Egerd was coming towards them.
He was tanned, but he did not look well. Part of it was for reasons Cornut had only slowly come to know; he was uncomfortable in the presence of the girl he loved and the man she had married. But there was something else. He looked sick. Locille was direct: 'What in the world's the matter with you?'
Egerd grinned. 'Don't you know about Med School? It's traditional, hazing freshmen. The usual treatment is a skin fungus that turns sweat rancid, so you stink, or a few drops of something that makes you break out in orange blotches, or - well, never mind. Some of the jokes are kind of, uh, personal.'
Locille said angrily, 'That's terrible. You don't look very funny to me, Egerd.'
Cornut said to her, after Egerd had left, 'Boys will be boys.' She looked at him swiftly. He knew his tone had been callous. He didn't know that she understood why; he thought his sudden sharp stab of jealousy had been perfectly concealed.
A little over two weeks after Master Carl's death, the proctor knocked on Cornut's door to say that he had a visitor. It was Sergeant Rhame, with a suitcase full of odds and ends. 'Master Carl's personal effects,' he explained. 'They belong to you now. Naturally, we had to borrow them for examination.'
Cornut shrugged. The stuff was of no great value. He poked through the suitcase; some shabby toilet articles, a book marked Diary - he flipped it open eagerly, but it recorded only demerits and class attendances - an envelope containing photographic film.
Sergeant Rhame said, 'That's what I wanted to ask you about. He had a lot of photographic equipment. We found several packs of film, unopened, which Master Carl had pressed against some kind of radiation-emitting paint on a paper base. The lab spent a lot of time trying to figure it out. They guessed he was trying to get the gamma radiation from the paint to register on the film, but we don't know why.'
Cornut said, 'Neither do I, but I can make a guess.' He explained about Carl's off-duty interests, and the endless laborious work that he had been willing to put into them. 'I'm not sure what his present line was, but I know it had something to do with trying to get prints of geometrical figures - stars, circles, that sort of thing. Why? Do you mean he finally succeeded in getting one?'
'Not exactly.' Sergeant Rhame opened a package and handed Cornut a glossy print. 'All the negatives were blank except one. This one. Make anything of it?'
Cornut studied it. It seemed to be a photograph of a sign, or a printer's proof. It was not very well defined, but there was no doubt what it said. He puzzled over it for a while, then shook his head.
The lettering on the print said simply:
YOU DAMN OLD FOOL
CHAPTER XII
The wind was brisk, and the stretched cables under the texas made a bull-roarer sound as they vibrated. The pneumatic generators rattled, whined and crashed. Locille's brother was too used to them to notice. He wasn't feeling very well, but it was his custom to do what his parents expected him to do, and they expected that he would watch the University broadcasts of his sister's classes. The present class was Cornut's, and Roger eyed with polite ignorance the professor's closely-reasoned exposition of Wilson's Theorem. He watched the dancing girls and the animated figures with more interest, but it was, on the whole, a disappointing show. The camera panned the studio audience only twice, and in neither case was he able to catch a glimpse of Locille.
He reported to his mother, took his last look at the flag Locille had brought him, and went to work.
As the day wore on, Roger felt worse. First it was his head pounding, then his bones aching, then an irresistible sudden nausea. Roger's job was conducive to that; he spent the whole day standing thigh deep in a smelly fluid composed of salt water, fish lymph and blood.
Ordinarily it didn't bother him (as nothing much bothered him, anyhow). Today was different. He steadied himself with one hand against a steel-topped table, shook his head violently to clear it. He had just come back from a hasty trip to the washroom, where he had vomited profusely. Now it seemed he was close to having to race out there again.
Down the table the sorter called, 'Roger! Hey! You're holding up the works.'
Roger rubbed the back of his neck and mumbled something that was not intelligible, even to himself. He got back to work because he had to; the fish were piling up.
It was the sorter's job to separate the females of the stocked Atlantic salmon run from the males. The male fish were thrust down a chute to a quick and undistinguished death. But the females, in breeding season, contained something too valuable to be wasted on the mash of entrails and bony parts that made dry fish meal. That was Roger's job - Roger's and a few dozen others who stood at tables just like his. The first step was to grasp the flopping female by the tail with one hand and club her brains out, or as nearly as possible out, with the other. The second was to hold her with both hands, exposing her belly to his partner across the table, whose long, fat knife ripped open the egg sac inside. (Quite often the knife missed. Roger's job was not sought after.) A quick wringing motion; the eggs poured one way, the gutted body slid another; and he was ready for the next fish. Sometimes the fish struggled terribly, which was unpleasant for a man with imagination; even the dullest grew to dislike the work. Roger had held the same job for four years.
'Come on, Roger!' The sorter was yelling at him again. Roger stared at him woozily. For the first time he became suddenly aware of the constant slam, bang, rattle, roar that permeated the low-level fishery plant. He opened his mouth to say something; and then he ran. He made it to the washroom, but with nothing at all to spare.
An hour later, his mother was astonished to see him home. 'What happened?'
He tried to explain everything that had happened, but it involved some complicated words. He settled for 'I didn't feel good.'
She was worried. Roger was always healthy. He didn't look good, ever, but that was because the part of his brain that was damaged had something to do with his muscle tone; in fact, he had been sick hardly a week's total in his life. She said doubtfully, 'Your father will be home in an hour or so, but maybe I ought to call him. I wonder. What do you think, Roger?'
That was rhetoric; she had long since reconciled herself to the fact that her son did not think. He stumbled and straightened up, scowling. The back of his neck was beginning to pain badly. He was in no mood to contemplate hard questions. What he wanted was to go to bed, with Locille's flag by his pillow, so that he could fondle it drowsily before he slept. That was what he liked. He told his mother as much.
She was seriously concerned now. 'You are sick. I'd better call the clinic. You lie down.'
'No. No, you don't have to. They called over at the place.'
He swallowed with some pain; he was beginning to shiver. 'Mr Garney took me to the dia - the dia—'
'The diagnosticon at the clinic, Roger!'
'Yes, and I got some pills.' He reached in his pocket and held up a little box. 'I already took one and I have to take some more later.'
His mother was not satisfied, but she was no longer very worried; the diagnostic equipment did not often fail. 'It's that cold water you stand in,' she mourned, helping him to his room. 'I've told you, Roger. You ought to have a better job. Slicer, maybe even sorter. Or maybe you can get out of that part of it altogether. You've worked there four years now...'
'Good night,' Roger said inappropriately - it was early afternoon. He began to get ready for bed, feeling a little better, at least psychologically, in the familiar, comfortable room with his familiar, comfortable bed and the little old Japanese flag wadded up by the pillow. 'I'm going to sleep now,' he told her, and got rid of her at last.