Futility Closet - 020-Life Imitates Science Fiction

Episode Date: July 28, 2014

In 1944, fully a year before the first successful nuclear test, Astounding Science Fiction magazine published a remarkably detailed description of an atomic bomb. The story, by the otherwise undistinguished author Cleve Cartmill, sent military intelligence racing to discover the source of his information -- and his motives for publishing it. In this episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll follow the investigation that ensued, which involved legendary editor John W. Campbell and illuminated the imaginative power of science fiction and the role of censorship in times of war. We'll also hear Mark Twain's advice against being too clever and puzzle over the failure of a seemingly perfect art theft. Sources for our segment on Cleve Cartmill: Cleve Cartmill and Jean Marie Stine, Deadline & Other Controversial SF Classics, 2011. Albert I. Berger, "The Astounding Investigation: The Manhattan Project's Confrontation With Science Fiction," Analog, September 1984. Robert Silverberg, "Reflections: The Cleve Cartmill Affair" (in two parts), Asimov's Science Fiction, September and October–November 2003. Mark Twain appended the poem "Be Good, Be Good" to a letter to Margaret Blackmer on Nov. 14, 1907: Be good, be good, be always good, And now & then be clever, But don’t you ever be too good, Nor ever be too clever; For such as be too awful good They awful lonely are, And such as often clever be Get cut & stung & trodden on by persons of lesser mental capacity, for this kind do by a law of their construction regard exhibitions of superior intellectuality as an offensive impertinence leveled at their lack of this high gift, & are prompt to resent such-like exhibitions in the manner above indicated — & are they justifiable? alas, alas they (It is not best to go on; I think the line is already longer than it ought to be for real true poetry.) Listener mail: The observation that a letter might be addressed to Glenn Seaborg by listing five chemical elements was made by Jeffrey Winters in "The Year in Science: Chemistry 1997," Discover, January 1998. I don't know whether any such letter was ever delivered successfully. Jeff Van Bueren's article "Postal Experiments" appeared in the Annals of Improbable Research, July/August 2000. Many thanks to Doug Ross for the music in this episode. If you have any questions or comments you can reach us at [e-mail]. Thanks for listening!

Welcome to Futility Closet, a celebration of the quirky and the curious, the thought-provoking and the simply amusing. This is the audio companion to the popular website that catalogs more than 8,000 curiosities in history, language, mathematics, literature, philosophy, and art. You can find us online at futilitycloset.com. Thanks for joining us. Welcome to episode 20. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In today's show, we'll learn of a science fiction story so accurate that it brought on an investigation by military intelligence in 1944, hear Mark Twain's advice against being too clever, and puzzle over the failure of a perfectly planned

art theft. In February 1944, Astounding Science Fiction magazine published a short story by Cleve Cartmill called Deadline. It's basically about a world war on an alien planet where the losing side retreats to its homeland and contemplates detonating an atomic weapon. The story itself as a story is not very good, but it drew a lot of attention when it appeared because it contains very detailed and accurate descriptions of atomic weapons. Here's a passage from the story. U-235 has been separated in quantity easily sufficient for preliminary atomic power research and the like. They got it out of uranium ores by new atomic isotope separation methods, and now they have quantities measured in pounds. But they've not brought the whole amount together, or any major portion of it,

because they're not at all sure that once started, it would stop before all of it had been consumed. They could end the war overnight with controlled U-235 bombs. So far, they haven't worked out any way to control the explosion of U-235. This was all published 14 months, more than a year before the first successful atomic explosion at the Alamogordo testing grounds. And that's why it was getting so much attention. Edward Teller himself said later that it provoked astonishment in the lunch table discussions at Los Alamos, both because of a lot of the technical accuracy of its descriptions of the physics involved, but also because the story raises moral questions about what you ought to do if you have a superweapon like this, which was on everyone's mind at the time.

The bomb in the story doesn't exactly match the one that the Manhattan Project was developing, but in this fictional universe, U-235 had been separated from non-fissionable isotopes and was ready to be detonated. One of the main engineering challenges that the Manhattan Project was facing at the time was how to do exactly that,

how to separate uranium into fissionable and non-fissionable isotopes. So all of this was just hitting way too close to home. I was going to say, it just really paralleled what was going on. Yeah, and no one knew who Cleve Cartnell was or where any of this stuff had come from. How he got all this, yeah. Yeah, so they wanted to know where they were getting this information and why they were publishing it. I mean, it was ostensibly just a story, but it's just way too accurate for anyone's comfort.

So the military intelligence launched an investigation. The official file was declassified in the summer of 2001, so we know exactly what happened. The story appeared in the March issue of the magazine, which appeared in February. And on March 8th, an investigator, in other words, almost immediately, an investigator named Arthur Riley

from the War Department's Counterintelligence Corps showed up at the office of the editor, John W. Campbell, who, for people who don't know, was a giant in the history of science fiction. He did probably more than anyone to set science fiction on its modern footing, where it had sort of evolved out of the pulps with ray guns and not very accurate characterization. And he insisted on, in particular, on accurate science. Like more science in the science fiction than just pure fantasy. So this whole story, as we'll see, is a real feather in his cap. And he was perfectly forthcoming. Riley asked him where this information had come from,

and he said, basically, it came from me. He said, a lot of this stuff, all of the information is publicly available, and it just fell to someone with enough sort of imagination to speculate about how it might be used to come up with a story like this. Campbell himself had studied atomic physics at MIT in 1933, so he was no slouch himself, but Riley was unconvinced. I think reading between the lines that Riley disliked him personally, which might have affected this somewhat, he found him egotistical.

that Riley disliked him personally, which might have affected the somewhat he found him egotistical. But also he pointed out that someone who studied the physics in 1933 wouldn't have had the whole story. So the story contained, Cartnell's story contained factors that had only come to light since 1940. So he said, for instance, a theoretical use of boron, unless it was coincidental, is indicative of quite recent information. So they wanted to continue the investigation by talking to Cleve Cartmill himself, the author.

Right. And Campbell gave them his address. He was way over at the other side of the country in Manhattan Beach, California. And for some reason, they had just approached Campbell, the editor, directly. But they didn't want to approach Cartmel directly. They wanted to sort of... Be more surreptitious? Yeah, just sort of eye him surreptitiously

and try to learn something about him before they engaged him directly. And in 1944, what that amounted to was getting his mailman to talk to him. That's espionage in 1944. So they did that. The postman, who read science fiction and had sort of a, you know, sort of nodding acquaintance with him, just drew him into a conversation about the story. And Cartmill told him basically the same that Campbell had told the investigator, which is that they'd just drawn it from general reading matter on scientific subjects

and from a sort of working knowledge of physics. Now, did they really expect that if Cartmill really was some kind of spy or secret agent that he would just spill that to his mailman? I don't know. That part of it I don't understand. It's really entertaining, but I can't imagine why they thought that step was necessary because the next thing they did was just go up and talk to him themselves. Okay.

And he's apparently a very nice man, Cleve Cartmill. He was a 36-year-old family man and basically a magazine writer. He didn't even specialize in science fiction. I think he was just, he wrote for Collier's. He did all kinds of writing and Campbell had trouble finding writers during the war. And so I think that's one reason that two of them wound up working together.

Campbell had said that Cartmill knew nothing at all about physics and that Campbell had supplied him all the technical details. That's not quite right. When he'd first come to California, Cartmill had worked for the American Radium Products Company in 1927 and studied a little bit about radium and its properties there. So he had a little bit of background in it. Yeah, but most of it was supplied by Campbell. It turned out that Cartmill wasn't even very proud of the story himself. He told the postman that it stinks and was much more interested in changing the subject subject and

talking about his other recent stories but the investigator came away thinking that he seemed you know earnest and forthcoming and and not hiding anything and and sure that they discovered that that all these facts were publicly available and that's pretty much how it turned out. We now have the correspondence between Campbell and Cartmill. Campbell had come up with the idea of this, writing a story about the possibilities of an atomic superweapon and proposed that to Cartmill, and they corresponded back and forth. Campbell had written to Cartmill on August 16, 1943,

just as an example of a correspondence saying that they'd found a way to produce a supply of fissionable U-235 that could be used to make a powerful weapon. He said, quote, they're afraid that the explosion of energy would be so incomparably violent that surrounding matter would be set off, and that would be serious. That would blow an island or a hunk of a continent right off the planet. It would shake the whole earth, causing So this was Campbell's speculations, though, or what he imagined. Yeah, that's from his reading of scientific journals and just the physics that were available at the time about what an atomic weapon could do. I see. It was Campbell who suggested that Cartmel write up a story about this, and he proposed that they set it as sort of an allegory on an alien planet so it wasn't too close to

the war that was really going on at the time. Cartmel didn't do a terrifically artistic job of this. In the story, the bad guys are named the Sixa, which is just axis spelled backwards. All the country names are spelled backwards. It's perfectly transparent. But they did go to the trouble, at least, to put it ostensibly on an alien planet. I see. So Cartmill agreed to this proposal and wrote back with some technical questions. He wrote, oh, the story is about Commando for the good guys

who goes into the bad guys' territory and tries to find this bomb and deactivate it before it can be set off. That's what the story is about. So Cartmel had written back to Campbell's proposal saying, with some technical questions, he said, you see, I want to know how to make a U-235 bomb so that I'll know how to destroy it because I think that would be highly entertaining reading.

And Campbell wrote back to him basically telling him how to construct an A-bomb. Wow. How it would be triggered, what the probable consequences of an explosion would be. And if you read the story, you can almost tell which of those passages are, because Cartmill lifted them practically verbatim out of Campbell's letters. So Campbell just really figured this all out for himself. Yeah. As far as we can tell.

The tone of the story changes quite a bit in these technical passages because he's using Campbell's language. I see. It's quite different from his own regular tone. Here's an actual paragraph from the story describing the bomb. Two cast-iron hemispheres clamped over the orange segments of cadmium alloy, and the fuse, I see it, is in a tiny can of cadmium alloy containing a speck of radium in a beryllium holder and a small explosive powerful enough to shatter the cadmium walls. Then, correct

me if I'm wrong, will you, the powdered uranium oxide runs together in the central cavity. The radium shoots neutrons into this mass and the U-235 takes over from there, right? So it's quite technically sophisticated compared to something like Jules Verne. Very specific. Yeah. You can see why the investigators were concerned. Yeah. But these guys, Cartmell and Campbell, were both so forthcoming and ingenuous and open-handed about all this that it became impossible to believe they were bad guys. And the whole premise doesn't really make sense. If they were bad guys trying to share atomic secrets, why would they publish them in a popular magazine? It just doesn't make any sense. Yeah.

So the whole investigation started to fizzle out. There just didn't seem to be anything nefarious going on. But that's not the end of it, because it still leaves the fact that someone's publishing pretty accurate descriptions of atomic weapons in a popular magazine. And how to make them, yeah. So we can't have that. Yeah. In particular, Lieutenant Colonel W.B. Parsons, who was an intelligence officer at Oak Ridge, which was producing uranium for the bomb, was still worried that publishing these details was incredibly dangerous.

Not just because some bad guy might make use of them, but just because if the public in general became awake to the idea that these weapons were... Oh, on the horizon. Possible, yeah. They can speculate, and that's exactly the sort of thing they were trying to avoid, which is, I think, legitimate fear, but they weren't sure what to do about that. Parsons, this intelligence officer, wanted, I think, quite a heavy-handed solution. He had proposed using what was called the Code of Wartime Practices,

which had been circulated to editors and broadcasters in June of the previous year, 1943, which basically forbade them to disseminate any information about wartime experiments involving, quote, atom smashing, atomic energy, atomic fission, atomic splitting, or any of their equivalents. For this reason, just not to get it out abroad in the public's mind. And under this rule, if the publisher refused to cooperate, they had the authority to take away their mailing privileges, which would just, that would shut down any publication. So he talked to a censor named Jack Lockhart, assistant director of the Office of Censorship, about doing this. And this is my favorite part of the whole story. Lockhart wrote back to him as follows. And remember, this is a wartime censor writing this. I can understand the worry which Colonel Parsons feels about publication of information of military value.

I hope he can understand the worry which the press feels about censorship. The press is as much a part of this nation as the army and has a job to do that is as important as the army's. I suppose that from the viewpoint of total military security, it would be best to stop all the presses of this nation when the nation goes to war, except for those kept running to get out military regulations and orders. But I don't think that would work in our democracy, He suggested just going and talking to them and appealing to them as patriotic citizens and seeing if they would just agree yeah which is what he did it fell to him to go talk to campbell which he did and said basically that just we're not forbidding you to do this but we would be grateful if you would just refrain from talking about atomic weapons for the

remainder of the war and camp Campbell basically mostly did that. There were a few references to it here and there in the material he edited, but he mostly stayed away from it thereafter. He always maintained afterward that if he had completely cut off any reference to it, that his readers were smart enough to put two and two together, you know, to recognize that it was absent

all of a sudden and realize that it had been suppressed. That would be suspicious, yeah. But whatever the truth, he mostly refrained from publishing anything about it, and that was largely the end of the matter. The best summary of this whole story that I've come across was written up by Albert Berger in the September 1984 issue of Analog magazine, where he makes, I think, the very good point that bureaucracies, including the Manhattan Project,

often try to control information by compartmentalizing it, so each contributor knows only about their little part of it, and no one except the higher-ups have a big picture. And science fiction, good science fiction, does exactly the opposite. He says, Campbell's science fiction did this best, putting scattered bits of scientific knowledge together into a specific concrete idea or device and speculating on what that idea or device's impact

might be on the world at large, which is exactly what happened here. So the whole thing is sort of emblematic that the world is changing, that it's becoming more and more possible for an educated, imaginative outsider to sort of surmise what's going on in even

clustered areas where information is supposed to be held secret. And that's, I think, more and more true even today. Today, Cleve Cartmel is largely forgotten as an author. This story, Deadline, is by far his most famous story, and it's famous really not for its literary merit so much as the fact that it had a role in this whole episode. But the whole bottom line for this, at least for me, is that it's a real testament to the intelligence and imagination of John W. Campbell as an editor. And it really cements his reputation as a champion of rigorously accurate science fiction. Certainly during wartime, the army side of this is understandable.

They did have justifiable concerns about the publication of such detailed information about atomic weapons. But equally, it really shows the power of an intelligent outsider to understand this sort of thing and publish accurate descriptions of it, even without access to a top-secret security clearance, for instance. If your speculations about new technology are so good that military intelligence comes knocking, you're doing pretty well. If you've been enjoying the esoteric trivia that we talk about in these podcasts, you should be sure to check out our book, Futility Closet, an idler's miscellany of compendious amusements,

which contains hundreds of intriguing distractions, as well as wordplay, puzzles, paradoxes, and other bite-sized amusements and conundrums. Look for it on Amazon or iTunes, and discover why other readers have called it a great fun read that will never leave you bored and full of wonderful discoveries for the curious mind. So there was a lot of interest in our story from last week on Reginald Bray, who's the guy who conducted a series of postal experiments to test the limits of the British postal system.

Yes. We got in a bunch of interesting email from listeners. Nathan Takus wrote to say, I was amused by the turnips and crocheted envelopes used by Reginald Bray in your latest episode. I wondered, though, if you had heard of Glenn Seaborg, the only person to ever have a chemical element named after him in his lifetime.

He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work as discoverer, or contributor to the discovery, of 10 synthetic elements. Late in Seaborg's life, after the element seaborgium had been named for him, it was possible to mail a letter to Glenn Seaborg using only the symbols of chemical elements. So I basically traced this idea back of mailing a letter to Seaborg using only chemical elements, and it seems to trace back to an article in Discover magazine, their January 1998 issue.

There was an article by Jeffrey Winters that said, not only is Seaborg the first living scientist to have an element named after him, he's also the only person who could receive mail addressed to him only in elements. Seaborgium, Lorentium for the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Berkelium, Californium, Americium. But don't forget the zip code. So you could send a letter to Glenn Seaborg with just five chemical symbols on it and still cover his name, his workplace, his city, his state, and his country.

And his country. That's great. Yeah, that was really cute. Alex Singh wrote in to say, I loved your piece about Reginald Bray and his postal exploits. Such experiments have been conducted in more modern times as well. Jeff Van Buren of San Francisco, California, conducted a series of official experiments,

which were published in the Annals of Improbable Research, Volume 6, Issue 4, July-August 2000. So I actually had never heard of the Annals of Improbable Research, but it turns out to be just what it sounds like. So I was very tickled to learn that such a thing exists. So I looked at Jeff Van Buren's article, which is entitled Postal Experiments. Basically, he and a team of what he calls mailing specialists sent a variety of items, most of them unpackaged, to various destinations in the U.S. The sent items were in the general categories of valuable, sentimental, unwieldy, pointless, potentially suspicious. These were things that would look like they might be illegal or dangerous

and disgusting. And they kept careful track and found that although some items were never delivered, the majority of them did get delivered, basically as long as they had a lot of stamps attached to them. Fair enough. He kind of stressed that that seemed to be a key element, putting a lot of stamps on them. Overall, they got a 64% delivery rate with success for 18 of the 28 items that they tried sending. The article is wonderful to read. It very carefully details the object sent and notes the outcome

and the number of days for delivery for each item. But here's some of the things they tried sending. The following were sent successfully. Okay. A molar tooth, which was mailed in a clear plastic box and Van Buren notes that it made a nice rattling sound. It ended up somehow being repackaged

during the delivery in a padded mailer. And there was a handwritten note inside that read, please be advised that human remains may not be transported through the mail, but we assumed this to be of sentimental value and made an exception in your case. Oh, that's nice of them. They mailed a ski, an unwrapped, just big ski. And they basically did this by slipping it into a postal bin that was being loaded into a truck when another team member created a disturbance up the street to distract the postal worker's attention.

That's probably what it would take. Stuck it in the truck. They received a notice of postage due at the post office, so when a team member went to the post office to pick it up, the clerk and supervisor had to consult a book of postal regulations for two minutes and 40 seconds before deciding on what additional postage to assess. The clerk asked the recipient if they knew how this had been mailed, and basically she's like, I don't know. The clerk also noticed that mail must be wrapped. Okay.

They sent a deer tibia. Really? Like just a bone? Just an unwrapped deer tibia. Van Buren says our mailing specialist received many strange looks from both postal clerks and members of the public in line when he picked it up at the station

the clerk put on rubber gloves before handling the bone inquired if our researcher were a cultist and commented that mail must be wrapped they sent a cardboard box full of dead fish and old seaweed. Oh, Bray did that. Bray sent a clump of seaweed, too. Did he? Yeah.

In a box? No, he just stuck it to a card. I think it got delivered. This was in the disgusting category for him here. So it was just stinky, smelly dead fish and old seaweed. They received a notice to pick it up at the post office, and when the mailing specialist arrived to pick it up, the postal supervisor warned them that they would be fined for mail service abuse, even as a recipient, should this happen again.

Oh, so there is a penalty if you... Yes, we don't recommend mailing dead fish. Okay. They mailed a wrapped brick, so it was wrapped so you couldn't tell what it was, and although that actually got delivered, what was finally delivered was the broken and pulverized remains of a brick. And inside was a small piece of paper that appeared to be some type of U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency release slip. So apparently they just pulverized the brick to make sure there wasn't anything inside it.

And then delivered it. And then delivered it, right. Here's your brick. Here's your brick. Here's your brick. The pulverized remains of a brick. They mailed what they called a sound-emitting toy, which was a monkey-in-a-box toy that when it was shaken, it would

shout, let me out of here! Help! Let me out of here! They addressed it in big letters to Little Johnny, and they thoughtfully put in a brand new battery so that it would be sure to make noise through the whole trip. All the way through the night.

Yes. Okay. And that got delivered right to the doorstep of the address that was on it. Interestingly, when they tried the same toy but wrapped in brown paper so you couldn't see what it was, that was never delivered. Huh. That's odd. That is odd.

Some of the items that didn't make it. A never-opened small bottle of spring water. Van Buren said, We observed the street corner box surreptitiously the following day upon mail collection. After puzzling briefly over this item, the postal carrier removed the mailing label and drank the contents of the bottle over the course of a few blocks as he worked his route. So that one was never delivered.

And then this one is the one that you liked, which is the helium balloon. Yes. Van Vuren says of this, the balloon was attached to a weight. The address was written on the balloon with magic marker. No postage was affixed. Our operative argued strongly that he should be charged a negative postage and refunded the postal fees because the transport airplane would actually be lighter as a result of our postal item. That is genius. This line of reasoning merely received a laugh from the clerk.

The balloon was refused. Reason given. Transportation of helium not wrapped. Although I have to argue the balloon is a wrapper. That's right. So the helium was wrapped. That's an airtight argument. We could make a fortune mailing helium balloons.

Anyway, so those never did get delivered. Some other items that were never delivered either was a can of soup, an unwrapped brick. The wrapped one was pulverized, but the unwrapped brick, nobody would dodge it. A lemon, a small bag of kitty litter, and a bald tire that was refused at the post office. They wouldn't even take it for delivery. They just heaved it up onto the counter? No, yes, and we're not taking it. Van Buren...

I guess the stamps don't stick to a tire. Van Buren says at the end of his article that the investigation team actually felt remorse for some of the experiment, most particularly the items in the disgusting category. So they tried to find as many of the postal employees who had been involved in the experiment as they could, and they gave them each a small box of chocolate. Oh, that's sweet. Isn't that nice?

That's the least they can do. Okay. Alec notes, by the way, the tagline for the Improbable Research Association is research that makes people laugh and then think. I believe that also applies to a lot of your posts on the blog. Oh, thank you. We had an email in from Bjorn Gedda, who said that he has a friend who worked in the Swedish postal service,

in the department that handles what Bjorn called problematic mail. There's a whole department. So this is, yeah, you said last week that you didn't know the postal services. End of it. End of it. So Bjorn at least has a friend who has a little bit of insight into that. Bjorn says, contrary to what my one might believe,

he loved it. It was often some detective work involved and also a bit of chance. He told me that once they sent out the same letter seven times to different addresses before it stopped coming back, basically what they received was a letter that was addressed to something like granny Esther, and then had just the name of a town that I'm not going to pronounce because it's Swedish. And they basically tried mailing it out seven times trying to find Granny Esther and apparently

finally did. Which is admirable. I mean, I got that feeling with the Edwardian post office, too, that they were really diligent about trying to get things through, even if it was kind of outrageous. And having a misdirected mail or a very badly or oddly directed male, I suppose, is a little different than dead fish or really smelly cheese or deer tibia, which were some of the other items from Van Buren's experiments. But Bjorn is a beekeeper and says also in his email, I can also inform you that it is still quite all right to send bees through the mail. mail, I can also inform you that it is still quite all right to send bees through the mail, both a single queen, which needs some five to six companions, and entire hives of some 10,000 bees. Can be sent through the mail? He's claiming, yes.

Wow. So if anybody has, you know, dreams of sending bees through the mail, apparently that's perfectly fine. In our original segment on Reginald Bray, the one bit of info I had about the post office's side of his adventures, I didn't include in the piece, but he did send off one postcard where instead of addressing it, he just written above the photograph of the town to a resident of. And that came back to him with postage due. And we don't know who wrote this, but some anonymous postal employee had written, pursuing this game, we hope there are not many. However, for your hobby, you will have to pay a penny. Oh, so they wouldn't deliver it because of the lack of postage. We don't know whether they would have delivered it otherwise. It's hard to tell. It may have been that. Yeah,

you're right. It may just have been that. But anyway, whoever wrote that had a sense of humor. Definitely had a sense of humor. Yes. So thanks to all our listeners who wrote in on this topic. And if you have any comments, you can leave them in the show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com or send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. We'll also have a link to Jeff Van Buren's Postal Experiments article in the show notes. Be Good, Be Good, a poem by Mark Twain. Be good, be good, be always good, and now and then be clever.

But don't you ever be too good, nor ever be too clever, for such as be too awful good, they awful lonely are, and such as often clever be, get cut and stung and trodden on by persons of lesser mental capacity, for this kind do, by a law of their construction, regard exhibitions of superior intellectuality as an offensive impertinence leveled at their lack of this high gift, and are prompt to resent such like exhibitions in the manner above indicated. And are they justifiable? Alas, alas, they... It is not best to go on. I think the line is already longer than it ought to be for real true

poetry. So this is our lateral thinking puzzle segment. This week, I'll be giving Greg a scenario and he'll have to try to figure it out using only yes or no questions. I've discovered the key to solving these is to close your eyes. To close your eyes. Okay, well, let's see if that works. So Greg will be solving this with his eyes closed. Our puzzle this week was sent in by Eric Tressler, who says, Here's a puzzle I thought up while catching up on your podcast. I hope you like it. All right.

And Eric sent in actually a very interesting puzzle and even nicely sent in hints. So we've got hints for you. Yes, if you need them. So here's Eric's puzzle. A famous artist's work is on exhibition in the city's museum. One night, the city's two most devious and infamous thieves decide to break in, and each makes off with one painting.

They are both wearing absolutely perfect disguises and leave no trace except for security camera footage which is discovered in the morning. The next day, both men were arrested. How were they caught? Alright. Are there other people involved besides these two? No.

Is the location important? No. You told me that. Did this really happen? No. No told me that. Did this really happen? No. No. Eric says he thought it up, so. Okay.

Two paintings. Two thieves and two thieves alone steal two paintings from a museum. Okay. Does it matter who the painter is? No. So they're just two valuable paintings. Yes. That are stolen valuable paintings. Yes. That are stolen under surveillance.

Yes. They're security camera footage. From an art museum. Yes. In a city. Does it matter exactly where? No. Okay.

So there's camera footage of whatever it is that happened. Right. That someone can presumably watch. Right. And that would show two men. Yes. Stealing two paintings. Yes.

Right. You don't seem to be getting very far. Okay. So, well, just because there's all these details. You have to confirm everything. Yeah, okay. So they get safely out of the museum with the paintings. Yes.

But are apprehended. Yeah, the next day both men are arrested. Presumably because of something that was on the camera footage. Yes. But which is not just their appearance, right? They were just recognized? What do you mean? Well, if they had a criminal record or something and they were clearly recognizable on the camera footage,

then the police could just pick them up. Right. According to Eric's puzzle, they the police could just pick them up. Right. According to Eric's puzzle, they're both wearing absolutely perfect disguises. Disguises, meaning they were... Disguises meaning something to hide their identity entirely or to represent them as someone else? The latter.

Oh. That's not really a yes or no question. That was cheating. Okay, well... But the latter. Okay. Okay. Disguises representing them as someone else. really a yes or no question that was cheating okay well but the latter okay disguises

representing them as someone else were they dressed as employees of the museum no as law enforcement no as some sort of maintenance or no someone who would were they dressed as someone who properly would have a right to take a painting off a museum wall. No. No. They were dressed as other people, though. Yes. Hmm. And that let the police pick them up. Yes.

Were they both dressed as... Were they dressed as separate people? Were they dressed as recognizable other people? Yes. Like, were they representing the identity of another person? Yes. Each of them? Yes. So the two of them were representing two other people.

I don't see, then, how that would let the police pick them up. Okay, were the people actual identities that I would know? No. Okay, so just sort of generic. No. Maybe I didn't answer those right. Within the puzzle, are they people with names? Well, nobody has names in the puzzle, so...

They weren't dressed as famous or well-known people? Define. Define. I don't know. Celebrities? Were they dressed as other criminals? Yes. They were dressed? But they are criminals.

Yes. But they were dressed as other criminals? Yes. Deliberately? Oh, to throw off suspicion or to send the police going after someone else. Right. All right, that still doesn't solve it, though. But you're definitely getting there.

Okay, so the two of these criminals dressed as other criminals. Yes. All right, that's clever enough right there to steal these paintings. And that was caught on camera. So then the question is, why didn't the police just go and get those other criminals? Right, right. You're missing like one little piece. Were the police fooled at any point by this ruse?

I don't know yet. Let's say yes. Yes, I guess they would be. So, I mean, the police see two criminals steal the paintings. Right. They think they recognize them and go to collar those two? Yes. And fail?

No. Succeed? In a fashion. All right. Okay. So are they able to locate these other two criminals? What other two criminals? The ones that the actual criminals were disguised as.

The way you're phrasing this, there's a problem. Were they disguised as each other yes all right just put it together so there's probably one assumption that you're making that's incorrect that would allow you to just see the answer you to just see the answer. Two criminals stole two paintings disguised as each other. Yes. I know. Was that, that was not planned, obviously.

There'd be no point in doing that. Was that the plan? That they'd go in disguised as each other? I'll have to say yes, the way you're asking it. Be careful about an assumption you're making. Okay. I'm with you. I am making...

I can tell I'm making some assumption. So when you say these are two different people, right? Two different people. Are they related? Do any of you know anything

about their history? No. Were there, you know, criminal background? No. Anything like, you know, criminal background? No. Anything like that? They're just thieves. They're just infamous thieves.

Infamous throughout the city. They're disguised as each other. Yes. You say that significantly. Yes. It's significant. The camera catches them doing this. Right.

The police see this. Yeah. Recognize them. Yes. And go to... Right. Capture them. Right. And right capture them right and do capture them yes you're nodding yes your eyes are open yeah that's the problem you opened your eyes halfway through you need to keep them closed okay so you say the police apprehend them right and say right you guys

stole two paintings last night so how does this all make sense how does this all fit together you mean why would they disguise themselves as each other yeah does it have something to do with the legal defense no you want me just to tell you you've just got about you just about have it you're just not quite seeing the whole situation do they go to jail i mean are they let's assume they do yeah that's not important is there a mix-up or a mistake involved like they made a plan made a plan to do... That's what I'm hung up on. No, yeah. It seems like... I don't understand why...

Right, that's what you're missing. I guess you should just give it to me. They're not working together. Oh, oh. So, a famous artist's work is on exhibition in the city's museum. One night, the city's two most devious and infamous thieves decide to break in and each makes off with one painting. That's my assumption. That's very good. They are both wearing absolutely perfect disguises

and leave no trace except for security camera footage, which is discovered in the morning. The next day, both men are arrested because they were disguised as each other, not working together at all. So each of them sort of implicated the other. That's very good. I get no credit for together at all. So each of them sort of implicated the other. That's very good. I get no credit for that at all

because that was the essential point is the one assumption I was making. Oh, yeah. But I mean, you did very well to figure out they were disguised as each other. So I think you get a lot of credit for that. So thank you, Eric. That was actually a very interesting puzzle.

Yes, thank you. We appreciate everybody that's been sending in puzzles. We've got a little collection of some pretty good ones right now. Yeah, thank you very much. Thanks to everybody. And if you want to send in a puzzle of your own, you can email them to podcast at futilitycloset.com. Well, that's it for another episode for us. You can see our show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com, where you can post comments or questions, listen to past shows, and see the links mentioned in today's episode.

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