The Big U

During our frantic reunion, two absurdly serious-looking men approached me with complicated badges and questions. As they introduced themselves, we were all startled by a hoarse blast of organ music that burst from all directions.

"Ephraim must have turned the broadcast volume way down, then back up again," said Casimir as soon as everyone in our area had turned down their radios. Once the music was quiet enough to be recognized, I knew it as Ephraim's old favorite, the "Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor"; and at the end of each phrase, when the voice of the Greathouse Organ plunged back down home to that old low C, it rumbled in concord with the OM generators across the street, and the Plex itself seemed to vibrate as a single huge eight-tubed organ pipe.

And after all this, I was the only one to understand. "Get away!" I screamed, tearing myself loose from an agent. "Get away!" I shouted, ripping a megaphone from a policeman's hand, and "Get away!" I continued, stumbling to the roof of a squad car and cranking up the volume.

"Get away!" all the other cops began to shout into their megaphones. "Get away!" crackled from the PA systems of squad cars and helicopters. It was the word of the hour, and mounted cops howled it at TUGgies and SUBbies and the media, forcing them back with truncheons and horses. Someone flashed It to the police teams who had entered the Plex, and they scrambled out and squealed away in their cars. Perhaps it was shouted ten thousand times as the ring of onlookers gradually expanded away from the Base.

The sound waxed. Ephraim kept turning it up and Bert Nix, building for the climax, kept pulling out more stops. Casimir tried to phone Ephraim from a booth, but he didn't answer. He probably couldn't even hear it ring.

He certainly heard nothing but organ as, at the end, he cranked the volume all the way and Pertinax Rushforth pulled out all the stops.

The windows went first. They all burst from their frames at once. All 25,000 picture windows boomed out into trillions of safe little cubes in the red dawn air. At first it seemed as though the Plex had suddenly grown fuzzy and white, then as though a blizzard had enveloped the eight towers, and finally as though It were rising up magnificently from a cloud of glinting orange foam. As the cloud of glass dropped away from the towers with grand deliberation, the millions of bats In the upper levels, driven crazy by the terrible sound, imprisoned in a building with too few exits, stopped beating their wings against the windows and exploded from the rooms in a black cloud of unbelievable volume. The black cloud drifted forth and rose into the sky and the white cloud sank into the depths, and Pertinax pushed the swell pedals to the floor and coupled all the manuals to the pedalboard and pushed his bare pink foot down on the first one, the low C, and held it down forever.

The building's steel frame was unaffected. The cinder-blocks laid within that frame, though, stopped being walls and became a million individual blocks of stone. Uncoupled, they began to dissolve away from the girders, and the floors accordio

The hundred thousand people watching it plugged their ears, except for the TUGgies, who watched serenely and shut off their OM generators. From the enormous heap of rubble, broken water pipes shot fountains glistening white in the rising sun. Crunches and aftershocks continued for days.

Not far away, Virgil Gabrielsen sat on a curbstone, his hair bright in the sun, drinking water. Between his feet was a stack of mini-computer memory discs in little black envelopes. The APPASMU is in the Smithsonian Institution and may be visited 10:00 A.M.– 5:30 P.M. seven days a week. And the Go Big Red Fan was found unscathed, sitting miraculously upright on a crushed sofa on a pile of junk, its painted blades rotating quietly and intermittently in the fresh spring breeze.

Credits

NEAL STEPHENSON has no job and does not live anyplace in particular except in summers, when he travels. This is his first published novel. In the past he has worked as a library and hospital clerk, garbage-to-energy consultant, vending-machine loader, physics research assistant, anti-perspirant test subject, crystal grower, movie extra, tutor, funeral home driver, detasseler, theatrical lighting technician, ditch digger, greeting-card salesman, fungus farmer, paperboy, and Chinese restaurant food-chopper, which prepared him for editing early drafts of The Big U.

One flew over the animal house…

If George Orwell had written a novel more like Animal House (the movie) than like Animal Farm (the book), and if Orwell were a young American whose early twenties were spent in the 1980s, and if Orwell counted among his concerns the origins of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind, Dungeons & Dragons, computer piracy, and heavy-metal rock versus Bach fugues, the result would perhaps have been similar to The Big U.

Casimir Radon's introduction to American Megaversity is fraught with red tape, Newspeak and enrollment procedures based on the catch-22 principle. Having struggled long and hard to afford a college education, Casimir has come up against the awful truth. What is he doing at the Big U? Meanwhile, unhappy roommates John Wesley Fenrick and Ephraim Klein (Business and Philosophy, respectively) wage sonic war with massive stereos; drug aficionado Dex Fresser becomes the leader of a cult that worships a neon sign, a dilapidated red fan, and other curious appliances; class president Sarah Johnson locks horns with the Airheads and the Terrorists, her dorm's female and male factions; Virgil Gabrielsen, resident genius, hunts down "the Worm," an insidious glitch in the all-important college computer system.

As the Apocalyptic plot thickens and boils, a small band of unlikely heroes tries to foil the scheme of Crotobaltislavonian freedom-fighters who have seized control of the radioactive waste dumped beneath the university, and to survive a campus-wide live-ammo civil war, and to avoid the plague of bats and mutant rats, and to get through the spring semester….

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