How to get to Main Detention? My first impulse was to look up and down the mall for Peter Greene. Had I appreciated the size and populousness of New Tammany I'd never have bothered — but I did not, and espied him at once. Four elms up and one over, he was doing calisthenics on the grass, almost the only person in sight. A kind of stationary jog: I heard him panting "Right! Right! Right!" in rhythm with his step as I approached, not alone to mark the cadence, it turned out, but in some wise to reassure himself as well; it was in fact the motto he'd lent me at Turnstile-time, reaccented for its present use:
"I'malright! I'malright! I'malright!"
It developed, however — when I saluted him and hove in range of his working eye — that he was not all right. From the Assembly-Before-the-Grate, where I'd last seen him, he had proceeded dutifully to a first-period lecture in a course very close to his concerns, Problems of Modern Marriage, hoping to learn something useful; for though he was still resolved to put by Miss Sally Ann and pay court to Anastasia, he was much afflicted with bad conscience and wanted to satisfy himself that his union really was unsalvageable — and that his wife was chiefly to blame for its disintegration. But he'd "plumb fergot," he told me, how tiresome it was to be a schoolboy. As the lecturer (on closed-circuit Telerama) had droned on about such matters as "contemporary role-confusion and attendant anxieties," he had first fallen asleep, then diverted himself by making spitballs and carving initials in his desktop, and finally left the building on the pretext of visiting the toilet.
"It's over my head," he complained to me. "Burn if it ain't!" How ever he would pass without going to school, he confessed he had no idea, any more than he knew how he could live without the woman he loved but could not live with. "Weren't for Bray's diploma I'd swear I was flunked, interpersonal-relationwise," he admitted. "Figured I'd come out and get me a breath of air, take a little pill, try 'er again."
I could not discern whether by The Woman He Loved But etc. he meant his wife or Anastasia; I did not inquire. Indeed, for all my good fortune at finding him so readily, it was with some misgiving that I asked him to transport me to Main Detention, for I feared he'd hold me to my promise of intercession with Anastasia's mother. But though he was delighted by the errand and "the chance to get to know Stacey's family better" — as if Maurice Stoker were her father! — he made no mention of that mad embassy; it did his spirits a campus of good, he declared, to learn that I too had cut my first class. Much of his eagerness to oblige me, I presently observed, stemmed from his pride in a new motorcycle he'd acquired just after registration, and had yet to try out on the open road. He showed me it, parked nearby: an astonishing contraption, all chromium plated, larger-engined than any of Stoker's, and equipped with every manner of accessory: headlights, fog-lights, spotlights, signal-lights, Telerama, air-horns that blasted the opening phrase of Alma Mater Dolorosa, a liquor cabinet, three dozen dials and control-knobs, an air-conditioned sidecar, and upholstery of striped fur. It was so new he'd not had time even to remove the mirrors (of which there were half a dozen); they were merely turned away from him. He bobbed his head happily.
"Pisscutter, ain't she?"
I agreed that it was an extraordinary machine, if that was what he meant. It proved a shocking fast one, too, and happily so loud (thanks to a lever marked Cut-Out) that he couldn't speak of Anastasia or anything else during the dash to Main Detention. Greene knew the route, and by means of simple gestures which we agreed upon before we started, I was able to distinguish for him between the few actual stop-signs along the way and the many he imagined he saw, and to function as his rear-view mirror also. We were halted at the somber gate of the outside wall by a uniformed guard, recognizable as one of Stoker's by his beard and dog, though sootless. I requested an audience with Max, identifying myself and explaining that I had Chancellor Rexford's authorization to go anywhere on the campus. The guard prepared to unleash the dog.
"Hold on!" Greene cried. "Pete Greene's my name: 'Keep-Our-Forests Greene,' you know? This here's a pal of mine. Look at my ID-card."
To prove that his card was not forged or stolen he wrote out a matching signature, this one on a personal check payable to the bearer, and insisted the guard retain it "as proof." Before this evidence the man relented and telephoned a companion inside the walls, who, given a similar affidavit of our sincerity, ushered us to the Warden's Office. For all my unease in those bleak courts and gray stone corridors, I might have voiced my doubt about the correctness of Greene's procedure; but the sound of Maurice Stoker's laugh distracted me. It issued from an inner office into the empty outer one where we were told to wait until the Warden was finished dictating letters to his secretary, and did not sound terribly businesslike. A female voice said something indistinct. The guard winked and left us. Peter Greene — chuckling, blinking, blushing — supposed aloud that a fellow with a stick with a mirror on its point could peer over the transom without being seen, if he had a mind to and no thing about mirrors. I didn't reply. More impatient at the delay than annoyed or intrigued by what Stoker might be up to, I tapped my sandal-toes and frowned at the floor-plan of the building, framed on one wall. It revealed Main Detention to be much larger in fact than I had supposed, for in addition to the single floor at ground-level there were three successively smaller ones beneath. The ground floor, as best I could discern, was given over mainly to adminstrative offices and living-quarters for the staff, but included combination detention-and-counseling facilities for two sorts of mild offenders as welclass="underline" a large exercise-room for loafers, procrastinators, and students who refused to choose a major or whose transcripts showed straight C's; and a courtyard for the mentally defective and the invincibly wrong-headed. On the floor below were detained four classes of miscreants: first, students who spent their evenings amusing themselves with classmates of the opposite sex instead of studying, and professors who turned their sabbatical leaves into honeymoons or participated in faculty wife-swapping parties; second, those who abused their dining-hall privileges, scheduled more than the normal credit-load, or stayed awake all night reading; third, those who read and researched but would neither teach nor publish, and contrariwise those who spent so much time publishing and lecturing that none was left over for reading and research; and fourth, professors who browbeat their students and students who circulated angry petitions against their professors. The second subterranean floor was divided into three cell-blocks, smaller than the ones above but like them containing chambers for both students and instructors: one block was reserved for anti-intellectuals, insubordinates, and those who refused to sign the College loyalty-oath; a second was for textbook writers who published revised editions to undercut the used-book market, padders of essay examinations, proliferators of unnecessary footnotes and research, and unscrupulous dispensers of grants-in-aid; the third was itself divided into sub-blocks: one (where I guessed Max was held) for murderers, rapists, extorters of answers by duress, and destroyers of library-books; another for droppers of courses and leapers from dormitory windows; the third for faggots, dykes, and teachers employed in the same departments from which they held degrees. The bottom floor, though smallest in area, was most complexly laid out: in wedge-shaped sections around a central sinkhole were incarcerated (clockwise from the top of the floor-plan) "make-out artists" (sic); "apple-polishers and brownies"; purveyors of "cribs" and "ponies"; impostors and charlatans; sellers of rank, tenure, absentee-excuses, and false ID-cards; users of academic distinction for social, political, or mercenary ends; cribbers and plagiarists; malicious faculty advisors and dormitory counselors; organizers of panty-raids, interfraternity brawls, and departmental cliques; and what the chart called "bullslingers and snowmen." In rings around the sinkhole itself were ranked those who'd tattled on classmates, roommates, or colleagues; who'd given classified military-science data to hostile colleges; and who'd exploited the naïveté of exchange-students or visiting professors. Finally, poised as it seemed over the sinkhole itself, was a single cell reserved for any who undid in flunkèd wise his professor, department-head, dean, chancellor, or — most heinous treason! — his Grand Tutor.