RAY VUKCEVICH COUNT ON ME It didn't confuse me that the new occupant of apartment 29A was a woman. The Father of Lies is nothing if not inventive. The number 29A is, of course, the Number of the Beast in base 16, and 16 is the atomic number of Sulfur. Base 16 is commonly called "hex." It was all too obvious. Celia Strafford looked to be in her early thirties -- 32, to be precise, since 2, 3, and 37 are the prime factors of 666, and she looked too old to be 23, and I"m 37, and she looked younger than me, so ergo, as they say, 32. I'm speaking of the age of her body; I couldn't know the age of the creature inside. She wore her long red hair loose down her back. I watched her closely as she stooped to pick up a box to lug up the stairs to her new apartment. She wore cut-off jeans and an abbreviated yellow halter top. Her legs were that strange golden tan you only see on women. I've never been able to figure how they achieve that color. She wore no shoes. Her old red Chevy looked right at home among the junkers in the street. Ours is not the nicest street in Las Vegas. "You must be my new neighbor," I said when I met her on the stairs. "I'm Palmer Jones I live next door. When you have time, I'll tell you 476 wonderful things about this place." My little test -- 476 is the Number in base 12; there aren't really any wonderful things about this dump. I just wanted to see what she'd do with the Number. She shifted her box and poked out a hand for me to shake -- blood red nails, I noted. Cool, cool skin. Her touch made me tremble. "I'm Celia." She gave me a deceptively nice smile, but it didn't fool me. I could see points of evil light flickering in her green eyes, I was sure of that, even if my mention of the Number hadn't gotten a rise out of her. I already knew her name, too, having sneaked a peek at her lease agreement while ostensibly chatting with our muddleheaded manager about the deplorable conditions of my pipes. Later, I'd looked up "Strafford" in my Oxford History of Britain, and, sure enough, Thomas Wentworth, the first Earl of Strafford, was listed in the index. A little digging in Johnson's A History of the English People revealed that Strafford was executed in 1641, and 1641 is the Number of the Beast base 7. I don't believe in coincidences. "So, what do you do, Palmer?" I hate that question. It always catches me off guard. "I was in the Army," I muttered. I didn't mention that I am actually Brother Palmer of the Secret Order of Morse. She turned on her perfect smile again and gave me a mock salute. "Well, there are probably 820 things worse than being in the Army," she said. Base 9. I felt the blood drain from my head. I could tell by the way her green eyes narrowed slightly that she'd seen my shock. I rushed a big frozen grin onto my face. "Right," I said. "Right." I hurried on down the stairs. I'd been on my way to the corner 7-Eleven to buy a pretense for getting into her apartment later on that evening, after she'd lugged all her stuff up to 29A. I planned on spending the wait in the park we locals called "Three Trees and a Bench," across an empty lot and one street over. I had my calculator and my binoculars, and the vantage point would allow me to watch her with no danger of being seen. I wouldn't change my plans. Even if she'd recognized me for what I am, it would be a bad idea to let her spook me into doing something rash. It was a fiery summer afternoon, just the day I'd most expected Celia Strafford to move in. You see, 666 expressed in base 14 is 358, and if you subtract 358 from 365 (the number of days in the year) you get 7 --that is, July, the seventh month. Then if you sum the digits of 358 in the Fadic fashion (3 + 5 + 8 - 16 (another sixteen!) and 1 + 6 - 7) you get the day. Ergo July 7. Poking out these numbers on my calculator again as I waited for her to finish moving in, I became even more convinced that she belonged to the Army of the Night, the Antichrists. I had been born to stop them. It didn't matter that I might have lost the element of surprise. Right after I'd been asked to leave the Army, I'd spent several weeks in the public library in Fayetteville, North Carolina, picking through city street maps for the spot I knew must exist. I suspected I had found it when I saw the address of my present apartment building on the outskirts of Las Vegas. 10131 FOX Road. The number 10131 is 666 in base 5, and according to the Pythagorean system of Numerology, FOX also evaluates to 666. That might not have been enough, but when I got here, I found that apartment 29A also existed, and that clinched it. I knew it was only a matter of time before someone like Celia moved in. Celia had a lot of stuff. All the apartments in our building are furnished, so she didn't have any really big items to move, but it took her all afternoon to unload her rented trailer and lug the boxes up to 29A. I knew that the precise number of boxes would be significant, and I tried to count them, but her red hair distracted me, and the way she moved in her short shorts, bending at the waist to pick up a box, slumping back against her car to catch her breath. Watching her I drifted into a fantasy in which I chased the demon from her body, and she, quivering with gratitude and relief, came into my arms, and we walked together from this dying neighborhood into a white picket fence family, just the two of us, multiplying, being fruitful. Wouldn't it be wonderful. I had to slap myself on both sides of the face, hard, to dislodge that dangerous delusion. You've got to be on your toes when dealing with the damned. You can't let a demon with red hair and green eyes make a fool out of you. I looked through my binoculars again, and seeing that she'd finished, I looked at my watch. It didn't surprise me that it was 5:56. That, after all, is 666 expressed in base 11. I gave Celia sixteen minutes to settle in, then hurried back to our building. "Mr. Jones. Palmer, wasn't it?" Celia said, when she answered my knock. "House warming gift." I showed her the wine I'd bought at the 7-Eleven. "Come in, come in. How nice." Celia closed the door behind me. She had a cat, a scrawny orange and white thing, that circled my legs in a figure 8, all the while giving me a look that said it knew exactly what I was up to. More precisely, the creature was a KITTEN! Notice that 666 in base 9. is 1010011010. Those digits can be converted to Morse code by changing the ones to dashes and the zeros to dots. * (underbar).(underbar)|..|(underbar)|(underbar)|.|(underbar). K |I |T|T|E |N This conversion of the Number to Morse code was the original inspiration for my founding the Secret Order of Morse. In the tenth century, this insight might have eased the minds of people who worried about the Apocalypse coming at the millennium. My findings show that it could not possibly have happened until the birth of Samuel F. B. Morse and the invention of the telegraph and Morse code. Saint Morse was pretty clear in the very first words sent by telegraph: "What hath God wrought!" He was telling us to finally look out for the Big One. If people before that time had pondered the nonexistence of telegraphy, they could have rested easy -- a luxury we clearly do not share today. "Sit down, Palmer," Celia said, pulling me toward a battered, flowered couch. She took the wine from my hand, turned to the tiny kitchen, and then paused at the door to look back at me with a mischievous smile. "I'll open the wine, but I was just indulging my sweet tooth. Would you like to join me in a piece of cake?" CAKE! * (underbar).(underbar).|.(underbar)|(underbar).(underbar)|. C |A |K |E "No thanks," I said, my voice a little shaky. She returned with two filled wine glasses and the bottle, the cake apparently forgotten, and handed me one. She took the chair in front of me, swept her long red hair back behind one ear and sipped her wine. Deliberately showing me her forehead, I thought. No mark. Must be hidden on her body. I decided to proceed cautiously. "What made you decide on this building.?" I asked. She just gave me a look, a knowing look, I thought, and grinned. "So, you're a military man. I'm a school teacher." "A school teacher?" "You want to know how much money I make." I had the sinking feeling I was losing control of the Examination. "How much money you make.?" "People always want to know how much teachers make," she said. "I make 22,122 dollars a year." "Base 4," I said. She grinned an evil grin. "Teaching is a lot like hunting," she said. "Like hunting.?" "You've got to be very quiet when you're trying to get an idea across. You've got to sneak up on the student and shoot him in the ear with a metaphor." "Shoot him in the ear?" She filled our wine glasses again and put the bottle back on the floor by her chair. "Shooting," she said. "You should know about shooting, Palmer, being in the Army and all." "I was in the Signal Corps." "Well, even if I'm not really moved in yet." She made a face at the piles of boxes, the clutter. "I'm still taking off tomorrow to go shooting." I gulped my wine. I knew the answer to my question, but I had to ask it anyway. Fools rush in. "What kind of gun will you use?" "A .3030, of course." Of course. 3030, the Number of the Beast, base 6. "And where will you go to do this shooting?" She put her wine glass on the floor and leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, to fix me with her flashing green eyes. "Mojave Desert. South of Death Valley. I'll be going to Essex." To Essex! To Essex! 2 E 6! Base 15. Here was the demon, strong and calm, cool, toying with me. I might as well have been a mouse quaking before the green eyes of a serpent. A short prayer: Lord, spare me the indignity of wetting my pants. I dropped my glass and leaped to my feet. Her eyes got big, and she jumped up, too. Every time I tried to make the Sign of the Cross at her with my fingers, my mind clouded. My first attempt looked like a T, my left first finger atop my right first finger. My second attempt looked like an upside-down L. I remembered what I wanted to do, but not how to do it. When I stopped in confusion to consider my hands, Celia collapsed giggling back into her chair. "You bozo, Palmer," she said and made a perfect cross with her slender white fingers. A demon couldn't do that. Not a demon, which meant that she was a woman, a real woman, a woman with a goofy grin now. "Oh, sit down, Palmer," she said. I slouched down onto the couch again. "Maybe we'd better introduce ourselves again," she said. "I'm Sister Celia of the Divine Order of Symmetry. We study the perfect forms of the Number." She held out her hand for me to shake. I next said what I had never said to another human being; I said, "I'm Brother Palmer of the Secret Order of Morse." It felt so good to say it aloud. "Morse? " There was not even a hint of mockery in her voice. I heard only genuine interest. I explained the angle I took on the Number. I used some of my favorite examples. For example, I said, "The Number looks a lot more like a series of dots (those holes in the sixes) than it does a series of dashes, and as a series of dots it is dot dot dot or S, and S is the symbol for Sulfur, and S is the first letter of the name of you know who." "Okay," she said. "And consider 6 spelled out," I said and took my notepad from my shirt pocket. "Look at what that would be in Morse code." I wrote on the pad and handed it to her. * . . . | . . | (underbar) . . (underbar) S | I|X * * * "I see," she said. "And with only the most obvious and elementary re-examination of the pattern of dot and dashes we get the following." I took the pad, wrote, and handed it back to her. * . . . . | . | (underbar) . . (underbar) H |E|X "So another way to look at 666 is six six six, and another way to look at six six six is hex hex hex. Everything fits." She agreed. We found that we agreed on a lot of things. Her kitten came and curled up in my lap. He'd waited until Celia and I had put all our cards on the table. Cats know these things. We shared what we'd discovered about the Number. "Look at the Number in base 3," she said. By this time she had produced two legal pads and we'd already filled and tossed yellow sheets all around the couch where we now sat shoulder to shoulder. "The Number is, of course, 220200 in base 3," she said. "If you take out the zeros you get 222, but notice there are 3 zeros and 3 times 222 is 666." "That's beautiful." "Yes," she said. She sighed. "Yes, beautiful. But it doesn't really matter now," "What do you mean?" "How many bases has your research involved, Palmer?" "Sixteen," I said. "There's bound to be discoveries above that, but I'll leave them to future scholars." "Let me show you something," she said. "There are three symmetric forms of The Number in the first 16 bases. That is, three palindromes. Make a table of them, please." I did so. * Base The Number 4 22122 10 666 13 3C3 "Now notice," she said, "that the forms break naturally into groups of three. Add that to your table." * The Groups Base Number Of Three 4 22122 22 | 1 | 22 10 666 6 | 6 | 6 13 3C3 3 | C | 3 "Next consider each member of a group as a number in its own base and convert it back to base 10." "What?" "For example, 22 in base 4 is two 4s and two ls or ten, right?" "Of course." "So do that with each number and add it to your table." * The Groups Base Number Of Three Base 10 4 22122 22 | 1 | 22 10 | 1 | 10 10 666 6 | 6 | 6 6 | 6 | 6 13 3C3 3 | C | 3 3 | 12| 3 "Now add the columns," she whispered. What could she be getting at? * The Groups Base Number Of Three Base 10 4 22122 22 | 1 | 22 10 | 1 | 10 10 666 6 | 6 | 6 6 | 6 | 6 13 3C3 3 | C | 3 + 3 | 12 | 3 | | 19 | 19 | 19 Each sum was nineteen. "So, maybe you'd better look at base 19, Palmer," she said. It was an historic moment. I looked up at her sunburst clock and saw that it was 12:32 -- the true witching hour, 666 base 8. "Look at the time, Celia," I said. She looked then took my hand and squeezed it. "Make the conversion to base 19, Palmer." Okay. We'd need 19 symbols including the usual symbol for zero. I took the calculator from my shirt pocket. Nineteen squared is 361, and 666 minus 361 is 305, and 19 goes into 305 16 times with 1 left over. My result stunned me, and I checked it again. Same result. I checked it once more. "Don't check it again, Palmer," she said. "It's right." I wrote my result on a fresh page and handed her the legal pad. The Number in base 19? It's 1G1. "More symmetry. What does it mean, Celia?" "Write those ls out as letters." She handed the pad back to me. I wrote: ONE G ONE "And that's the news, Palmer." She took the pad back and wrote two words under mine: ONE GONE. "That's what is built into the Number. God is gone. Dead or on a long vacation. We've been abandoned." She sounded so despondent. She let the pad slip to the floor, then she covered her face with her hands and leaned against me. I put my arm around her shoulders. "Maybe there's another meaning," I said. "No," she said and pushed up and away from me. "The principles of symmetry are clear. I can show you proof." She picked up the pad again. "Consider the table again but this time let's look at the second set of three perfect forms. And this time, let's add horizontally instead of vertically." She wrote. * The Groups Base Number Of Three Base 10 10 666 6 |6 |6 6 | 6 | 6 = 18 13 3C3 3 | C | 3 3 | 12 | 3 = 18 19 1G1 1 | G | 1 1 | 16 | 1 = 18 "Okay," I said. "Proof. Notice 13 is the middle form. And the sums are all eighteen. What do you suppose is described in chapter 13 verse 18?" The description of the Number, of course. I didn't need to say it. Still I had an uneasy feeling about her proof. She had not in any way taken into account the divine revelations of Samuel Morse. I took the pad again. * (underbar)|(underbar).|.|(underbar).|(underbar)|(underbar).|. O N E G O N E Base 19. I puzzled with it for a few moments, my heart pounding and my breath coming fast. I gasped when I saw the answer. The change was so simple. It involved only the last N and E. "Celia," I said. "What?" "Celia!" "What is it?" "Look." I showed her my work. * (underbar)|(underbar).|.|(underbar).|(underbar)|(underbar).. O N E G O D Not ONE GONE. That was only the message at a superficial level. The application of the Morse technique told the true tale: ONE GOD. "Oh, Palmer," she whispered. "Yes!" I cried. I grabbed her hands and pulled her up and we spent a few minutes jumping up and down in religious ecstasy. Then I kissed her. Everything got really clear, and the truth I saw then is still true today for Celia and me here in 29A: God's in His heaven, and all's right with the world. It all adds up.