Arthur Clarke - The Last Theorem

Myra shifted her weight around in the chair, trying to find a comfortable position. She decided there wasn’t one and leaned over to press her husband’s hand. “What’s P equals NP?” she asked. “Or that other equation?”

It was worse than she’d thought; Ranjit didn’t take the bait. “The thing is,” he said, “we’re just wasting our time here. We might as well give it up and go home.”

“You promised Gamini,” she reminded him. “Just give it a few more days.”

“A very few,” he said stubbornly. “A week at the most, and then we’re out of here.”

It didn’t come to that. It was the very next day that the teletext message came from ex–Lt. Col. T. Orion Bledsoe. “Clearance granted. Report to Pasadena ASAP.”

And they were certainly about ready to get out of Boston’s worst-yet climate. But when they were all packed up, and just waiting for the limo that was to take them to Logan Airport for the flight to LAX, Myra suddenly put her hand to her belly. “Oh, my,” she said. “I think that was a contraction.”

It was.

Once she made Ranjit understand what was happening, it was no problem to divert their limousine from the airport to Massachusetts General Hospital. Where, six hours later, little Natasha de Soyza Subramanian made her first appearance in the world.

And in another part of the galaxy, far, far away…

You couldn’t say that the Grand Galactics had forgotten about unruly Earth. That never happened. They were constitutionally incapable of forgetting anything. All the same, Earth had certainly slipped into the farther recesses of their collective mind, and their attention was concentrated on more important, or anyway more interesting, issues.

In the case of “Bill” himself, for example, there was the task of tending to their farm—or, perhaps it should be “farm” in quotation marks, since nothing organic grew there.

We wouldn’t usually think of the Grand Galactics as farmers of any kind. Nevertheless there were certain kinds of crops that they encouraged, and it is a curious fact that medieval human peasants had done something very similar with their own tiny plots.

The plot that interested Bill enough to cause him to visit it was a volume of space several light-years on a side.

At first look, any astronomer might have thought it was nothing but empty space. As a matter of fact, that is exactly what human astronomers had thought when they’d first observed it. It wasn’t entirely empty, though. Better observations, achieved when humans had managed to acquire better telescopes, showed that there was something in that patch of space that bent light, refracting blue in one direction, red in the other.

That something, as the Grand Galactics had always known, was interstellar dust.

This trip was not, of course, Bill’s first visit to his farm. Not long before—oh, a matter of a few million years or so before—he had explored it in detail, making a careful census of the dust. What percentage of the dust particles (as humans might measure them) were less than a hundredth of a micron in size? What percentage, indeed, were in all the size ranges all the way up to the giants, which were as much as ten microns across, or even larger? He took note as well of the chemical composition of the dust particles, and of their neutron counts and ionization status.

All this was a simple and quite easy part of the self-imposed duties of a Grand Galactic. Bill however had always found it among what one could call the most enjoyable duties. After all, his census would ultimately contribute to one of the great goals the Grand Galactics possessed.

So, like some eleventh-century Norman baron, what Bill was doing was riding his fields. The dust patch was what the baron’s Saxon serfs would have called a fallow field, allowed to remain unplanted so that the soil could rest and regain its fertility.

Bill’s patch didn’t raise corn or oats. It raised only stars—big ones, little ones, all kinds; but the Grand Galactics preferred the big ones. Those giants—what humans would call the A’s and B’s and O’s—could be counted on to rapidly burn up their initial stocks of hydrogen in the nuclear furnaces at their cores. Then, when that was gone, they would do the same with their helium, carbon, neon, magnesium—each element heavier than the one that came before, until they came to iron, which was the end of the line.

When a star’s core has turned to iron, the nuclear furnace at its core weakens, until it can no longer fight off the terrible gravitational squeeze of the dead weight of its outer layers. The star collapses on itself….

And then it rebounds in a titanic explosion, pouring out new treasuries of heavier elements still, manufactured in the condign heat of that explosion, to turn into tiny particles that will enrich the next patch of interstellar gas.

That was what would inevitably happen, sooner or later, in the normal course of events, and it didn’t require any action on the part of Bill. It would be taken care of by those simple Newtonian-Einsteinian laws of gravitation that the Grand Galactics had never seen any reason to change.

As we say, “sooner or later,” but the Grand Galactics preferred sooner. Bill chose to speed things up. He scanned a considerable volume of adjacent space and was lucky enough to find a trickle of nearby dark matter…coaxed it to flow into his patch…and was pleased. One of the Grand Galactics’ main objectives was being helped along.

And what was that objective?

There is no way of expressing it in terms a human being could understand, but one step in its achievement was known to be an increase in the proportion of heavy elements to light—in this case “heavy” meaning those elements with at least twenty or so protons in their nuclei, along with crowds of neutrons. The kind of elements, that is, that the original creation of the universe had omitted entirely.

Changing all those light elements to heavy would take much work, and vast amounts of time…but time, after all, belonged to the Grand Galactics.

The American East Coast might consider itself the center of power, of government, or of culture. (Of course, that would depend on which East Coast city you were talking about, New York, Washington, or Boston.) But in one very important way it was definitely inferior to the other edge of the North American continent. Oh, it wasn’t the palm trees and the flowers blooming everywhere that thrilled the Subramanians. After all, Myra and Ranjit were Lankans, and a riot of exotic vegetation was their natural ambience. No, the best thing about California was that it was warm! It never got painfully cold, especially around the Los Angeles area, where it wasn’t ever really cold at all.

So Pasadena, where Ranjit discovered he was based, was a great place to live. Well, it was if you didn’t count the possibility of earthquakes. Or wildfires that could flatten a whole subdivision of homes in a dry year. Or floods that could pull down some other subdivision, one that had been built on precipitous lots because all the flat lots had been built on already, floods that were always ready to do this in a year when some relatively minor fire had killed off enough of the brush to weaken the ground’s hold on the substrate.

Never mind. Those things might not happen. At least they might not before the Subramanian family had packed up and gone somewhere else. Meanwhile it was a splendid place to raise a child. Myra happily pushed Natasha’s carriage through the local supermarket, along with all the other mothers doing the same, and thought she had never been so lucky in her life.

Ranjit, on the other hand, had some doubts.