Free The Company of Strangers by Robert Wilson Page A

that when he walked that leg swung in a semi-circle and he had to support himself with a duckhead-topped cane. She felt lucky because, while his conversation was the usual penetrative stuff, heparticipated with the charm of an uncle who shouldn’t really take a fancy to his niece but couldn’t help it.
    ‘Tell me something,’ he said. ‘Mathematics. Has anybody ever asked you why mathematics? Interesting.’
    Andrea, a little drunk, shrugged. Unprepared for the question, her brain ticked. She spoke with her mind elsewhere.
    ‘You can get things to work out, I suppose,’ she said, feeling instantly stupid, embarrassed.
    ‘Not always, I shouldn’t think,’ said Rawlinson, surprising her, taking it seriously, taking her seriously even.
    ‘No, not always, but when you do it’s…well…there’s a beauty to it, an inconceivable simplicity. As Godfrey Hardy said, “Beauty is the test. There’s no place in this world for ugly mathematics.’”
    ‘Beauty?’ said Rawlinson, baffled. ‘Not something I remember from maths class. Fiendish is more the word. Show me beauty…beauty that I can understand.’
    ‘The number six,’ she said, ‘has three divisors – one, two and three – which if added together come to…six. Isn’t that perfect? And, seen in that same light, isn’t Pythagoras’s theorem beautiful too? So simple. The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the other two sides squared. True for all right-angled triangles ever created. What seems terribly complicated can be resolved into equations…formulae which go towards completing the…well, at least part of the puzzle.’
    He tapped his cheek with a long finger.
    ‘The puzzle?’
    ‘How things work,’ she said, hysteria mounting as the banality took root.
    ‘And people,’ he said; question or agreement, she wasn’t sure.
    ‘People?’
    ‘How do people fit into the equation?’
    ‘There are infinite possibilities in maths. Every number is a complex number. It can be real or imaginary, and real numbers can be rational or irrational. Rational like integers or fractions, irrational like algebra or transcendental numbers.’
    ‘Transcendental?’
    ‘Real, but non-algebraic.’
    ‘I see.’
    ‘Like π.’
    ‘What are you saying, Miss Aspinall?’
    ‘I’m talking to you in the simplest way possible, at the most basic end of mathematics, and already there are things you don’t fully understand. It’s a secret language. Only very few people know it and can speak it.’
    ‘That still doesn’t explain how people fit into your world.’
    ‘I was just showing you that numbers can be complicated in the same way that people can be. And something else…I’m a person, too, with all the normal human needs. I don’t always speak in algorithms.’
    ‘Numbers are more stable than people, I’d have thought. More predictable.’
    ‘I haven’t come across an emotional number…yet,’ she said, her hands feeling huge at her sides, flapping like albatross’s wings, ‘which is why, I suppose, it’s possible to get things to work out…every so often.’
    ‘Are solutions important to you?’
    Andrea studied him for a moment, the question carrying interview weight. His eyes didn’t flinch from hers. She lost the match.
    ‘I do like to solve problems. That’s the reward. But it’s not always possible and working towards something can be just as satisfying,’ she said, not believing it, but thinking it might please him.
    After this string of parties her tutor sent her over to Oriel to talk to someone about ‘matters pertaining to the war effort’. He sent her to a doctor who gave her a half-hour medical examination. She didn’t hear anything for a week until she was called back to Oriel and found herself signing the Official Secrets Act, so, it seemed, that they could give her a course in typing and shorthand. She thought she was headed for a code-cracking centre, where she’d heard lots of other maths graduates had been sent,