Cal Tech was just as much a fraud as any of the faiths on Godmen Lane. And like all good swindles, it looked great from the outside. It had more Nobel laureates man even Houston or Luanda—but most of them taught one or two survey courses and perhaps a doctoral-level program with a handful of specially chosen disciples. The school, with more than 25,000 students, was approaching its three hundredth anniversary, and was a soar of the most modern architecture and imagination. About the only buildings left from the "olden days"—before the institute had begun its cancerous expansion, devouring not just a nearby city college but the city's main center as well—was the fountain he was sitting on, and the nearby Spanish-style Kerkhoff Hall, now used for freshman orientations.
The work, while hard, largely consisted of swotting: rote memorization and regurgitation at periodic examinations. Both of the Theory courses he had qualified for this semester seemed to preach enhancement/modification of the past's breakthroughs rather than instilling any truly original thought in the students.
He wasn't so cork-topped that he had expected Cal Tech to be perfect, that it would give him the Secrets of the Ancients. But he had thought the school would have some original thinkers, scientists who were looking beyond this system/time's moil of rote repetition of the past's errors. Maybe there were sages, he thought, and he was just too damned young and dumb to know who, or where, they were. Yeah. Or maybe the original thinkers had gotten fed up and were teaching offplanet on Ganymede or Mars. If so, why were there so many offworlders going to Cal Tech?
Not that any of Kea's doubts had shown up in his work—he was holding a flat 4.0 average and had been on the Founder's List both semesters of the previous year. He was set All he had to do was keep his grades, smile, morale, and genitalia up, and he would be a Twenty-second Century Surefire Success. Which meant, he thought wryly, he would be sucked into one of the super design-plants like Wozniak City and, eventually, if he behaved properly, allowed to put his name on a "particularly elegant" computer path. Or, even more dizzyingly, to have a tertiary process in some synthetic industrial plant named after him. Perhaps they would reward him with a two-week, all-expense-paid trip to Nix Olympica. On one of the lesser peaks, of course.
Kea suddenly grinned. You're right, my lad, he thought. There's no option but suicide. Lie down in front of the next railbus as it passes, baby blue. Speaking of which... He looked at his watch—this year the fashion was to wear a timepiece on the wrist—and realized he'd best bust buns, or he was going to be late for work. He'd have just time to drop off his fichecase at his far off-campus rooming house, where he paid far too much for a tiny attic room, and change clothes.
Now forget all that crap you were thinking. You will not end up a cog in somebody else's machine. Hell, you can go back to Maui and start all over again as a gangster before you allow them to do that to you. Or you could volunteer for a longliner...
He shivered, and ran a thumb up the fastener of his jacket. He felt suddenly cold. The fall sun, no doubt, wasn't as warming as it appeared.
The hashhouse/ginjoint Kea worked in was in the middle of a bad district. About a million or so years ago, Kea had discovered after he peeled through geological layers of wallboard, paint, and flocked wallpaper, the place had been named the Gay Cantina. Now it had no name as far as anyone knew—it was just the dive over there. All the licenses were in the name of the owner, a glowering goon named Buno, and everything was paid in cash.
Buno hadn't believed anybody as good-looking—i.e., without any of the district's de rigueur face scars—as Richards, let alone anybody who was attending Cal Tech, would want a job in his dive. But Kea, who had spent a lot of time remembering his father's cooking and over the past several years had done the meals for Leong Suk and himself, persisted. Besides, he thought, it'd be a hoot seein‘ what happened the first time a yayhoo decided to hurrah the kid. Buno tried him out.
Now there was a smallish vee-notch in the countertop—and a wide dark stain around it. After that the district left Richards alone, especially when they noted that after he'd taken the chef's knife out of the counter—and the thug's hand—he hadn't called the police.
Kea worked from sixteen hundred hours until some vague time called closing, which meant when the last drunk had stum-bled out and no more were reeling in. Mostly the dive was pretty quiet and Kea could get his studying done. But not this night. The house was very busy, with a steady stream of hungry and even partially sober customers. About 2100, ten very unhappy drunks fell in. It was just another night. And then Austin Bargeta showed up. Kea, putting together a fried-egg-and-ham-and-cheese sandwich for one of the boozers, didn't see him when he entered. But he did recognize Bargeta's rather remarkable voice when he asked for a menu. Kea had heard it several times before—he and Bargeta were both suffering through Particle Theory and its Immediate Application in Common Yukawa Drive Situations.
The Bargetas were richrich. The family had been founded four generations before when a brilliant designer had made his trillions, building among other things one of the first portable triple-lobe astrographic instruments. Then he had married the daughter of one of Japan's most respected ^atea/bankers and the dynasty had begun. The family was very old-money now, with most of the wealth in holding companies. The rest was in interplanetary building/transport. Each Bargeta generation was presented with a choice—a child could become either family head or else a trust baby. The family head would prove himself by running the high-risk building/transport division, and the behind-the-scenes bankers would take care of the rest of the nearly automatic money machine. Being the Chosen One meant wealth and power beyond comprehension.
Austin Bargeta was making a run at being the heir apparent, or so Kea had heard. The problem and the gossiped wonderment was how long the family name would carry him before he was punted into the outer darkness, a failed heir apparent.
"Austin."
It took three blinks for Bargeta to sort of recognize Richards. He wasn't being a snob, Kea realized. He was not much more sober than the ten drunks behind him.
"Oh, it's Richards," he said. "You're in one of my classes. What are you doing hereT
"Some of us," Kea said, "have to work. You've heard of work, haven't you? What most people do? For money?"
"Oh. Oh, yes. I'm sorry. Didn't mean, and all... don't mean to sound like... been gazing on the wine while it was red, you know."
"Yeah. Austin, I've got to tab you to something. This isn't exactly your kind of place."
"Why not?" Bargeta turned and looked around, and nothing, from the graffiti on the wall to the stained ceiling to the clientele, seemed to register. "Seems quite... you know, authentic."
"It's that. Okay." Kea shrugged. Feed the kid—which Richards thought of Bargeta, even though Bargeta was a year and a class senior to him—and slick him out of here. "Can I get you something to eat?"
Bargeta focused on the menu. He was studying it when one of the drunks shouted, "Hey, cookie, if you're through blowin‘ in y'r bitch's ear, I'd like to order m' eats." Kea ignored the shout. Bargeta did not. He swiveled off the counter stool, face turning red, as if he were in a vid. Wonderful, Kea thought.
"I understand," Austin said with great clarity, "that you call your mother Piles, because she is such a bleeding ass. Or am I mistaken?"
The drunk came up in several waves. Kea noticed, as he slid unobtrusively to the cashbox, that the man was a Samoan. There weren't that many humans wandering around Pasadena measuring two meters in any direction. Kea also knew that the Samoan culture is maternal, and that, very shortly, Bargeta was going to be steamrolled. Bargeta took on some kind of half-assed martial arts stance as the Samoan juggernauted toward him.