*Track 19 (continued)
“Not quite what I was expecting,” was Stuart’s initial reaction, his observation principally driven by the structure of this clue being considerably less identical to its earlier ‘twin’ than they had become used to seeing. It soon became clear he wasn’t the only one with concerns.
“Where’s the home we need to head from?” asked Anne, “I know we’ve always assumed a British bias, but the forty ‘Challengers’ left could be based anywhere.”
“And there won’t be forty for long,” bemoaned Joe, always the first (even ahead of Stuart) to dissect the numbers, “another fifty percent cut. That’s cruel.”
“Anybody understand what sort of thimble we’re supposed to find, or how for that matter?” enquired an equally perplexed Charlie, “guess we should be grateful it’s not a needle in a haystack.”
Unusually, it was left to the perpetually grumpy Ed to provide their only beacon of light, “I think ‘heavenly hunt’ probably indicates Earth’s our starting point,” he declared, “unless there are some aliens left in that makes it the same for everybody.”
“OK, so it’s an intergalactic travel version of ‘Challenge 24’, that certainly adds a new dimension,” Stuart agreed, warming to Ed’s suggestion, “I guess we still need to solve the seven middle clues first though, to give us directions?”
“Yeah. Each one seems to have three parts, presumably with the same answer,” added a re-energised Charlie, “should we split up to solve these, or all just pitch in?”
“H3,” announced Joe unexpectedly, taking Charlie’s ‘pitching in’ proposal more literally than anybody had expected, “it’s a film. I’ve seen it on Netflix, about the IRA hunger strikers. H3 was their Maze prison block. That’s infamous, could be an answer to the middle one?”
“Well, an H3’s also the smallest Hummer,” confirmed Ed, a connoisseur of all-things combustion, “which I guess, by reputation, you could call a car for small drug dealers.”
“And if you Google H3, along with histamine, you get a hit for a ‘receptor’, which I guess is a sensor,” confirmed Charlie, “one down, six to go!”
This apparently unstoppable, sequential solution flow felt like they had taken an unfair advantage on ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’, employing a melding of minds (without the need for any coughing), and drawing on their diverse range of specialist knowledge. They all interpreted this early success, without discussion, as an answer to Charlie’s organisational enquiry. Pitching in, and shouting out, remained the order of the day, and what it lacked in structure it more than made up for with results:
Stuart suggested Clive’s car could be a C5, Anne knew it could also be an envelope, and Charlie retained his ‘king of search’ crown by uncovering a Lockheed military aircraft built in Marietta
Ed, assuming the Brian Cox scientific mantle, advised hydrogen gas was H2, which Charlie spotted could also be the second half of the financial year, with Joe, somewhat obscurely, discovering it was a circular London bus route that runs through the places named
Stuart dragged to mind some ancient (yet modern) Olympic recollection about C1 canoe racing, with Charlie claiming that he knew this was also Tokyo’s ring road, while Ed at least had the grace to acknowledge the internet as the source of his Mongolian TV knowledge
“So, are they all Hs or Cs?” enquired Anne. Stepping back from the testosterone fuelled competition, to shout out the maximum number of answers (in the shortest possible time), she seemed the only one who had remained level-headed enough to consider the overall pattern. Her supposition proved correct; its guidance playing a helpful role in unlocking the remaining three, harder sets of clues:
It was obvious the little red sports car was a Corvette, but all their models having a similar C/digit classification was at first unhelpful, until they found that a C6 could also be an alternate name for both a Soprano voice and, apparently, an arcane model of electrical connector
Joe established C2 was an old, defunct ‘low carb’ variant of Coca Cola, which reminded Ed that it was a similarly extinct Citroen model, although (in his Brian Cox guise) he was frustrated by Anne being the first to uncover its additional usage as a vitamin called choline, renowned as brain food
Clue two remained elusive longest; until Stuart’s randomised H/C/digit searches hit upon H6 being the grid number of a Milton Keynes road, otherwise known as Childs Way, which it then followed could also be an ‘unmade’ Harrison watch prototype and a British WW1 submarine
Amazingly, within twenty minutes, in a frantic fit of flash quizzing, they had solved all seven clues. Rearranged in their corrected order (according to the ‘Challenge’) these read: C5, H6, C2, H3, C6, H2, and C1.
“We just need to work out what to do with them now,” commented Charlie, immediately bursting their brief balloon of euphoria.
“It could be Hydrogen and Carbon,” suggested Ed, “they’re amongst the commonest elements on Earth and,” he hesitatingly continued, already sounding less convinced, “probably in space too. Maybe these are the most frequent compounds found on the different planets?”
“Not sure that will give us the directional element we need though,” countered Stuart, “excuse the pun!”
“I’ve just put C and H into Google,” was Joe’s typically millennial contribution, “but all I got back are some fabric, brick and window companies. Can’t see they’ll help. Plus a type of campervan, which wouldn’t be much good for space travel either.”
“So, H is used to denote Planck’s constant,” added Charlie, who had clearly followed Joe and tried drinking from the same internet cup, “which is something to do with electromagnetism and a photon’s energy, while C stands for capacitance, which is the ratio of electrical charge to its potential. Whether you can combine those two is way beyond my scientific pay grade though.” The subsequent silence suggested this was a concept similarly out of reach for Brian Cox.
Collectively they seemed in grave danger of disappearing without trace down some unfathomable, empirical rabbit hole; more appropriately perhaps down an Einsteinian wormhole. It took Anne to rescue them, bringing them back down to Earth, indeed much closer to home than that.
“You’re all over-thinking this again,” she started, “where do you see H and C every day?” Faced by a wall of video silence, further evidence of their communal guilt on her charge of analysis paralysis, Anne was forced to spell it out, “it’s obvious none of you do any washing up! Just look at your taps, surely H and C stand for hot and cold.”
This wasn’t the first time they had been usurped by feminine logic, by its triumph over macho mechanics, (“maybe we need more women on the team?” Stuart pondered). Anne’s suggestion clearly contained more than a grain of truth, its simplicity aligning with their previous ‘Challenge’ experience much better than the complexity of compounds. It certainly felt a lot less like walking the Planck!
Ed was the first to take up Anne’s baton and attempt to run with it, “so could C5 be the fifth coldest planet, the fifth furthest from the sun, and so on?”
“That still won’t help us plot a path, like we needed to for ‘Challenge 24’,” Stuart observed, conscious he may be verging on annoying everybody with his pedantry.
“You’re still missing the other obvious bit from the clue,” Anne laughed, “have you forgotten how to play hunt the thimble? How do you get closer to what you’re looking for?”
“Hotter and colder,” shouted Joe, and their route to a solution clicked into place. “We just need to start at home, on Earth,” he continued, “and plot our journey from there. It’s like Ed suggested, but with steps added. Five planets colder, six hotter, etcetera, until we reach our destination. We need to put the planets in order first though.”
“My very efficient memory just stores up nine planets,” responded Ed instantly. It took a moment, and some further clarification, before the others realised this was more than just an idle boast on his part. “It’s a mnemonic for the order of the planets from the Sun,” he explained, “Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and finally Pluto, if we’re still counting that as a planet.”
Charlie took charge of the baton for the glory leg, the home straight, thankfully managing to run it to the tape without invoking Stuart’s feared use of PowerPoint. “Five planets colder from Earth is Neptune, six hotter takes you to Venus, two moves colder is Mars, three hotter gives us Mercury, six colder is then Uranus, and two hotter would land on Jupiter. So one final hop colder from there must mean our ‘heavenly thimble’ is hidden on Saturn. That must be the answer.”
Having run through their solar system sequencing a second time, to double check they hadn’t made any simple arithmetical mismoves, a consensus was reached regarding SATURN and, with the safety net of one back-up guess in reserve, Stuart entered this as their solution.
With a mere thirty-eight minutes elapsed this, staggeringly, only proved quick enough to secure them a qualification spot in around seventh place, but as surprising as this was it could do nothing to dampen their elation at having successfully traversed an interplanetary route into ‘Challenge 69’s top twenty.
Given it was a Sunday, with nobody having to rush off to work, they all stayed on the line for an extended video chat, the topic never straying far from the all-pervading ‘Challenge’. “No more music references this month,” Charlie noted, “have we just been imagining them?”
“I’m pretty confident they’ll still be important before the end,” Stuart replied, “it might just be a double bluff this month, to throw us off track with only a ‘Challenge’ or two to go. You’ve reminded me though, there was something I meant to ask you. Did we ever see The Distractions?”
“Can’t remember them,” Charlie conceded, “but I’ll consult the list later and let you know. Why do you ask?”
It was only after Stuart had explained the ‘Quantick question’, and Charlie had claimed personal ownership over The Comsat Angels, that they realised Ed had stopped participating in the discussion. “What’s up Ed?” Stuart chided him, “are you sulking because Anne beat you to this month’s star pupil?”
“No,” Ed replied, “while you’ve all been rambling on, I’ve been doing some more digging. There was nothing musical this month, but I do think they might have dropped the ball on the time issue. I’ve got an idea when these clues were set.”
This sounded intriguing and, if true, could potentially prove a huge help as they entered the final stages. “Go on then,” Stuart prompted, “spill the beans.”
“I started with the two cars, because they’re both pretty obscure,” Ed began, safe in the knowledge this would be hazy territory for Stuart and Charlie. “The Citroen C2 launched in 2003, but was discontinued in 2009, likewise the Hummer H3, that was only available between 2005 and 2010.”
“That’s interesting,” Charlie conceded, “but not conclusive. They might not be made anymore, but we could still find out about both of them online today.”
“Agreed,” Ed conceded, without sounding deterred, “but it would still be more likely to include them when they were live models, so I looked at the other clues that could be time limited. I couldn’t remember C2 being a low-carb Coke, which isn’t surprising, it was a spectacular failure, only available from 2004 to 2007. Then there’s the Mongolian TV channel. Unless you lived in Ulan Bator that would only have been newsworthy at launch, in April 2006. Then finally, and here’s the killer, they made sure we paid a visit to every planet today, but left out Pluto. So ‘Challenge 65’ must have been set after it was downgraded to a dwarf, which didn’t happen until August 2006.”
“And your conclusion Sherlock?” asked Stuart, his attempt at mockery failing miserably to disguise a concession that Ed might well be on to something.
“We would need to look back over the previous ‘Challenges’, see if they support my theory,” Ed suggested, sounding confident, “but if I were a betting man I would put good money on these questions having been set in late 2006, early 2007.”
Ed’s assertion was met by a stunned silence. Much as they would have liked to, neither Stuart nor Charlie could find any obvious flaw in their friend’s logic. He could be right.
Ed used their pregnant pause to prove he could also multi-task. Not only had he uncovered a potentially crucial ‘Challenge’ key, but managed to do so without missing their earlier discussion. “And you can let Quantick know,” he announced, “I’m taking possession of Artery. I don’t give a shit if no one else has heard of them, just name me another band that has used a skull for percussion?”
Stuart had forgotten Ed’s longstanding championing of ‘The Slide’. He would have to agree though, it was a song, once witnessed live, that could never be forgotten.
‘The Slide’ also had a repeated refrain, he now recalled, which seemed uncannily prescient for their remaining ‘Challenge’ campaign, “one more time, once more ‘round.”
That might be all they had left.
(‘Track 20’ will follow on 24th June at 9am. In the meantime, it’s good to get reader feedback, so please add a comment below with any thoughts on ‘Track 19’)