he warned. “Watch out for that sort! Your Moishian liberal with his Student Rights and his Value of Suffering—he’ll take you down with him, and tell you it’s for your own good. Imagine, they used to say to me back in Siegfrieder I should jump into the fire along with them, as a protest!”

What bearing this had on the question of Max’s guilt or innocence I never quite determined, unless it was that in Eierkopf’s view a man capable of any emotion at all was capable of any other, and not to be trusted.
I was intrigued as well as repelled by the hairless cripple—who remarked in passing that he never slept at all in the usual way, but merely “turned his mind off” at odd intervals in the day and night, between mental tasks, and in this manner rested, like a fish or a machine. There were matters I wished to take up with him, out of general curiosity or in hope of immediately practical information: tomorrow’s matriculation procedure, the problem of finding good counsel for Max, Anastasia’s parentage and my own, the nature of Graduation, the character of my apparent rival Harold Bray, the question of entering WESCAC’s Belly and changing its AIM (which for all I knew he might be better informed about than Max, having dealt more recently with the computer), and sundry others. Since in any case I had nowhere to go and nothing to do until four minutes after six in the morning, and sleep was impossible under the troublous circumstances, I lingered on in the Observatory and at length accepted Dr. Eierkopf’s invitation to talk through the night—fortified and stimulated by sips of the black liquor distilled under Founder’s Hill, of which Croaker located a flask. Chased by the cold pale beer it was a bracing drink; fatigue was put from me, and I found myself obliged to acknowledge that while abhorrent in general and repulsive in many particulars, my host was not devoid of attractive qualities—as Maurice Stoker himself had not in my eyes been. He was undeniably generous in his way, ingenious, efficient, and orderly, brilliantly logical and systematic, and his opinions were interesting if not always agreeable. His contempt for Max was milder than at first it appeared, and had to do not with my keeper’s intellectual and scientific accomplishment, which he quite respected, but with his concern for non-scientifical campus problems and his general secular-studentism—all which Eierkopf dismissed irritatedly as “beside the point.” Mildly too he admitted to a few inclinations of his own in the administrative-policy way: he rather thought, for example, that a rotating commission of experts from the various sciences could run the University more harmoniously and efficiently than could the law-school, political-science, and business-administration types who customarily inhabited Tower Hall. He seconded without abash the idea of “preventive riot”: it was EAT or be EATen, he placidly declared (confessing that the acronym nauseated him), and New Tammany would be well advised to EAT the Nikolayans at once, without warning, both to simplify the political situation and to protect herself from destruction at the hands of an enemy who surely would not scruple to attack by stealth. At the matter of the Moishian genocaust he merely shrugged his narrow shoulders: riot was riot; the Siegfrieders had been cut off from their normal fuel supply;
a few good Moishian researchers like Chaim Schultz had gone up in smoke, but not many; the slaughter of whole student bodies was a tradition as old as riot itself—had not Laertides been called “Sacker of Cities”?—and the mere scale and efficiency of the Moishian extermination did not in his view make the Siegfrieders any more flunkèd than the classical Remusians, for instance, considering the proportionate increase in University population since ancient terms, and the improvement of homicidal technology.