'You'll have to, if you succeed in killing yourself.'
'That's what you're supposed to prevent, isn't it? Or is this whole thing a complete waste of time?'
'It's better than killing yourself.'
Cornut shrugged. It was a logically impeccable point. The analyst wheedled. 'Won't you even stay overnight? Observation might give us the answer...'
'No.'
The analyst hesitated, shrugged, shook hands. 'All right. I guess you know that if I had my way I wouldn't be asking you. I'd commit you to Med Centre.'
'Why, of course you would,' Cornut soothed. 'But you don't have your way, do you? You've undoubtedly tried to get an order from the President's Office already, haven't you?'
The analyst had the grace to look embarrassed. 'Front office interference,' he growled, 'you'd think they'd understand that Mental Health needs a little co-operation once in a while...'
Cornut left him still muttering. As he stepped out on to the Quad the heat and noise struck him like a fist. He didn't mind, either; he was used to it.
He had recovered enough to think of the morning's escape with amusement. The feeling was wry, with a taste of worry to it, but he was able to see the funny side of it. And it was ridiculous, no doubt about it. Suicide! Miserable people committed suicide, not happy ones. Cornut was a perfectly happy man.
Even the analyst had as much as admitted that. It had been a total waste of time, making him dig and dig into his cloudy childhood recollections for some early, abscessed wound of the mind that was pouring poisons out of its secret hiding place. He didn't have any! How could he? He was Gown. His parents had been on the faculty of this very University. Before he could walk, he was given over to the creches and the playschools, run by the best-trained experts in the world, organized according to the best principles of child guidance. Every child had love and security, every child had what the greatest minds in pediatric psychology prescribed. Trauma? There simply could not be any!
Not only was it impossible on the face of it, but Cornut's whole personality showed no sign of such a thing. He enjoyed his work very much, and although he knew there was something he lacked - a secure, certain love - he also felt that in time he would have it It did not occur to him to attempt to hurry it along.
'Good morning, good morning,' he said civilly to the knots of undergraduates on the walks. He began to whistle one of Carl's mnemonic songs. The undergraduates who nodded to him smiled. Cornut was a popular professor.
He passed the Hall of Humanities, the Lit Building, Pre-Med and the Administration Tower. As he got farther from home ground, the number of students who greeted him became smaller, but they still nodded politely to the master's cloak. Overhead the shriek of distant passing aircraft filled the sky.
The great steel sweep of the Bay Bridge was behind him, but he could still hear the unending rush of cars across it and, farther and louder, the mumble of the city.
Cornut paused at the door of the studio where he was to deliver his first lecture.
He glanced across the narrow strait at the city, where people lived who did not study. There was a mystery. It was, he thought, a problem greater than the silent murderer in his own brain. But it was not a problem he would ever have to solve.
'A good teacher is a good make-up man.' That was one of Master Carl's maxims. Cornut sat down at the long table and methodically applied a daub of neutral-coloured base to each cheekbone. The camera crew began sighting in on him as he worked the cream into his skin, down from the bone and away.
'Need any help?' Cornut looked up and greeted his producer.
'No thanks.' He brought the corners of his eyebrows down a fraction of an inch.
The clock was clicking off half-seconds. Cornut pencilled in age-lines (that was the price you paid for being a full professor at thirty) and brushed on the lip colour. He leaned forward to examine himself more closely in the mirror, but the producer stopped him. 'Just a minute - Dammit, man, not so much red!'
The cameraman turned a dial; in the monitor, Cornut's image appeared a touch paler, a touch greener.
'That's better. All done, professor?'
Cornut wiped his fingers on a tissue and set the golden wig on his head. 'All done,' he said, rising just as the minute hand touched the hour of ten.
From a grill at the top of the screen that dominated the front of the studio came the sounds of his theme music, muted for the studio audience. Cornut took his place in front of the class, bowed, nodded, smiled, and kicked at the pedal of the prompter until he found his place.
The class was full. He had more than a hundred students physically present. Cornut liked a large flesh-and-blood enrolment - because he was a traditionalist, but even more because he could tell from their faces how well he was getting across. This class was one of his favourites. They responded to his mood, but without ever overdoing it. They didn't laugh too loud when he made a conventional academic joke, they didn't cough or murmur. They never distracted the attention of the huger, wider broadcast audience from himself.
Cornut looked over the class while the announcer was finishing his remarks to the broadcast watchers. He saw Egerd, looking upset and irritable about something, whispering to the girl from the faculty dining-room. What was her name? Locille. Lucky fellow, Cornut thought absently to himself, and then the Binomial Theorem entered his mind -it was never far away - and displaced everything else.
'Good morning,' he said, 'and let's get to work. Today we're going to take up the relationship of Pascal's Triangle to the Binomial Theorem.' A sting of organ music rode in under his words. Behind him, on the monitor, the symbols p+q appeared in letters of golden fire. 'I presume you all remember what the Binomial Theorem is - unless you've been cutting your classes.' Very small laugh - actually a sort of sub-aural grunt, just about what the very small jocularity deserved. 'The expansion of p plus q is, of course, its square, cube, fourth power and so on.' Behind him an invisible hand began multiplying p + q by itself in bright gold. 'P plus q squared is p-squared plus two pq plus q-squared. P plus q cubed—' The writer in gold noted the sum as he spoke: p3 + 3p2q + 3pq2 + q3
'That's simple enough, isn't it?' He paused; then, deadpan, 'Well then, how come Sticky Dick says fifteen per cent of you missed it in the last test?' A warmer giggle, punctuated with a couple of loud, embarrassed hee-haws from the back. Oh, they were a very fine class.
The letters and numbers wiped themselves from the screen and a little red-faced comic cartoon figure of a bricklayer dropped into view and began building a pyramid of bricks:
'Now, forget about the theorem for a moment - that won't be hard for some of you.' (Small giggle which he rode over.) 'Consider Pascal's Triangle. We build it just like a brick wall, only - Hold it a minute there, friend.' The cartoon bricklayer paused, and looked curiously out at the audience. 'Only we don't start from the bottom. We build it from the top down.' The cartoon bricklayer did a comic pitfall in astonishment. Then, shrugging, he got up, erased the old wall with a sweep of his trowel, hung a brick in space and began building a triangle under it.
'And we don't do it with bricks,' added Cornut. 'We do it with numbers.'
The bricklayer straightened up, kicked the wall off the screen and followed after it, pausing just at the rim of visibility to stick his tongue out at Cornut. The monitor went to a film with live models, cartwheeling into view along the banks of seats of the university's football stadium, each model carrying a placard with a number, arranging themselves in a Pascal Triangle: