Summary

Beings from another dimension have sent a living plastic "robot" to Earth to find the "greatest mathematical mind in the Solar System," and get that person to open a vault on Mars, containing one of the race of its creators. It is able to imitate any form of matter, and to tap the thoughts of the being it duplicates. The creature kills its way to one man, Jim Brender, who it believes is the man. The creature, in the form of another man, reveals that the Martian vault was built by the Ancient Martians, made up of an 'ultimate metal'. The vault is known as the "Tower of the Beast", located in a buried Martian city. It says that the key to opening it is 'factoring the ultimate prime number

Prime number

A prime number is a natural number greater than 1 that has no positive divisors other than 1 and itself. A natural number greater than 1 that is not a prime number is called a composite number. For example 5 is prime, as only 1 and 5 divide it, whereas 6 is composite, since it has the divisors 2...

'.

Brender does not believe the tale and the creature causes a stock market crash

Stock market crash

A stock market crash is a sudden dramatic decline of stock prices across a significant cross-section of a stock market, resulting in a significant loss of paper wealth. Crashes are driven by panic as much as by underlying economic factors...

, bankrupting Brender to achieve its aim. Brender is forced by his circumstances to take a job as a space pilot

Space Pilot

Space Pilot is a shoot 'em up based on aircraft combat for the Commodore 64, released in 1984 by Kingsoft . The game takes place in the sky, which scrolls freely in eight directions, without any restrictions or obstacles whatsoever. The player controls a fighter airplane, which is capable of flying...

. The creature accompanies him to Mars, but is found out. He shoots it and weakens it, allowing its masters to take control of it. They explain that the "Beast" imprisoned in the vault is actually a scientist of their kind, Kalorn, who discovered how to bridge their two spaces. They intend to use the knowledge of Kalorn to conquer all spaces.

To do this they need to open the lock, a time lock. They get Brender to solve the combination, which is both simple and complex. However, releasing the lock has catastrophic consequences for Kalorn: exposed to the different timeflow of our universe (billions of times faster), Kalorn ages into dust when the vault is opened.

The opening of the vault also destroys the robot. Breder returns to Earth again wealthy, the finder and thereby partial owner of the contents of the buried city, worth billions.

Is there really an "ultimate prime number"?

No. The concept of an ultimate prime number is mathematically false. Euclid provided the first proof that there is an infinitude of prime numbers. Given any finite number, no matter how large, if we multiply all the primes below that number and then add 1 to the product, the resulting number will be either (1) a prime larger than the original given number, or (2) the product of primes all of which must be larger than the original given number. For example, if the given number is 10, the primes up to that number are 2, 3, 5, and 7; the product of these primes is 210; and adding 1 to this product gives us 211, which is, itself, a prime number larger than the original given number. Thus, there can be no such thing as an "ultimate prime number."

However, it should be pointed out that this "ultimate prime number" is in the fictional mathematics of the ancient martians, whose concept of math was radically different from our own.

Publication history

The story was originally published in Astounding

Analog Science Fiction and Fact

Analog Science Fiction and Fact is an American science fiction magazine. As of 2011, it is the longest running continuously published magazine of that genre...

 (1940) and has been published in several collections and anthologies, such as Monsters

Monsters (collection)

-Monsters:Monsters is a collection of 8 Science Fiction short stories written by A.E. van Vogt; during 1940 and 1950, and assembled by Forrest J. Ackerman in 1965. This compilation of short stories, describe unknown creatures that hanker for men's blood, and seek their destruction.-Short...

, The Other Side of the Moon

The Other Side of the Moon (anthology)

The Other Side of the Moon is an anthology of science fiction stories edited by August Derleth. It was first published by Pellegrini & Cudahy in 1949...

 and Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 2 (1940)

Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 2 (1940)

Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 2 is the second volume of Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories, which is a series of short story collections, edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg, which attempts to list the great science fiction stories from the Golden Age of Science...

.

External links

• Vault of the Beast at MathFiction.