"Ja, that's nice," he remarked a second later, and I was not too indignant to be astonished at Croaker's fondling the man's tiny organs while he peered. "Want to look?" he invited me. "Young ladies' dormitory across the way. But you're too agitated. No matter." He pushed Croaker's hand away. "Ach, that's enough. He is droll, don't you think?" he asked me. "Flunking nuisance, all the same. Now, Goat-Boy, let's see where to start on these notions of yours and Spielman's. I really am obliged to you for bringing Croaker home." He laughed aloud, as if struck by an extraordinarily amusing thought. "Do you know, your distinguished keeper went so far once as to accuse me of making his girlfriend pregnant. Imagine!"
"You deny it?"
He opened his robe with a kind of giggle, and Croaker tickled him at once. "Do I need to? Stop that, Croaker! So." More seriously he said to me, "Let's start there. You see how I'm made; I had early a kind of infantile paralysis; it left my legs and the rest as you observe. And young Mrs. Stoker does not call me her father."
I acknowledged that she did not.
"Then one of two things is true," Dr. Eierkopf reasoned lightly: "Max Spielman is Anastasia's father — "
"No!" I repeated indignantly what Max had told me about his accidental exposure to EAT-radiation, which had destroyed his fertility. Dr. Eierkopf smiled and nodded.
"Is that so? Very amusing! Well then, if Spielman isn't lying — by the way, Dr. Kennard Sear could verify that…"
"Dr. Sear!"
Expressing his agreeable surprise that I knew the man he spoke of, Dr. Eierkopf affirmed that certain classified files under Dr. Sear's jurisdiction could attest the fertility and potency of any male in New Tammany College who had been of spermatogenic age twenty-odd years ago. At that time, as part of the culminating phase of the Cum Laude Project, semen samples had been taken from all New Tammany males between puberty and senility. These had then been analyzed, classified, and culled under Dr. Sear's supervision to the standards evolved by WESCAC for the Grand-Tutorial Ideaclass="underline" Laboratory Eugenical Specimen, and although then-Chancellor Reginald Hector had curtailed the whole project shortly afterwards, the donor-data files from "Operation Sheepskin" were still intact and under seal somewhere in the Infirmary's research laboratories — as well, of course, as in WESCAC's memory-banks.
"So maybe Max is lying and maybe not," he went on.
"And maybe you are," I interrupted — not unimpressed, however, by the information.
Dr. Eierkopf made a high sound. "Very good! That's very good. Indeed, I might be lying. But suppose everybody's telling the truth; so your keeper is potent but sterile, and I'm fertile but impotent. Now what's left? Maybe Virginia Hector's telling the truth, how WESCAC was the father? How one night she goes into the Cum Laude Room to meet a boyfriend, and WESCAC grabs hold and fertilizes her with the GILES, yes?"
I was up off my stool. "Is that true? Is that why the project was stopped?"
Dr. Eierkopf raised the skin where eyebrows usually are. "So Miss Hector said. And ja, that's what made her poppa so angry he stopped the Cum Laude Project. A very great pity, when we were so close to success. A greater pity than any of those dumbsticks in Tower Hall can understand."
I demanded to know whether Miss Hector had been telling the truth. Dr. Eierkopf's tone suggested that he knew more than he cared to tell at the moment — and he openly acknowledged that many details of the Cum Laude Project were still secret, for various reasons — but certain facts, he maintained, were beyond doubt and could be spoken of: the GILES, he would stake his life on it, had been successfully developed, at least in prototypical form, and had been so to speak in WESCAC's hands, awaiting the selection of a volunteer "mother" and permission from Tower Hall and the Enochist lobbies to proceed with an experimental insemination. Second, WESCAC had, in Operation Ramshorn and the much-maligned Überkatzen experiment, demonstrated its capacity to take initiative and implement its resolves; for just that reason the Cum Laude Room had been designated temporarily off-limits to female employees, to prevent untimely accidents. Third, the precious original GILES had undeniably disappeared on the night in question, and was never found. Finally, a secret obstetrical report, which Eierkopf had seen just prior to his demotion, affirmed that Miss Virginia R. Hector quite definitely had been impregnated.
"So she's telling the truth!" I cried. So wondrous a notion then occurred to me that I stood speechless: the entire mystery of myself seemed in an instant brought to light, in a way that confirmed my hopes beyond my dreams! Enormous moment — which Dr. Eierkopf, alas, soon dashed to campus.
"Impossible," he said. "I don't say she's lying, but her story can't be correct." The logic of the case, he insisted, was this: WESCAC had been programmed to inseminate solely with the GILES; but the GILES would by definition produce a male child, the future Grand Tutor. Inasmuch as Miss Hector's baby had been female — the present Mrs. Maurice Stoker, among whose unquestionable attributes Grand-Tutorhood was surely not included — one of two things must be true: either WESCAC did in fact impregnate Virginia Hector, but ad libitum, on a self-programmed "malinoctial" impulse, and not with the GILES but with an ordinary semen-specimen acquired in some unknown wise; or else it was not WESCAC but some human male who clipped her in the Cum Laude Room. Assuming the latter, and further that both Max and he were speaking truthfully, then Miss Hector either had another lover or fell afoul of some unidentified rapist.
"For me," he concluded, "I happen to believe that she did have the great privilege of being chosen by WESCAC, just as she says. But then the computer must have decided not to honor her with the GILES, and either fertilized her with a different specimen or merely… enjoyed her, you know, without fertilizing her at all. For practice, ja? Or just for the malinoctial sport. And then later she happened to conceive by some ordinary lover." He appeared to wink. "She was quite a fetching person in those days… I myself used to wish sometimes that I were fashioned like other men, for her sake… But bah! I never was one-tenth the fool that Spielman was, with his flunking Compassion, and his Honor, and his Dignity of Studentdom! Scratch a liberal Moishian, Goat-Boy: you'll find a sentimentalist, every time."
Croaker made to refill my stein, leaving his vigil at the night-glass for the purpose. At first I declined, declaring to Dr. Eierkopf my resolve to go to Main Detention and do what I could towards Max's release. But he assured me that nothing could be done that night in any case — even telephoned a Main-Detention office on my behalf to confirm the fact — and that despite Maurice Stoker's unsavory reputation, the New Tammany judicial system was, in the main, fair.
"If Max didn't kill Hermann, they're not likely to convict him," he insisted. "If he did — as I suspect — there'll be a great deal of sentiment in his favor anyhow."
I asked him what, if not general malevolence, led him to believe that Max was guilty.
"You are a witty fellow," he replied, and excused himself at Croaker's summons to watch a co-ed undress in her darkened room a quarter-mile away. "But you are confusing malevolence with malificence." He spoke from the side of his mouth. "I like watching people in the night-glass; that may be naughty-minded, but it doesn't hurt anybody." As for his affliation with the Bonifacist riot-effort and his later work on EAT-weaponry and the Cum Laude Project, it was not the fault either of himself or of science that men used the fruits of his research for flunkèd purposes; he was but a toiler in the field, an explorer of nature's possibilities; his sole allegiance was to his work; he had no interest in intercollege rivalries — petty, to his mind, even if they led to the destruction of the University. No, he declared, the evil on campus was done not by disengaged intelligences like his, which amused themselves between prodigious intellectual feats by spying on naked sophomore girls with an infra-red telescope; it was done by principled people like Max Spielman, who prided themselves on having hearts as well as brains; who committed themselves with a passion to high-minded middlebrow causes; in short, who claimed or aspired to membership in the human fraternity.