verhead and Yamamoto glances up to
see the silhouette of an escort, way out of position, dangerously close to
them. Who is that idiot? Then the green island and the blue ocean rotate
into view as his pilot puts the Betty into a power dive. Another plane
flashes overhead with a roar that cuts through the noise of the Betty's
engines, and although it is nothing more than a black flash, its odd
forktailed silhouette registers in his mind. It was a P 38 Lightning, and
the last time Admiral Yamamoto checked, the Nipponese Air Force wasn't
flying any of those.
The voice of Admiral Ugaki comes through on the radio from the other
Betty, right behind Yamamoto's, ordering Yamamoto's pilot to stay in
formation. Yamamoto cannot see anything in front of them except for the surf
washing ashore on Bougainville, and the wall of trees, seeming to grow
higher and higher, as the plane descends the tropical canopy now actually
above them. He is Navy, not an Air Force man, but even he knows that when
you can't see any planes in front of you in a dogfight, you have problems.
Red streaks flash past from behind, burying themselves in the steaming
jungle ahead, and the Betty begins to shake violently. Then yellow light
fills the corners of both of his eyes: the engines are on fire. The pilot is
heading directly for the jungle now; either the plane is out of control, or
the pilot is already dead, or it is a move of atavistic desperation: run,
run into the trees!
They enter the jungle in level flight, and Yamamoto is astonished how
far they go before hitting anything big. Then the plane is bludgeoned wide
open by mahogany trunks, like baseball bats striking a wounded sparrow, and
he knows it's over. The greenhouse disintegrates around him, the meridians
and parallels crumpling and rending which isn't quite as bad as it sounds
since the body of the plane is suddenly filled with flames. As his seat
tears loose from the broken dome and launches into space, he grips his
sword, unwilling to disgrace himself by dropping his sacred weapon, blessed
by the emperor, even in this last instant of his life. His clothes and hair
are on fire as he tumbles like a meteor through the jungle, clenching his
ancestral blade.
He realizes something: The Americans must have done the impossible:
broken all of their codes. That explains Midway, it explains the Bismarck
Sea, Hollandia, everything. It especially explains why Yamamoto who ought to
be sipping green tea and practicing calligraphy in a misty garden is, in
point of fact, on fire and hurtling through the jungle at a hundred miles
per hour in a chair, closely pursued by tons of flaming junk. He must get
word out! The codes must all be changed! This is what he is thinking when he
flies head on into a hundred foot tall Octomelis sumatrana.
Chapter 40 ANTAEUS
When Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse sets foot on the Sceptered Isle for
the first time in several months, at the ferry terminal in Utter Maurby, he
is startled to find allusions to springtime all over the place. The locals
have installed flower boxes around the pier, and all of them are abloom with
some sort of pre Cambrian decorative cabbage. The effect is not exactly
cheerful, but it does give the place a haunted Druidical look, as if
Waterhouse is looking at the northwesternmost fringe of some cultural
tradition from which a sharp anthropologist might infer the existence of
actual trees and meadows several hundred miles farther south. For now,
lichens will do they have gotten into the spirit and turned greyish purple
and greyish green.
He and Duffel, their old companionship renewed, tussle their way over
to the terminal and fight each other for a seat aboard the disconcertingly
quaint two car Manchester bound whistle stop. It will sit there for another
couple of hours raising steam before leaving, giving him plenty of time to
take stock.
He's been working on some information theoretical problems occasioned
by the Royal and U.S. Navies' recent (1) propensity to litter the
floor of the Atlantic with bombed and torpedoed milchcows. These fat German
submarines, laden with fuel, food, and ammunition, loiter in the Atlantic
Ocean, using radio rarely and staying well away from the sea lanes, and
serve as covert floating supply bases so that the U boats don't have to go
all the way back to the European mainland to refuel and rearm. Sinking lots
of 'em is great for the convoys, but must seem conspicuously improbable to
the likes of a Rudolf von Hacklheber.
Usually, just for the sake of form, the Allies send out a search plane
beforehand to pretend to stumble upon the milchcow. But, setting aside some
of their blind spots in the political realm, the Germans are bright chaps,
and cannot be expected to fall for that ruse forever. If we are going to
keep sending their milchcows to the bottom, we need to come up with a
respectable excuse for the fact that we always know exactly where they are!
Waterhouse has been coming up with excuses as fast as he can for most
of the late winter and early spring, and frankly he is tired of it. It has
to be done by a mathematician if it's to be done correctly, but it's not
exactly mathematics. Thank god he had the presence of mind to copy down the
crypto worksheets that he discovered in the U boat's safe, which give him
something to live for.
In a sense he is wasting his time; the originals have long since gone
off to Bletchley Park where they were probably deciphered within hours. But
he's not doing it for the war effort per se, just trying to keep his mind
sharp and maybe add a few leaves to the next edition of the Cryptonomicon.
When he arrives at Bletchley, which is his destination of the moment, he
will have to ask around and find out what those messages actually said.
Usually, he is above such cheating. But the messages from U 553 have
him completely baffled. They were not produced on an Enigma machine, but
they are at least that difficult to decrypt. He does not even know, yet,
what kind of cipher he is dealing with. Normally, one begins by figuring
out, based on certain patterns in the ciphertext, whether it is, for
example, a substitution or a transposition system, and then further
classifying it into, say, an aperiodic transposition cipher in which keying
units of constant length encipher plaintext groups of variable length, or
vice versa. Once you have classified the algorithm, you know how to go about
breaking the code.
Waterhouse hasn't even gotten that far. He now strongly suspects that
the messages were produced using a one time pad. If so, not even Bletchley
Park will be able to break them, unless they have somehow obtained a copy of
the pad. He is half hoping that they will tell him that this is the case so
that he can stop ramming his head against this particular stone wall.
In a way, this would raise even more questions than it would answer.
The Triton four wheel naval Enigma was supposedly considered by the Germans
to be perfectly impregnable to cryptanalysis. If that was the case, then why
was the skipper of U 553 employing his own private system for certain
messages?
The locomotive starts hissing and sputtering like the House of Lords as
Inner Qwghlmians emerge from the terminal building and take their seats on
the train. A gaffer comes through the car, selling yesterday's newspapers,
cigarettes, candy, and Waterhouse purchases some of each.
The train is just beginning to jerk forward when Waterhouse's eye falls
on the lead headline of yesterday's newspaper: YAMAMOTO'S PLANE SHOT DOWN IN
PACIFIC ARCHITECT OF PEARL HARBOR THOUGHT TO BE DEAD.
"Malaria, here I come," Waterhouse mumbles to himself. Then, before
reading any further, he sets the newspaper down and opens up his pack of
cigarettes. This is going to take a lot of cigarettes.
***
One day, and a whole lot of tar and nicotine later, Waterhouse climbs
off the train and walks out the front door of Bletchley Depot into a
dazzling spring day. The flowers in front of the station are blooming, a
warm southern breeze is blowing, and Waterhouse almost cannot bear to cross
the road and enter some windowless hut in the belly of Bletchley Park. He
does it anyway and is informed that he has no duties at the moment.
After visiting a few other huts on other business, he turns north and
walks three miles to the hamlet of Shenley Brook End and goes into the Crown
Inn, where the proprietress, Mrs. Ramshaw, has, during these last three and
a half years, made a tidy business out of looking after stray, homeless
Cambridge mathematicians.
Dr. Alan Mathison Turing is seated at a table by a window, sprawled
across two or three chairs in what looks like a very awkward pose but which
Waterhouse feels sure is eminently practical. A full pint of some thing
reddish brown is on the table next to him; Alan is too busy to drink it. The
smoke from Alan's cigarette reveals a prism of sunlight coming through the
window, centered in which is a mighty Book. Alan is holding the book with
one hand. The palm of his other hand is pressed against his forehead, as if
he could get the data from book to brain through some kind of direct
transference. His fingers curl up into the air and a cigarette projects from
between them, ashes dangling perilously over his dark hair. His eyes are
frozen in place, not scanning the page, and their focus point is somewhere
in the remote distance.
"Designing another Machine, Dr. Turing?"
The, eyes finally begin to move, and swivel around towards the sound of
the visitor's voice. "Lawrence," Alan says once, quietly, identifying the
face. Then, once more warmly: "Lawrence!" He scrambles to his feet, as
energetic as ever, and steps forward to shake hands. "Delighted to see you!"
"Good to see you, Alan," Waterhouse says. "Welcome back." He is, as
always, pleasantly surprised by Alan's keenness, the intensity and purity of
his reactions to things.
He is also touched by Alan's frank and sincere affection for him. Alan
did not give this easily or lightly, but when he decided to make Waterhouse
his friend, he did so in a way that is unfettered by either American or
heterosexual concepts of manly bearing. "Did you walk the entire distance
from Bletchley? Mrs. Ramshaw, refreshment!"
"Heck, it's only three miles," Waterhouse says.
"Please come and join me," Alan says. Then he stops, frowns, and looks
at him quizzically. "How on earth did you guess I was designing another
machine? Simply a guess based on prior observations?"
"Your choice of reading material," Waterhouse says, and points to
Alan's book: RCA Radio Tube Manual.
Alan gets a wild look. "This has been my constant companion," he says.
"You must learn about these valves, Lawrence! Or tubes as you would call
them. Your education is incomplete otherwise. I cannot believe the number of
years I wasted on sprockets! God!"
"Your zeta function machine? I thought it was beautiful," Lawrence
says.
"So are many things that belong in a museum," Alan says.
"That was six years ago. You had to work with the available
technology," Lawrence says.
"Oh, Lawrence! I'm surprised at you! If it will take ten years to make
the machine with available technology, and only five years to make it with a
new technology, and it will only take two years to invent the new
technology, then you can do it in seven years by inventing the new
technology first!"
"Touché"
"This is the new technology," Alan says, holding up the RCA Radio Tube
Manual like Moses brandishing a Tablet of the Law. "If I had only had the
presence of mind to use these, I could have built the zeta function machine
much sooner, and others besides."
"What sort of a machine are you designing now?" Lawrence asks.
"I've been playing chess with a fellow named Donald Michie a
classicist," Alan says. "I am wretched at it. But man has always constructed
tools to extend his powers why not a machine that will help me play chess?"
"Does Donald Michie get to have one, too?"
"He can design his own machine!" Alan says indignantly.
Lawrence looks carefully around the pub. They are the only customers,
and he cannot bring himself to believe that Mrs. Ramshaw is a spy. "I
thought it might have something to do with " he says, and nods in the
direction of Bletchley Park.
"They are building I have helped them build a machine called Colossus."
"I thought I saw your hand in it."
"It is built from old ideas ideas we talked about in New Jersey, years
ago," Alan says. Brisk and dismissive is his tone, gloomy is his face. He is
hugging the RCA Radio Tube Manual to himself with one arm, doodling in a
notebook with the other. Waterhouse thinks that really the RCA Radio Tube
Manual is like a ball and chain holding Alan back. If he would just work
with pure ideas like a proper mathematician he could go as fast as thought.
As it happens, Alan has become fascinated by the incarnations of pure ideas
in the physical world. The underlying math of the universe is like the light
streaming in through the window. Alan is not satisfied with merely knowing
that it streams in. He blows smoke into the air to make the light visible.
He sits in meadows gazing at pine cones and flowers, tracing the
mathematical patterns in their structure, and he dreams about electron winds
blowing over the glowing filaments and screens of radio tubes, and, in their
surges and eddies, capturing something of what is going on in his own brain.
Turing is neither a mortal nor a god. He is Antaeus. That he bridges the
mathematical and physical worlds is his strength and his weakness.
"Why are you so glum?" Alan says. "What have you been working on?"
"Same stuff, different context," Waterhouse says. With these four words
he conveys, in full, everything that he has been doing on behalf of the war
effort. "Fortunately, I came upon something that is actually rather
interesting."
Alan looks delighted and fascinated to hear this news, as if the world
had been completely devoid of interesting things for the last ten years or
so, and Waterhouse had stumbled upon a rare find. "Tell me about it," he
insists.
"It's a cryptanalysis problem," Waterhouse says. "Non Enigma." He goes
on to tell the story about the messages from U 553. "When I got to Bletchley
Park this morning," he concludes, "I asked around. They said that they had
been butting their heads against the problem as long as I had, without any
success."
Suddenly, Alan looks disappointed and bored. "It must be a one time
pad," he says. He sounds reproachful.
"It can't be. The ciphertext is not devoid of patterns," Waterhouse
says.
"Ah," replies Alan, perking up again.
"I looked for patterns with the usual Cryptonomicon techniques. Found
nothing clear just some traces. Finally, in complete frustration, I decided
to start from a clean slate, trying to think like Alan Turing. Typically
your approach is to reduce a problem to numbers and then bring the full
power of mathematical analysis to bear on it. So I began by converting the
messages into numbers. Normally, this would be an arbitrary process. You
convert each letter into a number, usually between one and twenty five, and
then dream up some sort of arbitrary algorithm to convert this series of
small numbers into one big number. But this message was different it used
thirty two characters a power of two meaning that each character had a
unique binary representation, five binary digits long."
"As in Baudot code," Alan says (1). He looks guardedly
interested again.
"So I converted each letter into a number between one and thirty two,
using the Baudot code. That gave me a long series of small numbers. But I
wanted some way to convert all of the numbers in the series into one large
number, just to see if it would contain any interesting patterns. But this
was easy as pie! If the first letter is R, and its Baudot code is 01011, and
the second letter is F, and its code is 10111, then I can simply combine the
two into a ten digit binary number, 0101110111. And then I can take the next
letter's code and stick that onto the end and get a fifteen digit number.
And so on. The letters come in groups of five that's twenty five binary
digits per group. With six groups on each line of the page, that's a hundred
and fifty binary digits per line. And with twenty lines on the page, that's
three thousand binary digits.
So each page of the message could be thought of not as a series of six
hundred letters, but as an encoded representation of a single number with a
magnitude of around two raised to the three thousandth power, which works
out to around ten to the nine hundredth power."
"All right," Alan says, "I agree that the use of thirty two letter
alphabet suggests a binary coding scheme. And I agree that the binary coding
scheme, in turn, lends itself to a sort of treatment in which individual
groups of five binary digits are mooshed together to make larger numbers,
and that you could even take it to the point of mooshing together all of the
data on a whole page that way, to make one extremely large number. But what
does that accomplish?"
"I don't really know," Waterhouse admits. "I just have an intuition
that what we are dealing with here is a new encryption scheme based upon a
purely mathematical algorithm. Otherwise, there would be no point in using
the thirty two letter alphabet! If you think about it, Alan, thirty two
letters are all well and good as a matter of fact, they are essential for a
teletype scheme, because you have to have special characters like line feed
and carriage return."
"You're right," Alan says, "it is extremely odd that they would use
thirty two letters in a scheme that is apparently worked out using pencil
and paper."
"I've been over it a thousand times," Waterhouse says, "and the only
explanation I can think of is that they are converting their messages into
large binary numbers and then combining them with other large binary numbers
one time pads, most likely to produce the ciphertext."
"In which case your project is doomed," Alan says, "because you can't
break a one time pad."
"That is only true," Waterhouse says, "if the one time pad is truly
random. If you built up that three thousand digit number by flipping a coin
three thousand times and writing down a one for heads and a zero for tails,
then it would be truly random and unbreakable. But I do not think that this
is the case here."
"Why not? You think there were patterns in their one time pads?"
"Maybe. Just traces."
"Then what makes you think it is other than random?"
"Otherwise it makes no sense to develop a new scheme," Waterhouse says.
"Everyone in the world has been using one time pads forever. There are
established procedures for doing it. There's no reason to switch over to
this new, extremely odd system right now, in the middle of a war."
"So what do you suppose is the rationale for this new scheme?" asks
Alan, clearly enjoying himself a great deal.
"The problem with one time pads is that you have to make two copies of
each pad and get them to the sender and the recipient. I mean, suppose
you're in Berlin and you want to send a message to someone in the Far East!
This U boat that we found had cargo on board gold and other stuff from
Japan! Can you imagine how cumbersome this must be for the Axis?"
"Ahh," Alan says. He gets it now. But Waterhouse finishes the
explanation anyway:
"Suppose that you came up with a mathematical algorithm for generating
very large numbers that were random, or at least random looking."
"Pseudo random."
"Yeah. You'd have to keep the algorithm secret, of course. But if you
could get it the algorithm, that is around the world to your intended
recipient, then they could, from that day forward, do the calculation
themselves and figure out the one time pad for that particular day, or
whatever."
A shadow passes over Alan's otherwise beaming countenance. "But the
Germans already have Enigma machines all over the place," he says. "Why
should they bother to come up with a new scheme?"
"Maybe," Waterhouse says, "maybe there are some Germans who don't want
the entire German Navy to be able to decipher their messages."
"Ah," Alan says. This seems to eliminate his last objection. Suddenly
he is all determination. "Show me the messages!"
Waterhouse opens up his attache case, splotched and streaked with salt
from his voyages to and from Qwghlm, and draws out two manila envelopes.
"These are the copies I made before I sent the originals down to Bletchley
Park," he says, patting one of them. "They are much more legible than the
originals " he pats the other envelope " which they were kind enough to lend
me this morning, so that I could study them again."
"Show the originals!" Alan says. Waterhouse slides the second envelope,
encrusted with TOP SECRET stamps, across the table.
Alan opens the envelope so hastily that he tears it, and jerks out the
pages. He spreads them out on the table. His mouth drops open in purest
astonishment.
For a moment, Waterhouse is fooled; the expression on Alan's face makes
him think that his friend has, in some Olympian burst of genius, deciphered
the messages in an instant, just by looking at them.
But that's not it at all. Thunderstruck, he finally says, "I recognize
this handwriting."
"You do?" Waterhouse says.
"Yes. I've seen it a thousand times. These pages were written out by
our old bicycling friend, Rudolf von Hacklheber. Rudy wrote those pages."
***
Waterhouse spends much of the next week commuting to London for
meetings at the Broadway Buildings. Whenever civilian authorities are going
to be present at a meeting especially civilians with expensive sounding
accents Colonel Chattan always shows up, and before the meeting starts,
always finds some frightfully cheerful and oblique way to tell Waterhouse to
keep his trap shut unless someone asks a math question. Waterhouse is not
offended. He prefers it, actually, because it leaves his mind free to work
on important things. During their last meeting at the Broadway Buildings,
Waterhouse proved a theorem.
It takes Waterhouse about three days to figure that the meetings
themselves make no sense he reckons that there is no imaginable goal that
could be furthered by what they are discussing. He even makes a few stabs at
proving that this is so, using formal logic, but he is weak in this area and
doesn't know enough of the underlying axioms to reach a Q.E.D.
By the end of the week, though, he has figured out that these meetings
are just one ramification of the Yamamoto assassination. Winston Spencer
Churchill is very fond indeed of Bletchley Park and all its works, and he
places the highest priority on preserving its secrecy, but the interception
of Yamamoto's airplane has blown a gaping hole in the screen of deception.
The Americans responsible for this appalling gaffe are now trying to cover
their asses by spreading a story that native islander spies caught wind of
Yamamoto's trip and radioed the news to Guadalcanal, whence the fatal P 38s
were dispatched. But the P 38s were operating at the extreme limit of their
fuel range and would have had to be sent out at precisely the correct time
in order to make it back to Guadalcanal, so the Japanese would have to have
their heads several feet up their asses to fall for that. Winston Churchill
is pissed off in the extreme, and these meetings represent a prolonged
bureaucratic hissy fit intended to produce some meaningful and enduring
policy shift.
Every evening after the meetings, Waterhouse takes the tube to Euston
and the train to Bletchley, and sits up late working on Rudy's numbers. Alan
has been working on them during the daytime, so the two of them, combining
their efforts, can almost pound away on it round the clock.
Not all of the riddles are mathematical. For example, why the hell do
the Germans have Rudy copying out big long numbers by hand? If the letters
do indeed represent big numbers that would indicate that Dr. Rudolf von
Hacklheber had been assigned to a job as a mere cipher clerk. This would not
be the stupidest move ever made by a bureaucracy, but it seems unlikely. And
what little intelligence they've been able to gather from Germany suggests
that Rudy has in fact been given a rather important job important enough to
keep extremely secret.
Alan's hypothesis is that Waterhouse has been making an understandable
but totally wrong assumption. The numbers are not ciphertext. They are,
rather, one time pads that the skipper of U 553 was supposed to have used to
encrypt certain messages too sensitive to go out over the regular Enigma
channel. These one time pads were, for some reason, drawn up personally by
Rudy himself.
Usually, making one time pads is just as lowly a job as enciphering
messages a job for clerks, who use decks of cards or bingo machines to
choose letters at random. But Alan and Waterhouse are now operating on the
assumption that this encryption scheme is a radical new invention
presumably, an invention of Rudy's in which the pads are generated not at
random but by using some mathematical algorithm.
In other words, there is some calculation, some equation that Rudy has
dreamed up. You give it a value probably the date, and possibly some other
information as well, such as an arbitrary key phrase or number. You crank
through the steps of the calculation, and the result is a number, some nine
hundred digits long, which is three thousand binary digits, which gives you
six hundred letters (enough to cover one sheet of paper) when you convert it
using the Baudot code. The nine hundred digit decimal number, the three
thousand digit binary number, and the six hundred letters are all the same
abstract, pure number, encoded differently.
Meanwhile, your counterpart, probably on the other side of the world,
is going through the same calculation and coming up with the same one time
pad. When you send him a message encrypted using the day's pad, he can
decipher it.
If Turing and Waterhouse can figure out how the calculation works, they
can read all of these messages too.
Chapter 41 PHREAKING
The dentist is gone, the door locked, the phone unplugged. Randall
Lawrence Waterhouse lies naked on the starched, turned down sheets of his
king sized bed. His head is propped up on a pillow so that he can peer
through the vee of his feet at a BBC World Service newscast on the
television. A ten dollar minibar beer is near at hand. It's six in the
morning in America and so rather than a pro basketball game, he has to
settle for this BBC newscast, which is strongly geared to South Asian
happenings. A long and very sober story about a plague of locusts on the
India/Pakistan border follows a piece on a typhoon about to nail Hong Kong.
The king of Thailand is calling in some of his government's more corrupt
officials to literally prostrate themselves before him. Asian news always
has this edge of the fantastic to it, but it's all dead serious, no nods or
winks anywhere. Now he's watching a story about a nervous system disease
that people in New Guinea come down with as a consequence of eating other
people's brains. Just your basic cannibal story. No wonder so many Americans
come here on business and never really go home again it's like stepping into
the pages of Classics Comics.
Someone is knocking on his door. Randy gets up and puts on his plush
white hotel bathrobe. He peers through the peephole, half expecting to see a
pygmy standing there with a blowpipe, though he wouldn't mind a seductive
Oriental courtesan. But it's just Cantrell. Randy opens the door. Cantrell
is already holding up his hands, palms out, in a cheerful "shut up already"
gesture. "Don't worry," Cantrell says, "I'm not here to talk about Biz."
"In that case I won't break this beer bottle over your head," Randy
says. Cantrell must feel exactly the same way Randy does, which is that so
much wild shit happened today that the only way to deal with it is not to
talk about it at all. Most of the brain's work is done while the brain's
owner is ostensibly thinking about something else, so sometimes you have to
deliberately find something else to think and talk about.
"Come to my room," Cantrell says. "Pekka is here."
"The Finn who got blown up?"
"The same."
"Why is he here?"
"Because there's no reason not to be. After he got blown up he adopted
a technomadic lifestyle."
"So it's just a coincidence, or "
"Nah," Cantrell says. "He's helping me win a bet."
"What kind of bet?"
"I was telling Tom Howard about Van Eck phreaking a few weeks ago. Tom
said it sounded like bullshit. He bet me ten shares of Epiphyte stock that I
couldn't make it actually work outside of a laboratory."
"Is Pekka good at that kind of thing?"
By way of saying yes, Cantrell adopts a serious look and says, "Pekka
is writing a whole chapter about it for the Cryptonomicon. Pekka feels that
only by mastering the technologies that might be used against us can we
defend ourselves."
This sounds almost like a call to arms. Randy would have to be some
kind of loser to retreat to his bed after that, so he backs into the room
and steps into his trousers, which are standing there telescoped into the
floor where he dropped them upon his return from the sultan's palace. The
sultan's palace! The television is now broadcasting a news story about
pirates plying the waters of the South China Sea, making freighter crews
walk the plank. "This whole continent is like fucking Disneyland without the
safety precautions," Randy observes. "Am I the only person who finds it
surreal?"
Cantrell grins, but says, "If we begin talking about surreal, we'll end
up talking about today."
"You got that right," Randy says. "Let's go."
***
Before Pekka became known around Silicon Valley as the Finn Who Got
Blown Up, he was known as Cello Guy, because he had a nearly autistic
devotion to his cello and took it with him everywhere, always trying to
stuff it into overhead luggage racks. Not coincidentally, he was an analog
kind of guy from way back whose specialty was radio.
When packet radio started to get big as an alternative to sending data
down wires, Pekka moved to Menlo Park and joined a startup. His company
bought their equipment at used computer stores, and Pekka ended up scoring a
pretty nice nineteen inch high res multisync monitor perfectly adequate for
his adaptable twenty four year old eyes. He hooked it up to a slightly used
Pentium box jammed full of RAM.
He also installed Finux, a free UNIX operating system created by Finns,
almost as a way of proclaiming to the rest of the world "this is how weird
we are," and distributed throughout the world on the Net. Of course Finux
was fantastically powerful and flexible and enabled you, among other things,
to control the machine's video circuitry to the Nth degree and choose many
different scanning frequencies and pixel clocks, if you were into that kind
of thing. Pekka most definitely was into it, and so like a lot of Finux
maniacs he set his machine up so that it could display, if he chose, a whole
lot of tiny little pixels (which displayed a lot of information but was hard
on the eyes) or, alternatively, fewer and larger pixels (which he tended to
use after he had been hacking for twenty four hours straight and lost ocular
muscle tone), or various settings in between. Every time he changed from one
setting to another, the monitor screen would go black for a second and there
would be an audible clunk from inside of it as the resonating crystals
inside locked in on a different range of frequencies.
One night at three A.M., Pekka caused this to happen, and immediately
after the screen went black and made that clunking noise, it exploded in his
face. The front of the picture tube was made of heavy glass (it had to be,
to withstand the internal vacuum) which fragmented and sped into Pekka's
face, neck, and upper body. The very same phosphors that had been glowing
beneath the sweeping electron beam, moments before, conveying information
into Pekka's eyes, were now physically embedded in his flesh. A hunk of
glass took one of his eyes and almost went through into his brain. Another
one gouged out his voicebox, another zinged past the side of his head and
bit a neat triangular hunk out of his left ear.
Pekka, in other words, was the first victim of the Digibomber. He
almost bled to death on the spot, and his fellow Eutropians hovered around
his hospital bed for a few days with tanks of Freon, ready to jump into
action in case he died. But he didn't, and he got even more press because
his startup company lacked health insurance. After a lot of hand wringing in
local newspapers about how this poor innocent from the land of socialized
medicine had not had the presence of mind to buy health insurance, some rich
high tech guys donated money to pay his medical bills and to equip him with
a computer voicebox like Stephen Hawking's.
And now here is Pekka, sitting in Cantrell's hotel room. His cello
stands in the corner, dusty around the bridge from powdered rosin. He is
facing a blank wall to which he has duct taped a bunch of wires in precise
loops and whorls. These lead to some home brewed circuit boards which are in
turn hooked up to his laptop.
"Hello Randy congratulations on your success," says a computer
generated voice as soon as the door is shut behind Randy and Cantrell. This
is a little greeting that Pekka has obviously typed in ahead of time,
anticipating his arrival. None of the foregoing seems particularly odd to
Randy except for the fact that Pekka seems to think that Epiphyte has
already achieved some kind of success.
"How are we doing?" Cantrell asks.
Pekka types in a response. Then he cups one hand to his mutilated ear
while using his other hand to cue the voice generator: "He showers." Indeed,
it's possible now to hear the pipes hissing in the wall. "His laptop
radiates."
"Oh," Randy says, "Tom Howard's room is right next door?"
"Just on the other side of that wall," Cantrell says. "I specifically
requested it, so that I could win this bet. See, his room is a mirror image
of this one, so his computer is only a few inches away, just on the other
side of this wall. Perfect conditions for Van Eck phreaking."
"Pekka, are you receiving signals from his computer right now?" Randy
asks.
Pekka nods, types, and fires back, "I tune. I calibrate." The input
device for his voice generator is a one handed chord board strapped to his
thigh. He puts his right hand on it and makes flopping and groping motions.
Moments later speech emerges, "I require Cantrell."
"Excuse me," Cantrell says, and goes to Pekka's side. Randy watches
over their shoulders for a bit, understanding vaguely what they're doing.
If you lay a sheet of white paper on an old gravestone, and sweep the
tip of a pencil across it, you get one horizontal line, dark in some places
and faint in others, and not very meaningful. If you move downwards on the
page by a small distance, a single pencil line width, and repeat, an image
begins to emerge. The process of working your way down the page in a series
of horizontal sweeps is what a nerd would call raster scanning, or just
rastering. With a conventional video monitor a cathode ray tube the electron
beam physically rasters down the glass something like sixty to eighty times
a second. In the case of a laptop screen like Randy's, there is no physical
scanning; the individual pixels are turned on or off directly. But still a
scanning process is taking place; what's being scanned and made manifest on
the screen is a region of the computer's memory called the screen buffer.
The contents of the screen buffer have to be slapped up onto the screen
sixty to eighty times every second or else (1) the screen flickers and (2)
the images move jerkily.
The way that the computer talks to you is not by controlling the screen
directly but rather by manipulating the bits contained in that buffer,
secure in the knowledge that other subsystems inside the machine handle the
drudge work of pipelining that information onto the actual, physical screen.
Sixty to eighty times a second, the video system says shit! time to refresh
the screen again, and goes to the beginning of the screen buffer which is
just a particular hunk of memory, remember and it reads the first few bytes,
which dictate what color the pixel in the upper left hand corner of the
screen is supposed to be. This information is sent on down the line to
whatever is actually refreshing the screen, whether it's a scanning electron
beam or some laptop style system for directly controlling the pixels. Then
the next few bytes are read, typically for the pixel just to the right of
that first one, and so on all the way to the right edge of the screen. That
draws the first line of the grave rubbing.
Since the right edge of the screen has now been reached, there are no
more pixels off in that direction. It is implicit that the next bytes read
from memory will be for the leftmost pixel in the second raster line down
from the top. If this is a cathode ray tube type of screen, we have a little
timing problem here in that the electron beam is currently at the right edge
of the screen and now it's being asked to draw a pixel at the left edge. It
has to move back. This takes a little while not long, but much longer than
the interval of time between drawing two pixels that are cheek by jowl. This
pause is called the horizontal retrace interval. Another one will occur at
the end of every other line until the rastering has proceeded to the last
pixel at the bottom right hand corner of the screen and completed a single
grave rubbing. But then it's time to begin the process all over again, and
so the electron beam (if there is one) has to jump diagonally all the way up
to the upper left hand pixel. This also takes a little while and is called
the vertical retrace interval.
These issues all stem from inherent physical limitations of sweeping
electron beams through space in a cathode ray tube, and basically disappear
in the case of a laptop screen like the one Tom Howard has set up a few
inches in front of Pekka, on the other side of that wall. But the video
timing of a laptop screen is still patterned after that of a cathode ray
tube screen anyway. (This is simply because the old technology is
universally understood by those who need to understand it, and it works
well, and all kinds of electronic and software technology has been built and
tested to work within that framework, and why mess with success, especially
when your profit margins are so small that they can only be detected by
using techniques from quantum mechanics, and any glitches vis à vis
compatibility with old stuff will send your company straight into the
toilet.)
On Tom's laptop, each second of time is divided into seventy five
perfectly regular slices, during which a full grave rubbing is performed
followed by a vertical retrace