The Two Worlds by James P. Hogan Read Free Book Online Page B

poured incessantly through the laser link between Jupiter and Earth to controlling the instruments contained in the robot landed on Io. " DEC "! Those letters had to be part of the solution. What about the rest of the clue? "Poem." A list of synonyms paraded through Shannon's head: "verse" . . . "lyric" . . . "epic" . . . "elegy." They were no good. He wanted something of three letters to complete the single-word answer of six letters indicated in the parentheses. " Ode "! Added to "DEC" it gave "DECODE," which mean, "Find the meaning of." Not too difficult. Shannon penned in the answer and shifted his attention to 24 across.

    "Dianna's lock causes heartache (8)." "Dianna's" was an immediate giveaway, and after some reflection Shannon had succeeded in obtaining Di's tress (lock of hair), which gave heartache in the form of "DISTRESS."

    10 across read, "A guiding light in what could be a confused voyage (6)." The phrase "could be a confused voyage" suggested an anagram of "voyage," which comprised six letters. Shannon played with the letters for a while but could form them into nothing sensible, so moved on to 11 down. "Let's fit a date to reorganize the experimental results (4,4,4)." Three words of four letters each made up the solution. "Reorganize" looked like a hint for an anagram again. Shannon searched the clue for a combination of words containing twelve letters and soon picked out "Let's fit a date." He scribbled them down randomly in the margin of the page and juggled with them for a few minutes, eventually producing "TEST DATA FILE," which his instinct told him was the correct answer.

    The clue for 20 down was, "Argon beam matrix (5)." That didn't mean very much, so Shannon began working out some of the other clues to obtain some cross-letters in the words he had missed. The "guiding light" in 10 across turned out to be "BEACON," which was in the remainder of the clue and staring him in the face all the time as it had said: ". . . could be a con fused . . ." The suggestion of an anagram had been made deliberately to mislead. He wondered what kind of warped mentality was needed to qualify as a crossword compiler. Finally the "argon beam" was revealed as "Ar" (chemical symbol) plus "ray" (beam), to give "ARRAY," i.e., a matrix. Interestingly the answer to the first clue of all, 1 across, was "SHANNON," a river in Ireland, presumably slipped in as a confirmation to him personally.

    JOURNAL CROSSWORD PUZZLE NO. 786
(Compiler D. Maddson, Navcomms HQ, Houston)

 
ACROSS
1 Watery Irish flour (6)
5 Find the meaning of a poem to Digital Equipment Corporation (6)
9 Guilty of having no money after the pub! Quite the opposite (8)
10 A guiding light in what could be a confused voyage (6)
12 Writer, jumping into action, arrives as a profound conclusion (4,3)
13 The ultimate in text remedies (7)
14 Oriental rule changed by Swiss mathmatician (5)
16 Wild riot about the point of a short preamble, colloquially speaking (5)
17 Expert loses two-thirds but takes back art for something more (5)
18 A separated piece (5)
20 Continental one-fan car, maybe (7)
21 Ringing around to abolish a right (7)
23 Keep the elephant's head and tail in the rain (6)
24 Dianna's lock causes heartache (8)
25 After six months, men and I find a type of Arab (6)
26 Surrounds North Carolina with ease, to a point (7)

     
DOWN
1 Win in a sled, perhaps? It's not fair! (7)
2 But the arms this noted lady was advised to get wouldn't have been much good to Venus! (5)
3 Powerful response, right from the heart? (7,8)
4 Possibly did on gin? Can't—it's not habit-forming (3-9)
6 A wave from a charge of the Light Brigade (15)
7 Hydrogen makes harmony in turbulent star-care (9)
8 Norman's head in the lake? No—some other guy (5)
11 Let's fit a date to reorganize the experimental results (4,4,4)
15 It sounds like a lumberjack's musical number (9)
19 Hoover, initially in trust over the South, urges progress (7)
20 Argon beam matrix (5)
22 Deposit nothing