Arthur Clarke - The Last Theorem

But when Myra raised the question with the next doctor, he just said piously, “We can always hope, Dr. de Soyza.”

And another said even more piously, “There are times when we just can’t question God’s will.”

What no one said was, “Here are certain specific things you can do to help Robert improve.”

If there were such things, the medical profession didn’t seem to know what they were. And all this “progress” in understanding Robert’s condition had been bought at the price of some dozens of unpleasant episodes. Like strapping Robert to a gurney while they x-rayed his head. Or shaving his hair so they could wrap his skull with sticky magnetic tape. Or pinning him to a wheeled stretcher that fed him centimeter by centimeter into an MRI machine…all of which produced the effect that young Robert Subramanian, who had never been afraid of anything in his little life, began to cry as soon as anyone wearing white came anywhere near him.

There was one useful thing the medical profession had done, though. They had produced pharmaceuticals that controlled the falling down—they called it “petit mal,” to distinguish it from the grand mal of epilepsy, which it was not. He didn’t fall down anymore. But the doctors didn’t have any pills to make Robert as smart as his quite ordinary playmates.

Then came the morning when there was a knock on the door. And when Ranjit, getting ready to bike to his office at the university, opened it, the man who was standing there was Gamini. “I would have called to see if I could come over, Ranj,” he said, “but I was afraid you’d say no.”

Ranjit’s answer was to sweep him up in a thoroughgoing hug. “You are such a fool,” he told his oldest and best friend. “I thought it was the other way around. I thought you were mad at us for turning your offer down so long ago.”

Released, Gamini gave him a rueful grin. “Actually,” he said, “I’m not so sure you were altogether wrong. Can I come in?”

Of course Gamini Bandara could come in, where he got hugs from Myra and little Robert as well. Robert got the most attention, because Gamini had never seen him before, but then Robert went off with the cook to play with his jigsaw puzzles, and the grown-ups settled down on the veranda. “I didn’t see Tashy,” Gamini remarked, accepting a cup of tea.

“She’s out sailing,” Ranjit informed him. “She does a lot of it—says it’s practice for a big race she plans to be in. But what brings you to Lanka?”

Gamini pursed his lips. “You know Sri Lanka’s got a presidential election coming up? My father’s planning to resign from the Pax per Fidem board and come back to run. He’s hoping that if he gets elected, he can bring Sri Lanka into the compact.”

Ranjit looked genuinely pleased. “More power to him for that! He’d make a great president.” He paused, and Myra said what Ranjit had been unwilling to.

“You look doubtful,” she observed. “Is there a problem?”

“You bet there is,” Gamini told her. “It’s Cuba.”

He didn’t really need to say more, because naturally Myra and Ranjit had been following the events there. Cuba had been on the verge of a Pax per Fidem plebiscite of its own.

It had seemed pretty certain to pass, too. Cuba had been spared the usual third world horrors. Fidel Castro had caused much harm, but he had done a certain amount of good along the way—Cuba had an educated population; a copious supply of well-trained doctors, nurses, and other health professionals; an expert corps of pest-control people. And not a single Cuban dying of starvation in more than half a century.

But the other thing Castro had done was to inflame partisan passions. Some of the sons and grandsons—and daughters!—of the Cubans who had gone off to fight and die for the world revolution in a dozen different countries had not forgotten. Even a few of the ancient fighters themselves survived, though now at least in their eighties and more, but quite capable of pulling a trigger or setting the fuse on a bomb. How many of these were there? Not enough to put the verdict of the plebiscite in doubt, anyway. When the votes were counted, disarmament, peace, and a new constitution had achieved better than 80 percent of the ballots cast. But twelve of Pax per Fidem’s workers had been shot at, nine of them had been hit—the old fighters for socialism knew how to handle a gun—and two of the wounded had died.

“Well,” Ranjit said after a moment, “yes, tragic, but what does it have to do with Sri Lanka?”

“It has to do with America,” Gamini said angrily. “And Russia and China, too, because they do nothing. But it’s America who wants to send in about six companies of U.S. troops. Troops! With rapid-fire weapons and, I’m pretty sure, even tanks! When the whole point of Pax per Fidem is that we never use lethal force!”

Everyone was silent for a moment. Then, “I see,” Myra said, and stopped there.

It was Ranjit who said: “Go ahead, Myra. You’ve got the right. Say ‘I told you so.’”

Natasha Subramanian was practicing wind curls on the shallow seas near her parents’ home when she saw the odd-looking yellow car. It was coming down one of the streets that led to the beach, hesitating at each intersection. When it turned off that one, the street it turned onto was the one that the Subramanian home was on. From her position standing on her windsurf board she couldn’t see the house itself, but she could see the next street over clearly enough. The car didn’t appear there. So it had to have stopped at one of the houses on their block, and Natasha couldn’t help wondering if it had been theirs.

Since she was also aware that it was getting close to time for lunch, that made it a good time to come ashore. When she did, she saw that the yellow car was indeed parked in her driveway…but in the time it had taken her to get home, the car had suffered a peculiar change. Most of the front seat, including the space for the driver, was gone. Then, when she entered her kitchen, there was an old, old man in monks’ robes sitting at their table, watching Robert solve one of his jigsaw puzzles. Next to him stood the missing fraction of the car, balanced on two rubber-tired wheels and emitting a gentle hum.

It had been years since Natasha had seen the old monk, but she knew him at once. “You’re Surash, who used to change my father’s diapers. I thought you were dying,” she said.

Her mother gave her a sharp look, but Surash only smiled and patted her head. “I was indeed dying,” he said. “I still am, and so are we all, but I’m not housebound anymore. Not since they gave me this.” He dislodged Robert and pointed to the wheeled thing behind his chair. “I have promised to show your parents how it works. Come with us, Natasha.”

When Surash made the transition from his chair at the table to the seat of his two-wheeled contraption, Natasha could see how frail and tottery he really was. But once in the seat he turned the vehicle’s steering rod with a firm hand and wheeled it briskly through the door that her father had hurriedly opened for him.

When Surash backed his two-wheeler into the gap at the front of the waiting car, there were some quick sounds of turning gears. The main section of the car extruded strong grippers that locked the two-wheeled chair in place. A muted whistling sound came from the engine, and a cloud of pure white began to come out of the exhaust pipe at the rear. “Put your finger in it if you wish,” Surash called. “All I burn in this thing, you see, is simple hydrogen.”

“We know about hydrogen-fueled cars,” Ranjit informed him.

The old monk nodded benignly. “But do you know about this?” he asked, and demonstrated how, once his two-wheeled personal chariot was attached, the whole thing became a road-drivable car that could take him in comfort wherever he might choose to go.