Arthur Clarke - The Last Theorem

And so it went.

There was a personal item about to come up on the bad-news list at the next day’s lunch, too.

Ranjit was not immediately aware of that. When he caught his first sight of Gamini, there ahead of him and skeptically investigating what the cafeteria rather charitably called their special of the day, all he felt was the pleasure of seeing his friend again. But as he was seating himself, he became aware of the expression on Gamini’s face. “Is something wrong?” Ranjit demanded.

“Wrong? No, of course not,” Gamini said at once, and then sighed. “Oh, hell,” he said. “As a matter of fact, Ranjit, there is something I need to tell you about. It’s a promise I made my father years ago.”

Ranjit was instantly suspicious. Nothing good could be coming of that sort of promise, told in that tone of voice. “What promise?”

“I promised the old man that I would apply to transfer to the London School of Economics after my first year here. He visited there years ago and he thought it was the best school in the world to learn about government.”

Indignation fought with surprise in Ranjit’s voice. “About government? In a school of economics?”

“That’s not its whole name, Ranjit. It’s really called the London School of Economics and Political Science.”

To that Ranjit could only respond with his all-purpose “Huh.” But then he added morosely, “So you’re going to apply to this foreign school, just so you can keep some promise you made to your father?”

Gamini coughed. “Not exactly. I mean, it’s not what I’m going to do. It’s what I already did. I actually applied years ago. It was my father’s idea. He said that the earlier I put my name in, the better my chances would be, and it looks like he was right. The thing is, Ranjit, they accepted me. We got the letter last week. I start at London as soon as the school year is finished here.”

And that was the second of the bad things that happened to the friendship of Ranjit Subramanian and Gamini Bandara, and by a long way the worse of the two.

Things did not get better for Ranjit. The biology teacher’s shipment of embalmed white mice finally arrived, and so the grisly business of dissection started again, and interesting subjects like chikungunya didn’t come up again. Even his math course, the one he had counted on to make the others worth enduring, was letting him down.

By the end of his first week at university, Ranjit had been pretty sure he already knew all the algebra he would ever require. Solving Fermat’s great puzzle would not depend on conic sections or summation notation. Still, he had breezed through the first few months; such things as finding the factoring of polynomials and the use of logarithmic functions were at least moderately entertaining. But by the third month it became clear that Dr. Christopher Dabare, the mathematics instructor, not only was not planning to teach anything relating to number theory, but didn’t really know a lot about it himself. And, worse, didn’t want either to learn or to help Ranjit to learn.

For a time Ranjit made do with the resources of the university library, but the books in the stacks were finite in number. When they ran out, Ranjit’s last recourse would have been some or all of the number theory journals, such as the Journal of Number Theory itself, from Ohio State University in the United States, or the Journal de Théorie des Nombres de Bordeaux, for which that hard-won sketchy knowledge of French might have been useful after all. But the university library did not subscribe to any of those journals, and Ranjit could not access them himself. Oh, Dr. Dabare could, just by permitting the use of his private faculty member password. But he wouldn’t do that.

As the end of the year approached, Ranjit needed a friend to unload his disappointments on. But he didn’t have that, either.

It was bad enough that Gamini was going nine thousand kilometers away. But to make it worse for Ranjit even those last few weeks were not going to be reserved for the two boys to share. Gamini’s family obligations, as it turned out, had to come first. First there was a weekend in Kandy, the “great city” that had once been the island’s capital. One branch of Gamini’s family had doggedly stayed on in what had been the family home before the mighty “Great Attractor” that was the bustling city of Colombo had drawn the intellectual, the powerful, and even the merely ambitious to where power now resided. Then another weekend to Ratnapura, where a cousin supervised the family’s interests in the precious stone mines; still another to where Gamini’s ancient grandmother ruled their cinnamon plantations. And even when he was still in the city, Gamini had duty calls to make, and no realistic chance of bringing Ranjit along with him when he made them.

While Ranjit himself had nothing at all to do…except to attend his boring classes in the uninteresting subjects that he didn’t care about in the first place. And then nearer worries appeared.

It happened at the end of the sociology class Ranjit had never liked. The teacher, whom Ranjit had liked even less, was a Dr. Mendis, and as Ranjit was about to leave, Mendis was standing in the doorway, holding the black-covered notebook he entered grades into. “I’ve just been going over the grades from last week’s exam,” he told Ranjit. “Yours was unsatisfactory.”

That wasn’t surprising to Ranjit. “Sorry, sir,” he said absently, peering after his rapidly disappearing classmates. “I’ll try to do better,” he added, poised to follow them.

But Dr. Mendis wasn’t through with him. “If you remember,” he said, “at the beginning of term I explained to the class how your final grade would be calculated. It is made up of the midterm examination, the spot quizzes given out from time to time, your classroom attendance and participation, and the final exam, in the proportion of 25 percent, 20 percent, 25 percent, and 30 percent. I must now inform you that, although you did do reasonably well on the midterm, your performance in the classroom and the spot quizzes is so far below an acceptable standard that you would have to get at least 80 percent on the final examination to get a low C for the course. I truthfully don’t think you are capable of that.” He studied the entries in his book for a moment, and then nodded and snapped it shut. “So what I suggest is that you consider taking an Incomplete for the course.” He raised a hand as though to ward off objections from Ranjit, although Ranjit had not been planning any. “I am aware, of course, that that will naturally cause a problem with your hopes for a continuing scholarship. But it would be better than an outright failure, would it not?”

It would, Ranjit was forced to agree—but not out loud, because he didn’t want to give Dr. Mendis the satisfaction. By the time he got out of the classroom, the one fellow student left in the hall was a Burgher girl, nice enough looking, some years older than himself. Ranjit was aware that she had been in the sociology class with him, but to him she had been simply another item in the lecture hall’s furnishings. He hadn’t had much to do in his life with Burghers, the name given to that small fraction of the Sri Lankan population who traced a significant part of their ancestry to one or another of the old European colonizers. Particularly with the female ones.

This particular female Burgher was talking on a cell phone, but closed it up as he approached. “Mr. Subramanian?” she said.

Ranjit stopped, in no mood for casual conversation. “Yes?” he barked.

She did not seem to take offense at his tone. “My name is Myra de Soyza. I heard what Dr. Mendis was saying to you. Are you going to do what he said and take an Incomplete?”