He swallowed it, leaned back again and yawned. There was something about the pillow, he thought...
He turned his head, sniffed, breathed deeply. Yes. There was Locille about the pillow; that was what it was. Locille, who left a fragrance behind her. Beautiful fragrance of Locille, beautiful name. Beautiful girl. He caught himself yawning again—
Yawning?
Yawning!
He blinked the eyes that were much too heavy, and tried to turn the very weary head. Yawning! But after two wake-up pills - or was it three, or six?
History was repeating!
Red pills for wake-up, green for sleep. The green pills, he sobbed in his thoughts, he'd been taking the green ones! He was caught.
Oh, Lord, he whimpered soundlessly - oh, Lord, why this time? Why did you wait to catch me until I cared?
CHAPTER IX
The assistant audio engineer, staring bemused through the glass at the filling studio, was humming to himself. It irritated Master Carl. He could not help fitting words to the tune:
Strike the Twos and strike the Threes: The Sieve of Eratosthenes! When the multiples sublime, The numbers that are left, are prime.
It did not alleviate his annoyance that the song was one of his own. Classic Prime-Number Exposition was not the subject of the morning's class; it was Set Theory; he snapped, 'Be still, man! Don't you like your work here?' The assistant audio engineer paled. He had been brought up on a texas and never forgot that he might some day have to go back to one.
It was not really true that the humming distracted him. At Master Carl's age, you either know what you are doing or you don't, and he knew. He went out at the precise moment his theme began and spoke the words he always spoke, while his mind was on Cornut, on the Wolgren anomaly, on his private investigation of the paranormal, on - especially on - the responses and behaviour of each individual undergraduate in his in-studio audience. He noted every yawn of a drowsy nucleonics major in the far corner; he observed with particular care the furtive passage of notes from the boy, Egerd, to his protege's new wife, Locille. He did not intend to do anything about it. He was grateful to Locille. As a good watchdog, she might very well save the life of the only man on the faculty Carl considered to have any chance of ever replacing himself.
In five minutes he had concluded the live portion of his lecture and, indulging his own harmless desires, left the studio. Taped figures danced on the screen behind him, singing The Ballad of Sets.
Let 'S' be a number set, then progress:
If, of any two numbers (a and b) in S,
Their sum is also in the set,
The set is closed! And so we get A reproductive set with this definition:
'The number set S is closed by addition!'
He put the class out of his mind and eagerly drew a sheaf of photographic prints out of his briefcase. He had slept only restlessly the night before and had risen early to work at his newest hobby. He had had many. He needed many. Carl was in no way dissatisfied, could not have conceived a world in which he would not have been a mathematician, but it wasn't all pleasure to be a towering elder statesman in a young man's game. It was a queer fact of mathematics that nearly every great mathematician had done his best work before he was thirty. And most of them, like Carl, had turned to other curiosities in their later years.
Someone opened the door and the choral voices from the studio surged in on him:
If number set M is closed by subtraction, A modul is the term for this transaction!
Master Carl turned, frowning like ice. Egerd! He demanded terribly, 'What is a number set closed by multiplication?'
Egerd quailed but said, 'It's a ray, Master Carl. It's in the fourth canto. Sir, I want to—' 'Closed to addition and subtraction as well?' 'A ring, sir. Can I speak to you a moment?' Carl grunted.
'I did study the lesson, Master Carl. As you can see.'
He would have said more, but Carl had not finished being stern. 'There is no excuse, Egerd, for leaving a class without permission. You must know that. It may seem to you that you are able to grasp set theory by studying from books, no doubt. You are wrong. A mathematician must know these simple classical facts and definition as well as he knows that February has twenty-eight days, and in the same way. By mnemonics! I assure you that you will never become a first-rate mathematician by cutting classes.'
'Yes, sir. That's it. I want to transfer out. As soon as I get back from South America, if it's all right with you, sir.'
Master Carl was purely horrified.
This was not a case for discipline, he saw at once. Carl did not consider that the separation of Egerd from mathematics would be a loss to mathematics. It was compassion for the boy himself that gave him concern. 'Well. What is it you want to transfer to?'
'Med School, sir. I've made up my mind.' He added, 'You can understand why, Master Carl. I don't have much talent for this stuff.'
Carl didn't understand; he would never understand. He had, however, some long time before that made up his mind that there were things about his students that didn't need much understanding. His students had many facets; only one concerned him. They were like those paper patterns the soft-headed undergraduates in Topology played with, hexi-hexiflexagons, constructions that turned up new sides in bewildering variety each time they were flexed. He said mournfully, 'All right. I'll sign your release.' He scowled when he saw that Egerd already had it filled out and ready for him; the boy was too eager. The door opened again.
Master Carl halted with the pen in his hand. 'Now what?' He recognized the man - vaguely - it was that hanger-on of the Department of Liberal Arts. The name escaped him, but he was a sex-writer. He was also agitated.
The man said, 'Excuse me. I'm sorry. Name's Farley. I'm Master Cornut's—'
'You're a sex-writer. I have no objection to that. I do object to having my privacy disturbed.' Although that was not quite true either. Master Carl was prude enough (perhaps because he was woman-shy enough) to feel that the private affairs of men and women should not be inspired by scripts provided by sex-writers or, as they were once called, marriage counsellors. He would never have employed one, and he was irked with Cornut.
As it turned out, neither would Cornut. 'I was a wedding present,' Farley explained, 'and so I went to see Cornut this morning with a rough thirty-day draft. I don't use standard forms; I believe in personalized counselling. So I thought I'd better interview the male subject right away because, as you know—'
Egerd interrupted desperately, 'Master Carl. Please sign my transfer.'
The expression in his eyes said more than his words. The flexagon turned up another side, and this time Carl was able to read its design. He nodded and wrote his name. It was entirely clear that Egerd's reasons for transferring away from Locille and Master Cornut had nothing much to do with his talent for mathematics.
But the sex-writer would not be stopped. 'Then where is the female subject, Master Carl?' he demanded. 'They said she would be here...'
'Locille? Of course.' A terrible thought entered Carl's mind. 'You mean that something happened - again? When you went to see Cornut he was—'
'Out cold, yes. Almost dead. He's having his stomach pumped now, though; they think he'll be all right.'
When they reached Cornut's room, the medic was scanning a spectrum elaborated for him by a portable diagnosticon. Cornut himself was unconscious. The medic reassured them. 'Close, but he missed this time. What was it, his fifteenth? And the record is—'
Carl interrupted frostily. 'Can you wake him up? Good. Then do.'