Zion's Fiction: A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature

Two Minutes Too Early ^{Gur Shomron}

In retrospect, Tommy knew his suspicions should have been aroused from the very beginning. The deliveryman did not have the respectable appearance of an official representative of World Wide Puzzles and Riddles Organization. The hovercraft that conveyed him, despite the display of the well-known logo, was also rickety and dilapidated. But the most glaring of oddities was the fact that the package was delivered two minutes too early—something strictly forbidden by the rules of the competition. In their haste and enthusiasm they never gave this infraction a second thought and just blessed their good fortune in having those two extra, illegal minutes to try to complete the puzzle. And they opened the package, thereby instigating the sequence of events they could never have foreseen.

The very fact that the package had been delivered to the Lintons’ home was no trivial event. It was one of the hundred packages sent to the finalists of the 2137 World Puzzle Championship, and indeed, just qualifying for it evoked high esteem in itself. The entire population of the little township of Cape Cass was proud that three local children had made it to the finals of the most prestigious competition in the world. A lengthy article, including a large picture of the three, appeared on the front page of the Cape Cass Gazette, and the media had at least one item on them every day for the past month.

It was the second occasion that Tommy, David, and Lily Linton had appeared in the press, the first being about a year earlier, when they surprised the world by finishing second in the Youth Open Tournament. This was quite a sensation, as it was the first time ever that the New York, San Francisco, or London teams, the so-called brain tanks, had failed to walk off with the top three prizes. Furthermore, the Lintons missed first prize by a mere thirty seconds. Everyone joined in the wave of adulation for the modern-day Cinderella story, wherein regular kids (albeit very talented) succeeded in outshining teams of certified geniuses of the highest order. The teams in the first three places were eligible for entering the world adult championship, thus placing the children among the elite group of one hundred competitors for the coveted title of World Puzzle Champion.

The contest pitted groups of geniuses, three members to a group, against each other, somewhat akin to the chess championships of a century ago (which lost much of their popularity due to the advent of simple computer programs that could easily beat any grand master). The challenges provided by Professor—the organization’s computer—could be approached only by teams of exceptionally brilliant solvers equipped with advanced accessories and appliances. The sealed boxes, each containing exactly twenty thousand pieces, did not contain a picture or model of what should be constructed out of these fragments. The competitors were expected to derive the method of assembling the pieces and create a three-dimensional replica of an image or scene designed by Professor. This replica could rise to a man’s height, and its base diameter could be twice as long. It could depict any random idea that Professor might have had at the moment of creation; a wild lunar landscape and a bustling city scene were two of the subjects used by Professor in previous contests.

All solvers had forty-eight hours to carry out the building of the representation they had received. However, in order to rank among the first three, thereby acquiring world acclaim and sizable amounts of cash, a team had to complete the task in less than half that time. The world record, established nine years earlier, was twenty hours, fifty-five minutes, and seven seconds.

Tommy assisted Alfred in wheeling the trolley with the package onto the Lintons’ porch. Alfred Collins, the man who lived next door, was a rather timid, frail-looking gentleman in his sixties. He had moved to the neighboring cottage a couple of years earlier and had befriended the Linton children almost immediately. Their love for puzzle solving could be ascribed largely to Alfred’s close companionship—something the youngsters unconsciously craved while their parents were busy with their career activities. Alfred coached and managed the Linton team, contributing enormously to their success in the previous year’s competition.

“Hey, guys, it’s here!” Tommy shouted, opening the front door. “Thanks, Alfred, for helping me roll it in. You really should be more careful with that leg of yours.”

Alfred never stopped grinning. “You’d better get started.”

There was a flurry of activity—not a second was to be lost. Tommy and Alfred lugged the large package into the puzzle room. Dave and Lily hurriedly removed the wrapping, and Alfred hastily made his way out so as not to be caught by the automatic tracker lens. This was an advanced telecamera operated to ensure that the solvers received no outside assistance and that only authorized computing equipment was used. It was triggered by the removal of the top panel of the box.

“Good luck!” yelled Alfred from behind the closed door.

No one bothered to answer him. The game was on!

“Operating the disperser,” called Tommy. “All hands to the assembly deck.”

The disperser was a huge contraption with bellows, trunk, and hose. It, together with the computer, was the only mobile machine permitted in the puzzle room, according to the competition rules. Its job was to suck in all the pieces from the box and arrange them individually on the large apron surrounding the assembly deck. It was a relatively old model, and it took over a minute to finish the job.

“All pieces taken out,” announced Lily, extracting a small, star-shaped piece from the bottom of the box.

Apart from the disperser, the Lintons’ puzzle room was quite highly developed. All the previous year’s winnings, five thousand credits, were invested in innovations and improvements. The three-thousand-credit loan they had taken from Alfred was never returned (in fact, Alfred refused to take it back), and with it they bought an enormous ceiling mirror, allowing all of them to see all the pieces from anywhere. The room itself was very large, with a round deck in the middle that could snugly have accommodated a sumo ring. The deck was fitted on a hydraulic booster that could sink below floor level, and the surrounding apron was equipped with sliding metal plates that could carry a person toward the center of the deck. This machinery, standard to puzzle rooms everywhere, was absolutely vital for providing access to all points of the puzzle without endangering any of the unused pieces or partly erected sections.

The race against the clock had begun.

“First observation: ocean fragment with part of a coral reef. Also an unidentified brown object,” announced Piper, in its typical piping voice.

Piper, the Lintons’ compact computer, hovered lightly over the deck. Its spatial navigation was enabled by the repelling forces acting between the powerful electromagnets installed in its base and beneath the floor of the room. A tiny processor controlled the electromagnetic intensity, thereby allowing Piper motion anywhere within the room. This hovering capability was developed by Alfred and was approved by the Organization. It gave the computer a slight advantage over other puzzle computers, which traveled through a complex mesh of wires and cables.

“Restrict your scrutiny to the ocean and the ocean bed,” instructed Tommy.

The three siblings regarded Piper as their smart younger brother. Eleven-year-old Lily named him, and the brothers constructed him with the necessary computer intelligence for participating in puzzle contests. Tommy and Dave, fifteen and thirteen years of age, respectively, found that endowing the computer with the appropriate competence, while at the same time remaining within contest regulations and installing it into very compact resources, was a challenging effort indeed. Without Alfred to guide and advise them, their task would have taken triple the time.

The construction was necessary; the Organization wished to prevent an unfair advantage to the resource-affluent competitors such as the brain tanks. Therefore, all competing computers had to be confined to a size no larger than a tennis ball and weighing no more than three kilograms. Within these restrictions, the computer needed to cope with vision, speech, hearing, motion, and display—not to mention the actual solution processing itself. Indeed, enhancing one of the functions usually deteriorated one or more of the others. The solution processor needed to be able to scan all twenty thousand pieces and group them in ways that made sense to the solvers. This capability was directly dependent on its size and the quality of its programming.

“Detecting a sandy segment with marine vegetation. Probably extending all the way to the reef. Assembling,” called Lily.

“Okay,” confirmed Piper.

One of the three small lenses on Piper’s surface was focused on Lily. The computer could therefore confirm that the pieces she was handling did, in fact, match. What actually occurred was that any piece could be attached to any other piece by setting their surfaces together, and they would adhere to each other by magnetic force. However, nonfitting matches would fall apart about ten minutes later. It was the computer’s job to verify that such mismatches did not occur.

“I see the base of a large coral,” reported Dave. “I’d say about… umm… four hundred and fifty pieces.”

Tommy eyed his younger brother with unconcealed admiration while deftly putting together a submerged boulder. Dave was rapidly becoming an indispensable factor within the team. The very same Dave, until last year the team’s weakest link, was now revealing an uncanny photographic memory, enabling him to identify hundreds of matching parts at a glance. If he would only improve his coordination, mused Tommy, he could easily become one of the great masters.

The assembly work continued briskly. Portions of ocean bed and occasional corals began to appear on the deck. Dozens of crabs, sea urchins and starfish were strewn on the reef and within the vegetation covering it. The sea urchins were so lifelike that Lily actually pricked her finger while positioning one of them on a coral. The oysters were also very faithful to nature, and Tommy even fit a small pearl into one of them.

“Thirty minutes have elapsed,” announced Piper. “Crab and coral size ratios indicate a scale of one to ten. Unidentified object probably an ancient sea-going vessel. Attempting design of initial overall view; results in approximately five minutes.”

The picture that appeared on the 3-D screen exactly five minutes later was just a rough outline. It displayed a small coral reef surrounded by ocean. On the ocean bed, and adjacent to the reef, was the crude depiction of an antediluvian ship.

“Quite a coincidence,” pondered Tommy. “Just a couple of months ago we assembled a puzzle of a sunken ship named the Titanic.”

He sincerely hoped that the image on the screen closely resembled the solution. He realized that it was just a rough sketch, but Piper would henceforth update it continually with every piece assembled. Tommy knew that the closer the image was to reality, the easier their work would be.

They worked on without a break. An hour later, many more details surfaced; the ship was a sailing ship of some kind, damaged by the reef and half buried in the sand.

“Guessing—cannon on the bow indicates late-seventeenth-century British warship,” chimed in Piper. It had accumulated considerable naval historic data while solving the Titanic puzzle.

“I’m handling the aft section of the craft now,” said Lily. Dave and Tommy smiled at her choice of words. “It’s full of crates and boxes and stuff strewn around. I suppose that the open boxes need to be filled with all kinds of merchandise. Request double monitoring.”

“Okay,” attested Piper, and swiveled a lens from Dave to her.

Tommy marveled at his sister’s expertise. This thin, dark-haired girl had undertaken the hardest part of the puzzle—the ship’s interior. Yet chances were she would make only slight, if any, errors. Her talent for spatial orientation, combined with her extraordinary color perception, made her an invaluable asset to the team.

The first problem arose after seven hours and twenty minutes, about ten minutes after their first meal break. The mainmast that Dave had just completed erecting suddenly broke loose and fell into the watery area below it. To the team’s horror, the mast started sinking through the water pieces as if they really were liquid, and its base landed on the seabed. Tommy, who was assembling the nearby reef, reached out instinctively and grabbed the top of the mast before it, too, slid under.

“This isn’t possible,” yelled Tommy, flailing his free arm to keep himself from falling into the “water.” “The pieces sank through solids!” He lowered himself to a prone position on the floor plate.

“I’ve heard about this,” said Lily. “It’s some special substance that they developed last year. Alfred told me about it and said we could expect it in the competition. If you hadn’t caught the mast in time, we’d have to dismantle all the assembled water pieces.”

“I can’t understand why the mast broke away,” muttered Dave. “It fitted exactly, and Piper confirmed it.”

“That is correct,” said Piper. “Cannot discern anywhere else to place it.”

Lily shook her head, and after a couple of seconds said, “I think I know what went wrong.”

“Yes?” Dave and Tommy chorused together.

“There are two places that could possibly be suitable for a mast. I believe we’ve just encountered the trap of the puzzle, and that we’re very fortunate to have passed it with so little collateral damage. Let’s have a look at it…. Yes, some pieces have shaken loose from the mast, but they shouldn’t take more than a minute to restore.”

Tommy’s heart skipped a beat. In the heat of construction they had quite forgotten that every puzzle had a hidden trap. The temptation to rush ahead and complete the mast had nearly cost them dearly; they would have had to redo the puzzle from almost its starting point.

Piper piped: “Location found!” Tommy thought he detected a hint of embarrassment in Piper’s tone but immediately realized that this was his own wishful thinking. “Tip of mast is on other side of reef, not yet assembled.”

The image on the screen dissolved, and a new, updated image replaced it, the mast relocated now to its new position.

“Great!” exclaimed Tommy. “Now will someone please help me extricate this mast out of here, before my arm falls off?”

The team pulled gingerly on the mast and laid it aside. They had lost only three minutes, and work was renewed with full vigor.

“This looks like a trunk full of old books,” called Lily. She had completed the stern of the boat and was handling the various goods and merchandise that were supposed to fit therein. “The script is so tiny that I can hardly make out the titles. Here’s one called Gulliver’s Travels, and here’s another called Huthering Weights. Anyone heard of them?”

“Wuthering Heights,” Tommy sounded a bit exasperated. “Have you tried to close the trunk lid?”

“Yes. I tried, but it won’t fit. And now it won’t open again”

“Correct,” interjected Piper. “Please remember, we are permitted only one more error of this magnitude. Therefore, it would be a waste of time and effort to attempt to open the trunk.”

“Guys, please—no more individual attempts. If anyone has any doubts or queries, bring them up at once for all of us to consider. We lose three minutes for every error—two more of these, as Piper has pointed out, and we’ll be disqualified.”

“Thirty nine and one-half percent of all pieces are assembled,” intoned Piper, in his reedy voice. “Elapsed time is ten hours and twenty-seven minutes. At this rate you will break the world record.”

It was as if they all had woken up from a refreshing nap. Usually the first third of the puzzle consumed about half the solution time. It began to look as if they could complete the puzzle in less than twenty hours, if no further unforeseen surprises occurred.

Indeed, the replica began to take shape on the assembly deck, and the image projected by Piper became sharper and clearer. At the sixteen-hour mark, the toughest part of the ship’s assembly was nearly completed. The only major task that remained was the bow, jutting above the water’s surface, with its lion-head bowsprit, according to Piper’s projection. Piper had returned his lens to Dave, who appeared to be completely exhausted. Despite the fact that he was allocated the simplest tasks—the final touches to the body of water, with a few fish and eels swimming therein—he needed constant monitoring.

“You didn’t get enough sleep last night,” rebuked Tommy. “Just look how Lily is working like a demon.”

Tommy was about to complete the reef, placing every coral in its proper location and interspersing fish and vegetation expertly in the nooks and crannies. His past experience became more and more evident as the hours progressed. The number of unattached pieces was diminishing rapidly, and many of them could be found strewn around Tommy, whose deft fingers were picking them up and joining them to the others as efficiently as a master bricklayer.

Nineteen hours, thirty minutes, and ten seconds from commencement, and the puzzle was completed. Tommy pressed the red button on the telecamera, and a loud bell rang as the camera took in the assembled puzzle, together with a time stamp, and broadcast the image to the control desk of the contest.

Lily sank to the floor, tuckered out. Dave, who had stretched out exhausted five minutes earlier, held up a limp hand with his fingers extended in a V sign.

It seemed like just a second after the bell that Alfred burst into the room, as if he had been waiting all the while for just that moment. He hugged and kissed the children, clapped his hands in glee, and called up the Organization’s main office.

“Yes, yes, I am their manager. Thank you very much. Yes, we’re all very pleased. Yes, we’ll all make sure to be there tomorrow for the prize awarding ceremony. No, please, no press interviews before then. The children are very tired and very excited. They need to catch up on sleep hours.”

He hung up and danced a little jig.

“It looks good, guys, it looks good. You’re the first to submit the solution, meaning that you’ll take first prize! Tomorrow we’ll appear on SuperVision.”

The three siblings smiled at him, bleary-eyed.

“He has every right to dance and be ecstatic,” mused Tommy, as he leaned with half-closed eyes on a wall. “If it weren’t for him we wouldn’t have gotten anywhere. He financed the building of this room from his uncle’s inheritance money, and it was he who bought the computer’s components. He believed in us from the start, even though we were not certified geniuses—just smart kids. Well, we sure justified his faith in us.”

The doorbell rang. Alfred shooed them into the bedroom, then went to answer the door. As the children slipped out of the assembly room, they heard him arguing loudly with a herd of news-hungry reporters clustering outside.

The ceremony took place in the main auditorium of the Organization’s headquarters. The old building, considered an architectural masterpiece of the twenty-first century, was in the shape of a globe, and its highest point matched that of the ancient Eiffel Tower. Its surface was an exact map relief of the continents and oceans of the earth but had the appearance of being assembled from a puzzle. The main entrance was through a wide door in the south of the Pacific Ocean, and the Linton children remembered the sight from the many SuperVision broadcasts of similar ceremonies that they had witnessed over the years. Today they were the heroes of the show. Their parents, beaming proudly, chose to remain in the background and allow their offspring to bask in their moment of glory. Alfred, who was constantly repelling overeager reporters by waving his cane, made room for them to immortalize their historic entrance to the building on digifilm.

They were received with thunderous applause. They briskly followed the green-clad usher to their places of honor in the first row.

“I wonder if these people already know that we’ve broken the world record,” commented Dave.

“I don’t think so,” replied Tommy. “The results are kept secret and are first announced on this very occasion. I believe they don’t even know what place we took.”

“Shh,” hissed Alfred impatiently. “The ceremony is beginning.”

The majestic ceremony was relatively short. The world head scientist gave a speech, and the chairman of the Competition Board delivered his congratulatory address to the winners.

The master of ceremonies called upon the Clarke team from Sunnyvale to ascend and receive third prize. Their excellent time was twenty-one hours, thirty minutes, and fifty seconds.

“…With only one assembly error,” announced the MC as the audience cheered and applauded.

Next was the team from the Einstein Institute in New York, who took second prize with the amazing time of twenty-one hours, eighteen minutes, and seven seconds.

“Without a single assembly error,” roared the MC. “Only twenty-three minutes from the previous world record.” The applause was long and loud, and in it were mixed whispers of anticipation and excitement. The allusion was quite clear—the audience was about to witness history in the making. The breaking of a world record!

“And first prize, by a very large margin, goes to a team that has continually surprised us this year,” announced the MC, his excitement mounting. “I am honored to invite to the stage an independent team from Cape Cass: Lily, David, and Tommy Linton. And their manager, Alfred Collins.”

The three children skipped onto the stage amidst deafening applause. Alfred limped after them more slowly.

“For the past nine years the world record was held by the Peterson team, and it was considered to be the ultimate in human puzzle-solving endeavor,” continued the MC, his enthusiasm gaining. “And here we have a group of children, not even of the elite priority study program, who have broken this record. Ladies and gentlemen, it is with no little pride and elation that I tonight announce new limits to the human capacity to solve puzzles. In first place: the Linton team, with a new, fantastic world record of fifteen hours and forty-two minutes exactly!”

It was as if an earthquake had struck. The cheers, the clapping, the whistles, the yells—all made for a roar so deafening that Tommy, who had opened his mouth to correct the MC, closed it in consternation. He glanced at Dave and Lily and saw the confusion in their faces as well.

“And now, a few words from the head of the team—Tommy Linton!”

Tommy found the microphone shoved in front of his face. He swallowed hard and said:

“We are very happy to have won first place in the competition. It has been our dream for a long time. We’d like to thank our parents who gave us all the backing we needed. We’d also like to thank all the citizens of Cape Cass for their support and encouragement. And very special thanks goes to Alfred Collins, without whom we would not be standing here tonight.”

The applause shook the auditorium, and Tommy waited for it to subside before continuing.

“However, there has been an error in the MC’s announcement. Yes, we did break the world record, but our time was nineteen hours, thirty minutes, and ten seconds.” He paused briefly and then went on. “And we need to add two minutes to this timing, because the package arrived two minutes early.”

The huge auditorium became as still as a cemetery.

“Just what do you mean, young man?” boomed the Competition Board chairman. He waved a large sheet of paper and added: “I have here the photo-image of the puzzle you constructed, with its time stamp. The time is exactly fifteen hours and forty minutes!”

Tommy took the photo-image and his blood froze. The chairman was right about the timing. But the picture, instead of showing a coral reef and a shipwreck, displayed a savage volcanic scene—bubbling lava flowing down a mountainside studded with fabulous, overturned statues. Something was definitely very wrong. The paper sheet fluttered to the floor, and Tommy turned desperately to Alfred.

“Can anyone explain what is happening here?” thundered the head scientist. The audience started to mutter and exchange whispers.

“I can, Dr. Daniel Carter, if you’ll permit me,” said Alfred suddenly and picked up the microphone.

“Alfred Edelberg!” exclaimed the head scientist in astonishment.

“Not anymore,” corrected Alfred. He turned to the audience and addressed them directly, his voice carrying confidence and authority. “Today my name is Alfred Collins. In the past my surname was Edelberg. You may remember the Edelberg vaccine against aging—in fact, I’m pretty sure many of you have actually used it. It is named after me, as it was I who discovered it. Others may remember me due to the scandal that resulted when I accused the World Science Committee of limiting the freedom of research. I consequently lost my job, and I was expelled in disgrace from USA-Tech.”

His gaze scanned the audience. The whispers and murmurings intensified as several of those present recalled the episode that shook the scientific world some twenty years earlier.

“But I did not abandon hope,” continued Alfred, and he turned to face the head scientist, who sat motionless in his chair, his face as pale as a sheet. “I changed my name and continued my research, which now was, unfortunately, illegal, and I may be immediately arrested for it. I developed a series of biological grain types, easily produced by common plants, that raised the intelligence of the organism that ate them.”

He bent down to the floor, picked up the picture of the puzzle, and held it aloft for the audience to see.

“The puzzle in this picture was not assembled by Tommy, Dave, and Lily Linton. They assembled a different puzzle—a puzzle as difficult as this one, but a puzzle of my own design—and they completed it in nineteen hours, thirty minutes, and ten seconds. Two minutes must be added to this timing, because I delivered the puzzle to them two minutes too early. Thus, while they were busy with my puzzle, I intercepted the messenger with the real puzzle and took it to my house, next door to the Lintons’. There, in a simple and primitive assembly room, without the aid of a computer, the puzzle was assembled by the Zoko team in only fifteen hours and forty minutes.”

He smiled reassuringly at the three children who were staring at him, their mouths agape, their complexions ashen.

“However, the title of Humanity’s World Champion Puzzle Solvers still belongs to the team you see before you. There is no person, or team of persons, on this planet who could do the job better or faster than they.”

Alfred unscrewed the top of his walking cane, and withdrew from it a large roll of paper. He flattened it out and showed the stunned audience the picture printed on it.

“This is the team that broke the world record,” he cried. “They are only seven years old, but their individual IQs are higher than that of any other creature on this planet.”

The three orangutans in the picture were grinning broadly. Each of them held a yellow banana in one hand and a red portable supercomputer in the other.

“We’re so glad that you’ve managed to prove your theories, and that your banishment has been revoked,” said Lily. “But it’s such a shame that you’re returning to the university. We’ll miss you very much.”

The three champions sat in the large assembly room, watching Alfred wrapping up his memory cubes and placing them carefully into a large container.

“I won’t be so far away,” said Alfred. “Just about three hours’ drive from here. And you’ll always be welcome at my new location.”

“Lily will not be available until next year,” said Tommy. “We won’t travel to New York without her.”

“But you could visit me on holidays, couldn’t you?”

“Of course,” replied Lily. “We’ve long forgiven you for what happened. We love you very much, and we’re grateful to you for, well, adopting us, in a way. Even though your motive was to snatch our puzzle away from us. You know, Alfred, you were very lucky in choosing to coach us when you moved to Cape Cass as our neighbor. What would you have done had we not won second prize last year?”

Alfred did not respond. He hugged the little girl, and tears welled up in his eyes. There was no point in revealing to them what was contained in those spinach pies that they loved so much. They would never forgive him, and the world would exorcise him for illegally experimenting on humans. Even the fact that he himself was his own guinea pig for the past thirty years, and that all his discoveries stemmed from these experiments, would not have saved him.