The Strange Attractor Read Online Free PDF

Alec’s place.”
    “I haven’t seen her for quite a while, either. It’s a pity, really, they don’t get on better.”
    “Who, Wendy and Alec?”
    “No, no. Wendy and Jane.”
    “Don’t they?”
    “Well, you know Jane. She does tend to be demanding. She’d boss me around if I gave her half a chance. Where is Alec’s place, anyway?”
    “Pentyrch Road. It’s pretty big now. He must be doing well.”
    “What were you doing there?”
    “I gave someone a lift back from the inquest.”
    “ Inquest? ” This time she actually looked up from her book. “ What inquest?”
    “The one on Sammy Cantwell. I thought I’d go.”
    “Whatever for? You’re full of surprises.”
    “I just felt like it.”
    “You have been gadding about.” Setting her book down and swinging her legs off the sofa. “I’m booked to do some travelling myself. The agency rang this morning.”
    “Paris again, is it?”
    “I have to fly over next Wednesday. For two or three days.”
    “Look,” Dobie said. “You know you don’t have to do these jobs if you don’t want to.”
    “I do want to.”
    “That’s all right, then.”
    “When does your vacation start?”
    “Next week.”
    “I may come back with some ideas. I’ll bring the latest brochures.”
    “Yes, do that,” Dobie said.
    He thought that the earnest-looking lad’s efforts had gone to waste but a more detailed search at length revealed a small entry in the morning paper. There was even a modest one-column headline: UNLICENSED GUNS – CORONER HITS OUT. Dobie had observed no such display of pugilistic activity on the coroner’s part but was familiar enough with contemporary techniques of reportage to feel no particular surprise, even when he further observed that his ex-student’s name had been misspelled in a somewhat embarrassing way. He was now inclined to think that he himself had wasted if not much effort, at any rate a good deal of valuable time the previous day and drove off collegewards in a chastened mood. Leaving Jenny fast asleep, as usual.
     
     
     
    But whatever happens, Dobie thought, polluting the mild warmth of the morning with a vast exhalation of tobacco smoke, whatever happens I don’t want to become der zerstreut Professor of popular legend. Mathematicians have to stay on the ball. Fall back on these nineteenth-century gimmicks and you might as well retire. And I don’t want to retire. It’s true what Jenny says; I don’t have to go on teaching if I don’t want to. But I do want to.
    Not because I’m specially good at it. They don’t call me Drip-Dry for nothing. There are all kinds of with-it things that other and sprightlier lecturers (such as Wain) might breezily refer to, such as U2 (whatever that was) and Tottenham Hotspur and crack (or was it crash?) and Lenny Henry… One could surely bring such things into the study of Wallis’s Law, for instance, if only one knew the exact meaning of all those extraordinary concepts. And students such as Hywel Morgan, who frequently multiplied his logarithms, would then surely be on to the exponent of x in a flash. Let the graph of y = 5x represent the parabola described by a regulation football that, having been smartly kicked by Alan Rush (of Morecambe United and Scotland) in the general direction of the goal, is about to be deflected by the opposing scrum-half’s forearm… No, it was no good. Hopeless. And moreover offside. “That is why,” Dobie said gloomily, turning away from the long rows of marble and granite plaques, “a complex number may be represented graphically by a vector, that is to say by trigonometrical notation, which inevitably suggests to our minds the idea of direction .” What in actual fact it inevitably suggested to his mind was a mental picture of Hywel Morgan writing down the word direction and staring at it gloomily. Even that wasn’t so bad. But why didn’t he have a mental picture of Sammy Cantwell? That was bad. That was what rankled.
    Raising his head and