And maybe they were worried. That was a saddening thought; he didn't want the immortals to worry about him. 'I understand perfectly,' he said loud. 'I hope you hear me.
I'm in your way.' He paused, not aware that he had raised a tectorial finger. 'It is,' he said, 'like this. Suppose I had terminal cancer. Suppose St Cyr and I were in a shipwreck, and there was only one lifebelt. He has a life ahead of him, I have at best a week of pain. Who gets the lifebelt?' He shook the finger. 'St Cyr does!' he thundered. 'And this is the same case. I have a mortal disease, humanity. And it's their lives or mine!'
He poured another drink and decided that the truths that had been whipped into him were too great to lose. The sheet of paper with suicide possibilities fell unheeded to the floor; humming, he wrote:
We are children and the immortals are fully grown. Like children, we need their knowledge. They lead us, they direct our universities and plan our affairs; they have the wisdom of centuries and without them we would be lost, random particles, statistical chaos. But we are dangerous children, so they must remain secret and those who guess must die...
He crumpled the piece of paper angrily. He had nearly spoiled everything! His own vanity had almost revealed the secret he was about to die to protect. He scrambled on the floor for the list of possibilities, but stopped himself, bent over, staring at the floor.
The truth was that he didn't really like any of them.
He sat up and poured a drink sadly. He couldn't rely on himself to do a good job, he said to himself. Slashing his wrists, for example. Someone might come; and what could be more embarrassing than waking up on an operating table with sutures in his veins and the whole damned thing to do over again?
He noticed that his glass was empty again, but didn't bother to refill it. He was feeling quite sufficiently alcoholic already. If it weren't for his own confounded ineptitude he could be feeling pretty good, in fact, for it was nice to know that in a very short time he would be serving the best interests of the world by dying. Very nice ... He got up and wandered to the window, beaming. Outside the mobs were still swarming, trying to get immunization at the Med Centre; poor fools; he was so much better off than they! 'Strike the Twos and strike the Threes,' he sang. 'The Sieve of-Say!'
He had an idea. How fine it was, he thought gratefully, to have the wise helping hand of an elder friend in a time like this. He didn't have to worry about how to die, or whether he'd make a mess of it. He needed only to give St Cyr and the others a chance. Just relax ... let himself get drowsy ... even more drunk, perhaps. They would do the rest.
'The Sieve of Eratosthenes,' he sang cheerfully. 'When the multiples sublime, the numbers that are left, are prime!' He stumbled over to his bed and sprawled...
After a moment he got up, angrily. He wasn't being a bit fair. If it was difficult for him to find a convenient way of dying in his room, why should he impose that difficulty on his good liege, St Cyr?
He was extremely irritated with himself over that; but, picking up the bottle, marching out into the hall, singing as he looked for a conveniently fatal spot, he gradually began to feel very good again.
Sergeant Rhames tested the barricades in front of the aborigines' enclosure and let his men go back to trying to control the mobs at Med Centre. All the time his men were working, the aborigines had been trying to talk to them in their odd pidgin, but the police were too busy. The one who spoke English at all well, Masatura-san, was in his hut; the others were almost incomprehensible. Rhame glanced at his watch and decided that he had time for a quick cup of coffee before going over to help his men with the crowd. Although, he thought, it might be kinder to leave the crowd alone to crush half its members to death. At least it would be quick. And the private information of the police department surgeon was that the inoculations were not effective ... He turned, startled, as a girl's voice called him.
It was Locille, weeping. 'Please, can you help me? Cornut's gone, and my brother's dead, and - I found this.' She held out the sheet with Cornut's carefully lettered list of suicide possibilities.
The fact that Rhame had been taken from his computer studies to help hold a mob down was evidence enough that he really belonged there; but he hesitated and was lost. Individual misery was that much more persuasive than mass panic. He began with the essentials: 'Where is he? No idea at all? No note? Any witnesses who might have seen him go? ... You didn't ask? Why— 'But he had no time to ask why she had failed to question witnesses; he knew that every moment Cornut was off by himself was very possibly the moment in which he would die.
They found the student proctor, jumpy and distracted but still somewhere near his post. And he had seen Cornut!
'He was kind of crazy, I thought. I tried to tell him something - you know Egerd, used to be in his class?' (He knew perfectly well just how well Locille had known Egerd.) 'He died this morning. I thought Master Cornut would be interested, but he didn't even hear.'
Rhame observed the expression on Locille's face, but there was no time to worry about her feeling for a dead undergraduate. 'Which way? When?'
He had gone down the corridor more than half an hour before. They followed.
Locille said miserably, 'It's a miracle he's alive at all! But if he lasted this long... and I was just a few minutes late...'
'Shut up,' the policeman said harshly, and called out to another undergraduate.
Following him was easy; he had been conspicuous by his wild behaviour, even on that day. A few yards from the faculty refectory they heard raucous singing.
'It's Cornut!' cried Locille, and raced ahead. Rhame caught her at the door of the kitchens where she had worked so many months.
He was staggering about singing in a sloppy howl one of Master Carl's favourite tunes:
Add ray to modul, close th' set To adding, subtracting—
He stumbled against a cutting table and swore good-naturedly.
Produce a new system, an' this goddam thing ... Is gen'rally termed a (hic) ring!
In one hand he had a sharp knife, filched from the meat-cutter's drawer; he waved it, marking time.
'Come on, damn it!' he cried, laughing. 'Goose me along!'
'Save him!' cried Locille, and started to run to him; but Rhame caught her arm. 'Let go of me! He might cut his throat!'
He held her, staring hard. Cornut didn't even hear them; he was singing again. Rhame said at last, 'But he isn't doing it, you see. And he's had plenty of time, by the look of the place. Suicidal? Maybe I'm wrong, Locille, but it looks to me as if he's just blind drunk.'
CHAPTER XV
Throughout the city and the world there were scenes like the one in front of Med Centre, as a populace panicked by the apparition of pestilence - vanished these centuries! - scrambled for the amulet that would guard them against it. Hardly one man in a hundred was seriously ill, but that was enough. One per cent of twelve billion is a hundred and twenty million - a hundred and twenty million cases of the most deadly, most contagious ... and least excusable... disease in medicine. For smallpox can infallibly be prevented, and only a world which had forgotten Jenner could have been taken by it unawares ... or a world in which the memory of Jenner's centuries-old prophylaxis had been systematically removed.
In the highest tower of Port Monmouth the eight major television networks shared joint transmitter-repeater facilities. Equatorially mounted wire saucers scanned the sky for the repeater satellites. As each satellite in its orbit broke free of the horizon, a saucer hunted and found it. That saucer clung to it as it traversed the sky, breaking free and commencing the search pattern for a new one as the old one dipped beneath the curve of the earth again. There were more than sixty satellites circling the earth which the repeaters could use, each one specially launched and instrumented to receive, clean, amplify and rebroadcast the networks' programmes.