torrent of error  messages triggered by its inability to find various
pieces of hardware that were  present  on Randy's laptop (which is in a Ford
dealership's dumpster in  Los Altos) but are not on Tom's. And yet the basic
kernel works to  the  point that Randy can look at the file system and makes
sure it's intact. The Arethusa directory is still there, with its  long list
of short  files, each  file the result of running a different stack of cards
through  Chester's  card  reader.  Randy  opens up the  first  one and finds
several lines of random capital letters.
     "How do  you know there's  no  information  about the primary  in those
messages, Randy?" Doug asks.
     "The NSA couldn't decrypt these messages in ten years," Randy says. "It
all turned out to be a hoax. The output of a random number generator."
     Randy jumps back out to the file listing and types
     grep AADAA *
     and hits the  return key. It is  a  command to  find the opening letter
group in  the  ETC  card  messages, the famous  one  to  which Pontifex  had
alluded. The  machine answers back  almost immediately with an empty prompt,
meaning that the search failed.
     "Ho ly shit," Randy says.
     "What?" everyone says at once.
     Randy takes a long, deep breath. "These are  not the same messages that
Earl Comstock spent ten years attempting to break."


     <B>Chapter 81 DELUGE</B>


     It  takes  Goto Dengo about  half  a  minute  to waddle  up the  narrow
entrance of the  tunnel. He is trailing  the fingers of  one hand  along the
stone  ceiling just above his head, feeling the scars of  the drills. Behind
him  he can hear  the  four members  of  his  crew  making their  way along,
muttering to each other calmly.
     His  fingers slide  over a lip and rise up into empty, dark space; he's
into the main drift now.  He stands up  and wades forward. Perfect blackness
is cozy and reassuring to him in it, he  can always pretend that he is still
a boy, back on Hokkaido. He can make believe that  the last few years of his
life have never happened.
     But  in  fact  he is  a  grownup  and  he  is trapped in a hole in  the
Philippines  and surrounded by armies  of demons. He  opens the valves on an
acetylene headlamp and sparks it into life. He is perfectly capable, by this
point, of finding his way around Golgotha in the dark, but  his crew is not,
and he leaves them far behind. He stubs his toe brutally on a large gold bar
that has carelessly been left lying across the iron railway, and curses.
     "Is  everything okay, Lieutenant?"  says one of his crew,  fifty meters
behind him.
     "Fine,"  Goto Dengo says, loudly  and clearly. "You four be careful you
do not break your toes on this bar."
     So  now,  Wing  and Rodolfo and their  men,  waiting up ahead, know the
number of Nipponese soldiers they have to kill.
     "Where are the last few workers?" one of the crew shouts.
     "In the fool's vault."
     It takes them several minutes to pick their way through the main vault,
because  it is packed with  treasure. The starry core of  a galaxy must look
like this.  They clamber  up the shaft in its ceiling and make their  way to
the Hall of Glory. Goto Dengo finds the bare wires that lead to the electric
light bulb and attaches them to the screw terminals on a battery. Running at
the wrong voltage, the bulb looks like a tangerine floating in ink.
     "Shut off your headlamps," Goto  Dengo says, "to conserve fuel.  I will
leave mine burning in case there is an interruption in the power."
     He  pulls  a  fistful of white  cotton from a sterile  box.  It is  the
cleanest  whitest thing he has seen in several years. He pulls it apart into
smaller  wads, like Father  Ferdinand  breaking  the bread of the  mass, and
passes them out to  the men,  who stuff  it ritualistically into their ears.
"There  is no more time to waste," he hollers, "Captain Noda must be growing
impatient out there."
     "Sir!" one of the  men says, standing at attention  and  handing  him a
pair of wires marked MAIN TUNNEL DEMOLITION.
     "Very well,"  Goto Dengo  says, and screws the wires down to a  pair of
terminals on a wooden switch box.
     It seems  as though  he  should say something  ceremonious, but nothing
comes  to mind. Nipponese men are dying  all  over the Pacific without first
getting to make speeches.
     He clenches his teeth together,  shuts his eyes, and twists  the switch
handle.
     The  shock wave  comes through the floor  first, whacking the  soles of
their feet like a  flying plank. A moment later it comes through the air and
strikes them  like a  moving wall of stone. The cotton  in the ears seems to
accomplish nothing. Goto Dengo feels his eyes bounce  off the backs of their
sockets. All of his teeth feel as though they have  been crisply sheared off
at  the gumline with cold chisels. The wind is all forced out of his  lungs.
They  are empty for  the first  time since  the moment  of  his  birth. Like
newborn  infants, he  and  the  other men  can only writhe  and  look around
themselves in a panic until their bodies learn how to draw breath again.
     One of the men brought a bottle of sake, which has shattered. They pass
around  the jagged bottom  of  the bottle, each man taking  a gulp  of  what
remains.  Goto Dengo tries to pull the cotton out of his ears and finds that
the shock wave drove it in so deep that it cannot be extracted. So he merely
shouts: "Check your watches." They all do. "In two hours,  Captain Noda will
demolish  the plug on  the bottom of the lake  and flood the water traps. In
the meantime, we have work to do. You all know your jobs get to work!"
     They all <I>hai,</I> turn on  their heels, and go  their separate ways.  It is
the  first time that Goto Dengo has actually  sent  men off to their deaths.
But they  are  all dead men anyway, and so he doesn't know how to feel about
it.
     If he still believed  in the emperor still believed in the war he would
think nothing of it. But if he still believed,  he wouldn't be doing what he
is about to do.
     It  is  important  to  keep  up  the  appearance that this is  a normal
operation,  and so he  descends to  the vault to perform  his next scheduled
duty: inspect what used to be the main drift. The vault is filled with a fog
of rock dust around which his windpipe clenches like a fist grabbing a rope.
His  acetylene lamp only  makes the dust glow,  giving  him a  visibility of
perhaps six  inches. All  he can  see is  the bullion right in front  of his
face, which still glimmers beneath a film of dust and smoke.  The shock wave
has deranged his formerly neat stacks  of  crates  and bricks and turned the
entire  hoard into a  rude  mound that is still shedding avalanches, seeking
its angle of  repose. A 75  kilogram gold brick slides down  the pile like a
runaway boxcar,  emerging suddenly from the  cloud of dust, and he jumps out
of its way. Bits of rock are still sifting down from the  crazed ceiling and
plinking against his helmet.
     He  scrambles  carefully over the heap,  breathing  through  a  wad  of
cotton, until he can see what  used to be  the main drift.  The dynamite has
done  the  right thing:  shattered  the roof  of the  drift into billions of
shards.  Collapsed on the floor, they occupy  a larger volume than the  same
mass  of stone did  when  it was  all in one piece. The drift is filled with
tons of loose stone, all the way down to the entrance along the  Tojo River,
where Captain Noda's men are at work  even now, concealing the tiny puncture
wound behind river rocks.
     He feels,  rather than hears, a  small  explosion, and knows that  some
thing is going wrong. No one should be setting off explosions now.
     Movement in this  place is agonizingly slow, like a nightmare when  you
are trying to run away from a demon. It takes him so long to get back to the
Hall of Glory  that  there  is  almost no point in  doing it;  whatever  was
happening is over when he arrives.
     What he sees, when he arrives, is a group of three men waiting for him:
Wing, Rodolfo, and the Filipino named Bong.
     "The soldiers?"
     "All dead,"  Rodolfo  says  flatly, irritated by  the stupidity  of the
question.
     "The others?"
     "One soldier set off  a  grenade. Killed himself  and my two men,  Wing
says.
     "Another  soldier heard the grenade  and had a knife ready when Agustin
came  for him," Bong says.  He shakes his  head sorrowfully.  "I  think that
Agustin was not ready to kill a man. He hesitated."
     Goto Dengo stares at Bong, fascinated. "And you?"
     Bong doesn't  understand the question  for a  moment. Then light dawns.
"Oh, no, I  did not hesitate, Lieutenant Goto. A  Nipponese soldier  hurt my
sister one time, in a very inappropriate way."
     Goto Dengo stands there silently for a while, until he notices that the
other men are  all looking at him expectantly. Then he  checks his watch. He
is shocked  to see that only half an hour has gone by  since he  set off the
dynamite.
     "We have an hour and a half before  the  water traps are flooded. If we
are  not in  the  Bubble by then,  we will be  sealed  off, with  no  escape
possible," says Goto Dengo.
     "We go there and wait," Wing suggests, in Shanghainese.
     "No.  Captain Noda listens,  outside, for more explosions," Goto  Dengo
says, also in Chinese;  then, in English, tells the Filipinos, "We  have  to
set  off  the demolition  charges  at  certain times or Noda  san will  grow
suspicious."
     "Whoever  sets  them off will  be trapped  forever  in  this  chamber,"
Rodolfo says, gesturing around them at the Hall of Glory.
     "We will not set them off from here," says Goto Dengo,  pulling the lid
from a crate. Inside are several long coils  of two stranded telephone wire.
He  hands the  coils  out to Rodolfo, Wing,  and  Bong. They understand, and
begin to splice the new wires onto the ones that terminate here.
     They retreat  through Golgotha in  stages,  lugging battery packs  with
them  and  unrolling the wires  as  they go, dynamiting the  tunnel sections
behind  them one by  one. As they  do this,  certain oddities  of the tunnel
system finally become  clear to  Rodolfo,  Wing,  and Bong. It becomes fully
evident to  them, for the first time,  that the entire complex was carefully
designed by  Goto Dengo to serve two entirely contradictory purposes.  To  a
loyal Nipponese engineer like Captain Noda it looks like  precisely what  he
was ordered to build: a  vault laced  with  booby traps. But to the four men
sealed inside, Golgotha has a  second function. It  is an escape machine. As
the purposes of certain rooms, drifts, and  other  features  suddenly become
clear,  they straighten up, blinking, and turn to look at  Goto Dengo,  with
the same expressions  as the soldiers wore, weeks  ago, when they discovered
the Buddha in the Mercedes.
     Their destination is the Bubble, a niche that Goto Dengo had them carve
out of the stone during the last couple of months. He claimed, to anyone who
asked, that  it was a water reservoir, put  there to increase the deadliness
of one of the traps. It is a wide vertical shaft, four  meters in  diameter,
that begins in  the ceiling of a peripheral drift and goes straight up for a
few  meters,  then dead  ends. Ladders  still  cling  to  its walls,  and by
ascending,  they can reach a rock  ledge big  enough to sit  on. Canteens of
water and boxes of  biscuits have already  been stocked here by Wing and his
men.
     By the time they reach their seats in the top of the Bubble, all of the
others are in awe of Goto Dengo, and ready to do whatever he says. He senses
this. It fills him with unutterable misery.
     They have fifteen minutes to wait. The  others spend  it sipping  water
and nibbling biscuits. Goto Dengo fills  it with self recrimination. "I am a
loathsome worm," he says, "a traitor, a filthy piece of dog shit, not worthy
to clean  out the latrines of true  soldiers of  Nippon. I am bereft totally
cut off from the  nation I've  betrayed. I am now part of a world  of people
who hate Nippon  and who therefore hate me but at the same time I am hateful
to my own kind. I will stay here and die."
     "You are alive,"  Rodolfo says. "You have saved our lives. And  you are
rich."
     "Rich?"
     Wing  and  Rodolfo and  Bong look  at each other,  confused.  "Yes,  of
course!" Bong says.
     Goto  Dengo  is still looking nonplussed. Reckoning that he has  merely
gone deaf or daft  from the explosions, Bong  reaches  into his trousers and
pulls out a hand sewn pouch, teases  it open,  and displays a healthy double
handful of diamonds. Wing and Rodolfo scarcely take note.
     Goto Dengo  looks  away despondently. He himself has saved  no treasure
except these men's lives. But  that's not why he feels so bad.  He had hoped
that  being thus saved  they  would  all  be noble, and  not  think  of  the
treasure. But maybe that was too much to hope for.
     A distant  thump lifts them slightly off the  ledge, just for a moment.
Goto  Dengo  feels  a  strange sensation  in  his head: the air pressure  is
beginning to rise.  The  column of  air  trapped in  the diagonal  is  being
compressed by a piston of water  rushing down it from the lake. Captain Noda
has dynamited the plug.
     Goto Dengo is so excited that he forgets to die.
     He is an engineer, trapped inside one of  his own machines. The machine
was designed to  keep him alive,  and he will  never know whether it  worked
unless it  works. After he has achieved that satisfaction,  he supposes,  he
can always kill himself at leisure.
     He pinches his nose shut, presses his lips together, and begins to blow
air into his  Eustachian  tubes,  equalizing the pressure. The others follow
his lead.
     All  of  Golgotha's  traps are  basically the same.  All of them derive
their killing power from the pressure of the water communicated down to this
level  from  the  bottom of Lake Yamamoto.  In any number  of places in  the
complex, false walls have been constructed, designed to be pierced by greedy
thieves,  or to collapse  of their own  accord when thieves dig out the sand
that holds them up. Then the water will  rush  in  with explosive force  and
probably crush them before they have a chance to drown.
     At its Golgotha end,  the diagonal tunnel forks again and again, like a
river breaking up into distributaries. Goto Dengo explained it to inspecting
officers by likening it  to the  plumbing inside  a modern  hotel,  which is
supplied by a single main that is pressurized by a distant  water tower, but
which  divides into many different  pipes  that supply pressurized  water to
taps all over the structure.
     Golgotha  seethes,  hisses,  and  moans  as every pipe in  its ramified
system is  pressurized by  the deluge  unleashed by Captain Noda's  dynamite
charge.  The bubbles of air trapped  at  the ends of those pipes are seeking
escape: some are  leaking out through cracks in  the walls  and  others  are
bubbling away into  the  diagonal.  The surface  of Lake  Yamamoto  must  be
boiling  like  a cauldron,  and  Captain  Noda must  be  standing above  it,
watching the air  flee Golgotha, grinning with satisfaction. In moments, the
floors of the  tunnels are obscured by whirling lagoons of dirty  water, and
the  barrels  and railcars that  were left there have begun to rise, bobbing
like corks and clanging together.
     Most  of the  air  trapped  in  the Golgotha  does  not,  however, come
bubbling  up out  of Lake  Yamamoto. Most of  it rises  towards the  Bubble,
because that is how Goto Dengo planned it. He knows it's working because his
ears begin to pop.
     Eventually  the water rises up into the  Bubble  itself,  but it  rises
slowly, because  the pressure of the  air  in  here has  become  quite  high
already. As the water  climbs,  it further pressurizes the bubble of air  in
which Goto Dengo and the  others are trapped. The  pressure of the air rises
steadily until it becomes equal to the  pressure  of the water. Then balance
is achieved, and the water cannot rise any  more. Another kind of balance is
being reached within their  bodies, as the  compressed air floods into their
chests, and  the  nitrogen in that air seeps through  the membranes of their
lungs and dissolves into their bloodstreams.
     "Now we wait,"  says  Goto  Dengo,  and shuts off  his acetylene  lamp,
leaving them in darkness. "As long as  we do not burn lamps, there is enough
air in this chamber to keep us alive for several days. Captain  Noda and his
men will spend at least  that  long  tidying up the Bundok site, erasing all
traces of our work, and killing themselves. So we must wait, or else his men
will only  kill  us when  we appear on the  shores of Lake Yamamoto. I would
like to spend the time educating you on the subject of caisson disease, also
known as the bends."


     <B>***</B>


     Two days later they set off one last, relatively small dynamite charge,
blowing a hole through the wall of the Bubble that is large  enough to admit
a human being. On the other side, the diagonal to Lake Yamamoto begins.
     Rodolfo is more terrified than anyone else, and so they send him first.
Then  goes Bong, and then Wing.  Finally Goto Dengo leaves the foul, used up
air  of the Bubble  behind. Within a  few moments they have found  their way
into the  ascending diagonal tunnel. They begin to swim uphill through total
darkness. All of them are trailing their hands against  the  tunnel ceiling,
feeling for the opening of the first vertical shaft. Rodolfo is  supposed to
stop when he feels  it, but  the others  must also be alert  in case Rodolfo
misses.
     They  thud into one another  in the  darkness like  a loosely connected
train bumping to a halt. Rodolfo has stopped with any luck, he has found the
first  vertical  shaft. Wing finally moves  forward,  and Goto Dengo follows
straight  up the vertical shaft and finally into a bulb at its  top where  a
bubble  of  air has  been trapped. The bulb is just barely  wide  enough  to
accommodate  four men. They pause there, all jammed together in a cluster of
bodies,  heaving as  they  exhale  the  nitrogen&ndash;  and  carbon dioxide
tainted air  that  they've  been living  on for the last sixty  seconds, and
breathe in fresh lungfuls.  Goto Dengo feels his ears popping as pressure is
relieved.
     They have covered only a small  fraction of the  four hundred and fifty
meters  that separate Golgotha from  the lake <I>horizontally.</I>  But half of the
hundred  meter <I>vertical</I> distance  has  already  been covered. That  is,  the
pressure of the air they are breathing in this chamber is only half  of what
it was in the Bubble.
     Goto  Dengo is not a  diver, and knows very little of  diving medicine.
But his father used to speak of how caissons were used to send  workers deep
underwater, to build things or to mine. That is how he learned about caisson
disease, and how he learned the rule of thumb that most men will not  suffer
its  symptoms if you have them decompress  for a  while at half the original
air pressure. If they stop  and breathe for a while, the nitrogen will  come
out of the tissues. Once this is done, the air pressure may be halved again.
     In the Bubble, the air pressure  was nine  or ten  atmospheres. Here in
the first chamber, it's more like five. But there's not much air in this one
just  enough to let them  breathe for  fifteen or twenty  minutes, and bleed
nitrogen out of  their tissues, and get lungfuls of air for the next leg  of
the swim.
     "Okay," Goto  Dengo says, "we go." He finds Rodolfo in the darkness and
slaps  him encouragingly on the shoulder.  Rodolfo  takes a series  of  deep
breaths, getting ready,  and Goto Dengo  recites  the  numbers that they all
know by heart: "Twenty five  strokes straight.  Then the  tunnel  bends  up.
Forty strokes up a steep hill. Where the tunnel bends again, you go straight
up to the next air chamber."
     Rodolfo nods, crosses himself, and then does a somersault in the  water
and kicks himself  downwards. Then goes Bong,  then  Wing, and  finally Goto
Dengo.
     This leg is  very long.  The last  fifteen meters  is a vertical ascent
into  the air chamber. Goto  Dengo had  hoped  that the natural buoyancy  of
their bodies  would  make this  easy,  even if  they  were  on  the verge of
drowning. But as  he is kicking up the narrow shaft, pushing  frantically on
the feet of Wing,  who is above him  and not going as fast as he would like,
he feels a growing panic in his  lungs. Finally he understands  that he must
fight the urge to  hold his breath that  his lungs are filled  with air at a
much higher pressure than  the water around him, and that  if he doesn't let
some of that  air out, his  chest will explode.  So  against his instinct to
save that precious air,  he lets it boil out of his mouth. He hopes that the
bubbles will pass by the faces of  the men above him and give  them the idea
too. But shortly after he does it, they all stop moving entirely.
     For perhaps ten seconds  Goto Dengo is  trapped  in total darkness in a
water filled vertical hole  in the rock that  is not much wider than his own
body.  Of all the things he has experienced in the war,  this is  the worst.
But just as he gives up  and prepares to  die, they begin moving again. They
are half dead when they get to the breathing chamber.
     If Goto Dengo's  calculations  were right, then  the  pressure  in here
should be  no more than two  or three  atmospheres. But  he  is beginning to
doubt those calculations. When he has breathed in enough air to restore full
consciousness, he's  aware of sharp pains in his knees, and  it's clear from
the sounds that the others are making that they are suffering the same way.
     "This time we wait as long as we can," he says.
     The  next leg is shorter,  but it's made more difficult by the pain  in
their knees. Again Rodolfo goes first. But when Goto Dengo rises up into the
next air chamber, about  one and a half atmospheres above normal,  only Bong
and Wing are there.
     "Rodolfo missed  the opening," Bong says. "I think  he went too  far up
the ventilation shaft!"
     Goto Dengo nods. Only a  few meters beyond  where they turned into this
passage is a ventilation shaft that goes all the way to the surface. It  has
a sharp sideways jog in the middle that Goto  put there so that when Captain
Noda filled  it up with rubble (which he  has  presumably done by now),  the
diagonal tunnel  their escape route would not be blocked. If Rodolfo went up
that shaft, he found a cul de sac, with no air bubble in the top.
     Goto Dengo doesn't have to  tell the others that Rodolfo is dead.  Bong
crosses himself and  says a  prayer.  Then they  stay for  a  while and take
advantage  of the air  that  Rodolfo should  be sharing.  The  pain in  Goto
Dengo's knees becomes sharper, but after a while it plateaus.
     "From  here,  only  small  changes  in  altitude,  not   much  need  to
decompress. Mostly we swim for distance now," he  says. They still have more
than three hundred horizontal meters to cover, pierced with four more shafts
for air. The last of these doubles as a legitimate ventilation shaft.
     So from there on it is just swimming and resting, swimming and resting,
until finally the  walls  of  the tunnel peel  away  from them and they find
themselves in Lake Yamamoto.
     Goto  Dengo  breaks the  surface and does nothing for a  long time  but
tread water and breathe clean air. It is nighttime, and  for  the first time
in a  year, Bundok is quiet,  except for the sound of Bong, kneeling on  the
shore of the lake, making the sign of the cross and mumbling prayers as fast
as his lips can move.
     Wing has  already  departed,  without  so much as a  good bye.  This is
shocking to Goto  Dengo until he realizes what it means: he, too, is free to
go.  As far  as  the  world  knows,  he  is  dead,  all  of his  obligations
discharged. For the first time in his life, he can do whatever he wants.
     He  swims to the shore,  gets up on his feet, and  starts  walking. His
knees hurt. He cannot believe that he  has come through all of this, and his
only problem is sore knees.


     <B>Chapter 82 BUST</B>


     "Kopi,"   Randy  says  to  the  flight   attendant,  then  reconsiders,
remembering that he  is in steerage this time, and getting to a toilet might
not be so easy. It's just a little Malaysian Air  757.  The flight attendant
sees the indecision on his face  and wavers. Her face is  framed in a gaudy,
vaguely Islamic scarf that is  the  most tokenistic nod to sexual modesty he
has ever seen. "Kopi  <I>nyahkafeina,"</I> Randy says, and she beams and pours from
the orange carafe. It is not that she doesn't speak English, just that Randy
is starting to feel comfortable with the local pidgin. He realizes that this
is the first step in a long process that  will eventually turn  him into one
of these cheerful,  burly, sunburned expats who  infest the airport bars and
Shangri La hotels of the Rim.
     Outside his window, the long slender isle of Palawan  lies  parallel to
their flight path. A fogbound pilot could almost get from Kinakuta to Manila
by following Palawan's beaches, but that is a moot point on a day like this.
Those beaches slope gradually into the transparent waters of the South China
Sea. When you're down there planted in the sand, looking at a glancing angle
across the  waves, it probably doesn't  look like much, but from up here you
can see straight  down through the water for many fathoms, and so all of the
islands, and even  the coral heads, have skirts that start out dark brown or
dun near the water and blend into yellow and finally into swimming pool blue
before eventually fading into the deep blue of the ocean. Every little coral
head and sandbar looks like the iridescent eye on a peacock's plume.
     After the conversation at Tom  Howard's last night, Randy slept  in his
guest room and then spent most of the day  in Kinakuta buying  a new laptop,
complete with a  new hard drive, and transferring all  of the data  from the
drive he salvaged in Los Altos onto  the new  one, encrypting  everything in
the process. Considering  all of the completely boring and useless corporate
documents he has subjected to state of the art encryption, he can't  believe
he carried  the  Arethusa stuff around  on  his hard drive, unencrypted, for
several days, and across a couple  of national  borders. Not to  mention the
original ETC punch cards, which now reside in Tom Howard's basement safe. Of
course that stuff is encrypted to begin with, but that was done in 1945, and
so by modern standards it might as well have been enciphered  with a  cereal
box decoder ring. Or at least that is what Randy is kind of  hoping. Another
thing  he  did  this morning  was  to  download  the current version  of the
<I>Cryptonomicon</I> from the  ftp  server where it lives in San Francisco. Randy's
never looked at it in detail, but he  has heard it contains samples of code,
or at least algorithms, that he could use to attack Arethusa. With luck, the
very latest public code breaking techniques in the <I>Cryptonomicon</I> might match
up  to  the classified technology that  Pontifex  and  his  colleagues  were
employing at the NSA  thirty years ago. Those techniques didn't work against
the  Arethusa  messages that they  were trying  to  decrypt,  but  this  was
probably  only  because  those messages  were random numbers  not  the  real
messages. Now that Randy has what he suspects are the real messages, he  may
be able to  accomplish what Earl Comstock tried and failed  to do during the
fifties.
     They  are  angling  across  the terminator  not the robotic assassin of
moviedom,  but  the line  between  night  and day  through  which our planet
incessantly rotates. Looking east, Randy can  see  over the rim of the world
to places  where it is dusk, and the clouds catch only the reddest  fraction
of the sun's light, squatting in  darkness but glowing with sullen contained
fire like coals in their feathery ruffs of ash. The airplane is still in the
daylight, and is assiduously  tracked by  mysterious bars of rainbow, little
spectral doppelgangers probably some  new NSA surveillance  technology. Some
of the Palawan's rivers run blue and straight  into the ocean and some carry
enormous plumes of eroded silt that feather out into the ocean and are swept
up the shore by currents. In Kinakuta there is less deforestation than there
is here, but only because they have oil instead. All of  these countries are
burning resources at  a  fantastic rate  to get  their  economies stoked up,
gambling that they'll be able to make the  jump into hyperspace some kind of
knowledge  economy, presumably before they run out of stuff to sell and turn
into Haiti.
     Randy  is  paging  his  way  through  the   opening  sections  of   the
<I>Cryptonomicon,</I> but he can never  concentrate when  he's on  an airplane. The
opening sections  are stolen  pages from World War II era  military manuals.
These  used  to be  classified until ten years ago, when  one  of Cantrell's
friends  found copies just sitting in a library  in Kentucky and drove there
with a  shitload of  dimes and  photocopied  them. That got public, civilian
cryptanalysis up  to where the government was in the l940s. The Xeroxes have
been scanned and OCRed and converted  to the HTML format used for Web  pages
so  that  people  can put  in links and marginal  notes and  annotations and
corrections without messing with  the original text, and this they have done
enthusiastically,  which is  all very well but  makes  it hard  to read. The
original  text is  set in a deliberately  crabbed, old fashioned typeface to
make  it  instantly distinguishable  from  the  cyber  era annotations.  The
introduction to the <I>Cryptonomicon</I> was written, probably before Pearl Harbor,
by  a guy  named William Friedman,  and  is  filled with aphorisms  probably
intended to  keep  neophyte  code  breakers from slapping  grenades to their
heads  after a  long  week of  wrestling with  the latest  Nipponese machine
ciphers.
     <I>The fact that the  scientific investigator works 50 percent of his time
by nonrational means is, it seems, quite insufficiently recognized.</I>

     <I>Intuition,  like a flash of  lightning,  lasts only  for  a  second. It
generally comes  when one is tormented by a difficult decipherment  and when
one  reviews in his mind  the fruitless  experiments already tried. Suddenly
the light breaks  through and one finds after  a few minutes  what  previous
days of labor were unable to reveal.</I>

     And, Randy's favorite,
     <I>As to luck,  there is  the old miners' proverb: "Gold is where you find
it."</I>

     So far so good, but then with a few whacks of the Page Down key Randy's
looking  at  endless  staggered  grids  of  random  letters  (some  kind  of
predigital method for solving ciphers) which the author  would not  have put
into the document  if they did not  convey some kind of useful lesson to the
reader. Randy  is miserably aware that until he has learned to  read through
these grids he will not even be up to the level of competence of a World War
II novice cryptanalyst. The sample messages used are like ONE PLANE REPORTED
LOST AT SEA and TROOPS HAVING  DIFFICULTY MAINTAINING CONNECTION  WITH FORTY
FIFTH INFANTRY STOP which Randy finds kind of hokey until he  remembers that
the book was  written by people who probably didn't know what "hokey" meant,
who lived in some radically different  pre hokiness era where  planes really
did get lost at sea and  the people in  those planes never came back  to see
their families and in which people who even raised the issue of hokeyness in
conversation  were  likely  to  end  up  pitied  or shunned  or  maybe  even
psychoanalyzed.
     Randy feels like  a  little shit  when he thinks  about this  stuff. He
wonders about  Chester.  Is the shattered 747 hanging from Chester's ceiling
just  a  monumental  act of  bad  taste, or  is  Chester  actually  making a
Statement with  that thing?  Could it be that nerdy Chester is actually some
kind of deep thinker who has  transcended the glibness and superficiality of
his  age? This  very  subject  has been debated by  serious  people at  some
length, which is why learned articles about  Chester's house keep showing up
in unexpected places. Randy wonders if he's ever had a serious experience in
his life, an experience that would be worth the time it would take to reduce
it to  a pithy STOP punctuated message in capital letters and run it through
a cryptosystem.
     They must have flown right  by the site  of the wreck.  In a  few  days
Randy will turn right around and come halfway back to Kinakuta to make  what
meager contribution  he can to the job of dragging gold bars out of it. He's
only going  to  Manila  to take  care  of some business there; some  kind of
urgent meeting demanded  by one  of  Epiphyte's Filipino partners. The stuff
that Randy  came to Manila to do, a  year and a half ago, mostly runs itself
now, and when it actually  requires his attention he finds  it fantastically
annoying.
     He can see  that the modern  way of thinking about stuff, as applied to
the <I>Cryptonomicon,</I>  isn't  going  to  help  him  very  much in  his  goal of
decrypting  the  Arethusa   intercepts.   The   original  writers   of   the
<I>Cryptonomicon</I> actually  had  to decrypt and read these goddamn  messages  in
order to save the lives of their countrymen. But  the modern annotators have
no interest in reading other people's mail  per se; the only reason they pay
attention to this subject  at  all is  that  they  aspire to make new crypto
systems that cannot  be broken by  the NSA, or now this new IDTRO thing. The
Black  Chamber. Crypto  experts won't trust a  cryptosystem  until they have
attacked  it,   and  they   can't  attack  it  until  they  know  the  basic
cryptanalytical techniques, and  hence the demand for  a document like  this
modern, annotated version of the  <I>Cryptonomicon.</I> But their attacks generally
don't  go any further than demonstrating a  system's vulnerabilities  in the
abstract. All they want is to be able to  say <I>in theory</I> this system could be
attacked in the  following  way  because from a  formal number  theory stand
point it belongs to such and such class of problems, and those problems as a
group take about  so many processor cycles to attack. And this all fits very
well with the modern  way of thinking  about stuff  in which all you need to
do, in  order to attain a  sense  of  personal  accomplishment and earn  the
accolades of your peers, is to demonstrate  an ability to  slot new examples
of things into the proper intellectual pigeon holes.
     But  the gap  between demonstrating the vulnerability of a cryptosystem
in  the abstract, and actually breaking a bunch of messages written  in that
cryptosystem, is as wide, and as profound, as the gap between being  able to
criticize a film (e.g., by  slotting it into a particular genre or movement)
and being  able to go out into  the world with a movie camera and a bunch of
unexposed film and actually make  one. Of these issues the <I>Cryptonomicon</I> has
nothing to say until you tunnel down to its  oldest and deepest strata. Some
of which, Randy suspects, were written by his grandfather.
     The head flight attendant comes in  on  the intercom and says something
in various languages. Each transition to a  new language is accompanied by a
sort  of   frisson  of  confusion  running   through  the  whole   passenger
compartment: first  the English speaking passengers all ask each  other what
the English version of the announcement said and just as they  are giving it
up as a lost cause the Cantonese version winds down and the Chinese speaking
passengers ask each other what  it said. The Malay version gets  no reaction
at all because no one  actually speaks the Malay language, except  maybe for
Randy when he  is asking for coffee. Presumably the message has something to
do with the fact  that the plane is about to land.  Manila sprawls out below
them in  the  dark, vast patches  of it flickering  on and off  as different
segments of  the  electrical power  grid straggle  with their own particular
challenges vis &agrave; vis maintenance and overload. In his mind, Randy is already
sitting  in front of his TV tucking into a bowl of Cap'n Crunch. Maybe there
is a place in NAIA where  he  can purchase a brick of ice cold milk, so that
he will not even have to stop at a 24 Jam on the way home.
     The Malaysian Air flight attendants all have big smiles for him  on the
way out; as globe trotting expat technocrats all know,  hospitality industry
people think it is just adorable, or pretend to think  so,  when you try  to
use some language any language other than English, and they remember you for
it. Soon he is  inside good old NAIA,  which is  sort of, but not fully, air
conditioned.  There is  a whole  group  of girls  in identical  windbreakers
gathered  by  his  baggage carousel, chattering like an  exaltation of larks
under a DEATH TO DRUG TRAFFICKERS sign. The bags take a long  time to arrive
Randy wouldn't have checked baggage at all except  that he acquired a lot of
books, and a  few other souvenirs, on his trip some salvaged from the ruined
house  and some  inherited from his  grandfather's trunk. And in Kinakuta he
bought some new diving gear  that  he hopes  he will  put to use very  soon.
Finally he  had to buy a  big  sort of duffel bag on wheels to carry it all.
Randy enjoys watching  the  girls, apparently some  kind  of high school  or
college  field  hockey  team on the  road.  For them, even  waiting  for the
baggage carousel to start up is a big adventure, full of thrills and chills;
e.g., when the carousel groans into action for a  few moments and then shuts
down again. But finally it starts  up for real, and out comes a whole row of
identical gym  bags,  color coordinated to match the girls' uniforms, and in
the middle of them is Randy's big duffel. He heaves it  off the carousel and
checks  the  tiny  combination  padlocks:  one  on  the zipper for the  main
compartment and one on a smaller pocket at the end of the bag. There  is one
more tiny pocket on the top of the bag  which has no practical function that
Randy can think of; he didn't use it and so he didn't lock it.
     He deploys the bag's telescoping handle,  lifts it up onto its built in
wheels, and heads for customs. Along the way he gets mixed into the group of
field  hockey players, who  find this extremely  titillating and  hilarious,
which  is slightly embarrassing  for him until they start finding  their own
hilarity  hilarious. There are only a few customs lanes open, and there is a
sort of traffic director waving people this way and that; he shoos the girls
towards the green lane and then, inevitably, ducts Randy into a red one.
     Looking  through the lane,  Randy can  see the area  on  the other side
where people wait to greet arriving passengers. There is a  woman  in a nice
dress  there. It's Amy. Randy comes to a complete stop the better to gape at
her. She looks fantastic. He  wonders if it's totally presumptuous of him to
think that Amy put on a dress for no other reason than  that  she knew Randy
would enjoy looking at her  in it. Whether it's presumptuous or  not, that's
what he does  think, and it almost  makes him want to faint. He doesn't want
to  let  his  mind  run completely out of control  here, but maybe  there is
something better in store for him tonight  than digging into a bowl of Cap'n
Crunch.
     Randy  steps into the lane.  He wants to  just  bolt through  and  head
straight for Amy,  but this would be a bad idea. But it's okay. Anticipation
never  killed anyone. Anticipation can  actually be kind  of enjoyable. What
did  Avi say? <I>Sometimes wanting  is  better than having.</I> Randy's pretty sure
that having Amy would not disappoint,  but  wanting  ain't  such a bad thing
either. He is  holding his  laptop bag  out before  him  and drawing the big
duffel behind,  slowing  gradually to a stop so that  it won't roll  forward
under its own momentum and break  his  knees. There is  the  requisite  long
stainless  steel  table and  a  bored  fireplug shaped gentleman  behind  it
saying, "Nationality?  Port of embarkation?" for the hundred thousandth time
in his life.  Randy hands over his documents and answers the questions while
bending down to  heft the duffel bag up onto the metal tabletop. "Remove the
locks  please?" the customs inspector says. Randy bends  down and squints at
the tiny brass wheels, trying  to line them  up into  the right combination.
Whil