The Three Numbers (also known as "All in the Way You Read It") is a mystery short story by Isaac Asimov.
Part of the Black Widowers series, it was first published in the September 1974 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. It was later collected in 1976's More Tales of the Black Widowers.
Summary[]
Dr. Samuel Puntsch, a physicist, is the guest at a Black Widowers dinner. He presents a professional and ethical dilemma: his colleague and friend, Mart Revsof, is in a mental hospital, claiming to have discovered a breakthrough in stable magnetic fields for fusion energy. Revsof insists the plans are in his home safe and that "Soviet spies" are after him. Puntsch and Revsof's wife want to open the safe to secure the potential discovery for science and priority, but the combination Revsof's wife provides—12 r 27 15—doesn't work.
After the members discuss and reject various interpretations of the combination, the waiter Henry intervenes. He deduces that the combination was typed on a standard typewriter, where the numeral '1' and the lowercase letter 'l' are identical. He reinterprets the sequence not as "12 right 27 15" but as "l2 r 27 l5," where the 'l's stand for "left." The correct combination is thus: left to 2, right to 27, left to 5. The single 'r' was the only unambiguous letter, which had misled Puntsch into misreading the entire sequence.
Characters[]
Black Widowers[]
- Thomas Trumbull
- James Drake
- Emmanuel Rubin
- Mario Gonzalo
- Roger Halsted
- Geoffrey Avalon
- Henry (the waiter)
Others[]
- Dr. Samuel Puntsch (the guest)
- Mart Revsof
- Barbara Revsof