"Vukcevich-CountOnMe" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vukcevich Ray)

"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.