Giles Goat Boy (62 page)

I assured him he might depend on me not to tell tales out of school. Dr. Sear shook his head. “Treatment didn’t work, I’m afraid.”

“Balls!” called Hedwig. Not sufficiently conversant with modern literature to have mastered obscene slang, I nonetheless guessed by her tone that she meant the term otherwise than literally; thus I judged it witty of me to pretend to mistake her, and said: “I lost Freddie’s in the Turnstile, ma’am.”

Whether or not she appreciated the humor, she scrambled at me on all fours like a crippled doe.

“No, now, Hed!” her husband chided. I retreated a step, but Dr. Sear restrained me with a look of whimsical despair.

“Indulge her for a second, would you, old boy? There’s a good chap.”

I stood nonplussed while the woman knelt before me.

“I wish she’d be less indiscreet,” her husband sighed. “But if you don’t humor the poor thing’s spells she carries on dreadfully.” He patted his wife’s cropped head with one hand and caressed me frankly with the other. Yet something in the lady’s manner left me limp; though I had no particular wish to be unaccommodating, their joint endeavor could not rouse me. After a moment Mrs. Sear remarked, “He needs Stacey,” and then gave over the business with a shrug, stood up, straightened her hair, and seemed entirely normal once again. I apologized.

“Quite all right, darling,” she said. “Kennard’s made me such a wreck I can’t even get Croaker excited. I’ll get you a gown.”

“Really, my dear,” her husband protested; but he seemed amused by her remark. “You’ll have George thinking we’re perverted.”

“Hah,” said Hedwig. From the curtained booth behind the fluoroscope she fetched a white hospital gown like her own for me to wear until “something more suitable could be arranged.”

“You
must
come to dinner,” she chattered on; the two of them fussed
and patted my gown into place. “I’ll be a shepherdess and you’ll be a buck, and Kennard can be the jealous shepherd.”

“Excuse me?” I could not imagine shepherds in connection with goats; the notion was almost obscene.

“We could have Stacey in, too, and do it
à quatre!
”

Dr. Sear tut-tutted this proposal as extravagant and gently asserted to his wife that it was just such overeagerness on her part that chilled her male companions.

“But look here, George,” he added, “we have no secrets from you, and you’re obviously a man-of-the-campus, so to speak. It
would
be a lark for Hed and me both if you’d care to stay with us till this business about Max is resolved. You see we’re agreeable people; you could live as you please.”

I thanked him for his invitation, the hospitality of which was clear, however obscure the promised entertainment. But his mention of Max put me sharply in mind of more pressing business. I requested their address, promising to call on them in any case that same evening or the next to speak of Max’s arrest and the GILES program. And I admitted that in fact I had made no arrangement yet for eating and sleeping, nor had any clear idea how such arrangements were made in human studentdom.

“But you must excuse me now,” I concluded. “I have to see Chancellor Rexford yet about my Candidacy and then go through Scrapegoat Grate. And I want to have a talk with Anastasia, too, if I can find her.”

They expressed their surprise that Max had made no dormitory reservation for me or even provided me with funds, and so I explained very briefly the unusual circumstances of my departure from the goat-farm, adding Max’s observation that Grand Tutors and the like never as a rule packed even a sandwich in advance, though their hero-work might want nine years to complete. I had had, for example, no ID-card, yet I’d got through the Turnstile all the same, and was confident I’d find a way through Scrapegoat Grate.

“Think not of next period …”
Dr. Sear marveled. “I was telling Bray last night at Stoker’s what an extraordinary chap you are, and what a really miraculous string of coincidences your life has been. Look here—” He glanced at his watch. “You’ve a good half-hour yet till Rexford’s address; they’ve got all the regular admissions to process, and the Assembly-Before-the-Grate is just across the way from here … Have you an advisor?”

When I told him I had not, since Max’s false arrest, he volunteered to fill the role himself, declaring that although he could not share my antagonism
for Harold Bray, he respected the grounds of my own claim to Grand-Tutorhood, admired me personally, and would be pleased to assist me through the tedious ordeal of registration.

Mrs. Sear, who was lighting a cigarette, remarked, “He wants to blow you, too.”

“Really, Hed.”

I begged their pardon.

“We all want to, dear,” she said, shrugging at one or the other of us. “Novelty’s our cup of tea. Isn’t it, Kennard?”

Dr. Sear smiled. “You’ll give George the wrong impression.”

The woman pinched my cheek. “Georgie’s no dunce. He knows what was going on when he came in.” Her husband, she declared, had long since lost his taste for ordinary coupling, whether conjugal or extra-curricular, and even for such common perversions as sodomy and flagellation. Watching others still amused him, but only when the spectacle was out of the ordinary, as in Stoker’s Living Room; she herself, since she’d lost both novelty and youth, could interest him only by masturbating before the fluoroscope.

“That’s very curious,” I said. “Do you enjoy it, too?”

Dr. Sear had seemed bored by her recital, but here he laughed aloud. “There you are, Hed! She claims I’ve corrupted her, George, but she’s as tired as I am of the usual tricks. You put your finger right on it.”

“I wish he would,” said Hedwig. She was bored with sophistication, she maintained, and yearned to be climbed in the exordinary way by a simple brute like Croaker; but catering to her husband’s pleasures had so defeminized her that her effect on men was anaphrodisiac, as I had seen.

“Hedwig exaggerates,” her husband said patiently. “It’s true we’ve done everything in the book, but nobody forced her. She likes women and won’t admit it.”

I could have wished to hear more on this remarkable head; also perhaps to question Croaker’s alleged simplicity, which his art-work on my stick belied, and compare Dr. Sear’s optical pleasures with those of Eblis Eierkopf, to learn how prevalent such tastes were among well-educated humans. But it seemed more important to get back to my advising, and when I reverted to that matter, Mrs. Sear changed her tone completely. I could not do better, she declared seriously, than to have Kennard Sear for my advisor, as he was the most knowledgeable man on campus; in fact, he knew all the Answers, despite his perversions.

“Not
despite
, my dear:
because of
. George understands the tragic view.”

They kissed most cordially. The mixture of affections in the Sears’
marriage relation I found quite as curious as their amatory whimsies, since life in the goat-barn had left me open-minded in that latter regard. But their goodwill towards me was evident. Gratefully I put myself into their charge, stipulating only that in view of the urgent work at hand we forgo any further embraces—
à deux, trois
, or
quatre
, on-screen or off—for the present.

“I quite agree,” the doctor said. The important thing, in his opinion, was for me to by-pass the ordinary machinery of registration and deal only with the highest authorities; otherwise—since Bray’s advent had put the campus into such confusion, and my status in the College was irregular—I might be dismissed to the goat-barn by any minor official on some such technicality as my lack of a surname. “You’ve got through the Turnstile somehow; we can use that as grounds for admitting you as a Special Student, if Tower Hall authorizes it. I’ll give Rexford’s wife a call: she’s a patient of mine. Meanwhile I’ll look you over and write you a Clean Bill of Health; maybe that’ll do instead of an ID-card to get you through registration.”

“Why don’t I go see Bray in the Grateway Exit?” Mrs. Sear asked him. “He might intercede for George with Rexford. He could even register him himself, I’ll bet.”

“You want to see Stacey again,” Dr. Sear teased. But they obviously enjoyed planning my strategy together.

“And you can hardly wait to see George’s insides,” she retorted. Then they both laughed and agreed that the idea was a good one. To my objection that Bray was a false Tutor from whom I wanted no assistance even if he wished to provide it (which struck me as unlikely), Dr. Sear answered, “False or not, he’s in a strong position and he’s awfully acute, and it’s part of his stance to affirm people who deny him. Last night at Stoker’s I told him that I’d never pass the Finals because I know too much to answer simple questions, and the rascal Certified me with a line from the Founder’s Scroll:
Be ye nothing ignorant, saith the Founder
. Then I told him very frankly that I had no morals at all in sexual matters, and he quoted Enos Enoch:
Who knoweth not Truth’s backside, how shall he pass?
Awfully clever chap!”

As he spoke, Mrs. Sear left by a back door on her errand. “Poor thing,” he said after her, “she really is a simple Home-Ec. type at heart, and I suppose she’s on her way to the Asylum from living with me. But flunk it all, George, it’s a big University! How can we understand anything without trying everything? When Harold Bray compared me last night to
Gynander, he understood me better than Hed does after fifteen years of marriage.”

To turn the subject from my rival I asked, “Do you mean the blind man in the play?” And he answered, “Very clever, George,” with a kind of dry sigh, though I’d meant no irony. He proceeded then to examine and to X ray me, and his interest in the childhood injury to my legs gave me occasion to inquire about the GILES-files, whose bearing on the question of Anastasia’s paternity I briefly described.

“Why, that’s interesting!” he exclaimed. Indeed (as I’d rather hoped) the little mystery so intrigued him that he gave over his heavy-breathed inspection of my sigmoid colon. “I didn’t dream they were still quarreling over that old business! Even Stacey’s never mentioned it.”

The fact was, he declared, he could say confidently that neither Max nor Eblis Eierkopf was lying; he would have been glad to verify their innocence from the GILES-files if only it had occurred to anyone to ask, or to him that the dispute had never been settled.

“All of us who worked under Spielman had half a dozen specialties, you know—he inspired us that way—and I’d already moved on from genetics to psychiatry and anatomy before the Cum Laude scandal broke. I never did have any use for that project; put it out of mind as soon as we’d programmed the GILES, and haven’t really thought of it since. GILES indeed!”

His objections to the Cum Laude Project had been theoretical and practical, rather than moral; he’d thought Eierkopf’s sampling inherently biased by the fact that androgynous Grand Tutors like Gynander were by definition sterile, and anyhow he doubted WESCAC’s ability to manufacture and employ a GILES even when they’d supplied it with the seminal factors called for in the program. He confessed however to having been titillated by the prospect, and had gone so far as to volunteer Hedwig as receiver of the GILES, on condition he be allowed to watch—an offer vetoed by WESCAC.

“In any case I remember the results with Max and Eblis when we collected all the samples, because it seemed to me they proved my point: two utter geniuses, whatever else you might think of them, but Spielman was sterile from his accident, and Eierkopf was so impotent he couldn’t even give me a specimen. So if there really was a GILES, as Eblis claims, and if Virginia Hector really received it, as you say
she
claims, then it didn’t work. Much as I love dear Stacey, she’s no Grand Tutor. I’ll put her straight about Max.”

I had it in mind then to ask whether he knew anything of my own discovery
in the tapelift. But our conversation was interrupted by the guards outside the door, who called in to ask whether all was well, and should they fetch me to Main Detention or the Infirmary.

Dr. Sear frowned at the door-latch. “Just a moment, please.” As we wondered what to do, his wife slipped quietly in from the rear exit.

“Should I go out that way?” I whispered.

Dr. Sear shook his head. “Is Bray with us?” he asked Mrs. Sear. “Don’t pound sol” he called to the patrolmen.

Mrs. Sear’s expression was doubtful. “Bray says he won’t tolerate pretenders …”

“I won’t either!” I declared.

“Stacey’s doing all she can,” Mrs. Sear went on. “But Bray says it’s Scrapegoat Grate and WESCAC’s Belly or out.”

“Oh dear,” her husband sighed. But I insisted that those terms, while I did not acknowledge Bray’s authority to make them, were no more than my own intention, and that in fact I meant to demand that Mr. Bray accompany
me
into the Belly, for I had no faith whatever in his claim to have been there. We should see then who got EATen and who did not.

Dr. Sear shook his head, but had no time to argue.

“Let’s have him now, Doc,” the guards called, more sternly. “We got assembly-duty.”

Then the doctor’s face brightened, and he undid the latch. “Certainly, gentlemen.” The guards came in, looked first at the fluoroscope screen, then at Mrs. Sear, and only finally at me.

“Mr. George forgives your misunderstanding,” Dr. Sear said smoothly, “but it really would be pleasanter all around if you apologized.” I was, he declared, no Gate-crasher at all, but the man of the hour, the first in modern history who legitimately had passed the Trial-by-Turnstile!

“Legitimately?” Jake asked.

“Of course legitimately.” It was an unhappy symptom of studentdom’s malaise, he said, that Heroes were arrested for disturbing the peace; however, he believed I harbored no grudge, and would overlook the insult if they’d take me at once to the Assembly-Before-the-Grate. I listened astonished, but had presence enough of mind to keep a neutral expression.

“He’s already sent word to Maurice Stoker that you’re not to be punished,” Mrs. Sear put in. “If I’d had
my
way you’d be locked up yourselves, the way you barged in here.”

The pair had been looking skeptical, though clearly impressed. But
when I assured Mrs. Sear that they’d only been being overzealous in performance of their duties, Jake scowled and nodded, and the other removed his cap.