"Especially these self-sacrificial ones!" he warned. "Watch out for that sort! Your Moishian liberal with his Student Rights and his Value of Suffering — he'll take you down with him, and tell you it's for your own good. Imagine, they used to say to me back in Siegfrieder I should jump into the fire along with them, as a protest!"
What bearing this had on the question of Max's guilt or innocence I never quite determined, unless it was that in Eierkopf's view a man capable of any emotion at all was capable of any other, and not to be trusted. I was intrigued as well as repelled by the hairless cripple — who remarked in passing that he never slept at all in the usual way, but merely "turned his mind off" at odd intervals in the day and night, between mental tasks, and in this manner rested, like a fish or a machine. These were matters I wished to take up with him, out of general curiosity or in hope of immediately practical information: tomorrow's matriculation procedure, the problem of finding good counsel for Max, Anastasia's parentage and my own, the nature of Graduation, the character of my apparent rival Harold Bray, the question of entering WESCAC's Belly and changing its AIM (which for all I knew he might be better informed about than Max, having dealt more recently with the computer), and sundry others. Since in any case I had nowhere to go and nothing to do until four minutes after six in the morning, and sleep was impossible under the troublous circumstances, I lingered on in the Observatory and at length accepted Dr. Eierkopf's invitation to talk through the night — fortified and stimulated by sips of the black liquor distilled under Founder's Hill, of which Croaker located a flask. Chased by the cold pale beer it was a bracing drink; fatigue was put from me, and I found myself obliged to acknowledge that while abhorrent in general and repulsive in many particulars, my host was not devoid of attractive qualities — as Maurice Stoker himself had not in my eyes been. He was undeniably generous in his way, ingenious, efficient, and orderly, brilliantly logical and systematic, and his opinions were interesting if not always agreeable. His contempt for Max was milder than at first it appeared, and had to do not with my keeper's intellectual and scientific accomplishment, which he quite respected, but with his concern for non-scientifical campus problems and his general secular-studentism — all which Eierkopf dismissed irritatedly as "beside the point." Mildly too he admitted to a few inclinations of his own in the administrative-policy way: he rather thought, for example, that a rotating commission of experts from the various sciences could run the University more harmoniously and efficiently than could the law-school, political-science, and business-administration types who customarily inhabited Tower Hall. He seconded without abash the idea of "preventive riot": it was EAT or be EATen, he placidly declared (confessing that the acronym nauseated him), and New Tammany would be well advised to EAT the Nikolayans at once, without warning, both to simplify the political situation and to protect herself from destruction at the hands of an enemy who surely would not scruple to attack by stealth. At the matter of the Moishian genocaust he merely shrugged his narrow shoulders: riot was riot; the Siegfrieders had been cut off from their normal fuel supply; a few good Moishian researchers like Chaim Schultz had gone up in smoke, but not many; the slaughter of whole student bodies was a tradition as old as riot itself — had not Laertides been called "Sacker of Cities"? — and the mere scale and efficiency of the Moishian extermination did not in his view make the Siegfrieders any more flunkèd than the classical Remusians, for instance, considering the proportionate increase in University population since ancient terms, and the improvement of homicidal technology.
"Despite the Moishiocaust and deaths from all causes on both sides during C.R. Two," he pointed out, "there were more people on campus at the end of the Riot than at the beginning. So?" And blandly he turned up his palms.
But less egregious, and to me more interesting, were his opinions of Harold Bray, Grand-Tutorhood in general, and Graduation — all which matters, like ethics and politics, he first declared with a smile to be "out of his line" — suitable enough for small talk, but not worth serious attention.
"I myself am a Graduate, you know," he said.
"You!"
"That amuses you. Nevertheless, I am. Even your friend Bray agrees — not that that matters. And I verified it on WESCAC before I was demoted: there's the real Grand Tutor, of course."
I coughed on my beer. "WESCAC?"
"Certainly." He was sorry, he said coolly, that he could not second my own claim to that distinction — how he knew of it I couldn't imagine. He granted that in many respects my history paralled that of the Grand-Tutorial Ideal as abstracted by WESCAC, and if I had happened to be Virginia Hector's son by the GILES, there could be little doubt of my authenticity. But seeing I was not, the best he could say for Max was that my keeper — in his isolation, bitterness, and advancing years — had gone soft-headed and groomed me for some preposterous scheme of redress. Max being in his opinion incapable of sustained deception — other than self-deception — Eierkopf concluded that in all likelihood Max really believed me to be a Grand Tutor, and would even more so if he knew of the GILES incident.
"But don't forget," he said, "you have only Spielman's word for it that you came from the Tower Hall tapelift, for example. I remember hearing stories about a crazy Schwarzer finding a baby, but Max could have made up those stories — so could the Schwarzer have — or you might not be the same child." He smiled. "Or you might have been EATen yourself, ja?"
"I've thought of that."
"So. But anyhow you aren't Virginia Hector's child. And all this AIM business! Nobody knows how WESCAC's programmed itself since those days, or whether the criteria it reads out for Grand-Tutorhood are actually the ones it would go by if somebody tried to enter the Belly — it might be fooling us! Or talking a different language."
I began to feel dizzy, melancholy, and yet stubborn, as always when the uncertainty of my position was analyzed.
"Who says it's the Grand Tutor's job to straighten out the Quiet Riot anyhow?'" Eierkopf went on cheerfully. "Only Spielman, he's such a big Moishian pacifist! Did Enos Enoch worry about varsity politics? Unto the Chancellor that which is the Chancellor's; unto the Founder that which is the Founder's. And Scapulas says old Maios fought in the front lines in the Lykeionian riots, a regular alma-matriot."
Uneasily I declared, "I haven't decided yet what I'm going to do. Max is my advisor, but he's not my keeper any more. I'm pleased to hear you don't believe in this Bray fellow, at least."