Arthur Clarke - The Last Theorem

Oh, he loved the good parts of their life in Southern California as much as Myra did. Took pleasure in their excursions to the points of interest that were so unlike anything in Sri Lanka, the La Brea tar pits in the heart of the city, where millennia of ancient beasts had been trapped and preserved for humans to wonder over well into this twenty-first century. The movie studios, with their brilliantly engineered rides and exhibits. (Myra had been a little doubtful about taking Tashy to such a chancy place, but in the event, Natasha chortled and loved it.) Griffith Observatory with its seismographs and telescopes and its grand picnic area overlooking the city.

What he didn’t like was his job.

It gave him everything T. Orion Bledsoe had promised, that was true, and even a fair number of things Ranjit hadn’t expected at all. He had his own private office, which was spacious (three meters by more than five) if windowless (because, like all the rest of this installation, it was nearly twenty meters underground) and furnished with a large desk and a large leather armchair for his own use and several less pricey other chairs, at a clear oak table, for guests and meetings. And no fewer than three separate computer terminals, with unlimited access to almost everything. Now all it took was pushing a few keys for Ranjit to get his personal copies of just about every mathematical journal there was in the world. Not only did he get the journals themselves—hard copies when there were hard copies to begin with, electronic copies when that was all the original “publishers” had produced. He also received translations—horribly expensive, but paid for by the agency, out of their apparently limitless bank account—of at least the abstracts from those journals that happened to be in languages Ranjit had no hope of ever comprehending.

What was wrong was that he had nothing to do.

The first few days were busy enough, because Ranjit had to be walked through the places where red tape was generated so that they could generate Ranjit’s own contribution to the supply—identity badge to prepare, documents to sign, all the unavoidable flotsam of any large enterprise in the twenty-first century. Then nothing.

By the end of the first month, Ranjit, who was never grumpy, was waking up grumpy almost every workday morning. There was a cure. A prescribed dose of Natasha, along with one of Myra, usually cleared the symptoms up before he finished breakfast, but then by the time he came home for dinner, he was morose again. Apologetic about it, of course: “I don’t mean to take it out on Tashy and you, Myra, but I’m just wasting time here. No one will tell me what I’m supposed to be doing. When I find someone to ask, he just gets all mock-deferential and says, Well, that would be up to me, wouldn’t it?” But then, by the time he had finished dinner, and given Tashy her bath or changed her diaper or just dandled her on his knee, who could stay morose? Not Ranjit, and he was then his usual cheery self until the next time he had to get up to go to his nonwork.

By the end of the second month the depression was deeper. It took longer to lift, because, as Ranjit told his wife—over and over!—“It’s worse than ever! I cornered Bledsoe today—not easy to do, because he’s hardly ever in his office—and asked him point-blank what kind of work I was supposed to be doing. He gave me a dirty look, and do you know what he said? He said, ‘If you ever find out, please tell me.’ It seems he had orders from high up to hire me, but nobody ever told him what my job was to be.”

“They wanted you because you’re famous and you add class to the operation,” his wife informed him.

“Good guess. I sort of had the same idea myself, but it can’t be right. That whole operation’s so secret nobody knows who’s working in the next office.”

“So do you want to quit?” Myra asked.

“Huh. Well, I don’t think so. Don’t know if I can, really, because I’m not sure what all I signed, but anyway I promised Gamini.”

“Then,” she said, “let’s just learn to love it. Why don’t you solve that P equals NP problem you talk about? And anyway, tomorrow’s Saturday, so why don’t we take Tashy to the zoo?”

The zoo, of course, was a delight, although in the rest of the world things were going as badly as ever. Recent developments? Well, Argentina’s vast herds of cattle were keeling over by the thousands with a new variety of the old disease called bluetongue. It had just been confirmed that the plague was a biowarfare strain. What wasn’t clear was who had spread it. Maybe Venezuela or Colombia, some people around the agency thought, because Argentina had contributed heavily to the international force that was trying to keep the Venezuelan and the Colombian armies apart. (They weren’t very successful at it, but the Venezuelans and the Colombians hated them for trying.) The rest of the world was as unquiet as ever. In Iraq nightly outbreaks of car-bombings and beheadings showed that the two kinds of Iraqi Muslims were again trying to ensure that there was only one true Islamic faith by exterminating each other. In Africa the number of officially recognized wars had grown to fourteen, not counting several dozen tribal skirmishes. In Asia the Adorable Leader’s North Koreans were issuing communiqué after communiqué charging most of the world’s other states with spreading lies about them.

But in Pasadena nobody was fighting anybody, and little Tashy Subramanian was delighting her parents. What other infant so precociously tried to turn herself over in her crib at such an early age? Or even more precociously, at that same early age, slept nearly halfway through the night, on many nights, sometimes? Natasha Subramanian was bound to be a person of high intelligence, Myra and Ranjit agreed, no matter that Jingting Jian, the baby doctor the office’s advisory service had helped them find, swore that you could tell nothing about a child’s intelligence until it was at least four or five months old.

Though weak in that area, Dr. Jian was a very comforting pediatrician to have, full of tips on the diagnosis of infant crying. Some crying meant you had to do something right away; some could be ignored until the baby had cried itself out. Dr. Jian even had recordings of many of the possible crying styles to help them figure which was which. In fact, the advisers had done nearly everything that had had to be done for Myra and Ranjit. They had located for them the pretty little apartment in a gated development—four rooms, washer-dryer installed, access to the community swimming pool, its own plant-bedecked balcony that looked down on the city of Los Angeles from above, and, maybe most important of all in these times, its twenty-four-hour guard service to check every last person going in or out. The advisers had done more than that, too, helping them choose the best dry cleaners, pizza deliverers, banks, and car rental services (until the time when they might choose to buy a couple of cars for themselves, which time had not yet arrived).

They had even provided Myra with the names of three separate maid services, but Myra chose to decline them all. “The apartment’s not that big,” she told Ranjit. “What kind of housework is there to do? Vacuuming, cooking, laundry, dishes—just for the two of us there’s not that much work involved.”

Ranjit strongly agreed. “I’m sure you can handle it,” he said, which got him a slightly frosty look.

“I’m sure we can,” she corrected him. “Let’s see. I’d better be the cook, because I’m better at it than you are, so you can clean up afterward? That would be good. Laundry—you can operate a washer and dryer, can’t you? They’ve got all the instructions written out in their manuals, anyway. Changing the baby, feeding the baby—when you’re home we can take turns. When you’re not, I can do it myself.”