The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [80]
Then they met Sir Tariq. It was he, on behalf of the Royal Mathematical Society, who had invited Ranjit to become a member, and to come to London to tell them about his feat. (And had produced a foundation that paid their expenses.) Sir Tariq al Diwani turned out to be a plump elderly man with unruly Albert Einstein hair, a kindly heart, and no trace of any accent but the purest OxCam. (“Well,” he explained when pressed, “I’m fourth generation London, after all.”) And when he found that Ranjit was freezing most of the time, he struck his forehead. “Oh, blast,” he said. “I let them give you posh instead of comfort. I’ll have you moved.”
What they were moved to was a brand-shiny-new but not particularly fashionable hotel in South Kensington. Which puzzled Myra a bit until she had a talk with the concierge and, grinning, reported to Ranjit that Sir Tariq had chosen this particular hotel because, a, it was convenient to some of the city’s best museums, if that should interest them while they were there, and, b, it was frequently occupied by Arab oil sheikhs and their large retinues, an entire floor or two at a time. The importance of that was that what the oil sheikhs hated most, even more than Ranjit did, was being cold, not just in their private rooms but in a hotel’s lobbies, fire stairs, and even elevators as well. And what the owners of the hotel hated even more than that was to fail to give those free-spending Arabs every last thing they might desire.
Though not himself a free-spending oil sheikh, Ranjit was happy to receive the fallout from their spending. Over the next couple of months, his mood improved visibly—improved enough, indeed, for him to take a shot at that other reason for the particular hotel they were in, its proximity to Museum Row. The Natural History Museum (though drafty) was a delight, inspiring Ranjit to agree to the crosstown odyssey to the great British Museum itself, back in Gamini’s part of town—even grander (if even draftier) and making him agree that yes, cold countries might after all have some advantages over the hot ones.
It wasn’t all tourism. The lecture for the Royal Mathematical Society took some thought, though actually what Ranjit said in London was pretty much what he had said at the press conference in Colombo. Two magazines had urgently requested a visit, Nature because they were the ones who had published his paper and New Scientist because (they promised) they would take him to the best pub on their side of the Thames. And there were a couple of press conferences, too, set up at long range by De Saram in Colombo. And even so, with their pictures in print on every newsstand and occasionally on the telly as well, Myra persuaded Ranjit to put his thermal underwear to the test by standing outside Buckingham Palace one evening to observe the changing of the guard. When they were back in their hotel, and Ranjit had to admit none of his parts seemed to be at all frostbitten from the ordeal, he also pointed out that, of all the cameras held by their fellow tourists, every last one had been pointed at the guards, and not one at them. “So it’s true,” he said. “We can move around London all we like, and no one pays any attention to us at all. I’d really like this place if they’d just move it a thousand kilometers or so south.”
Well, they wouldn’t do that, so after a few hours of bundling up to get from the hotel lobby to a taxi, and from the taxi to some other lobby somewhere else, Ranjit gave up. He took Sir Tariq aside. Then he got on the phone with De Saram in Colombo, and then, grinning, reported to Myra, “We’re going to America. It’s what they call the Triple-A-S—the American Association for the Advancement of Science?—and next month they’re having their annual convention and De Saram has it all worked out. Oh, we’re not through here, Myra. Not permanently. We’ll do everything there is to do here,