There were no such advertisements for myself.
In a short while the area before Main Gate was clear, everyone having gone with the celebrators. The Amphitheater hoardings and ticket-office were dark, the entrance-gates left open and abandoned. Of our borrowed motorcycle there was no sign. I went over, thinking to tell Dr. Sear about Max's misfortune and ask what might be done to right the error of the arrest. Moreover I had no idea where I was to sleep, or how to procure tomorrow's food — such an easy matter at home, and so difficult here where nothing grew! — or what I was to do with myself once past Scrapegoat Grate, or how to deal with the arrant pretender Harold Bray. To ruminate in the meadows of leading studentdom to Commencement Gate was one thing; to stand in the concrete brilliant heart of a mighty college, potent and populous beyond imagining, and dwarfed by its towers to find one's own way, not to mention the others', was quite something else. Never had I more need of my advisor!
At the rim of the great dark bowl I paused. Vast and empty, strewn with discarded programs that palely caught the moon, the theater gathered like a giant ear echoes of distant jubilation. Dr. Sear was gone; there was no sign of Greene either, who I had half hoped might lodge me somewhere. No one was about but Croaker, his black outline discernable as an occlusion of white trash where we had sat through the tragedy. I went down. He was picking popcorn kernels from the stones with one hand, scratching at his groin with the other, and croaked to see me.
"Don't you believe in Bray?" I asked him, and got no answer. I picked up my stick, and, perhaps misunderstanding me, Croaker hoist me to his shoulders. Very well, I had no reason to protest, or on the other hand any direction to give him. I rested my arms and chin on his black bald skull and worried about Max, permitting Croaker to range at whim about the aisle and tiers. The reasonablest explanation I could come up with was that my advisor and keeper might indeed have seen the murder occur, or come upon the Bonifacist's corpse in the woods, and said nothing about it — that would account for his unusual behavior during the day. Judging from remarks of Stoker's and the general character of his staff, it would not be surprising to learn that the infamous Hermann had been employed at the Powerhouse under some alias, perhaps even with Stoker's knowledge and under his protection. Max might have recognized him, and Stoker seized upon some pretext for having the man killed before his identity came to light and blaming Max for the crime. It would not be easy to save him, I imagined, what with Stoker chief administrator of Main Detention. Perhaps, if things went well next morning, one could approach Chancellor Rexford with the truth… But rumor had it he and Stoker were half-brothers!
As I considered how a Grand Tutor ought to manage the situation — what Bray, to my shame be it said, might for instance have done in my position — Croaker evidently achieved his fill of popcorn-leavings or was taken by some dim new urge, for he gave over his ransack and trotted up out of the bowl; turned left and left again and loped away, Founder knew where, through emptied streets, I jogging listless pick-a-back.
5
We wended up an alley and through a wall beyond which stretched a lawn of some dimension. On its farther side, moonlit, a squat domed tower was, with slits and slots but no proper windows; Croaker galloped to it, grunting. A plank door in its base flew open without our having touched it; we went in and up a spiral of stone stairs as if Croaker knew what he was about, and emerged into a bright chamber under the dome, of which my first impression was that it was full of apparatus as had been the Powerhouse Control Room. Lights winked on panels; things hummed. But more arresting than the furniture was the occupant of the room, before whom Croaker squatted now. Hairless he was and naked, with the whitest skin I'd seen; his legs were useless-looking sticks that dangled from the high stool he perched on; shrunk too were his hams (though his hips were wide) and his bald gonads scarcely there at all. His paunch however was considerable, even bloat, and rounded up to a smaller chest and the sloped white shoulders from which plumpish arms depended. Most remarkable was his head: an outsized hairless browless ball that dandled forward and to one side as if too weighty for the neck. Thick round eyeglasses he wore on it, whose rimless lenses magnified his thumbnail-colored eyes. He had no teeth.
"So," he said, Z-ing the sibilant as Max did. But his voice was a furry pipe. Croaker at once set to whining.
"He wants you off so he gets his work done," the strange man said, with a faint smile. I dismounted and leaned on my stick, confounded. At once Croaker hurried to a metal locker nearby, took a white robe out, and draped it about the man's shoulders; our host bared his gums, and Croaker hurried to another room, returning presently with a set of false dentures in his hand. Accepting and inserting them, the man sighed and said, more clearly: "It was good not to have the brute around, but I do need him." He addressed Croaker then in a flurry of some unfamiliar speech, which the black man evidently understood, for he sprang to a cupboard and set about some task.
"You're the famous Goat-Boy, nein?" He tapped a long metal cylinder beside him, thrust into a slit in the wall. "I saw you through the night-glass while I was adjusting the main telescopes. There's an annular solar eclipse tomorrow. I'm Eblis Eierkopf." He smiled at my alarm and fluttered a hand. "Don't believe all Herr Spielman tells you." Here he managed an actual chuckle. "That dumbhead, shooting Herman Hermann! He thinks with his ventricles!" He had, he explained, heard the news bulletins about Max's arrest and Harold Bray's appearance in the Amphitheater, as earlier he'd heard reports from the Powerhouse of Croaker's having been subdued by the Ag-Hill Goat-Boy, et cetera. I was still too disconcerted by his identity and appearance to make a proper reply. This was the man responsible for the Cum Laude Project, and Miss Virginia R. Hector's undoing? This was Max's arch-enemy? Anastasia's father?
"Sit down," he invited. There was another stool near the eyepiece of a huge telescope aimed through a vertical opening in the dome. "Croaker brings beer as soon as my pablum's ready."
This my former ally did, clearly now emancipated from my direction; not only beer he brought me — excellent stuff in a pewter-topped stein — but boiled chicken-eggs, which he sliced with a clever wire gadget.
"Not those!" Dr. Eierkopf wailed when he caught sight of him. "They're for research!"
But it was too late, the eggs were sliced; whatever scientific work they'd been meant for would have to be begun afresh. Croaker served them round and spoon-fed Dr. Eierkopf his gruel — insisting, with grunts and throaty babble, that he eat every bit of it.
"So," Dr. Eierkopf sighed again. "When he ran off I could think undistracted, just as your friend Stoker promised, but I starved to death. Now I eat and don't get my work done, and he spoils my research. Drink up! Don't be afraid of me."
"I'm not afraid," I said. "I — believe I should despise you, sir."
This news he merely nodded at. "Of course you should, after all Spielman told you! The old man is plenty mixed up."
Sternly I declared that my keeper and advisor was the passèdest man on campus as far as I was concerned —
"As far as you know, you mean."
As far as I knew, then; that he most certainly had been cashiered unjustly, thanks in part to the bad offices of Eblis Eierkopf; that nothing could be more false than the present charge against him, inasmuch as all his life he'd affirmed the principle of non-violence — whereas his rival had been, if not actively a Bonifacist himself, at least a leading enemy scientist during Campus Riot II, who had contemplated without protest the combustion of numberless Moishian civilians in the furnaces of Siegfrieder College, and after the Riot had agreed without qualm to do EAT-research for New Tammany. And so forth. My harangue lasted some while, fueled by an actual twinkle in Dr. Eierkopf's eyes. Croaker meanwhile was peering through the smaller telescope, the one identified as a "night-glass"; he moved it slightly, gave a croak, and offered the eyepiece to his master, who begged me to excuse him for a moment.