John Korb writes:

> >(This parallels an old Arthur C. Clarke science fiction short story.
>  >What will mankind do when all the stars have burnt out?)
>
>  Wasn't that titled "The Nine Billion Names of God"?

Exactly so. It was a very short story about some IBM-type engineers who
installed a mainframe in a high, remote Tibetian monastery to print out the
nine billion names of God. Only near the end of their time at the monastery
did the engineers finally begin to understand the reason that they were doing
this: in the monk's religious tradition, when all nine billion names of God
had been spoken, the end of the world would be at hand. The engineers, who
didn't believe that any such thing would happen, still didn't want to be
around when the room was filled with a bunch of massively disappointed monks,
thus they slipped out of the monastery the night that the machine was
scheduled to complete all of its permutations. On the way down the trecherous
mountain path, in near pitch blackness, at exactly the time they calculated
the machine to finish, they looked up and noticed that the stars were
beginning to wink out, one by one.

It's clear that a great number of us all shared the same childhood.

Wirt Atmar