The Paper Route

Maya spread the map of the neighborhood flat on the kitchen table and weighed the corners down with two mugs, a stapler, and a frozen waffle.

"Twelve houses," she said. "We start here, we end here, we hit all twelve. Shortest walk. Go."

"Why shortest?" Soren asked.

"Because it's snowing and my boots leak."

That was a good enough reason. Soren drew a line from his house to the Patels', then to the gray house, then doubled back because he forgot the Okafors.

"That's dumb," Maya said. "You crossed your own line."

"You do it, then."

She did it. Hers was better. Then she looked at it and made a face, because there was a house in the corner she'd left for last, and getting to it meant a long lonely trudge across the whole map.

"Okay," she said. "Just try them all. There can't be that many ways."

Soren got a fresh piece of paper. He liked counting things properly.

"First house," he said. "We could start at any of twelve."

"We start at your house. That's fixed."

"Fine. So eleven choices for the second house. Then ten for the third. Then nine." His pencil moved down the page. "It keeps going down by one."

"So you multiply them," Maya said. "Eleven times ten times nine times eight, all the way down."

Soren multiplied. He was careful. Halfway through, the number got too big for the side of the page and he turned the paper.

"Eleven times ten is a hundred and ten," he said. "Times nine is nine hundred ninety. Times eight is seven thousand nine hundred twenty." He kept going. The number climbed. "Times seven. Times six. Times five."

He stopped and stared at what he'd written.

"How big," Maya said.

"Almost forty million."

"For twelve houses?"

"For twelve houses."

Maya leaned back. "That's a lot of trudging to check."

They were quiet. Outside, the snow kept coming down with that soft fuzzy sound that isn't really a sound.

Soren did a thing he does, which is to push past the answer to see how much worse it could get. He started crossing out the twelve and writing in bigger numbers.

"What if it was twenty houses," he said. "The whole block."

"Then there's, like, way more."

"No, I want to know how much more." He started the multiplication again, twenty, nineteen, eighteen, seventeen. The page filled. He needed a second page. The number stopped meaning anything to him as a number. It was just a wall of digits getting taller.

"I can't even say it," he said. "It's past trillions. It's past anything I have a word for."

"Let me see." Maya counted the digits with the end of the pencil. Eighteen digits. Nineteen. Her lips moved.

Then she stopped moving the pencil.

"Soren. My dad has that show. The space one. The guy said there's a number for how many atoms there are in the whole universe. Everything you can see with any telescope ever."

"I don't remember the number."

"It's big. It's like an eight with a bunch of zeros. Eighty zeros, something like that." She looked at his page again. The number for twenty houses didn't have eighty zeros. It wasn't close to eighty zeros.

"So we're fine," Soren said. "The atom number is way bigger."

But Maya had already gone somewhere ahead of him, and her voice changed.

"No. Wait. Add houses. What happens to your number every time you add one house?"

"It multiplies. By the next number up. Twenty becomes twenty-one becomes twenty-two."

"So each new house makes it like twenty times bigger. Twenty-one times. It doesn't add. It multiplies." She grabbed his pencil. "Keep going. Just the count of digits. How fast do the digits pile up."

Soren went. Thirty houses. Forty. He wasn't computing the whole number anymore, just how long it was, the way you'd measure a shadow instead of the building. The shadow stretched across the second page and onto a third.

"Sixty houses," he said, and his voice did something. "Sixty houses and the number of routes is already bigger than the atoms. Bigger than the whole observable universe. For sixty houses."

Maya put both hands flat on the table.

"There aren't sixty houses on the block," she said quietly. "There's like a hundred."

The two of them looked at the little map under the mugs and the stapler and the frozen waffle. Twelve houses. A small map. A leaky boot. And somewhere underneath it, hiding the whole time, a number so large that you could not write it down using every atom in every star you would ever see as a single digit each, and still run out of universe before you ran out of routes.

"So nobody can just check them all," Soren said slowly. "Not us. Not a computer. Not the biggest computer. Ever. There isn't enough stuff in the universe to do the checking."

"Then how does anybody plan anything," Maya said. "Mail trucks. Buses. The guy who fills the snack machines."

"They must not check all of them. They must have a trick."

"What trick."

Soren opened his mouth and found he didn't have one. Neither did Maya. And the not-having pulled at her, leaned her forward over the table, the way the edge of something deep pulls at you.

"They get close," she said. "They have to get close without checking. They find a really good way and they just don't know if it's the best way. They can't know." She looked up. "Nobody can know. For a whole block, nobody on Earth can ever be sure they found the actual shortest walk."

Soren reached for his notebook. He started writing the digit-counts down the margin, twelve, twenty, sixty, the shadow lengthening on the page.

Maya pulled her leaky boots on without arguing about them.

"Come on," she said. "Let's go deliver them the second-best way anybody's ever found."

She opened the kitchen door, and the cold came in, and the snow was still falling on a block of houses nobody could ever perfectly cross.