Lookir disgusted, Krupp returned to the microphone. "Where was I, talking about autonomy?"
He surveyed his notes and concluded his lecture in another twenty minutes. He paused then to light his cigar, which he had been fingering, twiddling, stroking and sniffing exquisitely for several minutes, and was answered by exagerrated coughing from the SUB section. "I'm free to answer some questions," he announced, surveying the room and squinting into his cigar smoke like a cowboy into the setting sun.
Nearly everyone in the SUB raised his/her hand, but Yllas Freedperson, Operatives 1 and 2 and two others arose and made their loud way up to the back of the hall for an emergency conference. They were deeply concerned; they stopped short of being openly suspicious, a deeply fascist trait, but it occurred to them that what had just happened might strongly suggest the presence of a TUG deep-cover mole in the SUB!
Meanwhile, question time went on down below. As was his custom, Krupp called on two people with serious questions before resorting to the SUB. Eventually he did so, looking carefully through that section and stabbing his finger at its middle.
By SUB custom, any call for a question was communal property and was distributed by consensus to a member of the group. This time, Dexter Fresser, Sarah's hometown ex-beau, number 2 person in the SUB and its chief political theorist, got the nod. Shaking his head, he pushed himself up in his seat until he could see Krupp's face hovering malevolently above the dome of the next person's bandanna. He took a deep breath, preparing for intellectual combat, and began.
"You were talking about autonomy. Well, then you were talking about Greek words of roots. I want to talk about Greek too because we have our roots in Greece, just like, you know, our words do-- that is, most of us do, our culture does, even if our ethnicity doesn't. But Rome was much, much more powerful than Greece, and that was after most of the history of the human race, which we don't know anything about. And you know in Greece they had gayness all over the place. I'm saying that nice and loud even though you hate it, but even though. uh, you know, fascist? But you can't keep me from saying it. Did you ever think about the concentration camps? How all those people were killed by fascists? And also in Haiti. which we annexed in 1904. And did you ever 1 think about the socialist revolution in France that was crushed by D-Day because the socialists were fighting off the Nazis single-handedly. Where's the good in that? Bela Lugos! was ugly, but he had a great mind. I mean, some of the greatest works of art were done by Satan-worshipers like Shakespeare and Michelangelo! And the next time your car throws a rod on 1-90 between Presho and Kennebec because you lost your dipstick you should think, even if it is a hundred and ten in the shade forty-four Celsius and there are red winged blackbirds coming at you like Bell AH-64s or something. Put the goddamn zucchini in later next time and it won t get so mushy! I know this is strong and direct and undiplomatical, but this is real life and I can't be like you and phrase it like blue tennis-shoe laces hanging from the rear-view mirror. See?"
Here he stopped. Krupp had listened patiently, occasionally looking away to restack his notes or puff on his cigar. "No," he said. "Do you have a question. son?"
Emotionally wounded, Dex Fresser shook his head back and forth and gestured around it as though tearing off a heavy layer of tar. While his companions supported him, another SUBbie rose to take his place. She was of average height, with terribly pale skin and a safety pin through her septum. She rose like a zeppelin on power takeoff and began to read in a singsong voice from a page covered with arithmetic.
"Mister Krupp, sir. Last year. According, to the Monoplex Monitor, you, I mean the Megaversity Corporation ruling clique, spent ten thousand dollars on legal fees for union-busting firms. Now. There are forty thousand students at. American Megaversity. This means that on the average, you spent… four thousand million dollars on legal fees for union-busting alone! How do you justify that, when in this very city people have to pay for their own abortions?"