"Have you taken into account the rats and bats?" I asked. Huh? Where?" The room was suddenly still.

"We've got giant rats downstairs, and billions of bats upstairs. The rats are this long. Eighty to a hundred pounds. No hearts. I hear they've worked their way up to the lower sublevels now, and they're climbing up through the stacks of garbage in the elevator shafts." "Shit!" cried Bert, beating his fists wildly on the table. "What a time to lose my fucking camera!"

"Let's catch one," said his biologist wife.

"Well, we could adjust the model to account for exogenous factors," said the bearded modeler.

"We'd have people eating rats, and rats eating people," said the mustachioed one.

"And rats eating bats."

"And bats eating bugs eating dead rats."

"The way to account for all that is with a standard input! output matrix," said the Chair commandingly.

"These rats sound similar to wolverines," said Longwood, cycling through the next few slides. "I think I have some wolverine scats a few slides ahead, if this is the series I think it is.,' Seeing that they had split into a slide and a modeling faction, I stepped out. A few minutes later we were back on the road. We were attacked by a hopeless twit who was trying to use a shotgun like a long-range rifle. I was nicked in the cheek by one ball. Hyacinth splashed him all over a piece of abstract sculpture made of welded-together lawn ornaments. The GASFers, who were humiliated that a female should carry the big gun, were looking as though they'd never have another erection.

We passed briefly through the Premed Center, which was filed with pale mutated undergrads dissecting war casualties and trying to gross each other out. I yelled at them to get outside and assist the wounded, but received mostly blank stares. "We can't," said one of them, scandalized, "we're not even in med school yet."

From here we entered the Medical Library, and from there, the Library proper.

Huge and difficult to guard, the Library was the land of the refugees. It had no desirable resources, but was a fine place in which to hide because the bookshelves divided into thousands of crannies. Waves of refugees made their way here and holed up, piling books into forts and rarely venturing out.

The first floor was unguarded and sparsely occupied. We stuck to the open areas and proceeded to the second floor. Here was a pleasant surprise. An organized relief effort had been formed, mostly by students in Nursing, Classics, History, Languages and Phys. Ed. By trading simple medical services to the barbarians they had obtained enough guns to guard the place. An incoming refugee would be checked out by a senior Nursing major or occasional premed volunteer, then given a place in the stacks– "your place is DG 311 1851 and its vicinity"– and so on. Most of the stragglers could then hide out between bulletproof walls of paper, while the seriously wounded could be lowered out the windows to the Red Cross people below. In the same way, food, supplies and brave doctors could be hoisted into the Plex. The atmosphere was remarkably quiet and humane, and all seemed in good humor.

The rest of our journey was uneventful. We climbed to the fourth floor and wended our way toward Emeritus' study. Soon we could smell smoke, and see it hanging in front of the lights. To the relief of Emeritus, it came not from his office but from the open door of the one labeled "Embers, Archibald."

Three men and a woman, all unarmed, sat around a small fire, occasionally throwing on another book. They had broken out the window to vent the smoke.

The woman shrieked as I appeared in the door. "Jesus! If I had a gun, you'd be dead now. I react so uncontrollably."

"Good thing you don't," I observed.

"It's really none of your business," intoned a thin, pale man. "But I suppose that since you have that wretched gun, you're going to have us do what you want. Well, we don't have anything you could want here. And forget about Zelda here. She's a lousy lay." Zelda shrieked in amusement. "It's a good thing you're witty when you're a bastard, Terence, or I'd despise you." "Oh, do go ahead. I adore being despised. I really do. It's so inspiring."

"Society despises the artist," said Embers, lighting a Dunhill in the bookfire, "unless he panders to the masses. But society treats the artist civilly so he can't select specific targets for his hatred. Open personal hatred is so very honest."

"Now that's meaningful, Arch," said the other man, a brief lump with an uncertain goatee.

"How come you're burning books?" I asked.

"Oh, that, well," said Embers, "Terence wanted a fire." Terence piped up again. "This whole event is so very like camping out, don't you agree? Except without the dreadful ants and so forth. I thought a fire would be very– primal. But it smoked dreadfully, so we broke out the window, and now it's very cold and we must keep it going ceaselessly, of course. Is that adequate? Is that against Library rules?"

"We've been finding," added Embers, "that older books are much better. They burn more slowly. And with their thin pages, Bibles and dictionaries are quite effective. I'm taking some notes." He waved a legal pad at me.

"Also," added the small one, "old books are printed on acid-free paper, so we aren't getting acid inside of our lungs." "Why don't you just cover the window and put it out?" I asked. "Aren't we logical?" said Terence. "You people are all so tediously Western. We wanted a fire, you can't take it away! What happened to academic freedom? Say, are you quite finished with your bloody suggestions? I'm trying to read one of my fictions to these people, Mr. Spock."

I followed my friends into Emeritus' office. Behind me Terence resumed his reading. "The thin stream of boiling oil dribbled from the lip of the frying pan and seared into the boy's white flesh. As he squirmed against the bonds that were holding him down, unable to move, it ran into the bed of thorny roses underneath him; the petals began to wither like a dying western sunset at dusk."

A minute or two later, as we exited with Emeritus' papers, there was a patter of applause. "Ravishing, Terence. Quite frankly, it's similar to Erasmus T. Bowlware's Gulag Pederast. Especially the self-impalement of the heroine on the electric fencepost of the concentration camp as she is driven into a frenzy by psychic emanations from the possessed child in the nearby mansion where the defrocked epileptic priest gives up his life in order to get the high-technology secrets to the Jewish commandos. I do like it."

"When do I get to read my fiction?" asked Zelda.

"Is this from the novel about the female writer who is struggling to write a novel about a woman writer who is writing a novel about a woman artist in Nazi Germany with a possessed daughter?" asked Embers.

"Well, I decided to make her a liberated prostitute and psychic," said Zelda; and that was the last I heard of the conversation, or of the people.

We deposited Emeritus in the refugee camp on the second floor and made it back to the Science Shop in about an hour. There, Sarah and Casimir were deep in conversation, and Ephraim Klein was listening in.

Casimir's finished suit of armor used bulletproof fabric taken from a couple of associate deans. The administration was unhappy about that, but they could only get to Casimir by shooting their way through the Unified Pure Plexorian Realm. Underneath the fabric, Casimir wore various hard objects to protect his flesh from impact. On legs and knees he wore soccer shinguards and the anti-kneecapping armor favored by administration members. He wore a jockstrap with a plastic cup, and over his torso was a heavy, crude breastplate that he had endlessly and deafeningly hammered out of half a fifty-five gallon oil drum. Down his back he hung overlapping shingles of steel plate to protect his spine.