Notes from the Grey Tower

Andemund only stayed at Cambridge for three months. There was no gathering for his farewell, nor did he attend the final examination. The only thing he did before leaving was to leave a mathematic problem on the blackboard during his last lesson.

He grinned at everyone in the lecture hall, waving a piece of chalk between his fingers. “You have two options— pass your finals, or solve this problem before your finals and call me to let me know the answer. 

Andemund’s finals were difficult as hell, which caused the majority of his students to fail their exams. When the results were posted outside the library, I squirmed into the surrounding crowd and found myself the first among the list of those who had failed.

I grabbed Edgar by the collar and shook him. It was impossible! I’d solved all the questions on the paper!

“Perhaps something went wrong along the way.” Edgar lowered his brush and raised both of his hands innocently. “You should go find Professor Wilson to inspect your paper.”

But Andemund had already left for Bletchley Park. He’d left by the day of our finals, and left the distribution of the papers to his assistant.

His assistant was a fine young woman whose height only came to my shoulder. She took out my finals paper, and rummaged around for the final report that Andemund had sent over by mail. She creased her brows. “Alan Caster, was it? Your lesson performance marks are zero.”

According to the syllabus that Andemund set, the marks from our finals and the marks from lesson performance each took up fifty percent of our final grade. I felt unjustified. “I remember attending a few lessons, at least. Why is it zero? Did something go wrong somewhere?”

She regretfully returned the report to its place. “Professor Wilson left instructions saying the results aren’t to be changed.”

Edgar patted me on the back. “You’ve been revenged upon. What did you do to him?”

I didn’t do anything, except maybe kiss him just that once…

My uncle took the reports I sent him very personally. My grades were directly related to the amount of living expenses I’d get from him, so only one option for me remained.

“I have only one way left to go.” I told Edgar sorrowfully. “If one subject fails, I won’t be able to afford even bread in the next month.”

I didn’t want to knock on Lindon’s door, but I had no choice. 

He lived on the top floor of a public student residence. The door was left ajar, and upon pushing in I discovered that there was nobody inside. The windows were open and a desk sat next to it, blue paint peeling off its surface from age and wear. A mess of papers were strewn across the desk, which scattered into the air as a draft of wind blew into the room. I snatched one away mid-flight and noticed the numbers and formulas scribbled on it.

A fountain pen rested on the unruly pile, the jar of ink beside it uncapped. I kicked at the bed that was in the room and dragged the person that was lying underneath out from the darkness. Desperately, I pleaded. “Lindon, we have to join forces now.”

The young man beneath the bed looked even more desperate than I was. He had a week’s worth of stubble on his chin and his hair was so disheveled it looked more like a clump of grass than hair. He requested the landlady for some beef and coffee, downed it all in one go and fixed his glasses. “Alan,” he moaned, “I can’t solve it at all.”

Lindon and I knew each other from secondary school; our letter of acceptance into Cambridge had been sent to us on the same day. He was always at the top of our school, was a genius in mathematics, and had once proven a well-known theorem on his own. One of his hobbies was to sit, with his grass-like disheveled hair, in front of the court to watch people play rugby, and to calculate from the launching angle and force whether the ball could enter the goal. 

One day I happened to pass by and heard him yell. “Score!”

“He’ll miss,” I said.

The ball missed the goal in the end. Lindon immediately asked me why, since according to his calculations the ball would have definitely entered the goal. 

“Because of the wind,” I casually replied. 

We became rivals from that day onwards. He was always the first in school, and I came only first in math. Although, even until our graduation, he had never been once able to beat me in math. 

This time I’d failed my grades due to Andemund’s retribution against me, and Lindon had failed because he’d been absent one too many times. When faced with an unsolvable problem, I’d usually hang around the library entrance to watch the female students pass by, and wait for inspiration to strike. As for Lindon, his method was rather extreme— he’d squirrel under his bed, drag the covers above him to block out all sources of light, and attempt the problem in complete darkness. And he would refuse to come out until he’d found the correct answer. 

If the problem was particularly difficult, he’d stay under the bed and attend no lessons for the whole day.

“How long have you been under there this time around?” I asked.

Lindon tore off a piece of bread. “I don’t remember. Maybe since Tuesday.”

Three days… I thought.

“It’s the problem Professor Wilson wrote on the blackboard.” He shrugged and turned to stare at my face. “It involves Waring’s problem. Alan, I know what you want to do, but I have to tell you, that problem is impossible to solve on our own.”

I knew Andemund had written a question down on the blackboard, two lines of text in total, but I didn’t know that it was the Waring problem that he’d presented. 

Waring’s problem referred to the problem proposed by E. Waring in 1770 that involved the relations between the sum of powers and natural integers. For nearly two hundred years, it was left unsolved by anyone.

I sank deeper into desperation while sitting in the library. I flipped through all the books I could find on Waring’s problem and still had no idea where to start. Edgar dropped by to check in on me and encouraged me to give up. He’d supply me with my living expenses next month. 

Teasingly, I asked him. “Where’d your money come from? Selling your art?”

He nodded seriously. “At least I can sell my art. You, on the other hand, have no skills of your own to offer, and now you’re wrecking your health too. Why not go along with me? A world-class mathematical problem isn’t going to be solved by some random second year university student any time soon.

“You look terrible, anyhow. I won’t be able to use you as a model anymore if you continue to go down like this— I don’t fancy drawing corpses all day, you know.”

I sat in the library for two weeks, the stack of notes produced from my calculations piling up to two feet in height. Perhaps it was an accidental error, but with under the mathematical conditions Andemund gave us, his version appeared to deviate slightly from the classic Waring’s problem, and had a few numbers missing that were integral to actually solving the problem. 

It was a six-digit number that was missing. Stuck, I was unable to progress any further, blocked beyond any attempt to solve the problem.

I wanted to call Lindon for his opinion (he had a telephone at his residence), so I went up to a telephone box. I was so consumed by the six missing numbers that, by pure coincidence, I distractedly punched in the string of numbers into the telephone dial. 

Seconds later, a sweet female voice came over from the other end of the line. “Hello. This is Bletchley Park.”

I stood in the telephone box holding the telephone, petrified. She continued. “May I inquire who you are trying to find?”

“Professor Wilson.” I replied.

“There is no Professor Wilson here.” The receptionist sounded uncertain. “This is the line for consultations directed for Garcia.”

“Is there a man named Andemund Wilson here? I remember Professor Wilson saying he’d be working here last month.”

“Are you from Cambridge?” Perhaps it was how childish I sounded, as I heard her smile through her voice. She called for another person over on her side. “Mr. Garcia, turns out one of your students actually called. Should I make him come over immediately?”

I heard Andemund’s voice. “Ask for his name. If his last name is Caster, then tell him he has the wrong number.”

I swallowed as the woman asked for my name and struggled to keep my voice calm. “Lindon. My name is Lindon Brown.”

The next afternoon, I hopped onto the nearest vehicle to London and located the rural area where Bletchley Park was. 

The leaves from the pagoda trees shaded the road I travelled through, flourishing in the June heat. Once I got off the car, I went straight down the main road and found myself at the place. I unbuttoned my shirt as I walked, sweltering under the summer heat. Beyond the iron gates, an old red brick building stood, green vines drooping from its walls and swaying lightly in the afternoon breeze. Among the countless houses that were built in rural London, it made no attempt to stand out from the rest of them. 

If it weren’t for the armed guards standing stoically in front of its gates.

I gave my name, and shortly after a woman in a blouse and long pants led me inside. At the time, it was rare to see women in her attire, so her attractive face and voluptuous build left a lasting impression on me.

“My name is Anne, Mr. Garcia’s assistant.” From her voice I deduced that she was the one who had received the call yesterday. Turns out she wasn’t the receptionist, but an assistant. 

Anne brought me through the garden and into an independent building built from red brick. “Mr. Garcia is our chief consultant. He’ll be with you in a minute to talk to you in person.”

She opened the door to an office and instructed me to wait there.

Ten minutes later, Andemund walked in.

He paused when he saw me, startled, and furrowed his brows. “Alan, you shouldn’t be here.”

I was as surprised as he was. “You’re not the Professor Wilson who created the field of functional analysis?”

He took off his tie and draped it on the back of the chair. “Strictly speaking, I am both Andemund Wilson, and Andemund Garcia. This depends on whether I’m engaging with academia or working within Bletchley Park.”

Edgar was right. Andemund would not make his second year students at Cambridge attempt to solve a problem presented two hundred years ago from now. He had set a password within the question, hoped for someone to find it, and for them to correctly guess how to use the password obtained. 

In other words, it wasn’t a mathematical problem that he’d given us. It was a ciphering problem. 

But Andemund didn’t let me explain. He directly threw me out of his office. His beautiful assistant waited beside the door. I pitifully looked on while Andemund sat in his office, filing through his documents as I was stuck behind an invisible barrier, unable to enter.

“You said I’d pass if I solved the problem.” I countered.

He didn’t even lift his head. “Well, now you’ve passed. I’ll call the school immediately. You can go back now.”

“You have no right to give me a zero for my lesson performance— this is obviously personal vengeance!”

His pen stopped writing. “I don’t remember anything worth seeking vengeance for.”

And then he’d stopped saying a single word to me. 

The skies were already dark when Andemund came out from his office. Night fell stiflingly. He saw me lingering outside his office, back against the wall, and seemed to be shocked at the sight.

“Darling, I think perhaps you wouldn’t want to let go of me that easily, so I chose to stay.” I bounced my thigh against the wall. “My parents were cryptologists, so I can still tell a bit. This isn’t just any building, but a cryptography institute operating under the Secret Intelligence Service. You lack talents, and you lack it very desperately, so you came to Cambridge in search for them. Now that I know where your institute lies, and have personally toured its insides…”

Andemund quietly said. “Go on.”

He stared at me with his emerald eyes and I felt a sheen of cold sweat run down my back despite the summer heat. I shut up.

He sighed. “Let’s have dinner.”

There was a comfortably lit restaurant on the second floor that I assumed was exclusively open to the chief consultant. As I hadn’t done anything of worth today, I ordered toast with a side serving of ham and eggs, although Andemund, who had worked all day, ate very little. Instead he ordered three cups of coffee throughout the meal, which he drank black.

“It’s not good for your stomach.” I reminded him. “My mother used to have a habit of drinking her coffee black, and I remember that her stomach used to hurt so much she couldn’t sleep.”

Andemund lowered his coffee cup and smiled. “Your eyes look very much like Mrs. Caster’s, especially when you’re doing anything serious. I’ve had the honour of meeting her once. She was an excellent cryptologist. “

I didn’t know Andemund had met my mother. When we first met and I’d brought up my parents, he seemed rather unfamiliar with them.

Andemund looked exhausted. I asked him. “Do you eat dinner this late every day?”

He leaned back into his chair, head tilted upwards, and placed the back of his hand over his eyes. “It’s arduous work, deciphering the Enigma.”

“You’re right, Alan. This is the cryptography institute operating under the MI6. To outsiders, we call it the Research Institute of Golf and Chess. The way the Germans operate is too unpredictable, and in order to prevent a repeat of the tragedies of war, there are encrypted messages that we must decrypt. The Polishmen managed to get their hands on the German Enigma machine, while the Russians were able to obtain their past ciphertexts, but they both failed in their mission to decrypt them. Now the Enigma machine and its ciphertexts has been replicated and sent to our institute. It’s an opportunity England cannot afford to lose. You are correct, we do lack people in this field.”

Andemund’s three-month trip to Cambridge as a professor was only a part of his plan in selecting people to join the MI6. He had two ways of selecting from the class, one being the top three scorers in the final exam, and the second being able to find his message within the problem he’d left behind. 

My final grades were quite decent, so I suspected that Andemund had tired of me and gave me a zero for my lesson performance to get me off his back. Though he didn’t expect that I’d chase him down here.

It was too late to return home at this hour, and Anne prepared a room for me to stay the night. The second day Andemund drove me back. He drove a black high-end sedan that I didn’t know the name of, but at the time not many owned a private sedan, so we drew looks from pedestrians whenever we passed by. It was almost as if he was giving me a private ride on his sedan, just the two of us together on a drive.

When we arrived at Cambridgeshire, he suddenly told me. Alan, forget whatever we talked about last night. Treat it as if you’ve never heard anything from me.

He dropped me off outside where I lived, and I knocked on his car window, saying. “Andemund, I love you. I’m serious. If the Enigma is truly as difficult as you say it is, then I would gladly carry a part of your load on my own shoulders.”

His smiled, eyes forming pleased crescents, and suddenly got off the car to circle around to where I stood. Before I could react, he had already pushed me onto the windows of his sedan. 

Translator’s notes: it was a terrible idea to translate two chapters in a day. But i did it, and will never do it again. i’m so exhausted i feel like a piece of used tissue paper.

Disclaimer: I am absolutely rubbish at translating technical terms from Chinese to English, since Google often hates me and refuses to tell me a singular answer for Chinese translations of English terms. I’ve tried my best, so please don’t throw stones at me if I get something wrong and gently inform me of my errors.

Another thing to note: the way the original phrased it implied that Andemund founded the field of functional analysis, but that feels a little off to me. I can’t think of a better translation though, so I’ll just leave it be for now.

Lindon’s name can be translated to a number of names, including Layton, Linton, Clinton, etc. I chose Lindon because it sounds closest to the Chinese version– ‘林頓’, but do inform me if there are any official translations of his name.

…I swear I will never try to update twice a day again. Goodnight!