Neal Stephenson,
CRYPTONOMICON
"There is a remarkably close parallel between the problems of the physicist
and those of the cryptographer. The system on which a message is enciphered
corresponds to the laws of the universe, the intercepted messages to the
evidence available, the keys for a day or a message to important constants
which have to be determined. The correspondence is very close, but the
subject matter of cryptography is very easily dealt with by discrete
machinery, physics not so easily."
Alan Turing
This morning [Imelda Marcos] offered the latest in a series of explanations
of the billions of dollars that she and her husband, who died in 1989, are
believed to have stolen during his presidency.
"It so coincided that Marcos had money," she said. "After the Bretton Woods
agreement he started buying gold from Fort Knox. Three thousand tons, then
4,000 tons. I have documents for these: 7,000 tons. Marcos was so smart. He
had it all. It's funny; America didn't understand him."
The New York Times, Monday, 4 March, 1996
Prologue
Two tires fly. Two wail.
A bamboo grove, all chopped down
From it, warring songs.
...is the best that Corporal Bobby Shaftoe can do on short notice he's
standing on the running board, gripping his Springfield with one hand and
the rearview mirror with the other, so counting the syllables on his fingers
is out of the question. Is "tires" one syllable or two? How about "wail?"
The truck finally makes up its mind not to tip over, and thuds back onto
four wheels. The wail and the moment are lost. Bobby can still hear the
coolies singing, though, and now too there's the gunlike snicking of the
truck's clutch linkage as Private Wiley downshifts. Could Wiley be losing
his nerve? And, in the back, under the tarps, a ton and a half of file
cabinets clanking, code books slaloming, fuel spanking the tanks of Station
Alpha's electrical generator. The modern world's hell on haiku writers:
"Electrical generator" is, what, eight syllables? You couldn't even fit that
onto the second line!
"Are we allowed to run over people?" Private Wiley inquires, and then
mashes the horn button before Bobby Shaftoe can answer. A Sikh policeman
hurdles a night soil cart. Shaftoe's gut reaction is: Sure, what're they
going to do, declare war on us? but as the highest ranking man on this truck
he's probably supposed to be using his head or something, so he doesn't
blurt it out just yet. He takes stock of the situation:
Shanghai, 1645 hours, Friday, the 28th of November 1941. Bobby Shaftoe,
and the other half dozen Marines on his truck, are staring down the length
of Kiukiang Road, onto which they've just made this careening high speed
turn. Cathedral's going by to the right, so that means they are, what? two
blocks away from the Bund. A Yangtze River Patrol gunboat is tied up there,
waiting for the stuff they've got in the back of this truck. The only real
problem is that those particular two blocks are inhabited by about five
million Chinese people.
Now these Chinese are sophisticated urbanites, not suntanned yokels
who've never seen cars before they'll get out of your way if you drive fast
and honk your horn. And indeed many of them flee to one side of the street
or the other, producing the illusion that the truck is moving faster than
the forty three miles an hour shown on its speedometer.
But the bamboo grove in Bobby Shaftoe's haiku has not been added just
to put a little Oriental flavor into the poem and wow the folks back home in
Oconomowoc. There is a lot of heavy bamboo in front of this truck, dozens of
makeshift turnpikes blocking their path to the river, for the officers of
the U.S. Navy's Asiatic Fleet, and of the Fourth Marines, who dreamed up
this little operation forgot to take the Friday Afternoon factor into
account. As Bobby Shaftoe could've explained to them, if only they'd
bothered to ask a poor dumb jarhead, their route took them through the heart
of the banking district. Here you've got the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank of
course, City Bank, Chase Manhattan, the Bank of America, and BBME and the
Agricultural Bank of China and any number of crappy little provincial banks,
and several of those banks have contracts with what's left of the Chinese
Government to print currency. It must be a cutthroat business because they
slash costs by printing it on old newspapers, and if you know how to read
Chinese, you can see last year's news stories and polo scores peeking
through the colored numbers and pictures that transform these pieces of
paper into legal tender.
As every chicken peddler and rickshaw operator in Shanghai knows, the
money printing contracts stipulate that all of the bills these banks print
have to be backed by such and such an amount of silver; i.e., anyone should
be able to walk into one of those banks at the end of Kiukiang Road and slap
down a pile of bills and (provided that those bills were printed by that
same bank) receive actual metallic silver in exchange.
Now if China weren't right in the middle of getting systematically
drawn and quartered by the Empire of Nippon, it would probably send official
bean counters around to keep tabs on how much silver was actually present in
these banks' vaults, and it would all be quiet and orderly. But as it
stands, the only thing keeping these banks honest is the other banks.
Here's how they do it: during the normal course of business, lots of
paper money will pass over the counters of (say) Chase Manhattan Bank.
They'll take it into a back room and sort it, throwing into money boxes (a
couple of feet square and a yard deep, with ropes on the four corners) all
of the bills that were printed by (say) Bank of America in one, all of the
City Bank bills into another. Then, on Friday afternoon they will bring in
coolies. Each coolie, or pair of coolies, will of course have his great big
long bamboo pole with him a coolie without his pole is like a China Marine
without his nickel plated bayonet and will poke their pole through the ropes
on the corners of the box. Then one coolie will get underneath each end of
the pole, hoisting the box into the air. They have to move in unison or else
the box begins flailing around and everything gets out of whack. So as they
head towards their destination whatever bank whose name is printed on the
bills in their box they sing to each other, and plant their feet on the
pavement in time to the music. The pole's pretty long, so they are that far
apart, and they have to sing loud to hear each other, and of course each
pair of coolies in the street is singing their own particular song, trying
to drown out all of the others so that they don't get out of step.
So ten minutes before closing time on Friday afternoon, the doors of
many banks burst open and numerous pairs of coolies march in singing, like
the curtain raiser on a fucking Broadway musical, slam their huge boxes of
tattered currency down, and demand silver in exchange. All of the banks do
this to each other. Sometimes, they'll all do it on the same Friday,
particularly at times like 28 November 1941, when even a grunt like Bobby
Shaftoe can understand that it's better to be holding silver than piles of
old cut up newspaper. And that is why, once the normal pedestrians and food
cart operators and furious Sikh cops have scurried out of the way, and
plastered themselves up against the clubs and shops and bordellos on
Kiukiang Road, Bobby Shaftoe and the other Marines on the truck still cannot
even see the gunboat that is their destination, because of this horizontal
forest of mighty bamboo poles. They cannot even hear the honking of their
own truck horn because of the wild throbbing pentatonic cacophony of coolies
singing. This ain't just your regular Friday P.M. Shanghai bank district
money rush. This is an ultimate settling of accounts before the whole
Eastern Hemisphere catches fire. The millions of promises printed on those
slips of bumwad will all be kept or broken in the next ten minutes; actual
pieces of silver and gold will move, or they won't. It is some kind of
fiduciary Judgment Day.
"Jesus Christ, I can't " Private Wiley hollers.
"The captain said don't stop for any reason whatsofuckinever," Shaftoe
reminds him. He's not telling Wiley to run over the coolies, he's reminding
Wiley that if he refrains from running over them, they will have some
explaining to do which will be complicated by the fact that the captain's
right behind them in a car stuffed with Tommy Gun toting China Marines. And
from the way the captain's been acting about this Station Alpha thing, it's
pretty clear that he already has a few preliminary strap marks on his ass,
courtesy of some admiral in Pearl Harbor or even (drumroll) Marine Barracks,
Eight and Eye Streets Southeast, Washington, D.C.
***
Shaftoe and the other Marines have always known Station Alpha as a
mysterious claque of pencil necked swabbies who hung out on the roof of a
building in the International Settlement in a shack of knot pocked cargo
pallet planks with antennas sticking out of it every which way. If you stood
there long enough you could see some of those antennas moving, zeroing in on
something out to sea. Shaftoe even wrote a haiku about it:
Antenna searches
Retriever's nose in the wind
Ether's far secrets
This was only his second haiku ever clearly not up to November 1941
standards and he cringes to remember it.
But in no way did any of the Marines comprehend what a big deal Station
Alpha was until today. Their job had turned out to involve wrapping a ton of
equipment and several tons of paper in tarps and moving it out of doors.
Then they spent Thursday tearing the shack apart, making it into a bonfire,
and burning certain books and papers.
"Sheeeyit!" Private Wiley hollers. Only a few of the coolies have
gotten out of the way, or even seen them. But then there is this fantastic
boom from the river, like the sound of a mile thick bamboo pole being
snapped over God's knee. Half a second later there're no coolies in the
street anymore just a lot of boxes with unmanned bamboo poles teeter
tottering on them, bonging into the streets like wind chimes. Above, a furry
mushroom of grey smoke rises from the gunboat. Wiley shifts up to high gear
and floors it. Shaftoe cringes against the truck's door and lowers his head,
hoping that his campy Great War doughboy helmet will be good for something.
Then money boxes start to rupture and explode as the truck rams through
them. Shaftoe peers up through a blizzard of notes and sees giant bamboo
poles soaring and bounding and windmilling toward the waterfront.
The leaves of Shanghai:
Pale doorways in a steel sky.
Winter has begun.
Chapter 1 BARRENS
Let's set the existence of God issue aside for a later volume, and just
stipulate that in some way, self replicating organisms came into existence
on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either
by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more
direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and
their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found
some way to survive and to propagate. After about three billion years of
this sometimes zany, frequently tedious fugue of carnality and carnage,
Godfrey Waterhouse IV was born, in Murdo, South Dakota, to Blanche, the wife
of a Congregational preacher named Bunyan Waterhouse. Like every other
creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous
badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace
his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous
badasses to that first self replicating gizmo which, given the number and
variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most
stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a
stupendous badass was dead.
As nightmarishly lethal, memetically programmed death machines went,
these were the nicest you could ever hope to meet. In the tradition of his
namesake (the Puritan writer John Bunyan, who spent much of his life in
jail, or trying to avoid it) the Rev. Waterhouse did not preach in any one
place for long. The church moved him from one small town in the Dakotas to
another every year or two. It is possible that Godfrey found the lifestyle
more than a little alienating, for, sometime during the course of his
studies at Fargo Congregational College, he bolted from the fold and, to the
enduring agony of his parents, fell into worldly pursuits, and ended up,
somehow, getting a Ph.D. in Classics from a small private university in
Ohio. Academics being no less nomadic than Congregational preachers, he took
work where he could find it. He became a Professor of Greek and Latin at
Bolger Christian College (enrollment 322) in West Point, Virginia, where the
Mattaponi and Pamunkey Rivers came together to form the estuarial James, and
the loathsome fumes of the big paper mill permeated every drawer, every
closet, even the interior pages of books. Godfrey's young bride, nee Alice
Pritchard, who had grown up following her itinerant preacher father across
the vastnesses of eastern Montana where air smelt of snow and sage threw up
for three months. Six months later she gave birth to Lawrence Pritchard
Waterhouse.
The boy had a peculiar relationship with sound. When a fire engine
passed, he was not troubled by the siren's howl or the bell's clang. But
when a hornet got into the house and swung across the ceiling in a broad
Lissajous, droning almost inaudibly, he cried in pain at the noise. And if
he saw or smelled something that scared him, he would clap his hands over
his ears.
One noise that troubled him not at all was the pipe organ in the chapel
at Bolger Christian College. The chapel itself was nothing worth mentioning,
but the organ had been endowed by the paper mill family and would have
sufficed for a church four times the size. It nicely complemented the
organist, a retired high school math teacher who felt that certain
attributes of the Lord (violence and capriciousness in the Old Testament,
majesty and triumph in the New) could be directly conveyed into the souls of
the enpewed sinners through a kind of frontal sonic impregnation. That he
ran the risk of blowing out the stained glass windows was of no consequence
since no one liked them anyway, and the paper mill fumes were gnawing at the
interstitial lead. But after one little old lady too many staggered down the
aisle after a service, reeling from tinnitus, and made a barbed comment to
the minister about the exceedingly dramatic music, the organist was
replaced.
Nevertheless, he continued to give lessons on the instrument. Students
were not allowed to touch the organ until they were proficient at the piano,
and when this was explained to Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, he taught
himself in three weeks, how to play a Bach fugue, and signed up for organ
lessons. Since he was only five years old at the time, he was unable to
reach both the manuals and the pedals, and had to play standing or rather
strolling, from pedal to pedal.
When Lawrence was twelve, the organ broke down. That paper mill family
had not left any endowment for maintenance, so the math teacher decided to
have a crack at it. He was in poor health and required a nimble assistant:
Lawrence, who helped him open up the hood of the thing. For the first time
in all those years, the boy saw what had been happening when he had been
pressing those keys.
For each stop each timbre, or type of sound, that the organ could make
(viz. blockflöte, trumpet, piccolo) there was a separate row of pipes,
arranged in a line from long to short. Long pipes made low notes, short
high. The tops of the pipes defined a graph: not a straight line but an
upward tending curve. The organist/math teacher sat down with a few loose
pipes, a pencil, and paper, and helped Lawrence figure out why. When
Lawrence understood, it was as if the math teacher had suddenly played the
good part of Bach's Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor on a pipe organ the size
of the Spiral Nebula in Andromeda the part where Uncle Johann dissects the
architecture of the Universe in one merciless descending ever mutating
chord, as if his foot is thrusting through skidding layers of garbage until
it finally strikes bedrock. In particular, the final steps of the organist's
explanation were like a falcon's dive through layer after layer of pretense
and illusion, thrilling or sickening or confusing depending on what you
were. The heavens were riven open. Lawrence glimpsed choirs of angels
ranking off into geometrical infinity.
The pipes sprouted in parallel ranks from a broad flat box of
compressed air. All of the pipes for a given note but belonging to different
stops lined up with each other along one axis. All of the pipes for a given
stop but tuned at different pitches lined up with each other along the
other, perpendicular axis. Down there in the flat box of air, then, was a
mechanism that got air to the right pipes at the right times. When a key or
pedal was depressed, all of the pipes capable of sounding the corresponding
note would speak, as long as their stops were pulled out.
Mechanically, all of this was handled in a fashion that was perfectly
clear, simple, and logical. Lawrence had supposed that the machine must be
at least as complicated as the most intricate fugue that could be played on
it. Now he had learned that a machine, simple in its design, could produce
results of infinite complexity.
Stops were rarely used alone. They tended to be piled on top of each
other in combinations that were designed to take advantage of the available
harmonics (more tasty mathematics here!). Certain combinations in particular
were used over and over again. Lots of blockflötes, in varying lengths, for
the quiet Offertory, for example. The organ included an ingenious mechanism
called the preset, which enabled the organist to select a particular
combination of stops stops he himself had chosen instantly. He would punch a
button and several stops would bolt out from the console, driven by
pneumatic pressure, and in that instant the organ would become a different
instrument with entirely new timbres.
The next summer both Lawrence and Alice, his mother, were colonized by
a distant cousin a stupendous badass of a virus. Lawrence escaped from it
with an almost imperceptible tendency to drag one of his feet. Alice wound
up in an iron lung. Later, unable to cough effectively, she got pneumonia
and died.
Lawrence's father, Godfrey, freely confessed that he was not equal to
the burdens now laid on his shoulders. He resigned from his position at the
small college in Virginia and moved, with his son, to a small house in
Moorhead, Minnesota, next door to where Bunyan and Blanche had settled.
Later he got a job teaching at a nearby normal school.
At this point, all of the responsible adults in Lawrence's life seemed
to arrive at a tacit agreement that the best way to raise him certainly the
easiest was to leave him alone. On the rare occasions when Lawrence
requested adult intervention in his life, he was usually asking questions
that no one could answer. At the age of sixteen, having found nothing in the
local school system to challenge him, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse went off
to college. He matriculated at Iowa State College, which among other things
was the site of a Naval ROTC installation in which he was forcibly enrolled.
The Iowa State Naval ROTC had a band, and was delighted to hear that
Lawrence had an interest in music. Since it was hard to drill on the deck of
a dreadnought while playing a pipe organ, they issued him a glockenspiel and
a couple of little dingers.
When not marching back and forth on the flood plain of the Skunk River
making loud dinging noises, Lawrence was majoring in mechanical engineering.
He ended up doing poorly in this area because he had fallen in with a
Bulgarian professor named John Vincent Atanasoff and his graduate student,
Clifford Berry, who were building a machine that was intended to automate
the solution of some especially tedious differential equations.
The basic problem for Lawrence was that he was lazy. He had figured out
that everything was much simpler if, like Superman with his X ray vision,
you just stared through the cosmetic distractions and saw the underlying
mathematical skeleton. Once you found the math in a thing, you knew
everything about it, and you could manipulate it to your heart's content
with nothing more than a pencil and a napkin. He saw it in the curve of the
silver bars on his glockenspiel, saw it in the catenary arch of a bridge and
in the capacitor studded drum of Atanasoff and Berry's computing machine.
Actually pounding on the glockenspiel, riveting the bridge together, or
trying to figure out why the computing machine wasn't working were not as
interesting to him.
Consequently he got poor grades. From time to time, though, he would
perform some stunt on the blackboard that would leave his professor weak in
the knees and the other students baffled and hostile. Word got around.
At the same time, his grandmother Blanche was invoking her extensive
Congregational connections, working the angles on Lawrence's behalf, totally
unbeknownst to him. Her efforts culminated in triumph when Lawrence was
awarded an obscure scholarship, endowed by a St. Paul oat processing heir,
whose purpose was to send Midwestern Congregationalists to the Ivy League
for one year, which (evidently) was deemed a long enough period of time to
raise their IQs by a few crucial points but not long enough to debauch them.
So Lawrence got to be a sophomore in Princeton.
Now Princeton was an august school and going there was a great honor,
but no one got around to mentioning either of these facts to Lawrence, who
had no way of knowing. This had bad and good consequences. He accepted the
scholarship with a faintness of gratitude that infuriated the oat lord. On
the other hand, he adjusted to Princeton easily because it was just another
place . It reminded him of the nicer bits of Virginia, and there were some
nice pipe organs in town, though he was not all that happy with his
engineering homework of bridge designing and sprocket cutting problems. As
always, these eventually came down to math, most of which he could handle
easily. From time to time he would get stuck, though, which led him to the
Fine Hall: the headquarters of the Math Department.
There was a motley assortment of fellows wandering around in Fine Hall,
many sporting British or European accents. Administratively speaking, many
of these fellows were not members of the Math Department at all, but a
separate thing called IAS, which stood for Institute for Advanced something
or other. But they were all in the same building and they all knew a thing
or two about math, so the distinction didn't exist for Lawrence.
Quite a few of these men would pretend shyness when Lawrence sought
their advice, but others were at least willing to hear him out. For example:
he had come up with a way to solve a difficult sprocket tooth shape problem
that, as normally solved by engineers, would require any number of perfectly
reasonable but aesthetically displeasing approximations. Lawrence's solution
would provide exact results. The only draw back was that it would require a
quintillion slide rule operators a quintillion years to solve. Lawrence was
working on a radically different approach that, if it worked, would bring
those figures down to a trillion and a trillion respectively. Unfortunately,
Lawrence was unable to interest anyone at Fine Hall in anything as prosaic
as gears, until all of a sudden he made friends with an energetic British
fellow, whose name he promptly forgot, but who had been doing a lot of
literal sprocket making himself lately. This fellow was trying to build, of
all things, a mechanical calculating machine specifically a machine to
calculate certain values of the Riemann Zeta Function
where s is a complex number.
Lawrence found this zeta function to be no more and no less interesting
than any other math problem until his new friend assured him that it was
frightfully important, and that some of the best mathematicians in the world
had been gnawing on it for decades. The two of them ended up staying awake
until three in the morning working out the solution to Lawrence's sprocket
problem. Lawrence presented the results proudly to his engineering
professor, who snidely rejected it, on grounds of practicality, and gave him
a poor grade for his troubles.
Lawrence finally remembered, after several more contacts, that the name
of the friendly Brit was Al something or other. Because Al was a passionate
cyclist, he and Al went on quite a few bicycle rides through the countryside
of the Garden State. As they rode around New Jersey, they talked about math,
and particularly about machines for taking the dull part of math off their
hands.
But Al had been thinking about this subject for longer than Lawrence,
and had figured out that computing machines were much more than just labor
saving devices. He'd been working on a radically different sort of computing
mechanism that would work out any arithmetic problem whatsoever, as long as
you knew how to write the problem down. From a pure logic standpoint, he had
already figured out everything there was to know about this (as yet
hypothetical) machine, though he had yet to build one. Lawrence gathered
that actually building machinery was looked on as undignified at Cambridge
(England, that is, where this Al character was based) or for that matter at
Fine Hall. Al was thrilled to have found, in Lawrence, someone who did not
share this view.
Al delicately asked him, one day, if Lawrence would terribly mind
calling him by his full and proper name, which was Alan and not Al. Lawrence
apologized and said he would try very hard to keep it in mind.
One day a couple of weeks later, as the two of them sat by a running
stream in the woods above the Delaware Water Gap, Alan made some kind of an
outlandish proposal to Lawrence involving penises. It required a great deal
of methodical explanation, which Alan delivered with lots of blushing and
stuttering. He was ever so polite, and several times emphasized that he was
acutely aware that not everyone in the world was interested in this sort of
thing.
Lawrence decided that he was probably one of those people.
Alan seemed vastly impressed that Lawrence had paused to think about it
at all and apologized for putting him out. They went directly back to a
discussion of computing machines, and their friendship continued unchanged.
But on their next bicycle ride an overnight camping trip to the Pine Barrens
they were joined by a new fellow, a German named Rudy von something or
other.
Alan and Rudy's relationship seemed closer, or at least more
multilayered, than Alan and Lawrence's. Lawrence concluded that Alan's penis
scheme must have finally found a taker.
It got Lawrence to thinking. From an evolution standpoint, what was the
point of having people around who were not inclined to have offspring? There
must be some good, and fairly subtle, reason for it.
The only thing he could work out was that it was groups of people
societies rather than individual creatures, who were now trying to out
reproduce and/or kill each other, and that, in a society, there was plenty
of room for someone who didn't have kids as long as he was up to something
useful.
Alan and Rudy and Lawrence rode south, anyway, looking for the Pine
Barrens. After a while the towns became very far apart, and the horse farms
gave way to a low stubble of feeble, spiny trees that appeared to extend all
the way to Florida blocking their view, but not the head wind. "Where are
the Pine Barrens I wonder?" Lawrence asked a couple of times. He even
stopped at a gas station to ask someone that question. His companions began
to make fun of him.
"Vere are ze Pine Barrens?" Rudy inquired, looking about quizzically.
"I should look for something rather barren looking, with numerous pine
trees," Alan mused.
There was no other traffic and so they had spread out across the road
to pedal three abreast, with Alan in the middle.
"A forest, as Kafka would imagine it," Rudy muttered.
By this point Lawrence had figured out that they were, in fact, in the
Pine Barrens. But he didn't know who Kafka was. "A mathematician?" he
guessed.
"Zat is a scary sing to sink of," Rudy said.
"He is a writer," Alan said. "Lawrence, please don't be offended that I
ask you this, but: do you recognize any other people's names at all? Other
than family and close friends, I mean."
Lawrence must have looked baffled. "I'm trying to figure out whether it
all comes from in here," Alan said, reaching out to rap his knuckles on the
side of Lawrence's head, "or do you sometimes take in new ideas from other
human beings?"
"When I was a little boy, I saw angels in a church in Virginia,"
Lawrence said, "but I think that they came from inside my head."
"Very well," Alan said.
But later Alan had another go at it. They had reached the fire lookout
tower and it had been a thunderous disappointment: just an alienated
staircase leading nowhere, and a small cleared area below that was glittery
with shards of liquor bottles. They pitched their tent by the side of a pond
that turned out to be full of rust colored algae that stuck to the hairs on
their bodies. Then there was nothing left to do but drink schnapps and talk
about math.
Alan said, "Look, it's like this: Bertrand Russell and another chap
named Whitehead wrote Principia Mathematica .
"Now I know you're pulling my leg," Waterhouse said. "Even I know that
Sir Isaac Newton wrote that ."
"Newton wrote a different book, also called Principia Mathematica ,
which isn't really about mathematics at all; it's about what we would today
call physics."
"Then why did he call it Principia Mathematica?"
"Because the distinction between mathematics and physics wasn't
especially clear in Newton's day "
"Or maybe even in zis day," Rudy said.
" which is directly relevant to what I'm talking about," Alan
continued. "I am talking about Russell's P.M., in which he and Whitehead
started absolutely from scratch, I mean from nothing, and built it all up
all mathematics from a small number of first principles. And why I am
telling you this, Lawrence, is that Lawrence! Pay attention!"
"Hmmm?"
"Rudy take this stick, here that's right and keep a close eye on
Lawrence, and when he gets that foggy look on his face, poke him with it!"
"Zis is not an English school, you can't do zese kind of sing."
"I'm listening," Lawrence said.
"What came out of P.M., which was terrifically radical, was the ability
to say that all of math, really, can be expressed as a certain ordering of
symbols."
"Leibniz said it a long time before zen!" protested Rudy.
"Er, Leibniz invented the notation we use for calculus, but "
"I'm not talking about zat!"
"And he invented matrices, but "
"I'm not talking about zat eezer!"
"And he did some work with binary arithmetic, but "
"Zat is completely different!"
"Well, what the hell are you talking about, then, Rudy?"
"Leibniz invented ze basic alphabet wrote down a set of symbols, for
expressing statements about logic."
"Well, I wasn't aware that Herr Leibniz counted formal logic among his
interests, but "
"Of course! He wanted to do what Russell and Whitehead did, except not
just with mathematics, but with everything in ze whole world!"
"Well, from the fact that you are the only man on the planet, Rudy, who
seems to know about this undertaking of Leibniz's, can we assume that he
failed?"
"You can assume anything that pleases your fancy, Alan," Rudy
responded, "but I am a mathematician and I do not assume anything."
Alan sighed woundedly, and gave Rudy a Significant Look which
Waterhouse assumed meant that there would be trouble later. "If I may just
make some headway, here," he said, "all I'm really trying to get you to
agree on, is that mathematics can be expressed as a series of symbols," (he
snatched the Lawrence poking stick and began drawing things like + = 3)
[square root of 1][pi] in the dirt) "and frankly I could not care less
whether they happen to be Leibniz's symbols, or Russell's, or the hexagrams
of the I Ching...."
"Leibniz was fascinated by the I Ching!" Rudy began.
"Shut up about Leibniz for a moment, Rudy, because look here: You Rudy
and I are on a train, as it were, sitting in the dining car, having a nice
conversation, and that train is being pulled along at a terrific clip by
certain locomotives named The Bertrand Russell and Riemann and Euler and
others. And our friend Lawrence is running alongside the train, trying to
keep up with us it's not that we're smarter than he is, necessarily, but
that he's a farmer who didn't get a ticket. And I, Rudy, am simply reaching
out through the open window here, trying to pull him onto the fucking train
with us so that the three of us can have a nice little chat about
mathematics without having to listen to him panting and gasping for breath
the whole way."
"All right, Alan."
"Won't take a minute if you will just stop interrupting."
"But there is a locomotive too named Leibniz."
"Is it that you don't think I give enough credit to Germans? Because I
am about to mention a fellow with an umlaut."
"Oh, would it be Herr Türing?" Rudy said slyly.
"Herr Türing comes later. I was actually thinking of Gödel."
"But he's not German! He's Austrian!"
"I'm afraid that it's all the same now, isn't it?"
"Ze Anschluss wasn't my idea, you don't have to look at me that way, I
think Hitler is appalling."
"I've heard of Gödel," Waterhouse put in helpfully. "But could we back
up just a sec?"
"Of course Lawrence."
"Why bother? Why did Russell do it? Was there something wrong with
math? I mean, two plus two equals four, right?"
Alan picked up two bottlecaps and set them down on the ground. "Two.
One two. Plus " He set down two more. "Another two. One two. Equals four.
One two three four."
"What's so bad about that?" Lawrence said.
"But Lawrence when you really do math, in an abstract way, you're not
counting bottlecaps, are you?"
"I'm not counting anything. "
Rudy broke the following news: "Zat is a very modern position for you
to take."
"It is?"
Alan said, "There was this implicit belief, for a long time, that math
was a sort of physics of bottlecaps. That any mathematical operation you
could do on paper, no matter how complicated, could be reduced in theory,
anyway to messing about with actual physical counters, such as bottlecaps,
in the real world."
"But you can't have two point one bottlecaps."
"All right, all right, say we use bottlecaps for integers, and for real
numbers like two point one, we use physical measurements, like the length of
this stick." Alan tossed the stick down next to the bottlecaps.
"Well what about pi, then? You can't have a stick that's exactly pi
inches long."
"Pi is from geometry ze same story," Rudy put in.
"Yes, it was believed that Euclid's geometry was really a kind of
physics, that his lines and so on represented properties of the physical
world. But you know Einstein?"
"I'm not very good with names."
"That white haired chap with the big mustache?"
"Oh, yeah," Lawrence said dimly, "I tried to ask him my sprocket
question. He claimed he was late for an appointment or something."
"That fellow has come up with a general relativity theory, which is
sort of a practical application, not of Euclid's, but of Riemann's geometry
"
"The same Riemann of your zeta function?"
"Same Riemann, different subject. Now let's not get sidetracked here
Lawrence "
"Riemann showed you could have many many different geometries that were
not the geometry of Euclid but that still made sense internally," Rudy
explained.
"All right, so back to P.M. then," Lawrence said.
"Yes! Russell and Whitehead. It's like this: when mathematicians began
fooling around with things like the square root of negative one, and
quaternions, then they were no longer dealing with things that you could
translate into sticks and bottlecaps. And yet they were still getting sound
results."
"Or at least internally consistent results," Rudy said.
"Okay. Meaning that math was more than a physics of bottlecaps."
"It appeared that way, Lawrence, but this raised the question of was
mathematics really true or was it just a game played with symbols? In other
words are we discovering Truth, or just wanking?"
"It has to be true because if you do physics with it, it all works out!
I've heard of that general relativity thing, and I know they did experiments
and figured out it was true."
"Ze great majority of mathematics does not lend itself to experimental
testing," Rudy said.
"The whole idea of this project is to sever the ties to physics," Alan
said.
"And yet not to be yanking ourselves."
"That's what P.M. was trying to do?"
"Russell and Whitehead broke all mathematical concepts down into
brutally simple things like sets. From there they got to integers, and so
on.
"But how can you break something like pi down into a set?"
"You can't," Alan said, "but you can express it as a long string of
digits. Three point one four one five nine, and so on."
"And digits are integers," Rudy said.
"But no fair! Pi itself is not an integer!"
"But you can calculate the digits of pi, one at a time, by using
certain formulas. And you can write down the formulas like so!" Alan
scratched this in the dirt:
"I have used the Leibniz series in order to placate our friend. See,
Lawrence? It is a string of symbols."
"Okay. I see the string of symbols," Lawrence said reluctantly.
"Can we move on? Gödel said, just a few years ago, 'Say! If you buy
into this business about mathematics being just strings of symbols, guess
what?' And he pointed out that any string of symbols such as this very
formula, here can be translated into integers."
"How?"
"Nothing fancy, Lawrence it's just simple encryption. Arbitrary. The
number '538' might be written down instead of this great ugly [sigma], and
so on.
"Seems pretty close to wanking, now."
"No, no. Because then Gödel sprang the trap! Formulas can act on
numbers, right?"
"Sure. Like 2x."
"Yes. You can substitute any number for x and the formula 2x will
double it. But if another mathematical formula, such as this one right here,
for calculating pi, can be encoded as a number, then you can have another
formula act on it. Formulas acting on formulas!"
"Is that all?"
"No. Then he showed, really through a very simple argument, that if
formulas really can refer to themselves, it's possible to write one down
saying 'this statement cannot be proved.' Which was tremendously startling
to Hilbert and everyone else, who expected the opposite result."
"Have you mentioned this Hilbert guy before?"
"No, he is new to this discussion, Lawrence."
"Who is he?"
"A man who asks difficult questions. He asked a whole list of them
once. Gödel answered one of them."
"And Türing answered another," Rudy said.
"Who's that?"
"It's me," Alan said. "But Rudy's joking. 'Turing' doesn't really have
an umlaut in it."
"He's going to have an umlaut in him later tonight," Rudy said, looking
at Alan in a way that, in retrospect, years later, Lawrence would understand
to have been smoldering.
"Well, don't keep me in suspense. Which one of his questions did you
answer?"
"The Entscheidungsproblem," Rudy said.
"Meaning?"
Alan explained, "Hilbert wanted to know whether any given statement
could, in principle, be found true or false."
"But after Gödel got finished, it changed," Rudy pointed out. "That's
true after Gödel it became 'Can we determine whether any given statement is
provable or non provable?' In other words, is there some sort of mechanical
process we could use to separate the provable statements from the
nonprovable ones?"
'Mechanical process' is supposed to be a metaphor, Alan. . .
"Oh, stop it, Rudy! Lawrence and I are quite comfortable with
machinery."
"I get it," Lawrence said.
"What do you mean, you get it?" Alan said.
"Your machine not the zeta function calculator, but the other one. The
one we've been talking about building "
"It is called Universal Turing Machine," Rudy said.
"The whole point of that gizmo is to separate provable from nonprovable
statements, isn't it?''
"That's why I came up with the basic idea for it," Alan said. "So
Hilbert's question has been answered. Now I just want to actually build one
so that I can beat Rudy at chess."
"You haven't told poor Lawrence the answer yet!" Rudy protested.
"Lawrence can figure it out," Alan said. "It'll give him something to
do."
***
Soon it became clear that Alan really meant: It'll give him something
to do while we're fucking. Lawrence shoved a notebook into the waistband of
his trousers and rode his bicycle a few hundred yards to the fire tower,
then climbed up the stairs to the platform at the top and sat down, back to
the setting sun, notebook propped up on his knees to catch the light.
He could not collect his thoughts, and then he was distracted by a
false sunrise that lit up the clouds off to the northeast. He thought at
first that some low clouds were bouncing fragments of the sunset back to
him, but it was too concentrated and flickering for that. Then he thought it
was lightning. But the color of the light was not blue enough. It fluctuated
sharply, modulated by (one had to assume) great, startling events that were
occulted by the horizon. As the sun went down on the opposite side of the
world, the light on the New Jersey horizon focused to a steady, lambent core
the color of a flashlight when you shine it through the palm of your hand
under the bedsheets.
Lawrence climbed down the stairs and got on his bicycle and rode
through the Pine Barrens. Before long he came to a road that led in the
general direction of the light. Most of the time he could not see anything,
not even the road, but after a couple of hours the glow bouncing off the low
cloud layer lit up flat stones in the road, and turned the barrens'
wandering rivulets into glowing crevices.
The road began to tend in the wrong direction and so Lawrence cut
directly into the woods, because he was very close now, and the light in the
sky was strong enough that he could see it through the sparse carpet of
scrubby pines black sticks that appeared to have been burned, though they
hadn't. The ground had turned into sand, but it was damp and compacted, and
his bicycle had fat tires that rode over it well. At one point he had to
stop and throw the bike over a barbed wire fence. Then he broke out of the
sticks and onto a perfectly flat expanse of white sand, stitched down with
tufts of beach grass, and just then he was dazzled by a low fence of quiet
steady flames that ran across a part of the horizon about as wide as the
harvest moon when it sinks into the sea. Its brightness made it difficult to
see anything else Lawrence kept riding into little ditches and creeks that
meandered across the flats. He learned not to stare directly at the flames.
Looking off to the sides was more interesting anyway: the table land was
marked at wide intervals by the largest buildings he had ever seen, cracker
box structures built by Pharaohs, and in the mile wide plazas between them,
gnomons of triangulated steel were planted in wide stances: the internal
skeletons of pyramids. The largest of these pierced the center of a
perfectly circular railway line a few hundred feet in diameter: two argent
curves scored on the dull ground, interrupted in one place where the tower's
shadow, a stopped sundial, told the time. He rode by a building smaller than
the others, with oval tanks standing next to it. Steam murmured from valves
on the tops of the tanks, but instead of rising into the air it dribbled
down the sides and struck the ground and spread out, coating the sea grass
with jackets of silver.
A thousand sailors in white were standing in a ring around the long
flame. One of them held up his hand and waved Lawrence down. Lawrence came
to a stop next to the sailor and planted one foot on the sand to steady
himself. He and the sailor stared at each other for a moment and then
Lawrence, who could not think of anything else, said, "I am in the Navy
also." Then the sailor seemed to make up his mind about something. He
saluted Lawrence through, and pointed him towards a small building off to
the side of the fire.
The building looked only like a wall glowing in the firelight, but
sometimes a barrage of magnesium blue light made its windowframes jump out
of the darkness, a rectangular lightning bolt that echoed many times across
the night. Lawrence started pedaling again and rode past that building: a
spiraling flock of alert fedoras, prodding at slim terse notebooks with
stately Ticonderogas, crab walking photogs turning their huge chrome
daisies, crisp rows of people sleeping with blankets over their faces, a
sweating man with Brilliantined hair chalking umlauted names on a
blackboard. Finally coming around this building he smelled hot fuel oil,
felt the heat of the flames on his face and saw beach glass curled toward it
and desiccated.
He stared down upon the world's globe, not the globe fleshed with
continents and oceans but only its skeleton: a burst of meridians, curving
backwards to cage an inner dome of orange flame. Against the light of the
burning oil those longitudes were thin and crisp as a draftsman's ink
strokes. But coming closer he saw them resolve into clever works of rings
and struts, hollow as a bird's bones. As they spread away from the pole they
sooner or later began to wander, or split into bent parts, or just broke off
and hung in the fire oscillating like dry stalks. The perfect geometry was
also mottled, here and there, by webs of cable and harnesses of electrical
wiring. Lawrence almost rode over a broken wine bottle and decided he should
now walk, to spare his bicycle's tires, so he laid the bike down, the front
wheel covering an aluminum vase that appeared to have been spun on a lathe,
with a few charred roses hanging out of it. Some sailors had joined their
hands to form a sort of throne, and were bearing along a human shaped piece
of charcoal dressed in a coverall of immaculate asbestos. As they walked the
toes of their shoes caught in vast, ramified snarls of ropes and piano
wires, cables and wires, creative furtive movements in the grass and the
sand dozens of yards every direction. Lawrence began planting his feet very
thoughtfully one in front of the other, trying to measure the greatness of
what he had come and seen. A rocket shaped pod stuck askew from the sand,
supporting an umbrella of bent back propellers. The duralumin struts and cat
walks rambled on above him for miles. There was a suitcase spilled open,
with a pair of women's shoes displayed as if in the window of a down town
store, and a menu that had been charred to an oval glow, and then some
tousled wall slabs, like a whole room that had dropped out of the sky these
were decorated, one with a giant map of the world, great circles arcing away
from Berlin to pounce on cities near and far, and another with a photograph
of a famous, fat German in a uniform, grinning on a flowered platform, the
giant horizon of a new Zeppelin behind him.
After a while he stopped seeing new things. Then he got on his bicycle
and rode back through the Pine Barrens. He got lost in the dark and so
didn't find his way back to the fire tower until dawn. But he didn't mind
being lost because while he rode around in the dark he thought about the
Turing machine. Finally he came back to the shore of the pond where they had
camped. The dawn light shining on the saucer of calm reddish water made it
look like a pool of blood. Alan Mathison Turing and Rudolf von Hacklheber
were lying together like spoons on the shore, still smudged a little bit
from their swim yesterday. Lawrence started a little fire and made some tea
and they woke up eventually.
"Did you solve the problem?" Alan asked him.
"Well you can turn that Universal Turing Machine of yours into any
machine by changing the presets "
"Presets?"
"Sorry, Alan, I think of your U.T.M. as being kind of like a pipe
organ."
"Oh."
"Once you've done that, anyway, you can do any calculation you please,
if the tape is long enough. But gosh, Alan, making a tape that's long
enough, and that you can write symbols on, and erase them, is going to be
sort of tricky Atanasoffs capacitor drum would only work up to a certain
size you'd have to "
"This is a digression," Alan said gently.
"Yeah, okay, well if you had a machine like that, then any given preset
could be represented by a number a string of symbols. And the tape that you
would feed into it to start the calculation would contain another string of
symbols. So it's Gödel's proof all over again if any possible combination of
machine and data can be represented by a string of numbers, then you can
just arrange all of the possible strings of numbers into a big table, and
then it turns into a Cantor diagonal type of argument, and the answer is
that there must be some numbers that cannot be computed."
"And ze Entscheidungsproblem?" Rudy reminded him.
"Proving or disproving a formula once you've encrypted the formula into
numbers, that is is just a calculation on that number. So it means that the
answer to the question is, no! Some formulas cannot be proved or disproved
by any mechanical process! So I guess there's some point in being human
after all!"
Alan looked pleased until Lawrence said this last thing, and then his
face collapsed. "Now there you go making unwarranted assumptions."
"Don't listen to him, Lawrence!" Rudy said. "He's going to tell you
that our brains are Turing machines."
"Thank you, Rudy," Alan said patiently. "Lawrence, I submit that our
brains are Turing machines."
"But you proved that there's a whole lot of formulas that a Turing
machine can't process!"
"And you have proved it too, Lawrence."
"But don't you think that we can do some things that a Turing machine
couldn't?"
"Gödel agrees with you, Lawrence," Rudy put in, "and so does Hardy."
"Give me one example," Alan said.
"Of a noncomputable function that a human can do, and a Turing machine
can't?"
"Yes. And don't give me any sentimental nonsense about creativity. I
believe that a Universal Turing Machine could show behaviors that we would
construe as creative."
"Well, I don't know then . . . I'll try to keep my eye out for that
kind of thing in the future.''
But later, as they were tiding back towards Princeton, he said, "What
about dreams?"
"Like those angels in Virginia?"
"I guess so."
"Just noise in the neurons, Lawrence."
"Also I dreamed last night that a zeppelin was burning."
***
Soon, Alan got his Ph.D. and went back to England. He wrote Lawrence a
couple of letters. The last of these stated, simply, that he would not be
able to write Lawrence any more letters "of substance" and that Lawrence
should not take it personally. Lawrence perceived right away that Alan's
society had put him to work doing something useful probably figuring out how
to keep it from being eaten alive by certain of its neighbors. Lawrence
wondered what use America would find for him .
He went back to Iowa State, considered changing his major to
mathematics, but didn't. It was the consensus of all whom he consulted that
mathematics, like pipe organ restoration, was a fine thing, but that one
needed some way to put bread on the table. He remained in engineering and
did more and more poorly at it until the middle of his senior year, when the
university suggested that he enter a useful line of work, such as roofing.
He walked straight out of college into the waiting arms of the Navy.
They gave him an intelligence test. The first question on the math part
had to do with boats on a river: Port Smith is 100 miles upstream of Port
Jones. The river flows at 5 miles per hour. The boat goes through water at
10 miles per hour. How long does it take to go from Port Smith to Port
Jones? How long to come back?
Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have
to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current
would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat.
Clearly, 5 miles per hour was nothing more than the average speed. The
current would be faster in the middle of the river and slower at the banks.
More complicated variations could be expected at bends in the river.
Basically it was a question of hydrodynamics, which could be tackled using
certain well known systems of differential equations. Lawrence dove into the
problem, rapidly (or so he thought) covering both sides of ten sheets of
paper with calculations. Along the way, he realized that one of his
assumptions, in combination with the simplified Navier Stokes equations, had
led him into an exploration of a particularly interesting family of partial
differential equations. Before he knew it, he had proved a new theorem. If
that didn't prove his intelligence, what would?
Then the time bell rang and the papers were collected. Lawrence managed
to hang onto his scratch paper. He took it back to his dorm, typed it up,
and mailed it to one of the more approachable math professors at Princeton,
who promptly arranged for it to be published in a Parisian mathematics
journal.
Lawrence received two free, freshly printed copies of the journal a few
months later, in San Diego, California, during mail call on board a large
ship called the U.S.S. Nevada. The ship had a band, and the Navy had given
Lawrence the job of playing the glockenspiel in it, because their testing
procedures had proven that he was not intelligent enough to do anything
else.
The sack of mail carrying Lawrence's contribution to the mathematical
literature arrived just in the nick of time. Lawrence's ship, and quite a
few of her sisters, had until then been based in California. But at just
this moment, all of them were transferred to some place called Pearl Harbor,
Hawaii, in order to show the Nips who was boss.
Lawrence had never really known what he wanted to do with his life, but
he quickly decided that being glockenspiel player on a battleship in Hawaii
during peacetime was a long way from the worst life you could possibly have.
The harshest part of the job was sometimes having to sit or march in very
warm conditions, and enduring occasional fluffed notes by other band
members. He had abundant free time, which he spent working on a series of
new theorems in the field of information theory. The field had been invented
and pretty much encompassed by his friend Alan, but there was much detail
work to be done. He and Alan and Rudy had sketched out a general plan of
what needed to be proved or disproved. Lawrence tore through the list. He
wondered what Alan and Rudy were up to in Britain and Germany, but he
couldn't write to them and find out, so he kept his work to himself. When he
wasn't playing the glockenspiel or working out theorems, there were bars and
dances to go to. Waterhouse did some penis work of his own, got the clap,
had it cured (1), bought condoms. All of the sailors did this.
They were like three year olds who shove pencils in their ears, discover
that it hurts, and stop doing it. Lawrence's first year went by almost
instantly. Time just blazed by. Nowhere could be sunnier, more relaxing,
than Hawaii.
Chapter 2 NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM
"Filipinos are a warm, gentle, caring, giving people," Avi says, "which
is a good thing since so many of them carry concealed weapons."
Randy is in Tokyo's airport, ambling down a concourse with a slowness
that is infuriating to his fellow travelers. They have all spent the last
half day strapped into bad chairs, stuffed into an aluminum tube aslosh with
jet fuel. Over the safety engineered nubs molded into the jetway floor,
their rolling suitcases drone like fighter planes. They graze the backs of
his knees as they bank around his husky columnar body. Randy is holding his
new GSM phone to the side of his head. Supposedly it works anywhere in the
world, except for the United States. This is his first chance to try it out.
"You sound clear as a bell," Avi says. "How was the flight over?"
"All right," Randy says. "They had one of those animated maps up on the
video screen."
Avi sighs. "All the airlines have those now," he announces
monotonically.
"The only feature between San Francisco and Tokyo was Midway Island."
"So?"
"It kind of hung there for hours. MIDWAY. Mute embarrassment all
around."
Randy reaches the departure gate for Manila, and pauses to admire a
five foot wide high definition TV set bearing the logo of a major Nipponese
consumer electronics company. It is running a video in which a wacky cartoon
professor and his adorable canine sidekick cheerfully tick off the three
transmission routes of the AIDS virus.
"I have a fingerprint for you," Randy says.
"Shoot."
Randy stares at the palm of his hand, on which he has written a string
of numbers and letters in ballpoint pen. "AF 10 06 E9 99 BA 11 07 64 C1 89
E3 40 8C 72 55."
"Got it," Avi says. "That's from Ordo, right?"
"Right. I e mailed you the key from SFO."
"The apartment situation is still resolving," Avi says. "So I just
reserved you a suite at the Manila Hotel."
"What do you mean, it's still resolving?"
"The Philippines is one of those post Spanish countries with no clear
boundaries between business and personal relationships," Avi says. "I don't
think you can secure lodgings there without marrying into a family with a
major street named after it."
Randy takes a seat in the departure area. Perky gate attendants in
jaunty, improbable hats zero in on Filipinos with too many carry ons, and
subject them to a public ritual of filling out little tags and surrendering
their possessions. The Filipinos roll their eyes and stare longingly out the
windows. But most of the waiting passengers are Nipponese some businessmen,
mostly vacationers. They are watching an educational video about how to get
mugged in foreign countries.
"Huh," Randy says, looking out the window, "got another 747 down to
Manila."
"In Asia, no decent airline bothers to dick around anything smaller
than a 747," Avi snaps. "If someone tries to pack you on board a 737 or god
forbid an Airbus, run, don't walk, away from the boarding lounge, and call
me on my Sky Pager and I'll send in a chopper to evacuate you."
Randy laughs.
Avi continues. "Now, listen. This hotel you're going to is very old,
very grand, but it's in the middle of nowhere."
"Why would they build a grand hotel in the middle of nowhere?"
"It used to be a happening place it's on the waterfront, right on the
edge of Intramuros."
Randy's high school Spanish is enough to translate that: Inside the
Walls.
"But Intramuros was annihilated by the Nipponese in 1945," Avi
continues. "Systematically. All of the business hotels and office buildings
are in a new neighborhood called Makati, much closer to the airport."
"So you want to put our office in Intramuros."
"How'd you guess?" Avi says, sounding a little spooked. He prides
himself on unpredictability.
"I'm not an intuitive guy generally," Randy says, "but I've been on a
plane for thirteen hours and my brain has been turned inside out and hung up
to dry."
Avi rattles off canned justifications: office space is much cheaper in
Intramuros. Government ministries are closer. Makati, the gleaming new
business district, is too isolated from the real Philippines. Randy pays no
attention to it.
"You want to work out of Intramuros because it was systematically
annihilated, and because you're obsessed with the Holocaust," Randy finally
says, quietly and without rancor.
"Yeah. So?" Avi says.
***
Randy stares out the window of the Manila bound 747, sipping on a
fluorescent green Nipponese soft drink made from bee extracts (at least, it
has pictures of bees on it) and munching on something that a flight
attendant handed him called Japanese Snack. Sky and ocean are the same
color, a shade of blue that makes his teeth freeze. The plane is so high
that, whether he looks up or down, he sees foreshortened views of boiling
cumulonimbus stacks. The clouds erupt from the hot Pacific as if immense
warships were exploding all over the place. The speed and power of their
growth is alarming, the forms they adopt as bizarre and varied as those of
deep sea organisms, and all of them, he supposes, are as dangerous to an
airplane as punji stakes to a barefoot pedestrian. The red orange meatball
painted on the wingtip startles him when he notices it. He feels like he's
been thrown into an old war film.
He turns on his laptop. Electronic mail from Avi, encrypted to a fare
thee well, has been piling up in his in box. It is a gradual accumulation of
tiny files, thrown at him by Avi whenever a thought popped into his head
over the last three days; it would be obvious, even if Randy didn't know it,
that Avi owns a portable e mail machine that talks to the Internet by radio.
Randy fires up a piece of software that is technically called Novus Ordo
Seclorum but that everyone calls Ordo for short. It is a fairly strained pun
based on the fact that Ordo's job, as a piece of cryptographic software, is
to put a message's bits in a New Order and that it will take Centuries for
nosy governments to decrypt it. A scanned image of a Great Pyramid appears
in the middle of his screen, and a single eye gradually materializes at its
apex.
Ordo can handle this in one of two ways. The obvious way is to decrypt
all of the messages and convert them into plaintext files on his hard disk,
which he can then read any time he wants. The problem with this (if you are
paranoid) is that anyone who gets his hands on Randy's hard disk can then
read the files. For all he knows, the customs officials in Manila will
decide to ransack his computer for child pornography. Or, fogged by jet lag,
he'll leave his laptop in a taxi. So instead he puts Ordo into a streaming
mode where it will decrypt the files just long enough for him to read them
and then, when he closes the windows, expunge the plaintext from the
computer's memory and from its hard drive.
The subject heading of Avi's first message is: "Guideline 1."
We look for places where the math is right. Meaning what? Meaning that
pop. is about to explode we can predict that just by looking at age
histogram and per capita income is about to take off the way it did in
Nippon, Taiwan, Singapore. Multiply those two things together and you get
the kind of exponential growth that should get us all into fuck you money
before we turn forty.
This is an allusion to a Randy/Avi conversation of two years ago
wherein Avi actually calculated a specific numerical value for "fuck you
money." It was not a fixed constant, however, but rather a cell in a
spreadsheet linked to any number of continually fluctuating economic
indicators. Sometimes when Avi is working at his computer he will leave the
spreadsheet running in a tiny window in the corner so that he can see the
current value of "fuck you money" at a glance.
The second message, sent a couple of hours later, is called "Guideline
2."
Two: pick a tech where no one can compete with us. Right now,
that=networking. We're kicking the crap out of everyone else in the world
when it comes to networking. It's not even funny.
The next day, Avi sent a message called, simply, "More." Perhaps he had
lost track of the number of guidelines he'd issued so far.
Another principle: this time we retain control of the corporation. That
means that we keep at least fifty percent of the shares which means little
to no outside investment until we've built up some value.
"You don't have to convince me," Randy mumbles to himself as he reads
this.
This shapes the kinds of businesses we can get into. Forget anything
that requires a big initial investment.
Luzon is green black jungle mountains gouged with rivers that would
appear to be avalanches of silt. As the navy blue ocean verges on its khaki
beaches, the water takes on the shocking iridescent hue of a suburban
swimming pool. Farther south, the mountains are swidden scarred the soil
beneath is bright red and so these parts look like fresh lacerations. But
most is covered with foliage that looks like the nubby green stuff that
model railroaders put over their papier mâché hills, and in vast stretches
of the mountains there are no signs whatsoever that human beings have ever
existed. Closer to Manila, some of the slopes are deforested, sprinkled with
structures, ribboned with power line cuts. Rice paddies line the basins. The
towns are accretions of shanties, nucleated around large cross shaped
churches with good roofs.
The view gets blurry as they belly down into the pall of sweaty smog
above the city. The plane begins to sweat like a giant glass of iced tea.
The water streams off in sheets, collects in crevices, whips off the flaps'
trailing edges.
Suddenly they are banking over Manila Bay, which is marked with endless
streaks of brilliant red some kind of algal bloom. Oil tankers trail long
time delayed rainbows that flourish in their wakes. Every cove is jammed
with long skinny boats with dual outriggers, looking like brightly painted
water skaters.
And then they are down on the runway at NAIA, Ninoy Aquino
International Airport. Guards and cops of various stripes are ambling around
with M 16s or pistol handled pump shotguns, wearing burnooses fashioned from
handkerchiefs clamped to the head with American baseball caps. A man dressed
in a radiant white uniform stands below the ragged maw of the jetway holding
his hands downwards with fluorescent orange sticks in them, like Christ
dispensing mercy on a world of sinners. Sulfurous, fulminating tropical air
begins to leak in through the jumbo's air vents. Everything moistens and
wilts.
He is in Manila. He takes his passport out of his shirt pocket. It
says,
RANDALL LAWRENCE WATERHOUSE.
***
This is how Epiphyte Corporation came into existence:
"I am channeling the bad shit!" Avi said.
The number came through on Randy's pager while he was sitting around a
table in a grubhouse along the coast with his girlfriend's crowd. A place
where, every day, they laser printed fresh menus on 100% recycled imitation
parchment, where oscilloscope tracings of neon colored sauces scribbled
across the plates, and the entrees were towering, architectonic stacks of
rare ingredients carved into gemlike prisms. Randy had spent the entire meal
trying to resist the temptation to invite one of Charlene's friends (any one
of them, it didn't matter) out on the sidewalk for a fistfight.
He glanced at his pager expecting to see the number of the Three
Siblings Computer Center, which was where he worked (technically, still
does). The fell digits of Avi's phone number penetrated the core of his
being in the same way that 666 would a fundamentalist's.
Fifteen seconds later, Randy was out on the sidewalk, swiping his card
through a pay phone like an assassin drawing a single edged razor blade
across the throat of a tubby politician.
"The power is coming down from On High," Avi continued. "Tonight, it
happens to be coming through me you poor bastard."
"What do you want me to do?" Randy asked, adopting a cold, almost
hostile tone to mask sick excitement.
"Buy a ticket to Manila," Avi said.
"I have to talk it over with Charlene first," Randy said.
"You don't even believe that yourself," Avi said.
"Charlene and I have a long standing relationsh "
"It's been ten years. You haven't married her. Fill in the fucking
blanks."
(Seventy two hours later, he would be in Manila, looking at the One
Note Flute.)
"Everyone in Asia is wondering when the Philippines is finally going to
get its shit together," Avi said, "it's the question of the nineties."
(The One Note Flute is the first thing you see when you make it through
Passport Control.)
"I flashed on this when I was standing in line at Passport Control at
Ninoy Aquino International Airport," Avi said, compressing that entire name
into a single, sharply articulated burst. "You know how they have different
lanes?"
"I guess so," Randy said. A parallelpiped of seared tuna did a barrel
roll in his gullet. He felt a perverse craving for a double ice cream cone.
He did not travel as much as Avi, and had only a vague idea of what he meant
by lanes.
"You know. One lane for citizens. One for foreigners. Maybe one for
diplomats."
(Now, standing there waiting to have his passport stamped, Randy can
see it clearly. For once he doesn't mind the wait. He gets in a lane next to
the OCW lane and studies them. They are Epiphyte Corp.'s market. Mostly
young women, many of them fashionably dressed, but still with a kind of
Catholic boarding school demureness. Exhausted from long flights, tired of
the wait, they slump, then suddenly straighten up and elevate their fine
chins, as if an invisible nun were making her way up the line whacking their
manicured knuckles with a ruler.)
But seventy two hours ago he hadn't really understood what Avi meant by
lanes, so he just said, "Yeah, I've seen the lane thing."
"At Manila, they have a whole lane just for returning OCWs!"
"OCWs?"
"Overseas Contract Workers. Filipinos working abroad because the
economy of the Philippines is so lame. As maids and nannies in Saudi. Nurses
and anesthesiologists in the States. Singers in Hong Kong, whores in
Bangkok."
"Whores in Bangkok?" Randy had been there, at least, and his mind
reeled at the concept of exporting prostitutes to Thailand.
"The Filipino women are more beautiful," Avi said quietly, "and have a
ferocity that makes them more interesting, to the innately masochistic
business traveler, than all those grinning Thai bimbos." Both of them knew
that this was complete bullshit; Avi was a family man and had no firsthand
experience whereof he spoke. Randy didn't call him on it, though. As long as
Avi retained this extemporaneous bullshitting ability there was a better
than even chance of all of them making fuck you money.
(Now that he's here, it is tempting to speculate as to which of the
girls in the OCW lane are hustlers. But he can't see that going anywhere but
wrong, so he squares his shoulders and marches toward the yellow line.
The government has set up glass display cases in the concourse leading
from Passport Control to the security barrier. The cases contain artifacts
demonstrating the glories of pre Magellan Filipino culture. The first one of
these contains the pièce de résistance: a rustic hand carved musical
instrument labeled with a long and unreadable name in Tagalog. Underneath
that, in smaller letters, is the English translation: ONE NOTE FLUTE.)
"See? The Philippines is innately hedged," Avi said. 'You know how rare
that is? When you find an innately hedged environment, Randy, you lunge into
it like a rabid ferret going into a pipe full of raw meat."
A word about Avi: his father's people had just barely gotten out of
Prague. As Central European Jews went, they were fairly typical. The only
thing about them that was really anomalous was that they were still alive.
But his mother's people were unbelievably peculiar New Mexican crypto Jews
who had been living on mesas, dodging Jesuits, shooting rattlesnakes and
eating jimsonweed for three hundred years; they looked like Indians and
talked like cowboys. In his relations with other people, therefore, Avi
dithered. Most of the time he was courtly and correct in a way that was
deeply impressive to businesspeople Nipponese ones expecially but there were
these eruptions, from time to time, as if he'd been dipping into the loco
weed. Randy had learned to deal with it, which is why Avi called him at
times like this.
"Oh, calm down!" Randy said. He watched a tanned girl rollerblade past
him, on her way up from the beach. "Innately hedged?"
"As long as the Philippines don't have their shit together, there'll be
plenty of OCWs. They will want to communicate with their families the
Filipinos are incredibly family oriented. They make Jews look like a bunch
of alienated loners."
"Okay. You know more about both groups than I do."
"They are sentimental and affectionate in a way that's very easy for us
to sneer at."
"You don't have to be defensive," Randy said, "I'm not sneering at
them."
"When you hear their song dedications on the radio, you'll sneer," Avi
said. "But frankly, we could take some pointers from the Pinoys on this
front."
"You are so close to being sanctimonious right now "
"I apologize," Avi said, with absolute sincerity. Avi's wife had been
pregnant almost continuously for the four years they'd been married. He was
getting more religiously observant daily and couldn't make it through a
conversation without mentioning the Holocaust. Randy was a bachelor who was
just about to break up with the chick he'd been living with.
"I believe you, Avi," Randy said. "Is it a problem with you if I buy a
business class ticket?"
Avi didn't hear him, so Randy assumed that meant yes. "As long as
that's the case, there will be a big market for Pinoy grams."
"Pinoy grams?"
"For god's sake, don't say it out loud! I'm filling out the trademark
application as we speak," Avi said. Randy could hear a rattling sound in the
background, computer keys impacting so rapidly it sounded like Avi was
simply holding the keyboard between his pale, spindly hands and shaking it
violently up and down. "But if the Filipinos do get their shit together,
then we see explosive growth in telecoms, as in any other Arday."
"Arday?"
"R D A E. Rapidly Developing Asian Economy. Either way, we win."
"I gather you want to do something with telecoms?"
"Bingo." In the background, a baby began to cough and cry. "Gotta go,"
Avi said, "Shlomo's asthma is spiking again. Take down this fingerprint."
"Fingerprint?"
"For my encryption key. For e mail."
"Ordo?"
"Yeah."
Randy took out a ballpoint pen and, finding no paper in his pocket,
poised it over the palm of his hand. "Shoot."
"67 81 A4 AE FF 40 25 9B 43 OE 29 8D 56 60 E3 2F." Then Avi hung up the
phone.
Randy went back into the restaurant. On his way back, he asked the
waiter to bring him a half bottle of good red wine. Charlene heard him, and
glowered. Randy was still thinking about innate ferocity, and did not see it
in her face; only a schoolmarmishness common among all of her friends. My
god! I have to get out of California, he realized.
Chapter 3 SEAWEED
Woman holds baby Eyes pale as a muzzle flash Band chimes frozen tears
The fourth marines is marching downhill to the strains of John Philip
Sousa, which ought to be second nature to a Marine. But the Fourth Marines
have been in Shanghai (which ain't no halls of Montezuma nor shores of
Tripoli) for too long, longer than Marines should ever stay in one place,
and Bobby's already seen his sergeant, one Frick, throw up from opium
withdrawal.
A Marine band is several Shanghai blocks ahead. Bobby's platoon can
hear the thumpity thump of the big drums and the piercing noises from
piccolos and glockenspiels but he can't follow the tune. Corporal Shaftoe is
effectively their leader, because Sergeant Frick is useless.
Shaftoe marches alongside the formation, supposedly to keep an eye on
his men, but mostly he's just staring at Shanghai.
Shanghai stares back, and mostly gives them a standing ovation. Of
course there is a type of young street rowdy who makes it a point of honor
to let the Marines know he isn't scared of them, and they are jeering the
Marines from a safe distance, and setting off strings of fire crackers,
which does nothing to steady anyone's nerves. The Europeans are applauding a
whole chorus line of Russian dancing girls from Delmonte's is showing thigh
and blowing kisses. But most of the Chinese look pretty stonefaced, which
Bobby suspects means they're scared shitless.
The worst thing is the women carrying half white babies. A few of these
women are rabid, hysterical, throwing themselves into formations of massed
Marines, undeterred by rifle butts. But most of them are stoic: they stand
with their light eyed babies and glare, searching the ranks and files for
the guilty party. They've all heard about what happened upriver in Nanjing
when the Nips came there, and they know that when it's all over, the only
trace that they and their babies ever existed may be a really bad memory in
the mind of some American Marine.
It works for Shaftoe: he has hunted deer in Wisconsin and seen them
limping across the snow, bleeding to death. He saw a man die in basic
training at Parris Island. He has seen whole tangles of bodies in the
Yangtze, downstream of where the Nipponese were prosecuting the China
Incident, and he has seen refugees from places like Nanjing starve to death
in the gutters of Shanghai. He has himself killed people who were trying to
storm the riverboats it was his duty to protect. He thinks that he has never
seen, and will never see, anything as terrible as those stone faced Chinese
women holding their white babies, not even blinking as the firecrackers
explode all around them.
Until, that is, he looks into the faces of certain Marines who stare
into that crowd and see their own faces looking back at them, pudgy with
baby fat and streaked with tears. Some of them seem to think it's all a
joke. But many of the Marines who march out of their empty barracks that
morning sane and solid men, have, by the time they reach the gunboats
waiting for them at the Bund, gone mad. They don't show it. But Shaftoe can
see in their eyes that something has given way inside.
The very best men in the regiment are in a foul mood. The ones like
Shaftoe, who didn't get involved with the Chinese women, are still leaving
plenty behind: houses with maids and shoeshine boys and coolies, with women
and opium for almost nothing. They don't know where they are being shipped
off to, but it's safe to say that their twenty one dollars a month won't go
as far. They'll be in barracks and they'll have to learn to polish their own
boots again. When the gangplanks are drawn in from the stone edge of the
Bund, they are cut off from a whole world that they'll never see again, a
world where they were kings. Now they are Marines again, It's okay with
Shaftoe, who wants to be a Marine. But many of the men have become middle
aged here, and don't.
The guilty men duck belowdecks. Shaftoe remains on the deck of the
gunboat, which casts off from the Bund, headed for the cruiser Augusta,
which awaits in mid channel.
The Bund is jammed with onlookers in a riot of differently colored
clothing, so one patch of uniform drab catches his eye: a group of Nip
soldiers who've come down to bid their Yank counterparts a sarcastic
farewell. Shaftoe scans the group looking for someone tall and bulky, and
picks him out easily. Goto Dengo's waving to him.
Shaftoe takes his helmet off and waves back. Then, on impulse, just for
the hell of it, he winds up and flings the helmet directly at Goto Dengo's
head. The throw goes awry and Goto Dengo has to knock down about a dozen of
his comrades in order to catch it. All of them seem to think that it is a
high honor, as well as tremendously amusing, to be knocked down by Goto
Dengo.
Twenty seconds later, a comet sails up out of the flesh cosmos of the
Bund and bounces on the wooden deck of the gunboat a hell of a throw. Goto
Dengo is showing off his follow through. The projectile is a rock with a
white streamer wrapped around it. Shaftoe runs over and snatches it. The
streamer is one of those thousand stitch headbands (supposedly; he's taken a
few off of unconscious Nips, but he's never bothered to count the stitches)
that they tie around their heads as a good luck charm; it has a meatball in
the center and some Nip writing to either side. He unties it from around the
rock. In so doing he realizes, suddenly, that it's not a rock after all; it
is a hand grenade! But good old Goto Dengo was just joking he didn't pull
the pin. A nice souvenir for Bobby Shaftoe.
***
Shaftoe's first haiku (December 1940) was a quick and dirty adaptation
of the Marine Creed:
This is my rifle
There are many like it but
This rifle is mine.
He wrote it under the following circumstances: Shaftoe and the rest of
Fourth Marines were stationed in Shanghai so that they could guard the
International Settlement and work as muscle on the gunboats of the Yangtze
River Patrol. His platoon had just come back from the Last Patrol: a
thousand mile reconnaissance in force all the way up past what was left of
Nanjing, to Hankow, and back. Marines had been doing this ever since the
Boxer Rebellion, through civil wars and everything else. But towards the end
of 1940, what with the Nips (1) basically running all of
northeast China now, the politicians back in D.C. had finally thrown in the
towel and told the China Marines not to steam up the Yangtze any more.
Now, the Old Breed Marines like Frick claimed they could tell the
difference between organized brigands; armed mobs of starving peasants;
rogue Nationalists; Communist guerrillas; and the irregular forces in the
pay of warlords. But to Bobby Shaftoe they were all just crazy, armed slopes
who wanted a piece of the Yangtze River Patrol. The Last Patrol had been a
wild trip. But it was over and they were back in Shanghai now, the safest
place you could be in China, and about a hundred times more dangerous than
the most dangerous place you could be in America. They had climbed off the
gunboat six hours ago, gone to a bar, and not come out until just now, when
they had decided it was high time they went to a whorehouse. On their way,
they happened to pass this Nip restaurant.
Bobby Shaftoe had looked in the windows of the place before, and
watched the man with the knife, trying to figure out what the hell he was
doing. It looked a hell of a lot like he was cutting up uncooked fish and
putting the raw meat on bullets of rice and handing it over to the Nips on
the other side of the counter, who were wolfing it down.
It had to be some kind of optical illusion. The fish must have been
precooked in the back room.
This had been nagging at Shaftoe for about a year. As he and the other
horny drunk Marines went by the place, he slowed down to peer through the
window, trying to gather more evidence. He could swear that some of that
fish looked ruby red, which it wouldn't have been if it were cooked.
One of his buddies, Rhodes from Shreveport, noticed him looking. He
dared Shaftoe to go in there and sit down at that bar. Then another private,
Gowicki from Pittsburgh, double dared him!
Shaftoe sucked his teeth and considered the matter. He had already made
up his mind that he was going to do it. He was a sniper scout, and it was in
his nature to do crazy shit like this; but it was also part of his training
to scan the terrain carefully before venturing in.
The restaurant was three quarters full, and everyone in the place was a
uniformed member of the Nipponese military. At the bar where the man was
cutting up the apparently raw fish, there was a marked concentration of
officers; if you only had one grenade, that's where you'd throw it. Most of
the place was filled with long tables where enlisted men sat, drinking
noodle soup from steaming urns. Shaftoe paid particular attention to these,
because they were the ones who were going to be beating the shit out of him
in about sixty seconds. Some were there alone, with reading material. A
cluster of them, back in one corner, were paying attention to one fellow who
was apparently telling a joke or story.
The longer Shaftoe spent reconnoitering the place, the more convinced
Rhodes and Gowicki became that he was actually going to do it. They became
excited and called for the other Marines, who had gone ahead of them down
the block, headed for that whorehouse.
Shaftoe saw the others coming back his tactical reserve. "What the
fuck," he said, and went into the restaurant. Behind him, he could hear the
others shouting excitedly; they couldn't believe he was doing it. When
Shaftoe stepped over the threshold of that Nip restaurant, he passed into
the realm of legend.
All the Nips looked up at him when he came in the door. If they were
surprised, they didn't show it. The chef behind the counter began to holler
out some kind of ritual greeting, which faltered and trailed off as he got a
look at what had just come in. The fellow in the back of the room a husky,
pink cheeked Nip continued telling his joke or story or whatever it was.
Shaftoe nodded to no one in particular, then stepped to the nearest
empty chair at the bar and sat down.
Other Marines would have waited until the whole squad had assembled.
Then they would have invaded the restaurant en masse, knocked over a few
chairs, spilled some soup. But Shaftoe had seized the initiative before the
others could do any such thing and gone in by himself as a sniper scout was
supposed to do. It was not just because be was a sniper scout, though. It
was also because he was Bobby Shaftoe, and he was sincerely curious about
this place, and if he could, he wanted to spend a few calm minutes in here
and learn a few things about it before the fun started.
It helped, of course, that Shaftoe was a quiet and contemplative drunk,
not a dangerous explosive drunk. He must have reeked of beer (those Krauts
in Tsingtao cranked out a brew whose taste took him right back to Wisconsin,
and he was homesick). But he wasn't hollering or knocking things over.
The chef was busy crafting one of his little morsels and pretended to
ignore Shaftoe. The other men at the counter stared coldly at Shaftoe for a
while, then turned their attentions back to their food. Shaftoe looked at
the array of raw fish laid out on shaved ice behind the bar, then looked
around the room. The guy back in the corner was talking in short bursts,
reading from a notebook. He would speak maybe ten or twenty words, and then
his little audience would turn to one another and grin, or grimace, or
sometimes even make a patter of applause. He wasn't delivering his material
like a dirty joke. He spoke precisely and expressively.
Fuck! He was reading poetry! Shaftoe had no idea what he was saying,
but he could tell, by the sound of it, that it must be poetry. Didn't rhyme
though. But the Nips did everything queerly.
He noticed that the chef was glaring at him. He cleared his throat,
which was useless since he couldn't speak Nip. He looked at some of that
ruby red fish behind the bar, pointed to it, held up two fingers.
Everyone was startled that the American had actually placed an order.
The tension was broken, only a little. The chef went to work and produced
two morsels, which he served up on a wooden pedestal.
Shaftoe had been trained to eat insects, and to bite the heads off
chickens, so he figured he could handle this. He picked the morsels up in
his fingers, just like the Nips were doing, and ate them. They were good. He
ordered two more, of another variety. The guy in the corner kept reading
poetry. Shaftoe ate his morsels and then ordered some more. For perhaps ten
seconds, between the taste of the fish and the sound of the poetry, he
actually felt comfortable here, and forgot that he was merely instigating a
vicious racial brawl.
The third order looked different: laid over the top of the raw fish
were thin translucent sheets of some kind of moist, glistening material. It
looked sort of like butcher paper soaked in oil. Shaftoe gawked at it for a
while, trying to identify it, but it looked like no foodstuff he knew of. He
glanced left and right, hoping that one of the Nips had ordered the same
stuff, so that he could watch and learn the right way to eat it. No luck.
Hell, they were officers. Maybe one of them spoke a little English. "
'Scuse me. What's this?" Shaftoe said, peeling up one corner of the eerie
membrane.
The chef looked up at him nervously, then scanned the bar, polling the
customers. Discussion ensued. Finally, a Nip officer at the end of the bar,
a naval lieutenant, stood up and spoke to Bobby Shaftoe.
"Seaweed."
Shaftoe did not particularly like the lieutenant's tone of voice
hostile and sullen. This, combined with the look on his face, seemed to say,
You'll never understand it, you farmer, so why don't you just think of it as
seaweed.
Shaftoe folded his hands primly in his lap, regarded the seaweed for a
few moments, and then looked up at the lieutenant, who was still gazing at
him expressionlessly. "What kind of seaweed, sir?" he said.
Significant glances began flying around the restaurant, like semaphores
before a naval engagement. The poetry reading seemed to have stopped, and a
migration of enlisted men had begun from the back of the room. Meanwhile the
lieutenant translated Shaftoe's inquiry to the others, who discussed it in
some detail, as if it were a major policy initiative from Franklin Delano
Roosevelt.
The lieutenant and the chef exchanged words. Then the lieutenant looked
at Shaftoe again. "He say, you pay now." The chef held up one hand and
rubbed his fingers and thumb together.
A year of working the Yangtze River Patrol had given Bobby Shaftoe
nerves of titanium, and unlimited faith in his comrades, and so he resisted
the impulse to turn his head and look out the window. He already knew
exactly what he would see: Marines, shoulder to shoulder, ready to die for
him. He scratched the new tattoo on his forearm: a dragon. His dirty
fingernails, passing over the fresh scabs, made a rasping sound in the
utterly silent restaurant.
"You didn't answer my question," Shaftoe said, pronouncing the words
with a drunk's precision.
The lieutenant translated this into Nipponese. More discussion. But
this time it was curt and decisive. Shaftoe could tell that they were about
to bounce him. He squared his shoulders.
The Nips were good; they mounted an organized charge out the door, onto
the sidewalk, and engaged the Marines, before anyone actually laid a hand on
Shaftoe. This spoiling attack prevented the Marines from invading the
restaurant proper, which would have disturbed the officers' meal and, with
any luck, led to untold property damage. Shaftoe then felt himself being
grabbed from behind by at least three people and hoisted into the air. He
made eye contact with the lieutenant while this was happening, and shouted:
"Are you bullshitting me about the seaweed?"
As brawls went, the only remarkable part of this one was the way he was
carried out to the street before he could actually get started. Then it was
like all the other street fights he'd been in with Nip soldiers in Shanghai.
These all came down to American brawn (you didn't get picked for the Fourth
Regiment unless you were an impressive looking six footer) versus that
Nipponese chop socky.
Shaftoe wasn't a boxer. He was a wrestler. This was to his advantage.
The other Marines would put up their dukes and try to fight it out Marquis
of Queensberry style no match for chop socky. Shaftoe had no illusions about
his boxing, so he would just put his head down and charge like a bull, take
a few blows to the face on his way in, but usually get a solid hold on his
opponent and slam him into the cobblestones. Usually that shook the Nip up
enough that Shaftoe could get him in a full nelson or a hammerlock and get
him to cry uncle.
The guys who were carrying him out of the restaurant got jumped by
Marines as soon as they were in the open. Shaftoe found himself going up
against an opponent who was at least as tall as he was, which was unusual.
This one had a solid build, too. Not like a sumo wrestler. More like a
football player a lineman, with a bit of a gut. He was a strong S.O.B. and
Shaftoe knew right away that he was in for a real scrape. The guy had a
different style of wrestling from the American, which (as Shaftoe learned
the hard way) included some illegal maneuvers: partial strangulation and
powerful, short punches to major nerve centers. The gulf between Shaftoe's
mind and body, already wedged open by alcohol, was yanked open to a chasm by
these techniques. He ended up lying on the sidewalk, helpless and paralyzed,
staring up into the chubby face of his opponent. This was (he realized) the
same guy who'd been sitting in the corner of the restaurant reading poetry.
He was a good wrestler for a poet. Or maybe vice versa.
" It is not seaweed ," said the big Nip. He had a look on his face like
a naughty schoolkid getting away with something. "The English word is maybe
calabash? " Then he turned and walked back into the restaurant.
So much for legend. What none of the other Marines knows is that this
was not the last encounter between Bobby Shaftoe and Goto Dengo. The
incident left Shaftoe with any number of nagging questions about subjects as
diverse as seaweed, poetry, and chop socky. He sought out Goto Dengo after
that, which was not that hard he just paid some Chinese boys to follow the
conspicuous Nip around town and file daily reports. From this he learned
that Goto Dengo and some of his comrades gathered every morning in a certain
park to practice their chop socky. After making sure that his will was in
order and writing a last letter to his parents and siblings in Oconomowoc.
Shaftoe went to that park one morning, reintroduced himself to the surprised
Goto Dengo, and made arrangements to serve as human punching bag. They found
his self defense skills hilariously primitive but admired his resilience,
and so, for the small cost of a few broken ribs and digits, Bobby Shaftoe
got a preliminary course in the particular type of chop socky favored by
Goto Dengo, which is called judo. Over time, this even led to a few social
engagements in bars, and restaurants, where Shaftoe learned to recognize
four types of seaweed, three types of fish eggs, and several flavors of Nip
poetry. Of course he had no idea what the fuck they were saying, but he
could count syllables, which, as far as he could tell, is about all there is
to Nip poetry appreciation.
Not that this or any other knowledge of their culture is going to do
him any good now that it will soon be his job to kill them.
In return, Shaftoe taught Goto Dengo how not to throw like a girl. A
lot of the Nips are good at baseball and so it was hilarious, even to them,
to see their burly friend pushing ineffectually at a baseball. But it was
Shaftoe who taught Goto Dengo to stand sideways, to rotate his shoulders,
and to follow through. He's paid a lot of attention to the big Nip's
throwing form during the last year, and maybe that's why the image of Goto
Dengo planting his feet on the ashlars of the Bund, winding up, throwing the
streamer wrapped grenade, and following through almost daintily on one
combat booted foot stays in Shaftoe's mind all the way to Manila and beyond.
***
A couple of days into the voyage it becomes apparent that Sergeant
Frick has forgotten how to shine his boots. Every night he puts them on the
deck beside his bunk, like he's expecting a coolie to come around and shine
them up during the night. Every morning he wakes up and finds them in a
sorrier state than before. After a few days he starts to draw reprimands
from On High, starts to get a lot of potato peeling duty.
Now in and of itself this is forgivable. Frick started out his career
chasing bandolier draped desperadoes away from mail trains on the High
Chaparral, for God's sake. In '27 he got shipped off to Shanghai on very
short notice, and no doubt had to display some adaptability. Fine. And now
he's on this miserable pre Great War cruiser and it's a little hard on him.
Fine. But he does not take all of this with the dignity that is demanded of
Marines by Marines. He whines about it. He lets himself get humiliated. He
gets angry. A lot of the other old China Marines see things his way.
One day Bobby Shaftoe is up on the deck of the destroyer tossing the
old horsehide around with a couple of the other young Marines when he sees a
few of these older guys accumulating into a sort of human booger on the
afterdeck. He can tell by the looks on their faces and by their gestures
that they are bellyaching.
Shaftoe hears a couple of the ship's crew talking to each other nearby
"What the hell is wrong with those Marines?" one of them says. The other one
shakes his head sadly, like a doctor who has just seen a patient's eyeballs
roll up into their sockets. "Those poor bastards have gone Asiatic." he
says.
And then they turn and look at Shaftoe.
That evening, at mess, Bobby Shaftoe gulps his food down double time,
then stands up and approaches the table where those Old Breed Marines are
sullenly gathered. "Begging your pardon, Sergeant!" he hollers. "Request
permission to shine your boots, Sarge!"
Frick's mouth drops open, revealing a half chewed plug of boiled beef.
"Whud you say, Corporal?"
The mess has gone silent. "Respectfully request permission to shine
your boots, Sarge!"
Frick is not the quickest guy in the world even when he's sober, and
it's pretty obvious, just from looking at his pupils, that he and his
comrades have brought some opium aboard. "Wull, uh, I guess so," he says. He
looks around at his crew of gripers, who are a little confused and a little
amused. He unlaces his boots. Bobby Shaftoe takes those disgraceful things
away and returns a bit later with them resplendently shined. By this time,
Frick has gotten high and mighty. "Wull, those boots look real good,
Corporal Shaftoe," he says in a brassy voice. "Darned if you ain't as good a
shoe shiner as my coolie boy was."
At lights out, Frick and crew are short sheeted. Various other, ruder
practical jokes ensue during the nighttime. One of them gets jumped in his
bunk and beaten by unspecified attackers. The brass call a surprise
inspection the next morning and cuss them out. The "gone Asiatic" crew spend
most of the next day gathered in a cluster, watching each other's backs.
Around midday, Frick finally gets it through his head that all of this
was triggered by Shaftoe's gesture, and that Shaftoe knew, all along, what
was going to happen. So he rushes Bobby Shaftoe up on the deck and tries to
throw him over the rail.
Shaftoe's warned at the last minute by one of his compadres, and spins
around just enough to throw off Frick's attack. Frick caroms off the rail,
turns around, and tries to grab Shaftoe's nuts. Shaftoe pokes him in the
eye, which straightens him right up. They back away from each other. The
opening formalities having been finished; they put up their dukes.
Frick and Shaftoe box for a couple of rounds. A large crowd of Marines
gathers. On most of their cards, Frick is winning the fight. Frick was
always dim witted, and is now crazy to boot, but he knows his way around a
boxing ring, and he has forty pounds on Shaftoe.
Shaftoe puts up with it until Frick socks him pretty hard in the mouth
and gives him a bloody lip.
"How far are we from Manila?" Shaftoe hollers. This question, as usual,
leaves Sergeant Frick confused and bewildered, and straightens him up for a
moment.
"Two days," answers one of the ship's officers.
"Well, goddamn," Bobby Shaftoe says. "How'm I gonna kiss my girl with
this fat lip?"
Frick answers, "Just go out and find a cheaper one."
That's all he needs. Shaftoe puts his head down and charges in on
Frick, hollering like a Nip. Before Frick can get his brain in gear, Bobby
Shaftoe has him wrapped up in one of those chop socky holds that Goto Dengo
taught him in Shanghai. He works his way up Frick's body to a choke hold and
then clamps down until Sergeant Frick's lips turn the color of the inside of
an oyster shell. Then he hangs Frick over the rail, holding him upside down
by the ankles, until Frick recovers enough to shout, "Uncle!"
A disciplinary proceeding is hastily called. Shaftoe is found guilty of
being courteous (by shining Frick's boots) and defending the life of a
Marine (himself) from a crazed attacker. The crazed attacker goes straight
to the brig. Within a few hours, the noises Frick makes lets all of the
Marines know what opium withdrawal feels like.
So Sergeant Frick does not get to see their entrance into Manila Bay.
Shaftoe almost feels sorry for the poor bastard.
The island of Luzon lies to port all day long, a black hulk barely
visible through the haze, with glimpses of palm trees and beaches down
below. All of the Marines have been this way before and so they can pick out
the Cordillera Central up north, and later the Zambales Mountains, which
eventually plunge down to meet the sea near Subic Bay. Subic triggers a
barrage of salty anecdotes. The ship does not put in there, but continues to
swing southward around Bata'an, turning inland toward the entrance of Manila
Bay. The ship reeks of shoe polish, talcum powder, and after shave lotion;
the Fourth Marines may have specialized in whoring and opium abuse, but
they've always been known as the best looking Marines in the Corps.
They pass by Corregidor. An island shaped like a bead of water on a
waxed boot, it is gently rounded in the middle but steeply sloping into the
water. It has a long, bony, dry tail that trails off at one end. The Marines
know that the island is riddled with tunnels and bristling with terrible
guns, but the only sign of these fortifications is the clusters of concrete
barracks up in the hills, housing the men who serve the weapons. A tangle of
antennas rises up above Topside. Their shapes are familiar to Shaftoe,
because many of the same antennas rose above Station Alpha in Shanghai, and
he had to take them apart and load them into the truck.
There is a giant limestone cliff descending nearly into the sea, and at
the base of it is the entrance to the tunnel where all the spooks and radio
men have their hideaway. Nearby is a dock, quite busy at the moment, with
supplies being offloaded from civilian transports and stacked right there on
the beach. This detail is noticed by all of the Marines as a positive sign
of approaching war. Augusta drops anchor in the cove, and all of that tarp
wrapped radio stuff is unloaded into launches and taken to that dock, along
with all of the odd pencil necked Navy men who tended that gear in Shanghai.
The swell dies as they pass Corregidor and enter the bay. Greenish
brown algae floats in swirls and curlicues near the surface. Navy ships lay
brown ropes of smoke across the still sea. Undisturbed by wind, these unfold
into rugged shapes like translucent mountain ranges. They pass the big
military base at Cavite a sheet of land so low and flat that its boundary
with the water would be invisible except for the picket line of palm trees.
A few hangars and water towers rise from it, and low dark clusters of
barracks farther inland. Manila is dead ahead of them, still veiled in haze,
It is getting on toward evening.
Then the haze dissolves, the atmosphere suddenly becomes as limpid as a
child's eyes, and for about an hour they can see to infinity. They are
steaming into an arena of immense thunderheads with lightning cork screwing
down through them all around. Flat grey clouds like shards of broken slate
peek out between anvils. Behind them are higher clouds vaulting halfway to
the moon, glowing pink and salmon in the light of the setting sun. Behind
that, more clouds nestled within banks of humidity like Christmas ornaments
wrapped in tissue paper, expanses of blue sky, more thunderheads exchanging
bolts of lightning twenty miles long. Skies nested within skies nested
within skies.
It was cold up there in Shanghai, and it's gotten warmer every day
since. Some days it's even been hot and muggy. But around the time Manila
heaves into view, a warm breeze springs up over the deck and all of the
Marines sigh, as if they have all ejaculated in unison.
Manila's perfume
Fanned by the coconut palms
The thighs of Glory
Manila's spreading tile roofs have a mestizo shape about them, half
Spanish and half Chinese. The city has a concave seawall with a flat
promenade on the top. Strollers turn and wave to the Marines; some of them
blow kisses. A wedding party is gushing down the steps of a church and
across the boulevard to the seawall, where they are getting their pictures
taken in the flattering peach colored light of the sunset. The men are in
their fancy, gauzy Filipino shirts, or in U.S. military uniforms. The women
are in spectacular gowns and dresses. The Marines holler and whistle at them
and the women turn towards them, hitching up their skirts slightly so that
they won't trip, and wave enthusiastically. The Marines get woozy and
practically fall overboard.
As their ship is easing into its dock, a crescent shaped formation of
flying fish erupts from the water. It moves away like a dune being blown
across the desert. The fish are silver and leaf shaped. Each one strikes the
water with a metallic click, and the clicks merge into a crisp ripping
noise. The crescent glides beneath a pier, flowing around its pilings, and
disappears in the shadows underneath.
Manila, the Pearl of the Orient, early on a Sunday evening, the 7th of
December, 1941. In Hawaii, on the other side of the Date Line, it is only
just past midnight. Bobby Shaftoe and his comrades have a few hours of
freedom. The city is modern, prosperous, English speaking, and Christian, by
far the wealthiest and most advanced city in Asia, practically like being
back home in the States. For all its Catholicity, it has areas that seem to
have been designed, from the foundation stones upwards, to the
specifications of horny sailors. You get to those parts of town by turning
right once your feet are on dry land.
Bobby Shaftoe turns left, politely excuses himself past a legion of
excited prostitutes, and sets his course on the looming walls of Intramuros.
He stops only to buy a sheaf of roses from a vendor in the park, who is
doing land office business. The park and the walls above it are crowded with
strolling lovers, the men mostly in uniforms and the women in demure but
stunning dresses, twirling parasols on their shoulders.
A couple of fellows driving horse drawn taxis want to do business with
Bobby Shaftoe but he turns them down. A taxi will only get him there faster,
and he is too nervous to get there fast. He walks through a gate in the wall
and into the old Spanish city.
Intramuros is a maze of buff colored stone walls rising abruptly from
narrow streets. The first floor windows along the sidewalks are guarded by
black ironwork cages. The bars swell, swirl, and sprout finedly hammered
leaves. The second stories hang out overhead, sporting gas lights that are
just now being lit by servants with long, smoking poles. The sound of
laughter and music drifts out of the windows above, and when he passes by
the archways that open into the inner courtyards, he can smell flowers back
in the gardens.
Damned if he can tell these places apart. He remembers the street name
of Magallanes, because Glory told him once it was the same thing as
"Magellan." And he remembers the view of the cathedral from the Pascuals'
window. He wanders around a block a couple of times, certain that he is
close. Then he hears an exaltation of girlish laughter coming from a second
story window, and moves toward it like a jellyfish sucked into an intake
pipe. It all comes together. This is the place. The girls are all gossiping,
in English, about one of their instructors. He does not hear Glory's voice
but he thinks he hears her laughter.
"Glory!" he says. Then he says it louder. If they hear him, they pay
him no mind. Finally he winds up and flings the bouquet of roses like a
potato masher grenade over the wooden railing, through a narrow gap between
the mother of pearl shutters, and into the room.
Miraculous silence from within the room, and then gales of laughter.
The nacre shutters part with slow, agonizing coyness. A girl of nineteen
steps out onto the balcony. She is dressed in the uniform of a nursing
student. Iris as white as starlight shining on the North Pole. She has let
her long black hair down to brush it, and it stirs languidly in the evening
breeze. The last ruddy light of the sunset makes her face glow like a coal.
She hides behind the bouquet for a moment, buries her nose in it, inhales
deeply, peeking out at him over the blossoms with her black eyes. Then she
lowers the bouquet gradually to reveal her high cheeks, her perfect little
nose, the fantastic sculpture of her lips, and teeth, white but fetchingly
crooked, barely visible. She is smiling.
"Jesus H. Christ," Bobby Shaftoe says, "your cheekbones are like a
fucking snowplow."
She puts her finger to her lips. The gesture of anything touching
Glory's lips puts an invisible spear through Shaftoe's chest. She eyes him
for a while, establishing, in her own mind, that she has the boy's attention
and that he is not going anywhere. Then she turns her back on him. The light
grazes her buttocks, showing nothing but suggesting cleavage. She goes back
inside and the shutter glides shut behind her.
Suddenly the room full of girls becomes quiet, except for occasional
ripples of suppressed laughter. Shaftoe bites his tongue. They are screwing
it all up. Mr. or Mrs. Pascual will notice their silence and become
suspicious.
Ironwork clangs and a big gate swings open. The potter beckons him
inside. Shaftoe follows the old fellow down the black, arched tunnel of the
porte cochere. The hard soles of his shiny black shoes skid on the
cobblestones. A horse back in the stable whinnies at the smell of his
aftershave. Sleepy American music, slow dance stuff from the Armed Forces
station, spills tinnily from a radio in the porter's nook.
Flowering vines grow up the stone walls of the courtyard. It is a tidy,
quiet, enclosed world, almost like being indoors. The porter waves him in
the direction of one of the stairways that lead up to the second floor.
Glory calls it the entresuelo and says that it's really a floor between the
floors, but it looks like a full fledged, regular floor to Bobby Shaftoe. He
mounts the steps and looks up to see Mr. Pascual standing there, a tiny bald
man with glasses and a trim little mustache. He is wearing a short sleeved
shirt, American style, and khaki trousers, and slippers, and is holding a
glass of San Miguel in one hand and a cigarette in the other. "Private
Shaftoe! Welcome back," he says.
So. Glory has decided to play this one by the book. The Pascuals have
been alerted. A few hours of socializing now stand between Bobby Shaftoe and
his girl. But a Marine is never fazed by such setbacks.
"Begging your pardon, Mr. Pascual, but I am a corporal now."
Mr. Pascual puts his cigarette in his mouth and shakes Corporal
Shaftoe's hand. "Well, congratulations! I just saw your uncle Jack last
week. I don't think he had any idea you were on your way back."
"It was a surprise to everyone, sir," Bobby Shaftoe says.
Now they are on a raised walkway that runs around the courtyard. Only
livestock and servants live at ground level. Mr. Pascual leads them around
to a door that takes them into the entresuelo. The walls here are rough
stone, the ceilings are simple painted planks. They pass through a dark,
somber office where Mr. Pascual's father and grandfather used to receive the
managers of the family's haciendas and plantations. For a moment, Bobby
Shaftoe gets his hopes up. This level has a few rooms that back in the old
days were apartments for high ranking servants, bachelor uncles, and
spinster aunts. Now that the hacienda business ain't what it used to be, the
Pascuals are renting them out to female students. Perhaps Mr. Pascual is
leading him directly to Glory.
But this goes the way of all foolish, horny illusions as Shaftoe finds
himself at the foot of a vast staircase of polished nara wood. He can see
pressed tin ceiling up there, chandeliers, and the imposing superstructure
of Mrs. Pascual, contained within a mighty bodice that looks like some thing
dreamed up by naval engineers. They ascend the stairs into the antesala,
which according to Glory is strictly for casual, drop in visitors but is
fancier than any room Bobby Shaftoe has ever seen. There are big vases and
pots all over the place, supposedly old, and supposedly from Japan and
China. A fresh breeze runs through; he looks out a window and sees, neatly
framed in it, the green dome of the cathedral with its Celtic cross on top,
just as he remembered it. Mrs. Pascual holds out her band and Shaftoe clasps
it. "Mrs. Pascual," he says, "thank you for welcoming me into your home."
"Please sit down," she says, "we want to hear everything."
Shaftoe sits in a fancy chair next to the piano, adjust his trousers a
bit so that they will not cramp his erect penis, checks his shave. It
probably has a few good hours left. A wing of airplanes drones overhead.
Mrs. Pascual is giving instructions to the maid in Tagalog. Shaftoe examines
the crusted lacerations on his knuckles and wonders whether Mrs. Pascual has
the slightest idea of what she would be in for if he really told her
everything. Perhaps a little anecdote about hand to hand combat with Chinese
river pirates on the banks of the Yangtze would break the ice. Through a
door and down the hall, he can see a corner of the family chapel, all Gothic
arches, a gilded altar, and in front of it an embroidered kneeler worn
threadbare by the patellas of Mrs. Pascual.
Cigarettes are brought round, stacked in a large lacquer box like
artillery shells in a crate. They drink tea and exchange small talk for what
seems like about thirty six hours. Mrs. Pascual wants to be reassured, over
and over again, that everything is fine and that there will not be a war.
Mr. Pascual obviously believes that war is just around the corner, and
mostly broods. Business has been good lately. He and Jack Shaftoe, Bobby's
uncle, have been shipping a lot of stuff between here and Singapore. But
business will get a lot worse soon, he thinks.
Glory appears. She has changed out of her student's uniform and into a
dress. Bobby Shaftoe nearly topples backward out of the window. Mrs. Pascual
formally reintroduces them. Bobby Shaftoe kisses Glory's hand in what he
thinks is more than likely a very gallant gesture. He's glad he did, because
Glory is palming a tiny wadded up note which ends up in his hand.
Glory takes a seat and is duly issued her own teacup. Another eternity
of small talk. Mr. Pascual asks him for the eighty seventh time whether he
has touched base with Uncle Jack yet, and Shaftoe reiterates that he
literally just stepped off the boat and will certainly see Uncle Jack
tomorrow morning. He excuses himself to the bathroom, which is an old
fashioned two holer mounted above deep shafts that must descend all the way
to hell. He unwads and reads Glory's note, memorizes the instructions, tears
it up and sprinkles it down the hole.
Mrs. Pascual allows the two young lovers a full half hour of "private"
time together, meaning that the Pascuals leave the room and only come back
every five minutes or so to check up on them. There is a painfully elaborate
and lengthy good bye ceremony which ends in Shaftoe returning to the street
and Glory waving to him from her balcony.
Half an hour later, they are doing tongue judo in the back of a horse
drawn taxi galloping over the cobblestones toward the nightclubs of Malate.
The extraction of Glory from the Pascual residence was a simple matter for a
highly motivated China Marine and a squadron of saucy nursing students.
But Glory must be kissing him with her eyes open because all of a
sudden she wriggles loose and says to the taxi driver, "Stop! Please stop,
sir!"
"What is it?" Shaftoe says blurrily. He looks around and sees nothing
but a great big old stone church looming up above them. This brings a
preliminary stab of fear. But the church is dark, there's no Filipinas in
long dresses, no Marines in dress uniforms, it can't be his wedding.
"I want to show you something," Glory says, and clambers down out of
the taxi. Shaftoe has to pursue her into the place the Church of San
Augustin. He's gone by this pile many times but he never reckoned he would
come inside on a date.
She stands at the bottom of a huge staircase and says, "See?"
Shaftoe looks up into darkness, thinks there might be a stained glass
window or two up there, maybe a Laceration of Christ or an Impalement of the
Blessed Thorax, but
"Look down ," Glory says, and taps one miniature foot against the first
tread of the staircase. It is a single great big huge slab of granite.
"Looks like ten or twenty tons of rock there I'd estimate," he says
authoritatively.
"It came from Mexico."
"Ah, go on!"
Glory smiles at him. "Carry me up the stairs." And in case Shaftoe's
thinking of refusing, she sort of falls into him, and he has no choice but
to catch her up in his arms. She traps his nape in the crook of her arm, the
better to pull her face close to his, but what he remembers is how the silk
of her sleeve feels against the freshly shaved skin of his neck. He begins
the ascent. Glory doesn't weigh much, but after four steps he has broken a
fine sweat. She is watching him, from four inches away, for signs of
fatigue, and he feels himself blushing. Good thing that the whole staircase
is lit up by about two candles. There's a lovely bust of a thorn crowned
Jesus with long parallel blood drops running down his face, and on the right
"These giant stones you are walking on were quarried in Mexico,
centuries and centuries ago, before America was even a country. They were
brought over in the bottoms of the Manila Galleons, as ballast." She
pronounces it bayast.
"I'll be damned."
"When those galleons arrived, the stones were brought out of their
bellies, one by one, and taken here to the Church of San Augustin, and piled
up. Each stone on top of the last year's stone. Until finally after many,
many years this staircase was finished."
After a while it seems to Shaftoe as though it's going to take at least
that many years to reach the top of the damn thing. The summit is adorned
with a life sized Jesus carrying a cross that appears to be at least as
heavy as one of those stair treads. So who's he to complain? Then Glory
says, "Now carry me down, so you will remember the story."
'"You think I'm some horny jarhead who won't remember a story unless
it's got a pretty girl in it?"
'"Yes," Glory says, and laughs in his face. He carries her down to the
bottom again. Then, before she goes off on some other tangent, he carries
her straight out the door and into the taxi.
Bobby Shaftoe is not one to lose his cool in the heat of action, but
the rest of the evening is a blurry fever dream to him. Only a few
impressions penetrate the haze: alighting from the taxi in front of a
waterfront hotel; all of the other boys gaping at Glory; Bobby Shaftoe
glaring at them, threatening to teach them some manners. Slow dancing with
Glory in the ballroom, Glory's silk clad thigh gradually slipping between
his legs, her firm body pressing harder and harder against his. Strolling
along the seawall, hand in hand beneath the starlight. Noticing that the
tide is out. Exchanging a look. Carrying her down from the seawall to the
thin strip of rocky beach beneath it.
By the time he is actually fucking her, he has more or less lost
consciousness, he is off in some fantastic, libidinal dream. He and Glory
fuck without the slightest hesitation, without any doubts, without any
troublesome thinking whatsoever. Their bodies have spontaneously merged,
like a pair of drops running together on a windowpane. If he is thinking
anything at all, it is that his entire life has culminated in this moment.
His upbringing in Oconomowoc, high school prom night, deer hunting in the
Upper Peninsula, Parris Island boot camp, all of the brawls and struggles in
China, his duel with Sergeant Frick, they are wood behind the point of a
spear.
Sirens are blowing somewhere. He startles back to awareness. Has he
been here all night long, holding Glory up against the seawall, her thighs
wrapped around his waist? That would not be possible. The tide hasn't come
in at all.
"What is it?" she says. Her hands are clasped around the back of his
neck. She lets go and runs them down his chest.
Still holding her up, his hands making a sling under her warm and
flawless ass, Shaftoe backs away from the seawall and turns around on the
beach, looking at the sky. He sees searchlights beginning to come on. And it
ain't no Hollywood premiere.
"It's war, baby," he says.
Chapter 4 FORAYS
The lobby of the Manila Hotel is about the size of a football field. It
smells like last year's perfume, rare tropical orchids, and bug spray. There
is a metal detector set up at the front door, because the Prime Minister of
Zimbabwe happens to be staying here for a couple of days. Big Africans in
good suits stand around the place in clusters of two and three. Mini throngs
of Nipponese tourists, in their Bermuda shorts, sandals and white socks,
have lodged themselves in the deep, thick, wide sofas and sit quietly,
waiting for a prearranged signal. Upper class Filipino children brandish
cylindrical potato chip canisters like tribal chieftains carrying ceremonial
maces. A dignified old bellman carrying a hand pumped tank circulates around
the defensive perimeter and silently sprays insecticide against the
baseboard. Enter Randall Lawrence Waterhouse, in a turquoise polo shirt
embroidered with the logo of one of the bankrupt high tech companies that he
and Avi have founded, and relaxed fit blue jeans held up with suspenders,
and bulky athletic shoes that once were white.
As soon as he got through the formalities at the airport, he perceived
that the Philippines are, like Mexico, one of those countries where Shoes
Matter. He approaches the registration counter quickly so that the ravishing
young woman in the navy blue uniform will not see his feet. A couple of
bellhops are engaged in a pathetic, Sisyphean contest with his bag, which
has roughly the dimensions and mass of a two drawer filing cabinet. "You
will not be able to find technical books there," Avi told him, "bring
anything you might conceivably need."
Randy's suite is a bedroom and living room, both with fourteen foot
ceilings, and a corridor along one side containing several closets and
various plumbing related technologies. The entire thing is lined in some
kind of tropical hardwood stained to a lovely glowing auburn, which would be
dismal in the northern latitudes but, here, gives it a cozy and cool
feeling. The two main rooms each have huge windows with tiny signs by the
latch handles warning of tropical insects. Each room is defended from its
windows by a multilayered system of interlocking barriers: incredibly
massive wooden shutters that rumble back and forth on tracks, like freight
trains maneuvering in a switching yard; a second layer of shutters
consisting of two inch squares of nacre held in a polished wooden grid,
sliding on its own set of tracks; window sheers, and finally, heavy gauge
blackout curtains, each suspended from its own set of clanging industrial
rails.
He orders up a large pot of coffee, which barely keeps him awake long
enough to unpack. It is late afternoon. Purple clouds tumble out of the
surrounding mountains with the palpable momentum of volcanic mudflows and
turn half of the sky into a blank wall striped with vertical bolts of
lightning; the walls of the hotel room flash with it as though paparazzi are
working outside the window. Below, food vendors in Rizal Park run up and
down the sidewalks to get out of the rain, which falls, as it has been doing
for about half a millennium, on the sloping black walls of Intramuros. If
those walls did not run in straight lines they could be mistaken for a
natural freak of geology: ridges of bare, dark volcanic rock erupting from
the grass like teeth from gums. The walls have dovetail shaped notches that
converge to old gun emplacements, providing interlocking fields of fire
across a dry moat.
Living in the States, you never see anything older than about two and a
half centuries, and you have to visit the eastern fringe of the country to
see that. The business traveler's world of airports and taxicabs looks the
same everywhere. Randy never really believes he's in a different country
until he sees something like Intramuros, and then he has to stand there like
an idiot for a long time, ruminating.
***
Right now, across the Pacific Ocean, in a small, tasteful Victorian
town located a third of the way from San Francisco to Los Angeles, computers
are seizing up, crucial files are disappearing, and e mail is careening into
intergalactic space, because Randy Waterhouse is not there to keep an eye on
things. The town in question sports three small colleges: one founded by the
State of California and two founded by Protestant denominations that are now
actively reviled by the majority of their faculty. Taken together these
colleges the Three Siblings comprise an academic center of middling
importance. Their computer systems are linked into one. They exchange
teachers and students. From time to time they host academic conferences.
This part of California has beaches, mountains, redwood forests, vineyards,
golf courses, and sprawling penal facilities all over the place. There are
plenty of three– and four star hotel rooms, and the Three Siblings,
taken together, have enough auditoria and meeting rooms to host a conference
of several thousand.
Avi's telephone call, some eighty hours ago, arrived in the middle of a
major interdisciplinary conference called "The Intermediate Phase (1939 45)
of the Global Hegemony Struggle of the Twentieth Century (Common Era)." This
is a bit of a mouthful and so it has been given a pithy nickname: "War as
Text."
People are coming from places like Amsterdam and Milan. The
conference's organizing committee which includes Randy's girlfriend,
Charlene, who actually gives every indication of being his ex girlfriend now
hired an artist in San Francisco to come up with a poster. He started with a
black and white halftone photo of a haggard World War II infantryman with a
cigarette dangling from his lower lip. He worked this image over using a
photocopier, blowing the halftone dots up into rough lumps, like rubber
balls chewed by a dog, and wreaking any number of other distortions on it
until it had an amazingly stark, striking, jagged appearance; the soldier's
pale eyes turned an eerie white. Then he added a few elements in color: red
lipstick, blue eyeshadow, and a trace of a red brassiere strap peeking out
from the soldier's unbuttoned uniform shirt.
The poster won some kind of an award almost the moment it came out.
This led to a press release, which in turn led to the poster's being
enshrined by the news media as an Official Object of Controversy. An
enterprising journalist managed to track down the soldier depicted in the
original photograph a decorated combat veteran and retired tool and die
maker who, as it happened, was not merely alive but in excellent health,
and, since the death of his wife from breast cancer, had spent his
retirement roaming around the Deep South in his pickup truck, helping to
rebuild black churches that had been torched by drunken yahoos.
The artist who had designed the poster then confessed that he had
simply copied it from a book and had made no effort whatsoever to obtain
permission the entire concept of getting permission to use other people's
work was faulty, since all art was derivative of other art. High powered
trial lawyers converged, like dive bombers, on the small town in Kentucky
where the aggrieved veteran was up on the roof of a black church with a
mouthful of nails, hammering down slabs of A/D exterior plywood and mumbling
"no comment" to a horde of reporters down on the lawn. After a series of
conferences in a room at the town's Holiday Inn, the veteran emerged,
accompanied by one of the five most famous lawyers on the face of the
planet, and announced that he was filing a civil suit against the Three
Siblings that would, if it succeeded, turn them and their entire community
into a flat, smoking abrasion in the earth's crust. He promised to split the
proceeds between the black churches and various disabled veterans' and
breast cancer research groups.
The organizing committee pulled the poster from circulation, which
caused thousands of bootleg copies to go up on the World Wide Web and, in
general, brought it to the attention of millions who never would have seen
it otherwise. They also filed suit against the artist, whose net worth could
be tallied up on the back of a ticket stub: he had assets of about a
thousand dollars and debts (mostly student loans) amounting to sixty five
thousand.
All of this happened before the conference even began. Randy was aware
of it only because Charlene had roped him into providing computer support
for the conference, which meant setting up a Web site and e mail access for
the attendees. When all of this hit the news, e mail began to flood in, and
quickly jammed up all of the lines and filled up all of the disk capacity
that Randy had spent the last month setting up.
Conferees began to arrive. A lot of them seemed to be sleeping in the
house where Randy and Charlene had been living together for seven years. It
was a big old Victorian house and there was plenty of room. They stumbled in
from Heidelberg and Paris and Berkeley and Boston, then sat around Randy and
Charlene's kitchen table drinking coffee and talking at great length about
the Spectacle. Randy inferred that the Spectacle meant the poster furor, but
as they went on and on about it, he sensed that they were using the word not
in a conventional sense but as part of some academic jargon; that it carried
a heavy load of shadings and connotations to them, none of which Randy would
ever understand unless he became one of them.
To Charlene, and to all of the people attending War as Text, it was
self evident that the veteran who filed the lawsuit was the very worst kind
of human being just the sort they had gathered together to debunk, burn in
effigy, and sweep into the ash bin of posthistorical discourse. Randy had
spent a lot of time around these people, and thought he'd gotten used to
them, but during those days he had a headache all the time, from clenching
his teeth, and he kept jumping to his feet in the middle of meals or
conversations and going out for solitary walks. This was partly to keep
himself from saying something undiplomatic, and partly as a childish but
fruitless tactic to get the attention he craved from Charlene.
He knew the whole poster saga was going to be a disaster from early on.
He kept warning Charlene and the others. They listened coolly, clinically,
as if Randy were a test subject on the wrong side of a one way mirror.
***
Randy forces himself to stay awake long enough for it to get dark. Then
he lies in bed for a few hours trying to sleep. The container port is just
north of the hotel, and all night long, Rizal Boulevard, along the base of
the old Spanish wall, is jammed from one end to the other with container
carrying semis. The whole city is a cauldron of internal combustion. Manila
seems to have more pistons and exhaust pipes than the rest of the world
combined. Even at two in the morning the hotel's seemingly unshakable mass
hums and rattles from the seismic energy pouring from all of those motors.
The noise detonates car alarms down in the hotel's lot. The noise of one
alarm triggers others, and so on. It is not the noise that keeps Randy awake
so much as the insane stupidity of this chain reaction. It is an object
lesson: the kind of nightmarish, snowballing technological fuck up that
keeps hackers awake at night even when they can't hear the results.
He paws open a Heineken from his minibar and stands in front of the
window, looking. Many of the trucks are adorned with brilliant displays of
multicolored lights not quite as flashy as those of the few jeepneys that
scurry and jostle among them. Seeing so many people awake and working puts
sleep out of the question.
He is too jet lagged to accomplish anything that requires actual
thought but there is one important job he can do, which requires no thinking
whatsoever. He starts up his laptop again. Seeming to levitate in the center
of his dark room, the screen is a perfect rectangle of light the color of
diluted milk, of a Nordic dawn. This light originates in small fluorescent
tubes imprisoned in the polycarbonate coffin of his computer's display. It
can only escape through a pane of glass, facing Randy, which is entirely
covered by small transistors arranged in a grid, which let photons through,
or don't, or let through only those of a particular wavelength, cracking the
pale light into colors. By turning those transistors on and off according to
some systematic plan, meaning is conveyed to Randy Waterhouse. A good
filmmaker could convey a whole story to Randy by seizing control of those
transistors for a couple of hours.
Unfortunately, there are a lot more laptop computers floating around
than there are filmmakers worth paying attention to. The transistors are
almost never put into the hands of human beings. They are controlled,
instead, by software. Randy used to be fascinated by software, but now he
isn't. It's hard enough to find human beings who are interesting.
The pyramid and the eyeball appear. Randy spends so much time using
Ordo now that he has his machine boot it up automatically.
Nowadays the laptop has only one function for Randy: he uses it to
communicate with other people, through e mail. When he communicates with
Avi, he has to use Ordo, which is a tool for taking his ideas and converting
them into streams of bits that are almost indistinguishable from white
noise, so that they can be sent to Avi in privacy. In exchange, it receives
noise from Avi and converts it into Avi's thoughts. At the moment, Epiphyte
has no assets other than information it is an idea, with some facts and data
to back it up. This makes it eminently stealable. So encryption is
definitely a good idea. The question is: how much paranoia is really
appropriate?
Avi sent him encrypted e mail:
When you get to Manila t would like you to generate a 4O96 bit key pair
and keep it on a floppy disk that you carry on your person at all times. Do
not keep it on your hard disk. Anyone could break into your hotel room while
you're out and steal that key.
Now, Randy pulls down a menu and picks an item labeled: "New key. . ."
A box pops up giving him several KEY LENGTH options: 768 bits, 1024,
1536, 2048, 3072, or Custom. Randy picks the latter option and then,
wearily, types in 4096.
Even a 768 bit key requires vast resources to break. Add one bit, to
make it 769 bits long, and the number of possible keys doubles, the problem
becomes much more difficult. A 770 bit key is that much more difficult yet,
and so on. By using 768 bit keys, Randy and Avi could keep their
communications secret from nearly every entity in the world for at least the
next several years. A 1024 bit key would be vastly, astronomically more
difficult to break.
Some people go so far as to use keys 2048 or even 3072 bits in length.
These will stop the very best codebreakers on the face of the earth for
astronomical periods of time, barring the invention of otherworldly
technologies such as quantum computers. Most encryption software even stuff
written by extremely security conscious cryptography experts can't even
handle keys larger than that. But Avi insists on using Ordo, generally
considered the best encryption software in the world, because it can handle
keys of unlimited length as long as you don't mind waiting for it to crunch
all the numbers.
Randy begins typing. He is not bothering to look at the screen; he is
staring out the window at the lights on the trucks and the jeepneys. He is
only using one hand, just flailing away loosely at the keyboard.
Inside Randy's computer is a precise clock. Whenever he strikes a key,
Ordo uses that clock to record the current time, down to microseconds. He
hits a key at 03:03:56.935788 and he hits another one at 03:05:57.290664, or
about .354876 seconds later. Another .372307 seconds later, he hits another
one. Ordo keeps track of all of these intervals and discards the more
significant digits (in this example the .35 and the .37) because these parts
will tend to be similar from one event to the next.
Ordo wants randomness. It only wants the least significant digits say,
the 76 and the 07 at the very ends of these numbers. It wants a whole lot of
random numbers, and it wants them to be very, very random. It is taking
somewhat random numbers and feeding them through hash functions that make
them even more random. It is running statistical routines on the results to
make sure that they contain no hidden patterns. It has breathtakingly high
standards for randomness, and it will not stop asking Randy to whack on the
keyboard until those standards are met.
The longer the key you are trying to generate, the longer this takes.
Randy is trying to generate one that is ridiculously long. He has pointed
out to Avi, in an encrypted e mail message, that if every particle of matter
in the universe could be used to construct one single cosmic supercomputer,
and this computer was put to work trying to break a 4096 bit encryption key,
it would take longer than the lifespan of the universe.
"Using today's technology," Avi shot back. "that is true. But what
about quantum computers? And what if new mathematical techniques are
developed that can simplify the factoring of large numbers?"
"How long do you want these messages to remain secret?" Randy asked, in
his last message before leaving San Francisco. "Five years? Ten years?
Twenty five years?"
After he got to the hotel this afternoon, Randy decrypted and read
Avi's answer. It is still hanging in front of his eyes, like the afterimage
of a strobe:
I want them to remain secret for as long as men are capable of evil.
The computer finally beeps. Randy rests his tired hand. Ordo politely
warns him that it may be busy for a while, and then goes to work. It is
searching the cosmos of pure numbers, looking for two big primes that can be
multiplied by each other to produce a number 4096 bits long.
If you want your secrets to remain secret past the end of your life
expectancy, then, in order to choose a key length, you have to be a
futurist. You have to anticipate how much faster computers will get during
this time. You must also be a student of politics. Because if the entire
world were to become a police state obsessed with recovering old secrets,
then vast resources might be thrown at the problem of factoring large
composite numbers.
So the length of the key that you use is, in and of itself, a code of
sorts. A knowledgeable government eavesdropper, noting Randy's and Avi's use
of a 4096 bit key, will conclude one of the following:
– Avi doesn't know what he's talking about. This can be ruled out
with a bit of research into his past accomplishments. Or,
– Avi is clinically paranoid. This can also be ruled out with
some research. Or,
– Avi is extremely optimistic about the future development of
computer technology, or pessimistic about the political climate, or both.
Or,
– Avi has a planning horizon that extends over a period of at
least a century.
Randy paces around his room while his computer soars through number
space. The shipping containers on the backs of those trucks bear exactly the
same logos as the ones that used to fill the streets of South Seattle when a
ship was unloading. To Randy this is oddly satisfying, as if by making this
crazy lunge across the Pacific, he has brought some kind of antipodal
symmetry to his life. He has gone from the place where things are consumed
to where they are produced, from a land where onanism has been enshrined at
the highest levels of the society to one where cars have "NO to
contraception!" stickers in their windows. It feels bizarrely right. He has
not felt this way since Avi and he founded their first doomed business
venture twelve years ago.
***
Randy grew up in a college town in eastern Washington State, graduated
from the University of Washington in Seattle, and landed a Clerk Typist II
job at the library there specifically the Interlibrary Loan Department where
his job was to process incoming loan requests mailed in from smaller
libraries all over the region and, conversely, to mail out requests to other
libraries. If nine year old Randy Waterhouse had been able to look into the
future and see himself in this career, he would have been delighted beyond
measure: the primary tool of the Interlibrary Loan Department was the Staple
Remover. Young Randy had seen one of these devices in the hands of his
fourth grade teacher and been enthralled by its cunning and deadly
appearance, so like the jaws of some futuristic robot dragon. He had, in
fact, gone out of his way to staple things incorrectly just so he could
prevail on his teacher to unstaple them, giving him another glimpse of the
blood chilling mandibles in action. He had gone so far as to steal a staple
remover from an untended desk at church and then incorporate it into an
Erector set robot hunter killer device with which he terrorized much of the
neighborhood; its pit viper yawn separated many a cheap plastic toy from its
parts and accessories before the theft was discovered and Randy made an
example of before God and man. Now, in the Interlibrary Loan office, Randy
had not just one but several staple removers in his desk drawer and was
actually obligated to use them for an hour or two a day.
Since the UW library was well endowed, its patrons didn't request books
from other libraries unless they had been stolen from their own or were, in
some way, peculiar. The ILL office (as Randy and his coworkers
affectionately called it) had its regulars people who had a whole lot of
peculiar books on their wish lists. These people tended to be either tedious
or scary or both. Randy always ended up dealing with the "both" subgroup,
because Randy was the only Clerk Typist in the office who was not a lifer.
It seemed clear that Randy, with his astronomy degree and his extensive
knowledge of computers, would one day move on, whereas his coworkers did not
harbor further ambitions. His larger sphere of interests, his somewhat
broader concept of normalcy, was useful when certain patrons came into the
office.
By the standards of many, Randy was himself a tedious, scary, obsessed
character. He was not merely obsessed with science but also with fantasy
role playing games. The only way he could tolerate working at such a stupid
job for a couple of years was that his off time was completely occupied with
enacting fantasy scenarios of a depth and complexity that exercised all of
the cranial circuitry that was so conspicuously going to waste in the ILL
office. He was part of a group that would meet every Friday night and play
until sometime on Sunday. The other stalwarts in the group were a computer
science/music double major named Chester, and a history grad student named
Avi.
When a new master's degree candidate named Andrew Loeb walked into the
ILL office one day, with a certain glint in his eye, and produced a three
inch thick stack of precisely typed request forms from his shitty old
knapsack, he was recognized immediately as being of a particular type, and
shunted in the direction of Randy Waterhouse. It was an instant meeting of
minds, though Randy did not fully realize this until the books that Loeb had
requested began to arrive on the trolley from the mail room.
Andy Loeb's project was to figure out the energy budgets of the local
Indian tribes. A human body has to expend a certain amount of energy just to
keep breathing and to maintain its body temperature. This figure goes up
when it gets cold or when the body in question is doing work. The only way
to obtain that energy is by eating food. Some foods have a higher energy
content than others. For example, trout is highly nutritious but so low in
fat and carbohydrates that you can starve to death eating it three times a
day. Other foods might have lots of energy, but might require so much work
to obtain and prepare that eating them would be a losing proposition, BTU
wise. Andy Loeb was trying to figure out what foods had historically been
eaten by certain Northwest Indian tribes, how much energy they expended to
get these foods and how much they obtained by eating them. He wanted to do
this calculation for coastal Indians like the Salish (who had easy access to
seafood) and for inland ones like the Cayuse (who didn't) as part of an
extremely convoluted plan to prove some sort of point about the relative
standards of living of these tribes and how this affected their cultural
development (coastal tribes made lots of fantastically detailed art and
inland ones occasionally scratched stick figures on rocks).
To Andrew Loeb it was an exercise in meta historical scholarship. To
Randy Waterhouse, it sounded like the beginnings of a pretty cool game.
Strangle a muskrat and you get 136 Energy Points. Lose the muskrat and your
core temp drops another degree.
Andy was nothing if not methodical and so he had simply looked up every
book that had ever been written on such topics, and every book mentioned in
those books' bibliographies, yea, even unto four or five generations;
checked out all of them that were available locally; and ordered the rest
from ILL. All of the latter passed across Randy's desk. Randy read some and
skimmed all. He got to learn about how much blubber the Arctic explorers had
to eat in order to keep from starving to death. He perused detailed
specifications for Army C rations. After a while, he actually began sneaking
into the photocopy room and making copies of key data.
In order to run a realistic fantasy role playing game, you had to keep
track of how much food the imaginary characters were getting and how much
trouble was involved in getting it. Characters passing across the Gobi
desert in November of the year 5000 B.C. would have to spend more time
worrying about food than, say, ones who were traveling across central
Illinois in 1950.
Randy was hardly the first game designer to notice this. There were a
few incredibly stupid games in which you didn't have to think about food,
but Randy and his friends disdained them. In all of the games that he
participated in, or that he himself designed, you had to devote a realistic
amount of effort to getting food for your character. But it was not easy to
determine what was realistic. Like most designers, Randy got over the
problem by slapping together a few rudimentary equations that he basically
just pulled out of thin air. But in the books, articles, and dissertations
that Andrew Loeb was borrowing through ILL, he found exactly the raw data
that a mathematically inclined person would need to come up with a
sophisticated rules system based on scientific fact.
Simulating all of the physical processes going on in each character's
body was out of the question, especially in a game where you might be
dealing with armies of a hundred thousand men. Even a crude simulation,
tracking only a few variables and using simple equations, would involve a
nightmarish amount of paperwork if you did it all by hand. But all of this
was happening in the mid 1980s, when personal computers had become cheap and
ubiquitous. A computer could automatically track a large database and tell
you whether each character was well fed or starving. There was no reason not
to do it on a computer.
Unless, like Randy Waterhouse, you had such a shitty job that you
couldn't afford a computer.
Of course, there's a way to dodge any problem. The university had lots
of computers. If Randy could get an account on one of them, he could write
his program there and run it for free.
Unfortunately, accounts were only available to students or faculty
members, and Randy was neither.
Fortunately, he started dating a grad student named Charlene at just
about this time.
How the hell did a generally keg shaped guy, a hard scientist, working
a dead end Clerk Typist job, and spending all his spare time in the
consummately nerdy pastime of fantasy role playing games, end up in a
relationship with a slender and not unattractive young liberal arts student
who spent her spare time sea kayaking and going to foreign films? It must
have been one of those opposites attract kind of deals, a complementary
relationship. They met, naturally, in the ILL office, where the highly
intelligent but steady and soothing Randy helped the highly intelligent but
scattered and flighty Charlene organize a messy heap of loan requests. He
should have asked her out then and there, but he was shy. Second and third
opportunities came along when the books she'd requested began to filter up
from the mailroom, and finally he asked her out and they went to see a film
together. Both of them turned out to be not just willing but eager, and
possibly even desperate. Before they knew it, Randy had given Charlene a key
to his apartment, and Charlene had given Randy the password to her free
university computer account, and everything was just delightful.
The university computer system was better than no computer at all. But
Randy was humiliated. Like every other high powered academic computing
network, this one was based on an industrial strength operating system
called UNIX, which had a learning curve like the Matterhorn, and lacked the
cuddly and stylish features of the personal computers then coming into
vogue. Randy had used it quite a bit as an undergraduate and knew his way
around. Even so, learning how to write good code on the thing required a lot
of time. His life had changed when Charlene had come along, and now it
changed more: he dropped out of the fantasy role playing game circuit
altogether, stopped going to meetings of the Society for Creative
Anachronism, and began to spend all of his free time either with Charlene or
in front of a computer terminal. All in all, this was probably a change for
the better. With Charlene, he did things he wouldn't have done otherwise,
like getting exercise, or going to see live music. And at the computer, he
was learning new skills, and he was creating something. It might be
something completely useless, but at least he was creating.
He spent a lot of time talking to Andrew Loeb, who actually went out
and did the stuff he was writing programs for; he'd disappear for a few days
and come back all wobbly and haggard, with fish scales caught in his
whiskers or dried animal blood under his fingernails. He'd ram down a couple
of Big Macs, sleep for twenty four hours, then meet Randy in a bar (Charlene
wasn't comfortable with having him in the house) and talk learnedly of the
difficulties of day to day life, aboriginal style. They argued about whether
aborigines would eat the more disgusting parts of certain animals or throw
them away. Andrew voted for yes. Randy disagreed just because they were
primitive didn't mean they couldn't have taste. Andrew accused him of being
a romantic. Finally, to settle it, they went up into the mountains together,
armed with nothing but knives and Andrew's collection of exquisitely crafted
vermin snares. By the third night, Randy found himself seriously thinking
about eating some insects. "Q.E.D.," Andrew said.
Anyway, Randy finished his software after a year and a half. It was a
success; Chester and Avi liked it. Randy was moderately pleased at having
built something so complicated that actually worked, but he bad no illusions
about its being good for anything. He was sort of embarrassed at having
wasted so much time and mental energy on the project. But he knew that if he
hadn't been writing code, he'd have spent the same amount of time playing
games or going to Society for Creative Anachronism meetings in medieval
drag, so it all zeroed out in the end. Spending the time in front of the
computer was arguably better, because it had honed his programming skills,
which had been pretty sharp to begin with. On the other hand, he'd done it
all on the UNIX system, which was for scientists and engineers not a savvy
move in an age when all the money was in personal computers.
Chester and Randy had nicknamed Avi "Avid," be cause he really, really
liked fantasy games. Avi had always claimed that he played them as a way of
understanding what it was really like to live in ancient times, and he was a
maniac about historical authenticity. That was okay; they all had half assed
excuses, and Avi's historical acumen frequently came in handy.
Not long after this, Avi graduated and disappeared, and popped up a few
months later in Minneapolis, where he had gotten a job with a major
publisher of fantasy role playing games. He offered to buy Randy's game
software for the astonishingly large sum of $1000 plus a small cut of future
profits. Randy accepted the offer in its general outlines, asked Avi to send
him a contract, then went out and found Andrew boiling some fish guts in a
birchbark kettle atop a Weber grill on the roof of the apartment building
where he lived. He wanted to give Andrew the good news, and to cut him in on
the proceeds. What ensued was a really unpleasant conversation, standing up
there in a pelting, spitting, wind blown rain.
To begin with, Andrew took this deal far more seriously than Randy did.
Randy saw it as a windfall, a lark. Andrew, who was the son of a lawyer,
treated it as if it were a major corporate merger, and asked many tedious
and niggling questions about the contract, which did not exist yet and which
would probably cover a single piece of paper when it did. Randy didn't
realize it at the time, but by asking so many questions for which Randy had
no answers, Andrew was, in effect, arrogating to himself the role of
Business Manager. He was implicitly forming a business partnership with
Randy that did not, in fact, exist.
Furthermore, Andrew didn't have the first notion of how much time and
effort Randy had put into writing the code. Or (as Randy was to realize
later) maybe be did. In any case, Andrew assumed from the get go that he
would share a fifty fifty split with Randy, which was wildly out of
proportion to the work he'd actually done on the project. Basically, Andrew
acted as if all of the work he'd ever done on the subject of aboriginal
dining habits was a part of this undertaking, and that it entitled him to an
equal split.
By the time Randy extricated himself from this conversation, his mind
was reeling. He had gone in with one view of reality and been radically
challenged by another one that was clearly preposterous; but after an hour
of Andrew's browbeating he was beginning to doubt himself. After two or
three sleepless nights, he decided to call the whole thing off. A paltry few
hundred dollars wasn't worth all of this agony.
But Andrew (who was, by now, represented by an associate of his
father's Santa Barbara law firm) vehemently objected. He and Randy had,
according to his lawyer, jointly created something that had economic value,
and a failure on Randy's part to sell it at market value amounted to taking
money out of Andrew's pocket. It had become an unbelievable Kafkaesque
nightmare, and Randy could only withdraw to a corner table at his favorite
pub, drink pints of stout (frequently in the company of Chester) and watch
this fantastic psychodrama unfold. He had, he now realized, blundered into
some serious domestic weirdness involving Andrew's family. It turned out
that Andrew's parents were divorced and, long ago, had fought savagely over
custody of him, their only child. Mom had turned into a hippie and joined a
religious cult in Oregon and taken Andrew with her. It was rumored that this
cult engaged in sexual abuse of children. Dad had hired private dicks to
kidnap Andrew back and then showered him with material possessions to
demonstrate his superior love. There had followed an interminable legal
battle in which Dad had hired some rather fringey psychotherapists to
hypnotize Andrew and get him to dredge up repressed memories of unspeakable
and improbable horrors.
This was just the executive summary of a weird life that Randy only
learned about in bits and pieces as the years went on. Later, he was to
decide that Andrew's life had been fractally weird. That is, you could take
any small piece of it and examine it in detail and it, in and of itself,
would turn out to be just as complicated and weird as the whole thing in its
entirety.
Anyway Randy had blundered into this life and become enveloped in the
weirdness. One of the young eager beavers in Andrew's dad's law firm
decided, as a preemptive move, to obtain copies of all of Randy's computer
files, which were still stored on the UW computer system. Needless to say,
he went about it in a heavy handed way, and when the university's legal
department began to receive his sullen letters, it responded by informing
both Andrew's lawyer, and Randy, that anyone who used the university's
computer system to create a commercial product had to split the proceeds
with the university. So now Randy was getting ominous letters from not one
but two groups of deadly lawyers. Andrew then threatened to sue him for
having made this blunder, which had halved the value of Andrew's share!
In the end, just to cut his losses and get out of it clean, Randy had
to hire a lawyer of his own. The final cost to him was a hair more than five
thousand dollars. The software was never sold to anyone, and indeed could
not have been; it was so legally encumbered by that point that it would have
been like trying to sell someone a rusty Volkswagen that had been dismantled
and its parts hidden in attack dog kennels all over the world.
It was the only time in his life when he had ever thought about
suicide. He did not think about it very hard, or very seriously, but he did
think about it.
When it was all over, Avi sent him a handwritten letter saying, "I
enjoyed doing business with you and look forward to continuing our
relationship both as friends and, should opportunities arise, as creative
partners."
Chapter 5 INDIGO
Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse and the rest of the band are up on the
deck of the Nevada one morning, playing the national anthem and watching the
Stars and Stripes ratchet up the mast, when they are startled to find
themselves in the midst of one hundred and ninety airplanes of unfamiliar
design. Some of them are down low, traveling horizontally, and others are up
high, plunging nearly straight down. The latter are going so fast that they
appear to be falling apart; little bits are dropping off of them. It is
terrible to see some training exercise gone miserably awry. But they pull
out of their suicidal trajectories in plenty of time. The bits that have
fallen off of them plunge smoothly and purposefully, not tumbling and
fluttering as chunks of debris would. They are coming down all over the
place. Perversely, they all seem to be headed for the berthed ships. It is
incredibly dangerous they might hit someone! Lawrence is outraged.
There is a short lived phenomenon taking place in one of the ships down
the line. Lawrence turns to look at it. This is the first real explosion
he's ever seen and so it takes him a long time to recognize it as such. He
can play the very hardest glockenspiel parts with his eyes closed, and The
Star Spangled Banner is much easier to ding than to sing.
His scanning eyes fasten, not on the source of the explosion, but on a
couple of airplanes that are headed right toward them, skimming just above
the water. Each drops a long skinny egg and then their railplanes visibly
move and they angle upwards and pass overhead. The rising sun shines
directly through the glass of their canopies. Lawrence is able to look into
the eyes of the pilot of one of the planes. He notes that it appears to be
some sort of Asian gentleman.
This is an incredibly realistic training exercise even down to the
point of using ethnically correct pilots, and detonating fake explosives on
the ships. Lawrence heartily approves. Things have just been too lax around
this place.
A tremendous shock comes up through the deck of the ship, making his
feet and legs feel as if he had just jumped off a ten foot precipice onto
solid concrete. But he's just standing there flatfooted. It makes no sense
at all.
The band has finished playing the national anthem and is looking about
at the spectacle. Sirens and horns are speaking up all over the place, from
the Nevada, from the Arizona in the next berth, from buildings onshore.
Lawrence doesn't see any antiaircraft fire going up, doesn't see any
familiar planes in the air. The explosions just keep coming. Lawrence
wanders over to the rail and stares across a few yards of open water towards
the Arizona.
Another one of those plunging airplanes drops a projectile that shoots
straight down onto Arizona's deck but then, strangely, vanishes. Lawrence
blinks and sees that it has left a neat bomb shaped hole in the deck, just
like a panicky Warner Brothers cartoon character passing at high speed
through a planar structure such as a wall or ceiling. Fire jets from that
hole for about a microsecond before the whole deck bulges up,
disintegrating, and turns into a burgeoning globe of fire and blackness.
Waterhouse is vaguely aware of a lot of stuff coming at him really fast. It
is so big that he feels more like he is falling into it. He freezes up. It
goes by him, over him, and through him. A terrible noise pierces his skull,
a chord randomly struck, discordant but not without some kind of deranged
harmony. Musical qualities aside, it is so goddamned loud that it almost
kills him. He claps his hands over his ears.
Still the noise is there, like red hot knitting needles through the ear
drums. Hell's bells. He spins away from it, but it follows him. He has this
big thick strap around his neck, sewn together at groin level where it
supports a cup. Thrust into the cup is the central support of his
glockenspiel, which stands in front of him like a lyre shaped breastplate,
huge fluffy tassels dangling gaily from the upper corners. Oddly, one of the
tassels is burning. That isn't the only thing now wrong with the
glockenspiel, but he can't quite make it out because his vision keeps
getting obscured by something that must be wiped away every few moments. All
he knows is that the glockenspiel has eaten a huge quantum of pure energy
and been kicked up to some incredibly high state never before achieved by
such an instrument; it is a burning, glowing, shrieking, ringing, radiating
monster, a comet, an archangel, a tree of flaming magnesium, strapped to his
body, standing on his groin. The energy is transmitted down its humming,
buzzing central axis, through the cup, and into his genitals, which would be
tumescing in other circumstances.
Lawrence spends some time wandering aimlessly around the deck.
Eventually he has to help open a hatch for some men, and then he realizes
that his hands are still clapped over his ears, and have been for a long
time except for when he was wiping stuff out of his eyes. When he takes them
off, the ringing has stopped, and he no longer hears airplanes. He was
thinking that he wanted to go belowdecks, because the bad things are coming
from the sky and he would like to get some big heavy permanent seeming stuff
between him and it, but a lot of sailors are taking the opposite view. He
hears that they have been hit by one and maybe two of something that rhymes
with "torpedoes," and that they are trying to raise steam. Officers and
noncoms, black and red with smoke and blood, keep deputizing him for
different, extremely urgent tasks that he doesn't quite understand, not
least because he keeps putting his hands over his ears.
Probably half an hour goes by before he hits upon the idea of
discarding his glockenspiel, which is, after all, just getting in the way.
It was issued to him by the Navy with any number of stern warnings about the
consequences of misusing it. Lawrence is conscientious about this kind of
thing, dating back to when he was first given organ playing privileges in
West Point, Virginia. But at this point, for the first time in his life, as
he stands there watching the Arizona burn and sink, he just says to himself
Well, to heck with it! He takes that glockenspiel out of its socket and has
one last look at it, it is the last time in his life he will ever touch a
glockenspiel. There is no point in saving it now anyway, he realizes;
several of the bars have been bent. He flips it around and discovers that
chunks of blackened, distorted metal have been impact welded onto several of
the bars. Really throwing caution to the winds now, he flings it overboard
in the general direction of the Arizona, a military lyre of burnished steel
that sings a thousand men to their resting places on the bottom of the
harbor.
As it vanishes into a patch of burning oil, the second wave of
attacking airplanes arrives. The Navy's antiaircraft guns finally open up
and begin to rain shells down into the surrounding community and blow up
occupied buildings. He can see human shaped flames running around in the
streets, pursued by people with blankets.
The rest of the day is spent, by Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse and the
rest of the Navy, grappling with the fact that many two dimensional
structures on this and other ships, which were put into place to prevent
various fluids from commingling (e.g. fuel and air) have holes in them, and
not only that but a lot of shit is on fire too and things are more than a
little smoky. Certain objects that are supposed to (a) remain horizontal and
(b) support heavy things have ceased to do either.
Nevada's engineering section manages to raise steam in a couple of
boilers and the captain tries to get the ship out of the harbor. As soon as
she gets underway, she comes under concerted attack, mostly by dive bombers
who are eager to sink her in the channel and block the harbor altogether.
Eventually, the captain runs her aground rather than see this happen.
Unfortunately, what Nevada has in common with most other naval vessels is
that she is not really engineered to work from a stationary position, and
consequently she is hit three more times by dive bombers. So it is a pretty
exciting morning overall. As a member of the band who does not even have his
instrument any more, Lawrence's duties are quite poorly defined, and he
spends more time than he should watching the airplanes and the explosions.
He has gone back to his earlier train of thought regarding societies and
their efforts to outdo each other. It is very clear to him, as wave after
wave of Nipponese dive bombers hurl themselves, with calligraphic precision,
at the ship he is standing on, and as the cream of his society's navy burns
and explodes and sinks, putting up virtually no resistance, that his society
is going to have to rethink a thing or two.
***
At some point he burns his hand on something. It is his right hand,
which is preferable he is left handed. Also, he becomes more clearly aware
that a portion of Arizona has tried to take his scalp off. These are minor
injuries by Pearl Harbor standards and he does not stay long in the
hospital. The doctor warns him that the skin on his hand might contract and
limit his fingers' range of motion. As soon as he can withstand the pain,
Lawrence begins to play Bach's Art of Fugue in his lap whenever he is not
otherwise occupied. Most of those tunes start out simple; you can easily
picture old Johann Sebastian sitting there on the bench on a cold morning in
Leipzig, one or two blockflöte stops yanked out, left hand in his lap, a fat
choirboy or two over in the corner heaving away on the bellows, faint
gasping noises coming from all the leaks in the works, and Johann's right
hand wandering aimlessly across the forbidding simplicity of the Great
manual, stroking those cracked and yellowed elephant tusks, searching for
some melody he hadn't already invented. That is good stuff for Lawrence
right now, and so he makes his right hand go through the same motions as
Johann's, even though it is a gauze wrapped hand and he is using an upside
down dinner tray as a substitute for the keyboard, and he has to hum the
music under his breath. When he really gets into it, his feet skid around
and piston under the sheets, playing imaginary pedals, and his neighbors
complain.
He is out of the hospital in a few days, just in time for him and the
rest of Nevada's band to begin their new, wartime assignment. This was
evidently something of a poser for the Navy's manpower experts. These
musicians were (from a killing Nips point of view) completely useless to
begin with. As of 7 December, they no longer have even a functioning ship
and most of them have lost their clarinets.
Still, it isn't all about loading shells and pulling triggers. No large
organization can kill Nips in any kind of systematic way without doing a
nearly unbelievable amount of typing and filing. It is logical to suppose
that men who can play the clarinet will not botch that kind of work any
worse than anyone else. And so Waterhouse and his bandmates receive orders
assigning them to what would appear to be one of the typing and filing
branches of the Navy.
This is located in a building, not a ship. There are quite a few Navy
people who sneer at the whole idea of working in a building, and Lawrence
and some of the other recent recruits, eager to fit in, have gotten into the
habit of copping the same attitude. But now that they have seen what happens
to a ship when you detonate hundreds of pounds of high explosive on, in, and
around it, Waterhouse and many, others are reassessing their feelings about
working in buildings. They report to their new post with high morale.
Their new commanding officer is not so cheerful, and his feelings
appear to be shared by everyone in the entire section. The musicians are
greeted without being welcomed and saluted without being honored. The people
who have been working in this building far from being overawed by their
status as guys who not only worked on an actual ship until recently but
furthermore have been very close to things that were exploding, burning,
etc., and not as the result of routine lapses in judgment but because bad
men deliberately made it happen do not seem to feel that Lawrence and his
bandmates deserve to be entrusted with this new work, whatever the hell it
is.
Glumly, almost despairingly, the commanding officer and his
subordinates get the musicians squared away. Even if they don't have enough
desks to go around, each man can at least have a chair at a table or
counter. Some ingenuity is displayed in finding places for all the new
arrivals. It is clear that these people are trying their best at what they
consider to be a hopeless task.
Then there is some talk about secrecy. A great deal of talk about it.
They run through drills intended to test their ability to throw things away
properly. This goes on for a long time and the longer it continues, without
an explanation as to why, the more mysterious it becomes. The musicians, who
were at first a little put out by their chilly reception, start to speculate
amongst themselves as to what kind of an operation they have gotten
themselves into now.
Finally, one morning, the musicians are assembled in a classroom in
front of the cleanest chalkboard Waterhouse has ever seen. The last few days
have imbued him with just enough paranoia that he suspects it is that clean
for a reason erasing chalkboards is not to be taken lightly during wartime.
They are seated in little chairs with desks attached to them, desks
designed for right handers. Lawrence puts his notepad in his lap, then rests
his bandaged right hand on the desk and begins to play a ditty from Art of
Fugue, grimacing and even grunting with pain as his burned skin stretches
and slides over his knuckles.
Someone chucks him on the shoulder. He opens his eyes to see that he is
the only person in the room sitting down; an officer is on the deck. He
stands up and his weak leg nearly buckles. When he finally gets himself
fully to his feet, he sees that the officer (if he even is an officer) is
out of uniform. Way out of uniform. He's wearing a bathrobe and smoking a
pipe. The bathrobe is extraordinarily worn, and not in the sense of, say, a
hospital or hotel bathrobe that gets laundered frequently. This thing hasn't
been laundered in a long time, but boy has it seen some use. The elbows are
worn out and the bottom of the right sleeve is ashy grey and slippery with
graphite from being dragged back and forth, tens of thousands of times,
across sheets of paper dense with number two pencil work. The terrycloth has
a dandruffy appearance, but it has nothing to do with exfoliation of the
scalp; these flakes are way too big, and too geometric: rectangles and
circular dots of oaktag, punched out of cards and tape respectively. The
pipe went out a long time ago and the officer (or whatever he is) is not
even pretending to worry about getting it relit. It is there just to give
him something to bite down on, which he does as vigorously as a civil war
infantryman having a leg sawed off.
Some other fellow one who actually bothered to shave, shower, and put
on a uniform introduces bathrobe man as Commander Shane spelled s c h o e n,
but Schoen is having none of it; he turns his back on them, exposing the
back side of his bathrobe, which around the buttocks is worn transparent as
a negligee. Reading from a notebook, he writes out the following in block
letters:
Here in London, the street pattern is irregular and so the transitions
in the square wave come at random seeming times, sometimes very close
together, sometimes very far apart.
A scientist watching the wave would probably despair of finding any
pattern; it would look like a random circuit, driven by noise, triggered
perhaps by the arrival of cosmic rays from deep space, or the decay of
radioactive isotopes.
But if he had depth and ingenuity, it would be a different matter.
Depth could be obtained by putting a green light bulb on the head of
every person in London and then recording their tracings for a few nights.
The result would be a thick pile of graph paper tracings, each one as
seemingly random as the others. The thicker the pile, the greater the depth.
Ingenuity is a completely different matter. There is no systematic way
to get it. One person could look at the pile of square wave tracings and see
nothing but noise. Another might find a source of fascination there, an
irrational feeling impossible to explain to anyone who did not share it.
Some deep part of the mind, adept at noticing patterns (or the existence of
a pattern) would stir awake and frantically signal the dull quotidian parts
of the brain to keep looking at the pile of graph paper. The signal is dim
and not always heeded, but it would instruct the recipient to stand there
for days if necessary, shuffling through the pile of graphs like an autist,
spreading them out over a large floor, stacking them in piles according to
some inscrutable system, pencilling numbers, and letters from dead
alphabets, into the corners, cross referencing them, finding patterns, cross
checking them against others.
One day this person would walk out of that room carrying a highly
accurate street map of London, reconstructed from the information in all of
those square wave plots.
Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is one of those people.
As a result, the authorities of his country, the United States of
America, have made him swear a mickle oath of secrecy, and keep supplying
him with new uniforms of various services and ranks, and now have sent him
to London.
He steps off a curb, glancing reflexively to the left. A jingling
sounds in his right ear, bicycle brakes trumpet. It is merely a Royal Marine
(Waterhouse is beginning to recognize the uniforms) off on some errand; but
he has reinforcements behind him in the form of a bus/coach painted olive
drab and stenciled all over with inscrutable code numbers.
"Pardon me, sir!" the Royal Marine says brightly, and swerves around
him, apparently reckoning that the coach can handle any mopping up work.
Waterhouse leaps forward, directly into the path of a black taxi coming the
other way.
After making it across that particular street, though, he arrives at
his Westminster destination without further life threatening incidents,
unless you count being a few minutes' airplane ride from a tightly organized
horde of murderous Germans with the best weapons in the world. He has found
himself in a part of town that seems almost like certain lightless, hemmed
in parts of Manhattan: narrow streets lined with buildings on the order of
ten stories high. Occasional glimpses of ancient and mighty gothic piles at
street ends clue him in to the fact that he is nigh unto Greatness. As in
Manhattan, the people walk fast, each with some clear purpose in mind.
The amended heels of the pedestrians' wartime shoes pop metallically.
Each pedestrian has a fairly consistent stride length and clicks with nearly
metronomic precision. A microphone in the sidewalk would provide an
eavesdropper with a cacophony of clicks, seemingly random like the noise
from a Geiger counter. But the right kind of person could abstract signal
from noise and count the pedestrians, provide a male/female break down and a
leg length histogram
He has to stop this. He would like to concentrate on the matter at
hand, but that is still a mystery.
A massive, blocky modern sculpture sits over the door of the St.
James's Park tube station, doing twenty four hour surveillance on the
Broadway Buildings, which is actually just a single building. Like every
other intelligence headquarters Waterhouse had seen, it is a great
disappointment.
It is, after all, just a building orange stone, ten or so stories, an
unreasonably high mansard roof accounting for the top three, some smidgens
of classical ornament above the windows, which like all windows in London
are divided into eight tight triangles by strips of masking tape. Waterhouse
finds that this look blends better with classical architecture than, say,
gothic.
He has some grounding in physics and finds it implausible that, when a
few hundred pounds of trinitrotoluene are set off in the neighborhood and
the resulting shock wave propagates through a large pane of glass the people
on the other side of it will derive any benefit from an asterisk of paper
tape. It is a superstitious gesture, like hexes on Pennsylvania Dutch
farmhouses. The sight of it probably helps keep people's minds focused on
the war.
Which doesn't seem to be working for Waterhouse. He makes his way
carefully across the street, thinking very hard about the direction of the
traffic, on the assumption that someone inside will be watching him. He goes
inside, holding the door for a fearsomely brisk young woman in a
quasimilitary outfit who makes it clear that Waterhouse had better not
expect to Get Anywhere just because he's holding the door for her and then
for a tired looking septuagenarian gent with a white mustache.
The lobby is well guarded and there is some business with Waterhouse's
credentials and his orders. Then he makes the obligatory mistake of going to
the wrong floor because they are numbered differently here. This would be a
lot funnier if this were not a military intelligence headquarters in the
thick of the greatest war in the history of the world.
When he does get to the right floor, though, it is a bit posher than
the wrong one was. Of course, the underlying structure of everything in
England is posh. There is no in between with these people. You have to walk
a mile to find a telephone booth, but when you find it, it is built as if
the senseless dynamiting of pay phones had been a serious problem at some
time in the past. And a British mailbox can presumably stop a German tank.
None of them have cars, but when they do, they are three ton hand built
beasts. The concept of stamping out a whole lot of cars is unthinkable there
are certain procedures that have to be followed, Mt. Ford, such as the hand
brazing of radiators, the traditional whittling of the tyres from solid
blocks of cahoutchouc.
Meetings are all the same. Waterhouse is always the Guest; he has never
actually hosted a meeting. The Guest arrives at an unfamiliar building, sits
in a waiting area declining offers of caffeinated beverages from a
personable but chaste female, and is, in time, ushered to the Room, where
the Main Guy and the Other Guys are awaiting him. There is a system of
introductions which the Guest need not concern himself with because he is
operating in a passive mode and need only respond to stimuli, shaking all
hands that are offered, declining all further offers of caffeinated and
(now) alcoholic beverages, sitting down when and where invited. In this
case, the Main Guy and all but one of the Other Guys happen to be British,
the selection of beverages is slightly different, the room, being British,
is thrown together from blocks of stone like a Pharaoh's inner tomb, and the
windows have the usual unconvincing strips of tape on them. The Predictable
Humor Phase is much shorter than in America, the Chitchat Phase longer.
Waterhouse has forgotten all of their names. He always immediately
forgets the names. Even if he remembered them, he would not know their
significance, as he does not actually have the organization chart of the
Foreign Ministry (which runs Intelligence) and the Military laid out in
front of him. They keep saying "woe to hice!" but just as he actually begins
to feel sorry for this Hice fellow, whoever he is, he figures out that this
is how they pronounce "Waterhouse." Other than that, the one remark that
actually penetrates his brain is when one of the Other Guys says something
about the Prime Minister that implies considerable familiarity. And he's not
even the Main Guy. The Main Guy is much older and more distinguished. So it
seems to Waterhouse (though he has completely stopped listening to what all
of these people are saying to him) that a good half of the people in the
room have recently had conversations with Winston Churchill.
Then, suddenly, certain words come into the conversation. Water house
was not paying attention, but he is pretty sure that within the last ten
seconds, the word Ultra was uttered. He blinks and sits up straighter.
The Main Guy looks bemused. The Other Guys look startled.
"Was something said, a few minutes ago, about the availability of
coffee?" Waterhouse says.
"Miss Stanhope, coffee for Captain Woe To Hice," says the Main Guy into
an electrical intercom. It is one of only half a dozen office intercoms in
the British Empire. However, it is cast in a solid ingot from a hundred
pounds of iron and fed by 420 volt cables as thick as Waterhouse's index
finger. "And if you would be so good as to bring tea."
So, now Waterhouse knows the name of the Main Guy's secretary. That's a
start. From that, with a bit of research he might be able to recover the
memory of the Main Guy's name.
This seems to have thrown them back into the Chitchat Phase, and though
American important guys would be fuming and frustrated, the Brits seem
enormously relieved. Even more beverages are ordered from Miss Stanhope.
"Have you seen Dr. Shehrrrn recently?" the Main Guy inquires of
Waterhouse. He has a touch of concern in his voice.
"Who?" Then Waterhouse realizes that the person in question is
Commander Schoen, and that here in London the name is apt to be pronounced
correctly, Shehrrn instead of Shane.
"Commander Waterhouse?" the Main Guy says, several minutes later. On
the fly, Waterhouse has been trying to invent a new cryptosystem based upon
alternative systems of pronouncing words and hasn't said anything in quite a
while.
"Oh, yeah! Well, I stopped in briefly and paid my respects to Schoen
before getting on the ship. Of course, when he's, uh, feeling under the
weather, everyone's under strict orders not to talk cryptology with him."
"Of course."
"The problem is that when your whole relationship with the fellow is
built around cryptology, you can't even really poke your head in the door
without violating that order."
"Yes, it is most awkward."
"I guess he's doing okay." Waterhouse does not say this very
convincingly and there is an appropriate silence around the table.
"When he was in better spirits, he wrote glowingly of your work on the
Cryptonomicon," says one of the Other Guys, who has not spoken very much
until now. Waterhouse pegs him as some kind of unspecified mover and shaker
in the world of machine cryptology.
"He's a heck of a fella," Waterhouse says.
The Main Guy uses this as an opening. "Because of your work with Dr.
Schoen's Indigo machine, you are, by definition, on the Magic list. Now that
this country and yours have agreed at least in principle to cooperate in the
field of cryptanalysis, this automatically puts you on the Ultra list."
"I understand, sir," Waterhouse says.
"Ultra and Magic are more symmetrical than not. In each case, a
belligerent Power has developed a machine cypher which it considers to be
perfectly unbreakable. In each case, an allied Power has in fact broken that
cypher. In America, Dr. Schoen and his team broke Indigo and devised the
Magic machine. Here, it was Dr. Knox's team that broke Enigma and devised
the Bombe. The leading light here seems to have been Dr. Turing. The leading
light with you chaps was Dr. Schoen, who is, as you said, under the weather.
But he holds you up as comparable to Turing, Commander Waterhouse."
"That's pretty darn generous," Waterhouse says.
"But you studied with Turing at Princeton, did you not?"
"We were there at the same time, if that's what you mean. We rode
bikes. His work was a lot more advanced."
"But Turing was pursuing graduate studies. You were merely an
undergraduate."
"Sure. But even allowing for that, he's way smarter than me."
"You are too modest, Captain Waterhouse. How many undergraduates have
published papers in international journals?"
"We just rode bikes," Waterhouse insists. "Einstein wouldn't give me
the time of day."
"Dr. Turing has shown himself to be rather handy with information
theory," says a prematurely haggard guy with long limp grey hair, whom
Waterhouse now pegs as some sort of Oxbridge don. "You must have discussed
this with him.
The don turns to the others and says, donnishly, "Information Theory
would inform a mechanical calculator in much the same way as, say, fluid
dynamics would inform the hull of a ship." Then he turns back to Waterhouse
and says, somewhat less formally: "Dr. Turing has continued to develop his
work on the subject since he vanished, from your point of view, into the
realm of the Classified. Of particular interest has been the subject of just
how much information can be extracted from seemingly random data."
Suddenly all of the other people in the room are exchanging those
amused looks again. "I gather from your reaction," says the Main Guy, "that
this has been of continuing interest to you as well."
Waterhouse wonders what his reaction was. Did he grow fangs? Drool into
his coffee?
"That's good," says the Main Guy before Waterhouse can answer, "because
it is of the highest interest to us as well. You see, now that we are making
efforts and I must emphasize the preliminary and unsatisfactory level of
these efforts to this point to coordinate intelligence between America and
Britain, we find ourselves in the oddest situation that has ever faced a
pair of allies in a war. We know everything, Commander Waterhouse. We
receive Hitler's personal communications to his theater commanders,
frequently before the commanders do! This knowledge is obviously a powerful
tool. But just as obviously, it cannot help us win the war unless we allow
it to change our actions. That is, if, through Ultra, we become aware of a
convoy sailing from Taranto to supply Rommel in North Africa, the knowledge
does us no good unless we go out and sink that convoy."
"Clearly," Waterhouse says.
"Now, if ten convoys are sent out and all of them are sunk, even those
under cover of clouds and darkness, the Germans will ask themselves how we
knew where those convoys could be found. They will realize that we have
penetrated the Enigma cypher, and change it, and then this tool will be lost
to us. It is safe to say that Mr. Churchill will be displeased by such an
outcome." The Main Guy looks at all of the others, who nod knowingly.
Waterhouse gets the feeling that Mr. Churchill has been bearing down rather
hard on this particular point.
"Let us recast this in information theory terms," says the don.
"Information flows from Germany to us, through the Ultra system at Bletchley
Park. That information comes to us as seemingly random Morse code
transmissions on the wireless. But because we have very bright people who
can discover order in what is seemingly random, we can extract information
that is crucial to our endeavors. Now, the Germans have not broken our
important cyphers. But they can observe our actions the routing of our
convoys in the North Atlantic, the deployment of our air forces. If the
convoys always avoid the U boats, if the air forces always go straight to
the German convoys, then it is clear to the Germans I'm speaking of a very
bright sort of German here, a German of the professor type that there is not
randomness here. This German can find correlations. He can see that we know
more than we should. In other words, there is a certain point at which
information begins to flow from us back to the Germans."
"We need to know where that point is," says the Main Guy. "Exactly
where it is. We need then to stay on the right side of it. To develop the
appearance of randomness."
"Yes," Waterhouse says, "and it has to be a kind of randomness that
would convince someone like Rudolf von Hacklheber."
"Exactly the fellow we had in mind," the don says. "Dr. von Hacklheber,
as of last year."
"Oh!" Waterhouse says. "Rudy got his Ph.D.?" Since Rudy got called back
into the embrace of the Thousand Year Reich, Waterhouse has assumed the
worst: imagining him out there in a greatcoat, sleeping in drifts and
besieging Leningrad or something. But apparently the Nazis, with their sharp
eye for talent (as long as it isn't Jewish talent) have given him a desk
job.
Still, it's touch and go for a while after Waterhouse shows pleasure
that Rudy's okay. One of the Other Guys, trying to break the ice, jokes that
if someone had had the foresight to lock Rudy up in New Jersey for the
duration, there would be no need for the new category of secret known as
Ultra Mega. No one seems to think it's funny, so Waterhouse assumes it's
true.
They show him the organizational chart for RAE Special Detachment No.
2701, which contains the names of all of the twenty four people in the world
who are on to Ultra Mega. The top is cluttered with names such as Winston
Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Then come some other names that
seem oddly familiar to Waterhouse perhaps the names of these very gents here
in this room. Below them, one Chattan, a youngish RAF colonel who
(Waterhouse is assured) accomplished some very fine things during the Battle
of Britain.
In the next rank of the chart is the name Lawrence Pritchard
Waterhouse. There are two other names: one is an RAF captain and the other
is a captain in the United States Marine Corps. There is also a dotted line
veering off to one side, leading to the name Dr. Alan Mathison Turing. Taken
as a whole, this chart may be the most irregular and bizarre ad hocracy ever
grafted onto a military organization.
In the bottom row of the chart are two groups of half a dozen names,
clustered beneath the names of the RAF captain and the Marine captain
respectively. These are the squads that represent the executive wing of the
organization: as one of the guys at the Broadway Building puts it, "the men
at the coal face," and as the one American Guy translates it for him, "this
is where the rubber meets the road."
"Do you have any questions?" the Main Guy asks.
"Did Alan choose the number?"
"You mean Dr. Turing?"
"Yes. Did he choose the number 2701?"
This level of detail is clearly several ranks beneath the station of
the men in the Broadway Buildings. They look startled and almost offended,
as if Waterhouse has suddenly asked them to take dictation.
"Possibly," says the Main Guy. "Why do you ask?"
"Because," Waterhouse says, "the number 2701 is the product of two
primes, and those numbers, 37 and 73, when expressed in decimal notation,
are, as you can plainly see, the reverse of each other."
All heads swivel toward the don, who looks put out. "We'd best change
that," he says, "it is the sort of thing that Dr. von Hacklheber would
notice." He stands up, withdraws a Mont Blanc fountain pen from his pocket,
and amends the organizational chart so that it reads 2702 instead of 2701.
As he is doing this, Waterhouse looks at the other men in the room and
thinks that they look satisfied. Clearly, this is just the sort of parlor
trick they have hired Waterhouse to perform.
Chapter 13 CORREGIDOR
There is no fixed boundary between the water of Manila Bay and the
humid air above it, only a featureless blue grey shroud hanging a couple of
miles away. Glory IV maneuvers cautiously through an immense strewing of
anchored cargo ships for about half an hour, then picks up speed and heads
out into the center of the bay. The air thins a bit, allowing Randy a good
view of Bata'an off to starboard: black mountains mostly veiled in haze and
speckled by the mushroom cap shaped clouds of ascending thermals. For the
most part, it has no beaches, just red cliffs plummeting the last few yards
into the sea. But as they work their way out to the end of the peninsula,
the land tails off more gently and supports a few pale green fields. At the
very tip of Bata'an are a couple of stabbing limestone crags that Randy
recognizes from Avi's video. But by this point he has eyes mostly for
Corregidor itself, which lies a few miles off the end of the peninsula.
America Shaftoe, or Amy as she likes to be called, spends most of the
voyage bustling around on the deck, engaging the Filipino and American
divers in bursts of serious conversation, sometimes sitting cross legged on
the deck plates to go over papers or charts. She has donned a frayed straw
cowboy hat to protect her head from solar radiation. Randy's in no hurry to
expose himself. He ambles around the air conditioned cabin, sipping his
coffee and looking at the photographs on the walls.
He is naively expecting to see pictures of divers landing submarine
cables on beaches. Semper Marine Services does a fair amount of cable work
and does it well, he checked their references before hiring them but they
apparently do not consider that kind of work interesting enough to
photograph. Most of these pictures are of undersea salvage operations:
divers, with enormous grins on their leathery faces, triumphantly holding up
barnacle encrusted vases, like hockey players brandishing the Stanley Cup.
From a distance, Corregidor is a lens of jungle bulging out of the
water with a flat shelf extending off to one side. From the maps, he knows
that it is really a sperm shaped affair. What looks like a shelf from this
angle is its tail, which snakes off to the east as if the sperm were trying
to swim out of Manila Bay to impregnate Asia.
Amy storms past and throws the cabin door open. "Come to the bridge,"
she says, "you should see this."
Randy follow's her. "Who's the guy in most of those pictures?" he asks.
"Scary, crew cut?"
"Yeah."
"That's my father," she says. "Doug."
"Would that be Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe?" Randy asks. He's seen the
name on some of the documents that he's exchanged with Semper Marine.
"The same."
"The ex SEAL?"
"Yeah. But he doesn't like to be referred to that way. It is such a
cliche."
"Why does he seem familiar to me?"
Amy sighs. "He had his fifteen minutes of fame back in 1975."
''I'm having trouble remembering."
"You know Comstock?"
"Attorney General Paul Comstock? Hates crypto?"
"I'm talking about his father. Earl Comstock."
"Cold War policy guy the brains behind the Vietnam War right?"
"I've never heard him described that way, but yeah, we're talking about
the same guy. You might remember that back in 1975, Earl Comstock fell, or
was pushed, off a ski lift in Colorado, and broke his arms."
"Oh, yeah. It's sort of coming back to me.
"My pop " Amy does a little head fake towards one of the photographs "
happened to be seated right next to him at the time."
"By accident, or "
"Total chance. Not planned."
"That's one way to look at it," Randy says, "but on the other hand, if
Earl Comstock went skiing frequently, the probability was actually rather
high that sooner or later he'd find himself sitting, fifty feet off the
ground, next to a Vietnam combat veteran."
"Whatever. All I'm saying is I don't want to talk about it, actually."
"Am I going to get to meet this character?" Randy asks, looking at the
photograph.
Amy bites her lip and squints at the horizon. "Ninety percent of the
time his presence is a sign that something really weird is going on." She
opens the hatch to the bridge and holds it for him, pointing out the high
step.
"The other ten percent?"
"He's bored, or on the outs with his girlfriend."
Glory's pilot is concentrating intensely and ignores them, which Randy
takes to be a sign of professionalism. The bridge has many counters
fashioned from doors or thick plywood, and all of the available space is
covered with electronic gear: a fax, a smaller machine that spews out
weather bulletins, three computers, a satellite phone, a few GSM phones
socketed into their chargers, depth sounding gear. Amy leads him over to a
machine with a big screen that is showing what looks like a black and white
photo of rugged terrain. "Sidescan sonar," she explains, "one of our best
tools for this kind of work. Shows us what's on the bottom." She checks one
of the computer screens for their current coordinates and then runs a quick
calculation in her head. "Ernesto, change course five degrees to starboard
please."
"Yes ma'am," Ernesto says, and makes it happen.
"What are you looking for?"
"This is a freebie like the cigarettes at the hotel," Amy explains.
"Just an extra added bonus for doing business with us. Sometimes we like to
play tour guide. See? Check that out." She uses her pinkie to point out
something that is just becoming visible on the screen. Randy hunches over
and peers at it. It is clearly a manmade shape: a jumble of straight lines
and right angles.
"Looks like a heap of debris," he says.
"It is now," Amy says, "but it used to be a good chunk of the Filipino
treasury."
"What?"
"During the war," Amy says, "after Pearl Harbor, but before the
Japanese took Manila, the government emptied out the treasury. They put all
the gold and silver into crates and shipped it to Corregidor for safekeeping
supposedly."
"What do you mean, supposedly?"
She shrugs. "This is the Philippines," she says. "I have the feeling a
lot of it ended up elsewhere. But a lot of the silver ended up there." She
straightens up and nods out the window at Corregidor. "At the time they
thought Corregidor was impregnable."
"When was this, roughly?"
"December '41 or January '42. Anyway, it became obvious that Corregidor
was going to fall. A submarine came and took away the gold at the beginning
of February. Then another sub came and took off guys they couldn't allow to
be captured, like codebreakers. But they didn't have enough subs to carry
away all the silver. MacArthur left in March. They started taking the silver
out, in crates, in the middle of the night, and dropping it into the water."
"You're shitting me!"
"They could always come back later and try to recover it," Amy says.
"Better to lose it all than let the Japanese take it, right?"
"I guess so."
"The Japanese recovered a lot of that silver they captured a bunch of
American divers on Bata'an and Corregidor, and made them go down, right down
below where we are at this moment, and recover it. But those same divers
managed to hide a lot of silver from their guards and get it to Filipinos,
who smuggled it into Manila, where it became so common that it totally
debased the Japanese occupation currency.
"So what are we seeing right now?"
"The remains of old crates that burst open when they hit the seafloor,"
Amy says.
"Was there any of that silver left when the war ended?"
"Oh, sure," Amy says breezily. "Most of it was dumped here, and those
divers got it, but some was dumped in other areas. My dad recovered some of
it as late as the 1970s."
"Wow. That doesn't make any sense!"
"Why not?"
"I can't believe that piles of silver just sat on the bottom of the
ocean for thirty years, free for the taking."
"You don't know the Philippines very well," Amy says.
"I know that it's a poor country. Why didn't someone come out and get
that silver?"
"Most of the treasure hunters in this part of the world are looking for
much bigger game," Amy says, "or easier."
Randy's nonplussed. "A pile of silver on the bottom of the bay seems
big and easy to me.
"It's not. Silver's not worth that much. A Sung Dynasty vase, cleaned
up, can go for more than its weight in gold. Gold. And it's easier to find
the vase you just scan the seafloor, looking for something shaped like a
junk. A sunken junk makes a distinctive image on sonar. Whereas an old
crate, all busted up and covered with coral and barnacles, tends to look
like a rock."
As they draw closer to Corregidor, Randy can see that the tail of the
island is lumpy, with big stacks of rock protruding from it here and there.
The color of the land fades gradually from dark jungle green to pale green
and then a sere reddish brown as the tail extends from the fat center of the
island out to the end, and the soil becomes dryer. Randy's gaze is fixed on
one of those rocky crags, which is surmounted by a new steel tower. Atop the
tower is a microwave horn aimed east, toward Epiphyte's building in
Intramuros.
"See those caves along the waterline?" Amy says. She seems to regret
having mentioned sunken treasure in the first place, and now wants to get
off the subject.
Randy tears himself away from the microwave antenna, of which he is
part owner, and looks in the direction Amy's pointing. The limestock flank
of the island, which drops vertically the last few meters into the water, is
riddled with holes.
"Yeah."
"Built by Americans to house beach defense guns. Enlarged by the
Japanese as launch sites for suicide boats."
"Wow."
Randy notices a deep gargling noise, and looks over to see that a boat
has fallen in alongside them. It is a canoe shaped affair maybe forty feet
long, with long outriggers on either side. A couple of ragged flags fly from
a short mast, and bright laundry flaps gaily from various lines strung here
and there. A big, naked diesel engine sits in the middle of the hull
flailing the atmosphere with black smoke. Forward of that, several
Filipinos, including women and children, are gathered in the shade of a
bright blue tarpaulin, eating. Aft, a couple of men are fiddling with diving
equipment. One of them is holding something up to his mouth: a microphone. A
voice blares from Glory's radio, speaking Tagalog. Ernesto stifles a laugh,
picks up the mike, and answers briefly. Randy doesn't know what they are
saying, but he suspects it is something like "Let's horse around later, our
client is on the bridge right now."
"Business associates," Amy explains dryly. Her body language says that
she wants to get away from Randy and back to work.
"Thanks for the tour," Randy says. "One question."
Amy raises her eyebrows, trying to look patient.
"How much of Semper Marine's revenue derives from treasure hunting?"
"This month? This year? The last ten years? Over the lifetime of the
company?" Amy says.
"Whatever."
"That kind of income is sporadic," Amy says. "Glory was paid for, and
then some, by pottery that we recovered from a junk. But some years we get
all of our revenue from jobs like this one."
"In other words, boring jobs that suck?" Randy says. He just blurts it
out. Normally he controls his tongue a little better. But shaving off his
beard has blurred his ego boundaries, or something.
He's expecting her to laugh or at least wink a him, but she takes it
very seriously. She has a pretty good poker face. "Think of it as making
license plates," she says.
"So you guys are basically a bunch of treasure hunters," Randy says.
"You just make license plates to stabilize your cash flow."
"Call us treasure hunters if you like," Amy says. "Why are you in
business, Randy?" She turns around and stalks out of the place.
Randy's still watching her go when he hears Ernesto cursing under his
breath, not so much angry as astonished. Glory is swinging around the tip of
Corregidor's tail now and the entire southern side of the island is becoming
visible for the first time. The last mile or so of the tail curves around to
form a semicircular bay. Anchored in the center of this bay is a white ship
that Randy identifies, at first, as a small ocean liner with rakish and
wicked lines. Then he sees the name painted on its stern: RUI FALEIRO SANTA
MONICA, CALIFORNIA
Randy goes and stands next to Ernesto and they stare at the white ship
for a while. Randy has heard about it, and Ernesto, like everyone else in
the Philippines, knows about it. But seeing it is another thing entirely. A
helicopter sits on its afterdeck like a toy. A dagger shaped muscle boat
hangs from a davit, ready for use as a dinghy. A brown skinned man in a
gleaming white uniform can be seen polishing a brass rail.
"Rui Faleiro was Magellan's cosmographer," Randy says.
"Cosmographer?"
"The brains of the operation," Randy says, tapping his head.
"He came here with Magellan?" Ernesto asks.
In most of the world, Magellan is thought of as the first guy who went
around the world. Here, everyone knows he only made it as far as Mactan
Island, where he was killed by Filipinos.
"When Magellan set out on his ship, Faleiro stayed behind in Seville,"
Randy says. "He went crazy."
"You know a lot about Magallanes, eh?" Ernesto says. "No," Randy says,
"I know a lot about the Dentist."
***
"Don't talk to the Dentist. Ever. Not about anything. Not even tech
stuff. Any technical question he asks you is just a stalking horse for some
business tactic that is as far beyond your comprehension as Gödel's Proof
would be to Daffy Duck."
Avi told Randy this spontaneously one evening, as they were tucking
into dinner at a restaurant in downtown Makati. Avi refuses to discuss
anything important within a mile of the Manila Hotel because he thinks every
room, and every table, is under surveillance.
"Thanks for the vote of confidence," Randy said.
"Hey," Avi said, "I'm just trying to stake out my turf here justify my
existence in this project. I'll handle the business stuff."
"You're not being a little paranoid?"
"Listen. The Dentist has at least a billion dollars of his own, and
another ten billion under management half the fucking orthodontists in
Southern California retired at age forty because he dectupled their IRAs in
the space of two or three years. You don't achieve those kinds of results by
being a nice guy."
"Maybe he just got lucky."
"He did get lucky. But that doesn't mean he's a nice guy. My point is
that he put that money into investments that were extremely risky. He played
Russian roulette with his investors' life savings, keeping them in the dark.
I mean, this guy would invest in a Mindanao kidnapping ring if it gave a
good rate of return."
"Does he understand that he was lucky, I wonder?"
"That's my question. I'm guessing no. I think he considers himself to
be an instrument of Divine Providence, like Douglas MacArthur."
***
Rui Faleiro is the pride of Seattle's superyacht industry, which has
been burgeoning, ever so discreetly, of late. Randy gleaned a few facts
about it from a marketing brochure that was published before the Dentist
actually bought the ship. So he knows that the helicopter and the speedboat
came included in the purchase price, which has never been divulged. The
vessel contains, among other things, ten tons of marble. The master bedroom
suite contains full his and hers bathrooms lined with black marble and pink
marble respectively, so that the Dentist and the Diva don't have to fight
over sink space when they are primping for a big event in the yacht's grand
ballroom.
"The Dentist?" Ernesto says.
"Kepler. Doctor Kepler," Randy says. "In the States, some people call
him the Dentist." People in the high tech industry.
Ernesto nods knowingly. "A man like that could have had any woman in
the world," he says. "But he picked a Filipina."
"Yes," Randy says cautiously.
"In the States, do people know the story of Victoria Vigo?"
"I must tell you that she is not as famous in the States as she is
here."
"Of course."
"But some of her songs were very popular. Many people know that she
came from great poverty."
"Do people in the States know about Smoky Mountain? The garbage dump in
Tondo, where children hunt for food?"
"Some of them do. It will be very famous when the movie about Victoria
Vigo's life shows on television."
Ernesto nods, seemingly satisfied. Everyone here knows that a movie
about the Diva's life is being made, starring herself. They generally don't
know that it's a vanity project, financed by the Dentist, and that it will
be aired only on cable television in the middle of the night.
But they probably know that it will leave out all the good parts.
***
"As far as the Dentist is concerned," Avi said, "our advantage is that,
when it comes to the Philippines, he will be predictable. Tame. Even
docile." He smiles cryptically.
"How so?"
"Victoria Vigo whored her way up out of Smoky Mountain, right?"
"Well, there seems to be a lot of nudging and winking to that effect,
but I've never heard anyone come out and say it before," Randy said,
glancing around nervously.
"Believe me, it's the only way she could have gotten out of there.
Pimping arrangements were handled by the Bolobolos. This is a group from
Northern Luzon that was brought into power along with Marcos. They run that
part of town police, organized crime, local politics, you name it.
Consequently, they own her they have photographs, videos from the days when
she was an underage prostitute and porn film starlet."
Randy shook his head in disgust and amazement. "How the hell do you get
this information?"
"Never mind. Believe me, in some circles it's as well known as the
value of pi."
"Not my circles."
"Anyway, the point is that her interests are aligned with the Bolobolos
and always will be. And the Dentist is always going to obediently do
whatever his wife tells him to."
"Can you really assume that?" Randy said. "He's a tough guy. He
probably has a lot more money and power than the Bolobolos. He can do
whatever he wants."
"But he won't," Avi says, smiling that little smile again. "He'll do
what his wife tells him to.
"How do you know that?"
"Look," Avi said, "Kepler is a major control freak just like most
powerful, rich men. Right?"
"Right."
"If you are that much of a control freak, what sexual preferences does
that translate into?"
"I hope I'll never know. I suppose you would want to dominate a woman.
"Wrong!" Avi said. "Sex is more complicated than that, Randy. Sex is a
place where people's repressed desires come out. People get most turned on
when their innermost secrets are revealed "
"Shit! Kepler's a masochist?"
"He is such a fucking masochist that he was famous for it. At least in
the Southeast Asian sex industry. Pimps and Madams in Hong Kong, Bangkok,
Shenzhen, Manila, they all had files on him they knew exactly what he
wanted. And that's how he met Victoria Vigo. He was in Manila, see, working
on the FiliTel deal. Spent a lot of time here, staying in a hotel that's
owned, and bugged, by the Bolobolos. They studied his mating habits like
entomologists watching the reproductive habits of ants. They groomed
Victoria Vigo their ace, their bombshell, their sexual Terminator to give
Kepler exactly what Kepler wanted. Then they sent her into his life like a
guided fucking missile and pow! true love."
"You'd think he would have been suspicious, or something. I'm surprised
he'd get that involved with a whore."
"He didn't know she was a whore! That's the beauty of the plan! The
Bolobolos set her up with a fake identity as a concierge at Kepler's hotel!
A demure Catholic school girl! It starts with her getting him tickets to a
play, and inside of a year. he's chained to his bed on that fucking mega
yacht of his with strap marks on his ass, and she's standing over him with a
wedding ring on her finger the size of a headlamp, the hundred and thirty
eighth richest woman in the world."
"Hundred and twenty fifth," Randy corrected him, "FiliTel stock has
been on a bull run lately."
***
Randy spends the next days trying not to run into the Dentist. He stays
at a small private inn up on the top of the island, eating continental
breakfast every morning with an assortment of American and Nipponese war
veterans who have come here with their wives to (Randy supposes) deal with
emotional issues a million times more profound than anything Randy's ever
had to contend with. The Rui Faleiro is nothing if not conspicuous, and
Randy can get a pretty good idea of whether the Dentist is aboard it by
watching the movements of the helicopter and the speedboat.
When he thinks it's safe, he goes down to the beach below the microwave
antenna and watches Amy's divers work on the cable installation. Some of
them are working out in the surf zone, bolting sections of cast iron pipe
around the cable. Some are working a couple of miles offshore coordinating
with a barge that is injecting the cable directly into the muddy seafloor
with a giant, cleaver like appendage.
The shore end of the cable runs into a new reinforced concrete building
set back about a hundred meters from the high tide level. It is basically
just a big room filled with batteries, generators, air conditioning units,
and racks of electronic equipment. The software running on that equipment is
Randy's responsibility, and so he spends most of his time in that building,
staring into a computer screen and typing. From there, transmission lines
run up the hill to the microwave tower.
The other end is being extended out towards a buoy that is bobbing in
the South China Sea a few kilometers away. Attached to that buoy is the end
of the North Luzon Coastal Festoon, a cable, owned by FiliTel, that runs up
the coast of the island. If you follow it far enough you reach a building at
the northern tip of the island, where a big cable from Taiwan comes in.
Taiwan, in turn, is heavily webbed into the world submarine cable network;
it is easy and cheap to get data into or out of Taiwan.
There is only one gap left in the private chain of transmission that
Epiphyte and FiliTel are trying to establish from Taiwan to downtown Manila,
and that gap gets narrower by the day, as the cable barge grinds its way
towards the buoy.
***
When it finally gets there, Rui Faleiro weighs anchor and glides out to
meet it. The helicopter and the speedboat, and a flotilla of hired boats, go
into action ferrying dignitaries and media crews out from Manila. Avi shows
up carrying two fresh tuxedos from a tailor shop in Shanghai ("All those
famous Hong Kong tailors were refugees from Shanghai"). He and Randy tear
off the tissue paper, put them on, and then ride in an un air conditioned
jeepney down the hill to the dock, where Glory awaits them.
Two hours later, Randy gets to lay eyes on the Dentist and the Diva for
the first time ever in the grand ballroom of the Rui Faleiro. To Randy the
party is like any other: he shakes hands with a few people, forgets their
names, finds a place to sit down, and enjoys the wine and the food in
blissful solitude.
The one thing that is special about this party is that two tar covered
cables, each about the thickness of a baseball bat, are running up onto the
quarterdeck. If you go to the rail and look down you can see them disappear
into the brine. The cable ends meet on a tabletop in the middle of the deck,
where a technician, flown in from Hong Kong and duded up in a tuxedo, sits
with a box of tools, working on the splice. He is also working on a big
hangover, but that is fine with Randy since he knows that it's all fake the
cables are just scraps, their loose ends trailing in the water alongside the
yacht. The real splice was performed yesterday and is already lying on the
bottom of the sea with bits running through it.
There is another man on the quarterdeck, mostly staring at Bata'an and
Corregidor but also keeping an eye on Randy. The moment Randy notices him,
this man nods as if checking something off a list in his head, stands up,
walks over, and joins him. He is wearing a very ornate uniform, the U.S.
Navy equivalent of black tie. He is mostly bald, and what hair he does have
is battleship grey, and shorn to a length of perhaps five millimeters. As he
walks toward Randy, several Filipinos watch him with obvious curiosity.
"Randy," he says. Medals clink together as he grips Randy's right hand
and shakes it. He looks to be around fifty, but he has the skin of an eighty
year old Bedouin. He has a lot of ribbons on his chest, and many of them are
red and yellow, which are colors that Randy vaguely associates with Vietnam.
Above his pocket is a little plastic nameplate reading, SHAFTOE. "Don't be
deceived, Randy," says Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe, "I'm not on active duty.
Retired eons ago. But I'm still entitled to wear this uniform. And it's a
hell of a lot easier than going out and trying to find a tuxedo that fits
me."
"Pleased to meet you."
"Pleasure's mine. Where'd you get yours, by the way?"
"My tuxedo?"
"Yeah."
"My partner had it made."
"Your business partner, or your sexual partner?"
"My business partner. At the moment, I am without a sexual partner."
Doug Shaftoe nods impassively. "It is telling that you have not obtained one
in Manila. As our host did, for example."
Randy looks into the ballroom at Victoria Vigo, who, if she were any
more radiant, would cause paint to peel from the walls and windowpanes to
sag like caramel.
"I guess I'm just shy, or something," Randy says.
"Are you too shy to listen to a business proposition?"
"Not at all."
"My daughter asserts that you and our host might lay some more cables
around here in coming years."
"In business, people rarely plan to do a thing only once," Randy says.
"It messes up the spreadsheets."
"You are aware, by now, that the water in this area is shallow."
"Yeah."
"You know that cables cannot be laid in shallow water without extremely
detailed, high resolution sidescan sonar surveys."
"Yes."
"I would like to perform those surveys for you, Randy."
"I see."
"No, I don't think you do see. But I want you to see, and so I'm going
to explain it."
"Okay," Randy says. "Should I bring my partner out?"
"The concept I am about to convey to you is very simple and does not
require two first rate minds in order to process it," Doug Shaftoe says.
"Okay. What is the concept?"
"The detailed survey will be just chock full of new information about
what is on the floor of the ocean in this part of the world. Some of that
information might be valuable. More valuable than you imagine."
"Ah," Randy says. "You mean that it might be the kind of thing that
your company knows how to capitalize on."
"That's right," says Doug Shaftoe. "Now, if you hire one of my
competitors to perform your survey, and they stumble on this kind of
information, they will not tell you about it. They will exploit it
themselves. You will not know that they have found anything and you will not
profit from it. But if you hire Semper Marine Services, I will tell you
about whatever I find, and I will cut you and your company in on a share of
any proceeds."
"Hmmmm," Randy says. He is trying to figure out how to do a poker face,
but he knows that Shaftoe sees right through him.
"On one condition," Doug Shaftoe says.
"I suspected there might be a condition."
"Every hook that's worth a damn has a barb. This is the barb."
"What is it?" Randy asks.
"We keep it a secret from that son of a bitch," Doug Shaftoe says,
jerking his thumb at Hubert Kepler. "Because if the Dentist finds out, then
he and the Bolobolos will just split the entire thing up between them and
we'll see nothing. There's even a chance we would end up dead."
"Well, the being dead part is something that we will certainly have to
think about," Randy says, "but I will convey your proposal to my partner."
Chapter 14 TUBE
Waterhouse and a few dozen strangers are standing and sitting in an
extraordinarily long, narrow room that rocks from side to side. The room is
lined with windows but no light comes into them, only sound: a great deal of
rumbling, rattling, and screeching. Everyone is pensive and silent, as if
they were sitting in church waiting for the service to kick off.
Waterhouse is standing up gripping a ceiling mounted protuberance that
keeps him from being rocked right onto his can. For the last couple of
minutes he has been staring at a nearby poster providing instructions on how
to put on a gas mask. Waterhouse, like everyone else, is carrying one such
device with him in a small dun canvas shoulder bag. Waterhouse's looks
different from everyone else's because it is American and military. It has
drawn a stare or two from the others.
On the poster is a lovely and stylish woman with white skin, and auburn
hair which appears to have been chemically melted and reset into its current
shape at a quality salon. She stands upright, her spine like a flagpole,
chin in the air, elbows bent, hands ritualistically posed: fingers splayed,
thumbs sticking straight up in the air just in front of her face. A sinister
lump dangles between her hands, held in a cat's cradle of khaki strapping.
Her upthrust thumbs are the linchpins of this tidy web.
Waterhouse has been in London for a couple of days now and so he knows
the next part of the story. He would know this pose anywhere. This woman is
poised for the chin thrust. If gas ever falls on the capital, the gas
rattles will sound and the tops of the massive mailboxes, which have all
been treated with special paint, will turn black. Twenty million thumbs will
point into the greenish, poison sky, ten million gas masks will dangle from
them, ten million chins will thrust. He can just imagine the crisp luscious
sound of this woman's soft white skin forcing itself into the confining
black rubber.
Once the chin thrust is complete, all is well. You have to get the
straps neatly arranged atop your auburn permanent and get indoors, but the
worst danger is past. The British gas masks have a squat round fitting on
the front to allow exhalation, which looks exactly like the snout of a pig,
and no woman would be caught dead in such a thing if the models in the gas
mask posters were not such paragons of high caste beauty.
Something catches his eye out in the darkness beyond the window. The
train has reached one of those parts of the Underground where dim gun barrel
colored light sifts down, betraying the stygian secrets of the Tube.
Everyone in the car blinks, glances, and draws breath. The World has
rematerialized around them for a moment. Fragments of wall, encrusted
trusses, bundles of cable hang in space out there, revolving slowly, like
astronomical bodies, as the train works its way past.
The cables catch Waterhouse's eye: neatly bracketed to the stone walls
in parallel courses. They are like the creepers of some plutonic ivy that
spreads through the darkness of the Tube when the maintenance men aren't
paying attention, seeking a place to break out and up into the light.
When you walk along the street, up there in the Overground, you see the
first tendrils making their way up the ancient walls of the buildings.
Neoprene jacketed vines that grow in straight lines up sheer stone and
masonry and inject themselves through holes in windowframes, homing in
particularly on offices. Sometimes they are sheathed in metal tubes.
Sometimes the owners have painted them over. But all of them share a common
root system that flourishes in the unused channels and crevices of the
Underground, converging on giant switching stations in deep bomb proof
vaults.
The train invades a cathedral of dingy yellow light, and groans to a
stop, hogging the aisle. Lurid icons of national paranoia glow in the niches
and grottoes. An angelic chin thrusting woman anchors one end of the moral
continuum. At the opposite we have a succubus in a tight skirt, sprawled on
a davenport in the midst of a party. smirking through her false eyelashes as
she eavesdrops on the naive young servicemen gabbing away behind her.
Signs on the wall identify this as Euston in a tasteful sans serif that
screams official credibility. Waterhouse and most of the other people get
off the train. After fifteen minutes or so of ricocheting around the
station's precincts, asking directions and puzzling out timetables,
Waterhouse finds himself sitting aboard an intercity train bound for
Birmingham. Along the way, it is promised, it will stop at a place called
Bletchley.
Part of the reason for the confusion is that there is another train
about to leave from an adjacent siding, which goes straight to Bletchley,
its final destination, with no stops in between. Everyone on that train, it
seems, is a female in a quasimilitary uniform.
The RAF men with the Sten guns, standing watch by each door of that
train, checking papers and passes, will not let him aboard. Waterhouse looks
through the yellowing influence of the windows at the Bletchley girls in the
train, facing each other in klatsches of four and five, getting their
knitting out of their bags, turning balls of Scottish wool into balaclavas
and mittens for convoy crews in the North Atlantic, writing letters to their
brothers in the service and their mums and dads at home. The RAF gunmen
remain by the doors until all of them are closed and the train has begun to
move out of the station. As it builds speed, the rows and rows of girls,
knitting and writing and chatting, blur together into something that
probably looks a good deal like what sailors and soldiers the world over are
commonly seeing in their dreams. Waterhouse will never be one of those
soldiers, out on the front line, out in contact with the enemy. He has
tasted the apple of forbidden knowledge. He is forbidden to go anywhere in
the world where he might be captured by the enemy.
***
The train climbs up out of the night and into a red brick arroyo,
headed northwards out of the city. It is about three in the afternoon; that
special BP train must have been carrying swing shift gals.
Waterhouse has the feeling he will not be working anything like a
regular shift. His duffel bag which was packed for him is pregnant with
sartorial possibilities: thick oiled wool sweaters, tropical weight Navy and
Army uniforms, black ski mask, condoms.
The train slowly pulls free of the city and passes into a territory
patched with small residential towns. Waterhouse feels heavy in his seat,
and suspects a slight uphill tendency. They pass through a cleft that has
been made across a low range of hills, like a kerf in the top of a log, and
enter into a lovely territory of subtly swelling emerald green fields strewn
randomly with small white capsules that he takes to be sheep.
Of course, their distribution is probably not random at all it probably
reflects local variations in soil chemistry producing grass that the sheep
find more or less desirable. From aerial reconnaissance, the Germans could
draw up a map of British soil chemistry based upon analysis of sheep
distribution.
The fields are enclosed by old hedges, stone fences, or, especially in
the uplands, long swaths of forest. After an hour or so, the forest comes
right up along the left side of the train, covering a bank that rises up
gently from the railway siding. The train's brakes come on gassily, and the
train grumbles to a stop in a whistle stop station. But the line has forked
and ramified quite a bit, more than is warranted by the size of the station.
Waterhouse stands, plants his feet squarely, squats down in a sumo
wrestler's stance, and engages his duffel bag. Duffel appears to be winning
as it seemingly pushes Waterhouse out the door of the train and onto the
platform.
There is a stronger than usual smell of coal, and a good deal of noise
coming from not far away. Waterhouse looks up the line and discovers a heavy
industrial works unfurled across the many sidings. He stands and stares for
a couple of minutes, as his train pulls away, headed for points north, and
sees that they are in the business of repairing steam locomotives here at
Bletchley Depot. Waterhouse likes trains.
But that is not why he got a free suit of clothes and a ticket to
Bletchley, and so once again Waterhouse engages Duffel and gets it up the
stairs to the enclosed bridge that flies over all of the parallel lines.
Looking toward the station, he sees more Bletchley girls, WAAFs and WRENs,
coming towards him; the day shift, finished with their work, which consists
of the processing of ostensibly random letters and digits on a heavy
industrial scale. Not wanting to appear ridiculous in their sight, he
finally gets Duffel maneuvered onto his back, gets his arms through the
shoulder straps, and allows its weight to throw him forward across the
bridge.
The WAAFs and WRENs are only moderately interested in the sight of a
newly arriving American officer. Or perhaps they are only being demure. In
any case, Waterhouse knows he is one of the few, but not the first. Duffel
shoves him through the one room station like a fat cop chivvying a
hammerlocked drunk across the lobby of a two star hotel. Waterhouse is
ejected into a strip of open territory running along the north south road.
Directly across from him the woods rise up. Any notion that they might be
woods of the inviting sort is quickly dissolved by a dense spray of gelid
light glinting from the border of the wood as the low sun betrays that the
place is saturated with sharpened metal. There is an orifice in the woods,
spewing WAAFs and WRENs like the narrow outlet of a giant yellowjacket nest.
Waterhouse must either move forward or be pulled onto his back by
Duffel and left squirming helplessly in the parking lot like a flipped
beetle, so he staggers forward, across the street and onto the wide footpath
into the woods. The Bletchley girls surround him. They have celebrated the
end of their shift by applying lipstick. Wartime lipstick is necessarily
cobbled together from whatever tailings and gristle were left over once all
of the good stuff was used to coat propeller shafts. A florid and cloying
scent is needed to conceal its unspeakable mineral and animal origins.
It is the smell of War.
Waterhouse has not even been given the full tour of BP yet, but he
knows the gist of it. He knows that these demure girls, obediently shuffling
reams of gibberish through their machines, shift after shift, day after day,
have killed more men than Napoleon.
He makes slow and apologetic progress against the tide of the departing
day shift. At one point he simply gives up, steps aside, body slams Duffel
into the ivy, lights up a cigarette, and waits for a burst of a hundred or
so girls to go by him. Something pokes at his ankle: a wild raspberry cane,
furious with thorns. It supports an uncannily small and tidy spider web
whose geodesic strands gleam in a beam of low afternoon light. The spider in
the center is an imperturbable British sort, perfectly unruffled by
Waterhouse's clumsy Yank antics.
Waterhouse reaches out and catches a yellow brown elm leaf that happens
to fall through the air before him. He hunkers down, plants his cigarette in
his mouth, and, using both hands for steadiness, draws the sawtooth rim of
the elm leaf across one of the web's radial strands, which, he knows, will
not have any sticky stuff on it. Like a fiddle bow on a string, the leaf
sets up a fairly regular vibration in the web. The spider spins to face it,
rotating instantly, like a character in a badly spliced movie. Waterhouse is
so startled by the speed of the move that he starts back just a bit, then he
draws the leaf across the web again. The spider tenses, feeling the
vibrations.
Eventually it returns to its original position and carries on as
before, ignoring Waterhouse completely.
Spiders can tell from the vibrations what sort of insect they have
caught, and home in on it. There is a reason why the webs are radial, and
the spider plants itself at the convergence of the radii. The strands are an
extension of its nervous system. Information propagates down the gossamer
and into the spider, where it is processed by some kind of internal Turing
machine. Waterhouse has tried many different tricks, but he has never been
able to spoof a spider. Not a good omen!
The rush hour seems to have ended during Waterhouse's science
experiment. He engages Duffel once more. The struggle takes them another
hundred yards down the path, which finally empties out into a road just at
the point where it is barred by an iron gate slung between stupid obelisks
of red brick. The guards are, again, RAF men with Sten guns, and right now
they are examining the papers of a man in a canvas greatcoat and goggles,
who has just ridden up on an Army green motorcycle with panniers slung over
the rear wheel. The panniers are not especially full, but they have been
carefully secured; they contain the ammunition that the girls feed into the
chattering teeth of their ravenous weapons.
The motorcyclist is waved through, and makes an immediate left turn
down a narrow lane. Attention falls upon Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, who
after a suitable exchange of salutes, presents his credentials.
He has to choose among his several sets, which he doesn't manage to
hide from the guards. But the guards do not seem alarmed or even curious
about this, which sets them distinctly apart from most whom Waterhouse has
dealt with. Naturally, these men are not on the Ultra Mega list, and so it
would be a grave breach of security to tell them that he was here on Ultra
Mega business. They appear to have greeted many other men who can't state
their real business, however, and don't bat an eyelash when Lawrence
pretends to be one of the naval intelligence liaisons in Hut 4 or Hut 8.
Hut 8 is where they decrypt naval Enigma transmissions. Hut 4 accepts
the decrypts from Hut 8 and analyzes them. If Waterhouse pretends to be a
Hut 4 man the disguise will not last for long, because those fellows have to
actually know something about the Navy. He perfectly fits the profile of a
Hut 8 man, who need not know anything except pure math.
One of the RAF men peruses his papers, then steps into a small
guardhouse and stirs the crank on a telephone. Waterhouse stands there
awkwardly, marveling at the weapons slung from the shoulders of the RAP men.
They are, as far as he can tell, nothing more than steel pipes with a
trigger mounted toward one end. A small window cut through the pipe provides
a view of a coil spring nested inside. A few handles and fittings bolted on
from place to place do not make the Sten gun look any less like an ill
conceived high school metal shop project.
"Captain Waterhouse? You are to proceed to the Mansion," says the guard
who had spoken on the telephone. "You can't miss it."
Waterhouse walks for about fifty feet and finds that the Mansion is,
indeed, tragically unmissable. He stands and stares at it for a minute,
trying to fathom what the architect had been thinking. It is a busy piece of
work, with an excessive number of gables. He can only suppose that the
designer wanted to build what was really a large, single dwelling, but
sought to camouflage it as a line of at least half a dozen wildly mismatched
urban row houses inexplicably crammed together in the middle of six hundred
acres of Buckinghamshire farmland.
The place has been well looked after, but as Waterhouse draws closer,
he can see black lianas climbing up the brickwork. The root system that he
glimpsed in the Underground has spread beneath forest and pasture even to
this place and has begun to throw its neoprene creepers upwards. But this
organism is not phototropic it does not grow towards the light, always
questing towards the sun. It is infotropic. And it has spread to this place
for the same reason that infotropic humans like Lawrence Pritchard
Waterhouse and Dr. Alan Mathison Turing have come here, because Bletchley
Park has roughly the same situation in the info world as the sun does in the
solar system. Armies, nations, prime ministers, presidents and geniuses fall
around it, not in steady planetlike orbits but in the crazy careening
ellipses and hyperbolae of comets and stray asteroids.
Dr. Rudolf von Hacklheber can't see Bletchley Park, because it is the
second best kept secret in the world, after Ultra Mega. But from his office
in Berlin, sifting through dispatches from the Beobachtung Dienst, he can
glimpse fragments of those trajectories, and dream up hypotheses to explain
why they are just so. If the only logical hypothesis is that the Allies have
broken Enigma, then Detachment 2702 will have failed.
Lawrence displays further credentials and enters between a pair of
weathered gryphons. The mansion is nicer once you can no longer see its
exterior. Its faux rowhouse design provides many opportunities for bay
windows, providing sorely needed light. The hall is held up by gothic arches
and pillars made of a conspicuously low grade of brown marble that looks
like vitrified sewage.
The place is startlingly noisy; there is a rushing, clattering noise,
like rabid applause, permeating walls and doors, carried on a draft of hot
air with a stinging, oily scent. It is the peculiar scent of electric
teletypes or teleprinters, as the Brits call them. The noise and the heat
suggest there must be dozens of them in one of the mansion's lower rooms.
Waterhouse climbs a paneled stairway to what the Brits call the first
floor, and find it quieter and cooler. The high panjandrums of Bletchley
have their offices here. If the organization is run true to bureaucratic
form, Waterhouse will never see this place again once his initial interview
is finished. He finds his way to the office of Colonel Chattan, who
(Waterhouse's memory jogged by the sight of the name on the door) is the
fellow at the top of the chart of Detachment 2702.
Chattan rises to shake his hand. He's strawberry blond, blue eyed, and
probably would be rosy cheeked if he didn't have such a deep desert tan at
the moment. He is wearing a dress uniform; British officers have their
uniforms tailor made, it is the only way to obtain them. Waterhouse is
hardly a clothes horse, but he can see at a glance that Chattan's uniform
was not thrown together by Mummy in a few evenings in front of a flickering
coal grate. No, Chattan has himself an honest to god tailor somewhere. Yet,
when he speaks Waterhouse's name, he does not say "woe to hice" like the
Broadway Buildings crowd. The R comes through hard and crackling and the
"house" part is elongated into some thing like "hoos." He has some kind of a
wild ass accent on him, this Chattan.
With Chattan is a smaller man in British fatigues tight at the wrists
and ankles, otherwise blousy, of thick khaki flannel that would be
intolerably hot if these people couldn't rely on a steady ambient
temperature, indoors and out, of about fifty five degrees. The overall
effect always reminds Waterhouse of Dr. Dentons. This fellow is introduced
as Leftenant Robson, and he is the leader of one of 2702's two squads the
RAE one. He has a bristly mustache, trimmed very short, of silver and auburn
whiskers. He is a cheerful sort, at least in the presence of higher ranks,
and smiles frequently. His teeth splay out radially from the gumline so that
each mandible has the appearance of a coffee can in which a small grenade
has been detonated.
"This the fellow we've been waiting for," Chattan says to Robson. "The
one we could've used in Algiers."
"Yes!" Robson says. "Welcome to Detachment 2701, Captain Waterhouse."
"2702," Waterhouse says.
Chattan and Robson look ever so mildly startled.
"We can't use 2701 because it is the product of two primes."
"I beg your pardon?" Robson says.
One thing Waterhouse likes about these Brits is that when they don't
know what the hell you are talking about, they are at least open to the
possibility that it might be their fault. Robson has the look of a man who
has come up through the ranks. A Yank of that type would already be scornful
and blustery.
"Which ones?" Chattan says. That is encouraging; he at least knows what
a prime number is.
"73 and 37," Waterhouse says.
This makes a profound impression on Chattan. "Ah, yes, I see." He
shakes his head. "I shall have to give the Prof a good chaffing about this."
Robson has cocked his head far to one side so that it is almost resting
upon the thick woolly beret chucked into his epaulet. He is squinting, and
has an aghast look about him. His hypothetical Yank counterpart would
probably demand, at this point, a complete explanation of prime number
theory, and when it was finished, denounce it as horseshit. But Robson just
lets it go by. "Am I to understand that we are changing the number of our
Detachment?"
Waterhouse swallows. It seems clear from Robson's reaction that this is
going to involve a great deal of busy work for Robson and his men: weeks of
painting and stenciling and of trying to propagate the new number throughout
the military bureaucracy. It will be a miserable pain in the ass.
"2702 it is," Chattan says breezily. Unlike Waterhouse, he has no
difficulty issuing difficult, unpopular commands.
"Right then, I must see to some things. Pleasure making your
acquaintance, Captain Waterhouse."
"Pleasure's mine."
Robson shakes Waterhouse's hand again and excuses himself.
"We have a billet for you in one of the huts to the south of the
canteen," Chattan says. "Bletchley Park is our nominal headquarters, but we
anticipate that we will spend most of our time in those theaters where
heaviest use is being made of Ultra."
"I take it you've been in North Africa," Waterhouse says.
"Yes." Chattan raises his eyebrows, or rather the ridges of skin where
his eyebrows are presumably located; the hairs are colorless and
transparent, like nylon monofilament line. "Just got out by the skin of our
teeth there, I'm afraid."
"Had a close shave, did you?"
"Oh, I don't mean it that way," Chattan says. "I'm talking about the
integrity of the Ultra secret. We are still not sure whether we have
survived it. But the Prof has done some calculations suggesting that we may
be out of the woods."
"The Prof is what you call Dr. Turing?"
"Yes. He recommended you personally, you know."
"When the orders came through, I speculated as much."
"Turing is presently engaged on at least two other fronts of the
information war, and could not be part of our happy few."
"What happened in North Africa, Colonel Chattan?"
"It's still happening," Chattan says bemusedly. "Our Marine squad is
still in theater, widening the bell curve.
"Widening the bell curve?"
"Well, you know better than I do that random things typically have a
bell shaped distribution. Heights, for example. Come over to this window,
Captain Waterhouse."
Waterhouse joins Chattan at a bay window, where there is a view across
acres of what used to be gently undulating farmland. Looking beyond the
wooded belt to the uplands miles away, he can see what Bletchley Park
probably used to look like: green fields dotted with clusters of small
buildings.
But that is not what it looks like now. There is hardly a piece of land
within half a mile that has not been recently paved or built upon. Once you
get beyond the Mansion and its quaint little outbuildings, the park consists
of one story brick structures, nothing more than long corridors with
multiple transepts: +++++++, and new +'s being added as fast as the masons
can slap bricks on mud (Waterhouse wonders, idly, whether Rudy has seen
aerial reconnaissance photos of this place, and deduced from all of those
+'s the mathematical nature of the enterprise). The tortuous channels
between buildings are narrow, and each is made twice as narrow by an eight
foot high blast wall running down the middle of it, so that the Jerries will
have to spend at least one bomb for each building.
"In that building there," Chattan says, pointing to a small building
not far away a truly wretched looking brick hovel "are the Turing Bombes.
That's 'bombe' with an 'e' on the end. They are calculating machines
invented by your friend the Prof."
"Are they true universal Turing machines?" Waterhouse blurts. He is in
the grip of a stunning vision of what Bletchley Park might, in fact, be: a
secret kingdom in which Alan has somehow found the resources needed to
realize his great vision. A kingdom ruled not by men but by information,
where humble buildings made of + signs house Universal Machines that can be
configured to perform any computable operation.
"No," Chattan says, with a gentle, sad smile.
Waterhouse exhales for a long time. "Ah."
"Perhaps that will come next year, or the next."
"Perhaps."
"The bombes were adapted, by Turing and Welchman and others, from a
design dreamed up by Polish cryptanalysts. They consist of rotating drums
that test many possible Enigma keys with great speed. I'm sure the Prof will
explain it to you. But the point is that they have these vast pegboards in
the back, like telephone switchboards, and some of our girls have the job of
putting the right pegs into the right holes and wiring the things up every
day. Requires good eyesight, careful attention, and height."
"Height?"
"You'll notice that the girls who are assigned to that particular duty
are unusually tall. If the Germans were to somehow get their hands on the
personnel records for all of the people who work at Bletchley Park, and
graph their heights on a histogram, they would see a normal bell shaped
curve, representing most of the workers, with an abnormal bump on it
representing the unusual population of tall girls whom we have brought in to
work the plug boards."
"Yes, I see," Waterhouse says, "and someone like Rudy Dr. von
Hacklheber would notice the anomaly, and wonder about it."
"Precisely," Chattan says. "And it would then be the job of Detachment
2702 the Ultra Mega Group to plant false information that would throw your
friend Rudy off the scent." Chattan turns away from the window, strolls over
to his desk, and opens a large cigarette box, neatly stacked with fresh
ammunition. He offers one to Waterhouse with a deft hand gesture, and
Waterhouse accepts it, just to be social. As Chattan is giving him a light,
he gazes through the flame into Waterhouse's eye and says, 'I put it to you
now. How would you go about concealing from your friend Rudy that we had a
lot of tall girls here?'
"Assuming that he already had the personnel records?"
"Yes."
"Then it would be too late to conceal anything."
"Granted. Let us instead assume that he has some channel of information
that is bringing him these records, a few at a time. This channel is still
open and functioning. We cannot shut it down. Or perhaps we choose not to
shut it down, because even the absence of this channel will tell Rudy
something important."
"Well, there you go then," Waterhouse says. "We gin up some false
personnel records and plant them in the channel."
There is a small chalkboard on the wall of Chattan's office. It is a
palimpsest, not very well erased; the housekeeping detail here must have a
standing order never to clean it, lest something important be lost. As
Waterhouse approaches it, he can see older calculations layered atop each
other, fading off into the blackness like transmissions of white light
propagating into deep space.
He recognizes Alan's handwriting all over the place. It takes a
physical effort not to stand there and try to reconstruct Alan's
calculations from the ghosts lingering on the slate. He draws over them only
with reluctance.
Waterhouse slashes an abscissa and an ordinate onto the board, then
sweeps out a bell shaped curve. On top of the curve, to the right of the
peak, he adds a little hump.
"The tall girls," he explains. "The problem is this notch." He points
to the valley between the main peak and the bump. Then he draws a new peak
high and wide enough to cover both:
"We can do that by planting fake personnel records in Rudy's channel,
giving heights that are taller than the overall average, but shorter than
the bombe girls."
"But now you've dug yourself another hole," Chattan says. He is leaning
back in his officer's swivel chair, holding the cigarette in front of his
face, regarding Waterhouse through a motionless cloud of smoke.
Waterhouse says, "The new curve looks a little better because I filled
in that gap, but it's not really bell shaped. It doesn't tail off right, out
here at the edges. Dr. von Hacklheber will notice that. He'll realize that
someone's been tampering with his channel. To prevent that from happening I
would have to plant more fake records, giving some unusually large and small
values."
"Invent some fake girls who were exceptionally short or tall," Chattan
says.
"Yes. That would make the curve tail off in the way that it should.'
Chattan continues to look at him expectantly.
Waterhouse says, "So, the addition of a small number of what would
otherwise be bizarre anomalies makes it all look perfectly normal."
"As I said," Chattan says, "our squad is in North Africa even as we
speak widening the bell curve. Making it all look perfectly normal."
Chapter 15 MEAT
Okay, so Private First Class Gerald Hott, late of Chicago, Illinois,
did not exactly shoot up through the ranks during his fifteen year tenure in
the United States Army. He did, how ever, carve a bitchin' loin roast. He
was as deft with a boning knife as Bobby Shaftoe is with a bayonet. And who
is to say that a military butcher, by conserving the limited resources of a
steer's carcass and by scrupulously observing the mandated sanitary
practices, might not save as many lives as a steely eyed warrior? The
military is not just about killing Nips, Krauts, and Dagoes. It is also
about killing livestock and eating them. Gerald Hott was a front line
warrior who kept his freezer locker as clean as an operating room and so it
is only fitting that he has ended up there.
Bobby Shaftoe makes this little elegy up in his head as he is shivering
in the sub Arctic chill of a formerly French, and now U.S. Army, meat locker
the size and temperature of Greenland, surrounded by the earthly remains of
several herds of cattle and one butcher. He has attended more than a few
military funerals during his brief time in the service, and has always been
bowled over by the skill of the chaplains in coming up with moving elegies
for the departed. He has heard rumors that when the military inducts 4 Fs
who are discovered to have brains, it teaches them to type and assigns them
to sit at desks and type these things out, day after day. Nice duty if you
can get it.
The frozen carcasses dangle from meathooks in long rows. Bobby Shaftoe
gets tenser and tenser as he works his way up and down the aisles, steeling
himself for the bad thing he is about to see. It is almost preferable when
your buddy's head suddenly explodes just as he is puffing his cigarette into
life buildup like this can drive you nuts.
Finally he rounds the end of a row and discovers a man slumbering on
the floor, locked in embrace with a pork carcass, which he was apparently
about to butcher at the time of his death. He has been there for about
twelve hours now and his body temp is hovering around minus ten degrees
Fahrenheit.
Bobby Shaftoe squares himself to face the body and draws a deep breath
of frosty, meat scented air. He clasps his cyanotic hands in front of his
chest in a manner that is both prayerful and good for warming them up. "Dear
Lord," he says out loud. His voice does not echo; the carcasses soak it up.
"Forgive this marine for these, his duties, which he is about to perform,
and while you are at it, by all means forgive this marine's superiors whom
You in Your infinite wisdom have seen fit to bless him with, and forgive
their superiors for getting the whole deal together."
He considers going on at some length but finally decides that this is
no worse than bayonetting Nips and so let's get on with it. He goes to the
locked bodies of PFC Gerald Hott and Frosty the Pig and tries to separate
them without success. He squats by them and gives the former a good look.
Hott is blond. His eyes are half closed, and when Shaftoe shines a
flashlight into the slit, he can see a glint of blue. Hott is a big man,
easily two twenty five in fighting trim, easily two fifty now. Life in a
military kitchen does not make it easy for a fellow to keep his weight down,
or (unfortunately for Hott) his cardiovascular system in any kind of
dependable working order.
Hott and his uniform were both dry when the heart attack happened, so
thank god the fabric is not frozen onto the skin. Shaftoe is able to cut
most of it off with several long strokes of his exquisitely sharpened V 44
"Gung Ho" knife. But the V 44's machetelike nine and a half inch blade is
completely inappropriate for close infighting viz., the denuding of the
armpits and groin and he was told to be careful about inflicting scratches,
so there he has to break out the USMC Marine Raider stiletto, whose slender
double edged seven and a quarter inch blade might have been designed for
exactly this sort of procedure, though the fish shaped handle, which is made
of solid metal, begins freezing to the sweaty palm of Shaftoe's hand after a
while.
Lieutenant Ethridge is hovering outside the locker's tomblike door.
Shaftoe barges past him and heads straight for the building's exit, ignoring
Ethridge's queries: "Shaftoe? How 'bout it?"
He does not stop until he is out of the shade of the building. The
North African sunshine breaks over his body like a washtub of morphine. He
closes his eyes and turns his face into it, holds his frozen hands up to cup
the warmth and let it trickle down his forearms, drip from his elbows.
"How 'bout it?" Ethridge says again.
Shaftoe opens his eyes and looks around.
The harbor's a blue crescent with miles of sere jetties snaking around
each other like diagrams of dance steps. One of them's covered with worn
stumps of ancient bastions and next to it a French battleship lies half
sunk, still piping smoke and steam into the air. All around it, the ships of
Operation Torch are unloading shit faster than you can believe. Cargo nets
rise from the holds of the transports and splat onto the quays like giant
loogies. Longshoremen haul, trucks carry, troops march, French girls smoke
Yankee cigarettes, Algerians propose joint ventures.
Between those ships, and the Army's meat operation, up here on this
rock, is what Bobby Shaftoe takes to be the City of Algiers. To his
discriminating Wisconsinan eye it does not appear to have been built so much
as swept up on the hillside by a tidal wave. A lot of acreage has been
devoted to keeping the fucking sun off, so from above, it has a shuttered up
look about it lots of red tile, decorated with flowers and Arabs. Looks like
a few modern concrete structures (e.g. this meat locker) have been thrown up
by the French in the wake of some kind of vigorous slum clearing offensive.
Still, there's a lot of slums left to be cleared target number one being
this human beehive or anthill just off to Shaftoe's left, the Casbah, they
call it. Maybe it's a neighborhood. Maybe it's a single poorly organized
building. Has to be seen to be believed. Arabs packed into the place like
fraternity pledges into a telephone booth.
Shaftoe turns around and looks again at the meat locker, which is
dangerously exposed to enemy air attack here, but no one gives a fuck
because who cares if the Krauts blow up a bunch of meat?
Lieutenant Ethridge, almost as desperately sunburned as Bobby Shaftoe,
squints.
"Blond," Shaftoe says.
"Okay."
"Blue eyed."
"Good."
"Anteater not mushroom."
"Huh?"
"He's not circumcised, sir!"
"Excellent! How 'bout the other thing?"
"One tattoo, sir!"
Shaftoe is enjoying the slow buildup of tension in Ethridge's voice:
"Describe the tattoo, Sergeant!"
"Sir! It is a commonly seen military design, sir! Consisting of a heart
with a female's name in it."
"What is that name, Sergeant?" Ethridge is on the verge of pissing his
pants.
"Sir! The name inscribed on the tattoo is the following name: Griselda.
Sir!"
"Aaaah!" Lieutenant Ethridge lets loose deep from the diaphragm. Veiled
women turn and look. Over in that Casbah, starved looking, shave needing
ragheads lean out of spindly towers yodeling out of key.
Ethridge shuts up and contents himself with clenching his fists until
they go white. When he speaks again, his voice is hushed with emotion.
"Battles have hinged on lesser strokes of luck than this one, Sergeant!"
"You're telling me!?" Shaftoe says. "When I was on Guadalcanal, sir, we
got trapped in this little cove and pinned down "
"I don't want to hear the lizard story, Sergeant!"
"Sir! Yes, sir!"
***
Once when Bobby Shaftoe was still in Oconomowoc, he had to help his
brother move a mattress up a stairway and learned new respect for the
difficulty of manipulating heavy but floppy objects. Hott, may God have
mercy on his soul, is a heavy S.O.B., and so it is excellent luck that he is
frozen solid. After the Mediterranean sun has its way with him, he is sure
enough going to be floppy. And then some.
All of Shaftoe's men are down in the detachment's staging area. This is
a cave built into a sheer artificial cliff that rises from the
Mediterranean, just above the docks. These caves go on for miles and there
is a boulevard running over the top of them. But even the approaches to
their particular cave have been covered with tents and tarps so that no one,
not even Allied troops, can see what they are up to: namely, looking for any
equipment with 2701 painted on it, painting over the last digit, and
changing it to 2. The first operation is handled by men with green paint and
the second by men with white or black paint.
Shaftoe picks one man from each color group so that the operation as a
whole will not be disrupted. The sun is stunningly powerful here, but in
that cavern, with a cool maritime breeze easing through, it's not really
that bad. The sharp smell of petroleum distillates comes off all of those
warm painted surfaces. To Bobby Shaftoe, it is a comforting smell, because
you never paint stuff when you're in combat. But the smell also makes him a
little tingly, because you frequently paint stuff just before you go into
combat.
Shaftoe is about to brief his three handpicked Marines on what is to
come when the private with black paint on his hands, Daniels, looks past him
and smirks. "What's the lieutenant looking for now do you suppose, Sarge?"
he says.
Shaftoe and Privates Nathan (green paint) and Branph (white) look over
to see that Ethridge has gotten sidetracked. He is going through the
wastebaskets again.
"We have all noticed that Lieutenant Ethridge seems to think it is his
mission in life to go through wastebaskets," Sergeant Shaftoe says in a low,
authoritative voice. "He is an Annapolis graduate."
Ethridge straightens up and, in the most accusatory way possible, holds
up a fistful of pierced and perforated oaktag. "Sergeant! Would you identify
this material?"
"Sir! It is general issue military stencils, Sir!"
"Sergeant! How many letters are there in the alphabet?"
"Twenty six, sir!" responds Shaftoe crisply.
Privates Daniels, Nathan and Branph whistle coolly at each other this
Sergeant Shaftoe is sharp as a tack.
"Now, how many numerals?"
"Ten, sir!"
"And of the thirty six letters and numerals, how many of them are
represented by unused stencils in this wastebasket?"
"Thirty five, sir! All except for the numeral 2, which is the only one
we need to carry out your orders, sir!"
"Have you forgotten the second part of my order, Sergeant?"
"Sir, yes, sir!" No point in lying about it. Officers actually like it
when you forget their orders because it reminds them of how much smarter
they are than you. It makes them feel needed.
"The second part of my order was to take strict measures to leave
behind no trace of the changeover!"
"Sir, yes, I do remember that now, sir!"
Lieutenant Ethridge, who was just a bit huffy first, has now calmed
down quite a bit, which speaks well of him and is duly, silently noted by
all of the men, who have known him for less than six hours. He is now
speaking calmly and conversationally, like a friendly high school teacher.
He is wearing the heavy rimmed black military eyeglasses known in the trade
as RPGs, or Rape Prevention Glasses. They are strapped to his head by a hunk
of black elastic. They make him look like a mental retard. "If some enemy
agent were to go through the contents of this wastebasket, as enemy agents
have been known to do, what would he find?"
"Stencils sir!"
"And if he were to count the numerals and letters, would he notice
anything unusual?"
"Sir! All of them would be clean except for the numeral twos which
would be missing or covered with paint, sir!"
Lieutenant Ethridge says nothing for a few minutes, allowing his
message to sink in. In reality no one knows what the fuck he is talking
about. The atmosphere becomes tinderlike until finally, Sergeant Shaftoe
makes a desperate stab. He turns away from Ethridge and towards the men. "I
want you Marines to get paint on all of those goddamn stencils!" he barks.
The Marines charge the wastebaskets as if they were Nip pillboxes, and
Lieutenant Ethridge seems mollified. Bobby Shaftoe, having scored massive
points, leads Privates Daniels, Nathan, and Branph out into the street
before Lieutenant Ethridge figures out that he was just guessing. They head
for the meat locker up on the ridge, double time.
These Marines are all lethal combat veterans or else they never would
have gotten into a mess this bad trapped on a gratuitously dangerous
continent (Africa) surrounded by the enemy (United States Army troops).
Still, when they get into that locker and take their first gander at PFC
Hott, a hush comes over them.
Private Branph clasps his hands, rubbing them together surreptitiously.
"Dear Lord "
"Shut up, Private!" Shaftoe says, "I already did that."
"Okay, Sarge."
"Go find a meat saw!" Shaftoe says to Private Nathan.
The privates all gasp.
"For the fucking pig!" Shaftoe clarifies. Then he turns to Private
Daniels, who is carrying a featureless bundle, and says, "Open it up!"
The bundle (which was issued by Ethridge to Shaftoe) turns out to
contain a black wetsuit. Nothing GI; some kind of European model. Shaftoe
unfolds it and examines its various parts while Privates Nathan and Branph
dismember Frosty the Pig with vigorous strokes of an enormous bucksaw.
They are all working away silently when a new voice interrupts. "Dear
Lord," the voice begins, as they all look up to see a man standing nearby,
hands clasped prayerfully. His words, sacramentally condensed into an
outward and visible cloud of steam, veil his face. His uniform and rank are
obscured by an Army blanket thrown over his shoulders. He'd look like a
camel riding Holy Land prophet if he were not clean shaven and wearing Rape
Prevention Glasses.
"Goddamn it!" Shaftoe says. "I already said a fucking prayer."
"But are we praying for Private Hott, or for ourselves?" the man says.
This is a poser. Everything becomes quiet as the meat saw stops moving.
Shaftoe drops the wetsuit and stands up. Blanket Man's got very short
grizzly hair, or maybe that's frost coalescing on his scalp. His ice colored
eyes meet Shaftoe's through the mile thick lenses of his RPGs, as if he's
really expecting an answer. Shaftoe takes a step closer and realizes that
the man is wearing a clerical collar.
"You tell me, Rev," Shaftoe says.
Then he recognizes Blanket Man. He's about to let fly with a lusty What
in the fuck are you doing here, but something makes him hold back. The
chaplain's eyes make a sideways dart so small and so fast that only Shaftoe,
who's practically rubbing noses with him, could possibly see it.
The message being: Shut up, Bobby, we'll talk later.
"Private Hott is with God now or wherever people go after they die,"
says Enoch "You can call me Brother" Root.
"What kind of an attitude is that!? Course he's with God. Jesus Christ!
'Wherever they go when they die.' What kind of a chaplain are you?"
"I guess I'm a Detachment 2702 kind of chaplain," the chaplain says.
Lieutenant Enoch Root finally breaks eye contact with Shaftoe and turns his
gaze to where the action is. "As you were, fellows," he says. "Looks like
bacon tonight, huh?"
The men chuckle nervously and resume sawing.
Once they get the pig's carcass disentangled from Hott's, each of the
Marines grabs a limb. They carry Hott out into the butcher shop, which has
been temporarily evacuated for purposes of this operation, so that Hott's
former comrades in shanks will not spread rumors.
Hasty evacuation of a butcher shop after one of its workers has been
found dead on the floor could spawn a few rumors in and of itself. So the
cover story du jour, freshly spun by Lieutenant Ethridge, is that Detachment
2702 is (contrary to all outward appearances) an elite, crack medical team
concerned that Hott had been struck down by a rare new form of North African
food poisoning. Maybe even something deliberately left behind by the French,
who are, by accounts, a little irritable about having their battleship sunk.
Anyway, the whole shop (the story goes) has to be shut down for the day and
gone over with a nit comb. Hott's corpse will be cremated before being sent
back to the family, just to make sure that the dreaded affliction does not
spread into Chicago the planetary abbatoir capital where its incalculable
consequences could alter the outcome of the war.
There is a GI coffin laid out on the floor, just to preserve the
fiction. Shaftoe and his men ignore it completely and begin dressing the
body, first in an appalling pair of swim trunks, then various components of
the wetsuit.
"Hey!" Ethridge says. "I thought you were going to do the gloves last."
"Sir, we're doing them first, by your leave, sir!" Bobby Shaftoe says.
"On account of his fingers will thaw out first and once that happens we
are screwed, sir!"
"Well, slap this on him first," Ethridge says, and hands over a wrist
watch. Shaftoe hefts it and whistles. It's a beaut: a Swiss chronometer in
solid uranium, its jewel laden movement throbbing away like the heart beat
of a small mammal. He swings it on the end of its wristband, made in
cunningly joined armor plates. It is heavy enough to stun a muskellunge.
"Nice," Shaftoe says, "but it doesn't tell time too good."
"In the time zone where we are going," Ethridge says, "it does."
The chastened Shaftoe sets about his work. Meanwhile, Lieutenants
Ethridge and Root are making themselves useful. They carry the crudely sawed
remains of Frosty the Pig into the butcher shop and throw them on a gigantic
scale. They add up to some thirty kilograms, whatever the fuck that means.
Enoch Root, showing an appetite for physical labor that is duly and silently
noted by the men, hauls in another pig carcass, stiff as a Radio Flyer, and
dumps it onto the scale, bringing the total up to seventy. Ethridge does the
breaststroke through clouds of flies to gather up all the cuts of meat that
were on the chopping blocks when the place was evacuated. He throws them on
the scale and the needle swings up to near the one hundred mark. From that
point they are able to bring it up to one thirty by ferrying hams and roasts
in from the freezer one at a time. Enoch Root who seems to be conversant
with exotic systems of measurement has made a calculation, and checked it
twice, establishing that the weight of Gerald Hott, converted into
kilograms, is one hundred and thirty.
All the meat goes into the coffin. Ethridge slams the lid shut,
trapping some flies who have no idea what they are in for. Root goes around
with a clawhammer, driving in sixteen penny nails with sure, powerful,
Carpenter of Nazareth like strokes. Meanwhile, Ethridge has taken a GI
manual out of his briefcase. Shaftoe is close enough to read the title,
printed in block letters on its olive drab cover:
COFFIN SEALING PROCEDURES
PART III: TROPICAL ENVIRONMENTS
VOL. II: HIGH DISEASE RISK SITUATIONS (BUBONIC PLAGUE, ETC.)
The two lieutenants devote a good hour to following the instructions in
that manual. The instructions are not that complicated, but Enoch Root keeps
noticing syntactical ambiguities and wants to explore their ramifications.
First this rattles Ethridge, then his emotions tend towards impatience and,
finally, extreme pragmatism. To make the chaplain shut up, Ethridge
confiscates the manual and starts Root on stenciling Hott's name on the
coffin and pasting it up with red stickers printed with medical warnings so
appalling that the topic headings alone induce faint nausea. By the time
Root is finished, the only person who can legally open this coffin is
General George C. Marshall himself, and even he would have to first get
special permission from the Surgeon General and evacuate all living things
within a hundred mile radius.
"Chaplain talks kind of funny," says Private Nathan at one point,
listening, slackjawed, to one of these Root/Ethridge debates.
"Yeah!" exclaims Private Branph, as if the accent took a really keen
listener to notice. "What kind of an accent is that anyway?"
All eyes turn to Bobby Shaftoe, who pretends to listen for a bit and
then says, "Well, fellas, I would guess that this Enoch Root is the
offspring of a long line of Dutch and possibly German missionaries in the
South Sea Islands, interbred with Aussies. And furthermore, I would guess
that being as how he grew up in territories controlled by the British that
he carries a British passport and was drafted into their military when the
war started and is now part of ANZAC."
"Haw!" roars Private Daniels, "if you got all of that right, I'll give
you five bucks ."
"Deal," Shaftoe says.
Ethridge and Root finish sealing the coffin at about the same time
Shaftoe and his Marines are wrestling the last bits of the wetsuit into
place. It takes a shitload of talcum powder, but they get it done. Ethridge
supplies them with the talcum powder, which is not GI talc; it is from
somewhere in Europe. Some of the letters on the label have pairs of dots
over them, which Shaftoe knows to be a characteristic of the German
language.
A truck backs up to the loading dock, smelling the fresh paint (it is a
Detachment 2702 truck). In go the sealed coffin and the now vulcanized dead
butcher.
"I'm going to stay behind and check the wastebaskets," Lieutenant
Ethridge tells Shaftoe. "I'll meet you at the airfield in one hour."
Shaftoe imagines one hour in the back of a hot truck with this cargo.
"You want me to keep him on ice, sir?" he asks.
Ethridge has to think about this one for a while. He sucks his teeth,
checks his watch, hems and haws. But when he finally answers, he sounds
definite. "Negative. It is imperative, for purposes of this mission, that we
now get him into a thawed mode."
PFC General Hott and his meat laden coffin occupy the center of the
truck's bed. The Marines sit to the sides, arranged like pallbearers.
Shaftoe finds himself staring across the carnage into the face of Enoch
Root, which is wearing an expression of forced nonchalance.
Shaftoe knows he ought to wait, but he just can't stand it. "What are
you doing here?" he finally says.
"The detachment is relocating," the Rev says. "Closer to the front."
"We just got off the fucking boat," Shaftoe says. "Of course we're
going closer to the goddamn front we can't go any farther unless we swim ."
"As long as we're pulling up stakes," Root says coolly, "I'll be coming
along for the ride."
"I don't mean that," Bobby Shaftoe says. "I mean, why should the
detachment have a chaplain?"
"You know the military," Root says. "Every unit has to have one."
"It's bad luck."
"It's bad luck to have a chaplain? Why?"
"It means the waffle butts are expecting a lot of funerals, is why."
"So you are taking the position that the only thing a cleric can do is
to preside over funerals? Interesting."
"And weddings and baptisms," Shaftoe says. All of the other Marines
chortle.
"Could it be you're feeling a little anxious about the unusual nature
of Detachment 2702's first mission?" Root inquires, casting a significant
glance at the late Hott, then staring directly into Shaftoe's eyes.
"Anxious? Listen, Rev, I done some things on Guadalcanal that make this
look like Emily Fucking Post."
All of the other Marines think this is a great line, but Root is
undeterred.
"Did you know why you were doing those things on Guadalcanal?"
"Sure! To stay alive."
"Do you know why you're doing this?"
"Fuck no."
"Doesn't that irritate you a little bit? Or are you too much of a
stupid jarhead to care?"
"Well, you kind of backed me into a corner there, Rev," Shaftoe says.
After a pause he goes on, "I'll admit to being a little curious.
"If there were someone in Detachment 2702 who could help answer your
questions about why, would that be useful?"
"I guess so," Shaftoe grumbles. "It just seems weird to have a
chaplain."
"Why does it seem weird?"
"Because of what kind of unit this is."
"What kind of unit is it?" Root asks. He asks it with a certain
sadistic pleasure.
"We're not supposed to talk about it," Shaftoe says. "And anyway, we
don't know."
Down the hill, immense zigzagging ramps descend pompously over rows of
tiger striped arches to the strand of ramifying railway lines that feed the
port from the south. "It's like standing in the drain of a fucking pinball
machine," says B. Shaftoe, looking up at the way they have just come,
thinking about what might come rolling down out of the Casbah. They head
south along those railway lines and come into a zone of ore dumps and coal
heaps and smokestacks, clearly recognizable to Great Lakes Eagle Scout
Shaftoe, but here operated through some kind of cross cultured gear train
about a million meshings deep. They pull up in front of the Société
Algérienne d'Éclairage et de Force, a double smokestacked behemoth with the
biggest coal pile of all. They're in the middle of nowhere, but it's obvious
that they are expected. Here as everywhere else that Detachment 2702 goes a
strange Rank Inflation Effect is taking place. The coffin is carried into
the SAEF by two lieutenants, a captain, and a major, overseen by a colonel!
There is not a single enlisted man in sight, and Bobby Shaftoe, a mere
sergeant, worries about what sort of work they'll find for him. There is
also a Paperwork Negation Effect going on here; whenever Shaftoe expects to
be stalled by the usual half an hour's worth of red tape, an anxious officer
runs up and waves his hands furiously and he is allowed to proceed.
An Arab, wearing what appears to be a red coffee can on his head, hauls
an iron door open; flames lunge at him and he beats them back with a
blackened iron stick. The pallbearers center the head of the coffin in the
opening and then shove it through, like ramming a big shell home into a
sixteen inch gun, and the man with the can on his head clangs the door shut,
a tassel on the top of his can whipping around crazily. Before he's even got
it latched he's yodeling just like those guys up in the Casbah. The officers
all stand around agreeing with each other and signing their names on
clipboards.
So with a dearth of complications that can only strike combat veteran
Bobby Shaftoe as eerie, the truck leaves the Société Algérienne d'Éclairage
et de Force behind and heads back up those damn ramps into Algiers. The
climb's steep a first gear project all the way. Vendors with push carts
loaded with boiling oil are not only keeping up with them but cooking
fritters along the way. Three legged dogs run and fight underneath the
actual drive train of the truck. Detachment 2702 is also dogged by coffee
can wearing natives threatening to play guitars made of jerry cans, and by
orange vendors and snake charmers, and a few blue eyed burnoose wearers
holding up lumps of unwrapped and unlabelled dark stuff. Like hailstones,
these may be classified by analogy to fruits and sporting goods. Typically
they range from grape to baseball. At one point, the chaplain impulsively
trades a Hershey bar for a golf ball of the stuff.
"What is that? Chocolate?" Bobby Shaftoe asks.
"If it was chocolate," Root says, "that guy wouldn't have taken a
Hershey bar for it."
Shaftoe shrugs. "Unless it's shitty chocolate."
"Or shit!" blurts Private Nathan, provoking incredible hilarity.
"You heard of Mary Jane?" Root asks.
Shaftoe role model, leader of men stifles the impulse to say, Heard of
her? I've fucked her!
"This is the concentrated essence," says Enoch Root.
"How would you know, Rev?" says Private Daniels.
The Rev is not rattled. "I'm the God guy here, right? I know the
religious angle?"
"Yes, sir!"
"Well, at one time, there was a group of Muslims called the hashishin
who would eat this stuff and then go out and kill people. They were so good
at it, they became famous or infamous. Over time the pronunciation of the
name has changed we know them as assassins."
There is an appropriately respectful silence. Finally, Sergeant Shaftoe
says, "What the hell are we waiting for?"
They eat some. Shaftoe, being the highest ranking enlisted man present,
eats more than the others. Nothing happens. "Only person I feel like
assassinating is that guy who sold it to us," he says.
***
The airfield, eleven miles out of town, is busier than it was ever
intended to be. This is nice grape– and olive growing land, but stony
mountains are visible farther inland, and beyond 'em is a patch of sand the
size of the United States most of which seems to be airborne and headed
their way. Countless airplanes predominantly Dakota transports, a.k.a.
Gooney Birds stir up vast, tongue coating, booger nucleating dust clouds. It
doesn't occur to Shaftoe for quite some time that his dry eyes and mouth may
not be entirely the result of dust in the air. His saliva has the
consistency of tile adhesive.
The detachment is so damn secret that no one at the airfield even knows
that they exist. There are a lot of Brits here, and in the desert, Brits
wear shorts, which makes Shaftoe want to punch them in the nose. He controls
the urge. But his obvious hostility towards men in short pants, combined
with the fact that he is demanding to be pointed in the direction of a unit
that is so secret that he cannot specify it by name or even vaguely describe
it, leads to a lot of bafflement, a lot of incredulity, and generally gets
the Anglo American alliance off on the wrong foot.
Sergeant Shaftoe, however, now understands that anything to do with
this detachment is liable to be way off to one side, shrouded in black tarps
and awnings. Like any other military unit, Detachment 2702 is rich in some
supplies and poor in others, but they do appear to control about fifty
percent of last year's total U.S. tarpage production. When Shaftoe mentions
this fact, and goes on about it to his comrades at great length, some of the
men look at him a little funny. It's left to Enoch Root to say, "Between the
giant lizards and the black tarps some people might think you were acting a
little paranoid."
"Let me tell you about paranoid," Shaftoe says, and he does, not
forgetting to mention Lieutenant Ethridge and his wastebaskets. By the time
he's had his say, the whole detachment has assembled on the far side of
those tarps, and everyone is nice and tense except for their newest recruit,
who, as Shaftoe notes approvingly, is beginning to relax. Lying on the bed
of the truck in his wetsuit, he adjusts, rather than bounces, when they go
over bumps.
Even so, he is still stiff enough to simplify the problem of getting
him out of the truck and into their assigned Gooney Bird: a bare knuckled
variant of the DC 3, militarized and (to Shaftoe's skeptical eye) rendered
somewhat less than airworthy by a pair of immense cargo doors gouged into
one side, nearly cutting the airframe in half. This particular Dakota has
been flying around in the fucking desert so long that all the paint's been
sand blasted off its propeller blades, the engine cowling, and the leading
edges of the wings, leaving burnished metal that will make an inviting
silver gleam for any Luftwaffe pilots within three hundred miles. Worse:
diverse antennas sprout from the skin of the fuselage, mostly around the
cockpit. Not just whip antennas but great big damn barbecue grills that make
Shaftoe wish he had a hacksaw. They are eerily like the ones that Shaftoe
humped down the stairway from Station Alpha in Shanghai a memory that has
somehow gotten all mangled together, now, with the other images in his head.
When he tries to recollect it, all he can see is a bloodied Jesus carrying a
high frequency dual band dipole down a stone staircase in Manila, and he
knows that can't be right.
Though they are on the precincts of a busy airfield, Ethridge refuses
to let this operation go forward when there is as much as a single airplane
in the sky. Finally he says, "Okay, NOW!" In the truck, they lift the body
up, just in time to hear Ethridge shout, "No, WAIT!" at which point they put
him down again. Long after it has stopped being grimly amusing, they put a
tarp on Gerald Hott and get him carried on board, and shortly thereafter are
airborne. Detachment 2072 is headed for a rendezvous with Rommel.
Chapter 16 CYCLES
It is early in November of 1942 and a simply unbelievable amount of
shit is going on, all at once, everywhere. Zeus himself would not be able to
sort it all out, not even if he mobilized the caryatids tell them never mind
what we told you, just drop those loads. Temples collapsing everywhere, like
spyglasses, he'd send those caryatids and any naiads and dryads he could
scare up to library school, issue them green visors, dress them in the prim
asexual uniforms of the OPAMS, the Olympian Perspective Archive Management
Service, put them to work filling out three by five cards round the clock.
Get them to use some of that vaunted caryatid steadfastness to tend
Hollerith machines and ETC card readers. Even then, Zeus would probably
still lack a handle on the situation. He'd be so pissed off he would hardly
know which hubristical mortals to fling his thunderbolts at, nor which pinup
girls and buck privates to molest.
Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is as Olympian as anyone right now.
Roosevelt and Churchill and the few others on the Ultra Mega list have the
same access, but they have other cares and distractions. They can't wander
around the data flow capital of the planet, snooping over translators'
shoulders and reading the decrypts as they come, chunkity chunkity whirr,
out of the Typex machines. They cannot trace individual threads of the
global narrative at their whim, running from hut to hut patching connections
together, even as the WRENs in Hut 11 string patch cables from one bombe
socket to another, fashioning a web to catch Hitler's messages as they speed
through the ether.
Here are some of the things Waterhouse knows: the Battle of El Alamein
is won, and Montgomery is chasing Rommel westwards across Cyrenaica at what
looks like a breakneck pace, driving him back toward the distant Axis
stronghold of Tunis. But it's not the rout it appears to be. If Monty would
only grasp the significance of the intelligence coming through the Ultra
channel, he would be able to move decisively, to surround and capture large
pockets of Germans and Italians. But he never does, and so Rommel stages an
orderly retreat, preparing to fight another day, and plodding Monty is
roundly cursed in the watch rooms of Bletchley Park for his failure to
exploit their priceless but perishable gems of intelligence.
The largest sealift in history just piled into Northwest Africa. It is
called Operation Torch, and it's going to take Rommel from behind, serving
as anvil to Montgomery's hammer, or, if Monty doesn't pick up the pace a
bit, maybe the other way around. It looks brilliantly organized but it's not
really; this is the first time America has punched across the Atlantic in
any serious way and so a whole grab bag of stuff is included on those ships
including any number of signals intelligence geeks who are storming
theatrically onto the beaches as if they were Marines. Also included in the
landing is the American contingent of Detachment 2702 a hand picked wrecking
crew of combat hardened leathernecks.
Some of these Marines learned what they know on Guadalcanal, a
basically useless island in the Southwest Pacific where the Empire of Nippon
and the United States of America are disputing with rifles each other's
right to build a military airbase. Early returns suggest that the Nipponese
Army, during its extended tour of East Asia, has lost its edge. It would
appear that raping the entire female population of Nanjing, and bayoneting
helpless Filipino villagers, does not translate into actual military
competence. The Nipponese Army is still trying to work out some way to kill,
say, a hundred American Marines without losing, say, five hundred of its own
soldiers.
The Japanese Navy is a different story they know what they are doing.
They have Yamamoto. They have torpedoes that actually explode when they
strike their targets, in stark contrast to the American models which do
nothing but scratch the paint of the Japanese ships and then sink
apologetically. Yamamoto just made another attempt to wipe out the American
fleet off the Santa Cruz Islands, sank Hornet and blew a nice hole in
Enterprise. But he lost a third of his planes. Watching the Japanese rack up
losses, Waterhouse wonders if anyone in Tokyo has bothered to break out the
abacus and run the numbers on this Second World War thing.
The Allies are doing some math of their own, and they are scared
shitless. There are 100 German U boats in the Atlantic now, operating mostly
from Lorient and Bordeaux, and they are slaughtering convoys in the North
Atlantic with such efficiency that it's not even combat, just a Lusitanian
level murder spree. They are on a pace to sink something like a million tons
of shipping this month, which Waterhouse cannot really comprehend. He tries
to think of a ton as being roughly equivalent to a car, and then tries to
imagine America and Canada going out into the middle of the Atlantic and
simply dropping a million cars into the ocean just in November. Sheesh!
The problem is Shark.
The Germans call it Triton. It is a new cypher system, used exclusively
by their Navy. It is an Enigma machine, but not the usual three wheel
Enigma. The Poles learned how to break that old thing a couple of years ago,
and Bletchley Park industrialized the process. But more than a year ago, a
German U boat was beached intact on the south coast of Iceland and gone over
pretty thoroughly by men from Bletchley. They discovered an Enigma box with
niches for four not three wheels.
When the four wheel Enigma had gone into service on February 1st, the
entire Atlantic had gone black. Alan and the others have been going after
the problem very hard ever since. The problem is that they don't know how
the fourth wheel is wired up.
But a few days ago, another U boat was captured, more or less intact,
in the Eastern Mediterranean. Colonel Chattan, who happened to be in the
neighborhood, went there with sickening haste, along with some other
Bletchleyites. They recovered a four wheel Enigma machine, and though this
doesn't break the code, it gives them the data they need to break it.
Hitler must be feeling cocky, anyway, because he's on tour at the
moment, preparatory to a working vacation at his alpine retreat. That didn't
prevent him from taking over what was left of France apparently something
about Operation Torch really got his goat, so he occupied Vichy France in
its entirety, and then dispatched upwards of a hundred thousand fresh
troops, and a correspondingly stupendous amount of supplies, across the
Mediterranean to Tunisia. Waterhouse imagines that you must be able to cross
from Sicily to Tunisia these days simply by hopping from the deck of one
German transport ship to another.
Of course, if that were true, Waterhouse's job would be a lot easier.
The Allies could sink as many of those ships as they wanted to without
raising a single blond Teutonic eyebrow on the information theory front. But
the fact is that the convoys are few and far between. Just exactly how few
and how far between are parameters that go into the equations that he and
Alan Mathison Turing spend all night scribbling on chalkboards.
After a good eight or twelve hours of that, when the sun has finally
come up again, there's nothing like a brisk bicycle ride in the
Buckinghamshire countryside.
***
Spread out before them as they pump over the crest of the rise is a
woods that has turned all of the colors of flame. The hemispherical crowns
of the maples even contribute a realistic billowing effect. Lawrence feels a
funny compulsion to take his hands off the handlebars and clamp them over
his ears. As they coast into the trees, however, the air remains
delightfully cool, the blue sky above unsmudged by pillars of black smoke,
and the calm and quiet of the place could not be more different from what
Lawrence is remembering.
"Talk, talk, talk!" says Alan Turing, imitating the squawk of furious
hens. The strange noise is made stranger by the fact that he is wearing a
gas mask, until he becomes impatient and pulls it up onto his forehead.
"They love to hear themselves talk." He is referring to Winston Churchill
and Franklin Roosevelt. "And they don't mind hearing each other talk up to a
point, at least. But voice is a terribly redundant channel of information,
compared to printed text. If you take text and run it through an Enigma
which is really not all that complicated the familiar patterns in the text,
such as the preponderance of the letter E, become nearly undetectable." Then
he pulls the gas mask back over his face in order to emphasize the following
point: "But you can warp and permute voice in the most fiendish ways
imaginable and it will still be perfectly intelligible to a listener." Alan
then suffers a sneezing fit that threatens to burst the khaki straps around
his head.
"Our ears know how to find the familiar patterns," Lawrence suggests.
He is not wearing a gas mask because (a) there is no Nazi gas attack in
progress, and (b) unlike Alan, he does not suffer from hay fever.
"Excuse me." Alan suddenly brakes and jumps off his bicycle. He lifts
the rear wheel from the pavement, gives it a spin with his free hand, then
reaches down and gives the chain a momentary sideways tug. He is watching
the mechanism intently, interrupted by a few aftersneezes.
The chain of Turing's bicycle has one weak link. The rear wheel has one
bent spoke. When the link and the spoke come into contact with each other,
the chain will part and fall onto the road. This does not happen at every
revolution of the wheel otherwise the bicycle would be completely useless.
It only happens when the chain and the wheel are in a certain position with
respect to each other.
Based upon reasonable assumptions about the velocity that can be
maintained by Dr. Turing, an energetic bicyclist (let us say 25 km/hr) and
the radius of his bicycle's rear wheel (a third of a meter), if the chain's
weak link hit the bent spoke on every revolution, the chain would fall off
every one third of a second.
In fact, the chain doesn't fall off unless the bent spoke and the weak
link happen to coincide. Now, suppose that you describe the position of the
rear wheel by the traditional [theta]. Just for the sake of simplicity, say
that when the wheel starts in the position where the bent spoke is capable
of hitting the weak link (albeit only if the weak link happens to be there
to be hit) then [theta] = 0. If you're using degrees as your unit, then,
during a single revolution of the wheel, [theta] will climb all the way up
to 359 degrees before cycling back around to 0, at which point the bent
spoke will be back in position to knock the chain off And now suppose that
you describe the position of the chain with the variable C, in the following
very simple way: you assign a number to each link on the chain. The weak
link is numbered 0, the next is 1, and so on, up to l – 1 where l is
the total number of links in the chain. And again, for simplicity's sake,
say that when the chain is in the position where its weak link is capable of
being hit by the bent spoke (albeit only if the bent spoke happens to be
there to hit it) then C = 0.
For purposes of figuring out when the chain is going to fall off of Dr.
Turing's bicycle, then, everything we need to know about the bicycle is
contained in the values of [theta] and of C. That pair of numbers defines
the bicycle's state. The bicycle has as many possible states as there can be
different values of ([theta], C) but only one of those states, namely (0,
0), is the one that will cause the chain to fall off onto the road.
Suppose we start off in that state; i.e., with ([theta] = 0, C = 0),
but that the chain has not fallen off because Dr. Turing (knowing full well
his bicycle's state at any given time) has paused in the middle of road
(nearly precipitating a collision with his friend and colleague Lawrence
Pritchard Waterhouse, because his gas mask blocks his peripheral vision).
Dr. Turing has tugged sideways on the chain while moving it forward
slightly, preventing it from being hit by the bent spoke. Now he gets on the
bicycle again and begins to pedal forward. The circumference of his rear
wheel is about two meters, and so when he has moved a distance of two meters
down the road, the wheel has performed a complete revolution and reached the
position [theta] = 0 again that being the position, remember, when its bent
spoke is in position to hit the weak link.
What of the chain? Its position, defined by C, begins at 0 and reaches
1 when its next link moves forward to the fatal position, then 2 and so on.
The chain must move in synch with the teeth on the sprocket at the center of
the rear wheel, and that sprocket has n teeth, and so after a complete
revolution of the rear wheel, when [theta] = 0 again, C = n. After a second
complete revolution of the rear wheel, once again [theta] = 0 but now C =
2n. The next time it's C = 3n and so on. But remember that the chain is not
an infinite linear thing, but a loop having only l positions; at C = l it
loops back around to C = 0 and repeats the cycle. So when calculating the
value of C it is necessary to do modular arithmetic that is, if the chain
has a hundred links (l = 100) and the total number of links that have moved
by is 135, then the value of C is not 135 but 35. Whenever you get a number
greater than or equal to l you just repeatedly subtract l until you get a
number less than 1. This operation is written, by mathematicians, as mod I.
So the successive values of C, each time the rear wheel spins around to
[theta] = 0, are
[C sub i] = n mod l, 2n mod l, 3n mod l,...,in mod l
where i = (1, 2, 3, ... [infinity]) more or less, depending on how
close to infinitely long Turing wants to keep riding his bicycle. After a
while, it seems infinitely long to Waterhouse.
Turing's chain will fall off when his bicycle reaches the state
([theta] = 0, C = 0) and in light of what is written above, this will happen
when (which is just a counter telling how many times the rear wheel has
revolved) reaches some hypothetical value such that in mod l = 0, or, to put
it in plain language, it will happen if there is some multiple of n (such
as, oh, 2n, 3n, 395n or 109,948,368,443n) that just happens to be an exact
multiple of l too. Actually there might be several of these so called common
multiples, but from a practical standpoint the only one that matters is the
first one the least common multiple, or LCM because that's the one that will
be reached first and that will cause the chain to fall off.
If, say, the sprocket has twenty teeth (n 20) and the chain has a
hundred teeth (l 100) then after one turn of the wheel we'll have C 20,
after two turns C = 40, then 60, then 80, then 100. But since we are doing
the arithmetic modulo 100, that value has to be changed to zero. So after
five revolutions of the rear wheel, we have reached the state ([theta] = 0,
C = 0) and Turing's chain falls off. Five revolutions of the rear wheel only
gets him ten meters down the road, and so with these values of l and n the
bicycle is very nearly worthless. Of course, this is only true if Turing is
stupid enough to begin pedaling with his bicycle in the chain falling off
state. If, at the time he begins pedaling, it is in the state ([theta] = 0,
C = 1) instead, then the successive values will be C 21, 41, 61, 81, 1, 21,
. . . and so on forever the chain will never fall off. But this is a
degenerate case, where "degenerate," to a mathematician, means "annoyingly
boring." In theory, as long as Turing put his bicycle into the right state
before parking it outside a building, no one would be able to steal it the
chain would fall off after they had ridden for no more than ten meters.
But if Turing's chain has a hundred and one links (l = 101) then after
five revolutions we have C = 100, and after six we have C = 19, then
C = 39, 59, 79, 99, 18, 38, 58, 78, 98, 17, 37, 57, 77, 97, 16, 36, 56,
76, 96, 15, 35, 55, 75, 95, 14, 34, 54, 74, 94, 13, 33, 53, 73, 93, 12, 32,
52, 72, 92, 11, 31, 51, 71, 91, 10, 30, 50, 70, 90, 9, 29, 49, 69, 89, 8,
28, 48, 68, 88, 7, 27, 47, 67, 87, 6, 26, 46, 66, 86, 5, 25, 45, 65, 85, 4,
24, 44, 64, 84, 3, 23, 43, 63, 83, 2, 22, 42, 62, 82, 1, 21, 41, 61, 81, 0
So not until the 101st revolution of the rear wheel does the bicycle
return to the state ([theta] = 0, C = 0) where the chain falls off. During
these hundred and one revolutions, Turing's bicycle has proceeded for a
distance of a fifth of a kilometer down the road, which is not too bad. So
the bicycle is usable. However, unlike in the degenerate case, it is not
possible for this bicycle to be placed in a state where the chain never
falls off at all. This can be proved by going through the above list of
values of C, and noticing that every possible value of C every single number
from 0 to 100 is on the list. What this means is that no matter what value C
has when Turing begins to pedal, sooner or later it will work its way round
to the fatal C = 0 and the chain will fall off. So Turing can leave his
bicycle anywhere and be confident that, if stolen, it won't go more than a
fifth of a kilometer before the chain falls off.
The difference between the degenerate and nondegenerate cases has to do
with the properties of the numbers involved. The combination of (n = 20, I =
100) has radically different properties from (n = 20, l = 101). The key
difference is that 20 and 101 are "relatively prime" meaning that they have
no factors in common. This means that their least common multiple, their
LCM, is a large number it is, in fact, equal to l x n = 20 x 101 = 2020.
Whereas the LCM of 20 and 100 is only 100. The 101 bicycle has a long period
– it passes through many different states before returning back to the
beginning whereas the l = 100 bicycle has a period of only a few states.
Suppose that Turing's bicycle were a cipher machine that worked by
alphabetic substitution, which is to say that it would replace each of the
26 letters of the alphabet with some other letter. An A in the plaintext
might become a T in the ciphertext, B might become F, C might be come M, and
so on all the way through to Z. In and of itself this would be an absurdly
easy cipher to break kids in treehouses stuff. But suppose that the
substitution scheme changed from one letter to the next. That is, suppose
that after the first letter of the plaintext was enciphered using one
particular substitution alphabet, the second letter of plaintext was
enciphered using a completely different substitution alphabet, and the third
letter a different one yet, and so on. This is called a polyalphabetic
cipher.
Suppose that Turing's bicycle were capable of generating a different
alphabet for each one of its different states. So the state ([theta] = 0, C
= 0) would correspond to, say, this substitution alphabet:
Painfully aware that he has just dodged a bullet, John Cantrell
continues with a thick tongue. "We thought you might want to see the
software in action. I'm going to demo it on the screen now, and during the
lunch break you should feel free to come around and try it out yourselves."
Randy fires up the software. He's got his laptop plugged into a video
jack on the underside of the table so that the sultan's lurking media geeks
can project a duplicate of what Randy's seeing onto a large projection
screen at the end of the room. It is running the front end to the cash demo,
but his mug shot program is still running in the background. Randy slides
the computer over to John, who runs through the demo (there should be a mug
shot of John Cantrell stored on the hard disk now).
"I can write the best cryptographic code possible, but it's all
worthless unless there is a good system for verifying the user's identity,"
John begins, regaining some poise now. "How does the computer know that you
are you? Passwords are too easy to guess, steal, or forget. The computer
needs to know something about you that is as unique to you as your
fingerprint. Basically it has to look at some part of your body, such as the
blood vessels in your retina or the distinctive sound of your voice, and
compare it against known values stored in its memory. This kind of
technology is called biometrics. Epiphyte Corp. boasts one of the top
biometrics experts in the world: Dr. Eberhard Föhr, who wrote what's
considered to be the best handwriting recognition system in the world." John
rushes through this encomium. Eb and everyone else in the room look bored by
it they've all seen Eb's resume. "Right now we're going with voice
recognition, but the code is entirely modular, so we could swap in some
other system, such as a hand geometry reader. That's up to the customer."
John runs the demo, and unlike most demos, it actually works and does
not crash. He even tries to fake it out by recording his own voice on a
pretty good portable digital tape recorder and then playing it back. But the
software is not fooled. This actually makes an impression on the Chinese
guys, who, up to the point, have looked like the contents of Madame
Tussaud's Dumpster after an exhibit on the Cultural Revolution.
Not everyone is such a tough sell. Harvard Li is a committed Cantrell
supporter, and the Filipino heavyweight looks like he can hardly wait to
deposit his cash reserves in the Crypt.
Lunchtime! Doors are hauled open to reveal a dining room with a buffet
along the far wall, redolent of curry, garlic, cayenne, and bergamot. The
Dentist makes a point of sitting at the same table with Epiphyte Corp., but
doesn't say very much just sits there with a dreadfully choleric expression
on his face, staring and chewing and thinking. When Avi finally asks him
what he thinks, Kepler says, levelly: "It's been informative."
The Three Graces cringe epileptically. Informative is evidently an
extremely bad word in the Dentist's lexicon. It means that Kepler has
learned something at this meeting, which means that he did not know
absolutely everything going into it, which would certainly rate as an
unforgivable intelligence failure on his scale of values.
There is an agonizing silence. Then Kepler says, "But not devoid of
interest."
Deep sighs of relief ventilate the blindingly white, plaque free
dentition of the Hygienists. Randy tries to imagine which is worse: that
Kepler suspects that the wool was pulled over his eyes, or that he sees a
new opportunity here. Which is more terrible, the paranoia or the avarice of
the Dentist? They are about to find out. Randy, with his sappy, romantic
instinct for ingratiation, almost says something like, "It's been
informative for us, too!" but he holds back, noticing that Avi has not said
it. Saying it would not enhance shareholder value. Best to play one's cards
close to the vest, let Kepler wonder whether Epiphyte Corp. knew the real
agenda.
Randy has chosen his seat tactically, so that he can look straight
through the door into the conference room and keep an eye on his laptop. One
by one, members of the other delegations excuse themselves, go into the
room, and run the demo, imprinting their own voices into the computer's
memory and then letting it recognize them. Some of the nerds even type
commands on Randy's keyboard; probably that ps command, snooping. Despite
the fact that Randy's got it set up so it can't be meddled with too much, it
bothers him at a deep level to see the fingertips of these strangers
prodding away at his keyboard.
It gnaws at him all through the afternoon session, which is all about
the communications links joining Kinakuta to the wide world. Randy ought to
be paying attention to this, since it impinges massively on the Philippines
project. But he doesn't. He broods over his keyboard, contaminated by a
foreign touch, and then he broods about the fact that he's brooding about
it, which demonstrates his unfitness for Biz. It's technically Epiphyte's
keyboard not even his and if it enhances shareholder value for sinister
Eastern nerds to poke around his files, he should be happy to let them do
it.
They adjourn. Epiphyte and the Nipponese dine together, but Randy's
bored and distracted. Finally, about nine P.M., he excuses himself and goes
to his room. He's mentally composing a response to root@eruditorum.org,
along the lines of because there seems to be a hell of a market for this
kind of thing, and it's better that I fill the niche, than someone frankly
and overly evil. But before his laptop has even had time to boot up, the
Dentist, clad in a white terrycloth robe and smelling like vodka and hotel
soap, knocks on Randy's door and invites himself in. He invades Randy (no;
the shareholders') bathroom and helps himself to a glass of water. He stands
at the shareholders' window and glowers down at the Nipponese cemetery for
several minutes before speaking.
"Do you realize who those people were?" he says. His voice, if
subjected to biometric analysis, would reflect disbelief, bewilderment,
maybe a trace of amusement.
Or maybe he's just faking it, trying to get Randy to let down his
guard. Maybe he is root@eruditorum.org.
"Yeah," Randy lies.
When Randy revealed the existence of Mugshot, after the meeting, Avi
gave him a commendation for deviousness, printed up the mugshots in his
hotel room, and Federal Expressed them to a private dick in Hong Kong.
Kepler turns around and gives Randy a searching look. "Either I had bad
information about you guys," he says, "or else you are in way over your
heads."
If this were the First Business Foray, Randy would piss his pants at
this point. If it were the Second, he would resign and fly back to
California tomorrow. But it's the third, and so he manages to maintain
composure. The light is behind him, so perhaps Kepler's momentarily dazzled
and can't read his face very well. Randy takes a swallow of water and
breathes deeply, asking, "In light of today's events," he says, "what's in
store for our relationship?"
"It is no longer about providing cheap long distance service to the
Philippines if, indeed, it ever was in the first place!" Kepler says darkly.
"The data flowing through the Philippines network now takes on entirely new
significance. It's a superb opportunity. At the same time, we're competing
against heavy hitters: those Aussies and the Singapore group. Can we compete
against them, Randy?"
It is a simple and direct question, the most dangerous kind. "We
wouldn't be risking our shareholders' money if we didn't think so."
"That's a predictable answer," Kepler snorts. "Are we going to have a
real conversation here, Randy, or should we invite our PR people into the
room and exchange press releases?"
During an earlier business foray, Randy would have buckled at this
point. Instead he says, "I'm not prepared to have a real conversation with
you, here and now."
"Sooner and later we have to have one," says the Dentist. Those wisdom
teeth will have to come out someday.
"Naturally."
"In the meantime, here is what you should be thinking about," Kepler
says, getting ready to leave. "What the hell can we offer, in the way of
telecommunications services, that stacks up competitively against the
Aussies and those Singapore boys? Because we can't beat 'em on price."
This being Randy's Third Business Foray, he doesn't blurt out the
answer: redundancy. "That question will certainly be on all of our minds,"
Randy says instead.
"Spoken like a flack," says Kepler, his shoulders sagging. He goes out
into the hallway and turns around, saying, "See you tomorrow at the Crypt."
Then he winks. "Or the Vault, or Cornucopia of Infinite Prosperity, or
whatever the Chinese word for it is." Having knocked Randy off balance with
this startling display of humanity, he walks away.
Chapter 39 YAMAMOTO
Tojo and his claque of imperial army boneheads said to him, in effect:
Why don't you go out and secure the Pacific Ocean for us, because we'll need
a convenient shipping lane, say, oh, about ten thousand miles wide, in order
to carry out our little plan to conquer South America, Alaska, and all of
North America west of the Rockies. In the meantime we'll finish mopping up
China. Please attend to this ASAP.
By then they were running the country. They had assassinated anyone in
their way, they had the emperor's ear, and it was hard to tell them that
their plan was full of shit and that the Americans were just going to get
really pissed off and annihilate them. So, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, a
dutiful servant of the emperor, put a bit of thought into the problem,
sketched out a little plan, sent out one or two boats on a small jaunt
halfway across the fucking planet, and blew Pearl Harbor off the map. He
timed it perfectly, right after the formal declaration of war. It was not
half bad. He did his job.
One of his aides later crawled into his office in the nauseatingly
craven posture that minions adopt when they are about to make you really,
really unhappy and told him that there had been a mix up in the embassy in
Washington and that the diplomats there had not gotten around to delivering
the declaration of war until well after the American Pacific Fleet had gone
to the bottom.
To those Army fuckheads, this is nothing just a typo, happens all the
time. Isoroku Yamamoto has given up on trying to make them understand that
the Americans are grudge holders on a level that is inconceivable to the
Nipponese, who learn to swallow their pride before they learn to swallow
solid food. Even if he could get Tojo and his mob of shabby, ignorant thugs
to comprehend how pissed off the Americans are, they'd laugh it off. What're
they going to do about it? Throw a pie in your face, like the Three Stooges?
Ha, ha, ha! Pass the sake and bring me another comfort girl!
Isoroku Yamamoto spent a lot of time playing poker with Yanks during
his years in the States, smoking like a chimney to deaden the scent of their
appalling aftershave. The Yanks are laughably rude and uncultured, of
course; this hardly constitutes a sharp observation. Yamamoto, by contrast,
attained some genuine insight as a side effect of being robbed blind by
Yanks at the poker table, realizing that the big freckled louts could be
dreadfully cunning. Crude and stupid would be okay perfectly understandable,
in fact.
But crude and clever is intolerable; this is what makes those red
headed ape men extra double super loathsome. Yamamoto is still trying to
drill the notion into the heads of his partners in the big Nipponese scheme
to conquer everything between Karachi and Denver. He wishes that they would
get the message. A lot of the Navy men have been around the world a few
times and seen it for themselves, but those Army guys have spent their
careers mowing down Chinamen and raping their women and they honestly
believe that the Americans are just the same except taller and smellier.
Come on guys, Yamamoto keeps telling them, the world is not just a big
Nanjing. But they don't get it. If Yamamoto were running things, he'd make a
rule: each Army officer would have to take some time out from bayoneting
Neolithic savages in the jungle, go out on the wide Pacific in a ship, and
swap 16 inch shells with an American task force for a while. Then maybe,
they'd understand they're in a real scrap here.
This is what Yamamoto thinks about, shortly before sunrise, as he
clambers onto his Mitsubishi G4M bomber in Rabaul, the scabbard of his sword
whacking against the frame of the narrow door. The Yanks call this type of
plane "Betty," an effeminatizing gesture that really irks him. Then again,
the Yanks name even their own planes after women, and paint naked ladies on
their sacred instruments of war! If they had samurai swords, Americans would
probably decorate the blades with nail polish.
Because the plane's a bomber, the pilot and copilot are crammed into a
cockpit above the main tube of the fuselage. The nose of the plane, then, is
a blunt dome of curving struts, like the meridians and parallels of a globe,
the trapezoids between them filled with sturdy panes of glass. The plane has
been parked pointing east, so the glass nose is radiant with streaky dawn,
the unreal hues of chemicals igniting in a lab. In Nippon nothing happens by
accident, so he has to assume that this is a deliberate morale building tip
o' the helmet to the Rising Sun. Making his way up to the greenhouse, he
straps himself in where he can stare out the windows as this Betty, and
Admiral Ugaki's, take off.
In one direction is Simpson's Harbor, one of the best anchorages in the
Pacific, an asymmetrical U wrapped in a neat grid of streets, conspicuously
blighted by a fucking British cricket oval! In the other direction, over the
ridge, lies the Bismarck Sea. Somewhere down there, the corpses of a few
thousand Nipponese troops lie pickled in the wrinkled hulls of their
transport ships. A few thousand more escaped to life rafts, but all of their
weapons and supplies went to the bottom, so the men are just useless mouths
now.
It's been like this for almost a year, ever since Midway, when the
Americans refused to bite on Yamamoto's carefully designed feints and ruses
up Alaska way, and just happened to send all of their surviving carriers
directly into the path of his Midway invasion force. Shit. Shit Shit. Shit.
Slit. Shit. Shit. Yamamoto's chewing on a thumbnail, right through his
glove.
Now those clumsy, reeking farmhands are sinking every transport ship
that the Army sends to New Guinea. Double shit! Their observation planes are
everywhere always showing up in the right place at the right time tally
hoing the emperor's furtive convoys in the sawing twang of bloody gummed
Confederates. Their coast watchers infest the mountains of all these
godforsaken islands, despite the Army's efforts to hunt them down and flush
them out. All of their movements are known.
The two planes fly southeastwards across the tip of New Ireland and
enter the Solomon Sea. The Solomon Islands spread out before them, fuzzy
jade humps rising from a steaming ocean, 6,500 feet below. A couple of small
humps and then a much bigger one, today's destination: Bougainville.
Have to show the flag, go out on these inspection tours, give the
frontline troops a glimpse of glory, build morale. Yamamoto frankly has
better things to do with his time, so he tries to pack as many of these
obligatory junkets into a single day as possible. He left his naval citadel
at Truk and flew to Rabaul last week so that he could supervise his latest
big operation: a wave of massed air attacks on American bases from New
Guinea to Guadalcanal.
The air raids were purportedly successful; kind of. The surviving
pilots reported vast numbers of sinkings, whole fleets of American aircraft
destroyed on their mucky airstrips. Yamamoto knows perfectly well that these
reports will turn out to be wildly exaggerated. More than half of his planes
never came back the Americans, and their almost equally offensive cousins,
the Australians, were ready for them. But the Army and the Navy alike are
full of ambitious men who will do everything they can to channel good news
the emperor's way, even if it's not exactly the truth. Accordingly, Yamamoto
has received a personal telegram of congratulations from none other than the
sovereign himself. It is his duty, now, to fly round to his various
outposts, hop out of his Betty, wave the sacred telegram in the air, and
pass on the blessings of the emperor.
Yamamoto's feet hurt like hell. Like everyone else within a thousand
miles, he has a tropical disease; in his case, beriberi. It is the scourge
of the Nipponese and especially of the Navy, because they eat too much
polished rice, not enough fish and vegetables. His long nerves have been
corroded by lactic acid, so his hands quiver. His failing heart can't shove
fluid through his extremities, so his feet swell. He needs to change his
shoes several times a day, but he doesn't have room here; he is encumbered
not only by the curvature of the plane's greenhouse, but also by his sword.
They are approaching the Imperial Navy airbase at Bougainville, right
on schedule, at 9:35. A shadow passes overhead and Yamamoto glances up to
see the silhouette of an escort, way out of position, dangerously close to
them. Who is that idiot? Then the green island and the blue ocean rotate
into view as his pilot puts the Betty into a power dive. Another plane
flashes overhead with a roar that cuts through the noise of the Betty's
engines, and although it is nothing more than a black flash, its odd
forktailed silhouette registers in his mind. It was a P 38 Lightning, and
the last time Admiral Yamamoto checked, the Nipponese Air Force wasn't
flying any of those.
The voice of Admiral Ugaki comes through on the radio from the other
Betty, right behind Yamamoto's, ordering Yamamoto's pilot to stay in
formation. Yamamoto cannot see anything in front of them except for the surf
washing ashore on Bougainville, and the wall of trees, seeming to grow
higher and higher, as the plane descends the tropical canopy now actually
above them. He is Navy, not an Air Force man, but even he knows that when
you can't see any planes in front of you in a dogfight, you have problems.
Red streaks flash past from behind, burying themselves in the steaming
jungle ahead, and the Betty begins to shake violently. Then yellow light
fills the corners of both of his eyes: the engines are on fire. The pilot is
heading directly for the jungle now; either the plane is out of control, or
the pilot is already dead, or it is a move of atavistic desperation: run,
run into the trees!
They enter the jungle in level flight, and Yamamoto is astonished how
far they go before hitting anything big. Then the plane is bludgeoned wide
open by mahogany trunks, like baseball bats striking a wounded sparrow, and
he knows it's over. The greenhouse disintegrates around him, the meridians
and parallels crumpling and rending which isn't quite as bad as it sounds
since the body of the plane is suddenly filled with flames. As his seat
tears loose from the broken dome and launches into space, he grips his
sword, unwilling to disgrace himself by dropping his sacred weapon, blessed
by the emperor, even in this last instant of his life. His clothes and hair
are on fire as he tumbles like a meteor through the jungle, clenching his
ancestral blade.
He realizes something: The Americans must have done the impossible:
broken all of their codes. That explains Midway, it explains the Bismarck
Sea, Hollandia, everything. It especially explains why Yamamoto who ought to
be sipping green tea and practicing calligraphy in a misty garden is, in
point of fact, on fire and hurtling through the jungle at a hundred miles
per hour in a chair, closely pursued by tons of flaming junk. He must get
word out! The codes must all be changed! This is what he is thinking when he
flies head on into a hundred foot tall Octomelis sumatrana.
Chapter 40 ANTAEUS
When Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse sets foot on the Sceptered Isle for
the first time in several months, at the ferry terminal in Utter Maurby, he
is startled to find allusions to springtime all over the place. The locals
have installed flower boxes around the pier, and all of them are abloom with
some sort of pre Cambrian decorative cabbage. The effect is not exactly
cheerful, but it does give the place a haunted Druidical look, as if
Waterhouse is looking at the northwesternmost fringe of some cultural
tradition from which a sharp anthropologist might infer the existence of
actual trees and meadows several hundred miles farther south. For now,
lichens will do they have gotten into the spirit and turned greyish purple
and greyish green.
He and Duffel, their old companionship renewed, tussle their way over
to the terminal and fight each other for a seat aboard the disconcertingly
quaint two car Manchester bound whistle stop. It will sit there for another
couple of hours raising steam before leaving, giving him plenty of time to
take stock.
He's been working on some information theoretical problems occasioned
by the Royal and U.S. Navies' recent (1) propensity to litter the
floor of the Atlantic with bombed and torpedoed milchcows. These fat German
submarines, laden with fuel, food, and ammunition, loiter in the Atlantic
Ocean, using radio rarely and staying well away from the sea lanes, and
serve as covert floating supply bases so that the U boats don't have to go
all the way back to the European mainland to refuel and rearm. Sinking lots
of 'em is great for the convoys, but must seem conspicuously improbable to
the likes of a Rudolf von Hacklheber.
Usually, just for the sake of form, the Allies send out a search plane
beforehand to pretend to stumble upon the milchcow. But, setting aside some
of their blind spots in the political realm, the Germans are bright chaps,
and cannot be expected to fall for that ruse forever. If we are going to
keep sending their milchcows to the bottom, we need to come up with a
respectable excuse for the fact that we always know exactly where they are!
Waterhouse has been coming up with excuses as fast as he can for most
of the late winter and early spring, and frankly he is tired of it. It has
to be done by a mathematician if it's to be done correctly, but it's not
exactly mathematics. Thank god he had the presence of mind to copy down the
crypto worksheets that he discovered in the U boat's safe, which give him
something to live for.
In a sense he is wasting his time; the originals have long since gone
off to Bletchley Park where they were probably deciphered within hours. But
he's not doing it for the war effort per se, just trying to keep his mind
sharp and maybe add a few leaves to the next edition of the Cryptonomicon.
When he arrives at Bletchley, which is his destination of the moment, he
will have to ask around and find out what those messages actually said.
Usually, he is above such cheating. But the messages from U 553 have
him completely baffled. They were not produced on an Enigma machine, but
they are at least that difficult to decrypt. He does not even know, yet,
what kind of cipher he is dealing with. Normally, one begins by figuring
out, based on certain patterns in the ciphertext, whether it is, for
example, a substitution or a transposition system, and then further
classifying it into, say, an aperiodic transposition cipher in which keying
units of constant length encipher plaintext groups of variable length, or
vice versa. Once you have classified the algorithm, you know how to go about
breaking the code.
Waterhouse hasn't even gotten that far. He now strongly suspects that
the messages were produced using a one time pad. If so, not even Bletchley
Park will be able to break them, unless they have somehow obtained a copy of
the pad. He is half hoping that they will tell him that this is the case so
that he can stop ramming his head against this particular stone wall.
In a way, this would raise even more questions than it would answer.
The Triton four wheel naval Enigma was supposedly considered by the Germans
to be perfectly impregnable to cryptanalysis. If that was the case, then why
was the skipper of U 553 employing his own private system for certain
messages?
The locomotive starts hissing and sputtering like the House of Lords as
Inner Qwghlmians emerge from the terminal building and take their seats on
the train. A gaffer comes through the car, selling yesterday's newspapers,
cigarettes, candy, and Waterhouse purchases some of each.
The train is just beginning to jerk forward when Waterhouse's eye falls
on the lead headline of yesterday's newspaper: YAMAMOTO'S PLANE SHOT DOWN IN
PACIFIC ARCHITECT OF PEARL HARBOR THOUGHT TO BE DEAD.
"Malaria, here I come," Waterhouse mumbles to himself. Then, before
reading any further, he sets the newspaper down and opens up his pack of
cigarettes. This is going to take a lot of cigarettes.
***
One day, and a whole lot of tar and nicotine later, Waterhouse climbs
off the train and walks out the front door of Bletchley Depot into a
dazzling spring day. The flowers in front of the station are blooming, a
warm southern breeze is blowing, and Waterhouse almost cannot bear to cross
the road and enter some windowless hut in the belly of Bletchley Park. He
does it anyway and is informed that he has no duties at the moment.
After visiting a few other huts on other business, he turns north and
walks three miles to the hamlet of Shenley Brook End and goes into the Crown
Inn, where the proprietress, Mrs. Ramshaw, has, during these last three and
a half years, made a tidy business out of looking after stray, homeless
Cambridge mathematicians.
Dr. Alan Mathison Turing is seated at a table by a window, sprawled
across two or three chairs in what looks like a very awkward pose but which
Waterhouse feels sure is eminently practical. A full pint of some thing
reddish brown is on the table next to him; Alan is too busy to drink it. The
smoke from Alan's cigarette reveals a prism of sunlight coming through the
window, centered in which is a mighty Book. Alan is holding the book with
one hand. The palm of his other hand is pressed against his forehead, as if
he could get the data from book to brain through some kind of direct
transference. His fingers curl up into the air and a cigarette projects from
between them, ashes dangling perilously over his dark hair. His eyes are
frozen in place, not scanning the page, and their focus point is somewhere
in the remote distance.
"Designing another Machine, Dr. Turing?"
The, eyes finally begin to move, and swivel around towards the sound of
the visitor's voice. "Lawrence," Alan says once, quietly, identifying the
face. Then, once more warmly: "Lawrence!" He scrambles to his feet, as
energetic as ever, and steps forward to shake hands. "Delighted to see you!"
"Good to see you, Alan," Waterhouse says. "Welcome back." He is, as
always, pleasantly surprised by Alan's keenness, the intensity and purity of
his reactions to things.
He is also touched by Alan's frank and sincere affection for him. Alan
did not give this easily or lightly, but when he decided to make Waterhouse
his friend, he did so in a way that is unfettered by either American or
heterosexual concepts of manly bearing. "Did you walk the entire distance
from Bletchley? Mrs. Ramshaw, refreshment!"
"Heck, it's only three miles," Waterhouse says.
"Please come and join me," Alan says. Then he stops, frowns, and looks
at him quizzically. "How on earth did you guess I was designing another
machine? Simply a guess based on prior observations?"
"Your choice of reading material," Waterhouse says, and points to
Alan's book: RCA Radio Tube Manual.
Alan gets a wild look. "This has been my constant companion," he says.
"You must learn about these valves, Lawrence! Or tubes as you would call
them. Your education is incomplete otherwise. I cannot believe the number of
years I wasted on sprockets! God!"
"Your zeta function machine? I thought it was beautiful," Lawrence
says.
"So are many things that belong in a museum," Alan says.
"That was six years ago. You had to work with the available
technology," Lawrence says.
"Oh, Lawrence! I'm surprised at you! If it will take ten years to make
the machine with available technology, and only five years to make it with a
new technology, and it will only take two years to invent the new
technology, then you can do it in seven years by inventing the new
technology first!"
"Touché"
"This is the new technology," Alan says, holding up the RCA Radio Tube
Manual like Moses brandishing a Tablet of the Law. "If I had only had the
presence of mind to use these, I could have built the zeta function machine
much sooner, and others besides."
"What sort of a machine are you designing now?" Lawrence asks.
"I've been playing chess with a fellow named Donald Michie a
classicist," Alan says. "I am wretched at it. But man has always constructed
tools to extend his powers why not a machine that will help me play chess?"
"Does Donald Michie get to have one, too?"
"He can design his own machine!" Alan says indignantly.
Lawrence looks carefully around the pub. They are the only customers,
and he cannot bring himself to believe that Mrs. Ramshaw is a spy. "I
thought it might have something to do with " he says, and nods in the
direction of Bletchley Park.
"They are building I have helped them build a machine called Colossus."
"I thought I saw your hand in it."
"It is built from old ideas ideas we talked about in New Jersey, years
ago," Alan says. Brisk and dismissive is his tone, gloomy is his face. He is
hugging the RCA Radio Tube Manual to himself with one arm, doodling in a
notebook with the other. Waterhouse thinks that really the RCA Radio Tube
Manual is like a ball and chain holding Alan back. If he would just work
with pure ideas like a proper mathematician he could go as fast as thought.
As it happens, Alan has become fascinated by the incarnations of pure ideas
in the physical world. The underlying math of the universe is like the light
streaming in through the window. Alan is not satisfied with merely knowing
that it streams in. He blows smoke into the air to make the light visible.
He sits in meadows gazing at pine cones and flowers, tracing the
mathematical patterns in their structure, and he dreams about electron winds
blowing over the glowing filaments and screens of radio tubes, and, in their
surges and eddies, capturing something of what is going on in his own brain.
Turing is neither a mortal nor a god. He is Antaeus. That he bridges the
mathematical and physical worlds is his strength and his weakness.
"Why are you so glum?" Alan says. "What have you been working on?"
"Same stuff, different context," Waterhouse says. With these four words
he conveys, in full, everything that he has been doing on behalf of the war
effort. "Fortunately, I came upon something that is actually rather
interesting."
Alan looks delighted and fascinated to hear this news, as if the world
had been completely devoid of interesting things for the last ten years or
so, and Waterhouse had stumbled upon a rare find. "Tell me about it," he
insists.
"It's a cryptanalysis problem," Waterhouse says. "Non Enigma." He goes
on to tell the story about the messages from U 553. "When I got to Bletchley
Park this morning," he concludes, "I asked around. They said that they had
been butting their heads against the problem as long as I had, without any
success."
Suddenly, Alan looks disappointed and bored. "It must be a one time
pad," he says. He sounds reproachful.
"It can't be. The ciphertext is not devoid of patterns," Waterhouse
says.
"Ah," replies Alan, perking up again.
"I looked for patterns with the usual Cryptonomicon techniques. Found
nothing clear just some traces. Finally, in complete frustration, I decided
to start from a clean slate, trying to think like Alan Turing. Typically
your approach is to reduce a problem to numbers and then bring the full
power of mathematical analysis to bear on it. So I began by converting the
messages into numbers. Normally, this would be an arbitrary process. You
convert each letter into a number, usually between one and twenty five, and
then dream up some sort of arbitrary algorithm to convert this series of
small numbers into one big number. But this message was different it used
thirty two characters a power of two meaning that each character had a
unique binary representation, five binary digits long."
"As in Baudot code," Alan says (1). He looks guardedly
interested again.
"So I converted each letter into a number between one and thirty two,
using the Baudot code. That gave me a long series of small numbers. But I
wanted some way to convert all of the numbers in the series into one large
number, just to see if it would contain any interesting patterns. But this
was easy as pie! If the first letter is R, and its Baudot code is 01011, and
the second letter is F, and its code is 10111, then I can simply combine the
two into a ten digit binary number, 0101110111. And then I can take the next
letter's code and stick that onto the end and get a fifteen digit number.
And so on. The letters come in groups of five that's twenty five binary
digits per group. With six groups on each line of the page, that's a hundred
and fifty binary digits per line. And with twenty lines on the page, that's
three thousand binary digits.
So each page of the message could be thought of not as a series of six
hundred letters, but as an encoded representation of a single number with a
magnitude of around two raised to the three thousandth power, which works
out to around ten to the nine hundredth power."
"All right," Alan says, "I agree that the use of thirty two letter
alphabet suggests a binary coding scheme. And I agree that the binary coding
scheme, in turn, lends itself to a sort of treatment in which individual
groups of five binary digits are mooshed together to make larger numbers,
and that you could even take it to the point of mooshing together all of the
data on a whole page that way, to make one extremely large number. But what
does that accomplish?"
"I don't really know," Waterhouse admits. "I just have an intuition
that what we are dealing with here is a new encryption scheme based upon a
purely mathematical algorithm. Otherwise, there would be no point in using
the thirty two letter alphabet! If you think about it, Alan, thirty two
letters are all well and good as a matter of fact, they are essential for a
teletype scheme, because you have to have special characters like line feed
and carriage return."
"You're right," Alan says, "it is extremely odd that they would use
thirty two letters in a scheme that is apparently worked out using pencil
and paper."
"I've been over it a thousand times," Waterhouse says, "and the only
explanation I can think of is that they are converting their messages into
large binary numbers and then combining them with other large binary numbers
one time pads, most likely to produce the ciphertext."
"In which case your project is doomed," Alan says, "because you can't
break a one time pad."
"That is only true," Waterhouse says, "if the one time pad is truly
random. If you built up that three thousand digit number by flipping a coin
three thousand times and writing down a one for heads and a zero for tails,
then it would be truly random and unbreakable. But I do not think that this
is the case here."
"Why not? You think there were patterns in their one time pads?"
"Maybe. Just traces."
"Then what makes you think it is other than random?"
"Otherwise it makes no sense to develop a new scheme," Waterhouse says.
"Everyone in the world has been using one time pads forever. There are
established procedures for doing it. There's no reason to switch over to
this new, extremely odd system right now, in the middle of a war."
"So what do you suppose is the rationale for this new scheme?" asks
Alan, clearly enjoying himself a great deal.
"The problem with one time pads is that you have to make two copies of
each pad and get them to the sender and the recipient. I mean, suppose
you're in Berlin and you want to send a message to someone in the Far East!
This U boat that we found had cargo on board gold and other stuff from
Japan! Can you imagine how cumbersome this must be for the Axis?"
"Ahh," Alan says. He gets it now. But Waterhouse finishes the
explanation anyway:
"Suppose that you came up with a mathematical algorithm for generating
very large numbers that were random, or at least random looking."
"Pseudo random."
"Yeah. You'd have to keep the algorithm secret, of course. But if you
could get it the algorithm, that is around the world to your intended
recipient, then they could, from that day forward, do the calculation
themselves and figure out the one time pad for that particular day, or
whatever."
A shadow passes over Alan's otherwise beaming countenance. "But the
Germans already have Enigma machines all over the place," he says. "Why
should they bother to come up with a new scheme?"
"Maybe," Waterhouse says, "maybe there are some Germans who don't want
the entire German Navy to be able to decipher their messages."
"Ah," Alan says. This seems to eliminate his last objection. Suddenly
he is all determination. "Show me the messages!"
Waterhouse opens up his attache case, splotched and streaked with salt
from his voyages to and from Qwghlm, and draws out two manila envelopes.
"These are the copies I made before I sent the originals down to Bletchley
Park," he says, patting one of them. "They are much more legible than the
originals " he pats the other envelope " which they were kind enough to lend
me this morning, so that I could study them again."
"Show the originals!" Alan says. Waterhouse slides the second envelope,
encrusted with TOP SECRET stamps, across the table.
Alan opens the envelope so hastily that he tears it, and jerks out the
pages. He spreads them out on the table. His mouth drops open in purest
astonishment.
For a moment, Waterhouse is fooled; the expression on Alan's face makes
him think that his friend has, in some Olympian burst of genius, deciphered
the messages in an instant, just by looking at them.
But that's not it at all. Thunderstruck, he finally says, "I recognize
this handwriting."
"You do?" Waterhouse says.
"Yes. I've seen it a thousand times. These pages were written out by
our old bicycling friend, Rudolf von Hacklheber. Rudy wrote those pages."
***
Waterhouse spends much of the next week commuting to London for
meetings at the Broadway Buildings. Whenever civilian authorities are going
to be present at a meeting especially civilians with expensive sounding
accents Colonel Chattan always shows up, and before the meeting starts,
always finds some frightfully cheerful and oblique way to tell Waterhouse to
keep his trap shut unless someone asks a math question. Waterhouse is not
offended. He prefers it, actually, because it leaves his mind free to work
on important things. During their last meeting at the Broadway Buildings,
Waterhouse proved a theorem.
It takes Waterhouse about three days to figure that the meetings
themselves make no sense he reckons that there is no imaginable goal that
could be furthered by what they are discussing. He even makes a few stabs at
proving that this is so, using formal logic, but he is weak in this area and
doesn't know enough of the underlying axioms to reach a Q.E.D.
By the end of the week, though, he has figured out that these meetings
are just one ramification of the Yamamoto assassination. Winston Spencer
Churchill is very fond indeed of Bletchley Park and all its works, and he
places the highest priority on preserving its secrecy, but the interception
of Yamamoto's airplane has blown a gaping hole in the screen of deception.
The Americans responsible for this appalling gaffe are now trying to cover
their asses by spreading a story that native islander spies caught wind of
Yamamoto's trip and radioed the news to Guadalcanal, whence the fatal P 38s
were dispatched. But the P 38s were operating at the extreme limit of their
fuel range and would have had to be sent out at precisely the correct time
in order to make it back to Guadalcanal, so the Japanese would have to have
their heads several feet up their asses to fall for that. Winston Churchill
is pissed off in the extreme, and these meetings represent a prolonged
bureaucratic hissy fit intended to produce some meaningful and enduring
policy shift.
Every evening after the meetings, Waterhouse takes the tube to Euston
and the train to Bletchley, and sits up late working on Rudy's numbers. Alan
has been working on them during the daytime, so the two of them, combining
their efforts, can almost pound away on it round the clock.
Not all of the riddles are mathematical. For example, why the hell do
the Germans have Rudy copying out big long numbers by hand? If the letters
do indeed represent big numbers that would indicate that Dr. Rudolf von
Hacklheber had been assigned to a job as a mere cipher clerk. This would not
be the stupidest move ever made by a bureaucracy, but it seems unlikely. And
what little intelligence they've been able to gather from Germany suggests
that Rudy has in fact been given a rather important job important enough to
keep extremely secret.
Alan's hypothesis is that Waterhouse has been making an understandable
but totally wrong assumption. The numbers are not ciphertext. They are,
rather, one time pads that the skipper of U 553 was supposed to have used to
encrypt certain messages too sensitive to go out over the regular Enigma
channel. These one time pads were, for some reason, drawn up personally by
Rudy himself.
Usually, making one time pads is just as lowly a job as enciphering
messages a job for clerks, who use decks of cards or bingo machines to
choose letters at random. But Alan and Waterhouse are now operating on the
assumption that this encryption scheme is a radical new invention
presumably, an invention of Rudy's in which the pads are generated not at
random but by using some mathematical algorithm.
In other words, there is some calculation, some equation that Rudy has
dreamed up. You give it a value probably the date, and possibly some other
information as well, such as an arbitrary key phrase or number. You crank
through the steps of the calculation, and the result is a number, some nine
hundred digits long, which is three thousand binary digits, which gives you
six hundred letters (enough to cover one sheet of paper) when you convert it
using the Baudot code. The nine hundred digit decimal number, the three
thousand digit binary number, and the six hundred letters are all the same
abstract, pure number, encoded differently.
Meanwhile, your counterpart, probably on the other side of the world,
is going through the same calculation and coming up with the same one time
pad. When you send him a message encrypted using the day's pad, he can
decipher it.
If Turing and Waterhouse can figure out how the calculation works, they
can read all of these messages too.
Chapter 41 PHREAKING
The dentist is gone, the door locked, the phone unplugged. Randall
Lawrence Waterhouse lies naked on the starched, turned down sheets of his
king sized bed. His head is propped up on a pillow so that he can peer
through the vee of his feet at a BBC World Service newscast on the
television. A ten dollar minibar beer is near at hand. It's six in the
morning in America and so rather than a pro basketball game, he has to
settle for this BBC newscast, which is strongly geared to South Asian
happenings. A long and very sober story about a plague of locusts on the
India/Pakistan border follows a piece on a typhoon about to nail Hong Kong.
The king of Thailand is calling in some of his government's more corrupt
officials to literally prostrate themselves before him. Asian news always
has this edge of the fantastic to it, but it's all dead serious, no nods or
winks anywhere. Now he's watching a story about a nervous system disease
that people in New Guinea come down with as a consequence of eating other
people's brains. Just your basic cannibal story. No wonder so many Americans
come here on business and never really go home again it's like stepping into
the pages of Classics Comics.
Someone is knocking on his door. Randy gets up and puts on his plush
white hotel bathrobe. He peers through the peephole, half expecting to see a
pygmy standing there with a blowpipe, though he wouldn't mind a seductive
Oriental courtesan. But it's just Cantrell. Randy opens the door. Cantrell
is already holding up his hands, palms out, in a cheerful "shut up already"
gesture. "Don't worry," Cantrell says, "I'm not here to talk about Biz."
"In that case I won't break this beer bottle over your head," Randy
says. Cantrell must feel exactly the same way Randy does, which is that so
much wild shit happened today that the only way to deal with it is not to
talk about it at all. Most of the brain's work is done while the brain's
owner is ostensibly thinking about something else, so sometimes you have to
deliberately find something else to think and talk about.
"Come to my room," Cantrell says. "Pekka is here."
"The Finn who got blown up?"
"The same."
"Why is he here?"
"Because there's no reason not to be. After he got blown up he adopted
a technomadic lifestyle."
"So it's just a coincidence, or "
"Nah," Cantrell says. "He's helping me win a bet."
"What kind of bet?"
"I was telling Tom Howard about Van Eck phreaking a few weeks ago. Tom
said it sounded like bullshit. He bet me ten shares of Epiphyte stock that I
couldn't make it actually work outside of a laboratory."
"Is Pekka good at that kind of thing?"
By way of saying yes, Cantrell adopts a serious look and says, "Pekka
is writing a whole chapter about it for the Cryptonomicon. Pekka feels that
only by mastering the technologies that might be used against us can we
defend ourselves."
This sounds almost like a call to arms. Randy would have to be some
kind of loser to retreat to his bed after that, so he backs into the room
and steps into his trousers, which are standing there telescoped into the
floor where he dropped them upon his return from the sultan's palace. The
sultan's palace! The television is now broadcasting a news story about
pirates plying the waters of the South China Sea, making freighter crews
walk the plank. "This whole continent is like fucking Disneyland without the
safety precautions," Randy observes. "Am I the only person who finds it
surreal?"
Cantrell grins, but says, "If we begin talking about surreal, we'll end
up talking about today."
"You got that right," Randy says. "Let's go."
***
Before Pekka became known around Silicon Valley as the Finn Who Got
Blown Up, he was known as Cello Guy, because he had a nearly autistic
devotion to his cello and took it with him everywhere, always trying to
stuff it into overhead luggage racks. Not coincidentally, he was an analog
kind of guy from way back whose specialty was radio.
When packet radio started to get big as an alternative to sending data
down wires, Pekka moved to Menlo Park and joined a startup. His company
bought their equipment at used computer stores, and Pekka ended up scoring a
pretty nice nineteen inch high res multisync monitor perfectly adequate for
his adaptable twenty four year old eyes. He hooked it up to a slightly used
Pentium box jammed full of RAM.
He also installed Finux, a free UNIX operating system created by Finns,
almost as a way of proclaiming to the rest of the world "this is how weird
we are," and distributed throughout the world on the Net. Of course Finux
was fantastically powerful and flexible and enabled you, among other things,
to control the machine's video circuitry to the Nth degree and choose many
different scanning frequencies and pixel clocks, if you were into that kind
of thing. Pekka most definitely was into it, and so like a lot of Finux
maniacs he set his machine up so that it could display, if he chose, a whole
lot of tiny little pixels (which displayed a lot of information but was hard
on the eyes) or, alternatively, fewer and larger pixels (which he tended to
use after he had been hacking for twenty four hours straight and lost ocular
muscle tone), or various settings in between. Every time he changed from one
setting to another, the monitor screen would go black for a second and there
would be an audible clunk from inside of it as the resonating crystals
inside locked in on a different range of frequencies.
One night at three A.M., Pekka caused this to happen, and immediately
after the screen went black and made that clunking noise, it exploded in his
face. The front of the picture tube was made of heavy glass (it had to be,
to withstand the internal vacuum) which fragmented and sped into Pekka's
face, neck, and upper body. The very same phosphors that had been glowing
beneath the sweeping electron beam, moments before, conveying information
into Pekka's eyes, were now physically embedded in his flesh. A hunk of
glass took one of his eyes and almost went through into his brain. Another
one gouged out his voicebox, another zinged past the side of his head and
bit a neat triangular hunk out of his left ear.
Pekka, in other words, was the first victim of the Digibomber. He
almost bled to death on the spot, and his fellow Eutropians hovered around
his hospital bed for a few days with tanks of Freon, ready to jump into
action in case he died. But he didn't, and he got even more press because
his startup company lacked health insurance. After a lot of hand wringing in
local newspapers about how this poor innocent from the land of socialized
medicine had not had the presence of mind to buy health insurance, some rich
high tech guys donated money to pay his medical bills and to equip him with
a computer voicebox like Stephen Hawking's.
And now here is Pekka, sitting in Cantrell's hotel room. His cello
stands in the corner, dusty around the bridge from powdered rosin. He is
facing a blank wall to which he has duct taped a bunch of wires in precise
loops and whorls. These lead to some home brewed circuit boards which are in
turn hooked up to his laptop.
"Hello Randy congratulations on your success," says a computer
generated voice as soon as the door is shut behind Randy and Cantrell. This
is a little greeting that Pekka has obviously typed in ahead of time,
anticipating his arrival. None of the foregoing seems particularly odd to
Randy except for the fact that Pekka seems to think that Epiphyte has
already achieved some kind of success.
"How are we doing?" Cantrell asks.
Pekka types in a response. Then he cups one hand to his mutilated ear
while using his other hand to cue the voice generator: "He showers." Indeed,
it's possible now to hear the pipes hissing in the wall. "His laptop
radiates."
"Oh," Randy says, "Tom Howard's room is right next door?"
"Just on the other side of that wall," Cantrell says. "I specifically
requested it, so that I could win this bet. See, his room is a mirror image
of this one, so his computer is only a few inches away, just on the other
side of this wall. Perfect conditions for Van Eck phreaking."
"Pekka, are you receiving signals from his computer right now?" Randy
asks.
Pekka nods, types, and fires back, "I tune. I calibrate." The input
device for his voice generator is a one handed chord board strapped to his
thigh. He puts his right hand on it and makes flopping and groping motions.
Moments later speech emerges, "I require Cantrell."
"Excuse me," Cantrell says, and goes to Pekka's side. Randy watches
over their shoulders for a bit, understanding vaguely what they're doing.
If you lay a sheet of white paper on an old gravestone, and sweep the
tip of a pencil across it, you get one horizontal line, dark in some places
and faint in others, and not very meaningful. If you move downwards on the
page by a small distance, a single pencil line width, and repeat, an image
begins to emerge. The process of working your way down the page in a series
of horizontal sweeps is what a nerd would call raster scanning, or just
rastering. With a conventional video monitor a cathode ray tube the electron
beam physically rasters down the glass something like sixty to eighty times
a second. In the case of a laptop screen like Randy's, there is no physical
scanning; the individual pixels are turned on or off directly. But still a
scanning process is taking place; what's being scanned and made manifest on
the screen is a region of the computer's memory called the screen buffer.
The contents of the screen buffer have to be slapped up onto the screen
sixty to eighty times every second or else (1) the screen flickers and (2)
the images move jerkily.
The way that the computer talks to you is not by controlling the screen
directly but rather by manipulating the bits contained in that buffer,
secure in the knowledge that other subsystems inside the machine handle the
drudge work of pipelining that information onto the actual, physical screen.
Sixty to eighty times a second, the video system says shit! time to refresh
the screen again, and goes to the beginning of the screen buffer which is
just a particular hunk of memory, remember and it reads the first few bytes,
which dictate what color the pixel in the upper left hand corner of the
screen is supposed to be. This information is sent on down the line to
whatever is actually refreshing the screen, whether it's a scanning electron
beam or some laptop style system for directly controlling the pixels. Then
the next few bytes are read, typically for the pixel just to the right of
that first one, and so on all the way to the right edge of the screen. That
draws the first line of the grave rubbing.
Since the right edge of the screen has now been reached, there are no
more pixels off in that direction. It is implicit that the next bytes read
from memory will be for the leftmost pixel in the second raster line down
from the top. If this is a cathode ray tube type of screen, we have a little
timing problem here in that the electron beam is currently at the right edge
of the screen and now it's being asked to draw a pixel at the left edge. It
has to move back. This takes a little while not long, but much longer than
the interval of time between drawing two pixels that are cheek by jowl. This
pause is called the horizontal retrace interval. Another one will occur at
the end of every other line until the rastering has proceeded to the last
pixel at the bottom right hand corner of the screen and completed a single
grave rubbing. But then it's time to begin the process all over again, and
so the electron beam (if there is one) has to jump diagonally all the way up
to the upper left hand pixel. This also takes a little while and is called
the vertical retrace interval.
These issues all stem from inherent physical limitations of sweeping
electron beams through space in a cathode ray tube, and basically disappear
in the case of a laptop screen like the one Tom Howard has set up a few
inches in front of Pekka, on the other side of that wall. But the video
timing of a laptop screen is still patterned after that of a cathode ray
tube screen anyway. (This is simply because the old technology is
universally understood by those who need to understand it, and it works
well, and all kinds of electronic and software technology has been built and
tested to work within that framework, and why mess with success, especially
when your profit margins are so small that they can only be detected by
using techniques from quantum mechanics, and any glitches vis à vis
compatibility with old stuff will send your company straight into the
toilet.)
On Tom's laptop, each second of time is divided into seventy five
perfectly regular slices, during which a full grave rubbing is performed
followed by a vertical retrace interval. Randy can follow Pekka and
Cantrell's conversation well enough to gather that they have already figured
out, from analyzing the signals coming through the wall, that Tom Howard has
his screen set up to give him 768 lines, and 1,024 pixels on each line. For
every pixel, four bytes will be read from the video buffer and sent on down
the line to the screen. (Tom is using the highest possible level of color
definition on his screen, which means that one byte apiece is needed to
represent the intensity of blue, green, and red and another is basically
left over, but kept in there anyway because computers like powers of two,
and computers are so ridiculously fast and powerful now that, even though
all of this is happening on a timetable that would strike a human being as
rather aggressive, the extra bytes just don't make any difference.) Each
byte is eight binary digits or bits and so, 1,024 times a line, 4 x 8 = 32
bits are being read from the screen buffer.
Unbeknownst to Tom, his computer happens to be sitting right next to an
antenna. The wires Pekka taped to the wall can read the electromagnetic
waves that are radiating out of the computer's circuitry at all times.
Tom's laptop is sold as a computer, not as a radio station, and so it
might seem odd that it should be radiating anything at all. It is all a
byproduct of the fact that computers are binary critters, which means that
all chip to chip, subsystem to subsystem communication taking place inside
the machine everything moving down those flat ribbons of wire, and the
little metallic traces on the circuit boards consists of transitions from
zero to one and back again. The way that you represent bits in a computer is
by switching the wire's voltage back and forth between zero and five volts.
In computer textbooks these transitions are always graphed as if they were
perfect square waves, meaning that you have this perfectly flat line at V 0,
representing a binary zero, and then it makes a perfect right angle turn and
jumps vertically to V 5 and then executes another perfect right angle turn
and remains at five volts until it's time to go back to zero again, and so
on.
This is the Platonic ideal of how computer circuitry is supposed to
operate, but engineers have to build actual circuits in the grimy analog
world. The hunks of metal and silicon can't manifest the Platonic behavior
shown in those textbooks. Circuits can jump between zero and five volts
really, really abruptly but if you monitor them on an oscilloscope, you can
see that it's not a perfectly square wave. Instead you get some thing that
looks like this:
The little waves are called ringing; these transitions among binary
digits hit the circuitry like a clapper striking a bell. The voltage jumps,
but after it jumps it oscillates back and forth around the new value for a
little while. Whenever you have an oscillating voltage in a conductor like
this, it means that electromagnetic waves are propagating out into space.
Consequently each wire in a running computer is like a little radio
transmitter. The signals that it broadcasts are completely dependent upon
the details of what's going on inside the machine. Since there are a lot of
wires in there, and the particulars of what they are doing are fairly
unpredictable, it is difficult for anyone monitoring the transmissions to
make head or tail of them. A great deal of what comes out of the machine is
completely irrelevant from a surveillance point of view. But there is one
pattern of signals that is (1) totally predictable and (2) exactly what
Pekka wants to see, and that is the stream of bytes being read from the
screen buffer and sent down the wire to the screen hardware. Amid all the
random noise coming from the machine, the ticks of the horizontal and
vertical retrace intervals will stand out as clearly as the beating of a
drum in a teeming jungle. Now that Pekka has zeroed in on that beat, he
should be able to pick up the radiation emanating from the wire that
connects screen buffer to video hardware, and translate it back into a
sequence of ones and zeroes that can be dumped out onto their own screen.
They will be able to see exactly what Tom Howard sees, through the kind of
surveillance called Van Eck phreaking.
That's what Randy knows. When it comes to the details, Cantrell and
Pekka are way out of his league, so after a few minutes he feels himself
losing interest. He sits down on Cantrell's bed, which is the only place
left to sit, and discovers a little palmtop computer on the bedside table.
It is already up and running, patched into the world over a telephone wire.
Randy's heard of this product. It is supposed to be a first stab at a
network computer, and so it's running a Web browser whenever it is turned
on; the Web browser is the interface.
"May I surf?" Randy asks, and Cantrell says, "Yes," without even
turning around. Randy visits one of the big Web searching sites, which takes
a minute because the machine has to establish a Net connection first. Then
he searches for Web documents containing the terms ((Andy OR Andrew) Loeb)
AND "hive mind." As usual, the search finds tens of thousands of documents.
But it's not hard for Randy to pick out the relevant ones.
WHY RIST 9303 IS A MEMBER IN GOOD STANDING OF THE CALIFORNIA BAR
ASSOCIATION
RIST 11A4 has experienced ambivalent feelings over the fact that RIST
9E03 (insofar as s/he is construed, by atomized society, as an individual
organism) is a lawyer. No doubt the conflicted feelings of RIST 11A4 are
quite normal and natural. Part of RIST 11A4 abhors lawyers, and the legal
system in general, as symptoms of the end stage terminal disease of atomized
society. Another part understands that disease can improve the health of the
meme pool if it slays an organism that is old and unfit for ongoing
propagation of its memotype. Make no mistake about it: the legal system in
its current form is the worst imaginable system for society to resolve its
disputes. It is appallingly expensive in terms of money and in terms of the
intellectual talent that goes to waste pursuing it as a career. But part of
RIST 11A4 feels that the goals of RIST 11A4 may actually be served by
turning the legal system's most toxic features against the rotten body
politic of atomized society and in so doing hasten its downfall.
Randy clicks on RIST 9E03 and gets
RIST 9E03 is the RIST that RIST 11A4 denotes by the arbitrarily chosen
bit pattern that, construed as an integer, is 9E03 (in hexadecimal
notation). Click here for more about the system of bit pattern designators
used by RIST 11A4 to replace the obsolescent nomenclature systems of
"natural languages." Click here if you would like the designator RIST 9E03
to be automatically replaced by a conventional designator (name) as you
browse this web site.
Click.
From now on. the expression RIST 9E03 will be replaced by the
expression Andrew Loeb. Warning: we consider such nomenclature fundamentally
invalid, and do not recommend its use, but have provided it as a service to
first time visitors to this Web site who are not accustomed to thinking in
terms of RISTs.
Click.
You have clicked on Andrew Loeb which is a designator assigned by
atomized society to the memome of RIST 9E03 . .
Click.
memome is the set of all memes that define the physical reality of a
carbon based RIST. Memes can be divided into two broad categories: genetic
and semantic. Genetic memes are simply genes (DNA) and are propagated
through normal biological reproduction. Semantic memes are ideas
(ideologies, religions, fads, etc.) and are propagated by communications.
Click.
The genetic part of the memome of Andrew Loeb shares 99% of its
contents with the data set produced by the Human Genome Project. This should
not be construed as endorsing the concept of speciation (i.e. that the
continuum of carbon based life forms can or should be arbitrarily
partitioned into paradigmatic species) in general, or the theory that there
is a species called "Homo sapiens" in particular.
The semantic part of the memome of Andrew Loeb is still unavoidably
contaminated with many primitive viral memes, but these are being gradually
and steadily supplanted by new semantic memes generated ab initio by
rational processes.
Click.
RIST stands for Relatively Independent Sub Totality. It can be used to
refer to any entity that, from one point of view, seems to possess a clear
boundary separating it from the world (as do cells in a body) but that, in a
deeper sense, is inextricably linked with a larger totality (as are cells in
a body). For example, the biological entities traditionally known as "human
beings" are nothing more than Relatively Independent Sub Totalities of the
social organism in which they are embedded.
A dissertation written under the name Andrew Loeb, who is now
designated RIST 9E03, indicates that even in those parts of RIST 0577 having
temperate climates and abundant food and water, the life of an organism such
as the type designated, in old meme systems, as "Homo sapiens," would have
been primarily occupied with attempting to eat other RISTs. This narrow
focus would inhibit the formation of advanced semantic meme systems (viz,
civilization as that word is traditionally construed). RISTs of this type
can only attain higher levels of functioning insofar as they are embedded in
a larger society, the most logical evolutionary end point of which is a hive
mind.
Click.
A hive mind is a social organization of RISTs that are capable of
processing semantic memes ("thinking"). These could be either carbon based
or silicon based. RISTs who enter a hive mind surrender their independent
identities (which are mere illusions anyway). For purposes of convenience,
the constituents of the hive mind are assigned bit pattern designators.
Click.
A bit pattern designator is a random series of bits used to uniquely
identify a RIST. For example, the organism traditionally designed as Earth
(Terra, Gaia) has been assigned the designator 0577. This Web site is
maintained by 11A4 which is a hive mind. RIST 11A4 assigns bit pattern
designators with a pseudo random number generator. This departs from the
practice used by that soi disant "hive mind" known to itself as the East Bay
Area Hive Mind Project but designated (in the system of RIST 11A4) as RIST
E772. This "hive mind" resulted from the division of "Hive Mind One"
(designated in the system of RIST 11A4 as RIST 4032) into several smaller
"hive minds" (the East Bay Area Hive Mind Project, the San Francisco Hive
Mind, Hive Mind IA, the Reorganized San Francisco Hive Mind, and the
Universal Hive Mind) as the result of an irreconcilable contradiction
between several different semantic memes that competed for mind share. One
of these semantic memes asserted that bit pattern designators should be
assigned in numerical order, so that (for example) Hive Mind One would be
designated RIST 0001 and so on. Another meme asserted that numbers should be
organized in order of importance, so that (for example) the RIST
conventionally known as the planet Earth would be RIST 0001. Another
semantic meme agreed with this one but disagreed as to whether the counting
should begin with 0000 or 0001. Within both the 0000 and 0001 camps, there
was disagreement about what RIST should be assigned the first number: some
asserted that Earth was the first and most important RIST, others that some
larger system (the solar system, the Universe, God) was in some sense more
inclusive and fundamental.
This machine has an e mail interface. Randy uses it.
To: root@eruditorum.org
From: dwarf@siblings.net
Subject: Re(2) Why?
Saw the website. Am willing to stipulate that you are not RIST 9E03.
Suspect that you are the Dentist, who yearns for honest exchange of views.
Anonymous, digitally signed e mail is the only safe vehicle for same.
If you want me to believe you are not the Dentist, provide plausible
explanation for your question regarding why we are building the Crypt.
Yours truly,
– BEGIN ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK – (etc.)
– END ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK
"We've got bits," Cantrell says. "Are you in the middle of something?"
"Nothing I'm not eager to get out of," Randy says, putting the palm top
down. He gets off the bed and stands behind Pekka. The screen of Pekka's
computer has a number of windows on it, of which the biggest and frontmost
is the image of another computer's screen. Nested within that are various
other windows and icons: a desktop. It happens to be a Windows NT desktop,
which is noteworthy and (to Randy) bizarre because Pekka's computer isn't
running Windows NT, it's running Finux. A cursor is moving around on that
Windows NT desktop, pulling down menus and clicking on things. But Pekka's
hand is not moving. The cursor zooms over to a Microsoft Word icon, which
changes color and expands to form a large window.
This copy of Microsoft Word is registered to THOMAS HOWARD.
"You did it!" Randy says.
"We see what Tom sees," Pekka says.
A new document window opens up, and words begin to spill across it.
Note to myself: let's see "Letters to Penthouse" print this!
I don't suppose that graduate students of either gender are exactly
sought out by sexual connoisseurs for their great fucking skills. We think
about it too much. Everything has to be verbalized. A person who believes
that fucking is a sexual discourse is simply never going to be any good in
the sack.
I have a thing about stockings. They have to be sheer black stockings,
preferably with seams up the back. When I was thirteen years old I actually
shoplifted some black pantyhose from a grocery store just so that I could
play with them. Walking out of that store with those L'eggs in my backpack,
my heart was pounding, but the excitement of the crime was nothing compared
to opening up the package and pulling them out, rubbing them against my
fuzzy, adolescent cheeks. I even tried pulling them on, but this just looked
grotesque what with my hairy legs and did absolutely nothing for me. I
didn't want to wear them. I wanted someone else to. I masturbated four times
that day.
It disturbed the shit out of me when I thought about it. I was a smart
boy. Smart boys are supposed to be rational. So, when I was in college I
figured out a rationalization for this. There wasn't that many women who
wore sheer black stockings in college, but sometimes I would go into the
city and see the well dressed office workers walking down the street on
their lunch breaks and make scientific observations of their legs. I noticed
that where the stocking stretched itself thin to go over a wide part of the
leg, such as the muscle of the calf, it became paler. just as a colored
balloon becomes paler when it is inflated. Conversely, it was darker in
narrow regions such as the ankle. This made the calf look more shapely and
the ankle look more slender. The legs, as a whole, looked healthier,
implying that just above the place where they joined together, a higher
class of DNA was to be found.
Q.E.D. My thing about black stockings was a highly rational adaptation.
It merely proved how smart I was, how rational even the most irrational
parts of my brain were. Sex held no power over me. It was nothing to fear.
This was quintessentially sophomoric thinking, but nowadays most
educated people hold quintessentially sophomoric opinions well into their
thirties and so this stuck with me for a long time. My wife Virginia
probably had some equally self serving rationalization for her own sexual
needs of which I was not to become aware for many years. So it's no surprise
that our premarital sex life was mediocre. Neither one of us admitted it was
mediocre, of course. If I had admitted it, I would have had to admit that it
was mediocre because Virginia didn't like to wear stockings, and at the time
I was too concerned with being a Sensitive New Age Guy to admit such heresy,
I loved Virginia for her mind. How could I be so shallow, so insensitive, so
perverse as to spurn her because she didn't like to pull filmy tubes of
nylon over her legs? As a pudgy nerd, I was lucky to have her.
Five years into our marriage, I attended the Comdex convention as
president of a small new high tech company. I was a little less pudgy and a
little less nerdy. I met a marketing girl for a big software distribution
chain. She was wearing sheer black stockings. We ended up fucking in my
hotel room. It was the best sex I'd ever had. I went home baffled and
ashamed. After that, my sex life with Virginia was pretty miserable. We had
sex maybe a dozen times over the next couple of years.
Virginia's grandmother died and we went back to upstate New York for
the funeral. Virginia had to wear a dress, which meant she had to shave her
legs and wear stockings something she'd done on only a handful of occasions
since our marriage. I practically fell over when I saw her, and suffered
through the funeral with a big, scratchy erection, trying to figure out how
I could get her alone.
Now, Granny had lived by herself in a big old house on a hill until a
couple of months earlier when she had fallen down and broken her hip, and
been moved into a nursing home. All of her children, grandchildren, and
great grandchildren came together for the funeral, and that house became the
central gathering place. It was a nice place full of good old furniture, but
in her declining years Granny had become something of a compulsive pack rat
and so there were heaps of newspapers and accumulated mail squirreled away
everywhere. In the end we had to haul away several truckloads of junk.
In some other ways, Granny had been pretty well organized and had left
behind a very specific last will and testament. Each one of her descendants
knew exactly which pieces of furniture, dishes, rugs, and curios they were
going to take home. She had a lot of possessions, but she also had a lot of
descendants, and so the loot had to be sliced pretty thin. Virginia ended up
with a black walnut dresser which was stored in an unused bedroom. We went
up there to have a look at it, and I ended up fucking her there. I stood up
with the flimsy trousers of my dark suit collapsed around my ankles while
she sat on top of that dresser with her legs wrapped around me and her
stocking clad heels digging into my butt cheeks. It was the best fuck we'd
ever had, bar none. Fortunately there were a lot of people eating, drinking,
and talking downstairs or they would have heard her moaning and hollering.
I finally came clean to her about the stockings. It felt good. I'd been
reading a lot about how the brain develops and had finally come to accept my
stocking kink. It seems that when you are a certain age, somewhere between
about two and five years, your mind just gels. The part of it that's
responsible for sex becomes set into a pattern that you'll carry with you
for the rest of your life. All of the gay people I've ever discussed it with
have told me that they knew they were gay, or at least different, years
before they even began thinking about sex, and all of them agree that
gayness cannot be converted into straightness, or vice versa, no matter how
hard you might try.
The part of your brain that handles sex frequently gets cross wired
into other, seemingly irrelevant areas at this age. This is when people pick
up an orientation towards sexual dominance or submission, or when a lot of
guys pick up highly specific kinks say, rubber, feathers, or shoes. Some of
them are unfortunate enough to get turned on by little kids, and those guys
are essentially doomed from that point onwards there is nothing to do except
castrate them or lock them up. No therapy will unkink the brain once it has
kinked.
So, all things considered, being turned on by black stockings wasn't
such a bad sexual card to have been dealt. I laid this all out to Virginia
during the trip home. I was surprised by how calmly she accepted it. I was
too big of a jerk to realize that she was thinking about how it all applied
to her.
After we got back home, she gamely went out and bought some stockings
and tried to wear them on occasion. This was not easy. Stockings imply a
whole lifestyle. They look stupid with jeans and sneakers. A woman in
stockings has to wear a dress or a skirt, and not just a blue denim skirt
but something nicer, more formal. She also has to wear the type of shoes
that Virginia didn't own and didn't like to wear. Stockings are not really
compatible with riding a bicycle to work. They were not even really
compatible with our house. During our frugal grad student days we had
accumulated a lot of furniture from Goodwill, or I had hammered it together
myself out of two by fours. This furniture turned out to be riddled with
hidden snags that a person in blue jeans would never notice but that would
destroy a pair of stockings in a moment. Likewise, our half finished house
and our old junker cars had many small sharp edges that were death to
stockings. On the other hand, when we went away for an anniversary trip to
London, getting around in black taxis, staying in a nice hotel, and eating
in good restaurants, we spent a whole week moving in a world that was
perfectly adapted to stockings. It just went to show us how radically we
would have to change our circumstances in order for her to dress that way
routinely.
So, much money was spent on stockings in a fit of good intentions. Some
good sex was had, though I seemed to enjoy it much more than Virginia did.
She never achieved the shocking, animal intensity she had shown at Granny's
house after the funeral . Attrition reduced her supply of stockings very
quickly, sheer inconvenience prevented her from renewing it, and within a
year after the funeral we were back to square one.
Other things were changing, though. I made a lot of money by cashing in
some stock options, and we bought a new house up in the hills. We hired some
movers to come pick up all of our junky furniture and move it into that
house, where it looked much shabbier. Virginia's new job forced her to
commute in a car. I didn't think our old junker was safe, and so I bought
her a nice little Lexus with leather seats and wool carpet, all of it nicely
snag free. Soon, kids came along and I traded in my old beater pickup truck
for a minivan.
Still, I couldn't bring myself to begin spending money on furniture
until my back started going bad on me, and I realized it was because of the
slack, twenty year old Goodwill mattress that Virginia and I were sleeping
on. We had to buy a new bed. Since it was my back at stake, I went out and
did the shopping.
I 'd rather stub out cigarettes on my tongue than go shopping. The idea
of hitting every big furniture store in the area, comparing beds, made me
want to die. All I wanted was to go to one place and buy a bed and have done
with it. But I didn't want a shitty bed that I'd be sick of in a year, or a
cheap mattress that would mess up my back again in five years.
So I went straight down to my local Gomer Bolstrood Home Gallery. I had
heard people talk about Gomer Bolstrood furniture. Women, in particular,
seemed to speak of it in hushed, religious tones. Their factory was said to
be up in some New England town where they had been based for the last three
hundred years. It was said that loose curls of walnut and oak from Gomer
Bolstroods block plane had been used as tinder beneath the pyres of
convicted witches. Gomer Bolstrood was the answer to a question I'd been
ruminating over ever since Granny's funeral, namely: where does all of this
high quality grandma furniture come from? In every family, young people go
to grandma's house for Thanksgiving, or other obligatory visits, and lust
over the nice antique furniture, wondering which pieces they will take home
when the old lady kicks the bucket. Some people lose patience and go to
estate sales or antique stores and buy the stuff.
But if the supply of old, high grade, heirloom quality furniture is
fixed, then where will the grannys of the future come from? I could see a
situation, half a century in the future, when Virginia's and my descendants
would all be squabbling over that one black walnut dresser, while bringing
in Ryder trucks to haul the rest of our stuff straight to the dump. As the
population grows, and the supply of old furniture remains constant, this
kind of thing is inevitable. There must be a source for new granny grade
furniture, or else the Americans of tomorrow will all end up sitting in
vinyl beanbag chairs, leaking little foam beads all over the floor.
The answer is Gomer Bolstrood, and the price is high. Each Gomer
Bolstrood chair and table really ought to come in a little felt lined box,
like a piece of jewelry. But at the time, I was rich and impatient. So I
drove to Gomer Bolstrood and stormed through the door, only to be brought up
short by a receptionist. I felt tacky in my white tennis shoes and jeans.
She had probably seen a lot of high tech millionaires come through those
doors, and took it pretty calmly. Before I knew it a middle aged woman had
emerged from the back of the store and appointed herself my personal design
consultant. Her name was Margaret. "Where are the beds?" I asked. She
stiffened and informed me that this not the kind of place where you could
walk into a Bed Room and see a row of beds lined up like pig's feet at a
butcher shop. A Gomer Bolstrood Home Design Gallery consists of a series of
exquisitely decorated rooms, some of which happen to be bedrooms and to
contain beds. Once we had that all straightened out. Margaret showed me the
bedrooms. As she led me from one room to the next. I couldn't help noticing
that she was wearing black stockings with seams up the back perfectly
straight seams.
My erotic feelings for Margaret made me uncomfortable. For a while, I
had to restrain the impulse to say "just sell me the biggest, most expensive
bed you have." Margaret showed me beds in different styles. The names of the
styles meant nothing to me. Some looked modern and some looked old
fashioned. I pointed to a very large, high four poster that looked like
granny furniture and said. "I'll take one of those."
There was a three month delay while the bed was hand carved by New
England craftsmen working at the same wage as plumbers or psychotherapists.
Then it showed up at our house and was assembled by technicians in white
coveralls, like the guys who work in semiconductor chip fabrication plants.
Virginia came home from work. She was wearing a denim skirt, heavy wool
socks, and Birkenstocks. The kids were still at school. We had sex on the
bed. I performed dutifully enough, I suppose. I could not really sustain an
erection and ended up with my head stuck between her bristly thighs. Even
with my ears blocked by her quadriceps. I could hear her moaning and
screaming. She went into erotic convulsions near the end, and almost snapped
my neck. Her climax must have lasted for two or three full minutes. This was
the moment when I first came to terms with the fact that Virginia could not
achieve orgasm unless she was in close proximity to preferably on top of a
piece of heirloom grade furniture that she owned.
The window containing the image of Tom Howard's desktop vanishes. Pekka
has clicked it into oblivion.
"I could not stand it any more," he says, in his electronically
generated deadpan.
"I predict a ménage à trois Tom, his wife, and Margaret doing it on a
bed at the furniture store, after hours," Cantrell says ruminatively.
"Is it Tom? Or a fictional character of Tom's?" Pekka asks.
"Does this mean you win the bet?" Randy asks.
"If only I can figure out how to collect on it," Cantrell says.
Chapter 42 AFLOAT
A brown miasma has settled across the Bismarck Sea, smelling of oil and
barbecue. American torpedo boats hurtle out of this reeking fog, their fat
hulls barely touching the water, their giant motors curving white scars into
the sea as they line up their targets: the few remaining ships in Goto
Dengo's troop convoy, whose decks are now covered with a dark mat of
soldiers, like moss on an old rock. The torpedos spring into the air like
crossbow bolts, driven by compressed gas from tubes on the boats' decks.
They belly flop into the water, settle to a comfortable depth where the
water is always calm, and draw bubble trails across the sea, heading
directly for the ships. The crowds on the ships' decks fluidize and gush
over the edges. Goto Dengo turns away and hears but doesn't see the
explosions. Hardly any of the Nipponese troops know how to swim.
Later, the airplanes come back to strafe them some more. Swimmers who
have the wit and the ability to dive are invulnerable. Those who don't are
dead very soon. The airplanes leave. Goto Dengo strips a life preserver off
a shattered corpse. He has the worst sunburn of his life and it is only
midafternoon, so he pilfers a uniform blouse, too, and ties it around his
head like a burnoose.
The ones who are still alive, and who can swim, try to converge on each
other. They are in a complicated strait between New Guinea and New Britain,
and tidal currents rushing through it tend to pull them apart. Some men
drift slowly away, calling out to their comrades. Goto Dengo ends up on the
fringes of a dissolving archipelago of maybe a hundred swimmers. Many of
them clutch life preservers or bits of wood to stay afloat. The seas are
considerably higher than their heads and so they can't see very far.
Before sunset, the haze lifts for an hour. Goto Dengo can clearly fix
the sun's position, so for the first time all day he knows west from east,
north from south. Better, he can see peaks rising above the southern
horizon, slathered with blue white glaciers.
"I will swim to New Guinea," he shouts, and begins doing it. There is
no point in trying to discuss it with the others. The ones who are inclined
to follow him, do: maybe a few dozen in all. The timing is right the sea has
become miraculously calm. Goto Dengo settles into a slow, easy sidestroke.
Most of the others are moving in an improvised dogpaddle. If they are making
any progress at all it is totally imperceptible. As the stars begin to come
out, he rolls over into a backstroke and gets a fix on Polaris. As long as
he swims away from that, it is physically impossible for him to miss New
Guinea.
Darkness falls. Dim light is shed by the stars and by a half moon. The
men call to one another, trying to stay bunched together. Some of them get
lost; they can be heard but not seen, and those in the main group can do
nothing but listen to their pleadings dwindle.
It must be around midnight when the sharks come. The first victim is a
man who had lacerated his forehead on a hatch frame when scrambling out of a
sinking ship, and who has been bleeding ever since, drawing a thin pink line
across the sea, leading the sharks straight to them. The sharks do not know
yet what they are dealing with, and so they kill him slowly, worrying him to
death in small bites. When he turns out to be easy prey, they explode into
some kind of berserk rage that is all the more fantastic for being hidden
beneath the black water. Men's voices are cut off in mid cry as they are
jerked straight down. Sometimes a leg or head will suddenly burst free from
the surface. The water splashing into Goto Dengo's mouth begins to taste of
iron.
The attack goes on for several hours. It appears that the noise and
smell have attracted some rival shark packs, because sometimes there is a
lull followed by renewed ferocity. A severed shark tail bumps up against
Goto Dengo's face; he hangs onto it. The sharks are eating them; why
shouldn't he retaliate? In Tokyo restaurants charge a lot of money for shark
sashimi. The skin of the shark tail is tough, but hunks of muscle are
hanging out of the torn edge. He buries his face in the meat and feasts on
it.
When Goto Dengo was young, his father had owned a fedora with English
writing on its ivory silk liner, and a briar pipe, and tobacco that he
bought through the mail from America. He would sit on a rock up in the hills
and snug his fedora down to keep the chilly air from the bald spot on top of
his head and smoke his pipe and just look at the world. "What are you
doing?" Dengo would ask him.
"Observing," father would say.
"But how long can you observe the same thing?"
"Forever. Look over there." Father pointed with the stem of his pipe. A
thread of white smoke piped out of the mouthpiece, like a silk thread being
unwound from a cocoon. "That band of dark rock is mineral bearing. We could
get copper out of there, probably some zinc and lead too. We would run a cog
railway up the valley to that flat spot there, then sink an angle shaft
parallel to the face of the deposit Then Dengo would get into the act and
decide where the workers would live, where the school would be built for
their children, where the playing field would be. By the time they were
finished they would have populated the whole valley with an imaginary city.
Goto Dengo has plenty of time to make observations this night. He
observes that severed body parts almost never get attacked. The men who swim
most violently are always the first to get it. So, when the sharks come in,
he tries to float on his back and not move a muscle, even when the jagged
ends of someone's ribs poke him in the face.
Dawn arrives, one or two hundred hours after the previous sunset. He
has never stayed awake all night long before, and finds it shocking to see
something as big as the sun go down on one side of the planet and come up on
the opposite. He is a virus, a germ living on the surface of unfathomably
giant bodies in violent motion. And, amazingly enough, he is still not
alone: three other men have survived the night of the sharks. They converge
on one another and turn to face the ice covered mountains of New Guinea,
salmon colored in the dawn light.
"They have not gotten any closer," one of the men says.
"They are deep in the interior," Goto Dengo says. "We are not swimming
to the mountains only to the shore much closer. Let's go before we die of
dehydration!" And he plunges forward into a sidestroke.
One of the others, a boy who speaks with an Okinawan accent, is an
excellent swimmer. He and Goto Dengo can easily outdistance the others. For
most of the day, they try to stay together with the other two anyway. The
waves come up and make it difficult even for good swimmers to move.
One of the slower swimmers has been fighting diarrhea since long before
his ship was sunk out from under him and was probably dehydrated to begin
with. Around midday, when the sun is coming straight down on top of them
like a flamethrower, he goes into convulsions, gets some water into his
lungs, and disappears.
The other slow swimmer is from Tokyo. He's in much better physical
condition he simply doesn't know how to swim. "There is no better time or
place to learn," Goto Dengo says. He and the Okinawan spend an hour or so
teaching him the sidestroke and backstroke, and then they resume swimming
southwards.
Around sunset, Goto Dengo catches the Okinawan gulping down mouthful
after mouthful of seawater. It is painful to watch, mostly because he
himself has been wanting to do it. "No! It will make you sick!" he says. His
voice is weak. The effort of filling his lungs, expanding his ribcage
against the relentless pressure of the water, is ruining him; every muscle
in his torso is rigid and tender.
The Okinawan has already started retching by the time Goto Dengo
reaches him. With the help of the Tokyo boy, he sticks his fingers down the
Okinawan's throat and gets him to vomit it all up.
He is very sick anyway, and until late at night cannot do anything
except float on his back and mumble deliriously. But just as Goto Dengo is
about to abandon him, he becomes lucid, asking "Where is Polaris?"
"It is cloudy tonight," Goto Dengo says. "But there is a bright spot in
the clouds that might be the moon."
Based on the position of that bright spot, they guess the position of
New Guinea and resume swimming. Their arms and legs are like sacks of clay,
and all of them are hallucinating.
The sun seems to be coming up. They are in a nebula of vapor, radiant
with peach colored light, as if hurtling through a distant part of the
galaxy.
"I smell something rotten," says one of them. Goto Dengo cannot tell
which.
"Gangrene?" guesses the other.
Goto Dengo fills his nostrils, an act that consumes about half of his
remaining energy reserves. "It is not rotten flesh," he says. "It is
vegetation."
None of them can swim anymore. If they could, they wouldn't know which
direction to choose, because the mist glows uniformly. If they picked a
direction, it wouldn't matter, because the current is taking them where it
will.
Goto Dengo sleeps for a while, or maybe he doesn't.
Something bumps his leg. Thank god; the sharks have come to finish
them.
The waves have grown aggressive. He feels another bump. The burned
flesh on his leg screams. It is something very hard, rough, and sharp.
Something is projecting out of the water just ahead, something bumpy
and white. A coral head.
A wave breaks behind them, picks them up, and flings them forward
across the coral, half flaying them. Goto Dengo breaks a finger and counts
himself lucky. The next breaker takes what little skin he has left and
flings him into a lagoon. Something forces his feet upwards, and because his
body is just a limp sack of shit at this point, doubles him over head first
into the water. His face strikes a bed of sharp coral sand. Then his hands
are in it too. His limbs have forgotten how to do any thing except swim, and
so it takes him a while to plant them in the bottom and lift his head out of
the water. Then he begins to crawl on his hands and knees. The odor of
rotten vegetation is overpowering now, as if a whole division's food
supplies had been left out in the sun for a week.
He finds some sand that is not covered with water, turns around, and
sits down on it. The Okinawan is right behind him, also on hands and knees,
and the Tokyo boy has actually clambered to his feet and is wading ashore,
being knocked this way and that by incoming waves. He is laughing.
The Okinawan boy collapses on the sand next to Goto Dengo, not even
trying to sit up.
A wave knocks the Tokyo boy off balance. Laughing, he collapses
sideways into the surf, throwing out one hand to break his fall.
He stops laughing and jerks back sharply. Something is dangling from
his forearm: a wriggling snake. He snaps it like a whip and it flies off
into the water.
Scared and sober, he splashes the last half dozen steps up onto the
beach and then falls flat on his face. By the time Goto Dengo reaches him,
he is stone dead.
Goto Dengo gathers his forces for some period of time that is difficult
to measure. He may have fallen asleep sitting up. The Okinawan boy is still
lying on the sand, raving. Goto Dengo gets his feet underneath himself and
staggers off in search of fresh water.
This is not a proper beach, merely a sandbar maybe ten meters long and
three wide, with some tall grassy stuff sprouting out of the top. On the
other side of it is a brackish lagoon that meanders between banks, not of
earth, but of living things all tangled together. That tangle is obviously
too thick to penetrate. So, notwithstanding what just happened to the Tokyo
boy, Goto Dengo wades into the lagoon, hoping that it will lead inland to a
freshwater stream.
He wanders for what seems like an hour, but the lagoon takes him back
to the edge of the sea again. He gives up and drinks the water he's wading
in, hoping it will be a little less salty. This leads to a great deal of
vomiting but makes him feel slightly better somehow. Again he wades into the
swamp, trying to keep the sound of the surf behind him, and after an hour or
so he finds a rivulet of water that is actually fresh. When he has finished
drinking from that, he feels strong enough to go back and carry the Okinawan
boy here, if need be.
He gets back to the beach in midafternoon and finds that the Okinawan
is gone. But the sand is all churned up by footprints. The sand is dry and
so the footprints are too indistinct to read. They must have made contact
with a patrol! Surely their comrades must have heard about the attack on the
convoy and are combing beaches for survivors. There must be a bivouac in the
jungle not far away!
Goto Dengo follows the trail into the jungle. After he's proceeded a
mile or so, the track crosses a small, open mud flat where he gets a good
look at the footprints, all made by bare feet with enormous, bizarrely
splayed toes. Footprints of people who have never worn shoes in their lives.
He proceeds more cautiously for another few hundred meters. He can hear
voices now. The Army taught him all about jungle infiltration tactics, how
to creep through the enemy's lines in the middle of the night without making
a sound. Of course, when they practiced it in Nippon they weren't being
eaten alive by ants and mosquitoes the whole time. But it hardly matters to
him now. An hour of patient work gets him to a vantage point from which he
can see into a flat clearing with a stagnant creek wandering through it.
Several long dark houses are built on tree trunk stilts to keep them up out
of the ooze, and roofed with bushy heaps of palm fronds.
Before he finds the Okinawan, Goto Dengo needs to get some food. In the
middle of the clearing, white porridge is steaming in a pot over an open
fire, but it's being tended by several tough looking women, naked except for
short fringes of fibrous stuff tied round their waists and just barely
concealing their genitals.
Smoke is rising from some of the long buildings too. But to get inside
one of them, he would have to clamber up its heavy, slanting ladder and then
worm through what looks like a rather small doorway. A child, standing
inside one of those doorways with a stick, could prevent an intruder from
coming in. Hanging outside some of the doorways are sacks, improvised from
lengths of fabric (so at least they have textiles!) and filled with big
round lumps: coconuts, possibly or some kind of preserved food set up to
keep it away from the ants.
Perhaps seventy people are gathered around something of interest in the
middle of the clearing. As they move around, Goto Dengo gets occasional
momentary glimpses of someone, possibly Nipponese, who is sitting at the
base of a palm tree with his hands behind his back. There's a lot of blood
on his face and he's not moving. Most of these people are men, and they tend
to carry spears. They have those fringes of hairy stuff (sometimes dyed red
or green) concealing their private parts, and some of the bigger and older
ones have decorated themselves by tying strips of fabric around their arms.
Some have painted designs on their skin in pale mud. They have shoved
various objects, some of them quite large, sideways through their nasal
septums.
The bloodied man seems to have captured everyone's attention, and Goto
Dengo reckons that this will be his only chance to steal some food. He picks
the longhouse farthest away from where the villagers have gathered, clambers
up its ladder, and reaches for the bulging sack that hangs by the entrance.
But the fabric is very old and it has rotted from the damp of the swamp, and
maybe from the attacks of the hundreds of flies that buzz around it, and so
when he grasps it his fingers go right through. A long swath of it tears
away and the contents tumble out around Goto Dengo's feet. They are dark and
sort of hairy, like coconuts, but their shape is more complicated, and he
knows intuitively that some thing is wrong even before he recognizes them as
human skulls. Maybe half a dozen of them. Scalp and skin still stuck on.
Some of them are dark skinned with bushy hair, like the natives, and others
look distinctly Nipponese.
Sometime later, he is able to think coherently again. He realizes that
he does not know how long he might have spent up here, in full view of the
villagers, gazing on the skulls. He turns around to look, but all attention
is still focused on the wounded man seated at the base of the tree.
From this vantage point Goto Dengo is able to see that it is indeed the
Okinawan, and that his arms have been tied together behind the tree trunk. A
boy of maybe twelve is standing over him, holding a spear. He steps forward
cautiously and suddenly pokes it into the midsection of the Okinawan, who
comes awake and thrashes from side to side. The boy's obviously startled by
this, and jumps back. Then an older man, his head decorated with a fringe of
cowrie shells, takes a stance behind and beside the boy, showing him how to
hold the spear, guiding him forward again. He adds his own strength to the
youngster's and they shove the spear straight into the Okinawan's heart.
Goto Dengo falls off the house.
The men become very excited and pick the boy up on their shoulders and
parade him around the clearing hollering and leaping and twirling, jabbing
their spears defiantly into the air. They are pursued by all but the very
youngest children. Goto Dengo, bruised but not damaged by the fall onto the
mucky ground, belly crawls into the jungle and looks for a place of
concealment. The women of the village carry pots and knives towards the
Okinawan's body and begin to cut it up with the conspicuous skill of a sushi
chef dismantling a tuna.
One of them is concentrating entirely on his head. Suddenly she jumps
into the air and begins to dance around the clearing, waving something
bright and glittery. "Ulab! Ulab! Ulab!" she cries ecstatically. Some women
and children begin following her around, trying to get a look at whatever it
is she's holding. Finally she stops and centers her hand in a rare shaft of
sunlight coming down through the trees. Resting in the palm of her hand is a
gold tooth.
"Ulab!" say the women and children. One of the kids tries to snatch it
out of her hand and she knocks him flat on his ass. Then one of the big
spear carrying men runs up and she hands the booty over to him.
Several of the men now gather round to marvel at the find.
The women go back to working over the Okinawan boy, and soon his body
parts are stewing in pots over an open fire.
Chapter 43 SHINOLA
Men who believe that they are accomplishing something by speaking speak
in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a waste of time.
Bobby Shaftoe has learned most of his practical knowledge how to fix a car,
butcher a deer, throw a spiral, talk to a lady, kill a Nip from the latter
type of man. For them, trying to do anything by talking is like trying to
pound in a nail with a screwdriver. Sometimes you can even see the
desperation spread over such a man's face as he listens to himself speak.
Men of the other type the ones who use speech as a tool of their work,
who are confident and fluent aren't necessarily more intelligent, or even
more educated. It took Shaftoe a long time to figure that out.
Anyway, everything was neat and tidy in Bobby Shaftoe's mind until he
met two of the men in Detachment 2702: Enoch Root and Lawrence Pritchard
Waterhouse. He can't put his finger on what bugs him about those two. During
the weeks they spent together on Qwghlm, he spent a lot of time listening to
them yammer at each other, and began to suspect that there might be a third
category of man, a kind so rare that Shaftoe never met any of them until
now.
Officers are discouraged from fraternizing with enlisted men and non
coms, which has made it more difficult for Shaftoe to pursue his research
into the matter. Sometimes, though, circumstances jumble all of the ranks
together willy nilly. A prime example would be this Trinidadian tramp
steamer.
Where do they get this stuff? wonders Shaftoe. Does the U.S. government
keep a bunch of Trinidadian tramp steamers riding at anchor at a naval yard
somewhere, just in case one is needed?
He thinks not. This one shows signs of a very recent and hasty change
of ownership. It is a mother lode of yellowed, ragged, multiethnic
pornography, some of it very run of the mill and some so exotic that he
mistook it for medical literature at first. There is a lot of stray
paperwork on the bridge and in certain cabins, most of which Shaftoe only
sees out of the corner of his eye as these areas tend to be the domain of
officers. The heads are still littered with their predecessors' curly black
pubic hairs, and the storage lockers are sparsely stocked with exotic
Caribbean foodstuffs, much of them rapidly going bad. The cargo hold is
filled with bales and bales of coarse brown fibrous material raw material
for life preservers or bran muffins, he supposes.
None of them much cares, because Detachment 2702 has been freezing its
ass off in the Far North ever since they left Italy a few months ago, and
now they are running around shirtless, of all things. One little airplane
ride, that's all it took, and they were in the balmy Azores. They did not
get any R and R there they went straight from the airfield to the
Trinidadian ship, in the dead of night, huddled under tarps in a covered
truck. But even the warm air that streamed in underneath the tarp felt like
an exotic massage in a tropical whorehouse. And once they steamed out of
sight of port, they were allowed to come up abovedecks and take in some sun.
This gives Bobby Shaftoe the opportunity to strike up a few
conversations with Enoch Root, partly just for the hell of it and partly so
that he can try to figure out this whole business about the third category
of men. Progress comes slowly.
"I don't like the word 'addict' because it has terrible connotations,"
Root says one day, as they are sunning themselves on the afterdeck. "Instead
of slapping a label on you, the Germans would describe you as
'Morphiumsüchtig.' The verb suchen means to seek. So that might be
translated, loosely, as 'morphine seeky' or even more loosely as 'morphine
seeking.' I prefer 'seeky' because it means that you have an inclination to
seek morphine."
"What the fuck are you talking about?" Shaftoe says.
"Well, suppose you have a roof with a hole in it. That means it is a
leaky roof. It's leaky all the time even if it's not raining at the moment.
But it's only leaking when it happens to be raining. In the same way,
morphine seeky means that you always have this tendency to look for
morphine, even if you are not looking for it at the moment. But I prefer
both of them to 'addict,' because they are adjectives modifying Bobby
Shaftoe instead of a noun that obliterates Bobby Shaftoe."
"So what's the point?" Shaftoe asks. He asks this because he is
expecting Root to give him an order, which is usually what men of the
talkative sort end up doing after jabbering on for a while. But no order
seems to be forthcoming, because that's not Root's agenda. Root just felt
like talking about words. The SAS blokes refer to this kind of activity as
wanking.
Shaftoe has had little direct contact with that Waterhouse fellow
during their stay on Qwghlm, but he has noticed that men who have just
finished talking to Waterhouse tend to walk away shaking their heads and not
in the slow way of a man saying "no," but in the sudden convulsive way of a
dog who has a horsefly in his middle ear. Waterhouse never gives direct
orders, so men of the first category don't know what to make of him. But
apparently men of the second category fare no better; such men usually talk
like they have an agenda in their heads and they are checking off boxes as
they go, but Waterhouse's conversation doesn't go anywhere in particular. He
speaks, not as a way of telling you a bunch of stuff he's already figured
out, but as a way of making up a bunch of new shit as he goes along. And he
always seems to be hoping that you'll join in. Which no one ever does,
except for Enoch Root.
After they've been out to sea for a day, the captain (Commander Eden
the same poor son of a bitch who got the job of ramming his previous command
into Norway) staggers out of his cabin, making use of every railing or other
handhold that comes within flailing distance. He announces in a slurred
voice that from here on out, according to orders from On High, anyone going
abovedecks must wear black turtle necks, black gloves, and black ski masks
underneath their other clothes. These articles are duly issued to the men.
Shaftoe gets the skipper really pissed off by asking him three times whether
he's sure he has the order worded correctly. One of the reasons Shaftoe is
so highly regarded by the enlisted men is that he knows how to ask these
kinds of questions without technically violating the rules of military
etiquette. The skipper, to his credit, doesn't just pull rank and yell at
him. He takes Shaftoe back to his cabin and shows him a khaki covered Army
manual, printed in black block letters:
TACTICAL NEGRO IMPERSONATION
VOLUME III: NEGROES OF THE CARIBBEAN
It is a pretty interesting order, even by Detachment 2702 standards.
Commander Eden's drunkenness is also kind of disturbing not the fact that he
is drunk, but the particular type of drunk the sort of drunk of say, a Civil
War soldier who knows that the surgeon is about to remove his femur with a
bucksaw.
After Shaftoe has finished getting the turtlenecks, gloves, and ski
masks passed out to the men, and told them to simmer down and do the
lifeboat drills again, Shaftoe finds Root in what passes for the sickbay.
Because he figures it is time to have one of those open ended conversations
in which you try to figure out a bunch of shit, Root is his man.
"I know you're expecting me to ask for morphine, but I'm not gonna,"
Shaftoe says. "I just want to talk."
"Oh," Root says. "Should I put on my chaplain hat, then?"
"I'm a fucking Protestant. I can talk to God myself whenever I god damn
well feel like it."
Root is startled and bewildered by Shaftoe's burst of hostility. "Well,
what do you want to talk about, Sergeant?"
"This mission."
"Oh. I don't know anything about the mission."
"Well, let's try to figure it out, then," Shaftoe says.
"I thought you were just supposed to follow orders," Root says.
"I'll follow 'em, all right."
"I know you will."
"But in the meantime I got a lot of time to kill, so I might as well
use that time to figure out what the fuck is going on. Now, the skipper says
to wear this stuff if we are abovedecks, where we might be seen. But who the
hell is going to see us, out here?"
"An observation plane?"
"Germans don't have no observation planes, not out there."
"Another ship?" Root asks rhetorically, getting into the spirit of the
thing.
"We'll see them at the same time they see us, and that'll give us
plenty of time to put that shit on."
"It would have to be a U boat that the skipper is worried about, then."
"Bingo," Shaftoe says, "because a U boat could look at us through its
periscope, and we'd never know we were being looked at."
But that day, they don't get much further in their attempt to figure
out the deeper question of why their commanding officers want them to make
themselves look like Negroes in the eyes of German U boat captains.
***
The next day, the skipper plants himself on the bridge, where he
evidently means to keep a close eye on things. He seems less drunk but no
happier. He is wearing a colorful short sleeved madras shirt over a long
sleeved black turtleneck, and rope sandals over black socks. Every so often
he puts on his black gloves and ski mask and goes out to scan the horizon
with binoculars.
The ship continues westwards for a few hours after sunrise, then turns
north for a short time, then heads east for an hour, then goes north again,
then turns back to the west. They are running a search pattern, and
Commander Eden does not appear to be looking forward to finding whatever it
is that they are searching for. Shaftoe runs another lifeboat drill, then
checks the lifeboats himself making sure that they are lavishly stocked.
Around noon, a lookout hollers. The ship changes course, headed roughly
northeast. The skipper emerges from the bridge and, with an air of
sepulchral finality, presents Bobby Shaftoe with a crate of dark brown shoe
polish and a sealed envelope containing detailed orders.
Minutes later, the men of Detachment 2702, under orders from Sergeant
Shaftoe, strip to their briefs and begin coating themselves with shoe
polish. They already own black Shinola, which they are ordered to massage
into their hair if it's not already black. Just another example of how the
military screws the little man Shinola ain't free.
"Do I look like a Negro yet?" Shaftoe asks Root.
"I have traveled a bit," Root says, "and you don't look like a Negro to
me. But to a German who has never seen the genuine article, and who's
looking through a periscope what the heck?" Then: "I take it you've figured
out the mission?"
"I read the fucking orders," Shaftoe says guardedly.
They are headed towards a ship. As they get closer, Shaftoe checks it
out with a borrowed spyglass, and is startled, but not really surprised, to
see that it's not one ship but two ships side by side. Both of these ships
have the long fatal lines of U boats, but one of them is fatter, and he
figures it's a milchcow.
Beneath his feet, he feels the engines throttling back to a dim idle.
The sudden quiet, and the palpable loss of momentum and power, are not
reassuring. He gets the usual sick, electric, nauseous, hyperactive feeling
that always makes combat such a stimulatin' experience.
***
The beat up Trinidadian steamer has plied the waters of the Atlantic
without incident throughout the war to date, running back and forth between
African and Caribbean ports, and occasionally venturing as far north as the
Azores. Perhaps it has been sighted, from time to time, by a patrolling U
boat, and judged to be not worth spending a torpedo on. But today its luck
has changed for the worse. They have, by random chance, blundered across a
milchcow a supply U boat of the Kriegsmarine of the Third Reich. The
steamer's normally jaunty crew of shoe brown Negroes has gathered at the
rails to peer across the ocean at this peculiar sight two ships tied
together in the middle of the ocean, going nowhere. But as they draw closer,
they realize that one of those ships is a killer, and that the other is
flying the battle flag of the Kriegsmarine. Too late, they cut their
engines.
There is wild confusion for a minute or so this might be an interesting
spectacle to the lowly, deck swabbing Negroes, but the smart Negroes up on
the bridge know they're in trouble they've seen something they shouldn't
have. They swing her around to the south and make a run for it! For an hour
they dash desperately across the seas. But they are trailed implacably by a
U boat, cutting through the waves like a Bowie knife. The U boat has its
whip aerial up, is monitoring the usual frequencies, and hears the
Trinidadian steamer fire up her radio and send out an SOS. In a short stream
of dits and dahs, the steamer broadcasts her location and that of the
milchcow, and in so doing taps out her own death warrant.
Pesky untermenschen! They've really gone and done it now! It won't be
twenty four hours before the milchcow is located and sunk by the Allies.
There is a good chance that a few U boats will be hounded to their deaths as
part of the bargain. That is not a good way to die being chased across the
ocean for several days, suffering the death of a thousand cuts from
strafings and bombings. Stuff like this really drives home, to the common
ordinary Obertorpedomaat, the wisdom of the Führer's plan to go out and find
all of the people who aren't Germans and kill them.
Meanwhile, our basic Kapitänleutnant has got to be asking himself: what
the hell are the chances that a tramp Trinidadian steamer is going to just
happen upon us and our milchcow, out in the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean?
You could probably work it out, given the right data:
N [sub n] = number of Negroes per square kilometer
N [sub m] = number of milchcows
A [sub a] =Area of the Atlantic Ocean
and so on. But wait a sec, neither Negroes nor milchcows are randomly
distributed, so the calculation becomes immensely more complicated. Far too
complicated for a Kapitänleutnant to mess around with, especially when he's
busy trying to effect a dramatic reduction in N [sub n]
The Trinidadian steamer is brought up short by a shell fired across her
bows from the U boat's deck gun. The Negroes gather on the decks, but they
hesitate, just for a moment, to launch the lifeboats. Perhaps the Germans
are going to give them a break.
Typical, sloppy, sentimental untermenschen thinking. The Germans
brought them up short so they would hold still to be torpedoed. As soon as
they realize this, the Negroes stage an impressive lifeboat drill. It's
remarkable that they even have enough lifeboats to go around, but the calm,
practiced skill with which they launch and board them is truly phenomenal.
It's enough to make a German naval officer reconsider, just for a moment,
his opinions about the shortcomings of darkies.
It is a textbook torpedoing! The torpedo is set to run nice and deep,
and as it passes underneath the ship, the detonation circuit senses a change
in the magnetic field and triggers the explosive, neatly snapping the ship's
keel, breaking its back, and sending it down with incredible speed. For the
next five or ten minutes, bales of brown stuff erupt from the water,
released from the cargo holds as the ship plummets towards the bottom. It
gives the whole scene an unexpectedly festive air.
Some U boat skippers would not be above machine gunning the survivors,
at this point, just to let off a little steam.
But the commander, Kapitänleutnant Günter Bischoff, is not yet a card
carrying member of the Nazi Party and probably never will be.
On the other hand, Bischoff is wrapped in a straightjacket and blasted
half out of his mind on drugs.
Acting commander of the U boat is Oberleutnant zur See Karl Beck. He is
a card carrying National Socialist, and, in other circumstances, he might be
game for a bit of punitive machine gunning, but at the moment he's exhausted
and pretty badly shook up. He is intensely conscious of the fact that he's
probably not going to live very long now that their location has been
reported.
So he doesn't. The Negroes are jumping out of the lifeboats, swimming
to the bales, and clinging to them with just their heads out of the water,
realizing it would take forever to hunt them all down. OL Beck knows the
Liberators and the Catalinas are already airborne and vectored towards him,
so he has to get the hell out of there. Since he has plenty of fuel, he
decides to head south for a while, planning to double back north in a day or
two, when the coast might be a bit clearer. It is the kind of thing that KL
Bischoff would do if he had not gone crazy, and everyone on the boat has
unlimited respect for the old man.
They run on the surface, as they always do when they are not making a
positive effort to sink a convoy, so they can send and receive radio
messages. Beck gives one to Oberfunkmaat Huffer, explaining what has just
happened, and Huffer gives it to one of his Funkmaats, who sits down in
front of U 691 's Enigma machine and encrypts it using the key for the day,
then taps it out on the radio.
An hour later, they get a message back, straight from U boat Command at
Wilhelmshaven, and when the Funkmaat runs it through the Enigma, what he
comes up with is: CAPTURE SURVIVING OFFICERS.
It's a classic example of military commandsmanship: if the order had
come in a more timely fashion it would have been easy to obey, but now that
they are an hour away it will be extremely difficult and dangerous. The
order doesn't make any sense, and no effort is made to clarify it.
Given the time lag, Beck figures he can get away with giving this one a
half assed try. He really should swing round and approach the wreck on the
surface, which would get him there faster, but which would be nearly
suicidal. So instead, he closes the hatches and descends to periscope depth
as he draws closer. This cuts the U boat's speed to a crawling seven knots,
so it takes them about three hours to get back to the atoll of bobbing brown
bales that marks the site.
A damn good thing, too, because another fucking submarine is there,
picking up survivors. It is a Royal Navy submarine.
This is so weird it makes the hairs on the back of Beck's neck stand up
and there's a lot of hair there, because like most submariners, Beck hasn't
shaved in weeks. There's nothing weird, though, that can't be settled with a
single well placed torpedo. Seconds later the submarine explodes like a
bomb; the torpedo must have touched off her munitions. Her crew, and most of
the rescued Negroes, are trapped within, and don't have a chance of getting
out even if they survived the explosions. The submarine drops off the
surface of the ocean like the wreckage of the Hindenberg tumbling down on
New Jersey.
"Gott in Himmel," Beck mumbles, watching this all through the
periscope. He'd been pleased by the success, until he'd remembered that he
had specific orders, and that killing everyone in sight was not one of them.
Will there be any survivors for him to pick up?
He takes the U boat up onto the surface, and climbs up on the conning
tower with his officers. First thing they do is scan the skies for
Catalinas. Finding none, they post lookouts, then begin to nose the U boat
through the sea of bales, which by now has spread out to cover at least a
square kilometer. It is getting dark, and they have to bring up
searchlights.
All looks rather dismal until one searchlight picks out a survivor just
a head, shoulders, and a pair of arms reaching up clenching a rope around a
bale. The survivor does not move or respond as they approach, and not until
a wave rolls the bale over is it revealed that everything below the man's
solar plexus has been bitten off by sharks. The sight sets even this
hardened crew of murderers to gagging. In the quiet that ensues, they hear
low voices echoing across the calm water. With a bit more searching, they
find two men, evidently talkative sorts, sharing a bale.
When the searchlight picks them out, one of the Negroes lets go of the
bale and dives beneath the surface. The other just stares calmly and
expectantly into the light. This Negro's eyes are pale, almost colorless,
and he has a skin condition: parts of him are turning white.
As they draw closer, the pale eyed Negro speaks to them in perfect
German. "My comrade attempts to drown himself," he explains.
"Is that even possible?" asks Kapitänleutnant Beck.
"He and I were just discussing that very question."
Beck checks his wristwatch. "He must want to kill himself very badly,"
he says.
"Sergeant Shaftoe takes his duty very seriously. It's kind of ironic.
His cyanide capsule dissolved in the seawater."
"I am afraid that all irony has become tedious and depressing to me,"
Beck says, as a body breaks the surface nearby. It is Shaftoe, and he seems
to be unconscious.
"You are?" Beck asks.
"Lieutenant Enoch Root."
"I'm only supposed to take officers," Beck says, casting a cold eye in
the direction of Sergeant Shaftoe's back.
"Sergeant Shaftoe has exceptionally broad responsibilities," says
Lieutenant Root calmly, "in some respects exceeding those of a junior
officer."
"Get them both. Fetch the medicine box. Revive the sergeant," Beck
says. "I will talk to you later, Lieutenant Root." And then he turns his
back on the prisoners, and heads for the nearest hatch. He is going to spend
the next week trying very hard to stay alive, in spite of the best efforts
of the Royal and United States Navies. It's going to be quite an interesting
challenge. He should be thinking about his strategy. But he can't get the
image of Sergeant Shaftoe's back out of his mind. His fucking head was still
underneath the water! If they weren't about to fish him out of the ocean, he
would have succeeded in drowning himself. So it was possible. At least for
one person.
Chapter 44 HOSTILITIES
As the vans, taxis, and limousines pull into the parking lot at the
Ministry of Information site, the members of Epiphyte Corp. are greeted by
smiling and bowing Nipponese virgins wearing, and bearing, gleaming white
Goto Engineering helmets. The time is about eight in the morning, and up
here on the mountain the temperature is still tolerable, though humid.
Everyone mills around before the cavern's maw, carrying their hardhats in
their hands, as no one wants to be the first to put his on and look stupid.
Some of the younger Nipponese executives are mugging hilariously with
theirs. Dr. Mohammed Pragasu circulates. He has an authentically used and
battered hardhat which he whirls absentmindedly around one finger as he
strolls from group to group.
"Has anyone simply asked Prag what the fuck is going on?" says Eb. He
rarely uses English profanity, so when he does, it's funny.
The only member of Epiphyte Corp. who does not at least crack a smile
is John Cantrell, who has been looking distant and tense ever since
yesterday. ("It's one thing to write a dissertation about mathematical
techniques in cryptography," he said, on the way up here, when someone asked
him what was bothering him. "And another to gamble billions of dollars'
worth of Other People's Money on it."
"We need a new category," Randy said. "Other, Bad People's Money."
"Speaking of which " Tom began, but Avi cut him off by glaring
significantly at the back of the driver's head.)
To: dwarf@siblings.net
From: root@eruditorum.org
Subject: Re(3) Why?
Randy,
You ask me to justify my interest in why you are building the Crypt.
My interest is a mark of my occupation. This is, in a sense, what I do
for a living.
You continue to assume that I am someone you know. Today you think I'm
the Dentist, yesterday you thought I was Andrew Loeb. This guessing game
will rapidly become tedious for both of us, so please believe me when I tell
you that we have never met.
– BEGIN ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK – (etc.)
– END ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK
To: root@eruditorum.org From: dwarf@siblings.net Subject: Re(4) Why?
Damn, after you said you did it for a living. I was going to guess that
you were Geb, or another one of my ex girlfriend's crowd.
Why don't you tell me your name?
– BEGIN ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK – (etc.)
– END ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK
To: dwarf@siblings.net From: root@eruditorum.org Subject: Re(5) Why?
Randy, I've already told you my name, and it meant nothing to you. Or
rather, it meant the wrong thing. Names are tricky that way. The best way to
know someone is to have a conversation with them.
Interesting that you assume I'm an academic.
– BEGIN ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK – (etc.)
– END ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK
To: root@eruditorum.org From: dwarf@siblings.net Subject: Re(6) Why?
Gotcha!
I didn't specify who Geb was. And yet you knew that he and my ex
girlfriend were academics. If (as you claim) I don't know you, then how do
you know these things about me?
– BEGIN ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK – (etc.)
– END ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK
Everyone now turns to look towards Prag, who seems to be having trouble
with his peripheral vision today. "Prag is avoiding us," Avi snaps.
"Which means it will be completely impossible for us to reach him until
after this is all over."
Tom steps towards Avi, drawing the corporate circle in closer. "The
investigator in Hong Kong?"
"Got some IDs, struck out on others," Avi says. "Basically, the heavy
set Filipino gentleman is Marcos's bagman. Responsible for keeping the
famous billions out of the hands of the Philippine government. The Taiwanese
guy not Harvard Li but the other one is a lawyer whose family has deep
connections to Japan, dating back to when Taiwan was part of their empire.
He has held down half a dozen government positions at various times, mostly
in finance and commerce now he's sort of a fixer who does jobs of all sorts
for high ranking Taiwanese officials."
"What about the scary Chinese guy?"
Avi raises his eyebrows and heaves a little sigh before answering.
"He's a general in the People's Liberation Army. Equivalent to a four star
rank. He's been working their investment arm for the last fifteen years."
"Investment arm? The Army!?" Cantrell blurts. Re's been getting
uneasier by the minute, and now looks mildly nauseated.
"The People's Liberation Army is a titanic business empire," Beryl
says. "They control the biggest pharmaceutical company in China. The biggest
hotel chain. A lot of the communications infrastructure. Railways.
Refineries. And, obviously, armaments."
"What about Mr. Cellphone?" Randy asks.
"Still working on him. My man in Hong Kong is sending his mug shot to a
colleague in Panama."
"I think that after what we saw in the lobby, we can make some
assumptions," Beryl says. (1)
To: dwarf@siblings.net
From: root@eruditorum.org
Subject: Re(7) Why?
Randy.
You ask how I know these things about you. There are many things I could
say, but the basic answer is surveillance.
– BEGIN ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK – (etc.)
– END ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK
Randy figures there's no better time to ask this question. And because
he's known Avi longer than anyone else, he's the only one who can get away
with asking it. "Do we really want to be involved with these people?" he
says. "Is this what Epiphyte Corp. is for? Is this what we are for?"
Avi heaves a big sigh and thinks about it for a while. Beryl looks at
him searchingly; Eb and John and Tom study their shoes, or search the triple
canopy jungle for exotic avians, while listening intently.
"You know, back in the forty niner days, every gold mining town in
California had a nerd with a scale," Avi says. "The assayer. He sat in an
office all day. Scary looking rednecks came in with pouches of gold dust.
The nerd weighed them, checked them for purity, told them what the stuff was
worth. Basically, the assayer's scale was the exchange point the place where
this mineral, this dirt from the ground, became money that would be
recognized as such in any bank or marketplace in the world, from San
Francisco to London to Beijing. Because of the nerd's special knowledge, he
could put his imprimatur on dirt and make it money. Just like we have the
power to turn bits into money.
"Now, a lot of the people the nerd dealt with were incredibly bad guys.
Peg house habitues. Escaped convicts from all over the world. Psychotic
gunslingers. People who owned slaves and massacred Indians. I'll bet that
the first day, or week, or month, or year, that the nerd moved to the gold
mining town and hung out his shingle, he was probably scared shitless. He
probably had moral qualms too very legitimate ones, perhaps," Avi adds,
giving Randy a sidelong glance. "Some of those pioneering nerds probably
gave up and went back East. But y'know what? In a surprisingly short period
of time, everything became pretty damn civilized, and the towns filled up
with churches and schools and universities, and the sort of howling maniacs
who got there first were all assimilated or driven out or thrown into
prison, and the nerds had boulevards and opera houses named after them. Now,
is the analogy clear?"
"The analogy is clear," Tom Howard says. He is less troubled by this
than any of them, with the possible exception of Avi. But then, his hobby is
collecting and shooting rare automatic weapons.
No one else will say anything; it is Randy's job to be troublesome.
"Uh, how many of those assayers got gunned down in the street after they
pissed off some psychotic gold miner?" he asks.
"I don't have any figures on that," Avi says.
"Well, I am not fully convinced that I really need this," Randy says.
"We all need to decide that question for ourselves," says Avi.
"And then vote, as a corporation whether to stay in or pull out right?"
Randy says.
Avi and Beryl look meaningfully at each other.
"Getting out, at this point, would be, uh, complicated," Beryl says.
Then, seeing a look on Randy's face, she hastens to add: "not for
individuals who might want to leave Epiphyte. That's easy. No problem. But
for Epiphyte to get out of this, uh . . ."
"Situation," Cantrell offers.
"Dilemma," Randy says.
Eb mumbles a word in German.
"Opportunity," Avi counters.
"...would be all but impossible," Beryl says.
"Look," Avi says, "I don't want anyone to feel compelled to stay in a
situation where they have moral qualms."
"Or fear imminent summary execution," Randy adds helpfully.
"Right. Now, we've all put a ton of work into this thing, and that work
ought to be worth something. To be totally above board and explicit, let me
reiterate what is already in the bylaws, which is that anyone can pull out;
we'll buy back your stock. After what's happened here the last couple of
days, I'm pretty confident that we could raise enough money to do so. You'd
make at least as much as if you had stayed home doing a regular salaried
job."
Younger, less experienced high tech entrepreneurs would have scoffed
bitterly at this. But everyone on this crew actually finds it impressive
that Avi can put a company together and keep it alive long enough to make it
worth the work they've put into it.
The black Mercedes cruises up. Dr. Mohammed Pragasu strides over to
meet it, greets the South Americans in fairly decent Spanish, makes a couple
of introductions. The scattered clumps of businessmen begin to draw closer
together, converging on the cavern's entrance. Prag is making a head count,
taking attendance. Someone's missing.
One of the Dentist's aides is maneuvering towards Prag in lavender
pumps, a cellphone clamped to her head. Randy breaks away from Epiphyte and
sets a collision course, reaching Prag's vicinity just in time to hear the
woman tell him, "Dr. Kepler will be joining us late some important business
in California. He sends his apologies."
Dr. Pragasu nods brightly, somehow avoids eye contact with Randy, who
is now close enough to floss Prag's teeth, and turns, clamping his hardhat
down on top of his glossy hair. "Please follow me, everyone," he announces,
"the tour begins."
It is a dull tour, even for those who have never been inside the place.
Whenever Prag leads them to a new spot, everyone looks around and gets their
bearings; conversation lulls for ten or fifteen seconds, then picks up
again; the high ranking executives stare unseeingly at the hewn stone walls
and mutter to each other while their engineering consultants converge on the
Goto engineers and ask them learned questions.
All of the construction engineers work for Goto and are, of course,
Nipponese. There is another who stands apart. "Who's the heavyset blond
guy?" Randy asks Tom Howard.
"German civil engineer on loan to Goto. He seems to specialize in
military issues."
" Are there any military issues?"
"At some point, about halfway into this project, Prag suddenly decided
he wanted the whole thing bombproof."
"Oh. Is that Bomb with a capital B, by any chance?"
"I think he's just about to talk about that," Torn says, leading Randy
closer.
Someone has just asked the German engineer whether this place is
nuclear hardened.
"Nuclear hardened is not the issue," he says dismissively. "Nuclear
hardened is easy it just means that the structure can support a brief
overpressure of so many megapascals. You see, half of Saddam's bunkers were,
technically, nuclear hardened. But this does no good against precision
guided, penetrating munitions as the Americans proved. And it is far more
likely this structure will be attacked in that way than that it would ever
be nuked we do not anticipate that the sultan will get involved in a nuclear
war."
This is the funniest thing that anyone has said all day, and it gets a
laugh.
"Fortunately," the German continues, "this rock above us is far more
effective than reinforced concrete. We are not aware of any earth
penetrating munitions currently in existence that could break through."
"What about the R and D the Americans have done on the Libyan
facility?" Randy asks.
"Ah, you are talking about the gas plant in Libya, buried under a
mountain," the German says, a bit uneasily, and Randy nods.
"That rock in Libya is so brittle," says the German, "you can shatter
it with a hammer. We are working with a different kind of rock here, in many
layers."
Randy exchanges a look with Avi, who looks as if he is about to bestow
another commendation for deviousness. At the same time Randy grins, he
senses someone's stare. He turns and locks eyes with Prag, who is looking
inscrutable, verging on pissed off. A great many people in this part of the
world would cringe and wither under the glare of Dr. Mohammed Pragasu, but
all Randy sees is his old friend, the pizza eating hacker.
So Randy stares right back into Prag's black eyes, and grins. Prag
prepares for the staredown. You asshole, you tricked my German for this you
shall die! But he can't sustain it. He breaks eye contact, turns away, and
raises one hand to his mouth, pretending to stroke his goatee. The virus of
irony is as widespread in California as herpes, and once you're infected
with it, it lives in your brain forever. A man like Prag can come home,
throw away his Nikes, and pray to Mecca five times a day, but he can never
eradicate it from his system.
The tour lasts for a couple of hours. When they emerge, the temperature
has doubled. Two dozen cellphones and beepers sing out as they exit the
radio silence of the cavern. Avi has a brief and clipped conversation with
someone, then hangs up and herds Epiphyte Corp. towards their car. "Small
change of plans," he says. "We need to break away for a little meeting." He
utters an unfamiliar name to the driver.
Twenty minutes later, they are filing into the Nipponese cemetery,
sandwiched between two busloads of elderly mourners.
"Interesting place for a meeting," says Eberhard Föhr.
"Given the people we're dealing with, we have to assume that all of our
rooms, our car, the hotel restaurant, are bugged," Avi snaps. No one speaks
for a minute, as Avi leads them down a gravel path towards a secluded corner
of the garden.
They end up in the corner of two high stone walls. A stand of bamboo
shields them from the rest of the garden, and rustles soothingly in a sea
breeze that does little to cool their sweaty faces. Beryl's fanning herself
with a Kinakuta street map.
"Just got a call from Annie in San Francisco," he says.
Annie in San Francisco is their lawyer.
"It's, uh ... seven P.M. there right now. Seems that just before the
close of business, a courier walked into her office, fresh off the plane
from LA, and handed her a letter from the Dentist's office."
"He's suing us for something," Beryl says.
"He's this far away from suing us."
"For what!?" Tom Howard shouts.
Avi sighs. "In a way, Tom, that is beside the point. When Kepler thinks
it's in his best interests to file a tactical lawsuit, he'll find a pretext.
We must never forget that this is not about legitimate legal issues, it is
about tactics."
"Breach of contract, right?" Randy says.
Everyone looks at Randy. "Do you know something we should know?" asks
John Cantrell.
"Just an educated guess," Randy says, shaking his head. "Our contract
with him states that we are to keep him informed of any changes in
conditions that may materially alter the business climate."
"That's an awfully vague clause," Beryl says reproachfully.
"I'm paraphrasing."
"Randy's right," Avi says. "The gist of this letter is that we should
have told the Dentist what was going on in Kinakuta."
"But we did not know," says Eb.
"Doesn't matter remember, this is a tactical lawsuit."
"What does he want?"
"To scare us," Avi says. "To rattle us. Tomorrow or the next day, he'll
bring in a different lawyer to play good cop to make us an offer."
"What kind of offer?" Tom asks.
"We don't know, of course," Avi says, "but I'm guessing that Kepler
wants a piece of us. He wants to own part of the company."
Light dawns on the face of everyone except Avi himself, who maintains
his almost perpetual mask of cool control. "So it's bad news, good news, bad
news. Bad news number one: Anne's phone call. Good news: because of what has
happened here in the last two days, Epiphyte Corp. is suddenly so desirable
that Kepler is ready to play hardball to get his hands on some of our
stock."
"What's the second bit of bad news?" Randy asks.
"It's very simple." Avi turns away from them for a moment, strolls away
for a couple of paces until he is blocked by a stone bench, then turns to
face them again. "This morning I told you that Epiphyte was worth enough,
now, that we could buy people out at a reasonable rate. You probably
interpreted that as a good thing. In a way, it was. But a small and valuable
company in the business world is like a bright and beautiful bird sitting on
a branch in a jungle, singing a happy song that can be heard from a mile
away. It attracts pythons." Avi pauses for a moment. "Usually, the grace
period is longer. You get valuable, but then you have some time weeks or
months to establish a defensive position, before the python manages to
slither up the trunk. This time, we happened to get valuable while we were
perched virtually on top of the python. Now we're not valuable any more."
"What do you mean?" Eb says. "We're just as valuable as we were this
morning."
"A small company that's being sued for a ton of money by the Dentist is
most certainly not valuable. It probably has an enormous negative value. The
only way to give it positive value again is to make the lawsuit go away.
See, Kepler holds all the cards. After Tom's incredible performance
yesterday, all of the other guys in that conference room probably wanted a
piece of us just as badly as Kepler did. But Kepler had one advantage: he
was already in business with us. Which gave him a pretext for filing the
lawsuit.
"So I hope you enjoyed our morning in the sun, even though we spent it
in a cave," Avi concludes. He looks at Randy, and lowers his voice
regretfully. "And if any of you were thinking of cashing out, let this be a
lesson to you: be like the Dentist. Make up your mind and act fast."
Chapter 45 FUNKSPIEL
Colonel Chattan's aide shakes him awake. The first thing Waterhouse
notices is that the guy is breathing fast and steady, the way Alan does when
he comes in from a cross country run.
"Colonel Chattan requests your presence in the Mansion most urgently."
Waterhouse's billet is in the vast, makeshift camp five minutes' walk from
Bletchley Park's Mansion. Striding briskly whilst buttoning up his shirt, he
covers the distance in four. Then, twenty feet from the goal, he is nearly
run over by a pack of Rolls Royces, gliding through the night as dark and
silent as U boats. One comes so close that he can feel the heat of its
engine; its muggy exhaust blows through his trouser leg and condenses on his
skin.
The old farts from the Broadway Buildings climb out of those Rolls
Royces and precede Waterhouse into the Mansion. In the library, the men
cluster obsequiously round a telephone, which rings frequently and, when
picked up, makes distant, tinny, shouting noises that can be heard, but not
understood, from across the room. Waterhouse estimates that the Rolls Royces
must have driven up from London at an average speed of about nine thousand
miles per hour.
Long tables are being looted from other rooms and chivvied into the
library by glossy haired young men in uniform, knocking flecks of paint off
the doorframes. Waterhouse takes an arbitrary chair at an arbitrary table.
Another aide wheels in a cart of wire baskets piled with file folders, still
smoking from the friction of being jerked out of Bletchley Park's infinite
archives. If this were a proper meeting, mimeographs might have been made up
ahead of time and individually served. But this is sheer panic, and
Waterhouse knows instinctively that he'd better take advantage of his early
arrival if he wants to know anything. So he goes over to the cart and grabs
the folder on the bottom of the stack, guessing that they'd have pulled the
most important one first. It is labeled: U 691.
The first few pages are just a form: a U boat data sheet consisting of
many boxes. Half of them are empty. The other half have been filled in by
different hands using different writing implements at different times, with
many erasures and cross outs and marginal notes written by bet hedging
analysts.
Then there is a log containing everything U 691 is ever known to have
done, in chronological order. The first entry is its launch, at
Wilhelmshaven on September 19, 1940, followed by a long list of the ships it
has murdered. There's one odd notation from a few months ago:
REFITTED WITH EXPERIMENTAL DEVICE (SCHNORKEL?). Since then, U 691 has
been tearing up and down like mad, sinking ships in the Chesapeake Bay,
Maracaibo, the approaches to the Panama Canal, and a bunch of other places
that Waterhouse, until now, has thought of only as winter resorts for rich
people.
Two more people come into the room and take seats: Colonel Chattan, and
a young man in a disheveled tuxedo, who (according to a rumor that makes its
way around the room) is a symphonic percussionist. This latter has clearly
made some effort to wipe the lipstick off his face, but has missed some in
the crevices of his left ear. Such are the exigencies of war.
Yet another aide rushes in with a wire basket filled with ULTRA message
decrypt slips. This looks like much hotter stuff; Waterhouse puts the file
folder back and begins leafing through the slips.
Each one begins with a block of data identifying the Y station that
intercepted it, the time, the frequency, and other minutiae. The heap of
slips boils down to a conversation, spread out over the last several weeks,
between two transmitters.
One of these is in a part of Berlin called Charlottenburg, on the roof
of a hotel at Steinplatz: the temporary site of U boat Command, recently
moved there from Paris. Most of these messages are signed by Grand Admiral
Karl Dönitz. Waterhouse knows that Dönitz has recently become the Supreme
Commander in Chief of the entire German Navy, but he has elected to hold
onto his previous title of Commander in Chief of U boats as well. Dönitz has
a soft spot for U boats and the men who inhabit them.
The other transmitter belongs to none other than U 691. These messages
are signed by her skipper, Kapitänleutnant Günter Bischoff.
Bischoff: Sank another merchantman. This newfangled radar shit is
everywhere.
Dönitz: Acknowledged. Well done.
Bischoff: Bagged another tanker. These bastards seem to know exactly
where I am. Thank god for the schnorkel.
Dönitz: Acknowledged. Nice work as usual.
Bischoff: Sank another merchantman. Airplanes were waiting for me. I
shot one of them down; it landed on me in a fireball and incinerated three
of my men. Are you sure this Enigma thing really works?
Dönitz: Nice work, Bischoff! You get another medal! Don't worry about
the Enigma, it's fantastic.
Bischoff: I attacked a convoy and sank three merchantmen, a tanker, and
a destroyer.
Dönitz: Superb! Another medal for you!
Bischoff: Just for the hell of it, I doubled back and finished off what
was left of that convoy. Then another destroyer showed up and dropped depth
charges on us for three days. We are all half dead, steeped in our own
waste, like rats who have fallen into a latrine and are slowly drowning. Our
brains are gangrenous from breathing our own carbon dioxide.
Dönitz: You are a hero of the Reich and the Führer himself has been
informed of your brilliant success! Would you mind heading south and
attacking the convoy at such and such coordinates? P.S. please limit the
length of your messages.
Bischoff: Actually, I could use a vacation, but sure, what the heck.
Bischoff (a week later): Nailed about half of that convoy for you. Had
to surface and engage a pesky destroyer with the deck gun. This was so
utterly suicidal, they didn't expect it. As a consequence we blew them to
bits. Time for a nice vacation now.
Dönitz: You are now officially the greatest U boat commander of all
time. Return to Lorient for that well deserved R & R.
Bischoff: Actually I had in mind a Caribbean vacation. Lorient is cold
and bleak at this time of year.
Dönitz: We have not heard from you in two days. Please report.
Bischoff: Found a nice secluded harbor with a white sand beach. Would
rather not specify coordinates as I no longer trust security of Enigma.
Fishing is great. Am working on my tan. Feeling somewhat better. Crew is
most grateful.
Dönitz: Günter, I am willing to overlook much from you, but even the
Supreme Commander in Chief must answer to his superiors. Please end this
nonsense and return home.
U 691: This is Oberleutnant zur See Karl Beck, second in command of U
691. Regret to inform you that KL Bischoff is in poor health. Request
orders. P.S. He does not know I am sending this message.
Dönitz: Assume command. Return, not to Lorient, but to Wilhelmshaven.
Take care of Günter.
Beck: KL Bischoff refuses to relinquish command.
Dönitz: Sedate him and get him back here, he will not be punished.
Beck: Thank you on behalf of me and the crew. We are underway, but
short of fuel.
Dönitz: Rendezvous with U 413 [a milchcow] at such and such
coordinates.
Now more people come into the room: a wizened rabbi; Dr. Alan Mathison
Turing; a big man in a herringbone tweed suit whom Waterhouse remembers
vaguely as an Oxford don; and some of the Naval intelligence fellows who are
always hanging around Hut 4. Chattan calls the meeting to order and
introduces one of the younger men, who stands up and gives a situation
report.
"U 691, a Type IXD/42 U boat under the nominal command of
Kapitänleutnant Günter Bischoff, and the acting command of Oberleutnant zur
See Karl Beck, transmitted an Enigma message to U boat Command at 2000 hours
Greenwich time. The message states that, three hours after sinking a
Trinidadian merchantman, U 691 torpedoed and sank a Royal Navy submarine
that was picking up survivors. Beck has captured two of our men: Marine
Sergeant Robert Shaftoe, an American, and Lieutenant Enoch Root, ANZAC."
"How much do these men know?" demands the don, who is making a
stirringly visible effort to sober up.
Chattan fields the question: "If Root and Shaftoe divulged everything
that they know, the Germans could infer that we were making strenuous
efforts to conceal the existence of an extremely valuable and comprehensive
intelligence source."
"Oh, bloody hell," the don mumbles.
An extremely tall, lanky, blond civilian, the crossword puzzle editor
of one of the London newspapers currently on loan to Bletchley Park, hustles
into the room and apologizes for being late. More than half of the people on
the Ultra Mega list are now in this room.
The young naval analyst continues. "At 2110, Wilhelmshaven replied with
a message instructing OL Beck to interrogate the prisoners immediately. At
0150, Beck replied with a message stating that in his opinion the prisoners
belonged to some sort of special naval intelligence unit."
As he speaks, carbon copies of the fresh message decrypts are being
passed round to all the tables. The crossword puzzle editor studies his with
a tremendously furrowed brow. "Perhaps you covered this before I arrived, in
which case I apologize," he says. "but where does the Trinidadian
merchantman come in to all of this?"
Chattan silences Waterhouse with a look, and answers: "I'm not going to
tell you." There is appreciative laughter all around, as if he had just
uttered a bon mot at a dinner party. "But Admiral Dönitz, reading these same
messages, must be just as confused as you are. We should like to keep him
that way."
"Datum 1: He knows a merchantman was sunk," pipes up Turing, ticking
off points on his fingers. "Datum 2: He knows a Royal Navy submarine was on
the scene a few hours later, and was also sunk. Datum 3: He knows two of our
men were pulled out of the water, and that they are probably in the
intelligence business, which is a rather broad categorization as far as I am
concerned. But he cannot necessarily draw any inferences, based upon these
extremely terse messages, about which vessel the merchantman or the
submarine our two men came from."
"Well, that's obvious, isn't it?" says Crossword Puzzle. "They came
from the submarine."
Chattan responds only with a Cheshire grin.
"Oh!" says Crossword Puzzle. Eyebrows go up all around the room.
"As Beck continues to send messages to Admiral Dönitz, the likelihood
increases that Dönitz will learn something we don't want him to know,"
Chattan says. "That likelihood becomes a virtual certainty when U 691
reaches Wilhelmshaven intact."
"Correction!" hollers the rabbi. Everyone is quite startled and there
is a long silence while the man grips the edge of the table with quivering
hands, and rises precariously to his feet. "The important thing is not
whether Beck transmits messages! It is whether Dönitz believes those
messages!"
"Hear, hear! Very astute!" Turing says.
"Quite right! Thank you for that clarification, Herr Kahn," Chattan
says. "Pardon me for just a moment," says the don, "but why on earth
wouldn't he believe them?"
This leads to a long silence. The don has scored a telling point, and
brought everyone very much back to cold hard reality. The rabbi begins to
mumble something that sounds rather defensive, but is interrupted by a
thunderous voice from the doorway: "FUNKSPIEL!"
Everyone turns to look at a fellow who has just come in the door. He is
a trim man in his fifties with prematurely white hair, extremely thick
glasses that magnify his eyes, and a howling blizzard of dandruff covering
his navy blue blazer.
"Good morning, Elmer!" Chattan says with the forced cheerfulness of a
psychiatrist entering a locked ward.
Elmer comes into the room and turns to face the crowd. "FUNKSPIEL!" he
shouts again, in an inappropriately loud voice, and Waterhouse wonders
whether the man is drunk or deaf or both. Elmer turns his back to them and
stares at a bookcase for a while, then turns round to face them again, a
look of astonishment on his face. "Ah was expectin' a chalkboard t'be
there," he says in a Texarkana accent. "What kind of a classroom is this?"
There is nervous laughter around the room as everyone tries to figure out
whether Elmer is cutting loose with some deadpan humor, or completely out of
his mind.
"It means 'radio games,' " says Rabbi Kahn.
"Thank, you, sir!" Elmer responds quickly, sounding pissed off. "Radio
games. The Germans have been playing them all through the war. Now it's our
turn."
Just moments ago, Waterhouse was thinking about how very British this
whole scene was, feeling very far from home, and wishing that one or two
Americans could be present. Now that his wish has come true, he just wants
to crawl out of the Mansion on his hands and knees.
"How does one play these games, Mr., uh..." says Crossword Puzzle.
"You can call me Elmer!" Elmer shouts. Everyone scoots back from him.
"Elmer!" Waterhouse says, "would you please stop shouting?"
Elmer turns and blinks twice in Waterhouse's direction. "The game is
simple," he says in a more normal, conversational voice. Then he gets
excited again and begins to crescendo. "All you need is a radio and a couple
of players with good ears, and good hands!" Now he's hollering. He waves at
the corner where the albino woman with the headset and the percussionist
with lipstick on his ear have been huddled together. "You want to explain
fists, Mr. Shales?"
The percussionist stands up. "Every radio operator has a