What’s to Be Afraid of in a Number?

A letter crossed my desk years ago from a fellow who’d written a book exposing odd cyclical correlations. The price of pig iron in China, he believed, ran in cycles comparable to sow bellies in Iowa. I didn’t buy his book, but the coincidences kept coming to my attention. For example, Jack Kennedy had a secretary named Nixon and Richard Nixon had a secretary named—you guessed it. I often wondered whether there might be cycles that would uncover mysteries. Numerology, astrology and “sympathetic magic” fall into this class of happenstance. So does a great deal of Old Testament religion, which gave rise to a gaggle of writers describing 666 as the sign of the devil. I wish life were that easy and such shortcuts to interpretations were available.

All this leads to my short story titled “Number Eleven,” which editor Don Webb has published at Bewildering Stories. You can read it at http://www.bewilderingstories.com/issue272/number_eleven.html. But, please, don’t write or call to tell me that numerology really does explain the innermost secrets of our existence!