Drunkard's Walk

  Then there was Charles Bingham. He was a reactor hand at the 14th Street generating plant. Mathematics might help him, in time, become a supervising engineer. It also might not - the candidates for that job were already lined up fifty deep. But there were half a million Charles Binghams.

  Sue-Ann Flood was the daughter of a farmer. Her father drove a helipopper, skimming the ploughed fields, seeding, spraying, fertilizing, and he knew that the time she put in on college-level studies would not help her gain admittance to the University. Sue-Ann knew it too; Sticky Dick measured abilities and talents, not knowledge. But she was only fourteen years old. She hoped. There were more than two million like Sue-Ann, and every one of them knew that all the others would be disappointed.

  Those, the millions of them, were the invisible audience who watched Master Cornut's tiny image on a cathode screen. But there were others. One watched from Bogota and one from Buenos Aires. One in Saskatchewan said, You goofed this morning, and one flying high over the Rockies said, Can't we try him now? And one was propped on incredibly soft pillows in front of a set not more than a quarter of a mile from Cornut himself; and he said, It's worth a try. The son of a bitch is getting in my hair.

  It was not the easiest task ever given man, to explain the relationship between the Pascal Triangle and the Binomial Distribution, but Cornut was succeeding. Master Carl's little mnemonic jingles helped, and what helped most of all was the utter joy Cornut took in it all. It was, after all, his life. As he led the class, he felt again the wonder he himself had felt, sitting in a class like this one. He hardly heard the buzz from the class as he put his pointer down to gesture, and blindly picked it up again, still talking. Teaching mathematics was a kind of hypnosis for him, an intense, gut-wrenching absorption that had gripped him from the time of his first math class. That was what Sticky Dick had measured, and that was why Cornut was a full professor at thirty. It was a wonder that so strange a thing as a number should exist in the first place, rivalled only by the greater wonder that they should perform so obediently the work of mankind.

  The class buzzed and whispered.

  It struck Cornut cloudily that they were whispering more than usual.

  He looked up, absent-mindedly. There was an itch at the base of his throat. He scratched it with the tip of the pointer, half distracted from the point he was trying to make. But the taped visual aids on the screen were timed just so and he could not falter; he picked up the thread of what he was saying; itch and buzz faded out of his mind...

  Then he faltered again.

  Something was wrong. The class was buzzing louder. The students in the first row were staring at him with a unanimous, unprecedented expression. The itch returned compellingly. He scratched at it; it still itched; he dug at it with the pointer.

  —No. Not with the pointer. Funny, he thought, there was the pointer on his desk.

  Suddenly his throat hurt very much.

  'Master Cornut, stop!' screamed someone - a girl ... Tardily he recognized the voice, Locille's voice, as she leaped to her feet, and half the class with her. His throat was a quick deep pain, like fire. A warm tickling thread slipped across his chest - blood! From his throat! He stared at the thing in his hand, and it was not the pointer at all but the letter-opener, steel and sharp. Confused and panicked, he wheeled to gaze at the monitor. There was his own face, over a throat that bore a narrow trickling slash of blood!

  Three million viewers gasped. Half the studio class was boiling towards him, Egerd and the girl ahead of the rest. 'Easy, sir! Here, let me—' That was Egerd, with a tissue, pressing it against the wound. 'You'll be all right, sir! It's only - But it was close!'

  Close ... He had all but cut his jugular vein in two, right in front of his class and the watching world. The murderer inside his head was getting very strong and sure, to brave the light of day.

  CHAPTER IV

  Cornut was literally a marked man now. He had a neat white sterile bandage on his throat, and the medics had cheerfully assured him that when the bandage was gone there would be a handsome scar. They demanded that he stay around for a complete psycho-medical checkup. He said, no. They said, Would you rather be dead? He said he wasn't going to die. They said, How can you be sure? But, as it turned out, the clinic was not going to be free for that sort of thing for a couple of hours, and he fought his way free. He was extremely angry at the medics for annoying him, at himself for being such a fool, at Egerd for staunching the flow of his blood, at Locille for seeing it... his patience was exhausted with the world.

  Cornut strode like a blinkered cart-horse to the Math Tower gym, looking neither to left nor right, though he knew what he would see. Eyes. The eyes of everyone on the campus, looking at him and whispering. He found an undergraduate who was reasonably willing to mind his own business (the boy only looked slightly doubtful when Cornut chose his epee, but one glimpse of Cornut's face made his own turn into opaque stone), and they two fenced for a furious half-hour. The medics had told Cornut to be sure to rest. Winded and muscles aching, he returned to his room to do so.

  He spent a long, thoughtful afternoon lying on his bed and looking at the ceiling, but nothing came of it The whole thing was simply too irritating to be borne.

  Medics or not, at a quarter to five he put on a clean shirt to keep his appointment at the faculty tea.

  The tea was a sort of official send-off to the University's Field Expedition. Attendance was compulsory, especially for those who, like Cornut, were supposed to make the trip; but that was not why he was there. He considered it to be his last good chance to get off the list.

  There were three hundred persons in the huge, vaulted room. The University conspicuously consumed space; it was a tradition, like the marginal pencillings in all the books in the library. Every one of the three hundred glanced once quickly at Cornut as he came in, then away - some with a muffled laugh, gome with sympathy, the worst with an unnatural lack of any expression at all. So much for the grapevine. Damn them, Cornut thought bitterly, you'd think no professor ever tried to commit suicide before. He couldn't help overhearing some of the whispers.

  'And that's the seventh time. It's because he's desperate to be department head and old Carl won't step down.'

  'Esmeralda! You know you're making that up!'

  His face flaming, Cornut walked briskly past the little knot. It was like a fakir's bed of coals; every step seemed to crisp him. But there were other things to gossip about at the tea, and some of the captured fragments of talk did not concern him at all.

  '—want us to get along with a fourteen-year-old trevatron. You know what the China's have? Six brand-new ones. And coin silver for the windings!'

  'Yes, but there's two billion of them. Per capita we stack up pretty—'

  Cornut halted in the middle of the drinking, eating, talking, surging mass and looked about for Master Carl. He caught sight of him. The department head was paying his respects to a queer-looking, ancient figure - St Cyr, the President of the University. Cornut was startled. St Cyr was an old man and by his appearance a sick one; it was rare to see him at a faculty tea. Still, this one was special - and anyway, that could make it a lot easier to get off the list.

  Cornut pushed his way towards them, past a stocky drunk from humanities who was whispering ribaldly to a patient student waitress, and threaded his way through a group of anatomists from the med school.

  'Notice what decent cadavers we've been getting lately? It hasn't been this good since the last shooting war. Of course, they're not much good except for geriatrics, but that's selective euthanasia for you.'

  'Will you watch what you're doing with that Martini?'

  Cornut made his way slowly towards Master Carl and President St Cyr. The closer he got, the easier it was to move. There were fewer people at St Cyr's end of the room; he was the central figure of the gathering, but the guests did not cluster around him; that's the kind of a man he was.

  The kind of a man St Cyr was was this: He was the ugliest man
in the room.

  There were others who were in no way handsome - old, or fat, or sick. St Cyr was something special. His face was an artifact of ugliness. Deep old scars made a net across his face like the flimsy cloth that holds a cheese. Surgery? No one knew. He had always had them. And his skin was a cyanotic blue.

  Master Greenlease (physical chem) and Master Wahl (anthropology) were there, Wahl because he was too drunk to care who he spoke to, no doubt; Greenlease because Carl had him by the elbow and would not let him go. St Cyr nodded four times at Cornut, like a pendulum. 'Nice wea-ther,' he said, tolling it like a clock.

  'Yes, it is, sir. Excuse me. Carl—'

  St Cyr lifted the hand that hung by his side and laid it limply in Cornut's hand - it was his version of a handshake. He opened his seamed mouth and gave the series of unvoiced glottal stops that were his version of a chuckle. 'It will be heav-y weath-er for Mas-ter Wahl,' he said, spacing out the syllables like an articulate metronome. It was his version of a joke.

  Cornut gave him a waxen smile and a small waxen laugh. The reference was to the fact that Wahl, too, was scheduled to go on the Field Expedition. Cornut didn't think that was funny - not as far as he himself was concerned, anyway -not when he had so many other things on his mind.

  'Carl,' he said, 'excuse me.' But Master Carl had other things on his mind; he was badgering Greenlease for information about molecular structure, heaven knew why. And also St Cyr had not released his hand.

  Cornut grumbled internally and waited. Wahl was giggling over some involved faculty joke to which St Cyr was listening like a judge. Cornut spared himself the annoyance of listening to it and thought about St Cyr. Queer old duck, of course. That was where you started. You could account for some of the queerness by, say, a bad heart. That would be the reason for the blueness. But what would be the reason for not having it operated on?

  And then, what about the other things? The deadpan expression. The lifeless voice, with its firmly pronounced terminal 'ings' and words without a stress syllable anywhere? St Cyr talked like a clockwork man. Or a deaf one?

  But again, what would be the reason for a man allowing himself to be deaf?

  Especially a man who owned a University, including an 800-bed teaching hospital.

  Wahl at last noticed that Cornut was present and punched his shoulder - cordially, Cornut decided, after thought. 'Committed any good suicides lately, boy?' He hiccoughed. 'Don't blame you. Your fault, President, you know, dragging him off to Tahiti with us. He doesn't like Tahiti.'

  Cornut said, with control, 'The Field Expedition isn't going to Tahiti.'

  Wahl shrugged. 'The way us anthropologists look at it, one gook island is like another gook island.' He even made a joke of his specialty! Cornut was appalled.

  On the other hand, St Cyr seemed neither to notice nor to mind. He flopped his hand free of Cornut's and rested it casually on Wahl's weaving shoulder. The other hand held the full highball glass which, Cornut had observed, always remained full. St Cyr did not drink or smoke (not even tobacco), nor had Cornut ever seen him give a second look to a pretty girl. 'Lis-ten,' he said in his slow-march voice, turning Wahl to face Carl and the chemist. 'This is in-ter-est-ing.'

  Carl was oblivious of the President, of Cornut, of everything except the fact that the chemist by his side knew something that Carl himself wanted to know. The information was there; he went after it. 'I don't seem to make myself clear. What I want to know, Greenlease, is how I can visualize the exact structure of a molecule. Do you follow me? For example, what colour is it?'

  The chemist looked uncomfortably at St Cyr, but St Cyr was apparently absorbed. 'Well,' he said. 'Uh. The concept of colour doesn't apply. Light waves are too long.'

  'Ah! I see.' Carl was fascinated. 'Well, what about the shape? I've seen those tinker-toy constructions. The atoms are little balls and they're held together with plastic rods - I suppose they represent connecting force. Are they anything like the real thing?'

  'Not much. The connecting force is real enough, but you can't see it - or maybe you could, at that' (Greenlease, like most of the faculty members present, had had a bit more than enough; he was not of a temper to try to interpret molecular forces in tinker-toy terms for professors who, whatever their status in Number Theory, were physical-chemical idiots) 'if, that is, you could see the atoms in the first place. One is no more impossible than the other. But the connecting force would not look like a rod, any more than the gravitation that holds the moon to the earth would look like a rod ... Let's see ... Do you know what I mean by the word "valence"? No. Well, do you know enough atomic theory to know what part is played by the number of electrons in - Or, look at it a different way.' He paused. By his expression, he was getting seriously annoyed, in a way he considered unjust - like an ivory hunter who, carrying a .400 Express in his crooked arm, cannot quite see how to cope with the attack of a hungry mosquito. He seemed on the point of reviewing atomic structure back through Bohr and well on the way to Democritus. 'I'll tell you what,' he said at last, 'stop around tomorrow if you can. I have some plates made under the electron microscope.'

  'Oh, thank you!' cried Carl with enthusiasm. 'Tomorrow - but tomorrow I'll be off on this con—' he smiled at St Cyr - 'tomorrow I'll be with the Field Expedition. Well, as soon as I get back, Greenlease. Don't forget.' He warmly shook hands as the chemist took his leave.

  Cornut hissed angrily, 'That's what I want to talk to you about.'

  Carl looked startled but pleased. 'I didn't know you were interested in my little experiments, Cornut. That was quite fascinating. I've always thought of a molecule of silver nitrate, for example, as being black or silvery. Perhaps that's where my work has gone wrong. Greenlease says—'

  'No. I'm not talking about that. I mean the Field Expedition. I can't go.'

  An observer a yard away would have thought that all of St. Cyr's attention was on Wahl; he had lost interest in the dialogue between Carl and Greenlease minutes before. But the old head turned like a parabolic mirror. The faded blue eyes radared in on Cornut. The slow metronome ticked, 'You must go, Cor-nut.'

  'Must go? Of course you must go. Good heavens, Cornut - Don't mind him, President. Certainly he'll go.' 'But I have all the Wolgren to get through—'

  'And then a su-i-cide to com-mit.' The muscles at the corner of the mouth tried to twitch the blue lips upwards, to show that it was a pleasantry.

  But Cornut was nettled. 'Sir, I don't intend to—'

  'You did not in-tend to this morn-ing.'

  Carl interrupted. 'Cornut, be quiet. President, that was distressing, of course. I've had a full report on it, and I believe we can pass it off as an accident. Perhaps it was an accident. I don't know. It would have been quite easy to pick up the paper-knife in error.'

  Cornut said, 'But—'

  'In an-y case, he must go.'

  'Naturally, President. You understand that, don't you, Cornut?' 'But—'

  'You will take the ad-vance plane, please. I want you to be there when I ar-rive.' 'Very well. It's settled, then.'

  'But—' said Cornut, but he was destined never to get a word deeper into that thought; through the mill of faculty came a man and a woman with the tense, nervous bearing of Townies. The woman carried a photo-taper; the man was a reporter from one of the nets.

  'President St Cyr? Yes, of course. Thanks for inviting us. Naturally, we'll have a whole crew here when your expedition gets back, but I wonder if we can't get a few photographs now. As I understand it, you've located seven aboriginals. Seven? I see. It's a whole tribe, then, but seven are being brought back here. And who is the head of the expedition? Oh, naturally. Millie, will you be sure to get President St Cyr?'

  The reporter's thumb was on the trigger of his voice-taper, getting down the fact that nine faculty members were going to bring back the seven aborigines, that the expedition would leave, in two planes, at nine o'clock that night, so as to arrive at their destination in early morning, local time; and that the benefits to anthropo
logical research would surely be beyond calculation.

  Cornut drew Master Carl aside. 'I don't want to go! What the hell does this have to do with mathematics, anyhow?'

  'Now, please, Cornut. You heard the President. It has nothing to do with mathematics, no, but it is purely a ceremonial function and a good deal of an honour. At the present time, you should not refuse it. You can see that some rumours of your, uh, accidents have reached him. Don't cause friction.'

  'What about the Wolgren? What about my, uh, accidents? Even here I nearly kill myself, and I'm all set up. What will I do without Egerd?'

  'I'll be with you.'

  'No, Carl!'

  Carl said, speaking very clearly, 'You are going.' The eyes were star-sapphires.

  Cornut studied the eyes for a moment, and then gave up. When Carl got that expression and that tone of voice, it meant that argument served no further useful purpose. Since Cornut loved the old man, he always stopped arguing at that point.

  'I'm going,' he said. But the expression on his face would have soured wine.

  Cornut packed - it took five minutes - and went back to the clinic to see if diagnostic space was free. It was not. He was cutting his time very close - take-off for the first plane was in less than an hour - but mulishly he took a seat in the reception room. Stolidly he did not look at the clock.

  When the examination room was available things went briskly. His vital statistics were machine-measured and machine-studied, his blood spectrum was machine-chromatographed, automatically the examining table was tipped so that he could step off, and as he dressed a photoelectric eye behind his hanging garments glanced at him, opened the door to the outside corridor and said, 'Thank you. Wait in the outer office, please,' from a machine-operated tape.