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“From,” or VON in German—as my message in fact did. I was playing with the idea of doing a quick run, to look for settings where the first letter was V.”
    “Very good. Very good,” Henryk repeated.
    “Just think how easy it would be,” Anna continued. “In the encoded message, the first letter of the address was K. Starting with a setting of MMM, I could just hit the one letter K. If it showed up as a V, then I would go on, to see if I got VON. But if I got any other letter but V, then I could simply hit K again. The right-hand wheel would already have turned one notch, giving a setting of MMN, and that's the one I would want to try next.
    “In other words, we can cut way down on the brute force,” Anna concluded. “Simply push the first letter—K in this case—over and over again until it comes out V. Whenever we get a V—one time in twenty-five—we can go on to the second letter. If it's an O, we keep right on going.”
    “Very good. Very good,” Henryk said once more. “Brilliant.”
    In fact, as Anna would soon discover, the “brute force” exercise had been a test, to see if she would pick up the V clue. The staff were already using this approach, with impressive results. Looking just for the first letter V worked in about half the cases, giving a quick decryption. As for the other half, many started with the date, not the address, so the V test didn't work.
    “We now come to the main event,” said Marian, thoughtfully stroking his beard. “How do we tackle the first six letters—the inscrutable six?”
    He looked around the room. Silence.
    Finally, Henryk cleared his throat and spoke: “Can everybody get back together at 8:00 a.m. tomorrow?” The professors nodded. He looked at Anna.
    She nodded too. She was delighted to be included with the big boys. There goes the topology class, she thought.
    Henryk wound up the meeting: "Let's focus on our next big puzzle: that irksome group of six. Let's sleep on it.”
    Anna had trouble sleeping on it. In fact, she had trouble getting to sleep at all; she was too excited. She had successfully decoded the German message. More important, she had figured out how to shortcut the process by using the V test. She had been accepted as one of the core group struggling with the Enigma. True, she had hit one pothole in the road during her first day. That bit about her eight year old mother was childish. But it was out of character, she reassured herself; it could be written off to her initial nervousness. There was no reason to fear a repeat.
    As she began to drift off, she had a warm, satisfied feeling. She had broken a long-standing, unwanted habit. When she was younger, she realized that it might not be such a good idea to answer the toughest math questions in class; her classmates resented it. And, with a few well chosen errors, she could keep her exam scores to a respectably mediocre B+, a practice she discarded—spectacularly—when it came time to take the university entrance examinations. Now, she noticed, she was giving direct answers to direct questions. After just a few days, she felt comfortable with her colleagues. There wasn't the slightest risk that she would make brilliant men like Henryk or Marian or Jerzy look bad.
    Henryk resumed the meeting at 8:00 a.m. sharp. In front of each of their places was a pile of about a dozen messages, in both the original and decrypted versions. Across the top of each decrypted message, three letters were printed in colored ink; they gave the rotor settings that had been used to encode that particular message.
    "You'll observe," said Jerzy, “that the rotor settings are different for each of the messages, even though they're all Blue, and they were all sent within a few days. That indicates that, as we suspected, the settings are changed for every message—not just once a month or even once a day. Well, we can't expect the Germans to make life easy for us."
    “And again, we were probably right in our