Giles Goat Boy (66 page)

“I’ll wait for you out here,” said my forelocked escort. But now my eyes had accommodated to the flickering instrument-panels and Telerama screens of the Grateway antechamber, I saw not only Harold Bray and Anastasia, perched on twin stools at a massive console, but behind them Scrapegoat Grate itself, a thick portcullis let into the chamber wall. Beyond it, squared by that iron weft and strangely dark, Great Mall’s elmed colonnade stretched out of sight.

“I won’t be coming back,” I told him.

He clucked his tongue. “Well. We’ll see.”

I stepped in, and the door closed at once. Like the Powerhouse Control Room, and to some extent Eierkopf’s Observatory, the Grateway antechamber was walled with dials, reels, and switches, that quietly hummed and clicked. There was a subtle fetid odor about, not describable but distinctly unpleasant. My rival’s appearance was not exactly as I recalled it—his skin seemed paler, his mustache smaller, his face less round, his pate more bald—but his eyes, unmistakable, gave back my flashlight-beam as if they too were lit.

“No lights necessary,” he said.

I braced my back against the panel opposite the console and raised
my stick, still holding in my left hand the flashlight and my watch with its broken chain. My plan had been to move straight to the Grate, ignoring Bray utterly if I could and striking him down if he tried to stop me. But it was bitter to see him perched in white-frocked authority with Anastasia reverent beside him. I left the light on.

“Don’t be upset, George,” Anastasia begged. “Dr. Bray’s not a
bit
jealous. He says He’ll program an Assignment for you and let you try the Grate. We saw your Trial-by-Turnstile on Telerama, and you were wonderful!”

It stung me to hear as it were the capital letters in which she spoke of him.
“He says!”
I burst out. “You’re fickle, Anastasia!” And to Bray I cried, “You know very well you aren’t what you say you are! You’re an impostor!”

Anastasia started off her stool. “George …” But Bray restrained her, with a hand long-fingered for one so heavy.

“No matter, my dear,” he said. I loathed the bony sight of his hand on her arm; was moved almost to strike it.

“You’d understand if you’d seen what I’ve seen,” Anastasia protested: “WESCAC didn’t do a thing when He went down in the Belly, and Scrapegoat Grate opens right up for Him! It’s really wonderful, George …”

“Nothing at all,” Bray said. His face never changed expression, nor did his voice, yet I imagined him much flattered by her awe. Her defense was vain: I’d not forgotten the sight of her kneeling in Bray’s presence before he’d done these allegèd wonders, and it enraged me to suppose
he
lusted for her too.

“Don’t you dare let him service you!” I warned her.

“George!”

“You’re too affectionate,” I scolded. “You let
everybody
service you, whether they deserve to or not. Men take advantage of you.”

“Mrs. Stoker is Certified,” Bray said. “The Founder’s Scroll says
Love thy classmate as thyself, or flunkèd be
.”

“Certified!” I scoffed, and declared to Anastasia that whomever else she mated with, she must not let Bray climb her; if she did I would regard as proved what in any case I half suspected: Stoker’s charge that beneath her charity was simple carnal appetite and a contemptible want of faith. How else explain her protestation of belief in me, her receipt of my Memorial Service for G. Herrold in the Living Room, her aspiration to Commencement at my hands—and then her apostasy with the first pretender to come by?

“You don’t understand, George!” But her eyes were tearful in the flashlight. “You make me feel
awful!
” From a large black drawstring purse on the console she took a tissue.

“No need to abuse her,” Bray said. “Perhaps the dear girl was simply being hospitable to both of us. Look here, young man, I don’t ask you to believe in me; call me an impostor all you like! Let’s suppose
you’re
the real Grand Tutor—
a
real one, anyhow …”

His conciliatory tone surprised me; my first suspicion was that he meant to ingratiate himself with me in hopes of protecting his fraud. “I
am
the Grand Tutor,” I said coldly.

“Very well, suppose you are, and I’m an impostor, and my success at the Belly and the Grate is some kind of trick, or a malfunction in WESCAC.”

I asserted that such exactly was my conviction—and was pleased to make it so, for that excellent last possibility had not occurred to me.

“Even so,” he went on, “you don’t claim you’re a Graduate yet, do you? Enos Enoch Himself didn’t claim so much at your age. So, no matter who the Grand Tutor is, you’re indisputably matriculating as a Special Student in New Tammany College, who wants a Graduation Assignment. And I’m undeniably the Keeper of the Grate, by the Chancellor’s appointment. Don’t you agree?”

Reluctantly I did and lowered my stick, still however hostile.

“Then let’s not contend, shall we?”

“All those Certifications of yours are false,” I charged. “Those people aren’t Candidates yet. I’ll bet you even Certified Stoker!”

Bray put his fingers together and once more quoted the Founder’s Scroll: “
Passèd are the Founder’s fools, and flunkèd they who hold His ways make sense
. But I’m not here to Certify you as a regular undergraduate, George; simply to read out your Assignment so that you can pass it or fail it, as may be. Think of it as WESCAC’s Assignment, since you seem not to care for me; that’s what it
is
, actually.”

I hesitated. His reasoning seemed unexceptionable, but I was loath to acknowledge it.

“It’s just like regular Matriculation,” Anastasia said. Her tears were wiped, her voice was soothing again. “Except in your case—because of the Turnstile and no ID-card and all—it’s … 
irregular
.”

“Everything that’s happened since you came to Main Gate has been fed into WESCAC,” Bray said briskly; “all that’s known about your background, plus what Eierkopf’s scanners picked up at the Powerhouse, the Turnstile, and the Assembly just now. All I have to do is ask you
the Candidacy Question so that WESCAC can evaluate your Answer: if it’s right, you pass—through Scrapegoat Grate, presumably. If it’s wrong, you don’t. Please don’t lean against that panel: it’s part of the Assignment Printer.” He pressed a number of buttons on the console and new whirrings began, behind my back and elsewhere. “Do you want to commence now?”

“Well … I guess so. Yes.” As I spoke I moved away from the Assignment Printer and found that my watch-chain had caught somehow on the panel of it. But before I could look to free it I was alarmed by the sound of a buzzer and the sight of several blinking red lights, in whose flash Anastasia urgently shook her head. It dawned on me that Bray’s apparently preliminary question had been the real one, tricked out in disguise, and that WESCAC was recording and rejecting my answer!

“No!” I cried. “Wait!”

More lights and buzzers. I was furious at having fallen twice into so simple a trap. “That doesn’t count! That’s not my answer!”

Bray made a clicking chuckle. But as he shrugged his shoulders (bony, like his hands), ready to dismiss me, Anastasia said meekly to him, “Actually it
didn’t
count, Sir …”

He tutted. “Of course it did. That was the Candidacy Question, and he flunked it.”

Humbly she smiled. “But we didn’t have a
Ready
on my panel, I’m afraid. Do You think his watch-chain might have short-circuited something?”

“Flunk it all!” Bray cursed.

“Give me a second,” I said. “I’ll get it loose.” I bent to see how the chain was fouled, doubly happy for the second chance and the evidence that Anastasia was after all loyal. Alas, the chain-end had got into a slot in the panel and would not come free; above it an orange light glowed. I fumbled to employ one of Eierkopf’s lenses, thinking to magnify the problem, but my hands were too full.

“Here,” Anastasia said. “Take this purse to keep your things in. It’s just an old bag of Mother’s; you can put everything on campus in it.” She slipped off the stool to hold it open near me—was the touch of her breast against my shoulder accidental, or a sign? “That little bottle that The Living Sakhyan gave you is in there.”

I thanked her, dropped in my flashlight and the shophar, and put Eierkopf’s lens to my eye. But I had difficulty focusing it.

“I have a
Ready
-light now, Sir,” Anastasia reported to Bray. “Do You want to repeat the same question, or what?”

“Well,” Bray clicked in my direction—chagrined, I thought: “What’s your Answer?”

But I was not to be tricked that way again. “My answer to your first question or my Answer to the Finals?” I demanded to know. “And what did you mean by
commence
before?” I turned from my fruitless inspection to see how he’d react. Again red lights flashed and buzzers buzzed, as if, though I hadn’t really answered, I’d answered wrong. But what dismayed me more, Anastasia was fondling the scoundrel’s neck! Where
was
her loyalty, that directly my back was turned she’d run a teasing finger around the collar of his tunic? Nor give over even when I looked, and he caught at her to stop!

“Mustn’t, mustn’t,” he said.

“Tickee-tickee,” teased the shameless girl.

I cried, “Flunk you, Anastasia!”

Bray said impatiently, “Look here, Goat-Boy …”

Ah, I was looking there, where yet she tickeed, with Eierkopf’s high-resolution lens still at my eye, and marked how her finger-end ran somehow as beneath the skin half down his neck. But what mattered that small oddness when my heart was stabbed? Flunk his Candidacy Question; I leaped lump-throated at the pair of them, breaking my chain.

“Oh!”

“ZZZ!” It was Bray himself that alarmingly buzzed; but dwarfing that wonder, when I batted her hand from him Anastasia’s nail snapped his neck-skin like a garter! To mind sprang the image of Bray’s advent, when he’d tossed a mask aside …

“Baa!”
With a Brickett-bleat I seized his scalp—it peeled off like a glove, mustache and all! Anastasia squealed; I stood struck dumb. Bray buzzed no more, but coldly glared at me from a face not different from the one I’d snatched, only perhaps a shade less slack, a bit more moist.

Then, “Put it on!” cried Anastasia.

“Goat-Boy!” Bray warned, rising from his stool. “Do you want to Graduate, or not?”

I slipped the silk-dry mask over my head, snatched up the purse of Anastasia’s mother, and charged at Scrapegoat Grate as I had used to charge the fence in kidly days. A scanner scanned and disappeared, blue sparks and smoke shot from the panel where my watch-chain was;
when I hit the Grate its grid-irons slipped in slots, I was through before I knew it, they clacked behind me but I would not look.

Even as I sticked myself up from the threshold and doffed the mask, out of a pipe in the Grate-wall popped a paper, to unroll at my feet. A circle it was, size of a cheeseburger-plate; around its edge in tall block capitals my PAT-phrase, thus:

And on the
verso
-top, when I’d retrieved it, the heading
ASSIGNMENT
, followed by a list.

With a grin I pursed my watch—chainless now—and falseface, and conned the Mall. I was registered! Few were about; the Carnival-structures were no more. Why was it dark? I had forgot: but for a flashing ring the sun was eclipsed. A fat man in a yellow robe sat on the grass some elms along. Beyond him, benched, one old and thin, a dark-suit stranger. The rest of studentdom was in class, I did not doubt, hard at Assignments of their own. And I—a Registered, Matriculated, Qualified by George Candidate for Graduation—I read mine:

Founder, Founder! Those I thought I grasped, I gasped at; most signified not a thing to me. What ID-card? Which infirmity? When had
the Founder’s Scroll got misplaced? And ay, and ay, so short a term! Fist to brow I told them over, faintful list, and struck at each. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven!

So too did Tower Clock. But was it right?

My own timepiece, when I fetched it out, said something earlier, but I’d been so careless in the winding and setting way that I’d scarcely have dared trust its accuracy even had the River George not got to it. On the other hand, my first Assignment-task confirmed that not all was well with Tower Clock. I stepped to consult the dark-suit oldster, as more likely than The Living Sakhyan to own a watch. Lo, as I did, half a dozen young ragged fellows gathered to him from the shadows, uncordially. They jostled and threatened.

“Let’s have it, old man.”

“If you want it,” I heard him reply, “pay for it.” But his molesters were plainly ready to have by force what they were after. I cried stop to them and gimped to the man’s assistance.