The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [12]
“Wrong? No, of course not,” Gamini said at once, and then sighed. “Oh, hell,” he said. “As a matter of fact, Ranjit, there is something I need to tell you about. It’s a promise I made my father years ago.”
Ranjit was instantly suspicious. Nothing good could be coming of that sort of promise, told in that tone of voice. “What promise?”
“I promised the old man that I would apply to transfer to the London School of Economics after my first year here. He visited there years ago and he thought it was the best school in the world to learn about government.”
Indignation fought with surprise in Ranjit’s voice. “About government? In a school of economics?”
“That’s not its whole name, Ranjit. It’s really called the London School of Economics and Political Science.”
To that Ranjit could only respond with his all-purpose “Huh.” But then he added morosely, “So you’re going to apply to this foreign school, just so you can keep some promise you made to your father?”
Gamini coughed. “Not exactly. I mean, it’s not what I’m going to do. It’s what I already did. I actually applied years ago. It was my father’s idea. He said that the earlier I put my name in, the better my chances would be, and it looks like he was right. The thing is, Ranjit, they accepted me. We got the letter last week. I start at London as soon as the school year is finished here.”
And that was the second of the bad things that happened to the friendship of Ranjit Subramanian and Gamini Bandara, and by a long way the worse of the two.
Things did not get better for Ranjit. The biology teacher’s shipment of embalmed white mice finally arrived, and so the grisly business of dissection started again, and interesting subjects like chikungunya didn’t come up again. Even his math course, the one he had counted on to make the others worth enduring, was letting him down.
By the end of his first week at university, Ranjit had been pretty sure he already knew all the algebra he would ever require. Solving Fermat’s great puzzle would not depend on conic sections or summation notation. Still, he had breezed through the first few months; such things as finding the factoring of polynomials and the use of logarithmic functions were at least moderately entertaining. But by the third month it became clear that Dr. Christopher Dabare, the mathematics instructor, not only was not planning to teach anything relating to number theory, but didn’t really know a lot about it himself. And, worse, didn’t want either to learn or to help Ranjit to learn.
For a time Ranjit made do with the resources of the university library, but the books in the stacks were finite in number. When they ran out, Ranjit’s last recourse would have been some or all of the number theory journals, such as the Journal of Number Theory itself, from Ohio State University in the United States, or the Journal de Théorie des Nombres de Bordeaux, for which that hard-won sketchy knowledge of French might have been useful after all. But the university library did not subscribe to any of those journals, and Ranjit could not access them himself. Oh, Dr. Dabare could, just by permitting the use of his private faculty member password. But he wouldn’t do that.
As the end of the year approached, Ranjit needed a friend to unload his disappointments on. But he didn’t have that, either.
It was bad enough that Gamini was going nine thousand kilometers away. But to make it worse for Ranjit even those last few weeks were not going to be reserved for the two boys to share. Gamini’s family obligations, as it turned out, had to come first. First there was a weekend in Kandy, the “great city” that had once been the island’s capital. One branch of Gamini’s family had doggedly stayed on