In the Cupola Suite of the Michelangelo Towers, Hoskins looked at his mentor threw up in the air reams of research papers, the result of more than a decade of works.
– “How could this have happened? Tell me, Steven, how the fuck this could have happened! What did I pay you for? How the fuck you and all the fucking referees I have working for me could have missed a mistake of that magnitude?”
Hoskins kept looking at the scattered papers on the floor.
– “Years and years of researches. Hundreds and hundreds of documents published worlwide and then this? Do you know what Time Magazine would say of me the next time they put me on their cover? Richard Greene, the greatest farce on the planet! That’s what they gonna say, Steven. How am I gonna be able to face the scientists community again? What about the Nobel Prize? What about the grants? How do you suppose I’m gonna get those millions and millions of dollars of grant every year?”
– “Richard, you’re overreacting. It’s not the end of the world. We only need a stronger proof. The error is so subtle that—”
– “I’m overreacting? You’re telling me I’m overreacting? And how the fuck no one has detected the flaw before? My works are the most cited in any thesis, scientific journal, and string theory papers, how comes none of these morons had seen the mistake?”
– “Like I said, Richard, the error is so subtle and abstract that I wonder how the hell that de Vries woman could have catch it in such a short period of time. The assertion is based on a gigantic argument, intricately constructed from hundreds of complex mathematical calculations well beyond what one person can handled glued together by thousands of logical links. It’s—it’s improbable for her or anybody else to have found the mistake just by looking at it.”
Greene stopped his pacing back and forth and looked at his assistant. “You know Hoskins, you’re right. It’s improbable and coming from a woman who had never worked on string theory, it’s more than improbable, it’s impossible.”
– “I suggest a press conference where you would say that the mistake is just a—uh—an oversight and that we’re working on it, that the mistake could not, under any circumstances, undermine the research path.”
Greene had not moved, his eyes fixed on the ceiling, thinking.
– “She must have help.”
– “Whoever helped her must be a hell of a freak of mathematical genius of incomparable magnitude.”
– “What about the geek who sat next to her?”
– “No way, he’s their computer guy. The guy’s working on his Ph.D.”
– “What about? Nah.”
– “What?”
– “No, that’s impossible.”
– “Richard, who you’re thinking about?”
– “The domestic.”
Hoskins looked at his mentor as if he had gone mad. “Richard, please. Be serious.”
– “Yeah, you’re right and set up that press conference, will you?”
– “Consider it done.”
