Visiting Professor (18 page)

“Lest you doubt that our intentions are, as they say, honorable, I also have in my possession a first-class Rochester–New
York–London airplane ticket made out in the name of Quinbus Flestrin,” the Oriental man adds.

Lemuel clears his throat. “I am curious about something.”

“You would be acting out of character if it were otherwise,” the Oriental man says with a Buddha-like flutter of his eyelids.

“How did you discover I was in Backwater?”

“I don’t suppose I would be treading on anyone’s toes if I were to tell you. My masters have been keeping track of a woman
journalist who is free-lancing for the reconstituted Russian KGB. Her name is Axinya Petrovna Volkova. Nowadays, due to a
severe shortage of foreign currency, Russian intelligence agents tend to cultivate fields close to home; they devote a great
deal of time and energy to operations in the Ukraine, for instance, or Uzbekistan. So when one of their agents took a train
across Europe, a boat across the Atlantic, then a bus to an out-of-the-way town in upstate New York, we naturally wanted to
know what there could be in the backwater called Backwater to justify the expenditure of scarce hard currency. Which is how
we stumbled across Lemuel Melorovich Falk, winner of the Lenin Prize for his work in the realm of pure randomness and theoretical
chaos.”

Molly passes by on her way to the kitchen. “Everything hunky-dory?”

“You have a delightful establishment,” the Oriental man tells her.

“Well, aren’t you a sweetheart? We sure as heck give it our best shot.” She smiles prettily at the Oriental man. “Feel free
to carve your initials in the table as long as they’re in English.”

“You mentioned that in my spare time I would give you a helping hand with ciphers,” Lemuel says. “Is this optional, or a requirement?”

“It is what our Roman friends would have thought of as a quid pro quo,” the Oriental man acknowledges.

Undergraduates drift into the lecture hall with the aimlessness of debris washing
up on a shore after a shipwreck. They sink wearily into chairs, their limbs angling off in all directions, their eyes glazed
over, their mouths sagging open in what appear to be permanent yawns. The minute hand of the large wall clock clicks loudly
onto two minutes to the hour. The hour is eleven
A.M.

“I mark on a curve,” Professor Bellwether is explaining to Lemuel in front of the blackboard. She gestures toward the students
scattered around the sloping lecture hall. “Take this class, which is listed in the catalogue as ‘Introductory Chaos.’ Out
of eighteen students, I give two A’s, ten B’s, six C’s.”

“No D’s, no F’s?” Lemuel asks.

Miss Bellwether snickers. “You would need a good reason to flunk a student. As our dean of admissions is fond of saying, you
don’t want to forget who pays your salary.” She nods toward the students, several of whom seem to have fallen asleep in their
chairs. “If we flunked everyone who catnapped in class, there would be no students left in Backwater. We’d wind up lecturing
to empty rooms. I don’t know what it was like back in Russia, Mr. Falk, but our undergraduates come to college to party and
smoke dope and, excuse the expression, screw
around. It’s bad enough we interrupt this orgy with classes. Let’s not lose our heads and insist the students stay awake in
them.”

Surveying the class, Lemuel mutters under his breath, “In America the Beautiful, education is chaos-related.”

“You can say that again.”

“Education is chaos-related.”

Miss Bellwether eyes her guest lecturer with misgivings. The minute hand settles onto the twelve. She strolls over to the
door and lets three more students wander in before she shuts it. Returning to stage center, she winds a tiny watch on her
wrist as she counts heads. “My goodness gracious, thirteen out of eighteen isn’t half bad for the morning after Spring Fest.
Is it the fame of the guest lecturer that rouses you out of bed at the crack of eleven, or my reputation for giving a C to
any Martian who regularly brings his or her warm body to class? No matter. Here, straight from St. Petersburg, Russia, is
Lemuel Falk, currently a visiting professor at our very own Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Chaos-Related Studies.
Mr. Falk is a world-class expert on pure randomness, which those of you who remained awake last week may remember we talked
about. Today Mr. Falk will discuss the transcendental number represented by the Greek letter pi, and its relation to pure
randomness. They’re all yours, Mr. Falk.”

Lemuel thrusts his hands deep into the pockets of the corduroy trousers Rain found for him in a used-clothing store in Hornell.

“Yo.”

Two of the boys sleeping in the rear row rearrange their limbs. The girls in the front row exchange looks. Nobody has ever
begun a guest lecture with “Yo” before.

“About pi, you probably need a clue or two. Pi expresses the relationship between the circumference and the diameter of a
circle. Any circle. Every circle. A pinhole. Or the sun. Or the path of a spaceship orbiting the universe. You divide the
circumference of a circle by its diameter and you get pi, which is roughly three point one four.”

In the back row, a boy’s head nods onto his chest.

“Three point one four,” Lemuel repeats. “Those of you who are not getting some much-needed shuteye may recall Miss Bellwether
referring to pi as a transcendental number. Pi is a transcendental number in the sense that it transcends our ability to pin
it down; if you begin to work out the decimal expansion of pi, no matter how small your handwriting, you will fill the paper
with numbers. In fact you will fill
all the paper in the world and still not scratch the surface of pi. That is because the decimal expansion of pi goes on forever.
It is infinitely long. I can say you infinity is something like the horizon seen from a ship; no matter how much you advance
toward it, it is always beyond your reach. Trying to calculate pi”—Lemuel is suddenly alert to an aspect of the problem he
never noticed before—”is a going without a getting there.”

In the second row, a handsome, swarthy boy with hawklike features and pitch-black hair bends over an open notebook, writing
as rapidly as Lemuel talks. He looks up when Lemuel pauses. Their eyes meet. The boy nods at Lemuel, as if inviting him to
go on.

“Where was I?”

“Sir, you were saying that trying to calculate pi is a going without a getting there,” prompts the swarthy boy.

“Yo. Like each time you add a digit to the decimal expansion of pi, you improve its accuracy ten times. Thus 3.141592—pi worked
out to six places—zeros in on pi with ten times the precision of pi worked out to five places.”

One of the coeds in the front row slips a note to the girl behind her. She reads it and starts to giggle. Miss Bellwether
flashes a cranky look in her direction, and the girl stops.

“Five places. The first person to exploit pi, even though he did not call it by that name, was an Egyptian mathematician who
used a very rough pi to calculate the area of a circle some 3,650 years ago. In the last century, mathematicians worked pi
out to two decimal places, three point one four. With the invention of the electronic digital computer after what you in the
West refer to as the Second World War, mathematicians were able to work pi out to two thousand decimal places. At the time
this seemed awesome. Using the latest generation of parallel supercomputer, I myself have calculated pi out to more than three
billion decimal places.”

The swarthy boy in the second row raises a pencil, eraser end up. “Sir?”

“Yo.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Sir, why bother to calculate the decimal expansion when pi, worked out to a mere forty-seven decimal places, is accurate
enough
to plot the path of a spaceship orbiting the universe with almost perfect circularity, give or take the diameter of a proton?”

“Izzat Afshar,” Miss Bellwether, leaning against a wall, dryly informs Lemuel, “is an exchange student from Syria. Unlike
some of our home-grown, garden-variety students, he not only manages to stay awake in class, he does homework.”

“That is a totally hype question,” Lemuel tells Izzat.

“Sir, I look forward eagerly to your response.”

The eyes of a boy dozing in the back row flutter open. “Izzat’s a certified airhead,” he says loudly. The girl in the second
row giggles again.

“Hey, I do not need this,” Lemuel tells the student in the back row. He stares down the boy, who shrugs and goes back to sleep.
Lemuel addresses Izzat. “Here’s the deal. There is a practical side to working out the decimal expansion of pi to three billion
places that I will not go into. There is also a theoretical side, which I
will
go into. The decimal expansion of pi, at least up to the three billion, three hundred and thirty million, two hundred and
twenty-seven thousand, seven hundred and fifty-three places I am familiar with, appears to be the most random sequence of
numbers ever discovered by man. My guess is that you could calculate the value of pi from now to doomsday without discovering
a method to its meandering madness; without reaching a point where you can predict the next number in the sequence. Of course
there will be occasional flashes of what I call random order, which, in theory, is a constituent of pure, unadulterated randomness;
something that is truly random will naturally have random repetitions. Which is why, around the three hundred millionth decimal
place, eight eights turn up. Further along, ten sixes appear. Somewhere after the five-hundred-million mark, you stumble across
a one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine, in that order.”

The pencil shoots into the air again. “Sir, you seem to be saying that if a sequence of numbers is really random, it will
have random repetitions.”

Lemuel performs a mock bow. “Rock ‘n’ roll.”

“Sir, how can you tell the difference between random repetitions, which indicate that a sequence is truly random, and nonrandom
repetitions, which indicate that a sequence is not random at all but chaotic?”

“Hey, Izzat, can you run that up the flagpole and salute it again?” cracks one of the boys in the back row.

“Another totally hype question,” Lemuel concedes. “I suspect you are looking forward eagerly to my response.”

“Sir, I am.”

“Nonrandom repetitions, run through a software program devised by me, reveal what those of us in the business of chaos call
a strange attractor, which is a mathematical portrait of the order that is thought to be at the heart of a chaotic system.
Random repetitions, run through the same software program, reveal … beans.”

“Sir, beans?”

“Check it out. Beans. Zilch. Zip. Zero. Nada. Nothing. Which is the tip-off that we should as a sign of respect take off our
hats and light candles and talk in whispers because we may be in the presence of pure, unadulterated randomness.”

“Sir, you speak about pure, unadulterated randomness as if it were a major religion, as if it were the work of God.”

“Pure, unadulterated randomness,” Lemuel fires back—the words originate in some heart of the heart of an unexplored Brooklyn
in him—”is not the
work
of god. It
is
God.”

Lemuel’s eyes burn with revelation. The Rebbe had been right after all. Randomness
is
His middle name.

“Fucking Yahweh,” he murmurs.

“Sir?”

After class Izzat
is in no hurry to arrange the papers in his crocodile attache case, and only gets up from his seat when he is alone in the
room with Lemuel. With great diffidence, he approaches the guest lecturer.

“Sir, would it be possible to have a private word with you?”

“Hey, didn’t I see you smoking dope on the stairs at Delta Delta Phi in a previous incarnation?”

“Sir, that is entirely conceivable.”

“Weren’t you condemned to thirty dollars or thirty days for demonstrating against the nuclear-waste dump?”

“Sir, you are clearly blessed with a memory for faces.”

Lemuel shrugs a shoulder. “So what is your question?”

“Sir, may I ask when your contract expires at the Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Chaos-Related Studies?”

“Ask. Ask. Everyone else wants to know, why not you?”

“Sir, when
does
your contract expire?”

“When does the semester end?”

“Thirty-one May.”

“Thirty-one May is when my contract expires.”

“Sir, what will you do then? Return to the St. Petersburg flat you share with two couples on the brink of divorce?”

Lemuel hikes his trousers and his eyebrows. “You seem to know things about me that are not in my official biography in the
Institute’s glossy three-color catalogue. So where is this conversation going?”

“Sir, my father, the minister of the interior—”

“Your father is minister of which interior?”

“Of the Syrian Arab Republic, sir. When I informed him I would be attending your guest lecture, he sent me an urgent coded
fax explaining the practical side to working out the decimal expansion of pi to three billion decimal places—”

“Your father, the minister of the interior of the Syrian Arab Republic, understands the practical side to working out the
decimal expansion of pi?”

“Sir, my father holds advanced degrees in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He did his master’s
thesis on common knowledge and his doctoral thesis on game theory. Which explains how he came to be in charge of my country’s
encryption and decryption service. Which also explains how he understands your remarkable contribution to the art of cryptography.
I only grasp it imperfectly, sir, the mathematics being clearly over my head, but you seem to have devised a computer program
that dips with near-perfect randomness into three billion, three hundred and thirty million, two hundred and twenty-seven
thousand, seven hundred and fifty-three decimal places of pi in order to extract a random three-number key, which is then
used to encipher and decipher secret messages.”

“Hey, your father, the minister of the interior, keeps his ear to the ground.”

Izzat smiles timidly. “Sir, my father, the minister of the interior, is known to have excellent sources of information in
the Central Asian
republics of the former Soviet Union. Which explains how he recruited many of your scientific colleagues. Thanks to my father,
the minister of the interior, the Syrian Arab Republic now employs former Soviet missile technicians, rocket-booster engineers,
laser and telemetry specialists, nuclear physicists. You name it, sir, the Syrian Arab Republic has it.”

“I need this conversation like a hole in the head.”

In the hallway, gongs ring melodiously. “Sir, in the inimitable words of my fraternity brothers at Delta Delta Phi, check
it out. My father—”

“The minister of the interior—”

“—has instructed me to offer you political asylum in the Syrian Arab Republic.”

“If I needed political asylum, Syria would be the last place on the planet Earth I would go to. What a chuckle. Political
asylum. In the Syrian Arab Republic.”