Frederik Pohl Read online

  He was a molecule.

  He saw that he was a molecule and he saw he could not stop. Then -the molecule. - stopped.

  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.

  CHAPTER VIII

  The ceremony was very simple. Master Carl officiated. There was a friendly meal, and then they were left alone, Locille and Cornut, by the grace of the magisterial power inherent in house-masters, man and wife.

  They went to his room.

  'You'd better rest,' said Locille.

  'All right.' He sprawled on the bed to watch her. He was very much aware of her, now studying, now doing womanlike tasks about his room - no. Their room. She was as inconspicuous as a flesh-and-blood person could be, moving quickly when she moved. But she might have been neon-lit and blaring with sirens for the way she kept distracting him.

  He stood up and dressed himself, not looking at her. She said questioningly: 'It's time for sleep, isn't it?'

  He fumbled. 'Is it?' But the clock said yes; it was; he had slept the day through. 'All right,' he said, as though it were some trivial
thing and not world-shaking at all. 'Yes, it's time for - sleep. But I think I will take a walk around the campus, Locille. I need it.'

  'Certainly.' She nodded and waited, polite and calm.

  'Perhaps I shall be back before you are asleep,' he went on. 'Perhaps not. Perhaps I—' He was rambling. He nodded, cleared his throat, picked up his cloak and left.

  No one was in the corridor outside, no one in sight in the hall.

  There was a thin electronic peep from the robot night-proctors, but that was all right. Master Cornut was no undergraduate, to wriggle under the sweep of the scanning beams on his belly. It was his privilege to come and go as he chose.

  He chose to go.

  He walked out on to the campus, quiet under a yellow moon, the bridge overhead ghostly silver. There was no reason why he should be so emotionally on edge. Locille was only a student.

  The fact remained, he was on edge.

  But why should he be? Student marriage was good for the students, good for the masters; custom sanctioned it; and Master Carl, from the majesty of his house-master's post, had suggested it in the first place.

  Queerly, he kept thinking of Egerd.

  There had been a look on young Egerd's face, and maybe it was that which bothered him. Master Cornut was not so many years past his sheepskin that he could quite dismiss the possible emotions of an undergraduate. Custom, privilege and law to one side, the fact remained that a student quite often did feel jealous of a master's prerogatives. While a student, Cornut himself had contracted no liaisons to be interfered with. But other students had. And there was no doubt that, in Egerd's immature, undergraduate way, he might well be jealous.

  But what did that matter? His jealousy could harm only himself. No serf, raging inwardly against his lord's jus primae noctis, was less able to make his anger felt than Egerd. But somehow Cornut was feeling it.

  He felt almost guilty.

  He was no logician, his field was Mathematics. But this whole concept of right, he thought as he paced along the riverbank, needed some study. What the world sanctioned was clear: The rights of the higher displaced the rights of the lower, as an atom of fluorine will drive oxygen out of a compound. But should it be that way?

  It was that way - if that was an answer.

  And all of class, all of privilege, all of law, seemed to be working to produce one single commodity - a product which, of all the world's goods, is unique in that it has never been in short supply, never quite satisfied its demand and never failed to find a market: Babies. Wherever you looked, babies. In the creches in the women's dorms, in the playrooms attached to the rooms of the masters - babies. It was almost as though it had been planned that way; custom and law determined the fact that as many adult humans as possible spend as much of their time as possible in performing the acts that made babies arrive. Why? What was the drive that produced so many babies?

  It wasn't a matter of sex alone - it was babies. Sex was perfectly possible and joyous under conditions that made the occurrence of babies utterly impossible; science had arranged that decades, even centuries, before. But contraception was - well, wrong. And so, all over the world, this uncomplicated and unaided practice of baby-making added a clear two per cent to the world's population every time the earth sailed around the sun.

  Two per cent per year!

  There were now something over twelve billion persons alive. Next year's census would show four hundred million more than that. And why?

  What made babies so popular?

  Crazy as it was, the conclusion forced itself on Master Cornut: It was planned that way.

  By whom, he wondered, settling down to a long night's thoughtful ramble and pursuing of the line of thought to its last extreme—

  But not tonight; because he looked up and there was his own dorm. His feet had known more clearly than he the ultimate answer to the question: Babies?

  He was back at the entrance of Math Tower where the girl, Locille, was waiting.

  The thing was, the bed.

  She had had a bed of her own moved into the room, for that was the way it was done; but of course there was his bed already there, much larger, so that—

  Well, which bed would she be in?

  He took a deep breath, nodded blindly to the unseeing electronic night proctor, and opened the door of his room.

  A riotous alarm bell shattered the stillness.

  Master Cornut stood staring, stupidly, while the flesh-and-blood undergraduate charged with supervising the corridors came peering worriedly around the corner, drawn by the sound; and the bell continued to ring. Then he realized it was connected with the door; it was his automatic alarm bell, rigged by himself. But he had not connected it this night, he knew.

  He stepped in quickly, threw a scowl back at the undergraduate, and closed the door. The ringing stopped.

  Locille was rising from the bed - his bed.

  Her hair was soft about her head and her eyes were downcast but bright. She had not been asleep. She said, 'You must be tired. Would you like me to fetch you something to eat?'

  He said in a tremblingly stern voice: 'Locille, why did you bug the door?'

  She looked at him. 'Why, to wake me up when you came in. The bell was there; I only had to turn it on.'

  'And why?'

  'Why,' she said, 'I wanted to.' And she yawned, rather prettily; and excused herself with a smile; and turned to straighten the covers on the bed.

  Cornut, watching her from behind as he had never watched her from the front, made note of two incredible facts.

  The first was that this girl, Locille, was beautiful. She was wearing very little, only a sleeping skirt and a sleeping yoke, and there was no doubt of her figure; and she was wearing no make-up that the eye could see, and there was no doubt about her face. Beautiful. Amazing, Cornut told himself, conscious of commotions inside himself, amazing, but I want this girl very much.

  And that led him to the other fact, which was more incredible still.

  Cornut had picked her out as a shopper might select one roast over another. Cornut had told her what to do; Cornut had, as far as he possibly could, arranged to destroy, with method and plan, everything of eagerness and spontaneous joy there might have been. It was his peculiar fortune that he had failed.

  He looked at her and knew what had never entered into his calculations. It had never occurred to him that she might be eager for him.

  Rap, tap.

  The girl shook him awake - fully awake. 'What do you want?' Cornut cried crossly at the door. Beside him, Locille made a face, a sweet, a mock-arrogant face, that was a tender caricature of his own; so that by the time the morning proctor opened the door a crack and peered around it, Cornut was smiling at him. Wonders never-ceasing, thought the proctor, and said timidly, 'Master Cornut, it is eight o'clock.'

  Cornut drew the covers over Locille's bare shoulder. 'Go away,' he said.

  The door closed, and one of Locille's pink slippers slapped lightly against it. She raised the other to toss after the first. Cornut caught her arm, laughing very softly; and she turned to him, not quite laughing, and kissed him, and sprang away.

  'And stay awake,' she warned. 'I have to go to class.'

  Cornut leaned back against the pillowcase.

  Why, it was a pleasant morning, he thought, and maybe in a way a pleasant world! It was perfectly amazing what hues and brightnesses there were in the world, that he had either never suspected or long forgot. He watched the girl, miraculously a part of his life, a segment joined on without a trace or seam where he had never suspected a segment was missing. She moved lightly around the room, and she looked at him from time to time; and if she wasn't a smile like a grinning ape it was because there wasn't any need for smiles just then, of course.

  Cornut was a well satisfied man that morning.

  Quick-quick, she was dressed; much too quickly. 'You,' said Cornut, 'are in much too much of a hurry to be gone from here.'

  Locille came and sat on the edge of the be
d. Even in the uniform she was beautiful now. That was another amazing thing. It was like knowing that a chalice was purest gold under the enamel; the colours were the same, the design was the same; but suddenly what had been a factory product was become a work of art, simply through knowing what graces lay underneath. She said, 'That is because I am in a hurry to return.' She looked at him again and said questioningly, 'You won't go back to sleep?'

  'Of course not.' She was frowning slightly, he saw with fondness; reminding him of the reason he had sought a companion in the first place; that old reason.

  'All right.' She kissed him, rose, found her carry-all where she had left it on a chair, and her books. She caroled softly to herself. 'Strike the Twos and strike the Threes, the Sieve of Eratosthenes. When the multiples - Cornut, you're sure you won't go back to sleep?' 'Sure.'

  She nodded, hesitating with one hand on the door. She said doubtfully, 'Maybe you'd better take a wake-up pill. Will you?'

  'I will,' he said, rejoicing in being nagged.

  'And you'd better start dressing yourself in a few minutes. It's only half an hour until your first class—'

  'I know.'

  'All right.' She blew him a kiss, and a smile; and she was gone.

  And the room was very empty. But not as empty as it had been all the days and nights before.

  Cornut dutifully got up, found himself the pillbox with the red and green sleeping regulators, took one and returned to bed; he had never felt better in his life.

  He lay back against the pillow, utterly relaxed and at peace. He had bought himself an alarm clock and it turned out to be a wife. He smiled at the low cream-coloured ceiling, and stretched and yawned. What a perfectly fine bargain! What a super-perfect alarm clock!

  And that reminded him; and he glanced at his watch; but he'd taken it off and the wall clock was out of his angle of vision. Well, no matter; the wake-up pill would keep him from going back to sleep again. It was common knowledge that the wake-up pill made time run short. It felt as though he had been lying there half an hour; well, it couldn't be more than five minutes; that was how they worked.

  Still...

  He fumbled in the little divided box. Fortunate that they were handy; another pill would make doubly sure.