Drunkard's Walk

  Master Carl, in a fluster, found him waiting.

  'Good God, boy! Do you know the plane's about to take off? And the President specially said we were to go in the first plane. Come on! I've a scooter waiting...'

  'Sorry.'

  'Sorry? What the devil do you mean, sorry? Come!'

  Cornut said flatly, 'I agreed to go. I will go. But, as there is some feeling, shared by yourself, that the medics can help keep me from killing myself, I do not intend to leave this building until they tell me what I must do. I am waiting for the results of my examination now.'

  Master Carl said, 'Oh.' He glanced at the clock on the wall. 'I see,' he said. He sat down beside Cornut thoughtfully.

  Suddenly he grinned. 'All right, boy. The President can't argue with that.'

  Cornut relaxed. He said, 'Well, you go ahead, Carl. No reason for both of us to get in trouble—'

  'Trouble!' Master Carl seemed quite gay. Cornut realized that it had finally occurred to the house-master that this trip was a sort of vacation; he was practising for a holiday mood. 'Why should there be any trouble? You have a good reason for being tardy. I, too, have a good reason for waiting for you. After all, the President urged me to bring the Wolgren analysis along. He's quite interested, you know. And as I did not see it in your room, I suppose it is in your bags; therefore I will wait for your bags.'

  Cornut protested, 'But it isn't anywhere near finished!'

  Carl actually winked. 'Now, do you suppose he'll know the difference? Be flattered that he is interested enough to pretend to look at it!'

  Cornut said grudgingly, 'Well, all right. How the devil did he hear about it in the first place?'

  'I told him, of course. I - I've had occasion to discuss you with him a good deal, these past few days.' Carl's expression lost some of its glow. 'Cornut,' he said severely, 'we can't let this go on, can we? You must regularize your life. Take a woman.'

  Cornut exploded, 'Master Carl! You have no right to interfere in my personal affairs!'

  'Trust me, boy,' the old man wheedled. 'This thing with Egerd is only a makeshift. A thirty-day marriage would surely see you through the worst of it, wouldn't it?'

  Three weeks, thought Cornut, diverted.

  'And, truly, you need a wife. It is bad for a man to go through life alone,' he explained.

  Cornut snapped, 'How about you?'

  'I'm older. You're young. How long is it since you've had a wife.'

  Cornut was obstinately silent.

  'You see? There are many lovely young girls in the University. They would be proud. Any of them.'

  Cornut did not want his mind to roam the corridors that had just been opened for it, but it did.

  'Besides, you will have her with you at all the dangerous times. You won't need Egerd.'

  Cornut's mind ran back quickly and began to trace a more familiar, less attractive maze. 'I'll think about it,' he said at last, just as the medic came in with his report, a couple of boxes of pills and a sheaf of papers. The report was negative, all down the line. The pills? They were just in case, said the medic; they couldn't hurt, they might help.

  And the sheaf of papers ... The top one said: Confidential. Tentative. Studies of Suicidal Tendencies in Faculty Members.

  Cornut covered it with his hand, interrupted the medic as he was about to explain the delay in getting the dossiers for him and cried, 'Let's get a move on, Carl! We can still make that plane.'

  But, as it turned out, they couldn't.

  As fast as the scooter would go, they got to the aircraft park just in time to see the first section of the Field Expedition lift itself off the ground with a great whistling roar on its VTO jets.

  Much to Cornut's surprise, Master Carl was not upset. 'Oh, well,' he said, 'we had our reasons. It isn't as though we were arbitrarily late. And anyway—' he allowed himself another wink, the second in a quarter of an hour - 'this gives us a chance to ride in the President's private plane, eh? Real living for us of the underprivileged class!' He even opened his mouth to chuckle, but he didn't do it, or if he did the sound was not heard. Overhead there was a gruff giant's cough and a bright spray of flame. They looked up. Flame, flame all over the heavens, falling in great white droplets to the earth.

  'My God,' said Cornut softly, 'and that was our plane.'

  CHAPTER V

  'Nothing loath,' said Master Carl thoughtfully, 'I kissed your concubine.' He squinted out of the window of the jet, savouring the sentence. It was good. Yes. But was it perfect?

  A towering cumulo-nimbus, far below, caught his attention and distracted him. He sighed. He didn't feel like working. Apparently everyone else in the jet was asleep. Or pretending to be. Only St Cyr, way up in front, propped on pneumatic pillows in the semi-circular lounge, looked as much awake as he ever did. But it was better not to talk to St Cyr. Carl was aware that most conversations involving himself turned, sooner or later, to either his private researches or to Number Theory. As he knew more about either than anyone else alive, they wound up as lectures. That was no good with St Cyr. He had made it clear long ago that he was not interested in being instructed by the instructors he hired. Also he was in a bad mood.

  It was odd, thought Master Carl, less in resentment than in a spirit of scientific inquiry, but St Cyr had been quite furious with Cornut and himself for no good reason. It could not have been for missing the first plane - if they'd caught it, they would have died, just like its crew and the four graduate students it carried. But St Cyr had been furious, the tick-tock voice hoarse and breathless, the hairless eyebrows almost scowling. Master Carl took his eyes away from the window and abandoned the question of St Cyr. Let him sulk. Carl didn't like problems that had no solution. Nothing loath, I kissed your concubine. But mightn't it be better to stick to song-writing?

  He became conscious of a beery breath on the back of his neck.

  'I'm glad you're awake, Wahl,' he said, turning, his face inches away from the hung-over face of the anthropologist. 'Let me have your opinion, please. Which is easier to remember: "Nothing loath, I kissed your concubine." Or, "Last digit? O, a potential square!"'

  Wahl shuddered. 'For God's sake. I just woke up.'

  'Why, I don't think that matters. It might help. The whole idea is to present the mnemonic in a form that is available under any conditions - including,' he said delicately, 'a digestive upset.' He rotated his chair to face Wahl, flipping through his notebook to display a scribbled page. 'Can you read that? The idea, you see, is to provide a handy recognition feature for quick factoring of aliquot numbers. Now, you know, of course, that all squares can end in only one of six digits. No square can end in two, three, seven or eight. So my first idea - I'm still not sure that I wasn't on the right track - was to use, "No, quantity not squared." You see the utility, I'm sure. Two letters in the first word, "no." Eight letters in "quantity," three in "not" and seven in "squared." It's easy to remember, I think, and it's self-defining. I consider that a major advantage.' 'Oh, it is,' said Wahl.

  'But,' Carl went on, 'it's negative. Also there is the chance that "no" can be misread for "nought" or "nothing" -meaning zero. So I tried the reverse approach. A square can end in zero, one, four, five, six or nine. Letting the ejaculative "O" stand for "zero," I then wrote: "Last digit? O, a potential square." Four, five, zero, one, nine and six - you see that. Excuse me. I'm so used to lecturing to undergraduates that sometimes I tend to over explain. But, although that has a lot to recommend it, it doesn't have - well - yumph.' He smiled with a touch of embarrassment. 'So, just on an inspiration, I came up with "Nothing loath, I kissed your concubine." Rather mnemonic, at least?'

  'It's all of that, Carl,' agreed Wahl, rubbing his temples. 'Say, where's Cornut?'

  'You realize that the "nothing," again, is "zero."'

  'Oh, there he is. Hey, Cornut!'

  'Be quiet! Let the boy sleep!' Carl was jolted out of his concentration. He leaned forward to see into the wing-backed seat ahead of him and was gratified to see that Cornut
was still snoring faintly.

  Wahl burst into a laugh, stopped abruptly with a look of surprise and clutched his head. After a moment he said, 'You take care of him like he was your baby.'

  'There is no need to take that sort of—'

  'Some baby! I've heard of accident-prones, but this one's fantastic. Not even Joe Btfsk wrecks planes that he ought to be in but isn't!'

  Master Carl bit back his instinctive rejoinder, paused to regain his temper and pondered an appropriate remark. He was saved the trouble. The jet lurched slightly and the distant thunderheads began to wheel towards the horizon. It wasn't the clouds, of course. It was the jet swinging in for a landing, vectored by unseen radar. It was only a very small motion, but it sent Wahl lurching frantically to the washroom and it woke Master Cornut. Carl leaped up as soon as he saw the younger man move, standing over him until his eyes were open. 'Are you all right?' he demanded at once.

  Cornut blinked, yawned and stretched his muscles.

  '—I guess so. Yes.'

  'We're about to land.' There was relief in Carl's voice. He had not expected anything to happen. Why should it? But there had been the chance that something might... 'I can get you a cup of coffee from the galley.'

  'All right - no. Never mind. We'll be down in a minute.'

  Below them the island was slipping back and forth slantwise, like a falling leaf - a leaf that was falling upwards, at least in their eyes, because it was growing enormously fast. Wahl came out of the washroom and stared at the houses.

  'Dirty hovels,' he growled. It was raining beneath their plane - no, around them - no, over. They were through the patchy cloud layer, and the 'hovels' Wahl had glimpsed were clear beneath. Out of the patches of clouds rain was falling.

  'Cum-u-lus of or-o-graph-ic or-i-gin,' said St Cyr's un-inflected voice, next to Master Carl's ear. 'There is al-ways cloud at the is-land. I hope the storm does not dis-turb you.'

  Master Wahl said, 'It disturbs me.'

  They landed, the jet's wheels screaming thinly as they touched the wet concrete runway. A short, dark man with an umbrella ran out and, holding it protectively over St Cyr's head, escorted them to the administration building, though the rain had nearly stopped.

  It was evident that St Cyr's reputation and standing were working for them. The whole party was passed through customs under seal; the brown-skinned inspectors didn't even touch the bags. One of them prowled briefly around the stack of the Field Expedition's luggage, carrying a portable voice-taper. 'Research instruments,' he chanted, singsong, and the machine clacked out its entry. 'Research instruments ... Research instruments.'

  Master Carl interrupted, 'That's my personal bag! There aren't any research instruments in it.'

  'Excuse,' said the inspector politely; but he went right on with calling every bag 'research instruments'; the only concession he made to Carl's correction was to lower his voice.

  It was, to Master Carl, an offensive performance, and he had it in his mind to speak to someone in authority about it, too. Research instruments! They had nothing resembling a research instrument to their names, unless you counted the collection of handcuffs Master Wahl had brought along, just in case the aboriginals were obstinate about coming along. He thought of bringing it up to St Cyr, but the President was talking to Cornut. Carl didn't want to interrupt. He had no objection to interrupting Cornut, of course, but interrupting the President of the University was something else again.

  Wahl said, 'What's that over there? Looks like a bar, doesn't it? How about a drink?'

  Carl shook his head frostily and stomped out into the street. He was not enjoying his trip, and it was a pity, he thought, because he realized that he had been rather looking forward to it. One needed a change of scene from the Halls of Academe every once in a while. Otherwise one tended to become stuffy and provincial, to lose contact with the mass of humanity outside the University walls. For that reason Carl had made it a practice, through the thirty-odd years since he began to teach, at least once in every year to accept or invent some task that would bring him in contact with the non-academic world ... They had all been quite as distasteful as this one, but since Master Carl had never realized this before it hadn't mattered.

  He stood in a doorway, out of the fresh hot sun, looking down a broad street. The 'filthy hovels' were not filthy at all; it was only Wahl's bad temper that had said that, not his reason. Why, they were quite clean, Master Carl marvelled. Not attractive. And not large. But they did have a quaint and not too repulsive appearance. They were clumsy prefabs of some sort of pressed fibre, plastic bonded - a local product most likely, Master Carl diagnosed; pulp from palm trees had gone into the making of them.

  A readable helipopper whirred, dipped, settled in the street before him, folded its vanes and rolled up to the entrance of the building where Carl was standing. The driver jumped out, ran around the side of the craft and opened the door.

  Now, that was odd.

  The driver acted as though the Empress Catherine was about to set foot on the soil she ruled, and yet what came out of the popper was no great lady but what seemed, at least at first glance, like a fourteen-year-old blonde. Carl pursed his thin lips and squinted into the bright sun. Curious, he marvelled, the creature was waving at him!

  The creature said, in a brassy voice of no fourteen-year-old, 'You're Carl. Come on, get in. I've been waiting for you people for an hour and a half, and I've got to get clear back to Rio de Janeiro tonight. And hurry up that old goat St Cyr, will you?'

  To Carl's surprise, St Cyr didn't strike the child dead.

  He came out and greeted her as affably as his corpse's voice could be made to sound, and he sat beside her in the front seat of the popper in the wordless association of old friends. But it wasn't the only surprising thing. Looking a little more closely at the 'girl' was a kind of surprise too, because a girl she was not. She was a painted grandmother with a face-lift, Bermuda shorts and a blonde bob! Why couldn't the woman grow old gracefully, like St Cyr, or for that matter like Master Carl himself?

  All the same, if St Cyr knew her she couldn't be all bad, and anyway Carl had something else bothering him. Cornut was missing.

  The helipopper was already on the bounce. Carl stood up. 'Wait! We're missing someone.' No one was listening. The grandmother in shorts was chattering away in St Cyr's ear, her voice queer and muffled under the sound of the sequenced rockets that whirled the vanes. 'President St Cyr! Please have this pilot turn back.' But St Cyr didn't even turn his head.

  Master Carl was worried. He pressed his face to the window, looking back towards the native town, but already it was too far to see anything.

  Of course, he told himself, there was no danger. There were no hostile natives anywhere in the world. Lightning would not strike. Cornut was as safe as if he were in his own bed.

  —Exactly as safe, his own mind assured him sternly, but no safer.

  But the fact of the matter was that Cornut was drinking a glass of beer at a dusty sidewalk table. For the first time in -was it for ever? - his mind was at rest.

  He was not thinking of the anomalies a statistical census had discovered in Wolgren's Distributive Law. He was not thinking of Master Carl's suggestion about term marriage, or even about the annoying interruption that this expedition represented. It did not seem quite as much of an annoyance, now that he was here. It was so quiet. It was like the fragrance of a new flower. He tested it experimentally with his ears and decided that, though odd, it was pleasant. A few hundred yards away some aircraft chugged into the sky, destroying the quiet, but the odd thing was that the quiet returned.

  Cornut now had the chance he had been looking for since leaving the clinic, the night before and ten thousand miles away. He ordered another beer from the sallow waitress and reached into his pocket for a sheaf of reports that medic had handed him.

  There were more of them than he had expected.

  How many cases had the analyst said had occurred at their own University? Fifteen o
r so. But here were more than a hundred case histories. He scanned the summaries quickly and discovered that the problem extended beyond the University - cases from other schools, cases from outside university circles entirely. There seemed to have been a rash of them among Government employees. There was a concentration of twelve on the staff of a single television network.

  He read the meaningless names and studied the almost as meaningless facts. One of the TV men had succeeded in short-circuiting a supposedly foolproof electric mattress eight times before he managed to die of it. He was happily married and about to be promoted.

  'Ancora birra?' Cornut jumped, but it was only the waitress. 'All right - wait.' There was no sense in these continual interruptions. 'Bring me a couple of bottles and leave them.'

  The sun was setting, the clouds overhead powerless to shield the island from its heat, as the horizon was bare blue. It was hot, and the beer was making him sleepy.

  It occurred to him that he really ought to be making an effort to catch up with the rest of the party. It was only chance that they had gone off without him, probably Master Carl would be furious.

  It also occurred to him that it was comfortable here.

  On an island as small as this, he would have no trouble finding them when he wanted them. Meanwhile he still had some beer, and he had all these reports, and it did not seem particularly disturbing to him that, though he read them all from beginning to end, he still found none where the course of the syndrome had taken more than ten weeks to reach its climax. Ten weeks. He had twenty days left.

  Master Carl demanded, 'Turn back! You can't leave the poor boy to die!'

  St Cyr whinnied surprisingly. The woman shrilled, 'He'll be all right. What's the matter, you want to spoil his fun? Give the kid a chance to kill himself, will you?'