ictory. "The new champ," he proclaimed. "Mom,
you're a genius!"

"But, Rick, I didn't say anything except...."

"You said just enough, dear," Hartson Brant replied. "We all had the
answer right in that second, because you gave us a clue. Do you remember
the code our former friend used when he was sending messages off the
island?"

The "former friend" Hartson Brant referred to was a member of the staff
who had turned renegade and helped Manfred Wessel's gang in their
efforts to build a moon rocket, using the Spindrift design, in order to
win the Stoneridge Grant of two million dollars. The traitor scientist
had used code messages to keep the gang informed of new developments on
Spindrift while he had used the cloak of false friendship to slow up the
building of the Spindrift rocket.

"He used a double code," Rick explained. "Part of it was a regular
cipher, but the first step was a book code."

"I do remember!" Mrs. Brant exclaimed. "He used a copy of that book
Hartson's friend wrote. What was it? _Psychiatry Simplified._ The code
was numbers that gave the page of the book, and the position of the word
on the page, and unless you found the book, as Rick and Scotty did, you
couldn't break the code!"

Barby jumped up in her excitement. "And I know what book Chahda was
using!"

The rest of the group spoke as one. "_The World Almanac!_"

Scotty ran for the library, Rick on his heels.

"We told him about that code," Scotty said. "Now I remember when, too.
It was right after we got back from India, when we were showing him
around the lab."

"I remember, too," Rick agreed. "We were telling him how the gang used
my plane, with me flying it, to smuggle their coded messages, and he
asked us about it because he had never heard of codes before!"

They reached the shelf that held the _Almanac_ and stopped short.
Because of the year-to-year news summaries in the famous annual, Hartson
Brant had kept each edition as a reference source. There were over a
dozen of them on the shelf.

"They're all different," Rick said. "The pages change each year. Which
one did he use?"

Scotty's forehead furrowed. "Which one did he memorize? It was an old
one, but I can't remember the date."

"Got it," Rick said. "Remember the letter L? The twelfth letter of the
alphabet. It must be the 1912 edition."

Scotty surveyed the shelf. "Which we don't have," he said.

Rick groaned. "No!"

Hartson Brant called from the dining room. "Haven