Arthur Clarke - The Last Theorem

He gestured at the Somalian. Evidently the man understood enough of what was going on, because he patted a wide-bladed kind of knife that he carried thrust into his belt.

“Have you got all that?” Kanakaratnam asked. “No noise, don’t try to leave, you stay here until somebody tells you it’s all right to leave. So don’t make trouble and you’ll turn out to have an interesting trip—after we take over the ship.”

It was a little longer than Kanakaratnam had suggested before Ranjit was freed. It took long enough, anyway, for him to be fed several times—quite well, actually, because the kitchen was after all on a cruise ship. At least twice Ranjit fell restlessly asleep on the hard cot that stood against the wall. The Somalian left him alone several times, but not without locking the door behind him. Ranjit thought it over carefully before taking the risk of trying it; it was thoroughly locked. Kanakaratnam looked in a couple of times, apparently just to be sociable. He was quite willing to explain to Ranjit what was going on. On the second day the pirates—that was the word Kanakaratnam himself used, “pirates”—stormed the bridge, disarmed those of the crew who were not actually already colleagues, and announced that the ship was changing course for the port of Bosaso in, yes, Somalia. Before Ranjit was released, the pirates looted everything of value from the ship’s strong room and everything easily portable from the staterooms of the passengers—who, they were informed, would fairly soon be on their way home, unharmed, provided only that their families or friends came up with the appropriate ransom money. (“You would be surprised,” Kanakaratnam told Ranjit, “what some people will pay to get Grandma back.”) And then there was the ship itself. If they got it safely to the right port in Somalia, a paint job and some decent false papers could make it the most saleable item of all.

It was all very businesslike. It was, in fact, Kanakaratnam explained, pretty much like any other commercial enterprise. Since the beginnings of the twenty-first century, piracy had become a fairly big business on its own, with established brokerage houses prepared to collect a ransom and pass it on to those demanding it, in return for which they guaranteed the safe return of captives. “In fact,” Kanakaratnam told Ranjit with satisfaction, “getting caught with that stolen junk was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me. My cell mate at Batticaloa was supposed to be in on this, but he got picked up for something else. But he told me all about it, and when I got a chance to get away, I knew just where to go.”

Even businesslike piracy did, of course, sometimes have its unpleasant side. One bad side, Ranjit was pretty sure, was what the pirates did with any crew members who resisted them too vigorously. (Ranjit asked Kanakaratnam, but he simply didn’t answer. Which was answer enough for Ranjit.)

When Kanakaratnam told Ranjit that the takeover was complete and he could come out of his cell, Ranjit found out there had been at least one unsavory occurrence. It was because of the ship’s captain, who had possessed an excessive sense of duty. He hadn’t wanted to turn over the keys to the strong room. Of course, that problem had been readily solved. The pirates had shot the captain on the shuffleboard court and promoted the much more cooperative first officer, who himself had pulled the keys out of the deceased man’s pocket and handed them over.

Ranjit had never been on a cruise ship before. Despite the grim circumstances, this one still offered all sorts of absurd amenities. There was a swimming pool on the top deck (though not conveniently usable when there was any significant wave action, which was almost always). The kitchen produced quite good meals, even if the actual passengers were clumped despondently together on one side of the dining room, watched over by pirates with assault rifles. The casino was closed, but that made little difference since all the passengers had already been relieved of the cash and credit cards they might have gambled with. The bars were closed, too, and there was no nightly show in the barroom theater. But there were canned movies on the TV screens in every stateroom, and the weather was balmy.

Too balmy, according to Kanakaratnam. “I’d rather have more clouds,” he said. “You don’t know how many eyes are up there, watching us. Satellites,” he clarified, when Ranjit looked puzzled. “Of course, they don’t pay much attention to an old rust bucket like this, but you never know. Oh,” he added, reminding himself of an obligation, “and Tiffany’s looking for you. Wants to know if you’ll help her with the kids up on the sundeck.”

“Why not?” Ranjit said agreeably, in fact rather looking forward to seeing his four playmates again. He was miserable, yes, but doing everything he could to hide it. When he came out of the stairwell into the bright tropical daylight of the sundeck, he couldn’t help casting a quick look at the sky.

Of course he couldn’t see any of those eyes in the sky. He hadn’t expected to but could not help wondering just who it might be whose eyes were staring down at them at that moment….

And, of course, he had no idea of what totally nonhuman eyes some of them were.

There turned out to be about twenty children among the ship’s passengers, ranging from six or seven up to about fourteen. Most of them spoke reasonable approximations of English, and what Tiffany wanted Ranjit to do—of course—was tell them stories so that they would forget having seen the murdered captain’s body exposed all day near the shuffleboard courts.

That turned out to be a tall order. Two of the ten-year-olds never stopped crying, and several of the others could not seem to take their eyes off the rifle-carrying pirate who patrolled the deck. It may have been that Ranjit made it even harder on himself, because rather than doing the simple and never-failing Russian multiplication thing again, he decided to show the children how to count on their fingers, binary style.

It was not a success. Clearly none of the passenger children had ever heard of binary numbers before. When Ranjit informed them that if you wanted to say you had one of something in binary, you could just write the old familiar one, but if you had two, you had to write it as one-zero, and three as one-one, the incomprehension was palpable.

He pressed on gamely. “Now we come to the counting-on-your-fingers part,” he told them, holding up his two hands. “What you have to do now is assume that every one of your fingers represents a numeral—and, yes, Tiffany, I know what you’re going to ask. Yes, we do count the thumb as a finger.” (Tiffany hadn’t said anything, but cheerfully nodded.) “Each numeral has to be a one or a zero because that’s all you have to work with in binary arithmetic. When the fingers are retracted”—he made two fists—“each finger is a zero. So now look here.” He laid his two fists on the table-top before him. “In binary these ten retracted fingers represent the number zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero. Which is just another way of saying that zero is the number all ten of the zeros represent, because no matter how many zeros you write down, it’s still just zero. But now look at this.”

He stuck out all the fingers on both hands. “Now they’re all ones, and the binary number I’m displaying is one one one one one one one one one one. And that means, if you want to express it in the decimal equivalent, that you’re writing a one for the last numeral one in the line, plus a two for the numeral one next to it. Plus a four for the one next to that—doubling each time, you see, all the way up to five hundred and twelve for the last numeral one at the end of the left hand. And so you have written—”