Arthur Clarke - The Last Theorem

So when Ranjit heard the old man’s step-slide coming along the empty corridors, he felt little interest, except that this time there was, along with it, the rap-tap-tap of the footsteps of someone who wasn’t limping at all. A moment later Ranjit’s cell door opened. The old man was there, but deferentially a step or two behind another man—a man who wore an expression of shock and dismay on a face whose lineaments Ranjit knew as well as he knew his own. “Sweet God Almighty, Ranj,” Gamini Bandara said wonderingly, “is that really you?”

Of all the questions Ranjit might have asked this unexpected visitor from his past, he chose the simplest. “What are you doing here, Gamini?”

“What the hell do you think I’m doing? I’m going to get you out of here, and if you think that was easy, you’re crazier than you look. Then we’ll get you to a dentist—what happened to your front teeth? Or, no, I suppose first you need to see a doctor—What?”

Ranjit was standing now, almost quivering with excitement. “Not a doctor! If you can get me out of here, get me to a computer!”

Gamini looked puzzled. “A computer? Well, sure, that can be arranged, but first we need to make sure you’re all right—”

“Damn it, Gamini!” Ranjit cried. “Can’t you understand what I’m saying? I think I’ve got the proof! I need a computer, and I need it right now! Do you have any idea how terrified I am that I’ll forget some part of the proof before I can get it refereed?”

Ranjit got the doctor. He got the computer, too—in fact got both of them at the same time, but not until Gamini had walked him out of his prison to where a helicopter waited, its vane turning over. As Ranjit climbed into the chopper, he saw a couple of men standing nearby. Squinty was one of them; Squinty looked astonished and worried but didn’t even gesture a good-bye. Then a twenty-minute downhill flight, among great mountains that wore brilliant caps of ice. In the helicopter Ranjit could not help turning to Gamini with questions, but this time it was Gamini who didn’t want to talk. “Later,” he said, nodding at the chopper pilot, who wore a uniform Ranjit had never seen before.

They landed at a real airport, a scant dozen meters from a plane—and not just any plane, Ranjit saw, but a BAB-2200, the fastest and, in some configurations, the most luxurious aircraft Boeing-Airbus had ever built, and it wore the blue globe-and-wreath United Nations insignia. Inside, it was even more so. Its seating was in leather armchairs. And its crew consisted of a pilot (wearing the uniform of a colonel in the American air force) and two very pretty flight attendants (wearing the same uniforms but with captain’s bars, and over the uniform fluffy white aprons). “Heading for home now, sir?” the pilot asked Gamini. He got a nod for an answer and immediately disappeared into the cockpit. One of the attendants led Ranjit to a chair (which, he discovered, swiveled) and belted him in. “That’s Jeannie,” Gamini informed him, while himself being belted into another chair. “She’s a doctor, too, so you better let her check you out—”

“The computer—” Ranjit started to object.

“Oh, you’ll get your damn computer, Ranj, but first we have to get airborne. It’ll just be a minute.”

By then the two women had already retreated to their fold-down seats against a bulkhead and, sure enough, the plane had begun to move. And as soon as the seat belt sign went off, the second of the attendants—“I’m Amy. Hi!”—was magicking a laptop out of the table next to Ranjit’s chair, while the one named Jeannie was approaching with stethoscope, blood pressure machine, and several other instruments at the ready.

Ranjit didn’t protest. He let the doctor poke and prod and listen as much as she liked while he himself slowly and clumsily typed out pages of a nearly six-page manuscript, pausing every couple of lines to ask Gamini if he could find the address of the magazine called Nature for him. “Their offices are in England somewhere.” Or just to scowl at the keyboard until memory at last told him what the next line should be. It was a slow process, but when Gamini ventured to ask him if he wanted anything to eat, Ranjit ferociously and unarguably told him to shut up. “Just give me ten minutes,” he demanded. “Oh, maybe half an hour at the most. I can’t stop now.”

It wasn’t ten minutes, of course. Wasn’t half an hour, either. It was well over an hour before Ranjit looked up, sighed, and said to Gamini, “I need to check everything, so I’d better send a copy to your house. Tell me your e-mail address.”

And when he had typed that in, he at last pushed the icon marked send and then sat back.

“Thanks,” he said. “I’m sorry to have been such a pest, but it was pretty important to me. Ever since I figured it out, five or six months ago, I’ve been terrified that I might forget some part of it before I could get it refereed.” He paused, suddenly licking his lips. “And one other thing. For a long time I’ve been thinking about real food. Do you have, say, any fresh fruit juice on this plane, any kind? And maybe something like a ham sandwich, or maybe a couple of scrambled eggs?”

Gamini refused to listen to any talk of American breakfasts but simply signaled to the flight attendants. Who produced a fine Sri Lankan meal—string hoppers of woven rice, a rich curry of meat and potatoes, and a plate of poppadoms—causing Ranjit’s eyes to bulge in wonder. “Tell me, Gamini,” he ordered, already chewing, “when did you get to be God? Isn’t this an American plane?”

Gamini, sipping a cup of tea that had come from the fields around Kandy, shook his head. “It’s a United Nations plane,” he said, “which happens to have an American crew, only it’s not on either UN or U.S. business right now. We just borrowed it to go after you.”

“And ‘we’ is—?”

Gamini shook his head again, grinning. “Can’t tell you, or anyway not right now. Pity. I knew you’d be interested, and as a matter of fact, I was considering asking you if you wanted to join us, when you went off on your little cruise.”

Ranjit didn’t put his spoon down, but he held it motionless while he gave his friend a long and not entirely friendly look. “You’re telling me that you’re such an important person that you can just borrow a plane like this to run your errands for you?”

This time Gamini laughed out loud. “Me? No. They didn’t do it for me. They did it because my dad requested it. He’s got this high-up UN job, you see.”

“And what job is that?”

“Can’t tell you that, either, so don’t ask. And don’t ask what country you’ve just got out of, either. Finding where you were wasn’t hard, after we got hold of Tiffany Kanakaratnam—Oh,” he said, taking note of Ranjit’s response to the child’s name, “that’s something I can tell you about, anyway, at least up to a point. I, uh, used my father’s position to run my own computer search for you. Sort of the way you got your math teacher’s password; I fed in every name I could think of that might possibly know anything about where you were—Myra de Soyza, and Maggie and Pru, and all your teachers, and all the monks that worked for your father, and the Kanakaratnams. No,” he said, again answering the look that had appeared on Ranjit’s face, “there wasn’t anything to embarrass you. We were just looking for meetings or conversations you’d had, after the day you disappeared. We got nothing. Didn’t get any data on the adult Kanakaratnams at all, which I think means they were shot out of hand along with the rest of the pirates by the first court that tried them. But I kept adding names as I thought of them, and when I put the names of the four children in, we found them. They’d been arrested, of course, but they were too young to be tried even on a piracy charge, so they were taken to some relatives near Killinochchi, and Tiffany gave us a description of the people who took you away. She described the helicopters and where you washed ashore; it took a lot of searching after that, to be sure, but at last I located you. You might have sat there for years more.”