October 20--Gund Hall finally crumples to the ground. Twenty architects are called in to submit sketches for a new building.
October 31--Christo, now a visiting professor in the VES Department, joins the contest with a design for a building resembling a five-story roll of paper towelling. The Corporation approves his plan and hires construction workers. "It will go so nicely with the Sackler Wing of the Fogg," exults Bok.
November
Despite a hot race at the end, Reagan bears out the predictions of a year and is reelected President of the United States. Hart observes that "Cambridge isn't so bad, and besides, I'll be with all my buddies."
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to media, Bok, Watt, the corporation and the Faculty Council meet in secret session. While welcoming a group of dignitaries to the Yard, Bok is heard to murmur, "And you think you're just sightseeing. Well, ignorance is bliss."
November 15--Returning briefly to his official sphere as Dean, Watt issues a statement strongly urging that no new courses be added to the Core Curriculum, "lest this Core put out Leaves, and grow like a green thing."
November 24--A freshman handing in a late term paper in the dead of night stumbles over one of the new, small kiosks, displacing it very slightly from its base. When students return after Thanksgiving, every kiosk is surrounded by a small barbed-wire fence.
December
December 31--Bok rises at dawn and creeps down Kennedy St., where the innumerable visiting dignitaries and failed politicians are carefully accounted for in the new barracks. Checking over a computer-typed list, he nods to himself and walks back up toward the Yard, into his Mass. Hall office. There he presses a small gray button and a recorded message is boorood over Cambridge. By 9 a.m., all local inhabitants have been informed that Harvard, having slowly accrued nine-tenths of the world's trained political leadership through its K-School programs, is poised for world hegemony. If the government of the United States, Soviet Union, People's Republic of China and several strategically placed others do not surrender, Bok will make good his threat to set of the large nuclear warhead concealed within the tower of Memorial Church or the innumerable small ones inside the kiosk-disguised silos in the Yard.
At 5 p.m. after hasty discussion, the superpowers and their major allies tender their unconditional capitulations, and Bok relieved, checks his watch. "Wouldn't it have been a pity." he say to Watt "it is hadn't worked and we'd had to wait till 1985."