Chapter 11

The cyclist rushed by again. He was no longer singing or stopping to drink. It was quite evident that he was absolutely exhausted and could barely stay on the bicycle.

Kuzya suddenly arched his back and hissed.

“What’s the matter? Did you see the Legs again?” I asked.

“Not Legs, but paws,” answered the cat. “And there is a large beast on those paws. Hide…”

Kuzya and I rushed to a small round house with bars over the windows. The door was locked, so we had to hide ourselves under the porch. There, as we lay under the porch, I remembered that I should despise danger, not hide from it. I already made up my mind to stop hiding, when I saw our old friend — the polar bear, coming down the road. Although I needed to come out of hiding, it was very scary. Even trained animal handlers at the circus are afraid of polar bears.

Our polar bear seemed to be even more angry than when we first met him. He sighed, growled, scolded me. He was dying of thirst and looking for the North.

We hid under the porch until he passed the house. Kuzya asked me what I could have possibly done to annoy such a terrible beast. If only I had known the reason myself!

“The polar bear is an evil and merciless beast,” Kuzya tried to scare me. “I wonder if he eats cats?”

“Even if he ate cats, he would only go for sea cats, like seals,” I told Kuzya to calm him down a little. But I really didn’t know.

It was time to get out of here. There was nothing to do here, but the ball was motionless, so we had to buckle down and wait.

A mournful moan came from the house. I walked up to the door.

“Please don’t get involved in any more adventures,” Kuzya begged me.

Knocking on the door, I heard another sad moan. I looked inside the house through the bars but saw nothing. Finally, I pounded on the door of the house and shouted:

“Hey, is anybody there?!”

“It’s me,” someone responded. “The innocently convicted.”

“And who are you, exactly?”

“I’m an unhappy tailor. They accused me of stealing.”

Kuzya was hopping around me, demanding that I not get involved with a thief. But I was really interested in finding out what the tailor had stolen. I began to question him, but the tailor didn’t want to confess to his crime and instead assured me that he is the most honest man in the world. He claimed that he had been unfairly slandered.

“Who slandered you?” I asked the tailor.

“Viktor Perestukin,” the prisoner answered without a trace of hesitation.

What was it about this land! First, the half of a construction worker, then the tailor-thief…

“That isn’t true! It’s not true!” I shouted through the window.

“No, really, really,” the tailor whispered to me. “Just listen to my story. As the head of a tailor shop, I received twenty-eight meters of fabric. I was responsible for figuring out how many suits could be sewn from this fabric. And, to my dismay, this Perestukin decided that I could sew twenty-seven suits out of the twenty-eight meters of fabric and even have one meter of fabric left over. How can you possibly sew twenty-seven suits, when a single suit takes three meters of fabric?”

I instantly remembered that this was one of the assignments that I got an F for.

“Nonsense,” I scoffed.

“Absolutely ridiculous,” Kuzya added.

“It might seem like nonsense to you,” the tailor whimpered, “but based on this calculation, they demanded that I sew twenty-seven suits. Where would I get enough fabric for them? That’s why I was accused of theft and put in jail.”

“Do you have the original problem with you?” I asked.

“Of course, here it is!” the tailor rejoiced. “They gave it to me along with my sentence.”

The tailor reached his hand through the bars and handed me the paper. I turned it over and saw my solution to the problem. It was very wrong. First, I divided the ones, then I divided the tens. What I did made absolutely no sense. It didn’t take much to fix the calculation. I told the tailor that he only had to make nine suits.

At that very moment, the door magically opened, and a man ran outside. Huge scissors hung from his belt, and a measuring tape dangled around his neck. The man hugged me, jumped up with joy, and shouted:

“Glory to the Great Mathematician! Glory to the All-Powerful Unknown Mathematician! Shame on Viktor Perestukin!”

He jumped up for one last time and ran away. His scissors clinked as he ran, and the measuring tape fluttered in the wind.