The premise of Ian Frazier's The Killion is that there exists
a number so mind-bendingly large, that to contemplate it is
to die.

The Killion first appeared in a September 1982 edition of
The New Yorker magazine. Here are excerpts,



Since the days of Archimedes, man has known
that numbers could attain great size.  The Greeks
could count up to a million, and the Romans,
in their turn, made it to a billion and a trillion.

Then man had to wait almost fifteen centuries,
until the gilded arms of the Renaissance had
flung open the shutters of the Dark Ages, before
he could move on to a billion trillion, a million
billion trillion, and, finally, a zillion.

In 1702, Sir Isaac Newton, father of the theory
of universal gravitation, experimented with
numbers as high as a million billion trillion
zillion, at one point even getting up to a baziliion.

These experiments convinced him of the theoretical
possibility of the existence of the killion.  He stopped
his experiments abruptly when, as the numbers
approached one killion, he found himself becoming
very sick . . .

. . .  In the early twentieth century, Albert Einstein
made some calculations that brought him right to
the verythreshold of the killion.  But here even
Einstein halted.

Probably the smartest scientist who ever lived,
Einstein also had a great, abiding affection for life.  

After the invention of the computer, it was
Einstein who insisted that each one be equipped
with a governor that would shut it off automatically
if it ever approached a killion.

Were it not for Einstein's farsightedness, the dawn
of the computer age might have had frightening
consequences for mankind.