I always assumed it was an allusion to Christabel Pankhurst, Christabel Pankhurst - Wikipedia.
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I believe that you can direct where/at what you’re aiming and get a different response.
THROW [noun] AT [noun]
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S or SE actually:
What about igniting the petrol bomb?
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Apologies to go back this far - I never succeeded in getting into the black ball in the snow chapter. It seems to be in the Snowy Basin room, where the missile hatch is, but you need to get the edge piece after releasing the missile (because you lose the cable in getting it), and no matter how quickly I get down there, there’s only a cloud of currents left over from the time window.
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You don’t actually lose the cable, it flies back up to the crags where you found it originally, but with the right amount of timing, you can still deal with the missile, run up and grab the piece, and still make it back down to the time window. And I second an earlier piece of advice, you can throw things at a specific target, not a general object, but other things that may be attached to said object.
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> burn bomb
(with sparkler)
And the petrol ignites. You may not be a good terrorist, but*** You have died ***
Ha! I didn’t expect that to work! I’m a bit disappointed in Black, though, for not being ready to throw it. No sense of self-preservation.
> throw poster at policeman
The poster hits the bobby square between the shoulder-blades. He rather comically runs from the dangerous revolutionary in the shadows (i.e., you). “Sarge! They’ve started throwing things!” he calls out.
Truly a terrifying threat to our police force.
Perhaps…
> throw poster at handcuffs
The handcuffs fall to the ground under the slight impact of the poster and the bobby spins round. He rather comically runs from the dangerous revolutionary in the shadows (i.e., you). “Sarge! They’ve started throwing things!” he calls out.
We can throw as heavy or as light of an item as we want (such as the cargo capsule from the moon), but I think the poster is the funniest (and probably the intended one, since it’s found in this area). Maybe we wadded it up, or folded it into a paper airplane—or maybe we just tapped the handcuffs gently and he panicked. (To be fair, he might have had good reason to; I hear some of these suffragettes are making petrol bombs!)
Now, let’s stop this crisis. Sorry, Black, but we’ve seen the future, and in the words of Graham Nelson:
> smash bomb
Violence isn’t the answer to this one.
So let’s end this.
> handcuff black
What do you want to handcuff Black to?> handcuff black to me
This might be pushing your present relationship a bit far.
Well, I’m not expecting them to be happy about it, per se, but I’m sure they’ll get over it once we have time to explain!
This does raise a problem, though, because there doesn’t seem to be any convenient scenery to handcuff them to. They aren’t willing to go southeast to the fountain with us, and cuffing their wrists together isn’t enough to stop them:
> handcuff black to black
Black, taken by surprise, is quickly handcuffed. But after a very angry scene, Black runs off to get help from the suffragettes, petrol bomb under arm.
I did manage to confuse Inform’s parser enough to get this:
> undo
What do you want to undo?> black, move
I only understood you as far as wanting to undo Black.
Which I consider an accomplishment, even if I’m not sure how I did it.
Black consults a London A-Z, and glances up at the moon.
Lovely place, that.
> handcuff me to me
It is, of course, every citizen’s duty to assist the police in quelling unrest.*** You have been stranded in the past ***
I’m not sure what I was expecting.
Here’s the room we’re in:
Russell Square
The grass is slightly sunken, and the bordering trees cast dense shadows, so the interior of the square is quite well-concealed from the distant policemen. A paved path runs southeast.Apparently oblivious to goings-on around, Black is sitting crouched over what looks alarmingly like a large petrol bomb.
The trees aren’t implemented, nor is the railing further out. The only thing I can find that’s appropriately immovable is the fountain, and Black is unwilling to move.
Any ideas for how to displace them from their work? I thought we might steal the petrol bomb by pushing it southeast, compelling them to follow, but the game just snarks at me.
Is that the best you can think of?
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ARGH. Never mind. I got it.
While the RAILING is not implemented, the RAILINGS are. You need to use the plural.
> handcuff black to railings
You succeed in handcuffing Black to the railings.Phrases to describe Black’s mood might include “thunderously angry”, and phrases to describe Black’s reaction to your explanation that you were only trying to help in the suffragist cause (because they’ll need to call a locksmith to get the cuffs off again, plenty of bother for the authorities…) include “unconvinced”.
You find a convenient excuse to head off along the path.
Sorry, Black. I’m sure you’ll understand soon…
This drops us back in the middle of the park, and we can no longer go to the northwest corner. (“Best not. It seems unlikely that you’re forgiven yet.”) Which means if we hadn’t sketched the nightingale, we’d still have the chance here. A nice mercy!
A few minutes later, the air is disturbed, and we make our way back to the Land, leaving Black stranded in the past. Maybe by the time they escape (and realize they’ve missed the disturbance, and search for some other way back…) they’ll feel better?
Nothing seems to have changed in the Land, so we can head back to Kaldecki’s Monument, and check on the footnotes.
> footnote d2
[ Footnote d2: ]Christabel Pankhurst was the most extreme of the extreme, at one stage basing herself in Paris while she organised arson attacks against the British state. Most historians take the view that the hardline suffragettes damaged their own cause, and it’s certainly true that a few moderate reform measures would have passed through Parliament if it hadn’t been for their agitation. On the other hand, the hunger-strikes especially kept the issue at the top of the attention of the authorities.
It was the First World War, when women had been in uniform, and had worked in traditionally male jobs, that decided the issue: as Asquith remarked, women had liberated themselves. Initially votes for women were restricted to those over 30 (it was feared that the women would swamp the men, after the war) and voters were about three to two male to female; in April 1928 equal votes were granted.
British politics hardly changed in style, to everybody’s surprise.
So DavidK was right about this one!
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Time for the final choice of the game. Berlin Wall or Suez crisis? After this there will only be one vignette left, and then we’re off to the endgame.
- Berlin Wall
- Suez crisis
0 voters
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I remain unsure whether violent militancy helped or hindered women’s suffrage in England. I myself would give credit to the very many law-abiding groups in civil society pushing away: just look at the list here -
which shows a deputation in 1906 made up of committees which look, in hindsight, more like the Establishment in waiting than like dangerous agitators. Campbell-Bannerman’s concession that day, i.e., that he personally agreed with their cause, was quite a significant moment. He was the sitting Prime Minister, and from that point on, votes for women became a viable proposition, even an inevitability - in the fullness of time. But of course, like the Irish Question, it was an issue which could always be postponed. (Consider the “inevitability” that Puerto Rico will some day be a state of the USA and not an imperial possession.) My own view is that the postponement would have been rather longer had suffragists actually, say, murdered some MPs sitting in Parliament. That I suppose is the feeble point Jigsaw is making.
We want the suffragists to be heroes because they were plucky underdogs, and because their cause was just, and because the English just adore dotty, determined amateurs. (Compare, say, escaping from Colditz.) And for some of them, that picture is true enough. But to me, Pankhurst drifted uncomfortably close to the position of anarchists bombing other world cities - say, New York or Rome - at about the same time.
Reading the transcript back, I’m not sure I like the comedic treatment of the police, who come across as the sort of doltish constables in a P. G. Wodehouse novel, where Jeeves has to help Wooster steal a policeman’s helmet. Without being overly woke about this, they were, in this context, closer to being the repressive arm of the state, and repression means violence. Still, Jigsaw needs a little light comedy sometimes.
A little pedantry, if I haven’t outstayed my welcome:
(a) Jigsaw claims that the central park area of Russell Square is sunken below street level, which today it is not. Nobody seems sure of exactly when Russell Square was filled in, but a writer in the 1890s claims that it still had a depression then, so maybe it still did in 1912. Sunken lawns were popular in English garden design for a while (not least when the clay had been dug out of a field to make bricks for a surrounding square of houses): but by the mid-twentieth century it was not fashionable at all any more, and you rarely see them now. Old Court of Selwyn College, Cambridge, my alma mater, was similarly once sunken and now is not. At any rate, I think Jigsaw can get away with the claim that the Square was sunken in 1912.
(b) On the other hand, the popular song “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” wasn’t written until 1939 - it sounds older because it became a nostalgic song during World War II. So that (slight) reference was a (slight) anachronism.
(c) The W.S.P.U. poster in this vignette was a genuine one, albeit published in 1913, so let’s assume that the protesters are carrying an early proof copy:
A print hung on the wall of one of my classrooms at school. But retro prints like that sentimentalise a sometimes nasty story.
(d) Christabel is also the name of the player character in Gareth Rees’s marvellous early game Christminster. Gareth was my editor and play-tester for Jigsaw, in company with the splendid Richard Tucker.
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The winner of the poll is the Berlin Wall, so our penultimate vignette will be A3. Then D4, then the endgame at D1!
Chapter Thirteen - Old Cartridge Cases
East Berlin
Willkommen in Berlin. (Almost the only words of German you understand.) You recognise it from spy films, by a tall tower on the horizon which looks like a golf ball impaled on a spike - some kind of television mast? The streets are drab in the dawn light, giving them a dirty, unfinished look.This one is a broad, extremely straight avenue with four rows of trees which are uniform enough to have been planted all at once, running east-west.
The device tells us we’re in 1989: the year of the Mauerfall. I think that’s the famous Berlin TV tower:
The tallest structure in all of Germany, at least at the time I learned about it, originally built to broadcast TV signals across the country.
The street runs east-west, and experimentation confirms the other directions are actually inaccessible: “The buildings are unbroken and locked up.” So let’s try…east!
Unter den Linden
Once the Champs-Elysees of Berlin, this is a broad, infinitely sad boulevard between long rows of old cuboidal buildings, reconstructed after the terrible bombings of 1945. But perhaps all streets are sad at dawn, when nothing is open: anyway, a more pressing concern is that up ahead to the east, early morning commuters are having their papers routinely checked by yawning policemen.A hoarding catches your eye.
The bits of German I’ve picked up from my family are enough to know that’s “under the lindens” (the type of tree).
Also, what’s a hoarding?
> x hoarding
In the West, a hoarding like this would be advertising cigarettes. Here it seems to be announcing some kind of 1989 Congress, and gives some prominence to an official portrait of Erich Honecker.
An advertisement of some sort? The OED online is currently down, so let’s check the physical edition:
“Any boarding on which bills are posted”. Huh. So I’ll interpret it as British for “billboard”. (I have the compact edition of the OED, with four pages per page, so I’m trying to take a photo through a magnifier here.)
The policemen and commuters aren’t implemented, but we can’t go east without some sort of credentials, and apparently they won’t accept this affidavit signed by Lenin himself. Let’s go back west instead.
Near the Brandenburg Gate
…but not very. About a hundred yards west is the triumphal arch, its green-blue copper roof topped with what looks like a charioteer carrying a flag. This is as close as you can get: the tree-lined square around it is empty but for discreet guard-posts. No traffic passes beneath any longer, for no traffic crosses the Wall.Side streets run north and south, along the frontier of East Berlin.
Or as they say in Germany…“Bei das Brandenburger Tor”? I think that’s right? I can understand a bit but I’m terrible at speaking the language.
Let’s see what’s going on over in West Berlin!
> w
You are not the first to entertain this hopeless idea.
North it is.
Alleyway
This alley peters out further to the north, and is quite narrow here, between the eastern building and the first fence of the wall to the west. Beyond the fence, hares roam the hundred yard no-man’s-land up to the Wall proper.
Hares, you say?
> sketch hares
As if from nowhere, one of the Vopos rushes up to you. “This is Free Berlin. The drawing of pictures is forbidden.” He admonishes you and steps discreetly back to the watch-towers.Curious. He said that in English.
…huh. Well that simply won’t do! We need to sketch one animal in this vignette for the endgame to work out!
I guess it’s time for a Peaceful Revolution.
Going back south:
Corner
The Wall, running the border of the Soviet and British Sectors, turns a corner and begins to head east here. (The Wall would be about 100 miles long if straightened out, so this is nothing unusual.) Thus, west and south are impossible. The shabby apartment block here has windows solidly bricked up, and looks out blindly across at Tempelhof Airport in the old American Sector. Its door hangs open at a crazy angle.
You know, I always imagined the Berlin Wall being perfectly straight, but it makes sense it would need to conform to the layout of the city.
> x wall
Which do you mean, the north wall, the south wall, the east wall, the west wall, the northeast wall, the southeast wall, the northwest wall or the southwest wall?
This wall-building is getting out of hand! (“Berlin” is unfortunately not a valid answer.)
>e
Checkpoint Charlie
One of the 13 border crossings, Checkpoint Charlie is rather unimpressive to look at. A broad boulevard four lanes wide simply extends south across a gap in the Wall: there is no cover or shelter of any kind. Uniformed police shuffle about at each end, and here and there is the glint of gun-metal. Far to the south is a blockhouse.
Oh, I thought this would take us into the apartment building! This is more useful.
> s
You join the small knot of people trying to cross back south (most of them Western construction workers who overslept their 24-hour visas, in their girlfriends’ flats). One of the Vopos on duty approaches you and asks for your travel permit.
Do you not recognize Lenin’s signature?
> n
You wander the dead, dawning streets…Side Street
A north-south corridor through East Berlin: there’s really little else to say about it, with the buildings closed up and the dawn gleaming dully off the iron window-frames.A white Skoda is parked here.
I think this is the right kind of car? (I don’t know cars, but Google says this is a 1989 white Skoda.)
Sadly, it’s locked, and “hotwire” isn’t a recognized verb. We’ll need a key.
North from here takes us back to the lindens, and south from there is the Soviet embassy, which we can’t enter. Let’s go back to the Corner and try IN.
Derelict Apartment Block
This block would probably have been demolished, if engineering works like the Wall didn’t always take priority. The door hangs open, half-shattered, and asonry is scattered across the floor. Dangerous-looking stairs climb the shell of the walls.>u
Precarious Balcony
From this balcony, you look out of a smashed and grimy spider’s-web window at the divided city. As the last street-lamps of night go out, the border would be obvious even without the Wall… You look down upon the guarded open space of Checkpoint Charlie.East Germany is the only country in the world where hang-gliding is illegal.
The balcony isn’t altogether disused, though. A Berliner rests here.
A basket-weave purse has been half-concealed from view.
That comment about hang-gliding being in a paragraph of its own makes me think it’s an item description, but sadly there’s no hang-glider here.
Also, NPC!
>x berliner
This kind of Berliner is a doughnut (a local delicacy), though Kennedy’s famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech probably meant the other kind.It looks rather succulent for Eastern produce (but that’s probably just your prejudices showing).
Oh. Not NPC. Kennedy was widely mocked for saying ich bin ein Berliner (“I am a Berliner”) rather than ich bin Berliner (“I am from Berlin”) in a speech, but in reality it’s about as much of a gaffe as saying “I am an American” rather than “I am American”. That is, not very.
The purse contains a Cyrillic-lettered key and a fifty Ost-mark note, which might be a lot of money or not much money at all—I can’t find anything online about how much Ost-marks were worth. Anyone happen to know?
The key unlocks the Skoda, but I suspect trying to ram a car into the checkpoint will not end well. Let’s find out! (The process of unlocking and starting it is a pain, which the game snarks on: “Not for nothing is “Skoda” the Czech word for “misery”.” But I blame early Inform’s lack of implicit action handling rather than the Czech automotive industry.)
You advance the Skoda a little way south. The Vopo on duty approaches the driver’s window and asks for your travel permit.
Oh, I’ve got a permit right here, actually…
> give fifty mark note to vopo
The young man calls out at once, at such an obvious attempt at entrapment. Vopos have been shot for taking bribes before… (Of course, as anyone knows, the whole bribery scene is run by the Mafia, and the going rate’s more like 50,000 Ost-marks.) Burly men drag you away, still protesting.
*** You languish in a Stasi jail ***
Yeah, that’s fair.
That seems like a good place to leave it for today. What should we try next?
20.txt (15.3 KB)
a3.sav (7.6 KB)
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Ha, nicely done!
(I enjoy a joke riffing on the Inform standard responses; there’s one in my game Sting that deploys “you lack the nerve when it comes to the crucial moment” to hopefully-comedic effect).
Oof – wonder if that’s a Britishism? If so, I suppose it’s fair revenge for the baseball puzzle in Zork 2!
Well, per Graham’s later note, maybe not – hunger strikes and molotov cocktails are both radical tactics, but there’s rather a lot of distance between the two!
(I am again not at all well read in this area, but at least per the Wikipedia article David shared, it seems like the historians’ consensus hasn’t shifted much in the past 25 years albeit there are some who argue for the efficacy of the violence).
Dunno if this is right, but I’m more picturing like the walkway boards in NYC that have ads posted on them?
Ooh, I’m still jealous. If I ever sell out, being able to buy a complete, unabridged OED will almost certainly be a big part of the reason.
The thing I always need to remind myself about the Berlin Wall is that it didn’t separate West Berlin from East Berlin – it separated West Berlin from East Germany. Like, it ran through the middle of the city, separating the Soviet sector from the Western ones, but then it ran around the whole outer perimeter of the Western sectors as well, forming a big circle!
Maybe they’ll be interested in our piece of historical memoribilia?
Is that actually a typo? And either way, can we SEARCH it? Wonder if there’s anything under the scattered bricks…
Actually, it’s well known that when the Soviets cracked down after the Prague Spring, they imposed draconian rationing of implicit actions to break the Czech population’s will, so it’s more of a both/and situation.
Eating the Berliner? Alternately, giving to the vopo?
(Although that doesn’t sound right, because we have to sketch the hare before crossing the border. Can we drive the car up to where the hares are and see if being in the car suffices to hide our sketchpad?)
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It has the default Inform behavior (you eat the whole thing and it’s “not bad”), which makes me suspect it’s not actually meant to be eaten—the pashka, for example, had a description of its sweetness and deliciousness that hints a child would want it.
> give berliner to vopo
“Ah, you’re very kind,” he says in English, cheerily consuming the doughnut. “Now, please, your papers.”
The game’s putting a lot of emphasis on the vopos speaking English. I wonder if that’s a hint? If it weren’t called out specifically in the text, I’d just assume that White happens to know German (see also: the room names in German, the ability to read Black’s Enigma message), and the game is translating for the sake of Anglophone players.
The game says going there is a horrible idea. Which makes sense.
Unfortunately, we can’t bring the car to that room: “The road becomes a narrow alleyway too quickly.”
As we go back to the lindens, though, we get a new NPC interaction:
A street-cleaner approaches your car window and offers to do the windows, for a small token of your appreciation.
Oh, I know how this works!
> give berliner to cleaner
Not that small, it seems.
Oh, you meant money…
> give mark to cleaner
(first taking the fifty Ost-mark note)
(putting wheel III into the canvas rucksack to make room)
He’s naturally disappointed that a Westerner like you is paying only in worthless Ost-marks. Still, he settles to do the windows, surreptitiously throwing something inside. “Is it true,” he asks confidentially, “what they say? Are they going to throw the tanks in, close the border with Hungary?”You’re unable to say anything very helpful to this capitalist in the making. He vanishes like the dew at this hint of suspicion.
Aha, so our clothes are visibly Western. And if dollars (and/or pounds) are worth a lot compared to marks, that explains why everyone’s being courteous and trying to speak English to us.
Unfortunately, all our dollars/pounds come from decades in the future and would be rejected as counterfeit. So marks are all you’ll get.
What’s that about throwing something inside?
In the white Skoda you can see a delivered note.
A note!
Cunningly, Black seems to have had this note delivered by the most indirect of means.
“Vital to keep Wall intact till 91, will explain later but all sorted out. See you at Charlie.”
Two more years? Well, if you say so!
Black says they have this under control, so let’s get out of here, and…
You shake your head, confused. Why does the Socialist Union of Nations allow parties like this, just echoes of the bad old days of gangsterish capitalism? Still, tomorrow the crack-down; for tonight, a toast to the old, old millennium, begun again.
*** You have wrecked the course of history ***
Welp. Sorry, Black. We really need to sketch this hare, and that’s not going to happen until the Wall comes down.
Oops. It’s my typo, not Graham’s.
> search masonry
Beneath the masonry is a curious, irregularly-cut trapdoor leading down.
Oho!
>d
Cellar Tunnel
This cellar is the exit point of one of the makeshift, briefly-used tunnels cut by “Travel Bureau Incorporated”, a bunch of West Berlin university students who risk their lives for this elaborate cause. The unguarded tunnel runs west into darkness. A break in the masonry, which probably goes back to the war, opens a cleft to the southwest.You feel terribly nervous here. If you should be caught…
[Your score has just gone up by one point.]
Oho!
>sw
U-Bahn Conduit
This conduit, once a service tunnel of the underground railway, is bricked up on all sides and probably has been since 1961: if it weren’t for the cleft northeast, the only access would be by the manhole up in the ceiling at the western end. Even the great trunks of telephone cables come in through one cement wall and out by another.
This manhole is almost certainly a trap but let’s try it. For science!
>u
You push the manhole aside, and climb out into the corner of the streets outside the derelict apartment block. In the open road, you are, to put it mildly, conspicuous. In a matter of seconds, in fact, you have a lot of explaining to do.*** You languish in a Stasi jail ***
Called it.
So I think what’s important here is the cables.
> x cables
There are a great many wires in the thick trunks.
I wonder what we could do with these. Maybe we could sabotage communications between East and West by blowing them up? What would that really accomplish, though?
What if we go west from the initial tunnel location?
>w
You disturb the motion detectors cruelly left by the Vopos when they discovered this tunnel, last year. Soon the tunnel is filled with tear gas, and guards firing at random… all in all, you’re lucky to be taken alive.*** You languish in a Stasi jail ***
You know, normally I’d say a game over from going in a direction is unfair, but the game was pretty explicit that we’re nervous about being caught down here. So yeah, this is reasonable.
It does seem that the only thing down there is the cables. So that’s going to be our goal. The question is, what can we do about it?
I haven’t found any other objects we can interact with, so far. SEARCH SKODA turns up nothing; OPEN TRUNK and OPEN BOOT are both unrecognized. Black’s note isn’t considered valid documentation to cross the border, and despite them saying they’d meet us at Charlie, they don’t seem to be around the checkpoint.
The main things we’ve found here but haven’t really used:
- A berliner (donut)
- A purse (which previously contained money)
- A Skoda (car)
- Underground phone cables
Annoyingly, there hasn’t been anything locked to use the RZ-ROV on…which is probably fair, since we could have tried this before the B-29 and not had the gadget. But it would be nice to bypass some obstacles with it.
What next?
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Small update: I haven’t made any significant progress since last time, and I suspect I’m missing some map connection or object that will tie it all together. Later today I’m going to go do the classic “test every exit from every room”.
There’s also the hoarding/billboard, which gets its own paragraph in its room description but I haven’t been able to do anything with. It might be just for flavor, to anchor us at a particular moment in time, but the separate paragraph is suspicious. So I’ll be trying every action on that as well.
If you have any better ideas, let me know here!
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Can you unplug and reroute the phone cables to listen into a conversation on a payphone somewhere?
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I was in fact missing an exit!
Alleyway
This alley peters out further to the north, and is quite narrow here, between the eastern building and the first fence of the wall to the west. Beyond the fence, hares roam the hundred yard no-man’s-land up to the Wall proper.>n
Beside the Spree River
This is where the alley-path ends: it continues into the old French Sector, but the bridge across the fifty-yard wide Spree River has been removed and there’s no way across.A thick rope floats in the stagnant shallows beside you.
When it says it peters out further to the north, that doesn’t mean you can’t still go north (as I’d originally thought). Taking the rope gets us a point, so it’s important somehow!
I also discovered that the apartment is northeast of the corner, so the map should look more like this:
You do have to go west rather than southwest to get out of the apartment again, but pretending it’s southwest lets me use straight lines instead of having to somehow hook the “down” exit around the “west-to-northeast” one.
Sadly not. “That’s not something you can sensibly release.” Pretty much anything you try to do with them gets a default failure response…
…except you can tie the rope to them, and get a point! This makes me think we are in fact going to disrupt communications between East and West. I’m not sure what this accomplishes, but it seems to be our goal.
> pull rope
Nothing obvious happens.
Or not. The rope is specifically described as a tow rope, which made me think we’d be pulling something with it, but we can’t move it beyond this room while it’s attached to the cables (which means we can’t use the Skoda for some extra power).
Maybe there’s something else we have to tow first? We can also tie the rope to the Skoda, which gets some special descriptions we we move:
The rope trails behind the Skoda as it drives, attracting attention. Fortunately nearby members of the security apparatus assume it is some kind of anti-car-sickness device, like those aluminium foil brushes.
But I’m not sure what to tow with it. We can’t get the Skoda into the derelict building to try to collapse it onto the Wall, and I haven’t found any way to refer to the Wall itself (and it’s probably strong enough to resist a small car pulling on it).
I believe I’ve tried every exit from every room, now, which suggests we have all the tools we need…but I’m not sure how to use them.
What next?
3 Likes
Can you park the Skoda above the manhole in any way?
1 Like
Oh! Of course! If the Derelict Apartment Block is northeast of the Corner, then going down and southwest should put us right below the Corner. So that’s where the manhole should be, right?
> x manhole
You see nothing special about the manhole.> open manhole
There is a manhole here, but it won’t open from above.
So let’s try from below.
> open manhole
[Just try going up.]
That just killed us before…why should it be different now?
> u
You push the manhole aside, but can’t get anywhere since the underside of the Skoda is in your way: from here all you can see is the bumper and the back wheel axle, the hubs, the distribution and so on.
Ahh, so the Skoda is above it. Can we put the rope into the manhole now?
> put rope in manhole
You need to be holding it before you can put it into something else.> get rope
You can’t take the rope away when it’s attached to the white Skoda.
We can go down, oddly enough, though we can’t go back up. And if we do, there’s a new line in the room description:
Above the open manhole you can see the underside of the Skoda you left parked in the streets.
Which means it’s in scope! Which means…
> untie rope
The rope is untied now.> get rope
Taken.
And then…
> tie rope to skoda
You tie the rope to the underside of the Skoda.> tie rope to cables
You tie the rope to the telephone cables.
And finally…
> east
With an enormous wrenching sound, the Skoda leaps forward and you jam on the brakes just in time to crash into the Wall’s first fence. The tow-rope trails behind, dragging a bundle of telephone cables. You’ve probably just paralysed the whole East Berlin phone system!
But not the Vopos. You scramble out of the car and dive for cover…
Precarious Balcony
Up on the balcony, overlooking the divided city, you pant furiously, hiding your body from sight of the Vopos searching the street below. The Skoda lies strewn across the wire fence like a bull spiked in a bullfight.[Your score has just gone up by one point.]
We just solved the temporal crisis! Bringing down the phone system is going to lead to increasing unrest in East Berlin, accelerating the destruction of the Wall.
…and, in the process, made the game unwinnable. We can get back to the Land from here, but we haven’t sketched the hares in No Man’s Land, and we can’t leave this balcony without being caught by the vopos.
So there’s one more thing we’ll have to do before we solve the crisis. The question is, how do we do it?
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The berliner must have something to do with it.
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If it were a fox or something, I would try to lure it in with the berliner, but I don’t think hares like baked goods.
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Is there any way to, for instance, push the car, or put the Berliner on the gas pedal to let it move driverless?
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