Interface by Neal Stephenson, J. Frederick George

order to crack a skull he had to get to a decent hospital. In order to reach a decent hospital from here, he had to use the Elton State University airplane. But every time he needed it, the football coach had taken it out on a recruiting trip to L.A. or Houston. This was in direct violation of Dr. Radhakrishnan's contract with Elton State, which stated that he would have access to the airplane as needed.
    The only person who could help him was Dr. Artaxerxes Jackman, the president of Elton State University, and Jackman had to be approached in the right way. Jackman had a Ph.D. in education and higher administration. It was almost criminal fraud to call him a doctor, but in the academic sense, a doctor he was. Dr. Radhakrishnan had not spent most of his life in his native India without figuring out that important positions are quite often filled by underserving swine, who must be deferred to in any case.
    His own father was a case in point. Forty years ago, about the time Gangadhar had been born, Jagdish Radhakrishnan had been a rising young idealist in the Nehru administration. That very idealism had led to an appointment on the Railway Corruption Enquiry Committee of 1953. Jagdish had carried out his respon sibilities zealously, refusing to pull his punches even when it became evident that he was getting close to many a high-ranking official. He found himself summarily transferred to a low post in the Sheet Mica Price Controller's organisation, where he had lan guished ever since, living only for the achievements of his two sons: Arun,   the golden boy,   the firstborn son,   now a member of Parliament, and to a lesser extent, Gangadhar.
    Gangadhar V.R.J.V.V. Radhakrishnan knew that the faculty of Elton State University was, in the academic world, roughly equivalent to the Sheet Mica Price Controller's Organisation, and that if he ever wanted to get out of this place he would have show more discretion - more savvy - less boneheaded idealism than his father had back in the 1950s. For half a year he had been trying, diplomatically and politely, to get in for a face-to-face with Dr. Jackman, but there meeting kept getting postponed.
    Before he even veered into the parking lot of the Coover biotechnology pavilion, blood balloons began to detonate on the windshield of his full-sized, one-ton, six-wheel-drive Chevy pickup truck. He kept driving even though he could no longer see through the windshield. If he was lucky, he might run over an animal rights activist and then claim it was an accident. The truck was not in a mood to slow down; it was heavily laden with fifty- pound sacks of Purina Monkey Chow. He had just paid for the monkey chow himself, with his own money, down at the grain elevator - the closest thing there was to a skyscraper in Elton, a white tubular obelisk sticking up above the railroad tracks on the edge of town. He had talked to the grinning windburned Nazis, given them his money, endured their snickering at his accent and their remarks about his heavy winter coat.
    "So what do you do with this stuff? Fry it up or just eat it cold?" one of them had said, as they were piling the monkey chow into his truck.
    "I feed it to brain-damaged lower primates," Dr. Radhakrishnan had said. "Would you like a sample?"
    The one thing they valued him for - that gave him potential status as a human being in their eyes - was his monster truck: 454 cubic inches of V-8 power, double wheels on the rear axle, a thick black roll bar brandishing great mesh-covered Stalag 17 searchlights that could pick out a shrew on a rock in a midnight windstorm across two miles of chaparral. He had traded in a BMW for this coarse and ungainly machine halfway through his first winter here, almost two years ago, when he found out that the ultimate driving machine simply did not go in a six-foot snowdrift.
    The double-edged windshield wipers smeared blood across the windshield in gory arcs, giving him a partial view of the loading dock. It wasn't