Free The Ganymede Club by Charles Sheffield Page B

Master would ever do. He went slumming, dropping down to the Journeyman level in the network and scanning back in time over the past two years.
    No sign of Ghost Boy as either a proposer or solver of any puzzles. Which left only the Journeyman puzzles themselves, hundreds and hundreds of them.
    Sorting through them was going to take some time. Bat raided his own Bat Cave sweetmeat hoard for orange jujubes, peppermint bonbons, and chocolates, returned to his terminal, and settled happily down to work. It was the middle of the night. No one was going to disturb him. Given a good puzzle like this, with its promise of yet another puzzle if he solved it, the idea of boredom or fatigue was unthinkable.
    * * *
    Five hours later, he had it. A dozen Journeyman puzzles involved odd topological elements similar to those of Ghost Boy's problem. They were hard to solve, and it was even more difficult to imagine how someone of the Journeyman class had managed to dream them up in the first place. But each puzzle had been proposed by a player named The Snark , and the most recent came three months ago.
    Obviously, The Snark and Ghost Boy were one and the same. He had changed his name when he moved to the Masters' level. And just as obviously, the earlier puzzles were going to tell Bat enough about the workings of Ghost Boy's mind to solve the most recent one.
    But not easily. It was another two hours before Bat groaned, raised his eyes to stare at the ceiling, and whispered a single word: "Dimensionality!"
    The Snark was devising his puzzles in spaces of a higher dimension, the fourth or fifth or higher, and then projecting down to three dimensions. The way to solve them was to reverse the process, imagining Ghost Boy's sets of interlocking figures as cross sections of some higher-dimensional structure.
    It still wasn't easy to solve this latest one, but now it was possible. Bat stared at nothing until he was sure that the entire puzzle construct, viewed in four dimensions, had no holes or reentry features. Finally, he wrote that the puzzle was "simply connected in 4-D," signed his solution Megachirops , and sent it off.
    He didn't expect a reply. For one thing, it was many hours into the standard Ganymede sleep cycle; for another, Puzzle Network protocol did not call for answers.
    It was a shock for him to find a message popping into his display area, just a couple of minutes later. It read: "Hey! You're not supposed to solve me that fast!" And then, an even bigger surprise, a smiling face appeared above the message.
    "Hi," the face said. "I'm Ghost Boy."
    "So I deduced." There was a silence, while Bat stared in astonishment at the display. It was not a surprise to find that a Master on the Puzzle Network was young—the mental agility of youth was an asset—but this was ridiculous. Ghost Boy was a kid. He was thin and gawky, with freckles and a big nose, and he had no sign of facial hair. He looked even younger than Bat! And Bat knew that he himself was a rare prodigy.
    "My name's Spook Belman," Ghost Boy said. "You see how it goes, I'm Ghost Boy now and I used to be The Snark ."
    Didn't Belman know anything at all about Puzzle Network manners? He was not only intruding, but also explaining. Bat tried to make allowances for the gaucherie of a newcomer. "I know," he said. "I caught both allusions from your name, thank you."
    "Well?" The kid's grin faded, and he frowned. "Aren't you going to return the compliment?"
    "What compliment?"
    " Your name. Tell me your real name. And turn on the visuals, so I can take a look at you."
    Unbelievable. "I prefer not to."
    "Well, you're a real sourpuss, aren't you." Spook Belman glared out from the display. "I guessed you were pretty young, from your style, and I thought maybe the two of us could get together and compare notes on the old fogies. But you sound like one of the old fogies yourself. That puzzle I set was supposed to stop anyone on the Network for a few days. Seems I was wrong, about it and