The Last Theorem

22 THE NEW WORLD

Apart from the great thermal disappointment that the climate of New York represented for Ranjit, the news that kept coming over their hotel suite’s large supply of TV sets was even more disheartening than usual. For example, South America had been relatively quiet, war-wise, for some time. No longer. Now (as one of their American hosts explained it to Myra and Ranjit) what had changed was the fact that the United States had revised most drug crimes down from felonies to, at most, misdemeanors. That had decriminalized nearly all the stock in trade of the Colombian drug merchants. That change in the laws made it possible for any American addict to get what he needed for his habit, cheap and without gangster intervention, at any local pharmacy, thus effectively putting the gangsters out of business. (It also made it pointless for any neighborhood pusher to hand out free samples to twelve-year-olds. That would no longer ensure him a supply of addicted customers for the future, since none of those future customers, if there were any, would be buying from him anyway. And so each year the census of American addicts slowly dwindled as the oldest ones died or went dry, and few new ones came along as replacements.)

But that was only the good part of drug decriminalization. There was a bad part as well.

The bad part, or the worst of the bad parts, was that the drug cartels, deprived of the profits from their coca plantations, began to look longingly at the equally addictive stuff that was being exported by their neighbors in Venezuela. Why, there was even more money in oil than there ever had been in drugs! And so armed parties from the Colombian drug citadels were infiltrating the oil fields of their neighbor. The relatively small (and often quite purchasable) Venezuelan army was putting up a show of resistance, sometimes, but the powerful motivation was all on the Colombian side, and so were almost all the victories.

All this, of course, in addition to the latest list of vicious little escapades from the Adorable Leader’s North Korea, and in addition to the renewal of violence in the irreconcilable fragments of what had once been Yugoslavia, and more and more heavy fighting in parts of what had once been the Soviet Union, and the Middle East….

It was all bad. What made up for it, a little, was the city of New York itself, not in the least like Trincomalee, or even Colombo, and in fact not all that much like London. “It’s so vertical,” Ranjit told his wife, as they stood at the sixty-sixth-floor picture window of their hotel suite. “Whoever heard of sleeping this high up?” And yet in the panorama of the city that lay before them there were a dozen or more buildings much taller, and when they walked in the city streets, there were times when the sun seldom appeared because steep concrete walls shut it out except when it was directly overhead.

“But it does have that beautiful park,” Myra pointed out, gazing at the lake, the giant apartments that lined the far side of the park, and the distant roofs of the Central Park Zoo.

“Oh, I’m not complaining,” Ranjit told her, and indeed he had little to complain about. Though Dr. Dhatusena Bandara’s office in the UN building was just across town, the doctor himself was somewhere else, on some errand that no one chose to discuss. His office had, though, provided them with a young lady who had taken them to the top of the Empire State Building and introduced them to the Lucullan joys of oyster stew in the old Grand Central railroad station, and who stood ready to get tickets for them for any show on Broadway. Which wasn’t a great thrill to Ranjit, whose entire lifetime experience of performances had been on a flat screen, but greatly pleased Myra. Which itself much pleased Ranjit, not to mention that he had discovered the American Museum of Natural History, only a few blocks away—wonderful in its own right as an exemplar of that new delight in Ranjit’s life, its museumness, but thrilling in the great planetarium that filled its northern space. “Planetarium” was hardly the right word, in fact; the structure on Central Park West was so much more than that. “I wish Joris could be with us!” Ranjit said, more than once, as he strolled its thrilling exhibits.

And then, following a long enough interval that Ranjit had stopped thinking he might actually show up, appeared the one person, totally unexpected, who could make a pleasant visit unforgettable. When Ranjit opened the door of their suite to a knock, supposing there would be no more than a chambermaid with an armload of fresh towels on the other side of it, there in fact, grinning, stood Gamini Bandara, with a spray of fresh roses in one hand for Myra and in the other a bottle of good old Sri Lanka arrack for the two of them. It was the first time they had been together since the wedding, and the questions came thick and fast. How had they liked England? What did they think of America? What was it like back in Lanka these days? It wasn’t until the men had poured their third round of arrack that Myra noticed that all the conversation went in the same direction, questions coming from Gamini, answers from her husband and herself. “So,” she said at last, “tell us, then, Gamini, what are you doing in New York?”

He grinned and spread his hands. “One damn meeting after another. It’s what I do.”

“But I thought you were based in California,” Ranjit put in.

“I am, right. But there’s all sorts of international stuff going on, and this is where the UN is, isn’t it?” Then he swallowed his third shot and looked serious. “Actually, the reason I’m here, Ranjit, is that I want to ask you to do me a favor.”

Ranjit said promptly, “Name it.”

“Don’t say yes so fast,” Gamini chided. “It means making a commitment for some time. But it’s not a bad commitment, either. So let me get right down to it. When you’re in Washington, you will be contacted by a man named Orion Bledsoe. He’s a cloak-and-dagger guy, and he’s high up in the part of the government most people never hear about. For that matter, he has quite a record of his own. He’s a veteran of the first Gulf War, and of the troubles in what used to be Yugoslavia, and then of the second, and much worse, war in the Gulf, the one in Iraq. That’s where he got, in that order, the wound that cost him his right arm, the Purple Heart, the Navy Cross, and, finally, the job he’s got now.”

“Which is what?” Ranjit asked, as Gamini seemed to pause for a moment.

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 much when he listened), and heaven only knew what arcane aspects of what previously unexplored (by Ranjit) other areas of human investigation turned up somewhere on the vast and challenging menu of events.

Myra kept right up with him, too, as fascinated by the panoply of human learning as he, with a few exceptions. The principal exception was the daily nap after lunch that he insisted on, because one of their doctors had insisted. “You are getting ready to have a baby, you know!” he informed her every day, although in fact she was never in any doubt of it. And then, on almost the last day of the convention, when Ranjit was tucking her in, they heard a gentle beep-beep from their telephone. It was a fresh text message, and what it said was:

Ranjit and Myra looked at each other. “It’s the man Gamini was talking about in New York,” Ranjit said, and Myra nodded briskly.

“Of course it is. Go ahead, call him, see what he wants. And then come back here and tell me all about it.”

The suite belonging to Lt. Col. (ret.) T. Orion Bledsoe was noticeably bigger than the one the AAAS convention had provided for Ranjit and Myra. Even the bowl of fruit on the conference table in the drawing room was larger, and it wasn’t alone on the table, either. Next to it was an unopened bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey, with the ice, glasses, and mixers to go with it.

T. Orion Bledsoe himself was not much taller than Ranjit, which for an American was hardly tall at all, and at least a couple of decades older. But he still had all his hair, and a pretty muscular handshake, though it was the left hand he offered and used to pull Ranjit in. “Come in, come in, Mr. uh—have a seat. Are you enjoying our District of Confusion?”

He didn’t wait for an answer, either, but led the way to the conference table. “Care for a drink, Mr. Subra—uh—? I mean, if Jack isn’t going to be too strong for you?”

Ranjit repressed a smile. Anyone who had spent his wild sixteenth year ingesting arrack was not likely to find some American tipple too strong. “That would be fine,” he said. “Your message said something about a proposal.”

Bledsoe gave him a reproachful look. “They say we Americans are always in a hurry, but in my experience it’s you foreigners that are always jumping the gun. Sure, I want to talk about something with you, but I like to get to know a man a little bit before we do business.” And all the time his previously neglected right hand was gripping the whiskey bottle while the other was opening the seal. Bledsoe noticed where Ranjit’s eyes were focused and gave a little chuckle. “Prosthetic,” he admitted—or boasted. “Pretty good design, too. I could even shake hands with it if I wanted to, but I don’t. I can’t feel your hand if I do, so what’s the point? And if I got absentminded and squeezed a little too hard, you could suddenly be in the market for one of your own.”

The artificial arm was actually quite efficient, Ranjit observed, reminding himself to tell Myra about it. The bottle open, the hand was pouring an even two centimeters of whiskey into each glass, and then passing Ranjit’s over to him. Bledsoe watched attentively to see if Ranjit was going to use any of the mixers. When he didn’t, Bledsoe gave a little nod of approval and took a taste from his own glass. “This is what we call sippin’ whiskey,” he said. “You can chug it down if you want to—hey, it’s a free country—but you ought to give it a chance. Ever been in Iraq?”

Ranjit, sipping a little of the sippin’ whiskey out of politeness to his host, shook his head.

“It’s where I got this.” He tapped the imitation arm with his good one. “With all the Shiites and the Sunnis doing their best to kill each other, but taking time out to kill as many of us as they could along the way. It was the wrong war, in the wrong place, for the wrong reasons.”

Ranjit tried his best to sound interested enough to be polite, wondering whether Bledsoe was going to say the right war would have been Afghanistan, or maybe Iran. It wasn’t, though. “North Korea,” Bledsoe proclaimed. “They’re the ones we should’ve pulverized. Ten missiles in the ten right places and they’d have been right out of the game.”

Ranjit coughed. “As I understand it,” he said, swallowing a little more of his Jack Daniel’s, “the trouble with fighting North Korea is that they have a very large and very modern army and they’ve got it sitting right on the border, less than fifty kilometers from Seoul.”

Bledsoe waved a dismissive hand. “Hell, sure there’d be losses. A lot of them, no doubt. So what? They’d be South Korean losses, not Americans. Well,” he corrected himself, grimacing at the annoyance, “all right, there are quite a few American troops right up there, sure. But you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, can you?”

It seemed to Ranjit that the party was getting unpleasant, and then as Bledsoe tossed a crumpled napkin into a wastebasket, he thought he saw a reason. The napkin bounced off an empty whiskey bottle. Apparently his was not the first conference Bledsoe had convened that day.

Ranjit cleared his throat. “Well, Mr. Bledsoe, I come from a small country with problems of its own. I don’t want to criticize American policy.”

Bledsoe bobbed his head in agreement. “And that’s another thing,” he said, and interrupted himself to offer a refill with the bottle. Ranjit shook his head. Bledsoe shrugged and recharged his own glass. “Your little island,” he said. “Shree—Shree—”

“Sri Lanka,” Ranjit politely corrected.

“That’s the one. D’you know what you’ve got there?”

Ranjit considered. “Well, I think it’s probably the most beautiful island in the—”

“I’m not talking about the whole damn island, for Christ’s sake! My God, there’s a million beautiful islands around all over the world and I wouldn’t give you a nickel for any of them. I’m just talking about one little harbor you’ve got there, Trinkum—Trinco—”

Ranjit took pity. “I think you mean Trincomalee. I was born there.”

“Really?” Bledsoe considered that datum, found no use for it, and continued. “Anyway, I don’t give a damn about the town. It’s the harbor that’s a world-beater! Do you know what that could be? It could be the world’s best base for a nuclear submarine navy, Mr. Sub—Subra—”

He had refilled his glass once again, and the sippin’ whiskey was beginning to show its effects. Ranjit sighed and rescued him again. “It’s Subramanian, Mr. Bledsoe, and, yes, we know what a base it could be. In World War II it was headquarters for the Allied fleet, and before that Lord Nelson himself said it was one of the world’s greatest harbors.”

“Oh, crap, what does Lord Nelson have to do with it? He was talking about a place for sailing ships, for God’s sake. I’m talking nukes! That harbor’s deep enough that submarines can dive well below what any enemy could find, much less attack! Dozens of them! Maybe hundreds. And what did we do about it? We let goddamn India snap up treaty rights for the whole damn port. India, for God’s sake! And what the hell India needs a navy for in the first place, I can’t—”

Ranjit was getting tired of this opinionated drunk. Gamini was Gamini, but Ranjit couldn’t be expected to put up with much more of this. He stood up. “Thanks for the drink, Mr. Bledsoe, but I’m afraid I have to be getting along.”

He held out a hand to be shaken in farewell, but Bledsoe didn’t reciprocate. He glared up at Ranjit, then deliberately put the top back on the whiskey bottle. “Excuse me one second,” he said. “We have some unfinished business.”

He disappeared into one of the suite’s bathrooms. Ranjit heard running water, thought it over, shrugged, and sat down. It was more than one second, though. It was close to five minutes before T. Orion Bledsoe appeared again, and he hardly seemed the same man. His face was scrubbed, his hair was brushed, and he was carrying a partial cup of steaming black coffee—no doubt from the coffee machine that seemed to be standard equipment in any American hotel bathroom.

He didn’t offer Ranjit any of the coffee. He didn’t offer any explanations, either, just sat down, glanced at the whiskey bottle as though astonished to find it there, and said briskly, “Mr. Subramanian, if I should mention the names Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, what would they mean to you?”

Slightly confused by the abrupt change in both subject and demeanor—but a little encouraged by the fact that the conversation had suddenly entered into an area he knew something about—Ranjit said, “Public-key cryptography, of course. The Diffie-Hellman-Merkle procedures.”

“Exactly,” Bledsoe said. “I don’t think I need tell you that Diffie-Hellman is in serious trouble, because of the quantum computers.”

He didn’t. Although Ranjit had never taken any particular interest in codes or code-cracking himself—not counting his exploits in learning one professor’s computer password—every mathematician in the world had a pretty good idea of what had gone on.

Diffie-Hellman was based on a very simple idea, but one that had been so difficult to execute that the idea had been useless until the age of really powerful computers. The first step in encoding any message that one wished to keep private was to represent it as a series of numbers. The simplest way to do that, of course, would be to replace the letter A with a one, the B with a two, and so on through Z equals twenty-six. (Naturally, no cryptographer in the world, or at least none over the age of ten, would take seriously such a trivial system of substitutions.) Then these numbers could be combined with an enormous number—call it “N”—in such a way that the original simple substitution was concealed. Simply adding the substituted numbers to giant N might do the trick by itself.

But N had a secret of its own. The way it was generated by cryptographers was by multiplying two large prime numbers together. Any decent computer could do that kind of multiplication in a fraction of a second, but once the two large primes were multiplied together, trying to discover what the primes themselves had been was a brutal job that, even with the best computers, could take many years. Hence the description “trapdoor cipher”—easy to get into, virtually impossible to get out of again. Still, public-key cryptography, as it was called, possessed one great virtue. Anybody could encrypt any message from the product of the primes—even, say, some harried member of the French Resistance in World War II, one step ahead of the Gestapo, with some crucial knowledge of where a bunch of panzer divisions were moving to. But only the people who knew what both those primes were could read the message.

Bledsoe took a sip of his rapidly cooling coffee. “The thing is, Subramanian,” he said, “we have some pretty important traffic going around the world right now—don’t ask me what it is. I have only a bare glimmering of a notion, and I can’t tell you even that much. But at this moment it is more important than ever that our code be unbreakable. Maybe there’s some way of decrypting that doesn’t involve all this factoring of prime numbers hocus-pocus. And if there is, we would like you to help us figure out what it is.”

Ranjit tried his best not to laugh. What he was being asked to do was what every code agency in the world had been working on ever since Diffie-Hellman had published their paper way back in 1975. “Why me?” he asked.

Bledsoe looked pleased with himself. “When I saw the news stories about your proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, it rang a bell. All those mathematicians that work on this public-key stuff use what they call the Fermat test, right? So who would know more about that than the man who just proved his theorem? And there were others around who liked you, so we started the machinery going to recruit you for our team.”

When Ranjit considered all the ways in which Bledsoe’s notion was ridiculous, he was tempted to get up and walk away. Fermat’s test was certainly the basis for many more recent ways of identifying prime numbers. But to leap from that to the notion that the man who proved Fermat’s theorem would be any good at public-key code-cracking was, well, simply preposterous.

All the same, this was exactly the offer that Gamini had asked him to accept. Ranjit controlled the impulse to laugh in Bledsoe’s face and said only, “‘Recruit’ me. Does that mean you’re offering me a job?”

“Damn straight it does, Subramanian. You’ll be provided with all the resources you need—and the U.S. government has plenty of resources—and a generous salary. How about—?”

Ranjit could not help blinking at the figure mentioned. It would have supported several generations of Subramanians. “That seems adequate,” he commented drily. “When should I start?”

“Ah, well,” Bledsoe said moodily, “not right away, I’m afraid. It’s a matter of your security clearance. You did, after all, spend a couple of months in the slammer back home, under suspicion of being associated in terrorist activities.”

Then Ranjit did come close to blowing his top. “That’s ridiculous! I wasn’t involved in any—”

Bledsoe raised his hand. “I know. Do you think I’d be offering you this kind of a job if I didn’t know that? But the security clearance people get real antsy when there’s a connection with a certified terrorist bunch like your pirates. Don’t worry. It’s all just about straightened out. We had to go right to the top. It took actual White House intervention, but you’ll get your clearance. Only it will take a bit more time.”

Ranjit sighed and bit the bullet. “How long?”

“Three weeks, maybe. At most a month. So what I suggest is you go ahead and do all those speaking dates you’ve accepted, and when the word comes through, I’ll get in touch with you and arrange for your coming to California.”

There didn’t seem to be much help for it. “All right,” Ranjit said. “I’ll need an address for you so I can keep you posted on where to reach me.”

Bledsoe grinned. He showed a lot of teeth, a lot of sharklike teeth, when he smiled, Ranjit observed. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll know where you are.”

Three weeks turned into six, and then into two months. Ranjit was beginning to wonder how long the generosity of the foundation that paid their hotel bills would last, and he still had not heard from Bledsoe again. “It’s just typical government red tape,” Myra said, consoling. “Gamini said to take the job. You took it. Now we just have to live by their timetable.”

“But where the hell is Gamini?” Ranjit said sulkily. He hadn’t appeared again, and when Ranjit e-mailed his father’s office to see if they could supply an address, they had simply replied, “He is in the field and can’t be reached.”

At least Myra had the visits to her old friends at MIT to amuse her. Ranjit didn’t have that much. When she came back to the hotel, puffing and—yes, you’d have to say it—waddling but full of news about the great new accomplishments of some of her old buddies, he greeted her with an unexpected question: “What would you think about catching the next plane back to Lanka?”

She eased herself and her great belly into a chair. “What’s the matter, dear?”

“This is going nowhere,” he announced, not adding that it was also very cold outside. “I’ve been thinking about what Dr. Bandara said. Being a full professor at the university wouldn’t be a bad life. I’d have a chance to do research, too, and you know there are plenty of other big problems that nobody has solved. If you wanted to be rich, I could see if I could work the bugs out of the Black-Scholes equation. Or, if I wanted a real challenge, there’s always P equals NP. If anybody could solve that, it would revolutionize mathematics.”

Myra shifted her weight around in the chair, trying to find a comfortable position. She decided there wasn’t one and leaned over to press her husband’s hand. “What’s P equals NP?” she asked. “Or that other equation?”

It was worse than she’d thought; Ranjit didn’t take the bait. “The thing is,” he said, “we’re just wasting our time here. We might as well give it up and go home.”

“You promised Gamini,” she reminded him. “Just give it a few more days.”

“A very few,” he said stubbornly. “A week at the most, and then we’re out of here.”

It didn’t come to that. It was the very next day that the teletext message came from ex–Lt. Col. T. Orion Bledsoe. “Clearance granted. Report to Pasadena ASAP.”

And they were certainly about ready to get out of Boston’s worst-yet climate. But when they were all packed up, and just waiting for the limo that was to take them to Logan Airport for the flight to LAX, Myra suddenly put her hand to her belly. “Oh, my,” she said. “I think that was a contraction.”

It was.

Once she made Ranjit understand what was happening, it was no problem to divert their limousine from the airport to Massachusetts General Hospital. Where, six hours later, little Natasha de Soyza Subramanian made her first appearance in the world.