Three million viewers gasped. Half the studio class was boiling towards him, Egerd and the girl ahead of the rest. 'Easy, sir! Here, let me—' That was Egerd, with a tissue, pressing it against the wound. 'You'll be all right, sir! It's only - But it was close!'
Close ... He had all but cut his jugular vein in two, right in front of his class and the watching world. The murderer inside his head was getting very strong and sure, to brave the light of day.
CHAPTER IV
Cornut was literally a marked man now. He had a neat white sterile bandage on his throat, and the medics had cheerfully assured him that when the bandage was gone there would be a handsome scar. They demanded that he stay around for a complete psycho-medical checkup. He said, no. They said, Would you rather be dead? He said he wasn't going to die. They said, How can you be sure? But, as it turned out, the clinic was not going to be free for that sort of thing for a couple of hours, and he fought his way free. He was extremely angry at the medics for annoying him, at himself for being such a fool, at Egerd for staunching the flow of his blood, at Locille for seeing it... his patience was exhausted with the world.
Cornut strode like a blinkered cart-horse to the Math Tower gym, looking neither to left nor right, though he knew what he would see. Eyes. The eyes of everyone on the campus, looking at him and whispering. He found an undergraduate who was reasonably willing to mind his own business (the boy only looked slightly doubtful when Cornut chose his epee, but one glimpse of Cornut's face made his own turn into opaque stone), and they two fenced for a furious half-hour. The medics had told Cornut to be sure to rest. Winded and muscles aching, he returned to his room to do so.
He spent a long, thoughtful afternoon lying on his bed and looking at the ceiling, but nothing came of it The whole thing was simply too irritating to be borne.
Medics or not, at a quarter to five he put on a clean shirt to keep his appointment at the faculty tea.
The tea was a sort of official send-off to the University's Field Expedition. Attendance was compulsory, especially for those who, like Cornut, were supposed to make the trip; but that was not why he was there. He considered it to be his last good chance to get off the list.
There were three hundred persons in the huge, vaulted room. The University conspicuously consumed space; it was a tradition, like the marginal pencillings in all the books in the library. Every one of the three hundred glanced once quickly at Cornut as he came in, then away - some with a muffled laugh, gome with sympathy, the worst with an unnatural lack of any expression at all. So much for the grapevine. Damn them, Cornut thought bitterly, you'd think no professor ever tried to commit suicide before. He couldn't help overhearing some of the whispers.
'And that's the seventh time. It's because he's desperate to be department head and old Carl won't step down.'
'Esmeralda! You know you're making that up!'
His face flaming, Cornut walked briskly past the little knot. It was like a fakir's bed of coals; every step seemed to crisp him. But there were other things to gossip about at the tea, and some of the captured fragments of talk did not concern him at all.
'—want us to get along with a fourteen-year-old trevatron. You know what the China's have? Six brand-new ones. And coin silver for the windings!'
'Yes, but there's two billion of them. Per capita we stack up pretty—'
Cornut halted in the middle of the drinking, eating, talking, surging mass and looked about for Master Carl. He caught sight of him. The department head was paying his respects to a queer-looking, ancient figure - St Cyr, the President of the University. Cornut was startled. St Cyr was an old man and by his appearance a sick one; it was rare to see him at a faculty tea. Still, this one was special - and anyway, that could make it a lot easier to get off the list.
Cornut pushed his way towards them, past a stocky drunk from humanities who was whispering ribaldly to a patient student waitress, and threaded his way through a group of anatomists from the med school.
'Notice what decent cadavers we've been getting lately? It hasn't been this good since the last shooting war. Of course, they're not much good except for geriatrics, but that's selective euthanasia for you.'
'Will you watch what you're doing with that Martini?'
Cornut made his way slowly towards Master Carl and President St Cyr. The closer he got, the easier it was to move. There were fewer people at St Cyr's end of the room; he was the central figure of the gathering, but the guests did not cluster around him; that's the kind of a man he was.
The kind of a man St Cyr was was this: He was the ugliest man in the room.
There were others who were in no way handsome - old, or fat, or sick. St Cyr was something special. His face was an artifact of ugliness. Deep old scars made a net across his face like the flimsy cloth that holds a cheese. Surgery? No one knew. He had always had them. And his skin was a cyanotic blue.
Master Greenlease (physical chem) and Master Wahl (anthropology) were there, Wahl because he was too drunk to care who he spoke to, no doubt; Greenlease because Carl had him by the elbow and would not let him go. St Cyr nodded four times at Cornut, like a pendulum. 'Nice wea-ther,' he said, tolling it like a clock.
'Yes, it is, sir. Excuse me. Carl—'
St Cyr lifted the hand that hung by his side and laid it limply in Cornut's hand - it was his version of a handshake. He opened his seamed mouth and gave the series of unvoiced glottal stops that were his version of a chuckle. 'It will be heav-y weath-er for Mas-ter Wahl,' he said, spacing out the syllables like an articulate metronome. It was his version of a joke.
Cornut gave him a waxen smile and a small waxen laugh. The reference was to the fact that Wahl, too, was scheduled to go on the Field Expedition. Cornut didn't think that was funny - not as far as he himself was concerned, anyway -not when he had so many other things on his mind.
'Carl,' he said, 'excuse me.' But Master Carl had other things on his mind; he was badgering Greenlease for information about molecular structure, heaven knew why. And also St Cyr had not released his hand.
Cornut grumbled internally and waited. Wahl was giggling over some involved faculty joke to which St Cyr was listening like a judge. Cornut spared himself the annoyance of listening to it and thought about St Cyr. Queer old duck, of course. That was where you started. You could account for some of the queerness by, say, a bad heart. That would be the reason for the blueness. But what would be the reason for not having it operated on?
And then, what about the other things? The deadpan expression. The lifeless voice, with its firmly pronounced terminal 'ings' and words without a stress syllable anywhere? St Cyr talked like a clockwork man. Or a deaf one?
But again, what would be the reason for a man allowing himself to be deaf?
Especially a man who owned a University, including an 800-bed teaching hospital.
Wahl at last noticed that Cornut was present and punched his shoulder - cordially, Cornut decided, after thought. 'Committed any good suicides lately, boy?' He hiccoughed. 'Don't blame you. Your fault, President, you know, dragging him off to Tahiti with us. He doesn't like Tahiti.'
Cornut said, with control, 'The Field Expedition isn't going to Tahiti.'
Wahl shrugged. 'The way us anthropologists look at it, one gook island is like another gook island.' He even made a joke of his specialty! Cornut was appalled.
On the other hand, St Cyr seemed neither to notice nor to mind. He flopped his hand free of Cornut's and rested it casually on Wahl's weaving shoulder. The other hand held the full highball glass which, Cornut had observed, always remained full. St Cyr did not drink or smoke (not even tobacco), nor had Cornut ever seen him give a second look to a pretty girl. 'Lis-ten,' he said in his slow-march voice, turning Wahl to face Carl and the chemist. 'This is in-ter-est-ing.'