It was originally published in Strange Horizons in November 2000, and since it is now available online I strongly encourage you to give it a try. What have you got to lose?

Much thanks to Roee Shenberg for writing to bring this story to my attention!

Charlie, I disagree with your remarks, but respect your right to have a different opinion. I think the author definitely appreciates the fact that the idea of an integer between 3 and 4 is inconsistent with the usual axioms of arithmetic (e.g. Peano's Axioms). I found it entertaining to be forced to suspend disbelief for a while. (Try to approach this story with the same mindset that you would use for Alice in Wonderland or The Wizard of Oz...you don't have to think it is realistically possible for it to be enjoyable.) Moreover, one has to keep in mind that we might be wrong about those axioms. They themselves might be inconsistent. (As Gödel showed us, we can never prove they are consistent...and so we face the possibility that they contain an inconsistency we have not noticed.) And besides, even if Peano's Axioms are consistent, that does not mean that they apply to the physical universe. (BTW I did not count your vote of "1" for mathematical content for this work of fiction. The mathematical content vote is supposed to record how significant mathematics is to the work, not how accurately it is portrayed. I have been forced to give high mathematical content ratings to works of fiction I hated as much as you despise this one simply because they were about mathematics, even if the math that was there was completely wrong. In this case, the work is most definitely about mathematics, more so than many other works listed in this database.)

A student at the Savannah College of Art and Design, Colin Levy, has made a very nice short film based on this story. Aside from being well acted and directed, the film adds quite a bit. (Apparently, Teper contributed to the writing of the script as well.) The tense shot of the psychiatrist in the elevator as it passes from the fourth to the third floor was nice, and I like the Flatland-like reference of the ant crawling on the diagram of a wormhole. However, I am torn between liking the extra dramatic twist that was added, linking the professor to the psychiatrist, or whether I prefer the simplicity of the original story. (Thanks to Annalisa Calini for letting me know about the film.)

Warning, the following remark contains a spoiler: I have tagged this work with the "time travel" motif, but this applies only to Colin Levy's short film and not to the original short story by Igor Teper.

(Thanks, Anonymous, for giving me something to laugh about this afternoon. I needed that!)

Hey, Bike. I would not think too hard about bleem. It is not likely to stand up to a rigorous investigation. But, loosely speaking, my interpretation of the jellybean thing at the end was this: For some reason, we cannot see or recognize bleem the way we can with other numbers. So, when it looked like there were three jelly beans, that was just our bleem-blindness and there were actually bleem of them. He took one away and now there really were three of them, which we also see as three jellybeans. Make sense, sort of?