When all the data had come in, Comrade Jiang, the cynosure of everybody’s eyes, sat down in front of a large abacus and prepared to make the final calculations. Huang Yiyi and I were both unbearably nervous. Everyone had their eyes fixed on Comrade Jiang’s fingers, and watched unblinkingly as his hands flew across the abacus. There was not a single sound to be heard in the whole of the vast Calculations Office, just the click of the beads on his abacus. The sound was tiny, but it thudded in our minds like the blows of an axe.

In the end, his fingers seemed to receive an electric shock. They convulsed and then hung in the air unmoving – but beneath his rigid fingers there were still several beads up by the central bar! That meant that the result of this calculation was an infinite number: we could never work it out. Or to put it another way, it meant that Huang Yiyi was wrong!

Comrade Jiang was appalled and just stood there, not daring to report.

A dead silence reigned in the Calculations Office, but there was a tension in the air that could explode at any moment.

Huang Yiyi lost control of herself and shrieked, ‘It’s not possible! You must have made a mistake!’

I pulled myself together and went over to comfort her. She suddenly seemed to go mad and got up, grabbed hold of an abacus, and then threw it violently to the floor, before bursting into tears and running out of the Calculations Office.

The beads of the abacus scattered across the ground, bouncing and rolling around our feet.

That was how an amazing theory and an enormous effort ended in failure.

That evening I went to Huang Yiyi’s room for a second time. I was intending to try and cheer her up, but she seemed to have done that herself, and so she was comparatively calm. I found her lying on the sofa reading a foreign fashion magazine. When she saw me come in, she sat up and said shamefacedly, ‘I’m sorry. I … behaved really badly.’

‘It doesn’t matter: everyone understands how you feel. If you hadn’t smashed the abacus, quite possibly I would have done.’

When I said that, she became very cheerful and said, ‘Really? I was afraid you’d be angry because I made you look bad.’

‘The person who made us look bad is Sivincy.’

She ground her teeth and swore. ‘That witch! I thought this time I’d got her, but we’ve come away empty-handed.’

‘I wasn’t expecting it, either. I really thought you’d pull it off.’

‘And that’s why you made such a big decision, roping everyone else in to help me out. And now I’m a laughing stock.’