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It took about a month to get ready. It was not all that easy to work in the house because Sib kept interrupting to read out amusing extracts from the Magazine of the Parrot Society such as Factors Affecting Parrots, A. Human Interference. Or she would jump up and look at the book on Fourier analysis and say How fascinating. Finally I went over to the Barbican and worked there. At the end of the month I wondered whether I shouldn’t spend another month on it, or even a year. Wouldn’t it be worth an extra year to be in with a chance? A chance of having a Nobel Prize winner for a father, and not just any Nobel Prize winner either, but a Robert Donat lookalike who jumped off trains? If I got this right—I thought if I got this right it would be like jumping onto a moving train, suddenly everything would be fast and easy and I would never look back.

I would have spent a year if I had known what to do, but I was not sure what to do, and I thought the more I did the older I would get and the less surprising it would be that I could do it.

I recited the periodic table one last time for good luck and I went out to look for Sorabji.

Sorabji had started out at the University of London and he still had some kind of affiliation even though he was now at Cambridge. He had kept his house in London when he got the appointment because the children were doing very well in their schools and it made sense for them to stay there. He had rooms in his college in Cambridge. He might be in Cambridge doing research or he might be in London because it was summer.

I took the Circle Line to South Kensington. I went to Imperial College and the woman in reception said there had been an unconfirmed sighting three weeks ago. I explained that I was doing an astronomy project over the summer for school and part of the project was supposed to be an interview with a famous astronomer and was there any chance I could interview Professor Sorabji? I said Please? I said couldn’t she let me have his home address so I could write to him there? I said Please?

She said Professor Sorabji was a very busy man.

I said: Please?

She said she couldn’t just give out his address to every Tom Dick and Harry.

I said I had been studying Fourier analysis every day for a month to surprise Professor Sorabji and Please?

She said: Fourier analysis! What’s that when it’s at home?

I said: Would you like to see me find the gravitational potential at any point outside a solid uniform sphere of radius a of mass m?

She said: Well—

I said: How about a problem with vibrating strings or membranes? Say a square drumhead or membrane has edges which are fixed and of unit length. If the drumhead is given an initial transverse displacement and then released, what is the subsequent motion?

She seemed to be wavering, so I snatched up a leaflet describing Imperial College and on the back hastily used the Legendre function to calculate the gravitational potential at any point outside a solid uniform sphere of radius a of mass m, and on a separate leaflet I began to calculate the subsequent motion of the drumhead but she said Oh all right. She wrote his address on a card. It was within walking distance.

I started walking to his house. I was getting more and more nervous. What if I had the chance of having a perfect father and blew it because I forgot the mass numbers of the three most abundant isotopes of hafnium?

I said: Hafnium. Symbol Hf. Atomic number 72. Relative atomic mass 178.49. Number of natural isotopes 6. Mass numbers of most abundant isotopes with percentage abundance 177, 18.6%, 178, 27.3%, 180, 35.1%. Most stable radioisotope (predominant type of decay) half-life, 181 (β –, γ) 42 d. First ionization energy 7.0 eV. Density in g/cm³ at 20°C 13.31. Melting point 2227°C. Electron configuration [Xe]4f ¹⁴5d²6s². Oxidation state in compounds, IV. Atomic radius 156.4α pm. Covalent radius for single bonds 144 pm. Reduction potential w/ number electrons etc. etc. -1.505(4). Electronegativity 1.2. Terrestrial abundance: 4 · 10^-4.

I knew what some of them meant. I thought I might as well learn them all at the same time. Now I realised I should have found out what reduction potential E° in V with number (n) of electrons was for, and I wished I had gone ahead and learned ionic radius in pm with oxidation number and coordination number. What if it turned out the one thing that had kept me from having Sorabji was not knowing the ionic radius with oxidation and coordination numbers? I was about to turn around and go home again but I thought that was stupid. It was just chemistry anyway so he probably wouldn’t care, and anyway there would always be some other thing.

I found the house and went to the door and knocked. A woman came to the door. She had brilliant black eyes and jet black hair. She was wearing a purple sari. She seemed forceful and decisive just opening the door and listening to my explanation about the school project and the interview.