erfunctory gesture, the subtext being I wish you'd go
away but minimal standards of social decency dictate that I should say
something. The Dentist, no slouch himself in the social ineptness
department, comes right back as if it were an actual request for
information. "I can only assume that you have somehow gotten embroiled with
someone who has a lot of influence in this country. It appears that someone
is trying to send you a "
"No! Just stop," Randy says. "Don't say it." Hubert Kepler is now
looking at him quizzically, so Randy continues. "The message theory doesn't
hold up."
Kepler looks genuinely baffled for a few moments, then actually does
grin a little bit. "Well, it certainly isn't an attempt to do away with you,
because "
"Obviously," Randy says.
"Yes. Obviously."
There is another one of those long pauses; Kepler seems unsure of
himself. Randy arches his back and stretches. "The chair in my cell is not
what you call ergonomic," he says. He holds his arms out and wiggles the
fingers. "My carpals are going to start acting up again. I can tell."
Randy is looking at Kepler pretty carefully when he says this, and
there's no doubt that genuine astonishment is now spreading across the
Dentist's face. The Dentist only has one facial expression (already
described) but it changes in intensity; it gets more so and less so
depending on his emotions. The Dentist's expression proves he had no idea,
until now, that Randy's been allowed to have a computer in his cell. In the
trying to figure out what the fuck is going on department, the computer is
the single most important datum, and Kepler didn't even know about it until
just now. So to whatever extent the Dentist actually gives a shit, he has a
lot of thinking to do. He excuses himself pretty soon after.
Not half an hour later, some twenty five year old American guy with a
ponytail shows up and has a brief audience with Randy. It turns out that he
works for Chester in Seattle and has just now flown across the Pacific on
Chester's personal jet and came here straight from the airport. He is
completely jazzed, totally in bat out of hell mode, and cannot shut up. The
sheer amazingness of his sudden flight across the ocean on a rich guy's
private jet has made a really, really deep impression on him and he
obviously needs someone to share it with. He has brought a "care package"
consisting of some junk food, a few trashy novels, the largest bottle of
Pepto Bismol Randy's ever seen, a CD Walkman, and a cubical stack of CDs.
This guy can't get over the battery thing; he was told to bring a lot of
extra batteries, and so he did, and sure enough, between the luggage guys at
the airport and the customs inspectors, all of the batteries disappeared en
route except for one package that he's got in the pocket of his long baggy
Seattle grunge boy shorts. Seattle's full of guys like this who flipped a
coin when they graduated from college (heads Prague, tails Seattle) and just
showed up with this expectation that because they were young and smart
they'd find a job and begin making money, and then appallingly enough did
exactly that. Randy can't figure out what the world must look like to a guy
like this. He has a hard time getting rid of the guy, who shares the common
assumption (increasingly annoying) that just because Randy's in jail, he
doesn't have a life, has nothing better to do than interface with visitors.
When Randy gets back to his cell, he sits crosslegged on his bed with
the Walkman and begins dealing out the CDs like cards in a solitaire game.
The selection is pretty reasonable: a two disc set of the Brandenburg
Concertos, a collection of Bach organ fugues (nerds have a thing about
Bach), some Louis Armstrong, some Wynton Marsalis, and then various
selections from Hammerdown Systems, which is a Seattle based record label in
which Chester is a major investor. It is a second generation Seattle scene
record label; all of its artists are young people who came to Seattle after
they graduated from college in search of the legendary Seattle music scene
and discovered that it didn't really exist it was just a couple of dozen
guys who sat around playing guitar in one another's basements and so who
were basically forced to choose between going home in ignominy or
fabricating the Seattle music scene of their imagination from whole cloth.
This led to the establishment of any number of small clubs, and the
foundation of many bands, that were not rooted in any kind of authentic
reality whatsoever but merely reflected the dreams and aspiration of pan
global young adults who had all flocked to Seattle on the same chimera hunt.
This second wave scene came in for a lot of abuse from those of the original
two dozen people who had not yet died of drug overdose or suicide. There was
something of a backlash; and yet, about thirty six hours after the backlash
reached its maximum intensity, there was an antibacklash backlash from young
immigrants who asserted their right to some kind of unique cultural identity
as people who had naively come to Seattle and discovered that there was no
there there and that they would have to create it themselves. Fueled by that
conviction, and by their own youthful libidinous energy, and by a few
cultural commentators who found this whole scenario fetchingly post modern,
they started a whole lot of second generation bands and even a couple of
record labels, of which Hammerdown Systems is the only one that didn't
either go out of business or get turned into a wholly owned subsidiary of an
L.A. or New York based major label inside of six months.
And so Chester has decided to favor Randy with those recent Hammerdown
selections of which he is most proud. Perversely, almost all of these are
from bands that are not even in Seattle at all but in small, prohibitively
hip college towns in North Carolina and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. But
Randy does find one from an evidently Seattle based band called Shekondar.
Evidently, that is, because on the back of the CD is a blurry photograph of
several band members drinking sixteen ounce lattes in cups bearing the logo
of a chain of coffee bars that as far as Randy knows has not yet burst free
from the city limits of Seattle to crush everything in its path worldwide in
the now wearisomely predictable manner of Seattle based companies. Now,
Shekondar happens to have been the name of an especially foul underworld
deity who played an important role in some of the game scenarios that Randy
played with Avi and Chester and the gang back in the old days. Randy opens
up the case of the CD and notes immediately that the disc has the golden hue
of a master, not the traditional silver of a mere copy. Randy puts that
golden master into his Walkman and hits the Play button and is treated to
some passable post Cobain mortem material, genetically engineered to have
nothing in common with what is traditionally thought of as the Seattle sound
and in that sense absolutely typical of Seattle du jour. He jumps forward
through a couple more tracks and then rips the earphones off his head,
cursing, as the Walkman attempts to translate a stream of pure digital
information, representing something other than music, into sound. This feels
a bit like needles of dry ice jabbed into his eardrums.
Randy moves the golden disc to the CD ROM drive that is built into his
laptop, and checks it out. Indeed it does sport a couple of audio tracks (as
he's discovered) but almost all of the disc's capacity is given over to
computer files. There are several directories, or folders, each named after
one of the documents that was in grandfather's trunk. Within each of these
directories is a long list of files named PAGE.001.jpeg, PAGE.002.jpeg, and
so on. Randy starts opening them up, using the same net browser software
that he uses to read the Cryptonomicon, and discovers that they are all
scanned image files. Evidently Chester had a bunch of minions de staple
those documents and feed them page by page through a scanner. At the same
time he must have had graphic artists, presumably people he knows through
Hammerdown Systems, hastily whipping up this fake Shekondar album cover.
It's even got a package insert, photographs of Shekondar in concert. What it
really is is a parody of the post Seattle Scene Seattle scene that aligns
perfectly with the faulty notions of same that could be expected in the
imagination of a Philippine airport customs inspector, who like everyone
else is fantasizing about moving to Seattle. The lead guitarist looks kind
of like Chester in a wig.
All of this sneaky stuff is probably gratuitous. It probably would have
been okay for Chester to just Fedex the fucking documents straight to the
jail. But Chester, sitting in his house by Lake Washington, is working on a
set of assumptions about Manila just as faulty as what half of the world
believes about Seattle. At least Randy gets a laugh out of it before diving
into zeta functions.
A word about libido: it's been something like three weeks for Randy
now. He was just beginning to address this situation when a highly
intelligent and perceptive Catholic ex priest was suddenly introduced into
the cell next to his and began sleeping six inches away from him. Since
then, masturbation per se has been pretty much out of the question. To the
extent Randy believes in any god at all, he's been praying for a nocturnal
emission. His prostate gland now has the size and consistency of a croquet
ball. He feels it all the time, and has begun to think of it as his Hunk of
Burning Love. Randy had a spot of prostate trouble once when he was
chronically drinking too much coffee, and it made everything between his
nipples and his knees hurt. The urologist explained that Little Man 'tate is
neurologically wired into just about every other part of your body, and he
didn't have to exert any rhetorical skill, or marshall any detailed
arguments, in order to make Randy believe that. Randy has believed, ever
since, that the ability of men to become moronically obsessed with
copulation is in some way a reflection of this wiring diagram; when you are
ready to give the external world the benefit of your genetic material, i.e.
when the 'tate is fully loaded, even your pinkies and eyelids know about it.
And so it might be expected that Randy would be thinking all the time
about America Shaftoe, his sexual target of choice, who (just to make things
a lot worse) has probably been spending a lot of time in wetsuits lately.
And indeed that is where his thoughts were directed at the moment Enoch Root
was dragged in. But since then it has become evident that he needs to
exercise some kind of iron mental discipline here and not think about Amy at
all. Whilst juggling all of those chainsaws and puppies, he is also walking
a sort of intellectual tightrope, with decryption of the Arethusa intercepts
at the end of that tightrope, and as long as he keeps his eyes fixed on that
goal and just keeps putting one foot in front of the other, he'll get there.
Amy in a wetsuit is down below somewhere, no doubt trying to be emotionally
supportive, but if he even glances in her direction he's a goner.
What he's reading here is a set of academic papers, dating to the 1930s
and early forties, that have been heavily marked up by his grandfather, who
went through them none too subtly gleaning anything that could be useful on
the cryptographic front. That it's none too subtle is a good thing for
Randy, whose grasp of pure number theory is just barely adequate here.
Chester's minions had to scan not only the fronts of these pages but the
backs too, which were originally blank but on which Grandpa wrote many
notes. For example there is a paper written by Alan Turing in 1937 in which
Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse has found some kind of error, or at least,
something that Turing didn't go into in sufficient detail, forcing him to
cover several pages with annotations. Randy's blood absolutely runs cold at
the very idea that he is being so presumptuous as to participate in such a
colloquy. When he realizes just how deep over his head he is intellectually,
he turns off his computer and goes to bed and sleeps the bootless sleep of
the depressed for ten hours. Eventually he convinces himself that most of
the junk in these papers probably has no direct relevance to Arethusa and
that he just needs to calm down and filter the material carefully.
Two weeks pass. His prayers vis à vis the Hunk of Burning Love are
answered, giving him at least a couple of days of relief during which he can
admit the concept of Amy Shaftoe into his awareness, but only in a really
austere and passionless way. Attorney Alejandro shows up occasionally to
tell Randy that things are not going very well. Surprising obstacles have
arisen. All of the people he was planning to bribe have been preemptively
counter bribed by Someone. These meetings are tedious for Randy, who thinks
he has figured everything out. To begin with it's Wing, and not the Dentist,
who has caused all of this, and so Attorney Alejandro's working on faulty
assumptions.
Enoch, when he called Randy on the plane, said his old NSA buddy was
working for one of the Crypt's clients. It seems clear now that this client
is Wing. Consequently Wing knows that Randy has Arethusa. Wing believes that
the Arethusa intercepts contain information about the location of the
Primary. He wants Randy to decrypt those messages so that he'll know where
to dig. Hence the whole setup with the laptop.
All of Attorney Alejandro's efforts to spring Randy loose will be
unavailing until Wing has the information that he wants or thinks he does.
Then, all of a sudden, the ice will break, and Randy will unexpectedly be
cut loose on a technicality. Randy's so sure of this that he finds Attorney
Alejandro's visits annoying. He would like to explain all of this so that
Attorney Alejandro could knock it off with the wild goose chase, and his
increasingly bleak and dull situation reports on same. But then Wing, who
presumably surveils these attorney/client conferences, would know that Randy
had figured out the whole game, and Randy doesn't want Wing to know that. So
he nods through these meetings with his lawyer and then, for good measure,
goes back and tries to sound convincingly bewildered and depressed as he
gives Enoch Root the update.
He gets to the point, conceptually, where his grandfather was when he
commenced breaking the Arethusa messages. That is, he has a theory in mind
now of how Arethusa worked. If he doesn't know the exact algorithm, he knows
what family of algorithms it belongs to, and that gives him a search space
with many fewer dimensions than he had before. Certainly few enough for a
modern computer to explore. He goes on a forty eight hour hacking binge. The
nerve damage in his wrists has mounted to the point where he practically has
sparks shooting out of his fingertips. His doctor told him never again to
work on these nonergonomic keyboards. His eyes start to go out on him too,
and he has to invert the screen colors and work with white letters on a
black background, gradually increasing the size of the letters as he loses
the ability to focus. But at last he gets something that he thinks is going
to work, and he fires it up and sets it to running on the Arethusa
intercepts, which live inside the computer's memory but have never yet been
displayed upon its screen. He falls asleep. When he wakes up, the computer
is informing him that he's got a probable break into one of the messages.
Actually, three of them, all intercepted on 4 April 1945 and hence all
encrypted using the same keystream.
Unlike human codebreakers, computers can't read English. They can't
even recognize it. They can crank out possible decrypts of a message at
tremendous speed but given two character strings like
SEND HELP IMMEDIATELY
and
XUEBP TOAFF NMQPT
they have no inherent ability to recognize the first as a successful
decryption of a message and the second as a failure. But they can do a
frequency count on the letters. If the computer finds that E is the most
common, followed by T, and so on and so forth, then it's a pretty strong
indication that the text is some natural human language and not just random
gibberish. By using this and other slightly more sophisticated tests,
Randy's come up with a routine that should be pretty good at recognizing
success. And it's telling him this morning that 4 April 1945 is broken.
Randy dare not display the decrypted messages onscreen for fear that they
contain the information that Wing's looking for, and so he cannot actually
read these messages, as desperately as he'd like to. But by using a command
called grep, which searches through text files without opening them, he can
at least verify that the word MANILA occurs in two places.
Based on this break, with several more days' work Randy solves Arethusa
entirely. He comes up, in other words, with A(x) = K, such that for any
given date x he can figure out what K, the keystream for that day would be;
and just to prove it, he has the computer crank out K for every day in 1944
and 1945 and then use them to decrypt the Arethusa intercepts that came in
on those days (without displaying them) and does the frequency count on them
and verifies that it worked in each case.
So now he has decrypted all of the messages. But he cannot actually
read them without transmitting their contents to Wing. And so now, the
subliminal channel comes into play.
In cryptospeak, a subliminal channel is a trick whereby secret
information is subtly embedded in a stream of other stuff. Usually it means
something like manipulating the least significant bits of an image file to
convey a text message. Randy's drawn inspiration from the concept in his
labors here in jail. Yes, he has been working on decrypting Arethusa, and
that has involved screwing around with a tremendous number of files and
writing a lot of code. The number of separate files he's read, created, and
edited in the last few weeks is probably in the thousands. None of them have
had title bars on their windows, and so the Van Eck phreakers surveilling
him have presumably had a terrible time keeping track of which is which.
Randy can open a file by typing its title in a window and hitting the return
key, all of which happens so fast that the surveillance people probably
don't have time to read or understand what he has typed before it
disappears. This, he thinks, may have given him just a bit of leeway. He has
kept a subliminal channel going in the background: working on a few other
bits of code that have nothing to do with breaking Arethusa.
He got the idea for one of these when he was paging through the
Cryptonomicon and discovered an appendix that contained a listing of the
Morse code. Randy knew Morse code when he was a Boy Scout, and learned it
again a few years ago when he was studying for a ham radio license, and it
doesn't take him long to refresh his memory. And neither does it take him
very long to write a little bit of code that turns his computer's space bar
into a Morse code key, so that he can talk to the machine by whacking out
dots and dashes with his thumb. This might look a little conspicuous, if not
for the fact that Randy spends half of his time reading text files in little
windows on the screen, and the way you page through a text file in most UNIX
systems is by whacking the space bar. All he has to do is whack it in a
particular rhythm, a detail he's relying on the surveillance guys to miss.
The results all go into a buffer that is never displayed on the screen, and
get written out to files with completely meaningless names. So, for example,
Randy can whack out the following rhythm on his spacebar while pretending to
read a lengthy section of the Cryptonomicon:
dash dot dot dot (pause) dot dot dash (pause) dash dot (pause) dash dot
dot (pause) dash dash dash (pause) dash dot dash
which ought to spell out BUNDOK. He doesn't want to open the resulting
file on screen, but later, while he's in the middle of a long series of
other cryptic commands he can type
grep ndo (meaningless file name) > (another meaningless file name)
and grep will search through the first named file to see if it contains
the string "ndo" and put the results into the second named file, which he
can then check quite a bit later. He can also do "grep bun" and "grep dok"
and if the results of all of these greps are true then he can be pretty
confident that he has successfully coded the sequence "BUNDOK" into that one
file. In the same way he can code "COORDINATES" into some other file and
"LATITUDE" into another, and various numbers into others, and finally by
using another command called "cat" he can slowly combine these one word
files into longer ones. All of these demands the same ridiculous patience
as, say, tunneling out of a prison with a teaspoon, or sawing through iron
bars with a nail file. But there comes a point, after he's spent about a
month in jail, when suddenly he's able to make a window appear on the screen
that contains the following message:
COORDINATES OF PRIMARY STORAGE LOCATIONS
SITE BUNDOK: LATITUDE NORTH FOURTEEN DEGREES THIRTY TWO MINUTES . . .
LONGITUDE. EAST ONE TWO ZERO DEGREES FIFTY SIX MINUTES .
SITE MAKATI: (etc.)
SITE ELDORADO: (etc.)
All of which is total bullshit that he just made up. The coordinates
given for the Makati site are those of a luxury hotel in Manila, sited at a
major intersection that used to be the site of a Nipponese military airbase.
Randy happens to have these numbers in his computer because he took them
down during his very early days in Manila, when he was doing the GPS survey
work for siting Epiphyte's antennas. The coordinates given for SITE ELDORADO
are simply the location of the pile of gold bars that he and Doug Shaftoe
went to examine, plus a small random error factor. And those given for SITE
BUNDOK are the real coordinates of Golgotha plus a couple of random error
factors that should have Wing digging a deep hole in the ground about twenty
kilometers away from the real site.
How does Randy know that there is a site called Golgotha, and how does
he know its real coordinates? His computer told him using Morse code.
Computer keyboards have LEDs on them that are essentially kind of useless:
one to tell you when NUM LOCK is on, one for CAPS LOCK, and a third one
whose purpose Randy can't even remember. And for no reason other than the
general belief that every aspect of a computer should be under the control
of hackers, someone, some where, wrote some library routines called XLEDS
that make it possible for programmers to turn these things on and off at
will. And for a month, Randy's been writing a little program that makes use
of these routines to output the contents of a text file in Morse code, by
flashing one of those LEDs. And while all kinds of useless crap has been
scrolling across the screen of his computer as camouflage, Randy's been
hunched over gazing into the subliminal channel of that blinking LED,
reading the contents of the decrypted Arethusa intercepts. One of which
says:
THE PRIMARY IS CODE NAMED GOLGOTHA. COORDINATES OF THE MAIN DRIFT ARE
AS FOLLOWS: LATITUDE NORTH (etc.)
Chapter 91 THE BASEMENT
At this point in history (April of 1945) the word that denotes a person
who sits and performs arithmetical calculations is "computer." Waterhouse
has just found a whole room full of dead computers. Anyone in his right mind
anyone other than Waterhouse and some of his odd Bletchley Park friends,
like Turing would have taken one look at these computers and assumed that
they were the accounting department, or something, and that each slave in
the room was independently toting up figures. Waterhouse really ought to
remain open to this idea, because it is so obvious. But from the very
beginning he has had a hypothesis of his own, much more interesting and
peculiar.
It is that the slaves were functioning, collectively, as cogs in a
larger computation machine, each performing a small portion of a complex
calculation: receiving numbers from one computer, doing some arithmetic,
producing new numbers, passing them on to another computer.
Central Bureau is able to trace the identities of five of the dead
slaves. They came from places like Saigon, Singapore, Manila, and Java, but
they had in common that they were ethnic Chinese and they were shopkeepers.
Apparently the Nipponese had cast a wide net for expert abacus users and
brought them together, from all over the Co Prosperity Sphere, to this
island in Manila Bay.
Lawrence Waterhouse tracks down a computer of his own in the ruins of
Manila, a Mr. Gu, whose small import/export business was destroyed by the
war (it is hard to run such a business when you are on an island, and every
ship that leaves or approaches the island gets sunk by Americans).
Waterhouse shows Mr. Gu photos of the abaci as they were left by the dead
computers. Mr. Gu tells him what numbers are encoded in those bead
positions, as well as giving Waterhouse a couple of days' tutorial on basic
abacus technique. The important thing learned from this is not really abacus
skills but rather the remarkable speed and precision with which a computer
like Mr. Gu can churn out calculations.
At this point, Waterhouse has reduced the problem to pure data. About
half of it's in his memory and the other half scattered around on his desk.
The data includes all of the scratch paper left behind by the computers. To
match up the numbers on the scratch paper with the numbers left on the
abaci, and thus to compile a flash frozen image of the calculations that
were underway in that room when the apocalypse struck, is not that difficult
at least, by the standards of difficulty that apply during wartime, when,
for example, landing several thousand men and tons of equipment on a remote
island and taking it from heavily armed, suicidal Japanese troops with the
loss of only a few dozen lives is considered to be easy.
From this it is possible (though it approaches being difficult) to
generalize, and to figure out the underlying mathematical algorithm that
generated the numbers on the abaci. Waterhouse becomes familiar with some of
the computers' handwriting, and develops evidence that slips of scratch
paper were being handed from one computer to another and then to yet
another. Some of the computers had logarithm tables at their stations, which
is a really important clue as to what they were doing. In this way he is
able to draw up a map of the room, with each computer's station identified
by number, and a web of arrows interconnecting the stations, depicting the
flow of paper, and of data. This helps him visualize the collective
calculation as a whole, and to reconstruct what was going on in that
subterranean chamber.
For weeks it comes in bits and pieces, and then one evening, some
switch turns on in Lawrence Waterhouse's mind, and he knows, in some
preconscious way, that he's about to get it. He works for twenty four hours.
By that point he has come up with a lot of evidence to support, and none to
contradict, the hypothesis that this calculation is a variant of a zeta
function. He naps for six hours, gets up, and works for another thirty. By
that point he's figured out that it definitely is some kind of zeta
function, and he's managed to figure out several of its constants and terms.
He almost has it now. He sleeps for twelve hours, gets up and walks around
Manila to clear his head, goes back to work, and hammers away at it for
thirty six hours. This is the fun part, when big slabs of the puzzle,
painstakingly assembled from fragments, suddenly begin to lock together, and
the whole thing begins to make sense.
It all comes down to an equation written down on one sheet of paper.
Just looking at it makes him feel weirdly nostalgic, because it's the same
type of equation he used to work with back at Princeton with Alan and Rudy.
Another pause for sleep, then, because he has to be alert to do the
final thing.
The final thing is as follows: he goes into the basement of a building
in Manila. The building has been turned into a signals intelligence
headquarters by the United States Army. He is one of some half dozen people
on the face of the planet who are allowed to enter this particular room. The
room amounts to a bit more than a quarter of the basement's total square
footage, and in fact shares the basement with several other rooms, some of
which are larger than it is, and some of which are serving as offices for
men with higher rank than Waterhouse wears on his uniform. But there are a
few oddities connected with Waterhouse's room:
(1) At any given moment, no fewer than three United States Marines are
loitering directly in front of the door of this room, carrying pump shotguns
and other weapons optimized for close range indoor flesh shredding.
(2) Lots of power cables go into this room; it has its own fuse panel,
separate from the rest of the building's electrical system.
(3) The room emits muffled, yet deafening quasimusical noises.
(4) The room is referred to as the Basement, even though it's only part
of the basement. When "the Basement" is written down, it is capitalized.
When someone (let's say Lieutenant Colonel Earl Comstock) is going to
verbalize this, he will come to a complete stop in mid sentence, so that all
of the preceding words kind of pile into each other like cars in a colliding
train. He will, in fact, bracket "the Basement" between a pair of full one
second long caesuras. During the first of these, he will raise his eyebrows
and purse his lips simultaneously, altering the entire aspect ratio of his
face so that it becomes strikingly elongated in the vertical dimension, and
his eyes will dart sideways in case any Nipponese spies somehow managed to
escape the recent apocalypse and found a place to lurk around the fringes of
his peripheral vision. Then he will say "the" and then he will say
"Basement," drawing out the s and primly articulating the t. And then will
come another caesura during which he will incline his head towards the
listener and fix him with a sober, appraising look, seeming to demand some
kind of verbal or gestural acknowledgment from the listener that something
appallingly significant has just passed between them. And then he will
continue with whatever he was saying.
Waterhouse nods to the Marines, one of whom hauls the door open for
him. A really funny thing happened shortly after the Basement was
established, when it was still just a bunch of wooden crates and a stack of
32 foot long sewer pipe segments, and the electricians were still running in
the power lines: Lieutenant Colonel Earl Comstock tried to enter the
Basement to inspect it. But owing to a clerical error, Lieutenant Colonel
Earl Comstock's name was not on the list, and so a difference of opinion
ensued that culminated with one of the Marines drawing his Colt .45 and
taking the safety off and chambering a round, pressing the barrel of the
weapon directly into the center of Comstock's right thigh, and then
reminiscing about some of the spectacular femur bursting wounds he had
personally witnessed on places like Tarawa and in general trying to help
Comstock visualize just what his life would be like, both short– and
long term, if a large piece of lead were to pass through the middle of said
major bone. To everyone's surprise, Comstock was delighted with this
encounter, almost enchanted, and hasn't stopped talking about it since. Of
course, now his name's on the list.
The Basement is filled with ETC card machines and with several racks of
equipment devoid of corporate logos, inasmuch as they were designed and
largely built by Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse in Brisbane. When all of
these things are hooked together in just the right way, they constitute a
Digital Computer. Like a pipe organ, a Digital Computer is not so much a
machine as a meta machine that can be made into any of a number of different
machines by changing its internal configuration. At the moment, Lawrence
Pritchard Waterhouse is the only guy in the world who understands the
Digital Computer well enough to actually do this, though he's training a
couple of Comstock's ETC men to do it themselves. On the day in question, he
is turning the Digital Computer into a machine for calculating the zeta
function that he thinks is at the core of the cryptosystem called Azure or
Pufferfish.
The function requires a number of inputs. One of these is a date. Azure
is a system for generating one time pads that change every day, and
circumstantial evidence from the room of the dead abacus slaves tells him
that, at the moment of their death, they were working on the one time pad
for 6 August 1945, which is four months in the future. Waterhouse writes it
down in the European style (day of the month first, then month) as 06081945,
then lops off the leading zero to get 6,081,945 a pure quantity, an integer,
unmarred by decimal point, rounding error, or any of the other compromises
so abhorrent to number theorists. He uses this as one of the inputs to the
zeta function. The zeta function requires a few other inputs too, which the
person who designed this cryptosystem (presumably Rudy) was at liberty to
choose. Surmising which inputs Rudy used has occupied much of Waterhouse's
thoughts in the last week. He puts in the numbers he has guessed, anyway,
which is a matter of converting them to binary notation and then physically
incarnating those ones and zeros on a neat row of stainless steel toggle
switches: down for zero, up for one.
Finally he puts on his artilleryman's ear protectors and lets the
Digital Computer howl through the calculation. The room gets much hotter. A
vacuum tube burns out, and then another one. Waterhouse replaces them.
That's easy because Lieutenant Colonel Comstock has made a basically
infinite supply of tubes available to him quite a remarkable feat during
wartime. The filaments of all those massed tubes glow redly and shine
palpable radiant heat across the room. The smell of hot oil rises from the
louvers on the ETC card machines. The stack of blank cards in the input
hopper shortens mysteriously as they vanish into the machine. Cards skitter
into the output bin. Waterhouse pulls them out and looks at them. His heart
is pounding very hard.
It's quiet again. The cards have numbers on them, nothing more. They
just happen to be exactly the same numbers that were frozen on certain abaci
down in the room of the computer slaves.
Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse has just demolished another enemy
cryptosystem: Azure/Pufferfish may now be mounted like a stuffed head on the
wall of the Basement. And indeed, looking at those numbers he feels the same
kind of letdown that a big game hunter must feel when he's stalked some
legendary beast halfway across Africa and finally brought it down with a
slug through the heart, walked up to the corpse, and discovered that after
all it's just a big, messy, pile of meat. It's dirty and it's got flies on
it. Is that all there is to it? Why didn't he solve this thing a long time
ago? All of the old Azure/Pufferfish intercepts can be decrypted now. He'll
have to read them, and they will turn out to be the usual numb mutterings of
giant bureaucracies trying to take over the world. He doesn't, frankly, care
anymore. He just wants to get the hell out of here and get married, play the
organ, and program his Digital Computer, and hopefully get someone to pay
him a salary to do one or the other. But Mary's in Brisbane and the war's
not over yet we haven't even gotten around to invading Nippon, for
crissakes, and conquering the place is going to take forever, with all those
plucky Nipponese women and children drilling on soccer fields with pointed
bamboo staves and it's probably going to be something like 1955 before he
can even get discharged from the military. The war is not over yet, and as
long as it goes on they will need him to stay down here in the Basement
doing more of what he just did.
Arethusa. He still hasn't broken Arethusa. Now that's a cryptosystem!
He's too tired. He can't break Arethusa just now.
What he really needs is someone to talk to. Not about anything in
particular. Just to talk. But there's only half a dozen people on the planet
he can really talk to, and none of them is in the Philippines. Fortunately,
there are long copper wires running underneath the oceans which made
geographical location irrelevant, as long as you have the right clearance.
Waterhouse does. He gets up and leaves the Basement and goes to have a chat
with his friend Alan.
Chapter 92 AKIHABARA
As Randy's plane banks into Narita, a low stratum of cloud screens the
countryside like a silk veil. It must be Nippon: the only two colors are the
orange of the earth moving equipment and the green of the earth that has not
yet been moved. Other than that, everything is greyscale: grey parking lots
divided into rectangles by white lines, the rectangles occupied with black,
white, or grey cars, fading off into silvery fog beneath a sky the color of
aviation alloy. Nippon is soothing, a good destination for a man who has
just been rousted from his jail cell, hauled up before a judge, tongue
lashed, driven to the airport, and expelled from the Philippines.
The Nipponese look more American than Americans. Middle class
prosperity is lapidary; the flow of cash rounds and smooths a person like
water does riverbed stones. The goal of all such persons seems to be to make
themselves cuddly and nonthreatening. The girls in particular are unbearably
precious, although perhaps Randy just thinks so because of that troublesome
neurological hookup between his brain and Little Man 'tate. The old folks,
instead of looking weathered and formidable, tend to wear sneakers and
baseball caps. Black leather, studs, and handcuffs as accessories are the
marks of the powerless lower classes, the people who tend to end up in the
pokey in Manila, and not of the persons who actually dominate the world and
crush everything in their path.
"The doors are about to close." "The bus is leaving in five minutes."
Nothing happens in Nippon without a perky, breathy woman's voice giving you
a chance to brace yourself. It is safe to say that this is not true of the
Philippines. Randy thinks about taking a bus into Tokyo until he comes to
his senses and remembers that he's carrying around in his head the precise
coordinates of a mine that probably contains not less than a thousand tons
of gold. He hails a taxi. On the way into town, he passes by a road
accident: a tanker truck has crossed the white line and flipped over on the
shoulder. But in Nippon, even traffic accidents have the grave precision of
ancient Shinto rituals. White gloved cops direct traffic, moon suited rescue
workers descend from spotless emergency vans. The taxi passes beneath Tokyo
Bay through a tunnel that was built, three decades ago, by Goto Engineering.
Randy ends up in a big old hotel, "old