ere. He rolls out of his hammock and walks naked in the warm
rain to wash himself. Goto Dengo has a job to do.

Chapter 67 COMPUTER

Lieutenant Colonel Earl Comstock of The Electrical Till Corporation and
the United States Army, in that order, prepares for today's routine briefing
from his subordinate, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, much as a test pilot
readies himself to be ripped into the stratosphere with a hot rocket engine
under his ass. He turns in early the night before, wakes up late, talks to
his aide and makes sure that (a) plenty of hot coffee is available and (b)
none of it will be given to Waterhouse. He gets two wire recorders set up in
the room, in case either goes on the fritz, and brings in a team of three
crack stenographers with loads of technical savvy. He has a couple of
fellows in his section also ETC employees during peacetime who are real math
whizzes, so he brings them in too. He gives them a little pep talk:
"I do not expect you fellows to understand what the fuck Waterhouse is
talking about. I'm gonna be running after him as fast as I can. You just hug
his legs and hold on for dear life so that I can sort of keep his backside
in view as long as possible." Comstock is proud of this analogy, but the
math whizzes seem baffled. Testily, he fills them in on the always tricky
literal vs. figurative dichotomy. Only twenty minutes remain before
Waterhouse's arrival; right on schedule, Comstock's aide comes through the
room with a tray of benzedrine tablets. Comstock takes two, attempting to
lead by example. "Where's my darn chalkboard team?" he demands, as the
powerful stimulant begins to rev up his pulse. Into the room come two
privates equipped with blackboard erasers and damp chamois cloths, plus a
three man photography team. They set up a pair of cameras aimed at the
chalkboard, plus a couple of strobe lights, and lay in a healthy stock of
film rolls.
He checks his watch. They are running five minutes behind schedule. He
looks out the window and sees that his jeep has returned; Waterhouse must be
in the building. "Where is the extraction team?" he demands.
Sergeant Graves is there a few moments later. "Sir, we went to the
church as directed, and located him, and, uh " He coughs against the back of
his hand.
"And what?"
"And who is more like it, sir," says Sergeant Graves, sotto voce. "He's
in the lavatory right now, cleaning up, if you know what I mean." He winks.
"Ohhhh," says Earl Comstock, cottoning on to it.
"After all," Sergeant Graves says, "you can't blow out the rusty pipes
of your organ unless you have a nice little assistant to get the job
properly done."

Comstock tenses. "Sergeant Graves it is critically important for me to
know did the job get properly done?"

Graves furrows his brow, as if pained by the very question. "Oh, by all
means sir. We wouldn't dream of interrupting such an operation. That's why
we are late begging your pardon."
"Don't mention it," Comstock stays, slapping Graves heartily on the
shoulder. "That is why I try to give my men broad discretion. It has been my
opinion for quite some time that Waterhouse is badly in need of some
relaxation. He concentrates a little too hard on his work. Sometimes I
frankly cannot tell whether he is saying something very brilliant, or just
totally incoherent. And I think you have made a pivotal, Sergeant Graves, a
pivotal contribution to today's meeting by having the good sense to stand
off long enough for Waterhouse's affairs to be set in order." Comstock
realizes that he is breathing very fast, and his heart is pounding madly.
Perhaps he overdid the benzedrine?
Waterhouse drifts into the room ten minutes later on flaccid legs, as
if he had inadvertently left his own skeleton behind in bed. He barely makes
it to his designated seat and thuds into it like a sack of guts, popping a
few strands of wicker out of its bottom. He is breathing raggedly through
his mouth, blinking heavy eyelids frequently.
"Looks like today's going to be a milk run, men!" Comstock announces
brightly. Everyone except Waterhouse snickers. Waterhouse has been in the
building for a quarter of an hour, and it took at least that long for
Sergeant Graves to drive him here from the church, and so it has been at
least half an hour. And yet, to look at him, you'd think that it had
happened five seconds ago.
"Someone pour that man a cup of coffee!" Comstock orders. Someone does.
Being in the military is amazing; you give orders, and things happen.
Waterhouse does not drink, or even touch, the coffee, but at least it gives
his eyes something to focus on. Those orbs wander around under their rumpled
lids for a while, like ack ack guns trying to track a house fly, before
finally fixing on the white coffee mug. Waterhouse clears his throat at some
length, as if preparing to speak, and the room goes silent. It remains
silent for about thirty seconds. Then Waterhouse mumbles something that
sounds like "coy."
The stenographers take it down in unison.
"Beg pardon?" says Comstock.
One of the math whizzes says, "He might be talking about Coy Functions.
I think I saw them when I was flipping through a graduate math textbook
once."
"I thought he was saying 'quantum' something," says the other ETC man.
"Coffee," Waterhouse says, and heaves a deep sigh.
"Waterhouse," says Comstock, "how many fingers am I holding up?"
Waterhouse seems to realize that there are other people in the room now. He
closes his mouth, and his nostrils flare as air begins to rush through them.
He tries to move one of his hands, realizes that he is sitting on it, and
shifts heavily to and fro until it flops loose. He gets his eyes all the way
open, providing a really good, clear view of that coffee mug. He yawns,
stretches, and farts.
"The Nipponese cryptosystem that we call Azure is the same thing as the
German system that we call Pufferfish," he announces. "Both of them are also
related somehow to another, newer cryptosystem I have dubbed Arethusa. All
of these have something to do with gold. Probably gold mining operations of
some sort. In the Philippines."
Whammo! The stenographers go into action. The photographer fires off
his strobes, even though there's nothing to take pictures of just nerves.
Comstock glances beadily at his wire recorders, makes sure those reels are
spinning. He is a little unnerved by how rapidly Waterhouse is coming up to
speed. But one of the responsibilities of leadership is to mask one's own
fears, to project confidence at all times. Comstock grins and says, "You
sound awfully sure of yourself, Waterhouse! I wonder if you can get me to
feel that same level of confidence."
Waterhouse frowns at the coffee mug. "Well, it's all math," he says.
"If the math works, why then you should be sure of yourself. That's the
whole point of math."
"So you have a mathematical basis for making this assertion?"
"Assertions," Waterhouse says. "Assertion number one is that Pufferfish
and Azure are different names for the same cryptosystem. Assertion number
two is that Pufferfish/Azure is a cousin of Arethusa. Three: all of these
cryptosystems are related to gold. Four: mining. Five: Philippines."
"Maybe you could just chalk those up on the blackboard as you go
along," Comstock says edgily.
"Glad to," Waterhouse says. He stands up and turns toward the
blackboard, freezes for a couple of seconds, then turns back around, lunges
for the coffee mug, and drains it before Comstock or any of his aides can
rip it from his grasp. Tactical error! Then Waterhouse chalks up his
assertions. The photographer records it. The privates massage their chamois
cloths and glance nervously in Comstock's direction.
"Now, you have some sort of, er, mathematical proof for each one of
these assertions?" Comstock asks. Math isn't his bag, but running meetings
is, and what Waterhouse has just chalked up on that board looks, to him,
like the rudiments of an agenda. And Comstock feels a lot better when he has
an agenda. Without an agenda, he's like a grunt running around in the jungle
without a map or a weapon.
"Well, sir, that's one way to look at it," Waterhouse says after some
thought. "But it is much more elegant to view all of these as corollaries
stemming from the same underlying theorem."
"Are you telling me that you have succeeded in breaking Azure? Because
if so, congratulations are in order!" Comstock says.
"No. It is still unbroken. But I can extract information from it."
This is the moment where the joystick snaps off in Comstock's hand.
Still, he can pound haplessly on the control panel. "Well, would you mind
taking them one at a time, at least?"
"Well, let's just take, for example, Assertion Four, which is that
Azure/Pufferfish has something to do with mining." Waterhouse sketches out a
freehand map of the Southwest Pacific theater of operations, from Burma to
the Solomons, from Nippon to New Zealand. It takes him about sixty seconds.
Just for grins, Comstock pulls a printed map out of his clipboard and
compares it against Waterhouse's version. They are basically identical.
Waterhouse draws a circle with a letter A in it at the entrance to
Manila Bay. "This is one of the stations that transmits Azure messages."
"You know that from huffduff, correct?"
"That's right."
"Is that on Corregidor?"
"One of the smaller islands near Corregidor."
Waterhouse draws another circle A in Manila itself, one in Tokyo, one
in Rabaul, one in Penang, one in the Indian Ocean.
"What's that?" Comstock asks.
"We picked up an Azure transmission from a German U boat here,"
Waterhouse says.
"How do you know it was a German U boat?"
"Recognized the fist," Waterhouse says. "So, this is the spatial
arrangement of Azure transmitters not counting the stations in Europe that
are making Pufferfish transmissions, and hence, according to Assertion One,
are part of the same network. Anyway, now let us say that an Azure message
originates from Tokyo on a certain date. We don't know what it says, because
we haven't broken Azure yet. We just know that the message went out to these
places." Waterhouse draws lines radiating downward from Tokyo to Manila,
Rabaul, Penang. "Now, each one of these cities is a major military base.
Consequently, each is the source of a steady stream of traffic,
communicating with all of the Nipponese bases in its region." Waterhouse
draws shorter lines radiating from Manila to various locations in the
Philippines, and from Rabaul to New Guinea and the Solomons.
"Correction, Waterhouse," Comstock says. "We own New Guinea now."
"But I'm going back in time!" Waterhouse says. "Back to 1943, when
there were Nip bases all along the north coast of New Guinea, and through
the Solomons. So, let us say that within a brief window of time following
this Azure message from Tokyo, a number of messages are transmitted from
places like Rabaul and Manila to smaller bases in those areas. Some of them
are in ciphers that we have learned how to break. Now, it is not
unreasonable to suppose that some of these messages were sent out as a
consequence of whatever orders were contained in that Azure message."
"But those places send out thousands of messages a day," Comstock
protests. "What makes you think that you can pick out the messages that are
a consequence of the Azure orders?"
"It's just a brute force statistics problem," Waterhouse says. "Suppose
that Tokyo sent the Azure message to Rabaul on October 15th, 1943. Now,
suppose I take all of the messages that were sent out from Rabaul on October
14th and I index them in various ways: what destinations they were
transmitted to, how long they were, and, if we were able to decrypt them,
what their subject matter was. Were they orders for troop movements? Supply
shipments? Changes in tactics or procedures? Then, I take all of the
messages that were sent out from Rabaul on October 16th the day after the
Azure message came in from Tokyo and I run exactly the same statistical
analysis on them."
Waterhouse steps back from the chalkboard and turns into a blinding
fusillade of strobe lights. "You see, it is all about information flow.
Information flows from Tokyo to Rabaul. We don't know what the information
was. But it will, in some way, influence what Rabaul does afterwards. Rabaul
is changed, irrevocably, by the arrival of that information, and by
comparing Rabaul's observed behavior before and after that change, we can
make inferences."
"Such as?" Comstock says warily.
Waterhouse shrugs. "The differences are very slight. They hardly stand
out from the noise. Over the course of the war, thirty one Azure messages
have gone out from Tokyo, so I have that many data sets to work with. Any
one data set by itself might not tell me anything. But when I combine all of
the data sets together giving me greater depth then I can see some patterns.
And one of the patterns that I most definitely see is that, on the day after
an Azure message went out to, say, Rabaul, Rabaul was much more likely to
transmit messages having to do with mining engineers. This has ramifications
that can be traced all the way back until the loop is closed."
"Loop is closed?"
"Okay. Let's take it from the top. Azure message goes from Tokyo to
Rabaul," Waterhouse says, drawing a heavy line down the chalkboard joining
those two cities. "The next day, a message in some other crypto system one
that we have broken goes from Rabaul to a submarine operating out of a base
here, in the Moluccas. The message states that the submarine is to proceed
to an outpost on the north coast of New Guinea and pick up four passengers,
who are identified by name. From our archives, we know who these men are:
three aircraft mechanics and one mining engineer. A few days later, the
submarine transmits from the Bismarck Sea stating that it has picked those
men up. A few days after that, our waterfront spies in Manila inform us that
the same submarine has showed up there. On the same day, another Azure
message is transmitted from Manila back up to Tokyo," Waterhouse concludes,
adding a final line to the polygon, "closing the loop."
"But that could all be a series of random, unconnected events," says
one of Comstock's math whizzes, before Comstock can say it. "The Nips are
desperate for aircraft mechanics. There's nothing unusual about this kind of
message traffic."
"But there is something unusual about the patterns," Waterhouse says.
"If, a few months later, another submarine is sent, in the same way, to pick
up some mining engineers and some surveyors who have been trapped in Rabaul,
and, upon its arrival in Manila, another Azure message is sent from Manila
up to Tokyo, it begins to look very suspicious."
"I don't know," Comstock stays, shaking his head. "I'm not sure if I
can sell this to the General's staff. It's too much of a fishing
expedition."
"Correction, sir, it was a fishing expedition. But now I'm back from
the fishing expedition, and I've got the fish!" Waterhouse storms out of the
room and down the hall toward his lab half the fucking wing. Good thing
Australia is a big continent, because Waterhouse is going to take all of it
if he's not held sternly in check. Fifteen seconds later he's back with a
stack of ETC cards a foot high, which he pounds down on the tabletop. "It's
all right here."
Comstock has never fired a gun in his life, but he knows card punching
and reading machinery like a jarhead knows his Springfield, and he's not
impressed. "Waterhouse, that stack of cards carries about as much
information as a letter home to Mom. Are you trying to tell me "
"No, this is just the summary. The result of the statistical analysis."
"Why the hell did you punch it onto ETC cards? Why not just turn in a
plain old typed report like everyone else?"
"I didn't punch it," Waterhouse says. "The machine punched it."
"The machine punched it," Comstock says very slowly.
"Yes. When it was done performing the analysis." Waterhouse suddenly
breaks into his braying laugh. "You didn't think this was the raw inputs,
did you?"
"Well, I "
"The inputs filled several rooms. I had to run almost every message we
have intercepted through the whole war through this analysis. Re member all
those trucks I requisitioned a few weeks ago? Those trucks were just to
carry the cards back and forth from storage."
"Jesus Christ!" Comstock says. He remembers the trucks now, their
incessant comings and goings, fender benders in the motor pool, exhaust
fumes coming through his window, the enlisted men shoving heavy carts up and
down the hallways, laden with boxes. Running over people's feet. Scaring the
secretaries.
And the noise. The noise, the noise, from Waterhouse's goddamned
machine. Flowerpots vibrating their way off file cabinets, standing waves in
coffee cups.
"Wait a sec," says one of the ETC men, with the nasal skepticism of a
man who has just realized he's being bullshitted. "I saw those trucks. I saw
those cards. Are you trying to get us to believe that you were actually
running a statistical analysis on each and every single one of those message
decrypts?"
Waterhouse looks a little defensive. "Well, that was the only way to do
it!"
Comstock's math whiz is homing in for the kill now. "I agree that the
only way to accomplish the analysis that is implied by that" he waves at the
mandala of intersecting polygons on Waterhouse's map "is to go through all
of those truckloads of old decrypts one by one. That is clear. That is not
what we are objecting to."
"What are you objecting to, then?"
The whiz laughs angrily. "I'm just worried about the inconvenient fact
that there is no machine in the whole world that is capable of processing
all of that data, that fast."
"Didn't you hear the noise?" Waterhouse asks.
"We all heard the goddamn noise," Comstock says. "What does that have
to do with anything?"
"Oh," Waterhouse says, and rolls his eyes at his own stupidity. "That's
right. Sorry. Maybe I should have explained that part first."
"What part?" Comstock asks.
"Dr. Turing, of Cambridge University, has pointed out that bobbadah
bobbadah hoe daddy yanga langa furjeezama bing jingle oh yeah," Waterhouse
says, or words to that effect. He pauses for breath, and turns fatefully
towards the blackboard. "Do you mind if I erase this?" A private lunges
forward with an eraser. Comstock sinks into a chair and grips its arms. A
stenographer reaches for a benzedrine tablet. An ETC man chomps down on a
number two lead pencil like a dog on a drumstick. Strobes flash. Waterhouse
grabs a fresh stick of chalk, reaches up, and presses its tip to the
immaculate slate. The crisp edge of the stick fractures with a slight pop,
and a tiny spray of chalk particles drifts to the floor spreading into a
narrow parabolic cloud. Waterhouse bows his head for a minute, like a priest
getting ready to stride up the aisle, and then draws a deep breath.
The benzedrine wears off five hours later and Comstock finds himself
sprawled across a table in a room filled with haggard, exhausted men.
Waterhouse and the privates are pasty with chalk dust, giving them a
ghoulish appearance. The stenographers are surrounded with used pads, and
frequently stop writing to flap their limp hands in the air like white
flags. The wire recorders are spinning uselessly, one reel full and one
empty. Only the photographer is still going strong, hitting that strobe
every time Waterhouse manages to fill the chalkboard.
Everything smells like underarm sweat. Comstock realizes that
Waterhouse is looking at him expectantly. "See?" Waterhouse asks.
Comstock sits up and glances furtively at his own legal pad, where he
hoped to draw up an agenda. He sees Waterhouse's four assertions, which he
copied down during the first five minutes of the meeting, and then nothing
except a tangled field of spiky doodles surrounding the words BURY and
DISINTER.
It behooves Comstock to say something. "This thing, the, uh, the
burying procedure, that's the, uh "
"The key feature!" Waterhouse says brightly. "See, these ETC card
machines are great for input and output. We've got that covered. The logic
elements are straightforward enough. What was needed was a way to give the
machine memory, so that it could, to use Turing's terminology, bury data
quickly, and just as quickly disinter it. So I made one of those. It is an
electrical device, but its underlying principles would be familiar to any
organ maker."
"Could I, uh, see it?" Comstock asks.
"Sure! It's down in my lab."
Going to see it is more complicated. First everyone has to use the
toilet, then the cameras and strobes have to be moved down to the lab and
set up. When they've all filed in, Waterhouse is standing next to a giant
rack of pipes with thousands of wires hanging out of it.
"That's it?" Comstock says, when the group is finally assembled. Pea
sized drops of mercury are scattered around the floor like ball bearings.
The flat soles of Comstock's shoes explode them into bursts rolling in all
directions.
"That's it."
"What did you call it again?"
"The RAM," Waterhouse says. "Random Access Memory. I was going to put a
picture of a ram on it. Y'know, one of those sheeps with the big huge curly
horns?"
"Yes."
"But I didn't have time, and I'm not that good at drawing pictures."
Each pipe is four inches in diameter and thirty two feet long. There must be
a hundred of them, at least Comstock is trying to remember that requisition
that he signed, months ago Waterhouse had ordered enough drain pipe to plumb
a whole goddamn military base.
The pipes are laid out horizontally, like a rank of organ pipes that
has been knocked flat. Stuck into one end of each pipe is a little paper
speaker ripped from an old radio.
"The speaker plays a signal a note that resonates in the pipe, and
creates a standing wave," Waterhouse says. "That means that in some parts of
the pipe, the air pressure is low, and in other parts it is high." He is
backing down the length of one of the pipes, making chopping motions with
his hand. "These U tubes are full of mercury." He points to one of several U
shaped glass tubes that are plumbed into the bottom of the long pipe.
"I can see that very plainly, Waterhouse," Comstock says. "Could you
keep backing up to the next one?" he requests, peering over the
photographers' shoulder through the viewfinder. "You're blocking my view
that's better farther farther " because he can still see Waterhouse's
shadow. "That's good. Hit it!"
The photographer pulls the trigger, the strobe flares.
"If the air pressure in the organ pipe is high, it pushes the mercury
down a little bit. If it's low, it sucks the mercury up. I put an electrical
contact into each U tube just a couple of wires separated by an air gap. If
those wires are high and dry (like because high air pressure in the organ
pipe is shoving the mercury down away from them), no current flows. But if
they are immersed in the mercury (because low air pressure in the organ pipe
is sucking the mercury up to cover them), then current flows between them,
because mercury conducts electricity! So the U tubes produce a set of binary
digits that is like a picture of the standing wave a graph of the harmonics
that make up the musical note that is being played on the speaker. We feed
that vector back to the oscillator circuit that is driving the speaker, so
that the vector of bits keeps refreshing itself forever, unless the machine
decides to write a new pattern of bits into it."
"Oh, so the ETC machinery actually can control this thing?" Comstock
asks.
Again with the laugh. "That's the whole point! This is where the logic
boards bury and disinter the data!" Waterhouse says. "I'll show you!" And
before Comstock can order him not to, Waterhouse has nodded to a corporal
standing at the other end of the room, wearing the protective earmuffs that
are generally issued to the men who fire the very largest artillery. That
corporal nods and hits a switch. Waterhouse slams his hands over his ears
and grins, showing a little too much gum for Comstock's taste, and then time
stops, or something, as all of those pipes come alive playing variations on
the same low C.
It's all Comstock can do not to drop to his knees; he has his hands
over his ears, of course, but the sound's not really coming in through his
ears, it is entering his torso directly, like X rays. Hot sonic tongs are
rummaging through his viscera, beads of sweat being vibrated loose from his
scalp, his nuts are hopping around like Mexican jumping beans. The crescents
of mercury in all those U tubes are shifting up and down, opening and
closing the contacts, but systematically: it is not turbulent sloshing
around, but a coherent progression of discrete controlled shiftings,
informed by some program.
Comstock would draw his sidearm and put a bullet through Waterhouse's
head, but he'd have to take one hand off one ear. Finally it stops.
"The machine just calculated the first hundred numbers in the Fibonacci
sequence," Waterhouse says.
"As I understand it, this RAM is just the part where you bury and
disinter the data," Comstock says, trying to master the higher harmonics in
his own voice, trying to sound and act as if he saw this kind of thing
daily. "If you had to give a name to the whole apparatus, what would you
call it?"
"Hmmm," Waterhouse says. "Well, its basic job is to perform
mathematical calculations like a computer."
Comstock snorts. "A computer is a human being."
"Well ... this machine uses binary digits to do its computing. I
suppose you could call it a digital computer."
Comstock writes it out in block letters on his legal pad: DIGITAL
COMPUTER.
"Is this going to go into your report?" Waterhouse asks brightly.
Comstock almost blurts report? This is my report! Then a foggy memory
comes back to him. Something about Azure. Something about gold mines. "Oh,
yeah," he murmurs. Oh, yeah, there's a war on. He considers it. "Nah. Now
that you mention it, this isn't even a footnote." He looks significantly at
his pair of hand picked math whizzes, who are gazing at the RAM like a
couple of provincial Judean sheep shearers getting their first look at the
Ark of the Covenant. "We'll probably just keep these photos for the
archives. You know how the military is with its archives."
Waterhouse goes into that dreadful laugh again.
"Do you have anything else to report before we adjourn?" Comstock says,
desperate to silence him.
"Well, this work has given me some new ideas on information theory
which you might find interesting "
"Write them down. Send them to me."
"There's one other thing. I don't know if it is really germane here,
but "
"What is it, Waterhouse?"
"Uh, well ... it seems that I'm engaged to be married!"

Chapter 68 CARAVAN

Randy has lost all he owned, but gained an entourage. Amy has decided
that she might as well come north with him, as long as she happens to be on
this side of the Pacific Ocean.
This makes him happy. The Shaftoe boys, Robin and Marcus Aurelius,
consider themselves invited along like much else that in other families
would be the subject of extended debate, this goes without saying,
apparently.
This makes it imperative that they drive the thousand or so miles to
Whitman, Washington, because the Shaftoe boys are not really the sort who
are in position to simply drop the hot rod off at the Park 'n' Ride, run
into the airport, and demand tickets on the next flight to Spokane. Marcus
Aurelius is a college sophomore on an ROTC scholarship and Robin's attending
some kind of military prep school. But even if they did have that kind of
money rattling around in their pockets, actually spending it would offend
their native frugality. Or so Randy assumes, for the first couple of days.
It's the obvious assumption to make, given that the Cash Flow Issue seems
always to be on their mind. For example the boys made Herculean efforts to
consume every spoonful of the gut busting vat of oatmeal cooked by Amy the
morning after the quake, and finding it beyond their endurance they
carefully decanted the remainder into a Ziploc bag while fretting at length
about the high cost of Ziploc bags and didn't Randy have any old glass jelly
jars or something, some where in the basement, that might be unbroken and
usable for this purpose.
Randy has had plenty of time to disabuse himself of this fallacy
(namely that their airplane avoidance is dictated by financial constraints)
and to draw the real reason out of them after they have dropped Amy's U Haul
off near SFO and begun to caravan northwards in the Acura and the jacked up,
thundering Impala. People are rotated from car to car whenever they stop,
according to some system that no one is divulging to Randy, but that always
situates him alone in a car with either Robin or Marcus Aurelius. Both of
them are too dignified to spill their guts on light pretexts, and too polite
to assume that Randy gives a shit about anything they think, and perhaps too
basically suspicious of Randy to share a whole lot with him. Some kind of
bonding is required first. The ice doesn't start to break up until Day 2 of
the drive, after they have all slept in an Interstate 5 rest area near
Redding in the reclined seats of the vehicles (each of the Shaftoe boys
solemnly and separately informs him that the chain of lodgings known as
Motel 6 is one giant con game, that if those rooms ever did cost six dollars
a night, which is doubtful, they certainly don't now, and many are the
innocent young travelers who have been drawn in by the siren calls of those
fraudulent signs rising above interstate cloverleaves; they try to sound
impartial and wise about it, but the way their faces flush and their eyes
glance aside and their voices rise makes Randy suspect he is actually
listening to some thinly veiled personal and recent history). Again without
anyone saying anything, it is taken to be obvious that Amy, as the female,
will require her own car to sleep in, which puts Randy in the hot rod with
Robin and Marcus Aurelius; As the guest, Randy gets the reclining passenger
seat, the best bed in the house, and M.A. curls up on the back seat while
Robin, the youngest, sleeps behind the steering wheel. For about the first
thirty seconds after the dome light has gone off and the Shaftoes have
finished saying their prayers out loud, Randy lies there feeling the Impala
rock on its suspension from the wake blasts of passing long haul semis and
feels considerably more alienated than he did while trying to sleep in the
jeepney in the jungle town in northern Luzon. Then he opens his eyes and
it's morning, and Robin's out there doing one handed pushups in the dust.
"When we get there," Robin pants, after he's finished, "do you s'pose
you could show me that video on the Internet thing you were telling me
about?" He asks it with all due boyishness. Then suddenly he looks abashed
and adds, "Unless it's like real expensive or something."
"It's free. I'll show it to you," Randy says. "Let's get some
breakfast." It goes without saying that McDonald's and their ilk charge
scandalously more for, e.g., a dish of hash browns than one would pay for
the equivalent mass of potatoes in raw form at (if you think money grows on
trees) Safeway or (if you have any kind of decent regard for the value of a
buck) farmer's markets situated at lonely interchanges in the boon docks. So
for breakfast they must drive to a small town (grocery stores in big places
like Redding being a tipoff) and find an actual grocery store (convenience
stores being etc., etc., etc.) and purchase breakfast in the most elemental
form conceivable (deeply discounted well past their prime bananas that are
not even in a bunch but swept up from the floor, or something, and gathered
together in a gaily printed paper sack, and generic Cheerio knockoffs in a
tubular bag, and a box of generic powdered milk) and eat it from tin
military surplus messkits that the Shaftoes produce with admirable coolness
from the hot rod's trunk, a ferrous, oily chasm all a bang with tire chains,
battered ammo boxes, and, unless Randy's eyes are playing tricks on him, a
pair of samurai swords.
Anyway, this is all done pretty nonchalantly, and not like they are
trying to test Randy's mettle or anything, and so he doesn't imagine that it
qualifies as a true bonding experience. If, hypothetically, the Impala
throws a rod in the desert and they have to fix it with parts stolen from a
nearby junkyard guarded by rabid dogs and shotgun packing gypsies, that
would be a bonding experience. But Randy's wrong. On Day 2 the Shaftoes (the
male ones anyway) open up to him a bit.
It seems (and this is abstracted from many hours of conversation) that
when you are an able bodied young male Shaftoe and you are a stranger in a
strange land with a car that you have, with plenty of advice and elbow
grease from your extended family, fixed up pretty nicely, the idea of
parking it in favor of some other mode of conveyance is, in addition to
obvious financial folly, some kind of moral failure, pure and simple. That's
why they are driving to Whitman, Washington. But why (one of them finally
summons the boldness to inquire) why are they taking two cars? There is
plenty of room in the Impala for four. Randy has gotten the sense all along
that the Shaftoes are dismayed by Randy's insistence on taking the redundant
and repulsively scarred Acura, and that only their formidable politeness has
prevented them from pointing out the sheer madness of it. "I do not imagine
that we will stay together beyond Whitman," Randy says (after being around
these guys for a couple of days he has begun to fall out of the habit of
using contractions those tawdry shortcuts of the verbally lazy and
pathologically rushed). "If we have two cars, we can split up at that
point."
"The drive is not that far, Randall," says Robin, slapping the Impala's
gas pedal against the floor to rip the transmission into passing gear, and
careening around a gasoline tanker. From the initial "Sir" and "Mr.
Waterhouse," Randy has been able to talk them down into addressing him by
his first name, but they have agreed to it only on the condition
(apparently) that they use the full "Randall" instead of "Randy." Early
attempts to use "Randall Lawrence" as a compromise were vigorously denounced
by Randy, and so "Randall" it is for now. "M.A. and I would be happy to drop
you back off at the San Francisco Airport or, uh, wherever you elected to
park your Acura."
"Where else would I park it?" Randy says, not getting this last bit.
"Well, I mean that you could probably find a place where you could park
it free of charge for a few days, if you did some looking around. Assuming
you wanted to keep it." He adds encouragingly, "That Acura probably would
have some decent resale value even considering all the body work it needs."
Only at this point does Randy figure out that the Shaftoes believe him
to be utterly destitute, helpless, and adrift in the wide world. A total
charity case. He recalls, now, seeing them discard a whole sack of
McDonald's wrappers when they arrived at his house. This whole austerity
binge has been concocted to avoid putting financial pressure on Randy.
Robin and M.A. have been observing him carefully, talking about him,
thinking about him. They happen to have made some faulty assumptions, and
come to some wrong conclusions, but all the same, they have shown more
sophistication than Randy was giving them credit for. This causes Randy to
go back and review the conversations he has had with them the last couple of
days, just to get some idea of what other interesting and complicated things
might have been going on in their heads. M.A. is a pretty straightforward by
the book type, the kind who'll get good grades and fit well into any kind of
hierarchical organization. Robin, on the other hand, is more of a wild card.
He has the makings of either a total loser or a successful entrepreneur, or
maybe one of those guys who will oscillate between those two poles. Randy
realizes now, in retrospect, that he has spilled a hell of a lot of
information to Robin, in just a couple of days, about the Internet and
electronic money and digital currency and the new global economy. Randy's
mental state is such that he is prone to babbling aimlessly for hours at a
time. Robin has hoovered it all up.
To Randy it's just been aimless ventilating. He hasn't even considered,
until now, what effect it has been exerting on the trajectory of Robin
Shaftoe's life. Randall Lawrence Waterhouse hates Star Trek and avoids
people who don't hate it, but even so he has seen just about every episode
of the damn thing, and he feels, at this moment, like the Federation
scientist who beams down to a primitive planet and thoughtlessly teaches an
opportunistic pre Enlightenment yahoo how to construct a phaser cannon from
commonly available materials.
Randy still has some money. He cannot begin to guess how he can convey
this fact to these guys without committing some grievous protocol error, so
the next time they stop for gas, he asks Amy to convey it to them. He thinks
(based on his hazy understanding of the rotation system) that it's his turn
to be alone in a car with Amy, but if Amy is going to convey this data about
the money to one of the boys, she'll need to spend the next leg with him,
because it must be conveyed indirectly, which will take a while, and because
of that indirectness, time will then need to be allotted for it to sink in.
But three hours later, then, at the gas stop after that, it naturally
follows that M.A. and Robin must be placed together in the same car, so that
Robin (who now knows and understands, and who gets out of the Impala with a
big grin on his face and punches Randy affably on the shoulder) can pass the
message on to M.A., whose recent conversational gambits vis &agrave; vis Randy made
no sense at all until Randy figured out that they thought of him as a beggar
and that M.A. was trying in a really oblique way to find out if Randy needed
to share any of M.A.'s personal toiletry items. At any rate, Randy and Amy
get into the Acura and they head north into Oregon, trying to keep up with
the hot rod.
"Well, it's nice to have a chance to spend some time with you," Randy
says. His back is still a bit sore from where Amy struck him whilst
asserting, the other morning, that expressing one's feelings was "the name
of the game." So he figures he will express those aspects of his feelings
least likely to get him in serious trouble.
"Ah figgered you 'n' ah'ud have plenny a tahm to chew the rag," Amy
says, having reverted utterly to the tongue of her ancestors in the last
couple of days. "But it has been ages and ages since I saw those two boys,
and you've never seen 'em at all."
"Ages and ages? Really?"
"Yeah."
"How long?"
"Well, last time I saw Robin he was just start