That was the approved way of recording the most important documents, and it was like Master Carl to believe that the disposition of his tiny estate was of great importance. It was a tape of his image that recited the sonorous phrases: 'Being of sound and disposing mind, I devise and bequeath unto my dear friend, Master Cornut—' Cornut sat blinking at the image. It was entirely lifelike. That, of course, was the point; papers could be forged and sound tapes could be altered, but there was no artisan in the world who could quite succeed in making a change in a video tape without leaving a trace. The voice was the voice that had boomed out of a million student television sets for decades. Cornut, watching, hardly listened to the words but found himself trying to tell when it was that Carl had made the decision to leave him all his worldly goods. The cloak, he recalled vaguely, was an old one; but when was it Carl had stopped wearing it?
It didn't matter. Nothing mattered about Master Carl, not any more; the tape rattled and flapped off the reel, and the picture of Master Carl vanished from the screen.
Locille's hand touched his shoulder.
The chancellor said cheerfully, 'Well, that's it All yours. Here's the inventory.'
Cornut glanced over it rapidly. Books, more than a thousand of them, value fixed by the appraisers (they must have been working day and night!) at five hundred dollars and a bit. Clothing and personal effects - Cornut involuntarily grinned - an arbitrary value of $1. Cash on hand, a shade over a thousand dollars, including the coins in his pocket when he died. Equity in the University pension plan, $8,460; monthly salary due, calculated to the hour of death, $271; residuals accruing from future use of taped lectures, estimated, $500. Cornut winced. Carl would have been hurt by that, but it was true; there was less and less need for his old tapes, with newer professors adopting newer techniques. And there was an estimate of future royalties to be earned by his mnemonic songs, and that was unkindest of alclass="underline" $50.
Cornut did not bother to read the itemized liabilities -inheritance tax, income tax due, a few miscellaneous bills. He only noted the net balance was a shade over $8,000.
The funeral director walked silently from the back of the room and suggested, rather handsomely, 'Call it eight thousand even. Satisfactory? Then sign here, Master Cornut.'
'Here' was at the bottom of a standard mortuary agreement, with the usual fifty-fifty split between the heirs and the mortician. Cornut signed quickly, with a feeling of slight relief. He was getting off very lightly. The statutory minimum fee for a basic funeral was $2500; if the estate had been less than $5,000, he would have inherited only the balance above $2500; if it had been under $2500, he would have had to make up the difference. That was the law. More than one beneficiary, legally responsible for the funeral expenses, had regretted the generous remembering of the deceased. (In fact, there were paupers in the world who sold their wills as an instrument of revenge on occasion. For a hundred dollars' worth of liquor they would bequeath their paltry all to the drink-supplier's worst enemy, who would then, sooner or later, find himself unexpectedly saddled with an inescapable $2500 cost.)
Sergeant Rhame was waiting for them outside the Chancellor's office. 'Do you mind?' he asked politely, holding out his hand. Cornut handed over the mortuary agreement, containing the inventory of Carl's estate. The policeman studied it thoughtfully, then shook his head. 'Not much money, but he didn't need much, did he? It doesn't help explain anything.' He glanced at his watch. 'All right,' he said. 'I'll walk over with you. We're due at the inquest.'
As a tribute to the University, the state medical examiner had empanelled a dozen faculty members as his jury. Only one was from the Mathematics Department, a woman professor named Janet, but Cornut recognized several of the others, vaguely, from faculty teas and walks on the campus.
St Cyr testified, briefly and in his customary uninflected pendulum-tick, that Master Carl had shown no previous signs of insanity but had been wild and threatening indeed the night of his death.
St Cyr's housekeeper testified the same, adding that she had feared for her own life.
The bodyguard who killed Carl took the stand. Cornut felt Locille shrink in the seat behind him; he understood; he felt the same revulsion. The man did not seem much different from other men, though; he was middle-aged, husky, with a speech impediment that faintly echoed St Cyr's own. He explained that he had been on President St Cyr's payroll for nearly ten years; that he had once been a policeman and that it was not uncommon for very wealthy men to hire ex-policemen as bodyguards; and that he had never before had to kill anyone in defence of St. Cyr's life. 'But this one. He was dangerous. He was... going to kill... somebody.' He got the words out slowly, but without appearing particularly agitated.
Then there were a few others - Cornut himself, the night proctor, the student librarian, even the sex-writer, Farley, who said that Master Carl had indeed seemed upset on his one personal contact with him but, of course, the occasion had been a disturbing one; he had told him of Master Cornut's most recent suicide attempt. Cornut attempted to ignore the faces that turned towards him.
The verdict took five minutes: 'Killed in self-defence, in the course of attempting to commit murder.'
For days after that Cornut kept away from St Cyr's residence, for the sake of avoiding Carl's executioner. He had never seen the man before Carl was killed, and never wanted to see him again.
But as time passed, Carl's death dwindled in his mind; his own troubles, more and more, filled it.
As day followed day, he began to approach, then reached, finally passed the all-time record for suiciders. And he was still alive.
He was still alive because of the endless patience and watchfulness of Locille. Every night she watched him asleep, every morning she was up before him. She began to look pale, and he found her taking catnaps in the dressing-room while he was lecturing to his classes; but she did not complain. She also did not tell him, until he found the marks and guessed, that twice in one week, even with her alert beside him, he had severed his wrists, first on a letter opener, second on a broken drinking tumbler. When he chided her for not telling him, she kissed him. That was all.
He was having dreams, too, queer ones; he remembered them sharply when he woke, and for a while told them to Locille, and then stopped. They were very peculiar. They had to do with being watched, being watched by some gruff, irritated warden, or by a hostile Roman crowd waiting for his blood in the arena. They were unpleasant; and he tried to explain them to himself. It was because he was subconsciously aware of Locille watching him, he told himself; and in the next breath said, Paranoia. He did not believe it ... But what then? He considered returning to his analyst, but when he broached it to Locille she only looked paler and more strained. Some of the sudden joy had gone out of their love; and that worried Cornut; and it did not occur to him that the growing trust and solidarity between them was perhaps worth more.
But not all the joy had gone. Apart from interludes of passion, somewhat constrained by Locille's ironclad determination to stay awake until he was quite asleep, apart from the trust and closeness, there were other things. There was the interest of work shared, for as Cornut's wife Locille became more his pupil than ever before in one of his classes; together they rechecked the Wolgren, found it free of gross error, reluctantly shelved it for lack of confirming data and began a new study of prime distribution in very large numbers. They were walking back to the Math Tower one warm day, planning a new approach through analytic use of the laws of congruence, when Locille stopped and caught his arm.