The Visiting Professor

by Robert Littell

  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.

  Chapter Three

  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 si
xes 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.”

  “Sir, you are leaping to conclusions without being aware of the advantages of obtaining political asylum in the Syrian Arab Republic.”

  “Name me an advantage. To political asylum. In the Syrian Arab Republic.”

  “Twenty-four-hour access to a Fujitsu parallel supercomputer to pursue your work on pure, unadulterated randomness. A numbered Swiss bank account with an initial balance in seven figures—my father, the minister of the interior, is talking British sterling. A centrally air-conditioned duplex penthouse all to yourself in downtown Damascus. A fully staffed condominium in Dayr-az-Zawr dominating the Euphrates valley, which is said to have a milder climate than Miami. Ah, it is obvious from your expression that you are sensitive to weather. Coming as you do from a city a snowball’s throw from the Arctic Circle, who can blame you for being tempted by Florida or its equivalent? Which brings me to the last item on my father’s list: all the black beluga your heart desires.”

  Glancing out of the window Lemuel spots Rain, the French horn strapped diagonally across her back on a braided sling, hurrying toward a practice session of the marching band.

  “What my heart desires is not black beluga.”

  “Sir, knowing my father, you only have to identify what your heart desires and it will be yours.”

  Lost in a painful fiction, Lemuel focuses on a horizon beyond the horizon. “My heart desires … to know what happened to my Royal Canadian Air Force Exercise Manual.”

  “Sir?”

  Word Perkins, the Institute’s factotum, surprised to see light seeping under Lemuel’s door so late, pokes his head into the office without bothering to knock. “Caught you burnin’ midnight oil, huh, professor from Petersboig? Still tryin’ to catch that there serial killer with yaw computer?”

  Lemuel makes a mental note of “midnight oil.” At a delicate point in his programming, he continues to punch codes onto the computer screen.

  Working the night watchman’s shift, Word Perkins is eager for an excuse to take a break. “I’m glad you asked,” he says, firing a preemptive shot across Lemuel’s bow. “Lotsa folks wanna know how someone winds up whit a handle like Woid. Here’s the deal. My ol’ man was a Baptist deacon in the Bronx,” he explains, orbiting the circle of light cast by the desk lamp. “I was the foistbawn a twelve. So my papa went an’ called me Woid after the Gospel accordin’ to Saint John. ‘In the beginn
in’ was the Woid …’ “

  Lemuel looks up from the computer keyboard. “So can you say me the rest of the passage?”

  Word Perkins hefts himself onto the edge of Lemuel’s desk, reaches into his pocket to turn up the volume on his hearing aid. “Sure I can,” he admits. “ ‘In the beginnin’ was the Woid, an’ the Woid was whit God, an’ the Woid was God.’ “

  “The Word was God,’ “ Lemuel repeats slowly.

  “That’s what the man went an’ said.”

  “What word was God?”

  “Search me.”

  “Search you? Hey, I dig it. If I was to search you, right? I still would not discover what word was God.”

  “Huh?”

  “On the other hand, if you was to search me you might discover what word was God.” Lemuel smiles triumphantly. “Randomness is the word. That was God.”

  Baffled, Word Perkins removes the blue policeman’s cap he wears when he is working as night watchman and scratches over an over-sized ear, dislodging flakes of dandruff, which float toward the ground.

  “Fucking Saint John,” Lemuel says excitedly. He adds quickly, “Hey, no offense intended toward the saint in question, right? But what a pisser he must have been. Think of it. In the beginning was randomness, and randomness was with God, and randomness was God.”

  Word Perkins’s eyes narrow into a suspicious squint. ‘This randomness that was God, it ain’t got nothin’ to do whit cross-country skiin’, huh?”

  Lemuel shakes his head. “Not.”

  Word Perkins accepts this with a careful nod; the penny has dropped. “I went an’ made a fool outa myself the night you breezed into Backwater, didn’t I? Tellin’ you this was a randomnists’ paradise ‘cause a all the snow we got us.”