Drunkard's Walk

CHAPTER XII

The wind was brisk, and the stretched cables under the texas made a bull-roarer sound as they vibrated. The pneumatic generators rattled, whined and crashed. Locille's brother was too used to them to notice. He wasn't feeling very well, but it was his custom to do what his parents expected him to do, and they expected that he would watch the University broadcasts of his sister's classes. The present class was Cornut's, and Roger eyed with polite ignorance the professor's closely-reasoned exposition of Wilson's Theorem. He watched the dancing girls and the animated figures with more interest, but it was, on the whole, a disappointing show. The camera panned the studio audience only twice, and in neither case was he able to catch a glimpse of Locille.

He reported to his mother, took his last look at the flag Locille had brought him, and went to work.

As the day wore on, Roger felt worse. First it was his head pounding, then his bones aching, then an irresistible sudden nausea. Roger's job was conducive to that; he spent the whole day standing thigh deep in a smelly fluid composed of salt water, fish lymph and blood.

Ordinarily it didn't bother him (as nothing much bothered him, anyhow). Today was different. He steadied himself with one hand against a steel-topped table, shook his head violently to clear it. He had just come back from a hasty trip to the washroom, where he had vomited profusely. Now it seemed he was close to having to race out there again.

Down the table the sorter called, 'Roger! Hey! You're holding up the works.'

Roger rubbed the back of his neck and mumbled something that was not intelligible, even to himself. He got back to work because he had to; the fish were piling up.

It was the sorter's job to separate the females of the stocked Atlantic salmon run from the males. The male fish were thrust down a chute to a quick and undistinguished death. But the females, in breeding season, contained something too valuable to be wasted on the mash of entrails and bony parts that made dry fish meal. That was Roger's job - Roger's and a few dozen others who stood at tables just like his. The first step was to grasp the flopping female by the tail with one hand and club her brains out, or as nearly as possible out, with the other. The second was to hold her with both hands, exposing her belly to his partner across the table, whose long, fat knife ripped open the egg sac inside. (Quite often the knife missed. Roger's job was not sought after.) A quick wringing motion; the eggs poured one way, the gutted body slid another; and he was ready for the next fish. Sometimes the fish struggled terribly, which was unpleasant for a man with imagination; even the dullest grew to dislike the work. Roger had held the same job for four years.

'Come on, Roger!' The sorter was yelling at him again. Roger stared at him woozily. For the first time he became suddenly aware of the constant slam, bang, rattle, roar that permeated the low-level fishery plant. He opened his mouth to say something; and then he ran. He made it to the washroom, but with nothing at all to spare.

An hour later, his mother was astonished to see him home. 'What happened?'

He tried to explain everything that had happened, but it involved some complicated words. He settled for 'I didn't feel good.'

She was worried. Roger was always healthy. He didn't look good, ever, but that was because the part of his brain that was damaged had something to do with his muscle tone; in fact, he had been sick hardly a week's total in his life. She said doubtfully, 'Your father will be home in an hour or so, but maybe I ought to call him. I wonder. What do you think, Roger?'

That was rhetoric; she had long since reconciled herself to the fact that her son did not think. He stumbled and straightened up, scowling. The back of his neck was beginning to pain badly. He was in no mood to contemplate hard questions. What he wanted was to go to bed, with Locille's flag by his pillow, so that he could fondle it drowsily before he slept. That was what he liked. He told his mother as much.

She was seriously concerned now. 'You are sick. I'd better call the clinic. You lie down.'

'No. No, you don't have to. They called over at the place.'

He swallowed with some pain; he was beginning to shiver. 'Mr Garney took me to the dia - the dia—'

'The diagnosticon at the clinic, Roger!'

'Yes, and I got some pills.' He reached in his pocket and held up a little box. 'I already took one and I have to take some more later.'

His mother was not satisfied, but she was no longer very worried; the diagnostic equipment did not often fail. 'It's that cold water you stand in,' she mourned, helping him to his room. 'I've told you, Roger. You ought to have a better job. Slicer, maybe even sorter. Or maybe you can get out of that part of it altogether. You've worked there four years now...'

'Good night,' Roger said inappropriately - it was early afternoon. He began to get ready for bed, feeling a little better, at least psychologically, in the familiar, comfortable room with his familiar, comfortable bed and the little old Japanese flag wadded up by the pillow. 'I'm going to sleep now,' he told her, and got rid of her at last.

He huddled under the warming covers - set as high as the rheostat would go, but still not high enough to warm his shaking body. The pain in his head was almost blinding now.

At the clinic, Mr Garney had been painfully careful to explain what the pills were for. They would take away the pain, stop the throbbing, make him comfortable, let him sleep. Feverishly Roger took another one out of the box and swallowed it.

It worked, of course. The clinic's pills always performed as advertised. The pain dwindled to a bearable ache, then to a memory; the throbbing stopped; he began to fall asleep.

Roger felt drowsily peaceful. He could not see his face, and therefore did not know how flushed it was becoming; he had no idea that his temperature was climbing rapidly. He went quite happily to sleep ... with the old, frayed flag against his cheek ... just as he had done for nearly three weeks now, and as he would never in this life do again.

The reason Roger hadn't seen his sister in the audience was that she wasn't there; she was waiting in Cornut's little dressing-room. Cornut suggested it. 'You need the rest,' he said solicitously, and promised to review the lesson with her later.

Actually he had another motive entirely. As soon as he was off the air, he wrote a note for Locille and gave it to a student to deliver:

There's something I have to do. I'll be gone for a couple of hours. I promise I'll be all right. Don't worry.

Before the note reached her, Cornut was at the bridge, in the elevator, on his way to the city.

He did have something to do, and he did not want to talk to Locille about it. The odd dreams had been worsening, and there had been other things. He nearly always had a hangover now, for instance. He had found that a few drinks at night made him sleep better and he had come to rely on them.

And there was something else, about which he could not talk to Locille at all because she would not talk.

The monotrack took him out far downtown, in a bright noisy, stuffy underground station. He paused at a phone booth to check the address of the sex-writer, Farley, and hurried up to street level, anxious to get away from the smell and noise. That was a mistake. In the open the noise pounded more furiously, the air was even more foul. Great cubical blocks of buildings rose over him; small three-wheeled cars and large commercial vehicles pounded on two levels around him. It was only a minute's walk to Farley's office, but the minute was an ordeal.

The sign on the door was the same as the lettering on his folder:

S. R. Farley, Consultant

The sex-writer's secretary looked very doubtful, but finally reported that Mr Farley would be able to see Master Cornut, even without an appointment. Cornut sat across the desk, refused a cigarette and said directly, 'I've studied the sample scripts you left for us, Farley. They're interesting, though I don't believe I'll require your services in future. J think I've grasped the notation, and I note that there is one page of constants which seems to describe the personality traits of my wife and myself.'

'Oh, yes. Very important,' said Farley. 'Yours is incomplete, of course, as I had no real opportunity to interview you, but I secured your personnel-file data, the profile from the Med Centre and so on.'

'Good Now I have a question to ask you.'

Cornut hesitated. The proper way to ask the question was to say: I suspect, from a hazy, sleepy recollection, that the other morning I made a rather odd suggestion to my wife. That was the proper way, but it was embarrassing; and it also involved a probability of having to explain how many rather odd things he had done, some of them nearly fatal, in those half-waking moments ... 'Let me borrow a piece of paper,' he said instead, and rapidly sketched in a line of symbols. Stating the problem in terms of and made it vastly less embarrassing; he shoved it across the desk to the sex-writer. 'What would you say to this? Does it fit in with your profile of our personalities?'

Farley studied the line and raised his eyebrows. 'Absolutely not,' he said promptly. 'You wouldn't think of it; she wouldn't accept it.'

'You could say it was an objectionable thing?'

'Master Cornut! Don't use moralistic terms! A couple's sex life is entirely a private matter! what is customary and moral in one place is—'

'Please, Mr Farley. In terms of our own morals-you have them sketched out on the profile - this would be objectionable?'

The sex-writer laughed. 'More than that, Master Cornut. It would be absolutely impossible. I know my data weren't complete, but this sort of thing is out of the question.'

Cornut took a deep breath. 'But suppose,' he said after a moment, 'I told you that I had proposed this to my wife.'

Farley drummed his fingers on the desk. 'I can only say that other factors are involved,' he said. 'Like what?'

Farley said seriously, 'You must be trying to drive her away from you.'

In the two blocks between Farley's office and the mono-track station entrance, Cornut saw three men killed; a turbo-truck on the upper traffic level seemed to stagger, grazed another vehicle and shot through the guard rail, killing its driver and two pedestrians.

It was a shocking interpolation of violence into Cornut's academic life, but it seemed quite in keeping with the rest of his day. His own life was rapidly going as badly out of control as the truck.

You must be trying to drive her away from you.

Cornut boarded his train, hardly noticing, thinking hard. He didn't want to drive Locille away!

But he also did not want to kill himself, and yet there was no doubt that he had kept trying. It was all part of a pattern, there could be no doubt of its sum: He was trying to destroy himself in every way. Failing to end his life, that destroyer inside himself was trying to end the part of his life that had suddenly grown to mean most to him, his love for Locille. And yet it was the same thing really, he thought, for with Locille gone, Carl dead, Egerd transferred, he would have no one close to him to help him through the dangerous half-awake moments that came at least twice in every twenty-four hours.

He would not last a day.

He slumped back into his seat, with the first sensation of despair he had ever felt. One part of his mind said judgmentally: It's too bad.

Another part entirely was taking in his surroundings; even in his depression, the novelty of being among so many non-University men and women made an impression. They seemed so tired and angry, he thought abstractedly; one or two even looked sick. He wondered if any of them had ever known the helplessness of being under siege from the most insidious enemy of all, himself.

But suppose Master Carl was right after all, said Cornut to himself, quite unexpectedly.

The thought startled him. It came through without preamble, and if there had been a train of rumination that caused it, he had forgotten its existence. Right? Right about what?

The P.A. system murmured that the next stop was his. Cornut got up absently, thinking. Right?

He had doubted that Master Carl had really tried to kill St Cyr. But the evidence was against him; the police lab had verified his fingerprints on the axe, and they could not have been deceived.

So suppose Carl really had picked up the weapon to split the old man's skull. Incredible! But if he had ... And if Carl had not merely gone into an aberrated senile rage ...

Why then, said Cornut to himself, emerging from the elevator at the base of the Bridge pier and blinking at the familiar campus, why then perhaps he had a reason. Perhaps St Cyr needed killing.