He really was not a bad man, and it was the loss to science that was first on his mind, only a little later what it must feel like to be chopped and gulped.
Shaffery pulled his hands in and folded them on his chest, crossed his feet at the ankles, and rested them on the end of the boat, knees spread on the sides. There was now nothing trailing in the water that might strike a shark as bait. There was, on the other hand, no good way for him to get back to shore. He could yell, but the wind was the wrong way. He could wait till he drifted near one of the islets. But if he missed them, he would be out in the deep ocean before he knew it.
Shaffery was almost sure that sharks seldom attacked a boat, even a rubber one. Of course, he went on analytically, the available evidence didn’t signify. They could flip a raft like this over easily enough. If this particular shark ate him off this particular half-shell, there would be no one to report it.
Still, there were some encouraging considerations. Say it was a shark. Say it was capable of tipping the boat or eating him boat and all. They were dull-witted creatures, and what was to keep one hanging around in the absence of blood, splashing, noise, trailing objects or any of the other things sharks were known to take an interest in? It might be a quarter mile away already. But it wasn’t, because at that moment he heard the splash of some large object breaking the surface a foot from his head.
Shaffery could have turned to look, but he didn’t; he remained quite motionless, listening to the gentle water noises, until they were punctuated by a sort of sucking sound and then a voice. A human voice. It said, “Scared the piss out of you, didn’t I? What do you say, Shaffery? Want a tow back to shore?”
It was not the first time Shaffery had encountered Larry Nesbit diving in the cove; it was only the first time it had happened at night. Shaffery twisted about in the raft and gazed at Nesbit’s grinning face and its frame of wet strands of nape-length hair. It took a little time to make the transition in his mind from eighteen-foot shark to five-foot-eight TV star. “Come on,” Nesbit went on, “what do you say? Tell you what. I’ll tow you in, and you give me some of old Nuccio’s Scotch, and I’ll listen to how you’re going to invent antigravity while we get pissed.”
That Nesbit, he had a way with him. The upshot of it all was that Shaffery had a terrible hangover the next day; not the headache but the whole works, trotting to the toilet and being able to tolerate only small sips of ginger ale and wishing, or almost wishing, he was dead. (Not, to be sure, before he did the one immortalizing thing. Whatever it was going to be.)
It was not altogether a disaster, the hangover. The next morning was very busy, and it was just as well that he was out of the way. When the Board of Directors convened to discuss the astronomical events of the year, or whatever it is they did discuss in the afternoon session to which Shaffery was definitely not invited, it was always a busy time. They arrived separately, each director with his pair of associates. One after another 40-foot cabin cruisers with fishing tops came up to the landing and gave up cargoes of plump little men wearing crew cuts and aloha shirts. The observatory car, not ever used by any of the observatory personnel, was polished, fueled and used for round trips from the landing strip at Jubila, across the island, to Comray Hill and the observatory. Shaffery laid low in his private retreat. He had never told his wife that he was not allowed in the observatory for the board meetings; so she didn’t look for him. He spent the morning in the tar-paper shack where photographic material had once been kept, until he discovered that the damp peeled the emulsion away from the backing. Now it was his home away from home. He had fitted it with a desk, chair, icebox, coffeepot and bed.
Shaffery paid no attention to the activity outside, not even when the directors’ assistants, methodically searching the bushes and banana groves all round the observatory, came to his shack, opened the door without knocking, and peered in at him. They knew him from previous meetings, but they studied him silently for a moment before the two in the doorway nodded to each other and left him again. They were not well-mannered men, Shaffery thought, but no doubt they were good at their jobs, whatever those jobs were. He resolutely did not think about the Board Meeting, or about the frightening, calumnious things Larry Nesbit had said to him the night before, drinking the Board Chairman’s Scotch and eating his food, in that half-jocular, shafting, probing way he had. Shaffery thought a little bit about the queasy state of his lower abdomen, because he couldn’t help it, but what he mostly thought about was Fermat’s Last Theorem.
A sort of picayune, derivative immortality was waiting there for someone. Not much, but Shaffery was getting desperate. It was one of those famous mathematical problems that grad students played at for a month or two and amateurs assaulted in vain all their lives. It looked easy enough to deal with. It started with so elementary a proposition that every high-school boy mastered it about the time he learned to masturbate successfully. If you squared the sides of a right triangle, the sum of the squares of the two sides was equal to the square of the hypotenuse.
Well, that was all very well, and it was so easy to understand that it had been used to construct right angles by surveyors for centuries. A triangle whose sides were, say, 3 feet and 4 feet, and whose hypotenuse was 5 feet, had to make a right angle, because 32+42=52; and it always had, since the time of Pythagoras, five hundred years B.C., a2+b2=c2. The hitch was, if the exponent was anything but 2, you could never make the equation come out using whole numbers; a3+b3 never equaled c3, and a27+b27 did not add up to any c27, no matter what numbers you used for a, b and c. Everybody knew that this was so. Nobody had ever proved that it had to be so, by mathematical proofs, except that Fermat had left a cryptic little note, found among his papers after his death, claiming that he had found a “truly wonderful” proof, only there wasn’t enough room in the margin of the book he was writing on to put it all down.
Shaffery was no mathematician. But that morning, waking up to the revolution in his stomach and the thunder in his head, he had seen that that was actually a strength. One, all the mathematicians of three or four centuries had broken their heads against the problem; so obviously it couldn’t be solved by any known mathematics anyway. Two, Einstein was weak in mathematics too and had disdained to worry about it, preferring to invent his own.
So he spent the morning, between hurried gallops across the parking lot to the staff toilet, filling paper with mathematical signs and operators of his own invention. It did not seem to be working out, to be sure. For a while he thought of an alternative scheme, to wit, inventing a “truly wonderful” solution of his own and claiming he couldn’t find room to write it down in the margin of, say, the latest issue of Mathematical Abstracts; but residual sanity persuaded him that perhaps no one would ever find it, or that if it was found it might well be laughed off, and anyway that it would be purely posthumous celebrity and he wanted to taste it while he was alive. So he broke for lunch, came back feeling dizzy and ill and worried about the meeting that was going on, and decided to take a nap before resuming his labors.