Нил Стивенсон. Криптономикон (engl)
Neal Stephenson. Cryptonomicon
Neal Stephenson,
CRYPTONOMICON
"There is a remarkably close parallel between the problems of the physicist
and those of the cryptographer. The system on which a message is enciphered
corresponds to the laws of the universe, the intercepted messages to the
evidence available, the keys for a day or a message to important constants
which have to be determined. The correspondence is very close, but the
subject matter of cryptography is very easily dealt with by discrete
machinery, physics not so easily."
Alan Turing
This morning [Imelda Marcos] offered the latest in a series of explanations
of the billions of dollars that she and her husband, who died in 1989, are
believed to have stolen during his presidency.
"It so coincided that Marcos had money," she said. "After the Bretton Woods
agreement he started buying gold from Fort Knox. Three thousand tons, then
4,000 tons. I have documents for these: 7,000 tons. Marcos was so smart. He
had it all. It's funny; America didn't understand him."
The New York Times, Monday, 4 March, 1996
Prologue
Two tires fly. Two wail.
A bamboo grove, all chopped down
From it, warring songs.
...is the best that Corporal Bobby Shaftoe can do on short notice he's
standing on the running board, gripping his Springfield with one hand and
the rearview mirror with the other, so counting the syllables on his fingers
is out of the question. Is "tires" one syllable or two? How about "wail?"
The truck finally makes up its mind not to tip over, and thuds back onto
four wheels. The wail and the moment are lost. Bobby can still hear the
coolies singing, though, and now too there's the gunlike snicking of the
truck's clutch linkage as Private Wiley downshifts. Could Wiley be losing
his nerve? And, in the back, under the tarps, a ton and a half of file
cabinets clanking, code books slaloming, fuel spanking the tanks of Station
Alpha's electrical generator. The modern world's hell on haiku writers:
"Electrical generator" is, what, eight syllables? You couldn't even fit that
onto the second line!
"Are we allowed to run over people?" Private Wiley inquires, and then
mashes the horn button before Bobby Shaftoe can answer. A Sikh policeman
hurdles a night soil cart. Shaftoe's gut reaction is: Sure, what're they
going to do, declare war on us? but as the highest ranking man on this truck
he's probably supposed to be using his head or something, so he doesn't
blurt it out just yet. He takes stock of the situation:
Shanghai, 1645 hours, Friday, the 28th of November 1941. Bobby Shaftoe,
and the other half dozen Marines on his truck, are staring down the length
of Kiukiang Road, onto which they've just made this careening high speed
turn. Cathedral's going by to the right, so that means they are, what? two
blocks away from the Bund. A Yangtze River Patrol gunboat is tied up there,
waiting for the stuff they've got in the back of this truck. The only real
problem is that those particular two blocks are inhabited by about five
million Chinese people.
Now these Chinese are sophisticated urbanites, not suntanned yokels
who've never seen cars before they'll get out of your way if you drive fast
and honk your horn. And indeed many of them flee to one side of the street
or the other, producing the illusion that the truck is moving faster than
the forty three miles an hour shown on its speedometer.
But the bamboo grove in Bobby Shaftoe's haiku has not been added just
to put a little Oriental flavor into the poem and wow the folks back home in
Oconomowoc. There is a lot of heavy bamboo in front of this truck, dozens of
makeshift turnpikes blocking their path to the river, for the officers of
the U.S. Navy's Asiatic Fleet, and of the Fourth Marines, who dreamed up
this little operation forgot to take the Friday Afternoon factor into
account. As Bobby Shaftoe could've explained to them, if only they'd
bothered to ask a poor dumb jarhead, their route took them through the heart
of the banking district. Here you've got the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank of
course, City Bank, Chase Manhattan, the Bank of America, and BBME and the
Agricultural Bank of China and any number of crappy little provincial banks,
and several of those banks have contracts with what's left of the Chinese
Government to print currency. It must be a cutthroat business because they
slash costs by printing it on old newspapers, and if you know how to read
Chinese, you can see last year's news stories and polo scores peeking
through the colored numbers and pictures that transform these pieces of
paper into legal tender.
As every chicken peddler and rickshaw operator in Shanghai knows, the
money printing contracts stipulate that all of the bills these banks print
have to be backed by such and such an amount of silver; i.e., anyone should
be able to walk into one of those banks at the end of Kiukiang Road and slap
down a pile of bills and (provided that those bills were printed by that
same bank) receive actual metallic silver in exchange.
Now if China weren't right in the middle of getting systematically
drawn and quartered by the Empire of Nippon, it would probably send official
bean counters around to keep tabs on how much silver was actually present in
these banks' vaults, and it would all be quiet and orderly. But as it
stands, the only thing keeping these banks honest is the other banks.
Here's how they do it: during the normal course of business, lots of
paper money will pass over the counters of (say) Chase Manhattan Bank.
They'll take it into a back room and sort it, throwing into money boxes (a
couple of feet square and a yard deep, with ropes on the four corners) all
of the bills that were printed by (say) Bank of America in one, all of the
City Bank bills into another. Then, on Friday afternoon they will bring in
coolies. Each coolie, or pair of coolies, will of course have his great big
long bamboo pole with him a coolie without his pole is like a China Marine
without his nickel plated bayonet and will poke their pole through the ropes
on the corners of the box. Then one coolie will get underneath each end of
the pole, hoisting the box into the air. They have to move in unison or else
the box begins flailing around and everything gets out of whack. So as they
head towards their destination whatever bank whose name is printed on the
bills in their box they sing to each other, and plant their feet on the
pavement in time to the music. The pole's pretty long, so they are that far
apart, and they have to sing loud to hear each other, and of course each
pair of coolies in the street is singing their own particular song, trying
to drown out all of the others so that they don't get out of step.
So ten minutes before closing time on Friday afternoon, the doors of
many banks burst open and numerous pairs of coolies march in singing, like
the curtain raiser on a fucking Broadway musical, slam their huge boxes of
tattered currency down, and demand silver in exchange. All of the banks do
this to each other. Sometimes, they'll all do it on the same Friday,
particularly at times like 28 November 1941, when even a grunt like Bobby
Shaftoe can understand that it's better to be holding silver than piles of
old cut up newspaper. And that is why, once the normal pedestrians and food
cart operators and furious Sikh cops have scurried out of the way, and
plastered themselves up against the clubs and shops and bordellos on
Kiukiang Road, Bobby Shaftoe and the other Marines on the truck still cannot
even see the gunboat that is their destination, because of this horizontal
forest of mighty bamboo poles. They cannot even hear the honking of their
own truck horn because of the wild throbbing pentatonic cacophony of coolies
singing. This ain't just your regular Friday P.M. Shanghai bank district
money rush. This is an ultimate settling of accounts before the whole
Eastern Hemisphere catches fire. The millions of promises printed on those
slips of bumwad will all be kept or broken in the next ten minutes; actual
pieces of silver and gold will move, or they won't. It is some kind of
fiduciary Judgment Day.
"Jesus Christ, I can't " Private Wiley hollers.
"The captain said don't stop for any reason whatsofuckinever," Shaftoe
reminds him. He's not telling Wiley to run over the coolies, he's reminding
Wiley that if he refrains from running over them, they will have some
explaining to do which will be complicated by the fact that the captain's
right behind them in a car stuffed with Tommy Gun toting China Marines. And
from the way the captain's been acting about this Station Alpha thing, it's
pretty clear that he already has a few preliminary strap marks on his ass,
courtesy of some admiral in Pearl Harbor or even (drumroll) Marine Barracks,
Eight and Eye Streets Southeast, Washington, D.C.
***
Shaftoe and the other Marines have always known Station Alpha as a
mysterious claque of pencil necked swabbies who hung out on the roof of a
building in the International Settlement in a shack of knot pocked cargo
pallet planks with antennas sticking out of it every which way. If you stood
there long enough you could see some of those antennas moving, zeroing in on
something out to sea. Shaftoe even wrote a haiku about it:
Antenna searches
Retriever's nose in the wind
Ether's far secrets
This was only his second haiku ever clearly not up to November 1941
standards and he cringes to remember it.
But in no way did any of the Marines comprehend what a big deal Station
Alpha was until today. Their job had turned out to involve wrapping a ton of
equipment and several tons of paper in tarps and moving it out of doors.
Then they spent Thursday tearing the shack apart, making it into a bonfire,
and burning certain books and papers.
"Sheeeyit!" Private Wiley hollers. Only a few of the coolies have
gotten out of the way, or even seen them. But then there is this fantastic
boom from the river, like the sound of a mile thick bamboo pole being
snapped over God's knee. Half a second later there're no coolies in the
street anymore just a lot of boxes with unmanned bamboo poles teeter
tottering on them, bonging into the streets like wind chimes. Above, a furry
mushroom of grey smoke rises from the gunboat. Wiley shifts up to high gear
and floors it. Shaftoe cringes against the truck's door and lowers his head,
hoping that his campy Great War doughboy helmet will be good for something.
Then money boxes start to rupture and explode as the truck rams through
them. Shaftoe peers up through a blizzard of notes and sees giant bamboo
poles soaring and bounding and windmilling toward the waterfront.
The leaves of Shanghai:
Pale doorways in a steel sky.
Winter has begun.
Chapter 1 BARRENS
Let's set the existence of God issue aside for a later volume, and just
stipulate that in some way, self replicating organisms came into existence
on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either
by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more
direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and
their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found
some way to survive and to propagate. After about three billion years of
this sometimes zany, frequently tedious fugue of carnality and carnage,
Godfrey Waterhouse IV was born, in Murdo, South Dakota, to Blanche, the wife
of a Congregational preacher named Bunyan Waterhouse. Like every other
creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous
badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace
his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous
badasses to that first self replicating gizmo which, given the number and
variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most
stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a
stupendous badass was dead.
As nightmarishly lethal, memetically programmed death machines went,
these were the nicest you could ever hope to meet. In the tradition of his
namesake (the Puritan writer John Bunyan, who spent much of his life in
jail, or trying to avoid it) the Rev. Waterhouse did not preach in any one
place for long. The church moved him from one small town in the Dakotas to
another every year or two. It is possible that Godfrey found the lifestyle
more than a little alienating, for, sometime during the course of his
studies at Fargo Congregational College, he bolted from the fold and, to the
enduring agony of his parents, fell into worldly pursuits, and ended up,
somehow, getting a Ph.D. in Classics from a small private university in
Ohio. Academics being no less nomadic than Congregational preachers, he took
work where he could find it. He became a Professor of Greek and Latin at
Bolger Christian College (enrollment 322) in West Point, Virginia, where the
Mattaponi and Pamunkey Rivers came together to form the estuarial James, and
the loathsome fumes of the big paper mill permeated every drawer, every
closet, even the interior pages of books. Godfrey's young bride, nee Alice
Pritchard, who had grown up following her itinerant preacher father across
the vastnesses of eastern Montana where air smelt of snow and sage threw up
for three months. Six months later she gave birth to Lawrence Pritchard
Waterhouse.
The boy had a peculiar relationship with sound. When a fire engine
passed, he was not troubled by the siren's howl or the bell's clang. But
when a hornet got into the house and swung across the ceiling in a broad
Lissajous, droning almost inaudibly, he cried in pain at the noise. And if
he saw or smelled something that scared him, he would clap his hands over
his ears.
One noise that troubled him not at all was the pipe organ in the chapel
at Bolger Christian College. The chapel itself was nothing worth mentioning,
but the organ had been endowed by the paper mill family and would have
sufficed for a church four times the size. It nicely complemented the
organist, a retired high school math teacher who felt that certain
attributes of the Lord (violence and capriciousness in the Old Testament,
majesty and triumph in the New) could be directly conveyed into the souls of
the enpewed sinners through a kind of frontal sonic impregnation. That he
ran the risk of blowing out the stained glass windows was of no consequence
since no one liked them anyway, and the paper mill fumes were gnawing at the
interstitial lead. But after one little old lady too many staggered down the
aisle after a service, reeling from tinnitus, and made a barbed comment to
the minister about the exceedingly dramatic music, the organist was
replaced.
Nevertheless, he continued to give lessons on the instrument. Students
were not allowed to touch the organ until they were proficient at the piano,
and when this was explained to Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, he taught
himself in three weeks, how to play a Bach fugue, and signed up for organ
lessons. Since he was only five years old at the time, he was unable to
reach both the manuals and the pedals, and had to play standing or rather
strolling, from pedal to pedal.
When Lawrence was twelve, the organ broke down. That paper mill family
had not left any endowment for maintenance, so the math teacher decided to
have a crack at it. He was in poor health and required a nimble assistant:
Lawrence, who helped him open up the hood of the thing. For the first time
in all those years, the boy saw what had been happening when he had been
pressing those keys.
For each stop each timbre, or type of sound, that the organ could make
(viz. blockflöte, trumpet, piccolo) there was a separate row of pipes,
arranged in a line from long to short. Long pipes made low notes, short
high. The tops of the pipes defined a graph: not a straight line but an
upward tending curve. The organist/math teacher sat down with a few loose
pipes, a pencil, and paper, and helped Lawrence figure out why. When
Lawrence understood, it was as if the math teacher had suddenly played the
good part of Bach's Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor on a pipe organ the size
of the Spiral Nebula in Andromeda the part where Uncle Johann dissects the
architecture of the Universe in one merciless descending ever mutating
chord, as if his foot is thrusting through skidding layers of garbage until
it finally strikes bedrock. In particular, the final steps of the organist's
explanation were like a falcon's dive through layer after layer of pretense
and illusion, thrilling or sickening or confusing depending on what you
were. The heavens were riven open. Lawrence glimpsed choirs of angels
ranking off into geometrical infinity.
The pipes sprouted in parallel ranks from a broad flat box of
compressed air. All of the pipes for a given note but belonging to different
stops lined up with each other along one axis. All of the pipes for a given
stop but tuned at different pitches lined up with each other along the
other, perpendicular axis. Down there in the flat box of air, then, was a
mechanism that got air to the right pipes at the right times. When a key or
pedal was depressed, all of the pipes capable of sounding the corresponding
note would speak, as long as their stops were pulled out.
Mechanically, all of this was handled in a fashion that was perfectly
clear, simple, and logical. Lawrence had supposed that the machine must be
at least as complicated as the most intricate fugue that could be played on
it. Now he had learned that a machine, simple in its design, could produce
results of infinite complexity.
Stops were rarely used alone. They tended to be piled on top of each
other in combinations that were designed to take advantage of the available
harmonics (more tasty mathematics here!). Certain combinations in particular
were used over and over again. Lots of blockflötes, in varying lengths, for
the quiet Offertory, for example. The organ included an ingenious mechanism
called the preset, which enabled the organist to select a particular
combination of stops stops he himself had chosen instantly. He would punch a
button and several stops would bolt out from the console, driven by
pneumatic pressure, and in that instant the organ would become a different
instrument with entirely new timbres.
The next summer both Lawrence and Alice, his mother, were colonized by
a distant cousin a stupendous badass of a virus. Lawrence escaped from it
with an almost imperceptible tendency to drag one of his feet. Alice wound
up in an iron lung. Later, unable to cough effectively, she got pneumonia
and died.
Lawrence's father, Godfrey, freely confessed that he was not equal to
the burdens now laid on his shoulders. He resigned from his position at the
small college in Virginia and moved, with his son, to a small house in
Moorhead, Minnesota, next door to where Bunyan and Blanche had settled.
Later he got a job teaching at a nearby normal school.
At this point, all of the responsible adults in Lawrence's life seemed
to arrive at a tacit agreement that the best way to raise him certainly the
easiest was to leave him alone. On the rare occasions when Lawrence
requested adult intervention in his life, he was usually asking questions
that no one could answer. At the age of sixteen, having found nothing in the
local school system to challenge him, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse went off
to college. He matriculated at Iowa State College, which among other things
was the site of a Naval ROTC installation in which he was forcibly enrolled.
The Iowa State Naval ROTC had a band, and was delighted to hear that
Lawrence had an interest in music. Since it was hard to drill on the deck of
a dreadnought while playing a pipe organ, they issued him a glockenspiel and
a couple of little dingers.
When not marching back and forth on the flood plain of the Skunk River
making loud dinging noises, Lawrence was majoring in mechanical engineering.
He ended up doing poorly in this area because he had fallen in with a
Bulgarian professor named John Vincent Atanasoff and his graduate student,
Clifford Berry, who were building a machine that was intended to automate
the solution of some especially tedious differential equations.
The basic problem for Lawrence was that he was lazy. He had figured out
that everything was much simpler if, like Superman with his X ray vision,
you just stared through the cosmetic distractions and saw the underlying
mathematical skeleton. Once you found the math in a thing, you knew
everything about it, and you could manipulate it to your heart's content
with nothing more than a pencil and a napkin. He saw it in the curve of the
silver bars on his glockenspiel, saw it in the catenary arch of a bridge and
in the capacitor studded drum of Atanasoff and Berry's computing machine.
Actually pounding on the glockenspiel, riveting the bridge together, or
trying to figure out why the computing machine wasn't working were not as
interesting to him.
Consequently he got poor grades. From time to time, though, he would
perform some stunt on the blackboard that would leave his professor weak in
the knees and the other students baffled and hostile. Word got around.
At the same time, his grandmother Blanche was invoking her extensive
Congregational connections, working the angles on Lawrence's behalf, totally
unbeknownst to him. Her efforts culminated in triumph when Lawrence was
awarded an obscure scholarship, endowed by a St. Paul oat processing heir,
whose purpose was to send Midwestern Congregationalists to the Ivy League
for one year, which (evidently) was deemed a long enough period of time to
raise their IQs by a few crucial points but not long enough to debauch them.
So Lawrence got to be a sophomore in Princeton.
Now Princeton was an august school and going there was a great honor,
but no one got around to mentioning either of these facts to Lawrence, who
had no way of knowing. This had bad and good consequences. He accepted the
scholarship with a faintness of gratitude that infuriated the oat lord. On
the other hand, he adjusted to Princeton easily because it was just another
place . It reminded him of the nicer bits of Virginia, and there were some
nice pipe organs in town, though he was not all that happy with his
engineering homework of bridge designing and sprocket cutting problems. As
always, these eventually came down to math, most of which he could handle
easily. From time to time he would get stuck, though, which led him to the
Fine Hall: the headquarters of the Math Department.
There was a motley assortment of fellows wandering around in Fine Hall,
many sporting British or European accents. Administratively speaking, many
of these fellows were not members of the Math Department at all, but a
separate thing called IAS, which stood for Institute for Advanced something
or other. But they were all in the same building and they all knew a thing
or two about math, so the distinction didn't exist for Lawrence.
Quite a few of these men would pretend shyness when Lawrence sought
their advice, but others were at least willing to hear him out. For example:
he had come up with a way to solve a difficult sprocket tooth shape problem
that, as normally solved by engineers, would require any number of perfectly
reasonable but aesthetically displeasing approximations. Lawrence's solution
would provide exact results. The only draw back was that it would require a
quintillion slide rule operators a quintillion years to solve. Lawrence was
working on a radically different approach that, if it worked, would bring
those figures down to a trillion and a trillion respectively. Unfortunately,
Lawrence was unable to interest anyone at Fine Hall in anything as prosaic
as gears, until all of a sudden he made friends with an energetic British
fellow, whose name he promptly forgot, but who had been doing a lot of
literal sprocket making himself lately. This fellow was trying to build, of
all things, a mechanical calculating machine specifically a machine to
calculate certain values of the Riemann Zeta Function
where s is a complex number.
Lawrence found this zeta function to be no more and no less interesting
than any other math problem until his new friend assured him that it was
frightfully important, and that some of the best mathematicians in the world
had been gnawing on it for decades. The two of them ended up staying awake
until three in the morning working out the solution to Lawrence's sprocket
problem. Lawrence presented the results proudly to his engineering
professor, who snidely rejected it, on grounds of practicality, and gave him
a poor grade for his troubles.
Lawrence finally remembered, after several more contacts, that the name
of the friendly Brit was Al something or other. Because Al was a passionate
cyclist, he and Al went on quite a few bicycle rides through the countryside
of the Garden State. As they rode around New Jersey, they talked about math,
and particularly about machines for taking the dull part of math off their
hands.
But Al had been thinking about this subject for longer than Lawrence,
and had figured out that computing machines were much more than just labor
saving devices. He'd been working on a radically different sort of computing
mechanism that would work out any arithmetic problem whatsoever, as long as
you knew how to write the problem down. From a pure logic standpoint, he had
already figured out everything there was to know about this (as yet
hypothetical) machine, though he had yet to build one. Lawrence gathered
that actually building machinery was looked on as undignified at Cambridge
(England, that is, where this Al character was based) or for that matter at
Fine Hall. Al was thrilled to have found, in Lawrence, someone who did not
share this view.
Al delicately asked him, one day, if Lawrence would terribly mind
calling him by his full and proper name, which was Alan and not Al. Lawrence
apologized and said he would try very hard to keep it in mind.
One day a couple of weeks later, as the two of them sat by a running
stream in the woods above the Delaware Water Gap, Alan made some kind of an
outlandish proposal to Lawrence involving penises. It required a great deal
of methodical explanation, which Alan delivered with lots of blushing and
stuttering. He was ever so polite, and several times emphasized that he was
acutely aware that not everyone in the world was interested in this sort of
thing.
Lawrence decided that he was probably one of those people.
Alan seemed vastly impressed that Lawrence had paused to think about it
at all and apologized for putting him out. They went directly back to a
discussion of computing machines, and their friendship continued unchanged.
But on their next bicycle ride an overnight camping trip to the Pine Barrens
they were joined by a new fellow, a German named Rudy von something or
other.
Alan and Rudy's relationship seemed closer, or at least more
multilayered, than Alan and Lawrence's. Lawrence concluded that Alan's penis
scheme must have finally found a taker.
It got Lawrence to thinking. From an evolution standpoint, what was the
point of having people around who were not inclined to have offspring? There
must be some good, and fairly subtle, reason for it.
The only thing he could work out was that it was groups of people
societies rather than individual creatures, who were now trying to out
reproduce and/or kill each other, and that, in a society, there was plenty
of room for someone who didn't have kids as long as he was up to something
useful.
Alan and Rudy and Lawrence rode south, anyway, looking for the Pine
Barrens. After a while the towns became very far apart, and the horse farms
gave way to a low stubble of feeble, spiny trees that appeared to extend all
the way to Florida blocking their view, but not the head wind. "Where are
the Pine Barrens I wonder?" Lawrence asked a couple of times. He even
stopped at a gas station to ask someone that question. His companions began
to make fun of him.
"Vere are ze Pine Barrens?" Rudy inquired, looking about quizzically.
"I should look for something rather barren looking, with numerous pine
trees," Alan mused.
There was no other traffic and so they had spread out across the road
to pedal three abreast, with Alan in the middle.
"A forest, as Kafka would imagine it," Rudy muttered.
By this point Lawrence had figured out that they were, in fact, in the
Pine Barrens. But he didn't know who Kafka was. "A mathematician?" he
guessed.
"Zat is a scary sing to sink of," Rudy said.
"He is a writer," Alan said. "Lawrence, please don't be offended that I
ask you this, but: do you recognize any other people's names at all? Other
than family and close friends, I mean."
Lawrence must have looked baffled. "I'm trying to figure out whether it
all comes from in here," Alan said, reaching out to rap his knuckles on the
side of Lawrence's head, "or do you sometimes take in new ideas from other
human beings?"
"When I was a little boy, I saw angels in a church in Virginia,"
Lawrence said, "but I think that they came from inside my head."
"Very well," Alan said.
But later Alan had another go at it. They had reached the fire lookout
tower and it had been a thunderous disappointment: just an alienated
staircase leading nowhere, and a small cleared area below that was glittery
with shards of liquor bottles. They pitched their tent by the side of a pond
that turned out to be full of rust colored algae that stuck to the hairs on
their bodies. Then there was nothing left to do but drink schnapps and talk
about math.
Alan said, "Look, it's like this: Bertrand Russell and another chap
named Whitehead wrote Principia Mathematica .
"Now I know you're pulling my leg," Waterhouse said. "Even I know that
Sir Isaac Newton wrote that ."
"Newton wrote a different book, also called Principia Mathematica ,
which isn't really about mathematics at all; it's about what we would today
call physics."
"Then why did he call it Principia Mathematica?"
"Because the distinction between mathematics and physics wasn't
especially clear in Newton's day "
"Or maybe even in zis day," Rudy said.
" which is directly relevant to what I'm talking about," Alan
continued. "I am talking about Russell's P.M., in which he and Whitehead
started absolutely from scratch, I mean from nothing, and built it all up
all mathematics from a small number of first principles. And why I am
telling you this, Lawrence, is that Lawrence! Pay attention!"
"Hmmm?"
"Rudy take this stick, here that's right and keep a close eye on
Lawrence, and when he gets that foggy look on his face, poke him with it!"
"Zis is not an English school, you can't do zese kind of sing."
"I'm listening," Lawrence said.
"What came out of P.M., which was terrifically radical, was the ability
to say that all of math, really, can be expressed as a certain ordering of
symbols."
"Leibniz said it a long time before zen!" protested Rudy.
"Er, Leibniz invented the notation we use for calculus, but "
"I'm not talking about zat!"
"And he invented matrices, but "
"I'm not talking about zat eezer!"
"And he did some work with binary arithmetic, but "
"Zat is completely different!"
"Well, what the hell are you talking about, then, Rudy?"
"Leibniz invented ze basic alphabet wrote down a set of symbols, for
expressing statements about logic."
"Well, I wasn't aware that Herr Leibniz counted formal logic among his
interests, but "
"Of course! He wanted to do what Russell and Whitehead did, except not
just with mathematics, but with everything in ze whole world!"
"Well, from the fact that you are the only man on the planet, Rudy, who
seems to know about this undertaking of Leibniz's, can we assume that he
failed?"
"You can assume anything that pleases your fancy, Alan," Rudy
responded, "but I am a mathematician and I do not assume anything."
Alan sighed woundedly, and gave Rudy a Significant Look which
Waterhouse assumed meant that there would be trouble later. "If I may just
make some headway, here," he said, "all I'm really trying to get you to
agree on, is that mathematics can be expressed as a series of symbols," (he
snatched the Lawrence poking stick and began drawing things like + = 3)
[square root of 1][pi] in the dirt) "and frankly I could not care less
whether they happen to be Leibniz's symbols, or Russell's, or the hexagrams
of the I Ching...."
"Leibniz was fascinated by the I Ching!" Rudy began.
"Shut up about Leibniz for a moment, Rudy, because look here: You Rudy
and I are on a train, as it were, sitting in the dining car, having a nice
conversation, and that train is being pulled along at a terrific clip by
certain locomotives named The Bertrand Russell and Riemann and Euler and
others. And our friend Lawrence is running alongside the train, trying to
keep up with us it's not that we're smarter than he is, necessarily, but
that he's a farmer who didn't get a ticket. And I, Rudy, am simply reaching
out through the open window here, trying to pull him onto the fucking train
with us so that the three of us can have a nice little chat about
mathematics without having to listen to him panting and gasping for breath
the whole way."
"All right, Alan."
"Won't take a minute if you will just stop interrupting."
"But there is a locomotive too named Leibniz."
"Is it that you don't think I give enough credit to Germans? Because I
am about to mention a fellow with an umlaut."
"Oh, would it be Herr Türing?" Rudy said slyly.
"Herr Türing comes later. I was actually thinking of Gödel."
"But he's not German! He's Austrian!"
"I'm afraid that it's all the same now, isn't it?"
"Ze Anschluss wasn't my idea, you don't have to look at me that way, I
think Hitler is appalling."
"I've heard of Gödel," Waterhouse put in helpfully. "But could we back
up just a sec?"
"Of course Lawrence."
"Why bother? Why did Russell do it? Was there something wrong with
math? I mean, two plus two equals four, right?"
Alan picked up two bottlecaps and set them down on the ground. "Two.
One two. Plus " He set down two more. "Another two. One two. Equals four.
One two three four."
"What's so bad about that?" Lawrence said.
"But Lawrence when you really do math, in an abstract way, you're not
counting bottlecaps, are you?"
"I'm not counting anything. "
Rudy broke the following news: "Zat is a very modern position for you
to take."
"It is?"
Alan said, "There was this implicit belief, for a long time, that math
was a sort of physics of bottlecaps. That any mathematical operation you
could do on paper, no matter how complicated, could be reduced in theory,
anyway to messing about with actual physical counters, such as bottlecaps,
in the real world."
"But you can't have two point one bottlecaps."
"All right, all right, say we use bottlecaps for integers, and for real
numbers like two point one, we use physical measurements, like the length of
this stick." Alan tossed the stick down next to the bottlecaps.
"Well what about pi, then? You can't have a stick that's exactly pi
inches long."
"Pi is from geometry ze same story," Rudy put in.
"Yes, it was believed that Euclid's geometry was really a kind of
physics, that his lines and so on represented properties of the physical
world. But you know Einstein?"
"I'm not very good with names."
"That white haired chap with the big mustache?"
"Oh, yeah," Lawrence said dimly, "I tried to ask him my sprocket
question. He claimed he was late for an appointment or something."
"That fellow has come up with a general relativity theory, which is
sort of a practical application, not of Euclid's, but of Riemann's geometry
"
"The same Riemann of your zeta function?"
"Same Riemann, different subject. Now let's not get sidetracked here
Lawrence "
"Riemann showed you could have many many different geometries that were
not the geometry of Euclid but that still made sense internally," Rudy
explained.
"All right, so back to P.M. then," Lawrence said.
"Yes! Russell and Whitehead. It's like this: when mathematicians began
fooling around with things like the square root of negative one, and
quaternions, then they were no longer dealing with things that you could
translate into sticks and bottlecaps. And yet they were still getting sound
results."
"Or at least internally consistent results," Rudy said.
"Okay. Meaning that math was more than a physics of bottlecaps."
"It appeared that way, Lawrence, but this raised the question of was
mathematics really true or was it just a game played with symbols? In other
words are we discovering Truth, or just wanking?"
"It has to be true because if you do physics with it, it all works out!
I've heard of that general relativity thing, and I know they did experiments
and figured out it was true."
"Ze great majority of mathematics does not lend itself to experimental
testing," Rudy said.
"The whole idea of this project is to sever the ties to physics," Alan
said.
"And yet not to be yanking ourselves."
"That's what P.M. was trying to do?"
"Russell and Whitehead broke all mathematical concepts down into
brutally simple things like sets. From there they got to integers, and so
on.
"But how can you break something like pi down into a set?"
"You can't," Alan said, "but you can express it as a long string of
digits. Three point one four one five nine, and so on."
"And digits are integers," Rudy said.
"But no fair! Pi itself is not an integer!"
"But you can calculate the digits of pi, one at a time, by using
certain formulas. And you can write down the formulas like so!" Alan
scratched this in the dirt:
"I have used the Leibniz series in order to placate our friend. See,
Lawrence? It is a string of symbols."
"Okay. I see the string of symbols," Lawrence said reluctantly.
"Can we move on? Gödel said, just a few years ago, 'Say! If you buy
into this business about mathematics being just strings of symbols, guess
what?' And he pointed out that any string of symbols such as this very
formula, here can be translated into integers."
"How?"
"Nothing fancy, Lawrence it's just simple encryption. Arbitrary. The
number '538' might be written down instead of this great ugly [sigma], and
so on.
"Seems pretty close to wanking, now."
"No, no. Because then Gödel sprang the trap! Formulas can act on
numbers, right?"
"Sure. Like 2x."
"Yes. You can substitute any number for x and the formula 2x will
double it. But if another mathematical formula, such as this one right here,
for calculating pi, can be encoded as a number, then you can have another
formula act on it. Formulas acting on formulas!"
"Is that all?"
"No. Then he showed, really through a very simple argument, that if
formulas really can refer to themselves, it's possible to write one down
saying 'this statement cannot be proved.' Which was tremendously startling
to Hilbert and everyone else, who expected the opposite result."
"Have you mentioned this Hilbert guy before?"
"No, he is new to this discussion, Lawrence."
"Who is he?"
"A man who asks difficult questions. He asked a whole list of them
once. Gödel answered one of them."
"And Türing answered another," Rudy said.
"Who's that?"
"It's me," Alan said. "But Rudy's joking. 'Turing' doesn't really have
an umlaut in it."
"He's going to have an umlaut in him later tonight," Rudy said, looking
at Alan in a way that, in retrospect, years later, Lawrence would understand
to have been smoldering.
"Well, don't keep me in suspense. Which one of his questions did you
answer?"
"The Entscheidungsproblem," Rudy said.
"Meaning?"
Alan explained, "Hilbert wanted to know whether any given statement
could, in principle, be found true or false."
"But after Gödel got finished, it changed," Rudy pointed out. "That's
true after Gödel it became 'Can we determine whether any given statement is
provable or non provable?' In other words, is there some sort of mechanical
process we could use to separate the provable statements from the
nonprovable ones?"
'Mechanical process' is supposed to be a metaphor, Alan. . .
"Oh, stop it, Rudy! Lawrence and I are quite comfortable with
machinery."
"I get it," Lawrence said.
"What do you mean, you get it?" Alan said.
"Your machine not the zeta function calculator, but the other one. The
one we've been talking about building "
"It is called Universal Turing Machine," Rudy said.
"The whole point of that gizmo is to separate provable from nonprovable
statements, isn't it?''
"That's why I came up with the basic idea for it," Alan said. "So
Hilbert's question has been answered. Now I just want to actually build one
so that I can beat Rudy at chess."
"You haven't told poor Lawrence the answer yet!" Rudy protested.
"Lawrence can figure it out," Alan said. "It'll give him something to
do."
***
Soon it became clear that Alan really meant: It'll give him something
to do while we're fucking. Lawrence shoved a notebook into the waistband of
his trousers and rode his bicycle a few hundred yards to the fire tower,
then climbed up the stairs to the platform at the top and sat down, back to
the setting sun, notebook propped up on his knees to catch the light.
He could not collect his thoughts, and then he was distracted by a
false sunrise that lit up the clouds off to the northeast. He thought at
first that some low clouds were bouncing fragments of the sunset back to
him, but it was too concentrated and flickering for that. Then he thought it
was lightning. But the color of the light was not blue enough. It fluctuated
sharply, modulated by (one had to assume) great, startling events that were
occulted by the horizon. As the sun went down on the opposite side of the
world, the light on the New Jersey horizon focused to a steady, lambent core
the color of a flashlight when you shine it through the palm of your hand
under the bedsheets.
Lawrence climbed down the stairs and got on his bicycle and rode
through the Pine Barrens. Before long he came to a road that led in the
general direction of the light. Most of the time he could not see anything,
not even the road, but after a couple of hours the glow bouncing off the low
cloud layer lit up flat stones in the road, and turned the barrens'
wandering rivulets into glowing crevices.
The road began to tend in the wrong direction and so Lawrence cut
directly into the woods, because he was very close now, and the light in the
sky was strong enough that he could see it through the sparse carpet of
scrubby pines black sticks that appeared to have been burned, though they
hadn't. The ground had turned into sand, but it was damp and compacted, and
his bicycle had fat tires that rode over it well. At one point he had to
stop and throw the bike over a barbed wire fence. Then he broke out of the
sticks and onto a perfectly flat expanse of white sand, stitched down with
tufts of beach grass, and just then he was dazzled by a low fence of quiet
steady flames that ran across a part of the horizon about as wide as the
harvest moon when it sinks into the sea. Its brightness made it difficult to
see anything else Lawrence kept riding into little ditches and creeks that
meandered across the flats. He learned not to stare directly at the flames.
Looking off to the sides was more interesting anyway: the table land was
marked at wide intervals by the largest buildings he had ever seen, cracker
box structures built by Pharaohs, and in the mile wide plazas between them,
gnomons of triangulated steel were planted in wide stances: the internal
skeletons of pyramids. The largest of these pierced the center of a
perfectly circular railway line a few hundred feet in diameter: two argent
curves scored on the dull ground, interrupted in one place where the tower's
shadow, a stopped sundial, told the time. He rode by a building smaller than
the others, with oval tanks standing next to it. Steam murmured from valves
on the tops of the tanks, but instead of rising into the air it dribbled
down the sides and struck the ground and spread out, coating the sea grass
with jackets of silver.
A thousand sailors in white were standing in a ring around the long
flame. One of them held up his hand and waved Lawrence down. Lawrence came
to a stop next to the sailor and planted one foot on the sand to steady
himself. He and the sailor stared at each other for a moment and then
Lawrence, who could not think of anything else, said, "I am in the Navy
also." Then the sailor seemed to make up his mind about something. He
saluted Lawrence through, and pointed him towards a small building off to
the side of the fire.
The building looked only like a wall glowing in the firelight, but
sometimes a barrage of magnesium blue light made its windowframes jump out
of the darkness, a rectangular lightning bolt that echoed many times across
the night. Lawrence started pedaling again and rode past that building: a
spiraling flock of alert fedoras, prodding at slim terse notebooks with
stately Ticonderogas, crab walking photogs turning their huge chrome
daisies, crisp rows of people sleeping with blankets over their faces, a
sweating man with Brilliantined hair chalking umlauted names on a
blackboard. Finally coming around this building he smelled hot fuel oil,
felt the heat of the flames on his face and saw beach glass curled toward it
and desiccated.
He stared down upon the world's globe, not the globe fleshed with
continents and oceans but only its skeleton: a burst of meridians, curving
backwards to cage an inner dome of orange flame. Against the light of the
burning oil those longitudes were thin and crisp as a draftsman's ink
strokes. But coming closer he saw them resolve into clever works of rings
and struts, hollow as a bird's bones. As they spread away from the pole they
sooner or later began to wander, or split into bent parts, or just broke off
and hung in the fire oscillating like dry stalks. The perfect geometry was
also mottled, here and there, by webs of cable and harnesses of electrical
wiring. Lawrence almost rode over a broken wine bottle and decided he should
now walk, to spare his bicycle's tires, so he laid the bike down, the front
wheel covering an aluminum vase that appeared to have been spun on a lathe,
with a few charred roses hanging out of it. Some sailors had joined their
hands to form a sort of throne, and were bearing along a human shaped piece
of charcoal dressed in a coverall of immaculate asbestos. As they walked the
toes of their shoes caught in vast, ramified snarls of ropes and piano
wires, cables and wires, creative furtive movements in the grass and the
sand dozens of yards every direction. Lawrence began planting his feet very
thoughtfully one in front of the other, trying to measure the greatness of
what he had come and seen. A rocket shaped pod stuck askew from the sand,
supporting an umbrella of bent back propellers. The duralumin struts and cat
walks rambled on above him for miles. There was a suitcase spilled open,
with a pair of women's shoes displayed as if in the window of a down town
store, and a menu that had been charred to an oval glow, and then some
tousled wall slabs, like a whole room that had dropped out of the sky these
were decorated, one with a giant map of the world, great circles arcing away
from Berlin to pounce on cities near and far, and another with a photograph
of a famous, fat German in a uniform, grinning on a flowered platform, the
giant horizon of a new Zeppelin behind him.
After a while he stopped seeing new things. Then he got on his bicycle
and rode back through the Pine Barrens. He got lost in the dark and so
didn't find his way back to the fire tower until dawn. But he didn't mind
being lost because while he rode around in the dark he thought about the
Turing machine. Finally he came back to the shore of the pond where they had
camped. The dawn light shining on the saucer of calm reddish water made it
look like a pool of blood. Alan Mathison Turing and Rudolf von Hacklheber
were lying together like spoons on the shore, still smudged a little bit
from their swim yesterday. Lawrence started a little fire and made some tea
and they woke up eventually.
"Did you solve the problem?" Alan asked him.
"Well you can turn that Universal Turing Machine of yours into any
machine by changing the presets "
"Presets?"
"Sorry, Alan, I think of your U.T.M. as being kind of like a pipe
organ."
"Oh."
"Once you've done that, anyway, you can do any calculation you please,
if the tape is long enough. But gosh, Alan, making a tape that's long
enough, and that you can write symbols on, and erase them, is going to be
sort of tricky Atanasoffs capacitor drum would only work up to a certain
size you'd have to "
"This is a digression," Alan said gently.
"Yeah, okay, well if you had a machine like that, then any given preset
could be represented by a number a string of symbols. And the tape that you
would feed into it to start the calculation would contain another string of
symbols. So it's Gödel's proof all over again if any possible combination of
machine and data can be represented by a string of numbers, then you can
just arrange all of the possible strings of numbers into a big table, and
then it turns into a Cantor diagonal type of argument, and the answer is
that there must be some numbers that cannot be computed."
"And ze Entscheidungsproblem?" Rudy reminded him.
"Proving or disproving a formula once you've encrypted the formula into
numbers, that is is just a calculation on that number. So it means that the
answer to the question is, no! Some formulas cannot be proved or disproved
by any mechanical process! So I guess there's some point in being human
after all!"
Alan looked pleased until Lawrence said this last thing, and then his
face collapsed. "Now there you go making unwarranted assumptions."
"Don't listen to him, Lawrence!" Rudy said. "He's going to tell you
that our brains are Turing machines."
"Thank you, Rudy," Alan said patiently. "Lawrence, I submit that our
brains are Turing machines."
"But you proved that there's a whole lot of formulas that a Turing
machine can't process!"
"And you have proved it too, Lawrence."
"But don't you think that we can do some things that a Turing machine
couldn't?"
"Gödel agrees with you, Lawrence," Rudy put in, "and so does Hardy."
"Give me one example," Alan said.
"Of a noncomputable function that a human can do, and a Turing machine
can't?"
"Yes. And don't give me any sentimental nonsense about creativity. I
believe that a Universal Turing Machine could show behaviors that we would
construe as creative."
"Well, I don't know then . . . I'll try to keep my eye out for that
kind of thing in the future.''
But later, as they were tiding back towards Princeton, he said, "What
about dreams?"
"Like those angels in Virginia?"
"I guess so."
"Just noise in the neurons, Lawrence."
"Also I dreamed last night that a zeppelin was burning."
***
Soon, Alan got his Ph.D. and went back to England. He wrote Lawrence a
couple of letters. The last of these stated, simply, that he would not be
able to write Lawrence any more letters "of substance" and that Lawrence
should not take it personally. Lawrence perceived right away that Alan's
society had put him to work doing something useful probably figuring out how
to keep it from being eaten alive by certain of its neighbors. Lawrence
wondered what use America would find for him .
He went back to Iowa State, considered changing his major to
mathematics, but didn't. It was the consensus of all whom he consulted that
mathematics, like pipe organ restoration, was a fine thing, but that one
needed some way to put bread on the table. He remained in engineering and
did more and more poorly at it until the middle of his senior year, when the
university suggested that he enter a useful line of work, such as roofing.
He walked straight out of college into the waiting arms of the Navy.
They gave him an intelligence test. The first question on the math part
had to do with boats on a river: Port Smith is 100 miles upstream of Port
Jones. The river flows at 5 miles per hour. The boat goes through water at
10 miles per hour. How long does it take to go from Port Smith to Port
Jones? How long to come back?
Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have
to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current
would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat.
Clearly, 5 miles per hour was nothing more than the average speed. The
current would be faster in the middle of the river and slower at the banks.
More complicated variations could be expected at bends in the river.
Basically it was a question of hydrodynamics, which could be tackled using
certain well known systems of differential equations. Lawrence dove into the
problem, rapidly (or so he thought) covering both sides of ten sheets of
paper with calculations. Along the way, he realized that one of his
assumptions, in combination with the simplified Navier Stokes equations, had
led him into an exploration of a particularly interesting family of partial
differential equations. Before he knew it, he had proved a new theorem. If
that didn't prove his intelligence, what would?
Then the time bell rang and the papers were collected. Lawrence managed
to hang onto his scratch paper. He took it back to his dorm, typed it up,
and mailed it to one of the more approachable math professors at Princeton,
who promptly arranged for it to be published in a Parisian mathematics
journal.
Lawrence received two free, freshly printed copies of the journal a few
months later, in San Diego, California, during mail call on board a large
ship called the U.S.S. Nevada. The ship had a band, and the Navy had given
Lawrence the job of playing the glockenspiel in it, because their testing
procedures had proven that he was not intelligent enough to do anything
else.
The sack of mail carrying Lawrence's contribution to the mathematical
literature arrived just in the nick of time. Lawrence's ship, and quite a
few of her sisters, had until then been based in California. But at just
this moment, all of them were transferred to some place called Pearl Harbor,
Hawaii, in order to show the Nips who was boss.
Lawrence had never really known what he wanted to do with his life, but
he quickly decided that being glockenspiel player on a battleship in Hawaii
during peacetime was a long way from the worst life you could possibly have.
The harshest part of the job was sometimes having to sit or march in very
warm conditions, and enduring occasional fluffed notes by other band
members. He had abundant free time, which he spent working on a series of
new theorems in the field of information theory. The field had been invented
and pretty much encompassed by his friend Alan, but there was much detail
work to be done. He and Alan and Rudy had sketched out a general plan of
what needed to be proved or disproved. Lawrence tore through the list. He
wondered what Alan and Rudy were up to in Britain and Germany, but he
couldn't write to them and find out, so he kept his work to himself. When he
wasn't playing the glockenspiel or working out theorems, there were bars and
dances to go to. Waterhouse did some penis work of his own, got the clap,
had it cured (1), bought condoms. All of the sailors did this.
They were like three year olds who shove pencils in their ears, discover
that it hurts, and stop doing it. Lawrence's first year went by almost
instantly. Time just blazed by. Nowhere could be sunnier, more relaxing,
than Hawaii.
Chapter 2 NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM
"Filipinos are a warm, gentle, caring, giving people," Avi says, "which
is a good thing since so many of them carry concealed weapons."
Randy is in Tokyo's airport, ambling down a concourse with a slowness
that is infuriating to his fellow travelers. They have all spent the last
half day strapped into bad chairs, stuffed into an aluminum tube aslosh with
jet fuel. Over the safety engineered nubs molded into the jetway floor,
their rolling suitcases drone like fighter planes. They graze the backs of
his knees as they bank around his husky columnar body. Randy is holding his
new GSM phone to the side of his head. Supposedly it works anywhere in the
world, except for the United States. This is his first chance to try it out.
"You sound clear as a bell," Avi says. "How was the flight over?"
"All right," Randy says. "They had one of those animated maps up on the
video screen."
Avi sighs. "All the airlines have those now," he announces
monotonically.
"The only feature between San Francisco and Tokyo was Midway Island."
"So?"
"It kind of hung there for hours. MIDWAY. Mute embarrassment all
around."
Randy reaches the departure gate for Manila, and pauses to admire a
five foot wide high definition TV set bearing the logo of a major Nipponese
consumer electronics company. It is running a video in which a wacky cartoon
professor and his adorable canine sidekick cheerfully tick off the three
transmission routes of the AIDS virus.
"I have a fingerprint for you," Randy says.
"Shoot."
Randy stares at the palm of his hand, on which he has written a string
of numbers and letters in ballpoint pen. "AF 10 06 E9 99 BA 11 07 64 C1 89
E3 40 8C 72 55."
"Got it," Avi says. "That's from Ordo, right?"
"Right. I e mailed you the key from SFO."
"The apartment situation is still resolving," Avi says. "So I just
reserved you a suite at the Manila Hotel."
"What do you mean, it's still resolving?"
"The Philippines is one of those post Spanish countries with no clear
boundaries between business and personal relationships," Avi says. "I don't
think you can secure lodgings there without marrying into a family with a
major street named after it."
Randy takes a seat in the departure area. Perky gate attendants in
jaunty, improbable hats zero in on Filipinos with too many carry ons, and
subject them to a public ritual of filling out little tags and surrendering
their possessions. The Filipinos roll their eyes and stare longingly out the
windows. But most of the waiting passengers are Nipponese some businessmen,
mostly vacationers. They are watching an educational video about how to get
mugged in foreign countries.
"Huh," Randy says, looking out the window, "got another 747 down to
Manila."
"In Asia, no decent airline bothers to dick around anything smaller
than a 747," Avi snaps. "If someone tries to pack you on board a 737 or god
forbid an Airbus, run, don't walk, away from the boarding lounge, and call
me on my Sky Pager and I'll send in a chopper to evacuate you."
Randy laughs.
Avi continues. "Now, listen. This hotel you're going to is very old,
very grand, but it's in the middle of nowhere."
"Why would they build a grand hotel in the middle of nowhere?"
"It used to be a happening place it's on the waterfront, right on the
edge of Intramuros."
Randy's high school Spanish is enough to translate that: Inside the
Walls.
"But Intramuros was annihilated by the Nipponese in 1945," Avi
continues. "Systematically. All of the business hotels and office buildings
are in a new neighborhood called Makati, much closer to the airport."
"So you want to put our office in Intramuros."
"How'd you guess?" Avi says, sounding a little spooked. He prides
himself on unpredictability.
"I'm not an intuitive guy generally," Randy says, "but I've been on a
plane for thirteen hours and my brain has been turned inside out and hung up
to dry."
Avi rattles off canned justifications: office space is much cheaper in
Intramuros. Government ministries are closer. Makati, the gleaming new
business district, is too isolated from the real Philippines. Randy pays no
attention to it.
"You want to work out of Intramuros because it was systematically
annihilated, and because you're obsessed with the Holocaust," Randy finally
says, quietly and without rancor.
"Yeah. So?" Avi says.
***
Randy stares out the window of the Manila bound 747, sipping on a
fluorescent green Nipponese soft drink made from bee extracts (at least, it
has pictures of bees on it) and munching on something that a flight
attendant handed him called Japanese Snack. Sky and ocean are the same
color, a shade of blue that makes his teeth freeze. The plane is so high
that, whether he looks up or down, he sees foreshortened views of boiling
cumulonimbus stacks. The clouds erupt from the hot Pacific as if immense
warships were exploding all over the place. The speed and power of their
growth is alarming, the forms they adopt as bizarre and varied as those of
deep sea organisms, and all of them, he supposes, are as dangerous to an
airplane as punji stakes to a barefoot pedestrian. The red orange meatball
painted on the wingtip startles him when he notices it. He feels like he's
been thrown into an old war film.
He turns on his laptop. Electronic mail from Avi, encrypted to a fare
thee well, has been piling up in his in box. It is a gradual accumulation of
tiny files, thrown at him by Avi whenever a thought popped into his head
over the last three days; it would be obvious, even if Randy didn't know it,
that Avi owns a portable e mail machine that talks to the Internet by radio.
Randy fires up a piece of software that is technically called Novus Ordo
Seclorum but that everyone calls Ordo for short. It is a fairly strained pun
based on the fact that Ordo's job, as a piece of cryptographic software, is
to put a message's bits in a New Order and that it will take Centuries for
nosy governments to decrypt it. A scanned image of a Great Pyramid appears
in the middle of his screen, and a single eye gradually materializes at its
apex.
Ordo can handle this in one of two ways. The obvious way is to decrypt
all of the messages and convert them into plaintext files on his hard disk,
which he can then read any time he wants. The problem with this (if you are
paranoid) is that anyone who gets his hands on Randy's hard disk can then
read the files. For all he knows, the customs officials in Manila will
decide to ransack his computer for child pornography. Or, fogged by jet lag,
he'll leave his laptop in a taxi. So instead he puts Ordo into a streaming
mode where it will decrypt the files just long enough for him to read them
and then, when he closes the windows, expunge the plaintext from the
computer's memory and from its hard drive.
The subject heading of Avi's first message is: "Guideline 1."
We look for places where the math is right. Meaning what? Meaning that
pop. is about to explode we can predict that just by looking at age
histogram and per capita income is about to take off the way it did in
Nippon, Taiwan, Singapore. Multiply those two things together and you get
the kind of exponential growth that should get us all into fuck you money
before we turn forty.
This is an allusion to a Randy/Avi conversation of two years ago
wherein Avi actually calculated a specific numerical value for "fuck you
money." It was not a fixed constant, however, but rather a cell in a
spreadsheet linked to any number of continually fluctuating economic
indicators. Sometimes when Avi is working at his computer he will leave the
spreadsheet running in a tiny window in the corner so that he can see the
current value of "fuck you money" at a glance.
The second message, sent a couple of hours later, is called "Guideline
2."
Two: pick a tech where no one can compete with us. Right now,
that=networking. We're kicking the crap out of everyone else in the world
when it comes to networking. It's not even funny.
The next day, Avi sent a message called, simply, "More." Perhaps he had
lost track of the number of guidelines he'd issued so far.
Another principle: this time we retain control of the corporation. That
means that we keep at least fifty percent of the shares which means little
to no outside investment until we've built up some value.
"You don't have to convince me," Randy mumbles to himself as he reads
this.
This shapes the kinds of businesses we can get into. Forget anything
that requires a big initial investment.
Luzon is green black jungle mountains gouged with rivers that would
appear to be avalanches of silt. As the navy blue ocean verges on its khaki
beaches, the water takes on the shocking iridescent hue of a suburban
swimming pool. Farther south, the mountains are swidden scarred the soil
beneath is bright red and so these parts look like fresh lacerations. But
most is covered with foliage that looks like the nubby green stuff that
model railroaders put over their papier mâché hills, and in vast stretches
of the mountains there are no signs whatsoever that human beings have ever
existed. Closer to Manila, some of the slopes are deforested, sprinkled with
structures, ribboned with power line cuts. Rice paddies line the basins. The
towns are accretions of shanties, nucleated around large cross shaped
churches with good roofs.
The view gets blurry as they belly down into the pall of sweaty smog
above the city. The plane begins to sweat like a giant glass of iced tea.
The water streams off in sheets, collects in crevices, whips off the flaps'
trailing edges.
Suddenly they are banking over Manila Bay, which is marked with endless
streaks of brilliant red some kind of algal bloom. Oil tankers trail long
time delayed rainbows that flourish in their wakes. Every cove is jammed
with long skinny boats with dual outriggers, looking like brightly painted
water skaters.
And then they are down on the runway at NAIA, Ninoy Aquino
International Airport. Guards and cops of various stripes are ambling around
with M 16s or pistol handled pump shotguns, wearing burnooses fashioned from
handkerchiefs clamped to the head with American baseball caps. A man dressed
in a radiant white uniform stands below the ragged maw of the jetway holding
his hands downwards with fluorescent orange sticks in them, like Christ
dispensing mercy on a world of sinners. Sulfurous, fulminating tropical air
begins to leak in through the jumbo's air vents. Everything moistens and
wilts.
He is in Manila. He takes his passport out of his shirt pocket. It
says,
RANDALL LAWRENCE WATERHOUSE.
***
This is how Epiphyte Corporation came into existence:
"I am channeling the bad shit!" Avi said.
The number came through on Randy's pager while he was sitting around a
table in a grubhouse along the coast with his girlfriend's crowd. A place
where, every day, they laser printed fresh menus on 100% recycled imitation
parchment, where oscilloscope tracings of neon colored sauces scribbled
across the plates, and the entrees were towering, architectonic stacks of
rare ingredients carved into gemlike prisms. Randy had spent the entire meal
trying to resist the temptation to invite one of Charlene's friends (any one
of them, it didn't matter) out on the sidewalk for a fistfight.
He glanced at his pager expecting to see the number of the Three
Siblings Computer Center, which was where he worked (technically, still
does). The fell digits of Avi's phone number penetrated the core of his
being in the same way that 666 would a fundamentalist's.
Fifteen seconds later, Randy was out on the sidewalk, swiping his card
through a pay phone like an assassin drawing a single edged razor blade
across the throat of a tubby politician.
"The power is coming down from On High," Avi continued. "Tonight, it
happens to be coming through me you poor bastard."
"What do you want me to do?" Randy asked, adopting a cold, almost
hostile tone to mask sick excitement.
"Buy a ticket to Manila," Avi said.
"I have to talk it over with Charlene first," Randy said.
"You don't even believe that yourself," Avi said.
"Charlene and I have a long standing relationsh "
"It's been ten years. You haven't married her. Fill in the fucking
blanks."
(Seventy two hours later, he would be in Manila, looking at the One
Note Flute.)
"Everyone in Asia is wondering when the Philippines is finally going to
get its shit together," Avi said, "it's the question of the nineties."
(The One Note Flute is the first thing you see when you make it through
Passport Control.)
"I flashed on this when I was standing in line at Passport Control at
Ninoy Aquino International Airport," Avi said, compressing that entire name
into a single, sharply articulated burst. "You know how they have different
lanes?"
"I guess so," Randy said. A parallelpiped of seared tuna did a barrel
roll in his gullet. He felt a perverse craving for a double ice cream cone.
He did not travel as much as Avi, and had only a vague idea of what he meant
by lanes.
"You know. One lane for citizens. One for foreigners. Maybe one for
diplomats."
(Now, standing there waiting to have his passport stamped, Randy can
see it clearly. For once he doesn't mind the wait. He gets in a lane next to
the OCW lane and studies them. They are Epiphyte Corp.'s market. Mostly
young women, many of them fashionably dressed, but still with a kind of
Catholic boarding school demureness. Exhausted from long flights, tired of
the wait, they slump, then suddenly straighten up and elevate their fine
chins, as if an invisible nun were making her way up the line whacking their
manicured knuckles with a ruler.)
But seventy two hours ago he hadn't really understood what Avi meant by
lanes, so he just said, "Yeah, I've seen the lane thing."
"At Manila, they have a whole lane just for returning OCWs!"
"OCWs?"
"Overseas Contract Workers. Filipinos working abroad because the
economy of the Philippines is so lame. As maids and nannies in Saudi. Nurses
and anesthesiologists in the States. Singers in Hong Kong, whores in
Bangkok."
"Whores in Bangkok?" Randy had been there, at least, and his mind
reeled at the concept of exporting prostitutes to Thailand.
"The Filipino women are more beautiful," Avi said quietly, "and have a
ferocity that makes them more interesting, to the innately masochistic
business traveler, than all those grinning Thai bimbos." Both of them knew
that this was complete bullshit; Avi was a family man and had no firsthand
experience whereof he spoke. Randy didn't call him on it, though. As long as
Avi retained this extemporaneous bullshitting ability there was a better
than even chance of all of them making fuck you money.
(Now that he's here, it is tempting to speculate as to which of the
girls in the OCW lane are hustlers. But he can't see that going anywhere but
wrong, so he squares his shoulders and marches toward the yellow line.
The government has set up glass display cases in the concourse leading
from Passport Control to the security barrier. The cases contain artifacts
demonstrating the glories of pre Magellan Filipino culture. The first one of
these contains the pièce de résistance: a rustic hand carved musical
instrument labeled with a long and unreadable name in Tagalog. Underneath
that, in smaller letters, is the English translation: ONE NOTE FLUTE.)
"See? The Philippines is innately hedged," Avi said. 'You know how rare
that is? When you find an innately hedged environment, Randy, you lunge into
it like a rabid ferret going into a pipe full of raw meat."
A word about Avi: his father's people had just barely gotten out of
Prague. As Central European Jews went, they were fairly typical. The only
thing about them that was really anomalous was that they were still alive.
But his mother's people were unbelievably peculiar New Mexican crypto Jews
who had been living on mesas, dodging Jesuits, shooting rattlesnakes and
eating jimsonweed for three hundred years; they looked like Indians and
talked like cowboys. In his relations with other people, therefore, Avi
dithered. Most of the time he was courtly and correct in a way that was
deeply impressive to businesspeople Nipponese ones expecially but there were
these eruptions, from time to time, as if he'd been dipping into the loco
weed. Randy had learned to deal with it, which is why Avi called him at
times like this.
"Oh, calm down!" Randy said. He watched a tanned girl rollerblade past
him, on her way up from the beach. "Innately hedged?"
"As long as the Philippines don't have their shit together, there'll be
plenty of OCWs. They will want to communicate with their families the
Filipinos are incredibly family oriented. They make Jews look like a bunch
of alienated loners."
"Okay. You know more about both groups than I do."
"They are sentimental and affectionate in a way that's very easy for us
to sneer at."
"You don't have to be defensive," Randy said, "I'm not sneering at
them."
"When you hear their song dedications on the radio, you'll sneer," Avi
said. "But frankly, we could take some pointers from the Pinoys on this
front."
"You are so close to being sanctimonious right now "
"I apologize," Avi said, with absolute sincerity. Avi's wife had been
pregnant almost continuously for the four years they'd been married. He was
getting more religiously observant daily and couldn't make it through a
conversation without mentioning the Holocaust. Randy was a bachelor who was
just about to break up with the chick he'd been living with.
"I believe you, Avi," Randy said. "Is it a problem with you if I buy a
business class ticket?"
Avi didn't hear him, so Randy assumed that meant yes. "As long as
that's the case, there will be a big market for Pinoy grams."
"Pinoy grams?"
"For god's sake, don't say it out loud! I'm filling out the trademark
application as we speak," Avi said. Randy could hear a rattling sound in the
background, computer keys impacting so rapidly it sounded like Avi was
simply holding the keyboard between his pale, spindly hands and shaking it
violently up and down. "But if the Filipinos do get their shit together,
then we see explosive growth in telecoms, as in any other Arday."
"Arday?"
"R D A E. Rapidly Developing Asian Economy. Either way, we win."
"I gather you want to do something with telecoms?"
"Bingo." In the background, a baby began to cough and cry. "Gotta go,"
Avi said, "Shlomo's asthma is spiking again. Take down this fingerprint."
"Fingerprint?"
"For my encryption key. For e mail."
"Ordo?"
"Yeah."
Randy took out a ballpoint pen and, finding no paper in his pocket,
poised it over the palm of his hand. "Shoot."
"67 81 A4 AE FF 40 25 9B 43 OE 29 8D 56 60 E3 2F." Then Avi hung up the
phone.
Randy went back into the restaurant. On his way back, he asked the
waiter to bring him a half bottle of good red wine. Charlene heard him, and
glowered. Randy was still thinking about innate ferocity, and did not see it
in her face; only a schoolmarmishness common among all of her friends. My
god! I have to get out of California, he realized.
Chapter 3 SEAWEED
Woman holds baby Eyes pale as a muzzle flash Band chimes frozen tears
The fourth marines is marching downhill to the strains of John Philip
Sousa, which ought to be second nature to a Marine. But the Fourth Marines
have been in Shanghai (which ain't no halls of Montezuma nor shores of
Tripoli) for too long, longer than Marines should ever stay in one place,
and Bobby's already seen his sergeant, one Frick, throw up from opium
withdrawal.
A Marine band is several Shanghai blocks ahead. Bobby's platoon can
hear the thumpity thump of the big drums and the piercing noises from
piccolos and glockenspiels but he can't follow the tune. Corporal Shaftoe is
effectively their leader, because Sergeant Frick is useless.
Shaftoe marches alongside the formation, supposedly to keep an eye on
his men, but mostly he's just staring at Shanghai.
Shanghai stares back, and mostly gives them a standing ovation. Of
course there is a type of young street rowdy who makes it a point of honor
to let the Marines know he isn't scared of them, and they are jeering the
Marines from a safe distance, and setting off strings of fire crackers,
which does nothing to steady anyone's nerves. The Europeans are applauding a
whole chorus line of Russian dancing girls from Delmonte's is showing thigh
and blowing kisses. But most of the Chinese look pretty stonefaced, which
Bobby suspects means they're scared shitless.
The worst thing is the women carrying half white babies. A few of these
women are rabid, hysterical, throwing themselves into formations of massed
Marines, undeterred by rifle butts. But most of them are stoic: they stand
with their light eyed babies and glare, searching the ranks and files for
the guilty party. They've all heard about what happened upriver in Nanjing
when the Nips came there, and they know that when it's all over, the only
trace that they and their babies ever existed may be a really bad memory in
the mind of some American Marine.
It works for Shaftoe: he has hunted deer in Wisconsin and seen them
limping across the snow, bleeding to death. He saw a man die in basic
training at Parris Island. He has seen whole tangles of bodies in the
Yangtze, downstream of where the Nipponese were prosecuting the China
Incident, and he has seen refugees from places like Nanjing starve to death
in the gutters of Shanghai. He has himself killed people who were trying to
storm the riverboats it was his duty to protect. He thinks that he has never
seen, and will never see, anything as terrible as those stone faced Chinese
women holding their white babies, not even blinking as the firecrackers
explode all around them.
Until, that is, he looks into the faces of certain Marines who stare
into that crowd and see their own faces looking back at them, pudgy with
baby fat and streaked with tears. Some of them seem to think it's all a
joke. But many of the Marines who march out of their empty barracks that
morning sane and solid men, have, by the time they reach the gunboats
waiting for them at the Bund, gone mad. They don't show it. But Shaftoe can
see in their eyes that something has given way inside.
The very best men in the regiment are in a foul mood. The ones like
Shaftoe, who didn't get involved with the Chinese women, are still leaving
plenty behind: houses with maids and shoeshine boys and coolies, with women
and opium for almost nothing. They don't know where they are being shipped
off to, but it's safe to say that their twenty one dollars a month won't go
as far. They'll be in barracks and they'll have to learn to polish their own
boots again. When the gangplanks are drawn in from the stone edge of the
Bund, they are cut off from a whole world that they'll never see again, a
world where they were kings. Now they are Marines again, It's okay with
Shaftoe, who wants to be a Marine. But many of the men have become middle
aged here, and don't.
The guilty men duck belowdecks. Shaftoe remains on the deck of the
gunboat, which casts off from the Bund, headed for the cruiser Augusta,
which awaits in mid channel.
The Bund is jammed with onlookers in a riot of differently colored
clothing, so one patch of uniform drab catches his eye: a group of Nip
soldiers who've come down to bid their Yank counterparts a sarcastic
farewell. Shaftoe scans the group looking for someone tall and bulky, and
picks him out easily. Goto Dengo's waving to him.
Shaftoe takes his helmet off and waves back. Then, on impulse, just for
the hell of it, he winds up and flings the helmet directly at Goto Dengo's
head. The throw goes awry and Goto Dengo has to knock down about a dozen of
his comrades in order to catch it. All of them seem to think that it is a
high honor, as well as tremendously amusing, to be knocked down by Goto
Dengo.
Twenty seconds later, a comet sails up out of the flesh cosmos of the
Bund and bounces on the wooden deck of the gunboat a hell of a throw. Goto
Dengo is showing off his follow through. The projectile is a rock with a
white streamer wrapped around it. Shaftoe runs over and snatches it. The
streamer is one of those thousand stitch headbands (supposedly; he's taken a
few off of unconscious Nips, but he's never bothered to count the stitches)
that they tie around their heads as a good luck charm; it has a meatball in
the center and some Nip writing to either side. He unties it from around the
rock. In so doing he realizes, suddenly, that it's not a rock after all; it
is a hand grenade! But good old Goto Dengo was just joking he didn't pull
the pin. A nice souvenir for Bobby Shaftoe.
***
Shaftoe's first haiku (December 1940) was a quick and dirty adaptation
of the Marine Creed:
This is my rifle
There are many like it but
This rifle is mine.
He wrote it under the following circumstances: Shaftoe and the rest of
Fourth Marines were stationed in Shanghai so that they could guard the
International Settlement and work as muscle on the gunboats of the Yangtze
River Patrol. His platoon had just come back from the Last Patrol: a
thousand mile reconnaissance in force all the way up past what was left of
Nanjing, to Hankow, and back. Marines had been doing this ever since the
Boxer Rebellion, through civil wars and everything else. But towards the end
of 1940, what with the Nips (1) basically running all of
northeast China now, the politicians back in D.C. had finally thrown in the
towel and told the China Marines not to steam up the Yangtze any more.
Now, the Old Breed Marines like Frick claimed they could tell the
difference between organized brigands; armed mobs of starving peasants;
rogue Nationalists; Communist guerrillas; and the irregular forces in the
pay of warlords. But to Bobby Shaftoe they were all just crazy, armed slopes
who wanted a piece of the Yangtze River Patrol. The Last Patrol had been a
wild trip. But it was over and they were back in Shanghai now, the safest
place you could be in China, and about a hundred times more dangerous than
the most dangerous place you could be in America. They had climbed off the
gunboat six hours ago, gone to a bar, and not come out until just now, when
they had decided it was high time they went to a whorehouse. On their way,
they happened to pass this Nip restaurant.
Bobby Shaftoe had looked in the windows of the place before, and
watched the man with the knife, trying to figure out what the hell he was
doing. It looked a hell of a lot like he was cutting up uncooked fish and
putting the raw meat on bullets of rice and handing it over to the Nips on
the other side of the counter, who were wolfing it down.
It had to be some kind of optical illusion. The fish must have been
precooked in the back room.
This had been nagging at Shaftoe for about a year. As he and the other
horny drunk Marines went by the place, he slowed down to peer through the
window, trying to gather more evidence. He could swear that some of that
fish looked ruby red, which it wouldn't have been if it were cooked.
One of his buddies, Rhodes from Shreveport, noticed him looking. He
dared Shaftoe to go in there and sit down at that bar. Then another private,
Gowicki from Pittsburgh, double dared him!
Shaftoe sucked his teeth and considered the matter. He had already made
up his mind that he was going to do it. He was a sniper scout, and it was in
his nature to do crazy shit like this; but it was also part of his training
to scan the terrain carefully before venturing in.
The restaurant was three quarters full, and everyone in the place was a
uniformed member of the Nipponese military. At the bar where the man was
cutting up the apparently raw fish, there was a marked concentration of
officers; if you only had one grenade, that's where you'd throw it. Most of
the place was filled with long tables where enlisted men sat, drinking
noodle soup from steaming urns. Shaftoe paid particular attention to these,
because they were the ones who were going to be beating the shit out of him
in about sixty seconds. Some were there alone, with reading material. A
cluster of them, back in one corner, were paying attention to one fellow who
was apparently telling a joke or story.
The longer Shaftoe spent reconnoitering the place, the more convinced
Rhodes and Gowicki became that he was actually going to do it. They became
excited and called for the other Marines, who had gone ahead of them down
the block, headed for that whorehouse.
Shaftoe saw the others coming back his tactical reserve. "What the
fuck," he said, and went into the restaurant. Behind him, he could hear the
others shouting excitedly; they couldn't believe he was doing it. When
Shaftoe stepped over the threshold of that Nip restaurant, he passed into
the realm of legend.
All the Nips looked up at him when he came in the door. If they were
surprised, they didn't show it. The chef behind the counter began to holler
out some kind of ritual greeting, which faltered and trailed off as he got a
look at what had just come in. The fellow in the back of the room a husky,
pink cheeked Nip continued telling his joke or story or whatever it was.
Shaftoe nodded to no one in particular, then stepped to the nearest
empty chair at the bar and sat down.
Other Marines would have waited until the whole squad had assembled.
Then they would have invaded the restaurant en masse, knocked over a few
chairs, spilled some soup. But Shaftoe had seized the initiative before the
others could do any such thing and gone in by himself as a sniper scout was
supposed to do. It was not just because be was a sniper scout, though. It
was also because he was Bobby Shaftoe, and he was sincerely curious about
this place, and if he could, he wanted to spend a few calm minutes in here
and learn a few things about it before the fun started.
It helped, of course, that Shaftoe was a quiet and contemplative drunk,
not a dangerous explosive drunk. He must have reeked of beer (those Krauts
in Tsingtao cranked out a brew whose taste took him right back to Wisconsin,
and he was homesick). But he wasn't hollering or knocking things over.
The chef was busy crafting one of his little morsels and pretended to
ignore Shaftoe. The other men at the counter stared coldly at Shaftoe for a
while, then turned their attentions back to their food. Shaftoe looked at
the array of raw fish laid out on shaved ice behind the bar, then looked
around the room. The guy back in the corner was talking in short bursts,
reading from a notebook. He would speak maybe ten or twenty words, and then
his little audience would turn to one another and grin, or grimace, or
sometimes even make a patter of applause. He wasn't delivering his material
like a dirty joke. He spoke precisely and expressively.
Fuck! He was reading poetry! Shaftoe had no idea what he was saying,
but he could tell, by the sound of it, that it must be poetry. Didn't rhyme
though. But the Nips did everything queerly.
He noticed that the chef was glaring at him. He cleared his throat,
which was useless since he couldn't speak Nip. He looked at some of that
ruby red fish behind the bar, pointed to it, held up two fingers.
Everyone was startled that the American had actually placed an order.
The tension was broken, only a little. The chef went to work and produced
two morsels, which he served up on a wooden pedestal.
Shaftoe had been trained to eat insects, and to bite the heads off
chickens, so he figured he could handle this. He picked the morsels up in
his fingers, just like the Nips were doing, and ate them. They were good. He
ordered two more, of another variety. The guy in the corner kept reading
poetry. Shaftoe ate his morsels and then ordered some more. For perhaps ten
seconds, between the taste of the fish and the sound of the poetry, he
actually felt comfortable here, and forgot that he was merely instigating a
vicious racial brawl.
The third order looked different: laid over the top of the raw fish
were thin translucent sheets of some kind of moist, glistening material. It
looked sort of like butcher paper soaked in oil. Shaftoe gawked at it for a
while, trying to identify it, but it looked like no foodstuff he knew of. He
glanced left and right, hoping that one of the Nips had ordered the same
stuff, so that he could watch and learn the right way to eat it. No luck.
Hell, they were officers. Maybe one of them spoke a little English. "
'Scuse me. What's this?" Shaftoe said, peeling up one corner of the eerie
membrane.
The chef looked up at him nervously, then scanned the bar, polling the
customers. Discussion ensued. Finally, a Nip officer at the end of the bar,
a naval lieutenant, stood up and spoke to Bobby Shaftoe.
"Seaweed."
Shaftoe did not particularly like the lieutenant's tone of voice
hostile and sullen. This, combined with the look on his face, seemed to say,
You'll never understand it, you farmer, so why don't you just think of it as
seaweed.
Shaftoe folded his hands primly in his lap, regarded the seaweed for a
few moments, and then looked up at the lieutenant, who was still gazing at
him expressionlessly. "What kind of seaweed, sir?" he said.
Significant glances began flying around the restaurant, like semaphores
before a naval engagement. The poetry reading seemed to have stopped, and a
migration of enlisted men had begun from the back of the room. Meanwhile the
lieutenant translated Shaftoe's inquiry to the others, who discussed it in
some detail, as if it were a major policy initiative from Franklin Delano
Roosevelt.
The lieutenant and the chef exchanged words. Then the lieutenant looked
at Shaftoe again. "He say, you pay now." The chef held up one hand and
rubbed his fingers and thumb together.
A year of working the Yangtze River Patrol had given Bobby Shaftoe
nerves of titanium, and unlimited faith in his comrades, and so he resisted
the impulse to turn his head and look out the window. He already knew
exactly what he would see: Marines, shoulder to shoulder, ready to die for
him. He scratched the new tattoo on his forearm: a dragon. His dirty
fingernails, passing over the fresh scabs, made a rasping sound in the
utterly silent restaurant.
"You didn't answer my question," Shaftoe said, pronouncing the words
with a drunk's precision.
The lieutenant translated this into Nipponese. More discussion. But
this time it was curt and decisive. Shaftoe could tell that they were about
to bounce him. He squared his shoulders.
The Nips were good; they mounted an organized charge out the door, onto
the sidewalk, and engaged the Marines, before anyone actually laid a hand on
Shaftoe. This spoiling attack prevented the Marines from invading the
restaurant proper, which would have disturbed the officers' meal and, with
any luck, led to untold property damage. Shaftoe then felt himself being
grabbed from behind by at least three people and hoisted into the air. He
made eye contact with the lieutenant while this was happening, and shouted:
"Are you bullshitting me about the seaweed?"
As brawls went, the only remarkable part of this one was the way he was
carried out to the street before he could actually get started. Then it was
like all the other street fights he'd been in with Nip soldiers in Shanghai.
These all came down to American brawn (you didn't get picked for the Fourth
Regiment unless you were an impressive looking six footer) versus that
Nipponese chop socky.
Shaftoe wasn't a boxer. He was a wrestler. This was to his advantage.
The other Marines would put up their dukes and try to fight it out Marquis
of Queensberry style no match for chop socky. Shaftoe had no illusions about
his boxing, so he would just put his head down and charge like a bull, take
a few blows to the face on his way in, but usually get a solid hold on his
opponent and slam him into the cobblestones. Usually that shook the Nip up
enough that Shaftoe could get him in a full nelson or a hammerlock and get
him to cry uncle.
The guys who were carrying him out of the restaurant got jumped by
Marines as soon as they were in the open. Shaftoe found himself going up
against an opponent who was at least as tall as he was, which was unusual.
This one had a solid build, too. Not like a sumo wrestler. More like a
football player a lineman, with a bit of a gut. He was a strong S.O.B. and
Shaftoe knew right away that he was in for a real scrape. The guy had a
different style of wrestling from the American, which (as Shaftoe learned
the hard way) included some illegal maneuvers: partial strangulation and
powerful, short punches to major nerve centers. The gulf between Shaftoe's
mind and body, already wedged open by alcohol, was yanked open to a chasm by
these techniques. He ended up lying on the sidewalk, helpless and paralyzed,
staring up into the chubby face of his opponent. This was (he realized) the
same guy who'd been sitting in the corner of the restaurant reading poetry.
He was a good wrestler for a poet. Or maybe vice versa.
" It is not seaweed ," said the big Nip. He had a look on his face like
a naughty schoolkid getting away with something. "The English word is maybe
calabash? " Then he turned and walked back into the restaurant.
So much for legend. What none of the other Marines knows is that this
was not the last encounter between Bobby Shaftoe and Goto Dengo. The
incident left Shaftoe with any number of nagging questions about subjects as
diverse as seaweed, poetry, and chop socky. He sought out Goto Dengo after
that, which was not that hard he just paid some Chinese boys to follow the
conspicuous Nip around town and file daily reports. From this he learned
that Goto Dengo and some of his comrades gathered every morning in a certain
park to practice their chop socky. After making sure that his will was in
order and writing a last letter to his parents and siblings in Oconomowoc.
Shaftoe went to that park one morning, reintroduced himself to the surprised
Goto Dengo, and made arrangements to serve as human punching bag. They found
his self defense skills hilariously primitive but admired his resilience,
and so, for the small cost of a few broken ribs and digits, Bobby Shaftoe
got a preliminary course in the particular type of chop socky favored by
Goto Dengo, which is called judo. Over time, this even led to a few social
engagements in bars, and restaurants, where Shaftoe learned to recognize
four types of seaweed, three types of fish eggs, and several flavors of Nip
poetry. Of course he had no idea what the fuck they were saying, but he
could count syllables, which, as far as he could tell, is about all there is
to Nip poetry appreciation.
Not that this or any other knowledge of their culture is going to do
him any good now that it will soon be his job to kill them.
In return, Shaftoe taught Goto Dengo how not to throw like a girl. A
lot of the Nips are good at baseball and so it was hilarious, even to them,
to see their burly friend pushing ineffectually at a baseball. But it was
Shaftoe who taught Goto Dengo to stand sideways, to rotate his shoulders,
and to follow through. He's paid a lot of attention to the big Nip's
throwing form during the last year, and maybe that's why the image of Goto
Dengo planting his feet on the ashlars of the Bund, winding up, throwing the
streamer wrapped grenade, and following through almost daintily on one
combat booted foot stays in Shaftoe's mind all the way to Manila and beyond.
***
A couple of days into the voyage it becomes apparent that Sergeant
Frick has forgotten how to shine his boots. Every night he puts them on the
deck beside his bunk, like he's expecting a coolie to come around and shine
them up during the night. Every morning he wakes up and finds them in a
sorrier state than before. After a few days he starts to draw reprimands
from On High, starts to get a lot of potato peeling duty.
Now in and of itself this is forgivable. Frick started out his career
chasing bandolier draped desperadoes away from mail trains on the High
Chaparral, for God's sake. In '27 he got shipped off to Shanghai on very
short notice, and no doubt had to display some adaptability. Fine. And now
he's on this miserable pre Great War cruiser and it's a little hard on him.
Fine. But he does not take all of this with the dignity that is demanded of
Marines by Marines. He whines about it. He lets himself get humiliated. He
gets angry. A lot of the other old China Marines see things his way.
One day Bobby Shaftoe is up on the deck of the destroyer tossing the
old horsehide around with a couple of the other young Marines when he sees a
few of these older guys accumulating into a sort of human booger on the
afterdeck. He can tell by the looks on their faces and by their gestures
that they are bellyaching.
Shaftoe hears a couple of the ship's crew talking to each other nearby
"What the hell is wrong with those Marines?" one of them says. The other one
shakes his head sadly, like a doctor who has just seen a patient's eyeballs
roll up into their sockets. "Those poor bastards have gone Asiatic." he
says.
And then they turn and look at Shaftoe.
That evening, at mess, Bobby Shaftoe gulps his food down double time,
then stands up and approaches the table where those Old Breed Marines are
sullenly gathered. "Begging your pardon, Sergeant!" he hollers. "Request
permission to shine your boots, Sarge!"
Frick's mouth drops open, revealing a half chewed plug of boiled beef.
"Whud you say, Corporal?"
The mess has gone silent. "Respectfully request permission to shine
your boots, Sarge!"
Frick is not the quickest guy in the world even when he's sober, and
it's pretty obvious, just from looking at his pupils, that he and his
comrades have brought some opium aboard. "Wull, uh, I guess so," he says. He
looks around at his crew of gripers, who are a little confused and a little
amused. He unlaces his boots. Bobby Shaftoe takes those disgraceful things
away and returns a bit later with them resplendently shined. By this time,
Frick has gotten high and mighty. "Wull, those boots look real good,
Corporal Shaftoe," he says in a brassy voice. "Darned if you ain't as good a
shoe shiner as my coolie boy was."
At lights out, Frick and crew are short sheeted. Various other, ruder
practical jokes ensue during the nighttime. One of them gets jumped in his
bunk and beaten by unspecified attackers. The brass call a surprise
inspection the next morning and cuss them out. The "gone Asiatic" crew spend
most of the next day gathered in a cluster, watching each other's backs.
Around midday, Frick finally gets it through his head that all of this
was triggered by Shaftoe's gesture, and that Shaftoe knew, all along, what
was going to happen. So he rushes Bobby Shaftoe up on the deck and tries to
throw him over the rail.
Shaftoe's warned at the last minute by one of his compadres, and spins
around just enough to throw off Frick's attack. Frick caroms off the rail,
turns around, and tries to grab Shaftoe's nuts. Shaftoe pokes him in the
eye, which straightens him right up. They back away from each other. The
opening formalities having been finished; they put up their dukes.
Frick and Shaftoe box for a couple of rounds. A large crowd of Marines
gathers. On most of their cards, Frick is winning the fight. Frick was
always dim witted, and is now crazy to boot, but he knows his way around a
boxing ring, and he has forty pounds on Shaftoe.
Shaftoe puts up with it until Frick socks him pretty hard in the mouth
and gives him a bloody lip.
"How far are we from Manila?" Shaftoe hollers. This question, as usual,
leaves Sergeant Frick confused and bewildered, and straightens him up for a
moment.
"Two days," answers one of the ship's officers.
"Well, goddamn," Bobby Shaftoe says. "How'm I gonna kiss my girl with
this fat lip?"
Frick answers, "Just go out and find a cheaper one."
That's all he needs. Shaftoe puts his head down and charges in on
Frick, hollering like a Nip. Before Frick can get his brain in gear, Bobby
Shaftoe has him wrapped up in one of those chop socky holds that Goto Dengo
taught him in Shanghai. He works his way up Frick's body to a choke hold and
then clamps down until Sergeant Frick's lips turn the color of the inside of
an oyster shell. Then he hangs Frick over the rail, holding him upside down
by the ankles, until Frick recovers enough to shout, "Uncle!"
A disciplinary proceeding is hastily called. Shaftoe is found guilty of
being courteous (by shining Frick's boots) and defending the life of a
Marine (himself) from a crazed attacker. The crazed attacker goes straight
to the brig. Within a few hours, the noises Frick makes lets all of the
Marines know what opium withdrawal feels like.
So Sergeant Frick does not get to see their entrance into Manila Bay.
Shaftoe almost feels sorry for the poor bastard.
The island of Luzon lies to port all day long, a black hulk barely
visible through the haze, with glimpses of palm trees and beaches down
below. All of the Marines have been this way before and so they can pick out
the Cordillera Central up north, and later the Zambales Mountains, which
eventually plunge down to meet the sea near Subic Bay. Subic triggers a
barrage of salty anecdotes. The ship does not put in there, but continues to
swing southward around Bata'an, turning inland toward the entrance of Manila
Bay. The ship reeks of shoe polish, talcum powder, and after shave lotion;
the Fourth Marines may have specialized in whoring and opium abuse, but
they've always been known as the best looking Marines in the Corps.
They pass by Corregidor. An island shaped like a bead of water on a
waxed boot, it is gently rounded in the middle but steeply sloping into the
water. It has a long, bony, dry tail that trails off at one end. The Marines
know that the island is riddled with tunnels and bristling with terrible
guns, but the only sign of these fortifications is the clusters of concrete
barracks up in the hills, housing the men who serve the weapons. A tangle of
antennas rises up above Topside. Their shapes are familiar to Shaftoe,
because many of the same antennas rose above Station Alpha in Shanghai, and
he had to take them apart and load them into the truck.
There is a giant limestone cliff descending nearly into the sea, and at
the base of it is the entrance to the tunnel where all the spooks and radio
men have their hideaway. Nearby is a dock, quite busy at the moment, with
supplies being offloaded from civilian transports and stacked right there on
the beach. This detail is noticed by all of the Marines as a positive sign
of approaching war. Augusta drops anchor in the cove, and all of that tarp
wrapped radio stuff is unloaded into launches and taken to that dock, along
with all of the odd pencil necked Navy men who tended that gear in Shanghai.
The swell dies as they pass Corregidor and enter the bay. Greenish
brown algae floats in swirls and curlicues near the surface. Navy ships lay
brown ropes of smoke across the still sea. Undisturbed by wind, these unfold
into rugged shapes like translucent mountain ranges. They pass the big
military base at Cavite a sheet of land so low and flat that its boundary
with the water would be invisible except for the picket line of palm trees.
A few hangars and water towers rise from it, and low dark clusters of
barracks farther inland. Manila is dead ahead of them, still veiled in haze,
It is getting on toward evening.
Then the haze dissolves, the atmosphere suddenly becomes as limpid as a
child's eyes, and for about an hour they can see to infinity. They are
steaming into an arena of immense thunderheads with lightning cork screwing
down through them all around. Flat grey clouds like shards of broken slate
peek out between anvils. Behind them are higher clouds vaulting halfway to
the moon, glowing pink and salmon in the light of the setting sun. Behind
that, more clouds nestled within banks of humidity like Christmas ornaments
wrapped in tissue paper, expanses of blue sky, more thunderheads exchanging
bolts of lightning twenty miles long. Skies nested within skies nested
within skies.
It was cold up there in Shanghai, and it's gotten warmer every day
since. Some days it's even been hot and muggy. But around the time Manila
heaves into view, a warm breeze springs up over the deck and all of the
Marines sigh, as if they have all ejaculated in unison.
Manila's perfume
Fanned by the coconut palms
The thighs of Glory
Manila's spreading tile roofs have a mestizo shape about them, half
Spanish and half Chinese. The city has a concave seawall with a flat
promenade on the top. Strollers turn and wave to the Marines; some of them
blow kisses. A wedding party is gushing down the steps of a church and
across the boulevard to the seawall, where they are getting their pictures
taken in the flattering peach colored light of the sunset. The men are in
their fancy, gauzy Filipino shirts, or in U.S. military uniforms. The women
are in spectacular gowns and dresses. The Marines holler and whistle at them
and the women turn towards them, hitching up their skirts slightly so that
they won't trip, and wave enthusiastically. The Marines get woozy and
practically fall overboard.
As their ship is easing into its dock, a crescent shaped formation of
flying fish erupts from the water. It moves away like a dune being blown
across the desert. The fish are silver and leaf shaped. Each one strikes the
water with a metallic click, and the clicks merge into a crisp ripping
noise. The crescent glides beneath a pier, flowing around its pilings, and
disappears in the shadows underneath.
Manila, the Pearl of the Orient, early on a Sunday evening, the 7th of
December, 1941. In Hawaii, on the other side of the Date Line, it is only
just past midnight. Bobby Shaftoe and his comrades have a few hours of
freedom. The city is modern, prosperous, English speaking, and Christian, by
far the wealthiest and most advanced city in Asia, practically like being
back home in the States. For all its Catholicity, it has areas that seem to
have been designed, from the foundation stones upwards, to the
specifications of horny sailors. You get to those parts of town by turning
right once your feet are on dry land.
Bobby Shaftoe turns left, politely excuses himself past a legion of
excited prostitutes, and sets his course on the looming walls of Intramuros.
He stops only to buy a sheaf of roses from a vendor in the park, who is
doing land office business. The park and the walls above it are crowded with
strolling lovers, the men mostly in uniforms and the women in demure but
stunning dresses, twirling parasols on their shoulders.
A couple of fellows driving horse drawn taxis want to do business with
Bobby Shaftoe but he turns them down. A taxi will only get him there faster,
and he is too nervous to get there fast. He walks through a gate in the wall
and into the old Spanish city.
Intramuros is a maze of buff colored stone walls rising abruptly from
narrow streets. The first floor windows along the sidewalks are guarded by
black ironwork cages. The bars swell, swirl, and sprout finedly hammered
leaves. The second stories hang out overhead, sporting gas lights that are
just now being lit by servants with long, smoking poles. The sound of
laughter and music drifts out of the windows above, and when he passes by
the archways that open into the inner courtyards, he can smell flowers back
in the gardens.
Damned if he can tell these places apart. He remembers the street name
of Magallanes, because Glory told him once it was the same thing as
"Magellan." And he remembers the view of the cathedral from the Pascuals'
window. He wanders around a block a couple of times, certain that he is
close. Then he hears an exaltation of girlish laughter coming from a second
story window, and moves toward it like a jellyfish sucked into an intake
pipe. It all comes together. This is the place. The girls are all gossiping,
in English, about one of their instructors. He does not hear Glory's voice
but he thinks he hears her laughter.
"Glory!" he says. Then he says it louder. If they hear him, they pay
him no mind. Finally he winds up and flings the bouquet of roses like a
potato masher grenade over the wooden railing, through a narrow gap between
the mother of pearl shutters, and into the room.
Miraculous silence from within the room, and then gales of laughter.
The nacre shutters part with slow, agonizing coyness. A girl of nineteen
steps out onto the balcony. She is dressed in the uniform of a nursing
student. Iris as white as starlight shining on the North Pole. She has let
her long black hair down to brush it, and it stirs languidly in the evening
breeze. The last ruddy light of the sunset makes her face glow like a coal.
She hides behind the bouquet for a moment, buries her nose in it, inhales
deeply, peeking out at him over the blossoms with her black eyes. Then she
lowers the bouquet gradually to reveal her high cheeks, her perfect little
nose, the fantastic sculpture of her lips, and teeth, white but fetchingly
crooked, barely visible. She is smiling.
"Jesus H. Christ," Bobby Shaftoe says, "your cheekbones are like a
fucking snowplow."
She puts her finger to her lips. The gesture of anything touching
Glory's lips puts an invisible spear through Shaftoe's chest. She eyes him
for a while, establishing, in her own mind, that she has the boy's attention
and that he is not going anywhere. Then she turns her back on him. The light
grazes her buttocks, showing nothing but suggesting cleavage. She goes back
inside and the shutter glides shut behind her.
Suddenly the room full of girls becomes quiet, except for occasional
ripples of suppressed laughter. Shaftoe bites his tongue. They are screwing
it all up. Mr. or Mrs. Pascual will notice their silence and become
suspicious.
Ironwork clangs and a big gate swings open. The potter beckons him
inside. Shaftoe follows the old fellow down the black, arched tunnel of the
porte cochere. The hard soles of his shiny black shoes skid on the
cobblestones. A horse back in the stable whinnies at the smell of his
aftershave. Sleepy American music, slow dance stuff from the Armed Forces
station, spills tinnily from a radio in the porter's nook.
Flowering vines grow up the stone walls of the courtyard. It is a tidy,
quiet, enclosed world, almost like being indoors. The porter waves him in
the direction of one of the stairways that lead up to the second floor.
Glory calls it the entresuelo and says that it's really a floor between the
floors, but it looks like a full fledged, regular floor to Bobby Shaftoe. He
mounts the steps and looks up to see Mr. Pascual standing there, a tiny bald
man with glasses and a trim little mustache. He is wearing a short sleeved
shirt, American style, and khaki trousers, and slippers, and is holding a
glass of San Miguel in one hand and a cigarette in the other. "Private
Shaftoe! Welcome back," he says.
So. Glory has decided to play this one by the book. The Pascuals have
been alerted. A few hours of socializing now stand between Bobby Shaftoe and
his girl. But a Marine is never fazed by such setbacks.
"Begging your pardon, Mr. Pascual, but I am a corporal now."
Mr. Pascual puts his cigarette in his mouth and shakes Corporal
Shaftoe's hand. "Well, congratulations! I just saw your uncle Jack last
week. I don't think he had any idea you were on your way back."
"It was a surprise to everyone, sir," Bobby Shaftoe says.
Now they are on a raised walkway that runs around the courtyard. Only
livestock and servants live at ground level. Mr. Pascual leads them around
to a door that takes them into the entresuelo. The walls here are rough
stone, the ceilings are simple painted planks. They pass through a dark,
somber office where Mr. Pascual's father and grandfather used to receive the
managers of the family's haciendas and plantations. For a moment, Bobby
Shaftoe gets his hopes up. This level has a few rooms that back in the old
days were apartments for high ranking servants, bachelor uncles, and
spinster aunts. Now that the hacienda business ain't what it used to be, the
Pascuals are renting them out to female students. Perhaps Mr. Pascual is
leading him directly to Glory.
But this goes the way of all foolish, horny illusions as Shaftoe finds
himself at the foot of a vast staircase of polished nara wood. He can see
pressed tin ceiling up there, chandeliers, and the imposing superstructure
of Mrs. Pascual, contained within a mighty bodice that looks like some thing
dreamed up by naval engineers. They ascend the stairs into the antesala,
which according to Glory is strictly for casual, drop in visitors but is
fancier than any room Bobby Shaftoe has ever seen. There are big vases and
pots all over the place, supposedly old, and supposedly from Japan and
China. A fresh breeze runs through; he looks out a window and sees, neatly
framed in it, the green dome of the cathedral with its Celtic cross on top,
just as he remembered it. Mrs. Pascual holds out her band and Shaftoe clasps
it. "Mrs. Pascual," he says, "thank you for welcoming me into your home."
"Please sit down," she says, "we want to hear everything."
Shaftoe sits in a fancy chair next to the piano, adjust his trousers a
bit so that they will not cramp his erect penis, checks his shave. It
probably has a few good hours left. A wing of airplanes drones overhead.
Mrs. Pascual is giving instructions to the maid in Tagalog. Shaftoe examines
the crusted lacerations on his knuckles and wonders whether Mrs. Pascual has
the slightest idea of what she would be in for if he really told her
everything. Perhaps a little anecdote about hand to hand combat with Chinese
river pirates on the banks of the Yangtze would break the ice. Through a
door and down the hall, he can see a corner of the family chapel, all Gothic
arches, a gilded altar, and in front of it an embroidered kneeler worn
threadbare by the patellas of Mrs. Pascual.
Cigarettes are brought round, stacked in a large lacquer box like
artillery shells in a crate. They drink tea and exchange small talk for what
seems like about thirty six hours. Mrs. Pascual wants to be reassured, over
and over again, that everything is fine and that there will not be a war.
Mr. Pascual obviously believes that war is just around the corner, and
mostly broods. Business has been good lately. He and Jack Shaftoe, Bobby's
uncle, have been shipping a lot of stuff between here and Singapore. But
business will get a lot worse soon, he thinks.
Glory appears. She has changed out of her student's uniform and into a
dress. Bobby Shaftoe nearly topples backward out of the window. Mrs. Pascual
formally reintroduces them. Bobby Shaftoe kisses Glory's hand in what he
thinks is more than likely a very gallant gesture. He's glad he did, because
Glory is palming a tiny wadded up note which ends up in his hand.
Glory takes a seat and is duly issued her own teacup. Another eternity
of small talk. Mr. Pascual asks him for the eighty seventh time whether he
has touched base with Uncle Jack yet, and Shaftoe reiterates that he
literally just stepped off the boat and will certainly see Uncle Jack
tomorrow morning. He excuses himself to the bathroom, which is an old
fashioned two holer mounted above deep shafts that must descend all the way
to hell. He unwads and reads Glory's note, memorizes the instructions, tears
it up and sprinkles it down the hole.
Mrs. Pascual allows the two young lovers a full half hour of "private"
time together, meaning that the Pascuals leave the room and only come back
every five minutes or so to check up on them. There is a painfully elaborate
and lengthy good bye ceremony which ends in Shaftoe returning to the street
and Glory waving to him from her balcony.
Half an hour later, they are doing tongue judo in the back of a horse
drawn taxi galloping over the cobblestones toward the nightclubs of Malate.
The extraction of Glory from the Pascual residence was a simple matter for a
highly motivated China Marine and a squadron of saucy nursing students.
But Glory must be kissing him with her eyes open because all of a
sudden she wriggles loose and says to the taxi driver, "Stop! Please stop,
sir!"
"What is it?" Shaftoe says blurrily. He looks around and sees nothing
but a great big old stone church looming up above them. This brings a
preliminary stab of fear. But the church is dark, there's no Filipinas in
long dresses, no Marines in dress uniforms, it can't be his wedding.
"I want to show you something," Glory says, and clambers down out of
the taxi. Shaftoe has to pursue her into the place the Church of San
Augustin. He's gone by this pile many times but he never reckoned he would
come inside on a date.
She stands at the bottom of a huge staircase and says, "See?"
Shaftoe looks up into darkness, thinks there might be a stained glass
window or two up there, maybe a Laceration of Christ or an Impalement of the
Blessed Thorax, but
"Look down ," Glory says, and taps one miniature foot against the first
tread of the staircase. It is a single great big huge slab of granite.
"Looks like ten or twenty tons of rock there I'd estimate," he says
authoritatively.
"It came from Mexico."
"Ah, go on!"
Glory smiles at him. "Carry me up the stairs." And in case Shaftoe's
thinking of refusing, she sort of falls into him, and he has no choice but
to catch her up in his arms. She traps his nape in the crook of her arm, the
better to pull her face close to his, but what he remembers is how the silk
of her sleeve feels against the freshly shaved skin of his neck. He begins
the ascent. Glory doesn't weigh much, but after four steps he has broken a
fine sweat. She is watching him, from four inches away, for signs of
fatigue, and he feels himself blushing. Good thing that the whole staircase
is lit up by about two candles. There's a lovely bust of a thorn crowned
Jesus with long parallel blood drops running down his face, and on the right
"These giant stones you are walking on were quarried in Mexico,
centuries and centuries ago, before America was even a country. They were
brought over in the bottoms of the Manila Galleons, as ballast." She
pronounces it bayast.
"I'll be damned."
"When those galleons arrived, the stones were brought out of their
bellies, one by one, and taken here to the Church of San Augustin, and piled
up. Each stone on top of the last year's stone. Until finally after many,
many years this staircase was finished."
After a while it seems to Shaftoe as though it's going to take at least
that many years to reach the top of the damn thing. The summit is adorned
with a life sized Jesus carrying a cross that appears to be at least as
heavy as one of those stair treads. So who's he to complain? Then Glory
says, "Now carry me down, so you will remember the story."
'"You think I'm some horny jarhead who won't remember a story unless
it's got a pretty girl in it?"
'"Yes," Glory says, and laughs in his face. He carries her down to the
bottom again. Then, before she goes off on some other tangent, he carries
her straight out the door and into the taxi.
Bobby Shaftoe is not one to lose his cool in the heat of action, but
the rest of the evening is a blurry fever dream to him. Only a few
impressions penetrate the haze: alighting from the taxi in front of a
waterfront hotel; all of the other boys gaping at Glory; Bobby Shaftoe
glaring at them, threatening to teach them some manners. Slow dancing with
Glory in the ballroom, Glory's silk clad thigh gradually slipping between
his legs, her firm body pressing harder and harder against his. Strolling
along the seawall, hand in hand beneath the starlight. Noticing that the
tide is out. Exchanging a look. Carrying her down from the seawall to the
thin strip of rocky beach beneath it.
By the time he is actually fucking her, he has more or less lost
consciousness, he is off in some fantastic, libidinal dream. He and Glory
fuck without the slightest hesitation, without any doubts, without any
troublesome thinking whatsoever. Their bodies have spontaneously merged,
like a pair of drops running together on a windowpane. If he is thinking
anything at all, it is that his entire life has culminated in this moment.
His upbringing in Oconomowoc, high school prom night, deer hunting in the
Upper Peninsula, Parris Island boot camp, all of the brawls and struggles in
China, his duel with Sergeant Frick, they are wood behind the point of a
spear.
Sirens are blowing somewhere. He startles back to awareness. Has he
been here all night long, holding Glory up against the seawall, her thighs
wrapped around his waist? That would not be possible. The tide hasn't come
in at all.
"What is it?" she says. Her hands are clasped around the back of his
neck. She lets go and runs them down his chest.
Still holding her up, his hands making a sling under her warm and
flawless ass, Shaftoe backs away from the seawall and turns around on the
beach, looking at the sky. He sees searchlights beginning to come on. And it
ain't no Hollywood premiere.
"It's war, baby," he says.
Chapter 4 FORAYS
The lobby of the Manila Hotel is about the size of a football field. It
smells like last year's perfume, rare tropical orchids, and bug spray. There
is a metal detector set up at the front door, because the Prime Minister of
Zimbabwe happens to be staying here for a couple of days. Big Africans in
good suits stand around the place in clusters of two and three. Mini throngs
of Nipponese tourists, in their Bermuda shorts, sandals and white socks,
have lodged themselves in the deep, thick, wide sofas and sit quietly,
waiting for a prearranged signal. Upper class Filipino children brandish
cylindrical potato chip canisters like tribal chieftains carrying ceremonial
maces. A dignified old bellman carrying a hand pumped tank circulates around
the defensive perimeter and silently sprays insecticide against the
baseboard. Enter Randall Lawrence Waterhouse, in a turquoise polo shirt
embroidered with the logo of one of the bankrupt high tech companies that he
and Avi have founded, and relaxed fit blue jeans held up with suspenders,
and bulky athletic shoes that once were white.
As soon as he got through the formalities at the airport, he perceived
that the Philippines are, like Mexico, one of those countries where Shoes
Matter. He approaches the registration counter quickly so that the ravishing
young woman in the navy blue uniform will not see his feet. A couple of
bellhops are engaged in a pathetic, Sisyphean contest with his bag, which
has roughly the dimensions and mass of a two drawer filing cabinet. "You
will not be able to find technical books there," Avi told him, "bring
anything you might conceivably need."
Randy's suite is a bedroom and living room, both with fourteen foot
ceilings, and a corridor along one side containing several closets and
various plumbing related technologies. The entire thing is lined in some
kind of tropical hardwood stained to a lovely glowing auburn, which would be
dismal in the northern latitudes but, here, gives it a cozy and cool
feeling. The two main rooms each have huge windows with tiny signs by the
latch handles warning of tropical insects. Each room is defended from its
windows by a multilayered system of interlocking barriers: incredibly
massive wooden shutters that rumble back and forth on tracks, like freight
trains maneuvering in a switching yard; a second layer of shutters
consisting of two inch squares of nacre held in a polished wooden grid,
sliding on its own set of tracks; window sheers, and finally, heavy gauge
blackout curtains, each suspended from its own set of clanging industrial
rails.
He orders up a large pot of coffee, which barely keeps him awake long
enough to unpack. It is late afternoon. Purple clouds tumble out of the
surrounding mountains with the palpable momentum of volcanic mudflows and
turn half of the sky into a blank wall striped with vertical bolts of
lightning; the walls of the hotel room flash with it as though paparazzi are
working outside the window. Below, food vendors in Rizal Park run up and
down the sidewalks to get out of the rain, which falls, as it has been doing
for about half a millennium, on the sloping black walls of Intramuros. If
those walls did not run in straight lines they could be mistaken for a
natural freak of geology: ridges of bare, dark volcanic rock erupting from
the grass like teeth from gums. The walls have dovetail shaped notches that
converge to old gun emplacements, providing interlocking fields of fire
across a dry moat.
Living in the States, you never see anything older than about two and a
half centuries, and you have to visit the eastern fringe of the country to
see that. The business traveler's world of airports and taxicabs looks the
same everywhere. Randy never really believes he's in a different country
until he sees something like Intramuros, and then he has to stand there like
an idiot for a long time, ruminating.
***
Right now, across the Pacific Ocean, in a small, tasteful Victorian
town located a third of the way from San Francisco to Los Angeles, computers
are seizing up, crucial files are disappearing, and e mail is careening into
intergalactic space, because Randy Waterhouse is not there to keep an eye on
things. The town in question sports three small colleges: one founded by the
State of California and two founded by Protestant denominations that are now
actively reviled by the majority of their faculty. Taken together these
colleges the Three Siblings comprise an academic center of middling
importance. Their computer systems are linked into one. They exchange
teachers and students. From time to time they host academic conferences.
This part of California has beaches, mountains, redwood forests, vineyards,
golf courses, and sprawling penal facilities all over the place. There are
plenty of three– and four star hotel rooms, and the Three Siblings,
taken together, have enough auditoria and meeting rooms to host a conference
of several thousand.
Avi's telephone call, some eighty hours ago, arrived in the middle of a
major interdisciplinary conference called "The Intermediate Phase (1939 45)
of the Global Hegemony Struggle of the Twentieth Century (Common Era)." This
is a bit of a mouthful and so it has been given a pithy nickname: "War as
Text."
People are coming from places like Amsterdam and Milan. The
conference's organizing committee which includes Randy's girlfriend,
Charlene, who actually gives every indication of being his ex girlfriend now
hired an artist in San Francisco to come up with a poster. He started with a
black and white halftone photo of a haggard World War II infantryman with a
cigarette dangling from his lower lip. He worked this image over using a
photocopier, blowing the halftone dots up into rough lumps, like rubber
balls chewed by a dog, and wreaking any number of other distortions on it
until it had an amazingly stark, striking, jagged appearance; the soldier's
pale eyes turned an eerie white. Then he added a few elements in color: red
lipstick, blue eyeshadow, and a trace of a red brassiere strap peeking out
from the soldier's unbuttoned uniform shirt.
The poster won some kind of an award almost the moment it came out.
This led to a press release, which in turn led to the poster's being
enshrined by the news media as an Official Object of Controversy. An
enterprising journalist managed to track down the soldier depicted in the
original photograph a decorated combat veteran and retired tool and die
maker who, as it happened, was not merely alive but in excellent health,
and, since the death of his wife from breast cancer, had spent his
retirement roaming around the Deep South in his pickup truck, helping to
rebuild black churches that had been torched by drunken yahoos.
The artist who had designed the poster then confessed that he had
simply copied it from a book and had made no effort whatsoever to obtain
permission the entire concept of getting permission to use other people's
work was faulty, since all art was derivative of other art. High powered
trial lawyers converged, like dive bombers, on the small town in Kentucky
where the aggrieved veteran was up on the roof of a black church with a
mouthful of nails, hammering down slabs of A/D exterior plywood and mumbling
"no comment" to a horde of reporters down on the lawn. After a series of
conferences in a room at the town's Holiday Inn, the veteran emerged,
accompanied by one of the five most famous lawyers on the face of the
planet, and announced that he was filing a civil suit against the Three
Siblings that would, if it succeeded, turn them and their entire community
into a flat, smoking abrasion in the earth's crust. He promised to split the
proceeds between the black churches and various disabled veterans' and
breast cancer research groups.
The organizing committee pulled the poster from circulation, which
caused thousands of bootleg copies to go up on the World Wide Web and, in
general, brought it to the attention of millions who never would have seen
it otherwise. They also filed suit against the artist, whose net worth could
be tallied up on the back of a ticket stub: he had assets of about a
thousand dollars and debts (mostly student loans) amounting to sixty five
thousand.
All of this happened before the conference even began. Randy was aware
of it only because Charlene had roped him into providing computer support
for the conference, which meant setting up a Web site and e mail access for
the attendees. When all of this hit the news, e mail began to flood in, and
quickly jammed up all of the lines and filled up all of the disk capacity
that Randy had spent the last month setting up.
Conferees began to arrive. A lot of them seemed to be sleeping in the
house where Randy and Charlene had been living together for seven years. It
was a big old Victorian house and there was plenty of room. They stumbled in
from Heidelberg and Paris and Berkeley and Boston, then sat around Randy and
Charlene's kitchen table drinking coffee and talking at great length about
the Spectacle. Randy inferred that the Spectacle meant the poster furor, but
as they went on and on about it, he sensed that they were using the word not
in a conventional sense but as part of some academic jargon; that it carried
a heavy load of shadings and connotations to them, none of which Randy would
ever understand unless he became one of them.
To Charlene, and to all of the people attending War as Text, it was
self evident that the veteran who filed the lawsuit was the very worst kind
of human being just the sort they had gathered together to debunk, burn in
effigy, and sweep into the ash bin of posthistorical discourse. Randy had
spent a lot of time around these people, and thought he'd gotten used to
them, but during those days he had a headache all the time, from clenching
his teeth, and he kept jumping to his feet in the middle of meals or
conversations and going out for solitary walks. This was partly to keep
himself from saying something undiplomatic, and partly as a childish but
fruitless tactic to get the attention he craved from Charlene.
He knew the whole poster saga was going to be a disaster from early on.
He kept warning Charlene and the others. They listened coolly, clinically,
as if Randy were a test subject on the wrong side of a one way mirror.
***
Randy forces himself to stay awake long enough for it to get dark. Then
he lies in bed for a few hours trying to sleep. The container port is just
north of the hotel, and all night long, Rizal Boulevard, along the base of
the old Spanish wall, is jammed from one end to the other with container
carrying semis. The whole city is a cauldron of internal combustion. Manila
seems to have more pistons and exhaust pipes than the rest of the world
combined. Even at two in the morning the hotel's seemingly unshakable mass
hums and rattles from the seismic energy pouring from all of those motors.
The noise detonates car alarms down in the hotel's lot. The noise of one
alarm triggers others, and so on. It is not the noise that keeps Randy awake
so much as the insane stupidity of this chain reaction. It is an object
lesson: the kind of nightmarish, snowballing technological fuck up that
keeps hackers awake at night even when they can't hear the results.
He paws open a Heineken from his minibar and stands in front of the
window, looking. Many of the trucks are adorned with brilliant displays of
multicolored lights not quite as flashy as those of the few jeepneys that
scurry and jostle among them. Seeing so many people awake and working puts
sleep out of the question.
He is too jet lagged to accomplish anything that requires actual
thought but there is one important job he can do, which requires no thinking
whatsoever. He starts up his laptop again. Seeming to levitate in the center
of his dark room, the screen is a perfect rectangle of light the color of
diluted milk, of a Nordic dawn. This light originates in small fluorescent
tubes imprisoned in the polycarbonate coffin of his computer's display. It
can only escape through a pane of glass, facing Randy, which is entirely
covered by small transistors arranged in a grid, which let photons through,
or don't, or let through only those of a particular wavelength, cracking the
pale light into colors. By turning those transistors on and off according to
some systematic plan, meaning is conveyed to Randy Waterhouse. A good
filmmaker could convey a whole story to Randy by seizing control of those
transistors for a couple of hours.
Unfortunately, there are a lot more laptop computers floating around
than there are filmmakers worth paying attention to. The transistors are
almost never put into the hands of human beings. They are controlled,
instead, by software. Randy used to be fascinated by software, but now he
isn't. It's hard enough to find human beings who are interesting.
The pyramid and the eyeball appear. Randy spends so much time using
Ordo now that he has his machine boot it up automatically.
Nowadays the laptop has only one function for Randy: he uses it to
communicate with other people, through e mail. When he communicates with
Avi, he has to use Ordo, which is a tool for taking his ideas and converting
them into streams of bits that are almost indistinguishable from white
noise, so that they can be sent to Avi in privacy. In exchange, it receives
noise from Avi and converts it into Avi's thoughts. At the moment, Epiphyte
has no assets other than information it is an idea, with some facts and data
to back it up. This makes it eminently stealable. So encryption is
definitely a good idea. The question is: how much paranoia is really
appropriate?
Avi sent him encrypted e mail:
When you get to Manila t would like you to generate a 4O96 bit key pair
and keep it on a floppy disk that you carry on your person at all times. Do
not keep it on your hard disk. Anyone could break into your hotel room while
you're out and steal that key.
Now, Randy pulls down a menu and picks an item labeled: "New key. . ."
A box pops up giving him several KEY LENGTH options: 768 bits, 1024,
1536, 2048, 3072, or Custom. Randy picks the latter option and then,
wearily, types in 4096.
Even a 768 bit key requires vast resources to break. Add one bit, to
make it 769 bits long, and the number of possible keys doubles, the problem
becomes much more difficult. A 770 bit key is that much more difficult yet,
and so on. By using 768 bit keys, Randy and Avi could keep their
communications secret from nearly every entity in the world for at least the
next several years. A 1024 bit key would be vastly, astronomically more
difficult to break.
Some people go so far as to use keys 2048 or even 3072 bits in length.
These will stop the very best codebreakers on the face of the earth for
astronomical periods of time, barring the invention of otherworldly
technologies such as quantum computers. Most encryption software even stuff
written by extremely security conscious cryptography experts can't even
handle keys larger than that. But Avi insists on using Ordo, generally
considered the best encryption software in the world, because it can handle
keys of unlimited length as long as you don't mind waiting for it to crunch
all the numbers.
Randy begins typing. He is not bothering to look at the screen; he is
staring out the window at the lights on the trucks and the jeepneys. He is
only using one hand, just flailing away loosely at the keyboard.
Inside Randy's computer is a precise clock. Whenever he strikes a key,
Ordo uses that clock to record the current time, down to microseconds. He
hits a key at 03:03:56.935788 and he hits another one at 03:05:57.290664, or
about .354876 seconds later. Another .372307 seconds later, he hits another
one. Ordo keeps track of all of these intervals and discards the more
significant digits (in this example the .35 and the .37) because these parts
will tend to be similar from one event to the next.
Ordo wants randomness. It only wants the least significant digits say,
the 76 and the 07 at the very ends of these numbers. It wants a whole lot of
random numbers, and it wants them to be very, very random. It is taking
somewhat random numbers and feeding them through hash functions that make
them even more random. It is running statistical routines on the results to
make sure that they contain no hidden patterns. It has breathtakingly high
standards for randomness, and it will not stop asking Randy to whack on the
keyboard until those standards are met.
The longer the key you are trying to generate, the longer this takes.
Randy is trying to generate one that is ridiculously long. He has pointed
out to Avi, in an encrypted e mail message, that if every particle of matter
in the universe could be used to construct one single cosmic supercomputer,
and this computer was put to work trying to break a 4096 bit encryption key,
it would take longer than the lifespan of the universe.
"Using today's technology," Avi shot back. "that is true. But what
about quantum computers? And what if new mathematical techniques are
developed that can simplify the factoring of large numbers?"
"How long do you want these messages to remain secret?" Randy asked, in
his last message before leaving San Francisco. "Five years? Ten years?
Twenty five years?"
After he got to the hotel this afternoon, Randy decrypted and read
Avi's answer. It is still hanging in front of his eyes, like the afterimage
of a strobe:
I want them to remain secret for as long as men are capable of evil.
The computer finally beeps. Randy rests his tired hand. Ordo politely
warns him that it may be busy for a while, and then goes to work. It is
searching the cosmos of pure numbers, looking for two big primes that can be
multiplied by each other to produce a number 4096 bits long.
If you want your secrets to remain secret past the end of your life
expectancy, then, in order to choose a key length, you have to be a
futurist. You have to anticipate how much faster computers will get during
this time. You must also be a student of politics. Because if the entire
world were to become a police state obsessed with recovering old secrets,
then vast resources might be thrown at the problem of factoring large
composite numbers.
So the length of the key that you use is, in and of itself, a code of
sorts. A knowledgeable government eavesdropper, noting Randy's and Avi's use
of a 4096 bit key, will conclude one of the following:
– Avi doesn't know what he's talking about. This can be ruled out
with a bit of research into his past accomplishments. Or,
– Avi is clinically paranoid. This can also be ruled out with
some research. Or,
– Avi is extremely optimistic about the future development of
computer technology, or pessimistic about the political climate, or both.
Or,
– Avi has a planning horizon that extends over a period of at
least a century.
Randy paces around his room while his computer soars through number
space. The shipping containers on the backs of those trucks bear exactly the
same logos as the ones that used to fill the streets of South Seattle when a
ship was unloading. To Randy this is oddly satisfying, as if by making this
crazy lunge across the Pacific, he has brought some kind of antipodal
symmetry to his life. He has gone from the place where things are consumed
to where they are produced, from a land where onanism has been enshrined at
the highest levels of the society to one where cars have "NO to
contraception!" stickers in their windows. It feels bizarrely right. He has
not felt this way since Avi and he founded their first doomed business
venture twelve years ago.
***
Randy grew up in a college town in eastern Washington State, graduated
from the University of Washington in Seattle, and landed a Clerk Typist II
job at the library there specifically the Interlibrary Loan Department where
his job was to process incoming loan requests mailed in from smaller
libraries all over the region and, conversely, to mail out requests to other
libraries. If nine year old Randy Waterhouse had been able to look into the
future and see himself in this career, he would have been delighted beyond
measure: the primary tool of the Interlibrary Loan Department was the Staple
Remover. Young Randy had seen one of these devices in the hands of his
fourth grade teacher and been enthralled by its cunning and deadly
appearance, so like the jaws of some futuristic robot dragon. He had, in
fact, gone out of his way to staple things incorrectly just so he could
prevail on his teacher to unstaple them, giving him another glimpse of the
blood chilling mandibles in action. He had gone so far as to steal a staple
remover from an untended desk at church and then incorporate it into an
Erector set robot hunter killer device with which he terrorized much of the
neighborhood; its pit viper yawn separated many a cheap plastic toy from its
parts and accessories before the theft was discovered and Randy made an
example of before God and man. Now, in the Interlibrary Loan office, Randy
had not just one but several staple removers in his desk drawer and was
actually obligated to use them for an hour or two a day.
Since the UW library was well endowed, its patrons didn't request books
from other libraries unless they had been stolen from their own or were, in
some way, peculiar. The ILL office (as Randy and his coworkers
affectionately called it) had its regulars people who had a whole lot of
peculiar books on their wish lists. These people tended to be either tedious
or scary or both. Randy always ended up dealing with the "both" subgroup,
because Randy was the only Clerk Typist in the office who was not a lifer.
It seemed clear that Randy, with his astronomy degree and his extensive
knowledge of computers, would one day move on, whereas his coworkers did not
harbor further ambitions. His larger sphere of interests, his somewhat
broader concept of normalcy, was useful when certain patrons came into the
office.
By the standards of many, Randy was himself a tedious, scary, obsessed
character. He was not merely obsessed with science but also with fantasy
role playing games. The only way he could tolerate working at such a stupid
job for a couple of years was that his off time was completely occupied with
enacting fantasy scenarios of a depth and complexity that exercised all of
the cranial circuitry that was so conspicuously going to waste in the ILL
office. He was part of a group that would meet every Friday night and play
until sometime on Sunday. The other stalwarts in the group were a computer
science/music double major named Chester, and a history grad student named
Avi.
When a new master's degree candidate named Andrew Loeb walked into the
ILL office one day, with a certain glint in his eye, and produced a three
inch thick stack of precisely typed request forms from his shitty old
knapsack, he was recognized immediately as being of a particular type, and
shunted in the direction of Randy Waterhouse. It was an instant meeting of
minds, though Randy did not fully realize this until the books that Loeb had
requested began to arrive on the trolley from the mail room.
Andy Loeb's project was to figure out the energy budgets of the local
Indian tribes. A human body has to expend a certain amount of energy just to
keep breathing and to maintain its body temperature. This figure goes up
when it gets cold or when the body in question is doing work. The only way
to obtain that energy is by eating food. Some foods have a higher energy
content than others. For example, trout is highly nutritious but so low in
fat and carbohydrates that you can starve to death eating it three times a
day. Other foods might have lots of energy, but might require so much work
to obtain and prepare that eating them would be a losing proposition, BTU
wise. Andy Loeb was trying to figure out what foods had historically been
eaten by certain Northwest Indian tribes, how much energy they expended to
get these foods and how much they obtained by eating them. He wanted to do
this calculation for coastal Indians like the Salish (who had easy access to
seafood) and for inland ones like the Cayuse (who didn't) as part of an
extremely convoluted plan to prove some sort of point about the relative
standards of living of these tribes and how this affected their cultural
development (coastal tribes made lots of fantastically detailed art and
inland ones occasionally scratched stick figures on rocks).
To Andrew Loeb it was an exercise in meta historical scholarship. To
Randy Waterhouse, it sounded like the beginnings of a pretty cool game.
Strangle a muskrat and you get 136 Energy Points. Lose the muskrat and your
core temp drops another degree.
Andy was nothing if not methodical and so he had simply looked up every
book that had ever been written on such topics, and every book mentioned in
those books' bibliographies, yea, even unto four or five generations;
checked out all of them that were available locally; and ordered the rest
from ILL. All of the latter passed across Randy's desk. Randy read some and
skimmed all. He got to learn about how much blubber the Arctic explorers had
to eat in order to keep from starving to death. He perused detailed
specifications for Army C rations. After a while, he actually began sneaking
into the photocopy room and making copies of key data.
In order to run a realistic fantasy role playing game, you had to keep
track of how much food the imaginary characters were getting and how much
trouble was involved in getting it. Characters passing across the Gobi
desert in November of the year 5000 B.C. would have to spend more time
worrying about food than, say, ones who were traveling across central
Illinois in 1950.
Randy was hardly the first game designer to notice this. There were a
few incredibly stupid games in which you didn't have to think about food,
but Randy and his friends disdained them. In all of the games that he
participated in, or that he himself designed, you had to devote a realistic
amount of effort to getting food for your character. But it was not easy to
determine what was realistic. Like most designers, Randy got over the
problem by slapping together a few rudimentary equations that he basically
just pulled out of thin air. But in the books, articles, and dissertations
that Andrew Loeb was borrowing through ILL, he found exactly the raw data
that a mathematically inclined person would need to come up with a
sophisticated rules system based on scientific fact.
Simulating all of the physical processes going on in each character's
body was out of the question, especially in a game where you might be
dealing with armies of a hundred thousand men. Even a crude simulation,
tracking only a few variables and using simple equations, would involve a
nightmarish amount of paperwork if you did it all by hand. But all of this
was happening in the mid 1980s, when personal computers had become cheap and
ubiquitous. A computer could automatically track a large database and tell
you whether each character was well fed or starving. There was no reason not
to do it on a computer.
Unless, like Randy Waterhouse, you had such a shitty job that you
couldn't afford a computer.
Of course, there's a way to dodge any problem. The university had lots
of computers. If Randy could get an account on one of them, he could write
his program there and run it for free.
Unfortunately, accounts were only available to students or faculty
members, and Randy was neither.
Fortunately, he started dating a grad student named Charlene at just
about this time.
How the hell did a generally keg shaped guy, a hard scientist, working
a dead end Clerk Typist job, and spending all his spare time in the
consummately nerdy pastime of fantasy role playing games, end up in a
relationship with a slender and not unattractive young liberal arts student
who spent her spare time sea kayaking and going to foreign films? It must
have been one of those opposites attract kind of deals, a complementary
relationship. They met, naturally, in the ILL office, where the highly
intelligent but steady and soothing Randy helped the highly intelligent but
scattered and flighty Charlene organize a messy heap of loan requests. He
should have asked her out then and there, but he was shy. Second and third
opportunities came along when the books she'd requested began to filter up
from the mailroom, and finally he asked her out and they went to see a film
together. Both of them turned out to be not just willing but eager, and
possibly even desperate. Before they knew it, Randy had given Charlene a key
to his apartment, and Charlene had given Randy the password to her free
university computer account, and everything was just delightful.
The university computer system was better than no computer at all. But
Randy was humiliated. Like every other high powered academic computing
network, this one was based on an industrial strength operating system
called UNIX, which had a learning curve like the Matterhorn, and lacked the
cuddly and stylish features of the personal computers then coming into
vogue. Randy had used it quite a bit as an undergraduate and knew his way
around. Even so, learning how to write good code on the thing required a lot
of time. His life had changed when Charlene had come along, and now it
changed more: he dropped out of the fantasy role playing game circuit
altogether, stopped going to meetings of the Society for Creative
Anachronism, and began to spend all of his free time either with Charlene or
in front of a computer terminal. All in all, this was probably a change for
the better. With Charlene, he did things he wouldn't have done otherwise,
like getting exercise, or going to see live music. And at the computer, he
was learning new skills, and he was creating something. It might be
something completely useless, but at least he was creating.
He spent a lot of time talking to Andrew Loeb, who actually went out
and did the stuff he was writing programs for; he'd disappear for a few days
and come back all wobbly and haggard, with fish scales caught in his
whiskers or dried animal blood under his fingernails. He'd ram down a couple
of Big Macs, sleep for twenty four hours, then meet Randy in a bar (Charlene
wasn't comfortable with having him in the house) and talk learnedly of the
difficulties of day to day life, aboriginal style. They argued about whether
aborigines would eat the more disgusting parts of certain animals or throw
them away. Andrew voted for yes. Randy disagreed just because they were
primitive didn't mean they couldn't have taste. Andrew accused him of being
a romantic. Finally, to settle it, they went up into the mountains together,
armed with nothing but knives and Andrew's collection of exquisitely crafted
vermin snares. By the third night, Randy found himself seriously thinking
about eating some insects. "Q.E.D.," Andrew said.
Anyway, Randy finished his software after a year and a half. It was a
success; Chester and Avi liked it. Randy was moderately pleased at having
built something so complicated that actually worked, but he bad no illusions
about its being good for anything. He was sort of embarrassed at having
wasted so much time and mental energy on the project. But he knew that if he
hadn't been writing code, he'd have spent the same amount of time playing
games or going to Society for Creative Anachronism meetings in medieval
drag, so it all zeroed out in the end. Spending the time in front of the
computer was arguably better, because it had honed his programming skills,
which had been pretty sharp to begin with. On the other hand, he'd done it
all on the UNIX system, which was for scientists and engineers not a savvy
move in an age when all the money was in personal computers.
Chester and Randy had nicknamed Avi "Avid," be cause he really, really
liked fantasy games. Avi had always claimed that he played them as a way of
understanding what it was really like to live in ancient times, and he was a
maniac about historical authenticity. That was okay; they all had half assed
excuses, and Avi's historical acumen frequently came in handy.
Not long after this, Avi graduated and disappeared, and popped up a few
months later in Minneapolis, where he had gotten a job with a major
publisher of fantasy role playing games. He offered to buy Randy's game
software for the astonishingly large sum of $1000 plus a small cut of future
profits. Randy accepted the offer in its general outlines, asked Avi to send
him a contract, then went out and found Andrew boiling some fish guts in a
birchbark kettle atop a Weber grill on the roof of the apartment building
where he lived. He wanted to give Andrew the good news, and to cut him in on
the proceeds. What ensued was a really unpleasant conversation, standing up
there in a pelting, spitting, wind blown rain.
To begin with, Andrew took this deal far more seriously than Randy did.
Randy saw it as a windfall, a lark. Andrew, who was the son of a lawyer,
treated it as if it were a major corporate merger, and asked many tedious
and niggling questions about the contract, which did not exist yet and which
would probably cover a single piece of paper when it did. Randy didn't
realize it at the time, but by asking so many questions for which Randy had
no answers, Andrew was, in effect, arrogating to himself the role of
Business Manager. He was implicitly forming a business partnership with
Randy that did not, in fact, exist.
Furthermore, Andrew didn't have the first notion of how much time and
effort Randy had put into writing the code. Or (as Randy was to realize
later) maybe be did. In any case, Andrew assumed from the get go that he
would share a fifty fifty split with Randy, which was wildly out of
proportion to the work he'd actually done on the project. Basically, Andrew
acted as if all of the work he'd ever done on the subject of aboriginal
dining habits was a part of this undertaking, and that it entitled him to an
equal split.
By the time Randy extricated himself from this conversation, his mind
was reeling. He had gone in with one view of reality and been radically
challenged by another one that was clearly preposterous; but after an hour
of Andrew's browbeating he was beginning to doubt himself. After two or
three sleepless nights, he decided to call the whole thing off. A paltry few
hundred dollars wasn't worth all of this agony.
But Andrew (who was, by now, represented by an associate of his
father's Santa Barbara law firm) vehemently objected. He and Randy had,
according to his lawyer, jointly created something that had economic value,
and a failure on Randy's part to sell it at market value amounted to taking
money out of Andrew's pocket. It had become an unbelievable Kafkaesque
nightmare, and Randy could only withdraw to a corner table at his favorite
pub, drink pints of stout (frequently in the company of Chester) and watch
this fantastic psychodrama unfold. He had, he now realized, blundered into
some serious domestic weirdness involving Andrew's family. It turned out
that Andrew's parents were divorced and, long ago, had fought savagely over
custody of him, their only child. Mom had turned into a hippie and joined a
religious cult in Oregon and taken Andrew with her. It was rumored that this
cult engaged in sexual abuse of children. Dad had hired private dicks to
kidnap Andrew back and then showered him with material possessions to
demonstrate his superior love. There had followed an interminable legal
battle in which Dad had hired some rather fringey psychotherapists to
hypnotize Andrew and get him to dredge up repressed memories of unspeakable
and improbable horrors.
This was just the executive summary of a weird life that Randy only
learned about in bits and pieces as the years went on. Later, he was to
decide that Andrew's life had been fractally weird. That is, you could take
any small piece of it and examine it in detail and it, in and of itself,
would turn out to be just as complicated and weird as the whole thing in its
entirety.
Anyway Randy had blundered into this life and become enveloped in the
weirdness. One of the young eager beavers in Andrew's dad's law firm
decided, as a preemptive move, to obtain copies of all of Randy's computer
files, which were still stored on the UW computer system. Needless to say,
he went about it in a heavy handed way, and when the university's legal
department began to receive his sullen letters, it responded by informing
both Andrew's lawyer, and Randy, that anyone who used the university's
computer system to create a commercial product had to split the proceeds
with the university. So now Randy was getting ominous letters from not one
but two groups of deadly lawyers. Andrew then threatened to sue him for
having made this blunder, which had halved the value of Andrew's share!
In the end, just to cut his losses and get out of it clean, Randy had
to hire a lawyer of his own. The final cost to him was a hair more than five
thousand dollars. The software was never sold to anyone, and indeed could
not have been; it was so legally encumbered by that point that it would have
been like trying to sell someone a rusty Volkswagen that had been dismantled
and its parts hidden in attack dog kennels all over the world.
It was the only time in his life when he had ever thought about
suicide. He did not think about it very hard, or very seriously, but he did
think about it.
When it was all over, Avi sent him a handwritten letter saying, "I
enjoyed doing business with you and look forward to continuing our
relationship both as friends and, should opportunities arise, as creative
partners."
Chapter 5 INDIGO
Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse and the rest of the band are up on the
deck of the Nevada one morning, playing the national anthem and watching the
Stars and Stripes ratchet up the mast, when they are startled to find
themselves in the midst of one hundred and ninety airplanes of unfamiliar
design. Some of them are down low, traveling horizontally, and others are up
high, plunging nearly straight down. The latter are going so fast that they
appear to be falling apart; little bits are dropping off of them. It is
terrible to see some training exercise gone miserably awry. But they pull
out of their suicidal trajectories in plenty of time. The bits that have
fallen off of them plunge smoothly and purposefully, not tumbling and
fluttering as chunks of debris would. They are coming down all over the
place. Perversely, they all seem to be headed for the berthed ships. It is
incredibly dangerous they might hit someone! Lawrence is outraged.
There is a short lived phenomenon taking place in one of the ships down
the line. Lawrence turns to look at it. This is the first real explosion
he's ever seen and so it takes him a long time to recognize it as such. He
can play the very hardest glockenspiel parts with his eyes closed, and The
Star Spangled Banner is much easier to ding than to sing.
His scanning eyes fasten, not on the source of the explosion, but on a
couple of airplanes that are headed right toward them, skimming just above
the water. Each drops a long skinny egg and then their railplanes visibly
move and they angle upwards and pass overhead. The rising sun shines
directly through the glass of their canopies. Lawrence is able to look into
the eyes of the pilot of one of the planes. He notes that it appears to be
some sort of Asian gentleman.
This is an incredibly realistic training exercise even down to the
point of using ethnically correct pilots, and detonating fake explosives on
the ships. Lawrence heartily approves. Things have just been too lax around
this place.
A tremendous shock comes up through the deck of the ship, making his
feet and legs feel as if he had just jumped off a ten foot precipice onto
solid concrete. But he's just standing there flatfooted. It makes no sense
at all.
The band has finished playing the national anthem and is looking about
at the spectacle. Sirens and horns are speaking up all over the place, from
the Nevada, from the Arizona in the next berth, from buildings onshore.
Lawrence doesn't see any antiaircraft fire going up, doesn't see any
familiar planes in the air. The explosions just keep coming. Lawrence
wanders over to the rail and stares across a few yards of open water towards
the Arizona.
Another one of those plunging airplanes drops a projectile that shoots
straight down onto Arizona's deck but then, strangely, vanishes. Lawrence
blinks and sees that it has left a neat bomb shaped hole in the deck, just
like a panicky Warner Brothers cartoon character passing at high speed
through a planar structure such as a wall or ceiling. Fire jets from that
hole for about a microsecond before the whole deck bulges up,
disintegrating, and turns into a burgeoning globe of fire and blackness.
Waterhouse is vaguely aware of a lot of stuff coming at him really fast. It
is so big that he feels more like he is falling into it. He freezes up. It
goes by him, over him, and through him. A terrible noise pierces his skull,
a chord randomly struck, discordant but not without some kind of deranged
harmony. Musical qualities aside, it is so goddamned loud that it almost
kills him. He claps his hands over his ears.
Still the noise is there, like red hot knitting needles through the ear
drums. Hell's bells. He spins away from it, but it follows him. He has this
big thick strap around his neck, sewn together at groin level where it
supports a cup. Thrust into the cup is the central support of his
glockenspiel, which stands in front of him like a lyre shaped breastplate,
huge fluffy tassels dangling gaily from the upper corners. Oddly, one of the
tassels is burning. That isn't the only thing now wrong with the
glockenspiel, but he can't quite make it out because his vision keeps
getting obscured by something that must be wiped away every few moments. All
he knows is that the glockenspiel has eaten a huge quantum of pure energy
and been kicked up to some incredibly high state never before achieved by
such an instrument; it is a burning, glowing, shrieking, ringing, radiating
monster, a comet, an archangel, a tree of flaming magnesium, strapped to his
body, standing on his groin. The energy is transmitted down its humming,
buzzing central axis, through the cup, and into his genitals, which would be
tumescing in other circumstances.
Lawrence spends some time wandering aimlessly around the deck.
Eventually he has to help open a hatch for some men, and then he realizes
that his hands are still clapped over his ears, and have been for a long
time except for when he was wiping stuff out of his eyes. When he takes them
off, the ringing has stopped, and he no longer hears airplanes. He was
thinking that he wanted to go belowdecks, because the bad things are coming
from the sky and he would like to get some big heavy permanent seeming stuff
between him and it, but a lot of sailors are taking the opposite view. He
hears that they have been hit by one and maybe two of something that rhymes
with "torpedoes," and that they are trying to raise steam. Officers and
noncoms, black and red with smoke and blood, keep deputizing him for
different, extremely urgent tasks that he doesn't quite understand, not
least because he keeps putting his hands over his ears.
Probably half an hour goes by before he hits upon the idea of
discarding his glockenspiel, which is, after all, just getting in the way.
It was issued to him by the Navy with any number of stern warnings about the
consequences of misusing it. Lawrence is conscientious about this kind of
thing, dating back to when he was first given organ playing privileges in
West Point, Virginia. But at this point, for the first time in his life, as
he stands there watching the Arizona burn and sink, he just says to himself
Well, to heck with it! He takes that glockenspiel out of its socket and has
one last look at it, it is the last time in his life he will ever touch a
glockenspiel. There is no point in saving it now anyway, he realizes;
several of the bars have been bent. He flips it around and discovers that
chunks of blackened, distorted metal have been impact welded onto several of
the bars. Really throwing caution to the winds now, he flings it overboard
in the general direction of the Arizona, a military lyre of burnished steel
that sings a thousand men to their resting places on the bottom of the
harbor.
As it vanishes into a patch of burning oil, the second wave of
attacking airplanes arrives. The Navy's antiaircraft guns finally open up
and begin to rain shells down into the surrounding community and blow up
occupied buildings. He can see human shaped flames running around in the
streets, pursued by people with blankets.
The rest of the day is spent, by Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse and the
rest of the Navy, grappling with the fact that many two dimensional
structures on this and other ships, which were put into place to prevent
various fluids from commingling (e.g. fuel and air) have holes in them, and
not only that but a lot of shit is on fire too and things are more than a
little smoky. Certain objects that are supposed to (a) remain horizontal and
(b) support heavy things have ceased to do either.
Nevada's engineering section manages to raise steam in a couple of
boilers and the captain tries to get the ship out of the harbor. As soon as
she gets underway, she comes under concerted attack, mostly by dive bombers
who are eager to sink her in the channel and block the harbor altogether.
Eventually, the captain runs her aground rather than see this happen.
Unfortunately, what Nevada has in common with most other naval vessels is
that she is not really engineered to work from a stationary position, and
consequently she is hit three more times by dive bombers. So it is a pretty
exciting morning overall. As a member of the band who does not even have his
instrument any more, Lawrence's duties are quite poorly defined, and he
spends more time than he should watching the airplanes and the explosions.
He has gone back to his earlier train of thought regarding societies and
their efforts to outdo each other. It is very clear to him, as wave after
wave of Nipponese dive bombers hurl themselves, with calligraphic precision,
at the ship he is standing on, and as the cream of his society's navy burns
and explodes and sinks, putting up virtually no resistance, that his society
is going to have to rethink a thing or two.
***
At some point he burns his hand on something. It is his right hand,
which is preferable he is left handed. Also, he becomes more clearly aware
that a portion of Arizona has tried to take his scalp off. These are minor
injuries by Pearl Harbor standards and he does not stay long in the
hospital. The doctor warns him that the skin on his hand might contract and
limit his fingers' range of motion. As soon as he can withstand the pain,
Lawrence begins to play Bach's Art of Fugue in his lap whenever he is not
otherwise occupied. Most of those tunes start out simple; you can easily
picture old Johann Sebastian sitting there on the bench on a cold morning in
Leipzig, one or two blockflöte stops yanked out, left hand in his lap, a fat
choirboy or two over in the corner heaving away on the bellows, faint
gasping noises coming from all the leaks in the works, and Johann's right
hand wandering aimlessly across the forbidding simplicity of the Great
manual, stroking those cracked and yellowed elephant tusks, searching for
some melody he hadn't already invented. That is good stuff for Lawrence
right now, and so he makes his right hand go through the same motions as
Johann's, even though it is a gauze wrapped hand and he is using an upside
down dinner tray as a substitute for the keyboard, and he has to hum the
music under his breath. When he really gets into it, his feet skid around
and piston under the sheets, playing imaginary pedals, and his neighbors
complain.
He is out of the hospital in a few days, just in time for him and the
rest of Nevada's band to begin their new, wartime assignment. This was
evidently something of a poser for the Navy's manpower experts. These
musicians were (from a killing Nips point of view) completely useless to
begin with. As of 7 December, they no longer have even a functioning ship
and most of them have lost their clarinets.
Still, it isn't all about loading shells and pulling triggers. No large
organization can kill Nips in any kind of systematic way without doing a
nearly unbelievable amount of typing and filing. It is logical to suppose
that men who can play the clarinet will not botch that kind of work any
worse than anyone else. And so Waterhouse and his bandmates receive orders
assigning them to what would appear to be one of the typing and filing
branches of the Navy.
This is located in a building, not a ship. There are quite a few Navy
people who sneer at the whole idea of working in a building, and Lawrence
and some of the other recent recruits, eager to fit in, have gotten into the
habit of copping the same attitude. But now that they have seen what happens
to a ship when you detonate hundreds of pounds of high explosive on, in, and
around it, Waterhouse and many, others are reassessing their feelings about
working in buildings. They report to their new post with high morale.
Their new commanding officer is not so cheerful, and his feelings
appear to be shared by everyone in the entire section. The musicians are
greeted without being welcomed and saluted without being honored. The people
who have been working in this building far from being overawed by their
status as guys who not only worked on an actual ship until recently but
furthermore have been very close to things that were exploding, burning,
etc., and not as the result of routine lapses in judgment but because bad
men deliberately made it happen do not seem to feel that Lawrence and his
bandmates deserve to be entrusted with this new work, whatever the hell it
is.
Glumly, almost despairingly, the commanding officer and his
subordinates get the musicians squared away. Even if they don't have enough
desks to go around, each man can at least have a chair at a table or
counter. Some ingenuity is displayed in finding places for all the new
arrivals. It is clear that these people are trying their best at what they
consider to be a hopeless task.
Then there is some talk about secrecy. A great deal of talk about it.
They run through drills intended to test their ability to throw things away
properly. This goes on for a long time and the longer it continues, without
an explanation as to why, the more mysterious it becomes. The musicians, who
were at first a little put out by their chilly reception, start to speculate
amongst themselves as to what kind of an operation they have gotten
themselves into now.
Finally, one morning, the musicians are assembled in a classroom in
front of the cleanest chalkboard Waterhouse has ever seen. The last few days
have imbued him with just enough paranoia that he suspects it is that clean
for a reason erasing chalkboards is not to be taken lightly during wartime.
They are seated in little chairs with desks attached to them, desks
designed for right handers. Lawrence puts his notepad in his lap, then rests
his bandaged right hand on the desk and begins to play a ditty from Art of
Fugue, grimacing and even grunting with pain as his burned skin stretches
and slides over his knuckles.
Someone chucks him on the shoulder. He opens his eyes to see that he is
the only person in the room sitting down; an officer is on the deck. He
stands up and his weak leg nearly buckles. When he finally gets himself
fully to his feet, he sees that the officer (if he even is an officer) is
out of uniform. Way out of uniform. He's wearing a bathrobe and smoking a
pipe. The bathrobe is extraordinarily worn, and not in the sense of, say, a
hospital or hotel bathrobe that gets laundered frequently. This thing hasn't
been laundered in a long time, but boy has it seen some use. The elbows are
worn out and the bottom of the right sleeve is ashy grey and slippery with
graphite from being dragged back and forth, tens of thousands of times,
across sheets of paper dense with number two pencil work. The terrycloth has
a dandruffy appearance, but it has nothing to do with exfoliation of the
scalp; these flakes are way too big, and too geometric: rectangles and
circular dots of oaktag, punched out of cards and tape respectively. The
pipe went out a long time ago and the officer (or whatever he is) is not
even pretending to worry about getting it relit. It is there just to give
him something to bite down on, which he does as vigorously as a civil war
infantryman having a leg sawed off.
Some other fellow one who actually bothered to shave, shower, and put
on a uniform introduces bathrobe man as Commander Shane spelled s c h o e n,
but Schoen is having none of it; he turns his back on them, exposing the
back side of his bathrobe, which around the buttocks is worn transparent as
a negligee. Reading from a notebook, he writes out the following in block
letters:
19 17 17 19 14 20 23 18 19 8 12 16 19 8 3
21 8 25 18 14 18 6 31 8 8 15 18 22 18 11
Around the time that the fourth or fifth number is going up on the
chalkboard, Waterhouse feels the hairs standing up on the back of his neck.
By the time the third group of five numbers is written out, he has not
failed to notice that none of them is larger than 26 that being the number
of letters in the alphabet. His heart is pounding more wildly than it did
when Nipponese bombs were tracing parabolic trajectories toward the deck of
the grounded Nevada. He pulls a pencil out of his pocket. Finding no paper
handy, he writes down the numbers from 1 to 26 on the surface of his little
writing desk.
By the time the man in the bathrobe is done writing out the last group
of numbers, Waterhouse is already well into his frequency count. He wraps it
up as Bathrobe Man is saying something along the lines of "this might look
like a meaningless sequence of numbers to you, but to a Nip naval officer it
might look like something entirely different." Then the man laughs
nervously, shakes his head sadly, squares his jaw resolutely, and runs
through a litany of other emotion laden expressions not a single one of
which is appropriate here.
Waterhouse's frequency count is simply a tally of how frequently each
number appears on the blackboard. It looks like this:
2
3 II
4
5
6 I
7
8 IIII
9
10
11 I
12 I
13
14 II
15 I
16 I
17 II
18 IIIIII
19 IIII
20 I
21 I
22 I
23 I
24
25 I
26
The most interesting thing about this is that ten of the possible
symbols (viz. 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 13, 24, and 26) are not even used. Only
sixteen different numbers appear in the message. Assuming each of those
sixteen represents one and only one letter of the alphabet, this message has
(Lawrence reckons in his head) 111136315345735680000 possible meanings. This
is a funny number because it begins with four ones and ends with four
zeroes; Lawrence snickers, wipes his nose, and gets on with it.
The most common number is 18. It probably represents the letter E. If
he substitutes E into the message everywhere he sees an 18, then Well, to be
honest, then he'll have to write out the whole message again, substituting
Es for 18s, and it will take a long time, and it might be time wasted
because he might have guessed wrong. On the other hand, if he just retrains
his mind to construe 18s as Es an operation that he thinks of as being
loosely analogous to changing the presets on a pipe organ's console then
what he sees in his mind's eye when he looks at the blackboard is
19 17 17 19 14 20 23 E 19 8 12 16 19 8 3
21 8 25 E 14 E 6 3 E 8 15 E 22 E 11
which only has 10103301395066880000 possible meanings. This is a funny
number too because of all those ones and zeroes but it is an absolutely
meaningless coincidence.
"The science of making secret codes is called cryptography," Commander
Schoen says, "and the science of breaking them is cryptanalysis." Then he
sighs, grapples visibly with some more widely divergent emotional states,
and resignedly plods into the mandatory exercise of breaking these words
down into their roots, which are either Latin or Greek (Lawrence isn't
paying attention, doesn't care, only glimpses the stark word CRYPTO written
in handsized capitals).
The opening sequence "19 17 17 19" is peculiar. 19, along with 8, is
the second most common number in the list. 17 is only half as common. You
can't have four vowels or four consonants in a row (unless the words are
German) so either 17 is a vowel and 19 a consonant or the other way round.
Since 19 appears more frequently (four times) in the message, it is more
likely to be the vowel than 17 (which only appears twice). A is the most
common vowel after E, so if he assumes that 19 is A, he gets
A 17 17 A 14 20 23 E A 8 12 16 A 8 3
21 8 25 E 14 E 6 3 E 8 15 E 22 E 11
This narrows it down quite a bit, to a mere 841941782922240000 possible
answers. He's already reduced the solution space by a couple of orders of
magnitude!
Schoen has talked himself up into a disturbingly heavy sweat, now, and
is almost bodily flinging himself into a historical overview of the science
of CRYPTOLOGY, as the union of cryptography and cryptanalysis is called.
There's some talk about an English fellow name of Wilkins, and book called
Cryptonomicon that he wrote hundreds of years ago, but (perhaps because he
doesn't rate the intelligence of his audience too highly) he goes very easy
on the historical background, and jumps directly from Wilkins to Paul
Revere's "one if by land, two if by sea" code. He even makes a mathematics
in joke about this being one of the earliest practical applications of
binary notation. Lawrence dutifully brays and snorts, drawing an appalled
look from the saxophonist seated in front of him.
Earlier in his talk, the Schoen mentioned that this message was (in
what's obviously a fictional scenario ginned up to make this mathematical
exercise more interesting to a bunch of musicians who are assumed not to
give a shit about math) addressed to a Nip naval officer. Given that
context, Lawrence cannot but guess that the first word of the message is
ATTACK. This would mean that 17 represented T, 14 C, and 20 K. When he fills
these in, he gets
A T T A C K 23 E A 8 12 16 A 8 3
21 8 25 E C E 6 3 E 8 15 E 22 E 11
and then the rest is so obvious he doesn't bother to write it out. He
cannot restrain himself from jumping to his feet. He's so excited he forgets
about the weak legs and topples over across a couple of his neighbors'
desks, which makes a lot of noise.
"Do you have a problem, sailor?" says one of the officers in the
corner, one who actually bothered to wear a uniform.
"Sir! The message is, 'Attack Pearl Harbor December Seven!' Sir!"
Lawrence shouts, and then sits down. His whole body is quivering with
excitement. Adrenaline has taken over his body and mind. He could strangle
twenty sumo wrestlers on the spot.
Commander Schoen is completely impassive except that he blinks once,
very slowly. He turns to one of his subordinates, who is standing against
the wall with his hands clasped behind his back, and says, "Get this one a
copy of the Cryptonomicon. And a desk as close to the coffee machine as
possible. And why don't you promote the son of a bitch as long as you're at
it."
***
The part about the promotion turns out to be either military humor or
further evidence of Commander Schoen's mental instability. Other than that
small bit of drollery, the story of Waterhouse past this point, for the next
ten months, is not much more complicated than the story of a bomb that has
just been released from the belly of a plunging airplane. The barriers
placed in his path (working his way through the Cryptonomicon , breaking the
Nipponese Air Force Meteorological Code, breaking the Coral naval attache
machine cipher, breaking Unnamed Nipponese Army Water Transport Code 3A,
breaking the Greater East Asia Ministry Code) present about as much
resistance as successive decks of a worm eaten wooden frigate. Within a
couple of months he is actually writing new chapters of the Cryptonomicon.
People speak of it as though it were a book, but it's not. It is basically a
compilation of all of the papers and notes that have drifted up in a
particular corner of Commander Schoen's office over the roughly two year
period that he's been situated at Station Hypo, as this place is called
(1). It is everything that Commander Schoen knows about breaking
codes, which amounts to everything that the United States of America knows.
At any moment it could have been annihilated if a janitor had stepped into
the room for a few minutes and tidied the place up. Understanding this,
Commander Schoen's colleagues in the officers' ranks of Station Hypo have
devised strenuous measures to prevent any type of tidying or hygienic
operations, of any description, in the entire wing of the building that
contains Commander Schoen's office. They know enough, in other words, to
understand that the Cryptonomicon is terribly important, and they have the
wit to take the measures necessary to keep it safe. Some of them actually
consult it from time to time, and use its wisdom to break Nipponese
messages, or even solve whole cryptosystems. But Waterhouse is the first guy
to come along who is good enough to (at first) point out errors in what
Schoen has written, and (soon) assemble the contents of the pile into
something like an orderly work, and (eventually) add original material onto
it.
At some point Schoen takes him downstairs and leads him to the end of a
long windowless corridor to a slab of a door guarded by hulking Myrmidons
and lets him see the second coolest thing they've got at Pearl Harbor, a
roomful of machinery from the Electrical Till Corporation that they use
mainly for doing frequency counts on Nip intercepts.
The most remarkable machine (2) at Station Hypo, however and
the first coolest thing in Pearl Harbor is even deeper in the cloaca of the
building. It is contained in something that might be likened to a bank vault
if it weren't all wired up with explosives so that its contents can be
vaporized in the event of a total Nip invasion.
This is the machine that Commander Schoen made, more than a year ago,
for breaking the Nipponese cipher called Indigo. Apparently, as of the
beginning of 1940, Schoen was a well adjusted and mentally healthy young man
into whose lap was dumped some great big long lists of numbers compiled from
intercept stations around the Pacific (perhaps, Waterhouse thinks, Alpha,
Bravo, etc.). These numbers were Nipponese messages that had been encrypted
somehow circumstantial evidence suggested that it had been done by some kind
of machine. But absolutely nothing was known about the machine: whether it
used gears or rotary switches or plugboards, or some combination thereof, or
some other kind of mechanism that hadn't even been thought of by white
people yet; how many such mechanisms it did or didn't use; specific details
of how it used them. All that could be said was that these numbers, which
seemed completely random, had been transmitted, perhaps even incorrectly.
Other than that, Schoen had nothing nothing to work on.
As of the middle of 1941, then, this machine existed in this vault,
here at Station Hypo. It existed because Schoen had built it. The machine
perfectly decrypted every Indigo message that the intercept stations picked
up, and was, therefore, necessarily an exact functional duplication of the
Nipponese Indigo code machine, though neither Schoen nor any other American
had ever laid eyes on one. Schoen had built the thing simply by looking at
those great big long lists of essentially random numbers, and using some
process of induction to figure it out. Somewhere along the line he had
become totally debilitated psychologically, and begun to suffer nervous
breakdowns at the rate of about one every week or two.
As of the actual outbreak of war with Nippon, Schoen is on disability,
and taking lots of drugs. Waterhouse spends as much time with Schoen as he
is allowed to, because he's pretty sure that whatever happened inside of
Schoen's head, between when the lists of apparently random numbers were
dumped into his lap and when he finished building his machine, is an example
of a noncomputable process.
Waterhouse's security clearance is upgraded about once a month, until
it reaches the highest conceivable level (or so he thinks) which is
Ultra/Magic. Ultra is what the Brits call the intelligence they get from
having broken the German Enigma machine. Magic is what the Yanks call the
intelligence they get from Indigo. In any case, Lawrence now gets to see the
Ultra/Magic summaries, which are bound documents with dramatic, alternating
red and black paragraphs printed on the front cover. Paragraph number three
states:
NO ACTION IS TO BE TAKEN ON INFORMATION HEREIN REPORTED, REGARDLESS OF
TEMPORARY ADVANTAGE, IF SUCH ACTION MIGHT HAVE THE EFFECT OF REVEALING THE
EXISTENCE OF THE SOURCE TO THE ENEMY.
Seems clear enough, right? But Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is not so
damn sure.
IF SUCH ACTION MIGHT HAVE THE EFFECT OF REVEALING...
At about the same time, Waterhouse has made a realization about
himself. He has found that he works best when he is not horny, which is to
say in the day or so following ejaculation. So as a part of his duty to the
United States he has begun to spend a lot of time in whorehouses. But he
can't have that much actual sex on what is still a glockenspiel player's pay
and so he limits himself to what are euphemistically called massages.
ACTION... EFFECT... REVEALING...
The words stay with him like the clap. He lies on his back during these
massages, arms crossed over his eyes, mumbling the words to himself.
Something bothers him. He has learned that when something bothers him in
this particular way it usually leads to his writing a new paper. But first
he has to do a lot of hard mental pick and shovel work.
It all comes to him, explosively, during the Battle of Midway, while he
and his comrades are spending twenty four hours a day down among those ETC
machines, decrypting Yamamoto's messages, telling Nimitz exactly where to
find the Nip fleet.
What are the chances of Nimitz finding that fleet by accident? That's
what Yamamoto must be asking himself.
It is all a question (oddly enough!) of information theory.
...ACTION...
What is an action? It might be anything. It might be something obvious
like bombing a Nipponese military installation. Everyone would agree that
this would constitute an action. But it might also be something like
changing the course of an aircraft carrier by five degrees or not doing so.
Or having exactly the right package of forces off Midway to hammer the
Nipponese invasion fleet. It could mean something much less dramatic, like
canceling plans for an action. An action, in a certain sense, might even be
the total absence of activity. Any of these might be rational responses, on
the part of some commander, to INFORMATION HEREIN REPORTED. But any of them
might be observable by the Nipponese and hence any of them would impart
information to the Nipponese. How good might those Nips be at abstracting
information from a noisy channel? Do they have any Schoens?
...EFFECT...
So what if the Nips did observe it? What would the effect be exactly?
And under what circumstances might the effect be REVEALING THE EXISTENCE OF
THE SOURCE TO THE ENEMY?
If the action is one that could never have happened unless the
Americans were breaking Indigo, then it will constitute proof, to the
Nipponese, that the Americans have broken it. The existence of the source
the machine that Commander Schoen built will be revealed.
Waterhouse trusts that no Americans will be that stupid. But what if it
isn't that clear cut? What if the action is one that would merely be really
improbable unless the Americans were breaking the code? What if the
Americans, in the long run, are just too damn lucky?
And how closely can you play that game? A pair of loaded dice that
comes up sevens every time is detected in a few throws. A pair that comes up
sevens only one percent more frequently than a straight pair is harder to
detect you have to throw the dice many more times in order for your opponent
to prove anything.
If the Nips keep getting ambushed if they keep finding their own
ambushes spoiled if their merchant ships happen to cross paths with American
subs more often than pure probability would suggest how long until they
figure it out?
Waterhouse writes papers on the subject, keeps pestering people with
them. Then, one day, Waterhouse receives a new set of orders.
The orders arrive encrypted into groups of five random looking letters,
printed out on the blue tissue paper that is used for top secret cablegrams.
The message has been encrypted in Washington using a one time pad, which is
a slow and awkward but, in theory, perfectly unbreakable cipher used for the
most important messages. Waterhouse knows this because he is one of the only
two persons in Pearl Harbor who has clearance to decrypt it. The other one
is Commander Schoen, and he is under sedation today. The duty officer opens
up the appropriate safe and gives him the one time pad for the day, which is
basically a piece of graph paper covered with numbers printed in groups of
five. The numbers have been chosen by secretaries in a basement in
Washington by shuffling cards or drawing chits out of a hat. They are pure
noise. One copy of the pure noise is in Waterhouse's hands, and the other
copy is used by the person who encrypted this message in Washington.
Waterhouse sits down and gets to work, subtracting noise from
ciphertext to produce plaintext.
The first thing he sees is that this message's classification is not
merely Top Secret, or even Ultra, but something entirely new: ULTRA MEGA.
The messages states that after thoroughly destroying this message, he
Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is to proceed to London, England, by the
fastest available means. All ships, trains, and airplanes, even submarines,
will be made available to him. Though a member of the U.S. Navy, he is even
to be provided with an extra uniform an Army uniform in case it simplifies
matters for him.
The one thing he must never, ever do is place himself in a situation
where he could be captured by the enemy. In this sense, the war is suddenly
over for Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse.
Chapter 6 THE SPAWN OF ONAN
A network of chunnel sized air ducts as vast and unfathomable as the
global Internet ramifies through the thick walls and ceilings of the hotel
and makes dim, attenuated noises that suggest that hidden deep within that
system are jet engine proving grounds, Iron Age smithys, wretched prisoners
draped with clanging chains, and writhing clumps of snakes. Randy knows that
the system is not a closed loop that it is somewhere connected to the
earth's atmosphere because faint street smells drift in from outside. For
all he knows, they may take an hour to work their way into his room. After
he has been living there for a couple of weeks, the smells come to function
as an olfactory alarm clock. He sleeps to the smell of diesel exhaust
because the traffic conditions of Manila require that the container ships
load and unload only at night. Manila sprawls along a warm and placid bay
that is an infinite reservoir of mugginess, and because the atmosphere is as
thick and opaque and hot as a glass of milk straight from the cow's udder,
it begins to glow when the sun rises. At this, Manila's regiments and
divisions of fighting cocks, imprisoned in makeshift hutches on every
rooftop, balcony and yard, begin to crow. The people come awake and begin to
burn coal. Coal smoke is the smell that wakes Randy up.
Randy Waterhouse is in merely decent physical condition. His doctor
ritualistically tells him that he could lose twenty pounds, but it's not
obvious where that twenty pounds would actually come from he has no beer
gut, no flagrant love handles. The offending pounds seem to be spread evenly
over his keglike torso. Or so he tells himself every morning, standing in
front of the billboard sized mirror of his suite. Randy and Charlene's house
in California contains practically no mirrors and he had lost track of what
he looks like. Now he sees that he has become atavistically hairy, and his
beard glints, because it is shot through with grey hairs.
Every day, he dares himself to shave that beard off. In the tropics,
you want to have as much skin as possible exposed to the air, with sweat
sheeting down it.
One evening when Avi and his family had been over for dinner, Randy had
said, "I'm the beard, Avi's the suit," as a way of explaining their business
relationship, and from that point Charlene had been off and running.
Charlene has recently finished a scholarly article, deconstructing beards.
In particular, she was aiming at beard culture in the Northern California
high tech community Randy's crowd. Her paper began by demolishing, somehow,
the assumption that beards were more "natural" or easier to maintain than
clean shavenness she actually published statistics from Gillette's research
department comparing the amount of time that bearded and beardless men spent
in the bathroom each day, proving that the difference was not statistically
significant. Randy had any number of objections to the way in which these
statistics were gathered, but Charlene was having none of it. "It is
counterintuitive," she said.
She was in a big hurry to move on to the meat of her argument. She went
up to San Francisco and bought a few hundred dollars' worth of pornography
at a boite that catered to shaving fetishists. For a couple of weeks, Randy
couldn't come home in the evening without finding Charlene sacked out in
front of the TV with a bowl of popcorn and a Dictaphone, watching a video of
a straight razor being drawn along wet, soapy flesh. She taped a few lengthy
interviews with some actual shaving fetishists who described in great detail
the feeling of nakedness and vulnerability shaving gave them, and how erotic
that was, especially when freshly shaved areas were slapped or spanked. She
worked up a detailed comparison of the iconography of shaving fetishist porn
and that of shaving product commercials shown on national TV during football
games, and proved that they were basically indistinguishable (you could
actually buy videotapes of bootleg shaving cream and razor ads in the same
places that sold the out and out pornography).
She pulled down statistics on racial variation in beard growth.
American Indians didn't grow beards, Asians hardly did, Africans were a
special case because daily shaving gave them a painful skin condition. "The
ability to grow heavy, full beards as a matter of choice appears to be a
privilege accorded by nature solely to white males," she wrote.
Alarm bells, red lights, and screaming klaxons went off in Randy's mind
when he happened across that phrase.
"But this assertion buys into a specious subsumption. 'Nature' is a
socially constructed discourse, not an objective reality [many footnotes
here]. That is doubly true in the case of the 'nature' that accords full
beards to the specific minority population of northern European males. Homo
sapiens evolved in climatic zones where facial hair was of little practical
use. The development of an offshoot of the species characterized by densely
bearded males is an adaptive response to cold climates. These climates did
not 'naturally' invade the habitats of early humans rather, the humans
invaded geographical regions where such climates prevailed. This
geographical transgression was strictly a sociocultural event and so all
physical adaptations to it must be placed in the same category including the
development of dense facial hair."
Charlene published the results of a survey she had organized, in which
a few hundred women were asked for their opinions. Essentially all of them
said that they preferred clean shaven men to those who were either stubbly
or bearded. In short order, Charlene proved that having a beard was just one
element of a syndrome strongly correlated to racist and sexist attitudes,
and to the pattern of emotional unavailability so often bemoaned by the
female partners of white males, especially ones who were technologically
oriented.
"The boundary between Self and Environment is a social con[struct]. In
Western cultures this boundary is supposed to be sharp and distinct. The
beard is an outward symbol of that boundary, a distancing technique. To
shave off the beard (or any body hair) is to symbolically annihilate the
(essentially specious) boundary separating Self from Other . . ."
And so on. The paper was rapturously received by the peer reviewers and
immediately accepted for publication in a major international journal.
Charlene is presenting some related work at the War as Text conference:
"Unshavenness as Signifier in World War II Movies." On the strength of
her beard work, three different Ivy League schools are fighting over who
will get to hire her.
Randy does not want to move to the East Coast. Worse yet, he has a full
beard, which makes him feel dreadfully incorrect whenever he ventures out
with her. He proposed to Charlene that perhaps he should issue a press
release stating that he shaves the rest of his body every day. She did not
think it was very funny. He realized, when he was halfway over the Pacific
Ocean, that all of her work was basically an elaborate prophecy of the doom
of their relationship.
Now he is thinking of shaving his beard off. He might do his scalp and
his upper body, while he's at it.
He is in the habit of doing a lot of vigorous walking. By the standards
of the body nazis who infest California and Seattle, this is only a marginal
improvement over (say) sitting in front of a television chain smoking
unfiltered cigarettes and eating suet from a tub. But he has stuck to his
walking doggedly while his friends have taken up fitness fads and dropped
them. It has become a point of pride with him, and he's not about to stop
just because he is living in Manila.
But damn, it's hot. Hairlessness would be a good thing here.
***
Only two good things came out of Randy's ill fated First Business Foray
with the food gathering software. First, it scared him away from trying to
do any kind of business, at least until he had the foggiest idea of what he
was getting into. Second, he developed a lasting friendship with Avi, his
old gaming buddy, now in Minneapolis, who displayed integrity and a good
sense of humor.
At the suggestion of his lawyer (who by that point was one of his major
creditors), Randy declared personal bankruptcy and then moved to central
California with Charlene. She had gotten her Ph.D. and landed a teaching
assistant job at one of the Three Siblings. Randy enrolled at another
Sibling with the aim of getting his master's degree in astronomy. This made
him a grad student, and grad students existed not to learn things but to
relieve the tenured faculty members of tiresome burdens such as educating
people and doing research.
Within a month of his arrival, Randy solved some trivial computer
problems for one of the other grad students. A week later, the chairman of
the astronomy department called him over and said, "So, you're the UNIX
guru." At the time, Randy was still stupid enough to be flattered by this
attention, when he should have recognized them as bone chilling words.
Three years later, he left the Astronomy Department without a degree,
and with nothing to show for his labors except six hundred dollars in his
bank account and a staggeringly comprehensive knowledge of UNIX. Later, he
was to calculate that, at the going rates for programmers, the department
had extracted about a quarter of a million dollars' worth of work from him,
in return for an outlay of less than twenty thousand. The only compensation
was that his knowledge didn't seem so useless anymore. Astronomy had become
a highly networked discipline, and you could now control a telescope on
another continent, or in orbit, by typing commands into your keyboard,
watching the images it produced on your monitor.
Randy was now superbly knowledgeable when it came to networks. Years
ago, this would have been of limited usefulness. But this was the age of
networked applications, the dawn of the World Wide Web, and the timing
couldn't have been better.
In the meantime, Avi had moved to San Francisco and started a new
company that was going to take role playing games out of the nerd ghetto and
make them mainstream. Randy signed on as the head technologist. He tried to
recruit Chester, but he'd already taken a job with a software company back
up in Seattle. So they brought in a guy who had worked for a few video game
companies, and later they brought in some other guys to do hardware and
communications, and they raised enough seed money to build a playable
prototype. Using that as their dog and pony show, they went down to
Hollywood and found someone to back them to the tune of ten million dollars.
They rented out some industrial space in Gilroy, filled it full of graphics
workstations, hired a lot of sharp programmers and a few artists, and went
to work.
Six months later, they were frequently mentioned as among Silicon
Valley's rising stars, and Randy got a little photograph in Time magazine in
an article about Siliwood the growing collaboration between Silicon Valley
and Hollywood. A year after that, the entire enterprise had crashed and
burned.
This was an epic tale not worth telling. The conventional wisdom circa
the early nineties had been that the technical wizards of Northern
California would meet the creative minds of Southern California halfway and
create a brilliant new collaboration. But this was rooted in a naive view of
what Hollywood was all about. Hollywood was merely a specialized bank a
consortium of large financial entities that hired talent, almost always for
a flat rate, ordered that talent to create a product, and then marketed that
product to death, all over the world, in every conceivable medium. The goal
was to find products that would keep on making money forever, long after the
talent had been paid off and sent packing. Casablanca, for example, was
still putting asses in seats decades after Bogart had been paid off and
smoked himself into an early grave.
In the view of Hollywood, the techies of Silicon Valley were just a
particularly naive form of talent. So when the technology reached a certain
point the point where it could be marketed to a certain large Nipponese
electronics company at a substantial profit the backers of Avi's company
staged a lightning coup that had obviously been lovingly planned. Randy and
the others were given a choice: they could leave the company now and hold on
to some of their stock, which was still worth a decent amount of money. Or
they could stay in which case they would find themselves sabotaged from
within by fifth columnists who had been infiltrated into key positions. At
the same time they would be besieged from without by lawyers demanding their
heads for the things that were suddenly going wrong.
Some of the founders stayed on as court eunuchs. Most of them left the
company, and of that group, most sold their stock immediately because they
could see it was going nowhere but down. The company was gutted by the
transfer of its technology to Japan, and the empty husk eventually dried up
and blew away.
Even today, bits and pieces of the technology keep popping up in the
oddest places, such as advertisements for new video game platforms. It
always gives Randy the creeps to see this. When it all started to go wrong,
the Nipponese tried to hire him directly, and he actually made some money
flying over there to work, for a week or a month at a time, as a consultant.
But they couldn't keep the technology running with the programmers they had,
and so it hasn't lived up to its potential.
Thus ended Randy's Second Business Foray. He came out of it with a
couple of hundred thousand dollars, most of which he plowed into the
Victorian house he shares with Charlene. He hadn't trusted himself with that
much liquid cash, and locking it up in the house gave him a feeling of
safety, like reaching home base in a frenzied game of full contact tag.
He has spent the years since running the Three Siblings' computer
system. He hasn't made much money, but he hasn't had much stress either.
***
Randy was forever telling people, without rancor, that they were full
of shit. That was the only way to get anything done in hacking. No one took
it personally.
Charlene's crowd most definitely did take it personally. It wasn't
being told that they were wrong that offended them, though it was the
underlying assumption that a person could be right or wrong about anything.
So on the Night in Question the night of Avi's fateful call Randy had done
what he usually did, which was to withdraw from the conversation. In the
Tolkien, not the endocrinological or Snow White sense, Randy is a Dwarf.
Tolkien's Dwarves were stout, taciturn, vaguely magical characters who spent
a lot of time in the dark hammering out beautiful things, e.g. Rings of
Power. Thinking of himself as a Dwarf who had hung up his war ax for a while
to go sojourning in the Shire, where he was surrounded by squabbling Hobbits
(i.e., Charlene's friends), had actually done a lot for Randy's peace of
mind over the years. He knew perfectly well that if he were stuck in
academia, these people, and the things they said, would seem momentous to
him. But where he came from, nobody had been taking these people seriously
for years. So he just withdrew from the conversation and drank his wine and
looked out over the Pacific surf and tried not to do anything really obvious
like shaking his head and rolling his eyes.
Then the topic of the Information Superhighway came up, and Randy could
feel faces turning in his direction like searchlights, casting almost
palpable warmth on his skin.
Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik had a few things to say about the Information
Superhighway. He was a fiftyish Yale professor who had just flown in from
someplace that had sounded really cool and impressive when he had gone out
of his way to mention it several times. His name was Finnish, but he was
British as only a non British Anglophile could be. Ostensibly he was here to
attend War as Text. Really he was there to recruit Charlene, and really
really (Randy suspected) to fuck her. This was probably not true at all, but
just a symptom of how wacked out Randy was getting by this point. Dr. G. E.
B. Kivistik had been showing up on television pretty frequently. Dr. G. E.
B. Kivistik had a couple of books out. Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik was, in short,
parlaying his strongly contrarian view of the Information Superhighway into
more air time than anyone who hadn't been accused of blowing up a day care
center should get.
A Dwarf on sojourn in the Shire would probably go to a lot of dinner
parties where pompous boring Hobbits would hold forth like this. This Dwarf
would view the whole thing as entertainment. He would know that he could
always go back out into the real world, so much vaster and more complex than
these Hobbits imagined, and slay a few Trolls and remind himself of what
really mattered.
That was what Randy always told himself, anyway. But on the Night in
Question, it didn't work. Partly because Kivistik was too big and real to be
a Hobbit probably more influential in the real world than Randy would ever
be. Partly because another faculty spouse at the table a likable, harmless
computerphile named Jon decided to take issue with some of Kivistik's
statements and was cheerfully shot down for his troubles. Blood was in the
water.
Randy had ruined his relationship with Charlene by wanting to have
kids. Kids raise issues. Charlene, like all of her friends, couldn't handle
issues. Issues meant disagreement. Voicing disagreement was a form of
conflict. Conflict, acted out openly and publicly, was a male mode of social
interaction the foundation for patriarchal society which brought with it the
usual litany of dreadful things. Regardless, Randy decided to get
patriarchal with Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik.
"How many slums will we bulldoze to build the Information
Superhighway?" Kivistik said. This profundity was received with thoughtful
nodding around the table.
Jon shifted in his chair as if Kivistik had just dropped an ice cube
down his collar. "What does that mean?" he asked. Jon was smiling, trying
not to be a conflict oriented patriarchal hegemonist. Kivistik in response,
raised his eyebrows and looked around at everyone else, as if to say Who
invited this poor lightweight? Jon tried to dig himself out from his
tactical error, as Randy closed his eyes and tried not to wince visibly.
Kivistik had spent more years sparring with really smart people over high
table at Oxford than Jon had been alive. "You don't have to bulldoze
anything. There's nothing there to bulldoze," Jon pleaded.
"Very well, let me put it this way," Kivistik said magnanimously he was
not above dumbing down his material for the likes of Jon. "How many on ramps
will connect the world's ghettos to the Information Superhighway?"
Oh, that's much clearer, everyone seemed to think. Point well taken,
Geb! No one looked at Jon, that argumentative pariah. Jon looked helplessly
over at Randy, signaling for help.
Jon was a Hobbit who'd actually been out of the Shire recently, so he
knew Randy was a dwarf. Now he was fucking up Randy's life by calling upon
Randy to jump up on the table, throw off his homespun cloak, and whip out
his two handed ax.
The words came out of Randy's mouth before he had time to think better
of it. "The Information Superhighway is just a fucking metaphor! Give me a
break!" he said.
There was a silence as everyone around the table winced in unison.
Dinner had now, officially, crashed and burned. All they could do now was
grab their ankles, put their heads between their knees, and wait for the
wreckage to slide to a halt.
"That doesn't tell me very much," Kivistik said. "Everything is a
metaphor. The word 'fork' is a metaphor for this object." He held up a fork.
"All discourse is built from metaphors."
"That's no excuse for using bad metaphors," Randy said.
"Bad? Bad? Who decides what is bad?" Kivistik said, doing his killer
impression of a heavy lidded, mouth breathing undergraduate. There was
scattered tittering from people who were desperate to break the tension.
Randy could see where it was going. Kivistik had gone for the usual
academician's ace in the hole: everything is relative, it's all just
differing perspectives. People had already begun to resume their little side
conversations, thinking that the conflict was over, when Randy gave them all
a start with: "Who decides what's bad? I do. "
Even Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik was flustered. He wasn't sure if Randy was
joking. "Excuse me?"
Randy was in no great hurry to answer the question. He took the
opportunity to sit back comfortably, stretch, and take a sip of his wine. He
was feeling good. "It's like this," he said. "I've read your book. I've seen
you on TV. I've heard you tonight. I personally typed up a list of your
credentials when I was preparing press materials for this conference. So I
know that you're not qualified to have an opinion about technical issues.''
"Oh," Kivistik said in mock confusion, "I didn't realize one had to
have qualifications."
"I think it's clear," Randy said, "that if you are ignorant of a
particular subject, that your opinion is completely worthless. If I'm sick,
I don't ask a plumber for advice. I go to a doctor. Likewise, if I have
questions about the Internet, I will seek opinions from people who know
about it."
"Funny how all of the technocrats seem to be in favor of the Internet,"
Kivistik said cheerily, milking a few more laughs from the crowd.
"You have just made a statement that is demonstrably not true," Randy
said, pleasantly enough. "A number of Internet experts have written well
reasoned books that are sharply critical of it."
Kivistik was finally getting pissed off. All the levity was gone.
"So," Randy continued, "to get back to where we started, the
Information Superhighway is a bad metaphor for the Internet, because I say
it is. There might be a thousand people on the planet who are as conversant
with the Internet as I am. I know most of these people. None of them takes
that metaphor seriously. Q.E.D."
"Oh. I see," Kivistik said, a little hotly. He had seen an opening. "So
we should rely on the technocrats to tell us what to think, and how to
think, about this technology."
The expressions of the others seemed to say that this was a telling
blow, righteously struck.
"I'm not sure what a technocrat is," Randy said. "Am I a technocrat?
I'm just a guy who went down to the bookstore and bought a couple of
textbooks on TCP/IP, which is the underlying protocol of the Internet, and
read them. And then I signed on to a computer, which anyone can do nowadays,
and I messed around with it for a few years, and now I know all about it.
Does that make me a technocrat?"
"You belonged to the technocratic elite even before you picked up that
book," Kivistik said. "The ability to wade through a technical text, and to
understand it, is a privilege. It is a privilege conferred by an education
that is available only to members of an elite class. That's what I mean by
technocrat."
"I went to a public school," Randy said. "And then I went to a state
university. From that point on, I was self educated."
Charlene broke in. She had been giving Randy dirty looks ever since
this started and he had been ignoring her. Now he was going to pay. "And
your family?" Charlene asked frostily.
Randy took a deep breath, stifled the urge to sigh. "My father's an
engineer. He teaches at a state college."
"And his father?"
"A mathematician."
Charlene raised her eyebrows. So did nearly everyone else at the table.
Case closed.
"I strenuously object to being labeled and pigeonholed and stereotyped
as a technocrat," Randy said, deliberately using oppressed person's
language, maybe in an attempt to turn their weapons against them but more
likely (he thinks, lying in bed at three A.M. in the Manila Hotel) out of an
uncontrollable urge to be a prick. Some of them, out of habit, looked at him
soberly; etiquette dictated that you give all sympathy to the oppressed.
Others gasped in outrage to hear these words coming from the lips of a known
and convicted white male technocrat. "No one in my family has ever had much
money or power," he said.
"I think that the point that Charlene's making is like this," said
Tomas, one of their houseguests who had flown in from Prague with his wife
Nina. He had now appointed himself conciliator. He paused long enough to
exchange a warm look with Charlene. "Just by virtue of coming from a
scientific family, you are a member of a privileged elite. You're not aware
of it but members of privileged elites are rarely aware of their
privileges."
Randy finished the thought. "Until people like you come along to
explain to us how stupid, to say nothing of morally bankrupt, we are."
"The false consciousness Tomas is speaking of is exactly what makes
entrenched power elites so entrenched," Charlene said.
"Well, I don't feel very entrenched," Randy said. "I've worked my ass
off to get where I've gotten."
"A lot of people work hard all their lives and get nowhere," someone
said accusingly. Look out! The sniping had begun.
"Well, I'm sorry I haven't had the good grace to get nowhere," Randy
said, now feeling just a bit surly for the first time, "but I have found
that if you work hard, educate yourself and keep your wits about you, you
can find your way in this society."
"But that's straight out of some nineteenth century Horatio Alger
book," Tomas sputtered.
"So? Just because it's an old idea doesn't mean it's wrong." Randy
said.
A small strike force of waitpersons had been forming up around the
fringes of the table, arms laden with dishes, making eye contact with each
other as they tried to decide when it was okay to break up the fight and
serve dinner. One of them rewarded Randy with a platter carrying a wigwam
devised from slabs of nearly raw tuna. The pro consensus, anti confrontation
elements then seized control of the conversation and broke it up into
numerous small clusters of people all vigorously agreeing with one another.
Jon cast a watery look at Randy, as if to say, was it good for you too?
Charlene was ignoring him intensely; she was caught up in a consensus
cluster with Tomas. Nina kept trying to catch Randy's eye, but he studiously
avoided this because he was afraid that she wanted to favor him with a
smoldering come hither look, and all Randy wanted to do right then was to go
thither. Ten minutes later, his pager went off, and he looked down to see
Avi's number on it.
Chapter 7 BURN
The American base at Cavite, along the shore of Manila Bay, burns real
good once the Nips have set it on fire, Bobby Shaftoe and the rest of the
Fourth Marines get a good long look at it as they cruise by, sneaking out of
Manila like thieves in the night. He has never felt more personally
disgraced in his life, and the same thing goes for the other Marines. The
Nips have already landed in Malaya and are headed for Singapore like a
runaway train, they are besieging Guam and Wake and Hong Kong and God knows
what else, and it should be obvious to anyone that they are going to hit the
Philippines next. Seems like a regiment of hardened China Marines might
actually come in handy around here.
But MacArthur seems to think he can defend Luzon all by himself,
standing on the walls of Intramuros with his Colt .45. So they are shipping
out. They have no idea where to. Most of them would rather hit the beaches
of Nippon itself than stay here in Army territory.
The night the war began, Bobby Shaftoe had first gotten Glory back into
the bosom of her family.
The Altamiras live in the neighborhood of Malate, a couple of miles
south of Intramuros, and not too far from the place where Shaftoe has just
had his half hour of Glory along the seawall. The city has gone mad, and
it's impossible to get a car. Sailors, marines, and soldiers are spewing
from bars, nightclubs, and ballrooms and commandeering taxis in groups of
four and six it's as crazy as Shanghai on Saturday night like the war's
already here. Shaftoe ends up carrying Glory halfway home, because her shoes
aren't made for walking.
The family Altamira is vast enough to constitute an ethnic group unto
itself and all of them live in the same building practically in the same
room. Once or twice, Glory had begun to explain to Bobby Shaftoe how they
are all related. Now there are many Shaftoes mostly in Tennessee but the
Shaftoe family tree still fits on a cross stitch sampler. The family Shaftoe
is to the Altamira clan as a single, alienated sapling is to a jungle.
Filipino families, in addition to being gigantic and Catholic, are massively
crosslinked by godparent/godchild relationships, like lianas stretched from
branch to branch and tree to tree. If asked, Glory is happy, even eager, to
talk for six hours nonstop about how the Altamiras are related to one
another, and that is just to give a general overview. Shaftoe's brain always
shuts off after the first thirty seconds.
He gets her to the apartment, which is usually in a state of hysterical
uproar even when the nation is not under military assault by the Empire of
Nippon. Despite this, the appearance of Glory, shortly after the outbreak of
war, borne in the arms of a United States Marine, is received by the
Altamiras in much the same way as if Christ were to materialize in the
center of their living room with the Virgin Mary slung over his back. All
around him, middle aged women are thudding down onto their knees, as if the
place has just been mustard gassed. But they are just doing it to shout
hallelujah! Glory alights nimbly upon her high heels, tears exploring the
exceptional geometry of her cheeks, and kisses everyone in the entire clan.
All of the kids are wide awake, though it is three in the morning. Shaftoe
happens to catch the eye of a squad of boys, aged maybe three to ten, all
brandishing wooden rifles and swords. They are all staring at Bobby Shaftoe,
replendent in his uniform, and they are perfectly thunderstruck; he could
throw a baseball into the mouth of each one from across the room. In his
peripheral vision, he sees a middle aged woman who is related to Glory by
some impossibly complex chain of relationships, and who already has one of
Glory's lipstick marks on her cheek, vectoring toward him on a collision
course, grimly determined to kiss him. He knows that he must get out of this
place now or he will never leave it. So, ignoring the woman, and holding the
gaze of those stunned boys, he rises to attention and snaps out a perfect
salute.
The boys salute back, raggedly, but with fantastic bravado. Bobby
Shaftoe turns on his heel and marches out of the room, moving like a bayonet
thrust. He reckons that he will come back to Malate tomorrow, when things
are calmer, and check up on Glory and the rest of the Altamiras.
He does not see her again.
He reports back to his ship, and is not granted any more shore leave.
He does manage to have a conversation with Uncle Jack, who pulls up
alongside in a small motorboat long enough for them to shout a few sentences
back and forth. Uncle Jack is the last of the Manila Shaftoes, a branch of
the family spawned by Nimrod Shaftoe of the Tennessee Volunteers. Nimrod
took a bullet in his right arm somewhere around Quingua, courtesy of some
rebellious Filipino riflemen. Recovering in a Manila hospital, old Nimrod,
or 'Lefty" as he was called by that point, decided that he liked the pluck
of these Filipino men, in order to kill whom a whole new class of
ridiculously powerful sidearm (the Colt .45) had had to be invented. Not
only that, he liked the looks of their women. Promptly discharged from the
service, he found that full disability pay would go a long way on the local
economy. He set up an export business along the Pasig riverfront, married a
half Spanish woman, and sired a son (Jack) and two daughters. The daughters
ended up in the States, back in the Tennessee mountains that have been the
ancestral wellspring of all Shaftoes ever since they broke out of the
indentured servitude racket back in the 1700s. Jack stayed in Manila and
inherited Nimrod's business, but never married. By Manila standards he makes
a decent amount of money. He has always been an odd combination of salty
waterfront trader and perfumed dandy. He and Mr. Pascual have been in
business together forever, which is how Bobby Shaftoe knows Mr. Pascual, and
which is how he originally met Glory.
When Bobby Shaftoe repeats the latest rumors, Uncle Jack's face
collapses. No one hereabouts is willing to face the fact that they are about
to be besieged by Nips. His next words ought to be, "Shit then, I'm getting
the hell out of here, I'll send you a postcard from Australia." But instead
he says something like "I'll come by in a few days to check up on you."
Bobby Shaftoe bites his tongue and does not say what he's thinking,
which is that he is a Marine, and he is on a ship, and this is a war, and
Marines on ships in wars are not known for staying put. He just stands there
and watches as Uncle Jack putt putts away on his little boat, turning back
every so often to wave at him with his fine Panama hat. The sailors around
Bobby Shaftoe watch with amusement, and a bit of admiration. The waterfront
is churning insanely as every piece of military gear that's not set in
concrete gets thrown onto ships and sent to Bata'an or Corregidor, and Uncle
Jack, standing upright in his boat, in his good cream colored suit and
Panama hat, weaves through the traffic with aplomb. Bobby Shaftoe watches
him until he disappears around the bend into the Pasig River, knowing that
he is probably the last member of his family who will ever see Uncle Jack
alive.
Despite all of those premonitions, he's surprised when they ship out
after only a few days of war, pulling out of their slip in the middle of the
night without any of the traditional farewell ceremonies. Manila is
supposedly lousy with Nip spies, and there's nothing the Nips would like
better than to sink a transport ship stuffed with experienced Marines.
Manila disappears behind them into the darkness. The awareness that he
hasn't seen Glory since that night is like a slow hot dentist's drill. He
wonders how she's doing. Maybe, once the war settles down a little bit, and
the battle lines firm up, he can figure out a way to get stationed in this
part of the world. MacArthur's a tough old bastard who will put up a hell of
a fight when the Nips come. And even if the Philippines fall, FDR won't let
them remain in enemy hands for very long. With any luck, inside of six
months, Bobby Shaftoe will be marching up Manila's Taft Avenue, in full
dress uniform, behind a Marine Band, perhaps nursing a minor war wound or
two. The parade will come to a section of the avenue that is lined, for a
distance of about a mile, with Altamiras. About halfway along, the crowd
will part, and Glory will run out and jump into his arms and smother him
with kisses. He'll carry the girl straight up the steps of some nice little
church where a priest in a white cassock is waiting with a big grin on his
face That dream image dissolves in a mushroom cloud of orange fire rising up
from the American base at Cavite. The place has been burning all day, and
another fuel dump has just gone up. He can feel the heat on his face from
miles away. Bobby Shaftoe is on the deck of the ship, all bundled up in a
life vest in case they get torpedoed. He takes advantage of the flaring
light to look down a long line of other Marines in life vests, staring at
the flame with stunned expressions on their tired, sweaty faces.
Manila is only half an hour behind them, but it might as well be a
million miles away.
He remembers Nanking, and what the Nips did there. What happened to the
women.
Once, long ago, there was a city named Manila. There was a girl there.
Her face and name are best forgotten. Bobby Shaftoe starts forgetting just
as fast as he can.
Chapter 8 PEDESTRIAN
RESPECT THE PEDESTRIAN, say the street signs of metro Manila. As soon
as Randy saw those he knew that he was in trouble.
For the first couple of weeks he spent in Manila, his work consisted of
walking. He walked all over the city carrying a handheld GPS receiver,
taking down latitudes and longitudes. He encrypted the data in his hotel
room and e mailed it to Avi. It became part of Epiphyte's intellectual
property. It became equity.
Now, they had secured some actual office space. Randy walks to it,
doggedly. He knows that the first time he takes a taxi there, he'll never
walk again.
RESPECT THE PEDESTRIAN, the signs say, but the drivers, the physical
environment, local land use customs, and the very layout of the place
conspire to treat the pedestrian with the contempt he so richly deserves.
Randy would get more respect if he went to work on a pogo stick with a
propeller beanie on his head. Every morning the bellhops ask him if he wants
a taxi, and practically lose consciousness when he says no. Every morning
the taxi drivers lined up in front of the hotel, leaning against their cars
and smoking, shout "Taxi? Taxi?" to him. When he turns them down, they say
witty things to each other in Tagalog and roar with laughter.
Just in case Randy hasn't gotten the message yet, a new red and white
chopper swings in low over Rizal Park, turns around once or twice like a dog
preparing to lie down, and settles in, not far from some palm trees, right
in front of the hotel.
Randy has gotten into the habit of reaching Intramuros by cutting
through Rizal Park. This is not a direct route. The direct route passes over
a no man's land, a vast, dangerous intersection lined with squatters huts
(it is dangerous because of the cars, not the squatters). If you go through
the park, on the other hand, you only have to brush off a lot of whores. But
Randy's gotten good at that. The whores cannot conceive of a man rich enough
to stay at the Manila Hotel who voluntarily walks around the city every day,
and they have given him up as a maniac. He has passed into the realm of
irrational things that you must simply accept, and in the Philippines this
is a nearly infinite domain.
Randy could never understand why everything smelled so bad until he
came upon a large, crisp rectangular hole in the sidewalk, and stared down
into a running flume of raw sewage. The sidewalks are nothing more than lids
on the sewers. Access to the depths is provided by concrete slabs with rebar
lifting loops protruding from them. Squatters fashion wire harnesses onto
those loops so that they can pull them up and create instant public
latrines. These slabs are frequently engraved with the initials, team name,
or graffiti tag of the gentlemen who manufactured them, and their competence
and attentiveness to detail vary, but their esprit de corps is fixed at a
very high level.
There are only so many gates that lead into Intramuros. Randy must run
a daily gauntlet of horse drawn taxis, some of whom have nothing better to
do than follow him down the street for a quarter of an hour muttering, "Sir?
Sir? Taxi? Taxi?" One of them, in particular, is the most tenacious
capitalist Randy has ever seen. Every time he draws alongside Randy, a rope
of urine uncoils from his horse's belly and cracks into the pavement and
hisses and foams. Tiny comets of pee strike Randy's pant legs. Randy always
wears long pants no matter how hot it is.
Intramuros is a strangely quiet and lazy neighborhood. This is mostly
because it was destroyed during the war, and hasn't been undestroyed yet.
Much of it is open weed farms still, which is very odd in the middle of a
vast, crowded metropolis.
Several miles south, towards the airport, amid nice suburban
developments, is Makati. This would be the logical place to base Epiphyte
Corp. It's got a couple of giant five star luxury hotels on every block, and
office towers that look clean and cool, and modern condos. But Avi, with his
perverse real estate sense, has decided to forgo all of that in favor of
what he described on the phone as texture. "I do not like to buy or lease
real estate when it is peaking," he said.
Understanding Avi's motives is like peeling an onion with a single
chopstick. Randy knows there is much more to it: perhaps he's earning a
favor, or repaying one, to a landlord. Perhaps he's been reading some
management guru who counsels young entrepreneurs to get deeply involved in a
country's culture. Not that Avi has ever been one for gurus. Randy's latest
theory is that it all has to do with lines of sight the latitudes and
longitudes.
Sometimes Randy walks along the top of the Spanish wall. Around Calle
Victoria, where MacArthur had his headquarters before the war, it is as wide
as a four lane street. Lovers nestle in the trapezoidal gunslits and put up
umbrellas for privacy. Below him, to the left, is the moat, a good city
block or two in width, mostly dry. Squatters have built shacks on it. In the
parts that are still submerged, they dig for mud crabs or string improvised
nets among the purple and magenta lotus blossoms.
To the right is Intramuros. A few buildings poke up out of a jumbled
wilderness of strewn stone. Ancient Spanish cannon are sprinkled around the
place, half buried. The rubble fields have been colonized by tropical
vegetation and squatters. Their clothesline poles and television antennas
are all wrapped up in jungle creepers and makeshift electrical wiring.
Utility poles jut into the air at odd angles, like widowmakers in a burned
forest, some of them almost completely obscured by the glass bubbles of
electrical meters. Every dozen yards or so, for no discernable reason, a
pile of rubble smolders.
As he goes by the cathedral, children follow him, whining and begging
piteously until he puts pesos in their hands. Then they beam and sometimes
give him a bright "Thank you!" in perfect American scented shopping mall
English. The beggars in Manila never seem to take their work very seriously,
for even they have been infected by the cultural fungus of irony and always
seem to be fighting back a grin, as if they can't believe they're doing
anything so corny.
They do not understand that he is working. That's okay.
Ideas have always come to Randy faster than he could use them. He spent
the first thirty years of his life pursuing whatever idea appealed to him at
the moment, discarding it when a better one came along.
Now he is working for a company again, and has some kind of
responsibility to use his time productively. Good ideas come to him as fast
and thick as ever, but he has to keep his eye on the ball. If the idea is
not relevant to Epiphyte, he has to jot it down and forget about it for now.
If it is relevant, he has to restrain his urge to dive into it and consider:
has anyone else come up with this idea before him? Is it possible to just go
out and buy the technology? Can he delegate the work to a contract coder in
the States?
He walks slowly, partly because otherwise he will suffer heatstroke and
fall dead in the gutter. Worse yet, he may fall through an open hatch into a
torrent of sewage, or brush against one of the squatters's electrical wires,
which dangle from overhead like patient asps. The constant dangers of sudden
electrocution from above or drowning in liquid shit below keep him looking
up and down as well as side to side. Randy has never felt more trapped
between a capricious and dangerous heaven and a hellish underworld. This
place is as steeped in religion as India, but all of it is Catholic.
At the northern end of Intramuros is a little business district. It is
sandwiched between Manila Cathedral and Fort Santiago, which the Spaniards
constructed to command the outlet of the Pasig River. You can tell it's a
business district because of the phone wires. As in other Rapidly Developing
Asian Economies, it is difficult to tell whether these are pirate wires, or
official ones that have been incredibly badly installed. They are a case
study in why incrementalism is bad. The bundles are so thick in some places
that Randy probably could not wrap both arms around them. Their weight and
tension have begun to pull the phone poles over, especially at curves in the
roads, where the wires go round a corner and exert a net sideways force on
the pole.
All of these buildings are constructed in the least expensive way
conceivable: concrete poured in place in wooden forms, over grids of hand
tied rebar. They are blocky, grey, and completely indistinguishable from one
another. A couple of much taller buildings, twenty or thirty stories, loom
over the district from a big intersection nearby, wind and birds circulating
through their broken windows. They were badly shaken up in an earthquake
during the 1980s and have not been put to rights yet.
He passes by a restaurant with a squat concrete blockhouse in front,
its openings covered with blackened steel grates, rusty exhaust pipes
sticking out the top to vent the diesel generator locked inside. NO BROWN
OUT has been proudly stenciled all over it. Beyond that is a postwar office
building, four stories high, with an especially thick sheaf of telephone
wires running into it. The logo of a bank is bolted to the front of the
building, down low. There is angle parking in front. The two spaces in front
of the main entrance are blocked off with hand painted signs: RESERVED FOR
ARMORED CAR and RESERVED FOR BANK MANAGER. A couple of guards stand in front
of the entrance clutching the fat wooden pistol grips of riot guns, weapons
that have the hulking, cartoonish appearance of action figure accessories.
One of the guards remains behind a bulletproof podium with a sign on it:
PLEASE DEPOSIT GUNS/FIREARMS TO THE GUARD.
Randy exchanges nods with the gunmen and goes into the building's
lobby, which is just as hot as outside. Bypassing the bank, ignoring the
unreliable elevators, he goes through a steel door that takes him into a
narrow stairwell. Today, it is dark. The building's electrical system is a
patchwork several different systems coexisting in the same space, controlled
by different panels, some on generators and some not. So blackouts begin and
end in phases. Somewhere near the top of the stairwell, small birds chirp,
competing with the sound of car alarms being set off outside.
Epiphyte Corp. rents the building's top floor, although he is the only
person working there so far. He keys his way in. Thank god; the air
conditioning has been working. The money they paid for their own generator
was worth it. He disables the alarm systems, goes to the fridge, and gets
two one liter bottles of water. His rule of thumb, after a walk, is to drink
water until he begins to urinate again. Then he can consider other
activities.
He is too sweaty to sit down. He must keep moving so that the cold dry
air will flow around his body. He flicks globes of sweat out of his beard
and does an orbit of the floor, looking out the windows, checking out the
lines of sight. He pulls a ballistic nylon traveler's wallet out of his
trousers and lets it dangle from his belt loop so that the skin underneath
it can breathe. It contains his passport, a virgin credit card, ten crisp
new hundred dollar bills, and a floppy disk with his 4096 bit encryption key
on it.
Northwards he can survey the greens and ramparts of Fort Santiago,
where phalanxes of Nipponese tourists toil, recording their fun with
forensic determination. Beyond that is the Pasig River, choked with floating
debris. Across the river is Quiapo, a built up area: high rise apartment and
office buildings with corporate names emblazoned on their top storeys and
satellite dishes on the roofs.
Unwilling to stop moving just yet, Randy strolls clockwise around the
office. Intramuros is ringed with a belt of green, its former moat. He has
just walked up its western verge. The eastern one is studded with heavy
neoclassical buildings housing various government ministries. The Post and
Telecommunications Authority sits on the Pasig's edge, at a vertex in the
river from which three closely spaced bridges radiate into Quiapo. Beyond
the large new structures above the river, Quiapo and the adjoining
neighborhood of San Miguel are a patchwork of giant institutions: a train
station, an old prison, many universities, and Malacanang Palace, which is
farther up the Pasig.
Back on this side of the river, it is Intramuros in the foreground
(cathedrals and churches surrounded by dormant land), government
institutions, colleges, and universities in the middle ground, and, beyond
that, a seemingly infinite sprawl of low lying, smoky city. Miles to the
south is the gleaming business city of Makati, built around a square where
two big roads intersect at an acute angle, echoing the intersecting runways
at NAIA, a bit farther south. An emerald city of big houses perched on big
lawns spreads away from Makati: it is where the ambassadors and corporate
presidents live. Continuing his clockwise stroll he can follow Roxas
Boulevard coming toward him up the seawall, marked by a picket line of tall
palm trees. Manila Bay is jammed with heavy shipping, big cargo ships
filling the water like logs in a boom. The container port is just below him
to the west: a grid of warehouses on reclaimed land that is about as flat,
and as natural, as a sheet of particle board.
If he looks over the cranes and containers, due west across the bay, he
can barely make out the mountainous silhouette of the Bata'an Peninsula,
some forty miles distant. Following its black skyline southwards tracing the
route taken by the Nipponese in '42 he can almost resolve a lump lying off
its southern tip. That would be the island of Corregidor. This is the first
time he's ever been able to see it; the air is unusually clear today.
A fragment of historical trivia floats to the surface of his melted
brain. The galleon from Acapulco. The signal fire on Corregidor.
He punches in Avi's GSM number. Avi, somewhere in the world, answers
it. He sounds like he is in a taxi, in one of those countries where horn
honking is still an inalienable right. "What's on your mind, Randy?"
"Lines of sight," Randy says.
"Huh!" Avi blurts, as if a medicine ball has just slammed into his
belly. "You figured it out."
Chapter 9 GUADALCANAL
The marine raiders' bodies are no longer pressurized with blood and
breath. The weight of their gear flattens them into the sand. The
accelerating surf has already begun to shovel silt over them; comet trails
of blood fade back into the ocean, red carpets for any sharks who may be
browsing the coastline. Only one of them is a giant lizard. but all have the
same general shape: fat in the middle and tailing off at the ends,
streamlined by the waves.
A little convoy of Nip boats is moving down the slot, towing barges
loaded with supplies packed into steel drums. Shaftoe and his platoon ought
to be lobbing mortars at them right now. When the American planes show up
and begin to kick the shit out of them, the Nips will throw the drums
overboard and run away, and hope that some of them will wash ashore on
Guadalcanal.
The war is over for Bobby Shaftoe, and hardly for the first or last
time. He trudges among the platoon. Waves hit him in the knees, then spread
into magic carpets of foam and vegetable matter that skim along the beach so
that his footing appears to glide out from under him. He keeps twisting
around for no reason and falling on his ass.
Finally he reaches the corpsman's corpse, and divests it of anything
with a red cross on it. He turns his back on the Nip convoy and looks up a
long glacis toward the tideline. It might as well be Mt. Everest as seen
from a low base camp. Shaftoe decides to tackle the challenge on hands and
knees. Every so often, a big wave spanks him on the ass, rushes up between
his legs orgasmically and washes his face. It feels good and also keeps him
from pitching forward and falling asleep below the high tide mark.
The next couple of days are a handful of dirty, faded black and white
snapshots, shuffled and dealt over and over again: the beach under water.
positions of corpses marked by standing waves. The beach empty. The beach
under water again. The beach strewn with black lumps, like a slice of
Grandma Shaftoe's raisin bread. A morphine bottle half buried in the sand.
Small, dark people, mostly naked, moving along the beach at low tide and
looting the corpses.
Hey, wait a sec! Shaftoe is on his feet somehow, clutching his
Springfield. The jungle doesn't want to let go of him; creepers have
actually grown over his limbs in the time he has lain there. As he emerges.
dragging foliage behind him like a float in a ticker tape parade, the sun
floods over him like warm syrup of ipecac. He can see the ground headed his
way. He spins as he falls momentarily glimpsing a big man with a rifle and
then his face is pressed into the cool sand. The surf roars in his skull: a
nice standing ovation from a studio audience of angels, who having all died
themselves, know a good death when they see one.
Little hands roll him over onto his back. One of his eyes is frozen
shut by sand. Peering through the other he sees a big fellow with a rifle
slung over his shoulder standing over him. The fellow has a red beard, which
makes it just a bit less probable that he is a Nipponese soldier. But what
is he?
He prods like a doctor and prays like a priest in Latin, even. Silver
hair buzzed close to a tanned skull. Shaftoe scans the fellow's clothing for
some kind of insignia. He's hoping to see a Semper Fidelis but instead he
reads: Societas Eruditorum and Ignoti et quasi occulti.
"Ignoti et ... what the fuck does that mean?" he asks.
"Hidden and unknown more or less," says the man. He's got a weird
accent, sort of Australian, sort of German. He checks out Shaftoe's insignia
in turn. "What's a Marine Raider? Some kind of new outfit?"
"Like a Marine, only more so," Shaftoe says. Which might sound like
bravado. Indeed it partly is. But this comment is as heavy laden with irony
as Shaftoe's clothes are with sand, because at this particular moment in
history, a Marine isn't just a tough s.o.b. He is a tough S.O.B. stuck out
in the middle of nowhere (Guadalcanal) with no food or weapons (owing, as
every Marine can tell you, to a sinister conspiracy between General
MacArthur and the Nips) totally making everything up as he goes along,
improvising weapons from found objects, addled, half the time, by disease
and the drugs supplied to keep diseases at bay. And in every one of those
senses, a Marine Raider is (as Shaftoe says) like a Marine, only more so.
"Are you some kind of commando or something?" Shaftoe asks,
interrupting Red as he is mumbling.
"No. I live on the mountain."
"Oh, yeah? What do you do up there, Red?"
"I watch. And talk on the radio, in code." Then he goes back to
mumbling.
"Who you talkin' to, Red?"
"Do you mean, just now in Latin, or on the radio in code?"
"Both I reckon."
"On the radio in code, I talk to the good guys.
"Who are the good guys?"
"Long story. If you live, maybe I'll introduce you to some of them,"
says Red.
"How about just now in Latin?"
"Talking to God," Red says. "Last rites, in case you don't live."
This makes him think of the others. He remembers why he made that
insane decision to stand up in the first place. "Hey! Hey!" He tries to sit
up, and finding that impossible, twists around. "Those bastards are looting
the corpses!"
His eyes aren't focusing and he has to rub sand out of the one.
Actually, they are focusing just fine. What looked like steel drums
strewn around the beach turn out to be steel drums strewn around the beach.
The natives are pawing them out of the sucking sand, digging with their
hands like dogs, rolling them up the beach and into the jungle.
Shaftoe blacks out.
When he wakes up there's a row of crosses on the beach sticks lashed
together with vines, draped with jungle flowers. Red is pounding them in
with the butt of his rifle. All the steel drums, and most of the natives,
are gone. Shaftoe needs morphine. He says as much to Red.
"If you think you need it now," Red says, "just wait." He tosses his
rifle to a native, strides up to Shaftoe, and heaves him up over his
shoulders in a fireman's carry. Shaftoe screams. A couple of Zeroes fly
overhead, as they stride into the jungle. "My name is Enoch Root," says Red,
"but you can call me Brother."
Chapter 10 GALLEON
One morning, Randy Waterhouse rises early, takes a long hot shower,
plants himself before the mirror of his Manila Hotel suite, and shaves his
face bloody. He was thinking of farming this work out to a specialist: the
barber in the hotel's lobby. But this is the first time Randy's face will be
visible in ten years, and Randy wants to be the first person to see it. His
heart actually thumps, partly out of primal brute fear of the knife, and
partly from the sheer anticipation. It is like the scene in corny old movies
where the bandages are finally taken off of the patient's face, and a mirror
proffered.
The effect is, first of all, intense deja vu, as if the last ten years
of his life were but a dream, and he now has them to live over again.
Then he begins to notice subtle ways in which his face has been
changing since it was last exposed to air and light. He is mildly astonished
to find that these changes are not entirely bad. Randy has never thought of
himself as especially good looking, and has never especially cared. But the
blood spotted visage in the mirror is, arguably, better looking than the one
that faded into the deepening shade of stubble a decade ago. It looks like a
grownup's face.
***
It has been a week since he and Avi laid out the entire plan for the
high officials of the PTA: the Post and Telecoms Authority. PTA is a generic
term that telecom businessmen slap, like a yellow stickynote, onto what ever
government department handles these matters in whatever country they happen
to be visiting this week. In the Philippines, it is actually called
something else.
Americans brought, or at least accompanied, the Philippines into the
twentieth century and erected the apparatus of its central government.
Intramuros, the dead heart of Manila, is surrounded by a loose ring of giant
neoclassical buildings, very much after the fashion of the District of
Columbia, housing various parts of that apparatus. The PTA is headquartered
in one of those buildings, just south of the Pasig.
Randy and Avi get there early because Randy, accustomed to Manila
traffic, insists that they budget a full hour to cover the one– or two
mile taxi ride from the hotel. But traffic is perversely light and they end
up with a full twenty minutes to kill. They stroll around the side of the
building and up onto the green levee. Avi draws a bead on the Epiphyte Corp.
building, just to reassure himself that their line of sight is clear. Randy
is already satisfied of this, and just stands there with arms crossed,
looking at the river. It is choked, bank to bank, with floating debris: some
plant material but mostly old mattresses, cushions, pieces of plastic
litter, hunks of foam, and, most of all, plastic shopping bags in various
bright colors. The river has the consistency of vomit.
Avi wrinkles his nose. "What's that?"
Randy sniffs the air and smells, among everything else, burnt plastic.
He gestures downstream. "Squatter camp on the other side of Fort Santiago, '
he explains. "They sieve plastic out of the river and burn it for fuel."
"I was in Mexico a couple of weeks ago," Avi says. "They have plastic
forests there!"
"What does that mean?"
"Downwind of the city, the trees sort of comb the plastic shopping bags
out of the air. They get totally covered with them. The trees die because
light and air can't get through to the leaves. But they remain standing,
totally encased in fluttering, ragged plastic, all different colors."
Randy shrugs his blazer off, rolls up his sleeves; Avi does not seem to
notice the heat. "So that's Fort Santiago," Avi says, and starts walking
towards it.
"You've heard of it?" Randy asks, following him, and heaving a sigh.
The air is so hot that when it comes out of your lungs it has actually
cooled down by several degrees.
"It's mentioned in the video," Avi says, holding up a videotape
cassette and wiggling it.
"Oh, yeah."
Soon they are standing before the fort's entrance, which is flanked by
carvings of a pair of guards cut into the foamy volcanic tuff: halberd
brandishing Spaniards in blousy pants and conquistador helmets. They have
been standing here for close to half a millennium, and a hundred thousand
tropical thundershowers have streamed down their bodies and polished them
smooth.
Avi is working on a much shorter time horizon he has eyes only for the
bullet craters that have disfigured these soldiers far worse than time and
water. He puts his hands in them, like doubting Thomas. Then he steps back
and begins to mutter in Hebrew. Two ponytailed German tourists stroll
through the gate in rustic sandals.
"We have five minutes," Randy says.
"Okay, let's come back here later."
***
Charlene wasn't totally wrong. Blood seeps out of tiny, invisible
painless cuts on Randy's face and neck for ten or fifteen minutes after he
has shaved. Moments ago, that blood was accelerating through his ventricles,
or seeping through the parts of his brain that make him a conscious entity.
Now the same stuff is exposed to the air; he can reach up and wipe it off.
The boundary between Randy and his environment has been annihilated.
He gets out a big tube of heavy waterproof sunblock and greases his
face, neck, arms, and the small patch of scalp on the top of his head where
the hair is getting thin. Then he pulls on khakis, boat shoes, and a loose
cotton shirt, and a beltpack containing his GPS receiver and a couple of
other essentials like a wad of toilet paper and a disposable camera. He
drops his key off at the front desk, and the employees all do double takes
and grin. The bellhops seem particularly delighted by his makeover. Or
perhaps it is just that he is wearing leather shoes for once: topsiders,
which he's always thought of as the mark of effete preppies, but which are
actually a reasonable thing for him to wear today. Bellhops make ready to
haul the front door open, but instead, Randy cuts across the lobby towards
the back of the hotel, skirts the swimming pool, and walks through a line of
palm trees to a stone railing along the top of a seawall. Below him is the
hotel's dock, which sticks out into a small cove that opens onto Manila Bay.
His ride isn't here yet, so he stands at the railing for a minute. One
side of the cove is accessible from Rizal Park. A few gnarly Filipino
squatter types are lazing on the benches, staring back at him. Down below
the breakwater, a middle aged man, wearing only boxer shorts, stands in knee
deep water with a pointed stick, staring with feline intensity into the
lapping water. A black helicopter makes slow, banking circles against a
sugar white sky. It is a Vietnam vintage Huey, a wappity wap kind of chopper
that also makes a fierce reptilian hissing noise as it slithers overhead.
A boat materializes from the steam rising off the bay, cuts its
engines, and coasts into the cove, shoving a bow wave in front of it, like a
wrinkle in a heavy rug. A tall, slender woman is poised on the prow like a
living figurehead, holding a coil of heavy rope.
***
The big satellite dishes on the roof of the PTA's building are pointed
almost straight up, like birdbaths, because Manila is so close to the
equator. On its stone walls, spackle is coming loose from the bullet and
shrapnel craters into which it was troweled after the war. Window air
conditioners centered in the building's Roman arches drip water onto the
limestone balusters below, gradually melting them away. The limestone is
blackened with some kind of organic slime, and pitted by the root systems of
little plants that have taken root in them probably grown from seeds
conveyed in the shit of the birds that congregate there to bathe and drink,
the squatters of the aerial realm.
In a paneled conference room, a dozen people are waiting, equally
divided between table sitting big wheels and wall crawling minions. As Randy
and Avi enter a great flurry of hand shaking and card presenting ensues,
though most of the introductions zoom through Randy's short term memory like
a supersonic fighter blowing past shoddy Third World air defense systems. He
is left only with a stack of business cards. He deals them out on his patch
of table like a senescent codger playing Klondike on his meal tray. Avi, of
course, knows all of these people already seems to be on a first name basis
with most of them, knows their children's names and ages, their hobbies,
their blood types, chronic medical conditions, what books they are reading,
whose parties they have been going to. All of them are evidently delighted
by this, and all of them, thank god, completely ignore Randy.
Of the half dozen important people in the room, three are middle aged
Filipino men. One of these is a high ranking official in the PTA. The second
is the president of an upstart telecommunications company called FiliTel,
which is trying to compete against the traditional monopoly. The third is
the vice president of a company called 24 Jam that runs about half of the
convenience stores in the Philippines, as well as quite a few in Malaysia.
Randy has trouble telling these men apart, but by watching them converse
with Avi, and by using inductive logic, he is soon able to match business
card with face.
The other three are easy: two Americans and one Nipponese, and one of
the Americans is a woman. She is wearing lavender pumps color coordinated
with a neat little skirt suit, and matching nails. She looks as if she might
have stepped straight off the set of an infomercial for fake fingernails or
home permanents. Her card identifies her as Mary Ann Carson, and claims that
she is a V.P. with AVCLA, Asia Venture Capital Los Angeles, which Randy
knows dimly as a Los Angeles based firm that invests in Rapidly Developing
Asian Economies. The American man is blond and has a hard jawed quasi
military look about him. He seems alert, disciplined, impassive, which
Charlene's crowd would interpret as hostility born of repression born of
profound underlying mental disorder. He represents the Subic Bay Free Port.
The Nipponese man is the executive vice president of a subsidiary of a
ridiculously colossal consumer electronics company. He is about six feet
tall. He has a small body and a large head shaped like an upside down Bosc
pear, thick hair edged with gray, and wire rimmed glasses. He smiles
frequently, and projects the serene confidence of a man who has memorized a
two thousand page encyclopedia of business etiquette.
Avi wastes little time in starting the videotape, which at the moment
represents about seventy five percent of Epiphyte Corp.'s assets. Avi had it
produced by a hot multimedia startup in San Francisco, and the contract to
produce it accounted for one hundred percent of the startup's revenue this
year. "Pies crumble when you slice them too thin," Avi likes to say.
It starts with footage pilfered from a forgotten made for TV movie of a
Spanish galleon making headway through heavy seas. Superimpose title: SOUTH
CHINA SEA A.D. 1699. The soundtrack has been beefed up and Dolbyized from
its original monaural version. It is quite impressive.
("Half of the investors in AVCLA are into yachting," Avi explained.)
Cut to a shot (produced by the multimedia company, and seamlessly
spliced in) of a mangy, exhausted lookout in a crow's nest, peering through
a brass spyglass, hollering the Spanish equivalent of "Land ho!"
Cut to the galleon's captain, a rugged, bearded character, emerging
from his cabin to stare with Keatsian wild surmise at the horizon.
"Corregidor!" he exclaims.
Cut to a stone tower on the crown of a green tropical island, where a
lookout is sighting the (digitally inserted) galleon on the horizon. The
lookout cups his hands around his mouth and bellows, in Spanish, "It is the
galleon! Light the signal fire!"
("The family of the guy who runs the PTA is really into local history,"
Avi said, "they run the Museum of the Philippines.")
With a lusty cheer, Spaniards (actually, Mexican American actors) in
conquistador helmets plunge firebrands into a huge pile of dry wood which
evolves into a screaming pyramid of flame powerful enough to flash roast an
ox.
Cut to the battlements of Manila's Fort Santiago (foreground: carved
styrofoam; background: digitally generated landscape), where another
conquistador spies a light flaring up on the horizon. "Mira! El galleon!" he
cries.
Cut to a series of shots of Manila townsfolk rushing to the seawall to
adore the signal fire, including an Augustinian monk who clasps his rosary
strewn hands and bursts into clerical Latin on the spot ("the family that
runs FiliTel endowed a chapel at Manila Cathedral") as well as a clean cut
family of Chinese merchants unloading bales of silk from a junk ("24 Jam,
the convenience store chain, is run by Chinese mestizos").
A voiceover begins, deep and authoritative, English with a Filipino
accent ("The actor is the brother of the godfather of the grandson of the
man who runs the PTA"). Subtitles appear on the bottom of the screen in
Tagalog ("the PTA people have a heavy political commitment to the native
language").
"In the heyday of the Spanish Empire, the most important event of the
year was the arrival of the galleon from Acapulco, laden with silver from
the rich mines of America silver to buy the silks and spices of Asia, silver
that made the Philippines into the economic fountainhead of Asia. The
approach of the galleon was heralded by a beacon of light from the island of
Corregidor, at the entrance of Manila Bay."
Cut (finally!) from the beaming, greed lit faces of the Manila
townsfolk to a 3 D graphics rendering of Manila Bay, the Bata'an Peninsula,
and the small islands off the tip of Bata'an, including Corregidor. The
point of view swoops and zooms in on Corregidor where a hokily, badly
rendered fire blazes up. A beam of yellow light, like a phaser blast in Star
Trek, shoots across the bay. Our point of view follows it. It splashes
against the walls of Fort Santiago.
The signal fire was an ancient and simple technology. In the language
of modern science, its light was a form of electromagnetic radiation,
propagating in a straight line across Manila Bay, and carrying a single bit
of information. But, in an age starved for information, that single bit
meant everything to the people of Manila."
Cue that funky music. Cut to shots of teeming modern Manila. Shopping
malls and luxury hotels in Makati. Electronics factories, school children
sitting in front of computer screens. Satellite dishes. Ships unloading at
the big free port of Subic Bay. Lots and lots of grinning and thumbs up
gestures.
"The Philippines of today is an emerging economic dynamo. As its
economy grows, so does its hunger for information not single bits, but
hundreds of billions of them. But the technology for transmitting that
information has not changed as much as you might imagine."
Back to the 3 D rendering of Manila Bay. This time, instead of a
bonfire on Corregidor, there's a microwave horn up on a tower on the isle's
summit, gunning electric blue sine waves at the sprawl of Metro Manila.
"Electromagnetic radiation in this case, microwave beams propagating in
straight lines, over line of sight routes, can transmit vast quantities of
information quickly. Modern cryptographic technology makes the signal safe
from would be eavesdroppers."
Cut back to the galleon and lookout footage. "In the old days,
Corregidor's position at the entrance of Manila Bay made it a natural look
out a place where information about approaching ships could be gathered."
Cut to a shot of a barge in a cove somewhere, feeding thick tarry cable
overboard, divers at work with queues of round orange buoys. "Today,
Corregidor's geographical situation makes it an ideal place to land deep sea
fiberoptic cables. The information coming down these cables from Taiwan,
Hong Kong, Malaysia, Nippon, and the United States can from there be
transmitted directly into the heart of Manila. At the speed of light! "
More 3 D graphics. This time, it's a detailed rendering of the
cityscape of Manila. Randy knows it by heart because he gathered the data
for the damn thing by walking around town with his GPS receiver. The beam of
bits from Corregidor comes straight in off the bay and scores a bullseye on
the rooftop antenna of a nondescript four story office building between Fort
Santiago and the Manila Cathedral. It is Epiphyte's building, and the
antenna is discreetly labeled with the name and logo of Epiphyte Corp. Other
antennas then retransmit information to the PTA building and to other nearby
sites: skyscrapers in Makati, government offices in Quezon City, and an Air
Force base south of town.
***
Hotel staff throw a carpeted gangway across the gap between seawall and
boat. As Randy is walking across it, the woman extends her hand to him. He
reaches out to shake it. "Randy Waterhouse," he says.
She grabs his hand and pulls him on board not so much greeting him as
making sure he doesn't fall overboard. "Hi. Amy Shaftoe," she says. "Welcome
to Glory. "
"Pardon me?"
" Glory. The name of this junk is Glory ," she says. She speaks
forthrightly and with great clarity, as though communicating over a noisy
two way radio. "Actually, it's Glory IV," she continues. Her accent is
largely Midwestern, with a trace of Southern twang, and a little bit of
Filipino, too. If you saw her on the streets of some Midwestern town you
might not notice the traces of Asian ancestry around her eyes. She has dark
brown hair, sun streaked, just long enough to form a secure ponytail, no
longer.
"'Scuse me a sec," she says, pokes her head into the pilot house, and
speaks to the pilot in a mixture of Tagalog and English. The pilot nods,
looks around, and begins to manipulate the controls. The hotel staff pull
the gangway back. "Hey," Amy says quietly, and underhands a pack of
Marlboros across the gap to each one of them. They snatch them out of the
air, grin, and thank her. Glory IV begins to back away from the dock.
Amy spends the next few minutes walking around the deck, going through
some kind of mental checklist. Randy counts four men in addition to Amy and
the pilot two Caucasians and two Filipinos. All of them are fiddling around
with engines or diving gear in a way Randy recognizes, through many cultural
and technological barriers, as debugging. Amy walks past Randy a couple of
times, but avoids looking him in the eye. She's not a shy person. Her body
language is eloquent enough: "I am aware that men are in the habit of
looking at whatever women happen to be nearby, in the hopes of deriving
enjoyment from their physical beauty, their hair, makeup, fragrance, and
clothing. I will ignore this, politely and patiently, until you get over
it." Amy is a long limbed girl in paint stained jeans, a sleeveless t shirt,
and high tech sandals, and she lopes easily around the boat. Finally she
approaches him, meeting his eyes for just a second and then glancing away as
if bored.
"Thanks for giving me the ride," Randy says.
''It's nothing,'' she says.
"I feel embarrassed that I didn't tip the guys at the dock. Can I
reimburse you?"
"You can reimburse me with information," she says without hesitation.
Amy reaches up with one hand to rub the back of her neck. Her elbow pokes up
in the air. He notices about a month's growth of hair in her armpit, then
glimpses the corner of a tattoo poking out from under her shirt. "You're in
the information business, right?" She watches his face, hoping that he'll
take the cue and laugh, or at least grin. But he's too preoccupied to catch
it. She glances away, now with a knowing, sardonic look on her face you
don't understand me, Randy, which is absolutely typical, and I'm fine with
that. She reminds Randy of level headed blue collar lesbians he has known,
drywall hanging urban dykes with cats and cross country ski racks.
She takes him into an air conditioned cabin with a lot of windows and a
coffee maker. It has fake wood veneer paneling like a suburban basement, and
framed exhibits on the walls official documents like licenses and
registrations, and enlarged black and white photographs of people and boats.
It smells like coffee, soap, and oil. There is a boom box held down with
bungee cords, and a shoebox with a couple of dozen CDs in it, mostly albums
by American woman singer songwriters of the offbeat, misunderstood, highly
intelligent but intensely emotional school, getting rich selling music to
consumers who understand what it's like not to be understood (1).
Amy pours two mugs of coffee and sets them down on the cabin's bolted down
table, then fishes in the tight pockets of her jeans, pulls out a waterproof
nylon wallet, extracts two business cards, and shoots them across the table,
one after the other, to Randy. She seems to enjoy doing this a small,
private smile comes onto her lips and then vanishes the moment Randy sees
it. The cards bear the logo of Semper Marine Services and the name America
Shaftoe.
"Your name's America?" Randy asks.
Amy looks out the window, bored, afraid he's going to make a big deal
out of it. "Yeah," she says.
"Where'd you grow up?"
She seems to be fascinated by the view out the window: big cargo ships
strewn around Manila Bay as far as the eye can see, ships hailing from
Athens, Shanghai, Vladivostok, Cape Town, Monrovia. Randy infers that
looking at big rusty boats is more interesting than talking to Randy.
"So, would you mind telling me what's going on?" she asks. She turns to
face him, lifts the mug to her lips, and finally, looks him straight in the
eye.
Randy's a little nonplussed. The question is basically impertinent
coming from America Shaftoe. Her company, Semper Marine Services, is a
contractor at the very lowest level of Avi's virtual corporation only one of
a dozen boats and divers outfits that they could have hired so this is a bit
like being interrogated by one's janitor or taxi driver.
But she's smart and unusual, and, precisely because of all her efforts
not to be, she's cute. As an interesting female, and a fellow American, she
is pulling rank, demanding to be accorded a higher status. Randy tries to be
careful.
"Is there something bothering you?" he asks.
She looks away. She's afraid she's given him the wrong impression. "Not
in particular," she says, "I'm just nosy. I like to hear stories. Divers
always sit around and tell each other stories."
Randy sips his coffee. America continues, "In this business, you never
know where your next job is going to come from. Some people have really
weird reasons for wanting to get stuff done underwater, which I like to
hear." She concludes, "It's fun!" which is clearly all the motivation she
needs.
Randy views all of the above as a fairly professional bullshitting job.
He decides to give Amy press release material only. "All the Filipinos are
in Manila. That's where the information needs to go. It is somewhat awkward,
getting information to Manila, because it has mountains in back of it and
Manila Bay in front. The bay is a nightmare place to run submarine cables "
She's nodding. Of course she would know this already. Randy hits the
fast forward. "Corregidor's a pretty good place. From Corregidor you can
shoot a line of sight microwave transmission across the bay to downtown
Manila."
"So you are extending the North Luzon coastal festoon from Subic Bay
down to Corregidor," she says.
"Uh two things about what you just said," Randy says, and pauses for a
moment to get the answer queued up in his output buffer. "One, you have to
be careful about your pronouns what do you mean when you say 'you'? I work
for Epiphyte Corporation, which is designed from the ground up to work, not
on its own, but as an element in a virtual corporation, kind of like "
"I know what an epiphyte is," she says. "What's two?"
"Okay, good," Randy says, a little off balance. "Two is that the
extension of the North Luzon Festoon is just the first of what we hope will
be several linkups. We want to lay a lot of cable, eventually, into
Corregidor."
Some kind of machinery behind Amy's eyes begins to hum. The message is
clear enough. There will be work aplenty for Semper Marine, if they handle
this first job well.
"In this case, the entity that's doing the work is a joint venture
including us, FiliTel, 24 Jam, and a big Nipponese electronics company,
among others."
"What does 24 Jam have to do with it? They're convenience stores."
"They're the retail outlet the distribution system for Epiphyte's
product."
"And that is?"
"Pinoy grams." Randy manages to suppress the urge to tell her that the
name is trademarked.
"Pinoy grams?"
"Here's how it works. You are an Overseas Contract Worker. Before you
leave home for Saudi or Singapore or Seattle or wherever, you buy or rent a
little gizmo from us. It's about the size of a paperback book and encases a
thimble sized video camera, a tiny screen, and a lot of memory chips. The
components come from all over the place they are shipped to the free port at
Subic and assembled in a Nipponese plant there. So they cost next to
nothing. Anyway, you take this gizmo overseas with you. Whenever you feel
like communicating with the folks at home, you turn it on, aim the camera at
yourself and record a little video greeting card. It all goes onto the
memory chips. It's highly compressed. Then you plug the gizmo into a phone
line and let it work its magic."
"What's the magic? It sends the video down the phone line?"
"Right."
"Haven't people being messing around with video phones for a long
time?''
"The difference here is our software. We don't try to send the video in
real time that's too expensive. We store the data at central servers, then
take advantage of lulls, when traffic is low through the undersea cables,
and shoot the data down those cables when time can be had cheap. Eventually
the data winds up at Epiphyte's facility in Intramuros. From there we can
use wireless technology to send the data to 24 Jam stores all over Metro
Manila. The store just needs a little pie plate dish on the roof, and a
decoder and a regular VCR down behind the counter. The Pinoy gram is
recorded on a regular videotape. Then, when Mom comes in to buy eggs or Dad
comes in to buy cigarettes, the storekeeper says, 'Hey, you got a Pinoy gram
today,' and hands them the videotape. They can take it home and get the
latest news from their child overseas. When they're done, they bring the
videotape back to 24 Jam for reuse."
About halfway through this, Amy understands the basic concept, looks
out the window again and begins trying to work a fragment of breakfast out
of her teeth with the tip of her tongue. She does it with her mouth
tastefully closed, but it seems to occupy her thoughts more than the
explanation of Pinoy grams.
Randy is gripped by a crazy, unaccountable desire not to bore Amy. It's
not that he is getting a crush on her, because he puts the odds at fifty
fifty that she's a lesbian, and he knows better. She is so frank, so
guileless, that he feels he could confide anything in her, as an equal.
This is why he hates business. He wants to tell everyone everything. He
wants to make friends with people.
"So, let me guess," she says, "you are the guy doing the software."
"Yeah," he admits, a little defensive, "but the software is the only
interesting part of this whole project. All the rest is making license
plates.''
That wakes her up a little. "Making license plates?"
"It's an expression that my business partner and I use," Randy says.
"With any job, there's some creative work that needs to be done new
technology to be developed or whatever. Everything else ninety nine percent
of it is making deals, raising capital, going to meetings, marketing and
sales. We call that stuff making license plates."
She nods, looking out the window. Randy is on the verge of telling her
that Pinoy grams are nothing more than a way to create cash flow, so that
they can move on to part two of the business plan. He is sure that this
would elevate his stature beyond that of dull software boy. But Amy puffs
sharply across the top of her coffee, like blowing out a candle, and says,
"Okay. Thanks. I guess that was worth the three packs of cigarettes."
Chapter 11 NIGHTMARE
Bobby Shaftoe has become a connoisseur of nightmares.
Like a fighter pilot ejecting from a burning plane, he has just been
catapulted out of an old nightmare, and into a brand new, even better one.
It is creepy and understated; no giant lizards here.
It begins with heat on his face. When you take enough fuel to push a
fifty thousand ton ship across the Pacific Ocean at twenty five knots, and
put it all in one tank and the Nips fly over and torch it all in a few
seconds, while you stand close enough to see the triumphant grins on the
pilots' faces, then you can feel the heat on your face in this way.
Bobby Shaftoe opens his eyes, expecting that, in so doing, he is
raising the curtain on a corker of a nightmare, probably the final moments
of Torpedo Bombers at Two O'Clock! (his all time favorite) or the surprise
beginning of Strafed by Yellow Men XVII.
But the sound track to this nightmare does not seem to be running. It
is as quiet as an ambush. He is sitting up in a hospital bed surrounded by a
firing squad of hot klieg lights that make it difficult to see anything
else. Shaftoe blinks and focuses on an eddy of cigarette smoke hanging in
the air, like spilled fuel oil in a tropical cove. It sure smells good.
A young man is sitting near his bed. All that Shaftoe can see of this
man is an asymmetrical halo where the lights glance from the petroleum glaze
on his pompadour. And the red coal of his cigarette. As he looks more
carefully he can make out the silhouette of a military uniform. Not a Marine
uniform. Lieutenant's bars gleam on his shoulders, light shining through
double doors.
"Would you like another cigarette?" the lieutenant says. His voice is
hoarse but weirdly gentle.
Shaftoe looks down at his own hand and sees the terminal half inch of a
Lucky Strike wedged between his fingers.
'Ask me a tough one," he manages to say. His own voice is deep and
skirted, like a gramophone winding down.
The butt is swapped for a new one. Shaftoe raises it to his lips. There
are bandages on that arm, and underneath them, he can feel grievous wounds
trying to inflict pain. But something is blocking the signals.
Ah, the morphine. It can't be too bad of a nightmare if it comes with
morphine, can it?
"You ready?" the voice says. God damn it, that voice is familiar.
"Sir, ask me a tough one, sir!" Shaftoe says.
"You already said that."
"Sir, if you ask a Marine if he wants another cigarette, or if he's
ready, the answer is always the same, sir!"
"That's the spirit," the voice says. "Roll film."
A clicking noise starts up in the outer darkness beyond the klieg light
firmament. "Rolling," says a voice.
Something big descends towards Shaftoe. He flattens himself into the
bed, because it looks exactly like the sinister eggs laid in midair by Nip
dive bombers. But then it stops and just hovers there.
"Sound," says another voice.
Shaftoe looks harder and sees that it is not a bomb but a large bullet
shaped microphone on the end of a boom.
The lieutenant with the pompadour leans forward now, instinctively
seeking the light, like a traveler on a cold winter's night.
It is that guy from the movies. What's his name. Oh, yeah!
Ronald Reagan has a stack of three by five cards in his lap. He skids
up a new one: "What advice do you, as the youngest American fighting man
ever to win both the Navy Cross and the Silver Star, have for any young
Marines on their way to Guadalcanal?"
Shaftoe doesn't have to think very long. The memories are still as
fresh as last night's eleventh nightmare: ten plucky Nips in Suicide Charge!
"Just kill the one with the sword first."
"Ah," Reagan says, raising his waxed and penciled eyebrows, and cocking
his pompadour in Shaftoe's direction. "Smarrrt – you target them
because they're the officers, right?"
"No, fuckhead!" Shaftoe yells. "You kill 'em because they've got
fucking swords! You ever had anyone running at you waving a fucking sword ?"
Reagan backs down. He's scared now, sweating off some of his makeup,
even though a cool breeze is coming in off the bay and through the window.
Reagan wants to turn tail and head back down to Hollywood and nail a
starlet fast. But he's stuck here in Oakland, interviewing the war hero. He
flips through his stack of cards, rejects about twenty in a row. Shaftoe's
in no hurry, he's going to be flat on his back in this hospital bed for
approximately the rest of his life. He incinerates half of that cigarette
with one long breath, holds it, blows out a smoke ring.
When they fought at night, the big guns on the warships made rings of
incandescent gas. Not fat doughnuts but long skinny ones that twisted around
like lariats. Shaftoe's body is saturated with morphine. His eyelids
avalanche down over his eyes, blessing those orbs that are burning and
swollen from the film lights and the smoke of the cigarettes. He and his
platoon are racing an incoming tide, trying to get around a headland. They
are Marine Raiders and they have been chasing a particular unit of Nips
across Guadalcanal for two weeks, whittling them down. As long as they're in
the neighborhood, they've been ordered to make their way to a certain point
on the headland from which they ought to be able to lob mortar rounds
against the incoming Tokyo Express. It is a somewhat harebrained and
reckless tactic, but they don't call this Operation Shoestring for nothing;
it is all wacky improvisation from the get go. They are behind schedule
because this paltry handful of Nips has been really tenacious, setting
ambushes behind every fallen log, taking potshots at them every time they
come around one of these headlands. . .
Something clammy hits him on the forehead: it is the makeup artist
taking a swipe at him. Shaftoe finds himself back in the nightmare within
which the lizard nightmare was nested.
"Did I tell you about the lizard?" Shaftoe says.
"Several times," his interrogator says. "This'll just take another
minute." Ronald Reagan squeezes a fresh three by five card between thumb and
forefinger, fastening onto something a little less emotional: "What did you
and your buddies do in the evenings, when the day's fighting was done?"
"Pile up dead Nips with a bulldozer," Shaftoe says, "and set fire to
'em. Then go down to the beach with a jar of hooch and watch our ships get
torpedoed."
Reagan grimaces. "Cut!" he says, quietly but commanding. The clicking
noise of the film camera stops.
"How'd I do?" Bobby Shaftoe says as they are squeegeeing the Maybelline
off his face, and the men are packing up their equipment. The klieg lights
have been turned off, clear northern California light streams in through the
windows. The whole scene looks almost real, as if it weren't a nightmare at
all.
"You did great," Lieutenant Reagan says, without looking him in the
eye. "A real morale booster." He lights a cigarette. "You can go back to
sleep now."
"Haw!" Shaftoe says. "I been asleep the whole time. Haven't I?"
***
He feels a lot better once he gets out of the hospital. They give him a
couple of weeks of leave, and he goes straight to the Oakland station and
hops the next train for Chicago. Fellow passengers recognize him from his
newspaper pictures, buy him drinks, pose with him for snap shots. He stares
out the windows for hours, watching America go by, and sees that all of it
is beautiful and clean. There might be wildness, there might be deep forest,
there might even be grizzly bears and mountain lions, but it is cleanly
sorted out, and the rules (don't mess with bear cubs, hang your food from a
tree limb at night) are well known, and published in the Boy Scout Manual.
In those Pacific islands there is too much that is alive, and all of it is
in a continual process of eating and being eaten by something else, and once
you set foot in the place, you're buying into the deal. Just sitting in that
train for a couple of days, his feet in clean white cotton socks, not being
eaten alive by anything, goes a long way towards clearing his head up. Only
once, or possibly two or three times, does he really feel the need to lock
himself in the can and squirt morphine into his arm.
But when he closes his eyes, he finds himself on Guadalcanal, sloshing
around that last headland, racing the incoming tide. The big waves are
rolling in now, picking up the men and slamming them into rocks.
Finally they turn the corner and see the cove: just a tiny notch in the
coast of Guadalcanal. A hundred yards of tidal mudflats backed up by a
cliff. They will have to get across those mudflats and establish a foothold
on the lower part of the cliff if they aren't going to be washed out to sea
by the tide.
The Shaftoes are Tennessee mountain people miners, among other things.
About the time Nimrod Shaftoe went to the Philippines, a couple of his
brothers moved up to western Wisconsin to work in lead mines. One of them
Bobby's grandpa became a foreman. Sometimes he would go to Oconomowoc to pay
a visit to the owner of the mine, who had a summer house on one of the
lakes. They would go out in a boat and fish for pike. Frequently the mine
owner's neighbors owners of banks and breweries would come along. That is
how the Shaftoes moved to Oconomowoc, and got out of mining, and became
fishing and hunting guides. The family has been scrupulous about holding on
to the ancestral twang, and to certain other traditions such as military
service. One of his sisters and two of his brothers are still living there
with Mom and Dad, and his two older brothers are in the Army. Bobby's not
the first to have won a Silver Star, though he is the first to have won the
Navy Cross.
Bobby goes and talks to Oconomowoc's Boy Scout troop. He gets to be
grand marshal of the town parade. Other than that, he hardly budges from the
house for two weeks. Sometimes he goes out into the yard and plays catch
with his kid brothers. He helps Dad fix up a rotten dock. Guys and gals from
his high school keep coming round to visit, and Bobby soon learns the trick
that his father and his uncles and granduncles all knew, which is that you
never talk about the specifics of what happened over there. No one wants to
hear about how you dug half of your buddy's molars out of your leg with the
point of a bayonet. All of these kids seem like idiots and lightweights to
him now. The only person he can stand to be around is his great grandfather
Shaftoe, ninety four years of age and sharp as a tack, who was there at
Petersburg when Burnside blew a huge hole in the Confederate lines with
buried explosives and sent his men rushing into the crater where they got
slaughtered. He never talks about it, of course, just as Bobby Shaftoe never
talks about the lizard.
Soon enough his time is up, and then he gets a grand sendoff at the
Milwaukee train station, hugs Mom, hugs Sis, shakes hands with Dad and the
brothers, hugs Mom again, and he's off.
Bobby Shaftoe knows nothing of his future. All he knows is that he has
been promoted to sergeant, detached from his former unit (no great
adjustment, since he is the only surviving member of his platoon) and
reassigned to some unheard of branch of the Corps in Washington, D.C.
D.C.'s a busy place, but last time Bobby Shaftoe checked the
newspapers, there wasn't any combat going on there, and so it's obvious he's
not going to get a combat job. He's done his bit anyway, killed many more
than his share of Nips, won his medals, suffered from his wounds. As he
lacks administrative training, he expects that his new assignment will be to
travel around the country being a war hero, raising morale and suckering
young men into joining the Corps.
He reports, as ordered, to Marine Barracks, Washington, D.C. It's the
Corps's oldest post, a city block halfway between the Capitol and the Navy
Yard, a green quadrangle where the Marine Band struts and the drill team
drills. He half expects to see strategic reserves of spit and of polish
stored in giant tanks nearby.
Two Marines are in the office: a major, who is his new, nominal
commanding officer, and a colonel, who looks and acts like he was born here.
It is shocking beyond description that two such personages would be there to
greet a mere sergeant. Must be the Navy Cross that got their attention. But
these Marines have Navy Crosses of their own two or three apiece.
The major introduces the colonel in a way that doesn't really explain a
damn thing to Shaftoe. The colonel says next to nothing; he's there to
observe. The major spends a while fingering some typewritten documents.
"Says right here you are gung ho."
"Sir, yes sir!"
"What the hell does that mean?"
"Sir, it is a Chinese word! There's a Communist there, name of Mao, and
he's got an army. We tangled with 'em on more'n one occasion, sir. Gung ho
is their battle cry, it means 'all together' or something like that, so
after we got done kicking the crap out of them, sir, we stole it from them,
sir!"
"Are you saying you have gone Asiatic like those other China Marines,
Shaftoe?"
"Sir! On the contrary, sir, as I think my record demonstrates, sir!"
"You really think that?" the major says incredulously. "We have an
interesting report here on a film interview that you did with some soldier
(1) named Lieutenant Reagan."
"Sir! This Marine apologizes for his disgraceful behavior during that
interview, sir! This Marine let down himself and his fellow Marines, sir!"
"Aren't you going to give me an excuse? You were wounded. Shell
shocked. Drugged. Suffering from malaria."
"Sir! There is no excuse, sir!"
The major and the colonel nod approvingly at each other.
This "sir, yes sir" business, which would probably sound like horseshit
to any civilian in his right mind, makes sense to Shaftoe and to the
officers in a deep and important way. Like a lot of others, Shaftoe had
trouble with military etiquette at first. He soaked up quite a bit of it
growing up in a military family, but living the life was a different matter.
Having now experienced all the phases of military existence except for the
terminal ones (violent death, court martial, retirement), he has come to
understand the culture for what it is: a system of etiquette within which it
becomes possible for groups of men to live together for years, travel to the
ends of the earth, and do all kinds of incredibly weird shit without killing
each other or completely losing their minds in the process. The extreme
formality with which he addresses these officers carries an important
subtext: your problem, sir, is deciding what you want me to do, and my
problem, sir, is doing it. My gung ho posture says that once you give the
order I'm not going to bother you with any of the details and your half of
the bargain is you had better stay on your side of the line, sir, and not
bother me with any of the chickenshit politics that you have to deal with
for a living. The implied responsibility placed upon the officer's shoulders
by the subordinate's unhesitating willingness to follow orders is a
withering burden to any officer with half a brain, and Shaftoe has more than
once seen seasoned noncoms reduce green lieutenants to quivering blobs
simply by standing before them and agreeing, cheerfully, to carry out their
orders.
"This Lieutenant Reagan complained that you kept trying to tell him a
story about a lizard," the major says.
"Sir! Yes, sir! A giant lizard, sir! An interesting story, sir!"
Shaftoe says.
"I don't care," the major says. "The question is, was it an appropriate
story to tell in that circumstance?"
"Sir! We were making our way around the coast of the island, trying to
get between these Nips and a Tokyo Express landing site, sir!..." Shaftoe
begins.
"Shut up!"
"Sir! Yes sir!"
There is a sweaty silence that is finally broken by the colonel. "We
had the shrinks go over your statement, Sergeant Shaftoe."
''Sir! Yes, sir?''
"They are of the opinion that the whole giant lizard thing is a classic
case of projection."
"Sir! Could you please tell me what the hell that is, sir!"
The colonel flushes, turns his back, peers through blinds at sparse
traffic out on Eye Street. "Well, what they are saying is that there really
was no giant lizard. That you killed that Jap (2) in hand to hand
combat. And that your memory of the giant lizard is basically your id coming
out."
''Id, sir!''
"That there is this id thing inside your brain and that it took over
and got you fired up to kill that Jap bare handed. Then your imagination
dreamed up all this crap about the giant lizard afterwards, as a way of
explaining it."
"Sir! So you are saying that the lizard was just a metaphor, sir!"
"Yes."
"Sir! Then I would respectfully like to know how that Nip got chewed in
half, sir!"
The colonel screws up his face dismissively. "Well, by the time you
were rescued by that coastwatcher, Sergeant, you had been in that cove for
three days along with all of those dead bodies. And in that tropical heat
with all those bugs and scavengers, there was no way to tell from looking at
that Jap whether he had been chewed up by a giant lizard or run through a
brush chipper, if you know what I mean."
"Sir! Yes I do, sir!"
The major goes back to the report. "This Reagan fellow says that you
also repeatedly made disparaging comments about General MacArthur."
"Sir, yes sir! He is a son of a bitch who hates the Corps, sir! He is
trying to get us all killed, sir!"
The major and the colonel look at each other. It is clear that they
have, wordlessly, just arrived at some decision.
"Since you insist on reenlisting, the typical thing would be to have
you go around the country showing off your medals and recruiting young men
into the Corps. But this lizard story kind of rules that out."
"Sir! I do not understand, sir!"
"The Recruitment Office has reviewed your file. They have seen Reagan's
report. They are nervous that you are going to be in West Bumfuck, Arkansas,
riding in the Memorial Day parade in your shiny dress uniform, and suddenly
you are going to start spouting all kinds of nonsense about lizards and
scare everyone shitless and put a kink in the war effort."
"Sir! I respectfully "
"Permission to speak denied," the major says. "I won't even get into
your obsession with General MacArthur."
"Sir! The general is a murdering "
"Shut up!"
"Sir! Yes sir!"
"We have another job for you, Marine."
"Sir! Yes sir!"
"You're going to be part of something very special."
"Sir! The Marine Raiders are already a very special part of a very
special Corps, sir!"
"That's not what I mean. I mean that this assignment is . . . unusual."
The major looks over at the colonel. He is not sure how to proceed.
The colonel puts his hand in his pocket, jingles coins, then reaches up
and checks his shave.
"It is not exactly a Marine Corps assignment," he finally says. "You
will be part of a special international detachment. An American Marine
Raider platoon and a British Special Air Services squadron, operating
together under one command. A bunch of tough hombres who've shown they can
handle any assignment, under any conditions. Is that a fair description of
you, Marine?"
''Sir! Yes, sir!''
"It is a very unusual setup," the colonel muses, "not the kind of thing
that military men would ever dream up. Do you know what I'm saying,
Shaftoe?"
"Sir, no sir! But I do detect a strong odor of politics in the room
now, sir!"
The colonel gets a little twinkle in his eye, and glances out the
window towards the Capitol dome. "These politicians can be real picky about
how they get things done. Everything has to be just so. They don't like
excuses. Do you follow me, Shaftoe?"
''Sir! Yes, sir!''
"The Corps had to fight to get this. They were going to make it an Army
thing. We pulled a few strings with some former Naval persons in high
places. Now the assignment is ours. Some would say, it is ours to screw up.
"Sir! The assignment will not be screwed up, sir!"
"The reason that son of a bitch MacArthur is killing Marines like flies
down in the South Pacific is because sometimes we don't play the political
game that well. If you and your new unit do not perform brilliantly, that
situation will only worsen."
''Sir! You can rely on this Marine, sir!''
"Your commanding officer will be Lieutenant Ethridge. An Annapolis man.
Not much combat experience, but knows how to move in the right circles. He
can run interference for you at the political level. The responsibility for
getting things done on the ground will be entirely yours, Sergeant Shaftoe."
''Sir! Yes , sir!''
"You'll be working closely with British Special Air Service. Very good
men. But I want you and your men to outshine them."
"Sir! You can count on it, sir!"
"Well, get ready to ship out, then," the major says. "You're on your
way to North Africa, Sergeant Shaftoe."
Chapter 12 LONDINIUM
The massive British coinage clanks in his pocket like pewter dinner
plates. Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse walks down a street wearing the
uniform of a commander in the United States Navy. This must not be taken to
imply that he is actually a commander, or indeed that he is even in the
Navy, though he is. The United States part is, however, a safe bet, because
every time he arrives at a curb, he either comes close to being run over by
a shooting brake or he falters in his stride; diverts his train of thought
onto a siding, much to the disturbance of its passengers and crew; and
throws some large part of his mental calculation circuitry into the job of
trying to reflect his surroundings through a large mirror. They drive on the
left side of the street here.
He knew about that before he came. He had seen pictures. And Alan had
complained of it in Princeton, always nearly being run over as, lost in
thought, he stepped off curbs looking the wrong way.
The curbs are sharp and perpendicular, not like the American smoothly
molded sigmoid cross section curves. The transition between the side walk
and the street is a crisp vertical. If you put a green lightbulb on
Waterhouse's head and watched him from the side during the blackout, his
trajectory would look just like a square wave traced out on the face of a
single beam oscilloscope: up, down, up, down. If he were doing this at home,
the curbs would be evenly spaced, about twelve to the mile, because his home
town is neatly laid out on a grid.
Here in London, the street pattern is irregular and so the transitions
in the square wave come at random seeming times, sometimes very close
together, sometimes very far apart.
A scientist watching the wave would probably despair of finding any
pattern; it would look like a random circuit, driven by noise, triggered
perhaps by the arrival of cosmic rays from deep space, or the decay of
radioactive isotopes.
But if he had depth and ingenuity, it would be a different matter.
Depth could be obtained by putting a green light bulb on the head of
every person in London and then recording their tracings for a few nights.
The result would be a thick pile of graph paper tracings, each one as
seemingly random as the others. The thicker the pile, the greater the depth.
Ingenuity is a completely different matter. There is no systematic way
to get it. One person could look at the pile of square wave tracings and see
nothing but noise. Another might find a source of fascination there, an
irrational feeling impossible to explain to anyone who did not share it.
Some deep part of the mind, adept at noticing patterns (or the existence of
a pattern) would stir awake and frantically signal the dull quotidian parts
of the brain to keep looking at the pile of graph paper. The signal is dim
and not always heeded, but it would instruct the recipient to stand there
for days if necessary, shuffling through the pile of graphs like an autist,
spreading them out over a large floor, stacking them in piles according to
some inscrutable system, pencilling numbers, and letters from dead
alphabets, into the corners, cross referencing them, finding patterns, cross
checking them against others.
One day this person would walk out of that room carrying a highly
accurate street map of London, reconstructed from the information in all of
those square wave plots.
Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is one of those people.
As a result, the authorities of his country, the United States of
America, have made him swear a mickle oath of secrecy, and keep supplying
him with new uniforms of various services and ranks, and now have sent him
to London.
He steps off a curb, glancing reflexively to the left. A jingling
sounds in his right ear, bicycle brakes trumpet. It is merely a Royal Marine
(Waterhouse is beginning to recognize the uniforms) off on some errand; but
he has reinforcements behind him in the form of a bus/coach painted olive
drab and stenciled all over with inscrutable code numbers.
"Pardon me, sir!" the Royal Marine says brightly, and swerves around
him, apparently reckoning that the coach can handle any mopping up work.
Waterhouse leaps forward, directly into the path of a black taxi coming the
other way.
After making it across that particular street, though, he arrives at
his Westminster destination without further life threatening incidents,
unless you count being a few minutes' airplane ride from a tightly organized
horde of murderous Germans with the best weapons in the world. He has found
himself in a part of town that seems almost like certain lightless, hemmed
in parts of Manhattan: narrow streets lined with buildings on the order of
ten stories high. Occasional glimpses of ancient and mighty gothic piles at
street ends clue him in to the fact that he is nigh unto Greatness. As in
Manhattan, the people walk fast, each with some clear purpose in mind.
The amended heels of the pedestrians' wartime shoes pop metallically.
Each pedestrian has a fairly consistent stride length and clicks with nearly
metronomic precision. A microphone in the sidewalk would provide an
eavesdropper with a cacophony of clicks, seemingly random like the noise
from a Geiger counter. But the right kind of person could abstract signal
from noise and count the pedestrians, provide a male/female break down and a
leg length histogram
He has to stop this. He would like to concentrate on the matter at
hand, but that is still a mystery.
A massive, blocky modern sculpture sits over the door of the St.
James's Park tube station, doing twenty four hour surveillance on the
Broadway Buildings, which is actually just a single building. Like every
other intelligence headquarters Waterhouse had seen, it is a great
disappointment.
It is, after all, just a building orange stone, ten or so stories, an
unreasonably high mansard roof accounting for the top three, some smidgens
of classical ornament above the windows, which like all windows in London
are divided into eight tight triangles by strips of masking tape. Waterhouse
finds that this look blends better with classical architecture than, say,
gothic.
He has some grounding in physics and finds it implausible that, when a
few hundred pounds of trinitrotoluene are set off in the neighborhood and
the resulting shock wave propagates through a large pane of glass the people
on the other side of it will derive any benefit from an asterisk of paper
tape. It is a superstitious gesture, like hexes on Pennsylvania Dutch
farmhouses. The sight of it probably helps keep people's minds focused on
the war.
Which doesn't seem to be working for Waterhouse. He makes his way
carefully across the street, thinking very hard about the direction of the
traffic, on the assumption that someone inside will be watching him. He goes
inside, holding the door for a fearsomely brisk young woman in a
quasimilitary outfit who makes it clear that Waterhouse had better not
expect to Get Anywhere just because he's holding the door for her and then
for a tired looking septuagenarian gent with a white mustache.
The lobby is well guarded and there is some business with Waterhouse's
credentials and his orders. Then he makes the obligatory mistake of going to
the wrong floor because they are numbered differently here. This would be a
lot funnier if this were not a military intelligence headquarters in the
thick of the greatest war in the history of the world.
When he does get to the right floor, though, it is a bit posher than
the wrong one was. Of course, the underlying structure of everything in
England is posh. There is no in between with these people. You have to walk
a mile to find a telephone booth, but when you find it, it is built as if
the senseless dynamiting of pay phones had been a serious problem at some
time in the past. And a British mailbox can presumably stop a German tank.
None of them have cars, but when they do, they are three ton hand built
beasts. The concept of stamping out a whole lot of cars is unthinkable there
are certain procedures that have to be followed, Mt. Ford, such as the hand
brazing of radiators, the traditional whittling of the tyres from solid
blocks of cahoutchouc.
Meetings are all the same. Waterhouse is always the Guest; he has never
actually hosted a meeting. The Guest arrives at an unfamiliar building, sits
in a waiting area declining offers of caffeinated beverages from a
personable but chaste female, and is, in time, ushered to the Room, where
the Main Guy and the Other Guys are awaiting him. There is a system of
introductions which the Guest need not concern himself with because he is
operating in a passive mode and need only respond to stimuli, shaking all
hands that are offered, declining all further offers of caffeinated and
(now) alcoholic beverages, sitting down when and where invited. In this
case, the Main Guy and all but one of the Other Guys happen to be British,
the selection of beverages is slightly different, the room, being British,
is thrown together from blocks of stone like a Pharaoh's inner tomb, and the
windows have the usual unconvincing strips of tape on them. The Predictable
Humor Phase is much shorter than in America, the Chitchat Phase longer.
Waterhouse has forgotten all of their names. He always immediately
forgets the names. Even if he remembered them, he would not know their
significance, as he does not actually have the organization chart of the
Foreign Ministry (which runs Intelligence) and the Military laid out in
front of him. They keep saying "woe to hice!" but just as he actually begins
to feel sorry for this Hice fellow, whoever he is, he figures out that this
is how they pronounce "Waterhouse." Other than that, the one remark that
actually penetrates his brain is when one of the Other Guys says something
about the Prime Minister that implies considerable familiarity. And he's not
even the Main Guy. The Main Guy is much older and more distinguished. So it
seems to Waterhouse (though he has completely stopped listening to what all
of these people are saying to him) that a good half of the people in the
room have recently had conversations with Winston Churchill.
Then, suddenly, certain words come into the conversation. Water house
was not paying attention, but he is pretty sure that within the last ten
seconds, the word Ultra was uttered. He blinks and sits up straighter.
The Main Guy looks bemused. The Other Guys look startled.
"Was something said, a few minutes ago, about the availability of
coffee?" Waterhouse says.
"Miss Stanhope, coffee for Captain Woe To Hice," says the Main Guy into
an electrical intercom. It is one of only half a dozen office intercoms in
the British Empire. However, it is cast in a solid ingot from a hundred
pounds of iron and fed by 420 volt cables as thick as Waterhouse's index
finger. "And if you would be so good as to bring tea."
So, now Waterhouse knows the name of the Main Guy's secretary. That's a
start. From that, with a bit of research he might be able to recover the
memory of the Main Guy's name.
This seems to have thrown them back into the Chitchat Phase, and though
American important guys would be fuming and frustrated, the Brits seem
enormously relieved. Even more beverages are ordered from Miss Stanhope.
"Have you seen Dr. Shehrrrn recently?" the Main Guy inquires of
Waterhouse. He has a touch of concern in his voice.
"Who?" Then Waterhouse realizes that the person in question is
Commander Schoen, and that here in London the name is apt to be pronounced
correctly, Shehrrn instead of Shane.
"Commander Waterhouse?" the Main Guy says, several minutes later. On
the fly, Waterhouse has been trying to invent a new cryptosystem based upon
alternative systems of pronouncing words and hasn't said anything in quite a
while.
"Oh, yeah! Well, I stopped in briefly and paid my respects to Schoen
before getting on the ship. Of course, when he's, uh, feeling under the
weather, everyone's under strict orders not to talk cryptology with him."
"Of course."
"The problem is that when your whole relationship with the fellow is
built around cryptology, you can't even really poke your head in the door
without violating that order."
"Yes, it is most awkward."
"I guess he's doing okay." Waterhouse does not say this very
convincingly and there is an appropriate silence around the table.
"When he was in better spirits, he wrote glowingly of your work on the
Cryptonomicon," says one of the Other Guys, who has not spoken very much
until now. Waterhouse pegs him as some kind of unspecified mover and shaker
in the world of machine cryptology.
"He's a heck of a fella," Waterhouse says.
The Main Guy uses this as an opening. "Because of your work with Dr.
Schoen's Indigo machine, you are, by definition, on the Magic list. Now that
this country and yours have agreed at least in principle to cooperate in the
field of cryptanalysis, this automatically puts you on the Ultra list."
"I understand, sir," Waterhouse says.
"Ultra and Magic are more symmetrical than not. In each case, a
belligerent Power has developed a machine cypher which it considers to be
perfectly unbreakable. In each case, an allied Power has in fact broken that
cypher. In America, Dr. Schoen and his team broke Indigo and devised the
Magic machine. Here, it was Dr. Knox's team that broke Enigma and devised
the Bombe. The leading light here seems to have been Dr. Turing. The leading
light with you chaps was Dr. Schoen, who is, as you said, under the weather.
But he holds you up as comparable to Turing, Commander Waterhouse."
"That's pretty darn generous," Waterhouse says.
"But you studied with Turing at Princeton, did you not?"
"We were there at the same time, if that's what you mean. We rode
bikes. His work was a lot more advanced."
"But Turing was pursuing graduate studies. You were merely an
undergraduate."
"Sure. But even allowing for that, he's way smarter than me."
"You are too modest, Captain Waterhouse. How many undergraduates have
published papers in international journals?"
"We just rode bikes," Waterhouse insists. "Einstein wouldn't give me
the time of day."
"Dr. Turing has shown himself to be rather handy with information
theory," says a prematurely haggard guy with long limp grey hair, whom
Waterhouse now pegs as some sort of Oxbridge don. "You must have discussed
this with him.
The don turns to the others and says, donnishly, "Information Theory
would inform a mechanical calculator in much the same way as, say, fluid
dynamics would inform the hull of a ship." Then he turns back to Waterhouse
and says, somewhat less formally: "Dr. Turing has continued to develop his
work on the subject since he vanished, from your point of view, into the
realm of the Classified. Of particular interest has been the subject of just
how much information can be extracted from seemingly random data."
Suddenly all of the other people in the room are exchanging those
amused looks again. "I gather from your reaction," says the Main Guy, "that
this has been of continuing interest to you as well."
Waterhouse wonders what his reaction was. Did he grow fangs? Drool into
his coffee?
"That's good," says the Main Guy before Waterhouse can answer, "because
it is of the highest interest to us as well. You see, now that we are making
efforts and I must emphasize the preliminary and unsatisfactory level of
these efforts to this point to coordinate intelligence between America and
Britain, we find ourselves in the oddest situation that has ever faced a
pair of allies in a war. We know everything, Commander Waterhouse. We
receive Hitler's personal communications to his theater commanders,
frequently before the commanders do! This knowledge is obviously a powerful
tool. But just as obviously, it cannot help us win the war unless we allow
it to change our actions. That is, if, through Ultra, we become aware of a
convoy sailing from Taranto to supply Rommel in North Africa, the knowledge
does us no good unless we go out and sink that convoy."
"Clearly," Waterhouse says.
"Now, if ten convoys are sent out and all of them are sunk, even those
under cover of clouds and darkness, the Germans will ask themselves how we
knew where those convoys could be found. They will realize that we have
penetrated the Enigma cypher, and change it, and then this tool will be lost
to us. It is safe to say that Mr. Churchill will be displeased by such an
outcome." The Main Guy looks at all of the others, who nod knowingly.
Waterhouse gets the feeling that Mr. Churchill has been bearing down rather
hard on this particular point.
"Let us recast this in information theory terms," says the don.
"Information flows from Germany to us, through the Ultra system at Bletchley
Park. That information comes to us as seemingly random Morse code
transmissions on the wireless. But because we have very bright people who
can discover order in what is seemingly random, we can extract information
that is crucial to our endeavors. Now, the Germans have not broken our
important cyphers. But they can observe our actions the routing of our
convoys in the North Atlantic, the deployment of our air forces. If the
convoys always avoid the U boats, if the air forces always go straight to
the German convoys, then it is clear to the Germans I'm speaking of a very
bright sort of German here, a German of the professor type that there is not
randomness here. This German can find correlations. He can see that we know
more than we should. In other words, there is a certain point at which
information begins to flow from us back to the Germans."
"We need to know where that point is," says the Main Guy. "Exactly
where it is. We need then to stay on the right side of it. To develop the
appearance of randomness."
"Yes," Waterhouse says, "and it has to be a kind of randomness that
would convince someone like Rudolf von Hacklheber."
"Exactly the fellow we had in mind," the don says. "Dr. von Hacklheber,
as of last year."
"Oh!" Waterhouse says. "Rudy got his Ph.D.?" Since Rudy got called back
into the embrace of the Thousand Year Reich, Waterhouse has assumed the
worst: imagining him out there in a greatcoat, sleeping in drifts and
besieging Leningrad or something. But apparently the Nazis, with their sharp
eye for talent (as long as it isn't Jewish talent) have given him a desk
job.
Still, it's touch and go for a while after Waterhouse shows pleasure
that Rudy's okay. One of the Other Guys, trying to break the ice, jokes that
if someone had had the foresight to lock Rudy up in New Jersey for the
duration, there would be no need for the new category of secret known as
Ultra Mega. No one seems to think it's funny, so Waterhouse assumes it's
true.
They show him the organizational chart for RAE Special Detachment No.
2701, which contains the names of all of the twenty four people in the world
who are on to Ultra Mega. The top is cluttered with names such as Winston
Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Then come some other names that
seem oddly familiar to Waterhouse perhaps the names of these very gents here
in this room. Below them, one Chattan, a youngish RAF colonel who
(Waterhouse is assured) accomplished some very fine things during the Battle
of Britain.
In the next rank of the chart is the name Lawrence Pritchard
Waterhouse. There are two other names: one is an RAF captain and the other
is a captain in the United States Marine Corps. There is also a dotted line
veering off to one side, leading to the name Dr. Alan Mathison Turing. Taken
as a whole, this chart may be the most irregular and bizarre ad hocracy ever
grafted onto a military organization.
In the bottom row of the chart are two groups of half a dozen names,
clustered beneath the names of the RAF captain and the Marine captain
respectively. These are the squads that represent the executive wing of the
organization: as one of the guys at the Broadway Building puts it, "the men
at the coal face," and as the one American Guy translates it for him, "this
is where the rubber meets the road."
"Do you have any questions?" the Main Guy asks.
"Did Alan choose the number?"
"You mean Dr. Turing?"
"Yes. Did he choose the number 2701?"
This level of detail is clearly several ranks beneath the station of
the men in the Broadway Buildings. They look startled and almost offended,
as if Waterhouse has suddenly asked them to take dictation.
"Possibly," says the Main Guy. "Why do you ask?"
"Because," Waterhouse says, "the number 2701 is the product of two
primes, and those numbers, 37 and 73, when expressed in decimal notation,
are, as you can plainly see, the reverse of each other."
All heads swivel toward the don, who looks put out. "We'd best change
that," he says, "it is the sort of thing that Dr. von Hacklheber would
notice." He stands up, withdraws a Mont Blanc fountain pen from his pocket,
and amends the organizational chart so that it reads 2702 instead of 2701.
As he is doing this, Waterhouse looks at the other men in the room and
thinks that they look satisfied. Clearly, this is just the sort of parlor
trick they have hired Waterhouse to perform.
Chapter 13 CORREGIDOR
There is no fixed boundary between the water of Manila Bay and the
humid air above it, only a featureless blue grey shroud hanging a couple of
miles away. Glory IV maneuvers cautiously through an immense strewing of
anchored cargo ships for about half an hour, then picks up speed and heads
out into the center of the bay. The air thins a bit, allowing Randy a good
view of Bata'an off to starboard: black mountains mostly veiled in haze and
speckled by the mushroom cap shaped clouds of ascending thermals. For the
most part, it has no beaches, just red cliffs plummeting the last few yards
into the sea. But as they work their way out to the end of the peninsula,
the land tails off more gently and supports a few pale green fields. At the
very tip of Bata'an are a couple of stabbing limestone crags that Randy
recognizes from Avi's video. But by this point he has eyes mostly for
Corregidor itself, which lies a few miles off the end of the peninsula.
America Shaftoe, or Amy as she likes to be called, spends most of the
voyage bustling around on the deck, engaging the Filipino and American
divers in bursts of serious conversation, sometimes sitting cross legged on
the deck plates to go over papers or charts. She has donned a frayed straw
cowboy hat to protect her head from solar radiation. Randy's in no hurry to
expose himself. He ambles around the air conditioned cabin, sipping his
coffee and looking at the photographs on the walls.
He is naively expecting to see pictures of divers landing submarine
cables on beaches. Semper Marine Services does a fair amount of cable work
and does it well, he checked their references before hiring them but they
apparently do not consider that kind of work interesting enough to
photograph. Most of these pictures are of undersea salvage operations:
divers, with enormous grins on their leathery faces, triumphantly holding up
barnacle encrusted vases, like hockey players brandishing the Stanley Cup.
From a distance, Corregidor is a lens of jungle bulging out of the
water with a flat shelf extending off to one side. From the maps, he knows
that it is really a sperm shaped affair. What looks like a shelf from this
angle is its tail, which snakes off to the east as if the sperm were trying
to swim out of Manila Bay to impregnate Asia.
Amy storms past and throws the cabin door open. "Come to the bridge,"
she says, "you should see this."
Randy follow's her. "Who's the guy in most of those pictures?" he asks.
"Scary, crew cut?"
"Yeah."
"That's my father," she says. "Doug."
"Would that be Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe?" Randy asks. He's seen the
name on some of the documents that he's exchanged with Semper Marine.
"The same."
"The ex SEAL?"
"Yeah. But he doesn't like to be referred to that way. It is such a
cliche."
"Why does he seem familiar to me?"
Amy sighs. "He had his fifteen minutes of fame back in 1975."
''I'm having trouble remembering."
"You know Comstock?"
"Attorney General Paul Comstock? Hates crypto?"
"I'm talking about his father. Earl Comstock."
"Cold War policy guy the brains behind the Vietnam War right?"
"I've never heard him described that way, but yeah, we're talking about
the same guy. You might remember that back in 1975, Earl Comstock fell, or
was pushed, off a ski lift in Colorado, and broke his arms."
"Oh, yeah. It's sort of coming back to me.
"My pop " Amy does a little head fake towards one of the photographs "
happened to be seated right next to him at the time."
"By accident, or "
"Total chance. Not planned."
"That's one way to look at it," Randy says, "but on the other hand, if
Earl Comstock went skiing frequently, the probability was actually rather
high that sooner or later he'd find himself sitting, fifty feet off the
ground, next to a Vietnam combat veteran."
"Whatever. All I'm saying is I don't want to talk about it, actually."
"Am I going to get to meet this character?" Randy asks, looking at the
photograph.
Amy bites her lip and squints at the horizon. "Ninety percent of the
time his presence is a sign that something really weird is going on." She
opens the hatch to the bridge and holds it for him, pointing out the high
step.
"The other ten percent?"
"He's bored, or on the outs with his girlfriend."
Glory's pilot is concentrating intensely and ignores them, which Randy
takes to be a sign of professionalism. The bridge has many counters
fashioned from doors or thick plywood, and all of the available space is
covered with electronic gear: a fax, a smaller machine that spews out
weather bulletins, three computers, a satellite phone, a few GSM phones
socketed into their chargers, depth sounding gear. Amy leads him over to a
machine with a big screen that is showing what looks like a black and white
photo of rugged terrain. "Sidescan sonar," she explains, "one of our best
tools for this kind of work. Shows us what's on the bottom." She checks one
of the computer screens for their current coordinates and then runs a quick
calculation in her head. "Ernesto, change course five degrees to starboard
please."
"Yes ma'am," Ernesto says, and makes it happen.
"What are you looking for?"
"This is a freebie like the cigarettes at the hotel," Amy explains.
"Just an extra added bonus for doing business with us. Sometimes we like to
play tour guide. See? Check that out." She uses her pinkie to point out
something that is just becoming visible on the screen. Randy hunches over
and peers at it. It is clearly a manmade shape: a jumble of straight lines
and right angles.
"Looks like a heap of debris," he says.
"It is now," Amy says, "but it used to be a good chunk of the Filipino
treasury."
"What?"
"During the war," Amy says, "after Pearl Harbor, but before the
Japanese took Manila, the government emptied out the treasury. They put all
the gold and silver into crates and shipped it to Corregidor for safekeeping
supposedly."
"What do you mean, supposedly?"
She shrugs. "This is the Philippines," she says. "I have the feeling a
lot of it ended up elsewhere. But a lot of the silver ended up there." She
straightens up and nods out the window at Corregidor. "At the time they
thought Corregidor was impregnable."
"When was this, roughly?"
"December '41 or January '42. Anyway, it became obvious that Corregidor
was going to fall. A submarine came and took away the gold at the beginning
of February. Then another sub came and took off guys they couldn't allow to
be captured, like codebreakers. But they didn't have enough subs to carry
away all the silver. MacArthur left in March. They started taking the silver
out, in crates, in the middle of the night, and dropping it into the water."
"You're shitting me!"
"They could always come back later and try to recover it," Amy says.
"Better to lose it all than let the Japanese take it, right?"
"I guess so."
"The Japanese recovered a lot of that silver they captured a bunch of
American divers on Bata'an and Corregidor, and made them go down, right down
below where we are at this moment, and recover it. But those same divers
managed to hide a lot of silver from their guards and get it to Filipinos,
who smuggled it into Manila, where it became so common that it totally
debased the Japanese occupation currency.
"So what are we seeing right now?"
"The remains of old crates that burst open when they hit the seafloor,"
Amy says.
"Was there any of that silver left when the war ended?"
"Oh, sure," Amy says breezily. "Most of it was dumped here, and those
divers got it, but some was dumped in other areas. My dad recovered some of
it as late as the 1970s."
"Wow. That doesn't make any sense!"
"Why not?"
"I can't believe that piles of silver just sat on the bottom of the
ocean for thirty years, free for the taking."
"You don't know the Philippines very well," Amy says.
"I know that it's a poor country. Why didn't someone come out and get
that silver?"
"Most of the treasure hunters in this part of the world are looking for
much bigger game," Amy says, "or easier."
Randy's nonplussed. "A pile of silver on the bottom of the bay seems
big and easy to me.
"It's not. Silver's not worth that much. A Sung Dynasty vase, cleaned
up, can go for more than its weight in gold. Gold. And it's easier to find
the vase you just scan the seafloor, looking for something shaped like a
junk. A sunken junk makes a distinctive image on sonar. Whereas an old
crate, all busted up and covered with coral and barnacles, tends to look
like a rock."
As they draw closer to Corregidor, Randy can see that the tail of the
island is lumpy, with big stacks of rock protruding from it here and there.
The color of the land fades gradually from dark jungle green to pale green
and then a sere reddish brown as the tail extends from the fat center of the
island out to the end, and the soil becomes dryer. Randy's gaze is fixed on
one of those rocky crags, which is surmounted by a new steel tower. Atop the
tower is a microwave horn aimed east, toward Epiphyte's building in
Intramuros.
"See those caves along the waterline?" Amy says. She seems to regret
having mentioned sunken treasure in the first place, and now wants to get
off the subject.
Randy tears himself away from the microwave antenna, of which he is
part owner, and looks in the direction Amy's pointing. The limestock flank
of the island, which drops vertically the last few meters into the water, is
riddled with holes.
"Yeah."
"Built by Americans to house beach defense guns. Enlarged by the
Japanese as launch sites for suicide boats."
"Wow."
Randy notices a deep gargling noise, and looks over to see that a boat
has fallen in alongside them. It is a canoe shaped affair maybe forty feet
long, with long outriggers on either side. A couple of ragged flags fly from
a short mast, and bright laundry flaps gaily from various lines strung here
and there. A big, naked diesel engine sits in the middle of the hull
flailing the atmosphere with black smoke. Forward of that, several
Filipinos, including women and children, are gathered in the shade of a
bright blue tarpaulin, eating. Aft, a couple of men are fiddling with diving
equipment. One of them is holding something up to his mouth: a microphone. A
voice blares from Glory's radio, speaking Tagalog. Ernesto stifles a laugh,
picks up the mike, and answers briefly. Randy doesn't know what they are
saying, but he suspects it is something like "Let's horse around later, our
client is on the bridge right now."
"Business associates," Amy explains dryly. Her body language says that
she wants to get away from Randy and back to work.
"Thanks for the tour," Randy says. "One question."
Amy raises her eyebrows, trying to look patient.
"How much of Semper Marine's revenue derives from treasure hunting?"
"This month? This year? The last ten years? Over the lifetime of the
company?" Amy says.
"Whatever."
"That kind of income is sporadic," Amy says. "Glory was paid for, and
then some, by pottery that we recovered from a junk. But some years we get
all of our revenue from jobs like this one."
"In other words, boring jobs that suck?" Randy says. He just blurts it
out. Normally he controls his tongue a little better. But shaving off his
beard has blurred his ego boundaries, or something.
He's expecting her to laugh or at least wink a him, but she takes it
very seriously. She has a pretty good poker face. "Think of it as making
license plates," she says.
"So you guys are basically a bunch of treasure hunters," Randy says.
"You just make license plates to stabilize your cash flow."
"Call us treasure hunters if you like," Amy says. "Why are you in
business, Randy?" She turns around and stalks out of the place.
Randy's still watching her go when he hears Ernesto cursing under his
breath, not so much angry as astonished. Glory is swinging around the tip of
Corregidor's tail now and the entire southern side of the island is becoming
visible for the first time. The last mile or so of the tail curves around to
form a semicircular bay. Anchored in the center of this bay is a white ship
that Randy identifies, at first, as a small ocean liner with rakish and
wicked lines. Then he sees the name painted on its stern: RUI FALEIRO SANTA
MONICA, CALIFORNIA
Randy goes and stands next to Ernesto and they stare at the white ship
for a while. Randy has heard about it, and Ernesto, like everyone else in
the Philippines, knows about it. But seeing it is another thing entirely. A
helicopter sits on its afterdeck like a toy. A dagger shaped muscle boat
hangs from a davit, ready for use as a dinghy. A brown skinned man in a
gleaming white uniform can be seen polishing a brass rail.
"Rui Faleiro was Magellan's cosmographer," Randy says.
"Cosmographer?"
"The brains of the operation," Randy says, tapping his head.
"He came here with Magellan?" Ernesto asks.
In most of the world, Magellan is thought of as the first guy who went
around the world. Here, everyone knows he only made it as far as Mactan
Island, where he was killed by Filipinos.
"When Magellan set out on his ship, Faleiro stayed behind in Seville,"
Randy says. "He went crazy."
"You know a lot about Magallanes, eh?" Ernesto says. "No," Randy says,
"I know a lot about the Dentist."
***
"Don't talk to the Dentist. Ever. Not about anything. Not even tech
stuff. Any technical question he asks you is just a stalking horse for some
business tactic that is as far beyond your comprehension as Gödel's Proof
would be to Daffy Duck."
Avi told Randy this spontaneously one evening, as they were tucking
into dinner at a restaurant in downtown Makati. Avi refuses to discuss
anything important within a mile of the Manila Hotel because he thinks every
room, and every table, is under surveillance.
"Thanks for the vote of confidence," Randy said.
"Hey," Avi said, "I'm just trying to stake out my turf here justify my
existence in this project. I'll handle the business stuff."
"You're not being a little paranoid?"
"Listen. The Dentist has at least a billion dollars of his own, and
another ten billion under management half the fucking orthodontists in
Southern California retired at age forty because he dectupled their IRAs in
the space of two or three years. You don't achieve those kinds of results by
being a nice guy."
"Maybe he just got lucky."
"He did get lucky. But that doesn't mean he's a nice guy. My point is
that he put that money into investments that were extremely risky. He played
Russian roulette with his investors' life savings, keeping them in the dark.
I mean, this guy would invest in a Mindanao kidnapping ring if it gave a
good rate of return."
"Does he understand that he was lucky, I wonder?"
"That's my question. I'm guessing no. I think he considers himself to
be an instrument of Divine Providence, like Douglas MacArthur."
***
Rui Faleiro is the pride of Seattle's superyacht industry, which has
been burgeoning, ever so discreetly, of late. Randy gleaned a few facts
about it from a marketing brochure that was published before the Dentist
actually bought the ship. So he knows that the helicopter and the speedboat
came included in the purchase price, which has never been divulged. The
vessel contains, among other things, ten tons of marble. The master bedroom
suite contains full his and hers bathrooms lined with black marble and pink
marble respectively, so that the Dentist and the Diva don't have to fight
over sink space when they are primping for a big event in the yacht's grand
ballroom.
"The Dentist?" Ernesto says.
"Kepler. Doctor Kepler," Randy says. "In the States, some people call
him the Dentist." People in the high tech industry.
Ernesto nods knowingly. "A man like that could have had any woman in
the world," he says. "But he picked a Filipina."
"Yes," Randy says cautiously.
"In the States, do people know the story of Victoria Vigo?"
"I must tell you that she is not as famous in the States as she is
here."
"Of course."
"But some of her songs were very popular. Many people know that she
came from great poverty."
"Do people in the States know about Smoky Mountain? The garbage dump in
Tondo, where children hunt for food?"
"Some of them do. It will be very famous when the movie about Victoria
Vigo's life shows on television."
Ernesto nods, seemingly satisfied. Everyone here knows that a movie
about the Diva's life is being made, starring herself. They generally don't
know that it's a vanity project, financed by the Dentist, and that it will
be aired only on cable television in the middle of the night.
But they probably know that it will leave out all the good parts.
***
"As far as the Dentist is concerned," Avi said, "our advantage is that,
when it comes to the Philippines, he will be predictable. Tame. Even
docile." He smiles cryptically.
"How so?"
"Victoria Vigo whored her way up out of Smoky Mountain, right?"
"Well, there seems to be a lot of nudging and winking to that effect,
but I've never heard anyone come out and say it before," Randy said,
glancing around nervously.
"Believe me, it's the only way she could have gotten out of there.
Pimping arrangements were handled by the Bolobolos. This is a group from
Northern Luzon that was brought into power along with Marcos. They run that
part of town police, organized crime, local politics, you name it.
Consequently, they own her they have photographs, videos from the days when
she was an underage prostitute and porn film starlet."
Randy shook his head in disgust and amazement. "How the hell do you get
this information?"
"Never mind. Believe me, in some circles it's as well known as the
value of pi."
"Not my circles."
"Anyway, the point is that her interests are aligned with the Bolobolos
and always will be. And the Dentist is always going to obediently do
whatever his wife tells him to."
"Can you really assume that?" Randy said. "He's a tough guy. He
probably has a lot more money and power than the Bolobolos. He can do
whatever he wants."
"But he won't," Avi says, smiling that little smile again. "He'll do
what his wife tells him to.
"How do you know that?"
"Look," Avi said, "Kepler is a major control freak just like most
powerful, rich men. Right?"
"Right."
"If you are that much of a control freak, what sexual preferences does
that translate into?"
"I hope I'll never know. I suppose you would want to dominate a woman.
"Wrong!" Avi said. "Sex is more complicated than that, Randy. Sex is a
place where people's repressed desires come out. People get most turned on
when their innermost secrets are revealed "
"Shit! Kepler's a masochist?"
"He is such a fucking masochist that he was famous for it. At least in
the Southeast Asian sex industry. Pimps and Madams in Hong Kong, Bangkok,
Shenzhen, Manila, they all had files on him they knew exactly what he
wanted. And that's how he met Victoria Vigo. He was in Manila, see, working
on the FiliTel deal. Spent a lot of time here, staying in a hotel that's
owned, and bugged, by the Bolobolos. They studied his mating habits like
entomologists watching the reproductive habits of ants. They groomed
Victoria Vigo their ace, their bombshell, their sexual Terminator to give
Kepler exactly what Kepler wanted. Then they sent her into his life like a
guided fucking missile and pow! true love."
"You'd think he would have been suspicious, or something. I'm surprised
he'd get that involved with a whore."
"He didn't know she was a whore! That's the beauty of the plan! The
Bolobolos set her up with a fake identity as a concierge at Kepler's hotel!
A demure Catholic school girl! It starts with her getting him tickets to a
play, and inside of a year. he's chained to his bed on that fucking mega
yacht of his with strap marks on his ass, and she's standing over him with a
wedding ring on her finger the size of a headlamp, the hundred and thirty
eighth richest woman in the world."
"Hundred and twenty fifth," Randy corrected him, "FiliTel stock has
been on a bull run lately."
***
Randy spends the next days trying not to run into the Dentist. He stays
at a small private inn up on the top of the island, eating continental
breakfast every morning with an assortment of American and Nipponese war
veterans who have come here with their wives to (Randy supposes) deal with
emotional issues a million times more profound than anything Randy's ever
had to contend with. The Rui Faleiro is nothing if not conspicuous, and
Randy can get a pretty good idea of whether the Dentist is aboard it by
watching the movements of the helicopter and the speedboat.
When he thinks it's safe, he goes down to the beach below the microwave
antenna and watches Amy's divers work on the cable installation. Some of
them are working out in the surf zone, bolting sections of cast iron pipe
around the cable. Some are working a couple of miles offshore coordinating
with a barge that is injecting the cable directly into the muddy seafloor
with a giant, cleaver like appendage.
The shore end of the cable runs into a new reinforced concrete building
set back about a hundred meters from the high tide level. It is basically
just a big room filled with batteries, generators, air conditioning units,
and racks of electronic equipment. The software running on that equipment is
Randy's responsibility, and so he spends most of his time in that building,
staring into a computer screen and typing. From there, transmission lines
run up the hill to the microwave tower.
The other end is being extended out towards a buoy that is bobbing in
the South China Sea a few kilometers away. Attached to that buoy is the end
of the North Luzon Coastal Festoon, a cable, owned by FiliTel, that runs up
the coast of the island. If you follow it far enough you reach a building at
the northern tip of the island, where a big cable from Taiwan comes in.
Taiwan, in turn, is heavily webbed into the world submarine cable network;
it is easy and cheap to get data into or out of Taiwan.
There is only one gap left in the private chain of transmission that
Epiphyte and FiliTel are trying to establish from Taiwan to downtown Manila,
and that gap gets narrower by the day, as the cable barge grinds its way
towards the buoy.
***
When it finally gets there, Rui Faleiro weighs anchor and glides out to
meet it. The helicopter and the speedboat, and a flotilla of hired boats, go
into action ferrying dignitaries and media crews out from Manila. Avi shows
up carrying two fresh tuxedos from a tailor shop in Shanghai ("All those
famous Hong Kong tailors were refugees from Shanghai"). He and Randy tear
off the tissue paper, put them on, and then ride in an un air conditioned
jeepney down the hill to the dock, where Glory awaits them.
Two hours later, Randy gets to lay eyes on the Dentist and the Diva for
the first time ever in the grand ballroom of the Rui Faleiro. To Randy the
party is like any other: he shakes hands with a few people, forgets their
names, finds a place to sit down, and enjoys the wine and the food in
blissful solitude.
The one thing that is special about this party is that two tar covered
cables, each about the thickness of a baseball bat, are running up onto the
quarterdeck. If you go to the rail and look down you can see them disappear
into the brine. The cable ends meet on a tabletop in the middle of the deck,
where a technician, flown in from Hong Kong and duded up in a tuxedo, sits
with a box of tools, working on the splice. He is also working on a big
hangover, but that is fine with Randy since he knows that it's all fake the
cables are just scraps, their loose ends trailing in the water alongside the
yacht. The real splice was performed yesterday and is already lying on the
bottom of the sea with bits running through it.
There is another man on the quarterdeck, mostly staring at Bata'an and
Corregidor but also keeping an eye on Randy. The moment Randy notices him,
this man nods as if checking something off a list in his head, stands up,
walks over, and joins him. He is wearing a very ornate uniform, the U.S.
Navy equivalent of black tie. He is mostly bald, and what hair he does have
is battleship grey, and shorn to a length of perhaps five millimeters. As he
walks toward Randy, several Filipinos watch him with obvious curiosity.
"Randy," he says. Medals clink together as he grips Randy's right hand
and shakes it. He looks to be around fifty, but he has the skin of an eighty
year old Bedouin. He has a lot of ribbons on his chest, and many of them are
red and yellow, which are colors that Randy vaguely associates with Vietnam.
Above his pocket is a little plastic nameplate reading, SHAFTOE. "Don't be
deceived, Randy," says Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe, "I'm not on active duty.
Retired eons ago. But I'm still entitled to wear this uniform. And it's a
hell of a lot easier than going out and trying to find a tuxedo that fits
me."
"Pleased to meet you."
"Pleasure's mine. Where'd you get yours, by the way?"
"My tuxedo?"
"Yeah."
"My partner had it made."
"Your business partner, or your sexual partner?"
"My business partner. At the moment, I am without a sexual partner."
Doug Shaftoe nods impassively. "It is telling that you have not obtained one
in Manila. As our host did, for example."
Randy looks into the ballroom at Victoria Vigo, who, if she were any
more radiant, would cause paint to peel from the walls and windowpanes to
sag like caramel.
"I guess I'm just shy, or something," Randy says.
"Are you too shy to listen to a business proposition?"
"Not at all."
"My daughter asserts that you and our host might lay some more cables
around here in coming years."
"In business, people rarely plan to do a thing only once," Randy says.
"It messes up the spreadsheets."
"You are aware, by now, that the water in this area is shallow."
"Yeah."
"You know that cables cannot be laid in shallow water without extremely
detailed, high resolution sidescan sonar surveys."
"Yes."
"I would like to perform those surveys for you, Randy."
"I see."
"No, I don't think you do see. But I want you to see, and so I'm going
to explain it."
"Okay," Randy says. "Should I bring my partner out?"
"The concept I am about to convey to you is very simple and does not
require two first rate minds in order to process it," Doug Shaftoe says.
"Okay. What is the concept?"
"The detailed survey will be just chock full of new information about
what is on the floor of the ocean in this part of the world. Some of that
information might be valuable. More valuable than you imagine."
"Ah," Randy says. "You mean that it might be the kind of thing that
your company knows how to capitalize on."
"That's right," says Doug Shaftoe. "Now, if you hire one of my
competitors to perform your survey, and they stumble on this kind of
information, they will not tell you about it. They will exploit it
themselves. You will not know that they have found anything and you will not
profit from it. But if you hire Semper Marine Services, I will tell you
about whatever I find, and I will cut you and your company in on a share of
any proceeds."
"Hmmmm," Randy says. He is trying to figure out how to do a poker face,
but he knows that Shaftoe sees right through him.
"On one condition," Doug Shaftoe says.
"I suspected there might be a condition."
"Every hook that's worth a damn has a barb. This is the barb."
"What is it?" Randy asks.
"We keep it a secret from that son of a bitch," Doug Shaftoe says,
jerking his thumb at Hubert Kepler. "Because if the Dentist finds out, then
he and the Bolobolos will just split the entire thing up between them and
we'll see nothing. There's even a chance we would end up dead."
"Well, the being dead part is something that we will certainly have to
think about," Randy says, "but I will convey your proposal to my partner."
Chapter 14 TUBE
Waterhouse and a few dozen strangers are standing and sitting in an
extraordinarily long, narrow room that rocks from side to side. The room is
lined with windows but no light comes into them, only sound: a great deal of
rumbling, rattling, and screeching. Everyone is pensive and silent, as if
they were sitting in church waiting for the service to kick off.
Waterhouse is standing up gripping a ceiling mounted protuberance that
keeps him from being rocked right onto his can. For the last couple of
minutes he has been staring at a nearby poster providing instructions on how
to put on a gas mask. Waterhouse, like everyone else, is carrying one such
device with him in a small dun canvas shoulder bag. Waterhouse's looks
different from everyone else's because it is American and military. It has
drawn a stare or two from the others.
On the poster is a lovely and stylish woman with white skin, and auburn
hair which appears to have been chemically melted and reset into its current
shape at a quality salon. She stands upright, her spine like a flagpole,
chin in the air, elbows bent, hands ritualistically posed: fingers splayed,
thumbs sticking straight up in the air just in front of her face. A sinister
lump dangles between her hands, held in a cat's cradle of khaki strapping.
Her upthrust thumbs are the linchpins of this tidy web.
Waterhouse has been in London for a couple of days now and so he knows
the next part of the story. He would know this pose anywhere. This woman is
poised for the chin thrust. If gas ever falls on the capital, the gas
rattles will sound and the tops of the massive mailboxes, which have all
been treated with special paint, will turn black. Twenty million thumbs will
point into the greenish, poison sky, ten million gas masks will dangle from
them, ten million chins will thrust. He can just imagine the crisp luscious
sound of this woman's soft white skin forcing itself into the confining
black rubber.
Once the chin thrust is complete, all is well. You have to get the
straps neatly arranged atop your auburn permanent and get indoors, but the
worst danger is past. The British gas masks have a squat round fitting on
the front to allow exhalation, which looks exactly like the snout of a pig,
and no woman would be caught dead in such a thing if the models in the gas
mask posters were not such paragons of high caste beauty.
Something catches his eye out in the darkness beyond the window. The
train has reached one of those parts of the Underground where dim gun barrel
colored light sifts down, betraying the stygian secrets of the Tube.
Everyone in the car blinks, glances, and draws breath. The World has
rematerialized around them for a moment. Fragments of wall, encrusted
trusses, bundles of cable hang in space out there, revolving slowly, like
astronomical bodies, as the train works its way past.
The cables catch Waterhouse's eye: neatly bracketed to the stone walls
in parallel courses. They are like the creepers of some plutonic ivy that
spreads through the darkness of the Tube when the maintenance men aren't
paying attention, seeking a place to break out and up into the light.
When you walk along the street, up there in the Overground, you see the
first tendrils making their way up the ancient walls of the buildings.
Neoprene jacketed vines that grow in straight lines up sheer stone and
masonry and inject themselves through holes in windowframes, homing in
particularly on offices. Sometimes they are sheathed in metal tubes.
Sometimes the owners have painted them over. But all of them share a common
root system that flourishes in the unused channels and crevices of the
Underground, converging on giant switching stations in deep bomb proof
vaults.
The train invades a cathedral of dingy yellow light, and groans to a
stop, hogging the aisle. Lurid icons of national paranoia glow in the niches
and grottoes. An angelic chin thrusting woman anchors one end of the moral
continuum. At the opposite we have a succubus in a tight skirt, sprawled on
a davenport in the midst of a party. smirking through her false eyelashes as
she eavesdrops on the naive young servicemen gabbing away behind her.
Signs on the wall identify this as Euston in a tasteful sans serif that
screams official credibility. Waterhouse and most of the other people get
off the train. After fifteen minutes or so of ricocheting around the
station's precincts, asking directions and puzzling out timetables,
Waterhouse finds himself sitting aboard an intercity train bound for
Birmingham. Along the way, it is promised, it will stop at a place called
Bletchley.
Part of the reason for the confusion is that there is another train
about to leave from an adjacent siding, which goes straight to Bletchley,
its final destination, with no stops in between. Everyone on that train, it
seems, is a female in a quasimilitary uniform.
The RAF men with the Sten guns, standing watch by each door of that
train, checking papers and passes, will not let him aboard. Waterhouse looks
through the yellowing influence of the windows at the Bletchley girls in the
train, facing each other in klatsches of four and five, getting their
knitting out of their bags, turning balls of Scottish wool into balaclavas
and mittens for convoy crews in the North Atlantic, writing letters to their
brothers in the service and their mums and dads at home. The RAF gunmen
remain by the doors until all of them are closed and the train has begun to
move out of the station. As it builds speed, the rows and rows of girls,
knitting and writing and chatting, blur together into something that
probably looks a good deal like what sailors and soldiers the world over are
commonly seeing in their dreams. Waterhouse will never be one of those
soldiers, out on the front line, out in contact with the enemy. He has
tasted the apple of forbidden knowledge. He is forbidden to go anywhere in
the world where he might be captured by the enemy.
***
The train climbs up out of the night and into a red brick arroyo,
headed northwards out of the city. It is about three in the afternoon; that
special BP train must have been carrying swing shift gals.
Waterhouse has the feeling he will not be working anything like a
regular shift. His duffel bag which was packed for him is pregnant with
sartorial possibilities: thick oiled wool sweaters, tropical weight Navy and
Army uniforms, black ski mask, condoms.
The train slowly pulls free of the city and passes into a territory
patched with small residential towns. Waterhouse feels heavy in his seat,
and suspects a slight uphill tendency. They pass through a cleft that has
been made across a low range of hills, like a kerf in the top of a log, and
enter into a lovely territory of subtly swelling emerald green fields strewn
randomly with small white capsules that he takes to be sheep.
Of course, their distribution is probably not random at all it probably
reflects local variations in soil chemistry producing grass that the sheep
find more or less desirable. From aerial reconnaissance, the Germans could
draw up a map of British soil chemistry based upon analysis of sheep
distribution.
The fields are enclosed by old hedges, stone fences, or, especially in
the uplands, long swaths of forest. After an hour or so, the forest comes
right up along the left side of the train, covering a bank that rises up
gently from the railway siding. The train's brakes come on gassily, and the
train grumbles to a stop in a whistle stop station. But the line has forked
and ramified quite a bit, more than is warranted by the size of the station.
Waterhouse stands, plants his feet squarely, squats down in a sumo
wrestler's stance, and engages his duffel bag. Duffel appears to be winning
as it seemingly pushes Waterhouse out the door of the train and onto the
platform.
There is a stronger than usual smell of coal, and a good deal of noise
coming from not far away. Waterhouse looks up the line and discovers a heavy
industrial works unfurled across the many sidings. He stands and stares for
a couple of minutes, as his train pulls away, headed for points north, and
sees that they are in the business of repairing steam locomotives here at
Bletchley Depot. Waterhouse likes trains.
But that is not why he got a free suit of clothes and a ticket to
Bletchley, and so once again Waterhouse engages Duffel and gets it up the
stairs to the enclosed bridge that flies over all of the parallel lines.
Looking toward the station, he sees more Bletchley girls, WAAFs and WRENs,
coming towards him; the day shift, finished with their work, which consists
of the processing of ostensibly random letters and digits on a heavy
industrial scale. Not wanting to appear ridiculous in their sight, he
finally gets Duffel maneuvered onto his back, gets his arms through the
shoulder straps, and allows its weight to throw him forward across the
bridge.
The WAAFs and WRENs are only moderately interested in the sight of a
newly arriving American officer. Or perhaps they are only being demure. In
any case, Waterhouse knows he is one of the few, but not the first. Duffel
shoves him through the one room station like a fat cop chivvying a
hammerlocked drunk across the lobby of a two star hotel. Waterhouse is
ejected into a strip of open territory running along the north south road.
Directly across from him the woods rise up. Any notion that they might be
woods of the inviting sort is quickly dissolved by a dense spray of gelid
light glinting from the border of the wood as the low sun betrays that the
place is saturated with sharpened metal. There is an orifice in the woods,
spewing WAAFs and WRENs like the narrow outlet of a giant yellowjacket nest.
Waterhouse must either move forward or be pulled onto his back by
Duffel and left squirming helplessly in the parking lot like a flipped
beetle, so he staggers forward, across the street and onto the wide footpath
into the woods. The Bletchley girls surround him. They have celebrated the
end of their shift by applying lipstick. Wartime lipstick is necessarily
cobbled together from whatever tailings and gristle were left over once all
of the good stuff was used to coat propeller shafts. A florid and cloying
scent is needed to conceal its unspeakable mineral and animal origins.
It is the smell of War.
Waterhouse has not even been given the full tour of BP yet, but he
knows the gist of it. He knows that these demure girls, obediently shuffling
reams of gibberish through their machines, shift after shift, day after day,
have killed more men than Napoleon.
He makes slow and apologetic progress against the tide of the departing
day shift. At one point he simply gives up, steps aside, body slams Duffel
into the ivy, lights up a cigarette, and waits for a burst of a hundred or
so girls to go by him. Something pokes at his ankle: a wild raspberry cane,
furious with thorns. It supports an uncannily small and tidy spider web
whose geodesic strands gleam in a beam of low afternoon light. The spider in
the center is an imperturbable British sort, perfectly unruffled by
Waterhouse's clumsy Yank antics.
Waterhouse reaches out and catches a yellow brown elm leaf that happens
to fall through the air before him. He hunkers down, plants his cigarette in
his mouth, and, using both hands for steadiness, draws the sawtooth rim of
the elm leaf across one of the web's radial strands, which, he knows, will
not have any sticky stuff on it. Like a fiddle bow on a string, the leaf
sets up a fairly regular vibration in the web. The spider spins to face it,
rotating instantly, like a character in a badly spliced movie. Waterhouse is
so startled by the speed of the move that he starts back just a bit, then he
draws the leaf across the web again. The spider tenses, feeling the
vibrations.
Eventually it returns to its original position and carries on as
before, ignoring Waterhouse completely.
Spiders can tell from the vibrations what sort of insect they have
caught, and home in on it. There is a reason why the webs are radial, and
the spider plants itself at the convergence of the radii. The strands are an
extension of its nervous system. Information propagates down the gossamer
and into the spider, where it is processed by some kind of internal Turing
machine. Waterhouse has tried many different tricks, but he has never been
able to spoof a spider. Not a good omen!
The rush hour seems to have ended during Waterhouse's science
experiment. He engages Duffel once more. The struggle takes them another
hundred yards down the path, which finally empties out into a road just at
the point where it is barred by an iron gate slung between stupid obelisks
of red brick. The guards are, again, RAF men with Sten guns, and right now
they are examining the papers of a man in a canvas greatcoat and goggles,
who has just ridden up on an Army green motorcycle with panniers slung over
the rear wheel. The panniers are not especially full, but they have been
carefully secured; they contain the ammunition that the girls feed into the
chattering teeth of their ravenous weapons.
The motorcyclist is waved through, and makes an immediate left turn
down a narrow lane. Attention falls upon Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, who
after a suitable exchange of salutes, presents his credentials.
He has to choose among his several sets, which he doesn't manage to
hide from the guards. But the guards do not seem alarmed or even curious
about this, which sets them distinctly apart from most whom Waterhouse has
dealt with. Naturally, these men are not on the Ultra Mega list, and so it
would be a grave breach of security to tell them that he was here on Ultra
Mega business. They appear to have greeted many other men who can't state
their real business, however, and don't bat an eyelash when Lawrence
pretends to be one of the naval intelligence liaisons in Hut 4 or Hut 8.
Hut 8 is where they decrypt naval Enigma transmissions. Hut 4 accepts
the decrypts from Hut 8 and analyzes them. If Waterhouse pretends to be a
Hut 4 man the disguise will not last for long, because those fellows have to
actually know something about the Navy. He perfectly fits the profile of a
Hut 8 man, who need not know anything except pure math.
One of the RAF men peruses his papers, then steps into a small
guardhouse and stirs the crank on a telephone. Waterhouse stands there
awkwardly, marveling at the weapons slung from the shoulders of the RAP men.
They are, as far as he can tell, nothing more than steel pipes with a
trigger mounted toward one end. A small window cut through the pipe provides
a view of a coil spring nested inside. A few handles and fittings bolted on
from place to place do not make the Sten gun look any less like an ill
conceived high school metal shop project.
"Captain Waterhouse? You are to proceed to the Mansion," says the guard
who had spoken on the telephone. "You can't miss it."
Waterhouse walks for about fifty feet and finds that the Mansion is,
indeed, tragically unmissable. He stands and stares at it for a minute,
trying to fathom what the architect had been thinking. It is a busy piece of
work, with an excessive number of gables. He can only suppose that the
designer wanted to build what was really a large, single dwelling, but
sought to camouflage it as a line of at least half a dozen wildly mismatched
urban row houses inexplicably crammed together in the middle of six hundred
acres of Buckinghamshire farmland.
The place has been well looked after, but as Waterhouse draws closer,
he can see black lianas climbing up the brickwork. The root system that he
glimpsed in the Underground has spread beneath forest and pasture even to
this place and has begun to throw its neoprene creepers upwards. But this
organism is not phototropic it does not grow towards the light, always
questing towards the sun. It is infotropic. And it has spread to this place
for the same reason that infotropic humans like Lawrence Pritchard
Waterhouse and Dr. Alan Mathison Turing have come here, because Bletchley
Park has roughly the same situation in the info world as the sun does in the
solar system. Armies, nations, prime ministers, presidents and geniuses fall
around it, not in steady planetlike orbits but in the crazy careening
ellipses and hyperbolae of comets and stray asteroids.
Dr. Rudolf von Hacklheber can't see Bletchley Park, because it is the
second best kept secret in the world, after Ultra Mega. But from his office
in Berlin, sifting through dispatches from the Beobachtung Dienst, he can
glimpse fragments of those trajectories, and dream up hypotheses to explain
why they are just so. If the only logical hypothesis is that the Allies have
broken Enigma, then Detachment 2702 will have failed.
Lawrence displays further credentials and enters between a pair of
weathered gryphons. The mansion is nicer once you can no longer see its
exterior. Its faux rowhouse design provides many opportunities for bay
windows, providing sorely needed light. The hall is held up by gothic arches
and pillars made of a conspicuously low grade of brown marble that looks
like vitrified sewage.
The place is startlingly noisy; there is a rushing, clattering noise,
like rabid applause, permeating walls and doors, carried on a draft of hot
air with a stinging, oily scent. It is the peculiar scent of electric
teletypes or teleprinters, as the Brits call them. The noise and the heat
suggest there must be dozens of them in one of the mansion's lower rooms.
Waterhouse climbs a paneled stairway to what the Brits call the first
floor, and find it quieter and cooler. The high panjandrums of Bletchley
have their offices here. If the organization is run true to bureaucratic
form, Waterhouse will never see this place again once his initial interview
is finished. He finds his way to the office of Colonel Chattan, who
(Waterhouse's memory jogged by the sight of the name on the door) is the
fellow at the top of the chart of Detachment 2702.
Chattan rises to shake his hand. He's strawberry blond, blue eyed, and
probably would be rosy cheeked if he didn't have such a deep desert tan at
the moment. He is wearing a dress uniform; British officers have their
uniforms tailor made, it is the only way to obtain them. Waterhouse is
hardly a clothes horse, but he can see at a glance that Chattan's uniform
was not thrown together by Mummy in a few evenings in front of a flickering
coal grate. No, Chattan has himself an honest to god tailor somewhere. Yet,
when he speaks Waterhouse's name, he does not say "woe to hice" like the
Broadway Buildings crowd. The R comes through hard and crackling and the
"house" part is elongated into some thing like "hoos." He has some kind of a
wild ass accent on him, this Chattan.
With Chattan is a smaller man in British fatigues tight at the wrists
and ankles, otherwise blousy, of thick khaki flannel that would be
intolerably hot if these people couldn't rely on a steady ambient
temperature, indoors and out, of about fifty five degrees. The overall
effect always reminds Waterhouse of Dr. Dentons. This fellow is introduced
as Leftenant Robson, and he is the leader of one of 2702's two squads the
RAE one. He has a bristly mustache, trimmed very short, of silver and auburn
whiskers. He is a cheerful sort, at least in the presence of higher ranks,
and smiles frequently. His teeth splay out radially from the gumline so that
each mandible has the appearance of a coffee can in which a small grenade
has been detonated.
"This the fellow we've been waiting for," Chattan says to Robson. "The
one we could've used in Algiers."
"Yes!" Robson says. "Welcome to Detachment 2701, Captain Waterhouse."
"2702," Waterhouse says.
Chattan and Robson look ever so mildly startled.
"We can't use 2701 because it is the product of two primes."
"I beg your pardon?" Robson says.
One thing Waterhouse likes about these Brits is that when they don't
know what the hell you are talking about, they are at least open to the
possibility that it might be their fault. Robson has the look of a man who
has come up through the ranks. A Yank of that type would already be scornful
and blustery.
"Which ones?" Chattan says. That is encouraging; he at least knows what
a prime number is.
"73 and 37," Waterhouse says.
This makes a profound impression on Chattan. "Ah, yes, I see." He
shakes his head. "I shall have to give the Prof a good chaffing about this."
Robson has cocked his head far to one side so that it is almost resting
upon the thick woolly beret chucked into his epaulet. He is squinting, and
has an aghast look about him. His hypothetical Yank counterpart would
probably demand, at this point, a complete explanation of prime number
theory, and when it was finished, denounce it as horseshit. But Robson just
lets it go by. "Am I to understand that we are changing the number of our
Detachment?"
Waterhouse swallows. It seems clear from Robson's reaction that this is
going to involve a great deal of busy work for Robson and his men: weeks of
painting and stenciling and of trying to propagate the new number throughout
the military bureaucracy. It will be a miserable pain in the ass.
"2702 it is," Chattan says breezily. Unlike Waterhouse, he has no
difficulty issuing difficult, unpopular commands.
"Right then, I must see to some things. Pleasure making your
acquaintance, Captain Waterhouse."
"Pleasure's mine."
Robson shakes Waterhouse's hand again and excuses himself.
"We have a billet for you in one of the huts to the south of the
canteen," Chattan says. "Bletchley Park is our nominal headquarters, but we
anticipate that we will spend most of our time in those theaters where
heaviest use is being made of Ultra."
"I take it you've been in North Africa," Waterhouse says.
"Yes." Chattan raises his eyebrows, or rather the ridges of skin where
his eyebrows are presumably located; the hairs are colorless and
transparent, like nylon monofilament line. "Just got out by the skin of our
teeth there, I'm afraid."
"Had a close shave, did you?"
"Oh, I don't mean it that way," Chattan says. "I'm talking about the
integrity of the Ultra secret. We are still not sure whether we have
survived it. But the Prof has done some calculations suggesting that we may
be out of the woods."
"The Prof is what you call Dr. Turing?"
"Yes. He recommended you personally, you know."
"When the orders came through, I speculated as much."
"Turing is presently engaged on at least two other fronts of the
information war, and could not be part of our happy few."
"What happened in North Africa, Colonel Chattan?"
"It's still happening," Chattan says bemusedly. "Our Marine squad is
still in theater, widening the bell curve.
"Widening the bell curve?"
"Well, you know better than I do that random things typically have a
bell shaped distribution. Heights, for example. Come over to this window,
Captain Waterhouse."
Waterhouse joins Chattan at a bay window, where there is a view across
acres of what used to be gently undulating farmland. Looking beyond the
wooded belt to the uplands miles away, he can see what Bletchley Park
probably used to look like: green fields dotted with clusters of small
buildings.
But that is not what it looks like now. There is hardly a piece of land
within half a mile that has not been recently paved or built upon. Once you
get beyond the Mansion and its quaint little outbuildings, the park consists
of one story brick structures, nothing more than long corridors with
multiple transepts: +++++++, and new +'s being added as fast as the masons
can slap bricks on mud (Waterhouse wonders, idly, whether Rudy has seen
aerial reconnaissance photos of this place, and deduced from all of those
+'s the mathematical nature of the enterprise). The tortuous channels
between buildings are narrow, and each is made twice as narrow by an eight
foot high blast wall running down the middle of it, so that the Jerries will
have to spend at least one bomb for each building.
"In that building there," Chattan says, pointing to a small building
not far away a truly wretched looking brick hovel "are the Turing Bombes.
That's 'bombe' with an 'e' on the end. They are calculating machines
invented by your friend the Prof."
"Are they true universal Turing machines?" Waterhouse blurts. He is in
the grip of a stunning vision of what Bletchley Park might, in fact, be: a
secret kingdom in which Alan has somehow found the resources needed to
realize his great vision. A kingdom ruled not by men but by information,
where humble buildings made of + signs house Universal Machines that can be
configured to perform any computable operation.
"No," Chattan says, with a gentle, sad smile.
Waterhouse exhales for a long time. "Ah."
"Perhaps that will come next year, or the next."
"Perhaps."
"The bombes were adapted, by Turing and Welchman and others, from a
design dreamed up by Polish cryptanalysts. They consist of rotating drums
that test many possible Enigma keys with great speed. I'm sure the Prof will
explain it to you. But the point is that they have these vast pegboards in
the back, like telephone switchboards, and some of our girls have the job of
putting the right pegs into the right holes and wiring the things up every
day. Requires good eyesight, careful attention, and height."
"Height?"
"You'll notice that the girls who are assigned to that particular duty
are unusually tall. If the Germans were to somehow get their hands on the
personnel records for all of the people who work at Bletchley Park, and
graph their heights on a histogram, they would see a normal bell shaped
curve, representing most of the workers, with an abnormal bump on it
representing the unusual population of tall girls whom we have brought in to
work the plug boards."
"Yes, I see," Waterhouse says, "and someone like Rudy Dr. von
Hacklheber would notice the anomaly, and wonder about it."
"Precisely," Chattan says. "And it would then be the job of Detachment
2702 the Ultra Mega Group to plant false information that would throw your
friend Rudy off the scent." Chattan turns away from the window, strolls over
to his desk, and opens a large cigarette box, neatly stacked with fresh
ammunition. He offers one to Waterhouse with a deft hand gesture, and
Waterhouse accepts it, just to be social. As Chattan is giving him a light,
he gazes through the flame into Waterhouse's eye and says, 'I put it to you
now. How would you go about concealing from your friend Rudy that we had a
lot of tall girls here?'
"Assuming that he already had the personnel records?"
"Yes."
"Then it would be too late to conceal anything."
"Granted. Let us instead assume that he has some channel of information
that is bringing him these records, a few at a time. This channel is still
open and functioning. We cannot shut it down. Or perhaps we choose not to
shut it down, because even the absence of this channel will tell Rudy
something important."
"Well, there you go then," Waterhouse says. "We gin up some false
personnel records and plant them in the channel."
There is a small chalkboard on the wall of Chattan's office. It is a
palimpsest, not very well erased; the housekeeping detail here must have a
standing order never to clean it, lest something important be lost. As
Waterhouse approaches it, he can see older calculations layered atop each
other, fading off into the blackness like transmissions of white light
propagating into deep space.
He recognizes Alan's handwriting all over the place. It takes a
physical effort not to stand there and try to reconstruct Alan's
calculations from the ghosts lingering on the slate. He draws over them only
with reluctance.
Waterhouse slashes an abscissa and an ordinate onto the board, then
sweeps out a bell shaped curve. On top of the curve, to the right of the
peak, he adds a little hump.
"The tall girls," he explains. "The problem is this notch." He points
to the valley between the main peak and the bump. Then he draws a new peak
high and wide enough to cover both:
"We can do that by planting fake personnel records in Rudy's channel,
giving heights that are taller than the overall average, but shorter than
the bombe girls."
"But now you've dug yourself another hole," Chattan says. He is leaning
back in his officer's swivel chair, holding the cigarette in front of his
face, regarding Waterhouse through a motionless cloud of smoke.
Waterhouse says, "The new curve looks a little better because I filled
in that gap, but it's not really bell shaped. It doesn't tail off right, out
here at the edges. Dr. von Hacklheber will notice that. He'll realize that
someone's been tampering with his channel. To prevent that from happening I
would have to plant more fake records, giving some unusually large and small
values."
"Invent some fake girls who were exceptionally short or tall," Chattan
says.
"Yes. That would make the curve tail off in the way that it should.'
Chattan continues to look at him expectantly.
Waterhouse says, "So, the addition of a small number of what would
otherwise be bizarre anomalies makes it all look perfectly normal."
"As I said," Chattan says, "our squad is in North Africa even as we
speak widening the bell curve. Making it all look perfectly normal."
Chapter 15 MEAT
Okay, so Private First Class Gerald Hott, late of Chicago, Illinois,
did not exactly shoot up through the ranks during his fifteen year tenure in
the United States Army. He did, how ever, carve a bitchin' loin roast. He
was as deft with a boning knife as Bobby Shaftoe is with a bayonet. And who
is to say that a military butcher, by conserving the limited resources of a
steer's carcass and by scrupulously observing the mandated sanitary
practices, might not save as many lives as a steely eyed warrior? The
military is not just about killing Nips, Krauts, and Dagoes. It is also
about killing livestock and eating them. Gerald Hott was a front line
warrior who kept his freezer locker as clean as an operating room and so it
is only fitting that he has ended up there.
Bobby Shaftoe makes this little elegy up in his head as he is shivering
in the sub Arctic chill of a formerly French, and now U.S. Army, meat locker
the size and temperature of Greenland, surrounded by the earthly remains of
several herds of cattle and one butcher. He has attended more than a few
military funerals during his brief time in the service, and has always been
bowled over by the skill of the chaplains in coming up with moving elegies
for the departed. He has heard rumors that when the military inducts 4 Fs
who are discovered to have brains, it teaches them to type and assigns them
to sit at desks and type these things out, day after day. Nice duty if you
can get it.
The frozen carcasses dangle from meathooks in long rows. Bobby Shaftoe
gets tenser and tenser as he works his way up and down the aisles, steeling
himself for the bad thing he is about to see. It is almost preferable when
your buddy's head suddenly explodes just as he is puffing his cigarette into
life buildup like this can drive you nuts.
Finally he rounds the end of a row and discovers a man slumbering on
the floor, locked in embrace with a pork carcass, which he was apparently
about to butcher at the time of his death. He has been there for about
twelve hours now and his body temp is hovering around minus ten degrees
Fahrenheit.
Bobby Shaftoe squares himself to face the body and draws a deep breath
of frosty, meat scented air. He clasps his cyanotic hands in front of his
chest in a manner that is both prayerful and good for warming them up. "Dear
Lord," he says out loud. His voice does not echo; the carcasses soak it up.
"Forgive this marine for these, his duties, which he is about to perform,
and while you are at it, by all means forgive this marine's superiors whom
You in Your infinite wisdom have seen fit to bless him with, and forgive
their superiors for getting the whole deal together."
He considers going on at some length but finally decides that this is
no worse than bayonetting Nips and so let's get on with it. He goes to the
locked bodies of PFC Gerald Hott and Frosty the Pig and tries to separate
them without success. He squats by them and gives the former a good look.
Hott is blond. His eyes are half closed, and when Shaftoe shines a
flashlight into the slit, he can see a glint of blue. Hott is a big man,
easily two twenty five in fighting trim, easily two fifty now. Life in a
military kitchen does not make it easy for a fellow to keep his weight down,
or (unfortunately for Hott) his cardiovascular system in any kind of
dependable working order.
Hott and his uniform were both dry when the heart attack happened, so
thank god the fabric is not frozen onto the skin. Shaftoe is able to cut
most of it off with several long strokes of his exquisitely sharpened V 44
"Gung Ho" knife. But the V 44's machetelike nine and a half inch blade is
completely inappropriate for close infighting viz., the denuding of the
armpits and groin and he was told to be careful about inflicting scratches,
so there he has to break out the USMC Marine Raider stiletto, whose slender
double edged seven and a quarter inch blade might have been designed for
exactly this sort of procedure, though the fish shaped handle, which is made
of solid metal, begins freezing to the sweaty palm of Shaftoe's hand after a
while.
Lieutenant Ethridge is hovering outside the locker's tomblike door.
Shaftoe barges past him and heads straight for the building's exit, ignoring
Ethridge's queries: "Shaftoe? How 'bout it?"
He does not stop until he is out of the shade of the building. The
North African sunshine breaks over his body like a washtub of morphine. He
closes his eyes and turns his face into it, holds his frozen hands up to cup
the warmth and let it trickle down his forearms, drip from his elbows.
"How 'bout it?" Ethridge says again.
Shaftoe opens his eyes and looks around.
The harbor's a blue crescent with miles of sere jetties snaking around
each other like diagrams of dance steps. One of them's covered with worn
stumps of ancient bastions and next to it a French battleship lies half
sunk, still piping smoke and steam into the air. All around it, the ships of
Operation Torch are unloading shit faster than you can believe. Cargo nets
rise from the holds of the transports and splat onto the quays like giant
loogies. Longshoremen haul, trucks carry, troops march, French girls smoke
Yankee cigarettes, Algerians propose joint ventures.
Between those ships, and the Army's meat operation, up here on this
rock, is what Bobby Shaftoe takes to be the City of Algiers. To his
discriminating Wisconsinan eye it does not appear to have been built so much
as swept up on the hillside by a tidal wave. A lot of acreage has been
devoted to keeping the fucking sun off, so from above, it has a shuttered up
look about it lots of red tile, decorated with flowers and Arabs. Looks like
a few modern concrete structures (e.g. this meat locker) have been thrown up
by the French in the wake of some kind of vigorous slum clearing offensive.
Still, there's a lot of slums left to be cleared target number one being
this human beehive or anthill just off to Shaftoe's left, the Casbah, they
call it. Maybe it's a neighborhood. Maybe it's a single poorly organized
building. Has to be seen to be believed. Arabs packed into the place like
fraternity pledges into a telephone booth.
Shaftoe turns around and looks again at the meat locker, which is
dangerously exposed to enemy air attack here, but no one gives a fuck
because who cares if the Krauts blow up a bunch of meat?
Lieutenant Ethridge, almost as desperately sunburned as Bobby Shaftoe,
squints.
"Blond," Shaftoe says.
"Okay."
"Blue eyed."
"Good."
"Anteater not mushroom."
"Huh?"
"He's not circumcised, sir!"
"Excellent! How 'bout the other thing?"
"One tattoo, sir!"
Shaftoe is enjoying the slow buildup of tension in Ethridge's voice:
"Describe the tattoo, Sergeant!"
"Sir! It is a commonly seen military design, sir! Consisting of a heart
with a female's name in it."
"What is that name, Sergeant?" Ethridge is on the verge of pissing his
pants.
"Sir! The name inscribed on the tattoo is the following name: Griselda.
Sir!"
"Aaaah!" Lieutenant Ethridge lets loose deep from the diaphragm. Veiled
women turn and look. Over in that Casbah, starved looking, shave needing
ragheads lean out of spindly towers yodeling out of key.
Ethridge shuts up and contents himself with clenching his fists until
they go white. When he speaks again, his voice is hushed with emotion.
"Battles have hinged on lesser strokes of luck than this one, Sergeant!"
"You're telling me!?" Shaftoe says. "When I was on Guadalcanal, sir, we
got trapped in this little cove and pinned down "
"I don't want to hear the lizard story, Sergeant!"
"Sir! Yes, sir!"
***
Once when Bobby Shaftoe was still in Oconomowoc, he had to help his
brother move a mattress up a stairway and learned new respect for the
difficulty of manipulating heavy but floppy objects. Hott, may God have
mercy on his soul, is a heavy S.O.B., and so it is excellent luck that he is
frozen solid. After the Mediterranean sun has its way with him, he is sure
enough going to be floppy. And then some.
All of Shaftoe's men are down in the detachment's staging area. This is
a cave built into a sheer artificial cliff that rises from the
Mediterranean, just above the docks. These caves go on for miles and there
is a boulevard running over the top of them. But even the approaches to
their particular cave have been covered with tents and tarps so that no one,
not even Allied troops, can see what they are up to: namely, looking for any
equipment with 2701 painted on it, painting over the last digit, and
changing it to 2. The first operation is handled by men with green paint and
the second by men with white or black paint.
Shaftoe picks one man from each color group so that the operation as a
whole will not be disrupted. The sun is stunningly powerful here, but in
that cavern, with a cool maritime breeze easing through, it's not really
that bad. The sharp smell of petroleum distillates comes off all of those
warm painted surfaces. To Bobby Shaftoe, it is a comforting smell, because
you never paint stuff when you're in combat. But the smell also makes him a
little tingly, because you frequently paint stuff just before you go into
combat.
Shaftoe is about to brief his three handpicked Marines on what is to
come when the private with black paint on his hands, Daniels, looks past him
and smirks. "What's the lieutenant looking for now do you suppose, Sarge?"
he says.
Shaftoe and Privates Nathan (green paint) and Branph (white) look over
to see that Ethridge has gotten sidetracked. He is going through the
wastebaskets again.
"We have all noticed that Lieutenant Ethridge seems to think it is his
mission in life to go through wastebaskets," Sergeant Shaftoe says in a low,
authoritative voice. "He is an Annapolis graduate."
Ethridge straightens up and, in the most accusatory way possible, holds
up a fistful of pierced and perforated oaktag. "Sergeant! Would you identify
this material?"
"Sir! It is general issue military stencils, Sir!"
"Sergeant! How many letters are there in the alphabet?"
"Twenty six, sir!" responds Shaftoe crisply.
Privates Daniels, Nathan and Branph whistle coolly at each other this
Sergeant Shaftoe is sharp as a tack.
"Now, how many numerals?"
"Ten, sir!"
"And of the thirty six letters and numerals, how many of them are
represented by unused stencils in this wastebasket?"
"Thirty five, sir! All except for the numeral 2, which is the only one
we need to carry out your orders, sir!"
"Have you forgotten the second part of my order, Sergeant?"
"Sir, yes, sir!" No point in lying about it. Officers actually like it
when you forget their orders because it reminds them of how much smarter
they are than you. It makes them feel needed.
"The second part of my order was to take strict measures to leave
behind no trace of the changeover!"
"Sir, yes, I do remember that now, sir!"
Lieutenant Ethridge, who was just a bit huffy first, has now calmed
down quite a bit, which speaks well of him and is duly, silently noted by
all of the men, who have known him for less than six hours. He is now
speaking calmly and conversationally, like a friendly high school teacher.
He is wearing the heavy rimmed black military eyeglasses known in the trade
as RPGs, or Rape Prevention Glasses. They are strapped to his head by a hunk
of black elastic. They make him look like a mental retard. "If some enemy
agent were to go through the contents of this wastebasket, as enemy agents
have been known to do, what would he find?"
"Stencils sir!"
"And if he were to count the numerals and letters, would he notice
anything unusual?"
"Sir! All of them would be clean except for the numeral twos which
would be missing or covered with paint, sir!"
Lieutenant Ethridge says nothing for a few minutes, allowing his
message to sink in. In reality no one knows what the fuck he is talking
about. The atmosphere becomes tinderlike until finally, Sergeant Shaftoe
makes a desperate stab. He turns away from Ethridge and towards the men. "I
want you Marines to get paint on all of those goddamn stencils!" he barks.
The Marines charge the wastebaskets as if they were Nip pillboxes, and
Lieutenant Ethridge seems mollified. Bobby Shaftoe, having scored massive
points, leads Privates Daniels, Nathan, and Branph out into the street
before Lieutenant Ethridge figures out that he was just guessing. They head
for the meat locker up on the ridge, double time.
These Marines are all lethal combat veterans or else they never would
have gotten into a mess this bad trapped on a gratuitously dangerous
continent (Africa) surrounded by the enemy (United States Army troops).
Still, when they get into that locker and take their first gander at PFC
Hott, a hush comes over them.
Private Branph clasps his hands, rubbing them together surreptitiously.
"Dear Lord "
"Shut up, Private!" Shaftoe says, "I already did that."
"Okay, Sarge."
"Go find a meat saw!" Shaftoe says to Private Nathan.
The privates all gasp.
"For the fucking pig!" Shaftoe clarifies. Then he turns to Private
Daniels, who is carrying a featureless bundle, and says, "Open it up!"
The bundle (which was issued by Ethridge to Shaftoe) turns out to
contain a black wetsuit. Nothing GI; some kind of European model. Shaftoe
unfolds it and examines its various parts while Privates Nathan and Branph
dismember Frosty the Pig with vigorous strokes of an enormous bucksaw.
They are all working away silently when a new voice interrupts. "Dear
Lord," the voice begins, as they all look up to see a man standing nearby,
hands clasped prayerfully. His words, sacramentally condensed into an
outward and visible cloud of steam, veil his face. His uniform and rank are
obscured by an Army blanket thrown over his shoulders. He'd look like a
camel riding Holy Land prophet if he were not clean shaven and wearing Rape
Prevention Glasses.
"Goddamn it!" Shaftoe says. "I already said a fucking prayer."
"But are we praying for Private Hott, or for ourselves?" the man says.
This is a poser. Everything becomes quiet as the meat saw stops moving.
Shaftoe drops the wetsuit and stands up. Blanket Man's got very short
grizzly hair, or maybe that's frost coalescing on his scalp. His ice colored
eyes meet Shaftoe's through the mile thick lenses of his RPGs, as if he's
really expecting an answer. Shaftoe takes a step closer and realizes that
the man is wearing a clerical collar.
"You tell me, Rev," Shaftoe says.
Then he recognizes Blanket Man. He's about to let fly with a lusty What
in the fuck are you doing here, but something makes him hold back. The
chaplain's eyes make a sideways dart so small and so fast that only Shaftoe,
who's practically rubbing noses with him, could possibly see it.
The message being: Shut up, Bobby, we'll talk later.
"Private Hott is with God now or wherever people go after they die,"
says Enoch "You can call me Brother" Root.
"What kind of an attitude is that!? Course he's with God. Jesus Christ!
'Wherever they go when they die.' What kind of a chaplain are you?"
"I guess I'm a Detachment 2702 kind of chaplain," the chaplain says.
Lieutenant Enoch Root finally breaks eye contact with Shaftoe and turns his
gaze to where the action is. "As you were, fellows," he says. "Looks like
bacon tonight, huh?"
The men chuckle nervously and resume sawing.
Once they get the pig's carcass disentangled from Hott's, each of the
Marines grabs a limb. They carry Hott out into the butcher shop, which has
been temporarily evacuated for purposes of this operation, so that Hott's
former comrades in shanks will not spread rumors.
Hasty evacuation of a butcher shop after one of its workers has been
found dead on the floor could spawn a few rumors in and of itself. So the
cover story du jour, freshly spun by Lieutenant Ethridge, is that Detachment
2702 is (contrary to all outward appearances) an elite, crack medical team
concerned that Hott had been struck down by a rare new form of North African
food poisoning. Maybe even something deliberately left behind by the French,
who are, by accounts, a little irritable about having their battleship sunk.
Anyway, the whole shop (the story goes) has to be shut down for the day and
gone over with a nit comb. Hott's corpse will be cremated before being sent
back to the family, just to make sure that the dreaded affliction does not
spread into Chicago the planetary abbatoir capital where its incalculable
consequences could alter the outcome of the war.
There is a GI coffin laid out on the floor, just to preserve the
fiction. Shaftoe and his men ignore it completely and begin dressing the
body, first in an appalling pair of swim trunks, then various components of
the wetsuit.
"Hey!" Ethridge says. "I thought you were going to do the gloves last."
"Sir, we're doing them first, by your leave, sir!" Bobby Shaftoe says.
"On account of his fingers will thaw out first and once that happens we
are screwed, sir!"
"Well, slap this on him first," Ethridge says, and hands over a wrist
watch. Shaftoe hefts it and whistles. It's a beaut: a Swiss chronometer in
solid uranium, its jewel laden movement throbbing away like the heart beat
of a small mammal. He swings it on the end of its wristband, made in
cunningly joined armor plates. It is heavy enough to stun a muskellunge.
"Nice," Shaftoe says, "but it doesn't tell time too good."
"In the time zone where we are going," Ethridge says, "it does."
The chastened Shaftoe sets about his work. Meanwhile, Lieutenants
Ethridge and Root are making themselves useful. They carry the crudely sawed
remains of Frosty the Pig into the butcher shop and throw them on a gigantic
scale. They add up to some thirty kilograms, whatever the fuck that means.
Enoch Root, showing an appetite for physical labor that is duly and silently
noted by the men, hauls in another pig carcass, stiff as a Radio Flyer, and
dumps it onto the scale, bringing the total up to seventy. Ethridge does the
breaststroke through clouds of flies to gather up all the cuts of meat that
were on the chopping blocks when the place was evacuated. He throws them on
the scale and the needle swings up to near the one hundred mark. From that
point they are able to bring it up to one thirty by ferrying hams and roasts
in from the freezer one at a time. Enoch Root who seems to be conversant
with exotic systems of measurement has made a calculation, and checked it
twice, establishing that the weight of Gerald Hott, converted into
kilograms, is one hundred and thirty.
All the meat goes into the coffin. Ethridge slams the lid shut,
trapping some flies who have no idea what they are in for. Root goes around
with a clawhammer, driving in sixteen penny nails with sure, powerful,
Carpenter of Nazareth like strokes. Meanwhile, Ethridge has taken a GI
manual out of his briefcase. Shaftoe is close enough to read the title,
printed in block letters on its olive drab cover:
COFFIN SEALING PROCEDURES
PART III: TROPICAL ENVIRONMENTS
VOL. II: HIGH DISEASE RISK SITUATIONS (BUBONIC PLAGUE, ETC.)
The two lieutenants devote a good hour to following the instructions in
that manual. The instructions are not that complicated, but Enoch Root keeps
noticing syntactical ambiguities and wants to explore their ramifications.
First this rattles Ethridge, then his emotions tend towards impatience and,
finally, extreme pragmatism. To make the chaplain shut up, Ethridge
confiscates the manual and starts Root on stenciling Hott's name on the
coffin and pasting it up with red stickers printed with medical warnings so
appalling that the topic headings alone induce faint nausea. By the time
Root is finished, the only person who can legally open this coffin is
General George C. Marshall himself, and even he would have to first get
special permission from the Surgeon General and evacuate all living things
within a hundred mile radius.
"Chaplain talks kind of funny," says Private Nathan at one point,
listening, slackjawed, to one of these Root/Ethridge debates.
"Yeah!" exclaims Private Branph, as if the accent took a really keen
listener to notice. "What kind of an accent is that anyway?"
All eyes turn to Bobby Shaftoe, who pretends to listen for a bit and
then says, "Well, fellas, I would guess that this Enoch Root is the
offspring of a long line of Dutch and possibly German missionaries in the
South Sea Islands, interbred with Aussies. And furthermore, I would guess
that being as how he grew up in territories controlled by the British that
he carries a British passport and was drafted into their military when the
war started and is now part of ANZAC."
"Haw!" roars Private Daniels, "if you got all of that right, I'll give
you five bucks ."
"Deal," Shaftoe says.
Ethridge and Root finish sealing the coffin at about the same time
Shaftoe and his Marines are wrestling the last bits of the wetsuit into
place. It takes a shitload of talcum powder, but they get it done. Ethridge
supplies them with the talcum powder, which is not GI talc; it is from
somewhere in Europe. Some of the letters on the label have pairs of dots
over them, which Shaftoe knows to be a characteristic of the German
language.
A truck backs up to the loading dock, smelling the fresh paint (it is a
Detachment 2702 truck). In go the sealed coffin and the now vulcanized dead
butcher.
"I'm going to stay behind and check the wastebaskets," Lieutenant
Ethridge tells Shaftoe. "I'll meet you at the airfield in one hour."
Shaftoe imagines one hour in the back of a hot truck with this cargo.
"You want me to keep him on ice, sir?" he asks.
Ethridge has to think about this one for a while. He sucks his teeth,
checks his watch, hems and haws. But when he finally answers, he sounds
definite. "Negative. It is imperative, for purposes of this mission, that we
now get him into a thawed mode."
PFC General Hott and his meat laden coffin occupy the center of the
truck's bed. The Marines sit to the sides, arranged like pallbearers.
Shaftoe finds himself staring across the carnage into the face of Enoch
Root, which is wearing an expression of forced nonchalance.
Shaftoe knows he ought to wait, but he just can't stand it. "What are
you doing here?" he finally says.
"The detachment is relocating," the Rev says. "Closer to the front."
"We just got off the fucking boat," Shaftoe says. "Of course we're
going closer to the goddamn front we can't go any farther unless we swim ."
"As long as we're pulling up stakes," Root says coolly, "I'll be coming
along for the ride."
"I don't mean that," Bobby Shaftoe says. "I mean, why should the
detachment have a chaplain?"
"You know the military," Root says. "Every unit has to have one."
"It's bad luck."
"It's bad luck to have a chaplain? Why?"
"It means the waffle butts are expecting a lot of funerals, is why."
"So you are taking the position that the only thing a cleric can do is
to preside over funerals? Interesting."
"And weddings and baptisms," Shaftoe says. All of the other Marines
chortle.
"Could it be you're feeling a little anxious about the unusual nature
of Detachment 2702's first mission?" Root inquires, casting a significant
glance at the late Hott, then staring directly into Shaftoe's eyes.
"Anxious? Listen, Rev, I done some things on Guadalcanal that make this
look like Emily Fucking Post."
All of the other Marines think this is a great line, but Root is
undeterred.
"Did you know why you were doing those things on Guadalcanal?"
"Sure! To stay alive."
"Do you know why you're doing this?"
"Fuck no."
"Doesn't that irritate you a little bit? Or are you too much of a
stupid jarhead to care?"
"Well, you kind of backed me into a corner there, Rev," Shaftoe says.
After a pause he goes on, "I'll admit to being a little curious.
"If there were someone in Detachment 2702 who could help answer your
questions about why, would that be useful?"
"I guess so," Shaftoe grumbles. "It just seems weird to have a
chaplain."
"Why does it seem weird?"
"Because of what kind of unit this is."
"What kind of unit is it?" Root asks. He asks it with a certain
sadistic pleasure.
"We're not supposed to talk about it," Shaftoe says. "And anyway, we
don't know."
Down the hill, immense zigzagging ramps descend pompously over rows of
tiger striped arches to the strand of ramifying railway lines that feed the
port from the south. "It's like standing in the drain of a fucking pinball
machine," says B. Shaftoe, looking up at the way they have just come,
thinking about what might come rolling down out of the Casbah. They head
south along those railway lines and come into a zone of ore dumps and coal
heaps and smokestacks, clearly recognizable to Great Lakes Eagle Scout
Shaftoe, but here operated through some kind of cross cultured gear train
about a million meshings deep. They pull up in front of the Société
Algérienne d'Éclairage et de Force, a double smokestacked behemoth with the
biggest coal pile of all. They're in the middle of nowhere, but it's obvious
that they are expected. Here as everywhere else that Detachment 2702 goes a
strange Rank Inflation Effect is taking place. The coffin is carried into
the SAEF by two lieutenants, a captain, and a major, overseen by a colonel!
There is not a single enlisted man in sight, and Bobby Shaftoe, a mere
sergeant, worries about what sort of work they'll find for him. There is
also a Paperwork Negation Effect going on here; whenever Shaftoe expects to
be stalled by the usual half an hour's worth of red tape, an anxious officer
runs up and waves his hands furiously and he is allowed to proceed.
An Arab, wearing what appears to be a red coffee can on his head, hauls
an iron door open; flames lunge at him and he beats them back with a
blackened iron stick. The pallbearers center the head of the coffin in the
opening and then shove it through, like ramming a big shell home into a
sixteen inch gun, and the man with the can on his head clangs the door shut,
a tassel on the top of his can whipping around crazily. Before he's even got
it latched he's yodeling just like those guys up in the Casbah. The officers
all stand around agreeing with each other and signing their names on
clipboards.
So with a dearth of complications that can only strike combat veteran
Bobby Shaftoe as eerie, the truck leaves the Société Algérienne d'Éclairage
et de Force behind and heads back up those damn ramps into Algiers. The
climb's steep a first gear project all the way. Vendors with push carts
loaded with boiling oil are not only keeping up with them but cooking
fritters along the way. Three legged dogs run and fight underneath the
actual drive train of the truck. Detachment 2702 is also dogged by coffee
can wearing natives threatening to play guitars made of jerry cans, and by
orange vendors and snake charmers, and a few blue eyed burnoose wearers
holding up lumps of unwrapped and unlabelled dark stuff. Like hailstones,
these may be classified by analogy to fruits and sporting goods. Typically
they range from grape to baseball. At one point, the chaplain impulsively
trades a Hershey bar for a golf ball of the stuff.
"What is that? Chocolate?" Bobby Shaftoe asks.
"If it was chocolate," Root says, "that guy wouldn't have taken a
Hershey bar for it."
Shaftoe shrugs. "Unless it's shitty chocolate."
"Or shit!" blurts Private Nathan, provoking incredible hilarity.
"You heard of Mary Jane?" Root asks.
Shaftoe role model, leader of men stifles the impulse to say, Heard of
her? I've fucked her!
"This is the concentrated essence," says Enoch Root.
"How would you know, Rev?" says Private Daniels.
The Rev is not rattled. "I'm the God guy here, right? I know the
religious angle?"
"Yes, sir!"
"Well, at one time, there was a group of Muslims called the hashishin
who would eat this stuff and then go out and kill people. They were so good
at it, they became famous or infamous. Over time the pronunciation of the
name has changed we know them as assassins."
There is an appropriately respectful silence. Finally, Sergeant Shaftoe
says, "What the hell are we waiting for?"
They eat some. Shaftoe, being the highest ranking enlisted man present,
eats more than the others. Nothing happens. "Only person I feel like
assassinating is that guy who sold it to us," he says.
***
The airfield, eleven miles out of town, is busier than it was ever
intended to be. This is nice grape– and olive growing land, but stony
mountains are visible farther inland, and beyond 'em is a patch of sand the
size of the United States most of which seems to be airborne and headed
their way. Countless airplanes predominantly Dakota transports, a.k.a.
Gooney Birds stir up vast, tongue coating, booger nucleating dust clouds. It
doesn't occur to Shaftoe for quite some time that his dry eyes and mouth may
not be entirely the result of dust in the air. His saliva has the
consistency of tile adhesive.
The detachment is so damn secret that no one at the airfield even knows
that they exist. There are a lot of Brits here, and in the desert, Brits
wear shorts, which makes Shaftoe want to punch them in the nose. He controls
the urge. But his obvious hostility towards men in short pants, combined
with the fact that he is demanding to be pointed in the direction of a unit
that is so secret that he cannot specify it by name or even vaguely describe
it, leads to a lot of bafflement, a lot of incredulity, and generally gets
the Anglo American alliance off on the wrong foot.
Sergeant Shaftoe, however, now understands that anything to do with
this detachment is liable to be way off to one side, shrouded in black tarps
and awnings. Like any other military unit, Detachment 2702 is rich in some
supplies and poor in others, but they do appear to control about fifty
percent of last year's total U.S. tarpage production. When Shaftoe mentions
this fact, and goes on about it to his comrades at great length, some of the
men look at him a little funny. It's left to Enoch Root to say, "Between the
giant lizards and the black tarps some people might think you were acting a
little paranoid."
"Let me tell you about paranoid," Shaftoe says, and he does, not
forgetting to mention Lieutenant Ethridge and his wastebaskets. By the time
he's had his say, the whole detachment has assembled on the far side of
those tarps, and everyone is nice and tense except for their newest recruit,
who, as Shaftoe notes approvingly, is beginning to relax. Lying on the bed
of the truck in his wetsuit, he adjusts, rather than bounces, when they go
over bumps.
Even so, he is still stiff enough to simplify the problem of getting
him out of the truck and into their assigned Gooney Bird: a bare knuckled
variant of the DC 3, militarized and (to Shaftoe's skeptical eye) rendered
somewhat less than airworthy by a pair of immense cargo doors gouged into
one side, nearly cutting the airframe in half. This particular Dakota has
been flying around in the fucking desert so long that all the paint's been
sand blasted off its propeller blades, the engine cowling, and the leading
edges of the wings, leaving burnished metal that will make an inviting
silver gleam for any Luftwaffe pilots within three hundred miles. Worse:
diverse antennas sprout from the skin of the fuselage, mostly around the
cockpit. Not just whip antennas but great big damn barbecue grills that make
Shaftoe wish he had a hacksaw. They are eerily like the ones that Shaftoe
humped down the stairway from Station Alpha in Shanghai a memory that has
somehow gotten all mangled together, now, with the other images in his head.
When he tries to recollect it, all he can see is a bloodied Jesus carrying a
high frequency dual band dipole down a stone staircase in Manila, and he
knows that can't be right.
Though they are on the precincts of a busy airfield, Ethridge refuses
to let this operation go forward when there is as much as a single airplane
in the sky. Finally he says, "Okay, NOW!" In the truck, they lift the body
up, just in time to hear Ethridge shout, "No, WAIT!" at which point they put
him down again. Long after it has stopped being grimly amusing, they put a
tarp on Gerald Hott and get him carried on board, and shortly thereafter are
airborne. Detachment 2072 is headed for a rendezvous with Rommel.
Chapter 16 CYCLES
It is early in November of 1942 and a simply unbelievable amount of
shit is going on, all at once, everywhere. Zeus himself would not be able to
sort it all out, not even if he mobilized the caryatids tell them never mind
what we told you, just drop those loads. Temples collapsing everywhere, like
spyglasses, he'd send those caryatids and any naiads and dryads he could
scare up to library school, issue them green visors, dress them in the prim
asexual uniforms of the OPAMS, the Olympian Perspective Archive Management
Service, put them to work filling out three by five cards round the clock.
Get them to use some of that vaunted caryatid steadfastness to tend
Hollerith machines and ETC card readers. Even then, Zeus would probably
still lack a handle on the situation. He'd be so pissed off he would hardly
know which hubristical mortals to fling his thunderbolts at, nor which pinup
girls and buck privates to molest.
Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is as Olympian as anyone right now.
Roosevelt and Churchill and the few others on the Ultra Mega list have the
same access, but they have other cares and distractions. They can't wander
around the data flow capital of the planet, snooping over translators'
shoulders and reading the decrypts as they come, chunkity chunkity whirr,
out of the Typex machines. They cannot trace individual threads of the
global narrative at their whim, running from hut to hut patching connections
together, even as the WRENs in Hut 11 string patch cables from one bombe
socket to another, fashioning a web to catch Hitler's messages as they speed
through the ether.
Here are some of the things Waterhouse knows: the Battle of El Alamein
is won, and Montgomery is chasing Rommel westwards across Cyrenaica at what
looks like a breakneck pace, driving him back toward the distant Axis
stronghold of Tunis. But it's not the rout it appears to be. If Monty would
only grasp the significance of the intelligence coming through the Ultra
channel, he would be able to move decisively, to surround and capture large
pockets of Germans and Italians. But he never does, and so Rommel stages an
orderly retreat, preparing to fight another day, and plodding Monty is
roundly cursed in the watch rooms of Bletchley Park for his failure to
exploit their priceless but perishable gems of intelligence.
The largest sealift in history just piled into Northwest Africa. It is
called Operation Torch, and it's going to take Rommel from behind, serving
as anvil to Montgomery's hammer, or, if Monty doesn't pick up the pace a
bit, maybe the other way around. It looks brilliantly organized but it's not
really; this is the first time America has punched across the Atlantic in
any serious way and so a whole grab bag of stuff is included on those ships
including any number of signals intelligence geeks who are storming
theatrically onto the beaches as if they were Marines. Also included in the
landing is the American contingent of Detachment 2702 a hand picked wrecking
crew of combat hardened leathernecks.
Some of these Marines learned what they know on Guadalcanal, a
basically useless island in the Southwest Pacific where the Empire of Nippon
and the United States of America are disputing with rifles each other's
right to build a military airbase. Early returns suggest that the Nipponese
Army, during its extended tour of East Asia, has lost its edge. It would
appear that raping the entire female population of Nanjing, and bayoneting
helpless Filipino villagers, does not translate into actual military
competence. The Nipponese Army is still trying to work out some way to kill,
say, a hundred American Marines without losing, say, five hundred of its own
soldiers.
The Japanese Navy is a different story they know what they are doing.
They have Yamamoto. They have torpedoes that actually explode when they
strike their targets, in stark contrast to the American models which do
nothing but scratch the paint of the Japanese ships and then sink
apologetically. Yamamoto just made another attempt to wipe out the American
fleet off the Santa Cruz Islands, sank Hornet and blew a nice hole in
Enterprise. But he lost a third of his planes. Watching the Japanese rack up
losses, Waterhouse wonders if anyone in Tokyo has bothered to break out the
abacus and run the numbers on this Second World War thing.
The Allies are doing some math of their own, and they are scared
shitless. There are 100 German U boats in the Atlantic now, operating mostly
from Lorient and Bordeaux, and they are slaughtering convoys in the North
Atlantic with such efficiency that it's not even combat, just a Lusitanian
level murder spree. They are on a pace to sink something like a million tons
of shipping this month, which Waterhouse cannot really comprehend. He tries
to think of a ton as being roughly equivalent to a car, and then tries to
imagine America and Canada going out into the middle of the Atlantic and
simply dropping a million cars into the ocean just in November. Sheesh!
The problem is Shark.
The Germans call it Triton. It is a new cypher system, used exclusively
by their Navy. It is an Enigma machine, but not the usual three wheel
Enigma. The Poles learned how to break that old thing a couple of years ago,
and Bletchley Park industrialized the process. But more than a year ago, a
German U boat was beached intact on the south coast of Iceland and gone over
pretty thoroughly by men from Bletchley. They discovered an Enigma box with
niches for four not three wheels.
When the four wheel Enigma had gone into service on February 1st, the
entire Atlantic had gone black. Alan and the others have been going after
the problem very hard ever since. The problem is that they don't know how
the fourth wheel is wired up.
But a few days ago, another U boat was captured, more or less intact,
in the Eastern Mediterranean. Colonel Chattan, who happened to be in the
neighborhood, went there with sickening haste, along with some other
Bletchleyites. They recovered a four wheel Enigma machine, and though this
doesn't break the code, it gives them the data they need to break it.
Hitler must be feeling cocky, anyway, because he's on tour at the
moment, preparatory to a working vacation at his alpine retreat. That didn't
prevent him from taking over what was left of France apparently something
about Operation Torch really got his goat, so he occupied Vichy France in
its entirety, and then dispatched upwards of a hundred thousand fresh
troops, and a correspondingly stupendous amount of supplies, across the
Mediterranean to Tunisia. Waterhouse imagines that you must be able to cross
from Sicily to Tunisia these days simply by hopping from the deck of one
German transport ship to another.
Of course, if that were true, Waterhouse's job would be a lot easier.
The Allies could sink as many of those ships as they wanted to without
raising a single blond Teutonic eyebrow on the information theory front. But
the fact is that the convoys are few and far between. Just exactly how few
and how far between are parameters that go into the equations that he and
Alan Mathison Turing spend all night scribbling on chalkboards.
After a good eight or twelve hours of that, when the sun has finally
come up again, there's nothing like a brisk bicycle ride in the
Buckinghamshire countryside.
***
Spread out before them as they pump over the crest of the rise is a
woods that has turned all of the colors of flame. The hemispherical crowns
of the maples even contribute a realistic billowing effect. Lawrence feels a
funny compulsion to take his hands off the handlebars and clamp them over
his ears. As they coast into the trees, however, the air remains
delightfully cool, the blue sky above unsmudged by pillars of black smoke,
and the calm and quiet of the place could not be more different from what
Lawrence is remembering.
"Talk, talk, talk!" says Alan Turing, imitating the squawk of furious
hens. The strange noise is made stranger by the fact that he is wearing a
gas mask, until he becomes impatient and pulls it up onto his forehead.
"They love to hear themselves talk." He is referring to Winston Churchill
and Franklin Roosevelt. "And they don't mind hearing each other talk up to a
point, at least. But voice is a terribly redundant channel of information,
compared to printed text. If you take text and run it through an Enigma
which is really not all that complicated the familiar patterns in the text,
such as the preponderance of the letter E, become nearly undetectable." Then
he pulls the gas mask back over his face in order to emphasize the following
point: "But you can warp and permute voice in the most fiendish ways
imaginable and it will still be perfectly intelligible to a listener." Alan
then suffers a sneezing fit that threatens to burst the khaki straps around
his head.
"Our ears know how to find the familiar patterns," Lawrence suggests.
He is not wearing a gas mask because (a) there is no Nazi gas attack in
progress, and (b) unlike Alan, he does not suffer from hay fever.
"Excuse me." Alan suddenly brakes and jumps off his bicycle. He lifts
the rear wheel from the pavement, gives it a spin with his free hand, then
reaches down and gives the chain a momentary sideways tug. He is watching
the mechanism intently, interrupted by a few aftersneezes.
The chain of Turing's bicycle has one weak link. The rear wheel has one
bent spoke. When the link and the spoke come into contact with each other,
the chain will part and fall onto the road. This does not happen at every
revolution of the wheel otherwise the bicycle would be completely useless.
It only happens when the chain and the wheel are in a certain position with
respect to each other.
Based upon reasonable assumptions about the velocity that can be
maintained by Dr. Turing, an energetic bicyclist (let us say 25 km/hr) and
the radius of his bicycle's rear wheel (a third of a meter), if the chain's
weak link hit the bent spoke on every revolution, the chain would fall off
every one third of a second.
In fact, the chain doesn't fall off unless the bent spoke and the weak
link happen to coincide. Now, suppose that you describe the position of the
rear wheel by the traditional [theta]. Just for the sake of simplicity, say
that when the wheel starts in the position where the bent spoke is capable
of hitting the weak link (albeit only if the weak link happens to be there
to be hit) then [theta] = 0. If you're using degrees as your unit, then,
during a single revolution of the wheel, [theta] will climb all the way up
to 359 degrees before cycling back around to 0, at which point the bent
spoke will be back in position to knock the chain off And now suppose that
you describe the position of the chain with the variable C, in the following
very simple way: you assign a number to each link on the chain. The weak
link is numbered 0, the next is 1, and so on, up to l – 1 where l is
the total number of links in the chain. And again, for simplicity's sake,
say that when the chain is in the position where its weak link is capable of
being hit by the bent spoke (albeit only if the bent spoke happens to be
there to hit it) then C = 0.
For purposes of figuring out when the chain is going to fall off of Dr.
Turing's bicycle, then, everything we need to know about the bicycle is
contained in the values of [theta] and of C. That pair of numbers defines
the bicycle's state. The bicycle has as many possible states as there can be
different values of ([theta], C) but only one of those states, namely (0,
0), is the one that will cause the chain to fall off onto the road.
Suppose we start off in that state; i.e., with ([theta] = 0, C = 0),
but that the chain has not fallen off because Dr. Turing (knowing full well
his bicycle's state at any given time) has paused in the middle of road
(nearly precipitating a collision with his friend and colleague Lawrence
Pritchard Waterhouse, because his gas mask blocks his peripheral vision).
Dr. Turing has tugged sideways on the chain while moving it forward
slightly, preventing it from being hit by the bent spoke. Now he gets on the
bicycle again and begins to pedal forward. The circumference of his rear
wheel is about two meters, and so when he has moved a distance of two meters
down the road, the wheel has performed a complete revolution and reached the
position [theta] = 0 again that being the position, remember, when its bent
spoke is in position to hit the weak link.
What of the chain? Its position, defined by C, begins at 0 and reaches
1 when its next link moves forward to the fatal position, then 2 and so on.
The chain must move in synch with the teeth on the sprocket at the center of
the rear wheel, and that sprocket has n teeth, and so after a complete
revolution of the rear wheel, when [theta] = 0 again, C = n. After a second
complete revolution of the rear wheel, once again [theta] = 0 but now C =
2n. The next time it's C = 3n and so on. But remember that the chain is not
an infinite linear thing, but a loop having only l positions; at C = l it
loops back around to C = 0 and repeats the cycle. So when calculating the
value of C it is necessary to do modular arithmetic that is, if the chain
has a hundred links (l = 100) and the total number of links that have moved
by is 135, then the value of C is not 135 but 35. Whenever you get a number
greater than or equal to l you just repeatedly subtract l until you get a
number less than 1. This operation is written, by mathematicians, as mod I.
So the successive values of C, each time the rear wheel spins around to
[theta] = 0, are
[C sub i] = n mod l, 2n mod l, 3n mod l,...,in mod l
where i = (1, 2, 3, ... [infinity]) more or less, depending on how
close to infinitely long Turing wants to keep riding his bicycle. After a
while, it seems infinitely long to Waterhouse.
Turing's chain will fall off when his bicycle reaches the state
([theta] = 0, C = 0) and in light of what is written above, this will happen
when (which is just a counter telling how many times the rear wheel has
revolved) reaches some hypothetical value such that in mod l = 0, or, to put
it in plain language, it will happen if there is some multiple of n (such
as, oh, 2n, 3n, 395n or 109,948,368,443n) that just happens to be an exact
multiple of l too. Actually there might be several of these so called common
multiples, but from a practical standpoint the only one that matters is the
first one the least common multiple, or LCM because that's the one that will
be reached first and that will cause the chain to fall off.
If, say, the sprocket has twenty teeth (n 20) and the chain has a
hundred teeth (l 100) then after one turn of the wheel we'll have C 20,
after two turns C = 40, then 60, then 80, then 100. But since we are doing
the arithmetic modulo 100, that value has to be changed to zero. So after
five revolutions of the rear wheel, we have reached the state ([theta] = 0,
C = 0) and Turing's chain falls off. Five revolutions of the rear wheel only
gets him ten meters down the road, and so with these values of l and n the
bicycle is very nearly worthless. Of course, this is only true if Turing is
stupid enough to begin pedaling with his bicycle in the chain falling off
state. If, at the time he begins pedaling, it is in the state ([theta] = 0,
C = 1) instead, then the successive values will be C 21, 41, 61, 81, 1, 21,
. . . and so on forever the chain will never fall off. But this is a
degenerate case, where "degenerate," to a mathematician, means "annoyingly
boring." In theory, as long as Turing put his bicycle into the right state
before parking it outside a building, no one would be able to steal it the
chain would fall off after they had ridden for no more than ten meters.
But if Turing's chain has a hundred and one links (l = 101) then after
five revolutions we have C = 100, and after six we have C = 19, then
C = 39, 59, 79, 99, 18, 38, 58, 78, 98, 17, 37, 57, 77, 97, 16, 36, 56,
76, 96, 15, 35, 55, 75, 95, 14, 34, 54, 74, 94, 13, 33, 53, 73, 93, 12, 32,
52, 72, 92, 11, 31, 51, 71, 91, 10, 30, 50, 70, 90, 9, 29, 49, 69, 89, 8,
28, 48, 68, 88, 7, 27, 47, 67, 87, 6, 26, 46, 66, 86, 5, 25, 45, 65, 85, 4,
24, 44, 64, 84, 3, 23, 43, 63, 83, 2, 22, 42, 62, 82, 1, 21, 41, 61, 81, 0
So not until the 101st revolution of the rear wheel does the bicycle
return to the state ([theta] = 0, C = 0) where the chain falls off. During
these hundred and one revolutions, Turing's bicycle has proceeded for a
distance of a fifth of a kilometer down the road, which is not too bad. So
the bicycle is usable. However, unlike in the degenerate case, it is not
possible for this bicycle to be placed in a state where the chain never
falls off at all. This can be proved by going through the above list of
values of C, and noticing that every possible value of C every single number
from 0 to 100 is on the list. What this means is that no matter what value C
has when Turing begins to pedal, sooner or later it will work its way round
to the fatal C = 0 and the chain will fall off. So Turing can leave his
bicycle anywhere and be confident that, if stolen, it won't go more than a
fifth of a kilometer before the chain falls off.
The difference between the degenerate and nondegenerate cases has to do
with the properties of the numbers involved. The combination of (n = 20, I =
100) has radically different properties from (n = 20, l = 101). The key
difference is that 20 and 101 are "relatively prime" meaning that they have
no factors in common. This means that their least common multiple, their
LCM, is a large number it is, in fact, equal to l x n = 20 x 101 = 2020.
Whereas the LCM of 20 and 100 is only 100. The 101 bicycle has a long period
– it passes through many different states before returning back to the
beginning whereas the l = 100 bicycle has a period of only a few states.
Suppose that Turing's bicycle were a cipher machine that worked by
alphabetic substitution, which is to say that it would replace each of the
26 letters of the alphabet with some other letter. An A in the plaintext
might become a T in the ciphertext, B might become F, C might be come M, and
so on all the way through to Z. In and of itself this would be an absurdly
easy cipher to break kids in treehouses stuff. But suppose that the
substitution scheme changed from one letter to the next. That is, suppose
that after the first letter of the plaintext was enciphered using one
particular substitution alphabet, the second letter of plaintext was
enciphered using a completely different substitution alphabet, and the third
letter a different one yet, and so on. This is called a polyalphabetic
cipher.
Suppose that Turing's bicycle were capable of generating a different
alphabet for each one of its different states. So the state ([theta] = 0, C
= 0) would correspond to, say, this substitution alphabet:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Q G U W B I Y T F K V N D O H E P X L Z R C A S J M
but the state ([theta] = 180, C = 15) would correspond to this
(different) one:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
B O R I X V G Y P F J M T C Q N H A Z U K L D S E W
No two letters would be enciphered using the same substitution alphabet
until, that is, the bicycle worked its way back around to the initial state
([theta] = 0, C = 0) and began to repeat the cycle. This means that it is a
periodic polyalphabetic system. Now, if this machine had a short period, it
would repeat itself frequently, and would therefore be useful, as an
encryption system, only against kids in treehouses. The longer its period
(the more relative primeness is built into it) the less frequently it cycles
back to the same substitution alphabet, and the more secure it is.
The three wheel Enigma is just that type of system (i.e., periodic
polyalphabetic). Its wheels, like the drive train of Turing's bicycle,
embody cycles within cycles. Its period is 17,576, which means that the
substitution alphabet that enciphers the first letter of a message will not
be used again until the 17,577th letter is reached. But with Shark the
Germans have added a fourth wheel, bumping the period up to 456,976. The
wheels are set in a different, randomly chosen starting position at the
beginning of each message. Since the Germans' messages are never as long as
450,000 characters, the Enigma never reuses the same substitution alphabet
in the course of a given message, which is why the Germans think it's so
good.
A flight of transport planes goes over them, probably headed for the
aerodrome at Bedford. The planes make a weirdly musical diatonic hum, like
bagpipes playing two drones at once. This reminds Lawrence of yet another
phenomenon related to the bicycle wheel and the Enigma machine. "Do you know
why airplanes sound the way they do?" he says.
"No, come to think of it." Turing pulls his gas mask off again. His jaw
has gone a bit slack and his eyes are darting from side to side. Lawrence
has caught him out.
"I noticed it at Pearl. Airplane engines are rotary," Lawrence says.
"Consequently they must have an odd number of cylinders."
"How does that follow?"
"If the number were even, the cylinders would be directly opposed, a
hundred and eighty degrees apart, and it wouldn't work out mechanically."
"Why not?"
"I forgot. It just wouldn't work out."
Alan raises his eyebrows, clearly not convinced.
"Something to do with cranks," Waterhouse ventures, feeling a little
defensive.
"I don't know that I agree," Alan says.
"Just stipulate it think of it as a boundary condition," Waterhouse
says. But Alan is already hard at work, he suspects, mentally designing a
rotary aircraft engine with an even number of cylinders.
"Anyway, if you look at them, they all have an odd number of
cylinders," Lawrence continues. "So the exhaust noise combines with the
propeller noise to produce that two tone sound."
Alan climbs back onto his bicycle and they ride into the woods for some
distance without any more talking. Actually, they have not been talking so
much as mentioning certain ideas and then leaving the other to work through
the implications. This is a highly efficient way to communicate; it
eliminates much of the redundancy that Alan was complaining about in the
case of FDR and Churchill.
Waterhouse is thinking about cycles within cycles. He's already made up
his mind that human society is one of these cycles within cycles things
(1) and now he's trying to figure out whether it is like Turing's
bicycle (works fine for a while, then suddenly the chain falls off, hence
the occasional world war) or like an Enigma machine (grinds away
incomprehensibly for a long time, then suddenly the wheels line up like a
slot machine and everything is made plain in some sort of global epiphany
or, if you prefer, apocalypse) or just like a rotary airplane engine (runs
and runs and runs; nothing special happens; it just makes a lot of noise).
"It's somewhere around . . . here!" Alan says, and violently brakes to
a stop, just to chaff Lawrence, who has to turn his bicycle around, a chancy
trick on such a narrow lane, and loop back.
They lean their bicycles against trees and remove pieces of equipment
from the baskets: dry cells, electronic breadboards, poles, a trenching
tool, loops of wire. Alan looks about somewhat uncertainly and then strikes
off into the woods.
"I'm off to America soon, to work on this voice encryption problem at
Bell Labs," Alan says.
Lawrence laughs ruefully. "We're ships passing in the night, you and
I."
"We are passengers on ships passing in the night," Alan corrects him.
"It is no accident. They need you precisely because I am leaving. I've been
doing all of the 2701 work to this point."
"It's Detachment 2702 now," Lawrence says.
"Oh," Alan says, crestfallen. "You noticed."
"It was reckless of you, Alan."
"On the contrary!" Alan says. "What will Rudy think if he notices that,
of all the units and divisions and detachments in the Allied order of
battle, there is not a single one whose number happens to be the product of
two primes?"
"Well, that depends upon how common such numbers are compared to all of
the other numbers, and on how many other numbers in the range are going
unused . . ." Lawrence says, and begins to work out the first half of the
problem. "Riemann Zeta function again. That thing pops up everywhere."
"That's the spirit!" Alan says. "Simply take a rational and common
sense approach. They are really quite pathetic."
"Who?"
"Here," Alan says, slowing to a stop and looking around at the trees,
which to Lawrence look like all the other trees. "This looks familiar." He
sits down on the bole of a windfall and begins to unpack electrical gear
from his bag. Lawrence squats nearby and does the same. Lawrence does not
know how the device works it is Alan's invention and so he acts in the role
of surgical assistant, handing tools and supplies to the doctor as he puts
the device together. The doctor is talking the entire time, and so he
requests tools by staring at them fixedly and furrowing his brow.
"They are well, who do you suppose? The fools who use all of the
information that comes from Bletchley Park!"
"Alan!"
"Well, it is foolish! Like this Midway thing. That's a perfect example,
isn't it?"
"Well, I was happy that we won the battle," Lawrence says guardedly.
"Don't you think it's a bit odd, a bit striking, a bit noticeable, that
after all of Yamamoto's brilliant feints and deceptions and ruses, this
Nimitz fellow knew exactly where to go looking for him? Out of the entire
Pacific Ocean?"
"All right," Lawrence says, "I was appalled. I wrote a paper about it.
Probably the paper that got me into this mess with you."
"Well, it's no better with us Brits," Alan says.
"Really?"
"You would be horrified at what we've been up to in the Mediterranean.
It is a scandal. A crime.
"What have we been up to?" Lawrence asks. "I say 'we' rather than 'you'
because we are allies now."
"Yes, yes," Alan says impatiently. "So they claim." He paused for a
moment, tracing an electrical circuit with his finger, calculating
inductances in his head. Finally, he continues: "Well, we've been sinking
convoys, that's what. German convoys. We've been sinking them right and
left."
"Rommel's?"
"Yes, exactly. The Germans put fuel and tanks and ammunition on ships
in Naples and send them south. We go out and sink them. We sink nearly all
of them, because we have broken the Italian C38m cipher and we know when
they are leaving Naples. And lately we've been sinking just the very ones
that are most crucial to Rommel's efforts, because we have also broken his
Chaffinch cipher and we know which ones he is complaining loudest about not
having."
Turing snaps a toggle switch on his invention and a weird, looping
squeal comes from a dusty black paper cone lashed onto the breadboard with
twine. The cone is a speaker, apparently scavenged from a radio. There is a
broomstick with a loop of stiff wire dangling from the end, and a wire
running from that loop up the stick to the breadboard. He swings the
broomstick around until the loop is dangling, like a lasso, in front of
Lawrence's midsection. The speaker yelps.
"Good. It's picking up your belt buckle," Alan says.
He sets the contraption down in the leaves, gropes in several pockets,
and finally pulls out a scrap of paper on which several lines of text have
been written in block letters. Lawrence would recognize it anywhere: it is a
decrypt worksheet. "What's that, Alan?"
"I wrote out complete instructions and enciphered them, then hid them
under a bridge in a benzedrine container," Alan says. "Last week I went and
recovered the container and decyphered the instructions." He waves the paper
in the air.
"What encryption scheme did you use?"
"One of my own devising. You are welcome to take a crack at it, if you
like."
"What made you decide it was time to dig this stuff up?"
"It was nothing more than a hedge against invasion," Alan says.
"Clearly, we're not going to be invaded now, not with you chaps in the war."
"How much did you bury?"
"Two silver bars, Lawrence, each with a value of some hundred and
twenty five pounds. One of them should be very close to us." Alan stands up,
pulls a compass out of his pocket, turns to face magnetic north, and squares
his shoulders. Then he rotates a few degrees. "Can't remember whether I
allowed for declination," he mumbles. "Right! In any case. One hundred paces
north." And he strides off into the woods, followed by Lawrence, who has
been given the job of carrying the metal detector.
Just as Dr. Alan Turing can ride a bicycle and carry on a conversation
while mentally counting the revolutions of the pedals, he can count paces
and talk at the same time too. Unless he has lost count entirely, which
seems just as possible.
"If what you are saying is true," Lawrence says, "the jig must be up
already. Rudy must have figured out that we've broken their codes."
"An informal system has been in place, which might be thought of as a
precursor to Detachment 2701, or 2702 or whatever we are calling it," Alan
says. "When we want to sink a convoy, we send out an observation plane
first. It is ostensibly an observation plane. Of course, to observe is not
its real duty we already know exactly where the convoy is. Its real duty is
to be observed that is, to fly close enough to the convoy that it will be
noticed by the lookouts on the ships. The ships will then send out a radio
message to the effect that they have been sighted by an Allied observation
plane. Then, when we come round and sink them, the Germans will not find it
suspicious at least, not quite so monstrously suspicious that we knew
exactly where to go.
Alan stops, consults his compass, turns ninety degrees, and begins
pacing westwards.
"That strikes me as being a very ad hoc arrangement," Lawrence says.
"What is the likelihood that Allied observation planes, sent out purportedly
at random, will just happen to notice every single Axis convoy?"
"I've already calculated that probability, and I'll bet you one of my
silver bars that Rudy has done it too," Turing says. "It is a very small
probability."
"So I was right," Lawrence says, "we have to assume that the jig is
up."
"Perhaps not just yet," Alan says. "It has been touch and go. Last
week, we sank a convoy in the fog."
"In the fog?"
"It was foggy the whole way. The convoy could not possibly have been
observed. The imbeciles sank it anyway. Kesselring became suspicious, as
would anyone. So we ginned up a fake message in a cypher that we know the
Nazis have broken addressed to a fictitious agent in Naples. It
congratulated him on betraying that convoy to us. Ever since, the Gestapo
have been running rampant on the Naples waterfront, looking for the fellow."
"We dodged a bullet there, I'd say."
"Indeed." Alan stops abruptly, takes the metal detector from Lawrence,
and turns it on. He begins to walk slowly across a clearing, sweeping the
wire loop back and forth just above the ground. It keeps snagging on
branches and getting bent out of shape, necessitating frequent repairs, but
remains stubbornly silent the whole time, except when Alan, concerned that
it is no longer working, tests it on Lawrence's belt buckle.
"The whole business is delicate," Alan muses. "Some of our SLUs in
North Africa "
"SLUs?"
"Special Liaison Units. The intelligence officers who receive the Ultra
information from us, pass it on to field officers, and then make sure it is
destroyed. Some of them learned, from Ultra, that there was to be a German
air raid during lunch, so they took their helmets to the mess hall. When the
air raid came off as scheduled, everyone wanted to know why those SLUs had
known to bring their helmets."
"The entire business seems hopeless," Lawrence says. "How can the
Germans not realize?"
"It seems that way to us because we know everything and our channels of
communication are free from noise," Alan says. "The Germans have fewer, and
much noisier, channels. Unless we continue to do stunningly idiotic things
like sinking convoys in the fog, they will never receive any clear and
unmistakable indications that we have broken Enigma."
"It's funny you should mention Enigma," Lawrence says, "since that is
an extremely noisy channel from which we manage to extract vast amounts of
useful information."
"Precisely. Precisely why I am worried."
"Well, I'll do my best to spoof Rudy," Waterhouse says.
"You'll do fine. I'm worried about the men who are carrying out the
operations."
"Colonel Chattan seems pretty dependable," Waterhouse says, though
there's probably no point in continuing to reassure Alan. He's just in a
fretting mood. Once every two or three years, Waterhouse does something that
is socially deft, and now's the time: he changes the subject: "And
meanwhile, you'll be working it out so that Churchill and Roosevelt can have
secret telephone conversations?"
"In theory. I rather doubt that it's practical. Bell Labs has a system
that works by breaking the waveform down into several bands..." and then
Alan is off on the subject of telephone companies. He delivers a complete
dissertation on the subject of information theory as applied to the human
voice, and how that governs the way telephone systems work. It is a good
thing that Turing has such a large subject on which to expound, for the
woods are large, and it has become increasingly obvious to Lawrence that his
friend has no idea where the silver bars are buried.
Unburdened by any silver, the two friends ride home in darkness, which
comes surprisingly early this far north. They do not talk very much, for
Lawrence is still absorbing and digesting everything that Alan has disgorged
to him about Detachment 2702 and the convoys and Bell Labs and voice signal
redundancy. Every few minutes, a motorcycle whips past them, saddlebags
stuffed with encrypted message slips.
Chapter 17 ALOFT
Any way that livestock can travel, Bobby Shaftoe has too, boxcars, open
trucks, forced cross country marches. Military has now invented the airborne
equivalent of these in the form of the Plane of a Thousand Names: DC 3,
Skytrain, C 47, Dakota Transport, Gooney Bird. He'll survive. The exposed
aluminum ribs of the fuselage are trying to beat him to death, but as long
as he stays awake, he can fend them off.
The enlisted men are jammed into the other plane. Lieutenants Ethridge
and Root are in this one, along with PFC Gerald Hott and Sergeant Bobby
Shaftoe. Lieutenant Ethridge got dibs on all of the soft objects in the
plane and arranged them into a nest, up forward near the cockpit, and
strapped himself down. For a while he pretended to do paperwork. Then he
tried looking out the windows. Now he has fallen asleep and is snoring so
loudly that he is, no fooling, drowning out the engines.
Enoch Root has wedged himself into the back of the fuselage, where it
gets narrow, and is perusing two books at once. It strikes Shaftoe as
typical he supposes that the books say completely different things and that
the chaplain is deriving great pleasure from pitting them against each
other, like those guys who have a chessboard on a turntable so that they can
play against themselves. He supposes that when you live in a shack on a
mountain with a bunch of natives who don't speak any of your half dozen or
so languages, you have to learn to have arguments with yourself.
There's a row of small square windows on each side of the plane.
Shaftoe looks out to the right and sees mountains covered with snow and gets
scared shitless for a moment thinking maybe they've strayed into the Alps.
But off to the left, it still looks like the Mediterranean, and eventually
it gives way to Devil's Tower type outcroppings rising up out of stony
scrubland, and then after that it is just rocks and sand, or sand without
the rocks. Sand puckered here and there, for no particular reason, by
clutches of dunes. Damn it, they are still in Africa! You ought to be able
to see lions and giraffes and rhinos! Shaftoe goes forward to lodge a
complaint with the pilot and copilot. Maybe he can get a card game together.
Maybe the view out the front of the plane is something to write home about.
He is, on all counts, thrown back in stinging defeat. He sees
immediately that the project of finding a better view is doomed. There are
only three things in the whole universe: sand, sea, and sky. As a Marine, he
knows how boring the sea is. The other two are little better. There is a
line of clouds far ahead of them a front of some description. That's all
there is.
He gets a general notion of their flight plan before the chart is
snatched away and stashed out of his view. They seem to be attempting to fly
across Tunisia, which is kind of funny, because last time Shaftoe checked,
Tunisia was Nazi territory the anchor, in fact, of the Axis presence on the
African continent. Today's general flight plan seems to be that they'll cut
across the straits between Bizerta and Sicily, then head east to Malta.
All of Rommel's supplies and reinforcements come across those very
straits from Italy, and land at Tunis or Bizerta. From there, Rommel can
strike out east towards Egypt or west towards Morocco. In the several weeks
since the British Eighth Army kicked the crap out of him at El Alamein
(which is way, way over there in Egypt) he has been retreating westwards
back towards Tunis. In the few weeks since the Americans landed in Northwest
Africa, he's been fighting on a second front to his west. And Rommel has
been doing a damn good job of it, as far as Shaftoe can tell from listening
between the stentorian lines of the Movietone newsreels, so laden with
sinister cheer, whence the above facts were gleaned.
All this means that down below them, vast forces ought to be spread out
across the Sahara in readiness for combat. Perhaps there is even a battle
going on right now. But Shaftoe sees nothing. Just the occasional line of
yellow dust thrown up by a convoy, a dynamite fuse sputtering across the
desert.
So he talks to those flyboys. It's not until he notices them giving
each other looks that he realizes he's going on at great length. Those
Assassins must've killed their victims by talking them to death.
The card game, he realizes, is completely out of the question. These
flyboys don't want to talk. He practically has to dive in and grab the
control yoke to get them to say anything. And when they do, they sound
funny, and he realizes that these guys are not guys nor fellas. They are
blokes. Chaps. Mates. They are Brits.
The only other thing he notices about them, before he gives up and
slinks back into the cargo hold, is that they are fucking armed to the
teeth. Like they were expecting to have to kill twenty or thirty people on
their way from the airplane to the latrine and back. Bobby Shaftoe has met a
few of these paranoid types during his tour, and he doesn't like them very
much. That whole mindset reminds him too much of Guadalcanal.
He finds a place on the floor next to the body of PFC Gerald Hott and
stretches out. The teeny revolver in his waistband makes it impossible for
him to lie on his back, so he takes it out and pockets it. This only
transfers the center of discomfort to the Marine Raider stiletto holstered
invisibly between his shoulder blades. He realizes that he is going to have
to curl up on his side, which doesn't work because on one side he has a
standard issue Colt semiautomatic, which he doesn't trust, and on the other,
his own six shooter from home, which he does. So he has to find places to
stash those, along with the various ammo clips, speed loaders, and
maintenance supplies that go with them. The V 44 "Gung Ho" jungle clearing,
coconut splitting, and Nip decapitating knife, strapped to the outside of
his lower leg, also has to be removed, as does the derringer that he keeps
on the other leg for balance. The only thing that stays with him are the
grenades in his front pockets, since he doesn't plan to lie down on his
stomach.
They make their way around the headland just in time to avoid being
washed out to sea by the implacable tide. In front of them is a muddy tidal
flat, forming the floor of a box shaped cove. The walls of the box are
formed by the headland they've just gone round, another, depressingly
similar headland a few hundred yards along the shore, and a cliff rising
straight up out of the mudflats. Even if it were not covered with
relentlessly hostile tropical jungle, this cliff would seal off access to
the interior of Guadalcanal just because of its steepness. The Marines are
trapped in this little cove until the tide goes back out.
Which is more than enough time for the Nip machine gunner to kill them
all.
They all know the sound of the weapon by now and so they throw
themselves down to the mud instantly. Shaftoe takes a quick look around.
Marines lying on their backs or sides are probably dead, those on their
stomachs are probably alive. Most of them are on their stomachs. The
sergeant is conspicuously dead; the gunner aimed for him first.
The Nip or Nips have only one gun, but they seem to have all the
ammunition in the world the fruits of the Tokyo Express, which has been
coming down the Slot with impunity ever since Shaftoe and the rest of the
Marines landed early in August. The gunner rakes the mudflats leisurely,
zeroing in quickly on any Marine who tries to move.
Shaftoe gets up and runs towards the base of the cliff.
Finally, he can see the muzzle flashes from the Nip gun. This tells him
which way it's pointed. When the flashes are elongated it's pointed at
someone else, and it's safe to get up and run. When they become
foreshortened, it is swinging around to bear on Bobby Shaftoe He cuts it too
close. There is very bad pain in his lower right abdomen. His scream is
muffled by mud and silt as the weight of his web and helmet drive him face
first into the ground.
He loses consciousness for a while, perhaps. But it can't have been
that long. The firing continues, implying that the Marines are not all dead
yet. Shaftoe raises his head with difficulty, fighting the weight of the
helmet, and sees a log between him and the machine gun a piece of wave
burnished driftwood flung far up the beach by a storm.
He can run for it or not. He decides to run. It's only a few steps. He
realizes, halfway there, that he's going to make it. The adrenaline is
finally flowing; he lunges forward mightily and collapses in the shelter of
the big log. Half a dozen bullets thunk into the other side of it, and wet,
fibrous splinters shower down over him. The log is rotten.
Shaftoe has gotten himself into a bit of a hole, and cannot see forward
or back without exposing himself. He cannot see his fellow Marines, only
hear some of them screaming.
He risks a peek at the machine gun nest. It is well concealed by jungle
vegetation, but it is evidently built into a cave a good twenty feet above
the mudflat. He's not that far from the base of the cliff he might just
reach it with another sprint. But climbing up there is going to be murder.
The machine gun probably can't depress far enough to shoot down at him, but
they can roll grenades at him until the cows come home, or just pick him off
with small arms as he gropes for handholds.
It is, in other words, grenade launcher time. Shaftoe rolls onto his
back, extracts a flanged metal tube from his web gear, fits it onto the
muzzle of his ought three. He tries to clamp it down, but his fingers slip
on the bloody wing nut. Who's the pencil neck that decided to use a fucking
wing nut in this context? No point griping about it here and now. There is
actually blood all over the place, but he is not in pain. He drags his
fingers through the sand, gets them all gritty, tightens that wing nut down.
Out of its handy pouch comes one Mark II fragmentation grenade, a.k.a.
pineapple, and with a bit more groping he's got the Grenade Projection
Adapter, M1. He engages the former into the latter, yanks out the safety
pin, drops it, then slips the fully prepped and armed Grenade Projection
Adapter, Ml, with its fruity payload, over the tube of the grenade launcher.
Finally: he opens up one specially marked cartridge case, fumbles through
bent and ruptured Lucky Strikes, finds one brass cylinder, a round of
ammunition sans payload, crimped at the end but not endowed with an actual
bullet. Loads same into the Springfield's firing chamber.
He creeps along the log so that he can pop up and fire from an
unexpected location and perhaps not get his head chewed off by the machine
gun. Finally raises this Rube Goldberg device that his Springfield has
become, jams the butt into the sand (in grenade launcher mode the recoil
will break your collarbone), points it toward the foe, pulls the trigger.
Grenade Projection Adapter, M1 is gone with a terrible pow, trailing a damn
hardware store of now superfluous parts, like a soul discarding its corpse.
The pineapple is now soaring heavenward, even its pin and safety lever gone,
its chemical fuse aflame so that it even has a, whattayoucallit, an inner
light. Shaftoe's aim is true, and the grenade is heading where intended. He
thinks he's pretty damn smart until the grenade bounces back, tumbles down
the cliff, and blows up another rotten log. The Nips have anticipated Bobby
Shaftoe's little plan, and put up nets or chicken wire or something.
He lies on his back in the mud, looking up at the sky, saying the word
"fuck" over and over. The entire log throbs, and something akin to peat moss
showers down into his face as the bullets chew up the rotten wood. Bobby
Shaftoe says a prayer to the Almighty and prepares to mount a banzai charge.
Then the maddening sound of the machine gun stops, and is replaced by
the sound of a man screaming. His voice sounds unfamiliar. Shaftoe levers
himself up on his elbow and realizes that the screaming is coming from the
direction of the cave.
He looks up into the big, sky blue eyes of Enoch Root.
The chaplain has moved from his nook at the back of the plane and is
squatting next to one of the little windows, holding onto whatever he can.
Bobby Shaftoe, who has rolled uncomfortably onto his stomach, looks out a
window on the opposite side of the plane. He ought to see the sky, but
instead he sees a sand dune wheeling past. The sight makes him instantly
nauseated. He does not even consider sitting up.
Brilliant spots of light are streaking wildly around the inside of the
plane, like ball lightning, but and this is far from obvious at first they
are actually projected against the wall of the plane, like flashlight beams.
He back traces the beams, taking advantage of a light haze of vaporized
hydraulic fluid that has begun to accumulate in the air; and finds that they
originate in a series of small circular holes that some asshole has punched
through the skin of the plane while he was sleeping. The sun is shining
through these holes, always in the same direction of course; but the plane
is going every which way.
He realizes that he has actually been lying on the ceiling of the
airplane ever since he woke up, which explains why he was on his stomach.
When this dawns on him, he vomits.
The bright spots all vanish. Very, very reluctantly, Shaftoe risks a
glance out the window and sees only greyness.
He thinks he is on the floor now. He is next to the corpse, at any
rate, and the corpse was strapped down.
He lies there for several minutes, just breathing and thinking. Air
whistles through the holes in the fuselage, loud enough to split his head.
Someone some madman is up on his feet, moving about the plane. It is
not Root, who is in his little nook dealing with a number of facial
lacerations that he picked up during the aerobatics. Shaftoe looks up and
sees that the moving man is one of the British flyboys.
The Brit has yanked off his headgear to expose black hair and green
eyes. He's in his mid thirties, an old man. He has a knobby, utilitarian
face in which all of the various lumps, knobs and orifices seem to be there
for a reason, a face engineered by the same fellows who design grenade
launchers. It is a simple and reliable face, by no means handsome. He is
kneeling next to the corpse of Gerald Hott and is examining it minutely with
a flashlight. He is the very picture of concern; his bedside manner is
flawless.
Finally he slumps back against the ribbed wall of the fuselage. "Thank
god," he says, "he wasn't hit."
"Who wasn't?" Shaftoe says.
"This chap," the flyboy says, slapping the corpse.
"Aren't you going to check me?"
"No need to."
"Why not? I'm still alive. "
"You weren't hit," the flyboy says confidently. "If you'd been hit,
you'd look like Lieutenant Ethridge."
For the first time, Shaftoe hazards movement. He props himself up on
one elbow, and finds that the floor of the plane is slick and wet with red
fluid.
He had noticed a pink mist in the cabin, and supposed that it was
produced by a hydraulic fluid leak. But the hydraulic system now seems hunky
dory, and the stuff on the floor of the plane is not a petroleum product. It
is the same red fluid that figured so prominently in Shaftoe's nightmare. It
is streaming downhill from the direction of Lieutenant Ethridge's cozy nest,
and the Lieutenant is no longer snoring.
Shaftoe looks at what is left of Ethridge, which bears a striking
resemblance to what was lying around that butcher shop earlier today. He
does not wish to lose his composure in the presence of the British pilot,
and indeed, feels strangely calm. Maybe it's the clouds; cloudy days have
always had a calming effect on him.
"Holy cow," he finally says, "that Kraut twenty millimeter is some
thing else."
"Right," the flyboy says, "we've got to get spotted by a convoy and
then we'll proceed with the delivery."
Cryptic as it is, this is the most informative statement Bobby's ever
heard about the intentions of Detachment 2702. He gets up and follows the
pilot back to the cockpit, both of them stepping delicately around several
quivering giblets that were presumably flung out of Ethridge.
"You mean, by an allied convoy, right?" Shaftoe asks.
"An allied convoy?" the pilot asks mockingly. "Where the hell are we
going to find an allied convoy? This is Tunisia ."
"Well, then, what do you mean, we've got to get spotted by a convoy?
You mean we have to spot a convoy, right?"
"Very sorry," the flyboy says, "I'm busy."
When he turns back, he finds Lieutenant Enoch Root kneeling by a
relatively large piece of Ethridge, going through Ethridge's attache case.
Shaftoe cops a look of exaggerated moral outrage and points the finger of
blame.
"Look, Shaftoe," Root shouts, "I'm just following orders. Taking over
for him."
He pulls out a small bundle, all wrapped in thick, yellowish plastic
sheeting. He checks it over, then glances up reprovingly, one more time, at
Shaftoe.
"It was a fucking joke!" Shaftoe says. "Remember? When I thought those
guys were looting the corpses? On the beach?"
Root doesn't laugh. Either he's pissed off that Shaftoe successfully
bullshitted him, or he doesn't enjoy corpse looting humor. Root carries the
wrapped bundle back to that other body, the one in the wetsuit. He stuffs
the bundle inside the suit.
Then he squats by the body and ponders. He ponders for a long time.
Shaftoe kind of gets a kick out of watching Enoch ponder, which is like
watching an exotic dancer shake her tits.
The light changes again as they descend from the clouds. The sun is
setting, shining redly through the Saharan haze. Shaftoe looks out a window
and is startled to see that they are over the sea now. Below them is a
convoy of ships each making a neat white V in the dark water, each lit up on
one side by the red sun.
The airplane banks and makes a slow loop around the convoy. Shaftoe
hears distant pocking noises. Black flowers bloom and fade in the sky around
them. He realizes that the ships are trying to hit them with ack ack. Then
the plane ascends once more into the shelter of the clouds, and it gets
nearly dark.
He looks at Enoch Root for the first time in a while. Root is sitting
back in his little nook, reading by flashlight. A bundle of papers is open
on his lap. It is the plastic wrapped bundle that Root took out of
Ethridge's attache case and shoved into Gerald Hott's wetsuit. Shaftoe
figures that the encounter with convoy and ack ack finally pushed Root over
the edge, and that he yanked the bundle right back out again to have a look
at it.
Root glances up and locks eyes with Shaftoe. He does not seem nervous
or guilty. It is a strikingly calm and cool look.
Shaftoe holds his gaze for a long moment. If there were the slightest
trace of guilt or nervousness there, he would turn the chaplain in as a
German spy. But there isn't Enoch Root ain't working for the Germans. He
ain't working for the Allies either. He's working for a Higher Power.
Shaftoe nods imperceptibly, and Root's gaze softens.
"They're all dead, Bobby," he shouts. "Those islanders. The ones you
saw on the beach on Guadalcanal."
So that explains why Root is so touchy about corpse looting jokes.
"Sorry," Shaftoe says, moving aft so they don't have to scream at each
other. "How'd it happen?"
"After we got you back to my cabin, I transmitted a message to my
handlers in Brisbane," Root says. "Enciphered it using a special code. Told
them I'd picked up one Marine Raider, who looked like he might actually
live, and would someone please come round and collect him."
Shaftoe nods. He remembers that he'd heard lots of dots and dashes, but
he had been out of whack with fevers and morphine and whatever home remedies
Root had pulled out of his cigar box.
"Well, they responded," Root went on, "and said 'We can't go there, but
would you please take him to such and such place and rendezvous with some
other Marine Raiders.' Which, as you'll recall, is what we did."
"Yeah," Shaftoe says.
"So far so good. But when I got back to the cabin after handing you
over, the Nipponese had been through. Killed every islander they could find.
Burned the cabin. Burned everything. Set booby traps around the place that
nearly killed me. I just barely got out of the damn place alive."
Shaftoe nods, as only a guy who's seen the Nips in action can nod.
"Well they evacuated me to Brisbane where I started making a stink
about codes. That's the only way they could have found me obviously our
codes had been broken. And after I'd made enough of a stink, someone
apparently said, 'You're British, you're a priest, you're a medical doctor,
you can handle a rifle, you know Morse code, and most importantly of all,
you're a fucking pain in the ass so off you go!" And next thing I know, I'm
in that meat locker in Algiers."
Shaftoe glances away and nods. Root seems to get the message, which is
that Shaftoe doesn't know anything more than he does.
Eventually, Enoch Root wraps the bundle up again, just like it was
before. But he doesn't put it back in the attache case. He stuffs it into
Gerald Hott's wetsuit.
Later they emerge from the clouds again, close to a moonlit port, and
dip down very close to the ocean, going so slow that even Shaftoe, who knows
nothing about planes, senses they are about to stall. They open the side
door of the Dakota and, one two three NOW, throw the body of PFC Gerald Hott
out into the ocean. He makes what would be a big splash in the Oconomowoc
town pool, but in the ocean it doesn't come to much.
An hour or so later they land the same Gooney Bird on an airstrip in
the midst of a stunning aerial bombardment. They abandon the Skytrain at the
end of the airstrip, next to the other C 47, and run through darkness,
following the lead of the British pilots. Then they go down a stairway and
are underground in a bomb shelter, to be precise. They can feel the bombs
now but can't hear them.
"Welcome to Malta," someone says. Shaftoe looks around and sees that he
is surrounded by men in British and American uniforms. The Americans are
familiar it's the Marine Raider squad from Algiers, flown in on that other
Dakota. The Brits are unfamiliar, and Shaftoe pegs them as the SAS men that
those fellows in Washington were telling him about. The only thing they all
have in common is that each man, somewhere on his uniform, is wearing the
number 2702.
Chapter 18 NON DISCLOSURE
Avi shows up on time, idling his fairly good, but not disgustingly
ostentatious, Nipponese sports car gingerly up the steep road, which has
crazed into a loose mosaic of asphalt flagstones.
Randy watches from the second floor deck, staring fifty feet almost
straight down through the sunroof. Avi is clad in the trousers of a good
tropical weight business suit, a tailored white Sea Island cotton shirt,
dark ski goggles, and a wide brimmed canvas hat.
The house is a tall, isolated structure rising out of the middle of a
California grassland that slopes up from the Pacific, a few kilometers away.
Chilly air climbs up the slope, rising and falling in slow surges, like surf
on a beach. When Avi gets out of his car the first thing he does is pull on
his suit jacket.
He hauls two oversized laptop cases out of the tiny luggage compartment
in the car's nose, walks into the house without knocking (he has not been to
this particular house before, but he has been to others run along similar
principles), finds Randy and Eb waiting in one of its many rooms, and hauls
about fifteen thousand dollars worth of portable computer gear out of the
bags. He sets them up on a table. Avi hits the start button on two laptops
and, as they crawl through the boot process, plugs them into the wall so
that the batteries won't drain. A power conduit, with grounded three prong
outlets spaced every eighteen inches, has been screwed down remorselessly
along every inch of every wall, spanning drywall; holes in the drywall;
primeval op art contact paper; fake wood grain paneling; faded Grateful Dead
posters; and even the odd doorway.
One of the laptops is connected to a tiny portable printer, which Avi
loads with a few sheets of paper. The other laptop starts up a few lines of
text running across the screen, then beeps and stops. Randy ambles over and
looks at it curiously. It is displaying a prompt:
FILO.
Which Randy knows is short for Finux Loader, a program that allows you
to choose which operating system you want to run.
"Finux," Avi mumbles, answering Randy's unspoken question.
Randy types "Finux" and hits the return key. "How many operating
systems you have on this thing?"
"Windows 95, for games and when I need to let some lamer borrow my
computer temporarily," Avi says. "Windows NT for office type stuff. BeOS for
hacking, and screwing around with media. Finux for industrial strength
typesetting."
"Which one do you want now?"
"BeOS. Going to display some JPEGs. I assume there's an overhead
projector in this place?"
Randy looks over at Eb, the only person in the room who actually lives
here. Eb seems bigger than he is, and maybe it's because of his detonating
hair: two feet long, blond with a faint reddish glow, thick and wavy and
tending to congeal into ropy strands. No ponytail holder can contain it, so
when he bothers to tie it back, he uses a piece of string. Eb is doodling on
one of those little computers that uses a stylus so that you can write on
the screen. In general, hackers don't use them, but Eb (or rather, one of
Eb's defunct corporations) wrote the software for this model and so he has a
lot of them lying around. He seems to be absorbed in whatever he's doing,
but after Randy has been looking in his direction for two seconds, he senses
it, and looks up. He has pale green eyes and wears a luxuriant red beard,
except when he's in one of his shaving phases, which usually coincide with
serious romantic involvements. Right now his beard is about half an inch
long, indicating a recent breakup, and implying a willingness to take new
risks.
"Overhead projector?" Randy says.
Eb closes his eyes, which is what he does during memory access, then
gets up and walks out of the room.
The tiny printer begins to eke paper. The first line of text, centered
at the top of the page, is: NONDISCLOSURE AGREEMENT. More lines follow.
Randy has seen them, or ones like them, so many times that his eyes glaze
over and he turns away. The only thing that ever changes is the name of the
company: in this case: EPIPHYTE(2) CORP.
"Nice goggles."
"If you think these are weird, you should see what I'm going to put on
when the sun goes down," Avi says. He rummages in a bag and pulls out a
contraption that looks like a pair of glasses without lenses, with a
dollhouse scale light fixture mounted above each eye. A wire runs down to a
battery pack with belt loops. He slides a tiny switch on the battery pack
and the lights come on: expensive looking blue white halogen.
Randy raises his eyebrows.
"It's all jet lag avoidance," Avi explains. "I'm adjusted to Asian
time. I'm going back there in two days. I don't want my body to get back on
Left Coast time while I'm here."
"So the hat and goggles "
"Simulate night. This thing simulates daylight. See, your body takes
its cues from the light, adjusts its clock accordingly. Speaking of which,
would you mind closing the blinds?"
The room has west facing windows, affording a view down the grassy
slope to Half Moon Bay. It is late afternoon and the sun is pouring through.
Randy savors the view for a moment, then drops the blinds.
Eb stalks back into the room with an overhead projector dangling from
one hand, looking for a moment like Beowulf brandishing a monster's severed
arm. He puts it on the table and aims it at the wall. There is no need for a
screen, because above the ubiquitous power strips, every wall in the house
is covered with whiteboards. Many of the whiteboards are, in turn, covered
with cryptical incantations, written in primary colors. Some of them are
enclosed in irregular borders and labeled DO NOT ERASE! or simply DNE or NO!
In front of where Eb has put the overhead projector, there is a grocery
list, a half erased fragment of a flowchart, a fax number in Russia, a
couple of dotted quads Internet addresses and a few words in German, which
were presumably written by Eb himself. Dr. Eberhard Föhr scans all of this,
finds that none of it is enclosed in a DNE border, and wipes it away with an
eraser.
Two more men come into the room, deeply involved in a conversation
about some exasperating company in Burlingame. One of them is dark and lean
and looks like a gunfighter; he even wears a black cowboy hat. The other is
tubby and blond and looks like he just got out of a Rotary Club meeting.
They have one detail in common: each is wearing a bright silver bracelet on
his wrist.
Randy takes the NDAs out of the printers and passes them out, two
copies each, each pair preprinted with a name: Randy Waterhouse, Eberhard
Föhr, John Cantrell (the guy in the black cowboy hat) and Tom Howard (the
fair haired Middle American). As John and Tom reach for the pages, the
silver bracelets intercept stray beams of light sneaking through the blinds.
Each is printed with a red caduceus and several lines of text.
"Those look new," Randy says. "Did they change the wording again?"
"Yeah!" John Cantrell says. "This is version 6.0 just out last week."
Anywhere else, the bracelets would mean that John and Tom were
suffering from some sort of life threatening condition, such as an allergy
to common antibiotics. A medic hauling them out of a wrecked car would see
the bracelet and follow the instructions. But this is Silicon Valley and
different rules apply. The bracelets say, on one side:
IN CASE OF DEATH SEE REVERSE FOR BIOSTASIS PROTOCOL FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS
COLLECT REWARD $100,000
and on the other:
CALL NOW FOR INSTRUCTIONS I 800 NNN NNNN
PUSH 50,000 U HEPARIN IV AND DO CPR WHILE COOLING WITH ICE TO 10C.KEEP
PH 7.5
NO AUTOPSY OR EMBALMING
It is a recipe for freezing a dead, or nearly dead, person. People who
wear this bracelet believe that, if this recipe is followed, the brain and
other delicate tissues can be iced without destroying them. A few decades
down the line, when nanotechnology has made it possible to be immortal, they
hope to be thawed out. John Cantrell and Tom Howard believe that there is a
reasonable chance that they will still be having conversations with each
other a million years from now.
The room gets quiet as all of the men scan the forms, their eyes
picking out certain familiar clauses. They have probably signed a hundred
NDA forms between them. Around here, it is like offering someone a cup of
coffee.
A woman comes into the room, burdened with tote bags, and beams an
apology for being late. Beryl Hagen looks like a Norman Rockwell aunt, an
apron wearing, apple pie toting type. In twenty years, she's been the chief
financial officer of twelve different small high tech companies. Ten of them
have gone out of business. Except in the case of the second one, this was
through no fault of Beryl's. The sixth was Randy's Second Business Foray.
One was absorbed by Microsoft, one became a successful, independent company
in its own right. Beryl made enough money from the latter two to retire. She
consults and writes while she looks for something interesting enough to draw
her back into action, and her presence in this room suggests that
Epiphyte(2) Corp. must not be completely bogus. Or maybe she's just being
polite to Avi. Randy gives her a bearhug, lifting her off the floor, and
then hands her two copies of the NDA with her name on them.
Avi has detached the screen from his big laptop and laid it flat on the
surface of the overhead projector, which shines light through the liquid
crystal display and projects a color image on the whiteboard. It is a
typical desktop: a couple of terminal windows and some icons. Avi goes
around and picks up the signed NDAs, scans them all, hands one copy back to
each person, files the rest in the outer pocket of a laptop bag. He begins
to type on the laptop's keyboard, and letters spill across one of the
windows. "Just so you know," Avi mumbles, "Epiphyte Corp., which I'll call
Epiphyte(1) for clarity, is a Delaware corporation, one and one half years
old. The shareholders are myself, Randy, and Springboard Capital. We're in
the telecoms business in the Philippines. I can give you details later if
you want. Our work there has positioned us to be aware of some new
opportunities in that part of the world. Epiphyte(2) is a California
corporation, three weeks old. If things go the way we are hoping they will
go, Epiphyte(1) will be folded into it according to some kind of stock
transfer scheme the details of which are too boring to talk about now.
Avi hits the return key. A new window opens on the desktop. It is a
color map scanned in from an atlas, tall and narrow. Most of it is oceanic
blue. A rugged coastline juts in through the top border, with a few cities
labeled: Nagasaki, Tokyo. Shanghai is in the upper left corner. The
Philippine archipelago is dead center. Taiwan is directly north of it, and
to the south is a chain of islands forming a porous barrier between Asia and
a big land mass labeled with English words like Darwin and Great Sandy
Desert.
"This probably looks weird to most of you," Avi says. "Usually these
presentations begin with a diagram of a computer network, or a flowchart or
something. We don't normally deal with maps. We're all so used to working in
a purely abstract realm that it seems almost bizarre to go out into the real
world and physically do something.
"But I like maps. I've got maps all over my house. I'm going to suggest
to you that the skills and knowledge we have all been developing in our work
especially pertaining to the Internet have applications out here." He taps
the whiteboard. "In the real world. You know, the big round wet ball where
billions of people live."
There is a bit of polite snickering as Avi skims his hand over his
computer's trackball, whacks a button with his thumb. A new image appears:
the same map, with bright color lines running across the ocean, looping from
one city to the next, roughly following the coastlines.
"Existing undersea cables. The fatter the line, the bigger the pipe,"
Avi says. "Now, what is wrong with this picture?"
There are several fat lines running east from places like Tokyo, Hong
Kong, and Australia, presumably connecting them with the United States.
Across the South China Sea, which lies between the Philippines and Vietnam,
another fat line angles roughly north south, but it doesn't connect either
of those two countries: it goes straight to Hong Kong, then continues up the
China coast to Shanghai, Korea, and Tokyo.
"Since the Philippines are in the center of the map," John Cantrell
says, "I predict that you are going to point out that hardly any fat lines
go to the Philippines."
"Hardly any fat lines go to the Philippines!" Avi announces briskly. He
points out the one exception, which runs from Taiwan south to northern
Luzon, then skips down the coast to Corregidor. "Except for this one, which
Epiphyte(l) is involved with. But it's not just that. There is a general
paucity of fat lines in a north south direction, connecting Australia with
Asia. A lot of data packets going from Sydney to Tokyo have to be routed
through California. There's a market opportunity."
Beryl breaks in. "Avi, before you get started on this," she says,
sounding cautious and regretful, "I have to say that laying long distance,
deep sea cables is a difficult business to break into."
"Beryl is right!" Avi says. "The only people who have the wherewithal
to lay those cables are AT&T, Cable & Wireless, and Kokusai Denshin
Denwa. It's tricky. It's expensive. It requires massive NRE."
The abbreviation stands for "non recoverable expenses," meaning
engineering work to complete a feasibility study that would be money down
the toilet if the idea didn't fly.
"So what are you thinking?" Beryl says.
Avi clicks up another map. This one is the same as the previous, except
that new lines have been drawn in: a whole series of short island to island
links. A bewilderingly numerous chain of short hops down the length of the
Philippine archipelago.
"You want to wire the Philippines and patch them into the Net via your
existing link to Taiwan," says Tom Howard, in a heroic bid to short circuit
what he senses will be a lengthy part of Avi's presentation.
"The Philippines are going to be hot shit informationally speaking,"
Avi says. "The government has its flaws, but basically it's a democracy
modeled after Western institutions. Unlike most Asians, they do ASCII. Most
of them speak English. Longstanding ties to the United States. These guys
are going to be big players, sooner or later, in the information economy."
Randy breaks in. "We've already established a foothold there. We know
the local business environment. And we have cash flow."
Avi clicks up another map. This one's harder to make out. It looks like
a relief map of a vast region of high mountains interrupted by occasional
plateaus. Its appearance in the middle of this presentation without any
labels or explanation from Avi makes it an implicit challenge to the mental
acumen of the other people in the room. None of them is going to ask for
help anytime soon. Randy watches them squint and tilt their heads from side
to side. Eberhard Föhr, who is good at odd puzzles, gets it first.
"Southeast Asia with the oceans drained," he says. "That high ridge on
the right is New Guinea. Those bumps are the volcanoes of Borneo."
"Pretty cool, huh?" Avi says. "It's a radar map. U.S. military
satellites gathered all this data. You can get it for next to nothing."
On this map the Philippines can be understood, not as a chain of
separate islands, but as the highest regions of a huge oblong plateau
surrounded by deep gashes in the earth's crust. To get from Luzon up to
Taiwan by going across the ocean floor you would have to plunge into a deep
trench, flanked by parallel mountain ranges, and follow it northwards for
about three hundred miles. But south of Luzon, in the region where Avi is
proposing to lay a network of inter island cables, it's all shallow and
flat.
Avi clicks again, superimposing transparent blue over the parts that
are below sea level, green on the islands. Then he zooms in on an area in
the center of the map, where the Philippine plateau extends two arms
southwest toward northern Borneo, embracing, and nearly enclosing, a diamond
shaped body of water, three hundred and fifty miles across. "The Sulu Sea,"
he announces. "No relation to the token Asian on Star Trek ."
No one laughs. They are not really here to be entertained they are
concentrating on the map. All of the different archipelagos and seas are
confusing, even for smart people with good spatial relations. The
Philippines form the upper right boundary of the Sulu Sea, north Borneo
(part of Malaysia) the lower left, the Sulu Archipelago (part of the
Philippines) the lower right, and the upper left boundary is one extremely
long skinny Philippine island called Palawan.
"This reminds us that national boundaries are artificial and silly,"
Avi says. "The Sulu Sea is a basin in the middle of a larger plateau shared
by the Philippines and Borneo. So if you're wiring up the Philippines, you
can just as easily wire Borneo up to that network at the same time, just by
outlining the Sulu Sea with shallow, short hop cables. Like this."
Avi clicks again and the computer draws in more colored lines.
"Avi, why are we here?" Eberhard asks.
"That is a very profound question," Avi says.
"We know the economics of these startups," Eb says. "We begin with
nothing but the idea. That's what the NDA is for to protect your idea. We
work on the idea together put our brainpower into it and get stock in
return. The result of this work is software. The software is copyrightable,
trademarkable, perhaps patentable. It is intellectual property. It is worth
some money. We all own it in common, through our shares. Then we sell some
more shares to an investor. We use the money to hire more people and turn it
into a product, to market it, and so on. That's how the system works, but
I'm beginning to think you don't understand it."
"Why do you say that?"
Eb looks confused. "How can we contribute to this? How can we turn our
brainpower into equity that an investor will want to own a part of?"
Everyone looks at Beryl. Beryl's nodding agreement with Eb. Tom Howard
says, "Avi. Look. I can engineer big computer installations. John wrote Ordo
he knows everything about crypto. Randy does Internet, Eb does weird stuff,
Beryl does money. But as far as I know, none of us knows diddly about
undersea cable engineering. What good will our resumes do you when you go up
in front of some venture capitalists?"
Avi's nodding. "Everything you say is true," he concedes smoothly.
"We would have to be crazy to get involved in running cables through
the Philippines. That is a job for FiliTel, with whom Epiphyte(1) has been
joint venturing."
"Even if we were crazy, Beryl says, "we wouldn't have the opportunity,
because no one would give us the money."
"Fortunately we don't need to worry about that," Avi says, "because
it's being done for us." He turns to the whiteboard, picks up a red magic
marker, and draws a fat line between Taiwan and Luzon, his hands picking up
a leprous, mottled look from the shaded relief of the ocean floor that is
being projected against his skin. "KDD, which is anticipating major growth
in the Philippines, is already laying another big cable here." He moves down
and begins to draw smaller, shorter links between islands in the
archipelago. "And FiliTel, which is funded by AVCLA Asia Venture Capital Los
Angeles is wiring the Philippines."
"What does Epiphyte(l) have to do with that?" Tom Howard asks.
"To the extent they want to use that network for Internet Protocol
traffic, they need routers and network savvy," Randy explains.
"So, to repeat my question: why are we here?" Eberhard says, patiently
but firmly.
Avi works with his pen for a while. He circles an island at one corner
of the Sulu Sea, centered in the gap between North Borneo and the long
skinny Philippine island called Palawan. He labels it in block letters:
SULTANATE OF KINAKUTA.
"Kinakuta was run by white sultans for a while. It's a long story. Then
it was a German colony," Avi says. "Back then, Borneo was part of the Dutch
East Indies, and Palawan like the rest of the Philippines was first Spanish
and then American. So this was the Germans' foothold in the area."
"Germans always ended up holding the shittiest colonies," Eb says
ruefully.
"After the First World War, they handed it over to the Japanese, along
with a lot of other islands much farther to the east. All of these islands,
collectively, were called the Mandates because Japan controlled them under a
League of Nations Mandate. During the Second World War the Japanese used
Kinakuta as a base for attacks on the Dutch East Indies and the Philippines.
They retained a naval base and airfield there. After the war, Kinakuta
became independent, as it had been before the Germans. The population is
Muslim or ethnic Chinese around the edges, animist in the center, and it's
always been ruled by a sultan even while occupied by the Germans and the
Japanese, who both co opted the sultans but kept them in place as
figureheads. Kinakuta had oil reserves, but they were unreachable until the
technology got better and prices went up, around the time of the Arab oil
embargo, which was also when the current sultan came into power. That sultan
is now a very rich man not as rich as the Sultan of Brunei, who happens to
be his second cousin, but rich."
"The sultan is backing your company?" Beryl asks.
"Not in the way you mean," Avi says.
"What way do you mean?" Tom Howard asks, impatient.
"Let me put it this way," Avi says. "Kinakuta is a member of the United
Nations. It is every bit as much an independent country and member of the
community of nations as France or England. As a matter of fact, it is
exceptionally independent because of its oil wealth. It is basically a
monarchy the sultan makes the laws, but only after extensive consultation
with his ministers, who set policy and draft legislation. And I've been
spending a lot of time, recently, with the Minister of Posts and
Telecommunications. I have been helping the minister draft a new law that
will govern all telecommunications passing through Kinakutan territory."
"Oh, my god!" John Cantrell says. He is awestruck.
"One free share of stock to the man in the black hat!" Avi says. "John
has figured out Avi's secret plan. John, would you like to explain to the
other contestants?"
John takes his hat off and runs his hand back through his long hair. He
puts his hat back on and heaves a sigh. "Avi is proposing to start a data
haven," he says.
A little murmur of admiration runs through the room. Avi waits for it
to subside and says, "Slight correction: the sultan's starting the data
haven. I'm proposing to make money off it."
Chapter 19 ULTRA
Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse goes into battle armed with one third of
a sheet of British typing paper on which has been typed some words that
identify it as a pass to Bletchley Park. His name and some other things have
been scribbled on it in some upper class officer's Mont Blanc blue black,
the words ALL SECTIONS circled, and a stamp smashed across it, blurred into
a red whore's kiss, with sheer carelessness conveying greater Authority and
Power than the specious clarity of a forger.
He finds his way round the mansion to the narrow lane that runs between
it and its row of red brick garages (or stables, as his grandparents would
be likely to peg them). He finds it a very pleasant place for a cigarette.
The lane is lined with trees, a densely planted hedge of them. The sun is
just setting now. It is still high enough to snipe through any small defects
that it finds in the defensive perimeter of the horizon, so narrow red beams
strike him surprisingly in the eye as he ambles back and forth. He knows one
is shining invisibly through the clear air several feet above him, because
it is betraying an aerial: a strand of copper wire stretched from the wall
of the mansion to a nearby cypress. It catches the light in precisely the
same way as the strand of the spiderweb that Waterhouse was playing with
earlier.
The sun will be down soon; it is already down in Berlin, as in most of
the hellish empire that Hitler has built from Calais to the Volga. Time for
the radio operators to begin their work. Radio does not, in general, go
around corners. This can be a real pain when you are conquering the world,
which is inconveniently round, placing all of your most active military
units over the horizon. But if you use shortwave, then you can bounce the
information off the ionosphere. This works a good deal better when the sun
is not in the sky, sluicing the atmosphere with wideband noise. So radio
telegraphers, and the people who eavesdrop on them (what the Brits call the
Y Service) are, alike, nocturnal beings.
As Waterhouse has just observed, the mansion has an aerial or two. But
Bletchley Park is a huge and ravenous spider that requires a web the size of
a nation to feed it. He has seen enough evidence, from the black cables
climbing the mansion's walls and the smell and hiss of the massed teletypes,
to know that the web is at least partly made of copper wires. Another piece
of the web is made of rude stuff like concrete and asphalt.
The gate swings open and a man on a green motorcycle banks steeply into
the lane, the two cylinders of his machine blatting away, the noise stinging
Waterhouse's nose as he rides by. Waterhouse strides after him for some
distance, but loses his trail after a hundred yards or so. That is
acceptable; more of them will be along soon, as the Wehrmacht's nervous
system awakens and its signals are picked up by the Y Service.
The motorcyclist went through a quaint little gate that joins two old
buildings. The gate is topped by a tiny cupola with a weathervane and a
clock. Waterhouse goes through it and finds himself in a little square that
evidently dates back to when Bletchley Park was a precious Buckinghamshire
farmstead. To the left, the line of stables continues. Small gables have
been set into the roof, which is stained with bird shit. The building is
quivering with pigeons. Directly in front of him is a nice little red brick
Tudor farmhouse, the only thing he has seen so far that is not
architecturally offensive. Off to his right is a one story building. Strange
information is coming out of this building: the hot oil smell of teletypes,
but no typing noises, just a high mechanical whine.
A door opens on the stable building and a man emerges carrying a large
but evidently lightweight box with a handle on the top. Cooing noises come
from the box and Waterhouse realizes that it contains pigeons. Those birds
living up in the gables are not feral; they are homing pigeons. Carriers of
information, strands of Bletchley Park's web.
He homes in on the building that smells of hot oil and gazes into a
window. As evening falls, light has begun to leak out of it, betraying
information to black German reconnaissance planes, so a porter is strutting
about the courtyard slamming the black shutters closed.
Some information comes into Waterhouse's eyes at least: on the other
side of that window, men are gathered around a machine. Most of them are
wearing civilian clothes, and they have been too busy, for too long, to
trifle much with combs and razors and shoe polish. The men are intensely
focused upon their work, which all has to do with this large machine. The
machine consists of a large framework of square steel tubing, like a
bedstead set up on one end. Metal drums with the diameter of dinner plates,
an inch or so thick, are mounted at several locations on this framework.
Paper tape has been threaded in a bewilderingly loopy trajectory from drum
to drum. It looks as if a dozen yards of tape are required to thread the
machine.
One of the men has been working on a rubber drive belt that goes around
one of the drums. He steps back from it and makes a gesture with his hand.
Another man flips a switch and the drums all begin to spin at once. The tape
begins to fly through the system. Holes punched in the tape carry data; it
all blurs into a grey streak now, the speed creating an illusion in which
the tape appears to dissolve into a ribbon of smoke.
No, it is not an illusion. Real smoke is curling up from the spinning
drums. The tape is running through the machine so fast that it is catching
fire before the eyes of Waterhouse and the men inside, who watch it calmly,
as if it were smoking in an entirely new and interesting way.
If there is a machine in the world capable of reading data from a tape
that fast, Waterhouse has never heard of it.
The black shutter slams home. Just as it does, Waterhouse gets one
fragmentary glimpse of another object standing in the corner of the room: a
steel rack in which a large number of grey cylindrical objects are stored in
neat rows.
Two motorcyclists come through the courtyard at once, running in the
darkness with their headlights off. Waterhouse jogs after them for a bit,
leaving the picturesque old courtyard behind and entering into the world of
the huts, the new structures thrown up in the last year or two. "Hut" makes
him think of a tiny thing, but these huts, taken together, are more like
that new Pentagon thing that the War Department has been putting up across
the river from D.C. They embody a blunt need for space unfiltered through
any aesthetic or even human considerations.
Waterhouse walks to an intersection of roads where he thought he heard
the motorcycles making a turn, and stops, hemmed in by blast walls. On an
impulse, he clambers to the top of a wall and takes a seat. The view from
here is no better. He knows that thousands of people are at work all around
him in these huts, but he sees none of them, there are no signposts.
He is still trying to work out that business that he saw through the
window.
The tape was running so fast that it smoked. There is no point of
driving it that fast unless the machine can read the information that fast
transforming the pattern of holes in the tape into electrical impulses.
But why bother, if those impulses had nowhere to go? No human mind
could deal with a stream of characters coming in at that speed. No teletype
that Waterhouse knew of could even print them out.
It only makes sense if they are constructing a machine. A mechanical
calculator of some sort that can absorb the data and then do something with
it perform some calculation presumably a cipher breaking type of
calculation.
Then he remembers the rack he glimpsed in the corner, its many rows of
identical grey cylinders. Viewed end on, they looked like some kind of
ammunition. But they are too smooth and glossy for that. Those cylinders,
Waterhouse realizes, are made of blown glass.
They are vacuum tubes. Hundreds of them. More tubes in one place than
Waterhouse has e