The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [90]
What was wrong was that he had nothing to do.
The first few days were busy enough, because Ranjit had to be walked through the places where red tape was generated so that they could generate Ranjit’s own contribution to the supply—identity badge to prepare, documents to sign, all the unavoidable flotsam of any large enterprise in the twenty-first century. Then nothing.
By the end of the first month, Ranjit, who was never grumpy, was waking up grumpy almost every workday morning. There was a cure. A prescribed dose of Natasha, along with one of Myra, usually cleared the symptoms up before he finished breakfast, but then by the time he came home for dinner, he was morose again. Apologetic about it, of course: “I don’t mean to take it out on Tashy and you, Myra, but I’m just wasting time here. No one will tell me what I’m supposed to be doing. When I find someone to ask, he just gets all mock-deferential and says, Well, that would be up to me, wouldn’t it?” But then, by the time he had finished dinner, and given Tashy her bath or changed her diaper or just dandled her on his knee, who could stay morose? Not Ranjit, and he was then his usual cheery self until the next time he had to get up to go to his nonwork.
By the end of the second month the depression was deeper. It took longer to lift, because, as Ranjit told his wife—over and over!—“It’s worse than ever! I cornered Bledsoe today—not easy to do, because he’s hardly ever in his office—and asked him point-blank what kind of work I was supposed to be doing. He gave me a dirty look, and do you know what he said? He said, ‘If you ever find out, please tell me.’ It seems he had orders from high up to hire me, but nobody ever told him what my job was to be.”
“They wanted you because you’re famous and you add class to the operation,” his wife informed him.
“Good guess. I sort of had the same idea myself, but it can’t be right. That whole operation’s so secret nobody knows who’s working in the next office.”
“So do you want to quit?” Myra asked.
“Huh. Well, I don’t think so. Don’t know if I can, really, because I’m not sure what all I signed, but anyway I promised Gamini.”
“Then,” she said, “let’s just learn to love it. Why don’t you solve that P equals NP problem you talk about? And anyway, tomorrow’s Saturday, so why don’t we take Tashy to the zoo?”
The zoo, of course, was a delight, although in the rest of the world things were going as badly as ever. Recent developments? Well, Argentina’s vast herds of cattle were keeling over by the thousands with a new variety of the old disease called bluetongue. It had just been confirmed that the plague was a biowarfare strain. What wasn’t clear was who had spread it. Maybe Venezuela or Colombia, some people around the agency thought, because Argentina had contributed heavily to the international force that was trying to keep the Venezuelan and the Colombian armies apart. (They weren’t very successful at it, but the Venezuelans and the Colombians hated them for trying.) The rest of the world was as unquiet as ever. In Iraq nightly outbreaks of car-bombings and beheadings showed that the two kinds of Iraqi Muslims were again trying to ensure that there was only one true Islamic faith by exterminating each other. In Africa the number of officially recognized wars had grown