e he had never seen, in
one of his manifestations.

It promised more than it delivered, and it intimated more than it
said. Its theory was tedious and tenuous, bolstered with
undigested mountains of doubtful data. It left him unconvinced
that persons of genius (even if it could be agreed who or what
they were) had often the oddity of extra fingers and toes, or the
vestiges of them. And it puzzled him what possible difference it
could make.

Yet there were hints here of a Corsican who commonly kept a hand
hidden, or an earlier and more bizarre commander who wore always
a mailed glove, of another man with a glove between the two;
hints that the multiplex-adept, Leonardo himself, who sometimes
drew the hands of men and often those of monsters with six
fingers, may himself have had the touch. There was a comment of
Caesar, not conclusive, to the same effect. It is known that
Alexander had a minor peculiarity; it is not known what it was;
this man made it seem that this was it. And it was averred of
Gregory and Augustine, of Benedict and Albert and Acquinas. Yet a
man with a deformity could not enter the priesthood; if they had
it, it must have been in vestigial form.

There were cases for Charles Magnut and Mahmud, for Saladin the
Horseman and for Akhnaton the King; for Homer (a Seleuciad-Greek
statuette shows him with six fingers strumming an unidentified
instrument while reciting); for Pythagoras, for Buonarroti,
Santi, Theotokopolous, van Rijn, Robusti.

Zurbarin catalogued eight thousand names. He maintained that they
were geniuses. And that they were extradigitals.

Charles Vincent grinned and looked down at his misshapen or
double thumb.

"At least I am in good though monotonous company. But what in the
name of triple time is he driving at?"

And it was not long afterward that Vincent was examining
cuneiform tablets in the State Museum. These were a broken and
not continuous series on the theory of numbers, tolerably legible
to the now encyclopedic Charles Vincent. And the series read in
part:

"On the divergence of the basis itself and the confusion
caused--for it is five, or it is six, or ten or twelve, or sixty
or a hundred, or three hundred and sixty or the double hundred,
the thousand. The reason, not clearly understood by the people,
is that Six and the Dozen are first, and Sixty is a compromise in
condescending to the people. For the five, the ten are late, and
are no older than the people thems