The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [67]
It wasn’t that what the butler said reminded Ranjit of his father’s death. He didn’t need reminding. The loss was part of him, day and night, a wound that did not heal.
The worst thing about death was that it irrevocably ended communication. Ranjit was left with a long list of things he should have said to his father and never had. Now that the opportunity was lost, all those unsaid expressions of love and respect were silting up inside Ranjit’s heart.
And, of course, there was no more cheer to be found in the news. Fighting had flared up between Ecuador and Colombia, new squabbles were arising over the division of Nile water, and North Korea had filed a complaint before the Security Council accusing China of diverting rain clouds from Korean rice paddies to their own.
Nothing had changed. It was just that the world population was now irretrievably one person short.
But there was one thing he could do—should have done long since—and by his sixth day as a guest in the Vorhulst home, Ranjit finally demanded, and got, a copy of that frantic communication he had rushed off from the plane. He studied it as critically, as demandingly and as judgingly, as any freshman composition teacher had ever looked over a student’s final term paper. If the kind of mistakes that might disqualify him were there, he was going to find them. He was crushed to discover that there indeed were some—two of them on his first look, then four, then one or two additional passages that weren’t entirely wrong but did seem to be not entirely clear, either.
Ranjit had excuses. It was all due to that last stretch of seven or eight weeks, when he had at last completed the proof in his mind—all that he could manage to complete, since he was lacking paper, ink, or computer—and only kept rehearsing it, step by step, terrified that he might forget some crucial step.
The question was, what to do about those mistaken bits?
Ranjit worried over that question for all of one day and much of that night. Should he send the magazine a list of corrections? That would seem the sensible thing to do…but then Ranjit’s pride got in the way, because the “mistakes” were really rather trivial, things that any decent mathematician would spot at once and almost as quickly see how to repair. And he had a horror of seeming to beg.
He did not send another communication to Nature, though most nights after that, while trying to go to sleep, he all over again worried the question of whether he should have.
Ranjit wished he had a better idea of what a publication such as Nature did with submissions like the one he had sent them. He was pretty sure that if they had any idea of publishing it, their first step would be to send copies of it to three or four—or more—experts in that particular area to see that there weren’t any glaring mistakes in it.
How long could that take?
Ranjit didn’t know. What he did know was that it had already taken a lot longer than he would have liked.
So every time the butler knocked on the door to announce a visitor, Ranjit’s hopes soared, and every time the butler announced that visitor’s trivial errand, his hopes crashed again.
18
COMPANY
On the seventh day of Ranjit’s stay with the Vorhulsts the butler announced another visitor, and it was Myra de Soyza. “Am I intruding, Ranjit?” she asked at once. “Aunt Bea said I could look in on you as long as I didn’t keep you from resting.”
Actually he had in fact been resting, and Myra de Soyza was certainly keeping him from it. He didn’t want to say that and did his best to manufacture conversation. “What are you doing now?” he asked. “I mean, are you still at the university?”
She wasn’t. Hadn’t been since that sociology class they had shared; had in fact