Arthur Clarke - The Last Theorem

Oh, they did have other concerns. One, for example, was their project of increasing the proportion of heavy elements relative to primordial hydrogen in the galaxy’s chemical makeup. (They had a valid reason for this program, but not one that contemporary human beings would have understood.) Their other concerns were even less comprehensible to the likes of humanity. But, yes, they did consider the suppression of potentially dangerous civilizations worth doing.

Therefore the data concerning planet Earth required action. Their cease and desist order radioed to the human planet at light’s lazy stroll was still years from reaching its target. It would not be enough. Would not matter at all, in fact, because more urgent action was required. These upstart bipedal vertebrates not only possessed the technology of nuclear fission and fusion to an extent capable of creating inconveniencing weaponry, they already possessed a vast planetwide weapons industry to build on. The situation was even more annoying than the Grand Galactics had supposed, and they did not tolerate annoyance well.

They elected to terminate this particular annoyance.

When the Grand Galactics wished to convey an instruction to one of their client races, they had several delivery systems available. There was, for example, simple radio, efficient but ponderously slow. No electromagnetic signal—light, radar, that kind of thing—could go any faster than Dr. Einstein’s beloved c, which is to say an absolute maximum speed of some three hundred thousand kilometers a second. The Grand Galactics had devised some faster machines, sneaking through loopholes in relativity, but those were at most four or five times more speedy.

The Grand Galactics themselves, however—or any detachable fragment of them—being what ineffably nonbaryonic beings they were, suffered no such limitations. For reasons connected with the geometry of ten-dimensional space-time, their travel was composed of a number of laps, a to b, then b to c, then from c perhaps a straight shot to their destination. For each lap, however, transit time was always zero, whether across the diameter of a proton or from the galaxy’s core to its farthest-flung spiral arm.

So they took the inconvenient step of detaching a fragment of themselves to carry the instruction to the One Point Fives, and so the One Point Fives had their marching orders almost as soon as the Grand Galactics had decided to give them. And because the One Point Fives had anticipated what the decision would be, they were already in full marching order by the time the orders came.

The One Point Fives saw no reason to delay. Their invasion armada was quite ready to launch. They launched it.

To be sure, the One Point Fives were wholly material and thus not exempted from the speed-of-light rule. Roughly a human generation would pass before the armada could reach its destination and exterminate the undesirable species. But it was on its way.

Things were looking up for Ranjit Subramanian—well, they were, that is, if you didn’t count the fact that Gamini was still nine thousand kilometers away and Ranjit’s own father might almost as well have been. And things were hotting up again in Iraq, where muscular Christian thugs with assault rifles were guarding one end of a bridge that they didn’t want crossed by Islamists; the bridge was guarded at the other side by equally husky and well-armed Islamists who didn’t want Christians polluting their side of the river.

There were many more such things going on, but those certainly weren’t the things that were giving some provisional happiness to Ranjit.

Such things did exist, though. He was not only enjoying Astronomy 101, he was doing very well in it. The worst of his quizzes received scores in the upper eighties, the goodwill of his teacher (as measured in the compliments he gave Ranjit’s questions and discussion) scoring perhaps even higher. Of course, Dr. Vorhulst found some way to compliment nearly everyone else in the class, too. It wasn’t just that he was an indulgent or lazy teacher, Ranjit decided. More likely it was that no one would sign up for his class who wasn’t fascinated by the idea of sometime, somehow seeing human beings going off to visit some of those bizarre other worlds. When Ranjit got his third straight hundred on a quiz, it occurred to him for the first time that perhaps he might actually have the makings of the kind of student who would make his father proud.

So as an experiment he tried taking his other classes a bit more seriously. He checked his philosophy teacher’s list of extra-credit reading and picked a book that had at least an interesting title. But when he took Thomas Hobbes’s great work Leviathan home, it quickly stopped being interesting. Was Hobbes saying that the human mind was like a machine? Ranjit wasn’t sure. Nor could he make sense of, say, the distinction between meritum congrui and meritum condigni. And while he was quite confident he knew what Hobbes was saying when he praised a “Christian state” as the highest form of government, that was not a notion that appealed to the doggedly agnostic son of the head priest of a Hindu temple. Nothing in Hobbes, for that matter, seemed very relevant to the life of anybody Ranjit knew. Glumly he took the book back to the library and headed to his room, hoping for nothing but a peaceful hour’s nap.

He found two letters waiting for him. One was in a creamy-textured envelope embossed with the university’s golden seal. Most likely, Ranjit thought, a notice from the student banking people to inform him that his father had sent along another quarter’s dorm rent. But the other was from London and thus from Gamini. Ranjit ripped it open at once.

If he had hoped that hearing from Gamini would brighten this unsatisfactory day, he was disappointed once more. It didn’t. The letter was short and it did not at any point say that Gamini was missing him. What it principally talked about was attending a performance of one of Shakespeare’s less amusing comedies at something called the Barbican. For some reason, Gamini said, the director had dressed the entire cast in featureless white, so that half the time neither he nor Madge had been able to tell who was speaking.

It was, Ranjit realized as he reached for the letter on university stationery, the third, maybe the fourth, time Gamini had mentioned this Madge person. He was contemplating the possible implications of this fact while extracting a letter on the same creamy paper as the envelope, and then Gamini’s possible failing went right out of his mind. The stationery was engraved with the name of the dean of students, and the letter said:

Please present yourself at the office of the Dean at 2:00 P.M. on Tuesday next. It is alleged that during the school year just past you made unlawful use of the computer password of a faculty member. You are urged to bring with you any documents or other material that you consider relevant to this charge.

And it was signed by the dean of students.

According to her nameplate the woman at the dean’s reception desk was a Tamil, which was encouraging, but she was also as old as Ranjit’s father. Her look was cold. “You are expected,” she informed him. “You may go right into the dean’s private office.”

Never before had Ranjit had occasion to visit the dean of students. He knew what the man looked like, though—the faculty file on the university’s home page supplied photos—and the elderly man reading a newspaper at the huge mahogany desk definitely was not him. But he put down his paper and rose, not exactly with a smile but certainly without the hanging-judge look Ranjit had expected. “Come in, Mr. Subramanian,” he called. “Sit down. I’m Dr. Denzel Davoodbhoy, chairman of the mathematics department, and as mathematical matters seem to play a significant role here, the dean asked me to conduct this interview for him.”