How much more real this dream was than that they should go back to the house where the sleeping children lay and where Stanley and Beryl played cribbage.

It soon came: as they were on their way to a transparency of their majesties, not a little larger than life—with Bellona, in a very handsome helmet, on one side, and Peace, with a cornucopia and a full blown wreath of roses, on the other—the path was interrupted by a little knot of gentlemen.

A process that is unable to continue executing and cannot exit the system is zombied. A zombied process does not use any system resources but it still maintains an entry in the process table.

The oddly counted lords are always out of sync with at least one other evenly counted cycle. These two strange counts assured that at no single moment could all cycles end at the same time for an extraordinarily long time, for at least one odd count threw off all the even ones.