Arthur Clarke - The Last Theorem

“But I thought they enjoyed the tricks,” Mevrouw Vorhulst said, frowning.

“I suppose they did—in a way—but they said it wasn’t what they had signed up for.” He moodily peeled an orange. “I guess it wasn’t, either. I just don’t know what they want.”

Myra patted his hand, accepting an orange wedge. “Well,” she said, “that’s why you did this seminar, isn’t it? To see if this format would work? And apparently it didn’t, so now you’ll try something else.” She wiped the orange juice from her lips, leaned forward, kissed the top of his head. “So let’s give Tashy her bath, and then you and I can go for a swim in the pool to cheer ourselves up.”

All of which they did. It did cheer them up, too. When you came right down to it, just about everything about living in the Vorhulst household was cheering. The staff was visibly proud of their distinguished guests and, of course, quite infatuated with Natasha as well. True, Myra was still spending an hour or two most days searching for a flat for the three of them to move into, but no such flat appeared. Some seemed promising at first encounter, but Mevrouw Vorhulst helpfully pointed out the hidden flaws: bad neighborhood, long commute to the university, rooms that were tiny or dark or both. Oh, there were a thousand flaws a flat might have that would make it wrong for the Subramanians, and Beatrix Vorhulst was assiduous at finding them. “Of course,” Myra told her husband in one night’s pillow talk, “she really just wants us to stay, you know. With Joris away I think she’s lonely.”

Ranjit drowsily said, “Huh.” Then, yawning, “You know, there could be worse things than just staying here.”

Which was inarguably true. Chez Vorhulst their every need was met without effort on their part, and the price was certainly right. Ranjit had pleaded to be allowed to reimburse the Vorhulst family for at least the out-of-pocket expenses involved in housing them. Mevrouw declined. Declined affectionately and fondly, but definitely declined. “Oh, well,” Ranjit said to Myra as they lounged beside the pool that evening. “If it gives her pleasure to spoil us rotten, why should we deprive her?”

If Ranjit had a wish, it was that the outside world would be as pleasing. It wasn’t. The example of Korea notwithstanding, the globe of Earth was still pockmarked with small wars and acts of violence. There had been a sort of hiccupy pause right after Silent Thunder, while combatants worldwide hesitated in case they were next. They weren’t. Silent Thunder was not immediately repeated, and within a month the guns and the bombs outside North Korea were back to normal.

From time to time Ranjit wished that Gamini Bandara might drop by to give him the inside word on what was going on. He didn’t. Probably too busy straightening things out in the former North Korea, Ranjit supposed. Indeed, a great deal was going on there. Power was flowing back into the country’s struck transmission lines. Farms that had been abandoned because the men who would have worked them had been drafted into the army were being tilled once more. Even the actual manufacturing of consumer goods was beginning to happen. There were even puzzling reports of elections being planned. Curious ones, that neither the Subramanians nor anyone they spoke to could quite figure out. Computers seemed to be heavily involved, but in precisely what way no one could say.

Still, Myra and Ranjit admitted to each other, in their nightly wrapped-in-each-other’s-arms dialogues, most events seemed to be going at least a little better, or at least a little less badly, than before Silent Thunder had deposed a regime. Most things, that is. Not necessarily including Ranjit’s academic career.

The trouble with Ranjit’s academic career was that he couldn’t seem to get it started. After the dismal response to his first seminar, he was determined not to suffer a similar fate for his second attempt.

But what should it be? After much thought, he decided this one would be a recapitulation, step by step, of the long story of his involvement, and ultimate success, with Fermat’s legacy. Dr. Davoodbhoy agreed to schedule it, remarking temperately that it was at least worth a try.

The students, however, didn’t agree. Apparently, word had gotten around of his poor teaching skills, and although a few did sign up, a considerably larger number asked questions about it, temporized, and finally gave it a pass. Most seemed to think that Ranjit had already pretty well covered that ground, in speeches and interviews, anyway. The seminar was canceled.

Ranjit considered the research option. There were, to start, the famous seven unsolved problems proposed by the Clay Mathematics Institute at the dawn of the twenty-first century—not only interesting problems in themselves but, through the generosity of the institute, each one coming with a million-dollar reward for a solution.

So Ranjit accessed the list and thoughtfully pondered it. Some were pretty abstruse, even for him. Still, there was the Hodge conjecture and the Poincaré, the Riemann hypothesis—no, no, at least some of them had been solved and the prize collected. And, of course, the biggest of all: P = NP.

No matter how much Ranjit pondered over them, they remained remote. He could not work up the feeling that had gripped him the first time he’d seen what Fermat had scribbled in his margin. Myra offered one theory: “Maybe you just aren’t fourteen anymore.”

But that wasn’t it. Fermat’s proof had been an entirely different matter. It hadn’t ever been presented to him as a problem that he should try to solve. One of the greatest minds in the history of mathematics had boasted that he had a proof for that final theorem. All Ranjit had to do was figure it out.

He tried to explain to Myra. “Did you ever hear of a man named George Dantzig? He was a graduate student at UC Berkeley in 1939. He came late to a class and saw two equations that the professor had written on the blackboard. Dantzig thought they were a homework assignment, so he copied them down and took them home and solved them.

“Only,” he told her, “they weren’t homework. The professor had put them up there as two problems in statistical mathematics that no one had been able to solve.”

Myra pursed her lips. “So what you’re saying,” she said, “is if Dantzig had known that, he might not have been able to solve them. Is that right?”

Ranjit shrugged. “Maybe.”

Myra availed herself of her husband’s favorite reply to puzzling remarks. “Huh,” she said.

Which made him grin. “Good,” he said. “So now let’s give Tashy a swimming lesson.”

No one who knew little Natasha de Soyza Subramanian thought for one instant that she was not an exceptionally bright child. Toilet trained at under a year, first steps a month later, first clearly articulated word—it was “Myra”—less than a month after that. And all of those things Tashy had accomplished on her own.

It wasn’t that her mother didn’t have things she yearned to teach her daughter. She had many of them, but Myra was too intelligent to try to teach them all at once. So she limited parental lessons for her less-than-two-year-old to two subjects. One was singing, or at least vocalizing sounds that matched the ones Myra sang for her. The other was how to swim.

From the edge of the Vorhulst pool, his feet dangling in the water, Ranjit beamed at the two of them. He had learned not to rush to rescue his child whenever she slipped under the surface for a moment. “She’ll always come up by herself,” Myra promised, as indeed Natasha always did. “And anyway, I’m right here.”

Later, when Tashy was dry and contentedly playing with her toes in her playpen beside the pool, while her mother frowned over the news reports on her portable screen, Ranjit peeked over Myra’s shoulder. Of course the news was bad. When had it not been?