The Nine Billion Names of God

A Tibetan monastery asks Dr. Wagner to set up an “Automatic Sequence Computer” (15) to process a list of “all the possible names of God…all such names can be written with not more than nine letters in an alphabet we have devised” (16). The lama tells Dr. Wagner that the monks have been working on creating this language and compiling the list for three centuries already. He adds that his people believe that words like Allah and God are simply “man-made labels…but somewhere among all the possible combinations of letters that can occur are what one may call the real names of God” (16). The lama believes that with Dr. Wagner’s computer they will be able to permute the letters and “what would have taken us fifteen thousand years it will be able to do in a hundred days” (17). He says that if Dr. Wagner can get the computer to India by airplane, along with two engineers, they will transport them the rest of the way to Tibet.

Chuck and George, the engineers sent to Tibet along with the computer, are uncomfortable with their assignment and can’t wait to leave. They notice that the monks are not as pious as they expected: “Chuck was smoking one of the cigars that made him so popular with the monks—who, it seemed, were quite willing to embrace all the minor and most of the major pleasures of life” (18).