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 at a profound conclusion
(4, 3)
13 The ultimate In text remedIes (7)
14 Oriental rule changed by Swiss mathematician (5)
16 Wild riot about the point of a short preamble, coUoquiafly 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 Afterslxmonths,menandlflndatypeofArab(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-core (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 in the smaller amount (5)
the face all the time as it had said: “. . . could be a confused .” 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.
The complete message with the words placed in the same order as the numbers that Hunt had given now read:
DECODE DISTRESS BEACON
TEST-DATA-FILE ARRAY.
Shannon sat back in his chair and studied the final result with some satisfaction, although it so far still told him far from every-
thing. It was evident, however, that it had something to do with the Ganymeans, which tied in with Hunt’s being involved.
Some time before the Shapieron appeared out of the depths of space at Ganymede, the UNSA missions exploring the Jovian moon system had discovered the wreck of an ancient Ganymean spaceship from twenty-five million years back entombed beneath Ganymede’s ice crust. In the process of experimenting with some of the devices recovered from the vessel, Hunt and a group of engineers at Pithead-one of the surface bases on Ganymede-had managed to activate a type of Ganymean emergency transmitter that utilized gravity waves since the propulsive method used by Ganymean ships precluded their receiving electromagnetic signals while under main drive; that was what had attracted the Shapieron to Ganymede after reentering the solar system. Shannon remembered that there had been a suggestion to use that same device to relay the news of the surprise reply from the Giants’ Star on to the Shapieron after its departure, but Hunt had grown suspicious that the reply was a hoax and had vetoed the idea.
That had to be the “Distress Beacon” in Hunt’s message. So what was the “Test-Data-File Array” that Shannon was supposed to decode? The Ganymean beacon had been shipped to Earth along with many other items that various institutions had wanted to experiment with firsthand, and the researchers conducting those experiments usually made a point of sending their results back to Jupiter via the laser link to keep interested parties there informed. The only thing that Shannon could think of was that Hunt had somehow arranged for some information to be sent over the link disguised as a file of ordinary-looking experimental test data purportedly relating to the beacon and probably consisting of just a long list of numbers. Now that Shannon’s attention had been drawn to the file, the way the numbers were supposed to be read would hopefully, with close enough scrutiny, make itself clear.