Giles Goat Boy (61 page)

“I got one somewheres,” Greene said, slapping his pockets. There was a fishing for cards among the spectators; the crouching athletes held theirs between their teeth. I of course had none, and for the first time that morning began to be daunted by the prospect of Trial-by-Turnstile. How on campus had Bray managed such a fraud—upon WESCAC itself!

“Got the pre-game jitters?” Greene asked cheerfully. “Use my slogan, if you want; it ain’t copyrighted.”

Now drums rolled, and Maurice Stoker, with exaggerated gestures of menace, took up a position before the Turnstile, facing the athletes. The sequined beauty on his motorcycle, evidently the new Miss University, was escorted to a dais near the Left Gate. Stoker’s appearance this time
was met with good-humored hisses and boos, as he represented the Dean o’ Flunks now in his aspect of Opponent rather than Tempter.

“He’s in pretty good shape for a fellow his age,” Greene said. “But his reflexes won’t be too quick.” He himself now stripped off jacket, shirt, and undershirt—in order, he explained, both to run and climb the more freely and to offer Stoker as little as possible to grab hold of. For the latter reason the athletes also oiled their skin.

“Best
we
can do’s work up a good sweat,” he said, and asking me to hold his ID-card, began doing push-ups on the pavement. Me he advised to do the same, but since I thought it inappropriate to remove my wrapper, I saw little point in perspiration. I did however accept from him a “pep pill,” as he called it, to counter the effect of two restless nights; had I known the black capsules came from the Powerhouse, I’d perhaps have declined. Just as I swallowed, the drums ceased with a crash; Stoker spread his arms and danced threateningly; the whistle blew; and the first athlete dashed with a bleat from the starting line. As he neared the “Dean o’ Flunks” he feinted left, then dashed around him to the right; just as Greene had anticipated, Stoker was unable to recover his balance quickly enough to catch him. The crowd applauded, and the athlete nimbly sprang up into the teeth of the Turnstile. In former terms he would then have merely strained with every muscle to turn it—in vain, of course—until the “Dean o’ Flunks” pulled him down, whereupon he’d be suitably laureled, kissed by Miss University, and admitted. Today, however, for the first time, the objective was to climb as high as possible up the stationary gate, like a great comb stood on end, through which the spindled teeth of the Turnstile proper passed. The apparatus was some seven meters tall: when the climber had half scaled it, unpursued, it clicked and turned, and he was caught like a twig in a hayrake. The spectators exclaimed—as did I, thinking all was up with him—but then applauded his effort when it became clear that he was unhurt. From a metal arm above him swung down the lensed device which Max had guessed to be a scanner; the pinned athlete turned his teeth to it, still clenching his ID-card, and at once he was released. Thereupon Bray’s voice proclaimed from the loudspeakers what traditionally it had been the role of some Founder’s-Hall dignitary to say:

“Get thee hence, Dean o’ Flunks! Let this man be matriculated!”

Stoker stamped the ground in mock chagrin, the Left Gate rang open, the whistle blew again, and as the first athlete, waving to the crowd, was rewarded by the sequined girl and ushered inside by a gowned official, the second charged down the aisle to a similar fate, making what he took
to be goatlike noises. I ticked my batteries nervously together and shifted the shophar-sling to my other shoulder, wondering how I’d be able to climb with a walking-stick in hand. Impossibly, my watch read only six; yet the sun’s edge now was plainly visible behind us and the whole gate fired with light. A third athlete set out. On a sudden dread suspicion I put the watch to my ear—it was silent. I shook it, horrified, and tried the stem: it turned freely. I had neglected to rewind it at the Observatory!

“What time is it?” I cried to Peter Greene. But the third runner had been named Foltz and the next was to be Harvey, so my companion had knelt at the mark to take his turn.

“Later’n you think, I reckon!” he called back, and whinnied away, his irregular costume provoking mirth among the onlookers.

“It’s me’ll catch heck for this,” Murphy complained.

I shouted, “Wait!” and set out after, having noted earlier that
George
—and for that matter,
Goat-Boy—
ought to start before
Greene
. Now there was merriment indeed in the grandstands; my wrapper flapped, the shophar pitched, my watch flew on its lanyard, and as I gimped the lenses clattered on my stick. Murphy blew his whistle again and again at us, mistaking which signal the rest of the athletes sprang forth and pounded behind me. Stoker had poised himself to intercept Greene, but seeing me he changed his mind and crouched to snatch with particular relish.

“Not you, Goat-Boy!”

But as once before in George’s Gorge, my stout stick served me.
“I’m okay,”
I said to myself, and with an angry ranuncular trumpet jabbed it at him. He sidestepped grinning and caught the stick’s end, but the dodge fetched him squarely in the way of the runner behind me. The pair went sprawling; the crowd roared to its feet and pressed into the aisle, blocking other contestants. I sprinted the last few meters to the Turnstile, in whose lower teeth Greene was already caught.

“I’m okay!” he laughed. “It don’t matter anyhow. Misplaced my durn card!”

I saw it lying at his feet and snatched it up for him as the scanner descended. Just as I pressed it into his hand the gadget buzzed, and the great stile turned a few degrees to release him. The crowd and shrill officials pressed in; there was no time to scale the standing teeth; as Greene stepped out I slipped behind into the angle he’d been trapped in. A guard snatched at me, caught hold of the bouncing shophar; I ducked out of its sling and left it in his hands. The Turnstile turned back to catch me just as I reached its axis. I pressed there into the vertex, where a little space was between the shaft and the standing teeth. No one could
reach me, but I thought I might be crushed in the machinery, and desperately told myself what the heck anyhow, it didn’t nothing matter, so to speak. If I came through and attained that grander Gate, well and good for studentdom! If I passed away then and there, I would be saved one later pain, and the loss was studentdom’s, not mine; let them attend their Harold Bray, and all of them fail! I was in short okay.

What happened in fact was that the bald eye of the scanner scanned in vain, the stile moved on, and I was squeezed past the points of the standing teeth, which I cleared so narrowly that one ran into the armhole of my wrapper, another under my amulet-of-Freddie. I was inside then, but caught fast, and twisting to unhook myself managed only to catch my collar on a third tooth. No one could touch me: some laughed, others clapped hands, Peter Greene’s voice behind me cried, “By George, He done it, fair and square!” and officials whom I couldn’t turn to see fussed about, berating Murphy. Again the scanner dipped to face me; I smiled politely, but had no card to show. The Turnstile clicked and ground on, either to trap the next athlete or to deal with me. Girls squealed; the next row of teeth came through and pressed so hard against my back, I thought I must be sliced like Eblis Eierkopf’s hard-boiled eggs. But that foreseam I had started (wrestling with Croaker in George’s Gorge) now gave way with a rip from neck to hem, my knit-wool liner with it; the stile jerked on, the thong of my amulet parted, and for the second time those hides as dear to me as my own were sacrificed. Clad now in mine alone I was propelled onto Great Mall and into the arms of two sooty patrolmen who rushed up.

“Get thee hence, Dean o’ Flunks!”
the voice bid from the loudspeakers.
“Let this man be matriculated!”

Not impossibly he referred to Harvey or some other athlete caught outside as I was caught in; I didn’t look back, but seized the chance to demand imperiously of the Gatekeepers (so labeled by their armbands), “Take me to the Chancellor!”

At once they fell to disputing whether I should be fetched off to Main Detention as a gate-crasher or ushered into the Assembly Room as a matriculated student. It was agreed I could not be permitted to stand there indecently exposed, but the crowd beyond the gate grew so uproarious, especially when I turned to retrieve my watch (whose neck-chain too had caught on the Turnstile and been snapped), that the Gatekeepers abandoned self-control and scuffled with each other. I saw fit to wave through Main Gate to the crowd as I undid my watch-chain, and they responded enthusiastically, whistling and sailing laurel-wreaths
over the gate. Miss University stood openmouthed; when I blew her a kiss, she hid her eyes. My wrapper and amulet I regretfully abandoned as too enmeshed to salvage—indeed, they had so jammed the Turnstile that Trials were ended and both side-gates flung open for general admission, either automatically by WESCAC or upon executive order. Too soon off the goat-farm to be abashed by nakedness, I crowned myself with a wreath of laurel, took my watch and stick in hand (along with the two small batteries, which only now I noticed I still clutched), bowed first to the crowd and then to the grappling Gatekeepers in the dust, and followed a guide-rail rightwards to the nearest door of the Gatehouse. To show my composure as another pair of Stoker’s guards approached, I even took a moment to glance at the sun, now fully risen and already eclipse-bitten at its edge. Then I leaned on my stick and once again demanded, before they could speak: “Take me to the Chancellor!”

One growled, “Sure we will.”

“No police brutality, Jake,” the other cautioned, and said to me more pleasantly as each took an elbow: “We’ll
all
see the Chancellor soon, bud. First we got to get some nice clothes on, don’t we?”

“I’m okay,” I declared. Following Max’s advice I reminded them that I had done the unexampled in passing the Trial-by-Turnstile and was therefore a fully matriculated Candidate—not for any paltry Certification of Proficiency but for bonafide Graduation—who ought to be ushered at once into the Chancellor’s presence.

“Sure you are,” the first guard said. “Wouldn’t surprise me if you was the Grand Tutor Himself. Come along nice, there won’t be no brutality.”

“Fact is,” said the other, more cordially, “everybody comes through the Gate has got to be okayed by the Health Office before he registers. Ain’t that so, Jake?”

Jake agreed it was, adding that without Dr. Sear’s stamp on the Matric Card (as the ID-card was called after formal admission) not even a Harold Bray could schedule course-work in the College. At mention of that former name I consented to go with them—which was just as well, since in any case they propelled me strongly up the Gatehouse steps into a large room striped with desks and tables. Men and women working over card-files stood to nudge one another and stare as we came in.

“That’ll be okay,” I was saying. “I know Dr. Sear.”

Jake nodded gravely. “Figured you might, son.” To the onlookers he cried, “Okay, back to work, folks; this ain’t any vaudyville show.” And the other guard cleared our way past long tables over which hung signs—L
IBERAL
A
RTS
; E
NGINEERING
; B
URSAR:
H
AVE
R
ECEIPTS
R
EADY
—to a side-room marked X R
AYS
. Hustled in without ceremony, I saw Dr. Sear himself turn angrily from a large machine on whose glass face a singular spectacle glowed: the lower torso of a transparent woman, large as life, her bones and organs darkly visible inside her. What’s more, she was alive: before our eyes her phalanges toyed with something not far from her pubic symphysis, and her voice continued a rhythmic murmur for some seconds after our entry, as if she had been singing to herself.

“Get out of here!” Dr. Sear cried, hurrying towards us. “I’m examining a patient, for Founder’s sake!”

The guards apologized but pled the unusual nature of the situation-no more able than I to turn their eyes from the startling screen. The hand and voice there quit now; the pelvis turned away, and from a curtained stall behind the machine emerged a woman—middle-aged, untransparent—tying a white-cotton gown about her waist.

“Crashed through the Turnstile,” the guard not named Jake was explaining. “Some kind of nut. You better handle him …”

“Just wait outside!” Dr. Sear said crossly. He frowned at my nakedness as he herded them doorwards, and was too discomposed to return my greeting or even acknowledge yet that he knew me. But the woman’s eyes unsquinted now, and crowing, “It’s the Goat-Boy, Kennard!” she lurched in my direction. I recognized then the puff-eyed brittle face of Hedwig Sear, who had so relished mating me with Anastasia in the Living Room.

“Georgie
darling!
” But she stumbled into a chair-arm and thence into its seat, her legs immodestly sprawled; something seemed wrong with her balance. We looked on astonished.

“My wife’s having an attack, as you see,” Dr. Sear said impatiently. “My nurse isn’t here today, and she was preparing herself for treatment. For pity’s sake leave this chap here and wait outside!”

The guards apologized and withdrew, promising to stand by in case their help should be required. The one’s expression was resolutely sober, but Jake grinned and winked as he closed the door.

“Beasts,” Dr. Sear muttered. Yet his composure had quite returned. “What on campus are you up to, George? Get him a gown, Hed.” Before I could explain my naked presence he pressed upon me an explanation himself, of the extraordinary scene I’d interrupted. A portable X-ray unit was set up in the Gatehouse at registration-time, he declared,
to provide free tuberculosis examinations for any who wished them. Ordinarily Anastasia assisted him, but since her services had been commandeered for the morning by Harold Bray Himself, at the Grateway Exit, Hedwig had volunteered to take her place.

As he spoke, Mrs. Sear toyed with herself shamelessly, humming the while.

“Unhappily, my wife is subject to spells of uncontrolled behavior,” he went on to say. “She came here this morning in the condition you see, and I was attempting to calm her by radiation-shock when you interrupted. I trust your discretion.”