Prelude to Foundation - Isaac Asimov [125]
"No," said Amaryl. "I don't need that. One of you two use it." He squatted on the floor with a graceful downward motion.
Dors imitated the movement, sitting on the edge of Seldon's floorbased mattress, but Seldon dropped down rather clumsily, having to make use of his hands and unable, quite, to find a comfortable position for his legs.
Seldon said, "Well, young man, why do you want to see me?"
"Because you're a mathematician. You're the first mathematician I ever saw-close up-so I could touch him, you know."
"Mathematicians feel like anyone else."
"Not to me, Dr . . . . Dr. . . . Seldon?"
"That's my name."
Amaryl looked pleased. "I finally remembered. -You see, I want to be a mathematician too."
"Very good. What's stopping you?"
Amaryl suddenly frowned. "Are you serious?"
"I presume something is stopping you. Yes, I'm serious."
"What's stopping me is I'm a Dahlite, a heatsinker on Dahl. I don't have the money to get an education and I can't get the credits to get an education. A real education, I mean. All they taught me was to read and cipher and use a computer and then I knew enough to be a heatsinker. But I wanted more. So I taught myself."
"In some ways, that's the best kind of teaching. How did you do that?"
"I knew a librarian. She was willing to help me. She was a very nice woman and she showed me how to use computers for learning mathematics. And she set up a software system that would connect me with other libraries. I'd come on my days off and on mornings after my shift. Sometimes she'd lock me in her private room so I wouldn't be bothered by people coming in or she would let me in when the library was closed. She didn't know mathematics herself, but she helped me all she could. She was oldish, a widow lady. Maybe she thought of me as a kind of son or something. She didn't have children of her own."
(Maybe, thought Seldon briefly, there was some other emotion involved too, but he put the thought away. None of his business.)
"I liked number theory," said Amaryl. "I worked some things out from what I learned from the computer and from the bookfilms it used to teach me mathematics. I came up with some new things that weren't in the book-films."
Seldon raised his eyebrows. "That's interesting. Like what?"
"I've brought some of them to you. I've never showed them to anyone. The people around me-" He shrugged. "They'd either laugh or be annoyed. Once I tried to tell a girl I knew, but she just said I was weird and wouldn't see me anymore. Is it all right for me to show them to you?"
"Quite all right. Believe me."
Seldon held out his hand and after a brief hesitation, Amaryl handed him the bag he was carrying.
For a long time, Seldon looked over Amaryl's papers. The work was naive in the extreme, but he allowed no smile to cross his face. He followed the demonstrations, not one of which was new, of course-or even nearly new-or of any importance.
But that didn't matter.
Seldon looked up. "Did you do all of this yourself?"
Amaryl, looking more than half-frightened, nodded his head.
Seldon extracted several sheets. "What made you think of this?" His finger ran down a line of mathematical reasoning.
Amaryl looked it over, frowned, and thought about it. Then he explained his line of thinking.
Seldon listened and said, "Did you ever read a book by Anat Bigell?"
"On number theory?"
"The title was Mathematical Deduction. It wasn't about number theory, particularly."
Amaryl shook his head. "I never heard of him. I'm sorry."
"He worked out this theorem of yours three hundred years ago.'
Amaryl looked stricken. "I didn't know that."
"I'm sure you didn't. You did it more cleverly, though. It's not rigorous, but-"
"What do you mean, 'rigorous'?"
"It doesn't matter." Seldon put the papers back together in a sheaf, restored it to the bag, and said, "Make several copies of all this. Take one copy, have it dated by an official computer, and place it under computerized seal. My friend here, Mistress Venabili, can get you into Streeling University without tuition on some sort