Drunkard's Walk

CHAPTER VII

Egerd tried pounding on the locked door for nearly five minutes and then went away. He could have stayed longer, but he didn't want to; he thought it out carefully and concluded, first, that he had done what he undertook to do - in spite of the fact that Cornut's choosing to marry Locille upset the undertaking; and second, that if he was too late he was already too late.

Nearly an hour later Cornut woke up.

He was alive, he noticed with interest.

It had been a most peculiar dream. It did not seem like a dream. His afternoon lecture, with Pogo Possum drawling hickory-bark rules for factoring large integers, was much more fantasy in his mind than the dream-scene of himself contemplating himself, staggering drunk and with a bottle in his hand, trapped in the ceaseless Brownian zigzag. He knew that the only way a molecule could stop was to die, but curiously he had not died.

He got up, dressed and went out.

He was remarkably hung over, but it was much, much better outside. It was bright morning and, he remembered very clearly, he had an engagement with Locille for that morning.

He was on tape for the a.m. lecture; it gave him the morning off. He walked about the campus aimlessly, past the green steel and glass of the Stadium, past the broad lawns of the lower campus to the Bridge. The Med School lay huddled under the Bridge itself. He liked the Bridge, liked its sweep across the Bay, liked the way it condescended to drop one pylon to the island where the University had been built. He very much liked that pylon; that was Overlook Tower.

On impulse, thinking that this was a good time to be quite sober, he stopped at the Clinic to get a refill on his wake-up pills. The clinic was not manned at that hour, except for emergencies, but as Cornut was a returnee he was admitted to the automatic diagnosis machines. It was very much the same as the experience of three nights before, except that there was no human doctor at all. A mechanical finger inserted a hair-thin tendril into his arm and tasted his blood, compared it with the recent chromatograph, and whirred thoughtfully while it considered if there had been changes. In a moment the Solution light winked pink, there was a click and clatter, and in a hopper by his hand there dropped a plastic box of his pills.

He took one. Ah, fine! They were working. It was a strange and rewarding sensation. Whatever the pills contained, they fought fatigue at first encounter. He could trace the course of that first pill clear down his throat and into his abdomen. The path tingled with well-being. He felt pretty good. No, he felt very good. He walked out into the fresh air again, humming to himself.

It was a long climb up the pylon to Overlook Landing, but he did it on foot, feeling comfortable all the way. He popped another pill into his mouth and waited in patient good humour for Locille.

She came promptly from her class.

From the base of the pylon she glanced up at the Overlook Landing, nearly two hundred feet over her head. If Cornut was there she couldn't see him. She rode up on the outside escalators, twining round the huge hexagonal tower, for the sake of the air and the view. It was a lovely view - the clean white rectahedron of the biologicals factory, the dome-shaped Clinic under the spreading feet of the pylon itself, the bright University buildings, the green of the lawns, the two dissimilar blues of water and sky. Lovely...

But she was nervous. She stepped off the escalator, turned around the bulk of the pylon and bowed. 'Master Cornut,' she said.

The wind caught at her blouse and hair. Cornut stood dreaming over the rail, his own short hair blown carelessly around his forehead. He turned idly and smiled with sleepy eyes. 'Ah,' he said. 'Locille.' He nodded as though she had answered - she had not. 'Locille,' he said, 'I need a wife. You will do.'

'Thank you, Master Cornut.'

He waved a gentle hand. 'You aren't engaged, I understand?'

'No.' Unless you counted Egerd - but she didn't count Egerd.

'Not pregnant, I presume?' 'No. I have never been pregnant.'

'Oh, no matter, no matter,' he said hastily. 'I don't mind that. It isn't any sort of physical problem, I suppose?'

'No.' She didn't meet his eye this time, though. For there was a sort of physical problem, in a way. There couldn't have been a pregnancy without a man. She had avoided that.

She stood waiting for him to say something" else, but he was a long time in getting around to it. Out of the corner of her eye she noted that he was taking pills out of that little box as though they were candy. She wondered if he knew he was taking them. She remembered the knife-edge at his throat in class; she remembered the stories Egerd had told. Silly business; why would anyone try to kill himself?

He collected himself and cleared his throat, taking another pill. 'Let me see,' he mused. 'No engagements of record, no physical bars, no consanguinity, of course - I'm an only child, you see. Well, I think that's everything, Locille. Shall we say tonight, after late class?' He looked suddenly concerned. 'Oh, that is - you have no objection, do you?'

'I have no objection.'

'Good.' He nodded, but his face remained clouded. 'Locille,' he began, 'perhaps you've heard stories about me. I - I have had a number of accidents lately. And one reason why I wish to take a wife is to guard against any more accidents. Do you understand?'

'I understand that, Master Cornut.'

'Very good. Very good.' He took another pill out of the box, hesitated, glanced at it.

His eyes widened.

Not understanding, Locille stood motionless; she didn't know that a sudden realization had come to Master Cornut.

It was the last pill in the box. But there had been twenty at least! Twenty, not more than three-quarters of an hour before-twenty!

He cried hoarsely, 'Another accident!'

It was as if the realization released the storm of the pills. Cornut's pulse began to pound. His head throbbed in a new and faster tempo. The world spun scarlet around him. A rush of bile clogged his throat.

'Master Cornut!'

But it was already too late for the girl to cry out - he knew; he had acted. He hurled the box out into space, stared at her, crimson, then without ceremony leaped to the rail.

Locille screamed.

She was after him, clutching at him, but impatiently he shrugged her off, and then she saw that he was not climbing to hurl himself to death; he had his finger down his throat; without romance or manners, Master Cornut was getting the poison out of him quickly, efficiently—

And all by himself.

Locille stood by silently, waiting.

After a few minutes his shoulders stopped heaving, but he leaned on the rail, staring, for minutes after that. When he turned his face was the racked face of a damned soul.

'I'm sorry. Thanks.'

Locille said softly, 'But I didn't do anything.' 'Of course you did. You woke me up—' She shook her head. 'You did it by yourself, you know. You did.'

He looked at her with irritation, then with doubt. And then at last, he looked at her with the beginning of hope.