He saw her. 'Locille! Come on over and meet the aborigines!'
She hesitated and glanced at her C. E., who pantomimed take-ten-if-it-won't-spoil-the-gravy. Locille slipped off her gauntlets, set the automatic timers and thermostats and ducked past the kneading, baking, pressure-cooking machines of the Faculty Kitchen towards Egerd and his trophies.
'They're Japanese,' he said proudly. 'You've heard of War Two? They were abandoned on an island, and their descendants have been there ever since. Say, Locille—'
She took her eyes off the aborigines to look at Egerd. He seemed both angry and proud. 'I have to go to Valparaiso,' he said. 'There are six other aborigines who are going to South America, and Master Carl picked me to go along.'
She started to answer, but Cornut was wandering into the room, looking thoughtful.
Egerd looked thoughtfully, back at him.
'I wondered why Carl picked me for this,' he said, not bitterly but with comprehension. 'All right.' He turned to leave through another door. 'He can have his chance - for the next sixteen days,' he said.
Thoughtful Cornut was. He had never proposed marriage before. 'Hello, Locille,' he said formally.
She said, 'Hello, Master Cornut.'
He said, 'I, uh, want to ask you something.'
She said nothing. He looked around the kitchen as though he had never been in it before, which was probably so. He said, 'Would you like to - ah, would you like to meet me on Overlook Tower tomorrow?' 'Certainly, Master Cornut.'
'That's fine,' he said politely, nodding, and was halfway into the dining-room before he realized he hadn't told her when. Maybe she thought he expected her to stand there all day long! He hurried back. 'At noon?'
'All right.'
'And don't make any plans for the evening,' he commanded, hurrying away. It was embarrassing. He had never proposed marriage before, and had not succeeded in proposing now, he thought. But he was wrong. He had. He didn't know it, but Locille did.
The rest of the evening passed very rapidly for Cornut. The dinner was a great success. The aborigines were a howl. They passed among the guests, smoking their pipe of peace with everyone who cared to try it, which was everyone, and as the guests got drunker the aborigines, responding to every toast with a loud Banzai!, then a hoarse one, then a simper -the aborigines got drunker still.
Cornut had a ball. He caught glimpses of Locille from time to time at first, then not. He asked after her, asked the waitresses, asked the aborigines, finally found himself asking - or telling - about Locille with his arm around the flaccid shoulders of Master Wahl. He was quite drunk early, and he kept on drinking. He had moments of clarity: Master Carl listened patiently while Cornut tried to demonstrate Brownian motion in a rye-and-ginger-ale; a queer, alone moment when he realized he was staggering around the empty kitchen, calling Locille's name to the cold copper cauldrons. Somehow, God knows how, he found himself in the elevators of Math Tower, when it must have been very late, and Egerd in a cream-coloured robe was trying to help him into his room. He knew he said something to Egerd that must have been either coarse or cruel, because the boy turned away from him and did not protest when Cornut locked his door, but he did not know what. Had he mentioned Locille? When had he not! He fell sprawled on his bed, giggling. He had mentioned Locille a thousand times, he knew, and stroked the pillow beside him. He drifted off to sleep.
He drifted off to sleep and halted, for a moment sober, for a moment terrified, knowing that he was on the verge of sleep, again alone. But he could not stop.
He could not stop because he was a molecule in a sea of soapy soup and Master Carl was hurling him into the arms of Locille.
Master Carl was hurling him away because Egerd had hurled him at Master Carl; Locille thrust him at St Cyr and St Cyr, voicelessly chuckling, hurled him clear out of the jar, and he could not stop.
He could not stop because St Cyr told him: You are a molecule, drunken molecule, you are a molecule, drunk and random, without path, you are a drunken molecule and you cannot stop.
He could not stop though the greatest voice in the world was shouting at him: YOU CAN ONLY DIE, DRUNKEN MOLECULE, YOU CAN DIE, YOU CANNOT STOP.
He could not stop because the world was reeling, reeling, he tried to open his eyes to halt it, but it would not stop.
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...