"Plans are in the architectural offices," Groating said. "It isn't due for construction for another thirty years. We intend placing it at the north end of Central Park--" It was difficult to hear them. The room was filled with the bellow and roar of shouting from the amphitheater. It was packed from pit to gallery with quick-jerking figures. They climbed across the terraces; they fought up and down the broad aisles; they stood on their seats and waved. Most of all they opened their mouths into gaping black blots and shouted. The hoarse sound rolled like slow, thunderous waves, and there was a faint rhythm struggling to emerge from the chaos. A figure appeared from behind the columns, walked calmly up to the platform and began arranging cards on the small table. It was FitzJohn, icy and self-possessed, statuesque in his white tunic. He stood alongside the table, carefully sorting his notes, utterly oblivious of the redoubled roar that went up at his appearance. Out of that turmoil came the accented beats of a doggerel rhyme: Neon Crypton Ammoniated FitzJohn Neon Crypton Ammoniated FitzJohn When he was finished, FitzJohn straightened and, resting the fingertips of his right hand lightly on top of the table, he gazed out at the rioting--un-smiling, motionless. The pandemonium was reaching unprecedented heights. As the chanting continued, costumed figures appeared on the terrace tops and began fighting down the aisles toward the platform. There were men wearing metal-tubed frame-works representing geometric figures. Cubes, spheres, rhomboids and tesseracts. They hopped and danced outlandishly. Two young boys began unreeling a long streamer from a drum concealed behind the colonnade. It was of white silk and an endless equation was printed on it that read: eia = 1 + ia - a2! + a3! - a4!... and so on, yard after yard after yard. It didn't exactly make sense, but I understood it to be some kind of cutting reference to FitzJohn's equations. There were hundreds of others, some surprising and many obscure. Lithe contortionists, made up to represent Möbius Strips, grasped ankles with their hands and went rolling down the aisles. A dozen girls appeared from nowhere, clad only in black net representing giant Aleph-Nulls, and began an elaborate ballet. Great gas-filled balloons, shaped into weird topological manifolds were dragged in and bounced around. It was utter insanity and utterly degrading to see how these mad college kids were turning FitzJohn's lecture into a Mardi Gras. They were college kids, of course, crazy youngsters who probably couldn't explain the binomial theorem, but nevertheless were giving their own form of expression to their teachers' antagonism to FitzJohn. I thought vaguely of the days centuries back when a thousand Harvard undergraduates did a very similar thing when Oscar Wilde came to lecture. Undergraduates whose entire reading probably consisted of the _Police Gazette_.