Savant (11 page)

Metoo looked back down at the cover of the book. She had not thought of it in terms of the mathematics; it was simply a graphic illustration that this was a maths book, and, in particular, a book about probability. She felt herself tense slightly as she realised that this was another edition of the book that Tobe had been looking for in his office.

“OK,” said Metoo, “the maths is wrong. The cover of this book isn’t meant to have real maths on it. It wasn’t designed by a mathematician it was designed by... well... a designer.”

“But the maths is wrong.”

“Yes. The maths on the outside of the book is wrong, but the maths on the inside of the book is correct.”

“Why?” asked Tobe.

Metoo thought for a moment. She didn’t want to cause Tobe any anxiety, but she knew that Service needed something from her. She must make things as easy and normal as possible to get them all through whatever it was that was happening to them.

“A mathematician made the inside of the book, because he understands maths. A designer made the outside of the book, because he understands books,” she said.

Tobe thought for a moment.

“Inside, the book is the truth? Outside, the book is lies?”

“I suppose so,” said Metoo, touching his arm, and smiling at him as she handed the book back. “Is that all right?”

Tobe took the book from Metoo. He folded the back cover and the front cover away from the inside, grasped their outside edges together in his left hand, holding the body of the book in his right, and tore the covers off, so that only the spine and the pages of the book glued to it still remained. He handed the front and back covers of the book to Metoo. She took them.

“All books?” he asked.

“Some,” said Metoo, “not all.”

His action was perfectly logical, to anyone who knew Tobe at all, and Metoo wasn’t worried about him. She was worried about Service. She was worried about the situation, which she still knew almost nothing about, but she wasn’t worried about Tobe. He didn’t seem agitated or unhappy, and he seemed to be dealing extremely well with everything that was happening around him.

Tobe turned from Metoo, and stepped over the threshold back into his room. Metoo took this as a sign for her to leave, and walked back down the corridor to the garden room, and to Police Operator Saintout.

Tobe opened
On Probability
, and began reading on the title page, still standing in front of the wipe-wall, the pen held between his right palm and the last page of the book. He remained patient and methodical, reading the title page, acknowledgements, international codes and translations, edition numbers, publisher’s information, years of publication, author credentials and so on.

He began again at the beginning. After reading the first chapter, and following Eustache’s examples, Tobe put the book down on the desk to his left, open at the appropriate page, and began to make a simple probability tree based on the toss of a coin: obverse/reverse, obverse/reverse, obverse/reverse. His working was very neat and precise, forming a beautiful tree pattern across the wipe-wall. Tobe looked at the wall. The probability of the same thing happening over and over again just got smaller all the time: a half times a half, times a half, times a half... It could never actually reach zero, but it got closer and closer to it. Besides, everyone knew that a fair coin would land on its obverse on half of the occasions when it was tossed, and on its reverse the rest of the time. The first step was, at least, logical.

Tobe wiped the wall clean with the rag that was hanging on the hook next to the bookcase, and, standing in front of the wall, set to reading the second chapter of his maths text book.

After a few more minutes, Tobe turned back to the beginning of the book, and read the first chapter again. He closed the book and put it on the table.

He stepped over the threshold to his room and said, “Metoo.”

This time, Metoo heard Tobe the first time, her ears pricked, because she didn’t want to risk missing his call, and, as a consequence, have him walk into the garden room as he had done the previous morning.

As Metoo came into sight, around the corner of the corridor to his room, Tobe asked, “Have you got a coin?”

I
N
C
OLLEGES IN
Canada, India, North Africa and South America, the other four of the five best mathematicians in the World set to work on the printouts from the mini-print slot in Tobe’s office. Service Central had glanced at them, but quickly realised that they might as well be written in Welsh or Walloon, or some other dead language, for all they could understand the densely packed pages of symbols and devices.

It was common practice for experts to share ideas across the College system, worldwide, so Masters Gilles, Sanjeev, Mohammad, and Rosa were not surprised to receive the pages, apparently from Tobe. They were, however, required to work harder than usual to understand the half-finished thoughts and ideas, and examples of wild stabs in the dark that could not be considered as thorough extrapolations at all. Tobe was meticulous, and these pages of maths were not. Never-the-less, Tobe had, apparently, sent them, and there were some interesting ideas buried in the morass of numbers and symbols. If they were surprised that Tobe had sent them incomplete ideas, they didn’t show it, and they quickly became so embroiled in the maths that nothing else mattered.

They were soon talking to each other, comparing notes, trying to discover what Tobe was thinking. It was all logical, but none of it seemed to lead anywhere.

Probability was an old discipline; it had to be taught, of course, but none of the specialists could understand why Tobe had gone back to a subject that had nothing left to offer. It was not the sort of theoretical, unsolved mathematical puzzle that any of them specialised in, but, if Tobe was looking into it, there must be something there.

They worked on everything from quantum mechanics, Schrödinger’s Cat and Einstein’s EPR article, to the law of large numbers and the central limit theorem, all of which were hundreds of years old, and all of which were so familiar that no one expected anything new to come out of them.

Tobe had tried to get beyond the hay-day of mathematical thought, and had applied more modern ideas to his problem, including Qiu’s Statement and Calvert’s Synchronym.

After hours of working separately and together, of sharing results and extrapolations, all four Masters of mathematics came back with the same question,
What was Tobe trying to find the answer to?
None of them could work out what the initial premise had been, other than that it was broadly related to probability. There was no sense of the precise nature of the question.

Service Central, masquerading as Tobe, had no way to answer the question, and so stalled, while they collected information, and waited for the opportunity to interview Tobe.

Metoo, when she was asked, could not answer the question, even after she had spent some time reviewing the data in the garden room, watched over by Operator Saintout. She was a good theoretical mathematician, but no one considered that there were any remaining problems where probability was concerned, so she had not studied it since School.

She was certain of one thing: Tobe was looking for the answer to a question. She knew, only too well, that Tobe might not know the nature of that question, might not be able to express it in any language, mathematical or otherwise. Why something happened the way it happened could not always be explained; some things simply were. Tobe did not understand that. The chances of Tobe ever understanding that were, in Metoo’s vernacular, “Slim to none”.

Chapter Seventeen

R
ANKED
O
PERATORS
M
C
C
OLL
and Dudley continued with their duties. Of the three remaining Ranked Operators, Patel was the best rested, and she had eaten, so she was sent out to Tobe’s office to supervise the extraction at 18:00.

She had to take the room apart, starting with the floor, for logistical reasons, and then moving on to the wipe-wall, the bookshelves, the desk, and finally the fabric of the room. There would be nothing left when she was finished. Of course, she would not be doing the job alone, in fact, it was not intended that she would be doing the job at all.

Estefan and his colleague were stood-down for debriefing, and two more Techs and two Operators were brought in at the end of their Rest periods. Service Central wanted fresh men working the room; what came out of there could prove critical.

One Operator and one Tech began the process of working their way across the linopro, under Operator Patel’s instruction. Patel was aware that the information on the linopro had not been drawn from the door, inwards, but she also knew that it was the only way to collect and record all of the data. She began by instructing the Tech to make a 30 centimetre square on the threshold of the room, using pins and string to mark out the area. When everything was collected and bagged from that square, including copies of all the handwritten data, they could move on to a second square. All the squares would be numbered to form a grid, with the corresponding number on the bag containing the information from each square, so that the whole lot could be reconstructed if necessary from the data they collected.

It was difficult, painstaking work: collecting the tatty pages from books without leaving bits stuck to the linopro, copying out complex equations, including crossings out, errors and smudges that nobody present understood, while trying not to impose their own values on the artefacts.

The first square took almost half an hour to dismantle and bag up. When they were finished there would be a hundred bags just for the floor, and it could take fifty working hours to complete. By the end of the second hour, Operator Patel was viewing the process almost as if she was performing a kind of forensic archaeology. With one person copying and another documenting and bagging, per square, it was important to have both teams working the room at the same time. She worked out the optimum order for the squares to be completed in. Both teams working together would cut the time in half, to twenty-five hours. The team in the left half of the room worked in rows back and forth, across the room, while the team on the right of the room worked in columns along the length of the room.

Increased familiarity with the process, and the fact that the mathematical data seemed simpler and clearer, the closer to the middle of the room the men worked, made everything go faster than expected, and collection of data on the linopro was completed in a little under eighteen hours. Operator Patel did as much work as any of them; four people were working at any given time, and one was resting, or bringing refreshments. They also only worked fifty minutes to the hour to allow for comfort breaks and to keep the workforce relaxed. It was an efficient system, and Operator Patel got more out of her team than anyone at Service Central had dared to hope.

Operator Patel preferred to keep the teams that she had trained for the job, rather than bring in new staff, and, having made her case to Service Central, she was allowed to continue with one of the teams after a four hour rest period. The second team would come in after an eight hour rest period, and the first team would get their second four hours of rest. Then, both teams would go back to working the original system until the next task was accomplished and the wipe-wall was dismantled.

T
OBE HAD WORKED
on the first day, when he should have been taking tutorials. He had started work early on the second day, which should have been a rest day, and a rest day was imposed on him on the third day, after Pitu 3 had hit his Service button at 08:30 in the morning.

It would not be impossible to impose a second rest day on Tobe on day four of the event, if things were not sorted out before then, but Metoo did not relish the thought. She could still hardly believe that things seemed to have gone so far. Tobe was in his room, apparently tossing a coin and collecting the data, quite happily, while Saintout was wondering about in the garden room, doing goodness only knew what, and waiting for her to make one of the most important decisions of her life.

She signed in to Service, and asked, “Anomalies?”

The answer came back, “Moderate and monitoring.”

Metoo took a deep breath.

“Please advise,” she said.

“Maintain the subject,” Service replied.

Metoo wanted to scream. It was her job, to maintain the subject. She had been maintaining the subject for her entire adult life. She was on-call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. She fed him and clothed him. She had set his routine when she had first become his Assistant-Companion, moulding her predecessor’s regimen, as she went along, to better suit Tobe’s needs, without changing things so dramatically that she upset him. She had even weaned him off all the drug therapies that her predecessors had used for their own convenience. For the past eight years, she had maintained the subject.