The medic shrugged and fished for a hypodermic. He slipped the piston of the needle into the barrel; the faint spray appeared, hovering over Cornut's unbroken skin. The tiny droplets found their way through dermis and epidermis and subcutaneous fat and, in a moment, Cornut sat up.
He said clearly, 'I had the most ridiculous dream.'
And then he saw Locille; and his face was alight. That at least was no dream. Master Carl had little tact, but he had enough to take the medic and leave the two of them there.
The experience of having one's stomach pumped is not attractive. This was Cornut's third time, but he had not come to like it; he tasted bile and foulness, his oesophagus had been painfully scraped; the sleeping pills had left him with a headache.
'I'm sorry,' he said.
Locille brought him a glass and one of the capsules the medic had left. He swallowed it and began to chuckle. 'Lucky Wahl,' he said. 'You know, if I'd been awake when that fellow came in I'd have gone over and punched Wahl in the head; it was his idea; he got half of Anthropology to chip in to buy us Farley's services for a year. As it is ... I guess Wahl saved my life.' He got up and began to wander around. In spite of the taste and the head, he was feeling rather cheerful, in an unanalysed way. Even the dream, though queer, had not been unpleasant. Master Carl had been in it, and so had St Cyr and the woman from South America; but so had Locille.
He paused by his desk. "What's this?' It was a neat sheaf of papers clipped in a folder on which was printed: S. R. Farley, Consultant. That was all. Just Consultant. He opened it and found the first page a cleanly typed set of what seemed to be equations. The symbols 
and 
occurred frequently, along with strokes, daggers and congruencies which he vaguely remembered from an undergraduate course in symbolic logic. 'That's almost a Boolean notation,' he said interestedly. 'I wonder— Say, look at this, Locille. Line three. If you substitute these three terms from the expansion in line four, and—'
He stopped. She was blushing. But he hadn't noticed; he was suddenly scowling at his desk. 'My Wolgren! Where is it?'
'If you mean the report on distributive anomalies you were preparing for Master Carl, he took it as he went out.' 'But it isn't finished!'
'But he didn't want you working on it. Or anything. He wants you to take the day off - get off the campus - and he wants me to stay with you.'
'Huh.' He stared glumly at the window. 'Hum.' He made tasting motions with his lips and tongue and made a face. 'Well. All right. Where is there to go, off campus? Do you have any ideas?'
Locille looked a little worried. 'As a matter of fact,' she said diffidently, 'I do...'
At sundown they boarded the one-a-day ferry to the texas; there was traffic enough from the city to the texas, and even from the University to the city; but between the texas and the University there was almost none. They leaned against the rail as the ferry rose, looking down at the University's island, the city and the bay. The almost silent blades overhead chopped the scarlet sunset sky into dots and dashes; all they could hear inside the domed deck of the ferry was a bass flutter of blades and a more-than-soprano hiss of the blade-tip jets.
Locille said abruptly, 'I didn't tell you about Roger. My brother,' she said swiftly.
Cornut stopped an emotion before it had quite got started. 'What about him?' he asked, relieved.
She said flatly, 'He isn't University calibre. He might have been, but— When Roger was about five years old - he was swimming off the texas - there was another boy in the water, and he dived. They collided. The other boy drowned.' She paused, turning to look at him. 'Roger fractured his skull. Ever since then, he's been - well, his intelligence never developed much past that point.'
Cornut received the information, frowning.
It was not that he minded a stupid brother-in-law; it was only that he had never thought of there being any brother-in-law at all. It had never occurred to Cornut that marriage involved more than two people.
'He isn't insane,' Locille said worriedly, 'just not intelligent.'
Cornut hardly heard her. He was busy trying to cope with the thought that there was more here than watchdog or love; there was something here that he had never counted on. It took twenty minutes to fly the rest of the way to the texas, and it took all of that time for Cornut to puzzle out the fact that he had taken on more than a convenience or a pleasure, he had assumed a sort of obligation as well.
The texas stood in ninety feet of water, just over the horizon from Sandy Hook. It was fifteen acres of steel decks, twelve levels high, the lowest of the levels forty feet above mean high water. It was not the fault of the designers of the texas that 'mean high water' was an abstraction, the average distance between trough and peak of the great swells of the ocean. The texas crouched on hundreds of metal legs that sank into the ooze to the bedrock beneath, and it was a target. In storms the whitecaps slapped demandingly at its underbelly. If there was lightning, it was sure to strike at the radar beacon on its tower.
Time was when those radars had been the reason for the existence of texas towers. That time was past; satellite eyes and ionosphere-scatter search methods had ended their importance. But the world had found other uses for them. They guided the whale-backed submersibles of the world's cargo fleets as they surfaced over the continental shelf to find harbour; they served as mother 'ships' for the ranging fishery fleets in shallow seas. They provided living room for some tens of millions on the American seaboard alone. They provided work space for nuisance industries - the ones that smelled, or were loud, or were dangerous.
Power was free, nearly, on a texas. Each hollow leg was slotted in its lower stretch. The waves that came crashing by compressed the air in the columns, valved through a oneway exhaust into a pressure tank; pneumatic turbines whirred at the release vents of the tanks, and the texas' lights and industries drew current from those turbines. In 'good' weather - when the waves roared and pounded - there was power to smelt aluminium; the ore boats that unloaded the raw materials carried away the slag, dumping it within sight of the texas itself in the inexhaustible disposal pit of the ocean. When weather was 'bad' - when the Atlantic was glassy smooth - aluminium making stopped for a while. But weather was never really 'bad' for long.
Locille's parents lived with her brother, in a three-room apartment in the residential area of the texas. It was leeward of the fisheries, across the texas from the aluminium refinery, six levels above the generators. Cornut thought it horrible. It smelled and it was noisy.
Locille had brought presents. A sash for her father, something cosmetic for her mother and, Cornut saw with astonishment, one of the flags the aborigines had brought with them as a gift for her brother Roger. It had not occurred to Cornut that there should be gifts, much less gifts as expensive as any aboriginal artifact; the things were in great demand as conversation pieces. But he was grateful. The flag was a conversation piece here, too, and he needed one. Locille's mother brought out coffee and cake, and Cornut entertained them with his trip to the South Seas.
He did not, however, mention his blackout by the side of the road; and he could not keep his eyes off Roger.
Locille's brother was a huge young man, taller than Cornut, with a pleasant expression and dull eyes. He was not offered coffee and refused cake; he sat there, watching Cornut, fingering the worn fabric of his gift, even smelling it, rubbing it against his face. Cornut found him disconcerting. Barring the aborigines and a handful of clinical cases under study, there was not one human being on the campus with an I.Q. under a hundred and forty, and Cornut had no experience of the simple-minded. The boy could talk - but mostly did not - and though he seemed to understand what Cornut was saying, he never changed expression.