“About something I read. I’m still reading about prime numbers.”
“The subject does tend to suck you in.”
“Mick, let’s talk about l-i-e-s.” She spelled the word out because she was not sure how to pronounce it in this context.
He took his hand back. “Isn’t it a little soon for that discussion? If I can momentarily adopt a masterful tack, well then I insist that topic will come up much later in our relationship. If ever.”
She laughed at his expression. “I mean in the mathematical sense.”
“Oh, good, ’cause it’s such an alarming word in its plain English sense.” He noted her glass was empty. Again. “Can I get you another one? No more for me. I’m driving.”
“I shouldn’t.”
“These things are small and weak. Like me.”
“Oh, well. Why not.” Dinner would have to come from a cardboard box in the freezer, preformulated, but then, as Bob had mentioned, it usually did lately.
“You want to know about lies, eh? Well, all sorts of lies relate to math. There’s a Chinese professor by the name of Li.”
“Not him.”
“There’s also a Norwegian mathematician from the turn of the century, named Lie. He gave his name to some concepts called Lie Groups and Lie Transformations.”
“Are they used in prime number theory?”
“Maybe. But if so, it’s way over my head,” Mick said. “So much genius has been wasted trying to figure out what the hell the primes are, and why they sit where they sit on the number line, that I’d have to look it up, and I might not know enough about that field to help.
“Here’s the thing about number theory: Any fool can ask a simple question that no genius can solve. Is one a number? What’s the square root of minus one? Why can’t you divide by zero? And the question that has you hooked: How come the primes, the building blocks of all numbers, can’t be located using some formula?”
“It’s true,” Nina said. “It seems so simple. There must be a pattern. I look at the list of numbers, and I think I see a pattern like a mist just behind the list. That there’s some simple little adjustment to be made, and they would fall into a regular sequence-2, 3, 5, 7, 11…”
“There’s a very great mathematician named Grothendieck who said you have to come at things this difficult with the mind of an infant,” Mick said. “Maybe the mystery will be solved someday by some retired postal worker who likes math puzzles. Meantime, let’s talk about one more ‘li.’ ”
“The li that comes close to predicting a pattern of prime distribution,” Nina said.
“Right. Let’s start with maybe the greatest mathematician who ever lived, the incomparable Gauss. Active in math in the late seventeen hundreds. A child prodigy. He kept notebooks, and he only published a small number of his discoveries. It’s said that his failure to let the world into his brain set mathematics back a century.
“When he was fifteen, he wrote a stunning little function in his notebook. He wrote, ‘
“You said ‘log.’ A logarithm is some kind of root, is that right?”
Mick scratched his head and said, “I don’t think of it like that, but, yeah, it is a root. The natural log is the power a base number has to be raised to in order to equal the particular prime. Most people have had to study base 10 logs, but the scientific log is called the natural log, and…” He saw Nina’s eyes glazing over and said, “Yeah, it’s sort of a root,” and laughed.
“But not exact?”
“No. Close, but no cigar. Still, close was an amazing leap of creativity. Tantalizing, how close he came.”
“Are we getting closer to li yet?”
“Li. Hold on to your glass. Bring all brain cells into play. Grit your teeth. Ready?”
“Go for it.”
“Li means ‘logarithmic integral.’ It’s a refinement of the theorem that comes even closer to predicting the number of primes up to a certain number, and it gets more and more accurate as the numbers get larger. It still can’t predict individual primes, it just comes closer. Gauss came up with it later. It’s a root of a root, you might say. You make an
He drew a simple diagram on his napkin. A right triangle-“The vertical axis is
“That’s the li line, which predicts how many primes there should be up to any point. But it only works approximately. Each prime is located at some random distance below the li line.” He drew a jagged stepped line which ran under the li line like a narrow staircase. “See where the actual number of primes are located? It’s as though the primes got pulled away from their line and have sunk at different rates.” He spread his hands. “To find out how and why this force acts to distort the prime distribution, I would sell my soul. Now I’m getting romantic. It’s because of those brown eyes of yours.”
Lights were winking on all across the forest now, leaving the mountains and the lake in their mysterious darkness.
“Then Riemann found another pattern, somehow related to the li line, by working with a function called the Zeta Function. And his work still seems like the best approach to finding this force or differential or whatever you might call it. So prime theoreticians went looking in that direction. But so far, the Riemann Hypothesis hasn’t been proved.”
“I’ve been reading about that.”
“I have a really good book about it at home I could lend you. So this is connected to your case?”
“I told you, one of the witnesses is very interested in prime number theory.”
“Maybe he works for an Internet-security company,” Mick said.
“What?”
“Well, really big numbers can’t be factored-nobody can find the primes they’re made of-even with today’s computers. So a company called XYC invented a method of encoding financial and other information using that fact, so information couldn’t be hacked as it traveled from one Web site to another. The code lets you type in your credit-card number for certain eyes only. Ever buy anything on eBay?”
“No.”
“You will soon. Everybody will. Local markets can’t really compete. Where was I? Oh, yes. Internet codes. I have a good book about that at home as well. Want to borrow it? We could stop by there.”
Nina had been lulled into such a scholarly daze by Mick’s disquisition that she almost didn’t notice that he had made his move. Maybe she didn’t want to notice, erect defenses, analyze, think it through. “I would,” she said. “I could take it to read on the plane.”
“Let’s go, then. Maybe you should call your son and say you’ll be a little late.”
“Good idea.” Nina called Bob and said she’d be a little late. She wasn’t hungry. The B & B warmed in her stomach. She was on the trail of something intellectually challenging. Mick was a fount, a real fount. He was holding her hand as they emerged into the parking lot.
Okay, be honest, she was on a trail all right, but the trail had just forked, and his hand was confident.
He went on talking during the short trip to his place in the Tahoe Keys, and Nina leaned back in the passenger seat, allowing herself to be fed information as if he were spooning ice cream into her mouth. Up the stairs they went into his dark cabin. He didn’t turn on the lights. He opened the door to his stove-fireplace and a blast of heat came out and flames flickered into action.
“Let me show you something,” he said. He drew her to the window. Outside sparkled one of the canals that led to the lake. The stars shone down.
It didn’t surprise her when he began to undress her. “Ssh, ssh,” he said. “Let’s get comfortable and I’ll show you the books. It’s getting hot in here.”
She had heard that line in a bad rap song, but somehow she was in her slip, and his hands caressed her. “Right in here,” he said, drawing her over the threshold into his bedroom, where a large bookcase took up half the wall. The bed took up the rest of the room, though, and hardly had they entered when Mick engineered her to the bed and said, “Relax, I’ll get it in a second.”
She sat on the bed, tired all of a sudden and acutely aware of Mick kneeling in front of her, sliding his hand up her thigh. In the dark she only sensed his head below her. She took a handful of his hair, ready for the ride.
“This’ll only take a minute,” he said. “You’re really going to like this book, sweetheart. It’s full of details about logs that make you want to be close to somebody who understands. Like I’m close to you right now, touching you. Mmm, you are absolutely luscious. You’re hot, baby. And now I’m going to show you a log, a natural log, you’re gonna get this right away…”
He went on like that, and he did have some books, though she didn’t get back home with them for another hour and a half.
As for the sheets being in a grid pattern, she didn’t have time to look.
22
HER SILVER-TONGUED MATHEMATICIAN DUMPED HER the next day, via a cell-phone call Nina missed on her way to the Reno airport. While she and Bob waited for the hop to San Francisco to be called, she found it after a last-minute message from Sandy.
Hi. Maybe it’s better this way. You know that job offer in L.A.? They need me right away, so I won’t be here when you get back. I loved every minute and I think you’re sweet. And please don’t be mad-remember, I never lied to you. Bye, and good luck cracking the primes.
She didn’t return the call-what would she say? Another watershed of single life spread before her-the hookup followed by the cheerful phone message. Apparently he hadn’t “caught feelings,” as the alternateens say. She glanced over at Bob, who read
She examined herself. Emotional trauma?
She felt ruffled, yes.
Damage to her vanity, then?
Some. Mick should have found her so irresistible that he changed his plans, changed his circumstances, changed his very personality now that she had lit up his life. Then she would have decided at her leisure what to do with him.
Regret? Some. Mick had been fun, but then again, the fun wouldn’t have lasted. The main regret was that she had lost her math expert.
She hadn’t caught feelings either, then. It seemed that she would survive handily. Mick would go on his way, a very lonely way, finding women at every stop, staying with none of them. He hadn’t harmed her, and she was a big girl.
Well, then, could she just enjoy the memory, and not analyze it into smithereens?
