Drunkard's Walk

CHAPTER II

Cornut was uncomfortable in his sleep. He felt drowsily that he had worked himself into an awkward position, and besides, someone was calling his name. He mumbled, grimaced, opened his eyes.

He was looking straight down, nearly two hundred feet.

At once he was fully awake. He teetered dangerously, but someone behind him had caught him by an arm, someone who was shouting at him. Whoever it was, he pulled Cornut roughly back into the room.

At that moment the five alarm clocks burst into sound, like a well-drilled chorus; a beat later the phone by his bed rang; the room lights sprang into life, controlled by their automatic timer; one reading lamp turned and fitted with a new, brighter tube so that it became a spotlight aimed at the pillow where Cornut's head should have been. 'Are you all right?'

The question had been repeated several times, Cornut realized. He said furiously, 'Of course I'm all right!' It had been very close; his veins were suddenly full of adrenalin, and as there was nothing else for it to do, it charged him with anger... 'I'm sorry. Thanks, Egerd.'

The undergraduate let go. He was nineteen years old, with crew-cut red hair and a face that was normally deeply tanned, now almost white. 'That's all right.' He cautiously backed to the phone, still watching the professor. 'Hello. Yes, he's awake now. Thanks for calling.'

'They were almost too late,' said Cornut. Egerd shrugged.

'I'd better get back, sir. I'll have to— Oh, good morning, Master Carl.'

The house-master was standing in the doorway, a gaggle of undergraduates clustered behind him like young geese, staring in to see what all the commotion was. Master Carl was tall, black-haired, with eyes like star sapphires. He stood holding a wet photographic negative that dripped gently on to the rubber tiles. 'What the devil is going on here?' he demanded.

Cornut opened his mouth to answer, and then realized how utterly impossible it was for him to answer that question. He didn't know! The terrible thing about the last fifty days was just that. He didn't know what, he didn't know why, all he knew was that this was the ninth time he had very nearly taken his own life. 'Answer Master Carl, Egerd,' he said.

The undergraduate jumped. Carl was the central figure in his life; every student's hope of passing, of graduating, of avoiding the military draft or forced labour in the Assigned Camps lay in his house-master's whim. Egerd said, stammering, 'Sir, I-I have been on extra duty for Master Cornut. He asked me to come in each morning five minutes before wake-up time and observe him, because he— That is, that's what he asked me to do. This morning I was a little late.'

Carl said coldly, 'You were late?'

'Yes, sir. I—'

'And you came into the corridor without shaving?'

The undergraduate was struck dumb. The cluster of students behind Carl briskly dissolved. Egerd started to speak, but Cornut cut in. He sat down shakily on the edge of his bed. 'Leave the boy alone, will you, Carl? If he had taken time to shave I'd be dead.'

Master Carl rapped out, 'Very well. You may go to your room, Egerd. Cornut, I want to know what this is all about. I intend to get a full explanation ...' He paused, as though remembering something. He glanced down at the wet negative in his hand.

'As soon as we've had breakfast,' he said grimly, and stalked majestically back to his own rooms.

Cornut dressed heavily, and began to shave. He had aged a full year every day of the past seven weeks; on that basis, he calculated, he was already pushing eighty and a full decade older than Master Carl himself.

Seven weeks. Nine attempts at suicide.

And no explanation.

He didn't look like a man who had just sleepwalked himself to the narrow edge of suicide. He was young for a professor and built like an athlete, which was according to the facts; he had been captain of the fencing team as an undergraduate, and was its faculty advisor still. His face looked like the face of a husky, healthy youth who for some reason had been cutting himself short on sleep, and that was also according to the facts. His expression was that of a man deeply embarrassed by some incredibly inexcusable act he has just committed. And that fitted the facts too.

Cornut was embarrassed. His foolishness would be all over the campus by now; undoubtedly there had been whispers before, but this morning's episode had had many witnesses and the whispers would be quite loud. As the campus was Cornut's whole life, that meant that every living human being whose opinion counted with him at all would soon be aware that he was fecklessly trying to commit suicide - for no reason - and not even succeeding!

He dried his face and got ready to leave his room - which meant facing them, but there was no way out of that. A bundle of letters and memoranda were in the mail hopper by his desk. He paused to look at them: nothing important. He glanced at his notes, which someone had been straightening. Probably Egerd. His scrawled figures on the Wolgren anomalies were neatly stacked on top of the schema for this morning's lectures; in the centre of the desk, with a paperweight on top of it, was the red-bordered letter from the President's Office, inviting him to go on the Field Expedition. He reminded himself to ask Carl to get him off that. He had too much to do to waste time on purely social trips. The Wolgren study alone would keep him busy for weeks, and Carl was always pressing him to publish. But that was premature. Three months from now... maybe ... if Computer Section allocated enough time, and if the anomalies didn't disappear in someone's ancient error in simple addition.

And if he was still alive, of course.

'Oh, damn it all, anyhow,' Cornut said suddenly. He tucked the President's letter into his pocket, picked up his cape and walked irritably out into the hall.

The Math Tower dining-room served all thirty-one masters of the department, and most of them were there before him. He walked in with an impassive face, expecting a sudden hush to stop the permanent buzz of conversation in the hall, and getting it. Everyone was looking at him.

'Good morning,' he said cheerfully, nodding all around the room.

One of the few women on the staff waved to him, giggling. 'Good for you, Cornut! Come sit with us, will you? Janet has an idea to help you stop suiciding!'

Cornut smiled and nodded and turned his back on the two women. They slept in the women's wing, twelve stories below his own dorms, but already the word had spread. Naturally. He stopped at the table where Master Carl sat alone, drinking tea and looking through a sheaf of photographs. 'I'm sorry about this morning, Carl,' he said.

Master Carl looked vaguely up at him. Dealing with his equals, Carl's eyes were not the brittle star-sapphires that had pierced Egerd; they were the mild, blue eyes of a lean Santa Claus, which was much closer to his true nature. 'Oh? Oh. You mean about jumping out of the window, of course. Sit down, boy. He made a space on the table for the student waitress to put down Cornut's place-setting. The whole cloth was covered with photographic prints. He handed one to Cornut. 'Tell me,' he said apologetically, 'does that look like a picture of a star to you?'

'No.' Cornut was not very interested in his department head's hobbies. The print looked like a light-struck blob of nothing much at all.

Carl sighed and put it down. 'All right. Now, what about this thing this morning?'

Cornut accepted a cup of coffee from one of the student waitresses and waved away the others. 'I wish I could,' he said seriously.

Carl waited.

'I mean - it's hard.'

Carl waited.

Cornut took a long swallow of coffee and put down his cup. Carl was probably the only man on the faculty who hadn't been listening to the grapevine that morning. It was almost impossible to say to him the simple fact of what had happened. Master Carl was a child of the University, just as Cornut himself was; like Cornut, he had been born in the University's Medical Centre and educated in the University's schools. He had no taste for the boiling, bustling Townie world outside. In fact, he had very little taste for human problems at all. Lord knew what Carl, dry as digits, his head crammed with Vinogradoff and Frenicle de Bessy, would make of so non-mathematical a phenomenon as suicide.

'I've tried to kill myself nine times,' Cornut said, plunging in, 'don't ask me why; I don't know. That's what this morning was all about. It was my ninth try.'

Master Carl's expression was fully what Cornut had anticipated.

'Don't look so incredulous,' he snapped. 7 don't know any more about it than that. It's just as much of an annoyance to me as it is to you!'

The house-master looked helplessly at the photographic prints by his plate as though some answer might be there. It wasn't. 'All right,' he said, rubbing the lobes of bone over his eyes. 'I understand your statement. Has it occurred to you that you might get help?'

'Help? My God, I've got helpers all over the place. The thing is worst in the morning, you see; just when I'm waking up, not fully alert, that's the bad time. So I've set up a whole complicated system of alarms. I have five clocks set. I got the superintendent's office to rig up the lights on a timed switch. I got the night proctor to call me on the house phone - all of them together, you see, so that when I wake up, I wake up totally. It worked for three mornings, and, believe me, the only thing that that experience resembles is being awakened by a pot of ice-water in the face. I even got Egerd to come in early every morning to stand by while I woke, just on the chance that something would go wrong.'

'But this morning Egerd was late?'

'He was tardy,' Cornut corrected. 'A minute more and he would have been late. And so would I.'

Carl said, 'That's not exactly the sort of help I had in mind.'

'Oh. You mean the Med Centre.' Cornut reached for a cigarette. A student waitress hurried over with a light. He knew her. She was in one of his classes; a girl named Locille. She was pretty and very young. Cornut said absently, following her with his eyes, 'I've been there, Carl. They offered me analysis. In fact, they were quite insistent.'

Master Carl's face was luminous with interest. Cornut, turning back to look at him, thought that he hadn't seen Carl quite so absorbed in anything since their, last discussion about the paper Cornut was doing for him: the analysis of the discrepancies in Wolgren's basic statistical law.

Carl said, 'I'll tell you what astonishes me. You don't seem very worried about all this.'

Cornut reflected. '... I am, though.'

'You don't show it. Well, is there anything else that's worrying you?'

'Worrying me enough to kill myself? No. But I suppose there must be, mustn't there?'

Carl stared into the empty air. The eyes were bright blue again; Master Carl was operating with his brain, examining possibilities, considering their relevancy, evolving a theory. 'Only in the mornings?'

'Oh no, Carl. I'm much more versatile than that; I can try to kill myself at any hour of the day or night. But it happens when I'm drowsy. Going to sleep, waking up - once in the middle of the night. I found myself walking towards the fire stairs, God knows why. Perhaps something happened to half-wake me, I don't know. So I have Egerd keep me company at night until I'm thoroughly asleep, and again in the morning. My baby-sitter.'

Carl said testily, 'Surely you can tell me more than this!'

'Well... Yes, I suppose I can. I think I have dreams.'

'Dreams?'

'I think so, Carl. I don't remember very well, but it's as though someone were telling me to do these things, someone in a position of authority. A father? I don't remember my own father, but that's the feeling I get.'

The light went out of Carl's face. He had lost interest.

Cornut said curiously. 'What's the matter?'

The house-master leaned back, shaking his head. 'No, you mustn't think anyone is telling you, Cornut. There isn't anyone. I've checked it very thoroughly, believe me. Dreams come from the dreamer.'

'But I only said—'

Master Carl held up his hand. 'To consider any other possibility,' he lectured, in the voice that reached three million viewers every week, 'involves one of two possibilities. Let us examine them. First, there might be a physical explanation. That is, someone may actually be speaking to you as you sleep. I assume we can dismiss that. The second possibility is telepathy. And that,' he said sadly, 'does not exist.' 'But I only—'

'Look within yourself, my boy,' the old man said wisely. Then, his expression showing dawning interest again, 'And what about Wolgren? Any progress with the anomalies?'

Twenty minutes later, on the plea that he was late for an appointment, Cornut made his escape. There were twelve tables in the room, and he was invited to sit down at eight of them for a second cup of coffee ... and, oh yes, what is this story all about, Cornut?

His appointment, although he hadn't said so to Master Carl, was with his analyst. Cornut was anxious to keep it.

He wasn't very confident of analysis as a solution to his problem; despite three centuries, the technique of mental health had never evolved a rigorous proof system, and Cornut was innately sceptical of whatever was not susceptible of mathematical analysis. But there was something else he had neglected to tell Master Carl.

Cornut was not the only one of his kind.

The man at the Med Centre had been quite excited. He named five names that Cornut recognized, faculty members who had killed themselves or died in ambiguous circumstances within the past few years. One had made fifteen attempts before he finally succeeded in blowing himself up after an all-night polymerization experiment in the Chem Hall. A couple had succeeded on the first or second try.

What made Cornut exceptional was that he had got through seven weeks of this without even seriously maiming himself. The all-time record was ten weeks. That was the chemist.

The analyst had promised to have all the information about the other suiciders to show him this morning. Cornut could not deny that he was interested. Indeed, it was a matter of considerable concern.

Unless all precedent was wrong, he would succeed as all the others had ultimately succeeded; he would kill himself one way or another, and he probably would never know why he had done it.

And unless precedent was wrong again, it would happen within the next three weeks.