Compleat Crow

2

1

2

1

9

1

2

=18 and 1 + 8 = Nine,

Or: 18 = Triple Six.

Triple six! The number of the Beast in Revelations!Crow's head suddenly reeled. Dimly, out of some for-gotten corner of his mind, he heard an echoing voice say, 'His numbers are most propitious . . . propitious ... propitious ...' And when he tried to tie that voice down it wriggled free, saying, 'Not worth it . . . just a dream... unimportant . . . utterly unimportant . .

He shook himself, threw down his pen — then snatched it back up. Now Crow glared at the familiar room about him as a man suddenly roused from nightmare. 'It is important!' he cried. 'Damned important!'

But of course there was no one to hear him.

Later, fortified with coffee and determined to carry on, he used the Hebrew system to discover his number, in which the letters of the alphabet stand for numbers and a name's total equals the total of the man. Since this system made no use of the 9, he might reasonably expect a different sort of answer. But this was his result: