The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [18]
The computer of course had long since run out of permutations to try and so had stopped. Ranjit typed in all the new candidates, hit the go button, and left once more. Yes, he might be divorcing himself from the real world. But the real world seemed to have very little to offer a friendless and—at least temporarily—fatherless Tamil boy.
But then, when he got to his room to get a long-delayed sleep, there waiting for him was something that brightened the whole day. It was a letter with a London postmark, and it was from Gamini.
Dear Old Ranjit:
Got here safe and sound, also totally exhausted. It was a nine-hour flight, counting changing planes twice, but when I got to London, it was only four and a half hours later, which meant it was nearly another eight hours before I could get to bed, and I was a physical wreck. Oh, and missed you like hell.
It had taken long enough for Gamini to get around to saying the good part, but there it was. Ranjit took the time to read that sentence over three or four times before going on with the rest of the letter. Which was newsy but not very personal. Gamini’s classes were interesting but maybe more demanding than he would have liked. The food at the London School was, naturally, horrible, but there were plenty of Indian take-out places everywhere, and some of them knew what to do with a curry. The school’s housing wasn’t much better than the food, but Gamini wasn’t going to have to stay in it forever. As soon as he got the go-ahead from his father’s London lawyers, he was going to sign a lease on what the landlord called “a superb maisonette” just a five-minute walk from most of his classrooms. Such things you could do, Ranjit thought as he looked without enjoyment around his own bleak room, when you were lucky enough to possess a rich father. And, oh, yes, Ranjit, the letter went on, you’d be thrilled to be here because the school is no more than ten minutes away from the cluster of theaters and restaurants around Leicester Square. Gamini had already found time to see a revival of She Stoops to Conquer and a couple of musicals.
So Gamini Bandara, though nine thousand kilometers away, was having fun.
Ranjit sighed, spared a moment to be glad that his absent friend was doing so well—or, at least, spared a moment to tell himself that he was glad—crawled into his lonesome bed, and went to sleep.
It took Ranjit long enough to get the code-cracking job done—eleven days, actually, with much of each day devoted to dredging up additional possible entries or inventing new ways for the computer to mix and match them. But then there was the morning when he came in, expecting little, and got the supreme delight of seeing his computer screen announcing “Dr. Dabare password identified.” What it turned out to be was the motto of the University of Colombo, Buddhih Sarvatra Bhrajate—“wisdom shines forth everywhere”—with his wife’s birthday cut in half and interpolated between the words:
Buddhih.4-14.Sarvatra.1984.Bhrajate
And the world of mathematical documents was open to him!
4
FORTY DAYS OF DATA DOWNPOUR
So in the remaining six weeks before the new school year began, Ranjit for the first time in his life found himself very nearly drowning in the cascades of the precise sort of information he most desired.
To begin with there were the journals of number theory. There were two major ones in the English