“When I finish my work.”

“Do you sleep at night?” Professor Braun said, his blue eyes intent.

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty,” Elliott said. “How old are you?”

“Forty-two.”

“What have you discovered lately?”

“Don’t,” Raj said.

“You have to watch your health. I don’t like the look in your eye,” the professor went on.

“I don’t give a shit about my health.”

“Remember what happened to Cantor?”

Elliott thought of Cantor, alone in wartime at the asylum in Halle, begging his daughter to bring him home. She wouldn’t. He had always wondered how she put it: “Sorry, Father, but you’re too much trouble,” she must have said. Cantor had died swiftly after that.

“Don’t squander it,” the professor repeated, pushing the last piece of pizza away from himself. “ Wakefield, you have to pace yourself. It’s a question of balance. You should see people. Your friends are worried.”

“No, no,” Elliott said, draining his mug. “Accomplishment requires sacrifice, even pain. You have to set priorities. Right now, my work comes first. Friends, family, romps in the park, children, lovers, these things have to wait.” He stood up, carefully placing his chair under the table. “Thanks for the vitamins. I need to go.” He felt pressure to flee from their slowness and their compromises before they infected him.

“See you tomorrow, then,” said Dr. Braun.

“See you.” He gave them a friendly wave. He could afford the ten seconds it took to make them happy.

He didn’t go back to class the next day, or the next.

A week later, at four in the morning, Elliott finally fell into sleep, or something like sleep. He had been taking No-Doz and drinking a lot of coffee and hadn’t slept for a couple of days. He should have slept too hard for dreams to reach him.

But one did. It was early in the morning, he would remember later.

An angel appeared, her wings outspread, calling him to her and clasping him tight. He wasn’t afraid; he felt that he was already dead, and nothing worse could happen to him. In a way, he felt that this was his reward for dying. Maybe the angel was his mother.

They flew to a place at the dim limits. Here he found waves, rhythms, measures he had never known existed. All answers were here.

The angel generated a zeta landscape, infinitely dense. Even so, the mountains they flew over were porous, one or two stretching up into infinity. Between the mountains he saw deep holes, the points spiraling inward. The beauty of it made him weep.

They moved down to sea level and flew along the cross-section. The angel pointed. Then he saw it breaking through below: a huge prime, lonely and beautiful, its gray back shiny with spray. It had lost its way and was moving away from the other primes, spuming and slapping their tails in the limitless distance.

They moved into higher densities, Elliott now carrying his black notebook to write it all down. This rolling sequence, which looked like a field in Wisconsin, converged on both zero and infinity at the same time.

He looked at the angel, and the angel nodded its blazing head.

He didn’t really want to do it, but he felt he had to. He did the unthinkable. He divided by zero.

The white sky split and the rules gave way to random crime. The universe compressed into its basic reality, the four numbers surrounded by their clouds of probabilities. But Zero, staggering, was vanishing into the mist. One was a hard black branch beating the other integers. Two, the cop in blue, struggled to keep order, but it was outgunned by Three, red and bursting, rampaging all through the set.

The Three destroyed adelic space and time. Elliott, horrified, had to watch the gruesome factoring of the prime.

His angel faded away, leaving him to drift all alone in this disintegrating universe. It would all collapse into pure theory soon.

He became very frightened. Flying low across the sea, he found a hidden crater a few fathoms beneath: the square root of minus one, a geyser of fresh water rushing out of it into the saltiness.

He dove into the deep cold system.

13

TOO MANY COLLEGES, TOO MANY BROWNS. Nina recalled a math instructor at Lake Tahoe Community College she had helped with a contract problem once, Mick McGregor. Mick had his math doctorate, but had lost his first job at UC Berkeley for reasons he had never told her. Luckily for her today, he had landed right around the corner.

High noon on Thursday at the LTCC campus, and the place wasn’t exactly hopping although school was in session. Nina parked among shady pines and walked to the Administration Building. An art exhibit was going on inside, student sculptures propped amid the seats in the high-ceilinged reception area, paintings on the wall, but few students circulated. The building was brand-new and even the carpeting still looked fresh and welcoming.

At the registrar’s window she was directed to McGregor’s office, but she found him outside the building talking to a student.

“Uh-oh,” he said when he recognized her. He might as well have said, Here comes trouble. She often called forth that reaction, a hazard of her trade.

“Everything’s fine,” she assured him. “I’ve come to consult you about something I’m working on.” The student wandered away and they entered McGregor’s office, which was as neat as a marine’s cot. Nina looked around approvingly at the orderly books and papers and photos of McGregor with his family and students.

“Long time,” McGregor said. “I still wake up at night remembering how worried I was in those days that I’d lose the case. No offense, but you’re always in the dreams.”

“For Pete’s sake, Mick. We won the case. Can’t you rehabilitate me? I hate to think I’m part of somebody’s nightmares.” Nina was only half-joking.

“Let’s start over,” Mick said. “Let me think of you as a very pretty lady who dropped in on me unannounced for a chat about nothing much.” He was still young, with reddish hair, wearing jeans and a purple shirt with a white undershirt showing at the neck, his hands freckled, his manner ironic.

“I’d like to ask you about some math students, at least I think they may be math students, who I need to locate. They may be in Boston.”

“I was raised in Lawrence, Massachusetts. But you knew that.”

“I did know that.”

“What do you want to know?”

“I want to find them. I know three things: One or more has or had a professor named Brown; they flew from here to Boston; and one of them bought two books at Sierra Books here at Tahoe while they were visiting.”

“The plane was flying at the rate of four hundred miles an hour, and the student read one-fourth of the first book on the flight. Elementary. Want me to write out the proof for you?”

Nina handed him the names of the books. “I want to know what kind of math this is, and what level.”

McGregor read the names. “Ooh. Somebody’s into the Riemann Hypothesis. And Cantor’s Continuum Hypothesis. I’ve seen these books at Sierra Books gathering dust. It’s a wonder they carried them.”

“What can you tell me about these-these hypotheses?”

“Analytic number theory. A fancy word for arithmetic, but do not be misled. This is graduate-level stuff, very sexy math, very deep. Hardly anybody is working on it. The universities want combinatorics people and physicists and topologists these days. Students who read books on these topics on vacation are going to be obsessed with the hypotheses. For them it’s the closest thing to fun.”

“It sure doesn’t sound like fun to me. So would you think this student was working on a graduate degree?”

“Could be an advanced undergraduate. These books concern the most famous problems in math. Some people think figuring out whether the Riemann Hypothesis is true or not is the biggest mystery in the universe, bar nothing. It has to do with the prime numbers. You know? Prime numbers?”