The Number Devil: "The Twelfth Night"

What was the number devil up to? Maybe he’d had a good idea and couldn’t prove it. Or maybe he’d got bogged down in his polyp surfaces (or whatever it was he’d talked about last time).

The signature was an illegible squiggle that appeared to be in Arabic script.

What they saw was a very old man with snow-white hair and a long nose. He was toddling round and round in circles and carrying out a great debate with himself.

“He’s not the least bit confused; he’s got all his wits about him. As for his age, age means nothing here. Besides, Lord Rustle is one of our youngest. He hasn’t reached 150 yet.”

“That’s no ordinary dust,” said Teplotaxl. “It has more granules than a body could count in a lifetime. If you wanted to cover the head of a pin with it, you’d have to gather all the dust in this room. The man you see there is Professor Singer. He’s the man who discovered the dust.”

Professor Singer, a pale man with a goatee and piercing eyes, was singing to himself and doing a nervous little dance around the room.

Teplotaxl was right: the palace’s inhabitants were so old that he seemed a stripling by comparison.

“Welcome, gentlemen, welcome,” said one of them, a man with large eyes and a wig. “My name is Owl, and this is Professor Horrors.” The latter looked very stern, and he scarcely glanced up from his papers.

But Professor Horrors refused to divulge the subject of his labors.

“He means the imaginative numbers,” Teplotaxl explained hurriedly, and then he apologized to the eccentric gentlemen for having interrupted their labors.

The walls were decorated with mosaics of the most varied patterns, and a majestic throne of gold stood at the first landing on a gigantic flight of steps that led so high there was no telling where it ended.

Robert tactfully held his tongue and looked around.

Suddenly a beanpole of a man at the entrance swung a stick as far back as it would go and struck a gong, which resounded all through the palace.

There were solemn Egyptians, there were Indians with pink dots on their foreheads, there were Arabs wearing burnooses and monks in habits, there were Africans and American Indians, Turks with curved swords, Americans in jeans.

A Chinese gentleman in fine silk raiment ascended first the stairs and then the throne.

A Chinese gentleman in fine silk raiment ascended first the stairs and then the throne.

“Is he Chinese too?”
“Nobody knows. None of us has ever seen him face-to-face. But we revere him greatly. He is commander-in-chief of all number devils, the man who discovered one. Though for all we know he may not be a man at all. He may be a woman!”

“What you need is an unreasonable number, the most important of them all. A man all the way up at the head of the table discovered it more than two thousand years ago. Another Greek. Without it we wouldn’t know, to this day, how big a pie like this is—or how big our wheels or rings or oil tanks are. In other words, anything that’s round. Even the moon and our very own earth. Without the number pi we’d be lost.”

Otherwise they all ate heartily and drank heartily (from pentagonal crystal glasses, fortunately, and not Dr. Little’s weird bottles).

When the repast was over, the beanpole sounded the gong again and the man who may have discovered zero rose from his throne and disappeared up the stairs.

Gradually the other number devils stood as well—the most eminent first, of course—and started back to their rooms.

“So this is your apprentice,” said the dignitary in a sober voice.

“So this is your apprentice,” said the dignitary in a sober voice.

“Stand, Robert. By the power vested in me as General Secretary, I hereby accept you into the lowest rank of number apprentices and bestow upon you in recognition thereof the Order of Pythagoras, Fifth Class.” With these words he ceremoniously hung a heavy golden chain with a five-pointed star around Robert’s neck.

“Stand, Robert. By the power vested in me as General Secretary, I hereby accept you into the lowest rank of number apprentices and bestow upon you in recognition thereof the Order of Pythagoras, Fifth Class.” With these words he ceremoniously hung a heavy golden chain with a five-pointed star around Robert’s neck.

“Stand, Robert. By the power vested in me as General Secretary, I hereby accept you into the lowest rank of number apprentices and bestow upon you in recognition thereof the Order of Pythagoras, Fifth Class.” With these words he ceremoniously hung a heavy golden chain with a five-pointed star around Robert’s neck.

Robert saw that Teplotaxl was moved. Robert was too. On the brink of tears, in fact: he hadn’t realized how much a part of his life the number devil had become.

But neither the one nor the other felt it seemly to show his emotions, so all Teplotaxl said was “Good-bye, Robert,” and all Robert said was “Bye.”

“How many of you are there in the class?” he asked, and the eager-beaver Doris shot up her hand and said, “Thirty-eight.”

Robert was incensed. Mr. Bockel and his mind-bockeling problems! He thought, Now we’ll have to work like the devil while he takes it easy.