Drunkard's Walk

CHAPTER XVIII

Cornut passed out completely on the way back, and slept soddenly for hours. Rhame let him sleep. There was time enough for everything now, even for sleep. The medics, with the restored tapes for the stacks, had already begun the task of preparing vaccine; the hundred litres of serum was already being rationed among the already ill. The mobs were quieted - it took only hope to end their rage - and the danger, for most, was past. Not for all. The serum would never reach South Africa in time for some, for instance; and there were many already dead. But the dead were only in the millions ...

Cornut woke up like an explosion.

His head was pounding; he staggered to his feet, ready to fight. Rhame, full of wake-up pills but obviously fading, reassured him quickly. 'It's all right. Look!' They were back in the city, in a hastily cleared penal wing of one of the hospitals. Along a corridor, in room after room, there were couples of old, old men and women, sleeping or staggering. 'Twenty of them,' said Rhame proudly, 'and everyone guaranteed to have one point five per cent of alcohol in the blood or better. We'll keep them that way until we decide what to do next.'

'Only twenty?' demanded Cornut, suddenly alarmed. 'What about the others?' Rhame smiled like a shark. 'I see,' said Cornut, visioning that queer contradiction, a dead immortal ... Better, he told himself, than a dead planet.

He did not linger. He had to see Locille. Rhame had already phoned the campus and reported that she was well but still asleep; but Cornut needed first-hand assurance.

A police popper took him to the campus in a pelting rainstorm and he ran through the wet grass, looking around. The grass was stained and Uttered; the windows of the Med Centre showed where the mob had nearly smashed its way in. He hurried past, past the aborigines' camp, now deserted, past the Administration Building; past the memory of Master Carl and the Clinic where Egerd had died. The rain clouds stank of fumes from fires in the city; across the river there still lay thousands of unburied dead.

But the clouds were thin, and radiance began to shine through.

In his room, Locille stirred and woke. She was quite calm, and she smiled.

'I knew you'd be back,' she said. He took her in his arms, but even in that moment he could not forget what Rhame had told him, what they had already learned from the drunken, babbling immortals. The number of incipient tele-paths was great indeed, as he had begun to suspect; but they were not 'abortions' of immortals, not at all.

They were the real thing. The mutation that had produced a St Cyr had produced many many millions; it was not shortlived humans they had killed or driven to death, it was young immortals. The gene was a dominant, and now that it had shown so often it would soon fill the race. What the immortals had done was not to preserve themselves at the expense of a race that should have become extinct. They had only protected their own power against the Cornuts, the Locilles, the others with whom they did not wish to share.

'I knew you'd be back,' she whispered again.

'I told you I would,' he said. 'I'll always be back...' and he wondered how to tell her what 'always' had suddenly come to mean for them.