one else could think of my key sentence.
All well and good, but what was the sentence? I had no idea. Maybe too much of my memory had been washed, and the sentence was gone. Yet shouldn't I have anticipated that problem? I was an intelligent person, wasn't I? Surely I had allowed for it!
I pondered longer, but here at last I seemed to be balked. I was in a kind of hell, and part of that hell was my ignorance. What, in the period of my memory, would I have devised for my period of amnesia to recover?
Then I remembered the message on the wall: ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE.
Could that be it? It would be just like me to plant the message of success under the noses of my captors, in the form of a message of defeat. Delicious irony!
I tried it. The first letter was A; count off thirteen, to N. Four from the second letter, B—it came to F.
And so on, seven from A for H, twenty five from N—oops! That ran way off the alphabet. Well, skip that for now and go on to the next: eleven from D for O, and thirteen from O for punctuation. N F H ? O
? This couldn't be right, yet it had seemed like such a promising lead.
Wait—suppose the count started at the original letter, not next to it. That would change the displacement by one. I reviewed it in my mind, painstakingly recounting the letters. I had a good visual memory, but this was tricky to do. M E G ? N ? That was more like it. The final character could actually be a space, separating the word from the next; most words in the English language were short. The missing middle one...
Suddenly I had it. There were not thirty-six but thirty-seven characters in the original sentence, counting the space at the end. That might show how many there were in the alphabet/punctuation key. That brought the missing letter back around to A, and I knew that word.
MEGAN.
Bio of a Space Tyrant 3 - Politician
Chapter 2 — NYORK
As gawky as any tourist, I looked at the large screen in the dayroom of the passenger ship. Spirit, beside me, was similarly fascinated. All the others watching were children. Normal adults, jaded by experience, were reading, sleeping, watching entertainment holos or indulging in other pursuits or appetites in private chambers.
Of course, the approach to mighty Jupiter required several hours if I disregard the fact that the entire journey from Leda was an approach. No one could sit and watch the orange Colossus constantly without losing the edge of excitement. But my sister and I tried!
We had never before been closer than the orbit of Amalthea, and that had been a bitter occasion: the Jupiter authorities had towed our refugee bubble back out to space rather than accept us as immigrants.
That action had cost me my mother Charity, my fiancée Helse, and the rest of my companions. The mighty Colossus had not cared! I had been fifteen years old then, and Spirit had been twelve; now we were thirty and twenty-seven, our military careers abruptly behind us, and we were returning. How much better it would have been if we had made it the first time!
“Say, aren't you Captain Hubris, the Hero of the Belt?” a gangling Saxon boy abruptly inquired of me.
Startled by this recognition, I smiled. “I suppose I am.”
“Gee! That's great!” he exclaimed, and wandered away, his attention span and interest exhausted.
The phenomenal bands of Jupiter fuzzed as we came close. We had first seen the planet as a kind of giant face, with white eyeballs crossing from west to east in the north, and the Red Spot gaping like a mouth in the south. Now we were spiraling down above the great equatorial band that was occupied by the United States of Jupiter, the most powerful political entity in the Solar System. None of the giant city-bubbles was visible yet; they were on a plane at the five-bar level of atmospheric pressure; that is, five times the pressure of Earth's atmosphere at Earth's surface where the ambient temperature was a comfortable eighty degrees Fahrenheit, and
All well and good, but what was the sentence? I had no idea. Maybe too much of my memory had been washed, and the sentence was gone. Yet shouldn't I have anticipated that problem? I was an intelligent person, wasn't I? Surely I had allowed for it!
I pondered longer, but here at last I seemed to be balked. I was in a kind of hell, and part of that hell was my ignorance. What, in the period of my memory, would I have devised for my period of amnesia to recover?
Then I remembered the message on the wall: ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE.
Could that be it? It would be just like me to plant the message of success under the noses of my captors, in the form of a message of defeat. Delicious irony!
I tried it. The first letter was A; count off thirteen, to N. Four from the second letter, B—it came to F.
And so on, seven from A for H, twenty five from N—oops! That ran way off the alphabet. Well, skip that for now and go on to the next: eleven from D for O, and thirteen from O for punctuation. N F H ? O
? This couldn't be right, yet it had seemed like such a promising lead.
Wait—suppose the count started at the original letter, not next to it. That would change the displacement by one. I reviewed it in my mind, painstakingly recounting the letters. I had a good visual memory, but this was tricky to do. M E G ? N ? That was more like it. The final character could actually be a space, separating the word from the next; most words in the English language were short. The missing middle one...
Suddenly I had it. There were not thirty-six but thirty-seven characters in the original sentence, counting the space at the end. That might show how many there were in the alphabet/punctuation key. That brought the missing letter back around to A, and I knew that word.
MEGAN.
Bio of a Space Tyrant 3 - Politician
Chapter 2 — NYORK
As gawky as any tourist, I looked at the large screen in the dayroom of the passenger ship. Spirit, beside me, was similarly fascinated. All the others watching were children. Normal adults, jaded by experience, were reading, sleeping, watching entertainment holos or indulging in other pursuits or appetites in private chambers.
Of course, the approach to mighty Jupiter required several hours if I disregard the fact that the entire journey from Leda was an approach. No one could sit and watch the orange Colossus constantly without losing the edge of excitement. But my sister and I tried!
We had never before been closer than the orbit of Amalthea, and that had been a bitter occasion: the Jupiter authorities had towed our refugee bubble back out to space rather than accept us as immigrants.
That action had cost me my mother Charity, my fiancée Helse, and the rest of my companions. The mighty Colossus had not cared! I had been fifteen years old then, and Spirit had been twelve; now we were thirty and twenty-seven, our military careers abruptly behind us, and we were returning. How much better it would have been if we had made it the first time!
“Say, aren't you Captain Hubris, the Hero of the Belt?” a gangling Saxon boy abruptly inquired of me.
Startled by this recognition, I smiled. “I suppose I am.”
“Gee! That's great!” he exclaimed, and wandered away, his attention span and interest exhausted.
The phenomenal bands of Jupiter fuzzed as we came close. We had first seen the planet as a kind of giant face, with white eyeballs crossing from west to east in the north, and the Red Spot gaping like a mouth in the south. Now we were spiraling down above the great equatorial band that was occupied by the United States of Jupiter, the most powerful political entity in the Solar System. None of the giant city-bubbles was visible yet; they were on a plane at the five-bar level of atmospheric pressure; that is, five times the pressure of Earth's atmosphere at Earth's surface where the ambient temperature was a comfortable eighty degrees Fahrenheit, and