Word: cryptics
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...Near East. For example, the Greek word for "stumbling block," which is used to describe the crucified Christ in Corinthians I, once meant "bolt," which leads Allegro to connect it with the phallus-shaped "bolt-plant" mushroom; thus he concludes that "stumbling block" is, in fact, a cryptic reference to getting high on mushrooms...
...presidential party inaugurating the computer, Colossus flashes a brief, cryptic message: "THERE is ANOTHER SYSTEM." The Soviets have created a similar computer, called Guardian, and the two machines curtly inform their human creators that they yearn to be interconnected. The respective governments at first refuse, but missiles launched by the computers at a couple of strategic military targets are powerfully persuasive. From then on it's Colossus-Guardian all the way. The combined brains murder and create, dominate and control mankind, all for the greater good. "Freedom is an illusion," the machine announces in a raspy voice...
...Cote Basque: Hurok's come and gone, but there's Artur Rubinstein, who puffs a long Havana and says his wife cooked Polish chicken for an after-concert gathering the night before. Out comes Lyons' black lizardskin notebook and tiny gold pencil. A few cryptic notes, and he Ts off to Le Pavilion and, finally, the Four Seasons. The latter has a coat hook marked MR. LYONS. A coat, is already there. "Who's been hanging their coat on my hook?" In his consternation, Lyons, of all things, fails to recognize a celebrity: John Updike, sporting...
Womb and Grave. The remark is cryptic but not gratuitous. For the success of Searchers is a fine balance between observed fact and unobtrusive metaphor. The insatiable giant cod who cruises through Russell's pages not only passes ichthyological muster, but its instinctive cunning suggests a primitive form of wisdom, or even free will. Far above this predator of the deep, a white eagle inscribes huge parabolas in a futile search for food and a mate. Russell's details are hard and clear, but the irony is left for the reader to dislodge. The eagle-a cliche...
...atom, Gell-Mann and Physicist George Zweig then independently conceived a trio of basic building blocks out of which all the other particles -and, indeed, all matter-could be constructed. With his usual literary flair, Gell-Mann named these imaginary particles "quarks" (from James Joyce's cryptic line in Finnegans Wake: "Three quarks for Muster Mark!"). Gell-Mann cautioned that quarks might not exist outside his equations, but an Australian researcher recently reported finding them among the debris of atmospheric atoms broken up by cosmic rays (TIME, Sept. 12). Even if quarks are only a mathematical fiction, however, there...