Arthur Clarke - The Last Theorem

And then there they were, in London.

It did not disappoint, exactly. The great sights of the city were as fascinating to Ranjit as they had been to millions of visitors for hundreds of years. All of them—huge old St. Paul’s, the Tower of London, the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey—all the famous ones that every tourist had to see and a fair number of sights that were not really famous at all but were of particular interest to Ranjit—like the London School of Economics and a certain superb maisonette a few squares away on Arundel Street, because both had once been inhabited by Gamini Bandara at a time when Ranjit himself had had no hope of ever visiting them. When Myra persuaded him to take an excursion to Kew Gardens, he really loved the vast greenhouses. He loved all the great and famous structures of the city, almost without exception. What he did not love in the least, however, was all the open and unroofed spaces that lay between them, the spaces that he had to traverse in order to get from one to another.

And which were, without exception in this month of November, terribly, unbearably cold.

This soul-searing experience was one that Ranjit had never before encountered in all of his life. Oh, perhaps sometimes he had suffered a brief chill, maybe at the tip of Swami Rock when the winds were strong, or when he was just coming out of a plunge in the surf in the early, early morning. Not like this! Not when it was so cold that the sparse snows of the week before, and even the ones of the week before that, still left their blackened remains on the margins of parking lots and the edges of lawns because it had never warmed up enough since to finish melting them away.

Still, London’s shops were full of garments designed to keep the coldest visitor toasty, or anyway somewhat warm. Thermal underwear, gloves, and a fur-collared topcoat made the London streets bearable to Ranjit, while the first mink coat of her life improved things for Myra.

Then they met Sir Tariq. It was he, on behalf of the Royal Mathematical Society, who had invited Ranjit to become a member, and to come to London to tell them about his feat. (And had produced a foundation that paid their expenses.) Sir Tariq al Diwani turned out to be a plump elderly man with unruly Albert Einstein hair, a kindly heart, and no trace of any accent but the purest OxCam. (“Well,” he explained when pressed, “I’m fourth generation London, after all.”) And when he found that Ranjit was freezing most of the time, he struck his forehead. “Oh, blast,” he said. “I let them give you posh instead of comfort. I’ll have you moved.”

What they were moved to was a brand-shiny-new but not particularly fashionable hotel in South Kensington. Which puzzled Myra a bit until she had a talk with the concierge and, grinning, reported to Ranjit that Sir Tariq had chosen this particular hotel because, a, it was convenient to some of the city’s best museums, if that should interest them while they were there, and, b, it was frequently occupied by Arab oil sheikhs and their large retinues, an entire floor or two at a time. The importance of that was that what the oil sheikhs hated most, even more than Ranjit did, was being cold, not just in their private rooms but in a hotel’s lobbies, fire stairs, and even elevators as well. And what the owners of the hotel hated even more than that was to fail to give those free-spending Arabs every last thing they might desire.

Though not himself a free-spending oil sheikh, Ranjit was happy to receive the fallout from their spending. Over the next couple of months, his mood improved visibly—improved enough, indeed, for him to take a shot at that other reason for the particular hotel they were in, its proximity to Museum Row. The Natural History Museum (though drafty) was a delight, inspiring Ranjit to agree to the crosstown odyssey to the great British Museum itself, back in Gamini’s part of town—even grander (if even draftier) and making him agree that yes, cold countries might after all have some advantages over the hot ones.

It wasn’t all tourism. The lecture for the Royal Mathematical Society took some thought, though actually what Ranjit said in London was pretty much what he had said at the press conference in Colombo. Two magazines had urgently requested a visit, Nature because they were the ones who had published his paper and New Scientist because (they promised) they would take him to the best pub on their side of the Thames. And there were a couple of press conferences, too, set up at long range by De Saram in Colombo. And even so, with their pictures in print on every newsstand and occasionally on the telly as well, Myra persuaded Ranjit to put his thermal underwear to the test by standing outside Buckingham Palace one evening to observe the changing of the guard. When they were back in their hotel, and Ranjit had to admit none of his parts seemed to be at all frostbitten from the ordeal, he also pointed out that, of all the cameras held by their fellow tourists, every last one had been pointed at the guards, and not one at them. “So it’s true,” he said. “We can move around London all we like, and no one pays any attention to us at all. I’d really like this place if they’d just move it a thousand kilometers or so south.”

Well, they wouldn’t do that, so after a few hours of bundling up to get from the hotel lobby to a taxi, and from the taxi to some other lobby somewhere else, Ranjit gave up. He took Sir Tariq aside. Then he got on the phone with De Saram in Colombo, and then, grinning, reported to Myra, “We’re going to America. It’s what they call the Triple-A-S—the American Association for the Advancement of Science?—and next month they’re having their annual convention and De Saram has it all worked out. Oh, we’re not through here, Myra. Not permanently. We’ll do everything there is to do here, but not until the weather’s a little warmer.” So they were booked first class—another of those generous foundations—to leave on the American-Delta flight to New York City (Kennedy) at two P.M. that afternoon.

Which they did, though with many sincere protestations of thanks to Sir Tariq, and by two-twenty they were leaving England behind and approaching the eastern coast of Ireland.

Ranjit was all solicitude. “I haven’t rushed you too much, have I? You’re not—?” The whoopsing gesture he made at his mouth elucidated the question for Myra, who laughed. She held up her glass for an orange juice refill from the attendant, who was quick to oblige.

“I’m fine,” she said. “And yes, you and I can come back to England when it’s nice and warm—say June. But are you sure you’re doing the right thing now, going to America?”

Ranjit finished spreading the clotted cream and strawberry preserves on his scone and popped the product into his mouth. “Of course I am,” he told her, chewing. “I checked the New York weather reports for myself. Right now they’ve got a low of nine, looking to a high for the day of eighteen. I’ve been colder than that in Trinco.”

Uncertain whether to laugh or cry, Myra set down her glass. “Oh, my darling,” she said. “You’ve never been in America, have you?”

Suddenly worried, Ranjit turned to face her. “What do you mean?”

She reached out to stroke his hand. “Just that you haven’t noticed that they’re pretty old-fashioned there in some ways. The way they still use miles instead of kilometers, for instance. And—I hope this won’t upset you—the way they cling to the Fahrenheit thermometer scale instead of going to Celsius along with the rest of the world?”

Apart from the great thermal disappointment that the climate of New York represented for Ranjit, the news that kept coming over their hotel suite’s large supply of TV sets was even more disheartening than usual. For example, South America had been relatively quiet, war-wise, for some time. No longer. Now (as one of their American hosts explained it to Myra and Ranjit) what had changed was the fact that the United States had revised most drug crimes down from felonies to, at most, misdemeanors. That had decriminalized nearly all the stock in trade of the Colombian drug merchants. That change in the laws made it possible for any American addict to get what he needed for his habit, cheap and without gangster intervention, at any local pharmacy, thus effectively putting the gangsters out of business. (It also made it pointless for any neighborhood pusher to hand out free samples to twelve-year-olds. That would no longer ensure him a supply of addicted customers for the future, since none of those future customers, if there were any, would be buying from him anyway. And so each year the census of American addicts slowly dwindled as the oldest ones died or went dry, and few new ones came along as replacements.)