Savant Read Online Free PDF Page B

workings-out, and brimming with formulae, old and new. Tobe stood in the middle of the room, examining his handiwork, as if he might have forgotten something.
    He had forgotten nothing.
    Tobe had a photographic memory for almost everything, but especially for mathematics, including all the work he had ever done. He could reproduce any solution to any problem that he had solved in his thirty-five years, including all the various dead-end pathways he had followed, and all the missteps he had made and erased along the way. If required, he could have reproduced any mathematical problem he had solved, with reference to the colours of pen he’d had on hand, and the ink smudges he had left behind in his haste.
    The wall was full, all the reference was in place, and, still, Tobe had no solution.
    “It was the same,” he said, looking from the wipe-wall to the tattered book in his hands, the cover barely clinging to the remaining pages, fewer than half of them left. He tossed the book onto the chair, its cover coming free as it sailed across the room. The remaining pages scattered across the floor, and the cover landed half-on, half-off the chair, its sky-blue book-cloth hanging over the edge of the seat.
    Tobe got on his hands and knees on the floor, and began to collect up the pages. He stopped, and looked at the bundle in his fist. He pulled out one of the pages and skim-read it. He licked it and stuck it to the linopro. Then he looked around for something to write with.
     
     
    T HE CONTENTS OF Tobe’s room had not changed since he had taken it over, almost twenty years earlier. One or two things had been added, notably, more books, wedged tightly onto the shelves, which now extended to the full height of the room, beyond anyone’s natural reach.
    The top two shelves had been added five years earlier, and had caused a great deal of huffing and blowing on Tobe’s part. He had not been able to enter his office, alone, for several weeks. The little stepladder that he needed to retrieve the books on the top shelves had lived in the corridor outside his room for two Highs, and had finally been brought in by Metoo; it had taken all day for Tobe to decide exactly where they should live in the room. Tobe’s chair was the one he had inherited when he had taken over the room, and had, in its long life, had five replacement legs, two new seats, and a grand total of eight back-rests. The fact that it was, essentially, an entirely different chair to the one that Tobe had first used seemed lost on him.
    Tobe seldom worked at his desk, preferring to use the expanse of the wipe-wall, and then print his work off to share it, or to illustrate his intentions to his students and other mathematicians that he corresponded with around the World. The contents of the desk drawers were constant, and the bottom drawer on the left still held the old-fashioned and obsolete mechanical drawing, measuring and calculating devices that he had collected and been obsessed by as a kid. The drawer also held a box of chalk, long sticks of dusty yellow that had probably not been used anywhere in the World for at least fifty years, and possibly more than a century, and a collection of various types of antique chemical inks.
    Tobe opened the drawer, from his position kneeling on the floor, and took out the box of chalk. He turned it over several times in his hands, and then opened it. He took out the first stick of chalk, and then replaced it. He looked at the dusty residue on his forefinger and thumb, smelled it, and licked it. He took the same piece of chalk out of the box, again, and, tentatively, made a mark with it on the linopro. He looked down at the mark, and started to get off his knees to go to the wipe-wall. As he stood, he realised that he had smudged the chalk mark, not quite obliterating it, but fading it dramatically. He looked down at his robe, and saw a yellow smudge on it. He took the rag from its hook on the wipe-wall, and went back to wipe away