Landen and I were staring at the number. The thing was, now that he mentioned it, he was right—the number was prime and was even.

“That’s incredible,” I murmured. “Does anyone else know about this?”

He folded up the paper and put it back in his pocket. “No. I’m still studying the implications, since it renders two of Euclid’s axioms entirely fallacious. Much of the planet’s mathematics will have to be completely restructured.”

“Then you’re good? Really good?” asked Landen.

“Good? I’m the best. Euclidean, Riemannian, polytrop, differential, twenty-seven-dimension mapping, Advanced Nextian geometry and even Expectation-Influenced Probability. Tuesday did the groundwork, but I took it further.”

Landen and I exchanged glances. This sounded promising.

“What about a value for Uc?” I asked.

“Ah!” he said with a smile. “The ever-illusive Unentanglement Constant. I’ve been doing some initial work that looks promising, but I was distracted by the need to expand and catalog my collection of pornographic magazines.”

“How long would it take?” asked Landen.

“Alphabetically, about a week. If I do it by my favorites, then a lot longer.”

“Not the porn, the Unentanglement Constant.”

“Oh. A workable solution to Uc? About a month.”

Landen and I got to our feet.

“We don’t have a month. We don’t even have twenty-four hours. Come with us if you want to work with Tuesday.”

After some hunting we found Tuesday at the Anti-Smite stand, where she was chatting to some Americans who were keen on buying the system, due to one or two smitings that they’d so far managed to disguise as “another Barning Man that got out of hand.”

“Gavin?” said Tuesday, looking at him and then us in a quizzical manner. “What’s going on?”

I quickly explained what Gavin had told us and how he might possibly have the answer to the Uc. Tuesday looked doubtful.

“Listen,” she said, “only six people on the planet claim to understand Madeupion Quantum Unentanglement Theory, and five of them are mistaken.”

“Oh, yeah?” said Gavin. “It’s between six point four and six point six quintillionths of a second, right?”

“I never had it that accurate,” she replied, looking at him suspiciously, “and I’ve been working on the problem for two years.”

“Yes, but you’re a donkey,” remarked Gavin. “Look here, it’s obvious.”