Drunkard's Walk

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.