Right there in the first line it said “cross words,” and a little further on, “clues.” Their significance was obvious now. What about the rest of it? He had never mentioned any book to Hunt, so that part had to be just padding. Presumably the numbers that followed meant something, though. Shannon frowned and stared hard at them: 5, 24, 10, 11, and 20. . . . The sequence didn’t immediately jump out and hit him for any reason. He had already tried combining them in various ways and gotten nowhere, but when he read through the message again in its new context, two of the phrases that he had barely noticed before did jump out and hit him: “. . . came across . . . ,” associated with 5, 24, and 10, and immediately after: “. . . get down to. . . ,” associated with 11 and 20, had obvious connotations to do with crosswords: they referred to the across and down sets of clues. So presumably whatever Hunt was trying to say would be found in the answers to clues 5, 24, and 10 across, and 11 and 20 down. That had to be it.
With rising excitement he transferred his attention to the Journal. At that moment the captain and the first navigation officer appeared in the doorway across the room, talking jovially and laughing about something. Shannon rose from his seat and picked up the Journal in one movement. Before they were three paces into the room he had passed them, walking briskly in the opposite direction and tossing back just a curt “Good morning, gentlemen,” over his shoulder. They exchanged puzzled looks, turned to survey the doorway through which the Mission Director had already
vanished, looked at each other again and shrugged, and sat down at an empty table.
Back in the privacy of his stateroom, Shannon sat down at his desk and unfolded the paper once more. The clue to 5 across read, “Fmd the meaning of a poem to Digital Equipment Corporation (6) .” The company name was well known among UNSA and scientific people; DEC computers were used for everything from preprocessing the datastreams that poured incessantly through the laser link between Jupiter and Earth to controlling the instruments contained in the robot landed on Jo. “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 meant, “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 unmediate 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 reorganire 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
ACROSS
1 Watery Irish flower (7)