Professor Watson and the Numbers Game.

In 1972, John Cherry Watson, a teacher of creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin held this short story up to his afternoon class and exclaimed to them that it was one of the best short stories ever turned into him– one of the best he had ever read.

It was mine.  

I might as well have won the Pulitzer Prize that day.  From a mid-pack student to the one who got their short story raised and lauded over. And it was the spark that ignited the fire under me to write.  I have spent the last forty years doing just that. It is funny what one simple act can do in changing a person life, or at least in shaping it. His words of encouragement, his recognition of my talent before that class that day, gave me the strength to think that maybe I could be a writer.  Maybe I could make a living at this art.

A few months ago I came across that short story and I present it to you today. I hope you like it as much as Professor Watson did.

The Numbers Game

A short story

By

John Crawley

He would have told you if you had asked him that day that he never thought it would create such a fuss, this discovery of his. He would have shook his head and shrugged his boney shoulders and looked at you through the thick tortoise-shell glasses and said he had no idea that the moment would have been so keen in the sciences.  Alexander Popovich would have blushed if you had suggested things like the Nobel Prize or that his discovery would change the face of social structure.  He was a mathematician.  A physicist.  A theoretical physicist at that.  Usually the thoughts, which ran through his balding head, were of such lofty nature, that it was hard to put them in words.  He could put them in numbers, but to explain them to his nineteen-year old daughter, Chloe, was almost impossible. She was a freshman at Saint Edwards and he was a professor at The University of Texas.  They shared a house–empty as it was, after the death of his wife (her mother), Claudia. They shared an evening meal and an occasional visit to mass an even more occasional walk in Zilker Park on Sundays, but they shared little else.

Chloe was a business major. Finance. But she was much more concerned with the goings and coming of Robert Ord.  Robert, or Bobby, to Chloe, was the man of the hour.  He, too, was a business major. He was – or had been recently – a jock: high school football in some small town in the Panhandle, before coming to Austin to discover his way in the world, and before he discovered the daughter of Dr. Alexander Popovich.  

If you had asked Dr, Popovich that spring day in his office as he faced the dozen or more chalkboards filled with the hieroglyphics of numbers and algebraic contortions, along with nameless algorithms, if he believed that what he had just proved would one day ruin his life, he would have looked at you incredulously and simply said that what he had discovered was the nature of science. 

What Alexander Popovich had discovered, was that for eons, there has been missing in our numbering system, a whole number located exactly half way between six and seven.

Alexander Popovich had wrestled with this notion for years.  First it was pi.  Why did pi repeat itself endlessly when the circle it was trying to describe was round?  A perfect circle should have completeness to its math, so reasoned Alexander Popovich.  Then came Einstein’s theories that didn’t always add up to the exactness that either he or Professor Einstein thought they should.  So year after year, Dr. Popovich slaved away over his chalkboards, at first with the tenacity of a hobbyist, then with the passion of a man possessed by a demon. His fellow professors thought he was a crackpot. Yet, every time a great discovery showed up with a slight tweaking in the math that explained it, they looked at Alexander and wondered if the six-foot tall, stick-of-a-man might be onto something.

Then one day he came upon the problem.  The numbering system itself was all-wrong.  Something was amiss.  More figuring.  More tossing and turning at night and jumping from bed to scratch out equations on any piece of paper that was handy.  More countless hours of staring into space seeing the problem; yet, not quite visualizing the answer. Then one day on chalkboard number fourteen, he came across the moment of “eureka.” There was a number between six and seven.  It had always been there, but it had been hidden. And he, Alexander Popovich, had found it.

He turned and dialed the phone on his desk and his daughter answered.  He told her of the discovery.  She squealed with excitement, not so much from understanding what this meant, but more from the tone she heard in her father’s voice.  His thrill of victory, seeped through the copper lines and found their way to her waiting ears, and she in return, fed back the euphoria she knew her father was feeling.

“Daddy, Daddy, you’ll be famous.” She said.

If you had been there that day you would have seen him laugh.  “No darling.  It’s just a simple mathematical formula.  It will make a few journals at best.”

“Daddy are you crazy.  It changes everything. Everything.”

“Now don’t go on and on.  I want to take some time and discuss with my colleagues how I might go about publishing this.  It is science.  It takes a process, you know.  I have to publish it.  It has to be weighed and discussed and looked at before credit can be given or received.”  He was always so matter of fact.  Yet, he did feel a bit proud.  Pi was wrong.  Einstein was correct all along.  He had proved it.  Nature was not ever so slightly out of balance – science didn’t need tweaking every so often.  It was simply the numbers weren’t all there to add up.

“Whatever, Daddy.  I think it is still exciting.  What will you call it?”

“What?  Call what, dear?”

“The new number.  One, two three four, five,  six…What will you call the next number.  The one before seven?”

He hadn’t thought of that.  “I don’t know.”

“I think you should name it for mom.”

If you had been there, you’d probably had seen his eyes glisten just slightly from the words his daughter spoke, which pricked at his heart.  He so dearly missed his lovely bride, Claudia.  “Five six, Claudia…” He said over the phone.  They both laughed because it sounded so strange.  Yet they both new, whatever was placed between six and seven was going to be strange. It was going to be something very, very new.

X   X   X

Chloe told Bobby.  Bobby told his roommate, Pete van Pelt.  Peter told his father who was a systems analyst for a military contractor.  Mr. Van Pelt told a close personal friend and professional relation, Colonel Jackson at the Pentagon, who relayed the message up the latter to a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  There it would have stopped had the general not cracked a joke about the whole matter in front of a White House aide – a young man from Chicago who had earned a law degree from a Midwestern University and was trying to leap frog over his contemporaries from Yale and Harvard, who populated the White House under Nixon.  The young man, Howard Davis, told a member of the national security team about the Popovich discovery and ripples began to form on the still pond at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

By the weekend a meeting had been called with several cabinet-level folk and the National Security Advisor, Dr. Kissinger, along with the President and several close aides.  Davis was ordered to repeat verbatim what he had heard the general say.  He did as he was told while the men around the oval table looked gray and grim as they listened.

“This is not good,” said the Secretary of Commerce.

“I agree,” chimed-in the Secretary of the Treasury.  “Too costly.”

“Why wasn’t I told about this sooner?” asked the President.

“Military has its hands full in Vietnam.  Probably didn’t think much of this.” said one of the advisors, who was a chain smoker. Many thought it was Halderman, but no one for sure can remember who said it. It was remembered that the Secretary of Defense tried to smooth over his boys’ dropping of the hot potato, but no one was having anything of it.

“What’s the plan?”  Asked the President.  “This could be serious.”

“Yes, indeed,” agreed the Secretary of Commerce.  “Every street sign, every highway sign, every stamp, every dollar bill, everything that has a number on it will have to be re-calibrated and relabeled and this will cost the economy trillions.  It’s untold what it could do.”

“Might bring us to our knees.”  Everyone later, when probed, was sure this was Halderman.

The President rose from his chair and looked out the window toward a rainy Washington.  “Take care of this.”

“Sir…” one of the advisors nodded to the other gentlemen in the room.  They were quickly shuttled out. “If we don’t have this guy– what’s his name?”

“Popovich,” answered the Attorney General.

“Yeah.  If this bastard Popovich and his little formula disappear, we don’t have a problem.”

“Sir, with all due respect, we have two problems here.  Popovich may be one…but the other is that he has found a breech in the body of knowledge science owns.” The young man named Davis was almost blushing as he spoke.  Many angry faces turned toward him.  Some wondered what he was still doing in the room.  It was time to make a decision and they didn’t need this young, snot-nosed lawyer messing things up.

“Fuck science,” said the President.  “I won’t have the economy come crashing down because some intellectual twit has found some evidence for a number between six and seven.  Do you have any idea what this could do to us?  You heard the Secretary. Every age of every person would have to be recalculated.  What year would this be?  The Federal budget would go haywire. How many seats would there be in the Senate?  Everything as we know it would change. Hell, the FBI wouldn’t even be able to have a Top Ten Most wanted list anymore.  It would be some new number.  The cost of this change would be incalculable.  No.  No… the guy has to go.  Get a black ops team on it at once.  By the time Monday morning rolls around, I want this guy to be a memory.”  The President looked at Davis, he actually glowered at Davis. “Young man, you have now been brought to the inside of the decision making process.  You have seen it at work.  You can tell no one.  Your life, from this day forward, is sealed. You know nothing.  You saw nothing.  You heard nothing.  Do you understand me?’  Davis nodded.  He wished he had never opened his mouth.

X   X   X

Popovch visited the university twice on Saturday just to look at the chalkboards and wonder about the magnitude of what he had discovered.  He took Chloe and Robert out for dinner Saturday night. They celebrated with much Champagne and  big, thick Texas steaks. When they arrived back at their house in Windsor Heights, they didn’t notice the van parked across the street.  They didn’t notice that someone had been inside the house.  They didn’t see the wires and the small antenna running from the phone and from the cameras placed in the vents in the ceiling.  They were too high with booze and excitement.  Alexander Popovich slumped onto the sofa in the den and passed out like a baby.  His daughter and her boy friend flowed upstairs and into her room.  This had been a huge day.  There was now known to be a number between six and seven.  It was an earth-shaking day. Hell, we could be talking the Nobel Prize for mathematics.

Chloe and her father shared a hangover the next morning.  It was Sunday and bright in Austin – far brighter than either cared for.  After a pot of coffee, they both decided to skip mass, something that his late wife, and her mother, would not have approved of, but skip mass they did and then they took one more trip to the university to look at the chalkboards. 

His office was down a long dark corridor in the Mathematic Research Tower, that was a sixteen story tribute to the university’s good standing with the National Science Foundation, with Naval Science Grants and grants from various other military and paramilitary organizations who loved to fund the brains behind the day’s top research – research that would often go to help develop bombs, and other deadly delivery devices, which helped spread democracy across the face of the globe.  No other professors were working that Sunday.  A janitor was running an electric buffer, polishing the marble floors. They entered the office and turned on the lights.  Something was wrong.  He knew it almost at once.  The boards – his chalkboards had been touched.  Someone had been in his office.  He was sure of it.  He told Chloe so.

“Daddy!  Really!”  She studied one of the boards.  While she looked at the labyrinth of numbers about her, her father looked over his desk.  Was anything missing?  Was there something there that shouldn’t be?  Why did he suddenly feel paranoid?

“Daddy.”  Chloe’s voice echoed against the sides of the cool walls of the office.  Her pitch was more in questioning than in getting attention. “Daddy, right here.”  She pointed to the chalkboards with a list of numbers in a column following a set of algorithmic assumptions.

“Chloe, please don’t touch that board.  Something is not quite right here.” Popovich’s voice was shaking.  His notebook was missing.

“Daddy.”

“Chloe please don’t touch anything.  Something is not quite right.”

“Yes.  That’s what I’m trying to tell you.  The number here should be thirteen.  You didn’t carry the one.  You’ve got a mistake.”

Popovich circled from behind his desk and stood facing the board as his daughter gently underlined the chalk dust where the number one had been failed to carry into the next column. “It’s a damn mistake.  I miss added.” 

Had you been there you would have heard Chloe and her father actually laugh.  That would have been the last thing you would have heard them do.  For at just that moment the janitor and two other men dressed in drab worker’s clothes entered and filled the two Popoviches with bullets from silencer-tipped guns.  They fell to the cold marble floor and were quickly bagged and placed into janitorial carts and whisked away.  The chalkboards were erased.  The office was cleaned of fingerprints, bloodstains and other traces that anything had ever happened in the office.

That night, the black ops team landed in an airfield outside Los Angeles and reported via a secure phone that the threat – it was over.

There was nothing standing between six and seven.  Absolutely nothing but space, time and history.

X   X   X  

If you’d asked him, he would have told you that the discovery was no big thing.  That’s how Professor Alexander Popovich lived his life.  He had made a discovery that any mathematician could have stumbled upon – that there was more to our system of numbers than we had ever expected.  He found it by thinking about it for more than twenty years.  He had done the math and now he knew.  There was a whole number between six and seven. Yes, if you had met him that day and asked him of the importance of his discovery – before he had a chance to reflect upon it, he would have shrugged and suggested that it was no big thing.  But you and I now know it was.

Even with an error in the addition, finding a number between six and seven was a huge thing: life changing. Who knows what we’ll discover next ­– the next big thing that will need covering up.  Who knows, maybe there is a number between six and seven.  Maybe it’s between eleven and twelve.  Who knows!