Arthur Clarke - The Last Theorem

That hope, however, didn’t last. It vanished when, one day, Bruno exasperatedly threw his electrical cable across the room, grabbed up a short wooden club from the table of useful implements, and repeatedly smashed Ranjit across the face with it. That cost Ranjit a black eye and a knocked-out front tooth, as well as most of his tenuously held hope for ultimate release.

The other main torturer was an elderly man who never gave a name but had one eye always half-closed. (Ranjit thought of him as “Squinty.”) He seldom left a mark on Ranjit, and he was curiously reassuring in his conversation. On the very first day Ranjit met him, Ranjit held by two powerful assistants flat on his back, Squinty held up a square of cloth. “What we will do to you now,” he warned politely, “will make you think you are going to die. You won’t. I won’t let that happen. Only you must answer my questions truthfully.” And then he spread the cloth over Ranjit’s face and poured cold water over it from a metal pitcher.

Ranjit had never experienced anything quite like it. The effect wasn’t so much pain as brutalizing, incapacitating terror. Ranjit had not failed to hear and understand that Squinty had promised he wouldn’t die of this experience, but his body had understandings of its own. It knew that it was being terminally, lethally drowned, and it wanted the process stopped at once. “Help!” Ranjit cried, or tried to cry. “Stop! Let me up!” And all that came out was a bubbly, choky splatter of watery parts of sound, none of them like any English words—

The trickle of poured water stopped, the cloth was pulled off his face, and Ranjit was lifted to sitting position. “Now, what is your name?” Squinty asked politely.

Ranjit tried to stop coughing long enough to get the words out. “I’m Ranjit Sub—” he began, but he didn’t even finish saying his name before his shoulders were slammed back onto the floor, the cloth was over his face again, and the terrible pouring of water began once more.

Ranjit managed to hold out four times more before the heart was gone out of him, further resistance was impossible, and he gasped and managed to say, “I’m whoever you want me to be. Just stop!”

“Good,” said Squinty encouragingly. “We are making progress, Kirthis Kanakaratnam. So now tell me, what country were you working for?”

There were, of course, many other ways of making a subject become cooperative, but, of course, none of them produced any truthful confessions from Ranjit since he had no crimes to confess.

This exasperated his interrogators. The one he called Squinty complained. “You are making us look bad, Ranjit, or Kirthis, or whoever you are. Listen to me. It will go easier for you if you just stop denying you are Kirthis Kanakaratnam.”

Ranjit tried taking the advice. Then it did go easier, a little.

Although Ranjit hadn’t known any part of it, quite a few things had been going on outside the walls of his place of detention. Cathedrals had been blown up, railroad trains derailed, office buildings poisoned with radioactive dust in their ventilation systems. And assassinations? Oh, yes, there had been plenty of assassinations, by throat-cutting or defenestration from an upper floor; by handgun, shotgun, and assault rifle; quite often by poisoning, administered in sometimes quite ingenious ways. Not to mention, in one case, assassination by dropping a piano on the victim’s head, and in another, by standing on the victim’s chest to hold him to the bottom of his bathtub as its taps filled it with lukewarm water. And, of course, there were the wars. Perhaps the most violent of the new ones revived an old plague spot as a Sunni incursion into Kurdish territory threatened to set off another round of the turmoil that characterized post-occupation Iraq.

However, not everything that had transpired had been bad. Under the close supervision of four of the five Scandinavian nations—Iceland, with its own domestic unrest, stayed outside the group—several of the most bitterly fought wars were in, however brief, remission. Even Myanmar, the country that was more commonly called Burma (except by its own intransigent governing clique), had without warning released all of its political prisoners and invited foreign diplomats to monitor its next set of elections. Finally—a development that would have greatly pleased Ranjit, if he could have known of it—after endless stalling, the World Bank had come through with a decent billion-dollar start-up grant for an actual Artsutanov space elevator. True, a World Bank grant was a long way from the actual wheels turning, with the cars going up and down the cables, the hardware that you could hop onto and be drawn to low earth orbit at three hundred kilometers an hour. But it was a real first step.

Those, of course, were not the only data with a significant bearing on his own life that Ranjit did not know. For example, he didn’t know why he had been taken to this place and why he had been tortured in it. And then, when the torturing had stopped, he didn’t know why that had happened, either. Ranjit had never heard of extraordinary rendition or the momentous decision that had been handed down, decades earlier, by the British Law Lords.

Of course, Ranjit’s torturers could have helped him out with some information if they had chosen to. They didn’t choose to.

After the first day without inflicted pain, he didn’t see Bruno, the belly-slap and electrical-cable guy, again at all. He did see Squinty quite often, but only after Squinty had extracted a promise from him that he would stop asking why he had been tortured and whether he would ever be released, and indeed pretty much any question that Ranjit really wanted answered. Squinty did supply a tiny bit of information. (“Bruno? Oh, he’s been promoted upstairs. He just doesn’t know what to do with a prisoner unless he’s hurting him, and it doesn’t look like we’re going to be hurting you anymore.”)

That was, Ranjit reminded himself, a fact of life not to be scorned. It was a big improvement over the previous diet of thrashings and water-boardings. But it was, especially after Squinty quit coming around because Ranjit couldn’t keep his promise to stop asking forbidden questions, pretty damn boring. Ranjit wasn’t left entirely without human company. There was a limping old man who brought him his food and carried away his slop buckets, but that one was no use for conversation. He no doubt spoke some language or other, but it didn’t seem to be one that Ranjit possessed.

Ranjit didn’t know when he first began to have long one-sided talks with his friends. With his absent friends, that is, since none of them was physically present in his cell.

Of course, none of them could hear what he said to them. It would have been interesting if, for example, Myra de Soyza could have, or Pru No-Name. Less interesting for Gamini Bandara because, after reporting on his own emptily monotonous existence, about all Ranjit had to say to his absent lifelong friend was that he really should have budgeted more time to be with Ranjit and less for the American woman, who, after all, would never see him again.

Some of Ranjit’s best absent friends were people he had never known in the flesh. For instance, there was the no-longer-living Paul Wolfskehl. Wolfskehl had been a nineteenth-century German business tycoon whose best-beloved sweetheart had turned down his proposal of marriage. That meant that, in spite of all his wealth and power, life was no longer worth living for Wolfskehl, so he sensibly decided to commit suicide. That didn’t work out, though. While Wolfskehl was waiting for the exact right moment to do himself in, he idly picked up a book to read.

The book chanced to concern Fermat’s Last Theorem, written by a man named Ernst Kummer. As it happened, Wolfskehl had attended a couple of Kummer’s lectures on number theory; curiosity made him read the new essay….