The Last Theorem

  And when Ranjit stood up to get a better look, yes, it was the Vorhulst butler, moving a great deal faster than Ranjit had ever seen him move before, and holding a sheaf of papers clenched tightly in one hand. He seemed excited. Not just excited, impatient to get the pages to Ranjit, so that he was still five or six meters away when he called, “Sir! I think this may be what you’ve been waiting for!”

  And it was.

  Well, it sort of was. Well, what it was was a lengthy analysis of Ranjit’s paper, or actually five different analyses of the paper, each apparently written by a different (but unnamed) person, and what they’d done—in exacting and almost unreadable detail—was go over every last passage that Ranjit himself had already found to contain a mistake or an unclarity. Plus, they’d found no fewer than eleven other passages that needed cleaning up just as much but that Ranjit hadn’t caught in his own reading. There were forty-two sheets of paper in all, each densely written over with words and equations. As Ranjit quickly scanned each one and hurried to the next, he passed the sheets to Myra, his frown getting deeper with every page. “Holy gods,” he said at last, “what are they saying? Are they just telling me all the reasons they have for rejecting the bloody thing?”

  Myra was biting her lip as she reread the final page for the fourth or fifth time. Then a smile broke through. She handed the page back to Ranjit. “Dear,” she said—in the excitement of the moment neither of them noticed that she had never used that word to him before—“what’s the very last word at the end of the message?”

  Ranjit snatched the page from her. “What word?” he demanded. “You mean at the very bottom here? Where it says ‘Congratulations’?”

  “That is exactly what I mean,” she informed him, the smile now broad and tender and in every way exactly the best kind of smile he could ever have wished for from Myra de Soyza. “Have you ever heard of anyone being congratulated for a failure? They’re publishing your paper, Ranjit! They think you’ve finally done it!”

  19

  FAME

  “As soon as that magazine prints your article, you’re going to be famous. Really famous!” Beatrix Vorhulst declared as soon as Ranjit was back in her house that night.

  She was wrong, though. It didn’t take that long. Days before the magazine’s printing presses began to turn out the hundreds of thousands of copies that would bring Ranjit’s fame to the world, the fame had already arrived. Someone—perhaps someone on Nature’s staff, or among their referees—had leaked the story and so reporters began to call. First it was the BBC, then someone from The New York Times, and then it was everybody, all of them wanting Ranjit to explain just what it was that Monsieur Fermat had been playing at, and why it had taken all this time to prove he’d been right.

  All that was easy enough for Ranjit to answer. What was harder was what to say when the callers asked about the rumor that he’d been jailed for something or other, too, but there De Saram was a help. “Simply tell them that your attorney has instructed you not to discuss any of that because there is a suit pending. I’ll make that true by bringing an action on your behalf against the cruise line.”

  “But I don’t want to take their money,” Ranjit objected.

  “Don’t worry. You won’t get any. I’ll make sure of that, but that’s a sufficient reason for anybody to refuse to answer any question…since Dr. Bandara has impressed on me that that whole matter is not to be discussed.”

  That stratagem worked fine, but did nothing to decrease the number of people who wanted him to sit down in a quiet one-on-one with them—that is, with them and their team of anything up to a dozen recording technicians—and tell them all about this Fermat person and why he had behaved so peculiarly. For that, explained De Saram when Ranjit again turned to him for help, the only way to temper their curiosity about him was to go public. That is, to have a press conference and tell the whole story at once to everyone who wanted to hear.

  They were sitting by the Vorhulsts’ pool, De Saram and Ranjit and Myra de Soyza and Beatrix Vorhulst herself; trips to the de Soyza beach house were no longer much fun for Ranjit and Myra, because the press pests had found them there, so Myra now came to swim with Ranjit in the pool. “I’ve spoken to Dr. Bandara about it,” De Saram said, inching his chair closer to the shade of the great pool umbrella. “He is confident the university will make a space available for you to hold your press conference. Indeed, he says it would be an honor for the school.”

  Ranjit said uncomfortably, “What would I say?”

  “You’ll tell them what you did,” De Saram answered. “Leaving out, of course, all the specifics that Dr. Bandara feels must be kept secure.” He set his cup down and smiled at Mevrouw Vorhulst. “No, no more tea, thank you. I need to get back to the office. And I’ll find my way out.”

  Mevrouw Vorhulst let him shake her hand, but didn’t protest as he left. “Actually,” she observed to Ranjit and Myra, “that sounds like an excellent idea. I’d love to hear that talk.” Then, turning to Myra, she said, “Dear, do you remember the room we used to put you to sleep in when your parents were going to be really late? It’s still there, right next to Ranjit’s. If you’d like to use it from time to time—or as often as you like—it’s yours.”

  So when he went to sleep that night, Ranjit had to count that a good day. He had very little experience in public speaking, and that worried him a bit. But right there was Myra’s head on the pillow next to his own, and, all in all, things seemed to be going very well for him at last.

  The auditorium that the university donated for Ranjit’s press conference was quite big, and needed to be. Every one of its 4,350 seats was filled, and not just with newspeople. There were several hundred of those, but it seemed half of Sri Lanka had decided it wanted to be there as well. Besides the lucky 4,350, an additional 1,000, nearly, watched on closed-circuit television in another campus hall, leaving quite a few extremely important (or so self-described) other people consumed with indignation over having to watch the event on (ugh!) broadcast television.

  To Ranjit Subramanian, peering out at them through a peephole in the curtain, they looked like a great many people. It wasn’t just the number of the human beings in the room, either. It was the particular human beings they were! The president of Sri Lanka was seated in the front row. Two or three possible candidates for the next election were there, and so was the Vorhulst family, and—believe it or not!—so was Ranjit’s old math professor, not having the grace even to look as embarrassed as he should have felt but instead smiling and nodding to everyone in a less favored seat than his.

  As the curtain began to rise, the man sitting in the armchair next to Ranjit’s gave him a reassuring look. “You’ll be fine,” said the august Dr. Dhatusena Bandara, unexpectedly having flown in from his hush-hush UN job just to introduce Ranjit. “I wish Gamini could have been here, and so does he, but he’s busy recruiting in Nepal,” he added, and then the curtain was up and the lights were on him, and—without explaining just what it was that Gamini had to go to Nepal to recruit—Dr. Bandara moved to the lectern.

  And then, sooner thereafter than Ranjit would have imagined possible, it was he who was at the lectern, and every pair of hands in that hall began to clap.

  Ranjit waited patiently for the sound to stop. When it didn’t seem to be stopping, he cleared his throat. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you all.” And then, as it abated only slightly, he began:

  “The man who presented this problem to me—well, to the world—was named Fermat, an advocate, or lawyer, in France a few centuries ago—”

  By the time he got to the famous jotting in the margin of a page of Diophantus the applause had subsided, and the audience was intent. They weren’t quiet throughout the talk. They laughed when he commented that a lot of trouble could have been saved if the book Fermat had been reading had had larger margins. And they applauded again, though not in quite as unruly a fashion, as he described each step in his growing comprehension of what Fermat had been talking
about. Then, when he described Sophie Germain’s work and how that turned out to be the key at last, they applauded a lot. And kept on doing so at every opportunity until Ranjit reached the moment when he had become pretty sure, or at least pretty nearly sure, that he had by-God actually completed a defensible proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem.

  He stopped, smiled, and shook his head at them. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to memorize a five-page mathematical proof?” he asked. “I didn’t have anything to write with, you see. I couldn’t write it out. All I could do was go over it, over and over again, repeating each little step, I don’t know, hundreds of times, or thousands…. And then when I was rescued, all I could think of was getting to a computer and getting it all down at once….

  “And I did,” Ranjit finished, and let them clap the skin off their silly hands at that until they got tired of it. Which took a long time, until he managed to cut in again to say, “And so Gamini Bandara, my oldest and dearest friend, is one of the people I have to thank, and so is his father, Dr. Dhatusena Bandara.” He gestured toward the older man, who politely accepted his share of applause. “And there are two other persons I owe. One is my late father, Ganesh Subramanian of the Tiru Koneswaram temple in Trincomalee. The other person is hiding backstage here, but she is the one who first suggested to me that the clue to finding out what Fermat had discovered lay in looking at the mathematical procedures known to have been in use at around that time, and trying to figure out what other procedures Fermat might have deduced from them. I don’t know what I might have done without her, and I don’t intend to take that chance again. So come out here, Dr. Myra de Soyza, and take my hand—”

  Which she did, and though Ranjit was still speaking when she appeared, it was hard to make out just what he was saying. Myra got easily the biggest hand of anyone other than Ranjit himself, perhaps because the audience could read what was written all over his face when he spoke of her, perhaps only because she was definitely the best-looking.

  Ranjit might have let her applause go on forever, but Myra was shaking her head. “Thank you,” she called, “but let’s hear the rest of what Ranjit has to say.” She stepped back, and sat down in Ranjit’s own chair to listen.

  He turned back to the crowd. “That’s the end of what I wanted to say,” he informed them, “but I promised I would take a few questions….”

  And then it was over, and he had successfully ducked all the questions about where he had been jailed and why. They were back in the Vorhulst residence, along with a pared-to-the-bone residue of guests from the university hall. That included nearly all of the first two rows of the auditorium and a scattering of others, as well as a hired-for-the-occasion staff of servants to pass around the drinks and snacks. (That was so the actual Vorhulst household staff, each one of whom felt personally responsible for some part of the event, could attend as guests.) Ranjit and Myra sat side by side, holding hands, and quite remarkably happy to be there. All of the guests were just as happy, so that the champagne the hired staff was passing out was very nearly superfluous.

  Dr. Bandara, of course, was already on his way back to New York in his own BAB-2200, but before he’d left, he had taken Ranjit aside for a few words. “You’ll be wanting a job, of course,” he began, and Ranjit nodded.

  “Gamini said something about going to work with him,” Ranjit said.

  Dhatusena Bandara said, “And I hope that will happen, but I’m afraid not right away. Meanwhile, I understand the university is prepared to offer you a faculty position, teaching a few advanced classes and doing your own research, if you wish.”

  “But I’m not a professor! I haven’t even graduated!”

  Dr. Bandara said patiently, “A professor is just a person the university has hired in that grade. And don’t worry about degrees you may lack. I expect people will be offering you all the degrees you could wish for.”

  All of this, naturally, Ranjit passed on to Myra. But Beatrix Vorhulst, sitting on the other side of her, was looking dubious. “You know,” she said, “I’m not sure you even need a job. Look at these.” She held up a sheaf of printouts, vetted by her personal secretary, who was now supplemented by an assistant just to handle the traffic Ranjit was generating. “People want you to come and speak to them, or to be interviewed, or just to say that you drink their beer or wear their shirts. And they’re willing to pay for it! If you’ll wear their track shoes, these people will give you a good many American dollars. And if you’ll let them interview you, 60 Minutes will pay, too. Harvard University will pay you to come and talk to them—they don’t say how much, but I understand they’re rich.”

  “Whoa,” said Myra, laughing. “Let the poor man catch his breath.”

  But the secretary-screener was waving another piece of paper just off the printer at Mevrouw, who glanced at it, bit her lip, and said, “Well, this one isn’t about money, but I think you’ll want to see it, Ranjit. And you, too, Myra.”

  “Me?” asked Myra. “Why me?”

  But when it had been passed to Ranjit, who looked thunderstruck but handed it over to her, Myra quickly understood why. The note was from the old monk at his father’s former temple, and what it said was:

  Your father would be even more proud of you, and as delighted as we all are, that you are going to marry. Please don’t delay too long! You don’t want to wait until the unlucky months of Aashad, Bhadrapad, or Shunya. And of course, please, not on a Tuesday or a Saturday.

  Myra looked up at Ranjit, who was staring in confusion at her. “Did I say anything about getting married?” he asked.

  This brought about a faint blush. “Well, you did say some nice things about me,” she admitted.

  “I have no recollection of saying anything like that,” he said. “Must have been my subconscious.” And, taking a deep breath, he said, “Which proves that my subconscious is smarter than I am. So what about it, Myra? Will you?”

  “Of course I will,” she said, as though that had been the dumbest question she had ever heard. And that was that.

  Later, when the two of them played news clips of the speech out of curiosity, they found that what he had said was simply the obvious truism that he could not imagine spending the rest of his life without her…but that was enough, and anyway, by then they were already thoroughly married.

  Was everything perfect for the loving pair?

  Well, pretty close. The one big question that had to be settled was not about whether they should get married, because there wasn’t the slightest doubt about that, or even when, because the answer to that was as soon as could be. The real questions were where, and by whom. For a time it looked like that was easily answered, too, because the Vorhulsts and the Bandaras and the de Soyzas among them had access to every church in the city of Colombo, not to mention every registrar’s office, and were well along the process of eliminating the less attractive of them when Myra noticed the faraway look in Ranjit’s eyes.

  When she asked, he shrugged it off. “Nothing, really,” he said. “No. Nothing at all.”

  But, since Myra did not give up easily, at last he relented and showed her yet another text from the old monk: “Your father would have been so happy to see you marry in his temple.”

  Myra read it twice and then smiled. “What the hell,” she said. “I don’t think the presbytery of Ceylon is going to care. I’ll tell everybody.”

  And, of course, “everybody” understood at once that what Ranjit wanted was what Myra would enforce, and so it was. If there was a little disappointment in some circles in Colombo, there was wild delight among others in Trincomalee. The old monk quickly understood that it would have to be a stripped-down ceremony. He wistfully considered what a wonderful Paalikali Thalippu they could have had for the bride—if they could have had them at all—and how the groom’s Janavasanam arrival at the temple would have been decorated with the finest fruits and flowers. Well, that would have pretty nearly amounted to a full-scale parade, wouldn’t it? And anything like that would have
attracted vast attention just when the couple wanted to be ignored. So no Paalikali Thalippu and no Janavasanam, though the monk did make sure that the bride’s party carried the requisite supply of parupputenga and other sweetmeats to give to the groom.

  The good part of the stripped-downness of the wedding was that it could all be done quite quickly, for which reason it was less than a week before the bride and the groom were in Trincomalee—well, in hiding in Trincomalee, to be exact, because they tried to avoid showing their instantly recognizable faces in public.

  For that reason there were few people at the ceremony, as Ranjit spoke the words the old monk had written out for him and Myra allowed the monk to tie around her wrist the holy thread that would ward off evil, with the endless flowers all over the room and the unending blare of the Naathaswaram horns and the melam drums. Then it was all over and the two of them, now indissolubly wed, got back into their police car for the long ride back to the Vorhulst estate. “Long life!” called the monks as they left, and indeed Ranjit and Myra felt confident that that was what lay ahead of them.

  However, other persons, farther away, had quite different expectations.

  Those persons included the One Point Fives, the designated assassins for the Grand Galactics. They were executing their order to clean up the mess on Planet 3 of that trivial yellow star, and their armada was progressing on its flight. Since their vessels were material, they could not go faster than light speed. There would be many years of transit time, followed by a few days of actual extermination, after which the newlyweds, and every other human being anywhere, would be dead.

  It might not be a very long life after all.

  20

  MARRIAGE

  Now that he was everything that he had dared to dream of being, namely, free, famous, and married to Myra de Soyza, it seemed to Ranjit that his personal world just kept getting better and better. There was, however, a larger perspective that kept intruding itself on his private musings, and in many ways that wasn’t good at all.