The Nine Billion Names of God, Adapted For Intermediate Level

By Arthur C. Clarke, 1953

Level: Intermediate and up

“This is a somewhat unusual request,” said Dr. Wagner, trying to be as polite as he could. “As far as I know, it’s the first time anyone’s been asked to supply a Tibetan monastery with a computer. I should have thought that your — ah — institution hadn’t much use for such a machine. Could you explain just what you want to do with it?”

“Of course,” replied the head monk. “Your super computer can carry out any mathematical operation involving up to ten numbers. However, for our work we are interested in letters, not numbers. As we wish you to change the machine so that it prints words, not numbers.”

“I don’t quite understand....”

“This is a project on which we have been working for the last three hundred years — since the monastery was built, in fact. It is somewhat strange 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 making a list which will contain all the possible names of God.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“We believe,” continued the head monk undisturbed, “that all such names can be written with not more than nine letters in an alphabet we have created.”

“And you have been doing this for three hundred years?”

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

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

The monk paused for a second, and Wagner wondered if he had upset him. If so, there was no sign of annoyance in the reply.

“Call it ritual, if you like, but it’s an important part of our belief system. All the many names of the Creator — God, Jehovah, Allah, and so on — they are only human-made names. There is a philosophical problem of some difficulty here, which we do not need to discuss, but somewhere among all the possible combinations of letters that can occur are what one may call the real names of God. By systematic combination of letters, we have been trying to list them all.”

“I see. You’ve been starting at A and working up to Z....”

“Exactly — though we use a special alphabet of our own. Changing the printers to deal with this is, of course, a small matter. A rather more interesting problem is that of creating proper programs to eliminate unreasonable combinations. For example, no letter must come more than three times in a row.”

“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 quickly. “Go on.”

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

Dr. Wagner was hardly aware of the sounds from the Manhattan streets far below. He was in a different world, a world of natural, not man-made, mountains. High up in the mountains of Tibet, these monks had been patiently at work, for years and years, collecting their lists of meaningless words. Was there any limit to the foolishness of mankind? Still, he must not show his inner thoughts. The customer was always right....

“There’s no doubt,” replied the doctor, “that we can change the Mark V to print lists of this kind. 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 parts 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 that the project should take.”

Dr. Wagner made a note on his desk pad. “There are just two other points —”

Before he could finish the sentence the monk had taken out a small piece of paper.

“This is my account at the Asia Bank.”

“Thank you. It seems to be — ah — enough. The second matter is so small that I feel I shouldn’t mention it — but it’s important to discuss it. What source of electrical energy have you?”

“A gas generator. It was installed about five years ago and works quite well. It’s made life at the monastery much more comfortable.”

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

---

The view from the walls of the monastery made one feel that they were on top of the world, but in time one gets used to anything. After three months, George Hanley was not surprised by the two-thousand-foot drop into nothingness or the small fields in the valley below. He was leaning against the stones and staring unpleasantly at the far mountains whose names he had never cared to learn.

This, thought George, was the craziest thing that had ever happened to him. “Project Shangri-La,” some funny guy back at the labs had named it. For weeks now the Mark V had been printing out many sheets covered with nonsense. Patiently, the computer had been combining letters in all their possible combinations, finishing each class before going on to the next. As the sheets had come from the printers, the monks had carefully cut them up and pasted them into huge books.

In another week, thank God, they would have finished. Just what strange calculations had convinced the monks that they needn’t care to go on to words of ten, twenty, or a hundred letters, George didn’t know. One of his nightmares was that there would be some change of plan, and that the head monk would suddenly announce that the project would be extended to approximately one hundred years from now.

George heard the heavy wooden door close loudly in the wind as Chuck came out onto the walls 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 accept 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 extremely strict. Those regular trips they took down to the village, for example...

“Listen, George,” said Chuck. “I’ve learned something that means trouble.”

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

“No — it’s nothing like that.” Chuck rested himself on the edge of the wall, which was unusual because normally he was scared of the drop. “I’ve just found what all this is about.”

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

“Go on.”

“Well, they believe that when they have listed all the names — and they think that there are about nine billion of them — God’s purpose will be achieved. The human race will have finished what it was created to do, and there won’t be any point in continuing...”

“Then what do they expect us to do? Kill ourselves?”

“There’s no need for that. When the list’s completed, God steps in and simply turns everything off!”

“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 strange way, like I’d been stupid in class, and said, ’It’s nothing as light as that.’ ”

George thought this over a moment.

“That’s what I call taking the Wide View,” he said presently. “But what do you suppose we should do about it? I don’t see that it makes any 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 result doesn’t happen— or whatever it is 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 before, you know. When I was a kid in my home state of Louisiana, we had a crazy minister who once said the world was going to end next Sunday. Hundreds of people believed him — they even sold their homes. Yet when nothing happened, they didn’t get angry, as you’d expect. They just decided that he’d made a mistake in his calculations and continued 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 the old monk when his lifework turns out to be wrong. 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 little trick.”

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

“Look at it like this. The machine will finish its work four days from now, on the present twenty-hours-a-day basis. The transport arrives in a week. O.K. — then all we need to do is to find something that needs replacing during one of the maintenance 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 comes out. 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 mistrustful. No, I’ll stay and take what comes.”

---

"I still don’t like it,” he said, seven days later, as the tough little mountain horses carried them down the 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 fools they’ve been. I wonder how the head monk will take it?” “It’s funny,” replied Chuck, “but when I said goodbye I got the idea he knew we were leaving — and that he didn’t care because he knew the machine was running well and that the job would soon be finished. After that — well, of course, for him there just isn’t any after that....”

George turned and looked back up the mountain road. This was the last place from which one could get a clear view of the monastery. The short, square buildings were against the sky after sunset: here and there, lights shined from the windows of the buildings. Electric lights, of course, sharing the same wires as the Mark V. How much longer would they share it? wondered George. Would the monks break up the computer in their anger 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 head monk and his assistants would be sitting in their robes, inspecting the sheets as the junior monks carried them away from the printers and pasted them into the great books. No one would be saying anything. The only sound would be the never-ending sound of printers, for the Mark V itself was totally silent as it flashed through its thousands of calculations a second. Three months of this, thought George, was enough to make anyone crazy.“There she is!” called Chuck, pointing down into the valley. “Isn’t she beautiful!”

She certainly was, thought George. The old DC3 airplane was there like a small silver cross. In two hours she would be taking them away to freedom. It was a thought to enjoy like a fine wine. George thought about it as the horse walked slowly and patiently down the mountain.

The night of the high mountains of Tibet was now almost upon them. Luckily, the road was very good, as roads went in that region, and they were both carrying lights. There was not the smallest danger, only a certain discomfort from the great cold. The sky overhead was perfectly clear, and burning with the familiar, friendly stars. At least there would be no risk, thought George, that the pilot would be unable to fly because of weather conditions. That had been his only last worry.

He began to sing, but stopped after a while. The mountains, shinning like white ghosts on every side, did not bring much joy. Shortly George looked at his watch.

“Should be there in an hour,” he called back over his shoulder to Chuck. Then he added, “I wonder if the computer’s finished its run. It about time now.”

Chuck didn’t reply, so George turned around. He could just see Chuck’s face, turned toward the sky.

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

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

Vocabulary:  To help learners fully understand the audio and transcript, most vocabulary that might be unknown for this lesson’s level is provided. Vocab in bold is more useful for learners at the lesson’s target level. Try to choose 8 to 10 new words to learn from the story (in general, it’s best to try to learn no more than 8-10 new words a day).

Definitions are written with the help of various sources including  Merriam-Webster’s Learner’s Dictionary

Tibet: A mountainous region in western china.

Monastery: a place where monks live and work together.

Robe: a long, loose piece of clothing that is worn on top of other clothes to show that someone has a high rank or an important job.

Institution: an established organization.

Monk: a member of a religious community of men who usually promise to remain poor, unmarried, and separated from the rest of society.

Alphabet: the letters of a language arranged in their usual order.

Upset: angry or unhappy.

Ritual: a formal ceremony or series of acts that is always performed in the same way.

Jehovah, Allah: names of God.

Philosophical: relating to the study of ideas about knowledge, truth, the nature and meaning of life, etc.

Combinations: a result or product of combining two or more things or people; to cause (two or more things) to be together or to work together.

To occur: to happen.

To eliminate: to remove (something that is not wanted or needed): to get rid of (something).

To adapt: to change (something) so that it functions better or is better suited for a purpose.

Patient: able to remain calm and not become annoyed when waiting for a long time or when dealing with problems or difficult people.

Installation: the act or process of making a machine, a service, etc., ready to be used in a certain place: the act of installing something.

Maintenance: the act of keeping property or equipment in good condition by making repairs, correcting problems, etc.

To make a note: to make a a short piece of writing that is used to help someone remember something.

Pad: a set of paper sheets for writing or drawing that are glued or fastened at one edge.

Generator: a machine that produces electricity.

Drop: the distance from a higher to a lower level.

To lean: to rest on or against something or someone for support.

Shangri la: a fictional, mythical place located somewhere in Tibet.

Nonsense: words or ideas that are foolish or untrue.

Sheet: a usually rectangular piece of paper.

To paste: to stick (something) to or onto something by using paste.

To convince: to cause (someone) to believe that something is true.

To extend: to become longer or to be able to become longer.

Delay: a situation in which something happens later than it should.

Edge: the line or part where an object or area begins or ends.

To come clean with someone: to be totally honest with someone; not to hide anything.

Purpose: the reason why something is done or used: the aim or intention of something; the meaning.

Wide: extending a great distance from one side to the other: not narrow.

Blame: to say or think that a person or thing is responsible for something bad that has happened.

Trick: an action that is meant to deceive someone.

Disappointment: The state of feeling sad, unhappy, or displeased because something was not as good as expected or because something you hoped for or expected did not happen.

Overhead: above someone's head: in the sky or space above someone.

To whisper: to speak very softly or quietly.

To go out: to stop working: especially, to stop shining or burning.

Discussion Questions:

1. What happens at the end of the story?

2. Do you think that advanced computers could help us to understand the universe?

3. Does the universe have a purpose?

4. What’s the purpose of life?
5. What does this story say about religion and science?