Drunkard's Walk

By then it did not much matter. In for a penny, in for a pound; when Carl ordered him back to the town where the jet had landed, the pilot grumbled to himself but complied.

It was not hard to find where Cornut had gone. The police scooter told Carl about the sidewalk cafe, the cashier told him about the native cafeteria, the counterman had watched Cornut, failing to finish his sandwich and coffee, stagger back to - the airport again. There the traffic tower had seen him come in, try to get transportation to follow the others, fail and mulishly stagger off into the jungle on the level truck road.

He had been hardly able to keep his eyes open, the tower-man added.

Carl pressed the police into service. He was frightened.

The little scooter bounced along the road, twin spotlights scanning the growth on both sides. Please don't find him, begged Carl silently. I promised him...

The brakes squealed and the scooter skidded to a halt.

The police were small, thin, young and agile, but Master Carl was first off the scooter and first to the side of the huddled figure under the breadfruit tree.

For the first time in weeks, Cornut had fallen asleep -passed out, in fact - without a guardian angel. The moment of helplessness between waking and sleeping, the moment that had almost killed him a dozen times, had caught him by the side of a deserted road, in the middle of a uninhabited sink of smelly soft vegetation.

Carl gently lifted the limp head.

'... My God,' he said, a prayer instead of an oath, 'he's only drunk. Come on, you! Help me get him to bed.'

Cornut woke up with a sick mouth and a banging head, very cheerful. Master Carl was seated at a field desk, a shaded light over his head. 'Oh, you're up. Good. I had the porter call me a few minutes early, in case—'

'Yes. Thanks.' Cornut waggled his jaw experimentally, but that was not a very good experiment. Still, he felt very good. He had not been drunk in a long, long time, and a hangover was strange enough to him to be interesting in itself. He sat on the side of the bed. The porter had evidently had other orders from Master Carl, because there was coffee in a pewter pot, and a thick pottery cup. He drank some.

Carl watched him for a while, then browsed back to his desk. He had a jar of some faintly greenish liquid and the usual stack of photographic prints. 'How about this one?' he demanded. 'Does it look like a star to you?'

'No.'

Carl dropped it back on the heap. 'Becquerel's was no better,' he said cryptically.

'I'm sorry, Carl,' Cornut said cheerfully. 'You know I don't take much interest in psion—'

'Cornut!'

'Oh, sorry. In your researches into paranormal kinetics, then.'

Carl said doubtfully, having already forgotten what Cornut had said, 'I thought Greenlease had put me on the track of something. You know I've been trying to manipulate single molecules by P.K. - using photographic film, on the principle that as the molecules are just about to flip over into another state, not much energy should be needed to trigger them - Yes. Well, Greenlease told me about Brownian Movement. Like this.' He held the jar of soap solution to the light. 'See?'

Cornut got up and took the quart jar from Master Carl's hand. In the light he could see that the greenish colour was the sum of a myriad wandering points of light, looking more gold than green. 'Brownian Movement? I remember something about it.'

'The actual motion of molecules,' Carl said solemnly. 'One molecule impinging on another, knocking it into a third, the third knocking it into a fourth. There's a term for it in—'

'In math, of course. Why, certainly. The Drunkard's Walk.' Cornut remembered the concept with clarity and affection. He had been a second-year student, and the housemaster was old Wayne; the audio-visual had been a marionette drunkard, lurching away from a doll-sized lamp-post with random drunken steps in random drunken directions. He smiled at the jar.

'Well, what I want to do is sober him up. Watch!' Carl puffed and thought; he was a model of concentration; Rodin had only sketched the rough outlines, compared to Master Carl. Then he panted. 'Well?'

Apparently, Cornut thought, what Carl had been trying to do was to make the molecules move in straight lines. 'I don't think I see a thing,' he admitted.

'No. Neither do I... Well,' said Master Carl, retrieving his jar, 'even a negative answer is an answer. But I haven't given up yet. I have a few more thoughts on photographs -if Greenlease can give me a little help.' He sat down next to Cornut. 'And you?'

'You saw.'

Carl nodded seriously 'I saw that you were still alive. Was it because you were on your own drunkard's walk?'

Cornut shook his head. He didn't mean No, he meant, How can I tell?

'And my idea about finding a wife?'

'I don't know.'

'That girl in the dining hall,' Carl said with some acuteness. 'How about her?'

'Locille? Oh, good God, Carl, how do I know about her? I - I hardly know her name. Anyway, she seems to be pretty close to Egerd.'

Carl got up and wandered to the window. 'Might as well have breakfast. The aborigines ought to be ready now.' He stared at the crimson morning. 'Madam Sant' Anna has asked for a helper to get her aborigines to Valparaiso,' he said thoughtfully. 'I think I'll help her out.'

CHAPTER VI

Ten thousand miles away, in the early afternoon, Locille was not very close to Egerd at all. 'Sorry,' she said. 'I would like to. But—'

Egerd stood huffily up. 'What's the record?' he said angrily. 'Ten weeks? Good enough. I'll be around to see you again along about the first of the month.' He stalked out of the girls' dayroom.

Locille sighed, but as she did not know what to do about Egerd's jealousy, she did nothing. It was rather difficult to be a girl sometimes.

For here's Locille, a girl, pretty enough, full of a girl's problems. It is a girl's business to keep her problems to herself. It is a girl's business to look poised and lovely. And available.

It is not true that girls are made of sugar and spice. These mysterious creatures, enamelled of complexion faintly scented with distant flower-fields and musk, constricted here and enlarged there - they are animals, as men are animals, sustained by the same sludgy trickle of partly fermented organic matter; and indeed with a host of earthy problems men need never know; the oestral flow, the burgeoning cells that replenish the race. Womanhood has always been a triumph of artifice over the animal within.

And here, as we say, is Locille. Twenty years old, student, child of a retired subway engineer and his retired social-worker wife. She is young, she is nubile. The state of her health is a ploughmare's. What can she know of mysteries?

But she knew.

On the night the Field Expedition was due to return, Locille was excused from all her evening classes. She took advantage of an hour of freedom to telephone her parents, out on the texas. She discovered as she had discovered a hundred times before that there was nothing to say between them; and returned to the kitchens of the Faculty Mess in time to take up her duties for the evening.

The occasion was the return of the Field Expedition. It promised to be a monstrous feast.

More than two hundred visiting notables would be present, as well as most of the upper faculty of the University itself. The kitchens were buzzing with activity. All six C. E.s were on duty, all busy; the culinary engineer in charge of sauces and gravies spied Locille first and drafted her to help him, but there was a struggle; the engineer whose charge was pastries knew her and wanted her too. Sauces and gravies won out, and Locille found herself emulsifying caked steer blood and powdered spices in a huge metal vat; the sonic whine of the emulsifier and the staccato hiss of the steam as she valved it expertly into the mixture drowned out the settling roar of the jet; the party had returned without her knowing it; the first clue she had was when there was a commotion at one end of the kitchens, and she turned, and there was Egerd, dourly shepherding three short, sallow persons she didn't recognize.