king 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:
19 17 17 19 14 20 23 18 19 8 12 16 19 8 3
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:
1
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
19 17 17 19 14 20 23 E 19 8 12 16 19 8 3
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
A 17 17 A 14 20 23 E A 8 12 16 A 8 3
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
A T T A C K 23 E A 8 12 16 A 8 3
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
s