The Last Theorem

35 THE USES OF VACCINATION

Dr. Dhatusena Bandara did indeed resign from the Pax per Fidem board so he could run for the presidency of Sri Lanka. What left Ranjit openmouthed was that the elder Bandara’s replacement on the board was his son: Ranjit Subramanian’s boyhood friend was now part of the team that wielded Silent Thunder.

So Ranjit went to bed filled with wonder, and when he woke up the next morning, there was something else to wonder at. The breakfast he could smell cooking was not the kind of breakfast Myra usually preferred. Even stranger, when he got out of the shower and had begun to dress, he heard the distant sound of his wife singing what appeared to be some hymn from her childhood memories of Sunday school. Mystified, he pulled on a shirt and hurried to the kitchen.

Myra was indeed singing cheerfully to herself. She stopped as Ranjit came into the room, pursed her lips for a good-morning kiss, and waved him to the breakfast table. “Start with the juice,” she instructed. “I’ll have your eggs in a minute.”

Ranjit recognized what she was stirring up. “Scrambled eggs? And sausage, and those home-fried potatoes. What is it, Myra, are you homesick for California?”

She gave him a fond smile. “No, but I know you like this kind of food now and then, and I wanted to celebrate. Ranj, I woke up with an idea! I know how to make Surash happy and keep our principles intact!”

Ranjit drained the juice glass and watched with pleasure as Myra heaped the solid parts of the menu onto his plate. “If you can do that,” he declared, “I’m going to tell Gamini to put you on the Pax per Fidem board.”

She gave him another smile, but all she said was, “Can you eat four sausages? Tashy wouldn’t touch them. Said she’d get something at the university.”

Ranjit returned the smile with a mock-scowl. “Myra! Stop this talk of sausages and tell me how we make Surash happy!”

“Well,” she said, sitting down next to him and pouring herself a cup of tea, “today’s the day I take Robert in for his booster shots, you know. And I had a dream about it. I dreamed Robert was home, playing with his computer things, only he was stuck all over with little rolled-up darts of paper, and when I pulled one out of his shoulder and looked at it, I saw that they were all Bible verses.”

Ranjit’s scowl deepened. “It would be perfectly normal to have a dream that expressed concern over our child’s immunizations,” he informed her.

“Oh, yes, my darling,” she said affectionately, “but what was he being immunized against? We give the kids smallpox shots so they’ll get immunized and won’t be troubled with smallpox when they grow up. So if we inject them with Bible verses as children—I’m thinking of the kind of Sunday school I went to as a young girl—won’t they be—”

“Immunized against grown-up religion!” Ranjit shouted. He stood up and wrapped his arms around her. “You’re the best wife I ever had,” he told her. “It’s a great idea! Only—” He hesitated. “Do you think Natasha wants to take time from her busy schedule to go to Sunday school?”

“Yes,” Myra admitted, “that’s a problem. All we can do is try to persuade her.”

But when Natasha came home from her stint at the university’s solar-sail training center, she was radiant with joy. “It came!” she cried, waving a printout in the faces of her parents. “I’m confirmed for the race!”

Ranjit had never doubted that she would be, but he joined in the celebration, picking her up in a great bear hug…and then setting her down as soon as seemed proper, because his daughter was already three centimeters taller than he, with a body composed largely of muscle. Myra offered a congratulatory kiss, and then began studying the document that bore the official seal of the International Olympic Committee. “There are ten of you that are confirmed,” she observed. “And who’s this R. Olsos from Brazil? He’s another solar-sail pilot. Sounds familiar.”

Natasha produced what could only be called a giggle. “That’s Ron,” she told her mother. “Ronaldinho Olsos, the hundred-meter boy you met on the moon.”

Myra gave her an inquisitorial look. “When did he stop being a runner and turn into a solar-sail pilot?”

“Oh,” Natasha said idly, “it might be that I had something to do with it. He kept sounding jealous of what I was doing. We’ve sort of kept in touch ever since.”

“I see,” said Myra, who hadn’t known anything of the kind. However, as Myra de Soyza had at one time been a teenage girl herself, and remembered quite well how little she had wanted her parents involved in her experimental dealings with boys, she didn’t press the matter. She sent the maid out to the nearest decent bakery for a non-birthday but definitely celebratory cake for Natasha, which she herself decorated with an approximate sketch of the solar-sail ship Natasha would sail, and made a party out of that night’s dinner.

The Subramanian family was used to parties. Out of considerable experience they had become very good at them, too, so by the time Natasha had blown out the candles on her cake and made her conventional wish (not to be told to anyone, especially her parents), they were all feeling warmly, affectionately jovial. That was when Robert threw his arms around his big sister and whispered in her ear.

Which made her look startled. She turned to her parents. “Is that true? You’re going to make Robert go to church?”

“Not church,” her father said. “It’s a Sunday school. We’ve checked, and they have a class that would be good for him—learning the stories about Jesus and his Sermon on the Mount and all. And it would make Surash happy to know that my father’s grandchildren aren’t being kept entirely away from religion—”

Natasha shook her head crossly. “I don’t mind being kept entirely away from religion. And Robert says you want me to go, too! Honestly, don’t you think I have enough to do already? School, solar-sail practice—”

“It’s only one evening a week,” her mother informed her. “We aren’t talking about Sunday school for you. You’d go to the church’s teenager group. They do talk about the Bible now and then, yes, but most of their time is spent on projects to make the world a better place.”

“Which, for now,” her father added, “is mostly working for Bandara Senior’s campaign for the presidency. I assume you might like to help with that.”

That was unquestioned for Natasha, or any of the rest of her family, either. It was the elder Bandara who had persuaded the university to set up the solar-sail simulation laboratory that gave Natasha her best hope of doing well in the race to come. The solar-sail lab was orders of magnitude less expensive than the lunar-gravity chamber she had had to practice in for the moon race; it was little more than a chamber in which all six of the walls were screens. But the computer programs to run it were complex—and expensive. It was a major outlay for the university, and would have been totally impossible for the Subramanian family alone.

“And,” her mother said, passing Natasha her personal screen, “I have a picture of the group when they had a beach party a few weeks ago. They look like kids you might want to be friendly with.”

“Huh,” Natasha said, studying the score or so of young people displayed on the screen.

She didn’t comment on the fact that at least four of the boys in the picture were notably good-looking. Neither did her mother, although she was pretty sure that this unexpectedly reappearing Ron from Brazil wasn’t nearly as handsome.

“Of course,” Myra said, “it’s completely up to you. If you really feel you’d rather not—”

“Oh,” Natasha said, “I suppose I could try it out once or twice. As you say, it’d make Surash happy.”

When Bill returned to unite himself once more with his cluster of Grand Galactics, he wasn’t prepared for the joyous rush of feeling that came with the experience. All the time he had been detached for the running of his various errands, he had been something that was not a part of his previous life experience. He had been alone. And then, once again joined to his fellows, he wasn’t alone anymore, and he was jubilant.

It was almost difficult for him to leave the cluster again.

There wasn’t any choice, of course. The cluster had shared his concerns, and his need to be fair. Perhaps these wretched little humans no longer posed a threat to the galaxy’s peace. If so, perhaps it was unfair to wipe them out.

The Grand Galactics were always stern and sometimes ruthless. But they did not deliberately choose to be unfair.

So Bill took the jumps that returned him to the neighborhood of the little yellow sun that their planet revolved around, and sent two messages.

The first was to the One Point Five armada, now only a small fraction of a light-year from the planet it had been instructed to depopulate. “Cancel instructions for depopulation,” that message began. “Stop. Decelerate totally. Use emergency measures if necessary.”

And the second message was to the armada, but also to the Nine-Limbeds themselves. It merely ordered that no further evidence of their presence should be given to the Earth humans—

Which made a small problem for the Machine-Stored operators of the armada’s 154 ships.

They understood their orders, but those were much easier given than obeyed. In spacecraft you couldn’t just slam on the brakes. There weren’t any brakes. It was one thing to amp up the deceleration firing, which they did at once. That was terribly wasteful of electrical energy and working fluid, of course, but that didn’t matter. Those commodities, like everything else in the observable universe, did after all belong to the Grand Galactics. If they chose to waste them, that was no one’s business but their own.

No, it was the second part of their instruction that troubled the One Point Fives. They were commanded to avoid being observed by the subject species.

But never mind that the Nine-Limbeds had already blown their cover. When the One Point Fives were pouring gigajoules of energy into their exhausts, making a blazing beacon of ionized gases from 154 mammoth torches all firing at once, how could they remain unseen?