This is one that almost got away. Fritz Leiber sent me the story late in 1974 during a period when I was between contracts for volumes of Universe; I told him I loved the story but I wouldn’t be able to buy it till the following year, and reluctantly returned it to him. He sent it to his agent, Robert P. Mills, with a note saying I’d buy it if it was available later, and Mills wrote me that he’d try it on Playboy and such nongenre high-paying markets but unless one of them bought it he’d hold it for me.

The story was much too long for such magazines, so eventually I did get to buy it. I was very glad, because “A Rite of Spring” is a delightful tour de force, a love story based on a supposedly dry, outdated science. Only Leiber could have written it.

A RITE OF SPRING

Fritz Leiber

This is the story of the knight in shining armor and the princess imprisoned in a high tower, only with the roles reversed. True, young Matthew Fortree’s cell was a fabulously luxurious, quaintly furnished suite in the vast cube of the most secret Coexistence Complex in the American Southwest, not terribly far from the U.S. Government’s earlier most secret project, the nuclear one. And he was free to roam most of the rest of the cube whenever he wished. But there were weightier reasons which really did make him the knight in shining armor imprisoned in the high tower: his suite was on the top, or mathematicians’, floor and the cube was very tall and he rarely wished to leave his private quarters except for needful meals and exercise, medical appointments, and his unonerous specified duties; his unspecified duties were more taxing. And while he did not have literal shining armor, he did have some very handsome red silk pajamas delicately embroidered with gold.

With the pajamas he wore soft red leather Turkish slippers, the toes of which actually turned up, and a red nightcap with a tassel, while over them and around his spare, short frame he belted tightly a fleece-lined long black dressing gown of heavier, ribbed silk also embroidered with gold, somewhat more floridly. If Matthew’s social daring had equaled his flamboyant tastes, he would in public have worn small clothes and a powdered wig and swung a court sword at his side, for he was much enamored of the Age of Reason and yearned to quip wittily in a salon filled with appreciative young Frenchwomen in daringly low-cut gowns, or perhaps only one such girl. As it was, he regularly did wear gray kid gloves, but that was partly a notably unsuccessful effort to disguise his large powerful hands, which sorted oddly with his slight, almost girlish figure.

The crueler of Math’s colleagues (he did not like to be called Matt) relished saying behind his back that he had constructed a most alluring love nest, but that the unknown love bird he hoped to trap never deigned to fly by. In this they hit the mark, as cruel people so often do, for young mathematicians need romantic sexual love, and pine away without it, every bit as much as young lyric poets, to whom they are closely related. In fact, on the night this story begins, Math had so wasted away emotionally and was gripped by such a suicidally extreme Byronic sense of futility and Gothic awareness of loneliness that he had to bite his teeth together harshly and desperately compress his lips to hold back sobs as he knelt against his mockingly wide bed with his shoulders and face pressed into its thick, downy, white coverlet, as if to shut out the mellow light streaming on him caressingly from the tall bedside lamps with pyramidal jet bases and fantastic shades built up of pentagons of almost paper-thin, translucent ivory joined with silver leading. This light was strangely augmented at irregular intervals.

For it was a Gothic night too, you see. A dry thunderstorm was terrorizing the desert outside with blinding flashes followed almost instantly by deafening crashes which reverberated very faintly in the outer rooms of the Complex despite the mighty walls and partitions, which were very thick, both to permit as nearly perfect soundproofing as possible (so the valuable ideas of the solitary occupants might mature without disturbance, like mushrooms in a cave) and also to allow for very complicated, detection-proof bugging. In Math’s bedroom, however, for a reason which will be made clear, the thunderclaps were almost as loud as outside, though he did not start at them or otherwise show he even heard them. They were, nevertheless, increasing his Gothic mood in a geometrical progression. While the lightning flashes soaked through the ceiling, a point also to be explained later. Between flashes, the ceiling and walls were very somber, almost black, yet glimmering with countless tiny random highlights like an indoor Milky Way or the restlessly shifting points of light our eyes see in absolute darkness. The thick-piled black carpet shimmered similarly.

Suddenly Matthew Fortree started up on his knees and bent his head abruptly back. His face was a grimacing mask of self-contempt as he realized the religious significance of his kneeling posture and the disgusting religiosity of what he was about to utter, for he was a devout atheist, but the forces working within him were stronger than shame.

“Great Mathematician, hear me!” he cried hoarsely aloud, secure in his privacy and clutching at Eddington’s phrase to soften a little the impact on his conscience of his hateful heresy. “Return me to the realm of my early childhood, or otherwise moderate my torments and my loneliness, or else terminate this life I can no longer bear!”

As if in answer to his prayer there came a monstrous flash-and-crash dwarfing all of the storm that had gone before. The two lamps arced out, plunging the room into darkness through which swirled a weird jagged wildfire, as if all the electricity in the wall-buried circuits, augmented by that of the great flash, had escaped to lead a brief free life of its own, like ball lightning or St. Elmo’s fire.

(This event was independently confirmed beyond question or doubt. As thousands in the big cube testified, all the lights in the Coexistence Complex went out for one minute and seventeen seconds. Many heard the crash, even in rooms three or four deep below the outermost layer. Several score saw the wildfire. Dozens felt tingling electric shocks. Thirteen were convinced at the time that they had been struck by lightning. Three persons died of heart failure at the instant of the big flash, as far as can be determined. There were several minor disasters in the areas of medical monitoring and continuous experiments. Although a searching investigation went on for months, and still continues on a smaller scale, no completely satisfactory explanation has ever been found, though an odd rumor continues to crop up that the final monster flash was induced by an ultrasecret electrical experiment which ran amuck, or else succeeded too well, all of which resulted in a permanent increment in the perpetual nervousness of the masters of the cube.)

The monster stroke was the last one of the dry storm. Two dozen or so seconds passed. Then against the jagged darkness and the ringing silence, Math heard his door’s mechanical bell chime seven times. (He’d insisted on the bell being installed in such a way as to replace the tiny fish-eye lens customary on all the cube’s cubicles. Surely the designer was from Manhattan!)

He struggled to his feet, half blinded, his vision still full of the wildfire (or afterimages) so like the stuff of ocular migraine. He partly groped, partly remembered his way out of the bedroom, shutting the door behind him, and across the living room to the outer door. He paused there to reassure himself that his red nightcap was set properly on his head, the tassel falling to the right, and his black robe securely belted. Then he took a deep breath and opened the door.

Like his suite, the corridor was steeped in darkness and aswirl with jaggedy, faint blues and yellows. Then, at the level of his eyes, he saw two brighter, twinkling points of green light about two and a half inches horizontally apart. A palm’s length below them was another such floating emerald. At the height of his chest flashed another pair of the green points, horizontally separated by about nine inches. At waist level was a sixth, and a hand’s length directly below that, a seventh. They moved a bit with the rest of the swirling, first a little to the left, then to the right, but maintained their positions relative to each other.

Without consciousness of having done any thinking, sought any answers, it occurred to him that they were what might be called the seven crucial points of a girl: eyes, chin, nipples, umbilicus, and the center of all wonder and mystery. He blinked his eyes hard, but the twinkling points were still there. The migraine spirals seemed to have faded a little, but the seven emeralds were bright as ever and still flashed the same message in their cryptic positional Morse. He even fancied he saw the shimmer of a clinging dress, the pale triangle of an elfin face in a flow of black hair, and pale serpents of slender arms.

Behind and before him the lights blazed on, and there, surely enough, stood a slim young woman in a long dark-green grandmother’s skirt and a frilly salmon blouse, sleeveless but with ruffles going up her neck to her ears. Her left hand clutched a thick envelope purse sparkling with silver sequins, her right dragged a coat of silver fox. While between smooth black cascades and from under black bangs, an elfin face squinted worriedly into his own through silver-rimmed spectacles.

Her gaze stole swiftly and apologetically up and down him, without hint of a smile, let alone giggle, at either his nightcap and its tassel, or the turned-up toes of his Turkish slippers, and then returned to confront him anxiously.

He found himself bowing with bent left knee, right foot advanced, right arm curved across his waist, left arm trailing behind, eyes still on hers (which were green), and he heard himself say, “Matthew Fortree, at your service, mademoiselle.”

Somehow, she seemed French. Perhaps because of the raciness of the emeralds’ twinkling message, though only the top two of them had turned out to be real.

Her accent confirmed this when she answered, “ ‘Sank you. I am Severeign Saxon, sir, in search of my brother. And mooch scared. ‘Scuse me.”

Math felt a pang of delight. Here was a girl as girls should be, slim, soft-spoken, seeking protection, calling him sir, not moved to laughter by his picturesque wardrobe, and favoring the fond, formal phrases he liked to use when he talked to himself. The sort of girl who, interestingly half undressed, danced through his head on lonely nights abed.

That was what he felt. What he did, quite characteristically, was frown at her severely and say, “I don’t recall any Saxon among the mathematicians, madam, although it’s barely possible there is a new one I haven’t met.”

“Oh, but my brother has not my name…” she began hurriedly, then her eyelashes fluttered, she swayed and caught herself. “Pardonne,” she went on faintly, gasping a little. “Oh, do not think me forward, sir, but might I not come in and catch my breath? I am frightened by ze storm, I have searched so long, and ze halls are so lonely…”

Inwardly cursing his gauche severity, Math instantly resumed his courtly persona and cried softly, “Your pardon, madam. Come in, come in by all means and rest as long as you desire.” Shaping the beginning of another bow, he took her trailing coat and wafted her past him inside. His fingertips tingled at the incredibly smooth, cool, yet electric texture of her skin.

He hung up her coat, marveling that the silky fur was not so softly smooth as his fingertips’ memory of her skin, and found her surveying his spacious sanctum with its myriad shelves and spindly little wallside tables.

“Oh, sir, this room is like fairyland,” she said, turning to him with a smile of delight. “Tell me, are all zoze tiny elephants and ships and lacy spheres ivory?”

“They are, madam, such as are not jet,” he replied quite curtly. He had been preparing a favorable, somewhat flowery, but altogether sincere comparison of her pale complexion to the hue of his ivories (and of her hair to his jets), but something, perhaps “fairyland,” had upset him. “And now will you be seated, Miss Saxon, so you may rest?”

“Oh, yes, sir… Mr. Fortree,” she replied flusteredly, and let herself be conducted to a long couch facing a TV screen set in the opposite wall. With a bob of her head she hurriedly seated herself. He had intended to sit beside her, or at least at the other end of the couch, but a sudden gust of timidity made him stride to the farthest chair, a straight-backed one, facing the couch, where he settled himself bolt upright.

“Refreshment? Some coffee perhaps?”

She gulped and nodded without lifting her eyes. He pushed a button on the remote control in the left-hand pocket of his dressing gown and felt more in command of the situation. He fixed his eyes on his guest and, to his horror, said harshly, “What is your number, madam… of years?” he finished in a voice less bold.

He had intended to comment on the storm and its abrupt end, or inquire about her brother’s last name, or even belatedly compare her complexion to ivory and her skin to fox fur, anything but demand her age like some police interrogator. And even then not simply, “Say, would you mind telling me how old you are?” but to phrase it so stiltedly… Some months back, Math had gone through an acute attack of sesquipedalianism—of being unable to find the simple word for anything, or even a circumlocution, but only a long, usually Latin one. Attending his first formal reception in the Complex, he had coughed violently while eating a cookie. The hostess, a formidably poised older lady, had instantly made solicitous inquiry. He wanted to answer, “I got a crumb in my nose,” but could think of nothing but “nasal cavity,” and when he tried to say that, there was another and diabolic misfire in his speech centers, and what came out was, “I got a crumb in my navel.”

The memory of it could still reduce him to jelly.

“Seven—” he heard her begin. Instantly his feelings did another flip-flop and he found himself thinking of how nice it would be, since he himself was only a few years into puberty, if she were younger still.

“Seventeen?” he asked eagerly.

And now it was her mood that underwent a sudden change. No longer downcast, her eyes gleamed straight at him, mischievously, and she said, “No, sir, I was about to copy your ‘number of years’ and say ‘seven and a score.’ And now I am of a mind not to answer your rude question at all.” But she relented and went on with a winning smile, “No, seven and a decade, only seventeen—that’s my age. But to tell the truth, sir, I thought you were asking my ruling number. And I answered you. Seven.”

“Do you mean to tell me you believe in numerology?” Math demanded, his concerns doing a third instant flip-flop. Acrobatic moods are a curse of adolescence.

She shrugged prettily. “Well, sir, among the sciences—”

“Sciences, madam?” he thundered like a small Doctor Johnson. “Mathematics itself is not a science, but only a game men have invented and continue to play. The supreme game, no doubt, but still only a game. And that you should denominate as a science that… that farrago of puerile superstitions—! Sit still now, madam, and listen carefully while I set you straight.”

She crouched a little, her eyes apprehensively on his.

“The first player of note of the game of mathematics,” he launched out in lecture-hall tones, “was a Greek named Pythagoras. In fact, in a sense he probably invented the game. Yes, surely he did—twenty-five centuries ago, well before Archimedes, before Aristotle. But those were times when men’s minds were still befuddled by the lies of the witch doctors and priests, and so Pythagoras (or his followers, more likely!) conceived the mystical notion”—his words dripped sarcastic contempt—“that numbers had a real existence of their own, as if—”

She interrupted rapidly. “But do they not? Like the little atoms we cannot see, but which—”

“Silence, Severeign!”

“But Matthew—”

“Silence, I said!—as if numbers came from another realm or world, yet had power over this one—”

“That’s what the little atoms have—power, especially when they explode.” She spoke with breathless rapidity.

“—and as if numbers had all kinds of individual qualities, even personalities—some lucky, some unlucky, some good, some bad, et cetera—as if they were real beings, even gods! I ask you, have you ever heard of anything more ridiculous than numbers—mere pieces in a game—being alive? Yes, of course—the idea of gods being real. But with the Pythagoreans (they became a sort of secret society) such nonsense was the rule. For instance, Pythagoras was the first man to analyze the musical scale mathematically—brilliant!—but then he (his followers!) went on to decide that some scales (the major) are stimulating and healthy and others (the minor) unhealthy and sad—”

Severeign interjected swiftly yet spontaneously. “Yes, I’ve noticed that, sir. Major keys make me feel ‘appy, minor keys sad—no, pleasantly melancholy…”

“Autosuggestion! The superstitions of the Pythagoreans became endless—the transmigration of souls, metempsychosis (a psychosis, all right!), reincarnation, immortality, you name it. They even refused to eat beans—”

“They were wrong there. Beans cassolette—”

“Exactly! In the end, Plato picked up their ideas and carried them to still sillier lengths. Wanted to outlaw music in minor scales—like repealing the law of gravity! He also asserted that not only numbers, but all ideas were more real than things—”

“But excuse me, sir—I seem to recall hearing my brother talk about real numbers…”

“Sheer semantics, madam! Real numbers are merely the most primitive and obvious ones in the parlor game we call mathematics. Q.E.D.”

And with that, he let out a deep breath and subsided, his arms folded across his chest.

She said, “You have quite overwhelmed me, sir. Henceforth I shall call seven only my favorite number… if I may do that?”

“Of course you may. God (excuse the word) forbid I ever try to dictate to you, madam.”

With that, silence descended, but before it could become uncomfortable, Math’s remote control purred discreetly in his pocket and prodded him in the thigh. He busied himself fetching the coffee on a silver tray in hemispheres of white eggshell china, whose purity of form Severeign duly admired.

They made a charming couple together, looking surprisingly alike, quite like brother and sister, the chief differences being his more prominent forehead, large strong hands, and forearms a little thick with the muscles that powered the deft fingers. All of which made him seem like a prototype of man among the animals, a slight and feeble being except for hands and brain—manipulation and thought.

He took his coffee to his distant chair. The silence returned and did become uncomfortable. But he remained tongue-tied, lost in bitter reflections. Here the girl of his dreams (why not admit it?) had turned up, and instead of charming her with courtesies and witticisms, he had merely become to a double degree his unpleasant, critical, didactic, quarrelsome, rejecting, lonely self, perversely shrinking from all chances of warm contact. Better find out her brother’s last name and send her on her way. Still, he made a last effort.

“How may I entertain you, madam?” he asked lugubriously.

“Any way you wish, sir,” she answered meekly.

Which made it worse, for his mind instantly became an unbearable blank. He concentrated hopelessly on the toes of his red slippers.

“There is something we could do,” he heard her say tentatively. “We could play a game… if you’d care to. Not chess or go or any sort of mathematical game—there I couldn’t possibly give you enough competition—but something more suited to my scatter brain, yet which would, I trust, have enough complications to amuse you. The Word Game…”

Once more Math was filled with wild delight, unconscious of the wear and tear inflicted on his system by these instantaneous swoops and soarings of mood. This incredibly perfect girl had just proposed they do the thing he loved to do more than anything else, and at which he invariably showed at his dazzling best. Play a game, any game!

“Word Game?” he asked cautiously, almost suspiciously. “What’s that?”

“It’s terribly simple. You pick a category, say Musicians with names beginning with B, and then you—”

“Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Berlioz, Bartók, C.P.E. Bach (J.S.’ son),” he rattled off.

“Exactly! Oh, I can see you’ll be much too good for me. When we play, however, you can only give one answer at one time and then wait for me to give another—else you’d win before I ever got started.”

“Not at all, madam. I’m mostly weak on words,” he assured her, lying in his teeth.

She smiled and continued, “And when one player can’t give another word or name in a reasonable time, the other wins. And now, since I suggested the Game, I insist that in honor of you, and my brother, but without making it at all mathematical really, we play a subvariety called the Numbers Game.”

“Numbers Game?”

She explained, “We pick a small cardinal number, say between one and twelve, inclusive, and alternately name groups of persons or things traditionally associated with it. Suppose we picked four (we won’t); then the right answers would be things like the Four Gospels, or the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—”

“Or of Notre Dame. How about units of time and vectors? Do they count as things?”

She nodded. “The four seasons, the four major points of the compass. Yes. And now, sir, what number shall we choose?”

He smiled fondly at her. She really was lovely—a jewel, a jewel green as her eyes. He said like a courtier, “What other, madam, than your favorite?”

“Seven. So be it. Lead off, sir.”

“Very well.” He had been going to insist politely that she take first turn, but already gamesmanship was vying with courtesy, and the first rule of gamesmanship is, Snatch Any Advantage You Can.

He started briskly, “The seven crucial—” and instantly stopped, clamping his lips.

“Go on, sir,” she prompted. “ ‘Crucial’ sounds interesting. You’ve got me guessing.”

He pressed his lips still more tightly together, and blushed—at any rate, he felt his cheeks grow hot. Damn his treacherous, navel-fixated subconscious mind! Somehow it had at the last moment darted to the emerald gleams he’d fancied seeing in the hall, and he’d been within a hairsbreadth of uttering, “The seven crucial points of a girl.”

“Yes… ?” she encouraged.

Very gingerly he parted his lips and said, his voice involuntarily going low, “The Seven Deadly Sins: Pride, Covetousness—”

“My, that’s a stern beginning,” she interjected. “I wonder what the crucial sins are?”

“—Envy, Sloth,” he continued remorselessly.

“Those are the cold ones,” she announced. “Now for the hot.”

“Anger—” he began, and only then realized where he was going to end—and cursed the show-off impulse that had made him start to enumerate them. He forced himself to say, “Gluttony, and—” He shied then and was disastrously overtaken for the first time in months by his old stammer. “Lul-lul-lul-lul-lul—” he trilled like some idiot bird.

“Lust,” she cooed, making the word into another sort of bird call, delicately throaty. Then she said, “The seven days of the week.”

Math’s mind again became a blank, through which he hurled himself like a mad rat against one featureless white wall after another, until at last he saw a single dingy star. He stammered out, “The Seven Sisters, meaning the seven antitrust laws enacted in 1913 by New Jersey while Woodrow Wilson was Governor.”

“You begin, sir,” she said with a delighted chuckle, “by scraping the bottom of your barrel, a remarkable feat. But I suppose that being a mathematician you get at the bottom of the barrel while it’s still full by way of the fourth dimension.”

“The fourth dimension is no hocus-pocus, madam, but only time,” he reproved, irked by her wit and by her having helped him out when he first stuttered. “Your seven?”

“Oh. I could repeat yours, giving another meaning, but why not the Seven Seas?”

Instantly he saw a fantastic ship with a great eye at the bow sailing on them. “The seven voyages of Sinbad.”

“The Seven Hills of Rome.”

“The seven colors of the spectrum,” he said at once, beginning to feel less fearful of going word-blind. “Though I can’t imagine why Newton saw indigo and blue as different prismatic colors. Perhaps he wanted them to come out seven for some mystical reason—he had his Pythagorean weaknesses.”

“The seven tones of the scale, as discovered by Pythagoras,” she answered sweetly.

“Seven-card stud,” he said, somewhat gruffly.

“Seven-up, very popular before poker.”

“This one will give you one automatically,” he said stingily. “However, a seventh son.”

“And I’m to say the seventh son of a seventh son? But I cannot accept yours, sir. I said cardinal, not ordinal numbers. No sevenths, sir, if you please.”

“I’ll rephrase it then. Of seven sons, the last.”

“Not allowed. I fear you quibble, sir.” Her eyes widened, as if at her own temerity.

“Oh, very well. The Seven Against Thebes.”

“The Epigoni, their sons.”

“I didn’t know there were seven of them,” he objected.

“But there should be seven, for the sake of symmetry,” she said wistfully.

“Allowed,” he said, proud of his superior generosity in the face of a feminine whim. “The Seven Bishops.”

“Dear Sancroft, Ken, and Company,” she murmured. “The Seven Dials. In London. Does that make you think of time travel?”

“No, big newspaper offices. The Seven Keys to Baldpate, a book.”

“The Seven Samurai, a Kurosawa film.”

“The Seventh Seal, a Bergman film!” He was really snapping them out now, but—

“Oh, oh. No sevenths—remember, sir?”

“A silly rule—I should have objected at the start. The seven liberal arts, being the quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy) added to the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric).”

“Delightful,” she said. “The seven planets—”

“No, madam! There are nine.”

“I was about to say,” she ventured in a small, defenseless voice, “—of the ancients. The ones out to Saturn and then the sun and moon.”

“Back to Pythagoras again!” he said with a quite unreasonable nastiness, glaring over her head. “Besides, that would make eight planets.”

“The ancients didn’t count the Earth as one.” Her voice was even tinier.

He burst out with, “Earth not a planet, fourth dimension, time travel, indigo not blue, no ordinals allowed, the ancients—madam, your mind is a sink of superstitions!” When she did not deny it, he went on, “And now I’ll give you the master answer: all groups of persons or things belong to the class of the largest successive prime among the odd numbers—your seven, madam!”

She did not speak. He heard a sound like a mouse with a bad cold, and looking at her, saw that she was dabbing a tiny handkerchief at her nose and cheeks. “I don’t think I want to play the Game any more,” she said indistinctly. “You’re making it too mathematical.”

How like a woman, he thought, banging his hand against his thigh. He felt the remote control and, on a savage impulse, jabbed another button. The TV came on. “Perhaps your mind needs a rest,” he said unsympathetically. “See, we open the imbecile valve.”

The TV channel was occupied by one of those murderous chases in a detective series (subvariety: military police procedural) where the automobiles became the real protagonists, dark passionate monsters with wills of their own to pursue and flee, or perhaps turn on their pursuer, while the drivers become grimacing puppets whose hands are dragged around by the steering wheels.

Math didn’t know if his guest was watching the screen, and he told himself he didn’t care—to suppress the bitter realization that instead of cultivating the lovely girl chance had tossed his way, he was browbeating her.

Then the chase entered a multistory garage, and he was lost in a topology problem on the order of: “Given three entrances, two exits, n two-way ramps, and so many stories, what is the longest journey a car can make without crossing its path?” When Math had been a small child—even before he had learned to speak—his consciousness had for long periods been solely a limitless field, or even volume filled with points of light, which he could endlessly count and manipulate. Rather like the random patterns we see in darkness, only he could marshal them endlessly in all sorts of fascinating arrays, and wink them into or out of existence at will. Later he learned that at such times he had gone into a sort of baby-trance, so long and deep that his parents had become worried and consulted psychologists. But then words had begun to replace fields and sets of points in his mind, his baby-trances had become infrequent and finally vanished altogether, so that he was no longer able to enter the mental realm where he was in direct contact with the stuff of mathematics. Thinking about topological problems, such as that of the multilevel garage, was the closest he could get to it now. He had come from that realm “trailing clouds of glory,” but with the years they had faded. Yet it was there, he sometimes believed, that he had done all his really creative work in mathematics, the work that had enabled him to invent a new algebra at the age of eleven. And it was there he had earlier tonight prayed the Great Mathematician to return him when he had been in a mood of black despair—which, he realized with mild surprise, he could no longer clearly recall, at least in its intensity.

He had solved his garage problem and was setting up another when, “License plates, license plates!” he heard Severeign cry out in the tones of one who shouts, “Onionsauce, onionsauce!” at baffled rabbits.

Her elfin face, which Math had assumed to be still tearful, was radiant.

“What about license plates?” he asked gruffly.

She jabbed a finger at the TV, where in the solemn finale of the detective show, the camera had just cut to the hero’s thoroughly wrecked vehicle while he looked on from under bandages, and while the sound track gave out with taps. “Cars have them!”

“Yes, I know, but where does that lead?”

“Almost all of them have seven digits!” she announced triumphantly. “So do phone numbers!”

“You mean, you want to go on with the Game?” Math asked with an eagerness that startled him.

Part of her radiance faded. “I don’t know. The Game is really dreadful. Once started, you can’t get your mind off it until you perish of exhaustion of ideas.”

“But you want nevertheless to continue?”

“I’m afraid we must. Sorry I got the megrims back there. And now I’ve gone and wasted an answer by giving two together. The second counts for yours. Oh well, my fault.”

“Not at all, madam. I will balance it out by giving two at once too. The seven fat years and the seven lean years.”

“Anyone would have got the second of those once you gave the first,” she observed, saucily rabbiting her nose at him. “The number of deacons chosen by the Apostles in Acts. Nicanor’s my favorite. Dear Nicky,” she sighed, fluttering her eyelashes.

“Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity,” Math proclaimed.

“You’re not enumerating?”

He shook his head. “Might get too ambiguous.”

She flashed him a smile. Then her face slowly grew blank—with thought, he thought at first, but then with eyes half closed she murmured, “Sleepy.”

“You want to rest?” he asked. Then, daringly, “Why not stretch out?”

She did not seem to hear. Her head drooped down. “Dopey too,” she said somewhat indistinctly.

“Should I step up the air conditioning?” he asked. A wild fear struck him. “I assure you, madam, I didn’t put anything in your coffee.”

“And Grumpy!” she said triumphantly, sitting up. “Snow White’s seven dwarfs!”

He laughed and answered, “The Seven Hunters, which are the Flannan Islands in the Hebrides.”

“The Seven Sisters, a hybrid climbing rose, related to the rambler,” she said.

“The seven common spectral types of stars—B-A-F-G-K-M… and O,” he added a touch guiltily because O wasn’t really a common type, and he’d never heard of this particular Seven (or Six, for that matter). She gave him a calculating look. Must be something else she’s thinking of, he assured himself. Women don’t know much astronomy except maybe the ancient sort, rubbed off from astrology.

She said, “The seven rays of the spectrum: radio, high frequency, infrared, visible, ultraviolet, X, and gamma.” And she looked at him so bright-eyed that he decided she’d begun to fake a little too.

“And cosmic?” he asked sweetly.

“I thought those were particles,” she said innocently.

He grumphed, wishing he could take another whack at the Pythagoreans. An equally satisfying target occurred to him—and a perfectly legitimate one, so long as you realized that this was a game that could be played creatively. “The Seven Subjects of Sensational Journalism: crime, scandal, speculative science, insanity, superstitions such as numerology, monsters, and millionaires.”

Fixing him with a penetrating gaze, she immediately intoned, “The Seven Sorrows of Shackleton: the crushing of the Endurance in the ice, the inhospitality of Elephant Island, the failure of the whaler Southern Sky, the failure of the Uruguayan trawler Instituto de Pesca No. 1, the failure on first use of the Chilean steamer Yelcho, the failure of the Emma, and the South Pole unattained!”

She continued to stare at him judicially. He realized he was starting to blush. He dropped his eyes and laughed uncomfortably. She chortled happily. He looked back at her and laughed with her. It was a very nice moment, really. He had cheated inventively and she had cheated right back at him the same way, pulling him up short without a word.

Feeling very, very good, very free, Math said, “The Seven Years War.”

“The Seven Weeks War, between Prussia and Austria.”

“The Seven Days War, between Israel and the Arabs.”

“Surely Six?”

He grinned. “Seven. For six days the Israelis labored, and on the seventh day they rested.”

She laughed delightedly, whereupon Math guffawed too.

She said, “You’re witty, sir—though I can’t allow that answer. I must tell my brother that one of his colleagues—” She stopped, glanced at her wrist, shot up. “I didn’t realize it was so late. He’ll be worried. Thanks for everything, Matthew—I’ve got to split.” She hurried toward the door.

He got up too. “I’ll get dressed and take you to his room. You don’t know where it is. I’ll have to find out.”

She was reaching down her coat. “No time for that. And now I remember where.”

He caught up with her as she was slipping her coat on. “But Severeign, visitors aren’t allowed to move around the Complex unescorted—”

“Oh pish!”

It was like trying to detain a busy breeze. He said desperately, “I won’t bother to change.”

She paused, grinned at him with uplifted brows, as though surprised and pleased. Then, “No, Matthew,” settling her coat around her and opening the door.

He conquered his inhibitions and grabbed her by her silky shoulders—gently at the last moment. He faced her to him. They were exactly the same height.

“Hey,” he asked smiling, “what about the Game?”

“Oh, we’ll have to finish that. Tomorrow night, same time? G’bye now.”

He didn’t release her. It made him tremble. He started to say, “But Miss Saxon, you really can’t go by yourself. After midnight all sorts of invisible eyes pick up anyone in the corridors.”

He got as far as the “can’t,” when with a very swift movement she planted her lips precisely on his.

He froze, as if they had been paralysis darts—and he did feel an electric tingling. Even his invariable impulse to flinch was overridden, perhaps by the audacity of the contact. A self he’d never met said from a corner of his mind in the voice of Rex Harrison, “They’re Anglo body-contact taboos, but not Saxon.”

And then, between his parted lips and hers still planted on them, he felt an impossible third swift touch. There was a blind time—he didn’t know how long—in which the universe filled with unimagined shocking possibility: tiny ondines sent anywhere by matter transmission, a live velvet ribbon from the fourth dimension, pet miniwatersnakes, a little finger with a strange silver ring on it poking out of a young witch’s mouth… and then another sort of shocked wonder, as he realized it could only have been her tongue.

His lips, still open, were pressing empty air. He looked both ways down the corridor. It was empty too. He quietly closed the door and turned to his ivory-lined room. He closed his lips and worked them together curiously. They still tingled, and so did a spot on his tongue. He felt very calm, not at all worried about Severeign being spotted, or who her brother was, or whether she would really come back tomorrow night. Although he almost didn’t see the forest for the trees, it occurred to him that he was happy.

Next morning he felt the same, but very eager to tell someone all about it. This presented a problem, for Math had no friends among his colleagues. Yet a problem easily solved, after a fashion. Right after breakfast he hunted up Elmo Hooper.

Elmo was classed and quartered with the mathematicians, though he couldn’t have told you the difference between a root and a power. He was an idiot savant, able to do lightning calculations and possessing a perfect eidetic memory. He was occasionally teamed with a computer to supplement its powers, and it was understood, as it is understood that some people will die of cancer, that he would eventually be permanently cyborged to one. In his spare time, of which he had a vast amount, he mooned around the Complex, ignored except when he came silently up behind gossipers and gave them fits because of his remarkable physical resemblance to Warren Dean, Coexistence’s security chief. Both looked like young Vermont storekeepers and were equally laconic, though for different reasons.

Math, who though no lightning calculator, had a nearly eidetic memory himself, found Elmo the perfect confidant. He could tell him all his most private thoughts and feelings, and retrieve any of his previous remarks, knowing that Elmo would never retrieve any of them on his own initiative and never, never make a critical comment.

This morning he found Elmo down one floor in Physics, and soon was pouring out in a happy daze every detail about last night’s visit and lovely visitor and all his amazing reactions to her, with no more thought for Elmo than he would have had for a combined dictaphone and information-storage-and-retrieval unit.

He would have been considerably less at ease had he known that Warren Dean regularly drained Elmo of all conversations by “sensitive” persons he overheard in his moonings. Though Math wouldn’t have had to feel that way, for the dour security man had long since written Math off as of absolutely no interest to security, being anything but “sensitive” and quite incapable of suspicious contacts, or any other sort. (How else could you class a man who talked of nothing but ivories, hurt vanities, and pure abstractions?) If Elmo began to parrot Math, Dean would simply turn off the human bug, while what the bugs in Math’s walls heard was no longer even taped.

Math’s happy session with Elmo lasted until lunchtime, and he approached the Mathematics, Astronomy and Theoretical Physics Commons with lively interest. Telling the human memory bank every last thing he knew about Severeign had naturally transferred his attention to the things he didn’t know about her, including the identity of her brother. He was still completely trustful that she would return at evening and answer his questions, but it would be nice to know a few things in advance.

The Commons was as gorgeous as Math’s apartment, though less eccentrically so. It still gave him a pleasant thrill to think of all the pure intellect gathered here, busily chomping and chatting, though the presence of astronomers and especially theoretical physicists from the floor below added a sour note. Ah well, they weren’t quite as bad as their metallurgical, hardware-mongering brothers. (These in turn were disgusted at having to eat with the chemists from the second floor below. The Complex, dedicated to nourishing all pure science, since that provably paid off better peacewise or warwise than applied science, arranged all the sciences by floors according to degree of purity and treated them according to the same standards, with the inhabitants of the top floor positively coddled. Actually, the Complex was devoted to the corruption of pure science, and realized that mathematics was at least fully as apt as any other discipline to turn up useful ideas. Who knew when a new geometry would not lead to a pattern of nuclear bombardment with less underkill? Or a novel topological concept point the way to the more efficient placement of offshore oil wells?)

So as Math industriously nibbled his new potatoes, fresh green peas, and roast lamb (the last a particularly tender mutation from the genetics and biology floors, which incidentally was a superb carrier of a certain newly developed sheep-vectored disease of the human nervous system), he studied the faces around him for ones bearing a resemblance to Severeign’s—a pleasantly titillating occupation merely for its own sake. Although Math’s colleagues believed the opposite, he was a sensitive student of the behavior of crowds, as any uninvolved spectator is apt to be. He had already noted that there was more and livelier conversation than usual and had determined that the increase was due to talk about last night’s storm and power failure, with the physicists contributing rather more than their share, both about the storm and power failure and also about some other, though related topic which he hadn’t yet identified.

While coffee was being served, Math decided on an unprecedented move: to get up and drift casually about in order to take a closer look at his candidates for Severeign’s brother (or half brother, which would account elegantly for their different last names). And as invariably happens when an uninvolved spectator abandons that role and mixes in, it was at once noticed. Thinking of himself as subtly invisible as he moved about dropping nods and words here and there, he actually became a small center of attention. Whatever was that social misfit up to? (A harsh term, especially coming from members of a group with a high percentage of social misfits.) And why had he taken off his gray kid gloves? (In his new freedom he had simply forgotten to put them on.)

He saved his prime suspect until last, a wisp of a young authority on synthetic projective geometry named Angelo Spirelli, the spiral angel, whose floating hair was very black and whose face could certainly be described as girlish, though his eyes (Math noted on closer approach) were yellowish-brown, not green.

Unlike the majority, Spirelli was a rather careless, outgoing soul of somewhat racier and more voluble speech than his dreamy appearance might have led one to expect. “Hi, Fortree. Take a pew. What strange and unusual circumstance must I thank for this unexpected though pleasant encounter? The little vaudeville act Zeus and Hephaestus put on last night? One of the downstairs boys suspects collusion by the Complex.”

Emboldened, Math launched into a carefully rehearsed statement. “At the big do last week I met a female who said she was related to you. A Miss Severeign Saxon.”

Spirelli scowled at him, then his eyes enlarged happily. “Saxon, you say? Was she a squirmy little sexpot?”

Math’s eyebrows lifted. “I suppose someone might describe her in that fashion.” He didn’t look as if he’d care much for such a someone.

“And you say you met her in El ‘Bouk?”

“No, here at the fortnightly reception.”

“That,” Spirelli pronounced, scowling again, “does not add up.”

“Well,” Math said after a hiatus, “does it add down?”

Spirelli eyed him speculatively, then shrugged his shoulders with a little laugh. Leaning closer, he said, “Couple weeks ago I was into Albuquerque on a pass. At the Spurs ‘n’ Chaps this restless little saucer makes up to me. Says call her Saxon, don’t know if it was supposed to be last name, first, or nick.”

“Did she suggest you play a game?”

Spirelli grinned. “Games. I think so, but I never got around to finding out for sure. You see, she began asking me too many questions, like she was pumping me, and I remembered what Grandmother Dean teaches us at Sunday school about strange women, and I cooled her fast, feeling like a stupid, miserably well-behaved little choirboy. But a minute later Warren himself wanders in and I’m glad I did.” His eyes swung, his voice dropped. “Speak of the devil.”

Math looked. Across the Commons, Elmo Hooper—no, Warren Dean—had come in. Conversation did not die, but it did become muted—in waves going out from that point.

Math asked, “Did this girl in ‘Bouk have black hair?”

Grown suddenly constrained, Spirelli hesitated, then said, “No, blond as they come. Saxon was a Saxon type.”

After reaching this odd dead end, Math spent the rest of the afternoon trying to cool his own feelings about Severeign, simply because they were getting too great. He was successful except that in the mathematics library Webster’s Unabridged, second edition, tempted him to look up the “seven” entries (there were three columns), and he was halfway through them before he realized what he was doing. He finished them and resolutely shut the big book and his mind. He didn’t think of Severeign again until he finished dressing for bed, something he regularly did on returning to his room from dinner. It was a practice begun as a child to ensure he did nothing but study at night, but continued, with embellishments, when he began to think of himself as a gay young bachelor. He furiously debated changing back until he became irked at his agitation and decided to retain his “uniform of the night.”

But he could no longer shut his mind on Severeign. Here he was having an assignation (a word which simultaneously delighted him and gave him cold shivers) with a young female who had conferred on him a singular favor (another word that worked both ways, while the spot on his tongue tingled reminiscently). How should he behave? How would she behave? What would she expect of him? How would she react to his costume? (He redebated changing back.) Would she even come? Did he really remember what she looked like?

In desperation he began to look up everything on seven he could, including Shakespeare and ending with the Bible. A cross-reference had led him to the Book of Revelation, which he found surprisingly rich in that digit. He was reading, “And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour…” when, once again, there came the seven chimes at his door. He was there in a rush and had it open, and there was Severeign, looking exactly like he remembered her—the three points of merry green eyes and tapered chin of flustered, triangular elf-face, silver spectacles, salmon blouse and green grandmother’s skirt (with line of coral buttons going down the one, and jade ones down the other), the sense of the other four crucial points of a girl under them, slender bare arms, one clutching silversequined purse, the other trailing coat of silver fox—and their faces as close together again as if the electric kiss had just this instant ended.

He leaned closer still, his lips parted, and he said, “The seven metals of the ancients: iron, lead, mercury, tin, copper, silver, and gold.”

She looked as startled as he felt. Then a fiendish glint came into her eyes and she said, “The seven voices of the classical Greek actor: king, queen, tyrant, hero, old man, young man, maiden—that’s me.”

He said, “The Island of the Seven Cities. Antilia, west of Atlantis.”

She said, “The seven Portuguese bishops who escaped to that island.”

He said, “The Seven Caves of Aztec legend.”

She said, “The Seven Walls of Ekbatana in old Persia: white, black, scarlet, blue, orange, silver, and (innermost) golden.”

He said, “ ‘Seven Come Eleven,’ a folk cry.”

She said, “The Seven Cities of Cibola. All golden.”

“But which turned out to be merely the pueblos of the Zuni,” he jeered.

“Do you always have to deprecate?” she demanded. “Last night the ancients, the Pythagoreans. Now some poor aborigines.”

He grinned. “Since we’re on Amerinds, the Seven Council Fires, meaning the Sioux, Tetons, and so forth.”

She scowled at him and said, “The Seven Tribes of the Tetons, such as the Hunkpapa.”

Math said darkly, “I think you studied up on seven and then conned me into picking it. Seven Came Through, a book by Eddie Rickenbacker.”

“The Seven Champions of Christendom. Up Saint Dennis of France! To the death! No, I didn’t, but you know, I sometimes feel I know everything about sevens, past, present, or future. It’s strange.”

They had somehow got to the couch and were sitting a little apart but facing each other, totally engrossed in the Game.

“Hmph! Up Saint David of Wales!” he said. “The Seven Churches in Asia Minor addressed in Revelation. Thyatira, undsoweiter.”

“Philadelphia too. The seven golden candlesticks, signifying the Seven Churches. Smyrna’s really my favorite—I like figs.” She clenched her fist with the tip of her thumb sticking out between index and middle fingers. Math wondered uncomfortably if she knew the sexual symbolism of the gesture. She asked, “Why are you blushing?”

“I’m not. The Seven Stars, meaning the Seven Angels of the Seven Churches.”

“You were! And it got you so flustered you’ve given me one. The Seven Angels!”

“I’m not any more,” he continued unperturbed, secure in his knowledge that he’d just read part of Revelation. “The seven trumpets blown by the Seven Angels.”

“The beast with seven heads, also from Revelation. He also had the mouth of a lion and the feet of a bear and ten horns, but he looked like a leopard.”

“The seven consulships of Gaius Marius,” he said.

“The seven eyes of the Lamb,” she countered.

“The Seven Spirits of God, another name for the Seven Angels, I think.”

“All right. The seven sacraments.”

“Does that include exorcism?” he wanted to know.

“No, but it does include order, which ought to please your mathematical mind.”

“Thanks. The Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost. Say, I know tongues, prophecy, vision, and dreams, but what are the other three?”

“Those are from Acts two—an interesting notion. But try Isaiah eleven—wisdom, understanding, counsel, might, knowledge, fear of the Lord, and righteousness.”

Math said, “Whew, that’s quite a load.”

“Yes. On with the Game! To the death! The seven steps going up to Ezekiel’s gate. Zeek forty twenty-six.”

“Let’s change religions,” he said, beginning to feel snowed under by Christendom and the Bible. “The seven Japanese gods of luck.”

“Or happiness. The seven major gods of Hinduism: Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, Varuna, Indra, Agni, and Surya. Rank male chauvinism! They didn’t even include Lakshmi, the goddess of luck.”

Math said sweetly, “The Seven Mothers, meaning the seven wives of the Hindu gods.”

“Chauvinism, I said! Wives indeed! Seven Daughters of the Theater, a book by Edward Wagenknecht.”

“The seven ages of man,” Math announced, assuming a Shakespearean attitude. “At first the infant, mewling and puking—”

“And then the whining schoolboy—”

“And then the lover,” he cut in, in turn, “sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad made to his mistress’ eyebrow.”

“Have you ever sighed like furnace, Matthew?”

“No, but…” And raising a finger for silence, he scowled in thought.

“What are you staring at?” she asked.

“Your left eyebrow. Now listen…

“Slimmest crescent of delight,

Why set so dark in sky so light?

My mistress’ brow is whitest far;

Her eyebrow—the black evening star!”

“But it’s not woeful,” she objected. “Besides, how can the moon be a star?”

“As easily as it can be a planet—your ancients, madam. In any case, I invoke poetic license.”

“But my eyebrow bends the wrong way for setting,” she persisted. “Its ends point at the earth instead of skyward.”

“Not if you were standing on your head, madam,” he countered.

“But then my skirt would set too, showing my stockings. Shocking. Sir, I refuse! The Seven Sisters, meaning the Pleiades, those little stars.”

Matthew’s eyes lit up. He grinned excitedly. “Before I give you my next seven I want to show you yours,” he told her, standing up.

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll show you. Follow me,” he said mysteriously and led her into his bedroom.

While she was ooh-ahing at the strangely glimmering black floor, walls, and ceiling, the huge white-fleeced bed, the scattered ivories which included the five regular solids of Pythagoras, the jet bedside lamps with their shades that were dodecahedrons of silver-joined pentagons of translucent ivory—and all the other outward signs of the U.S. Government’s coddling of Matthew—he moved toward the lamps and switched them off, so the only light was that which had followed them into the bedroom.

Then he touched another switch and with the faintest whir and rustling the ceiling slowly parted like the Red Sea and moved aside, showing the desert night crusted with stars. The Coexistence Complex really catered to their mathematicians, and when Matthew had somewhat diffidently (for him) mentioned his fancy, they had seen no difficulty in removing the entire ceiling of his bedroom and the section of flat roof above and replacing them with a slightly domed plate-glass skylight, and masking it below with an opaque fabric matching the walls, which would move out of the way sidewise and gather in little folds at the urging of an electric motor.

Severeign caught her breath.

“Stars of the winter sky,” Matthew said with a sweep of his arm and then began to point. “Orion. Taurus the bull with his red-eye Aldebaran. And, almost overhead, your Pleiades, madam. While there to the north is my reply. The Big Dipper, madam, also called the Seven Sisters.”

Their faces were pale in the splendid starlight and the glow seeping from the room they’d left. They were standing close. Severeign did not speak at once. Instead she lifted her hand, forefinger and middle finger spread and extended, slowly toward his eyes. He involuntarily closed them. He heard her say, “The seven senses. Sight. And hearing.” He felt the side of her hand lightly brush his neck. “Touch. No, keep your eyes closed.” She laid the back of her hand against his lips. He inhaled with a little gasp. “Smell,” came her voice. “That’s myrrh, sir.” His lips surprised him by opening and kissing her wrist. “And now you’ve added taste too, sir. Myrrh is bitter.” It was true.

“But that’s all the senses,” he managed to say, “and you said seven. In common usage there are only five.”

“Yes, that’s what Aristotle said,” she answered dryly. She pressed her warm palm against the curve of his jaw. “But there’s heat too.” He grasped her wrist and brought it down. She pulled her hand to free it and he automatically gripped it more tightly for a moment before letting go.

“And kinesthesia,” she said. “You felt it in your muscles then. That makes seven.”

He opened his eyes. Her face was close to his. He said, “Seventh heaven. No, that’s an ordinal—”

“It will do, sir,” she said. She knelt at his feet and looked up. In the desert starlight her face was solemn as a child’s. “For my next seven I must remove your handsome Turkish slippers,” she apologized.

He nodded, feeling lost in a dream, and lifted first one foot, then the other, as she did it.

As she rose, her hands went to his gold-worked black dressing gown. “And this too, sir,” she said softly. “Close your eyes once more.”

He obeyed, feeling still more dream-lost. He heard the slithering hrush of his robe dropping to the floor, he felt the buttons of his handsome red silk pajama tops loosened one by one from the top down, as her little fingers worked busily, and then the drawstring of the bottoms loosened.

He felt his ears lightly touched in their centers. She breathed, “The seven natural orifices of the male body, sir.” The fingers touched his nostrils, brushed his mouth. “That’s five, sir.” Next he was briefly touched where only he had ever touched himself before. There was an electric tingling, like last night’s kiss. The universe seemed to poise around him. Finally he was touched just as briefly where he’d only been touched by his doctor. His universe grew.

He opened his eyes. Her face was still child-grave. The light shining past him from the front room was enough to show the green of her skirt, the salmon of her blouse, the ivory of her skin dancing with starlight. He felt electricity running all over his body. He swallowed with difficulty, then said harshly, “For my next seven, madam, you must undress.”

There was a pause. Then, “Myself?” she asked. “You didn’t have to.” She closed her eyes and blushed, first delicately under her eyes, along her cheekbones, then richly over her whole face, down to the salmon ruffles around her neck. His hands shook badly as they moved out toward the coral buttons, but by the time he had undone the third, his strong fingers were working with their customary deftness. The jade buttons of her skirt yielded as readily. Matthew, who knew from his long studious perusals of magazine advertisements that all girls wore pantyhose, was amazed and then intrigued that she had separate stockings and a garter belt. He noted for future reference in the Game that that made seven separate articles of clothing, if you counted shoes. With some difficulty he recalled his main purpose in all this. His hands edged under her long black curving hair until his middle fingers touched her burning ears.

He softly said, “The seven natural orifices of the female body, madam.”

“What?” Her eyes blinked open wide and searched his face. Then a comic light flashed in them, though Matthew did not recognize it as such. Saying, “Oh, very well, sir. Go on,” she closed them and renewed her blush. Matthew delicately touched her neat nostrils and her lips, then his right hand moved down while his eyes paused, marveling in admiration, at the two coral-tipped crucial points of a girl embellished on Severeign’s chest.

“Seven,” he finished triumphantly, amazed at his courage while lost in wonder at the newness of it all.

Her hands lightly clasped his shoulders, she leaned her head against his and whispered in his ear, “No, eight. You missed one.” Her hand went down and her fingers instructed his. It was true! Matthew felt himself flushing furiously from intellectual shame. He’d known that about girls, of course, and yet he’d had a blind spot. There was a strange difference, he had to admit, between things read about in books of human physiology and things that were concretely there, so you could touch them. Severeign reminded him he still owed the Game a seven, and in his fluster he gave her the seven crucial points of a girl, which she was inclined to allow, though only by making an exception, for as she pointed out, they seemed very much Matthew’s private thing, though possibly others had hit on them independently.

Still deeply mortified by his fundamental oversight, though continuing to be intensely interested in everything (the loose electricity lingered on him), Matthew would not accept the favor. “The Seven Wise Men of Greece—Solon, Thales, and so on,” he said loudly and somewhat angrily, betting himself that those old boys had made a lot of slips in their time.

She nodded absently, and looking somewhat smugly down herself, said (quite fatuously, Matthew thought), “The seven seals on the Book of the Lamb.”

He said more loudly, his strange anger growing, “In the Civil War, the Battle of Seven Pines, also called the Battle of Fair Oaks.”

She looked at him, raised an eyebrow, and said, “The Seven Maxims of the Seven Wise Men of Greece.” She looked down herself again and then down and up him. Her eyes, merry, met his. “Such as Pittacus: Know thy opportunity.”

Matthew said still more loudly, “The Seven Days Battles, also Civil War, June twenty-fifth to July first inclusive, 1862—Mechanicsville, et cetera!”

She winced at the noise. “You’ve got to the fourth age now,” she told him.

“What are you talking about?” he demanded.

“You know, Shakespeare. You gave it: the Seven Ages of Man. Fourth: ‘Then a soldier, full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard, jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel, seeking the bubble reputation even in the cannon’s mouth.’ You haven’t got a beard, but you’re roaring like a cannon.”

“I don’t care. You watch out. What’s your seven?”

She continued to regard herself demurely, her eyes half closed. “Seven swans a-swimming,” she said liltingly and a dancing vibration seemed to move down her white body, like that which goes out from a swan across the still surface of a summer lake.

Matthew roared, “The Seven Sisters, meaning the Scotch cannon at the Battle of Flodden!”

She shrugged maddeningly and murmured, “Sweet Seventeen,” again giving herself the once-over.

“That’s Sixteen,” he shouted. “And it’s not a seven anyhow!”

She wrinkled her nose at him, turned her back, and said smiling over her shoulder, “Chilon: Consider the end.” And she jounced her little rump.

In his rage Matthew astonished himself by reaching her in a stride, picking her up like a feather, and dropping her in the middle of the bed, where she continued to smile self-infatuatedly as she bounced.

He stood glaring down at her and taking deep breaths preparatory to roaring, but then he realized his anger had disappeared.

“The Seven Hells,” he said anticlimactically.

She noticed him, rolled over once and lay facing him on her side, chin in hand. “The seven virtues,” she said. “Prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude—those are Classical—and faith, hope and charity—those are Christian.”

He lay down facing her. “The seven sins—”

“We’ve had those,” she cut him off. “You gave them last night.”

He at once remembered everything about the incident except the embarrassment.

“Seven Footprints to Satan, a novel by Abraham Merritt,” he said, eyeing her with interest and idly throwing out an arm.

“The Seven-Year Itch, a film with Marilyn Monroe,” she countered, doing likewise. Their fingers touched.

He rolled over toward her, saying, “Seven Conquests, a book by Poul Anderson,” and ended up with his face above hers. He kissed her. She kissed him. In the starlight her face seemed to him that of a young goddess. And in the even, tranquil, shameless voice such a supernatural being would use, she said, “The seven stages of loving intercourse. First kissing. Then foreplay.” After a while, “Penetration,” and with a wicked starlit smile, “Bias: Most men are bad. Say a seven.”

“Why?” Matthew asked, almost utterly lost in what they were doing, because it was endlessly new and heretofore utterly unimaginable to him—which was a very strange concept for a mathematician.

“So I can say one, stupid.”

“Oh, very well. The seven spots to kiss: ears, eyes, cheeks, mouth,” he said, suiting actions to words.

“How very specialized a seven. Try eyebrow flutters too,” she suggested, demonstrating. “But it will do for an answer in the Game. The seven gaits in running the course you’re into. First the walk. Slowly, slowly. No, more slowly.” After a while, she said, “Now the amble, not much faster. Shakespeare made it the slowest gait of Time, when he moves at all. Leisurely, stretchingly. Yes, that’s right,” and after a while, “Now the pace. In a horse, which is where all this comes from, that means first the hoofs on the one side, then those on the other. Right, left, right, see?—only doubled. There’s a swing to it. Things are picking up.” After a while she said, “Now the trot. I’ll tell you who Time trots withal. Marry, he trots hard with a maid between the contract of her marriage and the day it is solemnized. A little harder. There, that’s right.” After a while she said, gasping slightly, “Now the canter. Just for each seventh instant we’ve all hoofs off the ground. Can you feel that? Yes, there it came again. Press on.” After a while she said, gasping, “And now the rack. That’s six gaits. Deep penetration too. Which makes five stages. Oh, press on.” Matthew felt he was being tortured on a rack, but the pain was wonderful, each frightening moment an utterly new revelation. After a while she gasped, “Now, sir, the gallop!”

Matthew said, gasping too, “Is this wise, madam? Won’t we come apart? Where are you taking me? Recall Cleobulus: Avoid Excess!”

But she cried ringingly, her face lobster-red, “No, it’s not sane, it’s mad! But we must run the risk. To the heights and above! To the ends of the earth and beyond! Press on, press on, the Game is all! Epimenides: Nothing is impossible to industry!” After a while he redded out.

After another while he heard her say, remotely, tenderly, utterly without effort, “Last scene of all, that ends this strange, eventful history, is mere oblivion. Now Time stands still withal. After the climax—sixth stage—there is afterplay. What’s your seven?”

He answered quite as dreamily, “The Seven Heavens, abodes of bliss to the Mohammedans and cabalists.”

She said, “That’s allowable, although you gave it once before by inference. The seven syllables of the basic hymn line, as ‘Hark, the herald angels sing.’”

He echoed with, “Join the triumph of the skies.”

She said, “Look at the stars.” He did. She said, “Look how the floor of heaven is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold.” It was.

He said, “There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st but in his motion like an angel sings. Hark.” She did.

Math felt the stars were almost in his head. He felt they were the realm in which he’d lived in infancy and that with a tiny effort he could at this very moment push across the border and live there again. What was so wrong about Pythagoreanism? Weren’t numbers real, if you could live among them? And wouldn’t they be alive and have personalities, if they were everything there was? Something most strange was happening.

Severeign nodded, then pointed a finger straight up. “Look, the Pleiades. I always thought they were the Little Dipper. They’d hit us in our tummies if they fell.”

He said, gazing at them, “You’ve already used that seven.”

“Of course I have,” she said, still dreamily. “I was just making conversation. It’s your turn, anyway.”

He said, “Of course. The Philosophical Pleiad, another name for the Seven Wise Men of Greece.”

She said, “The Alexandrian Pleiad—Homer the younger and six other poets.”

He said, “The French Pleiad—Ronsard and his six.”

She said, “The Pleiades again, meaning the seven nymphs, attendant on Diana, for whom the stars were named—Alcyone, Celaeno, Electra, Maia (she’s Illusion), Taygete (she got lost), Sterope (she wed war) and Merope (she married Sisyphus). My, that got gloomy.”

Matthew looked down from the stars and fondly at her, counting over her personal and private sevens.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said. Actually, he’d winced at the sudden memory of his eight-orifices error. The recollection faded back as he continued to study her.

“The Seven Children of the Days of the Week, Fair-of-Face and Full-of-Grace, and so on,” he said, drawing out the syllables. “Whose are you?”

“Saturday’s—”

“Then you’ve got far to go,” he said.

She nodded, somewhat solemnly.

“And that makes another seven that belongs to you,” he added. “The seventh day of the week.”

“No, sixth,” she said. “Sunday’s the seventh day of the week.”

“No, it’s the first,” he told her with a smile. “Look at any calendar.” He felt a lazy pleasure at having caught her out, though it didn’t make up for a Game error like the terrible one he’d made.

She said, “ ‘The Seven Ravens,’ a story by the Brothers Grimm. Another gloomy one.”

He said, gazing at her and speaking as if they too belonged to her, “The Seven Wonders of the World. The temple of Diana at Ephesus, et cetera. Say, what’s the matter?”

She said, “You said the World when we were in the Stars. It brought me down. The world’s a nasty place.”

“I’m sorry, Sev,” he said. “You are a goddess, did you know? I saw it when the starlight freckled you. Diana coming up twice in the Game reminded me. Goddesses are supposed to be up in the stars, like in line drawings of the constellations with stars in their knees and heads.”

“The world’s a nasty place,” she repeated. “Its number’s nine.”

“I thought six sixty-six,” he said. “The number of the beast. Somewhere in Revelation.”

“That too,” she said, “but mostly nine.”

“The smallest odd number that is not a prime,” he said.

“The number of the Dragon. Very nasty. Here, I’ll show you just how nasty.”

She dipped over the edge of the bed for her purse and put in his hands something that felt small, hard, cold and complicated. Then, kneeling upright on the bed, she reached out and switched on the lamps.

Matthew lunged past her and hit the switch for the ceiling drapes.

“Afraid someone might see us?” she asked as the drapes rustled toward each other.

He nodded mutely, catching his breath through his nose. Like her, he was now kneeling upright on the bed.

“The stars are far away,” she said. “Could they see us with telescopes?”

“No, but the roof is close,” he whispered back. “Though it’s unlikely anyone would be up there.”

Nevertheless he waited, watching the ceiling, until the drapes met and the faint whirring stopped. Then he looked at what she’d put in his hands.

He did not drop it, but he instantly shifted his fingers so that he was holding it with a minimum of contact between his skin and it, very much as a man would hold a large dark spider which for some occult reason he may not drop.

It was a figurine, in blackened bronze or else in some dense wood, of a fearfully skinny, wiry old person tautly bent over backward like a bow, knees somewhat bent, arms straining back overhead. The face was witchy, nose almost meeting pointed chin across toothlessly grinning gums pressed close together, eyes bulging with mad evil. What seemed at first some close-fitting, ragged garment was then seen to be only loathsomely diseased skin, here starting to peel, there showing pustules, open ulcers, and other tetters, all worked in the metal (or carved in even harder wood) in abominably realistic minuscule detail. Long empty dugs hanging back up the chest as far as the neck made it female, but the taut legs, somewhat spread, showed a long flaccid penis caught by the artificer in extreme swing to the left, and far back from it a long grainy scrotum holding shriveled testicles caught in similar swing to the right, and in the space between them long leprous vulva gaping.

“It’s nasty, isn’t it?” Severeign said dryly of the hideous hermaphrodite. “My Aunt Helmintha bought it in Crotona, that one-time Greek colony in the instep of the Italian Boot where Pythagoras was born—bought it from a crafty old dealer in antiquities, who said it came from ‘Earth’s darkest center’ by way of Mali and North Africa. He said it was a figure of the World, a nine-thing, Draco homo. He said it can’t be broken, must not, in fact, for if you break it, the world will disappear or else you and those with you will forever vanish—no one knows where.”

Staring at the figurine, Math muttered, “The seven days and nights the Ancient Mariner saw the curse in the dead man’s eye.”

She echoed, “The seven days and nights his friends sat with Job.”

He said, his shoulders hunched, “The Seven Words, meaning the seven utterances of Christ on the cross.”

She said, “The seven gates to the land of the dead through which Ishtar passed.”

He said, his shoulders working, “The seven golden vials full of the wrath of God that the four beasts gave to the seven angels.”

She said, shivering a little, “The birds known as the Seven Whistlers and considered to be a sign of some great calamity impending.” Then, “Stop it, Math!”

Still staring at the figurine, he had shifted his grip on it, so that his thick forefingers hooked under its knees and elbows while his big thumbs pressed against its arched narrow belly harder and harder. But at her command his hands relaxed and he returned the thing to her purse.

“Fie on you, sir!” she said, “to try to run out on the Game, and on me, and on yourself. The seven letters in Matthew, and in Fortree. Remember Solon: Know thyself.”

He answered, “The fourteen letters in Severeign Saxon, making two sevens too.”

“The seven syllables in Master Matthias Fortree,” she said, flicking off the lamps before taking a step toward him on her knees.

“The seven syllables in Mamsel Severeign Saxon,” he responded, putting his arms around her.

And then he was murmuring, “Oh Severeign, my sovereign,” and they were both wordlessly indicating sevens they’d named earlier, beginning with the seven crucial points of a girl (“Crucial green points,” he said, and “Of a green girl,” said she), and the whole crucial part of the evening was repeated, only this time it extended endlessly with infinite detail, although all he remembered of the Game from it was her saying “The Dance of the Seven Veils,” and him replying “The seven figures in the Dance of Death as depicted on a hilltop by Ingmar Bergman in his film,” and her responding, “The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus,” and him laboriously getting out, “In the like legend in the Koran, the seven sleepers guarded by the dog Al Rakim,” and her murmuring, “Good doggie, good doggie,” as he slowly, slowly, sank into bottomless slumber.

Next morning Math woke to blissful dreaminess instead of acutely stabbing misery for the first time in his life since he had lost his childhood power to live wholly in the world of numbers. Strong sunlight was seeping through the ceiling. Severeign was gone with all her things, including the purse with its disturbing figurine, but that did not bother him in the least (nor did his eight-error, the only other possible flyspeck on his paradise), for he knew with absolute certainty that he would see her again that evening. He dressed himself and went out into the corridor and wandered along it until he saw from the corner of his eye that he was strolling alongside Elmo Hooper, whereupon he poured out to that living memory bank all his joy, every detail of last night’s revelations.

As he ended his long litany of love, he noticed bemusedly that Elmo had dropped back, doubtless because they were overtaking three theoretical physicists headed for the Commons. Their speech had a secretive tone, so he tuned his ears to it and was soon in possession of a brand-new top secret they did well to whisper about, and they none the wiser—a secret that just might allow him to retrieve his eight-error, he realized with a throb of superadded happiness. (In fact, he was so happy he even thought on the spur of the moment of a second string for that bow.)

So when Severeign came that night, as he’d known she would, he was ready for her. Craftily he did not show his cards at first, but when she began with, “The Seven Sages, those male Scheherazades who night after night keep a king from putting his son wrongfully to death,” he followed her lead with “The Seven Wise Masters, another name for the Seven Sages.”

She said, “The Seven Questions of Timur the Lame—Tamurlane.”

He said, “The Seven Eyes of Ningauble.”

“Pardon?”

“Never mind. Seven Men (including ‘Enoch Soames’ and ‘A.V. Laider’), a book of short stories by Max Beerbohm.”

She said, “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a book by Lawrence of Arabia.”

He said, “The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao, a fantasy film.”

She said, “Just The Seven Faces by themselves, a film Paul Muni starred in.”

He said, “The seven Gypsy jargons mentioned by Borrow in his Bible in Spain.”

She said, “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, another film.”

He said, “The dance of the seven veils—how did we miss it?”

She said, “Or miss the seven stars in the hair of the blessed damosel?”

He said, “Or the Seven Hills of San Francisco when we got Rome’s?”

She said, “Seven Keys to Baldpate, a play by George M. Cohan.”

He said, “Seven Famous Novels, an omnibus by H.G. Wells.”

She said, “The Seven That Were Hanged, a novella by Andreyev.”

That’s my grim cue, he thought, but I’ll try my second string first. “The seven elements whose official names begin with N, and their symbols,” he said, and then recited rapidly, poker-faced, “N for Nitrogen, Nb for Nobelium, Nd for Neodymium, Ne for Neon, Ni for Nickel, No for Niobrium, Np for Neptunium.”

She grinned fiendishly, started to speak, then caught herself. Her eyes widened at him. Her grin changed, though not much.

“Matthew, you rat!” she said. “You wanted me to correct you, say there were eight and that you’d missed Na. But then I’d have been in the wrong, for Na is for Sodium—its old and unofficial name Natrium.”

Math grinned back at her, still poker-faced, though his confidence had been shaken. Nevertheless he said, “Quit stalling. What’s your seven?”

She said, “The Seven Lamps of Architecture, a book of essays by John Ruskin.”

He said, baiting his trap, “The seven letters in the name of the radioactive element Pluton—I mean Uranium.”

She said, “That’s feeble, sir. All words with seven letters would last almost forever. But you’ve made me think of a very good one, entirely legitimate. The seven isotopes of Plutonium and Uranium, sum of their Pleiades.”

“Huh! I got you, madam,” he said, stabbing a finger at her.

Her face betrayed exasperation of a petty sort, but then an entirely different sort of consternation, almost panic fear.

“You’re wrong, madam,” he said triumphantly. “There are, as I learned only today—”

“Stop!” she cried. “Don’t say it! You’ll be sorry! Remember Thales: Suretyship is the precursor of ruin.”

He hesitated a moment. He thought, that means don’t cosign checks. Could that be stretched to mean don’t share dangerous secrets? No, too far-fetched.

“You won’t escape being shown up that easily,” he said gleefully. “There are eight isotopes now, as I learned only this morning. Confess yourself at fault.”

He stared at her eagerly, triumphantly, but only saw her face growing pale. Not ashamed, not exasperated, not contumacious even, but fearful. Dreadfully fearful.

There were three rapid, very loud knocks on the door.

They both started violently.

The knocks were repeated, followed by a bellow that penetrated all soundproofing. “Open up in there!” it boomed hollowly. “Come on out, Fortree! And the girl.”

Matthew goggled. Severeign suddenly dug in her purse and tossed him something. It was the figurine.

“Break it!” she commanded. “It’s our only chance of escape.”

He stared at it stupidly.

There was a ponderous pounding on the door, which groaned and crackled.

“Break it!” she cried. “Night before last you prayed. I brought the answer to your prayer. You have it in your hands. It takes us to your lost world that you loved. Break it, I say!”

A kind of comprehension came to Math’s face. He hooked his fingers round the figure’s evil ends, pressed on the arching loathsome midst.

“Who is your brother, Severeign?” he asked.

“You are my brother, in the other realm,” she said. “Press, press!—and break the thing!”

The door began visibly to give under the strokes, now thunderous. The cords in Math’s neck stood out, and the veins in his forehead; his knuckles grew white.

“Break it for me,” she cried. “For Severeign! For Seven!”

The sound of the door bursting open masked a lesser though sharper crack. Warren Dean and his party plunged into the room to find it empty, and no one in the bedroom or bathroom either.

It had been he, of course, whom Matthew, utterly bemused, had mistaken for Elmo Hooper that morning. Dean had immediately reactivated the bugs in Matthew’s apartment. It is from their record that this account of Matthew’s and Severeign’s last night is reconstructed. All the rest of the story derives from the material overheard by Dean (who quite obviously, from this narrative, has his own Achilles’ heel) or retrieved from Elmo Hooper.

The case is still very open, of course. That fact alone has made the Coexistence Complex an even more uneasy place than before—something that most connoisseurs of its intrigues had deemed impossible. The theory of security is the dread one that Matthew Fortree was successfully spirited away to one of the hostiles by the diabolical spy Severeign Saxon. By what device remains unknown, although the walls of the Coexistence Complex have been systematically burrowed through in search of secret passageways more thoroughly than even termites could have achieved, without discovering anything except several lost bugging systems.

A group of daring thinkers believes that Matthew, on the basis of his satanic mathematical cunning and his knowledge of the eighth isotope of the uranium-plutonium pair, and probably with technological know-how from behind some iron curtain supplied by Severeign, devised an innocent-looking mechanism, which was in fact a matter transmitter, by means of which they escaped to the country of Severeign’s employers. All sorts of random setups were made of Matthew’s ivories. Their investigation became a sort of hobby-in-itself for some and led to several games and quasi-religious cults, and to two suicides.

Others believe Severeign’s employers were extraterrestrial. But a rare few quietly entertain the thought and perhaps the hope that hers was a farther country than that even, that she came from the Pythagorean universe where Matthew spent much of his infancy and early childhood, the universe where numbers are real and one can truly fall in love with Seven, briefly incarnate as a Miss S.S.

Whatever the case, Matthew Fortree and Severeign Saxon are indeed gone, vanished without a trace or clue except for a remarkably nasty figurine showing a fresh, poisonously green surface where it was snapped in two, which is the only even number that is a prime.

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