The Maxwell Equations

3

It is hardly necessary to say that after this event my peace of mind was completely gone. Not for one moment could I forget that terrible scream which had seemed to shake the very stone vaults sheltering Kraftstudt and Co. Besides I was still under the shock of finding such a complicated problem solved by one man in one day. And finally I was feverishly waiting for the solution of my second problem. If this one too was solved, then…

It was with shaking hands that two days later I received a package from the Kraftstudt's girl. By its bulk I could tell that it must contain the solution to the monstrously complicated piece of mathematics. With something akin to awe I stared at the thin creature in front of me. Then I had an idea.

"Please come in, I'll get the money for you."

"No, it's all right." She seemed frightened and in a hurry. "I'll wait outside…"

"Come on in, no point in freezing outside," I said and all but dragged her into the hall. "I must have a look first to see whether the work's worth paying for."

The girl backed against the door and watched me with wide-open eyes.

"It is forbidden…" she whispered.

"What is?"

"To enter clients' flats… Those are the instructions, sir…"

"Never mind the instructions. I'm the master of this house and nobody will ever know you've entered."

"Oh, sir, but they will, and then…"

"What then?" I said, coming nearer.

"Oh. it's so horrible…"

Her head drooped suddenly and she sobbed.

I put a hand on her shoulder but she recoiled.

"Give me the seven hundred marks at once and I will go."

I held out the money, she snatched it and was gone.

Opening the package I nearly cried out with astonishment. For several minutes I stood there staring at the sheaf of photo paper unable to believe my own eyes. The calculations were done in a different hand.

Another mathematical genius! And of greater calibre than the first. The equations he had solved in an analytical form on fifty-three pages were incomparably more complicated than the ones I had handed in die first time. As I peered at the integrals, sums, variations and other symbols of the highest realms of mathematics I had a sudden feeling of having been transferred into a strange mathematical world where difficulty had no meaning. It just didn't exist.

That mathematician, it seemed, had no more difficulty in solving my problem than we have in adding or subtracting two-digit numbers.

Several times I tore myself away from the manuscript to look up a thing in a mathematical manual or reference book. I was amazed by his skill in using the most complex theorems and proofs. His mathematical logic and methods were irreproachable. I did not doubt that had the best mathematicians of all nations and ages, such as Newton, Leibnitz, Gauss, Euler, Lobachevsky, Weierstrass and Hilbert, seen the way my problem had been solved they would have been no less surprised.

When I finished reading the manuscript I fell to thinking.

Where did Kraftstudt get these mathematicians? I was convinced now he had a whole team of them, not just two or three. Surely he couldn't have founded a computer firm employing only two or three men. How had he managed it? Why was his firm next door to a lunatic asylum? Who had uttered that inhuman scream behind the wall? And why?

"Kraftstudt, Kraftstudt…" hammered in my brain. Where and when had I heard that name? What was behind it? I paced up and down my study, pressing my head with my hands, tasking my memory.

Then I again sat down to that genius-inspired manuscript, delighting in it, re-reading it part by part, losing myself to the world in the complexities of intermediate theorems and formulae. Suddenly I jumped up because I recalled that terrible inhuman scream once more and with it came the name of Kraftstudt.

The association was not fortuitous. No, it was inevitable. The screams of a man tortured and- Kraftstudt! These naturally went together. During the Second World War a Kraftstudt served as investigator in a Nazi concentration camp at Graz. For his part in the murders and inhuman treatment he got a life sentence at the Nuremberg trials.

I remembered the man's photo in all newspapers, in the uniform of an SS Obersturmfuhrer, in a pince-nez, with wide-open, surprised eyes in a plump good-natured face. People wouldn't believe a man with such a face could have been a sadist. Yet detailed evidence and thorough investigation left no room for doubt.

What had happened to him since the trials? Maybe he had been released like many other war criminals?

But what had mathematics to do with it all? What was the connection between a sadistic interrogator and the solutions of differential and integral equations?

At this point the chain of my reasoning snapped, for I was powerless to connect those two links. Obviously there was a link missing somewhere. Some kind of mystery.

Hard as I beat my brains, however, I could think of nothing plausible. And then that girl who said, "They will know." How scared she was!

After a few days of tormenting guess-work. I finally realised that unless I cracked the mystery I would probably crack up myself.

First of all I wanted to make sure that the Kraftstudt in question was that same war criminal.