ts to touch it. He shakes his hand to bring
circulation back, then grasps the thing, yanks it out briskly, and throws it
down on the altar. It bounces once, twice in a seesawing motion, and rings
piercingly as it does the closest thing to a musical sound that has shaken
the air of this chapel in many centuries. It shines gaudily under the
electric lights they have set up around the chancel. The glittering light
catches the eye of Waterhouse, who has been living on grey and cloudy Qwghlm
for weeks, wearing and sleeping in things that are black or khaki or olive
drab. He is mesmerized by this thing, simply because of its brightness and
beauty against the dull and rude basalt, even before his mind identifies it
as a bar of solid gold.
It makes a heck of a paperweight, which is a good thing, because the
chapel is nothing if not drafty, and the important contents of the safe
consist of onionskin pages that fly away in the tiniest breeze. The pages
are ruled with faint horizontal and vertical lines, dividing each one into a
grid, and the grids are filled in with hand printed letters in groups of
five.
"Well, look what you found!" says a quiet voice. Waterhouse looks up
into the unsettlingly calm and placid gaze of Enoch Root.
"Yes. Encrypted messages," Waterhouse says. "Non Enigma."
"No," Root says. "I was referring to the Root of All Evil, here." He
tries to pick up the gold bar, but his fingers merely slip off of it. He
gets a firmer grip and hefts it up off the altar. Something about it catches
his eye, and he turns to bring it under one of the electric lights, frowning
at it with the critical intensity of a diamond cutter.
"It's got Hanzi characters stamped on it," Root says.
"Beg pardon?"
"Chinese or Japanese. No, Chinese there's the chop of a bank in
Shanghai. And here are some figures the fineness and the serial number."
Showing unexpected familiarity with such matters for a missionary priest.
Until this point, the gold bar has signified nothing to Waterhouse it's
just a bulk sample of a chemical element, like a lead weight or a flask of
mercury. But the fact that it might convey information is quite interesting.
He absolutely has to stand up and go look at it. Root is correct: the bar
has been neatly marked with small Oriental characters, applied with a stamp.
The tiny facets of the ideograms glitter under the light, sparks jumping the
gap between the two halves of the Axis.
Root sets the gold bar down on the altar. He saunters over to a table
where they keep stationery, and pulls out a sheet of onionskin and a fresh
pencil. Returning to the altar, he lays the frail page over the top of the
gold bar, then rubs the side of the pencil lead back and forth over it,
turning it all black except for where the stamped numbers and characters are
underneath. Within a few moments he has a perfect little rubbing, showing
the inscription in full detail. He folds the page up and pockets it, then
returns the pencil to the table.
Waterhouse has long since gone back to his examination of the pages
from the safe. The numbers are all written in the same hand. Now, since they
dredged all manner of other paperwork out of the sewage sloshing through the
U boat skipper's cabin, Waterhouse can recognize the captain's hand easily
enough; these sheets were written by someone else.
The format of the messages makes it clear that they were not encrypted
with an Enigma machine. Enigma messages always begin with two groups of
three letters each, which tell the receiving clerk how to set the wheels on
his machine. Those groups are missing on all of these sheets, so some other
cipher system must have been used. Like every other modern nation, the
Germans have a plethora of different cipher systems, some based on books and
some on machines. Bletchley Park has broken most of them.
Still, it looks like an interesting exercise. Now that the rest of
Detachment 2702 has arrived, making further trysts with Margaret
impractical, Waterhouse has nothing to look forward to. Trying to crack the
code used on these sheets will be a perfect puzzle to fill the gaping void
that opened up as soon as Waterhouse broke the combination of the safe. He
steals some paper of his own, sits down at the desk, and busies himself for
an hour or two copying out the ciphertext from the skipper's pages,
double– and triple checking each code group to make sure he's got an
accurate copy.
On the one hand, this is a pain in the ass. On the other, it gives him
a chance to go through the ciphertext by hand, at the very lowest level,
which might be useful later. The ineffable talent for finding patterns in
chaos cannot do its thing unless he immerses himself in the chaos first. If
they do contain patterns, he does not see them just now, in any rational
way. But there may be some subrational part of his mind that can go to work,
now that the letters have passed before his eyes and through his pencil, and
that may suddenly present him with a gift wrapped clue or even a full
solution a few weeks from now while he is shaving or antenna twiddling.
He has been dimly aware, for a while, that Chattan and the others are
awake now. Enlisted men are not allowed into the chancel, but the officers
get to gather round and admire the gold bar.
"Breaking the code, Waterhouse?" Chattan says, ambling over to the
desk, warming his hands with a mug of coffee.
"Making a clean copy," Waterhouse says, and then, because he is not
without a certain cunning, adds: "in case the originals are destroyed in
transit."
"Very prudent," Chattan nods. "Say, you didn't hide a second gold bar
anywhere, did you?"
Waterhouse has been in the military long enough that he does not rise
to the bait. "The pattern of sounds made when we tilted the safe back and
forth indicated that there was only a single heavy object inside, sir."
Chattan chuckles and takes a sip of his coffee. "I shall be interested
to see whether you can break that cipher, Lieutenant Waterhouse. I am
tempted to put money on it."
"I sure appreciate that, but it would be a lousy bet, sir," Waterhouse
replied. "The chances are very good that Bletchley Park has already broken
this cipher, whatever it may be."
"What makes you say that?" Chattan asks absently.
The question is so silly, coming from a man in Chattan's position, that
it leaves Waterhouse disoriented. "Sir, Bletchley Park has broken nearly all
of the German military and governmental codes."
Chattan makes a face of mock disappointment. "Waterhouse! How
unscientific. You are making assumptions."
Waterhouse thinks back and tries to work out the meaning of this. "You
think that this cipher might not be German? Or that it might not be military
or governmental?"
"I am merely cautioning you against making assumptions," Chattan says.
Waterhouse is still thinking this one over as they are approached by
Lieutenant Robson, the commanding officer of the SAS squad. "Sir," he says,
"for the benefit of the fellows down in London, we would like to know the
combination."
"The combination?" Waterhouse asks blankly. This word, devoid of
context, could mean almost anything.
"Yes, sir," Robson says precisely. "To the safe."
"Oh!" Waterhouse says. He is faintly irritated that they would ask him
this question. There seems little point in writing down the combination when
the equipment needed to break into the safe is sitting right there. It is
much more important to have a safe breaking algorithm than to have one
particular solution to a safe breaking problem. "I don't know," he says. "I
forgot."
"You forgot?" Chattan says. He says it on behalf of Robson who appears
to be violently biting his tongue. "Did you perhaps write it down before you
forgot it?"
"No," Waterhouse says. "But I remember that it consists entirely of
prime numbers."
"Well! That narrows it down!" Chattan says cheerfully. Robson does not
seem mollified, though.
"And there are five numbers in all, which is interesting since "
"Since five is itself a prime number!" Chattan says. Once again,
Waterhouse is pleased to see his commanding officer displaying signs of a
tasteful and expensive education.
"Very well," Robson announces through clenched teeth. "I shall inform
the recipients."
Chapter 36 SULTAN
The Grand Wazir of Kinakuta leads them into the offices of his boss,
the sultan, and leaves them alone for a few minutes at one corner of the
conference table, to build which a whole species of tropical hardwoods had
to be extinguished. After that, it is a race among the founders of Epiphyte
Corp. to see who can blurt out the first witticism about the size of the
sultan's home office deduction. They are in the New Palace, three arms of
which wrap around the exotic gardens of the ancient and magnificent Old
Palace. This meeting room has a ten meter high ceiling. The walls facing
onto the garden are made entirely of glass, so the effect is like looking
into a terrarium that contains a model of a sultan's palace. Randy has never
known much about architecture, and his vocabulary fails him abjectly. The
best he could say is that it's sort of like a cross between the Taj Mahal
and Angkor Wat.
To get here, they had to drive down a long boulevard of palm trees,
enter a huge vaulted marble entrance hall, submit to metal detection and
frisking, sit in an anteroom for a while sipping tea, take their shoes off,
have warm rose water poured over their hands by a turbaned servant wielding
an ornate ewer, and then walk across about half a mile of polished marble
and oriental carpets. As soon as the door wafts shut behind the grand
wazir's ass, Avi says, "I smell a con job."
"A con job?" Randy scoffs. "What, you think this is a rear screen
projection? You think this table is made of Formica?"
"It's all real," Avi admits sourly. "But whenever someone gives you the
treatment like this, it's because they're trying to impress you."
"I'm impressed," Randy says. "I admit it. I'm impressed."
"That's just a euphemism for, 'I'm about to do something moronic,'" Avi
says.
"What are we going to do? This isn't the kind of meeting where anything
actually gets done, is it?"
"If you mean, are we going to sign contracts, is money going to change
hands, then no, nothing is going to get done. But plenty is going to
happen."
The door opens again and the grand wazir leads a group of Nipponese men
into the room. Avi lowers his voice. "Just remember that, at the end of the
day, we're back in the hotel, and the sultan is still here, and all of this
is just a memory to us. The fact that the sultan has a big garden has no
relevance to anything."
Randy starts to get irked: this is so obvious it's insulting to mention
it. But part of the reason he's irked is because he knows Avi saw right
through him. Avi's always telling him not to be romantic. But he wouldn't be
here, doing this, if not for the romance.
Which leads to the question: why is Avi doing it? Maybe he has some
romantic delusions of his own, carefully concealed. Maybe that's why he can
see through Randy so damn well. Maybe Avi is cautioning himself as much as
he is the other members of Epiphyte Corp.
Actually this new group is not Nipponese, but Chinese probably from
Taiwan. The grand wazir shows them their assigned seats, which are far
enough away that they could exchange sporadic gunfire with Epiphyte Corp.
but not converse without the aid of bullhorns. They spend a minute or so
pretending to give a shit about the gardens and the Old Palace. Then, a
compact, powerfully built man in his fifties pivots towards Epiphyte Corp.
and strides over to them, dragging out a skein of aides. Randy's reminded of
a computer simulation he saw once of a black hole passing through a galaxy,
entraining a retinue of stars. Randy recognizes the man's face vaguely: it
has been printed in business journals more than once, but not often enough
for Randy to remember his name.
If Randy were something other than a hacker, he'd have to step forward
now and deal with protocol issues. He'd be stressed out and hating it. But,
thank god, all that shit devolves automatically on Avi, who steps up to meet
this Taiwanese guy. They shake hands and go through the rote exchange of
business cards. But the Chinese guy is looking straight through Avi,
checking out the other Epiphyte people. Finding Randy wanting, he moves on
to Eberhard Föhr. "Which one is Cantrell?" he says.
John's leaning against the window, probably trying to figure out what
parametric equation generated the petals on that eight foot tall,
carnivorous plant. He turns around to be introduced. "John Cantrell."
"Harvard Li. Didn't you get my e mail?"
Harvard Li! Now Randy is starting to remember this guy. Founder of
Harvard Computer Company, a medium sized PC clone manufacturer in Taiwan.
John grins. "I received about twenty e mail messages from an unknown
person claiming to be Harvard Li."
"Those were from me! I do not understand what you mean that I am an
unknown person." Harvard Li is extremely brisk, but not exactly pissed off.
He is, Randy realizes, not the kind of man who has to coach himself not to
be romantic before a meeting.
"I hate e mail," John says.
Harvard Li stares him in the eye for a while. "'What do you mean?"
"The concept is good. The execution is poor. People don't observe any
security precautions. A message arrives claiming to be from Harvard Li, they
believe it's really from Harvard Li. But this message is just a pattern of
magnetized spots on a spinning disk somewhere. Anyone could forge it."
"Ah. You use digital signature algorithm."
John considers this carefully. "I do not respond to any e mail that is
not digitally signed. Digital signature algorithm refers to one technique
for signing them. It is a good technique, but it could be better."
Harvard Li begins nodding about halfway through this, acknowledging the
point. "Is there a structural problem? Or are you concerned by the five
hundred and twelve bit key length? Would it be acceptable with a one
thousand twenty four bit key?"
About three sentences later, the conversation between Cantrell and Li
soars over the horizon of Randy's cryptographic knowledge, and his brain
shuts down. Harvard Li is a crypto maniac! He has been studying this shit
personally not just paying minions to read the books and send him notes, but
personally going over the equations, doing the math.
Tom Howard is grinning broadly. Eberhard is looking about as amused as
he ever gets, and Beryl's biting back a grin. Randy is trying desperately to
get the joke. Avi notes the confusion on Randy's face, turns his back to the
Taiwanese, and rubs his thumb and fingers together: money.
Oh, yeah. It had to be something to do with that.
Harvard Li cranked out a few million PC clones in the early nineties
and loaded them all with Windows, Word, and Excel but somehow forgot to
write any checks to Microsoft. About a year ago, Microsoft kicked his ass in
court and won a huge judgment. Harvard claimed bankruptcy: he doesn't have a
penny to his name. Microsoft has been trying to prove he still has the odd
billion or two salted away.
Harvard Li has clearly been thinking very hard about how to put money
where guys like Microsoft can't get it. There are many time honored ways:
the Swiss bank account, the false front corporation, the big real estate
project in deepest, darkest China, bars of gold in a vault somewhere. Those
tricks might work with the average government, but Microsoft is ten times
smarter, a hundred times more aggressive, and bound by no particular rules.
It gives Randy a little frisson just to imagine Harvard Li's situation:
being chased across the planet by Microsoft's state of the art hellhounds.
Harvard Li needs electronic cash. Not the lame stuff that people use to
buy t shirts on the Web without giving away their credit card numbers. He
needs the full on badass kind, based on hard crypto, rooted in an offshore
data haven, and he needs it bad. So nothing's more logical than that he is
sending lots of e mail to John Cantrell.
Tom Howard sidles up to him. "The question is, is it just Harvard Li,
or does he think he's discovered a new market?"
"Probably both," Randy guesses. "He probably knows a few other people
who'd like to have a private bank."
"The missiles," Tom says.
"Yeah." China's been taking potshots at Taiwan with ballistic missiles
lately, sort of like a Wild West villain shooting at the good guy's feet to
make him dance. "There have been bank runs in Taipei."
"In a way," Tom says, "these guys are tons smarter than us, because
they've never had a currency they could depend on." He and Randy look over
at John Cantrell, who has crossed his arms over his chest and is unloading a
disquisition on the Euler totient function while Harvard Li nods intently
and his nerd de camp frantically scrawls notes on a legal pad. Avi stands
far to one side, staring at the Old Palace, as in his mind the ramifications
of this bloom and sprawl and twine about each other like a tropical garden
run riot.
Other delegations file into the room behind the grand wazir and stake
out chunks of the conference table's coastline. The Dentist comes in with
his Norns or Furies or Hygienists or whatever the hell they are. There's a
group of white guys talking in Down Underish accents. Other than that, they
are all Asians. Some of them talk amongst themselves and some pull on their
chins and watch the conversation between Harvard Li and John Cantrell. Randy
watches them in turn: Bad Suit Asians and Good Suit Asians. The former have
grizzled buzz cuts and nicotine tanned skin and look like killers. They are
wearing bad suits, not because they can't afford good ones, but because they
don't give a shit. They are from China. The Good Suit Asians have high
maintenance haircuts, eyeglasses from Paris, clear skin, ready smiles. They
are mostly from Nippon.
"I want to exchange keys, right now, so we can e mail," Li says, and
gestures to an aide, who scurries to the edge of the table and unfolds a
laptop. "Something something Ordo," Li says in Cantonese. The aide points
and clicks.
Cantrell is gazing at the table expressionlessly. He squats down to
look under it. He strolls over and feels under the edge with his hand.
Randy bends and looks too. It's one of these high tech conference
tables with embedded power and communications lines, so that visitors can
plug in their laptops without having to string unsightly cables around and
fight over power outlets. The slab must be riddled with conduits. No visible
wires connect it to the world. The connections must run down hollow legs and
into a hollow floor. John grins, turns to Li, and shakes his head. "Normally
I'd say fine," he says, "but for a client with your level of security needs,
this is not an acceptable place to exchange keys."
"I'm not planning on using the phone," Li says, "we can exchange them
on floppies."
John knocks on wood. "Doesn't matter. Have one of your staff look into
the subject of Van Eck phreaking. That's with a 'p h,' not an 'f,' " he says
to the aide who's writing it down. Then, sensing Li's need for an executive
summary, he says, "They can read the internal state of your computer by
listening to the faint radio emissions coming out of the chips."
"Ahhhhh," Li says, and exchanges hugely significant looks with his
technical aides, as if this explains something that has been puzzling the
shit out of them.
Someone begins hollering wildly at the far end of the room not the end
by which the guests entered, but the other one. It is a chap in a getup
similar to, but not quite as ornate as, the grand wazir's. At some point he
switches to English the same dialect of English spoken by flight attendants
for foreign airlines, who have told passengers to insert the metal tongue
into the buckle so many times that it rushes out in one phlegmy garble.
Small Kinakutan men in good suits begin filing into the room. They take
seats across the head end of the table, which is wide enough for a Last
Supper tableau. In the Jesus position is a really big chair. It is the kind
of thing you'd get if you went to a Finnish designer with a shaved head,
rimless glasses, and twin Ph.D.s in semiotics and civil engineering, wrote
him a blank check, and asked him to design a throne. Behind is a separate
table for minions. All of it is backed up by tons of priceless artwork: an
eroded frieze, amputated from a jungle ruin somewhere.
All the guests gravitate instinctively towards their positions around
the table, and remain standing. The grand wazir glares at each one in turn.
A small man slips into the room, staring vacantly at the floor in front of
him, seemingly unaware that other people are present. His hair is lacquered
down to his skull, his appearance of portliness minimized by Savile Row
legerdemain. He eases into the big chair, which seems like a shocking
violation of etiquette until Randy realizes that this is the sultan.
Suddenly everyone is sitting down. Randy pulls his chair back and falls
into it. The leathery depths swallow his ass like a catcher's mitt accepting
a baseball. He's about to pull his laptop out of its bag, but in this
setting, both the nylon bag and the plastic computer have a strip mall
tawdriness. Besides, he has to resist this sophomoric tendency to take notes
all the time. Avi himself said that nothing was going to happen at this
meeting; all the important stuff is going to be subtextual. Besides, there
is the matter of Van Eck phreaking, which Cantrell probably mentioned just
to make Harvard Li paranoid, but which has Randy a bit rattled too. He opts
for a pad of graph paper the engineer's answer to the legal pad and a fine
point disposable pen.
The sultan has an Oxford English accent with traces of garlic and red
pepper still wedged in its teeth. He speaks for about fifteen minutes.
The room contains a few dozen living human bodies, each one a big sack
of guts and fluids so highly compressed that it will squirt for a few yards
when pierced. Each one is built around an armature of 206 bones connected to
each other by notoriously fault prone joints that are given to obnoxious
creaking, grinding, and popping noises when they are in other than pristine
condition. This structure is draped with throbbing steak, inflated with
clenching air sacks, and pierced by a Gordian sewer filled with burbling
acid and compressed gas and asquirt with vile enzymes and solvents produced
by the many dark, gamy nuggets of genetically programmed meat strung along
its length. Slugs of dissolving food are forced down this sloppy labyrinth
by serialized convulsions, decaying into gas, liquid, and solid matter which
must all be regularly vented to the outside world lest the owner go toxic
and drop dead. Spherical, gel packed cameras swivel in mucus greased ball
joints. Infinite phalanxes of cilia beat back invading particles,
encapsulate them in goo for later disposal. In each body a centrally located
muscle flails away at an eternal, circulating torrent of pressurized gravy.
And yet, despite all of this, not one of these bodies makes a single sound
at any time during the sultan's speech. It is a marvel that can only be
explained by the power of brain over body, and, in turn, by the power of
cultural conditioning over the brain.
Their host is trying to be appropriately sultanic: providing vision and
direction without getting sucked down into the quicksand of management. The
basic vision (or so it seems at first) is that Kinakuta has always been a
crossroads, a meeting place of cultures: the original Malays. Foote and his
dynasty of White Sultans. Filipinos with their Spanish, American and
Nipponese governors to the east. Muslims to the west. Anglos to the south.
Numerous Southeast Asian cultures to the north. Chinese everywhere as usual.
Nipponese whenever they are in one of their adventurous moods, and (for what
it's worth) the neolithic tribesmen who inhabit the interior of the island.
Hence nothing is more natural than that the present day Kinakutans
should run big fat optical fiber cables in every direction, patch into every
major national telco within reach, and become a sort of digital bazaar.
All of the guests nod soberly at the sultan's insight, his masterful
ability to meld the ancient ways of his country with modern technology.
But this is nothing more than a superficial analogy, the sultan
confesses. Everyone nods somewhat more vigorously than they did before:
indeed, everything that the sultan was just saying was, in fact, horseshit.
Several people jot down notes, lest they lose the Sultan's thread.
After all, the sultan says, physical location no longer matters in a
digitized, networked world. Cyberspace knows no boundaries.
Everyone nods vigorously except for, on the one hand, John Cantrell,
and, on the other, the grizzled Chinese guys.
But hey, the sultan continues, that's just dizzy headed cyber
cheerleading! What bullshit! Of course locations and boundaries matter!
At this point the room is plunged into dimness as the light pouring in
through the window wall is throttled by some kind of invisible mechanism
built into the glass: liquid crystal shutters or something. Screens descend
from slots cunningly hidden in the room's ceiling. This diversion saves the
cervical vertebrae of many guests, who are about to whiplash themselves by
nodding even more vigorously at the sultan's latest hairpin turn. Goddamn
it, does location matter in cyberspace or doesn't it? What's the bottom line
here? This isn't some Oxford debating society! Get to the point!
The sultan is whipping some graphics on them: a map of the world in one
of those politically correct projections that makes America and Europe look
like icebound reefs in the high Arctic. A pattern of straight lines is
superimposed on the map, each joining two major cities. The web of lines
gets denser and denser as the sultan talks, nearly obscuring the land
masses, and the oceans as well.
This, the sultan explains, is the conventional understanding of the
Internet: a decentralized web connecting each place with all the other
places, with no bottlenecks or, if you will, choke points.
But it's more bullshit! A new graphic comes up: same map, different
pattern of lines. Now we have webs within countries, sometimes within
continents. But between countries, and especially between continents, there
are only a few lines. It's not weblike at all.
Randy looks at Cantrell, who's nodding slyly.
"Many Net partisans are convinced that the Net is robust because its
lines of communication are spread evenly across the planet. In fact, as you
can see from this graphic, nearly all intercontinental Web traffic passes
through a small number of choke points. Typically these choke points are
controlled and monitored by local governments. Clearly, then, any Internet
application that wants to stand free of governmental interference is
undermined, from the very beginning, by a fundamental structure problem."
free of governmental interference. Randy can't believe he's hearing
this. If the sultan was a scruffy hacker talking to a room full of crypto
anarchists, that'd be one thing. But the sultan is a government, for god's
sake, and the room is full of card carrying Establishment types.
Like those Chinese buzz cuts! Who the hell are they? Don't try to tell
Randy those guys aren't part of the Chinese government, in some sense.
"Bottlenecks are only one of the structural barriers to the creation of
a free, sovereign, location independent cyberspace," the sultan continues
blithely.
Sovereign!?
"Another is the heterogeneous patchwork of laws, and indeed of legal
systems, that address privacy, free speech, and telecoms policy."
Another map graphic appears. Each country is colored, shaded, and
patterned according to a scheme of intimidating complexity. A half assed
stab at explaining it is made by a complex legend underneath. Instant
migraine. That, of course, is the whole point.
"The policy of any given legal system toward privacy issues is
typically the result of incremental changes made over centuries by courts
and legislative bodies," the sultan says. "With all due respect, very little
of it is relevant to modern privacy issues.
The lights come back on, sun waxes through the windows, the screens
disappear silently into the ceiling, and everyone's mildly surprised to see
that the sultan is on his feet. He is approaching a large and (of course)
ornate and expensive looking Go board covered with a complex pattern of
black and white stones. "Perhaps I can make an analogy to Go though chess
would work just as well. Because of our history, we Kinakutans are well
versed in both games. At the beginning of the game, the pieces are arranged
in a pattern that is simple and easy to understand. But the game evolves.
The players make small decisions, one turn at a time, each decision fairly
simple in and of itself, and made for reasons that can be easily understood,
even by a novice. But over the course of many such turns, the pattern
develops such great complexity that only the finest minds or the finest
computers can comprehend it." The sultan is gazing down thoughtfully at the
Go board as he says this. He looks up and starts making eye contact around
the room. "The analogy is clear. Our policies concerning free speech,
telecommunications and cryptography have evolved from a series of simple,
rational decisions. But they are today so complex that no one can understand
them, even in one single country, to say nothing of all countries taken
together."
The sultan pauses and walks broodingly around the Go board. The guests
have mostly given up on the obsequious nodding and jotting by this point. No
one is being tactical now, they are all listening with genuine interest,
wondering what he's going to say next.
But he says nothing. Instead he lays one arm across the board and, with
a sudden violent motion, sweeps all the stones aside. They rain down into
the carpet, skitter across polished stone, clatter onto the tabletop.
There is a silence of at least fifteen seconds. The sultan looks stony.
Then, suddenly, he brightens up.
"Time to start over," he says. "A very difficult thing to do in a large
country, where laws are written by legislative bodies, interpreted by
judges, bound by ancient precedents. But this is the Sultanate of Kinakuta
and I am the sultan and I say that the law here is to be very simple: total
freedom of information. I hereby abdicate all government power over the flow
of data across and within my borders. Under no circumstances will any part
of this government snoop on information flows, or use its power to in any
way restrict such flows. That is the new law of Kinakuta. I invite you
gentlemen to make the most of it. Thank you."
The sultan turns and leaves the room to a dignified ovation. Those are
the ground rules, boys. Now run along and play.
Dr. Mohammed Pragasu, Kinakutan Minister of Information, now rises from
his chair (which is to the right hand of the sultan's throne, naturally) and
takes the conn. His accent is almost as American as the sultan's is British;
he did his undergrad work at Berkeley and got his doctorate at Stanford.
Randy knows several people who worked and studied with him during those
years. According to them, Pragasu rarely showed up for work in anything
other than a t shirt and jeans, and showed just as strong an appetite for
beer and sausage pizza as any non Mohammedan. No one had a clue that he was
a sultan's second cousin, and worth a few hundred million in his own right.
But that was ten years ago. More recently, in his dealings with
Epiphyte Corp., he's been better dressed, better behaved, but studiously
informal: first names only, please. Dr. Pragasu likes to be addressed as
Prag. All of their meetings have started with an uninhibited exchange of the
latest jokes. Then Prag inquires about his old school buddies, most of whom
are working in Silicon Valley now. He delves for tips on the latest and
hottest high tech stocks, reminisces for a few minutes about the wild times
he enjoyed back in California, and then gets down to business.
None of them has ever seen Prag in his true element until now. It's a
bit hard to keep a straight face as if some old school chum of theirs had
rented a suit, forged an ID card, and was now staging a prank at a stuffy
business meeting. But there is a solemnity about Dr. Pragasu's bearing today
that is impressive, verging on oppressive.
Those Chinese guys across the table look like the Maoist Mt. Rushmore;
it is impossible to imagine that any of them has ever smiled in his life.
They are getting a live translation of the proceedings through ear pieces,
connected through the mysterious table to a boiler room full of
interpreters.
Randy's attention wanders. Prag's talk is dull because it is covering
technical ground with which Randy is already painfully familiar, couched in
simple analogies designed to make some kind of sense even after being
translated with Mandarin, Cantonese, Nipponese, or what have you. Randy
begins looking around the table.
There is a delegation of Filipinos. One of them, a fat man in his
fifties, looks awfully familiar. As usual, Randy cannot remember his name.
And there's another guy who shows up late, all by himself, and is ushered to
a solitary chair down at the far end: he might be a Filipino with lots of
Spanish blood, but he's more likely Latin American or Southern European or
just an American whose forebears came from those places. In any case, he has
scarcely settled into his seat before he's pulled out a cellphone and
punched in a very long phone number and begun a hushed, tense conversation.
He keeps sneaking glances up the table, checking out each delegation in
turn, then blurting capsule descriptions into his cellphone. He seems
startled to be here. No one who sees him can avoid noticing his furtiveness.
No one who notices it can avoid speculating on how he acquired it. But at
the same time, the man has a sullen glowering air about him that Randy
doesn't notice until his black eyes turn to stare into Randy's like the twin
barrels of a derringer. Randy stares back, too startled and stupid to avert
his gaze, and some kind of strange information passes from the cellphone man
to him, down the twin shafts of black light coming out of the man's eyes.
Randy realizes that he and the rest of Epiphyte(2) Corp. have fallen in
among thieves.
Chapter 37 SKIPPING
It's a hot cloudy day in the Bismarck Sea when Goto Dengo loses the
war. The American bombers come in low and level. Goto Dengo happens to be
abovedecks on a fresh air and calisthenics drill. To breathe air that does
not smell of shit and vomit makes him feel euphoric and invulnerable.
Everyone else must be feeling the same way, because he watches the airplanes
for a long time before he begins to hear warning klaxons.
The emperor's soldiers are supposed to feel euphoric and invulnerable
all the time, because their indomitable spirit makes them so. That Goto
Dengo only feels that way when abovedecks, breathing clean air, makes him
ashamed. The other soldiers never doubt, or at least never show it. He
wonders where he went astray. Perhaps it was his time in Shanghai, where he
was polluted with foreign ideas. Or maybe he was polluted from the very
beginning the ancient family curse.
The troop transports are slow there is no pretence that they are
anything other than boxes of air. They have only the most pathetic
armaments. The destroyers escorting them are sounding general quarters.
Goto Dengo stands at the rail and watches the crews of the destroyers
scrambling to their positions. Black smoke and blue light sputter from the
barrels of their weapons, and much later he hears them opening fire.
The American bombers must be in some kind of distress. He speculates
that they are low on fuel, or desperately lost, or have been chased down
below the cloud cover by Zeros. Whatever the reason, he knows they have not
come here to attack the convoy because American bombers attack by flying
overhead at a great altitude, raining down bombs. The bombs always miss
because the Americans' bombsights are so poor and the crews so inept. No,
the arrival of American planes here is just one of those bizarre accidents
of war; the convoy has been shielded under heavy clouds since early
yesterday.
The troops all around Goto Dengo are cheering. What good fortune that
these lost Americans have blundered straight into the gunsights of their
destroyer escort! And it is a good omen for the village of Kulu too, because
half of the town's young men just happen to be abovedecks to enjoy the
spectacle. They grew up together, went to school together, at the age of
twenty took the military physical together, joined the army together and
trained together. Now they are on their way to New Guinea together. Together
they were mustered up onto the deck of the transport only five minutes ago.
Together they will enjoy the sight of the American planes softening into
cartwheels of flame.
Goto Dengo, at twenty six, is one of the old hands here he came back
from Shanghai to be a leader and an example to them and he watches their
faces, these faces he has known since he was a child, never happier than at
this moment, glowing like cherry petals in the grey world of cloud, ocean,
and painted steel.
Fresh delight ripples across their faces. He turns to look. One of the
bombers has apparently decided to lighten its load by dropping a bomb
straight into the ocean. The boys of Kulu break into a jeering chant. The
American plane, having shed half a ton of useless explosives, peels sharply
upward, self neutered, good for nothing but target practice. The Kulu boys
howl at its pilot in contempt. A Nipponese pilot would have crashed his
plane into that destroyer at the very least!
Goto Dengo, for some reason, watches the bomb instead of the air plane.
It does not tumble from the plane's belly but traces a smooth flat parabola
above the waves, like an aerial torpedo. He catches his breath for a moment,
afraid that it will never drop into the ocean, that it will skim across the
water until it hits the destroyer that stands directly across its path. But
once again the fortunes of war smile upon the emperor's forces; the bomb
loses its struggle with gravity and splashes into the water. Goto Dengo
looks away.
Then he looks back again, chasing a phantom that haunts the edge of his
vision. The wings of foam that were thrown up by the bomb are still
collapsing into the water, but beyond them, a black mote is speeding away
perhaps it was a second bomb dropped by the same airplane. This time Goto
Dengo watches it carefully. It seems to be rising, rather than falling a
mirage perhaps. No, no, he's wrong, it is losing altitude slowly now, and it
plows into the water and throws up another pair of wings all right.
And then the bomb rises up out of the water again. Goto Dengo, a
student of engineering, implores the laws of physics to take hold of this
thing and make it fall and sink, which is what big dumb pieces of metal are
supposed to do. Eventually it does fall again but then it rises up again.
It is skipping across the water like the flat rocks that the boys of
Kulu used to throw across the fish pond near the village. Goto Dengo watches
it skip several more times, utterly fascinated. Once again, the fortunes of
war have provided a bizarre spectacle, seemingly for no other reason than to
entertain him. He savors it as if it were a cigarette discovered in the
bottom of a pocket. Skip, skip, skip.
Right into the flank of one of the escorting destroyers. A gun turret
flies straight up into the air, tumbling over and over. Just as it slows to
its apogee, it is completely enveloped in a geyser of flame spurting out of
the ship's engine room.
The Kulu boys are still chanting, refusing to accept the evidence of
their own eyes. Something flashes in Goto Dengo's peripheral vision; he
turns to watch another destroyer being snapped in half like a dry twig as
its magazines detonate. Tiny black things are skip, skip, skipping all over
the ocean now, like fleas across the rumpled bedsheets of a Shanghai
whorehouse. The chant falters. Everyone watches silently.
The Americans have invented a totally new bombing tactic in the middle
of a war and implemented it flawlessly. His mind staggers like a drunk in
the aisle of a careening train. They saw that they were wrong, they admitted
their mistake, they came up with a new idea. The new idea was accepted and
embraced all the way up the chain of command. Now they are using it to kill
their enemies.
No warrior with any concept of honor would have been so craven. So
flexible. What a loss of face it must have been for the officers who had
trained their men to bomb from high altitudes. What has become of those men?
They must have all killed themselves, or perhaps been thrown into prison.
The American Marines in Shanghai weren't proper warriors either.
Constantly changing their ways. Like Shaftoe. Shaftoe tried to fight
Nipponese soldiers in the street and failed. Having failed, he decided to
learn new tactics from Goto Dengo. "The Americans are not warriors,"
everyone kept saying. "Businessmen perhaps. Not warriors."
Belowdecks, the soldiers are cheering and chanting. They have not the
faintest idea what is really going on. For just a moment, Goto Dengo tears
his eyes away from the sea full of exploding and sinking destroyers. He gets
a bearing on a locker full of life preservers.
The airplanes all seem to be gone now. He scans the convoy and finds no
destroyers in working order.
"Put on the life jackets!" he shouts. None of the men seem to hear him
and so he makes for the locker. "Hey! Put on the life jackets!" He pulls one
out and holds it up, in case they can't hear him.
They can hear him just fine. They look at him as if what he's doing is
more shocking than anything they've witnessed in the last five minutes. What
possible use are life jackets?
"Just in case!" he shouts. "So we can fight for the emperor another
day." He says this last part weakly.
One of the men, a boy who lived a few doors away from him when they
were children, walks up to him, tears the life jacket out of his hands, and
throws it into the ocean. He looks Goto up and down, contemptuously, then
turns around and walks away.
Another man shouts and points: the second wave of planes is coming in.
Goto Dengo goes to the rail to stand among his comrades, but they sidle
away. The American planes charge in unopposed and veer away, leaving behind
nothing but more skipping bombs.
Goto Dengo watches a bomb come directly toward him for a few bounces,
until he can make out the message painted on its nose: BEND OVER, TOJO!
"This way!" he shouts. He turns his back to the bomb and walks back
across the deck to the locker full of life preservers. This time a few of
the men follow him. The ones who don't perhaps five percent of the
population of the village of Kulu are catapulted into the ocean when the
bomb explodes beneath their feet. The wooden deck buckles up wards. One of
the Kulu boys falls with a four foot long splinter driven straight up
through his viscera. Goto Dengo and perhaps a dozen others make it to the
locker on hands and knees and grab life preservers.
He would not be doing this if he had not already lost the war in his
soul. A warrior would stand his ground and die. His men are only following
him because he has told them to do it.
Two more bombs burst while they are getting the life preservers on and
struggling to the rail. Most of the men below must be dead now. Goto Dengo
nearly doesn't make it to the railing because it is rising sharply into the
air; he ends up doing a chin up on it and throwing one leg over the side,
which is now nearly horizontal. The ship is rolling over! Four others get a
grip on the rail, the rest slide helplessly down the deck and vanish into a
pit of smoke. Goto Dengo ignores what his eyes are telling him and tries to
listen to his inner ear. He is standing up on the side of the ship now, and
looking toward the stern he can see one of the propellers spinning uselessly
in the air. He begins running uphill. The four others follow him. An
American fighter plane comes over. He doesn't even realize they are being
strafed until he turns around and sees that the bullets have essentially cut
one man in half and crippled another by exploding his knee, so that the
lower leg and foot dangle by a few shreds of gristle. Goto Dengo throws the
man over his shoulders like a sack of rice and turns to resume the uphill
race, but finds that there is no more uphill to race towards.
He and the other two are standing on the summit of the ship now, a
steel bulge that rises for no more than a man's height out of the water. He
turns around once, then twice, looking for a place to run and sees nothing
but water all around. The water bloops and fizzes angrily as air and smoke
jet from the interior of the wrecked hull. Sea rushes in towards them. Goto
Dengo looks down at the steel bubble supporting his feet and realizes that
he is still, just for a moment, perfectly dry. Then the Bismarck Sea
converges on his feet from all directions at once and begins to climb up his
legs. A moment later the steel plate, which has been pressing so solidly
against the soles of his boots, drops away. The weight of the wounded man on
his shoulders shoves him straight down into the ocean. He gulps fuel oil
into his sinuses, struggles out from beneath the wounded man, and comes to
the surface screaming. His nose, and the cavities of his skull, are filled
with oil. He swallows some of it and goes into convulsions as his body tries
to eject it from every orifice at once: sneezing, vomiting, hawking it up
out of his lungs. Reaching up to his face with one hand he feels the oil
coating his skin thickly and knows that he dare not open his eyes. He tries
to wipe the oil from his face with his sleeve, but the fabric is saturated
with it.
He has to get down in the water and wipe himself clean so that he can
see again, but the oil in his clothing makes him float. His lungs are
finally clear now and he begins to gasp in air. It smells of oil but at
least it's breathable. But the volatile chemicals in the oil have gotten
into his blood now and he feels them spread through his body like fire. It
feels as though a hot spatula is being shoved between his scalp and his
skull. The other men are howling and he realizes that he is too. Some of the
Chinese workers in Shanghai used to breathe gasoline to get high, and this
was the noise that they made.
One of the men near him screams. He hears a noise approaching, like a
sheet being torn in half to make bandages. Radiant heat strikes him in the
face like a hot frying pan, just before Goto Dengo dives and kicks
downwards. The motion exposes a band of flesh around his calf, between his
boot and his trouser leg, and in the moment that it's poking straight up out
of the water, it gets seared to a crisp.
He swims blind through an ocean of fuel oil. Then there is a change in
the temperature and the viscosity of the fluid streaming over his face.
Suddenly the life preserver begins to tug him upwards; he must be in water
now. He swims for a few more kicks and begins to wipe at his eyes. The
pressure on his ears tells him he's not that deep, maybe a couple of meters
beneath the surface. Finally he risks opening his eyes. Ghostly, flickering
light is illuminating his hands, making them glow a bright green; the sun
must have come out. He rolls over on his back and looks straight up. Above
him is a lake of rolling fire.
He rips the life preserver off over his head and lets it go. It shoots
straight up and bursts out of the surface, burning like a comet. His oil
soaked clothing is tugging him relentlessly upwards, so he rips his shirt
off and lets it tumble up towards the surface. His boots pull down, his oily
pants push up, and he reaches some sort of equilibrium.
***
He grew up in the mines.
Kulu is near the north coast of Hokkaido, on the shore of a freshwater
lake where rivers converge from the inland hills and commingle their waters
before draining to the Sea of Okhotsk. The hills rise sharply from one end
of that lake, looming over a cold silver creek that rushes down out of
forest inhabited only by apes and demons. There are small islands in that
part of the lake. If you dig down into the islands, or the hills, you will
find veins of copper ore, and sometimes you will find zinc and lead and even
silver. That is what the men of Kulu have done for many generations. Their
monument is a maze of tunnels that snake through the hills, not following
straight lines but tracking the richest veins.
Sometimes the tunnels dip below the level of the lake. When the mines
were working these tunnels were pumped out, but now that they are exhausted,
the water has been allowed to seek its level and has formed sumps. There are
cavities and tunnels back in the hills that can only be reached by boys who
are brave enough to dive into the cold black water and swim through the
darkness for ten, twenty, thirty meters.
Goto Dengo went to all of those places when he was a boy. He even
discovered some of them. Big, fat and buoyant, he was a pretty good swimmer.
He was not the best swimmer, or the best at holding his breath. He was not
even the bravest (the bravest did not put on life preservers, and went to
their deaths like warriors).
He went where the others wouldn't because he, alone among all the boys
of Kulu, was not afraid of the demons. When he was a boy, his father, a
mining engineer, would take him hiking up into the places in the mountains
where demons were said to live. They would sleep out under the stars and
wake up to find their blankets covered with frost, and sometimes their food
stolen by bears. But no demons.
The other boys believed that demons lived in some of those underwater
tunnels, and that this explained why some of the boys who swam back there
never returned. But Goto Dengo did not fear the demons and so he went back
there fearing only the cold and the dark and the water. Which was plenty to
fear.
Now he need only pretend that the fire is a stone ceiling. He swims
some more. But he did not breathe properly before diving, and he is close to
panic now. He looks up again and sees that the water is burning only in
patches.
He is quite deep, he realizes, and he can't swim well in trousers and
boots. He fumbles at his bootlaces, but they are tied in double knots. He
pulls a knife from his belt and slashes through the laces, kicks the boots
off, sheds his pants and drawers too. Naked, he forces himself to be calm
for ten more seconds, brings his knees to his chest and hugs them. His
body's natural buoyancy takes over. He knows that he must be rising slowly
toward the surface now, like a bubble. The light is growing brighter. He
need only wait. He lets go of the knife, which is only slowing him down.
His back feels cold. He explodes out of the fetal position and thrusts
his head up into the air, gasping for breath. A patch of burning oil is
almost close enough for him to touch, and the oil is trickling across the
top of the ocean as if it were a solid surface. Nearly invisible blue flames
seep from it, then turn yellow and boil off curling black smoke. He
backstrokes away from a reaching tendril.
A glowing silver apparition passes over him, so close he can feel the
warmth of its exhaust and read the English warning labels on its belly. The
tips of its wing guns are sparkling, flinging out red streaks.
They are strafing the survivors. Some try to dive, but the oil in their
uniforms pops them right back to the surface, legs flailing uselessly in the
air. Goto Dengo first makes sure he is nowhere near any burning oil, then
treads water, spinning slowly in the water like a radar dish, looking for
planes. A P 38 comes in low, gunning for him. He sucks in a breath and
dives. It is nice and quiet under the water, and the bullets striking its
surface sound like the ticking of a big sewing machine. He sees a few rounds
plunging into the water around him, leaving trails of bubbles as the water
cavitates in their wake, slowing virtually to a stop in just a meter or two,
then turning downwards and sinking like bombs. He swims after one of them
and plucks it out of the water. It is still hot from its passage. He would
keep it as a souvenir, but his pockets are gone with his clothes and he
needs his hands. He stares at the bullet for a moment, greenish silver in
the underwater light, fresh from some factory in America.
How did this bullet come from America to my hand?
We have lost. The war is over.
I must go home and tell everyone.
I must be like my father, a rational man, explaining the facts of the
world to the people at home, who are crippled by superstitions.
He lets the bullet go again, watches it drop towards the bottom of the
sea, where the ships, and all of the young men of Kulu, are bound.
Chapter 38 MUGS
Hey, it's an immature market.
The rationalizations have not actually begun yet Randy's still sitting
in the sultan's big conference room, and the meeting's just getting up to
speed.
Naturally the early adopters are not going to be your regular joes.
Tom Howard has taken the floor to explain his work. Randy doesn't have
much to do, so he's imagining tonight's conversation in the Bomb and
Grapnel.
It's like the Wild West a little unruly at first, then in a few years
it settles down and you've got Fresno.
Most of the delegations have brought hired guns: engineers and security
experts who'll get a bounty if they can find a flaw in Tom's system. One by
one, these guys stand up to take their shots.
Ten years from now, widows and paperboys will be banking in cyberspace.
Magnificent isn't the word you would normally use to describe Tom
Howard; he's burly and surly, completely lacking in social graces, and
doesn't apologize for it. Most of the time he sits silently, wearing an
expression of sphinxlike boredom, and so it's easy to forget how good he is.
But during this particular half hour of Tom Howard's life, it is of the
essence that he be magnificent. He is going blade to blade with the Seven
Samurai here: the nerdiest high octane Ph.D.s and the scariest private
security clicks that Asia can produce. One by one they come after him and he
cuts their heads off and stacks them on the table like cannon balls. Several
times he has to stop and think for sixty seconds before delivering the
deathblow. Once he has to ask Eberhard Föhr to make some calculations on his
laptop. Occasionally he has to call on the cryptographic expertise of John
Cantrell, or to look over at Randy for a nod or shake of the head. But
eventually, he shuts the hecklers up. Beryl wears a not very convincing
smile throughout the entire thing. Avi just grips the arms of his chair, his
knuckles going from blue to white to pink to a normal healthy glow over the
course of the final five minutes, when it's clear that the Samurai are
withdrawing in disarray. It makes Randy want to empty a six shooter into the
ceiling and holler, "Yeee haaw!" at the top of his lungs.
Instead he listens, just in case Tom gets tripped up in the briar patch
of plesiosynchronous protocol arcana, whence only Randy can drag him out.
This gives him some more time to survey the faces of the other people in the
room. But the meeting is a couple of hours old now, and they are all as
familiar to him as siblings.
Tom wipes his sword on his pantleg and thwacks his big ass resoundingly
into his leather chair. Minions scurry into the room bringing tea and coffee
and sugar/fat pods. Dr. Pragasu stands up and introduces John Cantrell.
Sheesh! So far, the agenda is revolving entirely around Epiphyte Corp.
What gives?
Dr. Pragasu, having developed a friendly relationship with these
California hackers, is pimping them to his big money contacts. That's what
gives.
This is very interesting from a business standpoint. But Randy finds it
a bit irksome and threatening, this one way flow of information. By the time
they go home, this assemblage of shady gmokes is going to know everything
about Epiphyte Corp., but Epiphyte will still be in the dark. No doubt
that's exactly how they want it.
It occurs to Randy to look over at the Dentist. Dr. Hubert Kepler is
sitting on the same side of the table as he is, and so it's hard to read his
face. But it's clear he's not listening to John Cantrell. He's covering his
mouth with one hand and staring into space. His Valkyries are furiously
passing notes back and forth, like naughty cheerleaders.
Kepler's just as surprised as Randy. He doesn't seem like the kind of
guy who delights in surprises.
What can Randy do right now to enhance shareholder value? Intrigue is
not his specialty; he'll leave that to Avi. Instead, he tunes out the
meeting, opens up his laptop, and begins to hack.
Hacking is an overly glorious word for this. Everyone in Epiphyte Corp.
has a laptop with a tiny built in video camera, so that they can do long
distance videoconferencing. Avi insisted on it. The camera is almost
invisible: just an orifice a couple of millimeters across, mounted in the
top center of the frame that surrounds the screen. It doesn't have a lens as
such it's a camera in the oldest sense, a camera obscura. One wall contains
the pinhole and the opposite wall is a silicon retina.
Randy has the source code the original program for the
videoconferencing software. It is reasonably clever in its use of bandwidth.
It looks at the stream of frames (individual still images) coming from the
pinhole camera and notices that, although the total amount of data in those
frames is rather large, the difference from one frame to the next is tiny.
It would be altogether different if Frame 1 were a talking head and Frame 2,
a fraction of a second later, were a postcard shot of a Hawaiian beach and
Frame 3 a diagram of a printed circuit and Frame 4 a closeup of a
dragonfly's head. But in fact, each frame is a talking head the same
person's head, with minor changes in position and expression. The software
can save on precious bandwidth by mathematically subtracting each new frame
from the previous one (since, to the computer, each image is just a long
number) and then transmitting only the difference.
What it all means is that this software has a lot of built in
capabilities for comparing one image with another, and gauging the magnitude
of the difference from one frame to the next. Randy doesn't have to write
that stuff. He just has to familiarize himself with these already existing
routines, learn their names and how to use them, which takes about fifteen
minutes of clicking around.
Then he writes a little program called Mugshot that will take a snap
shot from the pinhole camera every five seconds or so, and compare it to the
previous snapshot, and, if the difference is large enough, save it to a
file. An encrypted file with a meaningless, random name. Mugshot opens no
windows and produces no output of its own, so the only way you can tell it's
running is by typing the UNIX command
ps
and hitting the return key. Then the system will spew out a long list
of running processes, and Mugshot will show up somewhere in that list.
Just in case someone thinks of this, Randy gives the program a fake
name: VirusScanner. He starts it running, then checks its directory and
verifies that it has just saved an image file: one mug shot of Randy. As
long as he sits fairly still, it won't save any more mug shots; the pattern
of light that represents Randy's face striking the far wall of the camera
obscura won't change very much.
In the technology world, no meeting is complete without a demo.
Cantrell and Föhr have developed a prototype of the electronic cash system,
just to demonstrate the user interface and the built in security features.
"A year from now, instead of going to the bank and talking to a human being,
you will simply launch this piece of software from any where in the world,"
Cantrell says, "and communicate with the Crypt." He blushes as this word
seeps through the translators and into the ears of the others. "Which is
what we're calling the system that Tom Howard has been putting together."
Avi's on his feet, coolly managing the crisis. 'Mì fú," he says,
speaking directly to the Chinese guys, "is a better translation."
The Chinese guys look relieved, and a couple of them actually crack
smiles when they hear Avi speaking Mandarin. Avi holds up a sheet of paper
bearing the Chinese characters (1):
Painfully aware that he has just dodged a bullet, John Cantrell
continues with a thick tongue. "We thought you might want to see the
software in action. I'm going to demo it on the screen now, and during the
lunch break you should feel free to come around and try it out yourselves."
Randy fires up the software. He's got his laptop plugged into a video
jack on the underside of the table so that the sultan's lurking media geeks
can project a duplicate of what Randy's seeing onto a large projection
screen at the end of the room. It is running the front end to the cash demo,
but his mug shot program is still running in the background. Randy slides
the computer over to John, who runs through the demo (there should be a mug
shot of John Cantrell stored on the hard disk now).
"I can write the best cryptographic code possible, but it's all
worthless unless there is a good system for verifying the user's identity,"
John begins, regaining some poise now. "How does the computer know that you
are you? Passwords are too easy to guess, steal, or forget. The computer
needs to know something about you that is as unique to you as your
fingerprint. Basically it has to look at some part of your body, such as the
blood vessels in your retina or the distinctive sound of your voice, and
compare it against known values stored in its memory. This kind of
technology is called biometrics. Epiphyte Corp. boasts one of the top
biometrics experts in the world: Dr. Eberhard Föhr, who wrote what's
considered to be the best handwriting recognition system in the world." John
rushes through this encomium. Eb and everyone else in the room look bored by
it they've all seen Eb's resume. "Right now we're going with voice
recognition, but the code is entirely modular, so we could swap in some
other system, such as a hand geometry reader. That's up to the customer."
John runs the demo, and unlike most demos, it actually works and does
not crash. He even tries to fake it out by recording his own voice on a
pretty good portable digital tape recorder and then playing it back. But the
software is not fooled. This actually makes an impression on the Chinese
guys, who, up to the point, have looked like the contents of Madame
Tussaud's Dumpster after an exhibit on the Cultural Revolution.
Not everyone is such a tough sell. Harvard Li is a committed Cantrell
supporter, and the Filipino heavyweight looks like he can hardly wait to
deposit his cash reserves in the Crypt.
Lunchtime! Doors are hauled open to reveal a dining room with a buffet
along the far wall, redolent of curry, garlic, cayenne, and bergamot. The
Dentist makes a point of sitting at the same table with Epiphyte Corp., but
doesn't say very much just sits there with a dreadfully choleric expression
on his face, staring and chewing and thinking. When Avi finally asks him
what he thinks, Kepler says, levelly: "It's been informative."
The Three Graces cringe epileptically. Informative is evidently an
extremely bad word in the Dentist's lexicon. It means that Kepler has
learned something at this meeting, which means that he did not know
absolutely everything going into it, which would certainly rate as an
unforgivable intelligence failure on his scale of values.
There is an agonizing silence. Then Kepler says, "But not devoid of
interest."
Deep sighs of relief ventilate the blindingly white, plaque free
dentition of the Hygienists. Randy tries to imagine which is worse: that
Kepler suspects that the wool was pulled over his eyes, or that he sees a
new opportunity here. Which is more terrible, the paranoia or the avarice of
the Dentist? They are about to find out. Randy, with his sappy, romantic
instinct for ingratiation, almost says something like, "It's been
informative for us, too!" but he holds back, noticing that Avi has not said
it. Saying it would not enhance shareholder value. Best to play one's cards
close to the vest, let Kepler wonder whether Epiphyte Corp. knew the real
agenda.
Randy has chosen his seat tactically, so that he can look straight
through the door into the conference room and keep an eye on his laptop. One
by one, members of the other delegations excuse themselves, go into the
room, and run the demo, imprinting their own voices into the computer's
memory and then letting it recognize them. Some of the nerds even type
commands on Randy's keyboard; probably that ps command, snooping. Despite
the fact that Randy's got it set up so it can't be meddled with too much, it
bothers him at a deep level to see the fingertips of these strangers
prodding away at his keyboard.
It gnaws at him all through the afternoon session, which is all about
the communications links joining Kinakuta to the wide world. Randy ought to
be paying attention to this, since it impinges massively on the Philippines
project. But he doesn't. He broods over his keyboard, contaminated by a
foreign touch, and then he broods about the fact that he's brooding about
it, which demonstrates his unfitness for Biz. It's technically Epiphyte's
keyboard not even his and if it enhances shareholder value for sinister
Eastern nerds to poke around his files, he should be happy to let them do
it.
They adjourn. Epiphyte and the Nipponese dine together, but Randy's
bored and distracted. Finally, about nine P.M., he excuses himself and goes
to his room. He's mentally composing a response to root@eruditorum.org,
along the lines of because there seems to be a hell of a market for this
kind of thing, and it's better that I fill the niche, than someone frankly
and overly evil. But before his laptop has even had time to boot up, the
Dentist, clad in a white terrycloth robe and smelling like vodka and hotel
soap, knocks on Randy's door and invites himself in. He invades Randy (no;
the shareholders') bathroom and helps himself to a glass of water. He stands
at the shareholders' window and glowers down at the Nipponese cemetery for
several minutes before speaking.
"Do you realize who those people were?" he says. His voice, if
subjected to biometric analysis, would reflect disbelief, bewilderment,
maybe a trace of amusement.
Or maybe he's just faking it, trying to get Randy to let down his
guard. Maybe he is root@eruditorum.org.
"Yeah," Randy lies.
When Randy revealed the existence of Mugshot, after the meeting, Avi
gave him a commendation for deviousness, printed up the mugshots in his
hotel room, and Federal Expressed them to a private dick in Hong Kong.
Kepler turns around and gives Randy a searching look. "Either I had bad
information about you guys," he says, "or else you are in way over your
heads."
If this were the First Business Foray, Randy would piss his pants at
this point. If it were the Second, he would resign and fly back to
California tomorrow. But it's the third, and so he manages to maintain
composure. The light is behind him, so perhaps Kepler's momentarily dazzled
and can't read his face very well. Randy takes a swallow of water and
breathes deeply, asking, "In light of today's events," he says, "what's in
store for our relationship?"
"It is no longer about providing cheap long distance service to the
Philippines if, indeed, it ever was in the first place!" Kepler says darkly.
"The data flowing through the Philippines network now takes on entirely new
significance. It's a superb opportunity. At the same time, we're competing
against heavy hitters: those Aussies and the Singapore group. Can we compete
against them, Randy?"
It is a simple and direct question, the most dangerous kind. "We
wouldn't be risking our shareholders' money if we didn't think so."
"That's a predictable answer," Kepler snorts. "Are we going to have a
real conversation here, Randy, or should we invite our PR people into the
room and exchange press releases?"
During an earlier business foray, Randy would have buckled at this
point. Instead he says, "I'm not prepared to have a real conversation with
you, here and now."
"Sooner and later we have to have one," says the Dentist. Those wisdom
teeth will have to come out someday.
"Naturally."
"In the meantime, here is what you should be thinking about," Kepler
says, getting ready to leave. "What the hell can we offer, in the way of
telecommunications services, that stacks up competitively against the
Aussies and those Singapore boys? Because we can't beat 'em on price."
This being Randy's Third Business Foray, he doesn't blurt out the
answer: redundancy. "That question will certainly be on all of our minds,"
Randy says instead.
"Spoken like a flack," says Kepler, his shoulders sagging. He goes out
into the hallway and turns around, saying, "See you tomorrow at the Crypt."
Then he winks. "Or the Vault, or Cornucopia of Infinite Prosperity, or
whatever the Chinese word for it is." Having knocked Randy off balance with
this startling display of humanity, he walks away.
Chapter 39 YAMAMOTO
Tojo and his claque of imperial army boneheads said to him, in effect:
Why don't you go out and secure the Pacific Ocean for us, because we'll need
a convenient shipping lane, say, oh, about ten thousand miles wide, in order
to carry out our little plan to conquer South America, Alaska, and all of
North America west of the Rockies. In the meantime we'll finish mopping up
China. Please attend to this ASAP.
By then they were running the country. They had assassinated anyone in
their way, they had the emperor's ear, and it was hard to tell them that
their plan was full of shit and that the Americans were just going to get
really pissed off and annihilate them. So, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, a
dutiful servant of the emperor, put a bit of thought into the problem,
sketched out a little plan, sent out one or two boats on a small jaunt
halfway across the fucking planet, and blew Pearl Harbor off the map. He
timed it perfectly, right after the formal declaration of war. It was not
half bad. He did his job.
One of his aides later crawled into his office in the nauseatingly
craven posture that minions adopt when they are about to make you really,
really unhappy and told him that there had been a mix up in the embassy in
Washington and that the diplomats there had not gotten around to delivering
the declaration of war until well after the American Pacific Fleet had gone
to the bottom.
To those Army fuckheads, this is nothing just a typo, happens all the
time. Isoroku Yamamoto has given up on trying to make them understand that
the Americans are grudge holders on a level that is inconceivable to the
Nipponese, who learn to swallow their pride before they learn to swallow
solid food. Even if he could get Tojo and his mob of shabby, ignorant thugs
to comprehend how pissed off the Americans are, they'd laugh it off. What're
they going to do about it? Throw a pie in your face, like the Three Stooges?
Ha, ha, ha! Pass the sake and bring me another comfort girl!
Isoroku Yamamoto spent a lot of time playing poker with Yanks during
his years in the States, smoking like a chimney to deaden the scent of their
appalling aftershave. The Yanks are laughably rude and uncultured, of
course; this hardly constitutes a sharp observation. Yamamoto, by contrast,
attained some genuine insight as a side effect of being robbed blind by
Yanks at the poker table, realizing that the big freckled louts could be
dreadfully cunning. Crude and stupid would be okay perfectly understandable,
in fact.
But crude and clever is intolerable; this is what makes those red
headed ape men extra double super loathsome. Yamamoto is still trying to
drill the notion into the heads of his partners in the big Nipponese scheme
to conquer everything between Karachi and Denver. He wishes that they would
get the message. A lot of the Navy men have been around the world a few
times and seen it for themselves, but those Army guys have spent their
careers mowing down Chinamen and raping their women and they honestly
believe that the Americans are just the same except taller and smellier.
Come on guys, Yamamoto keeps telling them, the world is not just a big
Nanjing. But they don't get it. If Yamamoto were running things, he'd make a
rule: each Army officer would have to take some time out from bayoneting
Neolithic savages in the jungle, go out on the wide Pacific in a ship, and
swap 16 inch shells with an American task force for a while. Then maybe,
they'd understand they're in a real scrap here.
This is what Yamamoto thinks about, shortly before sunrise, as he
clambers onto his Mitsubishi G4M bomber in Rabaul, the scabbard of his sword
whacking against the frame of the narrow door. The Yanks call this type of
plane "Betty," an effeminatizing gesture that really irks him. Then again,
the Yanks name even their own planes after women, and paint naked ladies on
their sacred instruments of war! If they had samurai swords, Americans would
probably decorate the blades with nail polish.
Because the plane's a bomber, the pilot and copilot are crammed into a
cockpit above the main tube of the fuselage. The nose of the plane, then, is
a blunt dome of curving struts, like the meridians and parallels of a globe,
the trapezoids between them filled with sturdy panes of glass. The plane has
been parked pointing east, so the glass nose is radiant with streaky dawn,
the unreal hues of chemicals igniting in a lab. In Nippon nothing happens by
accident, so he has to assume that this is a deliberate morale building tip
o' the helmet to the Rising Sun. Making his way up to the greenhouse, he
straps himself in where he can stare out the windows as this Betty, and
Admiral Ugaki's, take off.
In one direction is Simpson's Harbor, one of the best anchorages in the
Pacific, an asymmetrical U wrapped in a neat grid of streets, conspicuously
blighted by a fucking British cricket oval! In the other direction, over the
ridge, lies the Bismarck Sea. Somewhere down there, the corpses of a few
thousand Nipponese troops lie pickled in the wrinkled hulls of their
transport ships. A few thousand more escaped to life rafts, but all of their
weapons and supplies went to the bottom, so the men are just useless mouths
now.
It's been like this for almost a year, ever since Midway, when the
Americans refused to bite on Yamamoto's carefully designed feints and ruses
up Alaska way, and just happened to send all of their surviving carriers
directly into the path of his Midway invasion force. Shit. Shit Shit. Shit.
Slit. Shit. Shit. Yamamoto's chewing on a thumbnail, right through his
glove.
Now those clumsy, reeking farmhands are sinking every transport ship
that the Army sends to New Guinea. Double shit! Their observation planes are
everywhere always showing up in the right place at the right time tally
hoing the emperor's furtive convoys in the sawing twang of bloody gummed
Confederates. Their coast watchers infest the mountains of all these
godforsaken islands, despite the Army's efforts to hunt them down and flush
them out. All of their movements are known.
The two planes fly southeastwards across the tip of New Ireland and
enter the Solomon Sea. The Solomon Islands spread out before them, fuzzy
jade humps rising from a steaming ocean, 6,500 feet below. A couple of small
humps and then a much bigger one, today's destination: Bougainville.
Have to show the flag, go out on these inspection tours, give the
frontline troops a glimpse of glory, build morale. Yamamoto frankly has
better things to do with his time, so he tries to pack as many of these
obligatory junkets into a single day as possible. He left his naval citadel
at Truk and flew to Rabaul last week so that he could supervise his latest
big operation: a wave of massed air attacks on American bases from New
Guinea to Guadalcanal.
The air raids were purportedly successful; kind of. The surviving
pilots reported vast numbers of sinkings, whole fleets of American aircraft
destroyed on their mucky airstrips. Yamamoto knows perfectly well that these
reports will turn out to be wildly exaggerated. More than half of his planes
never came back the Americans, and their almost equally offensive cousins,
the Australians, were ready for them. But the Army and the Navy alike are
full of ambitious men who will do everything they can to channel good news
the emperor's way, even if it's not exactly the truth. Accordingly, Yamamoto
has received a personal telegram of congratulations from none other than the
sovereign himself. It is his duty, now, to fly round to his various
outposts, hop out of his Betty, wave the sacred telegram in the air, and
pass on the blessings of the emperor.
Yamamoto's feet hurt like hell. Like everyone else within a thousand
miles, he has a tropical disease; in his case, beriberi. It is the scourge
of the Nipponese and especially of the Navy, because they eat too much
polished rice, not enough fish and vegetables. His long nerves have been
corroded by lactic acid, so his hands quiver. His failing heart can't shove
fluid through his extremities, so his feet swell. He needs to change his
shoes several times a day, but he doesn't have room here; he is encumbered
not only by the curvature of the plane's greenhouse, but also by his sword.
They are approaching the Imperial Navy airbase at Bougainville, right
on schedule, at 9:35. A shadow passes overhead and Yamamoto glances up to
see the silhouette of an escort, way out of position, dangerously close to
them. Who is that idiot? Then the green island and the blue ocean rotate
into view as his pilot puts the Betty into a power dive. Another plane
flashes overhead with a roar that cuts through the noise of the Betty's
engines, and although it is nothing more than a black flash, its odd
forktailed silhouette registers in his mind. It was a P 38 Lightning, and
the last time Admiral Yamamoto checked, the Nipponese Air Force wasn't
flying any of those.
The voice of Admiral Ugaki comes through on the radio from the other
Betty, right behind Yamamoto's, ordering Yamamoto's pilot to stay in
formation. Yamamoto cannot see anything in front of them except for the surf
washing ashore on Bougainville, and the wall of trees, seeming to grow
higher and higher, as the plane descends the tropical canopy now actually
above them. He is Navy, not an Air Force man, but even he knows that when
you can't see any planes in front of you in a dogfight, you have problems.
Red streaks flash past from behind, burying themselves in the steaming
jungle ahead, and the Betty begins to shake violently. Then yellow light
fills the corners of both of his eyes: the engines are on fire. The pilot is
heading directly for the jungle now; either the plane is out of control, or
the pilot is already dead, or it is a move of atavistic desperation: run,
run into the trees!
They enter the jungle in level flight, and Yamamoto is astonished how
far they go before hitting anything big. Then the plane is bludgeoned wide
open by mahogany trunks, like baseball bats striking a wounded sparrow, and
he knows it's over. The greenhouse disintegrates around him, the meridians
and parallels crumpling and rending which isn't quite as bad as it sounds
since the body of the plane is suddenly filled with flames. As his seat
tears loose from the broken dome and launches into space, he grips his
sword, unwilling to disgrace himself by dropping his sacred weapon, blessed
by the emperor, even in this last instant of his life. His clothes and hair
are on fire as he tumbles like a meteor through the jungle, clenching his
ancestral blade.
He realizes something: The Americans must have done the impossible:
broken all of their codes. That explains Midway, it explains the Bismarck
Sea, Hollandia, everything. It especially explains why Yamamoto who ought to
be sipping green tea and practicing calligraphy in a misty garden is, in
point of fact, on fire and hurtling through the jungle at a hundred miles
per hour in a chair, closely pursued by tons of flaming junk. He must get
word out! The codes must all be changed! This is what he is thinking when he
flies head on into a hundred foot tall Octomelis sumatrana.
Chapter 40 ANTAEUS
When Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse sets foot on the Sceptered Isle for
the first time in several months, at the ferry terminal in Utter Maurby, he
is startled to find allusions to springtime all over the place. The locals
have installed flower boxes around the pier, and all of them are abloom with
some sort of pre Cambrian decorative cabbage. The effect is not exactly
cheerful, but it does give the place a haunted Druidical look, as if
Waterhouse is looking at the northwesternmost fringe of some cultural
tradition from which a sharp anthropologist might infer the existence of
actual trees and meadows several hundred miles farther south. For now,
lichens will do they have gotten into the spirit and turned greyish purple
and greyish green.
He and Duffel, their old companionship renewed, tussle their way over
to the terminal and fight each other for a seat aboard the disconcertingly
quaint two car Manchester bound whistle stop. It will sit there for another
couple of hours raising steam before leaving, giving him plenty of time to
take stock.
He's been working on some information theoretical problems occasioned
by the Royal and U.S. Navies' recent (1) propensity to litter the
floor of the Atlantic with bombed and torpedoed milchcows. These fat German
submarines, laden with fuel, food, and ammunition, loiter in the Atlantic
Ocean, using radio rarely and staying well away from the sea lanes, and
serve as covert floating supply bases so that the U boats don't have to go
all the way back to the European mainland to refuel and rearm. Sinking lots
of 'em is great for the convoys, but must seem conspicuously improbable to
the likes of a Rudolf von Hacklheber.
Usually, just for the sake of form, the Allies send out a search plane
beforehand to pretend to stumble upon the milchcow. But, setting aside some
of their blind spots in the political realm, the Germans are bright chaps,
and cannot be expected to fall for that ruse forever. If we are going to
keep sending their milchcows to the bottom, we need to come up with a
respectable excuse for the fact that we always know exactly where they are!
Waterhouse has been coming up with excuses as fast as he can for most
of the late winter and early spring, and frankly he is tired of it. It has
to be done by a mathematician if it's to be done correctly, but it's not
exactly mathematics. Thank god he had the presence of mind to copy down the
crypto worksheets that he discovered in the U boat's safe, which give him
something to live for.
In a sense he is wasting his time; the originals have long since gone
off to Bletchley Park where they were probably deciphered within hours. But
he's not doing it for the war effort per se, just trying to keep his mind
sharp and maybe add a few leaves to the next edition of the Cryptonomicon.
When he arrives at Bletchley, which is his destination of the moment, he
will have to ask around and find out what those messages actually said.
Usually, he is above such cheating. But the messages from U 553 have
him completely baffled. They were not produced on an Enigma machine, but
they are at least that difficult to decrypt. He does not even know, yet,
what kind of cipher he is dealing with. Normally, one begins by figuring
out, based on certain patterns in the ciphertext, whether it is, for
example, a substitution or a transposition system, and then further
classifying it into, say, an aperiodic transposition cipher in which keying
units of constant length encipher plaintext groups of variable length, or
vice versa. Once you have classified the algorithm, you know how to go about
breaking the code.
Waterhouse hasn't even gotten that far. He now strongly suspects that
the messages were produced using a one time pad. If so, not even Bletchley
Park will be able to break them, unless they have somehow obtained a copy of
the pad. He is half hoping that they will tell him that this is the case so
that he can stop ramming his head against this particular stone wall.
In a way, this would raise even more questions than it would answer.
The Triton four wheel naval Enigma was supposedly considered by the Germans
to be perfectly impregnable to cryptanalysis. If that was the case, then why
was the skipper of U 553 employing his own private system for certain
messages?
The locomotive starts hissing and sputtering like the House of Lords as
Inner Qwghlmians emerge from the terminal building and take their seats on
the train. A gaffer comes through the car, selling yesterday's newspapers,
cigarettes, candy, and Waterhouse purchases some of each.
The train is just beginning to jerk forward when Waterhouse's eye falls
on the lead headline of yesterday's newspaper: YAMAMOTO'S PLANE SHOT DOWN IN
PACIFIC ARCHITECT OF PEARL HARBOR THOUGHT TO BE DEAD.
"Malaria, here I come," Waterhouse mumbles to himself. Then, before
reading any further, he sets the newspaper down and opens up his pack of
cigarettes. This is going to take a lot of cigarettes.
***
One day, and a whole lot of tar and nicotine later, Waterhouse climbs
off the train and walks out the front door of Bletchley Depot into a
dazzling spring day. The flowers in front of the station are blooming, a
warm southern breeze is blowing, and Waterhouse almost cannot bear to cross
the road and enter some windowless hut in the belly of Bletchley Park. He
does it anyway and is informed that he has no duties at the moment.
After visiting a few other huts on other business, he turns north and
walks three miles to the hamlet of Shenley Brook End and goes into the Crown
Inn, where the proprietress, Mrs. Ramshaw, has, during these last three and
a half years, made a tidy business out of looking after stray, homeless
Cambridge mathematicians.
Dr. Alan Mathison Turing is seated at a table by a window, sprawled
across two or three chairs in what looks like a very awkward pose but which
Waterhouse feels sure is eminently practical. A full pint of some thing
reddish brown is on the table next to him; Alan is too busy to drink it. The
smoke from Alan's cigarette reveals a prism of sunlight coming through the
window, centered in which is a mighty Book. Alan is holding the book with
one hand. The palm of his other hand is pressed against his forehead, as if
he could get the data from book to brain through some kind of direct
transference. His fingers curl up into the air and a cigarette projects from
between them, ashes dangling perilously over his dark hair. His eyes are
frozen in place, not scanning the page, and their focus point is somewhere
in the remote distance.
"Designing another Machine, Dr. Turing?"
The, eyes finally begin to move, and swivel around towards the sound of
the visitor's voice. "Lawrence," Alan says once, quietly, identifying the
face. Then, once more warmly: "Lawrence!" He scrambles to his feet, as
energetic as ever, and steps forward to shake hands. "Delighted to see you!"
"Good to see you, Alan," Waterhouse says. "Welcome back." He is, as
always, pleasantly surprised by Alan's keenness, the intensity and purity of
his reactions to things.
He is also touched by Alan's frank and sincere affection for him. Alan
did not give this easily or lightly, but when he decided to make Waterhouse
his friend, he did so in a way that is unfettered by either American or
heterosexual concepts of manly bearing. "Did you walk the entire distance
from Bletchley? Mrs. Ramshaw, refreshment!"
"Heck, it's only three miles," Waterhouse says.
"Please come and join me," Alan says. Then he stops, frowns, and looks
at him quizzically. "How on earth did you guess I was designing another
machine? Simply a guess based on prior observations?"
"Your choice of reading material," Waterhouse says, and points to
Alan's book: RCA Radio Tube Manual.
Alan gets a wild look. "This has been my constant companion," he says.
"You must learn about these valves, Lawrence! Or tubes as you would call
them. Your education is incomplete otherwise. I cannot believe the number of
years I wasted on sprockets! God!"
"Your zeta function machine? I thought it was beautiful," Lawrence
says.
"So are many things that belong in a museum," Alan says.
"That was six years ago. You had to work with the available
technology," Lawrence says.
"Oh, Lawrence! I'm surprised at you! If it will take ten years to make
the machine with available technology, and only five years to make it with a
new technology, and it will only take two years to invent the new
technology, then you can do it in seven years by inventing the new
technology first!"
"Touché"
"This is the new technology," Alan says, holding up the RCA Radio Tube
Manual like Moses brandishing a Tablet of the Law. "If I had only had the
presence of mind to use these, I could have built the zeta function machine
much sooner, and others besides."
"What sort of a machine are you designing now?" Lawrence asks.
"I've been playing chess with a fellow named Donald Michie a
classicist," Alan says. "I am wretched at it. But man has always constructed
tools to extend his powers why not a machine that will help me play chess?"
"Does Donald Michie get to have one, too?"
"He can design his own machine!" Alan says indignantly.
Lawrence looks carefully around the pub. They are the only customers,
and he cannot bring himself to believe that Mrs. Ramshaw is a spy. "I
thought it might have something to do with " he says, and nods in the
direction of Bletchley Park.
"They are building I have helped them build a machine called Colossus."
"I thought I saw your hand in it."
"It is built from old ideas ideas we talked about in New Jersey, years
ago," Alan says. Brisk and dismissive is his tone, gloomy is his face. He is
hugging the RCA Radio Tube Manual to himself with one arm, doodling in a
notebook with the other. Waterhouse thinks that really the RCA Radio Tube
Manual is like a ball and chain holding Alan back. If he would just work
with pure ideas like a proper mathematician he could go as fast as thought.
As it happens, Alan has become fascinated by the incarnations of pure ideas
in the physical world. The underlying math of the universe is like the light
streaming in through the window. Alan is not satisfied with merely knowing
that it streams in. He blows smoke into the air to make the light visible.
He sits in meadows gazing at pine cones and flowers, tracing the
mathematical patterns in their structure, and he dreams about electron winds
blowing over the glowing filaments and screens of radio tubes, and, in their
surges and eddies, capturing something of what is going on in his own brain.
Turing is neither a mortal nor a god. He is Antaeus. That he bridges the
mathematical and physical worlds is his strength and his weakness.
"Why are you so glum?" Alan says. "What have you been working on?"
"Same stuff, different context," Waterhouse says. With these four words
he conveys, in full, everything that he has been doing on behalf of the war
effort. "Fortunately, I came upon something that is actually rather
interesting."
Alan looks delighted and fascinated to hear this news, as if the world
had been completely devoid of interesting things for the last ten years or
so, and Waterhouse had stumbled upon a rare find. "Tell me about it," he
insists.
"It's a cryptanalysis problem," Waterhouse says. "Non Enigma." He goes
on to tell the story about the messages from U 553. "When I got to Bletchley
Park this morning," he concludes, "I asked around. They said that they had
been butting their heads against the problem as long as I had, without any
success."
Suddenly, Alan looks disappointed and bored. "It must be a one time
pad," he says. He sounds reproachful.
"It can't be. The ciphertext is not devoid of patterns," Waterhouse
says.
"Ah," replies Alan, perking up again.
"I looked for patterns with the usual Cryptonomicon techniques. Found
nothing clear just some traces. Finally, in complete frustration, I decided
to start from a clean slate, trying to think like Alan Turing. Typically
your approach is to reduce a problem to numbers and then bring the full
power of mathematical analysis to bear on it. So I began by converting the
messages into numbers. Normally, this would be an arbitrary process. You
convert each letter into a number, usually between one and twenty five, and
then dream up some sort of arbitrary algorithm to convert this series of
small numbers into one big number. But this message was different it used
thirty two characters a power of two meaning that each character had a
unique binary representation, five binary digits long."
"As in Baudot code," Alan says (1). He looks guardedly
interested again.
"So I converted each letter into a number between one and thirty two,
using the Baudot code. That gave me a long series of small numbers. But I
wanted some way to convert all of the numbers in the series into one large
number, just to see if it would contain any interesting patterns. But this
was easy as pie! If the first letter is R, and its Baudot code is 01011, and
the second letter is F, and its code is 10111, then I can simply combine the
two into a ten digit binary number, 0101110111. And then I can take the next
letter's code and stick that onto the end and get a fifteen digit number.
And so on. The letters come in groups of five that's twenty five binary
digits per group. With six groups on each line of the page, that's a hundred
and fifty binary digits per line. And with twenty lines on the page, that's
three thousand binary digits.
So each page of the message could be thought of not as a series of six
hundred letters, but as an encoded representation of a single number with a
magnitude of around two raised to the three thousandth power, which works
out to around ten to the nine hundredth power."
"All right," Alan says, "I agree that the use of thirty two letter
alphabet suggests a binary coding scheme. And I agree that the binary coding
scheme, in turn, lends itself to a sort of treatment in which individual
groups of five binary digits are mooshed together to make larger numbers,
and that you could even take it to the point of mooshing together all of the
data on a whole page that way, to make one extremely large number. But what
does that accomplish?"
"I don't really know," Waterhouse admits. "I just have an intuition
that what we are dealing with here is a new encryption scheme based upon a
purely mathematical algorithm. Otherwise, there would be no point in using
the thirty two letter alphabet! If you think about it, Alan, thirty two
letters are all well and good as a matter of fact, they are essential for a
teletype scheme, because you have to have special characters like line feed
and carriage return."
"You're right," Alan says, "it is extremely odd that they would use
thirty two letters in a scheme that is apparently worked out using pencil
and paper."
"I've been over it a thousand times," Waterhouse says, "and the only
explanation I can think of is that they are converting their messages into
large binary numbers and then combining them with other large binary numbers
one time pads, most likely to produce the ciphertext."
"In which case your project is doomed," Alan says, "because you can't
break a one time pad."
"That is only true," Waterhouse says, "if the one time pad is truly
random. If you built up that three thousand digit number by flipping a coin
three thousand times and writing down a one for heads and a zero for tails,
then it would be truly random and unbreakable. But I do not think that this
is the case here."
"Why not? You think there were patterns in their one time pads?"
"Maybe. Just traces."
"Then what makes you think it is other than random?"
"Otherwise it makes no sense to develop a new scheme," Waterhouse says.
"Everyone in the world has been using one time pads forever. There are
established procedures for doing it. There's no reason to switch over to
this new, extremely odd system right now, in the middle of a war."
"So what do you suppose is the rationale for this new scheme?" asks
Alan, clearly enjoying himself a great deal.
"The problem with one time pads is that you have to make two copies of
each pad and get them to the sender and the recipient. I mean, suppose
you're in Berlin and you want to send a message to someone in the Far East!
This U boat that we found had cargo on board gold and other stuff from
Japan! Can you imagine how cumbersome this must be for the Axis?"
"Ahh," Alan says. He gets it now. But Waterhouse finishes the
explanation anyway:
"Suppose that you came up with a mathe