GILES, SON OF WESCAC
At once, and in perfect confidence, I answered yes — - or rather, affirmed what my father was declaring.
DO YOU WISH TO PASS
Triumphantly at this query too I pressed the right-hand button, for though I knew it to be held in certain quads that he who seeks Commencement Gate has perforce not found it, nor can the while he seeks, three instant and simultaneous counter-considerations overbalanced that one: first, it appeared that the Finals were designed for a series of affirmative responses — and aptly, for what could be more affirmative than Commencement? Second (and thus), those same aforementioned esoterics held that he is passed who knows himself passed, and so my yes was in fact a declaration of achievement more than an acknowledgment of desire. Finally, alerted by the curious sense of the preliminary question (whose function, I saw now, was just that alerting), I was not blind to the double meaning of this last one; and comfortable as the Belly oddly was, I did indeed wish to pass now through its exit and calm the anxious student body.
Lo, as if to confirm that third significance, when I pressed yes the bar disappeared, a new rumbling commenced round about, and the floor-walls seemed to pulse in slow waves towards the far end of the chamber. I saw a flicker there, heard a cry of many voices, and understood that the exit-port must be enlarging in the manner of the entry. I scrambled for it on hands and knees, assisted by the undulations; the crowd had seen the portal opening and pressed now nearer with flaming torches, by whose light I saw rise up before me, just inside the exit, the foe I had thought EATen!
Choked with dismay I cried, "Flunk you!"
"And Pass you, sir!" Bray exclaimed, as though joyously. "Pass you to the end of terms! Take these, Grand Tutor of the Western Campus, and go to the head of your class!"
He pressed into my hand what turned out to be my ID-card and Assignment-list.
"You admit you're a fraud!" I challenged him. Outside, the crowd commenced to chant again: "Give us the Goat! All the way with Bray!" Knees to knees now on the floor, facing each other across the exit, we shouldered against the outward-pressing waves. "How come you're not EATen?"
"I'm not a fraud, sir!" he said happily, and even wiped an eye. "Oh, pass you, pass you!" He owed his preservation, he declared, to the fact of WESCAC's having chosen him, some time past, for the work now all but accomplished: the role of proph-prof, foil, and routed antigiles. As John the Bursar had been necessary to declare Enos Enoch's matriculation and administer to him the rites of enrollment, so he Bray had been appointed not only to Certify my passage of the Finals (which he had done, he said, on the documents now in my hand), but to pretend to Grand-Tutorhood himself, in order that I might drive him out at last from Great Mall in proof of my authenticity. "I don't believe you," I said.
"You never did, pass your heart!" He would have embraced me, but I drew back. "You weren't supposed to — until now, of course." He went on: "Every one of my Certifications is false, and by failing all the people I pass, you prove your own passèdness. WESCAC spared me from EATing so that you could turn me over to the crowd — either now or after you've presented your ID-card to Reginald Hector. Then (you don't mind my suggesting this, do you, sir? Your father's suggestion, actually) the Grand-Tutorial thing to do would be to stop the lynching and merely expel me from the College forever." He motioned towards the porthole. "Shall we get on with it?"
Plausible as was his explanation (indeed, how else account for his not being EATen?), and sweet the prospect of accomplishing his fall, I was riven with doubts and perplexities. To reconceive him so abruptly, from foe into accomplice of my destiny, was beyond my managing, the more for the Stokerish air of his invitation, which seemed to me fraught with guile. Did he tempt me, then, like Stoker, in order to be refused? And if so, was it refusal that would flunk me, or refusal to refuse? The Abyss yawned under me, as in the Assembly-Before-the-Grate; I resisted it by yielding, not to the temptation to denounce him, but to an especially strong contraction of the chamber-walls, which virtually ejected me, headlong, through the port. It winked shut instantly behind, like an eye, or the drawstrung mouth of Virginia Hector's purse, slung over my shoulder. Even as I picked myself up — from a small grassplot luckily situated under the aperture — the crowd pressed to me, torches in hand, and lights from a mobile Telerama-unit flooded the scene.
"Hooray for Bray!" they seemed to be shouting. I had time for one glance behind me; he had contrived by some means to remain in the Belly. Then the vanguard was upon me, laughing and cheering; my heart quailed. But it was in victory they hoist me, stick in one hand, papers in the other, to their shoulders. Not until a microphone was thrust at me, and a reporter asked whether the Goat-Boy was indeed EATen for good and all, did I remember what face I wore. Chagrin! But I thought better than to proclaim the truth from so shaky a platform.
"All's well," I told the questioner — and was pleased to hear my voice amplified from the Telerama-vehicle. "The false Tutor's in the Belly; he'll trouble this campus no more."
There was great applause. Handfuls of confetti and streamers of toilet-tissue filled the air; klaxons and bugles sounded; undergraduate young men in ROTC uniforms seized and kissed the nearest co-eds — who willingly submitted, standing on one foot and raising the other behind them.
"Take me to your former chancellor," I exhorted them, "and wait for me outside his office. There'll be a surprise, I promise!"
What I designed, of course, was to present to ex-Chancellor Hector my ID-card, in fulfillment of the final article of my Assignment (since Mother was not herself, and among Grandfather's sinecures was the directorship of New Tammany's idle Office of Commencement); having secured his official endorsement that my Assignment was complete and my ID-card in order, I would unmask myself to him and to the student body, display my credentials, proclaim my indisputable Grand-Tutorhood, and then drive Bray from Great Mall if his expulsion seemed appropriate. The throng took up my promise with a right good will, brandished their torches exultantly now and hymned out the Varsity Anthem as they bore me forth:
Dear old New Tammany,
The University
On thee depends…
Through I approved neither the narrow alma-matriotism of that sentiment nor the general notion that the weal of studentdom was politically contingent, I could not but be moved, in those circumstances, by the fitness of their appeal, directed as it seemed not to their college but to me:
Teach us thy Answers bright;
Lead us from flunkèd Night;
Commence us to the Light
When our School-Term ends!
7
Reginald Hector's several offices — as Commencement Director, Executive Secretary of the Philophilosophical Fund, and Board Chairman of his brother's reference-book cartel — were housed, along with his living-quarters, in a smaller version of Lucius Rexford's Light House, just across Great Mall. As it had originally served the latter's purpose, it was now appropriately called the Old Chancellor's Mansion. Inappropriately, however, its white-brick facade and gracious windows were lit more brightly than those of its larger counterpart: either the Power-Plant trouble was localized, or Lucky Rexford had altered his ways indeed! The respect still felt by New Tammanians for their old professor-general was evidenced by the fact that whereas half a hundred guards had not kept them out of Tower Hall, the sight of one — a white-helmeted and — gloved ROTCMP — was enough to halt my bearers a respectful way from the porch. The fellow was armed, of course; yet surely it was not his rifle (held anyhow at Parade Rest) that stayed them, but their esteem for the man whose door he ceremonially protected. Much impressed at this contradiction of Max's contempt, and Dr. Sear's, for the former Chancellor, I asked to be set down, declared again into a row of microphones that important announcements would soon be forthcoming, perhaps from Reginald Hector as well as myself, and insisted that no one accompany me into the building. As I strode porchwards (gimplessly as possible) campus patrolmen assembled to contain the crowd — which I was gratified to see make no effort to push past them. A number of photographers and journalism-majors were rude enough to press after me up the walk, and though I respected their professional persistence, I was pleased when the military doorman, having inspected my ID-card and saluted me, obliged them to remain without.