Untamed with the Lester Tang Conjecture: Broken by the Egg

Seth Golub of Team RadiKS took this photo of Tom running the labyrinth.

We had a pretty good idea of how to get to the Palace of the Legion of Honor. But I was planning for the future. So as the trusty green van headed out of the parking lot, I was powering up a laptop hooked up to my latest purchased gadget: a little GPS unit. I had fond memories of Ilse, the talking GPS unit which had guided Team Mystic Fish so well through the Justice Unlimited Game. Ilse, it turned out, cost several hundred dollars. I could not afford my own Ilse. But I could afford a cheapie GPS unit that hooked up to a laptop, transforming that laptop into a speaking GPS unit. I looked at the screen. Something was not right.

"We're in the Pacific Ocean."

"What?"

"The GPS unit thinks we're in the Pacific Ocean."

"Wha--oh yeah. Well, can it give us directions to the--"

"Yeah: start swimming, dude."

By the GPS unit figured out where we were, we were most of the way to our goal.

I noticed that my secret-word badge had fallen off. I re-attached it, thinking unkind thoughts about all kinds of gadgetry. We drove to the Legion. We parked.

Our next clue was not at the Legion, but it was close by. We had a stack of photos. These appeared to be of a walk out towards the cliffs. If we had been quicker solvers, we would have carefully studied these photos to figure out where to go. As it was, we studied them for the first bit of the walk, but soon caught up to other teams and didn't need to look at the photos anymore.

We walked out and down to the base of a cliff, where there was a labyrinth made out of rocks. Someone from Game Control was there to hand us a clue packet and explain the set-up. The most important part of our clue was at the center of the labyrinth. But we couldn't just walk up and grab it. One member of our team would need to complete the labyrinth. This Game Control person would make sure that no-one cut any corners.

For time immemorial, people have walked labyrinths as an aid to meditation. So I guess each team sent out their most spiritual member to walk this labyrinth, someone who could maintain a state of quiet contemplation at a fast clip. Tom did this for our team. Tom also had the idea of radio-ing those members of our team who were still on their way down the trail--they didn't need to come all the way down here. We only needed one person to run the labyrinth. And there was no use all of us having to walk all the way back up to the Legion. But it was too late--we had all arrived.

Tom whipsawed his way to the center and retrieved our clue: a plastic egg. Following some advice from game control, we did not try to break open the egg on that windy shore, but instead started bringing it up to the trusty green van. We climbed up and up and up. Soon I was thinking about another San Francisco labyrinth--the one at the California Pacific Medical Center. And we climbed and climbed and eventually made our way back to the van.

Inside the van, we set up a low table and sat down on coolers. We opened up the plastic egg. It was full of paper chits. Each chit had the logo of some sports team. Some were decorated with Atlanta Falcons logos; others with the logo of the Toronto Raptors. We happily sorted our chits into matching stacks, then counted the chits in each stack. So we had numbers and sports teams. What could we do with this?

Our WOLF beeped. It had a hint for us, and we were ready for a hint. I forget exactly what the WOLF told us, but it was pretty clear that the number/team combinations referred to players. We should be thinking about uniform numbers.

Toby was our resident sports trivia guy, but he didn't know many of these numbers--some of them were pretty obscure. So we started calling up friends with internet access. This is how we learned that teams re-use numbers. So we might ask a friend "Who was number ____ for the __________ team?" and get back two or three answers.

We were ready to drive to a Starbucks to get some wireless access to do our own web research. Fortunately, our WOLF dinged. It was offering us a chance to cry uncle: to skip this clue and go on to the next. Did we want to spend half an hour in a Starbucks looking at sports trivia web sites? We did not. We cried uncle. Our next stop was at Blackie's Pasture.

(But first we stopped at a grocery store to pick up some bread for sandwiches.)

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