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:



     21 8 25 18 14 18 6 31 8 8 15 18 22 18 11
     Around the  time that the  fourth  or fifth  number is going up  on the
chalkboard, Waterhouse feels the hairs standing up on the back of  his neck.
By the  time  the third group of five  numbers  is written out, he  has  not
failed to notice that none  of them is larger than 26 that  being the number
of letters  in the alphabet. His heart is pounding more wildly  than  it did
when Nipponese bombs were tracing parabolic  trajectories toward the deck of
the grounded Nevada. He pulls a  pencil out of his pocket.  Finding no paper
handy, he writes down the numbers from 1 to 26 on the  surface of his little
writing desk.
     By the time the man in the bathrobe is done  writing out the last group
of numbers, Waterhouse is already well into his frequency count. He wraps it
up as  Bathrobe  Man is saying something along the lines of "this might look
like a meaningless sequence of numbers to you, but to a Nip naval officer it
might  look  like  something  entirely  different."  Then  the  man   laughs
nervously, shakes  his head  sadly, squares  his  jaw  resolutely, and  runs
through a litany of other emotion laden  expressions  not  a  single  one of
which is appropriate here.
     Waterhouse's frequency count is  simply  a tally of how frequently each
number appears on the blackboard. It looks like this:



     2
     3 II
     4
     5
     6 I
     7
     8 IIII
     9
     10
     11 I
     12 I
     13
     14 II
     15 I
     16 I
     17 II
     18 IIIIII
     19 IIII
     20 I
     21 I
     22 I
     23 I
     24
     25 I
     26
     The most interesting thing  about  this  is that  ten  of the  possible
symbols (viz. 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 13, 24, and 26) are not even used.  Only
sixteen  different numbers  appear  in the  message. Assuming each of  those
sixteen represents one and only one letter of the alphabet, this message has
(Lawrence reckons in his head) 111136315345735680000 possible meanings. This
is  a  funny  number  because  it begins  with  four ones and ends with four
zeroes; Lawrence snickers, wipes his nose, and gets on with it.
     The most  common number is 18. It probably represents the  letter E. If
he substitutes E into the message everywhere he sees an 18, then Well, to be
honest, then  he'll have to write out  the whole message again, substituting
Es for  18s, and  it  will  take a  long time,  and it might  be time wasted
because he  might have guessed wrong. On the other hand, if he just retrains
his mind to  construe 18s as  Es an operation  that  he  thinks of  as being
loosely analogous to  changing the presets on a  pipe organ's  console  then
what he sees in his mind's eye when he looks at the blackboard is



     21 8 25 E 14 E 6 3 E 8 15 E 22 E 11
     which only has 10103301395066880000  possible meanings. This is a funny
number  too because of all those  ones and  zeroes but  it  is an absolutely
meaningless coincidence.
     "The science of making secret codes is called  cryptography," Commander
Schoen says,  "and the science of breaking  them is  cryptanalysis." Then he
sighs, grapples  visibly with  some  more widely divergent emotional states,
and  resignedly plods into the mandatory exercise  of  breaking these  words
down into their roots,  which  are  either Latin or  Greek  (Lawrence  isn't
paying attention, doesn't care,  only glimpses the stark word CRYPTO written
in handsized capitals).
     The opening sequence  "19 17 17  19" is peculiar. 19, along with 8,  is
the second most  common number  in the list. 17 is only  half as common. You
can't have  four vowels  or four consonants in a row  (unless  the words are
German) so either 17 is a vowel and  19 a  consonant or the other way round.
Since  19 appears  more frequently  (four times)  in the message, it is more
likely to  be the vowel  than 17 (which only  appears  twice). A is the most
common vowel after E, so if he assumes that 19 is A, he gets



     21 8 25 E 14 E 6 3 E 8 15 E 22 E 11
     This narrows it down quite a bit, to a mere 841941782922240000 possible
answers. He's already reduced the solution  space by a  couple of  orders of
magnitude!
     Schoen has talked himself up into a disturbingly  heavy sweat, now, and
is almost bodily flinging himself  into a historical overview of the science
of  CRYPTOLOGY,  as  the union of cryptography and  cryptanalysis is called.
There's some talk about an  English fellow name of Wilkins, and book  called
Cryptonomicon that he wrote hundreds of  years  ago, but (perhaps because he
doesn't rate  the intelligence of his audience too highly) he goes very easy
on  the  historical  background, and jumps  directly  from  Wilkins to  Paul
Revere's "one if by land, two if by sea" code.  He even makes  a mathematics
in  joke  about  this being one  of the earliest  practical  applications of
binary  notation.  Lawrence dutifully brays  and snorts, drawing an appalled
look from the saxophonist seated in front of him.
     Earlier in his  talk, the Schoen mentioned  that this  message  was (in
what's obviously  a fictional scenario ginned up to  make this  mathematical
exercise more  interesting  to  a bunch of  musicians who are assumed not to
give  a  shit  about math)  addressed to  a  Nip naval  officer. Given  that
context,  Lawrence  cannot but  guess that  the first word of the message is
ATTACK. This would mean that 17 represented T, 14 C, and 20 K. When he fills
these in, he gets



     21 8 25 E C E 6 3 E 8 15 E 22 E 11
     and then the rest is  so obvious he doesn't bother to write it  out. He
cannot restrain himself from jumping to his feet. He's so excited he forgets
about  the weak legs and  topples over  across a  couple  of  his neighbors'
desks, which makes a lot of noise.
     "Do  you  have  a  problem, sailor?"  says  one of the officers in  the
corner, one who actually bothered to wear a uniform.
     "Sir!  The  message  is, 'Attack  Pearl  Harbor December  Seven!' Sir!"
Lawrence  shouts,  and  then sits down. His  whole body  is  quivering  with
excitement. Adrenaline has taken over his body  and  mind. He could strangle
twenty sumo wrestlers on the spot.
     Commander Schoen is  completely  impassive except  that he blinks once,
very slowly.  He turns to one of his  subordinates,  who is standing against
the wall with his  hands clasped  behind his back, and says, "Get this one a
copy of the  Cryptonomicon. And a desk  as close  to the  coffee machine  as
possible. And why don't  you promote the son of a bitch as long as you're at
it."


     ***


     The part about the promotion  turns out to be either military  humor or
further  evidence  of Commander Schoen's mental instability. Other than that
small bit of drollery, the story of Waterhouse past this point, for the next
ten months, is not  much more complicated than the story of a bomb that  has
just been  released from the belly  of  a plunging  airplane.  The  barriers
placed in his path (working his way through the Cryptonomicon , breaking the
Nipponese  Air Force Meteorological Code, breaking  the  Coral naval attache
machine cipher, breaking  Unnamed  Nipponese  Army Water Transport  Code 3A,
breaking the  Greater  East  Asia  Ministry  Code)  present  about  as  much
resistance  as  successive decks of a worm  eaten  wooden  frigate. Within a
couple of months he is actually writing  new chapters of the  Cryptonomicon.
People speak of it as though it were a book, but it's not. It is basically a
compilation of all  of  the  papers  and  notes  that have  drifted  up in a
particular corner  of  Commander Schoen's office over the roughly  two  year
period  that he's  been situated at Station Hypo,  as  this place is  called
(1). It is  everything that Commander Schoen knows about breaking
codes, which amounts to everything that the United States of  America knows.
At any moment  it could have been annihilated if  a janitor had stepped into
the  room for  a few minutes  and tidied  the place  up. Understanding this,
Commander Schoen's colleagues  in the officers' ranks of Station  Hypo  have
devised strenuous  measures  to prevent  any  type of  tidying  or  hygienic
operations,  of any description,  in  the entire wing  of the building  that
contains  Commander  Schoen's office. They know enough, in other  words,  to
understand that the Cryptonomicon is terribly  important, and  they have the
wit to take the measures necessary to keep  it safe. Some of  them  actually
consult  it  from  time to  time, and  use  its wisdom  to  break  Nipponese
messages, or even solve whole cryptosystems. But Waterhouse is the first guy
to come  along  who is good enough  to (at  first) point out errors in  what
Schoen has  written, and  (soon)  assemble the  contents  of the  pile  into
something like an orderly work, and (eventually)  add original material onto
it.
     At some point Schoen takes him downstairs and leads him to the end of a
long windowless corridor to  a slab of a door  guarded  by hulking Myrmidons
and  lets  him see the second coolest thing they've got  at Pearl Harbor,  a
roomful  of  machinery from  the  Electrical Till Corporation that  they use
mainly for doing frequency counts on Nip intercepts.
     The most remarkable machine (2) at Station Hypo, however and
the  first coolest thing in Pearl Harbor is even deeper in the cloaca of the
building. It is contained in something that might be likened to a bank vault
if  it  weren't all wired up with  explosives  so that  its contents can  be
vaporized in the event of a total Nip invasion.
     This is the  machine that Commander  Schoen made, more than a year ago,
for breaking  the  Nipponese cipher  called Indigo.  Apparently,  as  of the
beginning of 1940, Schoen was a well adjusted and mentally healthy young man
into whose lap was dumped some great big long lists of numbers compiled from
intercept  stations around the  Pacific (perhaps, Waterhouse thinks,  Alpha,
Bravo, etc.). These numbers were Nipponese messages that  had been encrypted
somehow circumstantial evidence suggested that it had been done by some kind
of  machine. But absolutely  nothing was known about the machine: whether it
used gears or rotary switches or plugboards, or some combination thereof, or
some other kind of mechanism  that  hadn't  even  been thought  of  by white
people yet; how many such mechanisms it did or didn't  use; specific details
of how it used them.  All that could be said was  that  these numbers, which
seemed completely  random,  had been transmitted, perhaps even  incorrectly.
Other than that, Schoen had nothing nothing to work on.
     As of the  middle of  1941, then, this  machine  existed in this vault,
here at Station Hypo. It existed because  Schoen  had built it. The  machine
perfectly decrypted every Indigo message that the  intercept stations picked
up,  and was, therefore, necessarily an exact functional  duplication of the
Nipponese Indigo code machine, though neither Schoen nor  any other American
had ever laid eyes on one. Schoen  had built the thing simply by looking  at
those great  big  long lists of essentially random  numbers,  and using some
process  of induction to  figure  it  out.  Somewhere  along the line he had
become  totally  debilitated psychologically, and  begun to  suffer  nervous
breakdowns at the rate of about one every week or two.
     As of the actual outbreak of war with Nippon, Schoen  is on disability,
and taking lots of drugs. Waterhouse spends  as  much time with Schoen as he
is  allowed to, because he's pretty  sure that whatever  happened  inside of
Schoen's  head, between  when  the lists  of  apparently random numbers were
dumped into his lap and when he finished building his machine, is an example
of a noncomputable process.
     Waterhouse's  security clearance is  upgraded about once a month, until
it  reaches  the  highest  conceivable  level (or  so he  thinks)  which  is
Ultra/Magic. Ultra is what the  Brits  call the  intelligence they  get from
having broken the  German Enigma machine.  Magic is what the  Yanks call the
intelligence they get from Indigo. In any case, Lawrence now gets to see the
Ultra/Magic summaries, which are  bound documents with dramatic, alternating
red and black paragraphs printed on the front cover. Paragraph  number three
states:
     NO ACTION  IS TO BE TAKEN ON INFORMATION HEREIN REPORTED, REGARDLESS OF
TEMPORARY ADVANTAGE,  IF SUCH  ACTION MIGHT HAVE THE EFFECT OF REVEALING THE
EXISTENCE OF THE SOURCE TO THE ENEMY.
     Seems clear enough, right? But Lawrence  Pritchard Waterhouse is not so
damn sure.
     IF SUCH ACTION MIGHT HAVE THE EFFECT OF REVEALING...
     At  about  the  same  time,  Waterhouse  has made  a  realization about
himself. He has found that he works best when he is  not horny,  which is to
say in the day or so following ejaculation.  So as a part of his duty to the
United  States he  has begun to spend a  lot  of time in whorehouses. But he
can't have that much actual sex on what is still a glockenspiel player's pay
and so he limits himself to what are euphemistically called massages.
     ACTION... EFFECT... REVEALING...
     The words stay with him like the clap. He lies on his back during these
massages,  arms  crossed  over  his eyes,  mumbling  the words  to  himself.
Something bothers  him. He has  learned that  when something bothers  him in
this particular way it usually leads to  his writing a new paper. But  first
he has to do a lot of hard mental pick and shovel work.
     It all comes to him, explosively, during the Battle of Midway, while he
and his  comrades are spending  twenty four hours a day down among those ETC
machines, decrypting Yamamoto's messages,  telling  Nimitz  exactly where to
find the Nip fleet.
     What are  the chances of Nimitz finding that fleet  by accident? That's
what Yamamoto must be asking himself.
     It is all a question (oddly enough!) of information theory.
     ...ACTION...
     What is an  action? It might be anything. It might be something obvious
like bombing  a Nipponese military installation.  Everyone would  agree that
this  would  constitute  an  action. But  it might  also be  something  like
changing the course  of an aircraft carrier by five degrees or not doing so.
Or  having exactly  the right  package  of forces  off Midway  to hammer the
Nipponese invasion fleet. It could  mean something much less dramatic,  like
canceling plans for an action. An action, in a certain sense,  might even be
the total  absence of activity. Any of these might be rational responses, on
the part of some commander, to  INFORMATION HEREIN REPORTED. But any of them
might be observable  by the Nipponese  and  hence any  of them would  impart
information  to the Nipponese.  How  good might those Nips be at abstracting
information from a noisy channel? Do they have any Schoens?
     ...EFFECT...
     So what if  the Nips did observe it? What would the  effect be exactly?
And  under what circumstances might the effect be REVEALING THE EXISTENCE OF
THE SOURCE TO THE ENEMY?
     If  the  action  is  one  that  could  never  have happened  unless the
Americans were  breaking  Indigo, then  it  will  constitute  proof,  to the
Nipponese, that  the Americans have  broken it.  The existence of the source
the machine that Commander Schoen built will be revealed.
     Waterhouse trusts that no Americans will be that stupid. But what if it
isn't that  clear cut? What if the action is one that would merely be really
improbable unless  the  Americans  were  breaking  the  code?  What  if  the
Americans, in the long run, are just too damn lucky?
     And  how  closely can you play that game?  A  pair  of loaded dice that
comes up sevens every time is detected in a few throws. A pair that comes up
sevens  only  one percent more frequently than a straight  pair is harder to
detect you have to throw the dice many more times in order for your opponent
to prove anything.
     If the Nips  keep getting  ambushed if  they  keep  finding  their  own
ambushes spoiled if their merchant ships happen to cross paths with American
subs more often  than pure  probability would  suggest how long  until  they
figure it out?
     Waterhouse writes  papers on  the subject, keeps pestering  people with
them. Then, one day, Waterhouse receives a new set of orders.
     The orders arrive encrypted into groups of five random looking letters,
printed out on the blue tissue paper that is used for top secret cablegrams.
The message has been encrypted in  Washington using a one time pad, which is
a slow and awkward but, in theory, perfectly unbreakable cipher used for the
most important messages. Waterhouse knows this because he is one of the only
two persons in Pearl  Harbor who  has clearance to decrypt it. The other one
is Commander Schoen,  and he is under sedation today. The duty officer opens
up the appropriate safe and gives him the one time pad for the day, which is
basically a piece of graph paper covered  with numbers printed  in groups of
five.  The  numbers  have  been  chosen by  secretaries  in  a  basement  in
Washington by shuffling cards or drawing chits out of a hat.  They  are pure
noise. One copy of  the pure noise is in  Waterhouse's  hands, and the other
copy is used by the person who encrypted this message in Washington.
     Waterhouse   sits  down  and  gets  to  work,  subtracting  noise  from
ciphertext to produce plaintext.
     The  first  thing he sees is that  this message's classification is not
merely Top Secret, or even Ultra, but something entirely new: ULTRA MEGA.
     The messages states  that after  thoroughly destroying this message, he
Lawrence  Pritchard  Waterhouse  is to  proceed to  London, England, by  the
fastest available means. All ships,  trains, and airplanes, even submarines,
will be made  available to him. Though a member of the U.S. Navy, he is even
to be  provided with an extra uniform an Army  uniform in case it simplifies
matters for him.
     The one thing he must never, ever do is  place himself  in a  situation
where he could be  captured by the enemy. In this sense, the war is suddenly
over for Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse.


     Chapter 6 THE SPAWN OF ONAN


     A network of chunnel sized air  ducts  as vast and  unfathomable as the
global Internet ramifies  through the thick walls and ceilings  of the hotel
and makes dim, attenuated  noises that suggest  that hidden deep within that
system are  jet engine proving grounds, Iron Age smithys, wretched prisoners
draped with clanging chains, and writhing clumps of snakes. Randy knows that
the  system is  not  a closed  loop that it is  somewhere  connected to  the
earth's atmosphere because faint  street smells drift  in from outside.  For
all he knows, they may take an  hour to work their way  into his room. After
he has been living there for a couple of weeks,  the smells come to function
as  an olfactory  alarm  clock. He  sleeps  to the smell  of diesel  exhaust
because the traffic conditions of Manila require that  the  container  ships
load  and unload only at night. Manila  sprawls along a warm and placid  bay
that is an infinite reservoir of mugginess, and because the atmosphere is as
thick and opaque and hot as a glass of  milk  straight from the cow's udder,
it  begins to  glow when the  sun  rises.  At  this, Manila's  regiments and
divisions  of  fighting cocks,  imprisoned  in  makeshift  hutches on  every
rooftop, balcony and yard, begin to crow. The people come awake and begin to
burn coal. Coal smoke is the smell that wakes Randy up.
     Randy  Waterhouse is in  merely decent physical condition.  His  doctor
ritualistically tells  him  that he  could lose  twenty pounds, but it's not
obvious where that twenty  pounds would  actually  come from he has no  beer
gut, no flagrant love handles. The offending pounds seem to be spread evenly
over his keglike torso.  Or so he tells  himself every morning, standing  in
front of the billboard sized mirror of his suite. Randy and Charlene's house
in  California contains practically no mirrors and he had lost track of what
he  looks like. Now he sees that he has become atavistically  hairy, and his
beard glints, because it is shot through with grey hairs.
     Every day, he  dares  himself to shave  that beard off. In the tropics,
you want to  have as much skin as  possible exposed  to the  air, with sweat
sheeting down it.
     One evening when Avi and his family had been over for dinner, Randy had
said, "I'm the beard, Avi's the suit," as a way of explaining their business
relationship,  and  from  that  point  Charlene had been  off  and  running.
Charlene has  recently finished a scholarly article, deconstructing  beards.
In  particular, she was aiming  at beard culture in the  Northern California
high tech community Randy's crowd. Her  paper began by demolishing, somehow,
the  assumption that beards were more  "natural" or easier to  maintain than
clean shavenness she  actually published statistics from Gillette's research
department comparing the amount of time that bearded and beardless men spent
in  the bathroom each day, proving that the difference was not statistically
significant.  Randy  had any number  of objections to the way in which these
statistics  were  gathered, but  Charlene  was having  none of  it.  "It  is
counterintuitive," she said.
     She was in a big hurry to move on to the meat of her argument. She went
up  to  San Francisco and bought a few hundred dollars' worth of pornography
at a boite that catered to shaving fetishists. For a couple  of weeks, Randy
couldn't come  home in the  evening  without finding Charlene sacked  out in
front of the TV with a bowl of popcorn and a Dictaphone, watching a video of
a straight razor being drawn along wet, soapy flesh. She taped a few lengthy
interviews with some actual shaving fetishists who described in great detail
the feeling of nakedness and vulnerability shaving gave them, and how erotic
that was, especially when freshly shaved areas were slapped or  spanked. She
worked up a detailed comparison of the iconography of shaving fetishist porn
and that of shaving product commercials shown on national TV during football
games,  and proved  that they were  basically indistinguishable  (you  could
actually buy videotapes of bootleg shaving cream and razor ads in  the  same
places that sold the out and out pornography).
     She  pulled down  statistics  on  racial  variation  in  beard  growth.
American  Indians didn't  grow  beards, Asians hardly did, Africans  were  a
special case  because daily shaving gave them a painful skin condition. "The
ability to grow heavy, full  beards  as a matter of choice appears  to  be a
privilege accorded by nature solely to white males," she wrote.
     Alarm bells, red lights, and screaming klaxons went off in Randy's mind
when he happened across that phrase.
     "But  this  assertion buys into a specious  subsumption.  'Nature' is a
socially constructed  discourse,  not an  objective reality  [many footnotes
here]. That is doubly true  in the case of  the  'nature' that  accords full
beards to the  specific minority population of northern European males. Homo
sapiens evolved in climatic zones where facial  hair was of little practical
use. The development of  an offshoot of the species characterized by densely
bearded  males is an adaptive response  to cold climates. These climates did
not 'naturally'  invade  the  habitats of early  humans  rather,  the humans
invaded   geographical   regions   where   such  climates   prevailed.  This
geographical  transgression  was strictly a  sociocultural event and  so all
physical adaptations to it must be placed in the same category including the
development of dense facial hair."
     Charlene published the results of  a survey she had organized, in which
a few hundred women were asked for their opinions. Essentially  all  of them
said that they preferred clean shaven men  to those who were either  stubbly
or bearded. In short order, Charlene proved that having a beard was just one
element of a syndrome strongly  correlated to racist and  sexist  attitudes,
and  to  the pattern of emotional  unavailability so  often bemoaned by  the
female partners  of white  males, especially ones  who  were technologically
oriented.
     "The boundary between Self  and Environment is a social con[struct]. In
Western cultures this  boundary is  supposed to be  sharp and distinct.  The
beard is an  outward  symbol  of that boundary,  a  distancing technique. To
shave  off the beard (or any body hair) is to  symbolically  annihilate  the
(essentially specious) boundary separating Self from Other . . ."
     And so on. The paper was rapturously received by the peer reviewers and
immediately  accepted  for  publication  in  a major  international journal.
Charlene is presenting some related work at the War as Text conference:
     "Unshavenness  as Signifier in World War II Movies." On the strength of
her beard work, three  different  Ivy  League schools are fighting  over who
will get to hire her.
     Randy does not want to move to the East Coast. Worse yet, he has a full
beard, which makes him feel  dreadfully incorrect whenever  he  ventures out
with her. He proposed  to  Charlene that  perhaps  he should  issue  a press
release stating that  he shaves the rest of his body every day. She did  not
think  it was very funny. He  realized, when he was halfway over the Pacific
Ocean, that all of her work was basically  an elaborate prophecy of the doom
of their relationship.
     Now  he is thinking of shaving his beard off. He might do his scalp and
his upper body, while he's at it.
     He is in the habit of doing a lot of vigorous walking. By the standards
of the body nazis who infest California and Seattle, this is only a marginal
improvement  over  (say) sitting  in front  of  a  television  chain smoking
unfiltered cigarettes and eating  suet from a tub. But he has stuck  to  his
walking doggedly  while his friends have taken up fitness  fads  and dropped
them. It has become a point of pride with  him,  and he's not about  to stop
just because he is living in Manila.
     But damn, it's hot. Hairlessness would be a good thing here.


     ***


     Only two good things came out of Randy's ill fated First Business Foray
with the food gathering software. First, it scared  him away  from trying to
do any kind of business, at least until he had the foggiest  idea of what he
was getting  into. Second, he  developed a  lasting friendship with Avi, his
old gaming buddy,  now  in Minneapolis, who displayed integrity and  a  good
sense of humor.
     At the suggestion of his lawyer (who by that point was one of his major
creditors), Randy  declared  personal  bankruptcy and then moved to  central
California with Charlene.  She had  gotten her  Ph.D. and landed  a teaching
assistant job  at one  of  the  Three  Siblings.  Randy enrolled  at another
Sibling with the aim of getting his master's degree in  astronomy. This made
him a grad student, and grad students  existed  not to learn  things but  to
relieve the tenured faculty members of tiresome  burdens  such as  educating
people and doing research.
     Within  a month  of  his arrival, Randy  solved some  trivial  computer
problems for one of the  other grad  students. A week later, the chairman of
the astronomy  department called him over  and  said,  "So, you're  the UNIX
guru." At the time, Randy was  still stupid enough  to be flattered by  this
attention, when he should have recognized them as bone chilling words.
     Three years later, he  left the  Astronomy Department without a degree,
and with  nothing to show for  his labors except six hundred dollars in  his
bank account  and a staggeringly comprehensive knowledge of UNIX. Later,  he
was to  calculate that, at  the going rates for programmers, the  department
had extracted about  a quarter of a million dollars' worth of work from him,
in return for an outlay of less than twenty  thousand. The only compensation
was that his knowledge didn't seem so useless  anymore. Astronomy had become
a  highly  networked  discipline, and you could now  control a telescope  on
another continent, or  in orbit, by  typing  commands  into  your  keyboard,
watching the images it produced on your monitor.
     Randy was  now superbly knowledgeable  when it came to  networks. Years
ago, this would  have been of  limited  usefulness.  But this was the age of
networked applications, the  dawn  of the  World Wide  Web,  and  the timing
couldn't have been better.
     In  the meantime, Avi  had  moved  to San Francisco and started  a  new
company that was going to take role playing games out of the nerd ghetto and
make them mainstream. Randy signed on as the  head technologist. He tried to
recruit Chester, but he'd already  taken a job with  a software company back
up in Seattle. So  they brought in a guy who had worked for a few video game
companies, and  later  they brought in some  other guys to do  hardware  and
communications,  and they  raised  enough  seed  money to build  a  playable
prototype. Using that as  their  dog  and  pony  show,  they  went  down  to
Hollywood and found someone to back them to the tune of ten million dollars.
They rented out some  industrial space in Gilroy, filled it full of graphics
workstations, hired a lot of sharp programmers  and a few  artists, and went
to work.
     Six  months  later, they  were  frequently mentioned  as among  Silicon
Valley's rising stars, and Randy got a little photograph in Time magazine in
an article about Siliwood the growing  collaboration  between Silicon Valley
and Hollywood. A year  after  that, the entire  enterprise  had  crashed and
burned.
     This was an epic tale not worth telling. The conventional  wisdom circa
the  early  nineties  had  been  that  the  technical  wizards  of  Northern
California would meet the  creative minds of Southern California halfway and
create a brilliant new collaboration. But this was rooted in a naive view of
what Hollywood  was  all  about. Hollywood  was merely a specialized  bank a
consortium of large  financial entities that hired talent, almost always for
a flat rate, ordered that talent to create a product, and then marketed that
product to death, all over the world, in every conceivable medium.  The goal
was to find products that would keep on making money forever, long after the
talent  had been paid off and  sent  packing.  Casablanca, for example,  was
still putting  asses in seats decades  after Bogart had  been  paid  off and
smoked himself into an early grave.
     In the view of Hollywood, the  techies  of Silicon  Valley were just  a
particularly naive form  of talent. So when the technology reached a certain
point the  point where it  could  be marketed to a certain  large  Nipponese
electronics company at a  substantial  profit the backers  of Avi's  company
staged a lightning coup  that had obviously been lovingly planned. Randy and
the others were given a choice: they could leave the company now and hold on
to some of their stock, which  was still worth  a decent amount of money. Or
they  could  stay  in  which case they  would find themselves sabotaged from
within  by fifth columnists who had been infiltrated into  key positions. At
the same time they would be besieged from without by lawyers demanding their
heads for the things that were suddenly going wrong.
     Some of the founders stayed on as  court eunuchs. Most of them left the
company, and of that group, most sold their stock immediately  because  they
could see  it was  going nowhere  but down.  The  company was  gutted by the
transfer of its technology to Japan,  and the empty husk eventually dried up
and blew away.
     Even today, bits  and pieces  of the technology keep popping up in  the
oddest places,  such  as  advertisements for new  video  game platforms.  It
always gives Randy the creeps to see this. When it all started to go  wrong,
the Nipponese tried to hire him  directly,  and  he actually made some money
flying over there to work, for a week or a month at a time, as a consultant.
But they couldn't keep the technology running with the programmers they had,
and so it hasn't lived up to its potential.
     Thus  ended  Randy's Second Business  Foray.  He  came out of it with a
couple  of  hundred thousand dollars,  most  of  which  he  plowed  into the
Victorian house he shares with Charlene. He hadn't trusted himself with that
much  liquid cash, and locking it  up in  the house  gave  him a  feeling of
safety, like reaching home base in a frenzied game of full contact tag.
     He  has  spent the  years  since running the  Three Siblings'  computer
system. He hasn't made much money, but he hasn't had much stress either.


     ***


     Randy  was forever telling  people, without rancor, that they were full
of shit. That was  the only way to get anything done in hacking. No one took
it personally.
     Charlene's  crowd most definitely  did take  it  personally.  It wasn't
being  told  that they were  wrong  that offended  them, though it  was  the
underlying assumption that a person could be right or  wrong about anything.
So on  the Night in Question the night of Avi's fateful call  Randy had done
what he  usually  did, which was to withdraw from the  conversation.  In the
Tolkien, not the  endocrinological or Snow White  sense,  Randy is a  Dwarf.
Tolkien's Dwarves were stout, taciturn, vaguely magical characters who spent
a lot  of  time in  the dark hammering out  beautiful  things, e.g. Rings of
Power. Thinking of himself as a Dwarf who had hung up his war ax for a while
to go sojourning in the Shire, where he was surrounded by squabbling Hobbits
(i.e., Charlene's friends), had actually done  a lot  for Randy's  peace  of
mind  over  the years.  He  knew  perfectly well  that  if he were stuck  in
academia,  these people, and the things they said, would  seem  momentous to
him. But where  he came from, nobody  had been taking these people seriously
for years. So he just withdrew from the conversation  and drank his wine and
looked out over the Pacific surf and tried not to do anything really obvious
like shaking his head and rolling his eyes.
     Then the topic of the Information Superhighway came up, and Randy could
feel  faces  turning in  his direction  like  searchlights,  casting  almost
palpable warmth on his skin.
     Dr. G. E. B.  Kivistik  had  a  few things to say about the Information
Superhighway.  He  was a fiftyish Yale  professor who had just flown in from
someplace that  had sounded really cool and impressive when he had gone  out
of  his way to  mention  it several times. His name was Finnish, but he  was
British as only a non British Anglophile could be. Ostensibly he was here to
attend War  as Text. Really  he was  there to recruit  Charlene,  and really
really (Randy suspected) to fuck her. This was probably not true at all, but
just a symptom of how wacked out Randy was getting by  this point. Dr. G. E.
B. Kivistik had been showing  up on television pretty frequently. Dr. G.  E.
B. Kivistik had a couple of books out. Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik was,  in short,
parlaying his  strongly contrarian view of the Information Superhighway into
more air time than anyone who hadn't been accused of  blowing  up a day care
center should get.
     A Dwarf on sojourn in the Shire would probably go to a  lot  of  dinner
parties where pompous boring  Hobbits would hold forth like this. This Dwarf
would view the  whole thing  as entertainment. He would know  that  he could
always go back out into the real world, so much vaster and more complex than
these  Hobbits imagined,  and slay a few Trolls and remind  himself  of what
really mattered.
     That was what  Randy always told himself,  anyway.  But on the Night in
Question, it didn't work. Partly because Kivistik was too big and real to be
a Hobbit probably more influential in the  real world than Randy would  ever
be. Partly because another faculty  spouse at the table a likable,  harmless
computerphile named  Jon  decided  to  take issue  with  some of  Kivistik's
statements  and  was cheerfully shot down for his troubles. Blood was in the
water.
     Randy had ruined  his relationship  with Charlene by  wanting  to  have
kids.  Kids raise issues. Charlene, like all of her friends, couldn't handle
issues.  Issues  meant  disagreement. Voicing  disagreement  was a  form  of
conflict. Conflict, acted out openly and publicly, was a male mode of social
interaction the foundation for patriarchal society which brought with it the
usual   litany   of  dreadful  things.  Regardless,  Randy  decided  to  get
patriarchal with Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik.
     "How   many   slums   will  we   bulldoze  to  build  the   Information
Superhighway?" Kivistik  said. This profundity  was received with thoughtful
nodding around the table.
     Jon shifted  in his  chair  as if Kivistik had just dropped an ice cube
down his  collar. "What does  that mean?" he asked.  Jon was smiling, trying
not to be a conflict  oriented patriarchal hegemonist. Kivistik in response,
raised his eyebrows and  looked  around  at  everyone else, as if to say Who
invited  this  poor lightweight?  Jon  tried  to  dig himself out  from  his
tactical  error, as  Randy closed his eyes  and tried not to  wince visibly.
Kivistik  had spent more years sparring with really  smart  people over high
table  at  Oxford  than  Jon had  been alive.  "You don't  have to  bulldoze
anything. There's nothing there to bulldoze," Jon pleaded.
     "Very well, let me put it this way," Kivistik said magnanimously he was
not above dumbing down his material for the likes of Jon. "How many on ramps
will connect the world's ghettos to the Information Superhighway?"
     Oh, that's  much clearer, everyone seemed to  think.  Point well taken,
Geb! No one looked at Jon,  that argumentative pariah. Jon looked helplessly
over at Randy, signaling for help.
     Jon was a Hobbit who'd actually been out of the Shire  recently,  so he
knew Randy was a dwarf. Now he  was fucking up Randy's life by  calling upon
Randy to jump up on the table, throw  off  his  homespun cloak, and whip out
his two handed ax.
     The words came out of Randy's mouth before he  had time to think better
of it. "The Information  Superhighway is just a fucking  metaphor! Give me a
break!" he said.
     There  was  a silence as everyone  around the  table winced  in unison.
Dinner had now, officially, crashed and  burned. All  they  could do now was
grab  their ankles, put their heads between their knees,  and  wait for  the
wreckage to slide to a halt.
     "That doesn't  tell  me  very  much," Kivistik said. "Everything  is  a
metaphor. The word 'fork' is a metaphor for this object." He held up a fork.
"All discourse is built from metaphors."
     "That's no excuse for using bad metaphors," Randy said.
     "Bad? Bad?  Who decides what is bad?" Kivistik  said,  doing his killer
impression  of  a  heavy  lidded, mouth breathing undergraduate.  There  was
scattered tittering from people who were desperate to break the tension.
     Randy  could see  where it  was going. Kivistik had gone for the  usual
academician's  ace in  the  hole:  everything  is relative,  it's  all  just
differing perspectives. People had already begun to resume their little side
conversations, thinking that the conflict was over, when Randy gave them all
a start with: "Who decides what's bad? I do. "
     Even Dr. G. E.  B. Kivistik was flustered.  He wasn't sure if Randy was
joking. "Excuse me?"
     Randy  was  in  no  great hurry  to  answer the question. He  took  the
opportunity to sit back comfortably, stretch, and take a sip of his wine. He
was feeling good. "It's like this," he said. "I've read your book. I've seen
you  on  TV. I've heard you tonight. I personally typed up  a  list  of your
credentials when I was preparing press  materials for  this conference. So I
know that you're not qualified to have an opinion about technical issues.''
     "Oh," Kivistik said  in  mock  confusion, "I didn't realize  one had to
have qualifications."
     "I  think  it's clear," Randy  said,  "that if you  are ignorant  of  a
particular  subject, that your opinion is completely worthless. If I'm sick,
I don't ask a plumber for advice.  I  go to a  doctor.  Likewise,  if I have
questions  about the Internet,  I will  seek opinions  from people who  know
about it."
     "Funny how all of the technocrats seem to be in favor of the Internet,"
Kivistik said cheerily, milking a few more laughs from the crowd.
     "You have just  made a statement that is demonstrably not  true," Randy
said,  pleasantly  enough. "A number  of Internet experts  have written well
reasoned books that are sharply critical of it."
     Kivistik was finally getting pissed off. All the levity was gone.
     "So,"  Randy  continued,  "to  get  back   to  where  we  started,  the
Information Superhighway is a bad metaphor for the  Internet,  because I say
it is. There might be a thousand people on the  planet who are as conversant
with the Internet as I  am. I know  most of these people. None of them takes
that metaphor seriously. Q.E.D."
     "Oh. I see," Kivistik said, a little hotly. He had seen an opening. "So
we should rely on  the technocrats to  tell us  what  to think,  and  how to
think, about this technology."
     The expressions  of the  others seemed to say that this was  a  telling
blow, righteously struck.
     "I'm  not sure what  a technocrat is," Randy said. "Am I a  technocrat?
I'm  just a  guy who went  down to  the bookstore and  bought  a  couple  of
textbooks on TCP/IP,  which is the underlying protocol of  the Internet, and
read them. And then I signed on to a computer, which anyone can do nowadays,
and  I  messed around  with it for a few years, and now I know all about it.
Does that make me a technocrat?"
     "You belonged  to the technocratic elite even before you picked up that
book," Kivistik said. "The ability to wade through a technical text, and  to
understand it, is a privilege. It is a privilege  conferred by an  education
that  is  available only to members of an elite class. That's what I mean by
technocrat."
     "I went to  a public school," Randy said. "And then I went to  a  state
university. From that point on, I was self educated."
     Charlene broke in. She  had  been giving Randy  dirty looks  ever since
this started and  he  had been ignoring  her. Now he was going to  pay. "And
your family?" Charlene asked frostily.
     Randy took a  deep breath, stifled the urge to  sigh.  "My  father's an
engineer. He teaches at a state college."
     "And his father?"
     "A mathematician."
     Charlene raised her eyebrows. So did nearly everyone else at the table.
Case closed.
     "I strenuously object to  being labeled and pigeonholed and stereotyped
as  a  technocrat,"  Randy  said,  deliberately   using  oppressed  person's
language, maybe in an attempt to  turn  their weapons against them  but more
likely (he thinks, lying in bed at three A.M. in the Manila Hotel) out of an
uncontrollable urge to be a prick. Some of them, out of habit, looked at him
soberly;  etiquette  dictated that you give all  sympathy to  the oppressed.
Others gasped in outrage to hear these words coming from the lips of a known
and convicted white male  technocrat. "No one in my family has ever had much
money or power," he said.
     "I think that  the  point that  Charlene's making is  like  this," said
Tomas,  one of their  houseguests who had flown in from Prague with his wife
Nina. He  had now  appointed himself conciliator. He  paused  long enough to
exchange a warm  look  with  Charlene.  "Just  by virtue  of coming  from  a
scientific family, you are a member of a privileged elite.  You're not aware
of  it  but  members   of  privileged  elites  are  rarely  aware  of  their
privileges."
     Randy  finished the thought.  "Until  people  like  you come  along  to
explain to us how stupid, to say nothing of morally bankrupt, we are."
     "The  false consciousness  Tomas  is speaking  of is exactly what makes
entrenched power elites so entrenched," Charlene said.
     "Well, I  don't feel very entrenched," Randy said.  "I've worked my ass
off to get where I've gotten."
     "A lot of people  work  hard all their lives and get nowhere,"  someone
said accusingly. Look out! The sniping had begun.
     "Well,  I'm sorry  I haven't  had the good grace to get nowhere," Randy
said, now feeling  just a bit surly for  the first time,  "but  I have found
that  if you work  hard, educate yourself and  keep your wits about you, you
can find your way in this society."
     "But  that's  straight  out of  some nineteenth century  Horatio  Alger
book," Tomas sputtered.
     "So?  Just  because it's an  old idea doesn't  mean it's wrong."  Randy
said.
     A small strike  force  of waitpersons  had been forming up  around  the
fringes  of the  table, arms laden with dishes, making eye contact with each
other as  they tried to decide when it was okay to break  up  the  fight and
serve  dinner.  One of them rewarded Randy  with a platter carrying a wigwam
devised from slabs of nearly raw tuna. The pro consensus, anti confrontation
elements  then  seized  control of  the  conversation  and broke it  up into
numerous small clusters of people all vigorously agreeing  with one another.
Jon cast a watery  look  at  Randy, as if to say, was it good  for  you too?
Charlene  was ignoring  him  intensely; she was  caught  up  in a  consensus
cluster with Tomas. Nina kept trying to catch Randy's eye, but he studiously
avoided  this  because  he  was afraid that she wanted to favor  him with  a
smoldering come hither look, and all Randy wanted to do right then was to go
thither. Ten  minutes later, his pager went off,  and he looked down  to see
Avi's number on it.


     Chapter 7 BURN


     The American  base at Cavite, along the shore of Manila Bay, burns real
good  once the Nips have set it  on fire, Bobby  Shaftoe and the rest of the
Fourth Marines get a good long look at it as they cruise by, sneaking out of
Manila like  thieves  in  the  night.  He has  never  felt  more  personally
disgraced in his life,  and the same  thing goes  for the other Marines. The
Nips  have  already landed in Malaya  and are headed  for  Singapore  like a
runaway train, they are besieging Guam and Wake and Hong Kong  and God knows
what else, and it should be obvious to anyone that they are going to hit the
Philippines next. Seems  like  a regiment  of  hardened  China Marines might
actually come in handy around here.
     But  MacArthur  seems  to think  he can  defend  Luzon all  by himself,
standing on the  walls of Intramuros with his Colt .45. So they are shipping
out. They have no idea where to. Most  of them would rather hit the  beaches
of Nippon itself than stay here in Army territory.
     The night the war began, Bobby Shaftoe had first gotten Glory back into
the bosom of her family.
     The  Altamiras  live  in the neighborhood of Malate, a couple  of miles
south of Intramuros,  and not too  far from the place where Shaftoe has just
had his  half hour  of Glory along the seawall.  The city has gone  mad, and
it's impossible to  get  a  car. Sailors, marines, and  soldiers are spewing
from  bars, nightclubs,  and ballrooms and commandeering  taxis in groups of
four and six it's  as  crazy  as Shanghai on Saturday night  like  the war's
already here. Shaftoe ends up carrying Glory halfway home, because her shoes
aren't made for walking.
     The  family Altamira is vast  enough to constitute an ethnic group unto
itself and all of  them  live  in the same building practically  in the same
room. Once or  twice, Glory had begun to explain  to Bobby Shaftoe  how they
are all  related. Now  there  are many Shaftoes mostly in  Tennessee but the
Shaftoe family tree still fits on a cross stitch sampler. The family Shaftoe
is to the Altamira  clan  as a  single,  alienated sapling  is to  a jungle.
Filipino families, in addition to being gigantic and Catholic, are massively
crosslinked by godparent/godchild relationships, like  lianas stretched from
branch  to branch and tree to tree. If asked, Glory is happy, even eager, to
talk  for six  hours  nonstop  about how the  Altamiras  are related  to one
another, and that is just to give a general overview. Shaftoe's brain always
shuts off after the first thirty seconds.
     He gets her to the apartment, which is usually in a state of hysterical
uproar even when the nation is not  under military assault by  the Empire of
Nippon. Despite this, the appearance of Glory, shortly after the outbreak of
war,  borne in  the arms  of  a  United  States Marine,  is received  by the
Altamiras in  much the same way as  if  Christ  were  to materialize in  the
center  of their living room with the Virgin  Mary  slung over his back. All
around him, middle  aged women are thudding down onto their knees, as if the
place has  just  been mustard gassed. But they  are just  doing  it to shout
hallelujah! Glory alights nimbly  upon her high heels,  tears exploring  the
exceptional geometry of her cheeks, and  kisses everyone in the entire clan.
All of the kids  are wide awake, though it is three in the morning.  Shaftoe
happens  to catch the eye of a squad of boys, aged maybe  three to  ten, all
brandishing wooden rifles and swords. They are all staring at Bobby Shaftoe,
replendent  in his  uniform, and they are  perfectly thunderstruck; he could
throw  a baseball  into  the mouth of each one from across  the room. In his
peripheral vision, he sees a  middle  aged woman who is related to  Glory by
some impossibly complex chain  of relationships, and who  already has one of
Glory's lipstick  marks on  her  cheek, vectoring toward him on  a collision
course, grimly determined to kiss him. He knows that he must get out of this
place now or he will never leave it. So, ignoring the woman, and holding the
gaze of those stunned boys,  he rises to attention and snaps out  a  perfect
salute.
     The  boys  salute  back,  raggedly,  but with  fantastic bravado. Bobby
Shaftoe turns on his heel and marches out of the room, moving like a bayonet
thrust.  He reckons  that he  will come back to Malate tomorrow, when things
are calmer, and check up on Glory and the rest of the Altamiras.
     He does not see her again.
     He reports back to his ship, and is not granted  any  more shore leave.
He does manage  to  have  a  conversation  with  Uncle Jack,  who  pulls  up
alongside in a small motorboat long enough for them to shout a few sentences
back and forth.  Uncle Jack is the last of the  Manila Shaftoes, a branch of
the family  spawned  by Nimrod  Shaftoe  of the Tennessee Volunteers. Nimrod
took a  bullet in  his right arm  somewhere around Quingua, courtesy of some
rebellious Filipino riflemen. Recovering  in a Manila hospital,  old Nimrod,
or 'Lefty" as he was called by that  point, decided that he liked the  pluck
of these  Filipino  men,  in  order  to  kill  whom  a  whole  new  class of
ridiculously  powerful sidearm  (the Colt  .45) had had to be  invented. Not
only that, he liked the looks  of their  women. Promptly discharged from the
service, he found that full  disability pay would go a long way on the local
economy. He  set up an export business along the Pasig riverfront, married a
half Spanish woman, and sired a  son (Jack) and two daughters. The daughters
ended up in  the States, back in the Tennessee mountains that have  been the
ancestral  wellspring  of all  Shaftoes  ever since they  broke  out of  the
indentured servitude racket back  in the 1700s.  Jack  stayed in Manila  and
inherited Nimrod's business, but never married. By Manila standards he makes
a decent amount of money. He  has  always been an  odd combination of  salty
waterfront trader and  perfumed  dandy. He and  Mr.  Pascual  have  been  in
business together forever, which is how Bobby Shaftoe knows Mr. Pascual, and
which is how he originally met Glory.
     When  Bobby  Shaftoe repeats  the  latest  rumors,  Uncle  Jack's  face
collapses. No one hereabouts is willing to face the fact that they are about
to be besieged by Nips. His next words  ought to be, "Shit then, I'm getting
the  hell out of here, I'll send you a postcard from Australia." But instead
he says something like "I'll come by in a few days to check up on you."
     Bobby Shaftoe  bites  his tongue and  does  not say what he's thinking,
which is that  he  is a Marine, and he is on a ship, and this is a war,  and
Marines on ships in wars are not known for staying put. He just stands there
and watches as Uncle Jack  putt putts  away on his little boat, turning back
every so often to wave at him with his fine Panama  hat.  The sailors around
Bobby Shaftoe watch with amusement, and a bit of  admiration. The waterfront
is  churning insanely as  every  piece of military  gear that's not  set  in
concrete gets thrown onto ships and sent to Bata'an or Corregidor, and Uncle
Jack,  standing  upright in his boat, in his  good  cream  colored suit  and
Panama hat,  weaves through the traffic with aplomb.  Bobby Shaftoe  watches
him  until he disappears around the  bend into the Pasig River, knowing that
he is probably  the  last member of his family who  will ever see Uncle Jack
alive.
     Despite  all  of those premonitions, he's surprised  when they ship out
after only a few days of war, pulling out of their slip in the middle of the
night  without  any  of  the  traditional  farewell  ceremonies.  Manila  is
supposedly lousy  with Nip spies, and there's  nothing  the Nips would  like
better than to sink a transport ship stuffed with experienced Marines.
     Manila disappears behind them into the darkness. The  awareness that he
hasn't seen Glory since that night  is  like a  slow hot dentist's drill. He
wonders how she's doing. Maybe, once the war settles down a  little bit, and
the battle lines  firm up, he can figure out a way to get stationed  in this
part of the world. MacArthur's a tough old bastard who will put up a hell of
a fight when the Nips come. And even if the Philippines fall,  FDR won't let
them remain in enemy hands  for very  long.  With  any luck,  inside of  six
months, Bobby  Shaftoe  will  be  marching up Manila's  Taft Avenue, in full
dress uniform,  behind a Marine  Band, perhaps nursing a minor  war wound or
two.  The parade will  come to a section of the avenue that is lined,  for a
distance  of about a mile, with Altamiras. About halfway  along,  the  crowd
will part, and Glory  will run out and  jump into  his  arms and smother him
with  kisses. He'll carry the girl straight up the steps of some nice little
church where a priest in a white cassock is waiting with a big  grin on  his
face That dream image dissolves in a mushroom cloud of orange fire rising up
from the  American base at  Cavite. The  place has been burning all day, and
another fuel dump has just gone  up. He can feel  the  heat on his face from
miles away.  Bobby Shaftoe is on the  deck of  the ship, all bundled up in a
life  vest in case they  get torpedoed.  He takes  advantage of  the flaring
light to look  down a long line of other Marines in  life vests, staring  at
the flame with stunned expressions on their tired, sweaty faces.
     Manila  is only half an  hour behind  them, but it  might as well  be a
million miles away.
     He remembers Nanking, and what the Nips did there. What happened to the
women.
     Once,  long ago, there was a city named Manila. There was a girl there.
Her face and name are best forgotten. Bobby  Shaftoe  starts forgetting just
as fast as he can.


     Chapter 8 PEDESTRIAN


     RESPECT  THE PEDESTRIAN,  say the street signs of metro Manila. As soon
as Randy saw those he knew that he was in trouble.
     For the first couple of weeks he spent in Manila, his work consisted of
walking.  He walked  all  over the  city  carrying a handheld GPS  receiver,
taking  down  latitudes and longitudes. He encrypted  the data in  his hotel
room  and e  mailed it  to  Avi. It  became  part of Epiphyte's intellectual
property. It became equity.
     Now,  they  had secured  some actual office space. Randy  walks to  it,
doggedly. He knows that  the  first time  he takes a taxi there, he'll never
walk again.
     RESPECT THE PEDESTRIAN,  the signs say,  but the drivers, the  physical
environment,  local land  use  customs, and  the  very  layout  of the place
conspire to  treat the pedestrian with the  contempt  he so richly deserves.
Randy would get more respect if  he  went  to work on  a pogo  stick with  a
propeller beanie on his head. Every morning the bellhops ask him if he wants
a taxi, and  practically lose consciousness  when he says no.  Every morning
the taxi drivers lined up in front of the hotel, leaning against  their cars
and smoking, shout "Taxi?  Taxi?" to him. When  he turns them down, they say
witty things to each other in Tagalog and roar with laughter.
     Just in case  Randy hasn't gotten the message yet, a new  red and white
chopper swings in low over Rizal Park, turns around once or twice like a dog
preparing to  lie down, and settles in,  not far from some palm trees, right
in front of the hotel.
     Randy  has  gotten  into the  habit of  reaching Intramuros by  cutting
through Rizal Park. This is not a direct route. The direct route passes over
a no  man's land, a vast, dangerous intersection  lined with  squatters huts
(it is dangerous because of the cars, not the  squatters). If you go through
the park, on the other hand, you only have to brush off a lot of whores. But
Randy's gotten good at that. The whores cannot conceive of a man rich enough
to stay at the Manila Hotel who voluntarily walks around the city every day,
and they  have  given him up as a  maniac. He has passed  into the  realm of
irrational things  that you must simply accept, and in the  Philippines this
is a nearly infinite domain.
     Randy  could never  understand  why everything smelled so  bad until he
came  upon a large, crisp rectangular hole in  the sidewalk, and stared down
into a running flume of raw sewage. The sidewalks are nothing more than lids
on the sewers. Access to the depths is provided by concrete slabs with rebar
lifting loops protruding from them.  Squatters  fashion wire harnesses  onto
those  loops  so that  they  can  pull  them up  and  create  instant public
latrines. These slabs are frequently engraved with the initials,  team name,
or graffiti tag of the gentlemen who manufactured them, and their competence
and  attentiveness to detail vary, but their esprit  de  corps is fixed at a
very high level.
     There  are only so many gates that lead into Intramuros. Randy must run
a daily gauntlet of horse drawn taxis, some  of whom have nothing better  to
do than follow him down the street for a quarter of an hour muttering, "Sir?
Sir?  Taxi?  Taxi?"  One  of  them,  in  particular,  is the most  tenacious
capitalist Randy has ever seen. Every  time he draws alongside Randy, a rope
of  urine  uncoils from his horse's  belly and  cracks into the pavement and
hisses and foams. Tiny comets of pee strike Randy's pant legs.  Randy always
wears long pants no matter how hot it is.
     Intramuros is a strangely  quiet and lazy  neighborhood. This is mostly
because it was  destroyed  during the  war, and hasn't been undestroyed yet.
Much  of it is open weed  farms still, which  is very odd in the middle of a
vast, crowded metropolis.
     Several   miles  south,  towards  the   airport,  amid  nice   suburban
developments, is Makati. This would  be  the  logical place to base Epiphyte
Corp. It's got a couple of giant five star luxury hotels on every block, and
office towers that look clean and cool, and modern condos. But Avi, with his
perverse real estate  sense, has decided  to forgo all of that  in  favor of
what  he  described on the phone as  texture. "I do not like to buy or lease
real estate when it is peaking," he said.
     Understanding Avi's motives is  like peeling  an  onion  with  a single
chopstick. Randy knows  there  is  much  more to it: perhaps he's  earning a
favor,  or repaying one,  to  a  landlord.  Perhaps  he's been  reading some
management guru who counsels young entrepreneurs to get deeply involved in a
country's  culture. Not that Avi has ever been one for gurus. Randy's latest
theory  is  that it all has  to  do  with lines  of sight the latitudes  and
longitudes.
     Sometimes  Randy  walks along the top of the Spanish wall. Around Calle
Victoria, where MacArthur had his headquarters before the war, it is as wide
as a four lane street.  Lovers nestle in the trapezoidal gunslits and put up
umbrellas  for privacy.  Below him,  to  the left,  is the moat, a good city
block or two in width, mostly dry. Squatters have built shacks on it. In the
parts that are still  submerged, they dig for mud crabs or string improvised
nets among the purple and magenta lotus blossoms.
     To the right is  Intramuros. A  few buildings poke up  out of a jumbled
wilderness of strewn stone. Ancient  Spanish cannon are sprinkled around the
place,  half  buried.  The  rubble  fields  have been colonized by  tropical
vegetation  and  squatters. Their  clothesline poles and television antennas
are all  wrapped up  in  jungle creepers  and  makeshift  electrical wiring.
Utility  poles jut into the air at odd angles, like widowmakers in  a burned
forest, some  of them  almost  completely obscured by  the glass bubbles  of
electrical  meters.  Every dozen yards  or so, for no discernable  reason, a
pile of rubble smolders.
     As he goes by the cathedral, children  follow  him, whining and begging
piteously until  he puts pesos in their hands. Then they  beam and sometimes
give  him a  bright "Thank you!" in perfect American scented  shopping  mall
English. The beggars in Manila never seem to take their work very seriously,
for even they have been infected by the  cultural fungus of irony and always
seem to  be fighting back  a  grin,  as if they can't believe  they're doing
anything so corny.
     They do not understand that he is working. That's okay.
     Ideas have always come to Randy faster than he could use them. He spent
the first thirty years of his life pursuing whatever idea appealed to him at
the moment, discarding it when a better one came along.
     Now  he  is  working  for  a  company  again,  and  has  some  kind  of
responsibility to use his time  productively. Good ideas come to him as fast
and thick as ever, but  he has to keep his eye  on the ball. If the  idea is
not relevant to Epiphyte, he has to jot it down and forget about it for now.
If it is relevant, he has to restrain his urge to dive into it and consider:
has anyone else come up with this idea before him? Is it possible to just go
out and buy the technology? Can he delegate the  work to a contract coder in
the States?
     He walks slowly, partly because otherwise he will suffer heatstroke and
fall dead in the gutter. Worse yet, he may fall through an open hatch into a
torrent of sewage, or brush against one of the squatters's electrical wires,
which dangle from overhead like patient asps. The constant dangers of sudden
electrocution from above or  drowning in  liquid shit below keep him looking
up  and  down as well  as side  to side. Randy has never  felt  more trapped
between a  capricious  and dangerous heaven and  a hellish underworld.  This
place is as steeped in religion as India, but all of it is Catholic.
     At  the northern end of Intramuros is a little business district. It is
sandwiched between Manila Cathedral  and Fort Santiago,  which the Spaniards
constructed to  command the outlet of the  Pasig River. You  can tell it's a
business district because of the phone wires. As in other Rapidly Developing
Asian Economies, it is difficult to tell  whether these are pirate wires, or
official  ones  that  have been incredibly  badly installed. They are a case
study in why incrementalism is bad. The bundles are  so thick in some places
that Randy probably could not wrap both arms  around  them. Their weight and
tension have begun to pull the phone poles over, especially at curves in the
roads, where the wires  go round a corner and exert a net sideways  force on
the pole.
     All  of  these buildings are constructed  in  the  least expensive  way
conceivable: concrete poured in  place  in wooden forms, over grids of  hand
tied rebar. They are blocky, grey, and completely indistinguishable from one
another.  A couple  of much taller buildings, twenty or thirty stories, loom
over the district from a big intersection nearby, wind and birds circulating
through their broken windows. They were  badly shaken  up  in  an earthquake
during the 1980s and have not been put to rights yet.
     He passes  by a restaurant with a  squat  concrete blockhouse in front,
its openings  covered  with  blackened  steel  grates,  rusty  exhaust pipes
sticking out  the top  to vent the diesel generator locked  inside. NO BROWN
OUT has been proudly stenciled all over it. Beyond that  is a postwar office
building,  four stories high, with  an especially  thick sheaf  of telephone
wires running into  it. The logo of a bank  is  bolted to the front  of  the
building, down low. There is angle parking in front. The two spaces in front
of the main entrance  are blocked off  with hand painted signs: RESERVED FOR
ARMORED CAR and RESERVED FOR BANK MANAGER. A couple of guards stand in front
of the entrance clutching the fat  wooden pistol grips of riot guns, weapons
that  have  the hulking, cartoonish appearance of action figure accessories.
One of the  guards remains behind  a bulletproof podium with  a sign  on it:
PLEASE DEPOSIT GUNS/FIREARMS TO THE GUARD.
     Randy exchanges  nods  with  the gunmen  and  goes into the  building's
lobby,  which  is just as hot as  outside. Bypassing the  bank, ignoring the
unreliable elevators, he goes  through  a  steel door that takes him into  a
narrow stairwell. Today, it is dark.  The building's  electrical system is a
patchwork several different systems coexisting in the same space, controlled
by different panels, some on generators and some not. So blackouts begin and
end in phases. Somewhere near the top of the  stairwell,  small birds chirp,
competing with the sound of car alarms being set off outside.
     Epiphyte Corp. rents  the building's top floor, although he is the only
person  working there  so far. He  keys  his  way  in.  Thank  god;  the air
conditioning has been working.  The money they paid for  their own generator
was worth it. He  disables the alarm systems, goes to the fridge,  and  gets
two one liter bottles of water. His rule of thumb, after a walk, is to drink
water  until  he  begins  to  urinate  again.  Then he  can  consider  other
activities.
     He is too sweaty to sit down. He must keep moving so that  the cold dry
air  will flow around his body. He  flicks globes of sweat  out of his beard
and  does an orbit of the floor, looking  out the windows, checking  out the
lines  of sight. He pulls  a ballistic  nylon traveler's wallet  out of  his
trousers  and lets it dangle from his belt loop so  that the skin underneath
it can breathe. It contains his  passport, a virgin credit  card, ten  crisp
new hundred dollar bills, and a floppy disk with his 4096 bit encryption key
on it.
     Northwards he  can  survey  the greens  and ramparts of  Fort Santiago,
where  phalanxes  of  Nipponese  tourists  toil, recording  their  fun  with
forensic determination. Beyond that is the Pasig River, choked with floating
debris. Across the river is Quiapo, a built up area: high rise apartment and
office buildings  with corporate names emblazoned on their top  storeys  and
satellite dishes on the roofs.
     Unwilling to stop moving just  yet,  Randy strolls clockwise around the
office. Intramuros is ringed with  a belt of green, its  former moat. He has
just walked up its western  verge.  The  eastern one is  studded  with heavy
neoclassical  buildings housing  various government ministries. The Post and
Telecommunications Authority sits  on the Pasig's edge, at a  vertex in  the
river from which three  closely spaced  bridges  radiate into Quiapo. Beyond
the  large  new  structures  above  the  river,  Quiapo  and  the  adjoining
neighborhood  of San Miguel are a patchwork  of  giant institutions: a train
station,  an old prison,  many universities, and Malacanang Palace, which is
farther up the Pasig.
     Back on this  side  of  the river,  it is Intramuros  in the foreground
(cathedrals   and   churches   surrounded   by  dormant  land),   government
institutions,  colleges, and universities  in the middle ground, and, beyond
that, a  seemingly infinite  sprawl of low lying,  smoky city.  Miles to the
south  is  the gleaming business city of Makati, built around a square where
two big roads intersect at an acute  angle, echoing the intersecting runways
at NAIA, a bit farther  south. An emerald city of big  houses perched on big
lawns spreads away from Makati: it is  where  the ambassadors and  corporate
presidents  live. Continuing  his  clockwise  stroll  he  can  follow  Roxas
Boulevard  coming toward him up the seawall, marked by a picket line of tall
palm  trees. Manila  Bay  is jammed with heavy  shipping,  big  cargo  ships
filling the water like logs in a boom. The  container port is just below him
to the west: a grid of warehouses  on reclaimed  land that is about as flat,
and as natural, as a sheet of particle board.
     If he looks over the cranes and containers, due west across the bay, he
can barely  make out  the  mountainous silhouette of the  Bata'an Peninsula,
some forty miles distant. Following its black skyline southwards tracing the
route taken by the Nipponese in  '42  he can almost resolve a lump lying off
its southern tip. That would be the island of Corregidor. This  is the first
time he's ever been able to see it; the air is unusually clear today.
     A fragment  of historical trivia floats to  the  surface of  his melted
brain. The galleon from Acapulco. The signal fire on Corregidor.
     He  punches in Avi's  GSM  number. Avi, somewhere in the world, answers
it.  He sounds like he is in a taxi, in  one  of  those countries where horn
honking is still an inalienable right. "What's on your mind, Randy?"
     "Lines of sight," Randy says.
     "Huh!"  Avi  blurts,  as if a medicine ball has just slammed  into  his
belly. "You figured it out."


     Chapter 9 GUADALCANAL


     The marine  raiders' bodies  are  no longer  pressurized with blood and
breath.  The  weight  of  their  gear  flattens  them  into  the  sand.  The
accelerating surf has already  begun to  shovel silt over them; comet trails
of blood fade back into the  ocean, red  carpets  for any  sharks who may be
browsing the coastline. Only one of them is a giant lizard. but all have the
same general  shape:  fat  in  the  middle  and  tailing  off  at  the ends,
streamlined by the waves.
     A  little convoy  of Nip boats is moving down the slot,  towing  barges
loaded with supplies packed into steel  drums. Shaftoe and his platoon ought
to  be  lobbing mortars at them  right now. When the American planes show up
and  begin to  kick  the  shit out of them, the  Nips  will throw  the drums
overboard  and  run  away,  and hope that some of  them will wash  ashore on
Guadalcanal.
     The war  is  over for Bobby Shaftoe, and  hardly for the  first or last
time. He trudges among the platoon.  Waves hit him in the knees, then spread
into magic carpets of foam and vegetable matter that skim along the beach so
that his footing appears  to glide  out  from under  him. He keeps  twisting
around for no reason and falling on his ass.
     Finally he reaches the  corpsman's  corpse, and divests  it of anything
with a red  cross on it. He turns his back on the Nip  convoy and looks up a
long  glacis toward the tideline. It  might as well be Mt.  Everest as  seen
from a low base camp. Shaftoe  decides to tackle the challenge on hands  and
knees. Every so often, a big  wave spanks him on the ass, rushes  up between
his legs orgasmically and washes his face. It feels good and also  keeps him
from pitching forward and falling asleep below the high tide mark.
     The next couple of days are  a handful of dirty, faded  black and white
snapshots,  shuffled and  dealt over and over  again: the beach under water.
positions of corpses marked by standing  waves.  The beach empty.  The beach
under  water  again.  The  beach  strewn with black  lumps, like a slice  of
Grandma  Shaftoe's raisin bread. A  morphine bottle half buried in the sand.
Small,  dark  people, mostly  naked,  moving along the beach at low tide and
looting the corpses.
     Hey,  wait a  sec!  Shaftoe  is  on  his feet  somehow,  clutching  his
Springfield.  The jungle  doesn't  want to  let  go of  him;  creepers  have
actually grown  over his limbs in the time he has lain there. As he emerges.
dragging  foliage behind him  like a float in a  ticker tape parade, the sun
floods over him like warm  syrup of ipecac. He can see the ground headed his
way. He spins as he falls momentarily glimpsing a big man  with a rifle  and
then his face is pressed into the cool sand.  The surf roars in his skull: a
nice standing ovation from a studio audience of angels, who having all  died
themselves, know a good death when they see one.
     Little  hands roll  him over onto his  back. One of his  eyes is frozen
shut by  sand. Peering through  the  other he sees a big fellow with a rifle
slung over his shoulder standing over him. The fellow has a red beard, which
makes it  just a  bit less probable that he is a Nipponese soldier. But what
is he?
     He prods like  a doctor and prays like a priest in Latin, even.  Silver
hair buzzed close to a tanned skull. Shaftoe scans the fellow's clothing for
some kind of insignia. He's hoping  to see a  Semper Fidelis but instead  he
reads: Societas Eruditorum and Ignoti et quasi occulti.

     "Ignoti et ... what the fuck does that mean?" he asks.
     "Hidden  and  unknown more or less,"  says  the man. He's got  a  weird
accent, sort of Australian, sort of German. He checks out Shaftoe's insignia
in turn. "What's a Marine Raider? Some kind of new outfit?"
     "Like a Marine,  only  more so," Shaftoe  says. Which might sound  like
bravado. Indeed it partly is. But  this comment is as heavy laden with irony
as  Shaftoe's clothes are with  sand, because at  this particular moment  in
history, a Marine isn't  just a tough s.o.b. He is  a tough S.O.B. stuck out
in the  middle of  nowhere (Guadalcanal) with no food or  weapons (owing, as
every  Marine  can  tell  you,  to  a  sinister  conspiracy  between General
MacArthur and  the Nips)  totally  making everything up as  he  goes  along,
improvising weapons from  found objects, addled,  half the  time, by disease
and the drugs supplied to keep  diseases at  bay. And in every  one of those
senses, a Marine Raider is (as Shaftoe says) like a Marine, only more so.
     "Are   you  some  kind  of   commando   or  something?"  Shaftoe  asks,
interrupting Red as he is mumbling.
     "No. I live on the mountain."
     "Oh, yeah? What do you do up there, Red?"
     "I  watch.  And talk  on  the radio,  in  code." Then  he  goes back to
mumbling.
     "Who you talkin' to, Red?"
     "Do you mean, just now in Latin, or on the radio in code?"
     "Both I reckon."
     "On the radio in code, I talk to the good guys.
     "Who are the good guys?"
     "Long  story. If you live, maybe I'll introduce you  to some  of them,"
says Red.
     "How about just now in Latin?"
     "Talking to God," Red says. "Last rites, in case you don't live."
     This  makes him think  of the  others.  He  remembers why  he made that
insane decision to stand up in  the first place. "Hey! Hey!" He tries to sit
up, and finding that  impossible, twists around. "Those bastards are looting
the corpses!"
     His eyes aren't focusing and he has to rub sand out of the one.
     Actually, they  are  focusing just fine.  What looked like  steel drums
strewn  around the beach turn out to be steel drums strewn around the beach.
The  natives  are pawing them out of  the  sucking sand, digging with  their
hands like dogs, rolling them up the beach and into the jungle.
     Shaftoe blacks out.
     When he wakes up there's a row of crosses on  the  beach sticks  lashed
together  with vines, draped  with jungle flowers. Red is  pounding  them in
with the butt  of his rifle. All the steel drums,  and most of the  natives,
are gone. Shaftoe needs morphine. He says as much to Red.
     "If you  think you  need it  now," Red says, "just wait." He tosses his
rifle  to  a  native,  strides  up to Shaftoe, and  heaves  him  up over his
shoulders in a  fireman's carry.  Shaftoe screams.  A couple  of Zeroes  fly
overhead, as they stride into the jungle. "My name is Enoch Root," says Red,
"but you can call me Brother."


     Chapter 10 GALLEON


     One morning,  Randy  Waterhouse rises early, takes  a long hot  shower,
plants himself before  the mirror of his  Manila Hotel suite, and shaves his
face bloody. He was  thinking of farming this work out to  a specialist: the
barber in the hotel's lobby. But this is the first time Randy's face will be
visible in  ten years, and Randy wants to be the first person to see it. His
heart actually  thumps, partly out  of primal  brute fear of the  knife, and
partly from the sheer anticipation. It is like the scene in corny old movies
where the bandages are finally taken off of the patient's face, and a mirror
proffered.
     The effect is, first of all, intense deja vu, as if the last  ten years
of his life were but a dream, and he now has them to live over again.
     Then  he  begins to  notice subtle  ways  in  which his face  has  been
changing since it was last exposed to air and light. He is mildly astonished
to find that these changes are not entirely bad. Randy  has never thought of
himself as especially good looking, and has  never especially cared. But the
blood spotted visage in the mirror is, arguably, better looking than the one
that faded into the deepening shade of stubble a decade ago. It looks like a
grownup's face.


     ***


     It  has been a week since  he and Avi laid out the  entire plan for the
high officials of the PTA: the Post and Telecoms Authority. PTA is a generic
term that telecom businessmen slap, like a yellow stickynote, onto what ever
government department handles these matters in whatever country they  happen
to be visiting  this  week.  In  the  Philippines,  it  is  actually  called
something else.
     Americans  brought, or  at least  accompanied, the Philippines into the
twentieth  century  and erected the  apparatus  of its  central  government.
Intramuros, the dead heart of Manila, is surrounded by a loose ring of giant
neoclassical  buildings,  very much  after the  fashion  of the  District of
Columbia,  housing various parts of that apparatus. The PTA is headquartered
in one of those buildings, just south of the Pasig.
     Randy  and  Avi  get there  early because Randy,  accustomed to  Manila
traffic, insists that they budget a full hour to cover the one– or two
mile taxi ride  from the hotel. But traffic is perversely light and they end
up  with a full twenty minutes to kill. They stroll around the  side of  the
building and up onto the green levee. Avi draws a bead on the Epiphyte Corp.
building, just to reassure himself that their line  of sight is clear. Randy
is already  satisfied of  this,  and  just  stands  there with arms crossed,
looking at the river. It is choked, bank to bank, with floating debris: some
plant  material but  mostly  old  mattresses, cushions,  pieces  of  plastic
litter, hunks of foam,  and, most  of  all, plastic shopping bags in various
bright colors. The river has the consistency of vomit.
     Avi wrinkles his nose. "What's that?"
     Randy sniffs the air and  smells, among everything else, burnt plastic.
He gestures downstream. "Squatter camp on the other side of Fort Santiago, '
he explains. "They sieve plastic out of the river and burn it for fuel."
     "I was in Mexico a couple of weeks ago," Avi says.  "They have  plastic
forests there!"
     "What does that mean?"
     "Downwind of the city, the trees sort of comb the plastic shopping bags
out of the air. They  get totally covered  with them. The trees die  because
light and  air can't get through  to  the  leaves. But they remain standing,
totally encased in fluttering, ragged plastic, all different colors."
     Randy shrugs his blazer off, rolls up his sleeves; Avi does not seem to
notice the  heat. "So that's  Fort Santiago,"  Avi says, and  starts walking
towards it.
     "You've heard  of  it?" Randy asks,  following him, and heaving a sigh.
The  air is  so  hot  that  when it comes  out of your lungs it has actually
cooled down by several degrees.
     "It's mentioned  in  the  video,"  Avi  says, holding  up  a  videotape
cassette and wiggling it.
     "Oh, yeah."
     Soon they  are standing before the fort's entrance, which is flanked by
carvings  of  a pair of guards cut into the  foamy  volcanic  tuff:  halberd
brandishing Spaniards  in  blousy pants and conquistador  helmets. They have
been  standing here for  close to half a millennium, and a hundred  thousand
tropical thundershowers  have streamed down their  bodies and  polished them
smooth.
     Avi is working on a much shorter time horizon he has  eyes only for the
bullet  craters that have disfigured these soldiers far worse  than time and
water. He puts his hands  in them, like doubting Thomas. Then he steps  back
and  begins  to mutter  in  Hebrew.  Two ponytailed German  tourists  stroll
through the gate in rustic sandals.
     "We have five minutes," Randy says.
     "Okay, let's come back here later."


     ***


     Charlene  wasn't  totally  wrong. Blood seeps  out  of tiny,  invisible
painless  cuts  on Randy's face and neck for ten or fifteen minutes after he
has shaved. Moments ago, that blood was accelerating through his ventricles,
or seeping through  the parts of his brain that make him a conscious entity.
Now the same  stuff is exposed to the air; he can reach up and  wipe it off.
The boundary between Randy and his environment has been annihilated.
     He gets out a big tube  of heavy  waterproof  sunblock and  greases his
face, neck, arms, and the small patch  of scalp on the top of his head where
the hair is getting thin. Then he pulls on  khakis, boat shoes, and a  loose
cotton shirt, and a  beltpack containing his GPS  receiver and  a couple  of
other essentials like a  wad  of toilet  paper and a  disposable camera.  He
drops his key  off at the front desk, and  the employees all do double takes
and grin.  The  bellhops  seem  particularly delighted  by his makeover.  Or
perhaps  it is  just that he is  wearing leather shoes for once:  topsiders,
which he's always thought  of as  the mark of effete preppies, but which are
actually a reasonable  thing for him to wear today. Bellhops  make ready  to
haul the  front door open, but instead,  Randy cuts across the lobby towards
the back of the hotel, skirts the swimming pool, and walks through a line of
palm trees to a stone  railing along the top of a seawall.  Below him is the
hotel's dock, which sticks out into a small cove that opens onto Manila Bay.
     His ride isn't here yet,  so he stands at the railing for a minute. One
side  of the  cove  is accessible  from  Rizal Park.  A few  gnarly Filipino
squatter  types are lazing  on the benches,  staring back at him. Down below
the breakwater, a middle aged man, wearing only boxer shorts, stands in knee
deep water  with a  pointed  stick, staring with  feline  intensity into the
lapping  water.  A black helicopter  makes  slow, banking  circles against a
sugar white sky. It is a Vietnam vintage Huey, a wappity wap kind of chopper
that also makes a fierce reptilian hissing noise as it slithers overhead.
     A boat  materializes from  the  steam  rising  off  the bay,  cuts  its
engines, and coasts into the cove, shoving a bow wave in front of it, like a
wrinkle in  a  heavy rug. A tall, slender woman is poised on the prow like a
living figurehead, holding a coil of heavy rope.


     ***


     The big satellite dishes on the roof of the PTA's  building are pointed
almost  straight  up,  like birdbaths, because Manila  is  so  close to  the
equator. On its stone walls,  spackle is coming  loose  from  the bullet and
shrapnel craters into  which it  was  troweled after  the  war.  Window  air
conditioners  centered in  the  building's Roman arches drip  water onto the
limestone  balusters  below, gradually  melting them away.  The limestone is
blackened with some kind of organic slime, and pitted by the root systems of
little  plants  that  have  taken  root in  them  probably  grown from seeds
conveyed in the shit of the birds that congregate  there to bathe and drink,
the squatters of the aerial realm.
     In  a  paneled conference  room, a  dozen  people are waiting,  equally
divided between table sitting big wheels and wall crawling minions. As Randy
and Avi enter a  great flurry of  hand  shaking  and card presenting ensues,
though most of the introductions zoom through Randy's short term memory like
a supersonic fighter blowing past shoddy Third World air defense systems. He
is left only with a  stack of business cards. He deals them out on his patch
of table like a senescent codger  playing Klondike on his meal tray. Avi, of
course, knows all of these  people already seems to be on a first name basis
with most of  them,  knows  their children's  names and ages, their hobbies,
their blood types, chronic medical conditions, what books  they are reading,
whose parties they have been going  to.  All of them are evidently delighted
by this, and all of them, thank god, completely ignore Randy.
     Of the half dozen important people  in the room, three are middle  aged
Filipino men. One of these is a high ranking official in the PTA. The second
is the president of an  upstart telecommunications  company  called FiliTel,
which is  trying  to compete  against the traditional monopoly. The third is
the vice  president  of a company called 24 Jam  that runs about half of the
convenience stores in the  Philippines, as  well as quite a few in Malaysia.
Randy  has trouble telling these men  apart, but  by watching  them converse
with Avi, and by  using inductive  logic, he  is soon able to match business
card with face.
     The other three  are easy: two Americans and one Nipponese, and  one of
the  Americans is a woman. She is wearing  lavender pumps  color coordinated
with a neat little skirt suit, and matching nails. She looks as if she might
have stepped straight off the set of  an infomercial for fake fingernails or
home permanents. Her card identifies her as Mary Ann Carson, and claims that
she  is a  V.P. with  AVCLA,  Asia Venture Capital Los Angeles, which  Randy
knows dimly as a Los  Angeles based firm that invests in  Rapidly Developing
Asian  Economies.  The American  man is blond and has  a  hard  jawed  quasi
military look about  him.  He  seems  alert, disciplined,  impassive,  which
Charlene's  crowd would interpret as  hostility born of  repression  born of
profound  underlying mental disorder. He represents the Subic Bay Free Port.
The  Nipponese man is  the  executive  vice  president of a subsidiary of  a
ridiculously  colossal consumer electronics company.  He  is about six  feet
tall. He has  a small body and a large head shaped like an  upside down Bosc
pear,  thick  hair  edged with  gray,  and  wire  rimmed glasses. He  smiles
frequently, and projects the serene confidence of a man  who has memorized a
two thousand page encyclopedia of business etiquette.
     Avi wastes  little time in starting the  videotape, which at the moment
represents about seventy five percent of Epiphyte Corp.'s assets. Avi had it
produced  by a hot multimedia startup in San Francisco, and the contract  to
produce it  accounted for one hundred percent  of the startup's revenue this
year. "Pies crumble when you slice them too thin," Avi likes to say.
     It starts with footage pilfered from a forgotten made for TV movie of a
Spanish galleon making headway through heavy seas.  Superimpose title: SOUTH
CHINA SEA A.D. 1699. The soundtrack  has been beefed  up  and Dolbyized from
its original monaural version. It is quite impressive.
     ("Half of the investors in AVCLA are into yachting," Avi explained.)
     Cut  to  a  shot (produced  by the multimedia  company,  and seamlessly
spliced in) of a mangy, exhausted lookout in a crow's nest, peering  through
a brass spyglass, hollering the Spanish equivalent of "Land ho!"
     Cut to the galleon's  captain, a  rugged,  bearded  character, emerging
from  his  cabin  to  stare  with  Keatsian  wild  surmise at  the  horizon.
"Corregidor!" he exclaims.
     Cut to a stone tower on the crown  of a green  tropical island, where a
lookout is sighting  the  (digitally inserted)  galleon on the  horizon. The
lookout cups his hands around  his mouth and bellows, in Spanish, "It is the
galleon! Light the signal fire!"
     ("The family of the guy who runs the PTA is really into local history,"
Avi said, "they run the Museum of the Philippines.")
     With a lusty cheer,  Spaniards (actually,  Mexican American actors)  in
conquistador helmets  plunge  firebrands  into a huge pile of dry wood which
evolves into a screaming pyramid of flame powerful enough to flash roast  an
ox.
     Cut  to  the battlements of Manila's Fort  Santiago (foreground: carved
styrofoam;   background:  digitally  generated  landscape),   where  another
conquistador spies a light flaring up on the horizon. "Mira! El galleon!" he
cries.
     Cut to a series of shots of Manila  townsfolk rushing to the seawall to
adore the signal fire, including an  Augustinian monk who  clasps his rosary
strewn  hands and bursts into clerical Latin on  the  spot ("the family that
runs  FiliTel endowed a chapel at  Manila Cathedral") as well as a clean cut
family of Chinese  merchants unloading bales of silk from  a junk  ("24 Jam,
the convenience store chain, is run by Chinese mestizos").
     A  voiceover begins,  deep  and authoritative, English with  a Filipino
accent  ("The  actor is  the brother of the godfather of the grandson of the
man  who runs  the PTA"). Subtitles appear  on the  bottom  of the screen in
Tagalog ("the PTA  people have a  heavy political  commitment to the  native
language").
     "In  the  heyday of the Spanish Empire, the most important event of the
year  was the arrival of the galleon from Acapulco, laden with  silver  from
the rich mines of America silver to buy the silks and spices of Asia, silver
that  made  the  Philippines  into  the  economic fountainhead of Asia.  The
approach of the galleon was heralded by a beacon of light from the island of
Corregidor, at the entrance of Manila Bay."
     Cut  (finally!)  from  the  beaming,  greed  lit faces  of  the  Manila
townsfolk  to a 3 D graphics rendering of Manila Bay, the Bata'an Peninsula,
and  the small islands off  the tip  of  Bata'an,  including Corregidor. The
point  of  view swoops and  zooms  in  on Corregidor where a  hokily,  badly
rendered fire blazes up. A beam of yellow light, like a phaser blast in Star
Trek, shoots across  the  bay.  Our point  of view follows  it. It  splashes
against the walls of Fort Santiago.
     The signal fire was an ancient and simple technology.  In  the language
of  modern science,  its  light  was a  form  of  electromagnetic radiation,
propagating  in a straight line across Manila Bay, and carrying a single bit
of information.  But,  in  an  age starved  for information, that single bit
meant everything to the people of Manila."
     Cue that funky  music. Cut to  shots of teeming modern Manila. Shopping
malls  and  luxury hotels in  Makati. Electronics factories, school children
sitting in  front of computer screens. Satellite  dishes. Ships unloading at
the  big  free port of Subic  Bay. Lots and lots of grinning  and  thumbs up
gestures.
     "The  Philippines  of  today  is an  emerging economic dynamo.  As  its
economy grows,  so  does its hunger  for information  not single  bits,  but
hundreds  of billions  of them.  But the technology  for  transmitting  that
information has not changed as much as you might imagine."
     Back  to  the  3 D rendering of  Manila  Bay. This  time, instead  of a
bonfire on Corregidor, there's a microwave horn up on  a tower on the isle's
summit, gunning electric blue sine waves at the sprawl of Metro Manila.
     "Electromagnetic radiation in this case, microwave beams propagating in
straight lines, over line of  sight routes, can transmit  vast quantities of
information quickly. Modern cryptographic technology  makes the  signal safe
from would be eavesdroppers."
     Cut  back  to the  galleon  and  lookout  footage.  "In  the old  days,
Corregidor's position at the entrance of  Manila  Bay made it a natural look
out a place where information about approaching ships could be gathered."
     Cut to a shot of a barge in a cove somewhere, feeding thick tarry cable
overboard,  divers  at  work  with  queues of round  orange  buoys.  "Today,
Corregidor's geographical situation makes it an ideal place to land deep sea
fiberoptic cables.  The  information coming down  these cables  from Taiwan,
Hong  Kong,  Malaysia,  Nippon,  and  the United  States  can from  there be
transmitted directly into the heart of Manila. At the speed of light! "
     More  3 D graphics.  This  time,  it's  a  detailed  rendering  of  the
cityscape  of Manila. Randy knows it by heart  because he  gathered the data
for the damn thing by walking around town with his GPS receiver. The beam of
bits from Corregidor comes straight in off the bay and scores  a bullseye on
the rooftop antenna of a nondescript four story office building between Fort
Santiago  and the  Manila  Cathedral.  It is  Epiphyte's building,  and  the
antenna is discreetly labeled with the name and logo of Epiphyte Corp. Other
antennas then retransmit information to the PTA building and to other nearby
sites:  skyscrapers in Makati, government offices in Quezon City, and an Air
Force base south of town.


     ***


     Hotel staff throw a carpeted gangway across the gap between seawall and
boat.  As Randy is walking across  it, the woman extends her hand to him. He
reaches out to shake it. "Randy Waterhouse," he says.
     She grabs  his hand and pulls him on board  not so much greeting him as
making sure he doesn't fall overboard. "Hi. Amy Shaftoe," she says. "Welcome
to Glory. "
     "Pardon me?"
     " Glory.  The name of  this  junk  is  Glory  ,"  she says.  She speaks
forthrightly and  with great clarity,  as  though communicating over a noisy
two  way  radio.  "Actually,  it's Glory IV,"  she continues.  Her accent is
largely Midwestern,  with  a trace  of  Southern twang, and  a little bit of
Filipino, too.  If you saw her on  the  streets of some Midwestern town  you
might not  notice the traces of Asian ancestry around her eyes. She has dark
brown  hair, sun streaked, just  long  enough to form a  secure ponytail, no
longer.
     "'Scuse me a sec," she says, pokes her head  into the  pilot house, and
speaks to  the  pilot in a mixture of Tagalog and  English. The  pilot nods,
looks around, and  begins to  manipulate the  controls. The hotel staff pull
the  gangway  back.  "Hey,"  Amy says  quietly,  and underhands  a  pack  of
Marlboros  across  the gap  to each one of them. They snatch them out of the
air, grin, and thank her. Glory IV begins to back away from the dock.
     Amy spends the  next few minutes walking around the deck, going through
some kind of mental checklist. Randy counts four men in addition to  Amy and
the pilot two Caucasians  and two Filipinos. All of them are fiddling around
with engines or diving gear in a way Randy recognizes, through many cultural
and technological barriers, as debugging. Amy  walks past Randy a  couple of
times, but avoids looking him in  the  eye. She's not a shy person. Her body
language is  eloquent  enough:  "I am  aware that men  are in  the  habit of
looking at whatever women  happen  to be nearby,  in  the hopes  of deriving
enjoyment  from their  physical beauty, their  hair, makeup, fragrance,  and
clothing. I  will ignore  this, politely  and patiently, until  you get over
it." Amy is a long limbed girl in paint stained jeans, a sleeveless t shirt,
and high tech sandals, and  she lopes easily  around the  boat. Finally  she
approaches him, meeting his eyes for just a second and then glancing away as
if bored.
     "Thanks for giving me the ride," Randy says.
     ''It's nothing,'' she says.
     "I  feel  embarrassed  that I  didn't  tip the  guys at the dock. Can I
reimburse you?"
     "You can  reimburse me with  information," she says without hesitation.
Amy reaches up with one hand to rub the back of her neck. Her elbow pokes up
in  the air. He notices  about a month's growth  of hair in her armpit, then
glimpses  the corner of a tattoo poking out from under her shirt. "You're in
the  information business, right?" She watches his face,  hoping  that he'll
take  the cue and laugh, or at least grin. But he's too preoccupied to catch
it.  She  glances  away, now with a knowing,  sardonic look on her face  you
don't understand me, Randy, which is absolutely typical, and  I'm fine  with
that. She reminds Randy of level headed  blue collar lesbians  he has known,
drywall hanging urban dykes with cats and cross country ski racks.
     She takes him into an air conditioned cabin with a lot of windows and a
coffee maker. It has fake wood veneer paneling like a suburban basement, and
framed  exhibits  on  the  walls   official   documents  like  licenses  and
registrations, and enlarged black and white photographs of people and boats.
It smells like coffee, soap, and oil. There is  a  boom  box held  down with
bungee cords, and a shoebox with a couple of dozen CDs in it, mostly  albums
by American woman singer  songwriters  of the offbeat, misunderstood, highly
intelligent but intensely emotional  school, getting rich  selling  music to
consumers who understand what it's like not to be understood (1).
Amy pours two mugs of coffee and sets them  down on the cabin's bolted  down
table, then fishes in the tight pockets of her jeans, pulls out a waterproof
nylon wallet, extracts two business cards, and shoots them across the table,
one  after the  other,  to  Randy. She  seems to enjoy doing  this a  small,
private  smile comes onto her lips and  then  vanishes the moment Randy sees
it. The  cards bear the logo of Semper Marine Services and the  name America
Shaftoe.
     "Your name's America?" Randy asks.
     Amy looks  out the window, bored, afraid he's going  to make a big deal
out of it. "Yeah," she says.
     "Where'd you grow up?"
     She seems to be fascinated by the view out the window: big cargo  ships
strewn  around  Manila Bay as far as  the eye can see,  ships  hailing  from
Athens, Shanghai,  Vladivostok,  Cape  Town,  Monrovia.  Randy  infers  that
looking at big rusty boats is more interesting than talking to Randy.
     "So, would you mind telling me what's going on?" she asks. She turns to
face him, lifts the mug  to her lips, and finally, looks him straight in the
eye.
     Randy's  a little  nonplussed.  The question  is  basically impertinent
coming  from  America  Shaftoe. Her  company,  Semper Marine Services, is  a
contractor at the very lowest level of Avi's virtual corporation only one of
a dozen boats and divers outfits that they could have hired so this is a bit
like being interrogated by one's janitor or taxi driver.
     But she's smart and unusual, and, precisely  because of all her efforts
not to be, she's  cute. As an interesting female, and a fellow American, she
is pulling rank, demanding to be accorded a higher status. Randy tries to be
careful.
     "Is there something bothering you?" he asks.
     She looks away. She's afraid she's given him the wrong impression. "Not
in particular," she says,  "I'm  just nosy. I like  to hear  stories. Divers
always sit around and tell each other stories."
     Randy sips his  coffee. America continues, "In this business, you never
know  where your  next job is going to come from.  Some people  have  really
weird  reasons  for wanting to get stuff done underwater,  which  I  like to
hear." She  concludes, "It's  fun!" which  is clearly all the motivation she
needs.
     Randy views all of the above as a fairly professional bullshitting job.
He decides to give Amy press release  material only.  "All the Filipinos are
in Manila. That's where the information needs to go. It is somewhat awkward,
getting information to Manila, because it  has mountains in  back of  it and
Manila Bay in front. The bay is a nightmare place to run submarine cables "
     She's nodding. Of  course  she  would know this already. Randy hits the
fast  forward. "Corregidor's a  pretty  good  place. From Corregidor you can
shoot a  line of sight  microwave transmission  across  the bay  to downtown
Manila."
     "So you are  extending  the North Luzon  coastal festoon from Subic Bay
down to Corregidor," she says.
     "Uh two things about what you  just said," Randy says, and pauses for a
moment  to get the answer queued up  in his output buffer. "One, you have to
be careful about your pronouns what do you mean  when you  say 'you'? I work
for Epiphyte Corporation,  which is designed from the ground up to work, not
on its own, but as an element in a virtual corporation, kind of like "
     "I know what an epiphyte is," she says. "What's two?"
     "Okay,  good," Randy  says, a little off  balance.  "Two  is  that  the
extension of the North Luzon Festoon is just the first  of what we hope will
be  several  linkups.  We want  to  lay a lot  of  cable,  eventually,  into
Corregidor."
     Some kind of machinery behind Amy's eyes  begins to hum. The message is
clear enough. There  will be work aplenty for Semper Marine,  if they handle
this first job well.
     "In  this case,  the entity that's  doing the  work is a joint  venture
including  us, FiliTel, 24  Jam, and  a big Nipponese  electronics  company,
among others."
     "What does 24 Jam have to do with it? They're convenience stores."
     "They're  the retail outlet  the  distribution  system  for  Epiphyte's
product."
     "And that is?"
     "Pinoy grams." Randy manages to  suppress the urge to tell her that the
name is trademarked.
     "Pinoy grams?"
     "Here's how it works.  You are an Overseas Contract Worker.  Before you
leave home for  Saudi or Singapore or Seattle or wherever, you buy or rent a
little  gizmo from us. It's about the size of a paperback book and encases a
thimble sized  video camera, a  tiny screen, and  a lot of memory chips. The
components come from all over the place they are shipped to the free port at
Subic  and assembled  in  a  Nipponese  plant there.  So they  cost next  to
nothing. Anyway, you take  this  gizmo overseas  with you. Whenever you feel
like communicating with the folks at home, you turn it on, aim the camera at
yourself and record  a  little  video greeting card.  It all goes  onto  the
memory chips. It's highly  compressed. Then you plug the gizmo into a  phone
line and let it work its magic."
     "What's the magic? It sends the video down the phone line?"
     "Right."
     "Haven't  people  being messing  around with video phones  for  a  long
time?''
     "The difference here is our software. We don't try to send the video in
real time  that's  too expensive. We store the data at central servers, then
take advantage of lulls,  when  traffic is  low through the undersea cables,
and shoot the data  down those cables when time can be had cheap. Eventually
the data winds  up  at  Epiphyte's facility in Intramuros. From there we can
use  wireless  technology to send the data to 24 Jam stores all  over  Metro
Manila.  The store just  needs a little pie plate dish  on  the roof,  and a
decoder  and  a  regular VCR down behind  the  counter.  The  Pinoy  gram is
recorded on a regular videotape. Then, when Mom comes in to buy  eggs or Dad
comes in to buy cigarettes, the storekeeper says, 'Hey, you got a Pinoy gram
today,' and  hands  them the videotape. They  can  take  it home and get the
latest  news from their  child overseas. When they're done, they  bring  the
videotape back to 24 Jam for reuse."
     About halfway  through this,  Amy understands the  basic concept, looks
out  the window again and begins  trying to work a fragment of breakfast out
of her  teeth  with  the tip  of her  tongue.  She  does it  with her  mouth
tastefully  closed, but  it  seems to  occupy her  thoughts  more  than  the
explanation of Pinoy grams.
     Randy is gripped by a crazy, unaccountable desire not to bore Amy. It's
not that he  is getting a crush on her,  because he  puts  the odds at fifty
fifty  that  she's a  lesbian, and he  knows  better. She is  so  frank,  so
guileless, that he feels he could confide anything in her, as an equal.
     This is why he hates business. He wants to tell everyone everything. He
wants to make friends with people.
     "So, let me guess," she says, "you are the guy doing the software."
     "Yeah," he admits, a little defensive, "but  the software  is the  only
interesting part  of  this whole project.  All  the rest  is  making license
plates.''
     That wakes her up a little. "Making license plates?"
     "It's an expression that my  business partner and I  use,"  Randy says.
"With  any  job,  there's  some creative work that  needs  to  be  done  new
technology to be developed  or whatever. Everything else ninety nine percent
of it  is making  deals, raising  capital, going to meetings, marketing  and
sales. We call that stuff making license plates."
     She nods, looking out the window. Randy is on the verge  of telling her
that Pinoy grams are nothing more  than a way to  create cash  flow, so that
they can move  on to part two of the business plan.  He  is sure  that  this
would  elevate his stature beyond that  of dull software boy. But Amy  puffs
sharply across the top  of her coffee, like blowing out a candle, and  says,
"Okay. Thanks. I guess that was worth the three packs of cigarettes."


     Chapter 11 NIGHTMARE


     Bobby Shaftoe has become a connoisseur of nightmares.
     Like a fighter pilot ejecting from a burning  plane,  he  has just been
catapulted out of an old nightmare, and into a  brand new,  even better one.
It is creepy and understated; no giant lizards here.
     It begins with  heat on his face. When you  take enough fuel to  push a
fifty thousand ton ship across the  Pacific Ocean at twenty five  knots, and
put  it all in  one tank and the Nips  fly over and torch  it all in  a  few
seconds,  while  you stand close enough to  see the triumphant grins  on the
pilots' faces, then you can feel the heat on your face in this way.
     Bobby Shaftoe  opens  his  eyes,  expecting that,  in  so doing, he  is
raising the curtain  on  a corker of a nightmare, probably the final moments
of  Torpedo Bombers at Two O'Clock!  (his all time favorite) or the surprise
beginning of Strafed by Yellow Men XVII.
     But the sound track to this nightmare does  not seem  to be running. It
is as quiet as an ambush. He is sitting up in a hospital bed surrounded by a
firing  squad of hot klieg  lights  that  make it difficult to  see anything
else.  Shaftoe blinks and  focuses on  an eddy of cigarette smoke hanging in
the air, like spilled fuel oil in a tropical cove. It sure smells good.
     A young  man is sitting  near his bed. All that Shaftoe can see of this
man is an asymmetrical halo where the lights glance from the petroleum glaze
on his  pompadour.  And the  red  coal of his cigarette. As  he  looks  more
carefully he can make out the silhouette of a military uniform. Not a Marine
uniform.  Lieutenant's  bars gleam  on  his shoulders, light shining through
double doors.
     "Would  you like another  cigarette?" the lieutenant says. His voice is
hoarse but weirdly gentle.
     Shaftoe looks down at his own hand and sees the terminal half inch of a
Lucky Strike wedged between his fingers.
     'Ask  me a  tough one," he manages to say.  His  own voice is deep  and
skirted, like a gramophone winding down.
     The butt is swapped for a new one. Shaftoe raises it to his lips. There
are bandages on that arm, and underneath them,  he  can feel grievous wounds
trying to inflict pain. But something is blocking the signals.
     Ah, the morphine. It can't  be  too bad of a nightmare if it comes with
morphine, can it?
     "You ready?" the voice says. God damn it, that voice is familiar.
     "Sir, ask me a tough one, sir!" Shaftoe says.
     "You already said that."
     "Sir, if you ask a  Marine  if he  wants another cigarette,  or if he's
ready, the answer is always the same, sir!"
     "That's the spirit," the voice says. "Roll film."
     A clicking noise starts up in the outer darkness beyond the klieg light
firmament. "Rolling," says a voice.
     Something  big descends towards Shaftoe.  He flattens himself  into the
bed, because it looks  exactly like the sinister eggs laid in  midair by Nip
dive bombers. But then it stops and just hovers there.
     "Sound," says another voice.
     Shaftoe looks harder and sees that it is not  a bomb but a large bullet
shaped microphone on the end of a boom.
     The lieutenant  with  the pompadour  leans  forward  now, instinctively
seeking the light, like a traveler on a cold winter's night.
     It is that guy from the movies. What's his name. Oh, yeah!
     Ronald Reagan  has a stack of three  by five cards in his lap. He skids
up  a  new one: "What advice do you,  as the youngest American  fighting man
ever  to win  both  the Navy Cross  and the Silver Star, have for  any young
Marines on their way to Guadalcanal?"
     Shaftoe  doesn't  have to think very long.  The  memories are  still as
fresh as last night's eleventh nightmare: ten plucky Nips in Suicide Charge!

     "Just kill the one with the sword first."
     "Ah," Reagan says, raising his waxed and penciled eyebrows, and cocking
his  pompadour in  Shaftoe's  direction.  "Smarrrt  –  you target them
because they're the officers, right?"
     "No,  fuckhead!" Shaftoe  yells.  "You  kill 'em  because  they've  got
fucking swords! You ever had anyone running at you waving a fucking sword ?"
     Reagan backs down. He's scared  now, sweating off some  of his  makeup,
even though a cool breeze is coming in off the bay and through the window.
     Reagan  wants to turn tail and head back down  to  Hollywood and nail a
starlet fast. But he's stuck here  in Oakland, interviewing the war hero. He
flips through his  stack of cards, rejects  about twenty in a row. Shaftoe's
in no hurry,  he's  going  to be  flat on  his back in this hospital bed for
approximately the rest  of  his life. He incinerates half  of that cigarette
with one long breath, holds it, blows out a smoke ring.
     When  they fought at  night, the big guns on the warships made rings of
incandescent gas. Not fat doughnuts but long skinny ones that twisted around
like lariats.  Shaftoe's  body  is  saturated  with  morphine.  His  eyelids
avalanche down over  his eyes,  blessing those  orbs  that  are  burning and
swollen from the film lights  and the  smoke  of the  cigarettes. He and his
platoon are racing an  incoming tide,  trying to get around a headland. They
are  Marine Raiders and  they have  been  chasing a particular unit of  Nips
across Guadalcanal for two weeks, whittling them down. As long as they're in
the neighborhood, they've been ordered to make their way to a certain  point
on the headland  from  which they ought to  be  able to  lob  mortar  rounds
against  the  incoming  Tokyo  Express.  It  is  a  somewhat harebrained and
reckless  tactic, but they don't call this Operation Shoestring for nothing;
it is all wacky improvisation  from  the get  go. They are  behind  schedule
because this  paltry  handful  of  Nips has  been really tenacious,  setting
ambushes behind  every fallen log, taking potshots  at them every time  they
come around one of these headlands. . .
     Something clammy  hits  him  on the forehead: it is  the makeup  artist
taking a swipe  at him.  Shaftoe finds  himself back in the nightmare within
which the lizard nightmare was nested.
     "Did I tell you about the lizard?" Shaftoe says.
     "Several  times," his  interrogator says.  "This'll  just  take another
minute." Ronald Reagan squeezes a fresh three by five card between thumb and
forefinger, fastening onto something  a little less emotional: "What did you
and your buddies do in the evenings, when the day's fighting was done?"
     "Pile  up  dead  Nips with a bulldozer," Shaftoe says, "and set fire to
'em. Then go  down  to the beach with a jar of hooch and watch our ships get
torpedoed."
     Reagan grimaces. "Cut!" he says, quietly  but  commanding. The clicking
noise of the film camera stops.
     "How'd I do?" Bobby Shaftoe says as they are squeegeeing the Maybelline
off his face, and  the men  are packing up their equipment. The klieg lights
have been turned off, clear northern California light streams in through the
windows. The whole scene  looks almost real, as if it weren't a nightmare at
all.
     "You  did  great," Lieutenant Reagan  says, without  looking him in the
eye. "A  real morale  booster." He  lights a cigarette. "You  can go back to
sleep now."
     "Haw!" Shaftoe says. "I been asleep the whole time. Haven't I?"


     ***


     He feels a lot better once he gets out of the hospital. They give him a
couple  of weeks of leave, and he goes  straight to the  Oakland station and
hops  the  next train for  Chicago. Fellow passengers recognize him from his
newspaper pictures, buy him drinks, pose with him  for snap shots. He stares
out the  windows for  hours, watching America go by, and sees that all of it
is beautiful and clean. There might be wildness, there might be deep forest,
there might even be  grizzly  bears and  mountain lions, but it  is  cleanly
sorted out, and the  rules (don't mess with bear cubs, hang your food from a
tree limb at  night) are well known, and published in the Boy Scout  Manual.
In  those Pacific islands there is too much that is  alive, and all of it is
in a continual process of eating and being eaten by something else, and once
you set foot in the place, you're buying into the deal. Just sitting in that
train for a couple of days, his feet in  clean white cotton socks, not being
eaten  alive by anything, goes a long way towards clearing his head up. Only
once, or possibly  two or three times, does he really feel the  need to lock
himself in the can and squirt morphine into his arm.
     But  when he closes his eyes, he finds himself on Guadalcanal, sloshing
around  that last  headland, racing  the incoming tide.  The  big  waves are
rolling in now, picking up the men and slamming them into rocks.
     Finally they turn the corner and see the cove: just a tiny notch in the
coast  of  Guadalcanal. A  hundred  yards of tidal  mudflats  backed up by a
cliff. They will have to get across those mudflats and  establish a foothold
on the lower part  of the cliff if they aren't going to be washed out to sea
by the tide.
     The Shaftoes are Tennessee mountain people miners, among other  things.
About  the  time Nimrod Shaftoe went  to the Philippines,  a  couple  of his
brothers moved up to western Wisconsin  to work in  lead mines.  One of them
Bobby's grandpa became a foreman. Sometimes he would go to Oconomowoc to pay
a  visit  to  the  owner of the mine, who had  a summer house on  one of the
lakes. They  would go out in a boat  and fish for pike.  Frequently the mine
owner's neighbors owners  of  banks and breweries would  come along. That is
how  the  Shaftoes moved  to  Oconomowoc, and got out of mining, and  became
fishing and hunting guides. The family has been scrupulous about  holding on
to  the ancestral twang, and  to  certain other  traditions such as military
service. One of his  sisters  and two of his brothers are still living there
with Mom and Dad,  and his  two older brothers are in the  Army. Bobby's not
the first to have won a Silver  Star, though he is the first to have won the
Navy Cross.
     Bobby goes and talks to  Oconomowoc's Boy  Scout  troop.  He gets to be
grand marshal of the town parade. Other than that, he hardly budges from the
house for  two weeks. Sometimes he goes out  into the yard  and  plays catch
with his kid brothers. He helps Dad fix up a rotten dock. Guys and gals from
his high school keep coming round to visit,  and Bobby soon learns the trick
that his  father  and his uncles and granduncles all knew, which is that you
never talk about the specifics of what happened over there. No  one wants to
hear about how you dug half of your buddy's molars  out of your leg with the
point of a bayonet. All of these kids seem like idiots  and lightweights  to
him now. The  only person he can stand to be around is his great grandfather
Shaftoe, ninety  four  years of age  and sharp as a  tack, who was  there at
Petersburg when Burnside  blew  a huge  hole  in  the Confederate lines with
buried  explosives and sent his men  rushing into the  crater where they got
slaughtered. He never talks about it, of course, just as Bobby Shaftoe never
talks about the lizard.
     Soon enough his time is up,  and then he gets a  grand  sendoff  at the
Milwaukee  train station, hugs Mom,  hugs Sis, shakes hands with Dad and the
brothers, hugs Mom again, and he's off.
     Bobby Shaftoe knows  nothing of his future. All he knows is that he has
been  promoted  to  sergeant,  detached  from  his  former  unit  (no  great
adjustment,  since  he is  the  only  surviving  member  of his platoon) and
reassigned to some unheard of branch of the Corps in Washington, D.C.
     D.C.'s  a  busy   place,  but  last  time  Bobby  Shaftoe  checked  the
newspapers, there wasn't any combat going on there, and so it's obvious he's
not  going  to get a combat job. He's done his bit  anyway, killed many more
than his share  of Nips, won his  medals,  suffered from his  wounds. As  he
lacks administrative training, he expects that his new assignment will be to
travel around  the country  being a war hero, raising morale  and  suckering
young men into joining the Corps.
     He  reports, as ordered, to  Marine Barracks, Washington, D.C. It's the
Corps's oldest post, a city block halfway  between the Capitol and the  Navy
Yard, a green quadrangle  where the  Marine Band struts and the  drill  team
drills.  He half expects  to  see strategic  reserves of spit  and of polish
stored in giant tanks nearby.
     Two  Marines  are in  the  office: a  major,  who  is  his new, nominal
commanding officer, and a colonel, who looks and acts like he was born here.
It is shocking beyond description that two such personages would be there to
greet a mere sergeant. Must be the Navy Cross that  got their attention. But
these Marines have Navy Crosses of their own two or three apiece.
     The major introduces the colonel in a way that doesn't really explain a
damn  thing  to Shaftoe.  The colonel  says  next to  nothing; he's there to
observe. The major spends a while fingering some typewritten documents.
     "Says right here you are gung ho."
     "Sir, yes sir!"
     "What the hell does that mean?"
     "Sir, it is a Chinese word! There's a Communist there, name of Mao, and
he's got an army. We tangled  with 'em on more'n one occasion, sir. Gung  ho
is  their battle cry,  it  means  'all together' or something like  that, so
after we got done kicking the crap out of them, sir, we  stole it from them,
sir!"
     "Are you  saying you have gone Asiatic like  those other China Marines,
Shaftoe?"
     "Sir! On the contrary, sir, as I think my record demonstrates, sir!"
     "You really  think  that?"  the major  says incredulously. "We have  an
interesting  report here on a film interview that you did with  some soldier
(1) named Lieutenant Reagan."
     "Sir! This Marine apologizes for  his disgraceful behavior during  that
interview, sir! This Marine let down himself and his fellow Marines, sir!"
     "Aren't  you  going  to give me an  excuse?  You  were  wounded.  Shell
shocked. Drugged. Suffering from malaria."
     "Sir! There is no excuse, sir!"
     The major and the colonel nod approvingly at each other.
     This "sir, yes sir" business, which would probably sound like horseshit
to  any civilian  in his  right mind,  makes sense  to Shaftoe  and  to  the
officers in  a deep  and  important way. Like a lot  of  others, Shaftoe had
trouble with  military  etiquette at first. He soaked up quite  a bit  of it
growing up in a military family, but living the life was a different matter.
Having now experienced all the  phases of military existence except for  the
terminal ones  (violent death, court  martial, retirement), he  has come  to
understand the culture for what it is: a system of etiquette within which it
becomes possible for groups of men to live together for years, travel to the
ends of the earth, and do all kinds of incredibly weird shit without killing
each other  or completely losing  their  minds  in the process.  The extreme
formality with  which  he  addresses  these  officers carries  an  important
subtext: your  problem, sir,  is  deciding what  you want  me to do,  and my
problem, sir,  is doing  it. My gung ho posture says that once  you give the
order  I'm not going to bother you with any of the details and  your half of
the bargain  is you had better stay on  your side of the line, sir, and  not
bother  me with any of the chickenshit politics that  you have to  deal with
for a living. The implied responsibility placed upon the officer's shoulders
by  the  subordinate's  unhesitating  willingness  to  follow  orders  is  a
withering burden to any officer with half a brain, and Shaftoe has more than
once  seen seasoned  noncoms  reduce green  lieutenants  to quivering  blobs
simply by standing before them and agreeing, cheerfully, to  carry out their
orders.
     "This Lieutenant  Reagan complained that you  kept trying to tell him a
story about a lizard," the major says.
     "Sir! Yes,  sir!  A  giant  lizard, sir! An  interesting  story,  sir!"
Shaftoe says.
     "I don't care," the major says. "The question is, was it an appropriate
story to tell in that circumstance?"
     "Sir! We were making our way around the coast of  the island, trying to
get between  these Nips  and a Tokyo  Express landing site, sir!..." Shaftoe
begins.
     "Shut up!"
     "Sir! Yes sir!"
     There is a sweaty  silence  that is finally broken by  the colonel. "We
had the shrinks go over your statement, Sergeant Shaftoe."
     ''Sir! Yes, sir?''
     "They are of the opinion that the whole giant lizard thing is a classic
case of projection."
     "Sir! Could you please tell me what the hell that is, sir!"
     The  colonel flushes,  turns his back, peers through  blinds  at sparse
traffic out on  Eye Street. "Well, what they are saying is that there really
was no giant lizard. That you killed that Jap (2) in hand to hand
combat. And that your memory of the giant lizard is basically your id coming
out."
     ''Id, sir!''
     "That  there is this  id thing inside  your brain and that it took over
and got you  fired up to  kill that Jap bare handed.  Then  your imagination
dreamed  up all this  crap about the giant  lizard afterwards, as  a way  of
explaining it."
     "Sir! So you are saying that the lizard was just a metaphor, sir!"
     "Yes."
     "Sir! Then I would respectfully like to know how that Nip got chewed in
half, sir!"
     The colonel  screws up his  face dismissively. "Well,  by the  time you
were  rescued by that coastwatcher, Sergeant, you had been  in that cove for
three days along  with all of those  dead bodies. And in that  tropical heat
with all those bugs and scavengers, there was no way to tell from looking at
that Jap whether he had been chewed up by a giant  lizard or  run through  a
brush chipper, if you know what I mean."
     "Sir! Yes I do, sir!"
     The major  goes back to  the report.  "This Reagan fellow says that you
also repeatedly made disparaging comments about General MacArthur."
     "Sir,  yes sir! He  is a son of a bitch who hates the Corps, sir! He is
trying to get us all killed, sir!"
     The major  and the colonel look at each other.  It is clear  that  they
have, wordlessly, just arrived at some decision.
     "Since  you  insist on reenlisting, the typical thing would be  to have
you go around the country  showing off your  medals and recruiting young men
into the Corps. But this lizard story kind of rules that out."
     "Sir! I do not understand, sir!"
     "The Recruitment Office has reviewed your file. They have seen Reagan's
report. They are nervous that you are going to be in West Bumfuck, Arkansas,
riding in the Memorial Day parade in your shiny dress uniform,  and suddenly
you are  going to  start spouting  all  kinds  of nonsense about lizards and
scare everyone shitless and put a kink in the war effort."
     "Sir! I respectfully "
     "Permission to speak  denied," the  major  says. "I won't even get into
your obsession with General MacArthur."
     "Sir! The general is a murdering "
     "Shut up!"
     "Sir! Yes sir!"
     "We have another job for you, Marine."
     "Sir! Yes sir!"
     "You're going to be part of something very special."
     "Sir! The  Marine Raiders  are already  a very  special part of a  very
special Corps, sir!"
     "That's not what I mean. I mean that this assignment is . . . unusual."
The major looks over at the colonel. He is not sure how to proceed.
     The colonel puts his hand in his pocket, jingles coins, then reaches up
and checks his shave.
     "It is not  exactly a  Marine  Corps assignment," he finally says. "You
will be  part  of a  special international  detachment.  An  American Marine
Raider  platoon  and a British  Special  Air  Services  squadron,  operating
together under one command. A  bunch of  tough hombres who've shown they can
handle  any  assignment, under any conditions. Is that a fair description of
you, Marine?"
     ''Sir! Yes, sir!''
     "It is a very unusual setup," the colonel muses, "not the kind of thing
that  military  men  would  ever  dream  up.  Do you  know what I'm  saying,
Shaftoe?"
     "Sir, no  sir!  But I  do detect a strong odor of politics in  the room
now, sir!"
     The  colonel  gets  a  little twinkle  in his  eye, and glances out the
window towards  the Capitol dome. "These politicians can be real picky about
how they get things done. Everything has to  be  just so.  They  don't  like
excuses. Do you follow me, Shaftoe?"
     ''Sir! Yes, sir!''
     "The Corps had to fight to get this. They were going to make it an Army
thing.  We pulled a  few  strings with  some former  Naval persons  in  high
places. Now the assignment is ours. Some would say, it is ours to screw up.
     "Sir! The assignment will not be screwed up, sir!"
     "The reason that son of a bitch MacArthur is killing Marines like flies
down in the South Pacific is because  sometimes we  don't play the political
game that well. If  you and your  new  unit do not perform brilliantly, that
situation will only worsen."
     ''Sir! You can rely on this Marine, sir!''
     "Your commanding officer will be Lieutenant Ethridge. An Annapolis man.
Not much combat experience,  but knows how to move  in the right circles. He
can run interference for you at the political  level. The responsibility for
getting things done on the ground will be entirely yours, Sergeant Shaftoe."
     ''Sir! Yes , sir!''
     "You'll be working closely with British  Special Air Service. Very good
men. But I want you and your men to outshine them."
     "Sir! You can count on it, sir!"
     "Well,  get  ready to ship out, then," the major says. "You're on  your
way to North Africa, Sergeant Shaftoe."


     Chapter 12 LONDINIUM


     The massive  British  coinage  clanks in his pocket like  pewter dinner
plates.  Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse  walks  down  a  street  wearing  the
uniform of a commander  in the United States Navy. This must not be taken to
imply  that  he is  actually a commander, or indeed that he  is even  in the
Navy, though he  is. The United States part is, however, a safe bet, because
every time he arrives  at a curb, he either comes close to being run over by
a shooting brake or he falters in his stride; diverts  his train of  thought
onto a siding,  much to  the  disturbance  of  its passengers and crew;  and
throws some large part of his  mental calculation circuitry into the job  of
trying to reflect his surroundings through a large mirror. They drive on the
left side of the street here.
     He knew about that before he came.  He had seen  pictures. And Alan had
complained of  it in Princeton, always nearly being  run over  as,  lost  in
thought, he stepped off curbs looking the wrong way.
     The  curbs  are sharp and perpendicular, not like the American smoothly
molded  sigmoid cross section curves. The transition  between  the side walk
and  the  street  is  a crisp vertical.  If  you  put a  green  lightbulb on
Waterhouse's  head and watched him  from the  side  during the blackout, his
trajectory  would look just like a  square wave traced out on  the face of a
single beam oscilloscope: up, down, up, down. If he were doing this at home,
the curbs would be evenly spaced, about twelve to the mile, because his home
town is neatly laid out on a grid.
     
     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:



     Q G U W B I Y T F K V N D O H E P X L Z R C A S J M
     but  the  state  ([theta]  =  180,  C  = 15) would correspond  to  this
(different) one:



     B O R I X V G Y P F J M T C Q N H A Z U K L D S E W
     No two letters would be enciphered using the same substitution alphabet
until, that is, the bicycle worked its  way back around to the initial state
([theta] = 0, C = 0) and began to repeat the cycle. This means  that it is a
periodic polyalphabetic system. Now, if this machine had a  short period, it
would  repeat  itself  frequently,  and  would therefore  be useful,  as  an
encryption system, only against  kids in  treehouses. The longer  its period
(the more relative primeness is built into it) the less frequently it cycles
back to the same substitution alphabet, and the more secure it is.
     The  three  wheel Enigma is just that  type  of  system (i.e., periodic
polyalphabetic).  Its wheels,  like the  drive  train of  Turing's  bicycle,
embody cycles  within  cycles.  Its period is  17,576, which means that  the
substitution alphabet that enciphers the first letter  of a message will not
be  used  again  until  the 17,577th  letter is reached.  But with Shark the
Germans  have added a  fourth wheel, bumping the  period up to  456,976. The
wheels  are  set in a  different, randomly chosen starting position  at  the
beginning of each message.  Since the Germans' messages are never as long as
450,000 characters, the Enigma never reuses  the same substitution  alphabet
in  the course of a given message, which is why  the Germans think  it's  so
good.
     A flight of transport  planes goes over them,  probably  headed for the
aerodrome at Bedford. The planes make  a weirdly musical diatonic  hum, like
bagpipes  playing two drones  at once.  This reminds Lawrence of yet another
phenomenon related to the bicycle wheel and the Enigma machine. "Do you know
why airplanes sound the way they do?" he says.
     "No, come to think of it." Turing pulls his gas mask off again. His jaw
has  gone a bit slack and his eyes  are  darting from side to side. Lawrence
has caught him out.
     "I  noticed it at Pearl. Airplane engines are  rotary," Lawrence  says.
"Consequently they must have an odd number of cylinders."
     "How does that follow?"
     "If the number were  even, the cylinders  would  be directly opposed, a
hundred and eighty degrees apart, and it wouldn't work out mechanically."
     "Why not?"
     "I forgot. It just wouldn't work out."
     Alan raises his eyebrows, clearly not convinced.
     "Something to do with cranks,"  Waterhouse  ventures, feeling a  little
defensive.
     "I don't know that I agree," Alan says.
     "Just stipulate it think of it  as  a  boundary  condition," Waterhouse
says.  But Alan  is  already hard at work, he suspects, mentally designing a
rotary aircraft engine with an even number of cylinders.
     "Anyway,  if  you  look  at  them, they  all  have  an  odd  number  of
cylinders," Lawrence continues.  "So the  exhaust  noise  combines  with the
propeller noise to produce that two tone sound."
     Alan climbs back onto his bicycle and they ride into the woods for some
distance without any more talking. Actually, they have not been  talking  so
much as mentioning certain  ideas and then leaving the other to work through
the  implications.  This  is  a  highly efficient  way  to  communicate;  it
eliminates much of  the redundancy that Alan  was complaining  about  in the
case of FDR and Churchill.
     Waterhouse is thinking about cycles within cycles. He's already made up
his mind that human  society  is one of these  cycles within  cycles  things
(1) and now he's trying to figure out whether it is like Turing's
bicycle (works fine  for a while, then  suddenly the  chain falls off, hence
the   occasional  world  war)  or  like   an  Enigma  machine  (grinds  away
incomprehensibly for a long time,  then suddenly the  wheels line  up like a
slot machine and everything is  made plain in some sort of  global  epiphany
or, if you  prefer, apocalypse) or just like a rotary airplane engine  (runs
and runs and runs; nothing special happens; it just makes a lot of noise).
     "It's somewhere around . . . here!" Alan says, and violently brakes  to
a stop, just to chaff Lawrence, who has to turn his bicycle around, a chancy
trick on such a narrow lane, and loop back.
     They lean their  bicycles against trees and remove pieces of  equipment
from the baskets:  dry  cells, electronic  breadboards,  poles, a  trenching
tool, loops of wire. Alan  looks about somewhat uncertainly and then strikes
off into the woods.
     "I'm  off to America soon, to work on this voice  encryption problem at
Bell Labs," Alan says.
     Lawrence laughs ruefully. "We're  ships passing  in the night, you  and
I."
     "We are passengers  on ships passing in the night," Alan  corrects him.
"It is no accident.  They need you precisely because I am leaving. I've been
doing all of the 2701 work to this point."
     "It's Detachment 2702 now," Lawrence says.
     "Oh," Alan says, crestfallen. "You noticed."
     "It was reckless of you, Alan."
     "On the contrary!" Alan says. "What will Rudy think if he notices that,
of  all the  units  and divisions  and  detachments  in the Allied  order of
battle, there is not a single one  whose number happens to be the product of
two primes?"
     "Well, that depends upon how common such numbers are compared to all of
the other  numbers, and  on how many other  numbers in  the range are  going
unused .  .  ." Lawrence says, and begins to work out  the first half of the
problem. "Riemann Zeta function again. That thing pops up everywhere."
     "That's  the spirit!" Alan says. "Simply  take  a  rational and  common
sense approach. They are really quite pathetic."
     "Who?"
     "Here," Alan says, slowing to a  stop and looking around at the  trees,
which to Lawrence look like all the  other  trees. "This looks familiar." He
sits  down on  the bole of a windfall and begins  to  unpack electrical gear
from his  bag.  Lawrence squats nearby and does the same. Lawrence  does not
know how the device works it is Alan's invention and so he  acts in the role
of  surgical assistant, handing tools and supplies to the  doctor as he puts
the  device  together. The  doctor is talking  the  entire time,  and  so he
requests tools by staring at them fixedly and furrowing his brow.
     "They  are well,  who  do you suppose?  The  fools who  use  all of the
information that comes from Bletchley Park!"
     "Alan!"
     "Well, it is foolish! Like this Midway thing. That's a perfect example,
isn't it?"
     "Well, I was happy that we won the battle," Lawrence says guardedly.
     "Don't you think it's a bit odd, a bit striking, a bit noticeable, that
after all  of  Yamamoto's  brilliant feints  and deceptions and ruses,  this
Nimitz  fellow knew exactly  where to go looking for him? Out of  the entire
Pacific Ocean?"
     "All right," Lawrence says, "I was appalled. I wrote  a paper about it.
Probably the paper that got me into this mess with you."
     "Well, it's no better with us Brits," Alan says.
     "Really?"
     "You would be horrified at  what we've been up to in the Mediterranean.
It is a scandal. A crime.
     "What have we been up to?" Lawrence asks. "I say 'we' rather than 'you'
because we are allies now."
     "Yes,  yes," Alan says impatiently.  "So  they claim." He paused for  a
moment,  tracing  an  electrical  circuit   with  his   finger,  calculating
inductances in his  head. Finally, he  continues:  "Well, we've been sinking
convoys, that's  what. German  convoys. We've  been sinking them  right  and
left."
     "Rommel's?"
     "Yes, exactly.  The Germans put  fuel and tanks and ammunition on ships
in  Naples and send them south. We go out and  sink them. We sink nearly all
of  them,  because we  have broken the Italian C38m cipher  and we know when
they are leaving Naples. And lately we've  been sinking  just  the very ones
that are most crucial to Rommel's  efforts, because we  have also broken his
Chaffinch cipher and we know which ones he is complaining loudest about  not
having."
     Turing snaps  a toggle  switch  on his  invention and  a weird, looping
squeal comes from  a dusty black paper cone lashed onto the breadboard  with
twine. The cone is a speaker, apparently  scavenged from a radio. There is a
broomstick with  a  loop of stiff  wire dangling  from the end, and  a  wire
running from  that  loop  up the  stick to the  breadboard.  He  swings  the
broomstick around  until the  loop is dangling,  like  a  lasso, in front of
Lawrence's midsection. The speaker yelps.
     "Good. It's picking up your belt buckle," Alan says.
     He  sets the contraption down in the leaves, gropes in several pockets,
and  finally pulls  out a scrap of paper on which several lines of text have
been written in block letters. Lawrence would recognize it anywhere: it is a
decrypt worksheet. "What's that, Alan?"
     "I wrote  out complete instructions and enciphered  them, then hid them
under a bridge in a benzedrine container," Alan says. "Last week  I went and
recovered the container and decyphered the instructions." He waves the paper
in the air.
     "What encryption scheme did you use?"
     "One of my own devising. You are welcome to take a crack at it,  if you
like."
     "What made you decide it was time to dig this stuff up?"
     "It  was  nothing  more than  a  hedge  against  invasion," Alan  says.
"Clearly, we're not going to be invaded now, not with you chaps in the war."
     "How much did you bury?"
     "Two silver bars, Lawrence,  each with  a  value  of  some hundred  and
twenty five pounds. One of them should be very close to us." Alan stands up,
pulls a compass out of his pocket, turns to face magnetic north, and squares
his  shoulders. Then  he rotates a  few  degrees. "Can't  remember whether I
allowed for declination," he mumbles. "Right! In any case. One hundred paces
north." And  he strides off  into the  woods, followed  by Lawrence, who has
been given the job of carrying the metal detector.
     Just as Dr. Alan Turing can  ride a bicycle and carry on a conversation
while mentally  counting the revolutions  of the pedals, he  can count paces
and talk  at the same  time  too. Unless  he has lost count  entirely, which
seems just as possible.
     "If  what  you are saying is true," Lawrence  says, "the jig must be up
already. Rudy must have figured out that we've broken their codes."
     "An informal  system  has been in place, which might be thought of as a
precursor to Detachment  2701,  or 2702 or whatever we are calling it," Alan
says. "When we  want  to sink a  convoy,  we  send out an  observation plane
first. It is ostensibly an  observation plane. Of course, to observe is  not
its real duty we already know exactly where the convoy is. Its real  duty is
to be observed that  is,  to fly close enough to the convoy that it will  be
noticed by the lookouts on the ships. The ships will  then send out  a radio
message to the effect that they have  been  sighted by an Allied observation
plane. Then, when we come round and sink them, the Germans will not find  it
suspicious  at  least, not quite  so  monstrously suspicious  that  we  knew
exactly where to go.
     Alan  stops,  consults his  compass, turns ninety  degrees, and  begins
pacing westwards.
     "That  strikes me as being  a very ad hoc  arrangement," Lawrence says.
"What is the likelihood that Allied observation planes, sent out purportedly
at random, will just happen to notice every single Axis convoy?"
     "I've already calculated  that probability, and I'll bet you  one of my
silver  bars  that Rudy has done it too," Turing  says. "It is a very  small
probability."
     "So I  was  right," Lawrence says, "we  have to assume that  the jig is
up."
     "Perhaps not just  yet,"  Alan  says. "It  has  been touch and go. Last
week, we sank a convoy in the fog."
     "In the fog?"
     "It was foggy the  whole way.  The convoy could not possibly  have been
observed. The  imbeciles  sank it anyway. Kesselring became  suspicious,  as
would anyone. So  we ginned up a  fake  message in a cypher that we know the
Nazis  have   broken  addressed  to  a   fictitious  agent   in  Naples.  It
congratulated him on betraying that convoy  to us.  Ever  since, the Gestapo
have been running rampant on the Naples waterfront, looking for the fellow."
     "We dodged a bullet there, I'd say."
     "Indeed." Alan stops abruptly, takes the metal detector  from Lawrence,
and  turns  it  on. He begins to walk slowly across a clearing, sweeping the
wire  loop back  and  forth just  above the  ground.  It keeps  snagging  on
branches and getting  bent out of shape, necessitating frequent repairs, but
remains stubbornly silent the  whole time, except when Alan, concerned  that
it is no longer working, tests it on Lawrence's belt buckle.
     "The whole business  is delicate,"  Alan muses.  "Some of  our SLUs  in
North Africa "
     "SLUs?"
     "Special Liaison Units. The intelligence officers who receive the Ultra
information from us, pass it on to field officers, and then make sure  it is
destroyed. Some of them learned,  from Ultra, that there was to be  a German
air raid during lunch, so they took their helmets to the mess hall. When the
air raid came off as  scheduled, everyone wanted to  know why those SLUs had
known to bring their helmets."
     "The entire  business seems  hopeless,"  Lawrence  says.  "How can  the
Germans not realize?"
     "It seems that way to us because we know everything and our channels of
communication are  free from noise," Alan says. "The Germans have fewer, and
much noisier, channels. Unless we continue to  do stunningly  idiotic things
like sinking convoys  in  the fog, they  will  never  receive any clear  and
unmistakable indications that we have broken Enigma."
     "It's  funny you should mention Enigma," Lawrence  says, "since that is
an extremely noisy channel from which  we manage to extract vast  amounts of
useful information."
     "Precisely. Precisely why I am worried."
     "Well, I'll do my best to spoof Rudy," Waterhouse says.
     "You'll  do fine. I'm  worried about  the  men who are carrying out the
operations."
     "Colonel  Chattan  seems pretty dependable,"  Waterhouse  says,  though
there's probably  no point in  continuing to  reassure Alan. He's  just in a
fretting mood. Once every two or three years, Waterhouse does something that
is  socially  deft,  and  now's  the  time: he  changes  the  subject:  "And
meanwhile, you'll be working it out so that Churchill and Roosevelt can have
secret telephone conversations?"
     "In theory. I rather  doubt that it's practical. Bell Labs has a system
that works by breaking the  waveform  down  into several  bands..." and then
Alan  is off  on the subject of telephone companies. He  delivers a complete
dissertation on the subject  of information  theory as applied  to the human
voice,  and how that governs the way  telephone  systems  work. It is a good
thing  that  Turing  has such a  large subject on which to  expound, for the
woods are large, and it has become increasingly obvious to Lawrence that his
friend has no idea where the silver bars are buried.
     Unburdened by any silver, the two friends  ride home in darkness, which
comes surprisingly  early  this far north. They do  not  talk very much, for
Lawrence is still absorbing and digesting everything that Alan has disgorged
to him about Detachment 2702 and  the convoys and Bell Labs and voice signal
redundancy. Every  few  minutes, a  motorcycle whips  past  them, saddlebags
stuffed with encrypted message slips.


     Chapter 17 ALOFT


     Any way that livestock can travel, Bobby Shaftoe has too, boxcars, open
trucks, forced cross country marches. Military has now invented the airborne
equivalent of  these  in the  form  of the Plane of a Thousand Names: DC  3,
Skytrain,  C  47, Dakota Transport, Gooney Bird. He'll  survive. The exposed
aluminum ribs of the  fuselage are trying to beat him  to death, but as long
as he stays awake, he can fend them off.
     The enlisted men are jammed into the  other plane. Lieutenants Ethridge
and Root are in this one, along with  PFC  Gerald  Hott  and  Sergeant Bobby
Shaftoe.  Lieutenant  Ethridge got dibs  on  all of  the soft objects in the
plane  and arranged  them into  a nest,  up forward  near the  cockpit,  and
strapped himself  down. For a while he pretended to  do  paperwork. Then  he
tried looking  out the windows. Now he has  fallen asleep and is snoring  so
loudly that he is, no fooling, drowning out the engines.
     Enoch Root has  wedged himself into the back of the fuselage,  where it
gets  narrow,  and  is  perusing two books  at once.  It strikes Shaftoe  as
typical he supposes that the books say completely different  things and that
the  chaplain  is  deriving great  pleasure from  pitting  them against each
other, like those guys who have a chessboard on a turntable so that they can
play  against themselves. He  supposes that  when  you live in a  shack on a
mountain with a bunch  of natives who don't speak any of your  half dozen or
so languages, you have to learn to have arguments with yourself.
     There's  a  row  of small square windows on  each  side  of  the plane.
Shaftoe looks out to the right and sees mountains covered with snow and gets
scared  shitless for  a moment thinking maybe they've strayed into the Alps.
But off to the left, it  still looks like the Mediterranean,  and eventually
it gives way to  Devil's Tower  type outcroppings  rising  up out  of  stony
scrubland, and then after that it is  just  rocks and sand, or sand  without
the rocks. Sand  puckered  here  and there,  for  no  particular  reason, by
clutches  of dunes. Damn it, they are still in Africa! You ought to be  able
to see  lions and  giraffes  and  rhinos!  Shaftoe goes  forward  to lodge a
complaint with the pilot and copilot. Maybe he can get a card game together.
Maybe the view out the front of the plane is something to write home about.
     He  is,  on all  counts,  thrown  back  in  stinging  defeat.  He  sees
immediately that the project of finding a better view  is  doomed. There are
only three things in the whole universe: sand, sea, and sky. As a Marine, he
knows how boring the  sea is. The other two are little better.  There  is  a
line  of  clouds far  ahead of them a front  of some description. That's all
there is.
     He  gets  a  general  notion of  their flight  plan before the chart is
snatched away and stashed out of his view. They seem to be attempting to fly
across Tunisia,  which is kind of funny, because  last time Shaftoe checked,
Tunisia  was Nazi territory the anchor, in fact, of the Axis presence on the
African continent. Today's general flight  plan seems to be that they'll cut
across the straits between Bizerta and Sicily, then head east to Malta.
     All  of  Rommel's supplies and  reinforcements  come across  those very
straits  from  Italy, and land at Tunis or Bizerta.  From there,  Rommel can
strike out east towards Egypt or west towards Morocco.  In the several weeks
since  the  British Eighth Army  kicked the crap  out of  him  at El Alamein
(which is  way, way over  there in Egypt) he  has  been retreating westwards
back towards Tunis. In the few weeks since the Americans landed in Northwest
Africa, he's been fighting  on a second front  to his west.  And  Rommel has
been doing a damn good job of it, as far as  Shaftoe can tell from listening
between  the stentorian  lines  of  the  Movietone  newsreels, so laden with
sinister cheer, whence the above facts were gleaned.
     All this means that down below them, vast forces ought to be spread out
across the Sahara  in readiness  for combat.  Perhaps there is even a battle
going on  right now. But  Shaftoe sees nothing.  Just the occasional line of
yellow  dust thrown up  by a convoy, a  dynamite fuse sputtering across  the
desert.
     So he talks  to those flyboys. It's not  until he  notices them  giving
each other looks  that  he  realizes  he's going on  at great length.  Those
Assassins must've killed their victims by talking them to death.
     The card game, he  realizes,  is completely  out of the question. These
flyboys  don't  want  to talk.  He practically has  to dive  in and grab the
control yoke  to get  them to  say anything. And when  they  do,  they sound
funny, and  he  realizes that these guys are not  guys nor  fellas. They are
blokes. Chaps. Mates. They are Brits.
     The only  other thing  he  notices about  them, before he gives up  and
slinks back into the cargo  hold,  is that  they  are fucking  armed to  the
teeth.  Like they were expecting to have to kill  twenty or thirty people on
their way from the airplane to the latrine and back. Bobby Shaftoe has met a
few  of these paranoid types during  his tour, and he doesn't like them very
much. That whole mindset reminds him too much of Guadalcanal.
     He  finds a place on the floor next to the body of PFC Gerald Hott  and
stretches out.  The teeny revolver in his waistband makes it  impossible for
him  to lie  on his  back, so  he  takes it out  and  pockets  it. This only
transfers the center of discomfort  to the Marine  Raider stiletto holstered
invisibly between his shoulder blades. He realizes that he is going to  have
to curl up on  his  side, which doesn't  work because on one side he  has  a
standard issue Colt semiautomatic, which he doesn't trust, and on the other,
his own  six shooter from home, which he does. So he  has to find  places to
stash  those,  along  with  the  various  ammo  clips,  speed  loaders,  and
maintenance supplies that go with them.  The V 44 "Gung Ho" jungle clearing,
coconut splitting,  and  Nip decapitating  knife, strapped to the outside of
his  lower leg, also has to be  removed, as does the derringer that he keeps
on  the other  leg  for balance. The only thing that  stays with him are the
grenades in his  front  pockets,  since he doesn't plan to  lie  down on his
stomach.
     They make their way  around the headland just  in time  to  avoid being
washed out  to sea by the implacable tide. In front of them is a muddy tidal
flat, forming  the floor  of a box  shaped cove.  The walls  of the  box are
formed  by the  headland  they've just  gone  round,  another,  depressingly
similar  headland a few  hundred  yards along the shore, and a cliff  rising
straight up  out  of  the  mudflats.  Even  if  it  were  not  covered  with
relentlessly hostile  tropical jungle, this  cliff  would seal off access to
the interior of Guadalcanal just because  of its steepness.  The Marines are
trapped in this little cove until the tide goes back out.
     Which is more than enough time for the  Nip machine gunner to kill them
all.
     They  all  know  the  sound of  the weapon by  now  and  so they  throw
themselves  down  to  the mud instantly. Shaftoe takes a  quick look around.
Marines lying  on their backs or sides are  probably  dead, those  on  their
stomachs are probably  alive.  Most  of  them  are  on  their stomachs.  The
sergeant is conspicuously dead; the gunner aimed for him first.
     The Nip or  Nips  have  only one gun,  but  they  seem  to have all the
ammunition in  the world the fruits of the  Tokyo  Express,  which  has been
coming down the Slot with impunity ever since Shaftoe and  the rest  of  the
Marines  landed early  in August. The  gunner  rakes the mudflats leisurely,
zeroing in quickly on any Marine who tries to move.
     Shaftoe gets up and runs towards the base of the cliff.
     Finally, he can see the muzzle flashes from the Nip gun. This tells him
which  way it's  pointed.  When the  flashes  are elongated it's pointed  at
someone  else,  and  it's  safe  to  get   up  and  run.  When  they  become
foreshortened, it is swinging around to bear on Bobby Shaftoe He cuts it too
close. There is very bad pain  in his  lower  right abdomen.  His scream  is
muffled by mud and silt  as the weight of his  web and helmet drive him face
first into the ground.
     He loses consciousness  for a  while, perhaps. But  it can't have  been
that long. The firing continues, implying that the  Marines are not all dead
yet. Shaftoe raises  his  head with difficulty, fighting the  weight  of the
helmet, and sees a  log between him  and the  machine  gun a  piece  of wave
burnished driftwood flung far up the beach by a storm.
     He can run for it or not. He decides to run. It's only a few  steps. He
realizes,  halfway  there, that he's  going to  make  it. The  adrenaline is
finally flowing; he lunges forward  mightily and collapses in the shelter of
the big log. Half a dozen bullets thunk into the  other side of it, and wet,
fibrous splinters shower down over him. The log is rotten.
     Shaftoe has gotten himself into a bit of a hole, and cannot see forward
or  back without exposing himself. He cannot  see his  fellow Marines,  only
hear some of them screaming.
     He risks a peek at the machine gun nest. It is well concealed by jungle
vegetation, but it is  evidently built into a cave a  good twenty feet above
the mudflat. He's not  that far from  the  base  of the cliff he might  just
reach it  with another  sprint. But climbing up there is going to be murder.
The machine gun probably can't depress  far enough to shoot down at him, but
they can roll grenades at him until the cows come home, or just pick him off
with small arms as he gropes for handholds.
     It is, in  other  words, grenade  launcher time. Shaftoe rolls onto his
back,  extracts  a flanged  metal tube from his web gear, fits  it  onto the
muzzle of  his ought  three. He tries to clamp it down, but his fingers slip
on the bloody wing nut. Who's the pencil neck that decided to  use a fucking
wing nut in this context? No point griping  about it here and now.  There is
actually blood all over the place,  but  he  is  not in  pain.  He drags his
fingers through the sand, gets them all gritty, tightens that wing nut down.
     Out of  its handy pouch comes one Mark II fragmentation grenade, a.k.a.
pineapple, and with a  bit  more groping he's  got  the  Grenade  Projection
Adapter, M1. He engages the former  into  the latter,  yanks  out the safety
pin, drops it, then slips the fully  prepped  and  armed Grenade  Projection
Adapter, Ml, with its fruity payload, over the tube of the grenade launcher.
Finally: he opens up one  specially marked  cartridge case,  fumbles through
bent and  ruptured  Lucky  Strikes,  finds  one brass  cylinder, a  round of
ammunition  sans  payload, crimped at the end but not endowed with an actual
bullet. Loads same into the Springfield's firing chamber.
     He  creeps  along  the log  so  that  he  can  pop up and fire from  an
unexpected location and perhaps  not get his head chewed off by the  machine
gun.  Finally raises this Rube  Goldberg device  that  his  Springfield  has
become,  jams  the  butt into the sand (in grenade launcher mode  the recoil
will break your collarbone), points  it toward  the  foe, pulls the trigger.
Grenade Projection Adapter, M1 is gone with  a terrible pow, trailing a damn
hardware store of now superfluous  parts, like a soul discarding its corpse.
The pineapple is now soaring heavenward, even its pin and safety lever gone,
its  chemical fuse aflame so  that  it even has a, whattayoucallit, an inner
light. Shaftoe's aim  is true, and the grenade is heading where intended. He
thinks he's pretty damn smart until the  grenade bounces  back, tumbles down
the cliff, and blows up another  rotten log. The Nips have anticipated Bobby
Shaftoe's little plan, and put up nets or chicken wire or something.
     He lies on his back in the mud, looking up at  the sky, saying the word
"fuck" over and over. The entire log throbs, and something akin to peat moss
showers down  into his face as the bullets chew up the  rotten  wood.  Bobby
Shaftoe says a prayer to the Almighty and prepares to mount a banzai charge.
     Then  the maddening sound of the machine gun stops, and is  replaced by
the  sound of a man screaming. His voice  sounds  unfamiliar. Shaftoe levers
himself up on his elbow and  realizes that the  screaming is coming from the
direction of the cave.
     He looks up into the big, sky blue eyes of Enoch Root.
     The  chaplain has moved from his nook at  the  back of the plane and is
squatting next to one of the  little windows,  holding onto whatever he can.
Bobby  Shaftoe, who  has rolled uncomfortably onto his stomach, looks out  a
window on  the  opposite side of the plane.  He ought  to see  the sky,  but
instead  he sees a sand dune wheeling past.  The  sight makes him  instantly
nauseated. He does not even consider sitting up.
     Brilliant  spots of light are streaking wildly around the inside of the
plane, like ball  lightning, but and this is  far from obvious at first they
are actually projected against the wall of the plane, like flashlight beams.
He  back traces the beams,  taking advantage of  a  light haze of  vaporized
hydraulic fluid that has begun to accumulate in the air; and finds that they
originate in a series of small circular holes that some  asshole has punched
through  the skin of  the plane  while he  was  sleeping. The sun is shining
through these holes, always  in the same direction of course;  but the plane
is going every which way.
     He  realizes  that  he has actually  been lying  on the ceiling of  the
airplane  ever since he woke up,  which explains why  he was on his stomach.
When this dawns on him, he vomits.
     The bright  spots all  vanish. Very, very reluctantly, Shaftoe  risks a
glance out the window and sees only greyness.
     He thinks  he is on  the  floor now. He is next  to the corpse, at  any
rate, and the corpse was strapped down.
     He lies there  for several minutes, just breathing  and  thinking.  Air
whistles through the holes in the fuselage, loud enough to split his head.
     Someone some madman is up on  his  feet,  moving about the plane. It is
not  Root, who  is in  his  little nook  dealing  with a  number  of  facial
lacerations that he picked  up during the aerobatics. Shaftoe  looks up  and
sees that the moving man is one of the British flyboys.
     The Brit  has yanked  off his headgear to expose black  hair  and green
eyes. He's in  his mid thirties, an old  man.  He has a  knobby, utilitarian
face in which all of the various lumps, knobs and orifices seem to be  there
for a  reason, a  face engineered  by  the same fellows who  design  grenade
launchers. It is  a  simple and reliable face, by no  means handsome. He  is
kneeling next to the corpse of Gerald Hott and is examining it minutely with
a  flashlight. He  is the very  picture of concern; his  bedside  manner  is
flawless.
     Finally he slumps back against the ribbed wall  of the fuselage. "Thank
god," he says, "he wasn't hit."
     "Who wasn't?" Shaftoe says.
     "This chap," the flyboy says, slapping the corpse.
     "Aren't you going to check me?"
     "No need to."
     "Why not? I'm still alive. "
     "You weren't  hit," the  flyboy  says  confidently. "If you'd been hit,
you'd look like Lieutenant Ethridge."
     For the  first time, Shaftoe hazards movement.  He props himself  up on
one elbow, and finds  that the floor  of the plane is slick and wet with red
fluid.
     He  had  noticed a pink  mist in the cabin,  and supposed that  it  was
produced by a hydraulic fluid leak. But the hydraulic system now seems hunky
dory, and the stuff on the floor of the plane is not a petroleum product. It
is the same red fluid that figured so prominently in Shaftoe's nightmare. It
is streaming downhill from the direction of Lieutenant Ethridge's cozy nest,
and the Lieutenant is no longer snoring.
     Shaftoe  looks  at  what is  left of  Ethridge, which bears  a striking
resemblance  to what was lying  around that butcher  shop earlier today.  He
does not wish to  lose  his  composure in the presence of the British pilot,
and indeed, feels strangely calm.  Maybe  it's the clouds; cloudy  days have
always had a calming effect on him.
     "Holy cow," he finally  says, "that  Kraut  twenty millimeter  is  some
thing else."
     "Right," the  flyboy  says, "we've got to get  spotted by a convoy  and
then we'll proceed with the delivery."
     Cryptic  as it is, this is the most informative  statement Bobby's ever
heard about  the intentions  of Detachment 2702. He gets  up and follows the
pilot  back  to the cockpit, both of them stepping delicately around several
quivering giblets that were presumably flung out of Ethridge.
     "You mean, by an allied convoy, right?" Shaftoe asks.
     "An allied  convoy?"  the pilot asks  mockingly. "Where the hell are we
going to find an allied convoy? This is Tunisia ."
     "Well, then, what do you mean, we've  got to get  spotted by a  convoy?
You mean we have to spot a convoy, right?"
     "Very sorry," the flyboy says, "I'm busy."
     When  he turns  back, he  finds  Lieutenant  Enoch Root  kneeling by  a
relatively large piece of Ethridge, going  through Ethridge's  attache case.
Shaftoe  cops a look of exaggerated moral  outrage and  points the finger of
blame.
     "Look, Shaftoe,"  Root  shouts, "I'm just following orders. Taking over
for him."
     He pulls out  a small bundle, all wrapped  in  thick, yellowish plastic
sheeting. He checks it over, then glances up  reprovingly, one more time, at
Shaftoe.
     "It was a fucking joke!" Shaftoe says. "Remember?  When I thought those
guys were looting the corpses? On the beach?"
     Root doesn't laugh.  Either he's pissed off  that Shaftoe  successfully
bullshitted him, or  he doesn't enjoy corpse looting humor. Root carries the
wrapped  bundle back to that other body, the one  in the wetsuit. He  stuffs
the bundle inside the suit.
     Then he squats  by  the body  and ponders. He ponders for  a long time.
Shaftoe  kind  of  gets a kick  out  of watching Enoch ponder, which is like
watching an exotic dancer shake her tits.
     The light changes again as  they  descend from  the  clouds. The sun is
setting, shining redly through the Saharan haze. Shaftoe looks out  a window
and  is  startled  to see that they are over the  sea now. Below  them  is a
convoy of ships each making a neat white V in the dark water, each lit up on
one side by the red sun.
     The airplane  banks  and makes a slow loop  around  the convoy. Shaftoe
hears distant pocking noises. Black flowers bloom and fade in the sky around
them. He realizes  that the ships are trying to hit  them with ack ack. Then
the plane  ascends once more into the shelter  of  the clouds,  and it  gets
nearly dark.
     He looks at Enoch Root  for the first time in a while. Root is  sitting
back in his little nook, reading  by  flashlight. A bundle of papers is open
on his  lap.  It is  the  plastic  wrapped bundle  that  Root  took  out  of
Ethridge's attache  case  and  shoved into  Gerald Hott's  wetsuit.  Shaftoe
figures that the  encounter with convoy and ack ack finally pushed Root over
the edge, and that he yanked the bundle right back out  again to have a look
at it.
     Root glances up and  locks eyes with Shaftoe. He does not seem  nervous
or guilty. It is a strikingly calm and cool look.
     Shaftoe holds his gaze  for a long moment. If  there were the slightest
trace  of  guilt or nervousness there, he  would turn the  chaplain in as  a
German spy. But  there isn't Enoch Root ain't  working  for  the Germans. He
ain't working  for  the  Allies either. He's  working  for a  Higher  Power.
Shaftoe nods imperceptibly, and Root's gaze softens.
     "They're all dead,  Bobby,"  he shouts. "Those  islanders. The ones you
saw on the beach on Guadalcanal."
     So  that  explains  why Root  is so touchy about corpse  looting jokes.
"Sorry,"  Shaftoe says,  moving aft so they don't  have  to  scream at  each
other. "How'd it happen?"
     "After  we  got you  back to my  cabin, I transmitted  a message  to my
handlers in Brisbane," Root says.  "Enciphered it using a special code. Told
them  I'd  picked  up one Marine Raider, who looked  like he might  actually
live, and would someone please come round and collect him."
     Shaftoe nods. He remembers that he'd heard lots of dots and dashes, but
he had been out of whack with fevers and morphine and whatever home remedies
Root had pulled out of his cigar box.
     "Well, they responded," Root went on, "and said 'We can't go there, but
would you please take him to such  and such place and  rendezvous with  some
other Marine Raiders.' Which, as you'll recall, is what we did."
     "Yeah," Shaftoe says.
     "So far so  good. But when  I  got back to the cabin  after handing you
over, the Nipponese had been through. Killed every islander they could find.
Burned the cabin. Burned  everything. Set booby traps  around the place that
nearly killed me. I just barely got out of the damn place alive."
     Shaftoe nods, as only a guy who's seen the Nips in action can nod.
     "Well  they  evacuated me  to  Brisbane where I started making a  stink
about  codes.  That's the only  way they could have found  me obviously  our
codes  had  been broken.  And  after I'd  made  enough  of a  stink, someone
apparently said, 'You're British, you're a priest, you're  a medical doctor,
you can handle  a rifle,  you know Morse code, and  most importantly of all,
you're a fucking pain in the ass so off you go!" And next thing I  know, I'm
in that meat locker in Algiers."
     Shaftoe glances away and nods. Root seems to get the message, which  is
that Shaftoe doesn't know anything more than he does.
     Eventually, Enoch Root  wraps  the bundle up again,  just like  it  was
before. But he  doesn't put it back in  the  attache case. He stuffs it into
Gerald Hott's wetsuit.
     Later they  emerge from the clouds again, close to a moonlit  port, and
dip down very close to the ocean, going so slow that even Shaftoe, who knows
nothing about planes, senses they  are about to stall.  They  open  the side
door of the Dakota and, one two three NOW, throw the body of PFC Gerald Hott
out into the ocean.  He makes what would be a big  splash in  the Oconomowoc
town pool, but in the ocean it doesn't come to much.
     An hour or so later they land  the same  Gooney  Bird on an airstrip in
the midst of a stunning aerial bombardment. They abandon the Skytrain at the
end  of the  airstrip,  next  to the other  C 47, and  run through darkness,
following the lead of  the British pilots.  Then they go down a stairway and
are  underground in a bomb  shelter,  to be precise. They can feel the bombs
now but can't hear them.
     "Welcome to Malta," someone says. Shaftoe looks around and sees that he
is surrounded  by men in British and American  uniforms. The  Americans  are
familiar  it's the Marine Raider squad from Algiers, flown in on that  other
Dakota. The Brits are unfamiliar, and Shaftoe pegs them as the SAS men  that
those fellows in Washington were telling him about.  The only thing they all
have in common is that  each man, somewhere  on  his uniform, is wearing the
number 2702.


     Chapter 18 NON DISCLOSURE


     Avi shows up  on time,  idling his  fairly  good, but  not disgustingly
ostentatious, Nipponese sports car gingerly  up the steep  road,  which  has
crazed into a loose mosaic of asphalt flagstones.
     Randy watches from  the  second  floor deck, staring fifty  feet almost
straight down  through the sunroof. Avi is clad in  the trousers of  a  good
tropical  weight business suit,  a  tailored white Sea  Island cotton shirt,
dark ski goggles, and a wide brimmed canvas hat.
     The house is  a tall,  isolated structure rising out of the middle of a
California grassland that slopes up from the Pacific, a few kilometers away.
Chilly air climbs up the slope, rising and falling in slow surges, like surf
on a beach. When Avi gets out of his  car the first thing he does is pull on
his suit jacket.
     He hauls two oversized laptop cases out of the tiny luggage compartment
in the car's nose, walks into the house without knocking (he has not been to
this  particular house before, but he has been  to others run  along similar
principles), finds Randy and Eb waiting  in one of its many rooms, and hauls
about fifteen thousand dollars worth of  portable computer gear  out  of the
bags.  He sets them up on a table. Avi hits the start button on two  laptops
and,  as they  crawl through  the boot process, plugs them into the  wall so
that the batteries won't drain.  A power  conduit, with grounded three prong
outlets spaced  every eighteen inches, has been  screwed down  remorselessly
along  every inch  of every wall, spanning drywall;  holes  in the  drywall;
primeval op art contact paper; fake wood grain paneling; faded Grateful Dead
posters; and even the odd doorway.
     One of the laptops  is connected to a tiny portable  printer, which Avi
loads with a few sheets of paper. The other laptop starts up  a few lines of
text running across the screen, then beeps and stops. Randy  ambles over and
looks at it curiously. It is displaying a prompt:
     FILO.
     Which Randy knows is  short for Finux Loader, a program that allows you
to choose which operating system you want to run.
     "Finux," Avi mumbles, answering Randy's unspoken question.
     Randy  types  "Finux"  and  hits the  return  key.  "How many operating
systems you have on this thing?"
     "Windows 95,  for games and  when I  need to let  some lamer  borrow my
computer temporarily," Avi says. "Windows NT for office type stuff. BeOS for
hacking, and  screwing around  with  media.  Finux for  industrial  strength
typesetting."
     "Which one do you want now?"
     "BeOS.  Going  to  display  some  JPEGs.  I assume  there's an overhead
projector in this place?"
     Randy looks  over at Eb, the only person in the room who actually lives
here. Eb seems bigger than  he is, and maybe it's because  of his detonating
hair: two  feet  long,  blond with a  faint reddish glow, thick and wavy and
tending to congeal into ropy  strands. No ponytail holder can contain it, so
when he bothers to tie it back, he uses a piece of string. Eb is doodling on
one of  those little computers that  uses a stylus so that  you can write on
the screen. In general,  hackers don't use them, but Eb (or  rather, one  of
Eb's defunct corporations) wrote the software for this model and so he has a
lot of them lying around. He  seems to be absorbed  in  whatever he's doing,
but after Randy has been looking in his direction for two seconds, he senses
it, and looks  up. He  has pale green eyes and wears a  luxuriant red beard,
except when he's in one of his shaving  phases, which usually  coincide with
serious romantic involvements. Right  now  his beard  is about half an  inch
long,  indicating a  recent breakup, and implying a willingness to  take new
risks.
     "Overhead projector?" Randy says.
     Eb closes his eyes, which  is what he does  during memory access,  then
gets up and walks out of the room.
     The tiny printer  begins to eke paper. The first line of text, centered
at  the  top of  the  page, is: NONDISCLOSURE AGREEMENT. More lines  follow.
Randy has seen them, or ones  like them, so many  times  that his eyes glaze
over and he  turns away. The only thing that ever changes is the name of the
company: in this case: EPIPHYTE(2) CORP.
     "Nice goggles."
     "If you  think these are weird, you should see what I'm going to put on
when the sun  goes down," Avi says. He  rummages in  a  bag  and pulls out a
contraption  that  looks  like  a  pair  of  glasses without lenses,  with a
dollhouse scale light  fixture mounted above each eye. A wire runs down to a
battery pack with  belt loops. He slides  a tiny  switch on the battery pack
and the lights come on: expensive looking blue white halogen.
     Randy raises his eyebrows.
     "It's all jet  lag avoidance," Avi  explains.  "I'm  adjusted  to Asian
time. I'm going back there in two days. I don't want my body to get  back on
Left Coast time while I'm here."
     "So the hat and goggles "
     "Simulate night.  This thing simulates daylight. See,  your  body takes
its  cues from  the light, adjusts its clock accordingly. Speaking of which,
would you mind closing the blinds?"
     The room has west  facing windows,  affording  a view down  the  grassy
slope to Half Moon Bay. It is late afternoon and the sun is pouring through.
Randy savors the view for a moment, then drops the blinds.
     Eb stalks  back into the room with an  overhead projector dangling from
one hand, looking for a moment like Beowulf  brandishing a monster's severed
arm. He puts it on the table and aims it at the wall. There is no need for a
screen, because above the ubiquitous  power strips, every  wall in the house
is covered  with whiteboards. Many of the whiteboards  are, in turn, covered
with cryptical incantations, written in  primary colors.  Some of  them  are
enclosed in irregular borders and labeled DO NOT ERASE! or simply DNE or NO!
In front of  where Eb has  put the  overhead projector,  there  is a grocery
list,  a half erased  fragment  of a  flowchart, a fax number in  Russia,  a
couple of dotted quads Internet addresses and a few  words  in German, which
were presumably written by Eb himself. Dr. Eberhard Föhr scans all of  this,
finds that none of it is enclosed in a DNE border, and wipes it away with an
eraser.
     Two  more  men  come into  the room, deeply involved  in a conversation
about some exasperating company  in Burlingame. One of them is dark and lean
and looks like  a gunfighter; he even wears a black cowboy hat. The other is
tubby and blond and looks  like he just got out  of a  Rotary  Club meeting.
They have one detail in common: each is wearing a bright  silver bracelet on
his wrist.
     Randy takes the NDAs  out of  the  printers  and passes them  out,  two
copies  each,  each pair  preprinted with a name: Randy Waterhouse, Eberhard
Föhr, John  Cantrell (the guy in the  black cowboy hat) and Tom Howard  (the
fair haired  Middle  American).  As John  and Tom reach  for the  pages, the
silver bracelets intercept stray beams of light sneaking through the blinds.
Each is printed with a red caduceus and several lines of text.
     "Those look new," Randy says. "Did they change the wording again?"
     "Yeah!" John Cantrell says. "This is version 6.0 just out last week."
     Anywhere  else,  the  bracelets  would  mean  that  John and  Tom  were
suffering from some sort  of life threatening condition,  such as an allergy
to  common antibiotics. A medic hauling them out of a wrecked car  would see
the  bracelet and  follow  the instructions. But this  is Silicon Valley and
different rules apply. The bracelets say, on one side:
     IN CASE OF DEATH SEE REVERSE FOR BIOSTASIS PROTOCOL FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS
COLLECT REWARD $100,000
     and on the other:
     CALL NOW FOR INSTRUCTIONS I 800 NNN NNNN
     PUSH 50,000 U HEPARIN IV AND DO CPR WHILE COOLING WITH  ICE TO 10C.KEEP
PH 7.5
     NO AUTOPSY OR EMBALMING
     It is a recipe for freezing a dead, or nearly dead, person. People  who
wear this  bracelet believe that, if this recipe  is followed, the brain and
other delicate tissues  can  be iced  without destroying them. A few decades
down the line, when nanotechnology has made it possible to be immortal, they
hope  to be thawed out. John Cantrell and Tom Howard believe that there is a
reasonable chance  that they will still be  having  conversations  with each
other a million years from now.
     The  room  gets  quiet as  all  of the men scan the forms,  their  eyes
picking  out certain familiar  clauses. They have probably signed  a hundred
NDA forms  between them. Around here, it is like offering someone a  cup  of
coffee.
     A  woman comes  into the  room, burdened  with tote bags, and  beams an
apology for being late. Beryl Hagen  looks like a Norman  Rockwell aunt,  an
apron wearing, apple pie toting type. In twenty years,  she's been the chief
financial officer of twelve different small high tech companies. Ten of them
have gone out of business. Except in  the case  of the second one,  this was
through no fault of Beryl's.  The sixth  was Randy's Second Business  Foray.
One was absorbed by Microsoft, one  became a successful, independent company
in its own right. Beryl made enough money from the latter two to retire. She
consults and writes while she looks for something interesting enough to draw
her  back  into  action,  and  her  presence  in  this  room  suggests  that
Epiphyte(2) Corp. must not  be completely bogus. Or  maybe  she's just being
polite  to Avi.  Randy  gives her a bearhug, lifting  her off the floor, and
then hands her two copies of the NDA with her name on them.
     Avi has detached the screen from his big laptop and laid it flat on the
surface of the  overhead  projector, which shines  light  through the liquid
crystal  display and projects a  color  image  on  the  whiteboard. It  is a
typical  desktop:  a couple of  terminal  windows and some icons.  Avi  goes
around and picks up the  signed NDAs, scans them all, hands one copy back to
each person, files  the rest in  the outer pocket of a laptop bag. He begins
to  type  on the laptop's  keyboard, and  letters  spill across  one  of the
windows. "Just so  you know," Avi mumbles, "Epiphyte Corp., which I'll  call
Epiphyte(1) for clarity, is  a Delaware  corporation, one and one half years
old.  The shareholders are myself, Randy, and Springboard  Capital. We're in
the telecoms business in the Philippines.  I can  give you details later  if
you  want.  Our  work  there  has  positioned us  to  be aware of  some  new
opportunities  in  that  part  of  the world.  Epiphyte(2) is  a  California
corporation, three weeks old. If  things go the way  we are hoping they will
go,  Epiphyte(1)  will be folded into it  according to some  kind  of  stock
transfer scheme the details of which are too boring to talk about now.
     Avi hits the  return  key.  A new window opens on the desktop. It is  a
color map  scanned in from an atlas, tall and narrow. Most  of it is oceanic
blue. A rugged coastline juts in through the top border, with a  few  cities
labeled:  Nagasaki,  Tokyo.  Shanghai  is  in  the  upper  left  corner. The
Philippine archipelago  is dead center. Taiwan is directly north  of it, and
to the south is a chain of islands forming a porous barrier between Asia and
a  big  land  mass labeled with English  words  like Darwin and  Great Sandy
Desert.
     "This probably looks weird  to most of  you," Avi says. "Usually  these
presentations begin with  a diagram of a computer network, or a flowchart or
something. We don't normally deal with maps. We're all so used to working in
a purely abstract realm that it seems almost bizarre to go out into the real
world and physically do something.
     "But I like maps. I've got maps all over my house. I'm going to suggest
to you that the skills and knowledge we have all been developing in our work
especially pertaining to the Internet  have  applications out here." He taps
the whiteboard. "In  the real world. You know, the big round wet  ball where
billions of people live."
     There  is a  bit of  polite  snickering as Avi skims his hand over  his
computer's trackball, whacks a button with  his thumb. A  new image appears:
the same map, with bright color lines running across the ocean, looping from
one city to the next, roughly following the coastlines.
     "Existing  undersea cables. The fatter the line, the bigger the  pipe,"
Avi says. "Now, what is wrong with this picture?"
     There are several fat  lines  running east from places like Tokyo, Hong
Kong,  and Australia,  presumably connecting  them  with the  United States.
Across the South China Sea, which lies  between the Philippines and Vietnam,
another fat  line angles roughly north south, but it  doesn't connect either
of those two countries: it goes straight to Hong Kong, then continues up the
China coast to Shanghai, Korea, and Tokyo.
     "Since  the Philippines  are in the center  of the  map," John Cantrell
says, "I predict that you are going to point out that  hardly any  fat lines
go to the Philippines."
     "Hardly any fat lines go to the Philippines!" Avi announces briskly. He
points  out the  one exception,  which  runs  from Taiwan south  to northern
Luzon, then skips down the coast to Corregidor. "Except for this  one, which
Epiphyte(l) is  involved with.  But it's not just  that. There is a  general
paucity of fat lines in  a north south direction, connecting Australia  with
Asia. A lot of data packets going  from  Sydney  to Tokyo have  to be routed
through California. There's a market opportunity."
     Beryl  breaks in. "Avi,  before you  get started  on  this,"  she says,
sounding cautious and regretful, "I have to  say that laying  long distance,
deep sea cables is a difficult business to break into."
     "Beryl is right!" Avi  says. "The only people who have the  wherewithal
to lay  those cables are AT&T, Cable & Wireless, and Kokusai Denshin
Denwa. It's tricky. It's expensive. It requires massive NRE."
     The  abbreviation  stands   for  "non  recoverable  expenses,"  meaning
engineering work  to complete a feasibility  study  that would be money down
the toilet if the idea didn't fly.
     "So what are you thinking?" Beryl says.
     Avi clicks up another map. This one is the same as the previous, except
that new lines have been drawn in: a whole  series of short island to island
links.  A bewilderingly  numerous chain of short hops down the length of the
Philippine archipelago.
     "You want to wire the  Philippines and patch them into the Net via your
existing link to Taiwan," says Tom Howard, in a heroic bid  to short circuit
what he senses will be a lengthy part of Avi's presentation.
     "The Philippines are  going  to  be hot shit informationally speaking,"
Avi says. "The  government  has  its flaws, but  basically it's  a democracy
modeled after Western institutions.  Unlike most Asians, they do ASCII. Most
of  them speak English. Longstanding ties to the  United States. These  guys
are going to be big players, sooner or later, in the information economy."
     Randy breaks in.  "We've already established  a foothold there. We know
the local business environment. And we have cash flow."
     Avi clicks up another map. This one's harder to make out. It looks like
a relief map  of  a vast  region of high mountains interrupted by occasional
plateaus.  Its appearance in the  middle of this  presentation  without  any
labels or explanation from Avi makes it  an implicit challenge to the mental
acumen of the other  people  in the  room. None of them  is going to ask for
help anytime  soon. Randy watches them squint and tilt their heads from side
to side. Eberhard Föhr, who is good at odd puzzles, gets it first.
     "Southeast Asia with the oceans  drained," he says. "That high ridge on
the right is New Guinea. Those bumps are the volcanoes of Borneo."
     "Pretty  cool,  huh?"  Avi says.  "It's  a  radar  map.  U.S.  military
satellites gathered all this data. You can get it for next to nothing."
     On this map  the  Philippines  can  be understood,  not as  a  chain of
separate islands,  but  as  the  highest regions  of a huge  oblong  plateau
surrounded  by deep  gashes  in the earth's  crust. To get from Luzon up  to
Taiwan  by going across the ocean floor you would have to plunge into a deep
trench, flanked by parallel mountain  ranges, and  follow it northwards  for
about three hundred miles. But south  of Luzon, in the  region where Avi  is
proposing to lay  a network of  inter  island  cables, it's  all shallow and
flat.
     Avi clicks again,  superimposing transparent  blue over the  parts that
are below sea level,  green on the islands.  Then he zooms in on an area  in
the center  of the  map,  where  the  Philippine plateau  extends  two  arms
southwest toward northern Borneo, embracing, and nearly enclosing, a diamond
shaped body of water, three  hundred and fifty miles across. "The Sulu Sea,"
he announces. "No relation to the token Asian on Star Trek ."
     No one laughs.  They  are not  really here  to be entertained  they are
concentrating on the map.  All of the different archipelagos  and  seas  are
confusing,   even  for   smart  people  with  good  spatial  relations.  The
Philippines  form the  upper right boundary  of  the  Sulu Sea, north Borneo
(part  of  Malaysia)  the lower left,  the  Sulu Archipelago  (part  of  the
Philippines) the lower right, and the upper left boundary is  one  extremely
long skinny Philippine island called Palawan.
     "This reminds us that  national boundaries are artificial  and  silly,"
Avi says. "The Sulu Sea is a basin in  the middle of a larger plateau shared
by the Philippines  and Borneo. So if you're wiring up  the Philippines, you
can just as easily wire Borneo up to that network at the  same time, just by
outlining the Sulu Sea with shallow, short hop cables. Like this."
     Avi clicks again and the computer draws in more colored lines.
     "Avi, why are we here?" Eberhard asks.
     "That is a very profound question," Avi says.
     "We know  the economics of these startups,"  Eb says.  "We  begin  with
nothing but the idea. That's what the NDA  is  for  to protect your idea. We
work  on the  idea together put  our  brainpower  into it  and get stock  in
return. The result of this  work is software. The software is copyrightable,
trademarkable, perhaps patentable. It is intellectual property.  It is worth
some money. We all own it in  common, through our shares. Then we sell  some
more shares to an investor. We use the money to hire more people and turn it
into a  product, to market it, and so  on. That's how the system  works, but
I'm beginning to think you don't understand it."
     "Why do you say that?"
     Eb looks confused. "How can we contribute  to this? How can we turn our
brainpower into equity that an investor will want to own a part of?"
     Everyone looks at  Beryl. Beryl's nodding agreement with Eb. Tom Howard
says, "Avi. Look. I can engineer big computer installations. John wrote Ordo
he knows  everything about crypto. Randy does Internet, Eb does weird stuff,
Beryl  does money.  But as far  as I know, none of  us  knows  diddly  about
undersea cable engineering. What good will our resumes do you when you go up
in front of some venture capitalists?"
     Avi's nodding. "Everything you say is true," he concedes smoothly.
     "We  would  have  to be crazy to get involved in running cables through
the  Philippines. That is a job for  FiliTel, with whom Epiphyte(1) has been
joint venturing."
     "Even if we were crazy, Beryl  says, "we wouldn't have the opportunity,
because no one would give us the money."
     "Fortunately  we  don't need to worry  about that,"  Avi says, "because
it's being done for  us." He  turns  to the whiteboard, picks up a red magic
marker,  and draws a fat line between Taiwan and Luzon, his hands picking up
a leprous,  mottled look from the shaded relief  of the  ocean floor that is
being projected against his skin. "KDD, which  is anticipating major  growth
in the Philippines, is already laying another big cable here." He moves down
and  begins  to  draw  smaller,  shorter  links   between  islands  in   the
archipelago. "And FiliTel, which is funded by AVCLA Asia Venture Capital Los
Angeles is wiring the Philippines."
     "What does Epiphyte(l) have to do with that?" Tom Howard asks.
     "To the extent  they want  to use  that network  for Internet  Protocol
traffic, they need routers and network savvy," Randy explains.
     "So,  to repeat my question: why are we here?" Eberhard says, patiently
but firmly.
     Avi works with his pen for a while. He circles an island  at one corner
of the Sulu Sea,  centered  in  the  gap between  North Borneo and  the long
skinny Philippine island called Palawan. He labels it in block letters:
     SULTANATE OF KINAKUTA.
     "Kinakuta was run by white sultans for a while. It's a long story. Then
it was a German colony," Avi says.  "Back then, Borneo was part of the Dutch
East Indies, and Palawan like the  rest of the Philippines was first Spanish
and then American. So this was the Germans' foothold in the area."
     "Germans  always  ended  up  holding the shittiest colonies,"  Eb  says
ruefully.
     "After the First World War, they handed it  over to the Japanese, along
with a lot of other islands much farther  to the east. All of these islands,
collectively, were called the Mandates because Japan controlled them under a
League  of Nations Mandate. During  the Second World  War  the Japanese used
Kinakuta as a base for attacks on the Dutch East Indies and the Philippines.
They retained a  naval  base and  airfield  there. After  the  war, Kinakuta
became independent, as  it had been before the  Germans.  The population  is
Muslim or ethnic  Chinese around the  edges, animist in the center, and it's
always been  ruled by a sultan even while  occupied  by  the Germans and the
Japanese,  who  both  co  opted  the  sultans but  kept  them  in  place  as
figureheads.  Kinakuta had oil reserves, but they were unreachable until the
technology  got  better and prices went  up, around the time of the Arab oil
embargo, which was also when the current sultan came into power. That sultan
is now a very rich man not as rich as the Sultan  of Brunei, who happens  to
be his second cousin, but rich."
     "The sultan is backing your company?" Beryl asks.
     "Not in the way you mean," Avi says.
     "What way do you mean?" Tom Howard asks, impatient.
     "Let me put it this way," Avi says. "Kinakuta is a member of the United
Nations. It  is every bit  as  much an independent country and member of the
community  of  nations as France  or  England.  As a  matter of  fact, it is
exceptionally  independent because of its oil  wealth.  It  is  basically  a
monarchy the  sultan makes the laws, but only  after  extensive consultation
with his  ministers, who  set policy  and  draft legislation. And  I've been
spending  a  lot  of  time,  recently,   with  the  Minister  of  Posts  and
Telecommunications.  I  have been  helping the minister draft a new law that
will govern all telecommunications passing through Kinakutan territory."
     "Oh, my god!" John Cantrell says. He is awestruck.
     "One free share of stock to  the man in the black hat!" Avi says. "John
has  figured  out Avi's secret  plan. John, would you like to explain to the
other contestants?"
     John takes his hat off and runs his hand back through his long hair. He
puts his hat  back on and heaves a  sigh. "Avi is  proposing to start a data
haven," he says.
     A little murmur of admiration  runs through  the room. Avi waits for it
to  subside and says, "Slight  correction: the  sultan's starting  the  data
haven. I'm proposing to make money off it."


     Chapter 19 ULTRA


     Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse  goes into battle armed with one third of
a  sheet of British typing paper  on  which  has been typed some  words that
identify it as a pass to Bletchley Park. His name and some other things have
been scribbled  on it in some  upper class officer's Mont Blanc blue  black,
the words  ALL SECTIONS circled, and a stamp smashed across it, blurred into
a red whore's kiss, with sheer  carelessness conveying greater Authority and
Power than the specious clarity of a forger.
     He finds his way round the mansion to the narrow lane that runs between
it and its row  of  red brick garages (or stables, as his grandparents would
be likely to peg them). He finds it a  very pleasant  place for a cigarette.
The lane is  lined with trees, a densely planted  hedge of  them. The sun is
just setting now. It is still high enough to snipe through any small defects
that it finds in the defensive perimeter of the horizon, so narrow red beams
strike him surprisingly in the eye as he ambles back and forth. He knows one
is  shining  invisibly through the clear air several feet above him, because
it is betraying an aerial: a strand  of copper wire stretched  from the wall
of  the mansion to a nearby  cypress. It catches the light in  precisely the
same way as  the strand of  the spiderweb  that  Waterhouse was playing with
earlier.
     The  sun will be down soon; it is already down in Berlin, as in most of
the hellish empire that Hitler has built from Calais to the Volga. Time  for
the  radio operators to begin their work.  Radio does not,  in  general,  go
around corners. This can be  a real pain when you  are conquering the world,
which is  inconveniently round, placing all  of your  most  active  military
units over the horizon. But if  you use shortwave, then you  can bounce  the
information off  the ionosphere. This works a good deal  better when the sun
is  not in  the sky, sluicing the  atmosphere with  wideband noise. So radio
telegraphers, and the  people who eavesdrop on them (what the Brits call the
Y Service) are, alike, nocturnal beings.
     As Waterhouse has just observed, the mansion has an aerial  or two. But
Bletchley Park is a huge and ravenous spider that requires a web the size of
a  nation to  feed  it. He has seen  enough evidence, from  the black cables
climbing the mansion's walls and the smell and hiss of the massed teletypes,
to know that the web is at least  partly made of copper wires. Another piece
of the web is made of rude stuff like concrete and asphalt.
     The gate swings open and a man on a green motorcycle banks steeply into
the lane, the two cylinders of his machine blatting away, the noise stinging
Waterhouse's  nose  as  he  rides by. Waterhouse strides  after him for some
distance,  but  loses  his  trail after  a  hundred  yards  or  so.  That is
acceptable; more  of them will be along  soon,  as  the  Wehrmacht's nervous
system awakens and its signals are picked up by the Y Service.
     The motorcyclist went  through a quaint little gate that  joins two old
buildings.  The  gate  is  topped by  a tiny cupola with a weathervane and a
clock. Waterhouse goes through  it and finds himself in a little square that
evidently  dates  back to when Bletchley Park was a precious Buckinghamshire
farmstead. To  the  left,  the line of  stables continues. Small gables have
been set  into the  roof, which is  stained with bird shit. The  building is
quivering with pigeons. Directly in front of him is a nice little red  brick
Tudor  farmhouse,   the   only  thing  he  has  seen  so  far  that  is  not
architecturally offensive. Off to his right is a one story building. Strange
information is coming out of this  building: the hot oil smell of teletypes,
but no typing noises, just a high mechanical whine.
     A door opens on the stable  building and a man emerges carrying a large
but evidently lightweight box with a  handle  on the top. Cooing noises come
from the  box  and Waterhouse realizes that it contains pigeons. Those birds
living up in the  gables are not feral; they are homing pigeons. Carriers of
information, strands of Bletchley Park's web.
     He homes  in  on the building  that smells of hot oil  and gazes into a
window.  As evening  falls, light has begun to leak  out  of  it,  betraying
information to black German reconnaissance planes, so  a porter is strutting
about the courtyard slamming the black shutters closed.
     Some information comes into Waterhouse's eyes at least:  on  the  other
side  of  that window, men are gathered around a  machine. Most  of them are
wearing  civilian  clothes, and  they have  been too busy, for  too long, to
trifle  much with combs and razors and shoe polish.  The men  are  intensely
focused  upon  their  work, which all has to do with this large machine. The
machine  consists  of  a  large  framework  of square steel tubing,  like  a
bedstead set up on one end.  Metal drums with the diameter of dinner plates,
an  inch or  so thick, are mounted at  several locations  on this framework.
Paper  tape has been threaded in a bewilderingly loopy trajectory from  drum
to  drum. It looks as  if a  dozen yards of tape are required to  thread the
machine.
     One of the men has been working on a rubber drive belt that goes around
one  of the drums. He steps back  from it and makes a gesture with his hand.
Another man flips a switch and the drums all begin to spin at once. The tape
begins to fly through  the system. Holes punched in the tape  carry data; it
all  blurs into a  grey streak now, the speed creating  an illusion in which
the tape appears to dissolve into a ribbon of smoke.
     No, it is not  an illusion. Real smoke is curling  up from the spinning
drums. The tape is running through the  machine so  fast that it is catching
fire before the eyes of Waterhouse and the men  inside, who watch it calmly,
as if it were smoking in an entirely new and interesting way.
     If there is a machine in the world capable of reading  data from a tape
that fast, Waterhouse has never heard of it.
     The  black shutter slams home.  Just  as it does,  Waterhouse  gets one
fragmentary glimpse of another object standing in the corner of the room:  a
steel rack in which a large number of grey cylindrical objects are stored in
neat rows.
     Two motorcyclists come through  the courtyard at once, running  in  the
darkness with their  headlights off. Waterhouse  jogs  after them for a bit,
leaving  the picturesque old courtyard behind and entering into the world of
the huts, the new structures  thrown up in the last year or two. "Hut" makes
him think of  a tiny thing,  but these huts, taken together, are  more  like
that new  Pentagon thing that the War Department has been  putting up across
the river from  D.C. They embody  a blunt need for space unfiltered  through
any aesthetic or even human considerations.
     Waterhouse walks to an intersection of roads  where he thought he heard
the motorcycles  making  a turn, and stops,  hemmed in by blast walls. On an
impulse,  he  clambers to the top of a  wall and takes a seat. The view from
here is no better. He knows that thousands of people are at work  all around
him in these huts, but he sees none of them, there are no signposts.
     He is still  trying  to work out that  business that he saw through the
window.
     The tape was running so fast  that  it  smoked.  There is no  point  of
driving it  that fast unless the machine can  read the information that fast
transforming the pattern of holes in the tape into electrical impulses.
     But why bother, if  those impulses had nowhere  to  go?  No human  mind
could deal with a stream of characters coming in at that  speed. No teletype
that Waterhouse knew of could even print them out.
     It  only makes sense  if they  are constructing a machine. A mechanical
calculator of some sort that can absorb the data  and then do something with
it   perform   some  calculation  presumably   a  cipher  breaking  type  of
calculation.
     Then he remembers the rack he glimpsed  in the corner, its many rows of
identical  grey  cylinders.  Viewed  end on, they  looked  like some kind of
ammunition. But  they are too smooth  and  glossy for that. Those cylinders,
Waterhouse realizes, are made of blown glass.
     They  are vacuum tubes. Hundreds of them. More tubes in  one place than
Waterhouse has ever seen.
     Those men in that room are building a Turing machine!


     ***


     It  is no wonder,  then, that the men in the room accept the burning of
the  tape  so  calmly.  That strip of  paper,  a  technology  as  old as the
pyramids, is merely  a vessel  for a  stream of  information. When it passes
through  the machine,  the  information is  abstracted from it, transfigured
into  a pattern  of pure binary  data. That the mere  vessel burns  is of no
consequence.  Ashes to ashes, dust to  dust the  data has passed  out of the
physical plane and  into the mathematical, a higher and purer universe where
different  laws apply. Laws, a few of which  are dimly and imperfectly known
to  Dr.  Alan Mathison  Turing and  Dr. John von Neumann and Dr. Rudolf  von
Hacklheber and a few  other people Waterhouse used  to  hang around with  in
Princeton. Laws about which Waterhouse himself knows a thing or two.
     Once you have transfigured the data into the realm of pure information,
all that is required is a tool. Carpenters work with wood and carry a box of
technology  for  measuring  it,  cutting   it,  smoothing  it,  joining  it.
Mathematicians work with information and need a tool of their own.
     They have been building  these tools, one  at a  time, for years. There
is, just to name one  example, a cash register and typewriter company called
the Electrical Till Corporation that makes a dandy  punched card machine for
tabulating large quantities of  data. Waterhouse's  professor  in  Iowa  was
tired of solving differential equations one at a time and invented a machine
to solve  them automatically  by storing  the  information  on  a  capacitor
covered drum and cranking through a certain algorithm. Given enough time and
enough  vacuum tubes,  a tool might be invented  to sum a column of numbers,
and another one to keep track of inventories, and another one to alphabetize
lists of words. A well equipped business  would have one of  each:  gleaming
cast iron monsters with heat waves  rising out of their grilles,  emblazoned
with  logos like  ETC and Siemens and Hollerith, each carrying  out its  own
specialized task. Just as a carpenter had a miter box and a dovetail jig and
a clawhammer in his box.
     Turing figured  out something entirely different, something unspeakably
strange and radical.
     He figured out that mathematicians, unlike carpenters, only  needed  to
have one tool in their toolbox, if it  were the right sort  of  tool. Turing
realized  that  it should be possible to build a meta machine that could  be
reconfigured  in such  a way that it would do any task you could conceivably
do with information. It would be a protean device that  could  turn into any
tool you could  ever  need. Like  a pipe  organ changing  into  a  different
instrument every time you hit a preset button.
     The  details were a bit hazy. This was not a  blueprint for  an  actual
machine, rather a thought experiment that Turing had dreamed up  in order to
resolve an abstract riddle  from  the  completely impractical world  of pure
logic. Waterhouse knows this perfectly well. But he cannot get one thing out
of  his mind as he sits there atop the blast walls at  the dark intersection
in  Bletchley Park:  the Turing machine, if  one really existed,  would rely
upon  having a tape. The tape would pass through the machine. It would carry
the information that the machine needed to do its work.
     Waterhouse  sits there staring  off into the darkness and  reconstructs
Turing's machine  in his mind.  More of the details  are coming back to him.
The tape, he now  recollects, would not  move through the Turing  machine in
one direction; it would change direction frequently. And  the Turing machine
would not just  read the tape; it would be able to erase  marks or  make new
ones.
     Clearly you cannot erase holes in a paper tape. And just as clearly the
tape only moves through this Bletchley  Park machine in  one  direction. So,
much as Waterhouse hates to admit this fact to himself, the rack of tubes he
just  spied  is not a Turing machine. It  is  some  lesser device a  special
purpose tool like a  punched card reader or Atanasoffs differential equation
solver.
     It  is  still  bigger  and  more  fiendishly  terrific   than  anything
Waterhouse has ever seen.
     A  night  train from Birmingham blows through, carrying bullets to  the
sea. As its sound dies away to the south, a motorcycle approaches the park's
main  gate.  Its  engine  idles as  the  rider's  papers  are checked,  then
Waterhouse hears  a Bronx cheer as it surges forward and cuts the sharp turn
into the lane. Waterhouse climbs to  his  feet  at  the intersection  of the
walls, and watches carefully as the bike sputters past him and homes in on a
"hut" a couple of blocks away. Light suddenly leaks from an open door as the
cargo changes hands. Then the light is snuffed and the bike stretches a long
loud raspberry down the road to the park's exit.
     Waterhouse lets himself down to earth and gropes his way down the  road
through  the moonless night.  He stops before  the entrance  to the hut  and
listens to it  teem for a  minute. Then, working  up  his  courage, he steps
forward and pushes the wooden door open.
     It is unpleasantly hot  in  here,  and  the  atmosphere is a nauseating
distillation of  human and  machine odors,  held  in and concentrated by the
coffin  doors slabbed  down over all the windows. Many people  are  in here,
mostly women working at gargantuan electrically powered typewriters.  He can
see even through his squint that the place is a running sluice for scraps of
paper,  maybe  four  by  six  inches  each,  evidently  brought  in  by  the
motorcyclists. Near the door, they have been  sorted and stacked  up in wire
baskets. Thence they go to the women at their giant typewriters.
     One of the few men in the place has risen to  his feet and is homing in
on Waterhouse. He is about Waterhouse's age, that is, in his early twenties.
He is wearing a British Army uniform. He has the air of a host  at a wedding
reception who  wants to  make sure that even the  most long lost, far  flung
members of the family are  properly greeted. Obviously  he is no more a real
military man than is Waterhouse  himself. No wonder this place is surrounded
by so much barbed wire and RAF men with machine guns.
     "Good evening, sir. Can I help you?"
     "Evening. Lawrence Waterhouse."
     "Harry Packard. Pleased to meet you." But he has no idea who Waterhouse
is; he is privy to Ultra, but not to Ultra Mega.
     "Pleasure's mine. I imagine  you'll  want  to  have  a  look at  this."
Waterhouse hands him  the  magic pass. Packard's pale  eyes  travel over  it
carefully, then jump around to focus  on a few sites of particular interest:
the signature  at  the bottom,  the smeared  stamp. The war has turned Harry
Packard  into a machine  for scanning and  processing slips of paper  and he
goes  about his  work  calmly and without  fuss  in this  case.  He  excuses
himself,  works the crank on a telephone, and speaks to someone; his posture
and  facial expression  suggest it  is someone important. Waterhouse  cannot
hear the words above the clicking and thrumming of  the massed  typewriters,
but he sees  interest and bemusement on Packard's  young, open,  pink  face.
Packard gives Waterhouse a sidelong glance or  two while he is  listening to
the person at the other end  of the line. Then  he says something respectful
and reassuring into the phone and rings off.
     "Right. Well, what would you like to see?"
     "I'm trying to get an overall sense of how the information flows."
     "Well,  we are  close  to the  beginning  of  it  here  these  are  the
headwaters.  Our wellsprings  are the Y Service  military  and amateur radio
operators who listen in on Jerry's radio transmissions, and provide  us with
these." Packard takes a slip from  a motorcyclist's pannier and hands it  to
Waterhouse.
     It is a form with various boxes at the top in which someone has written
in a date (today's) and time (a  couple of hours  ago) and a  few other data
such as  a radio frequency. The  body of  the form  is  mostly occupied by a
large open  space  in  which the following  has been printed  in hasty block
letters:



     Y P I J S L L E N J O P S K Y V Z P D L E M A O U
     T A MO G T M O A H E C
     the whole thing preceded by two groups of three letters each:



     "This one came in from one of our stations in Kent," Packard says.  "It
is a Chaffinch message."
     "So one of Rommel's?"
     "Yes. This  intercept came in from Cairo. Chaffinch gets top  priority,
which is why this message is on the top of the pile."
     Packard leads Waterhouse down the central aisle of the hut, between the
rows  of  typists. He picks  out one  girl who is just  finishing  up with a
message, and  hands her the slip.  She sets  it  up next to  her machine and
commences typing it in.
     At  first glance, Waterhouse had thought that the machines  represented
some  British  concept of how to build an electric typewriter as  big  as  a
dinner table,  wrapped up in two hundred pounds  of cast  iron,  a ten horse
motor  turning over under  the hood,  surrounded by  tall  fences  and armed
guards. But now that he is closer he  sees that it  is  something much  more
complicated. Instead of a platen, it has a large flat reel on it carrying  a
roll of narrow paper tape. This is not the same kind of tape he saw earlier,
smoking through the big  machine. This is narrower, and when it emerges from
the machine, it  does not have holes punched  through it for  a  machine  to
read. Instead, every  time  the girl slams  down  one  of  the  keys on  the
keyboard copying the text printed on the slip a new letter is printed on the
tape. But not the same letter that she typed.
     It does not take her long to type in all of the letters. Then she tears
the tape from her machine. It has a  sticky backing which she uses  to paste
it  directly  onto  the  original intercept  slip. She hands it  to Packard,
giving  him a demure smile. He responds with something between  a nod and  a
smart little bow, the  kind of thing  no American  male could ever  get away
with. He glances at it and hands it to Waterhouse.
     The letters on the tape say



     KEINEBESONDEREEREIGNISSE
     "In order to  obtain those settings, you  have to  break the code which
changes every day?"
     Packard smiles in agreement. "At midnight. If you stay here " he checks
his watch  " for another four hours, you will see fresh intercepts coming in
from  the  Y  Service that  will produce utter gibberish when  we  run  them
through the  Typex, because the Jerries will have changed all their codes on
the stroke of midnight. Rather like Cinderella's magic carriage turning back
into a pumpkin. We must then  analyze the new  intercepts  using the bombes,
and figure out the day's new codes."
     "How long does that take?"
     "Sometimes we are lucky and have broken the day's codes by two or three
o'clock in  the morning. Typically it  does not happen until after  noon  or
evening. Sometimes we do not succeed at all."
     "Okay, this is a  stupid question, but I want to  be clear. These Typex
machines which merely do a mechanical deciphering operation are a completely
different thing from the bombes, which actually break the codes."
     "The  bombes,  compared  to  these,  are  of  a  completely  different,
enormously higher order of sophistication," Packard agrees. "They are almost
like mechanical thinking machines."
     "Where are they located?"
     "Hut 11. But they won't be running just now."
     "Right,"  Waterhouse says, "not until after midnight when the  carriage
turns  back  into  a  pumpkin,  and you  need  to  break  tomorrow's  Enigma
settings."
     "Precisely."
     Packard steps over  to  a  small  wooden hatch set  low into one of the
hut's exterior walls. Next to it sits an office tray with a cup hook screwed
into  each end, and  a string tied to each cup  hook.  One of the strings is
piled up loose on the floor. The wall hatch has been  slid shut on the other
string. Packard puts the message slip on top of a pile of similar ones  that
has accumulated in the tray, then slides  the hatch open, revealing a narrow
tunnel leading away from the hut.
     "Okay, your pull!" he shouts.
     "Okay,  my  pull!" comes an answering voice a moment later.  The string
goes taught and the tray slides into the tunnel and disappears.
     "On its way to Hut 3," Packard explains.
     "Then so am I," Waterhouse says.


     ***


     Hut 3 is only a few  yards away,  on  the other side  of the inevitable
blast wall.  GERMAN MILITARY  SECTION  has  been  scrawled on  the  door  in
cursive; Waterhouse presumes that this is as opposed to "NAVAL"  which is in
Hut  4. The  ratio of men to  women seems higher  here. During wartime it is
startling to  see so many hale young men  in one  room together. Some are in
Army or RAF uniforms, some in civvies, and there is even one Naval officer.
     A  large horseshoe  shaped table dominates the center  of the building,
with  a  rectangular  table off  to the side. Each  chair at each  table  is
occupied by intent workers.  The intercept  slips are pulled into the hut on
the wooden tray and then move from  chair to chair according  to some highly
organized  scheme that Waterhouse  can  only vaguely grasp  at  this  point.
Someone  explains to him that the  bombes just broke the  day's codes around
sundown, and so the entire day's load of  intercepts has just  come down the
tunnel from Hut 6 during the last couple of hours.
     He decides to think of the hut as a mathematical black box for the time
being  that  is,  he'll  concentrate  only  on  its inputs  and  outputs  of
information and  ignore the internal  details. Bletchley Park,  taken in its
entirety, is a black box of sorts: random letters stream into  it, strategic
intelligence streams out, and the internal particulars are of no interest to
most  of the  people  on  the Ultra  distribution list.  The  question  that
Waterhouse is here to figure out is: is there another vector of  information
coming  out of  this place,  hidden subliminally in the teletype signals and
the  behaviors of the Allied  commanders? And  does  it point to Rudolf  von
Hacklheber, Ph.D.?


     Chapter 20 KINAKUTA


     Whoever laid  out the  flight paths into the  sultan's new airport must
have been  in cahoots with the Kinakuta Chamber of Commerce. If you're lucky
enough  to  be  in a window seat  on the left  side of the plane,  as  Randy
Waterhouse  is, the view during the final approach looks  like a  propaganda
flyby.
     Kinakuta's matted green slopes surge out of a mostly calm blue sea, and
eventually  soar  high enough  to  be dusted with snow at the  summits, even
though the  island is only seven degrees north  of the  equator. Randy  sees
right away what Avi meant when he  said that the place was Muslim around the
edges and  animist in  the  middle. The only places you could hope  to build
anything  like  a  modern  city  are  along  the  coast,  where  there's  an
intermittent fringe of nearly flat  land  a beige  rind clinging to a  giant
emerald.  The  biggest  and best flat place is on the northeastern corner of
the island,  where the main  river, several miles inland, bottoms out into a
flood plain that broadens to an alluvial delta  that reaches  out  into  the
Sulu Sea for a mile or two.
     Randy gives up counting the oil rigs  ten minutes before  Kinakuta City
even  comes into sight. From high  above they look like flaming  tank  traps
scattered in the surf to deter incoming Marines. As the plane sheds altitude
they  begin to look more like factories  on stilts, topped with high  stacks
where troublesome natural gas is flamed off. This gets more  alarming as the
plane  gets closer  to the water, and it begins  to seem  as if the pilot is
threading his way between pillars of fire  that would roast  the 777  like a
pigeon on the wing.
     Kinakuta City  looks more modern  than anything in the States.  He  has
been  trying to read about the place but has found precious little: a couple
of encyclopedia  entries, a few fleeting mentions in World War II histories,
some  puckish but  basically glowing articles in the Economist. Putting  his
rusty interlibrary  loan skills to work, he paid  the Library of Congress to
make  him a  photocopy of the one  book  he  could find  specifically  about
Kinakuta: one of about a million out of print World War II memoirs that must
have been  penned by G.I.s during the late forties and fifties.  So  far, he
hasn't had time to read it, and so the two inch  stack of pages is just dead
weight in his luggage.
     In any case, none of the maps  he has seen tallies with the  reality of
the modem  Kinakuta City. Anything that was  there during the war  has  been
torn down  and  replaced with new. The  river has been  dredged  into a  new
channel. An inconvenient mountain called Eliza Peak has been dynamited,  and
the rubble  shoved into the  ocean  to make several new square miles of real
estate, most of  which has been gobbled by the  new airport. The dynamitings
were so loud that  they prompted  complaints  from  the governments  of  the
Philippines and of  Borneo, hundreds  of miles away. They also  brought down
the wrath of Greenpeace, which was afraid that the sultan was scaring whales
in the  central Pacific.  So Randy expects half  of Kinakuta  City to  be  a
smoking crater, but of  course it's  not. The stump  of Eliza Peak  has been
neatly  paved over and used as the foundation of the sultan's new Technology
City.  All of  the  glass walled skyscrapers there, and in  the rest of  the
city, have pointy  tops, recalling a traditional architecture that has  long
since been bulldozed and used to fill in the harbor. The only building Randy
can see  that looks to be more than ten years old  is  the sultan's  palace,
which is ancient. Surrounded by miles of blue glass skyscrapers, it's like a
reddish beige mote frozen in a tray of ice.
     Once Randy fixes on that, everything snaps into its proper orientation.
He bends forward, risks the censure of the cabin crew by pulling his bag out
from under the seat ahead of him, and pulls out his photocopied G.I. memoir.
One of its first pages is a map of Kinakuta City as it appeared in 1945, and
dead center is the Sultan's Palace. Randy rotates it before his face  in the
way of a panicky  driver with a steering wheel,  and gets it to line up with
his view. There's the river. There's Eliza Peak, where the Nipponese used to
have a signals  intelligence detachment and a radar station, all  built with
slave labor. There's the former site of the Japanese Naval Air  Force field,
which  became the  Kinakuta Airport until the new one was built. Now it is a
flock of yellow cranes above a blue  nebula of  rebar, lit from  within by a
constellation of flickering white stars arc welders at work.
     Next to it is something  that doesn't belong: a patch of emerald green,
maybe a couple of city blocks, surrounded by a stone wall. Inside, there's a
placid pond toward  one end the  777 is now  so low that Randy can count the
lily pads a tiny  Shinto temple hewn  from black stone,  and a little bamboo
teahouse. Randy presses his face to the window and keeps turning his head to
follow it,  until  suddenly his  view is  blocked  by a high  rise apartment
building  just  off the wingtip. Through an open kitchen window,  he gets  a
microsecond's glimpse  of  a  slender  lady  swinging  a hatchet  towards  a
coconut.
     That garden looked like it  belonged a thousand  miles farther north in
Nippon.  When Randy finally realizes what it was, the hairs stand up  on the
back of his neck.
     Randy  got  on  this  plane  a  couple  of hours  ago at  Ninoy  Aquino
International Airport in Manila. The flight was delayed and so he had plenty
of time to look at the other passengers: three Westerners including himself,
a couple of dozen Malay types (either Kinakutan  or Filipino),  and everyone
else  Nipponese.  Some of the  latter looked like businessmen, traveling  on
their own  or  in  twos and threes,  but  most belonged  to some kind of  an
organized  tour group that marched into the boarding  lounge precisely forty
five minutes before scheduled takeoff, queued behind a young woman in a navy
blue skirt suit holding up a neat little logo on a stick. Retirees.
     Their  destination is not the Technology  City, or any of the  peculiar
pointy topped  skyscrapers in the financial district. They are all  going to
that walled  Nipponese  garden,  which is  built  on top  of  a  mass  grave
containing the bodies of three and  a  half thousand Nipponese soldiers, who
all died on August 23, 1945.


     Chapter 21 QWGHLM HOUSE


     Waterhouse eddies up and down the quiet side street, squinting at brass
plaques on sturdy white row houses:
     SOCIETY FOR THE UNIFICATION OF HINDUISM AND ISLAM
     ANGLO LAPP SOLIDARITY SOCIETY
     FULMINANTS ASSOCIATION
     CHIANG TZSE MUTUAL BENEVOLENT SOCIETY
     ROYAL COMMITTEE ON MITIGATION OF MARINE CRANKSHAFT WEAR
     BOLGER DAMSELFLY PROPAGATION FOUNDATION
     ANTI WELCH LEAGUE
     COMITY FOR [theta]E REFORMASHUN OF ENGLISH OR[theta]OGRAFY
     SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF CRUELTY TO VERMIN
     CHURCH OF VEDANTIC ETHICAL QUANTUM CONSCIOUSNESS
     IMPERIAL MICA BOARD
     At  first he  mistakes  Qwghlm House for the  world's  tiniest and most
poorly located department  store.  It has a bow window that  looms over  the
sidewalk  like  the thrusting  ram of a trireme,  embarnacled with Victorian
foofawfery, and housing a  humble display: a  headless mannequin  dressed in
something that appears to have been spun from steel wool (perhaps  a tribute
to  wartime  austerity?);  a heap  of sallow  dirt  with a shovel in it; and
another mannequin (a  recent addition shoehorned into one corner) dressed in
a Royal Navy uniform and holding a wooden cutout of a rifle.
     Waterhouse found a worm eaten copy of the Encyclopedia Qwghlmiana in  a
bookshop near  the British Museum a week ago and has been carrying it around
in his attache case since then, imbibing a page or two at a time, like doses
of strong medicine. The overriding Themes of the Encyclopedia are three, and
they dominate its every paragraph as totally as the Three Sgrhs dominate the
landscape of Outer  Qwghlm. Two  of these themes  are wool and guano, though
the  Qwghlmians have other names  for  them, in  their ancient,  sui generis
tongue. In fact, the same  linguistic  hyperspecialization occurs  here that
supposedly does  with  the Eskimos and  snow or  Arabs  and  sand,  and  the
Encyclopedia Qwghlmiana  never  uses  the English  words  "wool" and "guano"
except to slander the  inferior versions of these products that are exported
by  places like  Scotland in a perfidious effort to confuse the naive buyers
who  apparently  dominate the world's commodity  markets. Waterhouse  had to
read the encyclopedia  almost cover to cover  and use all his  cryptanalytic
skills to figure out, by inference, what these products actually were.
     Having  learned  so  much about  them, he is  fascinated to  find  them
proudly displayed in  the heart  of the cosmopolitan city: a mound  of guano
and a  woman dressed in wool (1). The woman's outfit is  entirely
grey, in keeping  with Qwghlmian tradition,  which scorns pigmentation as  a
loathsome and whorish innovation of the Scots. The top part of  the ensemble
is a sweater which appears, at a glance, to be made  of felt.  A closer look
reveals  that  it is  knit like any other sweater. Qwghlmian sheep  are  the
evolutionary product of thousands of years' massive weather related die off.
Their  wool is famous  for its density,  its  corkscrewlike fibers, and  its
immunity to  all known chemical straightening processes. It creates a matted
effect which the Encyclopedia describes as being supremely desirable and for
which there is an extensive descriptive vocabulary.
     The third  theme of  the  Encyclopedia Qwghlmiana is hinted at  by  the
mannequin with the gun.
     Propped up against  the stonework next to the building's  entrance is a
gaffer dressed  in an antique variant of  the Home Guard  uniform, involving
knickerbockers. His lower legs are encased  in formidable socks  made of one
of the variants of Qwghlmian wool, and lashed in place, just below the knee,
with tourniquets  fashioned  from thick cords  woven  together in  a vaguely
Celtic  interlace pattern (on almost every page,  the  Encyclopedia restates
that the  Qwghlmians are  not  Celts,  but  that they did  invent  the  best
features of Celtic culture). These  garters are the traditional  ornament of
true Qwghlmians; gentlemen wear them hidden underneath the trousers of their
suits.  They were traditionally  made  from the long, slender  tails of  the
Skrrgh, which is the predominant mammal native to the islands, and which the
Encyclopedia defines as "a small mammal of the order  Rodentia and the order
Muridae, common in the islands, subsisting  primarily  on  the eggs  of  sea
birds,  capable of  multiplying with great rapidity when that or  any  other
food is  made available to it, admired  and even emulated by Qwghlmians  for
its hardiness and adaptability."
     After Waterhouse has been standing there for  a few moments, enjoying a
cigarette  and  examining those  garters,  this  mannequin  moves  slightly.
Waterhouse thinks that it is falling over  in a  gust of wind,  but  then he
realizes that it is alive, and not exactly falling  over, but just  shifting
its weight from foot to foot.
     The gaffer takes note of him, smiles blackly, and  utters  some word of
greeting in his language, which, as  has already become  plain, is even less
suited than English to transcription into the Roman alphabet.
     "Howdy," Waterhouse says.
     The gaffer says  something  longer and more complicated. After a while,
Waterhouse (now wearing his cryptanalyst  hat,  searching for meaning  midst
apparent randomness, his neural circuits exploiting the redundancies  in the
signal) realizes  that  the man  is  speaking heavily accented  English.  He
concludes that his interlocutor was saying, "What part of the States are you
from, then?"
     "My  family's done a lot of  traveling around," Waterhouse says. "Let's
say South Dakota."
     "Ahh," the gaffer says ambiguously whilst flinging himself  against the
slab  of door. After a while  it  begins to move inwards, hand hammered iron
hinges grinding ominously as they pivot round inch thick tholes. Finally the
door collides with some kind of formidable  Stop. The gaffer remains leaning
against  it, his entire  body at a  forty  five degree angle to prevent  its
swinging  back and  crushing Waterhouse, who scurries  past. Inside, a  tiny
anteroom  is dominated  by  a  sculpture: two nymphets in  diaphanous  veils
kicking the crap out of a scurrying hag, entitled Fortitude and Adaptability
Driving Out Adversity .
     This operation is repeated a few times with doors that are successively
lighter but  more richly  decorated. The  first room, it becomes clear,  was
actually a preäntepenultimate room, so it is a while before they can be said
to be definitely inside Qwghlm House.  By that time they seem to be  deep in
the center  of the block, and  Waterhouse half expects to see an underground
train screech by. Instead he finds himself in a windowless paneled room with
a crystal chandelier that is painfully bright  but does not seem to actually
illuminate  anything. His feet sink so deeply into the gaudy carpet  that he
nearly blows out a ligament. The far end of the room is guarded by a staunch
Desk with a  stout Lady behind it.  Here  and there are large ebony  Windsor
chairs, with the spindly but dangerous look of aboriginal game snares.
     On the walls, diverse oil paintings. At a first glance Waterhouse sorts
them into ones that are higher  than they are  wide, and others. The  former
category is  portraits  of gentlemen, all  of  whom seem to share a grievous
genetic flaw that informs the geometry of the skull. The  latter category is
landscapes  or,  just  as  often,  seascapes, all  in the  bleak  and rugged
category. These Qwghlmian painters are so  fond of the locally produced blue
green grey paint (1)  that they apply it as if with the back of a
shovel.
     Waterhouse fights through the miring shag of  the Carpet until he nears
the Desk, where he is greeted by the Lady,  who  shakes his hand and pinches
her face together in a sort of allusion to a smile. There is a long exchange
of polite, perfunctory speech of  which  all Waterhouse remembers  is: "Lord
Woadmire will see you shortly," and: "Tea?"
     Waterhouse says yes to the tea because  he  suspects that this lady (he
has forgotten her name) is not really earning her keep. Clearly disgruntled,
she ejects herself from her chair and  loses  herself in deeper and narrower
parts of  the building. The gaffer has  already  gone back to his  post  out
front.
     A photograph of the king hangs  on the wall behind the desk. Waterhouse
hadn't  known,  until  Colonel  Chattan  discreetly reminded  him, that  His
Majesty's full title was not simply By the Grace Of God of England King, but
B.T.G.O.G. of the United  Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the
Isle of Man, Guernsey, Jersey, Outer Qwghlm, and Inner Qwghlm King.
     Next to it is a smaller photograph of the man he is about to meet. This
fellow and  his family are covered  rather sketchily  by the Encyclopedia  ,
which  is decades  old,  and so  Waterhouse  has  had  to do some additional
background research.  The  man  is  related  to the  Windsors  in  a way  so
convoluted  that  it can  only  be  expressed  using  advanced  genealogical
vocabulary.
     He  was born  Graf Heinrich  Karl  Wilhelm  Otto Friedrich von  Überset
Zenseehafenstadt,  but  changed  his name to  Nigel St.  John  Gloamthorpby,
a.k.a. Lord Woadmire, in 1914. In  his photograph, he looks every inch a von
Übersetzenseehafenstadt, and  he is entirely free  of the  cranial  geometry
problem  so evident in the older  portraits. Lord Woadmire is not related to
the original  ducal line of  Qwghlm, the  Moore family  (Anglicized from the
Qwghlmian clan name Mnyhrrgh)  which  had  been  terminated  in  1888  by  a
spectacularly  improbable  combination  of  schistosomiasis,  suicide,  long
festering  Crimean  war wounds,  ball lightning, flawed  cannon, falls  from
horses, improperly canned oysters, and rogue waves.
     The tea takes some time in coming and Lord Woadmire does not seem to be
in any particular hurry to win the war either, so Waterhouse makes a circuit
of the room, pretending to care about the paintings. The biggest one depicts
a number of bruised and lacerated Romans dragging  their sorry asses up onto
a  rocky and unwelcoming shore as splinters of  their invasion fleet wash up
around them. Front and  center is a particular Roman who looks no less noble
for wear and  tear. He is  seated wearily on  a high  rock,  a  broken sword
dangling from  one enervated hand,  gazing longingly across several miles of
rough  water  towards a shining, paradisiacal  island.  This  isle is richly
endowed  with tall trees and flowering meadows and green pastures, but  even
so  it can be identified as Outer Qwghlin by the Three  Sghrs towering above
it.  The isle  is  guarded  by a forbidding castle or two; its pale,  almost
Caribbean  beaches are lined with the colorful  banners  of a defending host
which (one can only assume) has just given the Roman invaders a bit of rough
handling which they will not soon forget. Waterhouse does not bother to bend
down and squint at the plaque;  he knows that the subject of the painting is
Julius  Cæsar's failed and  probably  apocryphal  attempt  to  add the
Qwghlm Archipelago  to the Roman Empire, the farthest from  Rome he ever got
and the  least  good  idea he  ever had. To say that the Qwghlmians have not
forgotten the  event is like saying that Germans can sometimes be  a  little
prickly.
     "Where Caesar failed, what hope has Hitler?"
     Waterhouse turns  towards  the  voice  and  discovers  Nigel  St.  John
Gloamthorpby a.k.a. Lord Woadmire,  a.k.a. the Duke  of Qwghlm.  He is not a
tall man.  Waterhouse  goose steps  through the carpet  to  shake his  hand.
Though Colonel Chattan briefed him on proper forms of address when meeting a
duke, Waterhouse can no more remember this  than  he can diagram  the duke's
family tree, so he decides to structure all of his utterances so as to avoid
referring to the  duke by name or pronoun. This will be a fun game and  make
the time go faster.
     "It is quite a painting," Waterhouse says, "a heck of a deal."
     "You  will  find the islands themselves  no less extraordinary, and for
the same reasons," the duke says obliquely.
     The next  time  Waterhouse  is really  aware of what's going on,  he is
sitting in the  duke's  office. He thinks  that there has been  some routine
polite conversation along the way, but there  is never any point in actually
monitoring that kind of thing. Tea is  offered to him,  and is accepted, for
the second or third time, but fails to materialize.
     "Colonel  Chattan is in the Mediterranean, and I have been sent in  his
place," Waterhouse explains, "not to waste time covering logistical details,
but to  convey our enormous gratitude for  the  most generous  offer made in
regards to the castle." There! No pronouns, no gaffe.
     "Not at all!" The duke is taking  the whole thing as an affront to  his
generosity. He  speaks in the  unhurried, dignified cadences of a man who is
mentally thumbing through a German English dictionary.  "Even setting  aside
my own... patriotic obligations... cheerfully accepted, of course..., it has
almost become almost...  terribly fashionable  to  have  a whole...  crew...
of... uniformed fellows and whatnot running around in one's... pantry.
     "Many of the great houses of Britain are doing  their bit for the War,"
Waterhouse agrees.
     "Well... by  all means, then...  use it!" the  duke says.  "Don't be...
reticent! Use it... thoroughly! Give it  a good... working over!  It  has...
survived... a thousand Qwghlm winters and it will... survive your worst."
     "We hope  to have a small  detachment in  place very soon,"  Waterhouse
says agreeably.
     "May  I... know..., to satisfy my own... curiosity...,  what sort of...
?" the duke says, and trails off.
     Waterhouse is  ready  for this. He is so ready that he has to hold back
for a moment and try to make a show of discretion. "Huffduff."
     "Huffduff?"
     "HFDF.  High  Frequency Direction  Finding.  A  technique  for locating
distant radio transmitters by triangulating from several points."
     "I  should  have...  thought   you  knew  where  all  the...  German...
transmitters were."
     "We do, except for the ones that move."
     "Move!?"  The  duke furrows his brow  tremendously, imagining  a  giant
radio transmitter building, tower and all mounted on four parallel rail road
tracks  like  Big Bertha, creeping  across  a  steppe,  drawn  by  harnessed
Ukrainians.
     "Think U boats," Waterhouse says delicately.
     "Ah!"  the  duke says  explosively. "Ah!" He leans back in  his  creaky
leather chair,  examining a whole new picture  with his mind's eye. "They...
pop up, do they, and send out... wireless?"
     "They do."
     "And you... eavesdrop."
     "If only we could!" Waterhouse says. "No, the Germans have used all  of
that world famous mathematical  brilliance of theirs to  invent ciphers that
are totally unbreakable. We don't have the  first idea what they are saying.
But, by using huffduff, we can figure out where they are saying it from, and
route our convoys accordingly."
     "Ah."
     "So what we propose to do is mount big rotating antennas, or aerials as
you  call them here,  on  the  castle,  and  staff  the place with  huffduff
boffins."
     The duke frowns. "There will be proper... safeguards for lightning?"
     "Naturally."
     "And you are aware that  you may... anticipate... ice storms as late in
the year as August?"
     "The Royal Qwghlm  Meteorological Station's reports, as a body of work,
don't leave a heck of a lot to the imagination."
     "Fine, then!"  the  duke  blusters,  warming to  the  concept. "Use the
castle, then! And give them... give them hell!"


     Chapter 22 ELECTRICAL TILL CORPORATION


     As evidence of the allies' slowly developing  plan to kill the Axis  by
smothering  them  under a mountain  of manufactured goods,  there's this one
pier  in Sydney Harbor  that  is  piled  high with  wooden crates and  steel
barrels: stuff that has been disgorged from the holds of ships from America,
Britain, India and just left to sit there because Australia doesn't know how
to digest it  yet. It is not the  only pier in Sydney that  is  choked  with
stuff. But because this pier isn't good for much else, it  is mounded higher
and the stuff is older, rustier, more  infested  with rats, more rimed  with
salt, more thickly frosted and flagrantly streaked with gull shit.
     A  man is picking his way over the pile, trying not to  get any more of
that gull shit on  his khakis. He  is wearing the  uniform of a major in the
United  States Army and  is badly encumbered by  a  briefcase.  His name  is
Comstock.
     Inside the briefcase are  various identity papers, credentials, and  an
impressive letter  from the office of The General in  Brisbane. Comstock has
had  occasion to  show all  of the  above to the  doddering and yet  queerly
formidable Australian  guards who, with their  doughboy helmets and  rifles,
infest  the waterfront. These  men  do not speak any dialect of  the English
language that the major can  recognize and vice versa, but they can all read
what is on those papers.
     The  sun is going  down and the rats are waking up. The major has  been
clambering  over  docks all day  long. He  has seen  enough  of war and  the
military to know that  what he is looking for will be found on the last pier
that he searches, which happens to be  this one. If he begins searching that
pier  at the near end,  what he  is looking for will be at the  far end, and
vice versa. All the  more reason to  stay sharp  as he works  his way along.
After casting an eye  around  to make sure  there are no  leaking  stacks of
drums of  aviation fuel  nearby, he lights up a cigarette. War is  hell, but
smoking cigarettes makes it all worthwhile.
     Sydney Harbor  is beautiful at sunset, but he's been looking at it  all
day and can't really see  it anymore. For lack of anything better to  do, he
opens  up  his  briefcase.  There's a  paperback novel in there, which  he's
already  read.  And  there  is a  clipboard  which  contains,  in  yellowed,
crackling, sedimentary  layers, a  fossil record  that only an archaeologist
could unravel. It is  the story of how The General, just after he got out of
Corregidor  and  reached  Australia  in April, sent  out a  request for some
stuff.  How that  request got forwarded to America and bounced pinball  like
through  the   cluttered  infinitude  of  America's  military  and  civilian
bureaucracies;  how  the  stuff in question was duly manufactured, procured,
trucked hither and yon, and caused to be placed on a ship; and finally, some
evidence to the effect  that said ship  was in  Sydney Harbor several months
ago. There's no evidence that this ship ever unloaded the stuff in question,
but  unloading stuff is what ships always do  when they reach  port  and  so
Comstock is going with that assumption for a while.
     After  Major Comstock  finishes his cigarette, he  resumes  his search.
Some of the papers on his clipboard specify certain magic numbers that ought
to be stenciled on  the outside of  the crates in question; at least, that's
what he's  been  assuming  since he started this  search at daybreak, and if
he's wrong, he'll have  to go back  and search every  crate in Sydney Harbor
again. Actually getting a look at each crates'  numbers means  squeezing his
body through narrow channels between crate piles and rubbing away the grease
and  grime that obscures the crucial data. The major is now as filthy as any
combat grunt.
     When  he  gets  close  to  the end of the pier,  his eye picks  out one
cluster of crates that appear to be all of the same vintage insofar as their
salt encrustations  are of similar thickness. Down low where the rain pools,
their rough sawn wood has rotted. Up where  it is roasted by the sun, it has
warped and split.  Somewhere these crates must have  numbers stenciled  onto
them, but something else has caught his eye, something that stirs Comstock's
heart, just as the sight of the  Stars and Stripes fluttering in the morning
sun might do for a beleaguered infantryman. Those crates are proudly  marked
with  the initials of the  company  that Major Comstock  (and  most  of  his
comrades in arms  up in  Brisbane) worked for, before they were shunted,  en
masse, into  the Army's Signal Intelligence Service. The  letters are  faded
and grimy, but he would recognize them anywhere in  the world: they form the
logo,  the  corporate  identity, the masthead,  of  ETC  the Electrical Till
Corporation.


     Chapter 23 CRYPT


     The terminal is supposed to echo the lines of a row of Malay longhouses
jammed  together  side by side. A freshly painted  jetway gropes  out like a
giant lamprey and slaps its neoprene lips onto  the side  of the plane.  The
elderly   Nipponese  tour  group   makes  no  effort  to  leave  the  plane,
respectfully leaving the aisles clear for the businessmen: You go ahead, the
people we're going to visit won't mind waiting.

     On his march up the jetway, humidity and jet fuel condense onto Randy's
skin in  equal measure,  and  he begins to sweat. Then he's in the terminal,
which  notwithstanding  the Malay longhouses  allusion  has  been engineered
specifically to look like any other brand new airport terminal in the world.
The air conditioning hits like a spike  through  the head. He puts  his bags
down on the floor and stands there for a moment, collecting his wits beneath
a Leroy Neiman painting the dimensions of  a volleyball court, depicting the
sultan in action on a polo pony. Trapped in a window seat during a short and
choppy flight, he  had never made it out to the lavatory, so  he goes to one
now and pees so hard that the urinal emits a sort of yodeling noise.
     As he steps  back, perfectly satisfied,  he becomes  conscious of a man
backing away from an  adjacent urinal one of  the  Nipponese businessmen who
just  got off  the plane. A couple of months ago,  the presence  of this man
would have ruled  out Randy's taking  a  leak at all.  Today, he didn't even
notice that the guy was  there. As a longtime bashful kidney sufferer, Randy
is  delighted  to  have  stumbled  upon the  magic  remedy: not to  convince
yourself that you are a  dominating Alpha Male, but rather to be too lost in
your  thoughts  to notice other  people around you.  Bashful kidney is  your
body's  way of telling you that you're  thinking  too hard, that you need to
get off the campus and go get a fucking job.
     "You were looking at the Ministry of Information site?" the businessman
says. He is in a perfect charcoal grey pinstripe suit,  which he  wears just
as easily and comfortably as Randy  does his souvenir t shirt from the fifth
Hackers Conference, surfer's jams, and Teva sandals.
     "Oh!" Randy  blurts, annoyed with himself. "I completely forgot to look
for it." Both  men laugh. The  Nipponese  man produces a business card  with
some deft sleight of hand. Randy has to rip open his nylon and velcro wallet
and delve  for his. They exchange cards in the traditional  Asian two handed
style, which Avi has forced Randy to practice until he gets it nearly right.
They  bow  at  each  other,  triggering  howls from  the  nearest  couple of
computerized self flushing urinals.  The bath  room door  swings open and an
aged Nip wanders in, a precursor of the silver horde.
     Nip is the word used by Sergeant Sean Daniel McGee, U.S. Army, Retired,
to refer to Nipponese people in his war  memoir  about Kinakuta, a photocopy
of which document Randy  is carrying  in  his bag.  It is  a terrible racist
slur.  On  the other hand, people  call British  people Brits,  and  Yankees
Yanks, all the  time. Calling a  Nipponese person  a  Nip is  just  the same
thing, isn't it? Or is it  tantamount  to calling a Chinese  person a Chink?
During the hundreds of hours of meetings, and megabytes  of encrypted e mail
messages, that Randy,  Avi, John  Cantrell,  Tom Howard,  Eberhard Föhr, and
Beryl have  exchanged, getting Epiphyte(2) off the ground, each of them  has
occasionally,  inadvertently, used the word Jap as shorthand for Japanese in
the  same way as  they used RAM to mean Random Access Memory. But of  course
Jap is a horrible racist  slur too. Randy figures it all has to do with your
state  of  mind  at the time you utter  the  word. If  you're just trying to
abbreviate,  it's not a slur. But if  you are fomenting  racist  hatreds, as
Sean  Daniel  McGee  occasionally  seems  to  be  not  above  doing,  that's
different.
     This particular Nipponese individual is  identified, on  his  card,  as
GOTO Furudenendu  ("Ferdinand  Goto").  Randy, who  has spent  a lot of time
recently puzzling over organizational  charts of certain important Nipponese
corporations, knows already that he is a vice president for special projects
(whatever that means) at Goto Engineering. He also knows that organizational
charts  of  Nipponese  companies are  horseshit and  that  job  titles  mean
absolutely nothing. That he has the same surname as the guy  who founded the
company is presumably worth taking note of.
     Randy's card says that he is Randall L.  WATERHOUSE ("Randy") and  that
he  is  vice  president  for  network  technology  development  at  Epiphyte
Corporation.
     Goto and Waterhouse stroll out of the washroom and start to follow  the
baggage  claim icons  that are strung across the terminal like bread crumbs.
"You have  jet lag now?" Goto asks  brightly  following  (Randy  assumes)  a
script from an English textbook. He's a  handsome  guy with a winning smile.
He's probably in his forties, though  Nipponese people seem  to have a whole
different aging algorithm so this might be way off.
     "No," Randy  answers.  Being  a nerd, he answers  such questions badly,
succinctly, and truthfully.  He  knows that Goto essentially does  not  care
whether  Randy has jet lag or not. He is vaguely  conscious that Avi,  if he
were here, would use  Goto's  question as it  was intended as an opening for
cheery social batter. Until he reached thirty, Randy felt bad about the fact
that he was not socially deft. Now he doesn't give a damn. Pretty soon he'll
probably start being proud of  it. In the meantime, just for the sake of the
common enterprise,  he tries  his best.  "I've actually  been in Manila  for
several days, so I've had plenty of time to adjust."
     "Ah! Did your activities in Manila go well?" Goto fires back.
     "Yes, very well,  thank you,"  Randy lies, now that  his social skills,
such  as they  are,  have had  a moment to  get  unlimbered.  "Did you  come
directly from Tokyo?"
     Goto's  smile freezes  in place  for a moment,  and he hesitates before
saying, "Yes.''
     This  is,   at   root,  a  patronizing  reply.   Goto   Engineering  is
headquartered in Kobe and they would  not fly out of the Tokyo airport. Goto
said yes anyway, because, during that moment of hesitation, he realized that
he was just  dealing with a Yank,  who, when he  said "Tokyo," really  meant
"the Nipponese home islands" or "wherever the hell you come from."
     "Excuse me," Randy says, "I meant to say Osaka."
     Goto grins brilliantly and seems to execute a tiny suggestion of a bow.
"Yes! I came from Osaka today."
     Goto and Waterhouse drift  apart from each other at the luggage  claim,
exchange grins  as they  breeze through immigration, and run into each other
at  the  ground transportation  section.  Kinakutan  men in brilliant  white
quasinaval  uniforms with  gold  braid  and white  gloves  are  buttonholing
passengers, proffering transportation to the local hotels.
     "You are staying at the Foote Mansion also?" Goto says.  That being the
luxury hotel in Kinakuta. But he knows the answer already tomorrow's meeting
has been planned as exhaustively as a space shuttle launch.
     Randy  hesitates.  The  largest Mercedes Benz he's  ever seen has  just
pulled up to the curb, condensed moisture not merely fogging its windows but
running down them in literal streamlines.  A driver  in Foote Mansion livery
has  erupted from it to divest Mr. Goto of his luggage, Randy knows that  he
need only make  a  subtle  move toward that car  and he will be whisked to a
luxury hotel  where he can take a shower, watch TV  naked  while  drinking a
hundred dollar bottle of French wine, go swimming, get a massage.
     Which is precisely the problem. He can  already feel himself wilting in
the equatorial heat. It's too early to go soft. He's only been awake for six
or  seven  hours.  There's work to be done. He forces himself to stand up at
attention, and the effort makes him break a sweat so palpably that he almost
expects to moisten  everything within a radius  of  several meters. "I would
enjoy sharing a ride to the hotel with you," he says, "but I have one or two
errands to run first."
     Goto understands. "Perhaps drinks this evening."
     "Leave me a message," Randy says. Then Goto's waving at him through the
smoked  glass of the  Mercedes as it pulls seven gees  away  from the  curb.
Randy does a one eighty, goes back inside to the halal Dunkin' Donuts, which
accepts eight currencies, and sates  himself.  Then  he reemerges  and turns
imperceptibly toward a line  of taxis. A driver hurls himself bodily towards
Randy  and  tears his  garment  bag  loose  from  his shoulder. "Ministry of
Information," Randy says.
     In the long run,  it  may, or may not, be a good idea for the Sultanate
of  Kinakuta  to  have  a gigantic  earthquake  ,  volcano  , tsunami ,  and
thermonuclear weapon  proof Ministry of Information with a cavernous sub sub
basement  crammed with  high powered computers and data  switches.  But  the
sultan has decided that it would be sort of cool. He has hired some alarming
Germans to design it, and Goto Engineering to  build it. No  one, of course,
is more familiar with staggering  natural disasters than the Nipponese, with
the  possible  exception  of  some peoples who are now extinct and therefore
unable to bid on jobs like this. They also know a thing or two  about having
the shit bombed out of them, as do the Germans.
     There  are  subcontractors, of  course, and  a plethora of consultants.
Through some miraculous feat of fast talking, Avi managed to land one of the
biggest consulting contracts:  Epiphyte(2)  Corporation  is  doing  "systems
integration"  work,  which means plugging together a bunch  of junk made  by
other  people,  and  overseeing  the  installation  of  all  the  computers,
switches, and data lines.
     The  drive to the site is surprisingly short. Kinakuta City  isn't that
big, hemmed in as it is by steep mountain ranges, and the sultan has endowed
it with plenty of eight lane superhighways. The taxi blasts across the plain
of  reclaimed  land on which the  airport is built, swings  wide around  the
stump of Eliza Peak, ignoring two  exits for Technology City, then turns off
at an unmarked exit. Suddenly they are stuck in a queue of empty dump trucks
Nipponese  behemoths emblazoned  with  the word  GOTO  in  fat  macho  block
letters. Coming towards them is  a stream of other trucks that are identical
except  that these are fully laden with stony rubble.  The taxi driver pulls
onto the right shoulder and zooms past trucks for about half a mile. They're
heading  up Randy's  ears pop once.  This  road  is built on the floor  of a
ravine that climbs up into one  of the mountain ranges. Soon they are hemmed
in  by vertiginous  walls of  green, which  act like a  sponge,  trapping an
eternal cloud of mist, through which sparks of brilliant color are sometimes
visible. Randy can't  tell whether they  are  birds or flowers. The contrast
between  the  cloud forest's lush vegetation and the dirt road, battered  by
the house sized tires of the heavy trucks, is disorienting.
     The  taxi stops. The driver  turns  and looks at him expectantly. Randy
thinks for a moment that the driver has gotten lost and is looking to  Randy
for instructions. The road  terminates  here, in  a parking lot mysteriously
placed in the middle  of  the cloud forest. Randy sees half a dozen big  air
conditioned trailers  bearing the logos of  various  Nipponese,  German, and
American firms; a couple of dozen cars; as many buses. All the accoutrements
of a major construction site are here, plus  a few  extras, like two monkeys
with giant stiff penises fighting over some booty from a Dumpster, but there
is no construction site. Just a  wall of green at the end of the road, green
so dark it's almost black.
     The empty  trucks are disappearing  into that darkness.  Full ones come
out, their  headlights emerging from  the mist and  gloom first, followed by
the colorful displays that the drivers have built onto the radiator grilles,
followed by the highlights on their chrome and glass, and finally the trucks
themselves. Randy's eyes adjust, and he  can see now that he is staring into
a cavern, lit up by mercury vapor lamps.
     "You want me to wait?" the driver asks.
     Randy glances  at the  meter, does a  quick conversion, and figures out
that the ride  to this point has cost him a dime. "Yes,"  he says, and  gets
out of the taxi. Satisfied, the driver kicks back and lights up a cigarette.
     Randy stands  there  and  gapes into the cavern  for a  minute,  partly
because it's a hell of a thing to look at and partly because a river of cool
air is draining out  of it, which feels good. Then he trudges across the lot
and goes to the trailer marked "Epiphyte."
     It is staffed by three tiny Kinakutan women who know exactly who he is,
though they've never met him before, and who give  every indication of being
delighted  to  see him. They wear long,  loose wraps  of brilliantly colored
fabric on top of Eddie Bauer turtlenecks to ward off the nordic chill of the
air conditioners. They are all  fearsomely efficient and  poised. Everywhere
Randy  goes in  Southeast  Asia he  runs into women who ought to be  running
General Motors or  something. Before  long  they  have sent  out word of his
arrival via walkie talkie and cell phone, and presented him  with  a pair of
thick  knee  high  boots,  a  hard hat, and a cellular  phone, all carefully
labeled with his name. After a couple  of minutes, a young  Kinakutan man in
hard  hat  and muddy boots  opens the trailer's door, introduces himself  as
"Steve," and  leads Randy into the entrance of  the  cavern.  They  follow a
narrow pedestrian board walk illuminated by a string of caged lightbulbs.
     For the first hundred meters or so, the cave is just a straight passage
barely wide  enough to admit two Goto  trucks and the pedestrian lane. Randy
trails  his hand  along the wall. The stone is rough and  dusty,  not smooth
like the surface of a natural cavern, and he can see fresh gouges wrought by
jackhammers and drills.
     He can  tell by the echo that something's about  to change. Steve leads
him  out into the  cavern proper. It is, well, cavernous. Big enough  for  a
dozen of the huge trucks to  pull around in a circle  to be laden with  rock
and muck. Randy  looks up, trying to find the ceiling, but all he sees  is a
pattern of bluish white  high intensity lights, like the ones in gymnasiums,
perhaps ten meters above. Beyond that it's darkness and mist.
     Steve goes off in search of  something and leaves Randy alone for a few
minutes, which  is  useful since  it takes a long  time for him  to  get his
bearings.
     Some of the cavern wall is smooth and natural; the rest of it is rough,
marking the enlargements  conceived  by  the  engineers  and executed by the
contractor. Likewise, some of the floor is smooth, and not quite level. Some
places it has been drilled and blasted to bring it down,  others it has been
filled in to bring it up.
     This, the main chamber, looks  to be about finished. The offices of the
Ministry of Information will be here. There are two other, smaller chambers,
deeper inside the  mountain,  still being  enlarged. One  will  contain  the
engineering plant (power generators and so forth) and the other will  be the
systems unit.
     A burly blond  man in  a white hard  hat  emerges from  a hole  in  the
chamber wall: Tom Howard, Epiphyte  Corporation's vice president for systems
technology. He takes  his hard hat off and waves  to Randy, then beckons him
over.
     The passageway that leads to the systems chamber is big enough that you
could drive a delivery van down it, but it's not as straight or as level  as
the main entryway. It is  mostly occupied by a conveyor system of terrifying
power and speed, which  is carrying tons of  dripping grey muck out  towards
the  main chamber to be dumped into  the  Goto trucks. In  terms of apparent
cost and sophistication, it beats the same relationship to a normal conveyor
belt  as an  F  15 does to  a  Sopwith  Camel. It is  possible to speak  but
impossible to be  heard when  you are near it, and so Tom  and Randy and the
Kinakutan who  calls  himself  Steve  trudge silently down  the passage  for
another hundred or so meters until they reach the next cavern.
     This one is only large enough to  contain a modest one story house. The
conveyor passes right through the middle of it  and disappears  down another
hole; the muck is coming from  deeper  yet in the mountain.  It's  still too
loud in here to talk. The floor has been leveled by pouring in concrete, and
conduits rise  from it every  few  meters with  orange  cables dangling from
their open tops: optical fiber lines.
     Tom walks towards another opening in the wall. It appears that  several
subsidiary caverns branch away from this one. Tom  leads  Randy  through the
opening, then turns to put a hand on his arm and steady him: they are at the
top of a steep wooden staircase that has been built down  a nearly  vertical
shaft that descends a good five meters or so.
     "What you just saw is the  main switch room," Tom says. "That'll be the
largest  router in the world when it's  finished. We're using some  of these
other chambers to install  computers and mass  storage systems.  The world's
largest RAID, basically, buffered with a big, big RAM cache."
     RAID means  Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks; it is a  way to store
vast quantities of information cheaply and reliably, and exactly the kind of
thing you would want to have in a data haven.
     "So  we're still  cleaning  out  some  of  these  other chambers,"  Tom
continues. "We  discovered something, down here, that  I thought  you'd find
interesting." He turns around and begins to descend  the staircase. "Did you
know that  these  caves  were used  as an air raid shelter by the  Japanese,
during the war?"
     Randy has  been  carrying the map page from his photocopied book around
in his pocket. He unfolds it and holds it up near a lightbulb. Sure  enough,
it  includes  a  site,  up in  the mountains,  labeled ENTRANCE TO  AIR RAID
SHELTER & COMMAND POST.
     "And a command post?" Randy says.
     "Yeah. How'd you know that?"
     "Interlibrary loan," Randy says.
     "We didn't know it until we got here and found  all of these old cables
and  electrical shit strung around the place.  We had to tear  it  out so we
could string in our own."
     Randy begins to descend the steps.
     "This shaft was full of rocks," Tom says, "but we could see wires going
down into it, so we knew something had to be down here."
     Randy looks  nervously at the ceiling. "Why  was it  full of rocks? Was
there a cave in?"
     "No," Tom says, "the Japanese soldiers  did it.  They threw  rocks down
the shaft until  it was  full. It took  a dozen of our laborers two weeks to
pull all the rocks out by hand."
     "So, what did the wires lead to?"
     "Lightbulbs,"  Tom   says,   "they  were   just  electrical   wires  no
communications."
     "Then what was it they  were trying to  hide down here?" Randy asks. He
has almost reached the bottom of the staircase, and he can see that there is
a room sized cavity.
     "See for yourself" Tom says, and flicks a light switch.
     The cavity is  about the  size of a  one car  garage, with a nice level
floor. There is a wooden  desk, chair, and filing cabinet, fuzzy with  fifty
years' growth of grey green fungus. And there is a metal footlocker, painted
olive drab, stenciled with Nipponese characters.
     "I  forced the lock  on this  thing," Tom  says. He steps  over  to the
footlocker and flips the lid open. It is filled with books.
     "You were  expecting maybe  gold  bars?"  Tom  says,  laughing  at  the
expression on Randy's face.
     Randy sits down on the  floor  and grabs  his ankles. He's staring open
mouthed at the books in the chest.
     "You okay?" Tom asks. "Heavy, heavy deja vu," Randy says. "From this?"
     "Yeah," Randy says, "I've seen this before."
     "Where?"
     "In my grandmother's attic."


     ***


     Randy  finds  his way up  out  of the  network of caverns and  into the
parking lot. The  warm  air feels good  on his skin,  but by the time he has
reached the Epiphyte Corp. trailer to turn in his hard hat and boots, he has
begun  to sweat  again. He bids good  bye to the three women who work there,
and once again is struck by their attentiveness, their solicitousness.  Then
he remembers that he is  not just some interloper. He is a shareholder,  and
an important officer, in the corporation that employs them he is paying them
or oppressing them, take your pick.
     He trudges  across the parking lot, moving  very  slowly, trying not to
get  that metabolic furnace  het up. A  second taxi has pulled alongside the
one  that  is  waiting for Randy, and the drivers  are  leaning out of their
windows shooting the breeze.
     As  Randy  approaches his taxi,  he happens to glance  back towards the
entrance of  the  cavern.  Framed  in  its  dark  maw,  and  dwarfed  by the
mountainous  shapes of  the  Goto  dump  trucks, is  a solitary man,  silver
haired, stooped, but trim and almost  athletic looking in a warmup suit  and
sneakers. He is standing with his back to  Randy, facing the cavern, holding
a long spray of flowers. He seems rooted in the mud, perfectly motionless.
     The front  door of the  Goto  Engineering  trailer flies open.  A young
Nipponese  man in a white  shirt, striped tie, and orange  hard hat descends
the  stairs and moves briskly towards the old man with  the flowers. When he
is still some distance away, he stops, puts his  feet together, and executes
a  bow.  Randy hasn't spent  enough time  around Nipponese to understand the
minutiae, but  this looks  to  him  like an extraordinarily  major  bow.  He
approaches the old man with a bright smile and holds one beckoning hand  out
towards the Goto  trailer. The old  man seems  disoriented  maybe the cavern
doesn't  look  like it  used  to  but  after a  few  moments  he  returns  a
perfunctory bow and allows the young  engineer to lead him out of the stream
of traffic.
     Randy gets in his taxi and says, "Foote Mansion," to the driver.
     He has been harboring an illusion that he will read Sean Daniel McGee's
war memoir slowly and thoroughly, from beginning to end,  but  this  has now
gone the way of all illusions. He hauls the photocopied stack out of his bag
during the  drive to the hotel and begins ruthless  triage. Most  of it  has
nothing to do  with Kinakuta at all it's about McGee's  experiences fighting
in New Guinea and the Philippines. McGee is no Churchill, but he does have a
distant  blarney tinged narrative talent, which  makes  even banal anecdotes
readable. His skills as  raconteur must have made  him  a big hit around the
bar at  the NCOs' Club; a  hundred tipsy sergeants must have  urged  him  to
write some of this shit down if he ever made it back to South Boston alive.
     He did make it back, but unlike most of the other GIs who  were  in the
Philippines on V J  day, he didn't go  straight back home. He took  a little
detour  to  the  Sultanate of Kinakuta, which was still home to  almost four
thousand  Nipponese troops. This explains an oddity about  his book. In most
war memoirs, V E Day or V J Day happens on the last page, or at least in the
last chapter, and then our  narrator goes home and buys a Buick. But V J day
happens about two  thirds of the way through Sean Daniel  McGee's book. When
Randy sets aside  the  pre August 1945 material, an ominously thick stack of
pages remains. Clearly, Sergeant McGee has something to get off his chest.
     The Nipponese garrison on Kinakuta had  long since been bypassed by the
war, and  like the other bypassed garrisons, had turned  what  energies they
had  left  to vegetable  farming,  and  waiting for the  extremely  sporadic
arrivals of  submarines, which, towards  the close of the war, the Nipponese
used to haul the most extremely vital cargo and to ferry certain desperately
needed specialists, like airplane mechanics, from one place to another. When
they got Hirohito's broadcast  from Tokyo, ordering  them to  lay down their
arms, they did so dutifully but (one has to suspect) gladly.
     The only  hard part was finding someone to surrender to. The Allies had
concentrated on planning the invasion of the  Nipponese home islands, and it
took them a while to get troops out to the bypassed garrisons like Kinakuta.
McGee's account of the confusion  in Manila is mordant at this point  in the
book McGee  starts to lose his patience, and  his charm.  He starts to rail.
Twenty pages  later, he's sloshing  ashore  at Kinakuta  City.  He stands at
attention while his company captain accepts the  surrender of  the Nipponese
garrison. He posts a guard around  the entrance  to the  cavern, where a few
diehard  Nips  have  refused  to  surrender.  He  organizes  the  systematic
disarming of the Nipponese soldiers, who are terribly emaciated, and sees to
it  that their rifles and ammunition are dumped into the ocean even as  food
and medical  supplies are  brought ashore.  He helps a  small contingent  of
engineers  string  barbed  wire  around  the  airfield,  turning  it into an
internment camp.
     Randy flips through  all of  this during the drive to  the hotel. Then,
words like "impaled" and  "screams" and "hideous" catch his eye, so he flips
back a few pages and begins to read more carefully.


     ***


     The upshot is  that the Nipponese had, since 1940, marched thousands of
tribesmen out  of  the  cool,  clean  interior  of  the island to  its  hot,
pestilential edge, and put  them to work. These slaves had enlarged  the big
cavern where the  Nipponese  built their air raid shelter  and command post;
improved the  road  to the top of Eliza Peak, where  the radar and direction
finding stations were perched; built another runway at the air field; filled
in  more of  the harbor; and died  by  thousands  of malaria,  scrub typhus,
dysentery, starvation, and overwork. These same tribesmen, or their bereaved
brothers, had then watched, from their redoubts high  in  the  mountains, as
Sean Daniel McGee and his comrades came  and stripped the Nipponese of their
armaments and concentrated them all in the airfield, guarded by a  few dozen
exhausted GIs  who were frequently drunk  or asleep.  Those tribesmen worked
around the clock, up there in the jungle, making spears, until the next full
moon illuminated the sleeping Nipponese like a searchlight. Then they poured
out  of the forest  in what  Sean  Daniel  McGee describes as "a  horde," "a
plague of wasps," "a howling army," "a black legion unleashed from the gates
of Hell," "a screaming mass," and in other ways he could never get away with
now. They flattened and disarmed the GI's, but did not hurt them. They flung
tree limbs over the barbed  wire until the fence had  become a highway,  and
then swarmed  into  the  airfield with  their  spears  at the ready. McGee's
account goes  on for about twenty pages, and, as much  as  anything else, is
the story  of  the night that one affable sergeant  from South Boston became
permanently unhinged.
     "Sir?"
     Randy is  startled to realize that the  taxi's door is open.  He  looks
around and finds that  he's under the awning of the Hotel Foote Mansion. The
door is being held open for him by a  wiry  young bellhop  with  a different
look  than  most of  the  Kinakutans Randy has encountered so far. This  kid
perfectly matches Sean Daniel McGee's description  of  a  tribesman from the
interior.
     "Thank  you," Randy  says,  and  makes a  point  of tipping the  fellow
generously.
     His  room is  all  done  up  in furniture designed  in  Scandinavia but
assembled locally from various endangered hardwoods. The view is towards the
interior mountains, but if he goes onto his tiny balcony he can see a bit of
water, a containership being unloaded, and most of the memorial garden built
by the Nipponese on the site of the massacre.
     Several  messages  and faxes  await him:  mostly  the  other members of
Epiphyte Corp., notifying  him that they  have arrived, and letting him know
in which room they can be found. Randy unpacks his bags, takes a shower, and
sends  his shirts down to the  laundry for tomorrow. Then  he  makes himself
comfortable at his little table, boots his laptop, and pulls up the Epiphyte
(2) Corporation Business Plan.


     Chapter 24 LIZARD


     Bobby Shaftoe and  his buddies  are  just out for a nice little morning
drive through the countryside.
     In Italy.
     Italy! He cannot fucking believe it. What gives?
     Not his job to know. His job has been very clearly described to him. It
has to be clearly described, because it makes no sense.
     In the good old days, back on Guadalcanal, his commanding officer would
say something like "Shaftoe, eradicate that pillbox!" and from there on out,
Bobby Shaftoe was  a free agent. He could walk, run, swim or crawl. He could
sneak up and lob in a satchel  charge,  or he could stand  off at a distance
and hose the  objective down with a flame thrower. Didn't matter as long  as
he accomplished the goal.
     The  goal  of  this  little  mission  is  completely  beyond  Shaftoe's
comprehension. They awaken him; Lieutenant Enoch  Root;  three  of the other
Marines,  including the  radio  man; and several of  the  SAS blokes  in the
middle of the night, and hustle  them down to one of the  few docks in Malta
that  hasn't  been blasted away by  the  Luftwaffe. A submarine  waits. They
climb aboard and play  cards  for about twenty four hours. Most  of the time
they are on the surface, where submarines can go a hell of a lot faster, but
from time to time they dive, evidently for the best of reasons.
     When next they are allowed up  on the  flat top of the submarine, it is
the middle  of  the  night  again. They are  in a  little cove in a parched,
rugged coastline; Shaftoe can see that much by the moonlight. Two trucks are
waiting  for them. They  open  hatches in the sub's  deck  and begin to take
stuff  out: into one of the trucks, the U.S. Marines  load a bunch  of cloth
sacks bulging with what  appears to be  all kinds  of trash. Meanwhile,  the
British Special Air Service are at work with wrenches, rags, grease and much
profanity  in the back of  the other truck, assembling something from crates
that  they  have  brought  up from  another part of  the submarine.  This is
covered up by  a tarp before Shaftoe can get a good look, but he  recognizes
it as something you'd rather have pointed away from you.
     There are a couple of dark men with mustachioes hanging around the dock
smoking  and arguing  with the skipper  of the submarine. After all  of  the
stuff is unloaded, the skipper appears to pay them with more crates from the
submarine. The men  pry a couple of them open for inspection, and appear  to
be satisfied.
     At  this point Shaftoe still  doesn't even know what continent they are
on. When he first saw the landscape he  figured Northern Africa. When he saw
the men, he figured Turkey or something.
     It is  not until the sun comes up on their little convoy, and (lying in
the back of the  truck on  top of the sacks of trash, peeking out from under
the  tarp) he is  able  to see road signs and  Christian churches,  that  he
realizes it has to  be Italy or Spain. Finally  he sees a sign pointing  the
way to ROMA and figures it's Italy. The sign points away from the midmorning
sun, so  they must be somewhere south  or  southeast of  Rome. They are also
south of some burg called Napoli.
     But he doesn't  spend a  lot of time looking. It is not encouraged. The
truck is being  driven by some fellow who speaks the language, and who stops
from time to time to converse with the natives. Some of the time this sounds
like  friendly  banter. Sometimes  it  sounds  like arguments  over  highway
etiquette.  Sometimes it is  quieter,  more guarded.  Shaftoe  figures  out,
slowly, that during these  exchanges the truck driver is  bribing someone to
let them go through.
     He finds it shocking that in a country actively embroiled in the middle
of the greatest war in history in a country run by  belligerent Fascists for
God's  sake  two truckloads of  heavily  armed enemy soldiers can just drive
around freely, protected  by  nothing except a couple of  five dollar tarps.
Criminy!  What kind of  a  sorry operation is this? He feels like leaping to
his feet, casting the tarp aside, and giving  these  Eyties a good  dressing
down. The whole place needs a good scrubbing with  toothbrushes anyway. It's
like these people aren't even trying. Now,  the Nips, think of them what you
will, at least when those guys declare war on you they mean it.
     He resists  the temptation to  upbraid  the Italians. He thinks it goes
against the orders he had thoroughly memorized  before the shock of figuring
out  that he was driving around  in an Axis country jangled everything loose
from his  brain. And if  they  hadn't come from the lips of  Colonel Chattan
himself the chap or bloke who's the commanding officer of Detachment 2702 he
wouldn't have believed them anyway.
     They are going to be putting  in  some bivouac time. They  are going to
play a lot of cards for a while. During this time, the radio man is going to
be very busy. This phase of the operation might last as long  as a week.  At
some point, it is likely that strenuous, concerted efforts to kill them will
be made  by  a  whole lot  of  Germans and,  if  they happen  to  be feeling
impetuous that day,  Italians. When this happens,  they are  to  send  out a
radio message, torch  the joint, drive to a certain field that passes for an
airstrip, and be picked up by those jaunty SAS flyboys.
     Shaftoe didn't believe a word of it at first. He pegged it as some kind
of  British  humor  thing, some  kind of  practical  joke/hazing ritual.  In
general  he doesn't know  what to make of  the Brits because they appear (in
his personal observation) to  be  the  only other people on the face  of the
earth, besides Americans, who possess a sense of  humor. He has heard rumors
that some Eastern  Europeans can do it, but he hasn't  met  any of them, and
they don't have much to yuk it up about at the  moment. In any case, he  can
never quite make out when these Brits are joking.
     Any  thought  that  this was  just a  joke evaporated when he  saw  the
quantity of armaments they were being issued. Shaftoe has found that, for an
organization devoted to shooting and blowing up people on a large scale, the
military  is  infuriatingly reticent about passing out weapons. And  most of
the  weapons  they  do  pass out  are for  shit. It is  for this reason that
Marines have long found it necessary to buy their  own tommy guns from home:
the Corps wants them to kill people, but they just won't give them the stuff
they need!
     But this Detachment 2702  thing is  a whole different outfit. Even  the
grunts are carrying  trench brooms!  And if that didn't get their attention,
the cyanide capsules sure did. And the  lecture from Chattan  on the correct
way  to blow  your  own  head off  ("you  would  be astonished  at how  many
otherwise competent chaps botch this apparently simple procedure").
     Now, Shaftoe realizes  that there is  an unspoken codicil to  Chattan's
orders:  oh, yeah,  and if  any of the Italians, who actually live in Italy,
and  who run the  place, and who are Fascists and who  are at war with us if
any of them notice you and, for some  reason, object  to  your little  plan,
whatever the fuck it  is, then  by all means kill  them. And if that doesn't
work,  please,  by  all means, kill  yourself, because you'll probably  do a
neater job of it than the Fascists will. Don't forget suntan lotion!
     Actually, Shaftoe doesn't  mind this mission. It is certainly  no worse
than  Guadalcanal. What bothers him  (he decides, making himself comfortable
on the sacks  of mysterious trash, staring up at a crack in the tarp) is not
understanding the purpose of it all.
     The rest of the platoon may or  may not be dead; he thinks he can still
hear some of them crying out, but it's hard to tell between  the pounding of
the  incoming surf  and the relentless  patter of  the machine gun.  Then he
realizes that some of them must be alive or else the Nips would not continue
to fire their gun.
     Shaftoe knows that he is closer to the gun than any of his buddies.  He
is the only one who has a chance.
     It  is  at  this  point  that  Shaftoe  makes his Big  Decision. It  is
surprisingly easy but then, really stupid decisions are always the easiest.
     He crawls  along  the log to the point that is  closest to  the machine
gun. Then he  draws  a few deep  breaths  in a row, rises to a  crouch,  and
vaults over the log! He has a clear view of the cave entrance now, the comet
shaped muzzle flash of the  machine gun tesselated  by the black grid of the
net  that  they put up  to reject incoming  grenades.  It is  all remarkably
clear. He looks back over the beach and sees motionless corpses.
     Suddenly he realizes they are  still firing the gun, not because any of
his buddies are alive,  but to use up all of their excess ammunition so that
they will not have to pack it out. Shaftoe is a grunt, and understands.
     Then the muzzle  swings abruptly towards him he has been sighted. He is
in the clear, totally exposed. He can dive into the jungle foliage, but they
will sweep it with fire  until  he is  dead. Bobby Shaftoe  plants his feet,
aims his  .45 into the cave, and begins pulling  the  trigger. The barrel of
the machine gun is pointing at him now.
     But it does not fire.
     His .45  clicks. It's empty. Everything is silent except  for the surf,
and for the screaming. Shaftoe holsters his .45 and pulls out his revolver.
     The voice that is doing the  screaming is unfamiliar.  It's  not one of
Shaftoe's buddies.
     A  Nipponese Imperial Marine bolts from the mouth of the cave, up above
the level of Shaftoe's head. The pupil of Shaftoe's right eye, the sights of
his revolver, and this Nip  are all arranged briefly along the same line for
a  moment, during  which  Shaftoe pulls the  trigger  a  couple of times and
almost certainly scores a hit.
     The  Imperial  Marine  gets  caught  in the netting and plunges  to the
ground in front of him.
     A   second  Nip  dives  out  of  the  cave  a  moment  later,  grunting
incoherently, apparently speechless with horror.  He lands wrong and  breaks
one of his leg  bones; Shaftoe can hear it snap. He  begins running  towards
the surf anyway, hobbling grotesquely on  the bad leg. He completely ignores
Shaftoe. There  is terrible bleeding from his neck and  shoulder, and  loose
chunks of flesh flopping around as he runs.
     Bobby Shaftoe holsters his revolver. He ought to shoulder his rifle and
plug the guy, but he is too confused to do anything for the moment.
     Something red flickers in the mouth of the cave. He glances up that way
and sees nothing clear enough to register against the deafening visual noise
of the jungle.
     Then he sees  the flash of red  again, and it  disappears again. It was
shaped like  a  sharpened  Y. It was shaped  like the  forked  tongue  of  a
reptile.
     Then a moving slab of living jungle explodes from the mouth of the cave
and crashes into the foliage below. The tops of the plants shake  and topple
as it moves.
     It  is out, free  and clear,  on the beach. It is low  to  the  ground,
moving on  all fours. It  pauses for a moment and flicks its  tongue towards
the Imperial Marine  who is  now  hobbling into the Pacific Ocean some fifty
feet distant.
     Sand erupts  into the air, like smoke from the burning  tires of a drag
racer, and  the lizard is rocketing across the beach. It covers the distance
to the Imperial Marine in one, two, three seconds, takes him in the backs of
the knees, takes him down hard into the surf. Then  the lizard  is  dragging
the dead Nip  back up onto  the land.  It stretches him out there  among the
dead Americans, walks around him a couple of times, flicking its tongue, and
finally starts to eat him.
     "Sarge! We're here!" says Private Flanagan.  Before he even  wakes  up,
Bobby Shaftoe notices that Flanagan is speaking  in  a normal voice and does
not  sound  scared  or  excited.  Wherever  "here"  is, it's  not  someplace
dangerous. They are not under attack.
     Shaftoe opens his eyes just as  the tarp is being peeled back from  the
open top of the  truck. He stares straight up  into a blue  Italian sky torn
around  the edges by the scrabbling branches of  desperate trees. "Shit!" he
says.
     "What's wrong, Sarge?"
     "I just always say that when I wake up," Shaftoe says.


     ***


     Their new home  turns out  to be an old stone farm building in an olive
farm, plantation, orchard or whatever the fuck you call a place where olives
are  grown. If this building were in Wisconsin, any cheesehead who passed by
would peg it as abandoned. Here, Shaftoe is not so sure. The roof has partly
collapsed into the building under the killing weight of  its red clay tiles,
and the  windows and  doorways  yawn,  open  to  the elements.  It's  a  big
structure, big enough that after several hours of sledgehammer work they are
able to drive one  of the trucks inside and conceal it from airborne snoops.
They unload the  sacks of trash from the other  truck. Then  the Italian guy
drives it away and never comes back.
     Corporal Benjamin, the radio man, gets busy  clambering up  olive trees
and stringing  copper wires around the place. The blokes of the  SAS  go out
and  reconnoiter while  the guys of the Marine Corps open the sacks of trash
and start spreading them around. There are several  months' worth of Italian
newspapers. All of them have been opened, rearranged, haphazardly  refolded.
Articles have been torn out, other articles circled or annotated in  pencil.
Chattan's orders are beginning to filter back into Shaftoe's brain; he heaps
these newspapers in the corners of the barn, oldest  ones  first, newer ones
on top.
     There is a whole sack filled with cigarette butts, carefully  smoked to
the nub. They  are of a  Continental brand  unfamiliar to  Shaftoe.  Like  a
farmer broadcasting seeds, he carries  this sack around the premises tossing
handfuls onto the ground, concentrating mostly on places where  people  will
actually work:  Corporal  Benjamin's table and another makeshift  table they
have  set up  for  eating and playing poker.  Likewise with a salad of  wine
corks and beer caps. An equal number of wine and beer bottles are flung, one
by  one,  into a dark and unused  corner of the barn. Bobby Shaftoe  can see
that this is the most satisfying work he will ever get, so he takes it over,
and flings  those bottles like a Green Bay  Packer quarterback firing spiral
passes into the sure hands of his plucky tight ends.
     The blokes come  back from reconnoitering  and there  is a  swappage of
roles; the Marines now  go out to familiarize themselves  with the territory
while  the SAS continue  unloading garbage. In an hour's worth  of wandering
around, Sergeant Shaftoe and Privates Flanagan and Kuehl determine that this
olive ranch is on a long skinny shelf of land that runs roughly north south.
To the west, the territory rises up steeply toward a conical peak that looks
suspiciously like a volcano. To the east, it drops, after  a few miles, down
towards  the  sea.  To the  north,  the plateau  dead ends  in  some  nasty,
impassable  scrubland,  and  to  the  south  it  opens  up on  more  farming
territory.
     Chattan wanted him to find a vantage point on the bay, as convenient as
possible to the barn. Toward sunset,  Shaftoe finds  it: a rocky outcropping
on the slopes of the volcano, half an hour's walk northeast of the  barn and
maybe five hundred feet above it in altitude.
     He and his Marines almost don't find their way back to the barn because
it has been  so well  hidden  by this point. The  SAS  have put  up blackout
shades over every opening, even  the  small chinks in the collapsed roof. On
the inside, they have settled in comfortably to the pockets of usable space.
With  all  of the  litter (now  enhanced  with  chicken  feathers and bones,
tonsorial trimmings  and  orange  peels)  it looks like they've been  living
there for a year, which, Shaftoe guesses, is the whole point.
     Corporal  Benjamin has about a  third of the  place to himself. The SAS
blokes keep calling  him a lucky sod. He has his transmitter set up now, the
tubes  glowing warmly, and he has an unbelievable amount of  paperwork. Most
of it's old and fake, just like the cigarette butts. But after  dinner, when
the sun is down not only here but in London, he begins tapping out the Morse
code.
     Shaftoe knows Morse code, like  everyone else in the place. As the guys
and  the blokes sit around the table, anteing up for what promises to  be an
all  night Hearts  marathon,  they  keep  one  ear  cocked  towards Corporal
Benjamin's keying. What they hear  is gibberish. Shaftoe goes and looks over
Benjamin's shoulder  at one point, just to verify that  he  isn't crazy, and
sees he's right:
     XYHEL ANAOG GFQPL TWPKI AOEUT
     and so on and so forth, for pages and pages.
     The next morning they dig a latrine and then proceed to fill it halfway
with a couple of barrels of genuine  U.S. Mil. Spec. General Issue 100% pure
certified  Shit. As  per  Chattan's  instructions,  they pour the  shit in a
dollop at a time, throwing in handfuls of crumpled  Italian newspapers after
each dollop to make it  look like it got there  naturally. With the possible
exception  of  being interviewed  by Lieutenant Reagan,  this  is the  worst
nonviolent job Shaftoe has ever had to do in the service of his  country. He
gives  everyone the rest  of  the day off, except for Corporal Benjamin, who
stays up until two in the morning banging out random gibberish.
     The next day they make  the observation post look good. They take turns
marching up there and back, up and back, up and back, wearing  a  trail into
the ground, and they scatter some cigarette butts and beverage containers up
there along with  some  general issue shit and  general issue piss. Flanagan
and  Kuehl hump a footlocker up there and hide it in the  lee  of a volcanic
rock. The locker contains books of silhouettes of various Italian and German
naval  and merchant ships,  and similar spotter's  guides for  airplanes, as
well as some binoculars, telescopes,  and camera equipment,  empty notepads,
and pencils.
     Even though Sergeant  Bobby Shaftoe is for the  most part  running this
show, he  finds  it  uncannily difficult  to arrange  a  moment  alone  with
Lieutenant Enoch Root. Root has been avoiding him  ever since their eventful
flight on  the Dakota. Finally,  on about the fifth day, Shaftoe tricks him;
he and a small contingent leave Root  alone  at the  observation point, then
Shaftoe doubles back and traps him there.
     Root  is  startled  to  see  Shaftoe come  back,  but  he  doesn't  get
particularly  upset.  He lights  up an  Italian cigarette and offers Shaftoe
one. Shaftoe  finds, irritatingly enough, that he is the nervous one. Root's
as cool as always.
     "Okay," Shaftoe  says, "what did  you  see? When you looked through the
papers we planted on the dead butcher what did you see?"
     "They were all written in German," Root says.
     "Shit!"
     "Fortunately,"  Root  continues,  "I  am  somewhat  familiar  with  the
language."
     "Oh, yeah your mom was a Kraut, right?"
     "Yes, a medical missionary," Root says,  "in case that helps dispel any
of your preconceptions about Germans."
     "And your Dad was Dutch."
     "That is correct."
     "And they both ended up on Guadalcanal why?"
     "To help those who were in need."
     "Oh, yeah."
     "I also learned some Italian along the  way. There's a lot of it  going
around in the Church."
     "Fuck me," Shaftoe exclaims.
     "But  my  Italian  is  heavily  informed by  the  Latin that my  father
insisted that I learn. So I would probably sound rather old fashioned to the
locals. In fact, I would probably sound like a seventeenth century alchemist
or something."
     "Could you sound like a priest? They'd eat that up."
     "If  worse comes  to worst," Root allows, "I will try hitting them with
some God talk and we'll see what happens."
     They both puff on their  cigarettes and look  out across the large body
of water before them, which Shaftoe has learned is called the Bay of Naples.
"Well anyway," Shaftoe says, "what did it say on those papers?"
     "A lot of detailed  information about military  convoys between Palermo
and Tunis. Evidently stolen from classified German sources," Root says.
     "Old convoys, or..."
     "Convoys  that were still  in  the future,"  Root says  calmly. Shaftoe
finishes his  cigarette,  and does not speak for a  while. Finally  he says,
"Fuckin' weird." He stands up and begins walking back towards the barn.


     Chapter 25 THE CASTLE


     Just as Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse detrains,  some rakehell hits him
full in the face with a turn of brackish ice water. The barrage continues as
he walks a gauntlet of bucket slinging ne'er do  wells. But then he realizes
no  one's there. This is just an intrinsic quality of the  local atmosphere,
like fog in London.
     The staircase that leads over the tracks  to  Utter Maurby  Terminal is
enclosed  with roof and walls,  forming a gigantic organ pipe that resonates
with an infrasonic throb as it is  pummeled  by wind  and water. As he walks
into the  lower end of the staircase, the storm is suddenly peeled away from
his face and he is able to stand there for a moment and give this phenom the
full appreciation it deserves.
     Wind and water have been  whipped  into an essentially random froth  by
the storm. A microphone held up in the air would register only white noise a
complete absence of information. But when that noise  strikes the  long tube
of  the staircase, it drives a physical resonance that  manifests  itself in
Waterhouse's brain  as a low hum. The physics of the tube extract a coherent
pattern from meaningless noise! If only Alan were here!
     Waterhouse experiments by singing the harmonics of this low fundamental
tone: octave, fifth, fourth,  major third,  and so on. Each one resonates in
the  staircase to a greater or lesser degree. It is the same series of notes
made  by a brass instrument. By hopping from one note to another, Waterhouse
is able to play some passable bugle calls on the staircase. He does a pretty
decent reveille.
     "How lovely!"
     He spins around. A woman is standing  behind him, lugging a portmanteau
the size of a hay bale. She is perhaps fifty years old, with the physique of
a stove, and she  had a nice new big city permanent until a few seconds  ago
when she stepped out of  the train. Salt water  is running down her face and
neck and disappearing beneath her sturdy frock of grey Qwghlm wool.
     "Ma'am,"  Waterhouse  says.  Then he  busies  himself  with hauling her
portmanteau up to the top of the stairs. This  puts the two of them, and all
of their  luggage, on a narrow covered bridge that leads  across the  tracks
and into the terminal building. The bridge has windows in it, and Waterhouse
suffers a nauseating attack of vertigo as he looks through them, and through
the half inch of rain and saltwater that is streaming down them at any given
moment, towards the North Atlantic Ocean. This major body of water is only a
stone's throw away and is trying vigorously to get much closer. This must be
an optical illusion, but the tops of the waves  appear to be  level with the
plane on which they're standing despite the  fact  that it's at least twenty
feet off the ground. Each one of those waves  must weigh  as much  as all of
the freight trains in Great Britain combined, and  they  are rolling towards
them relentlessly, simply hammering  the living daylights out  of the rocks.
It all  makes Waterhouse want to pitch a  fit,  fall  down, and throw up. He
plugs his ears.
     "Are you a bandsman, then, I take it?" the lady enquires.
     Waterhouse turns to look at her.  Her gaze is  darting  back  and forth
around the front  of his uniform, checking the insignia. Then  she looks  up
into his face and gives him a grandmotherly smile.
     Waterhouse realizes,  in that instant, that this woman is a German spy.
Holy cow!
     "Only in peacetime, ma'am," he says. "The Navy has other uses, now, for
men with good ears."
     "Oh!" she exclaims, "you listen to things, do you?"
     Waterhouse smiles. "Ping! Ping!" he says, mimicking sonar.
     "Ah!" she says. "I am Harriett Qrtt." She holds out her hand.
     "Hugh Hughes," Waterhouse says, and shakes.
     "Pleasure.
     "All mine.
     "You'll   be  needing   a  place  to  stay,  I  suppose."  She  blushes
ostentatiously. "Forgive me.  I just assume you are bound for Outer." That's
Outer, as in Outer Qwghlm. Right now, they are on Inner Qwghlm.
     "Quite right, actually," Waterhouse says.
     Like  every  other place name  in the  British Isles,  Inner and  Outer
Qwghlm represent a gross misnomer with ancient and probably comical origins.
Inner Qwghlm  is hardly even  an island; it is joined to the main  land by a
sandbar that used to come and go with the tides, but that has been beefed up
with a causeway that carries  a  road and the railway line.  Outer Qwghlm is
twenty miles away.
     "My husband and I operate  a small bed and  breakfast," Mrs. Qrtt says.
"We  should be honored to have  an Asdic man stay with  us." Asdic is simply
the  British  acronym for what Yanks refer  to as  sonar, but every time the
word  is mentioned in the presence of  Alan, he gets a naughty look  on  his
face and goes on an unstoppable punning tear.
     So he ends  up  at the Qrtt residence. Waterhouse and Mr. and Mrs. Qrtt
spend the  evening  huddled round the  only source of heat:  a coal  burning
toaster that has been bricked into the socket of an old  fireplace. Every so
often Mr. Qrtt  opens the door and pelts the ashes with a mote of coal. Mrs.
Qrtt ferries  out the chow and spies on Waterhouse. She notices his slightly
asymmetrical walk and manages  to ferret out that he had  a spot of polio at
one point. He plays the organ they have  a  pedal powered  harmonium in  the
parlor and she remarks on that.


     ***


     Waterhouse first sees Outer  Qwghlm through  a scupper. He doesn't even
know what a scupper is, except a modality  of vomiting. The  ferry crew gave
him and  the  other  half  dozen  passengers  detailed vomiting instructions
before they fought past the Utter Maurby breakwater, the salient point being
that if you  leaned  over  the  rail, you would  almost  certainly  be swept
overboard. Much better to  get down on  all  fours and aim at a scupper. But
half the time when Waterhouse peers down one of these, he sees not water but
some distant  point  on the horizon,  or seagulls chasing the ferry, or  the
distinctive three pronged silhouette of Outer Qwghlm.
     The prongs, called Sghrs, are basaltic  columns.  This being the middle
of  the  Second World War, and  Outer Qwghlm  being the part of  the British
Isles closest  to the  action  of the  Battle of the Atlantic, they are  now
flecked  with little white radio shacks and hairy with antennas. There is  a
fourth  sghr,  much  lower than the others and easily  mistaken  for  a mere
hillock, that rises  above Outer Qwghlm's  only harbor  (and,  indeed,  only
settlement, not counting the naval base on the other  side).  On top of this
fourth  sghr  is  the  castle that  is the  nominal home  of Nigel  St. John
Gloamthorpby  Woadmire and that is to be the new  headquarters of Detachment
2702.
     Five minutes' walk encompasses the whole town. A furious rooster chases
a feeble sheep down the main street. There is snow at the higher elevations,
but just  grey slush down here,  which  is indistinguishable  from  the grey
cobblestones  until  you  step  on  it  and  fall  down  on  your  ass.  The
Encyclopedia Qwghlmiana  had made much use of the definite article the Town,
the  Castle,  the  Hotel,  the  Pub, the Pier.  Waterhouse stops  in  at the
Shithouse to deal with some aftershocks of the sea voyage, and then walks up
the  Street. The Automobile pulls up  alongside  and offers him a  ride;  it
turns out to be the Taxi, too.  It takes him round the Park where he notices
the Statue (ancient Qwghlmians thrashing hapless Vikings); this gesture that
does not go unnoted by  the Taxi Driver, who veers into the Park to give him
a better look.
     The Statue is  the  sort  that  has  a great  deal to say and covers  a
correspondingly  large expanse  of real estate. Its  pedestal is  a  slab of
native basalt, covered on at least one side with what Waterhouse recognizes,
from the  Encyclopedia, as Qwghlmian runes. To an ignorant philistine, these
might look like an endless, random series of sans serif Xs, Is, Vs, hyphens,
asterisks, and upside down Vs. But it is an enduring source of pride to
     "We  didn't  care for  those Romans  and  that  Julius Caesar  fellow,"
observes  the taxi  driver, "and we weren't too  taken with  their  alphabet
either."
     Indeed the Encyclopedia Qwghlmiana features a lengthy article about the
local system of runes.  The  author of this article  has such a  chip on his
shoulder that the thing is almost physically painful  to read. The Qwghlmian
practice of eschewing the use of curves and loops, forming all glyphs out of
straight lines, far from being crude as some English scholars  have asserted
gives the script a limpid austerity.  It is an admirably functional style of
writing in a place where (after all  the trees were cut down by the English)
most  of  the  literate  intellectual  class suffered from chronic bilateral
frostbite.

     Waterhouse has rolled  down the window so that  he  can  get  a clearer
view; apparently  someone has lost  the Squeegee.  The chill breeze  washing
over his face finally begins to clear  away  his seasickness, to  the  point
where  he begins to wonder how  he should go  about making contact  with the
Whore.
     Then he realizes, with some disappointment, that if the Whore  has half
a brain in her head, she's across the island at the naval base.
     "Who's  the wretch?"  Waterhouse asks. He  points  to a  corner of  the
statue, where a  scrawny,  downtrodden loser,  with  an iron  collar  welded
around his  neck and a chain dangling from that, quivers  and  quails at the
carnage  being  meted out  by  the  strapping  Qwghlmian he  men. Waterhouse
already knows the answer, but he can't resist asking.
     "Hakh!" blurts the taxi driver, as if he is working up a loogie. "He is
from Inner Qwghlm, I can only suppose."
     "Of course."
     This exchange seems to have put the  driver  into a  foul  and vengeful
mood that can only be assuaged with  some fast driving. There are a dozen or
more  switchbacks in the road  up to the Castle, each  one glazed with black
ice and fraught with mortal danger. Waterhouse is glad he's not  walking it,
but  the switchbacks  and the  skating motion  of the taxi revive his motion
sickness.
     "Hakh!" the driver  says, when they are about three quarters of the way
up, and nothing has  been said for several minutes. "They  practically  laid
out the welcome  mat for the Romans. They spread their legs for the Vikings.
There are probably Germans over there now!"
     "Speaking  of bile,"  Waterhouse says, "I need  you to  pull over. I'll
walk from here."
     The  driver is  startled and miffed,  but he  relents  when  Waterhouse
explains that the alternative is  a  lengthy  cleanup  job.  He  even drives
Duffel up to the top of the sghr and drops it off.
     Detachment 2702 arrives at the Castle some fifteen minutes later in the
person  of Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse USN, who is serving as  the advance
party. The  walk gives him  time to get  his story straight, to get  himself
into character. Chattan has warned him that there will be servants, and that
they will  notice things,  and that they will gossip. It would be  much more
convenient if the  servants could simply be packed  off  to the mainland for
the  duration, but this  would be a  discourtesy  to the  duke. "You  will,"
Chattan said, "have to work out a modus vivendi." Once Waterhouse had looked
this term up, he agreed heartily.
     The castle is a mound of rubble about the size of the Pentagon. The lee
corner has been fitted  out with a functional roof, electrical wiring, and a
few other  frills  such as doors and windows.  In  this  area, which  is all
Waterhouse gets to see for that first  afternoon and evening, you can forget
you are on Outer Qwghlm and pretend that you are in some greener and balmier
place such as the Scottish Highlands.
     The next morning, accompanied by the butler, Ghnxh, he strikes out into
other parts  of the building  and is delighted to  find that you can't  even
reach them without going outside; the internal connecting passages have been
mortared  shut  to  stanch  the seasonal migrations  of  skrrghs (pronounced
something  like "skerries"), the  frisky,  bright  eyed, long tailed mammals
that  are  the mascot  of  the  islands.  This  compartmentalization,  while
inconvenient, will be good for security.
     Both Waterhouse and Ghnxh are encased in planklike wrappings of genuine
Qwghlm wool,  and  the latter carries the GALVANICK LUCIPHER.  The Galvanick
Lucipher is of antique design. Ghnxh, who is  about a hundred years old, can
only  smile in condescension  at Waterhouse's U.S.  Navy flashlight. In  the
sotto  voce tones one might  use  to correct an enormous  social  gaffe,  he
explains that the galvanick lucipher is of such a superior design as to make
any further reference to the Navy model a grating embarrassment for everyone
concerned. He leads Waterhouse back to a special room behind the room behind
the room behind the  room behind the  pantry, a  room that exists solely for
maintenance  of the  galvanick lucipher and  the storage  of  its parts  and
supplies.  The  heart  of the device is a hand  blown  spherical  glass  jar
comparable  in  volume  to a gallon  jug. Ghnxh,  who suffers  from a pretty
advanced case of either hypothermia or Parkinson's, maneuvers a glass funnel
into the neck of the jar. Then  he wrestles a glass carboy from a shelf. The
carboy, labeled  AQUA REGIA,  is filled with a  fulminant orange liquid.  He
removes its glass  stopper, hugs it,  and heaves  it over so that the orange
fluid begins to glug out  into the funnel and thence into the jar.  Where it
splashes out onto  the tabletop, something very much like smoke  curls up as
it eats holes just  like the  thousands of  other holes  already there.  The
fumes  get  into  Waterhouse's  lungs;  they  are astoundingly corrosive. He
staggers out of the room for a while.
     When  he ventures back, he finds Ghnxh  whittling an electrode from  an
ingot of pure carbon. The jar of aqua regia has been capped off  now, and  a
variety  of anodes, cathodes, and other working  substances are suspended in
it,  held in place  by clamps of hammered  gold. Thick wires, in  insulating
sheathes of hand  knit asbestos,  twist out of the jar and into the business
end of the galvanick lucipher: a copper salad bowl whose mouth is closed off
by a Fresnel lens like the ones on a lighthouse. When  Ghnxh gets his carbon
whittled to just the right size and shape, he fits it into a little hatch in
the side of this bowl, and casually throws a Frankensteinian blade switch. A
spark pops across the contacts like a firecracker.
     For a moment,  Waterhouse thinks  that  one  wall of the  building  has
collapsed,  exposing  them to the  direct light of  the sun. But  Ghnxh  has
simply  turned on the galvanick lucipher, which soon becomes about ten times
brighter,  as  Ghnxh  adjusts  a  bronze  thumbscrew.  Crushed  with  shame,
Waterhouse  puts  his  Navy  flashlight  back  into its prissy  little  belt
holster, and precedes Ghnxh out of the room,  the galvanick lucipher casting
palpable warmth on the back of his neck. "We've got about two  hours  before
she goes dead on us," Ghnxh says significantly.
     They work out a modus vivendi,  all right: Waterhouse kicks an old door
open and then Ghnxh strides  into the room  that  is on the  other  side and
sweeps the beam of the lantern around as if it were a flame thrower, driving
back  dozens  or   hundreds  of  squealing  skerries.   Waterhouse  clambers
cautiously into the  room, typically  making  his  way  over  the  collapsed
remnants of whatever roof or story used to be overhead. He gives the place a
quick inspection, trying to gauge how much effort would be required to  make
it liveable for any more advanced organism.
     Half of the castle has, at one point  or another, been burned down by a
combination of Barbary corsairs,  lightning bolts,  Napoleon, and smoking in
bed. The Barbary corsairs  did the best  job of it (probably just trying  to
stay  warm),  or  maybe  it's just  that  the  elements have  had  longer to
decompose  what little was  left behind by the flames. In any  case, in that
section of the castle, Waterhouse finds  a  place where there's not too much
rubble to shovel out, and where they can  quickly enclose  an adequate space
with a  combination of tarps and planks. It is diametrically opposed to  the
part of the castle  that is still inhabited,  which  exposes  it  to  winter
storms but  protects it from the  prying eyes of the staff. Waterhouse paces
off some rough measurements,  then goes to his room, leaving Ghnxh to see to
the decommissioning of the galvanick lucipher.
     Waterhouse sketches out  some plans for the upcoming work, at long last
putting his hitherto misspent engineering skills to some use. He draws  up a
bill of required materials, naturally involving a good many numbers:
     100 8' 2 x 4s is a typical entry. He writes out the list a second time,
in words not  numbers: ONE HUNDRED EIGHT FOOT TWO  BY FOURS. This wording is
potentially confusing,  so  he  changes it to TWO BY FOUR BOARDS ONE HUNDRED
COUNT LENGTH EIGHT FEET.
     Next he  pulls  a  sheet  of  what looks  like  ledger  paper,  divided
vertically into groups of five  columns.  Into these columns  he transcribes
the message, ignoring spaces:



     COUNT LENGT HEIGH TFEET
     and so on. Wherever he encounters a letter  J he writes I in its stead,
so that JOIST comes out as IOIST. He only uses every third line of the page.
     Ever  since he left Bletchley Park, he has been carrying several sheets
of onionskin paper around in his breast pocket; when he sleeps, he puts them
under his  pillow. Now  he takes them out and selects one  page, which has a
serial  number  typed across the top  and  is otherwise covered with  neatly
typed letters like this:



     and so on, all the way down to the bottom of the page.
     These sheets were typed up by a Mrs. Tenney,  an aged vicar's  wife who
works  at Bletchley  Park. Mrs. Tenney  has a peculiar job which consists of
the following: she takes  two sheets of  onionskin paper and puts a sheet of
carbon paper between them and  rolls them into a  typewriter.  She  types  a
serial number at the top. Then she turns the crank on a device used in bingo
parlors, consisting of a spherical cage containing twenty five wooden balls,
each with a letter printed on it (the  letter J is not used). After spinning
the cage the exact number  of  times specified in the procedure  manual, she
closes her eyes, reaches through  a hatch in the cage, and removes a ball at
random. She reads the letter off  the  ball and types it, then  replaces the
ball,  closes the hatch, and repeats the process. From time to time, serious
looking  men come into the  room,  exchange pleasantries with her, and  take
away the sheets that she has produced. These sheets end up in the possession
of men like Waterhouse, and men  in infinitely more desperate  and dangerous
circumstances, all over the world. They are called one time pads.
     He  copies  the  letters from  the  one time pad into  the  empty lines
beneath his message:



     When he is finished, two out of every three lines are occupied.
     Finally, he returns to the top of  the page one last time and begins to
consider  the letters two at a  time.  The first letter in the message is T.
The  first  letter from the  one time pad, directly  below  it  in the  same
column, is A.
     A is the first letter  in  the alphabet and so Waterhouse, who has been
doing this cipher stuff for much too long, thinks of it as being  synonymous
with the number 1. In the same way, T is equivalent to 19 if you are working
in a J less alphabet. Add 1 to 19 and you get 20, which is the letter U. So,
in the first column beneath T and A, Waterhouse writes a U.
     The  next  vertical  pair is W and T,  or  22 and 19,  which  in normal
arithmetic add up to 41, which has no letter equivalent; it's too large. But
it  has  been many years  since  Waterhouse  did normal arithmetic.  He  has
retrained his  mind  to work in modular arithmetic specifically, modulo  25,
which  means  that  you  divide  everything  by  25  and  consider only  the
remainder.  41 divided by 25 is 1 with a remainder of 16. Throw  away the  1
and the 16 translates  into the letter Q, which is what Waterhouse writes in
the second column. In the third column, O and H give 14 + 8 = 22 which is W.
In the fourth, B and O give 2 + 14 = 16 which is Q. And in the fifth, Y  and
P give 24 + 15 which  is 39.  39 divided by 25  is 1 with a remainder of 14.
Or, as Waterhouse would phrase it, 39 modulo 25 equals 14. The letter for 14
is O. So the first code group looks like









     By adding the random sequence ATHOP onto the meaningful sequence TWOBY,
Waterhouse has produced undecipherable gibberish. When he has enciphered the
entire message in this way, he takes  out a new page and copies out only the
ciphertext UQWQO and so on.
     The  duke has  a cast iron telephone which  he has put  at Waterhouse's
disposal. Waterhouse heaves it out of its cradle, rings the operator, places
a call across the island to the naval station,  and  gets through to a radio
man. He reads the ciphertext message to him letter by  letter. The radio man
copies it down and informs Waterhouse that it will be transmitted forthwith.
     Very  soon, Colonel Chattan,  down in  Bletchley Park,  will  receive a
message  that begins with UQWQO  and goes on in that vein. Chattan possesses
the other  copy  of  Mrs.  Tenney's  one  time pad.  He will  write out  the
ciphertext  first,  using every third  line. Beneath the ciphertext  he will
copy in the text from the one time pad:






     He  will  then perform  a  subtraction  where  Waterhouse  performed an
addition. U minus A means 20 minus 1 which equals 19 which gives the  letter
T. Q minus T means 16 minus  19 which equals 3, giving us 22 which is W. And
so  on.  Having deciphered  the  whole  message,  he'll  get  to  work,  and
eventually two by fours one hundred count will show up at the Pier.


     Chapter 26 WHY


     Epiphyte Corp.'s business plan is about an inch thick, neither  fat nor
skinny  as these things  go.  The interior  pages  are slickly and  groovily
desktop published out of Avi's laptop. The covers are rugged hand laid paper
of  rice  chaff,  bamboo tailings, free range  hemp, and crystalline glacial
meltwater made by wizened artisans operating out  of a mist shrouded  temple
hewn from  living  volcanic  rock on some  island known  only to aerobically
gifted, Spandex sheathed  Left Coast travel bores. An impressionistic map of
the  South China  Sea has  been dashed  across  these covers by  molecularly
reconstructed Ming  Dynasty calligraphers  using brushes  of  combed unicorn
mane dipped into ink made of grinding down charcoal slabs fashioned by blind
stylite monks from hand charred fragments of the True Cross.
     The actual  content of the  business  plan hews  to a logical structure
straight  out  of the  Principia Mathematica. Lesser  entrepreneurs purchase
business  plan writing software: packages  of  boilerplate  text and  spread
sheets, craftily linked together so  that you need only go through  and fill
in  a few  blanks. Avi and Beryl have written enough business plans  between
the  two of  them that they can  smash them  out  from brute  memory.  Avi's
business plans tend to go something like this:
     MISSION: At [name  of  company] it is  our conviction  that [to  do the
stuff  we  want  to  do]  and  to increase shareholder value are not  merely
complementary activities they are inextricably linked.
     PURPOSE: To increase shareholder value by [doing stuff]
     EXTREMELY  SERIOUS WARNING (printed on a  separate page, in red letters
on a yellow background):  Unless  you are as smart as Johann  Karl Friedrich
Gauss, savvy as  a  half blind Calcutta bootblack,  tough as General William
Tecumseh Sherman,  rich as the Queen of England,  emotionally resilient as a
Red  Sox  fan, and as generally able to take care of yourself as the average
nuclear missile submarine commander, you should never have been allowed near
this document. Please  dispose  of  it as you would any piece of high  level
radioactive waste and then arrange with a qualified surgeon to amputate your
arms at the  elbows and  gouge your eyes from their sockets. This warning is
necessary because once, a hundred years ago, a little old  lady  in Kentucky
put a hundred dollars into a dry goods company which went belly up and  only
returned her ninety nine dollars. Ever since then the government has been on
our  asses. If you ignore this warning, read on at your peril you  are  dead
certain to  lose everything  you've  got  and live  out your  final  decades
beating back waves of termites in a Mississippi Delta leper colony.
     Still reading? Great. Now that we've scared off the lightweights, let's
get down to business.
     EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: We will raise [some money], then [do some stuff] and
increase shareholder value. Want details? Read on.
     INTRODUCTION:  [This  trend],  which  everyone  knows about, and  [that
trend], which is so incredibly arcane that you probably didn't know about it
until just now, and [this other trend over here] which might seem, at  first
blush, to  be completely unrelated, when all taken together, lead us  to the
(proprietary, secret, heavily patented, trademarked, and NDAed) insight that
we could increase  shareholder value  by  [doing  stuff]. We will  need $ [a
large  number]  and  after [not  too long]  we  will  be able to realize  an
increase in value to $ [an even larger number], unless [hell freezes over in
midsummer].
     DETAILS:
     Phase 1: After taking vows of celibacy and abstinence  and forgoing all
of our  material  possessions for homespun robes, we (viz, appended resumes)
will move into a  modest complex  of  scavenged  refrigerator boxes  in  the
central  Gobi  Desert,  where real estate is so cheap  that  we are actually
being paid to occupy it,  thereby enhancing shareholder value even before we
have actually done anything. On  a daily ration consisting of  a  handful of
uncooked rice and a ladleful of water, we will [begin to do stuff].
     Phase 2, 3, 4, . . . , n  1: We will [do more stuff, steadily enhancing
shareholder value in the process] unless [the earth is struck by an asteroid
a thousand miles in diameter, in which case certain assumptions will have to
be readjusted; refer to Spreadsheets 397 413].
     Phase n: before the ink on our Nobel Prize certificates is dry, we will
confiscate the property of our competitors, including anyone  foolish enough
to have  invested  in their pathetic companies. We will  sell  all of  these
people   into  slavery.  All  proceeds  will  be   redistributed  among  our
shareholders, who  will  hardly notice, since Spreadsheet  265  demonstrates
that, by this  time, the company will be  larger than the British  Empire at
its zenith.
     SPREADSHEETS: [Pages and pages  of numbers in  tiny print, conveniently
summarized  by  graphs  that  all  seem  to be exponential  curves screaming
heavenward,  albeit  with  enough  pseudo  random  noise  in  them  to  lend
plausibility].
     RESUMES: Just recall the opening reel of The Magnificent  Seven and you
won't have to  bother with this part;  you should crawl to us on  hands  and
knees and beg us for the privilege of paying our salaries.


     ***


     To Randy and the others,  the business plan  functions as Torah, master
calendar, motivational text, philosophical treatise. It is a dynamic, living
document.  Its spreadsheets  are palimpsests,  linked to the company's  bank
accounts and  financial records  so that they  automatically adjust whenever
money flows in or  out. Beryl handles that stuff. Avi handles  the words the
underlying,  abstract  plan, and the  concrete  details,  that  inform those
spreadsheets interpreting  the numbers. Avi's part of the  plan mutates too,
from week  to week, as he  gets new input  from articles  in  the Asian Wall
Street Journal, conversations with government officials in flyblown Shenzhen
karaoke bars, remote sensing data  pouring in from satellites,  and  obscure
technical  journals   analyzing  the  latest  advances   in   optical  fiber
technology.  Avi's brain  also  digests the  ideas of Randy  and  the  other
members of  the  group  and incorporates them into the plan.  Every quarter,
they take a  snapshot of the business plan in its current state, trowel some
Maybelline onto it, and ship out new copies to investors.
     Plan Number Five is about to be mailed simultaneous  with the company's
first anniversary. An  early draft had been sent to each of them a couple of
weeks ago in an  encrypted e mail message, which  Randy  hadn't  bothered to
read, assuming he knew its contents. But little cues that  he's picked up in
the last few  days tell him that  he'd  better find  out what the damn thing
actually says.
     He fires up  his  laptop, plugs it into  a telephone jack, opens up his
communications software, and dials a  number in California. This  last turns
out  to be  easy, because this is a modern hotel and  Kinakuta has a  modern
phone  system.  If  it  hadn't  been  easy,  it  probably  would  have  been
impossible.
     In a  small,  stuffy,  perpetually  dark,  hot plastic  scented  wiring
closet,  in a cubicled  office  suite leased  by Novus Ordo Seclorum Systems
Incorporated,  sandwiched between an escrow  company  and  a discount travel
agent in the  most banal imaginable disco  era office building in Los Altos,
California,  a modem  wakes  up  and  spews  noise  down  a  wire. The noise
eventually travels  under  the  Pacific  as a pattern of scintillations in a
filament of glass so  transparent that if the ocean itself were  made out of
the same  stuff, you'd be able to see Hawaii from California. Eventually the
information reaches Randy's computer,  which spews noise  back. The modem in
Los Altos is  one of half a dozen that are  all connected to the back of the
same  computer, an entirely typical  looking tower  PC of  a  generic brand,
which has been  running, night and day, for  about  eight  months now.  They
turned its monitor  off about seven  months ago because it  was just wasting
electricity. Then John Cantrell (who is on  the board of Novus Ordo Seclorum
Systems  Inc.,  and  made  arrangements to put  it in the company's  closet)
borrowed the monitor because one of the coders who was working on the latest
upgrade  of  Ordo needed  a second  screen.  Later, Randy  disconnected  the
keyboard and mouse because, without a monitor, only bad information could be
fed into the system. Now it is just a faintly hissing off white obelisk with
no human interface other than  a cyclopean green LED staring out over a dark
landscape of empty pizza boxes.
     But there  is  a  thick  coaxial cable connecting it to  the  Internet.
Randy's computer talks to  it for a few  moments, negotiating the terms of a
Point to Point Protocol,  or PPP connection, and  then Randy's little laptop
is part of  the Internet, too; he can send data to Los Altos, and the lonely
computer  there,  which  is  named  Tombstone, will route it in  the general
direction of any of several tens of millions of other Internet machines.
     Tombstone,  or tombstone.epiphyte.com as it is  known to the  Internet,
has  an inglorious existence as a mail  drop and  a cache for files. It does
nothing that a thousand online services couldn't do for them more easily and
cheaply.  But  Avi,   with  his  genius  for  imagining  the  most  horrific
conceivable worst case scenarios, demanded that they have their own machine,
and that Randy and the others go through its kernel code one line at a  time
to verify that  there were no security holes. In every book store window  in
the Bay Area,  piled in heaps,  were thousands of copies of  three different
books about how a famous cracker had established total control over a couple
of  well  known  online  services.  Consequently, Epiphyte  Corp. could  not
possibly  use such an  online  service for  its secret  files while  with  a
straight face saying that it was exerting due diligence on its shareholders'
behalf. Thus tombstone.epiphyte.com.
     Randy logs on and checks his mail: forty seven messages,  including one
that came two days ago from Avi (avi@epiphyte.com) that is labeled:
     epiphyteBizPlan.5.4.ordo. Epiphyte  Business  Plan,  5th  edition,  4th
draft, in a file format  that can  only be  read by [Novus] Ordo [Seclorum],
which is wholly owned by the company of the same name, but whose hard  parts
were written, as it happens, by John Cantrell.
     He tells the computer to begin downloading that file it's going to take
a while. In the  meantime, he  scrolls  through the list of other  messages,
checking  the names of their senders, subject headings, and sizes, trying to
figure  out,  first  of all,  how many of  these can  simply be  thrown away
unread.
     Two messages jump out  because they are from an address that ends  with
aol.com,  the cyberspace  neighborhood of parents and children  but never of
students, hackers, or people who actually  work in high tech. Both  of these
are from Randy's  lawyer,  who  is trying  to get Randy's  financial affairs
disentangled from Charlene's with as little rancor  as possible. Randy feels
his blood pressure  spiking,  millions  of capillaries  in the brain bulging
ominously. But they  are very short  files,  and  the  subject headings seem
innocuous, so he calms down and decides not to worry about them now.
     Five  messages originate  from computers  with extremely familiar names
systems that are  part of the  campus  computer network  he used to run. The
messages come from system administrators who  took over the reins when Randy
left, guys who long ago asked him all the easy questions, such as What's the
best place to order pizza? and  Where did you hide the staples? and have now
gotten to the  point  of e mailing him  chunks  of arcane code that he wrote
years  ago  with  questions like, Was this an error, or something incredibly
clever I  haven't figured out  yet? Randy declines to answer  those messages
just now.
     There  are about  a  dozen  messages from friends,  some  of  them just
passing along Net  humor  that  he's already  seen a hundred  times. Another
dozen from other members of Epiphyte Corp., mostly concerning the details of
their itineraries as they all converge on Kinakuta for tomorrow's meeting.
     That  leaves a  dozen or so other  messages which  belong in  a special
category that  did not  exist  until a week ago, when a new issue of  TURING
Magazine  came  out,  containing  an  article about  the Kinakuta data haven
project,  and a cover  photo of Randy on a  boat in the Philippines. Avi had
gone to some lengths to  plant this article  so that he would have something
to wave in the faces of the other participants in tomorrow's meeting. TURING
is such a visual magazine that it cannot be viewed without the protection of
welding goggles,  and  so they  insisted on  a picture.  A  photographer was
dispatched to  the Crypt,  which was found visually wanting. A tizzy ensued.
The photographer was diverted to Manila Bay where he captured Randy standing
on a boat deck next to a big reel of orange cable, a volcano rising from the
smog in  the back  ground. The magazine  won't  even be  on  newsstands  for
another  month, but the article  is on  the  Web as  of a week ago, where it
instantly  became  a subject of  discussion on  the Secret Admirers  mailing
list,  which is where all of the cool  guys like John Cantrell hang  out  to
discuss  the  very  latest  hashing  algorithms  and  pseudo  random  number
generators.  Because  Randy  happened  to  be  in  the  picture,  they  have
mistakenly fastened upon  him as being more of a prime mover  than he really
is.  This  has  spawned  a  new category  of messages  in  Randy's  mailbox:
unsolicited advice and criticism from crypto freaks worldwide. At the moment
there are fourteen such messages in his in box, eight of them from a person,
or persons, identifying himself, or themselves, as Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.
     It  would be tempting to ignore these, but the problem is that a  solid
majority of people  on the Secret Admirers mailing list are about ten  times
as smart  as Randy.  You  can check the  list anytime you want  and  find  a
mathematics  professor  in Russia slugging it out with  another  mathematics
professor in  India,  kilobyte for  kilobyte, over  some stupefyingly arcane
detail in  prime number theory, while an  eighteen  year old, tube  fed math
prodigy in Cambridge jumps  in every  few days with an even more  stupefying
explanation of why they are both wrong.
     So when people  like this send him mail,  Randy tries to at least  skim
it.  He is a little  leery of the  ones  who  identify themselves as Admiral
Isoroku Yamamoto, or with the number 56 (which  is a code meaning Yamamoto).
But just because they are political verging on flaky doesn't mean they don't
know their math.
     To: randy@tombstone.epiphyte.com
     From: 56@laundry.org
     Subject: data haven
     Do you have public key somewhere posted? I would  like to exchange mail
with you  but I don't want Paul  Comstock to  read it:) My public key if you
care to respond is
     –  BEGIN ORDO  PUBLIC  KEY  BLOCK  –  (lines and  lines  of
gibberish)
     – END ORDO PUBLIC KEY BLOCK
     Your concept of  data haven is good but has important limits.  What  if
Philippine  government shuts down your cable? Or if the good Sultan  changes
his mind, decides to nationalize your computers, read all the disks? What is
needed is  not ONE data haven but a NETWORK of data havens more robust, just
like Internet is more robust than single machine.
     Signed,
     The Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto who signs his messages thus:
     –  BEGIN  ORDO  SIGNATURE  BLOCK  –  (lines  and  lines  of
gibberish)
     – END ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK
     Randy closes that one without responding. Avi doesn't want them talking
to  Secret Admirers for  fear  that  they  will later be accused of stealing
someone's ideas, so the reply to all of these  e mails is a form letter that
Avi paid  some  intellectual property lawyer about  ten thousand dollars  to
draft.
     He reads another message simply because of the return address:
     From: root@pallas.eruditorum.org
     On a UNIX machine, "root" is the name of the most godlike of all users,
the one who can read, erase, or edit any file, who can run any program,  who
can sign up new users and  terminate  existing  ones. So receiving a message
from someone who has the  account  name "root" is like getting a letter from
someone who  has the  title "President"  or  "General"  on  his  letterhead.
Randy's been root on a few different systems, some  of which were worth tens
of millions of dollars, and professional courtesy demands  he  at least read
this message.
     I read about your project.
     Why are you doing it?
     followed by an Ordo signature block.
     One  has  to  assume  this  is  an  attempt  to  launch  some  sort  of
philosophical debate. Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet  is a
sucker's  game  because  they  almost  always  turn  out  to  be  or  to  be
indistinguishable from self righteous sixteen year olds  possessing infinite
amounts  of free time.  And  yet the "root" address either  means that  this
person is in  charge of a large computer installation, or (much more likely)
has a Finux  box on his desk  at home. Even a  home Finux user has got to be
several cuts above  your average Internet surfing dilettante. Randy opens up
a terminal window and types
     whois eruditorum.org
     and a second later gets back a block of text from the InterNIC:
     eruditorum.org (Societas Eruditorum)
     followed by a mailing address: a P.O. Box in Leipzig, Germany.
     After  that a  few contact numbers are listed.  All  of  them  have the
Seattle area code. But the three digit exchanges, after the area code,  look
familiar  to Randy,  and he recognizes  them as gateways into  a  forwarding
service, popular among the highly mobile, that  will bounce your voice mail,
faxes, etc.  to wherever you  happen  to be at the moment. Avi, for example,
uses it all the time.
     Scrolling down, Randy finds:
     Record last updated on 18 Nov 98.
     Record created on 1 Mar 90.
     The "90" jumps out. That's a prehistoric date by Internet standards. It
means that Societas Eruditorum was way  ahead of the game.  Especially for a
group based in Leipzig, which was part of East Germany until about then.
     Domain servers in listed order:
     NS.SF.LAUNDRY.ORG
     followed  by  the  dotted  quad  for laundry.org,  which  is  a  packet
anonymizer used  by  many Secret  Admirers to  render  their  communications
untraceable.
     It all adds up to nothing, yet Randy can't get away with assuming  that
this message came from a bored sixteen year  old.  He should  probably  make
some token response. But he's afraid that it'll turn out to be a come on for
some  kind of  business proposition: probably some mangy  high tech  company
that's looking for capital.
     In the  latest version  of  the business plan,  there is  probably some
explanation of why Epiphyte(2) is  building  the Crypt. Randy can simply cut
and paste  it  into an e mail reply to root@pallas.eruditorum.org.  It'll be
something   vaporous  and  shareholder  pleasing,  and  therefore  kind   of
alienating. With any luck it will discourage  this person from pestering him
anymore. Randy double clicks on Ordo's eyeball/pyramid icon, and it opens up
a  little text window on the  screen, where he  is invited to type commands.
Ordo's also got a lovely graphical  user interface, but  Randy scorns it. No
menus or buttons for him. He types
     >decrypt epiphyteBizPlan.5.4.ordo
     The computer responds
     verify your  identity: enter  the  pass  phrase  or  'bio' to  opt  for
biometric verification.
     Before Ordo will decrypt the file, it needs  to have  the private  key:
all  4096 bits  of it. The  key is stored on Randy's hard disk. But bad guys
can break into hotel rooms and read the contents of  hard disks, so  the key
itself has been encrypted. In order to decrypt it, Ordo needs the key to the
key, which (in  Cantrell's one  concession to user friendliness)  is a  pass
phrase: a string  of words, easier to remember than 4096  binary digits. But
it has to be a long phrase or else it's too easy to break.
     The last  time Randy  changed  his pass phrase, he  was reading another
World War II memoir. He types:
     >with  hoarse shouts of "banzai!"  the drunken Nips  swarmed  out of
their trenches,  their  swords  and bayonets flashing in  the beams  of  our
searchlights
     and hits the "return" key. Ordo responds:
     incorrect pass phrase
     reenter the pass phrase or "bio" to use biometric verification.
     Randy  curses and tries  it a few more times,  with  slight changes  in
punctuation. Nothing works.
     In desperation and out of curiosity, he tries:
     bio
     and the software responds:
     unable to locate biometric configuration file. Talk to Cantrell : /
     Which is of course not a normal  part of the  software.  Ordo  does not
come  with biometric verification, nor do its error messages  refer to  John
Cantrell, or anyone else, by name. Cantrell has apparently written a plug in
module, a little add on, and distributed it to his friends in Epiphyte(2).
     "Fine," Randy  says, picks up his phone, and dials John Cantrell's room
number. This  being a brand new, modern hotel, he gets a  voice  mail box in
which John has actually bothered to record an informative greeting.
     "This   is   John  Cantrell  of   Novus   Ordo  Seclorum  and  Epiphyte
Corporations. For those of you who have reached me using my  universal phone
number  and  consequently have no idea where I am:  I am in  the Hotel Foote
Mansion in the Sultanate of Kinakuta please  consult  a quality atlas. It is
four o'clock  in the afternoon, Thursday  March  twenty first. I'm  probably
down in the Bomb and Grapnel."


     ***


     The Bomb  and  Grapnel is the pirate  themed hotel bar, which is not as
cheesy  as  it sounds.  It  is  decorated  with (among  other  museum  grade
memorabilia)  several brass  cannons  that seem authentic.  John Cantrell is
seated at a corner table, looking as at home here as a man in a black cowboy
hat possibly can.  His laptop is open on the table  next to a rum drink that
has  been served  up in a soup tureen. A two foot long  straw connects it to
Cantrell's mouth. He sucks  and types. Watching incredulously  is a cadre of
tough  looking Chinese  businessmen sitting at the bar;  when they see Randy
coming in, carrying his own laptop, they buzz up. Now there's two of them!

     Cantrell looks  up  and  grins something he cannot do  without  looking
fiendish.  He  and Randy shake hands triumphantly. Even  though they've only
been riding around on 747s, they feel like Stanley and Livingstone.
     "Nice tan,"  Cantrell  says puckishly,  all  but twirling his mustache.
Randy's caught off guard, starts and stops talking twice, finally shakes his
head in defeat. Both men laugh.
     "I got the tan  on boats," Randy says, "not by the hotel pool. The last
couple of weeks, I've been putting out fires all over the place."
     "Nothing that'll impact shareholder value, I hope," Cantrell deadpans.
     Randy says, "You're looking encouragingly pale."
     "Everything's  fine on  my end," Cantrell says. "It's  like I predicted
lots of Secret Admirers want to work on a real data haven."
     Randy orders  a  Guinness and says, "You also  predicted that a lot  of
those people would turn out to be squirrelly and undisciplined."
     "Didn't hire those,"  Cantrell says.  "And with Eb  to handle the weird
stuff,  we've  been  able  to roll right  over  the  few speed  bumps  we've
encountered."
     "Have you seen the Crypt?"
     Cantrell raises an eyebrow and  shoots  him  a flawless imitation of  a
paranoid glance. "It's like that  NORAD command bunker in Colorado Springs,"
he says.
     "Yeah!" Randy laughs. "Cheyenne Mountain."
     "It's too big," Cantrell announces. He knows Randy is thinking the same
thing.
     So  Randy decides  to  play  devil's  advocate.  "But  the sultan  does
everything big. There are big paintings of him in the big airport."
     Cantrell  shakes  his  head.  "The  Information Ministry is  a  serious
project. The sultan didn't just make it up. His technocrats conceived it."
     "I'm told Avi did a little bit of deft turkey baster work ..."
     "Whatever. But  the people behind it,  like  Mohammed Pragasu, are  all
Stanford B School types. Oxford and Sorbonne graduates. It's been engineered
to the doorstops by Germans. That cave is not a monument to the sultan."
     "No, it's not a vanity project," Randy agrees, thinking of  the  chilly
machine  room  that Tom  Howard is building  a thousand feet below the cloud
forest.
     "So there must be some rational explanation for how big it is."
     "Maybe it's in the business plan?" ventures Randy.
     Cantrell shrugs; he hasn't  read it  either. "The last one I read cover
to cover was Plan One. A year ago," admits Randy.
     "That was a good business plan," Cantrell says. (1)
     Randy changes  the subject. "I forgot my pass  phrase. Need  to do that
biometric thing with you."
     "It's too noisy here," Cantrell says,  "it  works by listening  to your
voice, doing Fourier shit,  remembering a few key numbers. We'll do it in my
room later."
     Feeling  some need to explain why he  hasn't been keeping up with his e
mail,  Randy says,  "I have been  totally obsessed,  interfacing  with these
AVCLA people in Manila."
     "Yup. How's that going?"
     "Look. My job's pretty simple," Randy says. "There's that big Nipponese
cable from  Taiwan down  to Luzon. A  router at  each end. Then  there's the
network of short run, interisland cables that the AVCLA people are laying in
the  Philippines. Each  cable segment  begins and ends at  a router,  as you
know. My job  is to program the routers, make sure the data will always have
a clear path from Taiwan to Kinakuta."
     Cantrell  glances away, worried  that  he's about  to get bored.  Randy
practically  lunges across  the table,  because he  knows it's  not  boring.
"John! You are a major credit card company!"
     "Okay." Cantrell meets his gaze, slightly unnerved.
     "You  are storing  your  data  in the  Kinakuta data haven. You need to
download a terabyte  of crucial  data. You begin the process  your encrypted
bytes are screaming up through the  Philippines at a gigabyte per second, to
Taiwan, from there across to  the States."  Randy pauses and swigs Guinness,
building the drama. "Then a ferry capsizes off Cebu."
     "So?"
     "So, in the space of ten minutes, a hundred thousand Filipinos all pick
up their telephones simultaneously."
     Cantrell actually whacks his forehead. "Oh, my god!"
     "Now  you understand! I've  been configuring  this network  so that  no
matter what happens, the data continues to flow to that credit card company.
Maybe at a reduced speed but it flows."
     "Well, I can see how that would keep you busy."
     "And  that's why  all I'm really  up to  speed on is these routers. And
incidentally  they're good routers, but they just don't have enough capacity
to feed a Crypt of that size, or justify it economically."
     "The gist of Avi and  Beryl's explanation,"  Cantrell  says,  "is  that
Epiphyte is no longer the sole carrier into the Crypt."
     "But we're laying the cable here from Palawan "
     "The sultan's minions  have been  out drumming  up  business," Cantrell
says. "Avi and Beryl are being vague, but from comparing notes with Tom, and
reading tea leaves, methinks there's one, maybe two other cables coming into
Kinakuta."
     "Wow!"  Randy says. It's all  he  can think of. "Wow!"  He drinks about
half of his Guinness.  "It makes  sense. If  they're doing it  once with us,
they can do it again, with other carriers.
     "They used us as leverage to bring in others," Cantrell says.
     "Well . . . the question is, then, is the cable through the Philippines
still needed? Or wanted?"
     "Yup," Cantrell says.
     "It is?"
     "No. I mean, yup, that's the question, all right."
     Randy considers  it.  "Actually, this could be good news for your phase
of the  operation. More pipes into the Crypt means more business in the long
run.
     Cantrell  raises his eyebrows, a little worried about Randy's feelings.
Randy leans back in  his chair and  says,  "We've had  debates before  about
whether it makes sense  for Epiphyte to  be screwing around with cables  and
routers in the Philippines."
     Cantrell  says, "The business plan has  always maintained that it would
make economic  sense to  be running a cable through the Philippines  even if
there weren't a Crypt at the end of it."
     "The  business plan has to say  the Intra Philippines network  could be
spun off  as  an independent  business, and still survive,"  Randy says, "to
justify our doing it."
     Neither one of  them needs to say any  more. They've been concentrating
on each other pretty intensely for a while, shutting out the rest of the bar
with  their  postures,  and  now,  spontaneously,  both of them  lean  back,
stretch, and  begin looking around.  The timing's  fortuitous, because  Goto
Furudenendu has just come in with a posse of  what  Randy  guesses are civil
engineers: healthy looking, clean cut Nipponese men in their thirties. Randy
invites him over with a smile, then flags down their waiter and orders a few
of those great big bottles of bitterly cold Nipponese beer.
     "This  reminds me  the  Secret Admirers are really  on  my case," Randy
says.
     Cantrell grins, showing some affection for those crazy Secret Admirers.
"Smart, rabidly  paranoid people are the backbone of  cryptology,"  he says,
"but they don't always understand business."
     "Maybe they understand it  too well," Randy  says. He is left with some
residual annoyance that he came down to the Bomb and Grapnel party  in order
to  answer  the  question  posed by  root@eruditorum.org ("Why are you doing
it?") and he still doesn't know. As a matter of fact, he knows less now than
he did before.
     Then the  men from  Goto join them,  and it just  happens that Eberhard
Föhr and Tom Howard show up at just the same time. There is  a combinatorial
explosion of  name card exchanges and introductions. It seems  like protocol
demands  a  lot  of  serious  social  drinking   now  Randy's  inadvertently
challenged these guys'  politeness by  ordering them  beer, and they have to
demonstrate that  they will not be  bested in  any such  contest. Tables get
pushed  together  and everything  gets just unbelievably jovial. Eb  has  to
order some beer for everyone too.  Pretty soon things have  degenerated into
karaoke. Randy gets up and sings "Me and  You and a  Dog Named Boo." It's  a
good choice because  it's a mellow, laid back song that  doesn't demand lots
of emoting. Or singing ability, for that matter.
     At some  point  Tom Howard  puts  his  beefy  arm up  on  the  back  of
Cantrell's chair, the better  to shout into his ear. Their matched Eutropian
bracelets,  engraved  with  "Hello  Doctor,  please  freeze  me  as follows"
messages,  are  glittery and  conspicuous,  and  Randy's  nervous  that  the
Nipponese guys are  going  to  notice  this  and ask questions  that will be
exceedingly difficult to answer. Tom is reminding Cantrell of something (for
some reason they always refer to Cantrell in this way; some people  are just
made to be called by last names). Cantrell nods and shoots Randy a quick and
somewhat furtive look. When  Randy looks back at him,  Cantrell glances down
apologetically and takes to chivvying his beer  bottle nervously between his
hands. Tom just keeps looking at Randy kind  of  interestedly.  All of  this
motivated glancing finally brings Randy and Tom and Cantrell together at the
farthest end of the bar from the karaoke speakers.
     "So, you  know  Andrew Loeb," Cantrell  says. It's clear he's basically
dismayed by this and yet sort of impressed too, as if he'd just learned that
Randy had once beaten a man to death with his bare hands and then just never
bothered to mention it.
     "It's true," Randy says. "As well as anyone can know a guy like that."
     Cantrell is paying undue diligence to the  project of picking the label
off of  his  beer bottle  and so Tom picks up  the thread  now. "You were in
business together?"
     "Not really. Can I ask how you guys are aware of this?  I  mean, how do
you  even know that Andrew  Loeb exists in  the first place? Because  of the
Digibomber thing?"
     "Oh, no it was after that. Andy became a  figure of note in some of the
circles where Tom and I both hang out," Cantrell says.
     "The only  circles I can  imagine that Andy'd be  a  part  of would  be
primitive  survivalists,  and  people who  believe they've  been Satanically
ritually abused."
     Randy says  this mindlessly,  as  if his mouth is a mechanical teletype
hammering out a weather forecast. It kind of hangs there.
     "That helps fill in a few gaps," Tom finally says.
     "What did you think  when the FBI searched  his  cabin?" Cantrell asks,
his grin returned.
     "I didn't know  what to think,"  Randy  says. "I remember  watching the
videotape on the  news  the  agents coming out of  that shack  with boxes of
evidence, and thinking my  name  must be on papers in them. That somehow I'd
get mixed up in the case as a result."
     "Did the FBI ever contact you?" Tom asks.
     "No.  I think  that once they searched through  all of  his stuff, they
figured out  pretty quickly that he wasn't the  Digibomber, and  crossed him
off the list."
     "Well,  not long  after that happened, Andy Loeb showed up on the Net,"
Cantrell says.
     "I find that impossible to believe."
     "So did we. I mean, we'd all received copies of his manifestoes printed
on this  grey recycled paper that was like the sheets of  fuzz that you peel
off a clothes dryer's lint trap."
     "He used some kind  of organic,  water  based ink that flaked off  like
black dandruff," Tom says.
     "We used to joke about  having Andy grit all over  our desks," Cantrell
says. "So when this guy  called Andy Loeb showed up on  the Secret  Admirers
mailing list, and the  Eutropia newsgroup, posting all of these long  rants,
we refused to believe it was him."
     "We  thought that someone had just written really brilliant parodies of
his prose style," Cantrell says.
     "But when they kept coming, day after  day, and he started getting into
these long  dialogs with people, it became obvious that it  really was him,"
Tom grumbles.
     "How did he square that with being a Luddite?"
     Cantrell: "He said  that he'd always thought of  computers as  a  force
that alienated and atomized society."
     Tom: "But as the result of being the number  one Digibomber suspect for
a  while, he'd  been  forcibly made aware of  the  Internet,  which  changed
computers by connecting them."
     "Oh, my god!" Randy says.
     "And he'd been mulling over the Internet  while he  was doing  whatever
Andrew Loeb does," Tom continues.
     Randy:  "Squatting  naked in icy mountain  streams strangling  muskrats
with his bare hands."
     Tom: "And he'd realized computers could be a tool to unite society."
     Randy: "And I'll bet he was just the guy to unite it."
     Cantrell: "Well, that's actually not far away from what he said."
     Randy: "So, are you about to tell me that he became a Eutropian?"
     Cantrell: "Well,  no.  It's  more  like  he discovered a  schism in the
Eutropian movement  we didn't know was there,  and created  his own splinter
group.
     Randy:  "I  think  of  the  Eutropians   as  being  totally  hard  core
individuals, pure libertarians."
     "Well, yeah!" Cantrell says. "But the basic premise  of Eutropianism is
that technology has made us post human. That Homo sapiens plus technology is
effectively a whole  new species: immortal,  omnipresent because of the Net,
and headed towards  omnipotence. Now, the first people to talk that way were
libertarians."
     Tom  says, "But the  idea has  attracted all kinds of people  including
Andy Loeb. He showed up one day and started yammering about hive minds."
     "And  of course he  was  flamed to a  crisp by most  of the Eutropians,
because that concept was anathema to them," Cantrell says.
     Tom:  "But  he kept  at  it,  and  after  a while, some  people started
agreeing with  him. Turned out there was really a pretty substantial faction
within the  Eutropians who didn't especially care for libertarianism and who
found the idea of a hive mind attractive."
     "So, now Andy's the leader of that faction?" Randy asks.
     "I would suppose so," Cantrell says. "They split  away and formed their
own newsgroup. We haven't heard much  from them in  the  last six  months or
so."
     "So how did you become aware of a connection between Andy and me?"
     "He stills pops into the Secret Admirers newsgroup from  time to time,"
Tom says.  "And  there's  been a  lot  of discussion there  about  the Crypt
lately."
     Cantrell says, "When he found out  that  you and Avi were involved,  he
posted  this  vast rant twenty  or thirty K  of run  on sentences.  Not very
complimentary."
     "Well, Jesus. What's his  beef? He won the case. Completely  bankrupted
me. You'd think he'd have something better to do than beat this dead horse,"
Randy says, thumping himself on the chest. "Doesn't he have a day job?"
     "He's some kind of a lawyer now," Cantrell says.
     "Ha! Figures."
     "He's  been  denouncing  us," Tom says.  "Capitalist roader.  Atomizing
society.  Making  the  world  safe  for  drug  traffickers and  Third  World
kleptocrats."
     "Well, at least he got  something right," Randy says. He's delighted to
have an answer, finally, to the question of why they're building the Crypt.


     Chapter 27 RETROGRADE MANEUVER


     Sio is a mud cemetery. Those who have already given their lives for the
emperor compete for mire space with those who  intend to. Bizarre forktailed
American planes dive out of the sun every  day  to murder them with terrible
glowing rains of cannon fire and the mind crushing detonations  of bombs, so
they sleep in open topped  graves and only come out at night. But their pits
are  full  of reeking water that chums with hostile  life, and when  the sun
goes down, rain  beats them, carrying into their bones the  deadly  chill of
high altitudes. Every man in the 20th Division knows that he will  not leave
New  Guinea  alive, so  it  remains  only  to choose  the  method of  death:
surrender to be tortured, then massacred by the Australians? Put grenades to
their  heads? Remain where they  are to be killed by the airplanes  all day,
and  all  night  by  malaria,  dysentery,  scrub   typhus,  starvation,  and
hypothermia? Or walk two hundred miles over mountains and flooding rivers to
Madang, which is tantamount to suicide  even when it is  peacetime  and  you
have food and medicine...?
     But that is what they are ordered to do. General Adachi flies to Sio it
is the  first friendly plane they have seen in weeks and lands on the rutted
septic field that they call an airstrip, and orders the evacuation. They are
to move  inland in four detachments.  Regiment  by regiment, they bury their
dead,  pack up what is left  of their equipment,  hoard what  little food is
left, wait for dark,  and  trudge towards the mountains.  The later echelons
can find  their path by smell,  following  the reek of  dysentery and of the
corpses dropped behind the pathfinder groups like breadcrumbs.
     The top commanders stay to the  end, and  the radio platoon stays  with
them;   without  a  powerful  radio  transmitter,   and  the   cryptographic
paraphernalia that goes with it,  a general is not a  general, a division is
not  a  division.  Finally  they go off  the  air,  and  begin  breaking the
transmitter down into the smallest pieces  they can, which unfortunately are
not all that small; a divisional radio transmitter is a powerful beast, made
for  lighting  up   the  ionosphere.   It  has  an   electrical   generator,
transformers, and other components that cannot be made light. The men of the
radio platoon, who  would find it difficult to move even the weight of their
own skeletons over the  mountains and across the surging rivers, will  carry
the additional burdens of engine blocks, fuel tanks, and transformers.
     And  the  big steel trunk with all  of  the Army codebooks. These books
were heavy as death when  they were bone dry; now they are sodden. To  carry
them out is beyond imagining. The rules dictate that they must  therefore be
burned.
     The men of the 20th  Division's radio platoon are not much inclined  to
humor of  any kind at the moment, not even the grim sardonic humor universal
among soldiers. If anything in the world is  capable of making them laugh at
this moment,  it  is the concept  of trying to construct  a  bonfire out  of
saturated  codebooks in  a  swamp during a rainstorm. They might  be able to
burn them if they used  a lot of aviation fuel more than they actually have.
Then the fire would produce a towering column of smoke that would draw P 38s
as the scent of human flesh draws mosquitoes.
     Burning  them  can't be necessary. New Guinea is a howling maelstrom of
decay and destruction; the only things that endure are rocks and wasps. They
rip off  the covers to bring  home as  proof that they  have been destroyed,
then  pack  the books  into  their trunk  and bury  it in  the  bank  of  an
especially vindictive river.
     It's not  a very good idea. But they have been  getting  bombed  a lot.
Even if the shrapnel misses you, the bomb's  shock wave is like a stone wall
moving  at  seven hundred  miles  an  hour. Unlike a  stone wall, it  passes
through your body, like a  burst of light through  a glass figurine.  On its
way  through  your  flesh,  it  rearranges every part of  you  down  to  the
mitochondrial  level, disrupting  every  process  in every  cell,  including
whatever enables your  brain to keep track of time and experience the world.
A few of these detonations are enough  to break  the thread of consciousness
into a snarl of tangled and chopped filaments. These men are not as human as
they were when they left home; they cannot be  expected to think  clearly or
to  do things for good reasons.  They throw mud  on  the trunk not as a sane
procedure for getting rid of it but as a kind of ritual, just to demonstrate
the proper respect for its lode of strange information.
     Then they shoulder  their burdens of iron and rice and begin  to strain
up into the  mountains. Their comrades  have left  a  trampled path that  is
already growing  back  into  jungle.  The mileposts are  bodies by now  just
stinking battlegrounds disputed by frenzied mobs  of microbes, bugs, beasts,
and birds never catalogued by scientists.


     Chapter 28 HUFFDUFF


     The huffduff mast is  planted before  they even have  a roof on the new
headquarters of Detachment  2702, and the huffduff antenna is raised  before
there is any electricity to run it.
     Waterhouse does his best to pretend as if he cares. He lets the workers
know: vast tank armadas clashing in the African desert might be dashing  and
romantic, but the  real battle of this war (ignoring, as always, the Eastern
Front)  is the  Battle  of the Atlantic.  We  can't  win the  Battle of  the
Atlantic without sinking some  U boats, and we can't sink them until we find
them,  and  we  need  a  way of finding them  other  than the tried and true
approach of letting our convoys  steam  through them and get  blown to bits.
That way, men, is to get this antenna in action as soon as humanly possible.
     Waterhouse is no actor, but when the second ice storm of the week blows
through  and inflicts grievous damage on  the antenna, and he has to stay up
all night repairing it by the light  of the Galvanick Lucifer, he  is pretty
sure that he has them hooked. The castle staff work late  shifts to keep him
supplied with hot tea and brandy, and the builders  give him some zesty  hip
hip hoorays the next morning when the patched antenna is winched  back up to
the top of the mast. They are all so sure that they are saving lives  in the
North Atlantic that they would probably lynch him if they knew the truth.
     This huffduff story is  ridiculously plausible. It is so plausible that
if Waterhouse were working for the Germans, he'd be  suspicious. The antenna
is a highly directional model.  It  receives  a strong  signal  when pointed
towards the source and a weak signal otherwise. The operator waits  for  a U
boat to begin transmitting and then swings  the antenna back and forth until
it gives  the maximum reading;  the direction of the antenna then  gives the
azimuth  to  the  source. Two  or more such readings, supplied by  different
huffduff stations, can be used to triangulate the origin of the signal.
     In order  to keep  up  appearances,  the station needs to be  manned 24
hours a  day, which almost kills Waterhouse during  the first weeks of 1943.
The  rest of Detachment 2702 has not shown  up on schedule, so it is  up  to
Waterhouse to preserve the illusion in the meantime.
     Everyone within ten miles basically, the entire  civilian population of
Qwghlm, or, to put it another way, the entire Qwghlmian race can see the new
huffduff antenna  rising  from  the mast on  the castle. They are not stupid
people  and  some of  them,  at least,  must understand that the  damn thing
doesn't do any good  if it is always pointed in the  same direction. If it's
not moving, it's  not working. And if it's not working,  then just what  the
hell is going on up there in the castle anyway?
     So Waterhouse has to move it. He lives in the  chapel, sleeping when he
sleeps  in  a  hammock  strung  at  a  perilous  altitude  above  the  floor
("skerries" are excellent jumpers, he has found).
     If he sleeps during the daytime, even casual observers in the town will
notice that the antenna does not move. That's no good. But he can't sleep at
night, when  the Germans  bounce  their  transmissions  off  the  ionosphere
between the U boats in the  North Atlantic  and their bases in Bordeaux  and
Lorient because a really close observer say an insomniacal castle worker, or
a German spy up in the rocks with a pair of binoculars will suspect that the
immobile huffduff antenna is  just  a  cover  story. So Waterhouse  tries to
split the difference by sleeping for a few hours around dusk and another few
hours around dawn a plan that does not go over well with his  body. And when
he gets up, he has absolutely nothing to look forward  to besides sitting at
the  huffduff console  for eight or twelve hours at a stretch, watching  the
breath come out of his mouth, twiddling the antenna, listening to nothing!
     He freely stipulates that he is a selfish bastard for feeling sorry for
himself when other men are being blown to bits.
     Having gotten that out of the way, what is he going to do to stay sane?
He has  got  his  routine down  pat: leave  the  antenna  pointed  generally
westwards for  a while, then swing it back and  forth  in  diminishing arcs,
pretending to zero  in on a U boat, then leave it sitting for a while and do
jumping  jacks to  warm back up. He has ditched his uniform for raiments  of
warm Qwghlmian  wool.  Every  once in  a  while,  at  totally  unpredictable
intervals,  members of the castle staff will burst in on him  with an urn of
soup or tea  service  or simply to see how he is  doing and tell  him what a
fine  chap he  is.  Once a day,  he  writes down  a  bunch of  gibberish his
purported results and dispatches it over to the naval base.
     He  divides his time between thinking  about  sex  and  thinking  about
mathematics. The former keeps intruding  upon the latter. It gets worse when
the stout fiftyish cook named Blanche, who has been bringing him  his meals,
comes down with dropsy or ague or gout  or colic or some other Shakespearian
ailment and is replaced by Margaret, who is about twenty and quite fetching.
     Margaret really messes up his head. When it gets really intolerable, he
goes  to  the  latrine (so  that the  staff will  not break in on  him at an
inopportune moment) and executes a Manual Override. But one thing he learned
in Hawaii was  that  a Manual Override is  unfortunately not the same as the
real thing. The effect wears off too soon.
     While  he's  waiting  for it  to  wear off, he gets a lot of solid math
done. Alan provided him with some notes on redundancy and  entropy, relating
to  the  voice  encryption  work  he  is currently doing  in New  York City.
Waterhouse works through that stuff and comes up with some nice lemmas which
he  lamentably cannot send to Alan  without violating both  common sense and
any  number of security  procedures.  This done, he turns  his attention  to
cryptology, pure and raw.  He spent enough time at Bletchley Park to realize
just how little of this art he really understood.
     The  U boats talk on the radio way too  much and everyone in the German
Navy knows  it. Their  security  experts have been  nagging  their brass  to
tighten up  their security, and they  finally did it by introducing the four
rotor version of the Enigma machine, which has knocked Bletchley Park on its
ass for about a year...
     Margaret has to walk round the castle out of doors to bring  Waterhouse
his  meals, and by the time she  gets here, her cheeks have turned rosy red.
The steam coming from her mouth floats around her face like a silken veil
     Stop that, Lawrence! The subject of today's lecture is the German Naval
four wheel  Enigma, known  to  them  as  Triton and  to the Allies as Shark.
Introduced  on 2 February of last year (1942), it wasn't until  the recovery
of the beached German U boat U 559 on 30 October that Bletchley Park got the
material  they  needed  to break the code.  A  couple of  weeks  ago, on  13
December,   Bletchley   Park  finally   busted   Shark,  and  the   internal
communications  of  the German Navy became an open book  to the Allies  once
more.
     The  first  thing they have  learned, as  a result, is that the Germans
have broken  our merchant  shipping codes wide open, and that  all year long
they have known exactly where to find the convoys.
     All of  this  information  has  been  provided  to  Lawrence  Pritchard
Waterhouse within the  last  few days,  via the totally secure one  time pad
channel. Bletchley is telling him this stuff because it raises a question of
information  theory, which  is his department and his problem. The  question
is: how quickly can  we replace our busted  merchant shipping  codes without
tipping the Germans off to the fact that we have broken Shark?
     Waterhouse does not have to think about this one  for very  long before
he  concludes that it is far too tricky to  play games with. The only way to
handle the  situation is  to  concoct  an  incident  of some sort that  will
explain to  the Germans why  we have totally lost  faith in our own merchant
shipping codes and are changing them. He writes up a message to this effect,
and begins to encrypt it using the one time pad that he shares with Chattan.
     "Is everything quite all right?"
     Waterhouse stands and whirls around, heart thrashing.
     It is Margaret, standing there veiled in the steam of her own breath, a
grey wool overcoat  thrown over her maid's uniform, supporting a tray of tea
and scones with grey wool mittens. The only parts of her not encased in wool
are  her ankles and her face.  The former are  well turned; Margaret is  not
above wearing heels. The latter has never been exposed to the direct rays of
the sun and brings to mind rose petals strewn over Devonshire clotted cream.
     "Oh!  Let me take it!" Waterhouse  blurts,  and lunges  forward  with a
jerkiness  born  of passion blended with hypothermia. While taking  the tray
from her hands, he inadvertently  pulls off one of  her mittens, which falls
to the  floor. "Sorry!"  he says,  realizing  he has  never seen  her  hands
before. She has red polish on the nails of the offended hand, which she cups
over her mouth and blows on. Her large green  eyes are  looking at him, full
of placid expectation.
     "Beg pardon?" Waterhouse says.
     "Is everything quite all right?" she repeats.
     "Yes! Why shouldn't it be?"
     "The antenna," Margaret says. "It hasn't moved in over an hour."
     Waterhouse is so flummoxed he can barely remain standing.
     Margaret is still breathing  through her lacquered  fingertips, so that
Waterhouse  can  only  see  her green eyes,  which  now  angle  and  twinkle
mischievously.  She  glances towards his  hammock. "Been napping on the job,
have we?"
     Waterhouse's first  impulse is to  deny it  and  to explain the  truth,
which is that he was thinking about  sex and  crypto and  forgot to move the
antenna.  But then he realizes that Margaret  has supplied him with a better
excuse. "Guilty as charged," he says. "Was up late last night."
     "That  tea will keep you alert," Margaret says. Then her eyes return to
the hammock. She pulls her mitten back on. "What is it like?"
     "What is what like?"
     "Sleeping in one of those. Is it comfortable?"
     "Very comfortable."
     "Can I just see what it's like?"
     "Ah. Well, it's very difficult to get in at that height."
     "You manage it, though,  don't you?"  she  says  chidingly.  Waterhouse
feels himself blushing. Margaret walks over to the hammock and kicks off her
heels. Waterhouse winces to see her bare feet on the  stone floor, which has
not been warm since the Barbary Corsairs burned the place down. Her toenails
are also  painted  red.  "I  don't mind it," Margaret says, "I'm a  farmer's
daughter. Come on, give me a leg up!"
     Waterhouse has completely lost whatever control he might ever have  had
over the situation and  himself. His  tongue seems  to be made  of  erectile
tissue. So he lumbers  over, bends down,  and makes a stirrup of  his hands.
She  puts  her  foot  into  it  and  launches  herself   into  the  hammock,
disappearing with a whoop and  a  giggle into his  bulky nest of  grey  wool
blankets. The hammock swings back and forth across the center of the chapel,
like a censer dispersing a  faint  lavender scent. It swings once, twice. It
swings five times,  ten  times, twenty. Margaret  is silent  and motionless.
Waterhouse stands  as if his feet were planted in mortar. For the first time
in weeks he does not know exactly what is going to happen next, and the loss
of control leaves him stunned and helpless.
     "It's   dreamy,"  she  says.  Dreamily.  Then,  finally,   she  shifts.
Waterhouse sees  her little face peeking out over the edge, shrouded  in the
grey cowl  of  a blanket. "Ooh!" she  screams,  and  flips flat  on her back
again. The sudden movement puts an eccentric jiggle into the rhythmic motion
of the hammock.
     "What's wrong?" Waterhouse says hopelessly.
     "I'm  afraid of heights!"  she  exclaims.  "I'm  so sorry, Lawrence,  I
should have warned you. Is it all right  if I call you Lawrence?" She sounds
as  if she would be terribly hurt if he said no. And how  can Lawrence wound
the feelings of a pretty, barefoot, acrophobic girl, helpless in a hammock?
     "Please.  By all means," he  says. But he knows perfectly well that the
ball is still in his court. "Can I be of any assistance?"
     "I should be so obliged," Margaret says.
     "Well, would  you like to climb down onto my shoulders, or some thing?"
Waterhouse essays.
     "I'm really far too terrified," she says.
     There is only one way out. "Well.  Would you take it the wrong way if I
came up there to help?"
     "It would  be  so heroic of you!" she says.  "I  should be  unspeakably
grateful."
     "Well, then . . ."
     "But I insist that you continue with your duties first!"
     "Beg pardon?"
     "Lawrence," Margaret says, "when  I get down  from this hammock I shall
go to  the kitchen  and mop the floor which is  already quite  clean enough,
thank you. You, on the other hand, have important work to do work that might
save the lives of hundreds of men on some Atlantic  convoy!  And I know that
you have been very  naughty in sleeping on the job. I refuse to allow you up
here until you have made amends."
     "Very  well," Waterhouse  says, "you  leave  me  no  alternative.  Duty
calls." He squares his shoulders, spins on his heel, and marches back to his
desk.  Skerries have already made  off with all of Margaret's scones, but he
pours  himself some tea.  Then he  resumes  encrypting his  instructions  to
Chattan: ONLY BRUTE FORCE APPROACH WILL BE SAFE PUT CODE BOOK ON SHIP INSERT
SHIP IN MURMANSK CONVOY WAIT FOR FOG RAM NORWAY.
     The  one  time  pad encryption takes  a while.  Lawrence can  do mod 25
arithmetic in  his sleep,  but doing it  with  an  erection  is a  different
matter. "Lawrence? What are  you doing?" Margaret  asks from her nest in the
hammock,  which,  Lawrence imagines, is  getting  warmer  and cozier  by the
minute. He glances surreptitiously at her discarded high heels.
     "Preparing my  report," Lawrence says.  "Doesn't do me any good to make
observations if I don't send them out."
     "Quite right," Margaret says thoughtfully.
     This is an excellent time to stoke the chapel's pathetic iron stove. He
puts in a few scoops of precious coal, his worksheet,  and the page from the
one  time pad  that he  has just used to  do the encryption. "Should warm up
now," he says.
     "Oh, lovely," Margaret says, "I'm all shivery."
     Lawrence  recognizes this as his  cue to initiate  a rescue  operation.
About fifteen seconds later, he is up there in the hammock with Margaret. To
the great surprise  of  neither one  of them,  the  quarters are awkward and
tight.  There  is some  flopping around which ends with Lawrence on his back
and Margaret on top of him, her thigh between his.
     She   is  shocked  to  discover  that  he  has  an  erection.  Ashamed,
apparently,  that she  did  not anticipate his  need.  "You poor  dear!" she
exclaims. "Of course! How could I have been so  dense! You must have been so
lonely here." She kisses his cheek, which is nice since he is too stunned to
move. "A brave warrior deserves  all the support we  civilians  can possibly
give him," she says, reaching down with one hand to open his fly.
     Then  she  pulls the  grey wool over her head  and  burrows  to  a  new
position. Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse  is stunned by what happens next. He
gazes up  at  the ceiling of the  chapel through half closed eyes and thanks
God for having sent him what is obviously a German spy and an angel of mercy
rolled into one adorable package.
     When it's finished, he opens his  eyes again and takes a deep breath of
cold Atlantic air. He is seeing everything around him with newfound clarity.
Clearly,  Margaret  is  going  to do wonders  for  his productivity  on  the
cryptological front if he can only keep her coming back.


     Chapter 29 PAGES


     It  has been  a  long time since horses ran at the  Ascot Racetrack  in
Brisbane. The  infield's  a commotion of stretched khaki. The grass has died
from lack of sun and  from the trampling feet of enlisted men. The field has
been punctured with latrines,  mess tents have been pitched. Three shifts  a
day, the residents  trudge across  the track,  round back  of the silent and
empty stables. In the field where the horses used to stretch their legs, two
dozen Quonset huts that have popped up like mushrooms. The men work in those
huts,  sitting before radios or  typewriters  or card  files  all day  long,
shirtless in the January heat.
     It  has been just as  long since  whores sunned  themselves on the long
veranda of the house on Henry Street, and passing gentlemen, on their way to
or from  the  Ascot  Racetrack,  peered  at  their charms through  the white
railing, faltered, checked their  wallets, forgot their scruples, turned  on
their heels,  and climbed up the house's front stairs. Now the place is full
of male officers and math freaks: mostly  Australians on  the  ground floor,
mostly Americans upstairs, and a sprinkling of lucky Brits who were spirited
out  of  Singapore before  General Yamashita, the  Tiger  of Malaya  and the
conqueror of that city, was able to capture them and  mine their  heads  for
crucial data.
     Today the old bordello has been turned upside down; everyone with Ultra
clearance  is out  in the garage,  which thrums and roars  with the sound of
fans,  and virtually glows with contained heat.  In that garage  is a rusted
steel trunk, still spattered with riverbank mud that partially  obscures the
Nipponese characters  stenciled on its sides. Had  a  Nipponese spy glimpsed
the trunk  during  its  feverish passage from the port  to  the whorehouse's
garage, he would have recognized it as belonging to the radio platoon of the
20th Division, which is currently lost in the jungles of New Guinea.
     The rumor, shouted  over the sound  of the fans, is that  a  digger  an
Australian grunt found it. His unit was sweeping the abandoned  headquarters
of the 20th Division for booby traps when his metal detector went nuts along
the banks of a river.
     The codebooks  are stacked inside  as neatly as gold bars. They are wet
and  mildewed  and  their  front  covers are  all missing, but this is  mint
condition  by the standards of wartime. Stripped to the waist and  streaming
with sweat, the  men  raise the books out one  by  one, like nurses  lifting
newborn infants  from the  bassinette, and carry  them to  tables where they
slice away the rotten bindings and peel the sodden pages  off the stacks one
by one,  hanging  them from  improvised  clotheslines  strung overhead.  The
stench and damp of New Guinea saturate the air as the river water trapped in
those pages  is  lifted out  by the rushing air; it all vents to the outside
eventually,  and half a mile downwind, pedestrians wrinkle their  noses. The
whorehouse's closets still redolent of French perfume, powder, hairspray and
jism, but now packed to the ceiling with office supplies are raided for more
string. The web  of clotheslines  grows,  new layers crisscrossing above and
below the old ones, every inch of string claimed by a wet page as soon as it
is stretched.  Each  page is a grid, a  table  with hiragana  or katakana or
kanji in one box, a group of digits or Romanji in another box, and the pages
all  cross referenced to other pages in a scheme  only a cryptographer could
love.
     The photographer  comes in, trailed by assistants who are burdened with
miles of  film.  All he  knows  is  that  each  page  must  be  photographed
perfectly. The malarial reek practically flattens him the moment he walks in
the door, but  when he recovers, his eyes scan  the garage.  All he can see,
stretching as if to infinity, are pages dripping  and curling, turning white
as they dry, casting their grids of information into sharp relief, like  the
reticules  of  so  many  bomb  sights, the  graven  crosshairs  of  so  many
periscopes,  plunging  through  cloud and fog to focus,  distinctly  on  the
abdomens  of Nipponese troopships, pregnant with  North  Borneo  fuel, alive
with burning steam.


     Chapter 30 RAM


     "Sir! Would you mind telling me where we are going, sir!"
     Lieutenant  Monkberg  heaves  a deep,  quivering  sigh,  his  rib  cage
shuddering like  a  tin shack in a cyclone.  He  executes a none too  snappy
pushup. His  hands are planted on the rim, and so this action extricates his
head  from  the bowl, of  a toilet or "head," as  it is  referred to in this
context: an alarmingly rundown freighter.  He jerks down a strip of abrasive
Euro  bumwad  and  wipes his  mouth before  looking up  at  Sergeant  Robert
Shaftoe, who has braced himself in the hatchway.
     And Shaftoe  does need  some serious  bracing, because  he is  carrying
close to his  own  weight  in gear. All of it was issued to him thoughtfully
prepacked.
     He could have  left  it  that way. But this is not  how an  Eagle Scout
operates. Bobby Shaftoe  has gone through and  unpacked all of it, spread it
out on the deck, examined it, and repacked it.
     This allowed Shaftoe to do some  serious inferring. To be  specific, he
infers  that the men of  Detachment 2702  are expected  to spend most of the
next three weeks  trying as hard as they  can not  to  freeze to death. This
will  be  punctuated by trying to kill a  lot of well armed sons of bitches.
German, most likely.
     "N  N N Norway," Lieutenant Monkberg  says. He looks so  pathetic  that
Shaftoe  considers offering him some m m m  morphine,  which induces  a mild
nausea of its own but holds  back the greater nausea of seasickness. Then he
comes to his senses, remembers that Lieutenant Monkberg is an  officer whose
duty it is to  send  him  off to die, and decides that he can  just go  fuck
himself sideways.
     "Sir! What is the nature of our mission in Norway, sir?"
     Monkberg unloads a rattling belch. "Ram and run," he says.
     "Sir! Ram what, sir?"
     ''Norway."
     "Sir! Run where, sir?"
     "Sweden."
     Shaftoe likes the sound of this. The perilous sea voyage through U boat
infested waters, the collision  with Norway, the desperate run across frozen
Nazi occupied territory, all seem trivial  compared with the shining goal of
dipping into the world's largest  and purest reservoir  of authentic Swedish
poontang.
     "Shaftoe! Wake up!"
     ''Sir! Yes, sir!"
     "You have noticed the way we are dressed." Monkberg refers to  the fact
that  they  have discarded their dog tags  and are all  wearing civilian  or
merchant marine clothing.
     "Sir! Yes, sir!"
     "We don't want the Nuns, or anyone else, to know what we really are."
     "Sir! Yes, sir!"
     "Now, you might ask yourself, if we're supposed to look like civilians,
then why  the hell are we carrying tommy guns, grenades, demolition charges,
et cetera."
     "Sir! That was going to be my next question, sir!"
     "Well, we have a cover story all worked out for that. Come with me."
     Monkberg  looks enthusiastic all  of a sudden. He clambers  to his feet
and leads  Shaftoe  down various passageways and  stairs to  the freighter's
cargo hold. "You know those other ships?"
     Shaftoe looks blank.
     "Those other ships around us? We  are in the middle  of  a convoy,  you
know."
     "Sir,  yes sir!" Shaftoe says, a little less certainly. None of the men
has been abovedecks very much in the  hours since  they were delivered,  via
submarine, to  this  wallowing wreck. Even  if they had gone  up for  a look
around they would have seen nothing but darkness and fog.
     "A Murmansk  convoy,"  Monkberg  continues.  "All of  these  ships  are
delivering weapons and supplies to the Soviet Union. See?"
     They have reached a cargo  hold. Monkberg turns on  an overhead  light,
revealing crates. Lots and lots and lots of crates.
     "Full  of  weapons,"  Monkberg  says, "including  tommy guns, grenades,
demolition charges, et cetera. Get my drift?"
     "Sir, no sir! I do not get the lieutenant's drift!"
     Monkberg  comes one  step closer to him. Unsettlingly close. He speaks,
now,  in a conspiratorial  tone. "See, we're all just crew  members  on this
merchant  ship, making the  run to Murmansk. It gets foggy. We get separated
from  our  convoy. Then, boom! We slam into fucking Norway. We  are stuck on
Nazi held territory. We have to make a  break for Sweden! But wait a second,
we say to ourselves. What about all those Germans between us and the Swedish
border? Well, we had better be armed to the teeth,  is what. And who is in a
better position  to  arm  themselves  to  the teeth than  the crew  of  this
merchant  ship that is jam packed  with armaments? So  we run down into  the
cargo hold and hastily pry open a few crates and arm ourselves."
     Shaftoe looks at the crates. None of them have been pried open.
     "Then," Monkberg continues, "we abandon ship and head for Sweden."
     There is a long silence. Shaftoe  finally rouses himself to say,  "Sir!
Yes, sir!"
     "So get prying."
     ''Sir! Yes, sir!"
     "And make it look hasty! Hasty! C'mon! Shake a leg!"
     "Sir! Yes, sir!"
     Shaftoe tries to get into  the spirit of the  thing. What's he going to
use to pry a crate open?  No crowbars in sight. He exits  the cargo hold and
strides down a passageway. Monkberg following him  closely, hovering, urging
him to be hastier: "You're in a hurry! The Nazis are coming! You have to arm
yourself! Think of your wife and kids back in Glasgow or Lubbock or wherever
the fuck you're from!"
     "Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, sir!" Shaftoe says indignantly.
     "No,  no!  Not  in  real  life!  In your pretend  role as this stranded
merchant son of a bitch! Look, Shaftoe! Look! Salvation is at hand!"
     Shaftoe turns around to see Monkberg pointing at a cabinet marked
     FIRE.
     Shaftoe pulls the  door  open to find,  among other  implements, one of
those  giant axes that  firemen  are  always carrying in and  out of burning
structures.
     Thirty  seconds later,  he's down in the  cargo hold,  Paul Bunyaning a
crate of .45 caliber ammunition.  "Faster! More haphazard!" Monkberg shouts.
"This isn't a precise operation, Shaftoe! You are in a blind panic!" Then he
says, "Goddamn it!" and runs forward and seizes the ax from Shaftoe's hands.
     Monkberg swings wildly, missing the crate entirely as he adjusts to the
tremendous weight and length of the implement.  Shaftoe  hits  the  deck and
rolls to safety. Monkberg finally gets his range and azimuth worked out, and
actually makes  contact with the crate. Splinters  and chips skitter  across
the deck.
     "See!"  Monkberg says, looking over his  shoulder at  Shaftoe,  "I want
splinteriness! I want chaos!" He is swinging the ax at the same time as he's
talking and looking  at Shaftoe,  and he's  moving his feet too  because the
ship is rocking, and consequently the blade of  the weapon misses  the crate
entirely, overshoots, and comes down right on Monkberg's ankle.
     "Gadzooks!" Lieutenant Monkberg says, in a quiet,  conversational tone.
He is looking  down  at his  ankle in fascination. Shaftoe comes over to see
what's so interesting.
     A  good  chunk of  Monkberg's  lower  left  leg has been  neatly  cross
sectioned.  In the  beam  of Shaftoe's  flashlight,  it is possible  to  see
severed  blood vessels and ligaments sticking  out of  opposite sides of the
meaty wound, like sabotaged bridges and pipelines dangling from the sides of
a gorge.
     "Sir! You are wounded, sir!"  Shaftoe says. "Let  me  summon Lieutenant
Root!"
     "No! You  stay here and work!" Monkberg says. "I can find Root myself."
He reaches  down  with both  hands  and squeezes  his  leg above the  wound,
causing  blood  to gush  out  onto the  deck.  "This is  perfect!"  he  says
meditatively. "This adds so much realism."
     After several repetitions of this order, Shaftoe reluctantly  goes back
to crate hacking. Monkberg hobbles and staggers  around the hold  for a  few
minutes, bleeding on everything, then  drags himself  off in search of Enoch
Root.  The  last thing he says is,  "Remember! We are aiming for a ransacked
effect!"
     But the bit with  the leg wound gets  the idea across  to Shaftoe  more
than Monkberg's words ever could.  The sight of the blood brings up memories
of  Guadalcanal  and more recent adventures. His  last  dose of morphine  is
wearing  off, which makes  him  sharper.  And he's  staffing  to get  really
seasick, which makes him want to fight it by doing some hard work.
     So he more or less goes berserk with that ax. He loses track of what is
going on.
     He wishes that Detachment 2702 could have stayed on dry land preferably
dry warm land such as that place they stayed, for two sunny weeks, in Italy.
     The  first part  of that mission had been  hard work, what with humping
those  barrels  of shit around. But the remainder of it (except for the last
few hours) had  been  just like shore leave, except that there  weren't  any
women.  Every day they'd taken turns  at the observation site,  looking  out
over the Bay  of Naples with their  telescopes  and binoculars. Every night,
Corporal Benjamin sat down and radioed more gibberish in Morse code.
     One night, Benjamin received  a message and spent some time deciphering
it. He announced the news to Shaftoe: "The Germans know we're here."
     "What do you mean, they know we're here?"
     "They know that for at least six months we have had an observation post
overlooking the Bay of Naples," Benjamin said.
     "We've been here less than two weeks."
     ''They're going to begin searching this area tomorrow."
     "Well, then let's get the fuck out of here," Shaftoe said.
     "Colonel Chattan orders  you to wait,"  Benjamin  said, "until you know
that the Germans know that we are here."
     "But I do know  that the Germans know that we are  here," Shaftoe said,
"you just told me."
     "No,  no no no no," Benjamin said, "wait until you would know  that the
Germans knew even if you didn't know from being told by Colonel Chattan over
the radio."
     "Are you fucking with me?"
     "Orders," Benjamin said, and handed  Shaftoe the  deciphered message as
proof.
     As  soon as  the  sun  came up  they could  hear the observation planes
crisscrossing the sky.  Shaftoe was ready  to execute their escape plan, and
he made sure that the men were too. He sent some of those SAS blokes down to
reconnoiter the  choke points along  their exit route. Shaftoe  himself just
laid down on his back and stared up at the sky, watching those planes.
     Did he know that the Germans knew now?
     Ever since he'd woken up, a couple of SAS blokes had been following him
around,  staring at  him.  Shaftoe  finally  looked  in their direction  and
nodded. They ran away. A moment later he heard wrenches crashing against the
insides of toolboxes.
     The  Germans had  observation planes all over the fucking sky. That was
pretty  strong  circumstantial evidence  that  the Germans knew.  And  those
planes  were clearly visible to  Shaftoe, so he  could,  arguably, know that
they knew. But Colonel Chattan had ordered him to stay put "until positively
sighted by Germans," whatever that meant.
     One  of those planes, in particular, was  coming closer and  closer. It
was searching very close  to the ground, cutting only a narrow swath on each
pass. Waiting for  it to pass over their position, Shaftoe wanted to scream.
This was too stupid to be real. He wanted to send  up a  flare  and get this
over with.
     Finally, in midafternoon, Shaftoe, lying  on his back in the shade of a
tree, looked straight up into the air and counted the rivets on the belly of
that German  airplane: a Henschel Hs  126 (1) with a single swept
back wing mounted above the fuselage, so as not to block the view downwards,
and with ladders and  struts and giant  awkward  splay footed  landing  gear
sticking out all over. One German encased in a glass shroud  and flying  the
plane,  another out in the open, peering down  through goggles and  fiddling
with a swivel mounted machine  gun. This one did all but look Shaftoe in the
eye, then tapped the pilot on the shoulder and pointed down.
     The Henschel altered its normal  search pattern, cutting the pass short
to swing round and fly over their position again.
     "That's  it,"  Shaftoe said to himself. He stood up  and began  walking
towards the dilapidated barn. "That's it!" he shouted. "Execute!"
     The SAS guys were in the back  of the truck, under a tarp, working with
their  wrenches.  Shaftoe glanced in  their direction and saw gleaming parts
from the Vickers laid  out on  clean white fabric. Where the hell  had these
guys gotten clean white fabric? They'd  probably been saving  it  for today.
Why couldn't they have got the Vickers in good working order before? Because
they'd had orders to assemble it hastily, at the last possible minute.
     Corporal  Benjamin  hesitated,  one  hand  poised above his radio  key.
"Sarge, are you sure they know we're here?"
     Everyone  turned  to  see  how  Shaftoe  would  respond  to  this  mild
challenge.  He had been slowly gathering  a reputation  as a man who  needed
watching.
     Shaftoe turned  on his  heel  and strolled  out  into the  middle  of a
clearing  a  few yards away.  Behind him, he  could  hear  the other  men of
Detachment 2702 jockeying for position in the doorway, trying to get a clear
view of him.
     The  Henschel was coming  back for another  pass, now  so  close to the
ground that you could probably throw a rock through its windshield.
     Shaftoe unslung his tommy gun, pulled back the bolt,  cradled it, swung
it up and around, and opened fire.
     Now some might complain that the trench broom lacked penetrating power,
but he was positive he could see pieces of crap flying out of the Henschel's
motor. The Henschel went out of control almost immediately. It banked  until
its wings were vertical,  veered, banked some more until it was upside down,
shed  what  little altitude it had to begin  with, and  made  an upside down
pancake landing in the olive  trees no more than a hundred yards distant. It
did not immediately burst into flame: something of a letdown there.
     There  was perfect silence from the other men. The  only sound was  the
beepity  beep of Corporal Benjamin, his  question now  answered, sending out
his little message. Shaftoe was able to follow the Morse code for  once this
message  was  going  out plaintext. "WE ARE DISCOVERED  STOP EXECUTING  PLAN
TORUS."
     As their first contribution  to Plan Torus, the other  men climbed onto
the truck, which pulled out from its hidey hole in the barn and idled in the
trees nearby. When Benjamin was finished, he abandoned  his radio and joined
them.
     As his first task of Plan  Torus, Shaftoe walked around the premises in
a neat  crisscross  pattern echoing  that of  the  searching  reconnaissance
planes. He was carrying an upside down gasoline can with no lid on it.
     He left the can about one third full, standing upright in the middle of
the  barn. He pulled the pin  from a grenade, dropped it into the  gasoline,
and ran out  of the building.  The  truck  was already pulling away when  he
caught up with it and dove into the waiting arms of his unit, who pulled him
on board. He got himself situated  in  the back of the truck just in time to
see the building go up in a satisfying fireball.
     "Okay," Shaftoe said to the men. "We got a few hours to kill."
     All  the men in  the truck  except for the  SAS  blokes working on  the
Vickers looked at each other like did he really just say that?

     "Uh, Sarge,"  one of them  finally said,  "could you  explain that part
about killing some time?"
     "The airplane's not going to be here for a while. Orders."
     "Was there a problem or "
     "Nope. Everything's going fine. Orders.
     Beyond  that  the men  didn't want to gripe, but a lot more looks  were
exchanged across the bed  of the  truck. Finally, Enoch  Root spoke up, "You
men are probably wondering why we couldn't  kill time for a few hours first,
before  alerting  the Germans to our presence, and rendezvous with the plane
just in the nick of time."
     "Yeah!" said a whole bunch of guys and blokes, vigorously nodding.
     "That's a good question," said Enoch  Root. He said it  like he already
knew the answer, which made everyone in the truck want to slug him.
     The  Germans had deployed some ground  units  to secure the area's road
intersections.  When Detachment 2702 arrived at the first crossroads, all of
the  Germans were freshly  dead, and  all they had  to do  was to  slow down
momentarily so that  some Marine Raiders could run out of hiding and jump on
board.
     The  Germans at the  second intersection had no idea what was going on.
This   was  obviously  the  result   of  some  kind  of  internal  Wehrmacht
communications fuckup, clearly recognizable as such even across cultural and
linguistic  boundaries. Detachment  2702 were able to simply  open fire from
underneath the  tarp and tear  them to pieces, or at least  drive them  into
hiding.
     The  next Germans they ran  into  weren't having any  of it;  they  had
formed  a roadblock out of a  truck and two cars, and  were  lined up on the
other  side of it, pointing  weapons at them. All of their weapons looked to
be small arms. But by this time  the  Vickers had finally been put together,
calibrated, fine  tuned, inspected, and loaded. The  tarp came  off  Private
Mikulski, a surly, brooding two  hundred and fifty  pound Polish British SAS
man, commenced  operations with the Vickers at about the same time  that the
Germans did with their rifles.
     Now when Bobby Shaftoe had gone through high  school, he'd been slotted
into a vocational track and ended up taking a lot of shop classes. A certain
amount of his  time was therefore, naturally, devoted to sawing large pieces
of wood  or metal  into smaller  pieces. Numerous saws were available in the
shop for that  purpose, some better than others. A sawing job  that would be
just  ridiculously hard and lengthy using a hand  saw would  be accomplished
with a  power  saw.  Likewise,  certain  cuts and  materials would cause the
smaller power saws to  overheat or seize up altogether and  therefore called
for  larger  power saws. But even with  the biggest  power saw  in the shop,
Bobby Shaftoe always got the sense that he was imposing some kind  of stress
on the machine. It would slow down when the blade contacted the material, it
would vibrate, it would heat  up, and if you pushed the material through too
fast it would threaten to jam. But then one summer he worked in a mill where
they  had a bandsaw. The bandsaw, its  supply of  blades, its  spare  parts,
maintenance  supplies,  special tools and manuals  occupied a whole room. It
was the only tool he had ever seen with infrastructure. It was the size of a
car. The two wheels that drove the blade were giant eight spoked things that
looked to have been salvaged from steam  locomotives.  Its  blades had to be
manufactured from long rolls  of blade stuff by unreeling about half a  mile
of  toothed ribbon,  cutting  it off,  and  carefully  welding  the cut ends
together into  a loop. When you hit the  power switch, nothing  would happen
for a little while except that a subsonic vibration would slowly rise up out
of  the earth,  as if a freight train  were  approaching from  far away, and
finally the blade would begin to move,  building speed slowly but inexorably
until  the teeth disappeared and  it  became a bolt  of pure  hellish energy
stretched taut between the table and the machinery above it. Anecdotes about
accidents involving the bandsaw  were told  in hushed voices and not usually
commingled with  other  industrial  accident  anecdotes.  Anyway,  the  most
noteworthy thing about  the bandsaw was that  you could cut anything with it
and not only  did it do  the job quickly  and  coolly but it didn't seem  to
notice  that  it was doing anything. It wasn't even aware that a human being
was sliding a great  big  chunk of  stuff through it. It never  slowed down.
Never heated up.
     In Shaftoe's  post  high school experience he  had found  that guns had
much in common with saws. Guns could fire bullets all right, but they kicked
back and heated up, got  dirty,  and  jammed  eventually.  They  could  fire
bullets in other words, but it  was a big deal for them, it placed a certain
amount of stress on them, and they  could not take that  stress forever. But
the Vickers in  the back of this truck was  to other guns as the bandsaw was
to other saws.  The  Vickers  was  water  cooled. It actually had  a fucking
radiator  on  it. It had infrastructure, just  like the bandsaw, and a whole
crew  of technicians  to fuss  over  it. But once the  damn thing was up and
running, it  could  fire  continuously  for  days as  long  as  people  kept
scurrying  up to it  with more belts of  ammunition. After  Private Mikulski
opened fire with the  Vickers, some of the  other Detachment 2702 men, eager
to pitch  in and  do their bit,  took  potshots at those Germans with  their
rifles, but doing so  made  them feel so small  and  pathetic that they soon
gave up and just  took cover in the ditch and  lit up cigarettes and watched
the  slow  progress  of  the  Vickers' bullet stream  across  the roadblock.
Mikulski hosed  down all  of  the German vehicles for  a  while,  yawing the
Vickers back and  forth  like a man  playing a fire extinguisher against the
base of  a  fire. Then he picked out a few  bits of  the  roadblock  that he
suspected  people might  be  standing behind and concentrated on them for  a
while, boring tunnels  through the wreckage of  the vehicles until he  could
see what was  on the  other side, sawing  through  their frames and breaking
them in half. He cut down half a dozen or so roadside  trees behind which he
suspected Germans were hiding, and then mowed about half an acre of grass.
     By  this time  it  had become  evident that some  Germans had retreated
behind a gentle swell in the earth just off to one side of the road and were
taking potshots  from there,  so Mikulski swung the muzzle of the Vickers up
into the air at a steep angle and  shot the  bullet  stream  into the sky so
that  the bullets plunged down like mortar shells on  the other side of  the
rise. It took him a while to get the angle just right, but then he patiently
distributed bullets over the entire field, like a man watering his lawn. One
of the SAS blokes actually  did some calculations on his knee, figuring  out
how long Mikulski  should keep  doing  this to make  sure  that bullets were
distributed over the  ground in  question at the right density  say, one per
square foot.  When  the  territory had  been properly sown with  lead slugs,
Mikulski turned back  to the roadblock  and made sure  that the truck pulled
across  the pavement was in small enough pieces that it could be shoved  out
of the way by hand.
     Then  he  ceased firing at  last. Shaftoe felt like he should  make  an
entry in a log book, the way ships' captains do when they pull  a man of war
into port. When they drove past the wreckage,  they slowed down for a bit to
gawk.  The  brittle  grey iron  of the  German vehicles' engine  blocks  had
shattered  like  glass and you could look into  the engines all neatly cross
sectioned and see the  gleaming pistons and  crankshafts exposed to the sun,
bleeding oil and coolant.
     They  passed through what was left  of the roadblock and  drove onwards
into a sparsely populated inland area that made excellent strafing territory
for  the Luftwaffe. The first two fighters that came  around were torn apart
in midair by Mikulski and  his Vickers. The next pair managed to destroy the
truck, the big  gun, and Private Mikulski in one pass. No one else was hurt;
they  were  all in the ditch,  watching as  Mikulski sat placidly behind the
controls  of  his  weapon,  playing  chicken  with  two  Messerschmidts  and
eventually losing.
     By now it was getting dark. The detachment  began to make its way cross
country on foot, carrying Mikulski's remains on a stretcher. They ran into a
German patrol and fought it out with them; two of the SAS men were  wounded,
and one of these had to be carried the rest of the way. Finally they reached
their rendezvous  point, a  wheat  field where they laid down road flares to
outline a landing strip for a U.S. Army DC 3, which executed a deft landing,
took them all on board, and flew them to Malta without further incident.
     And that was where they were introduced to Lieutenant  Monkberg for the
first time.
     No sooner  had they been debriefed than they were on another submarine,
bound for  parts unknown or at  least unspecified.  But when  they turned in
their warm  weather gear for ten pound oiled wool sweaters, they started  to
get an idea. A few claustrophobic days later, they had been transferred onto
this freighter.
     The vessel itself is  such  a pathetic heap that they have been amusing
themselves  by substituting the  word "shit"  for "ship" in various nautical
expressions, e.g.: let's get  this cabin shit shape! Where in hell  does the
shit's master think he's taking us? And so on.
     Now, in the shit's hold, an impassioned Bobby Shaftoe is doing his best
to create a  ransacked effect. He strews  rifles and tommy guns  around  the
deck. He opens boxes of .45  cartridges and flings them all over  the place.
He finds some skis, too they'll be needing skis, right? He plants mines here
and there,  just to throw  a scare  into  whatever  German  happens along to
investigate this shitwreck. He opens crates  of grenades. These do not  look
very  ransacked, sitting there full, so he pulls out dozens of them, carries
them abovedecks, and  throws  them  overboard. He tosses  out some skis also
maybe they will wash up on shore  somewhere and  contribute to  the  overall
sense of chaos that is so important to Lieutenant Monkberg.
     He  is  on his way across the upper deck,  carrying an armload of skis,
when something catches his eye out there in the fog. He flinches, of course.
Many strafings have turned Bobby Shaftoe into a big flincher. He flinches so
hard  that  he drops all of those skis on the deck  and comes this close  to
throwing himself  down among  them.  But he holds his ground long  enough to
focus in on this  thing  in the fog.  It is directly in  front of them,  and
somewhat higher than the bridge of the freighter, and (unlike plunging Zeros
or Messerschmidts) it is not moving fast just hanging there. Like a cloud in
the sky. As if the fog had coagulated into  a dense clump, like his mother's
mashed potatoes. It  gets brighter and brighter as  he stands there watching
it, and the  edges get more  and more sharply  defined, and he starts to see
other stuff around it.
     The other stuff is green.
     Hey, wait a  minute!  He is  looking at a green mountainside with a big
white snowfield in the middle of it.
     "Heads up!" he screams, and throws himself down on the deck.
     He  is hoping  to  be  surprised by the gradualness, the gentleness  of
their collision with  the earth's crust. He  has in  mind the  kind  of deal
where you run a little motorboat at a sandy beach, cut the motor and tilt it
out of the water at the last minute, and glide up gently onto the cushioning
sand.
     This turns out to be a  very  poor analogy  for what happens  next. The
freighter is actually going a lot faster than your typical putt putt fishing
boat. And  instead of gliding up onto a sandy beach, they have a nearly head
on collision  with a vertical  granite  wall. There  is  a really impressive
noise,  the  prow of the vessel actually bends upwards, and suddenly,  Bobby
Shaftoe finds that he is sliding  on his belly across the ice glazed deck at
a high speed.
     He is  terrified, for a moment, that  he's going to slide right off the
deck and  go flying into the drink, but he manages to steer himself into  an
anchor chain, which proves  an effective  stopper.  Down below,  he can hear
approximately ten  thousand other small and large objects finding  their own
obstacles to slam into.
     There  follows a  brief and  almost  peaceful interlude  of near  total
silence. Then a hue and cry  rises up  from the extremely sparse crew of the
freighter: "ABANDON SHIT! ABANDON SHIT!"
     The men of Detachment 2702 head for  the lifeboats. Shaftoe  knows that
they can take  care  of themselves, so he heads for the  bridge, looking for
the few oddballs who always find a way to make things interesting:
     Lieutenants Root and Monkberg, and Corporal Benjamin.
     The  first person  he sees is the skipper,  slumped in a chair, pouring
himself a drink and looking like a guy who just bled to death. This poor son
of a bitch is a Navy lifer who got detached from his regular unit solely for
the  purpose  of  doing what he just did. It clearly  does not sit well with
him.
     "Nice  job, sir!" Shaftoe says, not knowing  what  else to say. Then he
follows the sound of an argument into the signals cabin.
     The dramatis personae are Corporal  Benjamin, holding up a  large Book,
in a pose that recalls an exasperated preacher sarcastically acquainting his
wayward  parishioners  with  the unfamiliar sight  of the  Bible; Lieutenant
Monkberg, semireclined in  a chair,  his damaged  Limb up  on a  table;  and
Lieutenant Root, doing some needle and thread work on same.
     "It is my sworn duty " Benjamin begins.
     Monkberg interrupts him. "It is your sworn duty, Corporal, to follow my
orders!"
     Root's medical supplies are scattered all over the deck  because of the
collision.  Shaftoe begins to pick them up  and sort  them out,  keeping  an
especially sharp eye out for any small bottles that may have gone astray.
     Benjamin  is  very excited. Clearly,  he  is  not  getting  through  to
Monkberg, and so he opens up the hefty Book at random and holds  it up above
his  head. It contains line  after line,  column  after  column,  of  random
letters.  "This," Benjamin  says,  "is the  Allied MERCHANT SHIPPING CODE! A
copy of THIS BOOK is on EVERY SHIP of EVERY CONVOY in the North Atlantic! It
is used by those ships  to BROADCAST THEIR POSITIONS! Do you UNDERSTAND what
is going to HAPPEN if THIS BOOK falls into the hands of THE GERMANS?!"
     "I have given you my order," Lieutenant Monkberg says.
     They go  on in this vein for a couple  of minutes as Shaftoe scours the
deck for  medical debris.  Finally he  sees what  he's  looking for:  it has
rolled beneath a storage cabinet and appears to be miraculously unscathed.
     "Sergeant Shaftoe!" says Root peremptorily. It is the  closest  he  has
ever  come to sounding  like  a  military  officer.  Shaftoe straightens  up
reflexively.
     "Sir! Yes, sir!"
     "Lieutenant Monkberg's  dose  of  morphine  may wear off pretty soon. I
need you to find my morphine bottle and bring it to me right away."
     "Sir!  Yes, sir!" Shaftoe is a Marine, which means he's  really good at
following  orders  even when his  body is telling him not  to. Even so,  his
fingers do  not  want to release  their grip  on the little bottle, and Root
almost has to pry it loose.
     Benjamin and Monkberg,  locked in their dispute, are  oblivious to this
little  exchange.  "Lieutenant Root!" Benjamin says, his voice now  high and
trembly.
     "Yes, Corporal," Root says absent mindedly.
     "I have reason  to believe that Lieutenant Monkberg is a German spy and
that he should  be relieved of his command of this mission and placed  under
arrest!"
     "You son of a bitch!" Monkberg shouts. As well he might, since Benjamin
has just accused him of treason, for which he could face a firing squad. But
Root has Monkberg's leg clamped in place up there on the table, and he can't
move.
     Root  is completely  unruffled. He seems  to welcome this  unbelievably
serious accusation. It is an  opportunity to talk about  something with more
substance  than, for example, finding ways to substitute the word "shit" for
"ship" in nautical expressions.
     "I'll see you court martialed for this, you bastard!" Monkberg hollers.
     "Corporal Benjamin, what grounds do you have for this accusation?" says
Enoch Root in a lullaby voice.
     "The lieutenant has refused to allow me to destroy the codebooks, which
it  is my sworn duty to  do!" Benjamin  shouts.  He has  completely lost his
temper.
     "I  am under  very specific  and  clear orders  from  Colonel Chattan!"
Monkberg says, addressing Root.  Shaftoe is startled by this. Monkberg seems
to be recognizing  Root's authority in the matter. Or maybe he's scared, and
looking for an ally. The officers closing ranks against the enlisted men. As
usual.
     "Do you have a  written  copy of  those  orders  I could examine?" Root
says.
     "I don't think it's  appropriate for  us  to be having this  discussion
here and now," Monkberg says, still pleading and defensive.
     "How would you suggest  that we handle it?" Root says, drawing a length
of silk through Monkberg's numbed flesh. "We are aground. The  Germans  will
be here soon. We either leave the code books or we don't. We have  to decide
now."
     Monkberg goes limp and passive in his chair.
     "Can you show me written orders?" Root asks.
     "No. They were given verbally," Monkberg says.
     "And did these orders specifically mention the code books?" Root asks.
     "They did," Monkberg says, as if he's a witness in a courtroom.
     "And did these orders state  that the code books were to be  allowed to
fall into the hands of the Germans?"
     "They did."
     There is silence for  a moment as  Root ties  off  a  suture and begins
another  one.  Then  he says, "A  skeptic, such  as Corporal Benjamin, might
think that this business of the code books is an invention of yours."
     "If I falsified my own orders," Monkberg says, "I could be shot."
     "Only if you, and some witnesses to the event, all made their  way back
to  friendly territory, and compared notes with Colonel Chattan," says Enoch
Root, coolly and patiently.
     "What the fuck is going on!?"  says one of the SAS blokes,  bursting in
through  a hatch down below and  charging up the gangway. "We're all waiting
in the fucking  lifeboats!"  He bursts into the room, his face red with cold
and anxiety, and looks around wildly.
     "Fuck off," Shaftoe says.
     The SAS bloke pulls up short. "Okay, Sarge!"
     "Go down  and tell the men in the boats to fuck off too," Shaftoe says.
"Right away, Sarge!" the  SAS man says, and makes himself scarce. "As  those
anxious men in the  lifeboats  will  attest,"  Enoch  Root  continues,  "the
likelihood of you and several witnesses making it back to friendly territory
is diminishing by the minute. And  the fact that you just happened to suffer
a grievous self inflicted leg wound, just a few minutes ago, complicates our
escape  tremendously. Either  we  will all be captured together, or else you
will  volunteer  to  be left behind  and captured. Either way, you are saved
assuming that  you  are a  German spy from the court martial and  the firing
squad."
     Monkberg  can't  believe  his  ears.  "But  but  it  was  an  accident,
Lieutenant Root! I hit myself in the leg with a fucking ax you don't think I
did that deliberately!?"
     "It is very difficult for us to know," Root says regretfully.
     "Why don't we just destroy  the code  books? It's  the safest thing  to
do,"  Benjamin says. "I'd just be following  a  standing order nothing wrong
with that. No court martial there."
     "But that would ruin the mission!" Monkberg says.
     Root thinks this one  over  for a  moment.  "Has  anyone ever died," he
says,  "because  the enemy  stole  one  of  our secret  codes  and read  our
messages?"
     "Absolutely," Shaftoe says.
     "Has  anyone on our side ever died," Root continues, "because the enemy
didn't have one of our secret codes?"
     This is quite  a poser.  Corporate Benjamin makes  his mind up soonest,
but even he has to think about it. "Of course not!" he says.
     "Sergeant  Shaftoe? Do you have an opinion?" Root  asks, fixing Shaftoe
with a sober and serious gaze.
     Shaftoe says, "This code business is some tricky shit."
     Monkberg's turn. "I ...  I think... I believe I  could  come up with  a
hypothetical situation in which someone could die, yes."
     "How about you, Lieutenant Root?" Shaftoe asks.
     Root  does not say anything for a long time now. He just works with his
silk and his  needles. It seems like several minutes go by. Perhaps it's not
that long. Everyone is nervous about the Germans.
     "Lieutenant Monkberg  asks me to believe  that  it will  prevent Allied
soldiers from dying  if we turn over the Allied merchant shipping code books
to. the Germans today," Root finally  says. Everyone  jumps nervously at the
sound of his voice. "Actually, since we must use a sort of calculus of death
in these  situations, the real question  is, will this  some  how save  more
lives than it will lose?"
     "You  lost  me  there, padre,"  says Shaftoe. "I  didn't even  make  it
through algebra."
     "Then let's start with what we know: turning over  the  codes will lose
lives  because it  will enable the  Germans to figure  out where our convoys
are, and sink them. Right?"
     "Right!" Corporal Benjamin says. Root seems to be leaning his way.
     "That will be true,"  Root continues, "until such  time  as  the Allies
change the code systems which they will probably do as soon as possible. So,
on the negative side of the calculus of death,  we have some convoy sinkings
in  the  short term.  What about the positive side?" Root  asks, raising his
eyebrows in contemplation even as he stares down into Monkberg's wound. "How
might  turning  over  the  codes   save  some  lives?   Well,  that  is   an
imponderable."
     "A what?" Shaftoe says.
     "Suppose,  for  example,  that there is a secret convoy  about to cross
over from New York, and it contains thousands of troops, and some new weapon
that will turn the tide in the war and save  thousands of lives. And suppose
that it is using a different code system, so that even after the Germans get
our code books  today  they will  not know about it. The Germans will  focus
their  energies  on sinking  the convoys  that  they do know about  killing,
perhaps, a few hundred  crew members. But while their  attention is on those
convoys, the secret convoy will slip through and  deliver its precious cargo
and save thousands of lives."
     Another  long  silence. They  can  hear  the  rest of  Detachment  2702
shouting now, down in the lifeboats,  probably having a detailed  discussion
of their  own: if we leave all of  the fucking officers behind on a grounded
ship, does it qualify as mutiny?
     "That's  just hypothetical," Root says. "But it demonstrates that it is
at least theoretically possible that there might be a  positive  side to the
calculus of death. And now that I think about  it, there might not even be a
negative side."
     "What do you mean?" Benjamin says. "Of course there's a negative side!"
     "You are assuming that the Germans have not  already broken that code,"
Root says, pointing a bloody and  accusing finger at Benjamin's  big tome of
gibberish. "But maybe they have. They've been sinking  our convoys left  and
right, you know. If that's the case, then there is no negative in letting it
fall into their hands."
     "But that contradicts your  theory  about the secret convoy!"  Benjamin
says.
     "The secret convoy was just a Gedankenexperiment," Root says.
     Corporal  Benjamin rolls his eyes;  apparently,  he actually knows what
that means.  "If they've already broken it, then why are  we going to all of
this trouble, and risking our lives to GIVE IT TO THEM!?"
     Root ponders that one for a while. "I don't know."
     "Well, what  do  you think,  Lieutenant Root?" Bobby Shaftoe asks a few
excruciatingly silent minutes later.
     "I  think  that  in  spite  of  my  Gedankenexperiment,  that  Corporal
Benjamin's explanation i.e., that Lieutenant Monkberg  is  a  German spy  is
more plausible."
     Benjamin lets  out a sigh  of relief. Monkberg  stares  up into  Root's
face, paralyzed with horror.
     "But implausible things happen all the time," Root continues.
     "Oh, for pete's sake!" Benjamin shouts, and slams his hand down  on the
book.
     "Lieutenant Root?" Shaftoe says.
     "Yes, Sergeant Shaftoe?"
     "Lieutenant Monkberg's injury was an accident. I seen it happen."
     Root looks up into Shaftoe's eyes. He finds this interesting. "Really?"
     "Yes, sir. It was an accident all the way."
     Root  breaks  open  a  package of sterile gauze  and  begins to wind it
around  Monkberg's leg; the blood soaks through immediately, faster  than he
can wind  new layers around it. But gradually, Root starts to get the better
of it, and the  gauze  stays white and  clean.  "Guess  it's time to make  a
command decision," he says. "I say we leave the code books behind, just like
Lieutenant Monkberg says."
     "But if he's a German spy " Benjamin begins.
     "Then his ass is grass when we get back on friendly soil," Root says.
     "But you said yourself the chances of that were slim."
     "I shouldn't have said that," Enoch Root  says apologetically.  "It was
not  a wise or a thoughtful comment. It did not  reflect  the true spirit of
Detachment 2702.  I am convinced  that  we will  prevail  in the face of our
little problem here. I am convinced that we will make  it to Sweden and that
we will bring Lieutenant Monkberg along with us."
     "That's the spirit!" Monkberg says.
     "If  at any point, Lieutenant Monkberg shows  signs  of malingering, or
volunteers to be  left behind, or in any way behaves  so as to  increase our
risk of capture by the Germans, then we can  all  safely assume that he is a
German spy."
     Monkberg seems  completely  unfazed.  "Well, let's get the fuck out  of
here,  then!" he blurts, and gets to  his feet, somewhat unsteady from blood
loss.
     "Wait!" Sergeant Shaftoe says.
     "What is it now, Shaftoe?" Monkberg shouts, back in command again.
     "How are we going to know if he's increasing our risk of capture?"
     "What do you mean, Sergeant Shaftoe?" Root says.
     "Maybe it  won't  be  obvious," Shaftoe says. "Maybe  there's a  German
detachment  waiting  to capture us at a certain location in  the woods.  And
maybe Lieutenant Monkberg is going to lead us directly to the trap."
     "Atta boy, Sarge!" Corporal Benjamin says.
     "Lieutenant  Monkberg," says Enoch Root, "as the closest thing  we have
to a ship's doctor, I am relieving you of your command on medical grounds."
     "What medical grounds!?" Monkberg shouts, horrified.
     "You are short on blood,  and what blood  you do  have is  tainted with
morphine," says Lieutenant Enoch Root.  "So the second in command will  have
to  take over for you and make all decisions as  to which direction  we will
take."
     "But you're the only  other  officer!"  Shaftoe says.  "Except  for the
skipper, and he can't be a skipper without a boat."
     "Sergeant Shaftoe!" Root  barks, doing such  an effective impersonation
of a Marine that Shaftoe and Benjamin both stiffen to attention.
     "Sir! Yes sir!" Shaftoe returns.
     "This is the  first  and last order I am  going to give you, so  listen
carefully!" Root insists.
     "Sir! Yes sir!"
     "Sergeant Shaftoe, take me and the rest of this unit to Sweden!"
     "Sir!  Yes  sir!"  Shaftoe  hollers, and  marches  out  of  the  cabin,
practically knocking Monkberg  aside.  The others soon follow,  leaving  the
code books behind.
     After about half an hour of  screwing around with lifeboats, Detachment
2702  finds  itself on the ground  again,  in Norway. The snowline  is about
fifty feet above sea level; it is fortunate that Bobby Shaftoe knows what to
do with  a pair of skis. The SAS blokes also know this particular drill, and
they even know how to rig up a sort of sled arrangement that they can use to
pull Lieutenant Monkberg.  Within a few hours,  they are deep in the  woods,
headed east, not having seen a single  human  being,  German  or  Norwegian,
since they ran  aground. Snow  begins  to  fall, filling  in  their  tracks.
Monkberg is behaving himself not demanding to be left behind, not sending up
flares. Shaftoe begins to think that making it out to Sweden might be one of
Detachment 2702's  easier  missions.  The  only  hard  part,  as  usual,  is
understanding what the fuck is going on.


     Chapter 31 DILIGENCE


     Maps  of Southeast Asia  are  up on  the walls,  and even  covering the
windows, lending a  bunkerlike ambience to Avi's hotel room. Epiphyte  Corp.
has assembled for its first full on shareholder's meeting in two months. Avi
Halaby,  Randy Waterhouse, Tom Howard,  Eberhard Föhr,  John  Cantrell,  and
Beryl Hagen crowd into the room and pillage the minibar for  snacks and soft
drinks. Some  of them sit on the bed. Eberhard sits barefoot and crosslegged
on the floor with his laptop up  on a footstool.  Avi remains  standing.  He
crosses  his arms  and  leans  back, eyes  closed,  against  the  endangered
mahogany  doors  of his  entertainment  center. He  is wearing a brilliantly
laundered white shirt, so freshly and heavily starched that  it still cracks
when he moves.  Until fifteen minutes ago he was wearing a t shirt he hadn't
taken off his body for forty eight hours.
     Randy thinks for  a  minute  that Avi  may have  fallen  asleep  in the
unorthodox standing position. But "Look at that map," Avi says suddenly,  in
a  quiet voice. He opens his eyes  and swivels them in their sockets towards
same,  not  wasting precious energy  by turning  his head.  "Singapore,  the
southern  tip of  Taiwan,  and the northernmost point  of  Australia  form a
triangle."
     "Avi," says Eb solemnly, "any  three points form a triangle." Generally
they don't look  to  Eberhard to leaven the  proceedings with  humor,  but a
chuckle passes around the room, and Avi grins not so much because it's funny
as because it's evidence of good morale.
     "What's in the middle of the triangle?"
     Everyone  looks again. The  correct answer is a point in the middle  of
the Sulu Sea, but it's clear what Avi is getting at. "We are," Randy says.
     "That's correct," Avi says.  "Kinakuta is ideally situated to act as an
electronic crossroads. The perfect place to put big routers."
     "You're talking shareholderese," Randy warns.
     Avi ignores him. "Really it makes a lot more sense this way."
     "What way?" Eb asks sharply.
     "I've become aware that  there are other  cable people here. There is a
group  from Singapore and  a consortium from  Australia and New Zealand.  In
other words:  we used  to be  the sole carriers  into the Crypt. As of later
today, I suspect we will be one of three."
     Tom Howard grins triumphantly: he works in the Crypt,  he probably knew
before anyone. Randy and John Cantrell exchange a look.
     Eb sits up stiffly.  "How long  have you known  about this?"  he  asks,
Randy sees  a look of annoyance flash across Beryl's face. She does not like
being probed.
     "Would  the rest of  you  excuse  Eb and me  for a minute?" Randy says,
getting to his feet.
     Dr. Eberhard Föhr looks startled, then gets up and follows Randy out of
the room. "Where are we going?"
     "Leave  your laptop," Randy  says, escorting him  out into the hallway.
"We're just going here."
     "Why?"
     "It's like this," Randy says,  pulling the  door closed but not letting
it lock. "People like Avi and Beryl,  who  have been in business a lot, have
this noticeable preference for two person conversations like the one you and
I are having right now. Not only that, they rarely write things down."
     "Explain."
     "It's  kind of an  information theory thing. See,  if  worse  comes  to
worst, and there is some kind of legal action "
     "Legal action? What are you talking about?"
     Eb  came from a small city near the border with Denmark. His father was
a  high  school  mathematics  teacher,  his  mother an  English teacher. His
appearance  would  probably  make him an outcast in  his home town, but like
many of the people  who still live there, he believes that things should  be
done in a plain, open, and logical fashion.
     "I don't mean to alarm  you,"  Randy says,  "I'm not implying  that any
such thing is happening, or  about to. But America being the way it is right
now, you'd be amazed how often business ventures lead to lawsuits. When that
happens, any and all documents are disclosable. So people like Avi and Beryl
never  write  anything  down  that they wouldn't want  to see in open court.
Furthermore,  anyone  can be  asked,  under  oath,  to  testify  about  what
happened. That's why two person conversations, like this one, are best."
     "One person's word against another. I understand this."
     "I know you do."
     "We should anyway have been discreetly told."
     "The reason that Avi and Beryl didn't tell us about this  until now was
that they wanted  to  work  out the  problem  face to  face,  in  two person
conversations.  In other  words,  they did  it  to  protect  us  not to hide
anything from us. Now they are formally presenting us with the news."
     Eberhard is no longer suspicious. Now he is irked, which is worse. Like
a lot of techies, he can become obstreperous when he decides that others are
not being logical. Randy holds up his hands, palms out, in surrender.
     "I stipulate that this does not make sense," Randy says.
     Eb glares into the distance, not mollified.
     "Will you agree  with me that the world  is full of  irrational people,
and crazy situations?"
     "Jaaaa " Eb says guardedly.
     "If you  and I  are going to  hack and get paid for  it, people have to
hire us, right?"
     Eb considers it carefully. "Yes."
     "That means dealing with those people, at some  level, unpleasant as it
may be.  And accepting a whole  lot of  other nonsense, like lawyers and  PR
people and marketroids. And if you or I tried to deal with them, we would go
out of our minds. True?"
     "Most likely, yes."
     "It  is good, then, that people  like Avi  and  Beryl  have  come  into
existence, because they are our interface." An image from the Cold War comes
into  Randy's  head.  He reaches out  with both hands and gropes in the air.
"Like those glove boxes that they use to handle plutonium. See?"
     Eberhard nods. An encouraging sign.
     "But  that  doesn't  mean  that  it's  going  to  be  like  programming
computers. They  can only  filter  and soften the irrational  nature  of the
world  beyond, so  Avi  and Beryl  may still  do things that  seem a  little
crazy."
     Eb has been getting a more and more faraway look in his eyes. "It would
be  interesting to  approach this  as a problem in  information  theory," he
announces. "How can data  flow back and forth between  nodes  in an internal
network" Randy  knows  that  by  this Eb means people in a small corporation
– "but not exist to a person outside?"
     "What do you mean, not exist?"
     "How could a  court subpoena a document if, from their reference frame,
it had never existed?"
     "Are you talking about encrypting it?"
     Eb looks slightly pained by Randy's simple mindedness. "We are  already
doing that.  But  someone  could still prove that a document, of  a  certain
size, had been sent out at a certain time, to a certain mailbox."
     "Traffic analysis."
     "Yes.  But what if one jams it? Why couldn't I  fill my hard drive with
random bytes, so that individual files  would not be discernible? Their very
existence would be  hidden in the noise, like a striped tiger in tall grass.
And we could continually stream random noise back and forth to each other."
     "That would be expensive."
     Eberhard waves his hand dismissively. "Bandwidth is cheap."
     "That  is  more an article of  faith than  a  statement of fact," Randy
says, "but it might be true in the future."
     "But  the rest  of  our lives  will happen in the future, Randy,  so we
might as well get with the program now.
     "Well," Randy says, "could we continue this discussion later?"
     "Of course."
     They go back into the room.  Tom, who has  spent the most time here, is
saying: "The  five footers  with yellowish brown spots on an aqua background
are harmless and make great pets. The six footers with brownish yellow spots
on a  turquoise  background  kill  you  with a single  bite, in ten minutes,
unless you commit suicide in the meantime to escape the intolerable pain."
     This is all a way of letting Randy and Eb know that the others have not
been discussing business while they were out of the room.
     "Okay,"  Avi  says,  "the  upshot  is that  the  Crypt  is going to  be
potentially much bigger than we thought  at first, so this is good news. But
there is one thing that we have to  deal with." Avi has known Randy forever,
and knows that Randy won't really be bothered by what is to come.
     All  eyes  turn towards Randy, and  Beryl picks up the thread.  She has
arrogated to herself the role of worrying about people's feelings, since the
other people  in  the company  are so manifestly unqualified, and she speaks
regretfully. "The work Randy's been doing  in the Philippines, which is very
fine work, is no longer a critical part of this corporation's activities."
     "I  accept that," Randy says. "Hey, at least  I got my first tan in ten
years."
     Everyone seems immediately relieved that Randy is not pissed off.
     Tom,  typically, gets  right to brass  tacks: "Can we pull  out  of our
relationship with the Dentist? Just make a clean break?"
     The rhythm  of the  conversation  is abruptly  lost. It's  like a power
failure in a discotheque.
     "Unknown," Avi finally says. "We looked at the contracts. But they were
written by the Dentist's lawyers."
     "Aren't some of his partners lawyers?" Cantrell asks.
     Avi shrugs impatiently, as if that's not the half of it. "His partners.
His  investors. His  neighbors, friends,  golfing buddies.  His  plumber  is
probably a lawyer."
     "The point being that he is famously litigious," Randy says.
     "The other potential problem," Beryl  says, "is  that, if we did find a
way to  extract ourselves from  the  deal with AVCLA, we would then lose the
short term cash flow that we were counting on from the  Philippines network.
The ramifications of that turn out to be uglier than we had expected."
     "Damn!" Randy says, "I was afraid of that."
     "What are the  ramifications?" Tom says, hewing  as  ever to the bottom
line.
     "We  would have to  raise some more money to cover  the shortfall," Avi
says. "Diluting our stock."
     "Diluting it how much?" John asks.
     "Below fifty percent."
     This magic figure  touches  off  an epidemic of  sighing,  groaning and
shifting around among the officers of  Epiphyte Corp., who collectively hold
over  fifty  percent  of  the company's  stock. As  they  work  through  the
ramifications in their heads, they begin to look significantly at Randy.
     Finally Randy  stands, and holds out his  hands as if warding them off.
"Okay,  okay,  okay," he  says. "Where does this take us? The business  plan
states,  over and over, that the Philippines network makes  sense in and  of
itself that it could be  spun  off into an  independent business at any time
and still make money. As far as we know, that's still true, right?"
     Avi thinks this over before issuing the carefully engineered statement:
     "It is as true as it ever was."
     This elicits  a  titter,  and  a  bit of sarcastic  applause,  from the
others. Clever Avi! Where would we be without him?
     "Okay,"  Randy says. "So if  we stick with the  Dentist even though his
project is now irrelevant to us we hopefully make enough money that we don't
need to sell any more stock. We can  retain control over the company. On the
other hand, if we break our  relationship with AVCLA, the Dentist's partners
start to hammer us with lawsuits which they can do at virtually no cost,  or
risk. We get mired in court in  L.A.  We  have to fly back there and testify
and give depositions. We spend a ton of money on lawyers."
     "And we might even lose," Avi says.
     Everyone laughs.
     "So we  have to stay  in," Randy concludes. "We have to work  with  the
Dentist whether we want to or not."
     No one says anything.
     It's not that they disagree with Randy; on the contrary. It's just that
Randy is the guy who's been doing the Philippines stuff, and who is going to
end up handling this unfortunate  situation. Randy's going  to take all  the
force of this blow  personally. It is better that  he volunteer than that it
be forced on him. He is volunteering now, loudly and publicly,  putting on a
performance. The other actors in the ensemble are Avi, Beryl, Tom, John, and
Eb. The  audience consists of  Epiphyte Corp.'s minority  shareholders,  the
Dentist, and various  yet to  be empaneled juries.  It is a performance that
will never come to light unless  someone files a  lawsuit  against them  and
brings them all to the witness box to recount it under oath.
     John decides to trowel  it on a little thicker. "AVCLA's financing  the
Philippines on spec, right?"
     "Correct,"   Avi  says  authoritatively,   playing   directly   to  the
hypothetical juries of the future. "In the old days, cable layers would sell
capacity first to raise capital. AVCLA's building it with their own capital.
When it's  finished, they'll own it outright, and  they'll sell the capacity
to the highest bidder."
     "It's not all AVCLA's money  they're  not that rich," Beryl says. "They
got a big wad from NOHGI."
     "Which is?" Eb asks.
     "Niigata Overseas Holding Group Inc.," three people say in unison.
     Eb looks baffled.
     "NOHGI laid the deep sea cable from Taiwan to Luzon," Randy says.
     "Anyway," John says, "my point is that  since the Dentist is wiring the
Philippines  on  spec,  he  is  highly exposed.  Anything  that  delays  the
completion of that  system  is going  to  cause  him  enormous  problems. It
behooves us to honor our obligations."
     John is saying to  the hypothetical jury in  Dentist v. Epiphyte Corp.:
we carefully observed the terms of our contract with AVCLA.

     But this is not  necessarily going to look so good to the  hypothetical
jury in  the other hypothetical  minority  shareholder  lawsuit, Springboard
Group  v.  Epiphyte  Corp.  So  Avi  hastens  to  add,  "As  I  think  we've
established, through  a  careful  discussion  of the  issues,  honoring  our
obligations to the Dentist is part and  parcel of our obligation  to our own
shareholders. These two goals dovetail."
     Beryl rolls her eyes and heaves a deep sigh of relief.
     "Let us therefore go forth and wire the Philippines," Randy says.
     Avi addresses him  in  formal tones, as if his hand were  resting, even
now, on a Gideon Bible. "Randy, do you  feel that  the resources allotted to
you  are  sufficient  for you  to  meet our  contractual  obligations to the
Dentist?"
     "We need to have a meeting about that," Randy says.
     "Can it wait until after tomorrow?" Avi says.
     "Of course. Why shouldn't it?"
     "I have to use the bathroom," Avi says.
     This is a signal  that Avi and  Randy have used many times in the past.
Avi gets up and goes into the bathroom. A moment later, Randy says, "Come to
think of it . . ." and follows him in there.
     He is startled to find that Avi is actually pissing. On the spur of the
moment,  Randy unzips and starts pissing  right along  with him. It  doesn't
occur to him how remarkable this is until he's well into it.
     "What's up?" Randy asks.
     "I went down to the lobby to change money this morning," Avi says, "and
guess who came stalking into the hotel, fresh from the airport?"
     "Oh, shit," Randy says.
     "The Dentist himself."
     "No yacht?"
     "The yacht's following him."
     "Did he have anyone with him?"
     "No, but he might later."
     "Why is he here?"
     "He must have heard."
     "God. He's the last guy I want to run into tomorrow."
     "Why? Is there a problem?"
     "Nothing I can put my finger on," Randy says. "Nothing dramatic."
     "Nothing  that,  if  it  came  to  light  later,  would  make you  look
negligent?"
     "I don't think so," Randy says.  "It's just that this Philippines thing
is complicated and we need to talk about it."
     "Well,  for  God's  sake," Avi  says,  "if  you  run into  the  Dentist
tomorrow, don't say anything about your work. Keep it social."
     "Got it," Randy says, and zips up.  But what he's  really thinking  is:
why did I  waste  all those  years in academia when I could have  been doing
great shit like this?
     Which then reminds him of something: "Oh, yeah. Got a weird e mail."
     Avi immediately says "From Andy?"
     "How'd you guess?"
     "You said it was weird. Did you really get e mail from him?"
     "I don't really  know who it was from. Probably  not  Andy.  It  wasn't
weird in that way."
     "Did you respond to it?"
     "No. But dwarf@siblings.net did."
     "Who's that? Siblings.net is the system you used to administer, right?"
     "Yeah.  I still  have  some  privileges there.  I created a new account
there, name  of  dwarf,  which can't be traced to me. Sent anonymous  e mail
back to this guy telling him that until he proves otherwise, I'm assuming he
is an old enemy of mine."
     "Or a new one."


     Chapter 32 SPEARHEAD


     The  young Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse,  visiting his grandparents in
Dakota, follows a plow across a field. The diving blades  of the  plow heave
the  black soil up  out of the furrows and pile  it into  ridges, rough  and
jumbled when seen up close  but mathematically clean and  straight, like the
grooves of  a  phonograph  record, when  viewed  from  a  distance.  A  tiny
surfboard shaped object  projects  from  the crest of one  of those  earthen
waves.  Young  Waterhouse  bends down and  plucks  it  out. It is  an Indian
spearhead neatly chipped out of flint.
     U 553 is  a black  steel spear point  thrusting into the  air about ten
miles  north  of Qwghlm. The  grey rollers pick  it up and slam it down, but
other  than  that,  it does not  move;  it is  grounded on  a submerged  out
cropping  known  to the locals as  Caesar's Reef,  or Viking's Grief, or the
Dutch Hammer.
     On the  prairie, those flint arrowheads  can be  found lodged  in every
sort of natural matrix: soil, sod, the mud of a riverbank, the  heartwood of
a tree. Waterhouse has a talent for finding  them. How can  he walk across a
field salted, by the retreat of the last glacier, with countless stones, and
pick out the arrowheads? Why can the human eye detect a tiny artificial form
lost in nature's torn and turbulent  cosmos, a needle of data in  a haystack
of noise? It  is a sudden, sparking  connection between minds, he  supposes.
The  arrowheads are human things broken loose  from humanity, their  organic
parts  perished, their mineral forms enduring  crystals of intention. It  is
not the form  but the lethal intent that demands  the attention of a selfish
mind. It worked for young Waterhouse, hunting for arrowheads. It worked  for
the pilots  of the airplanes that  hounded U 553 this morning. It  works for
the listeners of the Beobachtung Dienst, who have trained their ears to hear
what is being said by Churchill and FDR on what are supposed to be scrambled
telephones.  But it doesn't  work very well with crypto. That is too bad for
everyone except the British and the Americans, who have devised mathematical
systems for picking out arrowheads amid pebbles.
     Caesar's Reef gashed  the underside of U  553's bow section  open while
shoving  the entire boat  up  and  partly out of the water. Momentum  almost
carried her over the hump, but she got hung  up  in the middle,  stranded, a
wave battered teeter totter. Her bows have mostly filled with water now, and
so it is  the sharp stern that projects up above the crests of the seas. She
has been abandoned by her crew, which means that according to the traditions
of maritime law, she is  up for  grabs. The Royal  Navy  has called dibs.  A
screen  of  destroyers patrols the area, lest some sister U boat slip in and
torpedo the wreck.
     Waterhouse had  been collected from the castle  in unseemly haste. Dusk
is now  falling like a lead curtain, and wolf packs hunt  at night. He is on
the bridge  of a corvette, a tiny escort ship that, in any kind of chop, has
the exact hydrodynamics  of an empty oil drum. If he stays down  below he'll
never  stop vomiting, and so he stands  abovedecks, feet braced wide,  knees
bent, holding  onto a rail with both hands, watching the wreck  come closer.
The number 553 is painted on her conning tower, beneath a cartoon of a polar
bear hoisting a beer stein.
     "Interesting,"  he says to  Colonel Chattan.  "Five five three  is  the
product of two prime numbers seven and seventy nine."
     Chattan manages  an appreciative  smile, but  Waterhouse can tell  that
it's nothing more than a spectacular display of breeding.
     The  remainder of  Detachment  2702  is,  meanwhile,  finally arriving.
Having just  finished with the successful Norway ramming mission,  they were
on their way to their new base of  operations on  Qwghlm  when they received
word of U 553's grounding.  They  rendezvoused with Waterhouse right here on
this  boat haven't  even had a chance  to sit  down yet,  much less  unpack.
Waterhouse  has  told  them several times how much  they  are going to  like
Qwghlm  and has  run out  of other things  to  say the crew of this corvette
lacks  Ultra  Mega clearance, and there is  nothing  that  Waterhouse  could
conceivably talk about with Chattan and the others that is not classified at
the Ultra Mega level. So he's trying gamely with prime number chitchat.
     Some of  the detachment the Marine lieutenant and most of  the enlisted
men were  dropped off in  Qwghlm so that they could  settle  into  their new
quarters.  Only Colonel Chattan  and a noncom  named Sergeant Robert Shaftoe
have accompanied Waterhouse to the U boat.
     Shaftoe  has a wiry build,  bulging Alley Oop  forearms and hands,  and
blond hair in a buzz cut that makes his big blue eyes look bigger.  He has a
big nose  and a big Adam's  apple  and big  acne  scars and some other scars
around the orbits of his eyes.  The large features in the trim body give him
an  intense presence; it is hard not to keep looking over in his  direction.
He  seems  like a  man  with  powerful emotions  but  an  even more powerful
discipline  that  keeps  them   under   control.   He  stares  directly  and
unblinkingly into the eyes of whoever is talking. When no one is talking, he
stares  at  the horizon and  thinks. When he is  thinking,  he  twiddles his
fingers incessantly.  Everyone  else  is using  their fingers  to hold on to
something, but Shaftoe is  planted on the deck like  a fat geezer waiting in
line  for  a movie.  He, like Waterhouse, but unlike  Chattan, is dressed in
heavy foul  weather gear  that  they  have  borrowed from the stores of this
torpedo boat.
     It is known, and word has  gone  out to all present, that the U  boat's
skipper the last  man to abandon ship had the presence of mind to bring  the
boat's Enigma  machine with  him. The RAF  planes, still circling  overhead,
watched the  skipper  rise  to a precarious kneel in his life raft and fling
the wheels of the machine in different directions, into the steep pitches of
hill sized waves. Then the machine itself went overboard.
     The Germans know that the machine will never be recovered. What they do
not know  is  that they will  never even be looked for, because there  is  a
place called Bletchley  Park that  already knows  all that there  is to know
about the four  wheel naval  Enigma. The Brits will  make a show  of looking
anyway, in case anyone is watching.
     Waterhouse is not looking  for Enigma machines. He is looking for stray
arrowheads.
     The corvette first approaches the U  boat  head on, thinks better of it
and swings  far  around  astern of the wreck, then beats upwind towards  it.
That way, Waterhouse reckons, the wind will  tend to blow them away from the
reef. Seen from underneath, the U boat is actually kind of fat  cheeked. The
part that's supposed to be above water, when it's surfaced, is neutral grey,
and it's as skinny as a knife. The part that's supposed to be below, when it
hasn't just crashed into a  great big rock, is  wide and black. She has been
boarded by  adventuresome  Royal  Navy  men who have cheekily raised a White
Ensign from her conning tower.
     They have apparently reached her in a shallow draft whaler that is tied
up alongside, loosely bound to her  by a sparse web of  lines,  kept away by
bald  tires slung  over  the rail.  The  corvette  carrying the  members  of
Detachment  2702 edges  towards the U  boat cautiously;  each  rolling  wave
nearly slams the boats together.
     "We're  definitely in a non Euclidean spatial geometry now!" Waterhouse
says puckishly. Chattan  bends towards him and cups a hand to his  ear. "Not
only  that but it's real time dependent, definitely something that has to be
tackled in four dimensions not three!"
     "I beg your pardon?"
     Any closer and they'll be grounded on the  reef themselves. The sailors
launch an actual rocket that carries a line between the  vessels, and devote
some time to rigging up a ship to ship transfer system. Waterhouse is afraid
they're  going to  put him  on it. Actually he's more resentful than afraid,
because  he  was under the impression  that he  wouldn't be put in any  more
danger  for  the  rest of the  war. He  tries to kill  time  looking  at the
underside of the U boat and watching  the sailors. They've formed  a sort of
bucket brigade  to haul books and papers up out  of the wreck to the conning
tower  and  from  there  down  into  the  whaler. The conning  tower  has  a
complicated  spidery  look  with gun barrels  and  periscopes  and  antennas
sticking out all over the place.
     Waterhouse  and Shaftoe  are  indeed sent  over  to  U 553 on a sort of
trolley contraption that rolls along a stretched cable. The sailors put life
jackets on them first, as a sort of hilarious token gesture, so that if they
avoid being smashed to bits they can die of hypothermia instead of drowning.
     When Waterhouse is halfway across, the trough  of a wave passes beneath
him, and he looks down into  the sucking cavity and sees the top of Caesar's
Reef, momentarily exposed, covered  with an indigo fur of mussels. You could
go  down there and  stand on it. For  an instant.  Then thousands of tons of
really cold water slams into the cavity and rises up  and punches him in the
ass.
     He  looks up  at  U 553, entirely  too much of which  is above him. His
basic impression is that it's hollow,  more colander than warship. The  hull
is perforated with rows of oblong slots arranged  in swirling  patterns like
streamlines  tattooed  onto the metal.  It seems impossibly flimsy.  Then he
peers through the slots light is shining all the way through from more slots
in the deck and perceives the silhouette of the pressure hull nested inside,
curved and much more solid looking than the outer hull. She's got two triple
bladed brass  propellers,  maybe a yard across,  dinged here and there  from
contact with who knows what. Right now  they are thrust up into the air, and
looking  at  them  Waterhouse  feels  the  same absurd embarrassment he felt
looking at  dead  guys in  Pearl Harbor whose  private parts  were  showing.
Diving  planes  and  rudders  stick  out  of  the  hull  downstream  of  the
propellers, and  aft of those, near the apex  of the stern,  are  two  crude
hatchlike slabs  of  metal which,  Waterhouse realizes, must  be  where  the
torpedoes come out.
     He slides the last twenty feet  at  terrifying speed  and is caught and
held, in various  places, by eight strong hands who lift  him to what passes
for safety: the deck of the U boat,  just  aft of the conning tower, sort of
nestled underneath an antiaircraft gun. Way up at the boat's  stern, there's
a big T shaped stanchion with cables  coming out of the ends of the crossbar
and stretched tight all  the way to the conning tower railing, near to hand.
Following  the example  of  a  Royal  Navy  officer  who  appears to  be his
appointed guardian, Waterhouse climbs uphill i.e.  towards  the stern  using
one of those cables as  a sort of banister, and follows him  down a hatch in
the afterdeck  and into the  interior  of the boat.  Shaftoe  follows a  few
moments later.
     It is the worst place Waterhouse has  ever been. Like  the  corvette he
has just  left, it rises smoothly on each roller, but unlike the corvette it
comes down with a crash on the rocks, nearly throwing him to the deck. It is
like  being sealed  up  in  a  garbage  can  that  is  being  beaten with  a
sledgehammer.  U 553 is about half full of a rich brew of cheap wine, diesel
fuel,  battery acid, and raw sewage. Because of the way she is pitched, this
soup quickly gets deeper as you go forward, but  it rolls aft in a drenching
tsunami every time  her midsection  slams down  on  the rocks.  Fortunately,
Waterhouse  is now  far  beyond nausea, in some  kind of transcendent  state
where his mind has become even more divorced from his body than usual.
     The officer in charge waits for the noise to subside and then says,  in
a  startlingly quiet voice, "Is there  anything in  particular you'd like to
inspect, sir?"
     Waterhouse is still trying to  get  some idea of where he is by shining
his flashlight beam around the place, which is  kind of like peering through
a  soda  straw.  He  can't get any  synoptic view  of his surroundings, just
narrow glimpses of pipes and wires. Finally he tries  holding his head still
and  sort  of  scribbling the flashlight beam around really  fast. A picture
emerges:  they are  in  a narrow crawl  space, obviously designed by and for
engineers,  intended to give access to a few thousand  linear miles of pipes
and wires that have been forced through some kind of bottleneck.
     "We  are looking for the skipper's  papers," Waterhouse  says. The boat
goes into free fall again; he leans against  something slippery,  claps  his
hands over his ears, closes his eyes and mouth, and exhales through his nose
so  that none of the soup  will force its way into his body. The thing  he's
leaning  against is  really  hard and cold and round. It's greasy. He shines
his light on it; it's made of brass. The light scribbling trick produces the
image  of a  brass spaceship of some sort, nestled  underneath (unless  he's
mistaken) a bunk. He's just on the verge of making a total ass of himself by
asking what it is, when he identifies it as a torpedo.
     In the next quiet interlude, he asks, "Is there anything like a private
cabin where he might have . ."
     "It's forward," the officer says. Forward is not an encouraging view.
     "Fuck!"  Sergeant Shaftoe says.  It's the  first  thing he has  said in
about half an hour. He begins to slosh forward, and the British  officer has
to hurry to  catch up.  The deck falls out from beneath their feet again and
they stop and turn around  so that the wave  of sewage will hit them in  the
backs.
     They travel  downhill. Every step's a pitched battle  vs. prudence  and
sound judgment, and they take a lot of steps. What Waterhouse had pegged  as
a bottleneck goes on and on  all the way, apparently, to the bow. Eventually
they find something that gives them an excuse to stop: a cabin, or maybe (at
about  four by six  feet) a corner of  a cabin. There's a bed, a little fold
out table, and cabinets  made of actual  wood. These in combination with the
photographs of family and friends give it  a cozy, domestic flavor which is,
however, completely  ruined  by  the framed picture  of Adolf Hitler  on the
wall.  Waterhouse finds  this  to  be in  shockingly  poor  taste  until  he
remembers it's a German boat. The mean high tide level  of the sewage angles
across  the  cabin  and  cuts it approximately  in half.  Papers  and  other
bureaucratic detritus are floating every where, written in the occult Gothic
script that Waterhouse associates with Rudy.
     "Take it all," Waterhouse says, but Shaftoe and the officer are already
sweeping  their  arms  through  the  brew and bringing  them up  wrapped  in
dripping papier mâché. They stuff it all into a canvas sack.
     The skipper's bunk is on the aft or uphill end of  the  cabin.  Shaftoe
strips it, looks under the pillow and under the mattress, finds nothing.
     The  fold out table  is on the totally  submerged end. Waterhouse wades
into  it carefully, trying not to lose his footing. He  finds  the desk with
his feet, reaches down into the murk with his hands, explores as a blind man
would.  He finds  a few drawers  which he  is able to  pull out of  the desk
entirely and hand off to  Shaftoe, who dumps their contents  into the  sack.
Within a short time he is pretty sure that there's nothing left in the desk.
     The boat rises and slams down. As the sewage rolls forward, it exposes,
for just a moment, something in the corner of  the cabin, something attached
to the forward bulkhead. Waterhouse wades over to identify it.
     "It's a safe!" he says.  He spins the  dial.  It's  heavy. A good safe.
German. Shaftoe and the British officer look at each other.
     A British  sailor  appears in the open  hatchway. "Sir!" he  announces.
"Another U boat has been sighted in the area."
     "I'd love to have a stethoscope," Waterhouse  hints. "This thing have a
sickbay?"
     "No,"  says the British officer. "Just a box of medical gear. Should be
floating around somewhere."
     "Sir!  Yes sir!"  Shaftoe  says,  and vanishes from  the room. A minute
later he's back holding a German  stethoscope  up above his head  to keep it
clean.  He tosses it  across the  cabin to Waterhouse, who snares it  in the
air, sockets it into his ears, and thrusts the business end down through the
sewage to the front of the safe.
     He has  done a little  of  this  before, as  an  exercise. Kids who are
obsessed  with locks  frequently  turn  into  adults who  are obsessed  with
crypto. The manager of the grocery store in Moorhead, Minnesota, used to let
the young Waterhouse play with his  safe. He broke the  combination,  to the
manager's  great  surprise, and  wrote  a  report about the  experience  for
school.
     This  safe  is a lot  better than that one was. Since he can't see  the
dial anyway, he closes his eyes.
     He is  vaguely conscious that the other  fellows  on the submarine have
been  shouting  and  carrying  on  about something  for  a while, as if some
sensational news has just come in. Perhaps the war is over. Then the head of
the stethoscope is wrenched loose  from his grasp. He opens  his eyes to see
Sergeant Shaftoe lifting it to his mouth as if it were a microphone. Shaftoe
stares at him coolly and speaks into the stethoscope: "Sir, torpedoes in the
water, sir." Then Shaftoe turns and leaves Waterhouse alone in the cabin.
     Waterhouse is about halfway up the conning tower ladder, looking  up at
a disk of greyish black sky, when the whole vessel jerks and booms. A piston
of sewage rises up beneath him  and  propels him upwards,  vomiting  him out
onto the top  deck  of  the  boat,  where his  comrades  grab  him  and very
considerately prevent him from rolling off into the ocean.
     The movement of  the  U 553 with the  waves has changed. She's moving a
lot more now, as if she's about to break free from the reef.
     It takes Waterhouse a minute to get  his  bearings.  He is starting  to
think he may have  suffered  some damage  during all of that.  Something  is
definitely wrong with his left arm, which is the one he landed on.
     Powerful  light  sweeps  over  them: a  searchlight  from  the  British
corvette  that  brought them  here.  The British  sailors  curse. Waterhouse
levers himself up on  his good elbow and sights down the hull of the U boat,
following the beam of  the searchlight to a bizarre sight. The boat has been
blown open just beneath the waterline, shards of  her hull peeled back  from
the wound  and projecting  jaggedly into the air. The  foul  contents of the
hull are draining out, staining the Atlantic black.
     "Fuck!" Sergeant Shaftoe  says. He shrugs  loose from a small but heavy
looking  knapsack  that he's been carrying around, pulls it open. His sudden
activity draws the attention of the  Royal Navy men who help out by pointing
their flashlights at his furious hands.
     Waterhouse, who may be in  some kind of delirium  by this point,  can't
quite believe what he sees: Shaftoe has pulled out a bundle of neat brownish
yellow cylinders, as thick  as a finger  and maybe  six inches long. He also
takes out  some small items, including  a coil of  thick, stiff red cord. He
jumps to his feet so decisively that he nearly knocks someone down, and runs
to the conning tower and disappears down the ladder.
     "Jesus," an officer says, "he's going to do some blasting." The officer
thinks  about  this for  a  very  small  amount  of  time;  the  ship  moves
terrifyingly with the waves and  makes scraping noises which might  indicate
it's sliding off the reef. "Abandon ship!" he hollers.
     Most of them  get into the whaler. Waterhouse  is bundled back onto the
trolley contraption. He is about  halfway across to the torpedo boat when he
feels, but scarcely hears, a sharp shock.
     For the rest of the way over he can't really see diddly, and even after
he's  back  on the  torpedo  boat, all is confusion, and someone named Enoch
Root  insists on  taking  him  below  and working on his  arm and  his head.
Waterhouse did not know until now that his head was damaged, which stands to
reason, in that your head is where you know things, and if it's damaged, how
can you know it? "You'll  get  at least a Purple Heart for this," Enoch Root
says.  He says it with a marked  lack of enthusiasm, as if he couldn't  care
less about Purple Hearts,  but is condescending to suppose that it will be a
big thrill for Waterhouse. "And Sergeant  Shaftoe probably has another major
decoration coming too, damn him."


     Chapter 33 MORPHIUM


     Shaftoe still sees the word every time he closes his  eyes. It would be
a lot  better  if  he  were  paying  attention to the  work at hand: packing
demolition charges around the gussets that join the safe to the U boat.
     MORPHIUM. It is printed thus on  a yellowed  paper label.  The label is
glued to a  small glass  bottle. The  color of  the glass  is the  same deep
purple that you see when your eyes have been dazzled by a powerful light.
     Harvey,  the sailor who has volunteered  to help him, keeps shining his
flashlight into Shaftoe's eyes. It is unavoidable; Shaftoe is wedged into  a
surpassingly  awkward position beneath  the  safe, working with the charges,
trying to set the primers with slimy fingers drained of warmth and strength.
This  would  not even be possible if the boat hadn't been torpedoed; before,
this cabin was half full of sewage and the safe was  immersed in it.  Now it
has been conveniently drained.
     Harvey is  not wedged  into  anything; he is being flung around  by the
paroxysms of the U boat, which like a  beached shark, is trying stupidly but
violently to thrash  its way loose from the reef. The beam of his flashlight
keeps  sweeping across Shaftoe's eyes. Shaftoe  blinks, and sees a cosmos of
purple: tiny purple bottles labeled MORPHIUM.
     "God damn it!" he hollers.
     "Is everything all right, Sergeant?" Harvey says.
     Harvey doesn't get  it. Harvey thinks  that Shaftoe is cursing  at some
problem with the explosives.
     The explosives  are  just fucking  great. There's  no problem  with the
explosives. The problem is with Bobby Shaftoe's brain.
     He  was right  there.  Waterhouse  sent him to find a  stethoscope, and
Shaftoe went chambering through the U  boat until he found a wooden  box. He
opened it up and saw right away it was full of medic stuff. He pawed through
it, looking for what Waterhouse wanted,  and there was the  bottle, plain as
day, right in front of  his face.  His hand  brushed  against it,  for god's
sake. He saw the label as the beam of his flashlight swept across it:
     MORPHIUM.
     But he didn't grab it. If it had said MORPHINE he would have grabbed it
in a second. But it said MORPHIUM. And it  wasn't until about thirty seconds
later that he realized that this was a fucking German boat and of course the
words would all be different and there  was about a 99 percent  chance  that
MORPHIUM was, in fact, exactly the same stuff  as MORPHINE. When he realized
that  he planted his feet in the passageway of the darkened  U  boat and let
out  a deep long scream  from  way  down in  his gut. With the noise of  the
waves, no one heard him. Then he continued onwards and carried out his duty,
handing over the stethoscope to Waterhouse.  He carried out his duty because
he is a Marine.
     Blowing this fucking safe off the wall is  not  his duty.  It's just an
idea that popped into  his head. They've been training him  how to use these
explosives; why  not put it into  practice?  He's blowing this safe up,  not
because he is a Marine, but because  he is  Bobby Shaftoe. And also  because
it's a great excuse to go back for that morphium.
     The U boat bucks and sends Harvey sprawling to the  deck. Shaftoe waits
for the  motion  to subside, then flails for handholds and pulls himself out
from under the safe.  His weight is mostly on his feet now, but it  wouldn't
be correct to say he's standing up. In this place, the best you can hope for
is to  scramble for  balance somewhat  faster than you are  falling on  your
Keister. Harvey has just lost that race  and Shaftoe is winning  it  for the
moment.
     "Fire in the hole!"  Shaftoe hollers.  Harvey finds  his feet!  Shaftoe
gives  him  a  helpful shove out into the passageway. Harvey  turns left and
heads uphill for the conning  tower  and  the  exit. Shaftoe turns right. He
heads  downhill. Towards the  bow. Towards Davy Jones's Locker.  Towards the
box with the MORPHIUM.
     Where the fuck is that box? When he found it before,  it was bobbing in
the soup.  Maybe horrible thought maybe it just drained out of the hole made
by the torpedo. He passes through a couple of bulkheads. The boat's angle is
getting steeper all  the time and he  ends up walking  backwards, like  he's
descending a ladder,  making handholds  out of pipes, electrical cables, and
the chains that suspend the submarines' bunks. This boat is so damn long.

     It seems like  a strange way to kill people.  Shaftoe's not  sure if he
approves of  everything that  is implied by this U  boat. Shaftoe has killed
Chinese bandits on the banks  of the  Yangtze by stabbing them  in the chest
with  a bayonet. He thinks he killed one, once, just  by  hitting him pretty
hard  in  the head. On Guadalcanal he  killed Nips  by shooting at them with
several  different  kinds  of  arms,  by rolling  rocks  down  on  them,  by
constructing  large bonfires at the entrances to caves where they were holed
up, by  sneaking up on them in  the jungle and  cutting  their  throats,  by
firing mortars into their positions, even by picking one up and throwing him
off a  cliff into the pounding surf. Of course he has known for  a long time
that  this face to face  style  of  killing the  bad guys  is  kind  of  old
fashioned, but it's not like he's spent a lot of time thinking about it. The
demonstration of the Vickers machine gun that he witnessed in Italy did sort
of  get him  thinking,  and now here he is, inside one  of  the most  famous
killing machines in  the whole war, and what does he see? He sees valves. Or
rather the cast  iron wheels  that are used for opening and  closing valves.
Entire  bulkheads  are covered with iron wheels,  ranging from  a  couple of
inches to over a foot in diameter,  packed in as densely as barnacles  on  a
rock, in what looks like a completely random and irregular fashion. They are
painted  either red  or  black, and they are polished to  a  gleam from  the
friction of men's hands.
     And where it's not valves  it's switches, huge Frankenstein movie ones.
There is one  big rotary switch, half green and half red, that's a good  two
feet in diameter. And it's not like this boat has  a lot of  windows in  it.
It's  got no windows at all.  Just a periscope that can only be used by  one
guy at a time. And so for these guys, the war comes down to being sealed  up
in an airtight drum  full  of  shit and  turning valve  wheels and  throwing
switches on command, and from time to time maybe some officer comes back and
tells them that they just killed a bunch of guys.
     There's that box it ended up  on  a bunk. Shaftoe yanks it  closer  and
hauls it  open. The contents  are all jumbled up, and there's more than  one
purple  bottle in there,  and he panics for a moment, thinking he'll have to
read all of the labels in their creepy Germanic script, but in a few seconds
he finds the MORPHIUM, grabs it, pockets it.
     He's on  his way back up towards the  conning tower when  a big  roller
slams  into the  outside of the boat and knocks him  off balance. He tumbles
downhill for a long, long ways, doing backward somersaults straight down the
middle  of  the  boat,  before he gets himself under control. Everything has
gone black; he's lost his flashlight.
     He comes very close to panicking now. It's not that he's a panicky guy,
just that it's  been  a while since he  had morphine, and when  he gets this
way, his body reacts badly to things. He's half blinded by a  powerful flash
of blue  light  that is gone before his eyes have time to  blink.  There's a
sizzling noise down below. He moves his left hand and  feels  a  tug  on his
wrist:  the flashlight's lanyard, which  he had the presence of mind to wrap
around himself. The light scrapes  and  clanks against  the steel grating on
which  Shaftoe  is now spreadeagled, like a  saint on  the gridiron. There's
another  flash of  blue light, reticulated by black  lines, accompanied by a
sizzling  noise. Shaftoe smells electricity. He raps  the flashlight against
the grating a couple of times and it comes on again, flickeringly.
     The  grid's woven from  pencil  thick rods spaced a  couple  of  inches
apart. He's  facedown on it, looking into a hold that,  if this U  boat were
level, would  be below him. The  hold is a  disaster, its neatly stacked and
crated  contents  now  Osterized  into  a slumgullion  of  shattered  glass,
splintered  wood, foodstuffs, high  explosives, and  strategic minerals, all
mingled with  seawater so that it sloshes back and forth with the rocking of
the dead U boat.  A perfect, quivering  globe  of silver  fills through  the
grating right near his head and  descends  through  his  flashlight beam and
explodes against a piece of debris. Then another. He looks uphill and sees a
rain of silver globules bouncing and rolling down the deckplates toward him:
the mercury columns  that  they  use  to measure  pressure  must  have  been
ruptured. There's another blinding  blue flash: an electrical spark  with  a
lot  of power  behind  it. Shaftoe  looks  down through  the  grid again and
perceives that the hold  is filled with huge metal cabinets with giant bolts
sticking out of them. Every  so often a piece of wet  debris will bridge the
gap between a couple of those bolts and a spark will light the place up: the
cabinets are batteries, they are what enable the U boat to run underwater.
     As  Sergeant  Robert Shaftoe lies  there with his face pressed  against
that chilly grid,  taking a few deep breaths and trying to regain his nerve,
a big wave rocks the boat back  so hard that he's afraid  he's going to fall
backwards and  plummet all  the way to  the submerged bow. The swill in  the
battery  hold  rolls downhill, gathering power and velocity as it falls, and
batters the forward  bulkhead of the hold with terrifying power; he can hear
rivets  giving  way  under the impact. As this happens, most of the  battery
hold is exposed to the  beam of Bobby Shaftoe's flashlight, all the way down
to the bottom.  And  that  is when he  sees the splintered crates down there
very  small  crates, such  as might be  used to contain very heavy supplies.
They  have been busted open. Through the  gaps in the  wreckage, Shaftoe can
see  yellow bricks, once  neatly stacked, now  scattered. They look  exactly
like he  would imagine gold bars. The only thing wrong  with that theory  is
that there are way too many of them down there  for them to be gold bars. It
is  like when he turned over rotten logs in Wisconsin and found thousands of
identical insect eggs sown on the dark earth, glowing with promise.
     For a  moment, he's  tempted. The amount of money down there is  beyond
calculation.  If  he  could get his  hands  on just one  of those  bars  The
explosives  must have detonated,  because Bobby  Shaftoe has just gone deaf.
That's  his  cue  to  get  the fuck out of here. He  forgets about  the gold
morphine's  good enough plunder  for  one  day. He half scrambles  and  half
climbs up the grid, up the passageway, up the skipper's cabin, smoke pouring
out of its hatch, its bulkheads now weirdly ballooned by the blast wave.
     The safe has broken loose! And the cable that he and Harvey attached to
it, though it's damaged, is still intact. Someone must be hauling away on it
up abovedecks because it is stubbornly and annoying taut. Right now the safe
is caught up on jagged  obstructions. Shaftoe has to pry it loose. The  safe
jerks onward and upward, drawn  by the taut cable,  until it  gets caught in
something  else.  Shaftoe  follows  the  safe  out  of  the  cabin,  up  the
passageway, up the  conning tower ladder, and finally  levers himself up out
of the submarine and into the teeth of the storm, to a hearty cheer from the
waiting sailors.
     No more than five minutes later, the U boat goes away. Shaftoe imagines
it  tumbling end  over end down the side of the reef, headed for an undersea
canyon, scattering gold bars and mercury globules into the black  water like
fairy dust. Shaftoe's back on the  corvette and  everyone is pounding him on
the  back and toasting him. He just wants to find a private place to open up
that purple bottle.


     Chapter 34 SUIT


     Randy's posture is righteous and alert: it is all because of his suit.
     It is trite to observe that  hackers don't like fancy clothes. Avi  has
learned that  good  clothes  can actually be  comfortable the slacks that go
with  a business  suit, for example, are really much  more comfortable  than
blue jeans. And he has spent enough time with hackers  to obtain the insight
that is it not  wearing suits that they  object to, so  much as getting them
on. Which includes not only the donning process per se but also picking them
out,  maintaining them,  and worrying  whether they are still in  style this
last being  especially  difficult  for men  who  wear  suits once every five
years.
     So  it's  like this: Avi has  a spreadsheet on  one  of  his computers,
listing the necks, inseams, and other vital measurements of every man in his
employ. A couple of weeks before an important meeting, he will simply fax it
to his tailor  in  Shanghai. Then,  in a classic demonstration of  the Asian
just in time delivery  system as pioneered by Toyota, the  suits will arrive
via Federal  Express, twenty four  hours ahead of time  so that  they can be
automatically piped to the hotel's laundry room. This morning, just as Randy
emerged from the shower, he heard a knock  at his door, and swung it open to
reveal  a  valet  carrying a  freshly  cleaned and  pressed  business  suit,
complete with shirt and tie. He put  it all on (a tenth generation photocopy
of a bad diagram of the half Windsor knot was thoughtfully provided). It fit
perfectly. Now he stands in  a lobby of the Foote Mansion, watching electric
numbers  above  an elevator count down, occasionally  sneaking  a  glance at
himself in a big  mirror. Randy's head protruding from a suit is a sight gag
that will be good for grins at least through lunchtime.
     He is pondering the morning's e mail.
     To: dwarf@siblings.net
     From: root@eruditorum.org
     Subject: Re: Why?
     Dear Randy,
     I  hope  you don't  mind if  I address  you as  Randy, since it's quite
obvious that you are you, despite your  use of an anonymous front. This is a
good idea, by the way. I applaud your prudence.
     Concerning the  possibility that I  am ''an old  enemy'' of  yours. I'm
dismayed that one so young  can already have old enemies. Or perhaps you are
referring to a recently acquired enemy of advanced years? Several candidates
come to  mind.  But I suspect you are referring to Andrew Loeb. I am not he.
This would be obvious to you if you had visited his website recently.
     Why are you building the Crypt? Signed.


     – BEGIN ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK – (etc., etc.)
     – END ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK
     It is not at all interesting to  watch the  numbers over  the elevators
and try to predict which  one  will arrive first, but it is more interesting
than  just standing  there. One  of them has been stuck  on  the floor above
Randy's for at least a minute;  he can hear it buzzing angrily. In Asia many
business men especially some  of the overseas Chinese would think nothing of
commandeering  one of  the hotel's elevators around the  clock for their own
personal use, stationing minions in it, in eight hour  shifts, to hold their
thumbs on the DOOR OPEN button, ignoring its self righteous alarm buzzer.
     Ding. Randy spins around on the balls of his feet (just try that little
maneuver in a  pair of sneakers!). Once again he has backed the wrong horse:
the winner is  an elevator that was on the  very top floor of the hotel last
time  he scanned it. This is an elevator with purpose, a fast track lift. He
walks towards the  green light. The doors part. Randy stares  squarely  into
the face of Dr. Hubert (the Dentist) Kepler, D.D.S.
     Or  perhaps you are referring to a recently  acquired enemy of advanced
years?

     "Good morning, Mr. Waterhouse! When you stand with your mouth open like
that, you remind me of one of my patients."
     "Good morning, Dr. Kepler." Randy hears his words from the other end of
a mile long bumwad  tube,  and immediately  reviews them in  his own mind to
make sure he has not revealed any proprietary corporate information or given
Dr. Kepler any reason to file a lawsuit.
     The  doors start  to close and Randy has to whack  them open  with  his
laptop case.
     "Careful! That's an expensive  piece of equipment, I'd wager," says the
Dentist.
     Randy  is  about  to say I go  through laptops like a transvestite goes
through nylons though maybe like a high speed drill through a necrotic molar
would be more thematically apropos, but instead he clams up and says nothing
at all, finding  himself in  dangerous territory: he is carrying proprietary
AVCLA information on this thing, and if the Dentist gets the impression that
Randy's being cavalier with it, he might spew out a barrage  of torts,  like
Linda Blair and the pea soup.
     "It's, uh, a pleasant surprise to see you in Kinakuta," Randy stammers.
     Dr.  Kepler wears eyeglasses the size of a 1959 Cadillac's  windshield.
They are special dentist eyeglasses, as  polished  as  the  Palomar  mirror,
coated  with  ultrareflective  material  so  that  you  can always  see  the
reflection of your own yawning maw in them, impaled on a shaft of hot light.
The Dentist's own eyes merely haunt the background, like a childhood memory.
They are squinty grey blue eyes, turned  down at the edges as if he is tired
of  the world, with Stygian pupils.  A trace  of a smile always seems to  be
playing  around his withered  lips. It is the smile of a man who is worrying
about  how to  meet  his next malpractice insurance  payment while patiently
maneuvering the point of his surgical steel  crowbar  under the edge of your
dead bicuspid, but who has read in a professional magazine that patients are
more likely  to come back, and less likely to sue you, if you smile at them.
"Say," he says, "I wonder  if I could have a quick huddle with  you sometime
later."
     Spit, please.

     Saved by  the bell! They have  reached  the ground floor.  The elevator
doors  open to reveal  the  endangered  marble lobby of  the  Foote Mansion.
Bellhops,  disguised as wedding  cakes,  glide to and fro  as  if mounted on
casters. Not ten feet away is Avi, and with him are two beautiful suits from
which protrude the heads of Eb and John. All three heads  turn towards them.
Seeing  the Dentist,  Eb and John adopt the  facial  expressions of  B movie
actors whose characters  have just taken small caliber bullets to the center
of the forehead. Avi, by contrast, stiffens up like  a man  who stepped on a
rusty nail a week ago and has  just felt the first stirrings  of the tetanus
infection that will eventually break his spine.
     "We've got a busy day  ahead of us," Randy says. "I guess my answer  is
yes, subject to availability."
     "Good. I'll hold you  to it,"  says  Dr. Kepler, and  steps out of  the
elevator. "Good morning, Mr. Halaby. Good  morning, Dr. Föhr. Good  morning,
Mr. Cantrell. Nice to see you all looking so very much like gentlemen."
     Nice to see you acting like one.

     "The  pleasure  is ours,"  Avi says.  "I  take  it we'll  be seeing you
later?"
     "Oh,  yes,"  says  the Dentist, "you'll  be  seeing  me  all day." This
procedure will be a lengthy one,  I'm afraid.  He turns his back on them and
walks  across the lobby  without  further  pleasantries. He is  headed for a
cluster  of  leather  chairs  nearly  obscured  by  an explosion of  bizarre
tropical flowers. The occupants of  those chairs are  mostly  young, and all
smartly  dressed. They snap to attention as their boss glides  towards them.
Randy counts three women and two men. One of the men is obviously a gorilla,
but the  women inevitably referred to  as Fates, Furies,  Graces,  Norns, or
Harpies are rumored to have bodyguard training, and to carry weapons, too.
     "Who are those?" John Cantrell asks. "His hygienists?"
     "Don't laugh," Avi says. "Back when he  was in practice, he got used to
having  a staff of women do  the pick and  floss work for him. It shaped his
paradigm."
     "Are you shitting me?" Randy asks.
     "You  know how it works,"  Avi says. "When  you go to the  dentist, you
never actually see  the dentist, right? Someone else makes  the appointment.
Then there's always this elite coterie  of highly efficient women who scrape
the plaque out of the way, so that the dentist doesn't have to deal with it,
and  take your  X rays.  The  dentist himself sits in the back somewhere and
looks at the X rays he deals  with you as this abstract greyscale image on a
little  piece of film. If  he sees holes, he goes into  action.  If  not, he
comes in  and  exchanges small  talk with you  for a minute  and then you go
home."
     "So, why is he here?" demands Eberhard Föhr.
     "Exactly!" Avi says. "When he walks into the room, you  never  know why
he's here to drill  a hole in your skull, or just talk about his vacation in
Maui."
     All eyes turn to Randy. "What went on in that elevator?"
     "I nothing!" Randy blurts.
     "Did you discuss the Philippines project at all?"
     "He just said he wanted to talk to me about it."
     "Well, shit." Avi says. "That means we have to talk about it first."
     "I know that," Randy says, "so I told him that I might talk to him if I
had a free moment."
     "Well, we'd best  make damn sure you have no free  moments today,"  Avi
says. He thinks for  a  moment  and continues,  "Did he  have  a hand in his
pocket at any time?"
     "Why? You expecting him to pull out a weapon?"
     "No," Avi says, "but someone told me, once, that the Dentist is wired."
     "You mean, like a police informant?" John asks incredulously.
     "Yeah," Avi says, like  it's no big deal. "He makes a habit of carrying
a tiny  digital recorder  the  size  of a  matchbook around in  his  pocket.
Perhaps  with  a  wire running  up inside his  shirt  to  a  tiny microphone
somewhere. Perhaps not. Anyway, you never know when he's recording you."
     "Isn't that illegal or something?" Randy asks.
     "I'm not a lawyer," Avi says.  "More to the point, I'm not  a Kinakutan
lawyer. But it wouldn't matter in a civil suit if he slapped us with a tort,
he could introduce any kind of evidence he wanted."
     They all  look across the lobby. The Dentist  is standing flatfooted on
the  marble, arms  folded over his chest, chin pointed at  the floor  as  he
absorbs input from his aides.
     "He might have put his  hand  in his pocket. I  don't remember,"  Randy
says. "It doesn't matter. We kept it extremely general. And brief."
     "He could still subject the recording  to  a voice stress analysis,  to
figure  out  if you were lying," John points  out.  He  relishes  the  sheer
unbridled paranoia of this. He's in his element.
     "Not to worry," Randy says, "I jammed it."
     "Jammed it? How?" Eb  asks, not catching the irony in Randy's voice. Eb
looks surprised and interested,  It is clear from the look on  his face that
Eb longs to get into a conversation about something arcane and technical.
     "I was joking," Randy explains. "If the Dentist analyzes the recording,
he'll find nothing but stress in my voice."
     Avi and John  laugh  sympathetically. But  Eb is  crestfallen. "Oh," Eb
says.  "I  was thinking  that we could  absolutely  jam his  device if we so
wanted."
     "A tape recorder doesn't use radio," John says. "How could we jam it?"
     "Van Eck phreaking," Eb says.
     At this  point,  Tom  Howard emerges  from the cafe  with  a thoroughly
ravished  copy of  the South  China  Morning Post  under  his arm, and Beryl
emerges from an elevator, prepped for combat in a dress and  makeup. The men
avert their eyes shyly and pretend  not to notice.  Greetings and small talk
ensue.  Then  Avi  looks at his watch  and says,  "Let's  head over  to  the
sultan's palace," as  if he were proposing they go grab some french fries at
Mickey Ds.


     Chapter 35 CRACKER


     Waterhouse has to keep an eye on that safe; Shaftoe is  itching to blow
it open  with  high explosives, and  Chattan (who  firmly overrules Shaftoe)
intends to ship it back to London so that it can be opened by experts at the
Broadway Buildings. Waterhouse only wants to  have  another crack at opening
it himself, just to see if he can do it.
     Chattan's position is the correct one. Detachment 2702 has a very clear
and specialized mission which most certainly  does not include opening safes
from  U boats. For  that matter,  it does not include going onto abandoned U
boats to recover safes, or other  crypto  data, in the first place. The only
reason they did that was because they  happened to be the  only people  with
Ultra clearance  who  were  in  the  neighborhood,  and U  553's  precarious
position did not give Bletchley Park time to send out its own experts.
     But Waterhouse's desire to open the safe himself has nothing to do with
Detachment   2702's  mission,  or   his  own   personal  duties,   or  even,
particularly, with winning the war. It is something that  Lawrence Pritchard
Waterhouse is driven to do. His is not to reason why. Even as he was reeling
down that stretched line from  U 553 to  the torpedo boat, battered by waves
and wind and rain, with a busted arm and a busted head, not knowing from one
moment to the next whether he would make it  back to the boat or plunge into
the Atlantic, he  was remembering the infinitesimal tremors picked up by the
half frozen neurons  in his  fingertips as he  twiddled the safe's submerged
dial. Even as Enoch  Root patched him up on  board the  boat, Waterhouse was
constructing  a crude mental  model  of how  the  safe's  tumblers  might be
constructed, visualizing the  thing in his mind's eye. And even  as the rest
of Detachment 2702 collapses into their cots and hammocks and sleeping  bags
around the chapel  of  Qwghlm Castle, the splinted and  bandaged  Waterhouse
stalks the polished corridors  of that building's better corner, looking for
a couple of used razor blades and a hunk of carbon.
     The razors he finds in a rubbish bin and  the carbon he steals from the
closet where Ghnxh  keeps the  galvanick  lucipher.  He brings them, plus  a
brick sized  crystal of hard glue and a blowtorch, back to the chapel, where
everyone else  is  sleeping. Enlisted men are in the nave, as befits Marines
who are  basically a  naval  organization. Officers  are  in  the  transept:
Chattan has the south arm  of it all to himself, Waterhouse and Root and the
SAS and USMC lieutenants have bunk beds  in  the north.  A  small  moiety of
Detachment 2702's astounding tarp supply has, then, been  hung up across the
eastern end of  the  place,  partitioning off the  chancel, Holy of  Holies,
where  once the Body  and  Blood  of Christ were  housed. Now it  contains a
Hallicrafters Model  S 27 15 tube superheterodyne radio receiver using state
of the  art  acorn tubes in its front end,  capable of tuning VHF from 27 to
143  Megahertz and of  receiving  AM,  FM,  and CW, and  including a  signal
strength meter which would  come in  handy if they were really  operating  a
huffduff station here, which they aren't.
     The lights are burning  behind those tarps and  one of the  Marines  is
snoring away in  a  chair in front of the altar. Waterhouse wakes him up and
sends  him to  bed. The Marine is  ashamed;  he knows  he was supposed to be
awake, twiddling that antenna convincingly.
     The radio itself has hardly been used they only turn it on when someone
comes to  visit  who is  not  in on the Secret.  It sits there on the altar,
pristine, as if it  had just come from the Hallicrafters factory in Chicago,
Illinois. All  of the altar's fancy bits (if  it  ever  had them) have  long
since succumbed to fire, rot, plunder, or the gnawing tusks of nest building
skerries.  What remains  is a  rectangular monolith  of basalt,  featureless
except for some  marks from the tools that were used to quarry and shape it.
It is a perfect foundation for tonight's experiment.
     Waterhouse  gets the safe  up  there  at some  cost  to the  disks  and
ligaments  in his lower back. It  is tubular  in  shape, like an  excerpt of
naval gun barrel. He stands it  up on its back end so that  its round  door,
with the round dial in the center, is staring up at the ceiling like a blind
eye, the radial lines on the  dial looking very  much like the striations of
an iris.
     Behind  that  dial is  a bunch  of  mechanical  stuff  that  has gotten
Waterhouse completely  pissed  off,  driven  him  into  a  frantic state. By
manipulating  this  dial  in  some  way, he  should  be  able to tease  that
mechanical stuff  into some configuration that allows the door to be opened.
That's all there is to it. That this door  remains locked is an outrage. Why
should the tiny volume inside  this  safe much less than a single cubic foot
be  so different from the space that Waterhouse moves through at  will? What
the hell is inside there?
     The  glue looks like bad amber, flawed and bubbled but still beautiful.
He fires up the little blowtorch and plays the flame over one end of it. The
glue softens, melts, and drips onto the door of  the safe, next to the dial,
forming a little puddle about the size of a silver dollar.
     Working quickly, Waterhouse sets two single edged razor blades into it,
the blades dangerously  upward facing, parallel  and somewhat  less than  an
inch apart. He holds them in place for a few moments while  the frigid metal
of the safe  sucks the heat out of that glue and makes it hard again. He has
employed a pair of toothpicks  as  spacers to make sure that the blunt backs
of the blades do not actually  touch the door of the safe; he  does not want
an electrical connection between them.
     He  solders a  wire  onto each of the razor  blades and runs the  wires
across  the altar  toward the radio. Then  he takes a little chunk of carbon
and lays it across the two blades, forming a bridge between them.
     He tears open the back of the radio and does a bit of rewiring. Most of
the rig  is already set up the way he  needs it; basically  he's looking for
something  that  will convert electrical impulses into sound  and pump  that
sound into the headphones, which is what a radio does. But the source of the
signal is no longer a transmitter on a U boat but rather the current flowing
up one of  Waterhouse's wires, into the left razor blade, across the  carbon
bridge, into the right razor blade, and back down the other wire.
     Getting this  hooked up the way he wants it  takes some doing.  When he
blunders down a blind alley and gets frustrated, he will go over and twiddle
the antenna for a while, pretending  to zero in  on a U boat. Then  an  idea
will occur to him and he will go back to work.
     Sometime around dawn, he hears a squeal from the headphones: a pair  of
Bakelite cups  bridged by a contraption that looks like a primitive surgical
device, hooked up to the radio by a twisted pair of black  and red wires. He
turns the volume down and claps the phones over his head.
     He reaches out and lays one fingertip on  the safe, and hears a painful
thud in his ears. He slides the fingertip over the surface of the cold metal
and  hears  a  rasping  sound. Any vibrations cause the bridge of carbon  to
tremble on the razor blades, making and breaking the  electrical connection,
modulating  the  electrical  current.  The  blades  and  the  carbon  are  a
microphone, and the microphone works almost too well.
     He takes his hand off the safe  and just sits  there and  listens for a
while. He can hear the footfalls  of skerries going through the detachment's
rations. He  can hear the impact of waves on the shore, miles  away, and the
thump of  the Taxi's bald tires  on  chuckholes out on the Road. Sounds like
the Taxi has a little alignment  problem! He can hear  the  scrub, scrub  of
Margaret  cleaning the floor  of the  kitchen, and some minor arrhythmias in
the heartbeats of the enlisted men, and the boom  of glaciers calving on the
coast of Iceland, and the  squirrely drone of hastily machined propellers on
approaching  convoy ships. Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is plugged into the
Universe in a way that exceeds even what Bletchley Park has to offer.
     The center of that particular universe is the Safe  from U 553, and its
axis passes up through the center of the  Dial, and  now Waterhouse has  his
hand on it. He turns the volume way down before he touches any thing so that
he won't  blow  his eardrums out. The Dial spins  heavily but easily, as  if
mounted on gas bearings. Still,  there is mechanical friction in there which
is not perceptible to Waterhouse's admittedly frozen fingers but which comes
through in his earphones like a rockslide.
     When the  tumblers move, it sounds like Waterhouse is shooting the main
bolt on the Gate of Hell. It takes him a little while, and  a few more false
starts,  to get his bearings;  he  doesn't know how many  numbers are in the
combination, or  which way he should  turn  the dial to begin with. But with
experimentation,  some  patterns  begin to show through,  and  eventually he
works out the following combination:
     23 right  37 left 7 right  31 left 13 right  and then  there's a really
meaty click and  he knows in his marrow that he can take off the headphones.
He spins a little wheel that is mounted on the front of the safe adjacent to
the dial. This withdraws the radial dogs that  have been  holding  the  door
shut.  He  hauls  the  door up, careful  not  to slash his hand  on the twin
razors, and looks into the safe.
     His feeling of disappointment that accompanies this action has  nothing
to  do  with the  contents of the safe.  He is disappointed because  he  has
solved  the problem,  and has gone back to the baseline state of boredom and
low level irritation  that  always  comes  over  him  when  he's  not  doing
something that inherently needs to  be done, like picking a lock or breaking
a code.
     He sticks his arm all the  way down to the bottom of the safe and finds
a metal object about the size of a hot dog bun.  He  knew it  would be there
because,  like children  investigating wrapped  presents in  the days before
Christmas, they  have been tilting the safe this way and that, and when they
did,  they heard something sliding from one  end to  the  other  going tink,
tonk, tink, tonk – and wondered what it was.
     This  object  is  so  cold,  and  sucks  the heat  out of his  hands so
efficiently, that  it  hurts  to  touch  it. He  shakes  his  hand to  bring
circulation back, then grasps the thing, yanks it out briskly, and throws it
down on  the altar. It bounces once, twice in a seesawing  motion, and rings
piercingly  as it does the closest thing to a  musical sound that has shaken
the air  of  this  chapel in  many centuries. It  shines  gaudily under  the
electric lights they have  set up  around the chancel.  The glittering light
catches the eye of Waterhouse, who has been living on grey and cloudy Qwghlm
for weeks, wearing  and sleeping in  things that are black or khaki or olive
drab. He is  mesmerized  by this thing, simply because of its brightness and
beauty against the dull and rude basalt, even before his  mind identifies it
as a bar of solid gold.
     It makes a heck of a paperweight, which  is  a good thing, because  the
chapel  is nothing if not  drafty, and the  important contents  of the  safe
consist of onionskin pages  that  fly away in  the tiniest breeze. The pages
are ruled with faint horizontal and vertical lines, dividing each one into a
grid, and the  grids are filled in with  hand printed letters  in  groups of
five.
     "Well, look what  you found!" says a quiet voice. Waterhouse  looks  up
into the unsettlingly calm and placid gaze of Enoch Root.
     "Yes. Encrypted messages," Waterhouse says. "Non Enigma."
     "No," Root says. "I was  referring to the  Root of All  Evil, here." He
tries to pick up the gold  bar, but his  fingers merely  slip off of  it. He
gets a firmer grip and hefts it up off the altar. Something about it catches
his eye, and he turns to bring it under one of the electric lights, frowning
at it with the critical intensity of a diamond cutter.
     "It's got Hanzi characters stamped on it," Root says.
     "Beg pardon?"
     "Chinese or  Japanese.  No,  Chinese  there's  the chop of  a  bank  in
Shanghai.  And  here are some figures the  fineness and  the serial number."
Showing unexpected familiarity with such matters for a missionary priest.
     Until this point, the gold bar has signified nothing to Waterhouse it's
just a bulk sample of a chemical element,  like a  lead weight or a flask of
mercury. But the fact that it might convey information is quite interesting.
He absolutely has to  stand up and go look at it. Root is correct:  the  bar
has been neatly marked with small Oriental characters, applied with a stamp.
The tiny facets of the ideograms glitter under the light, sparks jumping the
gap between the two halves of the Axis.
     Root sets the  gold bar  down on the altar. He saunters over to a table
where they keep stationery,  and pulls out  a sheet of onionskin and a fresh
pencil. Returning to the altar, he lays the frail  page over the top  of the
gold  bar, then  rubs  the side  of the  pencil lead back and forth over it,
turning it all black except for where the stamped numbers and characters are
underneath. Within  a few  moments  he has a perfect little rubbing, showing
the inscription in  full detail. He folds the page up  and pockets it,  then
returns the pencil to the table.
     Waterhouse  has long since gone  back to  his examination  of the pages
from the safe. The numbers are all written in the same hand. Now, since they
dredged all manner of other paperwork out of the sewage sloshing through the
U boat  skipper's  cabin, Waterhouse can recognize the captain's hand easily
enough; these sheets were written by someone else.
     The format of the  messages makes it clear that they were not encrypted
with an  Enigma  machine.  Enigma messages  always begin with  two groups of
three letters each, which tell the receiving clerk how  to set the wheels on
his machine. Those groups  are missing on all of these sheets, so some other
cipher system  must  have  been  used. Like every other modern  nation,  the
Germans have a plethora of different cipher systems, some based on books and
some on machines. Bletchley Park has broken most of them.
     Still,  it  looks like an interesting  exercise.  Now  that the rest of
Detachment   2702  has  arrived,  making   further  trysts   with   Margaret
impractical, Waterhouse  has nothing to look forward to. Trying to crack the
code used on these  sheets will be a  perfect puzzle to fill the gaping void
that opened up as soon  as Waterhouse broke  the combination of the safe. He
steals some paper of his own, sits down at the desk, and busies  himself for
an  hour  or  two  copying  out the ciphertext  from  the  skipper's  pages,
double– and triple checking each code group  to make sure he's  got an
accurate copy.
     On the one hand, this is a  pain in the ass. On the other, it gives him
a chance to go  through the ciphertext  by hand,  at the  very lowest level,
which  might be  useful later. The  ineffable talent for finding patterns in
chaos cannot do its thing unless he  immerses himself in the chaos first. If
they do contain patterns, he  does  not see them  just now, in any  rational
way. But there may be some subrational part of his mind that can go to work,
now that the letters have passed before his eyes and through his pencil, and
that  may  suddenly present  him with  a gift wrapped clue  or even  a  full
solution a few weeks from now while he is shaving or antenna twiddling.
     He has been  dimly aware, for a while, that  Chattan and the others are
awake  now. Enlisted men are not  allowed into the chancel, but the officers
get to gather round and admire the gold bar.
     "Breaking  the  code, Waterhouse?"  Chattan says, ambling over  to  the
desk, warming his hands with a mug of coffee.
     "Making  a clean copy," Waterhouse says,  and then, because  he is  not
without a  certain cunning,  adds: "in case the  originals are destroyed  in
transit."
     "Very prudent," Chattan nods. "Say, you didn't  hide a second gold  bar
anywhere, did you?"
     Waterhouse has been in  the military long enough that he  does not rise
to the bait. "The  pattern of  sounds made when we tilted the safe  back and
forth indicated that there was only a single heavy object inside, sir."
     Chattan chuckles  and takes a sip of his coffee. "I shall be interested
to see  whether you  can break  that  cipher,  Lieutenant  Waterhouse. I  am
tempted to put money on it."
     "I sure  appreciate that, but it would be a lousy bet, sir," Waterhouse
replied. "The chances are  very good that Bletchley Park has already  broken
this cipher, whatever it may be."
     "What makes you say that?" Chattan asks absently.
     The question is so silly, coming from a man in Chattan's position, that
it leaves Waterhouse disoriented. "Sir, Bletchley Park has broken nearly all
of the German military and governmental codes."
     Chattan   makes  a  face  of  mock   disappointment.  "Waterhouse!  How
unscientific. You are making assumptions."
     Waterhouse  thinks back and tries to work out the meaning of this. "You
think that this cipher might not be German? Or that it might not be military
or governmental?"
     "I am merely cautioning you against making assumptions," Chattan says.
     Waterhouse is still thinking this  one over as they  are approached  by
Lieutenant Robson, the commanding officer of the SAS squad.  "Sir," he says,
"for the benefit of  the fellows down in London, we  would like to  know the
combination."
     "The  combination?"  Waterhouse  asks  blankly.  This  word,  devoid of
context, could mean almost anything.
     "Yes, sir," Robson says precisely. "To the safe."
     "Oh!" Waterhouse says. He is faintly irritated  that they would ask him
this question. There seems little point in writing down the combination when
the equipment  needed to  break into the safe is sitting right  there. It is
much  more important  to have a safe  breaking algorithm  than  to have  one
particular solution to a safe breaking problem.  "I don't know," he says. "I
forgot."
     "You forgot?" Chattan says. He says  it on behalf of Robson who appears
to be violently biting his tongue. "Did you perhaps write it down before you
forgot it?"
     "No," Waterhouse says.  "But  I  remember that it  consists entirely of
prime numbers."
     "Well! That narrows it down!" Chattan says  cheerfully. Robson does not
seem mollified, though.
     "And there are five numbers in all, which is interesting since "
     "Since  five is  itself  a  prime number!"  Chattan  says. Once  again,
Waterhouse is pleased  to see his commanding officer displaying  signs of  a
tasteful and expensive education.
     "Very well," Robson announces  through clenched  teeth. "I shall inform
the recipients."


     Chapter 36 SULTAN


     The  Grand  Wazir of Kinakuta leads them into the  offices of his boss,
the  sultan,  and leaves them alone for  a few minutes at one corner  of the
conference table, to build which a whole species of tropical  hardwoods  had
to be extinguished. After that, it  is a race among the founders of Epiphyte
Corp.  to  see who can blurt  out the first witticism  about the size of the
sultan's home office deduction. They  are in the  New Palace, three arms  of
which  wrap around  the exotic  gardens of the  ancient and magnificent  Old
Palace. This meeting room has a  ten meter  high  ceiling. The  walls facing
onto the garden are made  entirely of  glass, so the effect  is like looking
into a terrarium that contains a model of a sultan's palace. Randy has never
known much about architecture,  and his vocabulary fails  him  abjectly. The
best he could say is that it's  sort of  like a cross  between the Taj Mahal
and Angkor Wat.
     To  get here, they had  to drive  down a long  boulevard of palm trees,
enter  a huge vaulted marble  entrance hall, submit to metal  detection  and
frisking, sit in an anteroom for a while sipping tea, take their shoes  off,
have warm  rose water poured over their hands by a turbaned servant wielding
an ornate  ewer, and  then walk across about half a  mile of polished marble
and oriental carpets.  As soon  as  the  door wafts shut  behind  the  grand
wazir's ass, Avi says, "I smell a con job."
     "A  con  job?" Randy  scoffs. "What,  you think this  is a  rear screen
projection? You think this table is made of Formica?"
     "It's all real," Avi admits sourly. "But whenever someone gives you the
treatment like this, it's because they're trying to impress you."
     "I'm impressed," Randy says. "I admit it. I'm impressed."
     "That's just a euphemism for, 'I'm about to do something moronic,'" Avi
says.
     "What are we going to do? This isn't the kind of meeting where anything
actually gets done, is it?"
     "If you mean,  are we going to sign contracts, is money going to change
hands,  then  no, nothing is going  to  get  done. But plenty  is  going  to
happen."
     The door opens again and the grand wazir leads a group of Nipponese men
into the room. Avi lowers his voice. "Just remember that, at the end  of the
day, we're back in the  hotel, and the sultan is still here, and all of this
is  just a memory  to  us. The fact that the sultan  has a big garden has no
relevance to anything."
     Randy starts to get irked: this is so obvious it's insulting to mention
it.  But part  of the  reason he's irked is  because he knows Avi saw  right
through him. Avi's always telling him not to be romantic. But he wouldn't be
here, doing this, if not for the romance.
     Which leads to the question: why is  Avi  doing  it?  Maybe he has some
romantic delusions of his own, carefully concealed. Maybe that's why he  can
see through Randy so  damn well. Maybe Avi is cautioning himself as much  as
he is the other members of Epiphyte Corp.
     Actually this new group is  not Nipponese, but  Chinese  probably  from
Taiwan. The  grand  wazir shows  them their  assigned  seats, which  are far
enough away  that  they could exchange sporadic  gunfire with Epiphyte Corp.
but not converse without  the  aid of bullhorns.  They spend a minute  or so
pretending to  give a shit  about the gardens  and  the Old  Palace. Then, a
compact, powerfully built man in  his fifties pivots towards  Epiphyte Corp.
and strides over to them, dragging out a skein of aides. Randy's reminded of
a computer simulation he saw once of a black hole  passing through a galaxy,
entraining a retinue  of stars. Randy recognizes the man's  face vaguely: it
has  been printed in business  journals more than once, but not often enough
for Randy to remember his name.
     If Randy were something other than a hacker, he'd have  to step forward
now and deal with protocol issues. He'd be stressed out and hating  it. But,
thank god, all that shit devolves automatically on Avi, who steps up to meet
this  Taiwanese  guy. They shake hands and  go through the  rote exchange of
business  cards.  But the  Chinese  guy  is looking  straight  through  Avi,
checking out the other Epiphyte  people. Finding Randy wanting,  he moves on
to Eberhard Föhr. "Which one is Cantrell?" he says.
     John's leaning against the window, probably trying  to figure  out what
parametric   equation  generated  the  petals  on  that  eight   foot  tall,
carnivorous plant. He turns around to be introduced. "John Cantrell."
     "Harvard Li. Didn't you get my e mail?"
     Harvard  Li! Now  Randy is starting  to  remember  this guy. Founder of
Harvard Computer Company, a medium sized PC clone manufacturer in Taiwan.
     John grins. "I received  about twenty  e mail  messages from an unknown
person claiming to be Harvard Li."
     "Those were  from me! I  do not understand  what you mean that  I am an
unknown  person." Harvard Li is extremely brisk, but not exactly pissed off.
He is, Randy  realizes, not the kind of man who has to coach himself not  to
be romantic before a meeting.
     "I hate e mail," John says.
     Harvard Li stares him in the eye for a while. "'What do you mean?"
     "The concept is good. The execution is poor. People  don't  observe any
security precautions. A message arrives claiming to be from Harvard Li, they
believe it's really from Harvard Li.  But this  message is just a pattern of
magnetized spots on a spinning disk somewhere. Anyone could forge it."
     "Ah. You use digital signature algorithm."
     John considers this carefully. "I do not  respond to any e mail that is
not digitally signed.  Digital signature algorithm  refers to one  technique
for signing them. It is a good technique, but it could be better."
     Harvard Li begins nodding about halfway through this, acknowledging the
point.  "Is  there a structural  problem? Or are  you  concerned by the five
hundred  and  twelve  bit key  length?  Would it  be  acceptable with  a one
thousand twenty four bit key?"
     About three sentences later,  the  conversation between Cantrell and Li
soars over the  horizon  of  Randy's cryptographic  knowledge, and his brain
shuts down. Harvard Li  is  a crypto  maniac! He has been studying this shit
personally not just paying minions to read the books and send him notes, but
personally going over the equations, doing the math.
     Tom Howard  is grinning broadly. Eberhard is looking about as amused as
he ever gets, and Beryl's biting back a grin. Randy is trying desperately to
get the joke. Avi notes the confusion on Randy's face, turns his back to the
Taiwanese, and rubs his thumb and fingers together: money.

     Oh, yeah. It had to be something to do with that.
     Harvard Li cranked  out a few million PC  clones in the  early nineties
and  loaded them  all  with Windows, Word, and Excel but  somehow  forgot to
write any checks to Microsoft. About a year ago, Microsoft kicked his ass in
court and won a huge judgment. Harvard claimed bankruptcy: he doesn't have a
penny  to his name.  Microsoft has been trying to prove he still has the odd
billion or two salted away.
     Harvard Li has clearly been  thinking very hard about how  to put money
where guys like  Microsoft can't get it. There  are  many time honored ways:
the Swiss bank  account, the false front corporation, the  big  real  estate
project in deepest, darkest China, bars of gold in  a vault somewhere. Those
tricks  might work  with  the average government, but Microsoft is ten times
smarter, a hundred times more aggressive, and bound by no particular  rules.
It gives  Randy  a little  frisson just to  imagine Harvard  Li's situation:
being chased across the planet by Microsoft's state of the art hellhounds.
     Harvard Li needs electronic cash. Not the lame stuff that people use to
buy  t shirts on the Web  without giving away their credit card  numbers. He
needs the  full on badass kind, based on hard crypto,  rooted in an offshore
data haven, and he needs it bad. So nothing's more logical than that  he  is
sending lots of e mail to John Cantrell.
     Tom Howard sidles up to him. "The question is,  is it  just Harvard Li,
or does he think he's discovered a new market?"
     "Probably  both," Randy guesses.  "He probably knows a few other people
who'd like to have a private bank."
     "The missiles," Tom says.
     "Yeah." China's been taking potshots at Taiwan with ballistic  missiles
lately, sort of like a Wild  West villain shooting at the good guy's feet to
make him dance. "There have been bank runs in Taipei."
     "In a  way," Tom  says, "these  guys are tons smarter than us,  because
they've never had a currency they could depend  on."  He and Randy look over
at John Cantrell, who has crossed his arms over his chest and is unloading a
disquisition  on the  Euler totient  function while Harvard Li nods intently
and his nerd de camp frantically scrawls  notes  on a legal pad. Avi  stands
far to one side, staring at the Old Palace, as in his mind the ramifications
of this  bloom and sprawl and twine about each other like a tropical  garden
run riot.
     Other delegations file into the  room behind the  grand wazir and stake
out chunks of  the conference  table's coastline.  The Dentist comes in with
his Norns or Furies or Hygienists or whatever  the hell they are. There's  a
group of white guys talking in Down Underish accents.  Other than that, they
are all Asians. Some of  them talk amongst themselves and some pull on their
chins and watch the conversation between Harvard Li and John Cantrell. Randy
watches them in  turn: Bad Suit Asians and Good Suit Asians. The former have
grizzled buzz cuts and nicotine tanned skin and look like  killers. They are
wearing bad suits, not because they can't afford good ones, but because they
don't  give  a  shit. They are from China.  The Good  Suit Asians have  high
maintenance haircuts, eyeglasses from Paris, clear skin, ready smiles.  They
are mostly from Nippon.
     "I want to exchange  keys, right now, so we  can  e mail," Li says, and
gestures to an aide, who  scurries to  the edge of the table and  unfolds  a
laptop.  "Something  something Ordo," Li says  in Cantonese. The aide points
and clicks.
     Cantrell  is gazing at  the  table expressionlessly. He squats down  to
look under it. He strolls over and feels under the edge with his hand.
     Randy bends  and looks  too. It's one  of  these  high tech  conference
tables with embedded power  and communications lines, so  that visitors  can
plug in their laptops without  having to string unsightly  cables around and
fight over power outlets. The slab must be riddled with conduits. No visible
wires connect it to the world. The connections must run down hollow legs and
into a hollow floor. John grins, turns to Li, and shakes his head. "Normally
I'd say fine," he says, "but for a client with your level of security needs,
this is not an acceptable place to exchange keys."
     "I'm not planning on using  the phone," Li says, "we  can exchange them
on floppies."
     John knocks on wood. "Doesn't matter. Have one of your  staff look into
the subject of Van Eck phreaking. That's with a 'p h,' not an 'f,' " he says
to the aide who's writing it down. Then, sensing Li's need  for an executive
summary,  he  says, "They  can read  the internal state of your computer  by
listening to the faint radio emissions coming out of the chips."
     "Ahhhhh,"  Li  says, and  exchanges hugely  significant  looks with his
technical  aides,  as if this explains  something that has been puzzling the
shit out of them.
     Someone begins hollering wildly at the far end of the room not  the end
by  which the guests entered,  but  the other one. It is a  chap in  a getup
similar to, but not quite as ornate as, the grand  wazir's. At some point he
switches to English the same dialect of  English spoken by flight attendants
for  foreign airlines,  who have told passengers to insert the  metal tongue
into  the  buckle so many times  that  it  rushes out in one phlegmy garble.
Small  Kinakutan men in  good suits begin  filing  into the  room. They take
seats  across the head  end of the table, which is wide enough  for  a  Last
Supper tableau. In the Jesus position is a really big  chair. It is the kind
of thing  you'd  get if you went  to a Finnish  designer with a shaved head,
rimless glasses,  and twin Ph.D.s in semiotics  and civil engineering, wrote
him  a blank  check, and asked him to  design a throne. Behind is a separate
table  for minions. All of it is backed up by tons  of priceless artwork: an
eroded frieze, amputated from a jungle ruin somewhere.
     All the guests gravitate  instinctively towards  their positions around
the table, and remain standing. The  grand wazir glares at each one in turn.
A  small man slips into the room, staring vacantly at the floor in  front of
him, seemingly unaware that other people are  present. His hair is lacquered
down to  his skull, his  appearance of portliness  minimized by  Savile  Row
legerdemain.  He eases  into the  big  chair, which  seems  like a  shocking
violation of etiquette until Randy realizes that this is the sultan.
     Suddenly everyone is sitting down. Randy pulls his chair back and falls
into it. The leathery depths swallow his ass like a catcher's mitt accepting
a baseball. He's  about  to pull  his laptop out  of  its bag,  but in  this
setting, both the  nylon  bag  and the plastic  computer have  a  strip mall
tawdriness. Besides, he has to resist this sophomoric tendency to take notes
all the  time.  Avi himself said  that  nothing was going to happen  at this
meeting; all the important stuff is going to  be subtextual.  Besides, there
is the matter of Van  Eck phreaking, which  Cantrell probably mentioned just
to make Harvard Li paranoid, but which has Randy a bit rattled too. He  opts
for a pad of graph paper the  engineer's answer to the  legal pad and a fine
point disposable pen.
     The sultan has an Oxford English accent with  traces of  garlic and red
pepper still wedged in its teeth. He speaks for about fifteen minutes.
     The room  contains a few dozen living human bodies, each one a big sack
of  guts and fluids so highly compressed that it will squirt for a few yards
when pierced. Each one is built around an armature of 206 bones connected to
each other by  notoriously fault prone  joints that are  given  to obnoxious
creaking, grinding, and popping noises when they are in  other than pristine
condition.  This  structure  is  draped with throbbing steak, inflated  with
clenching  air sacks, and pierced by a  Gordian sewer  filled  with burbling
acid and compressed gas and asquirt with vile  enzymes and solvents produced
by the many dark, gamy nuggets of genetically  programmed meat strung  along
its length. Slugs of dissolving food are forced  down this sloppy  labyrinth
by serialized convulsions, decaying into gas, liquid, and solid matter which
must all be regularly vented to the outside  world lest  the owner  go toxic
and  drop  dead.  Spherical, gel packed cameras swivel in mucus greased ball
joints.   Infinite  phalanxes  of  cilia  beat   back  invading   particles,
encapsulate them in goo for later disposal. In each body a centrally located
muscle  flails away at an eternal, circulating torrent of pressurized gravy.
And yet, despite all of this, not one  of these  bodies makes a single sound
at any time  during  the sultan's speech. It is a  marvel  that can only  be
explained by  the power of  brain over  body, and, in turn, by the  power of
cultural conditioning over the brain.
     Their host is trying to be appropriately sultanic: providing vision and
direction without getting  sucked down into the quicksand of management. The
basic vision  (or so it seems  at  first) is that Kinakuta has always been a
crossroads, a meeting  place of cultures: the original Malays. Foote and his
dynasty  of  White  Sultans.  Filipinos  with  their  Spanish,  American and
Nipponese governors  to the east. Muslims to the west. Anglos to  the south.
Numerous Southeast Asian cultures to the north. Chinese everywhere as usual.
Nipponese whenever they are in one of their adventurous moods, and (for what
it's worth) the neolithic tribesmen who inhabit the interior of the island.
     Hence nothing is more natural  than  that  the  present  day Kinakutans
should run big fat optical fiber cables in every direction, patch into every
major national telco within reach, and become a sort of digital bazaar.
     All  of the guests nod soberly at  the sultan's insight, his  masterful
ability to meld the ancient ways of his country with modern technology.
     But  this is  nothing  more  than  a  superficial analogy,  the  sultan
confesses.  Everyone  nods somewhat  more  vigorously than they  did before:
indeed, everything that  the sultan was just saying was, in fact, horseshit.
Several people jot down notes, lest they lose the Sultan's thread.
     After all, the sultan  says,  physical location no longer matters in  a
digitized, networked world. Cyberspace knows no boundaries.
     Everyone  nods vigorously except for, on  the  one hand, John Cantrell,
and, on the other, the grizzled Chinese guys.
     But  hey,  the  sultan  continues,  that's  just   dizzy  headed  cyber
cheerleading! What bullshit! Of course locations and boundaries matter!
     At this point the room is plunged into dimness as the light pouring  in
through  the window  wall is throttled by some  kind of  invisible mechanism
built into the glass: liquid crystal shutters or something.  Screens descend
from slots cunningly hidden in the room's ceiling. This  diversion saves the
cervical vertebrae of many  guests, who  are about to whiplash themselves by
nodding even more vigorously at the  sultan's latest  hairpin  turn. Goddamn
it, does location matter in cyberspace or doesn't it? What's the bottom line
here? This isn't some Oxford debating society! Get to the point!
     The sultan is whipping some graphics on them: a map of the world in one
of  those politically correct projections that makes America and Europe look
like  icebound reefs in the  high Arctic.  A pattern of  straight  lines  is
superimposed  on the map, each joining two major  cities. The  web of  lines
gets  denser and denser as  the  sultan  talks,  nearly  obscuring the  land
masses, and the oceans as well.
     This, the  sultan explains, is  the  conventional understanding  of the
Internet:  a  decentralized  web connecting  each place with  all  the other
places, with no bottlenecks or, if you will, choke points.
     But it's more bullshit! A  new  graphic  comes up:  same map, different
pattern  of lines.  Now we  have  webs within  countries,  sometimes  within
continents. But  between countries, and especially between continents, there
are only a few lines. It's not weblike at all.
     Randy looks at Cantrell, who's nodding slyly.
     "Many Net partisans are convinced  that  the  Net is robust because its
lines of communication are spread evenly across the planet. In fact,  as you
can see from  this graphic,  nearly  all intercontinental Web traffic passes
through  a small  number  of choke points. Typically these choke  points are
controlled and monitored by local governments. Clearly, then,  any  Internet
application  that  wants  to  stand  free of  governmental  interference  is
undermined, from the very beginning, by a fundamental structure problem."
     free  of  governmental  interference. Randy can't believe  he's hearing
this. If  the sultan was a scruffy hacker talking  to a room full  of crypto
anarchists, that'd be one  thing. But the sultan is  a government, for god's
sake, and the room is full of card carrying Establishment types.
     Like those Chinese buzz cuts! Who the  hell are they? Don't try to tell
Randy those guys aren't part of the Chinese government, in some sense.
     "Bottlenecks are only one of the structural barriers to the creation of
a free,  sovereign, location  independent cyberspace," the sultan  continues
blithely.
     Sovereign!?

     "Another is the  heterogeneous  patchwork of laws,  and indeed of legal
systems, that address privacy, free speech, and telecoms policy."
     Another map graphic  appears.  Each  country  is  colored,  shaded, and
patterned according  to  a  scheme of intimidating complexity. A  half assed
stab  at  explaining it  is  made by  a complex legend  underneath.  Instant
migraine. That, of course, is the whole point.
     "The  policy  of  any  given  legal  system  toward privacy  issues  is
typically the  result of  incremental changes made over  centuries by courts
and legislative bodies," the sultan says. "With all due respect, very little
of it is relevant to modern privacy issues.
     The lights  come back on, sun waxes  through  the windows, the  screens
disappear silently into the  ceiling, and everyone's mildly surprised to see
that the sultan is on his  feet. He is approaching  a  large and (of course)
ornate  and expensive  looking  Go board covered with a  complex  pattern of
black and  white stones. "Perhaps  I can make  an analogy to Go though chess
would  work just as well. Because  of  our history, we  Kinakutans are  well
versed in both games. At the beginning  of the game, the pieces are arranged
in a  pattern that is simple and easy to understand.  But the  game evolves.
The players make small decisions, one turn at  a  time, each decision fairly
simple in and of itself, and made for reasons that can be easily understood,
even by a novice.  But  over the course  of  many  such  turns, the  pattern
develops  such  great  complexity  that only the  finest minds or the finest
computers can comprehend  it." The sultan is gazing down thoughtfully at the
Go board as  he says this. He looks up and  starts making eye contact around
the  room.  "The  analogy  is clear.  Our policies concerning  free  speech,
telecommunications  and  cryptography  have evolved from a series of simple,
rational decisions. But they are today so complex that no one can understand
them, even in  one  single country, to say nothing  of all  countries  taken
together."
     The sultan pauses and walks broodingly around  the Go board. The guests
have mostly given up on the obsequious nodding and jotting by this point. No
one is being  tactical now,  they  are all listening  with genuine interest,
wondering what he's going to say next.
     But he says nothing. Instead he lays one arm across the board and, with
a sudden violent  motion, sweeps all  the stones  aside. They rain down into
the carpet, skitter across polished stone, clatter onto the tabletop.
     There is a silence of at least fifteen seconds. The sultan looks stony.
Then, suddenly, he brightens up.
     "Time to start over," he says. "A very difficult thing to do in a large
country, where  laws  are  written  by  legislative  bodies,  interpreted by
judges, bound by  ancient  precedents. But this is the Sultanate of Kinakuta
and I am the sultan and I say that the law here is to  be very simple: total
freedom of information. I hereby abdicate all government power over the flow
of data  across and within my borders. Under  no circumstances will any part
of this government snoop  on  information flows, or use  its power to in any
way  restrict  such  flows. That is the  new  law of  Kinakuta. I invite you
gentlemen to make the most of it. Thank you."
     The sultan turns and leaves the  room to a dignified ovation. Those are
the ground rules, boys. Now run along and play.
     Dr. Mohammed Pragasu, Kinakutan Minister of Information, now rises from
his chair (which is to the right hand of the sultan's throne, naturally) and
takes the conn. His accent is almost as American as the sultan's is British;
he did his undergrad work  at Berkeley  and  got his  doctorate at Stanford.
Randy  knows  several people who worked and  studied  with him during  those
years. According to  them, Pragasu rarely  showed up  for work  in  anything
other than a  t shirt and jeans,  and showed just as strong an appetite  for
beer and sausage pizza as any non  Mohammedan. No one had a clue that he was
a sultan's second cousin, and worth a few hundred million in his own right.
     But that  was  ten  years  ago. More  recently,  in his  dealings  with
Epiphyte  Corp., he's  been better dressed, better  behaved, but  studiously
informal: first names only,  please.  Dr.  Pragasu likes  to be addressed as
Prag. All of their meetings have started with an uninhibited exchange of the
latest jokes. Then Prag inquires about his old  school buddies, most of whom
are  working  in Silicon Valley now. He delves  for  tips on the  latest and
hottest high tech stocks, reminisces for a  few minutes about the wild times
he enjoyed back in California, and then gets down to business.
     None of them has ever seen Prag in  his true  element until now. It's a
bit hard to keep a  straight face as if some old school chum  of theirs  had
rented  a  suit, forged an  ID card, and was now staging a prank at a stuffy
business meeting. But there is a solemnity about Dr. Pragasu's bearing today
that is impressive, verging on oppressive.
     Those Chinese guys across the table look like the Maoist  Mt. Rushmore;
it is impossible  to  imagine that any of them  has ever smiled in his life.
They are getting a live translation of the  proceedings through  ear pieces,
connected   through  the   mysterious  table  to   a  boiler  room  full  of
interpreters.
     Randy's  attention wanders. Prag's  talk is dull because it is covering
technical ground  with which Randy is already painfully familiar, couched in
simple  analogies  designed to  make  some  kind of  sense even  after being
translated  with  Mandarin,  Cantonese, Nipponese, or what have  you.  Randy
begins looking around the table.
     There  is  a delegation of Filipinos. One of them, a  fat  man  in  his
fifties, looks awfully  familiar.  As usual, Randy cannot remember his name.
And there's another guy who shows up late, all by himself, and is ushered to
a solitary chair down at the  far end: he might be a  Filipino with lots  of
Spanish blood, but he's more  likely Latin American or  Southern European or
just an American whose forebears came from those places. In any case, he has
scarcely  settled  into  his  seat  before he's  pulled out  a cellphone and
punched in a very long phone number and begun  a hushed, tense conversation.
He  keeps sneaking glances up the  table, checking  out  each delegation  in
turn,  then  blurting  capsule  descriptions into  his cellphone.  He  seems
startled to be here. No one who sees him can avoid noticing his furtiveness.
No  one who  notices it can avoid speculating on how he acquired it. But  at
the same  time,  the  man has a sullen glowering air  about  him that  Randy
doesn't notice until his black eyes turn to stare into Randy's like the twin
barrels of a derringer. Randy stares back,  too startled and stupid to avert
his gaze, and some kind of strange information passes from the cellphone man
to him, down the twin shafts of black light coming out of the man's eyes.
     Randy realizes that he and the rest of Epiphyte(2) Corp. have fallen in
among thieves.


     Chapter 37 SKIPPING


     It's a hot cloudy  day in the Bismarck  Sea  when Goto Dengo loses  the
war.  The  American bombers come in low and level. Goto  Dengo happens to be
abovedecks  on a fresh air and calisthenics  drill. To breathe air that does
not  smell of shit  and  vomit makes  him  feel  euphoric  and invulnerable.
Everyone else must be feeling the same way, because he watches the airplanes
for a long time before he begins to hear warning klaxons.
     The emperor's soldiers are supposed to feel  euphoric  and invulnerable
all  the time, because  their  indomitable spirit makes  them  so. That Goto
Dengo only feels that way when  abovedecks, breathing clean  air, makes  him
ashamed.  The other  soldiers never  doubt, or at  least never  show  it. He
wonders where he went astray. Perhaps  it was his time in Shanghai, where he
was  polluted with  foreign  ideas. Or maybe he  was polluted from the  very
beginning the ancient family curse.
     The  troop transports  are slow  there  is no  pretence  that they  are
anything  other  than boxes  of  air.  They  have  only  the  most  pathetic
armaments. The destroyers escorting them are sounding general quarters.
     Goto Dengo  stands  at the rail and watches the crews of the destroyers
scrambling to their positions.  Black smoke and blue light  sputter from the
barrels of their weapons, and much later he hears them opening fire.
     The American bombers must be  in some kind of distress.  He  speculates
that they are low  on fuel, or desperately  lost,  or have been chased  down
below the cloud cover by Zeros.  Whatever the reason, he knows they have not
come  here to attack the convoy  because American  bombers  attack by flying
overhead  at a great altitude,  raining down bombs.  The  bombs always  miss
because the Americans' bombsights  are  so poor and the crews  so inept. No,
the arrival  of  American planes here is just one of those bizarre accidents
of  war;  the  convoy  has been  shielded under  heavy  clouds  since  early
yesterday.
     The  troops all around Goto  Dengo are cheering. What good fortune that
these lost  Americans have  blundered straight  into  the gunsights of their
destroyer escort! And it is a good omen for the village of Kulu too, because
half  of  the town's young  men just  happen  to be abovedecks  to enjoy the
spectacle. They grew  up  together, went to school together, at  the age  of
twenty  took  the  military physical together,  joined the army together and
trained together. Now they are on their way to New Guinea together. Together
they were mustered up  onto the deck of the transport only five minutes ago.
Together  they  will enjoy the  sight of  the American planes softening into
cartwheels of flame.
     Goto Dengo, at  twenty six, is one of the old  hands  here he came back
from Shanghai to  be a leader  and  an example to them and he watches  their
faces,  these faces he has known since he was a child, never happier than at
this moment, glowing like cherry petals in the  grey world of cloud,  ocean,
and painted steel.
     Fresh delight ripples across their  faces. He turns to look. One of the
bombers  has  apparently  decided to lighten  its load  by dropping  a  bomb
straight  into the ocean. The boys of  Kulu break  into a jeering chant. The
American plane, having shed half a  ton of useless explosives, peels sharply
upward, self neutered, good for nothing but target  practice. The  Kulu boys
howl  at its  pilot in  contempt. A Nipponese pilot would  have  crashed his
plane into that destroyer at the very least!
     Goto Dengo, for some reason, watches the bomb instead of the air plane.
It does not  tumble from the plane's belly but traces a smooth flat parabola
above the waves, like an aerial torpedo. He catches his breath for a moment,
afraid that  it will never drop into the ocean, that it will skim across the
water until  it hits the destroyer that stands directly across its path. But
once again  the fortunes  of war smile  upon the emperor's forces;  the bomb
loses  its  struggle  with gravity and splashes into the water.  Goto  Dengo
looks away.
     Then he looks back again, chasing a phantom that haunts the edge of his
vision. The  wings of  foam  that  were  thrown up by  the  bomb  are  still
collapsing  into the  water, but beyond them, a black mote is  speeding away
perhaps  it  was a second bomb dropped by the same airplane. This  time Goto
Dengo watches it carefully. It seems to  be rising,  rather than  falling  a
mirage perhaps. No, no, he's wrong, it is losing altitude slowly now, and it
plows into the water and throws up another pair of wings all right.
     And  then the  bomb rises  up out  of  the  water  again. Goto Dengo, a
student of engineering,  implores  the laws of physics to take hold of  this
thing and make it fall and sink, which is what big dumb pieces of  metal are
supposed to do. Eventually it does fall again but then it rises up again.
     It is skipping across  the  water like the flat rocks that the boys  of
Kulu used to throw across the fish pond near the village. Goto Dengo watches
it skip several more  times, utterly fascinated. Once again, the fortunes of
war have provided a bizarre spectacle, seemingly for no other reason than to
entertain  him. He savors  it as if  it  were a cigarette discovered in  the
bottom of a pocket. Skip, skip, skip.
     Right into the flank of one of the escorting destroyers.  A  gun turret
flies straight up into the air, tumbling over  and over. Just as it slows to
its apogee,  it is completely enveloped in a geyser of flame spurting out of
the ship's engine room.
     The Kulu  boys  are still  chanting, refusing to accept the evidence of
their own eyes.  Something flashes in  Goto  Dengo's peripheral  vision;  he
turns  to watch another destroyer  being snapped in half like a dry  twig as
its magazines detonate. Tiny  black things are skip, skip, skipping all over
the  ocean  now, like  fleas across  the  rumpled  bedsheets  of a  Shanghai
whorehouse. The chant falters. Everyone watches silently.
     The Americans have invented a  totally new bombing tactic in the middle
of a  war  and implemented it  flawlessly. His mind staggers like a drunk in
the aisle of a careening train. They saw that they were wrong, they admitted
their mistake, they came up with a  new idea. The new idea  was accepted and
embraced all the way up the chain of command. Now  they are using it to kill
their enemies.
     No  warrior with  any concept of  honor would  have been so craven.  So
flexible. What  a loss of  face it  must have been  for the officers who had
trained their men to bomb from high altitudes. What has become of those men?
They must have all killed themselves, or perhaps been thrown into prison.
     The  American  Marines  in  Shanghai  weren't  proper  warriors either.
Constantly  changing  their  ways.  Like  Shaftoe.  Shaftoe  tried to  fight
Nipponese soldiers  in the street and failed. Having  failed, he decided  to
learn  new  tactics from  Goto Dengo.  "The  Americans  are  not  warriors,"
everyone kept saying. "Businessmen perhaps. Not warriors."
     Belowdecks, the  soldiers  are cheering and chanting. They have not the
faintest  idea what  is really going on. For just a moment, Goto Dengo tears
his eyes away from the sea full of exploding and sinking destroyers. He gets
a bearing on a locker full of life preservers.
     The airplanes all seem to be gone now. He scans the convoy and finds no
destroyers in working order.
     "Put on  the life jackets!" he shouts. None of the men seem to hear him
and so he makes for the locker. "Hey! Put on the life jackets!" He pulls one
out and holds it up, in case they can't hear him.
     They can hear him just fine. They  look at him as if what he's doing is
more shocking than anything they've witnessed in the last five minutes. What
possible use are life jackets?
     "Just in case!"  he shouts.  "So we can fight for the  emperor  another
day." He says this last part weakly.
     One  of the men, a  boy who lived  a few doors  away from him when they
were children, walks up  to him, tears the life jacket out of his hands, and
throws  it into  the ocean. He looks Goto up and down, contemptuously,  then
turns around and walks away.
     Another man  shouts and points: the second wave of planes is coming in.
Goto Dengo goes  to  the rail  to  stand  among his comrades, but they sidle
away. The American planes charge in unopposed and veer  away, leaving behind
nothing but more skipping bombs.
     Goto  Dengo watches  a bomb come directly toward him for a few bounces,
until he can make out the message painted on its nose: BEND OVER, TOJO!
     "This  way!" he shouts. He  turns  his back to  the bomb and walks back
across the deck to the locker  full of  life preservers. This  time a few of
the men follow  him.  The  ones  who  don't  perhaps  five  percent  of  the
population of  the village  of Kulu are catapulted into  the ocean  when the
bomb explodes beneath their feet.  The wooden deck buckles up  wards. One of
the Kulu  boys falls  with  a four  foot  long  splinter driven straight  up
through  his  viscera.  Goto Dengo and perhaps a dozen others make it to the
locker on hands and knees and grab life preservers.
     He would not  be  doing this  if he had not already lost the war in his
soul.  A warrior would stand his  ground and die. His men are only following
him because he has told them to do it.
     Two more bombs  burst while they are getting the life preservers on and
struggling to the rail. Most of the men below  must be dead now. Goto  Dengo
nearly doesn't make it to the railing because it is rising sharply into  the
air;  he ends up doing a chin  up on it and throwing one leg  over the side,
which is now nearly horizontal. The ship  is rolling over! Four others get a
grip on the rail,  the rest slide helplessly down the deck and vanish into a
pit of smoke. Goto Dengo ignores what his eyes  are telling him and tries to
listen to his inner ear. He is standing up on the side of the  ship now, and
looking toward the stern he can see one of the propellers spinning uselessly
in the  air.  He  begins  running  uphill. The four  others  follow  him. An
American fighter plane comes over. He  doesn't even  realize they  are being
strafed until he turns around and sees that the bullets have essentially cut
one  man in half and  crippled another  by exploding  his  knee, so that the
lower leg and foot dangle by  a few shreds of gristle. Goto Dengo throws the
man  over his  shoulders like a sack of  rice and turns to resume the uphill
race, but finds that there is no more uphill to race towards.
     He and the  other two are standing  on the  summit of  the ship now,  a
steel bulge that rises for no more than a man's height out of  the water. He
turns  around  once, then twice, looking for a place to run and sees nothing
but water all  around. The  water bloops and fizzes angrily as air and smoke
jet from the interior of the wrecked hull. Sea rushes in  towards them. Goto
Dengo looks down at  the steel bubble supporting his feet  and realizes that
he is  still,  just  for  a  moment,  perfectly dry. Then  the Bismarck  Sea
converges on his feet from all directions at once and begins to climb up his
legs. A  moment later the steel plate, which  has been  pressing  so solidly
against the soles of his boots, drops away. The weight of the wounded man on
his  shoulders  shoves  him straight  down into the ocean. He gulps fuel oil
into his sinuses, struggles out from beneath  the wounded man,  and comes to
the surface screaming. His nose, and  the cavities of his skull,  are filled
with oil. He swallows some of it and goes into convulsions as his body tries
to  eject it from every orifice  at once: sneezing, vomiting, hawking it  up
out of  his lungs. Reaching up to  his face with  one hand  he feels the oil
coating his skin thickly and knows that he dare not open his eyes. He  tries
to wipe  the oil from his face with his  sleeve, but the fabric is saturated
with it.
     He has to get down  in  the water and wipe himself clean so that he can
see  again,  but the  oil in his  clothing makes  him float. His  lungs  are
finally clear now and  he begins  to  gasp  in  air. It smells of oil but at
least  it's  breathable. But  the  volatile chemicals in the oil have gotten
into his blood now and  he feels them spread through his  body like fire. It
feels  as though a hot spatula is  being  shoved  between  his scalp and his
skull. The other men are howling and he realizes that he is too. Some of the
Chinese  workers in Shanghai used to breathe gasoline to  get high, and this
was the noise that they made.
     One of the men near  him screams. He hears a noise approaching,  like a
sheet  being torn  in half to make bandages. Radiant heat strikes him in the
face  like  a  hot  frying  pan,  just before  Goto  Dengo dives  and  kicks
downwards. The motion exposes a band  of  flesh around his calf, between his
boot and his trouser leg, and in the moment that it's poking straight up out
of the water, it gets seared to a crisp.
     He swims blind through an ocean of fuel oil. Then there is a change  in
the temperature  and  the viscosity of the  fluid  streaming  over his face.
Suddenly the life preserver  begins to tug him upwards;  he must be in water
now. He swims for  a  few more kicks  and begins to  wipe at  his  eyes. The
pressure on his ears  tells him he's not that deep, maybe a couple of meters
beneath the surface.  Finally he risks opening his eyes. Ghostly, flickering
light is illuminating  his hands, making  them  glow a bright green; the sun
must have come out.  He rolls over on his back and looks  straight up. Above
him is a lake of rolling fire.
     He rips the  life preserver off over his head and lets it go. It shoots
straight up and bursts out  of the  surface, burning like a  comet.  His oil
soaked clothing is tugging  him relentlessly  upwards,  so he rips his shirt
off and lets it tumble up towards the surface. His boots pull down, his oily
pants push up, and he reaches some sort of equilibrium.


     ***


     He grew up in the mines.
     Kulu is near the north coast of Hokkaido, on  the shore of a freshwater
lake where rivers converge from the inland hills and  commingle their waters
before draining to the Sea  of Okhotsk. The hills rise sharply  from one end
of  that lake,  looming over  a  cold  silver creek that rushes down  out of
forest inhabited only by  apes and demons.  There are small islands  in that
part of the lake. If you dig down into  the islands,  or the hills, you will
find veins of copper ore, and sometimes you will find zinc and lead and even
silver. That is what the  men of Kulu have done for many  generations. Their
monument is a maze  of tunnels that snake through the  hills,  not following
straight lines but tracking the richest veins.
     Sometimes the tunnels dip  below the level  of the lake. When the mines
were working these tunnels were pumped out, but now that they are exhausted,
the water has been allowed to seek its level and has formed sumps. There are
cavities and tunnels back in the  hills that can only be reached by boys who
are brave enough to  dive into  the cold black  water and  swim through  the
darkness for ten, twenty, thirty meters.
     Goto  Dengo went  to  all  of those places when  he was a boy.  He even
discovered some of them. Big, fat and buoyant, he was a pretty good swimmer.
He was not the best swimmer, or  the best at  holding his breath. He was not
even the bravest  (the bravest  did not put on life preservers,  and went to
their deaths like warriors).
     He went where the others wouldn't because he, alone among all  the boys
of  Kulu,  was not afraid  of the demons.  When he  was a boy, his father, a
mining  engineer, would take him hiking up into the places in  the mountains
where  demons were said to  live. They would  sleep out under  the stars and
wake up to find  their blankets covered with frost, and sometimes their food
stolen by bears. But no demons.
     The other boys believed that demons lived  in  some of those underwater
tunnels, and that this explained  why some of  the boys  who swam back there
never returned. But Goto  Dengo did not fear the demons and so  he went back
there fearing only the cold and the dark and the water.  Which was plenty to
fear.
     Now he  need only  pretend that the fire is a  stone ceiling.  He swims
some more. But he did not breathe properly before diving, and he is close to
panic now. He looks up again  and sees  that the  water is  burning only  in
patches.
     He is quite deep, he realizes, and he  can't  swim well in trousers and
boots. He fumbles  at his bootlaces, but they are  tied  in double knots. He
pulls a knife  from his belt and  slashes through the laces, kicks the boots
off,  sheds his pants and drawers too. Naked, he forces  himself  to be calm
for  ten more seconds,  brings his knees  to his  chest and hugs  them.  His
body's natural buoyancy  takes over. He knows that he must be  rising slowly
toward the surface  now, like a bubble. The  light  is growing brighter.  He
need only wait. He lets go of the knife, which is only slowing him down.
     His  back feels cold. He explodes out of the fetal position and thrusts
his head up  into  the air, gasping for  breath. A patch of  burning oil  is
almost close enough for him  to touch, and the oil  is trickling across  the
top of the ocean as if it were a solid surface. Nearly invisible blue flames
seep  from  it,  then  turn  yellow  and boil  off  curling black smoke.  He
backstrokes away from a reaching tendril.
     A glowing silver  apparition passes over  him, so close he can feel the
warmth of its exhaust and read the English warning labels  on its belly. The
tips of its wing guns are sparkling, flinging out red streaks.
     They are strafing the survivors. Some try to dive, but the oil in their
uniforms pops them right back to the surface, legs flailing uselessly in the
air. Goto Dengo first makes sure he is  nowhere near any  burning  oil, then
treads water,  spinning slowly in the water like a  radar dish,  looking for
planes. A P 38  comes  in low, gunning  for him.  He  sucks in a breath  and
dives. It is nice  and quiet under  the water, and the  bullets striking its
surface sound like the ticking of a big sewing machine. He sees a few rounds
plunging into the  water around him, leaving trails of bubbles as  the water
cavitates in their wake, slowing virtually to a stop in just a meter or two,
then turning  downwards  and sinking like bombs. He swims after  one of them
and plucks it  out of the water. It is still hot from its passage.  He would
keep  it as  a  souvenir, but his  pockets are gone  with his clothes and he
needs his hands. He stares  at the  bullet for a moment,  greenish silver in
the underwater light, fresh from some factory in America.
     How did this bullet come from America to my hand?
     We have lost. The war is over.
     I must go home and tell everyone.
     I must be like my father, a rational man,  explaining  the facts of the
world to the people at home, who are crippled by superstitions.
     He lets the bullet  go again, watches it drop towards the bottom of the
sea, where the ships, and all of the young men of Kulu, are bound.


     Chapter 38 MUGS


     Hey, it's an immature market.

     The rationalizations  have not actually begun yet Randy's still sitting
in the sultan's big conference  room, and the meeting's  just  getting up to
speed.
     Naturally the early adopters are not going to be your regular joes.
     Tom Howard has taken the floor to explain his work. Randy  doesn't have
much  to  do,  so he's  imagining  tonight's conversation in  the  Bomb  and
Grapnel.
     It's like the Wild West a  little  unruly at first, then in a few years
it settles down and you've got Fresno.
     Most of the delegations have brought hired guns: engineers and security
experts who'll get a bounty if they  can find a flaw in Tom's system. One by
one, these guys stand up to take their shots.
     Ten years from now, widows and paperboys will be banking in cyberspace.
     Magnificent  isn't  the word you  would  normally use to  describe  Tom
Howard;  he's  burly and  surly, completely  lacking in  social graces,  and
doesn't apologize for  it. Most  of  the  time  he sits silently, wearing an
expression of sphinxlike boredom, and so it's easy to forget how good he is.
     But during this particular half hour of Tom Howard's life, it is of the
essence that he be magnificent. He  is going blade to  blade with the  Seven
Samurai here:  the  nerdiest  high  octane Ph.D.s and the  scariest  private
security clicks that Asia can produce. One by one they come after him and he
cuts their heads off and stacks them on the table like cannon balls. Several
times he  has to  stop  and think for  sixty  seconds before  delivering the
deathblow. Once he has to ask Eberhard Föhr to make some calculations on his
laptop.  Occasionally he has to call on the cryptographic expertise of  John
Cantrell,  or to  look over  at Randy  for a nod or  shake  of the head. But
eventually,  he  shuts  the  hecklers up. Beryl wears a not  very convincing
smile throughout the entire thing. Avi just grips the arms of his chair, his
knuckles going from  blue to white to pink to a normal healthy glow over the
course  of  the final  five  minutes,  when it's clear that the Samurai  are
withdrawing in disarray. It makes Randy want to empty a six shooter into the
ceiling and holler, "Yeee haaw!" at the top of his lungs.
     Instead he listens, just in case Tom gets tripped up in the briar patch
of plesiosynchronous protocol  arcana, whence  only Randy can  drag him out.
This gives him some more time to survey the faces of the other people in the
room. But the meeting is  a couple  of hours old now,  and they are  all  as
familiar to him as siblings.
     Tom wipes his sword on his pantleg and thwacks his big ass resoundingly
into his leather chair. Minions scurry into the room bringing tea and coffee
and sugar/fat pods. Dr. Pragasu stands up and introduces John Cantrell.
     Sheesh! So far, the agenda is revolving entirely  around Epiphyte Corp.
What gives?
     Dr.  Pragasu,  having  developed  a  friendly  relationship with  these
California hackers, is pimping  them to his big money  contacts. That's what
gives.
     This is very interesting from a business standpoint. But Randy finds it
a bit irksome and threatening, this one way flow of information. By the time
they  go home, this assemblage  of shady gmokes is going to know  everything
about  Epiphyte  Corp., but  Epiphyte will still  be in  the dark. No  doubt
that's exactly how they want it.
     It occurs to Randy to look  over at the Dentist.  Dr. Hubert Kepler  is
sitting on the same side of the table as he is, and so it's hard to read his
face. But  it's clear he's not listening to John Cantrell. He's covering his
mouth  with one  hand and staring into space.  His Valkyries  are  furiously
passing notes back and forth, like naughty cheerleaders.
     Kepler's just as  surprised as Randy. He doesn't seem like  the kind of
guy who delights in surprises.
     What can Randy do right now to enhance shareholder  value?  Intrigue is
not  his specialty;  he'll leave  that  to Avi. Instead,  he  tunes  out the
meeting, opens up his laptop, and begins to hack.
     Hacking is an overly glorious word for this. Everyone in Epiphyte Corp.
has a  laptop with a tiny  built in video camera,  so that  they can do long
distance  videoconferencing.  Avi  insisted on  it.  The  camera  is  almost
invisible:  just an orifice a couple  of millimeters across, mounted in  the
top center of the frame that surrounds the screen. It doesn't have a lens as
such it's a camera in the oldest sense, a camera obscura. One wall  contains
the pinhole and the opposite wall is a silicon retina.
     Randy   has   the   source   code   the  original   program   for   the
videoconferencing software. It is reasonably clever in its use of bandwidth.
It looks at the  stream  of frames (individual still images) coming from the
pinhole camera and notices that, although the total amount of  data in those
frames is rather large, the  difference  from one frame to the next is tiny.
It would be altogether different if Frame 1 were a talking head and Frame 2,
a  fraction of a second later,  were a postcard shot of a Hawaiian beach and
Frame  3  a  diagram  of  a printed  circuit  and  Frame 4 a  closeup  of  a
dragonfly's  head.  But  in  fact, each frame  is  a  talking  head the same
person's head, with minor  changes in position and expression. The  software
can save on precious  bandwidth by mathematically subtracting each new frame
from  the previous one  (since,  to  the computer, each image is just a long
number) and then transmitting only the difference.
     What  it  all  means  is that  this software has  a  lot  of  built  in
capabilities for comparing one image with another, and gauging the magnitude
of  the difference from  one frame to the next. Randy doesn't  have to write
that stuff. He just has to familiarize  himself  with these already existing
routines, learn their names and  how to  use them, which takes about fifteen
minutes of clicking around.
     Then he writes a little  program called Mugshot  that will take  a snap
shot from the pinhole camera every five seconds or so, and compare it to the
previous snapshot,  and, if the  difference is large  enough, save  it to  a
file.  An encrypted file with a meaningless, random  name. Mugshot  opens no
windows and produces no output of its own, so the only way you can tell it's
running is by typing the UNIX command
     ps
     and hitting the return key. Then the  system will spew out  a long list
of running processes, and Mugshot will show up somewhere in that list.
     Just in case someone  thinks of this, Randy  gives the  program a  fake
name: VirusScanner.  He  starts  it running, then checks  its directory  and
verifies that it has  just  saved an image file: one mug  shot of  Randy. As
long as  he sits fairly still, it won't save any more mug shots; the pattern
of light  that represents Randy's face striking the far wall  of  the camera
obscura won't change very much.
     In the  technology world,  no  meeting  is  complete  without  a  demo.
Cantrell and Föhr have developed a prototype of the  electronic cash system,
just to demonstrate  the user interface  and the built in security features.
"A year from now, instead of going to the bank and talking to a human being,
you will simply launch this piece of software from any  where in the world,"
Cantrell  says, "and communicate with the  Crypt." He  blushes as this  word
seeps  through  the translators  and into the  ears of the others. "Which is
what we're calling the system that Tom Howard has been putting together."
     Avi's on  his  feet, coolly  managing  the crisis.  'Mì  fú,"  he says,
speaking directly to the Chinese guys, "is a better translation."
     The Chinese guys  look relieved, and  a couple of them  actually  crack
smiles when they hear  Avi speaking Mandarin. Avi holds up a sheet  of paper
bearing the Chinese characters (1):
     
     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 distinctive
style of  keying we call it his fist. With a bit of practice,  our Y Service
people can  recognize different  German operators by their fists we can tell
when one  of them has been transferred to a different unit, for example." He
nods  in  the  direction  of the albino  woman. "Miss  Lord has  intercepted
numerous messages from U 691, and, is familiar with the fist  of that boat's
radio operator. Furthermore, we now have a wire  recording  of U 691 's most
recent transmission, which she and I  have  been  studying intensively." The
percussionist  draws a deep breath and screws his courage up  before saying,
"We are confident that I can forge U 691's fist."
     Turing chimes in. "And since we have broken Enigma, we can compose  any
message we want, and encrypt it just as U 691 would have."
     "Splendid. Splendid!" says one of the Broadway Buildings guys.
     "We  cannot  prevent  U  691  from  sending  out  her  own,  legitimate
messages," Chattan  cautions,  "short of  sinking her.  Which we  are making
every effort to do. But we can muddy the waters considerably. Rabbi?"
     Once again, the rabbi rises to his  feet,  drawing everyone's attention
as they  wait  for  him to fall  down. But  he  doesn't. "I  have composed a
message in  German naval jargon. Translated into English, it says,  roughly,
'Interrogation  of  prisoners proceeding slowly  request  permission  to use
torture' and then there are several Xs in a row and then is  added the words
WARNING AMBUSH U 691 HAS BEEN CAPTURED BY BRITISH COMMANDOS'"
     Sharp intakes of breath all around the room.
     "Is  contemporary  German  naval  jargon  a  normal  part  of  Talmudic
studies?" asks the don.
     "Mr. Kahn has spent a year  and a half analyzing  naval decrypts in Hut
4,"  Chattan  says.  "He  has the lingo  down pat."  He  goes  on: "we  have
encrypted Mr.  Kahn's message using today's naval  Enigma key, and passed it
on to Mr. Shales, who has been practicing."
     Miss  Lord  rises to her  feet,  like a child reciting her lessons in a
Victorian school, and  says, "I  am satisfied that Mr. Shales's rendition is
indistinguishable from U 691's."
     All eyes turn towards Chattan, who turns towards the old farts from the
Broadway Buildings,  who even  now  are  on the phone  relaying  all this to
someone of whom they are clearly terrified.
     "Don't the Jerrys have huffduff?" asks the Don, as if probing a flaw in
a student's dissertation.
     "Their  huffduff network  is not nearly  so well  developed  as  ours,"
responds one of  the young analysts.  "It is most  unlikely  that they would
bother to triangulate a transmission that appeared to come from one of their
own U  boats, so they  probably won't figure out  the message  originated in
Buckinghamshire, rather than the Atlantic."
     "However,  we have anticipated your objection," Chattan says, "and made
arrangements for several of our own ships, as well as various aeroplanes and
ground units,  to  flood the air with transmissions.  Their huffduff network
will have its hands full at the time of our fake U 691 transmission."
     "Very well," mutters the don.
     Everyone sits there in churchly silence  while  the  most senior of the
Broadway Buildings  contingent winds up  his conversation with Who Is at the
Other  End. Elmer  hanging up the  phone,  he  intones  solemnly,  "You  are
directed to proceed."
     Chattan nods at some of the younger men, who dash across the room, pick
up telephones,  and  begin to talk in  calm,  clinical  voices about cricket
scores.  Chattan looks  at  his watch.  "It will take a few minutes  for the
huffduff smokescreen to  develop. Miss  Lord,  you will notify  us  when the
traffic has risen to a suitably feverish pitch?"
     Miss Lord makes a little curtsey and sits down at her radio.
     "FUNKSPIEL!"  shouts Elmer, scaring everyone  half out  of their skins,
"We already done sent out some other messages. Made 'em look like Royal Navy
traffic.  Used a code the Krauts just broke a few  weeks ago. These messages
have  to do  with  an operation  a  fictitious operation, y'know  in which a
German U boat was supposedly boarded and seized by our commandos."
     There  is  a whole lot of tinny shouting from the telephone. The gentle
man who  has the  bad luck to be holding it translates into what is probably
more polite English: "What if Mr.  Shales's performance is not convincing to
the radio operators at  Charlottenburg? What  if  they  do  not  succeed  in
decrypting Mr. Elmer's false messages?"
     Chattan fields that one. He steps over to a map that has been set up on
an  easel at the end  of the room. The  map depicts a swath  of  the Central
Atlantic bordered on the  east  by France  and Spain. "U 691's last reported
position  was  here," he  says,  pointing to a pin stuck  in the lower  left
corner of  the map. "She has  been ordered back  to Wllhelmshaven  with  her
prisoners. She will  go this  way," he says, indicating a length of red yarn
stretched  in a  north  northeasterly direction,  "assuming  she  avoids the
Straits of Dover." (1)
     "There  happens  to  be  another  milchcow  here,"  Chattan  continues,
indicating another pin.  "One of our own submarines should be able  to reach
it within twenty  four hours, at  which point it will  approach at periscope
depth and engage  it with torpedoes. Chances are excellent that the milchcow
will   be  destroyed  immediately.  If  she  has   time  to  send  out   any
transmissions,  she  will  merely state  that  she is being  attacked  by  a
submarine.  Once  we have destroyed this  milchcow, we will  call once again
upon the skills of Mr. Shales, who will transmit  a fake distress call  that
will  appear  to originate from the milchcow, stating that  they  have  come
under attack from none other than U 691."
     "Splendid!" someone proclaims.
     "By the  time the sun rises tomorrow," Chattan concludes, "we will have
one of our  very best  submarine  hunting task forces on the scene.  A light
carrier with several antisubmarine planes will comb the ocean night and day,
using radar, visual reconnaissance, huffduff, and Leigh lights to hunt for U
691.  The chances are excellent  that she will be found and sunk long before
she  can approach the  Continent.  But  should she find  her way  past  this
formidable  barrier  she  will find the German Kriegsmarine no less eager to
hunt  her down and destroy her. Any information she may transmit to  Admiral
Dönitz in the meantime will be regarded with the most profound suspicion."
     "So," Waterhouse says, "the plan,  in  a  nutshell,  is to  render  all
information from U  691 unbelievable, and  subsequently to destroy  her, and
everyone on her, before she can reach Germany."
     "Yes," Chattan says, "and the former task will be greatly simplified by
the fact that U 691's skipper is already known to be mentally unstable."
     "So it seems likely that our guys, Shaftoe and Root, will not survive,"
Waterhouse says slowly.
     There is a long, frozen silence, as  if Waterhouse had interrupted high
tea by making farting sounds with his armpit.
     Chattan responds  in  a precise,  arch tone that  indicates he's really
pissed off.  "There is  the possibility that when U  691 is  engaged by  our
forces, she will be forced to the surface and will surrender."
     Waterhouse studies the  grain of the tabletop. His  face is hot and his
chest is burning.
     Miss Lord rises to  her  feet and speaks. Several important  heads turn
toward Mr. Shales,  who excuses himself and goes to a table in the corner of
the  room. He fiddles with the  controls on  a radio  transmitter for  a few
moments,  spreads the encrypted message out in front of himself, and takes a
deep breath,  as  though preparing for a big solo. Finally  he reaches  out,
rests one hand lightly on the radio key, and begins to tap  out the message,
rocking from side to  side and cocking his head this way and that. Mrs. Lord
listens with her eyes closed, concentrating intensely.
     Mr. Shales stops. "Finished," he announces in  a quiet voice, and looks
nervously at Mrs. Lord, who smiles. Then there is polite applause around the
library, as if they had  just  finished listening to a harpsichord concerto.
Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse keeps his hands folded in his lap. He has just
heard the death warrant of Enoch Root and Bobby Shaftoe.


     Chapter 46 HEAP


     To: root@eruditorum.org
     From: dwarf@siblings.net
     Subject: Re(8) Why?
     Let  me  just  take stock of what I  know so far:  you say  that asking
"why?" is part of what you do for a living; you're not  an academic; and you
are  in the  surveillance  business.  I am having trouble  forming  a  clear
picture.
     – BEGIN ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK – (etc.)
     – END ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK
     To: dwarf@siblings.net
     From: root@eruditorum.org
     Subject: Re(9) Why?
     Randy,  I  never said  that I, myself, am in the surveillance business.
But I know people who are. Formerly public– and now private sector. We
stay in touch.  The grapevine and all that. Nowadays, my involvement in such
things is limited to noodling around with  novel cryptosystems, as a sort of
hobby.
     Now, to get back to what I would consider to be the  main thread of our
conversation. You guessed that I was an academic. Were you being sincere, or
was this purely an attempt to "gotcha" me?
     The reason  I ask  is that  I  am, in  fact,  a man  of  the cloth,  so
naturally I consider it my job to ask "why?" I assumed  this would be fairly
obvious to  you. But  I should have  taken into account that you are not the
churchy type. This is my fault.
     It is  conventional now to  think  of clerics simply as presiders  over
funerals and weddings. Even people who  routinely go to church (or synagogue
or whatever) sleep through the sermons. That is because the arts of rhetoric
and oratory  have fallen  on hard  times, and so the sermons  tend not to be
very interesting.
     But there  was  a time when places  like Oxford and  Cambridge  existed
almost solely to train ministers, and their job was not just to preside over
weddings and  funerals but also to say  something thought provoking to large
numbers of people several times  a week. They were the retail outlets of the
profession of philosophy.
     I still think of this  as the priest's highest calling  or at least the
most  interesting part  of the job hence my  question to you, which I cannot
fail to notice, remains unanswered.
     – BEGIN ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK
     (etc.)
     – END ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK
     "Randy, what is the worst thing that ever happened?"
     This  is  never  a difficult question  to answer when you  are  hanging
around with Avi. "The Holocaust," Randy says dutifully.
     Even if he didn't know Avi,  their  surroundings would give him a hint.
The rest of Epiphyte Corp. have gone  back  to  the Foote Mansion to prepare
for hostilities  with  the  Dentist.  Randy and Avi are sitting  on  a black
obsidian  bench planted atop  the  mass  grave of thousands of Nipponese  in
downtown Kinakuta, watching the tour buses come and go.
     Avi  pulls a small GPS receiver out of  his attache case,  turns it on,
and sets  it out on a boulder in front of  them where it  will have a  clear
view of the sky. "Correct! And what is the highest and best purpose to which
we can devote our allotted lifespans?"
     "Uh . . . enhancing shareholder value?"
     "Very funny." Avi is annoyed.  He  is baring  his soul, which  he  does
rarely. Also,  he's in the midst  of  cataloging another small  h  holocaust
site, adding  it  to  his archives.  It is  clear  he would  appreciate some
fucking solemnity here. "I visited Mexico a few weeks ago," Avi continues.
     "Looking for a site where the Spanish killed a bunch  of Aztecs?" Randy
asks.
     "This is  exactly the kind of thing I'm fighting," Avi  says, even more
irritated. "No, I was not looking for a  place where a bunch of  Aztecs were
massacred.  The Aztecs  can go fuck themselves,  Randy! Repeat after me: the
Aztecs can go fuck themselves,"
     "The Aztecs can go fuck  themselves,"  Randy says cheerfully, drawing a
baffled look from an approaching Nipponese tour guide.
     "To begin  with, I  was  hundreds of miles from Mexico City, the former
Aztec capital.  I was on the outer fringes of the territory  that the Aztecs
controlled." Avi scoops his GPS off the boulder and begins  to punch keys on
its  pad, telling it to store  the latitude and longitude  in its memory. "I
was looking," Avi continues, "for the site of a Nahuatl city that was raided
by the Aztecs hundreds of years before the Spanish  even showed up. You know
what those fucking Aztecs did, Randy?"
     Randy  uses his hands to squeegee away sweat from his face.  "Something
unspeakable?"
     "I hate that word 'unspeakable.' We must speak of it."
     "Speak then."
     "The Aztecs took twenty five  thousand Nahuatl captives,  brought  them
back to Tenochtitlan, and killed them all in a couple of days."
     "Why?"
     "Some kind  of festival. Super Bowl weekend or something. I don't know.
The  point is, they did that kind of shit all the time. But now, Randy, when
I talk about Holocaust type stuff happening in Mexico, you give me this shit
about the mean nasty old Spaniards! Why? Because history has been distorted,
that's why."
     "Don't tell me you're about to come down on the side of the Spaniards."
     "As the descendant  of  people  who  were  expelled  from Spain by  the
Inquisition,  I  have  no illusions about  them," Avi  says,  "but, at their
worst, the Spaniards were a million times better than the Aztecs. I mean, it
really  says  something  about how  bad  the  Aztecs  were  that,  when  the
Spaniards, showed up and raped the  place, things actually got  a lot better
around there."
     "Avi?"
     "Yes."
     "We are sitting here in the  Sultanate of Kinakuta, trying  to build  a
data haven while fending off an oral surgeon turned hostile take over maven.
I have pressing responsibilities in  the Philippines. Why are  we discussing
the Aztecs?"
     "I'm giving you a pep talk,"  Avi says. "You are bored. Dangerously so.
The  Pinoy gram  thing  was cool  for a while, but now it's up and  running,
there's no new technology there."
     "True."
     "But the Crypt is amazingly cool. Tom and  John  and Eb are going nuts,
and every Secret Admirer in the world is spamming me with resumes. The Crypt
is exactly what you would like to be doing right now."
     "Again, true."
     "Even if you  were  working on the Crypt, though, philosophical  issues
would be gnawing at  you  issues based  on the types  of  people who you see
getting involved, who may be our first customers."
     "I cannot deny that I have philosophical issues," Randy  says. Suddenly
he has come up with a new hypothesis: Avi is actually root@eruditorum.org.
     "Instead, you are laying cable in the  Philippines. This is a  job that
because of changes we just became aware of yesterday is basically irrelevant
to our corporate  mission. But it's  a lingering contractual obligation, and
if we put anyone less important  than you on it, the Dentist will be able to
prove to the most half witted jury  of tofu brained Californians that we are
malingering."
     "Well,  thank you  for making it so clear  why I  should be miserable,"
Randy says forbearingly.
     "So,"  Avi  continues,  "I wanted  to  let  you know  that  you  aren't
necessarily just making license plates  here. And furthermore that the Crypt
is not a morally bankrupt endeavor. Actually, you are playing a big  role in
the most important thing in the world."
     Randy says, "You asked  me earlier what is the highest and best purpose
to  which we could dedicate our lives. And the obvious answer is 'to prevent
future Holocausts.'"
     Avi laughs darkly. "I'm  glad  it's  obvious to you, my  friend. I  was
beginning to think I was the only one."
     "What!? Get over yourself, Avi. People are  commemorating the Holocaust
all the time."
     "Commemorating  the  Holocaust is not, not  not not not  not,  the same
thing   as   fighting   to   prevent   future   holocausts.   Most   of  the
commemorationists are just whiners.  They think  that  if everyone feels bad
about past holocausts,  human  nature will  magically transform,  and no one
will want to commit genocide in the future."
     "I take it you do not share this view, Avi?"
     "Look  at Bosnia!" Avi  scoffs. "Human  nature  doesn't  change, Randy.
Education  is hopeless.  The most educated people in the world can turn into
Aztecs or Nazis just like that." He snaps his fingers.
     "So what hope is there?"
     "Instead of trying to educate the potential perpetrators of holocausts,
we try to educate the potential victims. They will at least pay some fucking
attention."

     "Educate them in what way?"
     Avi  closes his eyes and shakes his head. "Oh, shit, Randy,  I could go
on for hours I have drawn up a whole curriculum."
     "Okay, we'll get into that later."
     "Definitely  later. For  now, the  key point is that the  Crypt is  all
important.  I can  take all of my ideas  and put  them into a  single pod of
information,  but  almost  every  government  in  the  world  would  prevent
distribution to its citizens. It is essential to build the Crypt so that the
HEAP can be freely distributed throughout the world."
     "HEAP?"
     "Holocaust Education and Avoidance Pod."
     "Oh, Jesus Christ!"
     "This is the true meaning  of  what you are working on," Avi says, "and
so  I  urge  you  not  to  lose heart. Whenever you  are about to get  bored
stamping out those  license plates in the Philippines,  think  of the  HEAP.
Think  of what  those Nahuatl villagers could  have  done to  those  fucking
Aztecs if they'd  had a holocaust prevention manual a  handbook  on guerilla
warfare tactics."
     Randy sits and ponders for a while. "We have to go and buy some water,"
he finally says. "I've sweated away a few liters just sitting here."
     "We can just go back to the hotel," Avi says, "I'm basically finished."
     "You're finished. I haven't even started," Randy says.
     "Started what?"
     "Telling  you why  there's no chance  I'm  going  to  be bored  in  the
Philippines."
     Avi blinks. "You met a girl?"
     "No!" Randy says testily, meaning Yes, of course. "Come on, let's go."
     They go to a nearby 24 Jam and purchase bluish plastic bottles of water
the size of cinderblocks. Then they wander  around through  streets  crowded
with unbearably savory smelling food carts, guzzling the water.
     "I got e  mail from Doug Shaftoe a few days ago," Randy says. "From his
boat, via satellite phone."
     "In the clear?"
     "Yeah. I keep bothering him to get Ordo and encrypt his e  mail, but he
won't."
     "That  is really  unprofessional," Avi grumbles.  "He needs to  be more
paranoid."
     "He's so paranoid that he  doesn't even trust Ordo." Avi's scowl eases.
"Oh. That's okay then."
     "His e mail contained a stupid joke about Imelda Marcos."
     "You took me on this walk to tell me a joke?"
     "No, no, no," Randy says. "The joke was a prearranged signal. Doug told
me that he would send me e mail containing an Imelda joke if a certain thing
happened."
     "What certain thing?"
     Randy  takes a big  swig of water,  draws  a deep breath, and  composes
himself.  "More than a year  ago,  I had a  conversation  with Doug  Shaftoe
during that big party that  the Dentist threw  on board  the Rui Faleiro. He
wanted us to hire his company, Semper Marine Services, to do the survey work
on  all future cable lays. In  return he offered to cut us in on  any sunken
treasure he found while performing the survey."
     Avi skids to a  stop and clutches his water bottle  in both hands as if
he's afraid he might  drop it. "Sunken treasure, like, yo ho ho and a bottle
of rum? Pieces of six? That kind of thing?"
     "Pieces  of  eight. Same  basic idea,"  Randy  says. "The Shaftoes  are
treasure hunters. Doug is obsessed with the idea that there are  vast hoards
of treasure in and around the Philippines."
     "From where? Those Spanish galleons?"
     "No. Well, yes, actually. But that's not what Doug's after." He and Avi
have begun walking again. "Most of it is either much older than that pottery
from sunken Chinese junks or much more recent Japanese war gold."
     As  Randy  had expected, the mention of  Japanese war gold makes a huge
impact on Avi. Randy keeps talking. "Rumor has it that the Nipponese left  a
lot of gold in the area. Supposedly, Marcos recovered a big  stash buried in
a  tunnel  somewhere  that's where he got all his  money.  Most people think
Marcos was worth  something  like  five,  six  billion dollars, but a lot of
people in the Philippines think he recovered more like sixty billion."
     "Sixty billion!" Avi's spine stiffens. "Impossible."
     "Look, you can believe the rumors  or not,  I don't  care," Randy says.
"But  since it looks like one of Marcos's  bag men is going to be a founding
depositor in the Crypt, it is the kind of thing you should know."
     "Keep talking," Avi says, suddenly ravenous for data.
     "Okay. So people have been running all over  the Philippines ever since
the  war,  digging  holes  and dredging the  seafloor, trying  to  find  the
legendary Nipponese war gold.  Doug Shaftoe is one  of those people. Problem
is,  making  a thorough  sidescan  sonar  survey  of the whole area is quite
expensive  you can't just  go out and do it on  spec. He saw  an opportunity
when we came along."
     "I see. Very smart," Avi says approvingly. "He would do the survey work
that we needed anyway, in order to lay the cables."
     "Perhaps  a bit more than was strictly necessary, as long as he was out
there."
     "Right. Now I remember some angry mail from the Dentist's due diligence
harpies  because  the survey was costing too much and  taking too long. They
felt we  could  have hired a different  company and gotten the  same results
quicker and cheaper."
     "They were probably right," Randy admits. "Anyway, Doug wanted to cut a
deal that  gave us ten percent of  whatever  he found. More, if we wanted to
underwrite recovery operations."
     All of a sudden Avi's eyes go wide and he swallows a big gulp  of  air.
"Oh, shit,"  he says. "He  wanted  to keep the whole thing a secret from the
Dentist."
     "Exactly.  Because  the  Dentist  would  end up  taking all of it.  And
because of  the Dentist's  peculiar domestic situation, that means that  the
Bolobolos would know everything about it too.  These guys would happily kill
to get their hands on gold."
     "Wow!"  Avi says, shaking his  head. "Y'know, I don't want to seem like
one of those  hackneyed  Jews that you see in  heartwarming movies.  But  at
times like this, all I can say is 'Oy, gevalt!' "
     "I never told you about this deal, Avi, for two reasons. One of them is
just  our  general policy  of not blabbing about things. The other reason is
that we decided  to hire  Semper Marine Services  anyway  just on  their own
merits so Doug Shaftoe's proposition was irrelevant."
     Avi thinks this  one over.  "Correction. It was  irrelevant, as long as
Doug Shaftoe didn't find any sunken treasure."

     "Right. And I assumed that he wouldn't."
     "You assumed wrong."
     "I assumed  wrong," Randy  admits. "Shaftoe has found the remains of an
old Nipponese submarine."
     "How do you know that?"
     "If he  found  a Chinese  junk  he was going  to send me  a joke  about
Ferdinand Marcos. If he found World War II stuff, it was going to be Imelda.
If it was a surface ship, it was going to be about Imelda's shoes. If it was
a  submarine, her sexual  habits.  He sent me  a joke  about Imelda's sexual
habits."
     "Now, did you ever formally respond to Doug Shaftoe's proposition?" Avi
says.
     "No. Like  I  said, it wasn't relevant, we were going to  hire him  any
way.  But then, after the contracts were all signed  and we were drawing  up
the survey schedule, he  told me about this code involving the Marcos jokes.
I realized  then he  believed that by hiring him, we had implicitly said yes
to his proposition."
     "It's a funny way to do business," Avi says, wrinkling his nose. "You'd
think he would have been more explicit."
     "He is  the kind  of guy who  does  deals on a handshake.  On  personal
honor,"  Randy  says. "Once he had made  the  proposition,  he  would  never
withdraw it."
     "The problem with those honorable men,"  Avi says, "is that they expect
everyone else to be honorable in the same way."
     "It is true."
     "So he  believes, now, that we are accomplices in this plan to hide the
existence of this  sunken treasure from the Dentist  and the Bolobolos," Avi
says.
     "Unless we come clean to them right away."
     "In which case we are betraying Doug Shaftoe," Avi says.
     "Cravenly backstabbing  the ex SEAL who served six years of combat duty
in  Vietnam,  and  who has scary  and  well connected friends all  over  the
world," Randy adds.
     "Damn,  Randy! I  thought I  was going to freak you out by  telling you
about the HEAP."
     "You did."
     "And then you spring this on me!"
     "Life's rich pageant. And all that," Randy says.
     Avi thinks  for a minute. "Well, I guess it comes down to whom would we
rather have on our side in a bar fight."
     "The answer can  only be Douglas  MacArthur Shaftoe," Randy  says. "But
that doesn't mean we'll make it out of the bar alive."


     Chapter 47 SEEKY


     They have stuffed him into the narrow gap  between the U boat's slotted
outer hull and the pressure hull within, so that  bitterly cold, black water
streams through with the bludgeoning force of a firehose and wracks him with
malarial  chills:  bones cracking, joints freezing, muscles knotting. He  is
wedged in tightly between uneven  surfaces of  hard rough steel, bending him
in ways he's not supposed  to bend, and punishing him when he tries to move.
Barnacles  are  beginning to  grow  on him: sort of like lice but bigger and
capable of burrowing deeper into the flesh. Somehow he is able to  fight for
breath  anyway,  just  enough to  stay  alive  and  really  savor  just  how
unpleasant  the situation is. He's been  breathing cold seawater for a  long
time,  it has  made  his windpipe  raw,  and he  suspects  that plankton  or
something  are  eating his  lungs from  the  inside  out.  He pounds on  the
pressure hull but  the impact makes no noise.  He can sense  the warmth  and
heat inside,  and  he would like to get  in and enjoy both of  them. Finally
some kind of dream logic thing happens  and he  finds  a hatch.  The current
sweeps Shaftoe  out, leaving him suspended  alone in the watery cosmos,  and
the U boat hisses away and abandons him. Shaftoe is lost now. He cannot tell
up from down. Something bashes him on the head. He sees a few black drumlike
things moving  inexorably through the water with parallel  comet  trails  of
bubbles behind them. Depth charges.
     Then Shaftoe comes awake and  knows that  this  was  all just  his body
desiring morphine. He is certain for a moment that he is back in Oakland and
that  Lieutenant Reagan is looming  over him, preparing  for Phase 2 of  the
interview.
     "Good afternoon, Sergeant Shaftoe," Reagan says. He has adopted a heavy
German accent for some reason. A joke.  These  actors!  Shaftoe smells meat,
and other things not so  inviting. Something heavy, but not especially hard,
thuds into his face. Then it draws back. Then it hits him again.


     ***


     "Your companion is morphium seeky?" says Beck.
     Enoch Root is  a  bit taken aback; they've  only  been on  the boat for
eight hours. "Is he already making a nuisance of himself?"
     "He is semiconscious," Beck says, "and has a  great  deal to  say about
giant lizards among other subjects."
     "Oh, that's normal for him," Root says, relieved. "What makes you think
he is morphium seeky?"
     "The morphium bottle and  hypodermic syringe  that were in his pocket,"
Beck says with  that deadpan  Teutonic irony, "and the  needle marks in  his
arms."
     Root observes that the U boat is like a tunnel bored out of the sea and
lined with hardware. This cabin  (if that's not too grand  a word for it) is
by far  the largest open space  Root has seen,  meaning that  he can  almost
stretch  his arms  out without hitting  someone or inadvertently  tripping a
switch or a valve. It even sports some wooden cabinetry, and has been sealed
off from the corridor by a leather curtain. When they first brought  Root in
here, he thought it was a storage closet. But as  he looks around the place,
he begins  to  realize that it's  the nicest  place  on the  whole boat: the
captain's  private cabin. This is confirmed when Beck unlocks a  desk drawer
and produces a bottle of Armagnac.
     "Conquering France hath its privileges," Beck says.
     "Yeah," Root says, "you blokes really know how to sack a place."


     ***


     Lieutenant  Reagan  is  back  again,  molesting Bobby  Shaftoe  with  a
stethoscope that  appears to  have been  kept in a  bath  of liquid nitrogen
until ready  for use.  "Cough,  cough,  cough!" he keeps saying. Finally  he
takes the instrument away.
     Something is fucking with Shaftoe's  ankles. He tries to  get up on his
elbows to look, and smashes his face into a blistering  hot  pipe. When he's
recovered from that, he peeks carefully down the length of his body and sees
a goddamn hardware store down there. The bastards have put him in leg irons!
     He lies back down and gets slugged in the face by a dangling ham. Above
him  is a firmament of  pipes and  cables. Where has he seen this before? On
the Dutch Hammer, that's where. Except the lights are on in this U boat, and
it  doesn't  appear to be sinking, and it's full of Germans. The Germans are
calm and relaxed.  None  of them  is  bleeding or screaming. Damn! The  boat
rocks sideways, and a giant Blutwurst socks him in the belly.
     He  begins looking around, trying to get his bearings. There's not much
else to see except hanging meat. This  cabin is  a six foot long slice of  U
boat,  with a  narrow  gangway down the center, hemmed in by bunks. Or maybe
they are bunks.  The one directly  across from him  is  occupied by a  dirty
canvas sack.
     Fuck that. Where is the box with the purple bottles?


     ***


     "It  is amusing to  read  my communications  from Charlottenburg," Beck
says  to Root, changing the subject to the  message  decrypts  on his table.
"They were perhaps written by that Jew Kafka."
     "How so?"
     "It seems  that  they do not expect  that we  will ever  make  it  home
alive."
     "What makes you say that?" Root  says, trying not to savor the Armagnac
too  much. When he brings it up to  his nose and inhales, its perfume nearly
obliterates the reek of urine,  vomit, rotten food, and diesel that suffuses
everything on the U boat down to the atomic level.
     "They  are  pressing us  for  information about our prisoners. They are
very interested in you guys," Beck says.
     "In other words,"  Root says carefully, "they want  you to  question us
now."
     "Precisely."
     "And send the results in by radio?"
     "Yes," Beck says. "But I  really should be concentrating on how to keep
us alive  the  sun will  be up soon, and then we are  in  for some  very bad
trouble.  You'll  remember that  your ship radioed our coordinates  before I
sunk it. Every allied plane and ship is now out looking for us."
     "So, if I cooperate,"  Root  says, "you can get back to the business of
keeping us all alive."
     Beck tries to control  a smile. His little tactic was crude and obvious
to begin  with, and Root has already seen through it. Beck is, if any thing,
more uncomfortable than Root with this whole interrogation business.
     "Suppose I tell  you everything I know," Root says. "If you send it all
back to Charlottenburg, you'll be  running your radio, on  the surface,  for
hours. Huffduff will pick you out in a few  seconds and then every destroyer
and bomber within a thousand miles will jump on you."
     "On us," Beck corrects him.
     "Yes. So if I  really want to stay alive, it's best if I shut up," Root
says.


     ***


     "Are you looking for this?"  says the German with  the stethoscope, who
(Shaftoe has learned) is not a real doctor just the guy who happens to be in
charge of the box of medical stuff. Anyway, he is holding up just the thing.
The very thing.
     "Gimme that!" Shaftoe says, making a weak grab for it. "That's mine!"
     "Actually, it's mine," the medic  says. "Yours is  with the  captain. I
might share some of mine with you, if you are cooperative."
     "Fuck you," Shaftoe says.
     "Very well then,"  the medic  says,  "I will by leave  it." He puts the
syringe full of morphine on the bunk opposite and one level below Shaftoe's,
so that Shaftoe, by peering between a couple of Knockwursts, can see it. But
he can't reach it. Then the medic leaves.


     ***


     "Why was  Sergeant  Shaftoe  carrying  a German  morphine bottle  and a
German syringe?" says Beck  quizzically, doing  his  best  to make it  sound
conversational and not  interrogational. But the  effort is too much for him
and that  smile tries to seize control of his lips again. It is the smile of
a whipped  dog. Root  finds this somewhat alarming, since  Beck's the guy in
charge of keeping everyone on the boat alive.
     "That's news to me," Root says.
     "Morphine is closely regulated," Beck  says. "Each bottle has a number.
We  have  already  radioed  the  number  on  Sergeant  Shaftoe's  bottle  to
Charlottenburg, and soon they'll know  where it  came from. Even though they
may not tell us."
     "Good work. That  should keep them busy  for a while. Why  don't you go
back to running the ship?" Root suggests.
     "We are  in the calm before the storm," Beck  says, "and I  have not so
much to do. So I try to satisfy my own curiosity about you."


     ***


     "We're fucked, aren't we!?" says a German voice.
     "Huh?" Shaftoe says.
     "I said, we're fucked! You guys broke the Enigma!"
     "What's the Enigma?"
     "Don't play stupid," says the German.
     Shaftoe feels prickly on the back of his neck. That sounds exactly like
the kind of thing a German would say before commencing torture.
     Shaftoe composes his face into the cool, heavy lidded, dopey expression
that he always uses when he's trying to irritate  an officer. As best he can
when his legs are bolted down, he rolls over on his side,  towards the sound
of the voice.  He  is expecting to  see an aquiline SS  officer in  a  black
uniform,  jackboots,  death's   head  insignia,  and  riding  crop,  perhaps
twiddling a pair of thumbscrews in his black leather gloves.
     Instead he sees no one at all. Shit! Hallucinations again!
     Then the dirty canvas sail bag in the  bunk opposite him begins to move
around. Shaftoe blinks and resolves a head sticking out  of  one end:  straw
blond but prematurely half bald, contrasting black beard, catlike pale green
eyes.  The  man's  canvas garment  is  not  exactly a bag,  but a voluminous
overcoat. He has his arms crossed over his body.
     "Oh,   well,"  the   German  mutters,  "I  was  just  trying  to   make
conversation."  He  turns his  head and  scratches his nose  by nuzzling his
pillow for a while.  "You can tell me  any secret you want,"  he says. "See,
I've  already  notified  Dönitz that  the Enigma  is shit.  And  it made  no
difference.  Except  he ordered  me  a  new overcoat.  The  man rolls  over,
exposing his back to Shaftoe. The  sleeves of  the garment are  sewn shut at
the ends and tied together behind his back. "It is more comfortable than you
would think, for the first day or two."


     ***


     A mate pulls the leather  curtain aside, nods apologetically, and hands
Beck a fresh message decrypt. Beck reads it, raises his eyebrows, and blinks
tiredly. He sets  it down on the table  and stares at  the wall  for fifteen
seconds. Then he picks it up and reads it again, carefully.
     "It says that I am not to ask you any more questions."
     "What!?"
     "Under  no  circumstances,"  Beck says,  "am  I  to  extract  any  more
information from you."
     "What the hell does that mean?"
     "Probably that you know  something  I am not authorized to  know," Beck
says.


     ***


     It  has been about two hundred years,  now, since  Bobby  Shaftoe had a
trace of morphine in his system. Without it, he cannot know pleasure or even
comfort.
     The syringe  gleams like a cold star on the shelf underneath the  crazy
German in the  straitjacket. He'd rather that they just tore his fingernails
out or something.
     He knows he's going to crack. He  tries to think of a way to crack that
won't kill any Marines.
     "I could bring you the syringe in my teeth," suggests the man, who  has
introduced himself as Bischoff.
     Shaftoe mulls it over. "In exchange for?"
     "You tell me whether the Enigma has been decrypted."
     "Oh."  Shaftoe's  relieved; he was afraid  maybe Bischoff was  going to
demand  a blow job. "That's the code machine thingamajig you were telling me
about?" He and Bischoff have had a lot of time to shoot the breeze.
     "Yeah."
     Shaftoe's desperate. But  he's also highly irritable, which serves  him
well now. "You expect me to believe  that you  are  just a crazy  guy who is
curious about Enigma, and not a German naval officer who's dressed  up in  a
straitjacket to trick me?"
     Bischoff  is exasperated. "I already  said  that I've told Dönitz  that
Enigma  is crap!  So  if  you  tell  me it's  crap, that  doesn't  make  any
difference!"


     ***


     "Let me ask you a question, then," Root says.
     "Yes?" Beck says, making  a visible  effort  to raise  his eyebrows and
look like he cares.
     "What have you told Charlottenburg about us?"
     "Names, ranks, serial numbers, circumstances of capture."
     "But you told them that yesterday."
     "Correct."
     "What have you told them recently?"
     "Nothing. Except for the serial number on the morphium bottle."
     "And how long after you told them that did they send you the message to
stop extracting information from us?"
     "About forty five minutes," Beck says. "So, yes, I would very much like
to ask you where that bottle came from. But it is against orders."


     ***


     "I might consider answering your  question about Enigma," Shaftoe says,
"if you tell me whether this pipe bomb is carrying any gold."
     Bischoff's  brow furrows; he's having  translation problems.  "You mean
money? Geld?"

     "No. Gold. The expensive yellow metal."
     "A little, maybe," Bischoff says.
     "Not petty cash," Shaftoe says. "Tons and tons."
     "No. U boats don't carry tons of gold," Bischoff says flatly.
     "I'm  sorry you  said that, Bischoff. Because I thought  you and I were
starting a good relationship. Then you went and lied to me you fuck!"
     To  Shaftoe's surprise and  mounting irritation,  Bischoff  thinks that
it's absolutely hilarious to be called a fuck. "Why the hell should I lie to
you?  For god's sake, Shaftoe! Since you bastards broke Enigma and put radar
on everything that moves, virtually every U  boat that's put to sea has been
sunk!  Why would the Kriegsmarine load  tons of gold onto a  ship that  they
know is doomed! ?"
     "Why don't you ask the guys who loaded it on board U 553?"
     "Ha! This only proves you are full of shit!" Bischoff says.  "U 553 was
sunk a year ago, during a convoy attack."
     "Not so. I was on board it just a couple of months ago,"  Shaftoe says,
"off Qwghlm. It was full of gold."
     "Bullshit," Bischoff says. "What was painted on its conning tower?"
     "A polar bear holding a beer stein."
     Long silence.
     "You want to know more? I went into the captain's cabin," Shaftoe said,
"and there was a  photo of him with some other guys, and now that I think of
it, one of them looked like you."
     "What were we doing?"
     "You were all  in swimming trunks.  You all had whores  on your  laps!"
Shaftoe shouts. "Unless those were  your wives in which  case I'm sorry your
wife is a whore!"
     "Oh, ho ho ho ho ho!" Bischoff says. He rolls onto his back and  stares
up into the plumbing for a while, considering this, and then  continues. "Ho
ho ho ho ho ho ho!"
     "What,  did I just say something secret? Fuck  you and your mother if I
did," Shaftoe says.
     "Beck!" Bischoff screams. "Achtung!"
     "What're you doing?" Shaftoe asks.
     "Getting you your morphine."
     "Oh. Thank you."
     Half an  hour later,  the skipper's  there. Pretty  punctual by officer
standards. He and  Bischoff talk for  a while  in  German. Shaftoe hears the
word  morphium  several times. Finally, the  skipper  summons the medic, who
pokes the needle into Shaftoe's arm and injects about half of it.
     "You have  something to  say?" the skipper asks Shaftoe.  Seems  like a
nice enough guy. They all seem like pretty nice guys, now.
     First,  Shaftoe addresses  Bischoff.  "Sir!  I'm  sorry  I  used  harsh
language on you, sir!"
     "It's okay," Bischoff replied, "she was a whore, like you said."
     The skipper clears his throat impatiently.
     "Yeah. I was just wondering," Shaftoe says turning to the skipper, "you
have any gold on this U boat?"
     "The yellow metal?"
     "Yeah. Bars of it."
     The captain is still nonplussed. Shaftoe is beginning to feel a certain
mischievous satisfaction. Playing  with  officers'  minds  isn't as  good as
having a brain  saturated with highly  refined opiates, but it will  do in a
pinch. "I thought all these U boats carried it," he says.
     Beck dismisses the medic. Then he and Bischoff talk about Shaftoe for a
while in German. In the middle of this conversation, Beck drops some kind of
a bomb on  Bischoff. Bischoff  is stunned,  and refuses to  believe it for a
while, and Beck  keeps telling him  it's true.  Then Bischoff goes back into
that strange ho ho ho thing.
     "He can't ask you questions,"  Bischoff says. "Orders  from Berlin. Ho,
ho! But I can."
     "Shoot," Shaftoe says.
     "Tell us more about gold."
     "Give me more morphine."
     Beck summons the medic again, and  the medic gives him the  rest of the
syringe.  Shaftoe's  never  felt better.  What  a fucking deal! He's getting
morphine  out of  the Germans in exchange for  telling  them German military
secrets.
     Bischoff  starts interrogating Shaftoe in  depth,  while Beck  watches.
Shaftoe tells the whole story  of U 553 about three times over.  Bischoff is
fascinated, Beck looks sad and scared.
     When Shaftoe mentions that the gold bars had Chinese characters stamped
on them, both Beck and Bischoff  are floored. Their faces come aglow,  as if
lit up  by  the scanning beam  of  a  Leigh  light on a moonless night. Beck
begins  to sniffle,  as if  he's caught  a cold,  and  Shaftoe's startled to
realize that he's actually crying. He is crying tears of shame. But Bischoff
is still fascinated and focused.
     Then a mate bursts  in and hands  Beck  a message. The mate  is clearly
shocked and scared out  of his wits. He keeps  looking, not at  Beck, but at
Bischoff.
     Beck gets a grip on himself and reads  the message. Bischoff lunges out
of  his bunk, hooks his chin over  Beck's shoulder, and reads it at the same
time.  They  look like a two headed circus geek who hasn't bathed since  the
Hoover  Administration.  Neither speaks for at least a minute.  Bischoff  is
silent  because  his mental wheels are  spinning  like the  gyroscope  of  a
torpedo.  Beck is silent because he's on the verge  of blacking out. Outside
the cabin, Shaftoe can hear the news, whatever it is,  traveling up and down
the length of the U boat with the speed of sound.
     Some  of the  men are shouting in  rage,  some  sobbing,  some laughing
hysterically.  Shaftoe figures a  big battle must have  been  won, or  lost.
Maybe Hitler's been assassinated. Maybe Berlin's been sacked.
     Beck is now visibly terrified.
     The medic enters. He has  adopted an erect military  posture the  first
time Shaftoe's seen such formality on the U  boat. He addresses Beck briefly
in German. Beck nods continuously while the medic is talking.  Then he helps
the doctor get Bischoff out of his straitjacket.
     Bischoff's a bit stiff, a  bit unsteady, but  he limbers up  fast. He's
shorter  than  average,  with a  strong frame and a trim waist,  and  as  he
pounces from bunk  to deck,  he reminds Shaftoe of a jaguar deploying itself
from a tree. He shakes hands heartily with the medic, and with the miserable
Beck. Then he opens the hatch  that leads towards the control room. Half the
crew is jammed  into the gangway,  watching  that  door, and  when  they see
Bischoff, ecstasy floods over their faces and they erupt into wild cheering.
Bischoff accepts handshakes from  all of them,  making his  way  towards his
duty station like a politician through an adoring crowd. Beck slinks out the
other hatch and loses himself among the hammering diesels.
     Shaftoe  has  no idea what the  fuck's going on until Root shows  up  a
quarter of an hour later. Root  picks the message up  off the deck and reads
it. His perpetually bemused affect, normally so annoying, serves him well at
times  like this.  "This  is  a broadcast to all  ships at sea  from  German
supreme naval command, Tirpitzufer, Berlin. It says that U 691 which is this
boat we're on, Bobby has been boarded and  captured by Allied commandos, and
has already attacked and sunk a milchcow in the Atlantic. Now it appears  to
be on  its  way  towards continental Europe where it  will presumably try to
infiltrate  German naval bases and sink more ships. All German naval and air
forces are ordered to be  on the lookout  for U  691  and to destroy  it  on
sight."
     "Shit," Shaftoe says.
     "We are on the wrong boat at the wrong time," Root says.
     "What's the deal with that Bischoff character?"
     "He was relieved of command earlier. Now he's back."
     "That maniac's running the boat?"
     "He is the captain," Root says.
     "Well, where's he going to take us?"
     "I'm not sure if even he knows that."


     ***


     Bischoff goes to  his cabin and pours himself a slug  of that Armagnac.
Then he goes to  the chart room, which he's always  preferred to his  cabin.
The chart room is the only civilized place  on  the  whole boat.  It's got a
beautiful sextant  in a  polished wooden  box,  for  example. Speaking tubes
converge here from all  over  the boat, and  even though  no one is speaking
into  them  directly,  he can hear snatches of  conversation from  them, the
distant clamor of the diesels,  the  zap of a deck of  cards being shuffled,
the hiss  of fresh eggs hitting the griddle.  Fresh  eggs!  Thank  god  they
managed to rendezvous with the milchcow before she was sunk.
     He unrolls a  small scale chart  that encompasses  the  whole Northeast
Atlantic,  divided into  numbered  and  lettered  grid  squares  for  convoy
hunting. He should be looking at  the southern  part of the  chart, which is
where they are  now. But eyes are drawn, again and again, northwards to  the
Qwghlm Archipelago.
     Put it at the  center of a clock. Then Great Britain is at five and six
o'clock, and  Ireland is  at  seven o'clock. Norway is  due  east, at  three
o'clock. Denmark is just south of Norway, at four  o'clock,  and at the base
of Denmark,  where  it plugs into Germany, is Wilhelmshaven. France, home to
so many U boats, is far, far to the south completely out of the picture.
     A  U  boat  that was headed from  the  open sea towards a  safe port on
Fortress Europe would just  go to  the French ports  on  the  Bay of  Biscay
Lorient, most likely. Getting to Germany's North  Sea and Baltic ports would
be  a  far longer and more complicated and dangerous trip. The  U boat would
have to get around  Great  Britain somehow.  To the south, it would have  to
make a dash up the  Channel,  which (setting aside that  it's a  bottleneck,
crackling with British radar) has been turned  into a  maze of  sunken block
ships  and  minefields by those Royal Navy spoil sports. There is a lot more
room up north.
     Assuming Shaftoe's story is true and there must be some truth in it, or
else where would he have gotten the morphine bottle then it should have been
a  reasonably  simple matter for U 553  to get around Great  Britain via the
northern route.  But  U boats almost always  had mechanical problems to some
degree, especially after they  had been at sea for a while. This might cause
a skipper to hug the  coast rather than taking to the open seas, where there
would be no hope of survival if the  engines shut down entirely. During  the
last couple of years, stricken U boats  had been abandoned on the coasts  of
Ireland and Iceland.
     But supposing  that an ailing, coast hugging  U boat happened  to  pass
near the  Royal Navy base at Qwghlm at  just the time some other U boat  was
staging a raid there, as Shaftoe claimed. Then the dragnet of destroyers and
airplanes  that was  sent out  to  capture  the  raiders could quite  easily
capture U 553, especially if her ability to maneuver  were impaired to begin
with.
     There are two implausibilities in  Shaftoe's story. One, that  a U boat
would be carrying a trove of solid gold. Two, that a U boat would be  headed
for German ports instead of one of the French ports.
     But these two  together are  more plausible than  either one of them by
itself.  A U boat carrying that much gold  might  have very good reasons for
going  straight to  the Fatherland. Some highly placed person wanted to keep
this gold secret. Not just  secret  from  the enemy,  but secret  from other
Germans as well.
     Why are the Japanese giving gold to Germans? The Germans must be giving
them  something they  need  in  return:  strategic materials, plans  for new
weapons, advisors, something like that.
     He writes out a message:
     Dönitz!

     It  is  Bischoff.  I  am  back in  command. Thank you for the  pleasant
vacation. Now I am refreshed.

     How uncivilized for you to order that we should be sunk. There must  be
a misunderstanding. Can we not discuss it face to face?

     A  drunken polar bear  told me some fascinating  things. Perhaps I will
broadcast this information in an hour or so. Since I do not trust the Enigma
anyway, I will not bother to encrypt it.

     Yours respectfully,

     Bischoff


     ***


     A flock of white Vs migrates north from Gibraltar across a  sunlit sea.
At  the apex of each  V  is a  nitlike  mote. The motes are  ships,  hauling
megatons of  war crap, and thousands of  soldiers from  North Africa  (where
their services are no longer needed)  to Great Britain.  That's how it looks
to  the pilots  of the airplanes over the Bay of Biscay. All of those pilots
and all of those planes  are English or  American the Allies own  Biscay now
and have turned it into a crucible for U boat crews.
     Most of the Vs track straight parallel courses northwards, but a few of
them curl  and  twist  incessantly: these are destroyers,  literally running
circles around the plodding transports, pinging. Those tin cans will protect
the convoys; the pilots of the  airplanes who  are trying  to find U 691 can
therefore search elsewhere.
     The powerful sun casts a deep shadow in front of each ship; the eyes of
the lookouts,  irised down to  pinpoints and squinting against the  maritime
glare, can no more penetrate that shade than they could see through plywood.
If they could, they might notice that one of the big transports in the front
rank has got some kind of unusual attachment: a pipe sticking vertically out
of the water just in front and to one side of its bow.
     Actually it is a cluster of pipes, one  sucking in air, another spewing
diesel  exhaust,  another carrying a stream  of information  in the form  of
prismatically reflected light. Follow that data stream a few yards down into
the water and you  will enter the optic nerve of one  Kapitänleutnant Günter
Bischoff. This in turn leads to his brain, which is highly active.
     In the age of sonar, Bischoffs  U boat  was a rat in a dark, cluttered,
infinite cellar, hiding  from  a man who had neither torch nor lantern: only
two  rocks  that would spark when  banged  together.  Bischoff sank a lot of
ships in those days.
     One day, while he was  on the surface, trying to  make some time across
the Caribbean, a Catalina appeared out of nowhere. It came from a clear blue
sky and so Bischoff had plenty  of time to dive. The  Catalina dropped a few
depth charges and then went away; it must have been at the end of its range.
     Two days  later, a front moved in,  the sky became  mostly  cloudy, and
Bischoff made the mistake of relaxing. Another Catalina found them: this one
used the clouds  to conceal his  approach, waited until U 691 was crossing a
patch of  sunlit  water,  and then dove,  centering  his own shadow on the U
boat's  bridge.  Fortunately, Bischoff  had double sun sector air  lookouts.
This was a jargonic way of saying that  at  any given moment, two shirtless,
stinking, unshaven, sunburned men were standing on the deck, casting shadows
over  their eyes  with  their  outstretched  hands.  One of these  men  said
something  in a quizzical tone  of voice, which alerted Bischoff.  Then both
lookouts  were  torn  apart by a  rocket.  Five more of  Bischoffs  men were
wounded by cannon fire and rockets before Bischoff could  get the boat under
the surface.
     The  next day, the front had covered the sky with low  blue grey clouds
from horizon  to horizon.  U 691  was  far out of  sight  of  land. Even so,
Bischoff had Holz, his chief engineer, take her up to periscope depth first.
Bischoff  scanned  the  horizon  meticulously.  Satisfied  that  they   were
perfectly  alone,  he had Holz bring her to  the surface. They fired  up the
diesels  and pointed the boat east. Their  mission was  finished, their boat
was damaged, it was time to go home.
     Two hours later a flying boat bellied down through the  cloud layer and
dropped a skinny black egg on  them. Bischoff was up on the bridge, enjoying
some fresh  air,  and had  the  presence  of mind to scream some thing about
evasive action  into the  speaking tube. Metzger, the  helms man,  instantly
took it hard to starboard. The bomb plunged into the water exactly where the
deck of U 691 would have been.
     It continued in that vein until they got far away from land.  When they
finally  limped back to their base at  Lorient, Bischoff told this  story to
his  superiors in tones of  superstitious awe,  when they  finally broke the
news to him that the enemy had this new thing called radar.
     Bischoff studied it and read the intelligence reports: the  Allies were
even putting the shit on airplanes now! It could see your periscope!
     His  U boat is no longer a rat in  a dark  cellar. Now it is a wingless
horsefly dragging itself across an  immaculate tablecloth in  the  streaming
light of the afternoon sun.
     Dönitz,  bless  him, is  trying  to build new  U  boats that  can  stay
submerged all the time. But he has to beg for every ton of steel and for the
services of every engineer. In the meantime there  is this stopgap  measure,
the Schnorkel,  which is just  plumbing: a  pipe that sticks  up out  of the
water and enables you to run on diesel power, just beneath the surface. Even
the Schnorkel will show up on  radar, but less brilliantly. Every time U 691
surfaces for more than an hour, Holz  is up  there working on the Schnorkel,
welding new  bits  on, grinding old bits  off, wrapping it in rubber or some
other stuff that he hopes will absorb the radar. The engineers who installed
the Schnorkel in Lorient six months ago wouldn't recognize it now because it
has  evolved, like shrews evolving into tigers. If  Bischoff can  just get U
691 back to  a safe port, others can learn from Holz's innovations,  and the
few  U  boats  that  haven't  been sunk can  derive  some  benefit  from the
experiment.
     He snaps  out  of it. This must be how officers  die, and get their men
killed:  they  spend  more  time reviewing  the past than  planning for  the
future. It  is  nothing  short of masturbation for Bischoff to  be  thinking
about all of this. He must concentrate.
     He doesn't have  to worry  so much about being sunk by Germans. As soon
as he sent Dönitz the message threatening to broadcast the information about
the gold, Dönitz retracted his general order to sink U 691. But there is the
possibility that some  ship  might have received the first order but  missed
the second one, so he still has to watch himself.
     Big deal. There  is hardly any German  Navy left to sink him anyway. He
can  worry about  being sunk by the Allies instead.  They will  be  intently
irritated when they  figure  out that he has been shadowing this convoy  for
two whole  days.  Bischoff is  pretty irritated himself, it is a fast convoy
that  protects itself by zigzagging, and if U 691 does not zigzag in perfect
unison with the ship  above it, it will either be crushed by her, or blunder
out of her shadow and be noticed. This has put quite a strain on skipper and
crew, and quite a drain  on  the boat's supply  of  benzedrine. But  they've
covered five hundred miles! Soon, fatal Biscay will be behind them, Brittany
will be off to starboard, and Bischoff will have a choice: hang a right into
the English Channel, which would be suicidal; head north between Britain and
Ireland, which would be  suicidal; or veer to the west around Ireland, which
would be suicidal.
     Of course there's always France, which is friendly territory, but it is
a siren whose allure must be  sternly resisted. It's not enough for Bischoff
just to run the U boat aground on a godforsaken beach somewhere; he wants to
get  the thing back to a proper base. But  the skies above the proper  bases
are  infested with Catalinas, illuminating the sea with the satanic light of
their  radars. It is much cleverer to make them think  that  he's headed for
France, and then head for a German port instead.
     Or  at least it seemed  that way two days  ago. Now the complexities of
the plan are weighing on him.
     The  shadow  of the  ship  above them  suddenly seems  much longer  and
deeper.  This  means  either that  the  earth's  rotation has just  sped  up
tremendously,  moving the sun around to  a different angle, or that the ship
has  veered towards  them. "Hard  to starboard," Bischoff says  quietly. His
voice travels down a pipe to the man  who controls the rudder. "Anything  on
the radio?"
     "Nothing," says the Funkmaat.  That's weird; usually when the ships are
zigzagging,  they coordinate it on  the radio. Bischoff spins the  periscope
around and gets  a  load of the transport, still trying to shoulder its  way
into them. He checks his course; the bitch has veered a full ninety degrees!
     "They've seen  us,"  Bischoff says. "We'll dive in  just a moment." But
before he loses  his ability  to  use the periscope, he  does one more three
sixty, just to verify that his mental  map of the convoy is accurate. It is,
more or less; why, there's a destroyer, right there where he thought it was.
He  steadies the 'scope, calls out target  bearings. The Torpedomaat  echoes
the  digits while dialing  them into the targeting computer: the very latest
fully  analog technology. The computer grinds through some calculations  and
sets the  gyroscopes on  a  couple  of torpedoes. Bischoff says: fire, fire,
dive.  It happens, almost  that fast. The diesels'  anvil chorus, which  has
been subtly driving them all insane  for a couple of days,  is replaced by a
startling silence. They are running on batteries now.
     As has always been the case, and as will continue to be the case for at
least another half century, batteries suck. The convoy seems to bolt forward
as  U 691's speed  drops to  a pathetic wallow. The destroyers can  go about
five times as fast as they can now. Bischoff hates this part.
     "The destroyer is taking evasive action," says the sound man.
     "Did we have time to get the weather forecast?" he asks.
     "Storm front moving in this evening. Foul weather tomorrow."
     "Let's see  if we can stay alive until the  storm hits," Bischoff says.
"Then we'll  run this bucket  of shit straight up the  middle of the English
Channel, right up Winston Churchill's fat ass, and if we die, we'll die like
men."
     A terrible clamor radiates through  the water and pierces the hull. The
men cheer sullenly; they have just sunk another ship. Whoopdy doo!
     "I think it was the destroyer," says the sound man, as if he can hardly
believe their luck.
     "Those homing torpedoes  are bastards," Bischoff says, "when they don't
turn round and home in on you."

     One destroyer down,  three to go.  If they can  sink another one,  they
have  a chance of escaping the remaining two. But  it's nearly impossible to
escape from three destroyers.
     "There's no time like  the present," he says.  "Periscope depth!  Let's
see what the fuck is going on, while we've got them rattled."
     It  is like  this: one  of  the destroyers is  sinking  and another  is
heading  towards it to render assistance.  The other  two are  converging on
where U 691 was about thirty seconds ago, but they are hindered by having to
make  their  way through the middle of  the convoy. Almost immediately, they
begin to fire  their guns. Bischoff looses a spread of torpedoes towards the
assisting destroyer. Water is spouting up  all around them now as  they  are
straddled by shells from the other two. He  does another three sixty, fixing
the image of the convoy in his mind's eye.
     "Dive!" he says.
     Then he has a better idea. "Belay that! Surface and go to flank speed."
Any  other U boat crew would cut his throat at this moment, then  surrender.
But these  guys  don't  even hesitate; either  they  really do  love him, or
they've all decided they're going to die anyway.
     Twenty seconds  of raw terror  ensue.  U  691 is  screaming  across the
surface, banking like a Messerschmidt as  shells  pound into  the water  all
around  her.  Crewmen are  spilling  out of her hatches, looking like prison
camp inmates in the bright sun, trying not to slide off the deck as it tilts
this way and that,  diving to snap the carabiners of their safety lines onto
cables before  they are blown out of their shoes by the waterspouts from the
exploding shells. They are manning the guns.
     Then there's a big transport ship between  them and the two destroyers.
They're safe now, for a minute. Bischoff's up on the conning tower. He turns
aft  and gets a load of the other destroyer, spiraling  crazily in an effort
to shake off those homing torpedoes.
     When  they come  out  from  behind  the  shelter of the big  transport,
Bischoff sees that his  mental map of the convoy was  more or less accurate.
He  speaks more  orders  to  the rudder  and  the engines.  Before  the  two
attacking  destroyers have  a  chance  to open  up  with their  guns  again,
Bischoff  has got himself  positioned between  them and a troop transport: a
decrepit ocean  liner covered with a hasty  coat of wartime camo. They can't
shoot at him now without blowing hundreds of their own troops to shreds. But
he can shoot at them. When Bischoff's men see the liner above them, and gaze
across the water at the impotent destroyers,  they actually break  out  into
song: a congratulatory beer hall ditty.
     U  691  is  topheavy with  weaponry,  armed to the teeth because of the
aircraft threat. Bischoffs crew opens fire on the destroyers with all of the
small and medium sized stuff, to give the deck gun crew  a chance to line up
its shot. At this  range, the danger is that the shell will pass all the way
through  the  destroyer's hull, and  out the other side, without detonating.
You have to be patient, take your time, aim for the engines. Bischoff's crew
knows this.
     A skull cracking explosion  sounds from the barrel of the deck gun; the
shell skims the water, hits the  closest destroyer right in the boilers. The
destroyer doesn't blow up, but it does go dead in the water. They take a few
more  shots at the other destroyer and  manage to  knock out one of its guns
and one of  its  depth charge launchers.  Then the  lookouts  see  airplanes
headed  their way, and it's time to dive. Bischoff does  one final periscope
scan before they  go under,  and is surprised to see that the destroyer that
was trying to  evade the torpedoes managed to do  so; apparently two of them
curved back and hit transport ships instead.
     They  go straight  down to a hundred and  sixty meters. Destroyers drop
depth charges on them for eight  hours. Bischoff  takes a nap. When he wakes
up, depth charges are  booming all over the place and everything is fine. It
should be dark and stormy up there now: bad weather for Catalinas. He evades
the  destroyers by (in  a nutshell) doing clever  things he  has learned the
hard way. The U boat is as thin as a knitting needle, and when  you  turn it
directly toward  or away from  the  source of  a  ping, it  makes  almost no
reflection. All that's required is a clear mental map of  where you are with
respect to the destroyers.
     After another hour, the destroyers give up  and leave. Bischoff takes U
691 up  to schnorkel depth  and points her straight  up the  middle  of  the
English  Channel, as advertised. He also uses the  periscope to verify  that
the weather is, also as advertised, awful.
     Those  bastards  have a big fat red pin on the map marking his position
as  last reported by those destroyers. Around that pin, as the hours  go by,
they  will  draw  circles of  steadily  increasing  radius,  widening  gyres
enclosing the  set of all points  in the ocean where U 691 could possibly be
at  the  moment,  based on  their  assumptions about  her  speed. The square
mileage that must be searched will increase as the square of that radius.
     Going up the Channel, while submerged, just isn't going to work they'll
run into one of the block ships that the Brits sank there to prevent U boats
from  doing just that. The surface is the only way, and it's a hell of a lot
faster too. This raises the airplane  issue. Airplanes  search  not  for the
boat itself, which is tiny and dark,  but for  its  wake, which is white and
spreads for miles on calm water. There will be no wake  behind U 691 tonight
or rather, there will be, but it will be lost in random noise of much higher
amplitude. Bischoff decides  that covering distance  is  more important than
being subtle at the moment, and so he brings  her up to the surface and then
pins the  throttle.  This will burn fuel insanely, but U 691 has  a range of
eleven thousand miles.
     Sometime around noon  the next day, U 691,  battering its way through a
murderous  storm,  lances the Straits of  Dover and breaks through into  the
North  Sea. She  must  be  lighting up every  radar  screen  in Europe,  but
airplanes can't do much in this weather.
     "The prisoner Shaftoe wishes to speak to  you," says Beck, who has gone
back to  being his second in command, as if nothing had ever been different.
War gives men good ignoring skills. Bischoff nods.
     Shaftoe  enters  the  control  room,  accompanied  by  Root,  who  will
apparently serve  as  translator,  spiritual guide, and/or wry observer.  "I
know a place where we can go," Shaftoe says.
     Bischoff is  floored.  He hasn't thought about where they were actually
going  in days.  The concept  of having a coherent goal is almost beyond his
comprehension.
     "It is " Bischoff gropes " touching that you have taken an interest."
     Shaftoe shrugs. "I heard you were in deep shit with Dönitz."
     "Not as bad as I was," Bischoff says, immediately perceiving the folksy
wisdom of this American barnyard metaphor. "The depth is the same, but now I
am head up instead of head down."
     Shaftoe chuckles delightedly. They are  all buddies  now. "You have any
charts of Sweden?"
     This strikes Bischoff as a good but half witted idea. Seeking temporary
refuge in a neutral country: fine. But much more likely is that they run the
boat aground on a rock.
     "There's a bay there, by  this little town," Shaftoe says. "We know the
depths."
     "How could that be?"
     "Because  we charted  the fucking thing  ourselves, a  couple of months
ago, with a rock on a string."
     "Was  this before or after you  boarded  the mysterious U  boat full of
gold?" Bischoff asks.
     "Just before."
     "Would it  be out  of  line for me to  inquire  what an American Marine
Raider and  an  ANZAC  chaplain  were  doing in  Sweden,  a neutral country,
performing bathymetric surveys?"
     Shaftoe doesn't  seem to think  it's out of line at all. He's in such a
good mood  from the morphine. He tells  another yam. This  one begins on the
coast of Norway (he is deliberately vague about how he got there) and is all
about how Shaftoe led  Enoch Root and a dozen or so  men,  including one who
had a serious ax wound to the leg (Bischoff raises his eyebrows) all the way
across Norway  on  skis, slaying  pursuing Germans right  and left, and into
Sweden.  The story then bogs  down  for  a while because  there are  no more
Germans to kill,  and Shaftoe, sensing that Bischoffs attention is beginning
to  wander,  tries  to  inject  some  lurid thrills  into  the  narrative by
describing  the progress  of the gangrene up the leg of the officer who  ran
afoul of the ax (who, as far  as  Bischoff can make out, was under suspicion
as a  possible German spy).  Shaftoe keeps  encouraging  Root to jump in and
tell the story of  how Root performed several consecutive amputations of the
officer's  leg, all the way up  to the pelvis. Just as  Bischoff  is finally
starting to actually care  about this poor  bastard with the gangrenous leg,
the story takes another zigzag: they reach a little fishing town on the Gulf
of Bothnia. The  gangrenous officer is delivered into  the hands of the town
doctor. Shaftoe and his  comrades hole  up in the woods and  strike  up what
sounds like an  edgy relationship with  a Finnish smuggler and  his  lissome
daughter.  And now it's clear that  Shaftoe has reached his favorite part of
the story, which is  this Finnish girl. And  indeed,  up to  this point  his
story telling style has been as rude  and blunt and functional as the inside
of a U  boat. But  now  he relaxes, begins to smile, and  becomes  damn near
poetic  to the point where a few members of  Bischoff's  crew, who  speak  a
little bit of English, start to loiter within earshot. Essentially the story
goes totally  off  the  rails at this point,  and  while  it's  entertaining
material,  it  appears  to  be  headed  exactly  nowhere.  Bischoff  finally
interrupts with "What  about  the guy with  the bad leg?" Shaftoe frowns and
bites his lip. "Oh, yeah," he finally says, "he died."
     "The rock on the string," prompts Enoch Root. "Remember? That's why you
were telling the story."
     "Oh,  yeah," Shaftoe says, "they came  and picked us  up with a  little
submarine. That's how we got to Qwghlm and saw the U boat with the gold. But
before they could enter the harbor, they had  to have a chart. So Lieutenant
Root and I went out on a fucking rowboat with a rock on a string and charted
it."
     "And  you still  have a copy of  this  chart with  you?"  Bischoff asks
skeptically.
     "Nah," Shaftoe says, with  a  flip  coolness that in a less charismatic
man would be infuriating. "But the lieutenant remembers it. He's really good
at remembering numbers. Aren't you, sir?"
     Enoch  shrugs modestly. "Where I grew up, memorizing the  digits  of pi
was the closest thing we had to entertainment."


     Chapter 48 CANNIBALS


     Goto  Dengo flees  through the swamp. He is fairly certain  that  he is
being chased by the cannibals who just cooked up the friend with whom he had
washed  ashore. He  climbs up  a  tangle of vines and hides himself  several
meters  above the ground; men with  spears search the general area, but they
do not find him.

     He passes out. When he wakes up, it's  dark, and some small  animal  is
moving in the branches nearby. He is  so desperate for food that he grabs at
it blindly.  The  creature  has  a body the size  of  a house cat,  but long
leathery arms:  some  kind of huge  bat. It bites him  several  times on the
hands before he crushes it to death. Then he eats it raw.

     The next day he goes forth into  the swamp, trying to put more distance
between himself and the cannibals. Around midday he finds a stream the first
one he's  seen. For the most part the  water  just seeps out  of New  Guinea
though marshes, but  here  is  an actual river of  cold,  fresh water,  just
narrow enough to jump across.

     A few hours later he finds another village that is similar to the first
one, but  only  about  half  as  big.  The number of  dangling heads is much
smaller; maybe  these headhunters are not  quite  as  fearsome as the  first
group. Again there is a  central fire where white stuff is being cooked in a
pot: in  this  case,  it  appears to be  a wok, which they must have  gotten
though trade.  The people of  this  village don't know a  starving Nipponese
soldier  is lurking in  the vicinity,  so they are not very vigilant. Around
twilight, when the mosquitoes come out of  the swamps in a humming fog, they
all retire into their longhouses. Goto Dengo runs out into the middle of the
compound, grabs the  wok,  and makes off with it. He  forces himself not  to
take any of the  food until he is far away, hidden in a tree again, and then
he gorges himself. The food is a rubbery gel of what would appear to be pure
starch. Even  to a ravenous man,  it has no  flavor at all. Nevertheless  he
licks the wok clean. While he is doing so, an idea comes to him.

     The next morning, when the sun's bubble  bursts  out  of  the sea, Goto
Dengo is kneeling in the bed of the river, scooping sand up into the wok and
swirling  it around,  hypnotized  by the  maelstrom of dirt and foam,  which
slowly develops a glittering center.
     The next morning Dengo  is standing on  the edge of  the village bright
and early, shouting: "Ulab!  Ulab! Ulab!" which is  what  the  people in the
first village called gold.
     The  villagers  wriggle  out of their  tiny front doors,  bewildered at
first, but  when they see his face and the wok dangling  from one hand, rage
flashes  over them like  the  sun burning  out  from  behind a cloud. A  man
charges  with a spear, sprinting straight  across the  clearing. Goto  Dengo
dances back and takes half shelter behind a coconut tree, holding the wok up
over his chest  like  a  shield. "Ulab! Ulab!"  he  cries again. The warrior
falters. Goto Dengo holds out his fist,  swings it to and fro until it finds
a warm shaft  of sunlight, and then loosens it slightly. A  tiny cascade  of
glittering flakes trickles  out, catching the sun, then plunges into shadow,
hissing as it strikes the leaves below.
     It gets their attention.  The man with the  spear stops. Someone behind
him says something about patah.

     Goto Dengo levels the wok, resting it on his forearm, and sprinkles the
entire handful of gold dust into it. The village watches,  transfixed. There
is a  great deal  more  whispering about patah.  He  steps forward  into the
clearing, holding  the wok out before him as  an  offering  to the  warrior,
letting  them  see his  nakedness  and  his  pitiful  condition. Finally  he
collapses  to his  knees,  bows his head very low,  and  sets the wok on the
ground at the warrior's  feet. He  remains  there, head bowed, letting  them
know that they can kill him now if they want to.
     If  they want to choke off their newly discovered gold supply, that is.
The matter will require some discussion. They tie his elbows together behind
his  back with vines, put a noose around his neck, and tie  that  to a tree.
All of the kids  in the village stand around him and stare. They have purple
skin and frizzy hair. Flies swarm around their heads.
     The wok is  taken into a hut  that  is decorated  with more human heads
than any of  the other huts. All of the men go  in there. Furious discussion
ensues.
     A mud  daubed woman with long skinny  breasts brings Goto  Dengo half a
shell of coconut milk and a handful of white, knuckle sized grubs wrapped up
in leaves. Her  skin is  a tangle of overlapping ringworm  scars and  she is
wearing a necklace that consists of  a single human finger strung on a piece
of twine. The grubs squirt when Goto Dengo bites down on them.
     The children abandon him to watch a pair of  American P 38s fly by, out
over the ocean. Bored with airplanes, Goto Dengo  squats on his haunches and
observes the menagerie of arthropods  that have converged on him in hopes of
sucking his blood, taking a  bite  of  his flesh, eating his eyeballs out of
his skull, or  impregnating him  with  their eggs. The haunch position  is a
good one because  every five seconds  or  so he has to bash his face against
one  knee, then the other, in order  to keep  the bugs  out of his eyes  and
nostrils. A  bird  drops out  of a tree,  lands clumsily on his  head, pecks
something out of his hair, and  flies away.  Blood jets out of  his anus and
pools hotly under the arches of his feet. Creatures with many legs gather at
the edge of the pool and begin to feast.  Goto Dengo moves away, and leaving
them to it, gets a few minutes' respite.
     The men in  the hut  arrive at some  sort of agreement.  The tension is
broken. There is  laughter, even.  He  wonder what counts as  funny to these
guys.
     The guy who  wanted to  impale him  earlier comes  across the clearing,
takes his leash, and  tugs  Goto Dengo to a standing  position.  "Patah," he
says.
     He looks at the sky. It is getting  late, but he does not relish trying
to explain to them that they should simply wait until  tomorrow. He stumbles
across the  clearing to the cooking  fire  and  nods at a pan full  of brain
stew. "Wok," he says.
     It doesn't work. They think he wants to trade gold for the wok.
     There follows  about  eighteen hours  of  misunderstandings  and failed
attempts to  communicate. Goto Dengo almost dies; at least he  feels like he
might. Now that he is not on the move, the last few days are really catching
up with him. But finally, in the middle of the next morning, he gets to show
his  magic. Squatting in the nearby  stream,  his elbows unbound, the wok in
his  hands,  surrounded  by skeptical village fathers still keeping  a tight
grip on his rustic noose, he begins to pan for gold. Within a few minutes he
has  managed  to  summon a  few  flakes  of  the stuff out  of the riverbed,
demonstrating the basic concept.
     They  want to learn it themselves. He was  expecting this.  He tries to
show one of them how it's done, but (as Goto Dengo himself learned long ago)
it is one of those harder than it looks deals.
     Back to the village. He actually gets a place to sleep this night: they
stuff him into a long  skinny sack  of woven grass and tie it shut above his
head  this is how they keep themselves from  being  eaten  alive by  insects
while they are asleep. Malaria hits him  now: alternating waves of chill and
heat swamping his body with the force of riptides.
     Time goes out of whack for a while. Later, he realizes he has been here
for a while now, because his broken forefinger is now solid and gnarled, and
the abrasions  that he got  from  the coral head are  now  a  field of fine,
parallel scars, like the grain in a  piece of wood. His skin is covered with
mud and he smells of  coconut oil and of the smoke that they fill their huts
with  to chase away the  bugs.  His  life  is simple: when  malaria  has him
teetering on the brink of death,  he sits in front of a felled palm tree and
chips away at it  mindlessly for hours,  slowly creating a heap  of  fibrous
white stuff that  the women use to make starch. When he is feeling stronger,
he drags himself over to the river and pans for gold. In return they do what
they can to keep New Guinea from killing him.  He's so weak they do not even
bother to send a chaperone with him when he goes out.
     It would be an  idyllic  tropical paradise if not for the malaria,  the
insects, the constant diarrhea and resulting hemorrhoids,  and the fact that
the  people are dirty and smell bad and eat each other and use  human  heads
for  decoration. The  one thing  that  Goto  Dengo thinks  about, when  he's
capable of thinking, is that there is a  boy in this village who looks to be
about twelve years old. He remembers the twelve  year old who  was initiated
by driving a spear through his companion's heart, and wonders who's going to
be used for this boy's initiation rite.
     From time to time the village elders pound on a hollow log for a while,
then  stand around  listening to  other hollow logs  being  pounded in other
villages. One  day there is an  especially long episode of pounding, and  it
would seem that the villagers are pleased by what they have  heard. The next
day, they  have  visitors:  four men and  a  child  who speak  a  completely
different  language;  their word for gold is gabitisa.  The child  whom they
have brought with them is about six years old, and obviously retarded. There
is  a negotiation. Some of  the gold  that Goto Dengo has panned out  of the
stream is exchanged for the retarded child. The four visitors disappear into
the jungle with their gabitisa. Within a few hours, the  retarded child  has
been tied to a tree and the twelve year old boy has stabbed it  to death and
become  a  man. After some parading around and dancing, the older men sit on
top  of the younger man and cut long complicated gashes  into his  skin  and
pack dirt into them so that they will heal as decorative welts.
     Goto Dengo cannot do very much except  gape in numb astonishment. Every
time he begins  to think beyond the next fifteen minutes, tries to formulate
a plan  of action, the malaria comes back, flattens  him for  a week or two,
scrambles his brain and forces  him to start again from scratch. Despite all
of this he  manages to extract a  few  hundred grams  of gold dust from that
stream. From time to time the village is visited by relatively light skinned
traders who move up and down the coast in outrigger canoes and who speak yet
another different language. These traders begin  to come more frequently, as
the village  elders start trading  the  gold dust for betel nuts, which they
chew because it makes them feel good, and for the occasional bottle of rum.
     One  day,  Goto  Dengo is on his way  back from the  river, carrying  a
teaspoon  of  gold dust in the wok, when he  hears voices from  the  village
voices speaking in a cadence that used to be familiar.
     All of the men of the village, some twenty in all, are standing up with
their  backs  to  coconut  trees, their  arms secured  behind the trees with
ropes.  Several  of these  men are dead, with their intestines spilling down
onto the ground, already black with flies. The ones who are not dead yet are
being  used  for bayonet practice  by  a few dozen gaunt,  raving  Nipponese
soldiers.  The women ought to be  standing around  screaming, but he doesn't
see them. They must be inside the huts.
     A man in a lieutenant's uniform swaggers out of a hut, smiling broadly,
wiping  blood off  of his penis with  a  rag, and  almost trips  over a dead
child.
     Goto  Dengo  drops the  wok and puts  his  hands up  in  the air. "I am
Nipponese!"  he shouts, even though all he wants to  say at this moment is I
am not Nipponese.

     The  soldiers  are  startled,  and several of  them try to  swing their
rifles  around in his direction. But the Nipponese rifle is  an awful thing,
nearly as long as the  average soldier is tall, too  heavy  to maneuver even
when its  owner is in perfect health.  Luckily all of  these men are clearly
starving to death  and half crippled by malaria and bloody  flux,  and their
minds  work quicker than  their bodies. The lieutenant bellows,  "Hold  your
fire!" before anyone can get off a shot in the direction of Goto Dengo.
     There follows a long interrogation  in  one of the huts. The lieutenant
has many questions, and asks most of them more than  once. When he repeats a
question for the fifth or thirteenth time, he adopts a grand magnanimity, as
if giving Goto Dengo the opportunity to retract his earlier lies. Goto Dengo
tries to  ignore  the screams of the bayoneted  men and the raped women, and
concentrate on giving the same answer each time without variation.
     "You surrendered to these savages?"
     "I was incapacitated and helpless. They found me in this condition."
     "What efforts did you make to escape?"
     "I have been building my strength and learning from them how to survive
in the jungle what foods I can eat.
     "For six months?"
     "Pardon me, sir?" He hasn't heard this question before.
     "Your convoy was sunk six months ago."
     "Impossible."
     The lieutenant steps forward and slaps him across the face. Goto  Dengo
feels nothing but tries to cringe anyway, so as not to humiliate the man.
     "Your  convoy  was  coming to  reinforce  our  division!"  bellows  the
lieutenant. "You dare to question me?"
     "I humbly apologize, sir!"
     "Your  failure to  arrive  forced  us  to  make  a retrograde maneuver!
(1)  We  are marching overland to rendezvous  with our  forces at
Wewak!"
     "So, you are  the advance guard  for the division?" Goto Dengo has seen
perhaps two dozen men, a couple of squads at most.
     "We  are the  division," the lieutenant  says matter  of  factly.  "So,
again, you surrendered to these savages?"


     ***


     When they march out the following morning, no one remains  alive in the
village;  all  of  them have  been used  for bayonet practice  or shot while
trying to run away.
     He  is a prisoner. The lieutenant had  decided  to execute  him for the
crime of having surrendered to the enemy, and was  in the act of drawing his
sword when one  of the  sergeants  prevailed  upon him  to wait for a while.
Impossible as it might seem, Goto Dengo is in far better  physical condition
than any of the others and  therefore useful as a pack animal. He can always
be properly executed in  front of a large audience when they  reach a larger
outpost. So  he  marches in  the  middle  of the group now,  unfettered, the
jungle  serving the purpose of  chains  and bars. They have  loaded him down
with  the one remaining Nambu light  machine  gun, which  is too  heavy  for
anyone else to carry, and too powerful for them  to fire; any man who pulled
the trigger on this thing would be shaken to pieces by it, the jungle rotted
flesh scattering from jittering bones.
     After a few days have gone by, Goto Dengo requests permission  to learn
how to operate the Nambu. The lieutenant's reply is to beat him up though he
does not  have the strength to beat anyone  up properly so Goto Dengo has to
help  him,  crying out and doubling  over when the lieutenant thinks he  has
landed a telling blow.
     Every couple  of days, when  the sun comes  up in the morning, this  or
that soldier is found to have  more bugs on him than any of the others. This
means  that he is dead. Lacking shovels or  the strength  to dig, they leave
him where he lies and march onward. Sometimes they get lost, march back over
the same territory, and find these corpses all swollen and black; when  they
begin to smell  rotting human flesh,  they know that they have just wasted a
day's effort.  But in general  they  are  gaining  altitude now, and  it  is
cooler. Ahead  of them, their route  is  blocked by  a ridge  of snow capped
peaks that  runs directly to  the sea. According  to the  lieutenant's maps,
they will have  to climb up one side  of  it and down the other  in order to
reach Nipponese controlled territory.
     The  birds  and plants  are  different up  here.  One  day,  while  the
lieutenant is urinating against a tree,  the foliage shakes and an  enormous
bird runs  out. It  looks vaguely like an ostrich, but more compact and more
colorful.  It has a red neck, and a cobalt blue head with a giant helmetlike
bone  sticking  out of the  top of its skull,  like the nose of an artillery
shell.  It prances straight up to the lieutenant and  kicks him a  couple of
times, knocking him flat on his ass, then bends  his long neck down, shrieks
in his face, and runs back into the jungle, using its head bone as a kind of
battering ram to clear a path through the brush.
     Even if  the  men were  not  dying on  their feet,  they would  be  too
startled  to raise their weapons and take a shot at  it. They laugh giddily.
Goto Dengo laughs until he cries. The bird must  have delivered  a  powerful
kick, though, because the  lieutenant lies there for a long  time, clutching
his stomach.
     Finally one  of the  sergeants  regains his composure and walks over to
help the poor  man. As he draws closer, he suddenly turns around to face the
rest of the group. His face has gone slack.
     Blood is  fountaining out of  a  couple  of  deep stab  wounds  in  the
lieutenant's belly, and his body is already going limp  when the rest of the
group gathers around him. They  sit and watch until  they are pretty sure he
is dead, and then they march onwards. That evening, the sergeant shows  Goto
Dengo how to disassemble and clean the Nambu light machine gun.
     They are down  to nineteen.  But it seems as  though all of the men who
were susceptible to dying in this  place have now died, because  they go for
two, three, five, seven days without losing  any  more. This is in spite of,
or maybe because of, the fact that they are  climbing up into the mountains.
It is brutal work, especially for the heavily laden Goto Dengo. But the cold
air  seems  to clear up  their jungle rot and  quench the  ravenous internal
fires of malaria.
     One day they break their march early  at  the  edge of a snowfield, and
the sergeant orders double  rations  for  everyone. Black  stone  peaks rise
above  them,  with  an icy saddle  in between.  They sleep huddled together,
which  does  not prevent some of  them waking up with frostbitten toes. They
eat most of what  remains of their food supply and then set out towards  the
pass.
     The pass  turns out to be  almost disappointingly easy; the slope is so
gentle that they're  not really aware that they've  reached the summit until
they notice that the snow is sloping downwards beneath their feet.  They are
above the clouds, and the clouds cover the world.
     The  gentle slope  stops abruptly  at the  edge of a  cliff  that drops
almost vertically  at least a thousand feet down then it  passes through the
cloud layer,  so there's  no way  of knowing  its true height. They find the
memory  of  a  trail  traversing  the  slope. It  seems  to head  down  more
frequently than it heads up and so they follow it. It is new and exciting at
first,  but  then  it  grows  just as  brutally  monotonous  as every  other
landscape  where  soldiers have ever marched. As the hours go  by, the  snow
gets patchier,  the clouds  get closer. One of  the men falls asleep on  his
feet, stumbles,  and  tumbles  end  over end down  the  slope,  occasionally
bounding into free fall for several seconds. By the time he vanishes through
the cloud layer, he's too far away to see.
     Finally the eighteen  descend  into a clammy mist. Each sees the one in
front of  him only when  very close,  and then only as a grey, blurred form,
like an ice demon in a  childhood nightmare. The landscape has become jagged
and dangerous and  the lead man has to grope along practically  on hands and
knees.
     They are working their way around a protruding rib of fog slicked stone
when the lead man suddenly cries out: "Enemy!"
     Some of the eighteen actually laugh, thinking it is a joke.
     Goto Dengo distinctly hears a man  speaking English, with an Australian
accent. The man says, "Fuck 'em."
     Then a noise starts up that seems powerful enough to split the mountain
in half. He actually thinks it is a rock avalanche for awhile until his ears
adjust,  and he realizes  that  it  is a  weapon: something  big, and  fully
automatic. The Australians are firing at them.
     They try to retreat, but  they can only move  a few steps every minute.
Meanwhile, thick lead  slugs are hurtling  through  the fog all around them,
splintering  against the rock, sending  stone shards into  their  necks  and
faces. "The Nambu!" someone shouts.  "Get the Nambu!"  But Goto Dengo  can't
fire the Nambu until he finds a decent place to stand.
     Finally he gets to a ledge about the size of a large book, and unslings
the weapons. But all he can see is fog.
     There is a lull of a few minutes. Goto Dengo calls out the names of his
comrades. The three behind him  are accounted for. The others do not seem to
answer  his  calls.  Finally,  one man struggles back  along the  path. "The
others are all dead," he says, "you may fire at will."
     So he begins to  fire the Nambu into the fog. The recoil almost  knocks
him off the mountain, so he learns to brace it  against an outcropping. Then
he sweeps it  back and forth. He can tell when he's hitting the rock because
it makes a different sound from hitting fog. He aims for the rock.
     He spends  several clips without getting  any results.  Then he  begins
walking forward along the path again.
     The wind gusts, the  fog swirls and parts for a moment. He sees a blood
covered path leading directly to a tall  Australian man with a red mustache,
carrying a tommy gun. Their eyes  meet. Goto Dengo is  in a better  position
and fires first. The man with the tommy gun falls off the cliff.
     Two other Australians, concealed on the other side of the rock rib, see
this happen, and begin cursing.
     One of Goto  Dengo's comrades scampers down the path, shouts, "Banzai!"
and disappears  around  the corner,  carrying a  fixed  bayonet.  There is a
shotgun blast and two men  scream in unison. Then there is  the now familiar
sound of bodies tumbling down the rock face. "God damn  it!" hollers the one
remaining Aussie. "Fucking Nips."
     Goto  Dengo  has only  one honorable  way  out  of this. He follows his
comrade around the corner and opens up  with the Nambu,  pouring it into the
fog, sweeping the  rock face with lead. He stops when the magazine is empty.
Nothing happens  after that. Either the Aussie  retreated  down the path  or
else Goto Dengo shot him off the cliff.
     By nightfall, Goto Dengo and his three surviving comrades are back down
in the jungle again.


     Chapter 49 WRECK


     To: root@eruditorum.org
     From: randy@epiphyte.com
     Subject: answer
     That  you  are  a retail  level philosopher who just  happens  to  have
buddies who are in the surveillance business is simply too big a coincidence
for me to accept.
     So I'm not going to tell you why.
     But in case you are worried, let me assure you that we have our reasons
for  building  the  Crypt. And it's not just to make money though it will be
very good for our share holders. Did you think we were just a bunch of nerds
who stumbled into this and got in over our heads? We aren't.
     P.S. What do you mean when  you say  that you "noodle around with novel
cryptosystems?" Give me an example.
     Randall Lawrence Waterhouse
     Current  meatspace coordinates,  hot from  the GPS receiver card in  my
laptop:
     8 degrees,  52.33  minutes  N latitude  117  degrees,  42.75  minutes E
longitude
     Nearest geographical feature: Palawan, the Philippines
     To: randy@epiphyte.com
     From: root@eruditorum.org
     Subject: Re: answer
     Randy.
     Thank you for your oddly defensive note. Very pleased you have  a  good
reason. Never thought otherwise. Of course you  should not feel obligated to
share it with me.
     My having friends in the  world of electronic intelligence gathering is
not the big coincidence you make it out to be.
     How did you come to be a founder of the Crypt? By being good at science
and math.
     How did you  come to be  good  at science and math?  By standing on the
shoulders of the ones who came before you.
     Who were those people?
     We used to call them natural philosophers.
     Likewise,  my friends in the surveillance business owe their  skills to
the  practical  application of  philosophy. They  have the wit to understand
this, and to give credit where credit is due.
     P.S. You forgot to use the "dwarf@siblings.net" front address. I assume
this was deliberate?
     P.P.S. You  say you  want an example of a novel cryptosystem that I  am
working on. This sounds like a test. You  and  I  both know, Randy, that the
history of crypto is strewn with  the  wreckage of cryptosystems invented by
arrogant  dilettantes  and  soon  demolished  by  clever  codebreakers.  You
probably  suspect  that I  don't  know this that I'm  just  another arrogant
dilettante. Quite cleverly, you ask me to stick my neck out, so that you and
Cantrell  and his like minded friends  can cut  it off.  You are testing  me
trying to find my level
     Very well. I'll  send you  another message in  a few days. I'd love  to
have the Secret Admirers take a crack at my scheme anyway.
     In  a  narrow  hulled double  outrigger  boat in the South  China  Sea,
America  Shaftoe  stands astride  a thwart, her body pointing straight up at
the sun, despite the rollers, as if she is gyroscopically stabilized. She is
wearing  a  sleeveless  diving  vest  that  reveals  strong,  deeply  tanned
shoulders, the walnut  brown skin etched with a couple  of black tattoos and
brilliantly jeweled with beads of water. The handle of a  big knife projects
from a shoulder holster. The blade is that of a regular diving knife but the
handle is that of a kris, an ornate traditional weapon of Palawan. A tourist
can buy a kris at the duty  free  shop at NAIA, but this one  appears  to be
less flashy but better made than the tourist  shop  jobs, and worn from use.
She has  a  gold chain around her neck  with a gnarled black pearl  dangling
from  it.  She  has  just emerged from  the  water holding a tiny  jeweler's
screwdriver  between her teeth.  Her  mouth is open  to breathe,  displaying
crooked, bright white teeth with no  fillings. For this  brief moment she is
in her element, completely absorbed in  what  she  is doing, totally  unself
conscious. At  this moment Randy thinks he understands her:  why she  spends
most of her  time living here, why she didn't bother  with going to college,
why  she left  behind  her  mother's  family, who  raised her, lovingly,  in
Chicago, to be in business with her father, the  wayward  veteran who walked
out of the household when America was nine years old.
     Then she turns to  scan the  approaching launch, and sees  Randy on  it
staring at her.  She rolls her  eyes, and the  mask falls down over her face
again. She says something to the  Filipino men who are squatting in the boat
around  her  and two of them go  into action, scampering down  the outrigger
poles, like balance  beam artists, to stand on the  outrigger pontoon.  They
hold  their  arms  out as shock absorbers to ease  the  contact between  the
launch  which Doug Shaftoe has cheerfully  christened Mekong Memory  –
and the much longer, much narrower pamboat.
     One of the other Filipinos plants his bare foot  against  the  top of a
small Honda  portable generator  and pulls on  the ripcord,  the tendons and
wiry  muscles  popping out  of  his  arm and back for a moment like so  many
ripcords themselves. The generator starts instantly, with a nearly inaudible
purr. It is good stuff, part of the capital improvements that Semper  Marine
made as part of  its contract with Epiphyte  and Filitel. Now they are using
it, effectively, to defraud the Dentist.
     "She lies one hundred and fifty four meters below that buoy," says Doug
Shaftoe, pointing to a gallon plastic milk jug  bobbing on  the swells. "She
was lucky, in a way."
     "Lucky?"
     Randy clambers  off the launch and rests his weight on  the  outrigger,
shoving  it down so that the warm  water comes up to his knees.  Holding out
his arms like a tightrope  walker,  he makes his way down an  arm toward the
canoe hull in the center.
     "Lucky  for us," Shaftoe  corrects  himself. "We're on the  flank of  a
seamount. The Palawan Trough is  nearby." He's following  Randy, but without
all of  the teetering  and arm waving. "If she had  sunk in that, she'd have
gone down so deep that she'd be hard to reach, and  the  pressure down there
would've crushed her. But at two hundred meters, there wouldn't've been such
an implosion." Reaching the boat's  hull, he makes dramatic crushing motions
with his hands.
     "Do we care?" Randy asks. "Gold and silver don't implode."
     "If her  hull  is intact, getting  the  goods out  is a  hell  of a lot
easier," says Doug Shaftoe.
     Amy has  vanished beneath  the pamboat's canopy.  Randy and Doug follow
her  into its shade,  and  find  her sitting  crosslegged  on  a  fiberglass
equipment case that is encrusted with airport baggage stickers.  Her face is
socketed into the  top of a black rubber pyramid whose base is the screen of
a  ruggedized cathode ray  tube.  "How's the cable  business?"  she mutters.
Months ago, she gave up even trying to hide  her scorn for  the dull work of
cable laying.  Pretenses are shabby  things that, like papier  mâché houses,
must be  energetically maintained  or they will  dissolve.  Another  case in
point:  some time ago, Randy gave up pretending  that  he was not completely
fascinated with Amy Shaftoe. This is not exactly the  same thing as being in
love  with her, but it  has quite a few  things in common with that.  He has
always had a weird,  sick fascination with women who smoked and drank a lot.
Amy  does  neither,  but  her  complete  disregard  of  modern  skin  cancer
precautions  puts her in the same  category: people too busy  leading  their
lives to worry about extending their life expectancy.
     In any case, he  has a desperate  craving to know what Amy's dream  is.
For a while  he thought it was treasure hunting in the South China Sea. This
she  definitely  enjoys,  but he is not  sure  if it gives  her satisfaction
entire.
     "Been adjusting the trim on  those dive planes again," she explains. "I
don't think those pushrod things were  engineered very well." She  pulls her
head  out of  the black rubber cowl and  gives Randy  a quick sidelong look,
holding him responsible for the shortcomings of all engineers. "I hope it'll
run now without corkscrewing all over the place."
     "Are you ready?" her father asks.
     "Whenever you are," she answers, slamming the ball back into his court.
     Doug rises to a crouch and duck  walks out from  under  the low canopy.
Randy follows him, wanting to see the ROV for himself.
     It rests  in  the  water alongside the pamboat's  center hull: a stubby
yellow  torpedo with a glass dome for  a nose, held  in place  by a Filipino
crewman  who  leans  over  the gunwale to  grip it with both hands. Pairs of
stunted wings are mounted at the nose and at the tail,  each wing supporting
a  miniature  propeller mounted in a cowl. Randy is reminded of  a dirigible
with its outlying engine gondolas.
     Noting Randy's interest,  Doug Shaftoe squats alongside it to point out
the features.  "It's neutrally buoyant, so when we  have it  alongside  like
this, we have it in this foam cradle, which we will now take off." He begins
jerking loose  some quick release bungee cords, and molded segments of  foam
peel away  from  the ROV's hull. It drops lower in the water, nearly pulling
the crewman over the side with it, and he lets go, keeping his arms extended
so he can prevent it from  bumping into them with each swell. "You'll notice
there's  no umbilical," Doug  says.  "Normally that is mandatory for an ROV.
You need the umbilical for three reasons."
     Randy grins, because he knows  that  Doug Shaftoe is about to enumerate
the three reasons. Randy has spent  almost no  time around military  people,
but he is finding that he gets along with them surprisingly well.
     His favorite thing about them is their compulsive need to educate every
one  around them, all  the time. Randy does not need to  know anything about
the ROV,  but Doug Shaftoe is going to give him a short course anyway. Randy
supposes that  when you are in a war, practical knowledge is a good thing to
spread around.
     "One,"  says Douglas MacArthur  Shaftoe,  "to provide power to the ROV.
But this  ROV carries its own power source an oxygen/natural gas swash plate
motor, adapted  from  torpedo technology, and part  of  our peace  dividend"
(that is the other thing Randy likes about military  people their mastery of
deadpan  humor)  "that  generates  enough  electricity  to  run  all  of the
thrusters. Two,  for communications and  control. But  this  unit  uses blue
green lasers to communicate with the control  console  which Amy is manning.
Three, for emergency recovery in the event of total systems failure.  But if
this  unit fails, it is smart  enough, supposedly, to  inflate a bladder and
float up to the surface where it will activate a strobe light so that we can
go recover it."
     "Jeez," Randy says, "isn't this thing incredibly expensive?"
     "It is incredibly expensive,"  Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe says, "but the
guy  who runs the company  that makes it is an  old buddy of mine we were at
the  Naval  Academy  together he  loans  it to  me sometimes, when I  have a
pressing need."
     "Does your friend know what the pressing need is in this case?"
     "He  does not know specifically," says Doug  Shaftoe,  mildly offended,
"but I suppose he is not a stupid man either."
     "Clear!" shouts Amy Shaftoe, sounding rather impatient.
     Her father takes a good look at each of the thrusters in turn. "Clear,"
he responds. A moment later, something begins to thrum inside the ROV, and a
stream of bubbles spurts from an orifice on its tail, and then the thrusters
begin  to spin  around. They swivel  on the ends of their stubby wings until
they  are facing downwards, throwing fountains  into the  air,  and the  ROV
sinks rapidly. The  fountains diminish  and  become slight upwellings in the
sea. Seen through the water's  rough surface,  the ROV is a yellow splatter.
It shortens as the  vehicle's nose pitches down,  then rapidly disappears as
the thrusters drive it straight down. "Always kinda takes  my breath away to
see something that costs so much going off to who knows where," Doug Shaftoe
says meditatively.
     The water around the boat has begun to emit a  kind of dreadful, sickly
light, like radiation in  a low budget horror film. "Jeez! The laser?" Randy
says.
     "Mounted  to the bottom of  the  hull, in  a little  dome," Doug  says.
"Punches through even turbid water with ease."
     "What kind of bandwidth can you transmit on it?"
     "Amy is seeing decent monochrome video  on her little screen right now,
if that is what you mean.  It is all digital. All packetized. So  if some of
the data doesn't make it through, the image  gets a little choppy, but we do
not lose visuals altogether."
     "Cool."
     "Yes, it is cool," Doug Shaftoe allows. "Let us go and watch TV."
     They  crouch  beneath  the canopy. Doug turns on a small Sony  portable
television, a ruggedized  waterproof model  encased in  yellow plastic,  and
patches its input cable  into a  spare output jack on the back of Amy's rig.
He turns  it  on and they begin to see  a bit of what Amy is seeing. They do
not have the benefit of the dark cowl that Amy is using, and so the glare of
the sun  washes out everything but a straight  white line  emerging from the
dark center of the picture and expanding towards the edge. It is moving.
     "I am following the buoy line down," she explains. "Kind of boring."
     Randy's calculator watch beeps twice. He checks  the time; it is  three
in the afternoon.
     "Randy?" Amy says, in a velvet voice.
     "Yes?"
     "Could  you give me  the  square root of three  thousand  eight hundred
twenty three on that thing?"
     "Why do you want that?"
     "Just do it."
     Randy  holds his  wrist  up  so that  he  can see the  watch's  digital
display, takes a pencil  out of his pocket, and begins using its  eraser  to
press the tiny little  buttons. He hears a metallic snicking noise, but pays
it no mind.
     Something  cool  and  smooth glides along the underside  of his  wrist.
"Hold  still," Amy  says. She bites her lip and pulls.  The watch falls off,
and comes  away  in her  left hand,  its  vinyl  band neatly severed.  She's
holding the kris in her right,  the edge of its blade still decorated with a
few  of Randy's arm  hairs. "Huh. Sixty  one  point eight  three  oh four. I
would've  guessed higher." She  tosses  the watch over her  shoulder  and it
disappears into the South China Sea. "Square roots are tricky that way."
     "Amy, you're  losing the  rope!"  says her father  impatiently, focused
entirely on the screen of the TV.
     Amy  jams the  kris back  into its sheath, smiles sweetly at Randy, and
plugs her face back into the rig. Randy is speechless for a while.
     The  question of  whether or not she  is a lesbian is rapidly  becoming
more than purely academic. He  performs a  quick mental review of all of the
lesbians  he has  known. Usually they  are  mid  level,  nine  to  five city
dwellers with sensible haircuts. In other words, they are just like  most of
the other people Randy  knows. Amy is too flagrantly exotic, too much like a
horny film director's idea of  what a  lesbian would be.  So  maybe there is
some hope here.
     "If  you're gonna stare at my  daughter that way,"  Doug  Shaftoe says,
"you'd better start boning up on your ballroom dancing."
     "Is  he starin' at me?  I can never  tell when I have my  face stuck in
this thing," Amy says.
     "He  was  in  love  with  his  watch.  Now he  has  no object  for  his
affections," Doug says. "So, hold on to your hats!"
     Randy can tell when someone is trying to rattle  him. "What is it  that
offended you so much about my watch? The alarm?"
     "The whole  package was pretty annoying," Amy says,  "but the alarm  is
what made me psychotic."
     "You should have said something. Being a true geek, I actually know how
to turn that alarm off."
     "Then why didn't you?"
     "I don't want to lose track of time."
     "Why? Got a cake in the oven?"
     "The Dentist's due diligence people will be all over me."
     Doug shifts position and screws up his  face curiously. "You  mentioned
that before. What is due diligence?"
     "It's like this. Alfred has some money that he wants to invest."
     "Who's Alfred?"
     "A hypothetical person whose name begins with A."
     "I don't understand."
     "In the crypto world, when you are explaining a cryptographic protocol,
you use hypothetical people. Alice, Bob,  Carol, Dave, Evan, Fred, Greg, and
so on."
     "Okay."
     "Alfred  invests his money in a company that is  run by Barney.  When I
say 'run by' what I mean is that Barney has ultimate responsibility for what
that  company does. So, perhaps  Barney  is the  chairman  of  the  board of
directors  in this case. He's been chosen, by Alfred, Alice,  Agnes, Andrew,
and  the  other  investors,  to look  after  the  company.  He and the other
directors hire corporate officers such as Chuck, who is the president. Chuck
and the other officers hire Drew to run one of the company's divisions. Drew
hires  Edgar, the engineer, and so on and so forth.  So, in  military terms,
there  is a whole chain  of command that extends  down  to  the  guys in the
trenches, like Edgar."
     "And  Barney's  the man at the top of the  chain of the  command," Doug
says.
     "Right.  So,  just like  a  general, he  is ultimately responsible  for
everything that  is  done below him. Alfred has personally entrusted  Barney
with  that money. Barney  is legally required to  exercise due diligence  in
seeing  that  the  money is spent responsibly. If  Barney fails  to show due
diligence, he is in major legal trouble."
     "Ah."
     "Yeah. That  gets Barney's attention. Alfred's lawyers might show up at
any moment and demand proof that due diligence  is being  exercised.  Barney
needs to stay on his toes, make sure that his ass is covered at all times."
     "Barney in this case is the Dentist?"
     "Yeah.  Alfred, Agnes,  and the  others  are all of  the people in  his
investment club half of the orthodontists in Orange County."
     "And you are Edgar the Engineer."
     "No, you are Edgar the Engineer. I am  a corporate officer of Epiphyte.
I am more like Chuck or Drew."
     Amy breaks in. "But what does the Dentist have over you? You don't work
for him."
     "I'm sorry to tell you that is no longer the case, as of yesterday."
     This gets the Shaftoes' attention.
     "The Dentist now owns ten percent of Epiphyte."
     "How did that  come about? Last I was  informed of anything," Doug says
accusingly, "the son of a bitch was suing you."
     "He was suing us," Randy says, "because he wanted in. None of our stock
was for sale, and we  were not planning to go public  anytime  soon,  so the
only way he could get in was by essentially blackmailing us with a lawsuit."
     "You said it  was a bogus lawsuit!" Amy exclaims,  the only person here
who is bothering to show, or feel, any moral outrage.
     "It was. But it would  have  cost so much  to litigate it that it would
have bankrupted us. On the other hand,  when we offered to  sell the Dentist
some  stock, he dropped  the  suit. We got our  hands on some of  his money,
which is always useful."
     "But now you are beholden to his due diligence people."
     "Yeah. They are on  the cable ship even as we speak they came out on  a
tender this morning."
     "What do they think you are doing?"
     "I told them that the sidescan  sonar revealed  some fresh anchor scars
near the cable route, which needed to be assessed."
     "Very routine."
     "Yeah. Due  diligence people are  easy to manipulate. You  just have to
act really diligent. They eat it up."
     "We're  there," Amy  says, and hauls  back on a  joystick, twisting her
body to put a little English on the maneuver.
     Doug and Randy  look  at the TV  screen. It is completely  dark. Digits
along the bottom state that the pitch is five degrees and the roll is eight,
which means that the ROV is nearly level. The yaw  number is spinning around
rapidly,  meaning that the ROV is rotating  around its vertical  axis like a
fishtailing  car. "Should  come into  view  at  around  fifty degrees,"  Amy
mutters.
     The yaw numbers  slow down, dropping through a hundred degrees, ninety,
eighty. At  around seventy degrees,  something rotates into view at the edge
of the  screen. It looks like  a rugged, particolored sugarloaf rising  from
the seafloor.  Amy  gooses the  controls a  couple of times and the rotation
drops to a crawl.  The sugarloaf  glides into  the center  of the screen and
then  stops.  "Locking in  the  gyros," Amy  says, whacking  a button.  "All
forward."  The sugarloaf  slowly begins  to  get bigger. The  ROV is  moving
towards  it,   its  direction  automatically  stabilized  by  its  built  in
gyroscopes.
     "Swing wide  around it to starboard," Doug  says.  "I want a  different
angle  on  this."  He  pays  some attention  to a VCR that's supposed  to be
recording this feed.
     Amy lets the joystick come back  to neutral, then  executes a series of
moves that causes them to lose the image of the wreck for a minute. All they
can  see are coral  formations  passing beneath  the ROV's cameras. Then she
yaws it around to  the left and there  it  is  again:  the same  streamlined
projectile shape. But from this angle, they can see it's actually projecting
from the seafloor at a forty five degree angle.
     "It looks like the nose of an  airplane. A bomber," Randy says. "Like a
B 29."
     Doug shakes his head. "Bombers  had to have  a circular  cross  section
because  they were pressurized. This thing  does  not have a circular  cross
section. It is more eliptical."
     "But I don't see all of the railings and guns and, and "
     "Crap that  a  classic German U boat would have hanging off of it. This
is  a  more modern streamlined shape," Doug  says.  He shouts  something  in
Tagalog at one of his crew, over on Glory IV.

     "Looks pretty crusty," Randy says.
     "There will  be plenty of  crap growing on  her," Doug says, "but she's
still recognizable. There was not a catastrophic implosion."
     A  crew member runs onto the pamboat carrying  an old picture book from
Glory IV's small but idiosyncratic library: a pictorial history  of German U
boats. Doug flips past the  first three quarters of the book  and stops at a
photograph of a sub whose lines are strikingly familiar.
     "God, that looks just like the  Beatles' Yellow Submarine," Randy says.
Amy pulls her head out of the viewer and crowds him out of the way to look.
     "Except  it's  not yellow," Doug  says.  "This was the new  generation.
Hitler  could've won  the war  if he'd made a few dozen of  these." He flips
forward a few pages. There are pictures of more U boats with similar  lines,
but much larger.
     A cross sectional diagram shows a thin  walled,  elliptical outer  hull
enclosing a  thick walled, perfectly circular inner hull. "The circle is the
pressure  hull. Always kept at one atmosphere and full of air, for the crew.
Outside of it, an outer hull, smooth and streamlined, with room for fuel and
hydrogen peroxide tanks "
     "It carried its own oxidizer? Like a rocket?"
     "Sure for running submerged. Any interstices  in this outer hull  would
have been filled with seawater,  pressurized to match the  external pressure
of the ocean, to keep it from collapsing."
     Doug  holds the book up beneath the television monitor  and rotates it,
comparing the  lines  of  a U boat to the shape on the screen. The latter is
rugged  and  furry  with coral  and  other growths, but  the  similarity  is
obvious.
     "Why isn't it lying flat on the bottom, I wonder?" Randy says.
     Doug grabs  a  plastic water bottle, which  is  still mostly  full, and
tosses it overboard. It floats upside down.
     "Why isn't it lying flat, Randy?"
     "Because  there's  an  air bubble  trapped  in  one  end,"  Randy  says
sheepishly.
     "She suffered  damage  at the  stern. The bow pitched up.  There  was a
partial collapse. Seawater, rushing into the breach at the stern, forced all
of the  air  into  the bow. The depth  is  a  hundred and fifty four meters,
Randy. That's fifteen  atmospheres  of pressure. What does Boyle's  Law tell
you?"
     "That the volume of the air  must  have  been reduced  by  a  factor of
fifteen."
     "Bingo. Suddenly, fourteen fifteenths of the boat is full of water, and
the  other fifteenth  is a pocket of compressed  air,  capable of supporting
life briefly. Most of her crew dead, she fell fast and settled hard onto the
bottom, breaking her back and  leaving the bow section  pointing upwards, as
you see her. If anyone was still alive in the bubble, they died a long, slow
death. May God have mercy on their souls."
     In  other  circumstances,  the  religious  reference would  make  Randy
uncomfortable,  but here it seems  like the only appropriate  thing  to say.
Think what you will about religious people, they  always  have something  to
say  at times like  this.  What  would an  atheist  come up  with? Yes,  the
organisms inhabiting  that  submarine  must have  lost  their  higher neural
functions  over a prolonged period of time and eventually turned into pieces
of rotten meat. So what?

     "Closing in on what passes for the conning tower," Amy says.  According
to the book, this U boat isn't  going to have  the traditional high vertical
tower rising out of its back: just a low streamlined bulge.  Amy has piloted
the ROV very close to the U boat now, and once again she brings it to a stop
and yaws it around. The hull pans into the screen, a variegated  mountain of
coral  growths,  completely  unrecognizable  as  a  man  made  object  until
something dark enters the  screen. It turns into  a perfectly circular hole.
An eel comes snaking out of it and snaps angrily at the camera for a moment,
its teeth and gullet filling the screen. When it swims  away, they can see a
dome shaped hatch cover hanging from its hinges next to the hole.
     "Someone opened the hatch," Amy says.
     "My  god," says Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe. "My god." He leans away from
the TV as if he can't handle  the image  any more. He crawls  out from under
the  canopy and stands up, staring out across the South China Sea.  "Someone
got out of that U boat."
     Amy  is still fascinated, and one  with her  joysticks, like a thirteen
year old boy  in a video  arcade. Randy rubs  the strange empty place on his
wrist and  stares at  the screen, but he  is not seeing anything  now except
that perfect round hole.
     After a minute or  so, he goes out to join Doug, who is ritualistically
lighting up a cigar. "This is a good time to smoke," he mumbles. "Want one?"
     "Sure. Thanks."  Randy pulls out  a folding  multipurpose tool and cuts
the end from  the cigar, a pretty impressive looking  Cuban number.  "Why do
you say it's a good time to smoke?"
     "To fix it  in your memory. To mark it." Doug  tears his gaze from  the
horizon and looks at Randy searchingly, almost beseeching him to understand.
"This is one of the  most important moments  in your life. Nothing will ever
be the  same. We might get  rich. We might get killed. We might just have an
adventure, or  learn something.  But we have been  changed. We  are standing
close to the Heracitean  fire, feeling its heat on our faces." He produces a
flaring safety match from his cupped  palms like a magician, and holds it up
before Randy's  eyes, and  Randy puffs  the  cigar  alive, staring  into the
flame.
     "Well, here's to it," Randy says.
     "And here's to whoever got out," replies Doug.


     Chapter 50 SANTA MONICA


     The  United  States  Military  (Waterhouse  has  decided)  is first and
foremost an  unfathomable network of typists and file clerks, secondarily  a
stupendous mechanism for moving stuff from one part of the world to another,
and last and least a fighting  organization. For the last couple of weeks he
has been owned by the second group. They put him on a luxury liner too swift
to be caught by U boats though this is a moot point since, as Waterhouse and
a  few  other people know,  Dönitz has declared defeat in the  Battle of the
Atlantic,  and pulled his  U boats off the map until  he can  build the  new
generation,  which  will  run on  rocket fuel and  need  never  come to  the
surface.  In this  way Waterhouse got to New York. From Penn Station he took
trains to the Midwest, where he spent  a week  with his family and reassured
them  for the ten thousandth  time  that, because of what he knew,  he could
never be sent into actual combat.
     Then it was trains again to Los  Angeles,  and now  he  waits for  what
sounds like  it will be a  killing series of airplane  flights halfway round
the world to  Brisbane. He is one of  about a million young men and women in
uniform  and  on  leave,  wandering around  Los  Angeles  looking  for  some
entertainment.
     Now,  they  say  that  this  city  is  the entertainment capital and so
entertainment shouldn't  be hard to find. Indeed you can hardly  walk down a
city block without  bumping into  half a  dozen prostitutes and  passing  an
equal number of  night spots, movie theaters,  and  pool  halls.  Waterhouse
samples all of these during his four day layover, and  is distressed to find
that he is no longer entertained by any of them. Not even the whores!
     Maybe this is  why he is walking  along  the bluff north  of the  Santa
Monica Pier, looking  for a way down to the beach, which is completely empty
the  only  thing  in  Los  Angeles  that  isn't  generating  commissions and
residuals  for someone.  The beach lures but does not pander. The  plants up
here,  standing  watch  over the Pacific,  are  like something  from another
planet.  No, they do not  even  look like real plants  from  any conceivable
planet. They are too geometric and  perfect. They are schematic diagrams for
plants sketched out by some impossibly modern designer with a strong eye for
geometry  but who has never been out in a  woods and seen a real plant. They
don't even grow out of any recognizable organic matrix, they are embedded in
the  sterile ochre dust that passes for  soil in  this part  of the country.
Waterhouse knows that  this is  just the beginning, that  it will  only  get
weirder  from here on out.  He heard enough from Bobby Shaftoe to  know that
the other side of the Pacific is going to be indescribably strange.
     The  sun is preparing to  go  down and  the pier, down the beach to his
left,  is alight, a gaudy  galaxy; the  zoot  suits of the  carnival barkers
stand out  from a mile away, like emergency  flares. But Waterhouse is in no
hurry to reach it. He  can see ignorant armies of soldiers, sailors, marines
milling around, distinguishable by the hues of their uniforms.
     The last  time he  was in  California,  before Pearl Harbor, he was  no
different from all of those guys  on the pier just a little smarter, with  a
knack for numbers and music. But now he  understands the war  in  a way that
they  never will.  He is  still  wearing  the  same  uniform, but  only as a
disguise.  He  believes  now that the war, as  those guys  understand it, is
every bit  as fictional as the war movies being  turned out  across town  in
Hollywood.
     They  say  that  Patton  and  MacArthur are daring generals; the  world
watches  in anticipation  of their next intrepid sortie behind  enemy lines.
Waterhouse knows that Patton  and MacArthur, more  than  anything  else, are
intelligent consumers of Ultra/Magic. They  use it to figure out  where  the
enemy has concentrated his forces, then loop around them and strike where he
is weakest. That's all.
     They  say  that  Montgomery  is  a steady hand,  cagey  and insightful.
Waterhouse has no  use for Monty;  Monty's an idiot; Monty doesn't read  his
Ultra; he ignores it, in  fact, to the  detriment of his  men and of the war
effort.
     They say that  Yamamoto was killed by a lucky accident when some roving
P 38s just happened across  an anonymous flight of Nipponese planes and shot
them down. Waterhouse knows  that Yamamoto's death warrant was  hammered out
by an Electrical Till Corporation  line printer in a Hawaiian  cryptanalysis
factory, and that the  admiral was the victim of a straightforward political
assassination.
     Even his concept  of geography has  changed. When he  was  home, he sat
down with  his grandparents and they looked at the globe, spinning it around
until all they saw was blue,  tracing his route across the Pacific, from one
lonely  volcano  to the next godforsaken atoll. Waterhouse knows  that those
little  islands, before the war, had only one economic function: information
processing.  The  dots  and dashes traveling along  the undersea  cable  are
swallowed up by the earth currents after  a few thousand miles, like ripples
in heavy surf. The European powers colonized those islands at about the same
time  as  the  long cables were being laid, and  constructed power  stations
where the dots  and  dashes coming down the line were  picked up, amplified,
and sent on to the next chain of islands.
     Some of those cables must plunge into the deep not far from this beach.
Waterhouse is about  to follow the dots and dashes over the western horizon,
where the world ends.
     He finds a ramp that  leads down to the beach and lets gravity draw him
towards  sea level, gazing to the south and west. The  water is  pacific and
colorless beneath a hazy sky, the horizon line is barely discernable.
     The  fine dry sand  plumps under his  feet  in  fat circular waves that
crest  around  his  ankles, so he  has  to stop  and unlace his hard leather
shoes. Sand has become trapped in the matrix of his black socks and he pulls
them  off too  and stuffs them  in his  pockets. He walks towards  the water
carrying  one  shoe  in each hand. He sees  others who have tied their shoes
together through belt loops, leaving their hands free. But the  asymmetry of
this offends him,  so he carries his shoes as if preparing to invert himself
and wade on his hands with his head dangling into the water.
     The  low  sun shines  flatly  across the  sand,  grazing the  chaos and
creating a  knife sharp terminator at  the crest of each dunelet. The curves
flirt and osculate  with  one another in  some pattern that  is,  Waterhouse
guesses,  deeply  fascinating  and significant  but too challenging for  his
tired mind to attack. Some areas have been stomped level by seagulls.
     The  sand  at  the surf  line  has  been  washed flat. A  small child's
footprints wander across it, splaying like gardenia blossoms on thin shafts.
The sand looks like a geometric plane until a sheet of ocean grazes it. Then
small imperfections  are betrayed by  swirls in the  water. Those  swirls in
turn carve the  sand. The ocean is  a  Turing machine, the sand is its tape;
the  water reads the marks in  the sand and  sometimes  erases them and some
times carves new ones with tiny currents that are  themselves  a response to
the marks. Plodding through the surf, Waterhouse strikes deep craters in the
wet sand that are  read by the  ocean. Eventually the ocean erases them, but
in  the process its state has  been changed, the pattern of its  swirls  has
been  altered.  Waterhouse  imagines  that  the  disturbance  might  somehow
propagate   across  the  Pacific  and  into   some  super  secret  Nipponese
surveillance  device  made of bamboo  tubes and  chrysanthemum  leaves;  Nip
listeners would know that Waterhouse had walked that way. In turn, the water
swirling  around Waterhouse's feet carries  information about  Nip propeller
design and the deployment of their fleets if only he had the wit to read it.
The chaos of the waves, gravid with encrypted data, mocks him.
     The  land war is over for Waterhouse. Now he is gone, gone to the  sea.
This is the first time  he's taken a good look at it  the sea, that is since
he reached Los  Angeles. It looks big to him. Before, when he  was at Pearl,
it was just a blank, a nothing. Now it  looks like an active participant and
a  vector of information.  Fighting a war out  on that thing could  turn you
into  some kind of  a  maniac, make you deranged. What must it be like to be
the General?  To live for years among volcanoes and  alien trees, to  forget
about oaks and cornfields  and snowstorms  and football games? To  fight the
terrible  Nipponese in the  jungle, burning them out of caves, driving  them
off cliffs into the sea?  To be an oriental  potentate the supreme authority
over  millions of square  miles, hundreds  of millions of people.  Your only
tether to the real world  a slender  copper fiber rambling across  the ocean
floor, a faint bleating of dots and dashes  in the night?  What kind  of man
would this make you?


     Chapter 51 OUTPOST


     When their  sergeant  was aerosolized  by the Australian with the tommy
gun, Goto Dengo and his surviving comrades were left mapless, and mapless in
the jungles of New Guinea during a war is bad, bad, bad.
     In another country, they might have been  able to keep walking downhill
until they  reached  the  ocean, and then  follow  the  coastline  to  their
destination.  But travel along the coast is even more nearly impossible than
travel  in the  interior,  because  the  coast  is  a  chain of pestilential
headhunter infested marshes.
     In the end, they find a Nipponese outpost by simply following the sound
of the explosions. They may not have maps, but the American Fifth Air  Force
does.
     The relentless bombing is  reassuring, in a way,  to Goto  Dengo. After
their encounter with the Australians, he entertains an idea that he dare not
voice: that by the  time they reach their destination, it might already have
been overrun by the enemy.  That he can even conceive of such a  possibility
proves  beyond all doubt that he  is no  longer fit to be  a soldier  of the
emperor.
     In any case, the drone  of the bombers' engines, the tympanic thuds  of
the explosions, the flashes on the night horizon give them plenty of helpful
hints as to  where  the Nipponese people are located.  One  of  Goto Dengo's
comrades  is a farmboy from Kyushu who seems  to be capable  of substituting
enthusiasm for  food, water, sleep, medicine, and any other bodily needs. As
they trudge  onwards through  the jungle, this  boy  keeps his spirits up by
looking forward to the day when they draw  close enough to hear the sound of
the  antiaircraft  batteries  and see  the  American  planes,  torn  open by
shellfire, spiraling into the sea.
     That day never arrives. As they get  closer, though,  they can find the
outpost with their eyes  closed, simply by following the reek  of  dysentery
and  decaying  flesh.   Just  as  the  stench  draws   close  enough  to  be
overpowering, the enthusiastic  boy makes an odd grunting  sound. Goto Dengo
turns to see a peculiar, small, oval shaped entrance wound in the center  of
the boy's forehead. The boy falls down and lies on the ground quivering.
     "We are Nipponese!" Goto Dengo says.


     ***


     The tendency  of bombs to  fall out of the sky  and blow up  among them
whenever  then  sun  is up  dictates  that  bunkers  and  foxholes  be  dug.
Unfortunately  ground coincides  with water table. Footprints fill  up  with
water  before  the foot has even been worried loose from the  clutching mud.
Bomb craters are neat, circular ponds.  Slit trenches are zigzagging canals.
There  are no  wheeled  vehicles  and no beasts of burden, no  livestock, no
buildings.  Those  pieces  of  charred  aluminum must  have  been  parts  of
airplanes once. There are a few heavy weapons, but their barrels are cracked
and warped from explosions,  and pocked  with small craters. Palm  trees are
squat  stumps  crowned  with a  few jagged splinters radiating away from the
site  of the most recent  explosion. The expanse of red mud  is flecked with
random clutches of gulls  tearing  at  bits  of  food;  Goto Dengo  suspects
already what they're eating, and confirms this when he cuts his bare foot on
an excerpt of a human jawbone. The sheer volume of high  explosive that  has
detonated here has suffused every molecule of the air, water, and earth with
the chemical  smell of TNT residue. This smell reminds  Goto Dengo of  home;
the same stuff is good for pulverizing any rock that is standing between you
and a vein of ore.
     A  corporal  escorts Goto Dengo and  his one surviving comrade from the
perimeter to a tent that has been pitched out on the mud, its ropes tied not
to  stakes but to  jagged segments of  tree trunks,  or  heavy  fragments of
ruined weapons.  Inside, the mud is paved with the lids  of wooden crates. A
shirtless  man  of  perhaps  fifty  sits  crosslegged  on  top  of  an empty
ammunition box. His eyelids are so heavy and swollen that it is difficult to
tell whether he is awake. He breathes erratically. When he inhales, his skin
retracts into the interstices between ribs,  producing the illusion that his
skeleton is trying to burst free  from his doomed body. He has not shaved in
a  long time, but doesn't have enough whiskers to muster a real beard. He is
mumbling  to a clerk, who squats on his haunches  atop a crate lid stenciled
MANILA and copies down his words.
     Goto  Dengo  and  his comrade  stand  there for perhaps half  an  hour,
desperately trying to master  their  disappointment. He expected to be lying
in a hospital bed  drinking miso soup by now. But  these people are in worse
shape than he is; he is afraid that they might ask him for help.
     Still, it is good just to be under canvas, and standing in the presence
of  someone who  has authority, who  is taking charge. Clerks enter the tent
carrying  message  decrypts, which means  that  somewhere  around  here is a
functioning radio station, and a staff with codebooks.  They are not totally
cut off.
     "What  do  you  know how to do?" says the officer,  when Goto  Dengo is
finally granted the opportunity to introduce himself.
     "I am an engineer," says Goto Dengo.
     "Ah. You know how to build bridges? Airstrips?"
     The officer is engaging in a bit of whimsy here; bridges and  airstrips
are as far beyond their grasp as intergalactic  starships.  All of his teeth
have fallen out and so he gums his words, and  sometimes must  pause to draw
breath two or three times in the course of a sentence.
     "I will build such things if it is my commander's wish, though for such
things, others  have skill far better than mine. My specialty is underground
works."
     "Bunkers?"
     A wasp stings him on  the back of the neck and he  inhales sharply.  "I
will build bunkers if it is my commander's wish. My specialty is tunnels, in
earth or in rock, but especially in rock."
     The officer  stares  at Goto  Dengo  fixedly  for a  few  moments, then
directs a glance  at his clerk, who  nods a little  bow  and takes  it down.
"Your skills are  useless here," he says offhandedly, as if this is  true of
just about everyone.
     "Sir! Also, I am proficient with the Nambu light machine gun."
     "The Nambu  is  a poor weapon.  Not as good as  what  the Americans and
Australians have. Still, useful in jungle defense."
     "Sir! I will defend our perimeter to my last breath "
     "Unfortunately they will not  attack us from the jungle. They bomb  us.
But the Nambu cannot  hit  a plane. When they come, they will  come from the
ocean. The Nambu is useless against an amphibious assault."
     "Sir! I have lived in the jungle for six months."
     "Oh?" For the first time,  the officer seems interested. "What have you
been eating?"
     "Grubs and bats, sir!"
     "Go and find me some."
     "At once, sir!"


     ***


     He untwists some old rope to make twine, and knots the twine into nets,
and hangs  the nets in  trees.  Once that is done, his life is simple: every
morning he climbs up into the trees to collect  bats from the nets. Then  he
spends  the afternoon digging grubs  out of rotten logs with a  bayonet. The
sun goes down and he stands in  a foxhole  full of sewage until it comes  up
again.  When bombs go  off nearby, the concussion  puts him  into a state of
shock so profound as to separate mind from body  entirely; for several hours
afterwards, his  body  goes  around  doing things without his telling it to.
Stripped of its connections to the physical world, his mind runs  in circles
like  an engine that  has  sheared its driveshaft and is  screaming along at
full throttle, doing no useful work while burning itself up. He usually does
not  emerge from  this state until someone  speaks to him. Then  more  bombs
fall.


     ***


     One night he notices that there is sand beneath his feet. Strange.
     The air smells clean and fresh. Unheard of.
     Others are walking on the sand with him.
     They  are  being escorted by  a  couple of shambling  privates,  and  a
corporal bent under the weight of a Nambu. The corporal is peering into Goto
Dengo's face strangely. "Hiroshima," he says.
     "Did you say something to me?"
     "Hiroshima."
     "But what did you say before you said 'Hiroshima'?"
     "In?"
     "In Hiroshima."
     "What did you say before you said 'in Hiroshima'?"
     "Aunt."
     "You were talking to me about your aunt in Hiroshima?"
     "Yes. Her too."
     "What do you mean, her too?"
     "The same message."
     "What message?"
     "The message that you memorized for me. Give her the same message."
     "Oh," Goto Dengo says.
     "You remember the whole list?"
     "The list of people I'm supposed to give the message to?"
     "Yes. Recite the list again."
     The corporal has an  accent from Yamaguchi,  which is where most of the
soldiers posted here  came from. He  seems more rural than  urban. "Uh, your
mother and father back on the farm in Yamaguchi."
     "Yes!"
     "And your brother, who is in the Navy?"
     "Yes!"
     "And your sister, who is "
     "A schoolteacher in Hiroshima, very good!"
     "As well as your aunt who is also in Hiroshima."
     "And don't forget my uncle in Kure."
     "Oh, yeah. Sorry."
     "That's okay! Now tell  me  the  message  again, just to  make sure you
won't forget it."
     "Okay," says Goto Dengo, and draws a deep breath. He is really starting
to come around now. They are  trudging down to  the sea: he and half a dozen
others,  all unarmed and carrying small bundles, accompanied by the corporal
and privates. Below, in the gentle surf, a rubber boat awaits them.
     "We're almost there! Tell me the message! Tell it back to me!"
     "My beloved family," Goto Dengo begins.
     "Very good perfect so far!" says the corporal.
     "My thoughts are with you as always," Goto Dengo guesses.
     The corporal looks a bit crestfallen. "Close enough keep going."
     They have reached the boat. The crew shoves  it out into the surf a few
paces.  Goto  Dengo stops talking for a few moments as he watches the others
wade out to it and  climb in. Then the corporal  prods him in the back. Goto
Dengo staggers out into the ocean. No one has started yelling at him  yet in
fact they reach for him, pulling  him in. He tumbles into the bottom  of the
boat and clambers up to a kneeling position as the crew begin to row it  out
into the surf. He locks eyes with the corporal, back on the beach.
     "This  is the last message  you will receive from me, for by now I have
long since gone to my rest on the sacred soil of the Yasukuni Shrine."
     "No! No! That's totally wrong!" hollers the corporal.
     "I  know that you will visit  me there  and  remember  me fondly, as  I
remember you."
     The corporal splashes into the  surf, trying to chase the boat, and the
privates plunge in after him and grab him by  the arms. The corporal shouts,
"Soon  we  will deal the  Americans a smashing  defeat and then I will march
home through the streets of Hiroshima in triumph along with my comrades!" He
recites it like a schoolboy doing his lessons.
     "Know that I died bravely,  in a magnificent battle, and  never for one
moment shirked my duty!" Goto Dengo shouts back.
     "Please send  me some strong  thread so that  I can mend my boots!" the
corporal cries.
     "The  Army has  looked after us well, and we have lived the last months
of our lives in such comfort  and cleanliness that you would hardly guess we
had ever left the Home Islands!" Goto Dengo shouts, knowing  that he must be
difficult to  hear now above the surf. "When  the final battle came, it came
quickly, and we went to our deaths in the full flower of our youth, like the
cherry blossoms  spoken  of in the  emperor's rescript, which  we  all carry
against our breasts! Our  departure from this world is a small price to  pay
for the  peace  and  prosperity that we have  brought  to the people  of New
Guinea!"
     "No, that's totally wrong!"  wails  the corporal. But his  comrades are
dragging him up the beach  now, back towards the jungle, where his  voice is
lost in an eternal cacophony of hoots, screeches, twitters and eerie cries.
     Goto Dengo smells diesel and stale  sewage. He turns around. The  stars
behind them are blocked  out by something  long and black and shaped kind of
like a submarine.
     "Your message is  much better," someone mumbles.  It is  a young fellow
carrying  a  toolbox: an airplane mechanic  who  has not  seen  a  Nipponese
airplane in half a year.
     "Yes," says  another man also  a mechanic, apparently. "His family will
find your message much more comforting."
     "Thank you," Goto  Dengo says.  "Unfortunately  I have no idea what the
kid's name is."
     "Then go  to  Yamaguchi,"  says the first mechanic,  "and pick some old
couple at random."


     Chapter 52 METEOR


     "You  sure don't fuck like a smart girl," says Bobby Shaftoe, his voice
suffused with awe.
     The wood stove glows in the corner, even though it's only September for
crissakes, in Sweden, where Shaftoe has spent the last six months.
     Julieta is dark and lanky. She reaches one long arm far across the bed,
gropes on the nightstand for a cigarette.
     "Could you  reach that jiz rag?" Shaftoe says,  eyeing  a neatly folded
United States Marine Corps handkerchief  next to the cigarettes.  His arm is
too short.
     "Why?" Julieta  speaks great English like all the other Finns.  Shaftoe
sighs in exasperation  and  buries his face in her black hair.  The Gulf  of
Bothnia whooshes and foams down below them, like a badly tuned radio pulling
in strange information.
     Julieta is given to asking big questions.
     "I just don't want there to be a big mess when I execute my withdrawal,
ma'am," he says.
     He  hears  the  flint of Julieta's  lighter itching once, twice, thrice
behind his ear. Then her chest pushes him up as her lungs fill with smoke.
     "Take your time," she purrs, her vocal cords syrupy with condensed tar.
"What are you going to do, go for a swim? Invade Russia?"
     Somewhere out  there,  across the Gulf, is Finland. There  are Russians
there, and Germans.
     "See, even when you mention  going for a swim,  my  dick gets smaller,"
Shaftoe says.  "So  it's  going  to  come  out. Inevitably."  He  thinks  he
pronounces this last word correctly.
     "Then what will happen?" Julieta says.
     "We'll get a wet spot."
     "So? It's natural. People  have been sleeping on wet  spots as  long as
beds have existed."
     "God  damn it," Shaftoe says, and lunges  heroically  for the Semper Fi
handkerchief  Julieta digs her fingernails into  one of the  sensitive spots
that she has located during  her exhaustive cartographic survey of his body.
He squirms to no avail; all the Finns are great  athletes. He pops  out. Too
late! He knocks  his wallet onto  the  floor while grabbing  the hanky, then
rolls  off Julieta and wraps it around himself, a flag on a broken pole, the
only flag of surrender Bobby Shaftoe will ever wave.
     Then he  just lies there for  a while,  listening to the  surf, and the
popping of  the wood  in  the stove. Julieta rolls  away  from  him and lies
curled up on her side, avoiding the wet spot, even though it is natural, and
enjoying her cigarette, even though it isn't.
     Julieta  smells like coffee.  Shaftoe  likes to  nuzzle and  smell  her
coffee scented flesh.
     "The weather is not too bad. Uncle Otto  should be back  before night,"
she says. She is lazily regarding a map of Scandinavia.  Sweden dangles like
a flaccid, circumcised  phallus.  Finland bulges scrotally  underneath.  Its
eastern  border, with  Russia,  no longer bears any  resemblance to reality.
This illusive frontier is furiously crosshatched with pencil marks, the axes
of Stalin's  repeated  efforts to castrate Scandinavia, obsessively recorded
and annotated by  Julieta's uncle,  who like all Finns  is an  expert skier,
crack shot, and indomitable warrior.
     Still  they  despise  themselves.  Shaftoe  thinks  it's  because  they
eventually  farmed out  the  defense of their  country to the Germans. Finns
excelled at an old fashioned, personalized, retail style of Russian killing,
but when they started to run low on Finns, they had to call in the  Germans,
who  are   more  numerous  and   who  have  perfected  a  wholesale  Russian
slaughtering operation.
     Julieta scoffs at  this simple minded  theory: the Finns  are a million
times more complex  than  Bobby Shaftoe can ever understand. Even if the war
had  never happened, there  would be  an infinity of reasons for  them to be
depressed all the time. There is no  point even in trying to explain it all.
She can only provide him  with the haziest  glimpses into Finnish psychology
by fucking his brains out once every couple of weeks.
     He  has been  lying there for too long.  Soon the left over jism in his
tract will  harden like epoxy. This peril spurs him to action. He slides out
of bed, cringes from the chill, hops across cold planks to the rug, scurries
instinctively toward the warmth of the stove.
     Julieta rolls  over onto her  back to  watch  this.  She  looks  at him
appraisingly. "Be a man," she says. "Make me some coffee."
     Shaftoe snatches the cabin's cast  iron kettle, which could double as a
ship  anchor  if need arose. He throws a blanket over his shoulders and runs
outside.  He stops  at the brink of the seawall,  knowing that the splintery
pier will not be kind to his bare feet,  and pisses down onto the beach. The
yellow arc  is  veiled in steam, redolent of coffee. He  squints across  the
gulf and sees a tug pulling a  boom  of logs down the coast, and a couple of
sails, but not Uncle Otto's.
     Behind the cabin is a standpipe that is fed from a spring in the hills.
Shaftoe  fills  the kettle,  snatches  a  couple  of hunks of  firewood  and
scampers back inside, maneuvering between stacked bricks of foil packed java
and crates of Suomi machine  pistol ammunition. He  sets the  kettle  on the
iron stove and then stokes it up with the wood.
     "You use too much wood," Julieta says, "Uncle Otto will be noticing."
     "I'll chop more," Shaftoe says. "This whole  fucking country is full of
nothing but wood."
     "You'll be chopping wood all day if Uncle Otto gets angry at you."
     "So  it's okay for me to sleep with Otto's niece,  but burning a couple
of sticks of wood to make her coffee is grounds for dismissal?"
     "Grounds," Julieta says. "Coffee grounds."
     The entire country of Finland  (to hear Otto tell it) has been  plunged
into an  endless  night  of existential despair and suicidal depression. The
usual  antidotes have been  exhausted:  self flagellation with steeped birch
twigs, mordant  humor,  week  long drinking bouts.  The only  thing to  save
Finland now is coffee. Unfortunately the government of that country has been
short sighted enough to raise taxes  and  customs  duties  through the roof.
Supposedly  it  is  to pay  for  killing  Russians, and  for  resettling the
hundreds of thousands of  Finns who have to pull up stakes and move whenever
Stalin,  in  a drunken  lunge, or Hitler, in a psychotic fit,  attacks a map
with  a red Crayola. It  just  has the effect  of  making coffee  harder  to
obtain. According  to Otto,  Finland is  a nation  of  unproductive zombies,
except in areas  that have been penetrated by the distribution  networks  of
coffee  smugglers. Finns are  generally strangers to the  entire concept  of
good fortune, however they are lucky enough to live right across the Gulf of
Bothnia from a neutral, reasonably prosperous country famous for its coffee.
     With this  background,  the existence of  a  small  Finnish  colony  in
Norrsbruck becomes pretty much  self  explanatory. The  only  thing that  is
missing is muscle to load the coffee onto the boat,  and to unload  whatever
swag Otto brings back. Needed: one muscular lunkhead willing to be  paid off
the record in whatever specie Otto comes up with.
     Sergeant  Bobby  Shaftoe, USMC, pours some beans  into the  grinder and
starts  to  belabor the crank. A  black  flurry begins to  accumulate in the
coffeepot below. He has learned to make this stuff the Swedish way, using an
egg to settle the grounds.
     Chopping  wood,  fucking  Julieta, grinding  coffee,  fucking  Julieta,
pissing on the beach, fucking  Julieta, loading  and unloading Otto's ketch.
This has been pretty much it for Bobby Shaftoe during the last half year. In
Sweden he has found the calm, grey  green eye of the blood hurricane that is
the world.
     Julieta  Kivistik is  the  central mystery.  They  do  not have a  love
affair; they have a series of love affairs. At the beginning of each affair,
they are not even speaking to each other, they  do not even know each other,
Shaftoe is just a drifter who loads for her uncle. At the end of each affair
they are  in bed fucking.  In  between, there is anywhere from one  to three
weeks  of  tactical  maneuver, false  starts,  and arduous  cut  and  thrust
flirtation.
     Other than that, each affair is  completely different, like a whole new
relationship between  two entirely  different people. It  is crazy. Probably
because  Julieta  is crazy much  crazier than Bobby Shaftoe. But there's  no
reason for Shaftoe not to be crazy, here and now.
     He boils the coffee, does the trick with the egg, pours her a mug. This
is nothing more than a courtesy:  their affair  just ended and  the  new one
hasn't started yet.
     When he brings her the mug, she  is sitting up in bed,  smoking another
cigarette,  and  (just  like  a woman) cleaning  out  his wallet,  which  is
something that he has not done since well, since he first made it, ten years
ago,  in   Oconomowoc,   in   fulfillment  of   the  requirements  for   the
Leatherworking merit badge. Julieta has pulled the stuffing out of the thing
and is going through it as if it were a paperback book. Much of the stuff in
there has been ruined  by seawater.  But she  is looking, analytically, at a
snapshot of Glory.
     "Gimme that!" he says, and snatches it from her.
     If she were his  lover, she would try to play keep away with him, there
would be  silliness  and, perhaps, more sex at the  end  of it. But she is a
stranger now and she lets him have the wallet.
     She watches him set down the coffee, as if he's a waiter in a cafe.
     "You have a girlfriend where? In Mexico?"
     "Manila," Bobby Shaftoe says, "if she's even still alive."
     Julieta nods, completely impassive. She  is  neither jealous of  Glory,
nor worried about Glory's fate at the hands of the Nips. What's happening in
the Philippines can't be any  worse than what she's seen in Finland. And why
should  she  care,  anyway,  about the  past romantic  entanglements of  her
uncle's stevedore, young what's his name?
     Shaftoe pulls on boxers, wool pants,  a shirt and a sweater. "I'm going
into town," he says. "Tell Otto I'll be back to unload the boat."
     Julieta says nothing.
     As a last, polite gesture, Shaftoe  stops at the door, reaches behind a
stack  of  crates, hauls  out  the Suomi machine pistol  (1)  and
checks it: clean, loaded, ready for  action, just like it was about  an hour
ago, the last  time  he  checked it.  He  puts it  back in its place,  turns
around, locks eyes with Julieta for a moment. Then he goes out and pulls the
door shut. Behind him, he can hear her naked feet on the cold floor, and the
satisfying sound of the door's bolts being rammed home.
     He steps into a pair of tall rubber  boots and  then begins  to  trudge
south  along the beach. The boots are  Otto's and are a couple of  sizes too
big for his feet. They make him  feel  like a little  boy, splashing through
puddles in Wisconsin. This  is what a  boy of  his age  ought to  be  doing:
working, hard and honest, at a simple  job. Kissing girls. Walking into town
to  buy some smokes and maybe have  a beer.  The idea  of  flying  around on
heavily armed warplanes and using modern weapons systems to kill hundreds of
foreign homicidal maniacs now strikes him as dated and inappropriate.
     He slows down every few hundred yards to look at a steel drum, or other
war debris, cast up by the waves, half buried in sand, stenciled cryptically
in  Cyrillic or Finnish or German. They remind him of the Nipponese drums on
that Guadalcanal beach.
     Moon lifts sea,  but not the ones who sleep  on  the beach Each wave  a
shovel
     A lot of stuff gets wasted in a war not just stuff that comes in crates
and drums. It frequently happens, for example, that men  are called upon  to
die willingly that others may live.  Shaftoe learned on Guadalcanal that you
can  never tell when  circumstances will make you into that guy.  You can go
into battle with the clearest, simplest, smartest plan ever devised,  worked
out by  Annapolis trained, battle  hardened Marine officers, and based  upon
tons  of intelligence. But  ten  seconds after  the  first  trigger has been
pulled, shit is happening all over the place, people are running around like
maniacs. The battle plan that  was  genius a minute ago  suddenly  looks  as
sweetly naive as the  inscriptions in  your high  school year book. Guys are
dying. Some of them are dying  because a shell happens to fall on them,  but
surprisingly often, they are dying because they are ordered to.
     It was  like that  with  U  691. That whole  thing with the Trinidadian
steamer was  probably a brilliant plan (Waterhouse's, he  suspects)  at some
point. But then it all went wrong, and some Allied  commander gave the order
that Shaftoe and Root, along with the crew of U 691, were to die.
     He  should have  died  on the  beach on  Guadalcanal,  along  with  his
buddies, and he didn't. Everything  between then and U 691 was just sort  of
an  extra bonus life. He got a chance to go home and see his family, sort of
like Jesus after the Resurrection.
     Now Bobby Shaftoe is dead for sure. This is why he walks so slowly down
the beach, and takes such a brotherly interest in these items, because Bobby
Shaftoe is, too, a corpse washed up on the beach in Sweden.
     He is thinking about this when he sees the Heavenly Apparition.
     The sky here is like a freshly galvanized bucket that has been inverted
over the world to block  out inconvenient  sunlight; if  someone lights up a
cigarette half a mile away,  it blazes like a nova. By those  standards, the
Heavenly Apparition looks like a whole galaxy falling out  of orbit to graze
the  surface of the world.  You  could almost mistake it for  an air  plane,
except that it does not make the requisite chesty, droning thrum. This thing
emits a screaming whine and a long trail of fire. Besides, it goes  too fast
for an airplane. It comes streaking in from the Gulf of Bothnia  and crosses
the  shoreline a  couple  of miles  north of Otto's cabin,  gradually losing
altitude and slowing  down.  But as it slows down,  the flames burgeon,  and
claw  their  way  forward up  the thing's  black body,  which  resembles the
crumpled, curling wick at the root of a candle flame.
     It  disappears behind trees.  Around here, everything disappears behind
trees sooner or later.  A ball of fire  erupts from those  trees,  and Bobby
Shaftoe says, "One thousand  one, one thousand two, one  thousand three, one
thousand four, one thousand five, one  thousand six, one thousand seven" and
then  stops, hearing the explosion.  Then he  turns  around  and walks  into
Norrsbruck, going faster now.


     Chapter 53 LAVENDER ROSE


     Randy wants  to  go down  and look at  the U boat in person. Doug  says
evenly  that Randy is welcome to do so, but he needs to draw up a valid dive
plan first,  and reminds him that the depth of the  wreck is one hundred and
fifty four meters. Randy nods as if he had, of course, expected to draw up a
dive plan.
     He wants everything to be like driving cars, where  you just hop in and
go.  He knows a couple of guys who fly airplanes,  and he can still remember
how he felt when he learned that you can't just get in a plane (even a small
one)  and take off  you  have to have a flight plan,  and  it  takes a whole
briefcase full of books  and tables and specialized calculators,  and access
to  weather  forecasts above and beyond the  normal  consumer  grade weather
forecasts,  to come up with even a bad,  wrong flight plan that will  surely
kill you. Once Randy had gotten used to this idea, he grudgingly admitted it
made sense.
     Now Doug Shaftoe's telling him he needs a plan just to strap some tanks
on  his  back and  swim  a  hundred  and fifty four  meters  (straight down,
admittedly)  and  back. So Randy  yanks a couple of  diving  books  off  the
bungeed shelves of Glory IV and  tries to come  up with even a vague idea of
what  Doug's  talking about. Randy has never  gone scuba diving in his life,
but he's seen them doing it on Jacques Cousteau and it seems straightforward
enough.
     The first three books he consults  contain  more  than enough detail to
perfectly  reproduce the crestfallenness  that  Randy  experienced  when  he
learned about flight plans. Before  he'd opened the books  Randy had  gotten
out  his  mechanical pencil  and his graph paper in preparation  for  making
marks on the page; half an hour later  he's still trying  to get a handle on
the contents of the tables, and  he hasn't  made any  marks at all. He notes
that the depths in these tables only go down as far as a hundred and thirty,
and  at that level they only talk in terms of staying down there five or ten
minutes. And yet  he  knows  that Amy, and the Shaftoe's colorful  and  ever
enlarging cast of polyethnic scuba divers, are spending much longer at  this
depth,  and  are in fact beginning  to come up to the surface with artifacts
from the wreck.  There  is, for example, an  aluminum briefcase wherein Doug
hopes to find clues as to who was on this U boat and why it was on the wrong
side of the planet.
     Randy begins to fear that the entire wreck is going to be stripped bare
before he even makes any marks on his piece of graph  paper. The divers show
up, one or two  each  day, on speedboats  or outrigger  canoes from Palawan.
Blond  surf boys, taciturn galoots,  cigarette  smoking  Frenchmen, Nintendo
playing  Asians, beer  can crumpling ex Navy guys, blue collar  hillbillies.
They all have diving plans. Why doesn't Randy have a diving plan?
     He starts  sketching  one  out based on the depth of  one  hundred  and
thirty, which  seems reasonably close to one  hundred and  fifty four. After
working  on  it  for  about an hour (long enough  to  imagine  all sorts  of
specious details) he happens to notice that the table he's been using  is in
feet,  not meters, which means that all of these divers have been going down
to a  depth that is way more than three times as deep as the maximum that is
even talked about on these tables.
     Randy closes  up all of  the books  and  looks at them peevishly for  a
while. They are all nice new books with  color photographs on the covers. He
picked  them off the shelf because  (getting introspective  here)  he  is  a
computer  guy,  and in the  computer world any  book printed more  than  two
months ago is a campy nostalgia item. Investigating a little more, he  finds
that all three of these shiny new books have been  personally autographed by
the authors, with long personal inscriptions: two addressed to Doug, and one
to Amy.  The  one  to  Amy  has obviously  been  written  by  a  man who  is
desperately in love with her. Reading it is like moisturizing with Tabasco.
     He concludes that these are all consumer grade diving books written for
rum drenched  tourists,  and furthermore  that  the publishers probably  had
teams  of  lawyers go over them one word at a  time to make sure there would
not  be liability  trouble. That  the contents  of these  books,  therefore,
probably represent about one percent of everything that the authors actually
know about  diving, but  that the  lawyers have made sure  that  the authors
don't even mention that.
     Okay, so divers have mastered a  large body  of occult  knowledge. That
explains  their  general  resemblance  to  hackers,  albeit  physically  fit
hackers.
     Doug Shaftoe is not going down  to  the wreck himself.  As a matter  of
fact he looked  surprised, bordering  on contemptuous, when Randy  asked him
whether he would go down. Instead, he's going over the stuff that is brought
up from the wreck by the younger  divers. They began by doing a photographic
survey,  using digital cameras, and Doug's been printing out blowups  of the
inside  of the U boat on his  laser printer and  pasting them  up around the
walls of his personal wardroom on Glory IV.

     Randy does  a sorting  procedure  on the  diving books now:  he ignores
anything that  has color photographs, or that appears to have been published
within the last twenty  years,  or  that  has any  quotes on  the back cover
containing the words stunning, superb, user friendly, or, worst of all, easy
to understand. He looks for  old,  thick books  with  worn  out bindings and
block lettered titles like  DIVE MANUAL. Anything with  angry marginal notes
written by Doug Shaftoe gets extra points.
     To: randy@epiphyte.com
     From: root@eruditorum.org
     Subject: Pontifex
     Randy,
     For  now,   let's  use  "Pontifex"   as  the  working   title  of  this
cryptosystem. It is  a post war  system. What I  mean by that is that, after
seeing  what Turing and company did  to Enigma, I  came to the (now obvious)
conclusion  that  any  modern  system  had better  be  resistant  to machine
cryptanalysis. Pontifex uses a 54 element permutation as its key one key per
message, mind you! and it uses that permutation (which  we will denote as T)
to generate a keystream  which is added, modulo 26, to the plaintext (P), as
in a one time pad. The process of generating each character in the keystream
alters T in a reversible but more or less "random" fashion.
     At this point, a diver comes up with a  piece of actual gold,  but it's
not a bar: it's a sheet of  hammered gold, maybe eight inches on  a side and
about a quarter of a millimeter thick, with  a pattern  of tiny  neat  holes
punched through  it, like a  computer  card. Randy  spends  a couple of days
obsessing over this artifact. He learns  that it came out of a  crate stored
in the hold of the U boat, and that there are thousands more of them.
     Now all of a sudden he's reading stuff by guys whose names are preceded
by naval  ranks and succeeded by M.D.s and  Ph.D.s and they are going on for
dozens of pages  about the physics of nitrogen bubble formation in the knee,
for  example.  There are  photographs  of  cats  strapped  down  in benchtop
pressure chambers. Randy learns that the reason Doug Shaftoe doesn't dive to
one hundred and fifty four meters is that certain age related changes in the
joints  tend  to increase  the  likelihood of  bubble formation  during  the
decompression  process. He comes to terms with the fact that the pressure at
the  depth of  the wreck is  going  to  be  fifteen  or sixteen atmospheres,
meaning that as he ascends to the surface, any nitrogen  bubbles that happen
to be rattling around in his body are going to get  fifteen or sixteen times
as large as they were  to begin with  and that  this is  true whether  those
bubbles happen to be in his brain, his knee, the little blood vessels of the
eyeball, or  trapped  underneath his fillings. He  develops a  sophisticated
layman's  understanding  of  dive medicine, which  amounts to little because
everyone's  body  is  different hence the need  for each  diver  to  have  a
completely  different dive plan.  Randy will need to figure out his body fat
percentage before he can even begin marking up his sheet of graph paper.
     It  is also path dependent.  These divers' bodies get  partly saturated
with nitrogen every time  they go down, and not all  of it goes out of their
bodies when they come back  up all of them,  sitting around Glory IV playing
cards, drinking beer, talking  to their girlfriends on their GSM phones, are
all outgassing all the time nitrogen is seeping out of their bodies into the
atmosphere, and  each one of them  knows  more or less  how  much nitrogen's
stuffed  into  his  body at any given moment and understands, in  a deep and
nearly intuitive way, just exactly how that  information  propagates through
any dive plan that he might  be cooking up inside the powerful dive planning
supercomputer  that  each  of  these guys  apparently carries  around in his
nitrogen saturated brain.
     One of the divers comes up with a plank from the  crate that  contained
the stacks of gold sheets. It is in very bad  shape, and  it's still fizzing
as gas comes out of it. Fizzing in a way that Randy has no trouble imagining
his bones would do if he made any errors in working out his dive plan. There
is some stenciled lettering just barely visible on the wood: NIZ ARCH.
     Glory  IV has compressors for pumping air up to insanely high pressures
to fill the scuba  tanks. Randy develops an awareness  that the pressure has
to be insanely high or it  won't even emerge from the tanks while these guys
are  down at depth. The divers  are all being suffused with this pressurized
gas;  he  half  expects that  one  of  these  divers is going  to  bump into
something and explode into a pink mushroom cloud.
     To: randy@epiphyte.com
     From: cantrell@epiphyte.com
     Subject: Pontifex
     You forwarded  me a  message about a cryptosystem called Pontifex.  Was
this  invented by a  friend of  yours?  In  its  general outlines (viz, an n
element permutation  that  is  used to generate a keystream, and that slowly
evolves) it  is similar to a commercial  system called  RC4, which enjoys  a
complicated reputation  among Secret Admirers  it seems  secure, and has not
been broken, but it makes us nervous because it  is basically a single rotor
system, albeit  a  rotor that  evolves.  Pontifex evolves  in  a  much  more
complicated & asymmetrical way than RC4 and so might be more secure.
     Some things about Pontifex are slightly peculiar.
     (1) He talks about generating "characters" in the key  stream and  then
adding them, modulo 26, to the plaintext. This is how people talked 50 years
ago when ciphers were worked out  using pencil and paper. Today  we  talk in
terms of generating bytes  and adding them modulo 256. Is your friend pretty
old?
     (2) He speaks of T  as a 54 element permutation. There is nothing wrong
with  that  but  Pontifex would work  just as  well with 64  or  73  or  699
elements, so it makes more  sense to describe it as an n element permutation
where n could be 54 or any other integer. I  can't figure out why he settled
on 54. Possibly because it is twice the  number  of  letters in the alphabet
but this makes no particular sense.
     Conclusion: the author of Pontifex is cryptologically sophisticated but
shows possible signs of being an elderly crank. I need more details in order
to deliver a verdict.
     – Cantrell
     "Randy?" says Doug Shaftoe, and beckons him into his wardroom.
     The  inside  of  the  wardroom  door  is  decorated  with a  big  color
photograph  of  a massive stone  staircase in a  dusty church. They stand in
front of it. "Are there  a lot of Waterhouses?" Doug asks.  "Is it a  common
name?"
     "Uh, well, it's not a rare name."
     "Is  there  anything you'd like  to share  with  me  about your  family
history?"
     Randy knows  that  as a possible  suitor to  Amy, he will be undergoing
thorough scrutiny at all times. The Shaftoes are doing due diligence on him.
"What kind of thing  are you looking for?  Something terrible? I don't think
there's anything worth hiding from you."
     Doug stares at him distractedly for a while, then turns to face the now
open aluminum briefcase from the U boat.  Randy supposes that merely opening
it  required  coming  up  with  a  detailed  plan.   Doug   has  spread  out
miscellaneous  contents  on  a tabletop to be photographed and cataloged. Ex
Navy SEAL Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe has, at the peak of his career, become a
sort of librarian.
     Randy sees a pair  of  gold rimmed  spectacles, a fountain  pen, a  few
rusty paper clips. But  it looks  as though a lot of sodden paper  was taken
out of that briefcase too, and Doug Shaftoe has been carefully drying it out
and trying to read it. "Most  wartime paper was crap," he says. "It probably
dissolved into mush  within days of the sinking. The paper in this briefcase
was at least protected from marine critters, but most of it's gone. However,
the owner  of this  briefcase was apparently some sort of aristocrat.  Check
out the glasses, the pen."
     Randy checks them out.  The divers have found teeth and fillings in the
wreck,  but nothing  that qualifies  as a body. The places where people died
are  marked by these trails of hard, inert remains, such as eyeglasses. Like
the debris footprint of an exploded airliner.
     "So  what I'm getting at is that he had  a few scraps  of good paper in
his briefcase," Doug continues. "Personal stationery. So we suspect his name
was Rudolf von Hacklheber. Does that name ring any bells with you?"
     "No. But I could do a web search . . ."
     "I tried that," Doug  says. "Turned up just a few hits. There was a man
by that name who wrote a couple of  mathematics papers back in the thirties.
And  there are  some organizations  in and around Leipzig, Germany, that use
the name: a  hotel, a theater, a defunct  reinsurance  company. That's about
it."
     "Well,  if  he  was a mathematician, he  might have had some connection
with my grandfather. Is that why you were asking about my family?"
     "Check this  out," Doug says, and pings one  fingernail against a glass
tray full of a transparent liquid. An envelope, unglued and spreadeagled, is
floating in it. Randy bends over and peers at it. Something has been written
on the back in pencil, but it's impossible to read because the flaps  of the
envelope have been spread apart. "May I?" he asks. Doug nods and hands him a
couple of latex  surgical  gloves. "I don't have  to file a  diving plan for
this, do I?" Randy asks, wiggling his fingers into the gloves.
     Doug is not amused. "It is deeper than it looks," he says.
     Randy  flips the envelope  over, then folds the  flaps  back  together,
reassembling the inscription. It says:
     WATERHOUSE LAVENDER ROSE.


     Chapter 54 BRISBANE


     Through a small  dusty window Xed with masking tape, Lawrence Pritchard
Waterhouse gazes out at downtown  Brisbane. Bustling  it ain't. A taxi limps
down the street and pulls into the drive of the nearby Canberra Hotel, which
is home  to  many  mid  ranking  officers. The taxi  smokes and reeks  it is
powered  by  a charcoal burner  in  the  trunk. Marching feet  can be  heard
through the window.  It's  not  the  tromp, tromp of  combat boots, but  the
whack,  whack of sensible shoes  worn  by  sensible women: local volunteers.
Waterhouse instinctively leans closer to  the window to get  a look at them,
but  he's wasting his time. Dressed in those  uniforms,  you could  march  a
regiment of  pinup girls through  all  the cabins and  gangways of an active
battleship  and  not draw a  single wolf whistle, lewd  suggestion,  or butt
grab.
     A delivery  truck creeps out of  a side street and backfires alarmingly
as it  tries to  accelerate  onto the  main drag.  Brisbane is still worried
about attack  from the air, and  no one likes sudden  loud noises. The truck
looks  like it is being attacked by  an amoeba:  on its  back is a billowing
rubberized canvas balloon full of natural gas.
     He's on  the third floor  of a commercial  building so nondescript that
the most interesting observation one can make about  it is that it has  four
stories. There is  a tobacconist on the ground floor. The rest  of the place
must have been empty until The General beaten like a red headed stepchild by
those Nips came to Brisbane  from  Corregidor, and made  this  city into the
capital of the Southwest Pacific Theater. There must have been an incredible
amount of surplus  office  space around here before The  General showed  up,
because a lot of Brisbaners had fled south, expecting an invasion.
     Waterhouse has had plenty of time  to familiarize himself with Brisbane
and its environs. He's been here for four weeks, and he's been given nothing
to do. When he was in Britain, they couldn't shuffle him around fast enough.
Whatever his job  was at the moment,  he did it feverishly until he received
top secret, highest  priority  orders  to  rush,  by any  available means of
transportation, to his next assignment.
     Then they brought  him  here. The  Navy flew  him across  the  Pacific,
hopping from one island base  to the  next  in an assortment of flying boats
and transports.  He crossed the equator and  the international date line  on
the same day.  But  when he  reached  the  boundary between Nimitz's Pacific
Theater and The General's Southwest Pacific Theater, it was like he'd glided
into a  stone wall. It was all he could do  to talk himself onboard  a troop
transport  to New Zealand, and then to Fremantle. The transports were almost
unbelievably hellish: steel ovens packed with men,  baked by the sun, no one
allowed to  go  abovedecks  for  fear  they'd be  sighted,  and  marked  for
slaughter,  by a Nip submarine.  Even at  night they  couldn't  get a breeze
through  there, because  all  openings  had  to  be  covered  with  blackout
curtains. Waterhouse  couldn't really complain; some of the men had traveled
this way all the way from the East Coast of the United States.
     The important thing was that he made it to Brisbane, as per his orders,
and reported to  the right officer,  who told him to  await  further orders.
Which  he's been  doing until this morning, when he  was told  to show up at
this office upstairs of the  tobacconist. It is a room  full of enlisted men
typing up forms, trundling them around in wire baskets,  and filing them. In
Waterhouse's experience with the military, he has found that it's not a good
sign when one is ordered to report to a place like this.
     Finally  he  is  allowed  into the presence  of an Army  major  who has
several other conversations, and various pieces of important paperwork going
on  at  the  same time.  That  is  okay; Waterhouse  doesn't  need  to  be a
cryptanalyst to  get  the message  loud and clear, which  is that he is  not
wanted here.
     "Marshall  sent you  here because he thinks  that The General is sloppy
with Ultra," the major says.
     Waterhouse flinches to hear this word  spoken aloud, in an office where
enlisted  men and  women volunteers are coming and going. It's almost as  if
the major wishes to make it clear that The General is, in fact, quite sloppy
with Ultra, and rather likes it that way, thank you very much.
     "Marshall's  afraid that the Nips will get wise to us  and change their
codes. It's all because of Churchill." The major refers to General George C.
Marshall and Sir Winston Churchill as if  they were bullpen staff for a farm
league baseball team. He pauses  to light a cigarette. "Ultra is Churchill's
baby.  Oh yeah, Winnie  just luuuuuves his Ultra.  He thinks  we're going to
blow  his  secret and ruin  it for him because  he thinks we're idiots." The
major  takes  a  very deep  lungful of smoke, sits back  in his  chair,  and
carefully puffs  out a couple of smoke rings. It  is a convincing display of
insouciance. "So he's always  nagging  Marshall to tighten up security,  and
Marshall throws  him a  bone every so often, just to keep the Alliance on an
even keel." For the first time, the major looks Waterhouse  in the eye. "You
happen to be the latest bone. That's all."
     There is a long silence, as if Waterhouse is expected to say something.
     He clears his throat. No one ever got court martialed for following his
orders. "My orders state that "
     "Fuck your orders, Captain Waterhouse," the major says.
     There  is  a  long  silence.  The  major  tends  to  one or  two  other
distracting duties.  Then he stares out the window for a few moments, trying
to compose his thoughts. Finally he  says, "Get  this through your  head. We
are not idiots. The General is  not  an idiot. The General appreciates Ultra
as much  as Sir  Winston Churchill. The  General uses  Ultra as  well as any
commander in this war."
     "Ultra's no good if the Japanese learn about it."
     "As you can appreciate, the General does not have time to meet with you
personally. Neither  does  his staff. So you will not have an opportunity to
instruct him on how to keep Ultra a secret," says the major. He glances down
a couple of times at a sheet of paper on  his blotter, and indeed he  is now
speaking like a man who is reading a prepared statement. "From time to time,
since  we learned  that you were being sent  to  us, your existence has been
brought to the General's attention. During the brief periods of time when he
is not occupied with more pressing matters, he has  occasionally voiced some
pithy  thoughts about you, your mission,  and  the masterminds who sent  you
here."
     "No doubt," Waterhouse says.
     "The general is  of  the opinion  that persons  not familiar  with  the
unique  features of  the  Southwest  Pacific  Theater  may not  be  entirely
competent to judge his strategy," says the  major. "The General  feels  that
the  Nips  will  never  learn about Ultra.  Never.  Why?  Because  they  are
incapable  of  comprehending  what has  happened to  them.  The  General has
speculated that he could go down to the radio station tomorrow and broadcast
a speech announcing that we had broken all of the Nip codes and were reading
all of  their messages, and nothing would  happen. The  General's words were
something to the effect that the Nips will never believe how totally we have
fucked them, because when  you get fucked that  badly, it's your own goddamn
fucking fault and it makes you look like a fucking shithead."
     "I see," Waterhouse says.
     "But The General said all  of that at much greater  length  and without
using a single word of profanity, because that is how The General  expresses
himself."
     "Thank you for boiling it down," Waterhouse says.
     "You  know  those  white  headbands  that  the Nips  tie  around  their
foreheads? With the meatball and the Nip characters printed on them?"
     "I've seen pictures of them."
     "I've seen  them for  real,  tied  around  the heads  of  pilots of Nip
fighter planes that were about fifty feet away firing machine guns at me and
my men," says the major.
     "Oh, yeah! Me too. At Pearl Harbor," Waterhouse says. "I forgot."
     This appears to  be the  most irritating thing that Waterhouse has said
all day. The  major has to spend a moment composing  himself. "That headband
is called a hachimaki."

     "Imagine this,  Waterhouse.  The  emperor is  meeting with  his general
staff. All of the top generals and admirals in  Nippon  parade into the room
in full  dress uniforms  and bow down solemnly before the emperor. They have
come to report  on  the  progress of the  war. Each  of these  generals  and
admirals  is  wearing a brand  new  hachimaki  around  his  forehead.  These
hachimakis are printed with phrases saying things like, 'I am a dipshit' and
'Through my personal incompetence I killed two hundred  thousand of  our own
men' and 'I handed our Midway plans over to Nimitz on a silver platter.'
     The  major  now pauses and  takes  a phone call so that Waterhouse  can
savor this image for a  while. Then he hangs  up,  lights another cigarette,
and continues. "That's what it would look like for the Nips to admit at this
point in the war that we have Ultra."
     More  smoke  rings.  Waterhouse  has  nothing  to  say.  So  the  major
continues.  "See,  we've  gone over the watershed  line of this  war. We won
Midway.  We  won North  Africa. Stalingrad.  The  Battle  of  the  Atlantic.
Everything changes when you go over the  watershed line. The rivers all flow
a  different direction. It's as if the force of  gravity itself has  changed
and  is  now  working in our  favor.  We've adjusted  to that.  Marshall and
Churchill and all those others  are still stuck in  an  obsolete  mentality.
They are  defenders. But The General is not a defender. As a matter of fact,
just between you and me, The General is lousy on defense, as he demonstrated
in the Philippines. The General is a conqueror.
     "Well," Waterhouse finally says, "what do you suggest I do with myself,
seeing as how I'm here in Brisbane?"
     "I'm  tempted to say you should connect up with all of  the other Ultra
security  experts Marshall  sent  out  before  you, and  get a  bridge group
together," the major says.
     "I don't care for bridge," Waterhouse says politely.
     "You're supposed to be some expert codebreaker, right?"
     "Right."
     "Why don't you go to Central Bureau. The Nips  have a zillion different
codes and we haven't broken all of them yet."
     "That's not my mission."
     "You  don't worry  about your fucking mission," the  major  says. "I'll
make  sure  that Marshall  thinks  you're doing  your  mission,  because  if
Marshall  doesn't think that, he'll  give  us  no end of hassles.  So you're
clean with the higher ups."
     "Thank you."
     "You  can  consider  your   mission   accomplished,"  the  major  says.
"Congratulations."
     "Thank you."
     "My  mission is to beat the stuffing  out of the fucking Nips, and that
mission is not accomplished  just yet, and so I have other matters to attend
to," the major says significantly.
     "Shall I just see myself out then?" Waterhouse asks.


     Chapter 55 DÖNITZ


     Once, when Bobby Shaftoe was  eight years old, he went to  Tennessee to
visit Grandma and Grandpa.  One boring  afternoon he began skimming a letter
that the  old lady had left lying on an  end table. Grandma gave him a stern
talking  to and  then recounted the incident to Grandpa, who recognized  his
cue and gave  him forty  whacks. That and a whole series of roughly parallel
childhood experiences, plus several years in the Marine Corps, have made him
into one polite fellow.
     So he doesn't read others' mail. It be against the rules.
     But here he is.  The setting:  a  plank  paneled  room above  a pub  in
Norrsbruck,  Sweden.  The  pub  is  a  sailorly  kind  of place, catering to
fishermen, which makes it congenial for Shaftoe's friend and drinking buddy:
Kapitänleutnant Günter Bischoff, Kriegsmarine of the Third Reich (retired).
     Bischoff  gets a lot of interesting mail, and leaves it strewn all over
the  room. Some  of the mail  is  from  his family in Germany, and  contains
money. Consequently Bischoff, unlike Shaftoe, will  not have to work even if
this war continues, and he remains in Sweden cooling his boilers for another
ten years.
     Some  of  the mail is from the  crew of  U 691,  according to Bischoff.
After Bischoff  got them all here  to Norrsbruck in one piece, his second in
command, Oberleutnant zur See Karl Beck, cut a deal with the Kriegsmarine in
which  the  crew  were  allowed to return to Germany, no  hard feelings,  no
repercussions.  All of  them except for  Bischoff climbed  on board what was
left of U 691 and steamed off in the direction of Kiel.
     Only days  later, the mail  began to pour in. Every member of the crew,
to  a man,  sent Bischoff a  letter  describing the heroes' welcome they had
received: Dönitz himself met them at the pier and handed out hugs and kisses
and medals  and  other tokens  in embarrassing  profusion.  They can't  stop
talking about how much they want dear Günter to come back home.
     Dear Günter isn't budging;  he's been  sitting in his little room for a
couple  of months now. His world consists of pen, ink, paper,  candles, cups
of coffee, bottles of aquavit, the soothing beat of the surf. Every crash of
wave on shore, he says, reminds  him that he is  above  sea level now, where
men  were meant to live. His mind is always back there a hundred feet  below
the surface  of the  gelid Atlantic,  trapped  like a  rat  in a sewer pipe,
cringing from the explosions of the depths charges. He lived a hundred years
that way, and  spent every  moment  of  those hundred years  dreaming of the
Surface. He vowed, ten thousand  times, that  if he ever  made it back up to
the  world  of air and  light, he  would  enjoy every breath, revel in every
moment.
     That's pretty much what he's been doing, here in Norrsbruck. He has his
personal journal, and he's been going  through  it, page by page, filling in
all of the details that he  didn't have  time to jot down, before he forgets
them.  Someday, after the war,  it'll  make a book:  one  of  a  million war
memoirs that  will  clog libraries  from Novosibirsk  to Gander to Sequim to
Batavia.
     The  pace of  incoming mail dropped dramatically after the first weeks.
Several of his  men still write to him faithfully. Shaftoe is used to seeing
their letters scattered  around the place  when he comes  to visit.  Most of
them are written on scraps of cheap, greyish paper.
     Directionless  silver light  infiltrates  the  room  through Bischoff's
window, illuminating what looks  like a  rectangular pool of heavy cream  on
his  tabletop. It is  some kind of official Hun stationery, surmounted  by a
raptor  clenching a  swastika. The letter  is handwritten, not  typed.  When
Bischoff sets his wet glass down on it, the ink dissolves.
     And when  Bischoff goes to  empty his bladder, Shaftoe  can't keep  his
eyes away from it.  He knows that this is bad manners, but the  Second World
War has led  him into all sorts of uncouth behavior, and there don't seem to
be  any  angry  grandpas  lurking in the trenches  with  doubled  belts;  no
consequences at all for the  wicked,  in fact. Maybe  that  will change in a
couple  of  years,  if  the  Germans  and  the  Nips lose the war. But  that
reckoning will be so great and terrible that Shaftoe's  glance at Bischoff's
letter will probably go unnoticed.
     It came in an envelope. The first line of the address is very long, and
consists of "Günter BISCHOFF" preceded by a  string of ranks and titles, and
followed  by a series  of letters.  The  return address has  been savaged by
Bischoffs letter opener, but it's somewhere in Berlin.
     The  letter itself is  an  impossible  snarl of Germanic cursive. It is
signed, hugely, with a single word. Shaftoe spends some time  trying to make
out that word; he whose  John Hancock this is.  Must have an ego  that ranks
right up there with the General's.
     When Shaftoe figures out the signature  belongs to Dönitz,  he gets all
tingly. That Dönitz is  an important  guy  Shaftoe's  even  seen  him  on  a
newsreel, congratulating a grimy U boat crew, fresh from a salty spree.
     Why's he writing love notes to Bischoff? Shaftoe  can't read this stuff
any better than he could Nipponese. But  he can see a few figures. Dönitz is
talking numbers. Perhaps tons of shipping sunk, or casualties on the Eastern
Front. Perhaps money.
     "Oh, yes!" Bischoff says, having somehow reappeared in the room without
making any noise. When you're down in  a  U boat,  running silent, you learn
how to walk quietly. "I have come up with a hypothesis on the gold."
     "What gold?" Shaftoe says. He knows,  of course, but having been caught
in an act of flagrant naughtiness, his instinct is to play innocent.
     "That you saw down in the batteries of U 553," Bischoff says. "You see,
my friend, anyone else would say that you are simply a crazy jughead."
     "The correct term is Jarhead."
     "They  would say, first of all, that U 553 sank many months  before you
claim  to have seen it. Secondly, they would  say that such a boat could not
have been loaded with gold. But I believe that you saw it."
     "So?"
     Bischoff glances at  the letter from Dönitz  looking mildly seasick. "I
must tell you something about the Wehrmacht of which I am ashamed, first."
     "What? That they invaded Poland and France?"
     "No.
     "That they invaded Russia and Norway?"
     "No, not that."
     "That they bombed England and . . . "
     "No, no, no," Bischoff  says, the very model of forbearance. "Something
you did not know about."
     "What?"
     "It  seems that, while I  have been sneaking around the Atlantic, doing
my duty the Führer has come up with a little incentive program."
     "What do you mean?"
     "It seems that duty and loyalty are not enough for certain high ranking
officers. That they will not  carry out their orders to  the  fullest unless
they receive . . . special awards."
     "You mean, like medals?"
     Bischoff is smiling nervously. "Some generals on the Eastern Front have
been given estates in Russia. Very, very large estates."
     "Oh."
     "But not everyone can be bribed with  land. Some people require  a more
liquid form of compensation."
     "Booze?"
     "No, I mean liquid in the financial sense. Something you can carry with
you, and that is accepted in any whorehouse on the planet."
     "Gold," says Shaftoe, quietly.
     "Gold would suffice," Bischoff says. It has been a  long  time since he
looked Shaftoe in the eye. He's staring  out the  window instead. His  green
eyes might be a little moist.  He takes a deep breath,  blinks, and gets the
bitter irony under  control before continuing: "Since Stalingrad, it has not
gone well on the Eastern Front. Let us say that  Ukrainian real estate is no
longer worth what it  used to  be, if  the  deed to  the land  happens to be
written in German and issued in Berlin."
     "It's  getting harder to  bribe  a general by promising him  a chunk of
Russian land," Shaftoe translates. "So Hitler needs lots of gold."
     "Yes. Now,  the Japanese  have lots of gold  consider that they  sacked
China. As well as many other places. But they are lacking in certain things.
They need wolframite. Mercury. Uranium."
     "What's uranium?"
     "Who  the hell knows? The Japanese want it, we provide  it.  We provide
them  technology too  blueprints for new turbines. Enigma machines." At this
point Bischoff breaks off and laughs, painfully and darkly, for a long time.
When he gets it under control, he  continues: "So we have been shipping them
these things, in U boats."
     "And the Nips pay you in gold."
     "Yes. It is a dark economy, hidden beneath the ocean, trading small but
valuable items over vast distances. You got a glimpse of it."
     "You knew this was going on but you  didn't know about U  553," Shaftoe
points out.
     "Ah, Bobby, there  are many, many things going on in  the  Third  Reich
that  a mere U boat captain does not know about. You are a soldier, you know
this is true."
     "Yes," Shaftoe says, recalling the peculiarities of Detachment 2702. He
looks down at the letter. "Why is Dönitz telling you all of this now?"
     "He is not  telling  me  anything," Bischoff says  reprovingly. "I have
figured this out myself" He gnaws on a lip for a while. "Dönitz is making me
a proposition."
     "I thought you'd retired."
     Bischoff  considers it.  "I have retired from  killing people.  But the
other day I sailed a little sloop around the inlet."
     "So?"
     "So  it seems  that  I have not retired from going down to  the sea  in
ships."  Bischoff  heaves  a   sigh.  "Unfortunately,  all  of  the   really
interesting ships are owned by major governments."
     Bischoff  is  getting a  little spooky, so  Shaftoe opts for  a  little
change in the subject.  "Hey, speaking of really interesting  things..." and
he tells the story of the Heavenly  Apparition  that  he  saw  while  he was
walking down here.
     Bischoff is  delighted  by  the  story,  which revives the  hunger  for
excitement that he  has kept pickled in salt and alcohol ever since reaching
Norrsbruck. "You are sure it was manmade?" he asks.
     "It whined. Chunks of shit were falling out of  it. But I've never seen
a meteor so I don't know."
     "How far away?"
     "It crashed seven  kilometers from where I was standing. So, ten clicks
from here."
     "But ten kilometers is nothing for an Eagle Scout and a Hitler Youth!"
     "You weren't a Hitler Youth."
     Bischoff broods  over this  for a  moment. "Hitler so  embarrassing.  I
hoped that if I  ignored him  he  would go away. Perhaps if I had joined the
Hitler Youth, they would have given me a surface ship."
     "Then you'd be dead."
     "Right!"  Bischoff's  mood  brightens considerably. "Ten kilometers  is
still nothing. Let's go!"
     "It's already dark."
     "We will follow the flames."
     "They will have gone out."
     "We will follow the trail of debris, like Hansel and Gretel."
     "It didn't work for Hansel and Gretel. Didn't you even read the fucking
story?"
     "Don't be such a defeatist, Bobby," says Bischoff, diving into a hearty
fisherman's sweater.  "Normally you  are  not like  this.  What is troubling
you?"
     Glory.  It is  October  and  the  days  are growing short. Shaftoe  and
Bischoff, both mired in the yet to be discovered emotional dumps of Seasonal
Affective  Disorder, are  like  two  brothers  trapped  in  the same  pit of
quicksand, each keeping a sharp eye on the other.
     "Eh? Was ist los, buddy?"
     "Guess I'm just feeling at loose ends."
     "You need an adventure. Let's go!"
     "I  need  an  adventure like  Hitler  needs  an ugly  little toothbrush
mustache," says Bobby Shaftoe. But he drags himself  up out of his chair and
follows Bischoff out the door.


     ***


     Shaftoe and Bischoff are trudging through the dark Swedish woods like a
pair  of  lost souls  trying to find the side entrance  to Limbo.  They take
turns carrying the kerosene lantern,  which has  an effective range about as
long  as a  grown man's arm.  Sometimes they go for  a  whole  hour  without
talking, each  man alone with his own struggle against  suicidal depression.
Then one of them (usually Bischoff) will perk up and say something, like:
     "Haven't  seen  Enoch Root  recently. What has he  been up to  since he
finished curing you of your morphine addiction?" Bischoff asks.
     "Don't know.  He was such a fucking pain in the ass during that project
that I  never wanted to see him  again. But  I think he  got a Russian radio
transmitter  from Otto and took it into that church basement where he lives;
he's been messing around with it ever since."
     "Yes. I remember. He  was changing the frequencies. Did he  ever get it
to work?"
     "Beats  me,"  Shaftoe says, "but when  big pieces of burning shit start
falling out of the sky in my neighborhood, makes me wonder."
     "Yes. Also he goes to the post office quite frequently," Bischoff says.
"I chatted with  him  there once. He is  carrying on a heavy  correspondence
with others around the world."
     "Other what?"

     "That is my question, too."
     Eventually  they  find  the wreck  only  by following  the  sound of  a
hacksaw,  which reverberates through  the  pines  like  the shriek  of  some
extraordinarily stupid and horny bird. This enables them to home in on it in
a  general  way.  Final  coordinates  are  provided by a  sudden, strobelike
flashing  light,  devastating  noise, and a  sap  scented rain of  amputated
foliage.  Shaftoe and Bischoff both hit the  dirt and lie there listening to
fat  pistol slugs ricocheting from tree  trunk to tree trunk. The hacksawing
noise continues with no break in rhythm.
     Bischoff starts talking  Swedish, but Shaftoe shushes him.  "That was a
Suomi," he says. "Hey, Julieta! Knock it off! It's just me and Günter."
     There is no answer. Then, Shaftoe remembers that he has recently fucked
Julieta, and therefore needs to remember his manners. "Excuse me, ma'am," he
says,  "but  I  gather from the sound of  your weapon  that  you are  of the
Finnish  nation, for  which I have unbounded admiration, and I wanted to let
you  know that  I, former  Sergeant Robert Shaftoe,  and my  friend,  former
Kapitänleutnant Günter Bischoff, mean you no harm."
     Julieta, homing in on  the sound of his voice in the darkness, responds
with a  controlled  burst  of  fire  that  passes  about a  foot over  Bobby
Shaftoe's head. "Don't you belong in Manila?" she asks.
     Shaftoe groans, and rolls over  on his  back  as if he has been shot in
the gut.
     "What  does she  mean by  this?" asks  the bewildered  Günter Bischoff.
Seeing that his friend has been (emotionally) incapacitated, he tries: "This
is Sweden, a peaceful and neutral country! Why are you trying to machine gun
us?"
     "Go away!" Julieta must be with Otto, because they hear her talk to him
before saying, "We do not  want representatives of the American  Marines and
the Wehrmacht here. You are not welcome."
     "Sounds  like  you  are sawing away on something that  is  pretty  damn
heavy," Shaftoe finally retorts. "How you gonna haul it out of these woods?"
     This leads to an animated conversation between Julieta and  Otto.  "You
may approach," Julieta finally says.
     They  find  the  Kivistiks,  Julieta and Otto,  standing in  a  pool of
lantern light  around the severed,  charred wing  of an airplane. Most Finns
are  hard to  tell apart from Swedes, but  Otto and Julieta  both have black
hair and black eyes, and could pass for Turks. The tip of  the airplane wing
is painted with the  black and  white cross  of the Luftwaffe. An engine  is
mounted to that wing. If Otto's hacksaw has its  way, it  won't be  for much
longer. The engine has recently been set on fire and then used to knock down
a large number  of  pine  trees. But even  so  Shaftoe  can see it's like no
engine he has ever seen before. There is no propeller, but  there are  a lot
of little fan blades.
     "It looks like  a turbine,"  says Bischoff,  "but for air,  rather than
water." Otto straightens up, squeezes his lower back theatrically, and hands
Shaftoe the  hacksaw. Then he  hands  him a bottle of benzedrine tablets for
good measure.  Shaftoe eats a few  tablets,  strips  off his shirt to reveal
splendid musculature, does a couple  of USMC  approved stretching exercises,
grabs the hacksaw, and sets  to work. After a couple of minutes he  looks up
nonchalantly at  Julieta, who is standing  there holding  the machine pistol
and watching him with a look that is simultaneously frosty  and  smoldering,
like baked Alaska. Bischoff stands off to the side, reveling in this.
     Dawn is slapping her chapped and reddened fingers against a frostbitten
sky, attempting to restore some circulation, when the remains of the turbine
finally fall away  from  the wing. Pumped  on benzedrine, Shaftoe  has  been
operating  the hacksaw for six hours; Otto has stepped  in to  change blades
several  times, a major capital  investment  on his part. Next, they  devote
half of the  morning  to dragging the  engine through  the  woods and down a
creek bed to the  sea,  where Otto's boat is waiting,  and Otto and  Julieta
take their prize away. Bobby  Shaftoe and Günter Bischoff  trudge back up to
the site of the wreck. They  have  not discussed this openly yet it would be
unnecessary  but they intend to find the part of the airplane that  contains
the body of the pilot, and see to it that he gets a proper burial.
     "What is in Manila, Bobby?" Bischoff asks.
     "Something  that morphine made me  forget," Shaftoe answers,  "and that
Enoch Root, that fucking bastard, made me remember."
     Not fifteen minutes later they come to the gash  in the  woods that was
carved by the plunging airplane, and hear a man's voice wailing and sobbing,
completely  out  of  his mind  with  grief.  "Angelo!  Angelo! Angelo!  Mein
liebchen!"

     They cannot see the man who is crying out in this way, but they  do see
Enoch  Root,  standing  there and  brooding.  He looks  up  alertly as  they
approach,  and  produces a semiautomatic from his  leather  jacket.  Then he
recognizes them, and relaxes.
     "What the fuck is going on here?" Shaftoe says never one to beat around
in the bush. "Is that a fucking German you're with?"
     "Yes, I am with a German," Root says, "as are you."
     "Well, why is your German making such a fucking spectacle of himself?"
     "Rudy is crying over the body of his lover," Root says, "who died in an
attempt to reunite with him."
     "A woman was flying that plane?" says the flabbergasted Shaftoe.
     Root rolls his eyes and heaves a sigh. "You have forgotten to allow for
the possibility that Rudy might be a homosexual."
     It  takes Shaftoe a  long time  to  stretch his mind around this large,
inconveniently shaped concept. Bischoff, in typical  European fashion, seems
completely unruffled. But he still has questions to ask. "Enoch, why are you
. . . here?"
     "Why has  my spirit been  incarnated into a physical body in this world
generally? Or specifically, why am  I here in a Swedish forest, standing  on
the wreck of a mysterious German rocket plane while a homosexual German sobs
over the cremated remains of his Italian lover?
     "Last  rites,"  Root answers  his own  question. "Angelo was Catholic."
Then,  after a while, he notices that Bischoff  is  staring at him,  looking
completely unsatisfied.  "Oh.  I  am here, in  a larger sense,  because Mrs.
Tenney, the vicar's wife, has become sloppy, and forgotten to close her eyes
when she takes the balls out of the bingo machine."


     Chapter 56 CRUNCH


     The condemned man showers, shaves, puts on most of a suit, and realizes
that he is ahead of  schedule. He turns on the television, gets a San Miguel
out of  the fridge to steady his nerves, and then goes  to the closet to get
the stuff of his last meal.  The apartment  only has one closet and when its
door is  open it  appears to have  been  bricked shut, Cask  of  Amontillado
style,  with very large flat red oblongs, each imprinted with the image of a
venerable and  yet oddly cheerful and  yet somehow  kind of  hauntingly  sad
naval officer. The whole pallet load  was shipped here several weeks  ago by
Avi, in an attempt to lift Randy's  spirits.  For all Randy knows  more  are
still sitting on  a Manila dockside ringed with armed guards and  dictionary
sized rat  traps straining against their triggers, each baited with a single
golden nugget.
     Randy  selects one of the bricks from this  wall, creating a gap in the
formation, but there  is  another, identical  one right behind  it,  another
picture of that same naval officer. They seem to be marching from his closet
in a peppy phalanx.  "Part of this complete balanced breakfast," Randy says.
Then he slams the door on them and walks with a measured, forcibly calm step
to  the living room where  he does most of  his dining, usually while facing
his thirty six inch television. He sets up his San Miguel, an empty bowl, an
exceptionally large soup spoon  so large  that most European cultures  would
identify  it  as  a serving spoon  and most  Asian  ones  as a horticultural
implement. He obtains a stack of paper napkins, not the brown  recycled ones
that can't  be  moistened  even by  immersion in water,  but the  flagrantly
environmentally  unsound  type,  brilliant  white  and  cotton  fluffy   and
desperately  hygroscopic. He goes  to the kitchen, opens the fridge, reaches
deep into  the back, and finds an unopened box bag pod unit of UHT milk. UHT
milk need not, technically, be  refrigerated, but  it is pivotal, in what is
to  follow,  that  the  milk  be only a few microdegrees  above the point of
freezing. The fridge in Randy's apartment has louvers in  the back where the
cold air is blown in, straight from the freon coils. Randy always stores his
milk pods  directly  in front of those  louvers. Not too close,  or else the
pods will block the flow  of air, and not  too far away either. The cold air
becomes visible as it  rushes in and condenses  moisture, so it is  a simple
matter  to sit  there  with  the  fridge  door  open  and  observe  its flow
characteristics, like an engineer testing an experimental minivan in a River
Rouge wind tunnel. What Randy would  like to see, ideally, is the whole milk
pod  enveloped in an even, jacketlike flow to produce  better  heat exchange
through the multilayered plastic  and foil skin  of  the milk pod.  He would
like the milk to be  so cold that when he reaches in and grabs it, he  feels
the flexible, squishy pod stiffen between his fingers as ice crystals spring
into existence, summoned  out of  nowhere simply by the disturbance of being
squished.
     Today the milk is almost, but not quite, that cold. Randy goes into his
living  room  with it. He has to wrap it in a towel because it is so cold it
hurts his fingers. He launches  a  videotape and then sits down.  All  is in
readiness.
     This is one  of a series  of  videotapes  that  are  shot  in  an empty
basketball  gym  with  a  polished maple  floor and  a howling,  remorseless
ventilation  system.  They  depict  a  young  man and a  young  woman,  both
attractive, svelte, and dressed  something like marquee  players  in the Ice
Capades, performing  simple ballroom  dance steps  to  the  accompaniment of
strangled music from  a ghetto blaster set up on the free throw  line. It is
miserably clear that the video  has been shot by  a third conspirator who is
burdened with a consumer grade camcorder and reeling from some kind of inner
ear disease that he  or she  would  like  to share  with others. The dancers
stomp through the most simple steps with autistic determination. The  camera
operator  begins  in  each  case  with a  two  shot, then,  like a desperado
tormenting  a milksop, aims his weapon at their  feet and makes  them dance,
dance, dance. At one  point  the pager hooked to the man's elastic waistband
goes  off and a scene has to be cut short. No wonder: he is one  of the most
sought after ballroom dance instructors in Manila. His partner would be too,
if more men in this city were interested in learning to dance. As it is, she
must scrape by earning maybe a tenth of what the male instructor pulls down,
giving lessons  to  a small number of  addled  or henpecked stumblebums like
Randy Waterhouse.
     Randy  takes  the red box and holds it securely  between his knees with
the handy stay closed tab pointing away from him. Using both hands in unison
he  carefully  works  his fingertips underneath  the flap, trying to achieve
equal pressure on each side,  paying special attention to  places where  too
much glue  was  laid  down  by the  gluing machine.  For  a  few long, tense
moments, nothing at all happens, and an ignorant or impatient observer might
suppose that Randy is getting nowhere. But then the entire flap pops open in
an instant as the  entire glue front gives way.  Randy hates it when the box
top gets bent  or,  worst of  all possible words,  torn.  The  lower flap is
merely tacked down with a couple of small glue spots and Randy pulls it back
to  reveal a translucent,  inflated sac. The halogen  down light recessed in
the ceiling shines through  the cloudy material of  the  sac  to reveal gold
everywhere the glint of gold. Randy rotates the box ninety degrees and holds
it between his knees so its long axis is pointed at the television set, then
grips  the top of the sac and carefully parts its  heat  sealed seam,  which
purrs as it gives way. Removal of the somewhat milky plastic  barrier causes
the individual nuggets of Cap'n Crunch  to resolve, under the halogen light,
with a kind of preternatural crispness and definition that makes the roof of
Randy's mouth glow and throb in trepidation.
     On the  TV,  the dancing instructors have  finished  demonstrating  the
basic  steps. It  is  almost painful to watch  them doing the  compulsories,
because when  they do, they must willfully forget everything they know about
advanced ballroom dancing, and dance like persons who have suffered strokes,
or major brain injuries,  that have  wiped  out not only the parts of  their
brain  responsible for fine motor  skills but also blown every panel  in the
aesthetic discretion module. They must, in other words,  dance the way their
beginning pupils like Randy dance.
     The gold nuggets of  Cap'n Crunch pelt the bottom of the  bowl  with  a
sound  like glass rods being snapped in  half Tiny fragments spall away from
their corners  and ricochet  around  on  the white porcelain  surface. World
class cereal eating is a dance of fine compromises.  The  giant heaping bowl
of sodden  cereal,  awash in milk,  is the mark  of the  novice. Ideally one
wants the bone dry cereal nuggets and the cryogenic milk to  enter the mouth
with minimal contact  and for the entire reaction between them to take place
in the mouth.  Randy has worked out a set of mental blueprints for a special
cereal eating  spoon that will  have a tube  running down the  handle  and a
little pump for the milk, so that you can spoon dry cereal up out of a bowl,
hit a button  with your thumb, and squirt  milk into the bowl of  the  spoon
even as  you  are introducing it into your mouth.  The next best thing is to
work  in small  increments, putting only a small amount  of Cap'n Crunch  in
your  bowl at  a time  and  eating  it all  up before it  becomes  a  pit of
loathsome  slime, which, in  the case  of Cap'n Crunch,  takes about  thirty
seconds.
     At this point in the videotape  he always wonders if he's inadvertently
set his beer down on the fast  forward button,  or  something,  because  the
dancers  go straight from their  vicious  Randy  parody into  something that
obviously qualifies as advanced dancing. Randy knows that the steps they are
doing  are nominally the same as the  basic steps demonstrated earlier,  but
he's damned  if he can tell which is which, once they go into their creative
mode. There is no recognizable transition,  and that is  what  pisses  Randy
off,  and has always  pissed  him off,  about dancing lessons. Any moron can
learn to trudge through the basic steps. That takes all of half an hour. But
when that half  hour is over, dancing instructors always expect you'll  take
flight and go through  one  of those  miraculous time lapse transitions that
happen only  in  Broadway  musicals  and  begin  dancing brilliantly.  Randy
supposes that people who are lousy at math feel the same way: the instructor
writes a  few simple  equations on the  board,  and ten  minutes later  he's
deriving the speed of light in a vacuum.
     He pours the  milk with  one hand while jamming the  spoon  in with the
other, not wanting to waste a single moment of the magical, golden time when
cold milk and  Cap'n Crunch  are together but have  not yet begun to pollute
each other's essential natures: two Platonic ideals  separated by a boundary
a molecule wide. Where the flume of milk splashes over the spoon handle, the
polished stainless steel  fogs with condensation. Randy of course uses whole
milk, because  otherwise why bother? Anything less is indistinguishable from
water, and besides he thinks that the fat in whole milk acts as some kind of
a buffer that retards  the  dissolution into  slime process. The giant spoon
goes  into his mouth before the milk in the  bowl has even had  time to seek
its own level. A few drips come off the bottom and are caught by his freshly
washed goatee  (still trying to find  the right  balance between beardedness
and vulnerability, Randy has allowed one of  these  to grow). Randy sets the
milk  pod down, grabs  a  fluffy napkin, lifts it  to  his  chin, and uses a
pinching motion to sort of lift the drops of  milk from his  whiskers rather
than smashing and  smearing  them down  into the  beard.  Meanwhile  all his
concentration  is fixed on  the interior of his  mouth, which  naturally  he
cannot  see,  but  which  he can imagine in  three dimensions as if  zooming
through it in a virtual reality display. Here is  where a  novice would lose
his cool  and simply chomp down. A  few of the nuggets would explode between
his  molars,  but  then  his  jaw would  snap  shut and  drive  all  of  the
unshattered nuggets straight  up into his  palate where their armor of razor
sharp dextrose crystals would inflict massive collateral damage, turning the
rest of the meal into a  sort of pain  hazed death  march and rendering  him
Novocain mute for three days. But Randy has,  over time, worked out a really
fiendish Cap'n Crunch  eating  strategy that  revolves  around  playing  the
nuggets' most deadly features against each other. The nuggets themselves are
pillow shaped and vaguely striated to echo piratical treasure chests.
     Now, with  a flake type of  cereal, Randy's strategy  would never work.
But then, Cap'n Crunch in a flake form would be suicidal  madness; it  would
last about as long, when immersed in milk, as snowflakes sifting down into a
deep fryer.  No, the cereal engineers at General Mills had to find  a  shape
that would minimize  surface area, and, as  some sort  of compromise between
the  sphere  that  is  dictated  by  Euclidean  geometry and whatever sunken
treasure   related  shapes  that  the  cereal  aestheticians  were  probably
clamoring for,  they came up  with  this  hard  to  pin down striated pillow
formation. The important thing, for Randy's purposes, is that the individual
pieces  of Cap'n  Crunch are, to a  very rough approximation, shaped kind of
like molars. The strategy, then, is to make the Cap'n Crunch  chew itself by
grinding  the nuggets together in the center of the oral cavity, like stones
in a lapidary tumbler. Like  advanced ballroom  dancing, verbal explanations
(or for that matter watching videotapes) only goes so far and then your body
just has to learn the moves.
     By the time he has eaten a satisfactory amount of Cap'n Crunch (about a
third  of  a 25 ounce box) and reached the bottom of his beer bottle,  Randy
has convinced himself that this whole  dance thing is a practical joke. When
he  reaches the hotel, Amy  and Doug Shaftoe will  be  waiting for him  with
mischievous smiles. They will tell him they were just teasing and  then take
him into the bar to talk him down.
     Randy puts on the last few bits of  his  suit. Any delaying tactics are
acceptable at this point, so he checks his e mail.
     To: randy@epiphyte.com
     From: root@eruditorum.org
     Subject: The Pontifex Transform, as requested
     Randy,
     You  are right,  of course as the  Germans learned the hard way, no new
cryptosystem can be trusted until it has been published, so that people like
your Secret Admirer friends can have a go at breaking it. I would be in your
debt if you would do this with Pontifex.
     The  transform  at the heart  of Pontifex  has various asymmetries  and
special cases  that make it difficult to  express  in a few  clean,  elegant
lines of math. It  almost has  to be written down  as  pseudo  code. But why
settle for pseudo when you can have the real thing? What follows is Pontifex
written  as  a  Perl  script.  The  variable  $D  contains  the  54  element
permutation. The subroutine  e generates the  next  keystream  value  whilst
evolving $D.


     #!/usr/bin/perl s
     $f=$d? 1:1;$D=pack('C*'.33..86);$p=shift;
     $p=~y/a z/A Z/;$U='$D=~s/(.*)U$/U$1/;
     $D=~s/U(.)/$1U/;';($V=$U)=~s/U/V/g;
     $p=~s/[A Z]/$k=ord($&) 64,&e/eg;$k=0;
     while(<>){y/a z/A Z/;y/A Z//dc;$o.=$_}$o.='X'
     while length ($o)%5&&!$d;
     $o=~s/./chr(($f*&e+ord($&) l3)%26+65)/eg;
     $o=~s/X*$// if $d;$o=~s/.{5}/$& /g;
     print"$o\n";sub v{$v=ord(substr($D,$_[0])) 32;
     $v>53?53:$v}
     sub w{$D=~s/(.{$_[0]})(.*)(.)/$2$1$3/}
     sub e{eval"$U$V$V";$D=~s/(.*)([UV].*[UV])(.*)/$3$2$l/;
     &w(&v(53));$k?(&w($k)):($c=&v(&v(0)),$c>52?&e:$c)}
     There is also one message from his palimony lawyer in California, which
he prints  and  puts into his  breast pocket to  savor while he  is stuck in
traffic.  He takes the elevator downstairs and  catches a taxi to the Manila
Hotel.  This (riding  in a  taxi through  Manila)  would be  one of the more
memorable  experiences of his  life if this were the first time he  had ever
done it, but is the millionth time and so nothing registers. For example, he
sees two cars smashed together directly beneath a giant road sign that  says
NO SWERVING, but he doesn't really take note.
     Dear Randy,
     The worst is over. Charlene  and (more importantly) her  lawyer seem to
have accepted, finally, that  you are not sitting on  top of a huge pile  of
gold in  the Philippines!  Now that  your imaginary millions  are  no longer
confusing  the picture,  we can figure  out how to dispose of the assets you
actually have:  primarily, your equity in the house. This would be much more
complicated if Charlene wanted to  remain there, however it now appears that
she  has landed that Yale  job, which means  that  she  is just as  eager to
liquidate the house as you are. The question, then, will be how the proceeds
of the  sale  should be divided between you  and her. Their position appears
(not surprisingly)  to be that the huge increase in the house's value  since
you bought it  is a consequence of  changes in the real estate market  never
mind the quarter million you  spent shoring up the foundation, replacing the
plumbing, etc., etc.
     I assume you kept all of the receipts, cancelled checks and other proof
of how much money you spent on improvements, because that's the kind of  guy
you are. It would help me very much if I could pull these  out and wave them
around during my  next round of discussions with Charlene's  lawyer. Can you
produce them? I realize that this will  be something of an inconvenience for
you. However, since  you  have  invested most of your  net  worth into  that
house, the stakes are high.
     Randy puts the page into his breast pocket and  begins planning  a trip
to California.
     Most of the ballroom  dancing freaks in  this town belong to the social
class that can afford  cars and drivers.  The  cars are lined up all the way
down the hotel's  drive and out into the street, waiting to discharge  their
passengers,  whose bright  gowns are  visible even  through  tinted windows.
Attendants blow whistles and gesture with their white gloves, vectoring cars
into the parking lot, where they are sintered into a  tight mosaic. Some  of
the drivers don't even bother  getting out, and lean their  seats back for a
nap.  Others gather beneath a tree at one end of the lot to smoke, joke, and
shake their heads in dazed amusement at the world  in the way that only your
hardened future shocked Third Worlders can.
     Since he  has  been dreading this so much, you'd think Randy might just
sit back and  savor the delay.  But, like jerking a bandage off a hairy part
of the body, it is a deed  best done quickly and suddenly. As they pull to a
stop at  the  back of the line of limos,  he shoves  money at  his surprised
driver, opens the door,  and walks the  last block to the hotel. He can feel
the eyes of the gowned and  perfumed Filipinas playing across his husky back
like laser sights on commandos' rifles.
     Aging Filipinas in prom dresses have come and gone across the  lobby of
the Manila Hotel for as long as Randy has known the place. He hardly noticed
them  during the  early months when he was actually living there.  The first
time they appeared, he assumed that some function  was underway in the grand
ballroom:  perhaps a  wedding, perhaps  a  class action suit being filed  by
aging beauty contest contestants against the synthetic fibers industry. That
was about as far as he got before he stopped burning out his mental circuits
trying  to figure  everything out. Pursuing an explanation for every strange
thing you  see in the  Philippines  is like  trying to get every last bit of
rainwater out of a discarded tire.
     The Shaftoes are not waiting by the door to tell him it was all a joke,
so Randy squares  his shoulders and stomps  doggedly  across the vast lobby,
all alone, like a Confederate infantryman in Pickett's Charge, the  last man
of his regiment.  A photographer  in a Ronald Reagan pompadour and  a  white
tuxedo  is planted before  the door to the grand ballroom, shooting pictures
of people on the way in, hoping  that they will pay  for copies on  the  way
out. Randy shoots him such a fell look that the man's shutter finger cringes
back from the button. Then it's through the big doors and into the ballroom,
where, beneath swirling, colored lights, hundreds  of Filipinas are dancing,
mostly  with much  younger men,  to  the strains of a reprocessed Carpenters
tune generated  by  a small  orchestra in the corner. Randy  shells out some
pesos for a  corsage of sampaguita flowers. Holding  it at arm's  length  so
that he will not be plunged into a diabetic coma by its fumes, he  commences
a Magellanian circumnavigation of the dance floor, which is surrounded by an
atoll  of  round tables  that  are adorned  with  white  linen  tablecloths,
candles, and glass ashtrays. A man with a thin mustache sits alone at one of
those tables, back against  the wall, a cellphone against his head, one side
of his  face illuminated fluoroscopically  by  the  eerie green light of its
keypad. A cigarette juts from his fist.
     Grandma Waterhouse insisted that  seven  year old  Randy  take ballroom
dance lessons because one day it would certainly come in handy. He begged to
differ. Her Australian  accent had turned lofty  and English in  the decades
since she  had come to America, or maybe  that was  his imagination. She sat
there,  bolt upright as always, on her floral chintz Gomer Bolstrood settee,
the  sere hills of  the  Palouse  visible  through lace curtains behind her,
sipping tea  from a white  china  cup decorated with was it lavender  roses?
When she tilted the cup back,  seven year old Randy must  have  been able to
read the name of  the china pattern off the bottom.  The information must be
stored  in  his  subconscious  memory somewhere.  Perhaps  a hypnotist could
extract it.
     But seven year  old Randy had other things on his mind: protesting,  in
the strongest possible terms, the assertion that ballroom dance skills could
ever be of  any use.  At the same time, he was being patterned. Implausible,
even  ludicrous  ideas were suffusing his brain,  invisible  and odorless as
carbon monoxide gas: that the Palouse was  a normal landscape.  That the sky
was this blue  everywhere.  That  a  house should  look this  way: with lace
curtains, leaded glass windows, and  room after room full of Gomer Bolstrood
furniture.
     "I  met your  grandfather Lawrence at  a dance,  in Brisbane,"  Grandma
announced. She was  trying to tell him that he, Randall Lawrence Waterhouse,
would not even exist  had it not  been for the practice of ballroom dancing.
But Randy did not even know where babies came from yet and probably wouldn't
have  understood  even if  he did.  Randy straightened  up, remembering  his
posture, and asked her a  question:  did this encounter  in  Brisbane happen
when she was seven years old, or, perhaps, a little later?
     Perhaps if  she  had lived in a mobile home,  the  grown up Randy would
have  sunk his money  into  a  mutual fund, instead of  paying ten  thousand
dollars to  a soi  disant artisan from San Francisco to install leaded glass
windows around his front door, like at Grandma's house.
     He provides  tremendous,  long lasting  amusement  to  the  Shaftoes by
walking right past their table without recognizing them. He  looks  right at
Doug Shaftoe's date, a striking Filipina, probably in her forties, who is in
the middle of making some forceful  point. Without taking  her eyes off Doug
and  Amy Shaftoe,  she  reaches  out with one long graceful  arm  and  snags
Randy's wrist  as he goes by, yanking  him back like a dog on a meat  leash.
She then  holds him there while  she finishes her sentence, then looks up at
him with a  brilliant  smile. Randy  smiles back dutifully, but he does  not
give  her  the full  attention she seems accustomed to, because he is  a bit
preoccupied by the spectacle of America Shaftoe in a dress.
     Fortunately, Amy  has  not  gone in  for the prom  queen look.  She  is
wearing a form fitting black number with long sleeves that hide her tattoos,
and black tights, as opposed to stockings. Randy gives her the flowers, like
a quarterback handing off the pigskin  to a runner.  She accepts them with a
crooked expression,  like  a wounded soldier biting  down on a bullet. Irony
aside, she has  a gleam in her eye that he  has never seen before.  Or maybe
that is just light from the  mirrored ball, reflecting off  cigarette  smoke
induced tears. He senses in his  gut that he  did the right thing by showing
up.  As with all  gut feelings,  only time  will  tell whether  this  it  is
pathetic self delusion. He was kind of afraid that she would go through some
Hollywoodesque transfiguration  into a radiant goddess, which would have the
same effect  on  Randy  as an ax  to the base  of the skull. The fact of the
matter is  that she looks quite good, but arguably, just as out of place  as
Randy is in his suit.
     He is hoping that they can get  the dancing over right away so  that he
can flee the building in Cinderellan obloquy, but they bid him sit down. The
orchestra takes a break and the dancers return to their tables. Doug Shaftoe
is comfortably sprawled back in his chair with the masculine confidence of a
man who has not  only killed  people but who is, furthermore,  escorting the
most beautiful woman in the room. Her name is Aurora Taal, and she casts her
flawlessly Lancomed  gaze  over  the  other  Filipinas with  the  controlled
amusement of  one who has lived in Boston,  Washington, and London, and seen
it all, and come back to live in Manila anyway.
     "So,  did you  learn  anything  more  about this Rudolf von  Hacklheber
character?" Doug asks, after a few minutes  of small  talk. It follows  that
Aurora must be in  on the whole secret.  Doug  mentioned, weeks ago,  that a
small  number of  Filipinos knew about what they  were doing, and that  they
could be trusted.
     "He  was a mathematician. He was  from a wealthy Leipzig family. He was
at Princeton  before the war. His years there did, in fact, overlap  with my
grandfather's."
     "What kind of math did he do, Randy?"
     "Before the war he did number theory. Which tells us nothing about what
he did during the war. It wouldn't be surprising if he'd ended up working in
the Third Reich's crypto apparatus."
     "Which wouldn't explain how he ended up here."
     Randy shrugs. "Maybe he did engineering work on the  new generation  of
submarines. I don't know."
     "So the Reich got  him involved in some kind  of classified work, which
killed  him  eventually,"  Doug  says.  "We  could  have  guessed  that  for
ourselves, I suppose."
     "Why did  you mention  crypto, then?" Amy asks.  She  has some  kind of
emotional  metal  detector  that  screams  whenever  it  comes  near  buried
assumptions and hastily stifled impulses.
     "I  guess I  have crypto on the brain. And, if there  was some kind  of
connection between von Hacklheber and my grandfather "
     "Was your grandfather a crypto guy, Randy?" Doug asks.
     "He never said anything about what he did during the war."
     "Classic."
     "But  he  had this  trunk up in the attic. A war souvenir.  It actually
reminds me of a trunk full of Nipponese crypto materials that I recently saw
in a cave in Kinakuta."  Doug and Amy  stare at  him. "It doesn't amount  to
anything, probably," Randy concedes.
     The orchestra starts in with a Sinatra tune. Doug  and Aurora smile  at
each other and rise  to their feet.  Amy rolls her eyes and looks the  other
way, but it's put up or shut up time now,  and Randy  cannot conceive of any
way out. He stands  up and extends his hand  to  the  one he fears and hopes
for, and she, without looking, reaches out and puts her hand into his.
     Randy  shuffles, which is no way to dance beautifully but does rule out
snapping his partner's  metatarsals.  Amy is essentially no  better  at this
than he is, but  she has a better  attitude. By the time they get to the end
of the  first dance, Randy has at least reached  the point where his face is
no  longer  burning, and has gone for some thirty seconds without  having to
apologize  for anything, and  sixty without asking  his partner  whether she
will be needing medical attention. Then the song is over, and  circumstances
dictate that he  has  to dance with Aurora Taal. This is less  intimidating;
even though she is glamorous and a really good dancer, their relationship is
not one that allows for  the possibility of  grotesque pre  erotic fumbling.
Also,  Aurora  smiles  a lot, and she has a really spectacular smile,  where
Amy's  face was  intense and preoccupied. The  next  dance  is announced  as
ladies' choice, and Randy is still trying to make eye  contact with Amy when
he finds this tiny  middle aged Filipina standing there asking Aurora if she
would mind terribly. Aurora consigns him to the other lady like a pork belly
futures contract on the commodity exchange,  and suddenly Randy and the lady
are dancing the Texas two step to the strains of a pre disco Bee Gees tune.
     "So,  have you found  wealth  in the  Philippines  yet?" asks the lady,
whose name Randy did not quite catch. She acts as if she expects him to know
her.
     "Uh, my  partners and  I are exploring business  opportunities,"  Randy
says. "Maybe wealth will follow."
     "I understand you are good with numbers," the lady says.
     Randy is  really racking his brain now. How does this woman know he's a
numbers kind of guy? "I'm good with math," he finally says.
     "Isn't that what I said?"
     "Nah, mathematicians stay away from actual, specific numbers as much as
possible. We like to talk about numbers  without actually exposing ourselves
to them that's what computers are for."
     The lady will not be denied; she has a script and she's sticking to it.
"I have a math problem for you," the lady says.
     "Shoot."
     "What  is  the  value of the  following information:  fifteen  degrees,
seventeen minutes, forty  one point three two seconds  north,  and a hundred
and  twenty  one degrees, fifty seven minutes, zero point five  five seconds
east?"
     "Uh.  .  .  I don't know.  It sounds  like  a latitude  and  longitude.
Northern Luzon, right?"
     The lady nods.
     "You want me to tell you the value of those numbers?"
     "Yes."
     "Depends on what's there, I guess."
     "I suppose it does," the  lady says. And that's  all  she says, for the
rest of the dance. Other than  complimenting  Randy on  his balletic skills,
which is just as hard to interpret.


     Chapter 57 GIRL


     Flats are harder and harder to find in Brisbane, which has become a spy
boomtown Bletchley Park Down Under. There's Central Bureau, which has set up
out  at the  Ascot Racetrack, and another entity in a different part of town
called  Allied Intelligence Bureau. The people  who  work  at Central Bureau
tend to be  pallid mathematics experts. The AIB  people,  on the other hand,
remind Waterhouse very much of those Detachment 2702 fellows: tense, tanned,
and taciturn.
     Half  a  mile  from  the  Ascot Racetrack, he sees  one  of  the latter
tripping lightly  down  the  steps  of  a  nice gingerbready  rooming house,
carrying a five hundred pound duffel bag on his back. The man is dressed for
a long trip. A grandmotherish lady in an apron is on  the veranda, waving  a
tea towel at him. It is like a scene  from  a  movie; you wouldn't even know
that only a few  hours'  flight  from  here,  men  are  turning  black  like
photographic paper in  a developer  tray as  their living flesh is converted
into putrid gas by Clostridium bacteria.
     Waterhouse does not stop to estimate the probability that he, who needs
a place to  live, should happen  along  at the exact moment that a room  has
become  available. Cryptanalysts  wait for lucky  breaks, then exploit them.
After the  departing soldier has disappeared round the  corner, he knocks on
the  door  and introduces himself to  the lady.  Mrs. McTeague says (to  the
extent Waterhouse  can penetrate her  accent) that she likes  his looks. She
sounds distinctly astonished.  It  seems  clear that  the  improbability  of
Waterhouse's  having happened upon this  vacant  room is nothing compared to
the improbability of having his looks liked by Mrs. McTeague. Thus, Lawrence
Pritchard Waterhouse joins  a small  elite group of young men (four in  all)
whose looks Mrs. McTeague  likes. They sleep, two to a room, in the bedrooms
where Mrs. McTeague's offspring  grew from the brightest and most  beautiful
children ever born  into the finest adults who walk the earth except for the
King of England, the General, and Lord Mountbatten.
     Waterhouse's new roommate is out of town just now, but by glancing over
his personal effects, Waterhouse estimates that he is paddling a black kayak
from  Australia  to  Yokosuka  Naval  Base,  where he will  slip on  board a
battleship  and silently  kill  its entire crew  with his bare hands  before
doing an  Olympic qualifying dive into the bay, punching  out a few  sharks,
climbing back into his kayak and paddling back to Australia for a beer.
     The next morning, at breakfast, he meets the  fellows in the next room:
a  redheaded British naval officer who shows all the earmarks of  working at
Central  Bureau, and a fellow named Hale, whose nationality cannot be pegged
because he's not in uniform and he's too hung over to speak.
     Having accomplished his mission  (according to  his understanding  with
the General's  minions),  found  a  place  to  live,  and settled  his other
personal affairs, Waterhouse begins  hanging around the Ascot  Racetrack and
the  adjacent whorehouse,  trying to find  some  way to make himself useful.
Actually he would  rather sit  in  his room all day  and  work  on  his  new
project, which is to design a high  speed Turing  machine. But he has a duty
to  contribute to the war  effort. Even if he didn't,  he suspects that when
his new roommate gets back from  his mission, and finds  him sitting indoors
all day  drawing  circuit diagrams,  he will thrash Waterhouse  to the point
where Mrs. McTeague will no longer like his looks.
     To  put  it mildly, Central Bureau is  not the  kind  of  place where a
stranger can just wander in, check the place out, introduce himself and find
a  job.  Even the  wandering  in  part  is  potentially fatal.  Fortunately,
Waterhouse has  Ultra Mega  clearance, the highest clearance in  the  Entire
World.
     Unfortunately, this  category of secrecy  is itself  so secret that its
very  existence is  secret, and so  he  can't actually reveal  it to  anyone
unless he finds  someone  else with Ultra  Mega  clearance. There are only a
dozen people  with  Ultra Mega clearance in all of Brisbane.  Eight  of them
comprise  the top of the General's command hierarchy, three work at  Central
Bureau, and one is Waterhouse.
     Waterhouse  sniffs  out  the  nerve  center   in  the  old  whorehouse.
Superannuated Australian Territorial Guards in jaunty asymmetrical hats ring
the  place, clutching blunderbusses.  Unlike Mrs. McTeague, they don't  like
his looks. On the other hand they are used to this kind of thing: smart boys
from far away showing  up at  the  gate  with  long and, in the end,  boring
stories  about  how  the military  screwed up their orders, put them in  the
wrong boat, sent them to the wrong place, gave them tropical diseases, threw
their  belongings overboard, left them  to fend  for  themselves. They don't
shoot him, but they don't let him in.
     He hangs around and makes  a nuisance  of himself for a  couple of days
until he finally recognizes, and is recognized by, Abraham Sinkov. Sinkov is
a  top  American  cryptanalyst;  he  helped  Schoen  break  Indigo.  He  and
Waterhouse have crossed paths a few times,  and though they  aren't friends,
per se, their minds work the  same way.  This makes them brothers in a weird
family that has only a few hundred members,  scattered about the world. In a
way, it is a clearance that is rarer, harder to come by, and more mysterious
than  Ultra Mega.  Sinkov  writes him a new  set of  papers,  giving  him  a
clearance that is very high, but not so high that he can't reveal it.
     Waterhouse gets a tour. Shirtless men sit in Quonset huts made stifling
by  the red hot tubes  of their  radios.  They pluck  the  Nipponese  Army's
messages out  of the air and  hand them off to legions of  young  Australian
women who punch the intercepted messages onto ETC cards.
     There  is a  cadre  of  American officers composed  entirely of a whole
department of the Electrical Till  Corporation. One day, early in 1942, they
put their white shirts  and blue suits into mothballs, donned Army uniforms,
and climbed on ships to Brisbane. Their ringleader is a guy named Lieutenant
Colonel Comstock, and he has gotten the whole  code breaking process totally
automated. The cards punched by the Aussie girls come into the machine  room
stacked into ingots which are fed  through the machines. Decrypts fly out of
a line printer  on the  other  end and are taken  off  to another hut  where
American nisei, and some white men trained in Nipponese, translate them.
     A  Waterhouse is  the  last thing these guys  need.  He's beginning  to
understand what the major said  to him the other day: they  have passed over
the watershed line. The codes are broken.
     Which reminds  him  of  Turing. Ever  since Alan got back from New York
he's been distancing himself from Bletchley Park. He has moved up to another
installation,  a  radio center called  Hanslope  in north Buckinghamshire, a
place  of reinforced concrete, wires, antennas, more military formal  in its
atmosphere.
     At  the  time, Waterhouse  could not understand why  Alan would want to
move away  from  Bletchley. But now he knows  how Alan must have  felt after
they turned decryption  into a mechanical process, industrializing Bletchley
Park. He must have felt that the  battle was  won, and with  it the war. The
rest might seem like glorious conquest  to  people like the  General, but to
Turing, and  now to Waterhouse, it just looks like tedious mopping up. It is
exciting  to  discover electrons  and figure out  the equations that  govern
their movement; it is boring to  use those principles to design electric can
openers. From here on out, it's all can openers.
     Sinkov provides Waterhouse with a desk in the  whorehouse and begins to
feed him the messages that Central Bureau hasn't been able to decrypt. There
are  still dozens of minor Nipponese codes  that remain to be broken. Maybe,
by  breaking  one  or  two, and  teaching  the  ETC  machines  to read them,
Waterhouse can shorten the war by a single  day, or save a single life. This
is  a noble  calling that he undertakes  willingly, but in essence it is  no
different  from being an Army butcher who saves  lives by keeping his knives
clean, or a lifeboat inspector in the Navy.
     Waterhouse  cracks those minor Nip codes one after the other. One month
he even flies up to New Guinea, where  Navy  divers are salvaging code books
from a sunken Nip submarine. He lives in the jungle for two weeks and  tries
not to  die, comes back to Brisbane, and puts those  recovered codebooks  to
good but dull use. Then one day the dullness of his work becomes irrelevant.
     On  that  day, he returns  to  Mrs.  McTeague's  boardinghouse  in  the
evening, goes to  his room, and finds a large man snoring in the upper bunk.
A lot  of  clothing and equipment is  scattered  about the  place, emanating
sulfurous reek.
     The man sleeps for two days and then comes down late for  breakfast one
morning,  peering around  the room with Atabrine yellow eyes. He  introduces
himself as  Smith.  His oddly  familiar  accent is  not  made any easier  to
understand by the fact that his teeth are  chattering  violently. He doesn't
seem  especially bothered by this.  He  sits  down  and paws  an Irish linen
napkin into his lap with a hand that is stiff  and raw. Mrs. McTeague fusses
over him to  the extent that all of the  men at  the table  must resist  the
impulse to slug her. She pours him tea  with  plenty of milk  and  sugar. He
takes a few  sips, then excuses himself and goes to the WC, where he crisply
and politely vomits. He comes back, eats a soft boiled egg from a bone china
egg cup, turns green, leans back in his chair, and closes his eyes for about
ten minutes.
     When Waterhouse  returns  from work that evening, he blunders  into the
parlor and interrupts Mrs. McTeague having tea with a young lady.
     The young lady's name is Mary Smith; she is the cousin  of Waterhouse's
roommate, who is upstairs shivering and sweating in his bunk bed.
     Mary  stands up to be introduced,  which is not technically  necessary;
but she is a girl from the outback and has no use for effete refinement. She
is a petite girl dressed in a uniform.
     She  is the only woman Waterhouse has ever seen. She is the  only other
human being in the  universe actually,  and when she stands up to shake  his
hand,  his peripheral  vision  shuts  down  as  if he has been sucking  on a
tailpipe. Black curtains converge across a silver cyclorama, shuttering down
his cosmos to a vertical shaft  of carbon  arc  glory,  a pillar of light, a
heavenly follow spot targeted upon Her.
     Mrs. McTeague, knowing the score, bids him sit down.
     Mary is a tiny, white skinned, red headed person who is often seized by
little  fits of  self  consciousness.  When this happens she averts her eyes
from his and swallows,  and when she swallows there is a certain cord in her
white neck, rounding the concavity from shoulder to ear, that stands out for
a  moment.  It  draws attention both to her vulnerability and  to  the white
flesh of her neck, which is not white in a pallid sick way  but  in  another
way  that Waterhouse could never have understood until recently: viz.,  from
his  little  stint  in  New  Guinea,  where  everything is  either  dead and
decaying,   or   bright  and  threatening,  or  unobtrusive  and  invisible,
Waterhouse knows that anything this tender and translucent is too vulnerable
and tempting to  hold its own  in a world of violently competing destroyers,
that  it can only  be  sustained for a  moment (let alone years) by the life
force  within.  In  the South Pacific  where  the  forces  of Death  are  so
powerful, it leaves him vaguely intimidated. Her  skin, as unmarked as clear
water,  is  an extravagant display of  vibrant animal  power.  He  wants his
tongue on it. The whole curve of her neck, from collarbone to earlobe, would
make a perfect cradle for his face.
     She  sees  him looking  at her, and  swallows  again.  The cord flexes,
stretching the living skin  of her neck  out  for  just a  moment,  and then
relaxes, leaving nothing but smoothness and calm. She may  just as well have
caved his head in with a stone and tied his penis round a hitching rail. The
effect must be calculated. But apparently she has not ever done it to anyone
else, or there would be a band of gold round her pale left ring finger.
     Mary Smith is beginning to get annoyed  with him. She lifts  the teacup
to  her lips. She  has turned so that the light is grazing her neck in a new
way, and this time when she swallows he can see her Adam's apple moving  up.
Then it comes down like a pile driver on what is left of his good judgment.
     There is  a  thumping  noise upstairs;  her  cousin has  just  regained
consciousness.  "Excuse  me," she says,  and  she's gone,  leaving only Mrs.
McTeague's bone china as a reminder.


     Chapter 58 CONSPIRACY


     Dr.  Rudolf  Von  Hacklheber  is  not much  older  than sergeant  Bobby
Shaftoe, but even emotionally crushed, he  has  a certain  bearing about him
that  men in Shaftoe's world don't  acquire until they are in their forties,
if  then. His eyeglasses have tiny rimless lenses  that look  like they were
scavenged from a sniper's telescopic sights. Behind them is a whole paintbox
of vivid colors: blond lashes, blue eyes, red veins, lids swollen and purple
from weeping. Even so, he has a perfect shave, and the  silvery Nordic light
coming  in  through the  tiny windows of  Enoch Root's church cellar glances
from the planes of his face so as to highlight an interesting terrain of big
pores, premature creases, and old dueling scars. He has tried  to grease his
hair back, but  it misbehaves  and keeps tumbling down over his brow.  He is
wearing a white dress shirt and a very  long, heavy overcoat  on top of that
to ward off the cellar's chill.  Shaftoe, who hiked back  to Norrsbruck with
him  several  days  ago, knows that the long  legged von Hacklheber has  the
makings  of  a  half  decent  jock. But  he  can tell that rude  sports like
football would be  out of the  question; this Kraut would  be  a fencer or a
mountain climber or a skier.
     Shaftoe  was   only  startled   not  bothered   by   von   Hacklheber's
homosexuality. Some  of  the China Marines in Shanghai had a lot more  young
Chinese boys hanging  around their  flats than they really  needed  to shine
their boots and  Shanghai is far from the strangest or most far flung  place
where Marines made  themselves at home between the wars. You can worry about
morality when  you're off duty, but if you are  always stewing  and fretting
over  what the other guys are doing in the sack, then  what the hell are you
going to do  when you're presented with  an opportunity  to hit a  Nip squad
with a flamethrower?
     They buried the remains of Angelo, the pilot, two weeks ago,  and  only
now is von Hacklheber feeling in any kind of  shape to talk. He has rented a
cottage outside of town, but he has  come into Norrsbruck to meet with Root,
Shaftoe,  and  Bischoff on this day,  partly  because  he is  convinced that
German spies  are watching  it. Shaftoe shows up with  a  bottle  of Finnish
schnapps, Bischoff brings a loaf of  bread, Root  breaks out a  tin of fish.
Von Hacklheber brings information. Everyone brings cigarettes.
     Shaftoe smokes early and often, trying to kill the mildewy smell of the
cellar,  which reminds him of being locked up there with Enoch Root, kicking
his morphine habit. During that time, the pastor once had to come downstairs
and ask him please to stop screaming for a while because they were trying to
do a wedding upstairs. Shaftoe hadn't known he was screaming.
     Rudolf  von  Hacklheber's  English  is, in some  respects,  better than
Shaftoe's. He sounds unnervingly  like Bobby's junior high  school  drafting
teacher,  Mr.  Jaeger.  "Before  the  war  I  worked  under Dönitz  for  the
Beobachtung  Dienst of the  Kriegsmarine. We  broke some  of the most secret
codes of the British  Admiralty even before the  outbreak of hostilities.  I
was  responsible  for some  advances  in  this field,  involving the use  of
mechanical calculation. When war broke out there was much reorganization and
I became like a bone that several dogs are fighting over.  I was  moved into
Referat  Iva  of  Gruppe  IV,  Analytical Cryptanalysis,  which was  part of
Hauptgruppe  B,  Cryptanalysis, which reported ultimately  to  Major General
Erich Feilgiebel, Chief of Wehrmachtnachrichtungen verbindungen."

     Shaftoe looks  around at  the others, but none of them laughs, or  even
grins. They must not have heard it.  "Come again?" Shaftoe asks, proddingly,
like a man in a bar  trying to  get a shy friend to  tell a sure fire  thigh
slapper.
     "Wehrmachtnachrichtungenverbindungen,"   von  Hacklheber   says,   very
slowly, as if repeating  nursery rhymes to a toddler. He blinks once, twice,
three times  at Shaftoe,  then  sits forward  and says, brightly: "Perhaps I
should explain the organization of the  German intelligence hierarchy, since
it will help you all to understand my story."
     A BRIEF  TRIP INTO HELL'S DEMO  with HERR  DOKTOR PROFESSOR  RUDOLF VON
HACKLHEBER ensues.
     Shaftoe only hears  the first couple  of  sentences. At about the point
when von  Hacklheber tears a sheet out of  a notebook  and begins to diagram
the organizational tree of the Thousand Year Reich, with "Der Führer" at the
top, Shaftoe's eyes take on a  heavy glaze, his  body goes slack, he becomes
deaf, and he  accelerates up the throat of a nightmare,  like the butt  of a
half digested corn dog being reverse peristalsed from the body of an addict.
He has never been through this experience  before, but he  knows intuitively
that  this is how  the trip to Hell works: no leisurely boat ride across the
scenic  Styx,  no  gradual descent  into  that trite  tourist trap,  Pluto's
Cavern, no stops along the way to buy fishing licenses for the Lake of Fire.
     Shaftoe is  not (though he should be) dead, and so this is not hell. It
is closely modeled after hell, though. It is like a mock up slapped together
from tar paper and canvas, like the fake towns where they practiced house to
house warfare  during  boot camp. Shaftoe is gripped  with  a  sort of giddy
queasiness  that, he knows, is the most  pleasant thing he  will feel  here.
"Morphine  takes away the body's ability to  experience pleasure,"  says the
booming voice of Enoch Root, his  wry, annoying  Virgil, who for purposes of
this nightmare has adopted the voice  and  physical shape of  Moe, the mean,
dark haired Stooge. "It may be some time before you feel physically well."
     The   organizational   tree  of   this  nightmare   begins,   like  von
Hacklheber's,  with Der  Führer, but  then branches out widely and  crazily.
There  is an Asian branch,  headed up by the General,  and  including, among
other things, a  Hauptgruppe  of giant  carnivorous  lizards, a  Referat  of
Chinese  women  holding  up  pale  eyed  babies, and several  Abteilungs  of
plastered Nips  with  swords.  In the center of their domain is  the city of
Manila, where, in a tableau  that Shaftoe  would identify as Boschian  if he
had not spent his high school  art class  out behind the school  leg fucking
cheerleaders, a heavily pregnant Glory Altamira is being forced to  do  blow
jobs on syphilitic Nipponese troops.
     The  voice of  Mr. Jaeger, his drafting  teacher  the most  boring  man
Shaftoe had ever  known, until perhaps today fades in for a moment with  the
words, "but  all of  the organizational  structures I have detailed to  this
point became  obsolete at  the outbreak  of  hostilities. The hierarchy  was
shuffled and several of  the entities changed their names, as follows . . ."
Shaftoe hears a new sheet of paper being torn from the notebook, but what he
sees  is Mr. Jaeger tearing  up a diagram  of  a  table leg bracket that the
young  Bobby  Shaftoe  had  spent  a  week  drafting.  Everything  has  been
reorganized, General  MacArthur is still very  high  in the tree, walking  a
brace of giant  lizards on steel  leashes,  but now the hierarchy  is filled
with  grinning  Arabs holding up lumps of hashish, frozen  butchers, dead or
doomed lieutenants, and that fucking weirdo,  Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse,
dressed in a black, hooded robe, heading up a whole  legion of pencil necked
Signals geeks, also  in robes, holding bizarrely shaped antennas above their
heads,  wading through a  blizzard  of dollar bills printed  on  old Chinese
newspapers. Their eyes glow, flashing on and off in Morse code.
     "What are they saying?" Bobby says.
     "Please, stop screaming," says Enoch Root. "Just for a little while."
     Bobby's lying on  a  cot in  a thatched  hut  in  Guadalcanal.  Swedish
tribesmen run around in loincloths, gathering food: every  so often,  a ship
gets blown up out in the Slot, and fish shrapnel rains down and gets hung up
in the branches, along  with the  occasional  severed human arm or  hunk  of
skull. The Swedes ignore the  human bits and harvest the fish, taking it off
to make lutefisk in black steel drums.
     Enoch Root has an old cigar box on his lap. Golden light is shining out
of the crack around its lid.
     But  he's not in  the thatched  hut anymore;  he's inside a cold  black
metal phallus that has been probing  around  down below  the surface of  the
nightmare:  Bischoff's submarine.  Depth charges are  going off all over the
place and it's filling up with  sewage.  Something clocks him on the side of
the head: not  a ham this time, but a human leg.  The sub's lined with tubes
that carry voices:  in English, German, Arabic, Nipponese, Shanghainese, but
confined  and muffled in  the plumbing so that they mingle together like the
running  of water. Then  a  pipe  is ruptured  by a near  miss  from a depth
charge; from its jagged end issues a German voice:
     "The foregoing may be taken as a rather coarse grained treatment of the
general   organization   of   the   Reich  and  particularly  the  military.
Responsibility for  cryptanalysis and cryptography is  distributed  among  a
large number of small Amts and Diensts attached to various tendrils of  this
structure. These are continually being reorganized and rearranged, however I
may be able to provide you with a reasonably accurate and detailed picture .
. ."
     Shaftoe, chained to a bunk in the  submarine by fetters of  gold, feels
one of his small, concealed handguns  pressing  into the small  of his back,
and wonders whether  it would be bad  form to shoot himself in the mouth. He
paws  wildly at the broken tube and manages to  slap it down into the rising
sewage; bubbles  come  out, and von Hacklheber's words are trapped in  them,
like  word balloons in a comic strip. When the bubbles reach the surface and
burst, it sounds like screaming.
     Root is sitting on the opposite bunk with the cigar box  on his lap. He
holds up his hand in a V  for Victory, then  levels it at Shaftoe's face and
pokes him in the  eyes.  "I  cannot help you with  your  inability  to  find
physical  comfort it  is  a problem of body chemistry," he  says.  "It poses
interesting  theological questions.  It reminds us that all the pleasures of
the world are an illusion projected into our souls by our bodies."
     A lot  of  the  other  speaking tubes have  ruptured now, and screaming
comes from most  of  them;  Root has to lean close  in  order to shout  into
Bobby's ear. Shaftoe takes advantage of it to reach over and make a grab for
the cigar box,  which contains the stuff he  wants: not morphine.  Something
better  than morphine. Morphine  is to  the stuff  in the cigar  box what  a
Shanghai prostitute is to Glory.
     The box flies open  and blinding  light comes out of it. Shaftoe covers
his face. The salted and  preserved  body parts  suspended from  the ceiling
tumble  into his  lap and  begin to writhe,  reaching out for  other  parts,
assembling themselves into  living bodies. Mikulski comes back to life, aims
his Vickers at the ceiling of the U boat, and cuts an escape  hatch. Instead
of black water, golden light rushes through.
     "What  was your position in  all this, then?"  asks Root,  and  Shaftoe
nearly jumps out of his  chair,  startled by the sound of a voice other than
von Hacklheber's. Given  what happened the last time someone (Shaftoe) asked
a question, this is  heroic but risky. Starting with Hitler, von  Hacklheber
works his way down the chain of command.
     Shaftoe  doesn't  care:  he's  on a rubber  raft,  along  with  various
resurrected comrades from  Guadalcanal and  Detachment 2702. They are rowing
across  a still cove lit by giant flaming klieg  lights in the sky. Standing
behind the klieg lights is a man talking in a German accent:  "My  immediate
supervisors,  Wilhelm  Fenner,  from St.  Petersburg, who headed  all German
military  cryptanalysis  from 1922 onwards, and his chief  deputy, Professor
Novopaschenny."
     All  of these names sound alike to Shaftoe, but Root says, "A Russian?"
Shaftoe is really coming around now,  reemerging into  the World. He sits up
straight, and his body feels stiff, like it  hasn't moved in a long time. He
is about to apologize for the way he has been behaving, but  since no one is
looking at him funny, Shaftoe sees  no  reason to fill  them in on what he's
been doing these last few minutes.
     "Professor  Novopaschenny was a Czarist astronomer who knew Fenner from
St. Petersburg. Under them, I was given broad authority to pursue researches
into the theoretical limits of  security. I used tools from pure mathematics
as well as mechanical calculating devices of my own design. I  looked at our
own codes as well as those of our enemies, looking for weaknesses."
     "What did you find?" Bischoff asks.
     "I found weaknesses everywhere," von Hacklheber  says. "Most codes were
designed by  dilettantes  and  amateurs  with no  grasp  of  the  underlying
mathematics. It is really quite pitiable."
     "Including the Enigma?" Bischoff asks.
     "Don't even talk to me of that shit," von Hacklheber says. "I dispensed
with it almost immediately."
     "What do you mean, dispensed with it?" Root asks.
     "Proved that it was shit," von Hacklheber says.
     "But the entire Wehrmacht still uses it," Bischoff says.
     Von  Hacklheber shrugs and looks  at the burning tip  of his cigarette.
"You expect them to throw all those machines away  because one mathematician
writes a paper?" He stares at his cigarette a while longer, then  puts it to
his lips, draws on  it tastefully, holds the smoke in his lungs, and finally
exhales it slowly through his vocal cords whilst simultaneously causing them
to emit the following sounds: "I knew that there must  be people working for
the enemy who would figure this out. Turing.  Von  Neumann. Waterhouse. Some
of the Poles. I began to look for signs that they  had broken the Enigma, or
at  least realized  its weaknesses  and  begun  trying  to break  it. I  ran
statistical analyses  of  convoy sinkings and U  boat attacks.  I found some
anomalies, some improbable events, but not enough to make a pattern. Many of
the  grossest  anomalies  were  later  accounted for  by  the  discovery  of
espionage stations and the like.
     "From this I drew no conclusion. Certainly if they were smart enough to
break the Enigma they would  be smart  enough to conceal the fact from us at
any cost. But there was one anomaly they  could  not  cover up.  I  refer to
human anomalies."
     "Human anomalies?" Root asks. The phrase is classic Root bait.
     "I knew perfectly well  that only a handful  of people in the world had
the acumen to break the Enigma and then to cover up the  fact that  they had
broken it.  By using  our intelligence sources to ascertain where  these men
were, and what they  were doing,  I  could  make inferences." Von Hacklheber
stubs  out his  cigarette,  sits up  straight, and  drains a  half  shot  of
schnapps, warming to the task. "This  was  a human  intelligence problem not
signals intelligence. This is handled by a different branch of the service "
and  he's  off again talking about  the structure of the German bureaucracy.
Terrified, Shaftoe flees from the room, runs outside, and uses the outhouse.
When he gets back, von Hacklheber is just winding up. "It all came down to a
problem  of  sifting through large amounts  of raw data lengthy  and tedious
work."
     Shaftoe  cringes,  wondering what something would have  to be  like  in
order to qualify as lengthy and tedious to this joker.
     "After some  time," von Hacklheber  continues, "I learned, through some
of  our  agents  in  the  British Isles,  that a man  matching  the  general
description of Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse had been stationed  to a castle
in Outer Qwghlm.  I was  able to arrange for a young lady to place this  man
under  the closest  possible  surveillance,"  he  says dryly. "His  security
precautions were impeccable, and so we learned nothing directly. In fact, it
is quite likely that he knew that the young woman in question was  an agent,
and  so took  added precautions. But we did learn that this man communicated
through  one time  pads.  He  would  read his  encrypted messages  over  the
telephone to  a  nearby naval base whence  they would be  telegraphed  to  a
station in  Buckinghamshire,  which  would  respond  to  him  with  messages
encrypted using  the same  system  of one  time pads.  By going  through the
records of our various radio intercept stations we were able to accumulate a
stack of messages  that  had been  sent by this mysterious  unit, using this
series of one time  pads,  over a period  of time beginning in the middle of
1942 and continuing up to the present day. It was  interesting  to note that
this unit operated in a variety of places:
     Malta, Alexandria, Morocco, Norway, and various ships at sea. Extremely
unusual. I was very interested in this mysterious unit and so I began trying
to break their special code."
     "Isn't that impossible?" Bischoff asks. "There is no way to break a one
time pad, short of stealing a copy."
     "That is true in theory,"  von  Hacklheber  says. "In practice, this is
only true if the letters that make up  the one time pad are chosen perfectly
randomly. But, as  I  discovered, this is not true of the one time pads used
by Detachment 2702 which is the mysterious unit that Waterhouse, Turing, and
these two gentlemen all belong to."
     "But how did you figure this out?" Bischoff asks.
     "A few things helped me. There was a lot of depth many messages to work
with.  There was consistency the  one time pads  were generated in the  same
way,  always,  and always exhibited the same patterns. I made some  educated
guesses which turned out to be correct. And I  had a calculating machine  to
make the work go faster."
     "Educated guesses?"
     "I had  a hypothesis  that the one time  pads were being drawn up  by a
person who  was  rolling  dice or shuffling  a deck  of cards to produce the
letters. I began to consider psychological factors.  An English  speaker  is
accustomed to a certain frequency distribution of letters. He expects to see
a great many e's, t's,  and a's, and not so many z's and q's and  x's. So if
such a person were using  some  supposedly  random algorithm to generate the
letters,  he  would be subconsciously irritated  every time a z or an x came
up, and, conversely, soothed by  the  appearance  of e or t. Over time, this
might skew the frequency distribution."
     "But Herr Doctor  von Hacklheber, I find it unlikely that such a person
would substitute their own letters for the ones that  came up on the  cards,
or dice, or whatever."
     "It is not  very likely. But suppose that the algorithm gave the person
some small amount  of discretion." Von Hacklheber  lights another cigarette,
pours  out more schnapps. "I set up an  experiment. I got twenty  volunteers
middle aged women who wanted to  do their part for the Reich. I set them  to
work drawing up one time  pads using an algorithm where they drew  slips out
of a box. Then I used my  machinery to  run  statistical calculations on the
results. I found that they were not random at all."
     Root says, "The  one time pads for Detachment 2702 are being created by
Mrs.  Tenney, a vicar's wife. She uses a  bingo machine,  a cage filled with
wooden balls with a  letter stamped on  each ball. She is supposed to  close
her eyes before reaching into  the cage. But  suppose she has  become sloppy
and no longer closes her eyes when she reaches into it."
     "Or," von Hacklheber says, "suppose she looks at the cage, and sees how
the  balls are distributed inside of it, and then closes  her eyes. She will
subconsciously reach toward the E  and avoid the Z. Or,  if a certain letter
has  just come up recently, she will try to avoid choosing it again. Even if
she cannot see the inside of the cage, she  will learn to  distinguish among
the different balls by their feel being made of wood, each  ball will have a
different weight, a different pattern in the grain."
     Bischoff's not buying it. "But it will still be mostly random!"
     "Mostly random  is  not  good enough!"  von  Hacklheber  snaps.  "I was
convinced that the one  time pads of Detachment 2702 would  have a frequency
distribution similar to that of the King  James Version  of the  Bible,  for
example. And I strongly suspected that  the content  of those messages would
include words such as Waterhouse, Turing, Enigma, Qwghlm, Malta.  By putting
my  machinery  to work, I  was  able to  break  some  of the one time  pads.
Waterhouse was  careful to  burn  his  pads after using them once, but  some
other  parts of the detachment were careless, and used  the same  pads again
and again. I read many messages. It was obvious  that Detachment 2702 was in
the business of  deceiving the  Wehrmacht  by  concealing the fact  that the
Enigma had been broken."
     Shaftoe knows what an Enigma is, if only because Bischoff won't shut up
about them. When  von Hacklheber explains  this, everything  that Detachment
2702 ever did suddenly makes sense.
     "So,  the  secret is  out  then,"  Root  says.  "I assume you made your
superiors aware of your discovery?"
     "I  made  them  aware of absolutely  nothing," von  Hacklheber  snarls,
"because  by  this  time  I  had  long   since  fallen  into   a  snare   of
Reichsmarschall  Hermann Göring. I had  become  his pawn, his slave, and had
ceased to feel any loyalty whatsoever towards the Reich."


     ***


     The knock on Rudolf  von Hacklheber's  door had come at four o'clock in
the morning, a time  exploited by the Gestapo for its  psychological effect.
Rudy is wide awake. Even if bombers had  not been pounding  Berlin all night
long, he would have  been awake, because he has neither  seen nor heard from
Angelo in three days. He throws a dressing gown over his pajamas, steps into
slippers,  and  opens the door  of his flat to reveal, predictably, a small,
prematurely withered man backed up by a couple of classic Gestapo killers in
long black leather coats.
     "May I proffer an observation?" says Rudy von Hacklheber.
     "But  of course, Herr Doktor  Professor. As  long as  it is not a state
secret, of course."
     "In the old days the early days when no  one knew what the Gestapo was,
and no one was afraid of it, this four in the morning business was clever. A
fine way to exploit man's primal fear  of  the darkness. But now it is 1942,
almost 1943, and everyone is afraid of the Gestapo. Everyone. More than they
are of the dark. So, why don't you work during the daytime? You are stuck in
a rut."
     The bottom half of the withered man's face laughs. The top half doesn't
change. "I will pass  your suggestion up  the chain  of command,"  he  says.
"But,  Herr  Doktor, we  are not here to instill fear.  We have come at this
inconvenient time because of the train schedules."
     "Am I to understand that I am getting on a train?"
     "You have a few minutes," the Gestapo man says, pulling back  a cuff to
divulge a hulking Swiss  chronometer. Then he invites himself in and  begins
to pace up and down in front of Rudy's bookshelves, hands clasped behind his
back, bending at the waist to peer  at  the titles. He seems disappointed to
find  that  they are  all  mathematical  texts not  a  single  copy  of  the
Declaration of Independence in  evidence, though you can  never tell  when a
copy of the  Protocols  of  the  Elders of Zion might be hidden between  the
pages  of  a  mathematical  journal. When  Rudy  emerges,  dressed but still
unshaven, he finds the man  displaying  a pained expression while  trying to
read Turing's  dissertation on the Universal Machine. He looks like  a lower
primate trying to fly an aeroplane.
     Half an hour later, they are at the train station. Rudy looks up at the
departures board as they go  in, and memorizes its contents, so that he will
be able  to deduce, from the track  number, whether he's being taken  in the
direction of Leipzig or Konigsberg or Warsaw.
     It is a clever thing to do, but it turns out  to be a  waste of effort,
because the Gestapo men lead him to a track that is not listed on the board.
A short train  waits there. It does not  contain  any  boxcars, a relief  to
Rudy,  since he thinks that during the last few  years he may  have glimpsed
boxcars that  appeared  to be crammed full of  human beings.  These glimpses
were brief and  surreal, and  he cannot really sort out whether  they really
happened, or were merely fragments of nightmares that got filed in the wrong
cranial drawer.
     But  all  of  the cars on this train have  doors,  guarded  by  men  in
unfamiliar uniforms, and windows,  shrouded on the inside with shutters  and
heavy curtains.  The  Gestapo lead  him  to  a  coach door  without breaking
stride, and  just like that, he is through. And  he is alone. No  one checks
his papers,  and  the  Gestapo do  not enter behind  him. The door is closed
behind his back.
     Doktor Rudolf von Hacklheber is standing in a long skinny car decorated
like the anteroom of an  upper class whorehouse, with Persian runners on the
polished hardwood floor, heavy  furniture  upholstered in maroon velvet, and
curtains  so thick that they  look bulletproof. At one end of  the  coach, a
French maid hovers over a  table set with breakfast: hard  rolls,  slices of
meat and cheese,  and coffee. Rudy's nose tells him  that it is real coffee,
and the smell draws him down to the end of the car. The maid pours him a cup
with trembling hands. She has plastered thick foundation beneath her eyes to
conceal dark circles,  and (he realizes, as she  hands him the cup)  she has
also painted it onto her wrists.
     Rudy  savors  the  coffee, stirring cream into it  with  a golden spoon
bearing the marque of a French family. He strolls up and down  the length of
the car, admiring the art on the walls: a  series of Dürer engravings,  and,
unless his eyes  deceive him,  a couple of  pages  from  a Leonardo da Vinci
codex.
     The door  opens again and a man enters clumsily, as if thrown on board,
and ends up  sprawled over a velvet settee. By the time Rudy recognizes him,
the train has already begun to pull out of the station.
     "Angelo!" Rudy sets his coffee down on an end table  and throws himself
into the arms of his beloved.
     Angelo  returns   the  embrace  weakly.  He  stinks,  and  he  shudders
uncontrollably.  He is wearing a  coarse, dirty,  pajamalike garment, and is
wrapped  up in a grey wool blanket. His wrists are encircled by half scabbed
lacerations embedded in fields of yellow green bruises.
     "Don't worry about it, Rudy,"  Angelo says,  clenching and  opening his
fists  to prove that they still work.  "They  were not kind to me, but  they
took care with my hands."
     "Thou canst still fly?"
     "I  can still  fly.  But that is not  why they were so careful  with my
hands."
     "Why, then?"
     "Without hands, a man cannot sign a confession."
     Rudy  and  Angelo  gaze  into  each  other's eyes.  Angelo  looks  sad,
exhausted, but still has  some  kind of serene confidence  about him. Like a
baptizing  priest  ready  to receive the  infant, he  holds up his hands. He
silently mouths the words: But I can still fly!

     A suit of clothes is brought in by a  valet. Angelo cleans up in one of
the coach's  lavatories. Rudy  tries to  peer out between the curtains,  but
heavy shutters have  been  pulled  down  over  the  windows. They  breakfast
together as  the  train  maneuvers through the switching  yards  of  greater
Berlin,  perhaps working its  way around some bombed  out sections of track,
and finally accelerates into the open territory beyond.
     Reichsmarschall  Hermann Göring makes his way through the  car,  headed
towards the rear  of the  train, where the most ornate coach is located. His
body is about as big as  the hull of a torpedo boat, draped in a circus tent
sized Chinese  silk robe, the sash of which  drags  on the floor behind him,
like a leash trailing behind a dog. He has the largest belly of any man Rudy
has ever seen, and it is covered with golden hair that  deepens as the belly
curves under, until it becomes a tawny thicket that completely conceals  his
genitals. He is  not really  expecting to  see  two men sitting  here eating
breakfast, but seems  to consider  Rudy and Angelo's presence here to be one
of  life's small anomalies, not really worth noticing.  Given that Göring is
the number  two man  in  the Third Reich the designated  successor to Hitler
himself Rudy and Angelo really should jump to attention and give him a "Heil
Hitler!" But they are too stunned to move. Göring stumbles down  the  middle
of the coach, paying them no mind. Halfway down, he begins talking, but he's
talking to himself, and his words are slurred. He slams open the door at the
end of the coach and proceeds into the next car.
     Two hours  later, a doctor in a  white coat passes  through, headed for
Göring's coach, carrying a  silver  tray with  a white  linen  cloth  on it.
Tastefully arrayed on this, like caviar and champagne, are a blue bottle and
a glass hypodermic syringe.
     Half an hour after that,  an aide in a Luftwaffe uniform passes through
carrying  a sheaf of papers, and favors Rudy and Angelo with  a crisp "Heil,
Hitler!"
     Another  hour goes  by,  and then  Rudy  and Angelo are  escorted  back
through the train by a servant. The coach at the rear of the train is darker
and more  gentlemanly  than the  florid parlor  where they have been cooling
their heels. It  is paneled  in darkly stained wood  and contains an  actual
desk a  baronial monstrosity  carved  out  of  a ton of Bavarian oak. At the
moment,  its  sole function is to  support a  single  sheet of  paper,  hand
written,  and signed  at  the bottom. Even  from a distance, Rudy recognizes
Angelo's handwriting.
     They have to walk past the desk in order to reach Göring, who is spread
across an equally massive couch at the end of the car, underneath a Matisse,
and  flanked  between a  couple of Roman  busts on marble pedestals.  He  is
dressed  in red  leather jodhpurs,  red leather boots, a red leather uniform
jacket, a  red leather  riding crop  with a fat diamond set into the butt of
the handle. Bracelet  sized gold rings, infected with  big rubies, grip  his
pudgy  fingers. A red leather officer's  cap is  perched on his head, with a
gold  death's head, with  ruby eyes, centered above the bill. All of this is
illuminated only by a few striations of dusty  light that have forced  their
way in through tiny crevices  between curtains and  shutters; the sun  is up
now,  but Göring's blue  eyes, dilated  to dime sized  pits by the morphine,
cannot face it. He has his cherry  colored boots up  on an ottoman; no doubt
he  has trouble  with  circulation in  his  legs. He is drinking  tea from a
thimble sized porcelain cup, encrusted with gold leaf, looted from a chateau
somewhere. Heavy  cologne fails  to mask  his  odor:  bad  teeth, intestinal
trouble, and necrotizing hemorrhoids.
     "Good morning, gentlemen," he says  brightly. "Sorry to have  kept  you
waiting. Heil Hitler! Would you like some tea?"
     There is small talk.  It goes  on at length. Göring is  fascinated with
Angelo's work as a test pilot. Not only that, he has any number of  peculiar
ideas adapted from the Bavarian Illuminati, and is groping  for some  way to
tie these in with higher mathematics. Rudy is afraid, for a while, that this
task is about to  be placed on his shoulders. But  even Göring himself seems
impatient with  this phase of the conversation. Once or twice he reaches out
with his riding crop to part a curtain slightly.
     The  outdoor light  seems  to cause him  appalling pain  and he quickly
looks away.
     But finally  the  train  slows, maneuvers  through more  switches,  and
coasts to a gentle stop. They can  see nothing, of course. Rudy  strains his
ears,  and  thinks he hears  activity around  them: many feet marching,  and
commands  being shouted. Göring catches the  eye  of  an aide  and waves his
riding  crop towards  the  desk. The aide springs  forward, snatches  up the
handwritten document, and  bears it  over to the Reichsmarschall, presenting
it with a small, neat bow. Göring reads through it quickly. Then he looks up
at Rudy  and Angelo and makes tut tut tut  noises, shaking his gigantic head
from  side  to  side. Various layers  of jowls,  folds, and wattles  follow,
always a  few degrees out of phase. "Homosexuality,"  Göring says. "You must
be aware of the  Führer's policy regarding this sort of behavior."  He holds
up the sheet and shakes it. "Shame on you!  Both of you. A test pilot who is
a  guest  in  our country,  and  an eminent  mathematician working  on great
secrets.  You must  have known that the Sicherheitsdienst would get  wind of
this." He heaves an exhausted sigh. "How am I going to patch this up?"
     When Göring says this, Rudy knows for the first time since the knock on
his door  that he is not  going to die today. Göring has something  else  in
mind.
     But first his victims need to be properly terrified. "Do you  know what
could happen to you? Hmm? Do you?"
     Neither  Rudy nor Angelo answers.  It is not  the sort of question that
really needs answering.
     Göring answers it  for them  by reaching out  with his riding crop  and
lifting up the  curtain. Harsh blue light, reflected from  snow, peals  into
the coach. Göring shuts his eyes and looks the other way.
     They are in the middle of an  open area, surrounded by tall barbed wire
fences,  filled with long rows of dark barracks. In the center, a tall stack
pours smoke into a white sky.  SS  troops in  greatcoats and jackboots  pace
around, blowing into their  hands. Just  a  few yards away from  them, on an
adjacent railway siding, a  gang of wretches in striped clothing are at work
in,  and around, a boxcar,  unloading pale  cargo. A large number  of  naked
human bodies have become all frozen together in a solid, tangled mass inside
the boxcar, and the prisoners are at  work with axes, bucksaws, and prybars,
dismantling them  and throwing the parts onto the  ground. Because they  are
frozen solid, there is no blood, and  so the entire operation is startlingly
clean.  The  double  glazed  windows  of   Göring's  coach  block  sound  so
effectively that the impact  of  a  big  fire  ax on  a frozen abdomen comes
through as a nearly imperceptible thud.
     One  of the  prisoners turns  towards them, carrying a  thigh  toward a
wheelbarrow,  and risks a direct look  at the  Reichsmarschall's train. This
prisoner  has  a  pink  triangle  sewn to  the  breast  of  his uniform. The
prisoner's  eyes are  trying to  probe through the window, past the curtain,
trying to make a  human connection with someone on  the inside of the coach.
Rudy stiffens  in panic for a moment, thinking that the  prisoner sees  him.
Then Göring withdraws the  riding crop and the curtain falls.  A few moments
later, the train begins to move again.
     Rudy looks at  his lover. Angelo is sitting  frozen, just  like  one of
those corpses, with his hands over his face.
     Göring flicks his crop dismissively. "Get out," he says.
     "What?" ask Rudy and Angelo simultaneously.
     Göring  laughs heartily. "No, no!  I don't mean get out of the train! I
mean, Angelo, get out of this coach. I want to talk to Herr Doktor Professor
von Hacklheber in private. You may wait in the parlor car."
     Angelo leaves  eagerly. Göring waves  his crop at a  couple of hovering
aides, and they leave too. Göring and Rudy are alone together.
     "I am sorry to  show  you these  unpleasant things,"  Göring  says.  "I
simply wanted to impress upon you the importance of keeping secrets."
     "I can assure the Reichsmarschall that "
     Göring shushes him with a wave  of the crop. "Don't be tedious. I  know
that you have sworn  any number of great oaths, and been through all of  the
indoctrination concerning secrecy. I have no doubt of your sincerity. But it
is all just words, and not good enough for the work that I wish you to begin
doing for me. To  work for me, you must  see  the thing I have shown you, so
that you can really understand the stakes."
     Rudy looks at the floor, takes a deep breath, and forces out the words:
     "It would be a great honor to work for  you, Reichsmarschall. But since
you have access to  so  many  of the great museums and libraries  of Europe,
there is only one small favor I, as a scholar, might humbly request of you."


     ***


     Back  in  the church  basement in Norrsbruck,  Sweden,  Rudy yells, and
drops  a  cigarette on  the  floor,  having allowed it to burn  down to  his
fingers,  like a slow  fuse, while relating this story. He puts his  hand to
his mouth, sucks on  the  finger  briefly,  then  remembers his  manners and
composes himself. "Göring knew a surprising amount about cryptology, and was
aware of my work on the Enigma. He didn't trust the machine. He told me that
he wanted me to come up  with  the very  best cryptosystem in the world, one
that could never be  broken he wanted to communicate (he  said) with U boats
at  sea and  with installations in  Manila and Tokyo. And so, I came up with
such a system."
     "And you handed it over," Bischoff says.
     "Yes,"  Rudy  says, and here, for the first  time  all  day, he  allows
himself a  slight smile. "And  it  is a reasonably  good system, despite the
fact that I crippled it before giving it to Göring."
     "Crippled it?" Root asks. "What do you mean?"
     "Imagine  a new  engine  for  an  aeroplane.  Imagine  it  has  sixteen
cylinders. It is more powerful than any other engine in the  world. Even so,
a mechanic can do certain things very simple things to kill its performance.
Such  as  pulling out half  of the spark plug  wires.  Or tampering with the
timing. This is an analogy to what I did with Göring's cryptosystem."
     "So  what went wrong?" Shaftoe asks.  "They figured  out that  you  had
crippled it?"
     Rudolf  von  Hacklheber laughs.  "Not very likely. Maybe half  a  dozen
people in the world  could figure that out. No, what went wrong was that you
fellows, you  Allies, landed  in Sicily, and then  in Italy,  and  not  long
afterwards,  Mussolini was  overthrown, the Italians withdrew from the Axis,
and Angelo, like all of the other hundreds of thousands of Italian nationals
living  and working in the Reich,  fell  under  suspicion. His services were
badly needed as a test pilot, but his situation was  tenuous. He volunteered
for the most dangerous work of  all flying the  new Messerschmidt prototype,
with the turbine jet engine. This proved his loyalty in the eyes of some.
     "Remember that, at the same time, I  was decrypting the message traffic
of Detachment 2702. I kept these results to myself, as I  no longer felt any
particular  loyalty  to the  Third  Reich.  There had been a great burst  of
activity around the middle of April, and then no messages for a while  as if
the  detachment  had  ceased to exist. At exactly  the  same  time, Göring's
people  were very  active for a  few days they were afraid that Bischoff was
going to broadcast the secret of U 553."
     "So you know about that?" Bischoff asks.
     "Natürlich.  U  553  was  Göring's  treasure  ship.  Its existence  was
supposed  to  be a secret.  When you,  Sergeant Shaftoe,  turned up on board
Bischoff's U boat, talking about this thing, Göring was very concerned for a
few days. But then everything settled down, and there was no Detachment 2702
traffic  through the late spring and early  summer. Mussolini was overthrown
in late June. Then the troubles began for me  and Angelo. The  Wehrmacht was
defeated  by the  Russians at Kursk absolute proof, for those who needed it,
that the Eastern Front is lost. Since then Göring has  redoubled his efforts
to  get  his  gold,  jewels,  and  art out  of  the country." Rudy  looks at
Bischoff. "I am frankly surprised that he has not tried to recruit you."
     "Dönitz has," Bischoff admits.
     Rudy nods; it all fits.
     "During all of  this,"  Rudy  continues,  "I  received only one message
intercept in the Detachment 2702 code. It took my machinery several weeks to
break it.  It  was a message from Enoch  Root, stating that he and  Sergeant
Shaftoe  were in Norrsbruck, Sweden, and  requesting further instructions. I
was aware that  Kapitänleutnant Bischoff  was also  in the  same  town,  and
became interested.  I decided that this  would  be  a good place for  me and
Angelo to escape to."
     "Why!?" Shaftoe says. "Of all the places "
     "Enoch  and  I  had  never  met.  But  there  are  certain  old  family
connections," Rudy says, "and certain shared interests."
     Bischoff mutters something in German.
     "The connections make a very long  story. I would have to write a whole
fucking book," Rudy says irritably.
     Bischoff looks only  slightly appeased,  but Rudy goes  on  anyway. "It
took us several weeks to make preparations. I packed up the Leibniz Archiv "
     "Hold on the what?"
     "Certain materials I use in my  research. They had been scattered among
many libraries, all over Europe.  Göring brought them all together for me it
makes men  like him  feel  powerful, to  do  these  little  favors for their
slaves.  I  departed  from  Berlin last  week,  on  the pretext of  going to
Hannover, to do my Leibniz research. Instead I made my way to Sweden through
channels that were quite involved "
     "No shit! How'd you manage that little stunt?" Shaftoe asks.
     Rudy looks  at Enoch  Root as if expecting  him to answer the question.
Root shakes his head minutely.
     "It would be too tedious  to explain  here," Rudy says, sounding mildly
annoyed. "I found Enoch. We got a  message to Angelo saying that I  was safe
here. Angelo then  tried to make his escape in the  Messerschmidt prototype,
with the results that we have all seen."
     A long pause.
     "And now, here we are!" says Bobby Shaftoe.
     "Here we are," agrees Rudolf von Hacklheber.
     "What do you think we should do?" asks Shaftoe.
     "I  think  we  should  form  a  secret  conspiracy,"  says  Rudolf  von
Hacklheber offhandedly, as if proposing  to  go in  together  on a  fifth of
bourbon.  "We should  all  make our way  separately to  Manila and,  once we
arrive, we should take some, if not all, of the gold  that the Nazis and the
Nipponese have been hoarding there."
     "What do you want with a shitload of gold?" Bobby asks. "You're already
rich."
     "There are many deserving charities,"  Rudy says, looking significantly
at Root. Root averts his eyes.
     There is another long pause.
     "I can provide secure lines of communication, which is the sine qua non
of any secret conspiracy," says Rudolf von Hacklheber. "We will use the full
strength,  uncrippled version  of the same cryptosystem that I  invented for
Göring.  Bischoff can be our man on the inside, since Dönitz  wants  him  so
badly. Sergeant Shaftoe can be "
     "Don't even say it, I already know," says Bobby Shaftoe.
     He and Bischoff look at Root,  who's sitting  on his hands, staring  at
Rudy. Looking oddly nervous.
     "Enoch the Red, your organization can get us to Manila," von Hacklheber
says.
     Shaftoe snorts. "Don't you think the Catholic Church has its hands sort
of full right now?"
     "I'm  not  talking about the  Church,"  Rudy says. "I'm  talking  about
Societas Eruditorum."

     Root freezes.
     "Congratulations there, Rudy!" Shaftoe says. "You  surprised the padre.
I didn't think it could be done. Now would you mind telling us what the fuck
you're talking about?"


     Chapter 59 HOARD


     Like  a client of  one of your  less reputable pufferfish  sushi chefs,
Randy  Waterhouse does  not  move  from his assigned seat for  a full ninety
minutes  after the jumbo leaves Ninoy Aquino International Airport. A can of
beer is embedded in the core of his spiraled hand. His arm lies on the extra
wide Business Class armrest, a shank on a  slab. He does not  turn his head,
or  turret his eyeballs, even, to look out the window at northern Luzon. All
that's out there is jungle, which has two sets  of connotations going for it
now.  One  is the spooky Tarzan/Stanley  & Livingstone/"The horror,  the
horror"/natives  are  restless/Charlie's out there somewhere  waiting for us
kind.  The  second  is  the  more  modern and  enlightened  sort of  Jacques
Cousteauian teeming repository of brilliant and endangered species lungs  of
the  planet kind.  Neither  really  works  for Randy  anymore, which is  why
despite  the state of hibernatory torpor he shunted into  the moment his ass
impacted on the navy blue leather of the seat, he feels  a little  spike  of
irritation every time  one of the other  passengers, peering  out  a window,
pronounces the word "jungle." To him,  it is just a shitload  of  trees now,
trees going on for miles and miles, up the little hilly willies and down the
little hilly  willies.  It  is  easy,  now, for him  to understand  tropical
denizens' shockingly frank and blunt  craving to drive  through this sort of
territory in  the largest and widest available bulldozers (the only parts of
his  body  that  move during the  first hour and  a  half  of the flight are
certain  facial  muscles which pull the  corners of his mouth  back  into an
ironic rictus when  he imagines what Charlene would think of this it is just
too perfect Randy  goes off on  a Business Foray and  comes back identifying
with people who bulldoze rainforests). Randy  wants to bulldoze  the jungle,
all of it. Actually, thermonuclear weapons, detonated at  a suitable height,
would do  the job  faster. He needs to rationalize this urge. He will do so,
as soon as he solves the running out of planetary oxygen problem.
     By  the time it even  occurs to him to lift the beer to  his  lips, the
heat of  his body has gone into it, and his  hand has become as  chilly  and
stiff  as an uncooked rolled  roast.  For  that matter, his  whole body  has
adjourned into some kind of metabolic recess, and his  brain is  not exactly
purring at high RPM's either. He feels kind of the way  he  does, sometimes,
the day before he comes down with a total body cold and flu scenario, one of
those crushing viral Tet Offensives that, every few years, swats you out  of
the land of  the  fully  living for a week  or two. It is as if  about three
quarters of his body's resources of  nutrients and energy have been diverted
to  the  task of  manufacturing  quintillions of  viruses. At  the  currency
exchange  window of  NAIA,  Randy  had  stood behind a Chinese man who, just
before he stepped back from the window with his money, unloaded a  Sneeze of
such  titanic force that the rolling pressure wave turbulating outwards from
his raw,  flapping  facial orifices caused the  wall  of  bulletproof  glass
separating  him  from  the  moneychangers  to  flex  slightly,  so that  the
reflection of the  Chinese man, Randy behind him,  the lobby of NAIA and the
sunlit passenger  dropoff  lane  outside  underwent  a  subtle  warpage. The
viruses  must have roiled back  from the  glass, reflected  like  light, and
enveloped  Randy. So maybe Randy  is  the  personal  vector  of this  year's
version  of the flu named  after some city in East Asia that  annually tours
the United States, just barely preceded by rush shipments of flu vaccine. Or
maybe it's Ebola.
     Actually, he feels fine. Other than the fact that his mitochondria have
gone on strike,  or  that his thyroid seems  to  be failing  (perhaps it was
secretly removed by black market organ transplanters? He makes a mental note
to check for new scars in  the next mirror) he is not experiencing any viral
symptoms at all.
     It  is  some kind of post  stress thing. This is the first  time he has
relaxed in a couple of weeks. Not once has he sat down in a bar with a beer,
or put his  feet up on a desk, or  just collapsed  like a decaying corpse in
front of the television set. Now his body is telling him it's payback  time.
He does  not sleep;  he  does  not feel drowsy at all. Actually,  he's  been
sleeping  rather well. But his  body  refuses to  move for an hour, and then
most of another hour, and to the extent his brain is  working at  all it can
only chase its tail.
     But there is something that he could be doing. This is why laptops were
invented, so that  important  business  persons would  not fritter away long
flights relaxing. He can see it right there on the floor in front of him. He
knows  he should reach for it. But it would break the spell. He feels  as if
water condensed on his skin and  froze into a carapace that  will shatter as
soon as he moves any part of his  body. This is, he realizes, exactly  how a
laptop computer must feel when it drops into its power saving mode.
     Then  a flight  attendant is there holding a menu in front  of his face
and saying something that jolts him like a cattle prod. He  nearly jumps out
of  his seat, spills  his beer  a little, gropes for the menu. Before he can
drop back into his demi coma, he continues  the motion  and reaches down for
his laptop.  The  seat next to him is empty and he can  put his  dinner over
there while he works on the computer.
     People around him are watching CNN live, from CNN Center in Atlanta not
a canned  thing on tape. According  to the plethora of pseudotechnical  data
cards  jammed into the seatbacks, which Randy  is  the  only person who ever
reads,  this  plane  has some  kind  of antenna  that can keep a lock  on  a
communications satellite as it flies  across the Pacific. Furthermore,  it's
two way, so you can even transmit e mail. Randy spends a while familiarizing
himself  with the instructions, checks  the  rates, as if he really  gives a
shit how much it costs, then jacks the thing into the anus of his laptop. He
opens up the laptop and  checks  his e mail. Traffic is low because everyone
in Epiphyte knows he's en route somewhere.
     Nevertheless, there are three messages from Kia, Epiphyte's only actual
employee, the administrative assistant for the whole company. Kia works in a
totally alienated,  abstracted office in the Springboard  Capital  corporate
incubator complex in San Mateo. It is some sort of a federal regulation that
nascent  high tech  companies  must  not hire  pudgy fifty  year old support
staff, the way  big established companies do.  They must  hire topologically
enhanced twenty  year olds with names that  sound like new  models of  cars.
Since most  hackers are white males, their companies are disaster areas when
it  comes to  diversity, and it follows that  all of  the diversity must  be
concentrated in the one or two employees who are not hackers. In the part of
a  federal  equal opportunity form  where Randy would  simply  check  a  box
labeled  CAUCASIAN, Kia  would have to attach multiple  sheets on which  her
family  tree  would  be  ramified  backwards  through  time  ten  or  twelve
generations until  reaching ancestors who could  actually be  pegged  to one
specific  ethnic group  without  glossing anything  over,  and those  ethnic
groups  would  be intimidatingly hip ones  not Swedes, let's say, but Lapps,
and not Chinese but Hakka,  and  not  Spanish  but  Basque. Instead of doing
this, on  her job app for Epiphyte she simply checked "other" and then wrote
in TRANS ETHNIC.  In fact, Kia  is  trans–  just about every system of
human categorization, and what she isn't trans– she is post .
     Anyway, Kia  does  a  great job (it  is  part  of  the unspoken  social
contract with these people that they always do  an absolutely fantastic job)
and she has sent e mail to Randy notifying him that she has recently fielded
four trans Pacific telephone calls from  America Shaftoe, who wants  to know
Randy's  whereabouts,  plans, state of mind, and purity  of  spirit. Kia has
informed  Amy  that  Randy's  on  his  way  to  California  and has  somehow
insinuated, or Amy has somehow figured out, that the purpose of the visit is
NOT  BUSINESS.  Randy  senses  a  small  pane  of  glass  shattering over  a
neurological  alarm  button  somewhere.  He  is in  trouble. This is  divine
retribution for his having dared to sit still and not do anything for ninety
whole minutes. He uses  his word processor to whip out a note  explaining to
Amy that he needs  to straighten out some paperwork in  order  to sever  the
last clinging tendrils  of  his dead, dead, dead relationship  with Charlene
(which was  such a lousy idea  to begin with that it causes him to lie awake
at night questioning his own judgment and fitness to live), and  that he has
to be in California in order to do it. He faxes the note to Semper Marine in
Manila, and also faxes it to Glory IV in case Amy's out on the water.
     He then  does something that  probably means he's certifiably crazy. He
gets up and strolls up and down the business class aisle on pretext of using
the bathroom,  and  checks  out  the people sitting nearby,  paying  special
attention  to  their luggage,  the stuff they've  jammed  into the  overhead
compartments, the bags under the  seats in front of them. He is  looking for
anything that might contain  a Van Eck phreaking  type  of antenna.  It is a
completely useless thing to do, because just about any type of luggage might
contain such an antenna and he would never know  it. Furthermore, any actual
spy who had been planted on  this plane to  eavesdrop  on his computer would
not   be  sitting  there  holding  up  a  big  antenna  and  peering  at  an
oscilloscope. But performing  the check  (like  checking the rates  for live
data transmissions  to the  satellite) is sort of an empty ritual that makes
him feel vaguely responsible and arguably non stupid.
     Returning  to his seat, he fires up OrdoEmacs, which  is  a marvelously
paranoid piece of software invented  by  John Cantrell. Emacs  in its normal
form is the hacker's word processor, a text editor that offers little in the
way of fancy formatting capabilities but does the basic job of editing plain
text very well. Your normally cryptographically paranoid hacker would create
files using Emacs and then encrypt them with  Ordo later. But  if you forget
to encrypt them, or if your laptop  gets stolen before you get a chance  to,
or your plane crashes and you die but your laptop is sieved  out of the muck
by  baffled but dogged crash  investigators  and  falls  into  the hands  of
federal authorities, your files can  be read. For that matter it is possible
even to find ghostly traces of old bits on a hard drive's sectors even after
the file has been overwritten with new data.
     OrdoEmacs, on the other hand, works exactly like regular  Emacs, except
that it encrypts everything before writing  it out to  disk.  At no time  is
plaintext ever laid down on a disk by  OrdoEmacs the only place it exists in
its plain, readable form is in the pixels on the screen, and in the volatile
RAM  of the computer,  whence it vanishes the moment power is shut down. Not
only that, but  it's coupled to a screensaver that uses the little  built in
CCD camera in the laptop to check to see if you are actually there. It can't
recognize  your  face, but it can tell whether or not a vaguely human shaped
form is sitting in front  of it, and if  that vaguely human shaped form goes
away, even for a fraction of a second, it will drop into a screen saver that
will blank the display and freeze the machine until such time as you type in
a password, or biometrically verify your identity through voice recognition.
     Randy opens  up  a document template that Epiphyte  uses  for  internal
memoranda  and begins to lay out certain  facts that  will be  fresh, and no
doubt stimulating, to Avi, Beryl, John, Tom, and Eb.
     MY TRIP TO THE JUNGLE
     or
     THE DRUMS OF THE HUKS
     or
     GET A LOAD OF THIS
     or
     HE SQUEEZED MY TESTICLES
     or
     THE WEIRD TURN PRO
     a tale  of  adventure  and  discovery  in  the  majestic rain forest of
northern Luzon
     by
     Randall Lawrence Waterhouse
     As I stepped  on this unknown middle aged Filipina's feet during an ill
advised  ballroom dancing foray, she  leaned close to  me  and uttered  some
latitude  and  longitude  figures  with  a  conspicuously  large  number  of
significant digits of precision,  implying a maximum positional error on the
order of the size of a  dinner  plate.  Gosh,  was I  ever  curious! Subject
provided these numbers as part of a conversational gambit/thought experiment
concerning the  inherent value  (as in monetary) of  information, a  subject
(coincidentally?)  of interest  to us,  the  Management Team of  Epiphyte(2)
Corp. Examination  of  high res maps of Luzon  indicated  that  the lat. and
long,  in  question  were in  a hilly  (let's  just go  ahead  and  call  it
mountainous) region some  250  km north of  Manila.  For  those  of you  not
familiar  with  WW2  history,  this  area  was  within the  final  perimeter
controlled by  General  Yamashita,  the  Tiger  of  Malaya and  conqueror of
Singapore,  at the end of that war,  when Gen. MacArthur had driven him  and
his approx. l0^5 troops  out of the populated lowlands.  And no, this is not
just a fundamentally irrelevant historical note, as we shall see.
     Relayed  said  data  to  one  Douglas MacArthur  Shaftoe (refer  to  my
exceptionally colorful and readable status  reports on cable survey for more
anecdotal material concerning same) who asserted " someone is trying to send
you a  message" (note: all cheesy  dialog  hereinafter is DMS's) and offered
his assistance  with  a vigor bordering  on  scary  aggressiveness.  DMS  is
energetic and enterprising to a degree that from time to time leaves certain
persons (e.g. those burdened with a petty  fear of death or  torture) uneasy
(see my  prior speculation as to  possibility DMS may  have been born with a
redundant  Y  chromosome)  Primary role of  Yours  Truly  became as follows:
source  of  repetitious  and  evidently  irritating   counsels  of  caution,
restraint,  other  virtues given a  low  priority  by  DMS,  who  cites  his
longevity  (which unavoidably  exceeds that of Yours Truly  as  he was  born
before me), network of close personal  relationships (murky, globe spanning,
reputedly   puissant),  financial  prosperity  (commodities,  e.g.  precious
metals, distributed among many  locations  DMS  declines to reveal)  and (as
trump  card)  the corporeal perfection of his girlfriend (she must  carry an
umbrella  while  out  of  doors lest her face  cause  pilots  of  overflying
commercial airliners  to pitch  forward, dumb and inert, onto their  control
yokes)  all as proof that  the ideas shared by Yours Truly vis a  vis how to
avoid  death, dismemberment,  etc.  need not be  given more  than  the  most
cursory  attention. Yours Truly's only bargaining chips  were  appropriately
and ironically enough, information: namely the final few digits  of the lat.
and long, which were with held from DMS lest he simply  go there himself and
check them out (note:  DMS is honest to  a fault, and so the concern  is not
that  DMS might  steal or appropriate anything  but that situation would get
out of hand, to the extent it ever was in hand to begin with)
     Plans were made for a journey  ("mission" in DMS parlance) to said lat.
and long. Extra  batteries were purchased for the GPS receiver (see attached
expense report). Drinking  water, etc.  laid in.  A  jeepney  was  retained.
Concept of jeepney is  impossible  to convey  fully here: a minibus, usually
named after  a pop star, Biblical figure, or  abstract theological  concept,
whose engine & frame  come from American,  or Nipponese auto company but
whose entire body, seats, upholstery, & encrustations of lurid decor are
locally  manufactured by high spirited artisans. Jeepneys are  normally made
outside of Manila in towns or barangays (semiautonomous neighborhoods)  that
specialize in same; the design, materials, style, etc. of a jeepney  reflect
its provenance just  as good  wine allegedly betrays climate, soil, etc.  of
its terroir. Ours was (anomalously) a perfectly monochromatic jeepney mfged.
out of pure  stainless steel in the stainless  steel fabrication specialized
bgy. of  San Pablo, with (unlike normal  jeepneys) no colored decorations at
all  everything either stainless steel  colored or  (where  use was made  of
electric  lights)  pure  piercing halogen  white  with bluish  tinge  nicely
complementing hue of  stainless steel. Seats in  back  were stainless  steel
benches with surprisingly ergonomic lumbar support capabilities, Name of our
jeepney was THE GRACE OF GOD.  Readers of this memo will be disappointed  to
know that  Bong  Bong  Gad (sic),  designer/owner/driver/proprietor  of  the
vehicle, anticipated the inevitable "there but  for THE GRACE  OF GOD  go I"
witticism by unloading same on Yours Truly while we were still shaking hands
(Filipinos  go  in for long  handshakes,  and  the first party  to  initiate
termination of a  handshake usually the non Filipino is invariably left with
a nagging feeling that he is a shithead)
     Yours Truly, in discreet  one on one mode with DMS, adverted to lack of
windows in the rear (passenger) section of THE GRACE OF  GOD as prima  facie
evidence that it  lacked  air  conditioning, a technology  widely adopted in
Philippine Islands. DMS evinced skepticism as to moral fiber of Yours Truly,
commenced  with  a  series  of  probing questions  aimed  at establishing my
commitment  to  Mission, fiduciary resp. to Epiphyte  shareholders, level of
physical & mental  vigor, and overall  level of  "serious"  ness  (being
"serious" is  some kind of  umbrella  concept strongly  correlated  with  my
fitness to  live, to have the privilege of knowing  DMS, and to go  on dates
with his daughter.  This gives me an opening to mention what would  normally
be  no  one's business  but  my own but which in these  circumstances  it is
ethically mandated that  I  disclose,  namely,  that I  am  infatuated  with
daughter of DMS and that while not  exactly  reciprocating these feelings at
full strength she finds me sufficiently non loathsome to have dinner with me
from  time to time. It  has  only occurred to me at this very moment that my
pursuit  of  rel'nship w/the female in  question, one America (sic) by name,
would  in context of modern  U.S. society be classified as SEXUAL HARASSMENT
and that if desired culmination is achieved it might be classified as SEXUAL
ABUSE  or RAPE owing  to "power imbalance" existing between me and her. Viz,
Yours Truly is on Management Team  of Corp that  has  retained Semper Marine
for large job & provided them with majority of their revenue during last
fiscal year.  Anyone  with  thoughts  of  summoning  federal  authorities to
apprehend me upon  arrival at SFO & expose my misdeeds  & subject me
to  public  disgrace  & compulsory  consciousness  raising workshops  is
advised to acquaint him or herself with the Shaftoes first & to at least
remain open to possibility  that  Dad's martial prowess  in combination with
traditional  feelings   of  psychotic   protectiveness  toward  his   female
offspring, combined with Daughter's habit of carrying large Palawan stabbing
weapon  known as  a kris,  and Daughter's overall psychic  fierceness  &
physical fitness &  courage  exceeding that of Yours Truly, mitigate any
perceived  power imbalance, particularly given that most of our interactions
take place in settings which lend themselves admirably to  discreet homicide
& corpse disposal. In other words, I make  you aware of  this amor stuff
not  as  confession  of personal  misdeeds but  to make  full disclosure  of
situation  that  could  influence my  judgment vis  a vis  Semper Marine and
conceivably  negatively impact shareholder value,  or, much  more plausibly,
that could  be SEEN as doing so by  minority shareholder  lawyers who infest
our industry like guinea worms, and used as pretext for legal action).
     Back  to the question  at  hand,  then.  Yours  Truly  asserted  calmly
(feeling that vigorous assertions would be perceived by DMS as defensiveness
&  hence  a de  facto confession of  lack of "serious" ness) that (1)  a
couple of days' travel in open AC less vehicle through Philippine hinterland
would be a day  at the beach, a picnic, a walk in the  park, &  a sunday
stroll  all  rolled  into one, and (2) furthermore that even  if it were the
most  hideous torture Yours  Truly  would gladly undergo  it given that  the
stakes, for all  concerned (incl.  Epiphyte shareholders) were  so  high and
generally  Serious. In  retrospect, (1) and (2) in  close succession seem to
betray some kind of  hedging strategy on part of Yours Truly, however at the
time DMS was mollified,  formally withdrew previous  accusations as to moral
fiber, etc., and divulged that use  of jeepney  was tactical masterstroke on
his (DMS's) part in that,  where we  were going, a Merc with smoked glass or
fifty  thousand  dollar Land  Rover,  or  (by extension)  any  vehicle  with
extravagances such as upholstered seats,  windows with glass in them,  shock
absorbers dating from  post Kennedy assassination era, etc., etc. would only
draw undesired attention to Mission.
     America Shaftoe remained in  Manila  to stay in touch with Mission  via
radio &  (I  supposed) to call in  napalm strikes should we  find selves
embroiled. Bong Bong Gad & his approx. 12 yr old son/business  associate
Fidel  occupied front  seat. DMS & Yours  Truly  shared rear (passenger)
section  with three  mysterious,  precisely packed  G.I. green  duffel bags;
approx. 100  kilos of drinking water in  plastic  bottles;  &  two Asian
gentlemen    in   their    30s   or   40s    who   exhibited   stereotypical
inscrutability/impassivity/dignity, etc.,  etc.  during the first four hours
of the  journey, which  were  spent  simply trying  to  drive from center of
Manila to northern outskirts  of same. Nationality  of  these  two  was  not
immediately evident. Many Filipinos are,  racially, almost pure Chinese even
though  their  families  have  been living here for  centuries. Perhaps this
explained strongly Asian features of our traveling companions and (I now had
to assume) business associates.
     Proverbial  ice was  broken as one consequence  of  pig truck  incident
which occurred  on four lane  highway,  narrowed  by  construction  to  two,
leading N from Manila.  Casual obsvn.  of Filipino swine suggests that their
ludicrous,  pink, tabloid  sized ears function  as heat  exchangers,  as do,
e.g.,  the tongues of  dogs. They are transported in vehicles consisting  of
big  cage constructed on  bed of  a straight (as opposed to semiarticulated)
truck. Construction of such vehicles appears  to tax local  resources to the
point where they  are  only  economical when maximum conceivable  number  of
swine are packed into confines at all times. Heat buildup ensues. Pigs adapt
by fighting their way to perimeter of cage & hanging ear/heat exchangers
out over the side to flap in the wind of the truck's motion.
     The appearance  of such  a vehicle when approached  from  behind can be
easily  envisioned  without  further  description. Readers who devote a  few
moments'  consideration to the subject  of excreta need not be pounded  over
the  head  vis  a vis  what flies,  sprays, drips,  etc. from such  vehicles
either.  The  Pig  Truck Incident  was a  humorous demonstration of  applied
hydrodynamics,  though   since  no   actual   water  was  involved   perhaps
"excretodynamics" or "scatodynamics" might better fit.  THE GRACE OF GOD had
been  following  a  representative Pig Truck  for some miles in the hopes of
passing it. The sheer  quantity of excess  body heat radiating from its vast
phased array  of flapping  pink ears caused several  of our  drinking  water
bottles to achieve full rolling boil and explode. Bong Bong Gad maintained a
respectful distance because of excreta hazards, which  in no way  simplified
the problem of passing  the truck. Tension climbed to a palpable level &
Bong  Bong  was  subjected to  steadily  increasing stream of  good  natured
heckling  and unsolicited driving advice from passenger area, esp.  from DMS
who  viewed  lingering  unwelcome  presence  of  pig  truck  in our  planned
trajectory as  personal affront &  hence  challenge to be overcome w/all
due pluck, vigor, can do spirit, & other qualities known to be possessed
in abundance by DMS.
     After some  time Bong Bong made his move, using one  hand to manipulate
steering wheel and other to time share equally important responsibilities of
shifting gears and depressing  the horn button. As we drew alongside the Pig
Truck (which was on my side of  the jeepney) the Truck slalomed toward us as
if  perhaps  swerving  around  some  real  or  imagined roadside hazard. The
primary horn  of  THE GRACE  OF GOD was apparently  going  unheard, possibly
because  it was competing for audio bandwidth against large numbers of swine
voicing their displeasure in same frequency range. With aplomb normally seen
only  among  senescent  English  butlers,  Bong  Bong  reached up  with  his
horn/gearshift  hand and gripped a brilliant stainless  steel chain flailing
from  ceiling of cab  with  a stainless steel crucifix  on the end of it and
jerked downwards, energizing the secondary, tertiary, and quaternary honking
systems: a trio of tuba sized stainless  steel horns mounted  to the roof of
THE GRACE OF GOD and collectively drawing so much  power that our  vehicle's
speed dropped by (I would estimate) ten km/hr as  its energies were diverted
into  decibel  production.  A  demi hyperbolic swath  of  agricultural crops
twenty miles long was flattened to the ground by the blast, and, hundreds of
miles  north,  the Taiwanese government,  its collective ears still ringing,
filed a diplomatic protest  with  the Philippine ambassador. Dead whales and
dolphins washed ashore on the beaches of Luzon for days, and sonar operators
in passing U.S.  Navy  submarines were sent into early retirement with blood
streaming from their ears.
     Terrified by this sound, all of the pigs (I would suppose) voided their
bowels just as  the driver of the Pig Truck swerved violently  away from us.
Certain first year physics conservation of momentum  issues dictated that  I
be showered with former pig bowel contents in order  to enhance  shareholder
value. This was evidently the  funniest  thing  that the  two Asian  looking
gentlemen had ever  seen and rendered them helpless for several minutes. One
of them actually  retched  from  laughing too hard (the  first time that our
vehicle's  lack  of windows came in handy). The  other extended his hand and
introduced himself as  one Jean Nguyen. This is the French male name "zhohn"
and not the  Anglo female name "jeen." Jean Nguyen looked at me  expectantly
after telling me his name, as did DMS, as if they were expecting me to get a
fairly obvious joke. Perhaps  preoccupied with hygienic issues. I  failed to
get  it.  and they  pointed out to  me that  when "Jean" is  pronounced like
"John"  and "Nguyen" is pronounced the way a lot of Americans mangle it, the
name sounds  arguably  like "John  Wayne," which is  how I was encouraged to
address this  Jean Nguyen from that point onwards. It  seemed  in retrospect
that  I  was  being  given an  opportunity  to have  a small chuckle at Jean
Nguyen's  expense  and  thereby  to  even  the  scales,  in  some  small but
symbolically important sense,  for  the pig  shit  incident.  My failure  to
exploit this opportunity  left  everyone feeling mildly uneasy and like they
still  owed me one. The other gentle man  was  introduced  as Jackie Woo. He
spoke English with a vaguely East Indian  crackle which  led me to peg  him,
speculatively,  as a Malay Peninsula native  of Chinese  descent, e.g.. from
Singapore or Penang.
     First  day's travel  got us across the  central  Luzon  plain (rice and
sugar cane)  to  the  town of  San  Jose  at the  foot  of  the southernmost
extension of the Cordillera Central (trees and bugs). By  this point it  was
dark, and to my relief, neither DMS nor Bong Bong was eager  to brave twisty
Cordillera roads  in darkness. We  stayed in  a guest house. At this  point,
having devoted much time  to  detailed Pig  Truck  description I  will elide
various details concerning  San  Juan, its inhabitants (of various taxonomic
phyla some of which I had never encountered until that night), the character
building nature of our lodgings and,  in particular, their fanciful plumbing
system  which was a credit to  the imagination,  though not the  hydrostatic
acumen, of its anonymous  creator. It was the kind of  hostel  that  makes a
traveler eager to get an early and explosively sudden start  in the morning,
which we did.
     A  note now  about the  physical properties  of space, as perceived  by
human beings imprisoned  within bodies of limited  physical  capabilities. I
have long noticed that space  seems  to be more compressed, more  involuted,
some  how psychically LARGER in some places than others. Covering a distance
of three or four miles in the totally open scrublands of central  Washington
State is  a simple matter,  and takes less than an hour on  foot. and only a
few minutes if you have  some kind of vehicle. Covering the same distance in
Manhattan takes much longer. It's  not just  that the space in  Manhattan is
more physically obstructed (though it  definitely is) but that there is some
kind of psychological impact that alters the way you perceive and experience
distance.  You  cannot see  as far, and  what you do see is  full of people,
buildings,  goods,  vehicles, and other stuff that it  takes your brain some
amount of effort  to sort  through, to process. Even if you had some kind of
magic carpet  that  would glide past  all of the  physical  obstructions the
distance would  seem  much longer, and  would  take  longer to cover, simply
because your mind would have to deal with more stuff.
     The same thing is  true of a jungle type of environment  as  opposed to
the plains. Traversing  the  physical space  is basically an ongoing  battle
against  hundreds  of  different  combatants each one  of  which  is,  to  a
traveler, an  obstruction, a hazard, or both. I.e.,  no matter which one  of
them predominates in a given ten  square  meter area, you are still screwed,
as far as  getting  across that ten square  meters is  concerned. There  are
roads through the jungle,  but  even when they are in  good repair they seem
more  like  bottlenecks than vectors  of motion, and they  are never in good
repair mudslides,  fallen trees,  huge chuckholes,  and  the like block them
every few hundred meters. Also the same perceptual thing is at work here you
can't see more  than a few meters  in any  direction,  and  inputs,  some of
which,  like  butterflies,  are  (okay,  okay)  beautiful.   My  reason  for
mentioning  this is that I know that  everyone who  reads  this probably has
multiple  maps of Luzon  on their  wall or  in  their computer, which,  when
consulted, will cause it to  seem  as if  we  are  dealing with a triflingly
small area, and  covering minuscule distances. But you must try not to think
this way and instead imagine that Luzon is effectively as large as, say, the
United States west of the Mississippi. In terms of the time  it takes to get
around the place, it is at least that big.
     I mention this not out  of some impulse to mewl and convince you all of
how strenuously I have worked, but because until you grasp this central fact
of  the  effectively vast size  of  this  part  of  the  world. you will  be
completely unable to believe the dumbfounding facts that I am slowly getting
around to revealing.
     We went into the  mountains.  Around  midday, we encountered  our first
military  roadblock.  Distance  covered from  San  Juan  was  pathetic  from
cartographic  p.o.v.  ,  but  in  terms  of  unexpected  hassles  creatively
surmounted,  wrenchingly  difficult  decisions  made,  & pits of despair
climbed  out   of  by  the  emotional  fingernails,  should  be   considered
magnificent achievement on par with any given day  of  the Lewis & Clark
expedition, (excluding,  of  course,  anomalous days  such  as  their  first
encounters  with Ursus horribilis & their epic, stocking  foot traversal
of Bitterroot  Range.)  Roadblock was  established  in the low key  Filipino
style: one man in military uniform (U.S. Army castoffs) standing by roadside
smoking & beckoning. We were at a rare wide  spot in  the  road, a place
where  oncoming  Chicken playing  vehicles  could pull  aside abjectly. Four
members of Army (later pegged by insignia savvy DMS as a first lieutenant, a
sergeant,  and two  privates)  had ensconced  selves on parked  Humvee  type
vehicle w/absurdly long  whip antenna clamped to bumper. The privates, armed
with  M 16s, stiffly  unfolded selves  from repose  & adopted  positions
flanking THE GRACE OF GOD from behind, keeping their weapons pointed vaguely
at  the ground, as if more  worried  about entomological  threats  than  our
little  band of travelers. Sergeant was armed with what I first perceived as
L shaped nightstick fashioned from  parts scavenged from  plumbing aisle  of
home  improvement  store &  painted black,  but  on  further examination
proved to be a submachine gun.
     Said Sergeant approached Bong Bong Gad's door & conversed with same
in Tagalog.  Lieutenant was armed only  with sidearm & supervised  these
operations  from  a shaded area  near the Humvee, seeming to espouse a hands
off,  as opposed to micromanaging,  leadership  style. This  inspection  was
limited  to the Sergeant peering in through  TGOG's glassless windows  &
exchanging hearty greetings with DMS (evidently Jean Nguyen & Jackie Woo
spoke even  less Tagalog than Yours Truly). We were then allowed to proceed,
although  I  noticed that  the  lieutenant  immediately  commenced  a  radio
transmission. "The sergeant say there are Nice People Around," Bong Bong Gad
explained to me, using a coy local euphemism for NPA,  or New People's Army,
a  supposedly  revolutionary,  but  evidently  somewhat  feckless   guerilla
organization descended in  a direct line from the  Hukbalahaps, or Huks, the
fighters who resisted  the Nipponese occupation (but  not so desultorily) in
WW2.
     We then  covered an amount of distance  equivalent, in  terms of  Fear,
Uncertainty,  and  Doubt,  to one  more Lewis  And Clark  Expedition Day,  a
convenient  unit  of  distance, danger,  perspirational  weight  loss,  poor
sphincter control, wishing you were  at home, exasperation, &  emotional
toll  which I will hereinafter abbreviate as LAC. So after 1 LAC  we arrived
at another roadblock similar to the first except that here there was a troop
truck in addition to the Humvee, and  some tents pitched, and a pit latrine,
whose odor & appearance suggested a long standing  military  presence in
this area. A luckless private was made to crawl underneath THE GRACE  OF GOD
with  a flashlight, inspecting its undercarriage. The three duffel bags were
removed and their contents spread out. I should mention that upon my joining
this  expedition in Manila, DMS had  gone through my bag  with  a  level  of
inquisitiveness annoying at the time,  refused to allow me to  bring certain
items (such  as  pharmaceuticals)  and transferred  remaining items to clear
plastic bags of Ziploc type which were placed in the duffels. Merits of this
highly modular  approach  now became clear  as  inspection of our  cargo was
wondrously  facilitated:  duffels  were simply upended over tarps  spread on
ground & contents  inspected by sight  through transparent  inner  bags,
sometimes by feel  to check  for compositional  inhomogeneities.  Certain of
these bags  contained cartons of American  brand tobacco products  which  as
expected  did  not  make it  back into the duffels. Most of my  DMS mandated
supply  of  alkaline  AA batteries, which  I  had  thought  radically out of
proportion to projected demand, also vanished at this time. We were sent  on
our way and after approx. 0.6  LAC  (mostly  occasioned  by need  to  remove
downed tree from roadway) arrived at a town that  appeared seemingly out  of
nowhere  in  jungle valley, astride  a  river.  Slept  like  a  dead man  in
startlingly decent guesthouse that  night. Woke up next morning & looked
out window  to observe large crowd of locals milling  around in street below
in their best  meshback caps & American basketball t  shirts.  Descended
stairs  to discover DMS in dining room, strategically flanked by Jean Nguyen
& Jackie Woo, at other tables in corners of room,  wearing  climatically
inappropriate  jackets  & generally projecting  the  image of  concealed
weapon equipped badass motherfuckers not to be trifled with.
     Not  wishing  to  interfere  with this  psychodrama, Yours  Truly  took
innocuous position at yet another  table,  well away from  projected gunfire
corridors, accepted  coffee  from  proprietor,  declined  local  delicacies,
negotiated (see expense  report) for loan of bowl &  spoon,  breakfasted
upon  Cap'n  Crunch &  warm UHT  milk  from duffel  bag (former had been
packed  into a Ziploc that when fully loaded  adopted the distinctive pillow
shape of an individual nugget of Cap'n Crunch, only  much larger). Explosive
crunching noises  of  nuggets  caused  Yours  Truly  to feel conspicuous and
Western. Jean Nguyen & Jackie Woo had  declined all  refreshments except
tea, the  better to project image  of hair trigger alertness & potential
for instantaneous violence, DMS was eating an omelette with approx. diameter
of a Hula Hoop & engaging in one  short conversation  after another with
locals, who were  admitted through front  door  of building one at a time by
proprietor  and  allowed to  present their  cases to  DMS as  if  he were  a
traveling magistrate. Between two  such interviews, DMS noted my presence in
room & bade  me join  him. I moved  my  Cap'n Crunch  infrastructure  to
corner of table  not occupied by omelette & sat with him during the next
couple  of dozen interviews, which were  conducted in mixture of English and
Tagalog. Crowd  in  street dwindled gradually  as  they were interviewed and
then dismissed by DMS.
     Subject  matter of  interviews could be induced by Yours Truly  only by
recognizing occasional English  words & adopting  a  basically intuitive
pattern recognition approach not amenable to rational explication here. Most
common   keywords:  Nippon,   the   Nipponese,  the  War,  Gold,   Treasure,
Excavations,   Yamashita,   Mass  Executions.   Emotional  tenor  of   these
conversations consisted  of polite but  extreme skepticism  on  part of DMS,
while  confronted by desperate need to be  believed on part of interviewees.
In the end DMS did  not believe any of them as  far as I could discern. They
either  became obstreperous & had to  be shown the door (glancing warily
at  Jean Nguyen &  Jackie  Woo)  or  adopted  a wounded  & aggrieved
stance. DMS was amused by the former & disgusted  by  the latter.  Yours
Truly mused  silently  upon  inappropriateness  of his own presence in  this
setting  &  fondly  remembered  predictable comforts  of  home,  even of
Manila. Upon completion of  breakfast & of interviews, DMS divulged,  in
response to my  inquiries, that he had been at it for two hours before I had
arrived & that  formation  of  this milling crowd  occurs  spontaneously
before  doors of any lodgings  he takes  in  the  Philippines  owing to  his
reputation as treasure hunter. We had avoided it in San Juan only because he
goes  there frequently  and has already interviewed  everyone in region with
Nipponese  War  Gold  stories  found  99.9%  of  them  lacking  credibility,
investigating the remaining .1% with occasionally lucrative results.
     THE  GRACE  OF  GOD  had  been  washed  and  buffed  by  Fidel  Gad  in
magnificently  insouciant  gesture  of  defiance  of  jungle  elements.   We
proceeded  across river. Racial variations were conspicuous on faces, and in
physiognomies,  of   townspeople.  Philippines  were  settled  by  countless
overlapping waves of prehistoric migrants each racially & linguistically
incompatible with the last; this  in combination with the spatial involution
phenom. which  I have,  I think sufficiently belabored by this point,  makes
for  your basic  patchwork of different ethnic groups. The fork in the river
around which this town was  nucleated was meeting point of unofficial  turfs
of  three  such  different cultures. Lure of  bright  lights,  or  even dim,
flickering   ones,  has  drawn  thousands  down  from  mountains  in  recent
generations   to  establish   several  distinct  barangays.  This  morning's
interviewees  were migrants from the mountains, or  their sons or grandsons,
who claimed to  have first hand knowledge of sites of Yamashita's hoards, or
to have heard about same from late ancestors.
     After  covering  about 1.6 LACs through  jungle  (roads,  slopes, &
conditions  getting  worse  all the  time) we  encountered  another military
roadblock  that had (somewhat incredibly to my mind) been established  at  a
pass over a  ridge,  overlooking  some  rice  terraces that  had (even  more
incredibly)  been hacked  out of an essentially vertical south facing  slope
thousands  of  years ago by the evidently fearsomely  tenacious ancestors of
the locals. Here we were thoroughly searched. My testicles were squeezed  at
some  length by a  sergeant  with  a  pencil mustache, whose motives did not
appear to be  sexual, but  who  simultaneously looked  me searchingly in the
eye,  awaiting a  look  of  submission or hopelessness on  the  face  of the
squeezed.  The  others  were  subjected to the  same treatment and  probably
endured it with more stoicism than Yours Truly. No lethal weapons were found
attached  to any of our  scrota, but (surprise!) Jean ("John  Wayne") Nguyen
and  Jackie Woo were discovered  to be armed to the  teeth, and DMS somewhat
less  so. This is the part where Yours Truly expected to be shot in the nape
of  the neck  whilst  kneeling  above  a shallow  grave, but  ironically the
authorities  were far more  interested in my cache of Cap'n Crunch  than the
weaponry sported by my comrades. Negotiations took place between DMS and the
captain in charge  of  this outpost, in  the privacy of a  tent. DMS emerged
with a thinner wallet and full  clearance to proceed, on the conditions that
(1) all supplies of Cap'n Crunch be donated to the officers' mess, and (2) a
full inventory  of weapons and ammo  would be taken  upon  our return  &
compared with today's findings to make sure that we were not  smuggling arms
to the Nice People Around.
     Three  days' excruciatingly slow  travel,  comprising  maybe another 10
LACs, awaited  us. According  to my map and  GPS  we were circumnavigating a
cluster of active volcanoes that frequently spew out lahars (mud avalanches)
which, when they impact upon ruts in the jungle that I'm here calling roads,
cause logistical  problems well  into the  realm  of  the absurd. We  passed
entire  towns that had been buried  and abandoned. Church steeples projected
at angles from the grey mud, held up by the same flows that had knocked them
askew.  Skulls of goats,  dogs, etc.  protruded from  mud that  had hardened
around  living  animals  like  concrete.  We  bedded down  nightly  at small
settlements  after  propitiating  locals  with  gifts  of  penicillin (which
Filipinos use like  aspirin), batteries, disposable lighters, & whatever
else  had been left  to us by the soldiers  at the  roadblocks.  We slept on
benches,  floor, roof, or front seats of THE GRACE  OF GOD, beneath mosquito
nets.
     Finally, when my GPS revealed that we  were less  than ten km. from our
mysterious destination, a local instructed  us to wait in  a nearby village.
We remained there for a day & a night  resting up and reading books (DMS
is never without a milk crate of techno thrillers) until,  at  dawn, we were
approached by a trio of very young, short men, one of whom carried an AK 47.
He and his brethren climbed on the roof of THE GRACE OF GOD and we proceeded
into a  jungle track so  narrow that I would not  have pegged it even  as  a
footpath. A couple  of km. into the jungle we reached a point where we spent
more time pushing the jeepney than riding in it. Shortly thereafter  we left
Bong Bong  and Fidel and  one of the duffels behind,  the four  of us taking
turns humping  the two other  duffels.  I consulted  the GPS  & verified
that,  although  we  had  for  a  time  (alarmingly)  moved  away  from  the
Destination, we  were now  moving  toward it  again. We were eight  thousand
m(eters)  away  and  proceeding  at a  rate that  varied between  about five
hundred and a  thousand  m per  hour, depending on  whether we  were  moving
steeply uphill  or  steeply downhill. It was  around noon. Those of you with
even  rudimentary math skills will have anticipated  that  when the sun went
down we were still a few thousand meters away.
     The three Filipinos our guides, guards, captors, or whatever  they were
wore  the  obligatory U.S.  t  shirts  which make it  so  easy, nowadays, to
underestimate  cultural  differences. They  had  not yet,  however, attained
transethnicity.  While in  town they  were shod in flip  flops,  but in  the
jungle they went barefoot (I have owned pairs of shoes less durable than the
calluses on their feet).  They spoke a language that apparently  had zero in
common with the Tagalog I'd heard ("Tagalog" is the old name; the government
is  ragging on  people  to call it "Filipina," as if to  imply that it is in
some sense  a  common language  of  the archipelago, which,  as  these  guys
demonstrated, is not the case). DMS had to converse with them in English. At
one  point he  gave one a  throwaway  plastic ballpoint  pen and their faces
absolutely  lit  up. Then we  had  to scrounge  up  two  more  pens for  his
companions. It was like Christmas. Progress halted for several minutes while
they  marveled at  the  pens'  handy clicking mechanisms and  doodled on the
palms of their hands. The American t  shirts were, in other words,  not worn
as Americans wear them but in the same spirit that the Queen of England wore
the exotic Koh I Noor  Diamond on her  crown.  Not for the  first time I was
overtaken by a strong not exactly in Kansas feeling.
     We  slogged through the inevitable late afternoon thunderstorm and kept
moving into the night. DMS produced U.S. Army MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) from
the duffels, only a  couple of weeks past their stenciled expiration  dates.
The Filipino men found these nearly as  exciting  as the ballpoint pen,  and
saved  the  disposable  foil  trays for  later use  as  roofing material. We
started  slogging again. The moon came out, which represented a bit of luck.
I  fell down a couple of times and banged myself up on trees, which ended up
being a good thing because it put me into a state of mild shock, dulling the
pain  and jacking me up on adrenaline.  Our guides, at one point,  seemed  a
little uncertain as to which way they  should  go. I took a fix with the GPS
(using  the screen's  nightlight function)  and established  that we were no
more than fifty meters away from  the destination, almost too small an error
for my GPS to resolve. In any  event, it  told us roughly which direction to
proceed, and  we trudged  through the  trees for another  few  moments.  The
guides  became animated  and very  cheerful finally they  had  gotten  their
bearings, they knew where we  were. I bumped into something heavy, cold, and
immovable that nearly broke my knee. I  reached down to touch  it, expecting
to find a rock outcropping, but instead felt some thing smooth and metallic.
It seemed to be a stack of smaller units, maybe comparable in size to loaves
of bread. "Is this what we're looking for?" I asked. DMS turned on a battery
powered lantern and whipped the beam around in my direction.
     I was instantly  blinded  by a thigh high  stack  of gold bars, about a
meter  and  a half  on a side, sitting  out in the  middle  of  the  jungle,
unmarked and unguarded.
     DMS came over and sat down on top of it and lit a cigar. After a while,
we  counted  the  bars and measured  them.  They  are trapezoidal  in  cross
section, about 10  cm  wide and 10 high,  and about  40 cm  in length.  This
enabled us to estimate their mass at about  75 kg. each, which works  out to
2,400 troy ounces. Since gold is normally measured in troy ounces and not in
kilograms (!) I'm  going to make a wild guess that these bars were  intended
to weigh an even 2,500 troy ounces apiece. At current rates ($400/troy oz. )
this means each  bar is worth  a million dollars. There are 5 layers of bars
in  the stack,  each layer consisting of  24 bars, and  so  the value of the
stack is $120 million. Both the mass estimate and the value estimate presume
that the bars are nearly pure gold. I  took a  rubbing of the stamp from one
of the bars,  which  bears the mark of the  Bank  of Singapore. Each bar  is
marked with a unique serial number and I copied down as  many  of those as I
could see.
     Then we went back to Manila. All along the way, I tried to  imagine the
logistics  of getting even  a single one of  those gold bars from the jungle
out to the nearest bank where it could be turned into something useful, like
cash.
     Let me transition to a Q&A format here.
     Q: Randy, I get the feeling that you are about to lay out in detail all
of the hassles that would be involved in moving this gold overland, so let's
just cut to the chase and talk about helicopters.
     A:  There is no place for  a helicopter to land.  Terrain is  extremely
rugged. The nearest sufficiently  flat place is about one km. away. It would
have to be cleared. In Vietnam  this  was  accomplished using  'blockbuster"
bombs, but this is probably  not an option here. Trees would have to  be cut
down, creating a gap in the jungles conspicuous from the air.
     Q: Who cares if it's conspicuous? Who's going to see it?
     A: As should  be obvious from my anecdote,  the people who control this
gold have connections in Manila. We may assume that the area is overflown by
the Philippine Air Force regularly, and kept under radar surveillance.
     Q:  What would be involved in  getting  the bars to  the nearest decent
road?
     A:  They  would  have  to be  carried  over  the jungle  trails  I have
described. Each bar weighs as much as a full grown man.
     Q: Couldn't they be cut up into smaller pieces?
     A: DMS rates it as unlikely that the current owners would permit this.
     Q:  Is there any  chance  of  smuggling the  gold through  the military
checkpoints?
     A: Obviously not  in the  case  of  a mass  shipment. The gold weighs a
total of around ten tons, and would require a truck that could not negotiate
most of the roads we  saw. Concealing ten tons of goods  from the inspectors
at these checkpoints is not possible.
     Q: How about smuggling the bars out one at a time?
     A:  Still  very tricky.  Might be possible to  hike the bars out to  an
intermediate point  somewhere,  melt or chop  them down, and somehow secrete
them  in  the body of a jeepney or  other vehicle, then drive the vehicle to
Manila and  extract the  gold. This operation  would have to  be repeated  a
hundred  times. Driving  the same vehicle past one of  these  checkpoints  a
hundred (or  even two)  times would strike them as,  to put it mildly,  odd.
Even if this were possible there is the payment issue.
     Q: What is the payment issue?
     A: Obviously the people  who  control the  gold want to be paid for it.
Paying them in more  gold, or  in precious gems, would be ludicrous. They do
not  have bank accounts. They have to be paid in Philippine pesos.  Anything
bigger than about a 500 peso note is useless in this  area. A 500 peso  note
is worth about $20, and  so it would  be necessary  to bring six million  of
them into the jungle to perform the transaction.  Based on  some rudimentary
calculations I have made here using a mechanic's caliper and the contents of
my wallet, the stack of 500 peso notes  would be  about (please wait while I
switch my calculator over to the  "scientific notation" mode)  25,000 inches
high.  Or, if you prefer  the metric system,  something like two thirds of a
kilometer. If you  stacked the  bills a meter  high, you would  need  six or
seven  hundred such stacks, which if jammed  close together would  cover  an
area about three meters on  a side. Basically  we are talking about a  large
Ryder box truck full of money. This would have  to be  transported into  the
middle of  the  jungle, and obviously, melting  down  cash  and secreting it
inside of a truck is not an option.
     Q: Since the military seems to be the big obstacle here, why not simply
cut a deal with them? Let them keep  a big cut  of the  proceeds in exchange
for not hassling us.
     A: Because the money would go  to the  NPA which would  use  it  to buy
weapons for the purpose of killing people in the military.
     Q: There  must be some way to use the value of this  gold  to  leverage
some kind of extraction operation.
     A:  The gold  is worthless to a bank  until  it has been assayed. Until
then it is only a blurry Polaroid of a stack of yellow objects in what seems
to be a jungle. In order to perform an assay you need to go into the jungle,
find  the gold, bore out  a  sample, and transport it safely back to a large
city. But this proves nothing. Even if  the  potential  backers believe that
your  assay  really  came from  the  jungle (i.e.,  that you  did not switch
samples along the way) all they know now is the purity of one end of one bar
in the  stack. Basically  it is not possible  to  obtain full value for this
gold until the entire stack has been extracted and taken to a vault where it
can be systematically assayed.
     Q: Could  you  maybe just get the gold to some local bank and then sell
it at  steep  discount, so that  the  burden  of transporting it would be on
someone else's shoulders?
     A: DMS relates the tale of  one such transaction, in a provincial  town
in north  Luzon, which was  interrupted  when local entrepreneurs  literally
blew  one of the bank's walls off with  dynamite, came  in, and grabbed both
the  gold and the cash  that  was going to be used  to pay for the gold. DMS
asserts he  would rather slit his own throat quietly than walk  into a small
town bank with anything worth more than a few tens of thousands of dollars.
     Q: Is the situation basically impossible then?
     A: It is basically impossible.
     Q: Then what was the point of the whole exercise?
     A: To come full circle to the first thing DMS said. It was to send us a
message.
     Q: What is the message?
     A: That money is not worth having if you can't spend it.
     That certain  people have a lot of money that they badly want to spend.
And that  if we can give  them a way to spend it,  through  the Crypt,  that
these  people will be very  happy.  and conversely  that if we screw up they
will be very sad, and that whether they are  happy or sad they will be eager
to  share these emotions with us, the  shareholders and  management  team of
Epiphyte Corp.
     And  now  I am going to e  mail this to all of  you and then summon the
flight attendant  and  demand the array of alcoholic  beverages I  so richly
deserve. Cheers.
     – R
     Randall Lawrence Waterhouse
     Current meatspace  coordinates,  hot from the GPS receiver card  in  my
laptop:
     27 degrees,  14.95 minutes  N  latitude 143  degrees. 17.44  minutes  E
longitude
     Nearest geographical feature: the Bonin Islands


     Chapter 60 ROCKET


     Julieta  has  retreated  somewhere  far up  beyond the  Arctic  Circle.
Shaftoe  has  been pursuing her like a  dogged Mountie, slogging across  the
sexual tundra on frayed snowshoes and leaping  heroically from floe to floe.
But  she remains about as distant, and about as reachable, as  Polaris.  She
has spent more  time  lately  with  Enoch Root  than  with  him and Root's a
celibate priest or something. Or is he?!

     On the few occasions Bobby Shaftoe has actually gotten Julieta to crack
a smile, she has immediately  begun to ask difficult questions: Did you have
sex  with Glory, Bobby? Did you use a condom? Is it possible that  she might
have become pregnant? Can  you absolutely rule out  the possibility that you
have a child in the Philippines? How old would he or she be right now? Let's
see,  you fucked her on Pearl Harbor Day, so  the child would have been born
in early September of  '42. Your child would be fourteen, fifteen months old
now perhaps just learning to walk! How precious!
     It always gives Shaftoe the willies when  tough  girls like Julieta get
all fluttery  and  slip into baby talk. At first, he figures it's all a ruse
to keep him at arm's length. This smuggler's daughter, this atheist guerilla
intellectual what does  she care about some girl in  Manila? Snap out of it,
woman! There's a war on!
     Then he comes up with a better explanation: Julieta's pregnant.
     The  day  begins  with  the sound of a ship's  horn  in  the harbor  at
Norrsbruck. The town is a jumble of neat, wide  houses packed onto a spur of
rock that sticks out into the Gulf of Bothnia, forming the southern shore of
a  slender but  deep inlet lined with wharves. Half the  town  now turns out
beneath an  unsettling, turbulent peach and salmon  dawn to  see this quaint
harbor being deflowered by an  inexorable steel  phallus.  It comes complete
with spirochetes: several score men in black dress uniforms stand on the top
of the  thing, lined up neat as stanchions.  As the blast of  the horn fades
away, echoing back and forth  between the  stony ridges, it becomes possible
to hear the spirochetes singing: belting out a bawdy German sea chanty which
Bobby Shaftoe last heard during a convoy attack in the Bay of Biscay.
     Two other people in Norrsbruck will recognize  that tune. Shaftoe looks
for Enoch Root in his church cellar, but he is not present, his bed and lamp
are cold. Maybe the local chapter of Societas Eruditorum holds  its meetings
before dawn or maybe he's found another welcoming bed. But trusty old Günter
Bischoff can be seen, leaning out the window  of his seaside garret,  elbows
in the air  and his trusty  Zeiss 735  binoculars  clamped  over  his  face,
scanning the lines of the invading ship.
     The Swedes stand with  arms folded for a  minute  or so, regarding this
apparition. Then they make some kind of collective decision that it does not
exist, that nothing  has happened  here. They turn their backs, pad grumpily
into their houses, begin to boil  coffee. Being neutral is  no less strange,
no less fraught  with awkward compromises, than being  a belligerent. Unlike
most of  Europe, they  can rest  assured that  the Germans are  not  here to
invade them or sink their ships. On the other hand, the vessel's presence is
a violation of  their sovereign territory and  they ought to  run down there
with  pitchforks and  flintlocks  and fight the Huns off. On the third hand,
this boat was probably made out of Swedish iron.
     Shaftoe fails, at  first, to recognize the German  vessel as  a U  boat
because it  is  shaped all wrong. A regular U boat is shaped like a  surface
vessel,  except longer  and skinnier.  Which is  to say it  has  a sort of V
shaped hull and a flat  deck, studded with guns, from which rises a gigantic
conning tower that is covered with junk: ack ack guns, antennas, stanchions,
safety lines, spray shields. The Krauts would put cuckoo clocks up there too
if they had room. As a regular U boat plunges through the waves, thick black
smoke spews from its diesel engines.
     This one is just a torpedo as long as a  football field.  Instead  of a
conning tower there's a streamlined bulge on the top, hardly noticeable.
     No guns, no antennas, no cuckoo clocks; the  whole thing's as smooth as
a river rock. And it's not making smoke or noise,  just venting a little bit
of  steam. The diesels don't rumble. The fucking thing doesn't even  seem to
have diesels. Instead there is a dim whine, like the sound  that came out of
Angelo's Messerschmidt.
     Shaftoe intercepts Bischoff just as the latter is coming down the steps
of the inn carrying a duffel bag  the size  of a dead sea lion. He's panting
with  exertion, or maybe excitement.  "That's the one," he  gasps. He sounds
like he's talking  to  himself, but he's  speaking  English,  so he must  be
addressing Shaftoe. "That's the rocket."
     "Rocket?"
     "Runs on rocket fuel hydrogen peroxide, eighty five  percent. Never has
to  recharge  its verdammt batteries! Clocks twenty  eight knots  submerged!
That's my baby." He's as fluttery as Julieta.
     "Can I help you carry anything?"
     "Footlocker upstairs," Bischoff says.
     Shaftoe stomps up the narrow staircase to find Bischoff's room stripped
to the bedsprings, and  a pile of gold  coins  on the table, weighing down a
thank you note addressed to the owners. The black locker rests in the middle
of the  floor like a child's coffin. A wild hollering noise reaches his ears
through the open window.
     Bischoff  is down there, heading for the pier  beneath his duffel  bag,
and his  men, up  on  the  rocket, have caught sight  of him. The U boat has
launched a dinghy, which is surging towards the pier like a racing scull.
     Shaftoe  heaves  the locker up  onto his shoulder and  trudges down the
stairs.  It reminds him of shipping out, which is what  Marines are supposed
to  do, and  which  he  has not  actually done in  a  long  time.  Vicarious
excitement is not as good as the real thing, he finds.
     He  follows  Bischoff's  tracks  through  a  film  of  snow,  down  the
cobblestone street, and onto the  pier. Three  men  in black scramble out of
the launch, onto the ladder, up to the pier.  They salute  Bischoff and then
two of  them embrace  him.  Shaftoe's close enough  and the  salmon light is
bright enough, that he can recognize  these two:  members of Bischoff's  old
crew. The third guy is taller, older, gaunter, grimmer, better dressed, more
highly decorated. All in all, more of a Nazi.
     Shaftoe can't believe himself. When he picked up the locker he was just
being considerate to his friend Günter an ink stained retiree with  pacifist
leanings.  Now, all  of a  sudden, he's aiding and abetting the enemy!  What
would his fellow Marines think of him if they knew?
     Oh, yeah. Almost forgot. He is actually participating in the conspiracy
that  he,  Bischoff,  Rudy  von Hacklheber, and  Enoch  Root created  in the
basement of that church.  He  comes to a dead stop and slams the locker down
right there, in the  middle of the pier. The Nazi is startled  by the  noise
and raises his blue eyes in the direction of Shaftoe, who prepares  to stare
him down.
     Bischoff notices this. He turns towards  Shaftoe  and  shouts something
cheerful in Swedish. Shaftoe has the  presence of mind to  break eye contact
with  the  chilly  German. He grins and nods  back. This conspiracy thing is
going to be a  real pain  in the ass if  it  means backing down  from casual
fistfights.
     A couple of sailors have come up the  ladder now  to handle  Bischoff's
luggage. One of  them strides  down  the pier to get the footlocker. Shaftoe
recognizes him,  and  he recognizes Shaftoe, at the same  moment. Damn!  The
guy's  surprised,  but  not unpleasantly  so,  to  see  Shaftoe  here.  Then
something occurs to him and his face  freezes up in horror and his eyes dart
sideways, back toward the  tall Nazi. Shit! Shaftoe turns his back on all of
this, makes like he's strolling back into town.
     "Jens!  Jens!"  Bischoff  hollers, and  then  says  something  else  in
Swedish. He's running after Shaftoe. Shaftoe keeps his back prudently turned
until Bischoff throws  one  arm around  him with a final "JENS!" Then, sotto
voce,  in English:  "You have  my  family's address. If  I don't see  you in
Manila, let's get in touch after the war." He starts pounding Shaftoe on the
back,  pulls some paper money out  of his pocket, stuffs it  into  Shaftoe's
hand.
     "Goddamn it, you'll  see me  there," Shaftoe says. "What is  this  shit
for?"
     "I  am  tipping the nice Swedish boy who  carried my luggage," Bischoff
says.
     Shaftoe sucks his teeth and grimaces. He can tell he is not cut out for
this cloak and dagger nonsense. Questions come to his mind,  among  them How
is  that big  torpedo full of rocket  fuel safer than  what you were  riding
around in before? but he just says, "Good luck, I guess."
     "Godspeed, my friend," Bischoff  says.  "This will  remind you to check
your mail."  Then  he punches Shaftoe in the shoulder hard enough to raise a
three day welt, turns around, and begins walking towards salt water. Shaftoe
walks towards  snow and trees,  envying  him.  The next time he looks at the
harbor, fifteen minutes later, the U boat is  gone. Suddenly this town feels
just as cold, empty, and out in the middle of nowhere as it really is.
     He's  been  getting  his mail at  the  Norrsbruck post office,  general
delivery. When the place opens up a couple of hours later, Shaftoe's waiting
by the door; venting steam from his nostrils, like he's rocket fuel powered.
He receives a letter from his folks in Wisconsin,  and  one  large envelope,
posted yesterday  from somewhere in Norrsbruck,  Sweden,  bearing no  return
address but inscribed in Günter Bischoff's hand.
     It  is full of notes and documents concerning the new U boat, including
one or  two letters  personally signed  by  John Huncock himself.  Shaftoe's
German is slightly better than it was before he went on his own U boat ride,
but he still can't follow most  of it. He sees a lot of numbers there, a lot
of technical looking stuff.
     It is your basic priceless naval intelligence. Shaftoe wraps the papers
up carefully, sticks them in his pants,  begins walking up the beach towards
the Kivistik residence.
     It  is a  long, cold, wet trudge. He has  plenty  of time to assess his
situation: stuck  in a neutral  country on the other side of the  world from
where he  wants  to be. Alienated  from  the  Corps. Lumped in with a  vague
conspiracy.
     Technically speaking,  he has been AWOL for several months now.  But if
he  suddenly turns up at the  American  Embassy in Stockholm, carrying these
documents, all will be forgiven. So this is his ticket home. And "home" is a
very large  country  that  includes places like  Hawaii,  which is closer to
Manila than is Norrsbruck, Sweden.
     Otto's boat is fresh in from Finland, bobbing on an incoming tide, tied
up  to  his bird's nest  of a  jetty. The boat, he knows, is still loaded up
with whatever Finns are exchanging for coffee and  bullets  at  the  moment.
Otto himself is sitting  in the cabin, drinking coffee  naturally,  red eyed
and plumb wrung out.
     "Where's Julieta?" Shaftoe says. He's starting to worry  that she moved
back to Finland or something.
     Otto turns a bit greyer every time he drives his tub across the Gulf of
Bothnia. He  looks  especially grey today.  "Did  you see that monster?"  he
says,  then  shakes  his  head in a  combination of wonderment, disgust, and
world weariness that can only  be attained by hardened  Finns. "Those German
bastards!"
     "I thought they were protecting you from the Russians."
     This elicits a long thunder roll of dark, chortling laughter from Otto.
"Zdrastuytchye, tovarishch!" he finally says.
     "Say what?"
     "That  means, 'Welcome,  comrade' in  Russian," Otto says. "I have been
practicing it."
     "You  should be  practicing the  Pledge  of  Allegiance," Shaftoe says.
"Soon as we get done taking down the Germans, I figure we'll  just kick  her
into high gear and beat the Russkies all the way back to Siberia."
     More laughter from Otto, who knows naïveté when he sees it,  but is not
above  finding  it  charming.  "I have  buried  the  German air  turbine  in
Finland," he says. "I will sell it to  the Russians or the Americans whoever
gets there, first."
     "Where's Julieta?" Shaftoe asks again. Speaking of naïveté.
     "In town," Otto says. "Shopping."
     "So you've got cash."
     Otto looks seasick. Tomorrow is payday.
     Then Shaftoe's going to be on a bus, headed for Stockholm.
     Shaftoe sits down across from Otto and they drink coffee and talk about
weather, smuggling, and the relative merits of various small fully automatic
weapons  for a  while. Actually,  what they  are  talking  about  is whether
Shaftoe will get paid, and how much.
     In the end, Otto issues a guarded promise to pay, provided that Julieta
does  not  spend all of the  money on her "shopping" trip, and provided that
Shaftoe unloads the boat.
     So Bobby Shaftoe spends the rest  of the day  carrying Soviet  mortars,
rusty tins of  caviar, bricks  of  black  tea  from  China, Lapp folk art, a
couple  of icons, cases  of pine flavored  Finnish  schnapps, coils of  vile
sausages, and bundles of pelts up  out of the hold of Otto's boat, down  the
dock, into the cabin.
     Meanwhile, Otto goes into town, and  still has not come back long after
night has fallen. Shaftoe sacks out in the cabin, tosses and turns for about
four hours, sleeps for about ten minutes, and then is awakened by a knocking
at the door.
     He approaches  the  door  on hands  and knees,  gets the  Suomi machine
pistol out of its hiding place, then crawls to the  far end of the cabin and
exits silently through  a trap door in the floor. There is ice  on the rocks
below, but his bare feet give him enough traction to clamber  around and get
a good view of whoever is standing there, pounding on the door.
     It is Enoch Root himself, nowhere to be seen this last week or so.
     "Yo!" Shaftoe says.
     "Bobby," Root says, turning around, "I gather you heard."
     "Heard what?"
     "That we are in danger."
     "Nah," Shaftoe says, "this is just how I always answer the door."
     They go into the cabin.  Root  declines to turn on any lights and keeps
looking out  the  windows like he's expecting someone. He  smells faintly of
Julieta's perfume, a  distinctive scent that Otto has  been  smuggling  into
Finland by the  fifty five gallon drum. Somehow, Shaftoe is not surprised by
this. He proceeds to make coffee.
     "A very complex situation has arisen," Root says.
     "I can see that."
     Root is startled by  this, and  looks up  blankly at Shaftoe, his  eyes
glowing stupidly in the moonlight. You can be the smartest guy in the world,
but when a woman comes into the picture, you're just like any other sap.
     "Did you come all this way to tell me that you're fucking Julieta?"
     "Oh, no, no, no!" Root says. He stops for a  moment,  furrows his brow.
"I mean, I  am. And I was going to  tell you. But that's just the first part
of a  more  complicated business."  Root  gets  up, shoves hands in pockets,
walks around the cabin again, looking out the windows. "You have any more of
those Finnish guns?"
     "In  that  crate to your  left," Shaftoe says. "Why?  We  gonna have  a
shootout?"
     "Maybe. Not between you and me! But other visitors may be coming."
     "Cops?"
     "Worse."
     "Finns?" Because Otto has his rivals.
     "Worse."
     "Who then?" Shaftoe can't imagine worse.
     "Germans. German."
     "Oh, fuck!" Shaftoe hollers disgustedly. "How can you say they're worse
than Finns?"
     Root  looks taken  aback.  "If you're going to tell me  that  Finns are
worse, pound for pound, than Germans, then I agree with you. But the trouble
with Germans is that they tend to be in communication with millions of other
Germans."
     "Okay," Shaftoe mutters.
     Root hauls the lid off a crate,  pulls out a machine pistol, checks the
chamber, aims the barrel at the moon, peers through it like a telescope. "In
any case, some Germans are coming to kill you."
     "Why?"
     "Because you know too much about certain things."
     "What certain things? Günter and his new submarine?"
     "Yes."
     "And how, may I ask, do you know this? It has something to do with  the
fact that  you're  fucking Julieta, right?"  Shaftoe continues.  He's  bored
rather than pissed off. This whole Sweden thing is old and tired to him now.
He belongs in the Philippines.  Anything that doesn't get him  closer to the
Philippines just irritates him.
     "Right."  Root heaves a sigh.  "She thinks  highly  of you,  Bobby, but
after she saw that picture of your girlfriend "
     "Snap out of  it! She doesn't give  a shit  about you  or me. She  just
wants to have all of the good parts of being a Finn without the bad parts."
     "What are the bad parts?"
     "Having to live in Finland," Shaftoe says. "So she has to marry someone
with a good  passport.  Which nowadays means American  or British. You might
have noticed that she didn't fuck Günter."
     Root looks a little queasy.
     "Well, maybe she did then," Shaftoe  says, heaving a sigh. "Shit!" Root
has rooted an ammo clip out of another crate and figured out how to affix it
to the Suomi.  He says, "You  probably know that  the Germans  have a  tacit
arrangement with the Swedes."
     "What does 'tacit' mean?"
     "Let's just say they have an arrangement."
     "The Swedes are neutral, but they let the Krauts push them around."
     "Yes. Otto has to deal with Germans at each end of his smuggling route,
in Sweden  and in Finland, and he  has to deal with their navy when he's out
on the water."
     "I'm aware that the fucking Germans are all over Europe."
     "Well,  to make a long story  short, the local  Germans  have prevailed
upon Otto to betray you," Root says.
     "Did he?"
     "Yes. He did betray you."
     "Okay. Keep talking, I'm  listening to you," Shaftoe says. He begins to
mount a ladder up into the attic, but then he thought better of it.
     "I guess you could say he repented," Root says.
     "Spoken like a  true man of  the cloth," Shaftoe mutters. He's into the
attic now, crawling on hands and knees over the rafters. He stops and sparks
up  his Zippo. Most of its light  is absorbed by a dark green  slab: a crude
wooden crate with Cryllic letters stenciled on it.
     Root's voice  is  filtering  up from below: "He came  to, uh, the place
where Julieta and I, uh, were."
     Were  fucking. "Get me the  crowbar,"  Shaftoe shouts. "It's in  Otto's
toolbox, under the table."
     A minute later, the crowbar  rises up through  the hatch, like the head
of a  cobra emerging from a  basket. Shaftoe grabs it  and begins assaulting
the crate.
     "Otto was torn. He had to do what he did, or the German could have shut
down his livelihood. But  he respects you.  He couldn't bear it.  He  had to
talk  to  someone.  So  he came  to  us, and told Julieta what he had  done.
Julieta understood."
     "She understood!?"
     "But she also was horrified at the same time."
     "That is truly heartwarming."
     "Um, at that point, the Kivistiks broke  out the  schnapps and began to
discuss the situation. In Finnish."
     "I understand," Shaftoe says.  Give  those  Finns a grim,  stark, bleak
moral dilemma and  a bottle  of schnapps  and you  could pretty  much forget
about  them for forty eight hours. "Thanks for  having  the guts to come out
here."
     "Julieta will understand."
     "That's not what I mean."
     "Oh, I don't think Otto would hurt me.
     "No, I mean "
     "Oh!" Root exclaims. "No,  I  had to tell  you about Julieta  sooner or
later "
     "No, goddamn it, I mean the Germans."
     "Oh. Well,  I didn't even begin to  think about them until I was almost
here. It was not courage so much as a lack of foresight."
     Shaftoe's pretty good at  foresight. "Take this." He hands down a heavy
steel tube of coffee can diameter, a  few feet long. "It's heavy,"  he adds,
as Root's knees buckle.
     "What is it?"
     "A  Soviet hundred  and twenty millimeter  mortar," Shaftoe says. "Oh."
Root remains silent for a  while, as he lays the mortar  down  on the table.
When he speaks again, his voice sounds different. "I didn't realize Otto had
this kind of stuff."
     "The lethal radius of this bitch is a  good sixty feet,"  Shaftoe says.
He is hauling mortar bombs out  of the crate and stacking  them  next to the
hatch.  "Or  maybe  it's meters, I  can't remember." The bombs look like fat
footballs with tailfins on one end.
     "Feet, meters . . .  the  distinction is  important," Root says. "Maybe
it's  overkill.  But  we  have to get back to  Norrsbruck and take  care  of
Julieta."
     "What do you mean, take care of her?" Root says warily.
     "Marry her."
     "What?"
     "One of us has to marry her, and fast.  I don't know about you,  but  I
kind of  like her, and it'd be  a shame if she  spent the  rest of  her life
sucking  Russian  dick at gunpoint,"  Shaftoe  says. "Besides,  she might be
pregnant with one of our kids. Yours, mine, or Günter's."
     "We, the conspiracy, have an obligation  to look after  our offspring,"
Root agrees. "We could establish a trust fund for them in London."
     "There should  be  plenty of money for that,"  Shaftoe  agrees.  "But I
can't marry her, because I have to be available to marry Glory when I get to
Manila."
     "Rudy can't do it," Root says.
     "Because he's a fag?"
     "No, they marry women all the time," Root says. "He can't do it because
he's German, and what's she going to do with a German passport?"
     "It would not be savvy exactly," Shaftoe agrees.
     "That leaves me," Root says. "I'll marry her, and she'll have a British
passport. Best in the world."
     "Huh," Shaftoe says,  "how does that square with your being  a celibate
monk or priest or whatever the fuck you supposedly are?"
     Root says, "I'm supposed to be celibate "
     "But you're not," Shaftoe reminds him.
     "But God's  forgiveness  is  infinite," Root fires  back,  winning  the
point. "So,  as I was saying, I'm supposed to  be celibate but  that doesn't
mean I can't get married. As long as I don't consummate the marriage."
     "But if you don't consummate it, it doesn't count!"
     "But  the  only  person,  besides  me, who  will  know that  we  didn't
consummate it, is Julieta."
     "God will know," Shaftoe says.
     "God doesn't issue passports," Root says.
     "What about the church? They'll kick you out."
     "Maybe I deserve to be kicked out."
     "So let me  get  this  straight," Shaftoe  says,  "when you really were
fucking  Julieta, you  said  you  weren't and so you were able  to remain  a
priest. Now you're going to marry her and not fuck her and say that you are.
"
     "If  you're trying to say  that my relationship with the Church is very
complicated, I already knew that, Bobby."
     "Let's go, then," Shaftoe says.
     Shaftoe and Root  haul the mortar and a  boxload of bombs down onto the
beach, where  they can take cover behind a  stone retaining wall a good five
feet high. But  the surf makes it impossible to hear anything, so Root  goes
up and hides in the trees along the  road, and leaves Shaftoe to fiddle with
the Soviet mortar.
     There turns out to be not much fiddling necessary. An unlettered tundra
farmer with bilateral frostbite  could  get this thing up and running in ten
minutes. If he'd stayed up late the night before celebrating the fulfillment
of the last five year plan with a jug of wood alcohol maybe fifteen minutes.
     Shaftoe  consults the  instructions. It does  not matter that these are
printed  in Russian, because they  are made for illiterates anyway. A series
of parabolas  is  plotted  out,  the mortar supporting one leg and exploding
Germans  supporting the opposite. Ask a Soviet engineer  to design a pair of
shoes and he'll come  up with  something that looks like the boxes that  the
shoes  came in; ask him to make something that will massacre Germans, and he
turns into Thomas Fucking Edison.  Shaftoe scans the terrain,  picks out his
killing zone, then climbs up and  paces off the distance, assuming one meter
per pace.
     He's back down on  the  beach, adjusting  the tube's angle,  when  he's
startled  by a bulky form vaulting over the  wall, so close it almost knocks
him down. Root's breathing  fast.  "Germans," he  says, "coming in  from the
main road."
     "How do you know they're Germans? Maybe it's Otto."
     "The engines sound like diesels. Huns love diesels."
     "How many engines?"
     "Probably two."
     Root turns out to be right on the money. Two large black Mercedes issue
from  the  forest,  like bad ideas emerging from  the dim  mind  of  a green
lieutenant. Their headlights  are not illuminated.  Each stops and then sits
there for a moment, then the doors open quietly, Germans climb out and stand
up.  Several of  them  are wearing  long black leather  coats.  Several  are
carrying  those  keen  submachine guns  that  are the trade  mark  of German
infantry,  and the envy of  Yanks  and Tommies,  who  must go  burdened with
primeval hunting rifles.
     This is  the moment, then. Nazis are right over there and it is the job
of Bobby Shaftoe,  and to a lesser degree Enoch Root, to kill them all.  Not
just a job but  a  moral requisite, because they are  the  living avatars of
Satan, who publicly acknowledge being just as bad and vicious as they really
are. It is a world,  and a situation,  to  which Shaftoe and  a lot of other
people are perfectly adapted. He heaves a bomb up out of the box, introduces
it to the muzzle of the fat tube, lets it go, and plugs his ears.
     The mortar coughs like a kettledrum. The Germans look  towards them. An
officer's monocle  glints in the moonlight.  A total of  eight Germans  have
gotten out of the cars.  Three of them must be combat veterans  because they
are  down on their  stomachs in a microsecond.  The  trench coated  officers
remain standing, as do a couple of civilian clad goons, who immediately open
fire in their general direction with their submachine guns. This makes a lot
of  noise but only  impresses Shaftoe insofar as it is an impressive display
of stupidity. The  bullets  sail far over their  heads. Before they have had
time to pepper the Gulf of Bothnia, the mortar bomb has exploded.
     Shaftoe peeks over the top of the seawall. As he more or less expected,
all  of the people  who  were  standing up are  now  draped over the nearest
Mercedes, having been bodily lifted off their feet  and flung  sideways by a
moving curtain of shrapnel. But two of the  survivors the veterans are belly
crawling  towards  Otto's  cabin,  whose  thick  log  walls  look  extremely
reassuring in these circumstances. The third  survivor is blasting away with
his submachine gun, but he has no idea where they are.
     The ground is convex in a way that makes  it  hard  to see  those belly
crawling Germans. Shaftoe  fires  a couple more  mortar rounds without  much
effect. He hears the two Germans kicking down the door to Otto's cabin.
     Since  it  is only a one room cabin, this would  be a fine moment to be
armed with grenades. But  Shaftoe has  none, and  he  doesn't really want to
blow the place up anyway.  "Why don't you kill the one  German up there," he
tells Root, and  then  heads down the beach, hugging the seawall in case the
Germans are looking out the windows.
     Indeed,  when he's almost  there  the Germans smash the windows out and
begin  firing in the direction of Enoch Root. Shaftoe  creeps underneath the
cabin,  opens  the  trap door, and emerges into  the center of the room. The
Germans are standing there with their backs to him. He fires his Suomi  into
their backs until they stop moving. Then  he drags them over to the trapdoor
and dumps them down onto  the beach so they won't  bleed all over the floor.
The  next high tide  will carry them away,  and  with any  luck they'll wash
ashore on the Fatherland in a couple weeks.
     It is  silent now, the way it's supposed to be at an  isolated cabin by
the sea. But that doesn't mean anything. Shaftoe makes his way carefully  up
into the trees and circles around  behind  the action, surveying the killing
zone  from above.  The one  German is still crawling around  on  his elbows,
trying to figure out what's going on.  Shaftoe  kills him. Then he makes his
way  down to the beach and  finds Enoch Root bleeding into the sand. He  has
taken  a bullet just under the collarbone  and there is a lot of blood, both
from the wound and from Root's mouth, when ever he exhales.
     "I feel like I'm going to die," he says.
     "Good," Shaftoe says, "that means you probably won't."
     One of the  Mercedes  automobiles is still functional,  though it has a
number of shrapnel holes and a flat tire. Shaftoe jacks it up and swaps in a
surviving tire from the  other Mercedes, then drags Root  over  and gets him
laid out in the backseat. He drives into Norrsbruck, fast. The Mercedes is a
really  great car and he wants  to drive  it all the way to Finland, Russia,
Siberia, down through China maybe stop  for a little  sushi in Shanghai then
on down through Siam and then Malaya, whence he could hop a sea gypsy's boat
to Manila, find Glory, and
     The ensuing  erotic reverie is cut short  by the  voice  of Enoch Root,
bubbling through blood, or something. "Go to the church."
     "Now padre, this is no time to be trying to convert me into a religious
nut. You take it easy."
     "No, go now. Take me."

     "What, so you can make  your peace with god? Hell, Rev, you ain't gonna
die. I'll take you to the doctor's. You can go to church later."
     Root drifts off into a coma, mumbling something about cigars.
     Shaftoe ignores these ravings, burns rubber into Norrsbruck,  and wakes
up the doctor. Then he goes and finds Otto and Julieta  and  takes them over
to  the doctor's office. Finally, he goes round to  the church and wakes  up
the minister.
     When  they get back to the clinic, Rudolf von Hacklheber's arguing with
the  doctor:  Rudy  (who's apparently  speaking on  behalf of Enoch, who can
hardly even talk) wants  Enoch's wedding to Julieta to  happen now, in  case
Enoch dies on the table. Shaftoe is startled by how bad the patient suddenly
looks. But remembering what he and Enoch talked about earlier,  he weighs in
on Rudy's side, and insists that marriage must come before surgery.
     Otto produces a  diamond  ring literally out of  his asshole he carries
valuables around in a polished metal tube shoved  up his rectum and  Shaftoe
serves  as best man, uneasily holding that ring, still hot from Otto. Root's
too weak to thread  it over Julieta's finger and so Rudy guides his hands. A
nurse serves as bridesmaid. Julieta and  Enoch are joined in holy matrimony.
Root utters the words of the oath one at a time,  pausing  after each one to
cough  blood into a stainless steel  bowl. Shaftoe gets all choked  up,  and
actually sniffles.
     The doctor etherizes  Root, opens  his chest, and goes in to repair the
damage. Combat surgery isn't his metier, and so  he makes a few mistakes and
generally does a  great job of keeping the tension level  high.  Some  major
artery gives way, and it's necessary for Shaftoe and the minister to  go out
and yank Swedes off the streets and  persuade them to  donate blood. Rudy is
nowhere to be found, and  Shaftoe suspects  for  a  few minutes that  he has
blown  town.  But  then suddenly he shows  up  at  Root's bedside holding an
ancient Cuban cigar box, Spanish words all over it.
     When Enoch Root dies, the only other people  in the room are Rudolf von
Hacklheber, Bobby Shaftoe, and the Swedish doctor.
     The doctor checks his watch, then steps out of the room.
     Rudy reaches out  and closes Enoch's eyes, then  stands there with  his
hand  on the late  padre's face, and looks at  Shaftoe. "Go," he says,  "and
make sure that the doctor files the death certificate."
     In war, it happens pretty frequently that one of your buddies dies, and
you have to go  right back into action, and save  the  waterworks for later.
"Right," Shaftoe says, and leaves the room.
     The doctor's sitting  in his little office, umlaut studded diplomas all
over the walls, filling out the death certificate. A skeleton dangles in one
corner. Bobby Shaftoe stands at attention on the opposite flank, he  and the
skeleton sort of triangulating on the doctor and watching him scrawl out the
date and time of Enoch Root's demise.
     When  the  doctor's finished, he leans back in his chair  and rubs  his
eyes.
     "Can I buy you a cup of coffee?" asks Bobby Shaftoe.
     "Thank you," says the doctor.
     The young bride  and her father are sprawled blearily  in the  doctor's
waiting room. Shaftoe offers to buy them coffee too. They leave Rudy to keep
watch over the  body of their  late friend and coconspirator, and  walk down
the high street of Norrsbruck. Swedish people  are beginning to  come out of
their houses. They look  exactly like American midwesterners, and  Shaftoe's
always startled when they fail to speak English.
     The  doctor  stops  in   at  the  courthouse  to  drop  off  the  death
certificate. Otto and Julieta go on ahead to the cafe. Bobby Shaftoe loiters
outside, staring back up the street. After a minute or two he sees Rudy poke
his head  out the  door of the doctor's office and  look one  way, then  the
other. He pulls his head  back inside for  a moment. Then he and another man
walk out of the  office. The other man  is wrapped in a blanket that  covers
even his  head. They  climb into the Mercedes, Blanket Man lies  down in the
back seat, and Rudy drives off in the direction of his cottage.
     Bobby Shaftoe sits down in the cafe with the Finns.
     "Later today  I'm gonna get into  that fucking Mercedes and  drive into
Stockholm  like a  fucking bat out of hell," Shaftoe  says. Though the Finns
will never appreciate it, he has chosen  the "bat out of hell" phrase for  a
good reason. He understands,  now, why he has thought of  himself as  a dead
man ever since Guadalcanal. "Anyway, I hope y'all have a nice boat ride."
     "Boat ride?" Otto says innocently.
     "I gave you up to the Germans, just like you did to me," Shaftoe lies.
     "You bastard!" Julieta begins.  But Bobby cuts her  off:  "You got what
you wanted  and then some.  A British passport and " glancing out the window
he  sees  the  doctor  emerging  from the  courthouse  " Enoch's  survivor's
benefits on top of it. And maybe  more later. As for you, Otto,  your career
as a smuggler is over. I suggest you get the fuck out of here."
     Otto's still too  flabbergasted  to be outraged,  but  he's sure enough
gonna be outraged pretty soon. "And go where!? Have you  bothered to look at
a map?"
     "Display some fucking adaptability," Shaftoe says. "You can figure  out
a way to get that tub of yours to England."
     Say  what you will  about Otto, he likes a challenge. "I could traverse
the Göta Canal from Stockholm to Göteborg no Germans there that would get me
almost to Norway but Norway's full of Germans! Even if I make it through the
Skagerrak you expect me to cross the North Sea? In winter? During a war?"
     "If it makes you feel any  better, after you get to England you have to
sail to Manila."
     "Manila!?"

     "Makes England seem easy, huh?"
     "You think I am a rich yachtsman, who sails around the world for fun!?"

     "No,  but  Rudolf  von  Hacklheber  is.  He's   got  money,   he's  got
connections. He's got a line on a good yacht that makes your ketch look like
a dinghy," Shaftoe says. "C'mon, Otto. Stop whining, pull some more diamonds
out  of your asshole, and get it done.  It beats being  tortured to death by
Germans."  Shaftoe stands up and chucks Otto encouragingly on the  shoulder,
which Otto does not like at all. "See you in Manila."
     The doctor's coming in the door. Bobby Shaftoe slaps some money down on
the  table. He  looks Julieta in the eye. "Got  some miles to cover now," he
says, "Glory's waiting for me."
     Julieta nods. So in the eyes of one Finnish girl, anyway, Shaftoe's not
such a bad guy. He bends over  and gives  her  a big  succulent  kiss,  then
straightens up, nods to the startled doctor, and walks out.


     Chapter 61 COURTING


     Waterhouse has been chewing his way through exotic Nip  code systems at
the rate of about one a week,  but after he sees Mary Smith in the parlor of
Mrs.  McTeague's  boarding house,  his  production rate drops  to near zero.
Arguably,  it  goes negative,  for  sometimes  when  he  reads  the  morning
newspaper, its plaintext scrambles into gibberish before his eyes, and he is
unable to extract any useful information.
     Despite his and Turing's disagreements about whether the human brain is
a Turing machine, he has to admit that Turing wouldn't have too much trouble
writing  a set of  instructions to simulate the  brain functions of Lawrence
Pritchard Waterhouse.
     Waterhouse seeks happiness. He achieves it by breaking Nip code systems
and playing the pipe  organ. But since pipe  organs are in short supply, his
happiness level ends up being totally dependent on breaking codes.
     He cannot break codes (hence,  cannot  be  happy)  unless his  mind  is
clear. Now suppose  that mental clarity is designated by C [sub m], which is
normalized, or calibrated, in such a way that it is always the case that
     0 <= C [sub m] < 1
     where C [sub m]  = 0 indicates a totally clouded mind and C [sub m] = 1
is Godlike clarity an unattainable divine state of infinite intelligence. If
the number of messages Waterhouse decrypts, in a given day, is designated by
then it will be governed by C [sub m] in roughly the following way:

     
     Clarity of mind (C [sub m]) is affected  by any number  of factors, but
by  far  the  most  important is  horniness,  which might  be designated  by
[sigma], for  obvious anatomical reasons that  Waterhouse  finds  amusing at
this stage of his emotional development.

     Horniness begins at zero at  time t = t [sub  0] (immediately following
ejaculation) and increases from there as a linear function of time:

     
     The only way to drop it back to zero is to arrange another ejaculation.
There  is a critical  threshold  [sigma  sub c] such that  when [sigma] >
[sigma  sub  c]  it  becomes  impossible  for  Waterhouse to  concentrate on
anything, or, approximately,

     
     which amounts  to  saying  that  the moment  [sigma]  rises  above  the
threshold [sigma  sub c]  it becomes  totally impossible  for Waterhouse  to
break Nipponese cryptographic systems.  This makes it impossible for him  to
achieve happiness (unless there is a pipe organ handy, which there isn't).
     Typically, it takes two to three days for [sigma] to climb above [sigma
sub c] after an ejaculation:
     
     Critical,  then,  to the  maintenance of  Waterhouse's  sanity  is  the
ability  to  ejaculate  every two to three days. As  long as he  can arrange
this, [sigma] exhibits a  classic sawtooth wave  pattern, optimally with the
peaks  at or  near  [sigma sub c]  [see p. 546 top] wherein  the grey  zones
represent periods during which he is completely useless to the war effort.
     So  much for  the  basic theory. Now, when he was  at Pearl Harbor,  he
discovered  something  that,  in retrospect,  should  have  been  profoundly
disquieting.  Namely,  that  ejaculations  obtained in a  whorehouse  (i.e.,
provided  by  the  ministrations of an actual human female) seemed  to  drop
[sigma] below  the  level that Waterhouse could achieve through executing  a
Manual Override. In  other words, the  post  ejaculatory horniness level was
not always equal to zero, as the naive theory  propounded above assumes, but
to some other quantity dependent upon whether the ejaculation was induced by
Self   or  Other:   [sigma]   =[sigma  sub   self]  after  masturbation  but
[sigma]=[sigma sub other] upon leaving a whorehouse, where  [sigma sub self]
> [sigma sub other] an inequality to which Waterhouse's notable successes
in  breaking  certain  Nip  naval  codes  at  Station  Hypo  were   directly
attributable,  in  that  the  many  convenient  whorehouses  nearby  made it
possible for him to go somewhat longer between ejaculations.
     
     Note the twelve day period [above], 19 30 May 1942, with only one brief
interruption in  productivity  during which  Waterhouse  (some might  argue)
personally won the Battle of Midway.
     If  he had thought about this,  it  would  have bothered  him,  because
[sigma  sub  self]  >   [sigma  sub  other]  has  troubling  implications
particularly if the values  of  these  quantities  w.r.t. the  all important
[sigma  sub c]  are not  fixed.  If it weren't  for  this  inequality,  then
Waterhouse could function as a totally self contained and independent  unit.
But [sigma sub self] > [sigma sub other] implies that he is, in  the long
run, dependent on other human beings for his mental  clarity and, therefore,
his happiness. What a pain in the ass!
     Perhaps he  has  avoided thinking about this precisely because it is so
troubling. The week after he meets Mary  Smith, he realizes that he is going
to have to think about it a lot more.
     Something  about the arrival of Mary Smith on the scene has  completely
fouled  up the whole system of equations. Now, when  he has  an ejaculation,
his clarity  of mind does not  take the upwards jump that it should. He goes
right back to thinking about Mary. So much for winning the war!
     He  goes  out in  search of whorehouses,  hoping that good old reliable
[sigma sub  other]  will save his bacon. This is troublesome. When he was at
Pearl,  it was easy,  and uncontroversial. But Mrs. McTeague's boardinghouse
is  in  a  residential neighborhood, which,  if it  contains whorehouses, at
least bothers to hide  them. So Waterhouse has to travel downtown,  which is
not that  easy in a place where internal  combustion  vehicles are fueled by
barbecues in the trunk. Furthermore Mrs. McTeague is keeping her eye on him.
She knows his habits. If he starts coming back from work four hours late, or
going out after dinner, he'll have some explaining to do.  And it had better
be convincing, because she  appears  to  have  taken  Mary  Smith  under one
quivering gelatinous wing and is in  a position to  poison the sweet  girl's
mind  against  Waterhouse. Not only that, he  has to  do much of his  excuse
making in  public, at the  dinner table, which he shares with  Mary's cousin
(whose first name turns out to be Rod).
     But hey, Doolittle bombed Tokyo, didn't he? Waterhouse  should at least
be  able  to sneak  out to a  whorehouse. It  takes  a week of  preparations
(during which he is  completely unable to accomplish meaningful work because
of the soaring [sigma] level), but he manages it.
     It  helps a little, but only on  the  [sigma]  management level.  Until
recently, that was the only level  and so it  would have  been fine. But now
(as Waterhouse realizes through long contemplation  during the hours when he
should be breaking codes) a new  factor has entered the system  of equations
that governs  his behavior; he will have to  write to Alan and tell him that
some new instructions will  have to  be added to  the Waterhouse  simulation
Turing  machine.  This new factor is  F [sub MSp], the  Factor of Mary Smith
Proximity.
     In a simpler universe,  F [sub  MSp],  would  be orthogonal to [sigma],
which  is to say that the two  factors would be entirely independent of each
other.  If it were thus,  Waterhouse  could continue the usual sawtooth wave
ejaculation management program with no changes. In  addition,  he would have
to arrange to  have frequent conversations with  Mary Smith so  that F  [sub
MSp] would remain as high as possible.
     Alas! The  universe  is  not simple. Far from being  orthogonal, F [sub
MSp]  and  [sigma]  are  involved,  as  elaborately  as  the   contrails  of
dogfighting airplanes.
     The old [sigma] management scheme doesn't work  anymore. And a platonic
relationship  will  actually make F  [sub MSp]  worse, not better. His life,
which used  to be a straightforward set  of basically  linear equations, has
become a differential equation.
     It  is the visit to the whorehouse that makes  him realize this. In the
Navy, going to  a whorehouse is about  as controversial as  pissing down the
scuppers when you  are  on the high seas the  worst you can say about it  is
that, in other circumstances, it might  seem uncouth. So Waterhouse has been
doing it for years without feeling troubled in the slightest.
     But  he loathes  himself during, and after,  his  first post Mary Smith
whorehouse visit. He no longer sees himself through his own eyes but through
hers and, by  extension, those of her cousin Rod and of Mrs. McTeague and of
the whole society of decent God fearing folk to whom  he has  never paid the
slightest bit of attention until now.
     It  seems that the intrusion of F [sub MSp] into his happiness equation
is just the thin edge of a wedge  which leaves Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse
at the mercy of  a vast number  of uncontrollable factors, and requiring him
to  cope with  normal human  society.  Horrifyingly, he  now  finds  himself
getting ready to go to a dance.
     The dance is being organized by an Australian volunteer organization he
doesn't know or care about  the  details. Mrs. McTeague evidently feels that
the rent she collects from her boarders obligates her  to find them wives as
well as feeding  and housing them, so she badgers all of them to go, and  to
bring dates if possible. Rod finally shuts her up by announcing that he will
be attending  with a large group, to include his country cousin Mary. Rod is
about  eight  feet tall,  and so it  will be easy to pick  him  out across a
crowded dance floor. With any luck, then, the diminutive Mary will be in his
vicinity.
     So  Waterhouse goes to the dance, ransacking his mind for opening lines
that he can use with Mary. He comes up with several possibilities:
     "Do you realize  that  Nipponese industry is only capable  of producing
forty bulldozers per year?" To  be  followed up  with: "No  wonder  they use
slave labor to build their revetments!"
     Or, "Because  of  antenna  configuration limitations  inherent in their
design,  Nipponese naval  radar  systems  have  a blind spot to the rear you
always want to come in from dead astern."
     Or, "The Nip Army's minor, low level codes are actually harder to break
than the important high level ones! Isn't that ironic?"
     Or, "So, you're from the outback ... do you can a lot of your own food?
It  might interest you to know  that a close  relative of the bacterium that
makes canned soup go bad is responsible for gas gangrene."
     Or, "Nip battleships have started to blow up spontaneously, because the
high explosive shells in  their magazines  become  chemically  unstable over
time."
     Or, "Dr. Turing of Cambridge says that the soul is an illusion and that
all that defines us as human beings can be reduced to a series of mechanical
operations."
     And much more  in this vein. So far he has  not hit on anything that is
absolutely guaranteed  to sweep her off her feet. He doesn't, in fact,  have
the first idea what the fuck he's going to do. Which is how it's always been
with Waterhouse and women, which is why he has never really had a girlfriend
before.
     But this is different. This is desperation.
     What is there to say about the dance? Big room. Men in uniforms, mostly
looking smarter than they  have a right to. Mostly looking smarter, in fact,
than Waterhouse. Women in dresses and hairdos. Lipstick, pearls, a big band,
white  gloves,  fist  fights,  a little  bit o' kissin'  and  a wee  bit  o'
vomitin'. Waterhouse  gets there late that  transportation  thing again. All
the gasoline is  being  used to hurl enormous bombers through the atmosphere
so  that  high  explosives can be showered on Nips. Moving the wad  of flesh
called Waterhouse across Brisbane so  he can try to deflower a maiden is way
down the priority list. He has to  do a lot  of walking in his  stiff, shiny
leather  shoes,  which  become less shiny. By the time he gets  there, he is
pretty  sure  that  they are  functioning  only  as  tourniquets  preventing
uncontrollable arterial bleeding from the wounds they've induced.
     Rather late  into the dance he finally picks out Rod on the dance floor
and stalks him,  over the course  of several numbers (Rod having no shortage
of dance partners),  to a corner of  the room where  everyone  seems to know
each other, and all of  them seem to be having a perfectly fine time without
the intervention of a Waterhouse.
     But  finally  he  identifies  Mary  Smith's neck, which  looks just  as
unspeakably erotic seen  from behind through thirty yards of dense cigarette
smoke as it did seen from the side in Mrs. McTeague's parlor. She is wearing
a dress, and  a string of pearls that adorn  the  neck's architecture  quite
nicely. Waterhouse sets his direction of march towards her and plods onward,
like a Marine covering  the  last  few yards to a Nip pillbox where he knows
full well he's going  to die. Can you get a posthumous decoration  for being
shot down in flames at a dance?
     He's just a few paces away, still forging  along  woozily towards  that
white column of  neck, when  suddenly the  tune comes to  an end, and he can
hear  Mary's voice, and the voices of her  friends. They are chattering away
happily. But they are not speaking English.
     Finally,  Waterhouse  places  that  accent.  Not  only that: he  solves
another mystery, having to do with some  incoming mail he has  seen at  Mrs.
McTeague's house, addressed to someone named cCmndhd.
     It's  like this: Rod and Mary are Qwghlmian! And their  family name  is
not Smith it just sounds vaguely like Smith.  It's really cCmndhd. Rod  grew
up in Manchester in some Qwghlmian ghetto, no doubt and Mary's from a branch
of the  family  that  got into  trouble  (probably  sedition)  a  couple  of
generations back and got Transported to the Great Sandy Desert.
     Let's see Turing explain this one! Because what this proves, beyond all
doubt, is that there is a God, and furthermore  that He is a personal friend
and supporter of Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse. The opening line problem  is
solved, neat  as  a  theorem.  Q. E. D., baby.  Waterhouse  strides  forward
confidently,  sacrificing  another square centimeter  of  epidermis  to  his
ravenous  shoes. As  he later reconstructs  it, he  has, without meaning to,
interpolated himself between Mary cCmndhd and her date, and  perhaps jostled
the latter's elbow and forced him to spill his drink. It is a startling move
that quiets the group. Waterhouse opens his mouth and says "Gxnn bhldh  sqrd
m!"
     "Hey, friend!" says Mary's  date. Waterhouse turns towards the sound of
the voice. The sloppy grin  draped across  his  face serves  as a convenient
bulls eye, and Mary's date's fist homes in on it unerringly. The bottom half
of  Waterhouse's  head goes numb, his  mouth fills  with a warm  fluid  that
tastes nutritious. The vast concrete floor somehow  takes to the air,  spins
like  a flipped  coin, and  bounces off  the side  of his  head. All four of
Waterhouse's limbs seem to be pinned against the floor by the weight of  his
torso.
     Some sort  of  commotion is happening  up on that remote  plane of most
people's  heads, five to six feet above the  floor, where social interaction
traditionally takes place. Mary's date is being hustled off to the side by a
large powerful fellow it is hard to recognize faces  from this angle,  but a
good candidate would be Rod. Rod is shouting in Qwghlmian.
     Actually, everyone  is  shouting  in  Qwghlmian  even the ones who  are
speaking in English because  Waterhouse's  speech recognition centers have a
bad case of jangly ganglia. Best  to  leave  that fancy stuff for later, and
concentrate on more basic phylogenesis: it would be nice, for example, to be
a vertebrate again. After that quadrupedal locomotion might come in handy.
     A  perky Qwghlmian Australian fellow  in an  RAAF uniform  steps up and
grabs his right anterior fin, jerking him up the  evolutionary ladder before
he's  ready. He is not doing Waterhouse a  favor so much as  he  is  getting
Waterhouse's face up where it can  be  better scrutinized.  The RAAF  fellow
shouts at him (because the music has started again):
     "Where'd you learn to talk like that?"
     Waterhouse doesn't know where  to  begin; god  forbid  he should offend
these people again. But he doesn't have to. The RAAF guy screws up  his face
in disgust, as if he had just noticed a six foot  tapeworm trying to  escape
from Waterhouse's throat. "Outer Qwghlm?" he asks.
     Waterhouse nods. The  confused  and  shocked faces  before him collapse
into graven  masks.  Inner Qwghlmians! Of  course!  The inner islanders  are
perennially  screwed,  hence  have  the  best  music, the most  entertaining
personalities, but  are  constantly being  shipped off  to Barbados to  chop
sugar  cane, or  to  Tasmania to chase sheep, or to well,  to  the Southwest
Pacific  to be pursued through the jungle  by starving Nips draped with live
satchel charges.
     The RAAF chap forces himself to smile,  chucks Waterhouse gently on the
shoulder. Someone in this group is going to have to take the  unpleasant job
of  playing  diplomat, smoothing  it  all  over,  and with  the  true  Inner
Qwghlmian's nose  for a shit job, RAAF boy has  just volunteered. "With us,"
he explains brightly, "what you just said isn't a polite greeting."
     "Oh," Waterhouse says, "what did I say, then?"
     "You said that  while you were down at  the  mill to lodge  a complaint
about a sack with a weak seam that sprung loose on Thursday, you were led to
understand, by the tone of the proprietor's voice, that Mary's great aunt, a
spinster  who  had a loose reputation  as a younger  woman, had contracted a
fungal infection in her toenails."
     There  is  a  long silence.  Then everyone  speaks  at  once. Finally a
woman's voice breaks through the cacophony: "No, no!" Waterhouse looks; it's
Mary. "I understood him to say that it was at the pub, and that he was there
to apply for a job catching rats, and that it was my neighbor's dog that had
come down with rabies."
     "He was  at the basilica  for confession the  priest  angina "  someone
shouts from the back. Then everyone talks at once: "The dockside Mary's half
sister leprosy Wednesday complaining about a loud party!"
     There's a strong arm around  Waterhouse's  shoulders,  turning him away
from  all for this. He cannot  turn his  head  to see  who  owns  this limb,
because his  vertebrae have again become unstacked. He figures out that it's
Rod, nobly taking  his poor addled Yank roommate under his wing. Rod pulls a
clean hanky from his pocket and puts it up to Waterhouse's mouth, then takes
his hand  away. The  hanky  sticks to his lip, which is now  shaped  like  a
barrage balloon.
     That's not the  only  decent thing he  does. He  even gets Waterhouse a
drink, and finds him a chair. "You know about the Navajos?" Rod asks.
     "Huh?"
     "Your  marines use Navajo Indians as radio operators  they can speak to
each other in their own language  and the  Nips have no  idea  what the fuck
they're saying."
     "Oh. Yeah. Heard about that," Waterhouse says.
     "Winnie Churchill heard about those Navajos. Liked the idea. Wanted His
Majesty's forces to do likewise. We don't have Navajos. But "
     "You have Qwghlmians," Waterhouse says.
     "There are two different  programs underway,"  Rod says. "Royal Navy is
using Outer Qwghlmians. Army and Air Force are using Inner."
     "How's it working out?"
     Rod  shrugs. "So  so.  Qwghlmian is  a  very  pithy  language. Bears no
relationship to English or Celtic its closest relatives are  !Qnd,  which is
spoken by a  tribe of pygmies in Madagascar, and Aleut. Anyway, the pithier,
the better, right?"
     "By  all means," Waterhouse says. "Less  redundancy harder to break the
code."
     "Problem is,  if it's not exactly a dead language, then it's lying on a
litter  with a priest  standing  over it  making the sign of the cross.  You
know?"
     Waterhouse nods.
     "So everyone  hears it a little differently. Like just  now they  heard
your Outer Qwghlmian accent,  and assumed you were delivering an insult. But
I could tell you were saying that you  believed, based  on a rumor you heard
last Tuesday in the  meat market,  that  Mary was  convalescing normally and
would be back on her feet within a week."
     "I was trying to say that she looked beautiful," Waterhouse protests.
     "Ah!" Rod says. "Then you should have said, 'Gxnn bhldh sqrd m!'"
     "That's what I said!"
     "No, you confused the mid glottal with the frontal glottal," Rod says.
     "Honestly,"  Waterhouse says,  "can  you tell them  apart over  a noisy
radio?"
     "No," Rod says.  "On the  radio, we stick  to the basics: 'Get in there
and take that pillbox or I'll fucking kill you.' And that sort of thing."
     Before much longer, the band  has finished its last set and the party's
over. "Well," Waterhouse says, "would you  tell Mary what I  really did mean
to say?"
     "Oh, I'm  sure there's no need," Rod says confidently.  "Mary is a good
judge  of character. I'm sure she knows what  you meant. Qwghlmians excel at
nonverbal communication."
     Waterhouse just barely restrains himself from saying I guess you'd have
to, which would probably just earn him another slug in the  face. Rod shakes
his hand and departs. Waterhouse, marooned by his shoes, hobbles out.


     Chapter 62 INRI


     Goto Dengo lies on a cot of woven rushes  for  six weeks, under a white
cone of mosquito netting  that  stirs in the breezes  from the windows. When
there is a  typhoon,  the  nurses clasp  mother of pearl shutters  over  the
windows, but mostly they are left open day and night. Outside the window, an
immense stairway has been hand carved up the side of a green mountain.  When
the sun shines, the new rice on those terraces fluoresces; green light boils
into the  room  like  flames. He can  see small gnarled people  in  colorful
clothes  transplanting  rice seedlings and  tinkering  with  the  irrigation
system. The wall of his  room is plain,  cream colored  plaster spanned with
forking  deltas of cracks, like  the blood  vessels  on  the  surface  of an
eyeball. It is decorated only  with a  crucifix  carved out of  napa wood in
maniacal detail. Jesus's eyes are smooth orbs without pupil  or iris,  as in
Roman  statues.  He hangs  askew on  the crucifix, arms  stretched out,  the
ligaments probably pulled  loose  from their moorings now, the crooked legs,
broken by the butt  of  a Roman spear, unable to support the body. A pitted,
rusty  iron nail  transfixes  each palm, and a third suffices for both feet.
Goto  Dengo notices after a while that the sculptor  has arranged the  three
nails  in a perfect equilateral triangle. He and Jesus spend many hours  and
days staring at each other through the white veil that hangs around the bed;
when  it shifts in  the mountain breezes,  Jesus seems  to  writhe.  An open
scroll  is fixed to  the top of the crucifix;  it  says  I.N.R.I. Goto Dengo
spends  a long time  trying to fathom this. I Need Rapid something? Initiate
Nail Removal Immediately?
     The veil parts  and a perfect young woman  in a  severe black and white
habit  is  standing in  the gap, radiant in  the green light coming  off the
terraces,  carrying a bowl  of steaming water. She  peels back his  hospital
gown and begins to sponge  him off. Goto Dengo motions towards  the crucifix
and asks about  it  perhaps the woman has learned a little Nipponese. If she
hears him, she gives no sign. She  is  probably deaf  or crazy  or both; the
Christians are  notorious for  the way they dote  on defective persons.  Her
gaze is fixed on  Goto  Dengo's body, which she swabs gently but implacably,
one  postage stamp sized bit at  a time. Goto Dengo's mind is still  playing
tricks  with him,  and  looking down  at his naked torso he gets  all turned
around for a moment  and thinks  that he is  looking at the nailed  wreck of
Jesus.  His ribs are sticking out and  his skin is a  cluttered map of sores
and scars. He cannot possibly be good  for anything  now;  why are  they not
sending him back  to Nippon? Why haven't  they simply killed him? "You speak
English?" he says, and her huge brown eyes  jump just a bit. She is the most
beautiful woman he  has ever seen. To her, he must be a  loathsome  thing, a
specimen under a glass slide in a pathology  lab.  When  she leaves the room
she  will probably go and wash herself meticulously and then do anything  to
flush the memory of Goto Dengo's body out of her clean, virginal mind.
     He drifts away into a fever, and sees himself from the vantage point of
a mosquito trying to find a way  in through the  netting: a haggard, wracked
body  splayed, like  a slapped insect, on a wooden trestle. The only way you
can tell  he's  Nipponese  is  by the  strip of white  cloth tied around his
forehead,  but  instead  of an orange sun  painted  on it is an inscription:
I.N.R.I.
     A man in a long black  robe is sitting beside him, holding a  string of
red coral beads in his hand, a tiny  crucifix dangling from that. He has the
big head and  heavy brow of those  strange people working  up  on  the  rice
terraces,  but  his receding  hairline and swept back silver brown hair  are
very European, as are his intense eyes. "Iesus Nazarenus  Rex Iudaeorum," he
is saying. "It is Latin. Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews."
     "Jew? I thought Jesus was Christian," said Goto Dengo.
     The man in the black robe just stares at him. Goto Dengo tries again:
     "I didn't know Jews spoke Latin."
     One day a wheeled  chair is pushed into his room; he stares at  it with
dull curiosity. He has heard of these things they are used behind high walls
to  transport shamefully  imperfect  persons  from one  room  to  an  other.
Suddenly these tiny girls have picked him up and dropped him into it! One of
them says something about fresh air and the next thing  he knows he's  being
wheeled  out the door and into a  corridor!  They have  buckled him in so he
doesn't fall  out, and  he twists uneasily  in the chair, trying to hide his
face.  The  girl rolls him out  to a huge verandah that  looks out over  the
mountains. Mist rises  up  from  the  leaves and birds scream.  On  the wall
behind him is a large painting of I.N.R.I. chained naked to a post, shedding
blood from  hundreds  of parallel whip marks. A centurion  stands  above him
with a scourge. His eyes look strangely Nipponese.
     Three other Nipponese men  are  sitting on the verandah.  One  of  them
talks to himself unintelligibly and  keeps picking at a sore on his arm that
bleeds continuously into  a towel on his lap.  Another one  has had his arms
and face burned off, and peers out  at  the world through a single hole in a
blank mask of scar tissue. The third has  been tied into his chair with many
wide strips of  cloth because  he  flops around all the time  like a beached
fish and makes unintelligible moaning noises.
     Goto Dengo eyes the railing of the verandah, wondering if he can muster
the effort to wheel himself over there and fling his body over the edge. Why
has he not been allowed to die honorably?
     The  crew of the submarine  treated him and the other evacuees  with an
unreadable combination of reverence and disgust.
     When was  he set  apart  from  his  race? It  happened long  before his
evacuation  from  New  Guinea.  The lieutenant  who  rescued  him  from  the
headhunters treated him as a  criminal  and sentenced him to execution. Even
before then,  he was  different. Why  did the sharks  not  eat him? Does his
flesh smell different? He should have died with his comrades in the Bismarck
Sea. He lived, partly because he was lucky, partly because he could swim.
     Why could he  swim? Partly  because his body was good at it  but partly
because his father raised him not to believe in demons.
     He laughs out loud. The other men on the verandah turn to look at him.
     He was raised not to believe in demons, and now he is one.
     Black robe  laughs out loud at Goto  Dengo during his next visit. "I am
not  trying to convert you,"  he says. "Please  do not  tell  your superiors
about your suspicions. We have been strictly  forbidden to proselytize,  and
there would be brutal repercussions."
     "You aren't trying to convert  me with words,"  Goto Dengo admits, "but
just by having me here." His English does not quite suffice.
     Black  robe's name  is  Father Ferdinand. He is a Jesuit or  something,
with enough English to run rings around Goto Dengo. "In what way does merely
having you  in this  place constitute proselytization?" Then, just to  break
Goto Dengo's legs out  from under him, he says the same thing in half decent
Nipponese.
     "I don't know. The art."
     "If you don't like our art, close your eyes and think of the emperor."
     "I can't keep my eyes closed all the time."
     Father Ferdinand laughs snidely.  "Really? Most of your countrymen seem
to have no difficulty with keeping their eyes tightly  shut from  cradle  to
grave."
     "Why don't you have happy art? Is this a hospital or a morgue?"
     "La Pasyon is important here," says Father Ferdinand.
     "La Pasyon?"
     "Christ's suffering. It speaks deeply to the people of the Philippines.
Especially now."
     Goto Dengo has another  complaint that he is not able to voice until he
borrows Father Ferdinand's Japanese English dictionary and spends  some time
working with it.
     "Let me see if I understand you," Father Ferdinand  says. "You  believe
that  when we treat you with mercy and dignity, we are implicitly trying  to
convert you to Roman Catholicism."
     "You bent my words again," says Goto Dengo.
     "You  spoke  crooked  words  and I  straightened  them,"  snaps  Father
Ferdinand.
     "You are trying to make me into one of you."
     "One of us? What do you mean by that?"
     "A low person."
     "Why would we want to do that?"
     "Because you have a low person religion. A loser religion.  If you make
me into a low person, it will make me want to follow that religion."
     "And by treating  you decently  we are trying to  make you into  a  low
person?"
     "In Nippon, a sick person would not be treated as well."
     "You  needn't explain  that to us," Father Ferdinand says. "You are  in
the  middle  of  a country full of  women who have  been raped  by Nipponese
soldiers."
     Time   to  change  the  subject.  "Ignoti  et  quasi  occulti  Societas
Eruditorum," says  Goto Dengo, reading  the inscription on  a medallion that
hangs from Father Ferdinand's neck. "More Latin? What does it mean?"
     "It is an organization I belong to. It is ecumenical."
     "What does that mean?"
     "Anyone can join it. Even you, after you get better."
     "I will  get  better," Goto Dengo says. "No  one will  know that  I was
sick."
     "Except for us.  Oh,  I  understand! You mean, no Nipponese people will
know. That's true."
     "But the others here will not get better."
     "It is true. You have the best prognosis of any patient here."
     "You are receiving those sick Nipponese men into your bosoms."
     "Yes. This is more or less dictated by our religion."
     "They are  low  people  now.  You want them  to  join  your  low person
religion."
     "Only insofar as it is good for them," says Father Ferdinand. "It's not
like  those  guys  are going to run  out and  build  us  a new  cathedral or
something."
     The next day, Goto Dengo is deemed to be  cured. He does not feel cured
at all, but he will do anything to get out of this rut: losing one staredown
after another with the King of the Jews.
     He expects that they will saddle  him  with a  duffel bag and  send him
down to the bus terminal to fend for himself, but instead a car comes to get
him. As if that's not good enough, the car takes him to an airfield, where a
light plane picks him up. It is the first time he has ever flown in a plane,
and  the excitement revives him  more than six weeks  in  the hospital.  The
plane  takes off between two green mountains and heads  south (judging  from
the  sun's position) and for the first time he understands where he's  been:
in the center of Luzon Island, north of Manila.
     Half an hour  later,  he's above the  capital, banking  over the  Pasig
River and then the  bay, chockablock  with military transports. The corniche
is  guarded  by a picket line of  coconut  palms. Seen  from overhead, their
branches  writhe  in  the  sea  breeze  like colossal  tarantulas impaled on
spikes. Looking over the pilot's shoulder, he sees a pair of paved airstrips
in the flat paddy land just south of the city, crossing at an acute angle to
form a narrow  X. The light plane  porpoises through gusts. It  bounces down
the  airstrip like  an  overinflated soccer  ball, taxiing past  most of the
hangars and finally fishtailing to a stop near an isolated guard hut where a
man waits on a  motorcycle with an empty sidecar. Goto Dengo is directed out
of the plane and into the sidecar by means of gestures; no one will speak to
him. He is dressed in an Army uniform devoid of rank and insignia.
     A pair of goggles  rests on the seat, and  he puts them on  to keep the
bugs out of his eyes. He is a little nervous because he does not have papers
and he does not have  orders. But they are waved out of the airbase and onto
the road without any checks.
     The motorcycle  driver  is  a  young Filipino man  who  keeps  grinning
broadly, at the risk  of getting insects stuck  between his big white teeth.
He seems to think that he has  the best job in the  whole world, and perhaps
he does. He turns south onto a road that probably qualifies as a big highway
around  these parts, and commences  weaving through traffic. Most of this is
produce carts  drawn by carabaos big  oxlike things with  imposing  crescent
moon shaped horns. There are a few  automobiles, and the occasional military
truck.
     For  the first couple of hours the road  is  straight, and runs  across
damp table land used for growing rice. Goto Dengo catches glimpses of a body
of water off to the left, and isn't sure whether it is a big lake or part of
the ocean. "Laguna de Bay," says the driver, when he catches Goto looking at
it. "Very beautiful."
     Then they turn  away from the lake onto  a road that climbs gently into
sugar  cane territory.  Suddenly, Goto Dengo catches sight  of a volcano:  a
symmetrical cone, black with vegetation, cloaked in mist as though protected
by a mosquito net. The sheer density of the air makes it impossible to judge
size and distance; it could be a little cinder cone just off  the road, or a
huge stratovolcano fifty miles away.
     Banana trees, coconut palms, oil palms, and date palms begin to appear,
sparsely at first, transforming the landscape into a kind of moist savannah.
The driver pulls into a shambolic roadside store to buy petrol.  Goto  Dengo
unfolds his jangled body from the sidecar and sits  down at a table  beneath
an  umbrella. He wipes  a crust of sweat and dirt from his forehead with the
clean  handkerchief that  he found  in  his pocket  this morning, and orders
something to  drink.  They bring him a glass  of ice  water, a  bowl of raw,
locally  produced sugar,  and a plate of pinball  sized calamansi  limes. He
squeezes  the  calamansis  into the water,  stirs  in sugar,  and  drinks it
convulsively.
     The driver comes and joins him; he has cadged a free cup of  water from
the proprietors. He always wears a mischievous grin, as if he and Goto Dengo
are sharing a little private joke. He raises an imaginary  rifle to his face
and makes a scratching motion with his trigger finger. "You soldier?"
     Goto Dengo thinks it  over. "No," he  says, "I do  not deserve  to call
myself a soldier."
     The driver is astonished. "No soldier? I thought you were soldier. What
are you?"
     Goto  Dengo  thinks about  claiming that he is a poet. But he does  not
deserve that title either. "I am a digger," he finally says, "I dig holes."
     "Ahh," the driver says, as if he understands. "Hey, you want?" He takes
two cigarettes out of his pocket.
     Goto Dengo has to laugh at the smoothness  of the gambit.  "Over here,"
he  says to  the proprietor.  "Cigarettes." The driver  grins  and puts  his
cigarettes back where they came from.
     The owner comes over and hands Goto Dengo a pack of Lucky Strikes and a
book of  matches. "How much?" says Goto Dengo,  and takes out an envelope of
money that he found in his pocket this morning.  He  takes the bills out and
looks at  them:  each is printed in English  with  the  words  THE  JAPANESE
GOVERNMENT  and  then some number of  pesos.  There is  a picture  of a  fat
obelisk in  the middle,  a  monument to  Jose P. Rizal that stands  near the
Manila Hotel.
     The proprietor grimaces. "You have silver?"
     "Silver? Silver metal?"
     "Yes," the driver says.
     "Is that what people use?" The driver nods.
     "This is no good?" Goto Dengo holds up the crisp, perfect bills.
     The  owner takes the  envelope  from Goto Dengo's hand and counts out a
few of the largest denomination of bills, pockets them, and leaves.
     Goto Dengo breaks the seal on the pack of Lucky Strikes, raps  the pack
on  the  tabletop  a  few  times,  and  opens the  lid.  In addition to  the
cigarettes, there is a printed card in there. He can just see  the top  part
of it: it is a drawing of a man in a military officer's cap. He pulls it out
slowly,  revealing  an  eagle  insignia  on  the  cap,  a  pair  of  aviator
sunglasses, an enormous corncob pipe, a lapel bearing a line of four  stars,
and finally, in block letters, the words I SHALL RETURN.
     The driver is looking purposefully nonchalant. Goto Dengo shows him the
card and raises his eyebrows. "It is nothing," the  driver says. "Japan very
strong.  Japanese  people  will be  here  forever.  MacArthur good only  for
selling cigarettes."
     When Goto Dengo opens the book of matches, he finds the same picture of
MacArthur, and the same words, printed on the inside.
     After a smoke, they are  back  on the road. More black  cones coalesce,
all around them now,  and the road begins  to  ramble up over hills and down
into valleys. The trees get closer and closer together until they are riding
through a sort of cultivated and  inhabited jungle: pineapples close to  the
ground,  coffee  and  cocoa bushes  in  the  middle,  bananas  and  coconuts
overhead. They pass through one village after another, each one a cluster of
dilapidated huts huddled around a great white church, built squat and strong
to survive earthquakes. They zigzag  around heaps of fresh coconuts piled by
the roadside, spilling out into  the right of way.  Finally they turn off of
the main road and into a dirt track that  winds through the trees. The track
has been rutted by the tires of trucks that are much too big for it. Freshly
snapped off tree branches litter the ground.
     They pass  through a deserted village.  Stray  dogs  flit in and out of
huts whose  front  doors swing unlatched. Heaps of young green coconuts  rot
under snarls of black flies.
     Another mile down the road, the cultivated forest gives way to the wild
kind, and a military checkpoint bars the road. The  smile  vanishes from the
driver's face.
     Goto Dengo states his name to one of the  guards. Not knowing why he is
here, he can say nothing  else. He is pretty sure  now that this is a prison
camp and that he is about to become an inmate. As his eyes adjust he can see
a barrier  of barbed wire strung  from  tree to  tree, and a  second barrier
inside of that. Peering carefully into the undergrowth he can make out where
they  dug  bunkers  and  established  pillboxes,  he   can   map  out  their
interlocking fields of fire  in his mind. He  sees  ropes dangling  from the
tops of tall  trees where snipers  can  tie themselves into the branches  if
need be. It has all been done according to doctrine, but it has a perfection
that is never seen on a real battlefield, only in training camps.
     He is startled to realize that all of these fortifications are designed
to keep people out, not keep them in.
     A call comes through on the field telephone, the barrier is raised, and
they are waved through.  Half a mile into the jungle they come to  a cluster
of tents pitched on platforms made from  the freshly hewn logs  of the trees
that were  cut down to  make  this  clearing. A lieutenant is  standing in a
shady patch, waiting for them.
     "Lieutenant Goto, I am Lieutenant Mori."
     "You have arrived in the  Southern Resource Zone  recently,  Lieutenant
Mori?"
     "Yes. How did you know?"
     "You are standing directly beneath a coconut tree."
     Lieutenant Mori looks straight up in the air to see several wooly brown
cannonballs dangling high over his head. "Ah, so!" he says, and moves out of
the way. "Did you have any conversation with the driver on the way here?"
     "Just a few words."
     "What did you discuss with him?"
     "Cigarettes. Silver."
     "Silver?"  Lieutenant  Mori is  very  interested in this, so Goto Dengo
recounts their whole conversation.
     "You told him that you were a digger?"
     "Something like that, yes."
     Lieutenant  Mori backs off a step, turning  to an enlisted  man who has
been standing off to the side, and nods. The enlisted  man picks the butt of
his  rifle  up off  the  ground, wheels  the weapon  around  to a horizontal
position, and turns towards the driver.  He covers the distance in about six
steps, accelerating to a  full sprint, and cuts loose with a throaty roar as
he drives his bayonet into the driver's slim body. The victim is  picked  up
off  his feet,  then  sprawls  on  his  back  with a low  gasp.  The soldier
straddles him and  thrusts the bayonet  into  his torso  several more times,
each  stroke making a  wet hissing  sound as  metal slides between  walls of
meat.
     The driver  ends up sprawled motionless on the ground, jetting blood in
all directions.
     "The indiscretion will not  be held against  you," says Lieutenant Mori
brightly, "because you did not know the nature of your new assignment.
     "Pardon me?"
     "Digging. You  are here to dig, Goto  san." He  snaps to  attention and
bows deeply. "Let me be the first to congratulate you. Your assignment  is a
very important one."
     Goto Dengo returns the bow, not sure how deep to make it. "So I'm not "
He gropes for  words.  In  trouble? A pariah? Condemned to death? "I'm not a
low person here?"
     "You  are a  very high person  here,  Goto  san. Please come  with me."
Lieutenant Mori gestures towards one of the tents.
     As Goto Dengo walks away, he hears the  young motorcycle driver  mumble
something.
     "What did he say?" Lieutenant Mori asks.
     "He said,  'Father,  into  your  hands  I  commend  my spirit.' It's  a
religious thing," Goto Dengo explains.


     Chapter 63 CALIFORNIA


     Half of  the  people  who  work  at  SFO,  San Francisco  International
Airport, now seem to be Filipino, which certainly helps to ease the shock of
reentry.  Randy gets singled out, as he always does,  for a thorough luggage
search  by  the  exclusively  Anglo  customs  officials.  Men  traveling  by
themselves  with  practically no  luggage  seem  to  irritate  the  American
authorities. It's not so much that  they think you are a drug  trafficker as
that you fit, in the  most  schematic possible way, the profile  of the most
pathologically optimistic conceivable drug trafficker, and hence practically
force them to investigate you. Irritated that you have forced their hand  in
this manner,  they want to teach you a  lesson: travel with a wife  and four
kids next time, or check a few giant trundling bags, or something, man! What
were  you thinking? Never mind that Randy  is coming in  from a  place where
DEATH TO DRUG  TRAFFICKERS is posted all over  the airport the way  CAUTION:
WET FLOOR is here.
     The  most Kafkaesque moment is, as always, when  the  customs  official
asks what he does for a living, and he has to devise an answer that will not
sound  like the frantic improvisations  of a drug mule with a belly full  of
ominously  swelling  heroin  stuffed  condoms.   "I   work  for  a   private
telecommunications provider" seems to be innocuous enough. "Oh, like a phone
company?" says the  customs  official, as if  she's  having none of it. "The
phone market isn't really that available  to us," Randy says, "so we provide
other communications services. Mostly data."
     "Does that involve a lot of traveling around from place to place then?"
asks the customs official, paging through the luridly  stamped back pages of
Randy's passport.  She makes eye contact with a more senior customs official
who  sidles  over  towards  them. Randy now  feels himself getting  nervous,
exactly the way  your drug mule would, and  fights  the impulse to scrub his
damp palms against his  pant legs, which would probably guarantee him a trip
through the magnetic tunnel of a CAT scanner, a triple dose of mint flavored
laxative, and several  hours of straining  over  a  stainless steel evidence
bucket. "Yes, it does," Randy says.
     The  senior customs official, trying to be unobtrusive and low key in a
way that  makes Randy stifle a sort of gasping, pained outburst of laughter,
begins to flip through some appalling communications industry  magazine that
Randy stuffed into his briefcase on his way out the door back in Manila. The
word INTERNET appears at  least five times on the front cover.  Randy stares
directly into  the  eyes of  the  female  customs official  and  says,  "The
Internet." Totally factitious understanding  dawns  on the woman's face, and
her eyes ping bosswards. The boss, still deeply absorbed in an article about
the  next generation of high speed routers,  shoves out  his  lower  lip and
nods,  like every other nineties  American male who senses that knowing this
stuff is now as intrinsic to maleness as changing flat tires was  to Dad. "I
hear that's really exciting now,"  the  woman says in a completely different
tone of voice, and begins scooping Randy's stuff together into a big pile so
that he can repack it. Suddenly the spell is  broken,  Randy is a  member in
good  standing of  American society  again, having  cheerfully endured  this
process  of being  ritually  goosed by  the Government.  He  feels a  strong
impulse  to drive  straight  to  the nearest  gun store  and spend about ten
thousand dollars. Not that he wants to hurt anyone; it's  just that any kind
of government authority gives him the creeps now. He's probably been hanging
out  too much  with the  ridiculously  heavily armed  Tom  Howard.  First  a
hostility to rainforests, now  a desire to own an automatic weapon; where is
this all going?
     Avi is waiting for him, a tall pale figure standing at the  velvet rope
surrounded  by   hundreds  of  Filipinas  in  a  state  of  emotional  riot,
brandishing gladiola spears like medieval pikemen. Avi has his hands  in the
pockets of  his floor skimming  coat, and  keeps his head turned  in Randy's
direction but is  sort of  concentrating  on a point  about  halfway between
them,  frowning  in  an  owlish way. This is  the  same  frown  that Randy's
grandmother used  to wear when she was teasing apart a tangle of string from
her junk drawer. Avi adopts it when he is doing  basically the same thing to
some new complex  of information. He  must have read Randy's e  mail message
about the gold. It occurs to Randy that he missed  a great opportunity for a
practical joke: he could have loaded up his bag with a couple of lead bricks
and  then handed it  to Avi and completely blown  his  mind. Too  late.  Avi
rotates  around his  vertical  axis as Randy comes abreast of  him and  then
breaks into a stride  that matches Randy's pace. There is some unarticulated
protocol that dictates when Randy and Avi will shake hands, when  they  will
hug, and when they will just act like they've  only been separated for a few
minutes. A recent exchange  of e  mail seems to constitute a virtual reunion
that obviates any hand  shaking or hugging. "You were right about the cheesy
dialog," is the first thing Avi says. "You're spending  too much  time  with
Shaftoe, seeing  things his way.  This  was not  an attempt  to  send you  a
message, at least not in the way Shaftoe means."
     "What's your interpretation, then?"
     "How would you go about establishing a new currency?" Avi asks.
     Randy frequently overhears snatches  of business  related  conversation
from  people he  passes  in airports, and it's  always about how did the big
presentation go, or who's on the short list to replace the departing CFO, or
something.  He prides  himself  on  what he believes to  be the  much higher
plane, or at least the much more bizarre subject matter, of his interchanges
with Avi. They are walking together around the slow arc of SFO's inner ring.
A whiff  of soy sauce and ginger drifts out of a restaurant and fogs Randy's
mind, making him unsure, for a moment, which hemisphere he's in.
     "Uh,  it's  not something I  have given much  thought to," he says. "Is
that what we are about now? Are we going to establish a new currency?"
     "Well obviously someone needs to establish one that doesn't  suck," Avi
says.
     "Is this some exercise in keeping a straight face?" Randy asks.
     "Don't you ever read the newspapers?"  Avi grabs Randy by the elbow and
drags him over towards  a newsstand. Several  papers are running  front page
stories about crashing Southeast Asian currencies,  but this isn't all  that
new.
     "I  know currency fluctuations are important to Epiphyte," Randy  says.
"But my god, it's so tedious I just want to run away.
     "Well, it's not tedious to her," Avi says, yanking out  three different
newspapers that have all decided to run the same wire service photograph: an
adorable Thai  moppet standing  in  a mile  long queue in  front  of a bank,
holding up a single American dollar bill.
     "I know it's a big deal for some of our customers," Randy says, "I just
didn't really think of it as a business opportunity."
     "No, think about it," Avi says. He counts out a few dollar bills of his
own to pay  for  the newspapers, then swerves towards  an exit. They enter a
tunnel that leads to a parking garage. "The sultan feels that "
     "You've been just sort of hanging out with the sultan?"
     "Mostly with Pragasu. Will you let me finish? We  decided to set up the
Crypt, right?"
     "Right."
     "What is the Crypt? Do you remember its original stated function?"
     "Secure, anonymous, unregulated data storage. A data haven."
     "Yeah. A bit bucket. And we envisioned many applications for this."
     "Boy, did  we ever,"  Randy says,  remembering many  long nights around
kitchen tables and hotel rooms, writing versions of the  business plan  that
are now as ancient and as lost as the holographs of the Four Gospels.
     "One of these was electronic banking. Heck, we even  predicted it might
be one  of the major applications. But whenever a business plan first  makes
contact with the actual  market  the real world suddenly all  kinds of stuff
becomes clear. You may have envisioned  half a dozen  potential  markets for
your product, but as soon as you open your doors, one just explodes from the
pack and  becomes  so instantly important that good business sense  dictates
that you abandon the others and concentrate all your efforts."
     "And that's what happened with the e banking thing," Randy says.
     "Yes. During  our  meetings at the Sultan's Palace," Avi says.  "Before
those  meetings,  we  envisioned  well you  know  what  we envisioned.  What
actually  happened was  that  the room was packed with these  guys who  were
exclusively interested in the e  banking thing.  That  was  our  first clue.
Then,  this!"  He holds  up his  newspapers,  whacks the dollar  brandishing
moppet with the back of his hand. "So, that's the business we're in now."
     "We  are bankers," Randy says.  He will  have  to  keep saying this  to
himself for a while in order to believe  it, like, "We are striving with all
our might to uphold the goals of the  23rd Party Congress."  We are bankers.
We are bankers.

     "Banks used to  issue  their  own  currencies.  You can see  these  old
banknotes  in the  Smithsonian. 'First  National  Bank of South Bumfuck will
remit ten pork bellies to the bearer,' or whatever. That had to stop because
commerce became nonlocal  you needed  to be able to take your money with you
when you went out West, or whatever."
     "But if we're online, the whole world is local," Randy says.
     "Yeah.  So all we need is something to back the currency. Gold would be
good."
     "Gold? Are you joking? Isn't that kind of old fashioned?"
     "It was until  all  of the unbacked currencies  in Southeast Asia  went
down the toilet."
     "Avi,  so  far  I am still kind of  confused, frankly.  You seem  to be
working your way around to telling me that my little trip to see the gold in
the jungle  was no coincidence. But how can we  use  that  gold  to back our
currency?"
     Avi shrugs as if  it's such a minor detail he hasn't  even bothered  to
think about it. "That's just a deal making issue."
     "Oh, god."
     "These people who sent you a message want to get into business with us.
Your trip to see the gold was a credit check."
     They  are walking through a tunnel  toward the  garage, stuck behind an
extended clan  of  Southeast Asians in elaborate  headdresses.  Perhaps  the
entire remaining gene pool of some nearly extinct mountain dwelling minority
group. Their  belongings  are  in giant  boxes wrapped  in  iridescent  pink
synthetic twine, balanced atop airport luggage carts.
     "A credit check."  Randy always hates it when he gets so far behind Avi
that all he can do is lamely repeat phrases.
     "You know how, when you and Charlene bought  that house, the lender had
to look at it first?"
     "I bought it for cash."
     "Okay, okay, but in general, before  a bank  will issue a mortgage on a
house, they will inspect it. Not in great  detail, necessarily. They'll just
have some executive  of the bank  drive  by the property to  verify that  it
exists and is where the documents claim it is, and so on.
     "So, that's what my journey to the jungle was about?"
     "Yeah.  Some  of the  potential,  uh, participants in the project  just
wanted to make it clear to us that they were, in fact, in possession of this
gold."
     "I really have to wonder what 'possession' denotes in this case."
     "Me too," Avi says. "I've been sort of puzzling over  that one." Hence,
Randy thinks, the frowny look in the airport.
     "I just thought they wanted to sell it," Randy says.
     "Why? Why sell it?"
     "To liquidate it. So they could buy real estate. Or five thousand pairs
of shoes. Or something."
     Avi  scrunches his  face in disappointment. "Oh,  Randy, that is really
unworthy, alluding to the Marcoses.  The  gold  you  saw  is  pocket  change
compared to what Ferdinand Marcos dug up. The people who set up your trip to
the jungle are satellites of satellites of him."
     "Well. Consider  it a cry  for help,"  Randy  says. "Words  seem to  be
passing back and forth between us, but I understand less and less."
     Avi  opens his mouth to  respond, but just  then the  animists  trigger
their car alarm. Unable to propitiate it,  they form a circle around the car
and grin at one another. Avi and Randy pick up their pace and get  well away
from it.
     Avi  stops and  straightens,  as if pulled up  short.  "Speaking of not
understanding things," he says, "you need to communicate with that girl. Amy
Shaftoe."
     "Has she been communicating with you?"
     "In the  course of twenty minutes' phone conversation,  she  has deeply
and eternally bonded with Kia," Avi says.
     "I would believe that without hesitation."
     "It wasn't even like they got to know each other. It was like they knew
each other in a previous life and had just gotten back in touch."
     "Yeah. So?"
     "Kia now  feels bound by duty and  honor to present a united front with
America Shaftoe."
     "It all hangs together," Randy says.
     "Acting  sort of like Amy's emotional agent  or lawyer, she has made it
clear to me that we, Epiphyte Corporation, owe  Amy  our full  attention and
concern."
     "And what does Amy want?"
     "That was my question," Avi says, "and I was made to  feel very bad for
asking it. Whatever  it is  that we  that you  owe to Amy  is  something  so
obvious  that  merely manifesting  a need  to  verbalize  it  is...  just...
really..."
     "Shabby. Insensitive."
     "Coarse. Brutish."
     "A really transparent, toddler level exercise  in the cheapest kind of,
of. . ."
     "Of evasion of personal responsibility for one's own gross misdeeds."
     "Kia was rolling her eyes, I imagine. Her lip was sort of curled."
     "She drew breath  as if to give me a  good  piece of her  mind but then
thought better of it."
     "Not because you're her boss. But because you would never understand."
     "This is just  one of those evils that  has  to be sort of accepted and
swallowed, by any mature woman who's been around the block."
     "Who knows the harsh realities. Yeah," Randy says.
     "Okay, you can tell Kia that her  client's needs and demands  have been
communicated to the guilty party "
     "Have they?"
     "Tell her that the fact that her client has needs  and demands has been
heavy handedly insinuated to me and  that it is understood that the ball  is
in my court."
     "And  we can  stand  down to some kind of detente  while  a response is
prepared?"
     "Certainly. Kia can return to her normal duties for the time being."
     "Thank you, Randy."
     Avi's Range Rover is parked in the most remote  part of the roof of the
parking ramp, in the  center of about  twenty five empty parking spaces that
form a sort of security buffer zone. When they have  traversed about half of
the glacis, the  car's headlights  flutter,  and Randy hears the preparatory
snap of a sound system being energized. "The Range Rover has picked us up on
Doppler radar," Avi says hastily.
     The Range  Rover  speaketh  in  a fearsome Oz like voice cranked  up to
burning  bush  decibel levels. "You  are  being tracked by  Cerberus! Please
alter your course immediately!"
     "I can't believe you bought one of these things," Randy says.
     "You  have encroached  on the  Cerberus defensive perimeter! Move back.
Move back," says the Range Rover. "An armed response team is being placed on
standby."
     "It is the only cryptographically sound car alarm system," Avi says, as
if  that settles  the  matter. He digs  out a keychain  attached to  a black
polycarbonate fob  with the same  dimensions, and  number  of buttons, as  a
television remote  control. He  enters a long series of  digits and cuts off
the voice in the middle of proclaiming that Randy and Avi are being recorded
on a digital video camera that is sensitive into the near infra red range.
     "Normally  it doesn't do that," Avi says. "I had it set to its  maximum
alert status."
     "What's the worst that could happen? Someone  would  steal your car and
the insurance company would buy you a new one?"
     "I couldn't care  less  if it gets stolen. The worst that could  happen
would be  a car  bomb, or, not quite as bad, someone putting a bug in my car
and listening to everything I say."
     Avi drives  Randy over the San Andreas Fault to his place in  Pacifica,
which is where Randy stores his car  while he's overseas. Avi's wife Devorah
is in at the doctor's for  a routine prenatal and all the kids are either at
school or being hustled  around  the neighborhood by their tag  team duo  of
tough Israeli nannies. Avi's nannies have the souls of  war  hardened Soviet
paratroopers in the bodies of nubile eighteen year old girls. The  house has
been  utterly abandoned  to  kid  raising. The formal dining  room  has been
converted  to  a  nanny  barracks  with  bunk  beds  hammered together  from
unfinished two by fours, the  parlor  filled with cribs and changing tables,
and every  square  centimeter  of  cheap shag  carpet in the place  has been
infused with a few dozen flakes of glitter, in various festive colors, which
if  they  even cared  about getting  rid of it could only be removed through
direct microsurgical extraction, one flake at a time. Avi plies Randy with a
sandwich of turkey  bologna  and ketchup on  generic Wonderoid bread. It  is
still too early in Manila for Randy to call Amy and make amends for whatever
he did wrong. Down below  them, in  Avi's  basement  office, a  fax  machine
shrieks and rustles  like a bird  in  a  coffee can. A laminated CIA  map of
Sierra Leone is spread out on the  table, peeking out here and there through
numerous overlying strata of dirty  dishes, newspapers, coloring  books, and
drafts of the Epiphyte(2) Business Plan. Post  it notes are stuck to the map
from place to place. Written on each note, in Avi's distinctive triple ought
Rapidograph drafting  pen  hand,  is  a  latitude and longitude with lots of
significant  digits,  and some kind  of  precis  of what happened there:  "5
women,  2 men,  4 children, with machetes  photos:" and then serial  numbers
from Avi's database.
     Randy was a little  groggy on the drive  over, and was irritable  about
the inappropriate daylight,  but after the sandwich his  metabolism tries to
get  into the  spirit  of things. He  has  learned to surf these  mysterious
endocrinological swells. "I'm going to get going," he says, and stands.
     "Your overall plan, again?"
     "First I go south,"  Randy  says, superstitiously not even  wanting  to
utter the name of the place where he used to live. "For  no more than a day,
I hope. Then jet lag will land on me like a plunging safe and I will hole up
somewhere and watch basketball through the vee of my feet  for maybe a  day.
Then I head north to the Palouse country."
     Avi raises his eyebrows. "Home?"
     "Yeah."
     "Hey, before  I forget could you  look  for information on the Whitmans
while you're up there?"
     "You mean the missionaries?"
     "Yeah. They came out to the  Palouse to convert the Cayuse Indians, who
were  these  magnificent horsemen. They had the best of intentions, but they
accidentally gave them measles. Annihilated the whole tribe."
     "Does  that  really  land  within the  boundaries  of  your  obsession?
Inadvertent genocide?"
     "Anomalous cases have heightened utility in that they help us delineate
the boundaries of the field."
     "I'll see what I can find about the Whitmans."
     "May I inquire," Avi says, "why you are going up there? Family visit?"
     "My grandmother is moving to a  managed care facility. Her children are
convening to  divide  up her  furniture  and so  on, which  I find  a little
ghoulish, but it's nobody's fault and it has to be done."
     "And you are going to participate?"
     "I am  going to avoid it as much as I can,  because it's probably going
to be a  catfight. Years from now, family members will still not be speaking
to each other because they didn't get Mom's Gomer Bolstrood credenza."
     "What is it with  Anglo Saxons and furniture? Could you explain that to
me?"
     "I am  going because we  found  a piece of  paper in a briefcase  in  a
sunken Nazi submarine in the Palawan Passage that says, 'WATERHOUSE LAVENDER
ROSE.'"
     Avi looks baffled now, in a way that Randy finds satisfying. He gets up
and climbs  into his  car and starts driving south, down the coast, the slow
and beautiful way.


     Chapter 64 ORGAN


     Lawrence Waterhouse's libido is suppressed for about a week by the pain
and swelling in his jaw. Then the pain and swelling in his groin surges into
the fore, and he begins searching his memories of the dance, wondering if he
made any progress with Mary cCmndhd.
     He  wakes up  suddenly  at  four  o'clock one Sunday morning,  clammily
coated  from his nipples to his knees. Rod is still  sleeping soundly, thank
god, and so if Waterhouse did any moaning or calling out of names during his
dream, Rod's probably not aware  of  it. Waterhouse  begins trying  to clean
himself off without making a  lot of noise.  He doesn't  even want  to think
about how he's  going  to explain the  condition of  the sheets  to Who Will
Launder  Them. "It was completely innocent,  Mrs. McTeague. I dreamed that I
came downstairs in my pajamas and that Mary was sitting in the parlor in her
uniform, drinking tea, and she turned  and looked me in the eye, and  then I
just couldn't  control myself and  aaaaAAAHHH! HUH! HUH! HUH! HUH! HUH! HUH!
HUH! HUH! HUH! HUH! HUH! And then I woke up and just look at the mess.
     Mrs. McTeague (and other old ladies like her all around the world) does
the  laundry  only because it is her role  in the giant Ejaculation  Control
Conspiracy which, as Waterhouse is belatedly realizing,  controls the entire
planet. No doubt she has a clipboard down in the cellar, next to her mangle,
where she  marks down the frequency and volume  of  the ejaculations of  her
four boarders.  The data  sheets are mailed into some Bletchley Park type of
operation somewhere (Waterhouse guesses it's disguised as a large convent in
upstate New York), where the  numbers from all round the world are tabulated
on Electrical Till Corporation machines and printouts piled up on carts that
are wheeled  into  the  offices of the high priestesses  of  the conspiracy,
dressed in heavily starched white raiments,  embroidered with the  emblem of
the conspiracy: a penis caught in a  mangle. The priestesses review the data
carefully.  They observe  that  Hitler still  isn't getting any, and  debate
whether letting him have some would calm him down  a little bit or just give
him license to  run further out of control. It will take months for the name
of Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse to come to the top of the list,  and months
for orders to be sent out to Brisbane and even then, the orders may  condemn
him to another  year  of waiting for Mary cCmndhd to  show up  in his dreams
with a teacup.
     Mrs.  McTeague,  and  other  ECC  members  (such  as Mary  cCmndhd  and
basically  all  of  the other  young  women) are  offended  by  easy  girls,
prostitutes,  and whorehouses, not for  religious  reasons, but because they
provide  a  refuge where men can have ejaculations that are not  controlled,
metered, or monitored in any way. Prostitutes are turncoats, collaborators.
     All of  this  comes into  Waterhouse's mind as he lies in his  damp bed
between four  and six  o'clock in the morning, considering his place  in the
world with the crystalline  clarity  that can only  be obtained by getting a
good night's sleep and then  venting  several weeks' jism production. He has
reached a fork in the road.
     Last night, before Rod  turned in, he shined his shoes, explaining that
tomorrow  morning  he  had  to  be  up bright  and  early  for church.  Now,
Waterhouse  knows  what  that means,  having spent many a Sabbath on Qwghlm,
cringing and blushing under the glares of the locals, who were outraged that
he appeared to be running the huffduff equipment on  the day of rest. He has
seen them  shuffling into their morbid, thousand year old black stone chapel
on Sunday  mornings for  their  three hour services. Hell,  Waterhouse  even
lived in a Qwghlmian chapel for several months. Its gloom suffused his whole
being.
     Going to  church with Rod would mean giving  in  to  the  ECC, becoming
their minion. The alternative is the whorehouse.
     Even though he grew up in churches, raised by church people, Waterhouse
(as must  be obvious by this point) never  really understood their attitudes
about sex. Why  did  they get  so hung up on that one issue, when there were
others like murder, war, poverty, and pestilence?
     Now,  finally, he  gets it: the churches are merely one branch  of  the
ECC. And  what they  are doing, when they fulminate about sex, is  trying to
make sure that all the young people fall in line with the ECC's program.
     So,  what is the end result of the ECC's efforts? Waterhouse  stares at
the ceiling, which is starting to become fuzzily visible as the sun rises in
the west, or the north,  or wherever the hell it rises  here in the Southern
Hemisphere. He takes a quick inventory of the world and finds that basically
the  ECC  is running the  entire planet, good countries  and  bad  countries
alike. That all successful and respected men are minions  of the ECC, or  at
least are  so scared of it that they pretend  to be. Non ECC members live on
the  fringes  of  society,  like  prostitutes,  or  have  been  driven  deep
underground and must waste tremendous amounts of  time and energy keeping up
a false front. If you knuckle under and become a minion of the ECC,  you get
to  have a career, a family, kids, wealth, house, pot roasts, clean laundry,
and the respect of all the other ECC minions.  You have  to pay dues in  the
form of chronic nagging sexual irritation which can only be relieved by, and
at  the discretion and convenience of, one person, the person designated for
this  role by the ECC: your wife. On  the other hand, if you reject the  ECC
and  its works,  you  can't, by definition,  have a family,  and your career
options are limited to pimp, gangster, and forty year enlisted sailor.
     Hell, it's  not even that bad of a conspiracy.  They build churches and
universities, educate kids, install swingsets in parks. Sometimes they throw
a war and kill ten or twenty million people, but it's a  drop in  the bucket
compared to stuff like influenza which the ECC campaigns against by  nagging
everyone to wash their hands and cover their mouths when sneezing.
     The  alarm  clock.  Rod  rolls out of bed  like  it's  a  Nip air raid.
Waterhouse stares at the ceiling for another  few minutes, dithering. But he
knows  where he's going, and there's no point in wasting any more time. He's
going to church, and not  exactly because he has renounced Satan and all his
works,  but  because  he wants to fuck Mary. He  almost can't help flinching
when he says  (to himself) this terrible sounding thing. But the weird thing
about church is  that  it  provides  a special  context within  which  it is
perfectly okay  to want to fuck Mary. As long  as  he goes to church, he can
want to fuck Mary as much as he wants, he can spend all of his  time, in and
out of  church, thinking  about fucking Mary. He  can let her know  that  he
wants to fuck her as long as he finds a more oblique way of phrasing it. And
if he  jumps through certain hoops (hoops of gold) he  can even fuck Mary in
actuality, and it will all be  perfectly acceptable at no time will he  have
to feel the slightest trace of shame or guilt.
     He  rolls out of  bed, startling Rod, who (being some  sort  of  jungle
commando)  is easily startled. "I'm going to fuck your cousin  until the bed
collapses into a pile of splinters," Waterhouse says.
     Actually,  what  he  says  is  "I'm going  to  church  with  you."  But
Waterhouse, the cryptologist, is engaging in a bit of secret code work here.
He is  using  a newly  invented code, which  only he knows. It will  be very
dangerous  if the code is ever broken, but this is impossible since there is
only one copy, and  it's in Waterhouse's head. Turing might be  smart enough
to  break the  code anyway,  but he's  in England, and he's  on Waterhouse's
side, so he'd never tell
     A  few minutes later, Waterhouse  and cCmndhd go downstairs, headed for
"church," which in Waterhouse's secret code, means "headquarters of the Mary
fucking campaign of 1944."
     As they step out into the cool morning air they can hear Mrs.  McTeague
bustling  into their bedroom to strip their  beds  and inspect their sheets.
Waterhouse smiles, thinking that he has just gotten away with something; the
damning  and  overwhelming evidence found on his bed linens will  be  neatly
cancelled out by the fact that he got up early and went to church.
     He is expecting a  prayer group meeting in the basement of a dry  goods
store, but it turns out that the Inner Qwghlmians got banished  to Australia
in droves. Many of them settled in Brisbane. In the downtown they managed to
construct a United Ecclesiastical Church out of rough hewn  beige sandstone.
It would look  big, solid, and almost opulent if it were not directly across
the  street from the Universal  Ecclesiastical Church, which is twice as big
and made of smooth faced limestone. Outer Qwghlmians, dressed in dour blacks
and  greys, and frequently  in  navy uniforms, shuffle  up  the  wide,  time
blackened steps of the Universal Ecclesiastical Church, occasionally turning
their heads  to  throw disapproving  looks across  the  street  at the Inner
Qwghlmians,  who  are actually  dressed for  the  season  (it  is  summer in
Australia) or in Army  uniforms. Waterhouse  can see that what really pisses
them off is the sound of the music that vents from the United Ecclesiastical
Church whenever its red enameled  front doors are hauled open. The choir  is
practicing and the organ is playing. But  he can tell from half a block away
that something's wrong with the instrument.
     The  look  of  the  Inner Qwghlmian women in their pastel  dresses  and
bright bonnets is reassuring.  These do not look  like people who engage  in
human sacrifice.  Waterhouse tries  to spring lightly up the  steps as if he
really wants to be here.  Then he  remembers that he  does want  to be here,
because it is all part of his plan to fuck Mary.
     The churchgoers are all  talking  in Qwghlmian, greeting each other and
saying nice  things to Rod, who is evidently well thought of. Waterhouse has
no idea what they are saying, and finds it comforting to  know  that most of
them  don't either. He  strolls into the central aisle of the church, stares
down its  vault to the altar, the choir behind it, singing beautifully; Mary
is  there, in the alto section,  exercising those pipes  of hers, which  are
framed attractively by the satin stole of her chorister's uniform. Above and
behind the choir, a big old  pipe organ spreads its tarnished wings,  like a
stuffed  and mounted eagle that's been sitting in  a  damp  attic for  fifty
years.  It  wheezes and  hisses asthmatically, and emits bizarre, discordant
drones when certain stops are used; this happens when a valve is stuck open,
and it is called a cipher. Waterhouse knows all about ciphers.
     Notwithstanding  the  pathetic  organ, the  choir  is  spectacular, and
builds  to  a stirring  six part harmony climax as Waterhouse  ambles up the
aisle, wondering whether  his erection is visible. A shaft of light comes in
through  the  stained glass  rosette  above  the  organ  pipes  and  pinions
Waterhouse in its gaudy beam.  Or maybe  it  just  feels that  way,  because
Waterhouse has it all figured out now.
     Waterhouse  is going to  fix the church's organ. This project  will  be
sure to have  side benefits for his own organ, a single pipe instrument that
needs attention just as badly.
     It  turns out that, like  all ethnic groups that have been consistently
screwed for  a long  time, the Inner Qwghlmians have  great  music. Not only
that, they actually have fun in church. The minister actually has a sense of
humor.  It's  about as tolerable as  church could ever be. Waterhouse hardly
pays attention because he is doing a lot of staring: first, at Mary, then at
the organ (trying to figure out  how it is engineered) then back to Mary for
a while.
     He is outraged and offended, after the service, when the powers that be
are reluctant to let him, a total stranger and a Yank to boot, begin ripping
off access panels and meddling with  the inner  workings  of  the organ. The
minister is a good  judge of character a little too good to suit Waterhouse.
The organist  (and hence ultimate authority on all matters organic) looks to
have  been  shipped  over  here  with  the very first load of convicts after
having been convicted, in the Old Bailey, of talking too loud, bumping  into
things, not tying  his shoelaces properly, and having dandruff so  in excess
of  Society's unwritten standards as  to offend the dignity of the Queen and
of the Empire.
     It all leads to an unbearably tense and complicated meeting in a Sunday
school classroom near the offices  of the minister,  who is called the  Rev.
Dr. John Mnrh. He is a stout red faced chap who clearly would prefer to have
his head in a tun of ale but who is putting up with all of this because it's
good for his immortal soul.
     This meeting essentially becomes a venue within which the organist, Mr.
Drkh, can vent  his opinions  on the  sneakiness  of the Japanese,  why  the
invention  of  the well tempered tuning  system was a bad idea  and  how all
music written since has been a shabby compromise, the sterling  qualities of
the  General, the numerological significance of the lengths of various organ
pipes, how the excessive libido of  American troops might be controlled with
certain  dietary  supplements,  how   the   hauntingly  beautiful  modes  of
traditional Qwghlmian music are particularly ill suited to the well tempered
tuning system,  how the king's dodgy Germanic relatives are plotting to take
over the  Empire  and turn it over to  Hitler, and, first and foremost, that
Johann Sebastian Bach was  a bad musician, a worse  composer, an evil man, a
philanderer, and the  figurehead of a worldwide conspiracy, headquartered in
Germany,  that  has been slowly taking over the world for the  last  several
hundred years, using the  well  tempered tuning system as a sort of  carrier
frequency on which its ideas (which originate with the  Bavarian illuminati)
can be broadcast into the minds of everyone  who listens to music especially
the music of Bach. And by the way how this conspiracy may best be fought off
by playing and  listening to traditional Qwghlmian music, which, in case Mr.
Drkh  didn't  make  this  perfectly clear, is  wholly incompatible with well
tempered tuning  because of its haunting and beautiful,  but numerologically
perfect, scale.
     "Your  thoughts  on  numerology are most  interesting," Waterhouse says
loudly, running  Mr. Drkh off the  rhetorical  road. "I  myself studied with
Drs.  Turing  and  von  Neumann at the  Institute  for  Advanced  Studies in
Princeton."
     Father John snaps  awake,  and Mr.  Drkh looks as if he's  just taken a
fifty  caliber round in the small of his back. Clearly,  Mr. Drkh has had  a
long career of being the weirdest  person  in any given room, but he's about
to go down in flames.
     In general,  Waterhouse  isn't good at just  winging it, but he's tired
and pissed off and horny, and this is a fucking war, and sometimes  you have
to. He mounts the podium,  dives for a  round of chalk, and starts hammering
equations  onto the blackboard like  an ack ack  gun. He uses well  tempered
tuning as a starting point, takes off from there  into the deepest realms of
advanced number theory, circles back  all of a sudden to the Qwghlmian modal
scale, just  to  keep them on their toes,  and  then goes screaming straight
back  into number theory  again. In the process, he actually stumbles across
some  interesting material  that he doesn't think  has  been  covered in the
literature yet, and so he diverts from strict bullshitting for a few minutes
to  explore this  thing and actually prove something  that  he thinks  could
probably be published in a  mathematical journal, if he just  gets around to
typing  it up properly. It reminds him that he's not half bad at  this stuff
when he's  recently ejaculated, and that in  turn just fuels his  resolve to
get this Mary fucking thing worked out.
     Finally, he  turns around, for the  first time since he started. Father
John and Mr. Drkh are both dumbfounded.
     "Let  me just demonstrate!" Waterhouse blurts, and strides  out  of the
room and doesn't  bother looking  back. Back in the  church,  he goes to the
console,  blows the dandruff off the keys,  hits the main  power switch. The
electric  motors  come  on,  somewhere  back  behind  the  screen,  and  the
instrument  begins to  complain and whine.  No matter it can all be  drowned
out.  He scans the  rows  of stops he  already knows what  this organ's got,
because he's listened and deconstructed. He starts yanking out knobs.
     Now Waterhouse is going  to demonstrate that  Bach can sound good  even
played on Mr. Drkh's organ, if you choose the right key. Just as Father John
and Mr. Drkh are about halfway up the aisle, Waterhouse slams  into that old
chestnut, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, except that he's transposing it into
C sharp minor  as  he  goes  along,  because (according  to  a  very elegant
calculation that just came into  his head as he was running up  the aisle of
the church) it  ought  to sound  good that way when  played  in  Mr.  Drkh's
mangled tuning system.
     The  transposition is an awkward business at  first and  he hits  a few
wrong notes, but then it comes naturally and he transitions from the toccata
into the  fugue  with  tremendous  verve and  confidence. Gouts of dust  and
salvos of mouse droppings explode from the pipes as Waterhouse invokes whole
ranks that  have not  been used in decades. Many  of these are big  bad loud
reed  stops  that  are difficult  to  tune.  Waterhouse  senses the  pumping
machinery straining to keep up with this unprecedented demand for power. The
choir loft is suffused with  a brilliant glow as the  dust  flung out of the
choked  pipes  fills the air and catches  the light coming  through the rose
window.  Waterhouse  muffs a pedal line, spitefully  kicks off his  terrible
shoes  and  begins to  tread the pedals the way he used to back in Virginia,
with  his bare  feet, the trajectory of  the bass line traced out across the
wooden pedals in  lines of blood from his  exploded blisters. This  baby has
some  nasty  thirty two  foot reed  stops in the pedals, real  earthshakers,
probably  put there specifically to irritate the Outer Qwghlmians across the
street. None of the people who go to this church have ever heard these stops
called into action,  but Waterhouse puts them  to  good use now,  firing off
power chords like salvos from the mighty guns of the battleship Iowa.
     All  during the service, during the sermon  and  the scripture readings
and the prayers, when he wasn't thinking about fucking Mary, he was thinking
about how he was going to fix this organ. He was thinking back to  the organ
he  worked  on  in Virginia, how the stops  enabled  the flow of  air to the
different ranks of pipes and how the keys on the  keyboards activated all of
the pipes that were enabled. He has this whole organ  visualized in his head
now,  and while he is pounding through to the end of the figure, the  top of
his skull comes off, the filtered  red  light  pours  in, he sees the entire
machine  in his  mind,  as if  in  an  exploded draftsman's  view.  Then  it
transforms itself into a slightly different  machine an  organ that  runs on
electricity, with ranks of vacuum tubes here, and a grid of relays there. He
has the answer, now,  to Turing's question, the question  of how to  take  a
pattern of binary data and bury it into  the circuitry of a thinking machine
so that it can be later disinterred.

     Waterhouse knows how to make electric memory. He must go write a letter
to Alan instantly!

     "Excuse me," he says,  and runs  from the  church. On his way  out,  he
brushes past a small  young  woman who has been standing there gaping at his
performance. When he is several blocks away, he realizes two things: that he
is walking  down  the  street  barefoot, and that  the young woman was  Mary
cCmndhd. He will have to circle back later and  get his shoes and maybe fuck
her. But first things first!


     Chapter 65 HOME


     Randy opens his  eyes from out of a  sliding nightmare.  He was  in his
car, driving down the Pacific Coast Highway, when  something went wrong with
the steering. The  car began to  wander, first  towards the  vertical  stone
cliff on the  left  and then  towards the  sheer drop to  huge jagged  rocks
projecting  from  thrashing waves  on  the  right.  Big rocks  were  rolling
nonchalantly across the highway.  He could not steer; the only way  to  stop
moving is to open his eyes.
     He is lying on a  sleeping  bag  on a polished maple  floor that is not
level, and that is why he had the sliding dream. The  eye/inner ear conflict
makes his body spasm, he flails to plant both hands against the plane of the
floor.
     America Shaftoe  sits, jeaned  and  barefoot,  in the blue  light of  a
window, bobby  pins sprouting from chapped lips, looking at her  face in  an
isosceles  triangle  of mirror whose scalpel sharp edges  depress but do not
cut the pink  skin of her fingertips. A web of lead ropes sags in  the empty
windowframe,   a  few  lozenges  of  beveled  glass  still  trapped  in  the
interstices. Randy lifts his  head  slightly and  looks  downhill, into  the
corner  of  the room, and  sees a great heap of swept shards. He rolls over,
looks  out  the  door  and across the hallway  and  into  what  used  to  be
Charlene's  home  office.  Robin and Marcus Aurelius Shaftoe  are sharing  a
double mattress in there, a  shotgun and a rifle, a couple of big black  cop
flashlights, a Bible  and a  calculus  textbook neatly arranged on the floor
next to them.
     The nightmare's  feeling  of  panic, of needing to go somewhere and  do
something, subsides. Lying here in his ruined house listening to Amy's brush
whistle through her hair, throwing off  electrostatic  snaps, is  one of the
calmer moments he's had.
     "You just about ready to hit the road?" Amy says.
     Across the hallway, one of the Shaftoe boys  sits up without making any
sound.  The other opens  his  eyes,  lifts  his head,  glances  towards  the
weapons, lights, and Good Book, then relaxes again.
     "I got  a  fire going  out  in  the yard,"  Amy  says, "and some  water
boiling. Didn't think it was safe to use the fireplace."
     Everyone slept in their clothes last night.  All they have to do is put
their shoes on and piss out  the windows. The Shaftoes move about  the place
faster than  Randy does,  not because they are more surefooted,  but because
they never saw  this house when it was level and sound. But Randy lived here
for years and years when it was, and his mind thinks it knows its way around
the place. Going to bed last  night, his biggest fear  was that he would get
up drowsily in the middle of  the night and try to go downstairs. The  house
used to have a beautiful winding stairway which has now telescoped  into the
basement. Last night, by dint of pulling the U  Haul onto the front lawn and
aiming its headlights directly in through windows (whose cracks and jags and
facets refracted the light gorgeously), they were  able to clamber  into the
basement  and find a  ten foot aluminum extension ladder  which they used to
get into  the upstairs. Once  they had gotten up, they pulled the  ladder up
with  them, like  a  drawbridge, so  that  even  if  looters  did  enter the
downstairs, the Shaftoe boys would be able to sit at the top of what used to
be  the  stairway  and  pick  them off  leisurely  with  the long guns (this
scenario seemed plausible last night, in the dark, but  now strikes Randy as
a bumpkin's reverie).
     Amy's  turned  some balusters  from the veranda's  railing  into a nice
bonfire in  the front  yard. She stomps a crushed  saucepan back  into shape
with  a small  number of deftly aimed heel strokes and  cooks  oatmeal.  The
Shaftoe boys throw whatever looks potentially useful  into the back of the U
Haul, and check the oil in their hot rod.
     All of Charlene's stuff is in New Haven now. In Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik's
house, to be specific. He has generously offered to let her stay there while
she  looks  for a house; Randy predicts  she'll never leave.  All of Randy's
stuff is in Manila or in Avi's basement, and all of the  disputed items  are
in a storage locker at the edge of town.
     Randy spent most of yesterday evening cruising  around town checking in
on various  old  friends to see if they were all right. Amy  went with  him,
taking a voyeuristic  interest in this tour of his former life,  and, from a
social point of  view, complicating  things incalculably.  In any case, they
didn't  make it back to  the house until  after dark, and so this is Randy's
first  chance to see  the damage in full daylight.  He  orbits it again  and
again,  amused, almost to the  point of giggling, by how perfectly destroyed
it  is,  taking pictures with  a disposable  camera he borrowed  from Marcus
Aurelius  Shaftoe, trying  to  see  if there  is  anything  left  that could
conceivably be worth money.
     The house's stone foundation  rises three feet above grade.  The wooden
walls of the house were built on  top of  that, but not actually attached to
it (a common practice  in the old days, which, at the time he blew town, was
on Randy's list of things to fix before the next earthquake). When the earth
began to  oscillate side  to side at  2:16  in the  afternoon yesterday, the
foundation oscillated right along  with it,  but  the  house  wanted to stay
where it was. Eventually the foundation wall moved right out from underneath
the house, one corner of which dropped three feet to the ground. Randy could
probably estimate the  amount of  kinetic energy the house picked up  during
this  fall, and convert it to an equivalent  in pounds of dynamite or swings
of a wrecking ball,  but it would be a  nerdy exercise, since he can see the
effects for himself. Let's just say that when it smashed to  earth the whole
structure  suffered a  vicious shock. The  parallel, upright  joists  in the
floors all  went  horizontal,  collapsing like  dominoes.  Every  window and
doorframe instantly became a parallelogram,  so all of the glass broke,  and
in  particular  all of the leaded glass was rent asunder. The  stairway fell
into the basement. The chimney, which had been in  need of tuck pointing for
some time,  sprayed  bricks  all over  the yard.  Most  of the  plumbing was
wrecked, which  means that  the heating system is  history, since  the house
used  radiators. The plaster fell from the lath everywhere,  cumulative tons
of old horse hair  plaster just exploding  out of the walls and ceilings and
mixing with  the water from  the busted  plumbing to make a grey slurry that
congealed in the downhill corners  of  the rooms. The hand  crafted  Italian
tiles  that  Charlene  picked out for the bathrooms are seventy five percent
broken. The granite counters in the kitchen are now seamed tectonic systems.
A few of the major appliances look repairable, but ownership of those was in
dispute anyway.
     "It's  a tear down, sir,"  says Robin Shaftoe. He has spent  his  whole
life  in  some Tennessee  mountain town, living in  trailers and cabins, but
even he has enough real estate acumen to sense this.
     "Is  there something  you wanted to get out of the basement, sir?" says
Marcus Aurelius Shaftoe.
     Randy  laughs.  "There's  a filing  cabinet down there . . .  wait!" he
reaches  out  and  puts a hand  on  Marcus's  shoulder,  to prevent him from
sprinting into the house and diving like Tarzan into the  stairway pit. "The
reason  I wanted it was because it contains  every single receipt for  every
penny I put into this  house. See, it was a wreck  when I bought it. Sort of
like it is now. Maybe not as bad."
     "You need those papers for your dee vorce?"
     Randy stops  and  clears  his  throat  in  mild  exasperation.  He  has
explained to them five times that  he  was never  married to Charlene and so
it's not  a divorce. But this idea of living with a woman to whom one is not
married is so embarrassing to the Tennessee branch of the Shaftoes that they
simply cannot process it, and so they keep talking about "your  ex wahf" and
"your dee vorce."
     Noting Randy's hesitation, Robin says, "Or for the IN surance?"
     Randy laughs with surprising heartiness.
     "You did get IN surance, didn't you sir?"
     "Earthquake insurance, around here, is basically  unobtainable,"  Randy
says.
     This is the first time it dawns on any  of the Shaftoes that as of 2:16
P.M.  yesterday  afternoon,  in  an  instant,  Randy's net worth dropped  by
something like  three hundred thousand dollars. They skulk away from him and
leave him alone for a while, taking pictures to document the loss.
     Amy comes over. "Oatmeal's ready," she says.
     "Okay."
     She stands close to him  with her  arms  folded. The  town is uncannily
quiet: the power is off and few vehicles  are on the  streets.  "I'm sorry I
ran you off the road."
     Randy looks at his  Acura:  the gouge, high  on  the left  rear fender,
where  the  bumper of Amy's  U Haul truck  took  him  from  behind,  and the
crumpled front right bumper where he  was forced  into a parked Ford Fiesta.
"Don't worry about it."
     "If I'd known Jesus. The last thing you need is a body shop bill on top
of everything else. I'll pay for it."
     "Seriously. Don't worry about it."
     "Well . . ."
     "Amy, I know perfectly well you don't give a shit about my  stupid car,
and when you pretend otherwise, the strain shows."
     "You're right. But I'm sorry I misapprehended the situation."
     "It  was my  fault," Randy says,  "I should  have  explained why  I was
coming here. Why the hell did you rent a U Haul, anyway?"
     "They were all out of regular cars at the San  Francisco Airport.  Some
kind of big convention at the Moscone Center. So I displayed adaptability. "
(1)
     "How  the hell  did you  get  here so fast?  I thought I took the  last
flight out of Manila."
     "I got to NAIA only a few minutes after you did, Randy. Your flight was
full. I got on the next flight to Tokyo. I think my flight actually took off
before yours did."
     "Mine was delayed on the ground."
     "Then from  Narita I just grabbed  the  next  flight  to SFO. Landed  a
couple hours after you. So  I was surprised that  you and I pulled into town
here at the same time."
     "I stopped over  at  a  friend's house. And I took the  scenic  route."
Randy closes his eyes for a moment,  remembering those loose boulders on the
Pacific Coast Highway, the roadway shaking beneath the tires of his Acura.
     "See, when I saw your  car, that's when I felt that God was with me, or
something," Amy said. "Or with you."
     "God was with me? How do you figure?"
     "Well, first of  all, I have to tell you that I left  Manila not out of
concern for you but out of burning rage, and a  desire to just feed you your
ass on a plate."
     "I figured."
     "It's not  even  clear  to me that you and  I  constitute  a  potential
couple. But you have started acting  towards me in a way that indicates some
interest in that  direction, so you  have certain  obligations." Amy has now
started to get  pissed off  and begun to  move around  the yard. The Shaftoe
boys  eye  her warily  from across  their steaming oatmeal bowls,  ready  to
Spring into action and wrestle her  to the  ground if she should fly  out of
control. "It would be just ... totally... unacceptable for you to make those
kinds  of representations to me  and  then  jet  off and  cuddle  with  your
California sweetheart  without coming to me first and  going through certain
formalities, which would be awkward but which I would hope  you would be man
enough to endure. Right?"
     "Absolutely right. Never felt otherwise."
     "So you can imagine how it looked."
     "I guess so. Assuming you have no faith in me whatsoever."
     "Well, I'm  sorry for that, but  I will  say that on the flight over  I
began to  think that  it wasn't your fault, that Charlene had somehow gotten
to you."
     "What do you mean, gotten to me?"
     Amy looks at the ground. "I don't know, she must have some kind of hold
over you."
     "I think not." Randy sighs.
     "Anyway,  I thought that maybe you were just in the process of making a
big, stupid mistake. So when I  got on that plane in Tokyo I  was just going
to track you down  and. . ." She  draws a deep breath and mentally counts to
ten. "But  when I got  off that plane I was to boot just  obsessed with this
disgusting image of you getting back together with this woman  who obviously
was no  damn good  for you. And I felt that would be  an unfortunate outcome
for you. And I thought I was too  late to do anything about  it. So,  when I
got  into town, and pulled around the corner and saw your Acura in  the lane
right there in front of me, and you talking on your cellphone "
     "I was leaving a  message on  your  answering machine in Manila," Randy
says. "Explaining that  I was just coming  here to pick up  some papers  and
there'd been an earthquake only minutes before and so I might be a while."
     "Well, I didn't have time to check my messages, which were placed on my
machine  too late to accomplish any useful purpose," Amy says, "and so I had
to go on an imperfect knowledge of these events since no one had bothered to
fill me in."

     "So..."
     "I felt that cooler heads should prevail."
     "And therefore you ran me off the road?"

     Amy  looks  a  little  disappointed. She takes  a  patient,  Montessori
preschool teacher tone  of  voice. "Now, Randy, think  about  priorities for
just a minute. I could see the way you were driving."
     "I  was in  a hurry  to find out  whether I  was totally destitute,  or
merely bankrupt."
     "But because of my imperfect knowledge of the situation I thought maybe
you were rushing into your poor little Charlene's arms. In other words, that
the emotional  stress of the  earthquake might induce you to who knows what,
relationship wise."
     Randy presses his lips together and takes  a huge  breath  through  his
nose.
     "Compared  to that,  a little bit  of sheet metal  just  was  not  very
important to me. Of course, I know that a lot of guys would just stand  back
and allow someone they cared about  to  do something extremely  foolish  and
damaging,  only so  that  everyone  concerned could  then  drive  off  to  a
miserable and emotionally fucked up future in perfect, shiny cars."
     Randy can do nothing but roll  his eyes. "Well,"  he says, "I  am sorry
that I blew up at you when I got out of the car."
     "You  are? Why, exactly? You should be pissed off  when a  truck driver
runs you off the road."
     "I didn't know who you were. I didn't recognize you in this context. It
did not occur to me that you would do what you did with the airplanes."
     Amy  laughs in a goofy, mischievous way that doesn't  seem right  here.
Randy  feels  quizzical and  mildly irritated. She  looks  at him knowingly.
"I'll bet you never blew up at Charlene."
     "That's right," Randy says.
     "You didn't? In all those years?"
     "When we had issues, we talked them out."
     Amy snorts. "I'll bet you had really boring " She stops herself.
     "Boring what?"
     "Never mind."
     "Look, I think that in a good relationship, you  have  to have ways for
working out any issues that might come up." Randy says reasonably.
     "And you don't consider ramming your car a good way, I'll bet."
     "I can think of some problems with it."
     "And you had  ways of working out your problems with Charlene that were
very sophisticated. No voices were ever raised. No angry words exchanged."
     "No cars rammed."
     "Yeah. And that worked, right?"
     Randy sighs.
     "How about that thing that Charlene wrote about beards?" Amy asks.
     "How did you know about that?"
     "Looked it up on the Internet.  Was  that an  example of  how you  guys
worked  out  your  problems? By  publishing totally  oblique academic papers
blasting the other person?"
     "I feel like having some oatmeal."
     "So don't apologize to me for blowing up at me."
     "That oatmeal would really hit the spot."
     "For having, and showing, emotion."
     "Chow time!"
     "Because that's what it's all about. That's the name of the game, Randy
boy," she says, pulling abreast of him and whacking him between the shoulder
blades in  a gesture inherited from her dad.  "Mmm, that oatmeal  does smell
good."


     ***


     The caravan  pulls out of town  a  little after noon: Randy leading the
way in his damaged Acura, Amy sitting in the  passenger seat with  her bare,
tanned feet up on the dashboard, spoked with white lines  from the straps of
her high tech sandals, oblivious to the danger (alluded to by Randy)  of her
legs being snapped by an air bag deployment. The souped up Impala  is driven
by its owner of record and chief engineer, Marcus Aurelius Shaftoe. Bringing
up the rear, the almost totally empty U Haul truck, driven by Robin Shaftoe.
Randy has  that  moving through  syrup feeling he  gets  when  enacting some
emotionally huge transition in his  life. He puts Samuel Barber's Adagio for
Strings on the Acura's stereo and drives very slowly down the main street of
the town, looking all around at the remains of the coffeehouses, bars, pizza
places, and Thai restaurants where, for many years, he prosecuted his social
life. He should have performed this little ceremony before he first left for
Manila, a  year and a  half ago. But then he fled as if from the scene of  a
crime, or, at  least, a grotesque personal embarrassment. He only had a  day
or two before he got on the plane, and he spent most  of  it on the floor of
Avi's  basement,  dictating  whole  swathes  of  the  business  plan  into a
microcassette  recorder, as opposed to  typing them, because  his hands  had
gone carpal.
     He  never  even properly said  good bye to most  of the people  he knew
here. He did  not speak to them, and barely thought of them, until yesterday
evening, when he pulled up in front of their skewed and occasionally smoking
homes in his  crumpled and U  Haul  orange streaked  car with  this strange,
wiry, tanned woman who,  whatever strengths and shortcomings she might have,
was not  Charlene. So,  taking everything into account, it was not precisely
the way that Emily Post would have orchestrated a reunion with out  of touch
friends. The evening's tour is  still a  flurry of odd,  emotionally charged
images in his memory, but he's beginning to sort it out a little, to run the
numbers  as it were,  and  he would  say  that  of  the  people  he ran into
yesterday people he  had exchanged dinner invitations with and loaned  tools
to,  people  whose personal computers he  had debugged  in  exchange for six
packs of  good beer, whom he had seen important movies  with  that  at least
three quarters of these people have really no interest whatsoever in  seeing
Randy's  face  again as long as  they live, and were made to  feel intensely
awkward by his  totally unexpected reappearance in their  front yards, where
they were  throwing  impromptu  parties  with salvaged beer  and wine.  This
hostility  was pretty strongly gender linked, Randy is sad to conclude. Many
of the females wouldn't  talk to him it all, or would come near him only the
better  to  fix  him  with frosty  glares  and  appraise  his  presumed  new
girlfriend.  This only stands  to reason,  since, before  she left for Yale,
Charlene had the better part of a year to  popularize her version of events.
She has been able to structure the discourse to her advantage,  just  like a
dead white male. No  doubt Randy  has  been classified as an  abandoner,  no
better than the married man  who up and walks out  on  his wife and children
never mind that he was the  one who wanted to marry her and have  kids  with
her. But  his whining alert starts to buzz when  he thinks about that, so he
backs up and tries another path.
     He embodies  (he realizes) just  about  the worst nightmare,  for  many
women, of what might happen in their  lives. As for  the  men  he  saw  last
night, they  were  pretty  strongly  incensed  to back whatever stance their
wives adopted. Some of them really did,  apparently, feel  similarly. Others
eyed  him with  obvious  curiosity. Some  were openly friendly. Weirdly, the
ones  who adopted the  sternest and  most terrible Old Testament  moral tone
were the Modern Language Association types who believed  that everything was
relative and  that, for  example, polygamy was  as  valid as  monogamy.  The
friendliest and most sincere welcome he'd gotten was from Scott, a chemistry
professor, and Laura, a  pediatrician, who, after knowing Randy and Charlene
for  many years, had one day  divulged to Randy, in strict confidence, that,
unbeknownst  to the  academic community  at  large, they had  been spiriting
their three children off to church every Sunday  morning,  and even had them
all baptized.
     Randy had gone into their  house once  to  help Scott wrestle a freshly
reconditioned clawfoot bathtub up the stairs, and had actually seen the word
GOD written on actual pieces of paper stuck to the walls of their house like
on the refrigerator  door,  and  the walls of the children's bedrooms, where
juvenile art tends  to be reposited.  Little time wasting projects  they had
done during Sunday school pages torn from coloring books, showing a somewhat
more  multicultural Jesus than the one Randy had grown  up with (curly hair,
e.g.),  talking to little  biblical kids  or assisting disoriented Holy Land
livestock. The sight  of this stuff around the house, commingled with normal
(i.e.,  secular) kid art  junk from elementary school, Batman posters,  etc.
made Randy feel grossly embarrassed.  It was like going to the house of some
supposedly sophisticated people and  finding a neon  on  black velvet  Elvis
painting  hanging  above their state  of the art Italian designer furniture.
Definitely  a  social class thing. And it  wasn't like Scott  and Laura were
deadly earnest types, and neither were they  glassy eyed  and foaming at the
mouth. They had after all managed  to pass themselves off as members in good
standing of decent academic society for a number  of  years. They were a bit
quieter than many others, they took up less space in the room, but then that
was normal for people trying to raise three kids, and so they passed.
     Randy  and Amy  had spent a full hour  talking to Scott and  Laura last
night; they  were the  only people who made  any  effort to  make  Amy  feel
welcome. Randy hadn't the faintest idea what these people thought of him and
what  he had done, but  he could sense right away that, essentially that was
not the issue because even if they thought he had done something  evil, they
at least  had  a framework, a  sort of procedure  manual,  for dealing  with
transgressions.  To  translate  it into  UNIX  system  administration  terms
(Randy's fundamental  metaphor  for just about everything), the post modern,
politically  correct  atheists  were  like  people who  had  suddenly  found
themselves in charge of a big and unfathomably complex computer system (viz,
society) with  no documentation or instructions of any kind,  and  so  whose
only way to keep the  thing running was to invent  and enforce certain rules
with a  kind  of neo Puritanical rigor, because they were at a loss to  deal
with any deviations  from what they saw as the norm. Whereas people who were
wired into a church were like  UNIX system  administrators  who, while  they
might not understand everything, at least  had some documentation, some FAQs
and How tos  and README  files,  providing some guidance on what to do  when
things got  out of whack. They  were, in other words, capable of  displaying
adaptability.
     "Yo! Randy!" says America Shaftoe. "M.A. is honking at you."
     "Why?" Randy asks.  He looks in the rearview, sees a  reflection of the
ceiling of the Acura, and realizes he is slouched way  down in his  seat. He
sits up straight, and spots the Impala.
     "I think it's because you're driving ten miles an hour," Amy says, "and
M.A. likes to go ninety."
     "Okay," Randy says,  and, just as simple as that,  pushes  down  on the
accelerator pedal and drives out of town forever.


     Chapter 66 BUNDOK


     "The name of this place is Bundok," Captain Noda tells him confidently.
"We have chosen it carefully." Goto Dengo  and Lieutenant Mori are  the only
other  persons  present in the tent,  but  he  speaks  as  if  addressing  a
battalion drawn up on a parade ground.
     Goto Dengo has been  in the Philippines long enough to understand  that
in  the local tongue  bundok means any patch of rugged  mountainous terrain,
but  he does not  reckon that Captain  Noda is the sort who would appreciate
being brought up to speed by a subordinate. If Captain  Noda  says that this
place is called Bundok, then Bundok it is, and forever will be.
     Captain is not an especially high rank, but Noda carries  himself as if
he's a general. Somewhere, this man is important. He is pale skinned, as  if
he's been  spending the winter in Tokyo. His boots have not begun to rot  on
his feet yet.
     A hard leather  attache  case rests on the table. He opens  one end and
draws out a large piece of folded white cloth. The two lieutenants scurry to
assist him in unfolding this across the tabletop. Goto Dengo is startled  by
the feel of  the linen. His fingertips are the  only part  of his body  that
will ever touch bedsheets as  fine  as these.  THE MANILA  HOTEL is  printed
along the selvedge.
     A  diagram  has been  sketched out on the bedsheet. Blue black fountain
pen marks,  punctuated  with spreading  blotches where  the  hand hesitated,
reinforce  an  earlier  stratum  of  graphite  scratches.  Someone  terribly
important (probably the last person to sleep on this bedsheet)  has come  in
with  a black  grease pencil  and reshaped the whole thing in his  own image
with  fat thrusting  strokes and  hasty  notations that  look like unraveled
braids in a woman's long  hair. This work  has been annotated politely  by a
fastidious  engineer, probably Captain Noda himself, working with ink  and a
fine brush.
     The heavy  with the  grease pencil has labeled the entire  thing BUNDOK
SITE.
     Lieutenants  Mori and  Goto affix  the sheet to the canvas  of the tent
with  some  small,  rusty  cotter  pins  that  a  private  brings  to  them,
triumphantly,  in  a  cracked  porcelain coffee  cup.  Captain  Noda watches
calmly, puffing on a cigarette. "Be careful," he jokes,  "MacArthur slept on
that sheet!"
     Lieutenant Mori dutifully cracks  up. Goto Dengo is standing on tiptoe,
holding  up  the top  edge of the sheet, examining the  faint  pencil  marks
underlying  the whole  diagram. He  sees a couple'  of little  crosses  and,
having spent too long  in the Philippines, supposes at  first that they  are
churches. In one place, three of them are clustered together and he imagines
Calvary.
     Nearby, diggings have been indicated. He thinks Golgotha:  The Place of
the Skull.
     Lunatic! He needs to get his mind in order. Lieutenant Mori shoves pins
through the linen with faint  popping noises. Goto Dengo steps away, keeping
his  back  to  the  Captain, closes his eyes, and  gets  his bearings. He is
Nipponese. He  is in the Southern Resource Zone of Greater Nippon. The cross
shaped marks represent  summits. The diggings are some sort of excavation in
which he is destined to play an important role.
     The blue black fountain pen marks are rivers. Five of them  sprawl from
the triple summit  of Bundok. Two of the south going streams combine to make
a larger river. A third stream roughly parallels this one. But  the man with
the  black grease pencil  has drawn a stout line across the stream with such
force that loose curls of black grease can still  be seen  dangling from the
linen.  The fountain pen  has been used to scratch out a bulge  in the river
just upstream of this mark. Apparently they want to dam the river and make a
pool, or a pond,  or a lake;  it is difficult to get a sense of scale. It is
labeled, LAKE YAMAMOTO.
     Looking more closely, he sees that the  larger river the one  formed by
the confluence of the two tributaries is also to be dammed, but much farther
south.  This has been dubbed TOJO RIVER.  But there  is  no  LAKE  TOJO.  It
appears that this dam will thicken and deepen the Tojo River but not turn it
into an actual lake. Goto Dengo infers from this that the valley of the Tojo
River must be steep sided.
     The same  basic  pattern is repeated everywhere on the bedsheet. Grease
pencil wants  a complete perimeter security  system. Grease pencil wants one
and  only one road leading to this place. Grease pencil wants two  areas for
barracks: one big area and  one small area. The details have been worked out
by smaller men with better penmanship.
     "Worker housing," explains Captain Noda, pointing to  the big area with
his swagger stick. "Military barracks," he says, pointing to the small area.
Bending  closer,  Goto  Dengo can see that the larger, worker area is to  be
surrounded by an irregular  polygon of barbed wire. Actually,  two polygons,
one nested within the other, a barren space in between. The vertices of this
polygon are labeled with the names of weapons:
     Nambu, Nambu, Model 89 field mortar.
     A road or trail, or something, leads from there up the bank of the Tojo
River, past the dam, and terminates at the site of the proposed diggings.
     Goto Dengo bends close and peers. The area including both Lake Yamamoto
and the diggings has been surrounded by a  tidy square,  neatly crosshatched
with Captain Noda's brush and ink, and labeled "special security zone."
     He jerks  back as  Captain Noda shoves  the end of his  stick  into the
narrow space between his nose  and the bedsheet, and  whacks on  the Special
Security Zone  a few times. Concentric  ripples  speed outwards,  like shock
waves from dynamite. "This area is your responsibility, Lieutenant Goto." He
moves  the  pointer south and taps on  the zone farther down the Tojo River,
with the worker housing and the  barracks. "This is  Lieutenant  Mori's." He
circles  the  whole area,  windmilling  his arm to cover the entire security
perimeter  and the road  that gives access to it.  "The entirety is  mine. I
report to Manila. So, it is a  very small chain  of command for such a large
area. Secrecy is of paramount importance. Your first and highest order is to
preserve absolute secrecy at all costs."
     Lieutenants Mori and Goto blurt "Hai!" and bow.
     Addressing Mori, Captain  Noda continues: "The housing area will appear
to  be a prison camp  for special prisoners. Its existence  may be known  to
some on the  outside the local people will see trucks going in and out along
the road  and  will  guess as much."  Turning to  Goto  Dengo, he says: "The
existence of the Special Security Zone,  however, will be totally unknown to
the outside world. Your work will proceed  under the  cover  of  the jungle,
which is extraordinarily dense  here. It  will be invisible to  the  enemy's
observation planes."
     Lieutenant Mori jerks back as if a bug  has just flown into his eye. To
him, the idea of enemy observation  planes over Luzon is completely bizarre.
MacArthur is nowhere near the Philippines.
     Goto Dengo,  on the other hand, has  been  to New Guinea. He knows what
happens to Nipponese  Army units who try to  resist MacArthur in the jungles
of the  Southwest Pacific. He knows that MacArthur  is coming, and obviously
so does Captain Noda. More importantly, so do the men in Tokyo who sent Noda
down to accomplish this mission whatever it is.
     They know. Everyone knows we are losing the war.
     Everyone important, that is.
     "Lieutenant Goto, you are not to discuss  any details of your work with
Lieutenant  Mori except insofar  as  they pertain  to  pure logistics:  road
building, worker schedules, and so on." Noda is addressing this to both men;
the clear implication is that if Goto gets loose lipped, Mori is expected to
turn him in. "Lieutenant Mori, you are dismissed!"
     Mori grunts out another "Hai!" and makes himself scarce.
     Lieutenant  Goto bows. "Captain Noda, please permit me to say that I am
honored to have been selected to construct these fortifications."
     The stoic  look  on  Noda's face dissolves for  a moment. He turns away
from Goto  Dengo  and paces  across  the floor  of the  tent for  a  moment,
thinking, then turns to face him again. "It is not a fortification."
     Goto Dengo is practically startled right out of his boots for a moment.
Then he  thinks,  a  gold  mine! They must have  discovered an immense  gold
deposit in this valley. Or diamonds?
     "You must not think as if you were building a fortification," Noda says
solemnly.
     "A  mine?" Goto Dengo  says. But  he  says  it weakly.  He  is  already
realizing that  it  does not make sense. It would  be insane to put so  much
effort into  mining gold or  diamonds at this point in the war. Nippon needs
steel, rubber, and petroleum, not jewelry.
     Perhaps some new super weapon? His heart nearly bursts from excitement.
But Captain Noda's stare is as bleak as the fat muzzle of a tommy gun.
     "It is  a long term storage facility for vital war  making  materials,"
Captain Noda finally says.
     He  goes  on  to  explain, in general terms, how the facility is to  be
built.  It is  to be a network of  intersecting  shafts  bored  through hard
volcanic rock.  Its dimensions  are surprisingly small given  the  amount of
effort  that will be  spent on building it. They won't be able to store much
here:  enough  ammunition  for a  regiment  to fight  for  a week,  perhaps,
assuming that they make minimal use of heavy weapons, and get their food off
the land. But those supplies will be almost inconceivably well protected.
     Goto Dengo sleeps that  night in a hammock stretched between two trees,
protected by mosquito netting. The jungle emits a fantastic din.
     Captain Noda's sketches  looked familiar,  and  he  is trying to  place
them.  Just  as he's falling  asleep,  he  remembers cutaway  views  of  the
Pyramids of Egypt that  his father had shown him in a  picture book, showing
the design of the pharaoh's tombs.
     A  horrible thought comes to  him then: he is  building  a tomb for the
emperor. When Nippon falls to MacArthur, Hirohito will carry out the rite of
seppuku. His body will be flown out  of Nippon  and  brought to  Bundok  and
buried in the chamber that  Goto  Dengo  is building.  He has a nightmare of
being buried alive in a black chamber, the grey  image of the emperor's face
fading to black as the last brick is rammed home on its bed of mortar.
     He sits in absolute darkness, knowing that Hirohito is there with  him,
afraid to move.
     He is  a little boy in an abandoned mine chamber, naked and soaked with
icy water.  His flashlight has died. Before it flickered out, he  thought he
saw the  face of a demon.  Now he  hears only the drip, drip of ground water
into the sump. He can stay here and die, or he can dive into the water again
and swim back.
     When he  wakes  up, it's  raining  and the sun has climbed free of  the
horizon somewhere. He rolls out of his hammock  and walks naked in  the warm
rain to wash himself. Goto Dengo has a job to do.


     Chapter 67 COMPUTER


     Lieutenant Colonel Earl Comstock of The Electrical Till Corporation and
the United States Army, in that order, prepares for today's routine briefing
from  his subordinate, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, much as  a  test pilot
readies himself to be ripped into the stratosphere with a  hot rocket engine
under his ass. He turns  in early the  night before, wakes up late, talks to
his aide and makes sure  that (a) plenty of hot coffee  is available and (b)
none of it will be given to Waterhouse. He gets two wire recorders set up in
the room,  in case  either goes on the fritz, and  brings in a team of three
crack  stenographers with  loads of  technical  savvy.  He has a  couple  of
fellows in his section also ETC employees during peacetime who are real math
whizzes, so he brings them in too. He gives them a little pep talk:
     "I do not expect you fellows to  understand what the fuck Waterhouse is
talking about. I'm gonna be running after him as fast as I can. You just hug
his legs and hold on for dear life so that I  can sort of  keep his backside
in  view as long as  possible." Comstock is  proud of  this analogy, but the
math whizzes seem baffled. Testily, he  fills  them  in on the always tricky
literal  vs.  figurative  dichotomy.  Only  twenty  minutes  remain   before
Waterhouse's  arrival; right on schedule, Comstock's aide comes through  the
room with a tray  of benzedrine  tablets. Comstock takes  two, attempting to
lead  by  example. "Where's  my  darn  chalkboard team?" he demands,  as the
powerful stimulant  begins  to  rev  up  his pulse. Into the  room come  two
privates equipped  with  blackboard erasers  and damp chamois cloths, plus a
three  man photography  team. They  set up a pair of  cameras aimed  at  the
chalkboard, plus a couple of  strobe lights, and lay in a  healthy stock  of
film rolls.
     He checks his watch. They are running five  minutes behind schedule. He
looks out the window and sees that his jeep has returned; Waterhouse must be
in the building. "Where is the extraction team?" he demands.
     Sergeant  Graves is there a few  moments later.  "Sir,  we  went to the
church as directed, and located him, and, uh " He coughs against the back of
his hand.
     "And what?"
     "And who is more like it, sir," says Sergeant Graves, sotto voce. "He's
in the lavatory right now, cleaning up, if you know what I mean." He winks.
     "Ohhhh," says Earl Comstock, cottoning on to it.
     "After all," Sergeant Graves  says, "you can't blow out the rusty pipes
of  your organ  unless  you have  a  nice little  assistant to  get the  job
properly done."

     Comstock tenses. "Sergeant Graves it is critically  important for me to
know did the job get properly done?"

     Graves furrows his brow, as if pained by the very question. "Oh, by all
means sir. We wouldn't dream of  interrupting such an  operation. That's why
we are late begging your pardon."
     "Don't  mention it," Comstock stays,  slapping Graves  heartily  on the
shoulder. "That is why I try to give my men broad discretion. It has been my
opinion  for  quite  some time  that Waterhouse  is  badly in  need  of some
relaxation.  He concentrates  a  little  too hard on his work.  Sometimes  I
frankly cannot tell whether  he is saying something very brilliant, or  just
totally incoherent. And I think you have made a  pivotal, Sergeant Graves, a
pivotal  contribution  to today's meeting by having the good sense  to stand
off  long  enough for  Waterhouse's affairs to  be  set  in order." Comstock
realizes that he  is breathing very fast,  and his  heart is pounding madly.
Perhaps he overdid the benzedrine?
     Waterhouse drifts into the room  ten minutes  later on flaccid legs, as
if he had inadvertently left his own skeleton behind in bed. He barely makes
it  to his designated seat and  thuds into it like a sack of guts, popping a
few strands  of wicker out of its bottom. He is  breathing raggedly  through
his mouth, blinking heavy eyelids frequently.
     "Looks like today's going  to  be  a milk run, men!" Comstock announces
brightly.  Everyone except Waterhouse snickers.  Waterhouse has  been in the
building for  a quarter of  an  hour, and  it took  at  least that  long for
Sergeant Graves to drive him here from the church, and  so  it  has been  at
least half  an  hour. And yet, to look  at him,  you'd  think  that  it  had
happened five seconds ago.
     "Someone pour that man a cup of coffee!" Comstock orders. Someone does.
Being  in  the military  is  amazing;  you  give orders, and  things happen.
Waterhouse does not drink, or even touch, the coffee,  but at least it gives
his eyes something to focus on. Those orbs wander around under their rumpled
lids for a while, like ack  ack guns  trying  to track a  house fly,  before
finally fixing on the white coffee mug. Waterhouse clears his throat at some
length,  as  if preparing to  speak,  and the room  goes silent. It  remains
silent  for  about  thirty seconds. Then Waterhouse mumbles  something  that
sounds like "coy."
     The stenographers take it down in unison.
     "Beg pardon?" says Comstock.
     One of the math whizzes says, "He might be talking about Coy Functions.
I think I  saw them when I  was flipping through a  graduate  math  textbook
once."
     "I thought he was saying 'quantum' something," says the other ETC man.
     "Coffee," Waterhouse says, and heaves a deep sigh.
     "Waterhouse,"  says  Comstock, "how  many  fingers  am I  holding  up?"
Waterhouse seems to realize  that there are other people in the room now. He
closes his mouth, and his nostrils flare as air begins to rush through them.
He tries to move one of  his hands, realizes that he is  sitting on  it, and
shifts heavily to and fro until it flops loose. He gets his eyes all the way
open,  providing a really  good, clear  view  of that coffee mug. He  yawns,
stretches, and farts.
     "The Nipponese cryptosystem that we call Azure is the same thing as the
German system that we call Pufferfish," he announces. "Both of them are also
related somehow  to another, newer cryptosystem I  have dubbed Arethusa. All
of these have  something to do with gold. Probably gold mining operations of
some sort. In the Philippines."
     Whammo!  The stenographers go into  action. The photographer  fires off
his strobes,  even though there's nothing  to  take pictures of just nerves.
Comstock glances beadily at  his wire  recorders, makes sure those reels are
spinning. He is a little unnerved by how rapidly Waterhouse is coming up  to
speed. But one  of the  responsibilities of leadership is to mask one's  own
fears, to project confidence at all  times.  Comstock  grins  and says, "You
sound awfully sure of yourself, Waterhouse! I wonder  if you  can get me  to
feel that same level of confidence."
     Waterhouse  frowns at the coffee  mug. "Well, it's all  math," he says.
"If  the  math  works,  why then you  should be sure of yourself. That's the
whole point of math."
     "So you have a mathematical basis for making this assertion?"
     "Assertions," Waterhouse says. "Assertion number one is that Pufferfish
and Azure  are different  names for  the same cryptosystem. Assertion number
two is  that Pufferfish/Azure is a cousin of  Arethusa.  Three: all of these
cryptosystems are related to gold. Four: mining. Five: Philippines."
     "Maybe  you could just chalk those  up  on  the  blackboard  as  you go
along," Comstock says edgily.
     "Glad  to,"  Waterhouse  says.  He  stands  up  and  turns  toward  the
blackboard, freezes for a couple of seconds, then turns back  around, lunges
for the coffee  mug, and drains it before Comstock  or any of his aides  can
rip  it  from his  grasp. Tactical  error!  Then  Waterhouse  chalks  up his
assertions. The photographer records it. The privates  massage their chamois
cloths and glance nervously in Comstock's direction.
     "Now, you have  some sort  of, er, mathematical proof for each  one  of
these assertions?" Comstock asks. Math isn't his  bag,  but running meetings
is, and  what Waterhouse has  just  chalked up on that board  looks, to him,
like the rudiments of an agenda. And Comstock feels a lot better when he has
an agenda. Without an agenda, he's like a grunt running around in the jungle
without a map or a weapon.
     "Well,  sir, that's one way to look  at it," Waterhouse says after some
thought.  "But it  is much more elegant to view all of these as  corollaries
stemming from the same underlying theorem."
     "Are you telling me that you have succeeded in breaking  Azure? Because
if so, congratulations are in order!" Comstock says.
     "No. It is still unbroken. But I can extract information from it."
     This is the  moment where the  joystick  snaps off  in Comstock's hand.
Still, he can  pound haplessly on the control  panel.  "Well, would you mind
taking them one at a time, at least?"
     "Well,  let's  just take, for example,  Assertion Four,  which  is that
Azure/Pufferfish has something to do with mining." Waterhouse sketches out a
freehand map of the  Southwest Pacific  theater of operations, from Burma to
the Solomons, from  Nippon to New Zealand. It takes him about sixty seconds.
Just  for  grins,  Comstock  pulls a  printed  map out of his  clipboard and
compares it against Waterhouse's version. They are basically identical.
     Waterhouse  draws  a  circle with  a letter A in it at the entrance  to
Manila Bay. "This is one of the stations that transmits Azure messages."
     "You know that from huffduff, correct?"
     "That's right."
     "Is that on Corregidor?"
     "One of the smaller islands near Corregidor."
     Waterhouse draws another circle A  in Manila itself, one in  Tokyo, one
in Rabaul, one in Penang, one in the Indian Ocean.
     "What's that?" Comstock asks.
     "We  picked  up an  Azure  transmission  from  a  German  U boat here,"
Waterhouse says.
     "How do you know it was a German U boat?"
     "Recognized  the  fist," Waterhouse says.  "So,  this  is  the  spatial
arrangement of  Azure transmitters not counting the stations  in Europe that
are making Pufferfish transmissions, and hence, according to  Assertion One,
are part of the same  network. Anyway, now let  us say that an Azure message
originates from Tokyo on a certain date. We don't know what it says, because
we haven't broken Azure yet. We just know that the message went out to these
places."  Waterhouse draws lines  radiating downward  from  Tokyo to Manila,
Rabaul, Penang. "Now,  each one  of  these cities  is a major military base.
Consequently,  each  is   the  source  of  a  steady   stream  of   traffic,
communicating  with all of  the  Nipponese bases in its region."  Waterhouse
draws  shorter lines radiating from  Manila  to  various  locations  in  the
Philippines, and from Rabaul to New Guinea and the Solomons.
     "Correction, Waterhouse," Comstock says. "We own New Guinea now."
     "But I'm going back  in  time!"  Waterhouse  says. "Back to  1943, when
there  were Nip bases all  along the north coast  of New Guinea, and through
the Solomons. So, let  us  say that  within a brief window of time following
this  Azure  message  from Tokyo, a number of  messages are transmitted from
places like Rabaul and Manila to smaller bases in  those areas. Some of them
are  in  ciphers  that  we  have  learned  how  to  break.  Now,  it is  not
unreasonable  to suppose  that some of these messages  were  sent out  as  a
consequence of whatever orders were contained in that Azure message."
     "But  those  places send  out thousands of  messages a  day,"  Comstock
protests. "What makes you  think that you can pick out the messages that are
a consequence of the Azure orders?"
     "It's just a brute force statistics problem," Waterhouse says. "Suppose
that Tokyo sent the Azure  message to  Rabaul  on  October  15th, 1943. Now,
suppose I take all of the messages that were sent out from Rabaul on October
14th  and  I  index  them  in  various ways:  what  destinations  they  were
transmitted to, how long  they were,  and, if we  were able to decrypt them,
what their subject matter  was. Were they orders for troop movements? Supply
shipments?  Changes  in  tactics or  procedures?  Then,  I take  all of  the
messages that were  sent out from  Rabaul on October  16th the day after the
Azure  message came  in from Tokyo  and  I run exactly  the same statistical
analysis on them."
     Waterhouse steps back from  the chalkboard and  turns into  a  blinding
fusillade  of  strobe  lights.  "You see, it is all about information  flow.
Information  flows from Tokyo to Rabaul. We don't know  what the information
was. But it will, in some way, influence what Rabaul does afterwards. Rabaul
is  changed,  irrevocably,  by  the  arrival  of  that information,  and  by
comparing Rabaul's observed behavior  before  and  after that change, we can
make inferences."
     "Such as?" Comstock says warily.
     Waterhouse shrugs. "The differences are very  slight. They hardly stand
out  from the noise. Over the course of the war, thirty  one Azure  messages
have  gone  out from Tokyo, so I have that many data sets to work with.  Any
one data set by itself might not tell me anything. But when I combine all of
the data sets together giving me greater depth then I can see some patterns.
And one of the patterns that I most definitely see is that, on the day after
an Azure message went  out to,  say, Rabaul, Rabaul was much more likely  to
transmit messages having to do with mining engineers. This has ramifications
that can be traced all the way back until the loop is closed."
     "Loop is closed?"
     "Okay. Let's  take it  from the top.  Azure message  goes from Tokyo to
Rabaul," Waterhouse says, drawing a  heavy line down  the chalkboard joining
those two cities. "The next  day, a message in some other crypto system  one
that we have broken goes from Rabaul to a submarine operating out of  a base
here, in  the Moluccas. The message states  that the submarine is to proceed
to an outpost on the north coast of New Guinea and  pick up four passengers,
who are  identified by name. From  our archives, we know  who these men are:
three  aircraft mechanics and one  mining engineer.  A few days  later,  the
submarine transmits from the Bismarck  Sea stating that it  has picked those
men up. A few days after that, our waterfront spies in Manila inform us that
the  same submarine has  showed  up  there. On the  same day, another  Azure
message is transmitted from Manila  back up to Tokyo," Waterhouse concludes,
adding a final line to the polygon, "closing the loop."
     "But that could  all be a series  of random, unconnected  events," says
one  of Comstock's  math whizzes, before  Comstock can say it. "The Nips are
desperate for aircraft mechanics. There's nothing unusual about this kind of
message traffic."
     "But there is  something  unusual about the patterns," Waterhouse says.
"If, a few months later, another submarine is sent, in the same way, to pick
up some mining engineers and some surveyors who have been trapped in Rabaul,
and, upon its arrival in  Manila, another  Azure message is sent from Manila
up to Tokyo, it begins to look very suspicious."
     "I  don't know," Comstock stays, shaking his head. "I'm  not sure  if I
can  sell  this  to  the  General's  staff.  It's  too  much  of  a  fishing
expedition."
     "Correction,  sir, it was a fishing expedition. But now  I'm back  from
the fishing expedition, and I've got the fish!" Waterhouse storms out of the
room  and down the  hall toward  his lab  half the  fucking wing. Good thing
Australia is a big continent, because Waterhouse is  going to take all of it
if he's  not held sternly  in check. Fifteen seconds later he's back  with a
stack of ETC cards a foot high, which he pounds down on the  tabletop. "It's
all right here."
     Comstock has never fired a gun in his life, but  he knows card punching
and  reading machinery like a  jarhead knows his  Springfield,  and he's not
impressed.   "Waterhouse,  that  stack  of   cards  carries  about  as  much
information as a letter home to Mom. Are you trying to tell me "
     "No, this is just the summary. The result of the statistical analysis."
     "Why the hell did you punch it onto ETC cards? Why  not  just turn in a
plain old typed report like everyone else?"
     "I didn't punch it," Waterhouse says. "The machine punched it."
     "The machine punched it," Comstock says very slowly.
     "Yes. When it  was done performing  the analysis." Waterhouse  suddenly
breaks into  his  braying laugh. "You didn't think this was the raw  inputs,
did you?"
     "Well, I "
     "The inputs filled several rooms. I had to  run almost every message we
have intercepted through the whole war through this  analysis. Re member all
those  trucks I requisitioned  a few weeks ago? Those  trucks  were  just to
carry the cards back and forth from storage."
     "Jesus Christ!"  Comstock  says. He  remembers  the  trucks now,  their
incessant comings and  goings,  fender benders in  the motor  pool,  exhaust
fumes coming through his window, the enlisted men shoving heavy carts up and
down the hallways, laden with boxes. Running over people's feet. Scaring the
secretaries.
     And  the  noise.  The noise, the  noise,  from  Waterhouse's  goddamned
machine. Flowerpots vibrating their way off file cabinets, standing waves in
coffee cups.
     "Wait a sec," says one of the ETC  men, with  the nasal skepticism of a
man who has just realized he's being bullshitted. "I saw those trucks. I saw
those cards. Are  you trying  to get  us to believe that  you were  actually
running a statistical analysis on each and every single one of those message
decrypts?"
     Waterhouse looks a little defensive. "Well, that was the only way to do
it!"
     Comstock's  math  whiz is homing in for the kill now. "I agree that the
only way to accomplish the analysis that is implied by that" he waves at the
mandala of  intersecting polygons on Waterhouse's map "is to go through  all
of  those truckloads of old decrypts one by one. That is  clear. That is not
what we are objecting to."
     "What are you objecting to, then?"
     The whiz laughs angrily.  "I'm just worried about the inconvenient fact
that there is  no machine in  the whole world that is  capable of processing
all of that data, that fast."
     "Didn't you hear the noise?" Waterhouse asks.
     "We all  heard the goddamn noise," Comstock says. "What  does that have
to do with anything?"
     "Oh," Waterhouse says, and rolls his eyes at his own stupidity. "That's
right. Sorry. Maybe I should have explained that part first."
     "What part?" Comstock asks.
     "Dr.  Turing,  of Cambridge  University, has pointed out  that bobbadah
bobbadah hoe daddy yanga langa furjeezama  bing  jingle oh yeah," Waterhouse
says, or words  to that effect.  He  pauses for breath, and  turns fatefully
towards the blackboard. "Do  you  mind if I erase  this?"  A  private lunges
forward with an eraser. Comstock sinks  into a chair  and  grips its arms. A
stenographer reaches for  a benzedrine  tablet. An ETC man chomps down  on a
number two  lead pencil like a dog on a drumstick. Strobes flash. Waterhouse
grabs  a  fresh  stick  of  chalk, reaches up, and presses  its tip  to  the
immaculate  slate.  The crisp edge of the stick fractures with a slight pop,
and a  tiny spray of chalk particles drifts  to the  floor spreading  into a
narrow parabolic cloud. Waterhouse bows his head for a minute, like a priest
getting ready to stride up the aisle, and then draws a deep breath.
     The  benzedrine wears off five hours later and  Comstock  finds himself
sprawled  across a  table in  a  room  filled  with  haggard, exhausted men.
Waterhouse  and  the  privates  are  pasty with  chalk  dust,  giving them a
ghoulish appearance. The stenographers  are  surrounded with used  pads, and
frequently stop writing  to  flap their  limp hands in  the air  like  white
flags. The  wire recorders  are spinning uselessly, one  reel  full  and one
empty. Only  the photographer  is  still  going  strong, hitting that strobe
every time Waterhouse manages to fill the chalkboard.
     Everything  smells  like   underarm   sweat.  Comstock  realizes   that
Waterhouse is looking at him expectantly. "See?" Waterhouse asks.
     Comstock  sits up and glances furtively at his own legal  pad, where he
hoped to draw up an agenda.  He sees  Waterhouse's four assertions, which he
copied down during the  first  five minutes of the meeting, and then nothing
except a  tangled  field  of  spiky doodles  surrounding the  words BURY and
DISINTER.
     It  behooves  Comstock to say  something.  "This  thing, the,  uh,  the
burying procedure, that's the, uh "
     "The  key  feature!" Waterhouse says  brightly.  "See,  these ETC  card
machines are great for input and output.  We've got that  covered. The logic
elements are straightforward enough. What was  needed was a way  to give the
machine memory,  so that  it could, to use Turing's terminology,  bury  data
quickly,  and just as quickly disinter it. So  I made one of those. It is an
electrical device, but its  underlying principles  would be familiar to  any
organ maker."
     "Could I, uh, see it?" Comstock asks.
     "Sure! It's down in my lab."
     Going to  see  it is more complicated. First everyone  has to  use  the
toilet,  then the cameras and strobes have to  be moved down  to the lab and
set up. When  they've  all filed in, Waterhouse is standing next to  a giant
rack of pipes with thousands of wires hanging out of it.
     "That's  it?" Comstock  says, when the group  is finally assembled. Pea
sized drops of mercury are scattered around  the floor  like ball  bearings.
The flat soles of Comstock's  shoes explode  them into bursts rolling in all
directions.
     "That's it."
     "What did you call it again?"
     "The RAM," Waterhouse says. "Random Access Memory. I was going to put a
picture  of a ram on it. Y'know, one of those sheeps with the big huge curly
horns?"
     "Yes."
     "But I didn't have time,  and I'm not that good  at  drawing pictures."
Each pipe is four inches in diameter and thirty two feet long. There must be
a hundred of them,  at least Comstock is trying to remember that requisition
that he signed, months ago Waterhouse had ordered enough drain pipe to plumb
a whole goddamn military base.
     The  pipes are laid out horizontally, like a  rank  of organ pipes that
has been knocked flat. Stuck  into one  end of  each  pipe is a little paper
speaker ripped from an old radio.
     "The  speaker plays  a signal a  note that  resonates in the pipe,  and
creates a standing wave," Waterhouse says. "That means that in some parts of
the  pipe, the  air pressure is low,  and in other parts  it is high." He is
backing down the  length of one of  the pipes,  making chopping motions with
his hand. "These U tubes are full of mercury." He points to one of several U
shaped glass tubes that are plumbed into the bottom of the long pipe.
     "I can  see that very  plainly, Waterhouse," Comstock says.  "Could you
keep   backing  up   to  the  next  one?"  he  requests,  peering  over  the
photographers'  shoulder through  the viewfinder.  "You're blocking my  view
that's  better  farther farther  " because  he  can still  see  Waterhouse's
shadow. "That's good. Hit it!"
     The photographer pulls the trigger, the strobe flares.
     "If  the air pressure in the organ  pipe is high, it pushes the mercury
down a little bit. If it's low, it sucks the mercury up. I put an electrical
contact into each U tube just a couple  of wires separated by an air gap. If
those wires are high  and dry (like  because high air pressure  in the organ
pipe is shoving the mercury  down away  from them), no current flows. But if
they are immersed in the mercury (because low air pressure in the organ pipe
is sucking the mercury up  to cover them), then current flows  between them,
because mercury conducts electricity! So the U tubes produce a set of binary
digits that is like a picture of  the standing wave a graph of the harmonics
that make up the musical note  that is being played  on the speaker. We feed
that vector back to the  oscillator circuit  that is driving the speaker, so
that the vector of bits  keeps refreshing itself forever, unless the machine
decides to write a new pattern of bits into it."
     "Oh, so the ETC machinery  actually can  control  this thing?" Comstock
asks.
     Again with the  laugh. "That's the whole point! This is where the logic
boards bury and disinter the data!" Waterhouse  says. "I'll  show you!"  And
before  Comstock  can order him not to, Waterhouse  has nodded to a corporal
standing at the other end of the room, wearing the protective earmuffs  that
are generally  issued to the men who fire  the very  largest artillery. That
corporal nods and  hits a switch. Waterhouse  slams  his hands over his ears
and grins, showing a little too much gum for Comstock's taste, and then time
stops, or  something, as all of those pipes come alive playing variations on
the same low C.
     It's all Comstock  can do not  to drop  to his knees;  he has his hands
over his  ears, of course, but the sound's not  really coming in through his
ears,  it is entering his  torso directly, like X rays. Hot sonic tongs  are
rummaging through his viscera, beads of sweat  being vibrated loose from his
scalp, his nuts are hopping around like Mexican jumping beans. The crescents
of  mercury  in all those U  tubes  are  shifting up  and  down, opening and
closing the contacts,  but  systematically: it  is  not  turbulent  sloshing
around,  but  a  coherent  progression  of  discrete  controlled  shiftings,
informed by some program.
     Comstock would draw his sidearm and  put a  bullet through Waterhouse's
head, but he'd have to take one hand off one ear. Finally it stops.
     "The machine just calculated the first hundred numbers in the Fibonacci
sequence," Waterhouse says.
     "As  I  understand it,  this RAM is just the  part where you  bury  and
disinter the data," Comstock says,  trying to master the higher harmonics in
his own  voice,  trying  to sound and act  as  if he saw this kind  of thing
daily. "If you had  to  give a name to the  whole apparatus, what would  you
call it?"
     "Hmmm,"   Waterhouse  says.  "Well,   its  basic  job   is  to  perform
mathematical calculations like a computer."
     Comstock snorts. "A computer is a human being."
     "Well  ...  this  machine  uses  binary digits to  do its computing.  I
suppose you could call it a digital computer."
     Comstock writes  it  out in block  letters on  his  legal  pad: DIGITAL
COMPUTER.
     "Is this going to go into your report?" Waterhouse asks brightly.
     Comstock almost blurts report? This is my report!  Then a  foggy memory
comes  back to him. Something about Azure. Something about  gold mines. "Oh,
yeah," he  murmurs. Oh, yeah, there's a war on.  He considers it.  "Nah. Now
that  you mention it, this isn't even a footnote." He looks significantly at
his pair of hand picked math  whizzes,  who are gazing at  the  RAM  like  a
couple of  provincial Judean sheep shearers  getting their first look at the
Ark  of  the  Covenant.  "We'll  probably  just  keep  these photos for  the
archives. You know how the military is with its archives."
     Waterhouse goes into that dreadful laugh again.
     "Do you have anything else to report before we adjourn?" Comstock says,
desperate to silence him.
     "Well,  this work has given me  some  new ideas on  information  theory
which you might find interesting "
     "Write them down. Send them to me."
     "There's one other  thing. I don't know  if it is really  germane here,
but "
     "What is it, Waterhouse?"
     "Uh, well ... it seems that I'm engaged to be married!"


     Chapter 68 CARAVAN


     Randy has lost all  he owned, but gained an  entourage. Amy has decided
that she might as well come  north with him, as long as she happens to be on
this side of the Pacific Ocean.
     This  makes him  happy. The Shaftoe  boys,  Robin  and Marcus Aurelius,
consider themselves invited  along like  much  else that in  other  families
would  be  the  subject  of  extended  debate,  this  goes  without  saying,
apparently.
     This makes it  imperative that  they drive the thousand or so  miles to
Whitman, Washington, because the Shaftoe  boys are not  really the  sort who
are in position to  simply drop the hot rod  off at  the Park  'n' Ride, run
into the airport, and demand tickets  on the next flight to  Spokane. Marcus
Aurelius is a college sophomore on an ROTC scholarship and Robin's attending
some kind  of military prep  school. But even if they  did have that kind of
money  rattling around in their  pockets, actually spending it  would offend
their native frugality.  Or so Randy assumes,  for the first couple of days.
It's the obvious assumption  to make, given  that the  Cash Flow Issue seems
always to be on their mind.  For example the boys  made Herculean efforts to
consume every spoonful of  the gut busting vat of oatmeal  cooked by Amy the
morning  after  the  quake,  and  finding  it beyond  their  endurance  they
carefully decanted the remainder into a  Ziploc bag while fretting at length
about the high cost of Ziploc bags and didn't Randy have any old glass jelly
jars or  something, some  where in  the basement, that might be unbroken and
usable for this purpose.
     Randy  has had  plenty  of  time to  disabuse himself of  this  fallacy
(namely that their airplane avoidance is dictated by financial  constraints)
and to draw the real reason out of them after they have dropped Amy's U Haul
off near SFO and begun to caravan northwards in the Acura and the jacked up,
thundering Impala. People are rotated from car to  car  whenever  they stop,
according to some system that no one is  divulging to Randy, but that always
situates him alone  in a car with either  Robin or Marcus  Aurelius. Both of
them are too dignified to spill their guts on light pretexts, and too polite
to assume that Randy gives a shit about anything they think, and perhaps too
basically suspicious  of Randy to  share  a whole lot with him. Some kind of
bonding is required first. The ice doesn't start to break up until  Day 2 of
the drive,  after they have all slept  in an  Interstate  5  rest  area near
Redding  in the  reclined seats  of the vehicles  (each of the  Shaftoe boys
solemnly and  separately informs him that the  chain  of  lodgings known  as
Motel 6 is one giant con game, that if those rooms ever did cost six dollars
a  night,  which is doubtful, they  certainly don't now,  and  many  are the
innocent young travelers who have been drawn in by  the siren calls of those
fraudulent  signs  rising above interstate cloverleaves; they try  to  sound
impartial and wise about it, but  the way  their faces flush and their  eyes
glance  aside  and their voices  rise makes  Randy  suspect  he  is actually
listening  to some thinly veiled personal and recent history). Again without
anyone saying anything,  it is taken to be obvious that  Amy, as the female,
will require her own car to  sleep in, which puts Randy in the  hot rod with
Robin and Marcus  Aurelius; As the guest, Randy gets the reclining passenger
seat, the best bed in the  house, and M.A. curls up on  the back  seat while
Robin,  the youngest, sleeps behind the  steering wheel. For about the first
thirty  seconds  after the  dome light has gone off  and  the  Shaftoes have
finished saying their  prayers out loud, Randy lies there feeling the Impala
rock on  its  suspension from the wake blasts of passing long haul semis and
feels considerably  more alienated  than he did while trying to sleep in the
jeepney  in the  jungle town in  northern  Luzon. Then he opens his eyes and
it's morning, and Robin's out there doing one handed pushups in the dust.
     "When  we get there," Robin pants, after he's finished,  "do you s'pose
you could show me  that video on  the  Internet thing  you  were telling  me
about?" He asks it with all due boyishness. Then  suddenly he looks  abashed
and adds, "Unless it's like real expensive or something."
     "It's  free.  I'll  show  it  to  you,"  Randy  says.  "Let's  get some
breakfast."  It goes  without saying that McDonald's  and  their  ilk charge
scandalously more for, e.g.,  a dish of  hash browns than  one would pay for
the equivalent mass of potatoes in raw form at (if you think money grows  on
trees) Safeway or (if you have any kind of decent  regard for the value of a
buck) farmer's markets situated at lonely interchanges in the boon docks. So
for breakfast they  must drive to a small town (grocery stores in big places
like Redding  being a tipoff) and find an actual grocery  store (convenience
stores being etc., etc., etc.) and purchase  breakfast in the most elemental
form  conceivable (deeply discounted well past their prime  bananas that are
not even in a bunch but swept up from the floor, or something,  and gathered
together in a gaily printed paper sack, and generic Cheerio knockoffs  in  a
tubular  bag, and  a  box  of  generic  powdered  milk) and eat it  from tin
military surplus  messkits that the Shaftoes produce with admirable coolness
from the hot rod's trunk, a ferrous, oily chasm all a bang with tire chains,
battered  ammo boxes, and, unless Randy's  eyes are playing tricks on him, a
pair of samurai swords.
     Anyway, this  is all  done pretty nonchalantly,  and  not like they are
trying to test Randy's mettle or anything, and so he doesn't imagine that it
qualifies  as  a true  bonding  experience.  If, hypothetically, the  Impala
throws a rod in the desert  and they have to fix it with parts stolen from a
nearby junkyard  guarded  by rabid dogs and  shotgun  packing  gypsies, that
would be a bonding experience. But Randy's wrong. On Day 2 the Shaftoes (the
male ones anyway) open up to him a bit.
     It seems (and this is abstracted from many  hours of conversation) that
when you are an able bodied young male Shaftoe  and you are  a stranger in a
strange land with  a car that you  have,  with  plenty  of advice  and elbow
grease from  your extended  family, fixed  up  pretty  nicely, the  idea  of
parking it in favor  of some  other mode of  conveyance  is, in addition  to
obvious financial folly, some kind of moral failure, pure and simple. That's
why  they are driving to Whitman, Washington. But  why  (one of them finally
summons  the boldness  to inquire) why are  they taking  two cars?  There is
plenty of room in the Impala for four.  Randy has gotten the sense all along
that the Shaftoes are dismayed by Randy's insistence on taking the redundant
and repulsively scarred Acura, and that only their formidable politeness has
prevented them from pointing out the  sheer madness of it. "I do not imagine
that we will stay together  beyond Whitman," Randy says (after  being around
these guys  for a couple of days  he has  begun to fall  out of the habit of
using  contractions  those  tawdry  shortcuts  of  the  verbally  lazy   and
pathologically  rushed).  "If  we have two cars,  we  can split up  at  that
point."
     "The drive is not that far, Randall," says Robin, slapping the Impala's
gas  pedal against the  floor to rip the transmission into passing gear, and
careening  around  a  gasoline  tanker.  From  the  initial  "Sir"  and "Mr.
Waterhouse," Randy  has been able to talk  them down  into addressing him by
his  first  name,  but  they  have  agreed  to  it  only  on  the  condition
(apparently) that  they use  the full  "Randall"  instead of  "Randy." Early
attempts to use "Randall Lawrence" as a compromise were vigorously denounced
by Randy, and so "Randall" it is for now. "M.A. and I would be happy to drop
you back off at  the San Francisco Airport or, uh, wherever  you  elected to
park your Acura."
     "Where else would I park it?" Randy says, not getting this last bit.
     "Well, I mean that you could probably find a place where you could park
it free  of charge for  a few days, if you did some looking around. Assuming
you  wanted  to keep it." He adds encouragingly, "That Acura probably  would
have some decent resale value even considering all the body work it needs."
     Only at this point does Randy figure out that the Shaftoes believe  him
to be utterly destitute, helpless, and  adrift  in  the wide  world. A total
charity  case.  He recalls,  now,  seeing  them  discard  a  whole  sack  of
McDonald's  wrappers when  they arrived at  his house. This whole  austerity
binge has been concocted to avoid putting financial pressure on Randy.
     Robin and M.A. have been observing him  carefully, talking  about  him,
thinking  about him. They happen to  have made some faulty assumptions,  and
come  to some wrong  conclusions,  but all  the  same, they have shown  more
sophistication than Randy was giving them  credit for.  This causes Randy to
go back and review the conversations he has had with them the last couple of
days, just to get some idea of what other interesting and complicated things
might have been going on in their heads. M.A. is a pretty straightforward by
the book type, the kind who'll get good grades and fit well into any kind of
hierarchical organization. Robin, on the other hand, is more of a wild card.
He has the makings of either  a total loser or a successful entrepreneur, or
maybe one of those  guys who will  oscillate  between those two poles. Randy
realizes  now,  in retrospect,  that  he  has  spilled a hell  of  a lot  of
information to  Robin, in just  a couple  of  days,  about the  Internet and
electronic money and  digital currency  and the new  global economy. Randy's
mental  state is such that he is prone to babbling aimlessly for hours at  a
time. Robin has hoovered it all up.
     To Randy it's just been aimless ventilating. He hasn't even considered,
until  now, what effect  it has  been  exerting  on the  trajectory of Robin
Shaftoe's  life.  Randall Lawrence  Waterhouse hates  Star Trek  and  avoids
people who don't hate it, but  even  so he has seen just about every episode
of the  damn thing,  and  he  feels,  at  this moment, like  the  Federation
scientist who beams down to a primitive planet  and thoughtlessly teaches an
opportunistic pre  Enlightenment yahoo how to construct a phaser cannon from
commonly available materials.
     Randy still has some money. He cannot begin to  guess how he can convey
this fact to these guys without  committing some grievous protocol error, so
the next time they stop for gas, he asks Amy to convey it to them. He thinks
(based on  his hazy understanding of the rotation system) that it's his turn
to be alone in a car with Amy, but if Amy is going to convey this data about
the money  to  one of the boys, she'll need to spend the next leg with  him,
because it must be conveyed indirectly, which will take a while, and because
of that indirectness, time will then need  to be allotted for it to sink in.
But three hours  later,  then,  at  the  gas stop  after  that, it naturally
follows that M.A. and Robin must be placed together in the same car, so that
Robin (who now  knows and understands, and who gets out of the Impala with a
big grin on his face and punches Randy affably on the shoulder) can pass the
message on to M.A., whose recent conversational gambits vis à vis Randy made
no sense at all until Randy figured out that they thought of him as a beggar
and that M.A. was trying in a really oblique way to find out if Randy needed
to share any of M.A.'s personal toiletry items.  At any rate, Randy and  Amy
get into the  Acura and they head north into Oregon, trying to keep up  with
the hot rod.
     "Well, it's nice to have a chance to spend some  time  with you," Randy
says.  His  back  is  still a bit  sore  from  where Amy  struck him  whilst
asserting,  the other morning, that expressing one's feelings was  "the name
of  the game."  So he figures he will express those  aspects of his feelings
least likely to get him in serious trouble.
     "Ah  figgered you  'n' ah'ud  have plenny a tahm to  chew the rag," Amy
says, having  reverted  utterly to  the tongue  of her ancestors in the last
couple of days. "But it has been ages  and ages since I saw  those two boys,
and you've never seen 'em at all."
     "Ages and ages? Really?"
     "Yeah."
     "How long?"
     "Well, last time  I saw Robin he  was just starting kindergarten. And I
saw M.A. more recently he was probably eight or ten."
     "And you are related to them how, one more time?"
     "I think  Robin  is  my  second  cousin.  And  I  could explain  M.A.'s
relationship to me, but you'd  start shifting  around  and heaving great big
sighs before I got more'n halfway through it."
     "So, to these  guys, you are a shirttail relative they glimpsed once or
twice when they were tiny little boys."
     Amy shrugs. "Yeah."
     "So, like what possessed them to come out here?"
     Amy looks blank.
     "I mean," Randy says, "from the general attitude they copped, when they
fishtailed  to a stop in  the middle of my front yard and leapt out of their
red hot, bug encrusted vehicle, fresh from  Tennessee, obviously the  number
one mission objective was to ensure that the flower of Shaftoe womanhood was
being treated with all  of the  respect, decency, worshipfulness, et cetera,
properly owed it."
     "Oh. That's not really the vibe that I got."
     "Oh, it wasn't? Really?"
     "No. Randy, my family sticks together. Just 'cause we haven't seen each
other for a while doesn't mean our obligations have lapsed."
     "Well, you are making an implied comparison to my family here which I'm
not that crazy about  and maybe  we  should talk about later. But  as far as
those  family  obligations  go,  I  do  certainly think  that one  of  those
obligations is to preserve your notional virginity."
     "Who says it's notional?"
     "It's got to be notional to them because they haven't seen you for most
of your life. That's all I mean."
     "I think you are blowing the perceived sexual aspect of this  thing way
out of  proportion," Amy says. "Which is perfectly normal, for a guy, and  I
don't think less of you for it."
     "Amy, Amy. Have you done the math on this thing?"
     "Math?"
     "Counting  the  trip  through Manila traffic  to  NAIA,  the  check  in
procedure,  and  formalities at  SFO,  my entire journey from Manila  to San
Francisco took me something  like eighteen  hours.  Twenty for you.  Another
four  hours to get down  to  my house. Then eight hours after we  got to  my
house, in the middle of the night, Robin and Marcus Aurelius showed up. Now,
if  we  assume  that  the Shaftoe family grapevine functions at the speed of
light, it means that these guys, shooting hoops in front of their trailer in
Tennessee,  received a news flash that  a female Shaftoe was in some kind of
guy related personal distress at about  the time you  jumped off of Glory IV
and hopped in a taxi in Manila."
     "I sent e mail from Glory," Amy says.
     "To whom?"
     "The Shaftoe mailing list."
     "God!" Randy says, slapping himself in the face.  "What did this e mail
say?"
     "Can't remember," Amy  says. "That I was headed for California. I might
have made some kind of backhanded remark about  a young man I wanted to talk
to. I was kinda upset  at the time and I can't remember exactly what  I have
said."
     "I  think you  said something  like  'I  am  going to  California where
Randall Lawrence Waterhouse, who has AIDS, is going  to forcibly sodomize me
upon arrival.' "
     "No, it was nothing of the kind."
     "Well, I think that someone  read it between the lines. So,  anyway, Ma
or Auntie Em or someone emerges from the side door, shaking flour out of her
gingham apron I'm imagining this."
     "I can tell."
     "And  she  says,  'Boys,  your umpteenth  cousin thrice removed America
Shaftoe has sent  us e mail from Uncle  Doug's boat  in the South China  Sea
stating that she is having  some kind  of dispute with a young man  and it's
not out of the question that  she might need someone  around to  lend  her a
hand. In California.  Would  you swing by and look in on her?' And  they put
away their  basketball and say, 'Yes ma'am, what city and address?' and  she
says, 'Never you mind, just get on Interstate  40 and drive west not failing
to maintain an average speed of between one hundred and a hundred and twenty
percent of the legal speed limit and call me collect from a Texaco somewhere
and I will supply you with specific target coordinates later,' and they say,
'Yes ma'am' and thirty seconds later they are laying a patch in the driveway
as  they  pull  five  gees  backing  out  of the  garage  and  thirty  hours
subsequently  they are  in  my front yard, shining  their twenty five D cell
flashlights into my eyes and asking me a  lot of  pointed  questions. Do you
have any idea how far the drive is?"
     "I have no idea."
     "Well, according to M.A.'s Rand McNally  Road  Atlas,  it  is  an  even
twenty one hundred miles."
     "So?"
     "So that  means that  they maintained an average speed of seventy miles
an hour for a day and a half"
     "A day and a quarter," Amy says.
     "Do you have any idea how difficult that is to do?"
     "Randy, you push on the  gas pedal and keep it between  the lines.  How
hard is that?"
     "I'm not  saying it's an intellectual challenge.  I'm  saying that this
willingness to,  e.g., urinate  into empty McDonald's cups  rather than stop
the car, suggests a  kind  of  urgency. Passion, even. And being  a guy, and
having had the experience of being a guy of the age of M.A. and Robin, I can
tell  you that one of the  few things that gets  your blood  boiling to that
extent is this notion of  some female you love being done wrong by a strange
male."
     "Well, what if they did?" Amy says. "Now they think you're okay."
     "They do? Really?"
     "Yeah.  The  financial  disaster  aspect  makes  you more  human.  More
approachable. And it excuses a lot."
     "Do I need an excuse for something?"
     "Not in my book."
     "But to the extent they thought I was a rapist, it kind of palliates my
image problems."
     A brief lull in the conversation ensues. Then Amy pipes up.
     "So tell me about your family, Randy."
     "In the next couple of  days, you're  going to learn a great deal  more
than I would like you to about  my  family. And so am I. So let's talk about
something else."
     "Okay. Let's talk about business."
     "Okay. You go first."
     "We got a German  television producer coming out next  week to  have  a
look  at the U  boat. They might do a documentary about it.  We have already
hosted several German print journalists."
     "You have?"
     "It has caused a sensation in Germany."
     "Why?"
     "Because no one can figure out how it got there. Now, your turn."
     "We  are going  to  launch  our own currency." By saying this, Randy is
divulging proprietary information to someone not  authorized to hear it. But
he  does it anyway,  because  opening himself up to Amy in this way,  making
himself vulnerable to her, gives him a hard on.
     "How do you go about that? Don't you have to be a government?"
     "No. You  have to  be a  bank.  Why  do you think they're  called  bank
notes?" Randy  is fully aware  of  the insanity of divulging secret business
information to a woman solely for purposes of sexual self titillation but it
is in the nature of things, right now, that he doesn't especially care.
     "Okay but still, usually it's done by government banks, right?"
     "Only  because  people  tend  to  respect  the  government  banks.  But
government banks in Southeast Asia have a huge image problem right now. That
image problem translates directly into crashing exchange rates."
     "So, how do you do it?"
     "Get  a big pile of gold. Issue  certificates saying 'this  certificate
can be redeemed for such and such an amount of gold.' That's all there is to
it."
     "What's wrong with dollars and yen and stuff?"
     "The certificates the banknotes  are printed on paper.  We're going  to
issue electronic banknotes."
     "No paper at all?"
     "No paper at all."
     "So you can only spend it on the Net."
     "Correct."
     "What if you want to buy a sack of bananas?"
     "Find a banana merchant on the Net."
     "Seems like paper money'd be just as good."
     "Paper  money is  traceable  and perishable  and  has other  drawbacks.
Electronic banknotes are fast and anonymous."
     "What's an electronic banknote look like, Randy?"
     "Like any other digital thing: a bunch of bits."
     "Doesn't that make it kind of easy to counterfeit?"
     "Not if you have good crypto," Randy says. "Which we do."
     "How did you get it?"
     "By hanging out with maniacs."
     "What kind of maniacs?"
     "Maniacs who think that  having  good  crypto is  of  near  apocalyptic
importance."
     "How'd they get around to thinking any such thing?"
     "By  reading about people like Yamamoto who  died because they  had bad
crypto, and then projecting that kind of thing into the future."
     "Do you agree with  them?" Amy asks. It might be one of  those  pivotal
moment in the relationship questions.
     "At two in the morning, when I'm lying awake in bed, I do," Randy says.
"In the light of day, it all seems like  paranoia." He  glances over at Amy,
who's  looking at  him appraisingly, because he hasn't actually answered the
question yet. He's got to  pick one  thing  or the other.  "Better safe than
sorry, I guess. Having good crypto can't hurt, and it might help."
     "And it might make you a lot of money along the way," Amy reminds him.
     Randy  laughs.  "At  this  point,  it's not  even about trying  to make
money," he says. "I just don't want to be totally humiliated."
     Amy smiles cryptically.
     "What?" Randy demands.
     "You sounded just like a Shaftoe when you said that," Amy says.
     Randy drives the car in silence for about  half an hour  after that. He
was right, he suspects: it was a pivotal moment in  the relationship. All he
can do now is totally screw it up. So he shuts up and drives.


     Chapter 69 THE GENERAL


     For  two months  he sleeps on  a beach on New Caledonia,  stretched out
under a mosquito net, dreaming of worse places, polishing his line.
     In Stockholm, someone from the  British Embassy  got  him to a  certain
cafe. A gentleman he met in the  cafe got him to a car. The car got him to a
lake where a floatplane just happened to  be sitting with its motors running
and  its  lights  off. The Special  Air  Service  got  him to  London. Naval
Intelligence got him back to D.C., drained his brain, and turned him over to
the Marines with a big stamp on his  papers saying that  he must never again
be sent  into combat; he  Knew  Too Much  to  be taken prisoner. The Marines
found that he  Knew  Too Little to serve as a Rear Echelon Motherfucker, and
gave  him a choice: a one way ticket home, or higher education. He opted for
the ticket home,  then talked a green officer into believing that his family
had moved, and home was now San Francisco.
     You could  practically cross San Francisco Bay by jumping from one Navy
ship  to the next.  The waterfront was lined with the  Navy's piers, depots,
hospitals, and  prisons.  All of  them  were  guarded by Shaftoe's  military
brothers. Shaftoe's  tattoos  were  obscured  by civilian  clothes  and  his
haircut grown  out.  But he  only had to  look  a Marine  in the eye from  a
stone's throw, and that Marine would recognize him for a brother in need and
open any  gate for  him,  break any regulation, probably  even lay  down his
life. Shaftoe stowed away on a ship bound for Hawaii so fast  he didn't even
have time to  get drunk. From Pearl, it took him four days to get on  a ship
to Kwajalein. There, he was a legendary hero. His money was no good on Kwaj;
he smoked, drank and ate for a week without  being allowed to spend  a dime,
and  finally  his brothers got  him on  a plane that  took him a  couple  of
thousand miles due south to Noumea, in New Caledonia.
     They did so  with great  reluctance.  They would willingly  have  hit a
beach with him,  but  this was different:  they were sending him  perilously
close to SOWESPAC, the Southwest Pacific Theater, the domain of The General.
Even  now, a  couple of years after  The General had sent them  into action,
poorly  armed and  poorly  supported, on  Guadalcanal,  Marines still  spent
approximately  fifty  percent of their waking hours talking about what a bad
guy  he  was.  He  secretly  owned  half of  Intramuros.  He  had  become  a
billionaire from Spanish gold  that his father had  dug  up when  he'd  been
governor of the Philippines. Quezon had secretly named  him postwar dictator
of  the archipelago.  The General was running for president, and in order to
win,  he was  going to start throwing battles just to make F.D.R.  look bad,
and blaming it all on the Marines. And if that didn't work he'd come back to
the States  and stage  a coup  d'etat.  Which would be  beaten back, against
enormous odds, by the United States Marine Corps. Semper Fi!
     Anyway, his brothers got him to New Caledonia.  Noumea's a  neat French
city of wide  streets  and  tin  roofed buildings, fronting on  a big harbor
lined  with mountainous dumps of nickel and chromium ore from gigantic mines
up island. The place is about one  third Free French (there's pictures of de
Gaulle all over the  place), one third American  servicemen, and  one  third
cannibals. Word on the street is that the cannibals have not eaten any white
people in twenty seven years, so Bobby Shaftoe, sleeping out  on that beach,
feels almost as safe as he did in Sweden.
     But when he  reached  Noumea he slammed into a barrier more  impervious
than  any  brick  wall:  the  imaginary  line  between  the  Pacific theater
(Nimitz's  turf) and SOWESPAC. Brisbane, The General's headquarters, is just
a short (by Pacific standards) hop almost due west. If he can just get there
and deliver his line, everything's going to be fine.
     During   his  first  couple  of  weeks  on  the  beach,  he's  stupidly
optimistic. Then he's depressed for about a month,  thinking he'll never get
off  this  place.  Finally  he  starts  to  come  around, starts to  display
adaptability again. He's had no luck getting on board a ship. But the amount
of  air  traffic is  incredible. Seems  that The  General  likes  airplanes.
Shaftoe starts tailing flyboys.  The MPs won't  give him the time of day, he
can't get into an Army NCOs' Club to save his life.
     But  an NCOs' Club offers strictly limited entertainments. Customers in
search of more profound  satisfactions must leave  the perimeter  defined by
hardassed MPs and enter  the  civilian  economy. And when  horny, well  paid
American flyboys  are dropped into a  culture defined half by cannibals  and
half by Frenchmen, you get a  hell of  a civilian economy.  Shaftoe  finds a
vantage point outside  an  airbase gate,  plants himself  there, his pockets
loaded with cigarette  packs (the Marines on  Kwaj  left him with a lifetime
supply) and  waits.  Flyboys come out in twos and threes. Shaftoe  picks out
the sergeants, follows them to bars and whorehouses, sits down in their line
of  sight,  begins to chain smoke. Before long they've come over and started
to bum cigarettes off him. This leads to conversations.
     Once he gets this routine figured out, he learns a lot about  the Fifth
Air Force in a big hurry, makes a lot of friends. In a few weeks, he strikes
the  jackpot.  He goes over  the airfield fence  at 1:00 A.M.  of a moonless
night, belly  crawls  for  about a mile along the shoulder of  a runway, and
just barely makes a rendezvous with  the  crew of the Tipsy Tootsie, a B  24
Liberator  bound  for  Brisbane.  In fairly short order,  he  finds  himself
stuffed  into  the  glass sphere  at the tail  of the plane:  the  rear ball
turret. Its  purpose,  of  course, is to shoot down  Zeroes,  which tend  to
attack from  behind. But Tipsy Tootsie's crew  seems to  think that they are
about  as  likely to find  Zeroes around here as  they would be over central
Missouri.
     They warned him to wear something warm, but he didn't have any thing of
that  nature. Tipsy  Tootsie has barely left the  runway  when he  begins to
understand his mistake: the  temperature drops  like a  five  hundred  pound
bomb. It is physically impossible for him to get out of the turret. Even  if
he could, it  would just lead to his  getting arrested; he has been smuggled
on board without  the knowledge of the officers who are actually  flying the
plane. Calmly he  decides  to  add  prolonged  hypothermia  to  his  already
extensive knowledge of suffering. After a couple  of  hours, he either loses
consciousness or falls asleep, and this helps.
     He  is awakened by pink light that comes  from every direction at once.
The plane has lost altitude, the temperature  has risen, his body has thawed
out enough to bring him awareness. After a few minutes he's able to move his
arms. He reaches into the pink  glow and rubs condensation off the inside of
the ball turret. He takes out a hanky, wipes the  whole thing clean, and now
he's looking straight down the throat of a Pacific dawn.
     The sky is streaked and mottled by black clouds, like jets of squid ink
in a Caribbean cove. For  a  while,  it's  as  if he  is  under  water  with
Bischoff.
     Puckered scars mar the  Pacific in loops and lines, and he is  reminded
of his own naked flesh. But the hard jagged pieces work their way out of the
scar tissue like old shrapnel:  coral reefs emerging from a  shallowing sea.
Warmer and warmer. He begins to shiver again.
     Someone has dumped  brown dust  into  the Pacific, made a great pile of
it. On the  edge of the pile, is a  city. The city swings around them, comes
closer. Warmer and warmer. It's Brisbane. A runway streaks  up and he thinks
it's going to take his  ass off,  like the  world's biggest belt sander. The
plane stops. He smells gasoline.
     The pilot discovers him,  loses his temper, and makes ready to call the
MPs. "I'm here to work for The General," Shaftoe mumbles  through blue lips.
It just makes  the pilot want to slug  him. But  after  Shaftoe has  uttered
these words, everything is different, the angry officers stand a pace or two
farther away from  him, tone  down their  language, knock  off the  threats.
Shaftoe knows, from this, that The General does things differently.
     He spends a day recovering in a flophouse, then rises, shaves, drinks a
cup of coffee, and strikes out in search of brass.
     To his extreme  chagrin, he learns that The General has  relocated  his
headquarters to Hollandia, in  New Guinea. But his wife and son, and a bunch
of his staff, are  still staying at  Lennon's Hotel. Shaftoe  goes there and
analyzes the traffic pattern: to pull into the hotel's horseshoe drive,  the
cars have  to come around a particular corner, just up  the  street. Shaftoe
finds a  good loitering place near  that corner,  and waits. Looking through
the  windows of  the approaching  cars, he can  see the epaulets,  count the
stars and eagles.
     Seeing two stars, he decides to make his move. Jogging down the  block,
he reaches the awning  of the hotel  just as this  general's  door is  being
hauled open by his driver.
     "'Scuse me, General, Bobby Shaftoe reporting for duty, sir!" he blurts,
snapping out the perfectest salute in military history.
     "And who  the hell might you  be, Bobby  Shaftoe?" says  this  general,
hardly  batting an eye.  He  talks  like Bischoff! This  guy actually has  a
German accent!
     "I've killed  more Nips  than seismic activity. I'm trained to jump out
of  airplanes.  I speak a little Nip.  I can survive  in the jungle.  I know
Manila like the back of my  hand. My wife and child are there. And I'm kinda
at loose ends. Sir!"
     In  London, in  D.C., he'd  never have gotten this close, and if he had
he'd have been shot or arrested.
     But this is SOWESPAC,  and so the next morning at dawn he's  on a  B 17
bound for Hollandia, wearing Army green, no rank.
     New Guinea is a nasty looking piece of work: a gangrenous dragon with a
wicked, rocky spine, covered  with  ice. Just looking  at  it makes  Shaftoe
shiver from a queasy combination  of hypothermia and  incipient malaria. The
whole thing belongs  to The General now. Shaftoe can plainly see that such a
country could only  be conquered by a man who  was completely fucking out of
his  mind.  A month  in Stalingrad would be preferable  to twenty four hours
down there.
     Hollandia  is on the  north shore  of  this  beast,  facing, naturally,
towards the  Philippines. It  is well  known throughout  Marinedom that  The
General  has caused  a palace to be  built for himself there. Some credulous
fools actually  believe the  rumor that  it is merely  a complete 200% scale
replica of the Taj Mahal, built by enslaved Marines, but savvy jarheads know
that  it  is  actually  a  much vaster compound  built  out of  construction
materials  stolen from Navy hospital ships, dotted  with pleasure domes  and
fuck houses for his  string of Asiatic concubines, with  a soaring cupola so
high that The General can go up there and see what the Nips are doing to his
extensive real estate holdings in Manila, 1,500 miles to the northwest.
     Bobby  Shaftoe  sees no  such thing  out the windows of the  B  17.  He
glimpses one large and nice looking house up on a mountain above the sea. He
supposes that it  is a mere sentry post,  marking the benighted perimeter of
The  General's  domain. But almost immediately the B  17 bounces  down on  a
runway. The cabin is invaded  by  an equatorial miasma. It's like  breathing
Cream  O'  Wheat  direct  from  a  blurping vat. Shaftoe  feels  his  bowels
loosening  up already. Of  course there are  many Marines who feel that Army
uniform  trousers  look  best when  feces  stained.  Shaftoe must  put  such
thoughts out of his head.
     All the  passengers  (mostly  colonels and better)  move  as  to  avoid
working up a sweat, even though they are already drenched.  Shaftoe wants to
kick their fat, waffled butts downstairs he's in a hurry to get to Manila.
     Pretty soon he is hitching a ride  on the rear bumper of a jeep full of
brass.  The  airfield is  still ringed with ack ack guns, and shows signs of
having been bombed and strafed not  too long ago. Some of  these  signs  are
obvious  physical  evidence  like shell holes,  but Shaftoe gets most of his
information from watching the men:  their posture, their  facial expressions
as they stare into the sky, tell him exactly what the threat level is.
     No wonder, he thinks, remembering the sight  of that big white house up
on  the  mountain.  You  can  probably  see  that  thing by  moonlight,  for
crissakes! It must be visible from Tokyo! It's just begging to be strafed.
     Then, as the jeep begins  to trundle up the mountain in first  gear, he
figures it out: that thing's just  a decoy. The General's real command  post
must be a network of deep tunnels hidden beneath the jungle floor,  and that
is where you would have to look for your Asiatic concubines, etc.
     The  trip up the mountain takes an  eon.  Shaftoe jumps  off  and  soon
outpaces the whining jeep, and the one in front of it. Then he's on his own,
walking through the jungle. He'll just follow the tracks until they lead him
straight  to  the  cleverly  camouflaged  mineshaft that leads  down to  The
General's HQ.
     The walk gives him plenty of time to have a  couple of smokes and savor
the unrelieved nightmarishness  of the New  Guinea jungle, compared to which
Guadalcanal, which  he thought was the  worst place on earth,  seems like  a
dewy  meadow strewn with bunnies and butterflies. Nothing is more satisfying
than to consider that the Nips and the United States  Army spent a couple of
years beating the crap out of each other here.  Pity  the Aussies had to get
mixed up in it, though.
     The tracks  take him  straight to that big white clay pigeon of a house
up on  the  mountainside. They've gone way  overboard in trying  to make the
house  look like  someone's actually living there. Shaftoe can see furniture
and everything. The walls are crisscrossed by bullet  trails. They have even
set up  a mannequin on the balcony, in  a pink  silk dressing gown,  corncob
pipe,  and aviator  sunglasses,  scanning  the  bay through  binoculars!  As
reluctant as he is to approve  of anything done by the Army, Shaftoe  cannot
keep himself from laughing out loud at this witticism. Military humor at its
finest.  He  can't  believe  they  got away  with  it.  A  couple  of  press
photographers are standing down below, taking pictures of the scene.
     Standing in the middle of  the house's mud parking lot, he  plants  his
feet wide and thrusts his middle finger  up at that mannequin. Hey, asshole,
this one's from the Marines on Kwajalein! Damn, this feels good.
     The  mannequin  swivels  and aims  its  binoculars  directly  at  Bobby
Shaftoe, who freezes solid in his bird flipping posture as if  caught in the
gaze of a basilisk. Down below, air raid sirens begin to weep and wail.
     The binoculars  come away from the sunglasses. A  puff of smoke  blurts
out of the pipe. The General snaps out a sarcastic salute. Shaftoe remembers
to put his finger away, then stands there, rooted like a dead mahogany.
     The General  reaches up and removes the  pipe from his mouth  so he can
say, "Magandang gabi."
     "You  mean,  'magandang umaga,'  " Shaftoe says. "Gabi  means night and
umaga means morning."

     The drone of  airplane engines  is now getting  quite  noticeable.  The
press photographers decide to pack it in, and disappear into the house.
     "When you're headed  north from Manila  towards Lingayen and you get to
the fork  in the road at Tarlac and you take the right fork, there, and head
across the cane breaks  towards Urdaneta, what's the first village you  come
to?"
     "It's a trick question," Shaftoe  says. "North of  Tarlac there  are no
cane breaks, just rice paddies."
     "Hmm.   Very  good,"  The  General  says   grumpily.  Down  below,  the
antiaircraft guns open up with a fantastic clattering; from this distance it
sounds as if the north coast  of New  Guinea  is being jackhammered into the
sea. The  General  ignores it. If  he  were only pretending to ignore it, he
would  at  least look at  the  incoming  the Zeroes, so  that he could  stop
pretending to ignore them when it got too  dangerous. But he doesn't even do
so much as look. Shaftoe forces himself not to look either. The General asks
him a big long question in Spanish. He has a beautiful voice. He sounds like
he is  standing in an  anechoic  sound booth in New  York City or Hollywood,
narrating a newsreel about how great he is.
     "If you're trying to find out if I hablo Español, the answer is,
un poquito," Shaftoe says.
     The General cups  a hand to his ear  irritably. He can't hear  anything
except for the pair of Zeroes converging on him and Shaftoe at three hundred
odd  miles per hour, liquefying tons of  biomass with dense streams of  12.7
millimeter  slugs.  He keeps a sharp eye on  Shaftoe as a  trail of  bullets
thuds across the parking lot, spraying  Shaftoe's trouser legs with mud. The
same line of bullets makes a sudden upwards right angle turn when it reaches
the  wall  of the General's house,  climbs straight up the wall, tears out a
chunk  of the balcony's railing  about a foot away from where the  General's
hand is  resting,  beats up a  bunch of furniture back inside the house, and
then clears the roof of the house and vanishes.
     Now that the  planes  have  passed  overhead, Shaftoe can look at  them
without having  to worry that he is giving The General the  idea that  he is
some kind  of lily livered pansy.  The meatballs on their wings  broaden and
glower as they bank sharply, sharper than any American plane, and come round
for a second try.
     "I said " The General  begins.  But then the  atmosphere's  riven by  a
series of bizarre whizzing noises. One of the  house's  windows  is suddenly
punched out of its frame. Shaftoe hears a thud from inside and some crockery
breaking.  For  the  first  time, The  General  shows some  awareness that a
military  action is taking place.  "Warm up  my jeep, Shaftoe," he says,  "I
have a bone to pick with my triple A boys." Then he turns around and Shaftoe
gets a look at  the back of  his pink silk dressing gown. It is embroidered,
in black thread, with a giant lizard, rampant.
     The General  suddenly turns around. "Is  that you screaming down there,
Shaftoe?"
     "Sir, no sir!"
     "I  distinctly  heard you scream."  MacArthur turns his back on Shaftoe
again, giving him another look at the lizard (which  on second thought might
be some sort of Chinese  dragon design) and goes  inside the house, mumbling
irritably to himself.
     Shaftoe gets into the vehicle indicated and starts the engine.
     The General  emerges  from  the house and begins to plod across the lot
cradling an  unexploded antiaircraft shell in  his arms. The wind  makes his
pink silk dressing gown billow all around him.
     The Zeroes come back and  strafe the parking lot again, cutting a truck
nearly in half. Shaftoe feels  as if his intestines  have dissolved  and are
about to  spurt  from  his  body. He  closes  his  eyes,  puckers  his  anal
sphincter,  and clenches his teeth. The  General takes  a  seat next to him.
"Down the hill," he orders. "Drive towards the sound of the guns."
     They have barely gotten onto the road when their progress is blocked by
the two  jeeps that  had  been carrying all the brass up  from the airfield.
They  now sit  empty  on  the road, their doors hanging  open, engines still
running. The General reaches across in front of Shaftoe and honks the horn.
     Colonels and brigadier generals begin to emerge from the shadows of the
jungle,  like some especially bizarre native tribe, clutching their  attache
cases talismanically. They  salute The General,  who  ignores  them testily.
"Move my vehicles!" he  intones, jabbing at them with the stem of  his pipe.
"This is the road. The parking lot is that way."
     The Zeroes come back for a third pass. Shaftoe now realizes (as perhaps
The General has) that  these pilots are not the best; it is late  in the war
and  all  the  good  pilots  are  dead. Consequently they do  not line their
trajectories up properly with the road; the  strafing trails cut  across  it
diagonally. Still, a bullet  bores  through  the engine block of one  of the
jeeps. Hot oil and steam spray out of it.
     "Come  on,  push  it  out  of  the  way!"  The  General  says.  Shaftoe
instinctively begins to  climb out of  the jeep,  but The  General yanks him
back with a word: "Shaftoe! I need you to drive this vehicle."
     Wielding his pipestem  like a  conductor's baton, The General gets  his
staff back  out on the road and they begin shoving the  ruined jeep into the
jungle. Shaftoe makes the  mistake of  inhaling through his  nose and gets a
strong diarrheal  whiff at  least one of these  officers has shit his pants.
Shaftoe's still trying hard not to do  the same, and  probably would have if
he'd pushed the jeep. The Zeroes are trying to line up for  another strafing
run, but a few American fighter planes have now appeared on the scene, which
complicates matters.
     Shaftoe maneuvers them through a gap between the remaining jeep  and  a
huge tree,  then guns  it down the road.  The General hums to  himself for a
while, then says, "What's your wife's name?"
     "Gory."
     "I mean, Glory."
     "Ah.  Good. Good Filipina name. Filipinas  are the most beautiful women
in the world, don't you think?"
     Experienced world traveler Bobby Shaftoe screws up his  face and begins
to  review his experiences in  a systematic way. Then he  realizes  that The
General probably does not actually want his considered opinion.
     Of course, The General's wife  is American, so this could be tricky. "I
guess  the  woman  you love is  always the most beautiful," Shaftoe  finally
says.
     The General looks mildly pissed off. "Of course, but..."
     "But if you don't really give a  shit about them, the Filipinas are the
most beautiful, sir!" Shaftoe says.
     The General nods. "Now, your boy. What's his name, then?"
     Shaftoe swallows hard and thinks fast. He doesn't even know if he has a
kid he fabricated  that to make his line  sound better and even if he  does,
the chances are only fifty fifty that it's a boy. But if he does have a boy,
he knows already what the name will be. "His name well, sir,  his name and I
hope  you don't mind  this  but  his  name  is  Douglas." The General  grins
delightedly  and cackles, slapping the  antiaircraft shell  in  his lap  for
emphasis. Shaftoe flinches.
     When they  arrive  at  the  airfield,  a  full  fledged dogfight  is in
progress  overhead. The  place is  deserted because everyone except  them is
hiding behind sandbags. The General has Shaftoe drive up and down the length
of the field, stopping at each gun emplacement so that  he can peer over the
barrier.
     "There's the fellow!" The General  finally  says, pointing  his swagger
stick  at a gun on the opposite side of the  runway. "I  just saw him poking
his head out, yammering on the telephone."
     Shaftoe guns it  across the  runway. A flaming Zero, traveling at about
half  the speed of  sound,  impacts  the runway  a few hundred feet away and
disintegrates  into  a  howling  cloud of  burning  spare parts  that  comes
skittering and  rolling and  bounding  across  the  runway  in their general
direction.  Shaftoe  falters. The General yells  at him.  Reckoning that  he
can't avoid  what he  can't see, Shaftoe turns  into the storm.  Having seen
this  kind of  thing happen before, he  knows  that the  first thing to come
their  way will be the engine  block, a red hot tombstone of fine Mitsubishi
iron. And indeed there it  is,  one of its exhaust  manifolds still dangling
from it like  a  broken wing,  spinning end over end and spading huge divots
out of the  runway with  each  bounce.  Shaftoe swings  wide around  it.  He
identifies the fuselage  and sees that  it has plowed to a  stop already. He
looks for the wings; they broke up into  a few large pieces that are slowing
down rapidly,  but the tires  broke  loose from  the  landing  gear  and are
bounding along towards them, burning wheels  of  red fire. Shaftoe maneuvers
the  jeep  between them, guns it  across a small patch of flaming  oil, then
makes another hard turn and continues towards their objective.
     The  explosion  of  the  Zero  sent  everyone  back down  behind  their
sandbags. The General has to climb out of the jeep and peer over the top  of
the  barrier.  He holds the  antiaircraft  shell  up  above his head.  "Say,
Captain," he says in his  perfect radio announcer voice, "this arrived on my
end table with no return address, but I believe it came from your unit." The
captain's  helmeted head pops  into view over the top of the sandbags as  he
jumps to attention. He is gaping at the shell. "Would you please look  after
it, and make sure that it has been properly defused?" The General tosses the
shell  at  him  sideways, like  a watermelon, and the captain barely has the
presence of mind to catch it. "Carry on," The General says, "let's see if we
can actually shoot down some Nips next time." He waves disparagingly at  the
burning wreckage of the Zero and climbs into  the  jeep with  Shaftoe.  "All
right, back up the hill, Shaftoe!"
     "Yes, sir!"
     "Now, I know that you hate me because you are a Marine."
     Officers like it  when you pretend to be straight with them. "Yes, sir,
I do hate you, sir, but I do not feel that this need be an impediment to our
killing some Nips together, sir!"
     "We agree. But in the mission  I have in mind for you, Shaftoe, killing
Nips will not be the primary objective."
     Shaftoe's a bit off balance now. "Sir, with  all due respect, I believe
that killing Nips is my strong point."
     "I  don't doubt it.  And  that is a fine skill for a Marine. Because in
this  war,  a  Marine  is  a first  rate fighting  man  under the command of
admirals who don't know the first thing about ground  warfare, and who think
that the way to  win an  island is to hurl their men directly into the teeth
of the Nips' prepared defenses."
     The  General  pauses  here,  as  if  giving  Shaftoe  an opportunity to
respond.  But Shaftoe says nothing. He  is  remembering the stories that his
brothers told  him on  Kwajalein, about  all the battles  they had fought on
small Pacific islands, precisely as The General describes.
     "Consequently, a Marine must be very good at killing Nips, as I have no
doubt  you  are.  But now, Shaftoe, you are in  the Army, and in the Army we
actually have certain wonderful innovations, such as  strategy  and tactics,
which certain  admirals  would be well advised to acquaint  themselves with.
And so  your new  job, Shaftoe,  is not simply to kill Nips, but to use your
head."
     "Well, I know  that you probably  think I am a stupid jarhead, General,
but I do think that I have a good head on my shoulders."
     "And on  your shoulders is exactly where I would like it  to stay!" The
General says, slapping him  heartily on the back. "What  we are trying to do
now is to create a tactical situation that is favorable to us. Once  that is
accomplished, the actual  killing of Nips can be  handled by more  efficient
means such as aerial bombardment, mass starvation, and the like. It will not
be necessary for you to personally cut the throat of every Nip you run into,
as eminently qualified as you might be for such an operation."
     "Thank you, General, sir."
     "We  have millions of Filipino guerillas, and hundreds of thousands  of
troops, to handle the  essentially quotidian  business of turning live  Nips
into dead,  or  at  least captive,  Nips. But in order  to coordinate  their
activities, I need intelligence. That will be one of your  missions. But the
country  is  already crawling with my spies, and so  it will be a  secondary
mission.
     "And the primary mission, sir?"
     "Those Filipinos need leadership.  They need coordination.  And perhaps
most of all, they need fighting spirit."
     "Fighting spirit, sir?"
     "There are many reasons for the Filipinos to  be down in the dumps. The
Nips have not been kind to them. And although I have been very busy, here in
New Guinea,  preparing  the springboard for my return,  the  Filipinos don't
know about  any of this, and  many  of them probably  think I have forgotten
about  them entirely. Now it  is time  to  let them know  I'm coming. That I
shall return but soon!"
     Shaftoe snickers,  thinking that The General  is engaging in some  self
mocking humor  here yes, a  bit of irony but then he notes  that The General
does not seem especially amused. "Stop the vehicle!" he shouts.
     Shaftoe parks the jeep at the apex of a switchback, where they can look
northwest across the  outermost reaches  of the  Philippine Sea. The General
extends  one  arm  toward Manila, hand slightly cupped, palm  canted upward,
gesturing like  a  Shakespearean  actor in a posed photo  graph. "Go  there,
Bobby Shaftoe!" says The General. "Go there and tell them that I am coming."
     Shaftoe knows his cue, and he knows his line. "Sir, yes sir!"


     Chapter 70 ORIGIN


     From the point of view of admittedly privileged  white male technocrats
such as  Randy Waterhouse and  his ancestors, the Palouse was like  one  big
live in laboratory for nonlinear aerodynamics and chaos theory. Not much was
alive  there,  and  so one's observations were not forever  being clouded by
trees, flowers,  fauna, and the ploddingly linear and  rational endeavors of
humans. The Cascades blocked any of those  warm, moist,  refreshing  Pacific
breezes, harvesting  their moisture to carpet ski  areas  for  dewy  skinned
Seattleites, and  diverting  what remained north  to  Vancouver or  south to
Portland. Consequently the  Palouse had to get its air shipped down  in bulk
from the Yukon and British Columbia. It flowed across  the  blasted volcanic
scab  land  of  central  Washington  in (Randy  supposed)  a  more  or  less
continuous  laminar sheet that,  when it hit  the  rolling  Palouse country,
ramified into a vast system of floods,  rivers and rivulets diverging around
the bald  swelling  hills  and recombining in  the  sere declivities. But it
never recombined exactly the way it was before. The hills had thrown entropy
into the system. Like  a handful  of nickels  in a batch of bread dough this
could be  kneaded  from  place  to  place  but  never removed.  The  entropy
manifested itself as swirls and violent gusts and ephemeral vortices. All of
these things were clearly  visible, because  all summer  the air was full of
dust or smoke, and all winter it was full of windblown snow.
     Whitman had  dust devils (snow devils in  the winter)  in  the way that
medieval Guangzhou presumably had rats. Randy followed dust devils to school
when he  was a kid. Some were small enough that you could almost cup them in
your hand, and some were like small tornadoes, fifty or a hundred feet high,
that  would  appear  on  hilltops  or  atop  shopping  malls  like  biblical
prophecies as filtered  through the low budget SFX  technology and painfully
literal minded eye of a fifties epic film director. They at least scared the
bejesus out of newcomers. When Randy got bored in  school, he would look  at
the  window  and  watch  these  things  chase each  other  around  the empty
playground. Sometimes  a roughly car sized dust devil would glide across the
four square courts and between  the swingsets and score a direct hit on  the
jungle  gym,  which was  an old fashioned, unpadded, child  paralyzing  unit
hammered together by some kind of Dark Ages ironmonger and planted in  solid
concrete, a real  school of hard  knocks, survival  of  the fittest one. The
dust  devil  would seem to  pause as it enveloped  the  jungle gym. It would
completely lose  its form and  become  a puff of  dust  that  would begin to
settle back  down to the ground as all heavier than air  things really ought
to. But then suddenly the dust devil would reappear on the other side of the
jungle gym  and  keep going.  Or perhaps two dust devils  would spin off  in
opposite directions.
     Randy  spent  plenty   of  time  chasing  and  carrying  out  impromptu
experiments on dust devils while walking to and from school, to the point of
getting bounced off  the grille  of a  shrieking Buick once when he chased a
roughly shopping cart sized one  into the street in an attempt to climb into
the center  of it. He knew that  they were both fragile  and tenacious.  You
could stomp down on one of them and sometimes it would just dodge your foot,
or swirl around it, and  keep going. Other times, like if you tried to catch
one in your hands, it would vanish  but then you'd  look  up and see another
one just  like it twenty feet away, running away from you. The whole concept
of matter spontaneously  organizing itself into  grotesquely  improbable and
yet indisputably  self perpetuating and fairly  robust systems sort  of gave
Randy the willies later on, when he began to learn about physics.
     There was no room for  dust devils in the laws  of physics, as least in
the rigid form  in  which they were  usually  taught.  There  is  a  kind of
unspoken collusion going on  in mainstream science  education: you  get your
competent  but  bored,  insecure  and  hence  stodgy teacher talking  to  an
audience  divided  between  engineering  students,  who   are  going  to  be
responsible for making bridges that  won't fall down or airplanes that won't
suddenly plunge vertically into the ground at six hundred miles an hour, and
who by  definition  get  sweaty  palms and vindictive  attitudes when  their
teacher suddenly veers off track and begins raving about wild and completely
nonintuitive phenomena; and physics students, who derive much of their  self
esteem from  knowing  that  they  are  smarter  and morally  purer than  the
engineering  students,  and  who  by definition  don't want  to  hear  about
anything  that  makes  no  fucking  sense.  This  collusion  results in  the
professor saying: (something along the lines of) dust  is heavier than  air,
therefore  it  falls until it  hits  the ground. That's all there is to know
about  dust. The  engineers love it because they  like their issues dead and
crucified like butterflies  under glass. The physicists love it because they
want  to think they understand everything. No one asks difficult  questions.
And  outside  the  windows, the  dust devils continue to  gambol  across the
campus.
     Now that Randy's  back in Whitman for  the first time in several years,
watching  (because it's winter) ice devils  zigzagging across the  Christmas
empty streets,  he  is  inclined  to take a longer view of the matter, which
goes  a little something like this:  these devils,  these  vortices,  are  a
consequence of  hills and valleys  that are probably miles and miles upwind.
Basically, Randy, who has blown in from out of town, is in a mobile frame of
mind, and  is  seeing  things  from the wind's  frame  of reference not  the
stationary  frame of reference of the  little boy who rarely left town. From
the wind's frame of reference, it (the wind) is stationary and the hills and
valleys are moving things that crumple the horizon and then rush  towards it
and  then  interfere  with it and  go  away,  leaving the  wind to  sort out
consequences later on down the  line. And some of  the consequences are dust
or ice  devils. If there  was  more stuff in the way,  like expansive cities
filled with buildings, or forests filled with leaves and branches, then that
would be the end of the story; the wind would become completely deranged and
cease to exist as a unitary thing,  and all of the aerodynamic action  would
be  at the incomprehensible scale of micro  vortices around pine needles and
car antennas.
     A case in point would be the parking lot of Waterhouse House,  which is
normally  filled with cars and therefore a complete wind killer.  You aren't
going to see  dust devils at the downwind edge of a full parking lot, just a
generalized seepage of dead and decayed wind. But it  is Christmas break and
there are all of three cars parked in this space,  which doubles as football
overflow and  hence is  about the size of an artillery  practice range.  The
asphalt is dead monitor screen grey. A volatile gas of ice swirls  across it
as freely as a sheen of fuel on warm water, except  where it strikes the icy
sarcophagi  of  these three abandoned vehicles,  which  have evidently  been
sitting in this otherwise empty lot for a couple of weeks now, since all  of
the other cars went  away on Christmas break. Each car has become the  first
cause of a system of wakes and standing vortices that extends downstream for
hundreds of yards.  The wind here is a glinting abrasive thing, a perpetual,
face  shredding,  eyeball  poking  tendency  in  the  fabric  of  spacetime,
inhabited  by vast platinum blond arcs of fire that are centered on  the low
winter  sun.  Crystalline water is  suspended  in  it all the time, is  why:
shards of ice that are smaller than snowflakes probably just individual legs
of snowflakes that  have been sheared off and borne into the air as the wind
snapped  and  rattled over the crests of Canadian snow dunes. Once airborne,
they  stay airborne  unless they find themselves ducted into some pocket  of
dead air: the eye of a  vortex or the still boundary layer  of a  dead car's
parking lot wake. And so over the weeks the vortices and standing waves have
become  visible,  like  three  dimensional  virtual  reality  renderings  of
themselves.
     Waterhouse House  rises  above  this tableau, a high  rise dorm that no
person prominent enough to  have a  dorm named after him would want to  have
named after him. Out  of its climatically  inappropriate acreage of  picture
window shines  the same  embarrassing,  greenish  light  radiated  by  algae
scummed domestic aquaria. Janitors are going  through it with  machines  the
size of hot dog carts, wrangling these mile long coils of thumb thick orange
power cable, steaming beer vomit and artificial popcorn butter lipids up out
of  the thin grey mats that, when Randy  was there,  seemed not so much like
carpet as references to carpeting or carpet signifiers. When Randy now pulls
into the main vehicle  entrance, past the big tombstone that says WATERHOUSE
HOUSE, he cannot but look straight out the windshield and through the dorm's
front windows and straight at a  large portrait of his grandfather, Lawrence
Pritchard Waterhouse one of a dozen or so  figures, mostly departed now, who
compete  for  the  essentially  bogus  title  of  "inventor  of  the digital
computer." The portrait  is  securely  bolted to the cinderblock wall of the
lobby and imprisoned  under a half inch thick slab of Plexiglas that must be
replaced  every couple  of years,  as  it fogs from  repeated scrubbings and
petty  vandalizations. Seen through this milky cataract,  Lawrence Pritchard
Waterhouse is grimly resplendent  in full doctoral robes. He has one foot up
on something,  his elbow planted on the elevated knee,  and  has  tucked his
robes back behind the other arm and planted his fist on his hip. It is meant
to be a sort of dynamic  posture, but to Randy, who at  the age of  five was
present for  its  unveiling, it has a kind of  incredulous what the hell are
those little people doing down there vibe about it.
     Other than  the  three  dead cars in  their  shells  of  hardened, dust
infused ice, there is  nothing in the parking lot save about two dozen items
of  antique  furniture and a few other treasures such as a complete sterling
silver  tea service  and a dark, time  wracked trunk. As Randy pulls in with
his  Uncle Red  and  his  Aunt  Nina,  he notes that the  Shaftoe  boys have
discharged the responsibilities for  which they will be drawing minimum wage
plus twenty five percent  all day  long: namely they have moved all of these
items from where Uncle Geoff and Auntie Anne placed them back to the Origin.
     In a gesture of companionship and/or uncle  esque bonhomie,  Uncle Red,
much  to  the  evident  resentment  of  Aunt Nina, has  claimed the  Acura's
passenger seat, leaving Aunt Nina marooned in the  back where  she evidently
feels  much more  psychically isolated  than  the  situation would  seem  to
warrant.  She makes  lateral sliding motions trying  to  center  the eyes of
first  Randy,  then  Uncle Red, in  the  rearview  minor. Randy has taken to
relying solely on the outside rearview  mirrors during the ten  minute drive
over  from the hotel, because when he glances at  the  inside  one  he keeps
seeing Aunt Nina's dilated pupils aimed down  his  throat  like twin shotgun
barrels. The  blast  of  the  heater/defroster forms  a  pocket  of auditory
isolation back there which  on top of her already prominent feelings of near
animal rage and stress have left her volatile and obviously dangerous.
     Randy heads straight for the  Origin, as in the intersection  of the  X
and Y axes, which  is  marked by  a  light pole  with its very  own multiton
system of wind deposited wakes and vortices.
     "Look," says Uncle Red, "all we want to accomplish here is to make sure
that your mother's legacy,  if that is the correct  term for the possessions
of one who is  not  actually dead  but merely moved into  a  long term  care
facility, is equally divided among her five offspring. Am I right?"
     This  is not  addressed to Randy, but  he nods anyway, trying to show a
united front. He has  been  grinding his  teeth for  two days  straight; the
places  where his jaw  muscles anchor to his skull  have become the foci  of
tremendous radiating systems of surging and pulsing pain.
     "I think you'd agree that an equal division is all we  want," Uncle Red
continues. "Correct?"
     After  a  worrisomely long pause,  Aunt  Nina  nods. Randy  manages  to
glimpse her face in the rearview as she makes another dramatic lateral move,
and  sees there a  look  of  almost nauseous  trepidation, as if this  equal
division concept might be some Jesuitical snare.
     "Now, here's the interesting part," says Uncle Red, who is the chairman
of the mathematics department at Okaley College in Macomb, Illinois. "How do
we define  'equal'? This is what your  brothers,  and  brothers in law,  and
Randy  and  I were debating  so late into the  night last night. If we  were
dividing up a stack of  currency, it  would be easy,  because currency has a
monetary  value  that  is printed right  on  its  face,  and the  bills  are
interchangeable no one  gets  emotionally  attached to  a  particular dollar
bill."
     "This is why we should have an objective appraiser "
     "But everyone's going to disagree  with what the appraiser  says, Nina,
love," says Uncle Red. "Furthermore, the appraiser will  totally miss out on
the emotional  dimension, which evidently looms  very large here, or  so  it
would seem, based  on the, uh, let's say melodramatic character of the,  uh,
discussion,  if  discussion isn't too dignified  a term  for what some might
perceive  as more  of a, well,  catfight, that  you  and  your sisters  were
conducting all day yesterday."
     Randy nods  almost imperceptibly. He  pulls  up and parks next  to  the
furniture  that is again clustered around  the Origin.  At the  edge  of the
parking lot, near where the Y axis (here denoting perceived emotional value)
meets  a retaining wall, the Shaftoes' hot rod sits, all  steamed up on  the
inside.
     "The question reduces," Uncle Red says,  "to a mathematical one: how do
you divide up an inhomogeneous  set  of n objects among m people (or couples
actually);  i.e., how do you partition the set into m  subsets (S [sub  1],S
[sub 2], ... ,S [sub m]) such that the  value of each subset is as  close as
possible to being equal?"
     "It doesn't  seem that  hard,"  Aunt  Nina  begins  weakly.  She  is  a
professor of Qwghlmian linguistics.
     "It  is actually shockingly difficult," Randy says. "It is closely akin
to  the Knapsack Problem,  which  is so difficult to solve that it has  been
used as the basis for cryptographic systems."
     "And that's not even taking into account that each of the couples would
appraise the value of each of the n objects differently!"  Uncle Red shouts.
By this  point,  Randy has shut off  the car, and the  windows have begun to
steam up. Uncle Red pulls off a mitten and begins to draw figures in the fog
on the windshield, using it like a blackboard. "For each of the m people (or
couples) there exists an n element value vector, V, where  V [sub  1] is the
value that that particular couple would place on item number 1 (according to
some  arbitrary  numeration system) and V  [sub 2] is  the value  they would
place on  item number 2 and  so  on all the way up to item number n. These m
vectors,  taken  together, form  a value  matrix. Now,  we  can  impose  the
condition  that each vector  must  total up to the same amount; i.e., we can
just  arbitrarily specify some  notional value for  the entire collection of
furniture and other goods and impose the condition that
     [img file for page 625 is not found (source)]
     where [tau] is a constant."
     "But we  might all have  different opinions as to what the total  value
is, as well!" says Aunt Nina, gamely.
     "That has no impact mathematically," Randy whispers.
     "It  is just an arbitrary scaling factor!" Uncle  Red says witheringly.
"This  is why I ended up agreeing with your brother  Tom, though I didn't at
first,  that we should take a cue from the way he and the other relativistic
physicists  do it,  and  just arbitrarily set [tau] = 1. Which  forces us to
deal  with  fractional values,  which I thought  some of the ladies, present
company excluded of course, might find confusing, but at least it emphasizes
the arbitrary nature  of  the  scaling  factor and helps  to eliminate  that
source  of confusion." Uncle Tom tracks  asteroids  in Pasadena  for the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory.
     "There's the Gomer Bolstrood console,"  Aunt  Nina exclaims, rubbing  a
hole in the  fog  on her window, and  then continuing  to orbitally rub away
with  the sleeve of her coat as  if  she is going to abrade an  escape route
through the safety glass. "Just sitting out in the snow!"
     "It's not actually  precipitating,"  Uncle  Red  says,  "this  is  just
blowing snow. It is  absolutely bone dry, and if you go out  and look at the
console or whatever you call it, you will find that the  snow is not melting
on it at all,  because it has been sitting out in  the U  Stor It ever since
your  mother moved to the managed care  facility  and it has equilibrated to
the ambient temperature which I think we can all testify is  well below zero
Celsius."
     Randy crosses  his arms  over  his abdomen,  leans  his head  back, and
closes his eyes. The tendons in his neck are as stiff as subzero Silly Putty
and resist painfully.
     "That  console was in  my bedroom from the time I was born until I left
for  college," Aunt  Nina says.  "By  any decent  standard of  justice, that
console is mine.
     "Well, that brings me  to the breakthrough that Randy and Tom and Geoff
and I finally came up with  at about two  A.M.,  namely  that  the perceived
economic value of each item, as complicated as that is in and of itself, viz
the Knapsack Problem, is only  one dimension of the  issues that have got us
all on such a jagged emotional edge.  The other  dimension and here I really
do mean dimension in a  Euclidean geometry  sense is the  emotional value of
each item. That is, in theory we could come up with a division of the set of
all pieces of furniture that would give you, Nina, an equal share. But  such
a division might leave  you, love, just deeply, deeply  unsatisfied  because
you didn't get that console, which, though it's obviously not as valuable as
say the grand piano, has much greater emotional value to you.
     "I don't  think it's  out of the question that  I would commit physical
violence  in  order to defend my  rightful ownership of that console,"  Aunt
Nina says, suddenly reverting to a kind of dead voiced frigid calm.
     "But that's  not necessary,  Nina,  because we  have created this whole
setup here just so  that you can give your feelings the full expression they
deserve!"
     "Okay.  What do I do?" Aunt Nina says, bolting  from the car. Randy and
Uncle Red hastily gather up their gloves and mittens and hats and follow her
out. She is now hovering over the  console, watching the  dust  of ice swirl
across the dark but limpid, virtually glowing  surface of the console in the
turbulent  wake  of  her  body, forming  little  Mandelbrotian  epi epi  epi
vortices.
     "As Geoff and Anne did before us, and the others will do afterwards, we
are going to move each of these items  to a  specific position, as in (x, y)
coordinates, in the parking lots. The x axis runs this way," Uncle Red says,
facing  the  Waterhouse  House  and  holding  his arms out  in  a  cruciform
attitude,  "and the  y axis this way."  He  toddles around ninety degrees so
that one of  his hands is now pointing at  the  Shaftoes' Impala. "Perceived
financial value is measured by x. The farther in that direction  it is,  the
more valuable  you think it is. You might even assign something a negative x
value if you think it has negative value e.g., that over stuffed  chair over
there which  might cost  more to re upholster  than it  is  actually  worth.
Likewise,  the  y  axis measures  perceived  emotional  value. Now, we  have
established that  the console has extreme  emotional value to  you  and so I
think  that  we can just go right  ahead and move it down  the line  over to
where the Impala is located."
     "Can something have  negative emotional value?" Aunt Nina says,  sourly
and probably rhetorically.
     "If  you hate it so  much that  just  owning  it would  cancel  out the
emotional benefits of having something like the console, then yes, Uncle Red
says.
     Randy hoists the console onto  his  shoulder  and  begins  to walk in a
positive y direction. The Shaftoe boys  are available to hump furniture at a
moment's  notice, but  Randy  needs to mark a bit of territory here, just to
indicate that he is not without some masculine attributes himself  and so he
ends up  carrying  more  furniture than he  probably  needs to.  Back at the
Origin,  he can hear Red and Nina going at it. "I have a problem with this,"
Nina says. "What's to prevent her from just putting every  thing down at the
extreme y axis claiming that everything is terribly emotionally important to
her?" Her in this case can only mean Aunt Rachel, the wife of Tom. Rachel is
a multiethnic East Coast urbanite  who is not blessed or afflicted with  the
obligatory Waterhousian diffidence and so has always been regarded as a sort
of living incarnation of  rapacity, a sucking maw of need.  The  worst  case
scenario  here  is  that Rachel  somehow goes home with everything the grand
piano, the silver, the china, the Gomer Bolstrood dining room set. Hence the
need  for elaborate rules and rituals, and a booty division  system that  is
mathematically provable as fair.
     "That's  where  [tau sub e]  and [tau sub $] enter into  it," Uncle Red
says soothingly.
     [img file for page 628 is not found (source)]
     "All of our choices  will be mathematically  scaled so that they add up
to  the same total values on both the  emotional and financial scales. So if
someone  clumped  everything  together  in the extreme  corner,  then, after
scaling, it'd be as if they never expressed any preferences at all."
     Randy nears  the steamed up  Impala. One of the doors makes a crackling
noise as superannuated weatherstripping peels away from steel. Robin Shaftoe
emerges, breathes into his  cupped hands, and takes a  parade rest position,
signifying that he is  available to discharge  any responsibilities out here
on  the Cartesian coordinate  plane. Randy looks up over the Impala and  the
retaining wall and the ice clogged xeriscape  above that and into  the lobby
of Waterhouse House, where Amy Shaftoe has her feet up on a coffee table and
is looking through some of the extremely sad Cayuse  related literature that
Randy bought  for Avi. She looks down and smiles at him  and just barely, he
thinks, restrains  the  impulse to reach up and twirl one finger around  her
ear.
     "That's good, Randy!" shouts Uncle Red from the Origin, "now we need to
give it some x!" Meaning that the console is  not  devoid of  economic value
either. Randy  does a right  face  and begins  to  walk  into  the  (+x, +y)
quadrant, counting  the  yellow lines.  "Give it about four  parking spaces!
That's good!" Randy plonks the console down, then pulls a pad of graph paper
out of  his  coat,  whips back  the  first  sheet, which contains the  (x,y)
scatterplot  of Uncle Geoff  and Auntie Anne, and notes down the coordinates
of the console.  Sound carries in the  Palouse,  and  from the Origin he can
hear Aunt Nina saying  to Uncle Red, "How  much of our [tau  sub e] have  we
just spent on that console?"
     "If  we leave everything else down here at y  equals  zero,  a  hundred
percent after  scaling," Uncle  Red says. "Otherwise  it depends  on  how we
distribute  these things in the y dimension." Which is of course the correct
answer, albeit totally useless.
     If these days in  Whitman  don't  make Amy  flee from  Randy in terror,
nothing  will, and so he's glad  in a sick way that she  is seeing this. The
subject of his family has not really  come up until  now. Randy is not given
to talking  about his family because he  feels  there  is nothing to report:
small town, good education, shame and self esteem doled out in roughly equal
quantities and usually where warranted. Nothing spectacular along  the lines
of grotesque psychopathologies, sexual abuse, massive,  shocking trauma,  or
Satanic rallies in the backyard. So  normally when  people are talking about
their families, Randy just shuts up and listens, feeling that he has nothing
to say. His familial anecdotes  are so tame, so pedestrian, that it would be
presumptuous  even to relate them, especially  after someone else  has  just
divulged something really shocking or horrific.
     But standing there and looking at  these vortices he starts  to wonder.
Some people's insistence  that "Today I:  smoke/am overweight/have a  shitty
attitude/am depressed because: my mom died of cancer/my uncle put  his thumb
up  my  butt/my  dad  hit  me  with  a razor  strop"  seems  kind of  overly
deterministic  to Randy; it seems to reflect a  kind of  lazy or half witted
surrender to bald teleology. Basically, if everyone has a vested interest in
believing that they  understand everything, or even that people  are capable
in  principle of understanding it (either  because  believing  this  dampens
their insecurities about the  unpredictable world, or  makes them feel  more
intelligent  than  others, or  both) then you have an  environment in  which
dopey, reductionist, simple minded, pat, glib  thinking can circulate,  like
wheelbarrows filled with inflated currency in the marketplaces of Jakarta.
     But things  like  the  ability  of some  student's dead  car  to  spawn
repeating patterns of thimble sized vortices a hundred yards  downwind would
seem to argue in favor of a more cautious  view of the world, an openness to
the full  and true weirdness of the  Universe, an  admission of our  limited
human faculties. And if you've gotten to this point, then you can argue that
growing up in a family  devoid of gigantic and  obvious primal psychological
forces, and  living  a  life touched  by  many  subtle  and  even  forgotten
influences rather than one or two biggies (e.g., active participation in the
Church  of  Satan) can lead,  far  downwind,  to  consequences that are  not
entirely devoid of interest. Randy hopes, but very much doubts, that America
Shaftoe, sitting  up there in  the algae colored  light  reading  about  the
inadvertent extermination of the Cayuse, sees it this way.
     Randy rejoins his aunt at the  Origin. Uncle Red has been explaining to
her, somewhat  condescendingly, that they must pay careful attention  to the
distribution of items on the  economic scale,  and for  his  troubles he has
been sent  on  a long, lonely  walk down  the +x axis carrying  the complete
silver tea service. "Why couldn't we just have stayed inside and worked this
all out on paper?" Aunt Nina asks.
     "It  was felt that  there was  value in  physically moving  this  stuff
around,  giving people a direct physical analog of the value assertions that
they  were making," Randy says. "Also  that  it would be useful  to appraise
this stuff literally in the cold light  of day." As opposed to ten or twelve
emotionally fraught people clambering around a packed to the ceiling  U Stor
It locker with flashlights, sniping at each other from behind the armoires.
     "Once we've all made our choices, then what? You sit down and figure it
out on a spreadsheet, or something?"
     "It  is  much  too computationally intensive  to  be  solved that  way.
Probably a genetic  algorithm  is  called  for  certainly  there won't  be a
mathematically exact  solution. My  father  knows a researcher in Geneva who
has done work on  problems isomorphic to this one, and sent him  e mail last
night. With any luck we  will be able to ftp  some suitable software and get
it running on the Tera."
     "The Terror?"
     "Tera. As in Teraflops."
     "That does me no good at all. When you say 'as  in' you are supposed to
give me something more familiar to relate it to."
     "It is one of  the ten fastest computers on the planet. Do you see that
red brick building  just to the right of the end of the y axis," Randy says,
pointing down the hill, "Just behind the new gym?"
     "The one with all the antennas?"
     "Yes.  The  Tera  machine  is  in there. It was made  by a  company  in
Seattle."
     "It must have been very expensive."
     "My dad talked them out of it."
     "Yes!"  says  Uncle  Red  cheerfully,  returning  from   high  x  value
territory. "The man is a legendary donation raiser."
     "He must have a persuasive side to him that I have  not been perceptive
enough  to  notice  yet," Aunt Nina says,  wandering curiously towards  some
large cardboard boxes.
     "No," Randy says, "it's more like  he just goes  in and flops around on
the conference table until they become so embarrassed for his sake that they
agree to sign the check."
     "You've seen him do this?" Aunt Nina says skeptically, sizing up a  box
labeled CONSTITUENTS OF UPSTAIRS LINEN CLOSET.
     "Heard about it. High tech is a small town," Randy says.
     "He's  been able to make great capital of his father's work," Uncle Red
says.  "'If  my  father  had patented even  one of  his computer inventions,
Palouse College would be bigger than Harvard,' and so on."
     Aunt Nina has got the box open now. It is almost completely filled by a
single Qwghlmian blanket,  in a  dark greyish brown  on  dark  brownish grey
plaid.  The  blanket  in  question  is  about  an  inch  thick, and,  during
wintertime family reunions, was infamous as a booby prize of sorts among the
Waterhouse grandchildren. The  smell of mothballs, mildew, and heavily oiled
wool  causes Aunt Nina's nose to wrinkle, as it did Aunt Annie's before her.
Randy remembers bedding down beneath this  blanket once at the age  of about
nine,  and  waking   up  at  two  in  the  morning  with  bronchial  spasms,
hyperthermia,  and vague memories of  a  nightmare about being buried alive.
Aunt Nina slams the box flaps shut, turns around, and looks in the direction
of the Impala. Robin Shaftoe  is already running towards them. Being not bad
at math himself, he  was  quick to pick up  on this whole concept, and knows
from experience that the blanket box will have to be trundled deep  out into
( x, y) territory.
     "I  guess  I'm   just  worried,"  Aunt  Nina  says,  "about  having  my
preferences mediated by this  supercomputer.  I have  tried to make it clear
what I want. But will the computer understand  that?" She has paused  by the
CERAMICS box in a way that is tantalizing  Randy, who  badly wants to have a
look inside, but doesn't want to arouse suspicions. He's the referee  and is
sworn to objectivity. "Forget the china," she says, "too old ladyish."
     Uncle Red wanders over  and disappears  behind one of  the  dead  cars,
presumably  to take a leak.  Aunt Nina says, "How about you,  Randy?  As the
eldest son of the eldest son, you must have some feelings about this."
     "No  doubt  when  my parents' time  comes, they  will  pass  on some of
Grandma and Grandpa's legacy to me," Randy says.
     "Oh, very  circumspect.  Well  done," Aunt Nina says. "But  as the only
grandchild who  has  any memories of your grandfather at all, there must  be
something here that you might like to have."
     "There'll  probably  be some  odds and ends  that nobody  wants," Randy
says.  Then like  an  almost perfect  moron  like  an  organism  genetically
engineered  to be a total, stupid idiot Randy glances directly at the Trunk.
Then he tries to hide it, which only makes it  more conspicuous.  He guesses
that his mostly beardless face must be an open book, and wishes he had never
shaved. A bullet  of ice  strikes  him in  the  right  cornea with a  nearly
audible splot. The  ballistic impact blinds him and the thermal  shock gives
him an ice cream headache. When  he recovers enough to see again, Aunt  Nina
is  walking around the trunk,  kind of spiraling  in towards it in a rapidly
decaying  orbit. "Hmm. What's in here?" She grips  the handle at one end and
finds she can barely get it off the ground.
     "Old Japanese code books. Bundles of ETC cards."
     "Marcus?"
     "Yes,  ma'am!" says Marcus Aurelius Shaftoe, returning  from the double
negative quadrant.
     "What is  the angle  exactly in between the +x and +y axes?"  Aunt Nina
asks. "I would ask the referee, here, but I'm beginning to have doubts about
his objectivity."
     M.A.  glances at Randy  and  decides he had  best  interpret this  last
comment  as good natured familial horsing around. "Would  you like  that  in
radians or degrees, ma'am?"
     "Neither. Just demonstrate it for me. Take this great big trunk on that
strong back  of  yours and just split  the middle between +x and +y axes and
keep walking until I say when."
     "Yes,  ma'am.  M.A. hefts  the  trunk and  starts  walking,  frequently
looking  back  and forth  to verify that he's exactly  in  the middle. Robin
stands off at a safe distance watching with interest.
     Uncle  Red, returning  from  his  piss break,  watches  this in horror.
"Nina!  Love! That's not  worth  the cost of shipping it home! What on earth
are you doing?"
     "Making sure I get what I want," Nina says.


     ***


     Randy gets a small part  of what he wants two hours later, when his own
mother  breaks the seal on the CERAMICS box to  verify that the china is  in
good condition.  At the time, Randy and his  father are standing next to the
Trunk. It is rather late in  his parent's value plotting work  and so pieces
of  fine furniture are  now widely scattered across the parking lot, looking
like the aftermath of one  of those tornadoes that miraculously sets  things
down intact after whirling them  through the skies  for ten miles.  Randy is
trying  to find  a way to talk up the emotional value of  this trunk without
violating his oath  of objectivity.  The  chances of  anyone other than Nina
ending up with this  trunk are actually quite miserable, since she (to Red's
horror) left almost everything clumped  around the Origin except for  it and
the  coveted Console.  But if  Dad would at least move  the  thing off  dead
center which no one except Nina has  done then, if the Tera awards it to him
tomorrow morning, Randy can plausibly argue that it's something other than a
computer error. But Dad is  taking most of his  cues from Mom and is  having
none of it.
     Mom  has  bitten her gloves off  and is parting  layer  after  layer of
crumpled newsprint with magenta  hands. "Oh, the  gravy boat!" she exclaims,
and hoists up something that is more  of a heavy cruiser than  a boat. Randy
agrees with  Aunt Nina that the design is old ladyish  in  the  extreme, but
that's kind of  tautological  since he has only seen it in  the house of his
grandmother, who has been an old lady for as long as he has known her. Randy
walks towards his mother with his hands in his pockets, still trying to play
it  cool for  some reason. This  obsession  with secrecy may have gone a bit
far. He has seen this gravy  boat maybe twenty times in his  life, always at
family reunions,  and  seeing it now roils up  a whole silt  cloud  of  long
settled emotions. He reaches out, and Mom remits it  to  his mittened hands.
He pretends to admire it from  the side, and then flips  it over to read the
words glazed on the bottom.
     ROYAL ALBERT LAVENDER ROSE.
     For a moment he is sweating under a vertical sun,  swaying to keep  his
balance on a rocking boat, smelling the neoprene of hoses and flippers. Then
he's  back  in the Palouse.  He begins thinking about  how to  sabotage  the
computer  program to  ensure  that  Aunt Nina gets what she  wants,  so that
she'll give him what is rightfully his.


     Chapter 71 GOLGOTHA


     Lieutenant  Ninomiya reaches  Bundok about  two weeks after Goto Dengo,
accompanied by  several  bashed  and scraped  wooden  cases. "What  is  your
specialty?" asks Goto Dengo, and Lieutenant Ninomiya responds by opening  up
one of the cases  to reveal a  surveyor's  transit  swaddled in clean, oiled
linen. Another case contains an equally perfect  sextant. Goto  Dengo gawks.
The  gleaming  perfection  of the instruments  is  a marvel.  But  even more
marvelous  is  that they  sent  him a  surveyor only  twelve  days  after he
requested  one.  Ninomiya grins  at  the look on  his  new colleague's face,
revealing  that he has  lost  all of  his front teeth except for one,  which
happens to be mostly gold.
     Before  any engineering can be  done, all of this  wilderness  must  be
brought  into  the  realm  of  the  known.  Detailed maps must be  prepared,
watersheds  charted, soil sampled. For  two weeks Goto Dengo has  been going
around  with a pipe and  a sledgehammer  taking core samples of the dirt. He
has identified rocks from  the  streambeds, estimated the  flow rates of the
Yamamoto  and  Tojo  Rivers, counted and catalogued  trees. He  has  trudged
through  the jungle and  planted flags around  the approximate boundaries of
the Special  Security Zone. The whole  time, he's been worrying about having
to perform the survey himself, using primitive, improvised tools. And all of
a sudden, here is Lieutenant Ninomiya with his instruments.
     The  three  Lieutenants,  Goto,  Mori  and  Ninomiya, spend  a few days
surveying the  flat,  semi open  land  straddling  the lower Tojo River. The
year, 1944, is  turning  out  to  be dry so far, and Mori does not  want  to
construct his military barracks  on  land that will turn into a  marsh after
the first big rain. He is not concerned  about the comfort of the prisoners,
but  he would at least like to ensure that they won't  get washed  away. The
lay of the land  is also important in setting up the  interlocking fields of
fire that will  be necessary to put down  any riots or mass escape attempts.
They put Bundok's  few enlisted men to  work gathering  bamboo  stakes, then
drive these in to mark the locations of roads, barracks, barbed wire fences,
guard towers, and a  few carefully sited  mortar emplacements from which the
guards  will be able  to fill the atmosphere  in any chosen part of the camp
with shrapnel.
     When  Lieutenant  Goto  takes  Lieutenant Ninomiya up into the  jungle,
clambering up the steep valley of the Tojo, Lieutenant Mori must stay behind
in accordance with Captain Noda's  orders.  This is just as well, since Mori
has his work cut out  for him down below. The captain has granted Ninomiya a
special dispensation to see the Special Security Zone.
     "Elevations  are  of supreme importance  in this  project," Goto  Dengo
tells the surveyor on the way up. They are burdened with surveying equipment
and  fresh water,  but  Ninomiya  clambers  up the  rocky gulch of  the half
parched  river just as  ably  as Goto  Dengo  himself.  "We  will  begin  by
establishing the level  of Lake Yamamoto  which does not exist yet  and then
work downwards from there."
     "I  have  also  been  ordered  to   obtain  the  precise  latitude  and
longitude," says Ninomiya.
     Goto Dengo grins. "That's hard there is nowhere to see the sun."
     "What about the three peaks?"
     Goto Dengo turns to see if  Ninomiya  is  joking. But  the surveyor  is
looking intently up the valley.
     "Your dedication sets a good example," Goto Dengo says.
     "This place is paradise compared to Rabaul."
     "Is that where you were sent from?"
     "Yes."
     "How did you escape? It is cut off, isn't it?"
     "It  has  been cut  off for some time," Ninomiya says curtly.  Then, he
adds: "They came and got me in a submarine." His voice is husky and faint.
     Goto Dengo is silent for a while.
     Ninomiya  has a  system all worked out in his head, which they put into
effect the next  week,  after they  have done a rough survey of  the Special
Security Zone. Early in the morning, they hoist an enlisted  man into a tree
with a canteen,  a watch, and a  mirror. There is nothing special about this
tree except for  a  bamboo  stake recently  driven into  the ground  nearby,
labeled MAIN DRIFT.
     Then Lieutenants Ninomiya and Goto  climb to the top  of the  mountain,
which takes them about eight hours.  It is dreadfully arduous,  and Ninomiya
is shocked  that Goto volunteers to  go  with him. "I want to see this place
from the top of Calvary," Goto Dengo explains. "Only  then will  I  have the
insight to perform my duty well."
     On the way up, they compare notes, New Guinea vs. New Britain. It seems
that  the latter's only saving grace is the settlement of Rabaul, a formerly
British  port complete with  a  cricket oval, now the  linchpin of Nipponese
forces  in  Southwest Asia. "For a long time it was  a great  place to be  a
surveyor," Ninomiya says, and  describes the fortifications  that they built
there  in  preparation  for  MacArthur's  invasion.  He  has  a  draftsman's
enthusiasm for detail and at one point talks nonstop for  an hour describing
a particular system of bunkers and pillboxes down to the last booby trap and
glory hole.
     As the climb gets harder, the two vie with each other in belittling its
difficulty.  Goto  Dengo  tells the  tale of climbing over the  snow covered
mountain range in New Guinea.
     "Nowadays, on  New  Britain we climb  volcanoes all the time," Ninomiya
says offhandedly.
     "Why?"
     "To collect sulfur."
     "Sulfur? Why?"
     "To make gunpowder."
     After this they don't talk for a while.
     Goto Dengo tries to dig them out of a conversational  hole. "It'll be a
bad day for MacArthur when he tries to take Rabaul!"
     Ninomiya trudges along silently for a bit,  trying to control  himself,
and fails.  "You idiot," he says,  "don't you  see? MacArthur  isn't coming.
There's no need."
     "But Rabaul is the cornerstone of the whole theater!"
     "It is  a cornerstone of soft,  sweet  wood in a universe of termites,"
Ninomiya snaps. "All he  has  to do is ignore  us for another year, and then
everyone will be dead of starvation or typhus."
     The jungle thins out. The plants are wrestling for footholds on a loose
slope  of  volcanic cinders, and only  smaller ones  endure. This puts  Goto
Dengo in the mind of writing a poem in which  the small, tenacious Nipponese
prevail over the big, lumbering Americans, but it has been a long time since
he wrote a poem and he can't make the words go together.
     Someday the plants will  turn this cone of scoria and rubble into soil,
but  not yet. Now that Goto Dengo can finally  see for more than a few yards
he is beginning to understand the  lay of  the land. The numerical data that
he  and Ninomiya  have  compiled over the  last week  is being  synthesized,
within his mind, into a solid understanding of how this place works.
     Calvary  is  an old cinder cone. It started as a fissure from which ash
and scoria  were ejected,  one fragment at a time,  for thousands of  years,
tumbling up and outwards in a  family of mortar shell like parabolic curves,
varying in  height and distance depending on  the size  of each fragment and
the  direction  of the  wind. They  landed in a  wide ring  centered  on the
fissure.  As the  ring grew in height it naturally spread out into  a broad,
truncated cone with a central pit  gouged out of  its top, with the spitting
fissure in the bottom of that pit.
     The winds here tend to come from a little bit east of due south, and so
the ash  tended to  be pushed  towards the north  by  northwest edge of  the
cone's rim. That is  still the highest point  of  the  cinder  cone. But the
fissure died  out eons ago, or perhaps was plugged by its own emissions, and
the whole structure has been much eroded since then. The southern rim of the
cone  is  just  a barrier of  low  hills perforated  by the courses  of  the
Yamamoto  River and the two tributaries that come  together to form the Tojo
River.  The central  pit  is  a bowl of loathsome jungle, so  saturated with
chlorophyll that it looks black from above. Birds cruise above  the  canopy,
looking like colored stars from up here.
     The northern rim still rises a good  five hundred meters above the bowl
of jungle, but its formerly smooth arc has been dissected by erosion to form
three  distinct summits, each one a  pile of red scoria half concealed by  a
stubble  of green  vegetation.  Without discussion, Ninomiya and Goto  Dengo
head for the one in the middle, which is the highest. They reach it at about
two thirty  in the afternoon,  and immediately  wish they hadn't because the
sun is  beating  almost  straight down on  top of them. But  there is a cool
breeze up  here,  and once  they have  protected their heads  with makeshift
burnooses,  it's not  so bad. Goto Dengo sets up the tripod and  the transit
while Ninomiya  uses his sextant to  shoot  the sun.  He has  a  pretty good
German watch which he zeroed against the radio transmission from Manila this
morning, and  this  enables him  to  reckon  the  longitude.  He  works  the
calculation  out on a  scrap of paper on his lap, then goes back and does it
again to double check the numbers, speaking them out loud. Goto Dengo copies
them down in his notebook, just in case Ninomiya's notes get lost.
     At  three  o'clock  sharp, the enlisted man down in the tree  begins to
flash his  mirror at them: a brilliant spark from a dark rug of jungle  that
is otherwise featureless.  Ninomiya  centers  his transit on this signal and
takes down more figures. In combination  with  various other data from maps,
aerial photos and  the  like, this should enable him to make  an estimate of
the main shaft's latitude and longitude.
     "I don't know how accurate this will be," he frets, as they trudge down
the mountain. "I have the peak exactly what did you call it? Cavalry?"
     "Close enough."
     "This means soldiers on horseback, correct?"
     "Yes."
     "But the  site of the shaft I will not have very precisely unless I can
use better techniques."
     Goto Dengo considers telling him that this is perfectly all right, that
the place was made to be lost and forgotten. But he keeps his mouth shut.
     The survey work  takes  another couple of weeks. They figure  out where
the shore of Lake Yamamoto will be and calculate its volume. It will be more
of a pond than  a  lake less  than a  hundred meters across  but  it will be
deceptively deep, and it will hold a lot of  water. They calculate the angle
of the shaft that will connect the bottom of the lake to the main network of
tunnels.  They figure  out where  all of the  horizontal tunnels will emerge
from the walls of the Tojo River's gorge, and stake out the routes of  roads
and railways that will lead to those openings, so that debris can be removed
and precious  war  material brought  in for  storage. They double– and
triple  check all of it to make sure that  no fragment  of the works will be
visible from the air.
     Meanwhile, down  below,  Lieutenant Mori  and a  small work detail have
planted some fenceposts and strung some barbed wire just enough to contain a
hundred or so prisoners, who arrive packed into a couple of military trucks.
When these  are put  to work, the  camp expands very rapidly;  the  military
barracks  go  up  in a few days  and  the double  barbed  wire perimeter  is
completed. They never seem to  lack for supplies  here. Dynamite comes in by
the truckload, as if it  weren't  desperately  needed in places like Rabaul,
and is carefully stored under the supervision of Goto Dengo. Prisoners carry
it into a special shed  that has been constructed  for  this purpose in  the
shade of the  jungle. Goto Dengo has not been close to the prisoners before,
and  is startled to  realize that they are all Chinese.  And  they  are  not
speaking the dialect of Canton or of Formosa, but rather one that Goto Dengo
heard  frequently  when he was  posted  in  Shanghai.  These  prisoners  are
northern Chinese.
     It is stranger and stranger all the time, this Bundok place.
     The Filipinos, he knows, have been uniquely surly about their inclusion
in  the  Greater  East Asia Coprosperity  Sphere.  They are  well armed, and
MacArthur  has  been egging them on.  Many thousands of them have been taken
prisoner. Within  half a day's drive of  Bundok there are  more than  enough
Filipino prisoners to  fill Lieutenant Mori's camp and accomplish Lieutenant
Goto's project. And yet  the powers that be have shipped hundreds of Chinese
people all the way down from Shanghai to do this work.
     At times like this he begins to doubt  his own sanity. He feels an urge
to discuss the matter with Lieutenant Ninomiya. But the surveyor, his friend
and  confidant,  has made  himself scarce since his work was completed.  One
day, Goto  Dengo  goes by Ninomiya's tent and  finds it empty. Captain  Noda
explains that the surveyor was called  away suddenly  to  perform  important
work elsewhere.
     About  a  month  later,  when the  road  building  work  in the Special
Security  Zone is well underway, some of the Chinese workers who are digging
begin shouting excitedly. Goto Dengo understands what they are saying.
     They  have  uncovered  human remains. The jungle  has done its work and
practically nothing  is  left  but bones,  but the smell, and the legions of
ants,  tell him that the  corpse is  a fairly recent one. He grabs  a shovel
from one of the workers and pulls  up a scoop of dirt and carries it over to
the river, dripping tangles of ants. He lowers it carefully into the running
water. The dirt dissolves into a brown trail in the  river and  the skull is
soon  revealed: the dome of the head,  the eye  sockets  still  not entirely
empty, the nasal bone with  some fragments of  cartilage still attached, and
finally the jaws, pocked with old  abcesses and missing most of their teeth,
except for  one gold  tooth in the middle. The current turns the  skull over
slowly,  as  if  Lieutenant Ninomiya is hiding his face  in  shame, and Goto
Dengo sees a neat hole punched through the base of the skull.
     He  looks up. A dozen Chinese are gathered above him on  the riverbank,
watching him impassively.
     "Do not  speak of this to any of the other Nipponese," Goto Dengo says.
Their eyes go wide  and their  lips  part in astonishment as  they hear  him
speaking the precise dialect of Shanghai prostitutes.
     One  of  the  Chinese  workers is  nearly bald. He seems  to  be in his
forties, though prisoners age rapidly and so it is always difficult to tell.
He is not scared like the others. He is looking at Goto Dengo appraisingly.
     "You,"  Goto  Dengo says,  "pick two other  men  and  follow me.  Bring
shovels."
     He leads them into the  jungle, into a place where he knows  there will
be no further digging, and shows them where to put Lieutenant Ninomiya's new
grave. The bald man is a good leader as well  as a strong worker and he gets
the grave dug quickly, then transfers the remains  without  squeamishness or
complaint. If he has been  through the  China Incident and survived for this
long as a prisoner of war, he has probably seen and done much worse.
     Goto  Dengo does his  part by distracting Captain  Noda for a couple of
hours.  They go up  and tour  the  dam work  on the Yamamoto River. Noda  is
anxious to create Lake Yamamoto as  soon as possible, before MacArthur's air
force makes detailed surveys of the area. The sudden appearance of a lake in
the jungle would probably not go unnoticed.
     The site  of the lake is a natural  rock bowl, covered  by jungle, with
the  Yamamoto River  running through  the middle of  it.  Right next  to the
riverbank,  men  are  already  at work  with  rock drills,  placing dynamite
charges.  "The inclined shaft will  start here,"  Goto Dengo  tells  Captain
Noda, "and  runs straight " turning his back on the river he  makes one hand
into a  blade  and thrusts it into the jungle "  straight down to Golgotha."
The Place of the Skull.

     "Gargotta?" Captain Noda says.
     "It  is a Tagalog  word,"  Goto Dengo says  authoritatively.  "It means
'hidden glade.' "
     "Hidden  glade. I like  it!  Very good.  Gargotta!" Captain  Noda says.
"Your work is proceeding very well, Lieutenant Goto."
     "I am only striving to live  up to the  high standard that  was  set by
Lieutenant Ninomiya," says Goto Dengo.
     "He was an excellent worker," Noda says evenly.
     "Perhaps  when I am finished here, I  can follow him to wherever he was
sent."
     Noda grins. "Your work is only beginning. But I can say with confidence
that when you are finished you will be reunited with your friend."


     Chapter 72 SEATTLE


     Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse's  widow and five children agree that Dad
did something in the war, and that's about all. Each of them seems to have a
different 1950s B movie, or  1940s  Movietone newsreel,  in his or her head,
portraying  a rather different set of events. There is not even agreement on
whether he  was  in the  Army  or  the  Navy,  which  seems  like  a  pretty
fundamental plot point to Randy. Was he in Europe or Asia? Opinions  differ.
Grandma grew up on an Outback sheep farm. One might therefore think that, at
some point in her life, she might have been an earthy cuss the type of woman
who would not  only remember which service her late husband had  been in but
would be able  to  take  down his  rifle from  the attic and  field strip it
blindfolded. But she had evidently spent something like seventy five percent
of her waking hours in church (where she not  only  worshipped  but went  to
school  and transacted essentially all  of her social life), or  in  transit
thereto or  therefrom, and her own parents quite explicitly did not want her
to  wind up  living on  a farm, ramming  her  arm up livestock  vaginas  and
slapping raw steaks over the black eyes dished out  by some husband. Farming
might have been an adequate sort of booby prize for  one or at  most  two of
their  sons, sort of a  fallback  for any offspring  who  happened to suffer
major head injuries or fall into chronic alcoholism. But the real purpose of
the cCmndhd kids was to restore the past and lost glories of the family, who
allegedly  had  been major wool brokers around the time of  Shakespeare  and
well on their  way to living  in  Kensington  and  spelling their name Smith
before  some combination of scrapie,  long  term climatic change,  nefarious
conduct by jealous Outer  Qwghlmians, and a worldwide shift in fashions away
from funny smelling  thirty pound  sweaters with small arthropods  living in
them  had driven them all into honest poverty and then not so honest poverty
and led to their forcible transportation to Australia.
     The point  here being  that  Grandma was incarnated, indoctrinated, and
groomed by her Ma  to wear stockings and lipstick  and gloves in  a big city
somewhere. The experiment  had succeeded to  the  point  where  Mary cCmndhd
could, at  any point in her  post adolescent life, have  prepared and served
high tea to the Queen of England on ten minutes' notice, flawlessly, without
having to even glance in  a mirror, straighten  up her dwelling, polish  any
silver, or bone up on any etiquette. It  had been a standing joke among  her
male  offspring  that Mom could walk unescorted into any  biker  bar  in the
world and  simply by her bearing and appearance cause all ongoing fistfights
to be  instantly suspended,  all grubby  elbows to be removed from the  bar,
postures to  straighten, salty language to be  choked  off. The bikers would
climb  over  one another's  backs  to  take  her coat, pull her chair  back,
address her as ma'am, etc.  Though  it had  never been performed, this biker
bar scene was like a  whole sort of virtual  or notional comedy  sketch that
was a famous moment in entertainment  for the  Waterhouse  family,  like the
Beatles  on Ed Sullivan  or Belushi doing  his samurai bit on Saturday Night
Live.  It was up  there on their mental videocassette shelves right next  to
their imaginary newsreels and B movies of what the Patriarch had done in the
war.
     The bottom line was that the ability to run a house  in the way Grandma
was  legendary or infamous for doing, to keep the  personal grooming  up  to
that  standard, to send  out a few hundred Christmas  cards every year, each
written  in  flawless fountain pen longhand,  etc., etc., that all of  these
things taken together took up as much space in her brain as, say mathematics
might take up in a theoretical physicist's.
     And so when it came to anything of a practical nature she was perfectly
helpless,  and probably  always  had been. Until she  had gotten too  old to
drive,  she  had  continued to tool  around  Whitman  in  the  1965  Lincoln
Continental,  which was the  last vehicle  her husband  had  purchased, from
Whitman's Patterson Lincoln Mercury, before his untimely death. The  vehicle
weighed something  like six thousand pounds and had more moving parts than a
silo  full of  Swiss watches. Whenever any of her  offspring came  to visit,
someone would discreetly slip out to the garage to yank the  dipstick, which
would always be mysteriously topped up with  clear amber  colored  10W40. It
eventually turned out that her late  husband had summoned the  entire living
male  lineage of  the  Patterson  family four  generations of  them into his
hospital room and gathered them around his deathbed and wrought some kind of
unspecified  pact with them along the general lines of that, if at any point
in the  future,  the  tire pressure in the Lincoln dropped below spec or the
maintenance in any other way lapsed, all of  the Pattersons would not merely
sacrifice  their immortal souls, but literally be pulled out of meetings  or
lavatories and dragged off to hell on the spot,  like Marlowe's Dr. Faustus.
He  knew that his wife  had  only the vaguest idea of what a tire was, other
than something that from time to time a man would heroically jump out of the
car and  change while  she sat inside  the  car admiring  him. The  world of
physical objects  seemed to have been made solely for  the purpose of giving
the men around Grandma something to do with their  hands; and not, mind you,
for any practical  reason,  but  purely so that  Grandma could twiddle those
men's  emotional knobs  by reacting to how well or poorly they did it. Which
was a fine setup as long as men were actually around, but  not so good after
Grandpa  died. So  guerilla  mechanic  teams  had  been surveilling  Randy's
grandmother ever  since and occasionally swiping her Lincoln from the church
parking  lot on Sunday mornings  and taking  it down  to Patterson's for sub
rosa oil changes. The ability of the Lincoln to run flawlessly for a quarter
of a century without maintenance without  even  putting gasoline in the tank
had only confirmed  Grandmother's opinions about the  amusing superfluity of
male pursuits.
     In any event, what it all came down to was that Grandma, whose grasp of
practical  matters had only  declined  (if  that  was  even  possible)  with
advanced age,  was not  the sort  of person  you would go to for information
about her late husband's war record. Defeating the  Nazis  was  in the  same
category as changing a flat  tire: an untidy business that men were expected
to  know  how to  do.  And not  just the  men of yore,  the supermen of  her
generation; Randy was expected to know about these  things too.  If the Axis
reconstituted  itself tomorrow, Grandma would expect  Randy to  be suited up
behind the controls of a supersonic  fighter plane  the day after that.  And
Randy would sooner spiral into  the ground  at Mach 2 than bear  her tidings
that he wasn't up to the job.
     Luckily  for  Randy, who has recently  become intensely  curious  about
Grandpa, an  old  suitcase has been  unearthed.  It's a rattan  and  leather
thing, sort of  a snappy Roaring  Twenties number complete with  some  badly
abraded  hotel  stickers plotting Lawrence Pritchard  Waterhouse's migration
from the Midwest to Princeton and back which is completely filled with small
black and white photographs. Randy's father dumps the contents out on a ping
pong table that inexplicably sits in the center of the rec room at Grandma's
managed care facility, whose residents are about as likely to play ping pong
as they are  to get their nipples  pierced. The photos  are  messed out into
several  discrete piles  which are  in  turn sorted through by Randy and his
father and his aunts and uncles. Most of  them are photos of the  Waterhouse
kids, so  everyone's fascinated until they have found pictures of themselves
at  a couple  of different  ages. Then the  pile of  photos  begins  to look
depressingly large. Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse was evidently a shutterbug
of sorts and now his offspring are paying the price.
     Randy has a different set of motives, and so he stays there late, going
through  pictures by himself. Ninety nine  out of a hundred are snapshots of
Waterhouse brats  from the 1950s. But  some are older. He  finds  a photo of
Grandpa in a place with palm  trees, in a military uniform, with a big white
disk shaped officer's cap on his head. Three hours later  he comes across  a
picture  of  a very young Grandpa, really just  a turkey  necked  adolescent
costumed in grownup clothes, standing in front of a gothic building with two
other  men: a grinning dark  haired chap  who looks vaguely familiar, and an
aquiline blond  fellow in  rimless glasses.  All three  men  have  bicycles;
Grandpa is straddling his, and the other two, perhaps considering this to be
not so dignified, are supporting theirs with their  hands. Another hour goes
by,  and then there's Grandpa in a khaki uniform with more palm trees in the
background.
     The next morning  he sits down  next to his grandmother,  after she has
finished her daily hourlong getting out of bed ritual. "Grandmother, I found
these two old photographs." He deals them out on the  table in  front of her
and  gives her  a few moments to switch contexts.  Grandma doesn't turn on a
dime  conversationally, and besides,  those stiff  old  lady corneas  take a
little while to shift focus.
     "Yes, these  are both Lawrence when he was in the service." Grandmother
has always  had this knack for telling people the obvious in  a way  that is
scrupulously  polite but that makes the recipient feel like  a butthead  for
having wasted  her time. By  this  point  she  is obviously tired  of  IDing
photographs,  a tedious job with  an obvious subtext of "you're going to die
soon and we were curious who is this lady standing next to the Buick?"
     "Grandmother,"  Randy says brightly, trying to rouse her  interest, "in
this photo here, he is wearing a Navy uniform. And in this photo here, he is
wearing an Army uniform."
     Grandma Waterhouse  raises  her  eyebrows  and looks  at him  with  the
synthetic  interest she would  use if  she were at a  formal  affair of some
kind,  and  some  man she'd just met tried  to give  her  a tutorial on tire
changing.
     "It is, uh, I think, kind of unusual," Randy says, "for a man to be  in
both the Army and the  Navy during the same war. Usually  it's  one  or  the
other."
     "Lawrence had both  an Army  uniform  and a Navy  uniform," Grandmother
says, in the same tone she'd used to say he had both a small intestine and a
large intestine, "and he would wear whichever one was appropriate."
     "Of course he would," Randy says.


     ***


     The  laminar wind is gliding over the highway like a  crisp sheet being
stripped  from a  bed, and Randy's finding it hard to keep the Acura  on the
pavement. The  wind isn't  strong  enough to blow  the car  around,  but  it
obscures the edges of the road; all he can see is this white, striated plane
sliding  laterally  beneath  him. His eye tells him to steer into it,  which
would be a bad idea since it would  take him  and Amy straight into the lava
fields. He  tries  to focus on a distant point:  the white  diamond of Mount
Rainier, a couple of hundred kilometers west.
     "I  don't even  know when they got married,"  Randy  says.  "Isn't that
horrible?"
     "September of 1945," Amy says. "I dragged it out of her."
     "Wow."
     "Girl talk."
     "I didn't know you were even rigged for girl talk."
     "We can all do it."
     "Did you learn anything else about the wedding? Like "
     "The china pattern?"
     "Yeah."
     "It was in fact Lavender Rose," Amy says.
     "So it  fits. I mean, it  fits chronologically. The submarine went down
in May of 1945  off of  Palawan  four months  before the wedding. Knowing my
grandmother, wedding  preparations would  have  been well advanced  by  that
point they definitely would have settled on a china pattern."
     "And you think you have a  photo  of your grandpa in Manila around that
time?"
     "It's definitely  Manila.  And  Manila wasn't liberated until  March of
'45."
     "So what do  we  have, then?  Your  grandpa  must've had some  kind  of
connection with someone on that U boat, between March and May."
     "A pair of eyeglasses was found on the U boat." Randy pulls a photo out
of  his shirt pocket and hands it across to Amy. "I'd be interested to  know
if they match the specs on that guy. The tall blond."
     "I  can check it out  when  I go  back.  Is the  geek  on the left your
grandpa?"
     "Yeah."
     "Who's the geek in the middle?"
     "I think it's Turing."
     "Turing, as in TURING Magazine?"

     "They named the magazine  after him because he  did a lot of early work
with computers," Randy says.
     "Like your grandpa did."
     "Yeah."
     "How about this guy we're going  to see in Seattle? He's a computer guy
too?  Ooh,  you're getting  this  look  on your  face  like  'Amy  just said
something so stupid  it caused me physical  pain.'  Is this  a common facial
expression  among the men of your family? Do you think it  is the expression
that  your  grandfather wore when your grandmother came  home and  announced
that she had backed the Lincoln Continental into a fire hydrant?"
     "I am sorry if I make you feel bad  sometimes," Randy says. "The family
is full of  scientists. Mathematicians. The least intelligent  of  us become
engineers. Which is sort of what I am."
     "Excuse me, did you just say you were one of the least intelligent?"
     "Least focused, maybe."
     "My  point  is  that  precision,  and  getting  things  right,  in  the
mathematical sense, is the one thing we  have going for us.  Everyone has to
have  a  way of  getting  ahead, right? Otherwise  you  end  up  working  at
McDonald's your whole life, or worse. Some are born rich. Some are born into
a  big  family like yours. We make our way  in the world by knowing that two
plus  two  equals four,  and sticking to our guns in a way  that is kind  of
nerdy and that maybe hurts people's feelings sometimes. I'm sorry."
     "Hurts whose feelings? People who think that two plus two equals five?"
     "People who put a higher priority on social graces than on having every
statement uttered in a conversation be literally true."
     "Like, for example . . . female people?"
     Randy grinds  his teeth for about a mile, and  then  says, "If there is
any generalization at all that  you can draw about how men  think versus how
women think, I  believe it is  that men can narrow themselves down  to  this
incredibly  narrow laser beam focus  on  one tiny little  subject  and think
about nothing else."
     "Whereas women can't?"
     "I   suppose  women  can.  They  rarely  seem  to  want  to.  What  I'm
characterizing here,  as  the  female  approach,  is  essentially saner  and
healthier.
     "See, you are being a little paranoid here and focusing on the negative
too much. It's not  about how women are deficient.  It's more  about how men
are deficient. Our social deficiencies, lack of perspective, or whatever you
want  to call it,  is what enables us to study one  species of dragonfly for
twenty years,  or  sit  in  front  of a computer for a hundred  hours a week
writing  code. This is  not the behavior  of  a well  balanced  and  healthy
person, but  it can obviously lead to great advances in synthetic fibers. Or
whatever."
     "But you said that you yourself were not very focused."
     "Compared  to  other men in my family, that's true. So, I know a little
about astronomy, a lot about computers, a little about business, and I have,
if  I  may  say so,  a slightly higher  level of social functioning than the
others. Or maybe it's not even functioning, just an acute awareness of  when
I'm not functioning, so that I at least know when to feel embarrassed."
     Amy  laughs. "You're definitely good at that. It seems like you sort of
lurch from one moment of feeling embarrassed to the next."
     Randy gets embarrassed.
     "It's fun to watch," Amy says encouragingly. "It speaks well of you."
     "What I'm saying is  that  this does  set me apart.  One  of  the  most
frightening things about your true nerd,  for many people, is not that  he's
socially  inept because everybody's been there but rather his  complete lack
of embarrassment about it."
     "Which is still kind of pathetic."
     "It was pathetic when they  were in high school," Randy says. "Now it's
something else. Something very different from pathetic."
     "What, then?"
     "I don't know. There is no word for it. You'll see."


     ***


     Driving  over  the  Cascades produces a climatic  transition that would
normally require a four  hour airplane flight.  Warm rain spatters  the wind
shield and loosens the rinds of ice on the  wipers. The gradual surprises of
March and  April are compressed  into a terse executive summary. It is about
as tantalizing as a  strip tease video played on fast forward. The landscape
turns wet, and so green it's almost  blue, and bolts straight up  out of the
soil  in the  space  of  about a mile. The fast  lanes of  Interstate 90 are
strewn with brown snow turds  melted loose  from  homebound skiers' Broncos.
Semis  plummet past  them in  writhing conical shrouds of  water and  steam.
Randy's startled  to  see new office  buildings halfway  up  the  foothills,
sporting high tech  logos.  Then he wonders why he's startled. Amy has never
been here, and she takes her feet down from the  airbag deployment panel and
sits up straight  to look, wishing out  loud that Robin and  Marcus Aurelius
had  come along, instead  of turning back towards Tennessee. Randy remembers
to glide over  into  the  right lanes  and slow down as  they shed  the last
thousand feet of altitude into  Issaquah, and sure enough the highway patrol
is  out there ticketing speeders. Amy's duly impressed  by this  display  of
acumen. They are still miles outside of the city core, in  the half forested
suburbs  of  the East Side,  where  street  and avenue numbers are up in the
triple digits, when Randy  pulls onto an exit  ramp and  drives  them down a
long commercial strip that turns out to be just the sphere of influence of a
big mall. Several satellite malls have burst from the asphalt all around it,
wiping out old landmarks  and  screwing up Randy's navigation. Everything is
crowded because  people  are  out returning their  Christmas gifts.  After a
little bit of  driving around and cursing, Randy  finds the core mall, which
looks a little shabby compared to its satellites. He parks in the far corner
of the lot, explaining  that it is more logical to do this and then walk for
fifteen  seconds than  it  is to spend  fifteen minutes looking for a closer
space.
     Randy and Amy stand  behind the Acura's open trunk for a minute peeling
off layers of suddenly  gratuitous Eastern  Washington insulation. Amy frets
about  her cousins and wishes  that she and Randy  had donated all  of their
cold weather gear to them; when last seen they were circling the Impala like
a  pair  of carrier  based fighter aircraft  orbiting  their mother  ship in
preparation for  landing, checking  tire pressures  and fluid levels with an
intensity, an  alertness, that  made it  seem  as if  they  were about to do
something much  more exciting than settle their asses into bucket  seats and
drive east for a couple of days. They  have  a gallant style about them that
must knock the girls dead  back  home. Amy hugged them both passionately, as
if she'd never see them again, and  they accepted her hugs with dignity  and
forbearance, and  then  they were gone; resisting the  urge to  lay  a patch
until they were a couple of blocks distant.
     They go into the mall, Amy still wondering aloud why they are here, but
game.  Randy is  a little  bit turned around,  but eventually  homes in on a
dimly  heard  electronic  cacophony  digitized  voices  prophesying  war and
emerges into  the mall's food  court.  Navigating  now  partly by sound  and
partly  by smell, he  comes to the corner where a lot of males, ranging from
perhaps  ten  to  forty  years  old, are  seated  in  small  clusters,  some
extracting quivering chopstick loads of Szechuan from little white boxes but
most fixated on what, from a distance, looks like some kind of paperwork. As
backdrop, the ultraviolet  maw of a  vast game  arcade  spews digitized  and
sound  lab sweetened detonations, whooshes,  sonic booms and Gatling  farts.
But  the arcade seems nothing more than a defunct  landmark around which has
gathered this intense cult of paperwork hobbyists. A wiry teenager  in tight
black jeans and a black t shirt prowls among the tables with the provocative
confidence  of  a pool hustler, a long  skinny cardboard box  slung over his
shoulder  like  a  rifle. "These are my  ethnic group,"  Randy  explains  in
response to  the look on  Amy's face. "Fantasy role  playing gamers. This is
Avi and me ten years ago.
     "They  look like they're playing cards."  Amy looks again, and wrinkles
her nose. "Weird cards." Amy barges curiously into the middle of a four nerd
game.  Almost anywhere  else, the appearance of  a  female with  discernible
waist among these guys would cause some kind of a stir.  Their eyes would at
least travel  rudely up  and  down her body. But these guys only think about
one thing:  the  cards  in their hands, each contained  in  a  clear plastic
sleeve to keep it mint condition, each decorated  with a picture of  a troll
or  wizard or some  other leaf on the post Tolkienian evolutionary tree, and
printed on the back with elaborate rules. Mentally, these guys are not  in a
mall on the East Side of greater Seattle. They are on a mountain pass trying
to kill each other with edged weapons and numinous fire.
     The  young hustler is sizing  Randy up as a potential customer. His box
is  long enough to contain a few  hundred cards, and  it  looks heavy. Randy
would not be  surprised to learn something  depressing about this  kid, like
that he makes so much money from buying cards low and selling them high that
he owns a brand new Lexus he's too young to drive. Randy catches his eye and
asks, "Chester?"
     "Bathroom."
     Randy sits  down and watches Amy watching the nerds play their game. He
thought he'd  hit  bottom in  Whitman, out there  on  the parking  lot, that
surely she would get scared and flee. But this is potentially worse. A bunch
of tubby guys  who never go  outside, working themselves into a frenzy  over
elaborate games in which nonexistent characters go out and do pretend things
that  mostly are  not  as  interesting as what Amy,  her father, and various
other  members  of her family do all the time without making any  fuss about
it. It is almost like Randy  is deliberately hammering away at Amy trying to
find  out  when she'll break and run. But her lip  hasn't  started to writhe
nauseously yet. She's watching the game impartially, peeking over the nerds'
shoulders, following  the action, occasionally squinting at some abstraction
in the rules.
     "Hey, Randy."
     "Hey, Chester."
     So Chester's back from the bathroom. He looks exactly like  the Chester
of old,  except  spread out over a somewhat larger  volume, like the classic
demo of the expanding universe theory in which a face, or some other figure,
is drawn on a  partly inflated balloon which is then inflated some more. The
pores  have gotten larger, and the individual shafts of hair  farther apart,
which produces an illusion of  impending  baldness. It seems  like even  his
eyes have gotten farther apart and  the flecks of color in the  irises grown
into  blotches. He is not necessarily  fat he has the same rumpled heftiness
he used  to. Since people do not literally grow after their late teens, this
must be an illusion.  Older people  seem  to take  up a larger space in  the
room. Or maybe older people see more.
     "How's Avid?"
     "As avid as ever," Randy says, which is lame but obligatory. Chester is
wearing a sort of photographer's  vest with  a  gratuitous  number  of small
pockets, each of  which is stuffed with  gaming cards. Maybe  that's why  he
seems big. He has like twenty pounds of  cards strapped to him. "I note that
you have made the transition to card based RPGs," Randy says.
     "Oh, yeah! It is so much  better than the old  pencil and paper way. Or
even computer mediated RPGs, with all due respect to  the fine work that you
and Avi did. What are you working on now?"
     "Something that might actually be relevant to this," Randy says. "I was
just realizing that  if you have a set  of cryptographic protocols  suitable
for issuing an electronic currency that cannot be counterfeited  which oddly
enough we do  you could  adapt those same  protocols to card games.  Because
each one of these cards is like a banknote. Some more valuable than others."
     Chester nods  all the way through this, but does  not rudely  interrupt
Randy  as a younger nerd would. Your younger nerd takes offense quickly when
someone  near  him begins to  utter declarative sentences, because  he reads
into  it  an  assertion  that he,  the  nerd,  does  not  already  know  the
information being  imparted.  But your older nerd  has more self confidence,
and  besides, understands that frequently people need to think out loud. And
highly advanced nerds will furthermore understand  that uttering declarative
sentences  whose contents  are  already known to all present  is part of the
social  process of making conversation and therefore should not be construed
as aggression under any  circumstances. "It's  already  being done," Chester
says, when Randy's finished.  "In fact, that company you and Avi worked  for
in Minneapolis is one of the leaders "
     "I'd like you to meet my friend,  Amy," Randy interrupts,  even  though
Amy  is a  good distance away, and not paying attention. But Randy is afraid
that Chester's about to tell him  that  stock in that Minneapolis company is
now up to the point where its market capitalization exceeds that  of General
Dynamics, and that Randy  should've held onto his shares.  "Amy, this  is my
friend Chester," Randy  says,  leading Chester between tables. At this point
some of  the  gamers actually  do look up  interestedly not  at Amy, but  at
Chester, who (Randy infers) has probably got some one of a kind cards tucked
away in  that  vest, like THE THERMONUCLEAR ARSENAL OF THE  UNION  OF SOVIET
SOCIALIST REPUBLICS or YHWH. Chester exhibits a marked improvement in social
skills,  shaking  Amy's  hand  with  no  trace of  awkwardness and  dropping
smoothly  into  a  pretty decent  imitation  of  a  mature and well  rounded
individual engaging in polite small talk. Before Randy knows it, Chester has
invited them over to his house.
     "I heard it wasn't done yet," Randy says.
     "You must've seen the article in The Economist," Chester says.
     "That's right."
     "If you'd seen  the article in The  New York Times, you'd know that the
article in The Economist was wrong. I am now living in the house."
     "Well, it'd be fun to see it," Randy says.


     ***


     "Notice how well paved my street is?" Chester says sourly, half an hour
later. Randy has parked his  hammered and scraped Acura in the guest parking
lot of Chester's house and Chester has parked his 1932 Dusenberg roadster in
the garage, between a Lamborghini  and some other  vehicle that would appear
to be literally an aircraft, built to hover on ducted fans.
     "Uh,  I  can't  say that  I  did," Randy  says,  trying not  to gape at
anything.  Even  the pavement  under his  feet is some  kind  of custom made
mosaic of Penrose tiles. "I sort  of vaguely remember it as  being broad and
flat and not having any chuckholes. Well paved, in other words."
     "This," Chester  says,  head faking  towards his house, "was  the first
house to trigger the LOHO."
     "LOHO?"
     "The  Ludicrously Oversized Home Ordinance.  Some malcontents rammed it
through the  city  council. You get these, like  cardiovascular surgeons and
trust fund parasites who  like to have big  nice houses, but God forbid some
dirty hacker should  try to  build a house of his own, and send a few cement
trucks down their street occasionally."
     "They made you repave the street?"
     "They made  me repave  half the fucking  town," Chester says.  "I mean,
some of the neighbors were griping that the house was  an eyesore, but after
we got off on the wrong foot my  attitude was,  to  hell  with 'em." Indeed,
Chester's  house does  resemble nothing so much as  a regional  trucking hub
with a roof made entirely of glass. He waves his arm down a  patchily turfed
slab  of   mud  that  slopes  down  into  Lake  Washington.  "Obviously  the
landscaping hasn't even begun yet. So it  looks like  a science fair project
on erosion."
     "I was going to say the Battle of the Somme," Randy says.
     "Not as good an analogy because  there are no  trenches," Chester says.
He  is  still  pointing down  towards the lake.  "But if  you look  near the
waterline  you can  just  make out  some railroad ties,  half buried. That's
where we laid the tracks."
     "Tracks?"  Amy  says, the only word  she's been able to get out of  her
mouth since Randy drove his Acura  through the main gate. Randy told her, on
the way over here, that if  he,  Randy, had a  hundred thousand dollars  for
every order of magnitude by which Chester's net worth currently exceeds his,
then he (Randy) would  never have to work  again. This turned out to be more
clever  than informative,  and so Amy was not  prepared for what  they  have
found here and is still steepling her eyebrows.
     "For the locomotive," Chester says. "There are no railway lines nearby,
so we barged the locomotive in  and then winched it up a  short railway into
the foyer."
     Amy just scrunches up her face, silent.
     "Amy hasn't seen the articles," Randy says.
     "Oh! Sorry," Chester says, "I'm  into obsolete technology. The house is
a museum of dead tech. Stick your hand into these things."
     Lined up  before  the front  entrance  are four waist  high  pedestals,
emblazoned with the Novus Ordo Seclorum eyeball/pyramid  logo, with outlines
of  hands stenciled onto  their lids, and knobs in the  lagoons between  the
fingers. Randy  fits his hand into place  and feels the knobs slide in their
grooves, reading and memorizing the  geometry of his  hand. "The house knows
who  you  are now,"  Chester  says,  typing  their names into a  ruggedized,
weatherproofed  keyboard,   "and   I'm   giving  you   a  certain  privilege
constellation that I use for personal guests now you can come in through the
main gate and park your car and wander around the grounds whether or not I'm
home. And you can enter the house if I'm home, but if I'm not home, it'll be
locked to you. And  you can wander  freely in  the  house except for certain
offices where I keep proprietary corporate documents."
     "You have your own company or something?" Amy says weakly.
     "No.  After  Randy and Avi  left town,  I dropped out  of  college  and
snagged a job with a local company, which I still have," Chester says.
     The front door, a  translucent  crystal slab on a  track,  slides open.
Randy  and  Amy follow  Chester into  his house. As  advertised, there  is a
fullscale steam locomotive in the foyer.
     "The house is patterned after flex space," Chester says.
     "What's  that?"  Amy  asks.  She  is  completely  turned   off  by  the
locomotive.
     "A  lot of  high  tech companies get started in flex  space, which just
means  a  big warehouse with no  internal walls  or  partitions  just  a few
pillars to hold up the ceiling. You can drag partitions around to  divide it
up into rooms."
     "Like cubicles?"
     "Same  idea, but  the partitions go up higher so you  have a feeling of
being in  a  real room.  Of course,  they don't go  all  the way  up to  the
ceiling. Otherwise, there wouldn't be room for the TWA."
     "The what?" Amy asks. Chester,  who is  leading them into the  maze  of
partitions,  answers  the question  by  tilting his  head back  and  looking
straight up.
     The roof of the house is made entirely of glass, held up by a trusswork
of white  painted steel  tubes. It  is  maybe forty or fifty feet above  the
floor. The  partitions rise  to  a height of maybe twelve  feet. In the  gap
above the partitions and  below the  ceiling, a grid has been constructed, a
scaffolding of  red  pipes, nearly as vast  as the house  itself. Thousands,
millions, of aluminum shreds are  trapped in that space grid, like tom tufts
caught in a three  dimensional screen. It looks like an  artillery shell the
length of a football field that has exploded into shrapnel a microsecond ago
and been frozen in place;  light filters through the metal  scraps, trickles
down bundles of shredded wiring and glances flatly  off the crusts of melted
and hardened upholstery. It is so vast and so close that when Amy and  Randy
first look up at it they flinch, expecting it to fall on them. Randy already
knows what it is. But Amy has to stare at it for a long time, and prowl from
room to room, viewing it from different angles, before it takes shape in her
mind, and becomes recognizable as something familiar: a 747.
     "The FAA  and  NTSB were  surprisingly cool  about  it," Chester muses.
"Which  makes sense. I  mean, they've  reconstructed this thing in a hangar,
right?  Dredged up all the pieces, figured out where  they go, and hung them
on this  grid.  They've gone  over it and gathered all the forensic evidence
they  could  find,  hosed out all the human  remains  and  disposed  of them
properly, sterilized the debris so that the crash investigation team doesn't
have to worry about getting AIDS from touching a bloody flange or something.
And they're done with it. And they're paying like rent on  this hangar. They
can't throw it away. They have to store it somewhere. So all I had to do was
get  the  house certified as a federal warehouse, which was  a  pretty  easy
legal hack. And  if  there's a lawsuit,  I have to let the lawyers in to  go
over it. But really  it was not a problem to  do  this. The Boeing guys love
it, they're over here all the time."
     "It's like a resource to them," Randy guesses.
     "Yeah."
     "You like to play that role."
     "Sure!  I  have  defined  a  privilege  constellation  specifically for
engineer types who can come here anytime they  want to access the house as a
museum of dead tech. That's what I mean by the flex space analogy. To me and
my guests, it's  a home.  To  these visitors . . . there's one right there."
Chester  waves his arm across  the room (it  is a  central  room maybe fifty
meters on a side) at an  engineer type who has set up a Hasselblad on a huge
tripod and is pointing it straight up at a bent landing gear strut ". . . to
them  it's exactly like a  museum in that there  are places they  can go and
other places that  if they step over the line will  set  off  alarms and get
them in trouble."
     "Is there a gift shop?" Amy jokes.
     "The gift shop is roughed in, but not up and running the LOHO throws up
all kinds of impediments," Chester grumbles.
     They end up in  a relatively cozy glass  walled room with a view across
the churned mud to the lake. Chester fires up an espresso machine that looks
like a scale model of an  oil refinery and generates a brace of lattes. This
room happens  to  be underneath the TWA's left wing tip, which is relatively
intact. Randy realizes, now, that the entire plane has been hung in a gentle
banking attitude, like it's making an  imperceptible course change, which is
not really appropriate; a vertical  dive would make more sense, but then the
house would have to be fifty  stories high  to accommodate it. He can  see a
repeating pattern of tears in the wing's skin that seems to be an expression
of the same underlying math  that generates repeating vortices in a wake, or
swirls  in a Mandelbrot set. Charlene and his friends used to heckle him for
being a Platonist,  but everywhere he goes  he sees the same few ideal forms
shadowed in the physical world. Maybe he's just stupid or something.
     The  house lacks  a woman's touch. Randy gathers, from hints dropped by
Chester, that the TWA has not turned out to be the conversation starter that
he had hoped it would be. He is considering building fake ceilings over some
of the house's partitions so that they will feel more like rooms,  which, he
admits, might make "some people" feel  more  comfortable there and open  the
possibility  of  their  committing  themselves  to "an  extended  stay."  So
evidently  he is in early negotiations with  some  kind of  female, which is
good news.
     "Chester, two  years  ago you sent me e mail about a  project you  were
launching to build replicas of early computers. You wanted information about
my grandfather's work."
     "Yeah," Chester  says.  "You  want to see that stuff?  It's been on the
back burner, but "
     "I just inherited some of his notebooks," Randy says.
     Chester's eyebrows go up. Amy  glances out the window; her  hair, skin,
and  clothes take  on a pronounced reddish tinge from  Doppler effect as she
drops out of the conversation at relativistic velocity.
     "I want to know if you have a functioning ETC card reader."
     Chester snorts. "That's all?"
     "That's all."
     "You want a 1932 Mark III card reader? Or a 1938 Mark IV? Or a "
     "Does it make any difference? They all read the same cards, right?"
     "Yeah, pretty much."
     "I have some  cards  from circa 1945 that I would like to have read out
onto a floppy disk that I can take home."
     Chester picks up a cellphone the size  of  a gherkin and begins to prod
it. "I'll call my card man," he says. "Retired ETC engineer. Lives on Mercer
Island. Comes up  here on  his  boat a couple times  a week and tinkers with
this stuff. He'll be really excited to meet you."
     While Chester is conversing with  his card man,  Amy meets Randy's eyes
and gives  him a look that is almost perfectly  unreadable.  She seems a bit
deflated. Worn down.  Ready to  go home. Her very unwillingness to show  her
feelings  confirms this.  Before  this trip, Amy  would  have agreed that it
takes all kinds to  make a world.  She'd still assent to it now. But Randy's
been showing her  some  practical applications of that  concept, in the last
few days, that are going to take her a while to fit into her world view. Or,
more importantly, into her Randy view. And sure enough, the moment Chester's
off the phone, she's asking if she can use it to call the airlines. There is
only a momentary upward flick of the eyes towards the  TWA. And once Chester
gets over his astonishment that anyone still uses  voice technology  to make
airline reservations  in  this  day and age,  he takes  her  to  the nearest
computer (there is a fully outfitted UNIX machine in every room) and patches
into the airline databases directly  and begins  searching  for the  optimal
route  back  home.  Randy goes  and  stares  out  the  window at  the chilly
whitecaps slapping  the mud shore and  fights  the urge to just stay here in
Seattle,  which is a town where he could  be very happy. Behind  him Chester
and Amy  keep saying "Manila," and it sounds ridiculously exotic and hard to
reach. Randy thinks that he  is marginally smarter than Chester and would be
even richer if he'd only stayed here.
     A fast white boat comes  larruping around the point from  the direction
of Mercer Island and banks towards him. Randy  sets down his cold coffee and
goes out to  his car and retrieves  a  certain trunk  a  lovely gift  from a
delighted  Aunt  Nina.  It is  full  of  certain  old  treasures,  like  his
grandfather's high  school  physics notebooks. He sets aside (for example) a
box labeled HARVARD  WATERHOUSE PRIME  FACTOR CHALLENGE '49  52 to reveal  a
stack of bricks, neatly wrapped in  paper that has  gone gold with age, each
consisting  of  a  short  stack  of  ETC  cards, and each  labeled  ARETHUSA
INTERCEPTS  with a  date  from 1944  or  '45. They  have  been in  suspended
animation for more than fifty years, stored on a dead medium, and now  Randy
is going to breathe life  into them again,  and  maybe send them out on  the
Net,  a  few  strands of fossil DNA  broken out of  their  amber shells  and
released in the world again.
     Probably  they will fail and die,  but if they flourish, it should make
Randy's  life a little  more  interesting. Not  that it's devoid of interest
now, but it is easier to introduce new complications than to resolve the old
ones.


     Chapter 73 ROCK


     Bundok is  good  rock;  whoever picked  it must have  known this.  That
basalt is so strong that Goto Dengo can  carve into it any system of tunnels
that  he desires. As long as he observes a few basic engineering principles,
he need not worry about tunnels collapsing.
     Of course, cutting holes  into such rock is hard work. But Captain Noda
and Lieutenant Mori have provided  him with an unlimited supply  of  Chinese
laborers.  At first the chatter of their drills drowns out the sounds of the
jungle. Later, as  they burrow into the  earth, it fades  to a thick tamping
beat,  leaving only the buzzing drone of the air compressors.  Even at night
they work by the dim  light of lanterns,  which  cannot penetrate the canopy
overhead. Not that MacArthur is sending observation planes over Luzon in the
middle of the  night, but work lights  shining  up on the  mountain would be
noticed by the lowland Filipinos.
     The inclined shaft connecting  the bottom of  Lake Yamamoto to Golgotha
is by far the longest part of the complex, but it need not have a very great
diameter: just big enough for a single worker to worm  his way up to the end
and operate his drill. Before the lake is created, Goto Dengo has a crew dig
the extreme  upper  end  of  that  shaft,  tunneling out and down  from  the
riverbank  with  a  dip  angle  of  some  twenty  degrees.  This  excavation
continually fills up with water it is  effectively  a well and removing  the
waste rock is murder, because it all has to be hauled uphill. So when it has
proceeded for  some  five meters, Goto Dengo has the opening sealed  up with
stones and mortar.
     Then he  has the  latrines'  filled  in, and the area  around  the lake
cleared  of workers. They can  do nothing now but contaminate the place with
evidence. Summer has arrived,  the  rainy season on Luzon, and he is worried
that rain will find the ruts worn into the soil by the Chinese workers' feet
and  turn  them into gullies, impossible to  conceal.  But the unusually dry
weather holds, and vegetation rapidly takes root on the bare ground.
     Goto  Dengo is  faced with a challenge that would seem  familiar to the
designer of a garden back home:  he needs to create an  artificial formation
that seems  natural. It  needs to look as  though a boulder rolled down  the
mountain  after  an earthquake  and  wedged  itself  in a bottleneck of  the
Yamamoto River. Other  rocks, and the  logs of dead trees, piled up  against
it, forming a natural dam that created the lake.
     He finds the boulder he  needs sitting in the middle  of  the  riverbed
about a kilometer upstream. Dynamite would only shatter it, and so he brings
in a stout crew of  workers with iron levers, and  they  get it  rolling. It
goes a few meters and stops.
     This is discouraging, but the workers have the  idea now.  Their leader
is Wing  the  bald  Chinese  man  who  helped Goto Dengo bury the corpse  of
Lieutenant  Ninomiya.  He has the mysterious physical strength that seems to
be common among bald  men, and he has a kind of mesmerizing leadership power
over the other Chinese. He somehow manages to  get them excited about moving
the boulder. Of course, they have to move it, because Goto Dengo  has let it
be known that he wants it moved, and if they don't, Lieutenant Mori's guards
will shoot them on the spot. But above and beyond this, they seem to welcome
the challenge. Certainly  standing in cool running  water beats working down
in the mineshafts of Golgotha.
     The boulder is in place three days later. The  water divides around it.
More boulders  follow, and the river begins to pool. Trees do not  naturally
sprout  from  lakes, and so Goto  Dengo has  workers fell the  ones that are
standing here not with axes, though. He shows them how to excavate the roots
one at  a time, like archaeologists digging up a skeleton,  so that it looks
as if the trees were uprooted during a  typhoon. These are piled  up against
the boulders,  and smaller stones  and gravel follow. Suddenly the level  of
Lake Yamamoto begins to rise. The dam leaks, but the leaks peter out as more
gravel  and clay are dumped in behind it.  Goto  Dengo is not above plugging
troublesome holes with sheets of tin, as long as it's down where no one will
ever see it. When the lake has reached its desired level, the only sign it's
manmade is a pair of wires trailing up onto  its shore, rooted in demolition
charges molded into the concrete plug on its bottom.
     Golgotha is cut into a ridge of basalt that is flung out from  the base
of the mountain  like a buttress  root from the  trunk of a jungle tree that
separates the watersheds of the Yamamoto and  Tojo Rivers. Moving southwards
from the summit of Calvary, then, one would pass through the teeming bowl of
its extinct  crater  first, over the remains  of its  southern rim, and then
onto the gradual downward slope of a much larger mountain on which Calvary's
cinder cone  is just a blemish, like a  wart on  a nose.  The small Yamamoto
River  runs generally parallel  to the Tojo  on the other side of the basalt
ridge,  but descends  more gradually, so that its elevation gets higher  and
higher  above that  of  the  Tojo  River  as both work  their  way  down the
mountain. At the site  of Lake Yamamoto, it  is fifty meters above the Tojo.
By drilling  the connecting tunnel in a  southeasterly direction rather than
straight east underneath the ridge, one can  bypass a chain of  rapids and a
waterfall on the Tojo which drop that river's  elevation to almost a hundred
meters beneath the bottom of the lake.
     When  The General comes to inspect the works, Goto Dengo astonishes him
by taking him  up the Tojo River in the same Mercedes he used to  drive down
from Manila. By this point, the workers have constructed  a single lane road
that leads  from  the prison camp up the rocky bed of the river to Golgotha.
"Fortune  has smiled  on our endeavor by giving us a dry summer," Goto Dengo
explains. "With the water low, the riverbed makes an ideal roadway the  rise
in  altitude is gentle  enough for the heavy trucks that we will be bringing
in. When we are  finished, we will create a low dam near the site  that will
conceal  the most  obvious signs  of our work.  When the river  rises to its
normal height, there will be no visible trace that men were ever here."
     "It is  a good idea," The  General concedes, then mumbles  something to
his aide about using the  same technique at the  other  sites. The aide nods
and hais and writes it down.
     A kilometer into the jungle,  the banks rise up into  vertical walls of
stone  that climb higher and  higher above  the  water's  level  until  they
actually overhang the river. There is  a hollow in the  stony  channel where
the  river  broadens out; just  upstream is the waterfall. At this point the
road makes a left turn directly into the rock wall, and stops. Everyone gets
out of the  Mercedes: Goto Dengo, The General,  his  aide, and Captain Noda.
The river runs over their feet, ankle deep.
     A  mouse hole has been dug into the rock here. It has a flat bottom and
an arched ceiling. A six year  old could stand upright in here,  but  anyone
taller will have to stoop. A pair of iron rails  runs into the opening. "The
main drift," says Goto Dengo.
     "This is it?"
     "The opening is  small  so that we can conceal it later," Captain  Noda
explains, cringing, "but it gets wider inside."
     The General looks pissed off and nods. Led by Goto Dengo, all four  men
squat and  duck  walk into  the tunnel, pushed by a steady  current  of air.
"Notice the excellent  ventilation,"  Captain  Noda enthuses, and Goto Dengo
grins proudly.
     Ten  meters in, they are able to stand up. Here, the drift has the same
vaulted shape, but it's six feet high and six wide, buttressed by reinforced
concrete arches that they have poured in wooden forms on the floor. The iron
rails run far away into blackness.  A train of  three mine cars sits on them
sheet  metal boxes  filled with shattered basalt. "We  remove waste  by hand
tramming," Goto Dengo  explains.  "This drift, and  the rails, are perfectly
level, to keep the cars from running out of control."
     The  General grunts. Clearly he has no respect  for the  intricacies of
mine engineering.
     "Of course, we will  use  the same cars to move the,  er, material into
the vault when it arrives," Captain Noda says.
     "Where did this waste come from?" The General demands. He is pissed off
that they are still digging at this late stage.
     "From our longest and most  difficult  tunnel the inclined shaft to the
bottom of Lake Yamamoto," says Goto Dengo. "Fortunately, we can continue  to
extend that shaft even while the  material is  being loaded  into the vault.
Outgoing cars will carry waste from the shaft work, incoming cars will carry
the material."
     He stops to thrust his finger into a drill hole in the ceiling. "As you
can  see, all  of the holes are ready for the demolition  charges.  Not only
will  those  charges  bring  down  the  ceiling, but  they  will  leave  the
surrounding rock so rotten as to make horizontal excavation very difficult."
     They walk down the main drift for fifty meters. "We are in the heart of
the  ridge now,"  Goto  Dengo  says,  "halfway  between the two rivers.  The
surface is  a hundred meters straight up." In front of  them, the  string of
electric  lights  terminates  in  blackness. Goto Dengo  gropes for  a  wall
switch.
     "The vault," he says, and hits the switch.
     The tunnel  has abruptly broadened into a flat bottomed chamber with an
arched ceiling, shaped like a Quonset hut, lined with concrete, the concrete
massively  ribbed every couple of meters. The floor  of the vault is perhaps
the size of  a tennis  court. The only  opening  is a  small  vertical shaft
rising up from the  middle of the ceiling, just barely big enough to contain
a ladder and a human body.
     The General folds his arms  and waits while the aide goes around with a
tape measure, verifying the dimensions.
     "We go  up," says Goto Dengo, and, without waiting for  The  General to
bristle,  mounts the ladder up  into  the shaft.  It only goes  up for a few
meters, and then they are in another drift with another narrow gauge railway
on the floor. This one's shored up with  timbers  hewn from  the surrounding
jungle.
     "The haulage  level, where we  move rock around," Goto  Dengo explains,
when they have  all convened at the top of the  ladder. "You asked about the
waste in those cars. Let me show you  how it got there." He leads the  group
down the tracks for twenty or thirty meters,  past a train of battered cars.
"We are headed northwest, towards Lake Yamamoto."
     They reach the end of the drift, where another narrow shaft pierces the
ceiling. A fat reinforced  hose runs up into  it, compressed air keening out
through tiny leaks. The sound of drills can be heard, from very far away. "I
would  not  recommend  that  you look  up this  shaft,  because stray  rocks
occasionally come down from where we  are  working," he warns. "But  if  you
looked straight up, you would see that,  about  ten meters  above  us,  this
shaft comes  up into the floor  of a narrow inclined shaft that  goes uphill
that way " he motions northwest " towards the lake, and  downhill that way "
He turns a hundred and eighty degrees, back towards the vault.
     "Toward the fool's chamber," The General says, with relish.
     "Hai!" answers Goto Dengo. "As we extend the shaft up  toward the lake,
we rake the broken rock downhill with an iron hoe drawn by a winch, and when
it reaches the top of  this vertical shaft that you see  here, it falls down
into  waiting cars. From here  we can drop it down into  the main  vault and
from there hand tram it to the exit."
     "What are you doing with all the waste?" asks The General.
     "Spreading  some of it  down the riverbed, using it to make the roadway
that we  drove up  on.  Some of  it is  stored  above  to  backfill  various
ventilation shafts. Some  is being crushed into sand for a trap which I will
explain later."  Goto  Dengo  leads them back in the direction  of  the main
vault,  but  they pass  by  the  ladder  and turn  into another  drift, then
another. Then  the drifts become  narrow and cramped  again, like the one at
the entrance.  "Please forgive  me for leading you  into what seems  like  a
three  dimensional  maze,"  Goto  Dengo  says. "This  part  of  Golgotha  is
intentionally confusing.  If a thief  ever manages to break into  the fool's
chamber  from  above, he  will  expect to  find a  drift  through  which the
material was loaded into it. We have left one  there for him to find a false
drift  that  seems  to  lead away toward the Tojo River. Actually,  a  whole
complex  of false drifts and shafts that will all be demolished by  dynamite
when we are finished. It will be so difficult, not to mention dangerous, for
the thief to work his way through so much rotten rock, that he will probably
be satisfied with what he finds in the fool's chamber."
     He keeps pausing and looking back at The General, expecting him to tire
of this, but  clearly The  General  is getting a second wind.  Captain Noda,
taking up the rear, gestures him onwards impatiently.
     The  maze  takes  some  time  to  negotiate  and  Goto  Dengo,  like  a
prestidigitator, tries to fill up the time with some convincing  patter. "As
I'm sure you understand, shafts and  drifts must be engineered to counteract
lithostatic forces."
     "What?"
     "They must be  strong enough to  support the  rock  overhead. Just as a
building must be strong enough to hold up its own roof."
     "Of course," says The General.
     "If you have two parallel drifts, one above the other like storeys in a
building, then the rock in  between them the floor or the ceiling, depending
on which way you look at it  must be thick enough to  support itself. In the
structure we are  walking through, the rock is just barely thick enough. But
when the demolition charges have been set off, the rock will be shattered so
that reconstructing these drifts will be a physical impossibility."
     "Excellent!" says The General, and again tells his  aide to make a note
of it apparently so that the other Goto Dengos in the other Golgothas can do
the same.
     At one  point a drift has  been plugged by  a wall made of rubble stuck
together  with mortar. Goto Dengo shines his lantern on it, lets the General
see the iron rails disappearing beneath the masonry. "To a thief coming down
from  the  fool's chamber, this will look like the main drift," he explains.
"But if he demolishes that wall, he dies."
     "Why?"
     "Because on the other side of that wall is a shaft that connects to the
lake  Yamamoto pipe. One blow from a sledgehammer and that wall will explode
from the water pressure that  will  be  on the  other side  of it. Then Lake
Yamamoto rushes forth from that hole like a tsunami."
     The General and his aide spend some time cackling over this one.
     Finally  they waddle  down a drift into a vault, half the dimensions of
the main vault, that is illuminated from above by dim bluish sky light. Goto
Dengo  turns  on  some  electric  lights  as well. "The  fool's  vault,"  he
announces. He points up  the vertical shaft in the ceiling. "Our ventilation
has been courtesy of this."  The  General peers  upwards and sees, a hundred
meters above them, a circle of radiant  green blue  jungle  quartered by the
spinning  swastika of  a  big  electric  fan. "Of course,  we would not want
thieves to find the fool's chamber too easily or it wouldn't fool anyone. So
we have added some features, up there, to make it interesting."
     "What sorts of features?" asks Captain  Noda, stepping crisply into his
role as straight man.
     "Anyone who attacks Golgotha will  attack from above to gain horizontal
access, the distance  is too  great.  This  means they  will have  to tunnel
downwards, either  through fresh rock  or through the column of  rubble with
which this ventilation  shaft  will  be filled. In either  case,  they  will
discover, when they are about halfway down, a stratum of sand, three to five
meters  in  depth, spread across the whole area. I  need  hardly  remind you
that, in  nature, pockets of sand are  never found in the  middle of igneous
rock!"
     Goto  Dengo begins  climbing up  the ventilation shaft.  Halfway to the
surface,  it comes  up  into  a  network of  small,  rounded, interconnected
chambers, whittled out of  the rock,  with fat pillars left in place to hold
up the ceiling. The pillars are so thick and numerous that it's not possible
to  see very far,  but when the others have arrived,  and Goto  Dengo begins
leading them  from  room  to room,  they learn that  this system of chambers
extends for a considerable distance.
     He takes them to a place where an  iron manhole is  set into  a hole in
the rock wall,  sealed  in place with tar. "There are a  dozen of these," he
says. "Each one leads to the Lake  Yamamoto shaft so pressurized water  will
be  behind  it.  The only thing  holding  them in  place  right  now  is tar
obviously not enough to hold back the pressure of  the lake  water. But when
we have  filled  these rooms  with sand,  the sand will hold the manholes in
place. But if  a thief breaks in and  removes the sand, the manhole explodes
out of its  seat and millions  of gallons of water force their way  into his
excavation."
     From there, another climb up the shaft takes them to the surface, where
Captain Noda's men are waiting to move the ventilation fan out of their way,
and his aide is waiting with bottles of water and a pot of green tea.
     They  sit at  a folding table and  refresh themselves. Captain Noda and
The  General talk about goings on  in Tokyo evidently The General  just flew
down from there a few days ago. The  General's aide performs calculations on
his clipboard.
     Finally, they hike up over the top of the ridge to take  a look at Lake
Yamamoto. The jungle  is so  thick  that they almost  have to fall  into  it
before they can see it. The  General pretends to be  surprised that it is an
artificial body of water. Goto Dengo takes this as a high commendation. They
stand, as people often will, at the edge of the water, and say nothing for a
few  minutes. The General  smokes a cigarette,  squinting through the  smoke
across  the lake,  and  then turns to  the  aide  and  nods.  This seems  to
communicate much to the aide, who turns to  face Captain  Noda and  pipes up
with a question: "What is the total number of workers?"
     "Now? Five hundred."
     "The tunnels were designed with this assumption?"
     Captain  Noda  shoots  an  uneasy  look  at  Goto  Dengo.  "I  reviewed
Lieutenant  Goto's  work   and  found  that  it  was  compatible  with  that
assumption."
     "The  quality  of  the work is  the highest we  have  seen,"  the  aide
continues.
     "Thank you!"
     "Or expect to see," The General adds.
     "As a result, we may wish to increase the amount of material  stored at
this site."
     "I see."
     "Also . . . the schedule may have to be greatly accelerated."
     Captain Noda looks startled.
     "He has  landed on Leyte with  a  very great force,"  The  General says
bluntly, as if this had been expected for years.
     "Leyte!? But that is so close."
     "Precisely."
     "It is insane," Noda raves. "The Navy will crush him it is what we have
been waiting for all these years! The Decisive Battle!"
     The General and the  aide  stand uncomfortably for a  few long moments,
seemingly unable to speak. Then The  General fixes  Noda with a long, frigid
stare. "The Decisive Battle was yesterday."
     Captain  Noda  whispers,  "I see." He  suddenly looks  about ten  years
older, and he is not at a point in his life where he can spare ten years.
     "So. We  may  accelerate the work. We may  bring  more  workers for the
final phase of the operation," says the aide in a soft voice.
     "How many?"
     "The total may reach a thousand."
     Captain  Noda  stiffens,  grunts  out a  "Hai!"  and turns towards Goto
Dengo. "We will need more ventilation shafts."
     "But sir, with all due respect, the complex is very well ventilated."
     "We will need more deep,  wide ventilation shafts," Captain  Noda says.
"Enough for an additional five hundred workers."
     "Oh."
     "Begin the work immediately."


     Chapter 74 THE MOST CIGARETTES


     To: randy@epiphyte.com
     From: cantrell@epiphyte.com
     Subject: Pontifex Transform: tentative verdict
     Randy.
     I forwarded the Pontifex transform to the Secret Admirers mailing  list
as soon as you forwarded it to  me, so it has been rattling around there for
a  couple  of  weeks now.  Several very  smart people  have  analyzed it for
weaknesses, and  found no  obvious flaws. Everyone agrees that the  specific
steps involved in this transform are a  little bit peculiar, and wonders who
came up with them and how but that is not uncommon with good cryptosystems.
     So the verdict, for  now,  is that root@eruditorum.org knows  what he's
doing notwithstanding his strange fixation on the number 54.
     – Cantrell
     "Andrew Loeb," Avi says.
     He and Randy are enduring some kind of a forced march up the  beach  in
Pacifica; Randy's not sure why. Over and over again, Randy  is surprised  by
Avi's  physical vigor. Avi looks  like he  is  wasting away  from some vague
disease invented as a plot device by a screenwriter. He is kind of tall, but
this just  makes him seem more perilously  drawn  out. His slender body is a
tenuous link between huge feet and a huge head; he has the profile of a lump
of  silly  putty that has been  drawn apart  until the middle part is just a
tendril.  But he can stomp  up a beach like  a Marine.  It is January, after
all, and according to the Weather Channel there is this flume of water vapor
originating in a tropical storm about halfway between Nippon  and New Guinea
and jetting directly across the Pacific and taking a violent left turn  just
about  here. The  waves  thrashing the beach, not that far  away, are so big
that Randy has to look slightly upwards to see their crests.
     He has been telling  Avi all about Chester, and  Avi has (Randy thinks)
used this as a segue into reminiscing about the old days back in Seattle. It
is  somewhat unusual  for Avi to do this; he  tends to  be very  disciplined
about having  any given  conversation be either  business  or  personal, but
never both at  once. "I'll never forget," Randy  says, "going up to the roof
of Andrew's building to talk  to him about the  software, thinking to myself
'gosh, this is  kind of fun,'  and watching him just slowly and gradually go
berserk  before my  eyes.  It  could almost  make  you  believe  in  demonic
possession."
     "Well, his dad apparently believed  in  it," Avi says. "It was his dad,
right?"
     "It's  been a  long  time. Yeah, I  think it was his  mom  who  was the
hippie, who  had him  in  this commune,  and then his  dad was  the  one who
extracted  him from there, forcibly he  brought in  these  paramilitary guys
from Northern Idaho to actually do the job they literally took Andrew out in
a bag and then  put him through  all kinds of  repressed memory  therapy  to
prove that he'd been Satanically ritually abused."
     This tweaks Avi's interest. "Do you think his dad was into the  militia
thing?"
     "I only met him once. During the lawsuit. He took my deposition. He was
just this Orange County white shoe lawyer, in a big practice with a bunch of
Asians  and Jews and Armenians. So  I  assumed  he  was just using the Aryan
Nations guys because they were convenient, and for sale."
     Avi nods, apparently finding that a satisfactory hypothesis. "So he was
probably not a Nazi. Did he believe in the Satanic ritual abuse?"
     "I  doubt it," Randy says. "Though after spending some time with Andrew
I found it  highly plausible. Do we have  to talk  about this?  Gives me the
creeps," Randy says. "Depresses me.
     "I recently learned what became of Andrew," Avi says.
     "I saw his web site a while ago."
     "I'm speaking of very recent developments."
     "Let me guess. Suicide?"
     "Nope."
     "Serial killer?"
     "Nope."
     "Thrown into prison for stalking someone?"
     "He is not dead or in prison," Avi says.
     "Hmmm. Is this anything to do with his hive mind?"
     "Nope. Are you aware that he went to law school?"
     "Yeah. Is this something to do with his legal career?"
     "It is."
     "Well,  if Andrew  Loeb  is  practicing  law,  it must  be  some really
annoying and socially nonconstructive form of it.  Probably  something to do
with suing people on light pretexts."
     "Excellent," Avi says. "You're getting warm now."
     "Okay, don't tell  me, let me think," Randy says. "Is  he practicing in
California?"
     "Yes."
     "Oh, well, I've got it, then."
     "You do?"
     "Yes.  Andrew  Loeb would be  one  of these  guys who gins up  minority
shareholder lawsuits against high tech companies."
     Avi smiles with his lips pressed tightly together, and nods.
     "He'd  be  perfect," Randy  continues,  "because  he  would be  a  true
believer. He  wouldn't think that he was just out there being an asshole. He
would really, truly,  sincerely believe that he was representing  this class
of  shareholders  who  had been Satanically  ritually  abused  by the people
running the company.  He would work thirty six hours at a stretch digging up
dirt on them. Corporate memories  that had been repressed. No trick would be
too dirty, because he would be on  the side of  righteousness. He would only
sleep or eat under medical orders."
     "I can see that you got to know him incredibly well," Avi says.
     "Wow! So, whom is he suing at the moment?"
     "Us," Avi says.
     There  is now this five minute stoppage in the conversation, and in the
hike, and possibly in some  of Randy's neurological processes. The color map
of his vision goes out of whack: everything's in extremely washed out shades
of yellow and purple.  Like  someone's  clammy  fingers are around his neck,
modulating the flow in his  carotids  to the bare minimum  needed to sustain
life. When  Randy finally  returns to full consciousness, the first thing he
does is to look down at his shoes, because he  is  convinced for some reason
that he  has sunk into the wet sand to his knees. But his shoes  are  barely
making an impression on the firmly packed sand.
     A  big wave collapses  into a sheet of foam that skims up the beach and
divides around his feet.
     "Gollum," Randy says.
     "Was that an utterance,  or some kind of physiological  transient?" Avi
says.
     "Gollum. Andrew is Gollum."
     "Well, Gollum is suing us."
     "Us, as in you and  me?" he asks. It takes Randy about a full minute of
time to  get these words around  his tongue. "He's suing  us over  the  game
company?"
     Avi laughs.
     "It's possible!" Randy says. "Chester told me that  the game company is
now like the size of Microsoft or something."
     "Andrew Loeb has filed a minority shareholder lawsuit against the board
of directors of Epiphyte(2) Corporation," Avi says.
     Randy's body has  now finally had time  to deploy  a  full on  fight or
flight reaction part of his genetic legacy as a stupendous badass. This must
have been very useful when saber toothed tigers tried to claw their way into
his  ancestors'  caves  but  is  doing  him  absolutely  no  good  in  these
circumstances.
     "On behalf of whom?"
     "Oh, come on, Randy. There aren't that many candidates."
     "Springboard Capital?"
     "You told me yourself that Andrew's dad  was a white shoe Orange County
lawyer. Now, archetypally, where would a  guy like  that put  his retirement
money?"
     "Oh, shit."
     "That's right.  Bob  Loeb, Andrew's dad, got in on AVCLA very early. He
and the Dentist have been sending each other Christmas cards for like twenty
years. And so when Bob Loeb's idiot son graduated from law school, Bob Loeb,
knowing full well that the kid was too much of a  head case to be employable
anywhere  else, paid a  call on Dr. Hubert Kepler, and Andrew's been working
for him ever since.
     "Fuck. Fuck!" Randy says. "All these years. Treading water."
     "How's that?"
     "That time in Seattle  during the  lawsuit was a  fucking  nightmare. I
came  out of  it  dead  broke,  without a house,  without anything except  a
girlfriend and a knowledge of UNIX."
     "Well,  that's something," Avi says. "Normally those  two are  mutually
exclusive."
     "Shut up," Randy says, "I'm trying to agonize."
     "Well, I think that  agonizing  is  so  fundamentally pathetic  that it
borders on funny," Avi says. "But please go ahead."
     "Now,  after all  those years all that fucking  work I'm  back  where I
started.  A  net worth  of  zero.  Except  this time I  don't  even  have  a
girlfriend per se."
     "Well,"  Avi says,  "to begin with,  I think it's  better  to aspire to
having Amy than to actually have Charlene."
     "Ouch! You are a cruel man."
     "Sometimes wanting is better than having."
     "Well, that's good news," Randy says brightly, "because "
     "Look at Chester. Would you rather be Chester, or you?"
     "Okay, okay."
     "Also, you have a substantial amount  of  stock in Epiphyte,  which I'm
quite convinced is worth something."
     "Well, that all depends on the lawsuit, right?" Randy says.  "Have  you
actually seen any of the documents?"
     "Of course I have," Avi says, irked. "I'm the president and  CEO of the
fucking corporation."
     "Well, what's his beef? What's the pretext for the lawsuit?"
     "Apparently the Dentist is  convinced  that Semper Marine  has stumbled
upon some  kind of vast hoard of sunken war gold, as  a direct  byproduct of
the work they did for us."
     "He knows this, or he suspects this?"
     "Well," Avi  says,  "reading between  the  lines, I gather that he only
suspects it. Why do you ask?"
     "Never mind for now but he's going after Semper Marine, too?"
     "No! That would rule out the lawsuit he's filing against Epiphyte."
     "What do you mean?"
     "His point  is that if Epiphyte had been competently managed if we  had
exercised  due  diligence then we would have drawn up  a much more  thorough
contract with Semper Marine than we did."
     "We've got a contract with Semper Marine."
     "Yes," Avi  says, "and Andrew  Loeb is disparaging  it as little better
than   a  handshake  agreement.  He  asserts  that  we  should  have  turned
negotiations  over  to  a  big time law  firm with expertise in maritime and
salvage law. That such a  law firm  would  have  anticipated the possibility
that the sidescan sonar plots created by Semper Marine for the cable project
would reveal something like a sunken wreck."
     "Oh, Jesus Christ!"
     Avi gets a look of forced patience. "Andrew has  produced, as exhibits,
actual copies of  actual  contracts  that  other companies made  in  similar
circumstances,  which all contain such language. He  argues it's practically
boilerplate stuff, Randy."
     "I.e.,  that it's gross  negligence  to  have failed  to put  it in our
contract with Semper."
     "Precisely.  Now,  Andrew's lawsuit  can't go anywhere unless there are
some damages. Can you guess what the damages are in this case?"
     "If we'd made  a better contract, then Epiphyte would own  a  share  of
what is salvaged from the submarine. As it is, we, and the shareholders, get
nothing. Which constitutes obvious damages."
     "Andrew Loeb himself could not have put it any better."
     "Well,  what do  they  expect  us  to  do  about it? It's  not like the
corporation has deep pockets. We can't give them a cash settlement."
     "Oh,  Randy,  it's not about that. It's not like the  Dentist needs our
cigar box full of petty cash. It's a control thing."
     "He wants a majority share in Epiphyte."
     "Yes. Which is a good thing!"
     Randy throws back his head and laughs.
     "The Dentist can have any  company  he wants," says Avi,  "but he wants
Epiphyte. Why? Because we are badass, Randy. We have got the Crypt contract.
We  have got the talent.  The  prospect of running the world's first  proper
data  haven,  and  creating the  world's  first  proper digital currency, is
fantastically exciting."
     "Well, I can't tell you how excited I am."
     "You  should never forget what a  fundamentally strong position  we are
in. We are like the  sexiest girl in the world. And all of this bad behavior
on the Dentist's part is just his way of  showing that he wants to mate with
us."
     "And control us."
     "Yes.  I'm sure  that Andrew has been ordered to produce an outcome  in
which we are  found negligent, and liable for  damage. And then upon looking
into our books the court will find that  the damages exceed our  ability  to
pay. At which point the Dentist will magnanimously agree to take his payment
in the form of Epiphyte stock."
     "Which  will strike everyone  as  poetic  justice because  it will also
enable  him  to  take  control  of the  company  and  make sure it's managed
competently."
     Avi nods.
     "So, that's why he's not going up against Semper  Marine. Because if he
recovers anything from them, it renders his beef against us null and void."
     "Right.  Although, that would not  prevent him from suing  them  later,
after he's gotten what he wanted from us."
     "So Jesus! This is perverse," Randy says. "Every valuable item that the
Shaftoes pull up from that wreck actually gets us in deeper trouble."
     "Every nickel that the  Shaftoes make is a  nickel  of damages that  we
allegedly inflicted on the shareholders."
     "I wonder if we can get the Shaftoes to suspend the salvage operation."
     "Andrew  Loeb has  no case  against us," Avi says, "unless he can prove
that the contents of that wreck are  worth something. If  the Shaftoes  keep
bringing stuff up, that's easy.  If they stop bringing stuff up, then Andrew
will have to establish the value of the wreck in some other way."
     Randy grins. "That's  going  to be really difficult for him to do, Avi.
The Shaftoes don't even know what's down there. Andrew probably doesn't even
have the coordinates of the wreck."
     "There is a latitude and longitude specified in the lawsuit."
     "Fuck! To how many decimal places?"
     "I  don't  remember. The precision didn't reach out and poke me  in the
eye."
     "How the  hell did the  Dentist learn about  this wreck? Doug has  been
trying  to  keep it  secret. And he  knows  a few  things  about operational
secrecy."
     "You yourself told  me," Avi says, "that the Shaftoes have brought in a
German television producer. That doesn't sound like secrecy to me."
     "But it  is. They flew this woman  into Manila, put her on  board Glory
IV. Allowed her to take  minimal baggage. Went through her  stuff to  verify
she didn't have  a  GPS. Took her  out into the  South  China Sea and ran in
circles for a  while so she couldn't even  use dead reckoning. Then took her
to the site."
     "I've been on Glory. It's got GPS readouts all over the place."
     "No, they didn't let her see any  of that stuff.  There's  no way a guy
like Doug Shaftoe would screw this up."
     "Well," Avi says, "the Germans aren't the most plausible source for the
leak anyway. Do you remember the Bolobolos?"
     "Filipino  syndicate that used to pimp for Victoria Vigo, the Dentist's
wife. Probably set up the liaison between her and Kepler. Hence, presumably,
still has influence over the Dentist."
     "I  would  phrase  it differently. I would  say  that they have a  long
standing  relationship  with the Dentist that probably  works both ways. And
I'm thinking that they got  wind of the salvage operation  somehow.  Maybe a
high  ranking  Bolobolo  overheard  something   in  the   German  television
producer's  hotel. Maybe  a  low ranking one has been  keeping an eye on the
Shaftoes, taking note of the special equipment they've been shipping in."
     Randy nods. "That works. Supposedly the Bolobolos have  a  big presence
at  NAIA.  They would  notice something like  an underwater ROV  being  rush
shipped to Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe. So I'll buy that."
     "Okay."
     "But that wouldn't give them the latitude and longitude."
     "I'll bet you half of my  valuable stock in  Epiphyte  Corp. that  they
used SPOT for that."
     "SPOT? Oh. Rings a bell. French photo imaging satellite?"
     "Yeah. You can buy time on SPOT for a very reasonable fee. And it's got
enough resolution to distinguish Glory IV from, say, a container ship  or an
oil  tanker.  So all they had  to  do  was  wait  until their  spies  on the
waterfront told them that Glory was out to  sea, outfitted for salvage work,
and then use SPOT to locate them."
     "What  kind  of precision can  SPOT provide  in terms  of latitude  and
longitude?" Randy asks.
     "That's a  very good question. I'll have  someone  look  into  it," Avi
says.
     "If it's to within a hundred  meters, then Andrew can find the wreck by
just sending  some people there. If it's much more than that,  he'll have to
go out and do a survey of his own."
     "Unless he subpoenas the information from us," Avi says.
     "I'd like  to  see  Andrew  Loeb  go  up against the  Philippine  legal
system."
     "You aren't in the Philippines remember?"
     Randy swallows and it comes out sounding like gollum again.
     "Do you have any information about that wreck on your laptop?"
     "If I do, it's encrypted."
     "So he'll just subpoena your encryption key."
     "What if I forget my encryption key?"
     "Then it's further evidence of how incompetent you are as a manager."
     "Still, it's better than "
     "What about e mail?"  Avi asks. "Have you ever sent the location of the
wreck in an e mail message? Have you ever put it into a file?"
     "Probably. But it's all encrypted."
     This doesn't seem to ease the sudden tension on Avi's face.
     "Why do you ask?" Randy says.
     "Because,"  Avi  says,  pivoting to  face in  the general  direction of
downtown Los Altos. "All of a sudden I am thinking about Tombstone."
     "Through which passeth all of our e mail," Randy says.
     "On whose hard drives all of our files are stored," Avi says.
     "Which is  located  in  the State  of California,  within easy subpoena
range."
     "Suppose you  cc'd all of  us on  the  same e  mail message," Avi says.
"Cantrell's software, running on Tombstone, would have  made multiple copies
of that message  and encrypted each  one  separately  using the  recipient's
public key. These would have been mailed out to the recipients. Most of whom
keep copies of their old e mail messages on Tombstone."
     Randy's nodding. "So if Andrew  could subpoena Tombstone, he could find
all of  those copies and insist  that you,  Beryl, Tom, John,  and Eb supply
your decryption keys. And if all of you claimed you had forgotten your keys,
then you are obviously lying through your teeth."
     "Contempt of court for the whole gang," Avi says.
     "The most cigarettes," Randy says. This is a contraction of the phrase,
"We could  end up  in prison married to the guy with the  most  cigarettes,"
which  Avi coined during their earlier Andrew related legal troubles and had
so many occasions to repeat that it was eventually reduced to this vestigial
three words. Hearing  it come out of  his own mouth  takes Randy  back a few
years,  and fills him with a spirit of defiant nostalgia. Although he  would
feel considerably more defiant if they had actually won that case.
     "I  am  just  trying  to  figure  out  whether  Andrew  would  know  of
Tombstone's existence," Avi says.
     He and Randy begin  following  their own footprints back towards  Avi's
house. Randy notices that his stride is longer  now. "Why not? The Dentist's
due diligence people have been lodged in  our butt cracks ever since we gave
them those shares."
     "I detect some resentment in your voice, Randy."
     "Not at all."
     "Perhaps you disagree with my decision to settle the earlier  breach of
contract lawsuit by giving the Dentist some Epiphyte shares."
     "It was a sad day. But there was no other way out of the situation."
     "Okay."
     "If  I'm going to resent  you for that, Avi, then you should resent  me
for not having made a better contract with Semper Marine."
     "Ah, but you did! Handshake deal. Ten percent. Right?"
     "Right. Let's talk about Tombstone."
     "Tombstone's  in  a  closet that  we  are  subletting from  Novus  Ordo
Seclorum Systems,"  Avi says.  "I can  tell you  the due diligence boys have
never been to Ordo."
     "We must be paying rent to Ordo, then. They'd see the rent checks."
     "A trivial amount of money. For storage space."
     "The computer's a  Finux  box.  A donated  piece  of junk  running free
software. No paper trail there," Randy says. "What about the T1 line?"
     "They would have to be aware of the  T1  line," Avi says. "That is both
more expensive and more interesting than renting some storage space. And  it
generates a paper trail a mile wide."
     "But do they know where it goes?"
     "They would only need to go to the telephone company and ask them where
the line is terminated."
     "Which would give them what? The street  address of  an office building
in  Los Altos,"  Randy  says. "There are, what,  five office suites  in that
building."
     "But if  they were smart  and I'm  afraid  that Andrew does  have  this
particular kind of intelligence  they would notice  that one of those suites
is leased by Novus Ordo Seclorum Systems Inc. a highly distinctive name that
also appears on those rent checks."
     "And a subpoena against Ordo  would  follow immediately,"  Randy  says.
"When did you first hear about this lawsuit, by the way?"
     "I got  the call first thing  this morning. You  were still sleeping. I
can't believe you drove down from Seattle in one push. It's like  a thousand
miles."
     "I was trying to emulate Amy's cousins."
     "You described them as teenagers."

     "But I don't think that teenagers are the way they are because of their
age. It's because they have nothing to lose.  They simultaneously have a lot
of  time  on their  hands  and yet are very impatient  to get  on with their
lives."
     "And that's kind of where you are right now?"
     "It's exactly where I am."
     "Horniness too."
     "Yeah. But there are ways to deal with that."
     "Don't look at me that way," Avi says. "I don't masturbate."
     "Never?"
     "Never. Formally gave it up. Swore off it."
     "Even when you're on the road for a month?"
     "Even then."
     "Why on earth would you do such a thing, Avi?"
     "Enhances  my  devotion to Devorah. Makes our sex better.  Gives me  an
incentive to get back home."
     "Well, that's very touching," Randy  says, "and it might even be a good
idea."
     "I'm quite certain that it is."
     "But it's more masochism than I'm really  willing  to  shoulder at this
point in my life."
     "Why? Are you afraid that it would push you into "
     "Irrational behavior? Definitely."
     "And by that," Avi says,  "you mean, actually committing to Amy in some
way.
     "I  know you think that you just  kicked me  in the nuts rhetorically,"
Randy says,  "but your premise is totally wrong. I'm ready to commit  to her
at any time. But  for god's sake, I'm not even sure she's heterosexual. It'd
be madness to put a lesbian in charge of my ejaculatory functions."
     "If  she were a lesbian exclusively she'd have had the basic decency to
tell you by now," Avi says. "My feeling about  Amy is that she steers by her
gut feelings, and her gut feeling is that  you just don't  have the level of
passion that a woman like her  probably would like to see  as a prerequisite
for getting involved."
     "Whereas,  if I  stopped masturbating, I would  become such a  deranged
maniac that she could trust me."
     "Exactly. That's exactly how women think," Avi says.
     "Don't you have some kind  of rule against mixing business and personal
conversations?"
     "This is essentially a  business conversation in that it  is about your
state of mind, and your current level of personal desperation, and  what new
options it may have opened up for you," Avi says.
     They walk for five minutes without saying anything.
     Randy says,  "I  have  a  feeling  that  we are  about to  get  into  a
conversation about tampering with evidence."
     "How  interesting that  you should  bring  that up. What's your feeling
about it?"
     "I'm  against it,"  Randy  says. "But to  beat Andrew  Loeb, I would do
anything."
     "The most cigarettes," Avi points out.
     "First, we  have  to  establish  that it's necessary,"  Randy says. "If
Andrew already knows where the wreck is, why bother?"
     "Agreed. But  if he has only  a vague idea,"  Avi says, "then Tombstone
becomes perhaps very important if the information is stored on Tombstone."
     "It almost certainly is," Randy  says. "Because of my GPS signature.  I
know I sent  at  least one e mail message from Glory while we were  anchored
directly over the wreck. The latitude and longitude will be right there."
     "Well,  if  that's  the  case, then  this  could  actually  be kind  of
significant," Avi says. "Because if Andrew gets the exact coordinates of the
wreck,  he can send divers down and do an  inventory  and come up with  some
actual figures to use in  the lawsuit. He can do this  all very quickly. And
if  those  figures exceed  about half  the value of Epiphyte,  which frankly
wouldn't  be  very  difficult, then  we  become  indentured servants  of the
Dentist."
     "Avi, it's full of fucking gold bars," Randy says.
     "It is?"
     "Yes. Amy told me."
     It  is  Avi's turn  to  come to a  stop for a while and make swallowing
noises.
     "Sorry,  I would have  mentioned it earlier," Randy says, "but I didn't
know it was relevant until now.
     "How did Amy become aware of this?"
     "Night before last, before she climbed on the plane at SeaTac, I helped
her check her e  mail. Her father sent  her a message saying that a  certain
number of intact Kriegsmarine dinner plates had been found on the submarine.
This was a prearranged code for gold bars."
     "You said 'full of fucking gold bars.' Could you translate that into an
actual number, like in terms of dollars?"
     "Avi, who gives a shit? I think we  can agree that if the same thing is
discovered by Andrew Loeb, we're finished."
     "Wow!" Avi says. "So, in this, a hypothetical  person who was not above
tampering with evidence would certainly have a strong motive."
     "It is make or break," Randy agrees.
     They stop conversing for a while because  they now have to  dodge  cars
across the  Pacific Coast  Highway,  and there  is  this unspoken  agreement
between  them that not getting hit  by speeding  vehicles merits one's  full
attention. They end up running across the last couple  of lanes  in order to
exploit  a fortuitous break in  the northbound traffic. Then neither of them
especially  feels like dropping  back  to  a walk, so they run all  the  way
across the parking lot of the neighborhood grocery store and into the wooded
creek valley where Avi has his house. They are  back at  the house directly,
and then Avi points significantly at the ceiling, which is his way of saying
that they had better  assume the  house is bugged now. Avi walks over to his
answering machine, which is blinking, and ejects the incoming message  tape.
He  shoves  it in his pocket and  strides  across  the house's living  room,
ignoring frosty glares from one of his Israeli nannies, who doesn't like him
to  wear shoes inside  the house. Avi scoops a brightly colored  plastic box
off the floor. It has a handle, and rounded corners, and big bright buttons,
and a microphone trailing behind it on  a  coiled yellow cord. Avi continues
through the patio doors without breaking  stride, the microphone bouncing up
and down behind him on its helical cord. Randy follows him outside, across a
strip of dead grass, and  into  a grove of cypress trees. They keep  walking
until they have dropped into a  little  dell that shields them from view  of
the street. Then Avi squats down and ejects a Raffi tape from the little kid
tape recorder and shoves in his incoming message tape, rewinds it, and plays
it.
     "Hi, Avi? This  is Dave?  Calling from Novus Ordo Seclorum Systems? I'm
the, uh, president  here, you  might remember? You have this computer in our
wiring closet? Well, we  just, like, got  some visitors  here? Like, guys in
suits? And they said that they wanted to see that computer? And, like, if we
handed it over to them right away  they would be  totally cool about it? But
if we  didn't,  they'd come  back with a subpoena and with cops and turn the
place inside out and just take it? So, now we're playing stupid? Please call
me."
     "The machine said there were two messages," Avi says.
     "Hi, Avi? This is Dave again? Playing stupid didn't work, and so now we
told them to fuck off. The head suit is very mad at us. He called me out. We
had a  really tense discussion in the McDonald's across  the street. He says
that I  am being stupid. That when they come and turn the  place upside down
looking  for  Tombstone,  that  it  will totally  fuck  up  Ordo's corporate
operations and inflict major losses on our  shareholders. He said that  this
would probably be grounds for a minority shareholder lawsuit  against me and
that he'd  be happy to  file that lawsuit. I  haven't told him yet that Ordo
has only five shareholders and that all of us work here.  The manager of the
McDonald's  asked us to leave  because  we were  disrupting some  children's
Happy  Meals.  I acted  scared and  told him that  I would go in and look at
Tombstone  and see  what would be  involved  in removing it.  Instead, I  am
calling you. Hal and  Rick and Carrie are  uploading  the entire contents of
our own system to a remote location  so  that when these  cops  come and rip
everything out nothing will be lost. Please call me. Good bye."
     "Gosh," Randy says, "I feel like shit for having inflicted all  of this
on Dave and his crew.
     "It'll be great publicity for them," Avi says. "I'm sure  Dave has half
a  dozen television crews  poised in  the McDonald's at this moment, stoking
themselves to the rim of insanity on thirty two ounce coffees."
     "Well . . . what do you think we should do?"
     "It is only fitting and proper that I should go there," Avi says.
     "You  know,  we could  just  'fess  up. Tell the Dentist  about the ten
percent handshake deal."
     "Randy,  get  this through your head. The  Dentist doesn't  give a shit
about the submarine. The Dentist doesn't give a shit about the submarine."
     "The Dentist doesn't give a shit about the submarine," Randy says.
     "So,  I  am going to replace this cassette," Avi says, popping the tape
out of the machine, "and start driving really really fast."
     "Well, I'm going to do what my conscience tells me to do," Randy says.
     "The most cigarettes," Avi says.
     "I'm not going to  do it  from  here,"  Randy says, "I'm going to do it
from the Sultanate of Kinakuta."


     Chapter 75 CHRISTMAS 1944


     Goto Dengo has pointed wing  out to Lieutenant  Mori, and Mori's  guard
troops, and made it clear that they are  not  to run their bayonets  through
Wing's torso and wiggle the blades around in his vitals unless there is some
exceptionally good reason, such as  suppressing all out rebellion. The  same
qualities that  make Wing valuable  to Goto  Dengo make him  the most likely
leader of any organized breakout attempt.
     As  soon  as the general and his  aide have departed from  Bundok, Goto
Dengo goes and  finds  Wing, who  is  supervising the boring of the diagonal
shaft towards Lake Yamamoto. He is one of those lead by example types and so
he is way up at the rock face, working a drill,  at the end of a few hundred
meters of tunnel so narrow that it has to be negotiated on  hands and knees.
Goto Dengo has to present himself at the Golgotha end of the tunnel and send
a messenger crawling up  into it,  wearing a rusty helmet to protect himself
from the shattered stone that drizzles down from the rock face.
     Wing appears fifteen minutes later, black  from the rock dust  that has
condensed  onto his  sweaty  skin,  red  where the skin has been abraded  or
slashed by  stone.  He devotes a few minutes to methodically hawking dust up
out of his lungs. Every  so often he rolls his  tongue like a peashooter and
fires a jet of  phlegm against the wall and clinically observes it run  down
the  stone.  Goto  Dengo stands  by  politely. These  Chinese have an entire
medical belief system  centering on phlegm,  and working in the  mines gives
them a lot to talk about.
     "Ventilation  not good?" Goto Dengo  says. Whorehouse  Shanghainese has
not equipped him with  certain technical  terms like "ventilation," so  Wing
has taught him the vocabulary.
     Wing  grimaces. "I want  to finish tunnel.  I do  not want to sink more
ventilation shaft. Waste of time!"
     The only way to keep the workers at  the rock face from suffocating  is
by sinking vertical air shafts from the  surface  down to the diagonal shaft
at intervals. They have devoted as much  effort to these as they have to the
diagonal itself, and were hoping they'd never have to dig another.
     "How much farther?" Goto Dengo asks, as Wing finishes another paroxysm.
Wing looks thoughtfully at the ceiling.  He has Golgotha  mapped out in  his
head better than its designer does. "Fifty meter."
     The designer cannot help grinning. "Is that all? Excellent."
     "We go fast now," Wing says proudly, his teeth gleaming for a moment in
the lamplight. Then  he seems to remember that  he  is  a slave laborer in a
death camp and the teeth disappear. "We can go faster if we dig in  straight
line."
     Wing is alluding to the fact that the diagonal to Lake Yamamoto:
     
     is laid  out  in the  blueprints  like  this.  But Goto  Dengo, without
changing the blueprints, has ordered that it actually be dug like this:
     
     These  bends  increase  the  length of  the  tunnel  by  quite  a  bit.
Furthermore  the  rubble tends to pile up in the flatter western section and
must be raked along by hand. The only people who know about the existence of
these bends are him, Wing,  and Wing's crew. The only person who understands
the true reason for their existence is Goto Dengo.
     "Do not dig in a straight line. Keep digging as I said."
     "Yes."
     "Also, you will need a new ventilation shaft."
     "More ventilation shaft! No . . ." Wing protests.
     The  ventilation shafts shown on the  plans, awkward zig zags  and all,
are bad enough.
     
     But Goto Dengo has several  times told Wing and his  crew to begin work
on  some  additional "ventilation  shafts,"  before changing  his  mind  and
telling them to abandon the work with this result:
     
     "These new ventilation shafts will be dug from the top down," says Goto
Dengo.
     "No!" says Wing, still completely flabbergasted. This  is utter madness
in that if you dig a vertical shaft from the top downwards, you have to haul
the rubble up out of the hole. If you do it the other way,  the rubble falls
down and can be easily disposed of.
     "You will get new helpers. Filipino workers."
     Wing looks  stunned. He is even more  cut  off from the world than Goto
Dengo. He must infer the progress of the war from maddeningly oblique hints.
He and his workers fit the crazily scattered evidence at their disposal into
elaborate theories. These theories  are all so wildly wrong that  Goto Dengo
would laugh out loud at  them, if not for  the fact that he  is sympathetic.
Neither he nor Captain Noda knew that MacArthur had landed on Leyte, or that
the Imperial Navy had been crushed, until the general told them.
     One thing that Wing and his men have got right is  that  Bundok employs
imported labor in order to  ensure secrecy. If any of the Chinese workers do
manage  to escape, they will find  themselves on  an island,  far from home,
among people who do not speak their language, and who do not especially like
them. The fact that  Filipino workers will soon be arriving gives them a lot
to think about.  They will be  up all night whispering to each other, trying
to reconstruct their theories.
     "We don't need new  workers. We are almost done,"  Wing says, his pride
hurt again.
     Goto  Dengo taps  himself on  both shoulders with  both index  fingers,
suggesting  epaulets.  It takes Wing only  an instant  to realize  that he's
talking about the general,  and then a profoundly conspiratorial  look comes
over his  face and he takes half a step closer. "Orders," Goto  Dengo  says.
"We dig lots of ventilation shafts now."
     Wing was not a miner when he  arrived at  Bundok, but he is  now. He is
baffled. As he should be. "Ventilation shafts? To where?"
     "To nowhere," Goto Dengo says.
     Wing's face is still blank. He  thinks Goto Dengo's bad Shanghainese is
preventing understanding. But Goto Dengo  knows that Wing will figure it out
soon, some night during the bad fretful moments that always come just before
sleep.
     And then  he will lead the rebellion, and Lieutenant Mori's men will be
ready for it; they will open fire with their mortars, they will detonate the
mines,  use  the  machine  guns,  sweeping  across their  carefully  plotted
interlocking fields of fire. None of them will survive.
     Goto Dengo doesn't want that.  So he reaches out and slaps Wing  on the
shoulder. "I will give you instructions. We will make a special shaft." Then
he turns around and leaves; he has surveying to do. He  knows that Wing will
put it all together in time to save himself.


     ***


     Filipino prisoners arrive, in columns that have degenerated into ragged
skeins, shuffling on  bare feet, leaving  a wet red trail up  the road. They
are prodded onwards by the boots and bayonets of  Nipponese Army troops, who
look almost as wretched. When Goto Dengo sees them staggering into the camp,
he realizes that they must have been  on their  feet continuously since  the
order  was given by  the general,  two days  ago. The general promised  five
hundred new workers; slightly fewer than three hundred actually  arrive, and
from the fact that none of them is being carried on stretchers a statistical
impossibility,  given  their average physical condition  Goto Dengo  assumes
that  the other  two  hundred must have stumbled or passed out en route, and
been executed where they hit the ground.
     Bundok is eerily well stocked with fuel and rations, and  he sees to it
that  the prisoners and the Army troops alike are well fed, and given a  day
of rest.
     Then  he  puts  them to work. Goto Dengo has  been  commanding men long
enough, now,  that  he picks out  the  good  ones right  away.  There  is  a
toothless,  pop eyed character named  Rodolfo with iron  grey hair and a big
cyst on his cheek, arms that are  too long, hands  like grappling hooks, and
splay toed feet that remind  him of the natives he lived with on New Guinea.
His eyes  are no particular color  they seem to have been put together  from
shards  of other people's  eyes, scintillas of  grey, blue, hazel, and black
all sintered together. Rodolfo is self conscious about his lack of teeth and
always holds one of  his sprawling, prehensile  paws  over his mouth when he
speaks. Whenever Goto Dengo or another authority figure comes nearby, all of
the young  Filipino men avert their gaze and look significantly  at Rodolfo,
who  steps forward,  covers his  mouth, and fixes his  weird, alarming stare
upon the visitor.
     "Form your men into half a dozen  squads and give each squad a name and
a leader. Make sure each man knows the name of his squad and of his leader,"
Goto  Dengo says  rather loudly. At least some of the  other Filipinos  must
speak  English. Then  he bends  closer and says quietly,  "Keep a few of the
best and strongest men for yourself."
     Rodolfo blinks, stiffens, steps back,  removes his  hand from his mouth
and uses it to snap  out a  salute. His hand is like an awning that throws a
shadow  over  his  entire face and chest. It  is obvious that  he learned to
salute from Americans. He turns on his heel.
     "Rodolfo."
     Rodolfo  turns around again, looking so irritated  that Goto Dengo must
stifle a laugh.
     "MacArthur is on Leyte."
     Rodolfo's chest inflates  like  a weather  balloon and  he gains  about
three inches in height, but the expression on his face does not change.
     The news ramifies through the Filipino camp  like lightning seeking the
ground. The tactic has the  desired  effect of giving the Filipinos a reason
to live  again; they suddenly  display great  energy and verve. A supply  of
badly worn drills and air compressors has arrived  on  carabao  drawn carts,
evidently brought in from  one of the  other Bundok like sites around Luzon.
The Filipinos, experts at internal combustion,  cannibalize some compressors
to fix others. Meanwhile  the drills are passed around to Rodolfo's  squads,
who  drag them  up onto the top  of the ridge between the  rivers  and begin
sinking the new  "ventilation shafts"  while Wing's Chinese men put the last
touches on the Golgotha complex below.
     The carts that brought  in  the  equipment  were simply grabbed off the
roads by the Nipponese  Army,  along with their drivers mostly farm boys and
pressed into service  on the spot.  The farmboys can never leave  Bundok, of
course. The weaker carabaos  are slaughtered for meat, the stronger ones put
to work on Golgotha, and the drivers are assimilated into the workforce. One
of these is a boy named Juan with a big round head and a  distinctly Chinese
cast to his features. He turns out to be trilingual in English, Tagalog, and
Cantonese. He can communicate in a sort  of  pidgin  with Wing and the other
Chinese, frequently by using a finger to draw Chinese characters on the palm
of  his hand.  Juan is small,  healthy, and has a kind of wary agility  that
Goto Dengo thinks may be useful in what is to come, and so he becomes one of
the special crew.
     The submerged  plumbing in Lake Yamamoto  needs to  be  inspected. Goto
Dengo  has  Rodolfo ask around and see if there are any  men among them  who
have worked  as pearl divers.  He quickly finds one, a lithe,  frail looking
fellow from Palawan, named  Agustin. Agustin is weak  from dysentery, but he
seems to perk up around water, and after a couple of days'  rest  is  diving
down to the bottom  of Lake Yamamoto with no trouble. He becomes another one
of Rodolfo's picked men.
     There  are really too many Filipinos for the number of  tools and holes
that they have available, and so the work goes quickly at first as fresh men
are  quickly rotated through  by the squad leaders. Then, one night at about
two in the  morning, an  unfamiliar sound reverberates  through the  jungle,
filtering  up from the lowlands where the Tojo  River meanders  through cane
fields and rice paddies.
     It is the sound of vehicles. Masses of them. Since  the Nipponese  have
been out  of fuel for months, Goto Dengo's first  thought is that it must be
MacArthur.
     He throws on a  uniform and runs down  to Bundok's main gate along with
the other  officers. Dozens of trucks, and a few  automobiles, are queued up
there, engines  running,  headlights off.  When  he hears a Nipponese  voice
coming from the lead car, his heart  sinks. He long ago  stopped feeling bad
about wanting to be rescued by General Douglas MacArthur.
     Many  soldiers  ride  atop  the trucks. When the sun  rises, Goto Dengo
savors the novel and  curious sight of fresh,  healthy, well  fed  Nipponese
men. They  are  armed with  light and  heavy  machine  guns.  They look like
Nipponese  soldiers did  way back in 1937,  when  they  were  rolling across
northern  China.  It gives Goto Dengo  a  strange  feeling  of  nostalgia to
remember a  day when a  terrible defeat was not imminent, when they were not
going to lose everything horribly. A  lump  actually gathers  in his throat,
and his nose begins to run.
     Then  he  snaps  out of it,  realizing  that  the big day  has  finally
arrived. The part of him that is  still a loyal soldier of the emperor has a
duty to  see that the vital war materiel, which  has just arrived, is stored
away  in the big vault  of  Golgotha.  The part  of  him that isn't  a loyal
soldier anymore still has a lot to accomplish.
     In war, no matter how much you plan and  prepare and practice, when the
big  day actually arrives, you still can't find your  ass with  both  hands.
This  day is  no  exception. But  after a  few  hours  of  chaos, things get
straightened out, people learn their  roles. The heavier  trucks cannot make
it up the  rough  road that Goto Dengo has had built up the streambed of the
Tojo  River,  but  a  couple of the  small  ones  can,  and these become the
shuttles. So the big  trucks pull,  one  by one, into  a heavily  fenced and
guarded  area well  sheltered from MacArthur's  observation planes  that was
built months ago. Filipinos swarm into these trucks and unload crates, which
are  small, but evidently quite heavy.  Meanwhile the smaller trucks shuttle
the crates up  the Tojo River  Road to the entrance  of Golgotha, where they
are unloaded onto hand cars and rolled into the tunnel to the main vault. As
per the instructions  handed down from on  high, Goto Dengo sees to  it that
every twentieth crate is diverted to the fool's chamber.
     The unloading proceeds automatically from there, and Goto Dengo devotes
most of  these days to supervising the final stages of  the digging. The new
ventilation shafts are proceeding  on schedule, and  he  only needs to check
them once a day. The diagonal is now only  a few meters away from the bottom
of Lake Yamamoto. Groundwater has  begun to seep through small cracks in the
bedrock and trickle down  the diagonal into Golgotha, where it collects in a
sump that drains into the Tojo. Another few meters of cutting and  they will
break through into the short stub tunnel that Wing and his men  created many
months ago, digging downwards from what later became the bottom of the lake.
     Wing himself is otherwise engaged these days.  He and Rodolfo and their
special crew are  completing  final preparations.  Rodolfo  and company  are
digging down from the top of the ridge, cutting what looks like just another
vertical  ventilation shaft. Wing and company are directly below, engaged in
a complicated subterranean plumbing project.
     Goto Dengo has entirely lost track of what day it is.  About four  days
after the trucks come, though,  he gets a  clue. The Filipinos spontaneously
break  into song over their  evening rice  bowls. Goto Dengo  recognizes the
tune  vaguely;  he  occasionally  heard  the American Marines singing it  in
Shanghai.
     What child is this, Who laid to rest, On Mary's lap is sleeping?
     The Filipinos  sing  that and  other songs, in English and Spanish  and
Latin, all evening long.  After  they get  their lungs unlimbered  they sing
astonishingly well, occasionally  breaking  into  two– and three  part
harmony.  At first,  Lieutenant  Mori's guards get  itchy  trigger  fingers,
thinking  it's some kind of a signal for a mass breakout. Goto Dengo doesn't
want  to see his work cut short by a  massacre, and  so  he explains to them
that it is a religious thing, a peaceful celebration.
     That night, another  midnight truck convoy  arrives and the workers are
rousted  to unload it.  They work cheerfully,  singing  Christmas carols and
making jokes about Santa Claus.
     The whole camp stays up  well past sunrise unloading trucks. Bundok has
gradually  become a nocturnal place anyway, to avoid the gaze of observation
planes. Goto Dengo is just thinking of hitting the sack when a  fusillade of
sharp  crackling noises breaks out  up  above  the camp  on the Tojo  River.
Ammunition being in short supply, hardly anyone actually fires guns anymore,
and he almost doesn't recognize the sound of the Nambu.
     Then he jumps onto the running board of a truck and tells the driver to
head upstream. The shooting has died down as suddenly as it started. Beneath
the bald tires of the truck, the river has turned opaque and bright red.
     About two  dozen  corpses  lie in the  water  before  the  entrance  to
Golgotha. Nipponese soldiers stand  around  them,  up to their calves in the
red  water, their weapons slung from their shoulders.  A  sergeant  is going
around  with a bayonet,  stirring  the guts of the Filipinos who  are  still
moving.
     "What is going on?" Goto Dengo says. No one answers. But no  one shoots
him, either; he will be allowed to figure it out himself.
     The  workers had clearly been unloading another  small  truck, which is
still parked there at the head of the  road. Resting beneath its tailgate is
a wooden crate that was apparently dropped. Its heavy contents have exploded
the crate and spilled across the uneven conglomerate of  river rocks, poured
concrete and mine tailings that make up the riverbed here.
     Goto Dengo sloshes up to it and looks. He sees  it clearly enough,  but
he can't somehow absorb the knowledge until  he  feels  it in his  hands. He
bends down,  wraps his fingers  around  a cold brick  on  the bottom  of the
river,  and heaves it up out  of the water. It  is a glossy  ingot of yellow
metal, incredibly heavy, stamped with words in English: BANK OF SINGAPORE.
     There is a  scuffle behind him. The sergeant stands at the ready as two
of his men jerk the Filipino driver out of  the cab  of his truck that  Goto
Dengo rode  in  on.  Calmly looking almost bored  the  sergeant bayonets the
driver.  The men drop  him  in  the  red  water and  he  disappears.  "Merry
Christmas" one  of  the  soldiers cracks. Everyone  laughs, except for  Goto
Dengo.


     Chapter 76 PULSE


     As Avi walks  back  through his  house,  he utters  something  biblical
sounding in Hebrew that causes his kids to burst into tears, and his nannies
to rise from the kid mat and  begin shoving stuff into bags. Devorah emerges
from a  back room where  she's been  sleeping off some morning sickness. She
and Avi  embrace tenderly  in the  hallway and  Randy begins to  feel like a
fleck  of debris lodged in someone's eye. So he heads straight for an  exit,
goes out to his car and  starts driving. He winds through the hills over the
San Andreas Fault to Skyline and then heads south. Ten  minutes later, Avi's
car howls past him in the left lane, doing ninety or a hundred. Randy barely
has time to read the bumper sticker: MEAN PEOPLE SUCK.
     Randy's  looking for  a totally anonymous  location where he  can patch
into the Internet. A hotel  doesn't work because  a hotel keeps good records
of  outgoing telephone calls. What he  should really  do is use this  packet
radio interface he has for his laptop, but even that requires a place to sit
down and work undisturbed for a while. Which gets him thinking in terms of a
fast  food joint, not to  be found in the mid peninsular  wasteland. By  the
time he has  reached the northern skirts of the  Valley Menlo Park and  Palo
Alto he has decided fuck it, he'll just go to the scene of the action. Maybe
he could be of some use there. So he gets off at the El Monte exit and heads
into the  business district  of  Los  Altos, a pretty typical mid  twentieth
century American downtown gradually being metabolized by franchises.
     A major street intersects,  at something  other than  a  ninety  degree
angle, a smaller  commercial street, defining two (smaller) acute angle lots
and two (larger) obtuse  angle lots. On one  side  of the  major street, the
obtuse angle lot is occupied by a two storey office building, home of Ordo's
offices and Tombstone. The acute angle lot is occupied by the McDonald's. On
the opposite  side of the major street, the acute angle  lot is occupied by,
weirdly  enough, a  24 Jam, the  only one Randy has ever seen in the Western
Hemisphere. The obtuse angle  lot is  occupied by a Park 'n' Lock, where you
can  park for the  old fashioned  purpose  of wandering around  the business
district from store to store.
     The parking lot of the McDonald's is full, and  so  Randy pulls through
its drive  through window, chooses n, where n is a random number between one
and six, and asks for  Value  Meal n with super size fries. This having been
secured, he guns the Acura  directly across the big street into the Park 'n'
Lock just in time to see its  last available space being seized by a minivan
bearing the logo of a San Jose television station.  Randy is not planning to
stray  far  from his car, so  he  just blocks in another car.  But  as he is
setting the parking brake, he notices movement  inside it, and with a bit of
further attention realizes he is  watching a  man with long hair and a beard
methodically ramming shells into  a pump shotgun.  The man  catches sight of
Randy in his  rearview  mirror  and turns  around with a scrupulously polite
pardon me sir but you seem to have blocked me  in look. Randy recognizes him
as  Mike or Mark,  a  graphics  card hacker  who farms  ostriches  in Gilroy
(quirky  hobbies being  de rigueur  in the  high tech world).  He moves  the
Acura,  blocking  in  what  looks like an abandoned van from the Starsky and
Hutch epoch.
     Randy climbs  up  on the roof of his car with his laptop and  his Value
Meal n. Until  recently he would never have sat on  top of his Acura because
his considerable mass would dimple the sheet metal.  But after Amy rammed it
with the truck, Randy became much less anal, and now sees it as a tool to be
used until  it  is just  a moraine  of rusted  shards. He happens to  have a
twelve volt adapter for the laptop, so he runs that down  into his cigarette
lighter socket. Finally, he's settled, and gets a chance to take a good look
around.
     The parking lot of Novus Ordo Seclorum's office building is filled with
cop cars, and BMWs and Mercedes Benzes that Randy assumes belong to lawyers.
Avi's Range Rover is parked jauntily  on top of some landscaping, and  a few
TV camera  crews  have  set up, as  well. In front of  the  building's  main
entrance  a lot  of  people  are  jammed into  the smallest  possible  space
screaming  at each other.  They are surrounded by ring after concentric ring
of cops,  media,  and law firm minions collectively, what Tolkien would call
Men  and  a few  non–  or  post human creatures imbued  with  peculiar
physiognomies  and  vaguely  magical  powers: Dwarves  (steady,  productive,
surly) and  Elves  (brilliant in  a more  ethereal way). Randy, a Dwarf, has
begun  to  realize that his grandfather  may have been an Elf. Avi is a  Man
with a strong  Elvish glow about  him. Somewhere in the center of this whole
thing, presumably, is Gollum.
     There  is a little window  on the  screen of Randy's laptop  showing  a
cheesy  1940s  newsreel  style  animation  of  a radio tower, with  zigzaggy
conceptual radio  waves radiating outwards from  it  over  the whole  earth,
which is shown  ludicrously not  to scale in  this rendering the diameter of
the earth is about equal to the height of the radio tower. That these Jovian
info bolts are visible and moving is a visual cue that his radio adapter has
managed  to  patch itself  into  the packet  radio network.  Randy  opens  a
terminal window and types
     telnet laundry.org
     and in a  few seconds  bang!  he gets  a login  prompt.  Randy now  has
another look at the animated window,  and notes with approval  that the info
bolts have been  replaced with gouts of question marks. This  means that his
computer  has  recognized  laundry.org as a S/WAN machine running the Secure
Wide  Area Network protocol which  means  that every packet  going back  and
forth between Randy's laptop and laundry.org is encrypted. Definitely a good
idea when you are about to do something illegal over the radio.
     Mike or  Mark gets out of his car, cutting a  dramatic figure in a long
black Western style coat, a look  rather spoiled by the t shirt he's  got on
underneath it:  black with a fat red question mark in the middle. He hitches
the strap of  his shotgun up  onto his shoulder and leans into his back door
to retrieve a large black cowboy hat, which he  places  on  the roof of  his
car.  He  thrusts his  elbows  into the air and gathers  his long  hair back
behind his ears, staring up at the sky, and then  clamps the cowboy hat down
on  his head.  Tied  loosely  around his  neck is a  black  bandanna with  a
question  mark pattern, which he now pulls up over the bridge of his nose so
that  just an eye slit shows between it and  the cowboy hat. Randy  would be
really alarmed if it weren't for the  fact that several of his friends, such
as John Cantrell,  often go around looking this  way.  Mike  or Mark strides
across the Park 'n' Lock, tracked carefully by a panning cameraman, and jogs
across the street to the 24 Jam.
     Randy logs onto laundry.org  using ssh "secure shell"  a way of further
encrypting   communications  between   two  computers.   Laundry.org  is  an
anonymizing service; all packets routed  through it to another  computer are
stripped of identifying information first, so that anyone down the  line who
intercepts  one of those packets has no way of knowing where it  originated.
Once he's patched into the anonymizer, Randy types
     telnet crypt.kk
     and hits the  return key and then actually, literally, prays. The Crypt
is  still  going through its shakedown  period (which, indeed,  is  the only
reason that all of Tombstone's contents have not been moved onto it yet).
     In  the  lot  of the  24 Jam, Mike  or  Mark  has  joined  three  other
elvishlooking sorts in  black cowboy  hats  and  bandannas,  whom  Randy can
identify  based  on  the  length  and color of  their ponytails and  beards.
There's Stu, a Berkeley grad student who  is somehow mixed up in  Avi's HEAP
project, and  Phil, who  invented a major programming language  a couple  of
years ago and goes helicopter skiing in his spare time, and Craig, who knows
everything there is to know about  encrypted credit card transactions on the
Net and is  a devotee of  traditional Nipponese archery. Some of  these guys
are wearing long coats and some aren't. There  is a  lot  of Secret Admirers
iconography: t shirts bearing  the number 56,  which is a code for Yamamoto,
or just  pictures  of Yamamoto himself, or big fat question  marks. They are
having an energetic and very happy conversation though it looks a bit forced
because, to a man, they are carrying long weapons out in plain sight. One of
them has  a hunting  rifle, and each of the others is slinging a rudimentary
looking gun with a banana clip sticking out of the  side.  Randy thinks, but
is not sure, that these are HEAP guns.
     This scene,  not surprisingly, has caught the attention of  the police,
who have surrounded these four with squad cars,  and who are standing at the
ready  with rifles  and  shotguns.  It  is an  oddity  of  the  law in  many
jurisdictions that, while carrying (say) a concealed one shot  .22 derringer
requires a license, openly  carrying (e.g.)  a big game  rifle  is perfectly
legal.  Concealed weapons are  outlawed or at  least  heavily regulated, and
unconcealed  ones  are not. So a lot of Secret Admirers who  tend to  be gun
nuts have taken to going around conspicuously armed as a way of pointing out
the absurdity of  those rules. Their point is this: who  gives a  shit about
concealed weapons  anyway, since they are only useful for defending  oneself
against assaults by  petty criminals,  which almost never happens? The  real
reason the Constitution  provides  for the right to bear arms  is  defending
oneself  against oppressive governments, and when  it  comes  to that,  your
handgun is close to useless. So (according to  these guys) if  you are going
to assert  your right to  keep and bear arms  you  should  do  it openly, by
packing something really big.
     A bunch of junk  scrolls  up Randy's screen.  WELCOME TO THE CRYPT,  it
begins, and then there's a paragraph of information about what  a great idea
the Crypt is and  how anyone  who gives a damn  about privacy should  get an
account  here. Randy truncates the  commercial message with the whack  of  a
key, and logs in as Randy. Then he enters the command
     telnet tombstone.epiphyte.com
     and  gets  two  gratifying  messages  in  return:  one  saying  that  a
connection  has been established with Tombstone, and the  next saying that a
S/WAN link has been automatically negotiated. Finally he gets
     tombstone login:
     which means that he  is now free to log on to the  machine right across
the street from him. And now Mr. Randy has a little decision to make.
     So far, he's clean. The bits coming out of his laptop are encrypted; so
even if someone is monitoring the  local packet radio net, all  they know is
that some encrypted bits are  flying around. They  cannot trace any of those
bits  to  Randy's machine without bringing in an  elaborate radio  direction
finding rig  and zeroing  in on him most conspicuously. Those encrypted bits
are eventually  finding  their way to laundry.org up  in Oakland, which is a
big Internet host that probably has thousands  of packets rushing in and out
of it  every second. If someone  were tapping  laundry.org's  T3 line, which
would require an  enormous investment in  computers and communications gear,
they would detect  a very  small number of encrypted  packets  going out  to
crypt.kk  in  Kinakuta. But these  packets would have been stripped  of  any
identifying information before leaving laundry.org and so there  would be no
way to  tell where they originated. Now, crypt.kk is also an anonymizer, and
so  an entity tapping its staggeringly  enormous T5 line (a job on the order
of  eavesdropping  on a  small country's  telecommunications  system)  might
theoretically  be able to detect a  few packets going back and forth between
crypt.kk  and Tombstone.  But again, these  would be stripped of identifying
information, and so it would be impossible to trace them even as far back as
laundry.org,  to say  nothing of tracing them all  the way back  to  Randy's
laptop.
     But  in order for  Randy  to  get  into  Tombstone  and begin  actually
tampering with the evidence, he must now log on. If it were a poorly secured
host  of the type that used to  be  legion  on  the Internet, he could  just
exploit  one of its numerous security  holes  and crack his way into  it, so
that if his activities  on the  machine were discovered, he could claim that
it wasn't him just some cracker who happened  to  break into the  machine at
the very  moment it was being  seized  by the cops. But  Randy has spent the
last several years of his life making machines such  as this one impregnable
to crackers, and he knows it's impossible.
     Furthermore, there's no point  in logging on as just any  old user like
using a guest account.  Guests are not  allowed to tamper with system files.
In order  to do any meaningful evidence tampering here, Randy has to  log on
as  the  superuser.  The name of  the superuser  account is, inconveniently,
"randy" and you can't actually log in as "randy" without entering a password
that only Randy would know. So after using the  very latest in cryptographic
technology and trans oceanic packet switching  communications to conceal his
identity,  Randy  now  finds himself faced with the necessity  of typing his
name into the fucking machine.
     A little scenario flashes up in his head in which he sends an anonymous
broadcast  message  to all laundry.org users telling  them that the password
for the "randy"  account on "tombstone.epiphyte.com" is  such and  such  and
urging them  to spread this  information all  over  the Internet  as fast as
possible. This might have been a decent idea if he had thought of it an hour
ago. Now it is too late; any sentient  prosecutor tracing the time stamps on
the messages would be able to prove that it was just a blind.
     Besides, time is running low. The  discussion across  the street, which
is just a shrill hubbub at this distance, is rising to some sort of climax.
     Randy has meanwhile booted up his browser and gone to the ordo.net home
page. Usually it's a pretty  dull corporate home page, but today all of  the
blurbs  and  quotidian press  releases  have  been  obliterated  by a window
showing  live color video  of  what is going on in front of the building (or
rather, what was going on a couple of seconds ago; coming over his miserable
low bandwidth radio link, the video changes  frames about  once  every three
seconds). The video is originating from Ordo itself, where they've evidently
aimed a camera out the window and are  slamming the images straight out over
their very own T3 line.
     Randy glances  up  just  in time to  see the  guy who invented the term
"virtual  reality" walking across  the lot, deep in  conversation  with  the
executive  editor  of  TURING  Magazine.  Not far behind  them is  Bruce, an
operating systems engineer who, in his spare time, records Tierra del Fuegan
folk music and makes it available for free over the Internet.
     "Bruce!" Randy shouts.
     Bruce falters and looks over in Randy's direction. "Randy," he says.
     "Why are you here?"
     "Word on the street is that the Feds were raiding Ordo," Bruce says.
     "Interesting. . . . any particular Feds?"
     "Comstock," Bruce says. Meaning Paul Comstock,  who, by virtue of being
Attorney General of the United States, runs the FBI. Randy does not  believe
this rumor, but in spite of himself he scans the area for people fitting the
general  profile of  FBI  agents. The  FBI  hates and  fears  strong crypto.
Meanwhile  another  Secret  Admirer type shouts, "I  heard Secret  Service!"
Which is even creepier, in a way,  because the Secret Service is part of the
Treasury Department, and is charged with combating wire fraud and protecting
the nation's currency.
     Randy says, "Would you be open to  the possibility  that it's all a Net
rumor?  That what's  really  going  on  is  that a piece of equipment inside
Ordo's offices is being seized as part of a legal squabble?"
     "Then why are all these cops here?" Bruce says.
     "Maybe the masked men with assault rifles drew them."
     "Well,  why did the Secret Admirers  show up  in the first place if  it
wasn't a government raid?"
     "I don't know. Maybe it's just some kind of spontaneous self organizing
phenomenon like the origin of life in the primordial soup."
     Bruce says, "Isn't  it just as  possible that the  legal squabble is  a
pretext?"
     "In  other  words that the squabble is  sort of like a Trojan horse put
together by Comstock?"
     "Yeah."
     "Knowing all  of the parties involved,  I'd rate it as unlikely," Randy
says, "but let me think about it."
     The noise and intensity of the argument in the Ordo parking  lot  spike
upwards. Randy  looks at the video window, which unfortunately has  no sound
track. The transactions between frames come as isolated blocks of new pixels
slapped  up one at a time  over the old, like a large billboard being posted
sections. High definition TV it ain't. But Randy definitely  recognizes Avi,
standing there tall, pale,  and calm, flanked by one guy who's probably Dave
the  Ordo  president,  and another  guy who's  obviously a lawyer.  They are
literally standing in the doorway of the building and facing off against two
cops and none other than Andrew Loeb, who is in rapid motion and hence poses
an insurmountable bandwidth problem. The Internet video gear is smart enough
not  to mess  with parts of an image that  aren't changing very much, and so
the planted cops  get  refreshed maybe a couple  of times a minute, and then
just in a few rectangular image shards. But Andrew  Loeb is waving his  arms
around, hopping up and down, lunging towards Avi from time to time,  pulling
back and taking calls on his cellphone, and waving documents in the air. The
computers have identified him as a bunch of pixels that require a great deal
of attention and bandwidth, and so somewhere some poor algorithm is churning
through the  high pressure slurry of compressed  pixels that is the image of
Andrew  Loeb, and doing its  level best to freeze the  most  rapidly  moving
parts into  discrete frames and chop them up into checkerboard squares  that
can  be broadcast as  packets over the  Net. These packets arrive in Randy's
computer as the radio network  passes them along,  i.e., sporadically and in
the wrong order. So Andrew Loeb appears  as a cubist digital video artifact,
a rectilinear amoeba of mostly trench coat beige  pixels. From  time to time
his eyes or his mouth will suddenly appear, disembodied, in the center of an
image  block, and remain frozen there for  a few  seconds, crystallized in a
moment of howling rage.
     This  is  weirdly mesmerizing until Randy's startled out of his reverie
by  a  clunk.  He looks over to  see  that  the van he's blocked  in  wasn't
abandoned after  all; it  was full of Dwarves, who  have now thrown the back
doors open to reveal a nest of cables and wires. A couple of the Dwarves are
heaving a  boxy apparatus up onto the roof of the  van. Cables run out of it
to another boxy apparatus down below. The apparatus is electrical in  nature
and doesn't appear capable of firing projectiles so Randy decides not to pay
it much attention for the moment.
     Voices well up across the street.  Randy sees some cops climbing out of
a cop van carrying a battering ram.
     Randy types:
     randy
     and hits the return key. Tombstone answers:
     password:
     and Randy types it in. Tombstone informs  him that  he's logged on, and
that he has mail.
     The fact that Randy has logged on has now been  recorded  by the system
in several locations on the hard drive. He has, in other words, just slapped
big greasy fingerprints  all over a weapon that  the police are moments away
from seizing as evidence. If Tombstone is shut down and  grabbed by the cops
before Randy can erase those traces, they  will know he has logged on at the
very  moment that Tombstone was confiscated, and will  put him in prison for
tampering with evidence. He very  much wishes that Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe
could somehow be made aware of what a ballsy  thing  he is doing  here.  But
then Doug has probably done all kinds of ballsy  things of  which Randy will
never  be aware, and Randy respects him anyway because of his bearing. Maybe
the way to get that kind of bearing  is to go around doing ballsy things  in
secret that somehow percolate up to the surface of your personality.
     Randy could just reformat the hard drive with a single command, but (1)
it would take  several  minutes to execute  and (2)  it would not thoroughly
erase the incriminating bits, which could be lifted from the hard drive by a
motivated technician. Because he knows which files have recorded his log on,
he executes  a  command  that finds those  files on the  hard drive. Then he
types  another  command that causes random numbers to be written  over those
areas of the hard drive seven times in a row.
     The  cops are slamming  the battering ram against  the side door of the
office  building  when Randy's  right pinky slams the Enter key and executes
that command. He is almost certainly safe from  the tampering with  evidence
charge now. But he hasn't actually tampered yet, which is the whole point of
this exercise. He needs to find all  the  copies of the e mail  message that
specifies the latitude and longitude of the wreck, and do the same  multiple
erase trick on them. If the damn  things were not encrypted, he could search
for the  critical strings  of digits. As it is, he  will have  to search for
files that were created during a certain  time period, around  the time that
Randy was out  on Glory, anchored  over the wreck.  Randy knows roughly what
day that was, and so he sets the limits of the search to give him  any files
created  five days  either side of  that, just to be  safe, and limits it to
only those directories used for e mail.
     The search takes forever, or maybe  it just seems that way because  the
cops  have smashed the  side door off  its  hinges now  and are  inside  the
building. The video window catches Randy's  eye  as it changes dramatically;
he  gets a veering montage of grainy  frozen images of a room; a doorway;  a
hallway; a  reception  area; and finally  a  barricade.  The Ordo  guys have
yanked their  video camera out  of  the window and  restationed it at  their
front  desk,  recording a barrier  built of cheap modular  office  furniture
piled against the glass entrance  to the  reception. The camera tilts up  to
show that one of the  four glass door slabs has already been crystallized by
(one supposes) the impact of the battering ram.
     Randy's "find"  command finally returns with  a list of about a hundred
files.  The half  dozen  or so critical ones are on  the list somewhere, but
Randy doesn't have time to go through the list figuring  out which is which.
He has  the system generate a list  of  the  disk blocks  occupied by  those
files, so that he can go back later and do a super erase. Once he's got that
information, he does a  "rm"  or "remove" command on all  of them. This is a
paltry and miserable way to  expunge  secrets from a hard drive, but Randy's
afraid he  may not have time to do it more thoroughly. The "rm" only takes a
few moments and then Randy goes back and has the system write random numbers
on top of those disk blocks seven times in a row, just as he did earlier. By
this time the  barricade has been scattered  all  over Ordo's lobby  and the
cops are inside. They have weapons drawn and pointed at the ceiling and they
don't look very happy.
     There is one  thing left to do. Actually it's  a pretty big thing.  The
Epiphyte people use Tombstone for all kinds  of purposes, and there's no way
of telling whether other copies of that latitude and longitude  exist on  it
somewhere. Most  of Epiphyte  is  made up of inveterate  computer users  who
would be just the sort to write little scripts to back up all of their old e
mail messages to  an archive every week. So he whips up his  own script that
will just write random information to every sector on the entire hard drive,
then go back and do it again,  and again,  and again, forever or  until  the
cops  pull the plug. Just after he whacks the Enter key to send this command
in  to Tombstone, he  hears an electrical  buzzing  noise  from the van that
makes his hair stand on end for a moment. He sees a cop in the video window,
frozen. Then the screen of his computer goes blank.
     Randy looks  over toward the old van. The Dwarves are high fiving  each
other.
     There is a screeching of tires, and the sound of a low speed collision,
out on the street. About  a dozen cars have rolled quietly to  a  stop,  and
some  have  been  rear  ended  by  others  that  are still functioning.  The
McDonald's has  gone  dark. Television technicians are  cursing inside their
mobile units. Police officers and lawyers are pounding  their walkie talkies
and cellphones against their hands.
     "Pardon me," Randy says to  the Dwarves, "but would you gentlemen  like
to share anything with me?"
     "We just took out the whole building," says one of the Dwarves.
     "Took it out, in what sense?"
     "Nailed it with  a big electromagnetic  pulse.  Fried every chip within
range.
     "So it's  a scorched earth  kind of deal? Go  ahead and confiscate that
gear, you damn Feds, it's all worthless junk now?"
     "Yeah."
     "Well,  it  certainly  worked  on  those cars,"  Randy  says,  "and  it
definitely worked on this piece of junk that used to be my computer."
     "Don't worry it  has no effect on hard drives," the Dwarf says, "so all
of your files are intact."
     "I know you are expecting me to take that as good news," Randy says.


     Chapter 77 BUDDHA


     A car is coming. The engine noise is expensively muffled, but it sounds
like a diesel. Goto Dengo  is awake, waiting for it, and  so is the  rest of
the camp. No  one stirs  at Bundok  during the day anymore,  except  for the
radio men and those manning the anti aircraft  guns. They have not been told
that MacArthur is on Luzon,  but they  all sense The General's presence. The
American planes rip across the sky all day long, glittering  and proud, like
starships from  a  distant future  that none of them will ever  see, and the
earth  rings  like a  bell  from  the  impacts  of distant naval  guns.  The
shipments have become  smaller  but more frequent:  one  or  two broken down
lorries every night, their rear  bumpers practically scraping the road under
crippling burdens of gold.
     Lieutenant Mori has  placed  anther  machine  gun at  the  front  gate,
concealed in the foliage, just  in  case some Americans happen to blunder up
this  road in a jeep. Somewhere out there  in the dark, the barrel  of  that
weapon  is  tracking this car  as it jounces up the road. The men know every
dip and rise in that road, and can tell where the vehicles are  by listening
for the scrape of  their  undercarriages against  the hardpan,  a  signature
pattern of metallic dots and dashes.
     The car's headlamps are off, of course, and the guards at the gate dare
not  shine bright lights  around.  One  of them  risks opening up a kerosene
lantern,  and aims  its beam  at the visitor.  A silver  Mercedes  Benz hood
ornament  springs forth  from the  blackness, supported  by a chrome  plated
radiator grille. The beam of the lantern  fondles  the car's black  fenders,
its sweeping silver exhaust pipes, its running boards, clotted with the meat
of young coconuts it must  have sideswiped a pile on its way up here. In the
driver's side window  is  the face of  a  Nipponese  man in  his forties, so
haggard and tired he looks as though he is about to burst into tears. But he
is  just a  driver. Next  to him  is a  sergeant with a  sawed  off shotgun,
Nipponese rifles being generally  too  long to wield in  the front seat of a
luxury car. Behind them, a drawn curtain conceals  whatever, or  whoever, is
in the backseat.
     "Open!" demands the  guard, and the  driver reaches  up behind his head
and parts  the  curtain.  The lantern beam  falls through  the  opening  and
bounces  back  sharply  from a  pale  face  in the back seat. Several of the
soldiers shout. Goto  Dengo steps back, rattled,  then moves in for a better
look.
     The  man  in the backseat has  a very large head. But the strange thing
about  him is that  his skin is  a rich yellow  color not the  normal  Asian
yellow and it glitters.  He is wearing a peculiar, pointed hat, and he has a
calm smile on his face an expression  the likes  of which Goto Dengo has not
seen since the war began.
     More lantern beams come on, the ring of soldiers and officers closes in
on the Mercedes. Someone  pulls the rear door open and then jumps back as if
he has burned his hand on it.
     The passenger  is  sitting crosslegged on the backseat, which has  been
crushed into a broad V beneath his weight.
     It is a solid  gold Buddha, looted  from somewhere else  in the Greater
East Asia Co Prosperity Sphere, coming  to  meditate in serene darkness atop
the hoard of Golgotha.
     It turns out to  be  small enough to fit through the  entrance, but too
big to go  in one of the little railway cars, and so  the strongest Filipino
men must spend the next hours shoving it down the tunnel one inch at a tame.
     The  early  shipments were neatly crated, and the crates were stenciled
with  labels identifying the  contents as  machine gun ammunition  or mortar
rounds or the like. The crates that come later don't have the stencils. At a
certain point, the gold begins to  arrive  in  cardboard  boxes  and  rotten
steamer trunks.  They fall open all  the  time,  and  the workers  patiently
gather the gold up  and  carry it  to the tunnel entrance in their arms  and
throw it into the hand cars. The bars tumble end over end and smash into the
sheet metal with a din that  scares clouds of birds  out of  the overhanging
trees. Goto Dengo cannot help looking at  the bars.  They come in  different
sizes,  some of them so large  that it takes  two men to carry one. They are
stamped  with the names of central  banks from a few places  Goto Dengo  has
been  and  many he's  only  heard of:  Singapore, Saigon,  Batavia,  Manila,
Rangoon,  Hong Kong,  Shanghai,  Canton.  There  is  French  gold  that  was
apparently  shipped to Cambodia, and Dutch  gold  shipped  to  Jakarta,  and
British gold shipped to  Singapore  all to keep  it out  of the hands of the
Germans.
     But some shipments  consist entirely of  gold from the Bank  of  Tokyo.
They get five  convoys in  a row of the  stuff. According to the  tally that
Goto  Dengo  is keeping  in  his head, two thirds  of  the tonnage stored in
Golgotha ends up coming straight from Nippon's central reserves.  All  of it
is cold to the touch, and stored in good but old  crates. He  concludes that
it was shipped to the Philippines  a long time ago and has been sitting in a
cellar in Manila ever since, waiting for this moment. They must have shipped
it here at about the same time that Goto Dengo was plucked off  the beach in
New Guinea, way back in late 1943.
     They have known. They have known for that long that they  were going to
lose the war.
     By the  middle  of January,  Goto Dengo  has begun to  look back on the
Christmas Day massacre  with  something almost like  nostalgia,  missing the
atmosphere of naive innocence that made  the  killings necessary. Until that
morning,  even he had managed to convince himself  that Golgotha was an arms
cache  that  the emperor's soldiers would  someday use  to stage  a glorious
reconquest of Luzon. He knows that the workers believed it too. Now everyone
knows about  the gold, and the camp  has changed. Everyone  understands that
there will be no exit.
     At  the beginning of January, the workers  are made  up of  two  types:
those  who are resigned  to die here, and those who aren't. The latter group
make various escape attempts of a desultory and hopeless nature and are shot
by the guards. The  era of hoarding ammunition seems to be  over, or perhaps
the guards are  just too sick  and hungry to  climb  down out  of  the watch
towers and personally bayonet all of the people who present themselves to be
killed. So it is all done  with bullets, and the  bodies left to balloon and
blacken. Bundok is immanent with their stench.
     Goto Dengo hardly notices, though, because the  camp  is suffused  with
the crazy, sick tension that always precedes a battle. Or so he supposes; he
has seen a lot of excitement in this war, but he has never been in a  proper
battle.  The  same  is automatically true  of most of  the  Nipponese  here,
because essentially all of the  Nipponese  who go into battles wind up dead.
In this army you are either a greenhorn or a corpse.
     Sometimes,  a  briefcase  arrives  along with  the  gold shipment.  The
briefcase is always  handcuffed to the wrist  of a soldier  who has grenades
dangling all over his body so  that  he can blow himself and it to powder if
the convoy should  be assaulted by Huks.  The briefcases  go straight to the
Bundok radio station and  their contents  are placed in a  safe. Goto  Dengo
knows  that they  must contain codes not the usual  books,  but some kind of
special  codes  that are changed every day because  every morning, after the
sun has come up, the radio officer performs a ceremony  of burning a  single
sheet  of  paper in  front  of  the transmitter shack, and then rubbing  the
withered leaf of ash between his hands.
     It  is through  that radio station that  they  will receive  the  final
order. All is  in readiness, and Goto Dengo goes through  the complex once a
day checking everything.
     The diagonal tunnel finally reached the  stub tunnel  at the bottom  of
Lake Yamamoto a couple of weeks ago. The stub was filled with water that had
seeped past the concrete plug during the  months  since it had been put into
place, and  so when the two  tunnels were finally  joined,  several  tons of
water ran  down the diagonal  into Golgotha. This was  expected and  planned
for; all of it went into a sump and drained from  there into the Tojo River.
Now it  is  possible  to go all the way  up the  diagonal and  look  at  the
concrete plug from  the underside. Lake Yamamoto is on the  other side. Goto
Dengo goes up there every couple of days, ostensibly  to check the  plug and
its  demolition  charges,  but really  to check on the progress being  made,
unbeknownst to Captain Noda, by Wing's and Rodolfo's crews. They are  mostly
drilling upwards, making more of those short, vertical, dead end shafts, and
enlarging  the  chambers  at  their  tops.  The  system  (including  the new
"ventilation shafts" ordered by The General, and  dug from the top down just
to the east of the ridgeline) looks like this now:
     
     Inside the primary  storage complex  is  a small room that Captain Noda
has dubbed the Hall of Glory. It does not look very glorious right now. Most
of it is filled  with a snarl of wires which have been run  into it from all
parts of the Golgotha complex, and which dangle from the ceiling or trail on
the floor with hand  lettered  paper tags dangling from them,  saying things
like MAIN ENTRANCE DEMOLITION CHARGES. There are several crates of lead acid
batteries to supply power  for the detonations, and to give Goto Dengo a few
minutes of electric light  by which to read those paper tags. Extra boxes of
dynamite and blasting  caps  are stacked at one end of the Hall of  Glory in
case some  tunnels need a  little extra destruction, and coils of  red  fuse
cord in case the electrical system fails completely.
     But the demolition order hasn't yet come, so Goto Dengo does the things
soldiers do while waiting to  die. He writes letters to his family that will
never be delivered or even mailed.  He smokes. He plays cards. He  goes  and
checks his equipment  another time, and then another. A week goes by without
any gold deliveries. Twenty prisoners try to escape together.  The  ones who
don't get sprayed  across  the killing ground by mines get tangled in barbed
wire and are each shot by a team of two guards,  one aiming a flashlight and
the other aiming a rifle. Captain Noda spends all night, every night, pacing
back and forth in front of the main gate and smoking cigarettes, then drinks
himself  to sleep at  dawn. The radio men sit in front of their rig watching
the tubes glow, jerking like electrified frog legs whenever a  feeble string
of beeps comes in on their frequency. But the order does not come.
     One night, then, the  trucks come  again, just as they  did  the  first
time. The convoy must contain all that's left of the Nipponese motor pool on
Luzon.  They all  come together,  making a rumble that can be  heard half an
hour before they actually  reach the gate.  When  their cargo has been taken
out  and stacked on  the ground,  the  soldiers guarding this convoy  remain
behind at Bundok. The only people who leave are the drivers.
     It takes  two  days  to move this  last  hoard into the tunnels. One of
their shuttle trucks has broken down for good and  been cannibalized to keep
the other one going. It is running on half of its cylinders and is so feeble
that it has to be pushed up the riverbed road by teams of workers and hauled
over the rough patches on ropes. It has finally begun  to rain, and the Tojo
River is rising.
     The main vault is nearly full of treasure, and so is the  fool's vault.
The new shipment has to be packed in wherever it will fit; they break it out
of its crates and jam it into crannies. The crates are stenciled with double
headed eagles  and  swastikas,  and the  gold bars  inside come from Berlin,
Vienna,  Warsaw,  Prague,  Paris,  Amsterdam,  Riga,  Copenhagen,  Budapest,
Bucharest,  Milan. There are also cardboard boxes filled with diamonds. Some
of the crates are still damp,  and smell of the sea. Seeing this, Goto Dengo
knows that a big submarine must  have arrived from Germany, filled with Nazi
treasure. So  that explains  the two week  lull:  they've  been awaiting the
arrival of this U boat.
     He  works  in  the tunnels for two days,  wearing a  miner's  headlamp,
shoving jewels and gold  bars into crevices.  He goes into a sort  of trance
that is finally interrupted by a heavy thud reverberating through the rock.
     Artillery, he thinks. Or a bomb from one of MacArthur's planes.
     He comes up  the main ventilation shaft to the  top of the ridge, where
it's broad daylight.  He  is  crushed  to discover that  there is no  battle
underway. MacArthur isn't  going to rescue him.  Lieutenant Mori has brought
almost all of the workers up  here,  and they are hauling on ropes, dragging
Bundok's  heavy equipment  up  and throwing  it down into  the  recently dug
"ventilation  shafts." Both of the trucks are up here,  and men with torches
and sledgehammers are breaking them up into pieces small enough to drop down
the shafts. Goto Dengo arrives just in  time to see the  engine block of the
radio station's generator tumbling down a shaft into blackness. The  rest of
the radio gear follows it directly.
     Somewhere nearby, concealed in the  trees, someone is grunting heavily,
doing some kind  of hard physical labor. It is a practiced martial arts type
of grunt, from way down in the diaphragm.
     "Lieutenant Goto!" says Captain Noda. He  is  daft  with alcohol. "Your
duties are below."
     "What was that loud noise?"
     Noda  beckons him over to  an outcropping from which they can see  down
into the valley of  the Tojo River.  Goto Dengo,  unsteady for any number of
reasons, suffers a spell of dizziness  and nearly falls off.  The problem is
disorientation:  he  does not recognize the river. Until now, it has  always
been a few trickles of water braided down a  rocky bed. Even before they ran
a road up it,  you could  get up  almost as  far as the waterfall by hopping
from one dry rock to the next.
     Now, all of a sudden, the river is wide, deep, and murky. The tips of a
few big rocks protrude from the surface here and there.
     He remembers  something  he  saw a  hundred years  ago, in  a  previous
incarnation, on another  planet: a bedsheet from  the  Manila  Hotel  with a
crude map  sketched on it. The Tojo River drawn in with a fat trail of  blue
fountain pen ink.
     "We dynamited the rockfall," Noda says, "according to the plan."
     Long  ago, they had poised rocks above a bottleneck in the river, ready
to create  a little  dam. But  setting off that dynamite was supposed to  be
almost the last thing they did before sealing themselves up inside.
     "But we are not ready," Goto Dengo says.
     Noda laughs. He  seems  quite  high spirited. "You have been telling me
for a month that you are ready."
     "Yes," Lieutenant Goto says, slowly and thickly, "you are right. We are
ready."
     Noda slaps him on the back. "You must get  to  the main entrance before
it floods."
     "My crew?"
     "Your crew is waiting for you there."
     Goto Dengo begins  walking towards the trail that will take him down to
the main entrance. Along the way,  he passes the  top of another ventilation
shaft,  Several  dozen workers are queued  up there,  thumbs lashed together
behind their backs with piano wire, guarded by soldiers with fixed bayonets.
One by one, prisoners kneel at the lip of the  shaft. Lieutenant Mori  whips
his officer's sword into the nape  of each neck with  a terrific grunt. Head
and  body  tumble forward into the  ventilation shaft and thud meatily  into
other bodies,  far  below, a couple of seconds  later. Every leaf and pebble
within  a three meter radius  of  the shaft opening is saturated with bright
red blood, and so is Lieutenant Mori.
     "Don't worry about that," Captain Noda says. "I will see to it that the
tops of the shafts are backfilled with  rubble,  as we discussed. The jungle
will grow over them long before the Americans ever find this place."
     Goto Dengo averts his eyes and turns to leave.
     "Lieutenant Goto!"  says  a voice. He  turns  around.  It is Lieutenant
Mori, pausing for a moment  to catch  his  breath.  A Filipino kneels before
him, mumbling a prayer in  Latin,  fumbling with  a rosary that dangles from
his bound hands.
     "Yes, Lieutenant Mori."
     "According to  my roster, six prisoners are signed out to you.  I  will
need them."
     "Those six  prisoners are  down  below,  helping to  load in  the  last
shipment."
     "But all of the shipment is inside the tunnels now."
     "Yes,  but not well placed. The entire  purpose of the  fool's vault is
ruined if we  strew gold and diamonds  around the place in  such a way as to
lead  thieves deeper into the  caverns. I need  these  men  to continue that
work."
     "You take full responsibility for them?"
     "I do," Goto Dengo says.
     "If there  are only six," Captain Noda says, "then your  crew should be
able to keep them under control."
     "I will see you at Yasukuni, Goto Dengo," says Lieutenant Mori.
     "I  will  look  forward to it," Goto Dengo says. He does not  add  that
Yasukuni must be a very crowded place by now,  and they will probably have a
terrible time finding each other.
     "I envy you. The end will be longer and harder for  those of us on  the
outside." Lieutenant  Mori snaps his blade into the back  of the  Filipino's
head, cutting him off between an Ave and a Maria.
     "Your heroism will not go unrewarded," Goto Dengo says.
     Lieutenant Mori's crew  awaits him down  below, in front  of  the mouse
hole  that  leads into Golgotha: four  hand  picked  soldiers. Each wears  a
thousand stitch headband,  and so each  has an  orange ball  centered on his
forehead, reminding Goto  Dengo not of the  Rising Sun but of an exit wound.
The water is up to mid thigh now, and the entrance tunnel is half full. When
Goto Dengo arrives, followed closely by Captain Noda, the men all cheer  him
politely.
     Goto Dengo squats in the opening. Only his head and shoulders are above
the water. Before him the tunnel  is  black.  It takes  a powerful effort of
will for him to enter. But it  is  no worse than what he used to  do  in the
abandoned mines, back in Hokkaido.
     Of  course, the abandoned  mines  weren't  going to  be dynamited  shut
behind him.
     Going forward is his chance to survive. If he hesitates, Noda will kill
him on the spot, and all  his crew, and others will be sent in to finish the
job. Noda made sure that others were trained to do it.
     "See you at Yasukuni," he says to Captain Noda, and without waiting for
a response he sloshes forward into blackness.


     Chapter 78 PONTIFEX


     By the  time Randy  reaches  the Air  Kinakuta  boarding lounge, he has
already  forgotten how he  reached the airport. He honestly can't  remember.
Did  he hail a taxi? Not  likely in down town Los Altos.  Did he  get a ride
from some hacker? He couldn't  have driven  the  Acura,  because the Acura's
electronics had been burned to a crisp by the electromagnetic pulse gun.  He
had pulled the  title out  of the glove  compartment and signed it over to a
Ford  dealer  three  blocks away, in exchange for  five  thousand dollars in
cash.
     Oh, yeah. The Ford dealer gave him a ride to the airport.
     He has always  wanted to pull the stunt of walking up to the counter of
an exotic foreign airline and saying, "Get  me on the next plane  to X." But
now  he's  just done it and it wasn't cool and romantic  as he had hoped. It
was sort of bleak and stressful  and expensive. He had to buy  a first class
ticket,  which consumed most of  the five thousand dollars. But  he  doesn't
feel like beating himself to death  over how he is managing his assets  just
now, i.e., at  a time when  his net worth is a negative number that can only
be  expressed  using  scientific notation. The  probability  is high that he
failed to wipe  Tombstone's  hard  drive before the cops seized it, and that
the Dentist's lawsuit will consequently succeed.
     On his way  down  the concourse  he stands  and  stares  at  a  bank of
telephones for  a while. He very much wants to notify the Shaftoes of recent
events. It  would be a good thing if they could somehow strip the sunken sub
clean of  treasure as  fast  as possible,  reducing its value and  hence the
damage that the Dentist can inflict on Epiphyte.
     The math is pretty simple here. The  Dentist has a way to claim damages
from Epiphyte. The  amount  of  those  damages is  x,  where  x is  what the
Dentist,  as a  minority shareholder,  would  have made in capital gains  if
Randy  had  been  responsible enough to write a better  contract with Semper
Marine.  If such a contract had specified  a fifty fifty split, then x would
be equal to fifty percent of the cash value of the wreck times the one tenth
of Epiphyte that  the Dentist owns minus a few percent for  taxes  and other
frictional effects of  the real world. So if there's ten  million dollars in
the wreck, then x works out to around half a million bucks.
     In order for the Dentist to gain control of Epiphyte, he has to acquire
an  additional forty percent of its stock. The price of  that  stock (if  it
were for sale) is simply 0.4 times the total value of Epiphyte. Call it y.
     If x > y, the Dentist wins. Because then the judge is  going to say,
"You, Epiphyte, owe  this  poor aggrieved  minority shareholder $x. But as I
look  at the parlous state  of the corporation's finances I see that there's
no  way for you to raise that kind of money. And  so  the only way to settle
the debt is to give the plaintiff the one asset you have in abundance, which
is your  crappy stock.  And  since the  value of  the  whole corporation  is
really, really close to  being zero, you're going to have to give him almost
all of it."
     So  how to make  x <  y?  Either reduce the value  of  the wreck, by
stripping it of its gold, or else increase  the value  of Epiphyte, by what,
exactly?
     In better  times they  could maybe take the company public. But setting
up  an  IPO  takes months. And  no investor's  going  to touch it when  it's
encumbered by a lawsuit from the Dentist.
     Randy has this vision of driving through the jungle  with an end loader
and scooping up that big pile of gold bars  he found with Doug and taking it
straight  to  a bank and depositing it in Epiphyte's account. That'd  do it.
The whole concept makes his body tingle as he  stands there in the middle of
the international concourse.
     Off  to the left, some kind  of  huddled or teeming mass,  heavy on the
women and children, passes, and Randy hears  some familiar voices. His  mind
has wrapped  itself like  a starving squid  around this  gold in the  jungle
concept, and in order to  address reality for just a second,  he has to peel
the  tentacles  away,  popping  those suckers  off of  it  one  by  one.  He
eventually focuses  in on  the  scuttling group  and identifies it as  Avi's
family: Devorah and a bunch of kids and the two nannies, clutching passports
and tickets in El Al jackets. The kids are small and prone to sudden darting
tactics,  the  adults are  tense and not inclined to let them stray, so  the
group's movement  down the concourse  has the  general  aspect  of a sack of
beagles heading  in  the approximate direction of some fresh meat. Randy  is
probably personally responsible for this exodus and would  much rather slink
into the men's room and crawl down a toilet, but he has to say something. So
he catches  up with Devorah and startles her by offering to carry  the child
support  bag that she has  slung over her  shoulder. This turns  out  to  be
shockingly heavy: several gallons of  apple juice, he  would estimate,  plus
complete asthma attack management infrastructure, and maybe  a few bricks of
solid gold in case of some totalizing civil breakdown en route.
     "So. Uh, going to Israel?"
     "El Al doesn't fly to Acapulco." Pow! Devorah is in peak form.
     "Did Avi give you any kind of rationale for this?"
     "You're asking me? I kind of assumed you would know," Devorah says.
     "Well, things  have been, certainly,  volatile," Randy  says.  "I don't
know if fleeing the country is warranted."
     "Then why  are you in the airport with  an Air Kinakuta ticket sticking
out of your pocket?"
     "Oh, you know ... some business issues need resolving."
     "You seem really depressed. Do you have a problem?" Devorah asks.
     Randy sighs. "That depends. Do you?"
     "Do I what? Have a problem? Why should I have a problem?"
     "Because you've been uprooted and sent packing on ten minutes' notice."
     "We're going to Israel, Randy. That's not  being uprooted. That's being
rerooted." Or perhaps she is saying  "rerouted." Without a transcript, there
is no way for Randy to tell.
     "Yeah, but it's still kind of a hassle "
     "Compared to what?"
     "Compared to staying at home and living your life."
     "This is my  life, Randy." Devorah is definitely  kicking out a prickly
vibe here. Randy figures that she is  incredibly pissed off, but  under some
kind of emotional nondisclosure agreement. This is probably better than  the
only other  two alternatives Randy can think  of, namely (1) dissolving into
hysterical recriminations and (2) beatific  serenity. It is  an  I'll  do my
job, you do yours,  why are  you in my  face attitude.  Randy  feels like an
idiot, all of a sudden,  for having taken Devorah's bag. She is clearly just
this side of aghast, wondering why the fuck Randy is toiling  as a skycap at
this  critical moment. Like she and the nannies are not capable of humping a
sack down a  hallway. Has she,  Devorah, offered to step in and  help  Randy
write any code lately? And if Randy  really  has  nothing better to do,  why
doesn't  he be a  man, and  strap  grenades  all over his body and  give the
Dentist a big hug?
     Randy says, "I assume you'll be in touch with Avi before you take  off.
Would you give him a message?"
     "What's the message?"
     "Zero."
     "That's it?"
     "That's it," Randy says.
     Devorah  is  perhaps  not familiar  with Randy  and  Avi's  practice of
conserving precious bandwidth by communicating in binary code,  one bit at a
time, la  Paul  Revere and the  Old North Church. In this case, "zero" means
that Randy did not succeed in wiping  out all the  data on Tombstone's  hard
drive.


     ***


     Air Kinakuta's first  class lounge, with its free drinks and  highly un
American concept of service, beckons.  Randy  avoids it because  he knows he
will sink straight into a coma if he goes there, and they would have to load
him onto the  747  with a  forklift. Instead  he walks around  the  airport,
clutching his hip spastically  every time  he re realizes  that  his  laptop
isn't dangling there. He is not adjusting very quickly to the fact that most
of the laptop is stuffed into a  wastebasket at the Ford dealership where he
unloaded the Acura. While he was waiting for his man to scurry back from the
bank with  the five grand,  he  used  the  screwdriver  attachments  on  his
multipurpose pocket tool to extract the laptop's  hard drive, and then threw
away the rest.
     Very large  television sets hang  from the  ceilings  in the  departure
lounge, showing the Airport Channel, which  is a parade  of news  bits  even
more  punishingly flimsy than  normal television news, mixed in with a great
deal of  weather and  stock quotes.  Randy  is  struck,  but  not  precisely
surprised, to see footage of  black hatted Secret Admirers exercising  their
Second Amendment rights in the streets of Los Altos, and of Ordo's barricade
avalanching  towards the  camera,  and the police  storming over it  weapons
drawn. Paul  Comstock is shown pausing, as he climbs into a limousine to say
something, looking  hale and smug. The  conventional wisdom about TV news is
that the image is everything and if that  is the case then this is a big win
for  Ordo,  which  looks like  the  victim  of  jackbooted thugs. Which gets
Epiphyte  nowhere,  since Ordo is,  or  ought to be,  nothing  more  than  a
bystander. This is supposed to be a private conflict between the Dentist and
Epiphyte and  now  it's become a  public one between  Comstock and Ordo, and
this makes Randy irritated and confused.
     He  goes and  gets on his plane and starts  eating  caviar. Normally he
doesn't partake, but  caviar has a decadent fiddling while Rome  burns thing
going for it that works for him just now.
     As is his nerdly  custom, Randy actually  reads the informational cards
that  are stuffed  in among  the  in flight magazines and vomit sacs. One of
these  extols  the  fact  that  Sultan  Class  passengers  (as  first  class
passengers are  called) can not  only make outgoing  phone calls from  their
seats but can  also receive incoming  ones.  So Randy  dials  the number for
Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe's GSM telephone. It's an Australian phone  number,
but  it'll ring  anywhere on  the planet. Right now it's something like  six
A.M. in the  Philippines, but  Doug  is bound  to be awake,  and  indeed  he
answers his phone on the second ring. Randy can tell from the sound of horns
and  diesels that he is stuck  in Manila  traffic, probably in the back of a
taxi.
     "It's Randy. On a plane," says Randy. "An Air Kinakuta plane."
     "Randy! Well I've just been watching you on television,"  Doug says. It
takes a minute for that to sink  in; Randy has used a  couple  of  vodkas to
cleanse his palate of the caviar.
     "Yeah,"  Doug continues, "I turned on CNN  when  I woke up and glimpsed
you sitting on top of a car typing. What's going on?"
     "Nothing!  Nothing at all," Randy says. He  figures that this is a  big
stroke of luck. Now that Doug has seen him on  CNN, he'll  be more likely to
effect superbly dramatic measures out  of sheer paranoia. Randy slurps vodka
and says, "Wow, this Sultan Class service is great. Anyway,  if you do a Web
search on Ordo, you'll see this nonsense had absolutely  nothing to do  with
us. Nothing."
     "That's funny, because Comstock  is  denying that it's  a crackdown  on
Ordo," Doug says. When speaking of official U.S. government denials, Vietnam
combat veterans like Doug  are capable of summoning up a drawling irony that
is about as  subtle as having automotive jumper cables connected directly to
your fillings,  but much funnier. Vodka climbs about halfway up Randy's nose
before  he controls it. "They say that it's just a  little old  civil suit,"
Doug says, now using a petal soft, wounded innocent tone.
     "Ordo's status as purveyor of stuff that the government hates and fears
is just coincidental," Randy guesses.
     "That's right."
     "Well then, I'm sure there's nothing to it other than our troubles with
the Dentist," Randy says.
     "What troubles are those, Randy?"
     "Happened during the  middle of the night, your time. I'm sure you will
have some interesting faxes awaiting you this morning."
     "Well, maybe I should look at those faxes, then," Doug Shaftoe says.
     "Maybe I'll give you a buzz when I reach Kinakuta," Randy says.
     "You have a good flight, Randall."
     "Have a nice day, Douglas."
     Randy  puts  the phone back in its armrest cradle and  prepares to sink
into a well deserved plane coma. But five minutes later the  phone rings. It
is  so disorienting to have one's phone ring on  an airplane that he doesn't
know what  to make of it for a while. When  he finally realizes what's going
on, he has to consult the instruction card to figure out how to answer it.
     When he finally has the thing turned on  and at  his ear, a voice says,
"You call that subtle? You think that you and Doug Shaftoe are  the only two
people  in  the  world who  know  that  Sultan Class passengers can  receive
incoming phone calls?" Randy is certain he's never heard this voice  before.
It is  the voice of an old man.  Not  a voice worn out or cracking with age,
but a voice that's been slowly worn smooth, like the steps of a cathedral.
     "Um, who's this?"
     "Am  I  right in thinking that  you want Mr.  Shaftoe  to go to  a  pay
telephone somewhere and then call you back?"
     "Who is this, please?"
     "You think that's more secure than his GSM phone? It's not really." The
speaker  pauses frequently before, during,  and after sentences, as if  he's
been spending  a  lot  of time alone,  and is  having  trouble  hitting  his
conversational stride.
     "Okay,"  Randy  says, "you know who I am and  whom  I  was calling.  So
obviously you are surveilling me. You're not working for the Dentist, I take
it. That leaves what? The United States Government? The NSA, right?"
     The man laughs. "As a rule the Fort Meade boys don't bother to check in
with the people whose lines they are tapping." The caller has an un American
crispness in his  voice,  vaguely  Northern European.  "In your case the NSA
might  make an exception, it's true when  I was  there, they were  all great
admirers of your  grandfather's work.  In fact, they  liked it so much  they
stole it."
     "No higher flattery, I guess."
     "You should be a billionaire, Randy. Thank god you're not."
     "Why do you say that?"
     "Oh, because  then you'd be  a highly  intelligent man who never has to
make difficult choices who never  has to exert his mind. It is a  state much
worse than being a moron."
     "Did Grandpa work for you at the NSA?"
     "He wasn't interested.  Said he had a higher calling. So  while he made
better and  better computers to solve the  Harvard Waterhouse  Prime  Factor
Challenge, my friends at the NSA watched him, and learned."
     "And you did too."
     "I?  Oh, no, I have only modest skills  with  a  soldering iron.  I was
there to watch the NSA watching your grandfather."
     "On behalf of whom? Don't tell me eruditorum.org?"
     "Well done, Randy."
     "What should I call you Root? Pontifex?"
     "Pontifex is a nice word."
     "It's true," Randy  says. "I checked  it  out, looking for clues in the
etymology it's an old Latin word meaning 'priest.' "
     "Catholics call the Pope  'Pontifex  Maximus,'  or pontiff for  short,"
says Pontifex agreeably, "but the word  was  also used  by pagans to  denote
their priests, and Jews their rabbis it is ever so ecumenical."
     "But the literal meaning of the word is 'bridge builder,' and so it's a
good name for a cryptosystem," Randy says.
     "Or, I  hope, for me," Pontifex  says  drily. "I am glad you  feel that
way, Randy. Many people would think of a cryptosystem as a wall, rather than
a bridge."
     "Well, gosh. It's nice to telephonically meet you, Pontifex."
     "The pleasure is mutual."
     "You've been so quiet on the e mail front recently."
     "Didn't want to give you the creeps. I was afraid if I bothered you any
more, you'd think I was proselytizing."
     "Not at all. By the way people  in the know  think your cryptosystem is
weird, but good."
     "It's  not  weird  at  all,  once  you  understand it,"  Pontifex  says
politely.
     "Well, uh, what occasions  this phone  call? Obviously your friends are
still surveilling me on behalf of whom, exactly?"
     "I don't even know," Pontifex says. "But  I do know that you're  trying
to crack Arethusa."
     Randy cannot even remember  ever uttering  the  word "Arethusa." It was
printed on  the wrappers  on the bricks of ETC  cards  that  he  ran through
Chester's card  reader. Now Randy pictures a box inside  Grandpa's old trunk
labeled Harvard Waterhouse Prime Factor Challenge  and  dated  in the  early
1950s.  So that at least gives him a  date to peg on Pontifex. "You were  at
NSA during the  late  forties and early fifties," Randy says. "You must have
worked  on Harvest." Harvest  was a  legendary  code breaking supercomputer,
three decades ahead of its time, built by ETC engineers working under an NSA
contract.
     "I told you," Pontifex says, "your grandfather's work came in handy."
     "Chester's  got  this   retired  ETC  engineer  working  on  his   card
machinery," Randy  says. "He  helped  me  read the  Arethusa cards.  Saw the
wrappers. He's a friend of yours. He called you."
     Pontifex chuckles.  "Among our little band there is hardly a  word with
more memories attached to it  than Arethusa. He nearly hit the floor when he
saw it. Called me from the cellphone on his boat, Randy."
     "Why? Why was Arethusa such a big deal?"
     "Because  we  spent ten years of our  lives trying to break  the damned
code! And we failed!"
     "It  must have been  really frustrating," Randy says, "you  still sound
angry."
     "I'm angry at Comstock."
     "Not the "
     "Not Attorney General Paul Comstock. His father. Earl Comstock."
     "What!? The guy that Doug Shaftoe threw off the  ski lift?  The Vietnam
guy?"
     "No,  no!  I  mean, yes.  Earl Comstock was largely responsible for our
Vietnam  policy. And Doug Shaftoe did  get his fifteen  minutes of  fame  by
throwing him off a ski lift in,  I believe,  1979.  But  all of that Vietnam
nonsense was just a coda to his real career."
     "Which was?"
     "Earl Comstock, to  whom your grandfather  reported  in Brisbane during
World War II, was one of the  founders of  the NSA. And  he was my boss from
1949 through about 1960. He was obsessed with Arethusa."
     "Why?"
     "He was convinced it was a Communist cipher. That if we could break it,
we could  then exploit that break to get into some  later Soviet  codes that
were  giving  us difficulty. Which  was  ridiculous. But  he believed  it or
claimed to and so we  battered our heads  against Arethusa for years. Strong
men had nervous breakdowns.  Brilliant men  concluded that they were stupid.
In the end it turned out to be a joke."
     "A joke? What do you mean by that?"
     "We ran those  intercepts  through Harvest  backwards and forwards. The
lights dimmed in Washington  and Baltimore, we  used to  say, when  we  were
doing Arethusa work. I  still have the opening groups memorized: AADAA FGTAA
and  so  on.  Those  double  As!  People  wrote  dissertations  about  their
significance.  We concluded  in  the  end  that they  were just  flukes.  We
invented entire new systems of cryptanalysis to attack it wrote new  volumes
of  the Cryptonomicon. The data were very nearly random. Finding patterns in
them was like trying to read a  book  that  had  been  burned, and its ashes
mixed  with  all  the cement that  went into  the  Hoover Dam. We  never got
anything that was worth a damn.
     "After ten years or so, we began using it to haze incoming recruits. By
that time  the NSA was getting fantastically huge, we were hiring all of the
most brilliant math prodigies in the United States, and when we  got one who
was especially cocky we'd put him on the Arethusa project  just  to give him
the message  that he wasn't as smart as he thought he was. We broke a lot of
kids on that wheel. But then, around 1959, this one kid came in the smartest
kid we had seen yet and he broke it."
     "Well,  I assume  you didn't place this phone call  just to keep  me in
suspense," Randy says. "What did he find?"
     "He found that the Arethusa intercepts did not represent coded messages
at all. They were simply the output of a particular mathematical function, a
Riemann zeta function, which has many uses one being that it is used in some
cryptosystems  as a random  number generator. He  proved that  if you set up
this function in a particular way, and then gave it, as input, a  particular
string of numbers, it would  crank out the exact sequence  that was on those
intercepts.  So that  was all she  wrote.  And  it almost  ended  Comstock's
career."
     "Why?"
     "Partly  because  of  the  insane amount of money and  manpower he  had
thrown  into  the Arethusa project. But mostly because the  input string the
seed for the random number generator was the boss's name.
     C O M S T O C K."
     "You're kidding."
     "We had  the proof right  there. It  was impeccable  from a  pure  math
standpoint.  So,  either  Comstock had  generated  the  Arethusa  intercepts
himself, and been stupid enough to use his  own name as the seed and believe
me, he  really was that kind of guy or else someone  had played an  enormous
practical joke on him."
     "Which do you think it was?"
     "Well, he never divulged where  he had  gotten  these intercepts in the
first  place and so  it was difficult to  form a hypothesis.  I am  inclined
toward the  joke  theory, because  he was the  sort  of  man  who gives  his
subordinates a  powerful urge to play practical jokes on him. But in the end
it didn't matter. He was drummed out of the NSA at the  age of forty six.  A
classic grey man, a war veteran, a technocrat with a high security clearance
and any number of high powered connections. He went more or less straight to
Kennedy's National Security Counsel from there, and the rest is history."
     "Wow!" Randy says, kind of awed. "What a jerk!"
     "No kidding,"  says  Pontifex. "And now,  his  son well, don't  get  me
started on his son."
     As Pontifex's voice trails off, Randy asks, "So, you are calling me now
for what purpose?"
     Pontifex  doesn't  answer for a few moments,  as if he's wrestling with
the question himself. But Randy doubts that's the case. Someone is trying to
send you  a message. "I suppose  that I am just appalled by the very idea of
more young bright men throwing themselves against Arethusa. Until I received
that call from a  boat on Lake Washington,  I  had  thought it was dead  and
buried."
     "But why should you care?"
     "You've already  been  cheated  out of a fortune in computer  patents,"
Pontifex says. "It wouldn't be fair."
     "So, it's pity, then."
     "Furthermore as I  said  it  is  my friend's  job  to  keep  you  under
surveillance. He's going to hear  almost every word you say for the next few
months, or at least read transcripts. For you and  Cantrell and those others
to spend  that entire time yammering  about  Arethusa  would be more than he
could bear. Hideous deja  vu. Just intolerably  Kafkaesque. So  please, just
let it go."
     "Well, thanks for the tip."
     "You're welcome, Randy. And may I give you a word of advice?"
     "That's what Pontifex is supposed to do."
     "First a disclaimer: I've been out of circulation for a while. Have not
picked up the postmodern unwillingness to make value judgments."
     "Okay, I am bracing myself."
     "My advice:  do try to  build  the  best  Crypt you  possibly can. Your
clients some  of them, anyway are, for  all practical  purposes, aborigines.
They will either make you rich or kill you, like something straight out of a
Joseph Campbell footnote."
     "So you're talking about your basic Colombian drug lord types, here?"
     "Yes, I am, but  I'm also referring to certain white men  in suits.  It
only takes a single generation to revert to savagery."
     "Well, we provide state of the art cryptographic services to all of our
clients even the ones with bones in their noses."
     "Excellent! And now as much as I hate to sign off on a dark note I must
say good bye."
     Randy hangs up, and the phone rings again almost immediately.
     "Who the fuck are you?" Doug Shaftoe says, "I call you on the airplane,
and I get a busy signal."
     "I have a  funny story to tell you," Randy  says, "about a  guy you ran
into once while skiing. But unfortunately it will have to wait."


     Chapter 79 GLORY


     Bare chested,  camouflage painted, trench knife in hand, Colt .45 stuck
in the waistband of his khaki trousers,  Bobby Shaftoe moves like a cloud of
mist through the jungle. He stops when he  can get  a clear  view of the Nip
Army truck, framed between  the hairy, cluttered trunks of a  couple of date
palms. A skirmish line of ants crawls over the skin of his sandaled foot. He
ignores them.
     It has  all the  earmarks of  a piss stop. Two Nipponese privates climb
out of the truck and confer for a  few moments. One of  them wades into  the
jungle.  The other  leans  against  the  truck's  fender  and  lights  up  a
cigarette. Its glowing tip echoes the  light  of  the sunset behind him. The
one  in  the jungle drops his trousers, squats, leans back against a tree to
take a shit.
     At this moment they are supremely vulnerable. The contrast  between the
brightness of the  sunset and the dimness of the jungle renders them  nearly
blind.  The  shitter  is  helpless,  and  the smoker  looks exhausted. Bobby
Shaftoe sheds his sandals. He emerges from the  jungle  onto the road behind
the truck, strides forward on ant bitten  feet, crouches  behind the truck's
bumper. The weapon comes out of his hip pocket silently. Without  taking his
eyes off the smoker's feet visible beneath the truck's chassis he peels away
the  backing and slaps the payload onto the truck's tailgate. Then, just  to
rub it in, he slaps up another one. Mission accomplished! Take that, Tojo!
     Moments  later,  he's back  in the  jungle, watching as  the  Nip truck
drives away, now sporting two red, white, and blue stickers reading: I SHALL
RETURN! Bobby congratulates himself on another successful mission.
     Long after dark,  he reaches the Hukbalahap camp up  on the volcano. He
works his way  in through the  booby  trapped perimeter and makes  plenty of
noise as he approaches, so that  the Huk sentries won't shoot at  him in the
darkness. But he needn't have bothered. Discipline has broken down, they are
all drunk and getting drunker, because of something they heard on the radio:
MacArthur has returned. The General has landed on Leyte.
     Bobby Shaftoe's response is  to boil up some powerful coffee  and begin
pouring it into their signal man, Pedro. While the caffeine works its magic,
Shaftoe  grabs a message pad  and the stub of a pencil,  and writes  out his
idea  for  the  seventh  time:  OPPORTUNITY  EXISTS  TO CONTACT  AND  SUPPLY
FILAMERICAN  ELEMENTS IN CONCEPCION  STOP I VOLUNTEER  FOR  SAME STOP  AWAIT
INSTRUCTIONS STOP SIGNED SHAFTOE.
     He gets  Pedro to encrypt it and send it off. After that, all he can do
is wait and pray. This shit with the stickers has to stop.
     He  has been tempted, a  thousand  times, to  desert, and  to  go  into
Concepcion himself.  But just because he's out in the  boondocks with a band
of Huk irregulars doesn't mean he's beyond the reach of military discipline.
Deserters can still get shot or hanged, and despite the fact that he was one
in Sweden, Bobby Shaftoe believes that they deserve to be.
     Concepcion  is  down  in  the lowlands north  of  Manila. From the high
places  of the  Zambales Mountains you can actually see the town lying  amid
the green rice paddies. Those lowlands are still totally Nip controlled. But
when  the  General  lands,  he's probably  going to land north  of  here  at
Lingayen Gulf,  just like the Nips  did  when they invaded in  '41, and then
Concepcion is going to lie right in the middle  of his route to Manila. He's
going to need eyes there.
     Sure enough, the order comes through a couple of days later: RENDEZVOUS
TARPON POINT  GREEN 5 NOVEMBER STOP CONVEY TRANSMITTER CONCEPCION STOP AWAIT
FURTHER ORDERS STOP.
     Tarpon is the submarine that has been bringing them ammunition, medical
supplies, I  SHALL  RETURN  stickers, cartons of American  cigarettes with I
SHALL RETURN inserts in each pack, I SHALL RETURN matchbooks, I SHALL RETURN
coasters,  and  I SHALL  RETURN condoms.  Shaftoe  has been stockpiling  the
condoms because he knows  they won't  go over well in a Catholic country. He
figures that when he finds Glory he'll go through  a  long ton of condoms in
about a week.
     Three days later, he and a squad of Huks are on hand to meet Tarpon  at
"Point Green," which is their code name for a tiny cove on the west coast of
Luzon, down beneath Mount Pinatubo, not all that far north of Subic Bay. The
submarine glides in at around midnight, running on its electric motors so it
won't make  any sound, and the  Huks pull up alongside in rubber  boats  and
outrigger canoes and unload the cargo. Sure enough, the transmitter's there.
And  this time there's  none  of those goddamn stickers or  matchbooks.  The
cargo is  ammunition and  a few  fighting  men:  some Filamerican commandoes
fresh from a debriefing with MacArthur's intelligence chief, and a couple of
Americans MacArthur's advance scouts.
     Over the next several  days,  Shaftoe and  a few hand picked Huks carry
the transmitter  up one slope of the  Zambales Mountains and down the other.
They stop  when the  foothills finally give way to low lying paddy land. The
main north  south road, from Manila up towards Lingayen  Gulf, lies directly
across their path.
     After  a few days of scrambling and  scrounging, they are able  to load
the transmitter on board a farm cart and bury it in manure. They harness the
cart to a  pathetic carabao, loaned by a loyal but poor farmer,  and set out
across Nip country, headed for Concepcion.
     At this point they have  to  split up,  though, because there's no  way
that blue eyed Shaftoe can travel  in the open. Two  Huks,  pretending to be
farmboys, take  the manure cart while Shaftoe  begins  making his  way cross
country, traveling at night,  sleeping in ditches or in the homes of trusted
American sympathizers.
     It takes  him a  week and a half to  cover the fifty kilometers, but in
time, with patience and perseverance, he reaches the town of Concepcion, and
knocks on the door of their local contact around  midnight. The contact is a
prominent local citizen the manager of the town's only  bank. Mr. Calagua is
astonished to see an American standing  at his back door. This tells Shaftoe
that something  must  have gone  wrong the boys with the transmitter  should
have  arrived a week ago. But the manager tells him that no one has shown up
though  rumor has  it  that  the Nips recently caught  some  boys trying  to
smuggle contraband in a farm cart and executed them on the spot.
     So Shaftoe  is marooned in  Concepcion with  no way to get orders or to
send messages. He feels  bad for the boys who died, but in a way, this isn't
such a bad situation for him. The only  reason he wanted to be in Concepcion
is that the Altamira family comes from here. Half of  the  local farmers are
related to Glory in some way.
     Shaftoe breaks into the Calaguas' stables and  improvises  a  bed. They
would put him up in a spare bedroom  if he asked, but he tells them that the
stables  are  safer if  he gets caught,  the  Calaguas  can  at  least claim
ignorance. He recuperates on a pile of straw for a day  or two,  then starts
trying to learn something about the Altamiras. He can't go out nosing around
by himself, but  the  Calaguas know everyone  in town, and they have  a good
sense  of who can be trusted. So  inquiries go  out, and  within a couple of
days, information has come back in.
     Mr. Calagua  explains  it to him over glasses of bourbon in  his study.
Wracked by guilt  over the fact that his honored guest is sleeping on a pile
of hay in an outbuilding,  he  pushes bourbon at  him all the time, which is
fine with Bobby Shaftoe.
     "Some  of  the  information is reliable,  some  is  er farfetched," Mr.
Calagua  says. "Here  is  the reliable  part. First of  all, your  guess was
correct. When the  Japanese took over Manila,  many members of  the Altamira
family came back to this area to stay with relatives. They believed it would
be safer."
     "Are you telling me Glory is up here?"
     "No,"  Mr.  Calagua  says  sadly,  "she  is  not up here.  But  she was
definitely here on September 13th, 1942."
     "How do you know?"
     "Because she gave birth to a baby boy on that day the birth certificate
is on file at the town hall. Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe."
     "Well,  I'll be fucked sideways,"  Shaftoe says. He starts  calculating
dates in his head.
     "Many  of the Altamiras who  fled here have since gone back to the city
supposedly  to obtain work.  But some  of  them are also serving as eyes and
ears for the resistance."
     "I knew they would do the right thing," Shaftoe says.
     Mr. Calagua smiles cautiously. "Manila  is full  of people who claim to
be  the eyes and ears of the resistance. It is easy  to be eyes and ears. It
is harder to be fists and  feet. But some of the Altamiras are fighting, too
they have gone into the mountains to join the Huks."
     "Which mountains? I didn't run across any of them up in the Zambales."
     "South of Manila and Laguna de Bay are many volcanoes and heavy jungle.
This is where some of Glory's family are fighting."
     "Is that where Glory is? And the baby? Or are they in the city?"
     Mr. Calagua is nervous. "This is  the  part that may be far fetched. It
is said that Glory is a famous heroine of the fight against the Nips."
     "Are you telling me she's dead? If she's dead, just tell me."
     "No, I have no information that she is dead. But she is a heroine. This
is for certain."
     The next day,  Bobby Shaftoe's malaria comes back and keeps him laid up
for about a week. The Calaguas move him right into their house  and bring in
the  town doctor  to  look  after  him. It's  the  same doctor who delivered
Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe two years ago.
     When he's  feeling a little stronger, he lights out  for the south.  It
takes him  three weeks to reach the northern  outskirts of  Manila, hitching
rides on trains and trucks, or sloshing through paddies in the middle of the
night. He kills two Nipponese soldiers  stealthily, and  three of them in  a
firefight  at an intersection. Each time, he has to go to  ground  for a few
days to avoid capture. But get to Manila he does.
     He  can't go into the heart  of the city in addition  to  being  really
stupid, it would just slow him down. Instead he skirts it, taking  advantage
of the thriving resistance  network. He  is passed from one barangay to  the
next, all  the way around the outskirts  of Manila, until he has reached the
coastal plain between Laguna de Bay and Manila Bay. At this point nothing is
left to the  south  except  for a few miles  of rice paddies  and  then  the
volcanic  mountains  where  Altamiras are  making  names  for themselves  as
guerilla  fighters. During his  trip he  has heard a thousand  rumors  about
them. Most of them  are patently false people telling him  what he obviously
wants to  hear. But  several times he has  heard what sounds  like a genuine
scrap of information about Glory.
     They say that she  has a healthy young son, living in the  apartment in
the Malate neighborhood of Manila, being cared  for by  the  extended family
while his mother serves in the war.
     They say that she has put her nursing skills to work, acting  as a sort
of Florence Nightingale for the Huks.
     They say that she is a messenger for the  Fil American  forces, that no
one surpasses her daring in  crossing through Nipponese checkpoints carrying
secret messages and other contraband.
     The last part doesn't make much sense to Shaftoe. Which is she, a nurse
or  a  messenger? Maybe they  have her confused with  someone else. Or maybe
she's both maybe she's smuggling medicine through the checkpoints.
     The  farther south he gets, the  more  information he  hears.  The same
rumors and anecdotes  pop up  over and over again,  differing  only in their
small details. He  runs into half a  dozen people who  are dead certain that
Glory is  south  of  here,  working  as a  messenger  for a brigade  of  Huk
guerillas in the mountains above Calamba.
     He spends Christmas Day in  a fisherman's  hut on the shores of the big
lake, Laguna de Bay. There are plenty of mosquitoes. Another bout of malaria
strikes  him then; he spends  a couple of weeks wracked with  fever  dreams,
having bizarre nightmares about Glory.
     Finally he gets well enough to move again, and hitches a boat ride into
the lakeside town of Calamba. The black volcanoes that loom  above  it are a
welcome sight. They look nice and cool, and they remind him of the ancestral
Shaftoe  territory. According  to their family lore,  the first  Shaftoes to
come to America worked as indentured servants in tobacco and  cotton fields,
raising their eyes longingly towards those cool mountains as they stooped in
sweltering fields.  As  soon  as they could get away, they did,  and  headed
uphill. The mountains of  Luzon beckon Shaftoe in the same way away from the
malarial lowlands, up towards Glory. His journey's almost over.
     But he  gets stuck in Calamba, forced to hide  in a boathouse, when the
city's Nipponese Air Force troops begin gathering their forces for some kind
of a  move. Those Huks up on the mountain have been giving them a hard time,
and the Nips are getting crazed and vicious.
     The leader of the local Huks finally sends an emissary to get Shaftoe's
story. The emissary goes away and several  days pass. Finally a Fil American
lieutenant returns bearing  two pieces  of  good  news:  the Americans  have
landed  in force at Lingayen Gulf, and Glory is alive and  working with  the
Huks only a few miles away.
     "Help me get out of this  town," Shaftoe pleads. "Take me out in a boat
on the lake, drop me off in the countryside, then I can move."
     "Move where?" says the lieutenant, playing stupid.
     "To the high ground! To join those Huks!"
     "You  would be  killed. The ground  is  booby  trapped.  The  Huks  are
extremely vigilant."
     "But "
     "Why don't you go the other way?" the lieutenant asks. "Go to Manila."
     "Why would I want to go there?"
     "Your son  is there.  And that is  where you are needed. Soon  the  big
battle will be in Manila."
     "Okay,"  Shaftoe says,  "I'll  go to Manila.  But  first I want to  see
Glory."
     "Ah," the lieutenant says, as if light has finally dawned. "You say you
want to see Glory."
     "I'm not just saying it. I do want to see Glory."
     The lieutenant exhales a  cloud of cigarette smoke and shakes his head.
"No you don't," he says flatly.
     "What?"
     "You don't want to see Glory."
     "How can you say that? Are you fucking out of your mind?"
     The lieutenant's  face goes stony. "Very  well,"  he says, "I will make
inquiries. Perhaps Glory will come here and visit you."
     "That's crazy. It's much too dangerous."
     The lieutenant laughs. "No, you don't understand,"  he says. "You are a
white man  in  a provincial  city in  the Philippines occupied by  starving,
berserk  Nips.  It  is  impossible  for  you  to  show  your  face  outside.
Impossible. Glory, on the other hand, is free to move."
     "You said they're inspecting people almost every block."
     "They will not bother Glory."
     "Do the Nips ever you know. Molest women?"
     "Ah. You are  worried  about  Glory  being raped." The lieutenant takes
another long  draw on  his cigarette. "I can assure  you that this will  not
happen."  He rises to his feet, tired of the conversation. "Wait  here,"  he
says. "Gather your strength for the Battle of Manila."
     He walks out, leaving Shaftoe more frustrated than ever.
     Two days  later, the  owner of the boathouse,  who  speaks  very little
English,  shakes  Shaftoe  awake before sunrise.  He beckons  Shaftoe into a
small boat  and  rows him out into the lake, then  half  a mile up the shore
toward a sandbar. The dawn  is just breaking over the  other side of the big
lake, illuminating planet sized cumulus  clouds. It's as if the biggest fuel
dump  in  the  whole world is  being  blown  up  in  a  sky  diced into vast
trapezoids by the linear contrails of American planes on dawn patrol.
     Glory  is strolling out on the sandbar. He  can't  see her face because
she  is  wrapped in  a silk scarf,  but he would  know the shape of her body
anywhere. She walks back and forth along  the shore, letting the  warm water
of the lake lap against her bare feet. She is really loving that sunrise she
keeps  her back turned  to Shaftoe  so that she can enjoy  it. What a flirt.
Shaftoe gets as hard  as  an oar. He pats his  back pocket, making sure he's
well  stocked with I SHALL RETURN  condoms.  It will be tricky, bedding down
with Glory on a  sandbar with this old codger here, but maybe he can pay the
guy to go out and exercise his back for an hour.
     The  guy keeps looking over  his shoulder to judge  the distance to the
sandbar. When they are about a stone's throw  away, he sits up and ships the
oars. They coast for a few yards and then come to a stop.
     "What are you  doing?" Shaftoe  asks. Then he  heaves a sigh. "You want
money?" He rubs his thumb and fingertips together. "Huh? Like that?"
     But the guy is just staring into  his face, with an expression as tough
and stony as anything that Shaftoe has seen on a hundred battlefields around
the world. He waits for Shaftoe to shut up, then cocks his head and jerks it
back in the direction of Glory.
     Shaftoe looks up at Glory,  just as  she's turning around  to face him.
She reaches  up with clublike hands,  all wrapped up in long strips of cloth
like a mummy's, and paws the scarf away from her face.
     Or what used to be a face. Now it's just the front of her skull.
     Bobby Shaftoe breathes in deep, and lets out a scream that can probably
be heard in downtown Manila.
     The boatman casts  an  anxious look  toward the  town, then stands  up,
blocking Shaftoe's  view as he's drawing  in another breath. One of the oars
is in his hands. Shaftoe is just  cutting loose with another scream when the
oar clocks him in the side of the head.


     Chapter 80 THE PRIMARY


     The  sun has  made  a  long, skidding crash  landing  along  the  Malay
Peninsula  a  few  hundred kilometers west,  breaking open  and spilling its
thermonuclear fuel over about  half of  the horizon, trailing  out a wall of
salmon  and magenta clouds  that have  blown a gash all the way  through the
shell of the atmosphere and  erupted into space. The mountain containing the
Crypt is just a charcoal shard against that backdrop. Randy is annoyed  with
the  sunset for making it difficult to see the construction site. By now the
scar in the cloud forest has mostly healed over,  or, at least, some kind of
green  stuff  has taken  over the bare,  lipstick colored  mud. A  few  GOTO
ENGINEERING containers  still glower in the color  distorting light  of  the
mercury vapor lamps around the entrance, but most  of them have either moved
inside the  Crypt or gone back to Nippon. Randy can make  out the headlights
of  one  house sized Goto truck winding down the road,  probably filled with
debris for another one of the sultan's land reclamation projects.
     Seated up in the  plane's nose, Randy can actually look forward out his
window and see that they are landing on the new runway, built partly on such
fill.  The buildings of downtown are streaks of blue  green  light on either
side of the  plane,  tiny black  human figures frozen in them: a man  with a
phone clamped between his ear and his shoulder, a woman in a skirt hugging a
pile of books to her  chest but thinking about something far away. The  view
turns empty and  indigo as the plane's nose  tilts up for  the  landing, and
then Randy's looking out over the Sulu Sea at dusk, where the badjaos'  kite
sailed boats are scuttling into port from  a  day's  fishing, hung all about
with gutted stingrays, flying fresh  sharks' tails like flags. Not  long ago
it  was ridiculously exotic to him, but now he feels more  at home here then
he did in California.
     For  Sultan Class  passengers, everything happens with cinematic, quick
cut speed. The plane lands, a beautiful woman hands you your jacket, and you
get off. The planes used by Asian airlines  must have  special chutes in the
tail  where  flight  attendants are ejected into  the stratosphere on  their
twenty eighth birthdays.
     Usually  there's someone  waiting  for  a Sultan Class  passenger. This
evening  it's  John  Cantrell,  still  ponytailed  but  now  clean   shaven;
eventually the heat  has its way with everyone. He's even  taken to  shaving
the back of  his neck, a good trick  for shedding  a  couple of  extra BTUs.
Cantrell greets  Randy with an awkward simultaneous  handshake and one armed
hug/body check maneuver.
     "Good to see you, John," Randy says.
     "You too, Randy," John says, and each man averts his eyes shyly.
     "Who's where?"
     "You  and I  are here  in  the  airport. Avi  checked into a  hotel  in
downtown San Francisco for the duration."
     "Good. I didn't think he was safe in that house by himself."
     Cantrell  looks  provoked.  "Any  particular  reason?  Have there  been
threats?"
     "None that I  know  of. But it's  hard  to ignore the  high  number  of
vaguely terrifying people wrapped up in this."
     "No victim Avi. Beryl's flying back  to S.F.  from  Amsterdam  actually
she's probably there by now."
     "I heard she was in Europe. Why?"
     "Strange government shit is going on there. I'll tell you later."
     "Where's Eb?"
     "Eb has been holed up in the Crypt for a week with his team, doing this
kind of incredible D  Day like push to finalize the biometric identification
system. We won't bother him. Tom's been drifting back and forth between  his
house and the  Crypt, running various kinds of torture tests on the internal
Crypt network systems.  Probing  the  inner trust boundaries.  That's  where
we're going now."
     "To the inner trust boundaries?"
     "No! Sorry. His house." Cantrell shakes his  head. "It's ... well. It's
not the house I would build."
     "I want to see it."
     "His paranoia is getting just a little out of hand."
     "Hey speaking of  that.. ." Randy stops. He  was about to tell Cantrell
about  Pontifex, but  they are  very close to the halal  Dunkin' Donuts, and
people  are  looking  at  them.  There's no  way of  telling  who  might  be
listening. "I'll tell you later."
     Cantrell looks momentarily baffled and then grins wickedly. "Good one."
     "We have a car?"
     "I borrowed Tom's  car.  His  Humvee. Not  one  of those cushy civilian
models. A real military one."
     "Oh, that's great," Randy says. "Does it come complete with big machine
gun on the back?"
     "He  looked  into it he  could  certainly  get a license to  own one in
Kinakuta but his wife drew the line at having an actual heavy machine gun in
their domicile."
     "How about you? Where do you stand on this gun stuff?"
     "I own them and know how to use them, as you are aware," Cantrell says.
     They are winding  their way down  a gauntlet of duty free shops, really
more of a duty free shopping mall. Randy cannot figure out who actually buys
all  of  these large  bottles of  liquor and  expensive  belts. What kind of
blandly orgiastic lifestyle demands this particular selection of goods?
     In  the time  that's thus  passed Cantrell has evidently decided that a
more thorough  answer  to Randy's gun question is  merited. "But the  more I
practiced with them the more scared I got. Or maybe depressed."
     "What do you mean?" This is  Randy in unaccustomed sounding board mode,
psychotherapeutically prompting Cantrell for his feelings. It must have been
a weird day for  John  Cantrell,  and no doubt there are  some feelings that
need to be addressed.
     "Holding one of those  things in  your  hands,  cleaning the barrel and
shoving the rounds into clips, really brings  you  face to face with what  a
desperate,  last ditch  measure they really are.  I mean, if  it gets to the
point  where  we are  shooting at  people  and  vice  versa,  then  we  have
completely screwed up. So in the end, they only strengthened my  interest in
making sure we could do without them."
     "And hence the Crypt?" Randy asks.
     "My involvement in  the Crypt is arguably a direct result of a few very
bad dreams that I had about guns."
     It  is wonderfully healthy  to be  talking  like  this,  but  it  is  a
portentous departure  from their usual hard  core  technical  mode. They are
wondering about whether it is even worth it for them to be mixed up  in this
stuff. Heedless certainty sure is easier.
     "Well, what about those Secret Admirers who were hanging around outside
Ordo?" Randy asks.
     "What about them? You're asking me about their state of mind?"
     "Yeah. That is what we are talking about. States of mind."
     Cantrell shrugs.  "I  don't know specifically who  they were. I'd guess
there are one or two honest to god scary fanatics. Setting them aside, maybe
a third  of them are just too young and immature to  understand what's going
on.  It was just  a  lark for them.  The other two thirds  probably had very
sweaty palms."
     "They looked like they  were trying awfully hard to  keep up a cheerful
front."
     "They were probably happy to get out of  there, and to go sit in a dark
cool room  and  drink  beer afterwards. Certainly  a lot  of them have  been
sending me e mail about the Crypt since then."
     "As  an  alternative  to  violent  resistance  to  the   United  States
Government, I assume and hope you mean."
     "Exactly. Sure. I mean, that's what the Crypt is becoming. Right?"
     The question sounds a little querulous to  Randy. "Right," he says.  He
wonders why  he  feels so  much  more  settled  about this stuff  than  John
Cantrell does, and then recalls, that he has nothing left to lose.
     Randy takes  one last  breath  of dry, machine cooled air and  holds it
refreshingly in his lungs as they step out into the  heat of the evening. He
has learned to  relax  into the climate; you  can't fight  it.  There  is  a
humming logjam of black Mercedes Benzes waiting to pick up the Sultan–
and Vizier  Class passengers. Very few Wallah  Class  passengers  get off at
Kinakuta; most of them are in transit to  India. Because this is the kind of
place  where  everything  works just perfectly, Randy  and John are  in  the
Humvee about twenty seconds later, and  twenty seconds after that driving at
a hundred  and  twenty  kilometers per hour down a long horizontal shaft  of
ghastly blue green freeway light.
     "We have been assuming  that this Humvee is not bugged," Cantrell says,
"so, if you were holding back on something, you can speak freely now."
     Randy writes, Let's stop assuming anything of the kind on a notepad and
holds it  up. Cantrell raises his eyebrows one notch but of course does  not
seem  especially surprised he spends all of his time around people trying to
outdo each other in  paranoia. Randy writes We have been under  srv'nce by a
former NSA  hondo  gone private. Then  he adds, Prob. Working  for 1 or more
Crypt clients.

     How do you know? Cantrell mouths.
     Randy sighs, then writes: I was contacted by a Wizard.

     Then, as long as John's preoccupied with working his  way around a left
lane fender bender, he adds, Think of it as due diligence, underworld style.

     Cantrell  says out loud, "Tom has  been  pretty scrupulous about making
sure his  house  is  bug free. I mean,  he built the thing, or had it built,
from the  ground up."  He veers off onto an exit  ramp and plunges  into the
jungle.
     "Good.  We can  talk there," Randy  says, then writes, Remember the new
U.S.  Embassy in  Moscow bugs mixed into the concrete by KGB  had to be torn
down.

     Cantrell  grabs the  pad  and scribbles blind on  the  dashboard  while
maneuvering  the  Humvee up a curving  mountain  road into the cloud forest.
What do  you want to talk about that is  so secret? Arethusa? Give me agenda
pls.

     Randy:  (1)  Lawsuit &  whether Epiphyte can continue to exist. (2)
That NSA tapper, and Wizard, exist. (3) Maybe Arethusa.

     Cantrell grins and writes, I have good news re: Tombstone's /.

     "/"  in this context is UNIX for the root of the file system,  which in
the case  of Tombstone is synonymous with the hard drive that Randy tried to
wipe. Randy raises  his eyebrows skeptically and  Cantrell  grins, nods, and
draws his thumb across his throat.
     Chez  Howard is a flat roofed  concrete  structure  that  from  certain
angles looks like a very large drainage culvert set vertically in a mound of
grout on the top of  a foothill. It becomes visible from one of those angles
about ten  minutes before they actually  arrive, because the  road must make
several  switchbacks across the broad slope of that foothill, which has been
involuted and fractalized by relentless drainage. Even when it's not raining
here, the mere condensation of moisture from the South  Seas breezes gathers
on  leaves and rains from their drip tips all the time. Between the rain and
the  plant life, erosion must  be a violent and ravenous force  here,  which
makes Randy a  little uneasy about all of these mountains, because mountains
could  only  exist in such an environment if the underlying  tectonic forces
were  thrusting rock  into the air at a  rate that would make your  ears pop
standing still. But then again, having just lost a house to a temblor, he is
naturally inclined to a conservative view.
     Cantrell is now drawing an elaborate diagram, and has even slowed down,
almost to  a stop, the better to  draw it. It begins  with a tall rectangle.
Set within that is a parallelogram,  the same size, but skewed a little  bit
downwards, and with a little circle drawn  in the  middle of one edge. Randy
realizes he's looking at a perspective  view  of a door frame with its  door
hanging  slightly  ajar,  the  little  circle being its knob.  STEEL  FRAME,
Cantrell writes, hollow metal channels. Quick meandering  scribbles  suggest
the  matrix  of  wall surrounding it,  and the floor  underneath. Where  the
uprights of the doorframe  are  planted in the floor, Cantrell  draws small,
carefully  foreshortened circles. Holes in  the floor. Then he encircles the
doorframe  in a continuous  hoop,  beginning at  one of  those  circles  and
climbing up one side of the doorframe, across the top,  down the other side,
through the other hole in the floor, and then horizontally beneath the door,
then up through the  first hole again, completing the loop. He  draws one or
two careful iterations of this and then numerous sloppy ones until the whole
thing is surrounded in a vague, elongated tornado.  Many turns of fine wire.
Finally he draws two leads away from this huge  door sized coil and connects
them  to  a sandwich  of alternating long and short  horizontal lines, which
Randy recognizes as the symbol for a  battery. The diagram is completed with
a huge arrow  drawn vigorously  through  the center of the doorway,  like an
airborne  battering  ram,  labeled  B  which means  a  magnetic  field. Ordo
computer room door.

     "Wow,"  Randy  says.  Cantrell has  drawn a  classic elementary  school
electromagnet, the kind of thing young Randy made by winding a wire around a
nail and  hooking it  up to a lantern battery. Except that this one is wound
around  the  outside  of a doorframe and, Randy guesses, hidden  inside  the
walls  and beneath the floor so that no one would know  it was there  unless
they tore  the building apart. Magnetic  fields are  the styli of the modern
world, they  are what  writes  bits  onto disks,  or wipes  them  away.  The
read/write heads of Tombstone's hard drive are exactly the same thing, but a
lot smaller. If they are fine pointed draftsman's pens, then what Cantrell's
drawn  here  is a  firehose spraying  India ink.  It probably would  have no
effect on a disk drive that was a few meters away from it, but anything that
was actually carried through that  doorway would be wiped clean. Between the
pulse gun fired into the building from outside (destroying every chip within
range)  and  this  doorframe hack (losing every bit  on every disk) the Ordo
raid  must  have been purely a  scrap hauling run  for whoever  organized it
Andrew  Loeb  or  (according  to  the  Secret  Admirers)  Attorney   General
Comstock's sinister Fed forces who  were using Andy as a cat's paw. The only
thing  that  would have made it through that doorway  intact would have been
information stored  on CD ROM or other  nonmagnetic media, and Tombstone had
none of that.
     Finally they have  made it up  to the top of the hill, which Tom Howard
has shaved to the bedrock in a kind of monk's tonsure.  Not because he hates
living things, though he probably has no particular  affection for them, but
to hold at bay the forces of erosion and to create a defensive glacis across
which the  movements of incredibly poisonous snakes, squirrel sized insects,
opportunistic lower primates, and villainous upper primates will be  visible
on the  array of video cameras he has built into fairly subtle  recesses and
crevices up on the walls. Seen up close, the  house is  surprisingly  not as
dour and fortresslike as it  looked at first. It is not just  a single large
culvert  but a bundle of  them in different  diameters  and lengths, like  a
faggot  of  bamboo. There is a decent number of windows, particularly on the
north side where there's  a view,  down  the slope that  John and Randy have
just  climbed, to a crescent shaped  beach.  The windows are set deeply into
the walls, partly  to back them  out  of the nearly vertical rays of the sun
and partly because each  one has a  retractable steel shutter, hidden in the
wall, that can be dropped  down in  front  of it. It is an  okay  house, and
Randy wonders if Tom Howard would be willing to deed  it over to the Dentist
and hock his colossal suite of Gomer Bolstrood furniture and move his family
into  a crowded  apartment building  just  in  order to  retain  control  of
Epiphyte Corporation. But maybe that won't even be necessary.
     John  and  Randy  climb  out  of  the  Humvee to the sound of  gunfire.
Artificial light radiates upwards  from a  slot neatly dissected out  of the
jungle nearby. Humidity and clouds of insects make light  a nearly solid and
palpable thing here. John Cantrell  leads Randy across the perfectly sterile
parking  slab  and  into a screened  and fenced tunnel that has been stabbed
into the black vegetation. Underfoot is some kind of black plastic grid that
keeps  the  nude soil from becoming a glue trap. They walk down the  tunnel,
until  twenty  or  thirty paces  later  it opens up into an extremely  long,
narrow  clearing: the source of the light. At the far end  of it, the ground
rises abruptly in a sort of berm, partly  natural,  Randy thinks, and partly
enhanced  with  fill dirt excavated  from the house's  foundation. Two large
paper targets in the shape of human silhouettes are clipped to a rack there.
At the near end, two men with ear protectors  pulled down around their necks
are examining a gun. One of these men is Tom Howard. Randy is struck but not
really astonished  by the fact that  the  other  one  is  Douglas  MacArthur
Shaftoe, evidently fresh in from Manila. The gun looks like exactly the same
model that some of the black hatted and bandanna masked posse were  carrying
yesterday in Los Altos: a  long pipe with a sickle shaped  clip curving away
from one side, and a very simple stock made of a few bare metal parts bolted
together.
     Doug is  in the middle  of  saying  something, and is  not the type  to
interrupt his train of thought and fall all over himself being friendly just
because Randy has  recently traversed  the Pacific Ocean. "I never  knew  my
father," he says, "but my Filipino uncles  used to  tell me  stories that he
had  told. When he was on  Guadalcanal,  they the Marines were  still  using
their Springfields, the ought three  model, so four decades old when finally
the M 1 rifle began to show up. So they took one of each rifle and tossed it
into  the  water and rolled  it around in the sand for  a while and  did God
knows what else to it but  nothing  that would be  unusual in a real  combat
situation,  for  a Marine and then tried to  operate them and found that the
ought  three still  worked  and  the  M  1  didn't.  So they stuck  to their
Springfields.  And I would say that some  testing along those lines would be
in order if you think you are really designing an insurgency  weapon, as you
say. Good evening, Randy."
     "Doug, how are you?"
     "I  am  just fine, thank you!" Doug  is  one of  these guys  who always
interprets "how are you" as a literal request  for information,  not just an
empty formality, and always seems slightly touched  that someone would  care
enough to ask. "Mr. Howard here says that  when you were  sitting  on top of
that car typing  you were actually doing something clever. And dangerous. At
least from a legal point of view."
     "Were you monitoring that?" Randy asks Tom.
     "I  saw  packets  moving  through  the  Crypt,  and  later  saw  you on
television. I  put two and two  together," Tom says.  "Nice  job, Randy." He
lumbers forward and  shakes  Randy's  hand. This  is  an almost embarrassing
outpouring of emotion by Tom Howard standards.
     "What  I did there probably  failed," Randy says. "If  Tombstone's disk
was blanked, it was blanked by the doorframe coil, and not by what I did."
     "Well, you deserve recognition  anyway,  which  is what your friend  is
trying to give you," Doug says, mildly irked at Randy's obtuseness.
     "I should offer  you a drink, and  a chance to relax, and all of that,"
Tom says, looking towards his house,  "but on the other  hand Doug says  you
were flying Sultan Class."
     "Let's talk out here," Randy says. "But actually there is one thing you
could get me."
     "What's that?" Tom asks.
     Randy  pulls the little  disembodied hard  drive  out of his pocket and
holds it up in the light, the wire ribbon adangle.  "A laptop computer and a
screwdriver."
     "Done," Tom says, and disappears down the tunnel. Doug meanwhile begins
dismantling the weapon,  as if just to  keep his  hands  busy. He takes  the
parts out one by one and regards them curiously.
     "What do you think of the HEAP gun?" Cantrell asks.
     "I don't think it's as  crazy as when I first heard of it," Doug  says,
"but  if  your  friend  Avi  thinks  that people are  going to  be  able  to
manufacture  rifled gun barrels in  their  basements to  protect  themselves
against ethnic cleansing, he's got another thing coming."
     "Rifled barrels are hard," Cantrell says.  "There's no way  around  it.
They'd have to  be stockpiled and smuggled.  But the idea is that anyone who
downloaded the HEAP,  and who had access to some basic  machine tools, could
build the rest of the weapon."
     "I  need  to  sit down with  you sometime and  explain  everything else
that's wrong with the idea," Doug says.
     Randy changes the subject. "How's Amy?"
     Doug looks up and eyes Randy  carefully. "You  want my opinion? I think
she is lonely, and in need of reliable support and companionship."
     Now  that Doug has totally alienated both Randy and John, the gun range
is  completely silent  for a while, which is probably how Doug likes it. Tom
comes  out with  a laptop in  one hand  and, in the other, half a dozen blue
plastic water bottles all shrink wrapped together, already dribbling a trail
of condensation.
     "I have an agenda," Cantrell says, holding up the notepad.
     "Wow! You guys are organized," Tom says.
     "Item the first: Lawsuit and whether Epiphyte  can continue  to exist."
Randy lays the laptop out  on the same table where Doug  is working with the
HEAP gun and begins to remove screws. "I assume you guys know of the lawsuit
and  have  worked  out the implications of  it yourself," he  says.  "If the
Dentist  can prove that Doug discovered the wreck as a byproduct of  work he
did for  us, and  if the value of that wreck is  high enough compared to the
value  of the  company,  then the Dentist  owns us,  and for  all  practical
purposes owns the Crypt."
     "Whoa! Wait a minute. The Sultan  owns  the  Crypt,"  Tom says. "If the
Dentist controls  Epiphyte, all he  gets out of it is a contract to  provide
certain technical services in the Crypt."
     Randy  senses everyone's looking  at him. He twirls  screws out  of the
computer, refusing to agree with this.
     "Unless there's something here I'm not getting," Tom says.
     "I guess I'm just being paranoid and  sort of assuming that the Dentist
is somehow collaborating with forces in the U.S.  government that  are  anti
privacy and anti crypto," Randy says.
     "Attorney General Comstock's cabal, in other words," Tom says.
     "Yeah. For which I have never actually seen any evidence at all. But in
the wake of the Ordo raid everyone seems to be assuming it. If  that is  the
case, and the Dentist ends up  providing technical  services  to the  Crypt,
then  the Crypt  is  compromised.  We  have to  assume,  in that  case, that
Comstock has a man on the inside."
     "Not just Comstock," Cantrell says.
     "Okay, the U.S. government."
     "Not just the U.S. government," Cantrell says. "The Black Chamber."
     "What the hell do you mean by that?" Doug asks.
     "There was  a high level conference a couple of weeks  ago in Brussels.
Hastily  organized  we   think.   Chaired  by  Attorney  General   Comstock.
Representatives  of all the G7  countries and  a few  others. We know people
from  the  NSA were there.  People  from Internal Revenue.  Treasury  people
Secret Service.  Their counterparts in the  other  countries. And a  lot  of
mathematicians known  to have been co opted by the government. The U.S. vice
president was there. Basically we think that they are planning  to form some
kind of  international  body  to clamp  down on crypto  and  particularly on
digital money."
     "The International Data Transfer Regulatory  Organization,"  Tom Howard
says.
     "The Black Chamber is a nickname for that?" Doug asks.
     "That's what  people  on the Secret Admirers mailing list have  started
calling it," Cantrell says.
     "Why form this organization now?" Randy wonders.
     "Because  the Crypt is  about to go  hot,  and they know  it," Cantrell
says.
     "They are scared  shitless  about  their ability to collect taxes  when
everyone is using systems like the Crypt," Tom explains to Doug.
     "This has been the talk of the  Secret  Admirers mailing  list  for the
last week. And so when Ordo was raided, it really hit a raw nerve.
     "Okay," Randy says, "I've  been wondering why people  showed  up  there
almost  immediately with guns  and stranger things."  He  has got the laptop
opened up now and disconnected its hard drive.
     "You have wandered off the agenda," Doug says, pulling an oily rag down
the barrel of the HEAP gun. "The question is, does the Dentist have you guys
by  the  balls, or  only  by  the  short hairs? And that question  basically
revolves around yours truly. Right?"
     "Right!" Randy says, a little too forcefully he's feeling desperate for
a  change  in  subject.  The  whole Kepler/Epiphyte/Semper  Marine  thing is
stressful enough all by itself, and the last thing he needs is to be hanging
around with people who  believe it is nothing more than  a skirmish in a war
to decide the fate of the Free World a  preliminary round of the Apocalypse.
Avi's  obsession  with  the  Holocaust  seemed  fine  to  Randy  as  long as
Holocausts were things that happened long ago or far away  being  personally
involved in one is something Randy can do without.  He should have stayed in
Seattle. But he didn't, and  so the next best  thing for him is to limit the
conversation to straightforward things like bars of gold.
     "In order for him  to have a  claim, the  Dentist needs to  prove  that
Semper Marine found that wreck when it was doing  the cable  survey. Right?"
Doug asks.
     "Right," Cantrell  says, before Randy can  step in and say  that it's a
bit more complicated than that.
     "Well, I have been kicking around this part of the world for half of my
life, and I can always testify that I found the  wreck on an earlier survey.
That son of a bitch can never prove that I'm lying," Doug says.
     "Andrew Loeb his  lawyer is smart  enough to know that. He will not put
you on the stand," Randy says, screwing his own hard drive into place.
     "Fine.  Then all  he's  got  is circumstantial  evidence.  Namely,  the
proximity of the wreck to the cable survey corridor."
     "Right. Which implies a correlation," Cantrell says.
     "Well,  it  is not that  damn close," Doug says. "I was cutting  a very
wide swath at the time."
     "I have bad news," Randy says. "First of all, it is a civil case and so
circumstantial evidence is all he needs to win. Secondly, I just  heard from
Avi, on  the plane, that Andrew Loeb is filing  a second suit, for breach of
contract."
     "What goddamn contract?" Doug demands.
     "He has anticipated everything  you just  said," Randy says. "He  still
doesn't know where the wreck is.  But if it turns out  to be miles and miles
away from the survey  corridor, he will  claim that by surveying such a wide
swath  you  were  basically risking  the  Dentist's  money  in  order  to go
prospecting,  and  that  thus  the Dentist  still  deserves  a  share of the
proceeds."
     "Why does the Dentist want a beef with me?" Doug says.
     "Because then he can pressure you into testifying against Epiphyte. You
get  to  keep all  the gold. That gold  becomes damages  which  the  Dentist
leverages into control of Epiphyte."
     "Jesus fuckin' Christ!" Doug exclaims. "He can kiss my ass."
     "I know that," Randy says, "but if he gets wind of that attitude, he'll
just come up with another tactic and file another suit."
     Doug begins, "Well that's kind of defeatist "
     "Where I'm headed with this,"  Randy says, "is that we cannot fight the
Dentist on his turf which is the courtroom any more than the Viet Cong could
have fought a pitched battle in the open against the U.S. Army. So there are
some really good reasons to get that gold out  of the wreck surreptitiously,
before the Dentist can prove it's there."
     Doug looks outraged. "Randy,  have you ever tried to swim while holding
a gold bar in one hand?"
     "There's got to be a way to do it. Little submarines or something."
     Doug laughs out loud  and  mercifully decides not to debunk the concept
of little submarines. "Supposing it was possible. What do I do with the gold
then? If I deposit it in a bank account, or spend it on something, what's to
keep this Andrew Loeb guy from  taking  that as circumstantial evidence that
the wreck had a  ton  of money in  it? You're saying I  have to sit on  this
money for the rest of my life in order to protect you from this lawsuit."
     "Doug. You can do this," Randy says. "You get the gold. You put it on a
boat. My friends here can explain the rest." Randy fits the laptop's plastic
case back together and begins  maneuvering the little screws back into their
recesses.
     Cantrell says, "You bring the boat here."
     Tom continues, "To that beach, right down the hill. I'll be waiting for
you with the Humvee."
     "And you and Tom can drive it downtown and  deposit that bullion in the
vaults of the Central Bank of Kinakuta." Cantrell concludes.
     Someone has finally said something that  actually knocked  Doug Shaftoe
off balance. "And get what in return?" he asks suspiciously.
     "Electronic   cash   from   the   Crypt.  Anonymous.  Untraceable.  And
untaxable."
     Doug's  regained  his  composure  now,  and  is back  to belly  laughs.
"What'll that buy me? Pictures of naked girls on the World Wide Web?"
     "Soon enough, it'll buy you anything that money can buy," Tom  says. "I
would have to know a little more about  it,"  Doug says. "But once  again we
are straying  from the agenda. Let's leave it at this: you guys  need me  to
strip that wreck bare, quickly and secretly."
     "It's not  just what we need. It might be in your best interests, too,"
Randy says, groping on the back of the laptop for the power switch.
     "Item the  second:  A former  NSA hondo is surveilling us and something
about a Wizard?" John says.
     "Yeah."
     Doug's giving  Randy  a queer look and so Randy  launches into a  brief
summary of his classification system of Wizards, Elves, Dwarves, and Men not
to  mention Gollums,  which makes practically no  sense  to Doug, who hasn't
read Lord of  the Rings. Randy goes on to tell them about  his  conversation
with  Pontifex on the  airplane  phone. John  Cantrell  and  Tom  Howard are
interested in this, as Randy would expect them to be, but what surprises him
is how intently Doug Shaftoe listens.
     "Randy!" Doug almost shouts. "Didn't you at any  point ask this guy why
Old Man Comstock was so interested in the Arethusa messages?"
     "Coincidentally, this is the third item on the agenda," Cantrell says.
     "Why didn't you ask him on the ski lift?" Randy jokes.
     "I was giving  him  a very closely  reasoned explanation of  why I  was
about to sever the linkage between his ugly and perfumed corporeal  self and
his eternally  condemned soul," Doug says.  "Seriously! You got the messages
from your grandpa's old war souvenirs. Right?"
     "Right."
     "And your grandpa Waterhouse picked them up where?"
     "Judging from the dates, he must have been in Manila."
     "Well,  what do you imagine could have happened in  Manila  around that
time that would be so damned important to Earl Comstock?"
     "I told you, Comstock thought it was a Communist code."
     "But that's bullshit!" Doug says. "Jesus! Haven't  you  guys spent  any
time at all around people like Comstock? Can't you recognize bullshit? Don't
you think it would be a useful item to add to  your intellectual toolkits to
be capable of saying, when  a  ton of wet steaming  bullshit lands  on  your
head, 'My goodness, this appears to be bullshit'? Now. What do you  think is
the real reason Comstock wanted to crack Arethusa?"
     "I have no idea," Randy says.
     "The reason is gold," Doug says.
     Randy snorts. "You have got gold on the brain."
     "Did I  or  did  I  not  take  you out  into the jungle  and  show  you
something?" Doug demands.
     "You did. Sorry."
     "Gold is  the only thing  that could account for it. Because otherwise,
the Philippines just were  not that important during the fifties, to justify
such an effort at the NSA."
     "There was an ongoing  Huk insurrection," Tom says.  "But you're right.
The real focus around here anyway was Vietnam."
     "You know something?" fires  back Doug.  "During the  Vietnam war which
was Old Man  Comstock's  brainchild the American  military  presence  in the
Philippines was huge. That son of a  bitch had soldiers and marines crawling
over Luzon, supposedly  on training missions. But I think they were  looking
for something. I think they were looking for the Primary."
     "As in primary gold repository?"
     "You got it."
     "Is that what Marcos eventually found?"
     "Opinions differ,"  Doug says. "A lot  of people think that the Primary
is still waiting to be discovered."
     "Well, there isn't any information about the Primary, or anything else,
in  these messages," Randy says. The laptop has booted up now, in UNIX mode,
with a torrent of error  messages triggered by its inability to find various
pieces of hardware that were  present  on Randy's laptop (which is in a Ford
dealership's dumpster in  Los Altos) but are not on Tom's. And yet the basic
kernel works to  the  point that Randy can look at the file system and makes
sure it's intact. The Arethusa directory is still there, with its  long list
of short  files, each  file the result of running a different stack of cards
through  Chester's  card  reader.  Randy  opens up the  first  one and finds
several lines of random capital letters.
     "How do  you know there's  no  information  about the primary  in those
messages, Randy?" Doug asks.
     "The NSA couldn't decrypt these messages in ten years," Randy says. "It
all turned out to be a hoax. The output of a random number generator."
     Randy jumps back out to the file listing and types
     grep AADAA *
     and hits the  return key. It is  a  command to  find the opening letter
group in  the  ETC  card  messages, the famous  one  to  which Pontifex  had
alluded. The  machine answers back  almost immediately with an empty prompt,
meaning that the search failed.
     "Ho ly shit," Randy says.
     "What?" everyone says at once.
     Randy takes a long, deep breath. "These are  not the same messages that
Earl Comstock spent ten years attempting to break."


     Chapter 81 DELUGE


     It  takes  Goto Dengo about  half  a  minute  to waddle  up the  narrow
entrance of the  tunnel. He is trailing  the fingers of  one hand  along the
stone  ceiling just above his head, feeling the scars of  the drills. Behind
him  he can hear  the  four members  of  his  crew  making their  way along,
muttering to each other calmly.
     His  fingers slide  over a lip and rise up into empty, dark space; he's
into the main drift now.  He stands up  and wades forward. Perfect blackness
is cozy and reassuring to him in it, he  can always pretend that he is still
a boy, back on Hokkaido. He can make believe that  the last few years of his
life have never happened.
     But  in  fact  he is  a  grownup  and  he  is trapped in a hole in  the
Philippines  and surrounded by armies  of demons. He  opens the valves on an
acetylene headlamp and sparks it into life. He is perfectly capable, by this
point, of finding his way around Golgotha in the dark, but  his crew is not,
and he leaves them far behind. He stubs his toe brutally on a large gold bar
that has carelessly been left lying across the iron railway, and curses.
     "Is  everything okay, Lieutenant?"  says one of his crew,  fifty meters
behind him.
     "Fine,"  Goto Dengo says, loudly  and clearly. "You four be careful you
do not break your toes on this bar."
     So  now,  Wing  and Rodolfo and their  men,  waiting up ahead, know the
number of Nipponese soldiers they have to kill.
     "Where are the last few workers?" one of the crew shouts.
     "In the fool's vault."
     It takes them several minutes to pick their way through the main vault,
because  it is packed with  treasure. The starry core of  a galaxy must look
like this.  They clamber  up the shaft in its ceiling and make their  way to
the Hall of Glory. Goto Dengo finds the bare wires that lead to the electric
light bulb and attaches them to the screw terminals on a battery. Running at
the wrong voltage, the bulb looks like a tangerine floating in ink.
     "Shut off your headlamps," Goto  Dengo says, "to conserve fuel.  I will
leave mine burning in case there is an interruption in the power."
     He  pulls  a  fistful of white  cotton from a sterile  box.  It is  the
cleanest  whitest thing he has seen in several years. He pulls it apart into
smaller  wads, like Father  Ferdinand  breaking  the bread of the  mass, and
passes them out to  the men,  who stuff  it ritualistically into their ears.
"There  is no more time to waste," he hollers, "Captain Noda must be growing
impatient out there."
     "Sir!" one of the  men says, standing at attention  and  handing  him a
pair of wires marked MAIN TUNNEL DEMOLITION.
     "Very well,"  Goto Dengo  says, and screws the wires down to a  pair of
terminals on a wooden switch box.
     It seems  as though  he  should say something  ceremonious, but nothing
comes  to mind. Nipponese men are dying  all  over the Pacific without first
getting to make speeches.
     He clenches his teeth together,  shuts his eyes, and twists  the switch
handle.
     The  shock wave  comes through the floor  first, whacking the  soles of
their feet like a  flying plank. A moment later it comes through the air and
strikes them  like a  moving wall of stone. The cotton  in the ears seems to
accomplish nothing. Goto Dengo feels his eyes bounce  off the backs of their
sockets. All of his teeth feel as though they have  been crisply sheared off
at  the gumline with cold chisels. The wind is all forced out of his  lungs.
They  are empty for  the first  time since  the moment  of  his  birth. Like
newborn  infants, he  and  the  other men  can only writhe  and  look around
themselves in a panic until their bodies learn how to draw breath again.
     One of the men brought a bottle of sake, which has shattered. They pass
around  the jagged bottom  of  the bottle, each man taking  a gulp  of  what
remains.  Goto Dengo tries to pull the cotton out of his ears and finds that
the shock wave drove it in so deep that it cannot be extracted. So he merely
shouts: "Check your watches." They all do. "In two hours,  Captain Noda will
demolish  the plug on  the bottom of the lake  and flood the water traps. In
the meantime, we have work to do. You all know your jobs get to work!"
     They all hai, turn on  their heels, and go  their separate ways.  It is
the  first time that Goto Dengo has actually  sent  men off to their deaths.
But they  are  all dead men anyway, and so he doesn't know how to feel about
it.
     If he still believed  in the emperor still believed in the war he would
think nothing of it. But if he still believed,  he wouldn't be doing what he
is about to do.
     It  is  important  to  keep  up  the  appearance that this is  a normal
operation,  and so he  descends to  the vault to perform  his next scheduled
duty: inspect what used to be the main drift. The vault is filled with a fog
of rock dust around which his windpipe clenches like a fist grabbing a rope.
His  acetylene lamp only  makes the dust glow,  giving  him a  visibility of
perhaps six  inches. All  he can  see is  the bullion right in front  of his
face, which still glimmers beneath a film of dust and smoke.  The shock wave
has deranged his formerly neat stacks  of  crates  and bricks and turned the
entire  hoard into a  rude  mound that is still shedding avalanches, seeking
its angle of  repose. A 75  kilogram gold brick slides down  the pile like a
runaway boxcar,  emerging suddenly from the  cloud of dust, and he jumps out
of its way. Bits of rock are still sifting down from the  crazed ceiling and
plinking against his helmet.
     He  scrambles  carefully over the heap,  breathing  through  a  wad  of
cotton, until he can see what  used to be  the main drift.  The dynamite has
done  the  right thing:  shattered  the roof  of the  drift into billions of
shards.  Collapsed on the floor, they occupy  a larger volume than the  same
mass  of stone did  when  it was  all in one piece. The drift is filled with
tons of loose stone, all the way down to the entrance along the  Tojo River,
where Captain Noda's men are at work  even now, concealing the tiny puncture
wound behind river rocks.
     He feels,  rather than hears, a  small  explosion, and knows that  some
thing is going wrong. No one should be setting off explosions now.
     Movement in this  place is agonizingly slow, like a nightmare when  you
are trying to run away from a demon. It takes him so long to get back to the
Hall of Glory  that  there  is  almost no point in  doing it;  whatever  was
happening is over when he arrives.
     What he sees, when he arrives, is a group of three men waiting for him:
Wing, Rodolfo, and the Filipino named Bong.
     "The soldiers?"
     "All dead,"  Rodolfo  says  flatly, irritated by  the stupidity  of the
question.
     "The others?"
     "One soldier set off  a  grenade. Killed himself  and my two men,  Wing
says.
     "Another  soldier heard the grenade  and had a knife ready when Agustin
came  for him," Bong says.  He shakes his  head sorrowfully.  "I  think that
Agustin was not ready to kill a man. He hesitated."
     Goto Dengo stares at Bong, fascinated. "And you?"
     Bong doesn't  understand the question  for a  moment. Then light dawns.
"Oh, no, I  did not hesitate, Lieutenant Goto. A  Nipponese soldier  hurt my
sister one time, in a very inappropriate way."
     Goto Dengo stands there silently for a while, until he notices that the
other men are  all looking at him expectantly. Then he  checks his watch. He
is shocked  to see that only half an hour has gone by  since he  set off the
dynamite.
     "We have an hour and a half before  the  water traps are flooded. If we
are  not in  the  Bubble by then,  we will be  sealed  off, with  no  escape
possible," says Goto Dengo.
     "We go there and wait," Wing suggests, in Shanghainese.
     "No.  Captain Noda listens,  outside, for more explosions," Goto  Dengo
says, also in Chinese;  then, in English, tells the Filipinos, "We  have  to
set  off  the demolition  charges  at  certain times or Noda  san will  grow
suspicious."
     "Whoever  sets  them off will  be trapped  forever  in  this  chamber,"
Rodolfo says, gesturing around them at the Hall of Glory.
     "We will not set them off from here," says Goto Dengo,  pulling the lid
from a crate. Inside are several long coils  of two stranded telephone wire.
He  hands the  coils  out to Rodolfo, Wing,  and  Bong. They understand, and
begin to splice the new wires onto the ones that terminate here.
     They retreat  through Golgotha in  stages,  lugging battery packs  with
them  and  unrolling the wires  as  they go, dynamiting the  tunnel sections
behind  them one by  one. As they  do this,  certain oddities  of the tunnel
system finally become  clear to  Rodolfo,  Wing,  and Bong. It becomes fully
evident to  them, for the first time,  that the entire complex was carefully
designed by  Goto Dengo to serve two entirely contradictory purposes.  To  a
loyal Nipponese engineer like Captain Noda it looks like  precisely what  he
was ordered to build: a  vault laced  with  booby traps. But to the four men
sealed inside, Golgotha has a  second function. It  is an escape machine. As
the purposes of certain rooms, drifts, and  other  features  suddenly become
clear,  they straighten up, blinking, and turn to look at  Goto Dengo,  with
the same expressions  as the soldiers wore, weeks  ago, when they discovered
the Buddha in the Mercedes.
     Their destination is the Bubble, a niche that Goto Dengo had them carve
out of the stone during the last couple of months. He claimed, to anyone who
asked, that  it was a water reservoir, put  there to increase the deadliness
of one of the traps. It is a wide vertical shaft, four  meters in  diameter,
that begins in  the ceiling of a peripheral drift and goes straight up for a
few  meters,  then dead  ends. Ladders  still  cling  to  its walls,  and by
ascending,  they can reach a rock  ledge big  enough to sit  on. Canteens of
water and boxes of  biscuits have already  been stocked here by Wing and his
men.
     By the time they reach their seats in the top of the Bubble, all of the
others are in awe of Goto Dengo, and ready to do whatever he says. He senses
this. It fills him with unutterable misery.
     They have fifteen minutes to wait. The  others spend  it sipping  water
and nibbling biscuits. Goto Dengo fills  it with self recrimination. "I am a
loathsome worm," he says, "a traitor, a filthy piece of dog shit, not worthy
to clean  out the latrines of true  soldiers of  Nippon. I am bereft totally
cut off from the  nation I've  betrayed. I am now part of a world  of people
who hate Nippon  and who therefore hate me but at the same time I am hateful
to my own kind. I will stay here and die."
     "You are alive,"  Rodolfo says. "You have saved our lives. And  you are
rich."
     "Rich?"
     Wing  and  Rodolfo and  Bong look  at each other,  confused.  "Yes,  of
course!" Bong says.
     Goto  Dengo  is still looking nonplussed. Reckoning that he has  merely
gone deaf or daft  from the explosions, Bong  reaches  into his trousers and
pulls out a hand sewn pouch, teases  it open,  and displays a healthy double
handful of diamonds. Wing and Rodolfo scarcely take note.
     Goto Dengo  looks  away despondently. He himself has saved  no treasure
except these men's lives. But  that's not why he feels so bad.  He had hoped
that  being thus saved  they  would  all  be noble, and  not  think  of  the
treasure. But maybe that was too much to hope for.
     A distant  thump lifts them slightly off the  ledge, just for a moment.
Goto  Dengo  feels  a  strange sensation  in  his head: the air pressure  is
beginning to rise.  The  column of  air  trapped in  the diagonal  is  being
compressed by a piston of water  rushing down it from the lake. Captain Noda
has dynamited the plug.
     Goto Dengo is so excited that he forgets to die.
     He is an engineer, trapped inside one of  his own machines. The machine
was designed to  keep him alive,  and he will  never know whether it  worked
unless it  works. After he has achieved that satisfaction,  he supposes,  he
can always kill himself at leisure.
     He pinches his nose shut, presses his lips together, and begins to blow
air into his  Eustachian  tubes,  equalizing the pressure. The others follow
his lead.
     All  of  Golgotha's  traps are  basically the same.  All of them derive
their killing power from the pressure of the water communicated down to this
level  from  the  bottom of Lake Yamamoto.  In any number  of places in  the
complex, false walls have been constructed, designed to be pierced by greedy
thieves,  or to collapse  of their own  accord when thieves dig out the sand
that holds them up. Then the water will  rush  in  with explosive force  and
probably crush them before they have a chance to drown.
     At its Golgotha end,  the diagonal tunnel forks again and again, like a
river breaking up into distributaries. Goto Dengo explained it to inspecting
officers by likening it  to the  plumbing inside  a modern  hotel,  which is
supplied by a single main that is pressurized by a distant  water tower, but
which  divides into many different  pipes  that supply pressurized  water to
taps all over the structure.
     Golgotha  seethes,  hisses,  and  moans  as every pipe in  its ramified
system is  pressurized by  the deluge  unleashed by Captain Noda's  dynamite
charge.  The bubbles of air trapped  at  the ends of those pipes are seeking
escape: some are  leaking out through cracks in  the walls  and  others  are
bubbling away into  the  diagonal.  The surface  of Lake  Yamamoto  must  be
boiling  like  a cauldron,  and  Captain  Noda must  be  standing above  it,
watching the air  flee Golgotha, grinning with satisfaction. In moments, the
floors of the  tunnels are obscured by whirling lagoons of dirty  water, and
the  barrels  and railcars that  were left there have begun to rise, bobbing
like corks and clanging together.
     Most  of the  air  trapped  in  the Golgotha  does  not,  however, come
bubbling  up out  of Lake  Yamamoto. Most of  it rises  towards the  Bubble,
because that is how Goto Dengo planned it. He knows it's working because his
ears begin to pop.
     Eventually  the water rises up into the  Bubble  itself,  but it  rises
slowly, because  the pressure of the  air  in  here has  become  quite  high
already. As the water  climbs,  it further pressurizes the bubble of air  in
which Goto Dengo and the  others are trapped. The  pressure of the air rises
steadily until it becomes equal to the  pressure  of the water. Then balance
is achieved, and the water cannot rise any  more. Another kind of balance is
being reached within their  bodies, as the  compressed air floods into their
chests, and  the  nitrogen in that air seeps through  the membranes of their
lungs and dissolves into their bloodstreams.
     "Now we wait,"  says  Goto  Dengo,  and shuts off  his acetylene  lamp,
leaving them in darkness. "As long as  we do not burn lamps, there is enough
air in this chamber to keep us alive for several days. Captain  Noda and his
men will spend at least  that  long  tidying up the Bundok site, erasing all
traces of our work, and killing themselves. So we must wait, or else his men
will only  kill  us when  we appear on the  shores of Lake Yamamoto. I would
like to spend the time educating you on the subject of caisson disease, also
known as the bends."


     ***


     Two days later they set off one last, relatively small dynamite charge,
blowing a hole through the wall of the Bubble that is large  enough to admit
a human being. On the other side, the diagonal to Lake Yamamoto begins.
     Rodolfo is more terrified than anyone else, and so they send him first.
Then  goes Bong, and then Wing.  Finally Goto Dengo leaves the foul, used up
air  of the Bubble  behind. Within a  few moments they have found  their way
into the  ascending diagonal tunnel. They begin to swim uphill through total
darkness. All of them are trailing their hands against  the  tunnel ceiling,
feeling for the opening of the first vertical shaft. Rodolfo is  supposed to
stop when he feels  it, but  the others  must also be alert  in case Rodolfo
misses.
     They  thud into one another  in the  darkness like  a loosely connected
train bumping to a halt. Rodolfo has stopped with any luck, he has found the
first  vertical  shaft. Wing finally moves  forward,  and Goto Dengo follows
straight  up the vertical shaft and finally into a bulb at its  top where  a
bubble  of  air has  been trapped. The bulb is just barely  wide  enough  to
accommodate  four men. They pause there, all jammed together in a cluster of
bodies,  heaving as  they  exhale  the  nitrogen–  and  carbon dioxide
tainted air  that  they've  been living  on for the last sixty  seconds, and
breathe in fresh lungfuls.  Goto Dengo feels his ears popping as pressure is
relieved.
     They have covered only a small  fraction of the  four hundred and fifty
meters  that separate Golgotha from  the lake horizontally.  But half of the
hundred  meter vertical distance  has  already  been covered. That  is,  the
pressure of the air they are breathing in this chamber is only half  of what
it was in the Bubble.
     Goto  Dengo is not a  diver, and knows very little of  diving medicine.
But his father used to speak of how caissons were used to send  workers deep
underwater, to build things or to mine. That is how he learned about caisson
disease, and how he learned the rule of thumb that most men will not  suffer
its  symptoms if you have them decompress  for a  while at half the original
air pressure. If they stop  and breathe for a while, the nitrogen will  come
out of the tissues. Once this is done, the air pressure may be halved again.
     In the Bubble, the air pressure  was nine  or ten  atmospheres. Here in
the first chamber, it's more like five. But there's not much air in this one
just  enough to let them  breathe for  fifteen or twenty  minutes, and bleed
nitrogen out of  their tissues, and get lungfuls of air for the next leg  of
the swim.
     "Okay," Goto  Dengo says, "we go." He finds Rodolfo in the darkness and
slaps  him encouragingly on the shoulder.  Rodolfo  takes a series  of  deep
breaths, getting ready,  and Goto Dengo  recites  the  numbers that they all
know by heart: "Twenty five  strokes straight.  Then the  tunnel  bends  up.
Forty strokes up a steep hill. Where the tunnel bends again, you go straight
up to the next air chamber."
     Rodolfo nods, crosses himself, and then does a somersault in the  water
and kicks himself  downwards. Then goes Bong,  then  Wing, and  finally Goto
Dengo.
     This leg is  very long.  The last  fifteen meters  is a vertical ascent
into  the air chamber. Goto  Dengo had  hoped  that the natural buoyancy  of
their bodies  would  make this  easy,  even if  they  were  on  the verge of
drowning. But as  he is kicking up the narrow shaft, pushing  frantically on
the feet of Wing,  who is above him  and not going as fast as he would like,
he feels a growing panic in his  lungs. Finally he understands  that he must
fight the urge to  hold his breath that  his lungs are filled  with air at a
much higher pressure than  the water around him, and that  if he doesn't let
some of that  air out, his  chest will explode.  So  against his instinct to
save that precious air,  he lets it boil out of his mouth. He hopes that the
bubbles will pass by the faces of  the men above him and give  them the idea
too. But shortly after he does it, they all stop moving entirely.
     For perhaps ten seconds  Goto Dengo is  trapped  in total darkness in a
water filled vertical hole  in the rock that  is not much wider than his own
body.  Of all the things he has experienced in the war,  this is  the worst.
But just as he gives up  and prepares to  die, they begin moving again. They
are half dead when they get to the breathing chamber.
     If Goto Dengo's  calculations  were right, then  the  pressure  in here
should be  no more than two  or three  atmospheres. But  he  is beginning to
doubt those calculations. When he has breathed in enough air to restore full
consciousness, he's  aware of sharp pains in his knees, and  it's clear from
the sounds that the others are making that they are suffering the same way.
     "This time we wait as long as we can," he says.
     The  next leg is shorter,  but it's made more difficult by the pain  in
their knees. Again Rodolfo goes first. But when Goto Dengo rises up into the
next air chamber, about  one and a half atmospheres above normal,  only Bong
and Wing are there.
     "Rodolfo missed  the opening," Bong says. "I think  he went too  far up
the ventilation shaft!"
     Goto Dengo nods. Only a  few meters beyond  where they turned into this
passage is a ventilation shaft that goes all the way to the surface. It  has
a sharp sideways jog in the middle that Goto  put there so that when Captain
Noda filled  it up with rubble (which he  has  presumably done by now),  the
diagonal tunnel  their escape route would not be blocked. If Rodolfo went up
that shaft, he found a cul de sac, with no air bubble in the top.
     Goto Dengo doesn't have to  tell the others that Rodolfo is dead.  Bong
crosses himself and  says a  prayer.  Then they  stay for  a  while and take
advantage  of the air  that  Rodolfo should  be sharing.  The  pain in  Goto
Dengo's knees becomes sharper, but after a while it plateaus.
     "From  here,  only  small  changes  in  altitude,  not   much  need  to
decompress. Mostly we swim for distance now," he  says. They still have more
than three hundred horizontal meters to cover, pierced with four more shafts
for air. The last of these doubles as a legitimate ventilation shaft.
     So from there on it is just swimming and resting, swimming and resting,
until finally the  walls  of  the tunnel peel  away  from them and they find
themselves in Lake Yamamoto.
     Goto  Dengo  breaks the  surface and does nothing for a  long time  but
tread water and breathe clean air. It is nighttime, and  for  the first time
in a  year, Bundok is quiet,  except for the sound of Bong, kneeling on  the
shore of the lake, making the sign of the cross and mumbling prayers as fast
as his lips can move.
     Wing has  already  departed,  without  so much as a  good bye.  This is
shocking to Goto  Dengo until he realizes what it means: he, too, is free to
go.  As far  as  the  world  knows,  he  is  dead,  all  of his  obligations
discharged. For the first time in his life, he can do whatever he wants.
     He  swims to the shore,  gets up on his feet, and  starts  walking. His
knees hurt. He cannot believe that he  has come through all of this, and his
only problem is sore knees.


     Chapter 82 BUST


     "Kopi,"   Randy  says  to  the  flight   attendant,  then  reconsiders,
remembering that he  is in steerage this time, and getting to a toilet might
not be so easy. It's just a little Malaysian Air  757.  The flight attendant
sees the indecision on his face  and wavers. Her face is  framed in a gaudy,
vaguely Islamic scarf that is  the  most tokenistic nod to sexual modesty he
has ever seen. "Kopi  nyahkafeina," Randy says, and she beams and pours from
the orange carafe. It is not that she doesn't speak English, just that Randy
is starting to feel comfortable with the local pidgin. He realizes that this
is the first step in a long process that  will eventually turn  him into one
of these cheerful,  burly, sunburned expats who  infest the airport bars and
Shangri La hotels of the Rim.
     Outside his window, the long slender isle of Palawan  lies  parallel to
their flight path. A fogbound pilot could almost get from Kinakuta to Manila
by following Palawan's beaches, but that is a moot point on a day like this.
Those beaches slope gradually into the transparent waters of the South China
Sea. When you're down there planted in the sand, looking at a glancing angle
across the  waves, it probably doesn't  look like much, but from up here you
can see straight  down through the water for many fathoms, and so all of the
islands, and even  the coral heads, have skirts that start out dark brown or
dun near the water and blend into yellow and finally into swimming pool blue
before eventually fading into the deep blue of the ocean. Every little coral
head and sandbar looks like the iridescent eye on a peacock's plume.
     After the conversation at Tom  Howard's last night, Randy slept  in his
guest room and then spent most of the day  in Kinakuta buying  a new laptop,
complete with a  new hard drive, and transferring all  of the data  from the
drive he salvaged in Los Altos onto  the new  one, encrypting  everything in
the process. Considering  all of the completely boring and useless corporate
documents he has subjected to state of the art encryption, he can't  believe
he carried  the  Arethusa stuff around  on  his hard drive, unencrypted, for
several days, and across a couple  of national  borders. Not to  mention the
original ETC punch cards, which now reside in Tom Howard's basement safe. Of
course that stuff is encrypted to begin with, but that was done in 1945, and
so by modern standards it might as well have been enciphered  with a  cereal
box decoder ring. Or at least that is what Randy is kind of  hoping. Another
thing  he  did  this morning  was  to  download  the current version  of the
Cryptonomicon from the  ftp  server where it lives in San Francisco. Randy's
never looked at it in detail, but he  has heard it contains samples of code,
or at least algorithms, that he could use to attack Arethusa. With luck, the
very latest public code breaking techniques in the Cryptonomicon might match
up  to  the classified technology that  Pontifex  and  his  colleagues  were
employing at the NSA  thirty years ago. Those techniques didn't work against
the  Arethusa  messages that they  were trying  to  decrypt,  but  this  was
probably  only  because  those messages  were random numbers  not  the  real
messages. Now that Randy has what he suspects are the real messages, he  may
be able to  accomplish what Earl Comstock tried and failed  to do during the
fifties.
     They  are  angling  across  the terminator  not the robotic assassin of
moviedom,  but  the line  between  night  and day  through  which our planet
incessantly rotates. Looking east, Randy can  see  over the rim of the world
to places  where it is dusk, and the clouds catch only the reddest  fraction
of the sun's light, squatting in  darkness but glowing with sullen contained
fire like coals in their feathery ruffs of ash. The airplane is still in the
daylight, and is assiduously  tracked by  mysterious bars of rainbow, little
spectral doppelgangers probably some  new NSA surveillance  technology. Some
of the Palawan's rivers run blue and straight  into the ocean and some carry
enormous plumes of eroded silt that feather out into the ocean and are swept
up the shore by currents. In Kinakuta there is less deforestation than there
is here, but only because they have oil instead. All of  these countries are
burning resources at  a  fantastic rate  to get  their  economies stoked up,
gambling that they'll be able to make the  jump into hyperspace some kind of
knowledge  economy, presumably before they run out of stuff to sell and turn
into Haiti.
     Randy  is  paging  his  way  through  the   opening  sections  of   the
Cryptonomicon, but he can never  concentrate when  he's on  an airplane. The
opening sections  are stolen  pages from World War II era  military manuals.
These  used  to be  classified until ten years ago, when  one  of Cantrell's
friends  found copies just sitting in a library  in Kentucky and drove there
with a  shitload of  dimes and  photocopied  them. That got public, civilian
cryptanalysis up  to where the government was in the l940s. The Xeroxes have
been scanned and OCRed and converted  to the HTML format used for Web  pages
so  that  people  can put  in links and marginal  notes and  annotations and
corrections without messing with  the original text, and this they have done
enthusiastically,  which is  all very well but  makes  it hard  to read. The
original  text is  set in a deliberately  crabbed, old fashioned typeface to
make  it  instantly distinguishable  from  the  cyber  era annotations.  The
introduction to the Cryptonomicon was written, probably before Pearl Harbor,
by  a guy  named William Friedman,  and  is  filled with aphorisms  probably
intended to  keep  neophyte  code  breakers from slapping  grenades to their
heads  after a  long  week of  wrestling with  the latest  Nipponese machine
ciphers.
     The fact that the  scientific investigator works 50 percent of his time
by nonrational means is, it seems, quite insufficiently recognized.

     Intuition,  like a flash of  lightning,  lasts only  for  a  second. It
generally comes  when one is tormented by a difficult decipherment  and when
one  reviews in his mind  the fruitless  experiments already tried. Suddenly
the light breaks  through and one finds after  a few minutes  what  previous
days of labor were unable to reveal.

     And, Randy's favorite,
     As to luck,  there is  the old miners' proverb: "Gold is where you find
it."

     So far so good, but then with a few whacks of the Page Down key Randy's
looking  at  endless  staggered  grids  of  random  letters  (some  kind  of
predigital method for solving ciphers) which the author  would not  have put
into the document  if they did not  convey some kind of useful lesson to the
reader. Randy  is miserably aware that until he has learned to  read through
these grids he will not even be up to the level of competence of a World War
II novice cryptanalyst. The sample messages used are like ONE PLANE REPORTED
LOST AT SEA and TROOPS HAVING  DIFFICULTY MAINTAINING CONNECTION  WITH FORTY
FIFTH INFANTRY STOP which Randy finds kind of hokey until he  remembers that
the book was  written by people who probably didn't know what "hokey" meant,
who lived in some radically different  pre hokiness era where  planes really
did get lost at sea and  the people in  those planes never came back  to see
their families and in which people who even raised the issue of hokeyness in
conversation  were  likely  to  end  up  pitied  or shunned  or  maybe  even
psychoanalyzed.
     Randy feels like  a  little shit  when he thinks  about this  stuff. He
wonders about  Chester.  Is the shattered 747 hanging from Chester's ceiling
just  a  monumental  act of  bad  taste, or  is  Chester  actually  making a
Statement with  that thing?  Could it be that nerdy Chester is actually some
kind of deep thinker who has  transcended the glibness and superficiality of
his  age? This  very  subject  has been debated by  serious  people at  some
length, which is why learned articles about  Chester's house keep showing up
in unexpected places. Randy wonders if he's ever had a serious experience in
his life, an experience that would be worth the time it would take to reduce
it to  a pithy STOP punctuated message in capital letters and run it through
a cryptosystem.
     They must have flown right  by the site  of the wreck.  In a  few  days
Randy will turn right around and come halfway back to Kinakuta to make  what
meager contribution  he can to the job of dragging gold bars out of it. He's
only going  to  Manila  to take  care  of some business there; some  kind of
urgent meeting demanded  by one  of  Epiphyte's Filipino partners. The stuff
that Randy  came to Manila to do, a  year and a half ago, mostly runs itself
now, and when it actually  requires his attention he finds  it fantastically
annoying.
     He can see  that the modern  way of thinking about stuff, as applied to
the Cryptonomicon,  isn't  going  to  help  him  very  much in  his  goal of
decrypting  the  Arethusa   intercepts.   The   original  writers   of   the
Cryptonomicon actually  had  to decrypt and read these goddamn  messages  in
order to save the lives of their countrymen. But  the modern annotators have
no interest in reading other people's mail  per se; the only reason they pay
attention to this subject  at  all is  that  they  aspire to make new crypto
systems that cannot  be broken by  the NSA, or now this new IDTRO thing. The
Black  Chamber. Crypto  experts won't trust a  cryptosystem  until they have
attacked  it,   and  they   can't  attack  it  until  they  know  the  basic
cryptanalytical techniques, and  hence the demand for  a document like  this
modern, annotated version of the  Cryptonomicon. But their attacks generally
don't  go any further than demonstrating a  system's vulnerabilities  in the
abstract. All they want is to be able to  say in theory this system could be
attacked in the  following  way  because from a  formal number  theory stand
point it belongs to such and such class of problems, and those problems as a
group take about  so many processor cycles to attack. And this all fits very
well with the modern  way of thinking  about stuff  in which all you need to
do, in  order to attain a  sense  of  personal  accomplishment and earn  the
accolades of your peers, is to demonstrate  an ability to  slot new examples
of things into the proper intellectual pigeon holes.
     But  the gap  between demonstrating the vulnerability of a cryptosystem
in  the abstract, and actually breaking a bunch of messages written  in that
cryptosystem, is as wide, and as profound, as the gap between being  able to
criticize a film (e.g., by  slotting it into a particular genre or movement)
and being  able to go out into  the world with a movie camera and a bunch of
unexposed film and actually make  one. Of these issues the Cryptonomicon has
nothing to say until you tunnel down to its  oldest and deepest strata. Some
of which, Randy suspects, were written by his grandfather.
     The head flight attendant comes in  on  the intercom and says something
in various languages. Each transition to a  new language is accompanied by a
sort  of   frisson  of  confusion  running   through  the  whole   passenger
compartment: first  the English speaking passengers all ask each  other what
the English version of the announcement said and just as they  are giving it
up as a lost cause the Cantonese version winds down and the Chinese speaking
passengers ask each other what  it said. The Malay version gets  no reaction
at all because no one  actually speaks the Malay language, except  maybe for
Randy when he  is asking for coffee. Presumably the message has something to
do with the fact  that the plane is about to land.  Manila sprawls out below
them in  the  dark, vast patches  of it flickering  on and off  as different
segments of  the  electrical power  grid straggle  with their own particular
challenges vis à vis maintenance and overload. In his mind, Randy is already
sitting  in front of his TV tucking into a bowl of Cap'n Crunch. Maybe there
is a place in NAIA where  he  can purchase a brick of ice cold milk, so that
he will not even have to stop at a 24 Jam on the way home.
     The Malaysian Air flight attendants all have big smiles for him  on the
way out; as globe trotting expat technocrats all know,  hospitality industry
people think it is just adorable, or pretend to think  so,  when you try  to
use some language any language other than English, and they remember you for
it. Soon he is  inside good old NAIA,  which is  sort of, but not fully, air
conditioned.  There is  a whole  group  of girls  in identical  windbreakers
gathered  by  his  baggage carousel, chattering like an  exaltation of larks
under a DEATH TO DRUG TRAFFICKERS sign. The bags take a long  time to arrive
Randy wouldn't have checked baggage at all except  that he acquired a lot of
books, and a  few other souvenirs, on his trip some salvaged from the ruined
house  and some  inherited from his  grandfather's trunk. And in Kinakuta he
bought some new diving gear  that  he hopes  he will  put to use very  soon.
Finally he  had to buy a  big  sort of duffel bag on wheels to carry it all.
Randy enjoys watching  the  girls, apparently some  kind  of high school  or
college  field  hockey  team on the  road.  For them, even  waiting  for the
baggage carousel to start up is a big adventure, full of thrills and chills;
e.g., when the carousel groans into action for a  few moments and then shuts
down again. But finally it starts  up for real, and out comes a whole row of
identical gym  bags,  color coordinated to match the girls' uniforms, and in
the middle of them is Randy's big duffel. He heaves it  off the carousel and
checks  the  tiny  combination  padlocks:  one  on  the zipper for the  main
compartment and one on a smaller pocket at the end of the bag. There  is one
more tiny pocket on the top of the bag  which has no practical function that
Randy can think of; he didn't use it and so he didn't lock it.
     He deploys the bag's telescoping handle,  lifts it up onto its built in
wheels, and heads for customs. Along the way he gets mixed into the group of
field  hockey players, who  find this extremely  titillating and  hilarious,
which  is slightly embarrassing  for him until they start finding  their own
hilarity  hilarious. There are only a few customs lanes open, and there is a
sort of traffic director waving people this way and that; he shoos the girls
towards the green lane and then, inevitably, ducts Randy into a red one.
     Looking  through the lane,  Randy can  see the area  on  the other side
where people wait to greet arriving passengers. There is a  woman  in a nice
dress  there. It's Amy. Randy comes to a complete stop the better to gape at
her. She looks fantastic. He  wonders if it's totally presumptuous of him to
think that Amy put on a dress for no other reason than  that  she knew Randy
would enjoy looking at her  in it. Whether it's presumptuous or  not, that's
what he does  think, and it almost  makes him want to faint. He doesn't want
to  let  his  mind  run completely out of control  here, but maybe  there is
something better in store for him tonight  than digging into a bowl of Cap'n
Crunch.
     Randy  steps into the lane.  He wants to  just  bolt through  and  head
straight for Amy,  but this would be a bad idea. But it's okay. Anticipation
never  killed anyone. Anticipation can  actually be kind  of enjoyable. What
did  Avi say? Sometimes wanting  is  better than having. Randy's pretty sure
that having Amy would not disappoint,  but  wanting  ain't  such a bad thing
either. He is  holding his  laptop bag  out before  him  and drawing the big
duffel behind,  slowing  gradually to a stop so that  it won't roll  forward
under its own momentum and break  his  knees. There is  the  requisite  long
stainless  steel  table and  a  bored  fireplug shaped gentleman  behind  it
saying, "Nationality?  Port of embarkation?" for the hundred thousandth time
in his life.  Randy hands over his documents and answers the questions while
bending down to  heft the duffel bag up onto the metal tabletop. "Remove the
locks  please?" the customs inspector says. Randy bends  down and squints at
the tiny brass wheels, trying  to line them  up into  the right combination.
While  he's doing that, he hears the customs inspector working right next to
his  head, unzipping the tiny, empty  pocket on  the top  of the duffel bag.
There is a rustling noise. "What is this?" the inspector asks. "Sir? Sir?"
     "Yes,  what is  it?"  Randy  says,  straightening  up  and looking  the
inspector in the eye.
     Like a model in an infomercial, the inspector  holds  up a small Ziploc
bag  right  next  to  his head and points to it with the other hand.  A door
opens behind him and people come out. The Ziploc bag  has been partly filled
with sugar, or  something maybe confectioner's sugar and rolled into a cigar
shaped slug.
     "What is this, sir?" the inspector repeats.
     Randy shrugs. "How should I know? Where did it come from?"
     "It came  from  your bag,  sir," the inspector says, and  points to the
little pocket.
     "No, it didn't. That pocket was empty," Randy says.
     "Is this your  bag, sir?" the inspector says, reaching with one hand to
look at the paper claim check dangling  from  its  handle. Quite a crowd has
gathered  behind  him,  still  indistinct  to  Randy  who is  understandably
focusing on the inspector.
     "I should hope so I just opened the  locks," Randy  says. The inspector
turns around  and  gestures  to  the  people behind him, who en  masse  move
forward  into the  light.  They are wearing  uniforms and most  of  them are
carrying guns. Very soon, some of them are behind him. They are, as a matter
of fact, surrounding him. Randy looks towards Amy, but  sees only a pair  of
abandoned  shoes: she is sprinting barefoot toward a line of pay telephones.
He'll probably never see her in a dress again.
     He wonders  whether  it would be a bad idea, from  a narrowly  tactical
point of view, to ask for a lawyer this soon.


     Chapter 83 THE BATTLE OF MANILA


     Bobby Shaftoe is awakened by the smell of smoke. It is not the smoke of
cookies left  too long in the oven, piles of autumn leaves being  burned, or
Boy Scout campfires. It is a mixture of other kinds of  smoke with which  he
has become quite  familiar  in the last  couple of  years: tires,  fuel, and
buildings, for example.
     He props himself up on one  elbow and realizes  that he is lying in the
bottom of a long skinny boat. Just above his head, a dirty canvas sail luffs
in a treacherous and foul smelling breeze. It is the middle of the night.
     He turns his head to look upwind. His head doesn't like it. Fierce pain
is trying to batter down the doors of his mind. But the pain is  not getting
in. He senses the muffled booms of the  pain's hobnailed  boots against  his
front door, but that's about it.
     Ah! Someone has given  him morphine. Shaftoe grins appreciatively. Life
is good.
     The world  is dark a matte black hemisphere inverted over the  plane of
the lake. But there is a horizontal crack around the edge, off to the boat's
port  side, where  yellow light is leaking through. The  light  glimmers and
sparkles like stars viewed through the heat waves above the hood of  a black
automobile.
     He sits up, peers at it, gradually getting an idea of scale. The ragged
trail  of yellow light  extends from  the boat's eight  o'clock, all the way
around past the bow, to about one o'clock. Maybe it is some incredibly weird
sunrise phenomenon.
     "Myneela," says a voice behind him.
     "Huh?"
     "It is Manila," says another voice, closer to him, speaking the English
version of the name.
     "Why's it all lit up?"  Bobby  Shaftoe has not  seen  a city lit  up at
night since 1941, and has forgotten what it looks like.
     "The Japanese have put it to the torch."
     "The Pearl of the Orient!" someone says, farther back in  the boat, and
there is rueful laughter.
     Shaftoe's head is clearing now. He  rubs  his  eyes  and takes a better
look. A couple of  miles off to  port, a steel  drum full  of fuel takes off
into the sky like a rocket,  and disappears. He begins to  make out the bony
silhouettes of  palm trees along the  lake shore, standing out  against  the
flames.  The boat moves on across the warm water quietly, tiny waves chiming
against its hull. Shaftoe feels  as if he has  just  been born, a new person
coming into a new world.
     Anyone  else would  ask why they  are  traveling into the burning city,
instead  of running away from  it. But Shaftoe doesn't ask, any  more than a
newborn infant would ask questions. This is the world he has been born into,
and he looks at it wide eyed.
     The man who  has  been speaking to him is sitting on a  gunwale next to
Shaftoe, a  pale  face  hovering above a black garment, a white  rectangular
notch in  his collar.  The  light of the  burning city refracts  warmly in a
string of amber beads  from  which  depends,  a  heavy,  swinging  crucifix.
Shaftoe lies back  down in the  hull of the  boat and stares up at  him  for
awhile.
     "They gave me morphine."
     "I gave you morphine. You were difficult to control."
     "I apologize, sir,"  Shaftoe says with profound sincerity. He remembers
those China Marines who went Asiatic on the trip down from Shanghai, and how
they disgraced themselves.
     "We could not tolerate noise. The Nipponese would have found us."
     "I understand."
     "Seeing Glory was a very bad shock for you."
     "Level with me,  padre," says  Bobby Shaftoe. "My boy. My  son. Is he a
leper too?"
     The black eyes close, and the pale face moves  back and forth  in a no.
"Glory contracted the disease  not long after the child was born, working in
a camp in the mountains. The camp was not a very clean place."
     Shaftoe snorts. "No shit, Sherlock!"
     There is a long, uncomfortable  silence. Then  the  padre says, "I have
already taken confessions from the  other  men.  Would you like  me to  take
yours now?"
     "Is that what Catholics do when they're about to die?"
     "They do  it  all  the  time.  But  yes, it  is  advisable  to  confess
immediately before death. It  helps what is the expression grease the skids.
In the afterlife."
     "Padre, it looks to me like we're only an hour or two away from hitting
the beach. If I start confessing my sins to you right now, I might get up to
stealing cookies from the cookie jar when I was eight years old."
     The padre laughs. Someone hands Shaftoe  a cigarette,  already  lit. He
takes a big suck on it.
     "We wouldn't have time to get into any of  the good stuff, like nailing
Glory and  killing a whole  lot of Nips and Krauts." Shaftoe thinks about it
for a minute,  enjoying the cigarette.  "But if  this is  one of those deals
where we are all going to die  and it sure looks like  one of those deals to
me there is one thing I gotta do. Is this boat going back to Calamba?"
     "We hope that the owner  can take  some women and children  back across
the lake."
     "Anyone got a pencil and paper?"
     Someone passes up a pencil  stub,  but there  is no  paper to be found.
Shaftoe searches his pockets and finds nothing but a skein of I SHALL RETURN
condoms.  He opens one of  them,  peeling  the halves  of the  wrapper apart
carefully, and tosses  the rubber into the lake. Then he spreads the wrapper
out on the top of an ordnance crate and begins to write: "I, Robert Shaftoe,
being of  sound  mind  and body,  hereby  leave  all  of my  worldly  goods,
including  my  military  death  benefits,  to my  natural born son,  Douglas
MacArthur Shaftoe."
     He looks  up into the burning city. He considers adding something like,
"if  he's still alive," but  nobody likes a  whiner.  So he just  signs  the
fucking  thing.  The padre  adds his signature as witness.  Just to add some
extra credibility,  Shaftoe pulls off his dog tags and wraps the will around
them, then  wraps  the dog tags' chain around the whole thing. He  passes it
down to the  stern of the boat, where the boatman pockets it  and cheerfully
agrees to do the right thing with it when he gets back to Calamba.
     The boat isn't wide, but  it's  very long  and has a dozen Huks crammed
onto it. All of them are armed to the teeth with ordnance that has obviously
come  off  an  American submarine recently. The  weight of  men and weaponry
keeps  the boat so low in the water that waves  occasionally splash over the
gunwales. Shaftoe  paws through crates in the dark.  He can't see  for shit,
but his  hands identify, the components  of a  few Thompson submachine  guns
down in there.
     "Parts  for  weapons,"  one  of the Huks explains  to him, "don't  lose
those!"
     "Parts, nothing!" Shaftoe says, a few busy seconds later. He produces a
fully assembled trench broom from the crate. The red coals of half a dozen I
SHALL  RETURN  cigarettes leap upwards  into  the Huks'  mouths as they free
their hands for a light round of applause. Someone passes  him a  pie shaped
magazine, heavy with .45  caliber  cartridges. "Y'know,  they invented  this
kind ammo just to knock down crazy Filipino bastards," Shaftoe announces.
     "We know," one of the Huks says.
     "It's overkill for Nips," Shaftoe continues, jacking the tommy  gun and
the magazine together.  The Huks all laugh nastily. One of them is moving up
from the stern, making  the whole boat rock from side to side.  He is a very
young, slight fellow. He holds out his hand to Bobby Shaftoe. "Uncle Robert,
do you remember me?"
     Being  called  Uncle  Robert  is hardly  the  weirdest  thing  that has
happened to Shaftoe in the last few years, so he lets  it slide. He peers at
the  boy's face, which is dimly illuminated by  the  combustion  of  Manila.
"You're one of the Altamira boys," he guesses.
     The boy salutes him crisply, and grins.
     Then,  Shaftoe   remembers.   Three  years  ago,  the  Altamira  family
apartment, carrying  the freshly impregnated Glory up the stairs as air raid
sirens wailed all around the city. An  apartment filled  with  Altamiras.  A
squad of boys  with wooden  swords and rifles, staring at  Bobby  Shaftoe in
awe. Shaftoe throwing them a salute, then running out of the place.
     "All of us fought the Nips," the boy  says. Then his face falls, and he
crosses himself. "Two are dead."
     "Some of you were pretty damn young."
     "The youngest ones are still in Manila,"  the boy says.  He and Shaftoe
silently  stare across  the water into the flames, which have  merged into a
wall now.
     "In the apartment? In Malate?"
     "I think so. My name is Fidel."
     "Is my son in the same place?"
     "I think so. Maybe not."
     "We'll go find those kids, Fidel."


     ***


     Half the population of Manila  seems  to be standing  along the water's
edge, or in the water, waiting  for a boat like theirs to show up. MacArthur
is coming down from the north, and the Nipponese Air Force troops are coming
up from the south,  so the isthmus  between Manila Bay  and Laguna de Bay is
corked at  both  ends by great military  forces waging  total  war. A ragged
Dunkirk style evacuation is in progress along the lake side of  the isthmus,
but the number of boats  is not adequate.  Some of the refugees are behaving
like civilized human beings, but others are wading and  swimming out towards
them trying to  get  first dibs. A wet hand reaches up out of  the water and
grabs  the boat's gunwale  until  Shaftoe crushes it with  the  butt  of his
trench broom. The swimmer falls away, clutching his hand and  screaming, and
Shaftoe tells him he's ugly.
     There is  about half an hour's more ugliness  as the boat cruises  back
and forth just out of swimming range  and the  padre handpicks an assortment
of women carrying  small children. They are pulled up into  the  boat one by
one, and  the Huks climb off the boat one by one, and when it's all finished
the boat turns around and glides off into the darkness. Shaftoe and the Huks
wade ashore, carrying crates of  ammunition  between  them.  By this  point,
Shaftoe has grenades dangling off his body all over the place, like teats on
a pregnant sow, and most of the Huks  are walking all slow and stiff legged,
trying not to collapse under the weight of the bandoliers in which they have
practically mummified themselves. They stagger into the city, bucking a tide
of smoky refugees.
     This low land along the shore of the  lake is not the city proper it is
a suburb  of humble buildings made in the traditional style, of woven rattan
screens with thatched  roofs. They  burn  effortlessly,  throwing up the red
sheets  of flame  that they watched from the boat.  Inland, and  a few miles
north, is the  city proper,  with many masonry buildings. The Nipponese have
put it to  the torch also, but it burns sporadically, as isolated towers  of
flame and smoke.
     Shaftoe and his band  had been expecting to hit the beach  like Marines
and get mowed  down at the water's edge. Instead, they march for a good mile
and a half inland before they actually lay eyes on the enemy.
     Shaftoe's  actually glad  to see some real  Nips; he  has been  getting
nervous,  because  the  lack  of  opposition  has  made  the  Huks giddy and
overconfident.  Then half a dozen Nip Air Force troops spill  out of a store
which they have evidently been looting they are all carrying  liquor bottles
and  stop on the sidewalk  to  set  fire  to  the place,  fashioning Molotov
cocktails from  stolen bottles of  firewater. Shaftoe pulls  the  pin  on  a
grenade and underhands it down the sidewalk, watches it skitter for a while,
and  then  ducks into  a  doorway. When he  hears  the  explosion, and  sees
shrapnel crack the windshield of a car parked along the street, he jumps out
onto  the sidewalk,  ready to  open up with  the  tommy gun.  But  it's  not
necessary; all of the Nips are down, thrashing weakly in the gutter. Shaftoe
and the other  Huks  all take cover and  wait  for more  Nipponese troops to
arrive, and help their injured comrades, but it doesn't happen.
     The Huks  are elated. Shaftoe stands in the  street  brooding while the
padre administers  last rites to  the  dead  and dying Nipponese. Obviously,
discipline has completely broken  down. The Nips know they are trapped. They
know  MacArthur is about to run  right over them, like  a lawn mower plowing
through an  anthill. They have  become a  mob. For Shaftoe, it's going to be
easier  to fight  mobs of drunken,  deranged looters, but there's no telling
what they might be doing to civilians farther north.
     "We're wasting  our fucking time," Shaftoe says,  "let's  get to Malate
and avoid further engagements."
     "You are not in command of this group," says one of the others. "I am."
     "Who's that?" Shaftoe asks,  squinting against the light of the burning
liquor store.
     It turns out to be a Fil American  lieutenant, who was sitting way back
in the boat, and who has been  of no use at all to this point. Shaftoe knows
in his bones that this  guy is  not going  to  be  a good combat  leader. He
inhales deeply, trying to heave a sigh, then gags on smoke instead.
     "Sir, yes sir!" he says, and salutes.
     "I am Lieutenant Morales, and  if you have any more suggestions,  bring
them to me, or keep them to yourself."
     "Sir,  yes  sir!"  Shaftoe  says. He  doesn't  bother  to  memorize the
lieutenant's name.
     They  work their way north through narrow, clogged streets for a couple
of hours. The sun comes  up.  A small airplane flies over the  city, drawing
ragged fire from exhausted, drunken Nipponese troops.
     "It is a P 51 Mustang!" Lieutenant Morales exclaims.
     "It's  a fucking  Piper Cub,  goddamn it!"  Shaftoe  says. He  has been
holding  his  tongue  to this  point, but  he can't  help it  now. "It's  an
artillery spotter plane."
     "Then why is it flying over Manila?" Lieutenant Morales asks smugly. He
enjoys  this  rhetorical  triumph for about  thirty seconds. Then  the first
artillery rounds begin  to bore  in from the north and blast the shit out of
various buildings.
     They get into their first serious  firefight about half an hour  later,
against a platoon of Nipponese Air Force troops  holed up in a stone bank at
the vee formed by a couple of intersecting avenues. Lieutenant Morales comes
up with an extremely complicated plan that involves breaking  up  into three
smaller  groups. Morales takes three men  forward into the cover of a  large
fountain that sits  in the middle of the square. There, they are immediately
trapped by heavy fire from the Nipponese. They squat  and  huddle behind the
shelter  of  the fountain for about  a quarter of an hour, at which point an
artillery shell glides in from the north, a black pellet easing downwards in
a flawless parabolic trajectory, and scores a direct hit on the fountain. It
turns out to be a high explosive shell, which does not blow up until it hits
something the fountain, in this case. The padre gives Lieutenant Morales and
his men last rites  from a safe distance  of a hundred yards or so, which is
as good  a place  as any,  since  there is nothing left  of  their  physical
bodies.
     Bobby Shaftoe  is  voted new squad leader by acclamation. He leads them
around the square, giving the whole  intersection a wide berth. Way up north
somewhere, one of The General's batteries is  doggedly trying to  zero in on
that fucking bank, blowing up half  the neighborhood in the process. A Piper
Cub banks overhead doing  lazy figure eights,  offering suggestions over the
radio: "Almost there  a little to the  left no,  too far now bring  it in  a
little bit."
     It takes Shaftoe's  group a  whole day to make  another mile's progress
towards  Malate. They could get there in no time  by simply running  up  the
middle  of  major streets, but the artillery  fire  is coming in heavier and
heavier  as they head  north. Worse,  much of  it  consists of antipersonnel
rounds with radar proximity  fuses that blow up while  they're still several
yards above the ground, the better to spray shrapnel all over the place. The
air bursts look like the splayed foliage of burned coconut palms.
     Shaftoe sees no  point in  getting them all  killed. So they take it  a
block at a time, sprinting  one by one from doorway to doorway, and scouting
the  buildings with great care in case there are any  Nips lying in  wait to
shoot at them from the windows. When that happens, they have to hunker down,
scout the  place  out,  count windows  and  doors,  make  guesses about  the
building's  floor  plan,  send  men  out to check  various  lines of  sight.
Usually, it is not really difficult to root the Nips out of these buildings,
but it is time consuming.
     They  hole up in a  half burned apartment  building  around sunset, and
take turns getting a couple of  hours' sleep. Then they push on through  the
night, when the artillery fire is less intense. Bobby Shaftoe gets the whole
remaining squad, nine men including the padre, into Malate at about  four in
the morning. By the time dawn breaks, they have reached the street where the
Altamiras  live,  or  lived.  They  arrive  just in  time to see the  entire
apartment block being systematically blasted into rubble by round after high
explosive round.
     No one  runs out of it; no cries or screams can be heard in between the
explosions. The place is empty.
     They break  down the  barricaded door of a  drugstore across the street
and have  a chat  with the  sole living occupants: a seventy five  year  old
woman and a six  year old boy. The Nipponese came through the neighborhood a
couple of days ago, she says, heading north, in the direction of Intramuros.
They herded the  women and children out of the buildings and marched them in
one direction. They pulled  out all of the men,  and the boys over a certain
age, and marched them off in another. She and her grandson escaped by hiding
in a cupboard.
     Shaftoe  and his squad  emerge  from  the  drugstore  onto the  street,
leaving  the  padre  behind to grease  some heavenly  skids. Fifteen seconds
later,  two of them are  killed by shrapnel from an antipersonnel round that
detonates above the  street nearby. The  remainder of the squad backs  right
into a group of marauding Nipponese stragglers coming around the corner, and
a completely  insane close quarters firefight  ensues. They  have  the  Nips
heavily outgunned, but  half of Shaftoe's men are too stunned to fight. They
are  accustomed to the jungle. Some  of  them  have  never been  to the city
before, even in peacetime, and they just stand there  gaping.  Shaftoe ducks
into a doorway and  begins  to  make a fantastic  amount  of noise  with his
trench broom. The Nips  start  throwing  grenades around  like firecrackers,
doing as  much  damage  to  themselves as  to the Huks.  The  engagement  is
ridiculously  confused, and doesn't really end until another artillery round
comes in,  kills  several  of the Nips, and leaves the rest so  stunned that
Shaftoe is able to  walk out in  the open and  dispatch them with shots from
his Colt.
     They drag two of their wounded into the drugstore and leave them there.
One  other  man  is  dead.  They  are  down to  five  fighting men  and  one
increasingly busy padre. Their firefight has brought down another barrage of
antipersonnel artillery, and so the best they can do for the rest of the day
is find a basement to hide in, and try to get some sleep.
     Shaftoe sleeps hardly at all, and so when night falls he takes a couple
of benzedrine  tablets,  shoots  a bit of morphine to take the edge off, and
leads his squad out into the streets. The next neighborhood to  the north is
called Ermita. It has a lot of hotels. After Ermita is Rizal Park. The walls
of Intramuros  rise up from Rizal Park's northern edge. After  Intramuros is
the  Pasig  River, and MacArthur's  on  the  far side  of the Pasig.  So  if
Shaftoe's son and the rest of the Altamiras are still alive, they have to be
somewhere in  the couple of miles between here and Fort Santiago on the near
bank of the Pasig.
     Shortly after they cross  into the neighborhood of  Ermita, they happen
upon a stream of blood trickling out of a doorway, across the sidewalk, into
the gutter.  They kick down  the door  of the building and discover that its
ground  floor  is  filled with the corpses of Filipino  men several dozen in
all. All  of them have been bayoneted. One  is still alive. Shaftoe and  the
Huks carry him out onto the sidewalk and begin looking for some place to put
him  while the padre circulates through  the building, touching each  corpse
briefly and muttering something in Latin. When he comes out, he is bloody up
to the knees.
     "Any women? Children?" Shaftoe asks him. The padre shakes his head no.
     They are only a few blocks from  the Philippine  General  Hospital,  so
they carry the wounded man in that direction. Coming around the  corner they
see that the hospital's buildings have been half  destroyed  by  MacArthur's
artillery, and the grounds are covered with human beings laid out on sheets.
Then they realize that the men circulating around the area, carrying rifles,
are Nipponese  troops. A couple of  shots are fired in their direction. They
have to  duck into  an  alley and set the  wounded man  down. A few  moments
later, a trio of Nipponese soldiers appears in hot pursuit.  Shaftoe has had
enough time to think this one through, so he lets them get a good  few paces
into the alley. Then he and the Huks kill them silently, with blades. By the
time reinforcements have  been sent  out  after them,  Shaftoe and his group
have disappeared into the  alleyways  of  Ermita,  which in  many places are
running red with the blood of slaughtered Filipino men, and boys.


     Chapter 84 CAPTIVITY


     "Someone is trying  to send you a  message,"  Attorney Alejandro  says,
scant minutes into his first interview with his new client.
     Randy's  ready  for it. "Why  does everyone  here have these incredibly
cumbersome ways of sending me messages? Don't you people have e mail?"
     The Philippines are one of those countries  where "Attorney" is used as
a title,  like "Doctor."  Attorney Alejandro  has a backswept grey pompadour
that  gets a  little curly down around the  nape  of his neck  which,  as he
probably well  knows, makes  him look distinguished in a  nineteenth century
statesman kind of  way. He  smokes  a lot, which  bothers Randy hardly a bit
since he has  been in places, for a couple of days,  where everyone  smokes.
You don't  even need to bother  with cigarettes and matches  in a jail. Just
breathe,  and you get  the equivalent of  one or two  packs  a day  worth of
slightly pre owned tar and nicotine.
     Attorney Alejandro decides to act as if  Randy has never made this last
comment.  He attends to  a bit of  business with his cigarette. If he  wants
that cigarette up  and  burning  between  his lips,  he can make  it  happen
without even moving his hands; suddenly it's  just there, as  if he had been
hiding it, already lit, inside his mouth.  But if  he  needs  to introduce a
caesura into  the conversation, he can turn  the selection, preparation, and
ignition of  a cigarette  into  something  that in terms of solemn ritual is
just this side of the cha no yu. It must knock  'em dead in the court  room.
Randy's feeling better already.
     "What do you suppose  the  message is? That they are capable of killing
me if they want to? Because I already know that. I mean, shit! How much does
it cost to have a man killed in Manila?"
     Attorney Alejandro frowns  fiercely. He  has  taken  this  question the
wrong way: as  a suggestion that he is the kind of guy who would know such a
thing.  Of  course,  given that  he was  personally  recommended  by Douglas
MacArthur Shaftoe, he probably is just precisely that kind of guy, but it is
probably  rude to  aver this. "Your  imagination is running wild,"  he says.
"You  have  blown  the  death  penalty  aspect  of  this thing  all  out  of
proportion."  As  Attorney  Alejandro  probably expected,  this  display  of
blitheness renders  Randy speechless long enough for him to execute  another
bit  of patter with a cigarette and a stainless steel lighter encrusted with
military  regalia.  Attorney  Alejandro has mentioned, twice, that he  was a
colonel in  the  Army and lived for  years in the States. "We reinstated the
death  penalty in  '95 after a hiatus of ten years  approximately." The word
approximately crackles and explodes from his mouth like a spark from a Tesla
coil. Filipinos enunciate better than Americans and they know it.
     Randy and  Alejandro are meeting in  a high, narrow room  somewhere  in
between the jail and the courtroom in Makati. A prison guard loitered in the
room  with them for  a few minutes, hunched over  with sheepishness, leaving
only when  Attorney Alejandro  went over and  spoke  to him in low, fatherly
tones and pressed something into his hand. There is an open window,  and the
sound of  honking horns comes through it  from the street two stories below.
Randy's half expecting Doug Shaftoe and his comrades to rappel down from the
roof and  enter suddenly in glittering and screaming cloaks of broken window
glass  and extract  Randy while  Attorney Alejandro heaves his  bulk against
this half ton nara table and uses it to block the door shut.
     Coming up with fantasies like  this  one helps to  break the tedium  of
being  in jail, and probably does a  lot to explain Randy's jailmates' taste
in videos,  which  they  cannot  actually  watch but which they  talk  about
incessantly  in  a  mixture  of English  and  Tagalog  that  he  now  almost
understands. The videos, or rather the  lack of them, has given rise to some
kind of  retrograde  media evolution phenomenon: an oral storytelling rooted
in videos that these guys once saw. A particularly affecting description of,
for example, Stallone in Rambo III cauterizing his abdominal bullet wound by
igniting  a torn open  rifle cartridge and shooting gunpowder flames through
it will  plunge all  of  the men into several moments of reverent awe. It is
about  the only quiet time Randy  gets  now, and  he  has consequently begun
cooking  up  a  new  plan:  he will  exploit  his  Californian provenance by
asserting  that  he  has  seen  martial arts films  that  have not  yet been
bootlegged to  the streets of Manila, and narrate them in terms  so eloquent
that the entire jailhouse will for a few minutes  become a place of monastic
contemplation, like the idealized  Third  World prison  that Randy wishes he
were in. Randy read Papillon cover to cover a couple  of times when he was a
kid and  has always  imagined Third World  prisons  as places of supreme and
noble  isolation: steep  tropical  sunlight setting  the humid and smoky air
aglow as  it  slants  in over iron  bars  close set  in thick masonry walls.
Sweaty,  shirtless steppenwolves prowling back  and  forth  in their  cells,
brooding  about where it all went wrong. Prison journals furtively scribbled
on cigarette papers.
     Instead, the jail  where they've  been  keeping Randy  is just a really
crowded urban  society  where  some of  the people  cannot  actually  leave.
Everyone there is extremely  young except for  Randy and  an  ever  rotating
population  of  drunks.  It  makes him feel old. If  he sees one more  video
addled  boy  strutting  around in  a bootleg  "Hard Rock Cafe" t  shirt  and
fronting hand gestures from  American gangsta rappers, he  may actually have
to become a murderer.
     Attorney Alejandro says, rhetorically, "Why 'Death to Drug Smugglers'?"
Randy hasn't asked why, but Attorney Alejandro wants to share something with
him about why. "The Americans were very angry that some people in this  part
of the world persisted in selling  them  the drugs  that they want  so  very
badly."
     "Sorry. What can I say? We suck. I know we suck."
     "And so as a gesture of  friendship between our peoples, we  instituted
the  death penalty.  The  law  specified  two,  and  only  two,  methods  of
execution," Attorney Alejandro continues, "the gas chamber and the  electric
chair. As  you  can see, we took our lead in  this as in many other  things,
some wise  and some foolish from the Americans. Now, at the time, we did not
have a gas chamber anywhere in the Philippines. A study was made. Plans were
drawn up. Do you have any idea what is involved in constructing a proper gas
chamber?" Attorney  Alejandro  now goes off on  a fairly lengthy  riff,  but
Randy finds it hard to  concentrate until something  in Attorney Alejandro's
tone tells him that a coda is approaching. ". . . prison  service said, 'How
can you expect us to construct this space age facility when we have not even
the funds to  purchase rat poison  for  the  overcrowded prisons  we already
have?' As  you can see they  were just  whining for more funding.  You see?"
Attorney  Alejandro raises  his  eyebrows  significantly  and  sucks  in his
cheeks, as he reduces a good two  or three centimeters of a Marlboro to ash.
That  he feels it necessary  to explain  the underlying  motivations  of the
prison service  so  baldly  seems  to  imply that his  estimate  of  Randy's
intelligence is none too favorable, which given the way  he was  arrested at
the airport might be fair enough. "So this left only the electric chair. But
do you know what happened to the electric chair?"
     "I can't imagine," Randy says.
     "It  burned. Faulty wiring. So we had  no way to kill people." All of a
sudden Attorney Alejandro, who has betrayed no amusement thus far, remembers
to laugh. It is perfunctory, and  by the time Randy has bestirred himself to
show a  little polite  amusement,  it's over and  Alejandro's  back to being
serious. "But Filipinos are highly adaptable."
     "Once  again,"  Attorney  Alejandro  says,  "we looked to  America. Our
friend, our patron, our big  brother.  You are familiar  with the expression
Ninong? Of course you are, I forget you have spent a whole lotta time here."
Randy   is   always   impressed   by   the  mixture  of  love,  hate,  hope,
disappointment, admiration,  and  derision  that Filipinos  express  towards
America. Having actually been a part of the United States at one point, they
can take  digs at  it  in a way  that's usually reserved  for lifelong  U.S.
citizens. The failure of the United States to protect them from Nippon after
Pearl Harbor is still the most important thing that  ever  happened to them.
Probably just slightly more important than MacArthur's return to the country
a few years later. If that doesn't inculcate a love hate relationship...
     "The Americans," Attorney Alejandro continues, "were also reeling under
the  expense  of  executing  people  and having  embarrassments  with  their
electric chairs. Maybe they should have jobbed it out."
     "Pardon  me?" Randy says. He  gets the idea  that Attorney Alejandro is
just checking to see if he's awake.
     "Jobbed it out.  To the Nipponese. Gone to Sony or Panasonic or  one of
those guys and said (now  reverting to a perfect American  yokel accent), We
just  love  the VCRs that y'all've  been sellin' us why  don't  you make  an
electric chair that actually works?' Which  the Nips  would have done  it is
the kind of thing they would excel at and then after they sold Americans all
of the electric  chairs  they needed, we  could have purchased some  factory
seconds  at cut rate."  Whenever  Filipinos  slag  America in earshot  of an
American,  they  usually  try  to  follow  it  up  with  some   really  vile
observations about the Nipponese, just to put everything in perspective.
     "Where are we going with this?" Randy says.
     "Please forgive my digression. The Americans had gone over to executing
prisoners by lethal injection. And  so we have once again decided to  take a
cue from them. Why didn't  we just hang people? We have plenty of  rope this
is where rope comes from, you know "
     "Yes."
     " or shoot them? We have plenty of guns. But no, the congress wanted to
be modern like Uncle Sam, and so lethal injection it was. But then we sent a
delegation to see  how the Americans lethally injected people,  and you know
what they reported when they came back?"
     "It takes all kinds of special equipment."
     "It takes all kinds of special equipment, and a special room. This room
has not yet been constructed. So, you know how many people we have on  death
row now?"
     "I can't imagine."
     "More than two hundred and fifty. Even if the room were built tomorrow,
most  of them could not be executed, because it is illegal  to carry out the
execution until one year has passed since the final appeal."
     "Well, wait a minute! If you've lost your final appeal, then why wait a
whole year?"
     Attorney Alejandro shrugs.
     "In  America,  they usually do the final appeal while  the  prisoner is
lying strapped to the table with the needle in his arm."
     "Maybe they wait in case there is a miracle  during that year. We are a
very  religious  people  even  some of  the  death  row  prisoners  are very
religious. But they are now begging to be  executed.  They  cannot stand the
wait  any  longer!"  Attorney Alejandro laughs and  slaps  the table.  "Now,
Randy, all of these  two hundred and fifty people are poor. All of them." He
stops significantly.
     "I hear you,"  Randy says. "Did you know that my net worth is less than
zero, by the way?"
     "Yes, but you are rich in  friends and connections." Attorney Alejandro
starts frisking himself. A picture of a fresh pack of Marlboros appears over
his head in a  little thought balloon. "I recently received a telephone call
from a friend of yours in Seattle."
     "Chester?"
     "Yes, he's the one. He has money."
     "You could say that."
     "Chester is seeking ways to put his financial resources to work on your
behalf.  He  feels frustrated  and  unsure  of  himself  because  while  his
resources are quite significant, he does not know  the fine points of how to
wield them in the context of the Philippine judicial system."
     "That's  him  all over. Is there any chance that you might be  able  to
give him some pointers?"
     "I'll talk to him."
     "Let  me  ask  you this,"  Randy  says. "I  understand  that  financial
resources, wielded properly,  could  free me. But what if  some  rich person
wanted to use his money to send me to death row?"
     This  one stops Attorney Alejandro dead  for a minute. "There are  more
efficient ways for a wealthy person to kill someone. For the reasons  I have
described, a would  be assassin would first  look  somewhere  outside of the
Philippine capital punishment  apparatus. That is why, in my opinion as your
lawyer, what is really going on here is that "
     "Someone is trying to send me a message."
     "Exactly. You see, now you are beginning to understand."
     "Well, I'm wondering  if  you could give me  a ballpark estimate of how
long I'm going to be locked up. I mean, do you want me to plead to  a lesser
charge and then serve a few years?"
     Attorney Alejandro looks pained and scoffs. He doesn't deign to answer.
"I didn't think so,"  says Randy. "But at what point in these proceedings do
you imagine I could get out? I mean, they refused to release me on bail."
     "Of course! You are charged with a capital crime! Even though every one
knows it is a joke, proper respect must be shown."
     "They  pulled the  planted drugs  out  of my bag  there are  a  million
witnesses. It was a drug, right?"
     "Malaysian heroin. Very pure," Attorney Alejandro says admiringly.
     "So there are all of these people who can testify that a sack of heroin
was found in my luggage. That would seem to complicate the job of getting me
out of jail."
     "We can probably  get it dismissed before an actual trial  is launched,
by  pointing out flaws in the evidence," Attorney Alejandro  says. Something
in his tone of voice, and the way he's staring out the window, suggests this
is the first time he's actually thought about how he's going to specifically
attack this problem.  "Perhaps a baggage handler at  NAIA will step  forward
and testify that he saw a shadowy figure planting the drugs in your bag."
     "A shadowy figure?"
     "Yesss," says Attorney Alejandro irritably, anticipating sarcasm.
     "Are there a lot of those hanging around backstage at NAIA?"
     "We don't need a lot."
     "How  much time do you  think might  pass before this baggage handler's
conscience finally gets the better of him and he decides to step forward?"
     Attorney Alejandro shrugs. "A  couple of weeks, perhaps. For  it to  be
done properly. How are your accommodations?"
     "They suck. But you know what? Nothing really bothers me anymore."
     "There is  concern among some of  the  officials of  the prison service
that when you get out, you may say harsh things about the conditions."
     "Since when do they care?"
     "You are a little famous in America. Not very famous. A  little. Do you
remember the American boy in Singapore, who was caned?"
     "Of course."
     "Very bad publicity for Singapore. So there are officials of the prison
service who would be  sympathetic to the  idea of putting you  in a  private
cell. Clean. Quiet."
     Randy cops a questioning look, and holds up one hand and rubs his thumb
and fingers together in the "money" gesture.
     "It is done already."
     "Chester?"
     "No. Someone else."
     "Avi?"
     Attorney Alejandro shakes his head.
     "The Shaftoes?"
     "I cannot answer your question, Randy, because I do not know. I was not
involved  in  this decision. But whoever did it was also  listening  to your
request for some way to kill the time. You requested books?"
     "Yeah. Do you have some?"
     "No. But  they will allow this." Attorney  Alejandro now  opens up  his
briefcase, reaches in with  both hands, and pulls out Randy's new laptop. It
still has a police evidence sticker on it.
     "Give me a fucking break!" Randy says.
     "No! Take it!"
     "Isn't it like evidence or something?"
     "The police are finished. They  have opened it  up and looked for drugs
inside. Dusted it for fingerprints you can still  see the dust.  I hope that
it did not damage the delicate machinery."
     "Yeah, me too. So, are you telling me that I'm free  to take this to my
new, clean, quiet, private cell?"
     "That is what I am telling you."
     "And I can use it there? No restrictions?"
     "They  will  give  you  an electrical  socket.  A  plug  in,"  Attorney
Alejandro  says,  and then adds  significantly,  "I  asked them,"  which  is
clearly  a little reminder that any  fees eventually paid  to him will  have
been richly earned.
     Randy  draws  a   nice   deep  breath,  thinking,  Well,  it   is  just
fantastically generous in fact, a little bit startling that the powers  that
want to convict and execute me are willing to go to such lengths to allow me
to dick around  on my computer while I am awaiting  my trial  and  death. He
exhales and says, "Thank god, at least I'll be able to get some  work done."
Attorney Alejandro nods approvingly.
     "Your girlfriend is waiting to see you," he announces.
     "She's not really my girlfriend. What does she want?" Randy demands.
     "What do  you mean, what does she want?  She wants  to see you. To give
you emotional support. To let you know that you are not all alone."
     "Shit!" Randy mutters. "I don't want emotional support. I want  to  get
the fuck out of jail."
     "That is my department," Attorney Alejandro says proudly.
     "You know what this  is? It's one of those men are from Mars, women are
from Venus things."
     "I have not heard of this  phrase but I understand immediately what you
are saying."
     "It's one of those American books where once you've heard the title you
don't even need to read it," Randy says.
     "Then I won't."
     "You  and I see just that someone is trying to fuck me over  and that I
need to get out of jail. Very simple and clean. But  to her, it is much more
than that it is an opportunity to have a conversation!"
     Attorney Alejandro just rolls his eyes and makes the universal "females
yammering"  gesture:  thumb  and  fingertips  closing  and  opening  like  a
disembodied flapping jaw.
     "To share deep feelings and emotionally bond," Randy continues, closing
his eyes.
     "But  this  is   not  so  bad,"  Attorney  Alejandro  says,   radiating
insincerity like a mirrored ball in a disco.
     "I'm doing okay in this jail. Surprisingly okay," Randy says, "but it's
all about  keeping up  a kind of emotionless front. Many barriers between me
and  my surroundings. And  so it just makes me crazy that she's picking this
particular moment to implicitly demand that I let my guard down."
     "She  knows  you are weak,"  Attorney Alejandro says, and  winks.  "She
smells your vulnerability."
     "That's not  all she's going to smell. Is this new cell going to have a
shower?"
     "Everything. Remember to  put something heavy on the drain so that rats
do not climb up out of it during the night."
     "Thanks. I'll just put my laptop there." Randy leans back in  his chair
and wiggles his butt around. There is a problem now with an erection. It has
been  at least a week for Randy. Three nights in  the jail, the night before
that  at Tom Howard's house, before that  the  airplane,  before that  Avi's
basement floor .  . . actually it has probably been a lot more than  a week.
Randy needs badly to get into that private cell if for  no other reason than
it will give him an opportunity  to  vent that which is bearing down hard on
his prostate gland and get his  mind back  on an even keel. He prays  to god
that he's only going to be seeing Amy through a thick glass partition.
     Attorney Alejandro  opens the  door  and says something to  the waiting
guard, who leads them down a hallway toward another room. This one's bigger,
and has a number of long  tables, with little familial clusters of Filipinos
scattered  about. If these  tables  were ever  intended to serve as barriers
against  physical  contact, it  has  long  been  forgotten;  it  would  take
something  more like  the  Berlin Wall to  prevent  Filipinos  from  showing
affection for each other. So Amy is  there, already  striding around the end
of  one  of the  tables as  a couple of guards pointedly look the  other way
(though their  eyes dart back to  check  out her ass after  she has blown by
them). No dress this  time. Randy predicts it will be a few  years before he
sees Amy in  a dress again.  Last time he did, his dick got hard,  his heart
pounded,  he literally  salivated, and then suddenly armed  men were putting
handcuffs on him.
     Right  now, Amy's  in  old jeans ripped  out at  the  knee, a tank  top
undershirt and a black leather jacket,  better  to accommodate her concealed
weapons. Knowing  the  Shaftoes,  they've probably  gone to  some  very high
Defcon level, the one just  short of all  out nuclear exchange. Doug Shaftoe
probably showers with a  SEAL  knife clenched  in  his teeth  now.  Amy, who
normally goes for a  low, one  armed, sidelong type of hug, now throws  both
arms up as if signaling a touchdown and crooks  both elbows  behind the nape
of Randy's neck and lets  him feel everything. The flesh of his lower  belly
can  count the  stitch marks  in Amy's appendectomy  scar. So  that he has a
boner is probably about as obvious to her as that he smells bad. He might as
well have one of  those long fluorescent  orange bicycle flags lashed to the
shaft of his phallus and sticking up out of his pants.
     She steps  back, looks down at it, then  very deliberately looks him in
the  eye and says, "How do you  feel?" which being  as  it is the obligatory
question of females, is hard to read deadpan/ironic or just sweetly naive?
     "I miss  you,"  he says, "and  I  apologize if  my  limbic  system  has
misinterpreted your gesture of emotional support."
     She  takes this levelly, shrugs, and says, "No  need to apologize. It's
all a part of you, Randy. I don't have to get to know you in pieces, do I?"
     Randy resists the impulse  to check his watch, which would be pointless
because it has been confiscated anyway. She has undoubtedly set some kind of
world  speed  record  here, in the  male/female conversation  category,  for
working the  subject  around  to  Randy's  own  failure  to  be  emotionally
available.  To do it in this setting  displays a  certain chutzpah  that  he
cannot help but admire.
     "You've talked to Attorney Alejandro," she says.
     "Yeah.  I  assume  he's imparted to  me  whatever  he was  supposed  to
impart."
     "I don't  have much more for you,"  she says. Which on a pure  tactical
level means a  lot. If the wreck had been found by the Dentist's minions, or
their  salvage work had been  somehow interrupted, she'd say  something. For
her to say  nothing means that  they  are probably hauling gold  out of that
submarine at this very moment.
     So. She's busy  working  on  the gold  salvage operation, to  which her
contributions are no doubt vital. She has absolutely no specific information
to impart to him about  anything. So why has she  made the long, alternately
dull and dangerous trek to Manila? In order to do what exactly? It is one of
these  fiendish  mind reading exercises. She has her arms crossed  over  her
bosom and is eyeing him coolly. Someone is trying to send you a message.

     He suddenly  gets the feeling  that she's got him right where she wants
him.  Maybe she's the one who planted the heroin in his  bag. It's  a  power
thing, that's all.
     A big slab of memory  floats up to the surface of Randy's  mind, like a
floe calved off the polar icecap. He and  Amy and the Shaftoe  boys  were in
California, right after the earthquake, going through  all the  old  crap in
the  basement  looking  for a  few key  boxes  of  papers.  Randy  heard Amy
squealing  with laughter and found  her sitting in the corner on top of some
old book boxes, reading a paperback novel by flashlight. She had uncovered a
huge cache  of paperback romance novels, none  of which Randy had  ever seen
before. Bodice rippers of the  most incredibly  cheesy  sort.  Randy assumed
they'd  been left  behind  by the  house's previous owners  until he flipped
through a couple of them, checking the  copyright dates: all from  the years
when he and Charlene were living together.  Charlene must have  been reading
them at a rate of about one a week.
     "Ooh  baby,"  Amy  said,  and  read  him a passage about  a rugged  but
sensitive but tough but  loving but horny but smart hero having his way with
a protesting  but willing but  struggling  but yielding  tempestuous female.
"God!" She frisbeed the book into a puddle on the basement floor.
     "I always got the sense she had furtive reading habits."
     "Well, now you  know what she wanted," Amy said. "Did you give her what
she wanted, Randy?"
     And Randy has been thinking about that ever since. And when he got over
his surprise that Charlene was a bodice ripper addict, he decided it  wasn't
necessarily a bad thing, though in her circle, reading books like that would
be tantamount to wearing a tall pointy hat in the streets of Salem  Village,
Mass.  circa  1692.  She  and  Randy  had tried, awfully  hard,  to  have an
egalitarian  relationship. They had spent money  on  relationship counseling
trying  to keep the egalitarian  relationship alive. But she had become more
and more angry, without ever giving him a reason, and he had become more and
more confused. Eventually he stopped being confused and just  got irritated,
and tired of her. After Amy  discovered those books  in  the basement, Randy
slowly put a whole new and  different  story  together  in  his  head:  that
Charlene's limbic system was simply hooked up  in such a way that  she liked
dominant men. Again, not in a whips and chains sense, just in the sense that
in  most  relationships someone's  got to be active and  someone's got to be
passive, and there's  no particular logic to  that, but there's nothing  bad
about it  either.  In the end,  the passive partner  can have  just as  much
power, and just as much freedom.
     Intuition,  like  a  flash of  lightning, lasts  only for a second.  It
generally comes when one is tormented by  a difficult  decipherment and when
one reviews  in  his mind the fruitless experiments  already tried. Suddenly
the light  breaks  through and  one finds after a few minutes what  previous
days of labor were unable to reveal.

     Randy  has this very strong feeling that Amy doesn't read bodice ripper
novels. She goes the other way. She can't tolerate surrendering to any  one.
Which makes it hard  for  her to  function in  polite society; she could not
have been  happy sitting  at home during  her senior  year  of high  school,
waiting for a boy to invite her to the prom. This feature of her personality
is extremely prone to misinterpretation, so she bailed out. She would rather
be lonely, and true to herself, and in control, in an out of the way part of
the world, with  her music by  intelligent female singer songwriters to keep
her company, than misinterpreted and hassled in America.
     "I love you," he says. Amy looks away and heaves a big  sigh  like,  At
last  we're getting somewhere. Randy continues, "I've  been  infatuated with
you ever since we met."
     Now she's back to looking at him expectantly.
     "And the  reason  I've been slow  to, uh, to actually  show  it,  or do
anything about it, is first of all  because I wasn't sure whether or not you
were a lesbian."
     Amy scoffs and rolls her eyes.
     ".  .  .  and  later  just  because  of  my  own  reticence.  Which  is
unfortunately part of me too, just like this part." He glances down just for
a microsecond.
     She's shaking her head at him in amazement.
     "The  fact that the scientific investigator works  fifty percent of his
time by nonrational means is quite insufficiently recognized," Randy says.
     Amy sits down on his side of  the table, jacknifes, spins around neatly
on her ass, and comes to light on the other side. "I'll think about what you
said," she says. "Hang in there, sport."
     "Smooth sailing, Amy."
     Amy  gives him a little smile over her shoulder, then walks straight to
the exit, turning around once in the doorway to make sure he's still looking
at her.
     He is. Which, he feels quite confident, is the right answer.


     Chapter 85 GLAMOR


     A couple of squads of Nipponese  Air Force soldiers, armed  with rifles
and Nambus, pursue Bobby Shaftoe and his crew of Huks towards the Manila Bay
seawall. If it comes to  the point where  they must stand and  slug  it out,
they  can probably kill a  lot of Nips before they are overwhelmed. But they
are here to  find and assist the Altamiras,  not to  die heroically, and  so
they retreat through the neighborhood of Ermita. One of MacArthur's circling
Piper Cubs catches sight of one of those Nip squads as it is clambering over
the ruins of a  collapsed building, and calls in a  strike artillery  rounds
spiral in  from the north  like long passes in  a football game. Shaftoe and
the  Huks try to time the incoming rounds, guessing  at how  many  tubes are
firing on them, trying to run from one place of concealment to the next when
they think there's going to be a few  seconds' pause in the  shrapnel. Maybe
half of the  Nips  are killed  or wounded  by  this  barrage,  but they  are
fighting  at such close quarters that two of Shaftoe's Huks are hit as well.
Shaftoe is trying to drag one of  them out of danger when  he looks down and
sees  that he is stomping across a mess  of shattered white crockery that is
marked with  the name of a hotel the  same hotel where  he  slow danced with
Glory on the night that the war started.
     The  wounded  Huks  are  still  capable  of moving and  so  the retreat
continues. Shaftoe's calming  down a  bit, thinking about the situation with
more  clarity.  The  Huks  find  a good  defensive position  and  stall  the
attackers for a few minutes while he  gets  his bearings,  works out a plan.
Fifteen minutes  later, the  Huks abandon their  position and  fall back  in
panic,  or appear  to. About half  of the Nipponese squad rushes  forward in
pursuit and finds that they have been lured into a killing ground,  a cul de
sac  created by the partial collapse of a building into an alley. One of the
Huks opens up with a tommy  gun while Shaftoe who stayed behind, hiding in a
burned out car heaves grenades at the other half  of the squad, pinning them
down  and preventing them from  coming to help their comrades who  are being
noisily slaughtered.
     But these Nips are relentless. They  regroup under a surviving  officer
and continue their pursuit.  Shaftoe, now  on his own, ends up being  chased
around the foundations of  another hotel, a luxury place that rises up above
the bay, near the American Embassy. He  trips over the body of a young woman
who  apparently  leaped,  fell,  or  was  thrown  from one  of  the windows.
Crouching behind  some shrubbery for  a breather,  he hears a shrill keening
drifting  out  of the hotel's  windows.  The  place  is  full of  women,  he
realizes, and all of them are either screaming or sobbing.
     His pursuers seem to have  lost track of him.  The  Huks have lost him,
too. Shaftoe  stays  there  for  a while, listening  to all of  those women,
wishing he could go inside and do something for them. But the  place must be
filled with Nip soldiers,  or else the women wouldn't be  screaming  as they
are.
     He listens carefully for a while, trying to ignore  the lamentations of
the women. A fourteen year old girl in a bloody nightgown plummets down from
the fifth floor of the hotel, thuds  into the  ground like a sack of cement,
and bounces once. Shaftoe closes his eyes and listens until he is absolutely
sure that he does not hear any children.
     The picture's  getting  clearer now.  The males  are marched  away  and
killed. The women are marched  off in another direction. Young women without
children are brought to this hotel. Women with children must have been taken
somewhere else. Where?
     He hears tommy gun fire on the other side of the hotel. It  must be his
buddies. He creeps around to a corner of the hotel and listens again, trying
to figure  out where they are  somewhere in Rizal Park, he thinks.  But then
MacArthur's artillery opens up hell  for leather and  the  world  begins  to
heave beneath him like a  rug being shaken, and he can't hear trench  brooms
or screaming women or  anything. He has  a view east and  south towards  the
parts of Ermita and  Malate from which they have just come, and  he  can see
big  pieces of debris spinning up from  the ground over there, and  gouts of
dust.  He has seen  enough  of  war to know what it means: the Americans are
advancing from the south  now as  well,  pushing towards Intramuros. Shaftoe
and his band of Huks  were operating on their own,  but it appears that they
have inadvertently served as harbingers of a big infantry thrust.
     Terrified by the barrage, a bunch of Nip soldiers stagger out of a side
exit  of  the  hotel,  almost too drunk to stand, some of them still pulling
their  trousers  up. Shaftoe  disgustedly  throws a grenade at them and then
gets the hell out without bothering to examine the results. It is getting to
the  point  where  killing Nips is  no  fun  anymore. There  is no  sense of
accomplishment in it. It is a tedious and dangerous job that  never seems to
end. When will  these  stupid bastards knock  it off? They  are embarrassing
themselves in front of the whole world.
     He  finds his men in  Rizal Park,  beneath the shadow  of  Intramuros's
ancient  Spanish wall, disputing possession of a  baseball diamond with what
is left of the Nipponese  squads that pursued them here. The timing is  both
good  and  bad.  Any  earlier,  and  Nip  reinforcements in  the surrounding
neighborhood would have heard  the skirmish, flooded into the park and wiped
them out. Any later, and the American infantry would be here. But Rizal Park
is  in  the middle of a deranged urban battleground right now,  and  nothing
makes any  kind of sense. They  have  to impose their will on the situation,
the kind of thing Bobby Shaftoe has gotten fairly good at.
     The one thing they have going for them is that the artillery is pointed
elsewhere for the time being. Shaftoe squats  down behind a coconut tree and
tries to figure out how the hell he is going to reach that baseball diamond,
which is a couple of hundred yards away across totally flat, open ground.
     He knows  the place; Uncle Jack took  him  to  a baseball  game  there.
Wooden bleachers rise along the left and right field lines. Beneath each one
is a dugout. Shaftoe  knows  how battles work, and  so he knows  that one of
those dugouts  is full of  Nips  and one is  full of Huks and that  they are
pinned down in them by each other's fire just like Great War troops in their
opposing trenches. There are a few buildings under the bleachers, containing
toilets and a  refreshment  stand.  The Nips and  the Huks will be  creeping
through  those buildings right now, trying to get into a position from which
they can shoot into the dugouts.
     A  Nipponese grenade flies towards  him from the direction of  the left
field bleachers, making a stripping noise as it passes through the fronds of
a palm tree. Shaftoe ducks his head behind another tree so that he can't see
the grenade.  It  explodes  and tears the clothing, and a good deal  of  the
skin, from one of his arms and one of his legs. But like all Nip grenades it
is poorly made and miserably ineffectual. Shaftoe turns around and uncorks a
spume of .45 caliber rounds in the general direction  the grenade came from;
this should give the thrower something to think about while Shaftoe gets his
bearings.
     This is actually a stupid idea, because  he runs out of ammunition.  He
has a few rounds in his Colt, and that's it. He also has  one  grenade left.
He considers throwing it towards the baseball diamond, but his throwing  arm
is in pretty bad shape now.
     Besides Jesus  Christ! That baseball diamond is just too far away. Even
in peak condition he could not throw a grenade from here to there.
     Perhaps one of those corpses out  in the grass, between here and there,
isn't  really  a  corpse.  Shaftoe  crawls  towards them  on  his belly  and
establishes that they are most definitely dead people.
     Giving the field a  wide berth, he begins working his way around behind
home  plate toward the right field line, where his people are. He would love
to sneak up on the Nips from behind, but that grenade thrower really threw a
fright into him. Where the hell is he?
     The firing from the  dugouts has become  sporadic. They have stalemated
now and are trying to conserve ammunition. Shaftoe risks rising to a crouch.
He runs for about three paces before he sees the  door to the women's toilet
swing open and  a man jump out,  winding up like Bob Feller getting ready to
throw a fastball right down  the middle of the plate.  Shaftoe fires his .45
once, but the  weapons' absurdly vicious  recoil  jerks it right out of  his
lamed  hand. The grenade  comes  flying towards  him,  perfectly on  target.
Shaftoe dives to the ground and scrambles for  his .45. The grenade actually
bounces off his shoulder  and falls spinning into the dust, making a fizzing
noise. But it doesn't explode.
     Shaftoe looks up. The Nip is standing framed in the women's  room door.
His shoulders slump miserably.  Shaftoe recognizes him; there's only one Nip
who could throw  a  grenade  like  that. He lies  there  for a few  moments,
counting syllables on his fingers, then stands up, cups his hands around his
mouth, and hollers:
     Pineapple fastball – Guns of Manila applaud – Hit  by pitch
free base!
     Goto Dengo  and Bobby  Shaftoe lock themselves  inside the women's room
and share  a nip from  a bottle of port that the  former  has looted from  a
store somewhere. They spend a few minutes catching up with  each  other in a
general way. Goto  Dengo is already  somewhat drunk, which makes his grenade
throwing performance  all  the more impressive. "I'm hyped to  the  gills on
benzedrine," Shaftoe says. "Keeps you going, but kind of screws up your aim.
     "I noticed!" Goto Dengo says. He is so skinny and haggard he looks more
like some hypothetical sick uncle of Goto Dengo's.
     Shaftoe pretends to take offense  at this and drops into a judo stance.
Goto Dengo laughs uneasily and waves him off. "No more fighting," he says. A
rifle bullet  passes through the women's room wall and digs a  crater into a
porcelain sink.
     "We gotta come up with a plan," Shaftoe says.
     "The plan: You live, I die," Goto Dengo says.
     "Fuck   that,"  Shaftoe  says.  "Hey,  don't  you  idiots  know  you're
surrounded?"
     "We know," Goto Dengo says wearily. "We know for a long time."
     "So give up, you fucking morons! Wave  a white flag and you can all  go
home."
     "It is not Nipponese way."
     "So come up with another fucking way! Show some fucking adaptability!"
     "Why are you  here?" Goto  Dengo asks, changing the subject.  "What  is
your mission?"
     Shaftoe  explains  that he's looking  for his kid. Goto Dengo tells him
where  all of the women and children  are: in the Church of St.  Agustin, in
Intramuros.
     "Hey," Shaftoe says, "if we surrender to you, you'll kill us. Right?"
     "Yes."
     "If you  guys  surrender  to us,  we won't  kill you.  Promise. Scout's
honor."
     "For us, living or dying is not the important thing," Goto Dengo says.
     "Hey! Tell me something I  didn't fucking  already know!" Shaftoe says.
Even winning battles isn't important to you. Is it?"
     Goto Dengo looks the other way, shamefaced.
     "Haven't  you guys figured  out  yet that banzai charges  DON'T FUCKING
WORK?"
     "All  of the  people who learned that were killed  in banzai  charges,"
Goto Dengo says.
     As  if  on  cue,  the  Nips  in  the  left field dugout begin screaming
"Banzai!" and charge, as one, out onto the field. Shaftoe puts his eye up to
a bullet hole in the wall and watches them stumbling across the infield with
fixed bayonets.  Their  leader clambers  up the pitcher's mound as  if  he's
going to plant a flag there, and takes a slug in the middle of his face. His
men are being dismantled all around him by thoughtfully  placed  rifle slugs
from the Huks' dugout. Urban warfare  is not  the metier of the Hukbalahaps,
but calmly  slaughtering banzai charging  Nipponese is old hat. One  of  the
Nips actually manages to crawl all  the way to the first base  coach's  box.
Then a few pounds of meat come flying out of his back and he relaxes.
     Shaftoe turns  to see that  Goto  Dengo is aiming a revolver at him. He
chooses to ignore this for a moment. "See what I mean?"
     "I have seen it many times before."
     "Then why aren't  you  dead?"  Shaftoe asks the question  with all  due
flippancy, but it has a terrible effect on Goto Dengo. His face scrunches up
and he begins to  cry. "Aw, shit. You pull a gun on me and start bawling  at
the same time? How unfair can  you get? Why don't you kick some fucking dirt
in my eyes while you're at it?"
     Goto Dengo lifts  the revolver to his own temple. But Shaftoe sees that
one coming a mile away. He knows Nips well enough, by this point,  to figure
out  when they are about to go  hari kari on  you. Shaftoe jumps  forward as
soon as the barrel of the revolver begins to move. By the time it is against
Goto  Dengo's skull, Shaftoe has  his finger stuck into the  gap between the
hammer and the firing pin.
     Goto  Dengo  collapses to the floor  sobbing piteously.  It  just makes
Shaftoe want  to kick him. "Knock it off!" he says. "What the fuck is eating
at you?"
     "I  came  to Manila  to redeem myself to get back my lost  honor!" Goto
Dengo says.  "I could have done it here. I could be dead on that field right
now, and my  spirit  going to  Yasukuni. But then  you came!  You ruined  my
concentration!"
     "Concentrate on this, dumbshit!" Shaftoe says. "My  son is in a  church
right  over on  the far side of that wall,  with  a bunch  of other helpless
women  and children. If you want to redeem yourself, why not help me get 'em
out alive?"
     Goto Dengo  seems to have  gone into a trance  now. His face, which was
blubbering  just a minute ago, has solidified into a mask.  "I wish I  could
believe what  you believe," he  says. "I have died, Bobby. I was buried in a
rock  tomb. If I were  a Christian, I could  be born again now, and be a new
man. Instead, I must go on living, and accept my karma."
     "Well,  shit! There's  a padre right  out  there in the dugout. He  can
Christianize  your  ass in  about ten seconds  flat." Bobby  Shaftoe strides
across the bathroom and swings the door open.
     He is startled  to see a man standing just a few paces away. The man is
dressed in an old  but clean khaki uniform, devoid of insignia except  for a
pentagon of stars on the collar. He has  jammed a wooden match down into the
bowl of  a corncob pipe and is  puffing away futilely. But it's as if all of
the  oxygen has  been  sucked out of  the air by the burning of the city. He
throws the  match away in disgust, then  looks up into  the  face  of  Bobby
Shaftoe staring  at him through a pair of dark aviator sunglasses that  give
his gaunt  face the appearance of a skull. His mouth forms into an  0  for a
moment. Then his jaw sets. "Shaftoe. . . Shaftoe! SHAFTOE!" he says.
     Bobby  Shaftoe feels his body stiffening to  attention. Even if  he had
been dead for  a few hours, his body would do this out of some kind of  dumb
ingrained reflex. "Sir, yes sir!" he says wearily.
     The General composes his thoughts for  half a  second,  and then  says:
"You  were supposed  to be in  Concepcion.  You  failed to  be  there.  Your
superiors did not know what to think. They have been worried sick about you.
And the Department of the Navy has been positively insufferable  ever  since
they  became aware that you were  working for me. They  assert, in the  most
high handed way, that you know important secrets, and should never have been
placed in danger of capture. In short, your whereabouts and your status have
been the subject of the most intense, nay, feverish speculation for the last
several  weeks. Many supposed that you were  dead, or, worse, captured. This
distraction  has  been most  unwelcome to  me, inasmuch as  the planning and
execution of the reconquest of the  Philippine Islands  have  left me little
time to  devote  to  such  nagging distractions."  An  artillery shell  rips
through the air and detonates in the bleachers, sending  jagged fragments of
planks, about the size of canoe paddles, whirling through the air all around
them. One  of  them embeds  itself  like a javelin in the  dirt between  The
General and Bobby Shaftoe.
     The General takes advantage of this to draw breath, and then continues,
as if he were reading this from a script.  "And now, when I least expect it,
I encounter  you, here, many leagues distant from your assigned post, out of
uniform,  in  a  disheveled condition,  accompanied by a Nipponese  officer,
violating the  sanctity of a ladies' powder room! Shaftoe, have you no sense
whatsoever of military honor? Do you not respect decorum? Do you not believe
that a representative of the United States  military should  comport himself
with more dignity?"
     Shaftoe's kneecaps  are joggling up and  down  uncontrollably. His guts
have become molten, and he feels strange bubbling processes going on  in his
rectum.  His molars are chattering  together  like  a  teletype  machine. He
senses Goto Dengo behind him, and wonders what the poor bastard can possibly
be thinking.
     "Begging your pardon, General, not  to change the  subject or anything,
but are you here all by yourself?"
     The  General juts his chin  towards the  men's room.  "My aides are  in
there relieving themselves. They were in a great hurry  to do so, and  it is
good that we came  upon this place. But none of them considered invading the
powder room," he says severely.
     "I apologize for that, sir,"  Bobby Shaftoe  says hastily, "and for all
of those other things  that you mentioned.  But I still think of myself as a
Marine, and Marines do not make excuses, so I will not even try."
     "That is not satisfactory!  I  need  an  explanation for  where  you've
been."
     "I  have  been  out in the  world," Bobby  Shaftoe says,  "getting butt
fucked by Fortune."
     The  door  of the men's room opens and one of The General's aides walks
out, woozy and bowlegged. The General ignores him; he is  gazing  right past
Shaftoe now.
     "Pardon  my manners,  sir,"  Shaftoe  says, turning sideways.  "Sir, my
friend  Goto Dengo.  Goto  san,  say  hi  to  General  of  the Army  Douglas
MacArthur."
     Goto Dengo has been standing there like  a  pillar  of salt  this whole
time, utterly  dumbfounded, but  now  he snaps out of it, and bows very low.
MacArthur  nods  crisply. His aide  is staring darkly  at Goto Dengo and has
already drawn his Colt.
     "Pleasure," The General says airily. "Pray tell, what sort  of business
were you two gentlemen prosecuting in the ladies'?"
     Bobby Shaftoe knows how to lunge for an opening. "Uh, it is  very funny
you should ask that question, sir," he says offhandedly, "but Goto san, just
now, saw the light, and converted to Christianity."
     Some Nips on  top of the wall open  up  on them with a machine gun. The
flimsy, tumbling  rounds crack through the air and  thump into  the  ground.
General of the  Army Douglas  MacArthur  stands motionless  for a long time,
lips  pursed.  His  sniffles  once.  Then  he removes  his  aviator  glasses
carefully and wipes his eyes  on the  immaculate sleeve of his  uniform.  He
pulls out a neatly folded white hankie and wraps it around his hawklike nose
and honks into it a few  times. He folds it up carefully and puts it back in
his pocket, squares his shoulders, and then walks right up to Goto Dengo and
wraps  him up in a big, manly  bearhug. The remainder of The General's aides
emerge  from the  shitter en  bloc  and view  the  scene  with reticence and
palpable  tension all over their  faces. Profoundly mortified, Bobby Shaftoe
looks  down at his feet,  wiggles  his toes,  and caresses the  linear  scab
running upside  his  head where the  oar clocked him  a  few  days ago.  The
machine gun crew up on the wall are being picked off one by one by a sniper;
they writhe  and  scream operatically. The Huks have come up from the dugout
and stumbled into this little tableau; they  all stand motionless with their
jaws hanging down around their navels.
     Finally  MacArthur unhands  the  stiff body of  Goto Dengo, steps  back
dramatically, and presents him to  his staff. "Meet Goto san," he announces.
"You have all heard the expression, 'the only good Nip is a dead Nip'? Well,
this young  fellow is a counterexample, and as we learned in mathematics, it
only takes one counterexample to disprove the theorem."
     His staff observe cautious silence.
     "It seems only fitting that we take this young fellow  to the Church of
St.  Agustin,  over yonder in  Intramuros,  to carry  out the  sacrament  of
baptism," The General says.
     One  of the aides steps forward, hunched over in that he's expecting to
get  a slug between the shoulder blades any minute. "Sir,  it is my duty  to
remind you that Intramuros is still controlled by the enemy."
     "Then  it  is high  time we  made our presence felt!"  MacArthur  says.
"Shaftoe will get us  there. Shaftoe and these fine Filipino gentlemen." The
General throws  one arm around Goto  Dengo's neck  in a highly affectionate,
companionable way, and  begins strolling  with him towards the nearest gate.
"I would like you to know,  young man, that when I set up my headquarters in
Tokyo  which, God willing, should be  within a year I want you  there bright
and early the first day!"
     "Yes sir!" Goto Dengo  says. All things considered, it is  unlikely  he
would say anything else.
     Shaftoe draws a deep breath,  tilts his head back, and stares up into a
smoky heaven. "God," he  says, "usually I bow my head when  I'm  talking  to
You, but I figure this is a good time for us to have a face to face. You see
and know all things and so  I will not explain the situation to You. I would
just like to submit a request for You.  I know You are getting requests from
lonely soldiers all over the fucking place at this time, but since this  one
has  to do with a shitload of women and children, and General MacArthur too,
maybe You can jump me to the top of the  stack. You know what I  want. Let's
get it done."
     He  borrows a small, straight twenty round  tommy gun magazine from one
of his comrades and  they  set out for Intramuros. The gates are  sure to be
guarded, so Shaftoe and  the Huks run up the sloping walls instead, directly
beneath that wiped out  machine  gun  nest.  They  turn the gun  around into
Intramuros, and plant one of the wounded Huks there to operate it.
     The first time Shaftoe  gazes  into the  town, he  nearly falls off the
wall.  Intramuros  is gone. If he didn't know where  he  was, he would never
recognize  it.  Essentially  all of the buildings have  been leveled. Manila
Cathedral and the Church of St. Agustin still stand, both with heavy damage.
A few of the fine old Spanish houses still exist as hasty, freehand sketches
of  their former selves, missing roofs,  wings,  or walls.  But most of  the
blocks are just  jumbles of masonry and  shattered red roof tiles with smoke
and steam  seething out of them.  There are dead bodies all over  the place,
sowed all  over the  neighborhood  like  timothy seed broadcast onto freshly
plowed  soil.  The artillery has mostly  stopped there being nothing left to
destroy but small arms and machine gun fire sound on almost every block.
     Shaftoe is thinking  he'll have to assault one of the gates. But before
he can  even come up with a plan, MacArthur is up there with the rest of his
group, having scrambled up the rampart  behind  them. This is  evidently the
first time that The General has gotten a good look at Intramuros, because he
is stunned and, for once, speechless. He stands  there for  a long time with
his  mouth open, and begins  to  draw  fire  from a few  Nips  hidden in the
wreckage below. The turned around machine gun silences them.
     It  takes  them several hours to  make their way up the street and into
the Church of St. Agustin. A bunch of Nips have barricaded themselves inside
the place along with  what sounds like every hungry infant and irritable two
year  old in Manila. The church is just  one side of a large  compound  that
includes a monastery  and other buildings.  Many of the structures have been
torn  open by  artillery fire. The  treasures hoarded  in that  place by the
monks  over the course of  the last five hundred years have tumbled out into
the street. Blown all over  the  neighborhood like  shrapnel, and commingled
with  the bayoneted corpses  of Filipino boys,  are  huge  oil paintings  of
Christ being scourged, fantastic wooden sculptures  of  the Romans hammering
the spikes  through his wrists and ankles, marbles of Mary holding  the dead
and mangled Christ  in  her lap, tapestries of the whipping post and the cat
o'  nine  tails in  action, blood  coursing  out of  Christ's  back  through
hundreds of parallel gouges.
     The  Nips  still inside  the  church  defend  its main  doors with  the
suicidal determination that Shaftoe has begun to find so tedious, but thanks
to The General's artillery, there are plenty of other  ways, besides  doors,
to get into  the place now. So it is that, even  while a company of American
infantry mount a frontal assault on the main entrance, Bobby Shaftoe and his
Huks,  Goto  Dengo, The  General, and  his  aides  are already kneeling in a
little chapel in what used to be part of the monastery. The padre leads them
through a couple of extremely truncated prayers of thanksgiving and baptizes
Goto Dengo with  water  from a font, with  Bobby Shaftoe taking the role  of
beaming  parent  and  General  of the  Army  Douglas  MacArthur  serving  as
godfather. Shaftoe later remembers only one line of the ceremony.
     "Do you reject  the glamor  of Evil, and refuse to be mastered by  it?"
says the padre.
     "I  do!" says MacArthur with tremendous authority even as Bobby Shaftoe
is  muttering,  "Fuck  yes!" Goto  Dengo,  nods,  gets wet,  and  becomes  a
Christian.
     Bobby Shaftoe excuses himself and goes wandering  through the compound.
It seems as big and crazy as that Casbah in Algiers, all gloomy and dusty on
the inside, and  filled with still more La  Pasyon  art, made by artists who
had  obviously witnessed whippings firsthand, and who didn't need any priest
spouting little homilies  about the  glamor of Evil. He goes up and down the
great stairway once,  for  old time's sake, remembering the night Glory took
him here.
     There  is a  courtyard with a fountain in the center,  surrounded by  a
long shaded gallery where Spanish friars could stroll in the shade and  look
out  over the  flowers and hear the birds singing. Right now the only things
singing are shells passing  overhead. But  little  Filipino kids are running
races up and down  the gallery, and their mothers and aunts and grannies are
encamped in the courtyard, drawing water from  the fountain and cooking rice
over piles of burning chair legs.
     A  grey eyed two  year  old with  a makeshift bludgeon  is chasing some
bigger kids down a stone arcade.  Some of his hairs are the color of Bobby's
and  some  are  the color of Glory's, and Bobby Shaftoe  can  see Glory ness
shining almost  fluoroscopically out of his face.  The boy has the same bone
structure  that he  saw on the sandbar  a  few days ago, but this time it is
clothed  in  chubby  pink  flesh.  The  flesh  admittedly bears bruises  and
abrasions. No doubt honorably earned. Bobby squats down and looks the little
Shaftoe in  the eye,  wondering how to begin  to explain everything. But the
boy  says, "Bobby Shaftoe, you have boo boos," and drops his club  and walks
up to examine the wounds  on Bobby's  arm.  Little kids don't bother  to say
hello, they just start talking to you, and Shaftoe figures that's a good way
to  handle what  would otherwise be pretty damn awkward. The Altamiras  have
probably been telling  little Douglas M. Shaftoe, since the day he was born,
that one day Bobby  Shaftoe would come in glory from across the sea. That he
has now done so is just as routine and yet just as much of a miracle as that
the sun rises every day.
     "I see that you  and  yours have  displayed  adaptability  and that  is
good,"  says  Bobby Shaftoe to  his son, but sees immediately that  he's not
getting through to the kid at all. He feels a need to get something into the
kid's  head that  is going to  stick,  and this need  is  stronger  than the
craving for morphine or sex ever was.
     So he  picks up  the boy  and  carries him through the  compound,  down
semicollapsed  hallways and  over  settling  rubble  heaps and  between dead
Nipponese boys to  that big staircase,  and shows  him  the  giant  slabs of
granite, tells how they were laid, one on top of the next,  year by year, as
the galleons full of  silver  came  from Acapulco. Doug M. Shaftoe  has been
playing  with blocks, so he  zeroes  in on the basic concept right away. Dad
carries son up and  down the stairway a few times. They stand at  the bottom
and look up at it. The block analogy has struck deep. Without any prompting,
Doug M. raises both arms over his head and hollers "Soooo big" and the sound
echoes up and down the  stairs. Bobby wants to explain to the boy that  this
is how it's  done, you pile one thing on  top of the next and you keep it up
and keep  it up sometimes the galleon sinks in a typhoon, you don't get your
slab  of granite that year but  you stick with it and eventually you end  up
with something sooo big.

     He  wishes  that he could also make some further point about  Glory and
how she's been  hard at work building her  own staircase. Maybe  if he was a
word man like Enoch Root he would be able to explain. But he knows that this
is going way over the toddler's head, just as it went over Bobby's head when
Glory first showed him the steps. The only  thing that'll stick with Douglas
MacArthur Shaftoe is the memory that his father brought him here and carried
him up  and down the staircase, and if he lives long enough  and thinks hard
enough maybe he'll come to understand it too, the way Bobby  does. That is a
good enough start.
     Word has gotten around,  among the women in the  courtyard, that  Bobby
Shaftoe has arrived better late than never! and so he does not have time for
meaningful speeches anyway. The Altamiras send him out on an errand: to find
Carlos, an eleven year old boy who was rounded up a  few days ago  when  the
Nips swept through Malate. Shaftoe finds MacArthur and Goto Dengo first, and
excuses himself.  Those  two  are  deeply involved  in a discussion  of Goto
Dengo's tunnel  building  acumen, and how it  might be put to use during the
rebuilding of Nippon, a  project that The General is eager to launch as soon
as he finishes reducing the entire Pacific Rim to rubble.
     "You have sins to atone for, Shaftoe," The General says, "and you can't
atone for them by getting down on your knees and saying Hail Marys."
     "I understand that, sir," Shaftoe says.
     "I have  a little job that needs  doing precisely the kind of thing for
which a Marine Raider with parachute training would be ideally suited."
     "What's the Department of the Navy going to think of that, sir?"
     "I have no intention of letting the  swabbies know I've found you until
you  have carried  out  this mission.  But when  you  are  finished  all  is
forgiven."
     "I'll be right back," Shaftoe says.
     "Where are you going, Shaftoe?"
     "Got some other people who need to forgive me first."
     He heads  in the  direction  of Fort Santiago with a reconstituted,  re
armed and beefed up squad of Huks. The old Spanish fort  has been liberated,
within the last couple of hours, by the Americans. They have thrown open the
doors to  the dungeons and the subterranean  caverns  along the Pasig River.
Finding eleven  year  old  Carlos Altamira is,  then,  a problem  of sorting
through  several  thousand corpses.  Almost  all  of  the Filipinos who were
herded  into this  place  by the  Nips died,  either  through  out  and  out
execution, or by  suffocating in the dungeons,  or by drowning when the tide
came up the river  and flooded the cells. Bobby Shaftoe doesn't  really know
what Carlos  looked like,  and  so the best he can do  is cull out the young
looking  corpses  and present them to members of  the  Altamira  family  for
inspection. The benzedrine he took a couple of days ago has worn off, and he
feels  half dead himself. He trudges  through  the Spanish  dungeon  with  a
kerosene lantern, shining the dim yellow light  on  the faces  of the  dead,
muttering the words to himself like a prayer.
     "Do you reject the glamor of Evil, and refuse to be mastered by it?"


     Chapter 86 WISDOM


     A few years  ago, when Randy became tired  of the ceaseless pressure in
his lower jaw, he  went out  onto the north central Californian oral surgery
market  looking for someone  to  extract  his wisdom teeth.  His health plan
covered this, so price was not  an  obstacle. His dentist took  one of those
big cinemascopic wraparound X rays of  his entire lower head, the kind where
they pack your mouth with half a roll of high speed film and then clamp your
head in a jig  and the X  ray machine revolves around you spraying radiation
through a slit, as  the entire staff of  the dentist's office hits the  deck
behind a  lead wall,  resulting  in a printed  image  that  is  a  none  too
appetizing distortion  of his jaw into a  single flat  plane. Looking at it,
Randy  eschewed cruder analogies  like "head of a man run over several times
by  steamroller while lying flat on his back" and tried to  think of it as a
mapping  transformation  just  one  more in mankind's  long  history  of ill
advisedly trying to represent three D stuff on a flat  plane. The corners of
this  coordinate plane were anchored by the  wisdom teeth themselves,  which
even to  the dentally  unsophisticated Randy looked just a little disturbing
in that each one was about the size of his thumb (though maybe this was just
a distortion in the coordinate transform like the famously swollen Greenland
of  Mercator)  and  they  were pretty far  away from any other teeth,  which
(logically)  would  seem to put  them in  parts  of  his  body  not normally
considered  to be within  a dentist's purview, and  they  were at the  wrong
angle  not just a little crooked,  but verging on upside down and backwards.
At  first he just chalked all  of this up to the Greenland  phenomenon. With
his Jaw  map in hand, he hit  the streets of Three Siblings land looking for
an oral surgeon.  It was  already beginning  to work on him psychologically.
Those were some big ass teeth! Brought into being by the workings of  relict
DNA strands from the hunter gatherer epoch. Designed for reducing  tree bark
and mammoth gristle to easily digestible paste. Now these boulders of living
enamel were horrifyingly adrift in a gracile cro magnon head that simply did
not have room for them. Think of the sheer extra weight he had been carrying
around. Think of the use that priceless head real estate could have been put
to.  When they  were  gone, what  would fill up the four giant molar  shaped
voids  in his  melon? It  was moot until he could find someone to get rid of
them. But one oral surgeon after another turned him down. They would put the
X ray up on their light boxes, stare into  it and  blanch. Maybe it was just
the pale light coming out of the light boxes but Randy could have sworn they
were blanching. Disingenuously  as  if  wisdom teeth normally grew someplace
completely different they all pointed out that the  wisdom teeth were buried
deep,  deep,  deep in  Randy's head. The lowers were so far back in  his jaw
that   removing   them   would  practically  break  the   jawbone  in  twain
structurally;  from  there,  one  false  move would send  a  surgical  steel
demolition pick  into his middle ear.  The uppers  were so deep in his skull
that the roots  were  twined around the  parts of his brain  responsible for
perceiving the  color  blue  (on one side) and being able  to suspend  one's
disbelief in bad movies (on  the other) and between these  teeth  and actual
air, light and saliva lay many strata  of skin, meat, cartilage, major nerve
cables, brain  feeding  arteries, bulging caches of lymph nodes, girders and
trusses  of bone, rich  marrow  that was working just  fine thank you, a few
glands whose functions  were unsettlingly poorly understood, and many of the
other things that made Randy Randy,  all of them definitely falling into the
category of sleeping dogs.
     Oral surgeons, it seemed, were  not comfortable delving more than elbow
deep into a patient's head.  They had  been living in big houses and driving
to work in Mercedes Benz sedans  long before Randy had dragged his sorry ass
into their offices with his horrifying X ray and they had absolutely nothing
to gain by even attempting to remove these  not so  much wisdom teeth in the
normal sense as apocalyptic portents  from the Book of Revelations. The best
way to remove these teeth was with a guillotine. None of these oral surgeons
would even consider undertaking the  extraction until  Randy  had  signed  a
legal disclaimer too thick to staple, something that almost had to come in a
three ring  binder, the general import of which  was that  one of the normal
consequences of the procedure was for the patient's head  to end up floating
in a  jug of formaldehyde in a tourist trap just over the Mexican border. In
this manner Randy  wandered from one  oral surgeon's office to another for a
few weeks, like a teratomic  outcast roving across a post nuclear waste land
being driven  out of one village after another by the brickbats of wretched,
terrified peasants.  Until one day when he walked  into  an  office and  the
nurse at the  front desk almost seemed to expect him, and led him back  into
an exam room for a private consult with the oral surgeon, who was busy doing
something  in one of  his little rooms  that involved putting a lot of  bone
dust  into the  air.  The nurse bade him  sit  down,  proffered coffee, then
turned on the light box and took Randy's X rays and stuck them up there. She
took a step  back, crossed  her arms, and  gazed at the  pictures in wonder.
"So," she murmured, "these are the famous wisdom teeth!"
     That was the  last oral surgeon Randy visited for a couple of years. He
still had that relentless 24 Jam pressure in his head, but  now his attitude
had changed;  instead  of thinking  of  it as  an anomalous condition easily
remedied, it became his personal cross to bear, and really not all that  bad
compared  to what some people had to suffer  with.  There,  as in many other
unexpected situations, his  extensive fantasy  role playing game  experience
came in handy, as while spinning out various epic scenarios he had inhabited
the minds, if not the bodies, of  many characters who  were missing limbs or
had  been  burned over some algorithmically determined percentages of  their
bodies  by dragon's breath  or  wizard's  fireball, and  it was part of  the
ethics  of the game that you  had  to think pretty hard about what it  would
actually be  like  to live  with such injuries  and to  play your  character
accordingly.  By  those standards, feeling  all  the time  like  you  had an
automotive jack embedded in your skull, ratcheting up the pressure one click
every  few months, was not even worth mentioning. It was lost in the somatic
noise.
     So  Randy  lived  that  way  for  several  years, as  he  and  Charlene
insensibly crept  upwards  on  the  socioeconomic  scale  and  began finding
themselves at parties with people who had arrived in Mercedes Benzes. It was
at  one  of these parties  where Randy  overheard  a dentist  extolling some
brilliant young oral surgeon who  had just moved to the area. Randy  had  to
bite his tongue not to start asking all kinds of questions about  just  what
"brilliant" meant  in an oral surgery context questions  that were motivated
solely by curiosity  but that the  dentist would be likely to take the wrong
way. Among coders it was pretty obvious  who was  brilliant and  who wasn't,
but how  could  you  tell  a  brilliant oral surgeon  apart  from  a  merely
excellent one? It  gets  you  into deep  epistemological shit. Each  set  of
wisdom teeth could  only be extracted once. You couldn't have a hundred oral
surgeons extract the same set of wisdom  teeth and  then compare the results
scientifically.  And  yet  it was  obvious  from watching the  look  on this
dentist's face  that this  one particular  oral  surgeon, this new  guy, was
brilliant.  So later Randy sidled  up to  this dentist and allowed as how he
might have a challenge he might personally embody a challenge that would put
this  ineffable  quality of oral surgery  brilliance to  some good  use, and
could he have the guy's name please.
     A few days  later he was talking to this oral  surgeon, who  was indeed
young and  conspicuously bright and had more in common with  other brilliant
people Randy had known mostly  hackers than he did with other oral surgeons.
He  drove  a  pickup truck and kept  fresh copies of TURING MAGAZINE in  his
waiting  room. He  had  a  beard, and a staff  of  nurses and  other  female
acolytes  who  were  all  permanently  aflutter over  his brilliantness  and
followed him around steering him away from large obstacles and reminding him
to eat  lunch. This guy did not blanch when he saw Randy's Mercato roentgeno
gram on his light box. He actually lifted his chin up off his hand and stood
a little straighter  and  spake not  for  several  minutes.  His  head moved
minutely  every so often as  he  animadverted  on a different corner of  the
coordinate plane, and admired the  exquisitely  grotesque  situation of each
tooth  its  paleolithic  heft and its  long  gnarled roots trailing off into
parts of his head never charted by anatomists.
     When he finally turned to face Randy, he had this priestlike aura about
him, a kind of holy ecstasy,  a  feeling of cosmic  symmetry revealed, as if
Randy's jaw, and  his  brilliant oral surgery brain, had been carved out  by
the architect of the Universe fifteen billion years ago specifically so that
they could run into each other, here and now, in front of this light box. He
did not say anything like,  "Randy let me just show you how close the  roots
of this one tooth are to the bundle of nerves that distinguishes you  from a
marmoset," or  "My schedule is incredibly full and I was  thinking of  going
into the real  estate business  anyway,"  or "Just a  second while I call my
lawyer." He didn't even say anything like, "Wow, those suckers are really in
deep." The  young  brilliant  oral surgeon  just  said, "Okay,"  stood there
awkwardly for a few moments, and then walked out of the room in a display of
social ineptness  that totally  cemented Randy's faith  in  him. One of  his
minions eventually had Randy sign a legal disclaimer stipulating that it was
perfectly all  right if the oral surgeon decided to feed Randy's entire body
into a log chipper, but this, for once, seemed like just a formality and not
the opening round in an inevitable Bleak House like litigational saga.
     And so  finally the big day came, and Randy  took  care  to  enjoy  his
breakfast because he knew that, considering the nerve damage he was about to
incur,  this  might  be  the last  time in his life that he would be able to
taste food,  or even chew it. The oral surgeon's minions all looked at Randy
in awe when he actually  walked in the door of  their office, like My god he
actually  showed up! then flew reassuringly into action. Randy  sat  down in
the  chair and they gave him an injection and then the  oral surgeon came in
and asked him  what, if anything, was  the difference between Windows 95 and
Windows NT. "This is one of these conversations the sole purpose of which is
to make it  obvious  when I have lost  consciousness, isn't it?" Randy said.
"Actually,  there  is a  secondary purpose, which  is that I  am considering
making  the jump and  wanted  to get some of your thoughts about that,"  the
oral surgeon said.
     "Well,"  said Randy, "I have a lot more  experience with UNIX than with
NT, but from what I've seen,  it  appears that NT is  really a decent enough
operating system,  and certainly more of a serious effort  than Windows." He
paused  to  draw breath  and  then  noticed  that  suddenly  everything  was
different.  The oral surgeon and his minions  were still there and occupying
roughly the same positions in his field  of vision  as they had been when he
started  to utter  this sentence, but now  the oral  surgeon's  glasses were
askew and the lenses misted with blood, and his face was all sweaty, and his
mask flecked with tiny bits of stuff that very much looked  like it had come
from pretty far down in Randy's body, and the air in the room was murky with
aerosolized bone, and his nurses were limp  and haggard and looked like they
could use makeovers,  face  lifts, and weeks at the beach. Randy's chest and
lap, and the floor, were littered  with  bloody  wads and hastily torn  open
medical supply  wrappers. The  back of his head was sore from being battered
against  the head rest by the  recoil of the young brilliant  oral surgeon's
cranial jack hammer.  When he tried  to finish  his sentence  ("so if you're
willing  to  pay the premium I  think the  switch to NT would be  very  well
advised")  he  noticed  that  his  mouth  was jammed full of something  that
prevented speech.  The oral surgeon  pulled  his mask down off  his face and
scratched his sweat soaked beard. He was staring not at Randy but at a point
very far away. He heaved a big, slow sigh. His hands were shaking.
     "What day is it?" Randy mumbled through cotton.
     "As  I  told  you before," the brilliant young  oral surgeon  said, "we
charge for wisdom tooth  extractions on a  sliding scale,  depending on  the
degree of difficulty." He paused  for a moment, groping  for words. "In your
case  I'm afraid that we will be charging you the maximum on all four." Then
he got up and shambled out of the room, weighed down, Randy thought, not  so
much by the stress of his job as by the knowledge that no one was ever going
to give him a Nobel prize for what he had just accomplished.
     Randy went home and spent, about a week lying on his couch  in front of
the TV eating oral narcotics like jellybeans and moaning with pain, and then
he  got better. The pressure in  his skull was gone. Just  totally  gone. He
cannot even remember now what it used to feel like.
     Now as  he rides in the  police car to his new  private jail  cell,  he
remembers the  whole wisdom tooth extraction saga because of its many points
in common  with  what he just  went through emotionally  with  young America
Shaftoe. Randy's had a few girlfriends in his  life not many but all of them
were  like oral surgeons who just couldn't cut the mustard. Amy's  the  only
one who had the skill and the sheer balls to just look at him and say "okay"
and then tunnel into his skull and come back with the goods. It was probably
exhausting for her. She will extract  a high price from him in exchange. And
it  will leave Randy lying around moaning with  pain for a good  long while.
But he can tell already that the internal  pressure has been relieved and he
is  glad, so glad, that she came into his life, and that he finally had  the
good sense and, arguably, guts  to do this. He completely forgets, for a few
hours, that he has been marked for death by the Philippine government.
     From  the fact that he's in a car, he infers that his new, private cell
is in a different building. No one explains anything to  him because he  is,
after  all, a prisoner.  Since the  bust at  NAIA he's  been in a  jail down
south, a newish  concrete block number on the edge of  Makati, but now  they
are taking  him  north into  older parts  of Manila, probably into some more
stylish  and gothic prewar facility.  Fort Santiago,  on  the  banks of  the
Pasig, had cells that were  in the intertidal zone, so that prisoners locked
into them at low tide would be dead by high. Now  it's a historical site, so
he knows they're not headed there.
     The new  jail cell is indeed in a  big scary  old building somewhere in
the torus of major governmental institutions that surrounds the dead hole of
Intramuros. It is not in, but it is  right next to, a major  court building.
They  drive through  alleys among these big old stone buildings for  a while
and then present credentials at a guardhouse and wait for a big iron gate to
be rolled aside, and then they drive  across a  paved courtyard  that hasn't
been  swept out  in  a  while and  present more credentials  and wait for an
actual portcullis to be winched up, clearing an orifice that ramps them down
beneath  the  building  itself.  Then  the car  stops and they are  abruptly
surrounded by men in uniforms.
     The process  is  uncannily like pulling up to  the main  entrance of an
Asian  business hotel,  except that the  men in the  uniforms carry guns and
don't offer  to tote  Randy's laptop. He has a chain around  his  waist  and
manacles attached to that chain  in front,  and leg chains that shorten  his
stride. The  chain  between his ankles is supported in the middle by another
chain that goes up to  his waist so that it will not scrape the ground as he
walks. He has  just enough manual  dexterity  to grip the laptop and keep it
pressed up  against his lower abdomen. He's not just any chained wretch,  he
is a digital chained wretch, Marley's Ghost on the Information Superhighway.
That a  man in his situation  is  being allowed  to  have the  laptop is  so
grotesquely  implausible that it causes him to doubt even his own  supremely
cynical assessment of it, namely that Someone  presumably the  same  Someone
who is Sending  Him a Message has already discovered that everything on  the
hard  drive is encrypted,  and is  now  trying to gull  him  into firing the
machine  up  and using it so that so that what? Maybe  they've rigged  up  a
camera in his  cell and will be peering over his shoulder. But that would be
easy for him to defeat; he just has to not be completely stupid.
     The guards lead Randy down a  corridor  and through some prisoner check
in  stuff that doesn't really apply to him since  he  has already filled out
the forms and  turned over  his personal effects  at  another jail. Then the
great  big scary metal doors commence,  and corridors  that  don't  smell so
good, and he hears the generalized hubbub  of a jail. But they take him past
the hubbub and into other corridors that seem to be older and less used, and
finally through an old fashioned jailhouse door of iron bars and into a long
vaulted stone room containing a single row of maybe half a dozen cells, with
a guard's passageway running along past the doors of the iron  cages. Like a
theme park simulacrum of a jail. They take him all the way down to the  last
cell and  put him there.  A single iron bedstead awaits  him,  a thin cotton
mattress  with  stained  but clean sheets and  an army  blanket  folded  and
stacked  on  top of it. An old wooden  filing cabinet and folding chair have
been moved into the cell and placed in one corner, right  against  the stone
wall that is the terminus of this long room. The filing cabinet is evidently
meant  to serve  as Randy's work table. The  drawers are  locked  shut. This
cabinet has actually been locked into place with  a few turns of heavy chain
and a padlock, so it's  very clear that  he is expected  to use the computer
there, in that corner of the cell,  and nowhere else. As Attorney  Alejandro
promised, an  extension cord has  been plugged  into a  wall outlet near the
cellblock entrance and run down the passageway and securely knotted around a
pipe out of Randy's reach and the tail end of it allowed to trail across  in
the  direction of the filing  cabinet.  But  it  does not  quite  reach into
Randy's cell, so the only way  to plug the  computer in is  to set it up  on
that cabinet and stick the power cord into the  back and then toss the other
end out through the iron bars to a guard, who can mate it with the extension
cord.
     At first  this  appears to be just one of these maddening control freak
things, an exercise of power for the pure sadistic pleasure of it. But after
Randy's  been  unchained, and locked in his  cell, and  left alone for a few
minutes  to  run  through it in his  head,  he  thinks otherwise. Of  course
normally  Randy  could leave  the computer  on  the  card  table  while  the
batteries charged and then carry it  over to his bed and use  it there until
the batteries ran  down.  But the  batteries were  removed from the  machine
before Attorney Alejandro gave it  to him, and there  don't  seem to be  any
ThinkPad battery packs lying  around  his cell.  So he will  have to keep it
plugged in  all the time, and because of the way they have set up the filing
cabinet and the extension cord, he is forced by certain immutable properties
of three dimensional Euclidean spacetime to use the machine  in one and only
one place: right there on top of that damn filing cabinet. He does not think
this is an accident.
     He sits down  on that filing cabinet and scans the wall and ceiling for
over  the shoulder video cameras,  but  he doesn't  look  very  hard and  he
doesn't really expect to see one.  To make  out  text on a screen they would
have to be very high resolution cameras,  which would imply big and obvious;
subtle pinhole  cameras wouldn't do it. There aren't any big cameras  around
here.
     Randy  becomes almost  certain that  if  he  could  unlock that  filing
cabinet, he would find some electronic gear  inside  it. Directly underneath
his laptop there is probably an antenna to pick up Van Eck signals emanating
from the  screen. Below that, there is  some gear to translate those signals
into  a digital form and transmit the results to a listening station nearby,
probably right on the  other side of  one of these walls. Down in the bottom
are probably some  batteries to make  it all  run. He rocks the cabinet back
and forth as much as  the chains  will allow, and  finds  that  it is indeed
rather bottom  heavy,  as  if there's a  car  battery sitting in the  bottom
drawer. Or maybe it's just his  imagination. Maybe they are letting him have
his laptop just because they are nice guys.
     So this is it then. This is the setup. This is the deal. It is all very
clean  and simple.  Randy fires up the laptop  just  to  prove that it still
works.  Then he makes  his bed and goes and lies down on it, just because it
feels really good  to lie down. It is the first time he's had anything  like
privacy in at least a week. Notwithstanding Avi's bizarre admonition against
self abuse on the beach in Pacifica, it is high time that Randy took care of
something.  He  needs  to  concentrate  really  hard  now,  and  a   certain
distraction must be done away with. Replaying his last conversation with Amy
is enough to  give him a good erection. He reaches down  into his  pants and
then abruptly falls asleep.
     He wakes up  to  the sound of the cellblock  door clanging open.  A new
prisoner is being led in. Randy tries to  sit up and finds that  his hand is
still in his pants, having failed to accomplish its mission. He pulls it out
of there reluctantly and sits up. He swings his  feet down off  the bed  and
onto the stone floor. Now he's got his back to the adjacent cell, which is a
mirror image of his; i.e.,  the beds  and the toilets of  the  two cells are
right next  to each other along their shared  partition.  He  stands up  and
turns around and watches this other prisoner being led into the cell next to
his. The  new  guy  is a white  man,  probably  in his sixties,  maybe  even
seventies,  though  you could  make a  case for fifties or  eighties.  Quite
vigorous, anyway.  He's wearing a prison  coverall  just  like Randy's,  but
accessorized differently: instead  of a laptop, he's got a crucifix dangling
from a rosary with great big fat  amber beads, and some sort of medallion on
a  silver chain, and he's clutching several books to his belly: a Bible, and
something big and in German, and a current bestselling novel.
     The guards are treating  him with extreme reverence; Randy assumes  the
guy is a priest. They  are  talking to him  in Tagalog, asking him questions
being, Randy thinks, solicitous to his needs  and desires and the white  man
answers them in reassuring tones  and even  tells a joke. He makes a  polite
request; a guard scurries  out  and  returns moments later  with  a  deck of
cards.  Finally  the  guards back  out  of the  cell, practically bowing and
scraping, and  lock him  in  with  apologies  that start  to  get  a  little
monotonous. The white man says something, forgiving them wittily. They laugh
nervously and leave.  The white  man  stands there in the middle of his cell
for  a  minute, staring  at the  floor  contemplatively,  maybe  praying  or
something. Then he snaps  out of it and starts looking  around.  Randy leans
into the partition and sticks his hand through the bars. "Randy Waterhouse,"
he says.
     The white man frisbees his books onto the bed,  glides towards him, and
shakes  his  hand. "Enoch Root," he says.  "It's  a pleasure  to meet you in
person,   Randy."   His    voice   is    unmistakably   that   of   Pontifex
root@eruditorum.org.
     Randy freezes up for a long time, like a man who has just realized that
a colossal practical joke is being played on him, but  doesn't know just how
colossal it is,  or  what to  do  about it.  Enoch  Root sees that  Randy is
paralyzed, and steps  smoothly into the gap. He flexes the deck of  cards in
one  hand and shoots  them across  to the other; the queue of airborne cards
just hangs there between his hands for  a moment, like an accordion. "Not as
versatile as ETC cards,  but surprisingly useful," he muses. "With any luck,
Randy, you  and I can  make a  bridge as long as you are just standing there
pontificating anyway."
     "Make  a bridge?"  Randy  echoes, feeling and probably  sounding rather
stupid.
     "I'm sorry, my English is a bit rusty I meant bridge as in a card game.
Are you familiar with it?"
     "Bridge? No. But I thought it took four people."
     "I have come up with a version that  is played by two. I only hope this
deck is complete the game requires fifty four cards."
     "Fifty four," Randy muses. "Is your game anything like Pontifex?"
     "One and the same."
     "I think I have the rules for Pontifex squirreled away on my hard drive
somewhere," Randy says.
     "Then let's play," says Enoch Root.


     Chapter 87 FALL


     Shaftoe jumps out of the airplane. The  air is bracingly  cold up here,
and the wind chill  factor is something else. It is the first time in a year
that he has not been loathsomely hot and sweaty.
     Something  jerks mightily on his back: the  static line, still attached
to the airplane God forbid that American fighting men should be entrusted to
pull their  own ripcords. He can just  imagine the  staff meeting where they
dreamed up the concept of the static line: "For God's sake, General, they're
just enlisted men! As soon as they jump out of the airplane they'll probably
start daydreaming about their girlfriends, take a few hits from their pocket
flasks, catch forty winks,  and before you know it they'll all pile into the
ground at a couple of hundred miles an hour!"
     The  drogue  chute flutters out, catches air, and then eviscerates  his
main  pack in one jerk. There's a  bit of  flopping and buffeting  as  Bobby
Shaftoe's  body  pulls  the disorganized  cloud  of silk downwards,  then it
thunks open and he is  left hanging in space, his dark  body forming a small
perfect bullseye in the center  of  the  off white canopy for  any Nipponese
riflemen down below.
     No  wonder  those paratroopers think they are  gods among men: they get
such a nice view  of things, so  much better  than a poor Marine grunt stuck
down on  the beach, who is always looking uphill  into courses of pillboxes.
All of Luzon stretches out before him. He can see  one or two hundred  miles
north, across a mat of vegetation  as dense as felt, to the mountains in the
far north where General  Yamashita,  the Lion of Malaya, is  holed up with a
hundred thousand troops,  each of whom  would  like nothing  better than  to
strap lots of explosives to his body, sneak through the  lines at night, run
into the  middle  of a large concentration  of  American  soldiers, and blow
himself up  for his emperor. To Shaftoe's starboard is Manila Bay,  and even
from this distance,  some thirty miles,  he can see the jungle suddenly turn
thin and brown as it nears the shore, like a severed leaf that is dying from
the edge inwards that  would be what's  left of the city  of Manila. The fat
twenty  mile long tongue of land protruding towards him is Bata'an. Just off
the tip of  it is a rocky island shaped like a tadpole with a green head and
a bony  brown tail:  Corregidor. Smoke jets from many vents  on the  island,
which has been mostly reconquered  by  the Americans. Quite  a few Nipponese
blew themselves up in their underground  bunkers rather than surrender. This
heroic act has given someone in The General's chain of command a nifty idea.
     A  couple  of  miles  from  Corregidor,  motionless on  the  water,  is
something that looks like an absurdly squat, asymmetrical battleship, except
much  bigger. It  is encircled by American gunboats  and amphibious  landing
forces.  From  a  source  on  its lid, a  long wisp of  red  smoke  trickles
downwind: a smoke  bomb dropped out of Shaftoe's plane a few minutes ago, on
a parachute.  As Shaftoe descends, and  the wind  blows him directly towards
it, he can see the grain of the reinforced concrete of which this prodigy is
made. It used to  be a dry rock  in Manila  Bay.  The Spanish  built a  fort
there,  the Americans built a chain of gun emplacements on top  of that, and
when the Nips showed up they turned the entire thing into a solid reinforced
concrete  fortress with walls thirty  feet thick,  and  a  couple  of double
barreled  fourteen inch  gun turrets on the top.  Those guns have long since
been silenced; Shaftoe can  see  long cracks in  their barrels, and craters,
like frozen splashes in  the steel. Even though he is  parachuting  onto the
roof  of an impregnable Nipponese fortress chock  full of heavily armed  men
who  are  desperately  looking for  a picturesque  way to  die,  Shaftoe  is
perfectly  safe;  every  time  a  Nip  pokes  a rifle  barrel or  a pair  of
binoculars  out of a gun  slit, half a  dozen American antiaircraft  gunners
open up on him at point blank range from the nearby ships.
     A  tremendous racket ensues as a small power boat pops out of a  little
cave  along  the  waterline  of  the island and heads  directly  towards  an
American landing  craft.  A  hundred  guns  open fire on  it simultaneously.
Supersonic  bits  of metal crash into the water all  around the little boat,
ton after ton of them. Each bit makes  a splash. All of the splashes combine
into a jagged, volcanic eruption of white water centered on the little boat.
Bobby  Shaftoe  puts  his fingers  in his ears. Two thousand  pounds of high
explosive packed into the  little  boat's  nose  detonate.  The  shock  wave
flashes across the surface of the water, a powdery white ring expanding with
supernatural velocity.  It hits Bobby Shaftoe like a baseball to the  bridge
of  the nose. He  neglects to steer  his chute  for a while, and  trusts the
winds to carry him to the right place.
     The smoke bomb  was dropped as  proof of  the  concept that a  man on a
parachute might actually be able to land on the roof of this fortress. Bobby
Shaftoe is, of  course, the final and  irrefutable test of this proposition.
As he gets closer, and his head clears from the explosion, Shaftoe sees that
the smoke bomb never actually reached the roof: its little chute got tangled
up in the briar patch of antennas growing out of the top of the thing.
     All  kinds  of fucking  antennas!  Even  during  his days  in Shanghai,
Shaftoe had  a weird feeling around  antennas.  Those  Station  Alpha pencil
necks, in their  little  wooden roof shack with  all the antennas  sprouting
from it those were  not soldiers, sailors, or Marines in  the  normal sense.
Corregidor  was covered with antennas before the Nips came  and took it. And
everywhere that Shaftoe  went  during  his Detachment 2702 stint, there were
antennas.
     He is going to spend the next  few moments concentrating  very hard  on
those antennas, and  so he turns his head for a moment  to  get a bearing on
the American LCM the landing craft that the Nip suicide boat  was hoping  to
destroy.  It  is  exactly where it  is  supposed  to be  halfway between the
encircling force  of naval ships and  the sheer, forty foot high wall of the
fortress. Even if  Shaftoe  didn't already know  the  plan,  he  would, at a
glance, identify  this vessel  as  a Landing Craft,  Mechanized (Mark 3),  a
fifty foot long steel shoebox  designed to cough a medium sized tank up onto
a beach.  It has  a couple  of  fifty  caliber machine guns on it  which are
pounding away dutifully at various targets on the wall of the fortress which
Shaftoe cannot see. But from his vantage point  On High he can see something
that the Nipponese can't: the LCM is not carrying a  tank, in the sense of a
vehicle on caterpillar  treads with a gun turret. It is carrying,  rather, a
tank in the sense of a large steel container  with pipes and hoses and stuff
attached to it.
     The Nips in the fortress are taking  potshots  at  the approaching LCM,
but the only target at  which they have to aim is its front door, a piece of
metal  that  can  flop  down  to become a  ramp,  and  which  was  designed,
incredibly  enough, on the assumption that doomed  Nips would spend a lot of
time  trying to blow holes in it  with  various  projectile  weapons. So the
defenders are not getting anywhere. Antiaircraft gunners on other ships have
begun  raking  the walls of the fortress insanely, making  it hard  for  the
Nipponese to poke their heads  and  their  gun  barrels out.  Shaftoe  notes
fragments  of  antennas skittering  and  bouncing across  the  roof  of  the
fortress, and occasional streaks of tracers, and hopes that the men on those
ships have  the  presence  of mind to hold their fire before he lands on the
fucking thing, which will be in a few seconds.
     Shaftoe realizes that his mental concept of what this mission was going
to  be  like, as  he  reviewed  it with the  officers in the  LCM, bears  no
relationship to  the reality. This is only  about  the five thousandth  time
Shaftoe  has experienced this phenomenon  in the course of the  Second World
War; you'd think he  would no longer be surprised by it. The antennas, which
looked wispy  and inconsequential on the reconnaissance photos, are  in fact
sizable engineering works. Or they were until they  got de engineered by the
naval gunfire that silenced those big guns. Now they are  just wreckage of a
sort that is  going to be peculiarly nasty to  parachute down on top of. The
antennas  were,  and the wreckage is, made of all kinds of  different  shit:
spars  of  Philippine  mahogany,  sturdy  columns  of  bamboo, welded  steel
trusses.  The most common bits are  the ones that catch a parachutist's eye:
long metal  poky things,  and  miles and miles of guy wire,  snarled into  a
briarpatch, some of it taut enough to cut a plummeting Marine's head off and
some of it all loose and tangly with sharp hovering ends.
     It dawns on Shaftoe that this pile isn't just a gun emplacement; it's a
Nip  intelligence headquarters. "Waterhouse, you fucking  son of  a  bitch!"
Shaftoe hollers. As far as he knows,  Waterhouse is still in  Europe. But he
realizes, as he's clapping his hands protectively  over his eyes and falling
into the nightmare, that Waterhouse must have something to do with this.
     Bobby Shaftoe has landed. He tries to move and the  wreckage moves with
him; he is one with it.
     He opens his eyes carefully. His head is wrapped up in a snarl of heavy
wire a guy  wire that  broke under tension  and whipped  around him. Peering
between  loops of  wire, he sees three lengths of quarter inch  metal tubing
projecting out of his torso. Another one has gone through his thigh, and yet
another through his upper arm. He's pretty sure he has a broken leg too.
     He lies  there for a while,  listening  to the  sound of  the guns  all
around him.
     There is work that needs to be done. All he can think of is the boy. He
gropes  for  the  wire cutter with  his free hand and  begins to cut himself
loose from the snarl.
     The jaws of the wire cutter just barely fit over  the  metal  tubing of
the antenna. He reaches behind himself finds the places where the tubes poke
into his back, and cuts  them off, snip,  snip, snip. He cuts the  tube that
has impaled his arm. He leans forward and cuts the one that goes through his
leg. Then  he  pulls  the  tubes  out of his  flesh  and  drops them on  the
concrete, plink, plink, plink, plink, plink. Lots of blood follows.
     He doesn't even try to walk. He  just begins to drag himself across the
concrete roof of the fortress. The sun has warmed the  concrete and it feels
good. He cannot see the LCM, but he can  see the few antennas that stick out
of its top, and he knows it is in position now.
     The  rope  should be there. Shaftoe props himself up on his elbows  and
looks. Sure enough, there  it is,  a manila rope (natch!) tied to a grapnel,
one point of the grapnel lodged in a shell crater near the edge of the roof.
     He gets to it eventually, and begins to pull on the rope. He closes his
eyes, but tries  not to fall asleep.  He keeps pulling, and eventually feels
something big and thick between his hands: the hose.
     Almost finished. Lying on his back,  hugging the end of the hose to his
chest, he  rolls his  head from  side to  side until he can see the air vent
that they picked out  on the  reconnaissance photos. It used to have a sheet
metal  hood on the top of it, but that's long  gone now, it's just a hole in
the roof with a few jagged bits of  metal at its edges. He crawls over to it
and feeds in the end of the hose.
     Someone must be watching  him  on  one of the ships, because  the  hose
stiffens, like a  serpent coming alive,  and between his hands Bobby Shaftoe
can  feel  the fuel oil streaming through it. Ten  thousand  gallons of  the
stuff.  Straight down into  the fortress. He  can  hear the Nips down there,
singing  hoarse songs. By now  they  will have figured  out what is about to
happen. General MacArthur  is giving  them exactly what they've been praying
for.
     At this point, Bobby Shaftoe is supposed to abseil down a rope into the
LCM, but he knows it isn't going to happen. No one can reach him now, no one
can help him. When the fuel oil stops streaming through the hose, he summons
all the concentration he has left. Pretends, one last time, that he actually
gives a damn. Jerks the safety pin from a white phosphorus grenade, lets the
handle fly off and tinkle merrily across the roof. He can feel it come alive
in his hand, the thrumming animal  fizz of its inner fuse. He drops it  into
the  air shaft:  a circular  pipe straight down, a  black disk centered on a
field of dingy grey, like the ashes of a Nipponese flag.
     Then, on an impulse, he dives in there after it.
     Semper Fidelis Dawn star flares on disk of night I fall, sun rises


     Chapter 88 METIS


     The appearance of root@eruditorum.org in the cell right next to Randy's
is like  the crowning plot twist in this Punch and  Judy  show that has been
performed for his benefit ever  since his plane landed at  NAIA. As with any
puppet show, he knows that there must be a lot of people hidden just outside
the range  of his senses, in  furious motion, trying to make it all  happen.
For all he knows, some significant fraction of the Philippine gross national
product is being devoted to keeping up these pretenses for his benefit.
     There is a meal waiting  on the floor of Randy's cell, and a rat on top
of the meal. Randy  usually  reacts pretty badly to the sight  of rats; they
rupture  the  containment system that his upbringing and his education built
around the part  of his mind  where the collective unconscious stuff dwells,
and  send  him  straight into  Hieronymus  Bosch  territory.  But  in  these
circumstances it doesn't bother  him any  more  than seeing  one  at the zoo
would. The  rat has a surprisingly attractive  buckskin  colored pelt and  a
tail about as thick as a pencil that has evidently  run  afoul of a farmer's
wife with a carving  knife, and  woggles stiffly in  the air like  the blunt
antenna of a cellphone. Randy is hungry, but he doesn't want to eat anything
that a rat has left footprints on, so he just watches it.
     His body feels like it slept for a long time. He turns  on his computer
and types in a command called "date." The nails of his left hand look funny,
as if they all got bruised.  Focusing  on them he sees  a club drawn in blue
ballpoint  pen  ink  on the  nail  of the index  finger,  a  diamond  on the
forefinger, a heart on the  ring finger, a  spade on the pinky.  Enoch  Root
told  him that in  Pontifex,  as in  bridge, each card in  the  deck  has  a
numerical  value:  clubs 1 13, diamonds 14 26,  hearts  27 39, spades 40 52.
Randy drew the symbols on his nails so he wouldn't forget.
     Anyway, "date"  tells him  that  he  apparently slept all  of yesterday
afternoon and evening,  all night,  and about half of today. So this rat  is
actually eating his lunch.
     Randy's computer runs Finux, so when it boots up it  gives him a  black
screen with big fat white letters scrolling up it one line at a time, a real
circa  1975  type  of user interface. Also  presumably the easiest  possible
thing to read through Van Eck phreaking.  Randy  types  in "startx"  and the
screen goes black for a moment and then  turns a particular  shade of indigo
that Randy happens to like, and beige windows appear on it with much smaller
and crisper  black letters. So now he is running the  X Windows System, or X
as people like Randy call it, which provides all of the  graphical junk that
people expect  in  a user interface: menus, buttons, scroll bars, and so on.
As with anything  else under UNIX (of which Finux is a variant), there are a
million  options that only young, lonely, or obsessed people  have the  time
and patience to explore. Randy has  been all  three  at various times of his
life and knows a lot about these options. For example, the background of his
screen happens to be a  uniform indigo at  the  moment,  but it could  be an
image. Theoretically you could use  a movie, so that all of your windows and
menus and so on would  float around on top  of, say, Citizen Kane running in
an endless loop. You can, in fact, take any  piece  of software and make  it
into your screen background,  and it will purr along happily, doing whatever
it does, and not even known that  it's being used  as  window dressing. This
has given Randy some ideas on how to approach the Van Eck thing.
     In  its  current state, this computer is  just as vulnerable to Van Eck
phreaking as it was before Randy started up X. Before  it was white  letters
on a black background. Now it's  black on beige.  The  letters are  a little
smaller  and  they  live  in  windows,  but  it  makes  no  difference:  the
electronics inside his computer still have to make these transitions between
zero and  one, i.e. between  high  intensity  (white or  beige)  and minimal
(black) as they trace out these patterns of dots on the screen.
     Randy fundamentally does not know what the fuck is going on in his life
right now, and probably hasn't for a long time, even back  in  the days when
he thought that he  did know. But  his working hypothesis is that the people
who  set  this  whole situation  up (prime candidates: the  Dentist and  his
cohorts in the Bolobolo syndicate) know that he has some cool information on
his hard  drive. How should  they know this? Well, Pontifex the Wizard Enoch
Root whatever the fuck he's called when he  phoned  Randy on the plane, knew
that Randy had Arethusa, so God knows who  else  might know.  Someone set up
the fake drug bust at  NAIA so  that they could nab his laptop and yank  the
hard drive and make a copy  of its contents. Then they found out that it was
all doubly  encrypted. That is, the Arethusa  intercepts  are  encrypted  to
begin with in a pretty good World War II  cryptosystem, which anyone  should
be able to break nowadays, but on top of that they are furthermore encrypted
in a state  of the art  modern system that no  one  can break. If they  know
what's good for them, they won't even try to break it. The only way for them
to get the information is to get Randy to decrypt it for them, which he  can
do  by biometrically identifying himself to his laptop (by talking to it) or
by typing in a pass phrase that  only he knows. They  are hoping  that Randy
will decrypt the  Arethusa intercept  files and, like a moron, display their
contents on the screen.  The  moment that stuff appears  on the screen,  the
game  is over. The  Dentist's (or whoever's) surveillance guys can  feed the
intercepts  to some  kind of  a cryptanalytic supercomputer that  will break
them open in no time.
     That doesn't mean that Randy dare  not  open those files just  that  he
daren't display them on  the screen. This distinction is  crucial. Ordo  can
read the  encrypted files from  the hard drive. It  can  write them into the
computer's memory.  It can decrypt them, and write the  results into another
region of the computer's memory, and leave that data there indefinitely, and
the  Van Eck phreakers will  never be the  wiser. But as soon as Randy tells
the computer to show him that information  in  a window on the  screen,  the
Arethusa intercepts will belong to the Van Eck  phreakers;  and whoever they
are, they can probably break them faster than Randy can.
     The fun and interesting thing is  that Randy  doesn't  have to actually
see those intercepts in order  to work on them. As long as  they are sitting
in  the  computer's memory, he  can  subject them  to  every  cryptanalystic
technique in the whole Cryptonomicon.

     He starts tapping out some  lines in a language  called Perl.  Perl's a
scripting  language; useful for  controlling  your  computer's functions and
automating repetitive tasks. A UNIX machine like  this  one  is rooted  in a
filesystem that  contains tens  of thousands  of different files,  mostly in
straight ASCII text format. There  are many  different  programs for opening
these  files, displaying them on the screen, and editing them. Randy intends
to write  a Perl script that will roam through the filesystem choosing files
at random, opening each file in a randomly sized and located window,  paging
through  it for  a  while, and  then closing it again. If you run the script
fast  enough, the windows will pop open  all over  the place  in  a  kind of
rectangularized fireworks burst that will go  on forever. If this  script is
used as the screen background, in place  of solid indigo, then this  will go
on underneath the one window  on the screen  where Randy's actually working.
The people monitoring his work will go  crazy trying  to track  all of this.
Especially if Randy writes a  script  that  will  cause  the real window  to
change its shape and location at random every few seconds.
     It would be really stupid  to open the Arethusa intercepts in  a window
he's not going to do that. But he can use this technique to conceal whatever
else he's doing in the way  of decryption  work. It occurs to  him, however,
when he gets a  few lines into writing this Perl script, that if  he pulls a
stunt like  that so early in  his  incarceration, the people surveilling him
will know right away that he is on to them. And maybe it's better if he lets
them believe, for a while, that he suspects nothing.
     So  he  saves his  Perl script and  stops working on it for  now. If he
writes it in short bursts, opening  it once or twice a day to type  in a few
lines and then closing it, it's  unlikely that  the surveillors will be able
to follow what he is up to, even if they happen to be hackers. Just to be an
asshole,  he modifies his X Windows options in  such a way  that none of the
windows  on the  screen will have  a title  bar  at the  top.  That  way the
surveillance people won't be able to tell  what file he is working on at any
given moment,  which will  make it a  lot harder  for them to  string a long
series of  observations together into  a coherent picture of  what's in  his
Perl script.
     Too, he opens up  the  old message from root@eruditorum.org  giving the
Pontifex Transform,  expressed as a  few lines of  Perl code. The steps that
looked  so unwieldy  when carried out by  a  computer seem straight  forward
easy, even now that he construes them as manipulations of a deck of cards.
     "Randy."
     "Hmmm?" Randy looks up from the screen and is startled to find  that he
is in a jail in the Philippines.
     "Dinner is served."
     It is Enoch Root, looking at him through  the  bars.  He points  at the
floor of  Randy's cell where a new  tray of food  has  just  been  slid  in.
"Actually, it was served an hour ago you might want to have at it before the
rats come."
     "Thank you," Randy says. Making sure all the windows on his screen have
been closed, he  goes over and  lifts his dinner  up from the spatter of old
rat turds on the floor. It is rice and lechon, a simple and traditional pork
dish. Enoch Root finished eating a long time ago he sits on his bed, next to
Randy, and plays an  unusual game of solitaire, pausing occasionally to mark
down  a  letter.  Randy  watches  the manipulation  of the  deck  carefully,
growingly certain that it is the  same set of operations he was just reading
about in the old e mail message.
     "So what are you in for?" Randy asks.
     Enoch Root  finishes counting through the  deck, glances at a seven  of
spades, closes his eyes for a few moments, and marks down a W on his napkin.
Then  he  says,  "Disorderly  conduct.  Trespassing. Incitement to riot. I'm
probably guilty of the first two."
     "Tell me about it."
     "First tell me what you're in for."
     "Heroin was found in my bag at  the airport.  I stand accused of  being
the world's stupidest drug smuggler."
     "Is someone angry at you?"
     "That would make for a much longer story," Randy says, "but I think you
have the drift."
     "Well, in  my  case, it's  like this. I have  been working at a mission
hospital up in the mountain."
     "You're a priest?"
     "Not anymore. I'm a lay worker."
     "Where's your hospital?"
     "South  of here. Out in  the  boondocks," Enoch Root  says. "The people
there cultivate pineapple,  coffee, coconut,  bananas, and a few other  cash
crops. But their land is being torn apart by treasure hunters."
     Funny  that Enoch Root  should  suddenly be on  the subject  of  buried
treasure. And yet he has been so tight lipped. Randy  guesses  he's intended
to  play  stupid. He takes  a stab  at  it: "Is  there supposed  to  be some
treasure down there?"
     "The old timers  say that  many Nipponese trucks went down a particular
road during  the  last  few weeks before MacArthur's  return. Past a certain
point  it  was  not possible to  know where they went, because the  road was
blocked, and minefields set up to discourage the curious."
     "Or kill them," Randy says.
     Enoch Root takes this in stride. "That road  gives way to a rather vast
area in which gold might hypothetically have been hidden. Hundreds of square
miles.  Much  of it  is  jungle.  Much has  difficult  topography.  Lots  of
volcanoes, some extinct, some vomiting  up  mudflows from time to time.  But
some is flat enough to grow tropical crops, and in those places, people have
settled during the decades since the war,  and put together the rudiments of
an economy."
     "Who owns the land?"
     "You've gotten to know the  Philippines well," Enoch Root says. "You go
immediately to the central question."
     "Around here,  asking who owns  the land is like complaining  about the
weather in the Midwest," Randy muses.
     Enoch Root  nods. "I could spend  a long time answering  your question.
The answer  is that patterns  of  ownership changed just  after the war, and
then changed again under Marcos, and yet again in the last few years.  So we
have several epochs, if you will. First epoch: before the war. Land owned by
certain families."
     "Of course."
     "Of  course.  Second epoch:  the  war.  A vast area sealed off  by  the
Nipponese.  Some  of the  families who owned  the land  prospered under  the
occupation.  Others  went  bankrupt.  Third  epoch:  postwar.  The  bankrupt
families went away. The prosperous ones expanded  their holdings. As did the
church and the government."
     "Why?"
     "The government made part of the land the jungle into  a national park.
And after the eruptions, the church established the mission where I work."
     "Eruptions?"
     "In the early 1950s,  just  to make things interesting you know, things
are never  interesting enough in the Philippines the volcanoes  acted  up. A
few  lahars came through the  area, wiped out some villages, redirected some
rivers, displaced many  people. The church set up the hospital to help those
people."
     "A hospital doesn't take up very much land," Randy observes.
     "We  also have farms. We are trying to help the locals become more self
reliant." Enoch  Root  acts like he basically  does not want  to  talk about
this.  "At any rate, things then  settled down into  a pattern that more  or
less endured  until the Marcos era, when various people  were forced to sell
some of their holdings to Ferdinand and Imelda and various of their cousins,
nephews, cronies, and bootlicks."
     "They were looking for Nipponese war gold."
     "Certain of the  locals have made a business of  pretending to remember
where  the gold  is,"  Enoch  Root says. "Once  it  was  understood just how
remunerative  this could be, it spread like a virus. Everyone claims to have
hazy memories of the war now, or of  tales that  Dad or Granddad told  them.
The Marcos era treasure hunters did not display the cautious skepticism that
might have  been  expected from people with more  piercing  intellects. Many
holes were dug. No  gold was found.  Things settled down. Then,  in the last
few years, the Chinese came in."
     "Filipinos of Chinese ancestry, or "
     "Chinese  of  Chinese  ancestry," Enoch  Root  says. "Northern Chinese.
Robust ones  who like spicy food.  Not the usual  gracile Cantonese speaking
fish eaters."
     "These people are from where, then Shanghai?"
     Root  nods.  "Their company is one of  these post Maoist monstrosities.
Headed up by  an actual Long March veteran. Wily  survivor  of many  purges.
Name of Wing.  Mr. Wing or General Wing as he  likes to be addressed when he
is feeling nostalgic  handled  the transition  to capitalism rather  deftly.
Built hydroelectric projects with slave labor during the Great Leap Forward,
parlayed that into control of a very large government ministry which has now
become  a  sort  of corporation. Mr. Wing has  the ability  to  shut off the
electricity  to just  about any home  or  factory  or even military  base in
China, and by  Chinese standards this makes him into  a  distinguished elder
statesman."
     "What does Mr. Wing want there?"
     "Land. Land. More land."
     "What sort of land?"
     "Land in the jungle. Oddly enough."
     "Maybe he wants to build a hydroelectric project."
     "Yes, and maybe you're  a heroin smuggler. Say, Randy, don't think  I'm
rude for saying so, but you have sauce in your beard."  Enoch Root thrusts a
hand  through  the  bars,  proffering a paper napkin.  Randy  takes it  and,
lifting it to his face, notes that the following letters  are written on it:
OSKJJ JGTMW. Randy pretends to daub sauce off his beard.
     "Now  I've gone and done it,"  says  Enoch  Root,  "given  you my whole
supply of bumwad."
     "Greater  love  hath  no man," Randy says. "And  I see you gave me your
other deck of cards too you are too generous."
     "Not at all I thought you might want to play solitaire, just as I did."

     "Don't mind  if  I do,"  Randy says, setting  his dinner tray aside and
reaching for the deck.
     The card on top is an eight of spades. Skimming it and a few more cards
out of the way, he finds a joker, with small stars in the corners; according
to hints that  Enoch has already dropped, this is the A joker. It's the work
of a moment to slip it beneath the card below, which happens to be a Jack of
clubs. About two thirds of  the way down into the pack he finds a  big  star
joker, and B stands for Big, so he knows  that is Joker B; he  moves it down
two cards, below the six of clubs and the nine of diamonds. Straightening up
the pack and then smearing though it once more, he sticks various fingers in
as  he re finds those jacks,  and ends  up with a  good half of the pack the
full inter Joker span, plus the  two  Jokers themselves trapped  between his
index and  forefingers. The thinner stacks above and  below he pulls out and
swaps with each other. Enoch watches all of this and seems to approve.
     Randy pushes out the bottom  most card, now, and  it  turns out to be a
jack of clubs. On second thought he pulls that jack out and leaves it on his
knee for the time being, so he won't mess the next part up. According to the
mnemonic symbols he's marked on his fingernails, the numerical value of this
jack of clubs is simply 11. So, starting from the top of the deck, he counts
down  to the eleventh  card,  cuts the  deck  below it, then  swaps the  two
halves, and finally takes the jack of clubs  off his knee and puts it on the
bottom of the deck again.
     The card  on the top  of the deck is now a joker. "What's the numerical
value for a  joker?"  he asks, and  Enoch Root says, "it's fifty three,  for
either one of them." So Randy gets  a free ride this  time; he knows that if
he begins counting down from the top  of the deck,  when he reaches 53 he'll
be staring at the last card. And that  card happens to be the Jack of Clubs,
with a value of 11. Eleven, then is the first number in the keystream.
     Now, the  first letter  in the ciphertext that Enoch Root wrote on  the
napkin is O, and (setting  the deck of cards down, now, so that he can count
through the alphabet on his fingers)  O is letter fifteen.  If  he subtracts
eleven from that, he  gets four, and he  doesn't even have  to count on  his
fingers to know that letter number four is D. He has one letter deciphered.
     Randy remarks, "We still haven't gotten to your being arrested."
     "Yes! Well, it's like  this,"  says  Enoch  Root.  "Mr.  Wing  has been
digging some holes of his own up in the  jungle lately. A lot of trucks have
been going through. Ruining the roads. Running over stray dogs, which as you
know are an important food source for these people. A boy was  hit by one of
these trucks and has been  in our hospital  ever since. The  runoff from Mr.
Wing's  operations has been fouling the  river that  many people rely on for
fresh water. And there are questions  of  ownership too some feel  that  Mr.
Wing is encroaching on land that is properly owned  by the government. Which
in some extremely attenuated sense, means it is owned by the people."
     "Does he have a permit?"
     "Ah! Once again  your knowledge of local  politics is  evident.  As you
know, the normal procedure is for local officials to approach people who are
digging large holes in the ground, or  undertaking any kind of productive or
destructive activity whatsoever, and demand that they obtain a permit, which
simply  means that they want a bribe or else they'll raise a stink about it.
Mr. Wing's company has not obtained a permit."
     "Has a stink been raised?"
     "Yes. But Mr. Wing  has forged a very  strong relationship with certain
Filipinos of Chinese ancestry  who are well placed in the government, and so
the stink has been unavailing."
     The  second time  through, the joker moving part went quickly since one
of the jokers started out on top. The King of Hearts ends  up on the bottom,
and hence on Randy's knee. That son  of a bitch has a numerical index of 39,
and so Randy has to count most of the way through the deck to reach the card
in  the thirty  ninth position,  which is a  ten of  diamonds. He splits and
swaps the deck, then puts the King of Hearts back on the bottom. Top card is
now a four of diamonds, which translates to an index  of seventeen. Counting
the seventeen top cards into his hand he stops and looks at the  eighteenth,
which is a four  of hearts. That works out to a value of  26  + 4  = 30. But
everything here is modulo  26, so adding the 26 was a waste of time, because
now he has to subtract  it right off again. The  result is four.  The second
letter in Enoch's ciphertext is  S,  which  is the nineteenth  letter in the
alphabet, and subtracting four  from  that gives him O. So the plaintext, so
far, is "DO."
     "I get the picture."
     "I was sure that you would, Randy."
     Randy doesn't know what  to make of the  Wing business. It puts  him in
mind  of  Doug Shaftoe's yarns. Maybe Wing is looking  for the Primary,  and
maybe Enoch Root is too, and maybe  the Primary is what Old Man Comstock was
trying to  find by decrypting the  Arethusa messages. Maybe, in other words,
the location of the Primary is sitting on Randy's  hard drive right now, and
Root's worried that Randy, like an idiot, is going to give it away.
     How'd  he arrange to get  into  a cell  next to Randy's? Presumably the
Church's internal  lines of  communication are first rate.  Root could  have
known  for  a few days that Randy was in the clink. Time  enough to  hatch a
plan.
     "How'd you end up here, then?" Randy asks.
     "We decided to raise a bit of a stink ourselves."
     "We being the Church?"
     "What do  you mean  by  the  Church? If  you are asking me whether  the
Pontifex Maximus and the College of Cardinals put on their pointy bifurcated
hats and sat down together in Rome and drew up plans for a stink, the answer
is  no.  If  by 'church' you mean the  local  community  in my neighborhood,
almost all of whom happen to be devout Catholics, then yes."
     "So  the community  protested,  or  something,  and you were  the  ring
leader."
     "I was an example."
     "An example?"
     "It  frequently does not occur to these people to  challenge the powers
that be. When someone actually does,  they always  find it incredibly novel,
and derive much entertainment from it. That was my role. I had been making a
stink about Mr. Wing for quite some time."
     Randy can almost guess  what the next  two letters are going to be, but
he has to  keep working through the algorithm or the  deck will  get out  of
whack.  He  generates a  23 and then  a  47  which,  modulo  26,  is 21, and
subtracting the 23 and the 21 from the next  two  ciphertext letters K and J
(again,  modulo  26)  gives  him  N and  O as expected.  So  he  has  "DONO"
deciphered. And continuing  to  work  through it, one letter at a  time, the
cards getting a little sweaty in his hands now, he eventually gets DONOTUSEP
and  finally  loses  his place  while trying to  generate the last keystream
letter.  So now the deck  is out  of  whack  and  completely  unrecoverable,
reminding him that he'd better be careful next  time. But he  can guess that
this message must be:  DO NOT  USE PC. Enoch  is worried that Randy  did not
anticipate Van Eck phreaking.
     "So. There was a demonstration. You blocked a road or something?"
     "We  blocked roads,  we lay  down in  front of  bulldozers. Some people
slashed a few tires. The locals put their ingenuity to work,  and things got
a  bit out  of hand. Mr. Wing's dear friends in the government  took offense
and called out the Army.  Seventeen  people were arrested. Unreasonably high
bail was set for them as a punitive measure if these people can't get out of
jail they can't make money and  their families  suffer terribly. I could get
bailed out if I wanted to, but have elected to stay behind bars as a gesture
of solidarity."
     It all seems like a  plausible enough  cover  story to Randy.  "But I'm
guessing that a  lot of people in the  government are  appalled  by the fact
that they have thrown a  saint into jail," he says, "and so they have  moved
you here, to the high prestige luxury jail with private cells."
     "Once again your  understanding of the  local culture  is conspicuous,"
Enoch Root says. He shifts position on the bed and his crucifix swings  back
and forth  ponderously.  He  also has  a  medallion  around  his  neck  with
something startling written on it.
     "Do you have some occult symbol there?" Randy asks, squinting.
     "I beg your pardon?"
     "I can make out the word 'occult' on your medallion there."
     "It says ignoti  et  quasi  occulti,  which means  'unknown and  partly
hidden'  or words to that effect," says  Enoch Root. "It  is  the motto of a
society  to  which I belong.  You must know that  the word 'occult' does not
intrinsically have anything to  do with Satanic  rituals  and drinking blood
and all of that. It "
     "I  was trained as an astronomer," Randy says. "So I learned all  about
occultation the  concealment  of  one  body  behind another,  as  during  an
eclipse."
     "Oh. Well, then, I'll shut up."
     "In  fact, I know more than  you might think about  occultation," Randy
says. It might seem like he's beating a dead  horse, except  that he catches
the eye of Enoch Root while he's saying it, and gives a significant sidelong
glance at his computer. Root processes this for a moment and then nods.
     "Who's the lady in the middle? The Virgin Mary?" Randy asks.
     Root fingers the medallion without looking at it, and says, "Reasonable
guess. But wrong. It's Athena."
     "The Greek goddess?"
     "Yes."
     "How do you square that with Christianity?"
     "When I phoned you the other day, how did you know it was me?"
     "I don't know. I just recognized you."
     "Recognized me? What does that mean? You didn't recognize my voice."

     "Is  this some  roundabout way of  answering  my question about  Athena
worship v. Christianity?"
     "Doesn't it strike you as remarkable that you can  look at a  stream of
characters on the screen of your  computer e mail from  someone you've never
seen and later 'recognize' the same person on the phone? How does that work,
Randy?"
     "I haven't the faintest idea. The brain can do some weird "
     "Some complain  that e mail  is impersonal that your  contact  with me,
during the e mail  phase of  our  relationship,  was mediated  by  wires and
screens and cables. Some would say  that's not as good as conversing face to
face. And  yet our seeing of things is always mediated by  corneas, retinas,
optic nerves, and some neural machinery that takes the information  from the
optic nerve and propagates  it  into our minds. So, is looking at words on a
screen so very much inferior? I think not; at  least then you are  conscious
of the distortions. Whereas, when you see someone with your eyes, you forget
about  the  distortions  and  imagine  you  are experiencing them purely and
immediately."
     "So what's your explanation of how I recognized you?"
     "I  would argue that inside your mind was  some pattern of neurological
activity that  was  not there before you exchanged e  mail with me. The Root
Representation. It  is not me. I'm  this big slug of carbon  and  oxygen and
some other stuff on  this cot right next to you. The Root  Rep, by contrast,
is the thing that  you'll carry around  in your brain for the  rest  of your
life, barring some kind of major neurological insult, that your mind uses to
represent  me. When  you think about me, in other words, you're not thinking
about me qua this big slug  of carbon,  you are thinking about the Root Rep.
Indeed, some day you might get  released from jail and  run into someone who
would say, 'You know, I was in the  Philippines once, running  around in the
boondocks, and I ran into this old fart who started talking to me about Root
Reps.' And by  exchanging notes (as it were)  with  this fellow you would be
able to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that the Root Rep  in your brain
and the Root  Rep in  his brain were generated by  the  same actual slug  of
carbon and oxygen and so on: me.
     "And this has something to do, again, with Athena?"
     "If you think of the Greek gods  as real supernatural  beings who lived
on Mount Olympus, no. But if you think of them as being in the same class of
entities as the Root Rep, which is to say, patterns of neurological activity
that the mind uses to represent things that it sees,  or thinks  it sees, in
the outside world, then yes. Suddenly, Greek gods can be just as interesting
and relevant as real people. Why? Because, in the same way as you might  one
day encounter another person with his own Root Rep so, if you were to have a
conversation with an  ancient Greek  person,  and  he started  talking about
Zeus,  you might  once  you got over  your initial feelings  of  superiority
discover that you had some mental representations inside your own mind that,
though you  didn't name  them  Zeus and didn't think of them as  a big hairy
thunderbolt  hurling son  of a Titan, nonetheless had been  generated  as  a
result of interactions with entities in the  outside world that are the same
as  the ones  that cause  the Zeus Representation to  appear  in the Greek's
mind. And here  we  could talk about the Plato's Cave thing for  a while the
Veg O Matic of metaphors it slices! it dices!"
     "In which," Randy says,  "the actual entities in the real world are the
three dimensional, real things that are casting the shadows, this Greek dude
and I are  the wretches chained up looking at the shadows of those things on
the  walls, and it's  just that  the  shape of the  wall in  front of me  is
different from the shape of the wall in front of the Grecian "
     "  so that  given a shadow projected  on your wall is going  to adopt a
different  shape  from  the same shadow projected  on  his  wall, where  the
different wall  shapes here correspond to let's  say your  modern scientific
worldview versus his ancient pagan worldview."
     "Yeah. That Plato's Cave metaphor."
     At this very moment  some  wag of a prison guard,  out in the corridor,
throws a switch and  shuts off all  of the lights. The only illumination now
is from the screensaver on  Randy's laptop, which  is  running animations of
colliding galaxies.
     "I  think we can stipulate  that  the wall in  front of you,  Randy, is
considerably flatter and smoother, i.e.,  it generally gives you a much more
accurate shadow than his wall, and yet it's clear that he's still capable of
seeing the same shadows  and probably drawing some useful conclusions  about
the shapes of the things that cast them."
     "Okay.  So  the Athena  that  you  honor  on  your  medallion  isn't  a
supernatural being "
     "  who  lives on a mountain in Greece, et  cetera,  but rather whatever
entity,  pattern, trend, or what  have  you that, when  perceived by ancient
Greek  people,  and filtered  through  their perceptual machinery  and their
pagan  worldview,  produced the  internal mental  representation  that  they
dubbed Athena.  The distinction  being  quite  important because Athena  the
supernatural chick  with  the helmet is of  course nonexistent, but 'Athena'
the external  generator of the internal representation dubbed Athena by  the
ancient   Greeks  must  have  existed  back  then,  or  else   the  internal
representation never  would have been  generated, and  if she  existed  back
then, the chances are excellent that she exists now, and if all that is  the
case, then whatever ideas the ancient Greeks (who, though utter shitheads in
many ways, were terrifyingly intelligent people)  had about her are probably
still quite valid."
     "Okay, but why Athena and not Demeter or someone?"
     "Well, it's a truism that you can't understand a person without knowing
something about her family background, and so we have to do kind of  a quick
Cliff's Notes number on the ancient Greek Theogony  here. We start  out with
Chaos, which  is where all theogonies start, and which I like to think of as
a sea of white  noise totally random broadband static.  And for reasons that
we  don't really understand, certain polarities begin to coalesce from  this
Day, Night,  Darkness, Light,  Earth,  Sea. Personally, I like  to think  of
these as  crystals  not in the  hippy dippy  Californian  sense, but in  the
hardass technical sense of resonators, that received certain channels buried
in the  static of Chaos. At some point, out of  certain incestuous couplings
among such entities, you get Titans.  And  it's arguably kind of interesting
to  note that the Titans provide  really the  full complement of  basic gods
you've got the sun god, Hyperion, and an ocean god, Oceanus, and  so on. But
they  all get overthrown  in  a power  struggle  called the Titanomachia and
replaced with new gods like Apollo and Poseidon, who end up filling the same
slots in the organizational chart, as  it were. Which is kind of interesting
in that it seems to tie in with what I was saying about the same entities or
patterns  persisting through  time,  but  casting slightly different  shaped
shadows for different people. Anyway, so now we have the Gods of  Olympus as
we normally think of them: Zeus, Hera, and so on.
     "A  couple of basic observations about these: first, they all, with one
exception I'll get to soon, were produced by some  kind of  sexual coupling,
either Titan Titaness  or God Goddess or God Nymph or God Woman or basically
Zeus  and whom– or whatever Zeus was  fucking on  any particular  day.
Which  brings me to the second basic observation,  which is that the Gods of
Olympus are  the most squalid and dysfunctional  family imaginable.  And yet
there is something about the motley asymmetry of this pantheon that makes it
more credible. Like the Periodic Table of the Elements or the family tree of
the elementary  particles, or  just about any anatomical  structure that you
might pull up out of a cadaver, it has enough of a pattern to give our minds
something  to  work on and yet an irregularity that  indicates some  kind of
organic provenance you have a sun god and a moon goddess, for example, which
is  all  clean and symmetrical, and yet  over here is Hera,  who has no role
whatsoever except to be a literal bitch  goddess, and then there is Dionysus
who  isn't even fully a god he's half  human  but gets to be in the Pantheon
anyway and sit on Olympus with the Gods, as if you went to the Supreme Court
and found Bozo the Clown planted among the justices.
     "Now what I'm getting to here is  that  Athena was exceptional in every
way.  To  begin with she wasn't created through sexual  reproduction  in any
kind  of  normal  sense;  she  sprang fully  formed from  the head  of Zeus.
According to some  versions of the story, this  happened  after Zeus  fucked
Metis,  about  whom we'll hear  more in due course. Then he was  warned that
Metis would later give birth to  a son who would dethrone him, and so he ate
her, and later  Athena  came out of his head. Whether you buy into the Metis
story  or not, I think we can still  agree that something  a little peculiar
was going on  with  the nativity of Athena. She was also exceptional in that
she did not participate in the moral squalor of Olympus; she was a virgin."
     "Aha! I knew that was a picture of a virgin on your medallion."
     "Yes, Randy, you do have a keen  eye for virgins. Hephaestus leg fucked
her once  but  did  not achieve  penetration. She's quite  important  in the
Odyssey, but there are  really very few myths,  in the  usual sense of  that
term, that involve  her. The one exception really proves the rule: the story
of Arachne. Arachne was a superb weaver who became arrogant and began taking
credit herself, instead of attributing her talent to the gods. Arachne  went
so  far as  to issue  an open  challenge to  Athena, who was  the goddess of
weaving, among other things.
     "Now keep in mind that the typical Greek myth goes something like this:
innocent shepherd boy is minding his  own  business, an overflying god spies
him and gets a hard on, swoops down and rapes him silly; while the victim is
still  staggering  around in a daze, that god's wife or lover, in  a jealous
rage, turns  him  the helpless, innocent victim,  that  is into let's say an
immortal turtle and e.g. power staples him to a sheet of plywood with a dish
of turtle food just out of his reach and leaves him out in the  sun  forever
to  be repeatedly  disemboweled  by  army  ants  and  stung  by  hornets  or
something.  So if Arachne had dissed  anyone else in the Pantheon, she would
have been just a smoking hole in the ground before she knew what hit her.
     "But in this case, Athena appeared to her in the  guise of an old woman
and recommended that she display the proper humility. Arachne  declined  her
advice. Finally Athena revealed herself as such and challenged Arachne to  a
weaving contest, which you'll have to admit  was  uncommonly fair minded  of
her. And the  interesting thing  is that the contest turned out to be a draw
Arachne really was just as good as Athena! Only problem was that her weaving
depicted the gods of Olympus  at their shepherd raping, interspecies fucking
worst. This weaving was simply a literal and accurate illustration of all of
those other myths, which makes this  into a sort  of meta  myth. Athena flew
off the handle and whacked Arachne with her distaff, which might  seem  kind
of like  poor anger management until  you consider that  during the struggle
against the Giants, she wasted Enceladus by dropping Sicily on him! The only
effect was to cause Arachne to recognize her own hubris, at which she became
so ashamed that she hanged herself. Athena then brought her back to  life in
the form of a spider.
     "So anyway, you probably learned in elementary school that Athena wears
a helmet,  carries a shield called  Aegis, and is the goddess of  war and of
wisdom, as well as crafts such as the aforementioned weaving. Kind of an odd
combination, to say the least! Especially since Ares was  supposed to be the
god of war and Hestia the goddess  of home economics why the redundancy? But
a  lot's been screwed  up  in translation. See, the kind  of  wisdom that we
associate with old farts like yours truly, and which I'm trying to impart to
you here, Randy Waterhouse, was called dike by the Greeks. That's  not  what
Athena was the goddess of! She was the goddess of metis, which means cunning
or craftiness,  and which  you'll  recall was the name of her mother  in one
version of the story. Interestingly Metis (the personage, not the attribute)
provided young Zeus with the  potion that  caused Cronus to vomit up  all of
the baby gods he'd swallowed, setting the stage for the whole  Titanomachia.
So  now  the  connection  to crafts  becomes obvious  crafts  are  just  the
practical application of metis."

     "I associate the word 'crafts' with making crappy belts and ashtrays in
summer camp," Randy says.  "I mean,  who  wants to be the fucking goddess of
macrame?"
     "It's all bad translation. The word that we use today, to mean the same
thing, is really technology."

     "Okay. Now we're getting somewhere."
     "Instead  of calling  Athena the goddess of  war,  wisdom, and macrame,
then, we should say  war and technology. And here again we have  the problem
of an overlap with the jurisdiction of Ares, who's supposed to be the god of
war. And let's just say that Ares is a  complete asshole. His personal aides
are  Fear  and  Terror and  sometimes Strife. He is constantly  at odds with
Athena even  though maybe because –  they  are  nominally the  god and
goddess of  the same  thing  war.  Heracles,  who is one  of Athena's  human
proteges, physically wounds Ares on two  occasions, and even  strips  him of
his  weapons at one point! You see the fascinating thing about Ares is  that
he's  completely incompetent.  He's chained up by  a couple  of  giants  and
imprisoned in a bronze vessel  for  thirteen months. He's  wounded by one of
Odysseus's  drinking buddies during the iliad. Athena knocks him out with  a
rock  at one point.  When  he's  not making  a complete  idiot of himself in
battle, he's screwing every human female  he  can get  his hands on, and get
this his  sons are  all what we would today call  serial killers. And  so it
seems very clear to me that Ares really  was a  god of war as such an entity
would be recognized by  people who were involved  in  wars all the time, and
had a really clear idea of just how stupid and ugly wars are.
     "Whereas Athena is famous for being the backer of Odysseus, who,  let's
not  forget, is the guy who comes  up with  the  idea  for the Trojan Horse.
Athena  guides  both Odysseus  and Heracles  through  their  struggles,  and
although both of these guys are excellent fighters, they  win most  of their
battles  through cunning or (less pejoratively) metis. And  although both of
them  engage  in violence  pretty  freely (Odysseus likes  to  call  himself
'sacker of cities') it's clear that they are being held up  in opposition to
the kind of mindless, raging violence associated with Ares and his offspring
Heracles even  personally  rids  the world  of a few of  Ares's psychopathic
sons. I mean, the records  aren't totally clear it's not like you can go  to
the  Thebes  County Courthouse and look up the death  certificates on  these
guys  but  it  appears  that  Heracles, backed  up by  Athena  all  the way,
personally  murders  at  least half  of the Hannibal Lecterish offspring  of
Ares.
     "So insofar as Athena is a goddess of  war, what  really do we  mean by
that? Note that  her most famous weapon  is not  her sword  but  her  shield
Aegis, and Aegis has  a gorgon's head on it, so that  anyone who attacks her
is in serious danger of  being turned  to  stone.  She's always described as
being calm and majestic, neither of  which adjectives anyone ever applied to
Ares."
     "I don't know, Enoch. Defensive versus offensive war, maybe?"
     "The distinction is overrated. Remember when I said that Athena got leg
fucked by Hephaestus?"
     "It generated a clear internal representation in my mind."
     "As a myth should! Athena/Hephaestus is sort of an interesting coupling
in that he is another technology god. Metals,  metallurgy, and fire were his
specialties the old fashioned Rust Belt stuff. So, no wonder Athena gave him
a hard on! After he  ejaculated  on Athena's thigh, she's  all eeeeeyew! and
she wipes it off and throws the rag on the ground, where it somehow combines
with the earth and generates Erichthonius. You know who Erichthonius was?"
     "No."
     "One of the first kings of Athens. You know what he was famous for?"
     "Tell me."
     "Invented the chariot and introduced the use of silver as a currency."

     "Oh, Jesus!" Randy clamps his head  between his hands and makes moaning
noises, only for a little while.
     "Now  in  many  other mythologies you can find gods that have parallels
with  Athena.  The  Sumerians  had  Enki,  the  Norse had  Loki. Loki was an
inventor  god, but psychologically he  had  more in common with Ares; he was
not only the god of technology but the god of  evil too,  the closest  thing
they had  to the Devil. Native Americans had  tricksters  creatures full  of
cunning like  Coyote and Raven in their mythologies,  but they  didn't  have
technology yet, and so  they hadn't  coupled the Trickster  with  Crafts  to
generate this hybrid Technologist god."
     "Okay," Randy says, "so obviously where you're going  with this is that
there must be  some universal pattern of events that  when filtered  through
the sensory apparatus and the neural rigs of primitive, superstitious people
always  gives rise  to internal mental representations that they identify as
gods, heroes, etc."
     "Yes. And these can be recognized across cultures, in the same way that
two persons with Root Reps  in  their mind might 'recognize' me by comparing
notes."
     "So,  Enoch, you want me to believe that these gods which aren't really
gods,  but  it's  a  nice concise word  all share  certain  things in common
precisely because the external reality that generated them is consistent and
universal across cultures."
     "That  is right.  And in the case of Trickster gods the pattern is that
cunning people tend to  attain power that  un  cunning people don't. And all
cultures are fascinated by this. Some  of  them, like many Native Americans,
basically  admire it, but never  couple it  with technological  development.
Others, like the Norse, hate it and identify it with the Devil."
     "Hence  the strange  love  hate relationship that Americans  have  with
hackers."
     "That's right."
     "Hackers are always complaining that journalists cast them as bad guys.
But you think that this ambivalence is deeper seated."
     "In some  cultures.  The  Vikings to  judge  from their mythology would
instinctively  hate  hackers.  But something  different  happened  with  the
Greeks. The Greeks liked their geeks. That's how we get Athena."
     "I'll buy that but where does the war goddess thing come in?"
     "Let's face it, Randy,  we've all  known guys like Ares. The pattern of
human behavior that caused the internal  mental representation known as Ares
to appear in the minds of the  ancient Greeks is very much with us today, in
the  form  of  terrorists,  serial  killers,  riots, pogroms, and aggressive
tinhorn dictators who turn  out to be military incompetents. And yet for all
their stupidity and  incompetence, people like  that can conquer and control
large chunks of the world if they are not resisted."
     "You must meet my friend Avi."
     "Who is going to fight them off, Randy?"
     "I'm afraid you're going to say we are."
     "Sometimes it might be  other Ares worshippers, as  when Iran and  Iraq
went to war and no one cared  who won.  But if Ares worshippers aren't going
to  end up running the whole world, someone  needs to  do violence to  them.
This isn't very  nice, but it's a  fact: civilization requires an Aegis. And
the only way to fight  the bastards off in the  end is through intelligence.
Cunning. Metis."

     "Tactical cunning, like Odysseus and the Trojan Horse, or "
     "Both that,  and technological cunning. From  time  to time there  is a
battle that is out  and out won by a new technology  like longbows at Crecy.
For most of  history those battles happen only  every few centuries you have
the chariot,  the  compound bow, gunpowder,  ironclad ships,  and so on. But
something  happens  around,  say,  the  time  that the  Monitor,  which  the
Northerners believe  to be the only ironclad warship on  earth, just happens
to run into the Merrimack, of which the Southerners believe exactly the same
thing, and they pound the hell out of each other for hours and hours. That's
as  good a point as any to identify as the moment when a spectacular rise in
military technology takes off it's  the elbow in the exponential  curve. Now
it takes the world's essentially conservative  military establishments a few
decades to really comprehend what has happened, but by the time we're in the
thick of the Second  World War, it's accepted by everyone  who  doesn't have
his head completely  up his ass that the war's  going to be won by whichever
side has the best technology. So on the German side alone we've got rockets,
jet aircraft, nerve gas, wire guided missiles. And on the Allied  side we've
got three vast efforts that  put basically every top level hacker, nerd, and
geek to  work:  the codebreaking thing, which as you know  gave  rise to the
digital  computer; the Manhattan Project, which gave us nuclear weapons; and
the Radiation  Lab, which gave us the  modern  electronics industry.  Do you
know why we won the Second World War, Randy?"
     "I think you just told me."
     "Because we built better stuff than the Germans?"
     "Isn't that what you said?"
     "But why did we build better stuff, Randy?"
     "I guess  I'm  not competent to answer, Enoch,  I  haven't studied that
period well enough."
     "Well  the short answer is that we  won because the  Germans worshipped
Ares and we worshipped Athena."
     "And  am  I  supposed to  gather  that you,  or your organization,  had
something to do with all that?"
     "Oh,  come  now,  Randy!  Let's  not  allow  this  to  degenerate  into
conspiracy theories."
     "Sorry. I'm tired."
     "So am I. Goodnight."
     And then Enoch goes to sleep. Just like that. Randy doesn't.
     To the Cryptonomicon!


     ***


     Randy is mounting a  known ciphertext attack: the  hardest kind. He has
the  ciphertext (the Arethusa intercepts) and nothing else.  He doesn't even
know the algorithm that  was  used to encrypt them. In modern cryptanalysis,
this is  unusual;  normally the algorithms  are  public knowledge.  That  is
because algorithms that have  been openly discussed  and attacked within the
academic  community tend to be  much stronger than ones that have been  kept
secret. People  who rely on keeping  their algorithms  secret are  ruined as
soon  as  that  secret gets out. But Arethusa dates from World War  II, when
people were much less canny about such things.
     This would  be a  hell  of a  lot  easier  if Randy knew  some  of  the
plaintext that is encrypted within these messages. Of course, if he knew all
of the plaintext, he wouldn't even need  to  decrypt them; breaking Arethusa
in that case would be an academic exercise.
     There is a compromise between the two extremes of, on the one hand, not
knowing any of the plaintext at all,  and, on the other, knowing all of  it.
In the Cryptonomicon that  falls under the  heading of cribs.  A crib  is an
educated guess as to what words or phrases might be present in the  message.
For example if you were decrypting  German messages  from  World War II, you
might guess that  the plaintext included the  phrase "HElL HITLER" or  "SIEG
HElL." You might pick  out a sequence of ten  characters at random  and say,
"Let's  assume that  this represented HEIL HITLER. If that is the case, then
what would it imply about the remainder of the message?"
     Randy's not expecting to find any HEILHITLERs in the Arethusa messages,
but there might be other predictable words. He's been making a list of cribs
in  his head: MANILA, certainly. WATERHOUSE,  perhaps. And now he's thinking
GOLD and BULLION.  So,  in the case  of  MANILA  he could pick  out  any six
character string  from the intercepts and say, "What if these characters are
the encrypted form of MANILA?" and then work  from there. If he were working
with an intercept only  six  characters long, then  there would be only  one
such six character segment to choose  from.  A  seven character long message
would give him two possibilities: it could be the  first six or the last six
characters. The upshot is that for  a message intercept that is n characters
long,  the number of six character long segments  is equal to (n – 5).
In the case  of a 105 character  long intercept, he will have  100 different
possible locations for the word MANILA. Actually, a hundred and one: because
it's of course possible even likely that MANILA is not in  there at all. But
each of these 100 guesses has its own set of ramifications vis  à vis all of
the other characters  in the message. What those ramifications are, exactly,
depends on what assumptions Randy is making about the underlying algorithm.
     As far as that goes: the more he thinks  about it, the more he believes
he has some good  stuff to  go on thanks to  Enoch, who  (in retrospect) has
been feeding him  some useful  clues when not spamming him through  the bars
with  theogonical  analysis.  Enoch  mentioned  that when  the  NSA  started
attacking what  later turned out to be  the fake  Arethusa  intercepts, they
were going  on  the  assumption  that they were somehow  related to  another
cryptosystem  dubbed  Azure.  And  sure  enough,   Randy  learns   from  the
Cryptonomicon that  Azure was  an  oddball system used by both the Nipponese
and the  Germans  that  employed a  mathematical  algorithm  to  generate  a
different one time  pad every day. This is awfully vague, but it helps Randy
rule out a lot. He knows for example that Arethusa isn't a rotor system like
Enigma. And he knows that if he can find two  messages that were sent on the
same day, they will probably use the same one time pad.
     What kind of mathematical algorithm was used? The contents of Grandpa's
trunk provide clues. He remembers the photograph of Grandpa  with Turing and
von Hacklheber at Princeton, where all three of them were evidently  fooling
around with zeta functions. And in the trunk were several monographs  on the
same subject.  And  the  Cryptonomicon states that  zeta functions are  even
today  being used in cryptography, as sequence generators which  is  to say,
machines  for spitting out series of pseudo random numbers, which is exactly
what a one time  pad is. Everything  points  to that Azure and  Arethusa are
siblings and that both are just implementations of zeta functions.
     The big thing standing in his way right now is that he doesn't have any
textbooks on zeta functions sitting around his jail  cell.  The contents  of
Grandpa's trunk would be an excellent resource but they are currently stored
in a room  in Chester's house. But on the other hand, Chester's rich, and he
wants to help.
     Randy  calls  for a guard  and demands to see Attorney Alejandro. Enoch
Root  goes very still for a few moments, and then shunts  directly back into
the loping, untroubled sleep of a man who is exactly where he wants to be.


     Chapter 89 SLAVES


     People smell all kinds  of ways before  they  have burned, but only one
way afterwards.  As the Army boys lead Waterhouse down into the darkness, he
sniffs cautiously, hoping he won't smell that smell.
     Mostly  it smells  like  oil, diesel, hot steel, the brimstony tang  of
burnt rubber and exploded munitions. These smells are overpoweringly strong.
He draws in a lungful of reek, blows it out. And that, of course, is when he
catches  a whiff of  barbecue and knows that this concrete coated island is,
among other things, a crematorium.
     He  is following the Army boys down black smudged tunnels bored through
a  variegated matrix of concrete, masonry, and solid  rock.  The  caves were
there  first, eaten  into  the stone by rain and  waves,  then enlarged  and
rationalized by  Spaniards with chisels, jackhammers, blasting powder.  Then
along  came the  Americans  with  bricks,  and finally  the  Nipponese  with
reinforced concrete.
     As  they work their way into the maze, they pass down some tunnels that
apparently acted like blowtorches: the walls have been scoured clean as if a
torrent had been running through it for a million years, silver pools lie on
the  floor where guns or  filing cabinets melted into puddles.  Stored  heat
still radiates from the walls, adding to the heat of the Philippine climate,
making all of them sweat even more, if that is possible.
     Other corridors, other rooms were  nothing more  than backwaters in the
river  of fire.  Looking into doorways,  Waterhouse can see  books that were
charred but not consumed, blackened papers spilling from burst cabinets "One
moment,"  he says.  His escort  spins around just in time to see  Waterhouse
ducking through  a low door into a tiny room, where something has caught his
eye.
     It's a heavy wooden cabinet, mostly transmuted into charcoal now, so it
looks like the cabinet's gone but  its shadow persists. Someone  has already
pulled one of  its doors off its hinges, allowing  black  confetti to  flood
into the  room.  The cabinet was filled  with  slips of paper, mostly burned
now, but thrusting his hand into the ash heap (slowly! Most of this place is
still hot) Waterhouse pulls out a bundle, nearly intact.
     "What kind of money is that?" the Army guy asks.
     Waterhouse pulls a bill from the top of the bundle. The top is  printed
in Japanese  characters and bears an  engraved picture of Tojo.  He flips it
over. The back is printed in English: TEN POUNDS.
     "Australian currency," Waterhouse says.
     "Don't look Australian to me," the Army guy says, glowering at Tojo.
     "If  the Nips  had won..." Waterhouse  says, and  shrugs. He throws the
stack of ten pound notes onto the ash heap of history and carries his single
copy out  into the corridor. A necklace of lightbulbs  has been strung along
the ceiling. The light glances off  what looks like pools of quicksilver  on
the floor: the remains of guns, belt  buckles, steel cabinets and doorknobs,
melted down into puddles in the holocaust, now congealed.
     The fine print on the bill says, IMPERIAL RESERVE BANK, MANILA.
     "Sir!  You  okay?"  the Army guy  says. Waterhouse  realizes he's  been
thinking for a while.
     "Carry on," he says, and stuffs the bill in his pocket.
     He was thinking about whether it was okay  to  take  some of this money
with him. It's okay  to take souvenirs, but not  to loot. So he can take the
money if it's worthless, but not if it is real money.
     Now, someone who was not so inclined to think and  ponder everything to
the nth degree would immediately see  that the money was worthless, because,
after  all,  the Japanese did  not take Australia and  never  will. So  that
money's just a souvenir, right?
     Probably right.  The money  is effectively worthless. But if Waterhouse
were  to find a real Australian ten pound note  and  read the fine print, it
would also probably bear the imprimatur of a reserve bank somewhere.
     Two  pieces  of paper, each claiming to be worth  ten pounds, each very
official  looking, each bearing the name of a  bank. One of them a worthless
souvenir and one legal tender for all debts public and private. What gives?
     What it comes down to is that people trust the claims printed on one of
those pieces of paper but don't trust the other. They believe that you could
take  the  real Australian  note to a bank in  Melbourne, slide  it over the
counter, and get silver or gold or something at least in exchange for it.
     Trust goes a long way, but at some point,  if you're going to sponsor a
stable currency, you must put up or shut up. Somewhere, you have to actually
have a shitload of gold in the basement. Around the time  of  the evacuation
from Dunkirk, when  the Brits were  looking at an imminent invasion of their
islands by the Germans, they took all of their gold reserves, loaded them on
board  some battleships and passenger liners,  and squirted them across  the
Atlantic  to banks in Toronto and Montreal. This  would have enabled them to
keep their currency afloat even if the Germans had overrun London.
     But the Japanese have  to play by the same rules  as everyone else. Oh,
sure, you  can  get a kind of submission from a conquered  people by scaring
the shit out  of them, but it doesn't work  very well  to hold  a  knife  to
someone's throat and say, "I want you to believe that this piece of paper is
worth  ten pounds  sterling."  They might say that they believe it, but they
won't really believe it. They won't act as  if they believe  it. And if they
don't  act that way, then there is no currency,  workers don't get paid (you
can enslave them, but you  still have to  pay the slavedrivers), the economy
doesn't work, you  can't extract the  natural resources that prompted you to
conquer the country in the first place. Basically, if you're going to run an
economy you have to have a currency. When someone walks into a bank with one
of your notes you have to be able to give them gold in exchange for it.
     The  Nipponese are maniacs for  planning  things  out. Waterhouse knows
this; he has been reading  their decrypted messages twelve, eighteen hours a
day for a couple of  years now, he knows their minds. He knows, as surely as
he knows how to play  a  D major  scale, that  the Nipponese must have given
thought  to  this problem of backing their  imperial currency  not just  for
Australia but New Zealand,  New Guinea,  the Philippines, Hong  Kong, China,
Indochina, Korea, Manchuria.
     How much  gold and silver would you need in order to convince that many
human beings that your paper  currency  was actually worth some thing? Where
would you put it?
     The  escort  takes  him down  a  couple  of  levels  and  finally to  a
surprisingly large room, deep down. If they are in the bowels of the island,
then  this must  be the vermiform appendix or  something. It is glob shaped,
walls smooth and ripply in  most  places, chisel gnawed where men have  seen
fit to enlarge it. The walls are still cool and so is the air.
     There  are long  tables in this  room, and at least  three  dozen empty
chairs so Waterhouse nips in tiny whiffs  of air at first, terrified that he
will smell dead people. But he doesn't.
     It  figures. They're in  the center  of the rock. There's only  one way
into  the room. No way to  get a good draft through this place  no blowtorch
effect no burning  at all, apparently. This room was bypassed. The air is as
thick as cold gravy.
     "Found forty dead in this room," the escort says.
     "Dead of what?"
     "Asphyxiation."
     "Officers?"
     "One Japanese captain. The rest were slaves."
     Before the war  started, the term "slave"  was, to Lawrence Waterhouse,
as  obsolete as "cooper" or "chandler." Now that the Nazis and the Nipponese
have revived the practice, he hears it all the time. War's weird.
     His eyes have  been adjusting to the dim  light ever since they stepped
into the chamber. There's a single 25 watt bulb for the whole cavern and the
walls absorb nearly all of the light.
     He can  see squarish things on the tables, one in front of  each chair.
When he first  came in he assumed that these were  sheets  of paper  indeed,
some of them are. But as his vision gets better he can see that most of them
are hollow frames, sprinkled with abstract patterns of round dots.
     He fumbles for his flashlight and nails the  switch. Mostly all it does
is create a  fuzzy  yellow cone of oily smoke, swirling  fatly and lazily in
front  of him. He steps  forward shooing the smoke out of his way, and bends
over the table.
     It's  an  abacus,  its  beads  still  frozen  in  the  middle  of  some
calculation. Two feet down the table is another. Then another.
     He turns to face the Army guy. "What's the plural of abacus?"
     "Beg pardon, sir?"
     "Shall we say abaci?"
     "Whatever you say, sir."
     "Were any of these abaci touched by any of your men?"
     There  is  a  flurry of  discussion. The Army guy  has  to  confer with
several enlisted men, dispatch gofers to interview people, and make a couple
of phone calls. This is a good  sign; there are a  lot of men who would just
say "no, sir," or whatever they thought Waterhouse wanted to hear, and  then
he would never  know whether  they were telling the truth. This guy seems to
understand that it's important for Waterhouse to get an honest answer.
     Waterhouse walks up and down the rows of tables with his hands  clasped
carefully behind his back, looking at the abaci.  Next to most  of them is a
sheet of paper,  or a whole  notebook,  with  a pencil  handy. These are all
covered with numbers. From place to place, he sees a Chinese character.
     "Did any of you see the bodies of these slaves?" he says to an enlisted
man.
     "Yes, sir. I helped carry 'em out."
     "Did they look like Filipinos?"
     "No, sir. They looked like regular Asiatics."
     "Chinese, Korean, something like that?"
     "Yes, sir."
     After a few minutes, the answer comes back: no one will admit to having
touched an abacus. This  chamber was  the  last part  of  the fortress to be
reached by  Americans. The bodies  of the slaves were  mostly found piled up
near the door. The body  of the Nipponese  officer was on the  bottom of the
pile. The door had been locked from  the inside. It is a metal door, and has
a  slight outward bulge, as the fire upstairs  apparently sucked all the air
out of the room in a big hurry.
     "Okay,"  Waterhouse says, "I am going to go upstairs and report back to
Brisbane.   I  am  personally   going  to  take  this  room  apart  like  an
archaeologist. Make sure that nothing is touched. Especially the abaci."


     Chapter 90 ARETHUSA


     Attorney Alejandro comes to see Randy the next day  and they swap small
talk  about the weather  and  the Philippine Basketball  Association  whilst
exchanging handwritten slips  of paper  across  the table.  Randy  gives his
lawyer  a  note saying,  "Give this note to  Chester" and then  another note
asking Chester to  go  though  that trunk  and find any old documents on the
subject of zeta functions  and get them to Randy somehow. Attorney Alejandro
gives Randy a somewhat  defensive and yet self congratulatory note itemizing
his  recent  efforts  on  Randy's  behalf,  which is probably  meant  to  be
encouraging but  which Randy finds to  be unsettlingly vague. He  had rather
expected some specific results  by this point. He reads it and looks askance
at  Attorney Alejandro, who grimaces and taps  himself on the jaw,  which is
code  for "the  Dentist"  and  which  Randy  interprets  to  mean  that said
billionaire is  interfering with whatever  Attorney  Alejandro is trying  to
accomplish. Randy hands  Attorney Alejandro another note saying, "Give  this
note to Avi"  and  then  yet another  note asking  Avi to find  out  whether
General Wing is one of the Crypt's clients.
     Then nothing happens for a week. Since Randy lacks the information that
he needs  about zeta functions, he can't  do  any  actual codebreaking  work
during this week. But he can lay the groundwork for the work he'll do later.
The Cryptonomicon  contains  numerous  hunks of  C  code intended to perform
certain  basic  cryptanalytical  operations,  but a  lot of it is  folk code
(poorly written) and anyway  needs to be translated into the more modern C++
language.  So Randy  does  that.  The  Cryptonomicon  also describes various
algorithms that will probably come  in handy, and Randy implements those  in
C++ too. It is scut work, but he has nothing else to do, and one of the good
things about this particular kind of scut work is that it acquaints you with
every little detail of the mathematics; if you don't understand the math you
can't  write  the  code.  As  the days  go  by, his  mind  turns  into  some
approximation  of  a cryptanalyst's. This  transformation is  indexed by the
slow accretion of code in his code breaking library.
     He and Enoch Root get into the habit of having conversations during and
after their meals. Both  of them  seem to have rather  involved inner  lives
that require lots of maintenance and so the rest of the day they ignore each
other. Anecdote by anecdote, Randy plots the trajectory of his life to date.
Likewise Enoch speaks vaguely of some wartime events, then about what it was
like  to  live in  postwar  England, and then  in  the U.S. in  the fifties.
Apparently he was a Catholic  priest for a  while but got kicked  out of the
Church  for some  reason;  he doesn't say why,  and Randy doesn't ask. After
that all is vague. He mentions that he began spending large amounts of  time
in  the Philippines  during the  Vietnam  War, which  fits  in with  Randy's
general hypothesis:  if it's true  that  Old  Man  Comstock had U.S.  troops
combing the  Philippine  boondocks  for the Primary,  then  Enoch would have
wanted to be around, to interfere or  at  least keep an eye on  them.  Enoch
claims he's also been gadding about trying to bring Internet stuff to China,
but to Randy this just sounds like a cover story for something else.
     It is hard not to get the  idea that Enoch  Root  and General  Wing may
have other reasons to be pissed off at each other.
     "Like,  if  I can  just play  Plato's  advocate here, what do  you mean
exactly when you talk about defending civilization?"
     "Oh, Randy, you know what I mean."
     "Yeah, but China is civilized, right? Has been for a while."
     "Yes."
     "So maybe you and General Wing are actually on the same team."
     "If the Chinese are so civilized, how come they never invent anything?"
     "What paper, gunpowder "
     "Anything in the last millennium I mean.
     "Beats me. What do you think, Enoch?"
     "It's like the Germans in the Second World War."
     "I  know  that  all  the  bright  lights  fled  Germany in the thirties
Einstein, Born "
     "And Schrödinger, and von Neumann, and others but do  you know why they
fled?"
     "Well, because they didn't like the Nazis, of course!"
     "But do you know specifically why the Nazis didn't like them?"

     "A lot of them were Jews."
     "It  goes deeper than  mere anti Semitism. Hilbert, Russell, Whitehead,
Gödel, all of  them were engaged in a monumental act of tearing  mathematics
down and beginning from scratch. But the Nazis believed that mathematics was
a heroic science whose purpose was to reduce chaos to order just as National
Socialism was supposed to do in the political sphere."
     "Okay,"  Randy says, "but what the Nazis didn't understand  was that if
you tore it down and rebuilt it, it was even more heroic than before."
     "Indeed. It led to a renaissance,"  Root says, "like in the seventeenth
century, when the Puritans tore everything to rubble  and then  slowly built
it  back up  from scratch.  Over and  over  again we see the pattern of  the
Titanomachia repeated  the old gods are thrown down, chaos  returns, but out
of the chaos, the same patterns reemerge."
     "Okay. So again you were talking about civilization?"
     "Ares always reemerges from the chaos. It will never  go away. Athenian
civilization  defends  itself  from  the  forces  of  Ares  with  metis,  or
technology. Technology  is built on science. Science is like the alchemists'
uroburos,  continually  eating its own  tail. The process of science doesn't
work unless young scientists have  the freedom  to attack and tear  down old
dogmas, to engage  in an ongoing  Titanomachia. Science flourishes where art
and free speech flourish."
     "Sounds  teleological, Enoch. Free countries get  better science, hence
superior  military  power,  hence  get  to  defend  their  freedoms.  You're
proclaiming a sort of Manifest Destiny here."
     "Well, someone's got to do it."
     "Aren't we beyond that sort of thing now?"
     "I know you're just saying that to infuriate me. Sometimes, Randy, Ares
gets  chained up in a barrel for a few years,  but he  never  goes away. The
next time he emerges,  Randy, the conflict is going  to revolve around bio ,
micro , and nanotechnology. Who's going to win?"
     "I don't know."
     "Are you not just a bit unsettled by not knowing?"

     "Look,  Enoch, I'm  trying my best  here I really am but I'm broke, and
I'm locked up in this fucking cage, all right?"
     "Oh, stop whining."
     "What about you? Suppose you go back to your yam farm, or whatever, and
one day your shovel hits something that rings, and you suddenly dig up a few
kilotons of gold? You'd invest it all in high tech weapons?"
     Root, not surprisingly, has  an answer: the gold was stolen from all of
Asia by the Nipponese, who intended to use it as backing for a currency that
would become the legal tender of the Greater East Asia Co Prosperity Sphere,
and that while it goes without  saying that those particular Nips were among
the  most  egregious buttheads in planetary  history,  some aspects of their
plan weren't such a  shitty idea. That  to  the extent life still sucks  for
many Asians, things would  get a lot  better,  for a lot  of people,  if the
continent's economy could get jerked  into the twenty first, or at least the
twentieth,  century  and  hopefully  stay  there  for  a  while  instead  of
collapsing whenever some dictator's nephew in charge of a central bank loses
control  of  his  sphincters  and  wipes  out  a  major  currency.  So maybe
stabilizing the  currency situation would be a good thing to accomplish with
a shitload of gold,  and that's the only  moral thing to do  with it  anyway
considering whom  it was  stolen from you can't just  go out  and  spend it.
Randy finds  this  answer  appropriately  sophisticated and  Jesuitical  and
eerily in sync with  what Avi has  written into the  latest edition  of  the
Epiphyte(2) Business Plan.
     After  a decent number of days has gone by, Enoch Root comes right back
and asks Randy what he'd do with a few kilotons of  gold, and Randy mentions
the Holocaust Education and Avoidance Pod. Turns out that Enoch Root already
knows about the  HEAP, has  already  downloaded various revisions of it over
the gleaming new communications  network that  Randy and  the Dentist strung
through  the  islands, thinks it's  right in line with his ideas  vis à  vis
Athena, Aegis, etc., but has any number of difficult questions and trenchant
criticisms.
     Shortly  thereafter,  Avi himself comes in  for  a visit and  says very
little,  but  does let  Randy know that,  yes,  General  Wing is one  of the
Crypt's clients. The grizzled  Chinese gentlemen  who  sat  around the table
with them in Kinakuta, and  whose mugs were secretly captured by the pinhole
camera on Randy's laptop, are among Wing's chief lieutenants.  Avi also lets
him  know that the legal pressure has eased; the Dentist has suddenly reined
in Andrew Loeb and allowed any number of legal deadlines to be extended. The
fact that Avi says nothing at all about the sunken submarine  would seem  to
imply that the salvage operation is going well, or at least going.
     Randy's still processing these pieces  of news when he receives a visit
from none other than the Dentist himself.
     "I assume that you think I had you framed," says Dr. Hubert Kepler.
     He  and Randy are alone in a room together,  but  Randy is conscious of
many aides, bodyguards,  lawyers,  and Furies or Harpies or whatever just on
the  other  side  of the nearest door.  The Dentist  seems ever  so slightly
amused, but  Randy gradually collects that he is actually quite serious. The
Dentist's upper lip is permanently arched, or  shorter than it ought to  be,
or both, with the result that his glacier white incisors are always slightly
exposed, and depending  on how the light is hitting his face he looks either
vaguely beaverish  or  else as if he's none too effectively fighting back  a
sneering grin. Even  a gentle soul like Randy cannot  gaze upon such a  face
without thinking how much better it  would look with the application of some
knuckles. From the perfection of Hubert Kepler's dentition it is possible to
infer that he had a sheltered upbringing (full time bodyguards from the time
his adult teeth erupted from  the gumline) or that his choice of careers was
motivated by a very personal interest in reconstructive oral surgery. "And I
know that you're probably not going to believe me.  But I'm here to say that
I had nothing to do with what happened at the airport."
     The Dentist now stops  and gazes at Randy for a while, by  no means one
of  those guys who feels any need to nervously fill in gaps in conversation.
And so it  is during the ensuing, lengthy pause that  Randy figures out that
the Dentist isn't grinning at  all, that  his face is simply in its state of
natural repose. Randy shudders a  bit just to think of what it must be  like
to never be able to lose this alternatively beaverish and sneering look. For
your lover to gaze on you while you're sleeping and see this. Of course,  if
the stories are  to be believed, Victoria Vigo has her own ways of  exacting
retribution, and so maybe Hubert Kepler  really is suffering  the  abuse and
humiliation that his face seems to be asking for. Randy heaves a little sigh
when he thinks of this, sensing some trace of cosmic symmetry revealed.
     Kepler is  certainly  correct in  saying  that Randy is not inclined to
believe  a  single  word  he  says.  The  only way  for Kepler to  gain  any
credibility is for him to show up in person at this jail and utter the words
face to  face, which  given all of the other things that he could  be doing,
for fun or  profit or both, at  this moment,  gives a  lot of weight to what
he's saying. It is implicit  that if the Dentist wanted  to lie,  badly  and
baldly, to Randy, he could send his lawyers around to do it for him, or just
send  him a fucking telegram, for that  matter. So either he's  telling  the
truth, or else he's lying  but it's very important to  him that Randy should
believe in his lies. Randy  cannot work out why on earth the Dentist  should
give a flying fuck  whether Randy believes in his lies  or not, which pushes
him in the direction of thinking that maybe he really is telling the truth.
     "Who framed me, then?" Randy asks, kind of rhetorically. He was just in
the middle  of doing some pretty cool  C++ coding when he got yanked out  of
his cell to have this surprise encounter with the Dentist, and is surprising
himself with just how  bored  and irritated he is. He has reverted, in other
words, back into a  pure balls to the wall nerdism rivaled only by his early
game coding days  back in Seattle.  The  sheer  depth and  involution of the
current nerdism binge  would be hard to convey to anyone. Intellectually, he
is juggling half a dozen lit torches,  Ming vases, live puppies, and running
chainsaws. In  this  frame of mind  he cannot bring  himself to  give a shit
about  the fact that  this incredibly powerful billionaire has gone to a lot
of trouble to come and  F2F with him. And  so he asks  the above question as
nothing more than  a  perfunctory gesture, the subtext being I wish you'd go
away  but  minimal standards of social  decency dictate  that I  should  say
something.  The  Dentist,  no   slouch   himself  in  the  social  ineptness
department,  comes   right  back  as  if  it  were  an  actual  request  for
information. "I can only assume  that you have somehow gotten embroiled with
someone who has a lot of influence in this  country. It appears that someone
is trying to send you a "
     "No!  Just  stop,"  Randy says. "Don't say it." Hubert  Kepler  is  now
looking  at him quizzically, so Randy continues. "The message theory doesn't
hold up."
     Kepler looks  genuinely  baffled for a  few moments, then actually does
grin a little bit. "Well, it certainly isn't an attempt to do away with you,
because "
     "Obviously," Randy says.
     "Yes. Obviously."
     There  is  another  one  of those  long  pauses; Kepler seems unsure of
himself.  Randy arches his back and stretches. "The chair in my  cell is not
what you  call  ergonomic," he says.  He holds his arms  out and wiggles the
fingers. "My carpals are going to start acting up again. I can tell."
     Randy is  looking  at  Kepler  pretty carefully  when he says this, and
there's  no  doubt  that  genuine  astonishment  is now spreading across the
Dentist's  face.  The  Dentist  only  has  one  facial  expression  (already
described)  but  it  changes  in  intensity;  it gets  more so  and less  so
depending  on his emotions. The Dentist's  expression proves he had no idea,
until now, that Randy's been allowed to have a computer in his cell.  In the
trying to figure out what  the fuck is going on department,  the computer is
the single most important datum, and Kepler didn't  even know about it until
just now. So to whatever extent the Dentist actually gives a  shit, he has a
lot of thinking to do. He excuses himself pretty soon after.
     Not  half an hour later, some twenty five year old American guy  with a
ponytail shows up and has a brief  audience with Randy. It turns out that he
works for Chester  in Seattle and has just  now  flown across the Pacific on
Chester's  personal  jet and came  here straight  from  the  airport.  He is
completely jazzed, totally in bat out of  hell mode, and cannot shut up. The
sheer amazingness of his sudden  flight across  the  ocean on  a  rich guy's
private jet  has  made a  really,  really  deep  impression  on  him and  he
obviously needs  someone to  share  it with. He has brought a "care package"
consisting  of some junk  food, a few trashy novels, the  largest bottle  of
Pepto Bismol Randy's ever  seen, a CD Walkman, and  a cubical  stack of CDs.
This guy  can't get over the battery  thing; he was  told to bring a lot  of
extra batteries, and so he did, and sure enough, between the luggage guys at
the airport and the customs inspectors, all  of the batteries disappeared en
route except for one package that he's  got in the pocket of  his long baggy
Seattle grunge boy shorts. Seattle's  full of guys like this  who  flipped a
coin when they graduated from college (heads Prague, tails Seattle) and just
showed  up  with  this  expectation that  because they were young and  smart
they'd find a job and begin making  money, and  then appallingly  enough did
exactly that. Randy can't figure out  what the world must look like to a guy
like this. He has a hard time getting rid of the guy, who  shares the common
assumption  (increasingly  annoying) that  just because Randy's in jail,  he
doesn't have a life, has nothing better to do than interface with visitors.
     When Randy gets back to his  cell, he sits  crosslegged on his bed with
the  Walkman and begins dealing out the CDs like cards  in a solitaire game.
The  selection is  pretty  reasonable:  a two disc set  of  the  Brandenburg
Concertos,  a collection  of  Bach organ fugues (nerds have  a  thing  about
Bach),  some  Louis  Armstrong,  some  Wynton  Marsalis,  and  then  various
selections from Hammerdown Systems, which is a Seattle based record label in
which Chester is a  major  investor. It is a second generation Seattle scene
record label; all of  its artists are young people who came to Seattle after
they graduated from college in  search of the  legendary Seattle music scene
and  discovered that it didn't really  exist it was  just a  couple of dozen
guys  who sat around playing  guitar in one another's  basements and  so who
were  basically  forced  to  choose  between  going  home   in  ignominy  or
fabricating the Seattle music scene  of their imagination from  whole cloth.
This  led  to the  establishment of  any  number  of  small clubs,  and  the
foundation of  many  bands,  that  were not rooted in any kind of  authentic
reality whatsoever but merely reflected the  dreams  and  aspiration of  pan
global young adults who had all flocked to Seattle on the same chimera hunt.
This second wave scene came in for a lot of abuse from those of the original
two dozen people who had not yet died of drug overdose or suicide. There was
something of a  backlash; and yet, about thirty six hours after the backlash
reached its maximum intensity, there was an antibacklash backlash from young
immigrants who asserted their right to some kind of unique cultural identity
as people who had naively come to Seattle and discovered that  there  was no
there there and that they would have to create it themselves. Fueled by that
conviction,  and  by  their own youthful libidinous  energy, and  by  a  few
cultural commentators  who found this whole scenario fetchingly post modern,
they started  a  whole  lot of second generation bands  and even a couple of
record  labels, of which  Hammerdown  Systems  is the  only one  that didn't
either go out of business or get turned into a wholly owned subsidiary of an
L.A. or New York based major label inside of six months.
     And so Chester has decided to  favor Randy with those recent Hammerdown
selections of which  he is most proud. Perversely, almost all  of these  are
from bands that are  not even in Seattle at all but in  small, prohibitively
hip college towns in North Carolina and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. But
Randy does find one  from an evidently Seattle based band called  Shekondar.
Evidently, that is, because on the back of the  CD is a blurry photograph of
several band members drinking sixteen ounce lattes in  cups bearing the logo
of a chain of coffee bars that as far as  Randy knows has not yet burst free
from the city limits of Seattle to crush everything in its path worldwide in
the now wearisomely  predictable  manner  of Seattle based  companies.  Now,
Shekondar happens  to have been  the  name of an especially foul  underworld
deity who played an important role in some of  the game scenarios that Randy
played with Avi  and Chester and the gang back  in the old days. Randy opens
up the case of the CD and notes immediately that the disc has the golden hue
of  a  master, not the traditional  silver of a mere  copy. Randy puts  that
golden  master into his Walkman  and hits the Play button and is treated  to
some  passable post  Cobain mortem material, genetically engineered to  have
nothing in common with what is traditionally thought of as the Seattle sound
and in that  sense absolutely typical  of Seattle du jour. He jumps  forward
through  a  couple more  tracks and  then rips the earphones  off his  head,
cursing,  as the  Walkman  attempts  to  translate  a stream of pure digital
information, representing something other than music, into sound. This feels
a bit like needles of dry ice jabbed into his eardrums.
     Randy moves the golden disc to  the CD ROM drive that is built into his
laptop, and checks it out. Indeed it does sport a couple of audio tracks (as
he's discovered)  but  almost  all of the  disc's capacity is  given over to
computer files. There are several  directories, or folders, each named after
one  of the documents that  was in grandfather's trunk. Within each of these
directories  is a long list of files named PAGE.001.jpeg, PAGE.002.jpeg, and
so  on. Randy starts opening them up,  using the same  net  browser software
that he  uses to read  the  Cryptonomicon, and discovers that they  are  all
scanned image  files.  Evidently Chester had a bunch  of  minions de  staple
those documents  and feed them page by page through a scanner.  At the  same
time  he must have had  graphic artists, presumably people he  knows through
Hammerdown  Systems,  hastily whipping up this fake  Shekondar album  cover.
It's even got a package insert, photographs of Shekondar in concert. What it
really  is is a parody  of the post Seattle Scene Seattle scene that  aligns
perfectly with  the  faulty notions of same  that could  be expected  in the
imagination  of a  Philippine  airport  customs inspector, who like everyone
else is fantasizing about moving to Seattle. The lead  guitarist looks  kind
of like Chester in a wig.
     All of this sneaky stuff is probably gratuitous. It probably would have
been  okay for Chester to just Fedex the fucking documents  straight  to the
jail. But Chester, sitting in his house by Lake Washington, is working  on a
set  of  assumptions  about Manila just as faulty as what half of the  world
believes about  Seattle. At least Randy gets a laugh out of it before diving
into zeta functions.
     A  word about libido: it's been  something like  three weeks for  Randy
now.  He  was  just  beginning  to  address this  situation  when  a  highly
intelligent  and perceptive  Catholic ex priest was suddenly introduced into
the  cell next  to  his  and began sleeping six  inches away from him. Since
then, masturbation per se has  been pretty much  out of the question. To the
extent Randy believes in  any god at all, he's been  praying for a nocturnal
emission. His prostate gland now  has the size and consistency of a  croquet
ball. He feels it all the time, and has begun  to think of it as his Hunk of
Burning  Love.  Randy had a spot  of  prostate  trouble  once  when  he  was
chronically drinking  too much coffee, and  it made  everything  between his
nipples and his knees hurt. The urologist explained that Little Man 'tate is
neurologically wired into just about  every  other part of your body, and he
didn't  have  to  exert  any  rhetorical  skill,  or  marshall  any detailed
arguments, in order  to make  Randy  believe  that. Randy has believed, ever
since,  that  the  ability  of  men  to  become  moronically  obsessed  with
copulation is in  some way a reflection of this wiring diagram; when you are
ready to give the external world the benefit of your genetic  material, i.e.
when the 'tate is fully loaded, even your pinkies and eyelids know about it.
     And so it might  be expected that  Randy would be thinking all the time
about America Shaftoe, his sexual target of choice, who (just to make things
a lot worse) has  probably  been spending a lot of time  in wetsuits lately.
And indeed that is where his thoughts were directed at the moment Enoch Root
was dragged in.  But since  then  it  has  become  evident that he  needs to
exercise some kind of iron mental discipline here and not think about Amy at
all. Whilst juggling  all of those chainsaws and puppies, he is also walking
a sort of intellectual tightrope, with decryption of the Arethusa intercepts
at the end of that tightrope, and as long as he keeps his eyes fixed on that
goal and just keeps putting one foot in front of the other, he'll get there.
Amy in a wetsuit is down below somewhere, no doubt trying to  be emotionally
supportive, but if he even glances in her direction he's a goner.
     What he's reading here is a set of academic papers, dating to the 1930s
and early forties, that have been heavily marked up by his grandfather,  who
went through them none too subtly gleaning anything  that could be useful on
the  cryptographic front. That it's  none  too subtle  is  a  good thing for
Randy, whose grasp  of  pure number theory  is  just  barely adequate  here.
Chester's minions had to scan not only the  fronts of these  pages  but  the
backs  too, which  were  originally  blank  but  on which Grandpa wrote many
notes. For  example there is a paper written by Alan Turing in 1937 in which
Lawrence Pritchard  Waterhouse has found some kind  of error, or  at  least,
something that Turing didn't go into  in sufficient  detail, forcing  him to
cover several pages with annotations. Randy's blood  absolutely runs cold at
the  very idea that he is being so presumptuous as to participate in such  a
colloquy. When he realizes just how deep over his head he is intellectually,
he turns off his  computer  and goes to bed and sleeps the bootless sleep of
the  depressed for  ten hours. Eventually he convinces  himself that most of
the junk in these  papers  probably has no direct relevance to Arethusa  and
that he just needs to calm down and filter the material carefully.
     Two weeks  pass. His prayers vis à vis the Hunk  of  Burning  Love  are
answered, giving him at least a couple of days of relief during which he can
admit the concept of Amy Shaftoe into his  awareness, but  only in  a really
austere and  passionless  way.  Attorney Alejandro shows  up occasionally to
tell  Randy that  things are not going  very well. Surprising obstacles have
arisen. All of the people he was  planning to bribe  have  been preemptively
counter bribed by  Someone. These meetings are tedious for Randy, who thinks
he has figured everything out. To begin with it's Wing, and not the Dentist,
who  has  caused all of this, and so  Attorney Alejandro's working on faulty
assumptions.
     Enoch, when he  called Randy on  the plane, said his old NSA  buddy was
working for one of the Crypt's clients. It seems clear now  that this client
is Wing. Consequently Wing knows that Randy has Arethusa. Wing believes that
the  Arethusa intercepts contain  information  about  the  location  of  the
Primary. He wants Randy to  decrypt those messages so that he'll know  where
to dig. Hence the whole setup with the laptop.
     All  of  Attorney  Alejandro's  efforts to spring  Randy loose will  be
unavailing until Wing  has the information that he  wants or thinks he does.
Then, all of a  sudden, the ice will break,  and Randy will  unexpectedly be
cut loose on a technicality. Randy's so  sure of this that he finds Attorney
Alejandro's visits  annoying. He would like  to explain all  of this so that
Attorney Alejandro could knock it  off with the  wild goose chase,  and  his
increasingly bleak  and  dull situation  reports on same. But then Wing, who
presumably surveils these attorney/client conferences, would know that Randy
had figured out the whole game, and Randy doesn't want Wing to know that. So
he nods through these meetings with his  lawyer  and then, for good measure,
goes back and  tries to sound convincingly bewildered  and  depressed as  he
gives Enoch Root the update.
     He  gets to the point, conceptually, where his grandfather was when  he
commenced  breaking the Arethusa messages. That is, he has  a theory in mind
now of how Arethusa worked. If he doesn't know the exact algorithm, he knows
what family  of algorithms it belongs to, and that gives him a search  space
with  many fewer dimensions than  he had before. Certainly few enough  for a
modern computer to explore. He goes on a forty eight hour hacking binge. The
nerve damage in his wrists has mounted to the point where he practically has
sparks shooting  out of  his fingertips. His doctor told  him never again to
work on these  nonergonomic keyboards. His eyes start to go out  on him too,
and he  has to  invert the  screen colors and work  with white letters on  a
black background, gradually  increasing the size of the letters as he  loses
the ability to focus. But at  last he gets something that he thinks is going
to  work,  and  he fires  it  up  and  sets  it to  running on  the Arethusa
intercepts, which live inside the computer's memory but  have never yet been
displayed upon its screen. He falls  asleep. When he  wakes up, the computer
is informing him that he's got a probable  break into  one of the  messages.
Actually,  three of  them, all  intercepted  on  4  April 1945 and hence all
encrypted using the same keystream.
     Unlike human codebreakers,  computers can't  read  English. They  can't
even recognize it. They can  crank  out  possible decrypts of  a message  at
tremendous speed but given two character strings like
     SEND HELP IMMEDIATELY
     and
     XUEBP TOAFF NMQPT
     they have no inherent  ability to  recognize the first as  a successful
decryption  of  a  message and the second  as a failure. But they  can do  a
frequency count on the letters. If  the computer finds  that E  is the  most
common, followed by T, and so on  and so forth, then  it's a  pretty  strong
indication that the text is some natural human language and not  just random
gibberish. By using  this  and  other  slightly  more  sophisticated  tests,
Randy's come up  with  a routine that should  be pretty  good at recognizing
success.  And  it's telling him this morning that 4  April  1945 is  broken.
Randy  dare  not display the decrypted messages onscreen for fear that  they
contain the information that  Wing's looking for, and so he cannot  actually
read these messages, as desperately as  he'd like to. But by using a command
called grep, which searches through text files without opening  them, he can
at least verify that the word MANILA occurs in two places.
     Based on this break, with several more days' work Randy solves Arethusa
entirely. He comes up,  in  other words,  with A(x) = K,  such that  for any
given date x he can  figure out what K, the keystream for that day would be;
and just to prove  it, he has the computer crank out K for every day in 1944
and 1945 and then use  them to decrypt the Arethusa intercepts that came  in
on those days (without displaying them) and does the frequency count on them
and verifies that it worked in each case.
     So now he has decrypted  all  of the  messages. But he cannot  actually
read  them without transmitting  their contents  to  Wing.  And  so now, the
subliminal channel comes into play.
     In  cryptospeak,  a  subliminal  channel  is  a  trick  whereby  secret
information  is subtly embedded in a stream of other stuff. Usually it means
something like  manipulating the least significant bits of an image file  to
convey  a text message. Randy's  drawn  inspiration from the  concept in his
labors here in  jail. Yes, he has  been working on decrypting Arethusa,  and
that has  involved  screwing  around  with a  tremendous number of files and
writing a lot of code.  The number of separate files he's read, created, and
edited in the last few weeks is probably in the thousands. None of them have
had title bars on their windows, and so the Van  Eck  phreakers  surveilling
him have presumably  had a terrible  time keeping track of  which  is which.
Randy can open a file by typing its title in a window and hitting the return
key,  all of which happens  so  fast  that  the surveillance people probably
don't  have  time  to  read  or  understand  what  he  has  typed  before it
disappears. This, he thinks, may have given him just a bit of leeway. He has
kept  a subliminal channel going in the  background: working on a  few other
bits of code that have nothing to do with breaking Arethusa.
     He  got  the  idea for  one of  these  when  he was paging  through the
Cryptonomicon and  discovered  an appendix  that contained a  listing of the
Morse code. Randy  knew Morse code when he was a Boy  Scout,  and learned it
again a  few years ago when he was studying for  a ham radio license, and it
doesn't take him long to  refresh his memory.  And neither does it take  him
very long to write a little  bit of code that turns his computer's space bar
into a Morse  code key, so that  he can  talk to the machine by whacking out
dots and dashes with his thumb. This might look a little conspicuous, if not
for the fact that Randy spends half of his time reading text files in little
windows on the screen, and the way you page through a text file in most UNIX
systems is by whacking  the space bar.  All he  has to  do is whack  it in a
particular  rhythm, a  detail he's relying on the surveillance guys to miss.
The results all go into a buffer that  is never displayed on the screen, and
get written out to files with completely meaningless names. So, for example,
Randy can whack out the following rhythm on his spacebar while pretending to
read a lengthy section of the Cryptonomicon:

     dash dot dot dot (pause) dot dot dash (pause) dash dot (pause) dash dot
dot (pause) dash dash dash (pause) dash dot dash
     which ought to spell out BUNDOK. He doesn't want to  open the resulting
file on  screen,  but later, while he's in  the middle of a long  series  of
other cryptic commands he can type
     grep ndo (meaningless file name) > (another meaningless file name)
     and grep will search through the first named file to see if it contains
the string "ndo" and  put  the results into the second named file, which  he
can then check quite a bit later. He can also do "grep  bun"  and "grep dok"
and if the results of all  of  these greps are  true  then he can  be pretty
confident that he has successfully coded the sequence "BUNDOK" into that one
file. In the same  way he can  code  "COORDINATES" into some other  file and
"LATITUDE" into another, and various numbers  into  others,  and  finally by
using another  command  called "cat"  he can  slowly combine  these one word
files into longer ones. All  of  these  demands the same ridiculous patience
as, say, tunneling  out of a prison with a  teaspoon, or sawing through iron
bars with a nail file. But there  comes  a point,  after he's  spent about a
month in jail, when suddenly he's able to make a window appear on the screen
that contains the following message:
     COORDINATES OF PRIMARY STORAGE LOCATIONS
     SITE BUNDOK: LATITUDE NORTH FOURTEEN DEGREES  THIRTY TWO MINUTES  . . .
LONGITUDE. EAST ONE TWO ZERO DEGREES FIFTY SIX MINUTES .
     SITE MAKATI: (etc.)
     SITE ELDORADO: (etc.)
     All of which is total bullshit that he just made  up.  The  coordinates
given for the Makati site are those of  a luxury hotel in Manila, sited at a
major intersection that used to be the site of a Nipponese military airbase.
Randy happens  to  have these numbers in his  computer because he took  them
down during  his very early days in Manila, when he was doing the GPS survey
work for siting Epiphyte's antennas. The coordinates given for SITE ELDORADO
are simply the location  of  the pile of gold bars that he and  Doug Shaftoe
went to examine,  plus a small random error factor. And those given for SITE
BUNDOK are the real  coordinates  of Golgotha plus a  couple of random error
factors that should have Wing digging a deep hole in the ground about twenty
kilometers away from the real site.
     How does Randy know  that there is a site called Golgotha, and how does
he  know  its real  coordinates?  His computer told  him  using  Morse code.
Computer keyboards have LEDs on them  that are  essentially kind of useless:
one to tell you  when NUM LOCK is  on, one for  CAPS LOCK, and  a  third one
whose purpose Randy  can't  even remember.  And for no reason other than the
general  belief  that every aspect of a computer should be under the control
of hackers, someone,  some where,  wrote some library  routines called XLEDS
that  make it possible for programmers to  turn these things  on and  off at
will. And for a month,  Randy's been writing a little program that makes use
of these routines to  output the contents of a text file in  Morse code,  by
flashing one of those LEDs. And  while all  kinds of  useless crap  has been
scrolling across  the screen of  his  computer  as camouflage, Randy's  been
hunched  over  gazing into  the  subliminal channel  of  that blinking  LED,
reading the contents  of  the decrypted  Arethusa intercepts.  One  of which
says:
     THE PRIMARY IS CODE  NAMED GOLGOTHA. COORDINATES OF THE MAIN  DRIFT ARE
AS FOLLOWS: LATITUDE NORTH (etc.)


     Chapter 91 THE BASEMENT


     At this point in history (April of 1945) the word that denotes a person
who sits and  performs arithmetical  calculations is "computer."  Waterhouse
has just found a whole room full of dead computers. Anyone in his right mind
anyone other than Waterhouse  and some  of  his odd Bletchley Park  friends,
like Turing would have taken  one look  at these computers and assumed  that
they were  the accounting department, or  something, and that  each slave in
the  room  was independently toting up figures. Waterhouse  really ought  to
remain open to this idea,  because  it is so  obvious.  But  from  the  very
beginning he has  had a  hypothesis  of  his own, much more  interesting and
peculiar.
     It  is that the slaves  were functioning,  collectively,  as cogs  in a
larger computation  machine, each  performing a small  portion of a  complex
calculation: receiving  numbers  from one computer,  doing  some arithmetic,
producing new numbers, passing them on to another computer.
     Central  Bureau is  able  to trace the identities of five  of the  dead
slaves. They came from places like Saigon,  Singapore, Manila, and Java, but
they had  in common that they were ethnic Chinese and they were shopkeepers.
Apparently the Nipponese had cast a wide net for  expert  abacus  users  and
brought  them  together,  from all  over  the Co Prosperity  Sphere, to this
island in Manila Bay.
     Lawrence  Waterhouse tracks down a computer  of his own in the ruins of
Manila, a Mr. Gu, whose  small  import/export business was destroyed by  the
war  (it is hard to run such a business when you are on an island, and every
ship  that  leaves  or  approaches  the  island  gets  sunk  by  Americans).
Waterhouse shows Mr. Gu  photos of the abaci as  they  were left by the dead
computers.  Mr.  Gu  tells  him  what  numbers  are  encoded  in  those bead
positions, as well as giving  Waterhouse a couple of days' tutorial on basic
abacus technique. The important thing learned from this is not really abacus
skills  but rather the remarkable speed and precision  with which a computer
like Mr. Gu can churn out calculations.
     At this point,  Waterhouse has reduced the problem  to pure data. About
half of it's  in his memory and the other half scattered around on his desk.
The data includes all of the scratch paper left  behind by the computers. To
match up the  numbers  on  the scratch paper with  the numbers left  on  the
abaci,  and thus to compile  a flash frozen  image of  the calculations that
were underway in that room when the apocalypse struck, is not that difficult
at  least, by the standards  of difficulty that apply during  wartime, when,
for example,  landing several thousand men and tons of equipment on a remote
island and  taking  it from heavily armed, suicidal Japanese troops with the
loss of only a few dozen lives is considered to be easy.
     From  this it  is  possible (though it approaches being  difficult)  to
generalize,  and  to figure out the underlying mathematical  algorithm  that
generated the numbers on the abaci. Waterhouse becomes familiar with some of
the  computers'  handwriting,  and develops evidence that  slips of  scratch
paper  were  being handed  from one  computer  to  another and then  to  yet
another. Some of the computers had logarithm tables at their stations, which
is  a really  important clue as to  what they were doing.  In this way he is
able to draw up a  map of  the room, with each computer's station identified
by number,  and a web of arrows interconnecting  the stations, depicting the
flow  of paper,  and  of  data.  This  helps him  visualize  the  collective
calculation as  a  whole,  and  to  reconstruct  what was going on  in  that
subterranean chamber.
     For  weeks it  comes  in  bits and pieces,  and then one evening,  some
switch  turns  on  in  Lawrence  Waterhouse's mind,  and he knows,  in  some
preconscious way, that he's about to get it. He works for twenty four hours.
By that point he has come up with a lot of evidence to support, and none  to
contradict, the  hypothesis  that this calculation  is  a variant of  a zeta
function. He naps  for six hours, gets up, and  works for another thirty. By
that  point  he's figured out  that  it  definitely  is some  kind  of  zeta
function, and he's managed to figure out several of its constants and terms.
He  almost  has it now. He sleeps for twelve hours, gets up and walks around
Manila to clear his head, goes back  to work,  and  hammers away  at it  for
thirty  six hours. This  is the  fun  part,  when big slabs  of  the puzzle,
painstakingly assembled from fragments, suddenly begin to lock together, and
the whole thing begins to make sense.
     It  all comes down to an equation  written down on one sheet of  paper.
Just looking  at it makes him  feel weirdly nostalgic, because it's the same
type of equation he used to work with back at Princeton with Alan and Rudy.
     Another pause  for sleep,  then, because he  has to be alert to  do the
final thing.
     The final thing is as follows: he goes into the  basement of a building
in Manila.  The  building  has  been  turned  into  a  signals  intelligence
headquarters by the United States  Army. He is one of some half dozen people
on the face of the planet who are allowed to enter this particular room. The
room  amounts to  a  bit  more than a quarter of the basement's total square
footage, and in fact shares the basement with several  other  rooms, some of
which are larger than it is,  and some of which are  serving as  offices for
men with higher rank  than Waterhouse wears on his uniform. But  there are a
few oddities connected with Waterhouse's room:
     (1) At any given moment, no fewer than three United  States Marines are
loitering directly in front of the door of this room, carrying pump shotguns
and other weapons optimized for close range indoor flesh shredding.
     (2) Lots of power  cables go into this room; it has its own fuse panel,
separate from the rest of the building's electrical system.
     (3) The room emits muffled, yet deafening quasimusical noises.
     (4) The room is referred to as the Basement, even though it's only part
of the  basement.  When "the Basement" is written down, it  is  capitalized.
When someone  (let's say  Lieutenant  Colonel  Earl Comstock)  is  going  to
verbalize this, he will come to a complete stop in mid sentence, so that all
of the preceding words kind of pile into each other like cars in a colliding
train. He will, in fact, bracket  "the Basement" between a  pair of full one
second long  caesuras. During the first of these, he will raise his eyebrows
and purse his  lips simultaneously, altering the entire aspect  ratio of his
face so that it  becomes strikingly elongated in the vertical dimension, and
his eyes will dart  sideways in case any Nipponese spies somehow managed  to
escape the recent apocalypse and found a place to lurk around the fringes of
his  peripheral  vision.  Then he  will  say "the"  and  then  he  will  say
"Basement," drawing out the  s and  primly articulating the t. And then will
come  another caesura during  which  he  will incline  his head towards  the
listener and  fix him with a sober, appraising look, seeming to demand  some
kind of verbal or gestural  acknowledgment from the  listener that something
appallingly significant  has just passed between  them.  And  then  he  will
continue with whatever he was saying.
     Waterhouse  nods  to the  Marines,  one of whom hauls the door open for
him.  A  really   funny  thing  happened  shortly  after  the  Basement  was
established, when it was still just  a bunch of wooden crates and a stack of
32 foot long sewer pipe segments, and the electricians were still running in
the power  lines:  Lieutenant  Colonel  Earl Comstock  tried  to  enter  the
Basement to inspect it. But  owing to a clerical  error,  Lieutenant Colonel
Earl  Comstock's  name  was not on the list, and so a  difference of opinion
ensued that  culminated with one  of the Marines  drawing his Colt  .45  and
taking the safety  off  and chambering a round, pressing the  barrel  of the
weapon directly  into  the  center  of  Comstock's  right  thigh,  and  then
reminiscing about some of  the  spectacular  femur bursting  wounds  he  had
personally witnessed on  places like Tarawa and  in general  trying  to help
Comstock visualize just what his  life would  be like, both short– and
long term, if a large piece of lead were to pass through the  middle of said
major  bone.  To  everyone's  surprise,  Comstock  was  delighted  with this
encounter, almost enchanted, and hasn't stopped  talking about it  since. Of
course, now his name's on the list.
     The Basement is filled with ETC card machines and with several racks of
equipment devoid  of  corporate  logos, inasmuch as they  were  designed and
largely  built  by  Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse in Brisbane. When  all  of
these things  are hooked together in just the right  way,  they constitute a
Digital Computer. Like  a pipe  organ, a Digital Computer is  not so  much a
machine as a meta machine that can be made into any of a number of different
machines  by changing its  internal  configuration. At  the moment, Lawrence
Pritchard  Waterhouse  is  the  only  guy in the  world who  understands the
Digital Computer  well  enough to actually do this, though  he's  training a
couple of Comstock's ETC men to do it themselves. On the day in question, he
is turning  the  Digital Computer into a  machine for  calculating  the zeta
function that he thinks is  at the core of the  cryptosystem called Azure or
Pufferfish.
     The function requires a number of inputs. One of these is a date. Azure
is  a  system  for  generating  one time pads  that  change  every day,  and
circumstantial evidence  from the room of  the dead abacus slaves tells  him
that, at  the moment  of their  death, they were working on the one time pad
for 6 August  1945, which is four months in the future. Waterhouse writes it
down in the European style (day of the month first, then month) as 06081945,
then lops off the leading zero to get 6,081,945 a pure quantity, an integer,
unmarred by decimal point,  rounding error, or any  of the other compromises
so abhorrent to number theorists. He uses  this  as one of the inputs to the
zeta  function. The zeta function requires a few other inputs too, which the
person  who designed this cryptosystem  (presumably Rudy)  was at liberty to
choose. Surmising which inputs Rudy used has occupied  much  of Waterhouse's
thoughts in the last week. He  puts  in the numbers he has guessed,  anyway,
which is a matter of converting them to binary notation and then  physically
incarnating those  ones  and  zeros on a neat  row of stainless steel toggle
switches: down for zero, up for one.
     Finally  he puts on  his artilleryman's  ear  protectors  and lets  the
Digital Computer howl through the calculation. The  room gets much hotter. A
vacuum tube  burns out,  and  then another one.  Waterhouse  replaces  them.
That's  easy because  Lieutenant  Colonel  Comstock  has  made  a  basically
infinite supply  of tubes  available  to  him quite a remarkable feat during
wartime. The  filaments  of  all  those  massed  tubes  glow redly and shine
palpable radiant heat across  the room. The smell of  hot oil rises from the
louvers  on the ETC  card  machines. The stack  of blank  cards in the input
hopper shortens mysteriously as they vanish into the machine.  Cards skitter
into the  output bin. Waterhouse pulls them out and looks at them. His heart
is pounding very hard.
     It's quiet again. The  cards have numbers on them,  nothing more.  They
just happen to be exactly the same numbers that were frozen on certain abaci
down in the room of the computer slaves.
     Lawrence  Pritchard  Waterhouse  has  just  demolished   another  enemy
cryptosystem: Azure/Pufferfish may now be mounted like a stuffed head on the
wall of the Basement. And indeed, looking at those numbers he feels the same
kind  of  letdown that  a  big game hunter must feel when  he's stalked some
legendary beast  halfway across Africa and finally  brought  it  down with a
slug through the heart, walked  up to the corpse, and  discovered that after
all it's just a  big, messy, pile of meat.  It's dirty and it's got flies on
it. Is that all there is to it? Why didn't he  solve this thing a long  time
ago? All of the old Azure/Pufferfish intercepts  can be decrypted now. He'll
have to read them, and they will turn out to be the usual numb mutterings of
giant bureaucracies trying to take over the world. He doesn't, frankly, care
anymore. He just wants to get the hell out of here and get married, play the
organ, and program his Digital  Computer,  and  hopefully get someone to pay
him a  salary to do  one or the other. But Mary's  in Brisbane and the war's
not  over  yet  we  haven't even  gotten  around  to  invading  Nippon,  for
crissakes, and conquering the place is going to take forever, with all those
plucky Nipponese women and children drilling on  soccer  fields with pointed
bamboo  staves and it's probably  going to  be something like 1955 before he
can  even get discharged from the military. The war is not over yet, and  as
long as it  goes on they will need him to stay down  here  in  the  Basement
doing more of what he just did.
     Arethusa. He still hasn't broken Arethusa.  Now that's  a cryptosystem!
He's too tired. He can't break Arethusa just now.
     What  he  really needs  is someone to  talk  to. Not about anything  in
particular. Just to talk. But there's only half a dozen people on the planet
he can really  talk to, and none of them is in the Philippines. Fortunately,
there  are  long  copper wires  running  underneath the  oceans  which  made
geographical  location irrelevant, as long as you have the right  clearance.
Waterhouse does. He gets up and leaves the Basement and goes  to have a chat
with his friend Alan.


     Chapter 92 AKIHABARA


     As Randy's plane banks into Narita, a low stratum of cloud screens  the
countryside like a silk veil. It must be Nippon: the only two colors are the
orange of the earth moving equipment and the green of the earth that has not
yet been moved. Other than that, everything  is greyscale: grey parking lots
divided  into rectangles by white lines, the rectangles occupied with black,
white, or grey cars, fading off into silvery fog  beneath a sky the color of
aviation alloy.  Nippon  is soothing, a good destination  for a  man who has
just  been  rousted  from  his jail cell, hauled  up  before a judge, tongue
lashed, driven to the airport, and expelled from the Philippines.
     The   Nipponese  look  more   American  than  Americans.  Middle  class
prosperity  is lapidary; the flow of cash  rounds and smooths a person  like
water does riverbed stones. The goal of all such persons seems to be to make
themselves cuddly and nonthreatening. The girls in particular are unbearably
precious, although perhaps Randy just thinks so because of that  troublesome
neurological hookup between his brain and Little  Man 'tate.  The old folks,
instead of  looking weathered  and  formidable, tend  to  wear sneakers  and
baseball  caps.  Black leather, studs, and handcuffs as accessories are  the
marks of the powerless lower  classes, the people who  tend to end up in the
pokey in Manila, and not of the persons who actually dominate the  world and
crush everything in their path.
     "The doors are about to  close." "The bus is leaving in five  minutes."
Nothing happens  in Nippon without a perky, breathy woman's voice giving you
a chance to brace yourself. It is safe to  say that this  is not true of the
Philippines. Randy thinks about taking a bus into Tokyo  until  he  comes to
his senses and  remembers that  he's carrying around in his head the precise
coordinates of  a mine that probably contains not less than  a thousand tons
of  gold.  He  hails a  taxi.  On the  way into  town, he  passes by a  road
accident: a tanker  truck has crossed the white line and flipped over on the
shoulder. But in Nippon, even traffic accidents have the grave  precision of
ancient Shinto rituals. White gloved cops direct traffic, moon suited rescue
workers descend from spotless  emergency vans. The taxi passes beneath Tokyo
Bay through a tunnel that was built, three decades ago, by Goto Engineering.
     Randy ends  up in a  big  old  hotel, "old"  meaning that  the physical
structure was constructed  during the fifties, when  Americans competed with
Soviets  to build the most brutalistic space age buildings  out of  the most
depressing industrial materials. And indeed  one  can easily imagine Ike and
Mamie pulling up  to the  front door  in a five  ton Lincoln Continental. Of
course the  interior has  been gutted and redone more frequently  than  many
hotels steam clean  their carpets, and so everything is perfect. Randy has a
strong  impulse to lie in bed like a sack of shit, but he is tired  of being
confined. And there are many people he could talk to on the phone, but he is
supremely  paranoid  about telephone conversations now.  Any talking that he
might do would have to be censored. Talking openly and freely is a pleasure,
talking  carefully  is work, and Randy doesn't  feel like work. He calls his
parents to tell them everything's fine, calls Chester to thank him.
     Then  he takes his  laptop downstairs and  sits in the  middle  of  the
hotel's lobby, which is ostentatiously vast by Tokyo standards; the value of
the land beneath the lobby alone probably exceeds  that of Cape Cod.  No one
can even get near him with a Van Eck antenna here, and even if they do there
will  be  plenty of interference from the nearby computers of the  concierge
desk.  He starts  ordering drinks,  alternating between  brutally  cold pale
Nipponese beer and hot tea, and writes  a  memo explaining more or less what
he has spent the last month accomplishing.
     He writes it very slowly because his hands are  practically immobilized
now by  carpal tunnel  syndrome, and any motion that  even faintly resembles
typing  causes  him  a  lot of  pain. He ends  up cadging a  pencil from the
concierge  and then using  its eraser  to punch the keys one at a time.  The
memo  begins with the word  "carpal" which is a little  code that they  have
developed  to  explain why the following text  seems unnaturally  terse  and
devoid  of capital  letters.  He's  barely  got that tapped  out  when  he's
approached by a devastatingly cute and fluttery  young thing in a kimono who
tells him that there is a staff of typists on call in the Business Center to
help  him  with this  should he desire it. Randy declines as  politely as he
knows how, which is probably not politely  enough. Kimono Girl backs away in
tiny steps, bowing and uttering truncated sub vocal hais. Randy goes back to
work with the pencil eraser. He explains, as briefly and clearly  as he can,
what he's been doing,  and what he thinks is going  on with General Wing and
Enoch Root.  He leaves  the subject  of  what the fuck's  going on  with the
Dentist open for speculation.
     When he's done,  he encrypts it and then goes up to his room to  e mail
it. He can't get over the cleanliness of his lodgings.  The sheets appear to
have been tightened around the  mattress with  turnbuckles,  then dipped  in
starch. This is the first time  in over a month that he  hasn't had the warm
wet reek of sewer gas climbing  up his nostrils  and the  ammoniacal tang of
evaporating urine stinging his eyes. Somewhere in Nippon, a  man in a  clean
white coverall stands  in  a room with  a fat hose  fed gun vomiting freshly
chopped  glass fibers slathered with polyester resin onto a curvaceous form;
peeled  off  the  form,  the  result is  bath rooms  like this one: a single
topological surface pierced in at most two or  three  places  by  drains and
nozzles.  While Randy's e mailing his memo he lets hot  water  run  into the
largest and smoothest depression in  the bathroom surface. Then he takes off
his  clothes and  climbs  into it. He never  takes baths,  but  between  the
foulness  that seems infused into his  flesh  now, and the  throbbing of his
Hunk of Burning Love, there was never a better time.
     The last few days were the worst. When Randy  finished his project, and
displayed  the bogus  results on the screen, he expected that the cell  door
would swing open immediately. That he'd walk  out onto the streets of Manila
and  that, just for extra bonus points, Amy might  even be  waiting for him.
But nothing at all  happened  for a whole  day,  and then Attorney Alejandro
came to tell him that a deal  might be possible but that it  would take some
work. And  then it turned out that  the deal was actually a pretty  bad one:
Randy was  not going to be  exonerated as such. He  was going to be deported
from  the  country  under orders  not to come back. Attorney Alejandro never
claimed  that this was a particularly good deal, but something in his manner
made it clear  that there was  no point  griping about it; The Decision  Had
Been Made at levels that were not accessible.
     He could very easily take care of the Hunk  of Burning Love problem now
that he  has privacy, but astonishes himself by electing not to. This may be
perverse;  he's not  sure.  The last month  and  a half  of  total celibacy,
relieved  only  by nocturnal  emissions at roughly  two week  intervals, has
definitely got him  in a mental space he has never been  to before,  or come
near, or even heard about. When he was in  jail he had  to  develop a fierce
mental discipline in order not to be  distracted by  thoughts of sex. He got
alarmingly good at it after a while. It's a highly unnatural approach to the
mind/body problem, pretty much the antithesis of every sixties and seventies
tinged philosophy  that he ever imbibed from his  Baby Boomer  elders. It is
the kind of thing he associates with  scary hardasses: Spartans, Victorians,
and mid twentieth century American military heroes. It has turned Randy into
something  of a  hardass in  his  approach to  hacking,  and  meanwhile,  he
suspects, it has got him  into a much more intense and passionate head space
than he's ever known when it comes to  matters of the heart. He won't really
know that until he comes face to face with Amy, which looks  like it's going
to  be a while,  since  he's just  been kicked out of the country where  she
lives and works. Just as  an  experiment, he  decides he's going to keep his
hands off of himself for now. If it makes  him  a little  tense and volatile
compared to his pathologically mellow West  Coast self,  then so be  it. One
nice thing about  being in Asia is that  tense, volatile people blend  right
in. It's not like anyone ever died from being horny.
     So he  arises from  the bath unsullied  and wraps himself  in a  vestal
white robe.  His  cell  in  Manila  did not have a  mirror. He  knew  he was
probably losing weight, but not until he climbs  out  of the bath and  gives
himself a look  in the mirror does he realize  just how much. For the  first
time  since  he  was an  adolescent, he  has  a waist,  which makes a  white
bathrobe into a quasi practical garment.
     He's  scarcely  recognizable. Before the beginning  of this  the  Third
Business Foray he kind of assumed  that, going into his mid thirties, he had
figured  out who  he was, and that he'd  keep being the way he  was forever,
except with a gradually decaying body and gradually increasing net worth. He
didn't imagine it was possible  to change so much, and he wonders where it's
going to  end.  But  this  is  nothing  more  than an  anomalous  moment  of
reflection. He shakes it off and gets back to his life.
     The Nipponese have, and have always had, a marvelous skill with graphic
images this is clear in their manga and their anime, but reaches its fullest
expressive  flower  in  safety  ideograms.  Licking  red  flames,  buildings
splitting and  falling  as the jagged earth  parts beneath them,  a  fleeing
figure  silhouetted in  a doorway, suspended in  the stroboscopic flash of a
detonation. The written materials accompanying these  images are, of course,
not understandable to Randy, and so there is  nothing for his rational  mind
to work on; the terrifying  ideograms  blaze,  fragmentary  nightmare images
popping up on walls, and in the drawers of his room's desk, whenever he lets
his guard down for a  moment.  What he can  read  is  not exactly  soothing.
Trying  to sleep,  he lies in bed,  mentally checking  the locations of  his
bedside emergency  flashlight and  the pair  of  freebie slippers  (much too
small) thoughtfully left there so that he can  sprint out of the burning and
collapsing hotel without cutting his feet to sashimi when the next magnitude
8.0 tremblor shivers the  windows out of their frames. He stares  up  at the
ceiling, which is fraught with  safety equipment whose LEDs form a glowering
red  constellation,  a  crouching  figure  known  to  the  ancient Greeks as
Ganymede, the Anally Receptive Cup  bearer, and to  the Nipponese, as Hideo,
the Plucky Disaster Relief Worker, bending over to probe  a pile  of  jagged
concrete  slabs  for anything that's squishy.  All  of this leaves  him in a
state of free floating terror. He  gets up at five in the morning, grabs two
capsules of Japanese Snack from his minibar, and leaves the hotel, following
one of the two  emergency  exit  routes that  he  has  memorized. He  starts
wandering, thinking it would  be  fun to get  lost. Getting lost  happens in
about  thirty  seconds. He  should  have  brought  his  GPS, and  marked the
latitude and longitude of the hotel.
     The latitude  and longitude of  Golgotha are expressed, in the Arethusa
intercept, in degrees, minutes, seconds, and tenths of  a second of latitude
and  longitude. A minute is a nautical mile,  a  second is  about  a hundred
feet. In the seconds figure, the Golgotha numbers have  one digit  after the
decimal point, which implies a precision of ten feet. GPS receivers can give
you that kind of precision. Randy's not so sure about the  sextants that the
Nipponese surveyors presumably used during the war. Before he left, he wrote
the  numbers down on a scrap of  paper, but he rounded off  the seconds part
and  just  expressed  it in the  form of "XX  degrees and  twenty and a half
minutes" implying a precision of a couple of thousand feet. Then he invented
three other locations in the same general vicinity,  but miles away, and put
them all into a list, with the real location  being number  two on the list.
Above  it he wrote "Who  owns these  parcels  of land?" or, in crypto speak,
WHOOW NSTHE SEPAR etc. and then spent an almost unbelievably tedious evening
synchronizing the  two decks of cards and encrypting the entire message with
the Solitaire algorithm. He gave the ciphertext and the unused deck to Enoch
Root,  then  swiped the plaintext through some of the leftover grease in his
dinner tray and left it by  the  open drain. Within the hour, a rat had come
around and eaten it.
     He wanders all  day. At first it  is just  bleak  and depressing and he
thinks he's going to give up very soon, but then he gets  into the spirit of
it,  and learns how to eat: you approach  gentlemen on streetcorners selling
little  fried octopus balls  and make neolithic grunting  noises and proffer
yen until you discover food in your hands and then you eat it.
     Through some kind of nerdish homing instinct  he finds  Akihabara,  the
electronics district, and spends a while wandering through stores looking at
all of the consumer electronics  that will  go on sale in the  States a year
from now. That's where he is when his GSM telephone rings.
     "Hello?"
     "It's me. I'm standing behind a fat yellow line."
     "Which airport?"
     "Narita."
     "Delighted to hear it. Tell your driver to take you to the Mr. Donut in
Akihabara."
     Randy's there an hour later, flipping through a phone book sized  manga
epic, when Avi  walks in. The unspoken Randy/Avi greeting protocol  dictates
that  they  hug  each  other at  this  point, so  they  do, somewhat  to the
astonishment of their fellow donut eaters  who  usually make do with bowing.
The  Mr. Donut is a three level affair jammed  into a  sliver of real estate
with approximately the  same footprint as  a  spiral staircase and is  quite
crowded with people  who took  compulsory  English in  their  excellent  and
highly competitive schools. Besides,  Randy broadcast the time  and location
of the meeting over a radio an hour ago. So as long as they are there, Randy
and  Avi talk  about  relatively innocuous things.  Then they  go out for  a
stroll. Avi knows his way around this neighborhood. He leads Randy through a
doorway and into nerdvana.
     "Many people,"  Avi explains, "do  not  know  that  the  word  normally
spelled  and  pronounced  'nirvana' can  be more  accurately  transliterated
'nirdvana'  or, arguably, 'nerdvana.' This is nerdvana. The  nucleus  around
which  Akihabara  accreted. This is  where the  pasocon otaku  go to get the
stuff they need."
     "Pasocon otaku?"

     "Personal computer nerds," Avi says.  "But as in  so many other things,
the Nipponese take it to an extreme that we barely imagine."
     The place is laid out precisely like an Asian food market: it is a maze
of narrow aisles winding among tiny stalls, barely larger than phone booths,
where merchants have their  wares  laid out for inspection. The  first thing
they  see is a wire  stall: at least  a hundred reels of different types and
gauges of wire in  gaily hued  plastic insulation. "How apropos!"  Avi says,
admiring  the display, "we need to talk about wires." It need not be  stated
that this place is a great venue for  a  conversation: the paths between the
stalls are so  narrow  that they  have  to walk in  single  file. No one can
follow them, or get close to them, here, without being ridiculously blatant.
An array  of soldering irons bristles wickedly, giving one stall the look of
a  martial  arts  store.  Coffee  can  sized  potentiometers  are stacked in
pyramids. "Tell me about wires," Randy says.
     "I don't  need to tell you  how dependent we are on submarine  cables,"
Avi says.
     " 'We' meaning the Crypt, or society in general?"
     "Both. Obviously  the  Crypt can't even function without communications
linkages to the outside world. But the Internet and everything else are just
as dependent on cables."
     A pasocon  otaku in a trench coat, holding a  plastic bowl  as shopping
cart,  hunches over a display of gleaming copper toroidal coils that look to
have  been  hand polished  by  the  owner. Finger  sized halogen  spotlights
mounted on an overhead rack emphasize their geometric perfection.
     "So?"
     "So, cables are vulnerable."
     They  wander  past  a stall  that specializes in  banana plugs, with  a
sideline  in alligator clips, arranged in colorful  rosettes around disks of
cardboard.
     "Those  cables used  to be owned  by  PTAs. Which  were  basically just
branches  of  governments. Hence they pretty  much did what governments told
them to. But the new cables going  in  today  are  owned  and controlled  by
corporations  beholden  to  no  one except  their  investors.  Puts  certain
governments in a position they don't like very much."
     "Okay,"  Randy  says,  "they  used  to  have ultimate control over  how
information flowed between countries in that they ran the  PTTs that ran the
cables."
     "Yes."
     "Now they don't."
     "That's right. There's been this big  transfer of power  that has taken
place under  their noses, without their  having foreseen it." Avi  stops  in
front of a stall that sells LEDs in all manner of bubble gum  colors, packed
into tiny  boxes  like  ripe tropical fruits in crates, and standing up from
cubes of foam like psychedelic mushrooms. He is making big transfer of power
gestures with his hands, but to Randy's increasingly  warped mind this looks
like  a man moving heavy  gold bars  from  one pile  to another. Across  the
aisle, they are  being  stared  at by  the dead eyes of  a hundred miniature
video cameras. Avi continues, "And as we've  talked about many  times, there
are many reasons why different governments might want to control the flow of
information. China might want to institute political censorship, whereas the
U.S. might  want to regulate electronic cash transfers so that they can keep
collecting taxes.  In the old days  they could ultimately do this insofar as
they owned the cables."
     "But now they can't," Randy says.
     "Now they  can't,  and this change happened very fast,  or at  least it
looked fast to government with its retarded intellectual metabolism, and now
they are way behind  the curve, and scared  and pissed off, and starting  to
lash out."
     "They are?"
     "They are."
     "In what way are they lashing out?"
     A toggle switch merchant snaps a rag over rows and columns of stainless
steel merchandise. The tip of the rag breaks the sound barrier and generates
a tiny sonic  pop that blasts a dust mote from the top of a switch. Everyone
is politely ignoring them. "Do you have any idea  what down time on a  state
of the art cable costs nowadays?"
     "Of course I  do," Randy  says. "It can  be  hundreds  of  thousands of
dollars a minute."
     "That's  right. And it takes  at least  a  couple of  days to  repair a
broken cable.  A couple  of  days. A single  break  in a cable can cost  the
companies  that own it tens  or even hundreds of millions of dollars in lost
revenue."
     "But that hasn't been that much of an issue," Randy says.  "The  cables
are plowed in so deeply now. They're only exposed in the deep ocean.
     "Yes  where  only  an  entity  with  the  naval  resources  of  a major
government could sever them."
     "Oh, shit!"
     "This is the new balance of power, Randy."
     "You can't seriously be telling me that governments are threatening  to
"
     "The Chinese  have  already  done it.  They cut  an  older  cable first
generation  optical fiber  joining Korea  to  Nippon. The cable wasn't  that
important they only did it as a warning  shot. And what's the rule of  thumb
about governments cutting submarine cables?"
     "That it's like nuclear war," Randy  says.  "Easy to start. Devastating
in its results. So no one does it."
     "But  if the  Chinese have cut  a cable, then other governments with  a
vested interest in  throttling information  flow can say,  'Hey, the Chinese
did it, we need to show that we can retaliate in kind.' "
     "Is that actually happening?"
     "No, no, no!" Avi says. They've stopped in front of the largest display
of needlenose  pliers  Randy has ever  seen. "It's  all posturing.  It's not
aimed at other  governments  so much as  at  the entrepreneurs who  own  and
operate the new cables."
     Light dawns in Randy's mind. "Such as the Dentist."
     "The  Dentist  has  put more  money  into privately  financed submarine
cables than  just about anyone. He has a minority  stake in that  cable that
the Chinese cut between Korea and Nippon. So he's trapped like a rat. He has
no choice no choice at all other than to do as he's told."
     "And who's giving the orders?"
     "I'm sure  that  the Chinese  are very big in this  they don't have any
internal  checks and balances in their government, so they are more prone to
do something that is grossly irregular like this."
     "And they obviously have the  most to  lose from unfettered information
flow."
     "Yeah. But I'm just cynical enough to suspect that a whole lot of other
governments are right behind them."
     "If that's true," Randy  says, "then everything is  completely  fucked.
Sooner or later a  cable cutting  war is going to break out. All  the cables
will get chopped through. End of story."
     "The  world  doesn't  work  that  way anymore, Randy.  Governments  get
together and negotiate. Like they did in Brussels just after Christmas. They
come up with agreements. War does not break out. Usually."
     "So there's an agreement in place?"
     Avi shrugs. "As best as I can  make out.  A balance  of power  has been
struck between the  people  who  own  navies i.e., the  people who have  the
ability  to  cut  cables with impunity and the  people  who  own and operate
cables.  Each side is afraid of what the  other  can do to it. So they  have
come  to a  genteel  understanding.  The bureaucratic  incarnation of  it is
IDTRO."
     "And the Dentist is in on it."
     "Precisely."
     "So  maybe  the  Ordo  siege  really  was ultimately  directed  by  the
government."
     "I very much doubt that Comstock ordered it," Avi says. "I think it was
the Dentist demonstrating his loyalty."
     "How about the Crypt? Is the sultan party to this understanding?"
     Avi  shrugs.  "Pragasu isn't saying much. I told  him what I  have just
told you. I laid  out  my  theory of what is going on.  He looked tolerantly
amused. He did not confirm or deny. But he did give me cause to believe that
the Crypt is still going to be up and running on schedule."
     "See,  I find  that  hard to believe,"  Randy says. "It  seems like the
Crypt is their worst nightmare."
     "Whose worst nightmare?"
     "Any government that needs to collect taxes."
     "Randy, governments will always find  ways  to collect taxes. If  worse
comes to worst, the IRS can just base everything on property taxes you can't
hide real estate in cyberspace. But keep in mind that the U.S. government is
only a part of this thing the Chinese are very big in it, too."
     "Wing!"  Randy  blurts. He and  Avi  cringe  and look  around them. The
pasocon otaku don't care. A  man  selling rainbow colored  wire ribbons eyes
them with polite curiosity, then looks away. They move out of the bazaar and
onto the  sidewalk.  It  has started to rain. A dozen nearly identical young
women in miniskirts and high heels  march in wedge formation down the center
of the street sporting huge umbrellas blazoned with the face of a video game
character.
     "Wing's digging for gold in Bundok," Randy  says. "He  thinks he  knows
where  Golgotha  is. If he finds  it, he'll  need a  really  special kind of
bank."
     "He's  not the only  guy in the world who needs  a  special bank,"  Avi
says. "Over the years, Switzerland has done a hell of a lot of business with
governments, or people connected  with governments. Why didn't Hitler invade
Switzerland? Because the Nazis couldn't have done without  it.  So the Crypt
definitely fills a niche."
     "Okay,"  Randy  says,  "so the  Crypt  will be  allowed  to  remain  in
existence."
     "It has to. The world needs it," Avi says. "And  we'll need it, when we
dig up Golgotha."
     Suddenly  Avi's got an impish  look on his face; he looks  to have shed
about ten years of age. This gets a belly laugh out of Randy, the first time
he's  really laughed in a couple of months. His mood  has  gone through some
seismic shift all of a sudden, the whole world looks different to him. "It's
not  enough  to  know where  it is.  Enoch  Root says that these hoards were
buried deep in mines, down in the  hard rock. So we're not going to get that
gold out without launching a pretty major engineering project."
     "Why do you think I'm in Tokyo?" Avi says.  "C'mon, let's get  back  to
the hotel."
     While  Avi's checking in, Randy collects his  messages  from the  front
desk, and finds a FedEx envelope waiting for him. If it was tampered with en
route, the tamperers did a good  job of covering their traces. It contains a
hand enciphered message from Enoch Root, who evidently has figured  out some
way  to get  himself sprung  from the clink with his scruples intact. It  is
several lines of  seemingly random  block letters, in groups of five.  Randy
has been carrying around a deck of cards ever since he got sprung from jail:
the prearranged key that will decipher this message. The prospect of several
hours of solitaire seems a lot less  inviting in Tokyo than it did in prison
and he knows it will take that  long to  decipher a message  as long as this
one. But he's already programmed his  laptop to play Solitaire according  to
Enoch's rules, and he's already punched in the key that is  embodied in  the
deck that Enoch gave him and stored it on a floppy disk that he keeps rubber
banded to the deck in his pocket. So he and Avi go up to Avi's room, pausing
along the way  to  collect Randy's laptop, and while Avi  sorts  through his
messages,  Randy types in the ciphertext and  gets  it  deciphered. "Enoch's
message says  that the land  above Golgotha is owned  by the  Church," Randy
mutters,  "but in order to reach it we  have to travel across  land owned by
Wing, and by some Filipinos."
     Avi doesn't appear to hear him. He's fixated on a message slip.
     "What's up?" Randy asks.
     "A little  change of plans for  tonight. I hope you  have a really good
suit with you."
     "I didn't know we had plans for tonight."
     "We were  going  to  meet with Goto Furudenendu,"  Avi says. "I sort of
figured that they were the right guys to approach about digging  a big  hole
in the ground."
     "I'm with you," Randy says. "What's the change in plan?"
     "The old man is  coming down from his retreat in Hokkaido. He wants  to
buy us dinner."
     "What old man?"
     "The founder  of  the  company, Goto  Furudenendu's father," Avi  says.
'Protegé of Douglas  MacArthur.  Multi multi multi millionaire. Golf partner
and confidant of prime ministers. An old guy by the name of Goto Dengo."


     Chapter 93 PROJECT X


     It is early in April of the  year 1945. A  middle aged  nipponese widow
feels the earth turning over, and scurries out of her paper house, fearing a
temblor.  Her house is  on the island of Kyushu, near the sea. She gazes out
over the ocean and  sees  a  black  ship  on the horizon, steaming out of  a
rising sun of its  own making: for when its guns go off the entire vessel is
shrouded in red fire for a moment.  She  hopes that the Yamato, the  world's
greatest battleship, which steamed  away over that  horizon a few  days ago,
has returned  victorious, and is firing its guns in celebration. But this is
an  American battleship  and it is dropping shells into'  the port  that the
Yamato just left, making the earth's bowels heave as if it were preparing to
throw up.
     Until  this moment, the  Nipponese  woman  has been convinced  that the
armed forces of  her nation were crushing  the  Americans,  the British, the
Dutch, and the  Chinese at every turn.  This apparition must be some kind of
bizarre suicide raid. But the black ship  stays there all  day long, heaving
ton after  ton of  dynamite into sacred soil. No airplanes come  out to bomb
it, no ships to shell it, not even a submarine to torpedo it.
     In a shocking display of bad form,  Patton has lunged across the  Rhine
ahead  of  schedule,  to the  irritation of Montgomery  who has  been making
laborious plans and preparations to do it first.
     The  German submarine U 234  is in the North Atlantic, headed  for  the
Cape of Good Hope, carrying ten containers holding twelve hundred  pounds of
uranium oxide. The uranium is bound  for Tokyo where it will be used in some
experiments, still in a preliminary phase, towards the construction of a new
and extremely powerful explosive device.
     General  Curtis LeMay's  Air  Force  has  spent much of the last  month
flying dangerously  low over Nipponese cities showering them with incendiary
devices. A quarter of Tokyo has been leveled; 83,000  people died there, and
this does not count the similar raids on Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe.
     The night  after the Osaka raid, some Marines raised a flag on Iwo Jima
and they put a picture of it in all the papers.
     Within the last few days, the Red Army, now the  most terrible force on
earth, has taken Vienna and the oil fields of  Hungary, and the Soviets have
declared that  their Neutrality  Pact with Nippon will  be allowed to expire
rather than being renewed.
     Okinawa  has just  been invaded. The  fighting  is the  worst ever. The
invasion is supported  by a vast  fleet against  which  the  Nipponese  have
launched everything they have. The Yamato came after them, her eighteen inch
guns at the ready,  carrying only enough fuel for a one  way voyage. But the
cryptanalysts of  the U.S. Navy intercepted and decrypted her orders and the
great  ship  was sent  to  the  bottom  with 2,500  men. The Nipponese  have
launched the  first  of  their Floating  Chrysanthemum assaults  against the
invasion  fleet:  clouds of kamikaze planes, human bombs,  human  torpedoes,
speedboats packed with explosives.
     To  the irritation and  bafflement  of the  German  High  Command,  the
Nipponese  government  has sent a message to them, requesting  that, in  the
event that all of Germany's European naval bases are  lost, the Kriegsmarine
should be given  orders  to continue operating with the Nipponese in the Far
East. The message is encrypted in Indigo. It is duly intercepted and read by
the Allies.
     In the United Kingdom, Dr. Alan Mathison Turing, considering the war to
be effectively finished, has long since turned his attentions away from  the
problem  of voice encryption and into the creation of thinking machines. For
about ten months ever  since the  finished Colossus Mark II was delivered to
Bletchley Park he  has had the opportunity to work with a truly programmable
computing  machine. Alan invented these machines  long  before one was  ever
built,  and has never  needed  hands on experience in order  to  think about
them, but his experiences with Colossus Mark II have helped him  to solidify
some ideas  of how the next machine ought to be designed. He thinks of it as
a  postwar machine, but that's only because he's in Europe and  hasn't  been
concerned with the problem of conquering Nippon as much as Waterhouse has.
     "I've been working on  BURY and DISINTER," says a  voice, coming out of
small holes in a  Bakelite headset clamped over Waterhouse's head. The voice
is oddly distorted, nearly obscured by white noise and a maddening buzz.
     "Please say it again?"  Lawrence says,  pressing the phones against his
ear.
     "BURY  and  DISINTER,"  says   the  voice.  "They  are,  er,   sets  of
instructions  for the machine to  execute,  to carry out certain algorithms.
They are programmes.
     "Right! Sorry, I just wasn't able to hear you the first time. Yes, I've
been working on them too," Waterhouse says.
     "The  next machine will have a memory  storage system, Lawrence, in the
form  of  sound waves traveling down a cylinder filled with mercury we stole
the idea from John Wilkins, founder of the  Royal Society, who came  up with
it  three hundred  years ago, except he  was  going to  use  air  instead of
quicksilver.  I excuse me, Lawrence,  did you  say you  had been working  on
them?"
     "I did the same thing with tubes. Valves, as you would call them."
     "Well that's all well and good for you Yanks," Alan says, "I suppose if
you are  infinitely rich you could  make a BURY/DISINTER system out of steam
locomotives, or  something, and  retain a staff  of thousands to run  around
squirting oil on the squeaky bits."
     "The   mercury  line  is   a   good  idea,"  Waterhouse  admits.  "Very
resourceful."
     "Have you actually gotten BURY and DISINTER to work with valves?"

     "Yes.  My  DISINTER works better than our shovel expeditions," Lawrence
says. "Did you ever find those silver bars you buried?"
     "No,"  Alan says  absently.  "They  are  lost. Lost in the noise of the
world."
     "You know, that was a Turing test I just gave you," Lawrence says.
     "Beg pardon?"
     "This damned machine screws  up your voice so bad I can't tell you from
Winston Churchill," Lawrence says. "So the only way I can verify it's you is
by getting you to say things that only Alan Turing could say."
     He hears Alan's sharp, high pitched laugh at the other end of the line.
It's him all right.
     "This Project X  thing  really  is  appalling," Alan  says. "Delilah is
infinitely superior. I wish you could see it for yourself. Or hear it."
     Alan is in London, in a command bunker somewhere. Lawrence is in Manila
Bay, on  the Rock, the island of Corregidor. They are joined  by a thread of
copper that goes all the way around  the  world. There are many such threads
traversing the floors of the world's oceans now, but only a few special ones
go to rooms like this. The rooms are in  Washington, London, Melbourne,  and
now, Corregidor.
     Lawrence looks through a thick glass  window into the engineer's booth,
where a  phonograph  record is  playing on  the  world's  most  precise  and
expensive turntable. This is, likewise, the most valuable record ever turned
out: it is filled  with what is intended to be perfectly random white noise.
The  noise  is electronically combined  with  the sound of Lawrence's  voice
before it is sent down the wire. Once it gets to London, the noise (which is
being read  off an identical phonograph record there) is subtracted from his
voice, and the result sent into Alan  Turing's headphones. It all depends on
the   two  phonographs   being  perfectly  synchronized.  The  only  way  to
synchronize  them  is  to  transmit that maddening  buzzing noise, a carrier
wave, along with the voice signal. If all goes well, the opposite phonograph
player can lock onto the buzz and spin its wax in lockstep.
     The phonograph record is, in other words, a one time pad. Some where in
New  York, in the  bowels of  Bell Labs, behind a locked  and  guarded  door
stenciled PROJECT X, technicians are turning  out more  of these things, the
very latest chart topping white noise. They stamp out a few copies, dispatch
them  by courier  to the Project X sites around the globe, then destroy  the
originals.
     They would not be having this conversation at all, except that a couple
of years ago  Alan went  to Greenwich  Village and worked at Bell Labs for a
few months, while Lawrence  was on Qwghlm. H.M. Government sent him there to
evaluate this Project X thing and let them know whether it was truly secure.
Alan decided that  it was then  went back  home and began working on a  much
better one, called Delilah.
     What the hell does this have to do with dead Chinese abacus slaves?
     To Lawrence,  staring through the  window at the  spinning white  noise
disk, the connection could hardly be clearer. He says, "Last I spoke to you,
you were working on generating random noise for Delilah."
     "Yes," Alan says absently. That was a long time  ago,  and  that  whole
project  has  been BURIED in his memory storage system; it will  take  him a
minute or two to DISINTER it.
     "What sorts of algorithms did you consider to create that noise?"
     There  is  another  five  second  pause,  then  Alan  launches  into  a
disquisition about mathematical functions for generating pseudorandom number
sequences.  Alan  had  a  good British  boarding school education,  and  his
utterances tend to  be well structured,  with outline form, topic sentences,
the whole bit:
     PSEUDO RANDOM NUMBERS
     I. Caveat: they aren't really  random,  of course, they just look  that
way, and that's why the pseudo
     II. Overview of the Problem
     A. It seems as if it should be easy
     B. Actually it turns out to be really hard
     C.  Consequences  of  failure: Germans  decrypt  our  secret  messages,
millions die, humanity is enslaved, world plunged into an eternal Dark Age
     D. How can you tell if a series of numbers is random
     1, 2, 3, . . .  (A list of different statistical  tests for randomness,
the advantages and disadvantages of each)
     III. A bunch of stuff that I, Alan Turing, tried
     A, B, C, .  . . (A list of different mathematical  functions that  Alan
used to  generate random numbers; how almost  all  of them  failed abjectly;
Alan's initial confidence  is replaced  by surprise, then exasperation, then
despair,  and  finally by  guarded  confidence as  he  at  last  finds  some
techniques that work)
     IV. Conclusions
     A. It's harder than it looks
     B. It's not for the unwary
     C. It can be done if you keep your wits about you
     D.  In  retrospect  a  surprisingly  interesting  mathematical  problem
deserving of further research
     When Alan finishes with this perfectly structured whirlwind tour of the
Surprising  World  of  Pseudo  Randonmess,  Lawrence  says, "How about  zeta
functions?"
     "Didn't even consider those," Alan says.
     Lawrence's  mouth  drops  open.  He  can  see his  own  semitransparent
reflection in the  window, superimposed on the  spinning phonograph,  and he
sees that he has got a sort of  mildly outraged look on his face. There must
be  something conspicuously nonrandom about the output of the zeta function,
something so  obvious to Alan that he dismissed it out of hand. But Lawrence
has never seen any such thing. He knows that Alan is smarter than he is, but
he's not used to being so desperately far behind him.
     "Why. . . why not?" he finally stammers.
     "Because of  Rudy!" Alan thunders.  "You  and I and Rudy all worked  on
that damn machine at Princeton! Rudy knows that you and I have the knowledge
to build such  a device. So it  is the first thing that he would  assume  we
would use."
     "Ah." Lawrence sighs. "But leaving that aside,  the zeta function might
still be a good way of doing it."
     "It  might," Alan  says  guardedly,  "but I  have not investigated  it.
You're not thinking of using it, are you?"
     Lawrence tells  Alan about the abaci.  Even through  the  noise and the
buzz, he  can tell that Alan is thunderstruck. There  is  a  pause while the
technicians  at each  end  flip  over  their  phonograph records.  When  the
connection is  reestablished, Alan's still  very  excited.  "Let me tell you
something more," Lawrence says.
     "Yes, go ahead."
     "You know that the Nipponese use a plethora  of different codes, and we
still have only broken some of them."
     "Yes."
     "There is an unbroken cipher system that Central Bureau calls Arethusa.
It's incredibly  rare.  Only  thirty some  Arethusa  messages have ever been
intercepted."
     "Some company code?"  Alan  asks.  This is  a good  guess;  each  major
Nipponese corporation  had  its  own code  system before the  war, and  much
effort has gone  into  stealing code books for,  and otherwise breaking, the
Mitsubishi code, to name one example.
     "We  can't  figure  out  the  sources  and  destinations   of  Arethusa
messages," Lawrence continues, "because they use  a unique site code system.
We can only guess at their  origins by using huffduff. And huffduff tells us
that most of the Arethusa messages have originated from submarines. Possibly
just a single submarine, plying the route between Europe and Southeast Asia.
We have also seen them from Sweden, from London, Buenos Aires, and Manila."
     "Buenos Aires? Sweden?"
     "Yes. And so, Alan, I took an interest in Arethusa."
     "Well, I don't blame you!"
     "The message format matches that of Azure/Pufferfish."
     "Rudy's system?"
     "Yes."
     "Nice work on that, by the way."
     "Thank  you, Alan.  As  you must have heard by now, it is based on zeta
functions.  Which  you did not even consider  using  for Delilah because you
were afraid Rudy would think of it. And this  raises the question of whether
Rudy intended us to break Azure/Pufferfish all along."
     "Yes, it does. But why would he want us to?"
     "I  have  no idea.  The old  Azure/Puffeffish messages may contain some
clues. I am having my Digital Computer generate retroactive one time pads so
that I can decrypt those messages and read them."
     "Well, then, I shall have Colossus do  the same. It is busy  just now,"
Alan  says, "working  on Fish  decrypts.  But  I don't think Hitler has much
longer to go. When he is finished, I  can probably get down to Bletchley and
decrypt those messages."
     "I'm also working on Arethusa," Lawrence says. "I'm guessing it all has
something to do with gold."
     "Why do you say that?" Alan says. But at this point the tone arm of the
phonograph reaches the  end of its spiral groove  and  lifts off the record.
Time's  up. Bell  Labs, and the might  of the  Allied governments,  did  not
install  the  Project X  network  so that  mathematicians  could  indulge in
endless chitchat about obscure functions.


     Chapter 94 LANDFALL


     The sailing ship Gertrude wheezes  into the cove shortly after sunrise,
and Bischoff cannot help but laugh. Barnacles have grown so thick around her
hull that the hull itself (he supposes) could  be removed  entirely, and the
shell of  barnacles could be outfitted with a mast and canvas, and sailed to
Tahiti.  A  hundred  yard long skein of seaweed, rooted  in those barnacles,
trails  behind her,  making a long greasy disturbance in  her wake. Her mast
has evidently been snapped off at least once. It has been replaced by a rude
jury rigged  thing, a  tree  trunk  that has  received some attention from a
drawknife but still has bark adhering to it  in places, and long dribbles of
golden sap like wax  trails  on a candle, themselves streaked with sea salt.
Her  sails are  nearly black  with dirt and mildew, and rudely patched, here
and there,  with  fat  black  stitches,  like the  flesh  of  Frankenstein's
monster.
     The men on board are scarcely in better shape. They do not  even bother
to  drop  anchor they  just run  Gertrude aground  on a coral  head  at  the
entrance to the cove, and call it a day. Most of Bischoffs crew has gathered
on the  top  of V Million, the  rocket submarine;  they think  it's the most
hilarious thing they've ever seen. But when the men on Gertrude climb into a
dinghy and begin rowing towards them, Bischoff's men remember their manners,
and stand at attention, and salute.

     Bischoff  tries to recognize them as they row closer. It takes a while.
There are  five  in all. Otto has lost  his pot belly and gone much  greyer.
Rudy is a completely different man: he has long flowing hair ponytailed down
his  back, and a surprisingly thick,  Viking  like beard,  and he appears to
have  lost his left eye somewhere along the way, because he's  got an actual
black patch over it!

     "My god," Bischoff says, "pirates!"

     The other three men he has never seen before: a Negro with dread locks;
a brown skinned, Indian looking fellow; and a red headed European.

     Rudy is watching a stingray  furling and unfurling its  meaty wings ten
meters straight down.

     "The clarity of the water is exquisite," he remarks.

     "When the Catalinas come for us, Rudy, then you  will long  for the old
northern murk," Bischoff says.

     Rudolf  von Hacklheber  swings his one eye around  to bear on Bischoff,
and allows just  a trace of amusement  to show on  his face.  "Permission to
come aboard, Captain?" Rudy asks.

     "Granted with pleasure,"  Bischoff says. The dinghy has come  alongside
the round hull of the submarine, and Bischoff's crew  unrolls  a rope ladder
to them. "Welcome to the V Million!"

     "I have heard of the V 1 and the V 2, but . .

     "We  could  not  guess how  many  other  V  weapons Hitler  might  have
invented, and so we chose a very, very large number," Bischoff says proudly.

     "But Günter, you know what the V stands for?"

     "Vergeltungswaffen," Bischoff says. "You're not thinking  about it hard
enough, Rudy."

     Otto's puzzled, and  being puzzled makes  him angry. " Vergeltung means
revenge, doesn't it?"

     "But  it  can also  mean to pay  someone back, to compensate  them,  to
reward them," says Rudy, "even to bless them. I like it very much, Günter."

     "Admiral Bischoff to you," Günter returns.
     "You are the supreme commander of the V Million – there is no one
above you?"
     Bischoff clicks his heels together sharply and holds out his right arm.
"Heil Dönitz!" he shouts.
     "What the hell are you talking about?" asks Otto.
     "Haven't you been reading the papers? Hitler killed himself  yesterday.
In Berlin. The new Führer is my personal friend Karl Dönitz."
     "Is he part of the conspiracy too?" Otto mutters.
     "I thought my dear mentor and protector Hermann Göring was  going to be
Hitler's successor," Rudy says, sounding almost crestfallen.
     "He is down in the  south somewhere," Bischoff  says, "on a diet.  Just
before Hitler took cyanide, he ordered the SS to arrest that fat bastard."
     "But in all seriousness, Günter when you boarded this U boat in Sweden,
it was called something else, and there were some Nazis on board, yes?" asks
Rudy.
     "I had completely forgotten about them." Bischoff cups his hands around
his mouth  and shouts down the  hatch  in the  top of the  sleek rounded off
conning tower. "Has anyone seen our Nazis?"
     The command echoes down the length of the U boat from sailor to sailor:
Nazis?  Nazis?  Nazis? but  somewhere it turns  into Nein! Nein!  Nein!  and
echoes back up the conning tower and out the hatch.
     Rudy climbs up V Million's  smooth  hull on bare feet. "Do you have any
citrus  fruit?"  He smiles, showing magenta craters in his  gums where teeth
might be expected.
     "Get the calamansis," Bischoff says to one of his mates. "Rudy, for you
we have the Filipino miniature limes, great piles of them, with more vitamin
C than you could ever want."
     "I doubt that," Rudy says.
     Otto  just  looks at  Bischoff reproachfully,  holding  him  personally
responsible for having been thrown together with these four  other  men  for
all of 1944 and the first  four months of 1945.  Finally he speaks: "Is that
son of a bitch Shaftoe here?"
     "That son of a bitch Shaftoe is dead," Bischoff says.
     Otto averts his glare and nods his head.
     "I  take it  you received my letter  from Buenos Aires?" asks  Rudy von
Hacklheber.
     "Mr. G. Bishop,  General  Delivery, Manila, the Philippines,"  Bischoff
recites. "Of course  I did, my friend, or else we would not have known where
to meet you. I  picked it up when I went into town to  renew my acquaintance
with Enoch Root."
     "He made it?"
     "He made it."
     "How did Shaftoe die?"
     "Gloriously, of course," Bischoff  says. "And  there is other news from
Julieta: the conspiracy has a son!  Congratulations,  Otto, you are  a grand
uncle."
     This  actually  elicits  a  smile, albeit  black  and gappy, from Otto.
"What's his name?"
     "Günter Enoch Bobby  Kivistik. Eight pounds, three ounces superb  for a
wartime baby."
     There is hand  shaking  all around. Rudy, ever debonair,  produces some
Honduran cigars to mark the occasion. He and Otto stand in the sun and smoke
cigars and drink calamansi juice.
     "We have been waiting here  for three weeks," Bischoff says. "What kept
you?"
     Otto  spits out something that is  pretty bad looking. "I am sorry that
you  have had to spend three  weeks tanning yourselves on the beach while we
have been sailing this tub of shit across the Pacific!"
     "We were  dismasted, and  lost three men, and my left eye, and  two  of
Otto's fingers,  and  a few other items, going around Cape  Horn," Rudy says
apologetically.  "Our  cigars got  a little  wet. It  played havoc  with our
schedule."
     "No matter," Bischoff says. "The gold isn't going anywhere."
     "Do we know where it is?"
     "Not exactly. But we have found one who does."
     "Clearly, we  have  much  to  discuss," Rudy  says, "but I have  to die
first. Preferably on a soft bed."
     "Fine," Bischoff says. "Is there anything that needs to be removed from
Gertrude before we  cut her throat,  and let her  barnacles pull  her to the
bottom?"
     "Sink  the bitch now, please," Otto says. "I will even stay up here and
watch."
     "First   you   must   remove   five  crates  marked  Property  of   the
Reichsmarschall ," Rudy  says. "They are down in the bilge. We  used them as
ballast."
     Otto looks  startled, and scratches his beard in  wonderment. "I forgot
those were down there." The year and  a half old  memory is slowly resolving
in  his mind's eye. "It took a whole day  to load them  in. I wanted to kill
you. My back still aches from it."
     Bischoff   says,   "Rudy  you  made   off  with   Göring's  pornography
collection?"
     "I wouldn't like his kind  of pornography," Rudy answers evenly. "These
are cultural treasures. Loot."
     "They will have been ruined by bilge water!"
     "It's all gold. Sheets of gold foil with holes in it. Impervious."
     "Rudy, we are supposed to be exporting gold from  the  Philippines, not
importing it."
     "Don't worry. I shall export it again one day."
     "By that time, we'll have money to  hire stevedores, so poor Otto won't
have to put his back out again."
     "We won't need stevedores," Rudy says. "When I  export what is on those
sheets, I'll do it on wires."
     They all  stand there on the deck  of  V  Million in the tropical  cove
watching the sun set and the flying fish leap and hearing birds  and insects
cry  and buzz from  the flowering  jungle  all around. Bischoff's  trying to
imagine wires  strung  from  here to Los Angeles, and  sheets of  gold  foil
sliding down them.  It doesn't really work. "Come below, Rudy," he says, "we
need to get some vitamin C into you."


     Chapter 95 GOTO SAMA


     Avi  meets  Randy in the  hotel lobby. He has burdened  himself  with a
square, old  fashioned briefcase that  pulls his  slender frame to one side,
giving him the asymptotic curve  of a sapling in a steady wind. He and Randy
take a taxi to Some Other Part of Tokyo Randy cannot begin to fathom how the
city is laid out  enter the lobby of a  skyscraper, and take an  elevator up
far enough that Randy's ears pop. When the doors  slide open, a maître d' is
standing  right there anticipating them with  a radiant smile  and a bow. He
leads them into a  foyer where  four men wait:  a couple of younger minions;
Goto Furudenendu; and an elderly gentleman. Randy was expecting one of these
gracile, translucent Nipponese seniors,  but  Goto Dengo is a blocky  fellow
with a white buzz cut, somewhat hunched and  collapsed with age,  which only
goes to make him seem more  compact and solid. At  first blush he seems more
like  a  retired  village  blacksmith,  or  perhaps  a master sergeant in  a
daimyo's army, than a business executive, and yet within five or ten seconds
this impression is  swallowed up  by a good suit, good manners, and  Randy's
knowledge of who  he really is. He's the only  guy  in the  place who  isn't
grinning  from ear to ear:  apparently when you  reach a certain age you are
allowed to get away with staring tunnels through other people's  skulls.  In
the manner of  many  old people,  he  looks  vaguely startled that they have
actually shown up.
     Still, he  levers  himself  up on a big, gnarled cane  and shakes their
hands firmly. His son  Furudenendu proffers a hand to  help  him to his feet
and he  shrugs it off  with  glare of mock  outrage this  transaction  looks
pretty well practiced.  There's a  brief  exchange of small  talk  that goes
right  over  Randy's head.  Then  the  two minions peel off, like a  fighter
escort  no longer  needed, and the maître d' leads Randy, Avi, and Goto père
et  fils across a totally empty restaurant twenty or thirty tables  set with
white linen and crystal to a corner table,  where waiters stand at attention
to  pull  their chairs back. This building  is of  the sheer  walls of solid
glass  school of  architecture  and so  the  windows  go floor  to  ceiling,
providing, through  a bead curtain of raindrops,  a view  of nighttime Tokyo
that stretches  over the  horizon. Menus are handed out,  printed in  French
only. Randy and Avi get the girl menus, with no  prices. Goto Dengo gets the
wine  list,  and  pores  over  it for a  good ten  minutes before grudgingly
selecting a  white  from California  and a  red  from  Burgundy.  Meanwhile,
Furudenendu  is leading them in  exceedingly pleasant  small  talk about the
Crypt.
     Randy  can't  stop  looking  at  Tokyo on the  one  hand and the  empty
restaurant on the  other. It's  like this setting was picked specifically to
remind them that the Nipponese  economy has been on  the skids for  the last
several years a situation that the  Asian currency crisis has only worsened.
He half expects to see executives dropping past the window.
     Avi ventures  to ask about various tunnels and other  stupefyingly vast
engineering  projects  that he happens  to have  noticed  around  Tokyo  and
whether  Goto  Engineering had anything to do with  them. This at least gets
the  patriarch to  glance  up momentarily from  his  wine list, but the  son
handles the inquiries, allowing as how, yes, their company did play  a small
part in those endeavors. Randy  figures  that it's not the  easiest thing in
the  world  to  engage  a  personal friend of the  late  General of the Army
Douglas MacArthur in polite chitchat; it's  not like you  can ask him if  he
caught the latest episode of Star Trek: More Time  Space Anomalies. All they
can really do is cling to Furudenendu  and let him take the lead. Goto Dengo
clears his throat like the engine of a major piece of earth moving equipment
rumbling to life,  and recommends the  Kobe beef. The sommelier comes around
with the wines and Goto Dengo interrogates him in a mixture of Nipponese and
French for a  while, until a film of sweat has broken out on the sommelier's
brow. He  samples  the wines  very carefully. The tension is explosive as he
swirls  them  around  in his  mouth,  staring  off  into  the distance.  The
sommelier seems genuinely startled, not to mention relieved, when he accepts
both of them. The subtext here would seem to be that hosting a really  first
class dinner is a not  insignificant  management  challenge, and  that  Goto
Dengo should not be  bothered with  social chatter while  he  is coping with
these responsibilities.
     At  this point Randy's  paranoia  finally kicks in: is it possible that
Goto sama  bought the  whole  restaurant out for the  evening, just to get a
little  privacy?  Were  the two  minions just  aides  with  unusually  bulky
briefcases,  or  were they  security,  sweeping the place  for  surveillance
devices? Again, subtext wise, the message seems to be that Randy and Avi are
not to worry their pretty, young little heads about these things. Goto Dengo
is  seated  underneath  a  can  light   in  the  ceiling.  His  hair  stands
perpendicularly out  from  his  head, a bristling stand  of  normal vectors,
radiating halogenically. He has a formidable number of scars on his face and
his hands,  and  Randy  suddenly realizes that he must have been in the war.
Which should've been perfectly obvious considering his age.
     Goto  Dengo inquires  about how Randy and  Avi got  into their  current
lines of work, and how they formed  their partnership. This is a  reasonable
question, but it forces them to explain the entire concept  of  fantasy role
playing games. If Randy had  known this  would happen, he  would have thrown
himself bodily through a  window instead of  taking a  seat.  But Goto Dengo
takes it pretty calmly  and instantly cross correlates it  to late  breaking
developments in  the Nipponese  game  industry,  which has  been  doing this
gradual  paradigm  shift  from arcade  to  role  playing  games with  actual
narratives;  by  the  time  he's  finished  he  makes  them  feel  not  like
lightweight nerds  but like visionary geniuses who were ten  years ahead  of
their  time. This more or less  obligates  Avi (who is taking conversational
point) to ask Goto Dengo how he got into his line of work. Both of the Gotos
try  to  laugh it off, as if how could a couple of  young American visionary
Dungeons and Dragons pioneers possibly be interested in something as trivial
as  how Goto Dengo singlehandedly  rebuilt postwar  Nippon,  but  after  Avi
displays  a  bit  of  persistence, the  patriarch  finally  shrugs and  says
something about how his pop was in the mining racket and so he's  always had
a certain knack  for  digging holes  in the ground. His English started  out
minimal and  is getting better and  better as the evening proceeds, as if he
is  slowly  dusting off substantial banks of  memory  and processing  power,
nursing them on line like tube amplifiers.
     Dinner arrives; and so everyone has to eat for a bit, and to thank Goto
sama for his excellent recommendation.  Avi gets a bit reckless and asks the
old  man  if he  might  regale  them with some  reminiscences  about Douglas
MacArthur. He  grins, as if some  secret has  been  ferreted out of him, and
says, "I met the General in the Philippines." Just like that, he's jujitsued
the topic  of  conversation  around to what everyone actually wants to  talk
about.  Randy's pulse  and  respiration ratchet up  by  a  good twenty  five
percent and all of his  senses become more acute, almost as if his ears have
popped  again,  and he loses his appetite. Everyone else seems to be sitting
up a bit straighter too,  shifting in  their chairs slightly. "Did you spend
much time in that country?" Avi asks.
     "Oh,  yes. Much time. A hundred years," says Goto  Dengo, with a rather
frosty grin. He pauses, giving everyone a chance to get good and uneasy, and
then continues, "My son tells me that you want to dig a grave there."
     "A hole," Randy ventures, after much uncomfortableness.
     "Excuse  me.  My  English   is  rusty,"  says  Goto  Dengo,  none   too
convincingly.
     Avi  says,  "What we have  in mind would  be  a major excavation by our
standards. But probably not by yours."
     Goto  Dengo chuckles. "That all  depends on the circumstances. Permits.
Transportation issues. The  Crypt  was  a  big excavation,  but it was easy,
because the sultan was supporting it."
     "I must emphasize that the work we  are considering is still in  a very
early planning  phase," Avi  says.  "I regret to say  I can't give you  good
information about the logistical issues."
     Goto  Dengo comes  this close  to rolling his eyes.  "I understand," he
says  with  a  dismissive wave of the  hand. "We will  not talk  about these
things this evening."
     This  produces  a  really  awkward  pause,  while  Randy  and  Avi  ask
themselves what  the hell are  we going to talk about then? "Very well," Avi
says,  sort  of  weakly  lobbing  the  ball back  in  Goto  Dengo's  general
direction.
     Furudenendo  steps in.  "There are  many people who  dig  holes in  the
Philippines," he explains with a big knowing wink.
     "Ah!" Randy  says. "I  have met some  of  the  people  you  are talking
about!" This produces a general outburst of laughter around the table, which
is none the less sincere for being tense.
     "You understand, then," says Furudenendo, "that we  would have to study
a joint venture very  carefully." Even Randy easily  translates  this to: we
will participate in your loony tunes treasure hunt when hell freezes over.

     "Please!" Randy says, "Goto Engineering is a distinguished company. Top
of  the  line.  You have much  better things to  do  than to gamble on joint
ventures.  We would never propose such a thing. We would  be able to pay for
your services up front."
     "Ah!" The  Gotos  look  at each other  significantly.  "You  have a new
investor?" We  know you are broke. Avi grins. "We  have new resources." This
leaves the Gotos nonplussed. "If I  may," Avi says. He heaves his  briefcase
up off the floor and onto his lap, flips the latches open, and reaches  into
it with both hands. Then he performs a maneuver that, in a bodybuilding gym,
would be called a  barbell curl, and  lifts  a brick  of solid gold into the
light.
     The  faces of Goto Dengo and Goto Furudenendo  are transmuted to stone.
Avi holds  the  bar up  for a  few moments,  then lowers  it  back  into his
briefcase.
     Eventually, Furudenendo scoots his  chair back a couple of  centimeters
and rotates it slightly toward his  father, basically excusing himself  from
the  conversation.  Goto  Dengo  eats  dinner  and  drinks wine calmly,  and
silently, for a very, very long fifteen or twenty minutes. Finally, he looks
across the table at Randy and says, "Where do you want to dig?"
     "The site is in mountains south of Laguna de Bay "
     "Yes, you  already  told my son that. But that  is a large area of boon
docks. Many holes have been dug there. All worthless."
     "We have better information."
     "Some old Filipino has sold you his memories?"
     "Better than that," Randy says. "We have a latitude and longitude."
     "To what degree of precision?"
     "Tenths of a second."
     This occasions another  pause. Furudenendo tries  to say  something  in
Nipponese,  but his father  cuts  him  off gruffly.  Goto Dengo finishes his
dinner and crosses his fork  and  knife on the plate. A waiter's there  five
seconds later  to  clear the  table. Goto  Dengo  says something to him that
sends him fleeing back into the kitchen. They have essentially a whole floor
of the skyscraper to themselves now. Goto Dengo utters something to his son,
who produces  a fountain pen and two  business cards. Furudenendo  hands the
pen, and one card, to his father, and the other card to Randy. "Let's play a
little game," Goto Dengo says. "You have a pen?"
     "Yes," Randy says.
     "I am going to  write down a latitude and longitude," Goto  Dengo says,
"but only the seconds portion.  No degrees  and no minutes. Only the seconds
part. You understand?"
     "Yes."
     "The information is useless by itself. You agree?"
     "Yes."
     "Then there is no risk for you to write down the same."
     "It's true."
     "Then we will exchange cards. Agreed?"
     "I agree."
     "Very well."  Goto  Dengo  starts  writing. Randy takes a pen from  his
pocket and  jots  down  the seconds  and tenths of a second: latitude  35.2,
longitude  59.0. When he's  done,  Goto  Dengo's looking at him expectantly.
Randy holds out his card, numbers facing down, and Goto Dengo holds out his.
They exchange  them with the small bow that is obligatory around here. Randy
cups Goto sama's card in his palm and turns it into the light. It says
     35.2/59.0
     No one  says anything for ten  minutes. It's a  measure of  how stunned
Randy is  that he doesn't realize, for a long time, that Goto Dengo is  just
as stunned  as he is. Avi and  Furudenendu are  the only people at the table
whose minds  are still functioning, and they spend the whole time looking at
each other uncertainly, neither one really understanding what's going on.
     Finally  Avi  says something  that Randy doesn't  hear. He nudges Randy
firmly and says it again: "I'm going to the lavatory."
     Randy watches him  go, counts to ten, and says, "Excuse me." He follows
Avi  to  the  men's washroom: black  polished stone, thick white towels, Avi
standing there with his arms crossed. "He knows," Randy says.
     "I don't believe it."
     Randy shrugs. "What can I say? He knows."
     "If he knows, everyone knows. Our  security  broke down somewhere along
the line."
     "Everyone doesn't know," Randy says. "If everyone knew,  all hell would
be breaking loose down there, and Enoch would have gotten word to us.
     "Then how can he know?"
     "Avi," Randy  says,  "he  must  be the  one  who buried it."  Avi looks
outraged. "Are you shitting me?"
     "You have a better theory?"
     "I thought all the people who buried the stuff were killed."
     "It's fair to say that he's a survivor. Wouldn't you agree?"
     Ten minutes later they return to  the table. Goto Dengo has allowed the
restaurant staff back into the  room,  and dessert  menus have been  brought
out. Weirdly, the old man has gone back into polite chitchat mode, and Randy
gradually figures out that he's  trying to work out how the hell Randy knows
what  he  knows. Randy  mentions,  offhandedly,  that  his grandfather was a
cryptanalyst in Manila in  1945. Goto Dengo sighs, visibly, with  relief and
cheers up  somewhat.  Then  it's more completely  meaningless  chatter until
postprandial coffee  has  been served,  at which point the  patriarch  leans
forward to make a point. "Before you sip look!"
     Randy and Avi look into their cups. A weirdly glittering  layer of scum
is floating atop their coffee.
     "It  is gold," Furudenendu  explains. Both of the Gotos laugh.  "During
the eighties, when Nippon  had so much  money, this was the  fashion: coffee
with gold dust. Now it is out of fashion. Too ostentatious. But you go ahead
and drink."
     Randy  and Avi  do a bit nervously. The gold dust coats their  tongues,
then washes away down their throats.
     "Tell me what you think," Goto Dengo demands.
     "It's stupid," Randy says.
     "Yes." Goto Dengo  nods  solemnly. "It is stupid. So tell me, then: why
do you want to dig up more of it?"
     "We're businessmen," Avi says. "We make money. Gold is worth money."
     "Gold is the corpse of value," says Goto Dengo.
     "I don't understand."
     "If you  want to understand, look out the window!" says the  patriarch,
and  sweeps his cane around in an arc that encompasses half of Tokyo. "Fifty
years ago, it was flames. Now it  is lights! Do you understand?  The leaders
of Nippon were stupid. They took all of the gold  out of Tokyo and buried it
in holes in the  ground  in the  Philippines! Because they thought  that The
General would march into Tokyo  and steal it.  But The General  didn't  care
about the gold. He understood that the real gold is here " he points to  his
head " in the intelligence of the people, and here " he  holds out his hands
" in the work that they do. Getting rid of our gold was the best  thing that
ever happened to Nippon. It made us rich. Receiving  that gold was the worst
thing that happened to the Philippines. It made them poor."
     "Then let's get it out of the Philippines," Avi says, "so that they too
can have the opportunity to become rich."
     "Ah! Now you are making sense," says Goto Dengo. "You are going to take
the gold out and dump it into the ocean, then?"
     "No," Avi says, with a nervous chuckle.
     Goto Dengo  raises his eyebrows. "Oh. So, you wish  to  become  rich as
part of the bargain?"
     At this point  Avi does  something  that Randy's never seen him do,  or
even come close  to doing, before: he  gets pissed off. He doesn't  flip the
table over, or raise his voice. But his face  turns red,  the muscles of his
head  bulge  as  he  clenches his teeth together, and  he  breathes  heavily
through his nose for a while. The Gotos both seem to be rather impressed  by
this, and so  no one says anything for  a long time, giving Avi  a chance to
regain  his cool.  It  seems  as though Avi can't bring  words forth, and so
finally  he takes his wallet  out of his pocket  and flips  through it until
he's found a black and white photograph, which he pulls from its transparent
sleeve  and  hands across  to Goto Dengo.  It's  a family  portrait: father,
mother, four  kids, all with a mid  twentieth  century, Middle European look
about them. "My great uncle," Avi says, "and  his family. Warsaw,  1937. His
teeth are down in that hole. You buried my uncle's teeth!"
     Goto  Dengo looks up into Avi's eyes, neither angry nor defensive. Just
sad. And this seems to have an effect on Avi, who softens,  exhales finally,
breaks eye contact.
     "I  know  you probably had no choice," Avi  says. "But  that's what you
did.  I never knew him, or any of my other relatives who died in  the Shoah.
But I would gladly dump every  ounce of that  gold  into the ocean,  just to
give them a decent burial. That's what I'll do  if  you make it a condition.
But what I  was  really planning  on doing  was using it  to  make sure that
nothing of the kind ever happens again."
     Goto  Dengo ponders this  for a while, looking stonefaced out  over the
lights of Tokyo. Then he unhooks  his cane from the edge  of the table, jams
it into  the floor, and shoves himself to  his feet.  He  turns towards Avi,
straightens his posture, and then  bows. It's the  deepest  bow Randy's ever
seen. Eventually he straightens up and retakes his seat.
     The tension has been broken. Everyone's relaxed, not to say exhausted.
     "General Wing is very  close to finding Golgotha," Randy says, after  a
decent interval has ticked by. "It's him or us."
     "It's us, then," says Goto Dengo.


     Chapter 96 R.I.P.


     The  clamor  of the  Marines'  rifles  echoes through the cemetery, the
sharp reports pinging from tombstone to tombstone like pachinko  balls. Goto
Dengo bends down  and  thrusts his hand  into a pile of loose dirt. It feels
good.  He scoops up a handful of the stuff, it trickles out from between his
fingers  and  trails down  the  legs  of  his crisp new United  States  Army
uniform, getting caught in the trouser cuffs. He steps to the sharp brink of
the  grave and  pours the earth from his hand onto the General  Issue coffin
containing Bobby  Shaftoe. He  crosses  himself, staring  at the coffin  lid
stained with  dirt, and then, with some  effort,  lifts  his head up  again,
towards  the sunlit world of  things that  live.  Other than a few blades of
grass and some mosquitoes, the first living thing that he  sees is a pair of
feet in sandals made from old jeep tires, supporting a white man wrapped  in
a shapeless brown garment  of rough  fabric with  a large hood  on  the top.
Staring out from the shade of that hood is  the supernaturally weird looking
(in  that he has  a red beard and grey hair) head of  Enoch Root a character
who keeps bumping into Goto  Dengo as he  goes around Manila trying to carry
out his duties. Goto Dengo is seized and paralyzed by his wild stare.
     They stroll together across the burgeoning cemetery.
     "You have something you would like to tell me?" Enoch says.
     Goto Dengo turns his head to  look into Root's eyes. "I  was  told that
the confessional was a place of perfect secrets."
     "It is," Enoch says.
     "Then, how did you know?"
     "Know what?"
     "I  think your  Church brothers  told you something that you should not
know."
     "Put this idea out of  your  mind. The secrecy of the  confessional has
not  been violated.  I  did  not  talk to  the priest  who took  your  first
confession, and if I did, he would tell me nothing."
     "Then how do you know?" Goto Dengo asks.
     "I have  several ways of  knowing things. One  thing I know is that you
are a digger. A man who engineers big holes in the ground.  Your  friend and
mine, Father Ferdinand, told me that."
     "Yes."
     "The  Nipponese went to much trouble to bring you here. They  would not
have done this unless they wanted you to dig an important hole."
     "There are many reasons they might have done this."
     "Yes," Enoch Root says, "but only a few that make sense."
     They stroll silently for a while. Root's  feet kick the hem of his robe
out with each step.  "I  know other things," he continues. "South of here, a
man brought diamonds to a  priest. This man said  he had attacked a traveler
on the road, and taken from him a small fortune in diamonds. The victim died
of his injuries. The murderer gave the diamonds to the Church as penance."
     "Was the victim Filipino or Chinese?" asks Goto Dengo.
     Enoch Root stares at him coolly. "A Chinese man knows of this?"
     More strolling. Root  will  gladly  walk  from one  end of Luzon to the
other if that's how long it takes for the words to come out of Goto Dengo.
     "I have information from  Europe  too," Root  says.  "I  know  that the
Germans have been hiding treasure. It is widely known that General Yamashita
is burying more war gold in the northern mountains even as we speak."
     "What do you  want  from  me?"  Goto Dengo asks. There's no preliminary
moistening of the eyeballs, the tears leap out of him and run down his face.
"I came to the Church because of some words."
     "Words?"
     "This  is Jesus  Christ  who taketh away the sins  of the world,"  Goto
Dengo says. "Enoch Root, no one knows the sins of the world better  than me.
I have  swum in those sins, drowned in them,  burned in them, dug in them. I
was like a man swimming down  a  long  cave  filled  with  black cold water.
Looking  up, I saw a light  above me, and swam towards it. I  only wanted to
find the surface, to  breathe  air again. Still immersed  in the sins of the
world, at least I could breathe. This is what I am now."
     Root nods and waits.
     "I  had  to confess. The things  that I  saw  the things I  did were so
terrible. I had  to  purify  myself.  That  is  what  I  did,  in  my  first
confession." Goto Dengo heaves a deep, shuddering sigh. "It was a very, very
long confession. But it is finished. Jesus has taken away my sins, or so the
priest said."
     "Good. I'm glad it helped you."
     "Now, you want me to speak of these things again?"
     "There are others," says Enoch Root. He stops in his tracks, and turns,
and nods.  Silhouetted on the top of a rise, on  the other  side of  several
thousand  white  tombstones, are  two men  in  civilian clothes.  They  look
Western, but that is all Goto Dengo can tell from here.
     "Who are they?"
     "Men  who  have been to hell and come  back, as you  did. Men  who know
about the gold."
     "What do they want?"
     "To dig up the gold."
     Nausea wraps around Goto Dengo like a wet bedsheet. "They would have to
tunnel down through a thousand fresh corpses. It is a grave."
     "The whole world is a  grave,"  says Enoch Root. "Graves can be  moved,
corpses reinterred. Decently."
     "And then? If they got the gold?"
     "The world  is  bleeding.  It needs medicine and  bandages. These  cost
money."
     "But before this war, all of this gold  was out  here, in the sunlight.
In the world.  Yet look what happened." Goto Dengo shudders. "Wealth that is
stored up in gold is dead. It rots and stinks. True wealth is made every day
by men getting up out  of  bed and going to work. By school  children  doing
their  lessons, improving  their minds. Tell  those men  that  if they  want
wealth, they should  come to  Nippon with  me  after  the war. We will start
businesses and build buildings."
     "Spoken  like  a  true  Nipponese,"  Enoch says  bitterly.  "You  never
change."
     "Please make me understand what you are saying."
     "What of the man who cannot get out of bed and work,  because he has no
legs? What of the widow who  has no husband  to work, no children to support
her? What of children who cannot improve their minds because they lack books
and schoolhouses?"
     "You can shower gold on them," Goto Dengo says. "Soon  enough,  it will
all be gone."
     "Yes. But some of it will be gone into books and bandages."
     Goto Dengo does not have  a rejoinder for this. He is not outsmarted so
much as sad and tired. "What  do you want? You think I should give  the gold
to the Church?"
     Enoch Root  looks mildly  taken  aback, as if  the  idea hadn't  really
occurred to him before. "You could  do worse, I suppose. The Church  has two
thousand years of experience in using its resources to help the poor. It has
not always  been  perfect.  But is  has  built its  share of  hospitals  and
schools."
     Goto Dengo  shakes his head. "I have only been in your Church for a few
weeks and already I have many doubts about it. It has  been a good thing for
me. But to give it so much gold I am not sure if this is a good idea."
     "Don't  look  at  me  as  if you  expect  me  to  defend  the  Church's
imperfections,"  says  Enoch   Root.  "They  have  kicked   me  out  of  the
priesthood."
     "Then what shall I do?"
     "Perhaps give it to the Church with conditions."
     "What?"
     "You can  stipulate  that it  only be used to educate children,  if you
choose."
     Goto Dengo says, "Educated men created this cemetery."
     "Then choose some other condition."
     "My condition is  that  if that gold ever  comes  out of the ground, it
should be used so that we do not have any more wars like this one."
     "And how should we accomplish such a thing, Goto Dengo?"
     Goto Dengo sighs. "You put a big weight on my shoulders!"
     "No. I did not put  the weight on  your  shoulders. It has  always been
there."  Enoch Root  stares  mercilessly into Goto  Dengo's tormented  face.
"Jesus takes away the sins of the  world, but  the world remains: a physical
reality on which we are doomed to live  until death takes us away  from  it.
You have confessed, and  you  have been forgiven, and so the greater part of
your burden has been taken away by grace. But  the gold is still there, in a
hole in the  ground. Did  you think that the gold all turned into dirt  when
you  swallowed  the  bread and  the  wine?  That is  not  what  we  mean  by
transubstantiation." Enoch Root turns his back and walks away,  leaving Goto
Dengo alone in the bright avenues of the city of the dead.


     Chapter 97 RETURN


     "I SHALL RETURN" wrote Randy in his first e  mail message to Amy  after
he got  to Tokyo. Returning  to the  Philippines is not a very  good idea at
all, and probably not the kind of thing that the old mellow Randy would have
even considered.  But here he is  on  a beach in the Sultanate  of Kinakuta,
down below Tom Howard's  personal citadel, dipped in sunblock and Dramamined
to the gills, getting ready to return. Reckoning  that the goatee would make
him easy  to  identify, he  has shaved  it  off, and reckoning that hair  is
useless where he's  headed (the jungle, jail, and  Davy Jones's Locker being
the three most  likely possibilities), has  run a buzzer over  his head  and
shorn  himself  down to about an eighth of an inch  all around. This in turn
has necessitated finding a hat, to prevent radiation burns of the skull, and
the only hat in Tom Howard's house that fits Randy is an outback number that
some cephalomegalic  Aussie contractor left  behind there, evidently because
its  fragrance had begun to attract nocturnal rodents with  a proclivity for
aimless gnawing.
     A pamboat is drawn up  on the beach, and a couple of families' worth of
badjao kids are tear assing around, exactly like kids  at a rest area on the
interstate  who  know  that in ten  minutes  they have to get  back into the
Winnebago.  The  boat's  main  hull is carved from a single rainforest tree,
fifty feet  long  if it's an  inch, narrow  enough at its widest  point that
Randy  could sit  in the middle and touch  both gunwales with out  stretched
hands.  Most  of  the hull's shaded  under a thatched roof  of palm  fronds,
almost all grey brown from age and salt spray,  though in one place an older
woman is patching it with fresh  greens  and plastic  twine. On each  side a
narrow bamboo outrigger is connected  to the hull by bamboo poles. There's a
sort of bridge that sticks way out over the bow, painted with bright red and
green and yellow curlicues, like  chains of vortices thrown  off in the wake
of a boat and reflecting the colors of a tropical sunset.
     Speaking  of which, the sun's going down right now, and they are making
preparations to  bring  the final load, of gold up out  of the  hull of  the
pamboat.  The land  drops so precipitously towards the water that there's no
road access  to  the beach, which  is  probably a good thing since they want
this to be  as private as possible. But Tom Howard had a lot of heavy  stuff
shipped in here when he was constructing his house, and  so he already has a
short section of narrow  gauge railway in place. This sounds more impressive
than it is:  a  pair  of steel I beams,  already rusting, bracketed  to half
buried concrete ties, running fifty  yards straight  up a forty five  degree
slope to a small plateau that's accessible via private road.  There he's got
a  diesel  powered winch that  he can use  to drag stuff up the rails. It is
more than adequate for  this evening's  job, which  is  to move  a couple of
hundred kilograms of bullion the  last of the gold from the sunken submarine
up  from  the  beach and into the vault in his house. Tomorrow, he  and  the
others can  truck  it into downtown Kinakuta at  their leisure, and  turn it
into  strings  of  bits  representing very  large  numbers  with  noteworthy
cryptological properties.
     The badjaos  share the  same maddening refusal  to be exotic that Randy
has found everywhere  on his travels: the guy who's running the show insists
that  his  name  is Leon,  and the kids  on  the beach  are forever  copping
stereotyped martial arts poses and hollering "hi yaaa!" which Randy knows is
a Power Rangers thing, because Avi's  kids did exactly the  same thing until
their father banned all Power  Ranger  emulation inside the  house. When the
first  milk crate  full of gold bars  is dropped off the  high bridge of the
pamboat by Leon, and half buries  itself in the floury damp sand  below, Avi
stands over it and tries to utter some kind of solemn prayer for the dead in
Hebrew,  and gets maybe half  a dozen  phonemes  into it  before two of  the
badjao kids, having pegged him as a permanent stationary object,  decide  to
use him as tactical cover, and take up positions on either side of him madly
hi yaaaing each other. Avi's  not so full  of himself  that he can't see the
humor in this, and yet  not so sentimental that he doesn't obviously want to
strangle them.
     John Wayne is patrolling the surf with a cigarette  and a pump shotgun.
Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe rates the probability of frogman attack rather low
because the gold in the pamboat is only worth two and  half million dollars,
an  amount  that hardly rates anything as  elaborate,  and  expensive,  as a
seaborne  assault. John Wayne needs to  be  there in  case someone gets  the
mistaken impression that they've somehow managed to pack ten or twenty times
that much  gold into the pamboat. This seems improbable from a hydrodynamics
standpoint. But Doug says that overestimating the intelligence  of the enemy
is, if anything, more dangerous than underestimating it. He, Tom Howard, and
Jackie Woo are up the hill guarding the  roadhead with assault rifles. Tom's
been  positively strutting. All of  his fantasies  are  coming true in  this
little tableau.
     A large plastic box thuds into the sand, breaks open, and  spills out a
mess of shattered coral. Randy strolls over to it and  sees  leaves  of gold
inside  the  coral carapace, tiny  holes punched into them. To him the holes
are more interesting than the gold.
     But   everyone's   reacting   differently.   Doug    Shaftoe's   always
conspicuously  cool and  sort  of pensive in  the  presence  of a very large
amount  of gold, like  he's always known that it  was there, but touching it
makes him think about where it came from and what was  done to get it there.
The sight of a single  brick almost made Goto Dengo vomit  up his Kobe beef.
For Eberhard Föhr, who is out in the cove doing a lazy backstroke, it is the
physical  incarnation  of monetary  value, which  for him,  and the rest  of
Epiphyte, has mostly been a mathematical abstraction a practical application
of one particular  sub  sub sub branch of number theory. So it has  the same
kind  of purely  intellectual attraction to him as a moon rock or a dinosaur
tooth. Tom Howard sees  it in the  embodiment of some  political  principles
that are  almost  as  pure, and as  divorced  from human reality, as  number
theory. Mixed in with that is some sense of  personal vindication. For  Leon
the Sea Gypsy, it's just a cargo to be  hauled from point A to  point B, for
which  he'll be compensated  with  something more  useful.  For Avi it's  an
inextricable mixture of the sacred and the  satanic. For Randy and if anyone
knew about  this, he would be dreadfully embarrassed, and would freely admit
to its cloyingness it is the closest  thing he's got right now to a physical
link with his beloved, in that she was pulling these bars out  of the  wreck
of the  submarine just a few days ago. And that is  really the only sense in
which he gives a damn about it,  anymore. In fact, in the  few days since he
decided to hire Leon to smuggle him up the Sulu Sea and into southern Luzon,
he has had to remind himself over and over again that the nominal purpose of
the trip is to open up Golgotha.
     After  the gold has been unloaded, and Leon has taken on some supplies,
Tom  Howard  produces  a bottle  of  single  malt scotch,  finally answering
Randy's  question  of  who  patronizes  all of those  duty  free  stores  in
airports. Everyone gathers on the beach for  a  toast. Randy's a little edgy
when he joins this circle, because he's not sure what he's going to  propose
a toast to if the responsibility falls to him. Unearthing Golgotha? He can't
really drink to that. The meeting of minds between Avi and Goto Dengo  was a
spark  jumping across an air gap sudden, dazzling, and a little scary and it
hinged around their common understanding  that  all  of  this  gold is blood
money,  that  Golgotha is a grave they're preparing to desecrate. So  that's
not exactly toast material. How about a toast to  abstract lofty principles,
then?
     Here Randy's  got another hangup, something that's  been slowly dawning
on  him as  he stands on the beach beneath Tom  Howard's concrete house: the
perfect freedom  that Tom's found in Kinakuta is a cut flower in  a  crystal
vase. It's lovely, but it's dead, and  the reason  it's dead is that it  has
been alienated from its germinal soil. And  what is that soil exactly? To  a
first  approximation you  could just say "America,"  but it's a  little more
complicated than that; America's just the hardest to ignore instantiation of
a cultural and philosophical system that can be seen in a  few other places.
Not many. Certainly not in Kinakuta.  The closest outpost is really not that
far away: the Filipinos, for all  of their shortcomings in the  human rights
department, have imbibed the whole  Western freedom  thing  deeply, in a way
that  has arguably  made them economic  laggards compared to Asian countries
where no one gives a shit about human rights.
     In  the  end it's  a  moot  point; Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe purposes a
toast to smooth  sailing. Two years  ago  Randy would have  found this to be
banal and simple minded. Now he understands it as Doug's implicit nod to the
world's  moral ambiguity, and  a pretty deft  preemptive strike against  any
more  inflated  rhetoric. Randy  downs his Scotch in a gulp  and  then says,
"let's do it," which is also pretty stunningly banal, but this  gathering in
a  circle  on the beach  thing really makes  him nervous;  he  signed on  to
participate in a business opportunity, not to join a cabal.
     Four  days  on  the pamboat  ensue.  It  putts along  at  a steady  ten
kilometers per hour day and night, and it  sticks  to shallow coastal waters
along the periphery  of the Sulu Sea.  They are lucky with the weather. They
stop twice  on  Palawan and once  on Mindoro to  take  on diesel fuel and to
barter for unspecified  commodities. Cargo goes down in the  hull, people go
above it on the deck, which is just a few loose planks thrown crosswise over
the gunwales. Randy feels more out and out lonely than he has since he was a
teenaged geek, but he's not sad about it. He sleeps a lot, perspires, drinks
water, reads a couple of books, and  dicks around with his new GPS receiver.
Its most salient feature is a mushroom shaped external antenna that can pick
up weak signals, which ought to be useful in triple canopy jungle. Randy has
punched  Golgotha's latitude and  longitude  into  its  memory, so  that  by
hitting a couple of buttons he can  instantly see how  far away it is, along
what  heading.  From  Tom  Howard's  beach  it's  almost exactly a  thousand
kilometers. When the pamboat finally noses up on a tidal mudflat in southern
Luzon, and Randy sloshes ashore in full MacArthurian style,  the distance is
only about forty clicks.
     But tumbledown volcanoes rise before him,  black and mist shrouded, and
he  knows from experience  that forty kilometers  in  boondocks will be much
rougher going than the first nine hundred and sixty.
     The bell  tower of  an  old Spanish church rises up  above the  coconut
palms  not far away, carved from blocks of volcanic  tuff that are beginning
to glow in the lambency  of another damn mind blowing tropical sunset. After
he's snagged some extra bottles of water and said his good byes  to Leon and
the  family, Randy  walks towards it. As he  goes,  he erases  the memory of
Golgotha's location from his GPS, just in case it gets confiscated or ripped
off.
     The next thought he has says something about his general frame of mind:
that nuts are the genitalia of trees is never more obvious than when you are
looking at a  cluster of swelling  young coconuts nestled in  the hairy dark
groin  of a palm tree. It's surprising that  the Spanish missionaries didn't
have  the whole  species eradicated. Anyway, by the  time he's  reached  the
church, he's picked up a retinue of  little bare  chested Filipino  kids who
apparently aren't  used to seeing  white men  materialize  out  of  nowhere.
Randy's  not  crazy  about  this, but he'll settle for  no one summoning the
police.
     A  Nipponese sport  utility vehicle  of the adorably styled, alarmingly
high  center of gravity school is parked in front of the  church,  ringed by
impressed villagers. Randy  wonders if they could have done  this  any  more
conspicuously. A fiftyish driver leans against the  front  bumper smoking  a
cigarette and shooting the breeze with some local dignitaries: a priest and,
for god's sake, a cop  with a fucking bolt action rifle. Just about everyone
in sight  is smoking Marlboros,  which have apparently been distributed as a
goodwill gesture. Randy's got to get himself back into a Philippine frame of
mind: the way to sneak  into  the country  is  not to mount  some  cloak and
dagger  operation, crawling  up onto  an  isolated  beach  in a matte  black
wetsuit in the middle of the night, but simply to waltz in  and make friends
with all of  the  people who see you.  Because it's not like they're stupid;
they are going to see you.
     Randy smokes a cigarette. He had  never done this  in his life  until a
few months ago, when he finally got it through his head that it was a social
thing, that some people  take it as an insult when  you turn down an offered
cigarette, and that a few smokes weren't going to kill him in any case. None
of these people, except for the  driver and the  priest,  speaks  a  word of
English, and so this is the only  way he can communicate with them.  Anyway,
given all  the other changes he's gone  through,  why  the hell shouldn't he
become  a cigarette  smoker while  he's  at  it?  Maybe next  week  he'll be
shooting  heroin.  For  something  disgusting  and  lethal,  cigarettes  are
amazingly enjoyable.
     The driver is named Matthew, and he really turns out  to be not so much
a  driver  as a charismatic fixer/negotiator, a smoother of the way, a human
road grader. Randy just stands  there passively while Matthew charmingly and
hilariously extricates them  from this impromptu village meeting, a job that
would  probably be next  to impossible if the  priest  were  not so  clearly
complicit. The cop looks to the priest for cues as to what he should do, and
the priest tells  him  something  complicated  with a series  of  looks  and
gestures,  and in that way, somehow,  Randy  finds his  way  into  the sport
utility  vehicle's  passenger  seat and Matthew gets  behind the wheel. Well
after  sunset they trundle out of the village along its  execrable one  lane
road, trailed by  kids who run  alongside keeping one  hand on the car, like
Secret Service agents in a motorcade. They are  able to do this  for quite a
while because they've gone a few kilometers before the road gets good enough
for Matthew to shift out of first gear.
     This is not a  part of the world  where  it makes any sense  at all  to
drive at night, but clearly Matthew wasn't interested in an  overnight  stay
at that village. Randy has a pretty good idea of what's going to happen now:
many hours of driving very slowly on circuitous roads, half blocked by piles
of  freshly harvested  young  coconuts, impeded  by hunks  of lumber  thrown
across the right of way as speed bumps to  prevent kids  and dogs from being
run over. He leans his seat back.
     Bright light is streaming into  the car and he thinks: roadblock, cops,
spotlights.  The light's blocked by a silhouette. There's a rapping noise on
the window. Randy looks  over and sees the driver's seat  empty, no keys  in
the  ignition.  The  car's cool and dormant.  He sits  up and rubs his face,
partly because  it needs to be rubbed and partly because it's probably smart
to  keep  one's hands  in  plain sight.  More  rapping  on  the  windshield,
growingly impatient. The  windows are fogged and he can only see shapes. The
light's reddish.  He's got a completely inappropriate erection. Randy gropes
for a  window control,  but the car's got power windows and they don't  work
when it's not running.  He gropes around on the door until he's figured  out
how to unlock it, and almost instantly it flies  open and  someone's  coming
inside to join him.
     She  ends up on Randy's lap, lying  sideways on top of him, her head on
his  chest. "Close the door," Amy says, and  Randy  does. Then  she  squirms
around  until  she's  face to  face  with  him, her pelvic center of gravity
grinding mercilessly  against the  huge generalized region between navel and
thigh that  has, in recent months, become  one big  sex organ  for him.  She
brackets his neck between her forearms and grabs the carotid supports of the
whiplash arrestor. He's busted.  The obvious thing now would be a kiss,  and
she  feints  in that direction, but then reconsiders, as it seems like  some
serious looking is in  order  at this time. So they look  at  each other for
probably a good minute. It's not a moony kind of look that they share, not a
starry  eyed thing  by  any  means, more like a what the fuck have we gotten
ourselves into thing. As if it's really important to both of  them that they
mutually appreciate  how serious  everything is.  Emotionally, yes, but also
from a legal  and, for lack of a better term, military  standpoint. But once
Amy is  satisfied that her boy does indeed  get it, on all of these  fronts,
she permits herself a vaguely incredulous looking sneer that blossoms into a
real grin, and then a chuckle that in a less  heavily armed  woman might  be
characterized as a giggle, and then, just to shut herself up, she pulls hard
on the stainless  steel goalposts of the whiplash arrestor  and  nuzzles her
face up to Randy's and, after ten heartbeats' worth of exploratory sniffling
and  nuzzling, kisses him. It's a chaste kiss that takes a long time to open
up, which is totally  consistent with  Amy's cautious,  sardonic approach to
everything, as well  as with the hypothesis, alluded to once while they were
driving to Whitman, that she is in fact a virgin.
     Randy's life is  essentially complete  at the moment.  He  has  come to
understand during all of this that the light  shining in through the windows
is in fact  the light of dawn, and he tries to  fight back the thought  that
it's a good  day to die because it's clear to him  that although he might go
on from  this point  to  make a lot  of  money,  become famous, or whatever,
nothing's ever going to top this. Amy knows  it  too, and she makes the kiss
last for a very  long time before  finally breaking  away with a little gasp
for  air,  and bowing  her head  so that  her  brow  is supported on Randy's
breastbone, the curve of  her  head  following that  of his throat, like the
coastlines of South America and Africa. Randy almost can't take the pressure
of her on his groin. He braces his feet against the floorboards of the sport
utility vehicle and squirms.
     She moves suddenly and decisively, grabbing the  hem of the left leg of
his  baggy shorts and yanking  it almost  up to his navel, taking  his boxer
shorts along with. Randy pops free and  takes aim at her, straining upwards,
bobbing slightly with  each beat of his heart, glowing healthily (he  thinks
modestly)  in the dawn  light. Amy's in a sort  of light wrap  around skirt,
which she suddenly flings  over him, producing a momentary tent pole effect.
But she's on the move, reaching  up beneath to pull her underwear out of the
way, and then before he can even  believe  it's  happening  she sits down on
him, hard, producing a nearly electrical shock. Then she stops moving daring
him.
     Randy's  toe knuckles pop  audibly. He  lifts himself and Amy into  the
air, experiences some  kind of synaesthetic hallucination very much like the
famous "jump into hyperspace"  scene from Star Wars. Or perhaps the  air bag
has accidentally detonated? Then he pumps something like an Imperial pint of
semen it's a  seemingly  open ended series of ejaculations, each  coupled to
the next by nothing more than a leap of faith that another one is coming and
in the  end,  like all schemes built on faith and hope,  it lapses, and then
Randy sits utterly still until his body realizes it  has not drawn breath in
quite  a while. He  fills his  lungs all the way, stretching them out, which
feels almost as good as the orgasm, and then he opens his eyes she's staring
down  at him in bemusement,  but  (thank  god!)  not horror or  disgust.  He
settles back  into  the  bucket  seat,  which  squeezes his butt  in  a  not
unpleasant gesture of light harassment. Between that, and  Amy's thighs, and
other  penetrations,  he  is  not  going  anywhere  for  a while,  and  he's
moderately afraid  of  what Amy's going to  say she  has a  lengthy menu  of
possible responses to all of  this, most  of them  at  Randy's expense.  She
plants  a  knee, levers herself up, grabs the tail of his Hawaiian shirt and
cleans herself  off a bit. Then she shoves the door open,  pats him twice on
his  whiskery cheek, says  "Shave," and  exits stage left. Randy can now see
that the air bag has not, in fact, deployed. And yet he has the same feeling
of  a  major  sudden life change that  one might  get after surviving a  car
crash.
     He  is a mess. Fortunately  his  bag's in  the  backseat,  with another
shirt.  A  few minutes later  he finally  emerges from the fogged up car and
gets a look at  his  surroundings. He's  in  a  community built  on a canted
plateau with a few  widely spaced, very  high coconut palms scattered about.
Downslope, which  appears  to  be  roughly south,  there  is  a  pattern  of
vegetation  that  Randy  recognizes  as  a  tri  leveled  cash  crop  thing:
pineapples  down  on  the ground, cacao  and  coffee at  about  head  level,
coconuts and bananas above that. The  yellowish green  leaves of  the banana
trees are especially  appealing,  seemingly  big  enough to stretch out  and
sunbathe on. To the north, and uphill, a jungle is attempting to tear down a
mountain.
     This compound that he's in is  obviously a recent thing,  laid  out  by
actual surveyors, designed by people with educations, subsidized  by someone
who can afford brand new sheets of corrugated tin, ABS drainpipe, and proper
electrical wiring. It has something in common with a normal Philippine  town
in that it's built around a  church. In this case the church is  small Enoch
called it a chapel but that it was designed by Finnish architecture students
would  be obvious to Randy even if Root hadn't divulged it. It has a  bit of
that Bucky Fuller tensegrity thing going for  it lots of exposed,  tensioned
cables  radiating from  the  ends  of  tubular struts,  all collaborating to
support a roof that's not a single surface but a system of curved shards. It
looks awfully well designed to Randy, who now judges  buildings on  the sole
criterion of their ability to resist earthquakes. Root told him it was built
by  the  brothers  of a  missionary  order,  and by local  volunteers,  with
materials contributed by a Nipponese foundation that is still trying to make
amends for the war.
     Music is coming out of the church. Randy checks his watch and discovers
that it's Sunday morning. He avoids participating in the Mass, on the excuse
that it's already underway and he  doesn't want to interrupt  it, and ambles
toward a nearby pavilion a corrugated roof  sheltering a concrete floor slab
with  some  plastic  tables where  breakfast is  being laid out. He  arouses
violent  controversy  among a loose  flock  of  chickens that is  straggling
across his path,  none of whom can seem to figure out how  to get out of his
way; they're  scared of him, but  not mentally organized enough to translate
that fear into a coherent plan of action.  Several  miles away, a helicopter
is  flying  in from the sea,  shedding  altitude as it  homes  in  on a  pad
somewhere up in the jungle. It is a big and gratuitously loud cargo carrying
chopper with unfamiliar lines, and Randy vaguely suspects  that it was built
in Russia for Chinese customers and that it is part of Wing's operations.
     He recognizes Jackie Woo  lounging at one of  the  tables, drinking tea
and reading a bright magazine. Amy's in the adjacent kitchen,  embroiled  in
Tagalog  girl talk with a  couple of middle aged ladies who are handling the
preparations for the meal. This place seems pretty  safe, and so Randy stops
in the  open, punches in the  digits that only  he and Goto Dengo know,  and
takes  a GPS reading. According to the machine, they are  no more than  4500
meters away  from the  main drift of Golgotha. Randy checks  the heading and
determines  that  it is  uphill from  here. Although  the jungle  blurs  the
underlying shape of  the earth, he thinks that it's going  to be  up in  the
valley of a nearby river.
     Forty  five  hundred  meters  seems  impossibly close,  and he's  still
standing there trying to convince  himself that his memory is sound when the
ragged voices of the  worshippers suddenly spill out  across the compound as
the chapel's door is pushed  open. Enoch  Root emerges, wearing (inevitably)
what Randy  would  describe as a  wizard's robe.  But as he walks across the
compound he shucks  it off  to reveal  sensible khakis underneath, and hands
the  robe  to a young Filipino acolyte who scurries back inside with it. The
singing  trails  off and  then  Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe  emerges from  the
church, followed  by John Wayne and  several people who appear to be locals.
Everyone drifts towards the pavilion. The alertness that comes with being in
a new place, combined with the neurological aftermath of that shockingly big
and long orgasm, has left Randy's senses sharper, and his mind clearer, than
they've ever been, and he's impatient to get going. But he can't dispute the
wisdom of getting a  good breakfast, so he shakes  hands all around and sits
down  with the others. There  is a  bit of small talk  about how his pamboat
voyage went.
     "Your friends  should have come into the  country that way," says  Doug
Shaftoe,  and  then goes on  to explain that Avi and both  of the Gotos were
supposed to be here  yesterday,  but they were  detained at the airport  for
some  hours  and eventually  had to fly back to Tokyo while  some mysterious
immigration hassles were ironed out. "Why didn't  they go to Taipei  or Hong
Kong?" Randy  wonders  aloud  since  both those cities  are  much closer  to
Manila.  Doug  stares at  him blankly  and observes  that both of those  are
Chinese cities, and reminds him that their presumed adversary now is General
Wing, who has a lot of pull in places like that.
     Several backpacks have already been prepared, laden mostly with bottled
water.  After everyone's had a chance to digest breakfast, Douglas MacArthur
Shaftoe, Jackie Woo,  John  Wayne, Enoch Root, America Shaftoe, and  Randall
Lawrence Waterhouse all don packs. They  begin to stroll uphill, passing out
of the compound  and into a  transitional zone of big leaved  traveler trees
and giant clusters of bamboo:  ten centimeter thick trunks spraying out  and
up from central roots, like  frozen shell bursts, to heights of at least ten
meters, the poles striped green and brown where the husky leaves are peeling
away. The canopy  of the jungle looms  higher and higher, accentuated by the
fact that it's uphill from here, and emits a fantastic whistling noise, like
a  phaser on overload. As they enter  the shade of the canopy  the racket of
crickets is added to that whistling noise. It sounds as though there must be
millions of crickets and millions of whatever's  making the whistling noise,
but from  time to time the sound will suddenly stop and then start up again,
so if there are a lot of them, they are all following the same score.
     The place is filled  with plants that in America are only seen in pots,
but that grow to the size of oak trees here, so big that Randy's  mind can't
recognize  them  as,  for  example,  the  same  kind  of  Diefenbachia  that
Grandmother Waterhouse used to have growing on the counter in her downstairs
bathroom. There is  an incredible variety of butterflies, for whom the  wind
free environment seems to be congenial, and they weave in and out among huge
spiderwebs that call to  mind  the design of  Enoch Root's chapel. But it is
clear that the place is  ultimately ruled by ants; in fact it makes the most
sense  to  think  of the  jungle  as  a  living  tissue of ants  with  minor
infestations of  trees, birds, and humans. Some of  them  are  so small that
they are, to other  ants, as those ants are to  people; they prosecute their
ant activities in the same physical space but without interfering, like many
signals on  different frequencies  sharing the same medium. But there  are a
fair number of ants carrying other ants, and Randy assumed that they are not
doing it for altruistic reasons.
     Where the jungle's dense it is impassable,  but there are a fair number
of places where the trees are spaced a few meters apart and the under growth
is only  knee high, and light shines through. By moving from one  such place
to  another  they  make  slow progress in the general direction indicated by
Randy's GPS. Jackie Woo and  John Nguyen have disappeared, and appear  to be
moving parallel to them but much more quietly. The jungle is a nice place to
visit, but  you wouldn't want  to live, or  even stop moving, there. Just as
the beggars in Intramuros see you as a bipedal automatic teller machine, the
insects here see you as a big slab  of animated but not  very  well defended
food.  The  ability  to  move,  far  from  being a deterrent,  serves  as an
unforgeable guarantee of freshness.  The  canopy's tentpoles are  huge trees
"Octomelis sumatrana," says  Enoch  Root  with narrow buttress roots splayed
out explosively in every  direction, as thin and sharp as machetes sunk into
the  earth.  Some  of  them  are  almost  completely  obscured  by  colossal
philodendrons winding up their trunks.
     They  crest a broad,  gentle  ridgeline; Randy had forgotten that  they
were moving uphill. The air suddenly becomes cooler and  moisture  condenses
on  their  skins.  When the whistlers  and the crickets pause,  it be  comes
possible to hear the murmur of a stream  down below  them.  The next hour is
devoted to slowly working their way down the slope towards it. They  cover a
total of a hundred meters;  at this rate,  Randy thinks, it should take them
two  days,  hiking around  the  clock, to reach  Golgotha. But he keeps this
observation to himself. As they move downhill he starts to become  aware of,
and  to  be taken aback  by,  the sheer amount of biomass that happens to be
above  them  forty  or fifty  meters  above them in many cases. He feels  as
though he's at the bottom of the food chain.
     They enter a sunnier zone that consequently is snarled by  much heavier
undergrowth, and  are forced to break  out  the machetes and  hack their way
through to the river. Enoch Root explains that this is a place where a small
lahar, which had been  funneled between the steep walls of the river's gorge
farther upstream, spread out and mowed down a few hectares of ancient trees,
clearing the path for smaller, opportunistic vegetation. This is fascinating
for  about  ten  seconds  and then it's back to the machete work. Eventually
they reach  the edge  of  the river, all  of  them sticky and  greenish  and
itching  from the  sap and  juice  and  pulp  of the  vegetation  they  have
assaulted in order to  get here. The river's bed is  shallow and rocky here,
with no discernible bank. They sit down and  drink water for  a while. "What
is the point of all  this?" asks Enoch Root suddenly. "I don't mean to sound
discouraged by these physical  barriers, because  I'm not. But I'm wondering
whether you have worked out the goal of it in your own mind."
     "This is fact finding. Nothing more," Randy says.
     "But there's  no point in  just aimlessly finding facts unless you're a
pure scientist,  or a historian. You  are representing  a  business  concern
here. Correct?"
     "Yes."
     "And  so  if  I  were a shareholder in your company I  could demand  an
explanation of why you are sitting here on  the edge of this river right now
instead of actually doing whatever it is that your company does."
     "Assuming  you  were an intelligent shareholder, yes, that's what you'd
be doing."
     "And what would your explanation be, Randy?"
     "Well "
     "I know  where  we are  going,  Randy."  And Enoch  quotes  a string of
digits.
     "How did you know that?" Randy asks kind of hotly.
     "I've known it for fifty years," Enoch says. "Goto Dengo told me."
     All Randy can do for a while is fume. Doug Shaftoe's laughing. Amy just
looks  distracted. Enoch  broods  for  a  few  moments,  and  finally  says:
"Originally the plan was to buy this land with a smaller  cache of gold that
was dug up and loaded aboard a certain submarine. We would then wait for the
right moment and then dig up the rest. But the submarine sank, and  the gold
sank with it. I sat on the knowledge for many years. But then people started
buying up  land  around here people who were obviously hoping  to  find  the
Primary. If  I'd had the money,  I would have bought this land myself. But I
didn't. So I saw to it that the Church bought it."
     Doug Shaftoe says, "You  haven't answered  Enoch's question yet, Randy:
what good are you doing your shareholders here?"
     A red dragonfly  hovers  above  a  backwater of the stream,  its  wings
moving so fast  that the eye sees not  wings in movement  but a  probability
distribution of where the wings might be,  like electron orbitals: a quantum
mechanical effect that maybe explains why the insect can apparently teleport
from one place  to another,  disappearing from one  point and reappearing  a
couple of meters away, without seeming to pass through the space in between.
There sure is  a lot of  bright stuff in  the jungle. Randy figures that, in
the natural world, anything that is colored so brightly must be some kind of
serious evolutionary badass.
     "We  took the gold that you recovered from the submarine and turned  it
into electronic cash, right?" Randy says.
     "So you claimed. I haven't actually spent any of that  electronic  cash
yet," says Doug.
     "We want to do the same thing for the Church or Wing or whoever ends up
in possession  of the gold. We want to deposit it  in the Crypt, and make it
usable as electronic currency."
     Amy asks, "Do you  understand that,  in  order  to move the gold out of
here, it'll be necessary to travel across land controlled by Wing?"
     "Who says we have to move it?"
     Silence for a minute, or what passes for silence in a jungle.
     Doug Shaftoe says, "You're  right. If  the stories are even  half true,
this facility is far more secure than any bank vault."
     "The stories are all  true and then some,"  Randy  says.  "The  man who
designed and built Golgotha is Goto Dengo himself."
     "Shit!"
     "He drew plans of it for us. And the larger issue of local and national
security is not a  problem here," Randy adds. "Of  course the government has
sometimes  been  unstable.  But any  invader who wants  to  physically seize
possession  of the gold will have to  fight his way across this  jungle with
tens of millions of heavily armed Filipinos barring his path."
     "Everyone knows what the Huks did against the Nips," Doug says, nodding
vigorously. "Or the VC against  us, for that matter. No  one would be stupid
enough to try it."
     "Especially if we put you in charge, Doug."
     Amy's been woolgathering through most of the conversation, but  at this
she turns and grins at her father.
     "I accept," Doug says.
     Randy's slowly  becoming aware that most of the birds and bugs who live
here  move so fast  that you can't even turn your head fast enough to center
them in your vision. They exist only as slicing movements in your peripheral
vision.  The  only exception would  seem to  be a species of gnat  that  has
evolved into the specific niche  of plunging into the left eyeballs of human
beings at something just  under  the  speed of  sound. Randy has taken about
four hits in the left eye, none in the right. He takes another one  now, and
as he's recovering from it,  the earth jumps underneath them. It is a little
like an earthquake in its psychological effect: a  feeling of disbelief, and
then betrayal, that  the solid ground is having the temerity to move around.
But it's  all  over by the time the sensation has moved  up their spines  to
their brains. The river's still running, and the dragonfly is still hunting.
     "That felt  exactly like high explosive going off," says  Doug Shaftoe,
"but I didn't hear anything. Did anyone hear anything?"
     No one heard anything.
     "What  that  means," Doug continues,  "is that  someone  is setting off
explosives deep underground."
     They  start working  their way up  the riverbed. Randy's GPS  indicates
that Golgotha is less than two thousand meters upstream. The river begins to
develop proper  banks  that get steadily  higher  and  steeper.  John  Wayne
clambers up onto the  left bank and Jackie Woo  onto the right, so  that the
high ground on either side will be guarded,  or at least reconnoitered. They
pass  back  into the shade  of  the canopy. The ground here is some kind  of
sedimentary rock with granite boulders embedded in it from  place to  place,
like  mixed nuts  in  half melted chocolate. It must  be nothing more than a
scab of congealed ash and sediment on top of an underlying monolith  of hard
rock.  Those who are down in the streambed move very slowly now. Part of the
time  they are down in the  river, struggling  upstream  against  a powerful
current, and part of the time they  are picking their  way  from  boulder to
boulder,  or  sidestepping.  along  crumbling  ledges  of harder  rock  that
protrude from the banks here and there. Every few minutes, Doug looks up and
makes visual contact  with Jackie Woo  and John Wayne who must be contending
with  challenges of their  own, because sometimes they  fall behind the main
group. The  trees only seem to get higher as they work their way up into the
mountains, and now their  height is accentuated by  the fact  that  they are
rooted in the top of a bank that rises above the stream two, five, ten, then
twenty and thirty meters. The bank actually overhangs them now: the  river's
gorge is a tube mostly buried in the earth,  open to  the sky only through a
narrow  slot in  the  top. But it's  close to midday and the sun  is shining
nearly straight  down through it, illuminating all of the  stuff that  makes
its way down from the heights.  The corpse of a murdered insect drifts  down
from  the upper canopy like winter's first snowflake. Water seeping from the
rims of the overhanging bank forms a drip curtain, each drop glittering like
a diamond  and  making it  nearly impossible  to see the dark cavity behind.
Yellow butterflies weave among those falling drops but never get hit.
     They  come around  a gentle bend  in the river  and are confronted by a
waterfall some twenty meters high. At the base of the falls there's  a still
and  relatively  shallow pool, filling the bottom of  a broad  melon  shaped
cavity  formed  by the  concave,  overhanging banks. The vertical  sun beams
straight  down  on  the cloud of white foam at the base  of the falls, which
radiates the light  back at blinding power, forming a sort of  natural light
fixture that illuminates the  whole inside  of the cavity. The stone  walls,
sweating and dripping and  running with groundwater,  glisten in  its light.
The undersides of the  ferns and big leaved plants epiphytes  sprouting from
invisible footholds  in the  walls flicker and  dapple in the weirdly bluish
foam glow.
     Most of the  cavity's  walls  are hidden  behind  vegetation:  fragile,
cascading veils of moss growing from  the rock, and vines depending from the
branches of the trees hundreds of feet above them and dangling  halfway down
into the gorge, where they have become entangled with  protruding tree roots
and formed a  natural trellis for a finer network of creepers that is itself
the warp and  woof of a matted carpet  of moss saturated with flowing ground
water.  The  gorge  is  alive  with   butterflies  burning  with  colors  of
radioactive purity,  and down closer to  the rustling water are damselflies,
mostly  black with aqua bodies that flash in the sun their  wings  revealing
glimpses of salmon and coral red  on the underside as they orbit around each
other. But mostly the air is  filled  with  this  continual slow progress of
things that didn't survive, making their way down  through the column of air
and  into  the  water,  which  flushes   them  away:  dead  leaves  and  the
exoskeletons  of insects, sucked  dry  and eviscerated in some silent combat
hundreds of feet above their heads.
     Randy's keeping an eye on the display of his GPS, which has been having
a hard time locking onto any satellites down in this gorge. But finally some
numbers come up. He has it calculate the distance from here to Golgotha, and
the  answer  comes  up  immediately:  a  long  row  of  zeroes  with  a  few
insignificant digits trailing off the end.
     Randy says,  "This is it."  But most of what he says is  obscured by  a
sharp explosion from high above them on the bank. A few seconds later, a man
begins to scream.
     "No one move," says Doug Shaftoe, "we are in a minefield."


     Chapter 98 CRIBS


     On a grassy knoll, a man crouches behind a tombstone, peering through a
telescope  on a tripod,  and tracking the steady pace of a  robed and hooded
figure across the grass.
     FUNERAL. That's the crib that broke these guys.
     The Nipponese man in the  American  uniform, whom Enoch Root is leaving
behind,  must be that Goto Dengo  fella. Lawrence Pritchard  Waterhouse  has
seen that  name punched on so many ETC cards that  he  no longer even has to
read the  printed letters  at the  top of the card: he can identify a  "Goto
Dengo" from  arm's length simply  by  glancing at the pattern of punched out
rectangles.  The  same  is true  of  some  two dozen other Nipponese  mining
engineers  and surveyors  who  were  brought to Luzon in  '43  and  '44,  in
response to Azure/Pufferfish messages emanating  from Tokyo.  But, as far as
Waterhouse  can tell,  all of  the others are  dead.  Either  that, or  they
retreated north with Yamashita.
     Only one of them is alive, well, and living  in what is left of Manila,
and  that's  Goto  Dengo.  Waterhouse was  going  to  rat  him out  to  Army
Intelligence, but  that  doesn't  seem like such a  good idea  now  that the
unkillable Nip engineer has become a personal protegé of The General.
     Root is heading in the direction of those two  mysterious white men who
attended Bobby  Shaftoe's  funeral.  Waterhouse peers  at  them  through the
scope,  but  mediocre optics,  combined with the heat  waves rising from the
grass,  complicate  this. One  of them  seems  oddly familiar.  Odd  because
Waterhouse  doesn't know that  many bearded men with  long swept  back blond
hairdoes and black eyepatches.
     An idea springs out of his forehead fully formed, with no warning. This
is how  all the best ideas arrive. Ideas that  he patiently  cultivates from
tiny seeds always fail to germinate or else grow up into monstrosities. Good
ideas are just there all of  a sudden, like angels in the  Bible. You cannot
ignore them just because they are  ridiculous.  Waterhouse stifles a  giggle
and tries not to get overly excited. The dull, tedious, bureaucratic part of
his mind is feeling testy, and wants a few shreds of supporting evidence.
     This is  quickly supplied. Waterhouse knows, and  has  proved  to  Earl
Comstock,  that  strange  information is  in  the  air, dotting and  dashing
furtively from a small number of feeble transmitters scattered around  Luzon
and  the surrounding waters, encrypted using the Arethusa  system.  Lawrence
and Alan  have known for two years  now that Rudy invented  it, and from the
decrypts chattering out of  digital computers in  Bletchley Park and Manila,
they now know other things.  They know  that Rudy flew the coop late in 1943
and probably  went to Sweden. They know that one Günter Bischoff, captain of
the U boat  that plucked Shaftoe and Root out of the water, also ended up in
Sweden,  and that Dönitz persuaded him  to  take  over the gold running work
that had been performed by U 553  until it ran aground off Qwghlm. The Naval
Intelligence boys are fascinated by Bischoff, and so he had already been the
subject of much research. Waterhouse has seen photos of him from his student
days. The shorter  of  the two men he is peering at  now could easily be the
same fellow, now middle aged. And the taller one, the one with the eyepatch,
could most definitely be Rudy von Hacklheber himself.
     It is, then, a conspiracy.
     They have  secure communications. If Rudy is the architect of Arethusa,
then it will be essentially impossible to break, except for rare lapses such
as this FUNERAL business.
     They have a submarine. It cannot be found or sunk, because it is one of
Hitler's new rocket  fuel powered  babies, and because Günter Bischoff,  the
greatest U boat commander in history, is its skipper.
     They have, at some level, the backing of the odd brotherhood  that Root
belongs too, the ignoti et quasi occulti guys.
     And now they are trying to enlist Goto  Dengo. The man who, it is  safe
to assume, buried the gold.
     Three  days ago, the intercept boys in Waterhouse's section picked up a
brief flurry  of Arethusa messages, exchanged  between a  hidden transmitter
somewhere in Manila and a mobile one in the South China  Sea. Catalinas were
vectored toward the latter, and picked up diminishing radar echoes at first,
but  found  nothing when they arrived  on  the scene.  A team of  journeyman
codebreakers jumped on those messages and  started trying to tear them apart
by  brute  force. Lawrence Pritchard  Waterhouse, the old  hand,  went for a
stroll along the Manila Bay seawall. A breeze suddenly rose from the bay. He
stopped to let it cool his face. A coconut fell from the top of  a tree  and
smashed into the  ground ten feet away. Waterhouse  turned  on his heel  and
went back to the office.
     Just before the flurry of Arethusa messages began, Waterhouse had  been
sitting in his office listening to Armed Forces Radio. They had broadcast an
announcement that, three days from now, at such and such a time, the funeral
for the hero, Bobby Shaftoe, was going  to be held at  the big new  cemetery
down in Makati.
     Sitting down in his office with the fresh  Arethusa intercepts, he went
to work, using FUNERAL as a crib: if this group of seven letters decrypts to
FUNERAL, then what does the rest of  the message look like? Gibberish? Okay,
how about this group of seven letters?
     Even  with  this gift  thrown into his lap, it took him two  and a half
days of nonstop work to decrypt the message. The first one, transmitted from
Manila,  went: OUR FRIEND'S FUNERAL  SATURDAY  TEN  THIRTY  AM  US  MILITARY
CEMETERY MAKATI.
     The response from the submarine: WILL BE THERE SUGGEST YOU INFORM GD.
     He  aims the spyglass  at  Goto Dengo again. The Nipponese  engineer is
standing  with  his  head bowed  and  his  eyes  tightly shut.  Perhaps  his
shoulders  are heaving, perhaps  it's just the heat waves that  make it seem
so.
     But then Goto Dengo straightens up and takes a step in the direction of
the conspirators. He  stops. Then he takes  another step. Then another.  His
posture is straightening up miraculously. He seems to feel better with every
stride. He walks faster and faster, until he is almost running.
     Lawrence Pritchard  Waterhouse  is  hardly  a mind  reader, but he  can
easily  enough tell what Goto  Dengo  is  thinking: I  have a burden  on  my
shoulders,  and it has  been crushing  me.  And now I'm  going to  hand that
burden over to someone else. Hot damn! Bischoff and Rudy von Hacklheber step
forward  to  meet  him,  holding  out  their right  hands  enthusiastically.
Bischoff, Rudy, Enoch, and Goto Dengo join into a  knot, practically on  top
of Bobby Shaftoe's grave.
     It is a shame. Waterhouse  knew Bobby Shaftoe,  and would have liked to
attend his funeral standing up not skulking around like this. But Enoch Root
and Rudy would both recognize him. Waterhouse is their enemy.
     Or is  he? In a decade full of Hitlers and Stalins, it's hard to  worry
about a conspiracy that seemingly includes a priest, and that risks its very
existence in  order  to attend a member's funeral. Waterhouse rolls over and
lies on his back on some dead guy's grave and ponders it. If Mary were here,
he would lay  out the dilemma for her and she would tell him what to do. But
Mary's in Brisbane, picking out bridesmaids' dresses and china patterns.


     ***


     The next time he  sees  any  of  these fellows is one month later, in a
clearing in the jungle  a  couple of hours south of Manila. Waterhouse  gets
there before they do, and spends a sweaty night under a mosquito net. In the
morning, about half of Bischoff's submarine crew arrives, grumpy from an all
night  march.  As Waterhouse  expected,  they are quite  nervous about being
ambushed by the local Huk commander known as the Crocodile, and so they post
a number of sentries in the jungle. That is why Waterhouse took pains to get
here  before they did: so that  he would not have to infiltrate their picket
line.
     The Germans who  aren't standing guard go to work with shovels, digging
a hole in the ground next to  a big piece of  red pumice shaped vaguely like
the continent of Africa. Waterhouse  squats no more than  twenty  feet away,
trying to figure out how he can make his presence known without being gunned
down by a nervous white man.
     He almost gets close enough  to tap Rudy on the shoulder. Then he slips
on a slimy rock. Rudy hears him, turns, and sees nothing except for a swatch
of undergrowth being torn down by Waterhouse's falling body.
     "Is that you, Lawrence?"
     Waterhouse  stands up cautiously, keeping  his  hands  in  plain sight.
"Very good! How did you know?"
     "Don't be  stupid.  There aren't that  many people who could have found
us."
     They shake hands. Then they think better of it, and embrace. Rudy gives
him  a  cigarette. The German sailors look on incredulously. There  are some
others: a Negro and an  Indian, and a grizzled, dark  man who looks like  he
wants to kill Waterhouse on the spot.
     "You must be the famous  Otto!" Waterhouse  exclaims. But Otto does not
seem eager to make  new  friends, or even acquaintances, at this juncture in
his life, and turns away sourly. "Where's Bischoff?" Waterhouse asks.
     "Minding  the  submarine. It is risky, lurking in the shallows. How did
you  find  us, Lawrence?" He answers his own question before Waterhouse can.
"By decrypting the long message, obviously."
     "Yes."
     "But how did you do that? Did I miss something? Is there a back door?"
     "No. It wasn't easy. I broke one of your messages, a while back."
     "The FUNERAL one?"
     "Yes!" Waterhouse laughs.
     "I could have killed  Enoch for  sending  out  a message with  such  an
obvious  crib." Rudy shrugs.  "It is hard to teach crypto security,  even to
intelligent men. Especially to them."
     "Maybe he wanted me to decrypt it," Waterhouse muses.
     "It  is  possible,"  Rudy  admits.  "Perhaps  he  wanted  me  to  break
Detachment 2702's one time pad, so that I would come and join him."
     "I guess he figures if you're smart enough  to break hard codes, you're
automatically going to be on his side," Waterhouse says.
     "I'm not sure that I agree . . . it is naive."
     "It's a leap of faith," Waterhouse says.
     "How did you break Arethusa? I am naturally curious," Rudy says.
     "Because Azure/Pufferfish employs a different key every  day, I assumed
that Arethusa did the same."
     "I call them by different names. But yes, continue."
     "The difference is that the  daily key  for  Azure/Pufferfish is simply
the numerical date. Very easy to exploit, once you have figured it out."
     "Yes.  I  intended  it that  way,"  Rudy says.  He  lights  up  another
cigarette, taking extravagant pleasure in it.
     "Whereas the daily key for Arethusa is something I haven't been able to
put my finger on yet.  Perhaps a pseudo random function of the date, perhaps
random numbers  you are taking  from a one time pad.  In any  case it is not
predictable, which makes Arethusa harder to break."
     "But you did break the long message. Would you explain how?"
     "Well,  your meeting at the cemetery was brief. I guess you had to  get
out of there pretty fast."
     "It did not seem a good place to linger."
     "So, you and Bischoff went away back to  the submarine, I figured. Goto
Dengo went back to his  post at The General's headquarters. I knew  that  he
couldn't have told you anything substantive at the cemetery. That would have
to come later, and it would have to be in the form of an  Arethusa encrypted
message. You are justifiably proud of Arethusa."
     "Thank you," Rudy says briskly.
     "But the  drawback  of Arethusa, as  with  Azure/Puffeffish, is that it
requires a great deal of computation. This is fine  if you happen to have  a
computing machine, or a room full of trained abacus operators. I assume  you
have a machine on board the submarine?"
     "That we do," Rudy  says  diffidently, "nothing  very special. It still
requires a great deal of manual calculation."
     "But  Enoch Root in Manila, and Goto Dengo, could  not have had  such a
thing.  They would  have  to encrypt  the message by  hand  doing all of the
calculations on sheets of scratch paper.  Enoch already knew  the algorithm,
and could tell it to Goto Dengo, but you would have to agree on a key to put
into that  algorithm. The only time  you  could have decided on the  key was
while you were all  together at  the  cemetery. And during your conversation
there, I saw you pointing at Shaftoe's headstone. So I figured that you were
using  that as  a key maybe his  name, maybe his  dates  of birth and death,
maybe his military serial number. It turned out to be the serial number."
     "But still you did not know the algorithm."
     "Yes, but  I  had some idea that it was related to the Azure/Pufferfish
algorithm, which in turn is related to the zeta functions that we studied at
Princeton. So I just sat down and said to myself if Rudy were going to build
the ultimate  cryptosystem  on  this  basis,  and  if Azure/Pufferfish is  a
simplified version of that system, then  what  is Arethusa?  That gave  me a
handful of possibilities."
     "And out of that handful you were able to pick the right one."
     "No," Waterhouse says, "it was too hard. So I went to  the church where
Enoch was working, and looked through  his  wastebasket. Nothing.  I went to
Goto Dengo's office and did  the same.  Nothing. Both  of them  were burning
their scratch paper as they went along."
     Rudy's face suddenly relaxes.  "Oh, good. I was  afraid they were doing
something incredibly stupid."
     "Not at all. So, you know what I did?"
     "What did you do, Lawrence?"
     "I went and had an interview with Goto Dengo."
     "Yes. He told us that much."
     "I told him about the  research I had been doing into Azure/Pufferfish,
but I didn't tell him I had broken it. I got  him talking, in a very general
way, about what  he was doing on Luzon during the  last year. He told me the
same  story that  he has stuck  to all along, which is that he  was building
some minor  fortifications somewhere, and that after escaping from that area
he  wandered lost in the jungle for  several  days before  emerging near San
Pablo  and joining  up  with some Air  Force troops who  were heading  north
towards Manila.
     " 'It's a good thing you got out of there,' I  told him,  'because ever
since then,  the Hukbalahap leader who calls himself  the Crocodile has been
ransacking the jungle he's  convinced that you Nipponese buried a fortune in
gold there.' "
     As soon as the word "crocodile" emerges from Waterhouse's mouth, Rudy's
face screws up in disgust and he turns away.
     "So when the long  message was finally transmitted last  week, from the
transmitter that Enoch has hidden on the top of that church's  bell tower, I
had two cribs. First of all, I  suspected that the key was a number from the
tombstone  of  Bobby  Shaftoe. Secondly,  I was  confident  that  the  words
'Hukbalahap,'  'crocodile,' and probably  'gold' or 'treasure'  would appear
somewhere  in  the  message.  I  also  looked  for  obvious candidates  like
'latitude' and 'longitude.' With all of that to  go on, breaking the message
wasn't that hard."
     Rudy von Hacklheber heaves a big  sigh.  "So. You win," he says. "Where
is the cavalry?"
     "Cavalry, or calvary?" Waterhouse jokes.
     Rudy  smiles  tolerantly.  "I  know  where  Calvary  is.  Not far  from
Golgotha."
     "Why do you think the cavalry is coming?"
     "I know they are  coming," Rudy says.  "Your  efforts to break the long
message must have  required a whole  room full of computers. They will talk.
Surely the secret is out."  Rudy stubs out his half smoked cigarette,  as if
preparing to leave. "So, you have been sent to give us an offer surrender in
a civilized way and we will get good treatment. Something like that."
     "Au contraire, Rudy.  No  one knows except  me.  I  did  leave a sealed
envelope  in my desk,  to be  opened  if I  should die mysteriously  on this
little trip to the jungle. That Otto character has a fearsome reputation."
     "I don't believe you. It is impossible," Rudy says.
     "You of all people. Don't you see? I have a  machine, Rudy! The machine
does the  work for me. So I don't need a room full  of computers human ones,
leastways. And  as soon as I read the decrypted message, I burned all of the
cards. So I am the only one who knows."
     "Ah!" Rudy  says, stepping back and looking into the sky, adjusting his
mind to  these new facts.  "So, I gather that you have come here to join us?
Otto will be troublesome about it, but you are quite welcome."
     Lawrence  Pritchard  Waterhouse  actually  has to think  about it. This
surprises him a little.
     "Most of  it is  going  to  help  victims of the  war, in  one  way  or
another," Rudy says, "but if we take a tenth of a percent as commission, and
distribute it among the entire crew  of the  submarine, we are all among the
richest men in the world."
     Waterhouse  tries to imagine  himself one  of the  richest  men in  the
world. It doesn't seem to fit.
     "I've been exchanging letters with a college  in  Washington State," he
says. "My fiancée put me on to them."
     "Fiancée? Congratulations."
     "She's  Qwlghmian  Australian.  It  seems  that  there's  a  colony  of
Qwghlmians  in the  Palouse Hills as well, where Washington  and Oregon  and
Idaho  all come  together. Sheepherders  mostly.  But  there  is this little
college there, and they need a mathematics professor. I could be chairman of
the  department  within  a  few  years."  Waterhouse  stands  there  in  the
Philippine  jungle smoking his  cigarette and imagining this. Nothing sounds
more exotic. "It sounds like a nice life!" he  exclaims, as if this were the
first time he had thought of such a thing. "It sounds perfectly all right to
me."
     The Palouse Hills seem very far away. He is impatient to begin covering
the distance.
     "That it does," says Rudy von Hacklheber.
     "You  don't sound very convincing, Rudy. I know it wouldn't be so great
for you. But for me it's the cat's pajamas."
     "So, are you telling me you don't want in?"
     "I'll tell you this. You said most of  the money was  going to charity.
Well,  the college can always use  a  donation. If your  plan works out, how
about endowing a chair for me at this college? That's all I really want."
     "I will do  that," Rudy says, "and  I'll  endow  one for  Alan too,  at
Cambridge, and I'll provide both of you with laboratories full of electrical
computers."  Rudy's eyes wander  back to  the hole in the ground,  where the
Germans  having withdrawn most of their sentries are making steady progress.
"You know  that this  is nothing more than one of the  outlying caches. Seed
capital to finance the Golgotha work."
     "Yes. Just as the Nips planned it."
     "We'll dig  it  up soon  enough. Sooner, now that we  no longer have to
worry about the Crocodile!" Rudy says, and laughs. It  is an honest, genuine
laugh, the first time Waterhouse has ever seen him drop his guard. "Then  we
will go  to ground until  the war is over. In the meantime, maybe there will
be enough left  over  to give you and your Qwghlmian  bride a  nice  wedding
present."
     "Our china pattern is Lavender Rose by Royal Albert," Waterhouse says.
     Rudy takes an  envelope out of his pocket and writes that down. "It was
very  good  of you  to  come out  and  say  hello," he  mumbles  around  his
cigarette.
     "Those bicycle rides in New Jersey might as well have taken place  on a
different planet," Waterhouse says, shaking his head.
     "They did," Rudy says. "And when Douglas MacArthur  marches into Tokyo,
it's going to be a different planet yet again. See you there, Lawrence."
     "See you, Rudy. Godspeed."
     They  embrace one  more time.  Waterhouse  backs  away and watches  the
shovels biting into the red mud for a few  moments,  then turns his back  on
all of the money in the world and starts walking.
     "Lawrence!" Rudy shouts.
     "Yes?"
     "Don't forget to destroy that sealed envelope you left in your office."
     Waterhouse laughs.  "Aw,  I was just lying  about that. In case someone
wanted to kill me."
     "That's a relief."
     "You know  how people are always saying 'I can  keep a secret' and they
are always wrong?"
     "Yes."
     "Well," Waterhouse says, "I can keep a secret."


     Chapter 99 CAYUSE


     Another shock  wave passes silently through  the  ground, setting up  a
pattern  of waves, and reflections of waves, in  the water that laps  around
their knees.
     "Things are  going  to happen very slowly now for a while.  Get used to
it," says Doug Shaftoe. "Everyone needs a probe a long knife or a  rod. Even
a stick."
     Doug's got  a big knife, he being  that  kind of guy, and Amy  has  her
kris. Randy  pulls the lightweight aluminum frame of  his backpack apart  to
produce a couple of tubes; this takes a while but, as Doug  said, everything
is happening slowly now.  Randy tosses one of the tubes to  Enoch  Root, who
snatches a basically poorly aimed throw out of the air. Now that everyone is
equipped,  Doug  Shaftoe gives  them a  tutorial on how  to probe  one's way
through a minefield. Like every other lesson Randy's  ever imbibed, this one
is sort of interesting, but only until Doug divulges the main  point,  which
is that you  can poke  a mine  from the side and it won't blow up; you  just
can't  poke it vertically. "The water is bad because it makes it hard to see
what  the hell we're doing," he  says. Indeed, the  water  has a milky look,
probably from suspended volcanic ash; you can see clearly for a foot, hazily
for another foot, and below that you can see vague, greenish shapes at best;
everything is covered in a uniform brown jacket of silt. "On the other hand,
it's good  because  if a  mine  gets detonated  by something other than your
foot, the water's going to absorb some  of the blast by flashing into steam.
Now: tactically our problem is that we are exposed to an  ambush  from above
left: the west bank.  Poor old Jackie Woo is down and he  can't protect that
flank anymore. You can bet  that John Wayne is covering things on  the right
as best as he can. Since it is the left bank that's most vulnerable, we will
now head for the bank on  that side,  and try to reach the protection of the
overhang. We  should not all  converge on the same  point; we  spread out so
that if one of us detonates a mine it won't hit anyone else."
     Each one of them  picks  a  destination  on the  west  bank  and  tells
everyone else what it is, so that they won't converge on the same place, and
then each begins probing  his  or her way towards it. Randy tries  to resist
the  temptation  to look up. He says, after about fifteen  minutes:  "I know
what's  going on with the explosions. Wing's people  are tunneling their way
toward Golgotha. They're going to remove  the gold through some kind  of  an
underground conduit. It'll look  like they are  excavating it from their own
property. But they'll actually be taking it from here."
     Amy grins. "They're robbing the bank."
     Randy  nods, mildly annoyed  that she's  not  taking it more seriously.
"Wing must have been too busy with the Long March and the Great Leap Forward
to buy this real estate when it was available," Enoch says.
     A few minutes later,  Doug Shaftoe says,  "To what extent do you give a
shit, Randy?"
     "What do you mean?"
     "Would you be willing to die to prevent Wing from getting that gold?"
     "Probably not."
     "Would you be willing to kill?"
     "Well," says Randy, a bit taken aback, "I said I wouldn't be willing to
die. So "
     "Don't give  me  that golden rule shit,"  Doug says. "If someone  broke
into your house in the middle of the night and threatened your  family,  and
you had a shotgun in your hands, would you use it?"
     Randy  involuntarily looks  towards  Amy. Because  this is not only  an
ethical conundrum. It's also a test to determine  whether Randy is fit to be
Doug's daughter's  husband,  and the father of his  grandchildren.  "Well, I
should hope so," Randy says. Amy's pretending not to listen.
     The water all  around  them makes a spattering, searing noise. Everyone
cringes. Then  they realize that a handful of small  pebbles was tossed into
the water  from above. They look up  at the rim of the overhang, and  see  a
tiny, reciprocating movement: Jackie Woo, standing on the  top of  the bank,
waving his hand at them.
     "My eyes are going," Doug says. "Does he look intact to you?"
     "Yes!" Amy  says. She beams her pearlies are  very white in the sun and
waves back.
     Jackie's grinning. He's carrying  a long,  muddy rod in  one hand:  his
mine probe. In the other, he's got a dirty canister about the size of a clay
pigeon. He  holds  it up and waggles it  in  the  air. "Nip mine!" he shouts
gleefully.
     "Well,  put it the fuck  down, you asshole!"  Doug hollers, "after  all
these years it's going  to be incredibly  unstable." Then he gets a  look of
incredulous confusion. "Who  the hell set  off  the  other mine if it wasn't
you? Someone was screaming up there."
     "I haven't found him," Jackie Woo says. "He stopped screaming."
     "Do you think he's dead?"
     "No."
     "Did you hear any other voices?"
     "No."
     "Jesus Christ," Doug says, "someone's been shadowing us the whole way."
He turns around and looks up at the opposite bank, where  John Wayne has now
probed his  way to  the  edge  and is taking this all  in. Some kind of hand
gesture  passes between them  (they brought  walkie talkies, but Doug scorns
them as  a crutch for lightweights  and  wannabes). John Wayne  settles down
onto his belly and  gets out  a pair of binoculars  with objective lenses as
big as saucers and begins scanning Jackie Woo's side.
     The group in the riverbed probes onwards in  silence  for a while. None
of them  can  figure out what is going on, and so  it's good  that they have
this  mine probing thing to keep  their hands  and minds busy. Randy's probe
hits something flexible,  buried a couple of inches deep in silt and gravel.
He flinches so hard he almost  topples back on his ass, and  spends a minute
or two trying to get his composure back. The silt gives everything the blank
but suggestive look of sheet covered  corpses. Trying to identify the shapes
makes his mind tired. He clears some gravel aside and runs his hand  lightly
over this thing.  Dead  leaves  tumble  through  the  water and  tickle  his
forearms. "Got an old tire down here," he says. "Big. Truck  sized. And bald
as an egg."
     Every so  often a  colored bird  will  descend from the  shade  of  the
overhanging  jungle and flash into  the sun, never failing to scare the shit
out  of them. The  sun is  brutal. Randy was  only a few yards away from the
shade  of  the bank  when all of this started, and now he's pretty sure that
he's going to pass out from sunstroke before he gets there.
     Enoch Root  starts muttering in Latin at one point. Randy looks over at
him and sees that he's holding up a dripping, muddy human skull.
     An irridescent bright blue bird with a yellow scimitar beak mounted  in
a black and orange head shoots out of the jungle, seizes control of a nearby
rock, and cocks its head  at him. The earth shakes again; Randy flinches and
a bead curtain of sweat falls out of his eyebrows.
     "Down under the rocks and mud there's reinforced  concrete," Doug says.
"I can see the rebar sticking out."
     Another bird  or something flashes  out of the  shadows, headed  nearly
straight  down toward  the  water  at tremendous  speed.  Amy  makes a funny
grunting  sound.  Randy's just turning to  look  her way when  a tremendous,
hammering racket opens up from above. He looks up to see  a blossom of flame
strobing  out of the slotted  flash  arrestor on the  muzzle of John Wayne's
assault  rifle.  Seems  like he's shooting directly across the river. Jackie
Woo gets off a few shots too. Randy, who's squatting, loses his balance from
all of this head turning and has to  put out a hand to steady himself, which
fortunately doesn't  come  down on top of a mine. He looks over at Amy; only
her  head and  shoulders are  showing out of the water, and she's staring at
nothing  in particular, with a look in her eyes that  Randy doesn't like  at
all. He rises to his feet and takes a step towards her.
     "Randy, don't do that," says Doug Shaftoe. Doug has already reached the
shade, and  is  only a  couple of  paces from the curtain of vegetation that
hangs over the riverbank.
     There is a piece  of debris riding on the surface of the river not  far
from Amy's face, but it is not being moved by the current. It moves when Amy
moves.  Randy takes another step towards her, putting his foot down on a big
silt covered boulder whose top he can make out  through  the milky water. He
squats on that boulder like a bird  and focuses again on Amy,  who is  maybe
fifteen feet away from him. John  Wayne fires a series  of  individual shots
from his rifle. Randy realizes that the piece of debris is made of feathers,
bound to the butt of a narrow stick.
     "Amy's been shot with an arrow," Randy says.
     "Well that's just fucking great," Doug mutters.
     "Amy, where are you hit?" says Enoch Root.
     Amy still can't seem to speak. She stands up  awkwardly,  doing all the
work with  her left leg, and as she  rises the arrow emerges from the  water
and turns out to  be lodged squarely  in the  middle of her right thigh. The
wound is  washed clean at  first  but then blood wells out from  around  the
arrow's shaft and begins to patrol down her leg in bifurcating streams.
     Doug's engaged in some furious exchange of hand signals with the men up
above.  "You know,"  he  whispers, "I can  tell  that this is  one  of those
classic deals where what was supposed to be a simple reconnaissance suddenly
turns into the actual battle."
     Amy grabs the shaft of the arrow with both hands  and tries to snap it,
but the  wood  is  green,  and won't break  cleanly.  "I  dropped  my  knife
somewhere," she says. Her voice sounds calm, putting some effort into making
it that way. "I think I can  deal with this level of pain for a little," she
says. "But I don't like it at all."
     Near Amy,  Randy can see another silt covered boulder near the surface,
maybe six feet away. He gathers himself and leaps towards it. But it topples
under the impact of his foot and sends him splashing full  length  into  the
streambed. When he sits up  and gets a  look at it, the boulder turns out to
be a squat  cylindrical object about as big  around as a  dinner  plate  and
several inches thick.
     "Randy, what you're looking at is a Nip anti tank mine," Doug says. "It
is  highly  unstable with  age,  and it  contains  enough high  explosive to
essentially decapitate everyone in  our little group here. So  if  you could
just stop being a complete  asshole for a little bit, I'm sure that we would
all appreciate it very much."
     Amy shows Randy the palm of one hand. "I'm not looking for you to prove
anything," she says. "If you're trying to say you love me, send me a fucking
valentine."
     "I love you," Randy says. "I  want you to be okay. I want you  to marry
me."
     "Well, that's very romantic,"  Amy says, sarcastically, and then starts
crying.
     "Oh,  Jesus  Christ," Doug Shaftoe  says. "You guys  can do this later!
Will  you ease  up? Whoever  fired  that  arrow is long gone.  The Huks  are
guerrillas. They know how to make themselves scarce."
     "It wasn't fired  by a Huk," Randy  says. "Huks  have guns. Even I know
that."
     "Who fired it, then?" Amy asks, working hard to get her composure back.
     "It looks like a Cayuse arrow," Randy says.
     "Cayuse?  You think it  was fired  by a  Cayuse?"  Doug  demands. Randy
admires that Doug, while skeptical, is essentially open to the idea.
     "No," Randy says,  taking another step towards Amy, and  straddling the
antitank mine. "The Cayuse are extinct. Measles. So  it was made by  a white
man who  is an expert in the  hunting practices of Northwest Indian  tribes.
What  else do we know about him? That's he's really good  at sneaking around
in  the  jungle. And that he's so totally fucking  crazy that even when he's
been  injured by a land mine, he's still crawling  around in the undergrowth
taking shots at people." Randy's  probing the riverbed as he's  talking, and
now he takes another step. Only six feet away from Amy now. "Not just anyone
he took a shot at  Amy. Why? Because he's been watching.  He saw Amy sitting
next  to me when we took that  break, resting  her head  on my  shoulder. He
knows that if he wants to hurt me,  the best thing he  could possibly  do is
take a shot at her."
     "Why does he want to hurt you?" Enoch asks.
     "Because he's evil."
     Enoch looks tremendously impressed.
     "Well, who the hell is it?" Amy  hisses. She's irritated now,  which he
takes to be a good sign.
     "His  name  is Andrew Loeb," Randy says. "And Jackie Woo and John Wayne
are never going to find him."
     "Jackie and John are very good," Doug demurs.
     Another  step. He  can  almost  reach out and  touch Amy.  "That's  the
problem," Randy says.  "They're way too smart  to run  around in a minefield
without probing every step. But Andrew Loeb doesn't give  a  shit.  Andrew's
totally out of his fucking mind, Doug.  He's going to run around up there at
will. Or crawl, or hop, or whatever. I'd wager that Andy with one foot blown
off,  and not caring whether he  lives or dies, can move through a minefield
faster than Jackie, when Jackie does care."
     Finally, Randy's there. He crouches down before Amy, who leans forward,
places a hand on each of  his shoulders,  and rests her weight on him, which
feels good. The end of  her  ponytail paints the back of his  neck with warm
river  water.  The  arrow's  practically   in  his  face.  Randy  takes  his
multipurpose tool out and turns it into a saw and cuts through the  shaft of
the arrow while Amy holds it steady with one fist. Then Amy splays  her hand
out, winds  up, screams in Randy's ear, and  slams the butt of the shaft. It
disappears into her leg. She collapses over  Randy's  back and  sobs.  Randy
reaches around  behind her  leg, cuts his hand on the edge of the arrowhead,
grabs the shaft and yanks it out.
     "I don't see evidence of arterial bleeding," says Enoch Root, who has a
good view of her from behind.
     Randy rises to his feet,  lifting Amy into the  air, collapsed over his
shoulder like a sack  of rice. He's embarrassed that Amy's body is basically
shielding his from any further  arrow attacks now. But she's making it clear
that she's in no mood for walking.
     The shade is only  four steps away:  shade, and shelter  from above. "A
land mine just takes a leg or a foot, right?" Randy says. "If I step on one,
it won't kill Amy."
     "Not   one   of  your   better  ideas,  Randy!"   Doug  shouts,  almost
contemptuously. "Just calm down and take your time."
     "I just want  to know my options," Randy says. "I can't poke around for
mines while I'm carrying her."
     "Then I'll work my way over to you," says Enoch Root. "Oh, to hell with
it!" Enoch stands up and just walks over to them in half a dozen strides.
     "Fucking amateurs!" Doug bellows.  Enoch  Root ignores him, squats down
at Randy's feet and begins probing.
     Doug rises  up out of the stream  onto a few boulders  strewn along the
bank. "I'm going to ascend the wall here," he says, "and go up and reinforce
Jackie. He and I'll find this Andrew  Loeb together." It's clear that "find"
here  is a euphemism for probably a  long list of unpleasant operations. The
bank  is made  of soft  eroded stone with lumps of  hard black volcanic rock
jutting out of it frequently,  and by clambering from one outcropping to the
next, Doug is able to  make his way halfway up the bank in the time it takes
Enoch Root to locate one safe place to plant their feet. Randy wouldn't want
to be  the guy who just shot an arrow into Doug Shaftoe's  daughter. Doug is
stymied for  a moment by the  overhang; but  by traversing the bank a  short
distance he's able to reach a tangle of  tree roots that's almost as good as
a ladder to the top.
     "She's shivering," Randy announces. "Amy's shivering."
     "She's in shock. Keep her head low and her legs high," says Enoch Root.
Randy shifts Amy around, nearly losing his grip on a blood greased leg.
     One of the things that Goto Dengo spoke of during their dinner in Tokyo
was the Nipponese practice of tuning streams in gardens by moving rocks from
place  to  place.  The  sound of  a brook is made by patterns in the flow of
water,  and  those patterns  encode the presence of rocks  on the streambed.
Randy found in  this an echo  of  the Palouse  winds thing, and said so, and
Goto  Dengo  either thought  it was  terribly insightful  or else  was being
polite. In any case, several minutes later there is a change in the sound of
the water that is flowing around them, and so Randy naturally looks upstream
to  see that a man is standing in the water about  a  dozen feet  away  from
them. The man  has a  shaved head that is sunburned  as red as a three ball.
He's wearing what used  to  be  a  decent enough business  suit,  which  has
practically become one with the jungle now: it is impregnated with red  mud,
which  has made  it so heavy that it pulls  itself all  out  of  shape as he
totters to a standing position. He's got a great big pole, a wizard's staff.
He has planted it in the  riverbed  and is sort of climbing up it hand  over
hand.  When  he  gets  fully  upright,  Randy  can  see  that his  right leg
terminates just below the knee, although the bare tibia and fibula stick out
for a  few  inches. The bones  are scorched and splintered.  Andrew Loeb has
fashioned a tourniquet  from sticks  and a hundred dollar  silk necktie that
Randy's pretty sure he has seen in the  windows of airport duty  free shops.
This has throttled back the flow of  blood from the end of his leg to a rate
comparable to  what you would see coming out  a Mr.  Coffee during its  brew
cycle. Once Andy has gotten  himself fully  upright, he  smiles brightly and
begins to move towards Randy and  Amy and Enoch, hopping  on his  intact leg
and using the wizard's staff to keep  from falling down. In his free hand he
is  carrying a great big  knife: Bowie  sized,  but with all  of  the  extra
spikes, saw blades, blood grooves, and  other features that go into a really
top of the line fighting and survival knife.
     Neither Enoch nor Amy sees Andrew. Randy has this insight now that Doug
pointed  him in the direction  of earlier, namely that the ability  to  kill
someone is basically a mental stance, and  not a question of physical means;
a  serial killer  armed with  a couple  of feet of clothesline  is far  more
dangerous  than a cheerleader with a bazooka. Randy feels certain, all  of a
sudden, that he's got the mental stance now. But he doesn't have the means.
     And that is the problem right there in a nutshell. The bad guys tend to
have the means.
     Andy's  looking him right in the eye  and smiling at him, precisely the
same smile you would see on  the face of some old  acquaintance you had just
accidentally run into on an airport  concourse.  As he approaches, he's kind
of shifting the big knife around in his hand, getting it into the right grip
for  whatever kind of  attack he's  about  to make. It is this  detail  that
finally breaks Randy out of his trance and  causes  him to shrug Amy off and
drop her into  the water behind him. Andrew Loeb takes another step  forward
and plants his wizard's staff, which  suddenly  flies  into  the air like  a
rocket, leaving a steaming crater behind in the water, which instantly fills
in, of course.  Now  Andy's standing there like a stork, having miraculously
kept his  balance. He  bends his one  remaining knee and hops towards Randy,
then  does it again.  Then he  is  dead and toppling  backwards and Randy is
deaf, or  maybe  it happens in some  other order.  Enoch  Root has become  a
column of smoke  with  a barking, spitting white fire in  the center. Andrew
Loeb  has become  a red, comet shaped disturbance in the stream, marked by a
single arm thrust out of  the  water, a  French cuff that is still uncannily
white,  a  cuff  link shaped  like a  little honey bee, and  a  spindly fist
gripping the huge knife.
     Randy  turns around and looks at  Amy. She's levered  herself up on one
arm. In her opposite hand she's got a sensible, handy sort of revolver which
she is aiming in the direction of where Andrew Loeb fell.
     Something's moving in  the  corner of Randy's eye.  He  turns  his head
quickly. A coherent, wraith  shaped  cloud  of  smoke is  drifting away from
Enoch over the surface of the river, just coming into  the  sun where it  is
suddenly brilliant. Enoch is just standing there holding a great big old .45
and moving his lips in the unsettled cadences of some dead language.
     Andrew's fingers loosen, the knife falls, and the arm relaxes, but does
not disappear. An insect lands on his thumb and starts to eat it.


     Chapter 100 BLACK CHAMBER


     "Well," Waterhouse says, "I know a thing or two about keeping secrets."
     "I know that perfectly well," says Colonel Earl Comstock. "It is a fine
quality. It is why we want you. After the war."
     A  formation  of  bombers  flies  over   the  building,   rattling  its
shellshocked  walls  with a  drone that penetrates into their  sinuses. They
take this opportunity to heave their massive  Buffalo china coffee cups  off
their massive Buffalo china saucers and sip weak, greenish Army coffee.
     "Don't let that kind  of  thing  fool you,"  Comstock hollers over  the
noise, glancing up toward the bombers, which bank majestically to the north,
going  up  to blast hell  out of the incredibly tenacious  Tiger  of Malaya.
"People in the know think that the Nips are on their last legs. It's not too
early to think about what you will be doing after the war."
     "I told you, sir. Getting married, and "
     "Yeah,  teaching math at  some little school  out west." Comstock  sips
coffee and grimaces. The grimace is as  tightly coupled to the sip as recoil
is to the pull of a trigger. "Sounds delightful, Waterhouse, it really does.
Oh, there's all kinds of  fantasies that sound great to us, sitting here  on
the outskirts of  what  used  to  be Manila, breathing  gasoline  fumes  and
swatting  mosquitoes.  I've  heard  a  hundred   guys  mostly  enlisted  men
rhapsodize about mowing the  lawn. That's all those guys  can talk about, is
mowing the lawn. But when  they get  back home, will  they want  to  mow the
lawn?"
     "No."
     "Right.  They only talk  like that because mowing the lawn sounds great
when you're sitting in a foxhole picking lice off your nuts."
     One  of  the useful things about  military service is that  it gets you
acclimatized to having loud, blustery men say rude things to you. Waterhouse
shrugs it off. "Could be I'll hate it," he concedes.
     At  this  point Comstock  sheds a few decibels, scoots closer, and gets
fatherly  with  him. "It's not just you,"  he  says. "Your wife might not be
crazy about it either."
     "Oh, she loves the open countryside. Doesn't care for cities."
     "You wouldn't  have to live in a city.  With the kind  of salary we are
talking about here, Waterhouse " Comstock pauses for effect, sips, grimaces,
and lowers his  voice another notch " you could buy  a nice little Ford or a
Chevy." He stops to let that  sink in. "With a V 8 that would give you power
to burn! You could  live ten, twenty  miles away, and drive in every morning
at a mile a minute!"
     "Ten or twenty miles away from where? I'm not clear, yet,  on whether I
would be working in New York for Electrical Till, or in Fort Meade for this,
uh, this new thing "
     "We're thinking of calling it  the National Security  Agency," Comstock
says. "Of course, even that name is secret."
     "I understand."
     "There was a similar thing, between the wars, called the Black Chamber.
Which has a nice ring to it. But a bit old fashioned."
     "That was disbanded."
     "Yes. Secretary  of State  Stimson did away with it, he said 'Gentlemen
do  not read  one another's mail.' " Comstock  laughs  out  loud at this. He
laughs for a long time. "Ahh, the  world has changed, hasn't it, Waterhouse?
Without reading Hitler's and Tojo's mail, where would we be now?"
     "We would be in a heck of a fix," Waterhouse concedes.
     "You  have  seen  Bletchley  Park.  You  have  seen Central  Bureau  in
Brisbane. Those places are nothing  less than factories. Mail reading on  an
industrial  scale." Comstock's  eyes  glitter at the  idea,  he  is  staring
through the walls of  the building now like Superman with  his X ray vision.
"It is the way of the future, Lawrence. War will never be the  same.  Hitler
is gone. The Third Reich is  history. Nippon is soon to fall. But  this only
sets the stage  for the struggle  with Communism. To  build a Bletchley Park
big enough for that job, why, hell! We'd have to  take over the  whole state
of  Utah or something. That  is, if we  did it  the  old fashioned way, with
girls sitting in front of Typex machines."
     For the first time, now, Waterhouse gets it. "The digital computer," he
says.
     "The digital computer," Comstock echoes. He  sips and  grimaces. "A few
roomfuls of  that equipment would replace  an acre of girls sitting in front
of Typex machines." Comstock  now gets a naughty, conspiratorial grin on his
face, and leans forward. A drop of sweat rolls off the point of his chin and
plonks  into Waterhouse's coffee. "It would also  replace a lot of the stuff
that Electrical Till  manufactures.  So, you see, there  is a  confluence of
interests here." Comstock sets his cup down. Perhaps he is finally convinced
that there  is  no deep stratum of good coffee concealed underneath the bad;
perhaps coffee is a frivolous thing compared to the importance of what he is
about  to divulge. "I  have been  in constant touch with  my  higher ups  at
Electrical  Till, and there  is  intense interest in  this  digital computer
business. Intense interest. The machinery has already been set in motion for
a business deal and,  Waterhouse, I only tell  you  this because, as we have
established, you are good at keeping secrets."
     "I understand, sir."
     "A  business  deal  that  would  bring  Electrical  Till,  the  world's
mightiest manufacturer of business machines, together with the government of
the United States to construct a machine room of titanic proportions at Fort
Meade, Maryland,  under the aegis  of this  new Black  Chamber: the National
Security Agency.  It is an installation that  will be the Bletchley Park  of
our  upcoming war  against the Communist threat  a threat  both internal and
external."
     "And you would like me to get mixed up in this somehow?"
     Comstock blinks. He draws back. He  is suddenly cool and remote. "To be
absolutely frank, Waterhouse,  this thing  will  go  forward with or without
you."
     Waterhouse chuckles. "I figured that."
     "All I'm  doing  is giving you a greased path, as  it  were.  Because I
respect your skills, and  I have a certain, I don't know, fatherly affection
for you as the result of our work together. I  hope you don't mind my saying
so.
     "Not at all."
     "Say! And speaking of that "  Comstock stands up, walking around behind
his terrifyingly neat desk, and  plucks a single  piece of typing paper  off
the blotter. "How are you coming with Arethusa?"
     "Still archiving the intercepts  as they come in.  Still haven't broken
it."
     "I have some interesting news about Arethusa."
     "You do?"
     "Yes. Something you're not aware of." Comstock scans the paper.  "After
we took Berlin, we scooped up all of  Hitler's crypto people and flew thirty
five of them back to London. Our boys  there have been interrogating them in
detail.  Filling in a lot of blanks  for  us. What  do you  know  about this
Rudolf von Hacklheber fellow?"
     All  traces of moisture  have disappeared from Waterhouse's  mouth.  He
sips and does not grimace. "Knew him a little at Princeton. Dr. Turing and I
thought we saw his handiwork in Azure/Pufferfish."
     "You were right," Comstock says, rattling the paper. "But did you  know
that he was very likely a Communist?"
     "I had no knowledge of his political leanings."
     "Well, he is a homo, for  one thing,  and  Hitler hated homos,  so that
might have pushed him into the arms of the Reds. Also,  he was working under
a  couple of Russians at  Hauptgruppe B. Supposedly they  were Czarists, and
pro Hitler,  but  you never know. Well, anyway, in  the middle of  the  war,
sometime in late '43, he apparently fled to Sweden. Isn't that funny?"
     "Why's it funny?"
     "If you have the  wherewithal to escape  from  Germany, why  not go  to
England,  and fight  for  the good guys? No, he went to  the  east  coast of
Sweden  directly  across  the  water,"  Comstock  says  portentously,  "from
Finland. Which borders on  the Soviet Union." He slaps the page down on  his
desk. "Seems pretty clear cut to me."
     "So . . ."
     "And now, we have these goddamn Arethusa messages bouncing around. Some
of  them emanating from right here in Manila! Some  coming from a mysterious
submarine. Not a Nip submarine, evidently. It seems very much  like a secret
espionage ring of some description. Wouldn't you say so?"
     Waterhouse shrugs. "Interpretation isn't my department."
     "It  is mine,"  Comstock says,  "and  I  say it's  espionage.  Probably
directed from  the Kremlin. Why? Because they are using a cryptosystem that,
according to  you, is based  on Azure/Pufferfish, which was  invented by the
Communist homo Rudolf von Hacklheber. I hypothesize that von Hacklheber only
stayed in  Sweden  long enough to  get some shuteye  and maybe cornhole some
nice blond boy and then  scooted right over to Finland and from there to the
waiting arms of Lavrenti Beria."
     "Well, gosh!" Waterhouse says, "what do you think we should do?"
     "I have taken this  Arethusa thing off the back burner. We  have become
lazy and complacent.  More than once, our huffduff people observed  Arethusa
messages emanating from this general area." Comstock raises his index finger
to  a map  of  Luzon. Then he catches himself, realizing  that this would be
more dignified if he used a pointer. He bends down and grabs a long pointer.
Then he realizes he is too close,  and has to  back up a couple of steps  in
order to get the business end of the pointer on the part of the map that his
index  finger was touching a moment earlier. Finally situated, he vigorously
circles  a  coastal region south of Manila, along the strait  that separates
Luzon from Mindoro.  "South of all  these volcanoes,  along  the coast here.
This is  where that submarine has  been skulking around. We haven't gotten a
good fix on the bastards yet, because all of our huffduff stations have been
way up  north  here."  The pointer swoops  up for  a  lightning raid on  the
Cordillera Central, where  Yamashita has gone to ground. "But not  anymore."
Down swoops the pointer, vengefully. "I have  ordered several huffduff units
to set up  in this area, and at the northern end  of Mindoro. Next time that
submarine transmits  an Arethusa  message,  we'll  have  Catalinas  overhead
within fifteen minutes."
     "Well," Waterhouse volunteers, "maybe I should get cracking on breaking
that darn code, then."
     "If you  could  accomplish that, Waterhouse, it would  be brilliant. It
would  mean  victory  in this,  our first  cryptological  skirmish  with the
Communists.  It  would  be a  splendid kick off  for your  relationship with
Electrical Till  and the NSA.  We could set your new  bride up  with  a nice
house in the horse country, a gas stove, and  a Hoover that  would make  her
forget all about the Palouse Hills."
     "Sounds pretty  darn  inviting," Waterhouse says.  "I just  can't  hold
myself back!" And with that, he's out the door.


     ***


     In  a  stone  room in  a half ruined  church, Enoch Root looks out of a
busted window and grimaces. "I am not a mathematician," he says. "I only did
the calculations that Dengo  asked  me to do. You  will  have to ask him  to
encrypt the message."
     "Find another place for  your transmitter,"  Waterhouse  says, "and  be
ready to use it on short notice."


     ***


     Goto Dengo is right where he said he would be, sitting on the bleachers
above third  base.  The ballfield has been repaired,  but no one  is playing
now. He and  Waterhouse have the place to themselves, except for a couple of
poor  Filipino  peasants,  driven  down  to  Manila  by the  war  up  north,
scavenging for dropped popcorn.
     "What you ask is very dangerous," he says.
     "It will be totally secret," Waterhouse says.
     "Think into the  future," says Goto  Dengo.  "One  day,  these  digital
computers you speak of will break the Arethusa code. Is this not so?"
     "It is so. Not for many years."
     "Say ten years. Say twenty years. The code is broken. Then they will go
back and find all of  the old Arethusa messages including the  message  that
you want to send to your friends and read them. So?"
     "Yes. It is true."
     "And  then  they will see  this message that  says,  'Warning, warning,
Comstock has laid a trap, the huffduff stations  are waiting for you, do not
transmit.'  Then they will know  that there was  a spy in Comstock's office.
Certainly they will know it was you."
     "You're right. You're right.  I didn't think of that," Waterhouse says.
Then he realizes something else. "They'll know about you too."
     Goto Dengo blanches. "Please. I am so tired."
     "One of the Arethusa messages spoke of a person  named GD." Goto  Dengo
puts his head in his hands and  is perfectly motionless for a long time.  He
does not have to say it. He and  Waterhouse  are imagining  the  same thing:
twenty  years in the future,  Nipponese police burst into the office of Goto
Dengo, prosperous businessman, and arrest him for being a Communist spy.
     "Only if they decrypt those old messages," Waterhouse says.
     "But they will. You said that they will decrypt them."
     "Only if they have them," Waterhouse says.
     "But they do have them."
     "They are in my office."
     Goto Dengo  is  shocked, horrified. "You are not thinking to  steal the
messages?"
     "That's exactly what I'm thinking."
     "But this will be noticed."
     "No! I will replace them with others."


     ***


     The voice of Alan Mathison  Turing shouts above the buzz of the Project
X synchronization tone. The long playing record, filled with noise, spins on
its turntable. "You want the latest in random numbers?"
     "Yeah.  Some  mathematical  function that  will give me nearly  perfect
randomness. I know you've been working on this."
     "Oh  yes,"  Turing  says.  "I  can  provide  a  much higher  degree  of
randomness than  what is on  these idiotic phonograph records that you and I
are staring at."
     "How do you do it?"
     "I have in mind a zeta function that is simple to understand, extremely
tedious to calculate. I hope you have laid in a good stock of valves."
     "Don't worry about that, Alan."
     "Do you have a pencil?"
     "Of course."
     "Very  well then," Turing says, and  begins to call out the  symbols of
the function.


     ***


     The Basement is suffocatingly hot because  Waterhouse  shares it with a
coworker who generates  thousands of  watts of body heat.  The coworker both
eats and shits ETC cards. What it does in between is Waterhouse's business.
     He spends about twenty four hours sitting there, stripped to the waist,
his undershirt wrapped around his head like a turban so he won't  drop sweat
into the works and cause  short circuits,  flicking switches  on the digital
computer's  front panel, swapping patch cords on  the back, replacing burned
out tubes and  bulbs,  probing malfunctioning circuits with an oscilloscope.
In order to make the computer execute Alan's random number function, he even
has to  design  a new circuit board on the fly, and  solder it together. The
entire time, he  knows, Goto  Dengo and Enoch Root are at work  somewhere in
Manila  with  scratch  paper and  pencils,  encrypting  the  final  Arethusa
message.
     He doesn't have  to  wonder whether  they've transmitted it. He will be
told.
     Indeed, a lieutenant from the Intercept section comes  in at about five
in the evening, looking triumphant.
     "You got an Arethusa message?"
     "Two of them," the lieutenant says, holding up two separate sheets with
grids of letters on them. "A collision!"
     "A collision?"
     "A transmitter opened up down south first."
     "On land, or ?"
     "At sea off the northeast  end of  Palawan.  They transmitted this." He
waves one of the sheets. "Then, almost immediately, a transmitter in  Manila
came on the air, and sent this." He waves the other sheet.
     "Does Colonel Comstock know about this?"
     "Oh, yes sir!  He  was just leaving for the day when  the messages came
through. He's  been on the horn to his huffduff people,  the Air  Force, the
whole bit. He thinks we've got the bastards!"
     "Well, before you  get  carried  away  celebrating, could you  do  me a
favor?"
     "Yes, sir!"
     "What did you do with  all  of the original  intercept  sheets for  the
archived Arethusa messages?"
     "They're filed, sir. Do you want to see them?"
     "Yes. All of them. I need to check them against the versions on the ETC
cards.  If Arethusa works  the  way  I  think  it  does, then  even a single
mistranscribed letter could render all of my calculations useless."
     "I'll go and fetch them, sir! I'm not going home anyway.
     "You're not?"
     "Why,  no sir! I want to wait around and  see how it all comes out with
that darned submarine."
     Waterhouse goes to the oven and  takes out  a  brick of hot,  blank ETC
cards.  He has learned that he has to keep the cards hot,  or else they will
soak up the tropical humidity and jam the machinery; so before he  moved the
digital computer into this room, he  insisted that a  whole bank of ovens be
installed.
     He drops the hot cards into the hopper of a card punching machine, sits
down at the keyboard,  and clips  the first  intercept sheet up in front  of
him. He begins to punch  the letters  into it, one by  one.  It  is  a short
message;  it  fits onto  three cards. Then he begins punching in the  second
message.
     The lieutenant comes in carrying a cardboard box.  "All of the original
Arethusa intercept sheets."
     "Thank you, Lieutenant."
     The lieutenant looks  over his  shoulder.  "Can I help you transcribing
those messages?"
     "No. The  best way for you  to  help  me  would be to  refill my  water
pitcher and then don't bother me for the rest of the  night. I have a bee in
my bonnet about this Arethusa business."
     "Yes, sir!" says  the lieutenant,  insufferably cheerful about the fact
that the mystery submarine is, even now, on the run from Catalina bombers.
     Waterhouse finishes  punching in the second message,  though he already
knows what  it would  say if it  were decrypted:  "TRAP REPEAT  TRAP DO  NOT
TRANSMIT STOP HUFFDUFF UNITS NEARBY."
     He takes those cards out of the  puncher's output tray and places  them
neatly in  the  box  along with the cards  containing  all  of  the previous
Arethusa messages. He then takes the entire  contents of this box a brick of
messages about a foot thick and puts them into his attache case.
     He unclips the two fresh intercept slips from the card puncher and puts
them  on top  of the stack of older slips. The brick of cards in his attache
case,  and  the  pile  of  slips  in  his  hand,  contain  exactly  the same
information.  They are the  only copies in all  the world. He  flips through
them  to make sure that they contain all of the critical  intercepts such as
the  long message giving the location of Golgotha, and the one that mentions
Goto Dengo's initials. He puts the whole stack of slips on top of one of the
ovens.
     He dumps a foot thick stack of hot blank cards into the input hopper of
the  card  punch. He  connects the  punch's control cable  up to the digital
computer, so that the computer can control it.
     Then he  starts  the program  he has  written,  the one that  generates
random numbers according  to  Turing's function.  Lights flash, and the card
reader whirrs,  as the program  is loaded  into the computer's RAM. Then  it
pauses,  waiting for input: the function needs a seed. A stream of bits that
will get  it going. Any  seed will  do.  Waterhouse thinks  about  it  for a
moment, and then types in COMSTOCK.
     The  card punch rumbles into action. The stack of blanks  begins to get
shorter.  Punched  cards skitter  into the output tray. When it's  finished,
Waterhouse pulls one of them out, holds it up to the light, and looks at the
pattern of tiny rectangular holes punched out of the manila. A constellation
of doorways.
     "It'll look like  any  other  encrypted message," he explained  to Goto
Dengo, up on the bleachers, "but the,  uh,  the crypto boys" (he almost said
the  NSA) "can run their  computers on them forever and never break the code
because there is no code."
     He puts  this  stack  of freshly  punched cards  into  the box  labeled
ARETHUSA INTERCEPTS, and puts it back in its place on the shelf.
     Finally, before leaving the  lab,  he  goes back over to that oven, and
slides the corner of  that stack of  intercept  sheets very close to a pilot
light. It  is  reluctant to catch, so he gives it some help  with a flick of
his Zippo. He stands back and watches the pile  burn for a while, until he's
sure that all of the strange information on those sheets has been destroyed.
     Then  he  goes out into  the hallway in search of a  fire extinguisher.
Upstairs, he can hear Comstock's  boys, gathered around  the  radio,  baying
like hounds.


     Chapter 101 PASSAGE


     When he has  picked himself up off the deck, and his ears  have stopped
ringing, Bischoff says, "Take her down to seventy five meters."
     The  dial that tells  their depth  says  twenty. Somewhere,  perhaps  a
hundred meters  above them, crewmen of a circling bomber are  setting  their
depth charges to  explode when they have sunk to a depth of  twenty, and  so
twenty is a bad place to be for a while.
     The dial does not move, though, and Bischoff has to repeat the command.
Everyone on the boat must be deaf.
     Either that, or the V Million has  sustained damage to her dive planes.
Bischoff presses his skull  against a bulkhead,  and  even  though his  ears
don't work so well anymore, he can feel the  whine of the turbines. At least
they have power. They can move.
     But Catalinas can move faster.
     Say  what  you want  about those old, clanking diesel U boats,  they at
least had guns on them. You could surface, and  go  out on the decks  in the
sun and the air, and fight back. But in the V Million, this swimming rocket,
the  only weapon  is secrecy. In the  Baltic, fine. But this is the  Mindoro
Strait,  which is  an ocean of window  glass.  V  Million  might as  well be
suspended in midair from piano wires, searchlights crossing on it.
     The needle on the dial is moving  now, passing down through twenty five
meters. The deck twists under Bischoff's  feet  as she recoils from  another
depth charge. But  he  can tell from  the way  it twists  that this one  has
detonated too high to deal serious damage. From habit he glances at the dial
that tells their speed, and notes it down  along  with the time: 1746 hours.
The sun must be lower and  lower in the sky, its light glancing off the tops
of the waves, forcing the  pilots of  the Catalinas to  peer down through  a
screen of  bright noise.  Another hour and  V  Million  will  be  completely
invisible. Then,  if Bischoff has  kept careful records  of their  speed and
course,  dead  reckoning  will  tell them  approximately where they are, and
enable them  to  run down the Palawan  Passage in the night, or to  cut west
across the South China Sea  if that seems like a good idea. But really he is
hoping to find some nice pirate cove  on the north coast of  Borneo, marry a
nice orangutan, and raise a little family.
     The  face of  the depth dial says Tiefenmesser  in  that old  fashioned
Gothic  lettering  that the  Nazis loved  so much.  Messer  means a gauge or
meter, but it also means knife. Das Messer sitzt mir an der Kehle. The knife
is  at my throat; I am face  to  face with doom.  When  the knife is at your
throat, you  don't want it to move the way the needle on the Tiefenmesser is
moving now. Every  tick on the dial's face is another meter of water between
Bischoff and the sun and the air.
     "I  would like  to be a  Messerschmidt,"  Bischoff  mutters. A  man who
smashes Messers with a hammer, but also a beautiful thing that flies.
     "You will see light, and breathe fresh  air again, Günter," says Rudolf
von  Hacklheber, a civilian mathematician who  really  has no  place  on the
bridge  of a U boat during  a fight  to the death. But there's no good place
for him to be, and so here he is.
     Now this is a fine thing for  Rudy to say, a lovely show of support for
Günter. But saving the life of everyone on the U boat, and getting its cargo
of gold  to  safety,  now  depends  on  Günter's  emotional  stability,  and
especially  on his confidence. Sometimes, if  you want to live  and  breathe
tomorrow, you have  to dive into the black  depths today, and that is a leap
of faith  faith in your  U boat,  and your  crew  beside which  the  saints'
religious epiphanies amount to nothing.
     So  Rudy's promise is  soon forgotten or  at least  it  is forgotten by
Bischoff. Bischoff derives strength  from having  heard it, and from similar
things  that members of his crew say to him, and from their grins and thumbs
up and  slaps on the shoulder,  and their displays of  pluck and initiative,
the clever repairs that they  make to broken plumbing and overtaxed engines.
Strength gives him faith, and faith  makes him into a good U  boat  skipper.
Some would say the  best  who  ever  lived. But Bischoff knows  many others,
better than him, whose bodies are trapped in  knuckles of  imploded metal on
the floor of the North Atlantic.
     It comes together like this: the sun has gone down, as it can be relied
on to do every  day, even when you are a beleaguered  U  boat. The V Million
has  reamed a  tunnel through  the  Palawan  Passage, screaming  along,  for
several hours, at the completely  unreasonable speed of  twenty  nine  knots
four times as fast as U boats are supposed to be capable of going.
     The Americans will  have drawn  a small circle around the point in  the
ocean  where the mysterious U boat was  last sighted. But the speed of the V
Million is four times as great as they think it is. The real  circle is four
times as  wide as  the one they've  drawn.  The Yanks won't  expect  them to
surface where they are.
     But  they  have to surface because the V Million wasn't made  to run at
twenty nine  knots forever;  she burns  fuel,  and  hydrogen peroxide,  at a
ridiculous  rate  when  both of  her six thousand  horsepower  turbines  are
spinning. There is plenty of fuel remaining.  But  she runs  out of hydrogen
peroxide at about midnight. She has a few miserable batteries, and  electric
motors, that just barely suffice  to get her up to the surface. But then she
has to breathe air for a while, and run her diesels.
     So the V Million, and a few crew members, get to enjoy  some fresh air.
Bischoff  doesn't,  because he is  dealing  with new  complexities that have
arisen in  the engine room. This probably saves his life, because he doesn't
even know  they're being strafed until  he  hears the cannon rounds drumming
against the outer hull.
     Then it  is the same old drill, the crash dive,  which was  so exciting
when he  was a young  man  practicing it in  the Baltic,  and has become  so
tedious for him now.  Looking up through a hatch he gets a  moment's glimpse
of  a single  star in  the  sky  before  the view  is blocked by a mutilated
crewman being fed down from above.
     Only five  minutes  later the depth  charge scores a direct hit  on the
stern of the  V Million  and tears  a hole  through both  the  outer and the
pressure hull. The deck angles  beneath Bischoff's  feet, and his ears begin
to pop.  On a submarine, both of  these  are  bad omens. He can hear hatches
clanging shut  as the crew try to stem the  advance of the water towards the
bow; each one seals the  fate  of whomever  happens to  be  aft  of it.  But
they're all  dead anyway, it is just a question of timing now. Those hatches
are not  meant to stem five, six,  seven,  eight,  nine,  ten atmospheres of
pressure. They give way, the pressure spikes upwards as the bubble of air in
the front of the V Million suddenly halves its volume, then halves it again,
and  again.  Each  wave  of pressure  comes  as  sudden crushing pressure on
Bischoff's thorax, driving all the air out of his lungs.
     Because the  bow is  pointed straight  up, like  a needle  on a  meter,
there's no deck to stand on, and every time a bulkhead yields, and the water
level  shoots  up towards the bow, it leaves  them suddenly submerged,  with
crushed and  evacuated lungs,  and they must swim up and find the air bubble
again.
     But finally the mangled stern of the boat spikes into  the seafloor and
the  V  Million settles  down, the  forwardmost  cabin rotating around them,
tremendous rock crushing  noises all around as a  coral reef is destroyed by
the  boat's falling hull. And then it's finished. Günter Bischoff and Rudolf
von  Hacklheber are together in a safe cozy bubble of compressed air, all of
the air that used  to be in the V Million reduced  to a pocket the size of a
car. It's dark.
     He hears Rudy undoing the latches on his aluminum briefcase.
     "Don't strike a match," Bischoff says. "This air is compressed, it will
burn like a flare."
     "That would be terrible," Rudy says, and instead turns on a flashlight.
The light comes on and immediately dims and goes brown and shrinks to a tiny
red speck: the glowing remains of the filament in the bulb.
     "Your light bulb has imploded," Bischoff explains. "But  at least I got
a little glimpse of you, with that silly look on your face."
     "You too have looked better," Rudy says. Bischoff can hear  him closing
up  the  briefcase,  snapping  the  latches into place.  "Do  you  think  my
briefcase will float here forever?"
     "Eventually the pressure  hull  above us will  corrode.  The  air  will
escape  from  it  in  a thin  line of bubbles that will  grow into  gyrating
nebulas of foul air as they rush towards the surface.  The  water level will
rise and press your briefcase up against what is left of the pressure hull's
forward  dome, and it will fill with water. But still there will be a little
pocket of air in one corner of your briefcase, perhaps."
     "I was thinking of leaving a note in it."
     "If you do, better address it to the United States government."
     "Department of the Navy, you think?"
     "Department of Spying. What do they call it? The OSS."
     "Why do you say this?"
     "They knew where we were, Rudy. The Catalinas were waiting for us."
     "Maybe they found us with radar."
     "I  allowed for radar. Those planes came even faster. You  know what it
means?"
     "Tell me."
     "It means  that those who  were hunting us knew how fast  the V Million
could go."
     "Ah . . . so that is why you think of spies."
     "I gave Bobby the plans, Rudy."
     "The plans for the V Million?"

     "Yes . . so that he could buy forgiveness from the Americans."
     "Well, in  retrospect maybe you shouldn't have  done that. But I do not
blame you for it, Günter. It was a magnificent gesture."
     "Now they will come down and find us."
     "After we're dead, you mean.
     "Yes. The whole plan is ruined. Ah well, it was a nice conspiracy while
it lasted. Perhaps Enoch Root will display some adaptability."
     "You really think spies will come down to go through this wreck?"
     "Who knows?" Bischoff says. "Why are you worrying about it?"
     "I  have the coordinates of Golgotha here  in my briefcase," Rudy says.
"But I  know  for certain that they are  not written down anywhere else in V
Million."

     "You know that because you're the one who decrypted that message."
     "Yes. Maybe I should burn the message now."
     "It would kill us," Bischoff says, "but at least we would die with some
warmth and some light."
     "You  are  going to  be on  a sandy  beach, sunning yourself, in a  few
hours, Günter," Rudy says.
     "Stop it!"
     "I made  a  promise  which I intend  to keep,"  Rudy says.  There  is a
movement in the  water, the strangled splash of  a kicking foot being  drawn
under the surface.
     "Rudy?  Rudy?"  Bischoff  says.  But  he  is alone in  a  black dome of
silence.
     A minute later a hand grips his ankle.
     Rudy climbs  up  his body like a ladder and thrusts his head above  the
surface and  howls for air. But this air is the good stuff, sixteen times as
much oxygen in a single lungful. He feels better quickly. Bischoff holds him
while he calms down.
     "The hatch is open," Rudy says. "I saw light through it. The sun is up,
Günter!"
     "Let's go, then!"
     "You go. I'll stay and  burn the message." Rudy's opening his briefcase
again, feeling  through papers with his hands, taking something out, closing
the briefcase again.
     Bischoff cannot move.
     "I strike the match in thirty seconds," Rudy says.
     Bischoff  launches  himself towards  Rudy's  voice and  wraps  his arms
around him in the dark.
     "I'll find  the  others,"  Bischoff says.  "I'll  tell  them that  some
fucking  American spy is onto us. And we'll  get that  gold first, and we'll
keep it out of their hands."
     "Go!" Rudy cries. "I want everything to happen fast now."
     Bischoff kisses him once on each cheek and then dives.
     Ahead  of  him  is faint  blue green  light, coming  from no particular
direction.
     Rudy swam to the hatch, opened it, and  swam back,  and was almost dead
when he returned. Bischoff has to find that hatch and then swim all the  way
to the surface. He knows that it will be impossible.
     But  then much  brighter,  warmer light  floods the interior  of  the V
Million.  Bischoff looks back and  up, and  sees  the  forward  end  of  the
pressure  hull  turned into a dome of orange fire, the silhouette  of  a man
centered in it, lines of welds  and  rivets spreading away from that  center
like the meridians of a globe. It's bright as day. He turns around and swims
easily away down  the gangway, into the control room, and finds the hatch: a
disk of cyan light.
     A life ring is pressed up against what is now the ceiling of this room.
He grabs it and wrestles it down  into the middle of the  cabin, then shoves
it before him through the hatch, and kicks his way through.
     There's coral all around him, and it's beautiful. He'd love to stay and
sightsee,  but he's got responsibilities above. He keeps a grip on  the life
preserver, and although he  doesn't  feel himself moving, he sees the  coral
dropping  away  below. There's  a big grey  thing lying  on it, bubbling and
bleeding, and this gets smaller and smaller, like a rocket flying  away into
the sky.
     He looks  up into the water that is  streaming  over his face.  Both of
Bischoff's arms are above his head, gripping the rim of the  life ring,  and
he  sees a disk of  sunlight through  it, getting  brighter and redder as he
ascends.
     His knees begin to hurt.


     Chapter 102 LIQUIDITY


     The  rest of it all  seems like history to Randall Lawrence Waterhouse.
He  knows that technically speaking it is the present, and all of the really
important stuff  is future. But  what's  important  to him  is finished  and
settled. He would like to get on with his life, now that he's got one.
     They  carry  Amy back to the  missionary compound and the doctor who is
there does some work on her leg, but they can't  get her out to the hospital
in  Manila because Wing  has blockaded them  in  there.  This ought to  seem
threatening,  but  actually  just seems stupid  and annoying  to  them after
they've had a little while to get used to it.  The people  who  are doing it
are Chinese Communist geronto  apparatchiks  backed up by a  few bootlicking
cronies  within the  local  government, and none  of  them has the slightest
appreciation of things like encrypted  spread spectrum  packet radio,  which
makes it easy for people like Doug and Randy to communicate with the outside
world  and  explain  precisely  what  is going  on.  Randy's blood  type  is
compatible  with  Amy's and so he lets  the doctor suck him nearly  dry. The
lack of blood seemingly halves his IQ for a day or two, but even so, when he
sees Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe drawing up the  shopping list of men and gear
that they need  to dig up Golgotha,  he has  enough presence of mind to say:
strike all of that stuff.  Forget the trucks  and  jackhammers and dynamite,
the end loaders and excavators and tunnel  boring machines, and just give me
a drill, a  couple of pumps, and  a few  thousand gallons of fuel oil.  Doug
gets  it  right away,  as indeed how could he  not, since he basically  gave
Randy the idea by telling him old war legends about his father. They get the
shopping list out to Avi and Goto Dengo with no trouble at all.
     Wing keeps them  blockaded in the compound for a week; the subterranean
explosions continue  to shake the  earth;  Amy's  leg gets  infected and the
doctor comes this close to sawing it off to save her life. Enoch Root spends
some time alone with her and suddenly her leg gets a lot better. He explains
that he applied a local folk  remedy, but Amy refuses  to say anything about
it.
     Meanwhile  the  rest of them  kill  time by clearing  mines from around
Golgotha, and trying  to localize those explosions.  The verdict seems to be
that Wing still  has most  of a kilometer of hard rock to tunnel  through in
order to get access to Golgotha, and he's only making a few dozen meters per
day.
     They know  that all hell is breaking loose in the outside world because
media  and military helicopters keep flying over the place.  One day  a Goto
Engineering  chopper lands  in the  compound. It's  got earth imaging  sonar
gear, and more importantly it's got antibiotics, which have a nearly magical
impact  on  the  jungle  bugs  in  Amy's  leg,  which  have  never even  met
penicillin, much less this state of the art stuff that makes penicillin look
like chicken noodle  soup. Amy's fever breaks in a couple of hours and she's
hobbling within a day. The road gets opened  up again and then their problem
becomes trying  to keep people  out it  is jammed  with media, opportunistic
gold seekers, and  nerds. All of them  apparently think they are present  at
some kind of radical societal watershed, as if  global society has gotten so
screwed up that the only thing to do is shut down and reboot it.
     Randy sees  people holding up banners with his name on them,  and tries
not  to think about  what this implies. The truckloads  of  equipment almost
cannot make it through  this traffic jam, but  they do, and there's  another
really frustrating and tedious  week of  hauling all of the shit through the
jungle. Randy spends most of his time  hanging around with the earth imaging
sonar crew; they have this very  cool gear that Goto Engineering uses to  do
CAT scans  of the earth that they are about to dig into. By the  time all of
the heavy equipment is in place, Randy's got the entirety of Golgotha imaged
down to a resolution of about a meter;  he  could  fly through it in virtual
reality  if he were  into that kind  of thing. As it is, all  he needs is to
decide where to drill his three holes: two  from the top  down into the main
vault,  and then  one  from the side, coming in almost horizontally from the
riverbank, but at  a gentle upward angle, until it enters what  he thinks is
the lowest sump in the main chamber. The drain hole.
     Someone arrives from  the outside world and convinces Randy he's on the
cover of both Time and  Newsweek. Randy doesn't consider it to be good news.
He knows that he's got a new  life. He had a particular mental image of what
that new life is: mostly, being married to Amy  and minding his own business
until he dies of old age.  It  did  not enter his calculations that being on
the cover of newsweeklies, and people standing in the jungle holding banners
with his name on them, would in any way characterize his life. Now he  never
wants to leave the jungle.
     The pumps are mighty, house sized things; they have to be to fight  the
back pressure that they  are going to engender. Goto Dengo's young engineers
see to it  that they are mated  into  the two  vertical holes on top: one to
supply compressed air,  the other pressurized fuel  oil. Doug  Shaftoe would
like to be involved in  this, but he knows it's  over his  head technically,
and he's got  other duties:  securing the defensive  perimeter  against gold
seekers and whatever creepy crawly individuals Wing might have  sent  out to
harass and sabotage them.  But Doug has put the Word out, and a whole lot of
Doug's very interesting and well traveled friends have converged on Golgotha
from all  over the world  and are now camped out in foxholes in the  jungle,
guarding a defensive perimeter strung  with monofilament tripwires and other
stuff  that Randy  doesn't even  want to know  about. Doug just tells him to
stay  away from the perimeter,  and  he does. But  Randy  can  sense  Doug's
interest in the central project here, and so when the big day comes, he lets
Doug be the one to throw the switch.
     There is a lot of praying first: Avi's brought in  a rabbi from Israel,
and Enoch Root  has brought in the Archbishop  of Manila, and Goto Dengo has
flown  in some  Shinto priests,  and various Southeast  Asian countries have
gotten in on  the act too. All of them pray or chant for the memory of their
departed, though  the prayers are practically drowned  out by  the  choppers
overhead.  A lot of people don't want them disturbing Golgotha  at all,  and
Randy thinks they are basically right.  But he's gone  out and earth  imaged
Wing's tunnel, this subterranean tentacle of air reaching towards the hoard,
and released three dimensional maps of everything to the media, and made the
case   reasonably  well,  he  thinks  that  it's  better   to  do  something
constructive than to let it get ripped off by the likes of Wing. Some people
have  come around to his side and some haven't, but none of the latter group
is on the cover of Time and Newsweek.

     Doug Shaftoe is  the last guy to take  the floor.  He removes his  mesh
back  cap, puts  it over his heart, and with tears  streaming down  his face
says something about his father, whom he just barely remembers. He speaks of
the Battle of Manila  and of how he saw his father for the first time in the
wreckage of the Church of San Agustin, and how his father carried him up and
down  the stairway there before going  off to  bring  hellfire down upon the
Nipponese. He speaks about forgiveness and  certain other abstractions,  and
the words are  all chopped up and blurred by the helicopters overhead, which
only  makes it  more powerful  as  far  as  Randy's  concerned,  since  it's
basically all about a bunch of memories that are  all chopped up and blurred
in Doug's memory  to begin with. Finally Doug works  his way around to  some
kind of  resolution that  is  very  clear in his heart and  mind  but poorly
articulated, and hits the switch.
     The  pumps  take  a few  minutes to  pressurize Golgotha with a  highly
combustible mixture of  air and fuel oil, and then Doug hits another  switch
that sets  off  a  small detonation down below. Then the world  shudders and
rumbles before settling down into a kind of suppressed throbbing howl. A jet
of white hot flame shoots out of the drain hole down below, digs itself into
the river very  close to where  Andrew Loeb came  to rest, and throws  up  a
cloud of steam that forces  all  of  the  choppers  to gain  altitude. Randy
crawls  down under  the  cover  of  that steam cloud, sensing it's the  last
privacy he'll ever  have, and sits down by the edge  of  the river to watch.
After half an hour the jet of hot gas is joined by a rivulet of incandescent
fluid that sinks to the bottom of the stream as soon as it  emerges, clothed
in a fuzz of wildly boiling  water. For a long time there  is really nothing
to be seen except  steam; but after Golgotha's been  burning for an hour  or
two, it becomes possible to see that underneath the shallow water, spreading
down  the  valley  floor,  indeed  right around  the isolated  boulder where
Randy's perched, is a bright, thick river of gold.


     APPENDIX: THE SOLITAIRE ENCRYPTION ALGORITHM



     by Bruce Schneier
     Author, Applied Cryptography

     President, Counterpane Systems
     http://www.counterpane.com
     In Neal  Stephenson's novel  Cryptonomicon, The  character  Enoch  Root
describes a cryptosystem code  named "Pontifex" to  another character  named
Randy  Waterhouse, and  later  reveals that the steps  of  the algorithm are
intended  to  be  carried  out  using  a deck of  playing  cards.  These two
characters  go on to exchange several encrypted  messages using this system.
The  system  is called  "Solitaire" (in the novel, "Pontifex" is a code name
intended to temporarily conceal the fact  that it employs  a deck of  cards)
and  I designed it to  allow  field agents  to communicate  securely without
having to rely  on electronics  or  having to carry  incriminating tools. An
agent  might  be in a  situation where he  just  does  not  have access to a
computer, or may be prosecuted if he has tools for secret communication. But
a deck of cards . . . what harm is that?
     Solitaire gets its security from the  inherent randomness in a shuffled
deck of cards.  By manipulating this deck, a communicant can create a string
of  "random" letters  that  he  then combines with his  message.  Of  course
Solitaire can  be  simulated  on  a  computer,  but  it  is  designed to  be
implemented by hand.
     Solitaire may be  low tech,  but its  security is  intended  to be high
tech.  I designed Solitaire to be secure even against the  most well  funded
military   adversaries   with  the   biggest  computers  and   the  smartest
cryptanalysts. Of  course there  is no guarantee  that someone won't find  a
clever attack against Solitaire (watch  my  web page for  updates), but  the
algorithm is certainly better  than any  other pencil and paper cipher  I've
ever seen.
     It's not fast, though. It can take an evening to encrypt or  decrypt  a
reasonably long message. In David Kahn's  book Kahn on Codes, he describes a
real pencil and paper cipher used by a Soviet spy. Both the Soviet algorithm
and Solitaire take about the same amount of time to encrypt a message.


ENCRYPTING WITH SOLITAIRE



     Solitaire is an output feedback mode  stream cipher. Sometimes this  is
called a key generator (KG in U.S.  military speak). The basic  idea is that
Solitaire generates a stream, often called a "keystream," of numbers between
1  and  26.  To encrypt, generate the  same  number of keystream letters  as
plaintext letters.  Then add  them modulo 26 to plaintext  letters, one at a
time, to create the ciphertext. To decrypt,  generate the same keystream and
subtract modulo 26 from the ciphertext to recover the plaintext.
     For  example,  to encrypt  the  first Solitaire  message  mentioned  in
Stephenson's novel, "DO NOT USE PC":
     1. Split the  plaintext message  into five character groups.  (There is
nothing magical  about five character groups; it's just tradition.) Use  X's
to  fill in the  last group. So if the message is "DO NOT  USE PC" then  the
plaintext is:
     DONOT USEPC
     2. Use Solitaire  to  generate  ten  keystream  letters.  (Details  are
below.) Assume they are:
     KDWUP ONOWT
     3. Convert the plaintext message from letters into numbers: A =  1, B =
2, etc:



     4. Convert the keystream letters similarly:



     5. Add the plaintext number stream to the keystream numbers, modulo 26.
(All this  means is, if  the sum is  more  than  26,  subtract  26  from the
result.) For example, 1 + 1 = 2, 26 + 1 = 27, and 27 – 26 = 1, so 26 +
1 = 1.



     6. Convert the numbers back to letters.



     If you are really  good at this, you  can learn to add letters  in your
head,  and  just add  the  letters  from steps (1) and  (2).  It  just takes
practice. It's easy to remember  that A + A = B; remembering that T + Q =  K
is harder.


DECRYPTING WITH SOLITAIRE



     The basic idea is  that the receiver generates the  same keystream, and
then subtracts the keystream letters from the ciphertext letters.
     1. Take the ciphertext message and put it in five character groups. (It
should already be in this form.)



     2.  Use Solitaire  to  generate ten keystream letters. If  the receiver
uses the same key as the sender, the keystream letters will be the same:



     3. Convert the ciphertext message from letters into numbers:



     4. Convert the keystream letters similarly:



     5. Subtract  the keystream numbers  from the ciphertext numbers, modulo
26. For  example,  22 – 1 =  20,  1 – 22 = 5. (It's easy. If the
first number  is less than the second  number, add  26 to  the first  number
before subtracting. So 1 – 22 = ? becomes 27 – 22 = 5.)



     6. Convert the numbers back to letters.



     Decryption  is the  same  as  encryption, except that you  subtract the
keystream from the ciphertext message.


GENERATING THE KEYSTREAM LETTERS


     This is the heart of  Solitaire. The  above  descriptions of encryption
and decryption work for any output feedback mode stream cipher. This section
explains how Solitaire works.
     Solitaire generates a keystream using a deck of cards. You can think of
a 54  card deck (remember the jokers) as a 54 element permutation. There are
54!, or  about 2.31 x 10^71, possible different  orderings  of  a deck. Even
better, there are 52 cards in a deck (without the jokers), and 26 letters in
the alphabet. That kind of coincidence is just too good to pass up.
     To be used  for Solitaire, a deck  needs a full set of 52 cards and two
jokers. The jokers must be different in  some way. (This is common. The deck
I'm  looking at as I  write this has  stars on its jokers:  one has a little
star and  the other has  a  big star.) Call  one joker  A and the  other  B.
Generally, there  is a graphical element on the jokers that is the same, but
different size. Make the "B" joker the one that is "bigger." If it's easier,
you  can  write a big "A" and  "B" on the two  jokers, but remember that you
will have to explain that to the secret police if you ever get caught.
     To initialize the  deck,  take the  deck in  your hand,  face  up. Then
arrange the cards in  the initial configuration that is the key. (I'll  talk
about the key later,  but  it's different  than  the keystream.) Now  you're
ready to produce a string of keystream letters.
     This is Solitaire:
     1. Find the A joker. Move it one card down.  (That is, swap it with the
card  beneath it.) If the joker is the bottom card of the deck, move it just
below the top card.
     2. Find the B joker. Move it two cards down. If the joker is the bottom
card of the deck, move it just below the second card. If the joker is one up
from the bottom card,  move it just below  the  top card. (Basically, assume
the deck is a loop . . . you get the idea.)
     It's important to do these  two  steps  in  order. It's tempting to get
lazy and just move the jokers  as  you find them. This is okay,  unless they
are very close to each other.
     So if the deck looks like this before step 1:
     3AB89
     at the end of step 2 it should look like:
     3A8B9
     If you have any doubt, remember to move the A joker before the B joker.
And be careful when the jokers are at the bottom of the deck.
     3. Perform a triple cut. That is, swap the cards  above the first joker
with the cards below the second joker. If the deck used to look like:



     then after the triple cut operation it will look like:



     "First" and "second" jokers refer to  whatever joker is nearest to, and
furthest from, the top of the deck. Ignore  the "A" and "B" designations for
this step.
     Remember  that the jokers and the  cards between them  don't move;  the
other cards move around them. This is easy to do in your hands. If there are
no cards in one of  the three  sections (either the jokers are adjacent,  or
one is  on top or the bottom), just treat that section as  empty and move it
anyway.
     4.  Perform  a count cut. Look at  the bottom card.  Convert  it into a
number from 1 through 53. (Use the bridge order  of  suits: clubs, diamonds,
hearts, and  spades.  If the card is a (club), it is the value shown. If the
card is a (diamond), it is the value plus 13. If it is a  (heart), it is the
value plus 26. If it is a (spade), it is  the value plus 39. Either joker is
a  53.)  Count down  from the  top  card that number. (I  generally  count 1
through 13 again and again  if I  have to; it's easier than counting to high
numbers sequentially.) Cut after the card that you counted down to,  leaving
the bottom card on the bottom. If the deck used to look like:


     7 ... cards ... 45 ... cards ... 89
     and the ninth card was the 4, the cut would result in:


     5 ... cards ... 87 ... cards ... 49
     The reason  the last  card  is  left  in  place is  to  make  the  step
reversible. This is important for mathematical analysis of its security.
     5. Find the output card. Look at the top card. Convert it into a number
from 1 through 53, in the same manner as above. Count down that  many cards.
(Count the top card as number one.) Write the card after the one you counted
to on a  piece of paper. (If you hit a joker, don't write anything  down and
start over again with step 1.) This is the first output card. Note that this
step does not modify the state of the deck.



     6. Convert the  card  to a  number. As before, use  the bridge suits to
order them:  From lowest to highest,  we  have  clubs, diamonds, hearts, and
spades.  Hence,  A(clubs)  through K(clubs)  is  1 through  13,  A(diamonds)
through K(diamonds)  is  14  through 26, A(hearts)  through  K(hearts)  is 1
through 13, and A(spades) through K(spades) is 14 through 26.
     That's  Solitaire. You can use it create as many  keystream  numbers as
you need.
     I know that there are regional differences in decks of cards, depending
on the country. In general, it does not matter what  suit  ordering you use,
or how you convert cards to numbers. What matters is that the sender and the
receiver agree  on the rules. If you're  not consistent you won't be able to
communicate.


KEYING THE DECK



     Solitaire is only as  secure  as the  key. That is, the easiest  way to
break Solitaire is to figure out what key the communicants are using. If you
don't  have  a  good key, none  of  the  rest this  matters.  Here  are some
suggestions for exchanging a key.
     1. Shuffle the deck. A random key is the  best. One of the communicants
can shuffle  up  a  random leck and then create another, identical deck. One
goes to the sender and the  other to the  receiver. Most people are not good
shufflers, so  shuffle the  deck at least ten times, and try  to use  a deck
that has  been played with  instead of a fresh deck out of the box. Remember
to keep  a  spare deck in the keyed order, otherwise if  you  make a mistake
you'll never be able to decrypt the  message. Also remember  that the key is
at risk as long as it exists; the secret police could find the deck and copy
down its order.
     2. Use a bridge ordering. A description  of a set of bridge  hands that
you might see in a newspaper or a bridge  book is about a 95 bit key. If the
communicants can agree on a way to convert that to a deck ordering and a way
to set the jokers (perhaps after the first two  cards that are  mentioned in
the discussion of the game), this can work. Be warned: the secret police can
find your bridge column and copy down the order. You can try setting up some
repeatable convention for which bridge column to use;  for example, "use the
bridge column in your  home town newspaper for the day on which  you encrypt
the message," or something like that. Or use a  list  of  keywords to search
the  New York  Times website, and  use  the bridge column for the day of the
article  that comes up when you search  on  those words. If the keywords are
found  or  intercepted,  they  look  like a passphrase. And  pick  your  own
convention;  remember that the  secret police read  Neal Stephenson's books,
too.
     3. Use a passphrase  to order the deck. This method  uses the Solitaire
algorithm to create  an initial deck ordering. Both the sender  and receiver
share  a passphrase. (For example, "SECRET  KEY.") Start with the deck in  a
fixed  order;  lowest card  to  highest  card, in  bridge suits. Perform the
Solitaire operation, but instead  of Step 5,  do another count cut based  on
the first character of  the passphrase (19, in  this example). (Remember  to
put the  top cards  just above the  bottom  card in the deck, as before.) Do
this  once  for  each  character. Use  another  two  characters  to set  the
positions of  the jokers. Remember,  though,  that there are  only about 1.4
bits of randomness per  character in standard English. You're going to  want
at  least an 80 character  passphrase to make this  secure; I  recommend  at
least 120 characters. (Sorry, but you  just can't get good  security  with a
shorter key.)


SAMPLE OUTPUT



     Here's some sample data to practice your Solitaire skills with:
     Sample  1:  Start  with  an  unkeyed  deck: A(clubs)  through K(clubs),
A(hearts)  through K(hearts),  A(diamonds)  through  K(diamonds),  A(spades)
through K(spades), A joker, B  joker (you can think of this as 1  52, A, B).
The first ten outputs are:


     4 49 10 (53) 24 8 51 44 6 33
     The 53 is skipped, of course. I just put it there for demonstration. If
the plain text is:



     then the cipher text is:



     Sample  2: Using  keying  method 3 and the key "FOO," the first fifteen
outputs are:


     8 19 7 25 20 (53) 9 8 22 32 43 5 26 17 (53) 38 48
     If the plain text is all As, the cipher text is:



     Sample  3:  Using  keying  method  3  and the key  "CRYPTONOMICON," the
message "SOLITAIRE" encrypts to:



     Of  course,  you should use a  longer key.  These  samples are for test
purposes only. There are more  samples  on the website, and you  can use the
book's PERL script to create your own.


SECURITY THROUGH OBSCURITY



     Solitaire is  designed to be  secure even if  the  enemy  knows how the
algorithm works.  I  have assumed  that Cryptonomicon will be a best seller,
and that copies will  be  available  everywhere.  I assume that the  NSA and
everyone else will study the algorithm and  will watch for it. I assume that
the only secret is the key.
     That's  why keeping the key secret is so important. If you have a  deck
of  cards  in a safe  place,  you  should  assume  the  enemy will  at least
entertain the  thought that you  are using Solitaire.  If  you have a bridge
column in your safe deposit box, you should expect to raise  a few eyebrows.
If any group is known to be using the algorithm, expect the secret police to
maintain a database of bridge columns to use in cracking attempts. Solitaire
is strong  even if the enemy  knows you  are using it, and  a simple deck of
playing  cards  is  still much less incriminating than a software encryption
program  running on  your laptop,  but  the  algorithm  is no substitute for
street smarts.


OPERATIONAL NOTES



     The  first rule of an output feedback mode stream  cipher, any of them,
is that you should never use the same key to encrypt two different messages.
Repeat after  me: NEVER USE  THE SAME KEY TO ENCRYPT TWO DIFFERENT MESSAGES.
If you do, you completely break the security of the  system. Here's why:  if
you have two ciphertext streams, A + K and B + K, and you  subtract one from
the other, you get (A  + K) – (B + K) =  A + K – B – K = A
–  B. That's two  plaintext streams combined with  each other, and  is
very easy to break. Trust me on this one: you might not be able to recover A
and B from A – B, but a professional cryptanalyst can. This is vitally
important: never use the same key to encrypt two different messages.
     Keep your messages short. This algorithm is  designed  to  be used with
small messages:  a  couple of thousand characters. If you  have to encrypt a
100,000 word novel, use a computer algorithm. Use shorthand,  abbreviations,
and slang in your messages. Don't be chatty.
     For maximum security, try to  do everything in your head. If the secret
police starts breaking down your door, just calmly shuffle the  deck. (Don't
throw it  up in the air; you'd be surprised how much of the deck ordering is
maintained during the game of 52  Pickup.)  Remember to  shuffle the  backup
deck, if you have one.


SECURITY ANALYSIS



     There's quite  a lot of it, but it's far too  complicated to  reproduce
here. See http://www.counterpane.com, or write to


     Counterpane Systems
     1711 North Ave #16
     Oak Park, IL 60302


LEARNING MORE



     I recommend my own  book, Applied Cryptography (John Wiley &  Sons,
1996), as a good place  to start. Then read  The Codebreakers, by David Kahn
(Scribner,  1996).  After  that,  there  are  several   books   on  computer
cryptography, and a few others on manual cryptography. You can  subscribe to
my  free e mail newsletter at http://www.counterpane.com/cryptogram.html  or
by  sending   a   blank   e   mail   message   to   crypto  gram  subscribe@
chaparraltree.com. It's a fun field; good luck.





     1. 1940 being a good year to begin experimenting with venereal diseases
in that the new injectable penicillin was just becoming available.


     2. As the Nipponese were invariably called by Marines, who never used a
three syllable word where a three letter one would do.


     3. "Hypo"  is  a  military  way  of  saying the letter  H.  Bright  boy
Waterhouse  infers that there must be  at least seven  others: Alpha, Bravo,
Charlie. etc.


     4.  Assuming, provisionally, that Alan is wrong and  that  human brains
are not machines.


     5.  An  evident  paradox, but nothing  out of the ordinary being out of
America has just made this kind of thing more obvious to Randy.


     6. A deprecatory term for a fighting man not good  enough to  be in the
Corps.


     7. Men with experience in Asia use the word "Nip." The Colonel's use of
"Jap"  suggests that  his  career  has  been  spent  in the Atlantic  and/or
Caribbean.


     8. He has no hard data to back this up; it just seems like a cool idea.


     9. He has made up his mind that  he will  use the  English words rather
than making  a spectacle of himself  by trying to  pronounce  the  Qwghlmian
ones.


     10. According to the E.Q., derived from lichen.


     11. Cantrell alludes to the fact that Plan One brought them a couple of
million  dollars in  seed money  from  a venture capital outfit in San Mateo
called the Springboard Group.


     12.  Shaftoe had had nothing to do for the last couple of weeks  except
play Hearts using KNOW  YOUR ENEMY cards, so he could now peg  model numbers
of obscure Kraut observation planes.


     13. The first one, mì, meaning "secret"  and the second one, fú, having
a  dual  connotation  meaning, on the one hand, a symbol or mark, and on the
other hand, Taoist magic.


     14. Ever since the four wheel Enigma was broken.


     15. Baudot code is what teletypes use. Each of the 32 characters in the
teletype alphabet has a  unique number assigned to it.  This  number  can be
represented as a five digit binary  number, that is, five ones or zeroes, or
(more  useful)  five holes,  or  absences of holes, across a  strip of paper
tape.  Such  numbers  can  also  be  represented  as patterns of  electrical
voltages,  which  can  be  sent  down a wire, or  over the radio waves,  and
printed out at the other end. Lately, the Germans have been  using encrypted
Baudot  code messages  for communications between high  level command posts;
e.g., between Berlin and the  various Army group headquarters.  At Bletchley
Park,  this category  of encryption schemes is called Fish, and the Colossus
machine is being built specifically to break it.


     16. Half an hour ago, as Epiphyte Corp. was gathering  in the lobby,  a
big black Mercedes came in, fresh from  the airport. 747s come into Kinakuta
four times  a day, and from the time that a person presents himself  at  the
registration desk of his luxury hotel, you can figure out which city he flew
in from. These guys came in  from Los  Angeles.  Three  Latino men: a middle
aged fellow  of  great  importance,  a  somewhat younger  assistant,  and  a
palooka. They were  met in the  lobby by the  solitary fellow  who showed up
late yesterday with the cellphone.


     17. This is dry humor, and is received as such by everyone in the room;
at this point in the war, a U boat could no more  run up the English Channel
than it could travel up the Mississippi, sink  a few  barges in Dubuque, and
make its escape.


     18. Nipponese Army speak for "retreat."


     19.  It  goes without saying that  the Finns have to have their own sui
generis brand of automatic weapon.


     20. This phrase is a Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe parody.

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