The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [73]
Myra was biting her lip as she reread the final page for the fourth or fifth time. Then a smile broke through. She handed the page back to Ranjit. “Dear,” she said—in the excitement of the moment neither of them noticed that she had never used that word to him before—“what’s the very last word at the end of the message?”
Ranjit snatched the page from her. “What word?” he demanded. “You mean at the very bottom here? Where it says ‘Congratulations’?”
“That is exactly what I mean,” she informed him, the smile now broad and tender and in every way exactly the best kind of smile he could ever have wished for from Myra de Soyza. “Have you ever heard of anyone being congratulated for a failure? They’re publishing your paper, Ranjit! They think you’ve finally done it!”
19
FAME
“As soon as that magazine prints your article, you’re going to be famous. Really famous!” Beatrix Vorhulst declared as soon as Ranjit was back in her house that night.
She was wrong, though. It didn’t take that long. Days before the magazine’s printing presses began to turn out the hundreds of thousands of copies that would bring Ranjit’s fame to the world, the fame had already arrived. Someone—perhaps someone on Nature’s staff, or among their referees—had leaked the story and so reporters began to call. First it was the BBC, then someone from The New York Times, and then it was everybody, all of them wanting Ranjit to explain just what it was that Monsieur Fermat had been playing at, and why it had taken all this time to prove he’d been right.
All that was easy enough for Ranjit to answer. What was harder was what to say when the callers asked about the rumor that he’d been jailed for something or other, too, but there De Saram was a help. “Simply tell them that your attorney has instructed you not to discuss any of that because there is a suit pending. I’ll make that true by bringing an action on your behalf against the cruise line.”
“But I don’t want to take their money,” Ranjit objected.
“Don’t worry. You won’t get any. I’ll make sure of that, but that’s a sufficient reason for anybody to refuse to answer any question…since Dr. Bandara has impressed on me that that whole matter is not to be discussed.”
That stratagem worked fine, but did nothing to decrease the number of people who wanted him to sit down in a quiet one-on-one with them—that is, with them and their team of anything up to a dozen recording technicians—and tell them all about this Fermat person and why he had behaved so peculiarly. For that, explained De Saram when Ranjit again turned to him for help, the only way to temper their curiosity about him was to go public. That is, to have a press conference and tell the whole story at once to everyone who wanted to hear.
They were sitting by the Vorhulsts’ pool, De Saram and Ranjit and Myra de Soyza and Beatrix Vorhulst herself; trips to the de Soyza beach house were no longer much fun for Ranjit and Myra, because the press pests had found them there, so Myra now came to swim with Ranjit in the pool. “I’ve spoken to Dr. Bandara about it,” De Saram said, inching his chair closer to the shade of the great pool umbrella. “He is confident the university will make a space available for you to hold your press conference. Indeed, he says it would be an honor for the school.”
Ranjit said uncomfortably, “What would I say?”
“You’ll tell them what you did,” De Saram answered. “Leaving out, of course, all the specifics that Dr. Bandara feels must be kept secure.” He set his cup down and smiled at Mevrouw Vorhulst. “No, no