The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [106]
Ranjit didn’t let him finish. “Whatever you’re asking,” he said, “the answer is yes. After all, you’ve just saved my life!”
And “yes” it was…and years later Ranjit considered with wonder how that simple single word had changed his life.
Some light-years away the lives of the 140,000 One Point Fives in the Earth-depopulation fleet were also on the verge of a major change.
By the calculations of their Machine-Stored navigators the flotilla was within thirteen Earth years of their assault on the doomed human race. That was a meaningful point for the One Point Fives. It meant it was time for an important action to be taken.
So all over the fleet, in every corner of every ship, specially trained technical crews were checking every instrument or machine that was working, and turning most of them off. Basic drive, off; that meant the fleet was now simply drifting toward Earth—though already at such a great velocity that, under Einstein’s laws, further acceleration was very difficult and very nearly pointless. Airborne waste filters: off. So beginning at once the exhalations of the One Point Fives themselves would begin to contaminate the air they breathed. Power pack chargers, off. Search beams, off. The instruments that monitored the running of all the machinery that couldn’t be turned off even briefly—off.
Suddenly the armada of the One Point Fives was no longer a hard-driving fleet of warcraft aiming at a point of conflict; it had suddenly become a collection of derelicts, almost powerless and approaching the point where one ship might drift into another. The fleet could not maintain that condition for long.
The One Point Fives, however, didn’t need it to be for long. As soon as the last crew reported that everything that could be shut down was shut down, the One Point Fives began slipping out of the last vestiges of their protective armor and life supports. Then began the wildest orgy of sexual activity any One Point Five could imagine.
For about an hour.
Then the pallid creatures that were the organic One Point Fives hurriedly clambered back into their armor. In each ship the technical crews hastily retraced their steps, turning back on everything they had turned off, and the orgy was over.
Why did the One Point Fives do that?
For a reason that most human beings would have understood very easily. One Point Fives, whether armored or stripped to their wasted little organic bodies, did not look in the least like any humans, but they had some traits in common. No One Point Five wanted to die without leaving a live descendant to take his place. In the struggle that lay ahead there was a definite and nonzero chance that some or all of them would die. So in that collective mating, many—with luck, maybe most—of the females would become pregnant. The fifteen Earth years before that final conflict was the minimum time it would take for them to deliver their wretched little newborns to the nursery machines, and then for the infants to grow and mature to the stage of puberty.
With that knowledge, their parents could afford to launch the attack.
Of course, no human being knew this, so all nine billion of them went right on with their usual daily tasks, none of them knowing that, from that day forward, their own newborns could only expect to experience the first inklings of sexual maturity before being wiped from the face of the earth.
29
BURGEONING HOPES
In the event, Ranjit did not begin his next seminar with Goldbach’s conjecture. Myra had a different suggestion, and he had learned to listen to Myra.
The first day he faced the class, he spent most of the opening hour on housekeeping matters—answering questions on his testing and grading policies, announcing what days of class would be skipped for higher-echelon reasons, getting to begin to know some of the students. Then he asked, “How many of you know what a prime number is?”
Nearly every hand in the room went up. Half a dozen of the students didn’t wait to be recognized but called out one version or another of the definition: a number that can be