department."
"Who is that for physics?"
"Distinguished Professor Sharon," she said. Bulging her eyeballs at Casimir,
she made a respectful silence at the Professor's name, daring him to break it.
When Casimir returned to consciousness he was drifting down a hallway, still
mumbling to himself in astonishment. He had an appointment to meet the
Professor Sharon. He would have been ecstatic just to have sat in on one of
the man's lectures!
Casimir Radon was an odd one, as American Megaversity students went. This was
a good thing for him, as the Housing people simply couldn't match him up with
a reasonable roommate; he was assigned a rare single. It was in D Tower, close
to the sciences bloc where he would spend most of his time, on a floor of
single rooms filled by the old, the weird and the asinine who simply could not
live in pairs.
ln order to find his room he would have to trace a mind-twisting path through
the lower floors until he found the elevators of D Tower. So before he got
himself lost, he went to the nearest flat surface, which was the top of a
large covered wastebasket. From it he cleared away a few Dorito bags and
a half-drained carton of FarmSun SweetFresh brand HomeLivin' Artificial
Chocolate-Flavored Dairy Beverage and forced them into the overflowing maw
below. He then removed his warped and sweat-soaked Plex map (the Plexus) from
his pocket and unfolded it on the woodtoned Fiberglass surface.
As was noted at the base of the Plexus, it had been developed by the AM
Advanced Graphics Workshop. Rather than presenting maps of each floor of the
Plex, they had used an Integrated Projection to show the entire Plex as a
network of brightly colored paths and intersections. The resulting tangle was
so convoluted and yet so clean and spare as to be essentially without meaning.
Casimir, however, could read it, because he was not like us. After applying
his large intelligence to the problem for several minutes he was able to find
the most efficient route, and following it with care, he quickly became lost.
The mistake was a natural one. The elevators, which were busy even in the dead
of night, were today clogged with catatonic parents from New Jersey clutching
beanbag chairs and giant stuffed animals. Fortunately (he thought), adjacent
to each elevator was an entirely unused stairwell.
Casimir discovered shortly afterward that in the lower floors of the Plex all
stairwell doors locked automatically from the outside. I discovered it myself
at about the same time. Unlike Casimir I had been a the Plex for ten days,
but I had spent them typing up notes for my classes, It is unwise to prepare
two courses in ten days, and I knew it. I hadn't gotten to it until the last
minute, for various reasons, and so I'd spent ten days sitting there in my
bicycling shorts, drinking beer, typing, and sweating monumentally in the
fetid Plex air. So my first exposure to the Plex and its people really came
