Face of Fury (Zoe Prime #5) - Blake Pierce Page 0,57

the computers started getting it into the billions, I think it’s more of the domain for the tech students and professors. They want to put together a program that will work it out for them, not sit there with paper and a calculator.”

“But was there ever anyone in the past?” Zoe pressed.

“Now… now that you mention it, there was,” the professor replied. He sounded old, and was used to delivering dry lectures designed to take up an hour of time in a silent auditorium. His words were slow and precise, and it was beginning to irritate Zoe no end. If he could just get to the point, she could put the phone down and chase this new lead. “Now, he was a stranger character. As a I recall, he didn’t even want to be called a mathematician like the rest of us. No, he was on a higher plane, or so he thought. He called himself a—what was it now?—oh, a numbers theorist. Huh! You ever heard such a thing?”

“I have not,” Zoe ground out. “But what about pi?”

“Oh, yes, well, he had his theories,” Professor Brown said. “One of them was that pi had a final place. Of course, some of us believe that, some don’t, but not many of us think we’ll ever find it. He was different. He wanted to calculate it right to that final place and show us all the full string.”

“Final place?” Zoe blinked, shaking her head as if clearing it out would help her understand a bit better. It didn’t make any sense. “But pi is an infinite number. It goes on forever. Everyone knows that.”

“Well, we don’t know anything…”

“Computers have calculated it into the trillions, even the quadrillions, of digits.” Zoe couldn’t believe what she was hearing. It was logical, obvious even, that pi would never end. How could anyone think differently? It was a pure number—a number that never stopped being numbers. Now that she thought about it, she could almost understand being obsessive about it herself. But not like this.

“No, well, I do agree,” Professor Brown said. “But that’s a debate for another time, anyway. The thing was, this man—he was sure that there was a definitive end. He decided that was going to be his life’s work. He had some funding to do the research, but when we got a closer look into what he was doing, we cut him off. It just wasn’t going anywhere, you know. He never managed to find a shred of proof, even build a workable equation that would demonstrate it. Not even a theoretical one.”

Zoe wasn’t surprised. This man, this numbers theorist, had been chasing after a wild goose. More than that: a flying pig. Something that he was never going to be able to find, because it didn’t exist.

“What happened to him then?” Zoe asked. “You said he was not working there anymore?”

“No, well, there was something… let me look it up, now,” Professor Brown said, accompanied by the metallic sliding noise of a drawer opening and then the rustling of some paper. “Oh, here we are. I still have his personnel file. Right, that was it; he got into a fistfight in the staffroom after the funding was cut. Blamed one of his fellow educators for the loss. That was balderdash, of course. It was all his own fault.”

“So, he faced disciplinary action, or did he quit?” Zoe asked. She didn’t need the opinion piece so much as the bare facts.

“He was fired,” Professor Brown said. “Oh, yes, ma’am. Couldn’t have him on staff any longer. Took us a good job to convince the other staff member not to press charges, as it says here. Could have sent him to jail for a long time. He did some real damage. Anyway, the college paid for the medical bills, and we managed to avoid a wider lawsuit, so that worked out okay for us.”

Zoe half-closed her eyes. She couldn’t care less about how everything had worked out legally for the college. “Do you have the theorist’s name and last known address there?” she asked, her pen hovering above her notebook.

“I certainly do,” he said. “His name is Ezra Pitsis. Oh, huh, would you look at that—I never even made the connection. pi in his name too, hah! I bet he had some fun with that one. Now, I do recall he had to move in with his adult daughter after he was fired—I’m sure that was a bitter pill to swallow.”

Zoe’s heart