Later I was to think it remarkable that Casimir and I should emerge from those fire doors at nearly the same moment, and meet. On reflection I have changed my mind. The Big U was an unnatural environment, a work of the human mind, not of God or plate tectonics. If two strangers met in the rarely used stairways, it was not unreasonable that they should turn out to be similar, and become friends. I thought of it as an immense vending machine, cautiously crafted so that any denomination too ancient or foreign or irregular would rattle about randomly for a while, find its way into the stairway system, and inevitably be deposited in the reject tray on the barren back side. Meanwhile, brightly colored graduates with attractively packaged degrees were dispensed out front every June, swept up by traffic on the Parkway and carried away for leisurely consumption. Had I understood this earlier I might have come to my senses and immediately resigned, but on that hot September day, with the exhaust abrading our lungs and the noise squashing our conversation, it seemed worthwhile to circle around to the Main Entrance and give it another try.
We headed east to avoid the stadium. On our right the wall stretched and away for acres in a perfect cinderblock grid. Alter passing dozens of fire doors we came to the corner and turned into the access lot that stretched along the east wall. Above, at many altitudes, cars and trucks screeched and blasted through the tight curves of the interchange. People called it the Death Vortex, and some claimed that parts of it extended into the fourth dimension. As soon as it had been planned, the fine old brownstone neighborhood that was its site plummeted into slumhood; Haitians and Vietnamese filled the place up, and the feds airproofed the buildings and installed giant electric air filters before proceeding.
Here on the access lot we could look down a long line of loading docks, the orifices of the Plex where food and supplies were ingested and trash discharged, serviced by an endless queue of trucks. The first of these docks, by the northern corner, was specially designed for the discharge of hazardous wastes produced in Plex labs and was impressively surrounded by fences, red lights and threatening signs. The next six loading docks were for garbage trucks, and the rest, all the way down to the Parkway, for deliveries. We swung way out from the Plex to avoid all this, and followed the fence at the border of the lot, gazing into the no-man's-land of lost mufflers and shredded fanbelts beyond, and sometimes staring up into the Plex itself.
The three-by-three block base had six stories above ground and three below. Atop it sat eight 25-story towers where lived the 40,000 students of the university. Each tower had four wings 160 feet long, thrown out at right angles to make a Swiss cross. These towers sat at the four corners and four sides of the base. The open space between them was a huge expanse of roof called Tar City, inhabited by great machines, crushed furniture thrown from above, rats, roaches, students out on dares, and the decaying corpses of various things that had ventured out on hot summer days and become mired in the tar. All we could see were the neutral light brown towers and their thousands and thousands of identical windows reaching into the heavens. Even for a city person, it was awesome. Compared to the dignified architecture of the old brownstones, though, it caused me a nagging sense of embarrassment.
The Vortex whose coils were twined around those brownstones threw out two ramps which served as entrance and exit for the Plex parking ramp. These ran into the side of the building at about third-story level. To us they were useless, so we continued around toward the south side.
Here was actually some green: a strip of grass between the walk and the Parkway. On this side the Plex was faced with darker brown brick and had many picture windows and signs for the businesses of the built-in mall on the first floor. The Main Entrance itself was merely eight revolving doors in a row, and having swished through them we were drowned in conditioned air, Muzak, the smell of Karmel Korn and the idiotic babble of penny-choked indoor fountains. We passed through this as quickly as possible and rode the long escalators ("This must be what a ski lift is like," said Casimir) to the third floor, where a rampart of security booths stretched across our path like a thruway toll station. Several of the glass cages were occupied by ancient guards in blue uniforms, who waved us wearily through the turnstiles as we waved our ID cards at them. Casimir stopped on the other side, frowning.
"They shouldn't have let me in," he said.
"Why?" I asked. "Isn't that your ID?"
"Of course it is," said Casimir Radon, "but the photo is so bad they had no way of telling." He was serious. We surveyed the rounded blue back of the guard. Most of them had been recruited out of Korea or the Big One. The glass cages of the Plex had ruined their bodies. Now they had become totally passive in their outlook; but, by the same token, they had become impossible to faze or surprise.