Homicide on the Campus

In the dimness of the University of Chicago's Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, pretty Coed Susan Alberi, 18, passed her fellow worshiper a note. Would he please kneel in prayer? With a smile, he complied. "He thought I was trying to pick him up," Susan recounts gleefully. "Instead I choked him with my rosary."

Her "kill" was worth two points in the newest campus craze, "The Hunt," a game patterned on The Tenth Victim. As in the movie, players are divided into "hunters," who are given the names of their prey, and "victims," who are simply notified that they are on someone's assassination list. One session of the hunt goes on for four days; then the directors assay the kills, award one point if the kill was technically feasible and actually was carried out, two points, if the kill was technically brilliant. However, if the hunter is killed by his victim, he loses one point; if he kills a bystander, he loses two points. The first to win ten points is named a "decathlon" (as in the movie) and gets a party thrown in his honor.

Scrambled Brains. Midwest campuses are now fairly humming with homicidal ingenuity. One Chicago student got a long letter from the Bursar's Office, discussing his tuition payments, didn't realize that he had been trapped until the last paragraph: "By the way, you have just been handling paper impregnated with contact poison--phenyl-hydrazine substitution products. This poison should by now be spreading through your system and you will lie groaning on the floor. This is your hunter speaking. You are now dead."

Elsewhere on campus, one victim was hit on the head with a pillow labeled "2,000-lb. safe"; others have run into rubber bands stretched to simulate high-voltage wires, been cut down by lasers (flashlight beams), incinerated by flamethrowers (pressurized shaving-cream containers), drilled with water guns. Some of the more adventuresome kills:

> A plastic explosive was planted in the earpiece of a telephone and set to explode at the sound of A on a tuning fork. After planting the device, the hunter called his victim, then twanged the fork. Boom.

> A girl was coaxed into a sound studio by a student disk jockey on the pretext that he wanted to tape her voice for a commercial. Then, turning hunter, he loosened the doorknob, and from the control room sent a screaming high-frequency sweep that scrambled his victim's brains. Two points.

Basic Motive. Started at Oberlin, where an IBM 1620 computer matches hunters and victims and keeps tab of point totals, the game spread to the Illinois Institute of Technology, and last month reached the University of Chicago, where 100 paired hunters and victims, including four members of the faculty, were last week furiously playing at murder.

What makes the game fun? The Tenth Victim, set in the 21st century when war has been outlawed, describes The Hunt as "a safety valve for humanity's latent aggressive instincts." The same rule would seem to apply on campus. Sophomore Andrew Lachman, who, along with Junior Michael Starrels, organized the game at Chicago, calls it "a means of letting off aggression, a way to break some of the academic tension on campus." Starrels suggests a more basic motive: "There isn't much social activity on this campus," says he, "and this is a good way to meet girls."

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