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| Location Sproul Plaza | Start Code: CUBES |
U.C. Berkeley's Sproul Plaza was the center of the Free Speech Movement demonstrations back in 1964. Nowadays, it is a center of rants by local lunatics. So most people walking through the plaza probably didn't pay much attention to the fellow holding the sign that said "FIRE H2O AIR DIRT LOVE ZORG RUBY RHOD" They might have wondered why so many people were paying attention to what he said, though.
This fellow was not a believer in free speech. His speech was highly constrained, and he insisted that people addressing him respect his restricted style. It took a while to figure out what his rule was. It was: each word must have less than four... uhm, char in it. According to the sign, we were supposed to play the game of ten plus ten asks to guess a six word. That is, we were trying to get a six-letter word from someone who refused to hear or use six-letter words.
This may have been my favorite puzzle of the game, just because this guy stayed in character so well. A hint from the PDA suggested that we ask "Is it a game?" and it was. We asked about "connect four", revealing that we'd made a bad ask. We asked if the game "uses dice" "uses a card" "has luck". Someone was just sitting there thinking of six-letter game names and thought it might be "Tetris". So we entered that into the PDA, and that was right.
Mister four-letters then gave us a wooden block. I should mention--when we'd told our secret words to other folks, each had given us a bag full of wooden blocks. Now we had all of the blocks. Now it was time to use them.
There were 25 blocks. Each was a cube with a picture on one face, a number on the opposite face, and a letter on each other face. The pictures were significant. Six showed fire-related things, six showed earth-related, six showed water-related, six showed air-related. Ah, the four elements. Plus one block for love, the fifth element. There were themes that went across the four main elements: E.g., there was an umbrella, a retaining wall, the logo for Team Asbestos, a windshield.
OK, so "fours" were important, we'd just mentioned Tetris--were we supposed to put blocks together in groups of four? Sure enough, there were six cross-element themes, each with one block from showing each element. Looking at the letters on the sides of the cubes, putting matching letters together, showed us how to assemble six Tet-reminiscent blocks. By putting matching letters together, it was possible to fit those together, along with the leftover Love block, to form a 5x5 square of blocks. Turning that over gave us an ordered set of numbers. Around the sides of this square, letters formed the message: Elementary my dear Zorg.
These numbers were between 1 and 103. They looked like atomic numbers of elements. Who had a periodic table? I'd left mine back in the van. Brian had left his back in the van. Dwight had left his back in the van. Maybe it wasn't atomic numbers? It would be nice to avoid walking all the way back to the van, just in case solving this clue meant we were supposed to go somewhere else on campus. But it was probably atomic numbers. So I scampered over to the student union bookstore to pick buy a periodic table. Upon my return, Dwight and Brian were really hoping that this turned out to be atomic numbers, because they were running out of ideas.
And it was atomic numbers after all. Using the periodic table abbreviations for elements, the message told us to go to the Lr hall in Bk Cf. Soon we were heading back to the van, ready for the drive up Centennial Way to the Lawrence Hall of Science.