'Angry about what?' shouted Cornut.
'I was hoping you could tell us that. It must have been something pretty serious. He tried to kill St Cyr with an axe. Fortunately—' He hesitated, but could find no way to withdraw the word. 'As it happened, that is, the President's bodyguard was nearby. He couldn't stop Master Carl any other way; he shot him to death.'
CHAPTER XI
Cornut went through that night and the next day in a dream. It was all very simple, everything was made easy for him, but it was impossibly hard to take. Carl dead! The old man shot down - attempting to commit a murder! It was more than unbelievable, it was simply fantastic. He could not admit its possibility for a second. But he could not deny.
Locille was with him almost every moment, closer than a wife need be, even closer than a watchdog. He didn't notice she was there. He would have noticed if she were missing. It was as though she had always been there, all his life, because his life was now something radically new, different, something that had begun at one o'clock in a morning, stepping out of a ferry popper to see Sergeant Rhame.
Rhame had asked him all the necessary questions in a quarter of an hour, but he had not left him then. It was charity, not duty, that kept him. A policeman, even a forensic probabilistician detailed to Homicide at his own personal request, is used to violence and unlikely murderers, and can sometimes help to explain difficult facts to the innocent bystanders. He tried. Cornut was not grateful. He was only dazed.
He cancelled his classes for the next day - tapes would do - and accompanied Rhame on a laborious retracing of Carl's last moves. First they visited St Cyr's residence and found the President awake and icy. He did not seem shaken by his experience; but then, he never did. He gave them only a moment of his time. 'Carl a kill-er. It is a great shock, Cor-nut. Ge-ni-us, we can not ex-pect it to be sta-ble, I sup-pose.' Cornut did not want to linger. St Cyr's presence was never attractive, but the thing that repelled him about the interview was the sight of the fifteenth-century halberd replaced on the floor where, they said, Master Carl had dropped it as the gunman shot him down. The pile of the carpet there was crisper, cleaner than the rest. Cornut was sickly aware that it had been cleaned, and aware what stain had been so quickly dissolved away.
He was glad to be out of the President's richly furnished residence, though the rest of the day was also no joy. Their first stop was the night proctor on Carl's floor, who confirmed that the house master had left at about ten o'clock, seeming disturbed about something but, in his natural custom, giving no clue as to its nature to an undergraduate. As it did not occur to them to question the aborigines, they did not learn of his brief and entirely one-sided conversation, but they picked up his trail at the next point.
Master Carl had turned up at the stacks at twenty-five minutes past ten, demanding instant service from the night librarian.
The librarian was a student, working off part of his tuition, as most students did. He was embarrassed, and Cornut quickly deduced why. 'You were asleep, weren't you?'
The student nodded, hanging his head. He was very nearly asleep talking to them; the news of Master Carl's death had reached every night clerk on the campus, and the boy had been unable to get to sleep. 'He gave me five demerits, and—' He stopped, suddenly angry with himself.
Cornut deduced the reason. 'Consider them cancelled,' he said kindly. 'You're quite right in telling us about them. Sergeant Rhame needs all the information.'
'Thank you, Master Cornut. I - uh - I also didn't have a chance to get the ashtray off my desk, and he noticed it. But he just said he wanted to use the stacks.' The undergraduate waved towards the great air-conditioned hall where the taped and microfilmed University Library was kept. The library computer was served by some of the same circuits as the Student Test-Indices (College Examinations) Digital Computer on the level above it; all the larger computers on the campus were cross-hooked to some degree.
Rhame was staring at the layout. 'It's got more complicated since I was here,' he said. 'Did Master Carl know how to use it?'
The student grinned. 'He thought he did. Then he came storming back to me. He couldn't get the data he wanted. So I tried to help him - but it was classified data. Census figures.'
'Oh,' said Cornut.
Sergeant Rhame turned and looked at him. 'Well?'
Cornut said, 'I think I know what he was after, that's all. It was the Wolgren.'
Rhame understood what he was talking about - fortunately, as it had not occurred to Cornut that anyone would fail to be aware of Wolgren's Distributive Law. Rhame said, 'I only use some special Wolgren functions; I don't see exactly what it has to do with census figures.'
Cornut sat down, beginning to lecture. Without looking he put out his hand and Locille, still with him, took it. 'It's not important to what you're looking for. Anyway, I don't think it is. We had a question up for study - some anomalies in the Wolgren distribution of the census figures - and, naturally, there shouldn't be any anomalies. So I took it as a part-time project.' He frowned. 'I thought I had it beaten, but I ran into trouble. Some of the values derived from my equations turned out to be ... ridiculous. I tried to get the real values, but I got the same answer as Master Carl, they were classified. Silly, of course.'
The student librarian chimed in, 'He said moronic. He said he was going to take it up with the Saint—' He stopped, blushing.
Rhame said, 'Well, I guess he did. What were the values that bothered you?'
Cornut shook his head. 'Not important; they're wrong. Only I couldn't find my mistake. So I kept going over the math. I suppose Carl went through the same thing, and then decided to take a look at the real values in the hope that they'd give some clue, just as I did.'
'Let's take a look,' said Rhame. The student librarian led them to the library computer, but Cornut nodded him away. He set up the integrals himself.
'Age values,' he explained. 'Nothing of any great importance, of course. No reason it should be a secret. But—'
He finished with the keyboard, and indicated the viewer of the screen. It flickered, and then bloomed with a scarlet legend:
Classified Information
Rhame stared at the words. He said, 'I don't know.'
Cornut understood. 'I can't believe it, either. True, Carl was a house-master. He felt he had certain rights...'
The policeman nodded. 'What about it, son? Did he act peculiar? Agitated?'
'He was mad as hell,' said the student librarian with satisfaction. 'He said he was going right over to the Sa— to the President's residence and get clearance to receive the data. Said it was moronic - let's see - "moronic, incompetent bureaucracy,"' he finished with satisfaction.
Sergeant Rhame looked at Cornut 'Well, the inquest will have to decide,' he said after a moment.
'Do you think he would try to kill a man?' Cornut demanded harshly.
Master Cornut,' said the policeman slowly, 'I don't think anybody ever really wants to kill anybody. But he blew his top. If he was angry enough, who knows?' He didn't give Cornut a chance to debate the matter. 'I guess that's all,' he said, turning back to the night librarian. 'Unless he said anything else?'
The student hesitated, then grinned faintly. 'Just one other thing. As he was leaving, he gave me ten more demerits for smoking on duty.'
The following morning Cornut was summoned to the Chancellor's office to hear the reading of Carl's will.
Cornut was only mildly surprised to find that he was Master Carl's sole heir. He was touched, however. And he was saddened, for Master Carl's own voice told him about it.