Neither did the guards: Peter Greene they held from the crowd (who were inspired to hang us both), on the ground that no formal charge of rape had yet been brought against him; but they only grinned and stood by as I was beaten with my own stick, my black purse pulled like a death-mask over my head without regard for its contents, and the tip of the shophar thrust into my rump. No matter: I yearned for the end; welcomed the hemp onto my neck; stepped off the sidecar before they could push me. A vile cheer rose; I heard Stoker laugh at my strangling. "Blow it!" someone yelled — and I thought I might have, so fiercely did I strain to die; indeed there came a far-off shrieking whistle, blast upon blast from Founder's Hill; a sound I knew. As I let go reins and breath and all I heard a man cry, "Founder help us; we'll all be EATen!" And another, almost matter-of-factly: "It's the end of the University."
SECOND REEL
1
Students pass away; not so studentdom, until the campus itself shall perish. And at that term of terms, when the student body is no more, shall its mind not persist, in other universities than ours?
I couldn't at once adjudge, from where I woke beyond the noose, whether the EAT-whistle had blown for my sole succumbing or all studentdom's, as my chamber was isolate except from the cry and reek of fellow flunks. But that I was in Nether Campus I could not doubt: the heat, the shrieks and mad laughter, the stink — all attested it. I lay in foul straw in an iron stall with padded walls, lit by the red-orange glow from a port in the ceiling — the one apparent aperture. That I should abide there among the flunked forever I did not question: I had failed everything, everyone, in every sense; was as flunked as any other of Bray's passees; had flunked myself as I had flunked them; was flunked at the outset for craving ardently to pass, just as that patch-eyed Nikolayan had been selfish in his yen for perfect selflessness. "Passage is failure": I saw now in my black box what truth was in that remark, and prepared to suffer till the end of terms.
Two things alone surprised me: that the old West-Campus images of the mind's fate after death should turn out, evidently, to be literal truth instead of vivid metaphor — real iron, real dung, real fire and screams, and elsewhere, I presumed, real harps and passèd madrigals! — and that my punishment, so far at least, was in strictly human wise. I had been raised in straiter stalls than this, had slept for years in urinouser peat; surely the Founder knew I must find these quarters less loathesome than another human would. Was it that under the aspect of eternity all punishments were equal, being infinite every one? Or that in His wisdom the Founder chose so goat a lot for mine the smartlier to sting me for playing at human Tutorhood? No matter, these or any things: it was finished. My neck hurt; otherwise I was comfortable, sweetly tired in every limb. Naked, besmeared, I rested in the black heat and balmy absoluteness of my fall. I had failed all, then, passed nothing! Relief — from aspiration, doubt, responsibility, fear of failure — it flooded through me, drowned remorse and dread, swept me into the most delicious sleep.
Hours later — semesters, centuries — I woke to earnest conversation and realized I'd been hearing two male voices for some time.
"He wouldn't!"
"Excuse, Classmate sir: wouldhood!"
"Indeed, I think he would not…"
"Impossibleness not!"
"You truly believe he would, my boy?"
"Yes. No! Bah, I give it up!"
The latter voice, its accent and locutions, was exotic, much in the matter of that same Nikolayan defector's. The former — exotic too, but gentle, old, and wondrously familiar — was Max's. Had they been Shafted, then, and was there company in Dunce's College? I opened my eyes: I was on a bed now, of sorts — a sweet straw tick on an iron-wire platform — in a chamber better lighted than the one before, though no less warm. The floor and ceiling were of concrete, and the wall to which my steel-pipe bedframe was attached; the other walls were comprised of parallel vertical bars in the manner of detention-cells I'd read of. It was, after all, Max and Leonid Alexandrov I heard: they faced each other on the cell-floor, gesticulating as they argued.
"What about the other question?" Max demanded.
"Same like, turned around," Leonid said: "Would go."
"Maios didn't, when he had a chance to."
"Was vanity, then. Playing heroness."
"Playing! He died for it!"
"More famous so! Big advertise, name in historybooks!"
I feared to speak, lest the vision of my keeper vanish; for aught I knew, dear dreams might be my torment. But they saw me stir; Max hurried to me; real tears dropped into his beard and onto mine; material the arms that hugged me, mortal the hand that felt my brow, and I learned I was alive, in Main Detention. Leonid, though we'd met only once before, embraced me also, in the Nikolayan manner, and seemed as pleased as Max to see me wake. They had become friends, it appeared — as were too the Nikolayan and his former adversary Peter Greene, who saluted me glumly from the next cell!
"Thank the Founder you're okay!" Max cried. His late reserve with me was gone; beside my cot he closed his eyes and thumped his forehead against my chest.
"Nothing's okay," grumbled Peter Greene, and was cheerily bid by Classmate Alexandrov to go flunk himself.
"I didn't mean him," Greene said. "Y'know durn well what I mean."
I didn't, nor cared just then to learn. Enough to be alive and on campus, however incarcerate and disgraced. Responsibility! Remorse! Dishonor! I welcomed their sting now as evidence that, among my other failures, I had failed to pass away.
There is no time in Main Detention — under Stoker's wardenship, not even night and day. We slept or woke irregularly without regard to the lights, which went on and off at unpredictable intervals. Meals were served at any hour, apparently, sometimes in such close succession that one had no appetite, sometimes at so great a lapse of time that chants of protest rose from the detained. One had the impression that there was in theory a fixed routine, which however was whimsically administered: we would be routed out for exercise after "lunch," say, and find ourselves doing push-ups under the stars; or we might go for (what seemed like) days without leaving our cells, then be sent to the prison shops or reading-room for so long a stretch that we'd sleep and eat upon the work- or library-tables. In this disorder I saw Stoker's hand, as in our random assignment to cells. Main Detention itself, as I'd gathered from that chart in Stoker's office, was scrupulously laid out as to the location among its tiers of the several sorts of offenders; there was evidence, even, of a moral logic in its architecture. But in practice we were assorted by no discernible plan: I for example had been taken from the noose at Stoker's direction and detained for impersonating a Grand Tutor; the cells for that species of error were in the fourth block of the third, or bottom, tier, counting downwards; yet I had waked first in an observation-chamber for the criminally mad and later in the company of an alleged murderer, an alleged spy, and an alleged rapist (such was the charge against Peter Greene, who after reviving from Dr. Sear's sedation had on the evening of my fall tracked Anastasia into an alleyway behind the Old Chancellor's Mansion and there, by his own dour admission, flung My Ladyship upon the pavement and forced her virtue "redskin style"), no two of whom belonged in the same stratum. Moreover, at each return from work or exercise there was no telling where one would be confined, or with whom: I might be lodged alone or crammed into a cell with ten others in an empty tier; my companions might be fellow-impostors — false dons and pretended sophomores — or some of the many grafters, gamblers, pornographers, and prostitute co-eds detained under Lucius Rexford's far-reaching program of campus reform (of which more presently), or any other combination of the flunked.