Now when his parents had company, they asked Lester to get into his dog suit and fool everybody. He imitated a dog’s nyeh-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh so that grown-up ladies would clap their hands and exclaim, “Oh, listen! He’s trying to talk.” He frisked and romped and they rubbed his ears. Then he would unzip his dog suit and step out of it, and everyone would be very surprised.
He liked his dog suit so much that he no longer studied all the time. “Lester is more of a normal boy now,” said his mother sadly. He took to putting on his dog suit after school and going out to play with the kids in the park. He chased balls or sticks for them. Sometimes he played tag or ran around the bases or wrestled. It was a lot of fun for Lester, who had never belonged to a group before. The kids thought he was a smart dog and petted him all the time.
One day in the park Lester heard some kids talking about him.
“Hey, this mutt doesn’t belong to nobody,” said one.
“What do you want, a reward?” his companion answered.
“Nah, I’m going to take him home.”
Lester thought it would be great fun to surprise the kid and his family when they took him home, so he went along. He played all the way, pretending he saw cats and things, and when he got to the kid’s slum-clearance project, it was someplace he had never seen before. He was lost.
The kid took him upstairs and into a kitchen. “Hey, Ma,” he said. “I brought home a mutt.”
“You get that frigging mutt out of here before I cut you open,” said the kid’s mother absentmindedly. Lester slunk off into another room with his tail between his legs. In the other room there was a man drinking out of a bottle who kicked Lester in the side.
Lester went out into the hall. He decided he didn’t like it here and that he ought to get out of his dog suit.
But the zipper was stuck!
He tried and tried, but he couldn’t make it budge. What could he do? Maybe if he went home his Uncle Fred could take him back to the factory. Anyway his mother could always call the fire department. But he didn’t know how to get home. He would have to ask the kid and his mother for directions.
He padded back to the kitchen. He laughed to himself as he thought how surprised they would be to hear him talk! As he came into the room he heard the mother say, “Okay, okay, okay. But he’s got to eat garbage and nothing but garbage.”
He said, “I realize this will come as a shock to you, but I am not a dog at all. I am a boy named Lester and I live at 2331 Hummingbird Crescent and I am entering the fifth grade next autumn. Uncle Fred gave me this dog suit but the zipper is unfortunately stuck. May I inquire directions to my house? I want to see my mother and father again. 
The mother clapped her hands together and said, “Listen, he’s trying to talk!”
<<CONTENTS>>
* * * *
Mr. Kagan will say no more about himself than that he is a graduate student of mathematics. I can add only that, in his first year of publication, two of his stories were selected for annual “Best” collections.
What follows is what I did persuade him to say something about. If your math, like mine, extends only to a vague familiarity with words like vector, tensor, set, and Riemann space, Mr. K’s glossary should help you determine where the mathematical facts leave off, and the fun-and-fantasy begins.
Metamathematics: Study of the underlying structure of math.
Nonosecond = one billioneth of a second.
Gogoclass="underline" 10100 (10 with a hundred zero’s.)
Googolplex: (10100)100
Degenerate: (in math) a trivial or simple case—a point is a degenerate circle.
Isomorph(ism): A correspondence between two math systems which preserves structure.
Hausdorf Space: A “mathematical space” where any two points can be separated (“housed-off”).
Communitivity: The mathematical condition: a x b = b x a
Set: A collection or bunch
Class: A set
Group: A mathematical structure: e.g., the integers with addition as the operation.
Ring: A group with multiplication defined as a second operation.
Field: A group under addition and under multiplication, too.
Composing: Doing in a row: e.g., doing one operation, then a second, then a third.
Transformation: mapping a math structure from one place to another.
Orthogonal Transform: A transform that preserves lengths.
Inner Product Transform: A transform that preserves “inner-product.”
Degenerate Transform: A transform that doesn’t preserve anything in particular.
Well-Ordering Principle: Any collection of sets of a set can be ordered (but in a sequence).
Axiom of Zemelo: Assuming the well ordering principle.
Bolzano Weirstrauss Points: “Limit Points” of sequences—the values certain sequences of numbers approach infinitely closely.
THE MATHENAUTS
Norman Kagan
It happened on my fifth trip into the spaces, and the first ever made under the private-enterprise acts. It took a long time to get the P.E.A. through Congress for mathenautics, but the precedents went all the way back to the Telstar satellite a hundred years ago, and most of the concepts are in books anyone can buy, though not so readily understand. Besides, it didn’t matter if BC-flight was made public or not. All mathenauts are crazy. Everybody knows that.
Take our crew. Johnny Pearl took a pin along whenever he went baby-sitting for the grad students at Berkeley, and three months later the mothers invariably found out they were pregnant again. And Pearl was our physicist.
Then there was Goldwasser. Ed Goldwasser always sits in those pan-on-a-post cigarette holders when we’re in New York, and if you ask him, he grumbles; “Well, its an ash tray, ain’t it?” A punster and a pataphysicist. I would never have chosen him to go, except that he and I got the idea together.
Ted Anderson was our metamathematician. He’s about half a nonosecond behind Ephraim Cohen (the co-inventor of BC-flight) and has about six nervous breakdowns a month trying to pass him. But he’s got the best practical knowledge of the BC-drive outside Princeton—if practical knowledge means anything with respect to a pure mathematical abstraction.
And me—topologist. A topologist is a man who can’t tell a doughnut from a cup of coffee. (I’ll explain that some other time.) Seriously, I specialize in some of the more abstruse properties of geometric structures. “Did Galois discover that theorem before or after he died?” is a sample of my conversation.
Sure, mathenauts are mathenuts. But as we found out, not quite mathenutty enough.
The ship, the Albrecht Dold, was a twelve-googol scout that Ed Goldwasser and I’d picked up cheap from the N.Y.U. Courant Institute. She wasn’t the Princeton I.A.S. Von-Neumann, with googolplex coils and a chapter of the D.A.R., and she wasn’t one of those new toys you’ve been seeing for a rich man and his grandmother. Her coils were DNA molecules, and the psychosomatics were straight from the Brill Institute at Harvard. A sweet ship. For psychic ecology we’d gotten a bunch of kids from the Bronx College of the New York City University, commonsense types—business majors, engineers, pre-meds. But kids.