First Contact by Evan Mandery Page B

he said. “You know, same old nonsense.”
    “Still tackling the big problems in theoretical physics?”
    “I suppose.”
    “I worry about you,” she said in a tone that sounded concerned, though the Professor knew better.
    “Why is that?”
    “I worry that no one pays attention to your work. It could get depressing sitting in the basement every night working on these unimportant problems without any recognition. You might think your life has amounted to nothing. That could really get someone down.”
    The Professor liked to believe every living organism possessed a unique talent. His wife’s unique talent was to masquerade in an expression of genuine interest or concern a devastating critique of a person that reduced his life to rubble—a spectacular sort of disingenuousness.
    It was as if when John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln, he said, instead of “Sic semper tyrannis” (which is Latin for“Thus be it ever to tyrants”), “Hic quidam salve tu vente” (which is Latin for “Here is something to aid your digestion”).
     
    O F COURSE ON R IGEL -R IGEL they had never heard of the highly literate assassin John Wilkes Booth or the great President Abraham Lincoln. There was a man named Abraham Lincon-Lindle who lived on Rigel-Rigel, but he worked in a factory that manufactured paste.
     
    N OW M RS . F ENDLE -F RINKLE , E VELYN , was both right and wrong in what she said. She was right in the sense that the Professor was a failure in his profession, and his failure was in large part attributable to his personal character.
    At one time in his life the Professor had been a graduate student of great promise. Later, he secured for himself a teaching position in a well-regarded university. This was how he first came to be referred to as “the Professor,” a moniker that stuck with him even after he lost his post.
    In the academy on Rigel-Rigel it is what they like to call “publish or perish.” It is expected that professors, especially young professors without tenure, will write and publish lots of articles in top journals and hence bring prestige to their university. This was most decidedly not the Professor’s style.
    The Professor was a simple man. He did not have any aspirations to be rich or famous. He liked jelly beans and strawberry rhubarb pie, which had entirely different names on Rigel-Rigel but tasted basically the same as on Earth. He liked to take walks in drizzling rain. And he liked to think about physics. He didn’t care much about the practical consequences of the problems he thought about—he wasn’t trying to come up with a more efficient warp engine or a better electric toothbrush, for example—he just liked thinking about an interesting problem, even if it was the kind of problem that might take a long time to solve or might have no solution at all. As it was, he had been thinking about the same problem for thirty-two years.
    He was in this sense a bit like a man on Earth named Andrew Wiles who devoted most of his adult life to proving Fermat’s Last Theorem, a mathematical conjecture that went unsolved on Earth for four hundred years. This problem was referred to on Rigel-Rigel as Ascribanta Alianta, which roughly translates as “The ElementaryConjecture in Number Theory.” It was one of the first things every Rigelian student learned in second grade.
    What Professor Fendle-Frinkle had in common with Wiles was an abundant reservoir of perseverance. Left to his own devices, Professor Fendle-Frinkle could think about a question for days. He didn’t require much sleep. When he did sleep he continued to think at a subconscious level. He would awake continuing the same thought as before he went to bed. He thought about the kinds of problems that were so complex it might take a year to resolve a small subproof. The long haul did not deter him, though. Once, he became so excited by the improbable sight of a dollowarrie flying over an upside-down rainbow (right-side up by Earth