The Last Theorem

3 AN ADVENTURE IN CODE-CRACKING

There were nearly two months of summer vacation between the end of Ranjit’s first school year and the beginning of his second. This tinkering with the calendar was still regarded as a rather radical new experiment by much of the university’s faculty. Until recently they had never allowed a summer vacation on the grounds that, Sri Lanka being as close to the equator as it was, it never had seasons. But a few years of student unrest, followed by the realization that college-age young men and women need a break from discipline now and then, led to the experiment of following Western university practices.

For Ranjit, the experiment was not so successful. Gamini was away, so he had no one to enjoy it with, and world news remained bad.

What made it worse was that for a time things had looked good. There had been a promise of a superpower meeting to stamp out some of the world’s deadly little wars. That had sounded like a promising development, but the selection of a site for the meeting went badly. Russia proposed Kiev, in Ukraine, but when it came to a vote, Kiev lost by two votes to one. China offered Ho Chi Minh City, in Vietnam, but it, too, was defeated, by the same margin. As was the American proposal, Vancouver, in Canada. After which the Chinese representatives stormed out of the UN building, declaring that the Western powers had no real interest in world peace after all.

But the American and Russian delegates had expected that, and had made a plan in readiness. In joint statements they deplored the Chinese failure to subordinate national vanity to the needs of peace and announced their intention to set aside their often-expressed and irreconcilable differences to go ahead with the meeting without China’s presence.

For a locale they chose that beautiful Venice of the north, the city of Stockholm, Sweden. Their effort almost succeeded. They agreed on the urgent need to put an immediate stop to the ongoing fighting between Israel and the Palestinians, between the Muslim and the Christian fragments of what had once been Yugoslavia, between Ecuador and Colombia—well, between every pair of nations that was making war, declared or otherwise, on each other all around the globe. There were plenty of candidates, and there was no doubt that a few rockets in the right place could have made any of them stop fighting. The Americans and the Russians agreed that it was their simple duty, as the biggest bullies on the block, to do the job.

But there was one thing they couldn’t agree on. That was, in each combative pair, which one to aim their rockets at.

Ranjit Subramanian decided to do his best to ignore all that sort of thing. It was spoiling his summer, which was cherished, unprogrammed time for Ranjit, meaning he could do pretty much whatever he wanted to do, and he knew exactly what that would be. But when he trapped Dr. Christopher Dabare in his office, the math teacher took offense. “If I would not allow you to use my password during the school year, what gives you the lunatic notion that I will let you have it while I’m in Kuwait?”

Ranjit blinked at him. “Kuwait?”

“Where I have a contract to teach summer sessions each year for the oil sheikhs’ sons, at, I might mention, a rate of payment quite a bit more impressive than I receive trying to beat simple mathematical truths into the heads of you people.”

To which Ranjit, thinking fast, responded only, “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you’d be away. I wish you a pleasant trip,” and headed out of the professor’s office for the nearest computer. If bloody Dr. Dabare wouldn’t give up his password voluntarily, there were other possibilities. Specifically there were the kind of possibilities that existed in the case of a teacher who would be making his fortune a couple of thousand kilometers away, and Ranjit had instantly conceived a plan for taking advantage of them.

Step one in the plan was easy. Every faculty member at the university kept a potted biography on file. It took only a moment for Ranjit to pull Dabare’s up. Ten minutes later he was walking away, folding into his pocket the printout that held a healthy beginning for all the preliminary data he wanted—Dabare’s birth date, his personal phone extension number, his e-mail address, his passport number, his wife’s name—and the names of her parents, too—his own parents’ names, and even the name of his paternal grandfather, included because he had once been mayor of a small town somewhere in the south. Plus the name of his Jack Russell terrier, Millie, and the address of his beach house down the shore in Uppuveli. It wasn’t everything. It almost certainly would not even be enough. But it was certainly a good chunk of data to be starting with.

The question was, where could he find a place to run the necessary programs?

Certainly none of the terminals he was in the habit of using for his schoolwork would do. They were far too public. Ranjit had no doubt that when he finished programming the computer to do what he wanted, it would need to chug along for a significant period of time as it worked all the required combinations and permutations. He did not want some casual passerby wondering what that computer was up to.

But there was an ideal place! The one he and Gamini had discovered in the unfinished school of indigenous law!

When he got there, though, he got a shock. He came in the usual way for Gamini and himself—the back way—and was pleased to see the two computers still sitting there and lighting up at once when he hit the power key. But he could hear a distant sound of music, the kind of tuneless this-year’s trash that he and Gamini had agreed they hated, and when he peered in at the reception room, the actual receptionist was there. An elderly woman, rather fat. Making herself a cup of tea to go with the supermarket special “newspaper” in her hand.

She seemed to have the ears of a bat. She looked up at once to where Ranjit lurked. “Hello?” she called. “Is someone there?”

For a time it seemed to Ranjit that he was going to have to find another perfect spot for his computing, but it turned out that the receptionist did not consider her duties to include security checks. Her name, she said, was Mrs. Wanniarachchi. (To which Ranjit inventively responded that his was Sumil Bandaranaga.) She was glad to have company in the stacks, because sometimes it got lonesome. Mr. Bandaranaga did of course have at least a minor in comparative religions? Ranjit assured her that he did, and that was all it took. Mrs. Wanniarachchi gave him a friendly wave and went back to her scandal sheet, and Ranjit had the freedom of the library.

Nothing had changed. The pair of computer terminals still sat ready, and it didn’t take Ranjit long to set up his program and feed in the bits and pieces he had collected. As he left, the woman at the desk, already standing up and putting on her raincoat, said idly, “You’ve turned everything off, haven’t you?”

“Oh, of course,” Ranjit reassured her. Actually, he hadn’t; but the computer would turn itself off when it had found the password Ranjit was looking for, or when it concluded that the password could not be generated from any of the data he had supplied. And in the morning he could get the results.

Which were, as he had more or less expected, nonexistent.

There had not been enough data for the program to do its job. By then he already had more data to feed it, though, having spent one hour of the night wearing the rough clothes of a garbageman and collecting all the refuse Dr. Dabare’s household had set out for the real collectors of everything unwanted. Most of what Ranjit acquired was not only worthless but offensive to the nose, but there had been several dozen sheets of paper—statements of account from various shops and service providers; offers for tours, car rentals, and e-bank lending facilities; and, best of all, a dozen or so personal letters. Tragically most of them were in German, the language of the country where the professor had taken some graduate courses, a language as opaque to Ranjit as Inuit or Choctaw, but from the letters in English or Sinhalese he extracted Dabare’s driver’s license number, his exact height in centimeters, and the PIN for his cash machine card. (And wouldn’t it be only fair if Ranjit took a thousand rupees or so for the trouble the math professor was causing him? No, he concluded, it wouldn’t. Such a thing was feloniously illegal. But it was amusing to think about.)

The computer of course had long since run out of permutations to try and so had stopped. Ranjit typed in all the new candidates, hit the go button, and left once more. Yes, he might be divorcing himself from the real world. But the real world seemed to have very little to offer a friendless and—at least temporarily—fatherless Tamil boy.

But then, when he got to his room to get a long-delayed sleep, there waiting for him was something that brightened the whole day. It was a letter with a London postmark, and it was from Gamini.

It had taken long enough for Gamini to get around to saying the good part, but there it was. Ranjit took the time to read that sentence over three or four times before going on with the rest of the letter. Which was newsy but not very personal. Gamini’s classes were interesting but maybe more demanding than he would have liked. The food at the London School was, naturally, horrible, but there were plenty of Indian take-out places everywhere, and some of them knew what to do with a curry. The school’s housing wasn’t much better than the food, but Gamini wasn’t going to have to stay in it forever. As soon as he got the go-ahead from his father’s London lawyers, he was going to sign a lease on what the landlord called “a superb maisonette” just a five-minute walk from most of his classrooms. Such things you could do, Ranjit thought as he looked without enjoyment around his own bleak room, when you were lucky enough to possess a rich father. And, oh, yes, Ranjit, the letter went on, you’d be thrilled to be here because the school is no more than ten minutes away from the cluster of theaters and restaurants around Leicester Square. Gamini had already found time to see a revival of She Stoops to Conquer and a couple of musicals.

So Gamini Bandara, though nine thousand kilometers away, was having fun.

Ranjit sighed, spared a moment to be glad that his absent friend was doing so well—or, at least, spared a moment to tell himself that he was glad—crawled into his lonesome bed, and went to sleep.

It took Ranjit long enough to get the code-cracking job done—eleven days, actually, with much of each day devoted to dredging up additional possible entries or inventing new ways for the computer to mix and match them. But then there was the morning when he came in, expecting little, and got the supreme delight of seeing his computer screen announcing “Dr. Dabare password identified.” What it turned out to be was the motto of the University of Colombo, Buddhih Sarvatra Bhrajate—“wisdom shines forth everywhere”—with his wife’s birthday cut in half and interpolated between the words:

And the world of mathematical documents was open to him!