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.