The Big U

His head was protected by a converted defensive lineman's football helmet. He had cut the front out of a fencing mask and attached the wire mesh over the plastic bars of the helmet's facemask. Over the earholes he placed a pair of shooter's ear protectors. So that he would not overheat, he cut a hole in the back of the helmet and ran a flexible hose to it. The other end of the hose he co

When Casimir was in full battle garb, his only vulnerable points were feet, hands and eye-slit. Water could be had by sucking on a tube that ran down to a bicyclist's water bottle on his belt. And it should not go unmentioned that Casimir, draped in thick creamy-white fabric, with blazing yellow and blue ru

It was a very smoke-filled room that Casimir ventilated by swinging in through the picture window on the end of a rope. Through the soft white tobacco haze, Oswald Heimlich saw his figure against the sky for an instant before it burst into the room and did a helpless triple somersault across the glossy parquet floor. Heimlich was already on his feet, snatching up his $4,000 engraved twelve-gauge shotgun and flicking off the safety. As the intruder staggered to his feet, Heimlich sighted over the head of the Trustee across from him (who reacted instinctively by falling into the lap of the honorable former mayor) and fired two loads of .00 buckshot into this strange Tarzan's lumpy abdomen. The intruder took a step back and remained standing as the shot plonked into his chest and clattered to the floor. Heimlich fired again with similar effects. By now the great carved door had burst open and five guards dispersed to strategic positions and pointed their UZIs at the suspicious visitor. S. S. Krupp watched keenly.

The guards made the obligatory orders to freeze. He slowly reached around and began to draw a dueling sword from the Megaversity historical collections out of a plastic pipe scabbard. Tied to its handle was a white linen napkin with the AM coat of arms, which he waved suggestively.

"I swear," said S. S. Krupp, "don't you have a phone, son?" No one laughed. These were white male Eastern businessmen, and they were serious. Heimlich in particular was not amused; this man looked very much like the radiation emergency workers who had been staggering through his nightmares for several nights ru

"I'll bet you want to do a little negotiating," said Krupp, a

"I owe allegiance to no man," came the muffled voice from behind the mask, but "come on behalf of all."

"Well, that's good! That's a fine attitude," said Krupp. "Set yourself down and we'll see what we can do."

The intruder took an empty chair, laid his sword on the table and peeled off his hood of fabric to reveal the meshed-over football helmet, A rush of forced air was exhaled from his facemask and floated loose sheets of paper down the table.

"Why did you put a nuclear waste dump in the basement?" Everyone was surprised, if genteel, and they exchanged raised eyebrows for a while.

"Maybe Ozzie can tell you about that," suggested Krupp. "I was still in Wyoming at the time."

Heimlich scowled. "I won't deny its existence. Our reasons for wanting it must be evident. Perhaps if I tell you its history, you'll agree with us, whoever you are. Ahem. You may be aware that until recently we suffered from bad management at the presidential level. We had several good presidents in the seventies, but then we got Tony Commodi, who was irresponsible– an absolute mongoloid when it came to finance– insisted on teaching several classes himself, and so forth. He raised salaries while keeping tuition far too low. People became accustomed to it. At this time we Trustees were widely dispersed and made no effort to lead the university. Finally we were nearly bankrupt. Commodi was forced to resign by faculty and Trustees and was replaced by Pertinax Rushforth, who in those days was quite the renascence man, and widely respected. We Trustees were still faced with impossible financial problems, but we found that if we sold all the old campus– hundreds of acres of prime i

But of course the demographics made it clear that times would be very rough in the years to come. We could not compete for students, and so we had to run a very tight ship and seek i

"It was then that we hit upon the nuclear waste idea. Here is something that is not dependent on the economy; we will always have these wastes to dispose of. It's highly profitable, as there is a desperate demand for disposal facilities. The wastes must be stored for mille

"See, this city is on a real stable salt-dome area," added a heavy man in an enormous grey suit, "and now that there's no more crude down there, it's suitable for this kind of storage." "You," said the knight, pointing his sword at the man who had just spoken, "must be in the oil business. Are you Ralph Priestly?" "Ha! Well, yeah, that's me," said Ralph Priestly, u

"How did you know about our disposal site?" asked Heimlich. "That doesn't matter. What matters now is: how did the government of Crotobaltislavonia find out about it?" "Oh," said Heimlich, shocked. "You know about that also." "Yep."

After a pause, S. S. Krupp continued. "Now, don't go tell your honchos that we did this out of greed. America had to start doing something with this waste– that's a fact. You know what a fact is? That's something that has nothing to do with politics. The site is as safe as could be. See, some things just can't be handed over to political organizations, because they're so damned unstable. But great universities can last for thousands of years. Hell, look at the changes of government the University of Paris has survived in the last century alone! This facility had to be built and it had to be done by a university. The big steady cash flow makes us more stable, and that makes us better qualified to be ru

"Wait. If you're making so much money off of this, why are you so financially tight-assed?"

"That's a very good question," said Heimlich. "As I said, it's imperative that this facility remain secret. If we allowed the cash flow to show up on our ledgers, this would be impossible. We've had to construct a scheme for processing or laundering, as it were, our profits through various donors and benefactors. In order to allay suspicion, we keep these 'donations' as small as we can while meeting the university's basic needs."