Gary bought himself a pistol and twenty-four bullets. The purchase was semi-illegal and the quality of the weapon poor: rust, scratched paint on the handle, worn parts. Afraid the gun might blow up in his face, Gary cleaned it, polished and oiled it.
Daphne decided to write up the story for the newspapers. An article like that would have an effect. But she needed to get all the facts right: a mistake could mean a lawsuit for libel.
Gary found the shop in which Spig had bought the Amido. It took him a long time to convince the salesgirl. If only he had a little personal charm. It didn’t help that as he grew older, his left eye got weaker; his brain, not wanting to process an image from it, let the eye wander. The girl actually went red trying to keep from laughing, because Gary’s eye, when he asked her more and more urgently, turned further and further inward, toward his nose. A man might be no older than he felt, but having a lazy eye and a stomach rumbling from hunger added twenty years.
Only after he told her what had happened and what he suspected—he even included the disbelief and sweaty gray uniform T-shirt of Cukurca—did she begin to listen seriously. Fear appeared on the girl’s narrow, expressive face. He noticed then that she actually had a good figure, in her tights. His first impression of her hadn’t been positive: pink, transparent eyes; colorless, greasy hair; the pallid skin of an albino. He must have made an equally bad impression on her. He relaxed, and his eye turned in less. He looked good enough now, apparently, to get her to give him the serial numbers of the engine and the chassis of the Amido Civic sold to the Bolyas. He also wrote down her telephone number. Sabine, the girl who was attractive when you looked a second time.
Gary and Daphne got along fine with the Green Tunics. Jutta and Margot borrowed spices from them and invited them to supper, though Gary and Daphne kept saying no. To complete the article that would unmask the gang (they were both certain it was a gang), they needed to obtain the serial numbers of the Tunics’ Amido. The editor of the paper Daphne went to felt that without that clinching evidence it was impossible to print the article. He saw it on the front page, making a great sensation, but airtight proof was needed first. Losing a lawsuit could push the paper, not that wealthy, into bankruptcy.
109
The thugs were waiting by the garbage cans on the side of Frisch’s Bar. In green tunics, red epaulets, and nylon stockings over their heads. Gary tried to defend himself, but they had rubber clubs. He was beaten as professionally as before. Then they kicked him. Hard, but not in the head. They told him several times that it was for the Amido. One of the men, after a particularly strong kick, gave a muffled shout.
“Ah! I broke a toe on that son of a bitch!”
“Quiet, Eb,” shushed another.
More than that Gary didn’t remember. He lost consciousness. He woke at dawn, full of pain. They had broken his nose.
110
On the corner of 830 Avenue and 763 Street was an empty lot. It had a closely cut lawn in the center, bushes and trees growing wild on the perimeter, and among them, here and there, rusted pieces of metal, bits of glass, rubble, and trash.
The lot was once a garbage dump. Later they cleaned it up, leveled it, put in the grass and trees. On holidays public concerts were held here. For a few pence you could sit on the lawn, pant from the heat, and hear deafening music. The music had to be deafening, because on the perimeter the noise of the city would drown out any melody. Gary liked going to such concerts; Daphne didn’t.
Vendors of ices or hot dogs picked their way among the audience spread out on the grass. The heat was oppressive, humid. Covered with a thick coat of suntan lotion, Gary licked a sour ice. The band ground out its number, torturing guitar strings. They sang of the swill printed in some newspaper, concluding with the sentiment that the newspaper was good only for wiping one’s behind. Nowadays you protested in a crumpled shirt that had buttons missing and in pants that had holes, and you used the foulest language you could. The band was roundly applauded. An obese individual sitting in front of Gary roared bravo until the folds of flesh on his sides shook rhythmically. For the moment he had put aside a greasy cardboard boat containing a sausage.
How many calories did you burn up clapping? Surely not many. Gary folded his jacket into a ball and put it under his head; he had taken the jacket in case it poured. He stretched out comfortably and closed his eyes. Despite the loud music, he fell asleep—the heat won. He had just completed an exhausting run. He didn’t know the people who were moving, but he remembered a clock with a blue ceramic face and brass columns. For some reason he couldn’t get that clock out of his head.
111
Today is a great day! I did it! I discovered the formula behind the number of books in a nested world. If you figured this out ahead of me, Dave, then you’re a brain of the first order, and you can chop farther than the eyes can see.
I’m no brain of the first order, thought Gavein, and I certainly don’t chop far. He had no idea what the sequence was. It was hard enough following Zef and his number-magic act; he wasn’t about to compete.
The new numbers helped a lot. Consider them again:
2, 3, 5, 8, 13, … (the dots are the next nesting, which I haven’t got to yet in Nest of Worlds), and now imagine that at the beginning there is something, a number also, because the whole thing may have been set up precisely in this way by the author.
so we have:
x, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 …
You see? X must be 1. Add 2 to x, and you get 3, add 3 to 2, and you get 5, and so on. That’s the algorithm! It goes as follows: The next number is the sum of the two preceding. A lovely, elegant rule. I call it Zef’s Series. If not for the current mess with all these deaths, I would be awarded a degree for coming up with such a series and studying its properties. Zef’s Series: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, …
I’ll call Dr. Babcock at the Mathematics Division. What a great master’s thesis this will make. They’ll allow a physics student to do his dissertation in math.
In Lavath they don’t, Gavein thought.
That wasn’t the end of the note. A telephone bill was taped to the index card. On the back of the bill, more writing:
I have this idea, Dave. I won’t tell you it right away, because it’s kind of paranoid. Just read my notes in the order I wrote them. They’re stuck in the places they should be found.
My idea has to do with the 1 at the beginning of the series of versions of Nest of Worlds. The 1 must be there for the series to make sense. But…
Suppose.
If the worlds are nested one inside the other, let us posit the existence of a Superworld, a world in which is nested the world where I live, and where Laila lives, and Dave, Mom, and everyone else. Such a Superworld would possess the number N = 0, according to the formula. What follows from this?
First: the number of Lands would equal 12, that is, 1. In other words, a world with only one Land, and in that Land you would have to stay for the entirety of your life. The Land would be coextensive with the Superworld, since there would be no other Land! With N = 0, the world would be homogeneous, that is, you could travel throughout it at any age.