“No, I meant Fermat. Why don’t you go back to 1650 or whenever it was to get the proof from him?”
Vrank and his companions shuffled back and forth nervously, and finally Vrank said, “Well, uh, actually, we already did. He didn’t have a proof either.”
“You’re kidding.” Rick laughed. “He didn’t have a proof?”
Vrank shook his head. “We docked his life before we got to yours, just for a prologue, you know, but it turned out he was wrong when he wrote that note in the margin. He had a flash of inspiration, but it turned out to be—”
Rick’s laughter drowned him out. “Your time machine!” Rick said when he got his breath back. “The one with the bad filter. You did the same thing to him that you did to me.”
Vrank blushed. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“Then there never was a proof. Never was, and never will be. Except for Wiles’s semistable elliptic curves.”
“Yada.” Vrank sighed and turned to his companions. “We’re snarked, dooties.”
“What happens now?” Marsha asked.
“Nothing, at least from your point of view. We, on the other hand, get to bounce back downstream and see if anybody’s filed a complaint.”
“And if they did?”
“Then we have to pay a fine and make resti to anybody whose life got screwed up. Not to mention re-taking historical vid.”
“You don’t just go back and undo the mistake?”
Shil laughed. “Define ‘mistake.’ We came back to dock Rick solving the theorem, which he wouldn’t even have tried if we hadn’t. But we wouldn’t have come back here in the first place if he hadn’t done it already, so maybe we should trang the ripple suppressors in Vrank’s chrono again and bounce back and forth across the herenow until he twigs to it, hey? Which is the ‘real’ connie?”
“This is,” Rick said after a moment’s translation. “You’ve screwed with my head enough already; just leave well enough alone and go pay your fine.”
Vrank nodded. “That’s the way the judges usually figure it, too. Well, wish us luck.” He tapped his forehead in a mock salute, reached down to touch a control on his fanny pack/ time machine, and vanished. Torrie and Shil blinked out a moment later.
“Whew,” Marsha said, leaning back in the chair beside Rick’s. “I was afraid they were going to undo everything all the way back to me getting hired here, and I’d never have met you.”
Rick gave her a hug. “I’d have given them the proof before it came to that. I was just holding out to see if I could get them off our case entirely.”
“What?” Marsha stared at him with wide eyes. “You did figure it out?”
“That’s right.” Rick shuffled through the papers on his desk. “Hmm, that’s strange,” he said. “I had it here a minute ago.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE: In order to properly research this story, I, of course, had to find an elegant solution to Fermat’s last theorem. It is indeed a truly remarkable proof, which the margin of this publication is also too small to contain. Fortunately, the editor has graciously agreed to print it in a separate appendix, which can be found on page 179.