2014 Campbellian Anthology

by Various

  “Like you could have failed.” Duncan shook his head. “I don’t risk my theorem house on just anyone.” He pulled out his cellphone, tapped at it, then handed it to Grant. “I’m about to offer the man in this video a job. Tell me what you think of him.”

  The screen filled with a beefy guy jumping, spinning and twisting up and down a runway. He used computability theory to prove Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, a corrected version of Duncan’s proof. The man reasoned with a strength and incisiveness that made Grant’s jaw drop.

  Grant might quibble with the handful of moves that were not textbook perfect, but the result was superior to Grant’s attempt. He wanted Lisa and Marc to see this version.

  “You should have gotten him to verify your proof tonight. If you already had this, why did you show the flawed proof?” Grant handed back the cellphone. “Never mind. I no longer have to understand or care about your machinations.”

  Duncan stood. He bore down on Grant. His head and shoulders blocked the room from view. The musk and leather of his cologne enveloped Grant.

  “Tsai, this is video from tonight. That’s you correcting my proof.” He held the phone in front of Grant’s eyes. “When I say you’re the one person who could fix the proof, it’s not flattery. As hard as you are on everyone else’s work, you’re even harder on your own. God knows how you sell yourself in interviews. Are you surprised you can’t find another job?”

  Grant’s face burned. He pushed the phone away. His gaze fell to the floor as he sat.

  “What makes you think I’m looking?” Grant slid the away from Duncan.

  “Your department is eliminating its graduate program and some of its non-tenured faculty. Your student evaluations are… bi-modal. A small number of students will register for anything you teach. Everyone else writes comments like ‘Dr. Tsai can’t teach a cow how to moo.’”

  Being a force of nature had its advantages. By the time Duncan had worked over the department’s administrators, they probably thought that Duncan was doing them a favor by letting them show him Grant’s evaluations.

  “You used to be charming, Duncan.” Once, Grant would have done, hell, he had done anything Duncan wanted.

  “I still am.” Duncan flashed a quick smile. “But you no longer trust me when I’m charming and I need you to work with me.”

  “Yeah, right.” Grant forced himself to match Duncan’s gaze. “The first Duncan Banks collection got published in all the major journals and sold to all the major buyers. Everyone wanted to work with you. You didn’t need me anymore and I might as well not have existed.”

  “You’re never going to forgive me.” Duncan seemed to deflate a little. “I’m not who I—”

  “Make your damn offer.”

  When the semester ended in a few months, Grant would be out of a job. Besides, his legs felt like marble. Otherwise, he’d have walked out.

  “I have the outline of a solution for P=NP. Flesh it out with me. Please?”

  Grant sighed. Whether P=NP was one of the remaining great unsolved problems. Proving that P=NP meant biologists could quickly compute the structure of a protein rather than guessing its structure then checking for correctness. It meant computationally tractable ways to find optimal solutions to all sorts of packing and scheduling problems. No industry would be unaffected. Grant and Duncan would be heroes for the ages.

  “Show me.” Grant tried to sound bored.

  The proof of ten as a solitary number transformed into pieces of muslin. They changed shape as they slid around Duncan’s body. A lemma around Duncan’s back fortified two results on his shoulders. What covered his chest seemed to stay there out of sheer faith that someday something might hold it in place. He’d built it on conjectures Grant didn’t recognize. After a minute, Duncan wore something that fit roughly on him, pinned together by hope and determination more than it was stitched together by mathematical theorems and logic.

  “Well?” Duncan showed his palms to Grant. Rather than casting his light on the world, Duncan looked as if he were in eclipse.

  Grant let the outline inhabit his mind. Not enough hung on Duncan to prove anything. Grant wasn’t even sure what it actually proved, but the bits that were actually stitched together dazzled. The intermediate results, if verifiable, would advance mathematics nearly as much as the conclusion.

  Grant’s hands gripped the chair. He forced himself not to engage with proof. Math hadn’t excited him this much in years. But was it worth being burned by the sun and shocked by lightning again? They had never been, and could never be, just about the math.

  “By the age of thirty-five, most mathematicians have already done their best work.” Grant didn’t see any reason to be harsh, not when Duncan had been thoroughly, if bewilderingly, non-toxic. “You’ll want someone in his or her prime.”

  The outline transformed back into the proof of ten as a solitary number. It’s austere elegance replaced the buzz of the outline in Grant’s mind.

  “Do you need to see your video again? This has nothing to do with age.” Duncan frowned. “Tsai, I can’t change how I treated you but—”

  “I have grad students now.” Grant’s thighs burned as he stood. “I can’t just abandon my kids.”

  Maybe that wasn’t the real reason either, but like his age, it was the truth. Grant pushed himself to the door.

  “Wait.” Duncan’s voice swung away from Grant, not towards. “The proof, it’s as much yours as mine. You should write it up.”

  Duncan reached Grant with long strides. He offered the proof to Grant.

  “You need the proof as a template for the ready-to-wear version.” Grant could write it up from memory. “Send me a copy of the video instead?”

  The video had its flaws, but it was a proof verified at a major show. More importantly for the job search, it was available right now.

  “I uploaded it just after the show ended.” Duncan patted Grant’s back. “Within a week, anyone with even half an interest in math will have seen it.”

  “I’ll send you a draft of the paper to review in a few days.” Grant forced himself away from the intoxicating heat of Duncan’s desire.

  “When you’re swamped with job offers, don’t forget who asked you first, ok?”

  Grant wouldn’t dignify that ridiculous thought. He just grunted a hoarse laugh as he walked out the door.

  • • •

  Stacks of boxes took the place of reference books, papers and office supplies on Marc and Lisa’s office shelves. The two grad students sat at their desk reading their tablets. What made Grant suspicious though was the missing junk food.

  Either Marc and Lisa gotten better at hiding their stockpile of chips, cookies and whatnot, or they’d removed it. Hyperactive metabolisms be damned. They couldn’t eat like crap forever if they expected to be able to verify their proofs at conferences. However, Grant had never expected them to believe him much less do anything about it.

  “Not that I’m complaining, but why is the office suspiciously clean?”

  “We’re leaving school, Grant.” Lisa could make anything sound reasonable. “Everyone’s seen that video of you in Dr. Banks’s show. The word is you’re going back to him. Nice of you to tell us yourself that you’re dumping us.”

  Lisa looked hurt. Grant hadn’t realized that was possible.

  “One, I’m not going to make any plans without letting you know first.” Grant put his hands at his waist. “Two, I can’t believe neither of you bothered to check with me.”

  “You’ve been sending everything to voice mail.” Lisa swiped then tapped on her tablet. It chimed a few times. She thrust her sent mail folder in Grant’s face. “And you haven’t answered any of my emails.”

  Grant fished his cellphone out of his pocket. The screen stayed blank when he tried to wake it. “Oh, I forgot to turn it back on.”

  His phone vibrated as it booted up. His eyebrows raised at the number of voicemails waiting for him. He checked his email. His jaw dropped at the backlog.
He recognized the sender addresses: every theorem house of note, editors of all the important journals, and all of the best mathematics schools in the world, except one, Duncan’s. Its mathematics department would have been formidable even without him.

  “I may have other options.” Grant leaned against a shelf. He swiped through his email, sorting his job offers. Duncan was right again, damn him.

  “Why are you so surprised?” Lisa never let him get away with anything. “You fixing the proof on the fly is all anyone has talked about for days.”

  “I always disconnect my router when I write up a proof.” Grant’s gaze met her dismay. “Otherwise, I get distracted.”

  “Why the hell are you teaching here in the first place, Grant?” It was Marc’s turn to rip into him. “You’re not just good for your age—”

  “Hey, I’m not even twenty years older than you.”

  “You’re good.” Marc held out the last word. “That last pass up and down the runway—” His eyes widened and his voice broke with awe. “Why don’t you have your own collections?”

  “That’s why you let your funding lapse.” Lisa’s face lit with revelation. “You’d planned to abandon us.”

  “No, we’re losing funding because I write really crappy grant proposals.”

  “Look.” Marc stood, opening his palms to Grant. “Go back to Dr. Banks. If he wanted me to work with him, I’d ditch you in a second. It’ll be fine. I’ve started auditions for Project Prove It.”

  “No.” Grant straightened up. He breathed deeply expanding his chest as he crossed his armed and subtly flared his lats. Stealing a page from the Duncan dominance display playbook was shameless, but he hadn’t found another language Marc understood yet. “Auditioning to get on the reality show will eat up the rest of the semester. If you get in, all being on Project Prove It will demonstrate is that you can create trivial proofs within twenty-four hours for people with more money than aesthetic sense. You can’t build a career on that.”

  Actually, Marc probably could. Grant just wasn’t about to let him settle. Marc sat down, a bit stunned.

  Lisa wasn’t the least bit impressed with dominance displays. If anything, she grew louder. “I can complete all the math for my dissertation by the end of the semester even while looking for a job. After that, it’s just writing. A full time job won’t get in the way of that. I have a whole year after you leave when you can still sign my dissertation.”

  “Oh, Lisa.” Grant had expected no less than her full-throttled self confidence. “You have no idea how much work you have ahead of you.”

  Grant’s cellphone buzzed. He shut it off again.

  “If you ever answered your phone or read your email, you’d probably find some way to fund us.” Lisa shrugged. “All I know is if I had a research assistantship next semester, I could afford to stay in school.”

  And that was why Grant never ever dismissed Lisa. She had more sense than he did.

  “Give me a few days. I’ll think of something.”

  Grant locked himself in his own office. Towers of books surround him. He sped through his email and voicemail. When he’d caught up, he stretched away the back strain then hid his face in his hands. After that video, the universities clearly expected him to bring money in, not need support for his kids. Wherever he ended up, they could follow him, but they wouldn’t if he had no way to support them.

  People who distracted themselves from their dissertations never finished them. If he didn’t secure a future for his kids, they’d secure one for themselves and their hard work would never come to fruition. Lisa’s plan to finish was unworkable and Marc wouldn’t even bother.

  He called Duncan and left a message with his assistant. Maybe Grant was just capitulating to Duncan’s master plan, but he couldn’t think how else to secure funding before his kids did anything stupid. He’d get them their doctorates before Duncan could discard him again. Security, job or otherwise, could wait.

  • • •

  Grant’s flip-flops squeaked against the just-mopped floor. Water that clung to him from the shower chilled off his skin. He dropped his towel in the middle of the bench then unjammed his locker door. The pounding reverberated through the locker room. He pulled his gym bag out then dropped it on the floor.

  “Tsai, are you in here?” Duncan’s voice echoed off the metal. “I’m sorry my assistant wouldn’t put you through to me. Never happen again. I’ve fired him. Your kids said that you work out every night but I didn’t see anyone in the gym.”

  “Over here.” Grant took a deep breath. “Fund my kids until they complete their dissertations and I’ll do anything you want.”

  When Grant looked up again, Duncan stood just in front of the gym bag. No footfalls, much less squeaking.

  Rows of lockers dutifully closed in on Duncan. The ceiling lowered and the walls collapsed as he sucked up all the space in the room. Maxwell’s equations in differential form covered the front of his T-shirt. The symbols rippled as they curved around his body. The T-shirt caressed his beautifully powerful shoulders, chest, arms and back. A wrinkled leather belt held faded jeans on his body. The slight stretch across his thighs did the same. Dust and wear had ground his boots gray. The messenger bag Grant had given him long ago hung off a shoulder. Every tear on the bag had been expertly mended.

  “Hi, Tsai.” Duncan’s face registered Grant’s gaze sweeping through him. “Something wrong?”

  “No. I’d just forgotten what you looked like.” That sentence had made more sense in his head. “Do we have a deal?”

  “Tsai, work with me because you want to, not because you have to.” He handed Grant a manila folder from his messenger bag. “The advance for the Gödel’s incompleteness theorem proof will support your grad students long enough for you to line up proper funding.”

  Grant skimmed the contract in the folder as he dressed. Signing it wouldn’t make him Duncan’s slave or anything. He patted his pockets. Empty. He tucked the contract under one arm then found the pen stowed in his gym bag’s outer pocket.

  “Whoa.” Duncan squeezed Grant’s shoulder. “Have the contract looked at first. You’ll find it fair, but I could be scamming you.”

  “You’re not that kind of asshole.” Grant shoved the folder into the bag.

  “Thank you.” Duncan sounded as if Grant had paid him a compliment. “Now we can focus on what you really want.”

  “No, I’m good.” Grant felt bad about leave right after getting what he needed from Duncan, but not that bad. “I’ll send the contract back tomorrow.”

  Grant slid into his coat. He slammed the locker shut, picked up his gym bag then waved goodbye.

  “No one knows you better than I do. You’ll settle for funding, but that’s not all you want.”

  Grant’s soles squeaked on the floor as he turned and with each step away. So much for the graceful exit, not that it mattered. Duncan froze Grant with a single word.

  “Tenure.”

  Grant knew the scene behind him. A slight smile leavened Duncan’s face. His messenger bag slumped on the floor against a rusty bench leg. Duncan straddled the bench, leaning forward. His hands gripped one end of the bench. His arms braced his torso as if he were about to lift into a handstand. He presented the illusion of being perfectly relaxed while his T-shirt exposed every muscle of his torso.

  “Where?”

  “With me. Same university.”

  Grant turned around. His shoes squeaked again. He forced himself not to wince. Duncan looked as exactly as he imagined.

  “Isn’t that overkill?” Grant glared down at Duncan. He had so few chances to do that. “With tenure, how will you get rid of me when you don’t need me anymore?”

  Duncan lifted his torso and legs parallel to the bench. His smile faded as his gaze focused onto the bench’s graffiti. “You know, you get older, you realize the first guy you first bounced ideas off of has ruined you for everyone else since. So you change.” His hands thumped against the bench as he walked himself a
way from Grant. “You become what that first guy wants.”

  Duncan straightened into a handstand, lowered his legs, then stood upright on the bench facing one end. He backflipped off the bench landing to one side. The control required to avoid crashing into the lockers was intimidating. His hands spread in front him as if to ask, “Well?”

  The day Duncan didn’t look confident was the day the world would end. However, the years had abraded the smugness from his demeanor. His blistering gaze had always been inquisitive, but it now also yearned. Grant had walked away from the smug Duncan, but this one taunted him with possibilities he’d long convinced himself didn’t exist.

  Grant pursed his lips. His hands gripped his gym bag. He’d ask for the ridiculous. That ought to cool Duncan’s ardor.

  “For a start, the university will matriculate my grad students.”

  Not only did he want the university to fund his students, but he wanted enough funding from Duncan’s theorem house that he could buy off his teaching responsibilities. No reason why undergrads should suffer. Grant set down his gym bag and for what felt like minutes detailed his dream job.

  “Done.” Duncan unzipped Grant’s gym bag.

  “What?” Grant felt sucker punched. “My demands aren’t reasonable.”

  “Done.” Duncan teased the manila folder out of Grant’s gym bag then handed it to Grant. “I told you. No one knows you better than I do.”

  Grant studied the pages he’d glazed past the first time. They met his conditions term for term.

  Duncan had changed, but he hadn’t become what Grant wanted. Life hadn’t taught Duncan any humility. Rather than scaling his self-assurance down to match his achievements, he’d scaled his achievements up to match his self-assurance.

  “It’s up to you, Grant.” Duncan walked towards the locker room exit. “Refuse my offer and I’ll never bother you again. I promise.”

  Grant stuffed the folder back into his bag. “Tell me this, Duncan. What are you really trying to prove?”

  Duncan turned around. His gaze pressed against Grant. He looked as if he were intuiting the right response from how Grant’s bag pressed against his back, how Grant hadn’t tucked in his T-shirt or how off-kilter Grant had knotted his boot laces.