The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [22]
Vorhulst went on to explain what all those unfamiliar (at least to Ranjit) things were, and the boy was fascinated.
And then, when the class was nearly over, Vorhulst gave them some good news. Everyone in the class, he announced, would have the privilege of looking through Sri Lanka’s best telescope at the observatory on the slopes of Piduruthalagala. “A really neat two-meter reflector,” he said. And then he added, “It was a present from the government of Japan, replacing a smaller one they’d given us earlier.” That got a smattering of applause from the students, but that was nothing compared to what they did when he said, “Oh, and by the way, my computer password is ‘Faraway.’ You’re all welcome to use it to access any astronomical material on the Web.” Then there were actual cheers, among the loudest the ones that came from the Sinhalese boy in the seat next to Ranjit. And when the professor looked at the timer on the wall and said the remaining ten minutes could be used for questions, Ranjit was one of the first to have a hand up. “Yes,” Vorhulst said, looking at the identifying board on his desk, “Ranjit?”
Ranjit stood up. “I’m just wondering if you’ve ever heard of Percy Molesworth.”
“Molesworth, eh?” Vorhulst shaded his eyes to get a better look at Ranjit. “Are you from Trincomalee?” Ranjit nodded. “Yes, he’s buried there, isn’t he? And yes, I have heard of him. Did you ever look up his crater on the moon? Go ahead. ‘Faraway’ will give you access to the JPL page.”
That was precisely what Ranjit did, the minute the class was over. He quickly located Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the World Wide Web on the rank of computers in the hall and downloaded a splendid image of the lunar crater named Molesworth.
It was indeed impressive, nearly two hundred kilometers across. Though an almost flat plain, its interior was dotted with a dozen genuine meteor-made craters, including one with a magnificent central peak. Ranjit thought of his visits to Molesworth’s grave in Trincomalee with his father. How nice it would have been to let his father know that he had seen the lunar crater for himself. But to do that seemed impossible.
The rest of Ranjit’s courses, naturally, were nowhere near as interesting as Astronomy 101. He’d signed up for anthropology because he’d expected it would be easy for him to get through without actually thinking much about it. As it developed, it was easy, although the other salient fact about it, as Ranjit learned, was that it was very nearly terminally tedious. And he’d signed up for psychology because he’d wanted to hear more about this GSSM syndrome. But in the first session the teacher informed him that he didn’t believe in GSSM, no matter what some other professor in some other class might say. (“Because if multitasking made you stupid, how would any of you ever manage to graduate?”) Finally, he was taking philosophy because it looked like the kind of thing you could bluff your way through without the necessity of a lot of studying.
There he had been wrong. Professor de Silva was a devotee of the practice of giving spot quizzes almost every week. That would have been tolerable enough, perhaps, but Ranjit quickly also learned that the professor was the kind who required his classes to memorize dates.
For a while Ranjit tried to take an interest in the subject. Plato was not a total waste of time, he thought, nor Aristotle. But when Professor de Silva began getting up to the Middle Ages, with Peter Abelard and Thomas Aquinas and all those people, things got worse. Ranjit did not really care about the difference between epistemology