Achilles: What about you, Mr. Sloth?
Sloth: I admit, I bought one, just to humor old Crab.
Crab: And when the winning number was announced, I found, to my
amazement, that I'd won the lottery!
Achilles: Fantastic! I've never known anyone who won anything in a lot-
tery before!
Crab: I was flabbergasted at my good fortune.
Sloth: Don't you have something else to tell us about that lottery, Crab?
Crab: Oh, nothing much. It's just that my ticket number was 129. Now
when they announced the winning number, it was 128-just one off.
Sloth: So you see, he actually didn't win it at all.
Achilles: He ALMOST won, though ...
Crab: I prefer to say that I won it, you see. For I came so terribly close ...
If my number had been only one smaller, I would have won.
Sloth: But unfortunately, Crab, a miss is as good as a mile.
Tortoise: Or as bad. What about you, Mr. Sloth? What was your number?
Sloth: Mine was 256-the next power of 2 above 128. Surely, that counts
as a hit, if anything does! I can't understand why, however, those fair
officials-those UNfair officials-were so thickheaded about it. They
refused to award me my fully deserved prize. Some other joker
claimed HE deserved it, because his number was 128. I think my
number was far closer than HIS, but you can't fight City Hall.
Achilles: I'm all confused. If you didn't win the Subjunc-TV after all, Mr.
Crab, then how can we have been sitting here all afternoon watching
it? It seems as if we ourselves have been living in some sort ofhypothet-
ical world that would have been, had circumstances just been ever so
slightly different ...
Announcer: And that, folks, was how the afternoon at Mr. Crab's would
have been spent, had he won the Subjunc-TV. But since he didn't, the
four friends simply spent a pleasant afternoon watching Home Team
get creamed, 128-0. Or was it 256-0? Oh well, it hardly matters, in
five-dimensional Plutonian steam hockey.(^640) Contrafactus