Drunkard's Walk

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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.

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