Shannon stiffened, his hand still inside his jacket, as the number caught his eye. "How they got 786 is still a puzzle " replayed itself instantly in his mind. Every word of Hunt’s mysterious message had become firmly engraved by that time. "786" and "puzzle" both appearing in the same sentence. It couldn’t be a coincidence, surely. And then he remembered that Hunt had been a keen crossword solver too in his rare moments of free time; he had introduced Shannon to the particularly cryptic puzzles contained in the London Times , and the two of them had spent many a good hour solving them over drinks at the bar. Suppressing the urge to leap from his chair with a shout of Eureka! , he pushed the pen back into his pocket and felt behind it for the copy of the message tucked inside his wallet. He drew out the sheet of paper, unfolded it, and smoothed it flat on the table between the Journal and his coffee cup. He read it once again, and the words took on a whole new light of meaning.
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, "Find 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 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 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 everything. 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.