CHAPTER I
This man's name is Cornut, born in the year 2166 and now thirty. He is a teacher.
Mathematics is his discipline. Number Theory is his speciality. He instructs the Mnemonics of Number, a study which absorbs all his creative thought. But he also thinks about girls a lot; in a detached, remote sort of way.
He is unmarried. He sleeps alone and that is not so good.
If you wander around his small bedroom (it has lilac walls and a cream ceiling, those are the Math Tower colours), you will hear a whispering and a faint whirring sound. These are not the sounds of Cornut's breath, although he is Sleeping peacefully. The whispering is a hardly audible wheep, wheep from an electric clock. (It was knocked to the floor once. A gear is slightly off axis; it rubs against a rivet.) The whir is another clock. If you look more carefully you will find that there are more clocks.
There are five clocks in this room, all told. They all have alarms, set to ring at the same moment.
Cornut is a good-looking man, even if he is a little pale. If you are a woman (say, one of the girls in his classes), you would like to get him out in the sun. You would like to fatten him up and make him laugh more. He is not aware that he needs sunshine or fattening, but he is very much aware that he needs something.
He knows something is wrong. He has known this for seven weeks, on the best evidence of all.
The five clocks march briskly towards seven-fifteen, the time at which they are set to go off. Cornut has spent a lot of time arranging it so that they will sound at the same moment. He set the alarm dial on each, checked it by revolving the hands of the clocks themselves to make note of the exact second at which the trigger went off, painfully reset and re-checked. They are now guaranteed to ring, clang or buzz within a quarter-minute of each other.
However, one of them has a bad habit. It is the one that Cornut dropped once. It makes a faint click a few moments before the alarm mechanism itself rings.
It clicks now.
The sound is not very loud, but Cornut stirs. His eyes flicker. They close again, but he is not quite asleep.
After a moment he pushes back the covers and sits up. His eyes are still almost closed.
Suppose you are a picture on his wall - perhaps the portrait of Leibniz, taken from Ficquet's old engraving. Out of the eyes under your great curled wig you see this young man stand up and walk slowly towards his window.
His room is eighteen stories up.
If a picture on the wall can remember, you remember that this is not the first time. If a picture on the wall can know things, you know that he has tried to leap out of that window before, and he is about to try again.
He is trying to kill himself. He has tried nine times in the past fifty days.
If a picture on a wall can regret, you regret this. It is a terrible waste for this man to keep trying to kill himself, since he does not at all want to die.
CHAPTER II
Cornut was uncomfortable in his sleep. He felt drowsily that he had worked himself into an awkward position, and besides, someone was calling his name. He mumbled, grimaced, opened his eyes.
He was looking straight down, nearly two hundred feet.
At once he was fully awake. He teetered dangerously, but someone behind him had caught him by an arm, someone who was shouting at him. Whoever it was, he pulled Cornut roughly back into the room.
At that moment the five alarm clocks burst into sound, like a well-drilled chorus; a beat later the phone by his bed rang; the room lights sprang into life, controlled by their automatic timer; one reading lamp turned and fitted with a new, brighter tube so that it became a spotlight aimed at the pillow where Cornut's head should have been. 'Are you all right?'
The question had been repeated several times, Cornut realized. He said furiously, 'Of course I'm all right!' It had been very close; his veins were suddenly full of adrenalin, and as there was nothing else for it to do, it charged him with anger... 'I'm sorry. Thanks, Egerd.'
The undergraduate let go. He was nineteen years old, with crew-cut red hair and a face that was normally deeply tanned, now almost white. 'That's all right.' He cautiously backed to the phone, still watching the professor. 'Hello. Yes, he's awake now. Thanks for calling.'
'They were almost too late,' said Cornut. Egerd shrugged.
'I'd better get back, sir. I'll have to— Oh, good morning, Master Carl.'
The house-master was standing in the doorway, a gaggle of undergraduates clustered behind him like young geese, staring in to see what all the commotion was. Master Carl was tall, black-haired, with eyes like star sapphires. He stood holding a wet photographic negative that dripped gently on to the rubber tiles. 'What the devil is going on here?' he demanded.
Cornut opened his mouth to answer, and then realized how utterly impossible it was for him to answer that question. He didn't know! The terrible thing about the last fifty days was just that. He didn't know what, he didn't know why, all he knew was that this was the ninth time he had very nearly taken his own life. 'Answer Master Carl, Egerd,' he said.
The undergraduate jumped. Carl was the central figure in his life; every student's hope of passing, of graduating, of avoiding the military draft or forced labour in the Assigned Camps lay in his house-master's whim. Egerd said, stammering, 'Sir, I-I have been on extra duty for Master Cornut. He asked me to come in each morning five minutes before wake-up time and observe him, because he— That is, that's what he asked me to do. This morning I was a little late.'
Carl said coldly, 'You were late?'
'Yes, sir. I—'
'And you came into the corridor without shaving?'
The undergraduate was struck dumb. The cluster of students behind Carl briskly dissolved. Egerd started to speak, but Cornut cut in. He sat down shakily on the edge of his bed. 'Leave the boy alone, will you, Carl? If he had taken time to shave I'd be dead.'
Master Carl rapped out, 'Very well. You may go to your room, Egerd. Cornut, I want to know what this is all about. I intend to get a full explanation ...' He paused, as though remembering something. He glanced down at the wet negative in his hand.
'As soon as we've had breakfast,' he said grimly, and stalked majestically back to his own rooms.
Cornut dressed heavily, and began to shave. He had aged a full year every day of the past seven weeks; on that basis, he calculated, he was already pushing eighty and a full decade older than Master Carl himself.
Seven weeks. Nine attempts at suicide.
And no explanation.
He didn't look like a man who had just sleepwalked himself to the narrow edge of suicide. He was young for a professor and built like an athlete, which was according to the facts; he had been captain of the fencing team as an undergraduate, and was its faculty advisor still. His face looked like the face of a husky, healthy youth who for some reason had been cutting himself short on sleep, and that was also according to the facts. His expression was that of a man deeply embarrassed by some incredibly inexcusable act he has just committed. And that fitted the facts too.
Cornut was embarrassed. His foolishness would be all over the campus by now; undoubtedly there had been whispers before, but this morning's episode had had many witnesses and the whispers would be quite loud. As the campus was Cornut's whole life, that meant that every living human being whose opinion counted with him at all would soon be aware that he was fecklessly trying to commit suicide - for no reason - and not even succeeding!
He dried his face and got ready to leave his room - which meant facing them, but there was no way out of that. A bundle of letters and memoranda were in the mail hopper by his desk. He paused to look at them: nothing important. He glanced at his notes, which someone had been straightening. Probably Egerd. His scrawled figures on the Wolgren anomalies were neatly stacked on top of the schema for this morning's lectures; in the centre of the desk, with a paperweight on top of it, was the red-bordered letter from the President's Office, inviting him to go on the Field Expedition. He reminded himself to ask Carl to get him off that. He had too much to do to waste time on purely social trips. The Wolgren study alone would keep him busy for weeks, and Carl was always pressing him to publish. But that was premature. Three months from now... maybe ... if Computer Section allocated enough time, and if the anomalies didn't disappear in someone's ancient error in simple addition.