"Well, hum," Mother said, going to the console. "Founder's Scroll, is it? Is that the title?"
"Yes'm. Founder's Scroll."
Still flustered by my kiss, she fiddled with her hairpins and the switches of the CACAFILE."…o-l-l," she murmured, pressing buttons. "Who did you say the author was, dear?"
I hesitated. "The Founder."
She did not: "…n-d-e-r. No first name?"
"Just one name, Mother."
The CACAFILE seemed to purr at her touch. "Please step into the next room," she said, still in her office voice. "The volume or volumes you called for will be delivered to the Circulation Desk in approximately one minute."
As soon as I took her arm the manner vanished; she minced and colored like a shy schoolgirl. The CACAFILE-console gave a little snarl, then lapsed into its previous torpid blink.
"Let's go to the Circulation Desk, Mother."
"Oh. Well."
But at the empty Scroll-case we were arrested by a double commotion: from the Circulation Desk, next door to the Catalogue Room, feminine squeals as alarmed as merry; from behind us, at the door we'd first entered through, an angry male voice: "There you are, flunk you!"
A half-dozen scholars in the spokes of the card-file raised their heads.
"Hello, Daddy," Mother said placidly.
It was indeed Reginald Hector, but much changed: the fringe of hair around his bald pate was grown shoulder-long; his body, that had been sleek, was brown and wiry, and wrapped in fleece of Angora; his feet were sandaled, and under his right arm (apparently hurt, for he clasped it with his left) was a goat-herd's crook! This last he tried to raise with his better arm as she approached, and my surprise gave way to apprehension. I put the case between us.
"P.-G.!" A young dark-spectacled woman rushed in from the Circulation Room with a double handful of long white shreds. Behind her, from the desk-chute, more of the same blew forth, like paper streamers from a fan. "Thank the Founder you're here, P.-G.! Look at this!"
I recognized her as Professor-General Hector's receptionist, now out of uniform and evidently employed by the Library, perhaps in Mother's former capacity. She showed no surprise at her previous employer's costume, whether because she'd seen it before or because of her present agitation. The "P.-G." paused and scowled, crook high. Mother clucked her tongue, nowise discomposed. The young woman held out the tangled skein and wailed: "It's the Founder's Scroll!"
The ex-Chancellor clutched his ailing arm. "The Dunce you say!"
"A-plus," Mother affirmed.
"The CACAFILE's gone crazy!" the young woman cried. "All these months the Scroll's been lost in it somewhere, and now it's spitting it out in ribbons!"
There was consternation among the scholars: one snatched a handful of the shreds, examined them, and groaned; others raced to the Cataloguing Office to pound on its locked door, and yet others to the Circulation Desk, where they clenched and hopped in vain to see the wisdom of the ages shredding forth.
"You!" my grandfather roared, thrusting a fistful of tatters under my nose. I closed my eyes, nodded, and took a mouthful of the ruins.
"What's he doing?" the receptionist shrieked.
Mother smiled benignly and said, as if interrogated by a library-clerk: "Just browsing, thanks." At the same time a dim memory of our readings in the hemlock must have stirred in her, for she took it upon herself to feed me more of the Scroll. Though I'd had no lunch to speak of and was quite famished, the old vellum was bitter on my tongue, like dung dried in the sun of desert centuries — quite apart from the anguish I flavored it with, compounded of doubt and desolation. For either my insight of a few moments earlier was false, in which case I was as much in the dark as ever, or else it was true, in which case I was failing by my own terms. What was the use of restoring those shreds to the Scroll-case? I was not blind to the possibility that failing all, on my own terms as well as WESCAC's, might be the deeper sense of my answer; that is to say, that the failure truly equal to passage might be the failure to understand truly that Failure is Passage. Even as I chewed, that proposition flickered through my head as on a dim translux but did not console me. No, I was as snarled and wrecked as the Founder's Scrolclass="underline" never mind P.-G. Hector's crook (now belaboring my shoulders) and the alarums of bystanders; never mind that the lights began to flicker again, as they had upon my spring-term disaster, bespeaking another crisis at the Power Lines; never mind that the College was in anarchy, that lunatics and flunkees ranged the quads — all I could think of, strangely enough, was My Ladyship. I envisioned her beneath — no, atop — Peter Greene, or Maurice Stoker, or Eblis Eierkopf, or Lucky Rexford, in some lubricious exhibition on the Living-Room dais. No, no, after all it was none of them; or having serviced them to exhaustion, now she stood, slack-mouthed with love; expelled their mingled seed with a tricky jerk, and stretched forth her arms to her fated, fateful lover, who rose up glitter-eyed upon the dais and enfolded her body in his hard black cloak. And I was no longer jealous, no, I was relieved; joyous, even, for her sake, when I heard the muffled cry of her delight and knew she was infused for good and all with the germ of Passage. I wanted to die.
"You can't eat that!" a scholar shouted, clawing at the strips that hung like pasta from my jaws.
"He can shove it!" my grandfather snapped. "Independence, he calls it!" He grabbed at his wrapper. "Where's my aides?" he demanded of his former receptionist. "Get this flunkèd hair-shirt off me!"
"Weren't they with you at the barns, sir?" she said.
"Oh, the Dunce, I forgot I sent 'em out there." Suddenly defensive, he glared at me and asked how the flunk a man could mix a batch of goat-dip by himself and keep his eye on a young buck like Triple-T at the same time. At mention of that name tears sprang to my eyes; I swallowed a great cud of Scroll; the rest fell to the floor and was scrabbled up by scholars. For a moment my despair gave place to a sweeter if no less painful emotion.
"Tommy's Tommy's Tom? Have you been with the herd, Grandpa?"
"Don't Grandpa me, Dunce flunk you! If that buck hadn't banged up my arm — "
He would crook me a harder one despite his infirmity; I lowered my head to take the blow and die like Redfearn's Tom, grandsire of the buck he spoke of. There were cries from receptionist and bystanders, quite a number of whom had been attracted by the disturbance.