The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [103]
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?
“It would be so nice,” he said thoughtfully, “if something nice happened.” And then something did.
Its name was Joris Vorhulst. When Ranjit walked in the door after another day of sitting in his little university office and trying to figure out how to earn his salary, he heard sounds of laughter. The ladylike elderly chuckle he quickly identified as Mevrouw Vorhulst, the less restrained giggles were his own dear wife, while the baritone and definitely male one was—
Ranjit very nearly ran the dozen meters to where they were gathered on the sunporch. “Joris!” he cried. “I mean, Dr. Vorhulst! I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you!”
As soon as he said it, he realized how true it was. For days he had been wishing for someone like his old Astronomy 101 teacher—no, not someone like him! That specific person! That Joris Vorhulst who had made his astronomy course the only class in Ranjit’s experience that he’d yearned to have taken sooner. And who—maybe—could help Ranjit solve his own teaching problems.
The first thing to be settled was that it wasn’t to be “Dr. Vorhulst” anymore. “After all,” he said, “it’s one full professor talking to another now, even if I’m on extended leave to work on the Skyhook.”
Which, of course, demanded that Vorhulst give everyone a report on just how the space ladder was getting along. Very well, he assured them. “We’ve already begun deploying the micron-size cable. Once we get a decent start on that, we’ll start doubling up, and then things will really begin to move because we’ll be able to start using the ladder itself to lift material to LEO instead of all those damn rockets…. Not,” he added quickly, “that they’re not doing a hell of a job. It moves fast because the big boys are all moving it. Russia, China, America—they’ve just about turned their whole space programs over to getting the ladder going. I’ve been checking all their launch sites for two months now.” He held out his glass for a refill. “And they’ve already got started on the ground terminal down on the southeast coast. That’s why I’m in Lanka today; I’ve got to go down there and prepare a report for the three presidents.”
“I’d love to see that myself,” Ranjit said wistfully.
“Sure you would. So would anybody from Astronomy 101, I hope, but don’t go just yet. What’s there now is a couple hundred pieces of earthmoving machinery, all going at once, and I think it’s up to nearly three thousand construction workers getting in one another’s way. Give it a few months and we’ll go down for a visit together. Anyway, it’s all top secret right now—I think the Americans are afraid the Bolivians or the Easter Islanders or somebody will steal their ideas and build a skyhook of their own. You would need really top security clearances to get in.”
Ranjit was about to assure his old teacher that he had the best security clearances a human being could possess, when he stopped himself, wondering if they had all been revoked. And by then Vorhulst was saying, “And what about you, Ranjit? Outside of finding the Fermat