The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [83]
Gamini shook his head. “Come on, Ranj. I’ll have to let Bledsoe tell you that—there are rules I have to follow, you know.”
Ranjit tried again. “Is it going to be about a real job?”
That made Gamini pause for thought again. “Well, yes, but I can’t tell you what that is right now, either,” he said at last. “The important thing about that job is that you’ll be doing something useful for the world. All we need Bledsoe for is to see that you get the security clearance you need.”
“Need for what?” Ranjit asked.
Gamini, smiling, shook his head. Then, looking faintly embarrassed, he said, “I have to warn you that Bledsoe is a kind of old-fashioned Cold Warrior and a bit of a silly ass, too. But once you’re in the job, you won’t have to see much of him. And,” he added, “since when I’m in America I’m usually based less than half an hour’s drive from his part of the world, you probably will be seeing a lot more of me, if you can stand that.” He winked at Myra. And then reported that he was late for another of those damn meetings way on the other side of town, and he hoped they’d all see one another one day soon in Pasadena, and was gone.
Ranjit and Myra looked at each other. “Where’s Pasadena?” he asked.
“In California, I’m pretty sure,” she said. “Do you suppose that’s where you’d be based? If you took this job, I mean.”
He gave her an exasperated grin. “You know what? Maybe we should ask Gamini’s father about all this.”
Which they did, or at least left a query at his office. They didn’t get an answer right away, though. They didn’t get an answer at all until they had made the short hop from New York (LaGuardia) to Washington National (Reagan) and were already welcomed by the people from the Triple-A-S and booked into their new hotel, in sight of the Capitol and walking distance from the Mall. And all Dr. Bandara’s communication said was “Gamini assures me this person he wants you to see can be of great help to you.” But it didn’t say great help in doing what, or why Gamini cared in the first place, and so Ranjit sighed and gave up. Which actually was not a great disappointment, because Washington turned out to be full of things that interested him more than some unspecified job to be offered by some still unmet person named Orion Bledsoe.
The first thing—with Ranjit and Myra escorted there by enthusiastic volunteers from the AAAS—was the famous (which, actually, Ranjit had never heard of before coming to Washington) cluster of museums collectively known as the Smithsonian Institution. London’s British Museum and New York’s American Museum of Natural History had delighted him; this Smithsonian, not just one fabulous structure but a whole row of the things, staggered his imagination. All he could make time for was the Air and Space Museum and a quick peek into one or two of the others, but the space collection had, among countless other things, an actual working model (though not to scale) of the Artsutanov space elevator, which was even now beginning to be spun out in the skies above Sri Lanka. And then he had his own keynote speech to give the Triple-A-S convention, and (that having been done, and once again declared a triumph) he had their whole damn convention to pick and choose among. Bear in mind that this celebrated genius among Earth’s most honored scientific minds, world famous and already possessed of three actual doctoral degrees given by three of the world’s most prestigious schools (although in fact he had never quite achieved even a bachelor’s degree for himself)—this modern Fermat or even Newton had never in his not very long life been lucky enough to sit in on a single scientific convention of any kind, except ones for which he was the principal speaker. He had no idea so much could be learned on so many subjects. His own chores attended to, he had the freedom of the convention, and he used it, attending sessions on cosmology and Martian (and Venusian and Europan) tectonics and something called “Machine Intelligence: Awareness of Self” (that primarily for Myra, but it fascinated Ranjit almost as