On the positive side, he wasn’t having to pretend he was working in a hotel any more. This meant he didn’t have to waste hours and hours sitting behind a desk in a deserted lobby. As far as the positive side went, though, that was more or less it.
The negative side, now; there was a lot of that. There was being cooped up in the room provided for him to work in – tiny, windowless and furnished with a chair, a table, a calculator, a moderate amount of air for breathing purposes and nothing else, so he couldn’t possibly be distracted – with nothing to disturb him apart from Call-me-Bill barging in every fifteen minutes bleating, “Have you done it yet?” There was the problem of the work itself. Call-me-Bill had handed him a printout of the calculations he’d found on Pieter’s laptop after his disappearance. It had taken both of them, and an improvised stretcher and a car jack, to get the printout on to the table. Plenty of material to work on, therefore; the only problem was that it made no sense whatsoever. He sprained his brain for a week trying to find a way in before he realised what the problem was –
“Variable base mathematics,” Call-me-Bill repeated. “What—?”
Theo gave him a terrible smile. “It means it keeps switching,” he said. “From base ten to base four to base sixteen, sometimes in the same line. Which means two and two could equal four, or ten, or eleven, and you’ve got no way of knowing which base you’re in from one moment to the next. Presumably there’s a reason for it, but I can’t figure out what it is.”
Call-me-Bill frowned, then smiled at him. “Very good,” he said. “Carry on.”
So on he carried, by the simple expedient of ignoring the problem and believing. This didn’t come easily. When two and two made five, all his instincts yelled at him to stop, go back, find the error and correct it. Instead, he forced himself to have faith, so that if two and two made five, that was all right because Pieter said so. Once he’d trained himself to do this, a thin, frail thread of understanding began to stretch itself, like a spider’s web in sub-zero temperatures, from one page to the next. The variable bases, he discovered, were necessary because each line of maths might well be operating in two or three or more alternative realities at the same time. In a bizarre way, though, that actually helped, after a while. Outbreaks of base six, for example, indicated activity in the primary default alternate reality – the one where he’d jumped in just after the horrible bar fight, presumably – while the cowboy-saloon reality seemed to happen mostly in base nineteen. After three weeks of battling with this garbage he was beginning to have a shadowy idea of what Pieter had been trying to do, but still no clear picture of how he’d done it, or which sheets of single-spaced mathematical symbols represented Pieter’s working notes towards writing a user’s manual.
“It’s like this,” he explained to Call-me-Bill, after a particularly fraught progress meeting. “Suppose I’m a single-cell amoeba and you want me to evolve into Einstein. Well, at the rate I’m going, in a year’s time, with a lot of luck, I might just be a sea cucumber.”
Call-me-Bill gave him an agonised look. “That’s not good enough,” he said. “The money—”
Theo said something intemperate about the money and what Call-me-Bill might like to do with it. “It’s useless,” he went on. “God only knows how long it took Pieter to do all this stuff. And he knew what he was doing, and he was a genius.”
Call-me-Bill looked at him. “So, how long—?”
“Fifty years. Maybe. If I manage to keep this pace up without turning my brain to glue, which,” he added with a scowl, “doesn’t seem very likely. If you ask me, your best bet would be to cut your losses and turn this place into a hotel. You could make good money if you could get a slice of the conference trade.”
Somehow, Call-me-Bill didn’t find that idea very appealing, so it was back to the printouts and the calculator for another excruciating week, at the end of which Theo realised there was something else at work in there, something he hadn’t identified yet, without understanding which he was simply wasting his time; at which point he kicked off his shoes, smashed the chair against