The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [16]
3
AN ADVENTURE IN CODE-CRACKING
There were nearly two months of summer vacation between the end of Ranjit’s first school year and the beginning of his second. This tinkering with the calendar was still regarded as a rather radical new experiment by much of the university’s faculty. Until recently they had never allowed a summer vacation on the grounds that, Sri Lanka being as close to the equator as it was, it never had seasons. But a few years of student unrest, followed by the realization that college-age young men and women need a break from discipline now and then, led to the experiment of following Western university practices.
For Ranjit, the experiment was not so successful. Gamini was away, so he had no one to enjoy it with, and world news remained bad.
What made it worse was that for a time things had looked good. There had been a promise of a superpower meeting to stamp out some of the world’s deadly little wars. That had sounded like a promising development, but the selection of a site for the meeting went badly. Russia proposed Kiev, in Ukraine, but when it came to a vote, Kiev lost by two votes to one. China offered Ho Chi Minh City, in Vietnam, but it, too, was defeated, by the same margin. As was the American proposal, Vancouver, in Canada. After which the Chinese representatives stormed out of the UN building, declaring that the Western powers had no real interest in world peace after all.
But the American and Russian delegates had expected that, and had made a plan in readiness. In joint statements they deplored the Chinese failure to subordinate national vanity to the needs of peace and announced their intention to set aside their often-expressed and irreconcilable differences to go ahead with the meeting without China’s presence.
For a locale they chose that beautiful Venice of the north, the city of Stockholm, Sweden. Their effort almost succeeded. They agreed on the urgent need to put an immediate stop to the ongoing fighting between Israel and the Palestinians, between the Muslim and the Christian fragments of what had once been Yugoslavia, between Ecuador and Colombia—well, between every pair of nations that was making war, declared or otherwise, on each other all around the globe. There were plenty of candidates, and there was no doubt that a few rockets in the right place could have made any of them stop fighting. The Americans and the Russians agreed that it was their simple duty, as the biggest bullies on the block, to do the job.
But there was one thing they couldn’t agree on. That was, in each combative pair, which one to aim their rockets at.
Ranjit Subramanian decided to do his best to ignore all that sort of thing. It was spoiling his summer, which was cherished, unprogrammed time for Ranjit, meaning he could do pretty much whatever he wanted to do, and he knew exactly what that would be. But when he trapped Dr. Christopher Dabare in his office, the math teacher took offense. “If I would not allow you to use my password during the school year, what gives you the lunatic notion that I will let you have it while I’m in Kuwait?”
Ranjit blinked at him. “Kuwait?”
“Where I have a contract to teach summer sessions each year for the oil sheikhs’ sons, at, I might mention, a rate of payment quite a bit more impressive than I receive trying to beat simple mathematical truths into the heads of you people.”
To which Ranjit, thinking fast, responded only, “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you’d be away. I wish you a pleasant trip,” and headed out of the professor’s office for the nearest computer. If bloody Dr. Dabare wouldn’t give up his password voluntarily, there were other possibilities. Specifically there were the kind of possibilities that