Drunkard's Walk Read online

  Frederik Pohl

  Drunkard's Walk

  Unknown publisher (2011)

  * * *

  THE SUICIDE SYNDROME.

  'Something was wrong. The class was buzzing louder. The itch returned compellingly. He scratched at it; 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. 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.'

  Frederik Pohl

  Drunkard's Walk

  PANTHER

  GRANADA PUBLISHING

  London Toronto Sydney New York

  Published by Granada Publishing Limited in Panther Books 1978

  ISBN 0 586 04763 8

  First published in Great Britain by Victor Gollancz Ltd 1961 Copyright © Frederik Pohl 1960

  Granada Publishing Limited Frogmore, St Albans, Herts AL2 2NF and 3 Upper James Street, London WlR 4BP

  1221 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020, USA

  117 York Street, Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia

  100 Skyway Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M9W 3A6

  Trio City, Coventry Street, Johannesburg 2001, South Africa

  CML Centre, Queen & Wyndham, Auckland 1, New Zealand

  Made and printed in Great Britain by Hazell Watson & Viney Ltd Aylesbury, Bucks Set in Linotype Times

  CHAPTER I

  This man's name is Cornut, born in the year 2166 and now thirty. He is a teacher.

  Mathematics is his discipline. Number Theory is his speciality. He instructs the Mnemonics of Number, a study which absorbs all his creative thought. But he also thinks about girls a lot; in a detached, remote sort of way.

  He is unmarried. He sleeps alone and that is not so good.

  If you wander around his small bedroom (it has lilac walls and a cream ceiling, those are the Math Tower colours), you will hear a whispering and a faint whirring sound. These are not the sounds of Cornut's breath, although he is Sleeping peacefully. The whispering is a hardly audible wheep, wheep from an electric clock. (It was knocked to the floor once. A gear is slightly off axis; it rubs against a rivet.) The whir is another clock. If you look more carefully you will find that there are more clocks.

  There are five clocks in this room, all told. They all have alarms, set to ring at the same moment.

  Cornut is a good-looking man, even if he is a little pale. If you are a woman (say, one of the girls in his classes), you would like to get him out in the sun. You would like to fatten him up and make him laugh more. He is not aware that he needs sunshine or fattening, but he is very much aware that he needs something.

  He knows something is wrong. He has known this for seven weeks, on the best evidence of all.

  The five clocks march briskly towards seven-fifteen, the time at which they are set to go off. Cornut has spent a lot of time arranging it so that they will sound at the same moment. He set the alarm dial on each, checked it by revolving the hands of the clocks themselves to make note of the exact second at which the trigger went off, painfully reset and re-checked. They are now guaranteed to ring, clang or buzz within a quarter-minute of each other.

  However, one of them has a bad habit. It is the one that Cornut dropped once. It makes a faint click a few moments before the alarm mechanism itself rings.

  It clicks now.

  The sound is not very loud, but Cornut stirs. His eyes flicker. They close again, but he is not quite asleep.

  After a moment he pushes back the covers and sits up. His eyes are still almost closed.

  Suppose you are a picture on his wall - perhaps the portrait of Leibniz, taken from Ficquet's old engraving. Out of the eyes under your great curled wig you see this young man stand up and walk slowly towards his window.

  His room is eighteen stories up.

  If a picture on the wall can remember, you remember that this is not the first time. If a picture on the wall can know things, you know that he has tried to leap out of that window before, and he is about to try again.

  He is trying to kill himself. He has tried nine times in the past fifty days.

  If a picture on a wall can regret, you regret this. It is a terrible waste for this man to keep trying to kill himself, since he does not at all want to die.

  CHAPTER II

  Cornut was uncomfortable in his sleep. He felt drowsily that he had worked himself into an awkward position, and besides, someone was calling his name. He mumbled, grimaced, opened his eyes.

  He was looking straight down, nearly two hundred feet.

  At once he was fully awake. He teetered dangerously, but someone behind him had caught him by an arm, someone who was shouting at him. Whoever it was, he pulled Cornut roughly back into the room.

  At that moment the five alarm clocks burst into sound, like a well-drilled chorus; a beat later the phone by his bed rang; the room lights sprang into life, controlled by their automatic timer; one reading lamp turned and fitted with a new, brighter tube so that it became a spotlight aimed at the pillow where Cornut's head should have been. 'Are you all right?'

  The question had been repeated several times, Cornut realized. He said furiously, 'Of course I'm all right!' It had been very close; his veins were suddenly full of adrenalin, and as there was nothing else for it to do, it charged him with anger... 'I'm sorry. Thanks, Egerd.'

  The undergraduate let go. He was nineteen years old, with crew-cut red hair and a face that was normally deeply tanned, now almost white. 'That's all right.' He cautiously backed to the phone, still watching the professor. 'Hello. Yes, he's awake now. Thanks for calling.'

  'They were almost too late,' said Cornut. Egerd shrugged.

  'I'd better get back, sir. I'll have to— Oh, good morning, Master Carl.'

  The house-master was standing in the doorway, a gaggle of undergraduates clustered behind him like young geese, staring in to see what all the commotion was. Master Carl was tall, black-haired, with eyes like star sapphires. He stood holding a wet photographic negative that dripped gently on to the rubber tiles. 'What the devil is going on here?' he demanded.

  Cornut opened his mouth to answer, and then realized how utterly impossible it was for him to answer that question. He didn't know! The terrible thing about the last fifty days was just that. He didn't know what, he didn't know why, all he knew was that this was the ninth time he had very nearly taken his own life. 'Answer Master Carl, Egerd,' he said.

  The undergraduate jumped. Carl was the central figure in his life; every student's hope of passing, of graduating, of avoiding the military draft or forced labour in the Assigned Camps lay in his house-master's whim. Egerd said, stammering, 'Sir, I-I have been on extra duty for Master Cornut. He asked me to come in each morning five minutes before wake-up time and observe him, because he— That is, that's what he asked me to do. This morning I was a little late.'

  Carl said coldly, 'You were late?'

/>   'Yes, sir. I—'

  'And you came into the corridor without shaving?'

  The undergraduate was struck dumb. The cluster of students behind Carl briskly dissolved. Egerd started to speak, but Cornut cut in. He sat down shakily on the edge of his bed. 'Leave the boy alone, will you, Carl? If he had taken time to shave I'd be dead.'

  Master Carl rapped out, 'Very well. You may go to your room, Egerd. Cornut, I want to know what this is all about. I intend to get a full explanation ...' He paused, as though remembering something. He glanced down at the wet negative in his hand.

  'As soon as we've had breakfast,' he said grimly, and stalked majestically back to his own rooms.

  Cornut dressed heavily, and began to shave. He had aged a full year every day of the past seven weeks; on that basis, he calculated, he was already pushing eighty and a full decade older than Master Carl himself.

  Seven weeks. Nine attempts at suicide.

  And no explanation.

  He didn't look like a man who had just sleepwalked himself to the narrow edge of suicide. He was young for a professor and built like an athlete, which was according to the facts; he had been captain of the fencing team as an undergraduate, and was its faculty advisor still. His face looked like the face of a husky, healthy youth who for some reason had been cutting himself short on sleep, and that was also according to the facts. His expression was that of a man deeply embarrassed by some incredibly inexcusable act he has just committed. And that fitted the facts too.

  Cornut was embarrassed. His foolishness would be all over the campus by now; undoubtedly there had been whispers before, but this morning's episode had had many witnesses and the whispers would be quite loud. As the campus was Cornut's whole life, that meant that every living human being whose opinion counted with him at all would soon be aware that he was fecklessly trying to commit suicide - for no reason - and not even succeeding!

  He dried his face and got ready to leave his room - which meant facing them, but there was no way out of that. A bundle of letters and memoranda were in the mail hopper by his desk. He paused to look at them: nothing important. He glanced at his notes, which someone had been straightening. Probably Egerd. His scrawled figures on the Wolgren anomalies were neatly stacked on top of the schema for this morning's lectures; in the centre of the desk, with a paperweight on top of it, was the red-bordered letter from the President's Office, inviting him to go on the Field Expedition. He reminded himself to ask Carl to get him off that. He had too much to do to waste time on purely social trips. The Wolgren study alone would keep him busy for weeks, and Carl was always pressing him to publish. But that was premature. Three months from now... maybe ... if Computer Section allocated enough time, and if the anomalies didn't disappear in someone's ancient error in simple addition.

  And if he was still alive, of course.

  'Oh, damn it all, anyhow,' Cornut said suddenly. He tucked the President's letter into his pocket, picked up his cape and walked irritably out into the hall.

  The Math Tower dining-room served all thirty-one masters of the department, and most of them were there before him. He walked in with an impassive face, expecting a sudden hush to stop the permanent buzz of conversation in the hall, and getting it. Everyone was looking at him.

  'Good morning,' he said cheerfully, nodding all around the room.

  One of the few women on the staff waved to him, giggling. 'Good for you, Cornut! Come sit with us, will you? Janet has an idea to help you stop suiciding!'

  Cornut smiled and nodded and turned his back on the two women. They slept in the women's wing, twelve stories below his own dorms, but already the word had spread. Naturally. He stopped at the table where Master Carl sat alone, drinking tea and looking through a sheaf of photographs. 'I'm sorry about this morning, Carl,' he said.

  Master Carl looked vaguely up at him. Dealing with his equals, Carl's eyes were not the brittle star-sapphires that had pierced Egerd; they were the mild, blue eyes of a lean Santa Claus, which was much closer to his true nature. 'Oh? Oh. You mean about jumping out of the window, of course. Sit down, boy. He made a space on the table for the student waitress to put down Cornut's place-setting. The whole cloth was covered with photographic prints. He handed one to Cornut. 'Tell me,' he said apologetically, 'does that look like a picture of a star to you?'

  'No.' Cornut was not very interested in his department head's hobbies. The print looked like a light-struck blob of nothing much at all.

  Carl sighed and put it down. 'All right. Now, what about this thing this morning?'

  Cornut accepted a cup of coffee from one of the student waitresses and waved away the others. 'I wish I could,' he said seriously.

  Carl waited.

  'I mean - it's hard.'

  Carl waited.

  Cornut took a long swallow of coffee and put down his cup. Carl was probably the only man on the faculty who hadn't been listening to the grapevine that morning. It was almost impossible to say to him the simple fact of what had happened. Master Carl was a child of the University, just as Cornut himself was; like Cornut, he had been born in the University's Medical Centre and educated in the University's schools. He had no taste for the boiling, bustling Townie world outside. In fact, he had very little taste for human problems at all. Lord knew what Carl, dry as digits, his head crammed with Vinogradoff and Frenicle de Bessy, would make of so non-mathematical a phenomenon as suicide.

  'I've tried to kill myself nine times,' Cornut said, plunging in, 'don't ask me why; I don't know. That's what this morning was all about. It was my ninth try.'

  Master Carl's expression was fully what Cornut had anticipated.

  'Don't look so incredulous,' he snapped. 7 don't know any more about it than that. It's just as much of an annoyance to me as it is to you!'

  The house-master looked helplessly at the photographic prints by his plate as though some answer might be there. It wasn't. 'All right,' he said, rubbing the lobes of bone over his eyes. 'I understand your statement. Has it occurred to you that you might get help?'

  'Help? My God, I've got helpers all over the place. The thing is worst in the morning, you see; just when I'm waking up, not fully alert, that's the bad time. So I've set up a whole complicated system of alarms. I have five clocks set. I got the superintendent's office to rig up the lights on a timed switch. I got the night proctor to call me on the house phone - all of them together, you see, so that when I wake up, I wake up totally. It worked for three mornings, and, believe me, the only thing that that experience resembles is being awakened by a pot of ice-water in the face. I even got Egerd to come in early every morning to stand by while I woke, just on the chance that something would go wrong.'

  'But this morning Egerd was late?'

  'He was tardy,' Cornut corrected. 'A minute more and he would have been late. And so would I.'

  Carl said, 'That's not exactly the sort of help I had in mind.'

  'Oh. You mean the Med Centre.' Cornut reached for a cigarette. A student waitress hurried over with a light. He knew her. She was in one of his classes; a girl named Locille. She was pretty and very young. Cornut said absently, following her with his eyes, 'I've been there, Carl. They offered me analysis. In fact, they were quite insistent.'

  Master Carl's face was luminous with interest. Cornut, turning back to look at him, thought that he hadn't seen Carl quite so absorbed in anything since their, last discussion about the paper Cornut was doing for him: the analysis of the discrepancies in Wolgren's basic statistical law.

  Carl said, 'I'll tell you what astonishes me. You don't seem very worried about all this.'

  Cornut reflected. '... I am, though.'

  'You don't show it. Well, is there anything else that's worrying you?'

  'Worrying me enough to kill myself? No. But I suppose there must be, mustn't there?'

  Carl stared into the empty air. The eyes were bright blue again; Master Carl was operating with his brain, examining possibilities, considering their relevancy, evolving a
theory. 'Only in the mornings?'

  'Oh no, Carl. I'm much more versatile than that; I can try to kill myself at any hour of the day or night. But it happens when I'm drowsy. Going to sleep, waking up - once in the middle of the night. I found myself walking towards the fire stairs, God knows why. Perhaps something happened to half-wake me, I don't know. So I have Egerd keep me company at night until I'm thoroughly asleep, and again in the morning. My baby-sitter.'

  Carl said testily, 'Surely you can tell me more than this!'

  'Well... Yes, I suppose I can. I think I have dreams.'

  'Dreams?'

  'I think so, Carl. I don't remember very well, but it's as though someone were telling me to do these things, someone in a position of authority. A father? I don't remember my own father, but that's the feeling I get.'

  The light went out of Carl's face. He had lost interest.

  Cornut said curiously. 'What's the matter?'

  The house-master leaned back, shaking his head. 'No, you mustn't think anyone is telling you, Cornut. There isn't anyone. I've checked it very thoroughly, believe me. Dreams come from the dreamer.'

  'But I only said—'

  Master Carl held up his hand. 'To consider any other possibility,' he lectured, in the voice that reached three million viewers every week, 'involves one of two possibilities. Let us examine them. First, there might be a physical explanation. That is, someone may actually be speaking to you as you sleep. I assume we can dismiss that. The second possibility is telepathy. And that,' he said sadly, 'does not exist.' 'But I only—'

  'Look within yourself, my boy,' the old man said wisely. Then, his expression showing dawning interest again, 'And what about Wolgren? Any progress with the anomalies?'

  Twenty minutes later, on the plea that he was late for an appointment, Cornut made his escape. There were twelve tables in the room, and he was invited to sit down at eight of them for a second cup of coffee ... and, oh yes, what is this story all about, Cornut?

  His appointment, although he hadn't said so to Master Carl, was with his analyst. Cornut was anxious to keep it.