For example, the stars began to swell, and I said: "How much?" I tried to lead our predictions into the field of numbers, where he would have less to argue about.

At that time there were only two numbers: the number e and the number pi. The Dean did some figuring, by and large, and answered: "They'll grow to e raised to pi."

Trying to act smart! Any fool could have told that much. But matters weren't so simple, as I had realized. "You want to bet they stop, at a certain point?"

"All right. When are they going to stop?"

And with my usual bravado, I came out with my pi. He swallowed it. The Dean was dumfounded.

From that moment on we began to bet on the basis of e and of pi.

"Pi!" the Dean shouted, in the midst of the darkness and the scattered flashes. But instead that was the time it was e.

We did it all for fun, obviously; because there was nothing in it for us, as far as earning went. When the elements began to be formed, we started evaluating our bets in atoms of the rarer elements, and this is where I made a mistake. I had seen that the rarest of all was technetium, so I started betting tech-netium and whining, and hoarding: I built up a capital of technetium. I hadn't foreseen it was an unstable element that dissolved in radiations: suddenly I had to start all over again, from zero.

Naturally, I made some wrong bets, too, but then I got ahead again and I could allow myself a few risky prognostications.

"Now a bismuth isotope is going to come out!" I said hastily, watching the newborn elements crackle forth from the crucible of a "supernova" star. "Let's bet!"

Nothing of the sort: it was a polonium atom, in mint condition.

In these cases (k)yK would snigger and chuckle as if his victories were something to be proud of, whereas he simply benefited from overbold moves on my part. Conversely, the more I went ahead, the better I understood the mechanism, and in the face of every new phenomenon, after a few rather groping bets, I could calculate my previsions rationally. The order that made one galaxy move at precisely so many million light-years from another, no more and no less, became clear to me before he caught on. After a while it was all so easy I didn't enjoy it any more.

And so, from the data I had at my disposal, I tried mentally to deduce other data, and from them still others, until I succeeded in suggesting eventualities that had no apparent connection with what we were arguing about. And I just let them fall, casually, into our conversation.

For example, we were making predictions about the curve of the galactic spirals, and all of a sudden I came out with: "Now listen a minute, (k)yK, what do you think? Will the Assyrians invade Mesopotamia?"

He laughed, confused. "Meso- what? When?"

I calculated quickly and blurted a date, not in years and centuries of course, because then the units of measuring time weren't conceivable in lengths of that sort, and to indicate a precise date we had to rely on formulas so complicated it would have taken a whole blackboard to write them down.

"How can you tell?"

"Come on, (k)yK, are they going to invade or not? I say they do; you say no. All right? Don't take so long about it"

We were still in the boundless void, striped here and there by a streak or two of hydrogen around the vortexes of the first constellations. I admit it required very complicated deductions to foresee the Mesopotamian plains black with men and horses and arrows and trumpets, but, since I had nothing else to do, I could bring it off.

Instead, in such cases, the Dean always bet no, not because he believed the Assyrians wouldn't do it, but simply because he refused to think there would ever be Assyrians and Mesopotamia and the Earth and the human race.

These bets, obviously, were long-term affairs, more than the others; not like some cases, where the result was immediately known. "You see that Sun over there, the one being formed with an ellipsoid all around it? Quick, before the planets are formed: how far will the orbits be from one another?"

The words were hardly out of my mouth when, in the space of eight or nine – what am I saying? – six or seven hundred million years, the planets started revolving each in its orbit, not a whit more narrow nor a whit wider.

I got much more satisfaction, however, from the bets we had to bear in mind for billions and billions of years, without forgetting what we had bet on, and remembering the shorter-term bets at the same time, and the number (the era of whole numbers had begun, and this complicated matters a bit) of bets each of us had won, the sum of the stakes (my advantage kept growing; the Dean was up to his ears in debt). And in addition to all this I had to dream up new bets, further and further ahead in the chain of my deductions.

"On February 8, 1926, at Santhia, in the Province of Vercelli – got that? At number 18 in Via Garibaldi – you follow me? Signorina Giuseppina Pensotti, aged twenty-two, leaves her home at quarter to six in the afternoon: does she turn right or left?"

"Mmmmm…" (k)yK said.

"Come on, quickly. I say she turns right…" And through the dust nebulae, furrowed by the orbits of the constellations, I could already see the wispy evening mist rise in the streets of Santhia, the fault light of a street lamp barely outlining the sidewalk in the snow, illuminating for a moment the slim shadow of Giuseppina Pensotti as she turned the corner past the Customs House and disappeared.

On the subject of what was to happen among the celestial bodies, I could stop making new bets and wait calmly to pocket my winnings from (k)yK as my predictions gradually came true. But my passion for gambling led me, from every possible event, to foresee the interminable series of events that followed, even down to the most marginal and aleatory ones. I began to combine predictions of the most immediately and easily calculated events with others that required extremely complicated operations. "Hurry, look at the way the planets are condensing: now tell me, which is the one where an atmosphere is going to be formed? Mercury? Venus? Earth? Mars? Come on: make up your mind! And while you're about it, calculate for me the index of demographic increase on the Indian subcontinent during the British raj. What are you puzzling over? Make it snappy!"

I had started along a narrow channel beyond which events were piling up with multiplied density; I had only to seize them by the handful and throw them in the face of my competitor, who had never guessed at their existence. Once I happened to drop, almost absently, the question: "Arsenal-Real Madrid, semifinals. Arsenal playing at home. Who wins?," and in a moment I realized that with what seemed a casual jumble of words I had hit on an infinite reserve of new combinations among the signs which compact, opaque, uniform reality would use to disguise its monotony, and I realized that perhaps the race toward the future, the race I had been the first to foresee and desire, tended only – through time and space – toward a crumbling into alternatives like this, until it would dissolve in a geometry of invisible triangles and ricochets like the course of a football among the white lines of a field as I tried to imagine them, drawn at the bottom of the luminous vortex of the planetary system, deciphering the numbers marked on the chests and backs of the players at night, unrecognizable in the distance.

By now I had plunged into this new area of possibility, gambling everything I had won before. Who could stop me? The Dean's customary bewildered incredulity only spurred me to greater risks. When I saw I was caught in a trap it was too late. I still had the satisfaction – a meager satisfaction, this time – of being the first to be aware of it: (k)yK seemed not to catch on to the fact that luck had now come over to his side, but I counted his bursts of laughter, once rare and now becoming more and more frequent…