Starship: Free Mars

Part 3: Glory

Part 3: Glory

“Plus one, and minus three?”

Tate made a silly chomping motion with his hand. “Did I mention that minus signs have sharp little teeth? Do you want to think again about the middle term?”

The student looked at the polynomial Tate had written on the board. “Oh! Plus three minus one.”

“Very good,” Tate nodded and went on the next problem.

Mars had more than Tate had expected—and less. Here he was, back teaching pre-Calculus algebra, but it had been his own fault. During his initial interview, Tate had let Vicam Wieger get under his skin. A tall man in his mid fifties, Wieger had introduced himself as the head of Special Projects. He never said what the projects were or for whom they were to be done. However, even though Wieger had not mentioned an organization, one look at his short, steel-gray hair and erect bearing clearly said, “military.”

“And what,” Wieger had asked him that day, “are Pencian Operators?”

Three sentences into his reply, Tate realized Wieger was not following him. He switched gears and gave him a layman’s version.

“So what are they good for?”

Good for? What was anything good for in mathematics? “They are a unifying concept that lets us connect the properties of abstract topological field theory…”

“Fairy castles in the sky.”

Taken aback by the man’s blunt disparagement, Tate reached for the first analogy the came to mind. “So were imaginary numbers until they supplied the algebra of vectors. So were…

Wieger waved him away. “What good are they? We need people who can deal in the concrete world. We have real problems. We need real solutions.”

“You need a good boot in the ass.” Tate was hot now. He had never liked being insulted by the ignorant. “I never asked to come here. This kidnapping thing was not my idea. Send me back if you don’t want me.”

The man gave him a thin smile. “We can’t send you back right now. That would be… awkward. However, I’m sure we can find something useful for you to do in the meantime.”

Wieger’s “useful” had been his assignment to the University of Hellas as a “visiting professor”—visiting from another planet. Tate suspected the rest of the kidnapped mathematicians had been assigned to Wieger’s special project. He had not seen them since he had arrived on Mars. But then again, Tate did not get out and about much.

He had spent a good bit of his time the first three months at the university getting acquainted and finding out who was doing what. Mathematicians on Mars had been out of touch with Earth for quite a while, but they had not been idle. He looked over their research and realized they had broken new ground in several areas. Office visits to his colleagues almost always turned into mini seminars. Tate did not have access to the current Earth journals, but he remembered enough landmark developments from Earth's mathematicians to add tidbits of ideas that were new to his current colleagues.

While the exchange of new ideas was intellectually interesting, Tate was bored. He read Martian research journals day and night, but he was hopelessly out of date with what his new colleagues were doing. His own research was out of joint with what was going on around him. The other mathematicians at UH did not have a lot of interest in his research area which matched nicely with his inability to work with them on theirs. For now, the university gave him a full time teaching load. Not that Tate minded teaching. He loved teaching. However, he was not familiar with the nuances of the Martian notational system. Since the two worlds had stopped communicating, their notational techniques of mathematical signs and symbols had evolved away from the classic system especially at the research levels. Therefore, all of Tate's classes were entry-level algebra. For goodness sake, some of his students could not even factor a polynomial! He enjoyed the students, but he was bored.