Our own thumped violently. For a long time we were frozen, disturbed beyond reason; then a piercing beep emanated from Fred Fine and we jumped and gasped angrily.
Unconcerned, he pressed a button on his digital calculator/watch, halting the beep. "Sorry. That's my watch alarm."
We looked at him; he looked at his watch, We were all sweating.
"I set it to go off like that at midnight, the beginning of April first, every year. It's sort of a warning, so that this one remembers, hey, April Fools' Day, anything could happen now."
While we sewer-slogged, E13S held a giant party in honor of Big Wheel. It was conceived as your basic formless beer blowout, but the ever-spunky Airheads had insisted upon a theme: Great Partiers of the Past. The major styles in evidence were Disco, Sixties, Fifties and Toga. A team of sturdy Terrorists had lugged Dex Fresser's stereo up to the social lounge, which was the center of Disco activity. A darkened room down the hail featured a Sixties party, at which participants roughed up their perms, wore T-shirts, smoked more dope than usual and said "groovy" at the drop of a hat. The study lounge was Fifties headquarters, and was identical to all the other Fifties parties which had been held since about 1963 by people who didn't know anything about the Fifties. The Toga people were forced to adopt a wandering, nomadic partying existence; they had no authentic toga music to boogie to, though someone did experiment by playing an electronic version of the "1812 Overture" at full blast. Mostly these people just stood sheepishly in the hallways, draped in their designer bedsheets, clutching cups of beer and yelling "toga!" from time to time.
The Disco lounge was filled with women in lollipop plastic dresses and thick metallic lipstick under ski masks, and heavily scented young men in pastel three-piecers and shiny hardware-laden shoes. The smell was deafening, and when the doors were open, excess music spilled out and filled nearby rooms to their corners. These partiers were a generation whose youth had been stolen. They had prepared all through their adolescence for the day when they could go to college and attend real discos, adult discos where they had alcohol and sex partners you could take home with no pay-rental hassles. Their hopes had been dashed in the early eighties when Disco had flamed out somewhere over New Jersey, like a famous dirigible. But the nostalgic air here made them feel young again. Dex Fresser even showed up in a white three-piecer and took several opportunities to boogie right down to the ground with shapely females in clingy synthetic wraps.
On the windowsill, the Go Big Red Fan, held in place with bricks, spun and glowed in its self-made halo of black light. Overhead, a mirrored ball cast revolving dots of light on the walls, and more stoned or imaginative dancers could imagine that they were actually standing inside a giant Big Wheel. Whoooo! The picture windows were covered with newspaper, as the panes had long since been smashed and the curtains long since burned.
After Dex Fresser had consumed sixteen hits of acid (his supplier had never really grasped the idea of powers of two), five bongloads of hashish rolled in mescaline, a square of peyote Jell-O, a lude, four tracks, a small handful of street-legal caffeine pep pills, twelve tablespoons of cough syrup, half a can of generic light wine and a pack of Gaulois cigarettes, he began to toy with a strobe light that was being used to establish the Disco atmosphere. He turned it up faster and faster until the lounge was wracked with delighted freakedout screams and the dancers had begun to hop randomly and smash into one another, as though they had been time-warped into Punk. Meanwhile, what passed for Dex's mind wandered over to the Go Big Red Fan, and though the time-warp effect was really blowing his tubes, he thought the fan might be slowing down; continuing to turn up the strobe, he was able to make the Little Wheel stop revolving altogethereither that, or time itself had come to a halt! Dex spazzed out to the max. All became quiet as the propulsion reactors of a passing Sirian space cruiser damped out his stereo (the DJ had turned down the volume), and all heard Dex announce that at midnight Big Wheel would say something very important to him. He relaxed, the music was cranked back up, the strobe light hurled out a nearby window and the Fan began to rotate again.
Midnight could hardly come soon enough. The partiers packed into the social lounge, sitting in rows facing the window. Dex Fresser stood before the shrouded window with his back to the crowd, and priests stood ready to tear the papers away. A few minutes before midnight, the DJ put on "Stairway to Heaven," timed so that the high-energy sonic blast section would begin at 12:00 sharp.
The newspapers ripped apart, the red-white-and-blue power beams of Big Wheel exploded into the room, and the heavy beat of the rock and roll made their thoraxes boom like empty kegs. But Dex Fresser was impressively still. He stared into the naked face of the Big Wheel for fifteen minutes before he moved a muscle. Then he relayed the message to the huddled students. Speaking through a mike hooked to his stereo, he sounded loud and quadraphonic. "Tonight the Big Wheel has plans for us, man. We're going to have a fucking war." The Terrorists cheered and whooped and the Airheads oohed and aahed. "The outside people, who are all hearing-impaired to the voice of Big Wheel and Roy G Biv and our other leaders, will come tomorrow to the Plex with guns to kill us. They want to put short-range tactical nuclear weapons on the roof of D Tower in order to threaten Big Wheel and make him do as they wish.
"We have friends, though, like Astarte, the Goddess, who is the sister of Big Wheel and who is going to like help us out and stuff. The Terrorists and the SUB will cooperate just like Big Wheel and Astarte do. Also, the B-men are our friends too.
"We've got shitloads of really powerful enemies, says Big Wheel. Like the Administration and the Temple of Unlimited Godhead and a bunch of nerds and some other people. We have to kill all of them.
"This is going to take cooperation and we have to have perfect loyalty from everyone. See, even if you think you have friends among our enemies, you're wrong, because Big Wheel decides who our friends are, and if he says they're your enemies, they're your enemies, just like that. Everything's very simple with Big Wheel, that's how you can be sure he's telling the truth. So we've got to join together now and there can't be any secrets and we can't cover up for our enemies or have mercy for them."
Mari Meegan, sitting in the front row, legs tucked demurely to the side, listened intensely, eyes slitted and lips parted as she thought about how this applied to her.
At this point a few people came to their senses and made a run for it. One of these, a none-too-bright advisee of mine who had been going along for the good times, realized that these people were nuts, sprinted to the nearest fire stair, and escaped unharmed, later to tell me this story. What happened after his exit is vague; apparently, Yllas Freedperson, High Priestess of Astarte, showed up, and the leaders of the SUB and of the Terrorists did a lot of planning and organizing in those next few hours.
By contrast, Bert Nix celebrated the evening by incinerating himself in a storage room on C22W. He had been using it as a hideout for some time, and had gotten along well with the students, except for one problem: Bert Nix's obsession with collecting garbage. It was partly a practical habit, as he got most of his food and clothing from the trash. Far beyond that, however, he could not bring himself to throw out anything, and so in his little rooms scattered around the Plex the garbage was packed in to the ceiling, leaving only a little aisle to the door. Out of gratitude to his protectors, Bert Nix stuffed oily rags under the doors to seal the odor in.
This sufficed until the evening of March 31, when he happened to open the door while a fastidious student from Saskatoon was walking by. She watched as half a dozen cockroaches over three inches long lumbered out between the derelict's bare feet and approached her, waving their antennae affably. No Airhead, she stomped them to splinters and called Security on the nearest telephone. Between then and the time they arrived five hours later, however, the fire started. It could have been spontaneous combustion, it could have been the heating system, or a suicidal whim or wayward cigarette from Bert Nix. In any event, the room became a tightly sealed furnace, and when the flames had died, all that remained were a charred corpse in the aisle and drifts of cockroach bodies piled up in front of the door.