My favorite science fiction short story from my childhood.



The Nine Billion Names of God

Arthur C. Clarke 1953


“This is a slightly unusual request,” said Dr. Wagner, with what he hoped was
commendable restraint. “As far as I know, it’s the first time anyone’s been asked to
supply a Tibetan monastery with an automatic sequence computer. I don’t wish to
be inquisitive, but I should hardly thought that your—ah—establishment had much
use for such a machine. Could you explain just what you intend to do with it?”

“Gladly,” replied the lama, readjusting his silk robe and carefully putting away
the slide rule he had been using for currency conversions. “Your Mark V computer
can carry out any routine mathematical operation involving up to ten digits. However,
for our work we are interested in letters, not numbers. As we wish you to
modify the output circuits, the machine will be printing words, not columns of
figures.”

“I don’t understand. . . ”

“This is a project on which we have been working for the last three centuries—
since the lamasery was founded, in fact. It is somewhat alien to your way of
thought, so I hope you will listen with an open mind while I explain it.”

“Naturally.”

“It is really quite simple. We have been compiling a list which shall contain all
the possible names of God.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“We have reason to believe,” continued the lama imperturbably, “that all such
names can be written with not more than nine letters in an alphabet we have devised.”

“And you have been doing this for three centuries?”

“Yes. We expected it would take us about fifteen thousand years to complete the
task.”

“Oh.” Dr. Wagner looked a little dazed. “Now I see why you wanted to hire one
of our machines. But exactly what is the purpose of this project?”

The lama hesitated for a fraction of a second, and Wagner wondered if he had
offended him. If so, there was no trace of annoyance in the reply.

“Call it ritual, if you like, but it’s a fundamental part of our belief. All the many names
of the Supreme Being—God, Jehovah, Allah, and so on— they are only manmade labels. There is a
philosophical problem of some difficulty here, which I do not propose to discuss, but somewhere
among all the possible combinations of letters, which can occur, are what one may call the real
names of God. By systematic permutation of letters, we have been trying to list them all.”

“I see. You’ve been starting at AAAAAAAAA.. . and working up to ZZZZZZZZZ.
. . ”

“Exactly—though we use a special alphabet of our own. Modifying the electromatic
typewriters to deal with this is, of course, trivial. A rather more interesting
problem is that of devising suitable circuits to eliminate ridiculous combinations.
For example, no letter must occur more than three times in succession.”

“Three? Surely you mean two.”

“Three is correct. I am afraid it would take too long to explain why, even if you
understood our language.”

“I’m sure it would,” said Wagner hastily. “Go on.”

“Luckily it will be a simple matter to adapt your automatic sequence computer
for this work, since once it has been programmed properly it will permute each
letter in turn and print the result. What would have taken us fifteen thousand years
it will be able to do in a thousand days.”

Dr. Wagner was scarcely conscious of the faint sounds from the Manhattan
streets far below. He was in a different world, a world of natural, not man-made,
mountains. High up in their remote aeries these monks had been patiently at work,
generation after generation, compiling their lists of meaningless words. Was there
any limit to the follies of mankind? Still, he must give no hint of his inner thoughts.
The customer was always right. . .

“There’s no doubt,” replied the doctor, “that we can modify the Mark V to print
lists of this nature. I’m much more worried about the problem of installation and
maintenance. Getting out to Tibet, in these days, is not going to be easy.”

“We can arrange that. The components are small enough to travel by air—that
is one reason why we chose your machine. If you can get them to India, we will
provide transport from there.”

“And you want to hire two of our engineers?”

“Yes, for the three months which the project should occupy.”

“I’ve no doubt that Personnel can manage that.” Dr. Wagner scribbled a note on
his desk pad. “There are just two other points—”
Before he could finish the sentence, the lama had produced a small slip of paper.

“This is my certified credit balance at the Asiatic Bank.”

“Thank you. It appears to be—ah—adequate. The second matter is so trivial that
I hesitate to mention it—but it’s surprising how often the obvious gets overlooked.
What source of electrical energy have you?”

“A diesel generator providing 50 kilowatts at 110 volts. It was installed about
five years ago and is quite reliable. It’s made life at the lamasery much more comfortable,
but of course it was really installed to provide power for the motors driving
the prayer wheels.”

“Of course,” echoed Dr. Wagner. “I should have thought of that.”

The view from the parapet was vertiginous, but in time one gets used to anything.
After three months George Hanley was not impressed by the two-thousand foot
swoop into the abyss or the remote checkerboard of Velds in the valley below.
He was leaning against the wind-smoothed stones and staring morosely at the distant
mountains whose names he had never bothered to discover.
This, thought George, was the craziest thing that had ever happened to him.
“Project Shangri-La,” some wit at the labs had christened it. For weeks now, Mark V
had been churning out acres of sheets covered with gibberish. Patiently, inexorably,
the computer had been rearranging letters in all their possible combinations, exhausting
each class before going on to the next. As the sheets had emerged from
the electromatic typewriters, the monks had carefully cut them up and pasted them
into enormous books. In another week, heaven be praised, they would have finished.
Just what obscure calculations had convinced the monks that they needn’t
bother to go on to words of ten, twenty, or a hundred letters, George didn’t know.
One of his recurring nightmares was that there would be some change of plan and
that the High Lama (whom they’d naturally called Sam Jaffe, though he didn’t look
a bit like him) would suddenly announce that the project would be extended to
approximately 2060 A.D. They were quite capable of it.

George heard the heavy wooden door slam in the wind as Chuck came out onto
the parapet beside him. As usual, Chuck was smoking one of the cigars that made
him so popular with the monks—who, it seemed, were quite willing to embrace all
the minor and most of the major pleasures of life. That was one thing in their favor:
they might be crazy, but they weren’t bluenoses. Those frequent trips they took
down to the village, for instance. . . ” “Listen, George,” said Chuck urgently. “I’ve
learned something that means trouble.”

“What’s wrong? Isn’t the machine behaving?” That was the worst contingency
George could imagine. It might delay his return, than which nothing could be more
horrible. The way he felt now, even the sight of a TV commercial would seem like
manna from heaven. At least it would be some link from home.

“No—it’s nothing like that.” Chuck settled himself on the parapet, which was
unusual, because normally he was scared of the drop.

“I’ve just found out what all this is about.”

“What d’ya mean—I thought we knew.”

“Sure—we know what the monks are trying to do. But we didn’t know why. It’s
the craziest thing –”

“Tell me something new,” growled George.

“. . . but old Sam’s just come clean with me. You know the way he drops in every
afternoon to watch the sheets roll out. Well, this time he seemed rather excited, or
at least as near as he’ll ever get to it. When I told him we were on the last cycle he
asked me, in that cute English accent of his, if I’d ever wondered what they were
trying to do. I said, ‘Sure’—and he told me.”

“Go on, I’ll buy it.”

“Well, they believe that when they have listed all His names—and they reckon
that there are about nine billion of them—God’s purpose will have been achieved.
The human race will have finished what it was created to do, and there won’t be
any point in carrying on. Indeed, the very idea is something like blasphemy.”

“Then what do they expect us to do? Commit suicide?”

“There’s no need for that. When the list’s completed, God steps in and simply
winds things up. . . bingo!”

“Oh, I get it. When we finish our job, it will be the end of the world.”
Chuck gave a nervous little laugh.

“That’s just what I said to Sam. And do you know what happened? He looked
at me in a very queer way, like I’d been stupid in class, and said, ‘It’s nothing as
trivial as that’.”

George thought this over for a moment.
“That’s what I call taking the Wide View,” he said presently.
“But what d’ya suppose we should do about it? I don’t see that it makes the
slightest difference to us. After all, we already knew that they were crazy.”

“Yes— but don’t you see what may happen? When the list’s complete and the
Last Trump doesn’t blow— or whatever it is that they expect— we may get the blame.
It’s our machine they’ve been using. I don’t like the situation one little bit.”

“I see,” said George slowly. “You’ve got a point there. But this sort of thing’s
happened here before, you know. When I was a kid down in Louisiana we had a
crackpot preacher who said the world was going to end next Sunday. Hundreds
of people believed him— even sold their homes. Yet nothing happened; they didn’t
turn nasty, as you’d expect. They just decided that he’d made a mistake in his
calculations and went right on believing. I guess some of them still do.”

“Well, this isn’t Louisiana, in case you hadn’t noticed. There are just two of us
and hundreds of these monks. I like them, and I’ll be sorry for old Sam when his
lifework backfires on him. But all the same, I wish I was somewhere else.”

“I’ve been wishing that for weeks. But there’s nothing we can do until the contract’s
finished and the transport arrives to fly us out.”

“Of course,” said Chuck thoughtfully, “we could always try a bit of sabotage.”

“Like hell we could! That would make things worse.”

“Not the way I meant. Look at it like this. The machine will finish its run four
days from now, on the present twenty-hours-a-day basis. The transport calls in a
week. O.K., then all we need to do is to find something that wants replacing during
one of the overhaul periods—something that will hold up the works for a couple of
days. We’ll fix it, of course, but not too quickly. If we time matters properly, we can
be down at the airfield when the last name pops out of the register. They won’t be
able to catch us then.”

“I don’t like it,” said George. “It will be the first time I ever walked out on a job.
Besides, it would make them suspicious. No, I’ll sit tight and take what comes.”

“I still don’t like it,” he said seven days later, as the tough little mountain ponies
carried them down the winding road. “And don’t you think I’m running away because
I’m afraid. I’m just sorry for those poor old guys up there, and I don’t want to
be around when they find what suckers they’ve been. Wonder how Sam will take
it?”

“It’s funny,” replied Chuck, “but when I said goodbye I got the idea he knew we
were walking out on him—and that he didn’t care because he knew the machine
was running smoothly and that the job would soon be finished. After that—well, of
course, for him there just isn’t any After That. . . ”

George turned in his saddle and stared back up the mountain road. This was
the last place from which one could get a clear view of the lamasery. The squat,
angular buildings were silhouetted against the afterglow of the sunset; here and
there lights gleamed like portholes in the sides of an ocean liner. Electric lights, of
course, sharing the same circuit as the Mark V. How much longer would they share
it? wondered George. Would the monks smash up the computer in their rage and
disappointment? Or would they just sit down quietly and begin their calculations
all over again?
He knew exactly what was happening up on the mountain at this very moment.
The High Lama and his assistants would be sitting in their silk robes, inspecting the
sheets as the junior monks carried them away from the typewriters and pasted
them into the great volumes. No one would be saying anything. The only sound
would be the incessant patter, the never-ending rainstorm, of the keys hitting the
paper, for the Mark V itself was utterly silent as it flashed through its thousands of
calculations a second. Three months of this, thought George, was enough to start
anyone climbing up the wall.

“There she is!” called Chuck, pointing down into the valley. “Ain’t she beautiful!”

She certainly was, thought George. The battered old DC-3 lay at the end of the
runway like a tiny silver cross. In two hours she would be bearing them away to
freedom and sanity. It was a thought worth savoring like a fine liqueur. George let
it roll around in his mind as the pony trudged patiently down the slope.
The swift night of the high Himalayas was now almost upon them. Fortunately
the road was very good, as roads went in this region, and they were both carrying
torches. There was not the slightest danger, only a certain discomfort from the bitter
cold. The sky overhead was perfectly clear and ablaze with the familiar, friendly
stars. At least there would be no risk, thought George, of the pilot being unable to
take off because of weather conditions. That had been his only remaining worry.
He began to sing but gave it up after a while. This vast arena of mountains, gleaming
like whitely hooded ghosts on every side, did not encourage such ebullience.
Presently George glanced at his watch.

“Should be there in an hour,” he called back over his shoulder to Chuck. Then
he added, in an afterthought, “Wonder if the computer’s finished its run? It was due
about now.”

Chuck didn’t reply, so George swung round in his saddle. He could just see
Chuck’s face, a white oval turned toward the sky.

“Look,” whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is always
a last time for everything.)

Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: parabellum,

Awesome story.

Ah yes. This one and another which made significant impressions on me as a preteen.

The other was also by Clarke published in 1958. "A Slight Case of Sunstroke" (also called "The Stroke of the Sun"), a short story in which a diabolical card stunt was used to kill an unpopular soccer referee. In the story, a large number of hostile spectators aim reflective program covers at the unfortunate umpire, who collapses and dies from the concentrated solar energy focused where he stood.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: bald1,

Clarke was ever a master of the short story. For a novel, "Childhood's End" was always at the top of my list....

I remember it well. Good story.

Here is a more complete listing of Arthur C. Clarke's short stories:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..._by_Arthur_C._Clarke

Robert Heinlein also wrote some good short stories. Two he wrote were "All you Zombies" and "And he Built a Crooked House".

A more complete list of his short stories is at:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...y_Robert_A._Heinlein

I actually took a class on science fiction literature years ago. The book was a lot of short stories. I've been looking for it in all my stuff from numerous moves over the years.

I remember reading that a long time ago and thinking that the story was impressive but illogical, or inconsistent, with Buddhist doctrine. Maybe Mr Clarke hit upon an inverse truth. Not the extinction of the stars but of the self. The Sufies advocate the for the rememberance of G-d through Dhikr or the Wazifha. Hindus call it the mantra. A holy sound. Thusly one remembers with every breath. Ramakrishna said ' The salt doll dissolves in the ocean'.

A few books of possible interest. The Cloud of Unknowing; Journey to the Lord of Power; Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam.

Also got interested in the math of 'soundology'. Phenomes, very interesting. Here is an interactive chart of human speech. http://www.ipachart.com

This message has been edited. Last edited by: mr kablammo,

I used to gobble up sci fi stories as a kid.Unfortunately, as a young kid, a lot went over my head.

I remember this story from the title. I don't remember if I caught the meaning of the last sentence.

I tended to go with the more sci- leaning of Clarke's works, such as Earthlight, and The Exploration of Space.

That was great.

Great story. A single typo threw me for a loop, seemingly adding another character out of nowhere in the third act. After re-reading and realizing it was just a typo I'm all good now

Great story. I've never read it before. I wish that I'd have been introduced to sci fi short stories as a boy. It seems sword and sorcery was the big thing during that time in my life and that just turned me off. I suppose it was the difference between science and magic. Even imaginary science was palatable when compared to magic.

There were a few good sorcery fantasy stories back then but most was pretty weak. I did like "What Good is a Glass Dagger" I believe that was Larry Niven. Strangely, I've never read his sci fi stuff.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: mark123,

quote:

Originally posted by Chuck Perry:
Great story. A single typo threw me for a loop, seemingly adding another character out of nowhere in the third act. After re-reading and realizing it was just a typo I'm all good now

Please point out the typo, Chuck, so I can correct it. I scanned the story but I don't see it.

quote:

Originally posted by parabellum:

quote:

Originally posted by Chuck Perry:
Great story. A single typo threw me for a loop, seemingly adding another character out of nowhere in the third act. After re-reading and realizing it was just a typo I'm all good now

Please point out the typo, Chuck, so I can correct it. I scanned the story but I don't see it.

“I still don’t like it,” she said seven days later, as the tough little mountain ponies
carried them down the winding road. “And don’t you think I’m running away because
I’m afraid. I’m just sorry for those poor old guys up there, and I don’t want to
be around when they find what suckers they’ve been. Wonder how Sam will take
it?”

Thank you - I thoroughly enjoyed this!

I think the typo is where the engineers are heading down to the plane, and the pronoun "she" is used where "he" appears to be have been intended.

Edited to add: Member f2 just above noted it a minute ahead of me!

Thank you

f2 got it, thanks!

When they were describing the lamasery up in the cliffs, it made me think of school in the Himalayas in Black Narcissus.

Clarke is one of my very favorites. He has a simple elegance to his style that I have not found with any other writer.

I really enjoyed this story, and the Asimov one in the other post. I read a good bit of sci fi, but I've never read either of these two authors. Is there a good starting point or reading order for either author?

I recall reading that as a kid, I was a real sci-fi junkie then. Ray Bradbury’s short stories were some of my favorites too.