LITMIR.BIZ

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Dead Sea.

      Ranjit had given very little thought to the Dead Sea, but to the lecturer it was a hidden treasure. What you could do, he said, was dig aqueducts from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea, four hundred meters below sea level, and use the height difference to generate electricity.

      Ranjit found his mind racing at the idea. It was problem solving on a huge scale, and it was something worth doing! Ranjit couldn’t wait to tell Gamini about it.

      But when Gamini finally showed up for lunch, he wasn’t impressed. “Old stuff,” Gamini informed him. “My father’s friend Dr. Al-Zasr—he’s an Egyptian; they went to school together in England—told us about it once at dinner. Only it’s never going to happen. It was an Israeli idea, and the other nations around there don’t like Israeli ideas.”

      “Huh,” Ranjit said. The lecturer hadn’t mentioned that it was an Israeli idea. Or that it was twenty years old, and that if it hadn’t been built in twenty years, it wasn’t likely to be built now.

      Gamini wasn’t all that interested in chikungunya, either, and then it was his turn to educate Ranjit. “Your problem,” he informed his friend, “is what they call the GSSM syndrome. Know what that is? No, you don’t, but it’s what you’re doing. It’s your multitasking, Ranj. You’re cutting yourself into too many pieces. My psych teacher says there’s a good chance it makes you stupid, because, you know, every time you switch from one thing to another, you’re interrupting yourself, and you can do that just so much before there’s a permanent effect on your prefrontal cortex and you’ve got ADD.”

      Ranjit frowned. He was fiddling around on Gamini’s laptop. Recently, Ranjit had begun learning everything he could about computers. “What’s ADD? And while we’re at it, what’s the GSSM syndrome?”

      Gamini gave him a reproving look. “You really should try to keep up, Ranj. ADD is attention deficit disorder, and GSSM is the initials of the four people who led the research into the multitasking syndrome. There was somebody named Grafman, plus people named Stone, Schwartz, and Meyer. There was a woman named Yuhong Jiang, too, but I guess they didn’t have room for any more initials. Anyway, it sounds to me like you’re too concerned with events beyond your control.”

      It was a fair cop. Nevertheless, that night, before turning in, Ranjit made a point of watching the news, just to show that he wasn’t ruled by his friend’s notions. Not much of it was good. At least a score of countries were still truculently declaring that they had every right to whatever nuclear programs they chose to implement, and most of them were in fact implementing them. North Korea was, as usual, displaying itself as the very model of a rogue state. In endlessly troubled Iraq a Shiite incursion into oil-rich Kurdish territory threatened to set off another round of the turmoil that characterized that troubled country.

      And so it went.

      There was a personal item about to come up on the bad-news list at the next day’s lunch, too.

      Ranjit was not immediately aware of that. When he caught his first sight of Gamini, there ahead of him and skeptically investigating what the cafeteria rather charitably called their special of the day, all he felt was the pleasure of seeing his friend again. But as he was seating himself, he became aware of the expression on Gamini’s face. “Is something wrong?” Ranjit demanded.

      “Wrong? No, of course not,” Gamini said at once, and then sighed. “Oh, hell,” he said. “As a matter of fact, Ranjit, there is something I need to tell you about. It’s a promise I made my father years ago.”

      Ranjit was instantly suspicious. Nothing good could be coming of that sort of promise, told in that tone of voice. “What promise?”

      “I promised the old man that I would apply to transfer to the London School of Economics after my first year here. He visited there years ago and he thought it was the best school in the world to learn about government.”

      Indignation fought with surprise in Ranjit’s voice. “About government? In a school of economics?”

      “That’s not its whole name, Ranjit. It’s really called the London School of Economics and Political Science.”

      To that Ranjit could only respond with his all-purpose “Huh.” But then he added morosely, “So you’re going to apply to this foreign school, just so you can keep some promise you made to your father?”

      Gamini coughed. “Not exactly. I mean, it’s not what I’m going to do. It’s what I already did. I actually applied years ago. It was my father’s idea. He said that the earlier I put my name in, the better my chances would be, and it looks like he was right. The thing is, Ranjit, they accepted me. We got the letter last week. I start at London as soon as the school year is finished here.”

      And that was the second of the bad things that happened to the friendship of Ranjit Subramanian and Gamini Bandara, and by a long way the worse of the two.

      Things did not get better for Ranjit. The biology teacher’s shipment of embalmed white mice finally arrived, and so the grisly business of dissection started again, and interesting subjects like chikungunya didn’t come up again. Even his math course, the one he had counted on to make the others worth enduring, was letting him down.

      By the end of his first week at university, Ranjit had been pretty sure he already knew all the algebra he would ever require. Solving Fermat’s great puzzle would not depend on conic sections or summation notation. Still, he had breezed through the first few months; such things as finding the factoring of polynomials and the use of logarithmic functions were at least moderately entertaining. But by the third month it became clear that Dr. Christopher Dabare, the mathematics instructor, not only was not planning to teach anything relating to number theory, but didn’t really know a lot about it himself. And, worse, didn’t want either to learn or to help Ranjit to learn.

      For a time Ranjit made do with the resources of the university library, but the books in the stacks were finite in number. When they ran out, Ranjit’s last recourse would have been some or all of the number theory journals, such as the Journal of Number Theory itself, from Ohio State University in the United States, or the Journal de Théorie des Nombres de Bordeaux, for which that hard-won sketchy knowledge of French might have been useful after all. But the university library did not subscribe to any of those journals, and Ranjit could not access them himself. Oh, Dr. Dabare could, just by permitting the use of his private faculty member password. But he wouldn’t do that.

      As the end of the year approached, Ranjit needed a friend to unload his disappointments on. But he didn’t have that, either.

      It was bad enough that Gamini was going nine thousand kilometers away. But to make it worse for Ranjit even those last few weeks were not going to be reserved for the two boys to share. Gamini’s family obligations, as it turned out, had to come first. First there was a weekend in Kandy, the “great city” that had once been the island’s capital. One branch of Gamini’s family had doggedly stayed on in what had been the family home before the mighty “Great Attractor” that was the bustling city of Colombo had drawn the intellectual, the powerful, and even the merely ambitious to where power now resided. Then another weekend to Ratnapura, where a cousin supervised the family’s interests in the precious stone mines; still another to where Gamini’s ancient grandmother ruled their cinnamon plantations. And even when he was still in the city, Gamini had duty calls to make, and no realistic chance of bringing Ranjit along with him when he made them.

      While Ranjit himself had nothing at all to do… except to attend his boring classes in the uninteresting subjects that he didn’t care about in the first place. And then nearer worries appeared.

      It happened at the end of the sociology class Ranjit had never liked. The teacher, whom Ranjit had liked even less, was a Dr. Mendis, and as Ranjit was about to leave, Mendis was standing in the doorway, holding the black-covered notebook he entered grades into. “I’ve just been going over the grades from last week’s exam,” he told Ranjit. “Yours were unsatisfactory.”

      That wasn’t surprising to

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