Chapter 33 Chapter Thirteen Numbers Hidden Mysteries

It was already 7 o'clock in the evening.Judge Jarry Gates had been so engrossed in this nerve-wracking task--no progress--that he had completely forgotten the time for meals and rest, when there was a knock at his door. It's just in time.The head of the angry judge is steaming, and in another hour, I'm afraid his brain will be roasted! The judge called in impatiently, the door opened and Manoel entered. The young doctor left his friends on the raft to decipher the incomprehensible document, and ran to see Judge Jarry Gates by himself.He wondered if the judges had had better luck deciphering the documents than they had.He came to ask the judge if at last he had discovered the scheme of the code.

The judge did not lose his temper when he saw Manoel.Because if a person is locked there and uses his brain, his brain will be cracked.He needed someone to talk to, especially if someone was as eager to unravel the mystery as he was.Manoel was such a man. "Sir," said Manoel as he entered the door, "a question first. Are you doing better than us?" "You sit first." Judge Jarry Gates stood up and began to stride up and down the room. "You sit! If we are both standing, you go to one side, I go to the other side, I'm afraid my study is too small to accommodate us!"

Manoel sat down and asked the question again. "No! . . . I'm no luckier than you!" replied the judge. "I don't know much more. There's really nothing I can tell you. But there is one thing I'm sure of." "Which point, sir, which point?" "The document does not use the usual symbols, but a so-called 'number' in cryptography, or more precisely, it is written in 'number'!" "Then, sir," replied Manoel, "will it never be possible to understand this document?" "It can be read," said Judge Jarry Gates, "but only if a letter is always replaced by a fixed letter, for example, if the letter a always stands for p and p always stands for x...otherwise...not !"

"So, what about this document? . . . " "In this document, the notion of a letter varies with the cipher number, and it is this arbitrarily chosen cipher number that controls the meaning of the letter! Thus, b might be denoted by K, which then becomes g, which becomes m, n, or f, or some other letter!" "Then in this situation..." "Under the current circumstances, I regret to tell you that this cipher text is impossible to decipher!" "Impossible!" exclaimed Manoel. "No! Sir, we will always find the password to the document. It is a matter of life and death!"

Manoel was already on his feet, excited.The answer he had just received was so disappointing, but he refused to admit that the game was over. But the judge made a gesture, sat down again, and asked in a calmer voice: "Sir," he asked, "in the first place, who can make you think that the basis of this document is a number, or a number as you say?" "Listen, young man," replied Judge Jarry Gates, "you're going to have to admit it someday." The judge took the papers, put them before Manoel, showed him the calculations he had made, and said: "When I started processing this document, I did what I should do, that is, I did it in a logical way, never blindly, and I compared it with the alphabet written in proportion to the frequency of use of the letters of our language, Try to read this document according to the rules of our immortal analyst Edgar Poe! . . . Well, what worked for him failed this time! . . . "

"Failed!" Manoel exclaimed. "Yes, young man, I should have discovered from the first that such a search for an answer would be unsuccessful. Indeed, a stronger man than I would be so confused!" "God!" cried Manoel, "but I want to understand... I can't...!" "Please pick up this document," Judge Jarry Gates continued, "you just need to pay attention to the order of the letters, and then read the full text." Manoel complied. "Some letter combinations are very strange. Don't you see anything wrong with them?" asked the judge.

"I found nothing," replied Manoel. "I must have read the document from cover to cover no less than a hundred times." "Well, please study only the last paragraph. That should be the outline of the whole thing, you know.—Don't you notice anything unusual?" "No." "However, there is one detail that absolutely and fully proves that the documents are arranged based on a number." "That's..." Manoel asked. "That's, or rather those are two of the three h's side by side we see." What Judge Jarry Gates said is indeed true and deserves attention.One is the 204th, 205th, and 206th letters of this paragraph, and the other is the 258th, 259th, and 260th letters, both of which are juxtaposed h.At first, this feature did not catch the judge's attention.

"The proof? . . . " asked Manoel, unable to guess what inferences could be drawn from such a combination of letters. "Young man, this proves that documents obey the law of a number! This first shows that each letter changes according to the number of digits and the position of the digits!" "Why is that?" "Because there is no word in any language that has three identical letters in a row." Hearing this argument, Manoel was quite moved, and he thought about it, but he was speechless. "If I had noticed this sooner," the judge went on, "I would have suffered a lot less and wouldn't have started to have migraines from the top of my head to the back of my head!"

"But, sir," asked Manoel, feeling that the sliver of hope he had tried to keep alive was dying, "what do you mean by figures?" "It should be said to be a number!" "You said it was a number, just the number." "Well, an example will make you clearer than any explanation." Judge Jarry Gates sat down at the table, picked up a piece of paper and a pencil, and said: "Lejuge Jarriquez est done d'un esprit tres ingenieux (Judge Jarriquez has a very clever mind), Mr. Manoel." "When I wrote this sentence, I separated each letter and it became one line: Le juge Jarriquez est dbue d'un esprit ingenieux."

After writing, the judge—perhaps for him, this sentence expresses an undoubted proposition—looked directly at Manoel and said: "Now, suppose I take a number at random and convert this natural word into a cryptographic form. Suppose the number consists of 3 numbers, and these 3 numbers are 4, 2, and 3. I arrange the number 423 on it In that line of sentences, let the numbers correspond to the letters one by one, and repeat the arrangement until the end of the sentence. The result will be as follows: Lejuge Jarriquezest doued'unesprittresingenieux 423423423423423423423423423423423423423423423

"Well, Monsieur Manoel, and now representing each letter by the letter it moves back 4, 2 or 3 in the alphabet, it follows that: L pushed back 4 is P e pushed back 2 is g j pushed back 3 is m u push back 4 is z g pushed back 2 is i e push back 3 is h So on and so forth. "If it's not enough to push back to the end of the alphabet, I start again at the first letter of the alphabet. For example, the last letter of my name is z, and the number below it is 3. However, the alphabet at z There are no more letters in the back, so I start counting from word line a again, so that: Z pushed back 3 is c. "This shows that when I finished calculating the cryptographic system under the influence of the number 423—don't forget that this number was just chosen randomly—the sentence just now was replaced by this sentence: Pg mzih ncuvktzgciux hqyl fyr gvttly vuiu lrihrkhzz. "Young man, take a good look at this sentence. Isn't it exactly the same as the sentence in the document we studied? So, what is the conclusion? That is, if the meaning of the letter is determined by the number randomly placed under it, Then the letters represented by the password letters are not static. In this way, in this sentence, the first e is represented by g, but the second e is represented by h, the third e is represented by g, and the fourth e is represented by g. The e is represented by i; the m in the password file is equivalent to the first j, and n is equivalent to the second j, the two r in my name, the first is represented by u, and the second is represented by v ; the t in the word est becomes n, the t in esprit becomes y, and the t in ires becomes v. Now you should understand that if you don't know the number 423, you can't read these numbers Words. Therefore, since we do not know which numerals are used in this document, we cannot decipher it!" Hearing the judge speak so eloquently, Manoel first lowered his head, then raised his head again: "No," he cried, "no, sir! I will not give up hope that I will find the number!" "We might be able to do it," Judge Jarry Gates replied, "but only if the words in the document are written separately!" "why?" "That's how I reasoned, young man. It's quite safe to say that the last paragraph of this document summarizes the preceding paragraphs, isn't it? I'm sure, then, that there will be Joam D'Acosta's name in the last paragraph." In this way, if each line is written as individual words, a word-by-word test—I mean a word consisting of seven letters like Dacosta (Dacosta)—will not fail to find out the decryption number of the file. .” "Will you explain to me how it should be done, sir," asked Manoel, perhaps seeing a last ray of hope. "It couldn't be easier," Judge Jarry Gates replied. "For example, if you like, take one of the words in the sentence I just wrote - my last name. In the code it is replaced by this strange string of letters: ncuvktzgc. Well, now put the letters Arranged in a vertical column, then list the letters in my surname, and compare the order of the two in the alphabet, you get the following formula: There are 4 letters between n and j, 2 letters between c and a 3 letters between u and r 4 letters between v and r 2 letters between k and i 3 letters between t and q 4 letters between z and u 2 letters between g and e 3 letters between c and z However, how is a column of numbers obtained by such a simple operation combined?All you see are the numbers 423423423, etc., which means the number 423 repeated many times. " "Yes! That's right!" replied Manoel. "So you see that in this way false letters can be pushed forward in the order of the alphabet to give true letters, and not real letters can be pushed back to make false letters. I found this number easily, and this The number is indeed the one I chose as the clue to the code!" "Well, sir," cried Manoel, "if that is the case, if the last paragraph bears the surname D'Acosta, we have only to take each letter in these lines one by one as the seven letters of the name. The first letter of the letter should be able to..." "It is possible," Judge Jarry Gates replied, "but on one condition!" "What conditions?" "That would require the first digit of the number to fall just below the first letter of the word Dacosta, and you will agree with me that this is absolutely impossible!" "Dare!" Manoel felt that even his last hope had been shattered in the face of the helpless situation. "Perhaps we can only try our luck." Judge Jarry Gates shook his head and continued, "But such research cannot be left to chance!" "But, after all," Manoel continued, "can't we just happen to find that number?" "This number," cried Judge Jarry Gates, "this number! But how many numbers does it consist of? Is it 2, 3, 4, 9, or 10? Is it composed of numbers, or some numbers repeated many times? Young people, do you know? Using 10 numbers without repetition, a total of 3,268,000 different numbers can be formed. If several numbers are repeated, These millions of digital combinations will increase? Do you know that there are 525,600 minutes in a year, even if you try one number per minute, it will take more than six years. If each experiment takes an hour, you will It will take more than three centuries! No! You are demanding the impossible!" "The impossibility, sir," replied Manoel, "is that the righteous man will be condemned to death, and that Joam Dacosta will be ruined, and that you have the physical evidence of his innocence." , this is impossible!" "Ah! young man," cried Judge Jarry Gates, "after all who told you that Torres wasn't lying, that he really had the papers written by the murderer, and that this page is that paper? It really is. Does it concern Joam D'Acosta?" "Who said that! . . . " repeated Manoel. He buried his head between his hands. True enough, there's nothing conclusively proving that this document involves a diamond heist.There's not even a hint that it's not nonsense, a fake document created by Torres himself trying to sell it as the real thing! "It doesn't matter, Mr. Manoel," Judge Jarry Gates stood up: "It doesn't matter! No matter what this document is about, I will not give up finding out the password number! After all, this is also a kind of charade !" At this, Manoel rose to take his leave of the judge, and returned to the raft with more despair than he had come.