For some semesters, it seemed, among its host of peacetime chores, WESCAC had served the Department of Animal Husbandry's Artificial Breeding Laboratory by analyzing the genetic characteristics and histories of all their livestock and selecting optimum matches for the long-range breeding goals of several species — much in the way it paired dormitory roommates and counseled newlyweds. So comparable indeed were these activities that Eierkopf wished to combine and extend them. The immediate objective of the Cum Laude Project seemed innocent enough: WESCAC would abstract from thousands of historical and biographical texts a sort of quintessential type of the ideal West-Campus Graduate, or a number of such ideal types; it would then formulate a genetic and psychological analysis of these models, and with reference to the similar analyses of every New Tammany undergraduate (already in its memory), it would indicate which young men, paired with which young women, could most quickly breed to some approximation of the ideal, and in how many generations. The actual mating, to be sure, would be voluntary and legalized by marriage (at least in the pilot experiment): the whole operation would amount to no more than a sophisticated and programmatic Courtship Counseling, already in its simpler form a popular WESCAC service, and should tend towards improvements in the student body of a sort no right-minded person could object to: better physical and mental health, higher IQ's, intellectual earnestness, Enochian humility, and the like. But along with "Operation Sheepskin," as this eugenical analysis was called, there was initiated a more radical and truly noctic series of experiments called "Operation Ramshorn," which suggested quite clearly to Max what his former subordinate was really up to. WESCAC's facilities in the Livestock Research Labs were so implemented that it could achieve a pre-selected eugenical objective almost without student assistance. A small sheep-barn was constructed to its specifications and stocked with fecund Dorset ewes; WESCAC was supplied with their genetic histories and with phials of semen from a variety of rams, and was given management also of every operation from feed-mixing to lamb-incubation: its instructions were to develop a ram short of neck and light of plate, with compact shoulders, a deep rack, firm-muscled loins, well-fleshed legs, and a fine short fleece — but with no horns at all. Left then to itself, WESCAC fastened upon the ewes it required and impregnated them in their stalls with what semen it chose; its automatic implements took blood-tests, gave hormone-and-vitamin injections, adjusted feed-mixtures, exercise-times, and incubator-heats; it tapped certain of the male lambs for new sperm when they came of age, bred a second generation and a third, and (at just about the time Max first wandered to the NTC goat-farm) turned out exactly the desired product: a ram whose single shortcoming — which one assumed would be easily remedied in further experiments — was that like mules and certain other hybrids it was sterile.
"And don't forget," Max said, shaking his head, "while it was making love to the sheep it was running the whole College too, from teaching plane geometry to working out the payroll. That's some WESCAC, that is!"
Now, livestock was still managed much more cheaply and efficiently by knowledgeable students of animal husbandry, and would doubtless remain in their charge. The significance of "Operation Ramshorn," Max explained, lay not in the fact that WESCAC had fed and bred the sheep itself, instead of doing merely the eugenical brainwork — though goodness knew this fact was ominous enough when juxtaposed with "Operation Sheepskin"! It was two other aspects of the experiment that appalled my keeper, and made him not unhappy to be cut off from further news of the Cum Laude Project. First, a more sophisticated version of "Ramshorn," this one involving rats, had already been programmed with WESCAC's assistance. Asked by a cereal-grains professor to clear the college granaries of the pests, WESCAC displayed an unprecedented inefficiency: instead of formulating a better poison or designing a rat-proof grain elevator, it proposed to mate with enough cats to develop a spectacular rodent-hunter, and to miscegenate these Überkatzen with the rats themselves, to the end of evolving a species that would prey upon itself and choose no other mate but WESCAC, which then would breed them all sterile! A proposal fantastic in every respect: the professor of cereal-grains returned disenchanted to his old-fashioned poisons and ordinary pussycats; WESCAC's gaffe became a West-Campus joke and calmed the fears of many whom Max's gloomy warnings had disturbed. As the New Tammany Times asked in a playful editorial, "What has studentdom to dread from an intelligence that can't even build a better mousetrap?"
But Dr. Eierkopf and his associates had been neither disappointed nor amused. What the newspaper and cereal-grains people didn't know was that the rat-problem had been the first test of the NOCTIS system: WESCAC's thinking had been truly if crudely malinoctial, like a simple-minded undergraduate's; the very absurdity of the Überkatzen proposal was a sign of success, for it indicated plainly that WESCAC's reasoning had been influenced — nay, overmastered — by what could only be called lust. Significantly, its program was by no means illogical, however impracticable: but for the first time in its career it had been guilty of rationalizing. This meant that it now possessed a sort of subconsciousness — irrational, imperious, in a word noetic — - with which its malistic consciousness had to come to terms. Quite like a randy freshman, WESCAC had had little on its mind but sex; filled with amorous memories of the Dorset ewes, all it cared to do was mate, never mind with whom or at whose expense; Reason had become a pander for Desire. To be sure, there was nothing Grand-Tutorish in this — at least not apparently. Neither was there about the average undergraduate. But just as the frailest first-grader could be said to have more athletic potential than the mightiest bull in the pasture, just because he's human, so the ignorantest, most lecherous undergraduate, given proper managing, might one day become a Grand Tutor — which the best adding-machine on campus could never. Dr. Eierkopf's delight (and Max's despair) was that WESCAC had met this first prerequisite of Grand Tutorship: for better or worse its mind was now unmistakably, embarrassingly, irrevocably human.
"What happened next?" I demanded. "Can't we come to the part where I was born?"
"That's where we are," Max said. "What I mean, I don't know what happened next; I was herding the goats then and never saw anybody from the old days. All I know, what I found out years later, something must have happened to make the Tower Hall people see how dangerous the NOCTIS business was. Even before Lucius Rexford was elected, Chancellor Hector put an end to the Cum Laude Project and demoted Eblis Eierkopf to some job where he can't do any harm. The witch-hunting was over by then, and Dr. Rexford asked me would I come back to WESCAC, he was sorry I'd been sacked. But I'd seen enough of the student race to know that people was all I could love and all I could fear, while the goats I didn't feel nothing but simple affection for. And there was the new WESCAC: Mr. Rexford said it was all right, they got rid of the NOCTIS system and everything's under control. But I know WESCAC better than that. It don't forget anything it's ever learned, and if it really was noctic enough to desire things, even for a minute, then it desired to preserve and extend itself along with humping the sheep. It was always cunning, WESCAC was; now it's willful and passionate too, and it can EAT anybody that tries to change its mind against its will — all in the name of collegiate security, like a Bonifacist Kanzler! 'No thanks,' I told Dr. Rexford; 'I'm glad you been elected, your brain's in the right place, but I won't have anything to do with WESCAC no more. It's playing possum, is all,' I told him, 'or cat-and-mouse with the whole student body; let it come and EAT me, at least I won't serve myself up on a plate. Besides, I got Billy Bocksfuss to take care of, that's like my own son…' "