Drunkard's Walk

CHAPTER X

Master Carl lighted a do-not-disturb sign on his door and opened the folding screen that hid his little darkroom from the casual eyes of the student housekeepers. He was not ashamed of the hobby that made him operate a darkroom; it was simply none of their business. Carl was not ashamed of anything he did. His room attested to that; it bore the marks of all his interests.

Three boards held chess problems half worked out and forgotten, the pieces lifted, dusted and replaced by a dozen generations of student maids. On the cream-and-lilac walls were framed prints of Minoan scenes and inscriptions, the ten-year-old relics of his statistical examination into the grammar of Linear B. A carton that had once contained two dozen packs of Rhine cards (and still contained five unopened packs) showed the two years he had spent in demonstrating to his own satisfaction, once for all, that telepathy was not possible.

The proof rested on an analogy, but Master Carl had satisfied himself that the analogy was valid. If, he supposed, telepathic communication could be subsumed under the general equations of Unified Field Law, it had to fall into one of the two possible categories therein. It could be tunable, like the electromagnetic spectrum; or it could be purely quantitative, like the kinetogravitic realms. He eliminated the second possibility at once: it implied that every thought would be received by every person within range, and observation denied that on the face of it.

Telepathy, then, if it existed at all, had to be tunable. Carl then applied his analogy. Crystals identical in structure resonate at the same frequency. Humans identical in structure do exist: they are called identical twins. For two years Master Carl had spent most of his free time locating, persuading and testing pairs of identical twins. It took two years, and no more, because that was how long it took him to find three hundred and twenty-six pairs; and three hundred and twenty-six was the number the chi-square law gave as the minimum universe in which a statistical sampling could be regarded as conclusive. When the three hundred and twenty-sixth twin had failed to secure significantly more than chance correlation with the card symbols viewed by his sibling, Carl had closed out the experiment at once.

When the two-year job was ended Carl was not angry, but he was also not hopeful. It did not occur to him to go on to a three hundred and twenty-seventh set. He did, however, permit himself to turn at once to investigating other aspects of what had once been called psionics.

Precognition he eliminated on logical grounds; clairvoyance he pondered over for several months before deciding that, like the conjecture that flying saucers were of extraterrestrial origin, it offered too few opportunities for experimental verification to be an attractive study. Hexing he ruled out as necessarily involving either telepathy or clairvoyance. It was not the cases in which the sufferer knew he was hexed that offered a problem; simple suggestion could account for most of those; a man who saw the wax doll with the pins in it, or was told by the ju-ju man that his toenails were being roasted, might very easily sicken and die out of fear. But if the victim did not learn of his hex through physical means, he could learn only by either telepathy or clairvoyance; and Carl had eliminated them.

The traditional list of paranormal powers included only two other phenomena; fire-sending and telekinesis.

Carl elected to consider the first as only a subdivision of the second. Speeding the Brownian Movement of molecules (i.e. heating them) to the point of flame was surely no different in kind than gross manipulation of groups of molecules (i.e. moving material objects).

His first attempt at telekinesis involved a weary time of attempting to shift bits of matter, papers first, then balanced pins, hanging threads, finally grains of dust on a micro-balance. There was no result. Co-opting some help from Classical Physics, Carl then began a series of tests involving photographic film. It was, the drafted physicists assured him, the medium in which the least physical force produced the greatest measurable effect. A photon, a free electron, almost any particle containing energy could shift the unstable molecules in the film emulsion.

Carl worked with higher and higher speed emulsions, learning tricks to make the film still more sensitive - special developers, close temperature control, pre-exposing the film to 'soak up' part of the energy necessary to produce an image. With each new batch of film he then sat for hours, attempting to paint circles, crosses and stars on the emulsion with his mind, visualizing the molecules and willing the change-over. He scissored out stencils and held them over the wrapped filmpacks, considering it possible that the psionic 'radiation' might show only as a point source. He had one temporary, and illusive, success: a plate of particularly trigger-happy film, wrapped under his pillow all one night, developed the next morning into a ghostly, wavering 'X.' Master Florian of Photo-chemistry disillusioned him. Carl had only succeeded in so sensitizing the film that it reacted to the tiny infra-red produced by his own body heat.

Master Carl's project for this night involved pre-exposing a specially manufactured batch of X-ray film, by means of contact with a sheet of luminescent paper; the faint gamma radiation from the paper needed hours to affect the emulsion, but those hours had to be accurately timed.

To fill the space of those hours, Master Carl had another pleasant task. He sent a student courier to his office for the unfinished draft he had abstracted from Cornut's room. It was headed:

A Reconciliation

Of Certain Apparent Anomalies

In Wolgren's Distributive Law

Carl drew a stiff-backed chair up to his desk and began to read, enjoying himself very much.

Wolgren's Law, which had to do with the distribution of non-uniform elements in random populations, was purely a mathematician's rule. It did not deal with material objects; it did not even deal with numerical quantities as such. Yet Wolgren's Law had found applications in every sort of sampling technique known to man, from setting parameters for rejecting inferior batches of canned sardines to predicting election results. It was a general law, but the specific rules that could be drawn from it had proved themselves in nearly every practical test.

In every test but one. One of Carl's graduate students had attempted to reconcile the Wolgren rule with census data for his doctoral thesis - queerly, the subject seemed never to have been covered. The boy had failed. He had found another subject, got his degree and was now happily designing communications systems for the TV syndicates, but in failing he had produced a problem worth the attention of a first-rate mathematician; and Carl had offered it to Cornut.

Cornut had worked on it, in his own after-hours time, for six months. Incomplete as it was, the report gave Master Carl three hours of intensive enjoyment. Trust Cornut to do a beautiful job! Carl followed every step, mumbling to himself; cocking an eyebrow at the use of chi-squared until it was proved by a daring extension of Gibb's phase-analysis rule. It was the mathematical statement that concerned him, not the subject of census figures themselves. It was only when he had finished the report and sat back, glowing, that he wondered why Cornut had thought it was not finished. But it was! Every equation checked! The constants were standard and correct, the variables were pinned down and identified with page after page of expansions.

'Very queer,' said Carl to himself, staring vacantly at the bench where his X-ray film was quietly soaking up electrons. 'I wonder—'

He shrugged, and attempted to dismiss the problem. It would not be dismissed. He thought for a moment of calling in Cornut, but stopped himself; the boy would not be back from his visit to Locille's family, and even if he were it was no longer feasible to burst in on him.

Dissatisfied, Master Carl read again the last page of the report. The math was correct; this time he allowed the sense of it to penetrate: 'Of n births, the attained age of the oldest member of the population shall equal n times a constant e-log q.' Well? Why not?

Carl was irritated. He glanced at his clock. It was only ten. Frowning, he buttoned his jacket and went out, leaving lights on, door open, report open on the desk ... and the X-ray film still firmly taped to its gamma-emitting paper.

No one answered his knock on Cornut's door, so Carl, after a moment's thought, pushed it open. The room was empty; they had not returned from the texas.

Carl grumbled at the night proctor and dropped in the elevator to the campus. He thought a stroll might help. It was chilly, but he scarcely noticed. The q quantity, was there something wrong with that? But its expansions were all in order. He recalled, as clearly as though they were imprinted on the wall of the Administrative Building ahead of him, the equations defining q; he even remembered what quantities those equations involved. Public health, warfare, food supply, a trickily derived value for the state of the public mind ... they had all been in the accompanying tabulations.

'Good night, Carl-san.'

He stopped, blinking through the woven iron fence. He had reached the small encampment where the aborigines were housed; the captain, whatever his name was, had greeted him. 'I thought you people were off - ah, lecturing,' he finished lamely. 'On exhibition,' he had been about to say.

'Tomorrow, Carl-san,' said the waffle-faced man, offering Carl a long, feathered pipe. That had been in the briefing; it was a peace pipe, a quaint and for some reason, to the anthropologist a surprising, custom of the islanders. Carl shook his head. The man - Carl remembered his name; it was Masatura-san - said apologetically, 'You softspeak hard, sir. I smell you coming long way yesterday.'

'Really,' said Carl, not hearing a word. He was thinking about e-log and the validity of applying it; but that was all right too.

'Softspeak brownie not smell good,' the man explained seriously.

'No, of course not.' Carl was wondering about the values for a, the age factor in the final equation.

Tai-i Masatura-san said, growing agitated, 'Cornut-san smell bad also, St Cyr-san speak. Carl-san! Not speak brownie!'

Master Carl glanced at him. 'Certainly,' he said. Good night.' After him the tai-i called beseechingly, but Carl still did not hear; he had realized what it was that was unfinished about Cornut's report. The numerical values had been given for every quantity but one. It was still early; he did not intend to sleep until he had that one remaining value...

Cornut, with his arm around Locille, yawned into the face of the red moon that hung over the horizon. It was growing very late.

They had to take the ferry to the city and wait to transfer; the only direct popper from the texas to the city was in mid-morning, and Locille's family had no place to put them up. Nor, if they had, would Cornut have stayed. He needed time to become accustomed to domesticity; it was too many things at once; bad enough that he should have to interrupt his routine to accommodate Locille's presence in his room.

But it was, on the whole, worth while.

The University was under them now, the cables of the Bridge lacing the red moon, the lights from the Administration Building bright in the dark mass of towers.

It was odd that the Administration Building should be lighted.

Drowsily Cornut looked, out of the corner of his eye, at the neat, sleepy head of his wife. He did not know if he liked her better or worse as a member of a family. The parents -dull. Amiable, he supposed, but he was used to brilliance.

And her brother was an unfortunate accident, of course, but he had been so enchanted with the rag Locille had brought him, like a child, like an animal. Cornut was not quite pleased to be related to him. Of course, you couldn't choose your relatives. His own children, for example, might be quite disappointing...

His own children! The thought had come quite naturally; but he had never had that particular thought before. Involuntarily he shivered, and looked again at Locille.

She said sleepily, 'What's the matter?' And then, 'Oh. Why, I wonder what they want.'

The ferry was coming in close, and on the hardstand several men were standing patiently, behind them a police popper, its blades still but its official-business light winking red. In the floodlights that revealed the landing X to the pilot, Cornut vaguely recognized one of the men, an administration staffer; the others all wore police uniforms.

'I wonder,' he said, glad that he didn't have to explain the shudder. 'Well, I'll sleep well tonight.' He took her hand and helped her, unnecessarily but pleasurably, down the steps.

A squat uniformed man stepped forward. 'Master Cornut? Sergeant Rhame. You won't remember me, but—'

Cornut said, 'But I do. Rhame. You were in one of my classes, six or seven years ago. Master Carl recommended you; in fact, he was your advocate at the orals for your thesis.'

There was a pause. 'Yes, that's right,' said Rhame. 'He wanted me to apply for the faculty, but I'd majored in Forensic Probabilistics and the Force had already accepted me, and— Well, that's a long time ago.'

Cornut nodded pleasantly. 'Good to see you again, Rhame. Good night.' But Rhame shook his head.

Cornut stopped, a quick, vague fear beginning to pulse in his mind. No one enjoys the sudden knowledge that the policeman in front of him wants to discuss official business; Rhame's expression told Cornut that that was so. He said sharply,'What is it?'

Rhame was not enjoying himself. 'I've been waiting for you. It's about Master Carl; you're his closest friend, you know. There are some questions—'

Cornut hardly noticed Locille's sudden, frightened clutching at his arm. He stated, 'Something's happened to Carl.'

Rhame spread his hands. 'I'm sorry. I thought you knew. The lieutenant sent word to have you called from the texas; probably you'd left before the message got there.' He was trying to be kind, Cornut saw. He said, 'It happened about an hour ago - around twelve o'clock. The President had gone to bed - St Cyr, I mean. Master Carl came storming into his residence - very angry, the housekeeper said.'

'Angry about what?' shouted Cornut.

'I was hoping you could tell us that. It must have been something pretty serious. He tried to kill St Cyr with an axe. Fortunately—' He hesitated, but could find no way to withdraw the word. 'As it happened, that is, the President's bodyguard was nearby. He couldn't stop Master Carl any other way; he shot him to death.'