Operation Justice Unlimited: Fun With Chicken Wire

When Team Mystic Fish pulled into Eastshore State Park (by Golden Gate Fields), we thought we were in the wrong place--no other vans lurked in the parking lot. But the signs said we'd reached the right place, so we parked and hopped out. Game Control had said to look for a stone keyhole. Nothing like that within view of the parking lot. And this looked like a good-sized park. It could take a while to search.

I trotted over to some dog walkers, and asked if they knew where to find a stone keyhole around here. They wanted to know why I wanted to know. So I told them. And then one of them couldn't remember seeing a stone keyhole, but did remember seeing a bunch of art off that-a-way. And then she asked her fellow dog-walker if that seemed right. And by the time I was done following their conversation and walkie-talkied the rest of the group, I bet someone else on the team had already found the stone keyhole, which turned out to be a stone-lined big keyhole-shaped hole in the ground.

Some Game Control people sat in the hole. They gave us a bag containing a strange object. They told us why we hadn't seen any other teams' vehicles in the parking lot--we were the first team to arrive!

We were not in first place. A few teams had gone through the previous puzzles faster. So Team Snout had thrown an extra puzzle at them. We were not in first place--but we were doing pretty well.

Back at the van, we gathered around the van's common area. We faced the Slam-O Portal Map. We were supposed to fold, twist, and overlay this thing made of chicken wire and duct tape to match up adjacent color pairs. A few people tried their hand and mostly avoided injury. Then Brian Larson got ahold of the thing, and with his nimble fingers at work, we started to find matching pairs.

When two adjacent color pairs were overlaid, nearby a couple of white segments would also be overlaid. There were numbers and symbols on these segments, and from these we could get number-symbol pairs. We figured out that the letters represented planet names on our instruction sheet, and that the numbers were probably letter- or word-indexes into the descriptive text for those planets. But we weren't sure what we were doing.

The dog-walkers who had pointed me at the stone keyhole walked through the parking lot, done with their walk. They saw our van, covered with "TEAM MYSTIC FISH" magnets. They laughed.

We'd struggled with the puzzle for a while and finally called up Game Control's hint line to see if we were on the right track. We were on the right track when we used the numbers as indexes into the planet descriptions. But we needed to find more pairs. We were looking for ten of them. We could use the hex band along the left side of the instruction sheet as an aid--it would show how to order the letters we found. So we kept looking for pairs, more confident now. Soon we had our phrase: "MIND THE GAP"

We called up Game Control with the answer and to get our next location. As we drove to Emeryville, I wondered what mad genius had come up with this puzzle. I wondered how long it took Game Control to assemble these 25 intricate assemblages of chicken wire and duct tape. It was worth it.

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