Drunkard's Walk

CHAPTER V

'Nothing loath,' said Master Carl thoughtfully, 'I kissed your concubine.' He squinted out of the window of the jet, savouring the sentence. It was good. Yes. But was it perfect?

A towering cumulo-nimbus, far below, caught his attention and distracted him. He sighed. He didn't feel like working. Apparently everyone else in the jet was asleep. Or pretending to be. Only St Cyr, way up in front, propped on pneumatic pillows in the semi-circular lounge, looked as much awake as he ever did. But it was better not to talk to St Cyr. Carl was aware that most conversations involving himself turned, sooner or later, to either his private researches or to Number Theory. As he knew more about either than anyone else alive, they wound up as lectures. That was no good with St Cyr. He had made it clear long ago that he was not interested in being instructed by the instructors he hired. Also he was in a bad mood.

It was odd, thought Master Carl, less in resentment than in a spirit of scientific inquiry, but St Cyr had been quite furious with Cornut and himself for no good reason. It could not have been for missing the first plane - if they'd caught it, they would have died, just like its crew and the four graduate students it carried. But St Cyr had been furious, the tick-tock voice hoarse and breathless, the hairless eyebrows almost scowling. Master Carl took his eyes away from the window and abandoned the question of St Cyr. Let him sulk. Carl didn't like problems that had no solution. Nothing loath, I kissed your concubine. But mightn't it be better to stick to song-writing?

He became conscious of a beery breath on the back of his neck.

'I'm glad you're awake, Wahl,' he said, turning, his face inches away from the hung-over face of the anthropologist. 'Let me have your opinion, please. Which is easier to remember: "Nothing loath, I kissed your concubine." Or, "Last digit? O, a potential square!"'

Wahl shuddered. 'For God's sake. I just woke up.'

'Why, I don't think that matters. It might help. The whole idea is to present the mnemonic in a form that is available under any conditions - including,' he said delicately, 'a digestive upset.' He rotated his chair to face Wahl, flipping through his notebook to display a scribbled page. 'Can you read that? The idea, you see, is to provide a handy recognition feature for quick factoring of aliquot numbers. Now, you know, of course, that all squares can end in only one of six digits. No square can end in two, three, seven or eight. So my first idea - I'm still not sure that I wasn't on the right track - was to use, "No, quantity not squared." You see the utility, I'm sure. Two letters in the first word, "no." Eight letters in "quantity," three in "not" and seven in "squared." It's easy to remember, I think, and it's self-defining. I consider that a major advantage.' 'Oh, it is,' said Wahl.

'But,' Carl went on, 'it's negative. Also there is the chance that "no" can be misread for "nought" or "nothing" -meaning zero. So I tried the reverse approach. A square can end in zero, one, four, five, six or nine. Letting the ejaculative "O" stand for "zero," I then wrote: "Last digit? O, a potential square." Four, five, zero, one, nine and six - you see that. Excuse me. I'm so used to lecturing to undergraduates that sometimes I tend to over explain. But, although that has a lot to recommend it, it doesn't have - well - yumph.' He smiled with a touch of embarrassment. 'So, just on an inspiration, I came up with "Nothing loath, I kissed your concubine." Rather mnemonic, at least?'

'It's all of that, Carl,' agreed Wahl, rubbing his temples. 'Say, where's Cornut?'

'You realize that the "nothing," again, is "zero."'

'Oh, there he is. Hey, Cornut!'

'Be quiet! Let the boy sleep!' Carl was jolted out of his concentration. He leaned forward to see into the wing-backed seat ahead of him and was gratified to see that Cornut was still snoring faintly.

Wahl burst into a laugh, stopped abruptly with a look of surprise and clutched his head. After a moment he said, 'You take care of him like he was your baby.'

'There is no need to take that sort of—'

'Some baby! I've heard of accident-prones, but this one's fantastic. Not even Joe Btfsk wrecks planes that he ought to be in but isn't!'

Master Carl bit back his instinctive rejoinder, paused to regain his temper and pondered an appropriate remark. He was saved the trouble. The jet lurched slightly and the distant thunderheads began to wheel towards the horizon. It wasn't the clouds, of course. It was the jet swinging in for a landing, vectored by unseen radar. It was only a very small motion, but it sent Wahl lurching frantically to the washroom and it woke Master Cornut. Carl leaped up as soon as he saw the younger man move, standing over him until his eyes were open. 'Are you all right?' he demanded at once.

Cornut blinked, yawned and stretched his muscles.

'—I guess so. Yes.'

'We're about to land.' There was relief in Carl's voice. He had not expected anything to happen. Why should it? But there had been the chance that something might... 'I can get you a cup of coffee from the galley.'

'All right - no. Never mind. We'll be down in a minute.'

Below them the island was slipping back and forth slantwise, like a falling leaf - a leaf that was falling upwards, at least in their eyes, because it was growing enormously fast. Wahl came out of the washroom and stared at the houses.

'Dirty hovels,' he growled. It was raining beneath their plane - no, around them - no, over. They were through the patchy cloud layer, and the 'hovels' Wahl had glimpsed were clear beneath. Out of the patches of clouds rain was falling.

'Cum-u-lus of or-o-graph-ic or-i-gin,' said St Cyr's un-inflected voice, next to Master Carl's ear. 'There is al-ways cloud at the is-land. I hope the storm does not dis-turb you.'

Master Wahl said, 'It disturbs me.'

They landed, the jet's wheels screaming thinly as they touched the wet concrete runway. A short, dark man with an umbrella ran out and, holding it protectively over St Cyr's head, escorted them to the administration building, though the rain had nearly stopped.

It was evident that St Cyr's reputation and standing were working for them. The whole party was passed through customs under seal; the brown-skinned inspectors didn't even touch the bags. One of them prowled briefly around the stack of the Field Expedition's luggage, carrying a portable voice-taper. 'Research instruments,' he chanted, singsong, and the machine clacked out its entry. 'Research instruments ... Research instruments.'

Master Carl interrupted, 'That's my personal bag! There aren't any research instruments in it.'

'Excuse,' said the inspector politely; but he went right on with calling every bag 'research instruments'; the only concession he made to Carl's correction was to lower his voice.

It was, to Master Carl, an offensive performance, and he had it in his mind to speak to someone in authority about it, too. Research instruments! They had nothing resembling a research instrument to their names, unless you counted the collection of handcuffs Master Wahl had brought along, just in case the aboriginals were obstinate about coming along. He thought of bringing it up to St Cyr, but the President was talking to Cornut. Carl didn't want to interrupt. He had no objection to interrupting Cornut, of course, but interrupting the President of the University was something else again.

Wahl said, 'What's that over there? Looks like a bar, doesn't it? How about a drink?'

Carl shook his head frostily and stomped out into the street. He was not enjoying his trip, and it was a pity, he thought, because he realized that he had been rather looking forward to it. One needed a change of scene from the Halls of Academe every once in a while. Otherwise one tended to become stuffy and provincial, to lose contact with the mass of humanity outside the University walls. For that reason Carl had made it a practice, through the thirty-odd years since he began to teach, at least once in every year to accept or invent some task that would bring him in contact with the non-academic world ... They had all been quite as distasteful as this one, but since Master Carl had never realized this before it hadn't mattered.

He stood in a doorway, out of the fresh hot sun, looking down a broad street. The 'filthy hovels' were not filthy at all; it was only Wahl's bad temper that had said that, not his reason. Why, they were quite clean, Master Carl marvelled. Not attractive. And not large. But they did have a quaint and not too repulsive appearance. They were clumsy prefabs of some sort of pressed fibre, plastic bonded - a local product most likely, Master Carl diagnosed; pulp from palm trees had gone into the making of them.

A readable helipopper whirred, dipped, settled in the street before him, folded its vanes and rolled up to the entrance of the building where Carl was standing. The driver jumped out, ran around the side of the craft and opened the door.

Now, that was odd.

The driver acted as though the Empress Catherine was about to set foot on the soil she ruled, and yet what came out of the popper was no great lady but what seemed, at least at first glance, like a fourteen-year-old blonde. Carl pursed his thin lips and squinted into the bright sun. Curious, he marvelled, the creature was waving at him!

The creature said, in a brassy voice of no fourteen-year-old, 'You're Carl. Come on, get in. I've been waiting for you people for an hour and a half, and I've got to get clear back to Rio de Janeiro tonight. And hurry up that old goat St Cyr, will you?'

To Carl's surprise, St Cyr didn't strike the child dead.

He came out and greeted her as affably as his corpse's voice could be made to sound, and he sat beside her in the front seat of the popper in the wordless association of old friends. But it wasn't the only surprising thing. Looking a little more closely at the 'girl' was a kind of surprise too, because a girl she was not. She was a painted grandmother with a face-lift, Bermuda shorts and a blonde bob! Why couldn't the woman grow old gracefully, like St Cyr, or for that matter like Master Carl himself?

All the same, if St Cyr knew her she couldn't be all bad, and anyway Carl had something else bothering him. Cornut was missing.

The helipopper was already on the bounce. Carl stood up. 'Wait! We're missing someone.' No one was listening. The grandmother in shorts was chattering away in St Cyr's ear, her voice queer and muffled under the sound of the sequenced rockets that whirled the vanes. 'President St Cyr! Please have this pilot turn back.' But St Cyr didn't even turn his head.

Master Carl was worried. He pressed his face to the window, looking back towards the native town, but already it was too far to see anything.

Of course, he told himself, there was no danger. There were no hostile natives anywhere in the world. Lightning would not strike. Cornut was as safe as if he were in his own bed.

—Exactly as safe, his own mind assured him sternly, but no safer.

But the fact of the matter was that Cornut was drinking a glass of beer at a dusty sidewalk table. For the first time in -was it for ever? - his mind was at rest.

He was not thinking of the anomalies a statistical census had discovered in Wolgren's Distributive Law. He was not thinking of Master Carl's suggestion about term marriage, or even about the annoying interruption that this expedition represented. It did not seem quite as much of an annoyance, now that he was here. It was so quiet. It was like the fragrance of a new flower. He tested it experimentally with his ears and decided that, though odd, it was pleasant. A few hundred yards away some aircraft chugged into the sky, destroying the quiet, but the odd thing was that the quiet returned.

Cornut now had the chance he had been looking for since leaving the clinic, the night before and ten thousand miles away. He ordered another beer from the sallow waitress and reached into his pocket for a sheaf of reports that medic had handed him.

There were more of them than he had expected.

How many cases had the analyst said had occurred at their own University? Fifteen or so. But here were more than a hundred case histories. He scanned the summaries quickly and discovered that the problem extended beyond the University - cases from other schools, cases from outside university circles entirely. There seemed to have been a rash of them among Government employees. There was a concentration of twelve on the staff of a single television network.

He read the meaningless names and studied the almost as meaningless facts. One of the TV men had succeeded in short-circuiting a supposedly foolproof electric mattress eight times before he managed to die of it. He was happily married and about to be promoted.

'Ancora birra?' Cornut jumped, but it was only the waitress. 'All right - wait.' There was no sense in these continual interruptions. 'Bring me a couple of bottles and leave them.'

The sun was setting, the clouds overhead powerless to shield the island from its heat, as the horizon was bare blue. It was hot, and the beer was making him sleepy.

It occurred to him that he really ought to be making an effort to catch up with the rest of the party. It was only chance that they had gone off without him, probably Master Carl would be furious.

It also occurred to him that it was comfortable here.

On an island as small as this, he would have no trouble finding them when he wanted them. Meanwhile he still had some beer, and he had all these reports, and it did not seem particularly disturbing to him that, though he read them all from beginning to end, he still found none where the course of the syndrome had taken more than ten weeks to reach its climax. Ten weeks. He had twenty days left.

Master Carl demanded, 'Turn back! You can't leave the poor boy to die!'

St Cyr whinnied surprisingly. The woman shrilled, 'He'll be all right. What's the matter, you want to spoil his fun? Give the kid a chance to kill himself, will you?'

Carl took a deep breath. Then he started again, but it was no use, they insisted on treating the matter lightly. He slumped back in his seat and stared out of the window.

The helipopper came down in front of a building larger than most of the prefabs. It had glass in the windows, and bars over the glass. The blonde leaped up like a stick doll and shrilled, 'Everybody out! Hop to it, now, I haven't got all day.'

Carl morosely followed her into the building. He wondered how, even for a moment and at a distance, he had taken her for a child. Bright blue eyes under blonde hair, yes; but the eyes were bloodshot, the hair a yellow mop draped on a skull. Loathing her, and worrying about Cornut, he climbed a flight of steps, went through a barred door and looked into a double-barred room.

'The aborigines,' St Cyr said in his toneless voice.

It was the local jail, and it had only one cell. And that cell was packed with a dozen or more short, olive-skinned, ragged men and women. There were no children. No children, thought Master Carl petulantly, but they had been promised an entire population to select from! These were all old. The youngest of them seemed at least a hundred...

'Ob-serve them care-ful-ly,' came St Cyr's slow voice. 'There is not a per-son there more than fif-ty years old.'

Master Carl jumped. Mind-reading again! He thought with a touch of envy how wonderful it must be to be so wise, so experienced, so all-understanding that one could know, as St Cyr knew, what another person was thinking before he spoke it aloud. It was the sort of wisdom he hoped his subordinates would attribute to him, and they didn't; and it hurt to see that in St Cyr it existed.

Master Carl roamed fretfully down the corridor, looking through electrified bars at the aborigines. A sallow fat man in flowered shorts came in through the door, bowed to the blonde woman, bowed to St Cyr, offered a slight inclination of the head to Master Carl, staring contemptuously through the others. It was an instructive demonstration of how a really adept person could single out the categories of importance of a group of strangers on first contact. 'I,' he announced, 'am your translator. You wish to speak to your aborigines, sir. Do so. The short one there, he speaks some English.'

'Thank you,' said Master Carl. The short one was a surly-looking fellow wearing much the same costume as the others. All of them were basically clad in ragged shorts and a short-sleeved jacket with an incongruous, tight-fitting collar. The clothes looked very, very old; not merely worn, but old. Men and women dressed alike. Only in the collars and shoulder-bars of the jackets were there any particular variations. They seemed to have military insignia to mark their ranks. One woman's collar, for example, bore a red cloth patch with a gold stripe running through it; the red was faded, the gold was soiled, but once they had been bright. Across the gold stripe was a five-pointed star of yellow cloth. The shortest of the men, the one who looked up when the translator spoke, had a red patch with much more gold on it, and with three stars of greenish, tarnished metal. Another man had a plain red patch with three cloth stars.

These three, the two men and the woman, stepped forward, placed their palms on their knees and bowed jerkily. The one with the metal stars spoke breathily, 'Tai-i Masa-tura-san. I captain, sir. These are of my command: Heicho Ikuri, Joto-hei Shokuto.'

Master Carl stepped back fastidiously. They smelt! They didn't look dirty, exactly, but their complexions were all bad - scarred and pitted and seamed, as well as sallow; and they did have a distinct sour aura of sweat hanging over them. He glanced at the interpreter. 'Captain? Is that an Army rank?'

The interpreter grinned. 'No Army now,' he said reassuringly. 'Oh, no. Long gone. But they keep military titles, you see? Father to son, father to son, like that. This fellow here, the tai-i, he tells me they are all part of Imperial Japanese Expeditionary Force which presently will make assault landing in Washington, D.C. Tai-i is captain; he is in charge of all of them, I believe. The heicho - that's the woman - is, the captain tells, a sort of junior corporal. More important than the other fellow, who is what they call a superior private.'

'I don't know what a corporal or a private is.'

'Oh, no. Who does? But to them it is important, it seems.' The translater hesitated, grinned, and wheezed: 'Also, they are related. The tai-i is daddy, the heicho is mommy, the joto-hei is son. All named Masatura-san.'

'Dirty-looking things,' Master Carl commented. 'Thank heaven I don't have to go near them.'

'Oh,' said a grave, slow voice behind him, 'but you do. Yes, you do. It is your re-spon-si-bi-li-ty, Carl. You must su-per-vise their tests by the med-ics.'

Master Carl frowned and complained, but there was no way out of it. St Cyr gave the orders, and that was the order he gave.

The medics looked over the aborigines as thoroughly as any dissecting cadavers. Medics, thought Master Carl in disgust. How can they! But they did. They had the men and women strip - flaccid breasts, sagging bellies, a terminator of deepening olive showing the transition from shade to sun at the lines marked by collars and cuffs and the hem of their shorts. Carl took as much of it as he could, and then he walked out - leaving them nakedly proud beside their rags, while the medics fussed and muttered over them like stock judges.

It was not only that he was tired of the natives - whose interest to a mathematician was zero, no, but a quantity vanishingly small. More than that, he wanted to find Cornut.

There was a huge moon.

Carl retraced his steps to where the helipopper was casting a black silhouette on the silver dust. The pilot was half asleep on the seat, and Carl, with a force and determination previously reserved for critical letters in Math. Trans., said sharply, 'Up, you. I haven't all night.' The startled pilot was airborne with his passenger before he realized that it was neither his employer, the young-old blonde, nor her equal partner, the old, old St Cyr.

By then it did not much matter. In for a penny, in for a pound; when Carl ordered him back to the town where the jet had landed, the pilot grumbled to himself but complied.

It was not hard to find where Cornut had gone. The police scooter told Carl about the sidewalk cafe, the cashier told him about the native cafeteria, the counterman had watched Cornut, failing to finish his sandwich and coffee, stagger back to - the airport again. There the traffic tower had seen him come in, try to get transportation to follow the others, fail and mulishly stagger off into the jungle on the level truck road.

He had been hardly able to keep his eyes open, the tower-man added.

Carl pressed the police into service. He was frightened.

The little scooter bounced along the road, twin spotlights scanning the growth on both sides. Please don't find him, begged Carl silently. I promised him...

The brakes squealed and the scooter skidded to a halt.

The police were small, thin, young and agile, but Master Carl was first off the scooter and first to the side of the huddled figure under the breadfruit tree.

For the first time in weeks, Cornut had fallen asleep -passed out, in fact - without a guardian angel. The moment of helplessness between waking and sleeping, the moment that had almost killed him a dozen times, had caught him by the side of a deserted road, in the middle of a uninhabited sink of smelly soft vegetation.

Carl gently lifted the limp head.

'... My God,' he said, a prayer instead of an oath, 'he's only drunk. Come on, you! Help me get him to bed.'

Cornut woke up with a sick mouth and a banging head, very cheerful. Master Carl was seated at a field desk, a shaded light over his head. 'Oh, you're up. Good. I had the porter call me a few minutes early, in case—'

'Yes. Thanks.' Cornut waggled his jaw experimentally, but that was not a very good experiment. Still, he felt very good. He had not been drunk in a long, long time, and a hangover was strange enough to him to be interesting in itself. He sat on the side of the bed. The porter had evidently had other orders from Master Carl, because there was coffee in a pewter pot, and a thick pottery cup. He drank some.

Carl watched him for a while, then browsed back to his desk. He had a jar of some faintly greenish liquid and the usual stack of photographic prints. 'How about this one?' he demanded. 'Does it look like a star to you?'

'No.'

Carl dropped it back on the heap. 'Becquerel's was no better,' he said cryptically.

'I'm sorry, Carl,' Cornut said cheerfully. 'You know I don't take much interest in psion—'

'Cornut!'

'Oh, sorry. In your researches into paranormal kinetics, then.'

Carl said doubtfully, having already forgotten what Cornut had said, 'I thought Greenlease had put me on the track of something. You know I've been trying to manipulate single molecules by P.K. - using photographic film, on the principle that as the molecules are just about to flip over into another state, not much energy should be needed to trigger them - Yes. Well, Greenlease told me about Brownian Movement. Like this.' He held the jar of soap solution to the light. 'See?'

Cornut got up and took the quart jar from Master Carl's hand. In the light he could see that the greenish colour was the sum of a myriad wandering points of light, looking more gold than green. 'Brownian Movement? I remember something about it.'

'The actual motion of molecules,' Carl said solemnly. 'One molecule impinging on another, knocking it into a third, the third knocking it into a fourth. There's a term for it in—'

'In math, of course. Why, certainly. The Drunkard's Walk.' Cornut remembered the concept with clarity and affection. He had been a second-year student, and the housemaster was old Wayne; the audio-visual had been a marionette drunkard, lurching away from a doll-sized lamp-post with random drunken steps in random drunken directions. He smiled at the jar.

'Well, what I want to do is sober him up. Watch!' Carl puffed and thought; he was a model of concentration; Rodin had only sketched the rough outlines, compared to Master Carl. Then he panted. 'Well?'

Apparently, Cornut thought, what Carl had been trying to do was to make the molecules move in straight lines. 'I don't think I see a thing,' he admitted.

'No. Neither do I... Well,' said Master Carl, retrieving his jar, 'even a negative answer is an answer. But I haven't given up yet. I have a few more thoughts on photographs -if Greenlease can give me a little help.' He sat down next to Cornut. 'And you?'

'You saw.'

Carl nodded seriously 'I saw that you were still alive. Was it because you were on your own drunkard's walk?'

Cornut shook his head. He didn't mean No, he meant, How can I tell?

'And my idea about finding a wife?'

'I don't know.'

'That girl in the dining hall,' Carl said with some acuteness. 'How about her?'

'Locille? Oh, good God, Carl, how do I know about her? I - I hardly know her name. Anyway, she seems to be pretty close to Egerd.'

Carl got up and wandered to the window. 'Might as well have breakfast. The aborigines ought to be ready now.' He stared at the crimson morning. 'Madam Sant' Anna has asked for a helper to get her aborigines to Valparaiso,' he said thoughtfully. 'I think I'll help her out.'