The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [138]
Through it all, Myra stood there, frozen. She could see everything. She couldn’t move. She saw, and yearned to help, her husband’s struggles to deal with the interrogation in spite of his own helpless bafflement.
And such questions! “Sometimes,” she—or it—was asking, in that uninflected voice that might have come from a reanimated corpse, “the word you use for an assemblage of humans is ‘country’ and sometimes ‘nation.’ Are the two concepts differentiated by, perhaps, size?”
The figure’s putative father shook his head. “Not at all. There are some countries with as few as some hundreds of thousands of inhabitants and some—China, for instance—with nearly two billion. But they’re both sovereign states—nations, that is,” he corrected himself.
The figure was silent for a moment. Then, “How was the decision made to annihilate the electronic capabilities of the nations, countries, or sovereign states of North Korea, Colombia, Venezuela, and others?”
Ranjit sighed. “By the council of Pax per Fidem, I suppose. You’d probably have to ask one of them for a more reliable answer—Gamini Bandara, say, or his father.” When the figure was silent again, he added nervously, “Of course, I can speculate. Would you like me to do that?”
The eyes that were not Natasha’s eyes regarded him for a long moment. Then the figure said, “No.” There was an ear-piercing electronic squeal, and a quick stir in the air, and the figure was gone.
Myra could move again, and did. She ran to her husband’s side and threw her arms around him. They sat silent, hugging each other, until a banging at the front door startled everyone. When the maid answered it, at least a dozen police came racing in, looking for something to arrest. The captain, out of breath, panted, “Sorry. The duty constable saw what was happening through a window and alerted us, but when we got here, we just couldn’t get close to the house. Couldn’t even touch the wall—Excuse me.” He lifted his own screen to his ear, while Myra was assuring the police, diligently searching every part of the house, that none of them had been harmed.
Then the police captain replaced his pocket screen on his belt. “Dr. Subramanian? Did you mention Gamini Bandara, the president-elect’s son, in your conversation with that—” He stopped, searching for the right noun to complete the sentence and not finding it. “With that,” he finished.
Ranjit nodded. “Yes, I think I did.”
“I thought so,” the cop said heavily. “Now he’s getting the same kind of questioning you were, from the same person.”
All of that news went out to every human being who owned or had access to a screen. It did not give much understanding to anyone, though. Not to what was left of the Subramanian family, nor to the rest of the human race. Not even to the horde of One Point Fives who hung trapped in their troop transports, drifting through the Oort cloud.
Those beings had concerns much more immediate than those of the human race. To the One Point Fives it was all very well to be ordered to postpone their annihilation of the human race, but the orders the Grand Galactics had handed down did not seem to take full cognizance of what obeying those orders entailed.
It was a question of numbers. Some 140,000 One Point Fives had originally boarded the transports. That number had not changed for more than a dozen years. But then, unwilling to die without descendants to carry on their genetic line, the One Point Fives had given themselves the luxury of that brief and violent flurry of sexuality.
The results of that orgy had already been born. Indeed, they now were nearly fully adult….
But the armada had not been equipped to keep so large a number alive for a prolonged period.
The mechanical replenishers that had been built to supply air, water, and food for 140,000 One Point Fives had been forced to cope with nearly twice that number. Now they were beginning to crumble under that stress. Soon there would be shortages.