Chapter 6: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

“What’s impossible about that?” Lin Ran continued tapping, but this time he did not follow the Fibonacci sequence; instead, he tapped the desk slowly at one beat per second.

“Euler could derive a three-degree-of-freedom ballistic equation by hand. You’ve worked at NASA—you’ve surely seen people who can compute complex integrals manually, with precision even surpassing Boeing’s FRIDEN130 calculator.”

“Is it strange that I deduced the atmospheric drag coupling effect from Clairaut’s mathematical model of Earth’s shape under rotating fluid equilibrium, Legendre’s spherical harmonics, and Laplace’s perturbation theory?”

Lin Ran was doing his best to ease the atmosphere in the room, avoiding further pressure on the other man’s already shattered nerves.

Is this what it feels like to stand on the shoulders of giants? Lin Ran thought. Even without his enhanced brain, he still held ample advantages in this era.

Elite figures like Haines were nothing but pawns in his hands.

How did he know Haines was an elite from NASA? He’d overheard every word of Haines’s conversation with his superior outside the phone booth—the man’s astonishing mental calculation skills made him no less than an elite.

If even a low-level NASA employee could do this, the space race wouldn’t even need to be fought.

Before him, no matter how brilliant an elite might be, they could not match the wisdom of the future.

“Randolph, fine—I’ll temporarily accept you’re a Ramanujan-like figure in aerospace, and I’m Sir Mukherjee, the one who discovered Ramanujan. So since you’ve been so patient explaining things to me, what do you want?” Haines said after a deep breath.

“I’ve just arrived in New York. I need a place to stay, and I need some dollars—I have no money at all.”

“As for compensation, the fourth and fifth terms of Newton’s gravitational perturbation correction formula are my payment. You know their value well.”

“As for why I came to you—it’s pure coincidence.”

“Dear Professor Stuhlinger, the first day of the 1960s gave me a small but significant shock: today I met a Ramanujan-like figure—assuming he isn’t lying to me.”

“Like Ramanujan, he is an Asian with extraordinary mathematical talent. He can derive Newton’s gravitational perturbation correction formula up to the fifth term by hand...”

Haines brought Lin Ran back to his New York residence, though the man’s demands seemed utterly unbelievable to him.

How could someone like this worry about food, shelter, and clothing?

He’d assumed the man wanted help getting into NASA. Instead, it was merely money that would satisfy him.

But to Haines, this presented the perfect opportunity—if the man truly was a Ramanujan-level genius, even if he refused, Haines would personally push to get Lin Ran into NASA.

The man he was now urgently writing to was his senior, Ernst Stuhlinger, director of the Ion Propulsion Laboratory at the Marshall Space Flight Center.

He himself lacked the influence to get a Yellow man into NASA—even if that man were a Ramanujan-level genius—but Stuhlinger could.

After memorizing Lin Ran’s derivation in the café’s private room and burning the written formula in a metal basin, Haines returned home and immediately wrote to Stuhlinger, detailing his extraordinary encounter.

Back at Haines’s residence, Lin Ran reviewed in his guest room the gains and losses of these few short hours.

“I didn’t reveal too much in my conversation with Haines. Claiming I came from the mainland isn’t problematic.”

Who could verify whether I truly came from the mainland?

This identity is certainly insufficient now; after returning to 2020, I’ll need further opportunities to refine it.

Because if I want to join NASA, this identity alone will never dispel suspicion.

Especially with my knowledge and abilities, once inside NASA, I’d shine like a firefly in the dark.

No matter how distant McCarthyism may be, I must make this identity flawless.

Being undocumented isn’t a problem—but an undocumented person with no verifiable origins is a major problem. That’s absolutely unacceptable.”

Under Haines’s protection, the next three days of 1960 passed with unusual calm; the area where Haines lived was a wealthy neighborhood with decent security.

Beyond planning his next steps, Lin Ran conducted a series of tests under limited conditions:

“To assess bodily changes, I can use astronaut testing methods.”

But baseline tests, stress tests, motion capture—these either require control groups or specialized equipment, all of which are currently impossible for me.”

High-speed cameras for reaction tests don’t exist now, and even if I could borrow one after returning to 2020, if someone detected abnormalities in my body, it would be disastrous.”

For now, I can only use crude methods to make preliminary judgments about bodily anomalies.”

“Whether limb positioning, repeated motion trajectories, or muscle control—all these can be tested without any tools.”

Trained in aerospace, Lin Ran had learned many methods for testing the human body during his astronaut-related coursework.

He’d assumed he’d never become an astronaut and thus never need these methods—but now, unexpectedly, he could apply them at this moment. He’d set a specific target in his mind—say, below the lower lobe of the left ear—and observe how far his finger deviated from touching it, then change targets to gradually increase difficulty, measuring precision of limb control.

Or he’d perform designated movements—like drawing a square with the left hand and a circle with the right.

“As predicted, my control over my body has reached an entirely new level. Among humans, my bodily control must be the most precise.”

When his brain commanded his finger to move down two centimeters, even without a ruler, Lin Ran could visually judge it was exactly two centimeters.

After confirming his body’s high-precision control through stability tests in various postures, Lin Ran gained a preliminary understanding of his transformation:

“The Door allows me to move across locations and timelines; combined with my bodily changes, I now possess a degree of survival capability.”

“The evolution of my brain is astonishingly extreme—so far, it hasn’t just improved calculation and memory, but also deep thinking capacity.”

In the remaining time, Lin Ran kept a low profile. In his conversations with Haines, he revealed only his genius and no further anomalies.

When Haines pressed him about his identity, Lin Ran gave vague, evasive answers.

With no further information, Lin Ran followed the principle: beyond science, the more you say, the more likely you are to err—and the harder it will be to fix later. So he simply answered nothing.

While Lin Ran was keeping quiet, he received a priority mail from NASA: “Bring him to Houston. Arrange an interview.”