to others run along similar
principles), finds Randy and Eb waiting in one of its many rooms, and hauls
about fifteen thousand dollars worth of portable computer gear out of the
bags. He sets them up on a table. Avi hits the start button on two laptops
and, as they crawl through the boot process, plugs them into the wall so
that the batteries won't drain. A power conduit, with grounded three prong
outlets spaced every eighteen inches, has been screwed down remorselessly
along every inch of every wall, spanning drywall; holes in the drywall;
primeval op art contact paper; fake wood grain paneling; faded Grateful Dead
posters; and even the odd doorway.
One of the laptops is connected to a tiny portable printer, which Avi
loads with a few sheets of paper. The other laptop starts up a few lines of
text running across the screen, then beeps and stops. Randy ambles over and
looks at it curiously. It is displaying a prompt:
FILO.
Which Randy knows is short for Finux Loader, a program that allows you
to choose which operating system you want to run.
"Finux," Avi mumbles, answering Randy's unspoken question.
Randy types "Finux" and hits the return key. "How many operating
systems you have on this thing?"
"Windows 95, for games and when I need to let some lamer borrow my
computer temporarily," Avi says. "Windows NT for office type stuff. BeOS for
hacking, and screwing around with media. Finux for industrial strength
typesetting."
"Which one do you want now?"
"BeOS. Going to display some JPEGs. I assume there's an overhead
projector in this place?"
Randy looks over at Eb, the only person in the room who actually lives
here. Eb seems bigger than he is, and maybe it's because of his detonating
hair: two feet long, blond with a faint reddish glow, thick and wavy and
tending to congeal into ropy strands. No ponytail holder can contain it, so
when he bothers to tie it back, he uses a piece of string. Eb is doodling on
one of those little computers that uses a stylus so that you can write on
the screen. In general, hackers don't use them, but Eb (or rather, one of
Eb's defunct corporations) wrote the software for this model and so he has a
lot of them lying around. He seems to be absorbed in whatever he's doing,
but after Randy has been looking in his direction for two seconds, he senses
it, and looks up. He has pale green eyes and wears a luxuriant red beard,
except when he's in one of his shaving phases, which usually coincide with
serious romantic involvements. Right now his beard is about half an inch
long, indicating a recent breakup, and implying a willingness to take new
risks.
"Overhead projector?" Randy says.
Eb closes his eyes, which is what he does during memory access, then
gets up and walks out of the room.
The tiny printer begins to eke paper. The first line of text, centered
at the top of the page, is: NONDISCLOSURE AGREEMENT. More lines follow.
Randy has seen them, or ones like them, so many times that his eyes glaze
over and he turns away. The only thing that ever changes is the name of the
company: in this case: EPIPHYTE(2) CORP.
"Nice goggles."
"If you think these are weird, you should see what I'm going to put on
when the sun goes down," Avi says. He rummages in a bag and pulls out a
contraption that looks like a pair of glasses without lenses, with a
dollhouse scale light fixture mounted above each eye. A wire runs down to a
battery pack with belt loops. He slides a tiny switch on the battery pack
and the lights come on: expensive looking blue white halogen.
Randy raises his eyebrows.
"It's all jet lag avoidance," Avi explains. "I'm adjusted to Asian
time. I'm going back there in two days. I don't want my body to get back on
Left Coast time while I'm here."
"So the hat and goggles "
"Simulate night. This thing simulates daylight. See, your body takes
its cues from the light, adjusts its clock accordingly. Speaking of which,
would you mind closing the blinds?"
The room has west facing windows, affording a view down the grassy
slope to Half Moon Bay. It is late afternoon and the sun is pouring through.
Randy savors the view for a moment, then drops the blinds.
Eb stalks back into the room with an overhead projector dangling from
one hand, looking for a moment like Beowulf brandishing a monster's severed
arm. He puts it on the table and aims it at the wall. There is no need for a
screen, because above the ubiquitous power strips, every wall in the house
is covered with whiteboards. Many of the whiteboards are, in turn, covered
with cryptical incantations, written in primary colors. Some of them are
enclosed in irregular borders and labeled DO NOT ERASE! or simply DNE or NO!
In front of where Eb has put the overhead projector, there is a grocery
list, a half erased fragment of a flowchart, a fax number in Russia, a
couple of dotted quads Internet addresses and a few words in German, which
were presumably written by Eb himself. Dr. Eberhard Föhr scans all of this,
finds that none of it is enclosed in a DNE border, and wipes it away with an
eraser.
Two more men come into the room, deeply involved in a conversation
about some exasperating company in Burlingame. One of them is dark and lean
and looks like a gunfighter; he even wears a black cowboy hat. The other is
tubby and blond and looks like he just got out of a Rotary Club meeting.
They have one detail in common: each is wearing a bright silver bracelet on
his wrist.
Randy takes the NDAs out of the printers and passes them out, two
copies each, each pair preprinted with a name: Randy Waterhouse, Eberhard
Föhr, John Cantrell (the guy in the black cowboy hat) and Tom Howard (the
fair haired Middle American). As John and Tom reach for the pages, the
silver bracelets intercept stray beams of light sneaking through the blinds.
Each is printed with a red caduceus and several lines of text.
"Those look new," Randy says. "Did they change the wording again?"
"Yeah!" John Cantrell says. "This is version 6.0 just out last week."
Anywhere else, the bracelets would mean that John and Tom were
suffering from some sort of life threatening condition, such as an allergy
to common antibiotics. A medic hauling them out of a wrecked car would see
the bracelet and follow the instructions. But this is Silicon Valley and
different rules apply. The bracelets say, on one side:
IN CASE OF DEATH SEE REVERSE FOR BIOSTASIS PROTOCOL FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS
COLLECT REWARD $100,000
and on the other:
CALL NOW FOR INSTRUCTIONS I 800 NNN NNNN
PUSH 50,000 U HEPARIN IV AND DO CPR WHILE COOLING WITH ICE TO 10C.KEEP
PH 7.5
NO AUTOPSY OR EMBALMING
It is a recipe for freezing a dead, or nearly dead, person. People who
wear this bracelet believe that, if this recipe is followed, the brain and
other delicate tissues can be iced without destroying them. A few decades
down the line, when nanotechnology has made it possible to be immortal, they
hope to be thawed out. John Cantrell and Tom Howard believe that there is a
reasonable chance that they will still be having conversations with each
other a million years from now.
The room gets quiet as all of the men scan the forms, their eyes
picking out certain familiar clauses. They have probably signed a hundred
NDA forms between them. Around here, it is like offering someone a cup of
coffee.
A woman comes into the room, burdened with tote bags, and beams an
apology for being late. Beryl Hagen looks like a Norman Rockwell aunt, an
apron wearing, apple pie toting type. In twenty years, she's been the chief
financial officer of twelve different small high tech companies. Ten of them
have gone out of business. Except in the case of the second one, this was
through no fault of Beryl's. The sixth was Randy's Second Business Foray.
One was absorbed by Microsoft, one became a successful, independent company
in its own right. Beryl made enough money from the latter two to retire. She
consults and writes while she looks for something interesting enough to draw
her back into action, and her presence in this room suggests that
Epiphyte(2) Corp. must not be completely bogus. Or maybe she's just being
polite to Avi. Randy gives her a bearhug, lifting her off the floor, and
then hands her two copies of the NDA with her name on them.
Avi has detached the screen from his big laptop and laid it flat on the
surface of the overhead projector, which shines light through the liquid
crystal display and projects a color image on the whiteboard. It is a
typical desktop: a couple of terminal windows and some icons. Avi goes
around and picks up the signed NDAs, scans them all, hands one copy back to
each person, files the rest in the outer pocket of a laptop bag. He begins
to type on the laptop's keyboard, and letters spill across one of the
windows. "Just so you know," Avi mumbles, "Epiphyte Corp., which I'll call
Epiphyte(1) for clarity, is a Delaware corporation, one and one half years
old. The shareholders are myself, Randy, and Springboard Capital. We're in
the telecoms business in the Philippines. I can give you details later if
you want. Our work there has positioned us to be aware of some new
opportunities in that part of the world. Epiphyte(2) is a California
corporation, three weeks old. If things go the way we are hoping they will
go, Epiphyte(1) will be folded into it according to some kind of stock
transfer scheme the details of which are too boring to talk about now.
Avi hits the return key. A new window opens on the desktop. It is a
color map scanned in from an atlas, tall and narrow. Most of it is oceanic
blue. A rugged coastline juts in through the top border, with a few cities
labeled: Nagasaki, Tokyo. Shanghai is in the upper left corner. The
Philippine archipelago is dead center. Taiwan is directly north of it, and
to the south is a chain of islands forming a porous barrier between Asia and
a big land mass labeled with English words like Darwin and Great Sandy
Desert.
"This probably looks weird to most of you," Avi says. "Usually these
presentations begin with a diagram of a computer network, or a flowchart or
something. We don't normally deal with maps. We're all so used to working in
a purely abstract realm that it seems almost bizarre to go out into the real
world and physically do something.
"But I like maps. I've got maps all over my house. I'm going to suggest
to you that the skills and knowledge we have all been developing in our work
especially pertaining to the Internet have applications out here." He taps
the whiteboard. "In the real world. You know, the big round wet ball where
billions of people live."
There is a bit of polite snickering as Avi skims his hand over his
computer's trackball, whacks a button with his thumb. A new image appears:
the same map, with bright color lines running across the ocean, looping from
one city to the next, roughly following the coastlines.
"Existing undersea cables. The fatter the line, the bigger the pipe,"
Avi says. "Now, what is wrong with this picture?"
There are several fat lines running east from places like Tokyo, Hong
Kong, and Australia, presumably connecting them with the United States.
Across the South China Sea, which lies between the Philippines and Vietnam,
another fat line angles roughly north south, but it doesn't connect either
of those two countries: it goes straight to Hong Kong, then continues up the
China coast to Shanghai, Korea, and Tokyo.
"Since the Philippines are in the center of the map," John Cantrell
says, "I predict that you are going to point out that hardly any fat lines
go to the Philippines."
"Hardly any fat lines go to the Philippines!" Avi announces briskly. He
points out the one exception, which runs from Taiwan south to northern
Luzon, then skips down the coast to Corregidor. "Except for this one, which
Epiphyte(l) is involved with. But it's not just that. There is a general
paucity of fat lines in a north south direction, connecting Australia with
Asia. A lot of data packets going from Sydney to Tokyo have to be routed
through California. There's a market opportunity."
Beryl breaks in. "Avi, before you get started on this," she says,
sounding cautious and regretful, "I have to say that laying long distance,
deep sea cables is a difficult business to break into."
"Beryl is right!" Avi says. "The only people who have the wherewithal
to lay those cables are AT&T, Cable & Wireless, and Kokusai Denshin
Denwa. It's tricky. It's expensive. It requires massive NRE."
The abbreviation stands for "non recoverable expenses," meaning
engineering work to complete a feasibility study that would be money down
the toilet if the idea didn't fly.
"So what are you thinking?" Beryl says.
Avi clicks up another map. This one is the same as the previous, except
that new lines have been drawn in: a whole series of short island to island
links. A bewilderingly numerous chain of short hops down the length of the
Philippine archipelago.
"You want to wire the Philippines and patch them into the Net via your
existing link to Taiwan," says Tom Howard, in a heroic bid to short circuit
what he senses will be a lengthy part of Avi's presentation.
"The Philippines are going to be hot shit informationally speaking,"
Avi says. "The government has its flaws, but basically it's a democracy
modeled after Western institutions. Unlike most Asians, they do ASCII. Most
of them speak English. Longstanding ties to the United States. These guys
are going to be big players, sooner or later, in the information economy."
Randy breaks in. "We've already established a foothold there. We know
the local business environment. And we have cash flow."
Avi clicks up another map. This one's harder to make out. It looks like
a relief map of a vast region of high mountains interrupted by occasional
plateaus. Its appearance in the middle of this presentation without any
labels or explanation from Avi makes it an implicit challenge to the mental
acumen of the other people in the room. None of them is going to ask for
help anytime soon. Randy watches them squint and tilt their heads from side
to side. Eberhard Föhr, who is good at odd puzzles, gets it first.
"Southeast Asia with the oceans drained," he says. "That high ridge on
the right is New Guinea. Those bumps are the volcanoes of Borneo."
"Pretty cool, huh?" Avi says. "It's a radar map. U.S. military
satellites gathered all this data. You can get it for next to nothing."
On this map the Philippines can be understood, not as a chain of
separate islands, but as the highest regions of a huge oblong plateau
surrounded by deep gashes in the earth's crust. To get from Luzon up to
Taiwan by going across the ocean floor you would have to plunge into a deep
trench, flanked by parallel mountain ranges, and follow it northwards for
about three hundred miles. But south of Luzon, in the region where Avi is
proposing to lay a network of inter island cables, it's all shallow and
flat.
Avi clicks again, superimposing transparent blue over the parts that
are below sea level, green on the islands. Then he zooms in on an area in
the center of the map, where the Philippine plateau extends two arms
southwest toward northern Borneo, embracing, and nearly enclosing, a diamond
shaped body of water, three hundred and fifty miles across. "The Sulu Sea,"
he announces. "No relation to the token Asian on Star Trek ."
No one laughs. They are not really here to be entertained they are
concentrating on the map. All of the different archipelagos and seas are
confusing, even for smart people with good spatial relations. The
Philippines form the upper right boundary of the Sulu Sea, north Borneo
(part of Malaysia) the lower left, the Sulu Archipelago (part of the
Philippines) the lower right, and the upper left boundary is one extremely
long skinny Philippine island called Palawan.
"This reminds us that national boundaries are artificial and silly,"
Avi says. "The Sulu Sea is a basin in the middle of a larger plateau shared
by the Philippines and Borneo. So if you're wiring up the Philippines, you
can just as easily wire Borneo up to that network at the same time, just by
outlining the Sulu Sea with shallow, short hop cables. Like this."
Avi clicks again and the computer draws in more colored lines.
"Avi, why are we here?" Eberhard asks.
"That is a very profound question," Avi says.
"We know the economics of these startups," Eb says. "We begin with
nothing but the idea. That's what the NDA is for to protect your idea. We
work on the idea together put our brainpower into it and get stock in
return. The result of this work is software. The software is copyrightable,
trademarkable, perhaps patentable. It is intellectual property. It is worth
some money. We all own it in common, through our shares. Then we sell some
more shares to an investor. We use the money to hire more people and turn it
into a product, to market it, and so on. That's how the system works, but
I'm beginning to think you don't understand it."
"Why do you say that?"
Eb looks confused. "How can we contribute to this? How can we turn our
brainpower into equity that an investor will want to own a part of?"
Everyone looks at Beryl. Beryl's nodding agreement with Eb. Tom Howard
says, "Avi. Look. I can engineer big computer installations. John wrote Ordo
he knows everything about crypto. Randy does Internet, Eb does weird stuff,
Beryl does money. But as far as I know, none of us knows diddly about
undersea cable engineering. What good will our resumes do you when you go up
in front of some venture capitalists?"
Avi's nodding. "Everything you say is true," he concedes smoothly.
"We would have to be crazy to get involved in running cables through
the Philippines. That is a job for FiliTel, with whom Epiphyte(1) has been
joint venturing."
"Even if we were crazy, Beryl says, "we wouldn't have the opportunity,
because no one would give us the money."
"Fortunately we don't need to worry about that," Avi says, "because
it's being done for us." He turns to the whiteboard, picks up a red magic
marker, and draws a fat line between Taiwan and Luzon, his hands picking up
a leprous, mottled look from the shaded relief of the ocean floor that is
being projected against his skin. "KDD, which is anticipating major growth
in the Philippines, is already laying another big cable here." He moves down
and begins to draw smaller, shorter links between islands in the
archipelago. "And FiliTel, which is funded by AVCLA Asia Venture Capital Los
Angeles is wiring the Philippines."
"What does Epiphyte(l) have to do with that?" Tom Howard asks.
"To the extent they want to use that network for Internet Protocol
traffic, they need routers and network savvy," Randy explains.
"So, to repeat my question: why are we here?" Eberhard says, patiently
but firmly.
Avi works with his pen for a while. He circles an island at one corner
of the Sulu Sea, centered in the gap between North Borneo and the long
skinny Philippine island called Palawan. He labels it in block letters:
SULTANATE OF KINAKUTA.
"Kinakuta was run by white sultans for a while. It's a long story. Then
it was a German colony," Avi says. "Back then, Borneo was part of the Dutch
East Indies, and Palawan like the rest of the Philippines was first Spanish
and then American. So this was the Germans' foothold in the area."
"Germans always ended up holding the shittiest colonies," Eb says
ruefully.
"After the First World War, they handed it over to the Japanese, along
with a lot of other islands much farther to the east. All of these islands,
collectively, were called the Mandates because Japan controlled them under a
League of Nations Mandate. During the Second World War the Japanese used
Kinakuta as a base for attacks on the Dutch East Indies and the Philippines.
They retained a naval base and airfield there. After the war, Kinakuta
became independent, as it had been before the Germans. The population is
Muslim or ethnic Chinese around the edges, animist in the center, and it's
always been ruled by a sultan even while occupied by the Germans and the
Japanese, who both co opted the sultans but kept them in place as
figureheads. Kinakuta had oil reserves, but they were unreachable until the
technology got better and prices went up, around the time of the Arab oil
embargo, which was also when the current sultan came into power. That sultan
is now a very rich man not as rich as the Sultan of Brunei, who happens to
be his second cousin, but rich."
"The sultan is backing your company?" Beryl asks.
"Not in the way you mean," Avi says.
"What way do you mean?" Tom Howard asks, impatient.
"Let me put it this way," Avi says. "Kinakuta is a member of the United
Nations. It is every bit as much an independent country and member of the
community of nations as France or England. As a matter of fact, it is
exceptionally independent because of its oil wealth. It is basically a
monarchy the sultan makes the laws, but only after extensive consultation
with his ministers, who set policy and draft legislation. And I've been
spending a lot of time, recently, with the Minister of Posts and
Telecommunications. I have been helping the minister draft a new law that
will govern all telecommunications passing through Kinakutan territory."
"Oh, my god!" John Cantrell says. He is awestruck.
"One free share of stock to the man in the black hat!" Avi says. "John
has figured out Avi's secret plan. John, would you like to explain to the
other contestants?"
John takes his hat off and runs his hand back through his long hair. He
puts his hat back on and heaves a sigh. "Avi is proposing to start a data
haven," he says.
A little murmur of admiration runs through the room. Avi waits for it
to subside and says, "Slight correction: the sultan's starting the data
haven. I'm proposing to make money off it."
Chapter 19 ULTRA
Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse goes into battle armed with one third of
a sheet of British typing paper on which has been typed some words that
identify it as a pass to Bletchley Park. His name and some other things have
been scribbled on it in some upper class officer's Mont Blanc blue black,
the words ALL SECTIONS circled, and a stamp smashed across it, blurred into
a red whore's kiss, with sheer carelessness conveying greater Authority and
Power than the specious clarity of a forger.
He finds his way round the mansion to the narrow lane that runs between
it and its row of red brick garages (or stables, as his grandparents would
be likely to peg them). He finds it a very pleasant place for a cigarette.
The lane is lined with trees, a densely planted hedge of them. The sun is
just setting now. It is still high enough to snipe through any small defects
that it finds in the defensive perimeter of the horizon, so narrow red beams
strike him surprisingly in the eye as he ambles back and forth. He knows one
is shining invisibly through the clear air several feet above him, because
it is betraying an aerial: a strand of copper wire stretched from the wall
of the mansion to a nearby cypress. It catches the light in precisely the
same way as the strand of the spiderweb that Waterhouse was playing with
earlier.
The sun will be down soon; it is already down in Berlin, as in most of
the hellish empire that Hitler has built from Calais to the Volga. Time for
the radio operators to begin their work. Radio does not, in general, go
around corners. This can be a real pain when you are conquering the world,
which is inconveniently round, placing all of your most active military
units over the horizon. But if you use shortwave, then you can bounce the
information off the ionosphere. This works a good deal better when the sun
is not in the sky, sluicing the atmosphere with wideband noise. So radio
telegraphers, and the people who eavesdrop on them (what the Brits call the
Y Service) are, alike, nocturnal beings.
As Waterhouse has just observed, the mansion has an aerial or two. But
Bletchley Park is a huge and ravenous spider that requires a web the size of
a nation to feed it. He has seen enough evidence, from the black cables
climbing the mansion's walls and the smell and hiss of the massed teletypes,
to know that the web is at least partly made of copper wires. Another piece
of the web is made of rude stuff like concrete and asphalt.
The gate swings open and a man on a green motorcycle banks steeply into
the lane, the two cylinders of his machine blatting away, the noise stinging
Waterhouse's nose as he rides by. Waterhouse strides after him for some
distance, but loses his trail after a hundred yards or so. That is
acceptable; more of them will be along soon, as the Wehrmacht's nervous
system awakens and its signals are picked up by the Y Service.
The motorcyclist went through a quaint little gate that joins two old
buildings. The gate is topped by a tiny cupola with a weathervane and a
clock. Waterhouse goes through it and finds himself in a little square that
evidently dates back to when Bletchley Park was a precious Buckinghamshire
farmstead. To the left, the line of stables continues. Small gables have
been set into the roof, which is stained with bird shit. The building is
quivering with pigeons. Directly in front of him is a nice little red brick
Tudor farmhouse, the only thing he has seen so far that is not
architecturally offensive. Off to his right is a one story building. Strange
information is coming out of this building: the hot oil smell of teletypes,
but no typing noises, just a high mechanical whine.
A door opens on the stable building and a man emerges carrying a large
but evidently lightweight box with a handle on the top. Cooing noises come
from the box and Waterhouse realizes that it contains pigeons. Those birds
living up in the gables are not feral; they are homing pigeons. Carriers of
information, strands of Bletchley Park's web.
He homes in on the building that smells of hot oil and gazes into a
window. As evening falls, light has begun to leak out of it, betraying
information to black German reconnaissance planes, so a porter is strutting
about the courtyard slamming the black shutters closed.
Some information comes into Waterhouse's eyes at least: on the other
side of that window, men are gathered around a machine. Most of them are
wearing civilian clothes, and they have been too busy, for too long, to
trifle much with combs and razors and shoe polish. The men are intensely
focused upon their work, which all has to do with this large machine. The
machine consists of a large framework of square steel tubing, like a
bedstead set up on one end. Metal drums with the diameter of dinner plates,
an inch or so thick, are mounted at several locations on this framework.
Paper tape has been threaded in a bewilderingly loopy trajectory from drum
to drum. It looks as if a dozen yards of tape are required to thread the
machine.
One of the men has been working on a rubber drive belt that goes around
one of the drums. He steps back from it and makes a gesture with his hand.
Another man flips a switch and the drums all begin to spin at once. The tape
begins to fly through the system. Holes punched in the tape carry data; it
all blurs into a grey streak now, the speed creating an illusion in which
the tape appears to dissolve into a ribbon of smoke.
No, it is not an illusion. Real smoke is curling up from the spinning
drums. The tape is running through the machine so fast that it is catching
fire before the eyes of Waterhouse and the men inside, who watch it calmly,
as if it were smoking in an entirely new and interesting way.
If there is a machine in the world capable of reading data from a tape
that fast, Waterhouse has never heard of it.
The black shutter slams home. Just as it does, Waterhouse gets one
fragmentary glimpse of another object standing in the corner of the room: a
steel rack in which a large number of grey cylindrical objects are stored in
neat rows.
Two motorcyclists come through the courtyard at once, running in the
darkness with their headlights off. Waterhouse jogs after them for a bit,
leaving the picturesque old courtyard behind and entering into the world of
the huts, the new structures thrown up in the last year or two. "Hut" makes
him think of a tiny thing, but these huts, taken together, are more like
that new Pentagon thing that the War Department has been putting up across
the river from D.C. They embody a blunt need for space unfiltered through
any aesthetic or even human considerations.
Waterhouse walks to an intersection of roads where he thought he heard
the motorcycles making a turn, and stops, hemmed in by blast walls. On an
impulse, he clambers to the top of a wall and takes a seat. The view from
here is no better. He knows that thousands of people are at work all around
him in these huts, but he sees none of them, there are no signposts.
He is still trying to work out that business that he saw through the
window.
The tape was running so fast that it smoked. There is no point of
driving it that fast unless the machine can read the information that fast
transforming the pattern of holes in the tape into electrical impulses.
But why bother, if those impulses had nowhere to go? No human mind
could deal with a stream of characters coming in at that speed. No teletype
that Waterhouse knew of could even print them out.
It only makes sense if they are constructing a machine. A mechanical
calculator of some sort that can absorb the data and then do something with
it perform some calculation presumably a cipher breaking type of
calculation.
Then he remembers the rack he glimpsed in the corner, its many rows of
identical grey cylinders. Viewed end on, they looked like some kind of
ammunition. But they are too smooth and glossy for that. Those cylinders,
Waterhouse realizes, are made of blown glass.
They are vacuum tubes. Hundreds of them. More tubes in one place than
Waterhouse has ever seen.
Those men in that room are building a Turing machine!
***
It is no wonder, then, that the men in the room accept the burning of
the tape so calmly. That strip of paper, a technology as old as the
pyramids, is merely a vessel for a stream of information. When it passes
through the machine, the information is abstracted from it, transfigured
into a pattern of pure binary data. That the mere vessel burns is of no
consequence. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust the data has passed out of the
physical plane and into the mathematical, a higher and purer universe where
different laws apply. Laws, a few of which are dimly and imperfectly known
to Dr. Alan Mathison Turing and Dr. John von Neumann and Dr. Rudolf von
Hacklheber and a few other people Waterhouse used to hang around with in
Princeton. Laws about which Waterhouse himself knows a thing or two.
Once you have transfigured the data into the realm of pure information,
all that is required is a tool. Carpenters work with wood and carry a box of
technology for measuring it, cutting it, smoothing it, joining it.
Mathematicians work with information and need a tool of their own.
They have been building these tools, one at a time, for years. There
is, just to name one example, a cash register and typewriter company called
the Electrical Till Corporation that makes a dandy punched card machine for
tabulating large quantities of data. Waterhouse's professor in Iowa was
tired of solving differential equations one at a time and invented a machine
to solve them automatically by storing the information on a capacitor
covered drum and cranking through a certain algorithm. Given enough time and
enough vacuum tubes, a tool might be invented to sum a column of numbers,
and another one to keep track of inventories, and another one to alphabetize
lists of words. A well equipped business would have one of each: gleaming
cast iron monsters with heat waves rising out of their grilles, emblazoned
with logos like ETC and Siemens and Hollerith, each carrying out its own
specialized task. Just as a carpenter had a miter box and a dovetail jig and
a clawhammer in his box.
Turing figured out something entirely different, something unspeakably
strange and radical.
He figured out that mathematicians, unlike carpenters, only needed to
have one tool in their toolbox, if it were the right sort of tool. Turing
realized that it should be possible to build a meta machine that could be
reconfigured in such a way that it would do any task you could conceivably
do with information. It would be a protean device that could turn into any
tool you could ever need. Like a pipe organ changing into a different
instrument every time you hit a preset button.
The details were a bit hazy. This was not a blueprint for an actual
machine, rather a thought experiment that Turing had dreamed up in order to
resolve an abstract riddle from the completely impractical world of pure
logic. Waterhouse knows this perfectly well. But he cannot get one thing out
of his mind as he sits there atop the blast walls at the dark intersection
in Bletchley Park: the Turing machine, if one really existed, would rely
upon having a tape. The tape would pass through the machine. It would carry
the information that the machine needed to do its work.
Waterhouse sits there staring off into the darkness and reconstructs
Turing's machine in his mind. More of the details are coming back to him.
The tape, he now recollects, would not move through the Turing machine in
one direction; it would change direction frequently. And the Turing machine
would not just read the tape; it would be able to erase marks or make new
ones.
Clearly you cannot erase holes in a paper tape. And just as clearly the
tape only moves through this Bletchley Park machine in one direction. So,
much as Waterhouse hates to admit this fact to himself, the rack of tubes he
just spied is not a Turing machine. It is some lesser device a special
purpose tool like a punched card reader or Atanasoffs differential equation
solver.
It is still bigger and more fiendishly terrific than anything
Waterhouse has ever seen.
A night train from Birmingham blows through, carrying bullets to the
sea. As its sound dies away to the south, a motorcycle approaches the park's
main gate. Its engine idles as the rider's papers are checked, then
Waterhouse hears a Bronx cheer as it surges forward and cuts the sharp turn
into the lane. Waterhouse climbs to his feet at the intersection of the
walls, and watches carefully as the bike sputters past him and homes in on a
"hut" a couple of blocks away. Light suddenly leaks from an open door as the
cargo changes hands. Then the light is snuffed and the bike stretches a long
loud raspberry down the road to the park's exit.
Waterhouse lets himself down to earth and gropes his way down the road
through the moonless night. He stops before the entrance to the hut and
listens to it teem for a minute. Then, working up his courage, he steps
forward and pushes the wooden door open.
It is unpleasantly hot in here, and the atmosphere is a nauseating
distillation of human and machine odors, held in and concentrated by the
coffin doors slabbed down over all the windows. Many people are in here,
mostly women working at gargantuan electrically powered typewriters. He can
see even through his squint that the place is a running sluice for scraps of
paper, maybe four by six inches each, evidently brought in by the
motorcyclists. Near the door, they have been sorted and stacked up in wire
baskets. Thence they go to the women at their giant typewriters.
One of the few men in the place has risen to his feet and is homing in
on Waterhouse. He is about Waterhouse's age, that is, in his early twenties.
He is wearing a British Army uniform. He has the air of a host at a wedding
reception who wants to make sure that even the most long lost, far flung
members of the family are properly greeted. Obviously he is no more a real
military man than is Waterhouse himself. No wonder this place is surrounded
by so much barbed wire and RAF men with machine guns.
"Good evening, sir. Can I help you?"
"Evening. Lawrence Waterhouse."
"Harry Packard. Pleased to meet you." But he has no idea who Waterhouse
is; he is privy to Ultra, but not to Ultra Mega.
"Pleasure's mine. I imagine you'll want to have a look at this."
Waterhouse hands him the magic pass. Packard's pale eyes travel over it
carefully, then jump around to focus on a few sites of particular interest:
the signature at the bottom, the smeared stamp. The war has turned Harry
Packard into a machine for scanning and processing slips of paper and he
goes about his work calmly and without fuss in this case. He excuses
himself, works the crank on a telephone, and speaks to someone; his posture
and facial expression suggest it is someone important. Waterhouse cannot
hear the words above the clicking and thrumming of the massed typewriters,
but he sees interest and bemusement on Packard's young, open, pink face.
Packard gives Waterhouse a sidelong glance or two while he is listening to
the person at the other end of the line. Then he says something respectful
and reassuring into the phone and rings off.
"Right. Well, what would you like to see?"
"I'm trying to get an overall sense of how the information flows."
"Well, we are close to the beginning of it here these are the
headwaters. Our wellsprings are the Y Service military and amateur radio
operators who listen in on Jerry's radio transmissions, and provide us with
these." Packard takes a slip from a motorcyclist's pannier and hands it to
Waterhouse.
It is a form with various boxes at the top in which someone has written
in a date (today's) and time (a couple of hours ago) and a few other data
such as a radio frequency. The body of the form is mostly occupied by a
large open space in which the following has been printed in hasty block
letters:
A Y W B P R O J H K D H A O B Q T M D L T U S H I
Y P I J S L L E N J O P S K Y V Z P D L E M A O U
T A MO G T M O A H E C
the whole thing preceded by two groups of three letters each:
Y U H A B G
"This one came in from one of our stations in Kent," Packard says. "It
is a Chaffinch message."
"So one of Rommel's?"
"Yes. This intercept came in from Cairo. Chaffinch gets top priority,
which is why this message is on the top of the pile."
Packard leads Waterhouse down the central aisle of the hut, between the
rows of typists. He picks out one girl who is just finishing up with a
message, and hands her the slip. She sets it up next to her machine and
commences typing it in.
At first glance, Waterhouse had thought that the machines represented
some British concept of how to build an electric typewriter as big as a
dinner table, wrapped up in two hundred pounds of cast iron, a ten horse
motor turning over under the hood, surrounded by tall fences and armed
guards. But now that he is closer he sees that it is something much more
complicated. Instead of a platen, it has a large flat reel on it carrying a
roll of narrow paper tape. Th