bout de papier, Vol. 22, No. 3 (2006) — Fall/Winter 2006 // Automne/Hiver 2006, pp. 40–43
*he President bounced up the grandstand steps to his box behind the band. As he straightened from kissing a baby, a hotdog in flight to a customer caught him square upside the face. He fell over the railing and into the bell of a large tuba, which wedged around his prominent ears. Clambering to his feet, he was helped to his seat, resisting all attempts to remove the instrument and announcing that he intended to stay the course. Meanwhile, the Vice President suspended habeas corpus, the Secret Service sent the steps and the railing to Guantanamo, the CIA water-boarded the hotdog and the FBI led a (fortunately fruitless) search of the crowd for an ethnic computer engineer they could deport. The vendor escaped in the confusion. The judges considered awarding a special gold medal for Absurdly Hysterical Over-reaction to a Minor Incident but narrowly voted against it.
The Ultimate Games were underway. The brain-child of a twisted video gamer cloned from Henry Kissinger, they sought to replace war with a program of extreme sports events modelled on the Olympics, with the goals of war — border adjustments, colonial franchises, freedom of passage, support for puppet regimes, victory in the Eurovision songfest — up for decision based on team rankings. Regional finals winnowed contestants to six plus the host team. Modifications to the traditional structure of the events guaranteed strong audience and media interest. This year’s ten:
• Sumo, signature event of the Asian champions Kung Fusion. It is played on a giant wheel balanced atop a 100-metre tower, so being thrown out of the ring makes a real impact, especially if the bungee cord breaks. Adding a thrill, one wrestler, unknown to the others, has a nitroglycerin pouch in his loincloth.
• Javelin toss. Teams throw simultaneously from both ends of the field. Points for both distance and aim. Its classical roots are emphasized by the event’s sponsor, Salt of the Earth (from Carthage in the MidEast-Maghreb league).
• Long-jump, sponsored by DFAIT’s landmines destruction team. The landing pit is seeded with mines, moved forward with every successful jump.
• Shot-put, favourite of the European regional winners, Kropotkin’s Revenge. Played simultaneously by members of all squads, facing inward in a circle. The shots look standard, but the sputtering fuses add a nice anarchist touch.
• Caber toss. Adapted from the highland games, this involves hurling young telephone poles for distance. In these Games, tossing is done all at once and from anywhere on the field. Doping regulations are strict — anyone not stoned out of his gourd has an unfair advantage and is immediately disqualified, but extra marks for special combinations (scotch and acid is popular).
• Hurdles. Association of this event with Africa’s team, The Sun, is clear from the line of razor thorns across the top of each hurdle and the carnivorous wildlife released behind the runners. This version provides all world records for hurdles over 500 metres, many set posthumously (inside the lions).
• Skeet shooting, brought to the Games by the North American champion Screaming Eagles. The skeet targets arching overhead give the event an air of the traditional, but with contestants in ultra-light planes firing Stingers.
• Water polo, brought to the Games by the Demons of Don Gordo from the Latin American region. Spiced up by filling the pool with salsa. And sharks.
• Biathlon. Heavily modified from the original winter ski-and-shooting format. Contestants drive souped-up jalopies around a mirror maze and eliminate the competition with Saturday Night specials. Mad Max meets the LA freeway.
• Hockey, sponsored by the host team, Black Ice. Giving the players nuclear hand grenades brings new meaning to clearing the benches, while the holes they melt in the ice add interesting obstacles to the power play.
The crowd roared as Felix Africa sidled up to Liebnitz and whispered, “There’s a man in the VIP box with his head up a tuba!” “If it’s who I thinks it is,” said the ace logician, “a piccolo would have sufficed. But we have more important problems.” He scanned the crowd. “Too many little things are going wrong, too many accidents, too many slip-ups. Too many people around with dubious security passes and wild expressions in their eyes. I mean, aside from Chief MacBannock. And there’s this old codger who keeps dropping out of ventilator shafts and popping up out of drains — slowly — and waving a Glock around. I don’t know who he is, but I’ve put Manitoba Jones on finding him.”
“What’s worse, Rialto Sleazewagon is trying to make sure these Games are the last. They have reduced popular support for conflict and provided other ways to resolve its causes, so they are a threat to some people. Neo-cons hate them since they reduce opportunities for good old-fashioned international aggression and domestic repression. Terrorists oppose them because they promote peace, order and freedom. So someone hired Sleazewagon. And GEODE tells us that all the minor incidents are just to distract us from something bigger.”
“GEODE?” “, queried Felix. Liebnitz replied, “An artificial intelligence stored in a stone-age computer in SuWaNi. It’s befriended Bugbyte.” The beautiful black computer tech seated before a terminal at the far end of the booth looked up and said, “Our quartz-based friend just came through. Sleazewagon’s employers blocked GEODE from communicating anything obvious, but he sent us this puzzle. It’s set up like a score card for the Games, but the clues don’t match the actual results on the field, so it must be designed to help us on the major threat.”
GEODE’s puzzle read as follows:
Fill in the grid to show the winner of all the gold, silver and bronze medals for the 10 events, plus the medal point totals (based on 5 points for gold, 3 for silver and I for bronze) and rankings for the seven teams. Three silvers are already marked to give you a head start. No team has more than 5 medals or less than one gold and one silver. There are no ties for medals. Events are in time order (A to J) on the chart. Each team has a different point total and therefore ranking.
1. The Demons are in last place with 9 points, including a gold in water polo and a bronze won earlier.
2. Gold-silver-bronze in the long jump are held respectively by the Salt, the team in third place overall and the team with 15 points.
3. The team in first place has a gold in caber toss.
4. The team in fifth place has 12 points, including a bronze in water polo.
5. The Sun took the gold in biathlon by edging the team that won javelin.
6. Kung Fusion was the only team to take two medals in one event, winning both gold and bronze in hurdles.
7. The Eagles and Revenge each got one silver and one gold out of hockey and shot put.
8. The team with a bronze in both skeet and biathlon has three more points than the team in sixth place, which took the gold in the last event.
9. One team won medals in long jump, caber toss, hurdles, skeet and biathlon; another won medals in javelin, shot put, caber toss, water polo and biathlon.
10. The Eagles, the fourth-place team and the team with 17 points each had two silvers.
11. Ice has a gold in skeet and 14 points overall.
12. Revenge has four medals, including bronzes in sumo and javelin, and 10 points overall. Liebnitz filled in the grid. “More than enough data to solve it, but what do we do now?” There was a thump on the roof, then a trap door opened in the ceiling and a woman in pre-war aviator’s garb climbed down, dragging a parachute. Liebnitz smiled. “Assuming you aren’t Amelia Earhart, you must be Mabel Stanley. Felix, Bugbyte, meet the Ranee of SuWaNi.” The woman dusted off her jodhpurs and smiled back. “GEODE asked me to bring the other part of the message to you directly. Those idiots from the skeet event shot down my biplane, but I got out in time.” She grimaced. “The big finale is a missile, already on its way, aimed at the stadium and big enough to wipe out everyone in it. No one will ever revive the Games, and enough talse clues have been left to cause a big new round of wars.” “Already on its way?”, Felix quavered. “So there’s no time to evacuate the place.” Mabel calmly unstrapped a chunky wristwatch and gave it to Liebnitz. “This will make the missile auto-destruct. The warhead is a short-range neutron bomb, so even a close blast — say half a kilometre up — won’t hurt anyone. The detonator has to be close to the missile to work. The detonation command is a 10-digit number encoded in the puzzle — note the ranking of the team that wins the gold in each event, string them together in the order A to J and enter the result on the watch.” As the lead-lined dome closed over the radioactive hockey rink, the crew dashed down to the reviewing stand in front of the band. They quickly assembled cabers, bungee cords and spare parts from a ’57 Chevy biathlon racer into a giant crossbow and loaded a javelin with the watch duct-taped to it. As they awaited the countdown from GEODE, a pair of lions suddenly bounded onto the platform and herded them away from the crossbow. Three sputtering bombs arced over the rail and exploded, demolishing the device. “Only seven minutes to impact,” said Mabel. “Won’t matter to us,” replied Felix. “Those lions look hungry.”
The platform shuddered as Don Gordo hauled himself over the edge, a large shark covered with salsa and taco chips over one shoulder. Taking in the situation, he set the creature down and gave it a swift kick in the tail, at which it opened its eyes and wriggled with surprising agility toward the lions, who left in a big hurry. “Land shark, my latest genetic experiment,” explained the caudillo, “Bred from a goldfish — it’s really an 800-pound guppy — it really hates cats.” He grimly surveyed the remains of the crossbow. Liebnitz picked up the watch, which had been thrown clear.
Then a helicopter swooped over to hover above the platform. Two figures rappelled down, the younger one with a certain flair (narrowly avoiding impaling himself on the javelin wedged upright in the deck), the older more slowly. The first, Manitoba Jones, made the introductions, “This is the guy you sent me to find — the President’s father. He was worried about him and mounted an independent security sweep. Got the idea from watching Tom Cruise movies.” The tall, preppy man extended his hand. “Glad to meet you. Junior was always a handful and now he has nukes.”
Looking up from her laptop, Bugbyte said, “Missile within range. It has a message stencilled on the front, ’Greetings from Tora Bora’. We need to do something inside… about 45 seconds. But what?” The old man gestured at his ear and said, “I’ve been following your contact with GEODE on my hearing aid — it picks up a lot of weird stuff. So on the way over, I purloined the last of these from the skeet rack. Haven’t used one since Nicaragua, but I think I remember how.” Reaching into a backpack, he pulled out a Stinger and asked for the watch; strapping it to the rocket, he braced and fired. The Stinger rose and disappeared into the gathering dusk. There was a muffled detonation and a glittering starbust of multicoloured flame. The spectators applauded wildly.
“’Mission accomplished” my ass, Junior,” he said. Just then a hot dog came flying through the air and hit him square upside the face. Liebnitz turned and saw the security guards near a vendor’s cart, wrestling Rialto Sleazewagon to the ground. The old man wiped a steak of mustard from his cheek (’Not even Dijon!”), turned on his heel and slipped on the greasy wiener that had fallen to the deck. Toppling over the rail, he fell headfirst into the bell of the second tuba, where he stuck fast, feet waving in the air. Peering over the edge, Liebnitz murmured, “Must be something genetic.”
Can you duplicate Liebnitz’s feat by providing the ten-digit number making up the auto-destruct sequence for the missile? bout de papier will decide the winner by drawing from a box containing all correct entries received by February 15, 2007. The winner will receive a book prize autographed by A Aalto. Not necessary for the contest, but can you also till in the grid to indicate the winners of each medal, the medal point totals and the team rankings? And any suggestions for removing tubas from the hard-headed, without harming these delicate instruments?
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 22, No. 3 (2006) — Fall/Winter 2006 // Automne/Hiver 2006, pp. 40–43. Read the rest of this issue →
