Frederik Pohl Read online

  'Let's take a look,' said Rhame. The student librarian led them to the library computer, but Cornut nodded him away. He set up the integrals himself.

  'Age values,' he explained. 'Nothing of any great importance, of course. No reason it should be a secret. But—'

  He finished with the keyboard, and indicated the viewer of the screen. It flickered, and then bloomed with a scarlet legend:

  Classified Information

  Rhame stared at the words. He said, 'I don't know.'

  Cornut understood. 'I can't believe it, either. True, Carl was a house-master. He felt he had certain rights...'

  The policeman nodded. 'What about it, son? Did he act peculiar? Agitated?'

  'He was mad as hell,' said the student librarian with satisfaction. 'He said he was going right over to the Sa— to the President's residence and get clearance to receive the data. Said it was moronic - let's see - "moronic, incompetent bureaucracy,"' he finished with satisfaction.

  Sergeant Rhame looked at Cornut 'Well, the inquest will have to decide,' he said after a moment.

  'Do you think he would try to kill a man?' Cornut demanded harshly.

  Master Cornut,' said the policeman slowly, 'I don't think anybody ever really wants to kill anybody. But he blew his top. If he was angry enough, who knows?' He didn't give Cornut a chance to debate the matter. 'I guess that's all,' he said, turning back to the night librarian. 'Unless he said anything else?'

  The student hesitated, then grinned faintly. 'Just one other thing. As he was leaving, he gave me ten more demerits for smoking on duty.'

  The following morning Cornut was summoned to the Chancellor's office to hear the reading of Carl's will.

  Cornut was only mildly surprised to find that he was Master Carl's sole heir. He was touched, however. And he was saddened, for Master Carl's own voice told him about it.

  That was the approved way of recording the most important documents, and it was like Master Carl to believe that the disposition of his tiny estate was of great importance. It was a tape of his image that recited the sonorous phrases: 'Being of sound and disposing mind, I devise and bequeath unto my dear friend, Master Cornut—' Cornut sat blinking at the image. It was entirely lifelike. That, of course, was the point; papers could be forged and sound tapes could be altered, but there was no artisan in the world who could quite succeed in making a change in a video tape without leaving a trace. The voice was the voice that had boomed out of a million student television sets for decades. Cornut, watching, hardly listened to the words but found himself trying to tell when it was that Carl had made the decision to leave him all his worldly goods. The cloak, he recalled vaguely, was an old one; but when was it Carl had stopped wearing it?

  It didn't matter. Nothing mattered about Master Carl, not any more; the tape rattled and flapped off the reel, and the picture of Master Carl vanished from the screen.

  Locille's hand touched his shoulder.

  The chancellor said cheerfully, 'Well, that's it All yours. Here's the inventory.'

  Cornut glanced over it rapidly. Books, more than a thousand of them, value fixed by the appraisers (they must have been working day and night!) at five hundred dollars and a bit. Clothing and personal effects - Cornut involuntarily grinned - an arbitrary value of $1. Cash on hand, a shade over a thousand dollars, including the coins in his pocket when he died. Equity in the University pension plan, $8,460; monthly salary due, calculated to the hour of death, $271; residuals accruing from future use of taped lectures, estimated, $500. Cornut winced. Carl would have been hurt by that, but it was true; there was less and less need for his old tapes, with newer professors adopting newer techniques. And there was an estimate of future royalties to be earned by his mnemonic songs, and that was unkindest of all: $50.

  Cornut did not bother to read the itemized liabilities -inheritance tax, income tax due, a few miscellaneous bills. He only noted the net balance was a shade over $8,000.

  The funeral director walked silently from the back of the room and suggested, rather handsomely, 'Call it eight thousand even. Satisfactory? Then sign here, Master Cornut.'

  'Here' was at the bottom of a standard mortuary agreement, with the usual fifty-fifty split between the heirs and the mortician. Cornut signed quickly, with a feeling of slight relief. He was getting off very lightly. The statutory minimum fee for a basic funeral was $2500; if the estate had been less than $5,000, he would have inherited only the balance above $2500; if it had been under $2500, he would have had to make up the difference. That was the law. More than one beneficiary, legally responsible for the funeral expenses, had regretted the generous remembering of the deceased. (In fact, there were paupers in the world who sold their wills as an instrument of revenge on occasion. For a hundred dollars' worth of liquor they would bequeath their paltry all to the drink-supplier's worst enemy, who would then, sooner or later, find himself unexpectedly saddled with an inescapable $2500 cost.)

  Sergeant Rhame was waiting for them outside the Chancellor's office. 'Do you mind?' he asked politely, holding out his hand. Cornut handed over the mortuary agreement, containing the inventory of Carl's estate. The policeman studied it thoughtfully, then shook his head. 'Not much money, but he didn't need much, did he? It doesn't help explain anything.' He glanced at his watch. 'All right,' he said. 'I'll walk over with you. We're due at the inquest.'

  As a tribute to the University, the state medical examiner had empanelled a dozen faculty members as his jury. Only one was from the Mathematics Department, a woman professor named Janet, but Cornut recognized several of the others, vaguely, from faculty teas and walks on the campus.

  St Cyr testified, briefly and in his customary uninflected pendulum-tick, that Master Carl had shown no previous signs of insanity but had been wild and threatening indeed the night of his death.

  St Cyr's housekeeper testified the same, adding that she had feared for her own life.

  The bodyguard who killed Carl took the stand. Cornut felt Locille shrink in the seat behind him; he understood; he felt the same revulsion. The man did not seem much different from other men, though; he was middle-aged, husky, with a speech impediment that faintly echoed St Cyr's own. He explained that he had been on President St Cyr's payroll for nearly ten years; that he had once been a policeman and that it was not uncommon for very wealthy men to hire ex-policemen as bodyguards; and that he had never before had to kill anyone in defence of St. Cyr's life. 'But this one. He was dangerous. He was... going to kill... somebody.' He got the words out slowly, but without appearing particularly agitated.

  Then there were a few others - Cornut himself, the night proctor, the student librarian, even the sex-writer, Farley, who said that Master Carl had indeed seemed upset on his one personal contact with him but, of course, the occasion had been a disturbing one; he had told him of Master Cornut's most recent suicide attempt. Cornut attempted to ignore the faces that turned towards him.

  The verdict took five minutes: 'Killed in self-defence, in the course of attempting to commit murder.'

  For days after that Cornut kept away from St Cyr's residence, for the sake of avoiding Carl's executioner. He had never seen the man before Carl was killed, and never wanted to see him again.

  But as time passed, Carl's death dwindled in his mind; his own troubles, more and more, filled it.

  As day followed day, he began to approach, then reached, finally passed the all-time record for suiciders. And he was still alive.

  He was still alive because of the endless patience and watchfulness of Locille. Every night she watched him asleep, every morning she was up before him. She began to look pale, and he found her taking catnaps in the dressing-room while he was lecturing to his classes; but she did not complain. She also did not tell him, until he found the marks and guessed, that twice in one week, even with her alert beside him, he had severed his wrists, first on a letter opener, second on a broken drinking tumbler. When he chided her for not telling him, she kissed him. That was all.

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nbsp; He was having dreams, too, queer ones; he remembered them sharply when he woke, and for a while told them to Locille, and then stopped. They were very peculiar. They had to do with being watched, being watched by some gruff, irritated warden, or by a hostile Roman crowd waiting for his blood in the arena. They were unpleasant; and he tried to explain them to himself. It was because he was subconsciously aware of Locille watching him, he told himself; and in the next breath said, Paranoia. He did not believe it ... But what then? He considered returning to his analyst, but when he broached it to Locille she only looked paler and more strained. Some of the sudden joy had gone out of their love; and that worried Cornut; and it did not occur to him that the growing trust and solidarity between them was perhaps worth more.

  But not all the joy had gone. Apart from interludes of passion, somewhat constrained by Locille's ironclad determination to stay awake until he was quite asleep, apart from the trust and closeness, there were other things. There was the interest of work shared, for as Cornut's wife Locille became more his pupil than ever before in one of his classes; together they rechecked the Wolgren, found it free of gross error, reluctantly shelved it for lack of confirming data and began a new study of prime distribution in very large numbers. They were walking back to the Math Tower one warm day, planning a new approach through analytic use of the laws of congruence, when Locille stopped and caught his arm.

  Egerd was coming towards them.

  He was tanned, but he did not look well. Part of it was for reasons Cornut had only slowly come to know; he was uncomfortable in the presence of the girl he loved and the man she had married. But there was something else. He looked sick. Locille was direct: 'What in the world's the matter with you?'

  Egerd grinned. 'Don't you know about Med School? It's traditional, hazing freshmen. The usual treatment is a skin fungus that turns sweat rancid, so you stink, or a few drops of something that makes you break out in orange blotches, or - well, never mind. Some of the jokes are kind of, uh, personal.'

  Locille said angrily, 'That's terrible. You don't look very funny to me, Egerd.'

  Cornut said to her, after Egerd had left, 'Boys will be boys.' She looked at him swiftly. He knew his tone had been callous. He didn't know that she understood why; he thought his sudden sharp stab of jealousy had been perfectly concealed.

  A little over two weeks after Master Carl's death, the proctor knocked on Cornut's door to say that he had a visitor. It was Sergeant Rhame, with a suitcase full of odds and ends. 'Master Carl's personal effects,' he explained. 'They belong to you now. Naturally, we had to borrow them for examination.'

  Cornut shrugged. The stuff was of no great value. He poked through the suitcase; some shabby toilet articles, a book marked Diary - he flipped it open eagerly, but it recorded only demerits and class attendances - an envelope containing photographic film.

  Sergeant Rhame said, 'That's what I wanted to ask you about. He had a lot of photographic equipment. We found several packs of film, unopened, which Master Carl had pressed against some kind of radiation-emitting paint on a paper base. The lab spent a lot of time trying to figure it out. They guessed he was trying to get the gamma radiation from the paint to register on the film, but we don't know why.'

  Cornut said, 'Neither do I, but I can make a guess.' He explained about Carl's off-duty interests, and the endless laborious work that he had been willing to put into them. 'I'm not sure what his present line was, but I know it had something to do with trying to get prints of geometrical figures - stars, circles, that sort of thing. Why? Do you mean he finally succeeded in getting one?'

  'Not exactly.' Sergeant Rhame opened a package and handed Cornut a glossy print. 'All the negatives were blank except one. This one. Make anything of it?'

  Cornut studied it. It seemed to be a photograph of a sign, or a printer's proof. It was not very well defined, but there was no doubt what it said. He puzzled over it for a while, then shook his head.

  The lettering on the print said simply:

  YOU DAMN OLD FOOL

  CHAPTER XII

  The wind was brisk, and the stretched cables under the texas made a bull-roarer sound as they vibrated. The pneumatic generators rattled, whined and crashed. Locille's brother was too used to them to notice. He wasn't feeling very well, but it was his custom to do what his parents expected him to do, and they expected that he would watch the University broadcasts of his sister's classes. The present class was Cornut's, and Roger eyed with polite ignorance the professor's closely-reasoned exposition of Wilson's Theorem. He watched the dancing girls and the animated figures with more interest, but it was, on the whole, a disappointing show. The camera panned the studio audience only twice, and in neither case was he able to catch a glimpse of Locille.

  He reported to his mother, took his last look at the flag Locille had brought him, and went to work.

  As the day wore on, Roger felt worse. First it was his head pounding, then his bones aching, then an irresistible sudden nausea. Roger's job was conducive to that; he spent the whole day standing thigh deep in a smelly fluid composed of salt water, fish lymph and blood.

  Ordinarily it didn't bother him (as nothing much bothered him, anyhow). Today was different. He steadied himself with one hand against a steel-topped table, shook his head violently to clear it. He had just come back from a hasty trip to the washroom, where he had vomited profusely. Now it seemed he was close to having to race out there again.

  Down the table the sorter called, 'Roger! Hey! You're holding up the works.'

  Roger rubbed the back of his neck and mumbled something that was not intelligible, even to himself. He got back to work because he had to; the fish were piling up.

  It was the sorter's job to separate the females of the stocked Atlantic salmon run from the males. The male fish were thrust down a chute to a quick and undistinguished death. But the females, in breeding season, contained something too valuable to be wasted on the mash of entrails and bony parts that made dry fish meal. That was Roger's job - Roger's and a few dozen others who stood at tables just like his. The first step was to grasp the flopping female by the tail with one hand and club her brains out, or as nearly as possible out, with the other. The second was to hold her with both hands, exposing her belly to his partner across the table, whose long, fat knife ripped open the egg sac inside. (Quite often the knife missed. Roger's job was not sought after.) A quick wringing motion; the eggs poured one way, the gutted body slid another; and he was ready for the next fish. Sometimes the fish struggled terribly, which was unpleasant for a man with imagination; even the dullest grew to dislike the work. Roger had held the same job for four years.

  'Come on, Roger!' The sorter was yelling at him again. Roger stared at him woozily. For the first time he became suddenly aware of the constant slam, bang, rattle, roar that permeated the low-level fishery plant. He opened his mouth to say something; and then he ran. He made it to the washroom, but with nothing at all to spare.

  An hour later, his mother was astonished to see him home. 'What happened?'

  He tried to explain everything that had happened, but it involved some complicated words. He settled for 'I didn't feel good.'

  She was worried. Roger was always healthy. He didn't look good, ever, but that was because the part of his brain that was damaged had something to do with his muscle tone; in fact, he had been sick hardly a week's total in his life. She said doubtfully, 'Your father will be home in an hour or so, but maybe I ought to call him. I wonder. What do you think, Roger?'

  That was rhetoric; she had long since reconciled herself to the fact that her son did not think. He stumbled and straightened up, scowling. The back of his neck was beginning to pain badly. He was in no mood to contemplate hard questions. What he wanted was to go to bed, with Locille's flag by his pillow, so that he could fondle it drowsily before he slept. That was what he liked. He told his mother as much.

  She was seriously concerned now. 'You are sick. I'd better call the clinic. You lie down.'
>
  'No. No, you don't have to. They called over at the place.'

  He swallowed with some pain; he was beginning to shiver. 'Mr Garney took me to the dia - the dia—'

  'The diagnosticon at the clinic, Roger!'

  'Yes, and I got some pills.' He reached in his pocket and held up a little box. 'I already took one and I have to take some more later.'

  His mother was not satisfied, but she was no longer very worried; the diagnostic equipment did not often fail. 'It's that cold water you stand in,' she mourned, helping him to his room. 'I've told you, Roger. You ought to have a better job. Slicer, maybe even sorter. Or maybe you can get out of that part of it altogether. You've worked there four years now...'

  'Good night,' Roger said inappropriately - it was early afternoon. He began to get ready for bed, feeling a little better, at least psychologically, in the familiar, comfortable room with his familiar, comfortable bed and the little old Japanese flag wadded up by the pillow. 'I'm going to sleep now,' he told her, and got rid of her at last.

  He huddled under the warming covers - set as high as the rheostat would go, but still not high enough to warm his shaking body. The pain in his head was almost blinding now.

  At the clinic, Mr Garney had been painfully careful to explain what the pills were for. They would take away the pain, stop the throbbing, make him comfortable, let him sleep. Feverishly Roger took another one out of the box and swallowed it.

  It worked, of course. The clinic's pills always performed as advertised. The pain dwindled to a bearable ache, then to a memory; the throbbing stopped; he began to fall asleep.

  Roger felt drowsily peaceful. He could not see his face, and therefore did not know how flushed it was becoming; he had no idea that his temperature was climbing rapidly. He went quite happily to sleep ... with the old, frayed flag against his cheek ... just as he had done for nearly three weeks now, and as he would never in this life do again.

  The reason Roger hadn't seen his sister in the audience was that she wasn't there; she was waiting in Cornut's little dressing-room. Cornut suggested it. 'You need the rest,' he said solicitously, and promised to review the lesson with her later.