"I still think we should blow this fucker up."

"Good. Work on it. In the meantime I'll continue to carry a gun."

Professor Forthcoming, or "Emeritus" as Hyacinth called him, followed me around a great deal, jabbering about his lecture notes, prodding my latissimus muscles and marveling at how easy it would be for me, a former first-string college nose guard with a gun, to rescue them from the Library. I did not have the heart to discourage him. In the end, all I could do was make sure he paid for it: made him promise that he would sit down and study those notes so that he could rewrite them if he had to. He promised unashamedly, but by the time we organized the quest he was already looking forward to a conference in Monaco in the fall, and listening to the casualty reports on the radio to hear if any of his key grad students had been greased.

No, said Fred Fine, the APPASMU was not available for raids on the Library. But we could have some soldiers and one AK-47, on the condition that, given the choice between abandoning the quest and abandoning the assault rifle, we would abandon the quest. I loudly agreed to this before Emeritus could sputter any disagreements. Our party was me, Hyacinth, Emeritus, four GASF soldiers and the Science Shop technician Lute. Sarah stayed behind reading The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

Our route took us through fairly stable academic blocs, and other areas controlled by gangs. We could not avoid passing through the area controlled by Hansen's Gang, the smalltowners of the Great Plains. They were not well armed, but neither was anyone else in the base, and they had jumped into the fray with the glee of any rural in an informal blunt-instruments fight and come out winners. This was their idiom. Our negotiations with their leader were straightforward: we showed them our AK-47 and offered not to massacre them if they let us pass without hassle. Their leader had no trouble grasping this, but many of the members seemed to have a bizarre mental block: they could not see the AK-47 in Hyacinth's hands. All they saw was Hyacinth, the first clean healthy female they had seen in a week, and they came after her as though she were unarmed. "Hey! She's mine!" yelled one of these as we entered their largest common area.

"Fuck you," said another, swinging a motorcycle chain past his brother's eyes at high speed. He turned and began to trudge toward Hyacinth, hitching up his pants. "Hey, bitch, I'm gonna breed you," he said cheerfully. Hyacinth aimed the gun at him; he looked at her face. She pulled the bolt into firing position and squared off; he kept coming. When I stepped forward he brandished his chain, then changed course as Hyacinth stepped out from behind me.

"Go for it," and "All right, for sure, Combine," yelled his pals.

"Hyacinth, please don't do that," I said, plugging my ears. She fired off half a clip in one burst and pulverized a few square feet of cinderblock wall right next to the man's head. The lights went out as a power cable was severed. Courtesy of a window, we could still see.

"Shit, what the fuck?" someone inquired.

Rather than trying to explain, we proceeded from the room. "I like that bitch," someone said as we were leaving, "but she's weird. I dunno what's wrong with her."

The Mailroom was an armistice zone between Hansen's Gang and the Journalism Department. The elevators here descended to the mail docks, making this one of the few ports of entry to the Plex. The publicity-minded Crotobaltislavonians had worked out an agreement with one of the networks– you know which, if you watched any news in this period– allowing the camera crews to come and go through this room. The network's hired guards all toted machine guns. We counted twenty automatic weapons in this room alone, which probably meant that the network had the entire Axis outgunned.

In exchange for a brief interview, which was never aired, and for all the information we could provide about other parts of the Plex, we were allowed into the Journalism bloc. Here we picked up a three-man minicam crew who followed along for a while. Emeritus was magnificently embarrassed and insisted on walking behind the camera. One of the crew was an AM student, and I talked to him about the network's operations.

"You've got a hell of a lot of firepower. You guys are the most powerful force in the Plex. How are you using it?"

The student shrugged. "What do you mean? We protect our crews and equipment. All the barbarians are afraid of us." "Right, obviously," I said. "But I noticed recently that a lot of people around here are starving, being raped, murdered– you know, a lot of bum-out stuff. Do those guards try to help out? You can spare a few."

"Well, I don't know," he said uncomfortably. "That's kind of network-level policy. It goes against the agreement. We can go anywhere as long as we don't interfere. If we interfere, no agreement."

"But if you've already negotiated one agreement, can't you do more? Get some doctors into the building, maybe?"

"No way, man. No fucking way. We journalists have ethics." The camera crew turned back when we reached the border of the Geoanthropological Planning Science Department, a bloc with only two entrances. My office was here, and I hoped I could get us through to the other side. The heavy door was bullet-pocked, the lock had been shot at more than once, but it was blocked from the other side and we could hear a guard beyond. Nearby, in an alcove, under a pair of drinking fountains, stretched out straight and dead on the floor, was a middle-aged faculty member, his big stoneware coffee mug still clenched in his cold stiff fingers. He had apparently died of natural causes.

As it turned out, the guard was a grad student I knew, who let us in. He was tired and dirty, with several bandages, a bearded face, bleary red eyes and matted hair– just as he had always looked. Three other grads sat there in the reception room reading two-year-old U.S. News and World Reports and chomping hunks of beef jerky.

While my friends took a breather, I stopped by my office and checked my mailbox. On the way back I peeked into the Faculty Lounge.

The entire Geoanthropological Planning Science faculty was there, sitting around the big conference table, while a few favored grad students stood back against the walls. Several bowls of potato chips were scattered over the table and at least two kegs were active. The room was dark; they were having a slide show.

"Whoops! Looks like I tilted the camera again on this one," said Professor Longwood sheepishly, nearly drowned out by derisive whoops from the crowd. "How did this get in here? This is part of the Labrador tundra series. Anyway, it's not a bad shot, though I used the wrong film, which is why everything's pink. That corkscrew next to the caribou scat gives you some idea of scale– " but my opening the door had spilled light onto the image, and everyone turned around to look at me.

"Bud!" cried the Chair. "Glad you could make it! Want some beer? It's dark beer."

"Sounds good," I said truthfully, "but I'm just stopping in."

"How are things?" asked Professor Longwood.

"Fine, fine. I see you're all doing well too. Have you been outside much? I mean, in the Plex?"

There was bawdy laughter and everyone looked at a sheepish junior faculty member, a heavyset man from Upper Michigan. "Bert here went out to shoot some slides," explained the Chair, "and ran into some of those hayseeds. He told them he was a journalist and they backed off, but then they saw he didn't have a press pass, so he had to kick one of them in the nuts and give the other his camera!"

"Don't feel bad, Bert," said a mustachioed man nearby. "Well get a grant and buy you a new one." We all laughed.

"So you're here for the duration?" I asked.

"Shouldn't last very long," said a heavily bearded professor who was puffing on a pipe. "We are working up a model to see how long the food needs of the population can last. We're using survival ratios from the 1782 Bulgarian famine– actually quite similar to this situation. We're having a hell of a time getting data, but the model says it shouldn't last more than a week. As for us, we've got an absolute regional monopoly on beer, which we trade with the Journalism people for food."