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:
1
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
s