'Trouble!' Master Carl seemed quite gay. Cornut realized that it had finally occurred to the house-master that this trip was a sort of vacation; he was practising for a holiday mood. 'Why should there be any trouble? You have a good reason for being tardy. I, too, have a good reason for waiting for you. After all, the President urged me to bring the Wolgren analysis along. He's quite interested, you know. And as I did not see it in your room, I suppose it is in your bags; therefore I will wait for your bags.'
Cornut protested, 'But it isn't anywhere near finished!'
Carl actually winked. 'Now, do you suppose he'll know the difference? Be flattered that he is interested enough to pretend to look at it!'
Cornut said grudgingly, 'Well, all right. How the devil did he hear about it in the first place?'
'I told him, of course. I - I've had occasion to discuss you with him a good deal, these past few days.' Carl's expression lost some of its glow. 'Cornut,' he said severely, 'we can't let this go on, can we? You must regularize your life. Take a woman.'
Cornut exploded, 'Master Carl! You have no right to interfere in my personal affairs!'
'Trust me, boy,' the old man wheedled. 'This thing with Egerd is only a makeshift. A thirty-day marriage would surely see you through the worst of it, wouldn't it?'
Three weeks, thought Cornut, diverted.
'And, truly, you need a wife. It is bad for a man to go through life alone,' he explained.
Cornut snapped, 'How about you?'
'I'm older. You're young. How long is it since you've had a wife.'
Cornut was obstinately silent.
'You see? There are many lovely young girls in the University. They would be proud. Any of them.'
Cornut did not want his mind to roam the corridors that had just been opened for it, but it did.
'Besides, you will have her with you at all the dangerous times. You won't need Egerd.'
Cornut's mind ran back quickly and began to trace a more familiar, less attractive maze. 'I'll think about it,' he said at last, just as the medic came in with his report, a couple of boxes of pills and a sheaf of papers. The report was negative, all down the line. The pills? They were just in case, said the medic; they couldn't hurt, they might help.
And the sheaf of papers ... The top one said: Confidential. Tentative. Studies of Suicidal Tendencies in Faculty Members.
Cornut covered it with his hand, interrupted the medic as he was about to explain the delay in getting the dossiers for him and cried, 'Let's get a move on, Carl! We can still make that plane.'
But, as it turned out, they couldn't.
As fast as the scooter would go, they got to the aircraft park just in time to see the first section of the Field Expedition lift itself off the ground with a great whistling roar on its VTO jets.
Much to Cornut's surprise, Master Carl was not upset. 'Oh, well,' he said, 'we had our reasons. It isn't as though we were arbitrarily late. And anyway—' he allowed himself another wink, the second in a quarter of an hour - 'this gives us a chance to ride in the President's private plane, eh? Real living for us of the underprivileged class!' He even opened his mouth to chuckle, but he didn't do it, or if he did the sound was not heard. Overhead there was a gruff giant's cough and a bright spray of flame. They looked up. Flame, flame all over the heavens, falling in great white droplets to the earth.
'My God,' said Cornut softly, 'and that was our plane.'
CHAPTER V
'Nothing loath,' said Master Carl thoughtfully, 'I kissed your concubine.' He squinted out of the window of the jet, savouring the sentence. It was good. Yes. But was it perfect?
A towering cumulo-nimbus, far below, caught his attention and distracted him. He sighed. He didn't feel like working. Apparently everyone else in the jet was asleep. Or pretending to be. Only St Cyr, way up in front, propped on pneumatic pillows in the semi-circular lounge, looked as much awake as he ever did. But it was better not to talk to St Cyr. Carl was aware that most conversations involving himself turned, sooner or later, to either his private researches or to Number Theory. As he knew more about either than anyone else alive, they wound up as lectures. That was no good with St Cyr. He had made it clear long ago that he was not interested in being instructed by the instructors he hired. Also he was in a bad mood.
It was odd, thought Master Carl, less in resentment than in a spirit of scientific inquiry, but St Cyr had been quite furious with Cornut and himself for no good reason. It could not have been for missing the first plane - if they'd caught it, they would have died, just like its crew and the four graduate students it carried. But St Cyr had been furious, the tick-tock voice hoarse and breathless, the hairless eyebrows almost scowling. Master Carl took his eyes away from the window and abandoned the question of St Cyr. Let him sulk. Carl didn't like problems that had no solution. Nothing loath, I kissed your concubine. But mightn't it be better to stick to song-writing?
He became conscious of a beery breath on the back of his neck.
'I'm glad you're awake, Wahl,' he said, turning, his face inches away from the hung-over face of the anthropologist. 'Let me have your opinion, please. Which is easier to remember: "Nothing loath, I kissed your concubine." Or, "Last digit? O, a potential square!"'
Wahl shuddered. 'For God's sake. I just woke up.'
'Why, I don't think that matters. It might help. The whole idea is to present the mnemonic in a form that is available under any conditions - including,' he said delicately, 'a digestive upset.' He rotated his chair to face Wahl, flipping through his notebook to display a scribbled page. 'Can you read that? The idea, you see, is to provide a handy recognition feature for quick factoring of aliquot numbers. Now, you know, of course, that all squares can end in only one of six digits. No square can end in two, three, seven or eight. So my first idea - I'm still not sure that I wasn't on the right track - was to use, "No, quantity not squared." You see the utility, I'm sure. Two letters in the first word, "no." Eight letters in "quantity," three in "not" and seven in "squared." It's easy to remember, I think, and it's self-defining. I consider that a major advantage.' 'Oh, it is,' said Wahl.
'But,' Carl went on, 'it's negative. Also there is the chance that "no" can be misread for "nought" or "nothing" -meaning zero. So I tried the reverse approach. A square can end in zero, one, four, five, six or nine. Letting the ejaculative "O" stand for "zero," I then wrote: "Last digit? O, a potential square." Four, five, zero, one, nine and six - you see that. Excuse me. I'm so used to lecturing to undergraduates that sometimes I tend to over explain. But, although that has a lot to recommend it, it doesn't have - well - yumph.' He smiled with a touch of embarrassment. 'So, just on an inspiration, I came up with "Nothing loath, I kissed your concubine." Rather mnemonic, at least?'
'It's all of that, Carl,' agreed Wahl, rubbing his temples. 'Say, where's Cornut?'
'You realize that the "nothing," again, is "zero."'
'Oh, there he is. Hey, Cornut!'
'Be quiet! Let the boy sleep!' Carl was jolted out of his concentration. He leaned forward to see into the wing-backed seat ahead of him and was gratified to see that Cornut was still snoring faintly.
Wahl burst into a laugh, stopped abruptly with a look of surprise and clutched his head. After a moment he said, 'You take care of him like he was your baby.'
'There is no need to take that sort of—'
'Some baby! I've heard of accident-prones, but this one's fantastic. Not even Joe Btfsk wrecks planes that he ought to be in but isn't!'
Master Carl bit back his instinctive rejoinder, paused to regain his temper and pondered an appropriate remark. He was saved the trouble. The jet lurched slightly and the distant thunderheads began to wheel towards the horizon. It wasn't the clouds, of course. It was the jet swinging in for a landing, vectored by unseen radar. It was only a very small motion, but it sent Wahl lurching frantically to the washroom and it woke Master Cornut. Carl leaped up as soon as he saw the younger man move, standing over him until his eyes were open. 'Are you all right?' he demanded at once.