The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [124]
Since she was also aware that it was getting close to time for lunch, that made it a good time to come ashore. When she did, she saw that the yellow car was indeed parked in her driveway…but in the time it had taken her to get home, the car had suffered a peculiar change. Most of the front seat, including the space for the driver, was gone. Then, when she entered her kitchen, there was an old, old man in monks’ robes sitting at their table, watching Robert solve one of his jigsaw puzzles. Next to him stood the missing fraction of the car, balanced on two rubber-tired wheels and emitting a gentle hum.
It had been years since Natasha had seen the old monk, but she knew him at once. “You’re Surash, who used to change my father’s diapers. I thought you were dying,” she said.
Her mother gave her a sharp look, but Surash only smiled and patted her head. “I was indeed dying,” he said. “I still am, and so are we all, but I’m not housebound anymore. Not since they gave me this.” He dislodged Robert and pointed to the wheeled thing behind his chair. “I have promised to show your parents how it works. Come with us, Natasha.”
When Surash made the transition from his chair at the table to the seat of his two-wheeled contraption, Natasha could see how frail and tottery he really was. But once in the seat he turned the vehicle’s steering rod with a firm hand and wheeled it briskly through the door that her father had hurriedly opened for him.
When Surash backed his two-wheeler into the gap at the front of the waiting car, there were some quick sounds of turning gears. The main section of the car extruded strong grippers that locked the two-wheeled chair in place. A muted whistling sound came from the engine, and a cloud of pure white began to come out of the exhaust pipe at the rear. “Put your finger in it if you wish,” Surash called. “All I burn in this thing, you see, is simple hydrogen.”
“We know about hydrogen-fueled cars,” Ranjit informed him.
The old monk nodded benignly. “But do you know about this?” he asked, and demonstrated how, once his two-wheeled personal chariot was attached, the whole thing became a road-drivable car that could take him in comfort wherever he might choose to go.
Then, Myra insisted, it was time for lunch. And friendly talk. A lot of it. Surash wanted to hear all about Ranjit’s work at the university, and Natasha’s hopes for using some of her sailing skills at the great solar-sail space race that was to take place in just over a year, and Robert’s surprising skills at putting jigsaw puzzles together, and Myra’s struggle to keep up with the rest of her cohort at her profession. And even more he wanted to tell them how things were at the great temple in Trincomalee and where he had been in his new car—all up and down the island, he boasted, in his effort to complete a long longed-for pilgrimage to Sri Lanka’s most famous Hindu temples—and, most of all, how well the car had worked.
And where had this wonderful new machine come from? “Korea,” Surash said promptly. “They’ve just begun marketing it, and one of our people was able to get this one for me. Oh,” he said, almost jubilant, “isn’t it fine that with so much less of our efforts going into wars and preparing for wars we’re able to do so much more in other ways? Like that thing they call a nuclear quadrupole resonance detector that they use to find buried land mines, and then there’s a thing like a little robot on caterpillar treads that comes along and clears the dirt off the mines and puts them away and no one gets hurt! They’ve cleaned up almost all the old battlefields near Trinco now. And they’ve got that gene-spliced hormone spray that’s tuned to the DNA of the mosquitoes that carry the bending disease, and they’ve got little robot planes that go around and spray them dead. And much more. We owe a lot to that Silent Thunder!”
Ranjit nodded, looking at his wife. Who tossed her head and said, “I never said it was all bad, did I?”
When Surash