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If Steve Ballmer decides to give in to pressure from his fellow billionaires and return to negotiations with Yahoo, the magic price per share may need to be higher than even Yahoo's $37 demand.

"I think the problem is that the question was too broadly based..."

"Forty two?!" yelled Loonquawl. "Is that all you've got to show for seven and a half million years' work?"

"I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is."

-- 42, the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. Douglas Adams via Wikipedia

An even higher price could be in the cards for Microsoft, as much as $42 per share, although the tech company has yet to express an interest in negotiating with Yahoo again, despite moves by Carl Icahn to unseat Yahoo's board and other big money-men favoring it.

BusinessWeek's look at Yahoo and Microsoft touched on one analyst's assessment of the price per share being bandied about between the two companies before talks ended. If Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang really wanted $37 a share, he may have been undercutting the portal's value:

Sandeep Aggarwal, an analyst with financial-services firm Collins Stewart estimates that if Microsoft paid $15 billion for Yahoo's search operation and $3 billion a year to run ads on Yahoo Web pages, such a deal could add up to $9 a share to Yahoo's stock price - well north of Microsoft's last offer of $33 a share. "Maybe there's more value Yahoo can extract with just a search deal," Aggarwal says.

Rumors about Yahoo and Microsoft discussing a search deal have quieted in recent days. Considering its challenges from Icahn and other irate shareholders, Yahoo probably shouldn't hope for the answer to its questions arriving at $42 per share.