Drunkard's Walk

CHAPTER IX

The assistant audio engineer, staring bemused through the glass at the filling studio, was humming to himself. It irritated Master Carl. He could not help fitting words to the tune:

Strike the Twos and strike the Threes: The Sieve of Eratosthenes! When the multiples sublime, The numbers that are left, are prime.

It did not alleviate his annoyance that the song was one of his own. Classic Prime-Number Exposition was not the subject of the morning's class; it was Set Theory; he snapped, 'Be still, man! Don't you like your work here?' The assistant audio engineer paled. He had been brought up on a texas and never forgot that he might some day have to go back to one.

It was not really true that the humming distracted him. At Master Carl's age, you either know what you are doing or you don't, and he knew. He went out at the precise moment his theme began and spoke the words he always spoke, while his mind was on Cornut, on the Wolgren anomaly, on his private investigation of the paranormal, on - especially on - the responses and behaviour of each individual undergraduate in his in-studio audience. He noted every yawn of a drowsy nucleonics major in the far corner; he observed with particular care the furtive passage of notes from the boy, Egerd, to his protege's new wife, Locille. He did not intend to do anything about it. He was grateful to Locille. As a good watchdog, she might very well save the life of the only man on the faculty Carl considered to have any chance of ever replacing himself.

In five minutes he had concluded the live portion of his lecture and, indulging his own harmless desires, left the studio. Taped figures danced on the screen behind him, singing The Ballad of Sets.

Let 'S' be a number set, then progress:

If, of any two numbers (a and b) in S,

Their sum is also in the set,

The set is closed! And so we get A reproductive set with this definition:

'The number set S is closed by addition!'

He put the class out of his mind and eagerly drew a sheaf of photographic prints out of his briefcase. He had slept only restlessly the night before and had risen early to work at his newest hobby. He had had many. He needed many. Carl was in no way dissatisfied, could not have conceived a world in which he would not have been a mathematician, but it wasn't all pleasure to be a towering elder statesman in a young man's game. It was a queer fact of mathematics that nearly every great mathematician had done his best work before he was thirty. And most of them, like Carl, had turned to other curiosities in their later years.

Someone opened the door and the choral voices from the studio surged in on him:

If number set M is closed by subtraction, A modul is the term for this transaction!

Master Carl turned, frowning like ice. Egerd! He demanded terribly, 'What is a number set closed by multiplication?'

Egerd quailed but said, 'It's a ray, Master Carl. It's in the fourth canto. Sir, I want to—' 'Closed to addition and subtraction as well?' 'A ring, sir. Can I speak to you a moment?' Carl grunted.

'I did study the lesson, Master Carl. As you can see.'

He would have said more, but Carl had not finished being stern. 'There is no excuse, Egerd, for leaving a class without permission. You must know that. It may seem to you that you are able to grasp set theory by studying from books, no doubt. You are wrong. A mathematician must know these simple classical facts and definition as well as he knows that February has twenty-eight days, and in the same way. By mnemonics! I assure you that you will never become a first-rate mathematician by cutting classes.'

'Yes, sir. That's it. I want to transfer out. As soon as I get back from South America, if it's all right with you, sir.'

Master Carl was purely horrified.

This was not a case for discipline, he saw at once. Carl did not consider that the separation of Egerd from mathematics would be a loss to mathematics. It was compassion for the boy himself that gave him concern. 'Well. What is it you want to transfer to?'

'Med School, sir. I've made up my mind.' He added, 'You can understand why, Master Carl. I don't have much talent for this stuff.'

Carl didn't understand; he would never understand. He had, however, some long time before that made up his mind that there were things about his students that didn't need much understanding. His students had many facets; only one concerned him. They were like those paper patterns the soft-headed undergraduates in Topology played with, hexi-hexiflexagons, constructions that turned up new sides in bewildering variety each time they were flexed. He said mournfully, 'All right. I'll sign your release.' He scowled when he saw that Egerd already had it filled out and ready for him; the boy was too eager. The door opened again.

Master Carl halted with the pen in his hand. 'Now what?' He recognized the man - vaguely - it was that hanger-on of the Department of Liberal Arts. The name escaped him, but he was a sex-writer. He was also agitated.

The man said, 'Excuse me. I'm sorry. Name's Farley. I'm Master Cornut's—'

'You're a sex-writer. I have no objection to that. I do object to having my privacy disturbed.' Although that was not quite true either. Master Carl was prude enough (perhaps because he was woman-shy enough) to feel that the private affairs of men and women should not be inspired by scripts provided by sex-writers or, as they were once called, marriage counsellors. He would never have employed one, and he was irked with Cornut.

As it turned out, neither would Cornut. 'I was a wedding present,' Farley explained, 'and so I went to see Cornut this morning with a rough thirty-day draft. I don't use standard forms; I believe in personalized counselling. So I thought I'd better interview the male subject right away because, as you know—'

Egerd interrupted desperately, 'Master Carl. Please sign my transfer.'

The expression in his eyes said more than his words. The flexagon turned up another side, and this time Carl was able to read its design. He nodded and wrote his name. It was entirely clear that Egerd's reasons for transferring away from Locille and Master Cornut had nothing much to do with his talent for mathematics.

But the sex-writer would not be stopped. 'Then where is the female subject, Master Carl?' he demanded. 'They said she would be here...'

'Locille? Of course.' A terrible thought entered Carl's mind. 'You mean that something happened - again? When you went to see Cornut he was—'

'Out cold, yes. Almost dead. He's having his stomach pumped now, though; they think he'll be all right.'

When they reached Cornut's room, the medic was scanning a spectrum elaborated for him by a portable diagnosticon. Cornut himself was unconscious. The medic reassured them. 'Close, but he missed this time. What was it, his fifteenth? And the record is—'

Carl interrupted frostily. 'Can you wake him up? Good. Then do.'

The medic shrugged and fished for a hypodermic. He slipped the piston of the needle into the barrel; the faint spray appeared, hovering over Cornut's unbroken skin. The tiny droplets found their way through dermis and epidermis and subcutaneous fat and, in a moment, Cornut sat up.

He said clearly, 'I had the most ridiculous dream.'

And then he saw Locille; and his face was alight. That at least was no dream. Master Carl had little tact, but he had enough to take the medic and leave the two of them there.

The experience of having one's stomach pumped is not attractive. This was Cornut's third time, but he had not come to like it; he tasted bile and foulness, his oesophagus had been painfully scraped; the sleeping pills had left him with a headache.

'I'm sorry,' he said.

Locille brought him a glass and one of the capsules the medic had left. He swallowed it and began to chuckle. 'Lucky Wahl,' he said. 'You know, if I'd been awake when that fellow came in I'd have gone over and punched Wahl in the head; it was his idea; he got half of Anthropology to chip in to buy us Farley's services for a year. As it is ... I guess Wahl saved my life.' He got up and began to wander around. In spite of the taste and the head, he was feeling rather cheerful, in an unanalysed way. Even the dream, though queer, had not been unpleasant. Master Carl had been in it, and so had St Cyr and the woman from South America; but so had Locille.

He paused by his desk. "What's this?' It was a neat sheaf of papers clipped in a folder on which was printed: S. R. Farley, Consultant. That was all. Just Consultant. He opened it and found the first page a cleanly typed set of what seemed to be equations. The symbols and occurred frequently, along with strokes, daggers and congruencies which he vaguely remembered from an undergraduate course in symbolic logic. 'That's almost a Boolean notation,' he said interestedly. 'I wonder— Say, look at this, Locille. Line three. If you substitute these three terms from the expansion in line four, and—'

He stopped. She was blushing. But he hadn't noticed; he was suddenly scowling at his desk. 'My Wolgren! Where is it?'

'If you mean the report on distributive anomalies you were preparing for Master Carl, he took it as he went out.' 'But it isn't finished!'

'But he didn't want you working on it. Or anything. He wants you to take the day off - get off the campus - and he wants me to stay with you.'

'Huh.' He stared glumly at the window. 'Hum.' He made tasting motions with his lips and tongue and made a face. 'Well. All right. Where is there to go, off campus? Do you have any ideas?'

Locille looked a little worried. 'As a matter of fact,' she said diffidently, 'I do...'

At sundown they boarded the one-a-day ferry to the texas; there was traffic enough from the city to the texas, and even from the University to the city; but between the texas and the University there was almost none. They leaned against the rail as the ferry rose, looking down at the University's island, the city and the bay. The almost silent blades overhead chopped the scarlet sunset sky into dots and dashes; all they could hear inside the domed deck of the ferry was a bass flutter of blades and a more-than-soprano hiss of the blade-tip jets.

Locille said abruptly, 'I didn't tell you about Roger. My brother,' she said swiftly.

Cornut stopped an emotion before it had quite got started. 'What about him?' he asked, relieved.

She said flatly, 'He isn't University calibre. He might have been, but— When Roger was about five years old - he was swimming off the texas - there was another boy in the water, and he dived. They collided. The other boy drowned.' She paused, turning to look at him. 'Roger fractured his skull. Ever since then, he's been - well, his intelligence never developed much past that point.'

Cornut received the information, frowning.

It was not that he minded a stupid brother-in-law; it was only that he had never thought of there being any brother-in-law at all. It had never occurred to Cornut that marriage involved more than two people.

'He isn't insane,' Locille said worriedly, 'just not intelligent.'

Cornut hardly heard her. He was busy trying to cope with the thought that there was more here than watchdog or love; there was something here that he had never counted on. It took twenty minutes to fly the rest of the way to the texas, and it took all of that time for Cornut to puzzle out the fact that he had taken on more than a convenience or a pleasure, he had assumed a sort of obligation as well.

The texas stood in ninety feet of water, just over the horizon from Sandy Hook. It was fifteen acres of steel decks, twelve levels high, the lowest of the levels forty feet above mean high water. It was not the fault of the designers of the texas that 'mean high water' was an abstraction, the average distance between trough and peak of the great swells of the ocean. The texas crouched on hundreds of metal legs that sank into the ooze to the bedrock beneath, and it was a target. In storms the whitecaps slapped demandingly at its underbelly. If there was lightning, it was sure to strike at the radar beacon on its tower.

Time was when those radars had been the reason for the existence of texas towers. That time was past; satellite eyes and ionosphere-scatter search methods had ended their importance. But the world had found other uses for them. They guided the whale-backed submersibles of the world's cargo fleets as they surfaced over the continental shelf to find harbour; they served as mother 'ships' for the ranging fishery fleets in shallow seas. They provided living room for some tens of millions on the American seaboard alone. They provided work space for nuisance industries - the ones that smelled, or were loud, or were dangerous.

Power was free, nearly, on a texas. Each hollow leg was slotted in its lower stretch. The waves that came crashing by compressed the air in the columns, valved through a oneway exhaust into a pressure tank; pneumatic turbines whirred at the release vents of the tanks, and the texas' lights and industries drew current from those turbines. In 'good' weather - when the waves roared and pounded - there was power to smelt aluminium; the ore boats that unloaded the raw materials carried away the slag, dumping it within sight of the texas itself in the inexhaustible disposal pit of the ocean. When weather was 'bad' - when the Atlantic was glassy smooth - aluminium making stopped for a while. But weather was never really 'bad' for long.

Locille's parents lived with her brother, in a three-room apartment in the residential area of the texas. It was leeward of the fisheries, across the texas from the aluminium refinery, six levels above the generators. Cornut thought it horrible. It smelled and it was noisy.

Locille had brought presents. A sash for her father, something cosmetic for her mother and, Cornut saw with astonishment, one of the flags the aborigines had brought with them as a gift for her brother Roger. It had not occurred to Cornut that there should be gifts, much less gifts as expensive as any aboriginal artifact; the things were in great demand as conversation pieces. But he was grateful. The flag was a conversation piece here, too, and he needed one. Locille's mother brought out coffee and cake, and Cornut entertained them with his trip to the South Seas.

He did not, however, mention his blackout by the side of the road; and he could not keep his eyes off Roger.

Locille's brother was a huge young man, taller than Cornut, with a pleasant expression and dull eyes. He was not offered coffee and refused cake; he sat there, watching Cornut, fingering the worn fabric of his gift, even smelling it, rubbing it against his face. Cornut found him disconcerting. Barring the aborigines and a handful of clinical cases under study, there was not one human being on the campus with an I.Q. under a hundred and forty, and Cornut had no experience of the simple-minded. The boy could talk - but mostly did not - and though he seemed to understand what Cornut was saying, he never changed expression.

The fact of the matter was that Roger didn't much care what Cornut was saying. His whole attention was taken up with his gift. As soon as he thought it was proper to do so, he excused himself and carried it to his room.

Roger was aware that it was very old and came from very far away; but that could have been something of last week's, from the city just below the horizon; he had little memory. What Roger thought principally about the flag was that it was a pretty colour.

He tacked it with magnetic grips to the wall of his room, stood back thoughtfully, removed the grips and replaced it closer to his bed. He stood there looking at it, because somehow it satisfied him to stand and look at it.

It was bright moonlight outside, but there was a fair wind sweeping across the long reach from Portugal. The waves were high; and the pneumatic hammer-hammer and the rattle-slam of the valves opening and closing pounded through the texas, one noise reinforcing the other. It made it hard for anyone to talk in the other room. (Cornut was growing more and more uneasy.) But it didn't bother Roger. Since the day his own crushed skull had minced a corner of his brain, nothing had really bothered Roger.

But he liked the flag. After ten minutes of staring at it, he took off the magnets that held it, folded it and put it under his pillow. Smiling with pleasure, he went back into the other room to say good night to his sister's new husband.