The Potato Chip Puzzles_ The Puzzling World of Winston Breen - Eric Berlin [25]
“ALTERS,” Winston said after a moment of thought.
“Good! Try that,” Mr. Garvey said to Jake.
Jake punched in the letters. “No.”
“STALER,” Winston said.
Jake pushed more buttons. “No, sorry.”
“Try ALERTS,” said Mr. Garvey. “It has to be one of these.”
Jake shook his head. “It’s not that one.”
“Are you typing it in the right spot?”
Even in the dark, Winston saw Jake’s eyes flash. “Of course I am.” All he had to do was push the first button—the only button the computer would let him push. Did Mr. Garvey think he couldn’t manage that?
Apparently so. “Let me see,” Mr. Garvey said, and snatched the computer away. He glanced at the screen and then handed it back to Jake, who rolled his eyes at Winston in disbelief.
“So there’s another trick to this,” Mal said, looking back up at the floating words.
“A trick,” said Mr. Garvey. “Yes. A trick.”
They were standing fairly close to the exit, and as they watched, another team left the theater. Before the door could close, a hand opened it back up. Miss Norris peeked in and looked around. With the light flooding in from the lobby, she could see Winston and his team easily enough. She turned her head and said something, and then the girls walked in, glaring. If the four of them could blast rays of solid ice out of their eyes, Winston and his team would have been frozen forever. Bethany looked like she was on the verge of developing that power spontaneously. Winston and his friends traded embarrassed glances—they all wanted to crawl under the carpeting.
The girls and their teacher looked up at the floating words for a moment or two and then filed down into the seating area and out of sight.
Mr. Garvey watched his boys watch the girls. “All right, guys,” he said. “This is a competition, let’s remember that. We’re in last place, and we’re not going to get very far if we help other teams. Let’s get back to the puzzle.”
Winston may have been embarrassed at his teacher’s actions, but he wasn’t about to walk away from a day of puzzles. Neither were his friends. Jake looked up at the floating words. They were shimmering and golden. “I understand bull and ram and fish,” said Jake, “but what is a water carrier? What’s that supposed to be?”
“These are all constellations,” Winston said. “Symbols of the zodiac. Water carrier is . . . um.”
“Aquarius,” said Mal. “That’s what I am.”
“Right,” said Mr. Garvey. “The bull is Taurus, the ram is Aries, the fish is Pisces, the scales is Libra, and the goat is Capricorn. They’re all constellations.”
Winston gazed up at the floating words. The missing letters didn’t spell anything—at least not anything important. Those letters had to be missing for a reason, though.
All at once he saw it. It was almost as if some unseen force had whispered the answer into his ear. “I need a pencil and paper,” he said urgently. “And I need to see.”
Mr. Garvey said, “You have it?”
“I might. I need to see. It’s too dark in here.” He marched toward the exit without even making sure the others were behind him.
When they got back out to the main exhibit hall, Winston grabbed a pencil and a scrap of paper and wrote hastily:
AQUARIUS
TAURUS
ARIES
PISCES
LIBRA
CAPRICORN
“Okay,” said Mal. “Those are the signs of the zodiac.”
Winston nodded. “And that’s the key to the whole thing.”
(Continue reading to see the answer to this puzzle.)
CHAPTER SIX
WINSTON EXPLAINED THE ANSWER to his friends: One of the phrases floating up there on the theater ceiling had been WATER CARRIER. The sign of the water carrier is AQUARIUS. WATER CARRIER was missing its second letter; if you took the second letter out of the word AQUARIUS, that gave you the letter Q.
You had to do that for each word. BULL was missing its third letter, so Winston took the third letter—U—from the word TAURUS. And so on, until Winston had spelled the word QUASAR.
That was recognizably a word, but none of