Artsutanov’s inspiration was to realize that compression was only one possible way to build a structure. Another equally viable way was tension.
A structure based on tension—one made up of cables attached to some orbiting body, for example—was a theoretically elegant but practically unattainable notion when considered from the point of view of an engineer who had only mid-twentieth-century materials to make the cables out of. But, Artsutanov contended, who was to say that the advanced cable materials that might be developed a few decades on wouldn’t be up to that challenge?
When at last Ranjit got himself to go to bed that night, he was smiling—and kept on smiling even in his sleep, because for the first time in quite a while he had found something that was really worth smiling about.
He was still smiling the next morning at breakfast, and was counting the hours (there would be almost a hundred and forty of them) until the next session of Astronomy 101. There was no doubt in Ranjit’s mind that his astronomy sessions were the brightest spots in his academic year….
That being so, why not change his major from math to astronomy?
He stopped chewing long enough to think that over, but not to any successful conclusion. There was something in his head that wouldn’t let him take the official step of giving up on math. Rightly or wrongly that felt too much like giving up on Fermat’s theorem.
On the other hand, it was pretty strange—as his guidance counselor had pointed out in the one session he had been willing to allow her—to be a math major who wasn’t taking any mathematics courses.
Ranjit knew what to do about that, and he had a whole free morning to do it in. As soon as the counselor was in her office, Ranjit was there to clear up his status with her, and by noon he was officially registered as a late entry into the course in basic statistics. Why statistics? Well, it was, after all, a kind of mathematics. But entering the class so late, how would that work? No problem, Ranjit assured the counselor; there was no undergraduate math course that he couldn’t pick up in no time at all. And so by lunchtime Ranjit had solved at least one of his problems, even though it was a problem he hadn’t really thought important enough to be worth solving. All in all, Ranjit attacked his boring lunch quite cheerfully.
Then things went bad.
Some fool had left the radio news on at high volume instead of the murmur of music the college students were willing to put up with at their meals. Nobody seemed to know how to turn it off, either.
Of course, it was inevitable that the principal news stories that day were exactly the sort of stories Ranjit didn’t want to hear, because that was pretty much all the world news there was.
Now that the news was on, however, Ranjit dutifully listened to it. Predictably the news was bad—all the little wars were still thriving, and new ones were being promised, just like always. And then the news turned to local Colombo stories. These were not of much interest to Ranjit, until one word caught his attention. The word was “Trincomalee.”
Then he gave the news his full attention. It seemed that a man from Trincomalee had been stopped because he had failed to give way in his old van to a police car with its siren going. (Actually the police in the car had been heading toward a place to eat lunch.) When they pulled him over, the police naturally looked around the van. That was when they caught him with a load of toasters, blenders, and other small domestic appliances, and no good explanation for how they came to be in his possession.
Ranjit had stopped with his spoonful of rice halfway to his mouth, just as the news reader mentioned the suspect’s name. Kirthis Kanakaratnam.
That left Ranjit worse off than before. He couldn’t place the name. It did sound vaguely familiar, but from where? School? His father’s temple? It could have been from almost anywhere, and try as he might, Ranjit could not fit a face to the name. A later news story, long after lunch, after Ranjit had nearly given up, said the suspect had left a wife and four small children behind him.
It really was not his business, Ranjit told himself. He wasn’t successful in convincing himself, though, because if he didn’t know for sure just who this Kirthis Kanakaratnam was, how could he know it wasn’t someone who had in some context been a friend?
That was why Ranjit called the police. He called their central headquarters number, and he did it from a phone in a part of the campus he rarely visited. The voice was a woman, not young, and not in the habit of giving information away. A prisoner named Kirthis Kanakaratnam? Yes, perhaps so. They had a good many persons held in one Colombo jail or another, and they didn’t always give their right names. Could the caller give more information about this person? The names of some of his associates, for example? And was the caller himself related to him? Or perhaps associated with him in some enterprise? Or—
Ranjit quietly hung the phone up and departed that area. He didn’t really think that a squad of Colombo police was likely to come racing down the hallway any minute. But he was also far from positive that they weren’t, and saw no reason to wait around to find out.
When Ranjit got back to his rooms that night, there was the next best thing to Gamini’s actual presence waiting for him, namely, an e-letter from London. (There was also a message that Ranjit’s father had called and wished to be called back—very good news, Ranjit thought, because at least the old man seemed willing to speak to him again…but, all the same, it was the e-letter from Gamini that he looked at first.)
Gamini was showing every sign of having a wonderful time in London. Just yesterday (he wrote) he had walked over to the campus of University College London because Madge had told him that there was something she wanted him to see. Well, it was interesting, all right, assuming you liked looking at dead—even long-dead—bodies, because what was there to see was the waxed and mummified corpse of the two-hundred-years-ago English utilitarian philosopher, Jeremy Bentham. He was always there, Gamini said, but usually locked away in the wooden cabinet he called his “Auto-Icon.” As a special favor to Madge it had been unlocked for her by a smitten junior faculty member. This Bentham, Gamini went on to explain, had been a really ahead-of-his-time early-nineteenth-century thinker, had even once written a carefully thought out argument for extending tolerance—well, some tolerance, anyway—to homosexuals. Bentham was revolutionary, Gamini added, but he was also somewhat cautious. He didn’t publish the argument. He locked it away, and so it stayed for a century and a half, until someone finally put it into print in 1978.
By then Ranjit was getting tired of Jeremy Bentham, and a little curious about why Gamini was telling him so much. Could it be because Bentham had been one of the first significant figures to write with some sympathy about homosexuals? And if so, what was it that Gamini wanted Ranjit to understand about that subject? It certainly wasn’t that either of the young men considered himself homosexual, because they certainly did not.
He found that subject uneasy to think about and went on. There wasn’t much more of the letter anyway. A bunch of Gamini’s fellow students—Gamini didn’t mention this Madge there, but Ranjit would have bet a large sum that she had been in the group—had gone up to Stratford-upon-Avon for a day. And then at the very end, in a brief afterthought, the big news: “Oh, listen, I’ve got some summer courses I need to take, but Dad wants me home for a few days this summer so I can see Gram one more time before she goes. He says she’s doing poorly. So I’ll be back in Lanka for a bit. Where will you be? I don’t know if I’ll have time to get to Trinco—but somewhere?”