The Eye of the Sibyl and Other Classic Strories (54 page)

The first pamphlet pointed out that it was a great honor to be admitted to the College. That was its name—the one word. How strange, he thought, puzzled. It’s like naming your cat Cat and your dog Dog. This is my mother, Mrs. Mother, and my father, Mr. Father. Are these people working right? he wondered. It had been a phobia of his for years that someday he would fall into the hands of madmen—in particular, madmen who seemed sane up until the last moment. To Bibleman this was the essence of horror.

As he sat scrutinizing the pamphlets, a red-haired girl, wearing the College uniform, came over and seated herself beside him. She seemed perplexed.

“Maybe you can help me,” she said. “What is a syllabus? It says here that we’ll be given a syllabus. This place is screwing up my head.”

Bibleman said, “We’ve been dragooned off the streets to shovel shit.”

“You think so?”

“I know so.”

“Can’t we just leave?”

“You leave first,” Bibleman said. “And I’ll wait and see what happens to you.”

The girl laughed. “I guess you don’t know what a syllabus is.”

“Sure I do. It’s an abstract of courses or topics.”

“Yes, and pigs can whistle.”

He regarded her. The girl regarded him.

“We’re going to be here forever,” the girl said.

Her name, she told him, was Mary Lorne. She was, he decided, pretty, wistful, afraid, and putting up a good front. Together they joined the other new students for a showing of a recent Herbie the Hyena cartoon which Bibleman had seen; it was the episode in which Herbie attempted to assassinate the Russian monk Rasputin. In his usual fashion, Herbie the Hyena poisoned his victim, shot him, blew him up six times, stabbed him, tied him up with chains and sank him in the Volga, tore him apart with wild horses, and finally shot him to the moon strapped to a rocket. The cartoon bored Bibleman. He did not give a damn about Herbie the Hyena or Russian history and he wondered if this was a sample of the College’s level of pedagogy. He could imagine Herbie the Hyena illustrating Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle. Herbie—in Bibleman’s mind—chased after by a subatomic particle fruitlessly, the particle bobbing up at random here and there… Herbie making wild swings at it with a hammer; then a whole flock of subatomic particles jeering at Herbie, who was doomed as always to fuck up.

“What are you thinking about?” Mary whispered to him.

The cartoon ended; the hall lights came on. There stood Major Casals on the stage, larger than on the phone. The fun is over, Bibleman said to himself. He could not imagine Major Casals chasing subatomic particles fruitlessly with wild swings of a sledgehammer. He felt himself grow cold and grim and a little afraid.

The lecture had to do with classified information. Behind Major Casals a giant hologram lit up with a schematic diagram of a homeostatic drilling rig. Within the hologram the rig rotated so that they could see it from all angles. Different stages of the rig’s interior glowed in various colors.

“I asked what you were thinking,” Mary whispered.

“We have to listen,” Bibleman said quietly.

Mary said, equally quietly, “It finds titanium ore on its own. Big deal. Titanium is the ninth most abundant element in the crust of the planet. I’d be impressed if it could seek out and mine pure wurtzite, which is found only at Potosi, Bolivia; Butte, Montana; and Goldfield, Nevada.”

“Why is that?” Bibleman said.

“Because,” Mary said, “wurtzite is unstable at temperatures below one thousand degrees centigrade. And further—” She broke off. Major Casals had ceased talking and was looking at her.

“Would you repeat that for all of us, young woman?” Major Casals said.

Standing, Mary said, “Wurtzite is unstable at temperatures below one thousand degrees centigrade.” Her voice was steady.

Immediately the hologram behind Major Casals switched to a readout of data on zinc-sulfide minerals.

“I don’t see ‘wurtzite’ listed,” Major Casals said.

“It’s given on the chart in its inverted form,” Mary said, her arms folded. “Which is sphalerite. Correctly, it is ZnS, of the sulfide group of the AX type. It’s related to greenockite.”

“Sit down,” Major Casals said. The readout within the hologram now showed the characteristics of greenockite.

As she seated herself, Mary said, “I’m right. They don’t have a homeostatic drilling rig for wurtzite because there is no—”

“Your name is?” Major Casals said, pen and pad poised.

“Mary Wurtz.” Her voice was totally without emotion. “My father was Charles-Adolphe Wurtz.”

“The discoverer of wurtzite?” Major Casals said uncertainly; his pen wavered.

“That’s right,” Mary said. Turning toward Bibleman, she winked.

“Thank you for the information,” Major Casals said. He made a motion and the hologram now showed a flying buttress and, in comparison to it, a normal buttress.

“My point,” Major Casals said, “is simply that certain information such as architectural principles of long-standing—”

“Most architectural principles are long-standing,” Mary said.

Major Casals paused.

“Otherwise they’d serve no purpose,” Mary said.

“Why not?” Major Casals said, and then he colored.

Several uniformed students laughed.

“Information of that type,” Major Casals continued, “is not classified. But a good deal of what you will be learning is classified. This is why the college is under military charter. To reveal or transmit or make public classified information given you during your schooling here falls under the jurisdiction of the military. For a breech of these statues you would be tried by a military tribunal.”

The students murmured. To himself Bibleman thought, Banged, ganged, and then some. No one spoke. Even the girl beside him was silent. A complicated expression had crossed her face, however; a deeply introverted look, somber and—he thought—unusually mature. It made her seem older, no longer a girl. It made him wonder just how old she really was. It was as if in her features a thousand years had surfaced before him as he scrutinized her and pondered the officer on the stage and the great information hologram behind him. What is she thinking? he wondered. Is she going to say something more? How can she be not afraid to speak up? We’ve been told we are under military law.

Major Casals said, “I am going to give you an instance of a strictly classified cluster of data. It deals with the Panther Engine.” Behind him the hologram, surprisingly, became blank.

“Sir,” one of the students said, “the hologram isn’t showing anything.”

“This is not an area that will be dealt with in your studies here,” Major Casals said. “The Panther Engine is a two-rotor system, opposed rotors serving a common main shaft. Its main advantage is a total lack of centrifugal torque in the housing. A cam chain is thrown between the opposed rotors, which permits the main shaft to reverse itself without hysteresis.”

Behind him the big hologram remained blank. Strange, Bibleman thought. An eerie sensation: information without information, as if the computer had gone blind.

Major Casals said, “The College is forbidden to release any information about the Panther Engine. It cannot be programmed to do otherwise. In fact, it knows nothing about the Panther Engine; it is programmed to destroy any information it receives in that sector.”

Raising his hand, a student said, “So even if someone fed information into the College about the Panther—”

“It would eject the data,” Major Casals said.

“Is this a unique situation?” another student asked.

“No,” Major Casals said.

“Then there’re a number of areas we can’t get printouts for,” a student murmured.

“Nothing of importance,” Major Casals said. “At least as far as your studies are concerned.”

The students were silent.

“The subjects which you will study,” Major Casals said, “will be assigned to you, based on your aptitude and personality profiles. I’ll call off your names and you will come forward for your allocation of topic assignment. The College itself has made the final decision for each of you, so you can be sure no error has been made.”

What if I get proctology? Bibleman asked himself. In panic he thought, Or podiatry. Or herpetology. Or suppose the College in its infinite computeroid wisdom decides to ram into me all the information in the universe pertaining to or resembling herpes labialis… or things even worse. If there is anything worse.

“What you want,” Mary said, as the names were read alphabetically, “is a program that’ll earn you a living. You have to be practical. I know what I’ll get; I know where my strong point lies. It’ll be chemistry.”

His name was called; rising, he walked up the aisle to Major Casals. They looked at each other, and then Casals handed him an unsealed envelope.

Stiffly, Bibleman returned to his seat.

“You want me to open it?” Mary said.

Wordlessly, Bibleman passed the envelope to her. She opened it and studied the printout.

“Can I earn a living with it?” he said.

She smiled. “Yes, it’s a high-paying field. Almost as good as—well, let’s just say that the colony planets are really in need of this. You could go to work anywhere.”

Looking over her shoulder, he saw the words on the page.

“Pre-Socratic philosophy,” Mary said. “Almost as good as structural engineering.” She passed him the paper. “I shouldn’t kid you. No, it’s not really something you can make a living at, unless you teach… but maybe it interests you. Does it interest you?”

“No,” he said shortly.

“I wonder why the college picked it, then,” Mary said.

“What the hell,” he said, “is cosmogony?”

“How the universe came into being. Aren’t you interested in how the universe—” She paused, eyeing him. “You certainly won’t be asking for printouts of any classified material,” she said meditatively. “Maybe that’s it,” she murmured, to herself. “They won’t have to watchdog you.”

“I can be trusted with classified material,” he said.

“Can you? Do you know yourself? But you’ll be getting into that when the College bombards you with early Greek thought. ‘Know thyself.’ Apollo’s motto at Delphi. It sums up half of Greek philosophy.”

Bibleman said, “I’m not going up before a military tribunal for making public classified military material.” He thought, then, about the Panther Engine and he realized, fully realized, that a really grim message had been spelled out in that little lecture by Major Casals. “I wonder what Herbie the Hyena’s motto is,” he said.

“ ‘I am determined to prove a villain,’ ” Mary said. “ ‘And hate the idle pleasures of these days. Plots have I laid.’ ” She reached out to touch him on the arm. “Remember? The Herbie the Hyena cartoon version of
Richard the Third.”

“Mary Lorne,” Major Casals said, reading off the list.

“Excuse me.” She went up, returned with her envelope, smiling. “Leprology,” she said to Bibleman. “The study and treatment of leprosy. I’m kidding; it’s chemistry.”

“You’ll be studying classified material.” Bibleman said.

“Yes,” she said. “I know.”

On the first day of his study program, Bob Bibleman set his College input-output terminal on AUDIO and punched the proper key for his coded course.

“Thales of Miletus,” the terminal said. “The founder of the Ionian school of natural philosophy.”

“What did he teach?” Bibleman said.

“That the world floated on water, was sustained by water, and originated in water.”

“That’s really stupid,” Bibleman said.

The College terminal said, “Thales based this on the discovery of fossil fish far inland, even at high altitudes. So it is not as stupid as it sounds.” It showed on its holoscreen a great deal of written information, no part of which struck Bibleman as very interesting. Anyhow, he had requested AUDIO. “It is generally considered that Thales was the first rational man in history,” the terminal said.

“What about Ikhnaton?” Bibleman said.

“He was strange.”

“Moses?”

“Likewise strange.”

“Hammurabi?”

“How do you spell that?”

“I’m not sure. I’ve just heard the name.”

“Then we will discuss Anaximander,” the College terminal said. “And, in a cursory initial survey, Anaximenes, Xenophanes, Paramenides, Melissus—wait a minute; I forgot Heraclitus and Cratylus. And we will study Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Zeno—”

“Christ,” Bibleman said.

“That’s another program,” the College terminal said.

“Just continue,” Bibleman said.

“Are you taking notes?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“You seem to be in a state of conflict.”

Bibleman said, “What happens to me if I flunk out of the College?”

“You go to jail.”

“I’ll take notes.”

“Since you are so driven—”

“What?”

“Since you are so full of conflict, you should find Empedocles interesting. He was the first dialectical philosopher. Empedocles believed that the basis of reality was an antithetical conflict between the forces of Love and Strife. Under Love the whole cosmos is a duly proportioned mixture, called a
krasis.
This
krasis
is a spherical deity, a single perfect mind which spends all its time—”

“Is there any practical application to any of this?” Bibleman interrupted.

“The two antithetical forces of Love and Strife resemble the Taoist elements of Yang and Yin with their perpetual interaction from which all change takes place.”

“Practical application.”

“Twin mutually opposed constituents.” On the holoscreen a schematic diagram, very complex, formed. “The two-rotor Panther Engine.”

“What?” Bibleman said, sitting upright in his seat. He made out the large words