Drunkard's Walk Read online

He wasn't very confident of analysis as a solution to his problem; despite three centuries, the technique of mental health had never evolved a rigorous proof system, and Cornut was innately sceptical of whatever was not susceptible of mathematical analysis. But there was something else he had neglected to tell Master Carl.

  Cornut was not the only one of his kind.

  The man at the Med Centre had been quite excited. He named five names that Cornut recognized, faculty members who had killed themselves or died in ambiguous circumstances within the past few years. One had made fifteen attempts before he finally succeeded in blowing himself up after an all-night polymerization experiment in the Chem Hall. A couple had succeeded on the first or second try.

  What made Cornut exceptional was that he had got through seven weeks of this without even seriously maiming himself. The all-time record was ten weeks. That was the chemist.

  The analyst had promised to have all the information about the other suiciders to show him this morning. Cornut could not deny that he was interested. Indeed, it was a matter of considerable concern.

  Unless all precedent was wrong, he would succeed as all the others had ultimately succeeded; he would kill himself one way or another, and he probably would never know why he had done it.

  And unless precedent was wrong again, it would happen within the next three weeks.

  CHAPTER III

  The University was beginning its day. In the Regents Office a clerk filled a hopper and flipped a switch, and Sticky Dick - sometimes written as S.'I.-I. (C.E.), Di. C. - began to grind out grades on the previous day's examinations in English, Sanskrit and the nuclear reactions of the Bethe Phoenix cycle. Student orderlies in Med School wheeled their sectioned cadavers out of the refrigerated filing-drawers, playing the time-honoured ribald jokes with the detached parts. In the central tape room, the TV technicians went about their endless arcane ritual of testing circuits and balancing voltages; every lecture was put on tape as a matter of course, even those which were not either broadcast or syndicated.

  Thirty thousand undergraduates ran hastily over the probable mood of their various instructors, and came to the conclusion that they would be lucky to live through to evening. But it was better than trying to get along in the outside world, all the same.

  And in the kitchen attached to the faculty dining-room of Math Tower the student waitress, Locille, helped her C. E. mop the last drops of damp off the stainless steel cooking utensils. She hung up her apron, checked her make-up in the mirror by the door, descended in the service elevator and went out to the hot, loud walks of the Quad.

  Locille didn't think them either hot or loud. She had known much worse.

  Locille was a scholarship girl; her parents were Town, not Gown. She had only been at the University for two years. She still spent some of her weekends at home. She knew very clearly what it was like to live in the city across the bay - or worse, to live on one of the texases off the coast - with your whole life a rattling, banging clamour day and night and everyone piled up against everyone else. The noise in the Quadrangle was only human voices. The ground did not shake.

  Locille had a happy small face, short hair, a forthright way of walking out. She did not look worried but she was. He had looked so tired this morning! Also he wasn't eating, and that was not like him. If it wasn't scrambled eggs and bacon it was a hot cereal with fruit on top, always. Instinctively she approved of a man who ate well. Perhaps, she planned, smiling at a boy who greeted her without really seeing his face at all, tomorrow she would just bring the scrambled eggs and put them in front of him. Probably he'd eat them.

  Of course, that wasn't getting at the real problem.

  Locille shivered. She felt quite helpless. It was distressing to care so much what happened to someone, and be so far outside the situation itself...

  Running footsteps came up behind her and slowed.

  'Hi,' panted her most regular date, Egerd, falling into step. 'Why didn't you wait at the door? What about Saturday night?'

  'Oh, hello. I don't know yet. They might need me at the faculty dance.'

  Egerd said brusquely. 'Tell them you can't make it. You have to go out to the texas. Your brother has, uh, some disease or other, and your mother needs you to help take care of him.'

  Locille laughed.

  'Aw look. I've got Carnegan's boat for the evening! We can go clear down to the Hook.'

  Locille cheerfully let him take her hand. She liked Egerd. He was a good-looking boy, and he was kind. He reminded her of her brother... well, not of her real, living brother; but of the brother she should have had. She liked Egerd. But she didn't like him. The distinction was quite clear in her mind. Egerd, for example, obviously liked her.

  Egerd said, 'Well, you don't have to make up your mind now. I'll ask you again tomorrow.' That was a salesman's instinct operating; it was always better to leave the prospect with a 'maybe' than a 'no'. He guided her between two tall buildings towards the back gardens of the campus, where Agronomy had made a little Japanese retreat in the middle of fifteen intensively farmed acres of experimental peas and wheat. 'I think I got some demerits from old Carl this morning,' he said gloomily, remembering.

  'Too bad,' Locille said, although that was not an unusual phenomenon. But then he caught her attention.

  'I was just trying to do Cornut a favour. Trying? Hell, I saved his life.' She was all attention now. He went on, 'He was practically out of the window. Loopy! You know, I think half of these professors are off their rockers - Anyway, if I hadn't got there when I did he would've been dead. Splop. All over the Quad.

  'At that,' he said cheerfully, 'I was kind of late.'

  'Egerd!'

  He stopped and looked at her. 'What's the matter?'

  She raged. 'You shouldn't have been late! Didn't you know Master Cornut was relying on you? Really, you ought to be more careful.'

  She was actually angry. Egerd studied her thoughtfully, and stopped talking; but some of the pleasure had gone out of the morning for him. Abruptly he caught her arm.

  'Locille,' he said in a completely serious tone, 'please marry me for a while. I know I'm here on a scholarship and my grades are marginal. But I won't go back. Listen, I'm not going to stay with math. I was talking to some of the fellows at Med School. There's a lot of jobs in epidemiology, and that way my math credits will do me some good. I'm not asking for ten years of your life. We can make it month to month, even, and if you don't opt for a renewal I swear I won't hold it against you. But let me try to make you want to stay with me, Locille. Please. Marry me.'

  He stood looking down at her, his broad, tanned face entirely open, waiting. She didn't meet his eye.

  After a moment he nodded composedly.

  'All right. I can't compete with Master Cornut, can I?'

  She suddenly frowned. 'Egerd, I hope you don't feel - I mean, just because you've got the idea I'm interested in Master Cornut, I hope—'

  'No,' he said, grinning, 'I won't let him fall out of a window. But you know something? Pretty as you are, Locille, I don't think Cornut knows you're alive.'

  The analyst followed Cornut to the door. He was furious because he hadn't got his way - not with Cornut, particularly, but furious in general. Cornut said stiffly, 'Sorry, but I won't put everything else aside.'

  'You'll have to, if you succeed in killing yourself.'

  'That's what you're supposed to prevent, isn't it? Or is this whole thing a complete waste of time?'

  'It's better than killing yourself.'

  Cornut shrugged. It was a logically impeccable point. The analyst wheedled. 'Won't you even stay overnight? Observation might give us the answer...'

  'No.'

  The analyst hesitated, shrugged, shook hands. 'All right. I guess you know that if I had my way I wouldn't be asking you. I'd commit you to Med Centre.'

  'Why, of course you would,' Cornut soothed. 'But you don't have your way, do you? You've undoubtedly tried to get an order from the President's Office already, hav
en't you?'

  The analyst had the grace to look embarrassed. 'Front office interference,' he growled, 'you'd think they'd understand that Mental Health needs a little co-operation once in a while...'

  Cornut left him still muttering. As he stepped out on to the Quad the heat and noise struck him like a fist. He didn't mind, either; he was used to it.

  He had recovered enough to think of the morning's escape with amusement. The feeling was wry, with a taste of worry to it, but he was able to see the funny side of it. And it was ridiculous, no doubt about it. Suicide! Miserable people committed suicide, not happy ones. Cornut was a perfectly happy man.

  Even the analyst had as much as admitted that. It had been a total waste of time, making him dig and dig into his cloudy childhood recollections for some early, abscessed wound of the mind that was pouring poisons out of its secret hiding place. He didn't have any! How could he? He was Gown. His parents had been on the faculty of this very University. Before he could walk, he was given over to the creches and the playschools, run by the best-trained experts in the world, organized according to the best principles of child guidance. Every child had love and security, every child had what the greatest minds in pediatric psychology prescribed. Trauma? There simply could not be any!

  Not only was it impossible on the face of it, but Cornut's whole personality showed no sign of such a thing. He enjoyed his work very much, and although he knew there was something he lacked - a secure, certain love - he also felt that in time he would have it It did not occur to him to attempt to hurry it along.

  'Good morning, good morning,' he said civilly to the knots of undergraduates on the walks. He began to whistle one of Carl's mnemonic songs. The undergraduates who nodded to him smiled. Cornut was a popular professor.

  He passed the Hall of Humanities, the Lit Building, Pre-Med and the Administration Tower. As he got farther from home ground, the number of students who greeted him became smaller, but they still nodded politely to the master's cloak. Overhead the shriek of distant passing aircraft filled the sky.

  The great steel sweep of the Bay Bridge was behind him, but he could still hear the unending rush of cars across it and, farther and louder, the mumble of the city.

  Cornut paused at the door of the studio where he was to deliver his first lecture.

  He glanced across the narrow strait at the city, where people lived who did not study. There was a mystery. It was, he thought, a problem greater than the silent murderer in his own brain. But it was not a problem he would ever have to solve.

  'A good teacher is a good make-up man.' That was one of Master Carl's maxims. Cornut sat down at the long table and methodically applied a daub of neutral-coloured base to each cheekbone. The camera crew began sighting in on him as he worked the cream into his skin, down from the bone and away.

  'Need any help?' Cornut looked up and greeted his producer.

  'No thanks.' He brought the corners of his eyebrows down a fraction of an inch.

  The clock was clicking off half-seconds. Cornut pencilled in age-lines (that was the price you paid for being a full professor at thirty) and brushed on the lip colour. He leaned forward to examine himself more closely in the mirror, but the producer stopped him. 'Just a minute - Dammit, man, not so much red!'

  The cameraman turned a dial; in the monitor, Cornut's image appeared a touch paler, a touch greener.

  'That's better. All done, professor?'

  Cornut wiped his fingers on a tissue and set the golden wig on his head. 'All done,' he said, rising just as the minute hand touched the hour of ten.

  From a grill at the top of the screen that dominated the front of the studio came the sounds of his theme music, muted for the studio audience. Cornut took his place in front of the class, bowed, nodded, smiled, and kicked at the pedal of the prompter until he found his place.

  The class was full. He had more than a hundred students physically present. Cornut liked a large flesh-and-blood enrolment - because he was a traditionalist, but even more because he could tell from their faces how well he was getting across. This class was one of his favourites. They responded to his mood, but without ever overdoing it. They didn't laugh too loud when he made a conventional academic joke, they didn't cough or murmur. They never distracted the attention of the huger, wider broadcast audience from himself.

  Cornut looked over the class while the announcer was finishing his remarks to the broadcast watchers. He saw Egerd, looking upset and irritable about something, whispering to the girl from the faculty dining-room. What was her name? Locille. Lucky fellow, Cornut thought absently to himself, and then the Binomial Theorem entered his mind -it was never far away - and displaced everything else.

  'Good morning,' he said, 'and let's get to work. Today we're going to take up the relationship of Pascal's Triangle to the Binomial Theorem.' A sting of organ music rode in under his words. Behind him, on the monitor, the symbols p+q appeared in letters of golden fire. 'I presume you all remember what the Binomial Theorem is - unless you've been cutting your classes.' Very small laugh - actually a sort of sub-aural grunt, just about what the very small jocularity deserved. 'The expansion of p plus q is, of course, its square, cube, fourth power and so on.' Behind him an invisible hand began multiplying p + q by itself in bright gold. 'P plus q squared is p-squared plus two pq plus q-squared. P plus q cubed—' The writer in gold noted the sum as he spoke: p3 + 3p2q + 3pq2 + q3

  'That's simple enough, isn't it?' He paused; then, deadpan, 'Well then, how come Sticky Dick says fifteen per cent of you missed it in the last test?' A warmer giggle, punctuated with a couple of loud, embarrassed hee-haws from the back. Oh, they were a very fine class.

  The letters and numbers wiped themselves from the screen and a little red-faced comic cartoon figure of a bricklayer dropped into view and began building a pyramid of bricks:

  'Now, forget about the theorem for a moment - that won't be hard for some of you.' (Small giggle which he rode over.) 'Consider Pascal's Triangle. We build it just like a brick wall, only - Hold it a minute there, friend.' The cartoon bricklayer paused, and looked curiously out at the audience. 'Only we don't start from the bottom. We build it from the top down.' The cartoon bricklayer did a comic pitfall in astonishment. Then, shrugging, he got up, erased the old wall with a sweep of his trowel, hung a brick in space and began building a triangle under it.

  'And we don't do it with bricks,' added Cornut. 'We do it with numbers.'

  The bricklayer straightened up, kicked the wall off the screen and followed after it, pausing just at the rim of visibility to stick his tongue out at Cornut. The monitor went to a film with live models, cartwheeling into view along the banks of seats of the university's football stadium, each model carrying a placard with a number, arranging themselves in a Pascal Triangle:

  Cornut turned to relish the construction Pascal had first written down, centuries before. 'You will note,' he said, 'that each number is the sum of the two terms nearest in the line above it. The Pascal Triangle is more than a pretty pattern. It represents—' He had them. Their faces were rapt. The class was going very well.

  Cornut picked up the ivory-tipped pointer that lay on his desk, clustered with the ceremonial desk furnishings of the instructor - paper cutter, shears, pencils; all there for appearance - and with the aid of every audio-visual help possible to man, began explaining to three million viewers the relation between Pascal's Triangle and the binomial distribution.

  Every line on Cornut's face, every word, every posturing ballet dancer or animated digit that showed itself on the monitor behind him, was caught in the tubes of the cameras, converted into high-frequency pulses and hurled out at the world.

  Cornut had more than a hundred live watchers - the cream; the chosen ones who were allowed to attend University in person - but his viewers altogether numbered three million. In the relay tower at Port Monmouth a senior shift engineer named Sam Gensel watched with concentrated attention as across the dimpled tummies of the five girls in the four
th line of the Pascal Triangle electronics superimposed the symbols

  He was not interested in the astonishing fact that the signs of the five terms in the expansion of (p + q)4 were 1, 4, 6, 4 and 1 - the same as the numbers in the fourth line of the triangle - but he cared very much that the image was a trifle fuzzy. He twisted a vernier, scowled, turned it back; threw switches that called in an alternate circuit, and was rewarded by a crisper, clearer image. At some relay point a tube was failing. He picked up the phone to call the maintenance crew.

  The crisper, clearer signal was beamed up to the handiest television-relay satellite and showered back down on the world. On the Sandy Hook texas a boy named Roger Hoskins, smelling seriously of fish, paused by the door of his room to watch. He did not care about mathematics, but he was a faithful viewer, his sister was in the class, and Mom was always grateful when he could tell her that he'd caught a glimpse of their very fortunate, very seldom encountered daughter. In a creche over lower Manhattan three toddlers munched fibrous crackers and watched; the harried nursery teacher had discovered that the moving colours kept them quiet. On the twenty-fifth floor of a tenement on Staten Island a monocar motorman named Frank Moran sat in front of his set while Cornut reviewed Pascal's thesis. Moran did not get much benefit from it. He had just come off the night shift. He was asleep.

  There were many of them, the accidental or disinterested dialers-in. But there were more, there were thousands, there were uncounted hundreds of thousands who were following the proceedings with absorption.

  For education was something very precious indeed.

  The thirty thousand at the University were the lucky ones; they had passed the tests, stiffer every year. Not one out of a thousand passed those tests; it wasn't only a matter of intelligence, it was a matter of having the talents that could make a University education fruitful - in terms of society. For the world had to work. The world was too big to be idle. The land that had fed three billion people now had to feed twelve billion.

  Cornut's television audience could, if it wished, take tests and accumulate credits. That was what Sticky Dick was for; electronically it graded papers, supplied term averages and awarded diplomas for students no professor ever saw. Almost always the credits led nowhere. But to those trapped in dreary production or drearier caretaker jobs for society, the hope was important. There was a young man named Max Steck, for example, who had already made a small contribution to the theory of normed rings. It was not enough. Sticky Dick said he would not justify a career in mathematics. He was trapped as a sex-writer, for Sticky Dick's analysers had found him prurient-minded and creative. There were thousands of Max Stecks.