He started away as a small bat fluttered past.
"Troglodyte! No manners! This is what you're supposed to see!" Casimir whirled to see Bert Nix plunging from the open door toward Sharon's desk. Casimir tried to head him off, fearing some kind of attack, but Bert Nix stopped short and pointed triumphantly to Sharon. Casimir turned to look. Sharon was gazing at him dully through half-shut eyes, and weakly pounding his finger into a spot on the tabletop. Casimir leaned over and looked. Sharon was pointing at the Table of the Elements, indicating the box for Oxygen.
"Oxygen! Oh two! Get it?" shouted Bert Nix.
Bill Benson, Security Guard 5, was arguing with a friend whether it was possible that F.D.R. committed suicide when the emergency line rang. He let it ring four times. Since ninety-nine calls out of a hundred were pranks, by letting each one ring four times he was delaying the true emergency calls by an average of only four one-hundredths of a ring apiece-- nothing compared with the time it took to respond. Anyway, fed up with kids getting stoned at parties and falling on the way out to barf and spraining their wrists, then (through some miracle of temporary clearheadedness) calling Emergency and trying to articulate their problems through a hallucinogenic miasma while monster stereos in the background threatened to uncurl his phone cord. Eventually, though, he did pick up the phone, holding the earpiece several inches from his head in case it was another of those goddamn Stalinist whistle-blasters.
"Listen," came the voice, sounding distant, "I've got to have some oxygen. Do you have some there? It's an emergency!" Oh, shit, Did he have to get this call every night? He listened for a few more seconds. "It's an oxygen freak," he said to his friend, covering the mouthpiece with his hand.
"Oxygen freak? What do they do with oxygen?"
Benson swung his feet down from the counter, put the receiver in his lap, and explained. "See, nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, is the big thing. They breathe it through masks, like for surgery. But if you breathe it pure you'll kick in no time, because you got to have oxygen. And they are so crazy about laughing gas they don't want to take off that mask even to breathe, so they like to get some oxygen to mix with it so that they can sit there all goddamn night long and breathe nothing else and get blasted out of their little minds. So we always get these calls."
He picked up the receiver again, took a puff on his cigar, exhaled slowly. "Hello?" he said, hoping the poor gas-crazed sap had hung up.
"Yeah? When will it be here?"
"Cripes!" Bill Benson shouted, "look, guy, hang it up. We don't have any and you aren't allowed to have it."
"Well, shit then, come up here and help me. Call an ambulance! For God's sake, a man's dying here."
Some of these kids were such cretins, how did they make it into college? Money, probably. "Listen, use your head, kid," he said, not unkindly. "We're the Emergency Services desk. We can't leave our posts. What would happen if there was an emergency while we were gone?"
This was answered by silence; but in the background, Benson could just make out another voice, which sounded familiar: "You should have listened to what he was trying to tell you! He wasn't farting around! We had to sack the Cartography Department to afford him. And you don't listen!"
"Shut up!" shouted the gas freak.
"Hey, is that Bert? Is that Bert Nix on the phone?" asked Bill Benson. "Where are you, kid?"
"Emeritus Row!' shouted the kid, and dropped the phone. Bill Benson continued to listen after the BONKITY-BONK of the phone's impact, trying to make sure it was really good old Bert Nix. I think he heard this poem; on the news, he claimed he heard a poem, and it could well have been this, which Bert Nix quoted regularly and liked to write on the walls:
Tenuring and tenuring in the ivory tower! The flagon cannot fill the flagoneers. Krupp cuts a fart! The sphinxter cannot hold Dear academe, our Lusitanta, recoils. The time-limned dons are noosed. With airy webs The cerebrally infarcted bring me down. The East affects conscription, while the curst Are gulled with Fashionate Propensities.
Shrilly, sum reevaluation is demanded. Earlier-reckoned commencement is programmed! What fecund mumming! Outly ward those words hard When a glassed grimace on an animal Monday Rumbles at night; unaware that the plans aren't deserved Escapists' lie-panoply aims to head off the Fan. A sign frank and witless as the Sun Is mute in the skies, yet from it are shouted Real shadows of endogenous deserted words. The concrete drops down in; but know I now That thirty-storied stone steel keeps When next the might of Air are rooks unstable. What buff be; its towers coming down deglassed Slumps amid Bedlam in the morn?