" meaning that the physical
structure was constructed during the fifties, when Americans competed with
Soviets to build the most brutalistic space age buildings out of the most
depressing industrial materials. And indeed one can easily imagine Ike and
Mamie pulling up to the front door in a five ton Lincoln Continental. Of
course the interior has been gutted and redone more frequently than many
hotels steam clean their carpets, and so everything is perfect. Randy has a
strong impulse to lie in bed like a sack of shit, but he is tired of being
confined. And there are many people he could talk to on the phone, but he is
supremely paranoid about telephone conversations now. Any talking that he
might do would have to be censored. Talking openly and freely is a pleasure,
talking carefully is work, and Randy doesn't feel like work. He calls his
parents to tell them everything's fine, calls Chester to thank him.
Then he takes his laptop downstairs and sits in the middle of the
hotel's lobby, which is ostentatiously vast by Tokyo standards; the value of
the land beneath the lobby alone probably exceeds that of Cape Cod. No one
can even get near him with a Van Eck antenna here, and even if they do there
will be plenty of interference from the nearby computers of the concierge
desk. He starts ordering drinks, alternating between brutally cold pale
Nipponese beer and hot tea, and writes a memo explaining more or less what
he has spent the last month accomplishing.
He writes it very slowly because his hands are practically immobilized
now by carpal tunnel syndrome, and any motion that even faintly resembles
typing causes him a lot of pain. He ends up cadging a pencil from the
concierge and then using its eraser to punch the keys one at a time. The
memo begins with the word "carpal" which is a little code that they have
developed to explain why the following text seems unnaturally terse and
devoid of capital letters. He's barely got that tapped out when he's
approached by a devastatingly cute and fluttery young thing in a kimono who
tells him that there is a staff of typists on call in the Business Center to
help him with this should he desire it. Randy declines as politely as he
knows how, which is probably not politely enough. Kimono Girl backs away in
tiny steps, bowing and uttering truncated sub vocal hais. Randy goes back to
work with the pencil eraser. He explains, as briefly and clearly as he can,
what he's been doing, and what he thinks is going on with General Wing and
Enoch Root. He leaves the subject of what the fuck's going on with the
Dentist open for speculation.
When he's done, he encrypts it and then goes up to his room to e mail
it. He can't get over the cleanliness of his lodgings. The sheets appear to
have been tightened around the mattress with turnbuckles, then dipped in
starch. This is the first time in over a month that he hasn't had the warm
wet reek of sewer gas climbing up his nostrils and the ammoniacal tang of
evaporating urine stinging his eyes. Somewhere in Nippon, a man in a clean
white coverall stands in a room with a fat hose fed gun vomiting freshly
chopped glass fibers slathered with polyester resin onto a curvaceous form;
peeled off the form, the result is bath rooms like this one: a single
topological surface pierced in at most two or three places by drains and
nozzles. While Randy's e mailing his memo he lets hot water run into the
largest and smoothest depression in the bathroom surface. Then he takes off
his clothes and climbs into it. He never takes baths, but between the
foulness that seems infused into his flesh now, and the throbbing of his
Hunk of Burning Love, there was never a better time.
The last few days were the worst. When Randy finished his project, and
displayed the bogus results on the screen, he expected that the cell door
would swing open immediately. That he'd walk out onto the streets of Manila
and that, just for extra bonus points, Amy might even be waiting for him.
But nothing at all happened for a whole day, and then Attorney Alejandro
came to tell him that a deal might be possible but that it would take some
work. And then it turned out that the deal was actually a pretty bad one:
Randy was not going to be exonerated as such. He was going to be deported
from the country under orders not to come back. Attorney Alejandro never
claimed that this was a particularly good deal, but something in his manner
made it clear that there was no point griping about it; The Decision Had
Been Made at levels that were not accessible.
He could very easily take care of the Hunk of Burning Love problem now
that he has privacy, but astonishes himself by electing not to. This may be
perverse; he's not sure. The last month and a half of total celibacy,
relieved only by nocturnal emissions at roughly two week intervals, has
definitely got him in a mental space he has never been to before, or come
near, or even heard about. When he was in jail he had to develop a fierce
mental discipline in order not to be distracted by thoughts of sex. He got
alarmingly good at it after a while. It's a highly unnatural approach to the
mind/body problem, pretty much the antithesis of every sixties and seventies
tinged philosophy that he ever imbibed from his Baby Boomer elders. It is
the kind of thing he associates with scary hardasses: Spartans, Victorians,
and mid twentieth century American military heroes. It has turned Randy into
something of a hardass in his approach to hacking, and meanwhile, he
suspects, it has got him into a much more intense and passionate head space
than he's ever known when it comes to matters of the heart. He won't really
know that until he comes face to face with Amy, which looks like it's going
to be a while, since he's just been kicked out of the country where she
lives and works. Just as an experiment, he decides he's going to keep his
hands off of himself for now. If it makes him a little tense and volatile
compared to his pathologically mellow West Coast self, then so be it. One
nice thing about being in Asia is that tense, volatile people blend right
in. It's not like anyone ever died from being horny.
So he arises from the bath unsullied and wraps himself in a vestal
white robe. His cell in Manila did not have a mirror. He knew he was
probably losing weight, but not until he climbs out of the bath and gives
himself a look in the mirror does he realize just how much. For the first
time since he was an adolescent, he has a waist, which makes a white
bathrobe into a quasi practical garment.
He's scarcely recognizable. Before the beginning of this the Third
Business Foray he kind of assumed that, going into his mid thirties, he had
figured out who he was, and that he'd keep being the way he was forever,
except with a gradually decaying body and gradually increasing net worth. He
didn't imagine it was possible to change so much, and he wonders where it's
going to end. But this is nothing more than an anomalous moment of
reflection. He shakes it off and gets back to his life.
The Nipponese have, and have always had, a marvelous skill with graphic
images this is clear in their manga and their anime, but reaches its fullest
expressive flower in safety ideograms. Licking red flames, buildings
splitting and falling as the jagged earth parts beneath them, a fleeing
figure silhouetted in a doorway, suspended in the stroboscopic flash of a
detonation. The written materials accompanying these images are, of course,
not understandable to Randy, and so there is nothing for his rational mind
to work on; the terrifying ideograms blaze, fragmentary nightmare images
popping up on walls, and in the drawers of his room's desk, whenever he lets
his guard down for a moment. What he can read is not exactly soothing.
Trying to sleep, he lies in bed, mentally checking the locations of his
bedside emergency flashlight and the pair of freebie slippers (much too
small) thoughtfully left there so that he can sprint out of the burning and
collapsing hotel without cutting his feet to sashimi when the next magnitude
8.0 tremblor shivers the windows out of their frames. He stares up at the
ceiling, which is fraught with safety equipment whose LEDs form a glowering
red constellation, a crouching figure known to the ancient Greeks as
Ganymede, the Anally Receptive Cup bearer, and to the Nipponese, as Hideo,
the Plucky Disaster Relief Worker, bending over to probe a pile of jagged
concrete slabs for anything that's squishy. All of this leaves him in a
state of free floating terror. He gets up at five in the morning, grabs two
capsules of Japanese Snack from his minibar, and leaves the hotel, following
one of the two emergency exit routes that he has memorized. He starts
wandering, thinking it would be fun to get lost. Getting lost happens in
about thirty seconds. He should have brought his GPS, and marked the
latitude and longitude of the hotel.
The latitude and longitude of Golgotha are expressed, in the Arethusa
intercept, in degrees, minutes, seconds, and tenths of a second of latitude
and longitude. A minute is a nautical mile, a second is about a hundred
feet. In the seconds figure, the Golgotha numbers have one digit after the
decimal point, which implies a precision of ten feet. GPS receivers can give
you that kind of precision. Randy's not so sure about the sextants that the
Nipponese surveyors presumably used during the war. Before he left, he wrote
the numbers down on a scrap of paper, but he rounded off the seconds part
and just expressed it in the form of "XX degrees and twenty and a half
minutes" implying a precision of a couple of thousand feet. Then he invented
three other locations in the same general vicinity, but miles away, and put
them all into a list, with the real location being number two on the list.
Above it he wrote "Who owns these parcels of land?" or, in crypto speak,
WHOOW NSTHE SEPAR etc. and then spent an almost unbelievably tedious evening
synchronizing the two decks of cards and encrypting the entire message with
the Solitaire algorithm. He gave the ciphertext and the unused deck to Enoch
Root, then swiped the plaintext through some of the leftover grease in his
dinner tray and left it by the open drain. Within the hour, a rat had come
around and eaten it.
He wanders all day. At first it is just bleak and depressing and he
thinks he's going to give up very soon, but then he gets into the spirit of
it, and learns how to eat: you approach gentlemen on streetcorners selling
little fried octopus balls and make neolithic grunting noises and proffer
yen until you discover food in your hands and then you eat it.
Through some kind of nerdish homing instinct he finds Akihabara, the
electronics district, and spends a while wandering through stores looking at
all of the consumer electronics that will go on sale in the States a year
from now. That's where he is when his GSM telephone rings.
"Hello?"
"It's me. I'm standing behind a fat yellow line."
"Which airport?"
"Narita."
"Delighted to hear it. Tell your driver to take you to the Mr. Donut in
Akihabara."
Randy's there an hour later, flipping through a phone book sized manga
epic, when Avi walks in. The unspoken Randy/Avi greeting protocol dictates
that they hug each other at this point, so they do, somewhat to the
astonishment of their fellow donut eaters who usually make do with bowing.
The Mr. Donut is a three level affair jammed into a sliver of real estate
with approximately the same footprint as a spiral staircase and is quite
crowded with people who took compulsory English in their excellent and
highly competitive schools. Besides, Randy broadcast the time and location
of the meeting over a radio an hour ago. So as long as they are there, Randy
and Avi talk about relatively innocuous things. Then they go out for a
stroll. Avi knows his way around this neighborhood. He leads Randy through a
doorway and into nerdvana.
"Many people," Avi explains, "do not know that the word normally
spelled and pronounced 'nirvana' can be more accurately transliterated
'nirdvana' or, arguably, 'nerdvana.' This is nerdvana. The nucleus around
which Akihabara accreted. This is where the pasocon otaku go to get the
stuff they need."
"Pasocon otaku?"
"Personal computer nerds," Avi says. "But as in so many other things,
the Nipponese take it to an extreme that we barely imagine."
The place is laid out precisely like an Asian food market: it is a maze
of narrow aisles winding among tiny stalls, barely larger than phone booths,
where merchants have their wares laid out for inspection. The first thing
they see is a wire stall: at least a hundred reels of different types and
gauges of wire in gaily hued plastic insulation. "How apropos!" Avi says,
admiring the display, "we need to talk about wires." It need not be stated
that this place is a great venue for a conversation: the paths between the
stalls are so narrow that they have to walk in single file. No one can
follow them, or get close to them, here, without being ridiculously blatant.
An array of soldering irons bristles wickedly, giving one stall the look of
a martial arts store. Coffee can sized potentiometers are stacked in
pyramids. "Tell me about wires," Randy says.
"I don't need to tell you how dependent we are on submarine cables,"
Avi says.
" 'We' meaning the Crypt, or society in general?"
"Both. Obviously the Crypt can't even function without communications
linkages to the outside world. But the Internet and everything else are just
as dependent on cables."
A pasocon otaku in a trench coat, holding a plastic bowl as shopping
cart, hunches over a display of gleaming copper toroidal coils that look to
have been hand polished by the owner. Finger sized halogen spotlights
mounted on an overhead rack emphasize their geometric perfection.
"So?"
"So, cables are vulnerable."
They wander past a stall that specializes in banana plugs, with a
sideline in alligator clips, arranged in colorful rosettes around disks of
cardboard.
"Those cables used to be owned by PTAs. Which were basically just
branches of governments. Hence they pretty much did what governments told
them to. But the new cables going in today are owned and controlled by
corporations beholden to no one except their investors. Puts certain
governments in a position they don't like very much."
"Okay," Randy says, "they used to have ultimate control over how
information flowed between countries in that they ran the PTTs that ran the
cables."
"Yes."
"Now they don't."
"That's right. There's been this big transfer of power that has taken
place under their noses, without their having foreseen it." Avi stops in
front of a stall that sells LEDs in all manner of bubble gum colors, packed
into tiny boxes like ripe tropical fruits in crates, and standing up from
cubes of foam like psychedelic mushrooms. He is making big transfer of power
gestures with his hands, but to Randy's increasingly warped mind this looks
like a man moving heavy gold bars from one pile to another. Across the
aisle, they are being stared at by the dead eyes of a hundred miniature
video cameras. Avi continues, "And as we've talked about many times, there
are many reasons why different governments might want to control the flow of
information. China might want to institute political censorship, whereas the
U.S. might want to regulate electronic cash transfers so that they can keep
collecting taxes. In the old days they could ultimately do this insofar as
they owned the cables."
"But now they can't," Randy says.
"Now they can't, and this change happened very fast, or at least it
looked fast to government with its retarded intellectual metabolism, and now
they are way behind the curve, and scared and pissed off, and starting to
lash out."
"They are?"
"They are."
"In what way are they lashing out?"
A toggle switch merchant snaps a rag over rows and columns of stainless
steel merchandise. The tip of the rag breaks the sound barrier and generates
a tiny sonic pop that blasts a dust mote from the top of a switch. Everyone
is politely ignoring them. "Do you have any idea what down time on a state
of the art cable costs nowadays?"
"Of course I do," Randy says. "It can be hundreds of thousands of
dollars a minute."
"That's right. And it takes at least a couple of days to repair a
broken cable. A couple of days. A single break in a cable can cost the
companies that own it tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in lost
revenue."
"But that hasn't been that much of an issue," Randy says. "The cables
are plowed in so deeply now. They're only exposed in the deep ocean.
"Yes where only an entity with the naval resources of a major
government could sever them."
"Oh, shit!"
"This is the new balance of power, Randy."
"You can't seriously be telling me that governments are threatening to
"
"The Chinese have already done it. They cut an older cable first
generation optical fiber joining Korea to Nippon. The cable wasn't that
important they only did it as a warning shot. And what's the rule of thumb
about governments cutting submarine cables?"
"That it's like nuclear war," Randy says. "Easy to start. Devastating
in its results. So no one does it."
"But if the Chinese have cut a cable, then other governments with a
vested interest in throttling information flow can say, 'Hey, the Chinese
did it, we need to show that we can retaliate in kind.' "
"Is that actually happening?"
"No, no, no!" Avi says. They've stopped in front of the largest display
of needlenose pliers Randy has ever seen. "It's all posturing. It's not
aimed at other governments so much as at the entrepreneurs who own and
operate the new cables."
Light dawns in Randy's mind. "Such as the Dentist."
"The Dentist has put more money into privately financed submarine
cables than just about anyone. He has a minority stake in that cable that
the Chinese cut between Korea and Nippon. So he's trapped like a rat. He has
no choice no choice at all other than to do as he's told."
"And who's giving the orders?"
"I'm sure that the Chinese are very big in this they don't have any
internal checks and balances in their government, so they are more prone to
do something that is grossly irregular like this."
"And they obviously have the most to lose from unfettered information
flow."
"Yeah. But I'm just cynical enough to suspect that a whole lot of other
governments are right behind them."
"If that's true," Randy says, "then everything is completely fucked.
Sooner or later a cable cutting war is going to break out. All the cables
will get chopped through. End of story."
"The world doesn't work that way anymore, Randy. Governments get
together and negotiate. Like they did in Brussels just after Christmas. They
come up with agreements. War does not break out. Usually."
"So there's an agreement in place?"
Avi shrugs. "As best as I can make out. A balance of power has been
struck between the people who own navies i.e., the people who have the
ability to cut cables with impunity and the people who own and operate
cables. Each side is afraid of what the other can do to it. So they have
come to a genteel understanding. The bureaucratic incarnation of it is
IDTRO."
"And the Dentist is in on it."
"Precisely."
"So maybe the Ordo siege really was ultimately directed by the
government."
"I very much doubt that Comstock ordered it," Avi says. "I think it was
the Dentist demonstrating his loyalty."
"How about the Crypt? Is the sultan party to this understanding?"
Avi shrugs. "Pragasu isn't saying much. I told him what I have just
told you. I laid out my theory of what is going on. He looked tolerantly
amused. He did not confirm or deny. But he did give me cause to believe that
the Crypt is still going to be up and running on schedule."
"See, I find that hard to believe," Randy says. "It seems like the
Crypt is their worst nightmare."
"Whose worst nightmare?"
"Any government that needs to collect taxes."
"Randy, governments will always find ways to collect taxes. If worse
comes to worst, the IRS can just base everything on property taxes you can't
hide real estate in cyberspace. But keep in mind that the U.S. government is
only a part of this thing the Chinese are very big in it, too."
"Wing!" Randy blurts. He and Avi cringe and look around them. The
pasocon otaku don't care. A man selling rainbow colored wire ribbons eyes
them with polite curiosity, then looks away. They move out of the bazaar and
onto the sidewalk. It has started to rain. A dozen nearly identical young
women in miniskirts and high heels march in wedge formation down the center
of the street sporting huge umbrellas blazoned with the face of a video game
character.
"Wing's digging for gold in Bundok," Randy says. "He thinks he knows
where Golgotha is. If he finds it, he'll need a really special kind of
bank."
"He's not the only guy in the world who needs a special bank," Avi
says. "Over the years, Switzerland has done a hell of a lot of business with
governments, or people connected with governments. Why didn't Hitler invade
Switzerland? Because the Nazis couldn't have done without it. So the Crypt
definitely fills a niche."
"Okay," Randy says, "so the Crypt will be allowed to remain in
existence."
"It has to. The world needs it," Avi says. "And we'll need it, when we
dig up Golgotha."
Suddenly Avi's got an impish look on his face; he looks to have shed
about ten years of age. This gets a belly laugh out of Randy, the first time
he's really laughed in a couple of months. His mood has gone through some
seismic shift all of a sudden, the whole world looks different to him. "It's
not enough to know where it is. Enoch Root says that these hoards were
buried deep in mines, down in the hard rock. So we're not going to get that
gold out without launching a pretty major engineering project."
"Why do you think I'm in Tokyo?" Avi says. "C'mon, let's get back to
the hotel."
While Avi's checking in, Randy collects his messages from the front
desk, and finds a FedEx envelope waiting for him. If it was tampered with en
route, the tamperers did a good job of covering their traces. It contains a
hand enciphered message from Enoch Root, who evidently has figured out some
way to get himself sprung from the clink with his scruples intact. It is
several lines of seemingly random block letters, in groups of five. Randy
has been carrying around a deck of cards ever since he got sprung from jail:
the prearranged key that will decipher this message. The prospect of several
hours of solitaire seems a lot less inviting in Tokyo than it did in prison
and he knows it will take that long to decipher a message as long as this
one. But he's already programmed his laptop to play Solitaire according to
Enoch's rules, and he's already punched in the key that is embodied in the
deck that Enoch gave him and stored it on a floppy disk that he keeps rubber
banded to the deck in his pocket. So he and Avi go up to Avi's room, pausing
along the way to collect Randy's laptop, and while Avi sorts through his
messages, Randy types in the ciphertext and gets it deciphered. "Enoch's
message says that the land above Golgotha is owned by the Church," Randy
mutters, "but in order to reach it we have to travel across land owned by
Wing, and by some Filipinos."
Avi doesn't appear to hear him. He's fixated on a message slip.
"What's up?" Randy asks.
"A little change of plans for tonight. I hope you have a really good
suit with you."
"I didn't know we had plans for tonight."
"We were going to meet with Goto Furudenendu," Avi says. "I sort of
figured that they were the right guys to approach about digging a big hole
in the ground."
"I'm with you," Randy says. "What's the change in plan?"
"The old man is coming down from his retreat in Hokkaido. He wants to
buy us dinner."
"What old man?"
"The founder of the company, Goto Furudenendu's father," Avi says.
'Protegé of Douglas MacArthur. Multi multi multi millionaire. Golf partner
and confidant of prime ministers. An old guy by the name of Goto Dengo."
Chapter 93 PROJECT X
It is early in April of the year 1945. A middle aged nipponese widow
feels the earth turning over, and scurries out of her paper house, fearing a
temblor. Her house is on the island of Kyushu, near the sea. She gazes out
over the ocean and sees a black ship on the horizon, steaming out of a
rising sun of its own making: for when its guns go off the entire vessel is
shrouded in red fire for a moment. She hopes that the Yamato, the world's
greatest battleship, which steamed away over that horizon a few days ago,
has returned victorious, and is firing its guns in celebration. But this is
an American battleship and it is dropping shells into' the port that the
Yamato just left, making the earth's bowels heave as if it were preparing to
throw up.
Until this moment, the Nipponese woman has been convinced that the
armed forces of her nation were crushing the Americans, the British, the
Dutch, and the Chinese at every turn. This apparition must be some kind of
bizarre suicide raid. But the black ship stays there all day long, heaving
ton after ton of dynamite into sacred soil. No airplanes come out to bomb
it, no ships to shell it, not even a submarine to torpedo it.
In a shocking display of bad form, Patton has lunged across the Rhine
ahead of schedule, to the irritation of Montgomery who has been making
laborious plans and preparations to do it first.
The German submarine U 234 is in the North Atlantic, headed for the
Cape of Good Hope, carrying ten containers holding twelve hundred pounds of
uranium oxide. The uranium is bound for Tokyo where it will be used in some
experiments, still in a preliminary phase, towards the construction of a new
and extremely powerful explosive device.
General Curtis LeMay's Air Force has spent much of the last month
flying dangerously low over Nipponese cities showering them with incendiary
devices. A quarter of Tokyo has been leveled; 83,000 people died there, and
this does not count the similar raids on Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe.
The night after the Osaka raid, some Marines raised a flag on Iwo Jima
and they put a picture of it in all the papers.
Within the last few days, the Red Army, now the most terrible force on
earth, has taken Vienna and the oil fields of Hungary, and the Soviets have
declared that their Neutrality Pact with Nippon will be allowed to expire
rather than being renewed.
Okinawa has just been invaded. The fighting is the worst ever. The
invasion is supported by a vast fleet against which the Nipponese have
launched everything they have. The Yamato came after them, her eighteen inch
guns at the ready, carrying only enough fuel for a one way voyage. But the
cryptanalysts of the U.S. Navy intercepted and decrypted her orders and the
great ship was sent to the bottom with 2,500 men. The Nipponese have
launched the first of their Floating Chrysanthemum assaults against the
invasion fleet: clouds of kamikaze planes, human bombs, human torpedoes,
speedboats packed with explosives.
To the irritation and bafflement of the German High Command, the
Nipponese government has sent a message to them, requesting that, in the
event that all of Germany's European naval bases are lost, the Kriegsmarine
should be given orders to continue operating with the Nipponese in the Far
East. The message is encrypted in Indigo. It is duly intercepted and read by
the Allies.
In the United Kingdom, Dr. Alan Mathison Turing, considering the war to
be effectively finished, has long since turned his attentions away from the
problem of voice encryption and into the creation of thinking machines. For
about ten months ever since the finished Colossus Mark II was delivered to
Bletchley Park he has had the opportunity to work with a truly programmable
computing machine. Alan invented these machines long before one was ever
built, and has never needed hands on experience in order to think about
them, but his experiences with Colossus Mark II have helped him to solidify
some ideas of how the next machine ought to be designed. He thinks of it as
a postwar machine, but that's only because he's in Europe and hasn't been
concerned with the problem of conquering Nippon as much as Waterhouse has.
"I've been working on BURY and DISINTER," says a voice, coming out of
small holes in a Bakelite headset clamped over Waterhouse's head. The voice
is oddly distorted, nearly obscured by white noise and a maddening buzz.
"Please say it again?" Lawrence says, pressing the phones against his
ear.
"BURY and DISINTER," says the voice. "They are, er, sets of
instructions for the machine to execute, to carry out certain algorithms.
They are programmes.
"Right! Sorry, I just wasn't able to hear you the first time. Yes, I've
been working on them too," Waterhouse says.
"The next machine will have a memory storage system, Lawrence, in the
form of sound waves traveling down a cylinder filled with mercury we stole
the idea from John Wilkins, founder of the Royal Society, who came up with
it three hundred years ago, except he was going to use air instead of
quicksilver. I excuse me, Lawrence, did you say you had been working on
them?"
"I did the same thing with tubes. Valves, as you would call them."
"Well that's all well and good for you Yanks," Alan says, "I suppose if
you are infinitely rich you could make a BURY/DISINTER system out of steam
locomotives, or something, and retain a staff of thousands to run around
squirting oil on the squeaky bits."
"The mercury line is a good idea," Waterhouse admits. "Very
resourceful."
"Have you actually gotten BURY and DISINTER to work with valves?"
"Yes. My DISINTER works better than our shovel expeditions," Lawrence
says. "Did you ever find those silver bars you buried?"
"No," Alan says absently. "They are lost. Lost in the noise of the
world."
"You know, that was a Turing test I just gave you," Lawrence says.
"Beg pardon?"
"This damned machine screws up your voice so bad I can't tell you from
Winston Churchill," Lawrence says. "So the only way I can verify it's you is
by getting you to say things that only Alan Turing could say."
He hears Alan's sharp, high pitched laugh at the other end of the line.
It's him all right.
"This Project X thing really is appalling," Alan says. "Delilah is
infinitely superior. I wish you could see it for yourself. Or hear it."
Alan is in London, in a command bunker somewhere. Lawrence is in Manila
Bay, on the Rock, the island of Corregidor. They are joined by a thread of
copper that goes all the way around the world. There are many such threads
traversing the floors of the world's oceans now, but only a few special ones
go to rooms like this. The rooms are in Washington, London, Melbourne, and
now, Corregidor.
Lawrence looks through a thick glass window into the engineer's booth,
where a phonograph record is playing on the world's most precise and
expensive turntable. This is, likewise, the most valuable record ever turned
out: it is filled with what is intended to be perfectly random white noise.
The noise is electronically combined with the sound of Lawrence's voice
before it is sent down the wire. Once it gets to London, the noise (which is
being read off an identical phonograph record there) is subtracted from his
voice, and the result sent into Alan Turing's headphones. It all depends on
the two phonographs being perfectly synchronized. The only way to
synchronize them is to transmit that maddening buzzing noise, a carrier
wave, along with the voice signal. If all goes well, the opposite phonograph
player can lock onto the buzz and spin its wax in lockstep.
The phonograph record is, in other words, a one time pad. Some where in
New York, in the bowels of Bell Labs, behind a locked and guarded door
stenciled PROJECT X, technicians are turning out more of these things, the
very latest chart topping white noise. They stamp out a few copies, dispatch
them by courier to the Project X sites around the globe, then destroy the
originals.
They would not be having this conversation at all, except that a couple
of years ago Alan went to Greenwich Village and worked at Bell Labs for a
few months, while Lawrence was on Qwghlm. H.M. Government sent him there to
evaluate this Project X thing and let them know whether it was truly secure.
Alan decided that it was then went back home and began working on a much
better one, called Delilah.
What the hell does this have to do with dead Chinese abacus slaves?
To Lawrence, staring through the window at the spinning white noise
disk, the connection could hardly be clearer. He says, "Last I spoke to you,
you were working on generating random noise for Delilah."
"Yes," Alan says absently. That was a long time ago, and that whole
project has been BURIED in his memory storage system; it will take him a
minute or two to DISINTER it.
"What sorts of algorithms did you consider to create that noise?"
There is another five second pause, then Alan launches into a
disquisition about mathematical functions for generating pseudorandom number
sequences. Alan had a good British boarding school education, and his
utterances tend to be well structured, with outline form, topic sentences,
the whole bit:
PSEUDO RANDOM NUMBERS
I. Caveat: they aren't really random, of course, they just look that
way, and that's why the pseudo
II. Overview of the Problem
A. It seems as if it should be easy
B. Actually it turns out to be really hard
C. Consequences of failure: Germans decrypt our secret messages,
millions die, humanity is enslaved, world plunged into an eternal Dark Age
D. How can you tell if a series of numbers is random
1, 2, 3, . . . (A list of different statistical tests for randomness,
the advantages and disadvantages of each)
III. A bunch of stuff that I, Alan Turing, tried
A, B, C, . . . (A list of different mathematical functions that Alan
used to generate random numbers; how almost all of them failed abjectly;
Alan's initial confidence is replaced by surprise, then exasperation, then
despair, and finally by guarded confidence as he at last finds some
techniques that work)
IV. Conclusions
A. It's harder than it looks
B. It's not for the unwary
C. It can be done if you keep your wits about you
D. In retrospect a surprisingly interesting mathematical problem
deserving of further research
When Alan finishes with this perfectly structured whirlwind tour of the
Surprising World of Pseudo Randonmess, Lawrence says, "How about zeta
functions?"
"Didn't even consider those," Alan says.
Lawrence's mouth drops open. He can see his own semitransparent
reflection in the window, superimposed on the spinning phonograph, and he
sees that he has got a sort of mildly outraged look on his face. There must
be something conspicuously nonrandom about the output of the zeta function,
something so obvious to Alan that he dismissed it out of hand. But Lawrence
has never seen any such thing. He knows that Alan is smarter than he is, but
he's not used to being so desperately far behind him.
"Why. . . why not?" he finally stammers.
"Because of Rudy!" Alan thunders. "You and I and Rudy all worked on
that damn machine at Princeton! Rudy knows that you and I have the knowledge
to build such a device. So it is the first thing that he would assume we
would use."
"Ah." Lawrence sighs. "But leaving that aside, the zeta function might
still be a good way of doing it."
"It might," Alan says guardedly, "but I have not investigated it.
You're not thinking of using it, are you?"
Lawrence tells Alan about the abaci. Even through the noise and the
buzz, he can tell that Alan is thunderstruck. There is a pause while the
technicians at each end flip over their phonograph records. When the
connection is reestablished, Alan's still very excited. "Let me tell you
something more," Lawrence says.
"Yes, go ahead."
"You know that the Nipponese use a plethora of different codes, and we
still have only broken some of them."
"Yes."
"There is an unbroken cipher system that Central Bureau calls Arethusa.
It's incredibly rare. Only thirty some Arethusa messages have ever been
intercepted."
"Some company code?" Alan asks. This is a good guess; each major
Nipponese corporation had its own code system before the war, and much
effort has gone into stealing code books for, and otherwise breaking, the
Mitsubishi code, to name one example.
"We can't figure out the sources and destinations of Arethusa
messages," Lawrence continues, "because they use a unique site code system.
We can only guess at their origins by using huffduff. And huffduff tells us
that most of the Arethusa messages have originated from submarines. Possibly
just a single submarine, plying the route between Europe and Southeast Asia.
We have also seen them from Sweden, from London, Buenos Aires, and Manila."
"Buenos Aires? Sweden?"
"Yes. And so, Alan, I took an interest in Arethusa."
"Well, I don't blame you!"
"The message format matches that of Azure/Pufferfish."
"Rudy's system?"
"Yes."
"Nice work on that, by the way."
"Thank you, Alan. As you must have heard by now, it is based on zeta
functions. Which you did not even consider using for Delilah because you
were afraid Rudy would think of it. And this raises the question of whether
Rudy intended us to break Azure/Pufferfish all along."
"Yes, it does. But why would he want us to?"
"I have no idea. The old Azure/Puffeffish messages may contain some
clues. I am having my Digital Computer generate retroactive one time pads so
that I can decrypt those messages and read them."
"Well, then, I shall have Colossus do the same. It is busy just now,"
Alan says, "working on Fish decrypts. But I don't think Hitler has much
longer to go. When he is finished, I can probably get down to Bletchley and
decrypt those messages."
"I'm also working on Arethusa," Lawrence says. "I'm guessing it all has
something to do with gold."
"Why do you say that?" Alan says. But at this point the tone arm of the
phonograph reaches the end of its spiral groove and lifts off the record.
Time's up. Bell Labs, and the might of the Allied governments, did not
install the Project X network so that mathematicians could indulge in
endless chitchat about obscure functions.
Chapter 94 LANDFALL
The sailing ship Gertrude wheezes into the cove shortly after sunrise,
and Bischoff cannot help but laugh. Barnacles have grown so thick around her
hull that the hull itself (he supposes) could be removed entirely, and the
shell of barnacles could be outfitted with a mast and canvas, and sailed to
Tahiti. A hundred yard long skein of seaweed, rooted in those barnacles,
trails behind her, making a long greasy disturbance in her wake. Her mast
has evidently been snapped off at least once. It has been replaced by a rude
jury rigged thing, a tree