He huddled under the warming covers - set as high as the rheostat would go, but still not high enough to warm his shaking body. The pain in his head was almost blinding now.
At the clinic, Mr Garney had been painfully careful to explain what the pills were for. They would take away the pain, stop the throbbing, make him comfortable, let him sleep. Feverishly Roger took another one out of the box and swallowed it.
It worked, of course. The clinic's pills always performed as advertised. The pain dwindled to a bearable ache, then to a memory; the throbbing stopped; he began to fall asleep.
Roger felt drowsily peaceful. He could not see his face, and therefore did not know how flushed it was becoming; he had no idea that his temperature was climbing rapidly. He went quite happily to sleep ... with the old, frayed flag against his cheek ... just as he had done for nearly three weeks now, and as he would never in this life do again.
The reason Roger hadn't seen his sister in the audience was that she wasn't there; she was waiting in Cornut's little dressing-room. Cornut suggested it. 'You need the rest,' he said solicitously, and promised to review the lesson with her later.
Actually he had another motive entirely. As soon as he was off the air, he wrote a note for Locille and gave it to a student to deliver:
There's something I have to do. I'll be gone for a couple of hours. I promise I'll be all right. Don't worry.
Before the note reached her, Cornut was at the bridge, in the elevator, on his way to the city.
He did have something to do, and he did not want to talk to Locille about it. The odd dreams had been worsening, and there had been other things. He nearly always had a hangover now, for instance. He had found that a few drinks at night made him sleep better and he had come to rely on them.
And there was something else, about which he could not talk to Locille at all because she would not talk.
The monotrack took him out far downtown, in a bright noisy, stuffy underground station. He paused at a phone booth to check the address of the sex-writer, Farley, and hurried up to street level, anxious to get away from the smell and noise. That was a mistake. In the open the noise pounded more furiously, the air was even more foul. Great cubical blocks of buildings rose over him; small three-wheeled cars and large commercial vehicles pounded on two levels around him. It was only a minute's walk to Farley's office, but the minute was an ordeal.
The sign on the door was the same as the lettering on his folder:
S. R. Farley, Consultant
The sex-writer's secretary looked very doubtful, but finally reported that Mr Farley would be able to see Master Cornut, even without an appointment. Cornut sat across the desk, refused a cigarette and said directly, 'I've studied the sample scripts you left for us, Farley. They're interesting, though I don't believe I'll require your services in future. J think I've grasped the notation, and I note that there is one page of constants which seems to describe the personality traits of my wife and myself.'
'Oh, yes. Very important,' said Farley. 'Yours is incomplete, of course, as I had no real opportunity to interview you, but I secured your personnel-file data, the profile from the Med Centre and so on.'
'Good Now I have a question to ask you.'
Cornut hesitated. The proper way to ask the question was to say: I suspect, from a hazy, sleepy recollection, that the other morning I made a rather odd suggestion to my wife. That was the proper way, but it was embarrassing; and it also involved a probability of having to explain how many rather odd things he had done, some of them nearly fatal, in those half-waking moments ... 'Let me borrow a piece of paper,' he said instead, and rapidly sketched in a line of symbols. Stating the problem in terms of 
and 
made it vastly less embarrassing; he shoved it across the desk to the sex-writer. 'What would you say to this? Does it fit in with your profile of our personalities?'
Farley studied the line and raised his eyebrows. 'Absolutely not,' he said promptly. 'You wouldn't think of it; she wouldn't accept it.'
'You could say it was an objectionable thing?'
'Master Cornut! Don't use moralistic terms! A couple's sex life is entirely a private matter! what is customary and moral in one place is—'
'Please, Mr Farley. In terms of our own morals-you have them sketched out on the profile - this would be objectionable?'
The sex-writer laughed. 'More than that, Master Cornut. It would be absolutely impossible. I know my data weren't complete, but this sort of thing is out of the question.'
Cornut took a deep breath. 'But suppose,' he said after a moment, 'I told you that I had proposed this to my wife.'
Farley drummed his fingers on the desk. 'I can only say that other factors are involved,' he said. 'Like what?'
Farley said seriously, 'You must be trying to drive her away from you.'
In the two blocks between Farley's office and the mono-track station entrance, Cornut saw three men killed; a turbo-truck on the upper traffic level seemed to stagger, grazed another vehicle and shot through the guard rail, killing its driver and two pedestrians.
It was a shocking interpolation of violence into Cornut's academic life, but it seemed quite in keeping with the rest of his day. His own life was rapidly going as badly out of control as the truck.
You must be trying to drive her away from you.
Cornut boarded his train, hardly noticing, thinking hard. He didn't want to drive Locille away!
But he also did not want to kill himself, and yet there was no doubt that he had kept trying. It was all part of a pattern, there could be no doubt of its sum: He was trying to destroy himself in every way. Failing to end his life, that destroyer inside himself was trying to end the part of his life that had suddenly grown to mean most to him, his love for Locille. And yet it was the same thing really, he thought, for with Locille gone, Carl dead, Egerd transferred, he would have no one close to him to help him through the dangerous half-awake moments that came at least twice in every twenty-four hours.
He would not last a day.
He slumped back into his seat, with the first sensation of despair he had ever felt. One part of his mind said judgmentally: It's too bad.
Another part entirely was taking in his surroundings; even in his depression, the novelty of being among so many non-University men and women made an impression. They seemed so tired and angry, he thought abstractedly; one or two even looked sick. He wondered if any of them had ever known the helplessness of being under siege from the most insidious enemy of all, himself.
But suppose Master Carl was right after all, said Cornut to himself, quite unexpectedly.
The thought startled him. It came through without preamble, and if there had been a train of rumination that caused it, he had forgotten its existence. Right? Right about what?
The P.A. system murmured that the next stop was his. Cornut got up absently, thinking. Right?
He had doubted that Master Carl had really tried to kill St Cyr. But the evidence was against him; the police lab had verified his fingerprints on the axe, and they could not have been deceived.
So suppose Carl really had picked up the weapon to split the old man's skull. Incredible! But if he had ... And if Carl had not merely gone into an aberrated senile rage ...
Why then, said Cornut to himself, emerging from the elevator at the base of the Bridge pier and blinking at the familiar campus, why then perhaps he had a reason. Perhaps St Cyr needed killing.
CHAPTER XIII