Cornut blinked, yawned and stretched his muscles.
'—I guess so. Yes.'
'We're about to land.' There was relief in Carl's voice. He had not expected anything to happen. Why should it? But there had been the chance that something might... 'I can get you a cup of coffee from the galley.'
'All right - no. Never mind. We'll be down in a minute.'
Below them the island was slipping back and forth slantwise, like a falling leaf - a leaf that was falling upwards, at least in their eyes, because it was growing enormously fast. Wahl came out of the washroom and stared at the houses.
'Dirty hovels,' he growled. It was raining beneath their plane - no, around them - no, over. They were through the patchy cloud layer, and the 'hovels' Wahl had glimpsed were clear beneath. Out of the patches of clouds rain was falling.
'Cum-u-lus of or-o-graph-ic or-i-gin,' said St Cyr's un-inflected voice, next to Master Carl's ear. 'There is al-ways cloud at the is-land. I hope the storm does not dis-turb you.'
Master Wahl said, 'It disturbs me.'
They landed, the jet's wheels screaming thinly as they touched the wet concrete runway. A short, dark man with an umbrella ran out and, holding it protectively over St Cyr's head, escorted them to the administration building, though the rain had nearly stopped.
It was evident that St Cyr's reputation and standing were working for them. The whole party was passed through customs under seal; the brown-skinned inspectors didn't even touch the bags. One of them prowled briefly around the stack of the Field Expedition's luggage, carrying a portable voice-taper. 'Research instruments,' he chanted, singsong, and the machine clacked out its entry. 'Research instruments ... Research instruments.'
Master Carl interrupted, 'That's my personal bag! There aren't any research instruments in it.'
'Excuse,' said the inspector politely; but he went right on with calling every bag 'research instruments'; the only concession he made to Carl's correction was to lower his voice.
It was, to Master Carl, an offensive performance, and he had it in his mind to speak to someone in authority about it, too. Research instruments! They had nothing resembling a research instrument to their names, unless you counted the collection of handcuffs Master Wahl had brought along, just in case the aboriginals were obstinate about coming along. He thought of bringing it up to St Cyr, but the President was talking to Cornut. Carl didn't want to interrupt. He had no objection to interrupting Cornut, of course, but interrupting the President of the University was something else again.
Wahl said, 'What's that over there? Looks like a bar, doesn't it? How about a drink?'
Carl shook his head frostily and stomped out into the street. He was not enjoying his trip, and it was a pity, he thought, because he realized that he had been rather looking forward to it. One needed a change of scene from the Halls of Academe every once in a while. Otherwise one tended to become stuffy and provincial, to lose contact with the mass of humanity outside the University walls. For that reason Carl had made it a practice, through the thirty-odd years since he began to teach, at least once in every year to accept or invent some task that would bring him in contact with the non-academic world ... They had all been quite as distasteful as this one, but since Master Carl had never realized this before it hadn't mattered.
He stood in a doorway, out of the fresh hot sun, looking down a broad street. The 'filthy hovels' were not filthy at all; it was only Wahl's bad temper that had said that, not his reason. Why, they were quite clean, Master Carl marvelled. Not attractive. And not large. But they did have a quaint and not too repulsive appearance. They were clumsy prefabs of some sort of pressed fibre, plastic bonded - a local product most likely, Master Carl diagnosed; pulp from palm trees had gone into the making of them.
A readable helipopper whirred, dipped, settled in the street before him, folded its vanes and rolled up to the entrance of the building where Carl was standing. The driver jumped out, ran around the side of the craft and opened the door.
Now, that was odd.
The driver acted as though the Empress Catherine was about to set foot on the soil she ruled, and yet what came out of the popper was no great lady but what seemed, at least at first glance, like a fourteen-year-old blonde. Carl pursed his thin lips and squinted into the bright sun. Curious, he marvelled, the creature was waving at him!
The creature said, in a brassy voice of no fourteen-year-old, 'You're Carl. Come on, get in. I've been waiting for you people for an hour and a half, and I've got to get clear back to Rio de Janeiro tonight. And hurry up that old goat St Cyr, will you?'
To Carl's surprise, St Cyr didn't strike the child dead.
He came out and greeted her as affably as his corpse's voice could be made to sound, and he sat beside her in the front seat of the popper in the wordless association of old friends. But it wasn't the only surprising thing. Looking a little more closely at the 'girl' was a kind of surprise too, because a girl she was not. She was a painted grandmother with a face-lift, Bermuda shorts and a blonde bob! Why couldn't the woman grow old gracefully, like St Cyr, or for that matter like Master Carl himself?
All the same, if St Cyr knew her she couldn't be all bad, and anyway Carl had something else bothering him. Cornut was missing.
The helipopper was already on the bounce. Carl stood up. 'Wait! We're missing someone.' No one was listening. The grandmother in shorts was chattering away in St Cyr's ear, her voice queer and muffled under the sound of the sequenced rockets that whirled the vanes. 'President St Cyr! Please have this pilot turn back.' But St Cyr didn't even turn his head.
Master Carl was worried. He pressed his face to the window, looking back towards the native town, but already it was too far to see anything.
Of course, he told himself, there was no danger. There were no hostile natives anywhere in the world. Lightning would not strike. Cornut was as safe as if he were in his own bed.
—Exactly as safe, his own mind assured him sternly, but no safer.
But the fact of the matter was that Cornut was drinking a glass of beer at a dusty sidewalk table. For the first time in -was it for ever? - his mind was at rest.
He was not thinking of the anomalies a statistical census had discovered in Wolgren's Distributive Law. He was not thinking of Master Carl's suggestion about term marriage, or even about the annoying interruption that this expedition represented. It did not seem quite as much of an annoyance, now that he was here. It was so quiet. It was like the fragrance of a new flower. He tested it experimentally with his ears and decided that, though odd, it was pleasant. A few hundred yards away some aircraft chugged into the sky, destroying the quiet, but the odd thing was that the quiet returned.
Cornut now had the chance he had been looking for since leaving the clinic, the night before and ten thousand miles away. He ordered another beer from the sallow waitress and reached into his pocket for a sheaf of reports that medic had handed him.
There were more of them than he had expected.
How many cases had the analyst said had occurred at their own University? Fifteen or so. But here were more than a hundred case histories. He scanned the summaries quickly and discovered that the problem extended beyond the University - cases from other schools, cases from outside university circles entirely. There seemed to have been a rash of them among Government employees. There was a concentration of twelve on the staff of a single television network.