Giles Goat Boy (89 page)

“So lay it on the line, Dunce flunk you, or I’ll break you in two!”

Despite the menace of his words and tone I saw he was alarmed—he was, for example, asking my price instead of calling a patrolman—and so I gathered he’d got the drift of his daughter’s and granddaughter’s recent experience in the Catalogue Room. In short, he knew the GILES was alive and about—whether in Bray’s person or in George the Goat-Boy’s—and had every reason to fear being brought to account for his old infanticide-attempt. I might have unmasked myself then; but a strategy occurred to me for gaining more truth from him before giving any in return.
I
was
the GILES, I repeated, by WESCAC out of Virginia R. Hector: rescued from the tapelift by G. Herrold the booksweep, reared by Max Spielman as Billy Bocksfuss the Ag-Hill Goat-Boy, and come to Great Mall to change WESCAC’s AIM and Pass All or Fail All.

“No!” he protested—but in awe now more than in denial.

“Oh yes.” However, I declared, he was not to suppose I sought either wealth or fame for myself or retribution for him; I had left the barn to Pass All or Fail All, and having that same day passed all my tests and the Finals, I wanted nothing from him but a true accounting of my birth and infancy before I went forth to my larger work.

He rubbed his strong chin suspiciously. “What about that George fellow, crashed the Grate this morning?”

“An impostor,” I said. “A false goat-boy.”

“I heard from Maurice Stoker he was out to make trouble. Founder knows he’s made plenty!”

“But not for you,” I pointed out. “Anyhow, I’ve taken care of him.”

He squinted at me afresh. “You’re really Virginia’s son? She was saying crazy things about that George fellow …”

My heart glowed; she
had
acknowledged me then, at last, after the shock of my old blind assault, and of seeing me again, had led her to deny me! My gratitude for this overcame any lingering grudge against Reginald Hector; I sat beside him on the desktop and laid a friendly hand on his shoulder.

“Mother’s not well,” I reminded him. “It upset her to see me again, after all these terms, and two of us claiming to be the GILES.” But could he really imagine, I asked him gently, that a Grand Tutor harbored vengeance in His heart for an act that could only have been misguided?

“You’re really Him?” he demanded once more. “That other fellow—I don’t know; I was almost afraid …”

Speaking from my heart, not from my mask, I assured him once more that he was looking at the same Grand Tutor he’d committed to the Belly, and asked him why he’d done it. Surely one didn’t murder to avoid a scandal? He shook his head and replied, glum with doubt and shame, that though “the scandal-thing” was no light matter when the reputation of leaders was at stake (since “men won’t die for a fellow they don’t respect”), two other considerations had led him—and me—to the fatal tapelift. The first was the strange device of my PAT-card, which he took to mean that I would pass or fail not
everything
, but
everybody
: in other words, that I’d be the Commencement or Flunkage of all studentdom, as the late
Kanzler
of Siegfrieder College, his adversary in C.R. II,
had vowed to be. Considering Eblis Eierkopf’s role in the Cum Laude Project and past affiliation with Bonifacism, he’d adjudged it an unbearable risk that his own daughter might have given birth to another
Kollegiumführer
. Moreover, even supposing that she had not, he could not abide the thought of his grandson’s growing up as he had grown, and Ira, and to some extent Virginia also; better die ignorant than be an orphan in the University: nameless, by nameless parents got, and furtively brought to light!

“Never had a proper daddy myself, and never was one to Virginia,” he admitted; “her mother dead a-bearing and mine a tramp … I did what I could to keep the same from happening to Virginia. And I don’t know that I blame her, mind—but there she was: raped by a flunking Moishian, a flunking Bonifacist, or a flunking machine, one or the other, and half out of her head from it …”

“It was WESCAC,” I put in, “not Max or Dr. Eierkopf. And it wasn’t what you’d call a rape. You
did
put me in the lift, then, and push the
Belly
-button?”

“I did that,” he acknowledged firmly. “Founder forgive me if I shouldn’t have.” To a professor-general in time of riot, he declared, responsibility for the death of others was no novelty. The blood of hundreds of thousands could be said to be on his hands, he supposed, if one chose to look at it that way; flunk him if I would, he’d done his duty as he saw it, was beholden to none, would take his medicine with head held high. I assured him I had no mind to flunk him, not on that account at least; his deed was wrong, but I quite understood what led him to it and did not think his motives dishonorable, only wrong-headed, like his opinions.

He began to color.

“What I mean,” I said, “everybody speaks of your generosity and your brother’s selfishness, and I see their point, but it
is
his wealth behind the Unwed Co-ed’s Hospital and the P.P.F.—or
was
, anyhow. And behind you too, all your life …”

“Now, look here, young fellow! I beg Your doggone pardon—”

But, good officer that he was, he must have felt that Grand Tutors somehow outranked professor-generals, for when I raised my hand he fell silent. I was not condemning him or calling him a hypocrite, I explained, and would as leave save the matter for another conversation—but valid as was Enos Enoch’s dictum that students Commence or fail individually, never by classes, and admirable as was the virtue of self-reliance, I could not see that Reginald Hector exemplified either very well. How could he regard himself as beholden to none, when his brother
had made possible his whole career, his famous philanthropy, even his marriage? Very possibly he had been a good professor-general and chancellor; very possibly his liberality was authentic—but those talents and virtues were empty abstractions without Ira Hector’s wherewithal and influence.

“You Certified me Yourself!” he said angrily.

I smiled. “But that was before you’d Certified
me
, so it isn’t quite valid.” If he really wished to show his self-reliance, I suggested—now that he was out of a job anyway—why did he not chuck all sinecures and go to the goats, as Max had done? I was speaking half in jest (and half seriously, for G. Herrold’s death, Max’s arrest, and my departure left the goats much in need of herding), but the ex-Chancellor clearly believed I was baiting him, and looked ready to strike me. His Tutoring, I decided, must wait, since the crowd outside would not. I reassured him that I had no intent to denounce him publicly or otherwise reveal either his old attempt on my life or his various dependencies on Ira Hector. The one I forgave, the other was his affair. Neither did I want anything from him, except possibly the answer to a final question …

“Ask it,” he grumbled. “I won’t stand for blackmail, but I’m obliged to You for letting sleeping dogs lie. What I mean, I’m not
beholden
, You understand, but when a fellow needs a hand, why, I’ll give him the shirt off my back.”

I thought of the hungry undergraduates upon whom he’d bestowed cufflinks and desk-barometers, but contented myself with inquiring whether Anastasia was my sister.

“Aha,” he said, as if spying some ulterior motive in the question, and his expression turned fatuous again. “I’d
heard
you two were sweet on each other! Well, don’t You worry, lad—Sir—I don’t believe Stoker’s filthy talk about her and that George fellow. He says Pete Greene’s lost his head over her too—fellow served under me in C. R. Two, heck of a fine Joe. But I’d never believe that flunking Stoker!”

Disturbing as was the suggestion that Anastasia was known to be “sweet on” Harold Bray, I merely demanded to know whether he meant then that she was
not
Virginia Hector’s daughter. He sighed and rolled another cigarette, shaking his head.

“She only had the one, poor Ginny: just Yourself. Me and Ira stood by in the delivery-room, hoping You’d be stillborn. I figured You’d be some kind of monster, if Ginny hadn’t been lying about the GILES-thing …”

Unaccountably my heart thrilled to the news that “My Ladyship” and
I (so I began from that moment forth to regard her) were no kin. But I repeated Ira Hector’s assertion that he’d helped deliver her himself.

“I wouldn’t put it past him,” Reginald chuckled. “That’s Ira all over.” But the truth, he declared, was that Ira regularly “helped out” at the Unwed Co-ed’s Hospital simply to be helpful, and thus had taken part in a great many deliveries—it was, after all, his building. Anastasia’s parentage, however, would never be known: “The hospital records are confidential anyhow, and when we decided Ira should adopt a girl we had her papers destroyed. Ginny’s doctor was the only one who might have known, and he passed away twenty-some years ago.” In other words, Anastasia was an orphan, born to some luckless co-ed, left for adoption at the New Tammany Lying-In. When my disappearance from the tapelift, and G. Herrold’s garbled talk of finding a baby in the Belly, had led Reginald Hector to fear that his plan had misfired, he’d judged the scandal of illicit pregnancy less dangerous than that of infanticide, actual or attempted. The fortunate coincidence of Dr. Mayo’s death at about that same time had made it possible to enter on the records that Virginia Hector had borne a daughter, Anastasia—whom Ira raised when Virginia refused to. Scandal there’d been, when the news gradually became known, but on the whole it had not much damaged the public image of Reginald Hector; people pitied him and censured Virginia (a double injustice of which he seemed yet oblivious), whose subsequent deterioration they were pleased to regard as her due; Max was got rid of, the Cum Laude Project quietly scrapped, and Eblis Eierkopf demoted to less sensitive researches. Anastasia had proved a delightful grandchild, and but for an occasional nagging fear that the GILES had not really perished (if the baby had
been
the GILES), Reginald Hector had put the unpleasant episode out of mind—until yesterday, when it had suddenly come back to haunt him.

“But look here,” he said at last, patting my shoulder, “if You really promise to let bygones be bygones, You can count on me to put in a good word for You with Stacey.”

When I asked what exactly he meant, he winked. “She had no business marrying that dirty-minded draft-dodger in the first place! But Stacey listens to her Grandpa Reg, and if I was to tell her the G.T. loves her … Not that You haven’t told her so already, eh?” He nudged me with his elbow.

“A Grand Tutor loves the whole student body,” I told him coldly, adding that if he felt so beholden to me as to pimp for his married granddaughter, he was flunkèd indeed, and had better heed my counsel about herding goats. Not to lose my temper further at his pandering to
the image of Harold Bray, I turned my back on his expostulations and left the office. At that very moment, as if to remind me of urgenter business, the crowd outside set up a shout. But another came from behind me, like an answer to the first: a woman’s cry:

“You’re
not
my Giles!”

It was Mother, crazy-eyed and pointing from behind the ex-Chancellor. In vain the young receptionist tried to coax her back into the farther room; in vain Reginald Hector said, “Whoa down, Gin”—his own eyes still flashing wrath at me. She pushed past him with her claws out and would have attacked me if they’d not caught her arms.

“You’re not my Billy!” she cried. I froze before the hatred in her face. More shouts came from outside, disorganized and fearsome. She struggled now not at me but towards the office window, shrieking, “They’re killing him!”

“What’s she talking about?” her father demanded. The receptionist, herself verging on hysteria, replied that it was that George-fellow, the so-called Goat-Boy, that the crowd had discovered somewhere and dragged to the front gate. “She says it’s her
son
, sir! And I think—they’re lynching him …”

I ran for the porch, flunking myself for not having put off all disguise long since. The doorguard snapped to attention, ignoring the horror at the gate. There on hands and knees in the torchlight some poor wretch was indeed not long for this campus: blows and kicks rained upon him; the host of his attackers snarled like Border Collies at a wolf; those not near enough to strike with briefcase, umbrella, or slide-rule shouted imprecations and threw weighty textbooks. Already a noose was being rigged from a lamp-post, and Telerama crews were exhorting the crowd not to block their cameras. The victim’s tunic, though rent now and bloodied, I recognized as Bray’s; but his hair was gold and curled, not black and straight—and the face he raised, when the mob hailed the sight of me, was my own!

“Stop!” I commanded. “Stop in the name of the GILES!”

They did actually pause for a moment, weapons poised, and Reginald Hector (a more seasoned hand than I at giving orders) bellowed at them from the doorway to fall back before he horsewhipped the lot of them. “You heard your Grand Tutor: let the bastard go!”

“Billikins!”
my mother screamed behind me, and had I not caught hold of her, would have run to the gore-smeared likeness of her son. “
You’re
not the GILES!” she shrieked at me, and strove ferocious at my eyes. “Billy is!”

Did I see Bray smile through his mad disguise? A half-second I had to wonder what, if not an EATen mind, could have led him to so fatal a mask, and where anyhow he’d got it. In that same half-second, as the mob faltered, another woman squealed forth round a shrubberied corner of the mansion. I let go my mother in horror at sight of Anastasia herself, scarcely less abused than Bray: her sandals were gone; her hair was wild, her cheek bloody, her white uniform ripped down the front and everywhere grimed!

“What in thunder!” Reg Hector shouted. My mother, instead of assaulting me, ran weeping to embrace whom she thought her son. Like the crowd, I stood dumbfounded; Reginald Hector, half-mad with alarm, caught his granddaughter in his arms and shouted questions at her: What had happened? Who had attacked her? But she shook away and ran to me. Forgetting my mask I held out my arms—ah, Founder, she was worse mauled than on the night Croaker beached her!—but she halted just before me and screamed at me to “keep my promise.” Men with microphones came running.