e money is effectively worthless. But if Waterhouse
were to find a real Australian ten pound note and read the fine print, it
would also probably bear the imprimatur of a reserve bank somewhere.
Two pieces of paper, each claiming to be worth ten pounds, each very
official looking, each bearing the name of a bank. One of them a worthless
souvenir and one legal tender for all debts public and private. What gives?
What it comes down to is that people trust the claims printed on one of
those pieces of paper but don't trust the other. They believe that you could
take the real Australian note to a bank in Melbourne, slide it over the
counter, and get silver or gold or something at least in exchange for it.
Trust goes a long way, but at some point, if you're going to sponsor a
stable currency, you must put up or shut up. Somewhere, you have to actually
have a shitload of gold in the basement. Around the time of the evacuation
from Dunkirk, when the Brits were looking at an imminent invasion of their
islands by the Germans, they took all of their gold reserves, loaded them on
board some battleships and passenger liners, and squirted them across the
Atlantic to banks in Toronto and Montreal. This would have enabled them to
keep their currency afloat even if the Germans had overrun London.
But the Japanese have to play by the same rules as everyone else. Oh,
sure, you can get a kind of submission from a conquered people by scaring
the shit out of them, but it doesn't work very well to hold a knife to
someone's throat and say, "I want you to believe that this piece of paper is
worth ten pounds sterling." They might say that they believe it, but they
won't really believe it. They won't act as if they believe it. And if they
don't act that way, then there is no currency, workers don't get paid (you
can enslave them, but you still have to pay the slavedrivers), the economy
doesn't work, you can't extract the natural resources that prompted you to
conquer the country in the first place. Basically, if you're going to run an
economy you have to have a currency. When someone walks into a bank with one
of your notes you have to be able to give them gold in exchange for it.
The Nipponese are maniacs for planning things out. Waterhouse knows
this; he has been reading their decrypted messages twelve, eighteen hours a
day for a couple of years now, he knows their minds. He knows, as surely as
he knows how to play a D major scale, that the Nipponese must have given
thought to this problem of backing their imperial currency not just for
Australia but New Zealand, New Guinea, the Philippines, Hong Kong, China,
Indochina, Korea, Manchuria.
How much gold and silver would you need in order to convince that many
human beings that your paper currency was actually worth some thing? Where
would you put it?
The escort takes him down a couple of levels and finally to a
surprisingly large room, deep down. If they are in the bowels of the island,
then this must be the vermiform appendix or something. It is glob shaped,
walls smooth and ripply in most places, chisel gnawed where men have seen
fit to enlarge it. The walls are still cool and so is the air.
There are long tables in this room, and at least three dozen empty
chairs so Waterhouse nips in tiny whiffs of air at first, terrified that he
will smell dead people. But he doesn't.
It figures. They're in the center of the rock. There's only one way
into the room. No way to get a good draft through this place no blowtorch
effect no burning at all, apparently. This room was bypassed. The air is as
thick as cold gravy.
"Found forty dead in this room," the escort says.
"Dead of what?"
"Asphyxiation."
"Officers?"
"One Japanese captain. The rest were slaves."
Before the war started, the term "slave" was, to Lawrence Waterhouse,
as obsolete as "cooper" or "chandler." Now that the Nazis and the Nipponese
have revived the practice, he hears it all the time. War's weird.
His eyes have been adjusting to the dim light ever since they stepped
into the chamber. There's a single 25 watt bulb for the whole cavern and the
walls absorb nearly all of the light.
He can see squarish things on the tables, one in front of each chair.
When he first came in he assumed that these were sheets of paper indeed,
some of them are. But as his vision gets better he can see that most of them
are hollow frames, sprinkled with abstract patterns of round dots.
He fumbles for his flashlight and nails the switch. Mostly all it does
is create a fuzzy yellow cone of oily smoke, swirling fatly and lazily in
front of him. He steps forward shooing the smoke out of his way, and bends
over the table.
It's an abacus, its beads still frozen in the middle of some
calculation. Two feet down the table is another. Then another.
He turns to face the Army guy. "What's the plural of abacus?"
"Beg pardon, sir?"
"Shall we say abaci?"
"Whatever you say, sir."
"Were any of these abaci touched by any of your men?"
There is a flurry of discussion. The Army guy has to confer with
several enlisted men, dispatch gofers to interview people, and make a couple
of phone calls. This is a good sign; there are a lot of men who would just
say "no, sir," or whatever they thought Waterhouse wanted to hear, and then
he would never know whether they were telling the truth. This guy seems to
understand that it's important for Waterhouse to get an honest answer.
Waterhouse walks up and down the rows of tables with his hands clasped
carefully behind his back, looking at the abaci. Next to most of them is a
sheet of paper, or a whole notebook, with a pencil handy. These are all
covered with numbers. From place to place, he sees a Chinese character.
"Did any of you see the bodies of these slaves?" he says to an enlisted
man.
"Yes, sir. I helped carry 'em out."
"Did they look like Filipinos?"
"No, sir. They looked like regular Asiatics."
"Chinese, Korean, something like that?"
"Yes, sir."
After a few minutes, the answer comes back: no one will admit to having
touched an abacus. This chamber was the last part of the fortress to be
reached by Americans. The bodies of the slaves were mostly found piled up
near the door. The body of the Nipponese officer was on the bottom of the
pile. The door had been locked from the inside. It is a metal door, and has
a slight outward bulge, as the fire upstairs apparently sucked all the air
out of the room in a big hurry.
"Okay," Waterhouse says, "I am going to go upstairs and report back to
Brisbane. I am personally going to take this room apart like an
archaeologist. Make sure that nothing is touched. Especially the abaci."
Chapter 90 ARETHUSA
Attorney Alejandro comes to see Randy the next day and they swap small
talk about the weather and the Philippine Basketball Association whilst
exchanging handwritten slips of paper across the table. Randy gives his
lawyer a note saying, "Give this note to Chester" and then another note
asking Chester to go though that trunk and find any old documents on the
subject of zeta functions and get them to Randy somehow. Attorney Alejandro
gives Randy a somewhat defensive and yet self congratulatory note itemizing
his recent efforts on Randy's behalf, which is probably meant to be
encouraging but which Randy finds to be unsettlingly vague. He had rather
expected some specific results by this point. He reads it and looks askance
at Attorney Alejandro, who grimaces and taps himself on the jaw, which is
code for "the Dentist" and which Randy interprets to mean that said
billionaire is interfering with whatever Attorney Alejandro is trying to
accomplish. Randy hands Attorney Alejandro another note saying, "Give this
note to Avi" and then yet another note asking Avi to find out whether
General Wing is one of the Crypt's clients.
Then nothing happens for a week. Since Randy lacks the information that
he needs about zeta functions, he can't do any actual codebreaking work
during this week. But he can lay the groundwork for the work he'll do later.
The Cryptonomicon contains numerous hunks of C code intended to perform
certain basic cryptanalytical operations, but a lot of it is folk code
(poorly written) and anyway needs to be translated into the more modern C++
language. So Randy does that. The Cryptonomicon also describes various
algorithms that will probably come in handy, and Randy implements those in
C++ too. It is scut work, but he has nothing else to do, and one of the good
things about this particular kind of scut work is that it acquaints you with
every little detail of the mathematics; if you don't understand the math you
can't write the code. As the days go by, his mind turns into some
approximation of a cryptanalyst's. This transformation is indexed by the
slow accretion of code in his code breaking library.
He and Enoch Root get into the habit of having conversations during and
after their meals. Both of them seem to have rather involved inner lives
that require lots of maintenance and so the rest of the day they ignore each
other. Anecdote by anecdote, Randy plots the trajectory of his life to date.
Likewise Enoch speaks vaguely of some wartime events, then about what it was
like to live in postwar England, and then in the U.S. in the fifties.
Apparently he was a Catholic priest for a while but got kicked out of the
Church for some reason; he doesn't say why, and Randy doesn't ask. After
that all is vague. He mentions that he began spending large amounts of time
in the Philippines during the Vietnam War, which fits in with Randy's
general hypothesis: if it's true that Old Man Comstock had U.S. troops
combing the Philippine boondocks for the Primary, then Enoch would have
wanted to be around, to interfere or at least keep an eye on them. Enoch
claims he's also been gadding about trying to bring Internet stuff to China,
but to Randy this just sounds like a cover story for something else.
It is hard not to get the idea that Enoch Root and General Wing may
have other reasons to be pissed off at each other.
"Like, if I can just play Plato's advocate here, what do you mean
exactly when you talk about defending civilization?"
"Oh, Randy, you know what I mean."
"Yeah, but China is civilized, right? Has been for a while."
"Yes."
"So maybe you and General Wing are actually on the same team."
"If the Chinese are so civilized, how come they never invent anything?"
"What paper, gunpowder "
"Anything in the last millennium I mean.
"Beats me. What do you think, Enoch?"
"It's like the Germans in the Second World War."
"I know that all the bright lights fled Germany in the thirties
Einstein, Born "
"And Schrödinger, and von Neumann, and others but do you know why they
fled?"
"Well, because they didn't like the Nazis, of course!"
"But do you know specifically why the Nazis didn't like them?"
"A lot of them were Jews."
"It goes deeper than mere anti Semitism. Hilbert, Russell, Whitehead,
Gödel, all of them were engaged in a monumental act of tearing mathematics
down and beginning from scratch. But the Nazis believed that mathematics was
a heroic science whose purpose was to reduce chaos to order just as National
Socialism was supposed to do in the political sphere."
"Okay," Randy says, "but what the Nazis didn't understand was that if
you tore it down and rebuilt it, it was even more heroic than before."
"Indeed. It led to a renaissance," Root says, "like in the seventeenth
century, when the Puritans tore everything to rubble and then slowly built
it back up from scratch. Over and over again we see the pattern of the
Titanomachia repeated the old gods are thrown down, chaos returns, but out
of the chaos, the same patterns reemerge."
"Okay. So again you were talking about civilization?"
"Ares always reemerges from the chaos. It will never go away. Athenian
civilization defends itself from the forces of Ares with metis, or
technology. Technology is built on science. Science is like the alchemists'
uroburos, continually eating its own tail. The process of science doesn't
work unless young scientists have the freedom to attack and tear down old
dogmas, to engage in an ongoing Titanomachia. Science flourishes where art
and free speech flourish."
"Sounds teleological, Enoch. Free countries get better science, hence
superior military power, hence get to defend their freedoms. You're
proclaiming a sort of Manifest Destiny here."
"Well, someone's got to do it."
"Aren't we beyond that sort of thing now?"
"I know you're just saying that to infuriate me. Sometimes, Randy, Ares
gets chained up in a barrel for a few years, but he never goes away. The
next time he emerges, Randy, the conflict is going to revolve around bio ,
micro , and nanotechnology. Who's going to win?"
"I don't know."
"Are you not just a bit unsettled by not knowing?"
"Look, Enoch, I'm trying my best here I really am but I'm broke, and
I'm locked up in this fucking cage, all right?"
"Oh, stop whining."
"What about you? Suppose you go back to your yam farm, or whatever, and
one day your shovel hits something that rings, and you suddenly dig up a few
kilotons of gold? You'd invest it all in high tech weapons?"
Root, not surprisingly, has an answer: the gold was stolen from all of
Asia by the Nipponese, who intended to use it as backing for a currency that
would become the legal tender of the Greater East Asia Co Prosperity Sphere,
and that while it goes without saying that those particular Nips were among
the most egregious buttheads in planetary history, some aspects of their
plan weren't such a shitty idea. That to the extent life still sucks for
many Asians, things would get a lot better, for a lot of people, if the
continent's economy could get jerked into the twenty first, or at least the
twentieth, century and hopefully stay there for a while instead of
collapsing whenever some dictator's nephew in charge of a central bank loses
control of his sphincters and wipes out a major currency. So maybe
stabilizing the currency situation would be a good thing to accomplish with
a shitload of gold, and that's the only moral thing to do with it anyway
considering whom it was stolen from you can't just go out and spend it.
Randy finds this answer appropriately sophisticated and Jesuitical and
eerily in sync with what Avi has written into the latest edition of the
Epiphyte(2) Business Plan.
After a decent number of days has gone by, Enoch Root comes right back
and asks Randy what he'd do with a few kilotons of gold, and Randy mentions
the Holocaust Education and Avoidance Pod. Turns out that Enoch Root already
knows about the HEAP, has already downloaded various revisions of it over
the gleaming new communications network that Randy and the Dentist strung
through the islands, thinks it's right in line with his ideas vis à vis
Athena, Aegis, etc., but has any number of difficult questions and trenchant
criticisms.
Shortly thereafter, Avi himself comes in for a visit and says very
little, but does let Randy know that, yes, General Wing is one of the
Crypt's clients. The grizzled Chinese gentlemen who sat around the table
with them in Kinakuta, and whose mugs were secretly captured by the pinhole
camera on Randy's laptop, are among Wing's chief lieutenants. Avi also lets
him know that the legal pressure has eased; the Dentist has suddenly reined
in Andrew Loeb and allowed any number of legal deadlines to be extended. The
fact that Avi says nothing at all about the sunken submarine would seem to
imply that the salvage operation is going well, or at least going.
Randy's still processing these pieces of news when he receives a visit
from none other than the Dentist himself.
"I assume that you think I had you framed," says Dr. Hubert Kepler.
He and Randy are alone in a room together, but Randy is conscious of
many aides, bodyguards, lawyers, and Furies or Harpies or whatever just on
the other side of the nearest door. The Dentist seems ever so slightly
amused, but Randy gradually collects that he is actually quite serious. The
Dentist's upper lip is permanently arched, or shorter than it ought to be,
or both, with the result that his glacier white incisors are always slightly
exposed, and depending on how the light is hitting his face he looks either
vaguely beaverish or else as if he's none too effectively fighting back a
sneering grin. Even a gentle soul like Randy cannot gaze upon such a face
without thinking how much better it would look with the application of some
knuckles. From the perfection of Hubert Kepler's dentition it is possible to
infer that he had a sheltered upbringing (full time bodyguards from the time
his adult teeth erupted from the gumline) or that his choice of careers was
motivated by a very personal interest in reconstructive oral surgery. "And I
know that you're probably not going to believe me. But I'm here to say that
I had nothing to do with what happened at the airport."
The Dentist now stops and gazes at Randy for a while, by no means one
of those guys who feels any need to nervously fill in gaps in conversation.
And so it is during the ensuing, lengthy pause that Randy figures out that
the Dentist isn't grinning at all, that his face is simply in its state of
natural repose. Randy shudders a bit just to think of what it must be like
to never be able to lose this alternatively beaverish and sneering look. For
your lover to gaze on you while you're sleeping and see this. Of course, if
the stories are to be believed, Victoria Vigo has her own ways of exacting
retribution, and so maybe Hubert Kepler really is suffering the abuse and
humiliation that his face seems to be asking for. Randy heaves a little sigh
when he thinks of this, sensing some trace of cosmic symmetry revealed.
Kepler is certainly correct in saying that Randy is not inclined to
believe a single word he says. The only way for Kepler to gain any
credibility is for him to show up in person at this jail and utter the words
face to face, which given all of the other things that he could be doing,
for fun or profit or both, at this moment, gives a lot of weight to what
he's saying. It is implicit that if the Dentist wanted to lie, badly and
baldly, to Randy, he could send his lawyers around to do it for him, or just
send him a fucking telegram, for that matter. So either he's telling the
truth, or else he's lying but it's very important to him that Randy should
believe in his lies. Randy cannot work out why on earth the Dentist should
give a flying fuck whether Randy believes in his lies or not, which pushes
him in the direction of thinking that maybe he really is telling the truth.
"Who framed me, then?" Randy asks, kind of rhetorically. He was just in
the middle of doing some pretty cool C++ coding when he got yanked out of
his cell to have this surprise encounter with the Dentist, and is surprising
himself with just how bored and irritated he is. He has reverted, in other
words, back into a pure balls to the wall nerdism rivaled only by his early
game coding days back in Seattle. The sheer depth and involution of the
current nerdism binge would be hard to convey to anyone. Intellectually, he
is juggling half a dozen lit torches, Ming vases, live puppies, and running
chainsaws. In this frame of mind he cannot bring himself to give a shit
about the fact that this incredibly powerful billionaire has gone to a lot
of trouble to come and F2F with him. And so he asks the above question as
nothing more than a perfunctory gesture, the subtext being I wish you'd go
away but minimal standards of social decency dictate that I should say
something. The Dentist, no slouch himself in the social ineptness
department, comes right back as if it were an actual request for
information. "I can only assume that you have somehow gotten embroiled with
someone who has a lot of influence in this country. It appears that someone
is trying to send you a "
"No! Just stop," Randy says. "Don't say it." Hubert Kepler is now
looking at him quizzically, so Randy continues. "The message theory doesn't
hold up."
Kepler looks genuinely baffled for a few moments, then actually does
grin a little bit. "Well, it certainly isn't an attempt to do away with you,
because "
"Obviously," Randy says.
"Yes. Obviously."
There is another one of those long pauses; Kepler seems unsure of
himself. Randy arches his back and stretches. "The chair in my cell is not
what you call ergonomic," he says. He holds his arms out and wiggles the
fingers. "My carpals are going to start acting up again. I can tell."
Randy is looking at Kepler pretty carefully when he says this, and
there's no doubt that genuine astonishment is now spreading across the
Dentist's face. The Dentist only has one facial expression (already
described) but it changes in intensity; it gets more so and less so
depending on his emotions. The Dentist's expression proves he had no idea,
until now, that Randy's been allowed to have a computer in his cell. In the
trying to figure out what the fuck is going on department, the computer is
the single most important datum, and Kepler didn't even know about it until
just now. So to whatever extent the Dentist actually gives a shit, he has a
lot of thinking to do. He excuses himself pretty soon after.
Not half an hour later, some twenty five year old American guy with a
ponytail shows up and has a brief audience with Randy. It turns out that he
works for Chester in Seattle and has just now flown across the Pacific on
Chester's personal jet and came here straight from the airport. He is
completely jazzed, totally in bat out of hell mode, and cannot shut up. The
sheer amazingness of his sudden flight across the ocean on a rich guy's
private jet has made a really, really deep impression on him and he
obviously needs someone to share it with. He has brought a "care package"
consisting of some junk food, a few trashy novels, the largest bottle of
Pepto Bismol Randy's ever seen, a CD Walkman, and a cubical stack of CDs.
This guy can't get over the battery thing; he was told to bring a lot of
extra batteries, and so he did, and sure enough, between the luggage guys at
the airport and the customs inspectors, all of the batteries disappeared en
route except for one package that he's got in the pocket of his long baggy
Seattle grunge boy shorts. Seattle's full of guys like this who flipped a
coin when they graduated from college (heads Prague, tails Seattle) and just
showed up with this expectation that because they were young and smart
they'd find a job and begin making money, and then appallingly enough did
exactly that. Randy can't figure out what the world must look like to a guy
like this. He has a hard time getting rid of the guy, who shares the common
assumption (increasingly annoying) that just because Randy's in jail, he
doesn't have a life, has nothing better to do than interface with visitors.
When Randy gets back to his cell, he sits crosslegged on his bed with
the Walkman and begins dealing out the CDs like cards in a solitaire game.
The selection is pretty reasonable: a two disc set of the Brandenburg
Concertos, a collection of Bach organ fugues (nerds have a thing about
Bach), some Louis Armstrong, some Wynton Marsalis, and then various
selections from Hammerdown Systems, which is a Seattle based record label in
which Chester is a major investor. It is a second generation Seattle scene
record label; all of its artists are young people who came to Seattle after
they graduated from college in search of the legendary Seattle music scene
and discovered that it didn't really exist it was just a couple of dozen
guys who sat around playing guitar in one another's basements and so who
were basically forced to choose between going home in ignominy or
fabricating the Seattle music scene of their imagination from whole cloth.
This led to the establishment of any number of small clubs, and the
foundation of many bands, that were not rooted in any kind of authentic
reality whatsoever but merely reflected the dreams and aspiration of pan
global young adults who had all flocked to Seattle on the same chimera hunt.
This second wave scene came in for a lot of abuse from those of the original
two dozen people who had not yet died of drug overdose or suicide. There was
something of a backlash; and yet, about thirty six hours after the backlash
reached its maximum intensity, there was an antibacklash backlash from young
immigrants who asserted their right to some kind of unique cultural identity
as people who had naively come to Seattle and discovered that there was no
there there and that they would have to create it themselves. Fueled by that
conviction, and by their own youthful libidinous energy, and by a few
cultural commentators who found this whole scenario fetchingly post modern,
they started a whole lot of second generation bands and even a couple of
record labels, of which Hammerdown Systems is the only one that didn't
either go out of business or get turned into a wholly owned subsidiary of an
L.A. or New York based major label inside of six months.
And so Chester has decided to favor Randy with those recent Hammerdown
selections of which he is most proud. Perversely, almost all of these are
from bands that are not even in Seattle at all but in small, prohibitively
hip college towns in North Carolina and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. But
Randy does find one from an evidently Seattle based band called Shekondar.
Evidently, that is, because on the back of the CD is a blurry photograph of
several band members drinking sixteen ounce lattes in cups bearing the logo
of a chain of coffee bars that as far as Randy knows has not yet burst free
from the city limits of Seattle to crush everything in its path worldwide in
the now wearisomely predictable manner of Seattle based companies. Now,
Shekondar happens to have been the name of an especially foul underworld
deity who played an important role in some of the game scenarios that Randy
played with Avi and Chester and the gang back in the old days. Randy opens
up the case of the CD and notes immediately that the disc has the golden hue
of a master, not the traditional silver of a mere copy. Randy puts that
golden master into his Walkman and hits the Play button and is treated to
some passable post Cobain mortem material, genetically engineered to have
nothing in common with what is traditionally thought of as the Seattle sound
and in that sense absolutely typical of Seattle du jour. He jumps forward
through a couple more tracks and then rips the earphones off his head,
cursing, as the Walkman attempts to translate a stream of pure digital
information, representing something other than music, into sound. This feels
a bit like needles of dry ice jabbed into his eardrums.
Randy moves the golden disc to the CD ROM drive that is built into his
laptop, and checks it out. Indeed it does sport a couple of audio tracks (as
he's discovered) but almost all of the disc's capacity is given over to
computer files. There are several directories, or folders, each named after
one of the documents that was in grandfather's trunk. Within each of these
directories is a long list of files named PAGE.001.jpeg, PAGE.002.jpeg, and
so on. Randy starts opening them up, using the same net browser software
that he uses to read the Cryptonomicon, and discovers that they are all
scanned image files. Evidently Chester had a bunch of minions de staple
those documents and feed them page by page through a scanner. At the same
time he must have had graphic artists, presumably people he knows through
Hammerdown Systems, hastily whipping up this fake Shekondar album cover.
It's even got a package insert, photographs of Shekondar in concert. What it
really is is a parody of the post Seattle Scene Seattle scene that aligns
perfectly with the faulty notions of same that could be expected in the
imagination of a Philippine airport customs inspector, who like everyone
else is fantasizing about moving to Seattle. The lead guitarist looks kind
of like Chester in a wig.
All of this sneaky stuff is probably gratuitous. It probably would have
been okay for Chester to just Fedex the fucking documents straight to the
jail. But Chester, sitting in his house by Lake Washington, is working on a
set of assumptions about Manila just as faulty as what half of the world
believes about Seattle. At least Randy gets a laugh out of it before diving
into zeta functions.
A word about libido: it's been something like three weeks for Randy
now. He was just beginning to address this situation when a highly
intelligent and perceptive Catholic ex priest was suddenly introduced into
the cell next to his and began sleeping six inches away from him. Since
then, masturbation per se has been pretty much out of the question. To the
extent Randy believes in any god at all, he's been praying for a nocturnal
emission. His prostate gland now has the size and consistency of a croquet
ball. He feels it all the time, and has begun to think of it as his Hunk of
Burning Love. Randy had a spot of prostate trouble once when he was
chronically drinking too much coffee, and it made everything between his
nipples and his knees hurt. The urologist explained that Little Man 'tate is
neurologically wired into just about every other part of your body, and he
didn't have to exert any rhetorical skill, or marshall any detailed
arguments, in order to make Randy believe that. Randy has believed, ever
since, that the ability of men to become moronically obsessed with
copulation is in some way a reflection of this wiring diagram; when you are
ready to give the external world the benefit of your genetic material, i.e.
when the 'tate is fully loaded, even your pinkies and eyelids know about it.
And so it might be expected that Randy would be thinking all the time
about America Shaftoe, his sexual target of choice, who (just to make things
a lot worse) has probably been spending a lot of time in wetsuits lately.
And indeed that is where his thoughts were directed at the moment Enoch Root
was dragged in. But since then it has become evident that he needs to
exercise some kind of iron mental discipline here and not think about Amy at
all. Whilst juggling all of those chainsaws and puppies, he is also walking
a sort of intellectual tightrope, with decryption of the Arethusa intercepts
at the end of that tightrope, and as long as he keeps his eyes fixed on that
goal and just keeps putting one foot in front of the other, he'll get there.
Amy in a wetsuit is down below somewhere, no doubt trying to be emotionally
supportive, but if he even glances in her direction he's a goner.
What he's reading here is a set of academic papers, dating to the 1930s
and early forties, that have been heavily marked up by his grandfather, who
went through them none too subtly gleaning anything that could be useful on
the cryptographic front. That it's none too subtle is a good thing for
Randy, whose grasp of pure number theory is just barely adequate here.
Chester's minions had to scan not only the fronts of these pages but the
backs too, which were originally blank but on which Grandpa wrote many
notes. For example there is a paper written by Alan Turing in 1937 in which
Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse has found some kind of error, or at least,
something that Turing didn't go into in sufficient detail, forcing him to
cover several pages with annotations. Randy's blood absolutely runs cold at
the very idea that he is being so presumptuous as to participate in such a
colloquy. When he realizes just how deep over his head he is intellectually,
he turns off his computer and goes to bed and sleeps the bootless sleep of
the depressed for ten hours. Eventually he convinces himself that most of
the junk in these papers probably has no direct relevance to Arethusa and
that he just needs to calm down and filter the material carefully.
Two weeks pass. His prayers vis à vis the Hunk of Burning Love are
answered, giving him at least a couple of days of relief during which he can
admit the concept of Amy Shaftoe into his awareness, but only in a really
austere and passionless way. Attorney Alejandro shows up occasionally to
tell Randy that things are not going very well. Surprising obstacles have
arisen. All of the people he was planning to bribe have been preemptively
counter bribed by Someone. These meetings are tedious for Randy, who thinks
he has figured everything out. To begin with it's Wing, and not the Dentist,
who has caused all of this, and so Attorney Alejandro's working on faulty
assumptions.
Enoch, when he called Randy on the plane, said his old NSA buddy was
working for one of the Crypt's clients. It seems clear now that this client
is Wing. Consequently Wing knows that Randy has Arethusa. Wing believes that
the Arethusa intercepts contain information about the location of the
Primary. He wants Randy to decrypt those messages so that he'll know where
to dig. Hence the whole setup with the laptop.
All of Attorney Alejandro's efforts to spring Randy loose will be
unavailing until Wing has the information that he wants or thinks he does.
Then, all of a sudden, the ice will break, and Randy will unexpectedly be
cut loose on a technicality. Randy's so sure of this that he finds Attorney
Alejandro's visits annoying. He would like to explain all of this so that
Attorney Alejandro could knock it off with the wild goose chase, and his
increasingly bleak and dull situation reports on same. But then Wing, who
presumably surveils these attorney/client conferences, would know that Randy
had figured out the whole game, and Randy doesn't want Wing to know that. So
he nods through these meetings with his lawyer and then, for good measure,
goes back and tries to sound convincingly bewildered and depressed as he
gives Enoch Root the update.
He gets to the point, conceptually, where his grandfather was when he
commenced breaking the Arethusa messages. That is, he has a theory in mind
now of how Arethusa worked. If he doesn't know the exact algorithm, he knows
what family of algorithms it belongs to, and that gives him a search space
with many fewer dimensions than he had before. Certainly few enough for a
modern computer to explore. He goes on a forty eight hour hacking binge. The
nerve damage in his wrists has mounted to the point where he practically has
sparks shooting out of his fingertips. His doctor told him never again to
work on these nonergonomic keyboards. His eyes start to go out on him too,
and he has to invert the screen colors and work with white letters on a
black background, gradually increasing the size of the letters as he loses
the ability to focus. But at last he gets something that he thinks is going
to work, and he fires it up and sets it to running on the Arethusa
intercepts, which live inside the computer's memory but have never yet been
displayed upon its screen. He falls asleep. When he wakes up, the computer
is informing him that he's got a probable break into one of the messages.
Actually, three of them, all intercepted on 4 April 1945 and hence all
encrypted using the same keystream.
Unlike human codebreakers, computers can't read English. They can't
even recognize it. They can crank out possible decrypts of a message at
tremendous speed but given two character strings like
SEND HELP IMMEDIATELY
and
XUEBP TOAFF NMQPT
they have no inherent ability to recognize the first as a successful
decryption of a message and the second as a failure. But they can do a
frequency count on the letters. If the computer finds that E is the most
common, followed by T, and so on and so forth, then it's a pretty strong
indication that the text is some natural human language and not just random
gibberish. By using this and other slightly more sophisticated tests,
Randy's come up with a routine that should be pretty good at recognizing
success. And it's telling him this morning that 4 April 1945 is broken.
Randy dare not display the decrypted messages onscreen for fear that they
contain the information that Wing's looking for, and so he cannot actually
read these messages, as desperately as he'd like to. But by using a command
called grep, which searches through text files without opening them, he can
at least verify that the word MANILA occurs in two places.
Based on this break, with several more days' work Randy solves Arethusa
entirely. He comes up, in other words, with A(x) = K, such that for any
given date x he can figure out what K, the keystream for that day would be;
and just to prove it, he has the computer crank out K for every day in 1944
and 1945 and then use them to decrypt the Arethusa intercepts that came in
on those days (without displaying them) and does the frequency count on them
and verifies that it worked in each case.
So now he has decrypted all of the messages. But he cannot actually
read them without transmitting their contents to Wing. And so now, the
subliminal channel comes into play.
In cryptospeak, a subliminal channel is a trick whereby secret
information is subtly embedded in a stream of other stuff. Usually it means
something like manipulating the least significant bits of an image file to
convey a text message. Randy's drawn inspiration from the concept in his
labors here in jail. Yes, he has been working on decrypting Arethusa, and
that has involved screwing around with a tremendous number of files and
writing a lot of code. The number of separate files he's read, created, and
edited in the last few weeks is probably in the thousands. None of them have
had title bars on their windows, and so the Van Eck phreakers surveilling
him have presumably had a terrible time keeping track of which is which.
Randy can open a file by typing its title in a window and hitting the return
key, all of which happens so fast that the surveillance people probably
don't have time to read or understand what he has typed before it
disappears. This, he thinks, may have given him just a bit of leeway. He has
kept a subliminal channel going in the background: working on a few other
bits of code that have nothing to do with breaking Arethusa.
He got the idea for one of these when he was paging through the
Cryptonomicon and discovered an appendix that contained a listing of the
Morse code. Randy knew Morse code when he was a Boy Scout, and learned it
again a few years ago when he was studying for a ham radio license, and it
doesn't take him long to refresh his memory. And neither does it take him
very long to write a little bit of code that turns his computer's space bar
into a Morse code key, so that he can talk to the machine by whacking out
dots and dashes with his thumb. This might look a little conspicuous, if not
for the fact that Randy spends half of his time reading text files in little
windows on the screen, and the way you page through a text file in most UNIX
systems is by whacking the space bar. All he has to do is whack it in a
particular rhythm, a detail he's relying on the surveillance guys to miss.
The results all go into a buffer that is never displayed on the screen, and
get written out to files with completely meaningless names. So, for example,
Randy can whack out the following rhythm on his spacebar while pretending to
read a lengthy section of the Cryptonomicon:
dash dot dot dot (pause) dot dot dash (pause) dash dot (pause) dash dot
dot (pause) dash dash dash (pause) dash dot dash
which ought to spell out BUNDOK. He doesn't want to open the resulting
file on screen, but later, while he's in the middle of a long series of
other cryptic commands he can type
grep ndo (meaningless file name) > (another meaningless file name)
and grep will search through the first named file to see if it contains
the string "ndo" and put the results into the second named file, which he
can then check quite a bit later. He can also do "grep bun" and "grep dok"
and if the results of all of these greps are true then he can be pretty
confident that he has successfully coded the sequence "BUNDOK" into that one
file. In the same way he can code "COORDINATES" into some other file and
"LATITUDE" into another, and various numbers into others, and finally by
using another command called "cat" he can slowly combine these one word
files into longer ones. All of these demands the same ridiculous patience
as, say, tunneling out of a prison with a teaspoon, or sawing through iron
bars with a nail file. But there comes a point, after he's spent about a
month in jail, when suddenly he's able to make a window appear on the screen
that contains the following message:
COORDINATES OF PRIMARY STORAGE LOCATIONS
SITE BUNDOK: LATITUDE NORTH FOURTEEN DEGREES THIRTY TWO MINUTES . . .
LONGITUDE. EAST ONE TWO ZERO DEGREES FIFTY SIX MINUTES .
SITE MAKATI: (etc.)
SITE ELDORADO: (etc.)
All of which is total bullshit that he just made up. The coordinates
given for the Makati site are those of a luxury hotel in Manila, sited at a
major intersection that used to be the site of a Nipponese military airbase.
Randy happens to have these numbers in his computer because he took them
down during his very early days in Manila, when he was doing the GPS survey
work for siting Epiphyte's antennas. The coordinates given for SITE ELDORADO
are simply the location of the pile of gold bars that he and Doug Shaftoe
went to examine, plus a small random error factor. And those given for SITE
BUNDOK are the real coordinates of Golgotha plus a couple of random error
factors that should have Wing digging a deep hole in the ground about twenty
kilometers away from the real site.
How does Randy know that there is a site called Golgotha, and how does
he know its real coordinates? His computer told him using Morse code.
Computer keyboards have LEDs on them that are essentially kind of useless:
one to tell you when NUM LOCK is on, one for CAPS LOCK, and a third one
whose purpose Randy can't even remember. And for no reason other than the
general belief that every aspect of a computer should be under the control
of hackers, someone, some where, wrote some library routines called XLEDS
that make it possible for programmers to turn these things on and off at
will. And for a month, Randy's been writing a little program that makes use
of these routines to output the contents of a text file in Morse code, by
flashing one of those LEDs. And while all kinds of useless crap has been
scrolling across the screen of his computer as camouflage, Randy's been
hunched over gazing into the subliminal channel of that blinking LED,
reading the contents of the decrypted Arethusa intercepts. One of which
says:
THE PRIMARY IS CODE NAMED GOLGOTHA. COORDINATES OF THE MAIN DRIFT ARE
AS FOLLOWS: LATITUDE NORTH (etc.)
Chapter 91 THE BASEMENT
At this point in history (April of 1945) the word that denotes a person
who sits and performs arithmetical calculations is "computer." Waterhouse
has just found a whole room full of dead computers. Anyone in his right mind
anyone other than Waterhouse and some of his odd Bletchley Park friends,
like Turing would have taken one look at these computers and assumed that
they were the accounting department, or something, and that each slave in
the room was independently toting up figures. Waterhouse really ought to
remain open to this idea, because it is so obvious. But from the very
beginning he has had a hypothesis of his own, much more interesting and
peculiar.
It is that the slaves were functioning, collectively, as cogs in a
larger computation machine, each performing a small portion of a complex
calculation: receiving numbers from one computer, doing some arithmetic,
producing new numbers, passing them on to another computer.
Central Bureau is able to trace the identities of five of the dead
slaves. They came from places like Saigon, Singapore, Manila, and Java, but
they had in common that they were ethnic Chinese and they were shopkeepers.
Apparently the Nipponese had cast a wide net for expert abacus users and
brought them together, from all over the Co Prosperity Sphere, to this
island in Manila Bay.
Lawrence Waterhouse tracks down a computer of his own in the ruins of
Manila, a Mr. Gu, whose small import/export business was destroyed by the
war (it is hard to run such a business when you are on an island, and every
ship that leaves or approaches the island gets sunk by Americans).
Waterhouse shows Mr. Gu photos of the abaci as they were left by the dead
computers. Mr. Gu tells him what numbers are encoded in those bead
positions, as well as giving Waterhouse a couple of days' tutorial on basic
abacus technique. The important thing learned from this is not really abacus
skills but rather the remarkable speed and precision with which a computer
like Mr. Gu can churn out calculations.
At this point, Waterhouse has reduced the problem to pure data. About
half of it's in his memory and the other half scattered around on his desk.
The data includes all of the scratch paper left behind by the computers. To
match up the numbers on the scratch paper with the numbers left on the
abaci, and thus to compile a flash frozen image of the calculations that
were underway in that room when the apocalypse struck, is not that difficult
at least, by the standards of difficulty that apply during wartime, when,
for example, landing several thousand men and tons of equipment on a remote
island and taking it from heavily armed, suicidal Japanese troops with the
loss of only a few dozen lives is considered to be easy.
From this it is possible (though it approaches being difficult) to
generalize, and to figure out the underlying mathematical algorithm that
generated the numbers on the abaci. Waterhouse becomes familiar with some of
the computers' handwriting, and develops evidence that slips of scratch
paper were being handed from one computer to another and then to yet
another. Some of the computers had logarithm tables at their stations, which
is a really important clue as to what they were doing. In this way he is
able to draw up a map of the room, with each computer's station identified
by number, and a web of arrows interconnecting the stations, depicting the
flow of paper, and of data. This helps him visualize the collective
calculation as a whole, and to reconstruct what was going on in that
subterranean chamber.
For weeks it comes in bits and pieces, and then one evening, some
switch turns on in Lawrence Waterhouse's mind, and he knows, in some
preconscious way, that he's about to get it. He works for twenty four hours.
By that point he has come up with a lot of evidence to support, and none to
contradict, the hypothesis that this calculation is a variant of a zeta
function. He naps for six hours, gets up, and works for another thirty. By
that point he's figured out that it definitely is some kind of zeta
function, and he's managed to figure out several of its constants and terms.
He almost has it now. He sleeps for twelve hours, gets up and walks around
Manila to clear his head, goes back to work, and hammers away at it for
thirty six hours. This is the fun part, when big slabs of the puzzle,
painstakingly assembled from fragments, suddenly begin to lock together, and
the whole thing begins to make sense.
It all comes down to an equation written down on one sheet of paper.
Just looking at it makes him feel weirdly nostalgic, because it's the same
type of equation he used to work with back at Princeton with Alan and Rudy.
Another pause for sleep, then, because he has to be alert to do the
final thing.
The final thing is as follows: he goes into the basement of a building
in Manila. The building has been turned into a signals intelligence
headquarters by the United States Army. He is one of some half dozen people
on the face of the planet who are allowed to enter this particular room. The
room amounts to a bit more than a quarter of the basement's total square
footage, and in fact shares the basement with several other rooms, some of
which are larger than it is, and some of which are serving as offices for
men with higher rank than Waterhouse wears on his uniform. But there are a
few oddities connected with Waterhouse's room:
(1) At any given moment, no fewer than three United States Marines are
loitering directly in front of the door of this room, carrying pump shotguns
and other weapons optimized for close range indoor flesh shredding.
(2) Lots of power cables go into this room; it has its own fuse panel,
separate from the rest of the building's electrical system.
(3) The room emits muffled, yet deafening quasimusical noises.
(4) The room is referred to as the Basement, even though it's only part
of the basement. When "the Basement" is written down, it is capitalized.
When someone (let's say Lieutenant Colonel Earl Comstock) is going to
verbalize this, he will come to a complete stop in mid sentence, so that all
of the preceding words kind of pile into each other like cars in a colliding
train. He will, in fact, bracket "the Basement" between a pair of full one
second long caesuras. During the first of these, he will raise his eyebrows
and purse his lips simultaneously, altering the entire aspect ratio of his
face so that it becomes strikingly elongated in the vertical dimension, and
his eyes will dart sideways in case any Nipponese spies somehow managed to
escape the recent apocalypse and found a place to lurk around the fringes of
his peripheral vision. Then he will say "the" and then he will say
"Basement," drawing out the s and primly articulating the t. And then will
come another caesura during which he will incline his head towards the
listener and fix him with a sober, appraising look, seeming to demand some
kind of verbal or gestural acknowledgment from the listener that something
appallingly significant has just passed between them. And then he will
continue with whatever he was saying.
Waterhouse nods to the Marines, one of whom hauls the door open for
him. A really funny thing happened shortly after the Basement was
established, when it was still just a bunch of wooden crates and a stack of
32 foot long sewer pipe segments, and the electricians were still running in
the power lines: Lieutenant Colonel Earl Comstock tried to enter the
Basement to inspect it. But owing to a clerical error, Lieutenant Colonel
Earl Comstock's name was not on the list, and so a difference of opinion
ensued that culminated with one of the Marines drawing his Colt .45 and
taking the safety off and chambering a round, pressing the barrel of the
weapon directly into the center of Comstock's right thigh, and then
reminiscing about some of the spectacular femur bursting wounds he had
personally witnessed on places like Tarawa and in general trying to help
Comstock visualize just what his life would be like, both short– and
long term, if a large piece of lead were to pass through the middle of said
major bone. To everyone's surprise, Comstock was delighted with this
encounter, almost enchanted, and hasn't stopped talking about it since. Of
course, now his name's on the list.
The Basement is filled with ETC card machines and with several racks of
equipment devoid of corporate logos, inasmuch as they were designed and
largely built by Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse in Brisbane. When all of
these things are hooked together in just the right way, they constitute a
Digital Computer. Like a pipe organ, a Digital Computer is not so much a
machine as a meta machine that can be made into any of a number of different
machines by changing its internal configuration. At the moment, Lawrence
Pritchard Waterhouse is the only guy in the world who understands the
Digital Computer well enough to actually do this, though he's training a
couple of Comstock's ETC men to do it themselves. On the day in question, he
is turning the Digital Computer into a machine for calculating the zeta
function that he thinks is at the core of the cryptosystem called Azure or
Pufferfish.
The function requires a number of inputs. One of these is a date. Azure
is a system for generating one time pads that change every day, and
circumstantial evidence from the room of the dead abacus slaves tells him
that, at the moment of their death, they were working on the one time pad
for 6 August 1945, which is four months in the future. Waterhouse writes it
down in the European style (day of the month first, then month) as 06081945,
then lops off the leading zero to get 6,081,945 a pure quantity, an integer,
unmarred by decimal point, rounding error, or any of the other compromises
so abhorrent to number theorists. He uses this as one of the inputs to the
zeta function. The zeta function requires a few other inputs too, which the
person who designed this cryptosystem (presumably Rudy) was at liberty to
choose. Surmising which inputs Rudy used has occupied much of Waterhouse's
thoughts in the last week. He puts in the numbers he has guessed, anyway,
which is a matter of converting them to binary notation and then physically
incarnating those ones and zeros on a neat row of stainless steel toggle
switches: down for zero, up for one.
Finally he puts on his artilleryman's ear protectors and lets the
Digital Computer howl through the calculation. The room gets much hotter. A
vacuum tube burns out, and then another one. Waterhouse replaces them.
That's easy because Lieutenant Colonel Comstock has made a basically
infinite supply of tubes available to him quite a remarkable feat during
wartime. The filaments of all those massed tubes glow redly and shine
palpable radiant heat across the room. The smell of hot oil rises from the
louvers on the ETC card machines. The stack of blank cards in the input
hopper shortens mysteriously as they vanish into the machine. Cards skitter
into the output bin. Waterhouse pulls them out and looks at them. His heart
is pounding very hard.
It's quiet again. The cards have numbers on them, nothing more. They
just happen to be exactly the same numbers that were frozen on certain abaci
down in the room of the computer slaves.
Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse has just demolished another enemy
cryptosystem: Azure/Pufferfish may now be mounted like a stuffed head on the
wall of the Basement. And indeed, looking at those numbers he feels the same
kind of letdown that a big game hunter must feel when he's stalked some
legendary beast halfway across Africa and finally brought it down with a
slug through the heart, walked up to the corpse, and discovered that after
all it's just a big, messy, pile of meat. It's dirty and it's got flies on
it. Is that all there is to it? Why didn't he solve this thing a long time
ago? All of the old Azure/Pufferfish intercepts can be decrypted now. He'll
have to read them, and they will turn out to be the usual numb mutterings of
giant bureaucracies trying to take over the world. He doesn't, frankly, care
anymore. He just wants to get the hell out of here and get married, play the
organ, and program his Digital Computer, and hopefully get someone to pay
him a salary to do one or the other. But Mary's in Brisbane and the war's
not over yet we haven't even gotten around to invading Nippon, for
crissakes, and conquering the place is going to take forever, with all those
plucky Nipponese women and children drilling on soccer fields with pointed
bamboo staves and it's probably going to be something like 1955 before he
can even get discharged from the military. The war is not over yet, and as
long as it goes on they will need him to stay down here in the Basement
doing more of what he just did.
Arethusa. He still hasn't broken Arethusa. Now that's a cryptosystem!
He's too tired. He can't break Arethusa just now.
What he really needs is someone to talk to. Not about anything in
particular. Just to talk. But there's only half a dozen people on the planet
he can really talk to, and none of them is in the Philippines. Fortunately,
there are long copper wires running underneath the oceans which made
geographical location irrelevant, as long as you have the right clearance.
Waterhouse does. He gets up and leaves the Basement and goes to have a chat
with his friend Alan.
Chapter 92 AKIHABARA
As Randy's plane banks into Narita, a low stratum of cloud screens the
countryside like a silk veil. It must be Nippon: the only two colors are the
orange of the earth moving equipment and the green of the earth that has not
yet been moved. Other than that, everything is greyscale: grey parking lots
divided into rectangles by white lines, the rectangles occupied with black,
white, or grey cars, fading off into silvery fog beneath a sky the color of
aviation alloy. Nippon is soothing, a good destination for a man who has
just been rousted from his jail cell, hauled up before a judge, tongue
lashed, driven to the airport, and expelled from the Philippines.
The Nipponese look more American than Americans. Middle class
prosperity is lapidary; the flow of cash rounds and smooths a person like
water does riverbed stones. The goal of all such persons seems to be to make
themselves cuddly and nonthreatening. The girls in particular are unbearably
precious, although perhaps Randy just thinks so because of that troublesome
neurological hookup between his brain and Little Man 'tate. The old folks,
instead of looking weathered and formidable, tend to wear sneakers and
baseball caps. Black leather, studs, and handcuffs as accessories are the
marks of the powerless lower classes, the people who tend to end up in the
pokey in Manila, and not of the persons who actually dominate the world and
crush everything in their path.
"The doors are about to close." "The bus is leaving in five minutes."
Nothing happens in Nippon without a perky, breathy woman's voice giving you
a chance to brace yourself. It is safe to say that this is not true of the
Philippines. Randy thinks about taking a bus into Tokyo until he comes to
his senses and remembers that he's carrying around in his head the precise
coordinates of a mine that probably contains not less than a thousand tons
of gold. He hails a taxi. On the way into town, he passes by a road
accident: a tanker truck has crossed the white line and flipped over on the
shoulder. But in Nippon, even traffic accidents have the grave precision of
ancient Shinto rituals. White gloved cops direct traffic, moon suited rescue
workers descend from spotless emergency vans. The taxi passes beneath Tokyo
Bay through a tunnel that was built, three decades ago, by Goto Engineering.
Randy ends up in a big old hotel, "old" meaning that the physical
structure was constructed during the fifties, when Americans competed with
Soviets to build the most brutalistic space age buildings out of the most
depressing industrial materials. And indeed one can easily imagine Ike and
Mamie pulling up to the front door in a five ton Lincoln Continental. Of
course the interior has been gutted and redone more frequently than many
hotels steam clean their carpets, and so everything is perfect. Randy has a
strong impulse to lie in bed like a sack of shit, but he is tired of being
confined. And there are many people he could talk to on the phone, but he is
supremely paranoid about telephone conversations now. Any talking that he
might do would have to be censored. Talking openly and freely is a pleasure,
talking carefully is work, and Randy doesn't feel like work. He calls his
parents to tell them everything's fine, calls Chester to thank him.
Then he takes his laptop downstairs and sits in the middle of the
hotel's lobby, which is ostentatiously vast by Tokyo standards; the value of
the land beneath the lobby alone probably exceeds that of Cape Cod. No one
can even get near him with a Van Eck antenna here, and even if they do there
will be plenty of interference from the nearby computers of the concierge
desk. He starts ordering drinks, alternating between brutally cold pale
Nipponese beer and hot tea, and writes a memo explaining more or less what
he has spent the last month accomplishing.
He writes it very slowly because his hands are practically immobilized
now by carpal tunnel syndrome, and any motion that even faintly resembles
typing causes him a lot of pain. He ends up cadging a pencil from the
concierge and then using its eraser to punch the keys one at a time. The
memo begins with the word "carpal" which is a little code that they have
developed to explain why the following text seems unnaturally terse and
devoid of capital letters. He's barely got that tapped out when he's
approached by a devastatingly cute and fluttery young thing in a kimono who
tells him that there is a staff of typists on call in the Business Center to
help him with this should he desire it. Randy declines as politely as he
knows how, which is probably not politely enough. Kimono Girl backs away in
tiny steps, bowing and uttering truncated sub vocal hais. Randy goes back to
work with the pencil eraser. He explains, as briefly and clearly as he can,
what he's been doing, and what he thinks is going on with General Wing and
Enoch Root. He leaves the subject of what the fuck's going on with the
Dentist open for speculation.
When he's done, he encrypts it and then goes up to his room to e mail
it. He can't get over the cleanliness of his lodgings. The sheets appear to
have been tightened around the mattress with turnbuckles, then dipped in
starch. This is the first time in over a month that he hasn't had the warm
wet reek of sewer gas climbing up his nostrils and the ammoniacal tang of
evaporating urine stinging his eyes. Somewhere in Nippon, a man in a clean
white coverall stands in a room with a fat hose fed gun vomiting freshly
chopped glass fibers slathered with polyester resin onto a curvaceous form;
peeled off the form, the result is bath rooms like this one: a single
topological surface pierced in at most two or three places by drains and
nozzles. While Randy's e mailing his memo he lets hot water run into the
largest and smoothest depression in the bathroom surface. Then he takes off
his clothes and climbs into it. He never takes baths, but between the
foulness that seems infused into his flesh now, and the throbbing of his
Hunk of Burning Love, there was never a better time.
The last few days were the worst. When Randy finished his project, and
displayed the bogus results on the screen, he expected that the cell door
would swing open immediately. That he'd walk out onto the streets of Manila
and that, just for extra bonus points, Amy might even be waiting for him.
But nothing at all happened for a whole day, and then Attorney Alejandro
came to tell him that a deal might be possible but that it would take some
work. And then it turned out that the deal was actually a pretty bad one:
Randy was not going to be exonerated as such. He was going to be deported
from the country under orders not to come back. Attorney Alejandro never
claimed that this was a particularly good deal, but something in his manner
made it clear that there was no point griping about it; The Decision Had
Been Made at levels that were not accessible.
He could very easily take care of the Hunk of Burning Love problem now
that he has privacy, but astonishes himself by electing not to. This may be
perverse; he's not sure. The last month and a half of total celibacy,
relieved only by nocturnal emissions at roughly two week intervals, has
definitely got him in a mental space he has never been to before, or come
near, or even heard about. When he was in jail he had to develop a fierce
mental discipline in order not to be distracted by thoughts of sex. He got
alarmingly good at it after a while. It's a highly unnatural approach to the
mind/body problem, pretty much the antithesis of every sixties and seventies
tinged philosophy that he ever imbibed from his Baby Boomer elders. It is
the kind of thing he associates with scary hardasses: Spartans, Victorians,
and mid twentieth century American military heroes. It has turned Randy into
something of a hardass in his approach to hacking, and meanwhile, he
suspects, it has got him into a much more intense and passionate head space
than he's ever known when it comes to matters of the heart. He won't really
know that until he comes face to face with Amy, which looks like it's going
to be a while, since he's just been kicked out of the country where she
lives and works. Just as an experiment, he decides he's going to keep his
hands off of himself for now. If it makes him a little tense and volatile
compared to his pathologically mellow West Coast self, then so be it. One
nice thing about being in Asia is that tense, volatile people blend right
in. It's not like anyone ever died from being horny.
So he arises from the bath unsullied and wraps himself in a vestal
white robe. His cell in Manila did not have a mirror. He knew he was
probably losing weight, but not until he climbs out of the bath and gives
himself a look in the mirror does he realize just how much. For the first
time since he was an adolescent, he has a waist, which makes a white
bathrobe into a quasi practical garment.
He's scarcely recognizable. Before the beginning of this the Third
Business Foray he kind of assumed that, going into his mid thirties, he had
figured out who he was, and that he'd keep being the way he was forever,
except with a gradually decaying body and gradually increasing net worth. He
didn't imagine it was possible to change so much, and he wonders where it's
going to end. But this is nothing more than an anomalous moment of
reflection. He shakes it off and gets back to his life.
The Nipponese have, and have always had, a marvelous skill with graphic
images this is clear in their manga and their anime, but reaches its fullest
expressive flower in safety ideograms. Licking red flames, buildings
splitting and falling as the jagged earth parts beneath them, a fleeing
figure silhouetted in a doorway, suspended in the stroboscopic flash of a
detonation. The written materials accompanying these images are, of course,
not understandable to Randy, and so there is nothing for his rational mind
to work on; the terrifying ideograms blaze, fragmentary nightmare images
popping up on walls, and in the drawers of his room's desk, whenever he lets
his guard down for a moment. What he can read is not exactly soothing.
Trying to sleep, he lies in bed, mentally checking the locations of his
bedside emergency flashlight and the pair of freebie slippers (much too
small) thoughtfully left there so that he can sprint out of the burning and
collapsing hotel without cutting his feet to sashimi when the next magnitude
8.0 tremblor shivers the windows out of their frames. He stares up at the
ceiling, which is fraught with safety equipment whose LEDs form a glowering
red constellation, a crouching figure known to the ancient Greeks as
Ganymede, the Anally Receptive Cup bearer, and to the Nipponese, as Hideo,
the Plucky Disaster Relief Worker, bending over to probe a pile of jagged
concrete slabs for anything that's squishy. All of this leaves him in a
state of free floating terror. He gets up at five in the morning, grabs two
capsules of Japanese Snack from his minibar, and leaves the hotel, following
one of the two emergency exit routes that he has memorized. He starts
wandering, thinking it would be fun to get lost. Getting lost happens in
about thirty seconds. He should have brought his GPS, and marked the
latitude and longitude of the hotel.
The latitude and longitude of Golgotha are expressed, in the Arethusa
intercept, in degrees, minutes, seconds, and tenths of a second of latitude
and longitude. A minute is a nautical mile, a second is about a hundred
feet. In the seconds figure, the Golgotha numbers have one digit after the
decimal point, which implies a precision of ten feet. GPS receivers can give
you that kind of precision. Randy's not so sure about the sextants that the
Nipponese surveyors presumably used during the war. Before he left, he wrote
the numbers down on a scrap of paper, but he rounded off the seconds part
and just expressed it in the form of "XX degrees and twenty and a half
minutes" implying a precision of a couple of thousand feet. Then he invented
three other locations in the same general vicinity, but miles away, and put
them all into a list, with the real location being number two on the list.
Above it he wrote "Who owns these parcels of land?" or, in crypto speak,
WHOOW NSTHE SEPAR etc. and then spent an almost unbelievably tedious evening
synchronizing the two decks of cards and encrypting the entire message with
the Solitaire algorithm. He gave the ciphertext and the unused deck to Enoch
Root, then swiped the plaintext through some of the leftover grease in his
dinner tray and left it by the open drain. Within the hour, a rat had come
around and eaten it.
He wanders all day. At first it is just bleak and depressing and he
thinks he's going to give up very soon, but then he gets into the spirit of
it, and learns how to eat: you approach gentlemen on streetcorners selling
little fried octopus balls and make neolithic grunting noises and proffer
yen until you discover food in your hands and then you eat it.
Through some kind of nerdish homing instinct he finds Akihabara, the
electronics district, and spends a while wandering through stores looking at
all of the consumer electronics that will go on sale in the States a year
from now. That's where he is when his GSM telephone rings.
"Hello?"
"It's me. I'm standing behind a fat yellow line."
"Which airport?"
"Narita."
"Delighted to hear it. Tell your driver to take you to the Mr. Donut in
Akihabara."
Randy's there an hour later, flipping through a phone book sized manga
epic, when Avi walks in. The unspoken Randy/Avi greeting protocol dictates
that they hug each other at this point, so they do, somewhat to the
astonishment of their fellow donut eaters who usually make do with bowing.
The Mr. Donut is a three level affair jammed into a sliver of real estate
with approximately the same footprint as a spiral staircase and is quite
crowded with people who took compulsory English in their excellent and
highly competitive schools. Besides, Randy broadcast the time and location
of the meeting over a radio an hour ago. So as long as they are there, Randy
and Avi talk about relatively innocuous things. Then they go out for a
stroll. Avi knows his way around this neighborhood. He leads Randy through a
doorway and into nerdvana.
"Many people," Avi explains, "do not know that the word normally
spelled and pronounced 'nirvana' can be more accurately transliterated
'nirdvana' or, arguably, 'nerdvana.' This is nerdvana. The nucleus around
which Akihabara accreted. This is where the pasocon otaku go to get the
stuff they need."
"Pasocon otaku?"
"Personal computer nerds," Avi says. "But as in so many other things,
the Nipponese take it to an extreme that we barely imagine."
The place is laid out precisely like an Asian food market: it is a maze
of narrow aisles winding among tiny stalls, barely larger than phone booths,
where merchants have their wares laid out for inspection. The first thing
they see is a wire stall: at least a hundred reels of different types and
gauges of wire in gaily hued plastic insulation. "How apropos!" Avi says,
admiring the display, "we need to talk about wires." It need not be stated
that this place is a great venue for a conversation: the paths between the
stalls are so narrow that they have to walk in single file. No one can
follow them, or get close to them, here, without being ridiculously blatant.
An array of soldering irons bristles wickedly, giving one stall the look of
a martial arts store. Coffee can sized potentiometers are stacked in
pyramids. "Tell me about wires," Randy says.
"I don't need to tell you how dependent we are on submarine cables,"
Avi says.
" 'We' meaning the Crypt, or society in general?"
"Both. Obviously the Crypt can't even function without communications
linkages to the outside world. But the Internet and everything else are just
as dependent on cables."
A pasocon otaku in a trench coat, holding a plastic bowl as shopping
cart, hunches over a display of gleaming copper toroidal coils that look to
have been hand polished by the owner. Finger sized halogen spotlights
mounted on an overhead rack emphasize their geometric perfection.
"So?"
"So, cables are vulnerable."
They wander past a stall that specializes in banana plugs, with a
sideline in alligator clips, arranged in colorful rosettes around disks of
cardboard.
"Those cables used to be owned by PTAs. Which were basically just
branches of governments. Hence they pretty much did what governments told
them to. But the new cables going in today are owned and controlled by
corporations beholden to no one except their investors. Puts certain
governments in a position they don't like very much."
"Okay," Randy says, "they used to have ultimate control over how
information flowed between countries in that they ran the PTTs that ran the
cables."
"Yes."
"Now they don't."
"That's right. There's been this big transfer of power that has taken
place under their noses, without their having foreseen it." Avi stops in
front of a stall that sells LEDs in all manner of bubble gum colors, packed
into tiny boxes like ripe tropical fruits in crates, and standing up from
cubes of foam like psychedelic mushrooms. He is making big transfer of power
gestures with his hands, but to Randy's increasingly warped mind this looks
like a man moving heavy gold bars from one pile to another. Across the
aisle, they are being stared at by the dead eyes of a hundred miniature
video cameras. Avi continues, "And as we've talked about many times, there
are many reasons why different governments might want to control the flow of
information. China might want to institute political censorship, whereas the
U.S. might want to regulate electronic cash transfers so that they can keep
collecting taxes. In the old days they could ultimately do this insofar as
they owned the cables."
"But now they can't," Randy says.
"Now they can't, and this change happened very fast, or at least it
looked fast to government with its retarded intellectual metabolism, and now
they are way behind the curve, and scared and pissed off, and starting to
lash out."
"They are?"
"They are."
"In what way are they lashing out?"
A toggle switch merchant snaps a rag over rows and columns of stainless
steel merchandise. The tip of the rag breaks the sound barrier and generates
a tiny sonic pop that blasts a dust mote from the top of a switch. Everyone
is politely ignoring them. "Do you have any idea what down time on a state
of the art cable costs nowadays?"
"Of course I do," Randy says. "It can be hundreds of thousands of
dollars a minute."
"That's right. And it takes at least a couple of days to repair a
broken cable. A couple of days. A single break in a cable can cost the
companies that own it tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in lost
revenue."
"But that hasn't been that much of an issue," Randy says. "The cables
are plowed in so deeply now. They're only exposed in the deep ocean.
"Yes where only an entity with the naval resources of a major
government could sever them."
"Oh, shit!"
"This is the new balance of power, Randy."
"You can't seriously be telling me that governments are threatening to
"
"The Chinese have already done it. They cut an older cable first
generation optical fiber joining Korea to Nippon. The cable wasn't that
important they only did it as a warning shot. And what's the rule of thumb
about governments cutting submarine cables?"
"That it's like nuclear war," Randy says. "Easy to start. Devastating
in its results. So no one does it."
"But if the Chinese have cut a cable, then other governments with a
vested interest in throttling information flow can say, 'Hey, the Chinese
did it, we need to show that we can retaliate in kind.' "
"Is that actually happening?"
"No, no, no!" Avi says. They've stopped in front of the largest display
of needlenose pliers Randy has ever seen. "It's all posturing. It's not
aimed at other governments so much as at the entrepreneurs who own and
operate the new cables."
Light dawns in Randy's mind. "Such as the Dentist."
"The Dentist has put more money into privately financed submarine
cables than just about anyone. He has a minority stake in that cable that
the Chinese cut between Korea and Nippon. So he's trapped like a rat. He has
no choice no choice at all other than to do as he's told."
"And who's giving the orders?"
"I'm sure that the Chinese are very big in this they don't have any
internal checks and balances in their government, so they are more prone to
do something that is grossly irregular like this."
"And they obviously have the most to lose from unfettered information
flow."
"Yeah. But I'm just cynical enough to suspect that a whole lot of other
governments are right behind them."
"If that's true," Randy says, "then everything is completely fucked.
Sooner or later a cable cutting war is going to break out. All the cables
will get chopped through. End of story."
"The world doesn't work that way anymore, Randy. Governments get
together and negotiate. Like they did in Brussels just after Christmas. They
come up with agreements. War does not break out. Usually."
"So there's an agreement in place?"
Avi shrugs. "As best as I can make out. A balance of power has been
struck between the people who own navies i.e., the people who have the
ability to cut cables with impunity and the people who own and operate
cables. Each side is afraid of what the other can do to it. So they have
come to a genteel understanding. The bureaucratic incarnation of it is
IDTRO."
"And the Dentist is in on it."
"Precisely."
"So maybe the Ordo siege really was ultimately directed by the
government."
"I very much doubt that Comstock ordered it," Avi says. "I think it was
the Dentist demonstrating his loyalty."
"How about the Crypt? Is the sultan party to this understanding?"
Avi shrugs. "Pragasu isn't saying much. I told him what I have just
told you. I laid out my theory of what is going on. He looked tolerantly
amused. He did not confirm or deny. But he did give me cause to believe that
the Crypt is still going to be up and running on schedule."
"See, I find that hard to believe," Randy says. "It seems like the
Crypt is their worst nightmare."
"Whose worst nightmare?"
"Any government that needs to collect taxes."
"Randy, governments will always find ways to collect taxes. If worse
comes to worst, the IRS can just base everything on property taxes you can't
hide real estate in cyberspace. But keep in mind that the U.S. government is
only a part of this thing the Chinese are very big in it, too."
"Wing!" Randy blurts. He and Avi cringe and look around them. The
pasocon otaku don't care. A man selling rainbow colored wire ribbons eyes
them with polite curiosity, then looks away. They move out of the bazaar and
onto the sidewalk. It has started to rain. A dozen nearly identical young
women in miniskirts and high heels march in wedge formation down the center
of the street sporting huge umbrellas blazoned with the face of a video game
character.
"Wing's digging for gold in Bundok," Randy says. "He thinks he knows
where Golgotha is. If he finds it, he'll need a really special kind of
bank."
"He's not the only guy in the world who needs a special bank," Avi
says. "Over the years, Switzerland has done a hell of a lot of business with
governments, or people connected with governments. Why didn't Hitler invade
Switzerland? Because the Nazis couldn't have done without it. So the Crypt
definitely fills a niche."
"Okay," Randy says, "so the Crypt will be allowed to remain in
existence."
"It has to. The world needs it," Avi says. "And we'll need it, when we
dig up Golgotha."
Suddenly Avi's got an impish look on his face; he looks to have shed
about ten years of age. This gets a belly laugh out of Randy, the first time
he's really laughed in a couple of months. His mood has gone through some
seismic shift all of a sudden, the whole world looks different to him. "It's
not enough to know where it is. Enoch Root says that these hoards were
buried deep in mines, down in the hard rock. So we're not going to get that
gold out without launching a pretty major engineering project."
"Why do you think I'm in Tokyo?" Avi says. "C'mon, let's get back to
the hotel."
While Avi's checking in, Randy collects his messages from the front
desk, and finds a FedEx envelope waiting for him. If it was tampered with en
route, the tamperers did a good job of covering their traces. It contains a
hand enciphered message from Enoch Root, who evidently has figured out some
way to get himself sprung from the clink with his scruples intact. It is
several lines of seemingly random block letters, in groups of five. Randy
has been carrying around a deck of cards ever since he got sprung from jail:
the prearranged key that will decipher this message. The prospect of several
hours of solitaire seems a lot less inviting in Tokyo than it did in prison
and he knows it will take that long to decipher a message as long as this
one. But he's already programmed his laptop to play Solitaire according to
Enoch's rules, and he's already punched in the key that is embodied in the
deck that Enoch gave him and stored it on a floppy disk that he keeps rubber
banded to the deck in his pocket. So he and Avi go up to Avi's room, pausing
along the way to collect Randy's laptop, and while Avi sorts through his
messages, Randy types in the ciphertext and gets it deciphered. "Enoch's
message says that the land above Golgotha is owned by the Church," Randy
mutters, "but in order to reach it we have to travel across land owned by
Wing, and by some Filipinos."
Avi doesn't appear to hear him. He's fixated on a message slip.
"What's up?" Randy asks.
"A little change of plans for tonight. I hope you have a really good
suit with you."
"I didn't know we had plans for tonight."
"We were going to meet with Goto Furudenendu," Avi says. "I sort of
figured that they were the right guys to approach about digging a big hole
in the ground."
"I'm with you," Randy says. "What's the change in plan?"
"The old man is coming down from his retreat in Hokkaido. He wants to
buy us dinner."
"What old man?"
"The founder of the company, Goto Furudenendu's father," Avi says.
'Protegé of Douglas MacArthur. Multi multi multi millionaire. Golf partner
and confidant of prime ministers. An old guy by the name of Goto Dengo."
Chapter 93 PROJECT X
It is early in April of the year 1945. A middle aged nipponese widow
feels the earth turning over, and scurries out of her paper house, fearing a
temblor. Her house is on the island of Kyushu, near the sea. She gazes out
over the ocean and sees a black ship on the horizon, steaming out of a
rising sun of its own making: for when its guns go off the entire vessel is
shrouded in red fire for a moment. She hopes that the Yamato, the world's
greatest battleship, which steamed away over that horizon a few days ago,
has returned victorious, and is firing its guns in celebration. But this is
an American battleship and it is dropping shells into' the port that the
Yamato just left, making the earth's bowels heave as if it were preparing to
throw up.
Until this moment, the Nipponese woman has been convinced that the
armed forces of her nation were crushing the Americans, the British, the
Dutch, and the Chinese at every turn. This apparition must be some kind of
bizarre suicide raid. But the black ship stays there all day long, heaving
ton after ton of dynamite into sacred soil. No airplanes come out to bomb
it, no ships to shell it, not even a submarine to torpedo it.
In a shocking display of bad form, Patton has lunged across the Rhine
ahead of schedule, to the irritation of Montgomery who has been making
laborious plans and preparations to do it first.
The German submarine U 234 is in the North Atlantic, headed for the
Cape of Good Hope, carrying ten containers holding twelve hundred pounds of
uranium oxide. The uranium is bound for Tokyo where it will be used in some
experiments, still in a preliminary phase, towards the construction of a new
and extremely powerful explosive device.
General Curtis LeMay's Air Force has spent much of the last month
flying dangerously low over Nipponese cities showering them with incendiary
devices. A quarter of Tokyo has been leveled; 83,000 people died there, and
this does not count the similar raids on Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe.
The night after the Osaka raid, some Marines raised a flag on Iwo Jima
and they put a picture of it in all the papers.
Within the last few days, the Red Army, now the most terrible force on
earth, has taken Vienna and the oil fields of Hungary, and the Soviets have
declared that their Neutrality Pact with Nippon will be allowed to expire
rather than being renewed.
Okinawa has just been invaded. The fighting is the worst ever. The
invasion is supported by a vast fleet against which the Nipponese have
launched everything they have. The Yamato came after them, her eighteen inch
guns at the ready, carrying only enough fuel for a one way voyage. But the
cryptanalysts of the U.S. Navy intercepted and decrypted her orders and the
great ship was sent to the bottom with 2,500 men. The Nipponese have
launched the first of their Floating Chrysanthemum assaults against the
invasion fleet: clouds of kamikaze planes, human bombs, human torpedoes,
speedboats packed with explosives.
To the irritation and bafflement of the German High Command, the
Nipponese government has sent a message to them, requesting that, in the
event that all of Germany's European naval bases are lost, the Kriegsmarine
should be given orders to continue operating with the Nipponese in the Far
East. The message is encrypted in Indigo. It is duly intercepted and read by
the Allies.
In the United Kingdom, Dr. Alan Mathison Turing, considering the war to
be effectively finished, has long since turned his attentions away from the
problem of voice encryption and into the creation of thinking machines. For
about ten months ever since the finished Colossus Mark II was delivered to
Bletchley Park he has had the opportunity to work with a truly programmable
computing machine. Alan invented these machines long before one was ever
built, and has never needed hands on experience in order to think about
them, but his experiences with Colossus Mark II have helped him to solidify
some ideas of how the next machine ought to be designed. He thinks of it as
a postwar machine, but that's only because he's in Europe and hasn't been
concerned with the problem of conquering Nippon as much as Waterhouse has.
"I've been working on BURY and DISINTER," says a voice, coming out of
small holes in a Bakelite headset clamped over Waterhouse's head. The voice
is oddly distorted, nearly obscured by white noise and a maddening buzz.
"Please say it again?" Lawrence says, pressing the phones against his
ear.
"BURY and DISINTER," says the voice. "They are, er, sets of
instructions for the machine to execute, to carry out certain algorithms.
They are programmes.
"Right! Sorry, I just wasn't able to hear you the first time. Yes, I've
been working on them too," Waterhouse says.
"The next machine will have a memory storage system, Lawrence, in the
form of sound waves traveling down a cylinder filled with mercury we stole
the idea from John Wilkins, founder of the Royal Society, who came up with
it three hundred years ago, except he was going to use air instead of
quicksilver. I excuse me, Lawrence, did you say you had been working on
them?"
"I did the same thing with tubes. Valves, as you would call them."
"Well that's all well and good for you Yanks," Alan says, "I suppose if
you are infinitely rich you could make a BURY/DISINTER system out of steam
locomotives, or something, and retain a staff of thousands to run around
squirting oil on the squeaky bits."
"The mercury line is a good idea," Waterhouse admits. "Very
resourceful."
"Have you actually gotten BURY and DISINTER to work with valves?"
"Yes. My DISINTER works better than our shovel expeditions," Lawrence
says. "Did you ever find those silver bars you buried?"
"No," Alan says absently. "They are lost. Lost in the noise of the
world."
"You know, that was a Turing test I just gave you," Lawrence says.
"Beg pardon?"
"This damned machine screws up your voice so bad I can't tell you from
Winston Churchill," Lawrence says. "So the only way I can verify it's you is
by getting you to say things that only Alan Turing could say."
He hears Alan's sharp, high pitched laugh at the other end of the line.
It's him all right.
"This Project X thing really is appalling," Alan says. "Delilah is
infinitely superior. I wish you could see it for yourself. Or hear it."
Alan is in London, in a command bunker somewhere. Lawrence is in Manila
Bay, on the Rock, the island of Corregidor. They are joined by a thread of
copper that goes all the way around the world. There are many such threads
traversing the floors of the world's oceans now, but only a few special ones
go to rooms like this. The rooms are in Washington, London, Melbourne, and
now, Corregidor.
Lawrence looks through a thick glass window into the engineer's booth,
where a phonograph record is playing on the world's most precise and
expensive turntable. This is, likewise, the most valuable record ever turned
out: it is filled with what is intended to be perfectly random white noise.
The noise is electronically combined with the sound of Lawrence's voice
before it is sent down the wire. Once it gets to London, the noise (which is
being read off an identical phonograph record there) is subtracted from his
voice, and the result sent into Alan Turing's headphones. It all depends on
the two phonographs being perfectly synchronized. The only way to
synchronize them is to transmit that maddening buzzing noise, a carrier
wave, along with the voice signal. If all goes well, the opposite phonograph
player can lock onto the buzz and spin its wax in lockstep.
The phonograph record is, in other words, a one time pad. Some where in
New York, in the bowels of Bell Labs, behind a locked and guarded door
stenciled PROJECT X, technicians are turning out more of these things, the
very latest chart topping white noise. They stamp out a few copies, dispatch
them by courier to the Project X sites around the globe, then destroy the
originals.
They would not be having this conversation at all, except that a couple
of years ago Alan went to Greenwich Village and worked at Bell Labs for a
few months, while Lawrence was on Qwghlm. H.M. Government sent him there to
evaluate this Project X thing and let them know whether it was truly secure.
Alan decided that it was then went back home and began working on a much
better one, called Delilah.
What the hell does this have to do with dead Chinese abacus slaves?
To Lawrence, staring through the window at the spinning white noise
disk, the connection could hardly be clearer. He says, "Last I spoke to you,
you were working on generating random noise for Delilah."
"Yes," Alan says absently. That was a long time ago, and that whole
project has been BURIED in his memory storage system; it will take him a
minute or two to DISINTER it.
"What sorts of algorithms did you consider to create that noise?"
There is another five second pause, then Alan launches into a
disquisition about mathematical functions for generating pseudorandom number
sequences. Alan had a good British boarding school education, and his
utterances tend to be well structured, with outline form, topic sentences,
the whole bit:
PSEUDO RANDOM NUMBERS
I. Caveat: they aren't really random, of course, they just look that
way, and that's why the pseudo
II. Overview of the Problem
A. It seems as if it should be easy
B. Actually it turns out to be really hard
C. Consequences of failure: Germans decrypt our secret messages,
millions die, humanity is enslaved, world plunged into an eternal Dark Age
D. How can you tell if a series of numbers is random
1, 2, 3, . . . (A list of different statistical tests for randomness,
the advantages and disadvantages of each)
III. A bunch of stuff that I, Alan Turing, tried
A, B, C, . . . (A list of different mathematical functions that Alan
used to generate random numbers; how almost all of them failed abjectly;
Alan's initial confidence is replaced by surprise, then exasperation, then
despair, and finally by guarded confidence as he at last finds some
techniques that work)
IV. Conclusions
A. It's harder than it looks
B. It's not for the unwary
C. It can be done if you keep your wits about you
D. In retrospect a surprisingly interesting mathematical problem
deserving of further research
When Alan finishes with this perfectly structured whirlwind tour of the
Surprising World of Pseudo Randonmess, Lawrence says, "How about zeta
functions?"
"Didn't even consider those," Alan says.
Lawrence's mouth drops open. He can see his own semitransparent
reflection in the window, superimposed on the spinning phonograph, and he
sees that he has got a sort of mildly outraged look on his face. There must
be something conspicuously nonrandom about the output of the zeta function,
something so obvious to Alan that he dismissed it out of hand. But Lawrence
has never seen any such thing. He knows that Alan is smarter than he is, but
he's not used to being so desperately far behind him.
"Why. . . why not?" he finally stammers.
"Because of Rudy!" Alan thunders. "You and I and Rudy all worked on
that damn machine at Princeton! Rudy knows that you and I have the knowledge
to build such a device. So it is the first thing that he would assume we
would use."
"Ah." Lawrence sighs. "But leaving that aside, the zeta function might
still be a good way of doing it."
"It might," Alan says guardedly, "but I have not investigated it.
You're not thinking of using it, are you?"
Lawrence tells Alan about the abaci. Even through the noise and the
buzz, he can tell that Alan is thunderstruck. There is a pause while the
technicians at each end flip over their phonograph records. When the
connection is reestablished, Alan's still very excited. "Let me tell you
something more," Lawrence says.
"Yes, go ahead."
"You know that the Nipponese use a plethora of different codes, and we
still have only broken some of them."
"Yes."
"There is an unbroken cipher system that Central Bureau calls Arethusa.
It's incredibly rare. Only thirty some Arethusa messages have ever been
intercepted."
"Some company code?" Alan asks. This is a good guess; each major
Nipponese corporation had its own code system before the war, and much
effort has gone into stealing code books for, and otherwise breaking, the
Mitsubishi code, to name one example.
"We can't figure out the sources and destinations of Arethusa
messages," Lawrence continues, "because they use a unique site code system.
We can only guess at their origins by using huffduff. And huffduff tells us
that most of the Arethusa messages have originated from submarines. Possibly
just a single submarine, plying the route between Europe and Southeast Asia.
We have also seen them from Sweden, from London, Buenos Aires, and Manila."
"Buenos Aires? Sweden?"
"Yes. And so, Alan, I took an interest in Arethusa."
"Well, I don't blame you!"
"The message format matches that of Azure/Pufferfish."
"Rudy's system?"
"Yes."
"Nice work on that, by the way."
"Thank you, Alan. As you must have heard by now, it is based on zeta
functions. Which you did not even consider using for Delilah because you
were afraid Rudy would think of it. And this raises the question of whether
Rudy intended us to break Azure/Pufferfish all along."
"Yes, it does. But why would he want us to?"
"I have no idea. The old Azure/Puffeffish messages may contain some
clues. I am having my Digital Computer generate retroactive one time pads so
that I can decrypt those messages and read them."
"Well, then, I shall have Colossus do the same. It is busy just now,"
Alan says, "working on Fish decrypts. But I don't think Hitler has much
longer to go. When he is finished, I can probably get down to Bletchley and
decrypt those messages."
"I'm also working on Arethusa," Lawrence says. "I'm guessing it all has
something to do with gold."
"Why do you say that?" Alan says. But at this point the tone arm of the
phonograph reaches the end of its spiral groove and lifts off the record.
Time's up. Bell Labs, and the might of the Allied governments, did not
install the Project X network so that mathematicians could indulge in
endless chitchat about obscure functions.
Chapter 94 LANDFALL
The sailing ship Gertrude wheezes into the cove shortly after sunrise,
and Bischoff cannot help but laugh. Barnacles have grown so thick around her
hull that the hull itself (he supposes) could be removed entirely, and the
shell of barnacles could be outfitted with a mast and canvas, and sailed to
Tahiti. A hundred yard long skein of seaweed, rooted in those barnacles,
trails behind her, making a long greasy disturbance in her wake. Her mast
has evidently been snapped off at least once. It has been replaced by a rude
jury rigged thing, a tree