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particular order. Just lots of numbers banging about before his eyes. He’d have to add them quickly (hard for him because he didn’t add numbers well). For the most part, no discernible pattern would emerge. From the start, the pace of it was frantic, like entering into some barely contained madness, the numbers racketing wildly about inside his head. At that point, it would become compulsive and nonselective. He would have to add every group of numbers that came within his purview — not only license plates, but route numbers, numbers glimpsed on passing buildings, and those appearing on roadside billboards. It became a captivity from which he could not escape. A kind of panic commenced. Bombarded with unending numbers, more and more numbers crammed into an ever-decreasing space, his brain would decline to program any more. Yet, he’d be unable to stop. The numbers would simply lunge at him and he would have to add them. It went on and on like that for miles, until mental stupefaction and simple exhaustion brought it to a halt.
    At that point, as surely as if a switch were flicked, something inside him would turn off and he would enter a different, a higher plane of consciousness … a place of utter calm. The numbers would still be there, but slowed exquisitely, like tiny molecules falling through heavy liquid, and he was suddenly aware of some preternaturally heightened sense within himself. The sensation was that of the keenest excitation, not entirely unlike sex.
    In the cascade of numbers falling slowly before his eyes he could see patterns and combinations repeating themselves with startling frequency. But not only this: he could take these sequences and project them out into near infinity. There were, of course, the simple ones like 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 — demonstrating the power of 2; then mindbendingly complex ones like 1, 1, 2, 5, 14, 38, 120, 353 — representing the number of different ways of folding ever-longer strips of postage stamps. There were patterns that consisted of numbers in which each was the sum of the two previous numbers, such as 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55. And more complex variations based on the three, or sometimes four, previous numbers. There were series in which one had to double the last term and then add the second to last, and there were beautifully simple prime numbers that were one less than a power of 2, such as 3, 7, 31, etc.
    Of course he knew none of these patterns and was unaware that theoretical mathematicians, working with sophisticated computers, had been tracking them for years. He had no training in any of this, and had he been told that men, learned men, devoted whole lifetimes to the study of such things, he would have been baffled and not a little amused. Ironically, in the realm of simple arithmetic, he was nearly illiterate, barely able to add a column of numbers. His peculiar facility was a form of highly developed idiot savantism — although Warren Mars was by no means an idiot. Quite the contrary. On certain levels, he was actually a very clever fellow.
    Given the first three or four digits on a typical license plate, say, for example, 467, he would automatically move that out into 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 16, 17, cracking the inherent code to it at once. Driving along at 55 miles per hour, a 125 would instantly become 12, 29, 70, 169, 408, 985, and so on out into a gray, colorless void where he was flying free.
    It was the passion of a madman, with a certain element of whimsy. But at the completion of the exercise, when he would appear to come back to himself, the car still nosing nicely along at 55 mph, he would be scarcely aware that he was limp and exhausted, and that he was bathed in a cold, clammy sweat from head to toe.
    He was not aware of what sort of an ordeal he’d been through. He had no idea how his mind had been stretched by the ruthless tyranny of these numbers. For him it was all simply an amusing game at which he was incontestably the unqualified