T yler stared at the pieces of Archimedes’ puzzle hoping to see a pattern, but none was apparent. There were more than seventeen thousand solutions, but fewer than six hundred unique arrangements when equivalent rotations and reflections were subtracted. Archimedes had linked a single particular solution to the geolabe, and that was the one Tyler had to find.
On one side of the fourteen Stomachion pieces, each of the points was inscribed with a number written in Greek. On the other side, the pieces had Greek letters written on them. The puzzle would tell them how to use the geolabe, but unless the pieces were put together in the correct orientation, the results would be gibberish.
According to their written instructions, the bomb would be deactivated when the two dials on the front of the geolabe and the third dial on the back face were all pointing to the twelve o’clock position. Tyler couldn’t just randomly turn the knobs that controlled the motion of the dials, because each twist affected the motion of all three dials simultaneously. The complicated set of forty-seven gears inside the device meant that there were millions of possible orientations. To get the one that would disarm the bomb, they had to solve the puzzle.
“Eight minutes,” Stacy said, the edge in her voice palpable.
Tyler said nothing as he studied the Stomachion pieces.
“Are you thinking or frozen in terror?” she continued.
“My bomb-disposal instructor had a motto,” Tyler said. “‘Don’t just do something, stand there.’ Doing nothing doesn’t mean you’re doing nothing.”
“Just checking. What about dumping the whole thing over the side of the ship?”
“Can’t,” Tyler said. “We’re being watched.”
She swung around. “I don’t see a camera.”
“I haven’t had time to search for it, but it’s here. He said he had his eye on us.”
“Who is this guy?” Stacy asked.
“His name’s Jordan Orr.”
“You know him?”
“He’s the one who had me build the geolabe,” Tyler said, glancing at the timer as it clicked below seven minutes. “I’ll tell you all about it if we live through this.”
“So you built this geolabe but you don’t know how to use it?”
“Think of it like the Rubik’s Cube. Just because someone can assemble it doesn’t mean they can solve it. That must be Orr’s problem. He knows that the dials should all point at the noon position, but he can’t figure out how to get them there. But Orr does know that Archimedes encoded the Stomachion with instructions for how to get the dials aligned, so he built the bomb as a test. We need to solve the puzzle in order to operate the geolabe, and that will deactivate the bomb.”
Stacy nodded. “Makes sense that Archimedes would hide the instructions in a puzzle. The Greeks did invent steganography.”
Tyler had heard of steganography, the technique of hiding messages in plain sight, like the microdots hidden behind stamps on postcards during World War II, or the way terrorists cloaked messages in pictures and video posted on public forums like Facebook and YouTube. Not only do you have to know that the message exists; you have to know how to read it.
“Do you remember any specific methods of steganography that Archimedes might have used?”
“The Greeks developed the technique twenty-five hundred years ago,” Stacy said. “Sometimes a message was tattooed onto the shaved head of a courier, who would grow out his hair and then travel with the secret message safely concealed. Secret communications could also be hidden in wax tablets.”
“How?”
“In normal use you would write on the wax itself using a metal stylus. If you wanted to erase it, you’d warm it up and use a tool like a spatula to smooth it over. To send a secret message, you’d write on the wood underneath and then apply the wax and write an innocuous note in the wax. To read the hidden message, you’d just scrape off the wax.”
“So the message wasn’t encoded. You just had to know what to look for?”
“Yes.”
Six minutes left.
Tyler ran his fingers through his hair as he thought through the problem. “When I was building the geolabe, the text of the manual for constructing it said, ‘The puzzle will be solved only by the geolabe’s builder.’ I wondered about that for a long time, but I couldn’t figure out what it meant. Now that we have the Stomachion, I see something that’s too strange to be coincidental. It must have been in the codex all along, but Orr never shared those pages with me.”
Stacy bent down to look at the pieces. “What?”
“There are forty-seven gears in the mechanism. I know, because I spent a few months with them.”
“So?”
“Look at the pieces in the Stomachion. There are eleven triangles, one tetragon, and two pentagons. If you add up the number of all the points, the total comes to forty-seven.”
“Son of a bitch,” Stacy said. “I never would have noticed that.”
“Only the builder of the geolabe would. Tell me some of the numbers etched on the points. They’ve got to mean something.”
“Uh, twenty-four, fifty-seven, four, thirty-two, seventeen-”
“Wait. You said twenty-four, fifty-seven, and thirty-two?”
“And four and seventeen. What do they mean?”
The puzzle will be solved only by the geolabe’s builder.
“The gears!” Tyler shouted before he even realized that it had come out.
“What?”
“Quick! Is there a point with the number thirty-seven?”
Stacy scanned the pieces while Tyler held his breath. If this didn’t work, they were dead.
After an agonizing few seconds, she scooped up a piece. “Got it! Thirty-seven.”
“Okay, give me the piece with twenty-four on it.”
She gave it to him. When he put the pieces together, the numbers aligned perfectly.
“What happened?” she said. “Did you figure it out?”
Tyler nodded. “I hope so. One of the gears had thirty-seven teeth, and one of the gears it meshed into had twenty-four teeth. None of the gears had four or seventeen teeth, so those numbers must be included to throw off anyone looking for a code. Only someone who spent time crafting each gear would think to look for that connection. Now hurry. We’ve only got four minutes left.”
He told her the numbers he needed. He remembered some of them because they were such odd numbers to use in the gearing. He’d have to hope he recalled enough of them so that the others wouldn’t be necessary.
Within a minute, they had assembled the Stomachion into a square. They flipped it over so they could read the letters on the other side.
“It still looks like gibberish,” Tyler said.
“No!” Stacy yelled. “It makes perfect sense now. Notice that some of the letters seem to run in a crude spiral?”
“What does it say?” Tyler’s eyes flicked to the timer on the bomb. Three minutes left.
“Alpha Leo. Beta Libra. Alpha Pisces. Beta Scorpio… There’s twelve in all. They must refer to the signs of the zodiac written on the dials of the geolabe. But I don’t know what the alphas and betas refer to.”
“I do. You couldn’t see it, but the upper knob on the side is labeled alpha, and the bottom is labeled beta. I’m supposed to turn the knobs in sequence to set the dials properly. Read them from the beginning.”
“Alpha Leo,” Stacy said.
“Which one is Leo?” It literally was all Greek to Tyler.
Stacy pointed. “That one.”
Tyler turned the top knob. The hands on both dials rotated simultaneously. Tyler didn’t stop until the top hand rested on Leo.
“Now what?”
“Beta Libra.” She pointed again, and Tyler followed her instruction. They got into a rhythm going through the next seven signs, but the process was still achingly slow.
The timer ticked down to less than a minute.
Stacy waved her hands, prodding him to go faster. “Beta Cancer, Hurry!”
“How many left?” Tyler said as he twirled the knob frantically.
“Two. Alpha Sagittarius.”
Stacy pointed to the twelve o’clock symbol, but Tyler was already turning the dial toward it. “Got it!”
Before Stacy could even say “Beta Aquarius,” his fingers were twisting the bottom knob. Aquarius had to be the zodiac sign at the noon position.
“Fifteen seconds!”
Despite Tyler’s frenzied twisting, the hand on the dial seemed to move in slow motion, like a nightmare where you were running as hard as you could but moved as if you were mired in tar. He raced the timer as it counted down below ten seconds.
“Oh, God!” Stacy screamed. “Go, go, go!”
As all three dials reached the noon position, Tyler felt the knob click.
A piercing series of beeps blared from behind the geolabe. Stacy grabbed Tyler’s arm, digging her fingers into his biceps, but the timer stopped. It read four seconds left.
They both collapsed to their knees, completely drained. There was nothing like the relief of surviving certain death.
Stacy had her head buried in her arms. Tyler put a hand on her shoulder.
“You okay?” he asked.
She looked up and blinked several times before answering. “Peachy.”
Tyler’s phone rang.
“It’s him,” Stacy guessed.
Tyler nodded and answered the call, putting it on speaker so that she could hear.
“Okay, we did what you wanted,” Tyler said. “Are we finished here?”
“Finished?” The gravelly voice was gone, replaced by the smooth tone that he now recognized as Orr’s. “Locke, we are just getting started.”