Arthur Clarke - The Last Theorem

He did the arithmetic with a crayon on a scrap of paper:

“And if you add them all up together you get—”

“And so you’ve counted on your fingers all the way up to one thousand and twenty-three!”

Ranjit paused to look around at his audience. What he got back was not what he had hoped for. The number of weepers had risen to four or five, and the expressions on the other faces ranged from simple confusion to resentful bafflement.

Then, tardily, questions did begin.

“Do you mean—”

“Wait a minute, Ranjit, are you trying to say—”

And finally, rewardingly, “Oh, let’s see if I got it right. Let’s say we’re counting fish. So what that numeral one at the right-hand edge means is that there’s one pile of fish that has only one fish in it, and the numeral one next to it means there’s another pile that has two fish, and piles with four fish and eight fish, all the way up to the pile—that’s the numeral one at the other end—that has five hundred and twelve fish in it. And you add all the piles together, and altogether you’ve got one thousand and twenty-three fish. Is that it?”

“It is,” Ranjit said, gratified in spite of himself. Gratified despite the fact that the only children who had responded at all were Dot and Kirthis Kanakaratnam’s kids, and the one who had really understood was, of course, Tiffany.

Kanakaratnam himself didn’t seem to worry about Ranjit’s poor reception. When he joined Ranjit for lunch—two kinds of soup, three different salads, and at least half a dozen entrées on the menu—he said approvingly, “You did yourself some good today.” He did not say in what way, though Ranjit—who had also caught a glimpse of the late captain’s splayed and riddled corpse—had a pretty good idea of what it was.

When Kanakaratnam returned, an hour later, he made it explicit. “You need to keep on showing my friends that you’re cooperating with us,” he told Ranjit. “There’s been questions. So look, here’s the thing. We need to get biographical information about every passenger—to know how high to set the ransom—and most of our guys don’t speak any language the passengers can understand. So you can help us out that way, right?”

There was a question in the tone of Kanakaratnam’s voice, but in the realities of the situation Ranjit faced, there was none. It was clear to him that his best hope of survival was to be useful to the pirates, so he spent a few hours of each of the next two days questioning elderly couples—sometimes terrified, more often belligerent—about their bank accounts, pensions, real-estate holdings, and possibly wealthy relatives.

That only lasted for a couple of days, though, just until the trouble struck.

It was still dark when a change in the ship’s noise level woke Ranjit. The comforting sound of the ship’s engines was no longer the languid kerplum, kerplum but had become a fast and frantic beggabegga! beggabegga! Even louder was the yelling back and forth that came from the passage outside his room. When he peered out, he saw members of the original crew trotting as fast as they could toward the exits. Each of the men was carrying two or three suitcases, obviously purloined from the passengers’ staterooms—and, Ranjit was quite sure, stuffed full of passengers’ stolen valuables. Most of the yelling came from one of the pirates, urging the crew members along with a rope’s end. The pirates looked angry and worried. The captive crew members looked scared to death.

Once again it seemed to Ranjit that it would be a good idea to make himself useful. He backtracked the bag carriers to one of the ship’s stairwells, where other crewmen were throwing stolen bags down to his level. As Ranjit was about to pick up a couple of the bags to carry, he heard a childish voice calling his name, and when he looked up, Dot Kanakaratnam and her brood were coming down the steps toward him. All of them, even the tiny Betsy, were carrying a share of the loot, and Tiffany was full of information. An hour or two earlier, one of the pirates had spotted what looked like ship’s lights far astern. “But nothing showed on the radar,” Tiffany informed him excitedly, “so you know what that means?”

Ranjit didn’t, but he was capable of a decent guess. “A naval vessel with stealth antiradar?”

“Exactly! We’re being followed by some destroyer or something! That means we can’t make it to Somalia anymore, so we’re going to have to beach this ship somewhere—I guess it’ll be India or Pakistan, probably—and then just disappear into the woods. Up on the bridge they’re working the radio now, trying to arrange for one of the local gangs to help us.”

“And why would a local gang of crooks want to do that, when they can just take the loot away from us?” Ranjit asked.

But the children didn’t even try to answer that, and Dot said only, “Come on. Let’s get some of this stuff down to the departure place.”

Once everything worth stealing had been lugged to the B deck exit, there was nothing useful for any of the pirates to do. They mostly wound up on one of the outside decks, worriedly scanning the horizon for some trace of their radar-blind pursuer, or even more worriedly studying the horizon ahead for a glimpse of where the ship would be run aground.

There wasn’t actually much to see but water. If there was another craft or point of land anywhere near them, it did not reveal itself to Ranjit. Around noon he tired of the sport, went down to find something for lunch, and then returned to throw himself onto his bed. He was asleep in minutes….

And then awakened again when a violent metallic screeching and a rocking and bouncing motion that almost threw him to the floor told Ranjit they had arrived.

Then the ship was at rest, though tilted a half dozen degrees from the vertical. Ranjit looked around to make sure there was nothing for him to take—there wasn’t—and then, clutching the safety rails, made his way to the exit port. Nearly all of the spoils were already off the ship and being licked by wavelets from the sea behind them. So were most of the people—pirates, passengers, and captive crew alike. Some of the pirates were, quite ungently, ordering the crew and the passengers to carry the wet suitcases above the high-water mark.

Ranjit cast one look around, found no human beings on the shore, and let himself down into the warm calf-deep water.

Humans had been on that shore at one time. They had left unmistakable signs of their presence. This was one of those deserted Indian Ocean beaches that once had been used for low-cost (and low-safety) ship breaking. The whole place stank of oil and rust. All up and down the edge of the water were fragments of old hulls, or of discarded bits of ship’s furnishings—chairs, beds, tables—too old and damaged to be worth removing. What was nowhere in sight, though Ranjit knew they had once been there, was any trace of the desperately poor men who had taken the jobs of cutting up the hulls and separating out the commercially profitable sections of engines and drive shafts…the men who had died on that beach, as often as not, from the toxic substances that would have made the job too expensive on any better-policed stretch of coast. How much of those trapped poisons and carcinogens might remain in the sands and waters around him, Ranjit could not guess.

The best way to deal with that problem, Ranjit knew, was to get off that beach as quickly as possible.

There didn’t seem to be any good way of doing that. If there was to be help from local gangs, Ranjit could see no signs of it. Well, there might have been something—a quick glimpse of some shadowy something half-concealed by the brush, but when he looked again, nothing was there.