Resistance is Futile

by Jenny T. Colgan

  And then… a very tall Sri Lankan boy with cheekbones that could cut glass and a charmingly deep voice. A primes race which had ended up upstairs. The seduction had taken place in front of everyone she’d ever collaborated with in the history of the world.

  But that was not the worst of it. The worst of it was, when she left his room the next morning and went back to her own to change and wash her face, by the time she got down to breakfast it was entirely clear from the looks everyone gave her and the large collection of guys round Sé’s table that he’d already told everyone.

  But he did not stand up to greet her, nor did he say anything.

  She had looked at him and he had blushed to the roots of his dark hair. She had simply turned around and left the dining room. He had contacted her later to try and explain, to apologise, even to ask her out again, but she had never replied: the awful humiliation of walking into that room full of everyone discussing her was behind Connie’s deep and utter commitment to never ever dating other maths people, even though it was four years ago now and they were still the only people she ever met.

  She still flushed bright red to think about it, which she tried her best never to do. And what had been huge anger at Sé’s behaviour had mellowed now, of course – but she wasn’t keen to be working with him again, not a bit.

  ‘Beautiful country, Denmark,’ mused Arnold.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Connie.

  Grinning (and, Connie suspected, getting his own back for her not recognising him), Arnold extended an arm around the room.

  ‘Well, anyway,’ he said. ‘Welcome to the bunker.’

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘Um, three… four days?’

  ‘Fast work.’

  Arnold nodded.

  ‘It is a bit of… well, totally… a bunker,’ Connie went on.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Those bastard physicists get all the good stuff. Did you see their new facility? Ludicrous big white thing, looks like they all work in a gigantic Apple Mac.’

  ‘Haven’t seen a thing,’ said Connie, yawning. ‘I took the sleeper. I haven’t even found my rooms yet.’

  Arnold cheered up a little. ‘Oh, they’re a lot nicer than this.’

  ‘Less nice than this is quite a concept. Seriously, everyone thinks I’ve moved to some kind of amazing castle. With a portcullis in it. And battlements.’

  There was a sudden shouting down the hallway, and a large banging noise.

  ‘What’s that?’

  Arnold popped his head back out the door.

  ‘Hey! You can’t bring that in here.’

  ‘Well, obviously I can,’ came a laconic voice. ‘The real question is, how far?’

  Connie followed Arnold out of the bunker and into a corridor, where a large grand piano was tightly wedged. Standing in front of it, dripping wet but seemingly completely unperturbed by this fact, was the exceedingly tall, slender man she’d seen in the field.

  ‘Uh, hi?’ she said tentatively. The man stared at her curiously. His eyes were dark and intense, behind thick-framed glasses.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Arnold. ‘I knew I’d forgotten someone.’

  ‘You have…’ The strange man made a gesturing movement to the side of her head. He seemed to be groping for the word, and Connie wondered where he was from. The amount of people who felt the need to point out that she had bright red hair never ceased to surprise her. ‘… hair,’ he settled on finally. He couldn’t seem to take his eyes off it.

  ‘This is Luke,’ said Arnold finally. ‘I’d like to say he’s not normally like this, but so far…’

  ‘Hi there,’ said Connie politely. ‘What’s your field?’

  Luke squinted at her, like he was trying to take his eyes off her hair but couldn’t quite manage it.

  ‘Oh, this and that,’ he said vaguely.

  ‘Luke, you’re wet,’ said Arnold, changing the subject quickly. ‘You need dry clothes. You’ll freeze.’

  Luke glanced down as if he’d just noticed.

  ‘RIGHT,’ he said. ‘Clothes. Yes.’

  And he turned around and marched off, ducking under the piano, which he left wedged in the middle of the corridor.

  ‘Mrs Harmon isn’t going to like that,’ predicted Arnold. ‘Particularly after the whole… nest incident…’

  Connie blinked.

  ‘This isn’t going to be like other maths departments, is it?’

  ‘No,’ said Arnold sadly. ‘Cardiff’s got a lacrosse team.’

  Chapter Two

  Connie quickly ascertained two things amid her shock at being in a group rather than this job being just for her: one, that no one else appeared to have the faintest clue as to what was going on either – Arnold explained he reckoned some dodgy billionaire wanted to be the world’s foremost number theorist and was simply rounding up the rest of them to lock them away a dungeon – and two, that there was a ‘faculty meeting’ at 9 p.m. that evening which would hopefully clear things up a bit.

  Before then she decided to go and check out her new digs, assuming they were unlikely to be worse than the office space.

  The rain had finally stopped and a watery sunlight had appeared across the smoothed-down cobblestones. Leaving the low, ugly, modern building behind, Connie walked down the street and headed to the old college buildings where her rooms were. The old colleges and golden libraries gleamed in the weak light, as timeless and unchanging as the rain itself.

  This was more like it, she thought. Her college building was hundreds of years old, with different turrets, stained-glass windows and bits and bobs seemingly bolted on from different historical periods around a medieval core. A wooden porter’s lodge stood at the entrance, keeping out tourists and the unwary.

  ‘Hello,’ said Connie, slightly nervously. The golden stone seemed to glow with its patina of years; the perfectly green quad beyond designed to invoke awe. It was working.

  ‘Uh, hello. Dr MacAdair?’ said the man.

  She smiled. At least somebody was expecting her.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello. Robinson.’

  She wondered why he was saying Robinson, then realised it was his name.

  ‘Oh! Hello. Hello, Robinson. Uh, am I… in the right place?’

  ‘Of course, Doctor.’

  He handed over a large, ancient set of keys. ‘Do you need a hand up with your luggage?’

  Connie shook her head. ‘Nope, thanks.’

  She’d travelled down with just a suitcase; her parents had the rest, and would drive down with it later. She was a bit embarrassed at still having to get her parents to drive her to college at twenty-seven years old, but she had left her little car behind. Cambridge wasn’t going to be about getting out and about, or driving up and down to London. It was an extraordinary opportunity, a jewel of a job, a chance to bury herself solidly and fully in work, just the way she liked it, and she was intending to take it. Which meant she didn’t need much.

  She followed the signs to her set of rooms: P14. The buildings around the square of grass were fifteenth century in pale ancient brick with high mullioned windows. It was very different from the old grey tenement she had left behind.

  Inside, the corridor was absolutely silent, rugs positioned along the black and white tiled floor. She pushed open a heavy, studded, wooden door and quietly slipped inside, up the narrow, polished wooden staircase just at its entrance and into the main room.

  Connie gasped. They must have got it wrong.

  She was standing in large, corner, oak-panelled room. Huge, high windows looked out over the quad. There was a square rug on the dark oak floor, patterned with little birds, and rows of empty bookshelves just waiting to be filled. A large chesterfield sofa had plump, comfortable-looking cushions on it. Through the back was a small, pristine kitchen and a bathroom behind it that, with a large clawfoot bath on black and white tiles, Connie looked at longingly. Then, of all things, in the bedroom off it, which had a view over the low-lying hills, was an actu
al four-poster bed.

  Connie laughed out loud, and walked over to it wonderingly. The curtains, hanging on ancient wooden poles, were soft, clean, blue velvet, unimaginably old with plant and flower embroidered fringes. She shook her head in amazement. This was… well. It was something else.

  She tentatively sat on the side of the bed, wondering what on earth she’d let herself in for. And – if she were completely honest – feeling a bit odd and lonely in this strange place, even with such a spectacularly amazing apartment. In fact, that almost made it worse, having no one to share it with. No, it didn’t make it worse, she rapidly decided. But still.

  Of course she had friends – but it was harder in her world that she’d have supposed. She didn’t have a lot of school friends, seeing as she had skipped two years ahead. Then going so early to university had meant she had missed out on a lot of the fun everyone else was having. Amid her small cohort of chums, the girls used to make jokes about how many men she had access to. But Connie didn’t want to disabuse them of this without referencing how very introverted many mathematicians were, and of the ones that weren’t, a lot of them didn’t really want to talk shop after spending all day on it: they wanted to go out and get drunk and party with the gorgeous female drama students like everybody else.

  And even when she met someone and it got more serious, there was always some debate about who got shortlisted for which grant and who was on the list for which prize and Connie wasn’t just a mathematician, she was an unusually good one, so hearing remarks about tokenism and political correctness and quotients always got her more than a little wound up. Not to mention the havoc it could cause in highly-strung, delicately balanced departments. Engineers for sex, she always maintained – they knew where everything went and had a tendency towards patience – and maths for work, and, well, maybe when she got around to the love part, she’d know what she was after. They did say you just knew.

  Sometimes Connie worried that she wouldn’t know. That all the stuff she did know – Planck’s constant, Brouwer’s fixed-point theorem – might not leave room for the other stuff.

  She remembered again that Sé was there. Oh lord.

  There came a knock at the door. Connie jumped up from where she’d been napping, startled. Her first thought was that it must be the bursar come to tell her there’d been some sort of mistake with the rooms, and actually she was in the shared dorm down the road.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Uh, yeah, hello?’ came back an impatient, accented female voice.

  Connie pulled back the heavy wooden door. Standing there was a small, defiant-looking woman, a little stout, her hair braided tightly back from her head.

  ‘Professor Prowtheroe!’ said Connie, slightly starstruck. She’d seen her lecture as an undergraduate, and had been blown away.

  ‘A WOMAN,’ said Evelyn Prowtheroe crossly.

  ‘So they say,’ said Connie, a little taken aback.

  ‘I can’t believe there’s another WOMAN on this corridor. Who isn’t here?’

  The woman rubbed her chin thoughtfully. She barely came up to Connie’s neck.

  ‘Can you count?’ she said.

  ‘That’s an arithmetic test?’ said Connie crossly. She was tired and a little on edge, and hadn’t come all this way to be yelled at by a small person.

  ‘Have you got any tea?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Come next door. I have tea.’

  ‘I don’t…’

  ‘You don’t want tea? You’re British, aren’t you? What is the matter with you? It rained today and it’s three o’clock in the afternoon. You don’t have tea, someone is going to come along and arrest you and give you a French passport.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ said Connie, wondering if Professor Evelyn Prowtheroe would at least know more about what was going on than she did.

  ‘Right. Good. Come on then,’ said the woman, and Connie stepped out the few paces down the long, panelled hallway. Suddenly the woman stiffened and turned back.

  ‘You are a mathematician, aren’t you?’ she said in an accusatory tone. ‘I mean, you aren’t some kind of a physicist?’

  ‘Do I look like a physicist?’

  ‘You look like a red setter,’ said the woman, continuing onwards. It was useful that Connie was truly desperate for a cup of tea.

  The professor led her into a very similar set of rooms, equally beautiful, but these looked over the great, round library on the other side of the college, rather than the quad, and had a lovely view of the fields beyond from the main sitting room. It also had a little scalloped balcony Connie hadn’t noticed in her own set, that you could sit out on on sunny days, something they would come to use often as Evelyn liked to smoke but had lied and told the bursar she didn’t.

  The rooms were already beautifully furnished, the bookshelves full: there were lovely soapstone carvings, and exquisite rugs – Evelyn had worked all over the world and had brought back many lovely, intriguing things which made the room homely and charming. A fire was already going in the little grate, smelling beautifully of burning cedar, and an old-fashioned teapot was on the stove.

  Evelyn added milk, then poured out their tea into delicate, blue and gold cups through a tea strainer.

  ‘Raisin cookie?’ she said.

  Connie took one. It was the best cookie she had ever eaten in her life.

  ‘That’s amazing.’

  ‘Precision,’ said Evelyn. ‘That’s what most people skip in recipes. They pretend it’s flair, or creativity. But it isn’t.’

  She sighed, took another bite and looked back at Connie.

  ‘So, Ron Weasley,’ she said. ‘Have you got the faintest idea what’s going on?’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Connie. ‘I thought… I thought it was newly created fellowship posts. A place to think, and so on. That’s how they sold it at the interview. I thought it was just me. I didn’t realise there’d be… so many of us…’

  ‘Well, quite,’ said Evelyn. They both looked at their teacups.

  ‘I mean… they can’t mean to choose only one of us, surely?’

  ‘Well, if they do…’

  ‘I built a lot of my PhD on your work…’

  ‘Good,’ said Evelyn complacently.

  ‘It’s… it’s so elegant.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Then Evelyn turned to her.

  ‘So why on earth would they employ both of us?’ she asked.

  ‘Um, so we could collaborate?’

  ‘Actually, they invented this thing called the internet that’s very handy for that. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it.’

  Connie looked at her.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And you’ve met the others?’

  Connie nodded.

  ‘Yes. Ranjit seems enthused.’

  ‘Arnold… Ranjit… Sé…’

  ‘Um,’ said Connie, going pink.

  ‘Hang on,’ said Evelyn. ‘Weren’t you in Copenhagen?’

  Connie stared at her tea.

  ‘With the eau de vie? And the primes?’

  ‘Can we change the subject?’

  ‘Actually I should probably…’

  There was a loud knock at the door. Evelyn rolled her eyes and got up off the sofa.

  ‘3.07 every day this week. Just when they’ve cooled down to the exact temperature he likes.’

  ‘You make cookies every day?’ said Connie, perking up slightly.

  ‘Nature,’ said Evelyn, moving towards the door, ‘is an endless combination and repetition of very few laws.’

  Entering via the few stairs through the narrow hallway, and still, to Connie’s surprise, wearing the same, damp clothes, was the tall, thin young man she’d seen that morning pushing the piano. Luke.

  He stared at her again.

  ‘Hair,’ he said again.

  ‘Could you stop doing that?’ said Connie, as politely as she could manage. ‘It’s really creepy. My name isn’t “Hair”.’


  His eyes widened behind the black-rimmed spectacles.

  ‘Oh. Seriously? Creepy. Whoa. Sorry. Creepy?’

  Evelyn came forward.

  ‘Yes. You’re freaking people out, weirdo.’

  Luke nodded.