en you say 'you'? I work for Epiphyte Corporation, which is designed from the ground up to work, not on its own, but as an element in a virtual corporation, kind of like " "I know what an epiphyte is," she says. "What's two?" "Okay, good," Randy says, a little off balance. "Two is that the extension of the North Luzon Festoon is just the first of what we hope will be several linkups. We want to lay a lot of cable, eventually, into Corregidor." Some kind of machinery behind Amy's eyes begins to hum. The message is clear enough. There will be work aplenty for Semper Marine, if they handle this first job well. "In this case, the entity that's doing the work is a joint venture including us, FiliTel, 24 Jam, and a big Nipponese electronics company, among others." "What does 24 Jam have to do with it? They're convenience stores." "They're the retail outlet the distribution system for Epiphyte's product." "And that is?" "Pinoy grams." Randy manages to suppress the urge to tell her that the name is trademarked. "Pinoy grams?" "Here's how it works. You are an Overseas Contract Worker. Before you leave home for Saudi or Singapore or Seattle or wherever, you buy or rent a little gizmo from us. It's about the size of a paperback book and encases a thimble sized video camera, a tiny screen, and a lot of memory chips. The components come from all over the place they are shipped to the free port at Subic and assembled in a Nipponese plant there. So they cost next to nothing. Anyway, you take this gizmo overseas with you. Whenever you feel like communicating with the folks at home, you turn it on, aim the camera at yourself and record a little video greeting card. It all goes onto the memory chips. It's highly compressed. Then you plug the gizmo into a phone line and let it work its magic." "What's the magic? It sends the video down the phone line?" "Right." "Haven't people being messing around with video phones for a long time?'' "The difference here is our software. We don't try to send the video in real time that's too expensive. We store the data at central servers, then take advantage of lulls, when traffic is low through the undersea cables, and shoot the data down those cables when time can be had cheap. Eventually the data winds up at Epiphyte's facility in Intramuros. From there we can use wireless technology to send the data to 24 Jam stores all over Metro Manila. The store just needs a little pie plate dish on the roof, and a decoder and a regular VCR down behind the counter. The Pinoy gram is recorded on a regular videotape. Then, when Mom comes in to buy eggs or Dad comes in to buy cigarettes, the storekeeper says, 'Hey, you got a Pinoy gram today,' and hands them the videotape. They can take it home and get the latest news from their child overseas. When they're done, they bring the videotape back to 24 Jam for reuse." About halfway through this, Amy understands the basic concept, looks out the window again and begins trying to work a fragment of breakfast out of her teeth with the tip of her tongue. She does it with her mouth tastefully closed, but it seems to occupy her thoughts more than the explanation of Pinoy grams. Randy is gripped by a crazy, unaccountable desire not to bore Amy. It's not that he is getting a crush on her, because he puts the odds at fifty fifty that she's a lesbian, and he knows better. She is so frank, so guileless, that he feels he could confide anything in her, as an equal. This is why he hates business. He wants to tell everyone everything. He wants to make friends with people. "So, let me guess," she says, "you are the guy doing the software." "Yeah," he admits, a little defensive, "but the software is the only interesting part of this whole project. All the rest is making license plates.'' That wakes her up a little. "Making license plates?" "It's an expression that my business partner and I use," Randy says. "With any job, there's some creative work that needs to be done new technology to be developed or whatever. Everything else ninety nine percent of it is making deals, raising capital, going to meetings, marketing and sales. We call that stuff making license plates." She nods, looking out the window. Randy is on the verge of telling her that Pinoy grams are nothing more than a way to create cash flow, so that they can move on to part two of the business plan. He is sure that this would elevate his stature beyond that of dull software boy. But Amy puffs sharply across the top of her coffee, like blowing out a candle, and says, "Okay. Thanks. I guess that was worth the three packs of cigarettes." Chapter 11 NIGHTMARE Bobby Shaftoe has become a connoisseur of nightmares. Like a fighter pilot ejecting from a burning plane, he has just been catapulted out of an old nightmare, and into a brand new, even better one. It is creepy and understated; no giant lizards here. It begins with heat on his face. When you take enough fuel to push a fifty thousand ton ship across the Pacific Ocean at twenty five knots, and put it all in one tank and the Nips fly over and torch it all in a few seconds, while you stand close enough to see the triumphant grins on the pilots' faces, then you can feel the heat on your face in this way. Bobby Shaftoe opens his eyes, expecting that, in so doing, he is raising the curtain on a corker of a nightmare, probably the final moments of Torpedo Bombers at Two O'Clock! (his all time favorite) or the surprise beginning of Strafed by Yellow Men XVII. But the sound track to this nightmare does not seem to be running. It is as quiet as an ambush. He is sitting up in a hospital bed surrounded by a firing squad of hot klieg lights that make it difficult to see anything else. Shaftoe blinks and focuses on an eddy of cigarette smoke hanging in the air, like spilled fuel oil in a tropical cove. It sure smells good. A young man is sitting near his bed. All that Shaftoe can see of this man is an asymmetrical halo where the lights glance from the petroleum glaze on his pompadour. And the red coal of his cigarette. As he looks more carefully he can make out the silhouette of a military uniform. Not a Marine uniform. Lieutenant's bars gleam on his shoulders, light shining through double doors. "Would you like another cigarette?" the lieutenant says. His voice is hoarse but weirdly gentle. Shaftoe looks down at his own hand and sees the terminal half inch of a Lucky Strike wedged between his fingers. 'Ask me a tough one," he manages to say. His own voice is deep and skirted, like a gramophone winding down. The butt is swapped for a new one. Shaftoe raises it to his lips. There are bandages on that arm, and underneath them, he can feel grievous wounds trying to inflict pain. But something is blocking the signals. Ah, the morphine. It can't be too bad of a nightmare if it comes with morphine, can it? "You ready?" the voice says. God damn it, that voice is familiar. "Sir, ask me a tough one, sir!" Shaftoe says. "You already said that." "Sir, if you ask a Marine if he wants another cigarette, or if he's ready, the answer is always the same, sir!" "That's the spirit," the voice says. "Roll film." A clicking noise starts up in the outer darkness beyond the klieg light firmament. "Rolling," says a voice. Something big descends towards Shaftoe. He flattens himself into the bed, because it looks exactly like the sinister eggs laid in midair by Nip dive bombers. But then it stops and just hovers there. "Sound," says another voice. Shaftoe looks harder and sees that it is not a bomb but a large bullet shaped microphone on the end of a boom. The lieutenant with the pompadour leans forward now, instinctively seeking the light, like a traveler on a cold winter's night. It is that guy from the movies. What's his name. Oh, yeah! Ronald Reagan has a stack of three by five cards in his lap. He skids up a new one: "What advice do you, as the youngest American fighting man ever to win both the Navy Cross and the Silver Star, have for any young Marines on their way to Guadalcanal?" Shaftoe doesn't have to think very long. The memories are still as fresh as last night's eleventh nightmare: ten plucky Nips in Suicide Charge! "Just kill the one with the sword first." "Ah," Reagan says, raising his waxed and penciled eyebrows, and cocking his pompadour in Shaftoe's direction. "Smarrrt – you target them because they're the officers, right?" "No, fuckhead!" Shaftoe yells. "You kill 'em because they've got fucking swords! You ever had anyone running at you waving a fucking sword ?" Reagan backs down. He's scared now, sweating off some of his makeup, even though a cool breeze is coming in off the bay and through the window. Reagan wants to turn tail and head back down to Hollywood and nail a starlet fast. But he's stuck here in Oakland, interviewing the war hero. He flips through his stack of cards, rejects about twenty in a row. Shaftoe's in no hurry, he's going to be flat on his back in this hospital bed for approximately the rest of his life. He incinerates half of that cigarette with one long breath, holds it, blows out a smoke ring. When they fought at night, the big guns on the warships made rings of incandescent gas. Not fat doughnuts but long skinny ones that twisted around like lariats. Shaftoe's body is saturated with morphine. His eyelids avalanche down over his eyes, blessing those orbs that are burning and swollen from the film lights and the smoke of the cigarettes. He and his platoon are racing an incoming tide, trying to get around a headland. They are Marine Raiders and they have been chasing a particular unit of Nips across Guadalcanal for two weeks, whittling them down. As long as they're in the neighborhood, they've been ordered to make their way to a certain point on the headland from which they ought to be able to lob mortar rounds against the incoming Tokyo Express. It is a somewhat harebrained and reckless tactic, but they don't call this Operation Shoestring for nothing; it is all wacky improvisation from the get go. They are behind schedule because this paltry handful of Nips has been really tenacious, setting ambushes behind every fallen log, taking potshots at them every time they come around one of these headlands. . . Something clammy hits him on the forehead: it is the makeup artist taking a swipe at him. Shaftoe finds himself back in the nightmare within which the lizard nightmare was nested. "Did I tell you about the lizard?" Shaftoe says. "Several times," his interrogator says. "This'll just take another minute." Ronald Reagan squeezes a fresh three by five card between thumb and forefinger, fastening onto something a little less emotional: "What did you and your buddies do in the evenings, when the day's fighting was done?" "Pile up dead Nips with a bulldozer," Shaftoe says, "and set fire to 'em. Then go down to the beach with a jar of hooch and watch our ships get torpedoed." Reagan grimaces. "Cut!" he says, quietly but commanding. The clicking noise of the film camera stops. "How'd I do?" Bobby Shaftoe says as they are squeegeeing the Maybelline off his face, and the men are packing up their equipment. The klieg lights have been turned off, clear northern California light streams in through the windows. The whole scene looks almost real, as if it weren't a nightmare at all. "You did great," Lieutenant Reagan says, without looking him in the eye. "A real morale booster." He lights a cigarette. "You can go back to sleep now." "Haw!" Shaftoe says. "I been asleep the whole time. Haven't I?" *** He feels a lot better once he gets out of the hospital. They give him a couple of weeks of leave, and he goes straight to the Oakland station and hops the next train for Chicago. Fellow passengers recognize him from his newspaper pictures, buy him drinks, pose with him for snap shots. He stares out the windows for hours, watching America go by, and sees that all of it is beautiful and clean. There might be wildness, there might be deep forest, there might even be grizzly bears and mountain lions, but it is cleanly sorted out, and the rules (don't mess with bear cubs, hang your food from a tree limb at night) are well known, and published in the Boy Scout Manual. In those Pacific islands there is too much that is alive, and all of it is in a continual process of eating and being eaten by something else, and once you set foot in the place, you're buying into the deal. Just sitting in that train for a couple of days, his feet in clean white cotton socks, not being eaten alive by anything, goes a long way towards clearing his head up. Only once, or possibly two or three times, does he really feel the need to lock himself in the can and squirt morphine into his arm. But when he closes his eyes, he finds himself on Guadalcanal, sloshing around that last headland, racing the incoming tide. The big waves are rolling in now, picking up the men and slamming them into rocks. Finally they turn the corner and see the cove: just a tiny notch in the coast of Guadalcanal. A hundred yards of tidal mudflats backed up by a cliff. They will have to get across those mudflats and establish a foothold on the lower part of the cliff if they aren't going to be washed out to sea by the tide. The Shaftoes are Tennessee mountain people miners, among other things. About the time Nimrod Shaftoe went to the Philippines, a couple of his brothers moved up to western Wisconsin to work in lead mines. One of them Bobby's grandpa became a foreman. Sometimes he would go to Oconomowoc to pay a visit to the owner of the mine, who had a summer house on one of the lakes. They would go out in a boat and fish for pike. Frequently the mine owner's neighbors owners of banks and breweries would come along. That is how the Shaftoes moved to Oconomowoc, and got out of mining, and became fishing and hunting guides. The family has been scrupulous about holding on to the ancestral twang, and to certain other traditions such as military service. One of his sisters and two of his brothers are still living there with Mom and Dad, and his two older brothers are in the Army. Bobby's not the first to have won a Silver Star, though he is the first to have won the Navy Cross. Bobby goes and talks to Oconomowoc's Boy Scout troop. He gets to be grand marshal of the town parade. Other than that, he hardly budges from the house for two weeks. Sometimes he goes out into the yard and plays catch with his kid brothers. He helps Dad fix up a rotten dock. Guys and gals from his high school keep coming round to visit, and Bobby soon learns the trick that his father and his uncles and granduncles all knew, which is that you never talk about the specifics of what happened over there. No one wants to hear about how you dug half of your buddy's molars out of your leg with the point of a bayonet. All of these kids seem like idiots and lightweights to him now. The only person he can stand to be around is his great grandfather Shaftoe, ninety four years of age and sharp as a tack, who was there at Petersburg when Burnside blew a huge hole in the Confederate lines with buried explosives and sent his men rushing into the crater where they got slaughtered. He never talks about it, of course, just as Bobby Shaftoe never talks about the lizard. Soon enough his time is up, and then he gets a grand sendoff at the Milwaukee train station, hugs Mom, hugs Sis, shakes hands with Dad and the brothers, hugs Mom again, and he's off. Bobby Shaftoe knows nothing of his future. All he knows is that he has been promoted to sergeant, detached from his former unit (no great adjustment, since he is the only surviving member of his platoon) and reassigned to some unheard of branch of the Corps in Washington, D.C. D.C.'s a busy place, but last time Bobby Shaftoe checked the newspapers, there wasn't any combat going on there, and so it's obvious he's not going to get a combat job. He's done his bit anyway, killed many more than his share of Nips, won his medals, suffered from his wounds. As he lacks administrative training, he expects that his new assignment will be to travel around the country being a war hero, raising morale and suckering young men into joining the Corps. He reports, as ordered, to Marine Barracks, Washington, D.C. It's the Corps's oldest post, a city block halfway between the Capitol and the Navy Yard, a green quadrangle where the Marine Band struts and the drill team drills. He half expects to see strategic reserves of spit and of polish stored in giant tanks nearby. Two Marines are in the office: a major, who is his new, nominal commanding officer, and a colonel, who looks and acts like he was born here. It is shocking beyond description that two such personages would be there to greet a mere sergeant. Must be the Navy Cross that got their attention. But these Marines have Navy Crosses of their own two or three apiece. The major introduces the colonel in a way that doesn't really explain a damn thing to Shaftoe. The colonel says next to nothing; he's there to observe. The major spends a while fingering some typewritten documents. "Says right here you are gung ho." "Sir, yes sir!" "What the hell does that mean?" "Sir, it is a Chinese word! There's a Communist there, name of Mao, and he's got an army. We tangled with 'em on more'n one occasion, sir. Gung ho is their battle cry, it means 'all together' or something like that, so after we got done kicking the crap out of them, sir, we stole it from them, sir!" "Are you saying you have gone Asiatic like those other China Marines, Shaftoe?" "Sir! On the contrary, sir, as I think my record demonstrates, sir!" "You really think that?" the major says incredulously. "We have an interesting report here on a film interview that you did with some soldier (1) named Lieutenant Reagan." "Sir! This Marine apologizes for his disgraceful behavior during that interview, sir! This Marine let down himself and his fellow Marines, sir!" "Aren't you going to give me an excuse? You were wounded. Shell shocked. Drugged. Suffering from malaria." "Sir! There is no excuse, sir!" The major and the colonel nod approvingly at each other. This "sir, yes sir" business, which would probably sound like horseshit to any civilian in his right mind, makes sense to Shaftoe and to the officers in a deep and important way. Like a lot of others, Shaftoe had trouble with military etiquette at first. He soaked up quite a bit of it growing up in a military family, but living the life was a different matter. Having now experienced all the phases of military existence except for the terminal ones (violent death, court martial, retirement), he has come to understand the culture for what it is: a system of etiquette within which it becomes possible for groups of men to live together for years, travel to the ends of the earth, and do all kinds of incredibly weird shit without killing each other or completely losing their minds in the process. The extreme formality with which he addresses these officers carries an important subtext: your problem, sir, is deciding what you want me to do, and my problem, sir, is doing it. My gung ho posture says that once you give the order I'm not going to bother you with any of the details and your half of the bargain is you had better stay on your side of the line, sir, and not bother me with any of the chickenshit politics that you have to deal with for a living. The implied responsibility placed upon the officer's shoulders by the subordinate's unhesitating willingness to follow orders is a withering burden to any officer with half a brain, and Shaftoe has more than once seen seasoned noncoms reduce green lieutenants to quivering blobs simply by standing before them and agreeing, cheerfully, to carry out their orders. "This Lieutenant Reagan complained that you kept trying to tell him a story about a lizard," the major says. "Sir! Yes, sir! A giant lizard, sir! An interesting story, sir!" Shaftoe says. "I don't care," the major says. "The question is, was it an appropriate story to tell in that circumstance?" "Sir! We were making our way around the coast of the island, trying to get between these Nips and a Tokyo Express landing site, sir!..." Shaftoe begins. "Shut up!" "Sir! Yes sir!" There is a sweaty silence that is finally broken by the colonel. "We had the shrinks go over your statement, Sergeant Shaftoe." ''Sir! Yes, sir?'' "They are of the opinion that the whole giant lizard thing is a classic case of projection." "Sir! Could you please tell me what the hell that is, sir!" The colonel flushes, turns his back, peers through blinds at sparse traffic out on Eye Street. "Well, what they are saying is that there really was no giant lizard. That you killed that Jap (2) in hand to hand combat. And that your memory of the giant lizard is basically your id coming out." ''Id, sir!'' "That there is this id thing inside your brain and that it took over and got you fired up to kill that Jap bare handed. Then your imagination dreamed up all this crap about the giant lizard afterwards, as a way of explaining it." "Sir! So you are saying that the lizard was just a metaphor, sir!" "Yes." "Sir! Then I would respectfully like to know how that Nip got chewed in half, sir!" The colonel screws up his face dismissively. "Well, by the time you were rescued by that coastwatcher, Sergeant, you had been in that cove for three days along with all of those dead bodies. And in that tropical heat with all those bugs and scavengers, there was no way to tell from looking at that Jap whether he had been chewed up by a giant lizard or run through a brush chipper, if you know what I mean." "Sir! Yes I do, sir!" The major goes back to the report. "This Reagan fellow says that you also repeatedly made disparaging comments about General MacArthur." "Sir, yes sir! He is a son of a bitch who hates the Corps, sir! He is trying to get us all killed, sir!" The major and the colonel look at each other. It is clear that they have, wordlessly, just arrived at some decision. "Since you insist on reenlisting, the typical thing would be to have you go around the country showing off your medals and recruiting young men into the Corps. But this lizard story kind of rules that out." "Sir! I do not understand, sir!" "The Recruitment Office has reviewed your file. They have seen Reagan's report. They are nervous that you are going to be in West Bumfuck, Arkansas, riding in the Memorial Day parade in your shiny dress uniform, and suddenly you are going to start spouting all kinds of nonsense about lizards and scare everyone shitless and put a kink in the war effort." "Sir! I respectfully " "Permission to speak denied," the major says. "I won't even get into your obsession with General MacArthur." "Sir! The general is a murdering " "Shut up!" "Sir! Yes sir!" "We have another job for you, Marine." "Sir! Yes sir!" "You're going to be part of something very special." "Sir! The Marine Raiders are already a very special part of a very special Corps, sir!" "That's not what I mean. I mean that this assignment is . . . unusual." The major looks over at the colonel. He is not sure how to proceed. The colonel puts his hand in his pocket, jingles coins, then reaches up and checks his shave. "It is not exactly a Marine Corps assignment," he finally says. "You will be part of a special international detachment. An American Marine Raider platoon and a British Special Air Services squadron, operating together under one command. A bunch of tough hombres who've shown they can handle any assignment, under any conditions. Is that a fair description of you, Marine?" ''Sir! Yes, sir!'' "It is a very unusual setup," the colonel muses, "not the kind of thing that military men would ever dream up. Do you know what I'm saying, Shaftoe?" "Sir, no sir! But I do detect a strong odor of politics in the room now, sir!" The colonel gets a little twinkle in his eye, and glances out the window towards the Capitol dome. "These politicians can be real picky about how they get things done. Everything has to be just so. They don't like excuses. Do you follow me, Shaftoe?" ''Sir! Yes, sir!'' "The Corps had to fight to get this. They were going to make it an Army thing. We pulled a few strings with some former Naval persons in high places. Now the assignment is ours. Some would say, it is ours to screw up. "Sir! The assignment will not be screwed up, sir!" "The reason that son of a bitch MacArthur is killing Marines like flies down in the South Pacific is because sometimes we don't play the political game that well. If you and your new unit do not perform brilliantly, that situation will only worsen." ''Sir! You can rely on this Marine, sir!'' "Your commanding officer will be Lieutenant Ethridge. An Annapolis man. Not much combat experience, but knows how to move in the right circles. He can run interference for you at the political level. The responsibility for getting things done on the ground will be entirely yours, Sergeant Shaftoe." ''Sir! Yes , sir!'' "You'll be working closely with British Special Air Service. Very good men. But I want you and your men to outshine them." "Sir! You can count on it, sir!" "Well, get ready to ship out, then," the major says. "You're on your way to North Africa, Sergeant Shaftoe." Chapter 12 LONDINIUM The massive British coinage clanks in his pocket like pewter dinner plates. Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse walks down a street wearing the uniform of a commander in the United States Navy. This must not be taken to imply that he is actually a commander, or indeed that he is even in the Navy, though he is. The United States part is, however, a safe bet, because every time he arrives at a curb, he either comes close to being run over by a shooting brake or he falters in his stride; diverts his train of thought onto a siding, much to the disturbance of its passengers and crew; and throws some large part of his mental calculation circuitry into the job of trying to reflect his surroundings through a large mirror. They drive on the left side of the street here. He knew about that before he came. He had seen pictures. And Alan had complained of it in Princeton, always nearly being run over as, lost in thought, he stepped off curbs looking the wrong way. The curbs are sharp and perpendicular, not like the American smoothly molded sigmoid cross section curves. The transition between the side walk and the street is a crisp vertical. If you put a green lightbulb on Waterhouse's head and watched him from the side during the blackout, his trajectory would look just like a square wave traced out on the face of a single beam oscilloscope: up, down, up, down. If he were doing this at home, the curbs would be evenly spaced, about twelve to the mile, because his home town is neatly laid out on a grid. Here in London, the street pattern is irregular and so the transitions in the square wave come at random seeming times, sometimes very close together, sometimes very far apart. A scientist watching the wave would probably despair of finding any pattern; it would look like a random circuit, driven by noise, triggered perhaps by the arrival of cosmic rays from deep space, or the decay of radioactive isotopes. But if he had depth and ingenuity, it would be a different matter. Depth could be obtained by putting a green light bulb on the head of every person in London and then recording their tracings for a few nights. The result would be a thick pile of graph paper tracings, each one as seemingly random as the others. The thicker the pile, the greater the depth. Ingenuity is a completely different matter. There is no systematic way to get it. One person could look at the pile of square wave tracings and see nothing but noise. Another might find a source of fascination there, an irrational feeling impossible to explain to anyone who did not share it. Some deep part of the mind, adept at noticing patterns (or the existence of a pattern) would stir awake and frantically signal the dull quotidian parts of the brain to keep looking at the pile of graph paper. The signal is dim and not always heeded, but it would instruct the recipient to stand there for days if necessary, shuffling through the pile of graphs like an autist, spreading them out over a large floor, stacking them in piles according to some inscrutable system, pencilling numbers, and letters from dead alphabets, into the corners, cross referencing them, finding patterns, cross checking them against others. One day this person would walk out of that room carrying a highly accurate street map of London, reconstructed from the information in all of those square wave plots. Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is one of those people. As a result, the authorities of his country, the United States of America, have made him swear a mickle oath of secrecy, and keep supplying him with new uniforms of various services and ranks, and now have sent him to London. He steps off a curb, glancing reflexively to the left. A jingling sounds in his right ear, bicycle brakes trumpet. It is merely a Royal Marine (Waterhouse is beginning to recognize the uniforms) off on some errand; but he has reinforcements behind him in the form of a bus/coach painted olive drab and stenciled all over with inscrutable code numbers. "Pardon me, sir!" the Royal Marine says brightly, and swerves around him, apparently reckoning that the coach can handle any mopping up work. Waterhouse leaps forward, directly into the path of a black taxi coming the other way. After making it across that particular street, though, he arrives at his Westminster destination without further life threatening incidents, unless you count being a few minutes' airplane ride from a tightly organized horde of murderous Germans with the best weapons in the world. He has found himself in a part of town that seems almost like certain lightless, hemmed in parts of Manhattan: narrow streets lined with buildings on the order of ten stories high. Occasional glimpses of ancient and mighty gothic piles at street ends clue him in to the fact that he is nigh unto Greatness. As in Manhattan, the people walk fast, each with some clear purpose in mind. The amended heels of the pedestrians' wartime shoes pop metallically. Each pedestrian has a fairly consistent stride length and clicks with nearly metronomic precision. A microphone in the sidewalk would provide an eavesdropper with a cacophony of clicks, seemingly random like the noise from a Geiger counter. But the right kind of person could abstract signal from noise and count the pedestrians, provide a male/female break down and a leg length histogram He has to stop this. He would like to concentrate on the matter at hand, but that is still a mystery. A massive, blocky modern sculpture sits over the door of the St. James's Park tube station, doing twenty four hour surveillance on the Broadway Buildings, which is actually just a single building. Like every other intelligence headquarters Waterhouse had seen, it is a great disappointment. It is, after all, just a building orange stone, ten or so stories, an unreasonably high mansard roof accounting for the top three, some smidgens of classical ornament above the windows, which like all windows in London are divided into eight tight triangles by strips of masking tape. Waterhouse finds that this look blends better with classical architecture than, say, gothic. He has some grounding in physics and finds it implausible that, when a few hundred pounds of trinitrotoluene are set off in the neighborhood and the resulting shock wave propagates through a large pane of glass the people on the other side of it will derive any benefit from an asterisk of paper tape. It is a superstitious gesture, like hexes on Pennsylvania Dutch farmhouses. The sight of it probably helps keep people's minds focused on the war. Which doesn't seem to be working for Waterhouse. He makes his way carefully across the street, thinking very hard about the direction of the traffic, on the assumption that someone inside will be watching him. He goes inside, holding the door for a fearsomely brisk young woman in a quasimilitary outfit who makes it clear that Waterhouse had better not expect to Get Anywhere just because he's holding the door for her and then for a tired looking septuagenarian gent with a white mustache. The lobby is well guarded and there is some business with Waterhouse's credentials and his orders. Then he makes the obligatory mistake of going to the wrong floor because they are numbered differently here. This would be a lot funnier if this were not a military intelligence headquarters in the thick of the greatest war in the history of the world. When he does get to the right floor, though, it is a bit posher than the wrong one was. Of course, the underlying structure of everything in England is posh. There is no in between with these people. You have to walk a mile to find a telephone booth, but when you find it, it is built as if the senseless dynamiting of pay phones had been a serious problem at some time in the past. And a British mailbox can presumably stop a German tank. None of them have cars, but when they do, they are three ton hand built beasts. The concept of stamping out a whole lot of cars is unthinkable there are certain procedures that have to be followed, Mt. Ford, such as the hand brazing of radiators, the traditional whittling of the tyres from solid blocks of cahoutchouc. Meetings are all the same. Waterhouse is always the Guest; he has never actually hosted a meeting. The Guest arrives at an unfamiliar building, sits in a waiting area declining offers of caffeinated beverages from a personable but chaste female, and is, in time, ushered to the Room, where the Main Guy and the Other Guys are awaiting him. There is a system of introductions which the Guest need not concern himself with because he is operating in a passive mode and need only respond to stimuli, shaking all hands that are offered, declining all further offers of caffeinated and (now) alcoholic beverages, sitting down when and where invited. In this case, the Main Guy and all but one of the Other Guys happen to be British, the selection of beverages is slightly different, the room, being British, is thrown together from blocks of stone like a Pharaoh's inner tomb, and the windows have the usual unconvincing strips of tape on them. The Predictable Humor Phase is much shorter than in America, the Chitchat Phase longer. Waterhouse has forgotten all of their names. He always immediately forgets the names. Even if he remembered them, he would not know their significance, as he does not actually have the organization chart of the Foreign Ministry (which runs Intelligence) and the Military laid out in front of him. They keep saying "woe to hice!" but just as he actually begins to feel sorry for this Hice fellow, whoever he is, he figures out that this is how they pronounce "Waterhouse." Other than that, the one remark that actually penetrates his brain is when one of the Other Guys says something about the Prime Minister that implies considerable familiarity. And he's not even the Main Guy. The Main Guy is much older and more distinguished. So it seems to Waterhouse (though he has completely stopped listening to what all of these people are saying to him) that a good half of the people in the room have recently had conversations with Winston Churchill. Then, suddenly, certain words come into the conversation. Water house was not paying attention, but he is pretty sure that within the last ten seconds, the word Ultra was uttered. He blinks and sits up straighter. The Main Guy looks bemused. The Other Guys look startled. "Was something said, a few minutes ago, about the availability of coffee?" Waterhouse says. "Miss Stanhope, coffee for Captain Woe To Hice," says the Main Guy into an electrical intercom. It is one of only half a dozen office intercoms in the British Empire. However, it is cast in a solid ingot from a hundred pounds of iron and fed by 420 volt cables as thick as Waterhouse's index finger. "And if you would be so good as to bring tea." So, now Waterhouse knows the name of the Main Guy's secretary. That's a start. From that, with a bit of research he might be able to recover the memory of the Main Guy's name. This seems to have thrown them back into the Chitchat Phase, and though American important guys would be fuming and frustrated, the Brits seem enormously relieved. Even more beverages are ordered from Miss Stanhope. "Have you seen Dr. Shehrrrn recently?" the Main Guy inquires of Waterhouse. He has a touch of concern in his voice. "Who?" Then Waterhouse realizes that the person in question is Commander Schoen, and that here in London the name is apt to be pronounced correctly, Shehrrn instead of Shane. "Commander Waterhouse?" the Main Guy says, several minutes later. On the fly, Waterhouse has been trying to invent a new cryptosystem based upon alternative systems of pronouncing words and hasn't said anything in quite a while. "Oh, yeah! Well, I stopped in briefly and paid my respects to Schoen before getting on the ship. Of course, when he's, uh, feeling under the weather, everyone's under strict orders not to talk cryptology with him." "Of course." "The problem is that when your whole relationship with the fellow is built around cryptology, you can't even really poke your head in the door without violating that order." "Yes, it is most awkward." "I guess he's doing okay." Waterhouse does not say this very convincingly and there is an appropriate silence around the table. "When he was in better spirits, he wrote glowingly of your work on the Cryptonomicon," says one of the Other Guys, who has not spoken very much until now. Waterhouse pegs him as some kind of unspecified mover and shaker in the world of machine cryptology. "He's a heck of a fella," Waterhouse says. The Main Guy uses this as an opening. "Because of your work with Dr. Schoen's Indigo machine, you are, by definition, on the Magic list. Now that this country and yours have agreed at least in principle to cooperate in the field of cryptanalysis, this automatically puts you on the Ultra list." "I understand, sir," Waterhouse says. "Ultra and Magic are more symmetr