The Midas Code

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?”