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.
23
FARMER “BILL”
And in another part of the galaxy, far, far away…
You couldn’t say that the Grand Galactics had forgotten about unruly Earth. That never happened. They were constitutionally incapable of forgetting anything. All the same, Earth had certainly slipped into the farther recesses of their collective mind, and their attention was concentrated on more important, or anyway more interesting, issues.
In the case of “Bill” himself, for example, there was the task of tending to their farm—or, perhaps it should be “farm” in quotation marks, since nothing organic grew there.
We wouldn’t usually think of the Grand Galactics as farmers of any kind. Nevertheless there were certain kinds of crops that they encouraged, and it is a curious fact that medieval human peasants had done something very similar with their own tiny plots.
The plot that interested Bill enough to cause him to visit it was a volume of space several light-years on a side.
At first look, any astronomer might have thought it was nothing but empty space. As a matter of fact, that is exactly what human astronomers had thought when they’d first observed it. It wasn’t entirely empty, though. Better observations, achieved when humans had managed to acquire better telescopes, showed that there was something in that patch of space that bent light, refracting blue in one direction, red in the other.
That something, as the Grand Galactics had always known, was interstellar dust.
This trip was not, of course, Bill’s first visit to his farm. Not long before—oh, a matter of a few million years or so before—he had explored it in detail, making a careful census of the dust. What percentage of the dust particles (as humans might measure them) were less than a hundredth of a micron in size? What percentage, indeed, were in all the size ranges all the way up to the giants, which were as much as ten microns across, or even larger? He took note as well of the chemical composition of the dust particles, and of their neutron counts and ionization status.
All this was a simple and quite easy part of the self-imposed duties of a Grand Galactic. Bill however had always found it among what one could call the most enjoyable duties. After all, his census would ultimately contribute to one of the great goals the Grand Galactics possessed.
So, like some eleventh-century Norman baron, what Bill was doing was riding his fields. The dust patch was what the baron’s Saxon serfs would have called a fallow field, allowed to remain unplanted so that the soil could rest and regain its fertility.
Bill’s patch didn’t raise corn or oats. It raised only stars—big ones, little ones, all kinds; but the Grand Galactics preferred the big ones. Those giants—what humans would call the A’s and B’s and O’s—could be counted on to rapidly burn up their initial stocks of hydrogen in the nuclear furnaces at their cores. Then, when that was gone, they would do the same with their helium, carbon, neon, magnesium—each element heavier than the one that came before, until they came to iron, which was the end of the line.