Drunkard's Walk

CHAPTER XI

Cornut went through that night and the next day in a dream. It was all very simple, everything was made easy for him, but it was impossibly hard to take. Carl dead! The old man shot down - attempting to commit a murder! It was more than unbelievable, it was simply fantastic. He could not admit its possibility for a second. But he could not deny.

Locille was with him almost every moment, closer than a wife need be, even closer than a watchdog. He didn't notice she was there. He would have noticed if she were missing. It was as though she had always been there, all his life, because his life was now something radically new, different, something that had begun at one o'clock in a morning, stepping out of a ferry popper to see Sergeant Rhame.

Rhame had asked him all the necessary questions in a quarter of an hour, but he had not left him then. It was charity, not duty, that kept him. A policeman, even a forensic probabilistician detailed to Homicide at his own personal request, is used to violence and unlikely murderers, and can sometimes help to explain difficult facts to the innocent bystanders. He tried. Cornut was not grateful. He was only dazed.

He cancelled his classes for the next day - tapes would do - and accompanied Rhame on a laborious retracing of Carl's last moves. First they visited St Cyr's residence and found the President awake and icy. He did not seem shaken by his experience; but then, he never did. He gave them only a moment of his time. 'Carl a kill-er. It is a great shock, Cor-nut. Ge-ni-us, we can not ex-pect it to be sta-ble, I sup-pose.' Cornut did not want to linger. St Cyr's presence was never attractive, but the thing that repelled him about the interview was the sight of the fifteenth-century halberd replaced on the floor where, they said, Master Carl had dropped it as the gunman shot him down. The pile of the carpet there was crisper, cleaner than the rest. Cornut was sickly aware that it had been cleaned, and aware what stain had been so quickly dissolved away.

He was glad to be out of the President's richly furnished residence, though the rest of the day was also no joy. Their first stop was the night proctor on Carl's floor, who confirmed that the house master had left at about ten o'clock, seeming disturbed about something but, in his natural custom, giving no clue as to its nature to an undergraduate. As it did not occur to them to question the aborigines, they did not learn of his brief and entirely one-sided conversation, but they picked up his trail at the next point.

Master Carl had turned up at the stacks at twenty-five minutes past ten, demanding instant service from the night librarian.

The librarian was a student, working off part of his tuition, as most students did. He was embarrassed, and Cornut quickly deduced why. 'You were asleep, weren't you?'

The student nodded, hanging his head. He was very nearly asleep talking to them; the news of Master Carl's death had reached every night clerk on the campus, and the boy had been unable to get to sleep. 'He gave me five demerits, and—' He stopped, suddenly angry with himself.

Cornut deduced the reason. 'Consider them cancelled,' he said kindly. 'You're quite right in telling us about them. Sergeant Rhame needs all the information.'

'Thank you, Master Cornut. I - uh - I also didn't have a chance to get the ashtray off my desk, and he noticed it. But he just said he wanted to use the stacks.' The undergraduate waved towards the great air-conditioned hall where the taped and microfilmed University Library was kept. The library computer was served by some of the same circuits as the Student Test-Indices (College Examinations) Digital Computer on the level above it; all the larger computers on the campus were cross-hooked to some degree.

Rhame was staring at the layout. 'It's got more complicated since I was here,' he said. 'Did Master Carl know how to use it?'

The student grinned. 'He thought he did. Then he came storming back to me. He couldn't get the data he wanted. So I tried to help him - but it was classified data. Census figures.'

'Oh,' said Cornut.

Sergeant Rhame turned and looked at him. 'Well?'

Cornut said, 'I think I know what he was after, that's all. It was the Wolgren.'

Rhame understood what he was talking about - fortunately, as it had not occurred to Cornut that anyone would fail to be aware of Wolgren's Distributive Law. Rhame said, 'I only use some special Wolgren functions; I don't see exactly what it has to do with census figures.'

Cornut sat down, beginning to lecture. Without looking he put out his hand and Locille, still with him, took it. 'It's not important to what you're looking for. Anyway, I don't think it is. We had a question up for study - some anomalies in the Wolgren distribution of the census figures - and, naturally, there shouldn't be any anomalies. So I took it as a part-time project.' He frowned. 'I thought I had it beaten, but I ran into trouble. Some of the values derived from my equations turned out to be ... ridiculous. I tried to get the real values, but I got the same answer as Master Carl, they were classified. Silly, of course.'

The student librarian chimed in, 'He said moronic. He said he was going to take it up with the Saint—' He stopped, blushing.

Rhame said, 'Well, I guess he did. What were the values that bothered you?'

Cornut shook his head. 'Not important; they're wrong. Only I couldn't find my mistake. So I kept going over the math. I suppose Carl went through the same thing, and then decided to take a look at the real values in the hope that they'd give some clue, just as I did.'

'Let's take a look,' said Rhame. The student librarian led them to the library computer, but Cornut nodded him away. He set up the integrals himself.

'Age values,' he explained. 'Nothing of any great importance, of course. No reason it should be a secret. But—'

He finished with the keyboard, and indicated the viewer of the screen. It flickered, and then bloomed with a scarlet legend:

Classified Information

Rhame stared at the words. He said, 'I don't know.'

Cornut understood. 'I can't believe it, either. True, Carl was a house-master. He felt he had certain rights...'

The policeman nodded. 'What about it, son? Did he act peculiar? Agitated?'

'He was mad as hell,' said the student librarian with satisfaction. 'He said he was going right over to the Sa— to the President's residence and get clearance to receive the data. Said it was moronic - let's see - "moronic, incompetent bureaucracy,"' he finished with satisfaction.

Sergeant Rhame looked at Cornut 'Well, the inquest will have to decide,' he said after a moment.

'Do you think he would try to kill a man?' Cornut demanded harshly.

Master Cornut,' said the policeman slowly, 'I don't think anybody ever really wants to kill anybody. But he blew his top. If he was angry enough, who knows?' He didn't give Cornut a chance to debate the matter. 'I guess that's all,' he said, turning back to the night librarian. 'Unless he said anything else?'

The student hesitated, then grinned faintly. 'Just one other thing. As he was leaving, he gave me ten more demerits for smoking on duty.'

The following morning Cornut was summoned to the Chancellor's office to hear the reading of Carl's will.

Cornut was only mildly surprised to find that he was Master Carl's sole heir. He was touched, however. And he was saddened, for Master Carl's own voice told him about it.

That was the approved way of recording the most important documents, and it was like Master Carl to believe that the disposition of his tiny estate was of great importance. It was a tape of his image that recited the sonorous phrases: 'Being of sound and disposing mind, I devise and bequeath unto my dear friend, Master Cornut—' Cornut sat blinking at the image. It was entirely lifelike. That, of course, was the point; papers could be forged and sound tapes could be altered, but there was no artisan in the world who could quite succeed in making a change in a video tape without leaving a trace. The voice was the voice that had boomed out of a million student television sets for decades. Cornut, watching, hardly listened to the words but found himself trying to tell when it was that Carl had made the decision to leave him all his worldly goods. The cloak, he recalled vaguely, was an old one; but when was it Carl had stopped wearing it?

It didn't matter. Nothing mattered about Master Carl, not any more; the tape rattled and flapped off the reel, and the picture of Master Carl vanished from the screen.

Locille's hand touched his shoulder.

The chancellor said cheerfully, 'Well, that's it All yours. Here's the inventory.'

Cornut glanced over it rapidly. Books, more than a thousand of them, value fixed by the appraisers (they must have been working day and night!) at five hundred dollars and a bit. Clothing and personal effects - Cornut involuntarily grinned - an arbitrary value of $1. Cash on hand, a shade over a thousand dollars, including the coins in his pocket when he died. Equity in the University pension plan, $8,460; monthly salary due, calculated to the hour of death, $271; residuals accruing from future use of taped lectures, estimated, $500. Cornut winced. Carl would have been hurt by that, but it was true; there was less and less need for his old tapes, with newer professors adopting newer techniques. And there was an estimate of future royalties to be earned by his mnemonic songs, and that was unkindest of all: $50.

Cornut did not bother to read the itemized liabilities -inheritance tax, income tax due, a few miscellaneous bills. He only noted the net balance was a shade over $8,000.

The funeral director walked silently from the back of the room and suggested, rather handsomely, 'Call it eight thousand even. Satisfactory? Then sign here, Master Cornut.'

'Here' was at the bottom of a standard mortuary agreement, with the usual fifty-fifty split between the heirs and the mortician. Cornut signed quickly, with a feeling of slight relief. He was getting off very lightly. The statutory minimum fee for a basic funeral was $2500; if the estate had been less than $5,000, he would have inherited only the balance above $2500; if it had been under $2500, he would have had to make up the difference. That was the law. More than one beneficiary, legally responsible for the funeral expenses, had regretted the generous remembering of the deceased. (In fact, there were paupers in the world who sold their wills as an instrument of revenge on occasion. For a hundred dollars' worth of liquor they would bequeath their paltry all to the drink-supplier's worst enemy, who would then, sooner or later, find himself unexpectedly saddled with an inescapable $2500 cost.)

Sergeant Rhame was waiting for them outside the Chancellor's office. 'Do you mind?' he asked politely, holding out his hand. Cornut handed over the mortuary agreement, containing the inventory of Carl's estate. The policeman studied it thoughtfully, then shook his head. 'Not much money, but he didn't need much, did he? It doesn't help explain anything.' He glanced at his watch. 'All right,' he said. 'I'll walk over with you. We're due at the inquest.'

As a tribute to the University, the state medical examiner had empanelled a dozen faculty members as his jury. Only one was from the Mathematics Department, a woman professor named Janet, but Cornut recognized several of the others, vaguely, from faculty teas and walks on the campus.

St Cyr testified, briefly and in his customary uninflected pendulum-tick, that Master Carl had shown no previous signs of insanity but had been wild and threatening indeed the night of his death.

St Cyr's housekeeper testified the same, adding that she had feared for her own life.

The bodyguard who killed Carl took the stand. Cornut felt Locille shrink in the seat behind him; he understood; he felt the same revulsion. The man did not seem much different from other men, though; he was middle-aged, husky, with a speech impediment that faintly echoed St Cyr's own. He explained that he had been on President St Cyr's payroll for nearly ten years; that he had once been a policeman and that it was not uncommon for very wealthy men to hire ex-policemen as bodyguards; and that he had never before had to kill anyone in defence of St. Cyr's life. 'But this one. He was dangerous. He was... going to kill... somebody.' He got the words out slowly, but without appearing particularly agitated.

Then there were a few others - Cornut himself, the night proctor, the student librarian, even the sex-writer, Farley, who said that Master Carl had indeed seemed upset on his one personal contact with him but, of course, the occasion had been a disturbing one; he had told him of Master Cornut's most recent suicide attempt. Cornut attempted to ignore the faces that turned towards him.

The verdict took five minutes: 'Killed in self-defence, in the course of attempting to commit murder.'

For days after that Cornut kept away from St Cyr's residence, for the sake of avoiding Carl's executioner. He had never seen the man before Carl was killed, and never wanted to see him again.

But as time passed, Carl's death dwindled in his mind; his own troubles, more and more, filled it.

As day followed day, he began to approach, then reached, finally passed the all-time record for suiciders. And he was still alive.

He was still alive because of the endless patience and watchfulness of Locille. Every night she watched him asleep, every morning she was up before him. She began to look pale, and he found her taking catnaps in the dressing-room while he was lecturing to his classes; but she did not complain. She also did not tell him, until he found the marks and guessed, that twice in one week, even with her alert beside him, he had severed his wrists, first on a letter opener, second on a broken drinking tumbler. When he chided her for not telling him, she kissed him. That was all.

He was having dreams, too, queer ones; he remembered them sharply when he woke, and for a while told them to Locille, and then stopped. They were very peculiar. They had to do with being watched, being watched by some gruff, irritated warden, or by a hostile Roman crowd waiting for his blood in the arena. They were unpleasant; and he tried to explain them to himself. It was because he was subconsciously aware of Locille watching him, he told himself; and in the next breath said, Paranoia. He did not believe it ... But what then? He considered returning to his analyst, but when he broached it to Locille she only looked paler and more strained. Some of the sudden joy had gone out of their love; and that worried Cornut; and it did not occur to him that the growing trust and solidarity between them was perhaps worth more.

But not all the joy had gone. Apart from interludes of passion, somewhat constrained by Locille's ironclad determination to stay awake until he was quite asleep, apart from the trust and closeness, there were other things. There was the interest of work shared, for as Cornut's wife Locille became more his pupil than ever before in one of his classes; together they rechecked the Wolgren, found it free of gross error, reluctantly shelved it for lack of confirming data and began a new study of prime distribution in very large numbers. They were walking back to the Math Tower one warm day, planning a new approach through analytic use of the laws of congruence, when Locille stopped and caught his arm.

Egerd was coming towards them.

He was tanned, but he did not look well. Part of it was for reasons Cornut had only slowly come to know; he was uncomfortable in the presence of the girl he loved and the man she had married. But there was something else. He looked sick. Locille was direct: 'What in the world's the matter with you?'

Egerd grinned. 'Don't you know about Med School? It's traditional, hazing freshmen. The usual treatment is a skin fungus that turns sweat rancid, so you stink, or a few drops of something that makes you break out in orange blotches, or - well, never mind. Some of the jokes are kind of, uh, personal.'

Locille said angrily, 'That's terrible. You don't look very funny to me, Egerd.'

Cornut said to her, after Egerd had left, 'Boys will be boys.' She looked at him swiftly. He knew his tone had been callous. He didn't know that she understood why; he thought his sudden sharp stab of jealousy had been perfectly concealed.

A little over two weeks after Master Carl's death, the proctor knocked on Cornut's door to say that he had a visitor. It was Sergeant Rhame, with a suitcase full of odds and ends. 'Master Carl's personal effects,' he explained. 'They belong to you now. Naturally, we had to borrow them for examination.'

Cornut shrugged. The stuff was of no great value. He poked through the suitcase; some shabby toilet articles, a book marked Diary - he flipped it open eagerly, but it recorded only demerits and class attendances - an envelope containing photographic film.

Sergeant Rhame said, 'That's what I wanted to ask you about. He had a lot of photographic equipment. We found several packs of film, unopened, which Master Carl had pressed against some kind of radiation-emitting paint on a paper base. The lab spent a lot of time trying to figure it out. They guessed he was trying to get the gamma radiation from the paint to register on the film, but we don't know why.'

Cornut said, 'Neither do I, but I can make a guess.' He explained about Carl's off-duty interests, and the endless laborious work that he had been willing to put into them. 'I'm not sure what his present line was, but I know it had something to do with trying to get prints of geometrical figures - stars, circles, that sort of thing. Why? Do you mean he finally succeeded in getting one?'

'Not exactly.' Sergeant Rhame opened a package and handed Cornut a glossy print. 'All the negatives were blank except one. This one. Make anything of it?'

Cornut studied it. It seemed to be a photograph of a sign, or a printer's proof. It was not very well defined, but there was no doubt what it said. He puzzled over it for a while, then shook his head.

The lettering on the print said simply:

YOU DAMN OLD FOOL