It had given them other things too...

NUMEROLOGY

Often, new human travelers to space made jokes that The Number was forty-two. Xeni understood why; forty-two was a number of great power in the literature of Earth. But The Number, the one so reveared by The People of the Many Planets was not, in fact, forty-two. Granted, it was a number that The People had gotten from Earth, hundreds of years ago, in their travels. It was a number so powerful that the quad-dimentional humans couldn't even fathom it. It wasn't their fault, though. The Number was fifty-seven. The number given to them by The Great Ketchup.