Open covers and partition relations

An open cover of a topological space is said to be an -cover if there is for each finite subset of the space a member of the cover which contains the finite set, but the space itself is not a member of the cover. We prove theorems which imply that a set of real numbers has Rothberger's property if, and only if, for each positive integer , for each -cover of , and for each function from the two-element subsets of , there is a subset of such that is constant on , and each element of belongs to infinitely many elements of (Theorem 1). A similar characterization is given of Menger's property for sets of real numbers (Theorem 6).