Arthur Clarke - The Last Theorem

His driver stopped at one of the restaurants along the road, but when Ranjit opened the door to investigate, the smells were not encouraging. The second he tried was better. He actually went inside, got a menu, sniffed thoughtfully, and told the person who gave him the menu that he’d probably be back, but he made no promises about when. But in the third, Ranjit got a menu but hardly looked at it. The aroma from the kitchen, the way the few diners were lingering over their tea and sweets…Ranjit inhaled deeply and made a reservation. And when he issued the actual invitation to Myra, she looked uncertain for only a moment, and then said, “Of course. It would be lovely.”

Which meant Ranjit had only the day to get through before he could have the pleasure of being the one who provided something for her.

Ada wasn’t there, so they actually swam together, farther out than usual, and when they came back, they dressed and sat with drinks on the lanai, idly talking. Well, Myra was doing most of the talking. “It used to be a lot livelier here,” she said, gazing out over the nearly empty sand. “When I was tiny, there were two deluxe hotels right down the beach, and a lot more restaurants.”

Ranjit looked at her curiously. “You miss the lively times?”

“Oh, not really. I like it peaceful, the way it is. But my parents used to go dancing there, and now there’s nothing.”

Ranjit nodded. “The Boxing Day tsunami,” he said wisely.

But she was shaking her head. “Long before that,” she said. “It was 1984. The beginning of the civil war. Some of the first battles were fought right here, Sea Tigers making a landing so they could launch an attack on the airport. The army took the hotels over as firing positions, so the Tigers took care of the hotels. My parents were right here, couldn’t get away until things calmed down a little and the roads reopened. My mom said the tracers were like a fireworks display, screaming in from the assault boats and back out from the hotels. They called it ‘the entertainment.’”

Ranjit wanted to make a response but didn’t know how to do it. Not in words, maybe. What he really wanted to do was put an arm around her. He settled for a sort of first step, putting his hand over hers as it rested on the arm of her chair.

She didn’t seem to mind. “The ruined old buildings were still there while I was growing up,” she said. “You know what finally took care of them? That was the tsunami. Otherwise I think they’d still be right there.”

She turned toward him, smiling…and looking quite a lot as though she wanted to be kissed.

He put it to the test.

It turned out that his estimate had been correct. She had. And she was the one who took his hand and led him back into the beach house, with that welcoming couch, just right for two, and Ranjit discovered that sexual intercourse with a woman was not only a good thing in itself, but was several times better when the woman was someone you liked, and respected, and really wanted to spend a lot of time in the company of.

And then there was the dinner that he hosted, and that was great, too. So all in all that day on the beach was a great success, and Myra and Ranjit at once made plans to do it again. Often.

It didn’t quite work out that way, though, because the very next day something happened to change their plans.

Ada Labrooy was with them that day, and so was her nanny, who kept giving sidelong glances at Myra and Ranjit, convincing Ranjit that what the two of them had done was written all over their faces. It was a perfectly normal day, though—if you didn’t count that when he arrived, Myra kissed him on the lips instead of the usual cheek—until they were back from their outing in the water, and wearing their robes and helping themselves to their drinks.

And then Ada saw something. Hand shading her eyes from the sun, she asked, “Is that that man who works for the Vorhulsts again?”

And when Ranjit stood up to get a better look, yes, it was the Vorhulst butler, moving a great deal faster than Ranjit had ever seen him move before, and holding a sheaf of papers clenched tightly in one hand. He seemed excited. Not just excited, impatient to get the pages to Ranjit, so that he was still five or six meters away when he called, “Sir! I think this may be what you’ve been waiting for!”

And it was.

Well, it sort of was. Well, what it was was a lengthy analysis of Ranjit’s paper, or actually five different analyses of the paper, each apparently written by a different (but unnamed) person, and what they’d done—in exacting and almost unreadable detail—was go over every last passage that Ranjit himself had already found to contain a mistake or an unclarity. Plus, they’d found no fewer than eleven other passages that needed cleaning up just as much but that Ranjit hadn’t caught in his own reading. There were forty-two sheets of paper in all, each densely written over with words and equations. As Ranjit quickly scanned each one and hurried to the next, he passed the sheets to Myra, his frown getting deeper with every page. “Holy gods,” he said at last, “what are they saying? Are they just telling me all the reasons they have for rejecting the bloody thing?”

Myra was biting her lip as she reread the final page for the fourth or fifth time. Then a smile broke through. She handed the page back to Ranjit. “Dear,” she said—in the excitement of the moment neither of them noticed that she had never used that word to him before—“what’s the very last word at the end of the message?”

Ranjit snatched the page from her. “What word?” he demanded. “You mean at the very bottom here? Where it says ‘Congratulations’?”

“That is exactly what I mean,” she informed him, the smile now broad and tender and in every way exactly the best kind of smile he could ever have wished for from Myra de Soyza. “Have you ever heard of anyone being congratulated for a failure? They’re publishing your paper, Ranjit! They think you’ve finally done it!”

“As soon as that magazine prints your article, you’re going to be famous. Really famous!” Beatrix Vorhulst declared as soon as Ranjit was back in her house that night.

She was wrong, though. It didn’t take that long. Days before the magazine’s printing presses began to turn out the hundreds of thousands of copies that would bring Ranjit’s fame to the world, the fame had already arrived. Someone—perhaps someone on Nature ’s staff, or among their referees—had leaked the story and so reporters began to call. First it was the BBC, then someone from The New York Times, and then it was everybody, all of them wanting Ranjit to explain just what it was that Monsieur Fermat had been playing at, and why it had taken all this time to prove he’d been right.

All that was easy enough for Ranjit to answer. What was harder was what to say when the callers asked about the rumor that he’d been jailed for something or other, too, but there De Saram was a help. “Simply tell them that your attorney has instructed you not to discuss any of that because there is a suit pending. I’ll make that true by bringing an action on your behalf against the cruise line.”

“But I don’t want to take their money,” Ranjit objected.

“Don’t worry. You won’t get any. I’ll make sure of that, but that’s a sufficient reason for anybody to refuse to answer any question…since Dr. Bandara has impressed on me that that whole matter is not to be discussed.”

That stratagem worked fine, but did nothing to decrease the number of people who wanted him to sit down in a quiet one-on-one with them—that is, with them and their team of anything up to a dozen recording technicians—and tell them all about this Fermat person and why he had behaved so peculiarly. For that, explained De Saram when Ranjit again turned to him for help, the only way to temper their curiosity about him was to go public. That is, to have a press conference and tell the whole story at once to everyone who wanted to hear.