Песах Амнуэль - Zion's Fiction - A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature

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.”