Drunkard's Walk

CHAPTER XIII

Entering the room was like being plunged under the surface of the sea. The lights were blue-green, concealed and reflecting from blue-green walls. A spidery mural of blue and green lines covered one wall like a wave pattern; from boxes along the floor grating rose curving branches of pale plants from the hybridization farms, resembling the kelp of the mermaid forests.

The pelagic motif was not a matter of design, it was only that these shapes and these colours were those that most pleased and comforted President St Cyr. This was his room. Not his study, with its oak panels and ancient armour; not even the 'private' drawing-room where he sometimes entertained members of the faculty. This was the room he reserved for a very, very few.

Four of these few were present now. A fat man, gross arms quivering, turned himself around and said, 'When?' He said, 'Do you want us all?' He said, "That's Jillson's job.' St Cyr grinned and, after a moment, his bodyguard said, 'No, I don't. Really. You enjoy it more than I do.' A woman in a preposterously young frock opened her thin-lipped mouth and cackled hilariously, as there was a knock on the door.

Jillson, the bodyguard, opened it, and revealed St Cyr's thin, silent housekeeper with Master Cornut.

St Cyr, on a turquoise wing chair, raised a hand. Jillson took Master Cornut by the arm and led him in, the door behind him closing on the housekeeper. 'Master Cor-nut,' said St Cyr in his odd, uninflected voice. 'I have been waiting for you.' The old woman in the young dress laughed shrilly for no visible reason; the bodyguard smiled; the fat man chuckled.

Cornut could not help, even then, looking around this room where he had never been. It was cool - the air was kept a full dozen degrees under the usual room temperature Cornut liked. There was a muted muttering of music in the background, too low to distinguish the tune. And these people -were odd.

He ignored Jillson, the assassin of Master Carl, whom he remembered from the inquest. The fat man blinked at him. 'Sen-a-tor Dane,' said St Cyr. 'And Miss May Kerbs.'

Miss May Kerbs was the one who had laughed. She swayed over to Cornut, looking like a teen-age girl in her first party formal. 'We were talking about you,' she said shrilly and Cornut with a physical shock, recognized that this was no teen-ager. She suddenly resembled the woman from South America whom he had met on the Field Expedition; the features were not much alike, but their state of repair was identical. The face was a skull's face under the make-up. She was fifty if she was a day - no, seventy-five - no; she was older than that; she was older than he liked to think, for a woman who dressed like a brash virgin.

Cornut found himself grotesquely acknowledging the introductions. He could not take his eyes off the woman. Talking about him? What had they been saying?

'We knew you'd be here, pal,' said the assassin, Jillson, kindly. 'You think we murdered the kid.'

'The kid?'

'Master Carl,' explained Jillson. He had a reason, said a thought in Cornut's mind. Queerly, it came in the half-stammering accent of Jillson.

'But sit down, Mis-ter Cor-nut.' St Cyr gestured. Politely the woman plumped cushions of aqua and turquoise on a divan.

'I don't want to sit down!'

'No. But please do.' St Cyr's blue-tinged face was only polite.

The fat man wheezed. 'Too bad, youngster. We didn't want to goose him along. I mean, why bother? But he was a nuisance. Every year,' he explained sunnily, 'we get maybe half a dozen who really make nuisances of themselves, mostly like you, some like him. His trouble was going after the classified material in the stacks. Well,' he said severely, waving a fat finger, 'that material is classified for a reason.'

Cornut sat down at last because he couldn't help himself. It was not going at all as he had expected; they were not denying a thing. But to admit that they killed Carl to protect some unimportant statistic in the census figures? It made no sense!

The blonde floozie laughed shrilly.

'Forgive Miss Kerbs,' said the fat man. 'She thinks you are funny for presuming to judge whether or not our actions are sensible. Believe me, young man, they are.'

Cornut found that he was grinding his teeth. These onesided conversation, the answers coming before the questions were spoken, these queer half-understood remarks...

It was as though they were reading his mind.

It was as though they knew every thought he had.

It was as though they were - but that's impossible! He thought, no, it can't be! Carl proved it!

The damn old fool.

Cornut jumped. The thought was in the tones of the fat man's wheeze, and he remembered where he had seen words like that before.

The fat man nodded, his chins pulsing like a floating jellyfish. 'We exposed his plate for him,' he chuckled. 'Oh, yes. It was only a joke, but we knew he would not live to make trouble over it. Once he had the Wolgren analysis, he would have to be helped along.' He said politely, 'Too bad, because we wanted him to publish his proof that telepathy was impossible. It is; quite true. For him. But not for us. And unfortunately, my young friend, not for you.'

Locille woke shivering, reaching out at once to Cornut's side of the bed; but he was not in it.

She turned on the room lights and scanned the nearest of the battery of clocks; one o'clock in the morning.

She got up, looked out of the window, listened at the hall door, turned on the broadcast radio, shook the speaker-mike of the University annunciator to make sure it was working, checked the telephone to see that it was not unhooked, sat down on the side of the bed and, finally, began silently to weep. She was frightened.

Whatever compulsion drove Cornut to try suicide had never before stricken him when he was wide-awake and in possession of his thoughts. Was that no longer true? But if it was still true, why had he gone off like that?

The radio was whispering persuasively its stream of news-bulletins: Strikes in Gary, Indiana, a wreck of a cargo rocket, three hundred cases of Virus Gamma in one twelve-hour period, a catastrophic accident between a nuclear trawler and a texas (she listened briefly, then relaxed) off the coast of Haiti. As it did not mention Cornut's name, she heard very little. Where could he be?

When the telephone sounded she answered it at once.

It was not Cornut; it was the rough, quick voice of a busy man.'—asked me to call. She is with your brother. Can you come?'

'My mother asked you to call?'

Impatiently: 'That's what I said. Your brother is seriously ill.' The voice did not hesitate. 'It is likely that he will die within the next few hours. Goodbye.'

Love said, No, stay, wait for Cornut; but it was her mother who had sent for her. Locille dressed quickly.

She left urgent instructions with the night proctor on what to do when - not if, when - Cornut returned. Watch him asleep; keep the door open; check him every half hour; be with him when he wakes. 'Yes, ma'am,' said the student, and then, with gentleness, 'He'll be all right.'

But would he? Locille hurried across the campus, closing her mind to that question. It was too late for a ferry from the island. She would have to go to the Bridge, ride to the city, hope for a helipopper ferry to the texas from there. The Med Centre was bright with lights from many rooms; curious, she thought, and hurried by. In their wired enclosure, the aborigines were murmuring, not asleep. Curious again.

But suppose the proctor forgot?

Locille reassured herself that he would not forget; he was one of Cornut's own students. In any case, she had to take the chance. She was almost grateful that something had happened to take her away, for the waiting had been unbearable.

She walked by the President's residence without a glance; it did not occur to her that the fact that it, too, was lighted, was of any relevance to her own problems. In this she was wrong.

It was not until she was actually boarding the slow-arriving monotrack that realization of where she was going and why finally struck her. Roger! He was dying.

She began to weep, for Roger, for the missing Cornut, for herself; but there was no one else on the car to see.

At that moment, Cornut, sore-eyed, was picking himself up from the floor. Over him stood Jillson, patient and jolly, holding a club wrapped with a wet cloth. Cornut was aching as he had never imagined he could. He mumbled, 'You don't have to hit me any more.'

'Per-haps we do,' said St Cyr from his blue-green throne. 'We do not like this, you know. But we must.'

'Speak for yourself,' said Jillson cheerfully, and the ancient blonde screeched with laughter. They were talking among themselves, Cornut realized; he could hear only the audible part, but they were joking, commenting... they were having a fine old time, while this methodical maniac bludgeoned him black and blue.

The fat senator wheezed, 'Understand our position, Cornut. We aren't cruel. We don't kill you shorties for nothing. But we aren't human, and we can't be judged by human laws ... All right, Jillson.'

The bodyguard brought the club around, and Cornut sank against cushions the thoughtful old blonde kept re-piling for him. What made it particularly bad was that the senator held a gun. The first time he was beaten he had fought, but then the senator had held him at gun-point while Jillson methodically battered him unconscious. And all the time they kept talking!

St Cyr said mildly, 'Stop.'

It was time for another break. That had been the fifth beating in six or seven hours, and in between they had interrogated him. 'Tell us what you un-der-stand, Cor-nut.'

The club had taught him obedience. 'You are a worldwide organization,' he said obediently, 'of the next species after humanity. I understand that. You need to survive, and it doesn't matter if the rest of us don't. Through your telepathic abilities you can suggest suicide to some persons who have the power in a latent form—' Thud.

'An a-bort-ed form,' corrected St Cyr as Cornut struggled erect again after the blow.

He coughed, and saw blood on the back of his hand. But he only said, 'An aborted form. Like myself.'

'Abortions of mutations,' chuckled the senator. 'Unsuccessful attempts on the part of nature to create ourselves.'

'Yes. Abortions of mutations, unsuccessful attempts. That is what I am,' Cornut parroted. 'And - and you are able to suggest many things, as long as the subject has the - the abortive talent, and as long as you are able to reach his mind when it is not fully awake.'

The blonde said, 'Very good! You're a good learner, Cornut. But telepathy is only a fringe benefit. Do you know what it is that makes us really different?'

He cringed away from Jillson as he shook his head.

The bodyguard glanced at the woman, shrugged and said, 'All right, I won't hit him. Go ahead.'

'What it is that makes us different is our age, my dear boy.' She giggled shrilly. 'For example, I am two hundred and eighty-three years old.'

They fed him after a while and let him rest.

Although he ached in every cell, there was hardly a mark on him; that was the reason for the padding on the club. And that had a meaning too, Cornut thought painfully. If they didn't intend to mark him, then they realized that he would be seen. Which meant that, at least, they weren't going to kill him out of hand and dump his body in the sea.

Two hundred and eighty-three years old.

And yet she was not the oldest of the four of them; only Jillson was younger, a child of a century or so. The senator had been born while America was still a British colony. St Cyr had been born in de Gaulle's France.

The whole key had been in the restricted areas of the stacks, if he had only seen it; for the anomaly in the Wolgren application was not Wolgren's fault at all. What the data would have shown was a failure of some people to die. Statistically insignificant for thousands of years, that fraction had grown and grown in the last two or three centuries - since Lister, since Pasteur, since Fleming. They were immortal -not because they could not become diseased or succumb to a wound, but because they would not otherwise die.

And with the growth of preventive medicine, they had begun to assert their power. They had really very little. They were not wiser than the rest of humanity or stronger. Even their telepathy was, it seemed, only unique because the shortlived human had not the time to develop it; it depended on intricate and slow-forming neuronic hookups; it was a sign of maturity, like puberty or facial hair. Everything that made them powerful was only the gift of time. They had money. (But who, given a century or two of compound interest, could not be as rich as he chose?) They had a tight-held closed corporation devoted to their mutual interests - which was only sensible. They had furthered many a war, for what greater boon than war is there to medical science? They had endowed countless foundations, for the surgery of the short-lived could help preserve their own infinitely more valuable lives. And they had only contempt for the shortlived who fed them, served them and made their lives possible.

They had to be a closed corporation. Even an immortal needs friends, and the ordinary humans could for them be nothing more than weekend guests.

Contempt ... and fear. There were, they told him, the Cornuts, who had a rudimentary telepathic sense, who could not be allowed to live to develop it. Suggest killing, and the short-lived one died; it was that easy. The sleeping mind can build a dream out of a closing door, a distant truck's exhaust. The half-awake mind can convert that dream into action...

He heard a shrill laugh and the door opened. Jillson came in first, beaming. 'No!' cried Cornut instinctively, bracing himself against the club.