"Wait!" Caddo halted Oridin. "No tricks. Give me the combination and I'll open the safe!" Oridin turned to the space pirate. "The safe is unlocked. The formula is inside." Caddo's eyes betrayed his suspicion. The most valuable secret in the world was in an unlocked safe! Warily Caddo stepped forward. He hesitated, wondering if even his neutralizing force was enough to protect him. "There's no danger. Go ahead. Help yourself," Oridin urged. Caddo was desperate. He touched the handle of the door. It was unlocked. He flung it open. Inside the safe was a single sheet of white paper. Caddo seized it eagerly. His eyes widened in amazement as he read: "The certainty of success in any course of operations, expressed in mathematical terms, represents the sum of all factors, beginning at the starting point, which must be described as _real zero_, and ending with the objective, also reduced to a real numerical value. The constant of certainty, _J_, can be the determining factor which leads an operation from the beginning to the objective." Caddo read the paper and reread it again and again. "Is this all of it?" he asked, turning to Oridin. "Every bit," Oridin replied. "The formula is simple, like the one to determine the sum of an arithmetical progression--the first number of the progression plus the last number, multiplied by the number of terms in the progression and divided by two. In your case the progression lies between what you have and what you want. The certainty of getting it is the sum of all the factors." * * * * * Caddo sat down in a chair at the desk. He seemed to forget his suspicions of Oridin, who had placed a stack of paper beside him. Caddo was engrossed in the formula and Caddo, as a mathematician, knew that everything in the world could be expressed in figures. What would Napoleon, or Hitler, have given for this formula! "The beginning is _real zero_!" Caddo spoke aloud. "Which is different from a mathematical zero," Oridin said. "I might say that zero, like absolute vacuum, never occurs. Even if we have two apples and eat two of them the atoms of the apples continue to exist. In the formula you have a small fraction instead of zero. It serves the same purpose. If you multiply a number X by zero, the answer is zero. Multiply a fraction approaching zero, .000,000,001 by another number and that number approaches zero too. If that number is a fraction it will be even closer to zero than our _real zero_. In fact, we are dealing with trans-zero numbers, just like the transfinite numbers discovered by Georg Cantor." "Yes, yes!" Caddo said eagerly. He picked up a pencil. He scribbled furiously. His objective was all of the power in the world expressed in ergs; all of the gold in the world, expressed in dollars; all of the land, expressed in acres; the people, in individuals.