The number __ is especially significant to fans of science fiction and have tried to speculate the meaning behind it for years. In 1993 the author came clean and said –
The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought ‘__ will do’ I typed it out. End of story.
Which number am I talking about? And what’s the funda behind it?