The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [105]
Ranjit certainly would, and Joris had the fixings all ready for them. As he accepted the glass, Ranjit nodded toward the moon, nearly full, bright enough, almost, to read by. “Do you really think you’ll be able to do that?” he asked.
“I don’t think it; I guarantee it,” Vorhulst promised. “Maybe it’ll take a little longer for your average man in the street to buy a ticket. Not me. I’m an executive in the program, and rank has its privileges.” He took note of a faintly quizzical expression on Ranjit’s face. “What is it? You never expected me to take advantage of a position to get something I wanted? Well, for most things I wouldn’t. But space travel is special. If the only way to get to the moon would be by robbing banks to finance the trip, I’d rob banks.”
Ranjit shook his head. “I wish I liked my job as much as you like yours,” he said, feeling a tiny stab of what he could recognize only as jealousy.
Dr. Vorhulst gave his former student a considering look. “Have a refill,” he offered. And then, while he was mixing one, he said, “And while we’re here, how would you like to tell me how you and the university are getting along?”
Ranjit would have, of course, liked nothing better. It didn’t take long for him to unload his problems onto his former teacher, and not as long as that for Joris Vorhulst to get the picture. “So,” he said thoughtfully, again replenishing their glasses, “let’s get back to basics. You don’t have any trouble filling a class, do you?”
Ranjit shook his head. “For the first seminar, they had a waiting list thirty or forty people long that couldn’t get in.”
“So then, why do people sign up for a class with you? It isn’t because you’re a great teacher—even if you were, they wouldn’t have had any chance to find that out. It isn’t because abstruse mathematics has suddenly got popular. No, Ranjit, the thing that pulls them in is you yourself, and how you plugged away at that problem for all those years. Why don’t you teach them to do as you did?”
“Tried it,” Ranjit said glumly. “They said they’d heard me lecture on that already. They wanted something new.”
“All right,” Joris said, “then why don’t you show how someone else solved a problem like that, step by step….”
Ranjit looked at him with dawning hope. “Huh,” he said. “Yes, maybe. I know a lot about the way Sophie Germain tried to do Fermat herself—didn’t succeed, of course, except partially.”
“Fine,” Joris said with satisfaction, but Ranjit was still thinking.
“Or, wait a minute,” he was saying, suddenly excited, “do you know what I could do? I could take one of the grand old problems that nobody has solved—say, Euler’s reworking of the Goldbach conjecture; you can explain that in words of one syllable that anybody can understand, though nobody’s ever been able to produce a proof. What Goldbach proposed—”
Joris’s hand was raised. “Please don’t explain this Goldbach conjecture to me. But, yes, that sounds good. You could do it as a sort of class project. Everybody working on it together, the students and you as well. Who knows? Maybe you could even solve the thing!”
That produced an actual laugh from Ranjit. “That would be the day! But it doesn’t matter; the students would at least get a feeling of what it takes to solve a big problem, and that ought to hold their interest.” He nodded to himself, pleased. “I’ll try it! But it’s getting late and you have to get up in the morning, so thanks, but let’s call it a night.”
“We’d better do that before my mother catches me still up,” Vorhulst agreed. “But there’s something else I wanted to talk to you about, Ranjit.”
Ranjit, on the point of getting up to leave, paused with his hands on the arms of his chair, ready to lift. “Oh?”
“I’ve been thinking about that committee you were invited to go to work for at old Peace Through Transparency. It occurs to me that maybe we need something like it for the ladder. Famous people keeping an eye on what we’re doing and now and then telling the world about it. Famous people like you, Ranjit. Do you think you might