He picked glumly at a pimple. "I got a thing about mirrors."
"Let Dr. Sear be your mirror, then," I suggested. "If there's anybody who sees the other side of things, it's Dr. Sear." To Greene's objection that his previous connection with Dr. Sear had been profitless, I replied that this time his aim would not be therapy, but sophistication, and that for Knowledge of the Campus Dr. Sear was reputed to have no equal. I repeated Dr. Sear's observation in the Amphitheater: that while Commencement no doubt involved vision, it had nothing to do with illusions, which must be got rid of absolutely.
Greene swallowed a vitamin-pill and scratched his head. "I don't know."
"Then you ought to find out," I said, and urged him further to drop in on the doctor immediately, as I would need no more chauffeuring for the present: when I'd fixed the clock I meant to call on Chancellor Rexford, just across the Mall, to see what might be done about the Boundary Dispute; thereafter I'd most probably stop at the Infirmary myself to seek Dr. Sear's interpretation of my third and fourth tasks, which I did not clearly understand; I could meet Greene there if he wished to assist me further.
"Hey, that's where Miss Stacey works, isn't it?" I affirmed with a sigh that Mrs. Stoker was indeed Dr. Sear's chief assistant, and wondered whether her presence — which I'd forgotten to take into account — would preclude or assure the success of my little project for him. He was all enthusiasm for it now: vowed to cleave to Dr. Sear night and day and clasp to heart his every word. "I'll tell him you sent me," he said. "Better yet, you write me a note — like I'm your student, sort of." The idea delighted him, as if he were indeed a child given special permission to leave the classroom; with little hope now of results I borrowed his ball-point pen and scribbled an explanation to Dr. Sear on the only available paper, the back of his spurious diploma. Seeing Bray's inscription again, I could not resist amending it to read Passèd are the Kindergarteners — - into First Grade.
"You sure you don't want some good old New Tammany know-how up there in the Clock-tower?" But though he cheerfully insisted he'd like nothing better than to "take 'er apart and see what makes 'er tick," he was clearly impatient to be off. I declined the offer. He roared away then with a "Yi-hoo!" and spray of gravel, saluted a mailman whom he evidently took for some professor-general, and turned onto a path marked PEDESTRIANS ONLY, which however quickly cleared before his powerful machine.
I showed my ID-card to an attendant in the marble lobby of Tower Hall and to another at a lift marked belfry, to which I was directed. This latter, like the horn-rimmed man at the orientation lecture, consulted a clipboard and discovered (to our mutual surprise) that thanks to WESCAC and Chancellor Rexford I was among those persons authorized to ascend into the clockworks — the list of names was not a large one.
"Why can't everyone go up there?" I asked him. He wrinkled his forehead, smiled cautiously, and instructed me to push the Up-button when I was ready; the elevator made no stops between lobby and Belfry. I shrugged and pressed. The ascent was long, or the lift slow; my ears clicked, clicked again, and then the automatic doors opened on a formidable scene. The Belfry was floored and walled in rough cement, grease-stained and inscribed with the names of visitors and curious messages; the sides were open to the air above a breast-high wall, and afforded a splendid prospect of Great Mall — on which, however, it was difficult to concentrate, for what seized eye, ear, and nose was the huge machinery of the clockworks that almost filled the place. It seemed essentially a mesh of gearwheels of every size, from bright brass ones small as saucers to greased black cast-iron monsters, apparently motionless, of which only the topmost arc thrust through the floor; their shafts turned or were turned by drums of steel cable that disappeared through roof and floor. Great bells hung about, the smallest as large as a feed-bucket; their clappers were mounted outside them and connected by rods to various parts of the machinery. Everything clacked, clicked, creaked, and whirred together; rocker-arms and escapements teetered, governors whirled, circuit-boxes cracked and thudded, the middle-sized gears turned leisurely and the smaller ones spun into a shining blur. The place smelled of oil and iron despite the cool air that breezed through at that height.
"Halte dich dazu!" Dr. Eierkopf cried as the doors parted. I didn't see him at once, perched on Croaker's shoulders near a worktable to my left, but recognized the piped accent and could translate the tone of his command, if not its words. The spectacle anyhow held me for the second it took to see what I must beware of: the shaft of a great pendulum, fixed near the ceiling, swung noiselessly through a slot in the floor half a meter from the lift-sill; it rushed by even as Eierkopf spoke, hung weightily an instant, and rushed back.
"So: der Ziegenbübe." Eierkopf squinted through his eyeglasses; Croaker grinned and grunted. "Step here then. Look sharp." As I made my way to them between the wall and the pendulum-slot, Dr. Eierkopf had Croaker place him on a high stool. The great Frumentian then bounced up and down, fetched up his shirt (he was dressed now in his usual garb, the gray cotton sweatsuit worn by varsity athletes, with NTC across chest and shoulders) and pointed happily to his belly, where I saw a livid pattern of fresh-looking scars below his navel.
"He wants you to congratulate him on his Certification," Dr. Eierkopf mocked. "You want evidence that Dr. Bray's a faker? There you are." Bray it seemed had left the Belfry not a quarter-hour past, having visited it to make an official inspection of the clockworks, and before proceeding to the Chancellor's mansion had Certified both Croaker and Dr. Eierkopf.
"Both of you?" I could not conceal my incredulity. Dr. Eierkopf agreed that Commencement Gate, whatever and wherever it might be, could not imaginably be wide enough to admit contraries: Entelechus's Second and Third Logical Laws forbade the possibility. That he himself was a Candidate, if not indeed a Graduate, he needed no Grand Tutor to tell him: Scapulas's motto Graduation is a state of mind had long hung on the walls of Observatory and Belfry; it was a conclusion he had reached, like Scapulas, by inexorable logic, and confirmed to his satisfaction on WESCAC. He had explained it politely to Bray out of deference to the administration in which he hoped to recoup his former high position, not out of any reverence for the man himself; and the self-styled Grand Tutor had had the good sense merely to write Q.E.D. under that motto, making it a certificate of Eierkopf's Candidacy.
"What else could he do?" Dr. Eierkopf smiled over his gums. "Even Scapulas was a brute compared to me." Which made it the more absurd, he scoffed, that Bray should also Certify the shoulders, so to speak, on which the head perched. Scornfully he quoted Bray's quotation from the Founder's Scrolclass="underline" "Consider the beasts of the woods, that never fail." Whatever Enos Enoch might have meant by that advice, He surely wouldn't have Certified an animal who couldn't even read the Certification. But Bray, apparently determined to pass absolutely everyone, had first translated the Certificate of Candidacy into a Frumentian pictogram (a matriculation and procreation symbol, so he'd claimed) and then, somehow gaining Croaker's confidence, had engraved it on the black man's belly. Eierkopf himself was unfamiliar with the emblem; whether the bearer understood its significance was questionable, but he was most pathetically proud to display it in spite of the discomfort he no doubt suffered.
I did not denounce these Certifications, but concurred with Dr. Eierkopf's sentiments regarding the Certifier. Croaker's incisions certainly did look tender; however, I could discern no subscription of any sort on Eierkopf's Scapulist motto, which hung over a worktable littered with files, lenses, grindstones, calipers, micrometers, high-intensity lamps, and cartons of eggs.