THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 2, "MAD DOG in a SILVER FOG" :: CHAPTER 5, EPISODE 3

Again - the janitors and cafeteria staff finally walked during Nixon's voyage to Berlin, where he was greeted with stones and eggs. A fortnight later, five union members and an "outside agitator"... Mark Cobb... were jailed on charges of conspiring to violate the civil rights of the replacement workers, an Orwellian (though effective) ratcheting up of discussion of misdemeanors into felony raps. FREE MARK COBB! graffiti appeared on walls of the bus depot and Seven Eleven.

FIT, heretofore a hotbed of campus rest, doesn't quite explode yet (just bubbles some). Jeff's hunkered down under the thumb of Dr. Scott of Advanced Code... no cheerful Trekkie but a dour, former military officer whose preternaturally sinister assignments in ripping apart BASIC, COBOL, FORTRAN and the symbolic AIDS code and recombining them into mathematical Frankenstein's monsters were particularly valued by marketing recruiters. His other advisor, Pielcock, was a fellow of the Operations Research cabal, founded across the waves by Blackett (of Farm Hall, Turing's trial and Oppenheimer's Apple) - Cobb and Barry fingered Scott and Pielcock as FIT's one-two Baby Burners General before the janitors walked out.

"Project Cambridge is getting seven and a half million over five years," Barry argued, "they're using student mathematicians to separate out unfriendly villages for bombing... not in Vietnam, but Thailand, which is supposed to be our ally, and a whole bunch of African and Latin countries. Sola Pool's Con Com isn't a bridge towards 'understanding' Third-World cultures... it's Computer Assisted Murder." We're leaving the computer center late on a Wednesday... two or three in the morning and Barry jumping 'round like a kangaroo rat... "the trustees were out the other day, trying to find a way to get rid of all these old cobblestones. I guess they think it's hard," he sighed, "to start a revolution on concrete pavement."

I thought Barry was blowing jive, but while we slept in righteousness and Gallatin til' noon the Friday of ABM deployment when eighty students and outsiders took over and barricaded Mather Hall, the FIT Administration Building.

"I guess Barry must have pulled it off," Jeff wondered as we drove into town, parking a few blocks from campus so as not to be towed. But it wasn't Barry, of course, Mitch, rather... a TA in psychology at the time, a rat-stabber in flowered paisley rayon under his white lab coat who'd forged an unlikely alliance with Omar Assim of the Franklin Panther Party with one simple demand... "Free the Franklin Five".

"Cobb must be pissing himself," Jeff observed that afternoon and added, "it's like a basketball game there, and he's sixth man out." But Mitchell says now he and Omar agreed Franklin Five was more alliterative than six... Mark's release had been included on a footnoted list of demands mimeographed and hand delivered to the pigs, media and seven ancient secretaries at Mather Hall who were given ten minutes to collect their purses and personal belongings.

A parody of a security checkpoint had been established at a fire door... the rest of the entrances and exits were chained. Entry was free to students with ID, to faculty if escorted by a student, barred to administrators and the pigs. Jeff was made to wear a nametag identifying him as my guest... every revolution begins (and quite a few end) with someone asking for your papers.

"There are going to be a lot of meetings," Mitch warned. "Nixon is going to be out of office by the first of April, Agnew too, the Democrats will recognize their impotence and turn the reins over to us!" Someone asked if it was true that Joan Baez would be crossing the river to Jersey. No problem, Mitchell said. Weren't we the stardust and golems who'd hounded LBJ from the White House to spend his dotage growing out his hair and fingernails like Nebuchadnezzar on his hands and knees... grazing on Texas grass? Weren't we Americong in the belly... or, being in Franklin after all, rather nearer to the bowels... of the beast?

A draft list of revised demands was already on a blackboard when we clocked in, eight or nine of them... freedom for Tim Leary crossed out but with a question mark appended. Freedom for Franklin's Five still topped the list but fifteen cents an hour's raise for cooks and janitors had slipped to fourth behind pulling out of Vietnam and termination of a Bio/Psych contract to train dolphins to nuzzle up to Soviet subs with backpack nukes.

We won that one, I guess... that project sort of went away until it came back to me during lunch with Brian Palin as a sort of action toy, an arcade game tie-in. How many times need it be restated... grown people shouldn't be allowed to play with dolls!

"Well... I'm not sure Daimon's budget allows for robots, not at first, but if we did... you know.... they'd have to be of the adult contemporary sort. Farrah, Tom Selleck, John Travolta. This President, he's contemporary... but leans towards classic contemporary, you know, like in the Old West, or the fifties, "Anatomy of a Murder"? Eleanor Roosevelt. Bogart. Truman... Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, all going fishing and catch us a trout?"

"Bogie on skates?" Brian perks up over a field of cracked, crushed crabshells... he's not that smart, but he's shrewd. Dead celebrity ice skating robots don't have to be paid royalties... but would that fall under patent law? Copyrights? He extracts legal loopholes like flesh out of the smallest orifices of dead crustaceans. Not for nothing was he known round Sydney as the Jolly Slagman...

"Maybe September, or when the new TV shows come out... or a film or something needing promoting? And if the real celebrity was in town there could be Mystery... was that really Nastassia Kinski or a duplicate... and what about her snake? You could do them, couldn't you..."

Mitch looks down at Palin now but his own start was greased by public relations... technically sweet, because he'd armed himself with permits. The pigs seethed... busted a few poor schnooks coming and going, mostly possession, one for carrying a Swiss Army knife. That got played up in Newark's papers as an example that the war was driving The People to murderous excesses. And, of course, Kaz copped credit for getting the Franklin Five bailed out, although it really was their New York lawyers and the contributions from hundreds of little people, like Jeff's putting a tenner in the hat.

Jeff had taken care of his classes by posting a notice on the door in the math and sciences building... Class Canceled! Your assignment is to follow the situation and write a paper on it with reference to the a priori, variational and uncertain assumptions of rationality. Since he now had Jovian power to cast peasants from the plateau of mindless information accumulation into the stony underworld of Vietnam... students approached him with smiles, offerings and subterfuge, including one of my own teachers in medieval studies, sweet as a bug. "I have a key and really deep passwords to the 360 in the basement."

Before the days of Crays, the 360 was stronger than an unmodified Petra, just about the most powerful machine going... Franklin's was hooked up to ARPA and other useful databases so, he said, why not... all of the police and FIT security would be focused on Mather Hall and its demands, by now 29 of them.

Now that Mark Cobb and the others had been bailed out, Number One... Freedom for the Franklin Five!... had been upgraded (or perhaps more exactly downloaded) to Amnesty Now! The war was still number two and the fifteen cents down to number 16... which, I'd heard, caused friction between Mitch and Omar's Panther Party, though you'd never have known anything was wrong from the way Kazelka flitted from committee to committee with his attendant retinue of pig media. "Mitchell manipulates the media," a starry undergraduate gushed, "... the People will see on TV that we're right and that will be the end of the war."

Well... maybe... but meanwhile Jeff had his agenda, he'd become very curious about the capacities of the 360. He didn't think it had anywhere near the influence that Medieval Don, another TA this close to a Math Doctorate, thought it did, but he was interested in US Air Force data on two Soviet institutes... the Fiztekh in Leningrad (known to Russian Dogteamers, now, as "Kindergarten") and the cryonics sector of the Institute for Physical Problems. That variability in code and cipher performance could be effected by physical causes... chemical or metal stress, magnetic interventions, extremes of heat or of cold... was one of his newer interests and data from the United States either irrelevant or classified. "Sometimes you have to go round the back door," he said, whistling the Doors album cut, downloaded off Willie Dixon's dirty blues. But he also wanted access to physical files maintained in Mather Hall, now in possession of Mitch Kazelka.

It took a while to separate the People's Hero from his adoring media retinue but, after somebody was able to get Mark Cobb in front of the cameras to rap about his days in the Jersey gulag, Mitchell and Jeff huddled in a dark corner, and Jeff agreed he'd use the 360 to see whether the Feds had a list of their own spies at FIT, or within the larger university community... which, for expediency's sake, Jeff reduced to the hard science spooks.

And, in return, Kazelka handed over the key to the file room.

They spy on us, we spy on them. Everyone does it... General Johnny and Tess, Bud's brother... everybody except the little people who, for their apathy, deserve the entire spectrum of grief that we in the Environment impose upon them. Louis adding and scratching off names of potential FCC replacement commissioners... Paul wired to machines, staring out into a void like the end of some dirt road on Dukes of Hazzard. Fifteen year olds on too much coffee plotting takeovers of whole countries, financing the fun with involuntary loans hacked out of IMF fat...

Now, Mitchell's gotta run. In the auditorium, Bert the PILP's pissed but not wanting to appear so before the pig media who follow Kazelka room to room to room, as he complains: "I've been informed that we haven't ratified our priority demands, which means we can't send letters to the Governor, President Nixon and Dean Martin." This is not really a joke but the Lord High FIT Administrator's first name... his surname's unpronounceable, East European. "Now I understand Amnesty was consensed upon by the Science and Technology Subcommittee so that brings us to the war. I move that we endorse the resolution calling for immediate end to US involvement in the Vietnam War. Can we do this by voice vote?"

Someone knucklehead yells "Stop the War" and from the cheers of those who've roused out of their epoch of Bertish sleep, Mitchell proclaims the matter done and designates Bert to draft a letter to Nixon, which he scurries off to do.

"It's 1969 and these guys finally voted to take a position against the Vietnam War," I hear a cameraman from one of New York's local television stations marvel to a guy with a tape recorder but no nametag. "I hadn't cut the head off Rockefeller in Albany five years back, I coulda been in Saigon, for Tet!"