The Last Samurai (57 page)

He kept looking at the page thinking: Why have I never heard of this before? Why doesn’t everyone know about this? He sometimes said later how strange it was being at the school, knowing that no one had ever tried to give this glorious piece of information to the boys but instead forced them to spend hours turning perfectly good English poems into atrocious Latin ones. He said the frightening thing was thinking of how many other wonderful things there might be which were kept from them at the school. He had run away one last time and put himself in for A-levels independently and got the As and got into Cambridge, and he had never forgotten the things that were kept from people at school.

I thought suddenly Look. If Kambei had stopped recruiting when the first samurai didn’t work out a 205-minute masterpiece of modern cinema would have been over at minute 32. Five billion people on the planet, I’d tried one. And at least someone who’d run away from school 27 times would not leap to conclusions because I had left school at the age of six.

I was about to get excited and think This is it when I suddenly thought Wait just a minute.

I said to Sib: You know that story about the Ugandan from the Lango tribe

Sib said: Yes

I said: Is it actually true?

Sib said as far as she was aware

I said: But how do you know?

Sib said: Well there was an interview when Dr. Akii-Bua got an honorary degree from Oxford and he said he would not be there to tell the tale without the extraordinary heroism of Dr. Sorabji.

I said: And what about the volcano?

Sib said she had once read an interview of the man with the broken arm describing what it was like falling back into the volcano and then seeing Sorabji climb down inside the rim. She said: Why do you ask. I said I just wondered. I didn’t ask about Pete because I had seen Mathematics the Universal Language myself. Pete called Sorabji that maniac and that lunatic, but he never said Sorabji hadn’t saved his life.

All the evidence suggested that Sorabji was not only brilliant but a genuine hero. The question was whether I really had the nerve to go up to someone who was not only a hero but a scientific genius.

At first I thought I was not going to be able to do it. But then I thought if you’re a coward you deserve what you get. You deserve what you’ve got.

When I decided I was going to have to do it I realised I would have to be prepared. There was no point in going up to a Nobel Prize winner and saying the kind of thing that would make him think Sesame Street was about the right level.

The problem was that it was hard to know what would be enough. Finally I decided to do Fourier analysis
and
Laplace transforms
and
Lagrangians and I would also learn the periodic table because I had been meaning to do it for a long time and I would also learn the Lyman, Balmer, Paschen and Brackett hydrogen series because of Sorabji’s early interest in spectroscopy and maybe that would be enough.

It took about a month to get ready. It was not all that easy to work in the house because Sib kept interrupting to read out amusing extracts from the
Magazine of the Parrot Society
such as Factors Affecting Parrots, A. Human Interference. Or she would jump up and look at the book on Fourier analysis and say How fascinating. Finally I went over to the Barbican and worked there. At the end of the month I wondered whether I shouldn’t spend another month on it, or even a year. Wouldn’t it be worth an extra year to be in with a chance? A chance of having a Nobel Prize winner for a father, and not just any Nobel Prize winner either, but a Robert Donat lookalike who jumped off trains? If I got this right—I thought if I got this right it would be like jumping
onto
a moving train, suddenly everything would be fast and easy and I would never look back.

I would have spent a year if I had known what to do, but I was not sure what to do, and I thought the more I did the older I would get and the less surprising it would be that I could do it.

I recited the periodic table one last time for good luck and I went out to look for Sorabji.

Sorabji had started out at the University of London and he still had some kind of affiliation even though he was now at Cambridge. He had kept his house in London when he got the appointment because the children were doing very well in their schools and it made sense for them to stay there. He had rooms in his college in Cambridge. He might be in Cambridge doing research or he might be in London because it was summer.

I took the Circle Line to South Kensington. I went to Imperial College and the woman in reception said there had been an unconfirmed sighting three weeks ago. I explained that I was doing an astronomy project over the summer for school and part of the project was supposed to be an interview with a famous astronomer and was there any chance I could interview Professor Sorabji? I said Please? I said couldn’t she let me have his home address so I could write to him there? I said Please?

She said Professor Sorabji was a very busy man.

I said: Please?

She said she couldn’t just give out his address to every Tom Dick and Harry.

I said I had been studying Fourier analysis every day for a month to surprise Professor Sorabji and Please?

She said: Fourier analysis! What’s that when it’s at home?

I said: Would you like to see me find the gravitational potential at any point outside a solid uniform sphere of radius
a
of mass
m
?

She said: Well—

I said: How about a problem with vibrating strings or membranes? Say a square drumhead or membrane has edges which are fixed and of unit length. If the drumhead is given an initial transverse displacement and then released, what is the subsequent motion?

She seemed to be wavering, so I snatched up a leaflet describing Imperial College and on the back hastily used the Legendre function to calculate the gravitational potential at any point outside a solid uniform sphere of radius
a
of mass
m
, and on a separate leaflet I began to calculate the subsequent motion of the drumhead but she said Oh all right. She wrote his address on a card. It was within walking distance.

I started walking to his house. I was getting more and more nervous. What if I had the chance of having a perfect father and blew it because I forgot the mass numbers of the three most abundant isotopes of hafnium?

I said: Hafnium. Symbol Hf. Atomic number 72. Relative atomic mass 178.49. Number of natural isotopes 6. Mass numbers of most abundant isotopes with percentage abundance 177, 18.6%, 178, 27.3%, 180, 35.1%. Most stable radioisotope (predominant type of decay) half-life, 181 (β –, γ) 42 d. First ionization energy 7.0 eV. Density in g/cm
³
at 20°C 13.31. Melting point 2227°C. Electron configuration [Xe]4f
¹⁴
5d
²
6s
²
. Oxidation state in compounds, IV. Atomic radius 156.4α pm. Covalent radius for single bonds 144 pm. Reduction potential w/ number electrons etc. etc. -1.505(4). Electronegativity 1.2. Terrestrial abundance: 4 · 10
^-4
.

I knew what some of them meant. I thought I might as well learn them all at the same time. Now I realised I should have found out what reduction potential
E°
in V with number (n) of electrons was for, and I wished I had gone ahead and learned ionic radius in pm with oxidation number and coordination number. What if it turned out the one thing that had kept me from having Sorabji was not knowing the ionic radius with oxidation and coordination numbers? I was about to turn around and go home again but I thought that was stupid. It was just chemistry anyway so he probably wouldn’t care, and anyway there would always be some other thing.

I found the house and went to the door and knocked. A woman came to the door. She had brilliant black eyes and jet black hair. She was wearing a purple sari. She seemed forceful and decisive just opening the door and listening to my explanation about the school project and the interview.

She said: We’re having a guest for dinner, so I’m afraid my husband won’t be able to talk to you tonight. He
may
not be able to fit you in at all, you know, he’s terribly busy these days, still you may as well come in, no use letting the grass grow, if he can find a time you can fix it all up straight away. What is your name?

I said: Steve.

She said: Well come in Steve and we’ll see what we can do for you.

I followed her into the house. A television was on in a room to the left off the hall. She led me into a large room to the right.

A tall, thin, grey-haired man stood by the window looking into the street. He was holding a glass of sherry. He said he thought we were a long way from understanding that.

Sorabji said he thought the next few years would be critical. He was standing by the fireplace holding a glass of sherry. He began to talk about stellar winds, gesturing with his free hand and then putting down the glass of sherry to gesture with his other hand. The only thing I could understand was that he was talking about stellar winds. I’d never thought of reading about stellar winds. The other man said something which I also could not understand and Sorabji began to talk about Wolf-Rayet stars. A Wolf-Rayet star is a highly luminous star with broad emission bands in carbon or nitrogen. I could not understand what Sorabji was saying. I would have liked to say something brilliant but the only thing I could have said was that a Wolf-Rayet star is a highly luminous star with broad emission bands in carbon or nitrogen.

Sorabji was still talking impetuously though we were standing by the door. His skin was paler than a dark tan; his eyes were piercing and black; his hair was black and wavy. It did not seem impossible that I could get away with it. He would not decide I could not be his son on the basis of abysmal ignorance of stellar winds and the single scattering maximum and Wolf-Rayet stars, but I did not want to tell him and watch him think that Sesame Street was about the right level.

He was still talking impetuously when his wife interrupted without waiting for a good moment.

She said: GEORGE. This boy wants to talk to you. It’s for a school project. Can we find him a time?

He laughed. He said: Does it have to be in the next 18 months?

She said: GEORGE.

He said: I can’t think about it now, I’ve
almost
convinced this heretic of the error of his ways, isn’t that right Ken?

The man by the window gave a dry smile.

I don’t know that I’d go so far as to say that.

Sorabji began to talk impetuously again and she said: GEORGE.

He said: I’d have to check my diary. I daresay I can manage something. I’ll have a look later. Why don’t you stay for dinner?

I said: Thank you.

He said: Splendid, my wife will find you some problems to do—

His wife said GEORGE again but he said No, a rule’s a rule, and he explained that the rule was that if you finished a page of problems you got to eat with the grown-ups. He explained that his children had a page of problems to do every night. He said grinning: Don’t take it too seriously, will you? God knows the girls don’t, they’d far rather eat in front of the TV than sit listening to Ken and me talking nineteen to the dozen, if you find you can’t hack it you can stay and watch EastEnders and we’ll go through my diary later on.

His wife took me into the other room.

She said: George has this bee in his bonnet about mathematics, Steve.

I said it was all right.

The TV was on. Three girls were watching it and working on pages of problems. She introduced me and they looked up and then back at the TV. She said I could work on anything I thought I could do, and she said now she really must see about dinner.

The youngest girl was working on a page of problems in long division. I thought that they would take a long time to do, and what was the point? He was not going to think much of it if I brought in a page of long division. It wouldn’t matter whether it was right or not, it would be the type of thing anyone could do.

The middle girl was working on a lot of equations in three variables. He was not going to think much of it if I just came in with solutions to three-variable equations, and they would take a long time to do.