Table of Contents
Prose
A Night at the River-by Quinn Tyler Jackson
Before The Law-by Paul Nachbar
Deciphering the Consequences of Babel-by Quinn Tyler Jackson

A Night at the River

Copyright © 2000 by Quinn Tyler Jackson

Mr. Ainsley Bakkeson, it had been said by many at the pub he often used to frequent, was overly fond of liquor, and it was for this reason that his eyes were glossed over in the way a drunkard’s are. Others were quick to mention his jittery carriage as proof of his too frequent drinking, and indeed he was often be seen with a mug or two of the house’s stronger drinks emptied before him on his table. Despite his constant inebriation, however, he seemed to me at all times a man to be listened to, but I, having known old Mr. Bakkeson from my hardier youth, had had the occasion and misfortune to corroborate at least one of his tales.

In the days when Mr. Bakkeson had not been gray, I had been given the chance to pay a call to the offices of Bakkeson & Wilkson, Investigators. As I had expected when I had received the invitation by way of a common connection of ours, Mr. Bakkeson was in immediate need of what he called "a man with a quick pencil." Since his regular stenographer, Miss Miller, had fallen ill only a few days before, it had become essential to him to have a replacement. Having heard of my complete accuracy with dictation, Mr. Bakkeson conferred immediately with his associate and I was called upon by means of the connection. Once I had entered his office and was seated before him, he informed me further on the subject of my possible employment.

"You come well recommended, Mr. Montague," said he, at once shifting about the papers on his cluttered desk and surveying my reaction to his words with his steady regard. After I thanked him for his compliment, he continued to say that he needed my services as a stenographer. "Do you need employment?" he then inquired as a belated formality.

"Certainly," I at once informed him. "Unluckiness at horses rid my former employer of his practice."

"A lawyer, wasn’t he?"

"Yes, a very good lawyer," I returned, "but a gambler of most uncertain skill. Normally, news of my former employer’s habits would not leave my lips, for I am a very discrete man by nature, but the loss of his business is public knowledge, and I tell you this now so that we may get the matter of payment out of the way of our discussion. My last experience taught me to never work for a man who promises a check but delivers an empty bank account. I lost all interest in several investments due to one of his bad checks, and have no desire to repeat that misadventure."

At this he laughed quite resoundingly. "Good! I myself like a ‘sure thing’. You can see this in the fact that I have called upon your services, and not those of some younger pencil pusher who would ask less pay and deliver less accuracy. To show you this, I assure you that all of your payments will be made in cash every Thursday rather than by check. Does this satisfy your fears?"

"It does," I returned. "Shall I know what service I can render you, Mr. Bakkeson?"

"He crossed the room to shut his door. "I assume that you will not need a notebook to remember the bulk of what I am about to say, for it is apparently simple."

"Will your associate be joining us?" I interjected.

"Wilkson is engaged in another case," he answered upon resuming his place at his desk. "As for the particulars, I shall now make them clear to you." From this point on in the conversation, my new employer shifted about the many papers as if referring to notes. I could tell from the focus of his eyes, however, that he did not read the papers, but merely moved them about out of nervousness.

"Jonathan Walker, a man of considerable wealth and note in our city, came to our offices a week ago and asked me to look into the affairs of a potential customer of his whom he knew only by the name Darb," he began to inform me.

"Walker Apothecary Supply House?" I then verified, to make certain we were thinking of the same man.

"Indeed. A man well known to all for his virtual monopoly on the druggist supply trade in this region. The company which bears his name handles more druggists’ supplies than nearly any in this part of the country, and consequently deals in much import and export from many overseas interests.

"Which brings us to this Darb character," he continued. "Walker wanted me to discover in particular whether or not Darb was a man with whom to do business. A man of such position as Walker must always be wary of dealings that may be criminal, you understand, for the very nature of his company lends itself to attempts by those wishing a direct supply to the needs of the narcotics trade.

"He did his utmost to uncover the history and credentials of the man who was offering him a huge amount to purchase a large quantity of some potent chemicals and equipment.

"After my initial search for his background, which turned up no more than what Walker had told me already, I was inconvenienced in my search by the sudden illness which befell my stenographer, Miss Miller. Now, I am a busy man, and cannot proceed effectively without someone to take accurate notes for me, and was hence office-ridden, until your arrival today, Mr. Montague."

"I hope I can be of help," I informed him.

"I assume that Darb is a moniker, and though I am not a man of intuition, I can smell the stench of foul-play when monikers come into play. so I cautioned Walker about being hasty to do business, but it seems Darb had beaten me to Walker’s office, with a substantially larger offer than his first, and Walker then accepted."

"Totally negating his reasons for having sought your aid in the first place," I judged.

"Not completely," he corrected me. "Upon my arrival at his office, he asked me to continue my investigation of Darb, so that he should be able to at least clear his conscience of any doubt that he had agreed to deal with a dishonest man. He gave me permission to be more open in my research, asking me to approach Darb personally to see what I could make of him. For this, I must go to his residence."

"I was often used in such a way by the lawyer," I told him, "in order to ascertain the suitability of certain persons as witnesses for the defense. Perhaps I can be of help to you by approaching him myself." At this he seemed to light up, smiling widely.

"I have preconceived notions of Darb," he then said, "and thus may not be able to gauge him objectively. Your observation may be more critical than my own in this matter. I have already stated that I feel there is something afoot, and this may have biased me."

He handed me a piece of paper on which was written the address of Mr. Darb, and I left the office with the address in hand, ready for my assignment.

Though his desk had been cluttered with papers, I gathered from the other objects in Mr. Bakkeson’s office that he was a meticulously organized man in both his surroundings and his mind. The papers had been spread about so chaotically because he had been reading them when I had come in, and not because of any untidiness on his part. All else in the room had had the appearance of being nailed, taped, or pasted in place, with no hope of ever moving more than an inch in any direction from its proper place. I had even noted that the daily newspaper he had read earlier was divided neatly into separate sections on the small table reserved for this function beside his desk. Mr. Bakkeson was not an untidy man with untidy theories and intuitions

I soon arrived at the door of Mr. Darb’s house, which having been a number on Front Street, was a door overlooking the river. I knocked and waited.

When the door opened, I was immediately taken aback by Mr. Darb’s attire, for it was unlike any I had ever seen in the summer months. Mr. Darb was completely dressed in black.

"Good day," he addressed me in what sounded like a voice not unlike a thousand other voices in the area, save for the slightest accent. "May I help you?"

"Sir," said I, feigned concern thick in my tones, "it was I who was going to ask if I might have been of assistance to you! As I passed by, I thought I heard a cry for assistance coming from within the house. I saw no sign of you in either the windows or the yard, and I asked myself if perhaps you were in distress."

His eyebrows, which were as black as ebony, lifted at this notion. "Something wrong? Goodness, no! You must have been hearing things, and as for seeing me in the window, I am merely a frequent resident of the cellar, wherein I guard my wine racks. Tell me, concerned citizen, are you a connoisseur? It seems that one good turn deserves another, and after all, you have demonstrated your strong concern for my well-being."

I saw his offer as an opportunity to get a better view of his character. "More a consumer than a connoisseur," I replied.

"Then come in!" he invited me. "I have a bottle opened in the salon that I was enjoying, if you will join me."

I followed him as invited, making an extra effort to notice what was about me, in order that I could later return to my employer with an accurate evaluation of Mr. Darb’s house.

"It’s a wine from my native land," he informed me as he poured it into my glass, "so I do hope that you will like it."

I did not miss this open chance to uncover his origins. "Really? I cannot place your accent for the life of me. Languages are not my forte." True, I could not place his unique accent, but was phonetic stenographer and also had once been head translator for an international company with many dealings with Europe, and prided myself on my system of shorthand, which I had personally developed to allow me to take notes in all but a few of the more obscure languages. That I could not place his accent then, astonished me greatly, and I wished to ascertain his roots.

"The people of this city seem not too concerned for such things," he said in astonishment. "Can you guess where I come from by reading the label on this bottle of wine?" He handed me the bottle and I examined its label carefully.

The characters were not unlike those of the accented Latin, save for the usual minor variations that one always encountered, but I could not recognize even a single cognate with any of the numerous languages I knew how to speak even passably. At the end of the incomprehensible mass of foreign words, however, were the two clearly Latin words Anno Domini, which were followed by the unbelievable numbers 1542.

"Gracious!" I ejected. "I’m no wine specialist, but I am not blind to the date this was bottled! I might have said my eyes were deceiving me, had I not noticed the ancient condition of the label. Am I so honored a guest that I should quaff so casually your 1542?"

At this he laughed in such a manner that a cold chill ran first up, and then down my spine and to the very base of me. I wanted, at the sound of his laugh, nothing more than to quit that place and be gone from his company, but knew too well that direct escape was not only unwise, but impossible. He finally spoke to me in an altogether different manner than he had just laughed, so that I calmed down enough not to faint from my fright.

"Good gentleman," he said calmly, "are you refusing my act of good-will, which is only in answer to your own?"

Had he not said earlier that he had been enjoying the wine when I had interrupted him and that the bottle had already been opened, I may have believed that he had been so touched by my concern for a stranger that he opened so old a vintage as a gesture of thanks, but I had seen the date, and the utter carelessness with which he had passed me the bottle, and I knew that something was not as it should be with Mr. Darb. He had been drinking when I interrupted him—drinking alone one of his oldest (for how could he have had any older?) and most expensive wines, with no other objective than to drink it. I knew at once, then, that he was either very rich, very eccentric, or aware of something of which I could not be aware.

Mr. Darb passed me my glass and made a toast in his native tongue, which I did not recognize in its spoken form either. I asked him what he had toasted, and he returned, "Why your health, of course." Again my spine grew cold.

Though I wanted nothing more than to leave, I knew that I could not without drawing his suspicion, and, moreover, was held in my place by the thought of tasting the wine in my glass. Never had I had the opportunity to taste so rare a wine as this he was offering me so freely. I inhaled, expecting the harsh vapors of vinegar, and was taken by the fact that its fumes were far from sour—they were sweet! I remained uncertain if I should sip it or just stay as I was, in a trance induced by my disbelief.

I emptied the glass in one great gulp, and not in the tiny, appreciative sips of a connoisseur.

"You are more a consumer than a connoisseur!" Mr. Darb laughed.

His was not the house or salon of one who could afford such an exquisitely dear wine. I knew from his carelessness with the wine that he must have possessed more of the same—the idea was boggling to my brain—but his salon was modestly decorated in the style of one no richer than myself.

"What is it that you do for a living?" I ventured under the protection of my apparent innocence. I reasoned that, having been invited to share his wine, I had certain immunities from his suspicions at this point.

"I am an agent for another," he replied ambiguously. "I work for a larger interest, which is stationed in my native land."

"You still haven’t divulged that point," I reminded him, indicating with a pointed finger the label of the wine bottle.

"You couldn’t pronounce it if I told you," he returned with a wide smile.

"I am quite familiar with all of the countries of Europe."

"It is not a country," he retaliated. "As for my occupation, I am the foreign buying agent for a company that deals in pharmaceuticals."

"Permanently stationed here?" I asked. "Your house has a certain permanency about it. This house was built to last."

"This city offers much business to my company," he then said, "and as such a city, offers me a permanent home."

I gathered that he was attempting to deceive me, since I knew that a firm as large as Walker Apothecary Supply House would have had prior dealings with Mr. Darb’s ‘company’ if the company had invested so much into its "foreign buying agent’s" wine and home as was here evident. Such a company would have had many other dealings with Walker, and Darb’s credentials would never have been suspect. This, in harsh combination with the horrible cold chill that certain of his words put in me, convinced me that he was not a man that Mr. Jonathan Walker should honor with his business.

Soon, it became my sincerest desire to leave Mr. Darb’s presence, to return to the safety and rigidity of Mr. Bakkeson’s office on Broadway, and to tell Mr. Walker by means of my employer not to have any business with this man. Darb had been nothing but hospitable to me in every extension of what could be called hospitality, but my feelings about him became increasingly full of animosity as I sat in his chair and gulped yet another glass of the divine Ambrosia. Indeed, that he had even offered me another glass after my first gluttony an outward demonstration of his charity, but the quivering in my spine brought over me an insupportable sense of nausea.

I asked his pardon, informing him that I would be late for an important rendezvous if I stayed but a moment longer, and I was off. I hastily shook Mr. Darb’s icy hand, took my leave, and walked at all speed to the offices of Bakkeson & Wilkson, Investigators. Upon arriving there, pale faced and shaken, I approached his desk unceremoniously and asked his audience.

"What could you tell of Darb?"

"He is being deceitful about his intentions for whatever it is he wishes to purchase from Walker Apothecary," I said bluntly. "He claims that he is an agent for a larger interest, but of that ‘interest’ can only say that it is located somewhere in Europe unknown to me, which is quite impossible."

"You talked with him under guise, I should hope," he interrupted me. "He did not suspect your intentions?"

"I gained entrance to his home under pretence," I assured him, "and under no suspicion regarding my true purpose. He also claims to be stationed in our city on a permanent base for this ‘interest,’ yet no one has heard of him or his interest, which is impossible for one who claims to be so active a part in the industry."

"You found all this out, without arousing his cautions?" he demanded, for he was a very cautious man by nature.

"Again, I assure you that Darb was under the belief that I was but a hapless concerned citizen," I told him. "What do you make of the matter now?"

"Considering the chemicals and equipment involved, Mr. Montague," he began, "it cannot be allowed that Darb purchase what he has demanded." He produced some papers from one of his drawers and handed them to me so that I could read them. "Those chemicals are not only dear, Montague, they are dangerous in the hands of an educated madman. Do you think that our Darb is such a madman?" He stood, circled the office once, and returned to his seat. "Now, what I purposely did not tell you was that I already met Mr. Darb in person earlier this very day."

I shifted in my chair and listened to his account of his search for the address, which brought him to the river’s bank as it had done me. He met with Darb under the pretence of being desirous to locate an old war mate named Darbin, having claimed to Darb that he’d allowed for the chance that the suffix had been dropped in the years following the war.

"He assured me that he was not my man, and in a further attempt to determine his demeanor, I played the fool and insisted that he was indeed, judging completely by his voice. Of course, to carry on such a charade, I had to accompany my claim with much squinting of my eyes. This ploy forces the suspect to speak clearly in his attempt to disprove my claims, by which means I usually get a clear sounding of his parlance."

At this point, Mr. Bakkeson looked me coldly in the eyes, and then looked at his messy desktop and its many strewn papers. "To guarantee an unbiased response, I am not going to tell you what happened to me, until you tell me just one thing."

"Yes?" I asked, very interested.

"What did his laugh do to you?" he inquired, deadly seriousness obvious on his face.

I remembered the cold chills that had shot through my spine when Darb had laughed, and I shuddered at the thought. "They jelled my spine with ice and congealed my blood," I did not exaggerate.

Unexpectedly, Mr. Bakkeson stood before me, pulled up his sleeve, and pointed at a small round scar that he carried on his right forearm midway between his wrist and elbow. "That, Montague, is a war scar.

"A tangible scar, caused by a tangible bullet shot from the rifle of a tangible opponent. Do you understand? But, the feeling that went through me when he laughed-that awful freezing nausea that carried through my spine—can only be described in subjective terms. Unlike this scar, which was caused by a phenomena beyond any debate, what Darb left on my psyche was a scar of only the most subjective make-up. He struck me with his manner."

"I felt the same."

"You can see why I asked you to describe it to me before I went on," Mr. Bakkeson added. "My interpretation of it may have altered yours in some way. Now, if you will notice the list I gave you a few moments ago.... I quickly perused the papers, discovering that the chemicals Darb had requested were both dangerous and expensive. "I am no chemist, Mr. Bakkeson, but do have a general sense of the danger of these substances. There is a general pattern here that I can see, despite my ignorance of most of these chemicals, mind you, for I once worked as a clerk for a druggist."

"Pray tell!"

"Many of the requested chemicals serve as preservatives and retardants," I remarked, "making them quite unlikely candidates for any use in the illegal narcotics."

"And the others that don’t fall into that majority?" he asked with great interest in his searching regard.

"This is a peculiar one," I noticed, pointing to a long name followed by an enormous quantity. "If my memory serves me well, and I’m sure it does in this matter, only one customer of the druggist I worked for ever needed anything even vaguely related to this substance. I noted it then, since I have an aunt in the country who also takes it. But it seems impossible to me that Darb could want such a huge quantity of this."

"Explain yourself, man!" he insisted, as if I had hit upon something that he had earlier, and now wished me to verify.

"My aunt had a terrible allergy to the sun," I returned. "To you or me, the sun’s rays are a source of continual pleasure, but to this aunt, and to the lady who bought it from my druggist, the sun is a curse. But what they take is only a purer derivative of the stuff, and not the raw form that he is here demanding. It seems quite unlikely that any pharmaceutical company would need so large an amount of so specific a substance."

"Aha!" he shouted at last. "There we have it, Montague!"

When he calmed down enough for me to speak, I ventured to ask him to explain what he was getting at. He composed himself, looked me in the eye, and asked me one rather odd question. "While you were at the man’s house, Montague, did you notice if he had any mirrors?"

"Any mirrors?" I gasped from disbelief. "Whatever are you asking that for? Mirrors? My God, man, do we have vampires running rampant in our good city?" At first, I laughed at this absurd proposition, until it struck me that I had not seen a single mirror in Darb’s house. I had noted this fact, when, upon standing at his door to take my leave, I stood shaking his hand in such a position as to allow me full view of his bathroom, which was not far down the hall.

"He was an incredibly well groomed man, by my judgement," Mr. Bakkeson added, "and seemed one who would need a large mirror, or at least a small one."

"I saw none," I muttered, still searching my mind for possible oversight. "None at all," I added when I was sure. "At least not in the usual places one would have one. I paid particular attention to his decor, too, in hopes of analyzing him accurately."

"Montague, what I am about to say to you seems a huge impossibility, but please bear with me," he began. "When I looked at that list, I was struck by its apparent oddness. What druggist would need such things as he has asked for? Then, there was that inexplicable nausea. I’ve seen men die at my side, and was not so stricken by sickness as I was when Mr. Darb laughed. Tell me more about what you saw in his house, so that I may return to solid ground."

I could only hold my tongue for the longest while, until I remembered the wine, at which point I let out a string of words. "Drinks wine dated 1542, allergy to the sun, no history, speaks a language unknown to me, working for a ‘larger interest’...."

Mr. Bakkeson interrupted me at this point. "What’s this about wine dated 1542? Surely I misheard you. If not, that’s a new point to consider."

"He served me two glasses of a wine dated 1542 as if I were being served punch. Unless he owned a quantity of such wine, why would he do such a thing?"

"What has the wine to do with it?"

"I never have heard of such a thing as perfectly preserved wine of such age as that," I explained.

His eyes grew more serious at this idea. "And then, there is that indescribable chill that…."

"—runs up and down the spine, doing a terrible dance," I finished for him.

"Indeed!" he agreed with a shudder.

"What shall we do?" I asked him. "Tell Walker not to sell drugs to a vampire?" I could not believe that those words had left my lips.

"I don’t deal in possibilities, Mr. Montague," he reminded me. "I deal in certainties. How could we be certain of such a wild claim as this? A vampire? The Prince of Darkness finding the right sequence of narcotics that would bring him and his kind out into the daylight?" His face betrayed him, for it remained white despite his words. "Not possible!"

"Not probable, this I grant," I interrupted. "But not possible? I do not know this, Mr. Bakkeson. Are you certain that he could not be one? Certain?"

"Let us forget all sanity and logic and say that he is, Montague," he suggested. "Are you saying that, by means of the correct drugs, Satan could conquer the Earth?"

"Preposterous!" I ejected. "But, what shall you do about him? How shall you handle the case from this point?"

He thought about this for a moment, picked up his papers to organize them all hastily, walked to the door, and bid me follow him. "We go pay him a visit and do the one thing that we have not as yet tried," he said as he put on his long coat.

"We ask him directly?" I guessed.

"Vous y êtes, Montague, vous y êtes!"

We quickly left the office, entered the street, and paused a moment as Mr. Bakkeson thought out our plan of action. "It is night," he said, "and we must protect ourselves! I am in the habit of carrying a small but powerful firearm on my person, but we cannot go too hastily assuming that such a thing would do us much good in a melee with the man if he should get nasty."

"Shall we bring the traditional wooden stake?" I asked, not believing my own absurd question.

He thought about this for an instant and then returned, "Not too easy an object for concealment."

"What have we to protect ourselves with, then?" I pushed, remembering the chills and fearing for both of our safeties.

Mr. Bakkeson stopped where he stood and regarded me soberly. "We are assuming two things, Montague: that he is a vampire, and that a vampire cannot be harmed. If he isn’t a vampire, and we arrive with wooden stakes, then we look rather idiotic. Especially since we were both at his door today under another guise. And, then, if he is a vampire, why should it have to be a stake driven through him? Wouldn’t my pistol suffice?"

"It is generally accepted that vampires are immune to all normal assault," I reminded him. "At least in the folklore. If we are to suspend our common sense and believe folklore so far as to think he is a vampire, are we not also to believe what it has to say on the subject of armaments?"

"Does not that same folklore declare that the sun’s light will kill them, and that they suck blood from mortals’ veins? I have not heard or read of any such gruesome thing as blood-sucking in our district, and I do follow the papers as a matter of professionalism," he explained. "Yet, this vampire, if he indeed be such, walks in full day and drinks fine wines, not blood. Are we to assume that any of the words of folklore stand, Mr. Montague? Maybe my pistol would then be enough to keep him at bay."

I thought about his argument, and then reminded him that he was wagering. "I have already explained at length my unwillingness to gamble or be in the employ of one who does," I curtly reminded him.

"Now we border on all lunacy! Let us just pay him a visit and put an end to this, Montague! Soon we will be talking of hobgoblins and wraiths! On we go, Montague!" He started away from me, turned to see if I would follow, and continued on when I did not.

As he walked away from me, I began to feel pity for him, and soon started after him. Presently, I was at his side. "I cannot let you meet your fate alone, brave Mr. Bakkeson," I explained.

"I hardly expect to meet my fate!" Mr. Bakkeson declared. "You almost had me believing in the absurd a while back, Montague. Vampire!"

In good time, we were standing at the door of Darb’s house, waiting for someone to come to the door. I had by then come to realize the implausibility of vampires and the lot, and carried myself with more confidence than before. Despite my newly found calm, however, the nausea of that afternoon returned in periodic waves as we stood and waited. Judging purely by the look on my companion’s face, I could see that he too was overtaken by this inexplicable feeling of sickness. Before I could confirm this by asking, though, the door was opened and Mr. Darb greeted us.

"Both at once!" he laughed in a manner that could only be described as congealing. "I see that you have found your Mr. Darbin. Fancy that it could have been you."

"In way of introduction," Mr. Bakkeson returned coldly, "I am Ainsley Bakkeson of Bakkeson & Wilkson, Investigators, and my companion is Mr. Montague, my stenographer." He offered his hand as a gesture of his neutrality, and shook Mr. Darb’s hand when he returned the gesture.

"You are here for a reason?" he asked, his eyes lighting up on his final word.

"An anonymous client has endeavored to discover your suitability as a business partner," Mr. Bakkeson returned honestly. "As we have been unable to determine such from our research and masquerade, we have come here to talk with you openly and honestly about the subject. If you will allow us."

"Most certainly," Darb returned, motioning us to enter his domain. "I thought it odd that I should have two unexpected visitors in the span of one day, especially since I visited Jonathan Walker only today; but I have heard of his caution in choosing his connections, and should have suspected such a thing. You are agents of Walker, are you not?"

"I am not empowered to admit," Mr. Bakkeson answered coldly. I noticed that he quickly glanced down the hallway at the bathroom and that he grew paler when he did not see any trace of a mirror there. "I am only empowered to ask certain questions."

"Come into the salon," he invited us, "and I will answer any questions you have to ask." He led us into the salon I had been in before, offered us each a seat, sat down in his own chair, and waited for Mr. Bakkeson to begin.

"Firstly, Mr. Darb, there is the matter of your employer," he started.

"I work for a larger interest in a European country," he repeated. "This I have already told your stenographer."

"Understand that our client…."

"Who must be Walker," he interrupted, "for I’ve no other deals in progress at this moment of such substantial consequence as to warrant this investigation."

"Our client believes you wish to purchase some dangerous supplies from him in order to further a dishonest end," my employer continued unemotionally.

"Dishonest end? Really!" he laughed with that laugh that carried with it the frost. "Would either of you care for some wine?" he then offered. "Are you really so ignorant of wines as you first made out to be, Mr. Montague? The quality of the wine, and the near tears in your eyes betrayed you to me on that point, however, and I suspected you knew more about the grape than you had let on to me at my door."

"I was surely ashamed to have done so cruel a thing with such a vintage as that," I admitted to him. "Especially when I tasted it and realized it was in such a preserved state." With the words preserved state, I remembered having previously thought he was a vampire, and decided that he, too, was preserved. His skin was without color, and ancient looking, but neither wrinkle nor fold betrayed the smoothness of its perfectly porcelain surface. "You must have been around a long while to have procured a bottle of that vintage," I attempted.

"A long enough while," he returned. "I have some more of the same, if you would like a glass," he added. "It is in the cabinet on your left."

"Hardly worth opening another for me," I protested.

"I have much of that year," he insisted, getting up to approach the cabinet. "Now, Mr. Bakkeson, as for the matter of supplies. My company is in grave need of the supplies it asks me to purchase, and it is beyond my control to change their needs. I am simply…"

"… an agent for a ‘larger interest,’" Mr. Bakkeson finished. "But what interest is that?"

"You wish its name? Do you speak my tongue? Suffice it to say that it translates roughly as: The Grand Company of the Far East."

"An odd name indeed," my employer returned.

"When so translated," Darb explained. "In my language, it sounds quite nice, consisting of three words instead of the seven I now used to explain it to you."

"And this ‘Grand Company’ of yours is in the business of catering to a very specific clientele?" he asked. "How many people in your country are allergic to the sun, Mr. Darb?"

"You have betrayed your client with your question, Mr. Bakkeson," Darb laughed. "But, it is of no matter. I only asked one supplier for the substance that is sometimes used to remedy an allergy to sunlight."

"You have asked for enough of the treatment to help all of those alive on Earth who suffer from the ailment it alleviates," I said. "It is a very rare condition."

"If we were talking about the same condition you have mentioned," he said to me, "which is not here the case. You have assumed that we are talking about the ailment suffered by those in this part of the world." He then poured my wine and offered some to Mr. Bakkeson, who refused on the grounds that he never drank alcohol. "A sober detective!" Darb laughed in his spine-freezing manner. "Very good!"

I sipped my wine more carefully this time, nodded my head in appreciation of it, and waited for Mr. Bakkeson’s reply, which did not follow. I judged that he was waiting for me to talk so that he could use all the powers of his judgement to fully discern Darb’s character and constitution. This cued me to continue the conversation, which I quickly did.

"I do not know that the substance can be used to any other good," I noted to our host. "As far as I know, it can only be used for one purpose, and that is to negate or relieve the effects of a certain allergy to the sun’s rays. And even this end can only be achieved by a purer form than your company has demanded, and then only in the correct dosages. Any other application verges on the foolhardy, for it is as deadly as arsenic in its raw form, or in any but the slightest amounts."

Mr. Darb resumed his seat, smiling at me widely. "What do you not dabble in, Mr. Montague? A linguist, wine connoisseur, stenographer, and now chemist? For your information, my company wishes to process the raw substance for its own use."

"And is willing to pay dearly to do it," Mr. Bakkeson interrupted. "It seems that your entire country must be in the direst of health, Mr. Darb."

"My name is actually Athanasior," he admitted. "Darb is a business name while here."

"Now listen here, Darb or Athanasior, or whatever, we want to know what you wish to do with what you propose to buy from Walker, and after that, our business here is done," Mr. Bakkeson insisted.

"Do you really want to know?" he verified.

"I have made this clear!"

Athanasior, as I now knew him to be named, composed himself, took a sip from his glass, and turned to face Mr. Bakkeson. "Very well," said he, "it will change nothing. Imagine not the Black, or Red, or Yellow Plague, but another altogether different plague, with much different effect upon its victims."

"Indeed," Mr. Bakkeson bid him continue.

"In the same way polio can take away the use of one’s legs, this plague took away a very important thing. It slowly took away the daylight from the lives of the stricken, and this confused the primitive people who were so plagued, for they could not understand why the sun started to burn their skin, and why their appetites changed completely.

"But, they soon grew accustomed to it. After all, eating raw meat and coming out at night isn’t altogether insupportable. But, then, the oddest of things happened, Mr. Bakkeson! A thing so odd as to defy all sense!"

"Whatever could be odder than what you have to here related?" I dared.

"At first, it was only a guess, a remark made by some, but it was soon verified by experiment," he continued. "The stricken stayed frozen at the age that they were stricken, and the unstricken continued to grow old in their sunlight. Just so long as the venison remained raw, and the sunlight a memory of youth, the stricken were guaranteed immortality!

"That was many hundreds of years ago that that plague hit that place, and there are still some of us who have survived the ages. We have much wealth, and want the plague to be over forever."

"So, you experimented with a drug that would give your skins immunity to the sun," I ventured, "and attempted to maintain your agelessness with preservatives and retardants rather than the blood of deer."

"Raw meat tastes like raw meat even to the stricken," Athanasior replied, an almost sad look on his porcelain face.

"Blood? Not any save venison blood, I hope!" Bakkeson interrupted. "Am I to believe that you are none other than a vampire?"

"As they have come to be feared, no," Athanasior replied, "but in the sense of the undead, yes." The words that seemed so impossible to hear left his lips in the same casual way that the wine entered them. "Normally, those plagued cannot support the daylight, but what you see in me now as I sit before you is the product of the chemicals I wish to purchase from Walker. The sun will not burn me if I remember to take my pill, and I can eat my meat well-done if I remember to drink the elixir."

"An elixir of everlasting youth?" I gasped.

"Only to my kind," he corrected me. "The elixir would kill anyone not stricken in an instant."

"And you wish to produce more of these chemicals in your country for what reason?" Mr. Bakkeson demanded. "To bring your lot of accursed vampire friends out of the shadows of the night?"

"We have been living in the darkness too long, Mr. Bakkeson," Athanasior returned. "And, like you, we like our meat well done."

"How many of your lot were driven to drink the blood of men, Athanasior?" he demanded harshly.

At this, Athanasior’s pale face grew even more pale. "Why, none, Mr. Bakkeson. I’ve already told you that it was the blood of venison."

At this point, I could barely rely on my quick senses to judge what occurred, for Mr. Bakkeson stood so quickly and removed his pistol from its hidden holster so hastily that I missed much of what transpired between his standing pointing it at Athanasior’s forehead.

Athanasior gasped, clasping his chest from fright. "I have done you no wrong, man!"

Mr. Bakkeson approached Athanasior, his pistol fixed between the man’s eyes, and said, "I do not believe one point in your story! Perhaps now you can drink your chemicals to live, but you yourself admit that it has not always been so. I did not at all believe the ‘raw venison’ nonsense, Athanasior."

"It’s a plausible explanation," I reminded him.

"These vampires cannot go into the light of day, live forever, if indeed one can say live, and possess no mirrors. In these things, they follow the folklore, Montague, he said, "that you brought to my attention earlier. I asked myself why such a folklore would exist without some reflection of the truth. That is to say, the folklore states clearly that vampires live forever, cannot support the sun’s rays, and cast no reflection. If right in all these, why wouldn’t it be right about the most gruesome detail, Montague?"

"Lore tends to get exaggerated over the years," I offered, not removing my gaze from Athanasior’s fear-stricken face. "In their ignorance of the truth, the primitive peoples may have invented stories of human blood to satisfy their need to understand those who ate their meat raw. The Christians were once portrayed as baby eaters by the ignorant Romans."

Mr. Bakkeson rolled up his sleeve again for me, still maintaining his aim upon Athanasior. "I deal in tangibles, man! When I was shot in the arm by that bullet, if I had lost all my blood, I’d have died, so I can tell you that no blood of any deer is going to keep a man alive. I considered his raw meat alibi with an open mind, under the belief that the lore may have exaggerated the tales over the many hundreds of years, Montague, but I was not unaware of one very important ingredient on that list. It was something very interesting on the third page of the papers I gave you in my office before we came here. If you still have it, Montague...."

I very quickly produced the list and searched for the ingredient as he kept Athanasior at bay with his pistol. On the third page I noticed a substance that I had overlooked in Mr. Bakkeson’s office. Demanded in even larger quantities than all of the others was a certain compound of which I knew nothing from its name. I guessed that this was the ingredient that Mr. Bakkeson had referred to, and asked what it was.

"I’m not ignorant of chemicals either, since Walker told me what it is," Mr. Bakkeson boasted. "I know where that comes from and can only come from. It is a derivative of human blood serum. If the front of a if this venison story were true, why this ingredient?. Mr. Walker is forced to distill that compound from the blood of human donors. No other source, Athanasior, than the blood of men. What say you to that?"

The accused merely sat in his chair. "Mr. Bakkeson, I will have what I came to get for my people."

"Your people? The awful blood-sucking race of vampires you call brethren? I won’t allow it man! After I have rid this plane of you, I will hunt them down and rid it of them. Until then, they can stay hiding in the shadows that spawned them. I’ll have no more of your kind," he growled, his eyes filled with rage.

Athanasior started laughing, after which he calmed himself, smiled menacingly at Mr. Bakkeson, and lifted his arms above his head. "Mr. Bakkeson! Hunt us down if you will, and shoot at us with your meager means, but you shall not conquer!" He said a few short words in his native tongue, and the strangest of strange things followed.

Before our eyes, the form of the man transformed into the huge form of a hideous bat, or what can only be described as a bat by one not schooled in the subject of horror. From the shock of such a thing, Mr. Bakkeson stood back, allowing the beast to fly past us both unhindered, and out a window that Athanasior had obviously left open for escape in the case of eventual discovery.

Bakkeson fired the charges of his pistol out the window and into the darkness that now hung over the river, and when the pistol cracked no more, turned to me, saying, "Culpae poena par esto!"

When old, gray Mr. Bakkeson spoke in the public house of his journey into the hills of Europe and of the horrors he witnessed there, I listened to him when others would not. When he related to us all his tales of search and blood, the others laughed at him, but I remained silent. They would dismiss it as the tall tales of a drunkard, but I knew to heed his words with all belief. In those days that he would still bother to try to convince them, he would often point to me and tell them that I, too, had once seen a vampire. They would look at me, and listen to me tell my account of the horrible night on the river, but would always go away disbelievers.

I had drunken too much of that 1542 to offer much of a coherent corroboration, and the stories of two drunk men were not worth more than the stories of one. Whenever I would ask old Mr. Bakkeson if he had succeeded in his quest to rid the world of Athanasior and his kind, he would only mumble a single sentence to me under his breath.

"Fiat justitia, ruat coelum."

Before The Law  
by Paul Nachbar


    I am now 42, two years older than one is supposed to be, according  to some, when 'real life' actually begins. I haven't seen much evidence of this  new beginning,  although in the past couple of years I made some new connections, experimented  with minor publishing projects and joined a couple of high-iq  societies. Anyway, the other night, while sleeping on my gray, kind of ratty living room couch, I had the following dream:  In this dream, I was around 55 and looked pretty much the same as I do now,  with the exception of quite a bit more gray hair and some wrinkles.  Actually,  I was living in the same apartment with Ed, a roommate I had had for  years.  It was clear that I had not accomplished much with myself: a cluster of  ashtrays  and coffee cups revealed that I had gone back to smoking and drinking  coffee,  two of the unhappier habits of my youth. On the bookshelf above my  computer  terminal - by now a very old model - I had a couple of volumes of my own poetry I had published, in addition to a pretty eclectic assortment of  other  works. But the place was dark and quiet as a church, except for the  slight  buzz from a cable TV station which had been set on 'mute.'  Observing this long-term stagnation from the, uh, astral plane was  pretty  unpleasant. But there was more bad news to come, for within a few  minutes,  I - or my body - (it was hard at this point to tell the difference) had  a bad  coughing fit at the end of which, I spluttered and died.  Death - I mean this was a dream - was not totally unexpected for me.  What  was not at all expected was the environment I ended up in, the office of  a  professor, filled with dozens of books on military strategy among other  subjects  and a large, elegant and imposing desk. Somehow this place seemed  familiar in  an irritating way: I had once been there before, or to someplace like  it.  Then, from the right hand wall, a figure walked in, clad in an  expensive-looking  suit garnished by a pair of enormous golden wings. He bade me to sit  down  on a small, humble chair near his desk.  I was expecting, maybe, Saint Peter? I mean, I knew where I was  meta-physically speaking and this did not seem quite normal. Meanwhile, the  angel,  as I guess he was, perused a long, thick black file with my name  written upon  the cover. "Familiar..." he sighed after several moments. I had the same  precise  feeling. "Sir, " I said, "you look remarkably like a professor I had had  at New  York University Graduate School about, well, thirty some odd years  ago..."  "Yes...?" he intoned. " You look a lot like McGeorge Bundy, my prof in  a class on modern warfare and politics. I, uh, got an A minus," I added  with some embarrassment.  The angel looked up and me and said, "I have a rather fuzzy memory  of  such things but I believe that you are correct for I am McGeorge Bundy  in  a new form, as you can see!"  You may need a little historical information at this point. The only  Bundy  recognizable to most Americans in the latter part of the 20th century  was Al  Bundy, a character in a somewhat caustic comedy called "Married With  Children" and essentially a humorous idiot whom everyone picked on with  glee. McGeorge Bundy, however, was one of that group termed by one  historian "The Best and The Brightest." Accepted by Harvard as the  first  student with perfect SAT scores, McGeorge had later occupied positions  as  diverse as the Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at  Harvard  and Special Advisor on National Security Issues to President John F.  Kennedy.  I remembered him as a brilliant, though not scintillating lecturer, who  would,  without a single note, deliver long lectures to his seminar students on  a vast  variety of detailed, complex issues, supplemented by translations into  English  of five or six relevant texts written in a variety of imposing  languages. Truly  a formidable individual!  Alas, I thought to myself, I am truly doomed! The Angel Bundy  stared at  me with a curious slight grin, noting that he had some vague  recollection of me.  "I was, " I said, "the skinny grad student with a beard. I used to come  in late  to class and sat next to you....Unfortunately I would fall asleep from  exhaustion  every few moments and, um, kick your leg with a start when I jolted back   into consciousness."  I don't know why I confessed this information, which was certainly  going  to prejudice my case. "Sir, I know that I have been, for the most part,  a failure  on this earth. I do not wish to go to Hell, despite, I'm sure, a long,  long list  of misdeeds which might tempt you to send me there!"  "Hm.." he replied. "Where did you go to School?" I told him about  the  small liberal arts school I attended in the 1970s, detailing the  positive  and negative aspects of this institution. "I see.." he replied grinning  widely,  "a jewel of a school!" Then, looking over my records, he clucked softly:   "there are many, many omissions here, some awful, others merely comic.  You never did learn to row your own boat on earth, did you?"  "No, well, yes, absolutely correct, sir! I dabbled in one thing or  another  and ended up scrawling somewhat mediocre poems read by almost nobody  for the last twenty-five years of my life. My friends were right about me:  I should have gone to law school or have completed some other practical  course of action! I have been bad indeed!"  The Angel flipped through the pages of my record-book, sometimes looking grim but at other times almost chuckling. "These poems of yours are really not at all terrible. Some are even rather good."  This seemed to be a point in my favor, I supposed. "Of course, I could be severe and send you to some chosen place of eternal torment.  For that, there is some good reason indeed, as you well know! However, the silliness of your case moves me. There are, in fact, very, very few lawyers  permitted in Heaven, as the vast majority earned their niches in Inferno through  lifetimes of truly noxious deeds."  Could this be happening, I thought to myself. "Yes, we have a small but extremely comfortable place for you here. I guess you'll be able to spent a  great deal of time, as you wrote in one piece "doing whatever you want to do!  Take the second door on the left after exiting my office...and good  luck!"  I rose, trembling from my seat, shook his ethereal hand with  infinite gladness  and proceeded out the door which opened not to some vast chamber of  delight but back to my old familiar cramped apartment. I was once again  42, not 55 and certainly not among the deceased: pinching my skin was  sufficient  evidence of this fact. It was very late at night; a dumb but very sexy  cop  drama was on the television screen and I released the 'mute' on the volume  in order to listen to this somewhat mediocre fare. Who knows, I thought, what is fantasy and what is nightmare? Who knows, I thought, what  tomorrow might actually bring? Hope you enjoyed this.

Any English speaker, schooled or unschooled, is able to sense the difference between

and

The first utterance, although it does not contain a single intelligible noun or adjective, is known to be grammatically correct, whereas the second, although made up entirely of familiar parts of speech, is known to be incorrect. In a similar manner, a C++ compiler will compile the following code:

int n = 100;
for(int i = 0; i < n; i++)
{
	cout << i << endl;
}

but not the following:

n int = i;
for(++100; int i = 0; i < n)
{
	endl >> i >> cout;
}

It does not matter that the English speaker has never seen the words brillig, slithey, or toves, or that the C++ compiler does not understand the meaning or context of n or i. Human beings are able to understand a multitude of utterances that they have not heard before, just as compilers will faithfully turn thousands of previously unencountered lines of code into machine instructions. What matters is that parsing and pattern matching allow both the human and the computer to apply a finite set of rules of grammar to an infinite number of possible utterances.

It seems almost magical that an infinite number of utterances, be they the artificial utterances we call computer programs, or the natural utterances we call human language, can be unambiguously constructed from a finite number of parts. The Bible, with its vocabulary of about 7,000 words, or Shakespeare, with his vocabulary of 21,000 words, can inspire so much in us - even though neither of these have even begun to dent the vocabulary or range of expression available to us.

We are able to peer into the minds of giants because we are able, through automatic linguistic decipherment, to understand the sense of the words and their particular expression in these works. We do this naturally, instinctively. Sure, we learned how to speak from our parents, how to read at school - but the fundamental reason we were able to acquire language is that we possess in our brains what linguists call the Language Acquisition Device (LAD). Every normal, healthy human baby is born with the ability to acquire the local set of rules governing language. Some have even acquired many more than one language with fluency.

Does a compiler author program his compiler for each and every possible line of code that it may encounter? Of course not - not any more than we teach our children each and every thing they may possibly hear, and what it will mean. How then, when faced with the following utterance:

does the child know how to make sense of it? Surely we never took the time to prepare our child for something as awkward and awful as that! No, but we did prepare the child for such constructs as over the hill, and under the bridge, and strolled Mabel’s cow. We did this when we sang Ring around the rosies and London Bridge is falling down, by providing examples of form. Compiler authors do a similar thing when they provide productions and regular expressions in a formal context-free grammar. A child knows what under the N means, whatever N happens to be, just as a compiler is able to correctly translate into machine language any number of lines of code that conform to the grammar - regardless of their meaning or intent.

It was the study of how humans are able to parse and find order in language that made the largest advancements in artificial computer languages possible. Linguists slowly deciphered mankind’s ability to form an infinite number of utterances from a finite set of rules, and computer scientists took the ball and went with it. This is the very core of what makes it possible for compilers to generate exactly the same results given exactly the same source code, and what makes it possible for two programmers on opposite ends of the planet to implement the same algorithm in entirely different styles, in entirely different languages - but which still yield exactly the same results. Parsing and pattern matching lie at the heart of this "magic."

My interest in pattern matching stems from my fundamental interest in the concepts of human language, and this interest in pattern matching has grown from simple matching of strings and patterns of strings into other less traditional areas. I am especially intrigued by the possibility of a polymorphic, template based pattern matching language that searches streams for patterns other than those found in strings of characters. Whereas traditional parsers and pattern matchers are typically used to find and parse streams against known rules to find matches, this mythical beast would primarily be used to find equivalents.

For example, consider the following two functions:

int multiply_the_fast_way(int a, int b)
{
   return (a*b);
}

int multiply_the_slow_way(int a, int b)
{
   int c = 0;
   for(int i = 0; i < b; c += a, i++);
   return c;
}

Whereas the first uses the more efficient of the two algorithms, the second uses the elementary school student’s first method of multiplication - iterative addition. The functions are, however, equivalent, if one does not consider their computational efficiency. Any C/C++ programmer recognizes immediately that these two implementations of integer multiplication are functionally equivalent. Many C/C++ compilers, with optimizations turned fully on, will recognize what multiply_the_slow_way is up to, and will substitute integer multiplication accordingly. Some compilers, such as Microsoft Visual C++, will go one step further and replace multiply_the_slow_way(3,5) with 15 directly. (Indeed, since this is the case, programmers can actually get away with writing inefficient code that does not affect performance, if the intent of the code is clear to the optimization phase of the compilation.)

Just what it is that allows a human programmer or a good optimizing compiler to see multiply_the_slow_way and just know that it will always return the same results as its more efficient counterpart? It turns out that actually proving that two algorithms are equivalent is, in itself, a rather convoluted process that can take pages and pages of formalisms. (For a real eye-opener, see [Gurevich & Huggins]. With so many formalisms showing that the task of proving that even relatively simple algorithms both are and aren’t equivalent, why on Earth would I pursue the possibility of a pattern matching language that could, given one algorithm, hunt through millions of lines of code to find equivalent (or nearly equivalent) implementations of that algorithm?

Consider the work of Françoise Balmas of Université Paris-8, who has designed, "a model for the conceptual description of functions, which abstracts the computations performed by a function, but is still complete enough to be executable. It constitutes a key for the understanding of the function." [Balmas 94] Her current work [Balmas 99a,b] exploits the fact that programmers implement algorithms in stereotypes or clichés. Although, to date, the work as presented is limited to loops, Balmas’ work on outline signatures and reports is consequential, since it introduces a promising working model for potential querying of databases of existing algorithms, and area of reverse engineering that has unfortunately been previously considered computationally expensive. My thinking is that a polymorphic pattern matcher would allow these clichés to be used as subclasses of more implementation specific child patterns.

What would such a pattern matcher be used for? Here are just a few of the uses of such a beast that I can begin to imagine:

• Patent office officials wishing to search large databases of formal descriptions of processes and algorithms, might use such a matcher to find patents that already describe the candidate process.
• Since the computer is the most impartial of third-parties, software patent holders might ask that such a matcher be used to objectively scan through another company’s code base, in order to zero-in on sections of code that may substantiate claims of patent infringement. If no potentially infringing implementations are found during such a scan, the computer, unlike the human observer, simply "forgets" what it has seen and does not take what trade secrets it may have learned with it.
• A programmer might search through large code archives on the Internet for algorithms similar to those he is developing, so as to learn from how others have implemented similar algorithms.
• Software development companies might automate many of the more routine tasks that are currently dealt with in labor intensive code reviews, or simply and perhaps more commonly, for the budget’s sake, not dealt with at all.
• Large-scale Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) might suggest more efficient algorithms to programmers and designers based both upon some preconceived design patterns, and on the design patterns most employed in-house. Such IDEs might also track the life-cycle of a large software project, determine which styles have proven to be most prone to defect reports, and warn developers when old bad habits resurface.
• Automated language-to-language translators (as in French to English, not as in Java to C) might use such a matcher to determine the most suitable of multiple translations when several are suggested due to parsing ambiguities. This is a laudable goal, but before the many nuances of human languages can be approached, we must carefully consider the findings of [Hofstadter].

There is a fundamental mathematical theorem, derivable from the halting problem, that does not allow a truly general equivalence determining pattern matcher to exist, expressed clearly by [Appel]:

Theorem:  There is no algorithm A that takes as input any arbitrary algorithm A’(N) such that A returns true if A’(N) halts and false if A’(N) loops infinitely.

Proof:  (By showing an undecidable case.)  From the function A, construct the function B thusly:

    B(N) = if A(N, N) then (while true do ()) else true

If B(B) halts, then A(N, N) is true, so the then path is taken, thereby never halting, and so B(B) never halts. But if B(B) never halts, then A(B, B) is false, so the else path is taken, and so B(B) does halt. The algorithm B(B) halts if it does not halt and does not halt if it halts - which is an obvious contradiction - and therefore there can be no A(N, N) such that it tests whether another program halts.

It is therefore said that it is undecidable, in a general sense, whether or not an algorithm can determine if any other arbitrary algorithm halts, and therefore, it is shown that equivalence of algorithms is undecidable. There is no magic calculus that can determine in a general way whether two algorithms are equivalent, but there is plenty of room for research into specific subsets of infinity.

[Koenig] pointed out to me that Appel’s explanation has the disadvantage that (while true do ()) must be shown to terminate before the proof is entirely acceptable, and suggests a nice trick that avoids this:

Define:

      B(N) = if A(N, N) then (not N(N)) else false

Now, it is easy to show that B(B) = (not B(B)) is a contradiction.

That all said, just how is it, if it can be shown by means of the halting problem proof that no two arbitrary algorithms can be shown to be equivalent, that a compiler is able to optimize this:

int multiply_the_slow_way(int a, int b)
{
   int c = 0;
   for(int i = 0; i < b; c += a, i++);
   return c;
}

int main(void)
{
     return multiply_the_slow_way(3,5);
}

into this:

int main(void)
{
     return 15;
}

Several late stage optimizations in the back-end of the compiler are likely the cause of this. Since I do not have access to the inner workings of the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler that produced this particular optimization, I will suggest one path, based upon current techniques used by optimizing compilers.

First, once the source has been parsed into an abstract syntax tree (AST), it becomes clear that a and b are invariant, and it therefore becomes possible to unroll the for loop, thus:

int multiply_the_slow_way(int, int)
{
   	int c = 0;
   	c += 5; 
   	c += 5; 
   	c += 5; 
	return c;
}

Next, since c += 5 is actually by this point in the process reduced to a simplified intermediate representation (let us say incr A, 5), and since we can amalgamate three of these IR’s into a single incr 15, and since directed graph analysis shows, we obtain:

int multiply_the_slow_way(int, int)
{
	return 15;    
}

Finally, function integration (inlining) yields:

int main(void)
{
     return 15;
}

Thus, although it has been shown that no two arbitrary algorithms can be shown to be equivalent, through a series of well-established optimization techniques, such as loop unrolling, variable life analysis, constant folding, and function integration, it becomes possible for a compiler such as Microsoft Visual C++ to multiply the fast way.

And slowly, we begin to decipher the consequences of Babel.

[Appel] Andrew W. Appel, Modern Compiler Implementation in C, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

[Balmas 99a] Françoise Balmas, "QBO: A Query Tool Specially Developed to Explore Programs," Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, Atlanta (GA), October 6-8, 1999.

[Balmas 99b] Françoise Balmas, "Query by Outlines: a new paradigm to help manage programs," ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Program Analysis for Software Tools and Engineering, Toulouse, France, September 6, 1999.

[Balmas 94] Françoise Balmas, "An Augmented Pattern Matcher as a Tool to Synthesize Conceptual Descriptions of Programs," Knowledge-Based Software Engineering Conference ‘94, Monterey, CA, September 20-23, 1994.

[Gurevich & Huggins] Yuri Gurevich and James K. Huggins, "Equivalence is in the Eye of the Beholder," Theoretical Computer Science, 179 (1-2), pp. 353-380, 1997.

[Hofstadter] Douglas R. Hofstadter, Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language, Basic Books, 1997.

[Koenig] Andrew Koenig, email correspondence with the author.