Goto Dengo gathers his forces for some period of time that is difficult
to measure. He may have fallen asleep sitting up. The Okinawan boy is still
lying on the sand, raving. Goto Dengo gets his feet underneath himself and
staggers off in search of fresh water.
This is not a proper beach, merely a sandbar maybe ten meters long and
three wide, with some tall grassy stuff sprouting out of the top. On the
other side of it is a brackish lagoon that meanders between banks, not of
earth, but of living things all tangled together. That tangle is obviously
too thick to penetrate. So, notwithstanding what just happened to the Tokyo
boy, Goto Dengo wades into the lagoon, hoping that it will lead inland to a
freshwater stream.
He wanders for what seems like an hour, but the lagoon takes him back
to the edge of the sea again. He gives up and drinks the water he's wading
in, hoping it will be a little less salty. This leads to a great deal of
vomiting but makes him feel slightly better somehow. Again he wades into the
swamp, trying to keep the sound of the surf behind him, and after an hour or
so he finds a rivulet of water that is actually fresh. When he has finished
drinking from that, he feels strong enough to go back and carry the Okinawan
boy here, if need be.
He gets back to the beach in midafternoon and finds that the Okinawan
is gone. But the sand is all churned up by footprints. The sand is dry and
so the footprints are too indistinct to read. They must have made contact
with a patrol! Surely their comrades must have heard about the attack on the
convoy and are combing beaches for survivors. There must be a bivouac in the
jungle not far away!
Goto Dengo follows the trail into the jungle. After he's proceeded a
mile or so, the track crosses a small, open mud flat where he gets a good
look at the footprints, all made by bare feet with enormous, bizarrely
splayed toes. Footprints of people who have never worn shoes in their lives.
He proceeds more cautiously for another few hundred meters. He can hear
voices now. The Army taught him all about jungle infiltration tactics, how
to creep through the enemy's lines in the middle of the night without making
a sound. Of course, when they practiced it in Nippon they weren't being
eaten alive by ants and mosquitoes the whole time. But it hardly matters to
him now. An hour of patient work gets him to a vantage point from which he
can see into a flat clearing with a stagnant creek wandering through it.
Several long dark houses are built on tree trunk stilts to keep them up out
of the ooze, and roofed with bushy heaps of palm fronds.
Before he finds the Okinawan, Goto Dengo needs to get some food. In the
middle of the clearing, white porridge is steaming in a pot over an open
fire, but it's being tended by several tough looking women, naked except for
short fringes of fibrous stuff tied round their waists and just barely
concealing their genitals.
Smoke is rising from some of the long buildings too. But to get inside
one of them, he would have to clamber up its heavy, slanting ladder and then
worm through what looks like a rather small doorway. A child, standing
inside one of those doorways with a stick, could prevent an intruder from
coming in. Hanging outside some of the doorways are sacks, improvised from
lengths of fabric (so at least they have textiles!) and filled with big
round lumps: coconuts, possibly or some kind of preserved food set up to
keep it away from the ants.
Perhaps seventy people are gathered around something of interest in the
middle of the clearing. As they move around, Goto Dengo gets occasional
momentary glimpses of someone, possibly Nipponese, who is sitting at the
base of a palm tree with his hands behind his back. There's a lot of blood
on his face and he's not moving. Most of these people are men, and they tend
to carry spears. They have those fringes of hairy stuff (sometimes dyed red
or green) concealing their private parts, and some of the bigger and older
ones have decorated themselves by tying strips of fabric around their arms.
Some have painted designs on their skin in pale mud. They have shoved
various objects, some of them quite large, sideways through their nasal
septums.
The bloodied man seems to have captured everyone's attention, and Goto
Dengo reckons that this will be his only chance to steal some food. He picks
the longhouse farthest away from where the villagers have gathered, clambers
up its ladder, and reaches for the bulging sack that hangs by the entrance.
But the fabric is very old and it has rotted from the damp of the swamp, and
maybe from the attacks of the hundreds of flies that buzz around it, and so
when he grasps it his fingers go right through. A long swath of it tears
away and the contents tumble out around Goto Dengo's feet. They are dark and
sort of hairy, like coconuts, but their shape is more complicated, and he
knows intuitively that some thing is wrong even before he recognizes them as
human skulls. Maybe half a dozen of them. Scalp and skin still stuck on.
Some of them are dark skinned with bushy hair, like the natives, and others
look distinctly Nipponese.
Sometime later, he is able to think coherently again. He realizes that
he does not know how long he might have spent up here, in full view of the
villagers, gazing on the skulls. He turns around to look, but all attention
is still focused on the wounded man seated at the base of the tree.
From this vantage point Goto Dengo is able to see that it is indeed the
Okinawan, and that his arms have been tied together behind the tree trunk. A
boy of maybe twelve is standing over him, holding a spear. He steps forward
cautiously and suddenly pokes it into the midsection of the Okinawan, who
comes awake and thrashes from side to side. The boy's obviously startled by
this, and jumps back. Then an older man, his head decorated with a fringe of
cowrie shells, takes a stance behind and beside the boy, showing him how to
hold the spear, guiding him forward again. He adds his own strength to the
youngster's and they shove the spear straight into the Okinawan's heart.
Goto Dengo falls off the house.
The men become very excited and pick the boy up on their shoulders and
parade him around the clearing hollering and leaping and twirling, jabbing
their spears defiantly into the air. They are pursued by all but the very
youngest children. Goto Dengo, bruised but not damaged by the fall onto the
mucky ground, belly crawls into the jungle and looks for a place of
concealment. The women of the village carry pots and knives towards the
Okinawan's body and begin to cut it up with the conspicuous skill of a sushi
chef dismantling a tuna.
One of them is concentrating entirely on his head. Suddenly she jumps
into the air and begins to dance around the clearing, waving something
bright and glittery. "Ulab! Ulab! Ulab!" she cries ecstatically. Some women
and children begin following her around, trying to get a look at whatever it
is she's holding. Finally she stops and centers her hand in a rare shaft of
sunlight coming down through the trees. Resting in the palm of her hand is a
gold tooth.
"Ulab!" say the women and children. One of the kids tries to snatch it
out of her hand and she knocks him flat on his ass. Then one of the big
spear carrying men runs up and she hands the booty over to him.
Several of the men now gather round to marvel at the find.
The women go back to working over the Okinawan boy, and soon his body
parts are stewing in pots over an open fire.
Chapter 43 SHINOLA
Men who believe that they are accomplishing something by speaking speak
in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a waste of time.
Bobby Shaftoe has learned most of his practical knowledge how to fix a car,
butcher a deer, throw a spiral, talk to a lady, kill a Nip from the latter
type of man. For them, trying to do anything by talking is like trying to
pound in a nail with a screwdriver. Sometimes you can even see the
desperation spread over such a man's face as he listens to himself speak.
Men of the other type the ones who use speech as a tool of their work,
who are confident and fluent aren't necessarily more intelligent, or even
more educated. It took Shaftoe a long time to figure that out.
Anyway, everything was neat and tidy in Bobby Shaftoe's mind until he
met two of the men in Detachment 2702: Enoch Root and Lawrence Pritchard
Waterhouse. He can't put his finger on what bugs him about those two. During
the weeks they spent together on Qwghlm, he spent a lot of time listening to
them yammer at each other, and began to suspect that there might be a third
category of man, a kind so rare that Shaftoe never met any of them until
now.
Officers are discouraged from fraternizing with enlisted men and non
coms, which has made it more difficult for Shaftoe to pursue his research
into the matter. Sometimes, though, circumstances jumble all of the ranks
together willy nilly. A prime example would be this Trinidadian tramp
steamer.
Where do they get this stuff? wonders Shaftoe. Does the U.S. government
keep a bunch of Trinidadian tramp steamers riding at anchor at a naval yard
somewhere, just in case one is needed?
He thinks not. This one shows signs of a very recent and hasty change
of ownership. It is a mother lode of yellowed, ragged, multiethnic
pornography, some of it very run of the mill and some so exotic that he
mistook it for medical literature at first. There is a lot of stray
paperwork on the bridge and in certain cabins, most of which Shaftoe only
sees out of the corner of his eye as these areas tend to be the domain of
officers. The heads are still littered with their predecessors' curly black
pubic hairs, and the storage lockers are sparsely stocked with exotic
Caribbean foodstuffs, much of them rapidly going bad. The cargo hold is
filled with bales and bales of coarse brown fibrous material raw material
for life preservers or bran muffins, he supposes.
None of them much cares, because Detachment 2702 has been freezing its
ass off in the Far North ever since they left Italy a few months ago, and
now they are running around shirtless, of all things. One little airplane
ride, that's all it took, and they were in the balmy Azores. They did not
get any R and R there they went straight from the airfield to the
Trinidadian ship, in the dead of night, huddled under tarps in a covered
truck. But even the warm air that streamed in underneath the tarp felt like
an exotic massage in a tropical whorehouse. And once they steamed out of
sight of port, they were allowed to come up abovedecks and take in some sun.
This gives Bobby Shaftoe the opportunity to strike up a few
conversations with Enoch Root, partly just for the hell of it and partly so
that he can try to figure out this whole business about the third category
of men. Progress comes slowly.
"I don't like the word 'addict' because it has terrible connotations,"
Root says one day, as they are sunning themselves on the afterdeck. "Instead
of slapping a label on you, the Germans would describe you as
'Morphiumsüchtig.' The verb suchen means to seek. So that might be
translated, loosely, as 'morphine seeky' or even more loosely as 'morphine
seeking.' I prefer 'seeky' because it means that you have an inclination to
seek morphine."
"What the fuck are you talking about?" Shaftoe says.
"Well, suppose you have a roof with a hole in it. That means it is a
leaky roof. It's leaky all the time even if it's not raining at the moment.
But it's only leaking when it happens to be raining. In the same way,
morphine seeky means that you always have this tendency to look for
morphine, even if you are not looking for it at the moment. But I prefer
both of them to 'addict,' because they are adjectives modifying Bobby
Shaftoe instead of a noun that obliterates Bobby Shaftoe."
"So what's the point?" Shaftoe asks. He asks this because he is
expecting Root to give him an order, which is usually what men of the
talkative sort end up doing after jabbering on for a while. But no order
seems to be forthcoming, because that's not Root's agenda. Root just felt
like talking about words. The SAS blokes refer to this kind of activity as
wanking.
Shaftoe has had little direct contact with that Waterhouse fellow
during their stay on Qwghlm, but he has noticed that men who have just
finished talking to Waterhouse tend to walk away shaking their heads and not
in the slow way of a man saying "no," but in the sudden convulsive way of a
dog who has a horsefly in his middle ear. Waterhouse never gives direct
orders, so men of the first category don't know what to make of him. But
apparently men of the second category fare no better; such men usually talk
like they have an agenda in their heads and they are checking off boxes as
they go, but Waterhouse's conversation doesn't go anywhere in particular. He
speaks, not as a way of telling you a bunch of stuff he's already figured
out, but as a way of making up a bunch of new shit as he goes along. And he
always seems to be hoping that you'll join in. Which no one ever does,
except for Enoch Root.
After they've been out to sea for a day, the captain (Commander Eden
the same poor son of a bitch who got the job of ramming his previous command
into Norway) staggers out of his cabin, making use of every railing or other
handhold that comes within flailing distance. He announces in a slurred
voice that from here on out, according to orders from On High, anyone going
abovedecks must wear black turtle necks, black gloves, and black ski masks
underneath their other clothes. These articles are duly issued to the men.
Shaftoe gets the skipper really pissed off by asking him three times whether
he's sure he has the order worded correctly. One of the reasons Shaftoe is
so highly regarded by the enlisted men is that he knows how to ask these
kinds of questions without technically violating the rules of military
etiquette. The skipper, to his credit, doesn't just pull rank and yell at
him. He takes Shaftoe back to his cabin and shows him a khaki covered Army
manual, printed in black block letters:
TACTICAL NEGRO IMPERSONATION
VOLUME III: NEGROES OF THE CARIBBEAN
It is a pretty interesting order, even by Detachment 2702 standards.
Commander Eden's drunkenness is also kind of disturbing not the fact that he
is drunk, but the particular type of drunk the sort of drunk of say, a Civil
War soldier who knows that the surgeon is about to remove his femur with a
bucksaw.
After Shaftoe has finished getting the turtlenecks, gloves, and ski
masks passed out to the men, and told them to simmer down and do the
lifeboat drills again, Shaftoe finds Root in what passes for the sickbay.
Because he figures it is time to have one of those open ended conversations
in which you try to figure out a bunch of shit, Root is his man.
"I know you're expecting me to ask for morphine, but I'm not gonna,"
Shaftoe says. "I just want to talk."
"Oh," Root says. "Should I put on my chaplain hat, then?"
"I'm a fucking Protestant. I can talk to God myself whenever I god damn
well feel like it."
Root is startled and bewildered by Shaftoe's burst of hostility. "Well,
what do you want to talk about, Sergeant?"
"This mission."
"Oh. I don't know anything about the mission."
"Well, let's try to figure it out, then," Shaftoe says.
"I thought you were just supposed to follow orders," Root says.
"I'll follow 'em, all right."
"I know you will."
"But in the meantime I got a lot of time to kill, so I might as well
use that time to figure out what the fuck is going on. Now, the skipper says
to wear this stuff if we are abovedecks, where we might be seen. But who the
hell is going to see us, out here?"
"An observation plane?"
"Germans don't have no observation planes, not out there."
"Another ship?" Root asks rhetorically, getting into the spirit of the
thing.
"We'll see them at the same time they see us, and that'll give us
plenty of time to put that shit on."
"It would have to be a U boat that the skipper is worried about, then."
"Bingo," Shaftoe says, "because a U boat could look at us through its
periscope, and we'd never know we were being looked at."
But that day, they don't get much further in their attempt to figure
out the deeper question of why their commanding officers want them to make
themselves look like Negroes in the eyes of German U boat captains.
***
The next day, the skipper plants himself on the bridge, where he
evidently means to keep a close eye on things. He seems less drunk but no
happier. He is wearing a colorful short sleeved madras shirt over a long
sleeved black turtleneck, and rope sandals over black socks. Every so often
he puts on his black gloves and ski mask and goes out to scan the horizon
with binoculars.
The ship continues westwards for a few hours after sunrise, then turns
north for a short time, then heads east for an hour, then goes north again,
then turns back to the west. They are running a search pattern, and
Commander Eden does not appear to be looking forward to finding whatever it
is that they are searching for. Shaftoe runs another lifeboat drill, then
checks the lifeboats himself making sure that they are lavishly stocked.
Around noon, a lookout hollers. The ship changes course, headed roughly
northeast. The skipper emerges from the bridge and, with an air of
sepulchral finality, presents Bobby Shaftoe with a crate of dark brown shoe
polish and a sealed envelope containing detailed orders.
Minutes later, the men of Detachment 2702, under orders from Sergeant
Shaftoe, strip to their briefs and begin coating themselves with shoe
polish. They already own black Shinola, which they are ordered to massage
into their hair if it's not already black. Just another example of how the
military screws the little man Shinola ain't free.
"Do I look like a Negro yet?" Shaftoe asks Root.
"I have traveled a bit," Root says, "and you don't look like a Negro to
me. But to a German who has never seen the genuine article, and who's
looking through a periscope what the heck?" Then: "I take it you've figured
out the mission?"
"I read the fucking orders," Shaftoe says guardedly.
They are headed towards a ship. As they get closer, Shaftoe checks it
out with a borrowed spyglass, and is startled, but not really surprised, to
see that it's not one ship but two ships side by side. Both of these ships
have the long fatal lines of U boats, but one of them is fatter, and he
figures it's a milchcow.
Beneath his feet, he feels the engines throttling back to a dim idle.
The sudden quiet, and the palpable loss of momentum and power, are not
reassuring. He gets the usual sick, electric, nauseous, hyperactive feeling
that always makes combat such a stimulatin' experience.
***
The beat up Trinidadian steamer has plied the waters of the Atlantic
without incident throughout the war to date, running back and forth between
African and Caribbean ports, and occasionally venturing as far north as the
Azores. Perhaps it has been sighted, from time to time, by a patrolling U
boat, and judged to be not worth spending a torpedo on. But today its luck
has changed for the worse. They have, by random chance, blundered across a
milchcow a supply U boat of the Kriegsmarine of the Third Reich. The
steamer's normally jaunty crew of shoe brown Negroes has gathered at the
rails to peer across the ocean at this peculiar sight two ships tied
together in the middle of the ocean, going nowhere. But as they draw closer,
they realize that one of those ships is a killer, and that the other is
flying the battle flag of the Kriegsmarine. Too late, they cut their
engines.
There is wild confusion for a minute or so this might be an interesting
spectacle to the lowly, deck swabbing Negroes, but the smart Negroes up on
the bridge know they're in trouble they've seen something they shouldn't
have. They swing her around to the south and make a run for it! For an hour
they dash desperately across the seas. But they are trailed implacably by a
U boat, cutting through the waves like a Bowie knife. The U boat has its
whip aerial up, is monitoring the usual frequencies, and hears the
Trinidadian steamer fire up her radio and send out an SOS. In a short stream
of dits and dahs, the steamer broadcasts her location and that of the
milchcow, and in so doing taps out her own death warrant.
Pesky untermenschen! They've really gone and done it now! It won't be
twenty four hours before the milchcow is located and sunk by the Allies.
There is a good chance that a few U boats will be hounded to their deaths as
part of the bargain. That is not a good way to die being chased across the
ocean for several days, suffering the death of a thousand cuts from
strafings and bombings. Stuff like this really drives home, to the common
ordinary Obertorpedomaat, the wisdom of the Führer's plan to go out and find
all of the people who aren't Germans and kill them.
Meanwhile, our basic Kapitänleutnant has got to be asking himself: what
the hell are the chances that a tramp Trinidadian steamer is going to just
happen upon us and our milchcow, out in the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean?
You could probably work it out, given the right data:
N [sub n] = number of Negroes per square kilometer
N [sub m] = number of milchcows
A [sub a] =Area of the Atlantic Ocean
and so on. But wait a sec, neither Negroes nor milchcows are randomly
distributed, so the calculation becomes immensely more complicated. Far too
complicated for a Kapitänleutnant to mess around with, especially when he's
busy trying to effect a dramatic reduction in N [sub n]
The Trinidadian steamer is brought up short by a shell fired across her
bows from the U boat's deck gun. The Negroes gather on the decks, but they
hesitate, just for a moment, to launch the lifeboats. Perhaps the Germans
are going to give them a break.
Typical, sloppy, sentimental untermenschen thinking. The Germans
brought them up short so they would hold still to be torpedoed. As soon as
they realize this, the Negroes stage an impressive lifeboat drill. It's
remarkable that they even have enough lifeboats to go around, but the calm,
practiced skill with which they launch and board them is truly phenomenal.
It's enough to make a German naval officer reconsider, just for a moment,
his opinions about the shortcomings of darkies.
It is a textbook torpedoing! The torpedo is set to run nice and deep,
and as it passes underneath the ship, the detonation circuit senses a change
in the magnetic field and triggers the explosive, neatly snapping the ship's
keel, breaking its back, and sending it down with incredible speed. For the
next five or ten minutes, bales of brown stuff erupt from the water,
released from the cargo holds as the ship plummets towards the bottom. It
gives the whole scene an unexpectedly festive air.
Some U boat skippers would not be above machine gunning the survivors,
at this point, just to let off a little steam.
But the commander, Kapitänleutnant Günter Bischoff, is not yet a card
carrying member of the Nazi Party and probably never will be.
On the other hand, Bischoff is wrapped in a straightjacket and blasted
half out of his mind on drugs.
Acting commander of the U boat is Oberleutnant zur See Karl Beck. He is
a card carrying National Socialist, and, in other circumstances, he might be
game for a bit of punitive machine gunning, but at the moment he's exhausted
and pretty badly shook up. He is intensely conscious of the fact that he's
probably not going to live very long now that their location has been
reported.
So he doesn't. The Negroes are jumping out of the lifeboats, swimming
to the bales, and clinging to them with just their heads out of the water,
realizing it would take forever to hunt them all down. OL Beck knows the
Liberators and the Catalinas are already airborne and vectored towards him,
so he has to get the hell out of there. Since he has plenty of fuel, he
decides to head south for a while, planning to double back north in a day or
two, when the coast might be a bit clearer. It is the kind of thing that KL
Bischoff would do if he had not gone crazy, and everyone on the boat has
unlimited respect for the old man.
They run on the surface, as they always do when they are not making a
positive effort to sink a convoy, so they can send and receive radio
messages. Beck gives one to Oberfunkmaat Huffer, explaining what has just
happened, and Huffer gives it to one of his Funkmaats, who sits down in
front of U 691 's Enigma machine and encrypts it using the key for the day,
then taps it out on the radio.
An hour later, they get a message back, straight from U boat Command at
Wilhelmshaven, and when the Funkmaat runs it through the Enigma, what he
comes up with is: CAPTURE SURVIVING OFFICERS.
It's a classic example of military commandsmanship: if the order had
come in a more timely fashion it would have been easy to obey, but now that
they are an hour away it will be extremely difficult and dangerous. The
order doesn't make any sense, and no effort is made to clarify it.
Given the time lag, Beck figures he can get away with giving this one a
half assed try. He really should swing round and approach the wreck on the
surface, which would get him there faster, but which would be nearly
suicidal. So instead, he closes the hatches and descends to periscope depth
as he draws closer. This cuts the U boat's speed to a crawling seven knots,
so it takes them about three hours to get back to the atoll of bobbing brown
bales that marks the site.
A damn good thing, too, because another fucking submarine is there,
picking up survivors. It is a Royal Navy submarine.
This is so weird it makes the hairs on the back of Beck's neck stand up
and there's a lot of hair there, because like most submariners, Beck hasn't
shaved in weeks. There's nothing weird, though, that can't be settled with a
single well placed torpedo. Seconds later the submarine explodes like a
bomb; the torpedo must have touched off her munitions. Her crew, and most of
the rescued Negroes, are trapped within, and don't have a chance of getting
out even if they survived the explosions. The submarine drops off the
surface of the ocean like the wreckage of the Hindenberg tumbling down on
New Jersey.
"Gott in Himmel," Beck mumbles, watching this all through the
periscope. He'd been pleased by the success, until he'd remembered that he
had specific orders, and that killing everyone in sight was not one of them.
Will there be any survivors for him to pick up?
He takes the U boat up onto the surface, and climbs up on the conning
tower with his officers. First thing they do is scan the skies for
Catalinas. Finding none, they post lookouts, then begin to nose the U boat
through the sea of bales, which by now has spread out to cover at least a
square kilometer. It is getting dark, and they have to bring up
searchlights.
All looks rather dismal until one searchlight picks out a survivor just
a head, shoulders, and a pair of arms reaching up clenching a rope around a
bale. The survivor does not move or respond as they approach, and not until
a wave rolls the bale over is it revealed that everything below the man's
solar plexus has been bitten off by sharks. The sight sets even this
hardened crew of murderers to gagging. In the quiet that ensues, they hear
low voices echoing across the calm water. With a bit more searching, they
find two men, evidently talkative sorts, sharing a bale.
When the searchlight picks them out, one of the Negroes lets go of the
bale and dives beneath the surface. The other just stares calmly and
expectantly into the light. This Negro's eyes are pale, almost colorless,
and he has a skin condition: parts of him are turning white.
As they draw closer, the pale eyed Negro speaks to them in perfect
German. "My comrade attempts to drown himself," he explains.
"Is that even possible?" asks Kapitänleutnant Beck.
"He and I were just discussing that very question."
Beck checks his wristwatch. "He must want to kill himself very badly,"
he says.
"Sergeant Shaftoe takes his duty very seriously. It's kind of ironic.
His cyanide capsule dissolved in the seawater."
"I am afraid that all irony has become tedious and depressing to me,"
Beck says, as a body breaks the surface nearby. It is Shaftoe, and he seems
to be unconscious.
"You are?" Beck asks.
"Lieutenant Enoch Root."
"I'm only supposed to take officers," Beck says, casting a cold eye in
the direction of Sergeant Shaftoe's back.
"Sergeant Shaftoe has exceptionally broad responsibilities," says
Lieutenant Root calmly, "in some respects exceeding those of a junior
officer."
"Get them both. Fetch the medicine box. Revive the sergeant," Beck
says. "I will talk to you later, Lieutenant Root." And then he turns his
back on the prisoners, and heads for the nearest hatch. He is going to spend
the next week trying very hard to stay alive, in spite of the best efforts
of the Royal and United States Navies. It's going to be quite an interesting
challenge. He should be thinking about his strategy. But he can't get the
image of Sergeant Shaftoe's back out of his mind. His fucking head was still
underneath the water! If they weren't about to fish him out of the ocean, he
would have succeeded in drowning himself. So it was possible. At least for
one person.
Chapter 44 HOSTILITIES
As the vans, taxis, and limousines pull into the parking lot at the
Ministry of Information site, the members of Epiphyte Corp. are greeted by
smiling and bowing Nipponese virgins wearing, and bearing, gleaming white
Goto Engineering helmets. The time is about eight in the morning, and up
here on the mountain the temperature is still tolerable, though humid.
Everyone mills around before the cavern's maw, carrying their hardhats in
their hands, as no one wants to be the first to put his on and look stupid.
Some of the younger Nipponese executives are mugging hilariously with
theirs. Dr. Mohammed Pragasu circulates. He has an authentically used and
battered hardhat which he whirls absentmindedly around one finger as he
strolls from group to group.
"Has anyone simply asked Prag what the fuck is going on?" says Eb. He
rarely uses English profanity, so when he does, it's funny.
The only member of Epiphyte Corp. who does not at least crack a smile
is John Cantrell, who has been looking distant and tense ever since
yesterday. ("It's one thing to write a dissertation about mathematical
techniques in cryptography," he said, on the way up here, when someone asked
him what was bothering him. "And another to gamble billions of dollars'
worth of Other People's Money on it."
"We need a new category," Randy said. "Other, Bad People's Money."
"Speaking of which " Tom began, but Avi cut him off by glaring
significantly at the back of the driver's head.)
To: dwarf@siblings.net
From: root@eruditorum.org
Subject: Re(3) Why?
Randy,
You ask me to justify my interest in why you are building the Crypt.
My interest is a mark of my occupation. This is, in a sense, what I do
for a living.
You continue to assume that I am someone you know. Today you think I'm
the Dentist, yesterday you thought I was Andrew Loeb. This guessing game
will rapidly become tedious for both of us, so please believe me when I tell
you that we have never met.
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To: root@eruditorum.org From: dwarf@siblings.net Subject: Re(4) Why?
Damn, after you said you did it for a living. I was going to guess that
you were Geb, or another one of my ex girlfriend's crowd.
Why don't you tell me your name?
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To: dwarf@siblings.net From: root@eruditorum.org Subject: Re(5) Why?
Randy, I've already told you my name, and it meant nothing to you. Or
rather, it meant the wrong thing. Names are tricky that way. The best way to
know someone is to have a conversation with them.
Interesting that you assume I'm an academic.
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To: root@eruditorum.org From: dwarf@siblings.net Subject: Re(6) Why?
Gotcha!
I didn't specify who Geb was. And yet you knew that he and my ex
girlfriend were academics. If (as you claim) I don't know you, then how do
you know these things about me?
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Everyone now turns to look towards Prag, who seems to be having trouble
with his peripheral vision today. "Prag is avoiding us," Avi snaps.
"Which means it will be completely impossible for us to reach him until
after this is all over."
Tom steps towards Avi, drawing the corporate circle in closer. "The
investigator in Hong Kong?"
"Got some IDs, struck out on others," Avi says. "Basically, the heavy
set Filipino gentleman is Marcos's bagman. Responsible for keeping the
famous billions out of the hands of the Philippine government. The Taiwanese
guy not Harvard Li but the other one is a lawyer whose family has deep
connections to Japan, dating back to when Taiwan was part of their empire.
He has held down half a dozen government positions at various times, mostly
in finance and commerce now he's sort of a fixer who does jobs of all sorts
for high ranking Taiwanese officials."
"What about the scary Chinese guy?"
Avi raises his eyebrows and heaves a little sigh before answering.
"He's a general in the People's Liberation Army. Equivalent to a four star
rank. He's been working their investment arm for the last fifteen years."
"Investment arm? The Army!?" Cantrell blurts. Re's been getting
uneasier by the minute, and now looks mildly nauseated.
"The People's Liberation Army is a titanic business empire," Beryl
says. "They control the biggest pharmaceutical company in China. The biggest
hotel chain. A lot of the communications infrastructure. Railways.
Refineries. And, obviously, armaments."
"What about Mr. Cellphone?" Randy asks.
"Still working on him. My man in Hong Kong is sending his mug shot to a
colleague in Panama."
"I think that after what we saw in the lobby, we can make some
assumptions," Beryl says. (1)
To: dwarf@siblings.net
From: root@eruditorum.org
Subject: Re(7) Why?
Randy.
You ask how I know these things about you. There are many things I could
say, but the basic answer is surveillance.
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Randy figures there's no better time to ask this question. And because
he's known Avi longer than anyone else, he's the only one who can get away
with asking it. "Do we really want to be involved with these people?" he
says. "Is this what Epiphyte Corp. is for? Is this what we are for?"
Avi heaves a big sigh and thinks about it for a while. Beryl looks at
him searchingly; Eb and John and Tom study their shoes, or search the triple
canopy jungle for exotic avians, while listening intently.
"You know, back in the forty niner days, every gold mining town in
California had a nerd with a scale," Avi says. "The assayer. He sat in an
office all day. Scary looking rednecks came in with pouches of gold dust.
The nerd weighed them, checked them for purity, told them what the stuff was
worth. Basically, the assayer's scale was the exchange point the place where
this mineral, this dirt from the ground, became money that would be
recognized as such in any bank or marketplace in the world, from San
Francisco to London to Beijing. Because of the nerd's special knowledge, he
could put his imprimatur on dirt and make it money. Just like we have the
power to turn bits into money.
"Now, a lot of the people the nerd dealt with were incredibly bad guys.
Peg house habitues. Escaped convicts from all over the world. Psychotic
gunslingers. People who owned slaves and massacred Indians. I'll bet that
the first day, or week, or month, or year, that the nerd moved to the gold
mining town and hung out his shingle, he was probably scared shitless. He
probably had moral qualms too very legitimate ones, perhaps," Avi adds,
giving Randy a sidelong glance. "Some of those pioneering nerds probably
gave up and went back East. But y'know what? In a surprisingly short period
of time, everything became pretty damn civilized, and the towns filled up
with churches and schools and universities, and the sort of howling maniacs
who got there first were all assimilated or driven out or thrown into
prison, and the nerds had boulevards and opera houses named after them. Now,
is the analogy clear?"
"The analogy is clear," Tom Howard says. He is less troubled by this
than any of them, with the possible exception of Avi. But then, his hobby is
collecting and shooting rare automatic weapons.
No one else will say anything; it is Randy's job to be troublesome.
"Uh, how many of those assayers got gunned down in the street after they
pissed off some psychotic gold miner?" he asks.
"I don't have any figures on that," Avi says.
"Well, I am not fully convinced that I really need this," Randy says.
"We all need to decide that question for ourselves," says Avi.
"And then vote, as a corporation whether to stay in or pull out right?"
Randy says.
Avi and Beryl look meaningfully at each other.
"Getting out, at this point, would be, uh, complicated," Beryl says.
Then, seeing a look on Randy's face, she hastens to add: "not for
individuals who might want to leave Epiphyte. That's easy. No problem. But
for Epiphyte to get out of this, uh . . ."
"Situation," Cantrell offers.
"Dilemma," Randy says.
Eb mumbles a word in German.
"Opportunity," Avi counters.
"...would be all but impossible," Beryl says.
"Look," Avi says, "I don't want anyone to feel compelled to stay in a
situation where they have moral qualms."
"Or fear imminent summary execution," Randy adds helpfully.
"Right. Now, we've all put a ton of work into this thing, and that work
ought to be worth something. To be totally above board and explicit, let me
reiterate what is already in the bylaws, which is that anyone can pull out;
we'll buy back your stock. After what's happened here the last couple of
days, I'm pretty confident that we could raise enough money to do so. You'd
make at least as much as if you had stayed home doing a regular salaried
job."
Younger, less experienced high tech entrepreneurs would have scoffed
bitterly at this. But everyone on this crew actually finds it impressive
that Avi can put a company together and keep it alive long enough to make it
worth the work they've put into it.
The black Mercedes cruises up. Dr. Mohammed Pragasu strides over to
meet it, greets the South Americans in fairly decent Spanish, makes a couple
of introduction