The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [161]
“Huh,” Ranjit said, not only to grant the request but because he could think of no other response to what he had just heard. “What do you mean? Relieved of what burden?”
“Oh, running things,” the stranger said, studying the look on Ranjit’s face and trying to reproduce it on his own. “Not that they didn’t do a good job, mostly. But it was wrong to prevent the development of so many interesting species. And although the technical stuff was generally all right, you have to admit that what they did with the cosmological constant was simply embarrassing.”
Ranjit sat up straight. “Well,” he said, “if the Grand Galactics aren’t running things anymore, shouldn’t somebody else be taking over for them?”
“Of course,” the stranger said impatiently. “I thought you knew. Someone is. It’s us.”
THE SECOND POSTAMBLE
Acknowledgments, and Other Acknowledgments
As one of us has noted elsewhere, there is a definition of a gentleman that describes him as “one who is never rude by accident.” In the same way, we feel a proper science-fiction writer should never misstate a canonical scientific truth by accident.
The significant words here, however, are “by accident,” because there are times in the writing of a science-fiction story when the author is forced to take a scientific liberty because otherwise his, or her, story won’t work. (For example, we all know that traveling faster than light is pretty much out of the question. However, if we don’t let our characters do it anyway, there are whole classes of interesting stories that we can never write.)
So when such liberties are taken, we think it only fair that the writers admit to them. In the present work there are three such cases:
1. There is in this early twenty-first-century time no such spacecraft as the high-speed one Joris Vorhulst describes as visiting the Oort cloud. We wish there were, but there isn’t.
2. There is no five-page proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem such as the one Ranjit Subramanian is described as having produced, and one of us thinks it is possible there never can be because the question may be formally undecidable.
3. Sri Lanka could never really be the ground terminal for a Skyhook because it isn’t really on the equator. In a previous work one of us dealt with that problem by moving Sri Lanka farther south. Rather than repeat that, however, in the present case we have chosen a somewhat different solution. The equator, after all, is nothing but an imaginary line. So we have simply chosen to imagine it a few hundred kilometers farther north.
Finally we would like to acknowledge certain kindnesses, such as the elucidation provided by Dr. Wilkinson of the Drexel Math Forum of what Andrew Wiles really accomplished with his one-hundred-fifty-page proof, and such as the assistance beyond the call of duty provided by our friend Robert Silverberg and, through him, the principal orator of Oxford University in the UK.
THE THIRD POSTAMBLE
Fermat’s Last Theorem
We felt it would be useful to give more details of what Fermat’s Last Theorem was all about, but we could not find an earlier place for this discussion that did not wound, almost fatally, the story’s narrative pace. So here it is at the end…and, if you are part of that large fraction of humanity who doesn’t know it all already, we do think you will find that it was worth waiting for.
The story of the most famous problem in mathematics began with a casual jotting by a seventeenth-century