xes, etc. to wherever you happen to be at the moment. Avi, for example,
uses it all the time.
Scrolling down, Randy finds:
Record last updated on 18 Nov 98.
Record created on 1 Mar 90.
The "90" jumps out. That's a prehistoric date by Internet standards. It
means that Societas Eruditorum was way ahead of the game. Especially for a
group based in Leipzig, which was part of East Germany until about then.
Domain servers in listed order:
NS.SF.LAUNDRY.ORG
followed by the dotted quad for laundry.org, which is a packet
anonymizer used by many Secret Admirers to render their communications
untraceable.
It all adds up to nothing, yet Randy can't get away with assuming that
this message came from a bored sixteen year old. He should probably make
some token response. But he's afraid that it'll turn out to be a come on for
some kind of business proposition: probably some mangy high tech company
that's looking for capital.
In the latest version of the business plan, there is probably some
explanation of why Epiphyte(2) is building the Crypt. Randy can simply cut
and paste it into an e mail reply to root@pallas.eruditorum.org. It'll be
something vaporous and shareholder pleasing, and therefore kind of
alienating. With any luck it will discourage this person from pestering him
anymore. Randy double clicks on Ordo's eyeball/pyramid icon, and it opens up
a little text window on the screen, where he is invited to type commands.
Ordo's also got a lovely graphical user interface, but Randy scorns it. No
menus or buttons for him. He types
>decrypt epiphyteBizPlan.5.4.ordo
The computer responds
verify your identity: enter the pass phrase or 'bio' to opt for
biometric verification.
Before Ordo will decrypt the file, it needs to have the private key:
all 4096 bits of it. The key is stored on Randy's hard disk. But bad guys
can break into hotel rooms and read the contents of hard disks, so the key
itself has been encrypted. In order to decrypt it, Ordo needs the key to the
key, which (in Cantrell's one concession to user friendliness) is a pass
phrase: a string of words, easier to remember than 4096 binary digits. But
it has to be a long phrase or else it's too easy to break.
The last time Randy changed his pass phrase, he was reading another
World War II memoir. He types:
>with hoarse shouts of "banzai!" the drunken Nips swarmed out of
their trenches, their swords and bayonets flashing in the beams of our
searchlights
and hits the "return" key. Ordo responds:
incorrect pass phrase
reenter the pass phrase or "bio" to use biometric verification.
Randy curses and tries it a few more times, with slight changes in
punctuation. Nothing works.
In desperation and out of curiosity, he tries:
bio
and the software responds:
unable to locate biometric configuration file. Talk to Cantrell : /
Which is of course not a normal part of the software. Ordo does not
come with biometric verification, nor do its error messages refer to John
Cantrell, or anyone else, by name. Cantrell has apparently written a plug in
module, a little add on, and distributed it to his friends in Epiphyte(2).
"Fine," Randy says, picks up his phone, and dials John Cantrell's room
number. This being a brand new, modern hotel, he gets a voice mail box in
which John has actually bothered to record an informative greeting.
"This is John Cantrell of Novus Ordo Seclorum and Epiphyte
Corporations. For those of you who have reached me using my universal phone
number and consequently have no idea where I am: I am in the Hotel Foote
Mansion in the Sultanate of Kinakuta please consult a quality atlas. It is
four o'clock in the afternoon, Thursday March twenty first. I'm probably
down in the Bomb and Grapnel."
***
The Bomb and Grapnel is the pirate themed hotel bar, which is not as
cheesy as it sounds. It is decorated with (among other museum grade
memorabilia) several brass cannons that seem authentic. John Cantrell is
seated at a corner table, looking as at home here as a man in a black cowboy
hat possibly can. His laptop is open on the table next to a rum drink that
has been served up in a soup tureen. A two foot long straw connects it to
Cantrell's mouth. He sucks and types. Watching incredulously is a cadre of
tough looking Chinese businessmen sitting at the bar; when they see Randy
coming in, carrying his own laptop, they buzz up. Now there's two of them!
Cantrell looks up and grins something he cannot do without looking
fiendish. He and Randy shake hands triumphantly. Even though they've only
been riding around on 747s, they feel like Stanley and Livingstone.
"Nice tan," Cantrell says puckishly, all but twirling his mustache.
Randy's caught off guard, starts and stops talking twice, finally shakes his
head in defeat. Both men laugh.
"I got the tan on boats," Randy says, "not by the hotel pool. The last
couple of weeks, I've been putting out fires all over the place."
"Nothing that'll impact shareholder value, I hope," Cantrell deadpans.
Randy says, "You're looking encouragingly pale."
"Everything's fine on my end," Cantrell says. "It's like I predicted
lots of Secret Admirers want to work on a real data haven."
Randy orders a Guinness and says, "You also predicted that a lot of
those people would turn out to be squirrelly and undisciplined."
"Didn't hire those," Cantrell says. "And with Eb to handle the weird
stuff, we've been able to roll right over the few speed bumps we've
encountered."
"Have you seen the Crypt?"
Cantrell raises an eyebrow and shoots him a flawless imitation of a
paranoid glance. "It's like that NORAD command bunker in Colorado Springs,"
he says.
"Yeah!" Randy laughs. "Cheyenne Mountain."
"It's too big," Cantrell announces. He knows Randy is thinking the same
thing.
So Randy decides to play devil's advocate. "But the sultan does
everything big. There are big paintings of him in the big airport."
Cantrell shakes his head. "The Information Ministry is a serious
project. The sultan didn't just make it up. His technocrats conceived it."
"I'm told Avi did a little bit of deft turkey baster work ..."
"Whatever. But the people behind it, like Mohammed Pragasu, are all
Stanford B School types. Oxford and Sorbonne graduates. It's been engineered
to the doorstops by Germans. That cave is not a monument to the sultan."
"No, it's not a vanity project," Randy agrees, thinking of the chilly
machine room that Tom Howard is building a thousand feet below the cloud
forest.
"So there must be some rational explanation for how big it is."
"Maybe it's in the business plan?" ventures Randy.
Cantrell shrugs; he hasn't read it either. "The last one I read cover
to cover was Plan One. A year ago," admits Randy.
"That was a good business plan," Cantrell says. (1)
Randy changes the subject. "I forgot my pass phrase. Need to do that
biometric thing with you."
"It's too noisy here," Cantrell says, "it works by listening to your
voice, doing Fourier shit, remembering a few key numbers. We'll do it in my
room later."
Feeling some need to explain why he hasn't been keeping up with his e
mail, Randy says, "I have been totally obsessed, interfacing with these
AVCLA people in Manila."
"Yup. How's that going?"
"Look. My job's pretty simple," Randy says. "There's that big Nipponese
cable from Taiwan down to Luzon. A router at each end. Then there's the
network of short run, interisland cables that the AVCLA people are laying in
the Philippines. Each cable segment begins and ends at a router, as you
know. My job is to program the routers, make sure the data will always have
a clear path from Taiwan to Kinakuta."
Cantrell glances away, worried that he's about to get bored. Randy
practically lunges across the table, because he knows it's not boring.
"John! You are a major credit card company!"
"Okay." Cantrell meets his gaze, slightly unnerved.
"You are storing your data in the Kinakuta data haven. You need to
download a terabyte of crucial data. You begin the process your encrypted
bytes are screaming up through the Philippines at a gigabyte per second, to
Taiwan, from there across to the States." Randy pauses and swigs Guinness,
building the drama. "Then a ferry capsizes off Cebu."
"So?"
"So, in the space of ten minutes, a hundred thousand Filipinos all pick
up their telephones simultaneously."
Cantrell actually whacks his forehead. "Oh, my god!"
"Now you understand! I've been configuring this network so that no
matter what happens, the data continues to flow to that credit card company.
Maybe at a reduced speed but it flows."
"Well, I can see how that would keep you busy."
"And that's why all I'm really up to speed on is these routers. And
incidentally they're good routers, but they just don't have enough capacity
to feed a Crypt of that size, or justify it economically."
"The gist of Avi and Beryl's explanation," Cantrell says, "is that
Epiphyte is no longer the sole carrier into the Crypt."
"But we're laying the cable here from Palawan "
"The sultan's minions have been out drumming up business," Cantrell
says. "Avi and Beryl are being vague, but from comparing notes with Tom, and
reading tea leaves, methinks there's one, maybe two other cables coming into
Kinakuta."
"Wow!" Randy says. It's all he can think of. "Wow!" He drinks about
half of his Guinness. "It makes sense. If they're doing it once with us,
they can do it again, with other carriers.
"They used us as leverage to bring in others," Cantrell says.
"Well . . . the question is, then, is the cable through the Philippines
still needed? Or wanted?"
"Yup," Cantrell says.
"It is?"
"No. I mean, yup, that's the question, all right."
Randy considers it. "Actually, this could be good news for your phase
of the operation. More pipes into the Crypt means more business in the long
run.
Cantrell raises his eyebrows, a little worried about Randy's feelings.
Randy leans back in his chair and says, "We've had debates before about
whether it makes sense for Epiphyte to be screwing around with cables and
routers in the Philippines."
Cantrell says, "The business plan has always maintained that it would
make economic sense to be running a cable through the Philippines even if
there weren't a Crypt at the end of it."
"The business plan has to say the Intra Philippines network could be
spun off as an independent business, and still survive," Randy says, "to
justify our doing it."
Neither one of them needs to say any more. They've been concentrating
on each other pretty intensely for a while, shutting out the rest of the bar
with their postures, and now, spontaneously, both of them lean back,
stretch, and begin looking around. The timing's fortuitous, because Goto
Furudenendu has just come in with a posse of what Randy guesses are civil
engineers: healthy looking, clean cut Nipponese men in their thirties. Randy
invites him over with a smile, then flags down their waiter and orders a few
of those great big bottles of bitterly cold Nipponese beer.
"This reminds me the Secret Admirers are really on my case," Randy
says.
Cantrell grins, showing some affection for those crazy Secret Admirers.
"Smart, rabidly paranoid people are the backbone of cryptology," he says,
"but they don't always understand business."
"Maybe they understand it too well," Randy says. He is left with some
residual annoyance that he came down to the Bomb and Grapnel party in order
to answer the question posed by root@eruditorum.org ("Why are you doing
it?") and he still doesn't know. As a matter of fact, he knows less now than
he did before.
Then the men from Goto join them, and it just happens that Eberhard
Föhr and Tom Howard show up at just the same time. There is a combinatorial
explosion of name card exchanges and introductions. It seems like protocol
demands a lot of serious social drinking now Randy's inadvertently
challenged these guys' politeness by ordering them beer, and they have to
demonstrate that they will not be bested in any such contest. Tables get
pushed together and everything gets just unbelievably jovial. Eb has to
order some beer for everyone too. Pretty soon things have degenerated into
karaoke. Randy gets up and sings "Me and You and a Dog Named Boo." It's a
good choice because it's a mellow, laid back song that doesn't demand lots
of emoting. Or singing ability, for that matter.
At some point Tom Howard puts his beefy arm up on the back of
Cantrell's chair, the better to shout into his ear. Their matched Eutropian
bracelets, engraved with "Hello Doctor, please freeze me as follows"
messages, are glittery and conspicuous, and Randy's nervous that the
Nipponese guys are going to notice this and ask questions that will be
exceedingly difficult to answer. Tom is reminding Cantrell of something (for
some reason they always refer to Cantrell in this way; some people are just
made to be called by last names). Cantrell nods and shoots Randy a quick and
somewhat furtive look. When Randy looks back at him, Cantrell glances down
apologetically and takes to chivvying his beer bottle nervously between his
hands. Tom just keeps looking at Randy kind of interestedly. All of this
motivated glancing finally brings Randy and Tom and Cantrell together at the
farthest end of the bar from the karaoke speakers.
"So, you know Andrew Loeb," Cantrell says. It's clear he's basically
dismayed by this and yet sort of impressed too, as if he'd just learned that
Randy had once beaten a man to death with his bare hands and then just never
bothered to mention it.
"It's true," Randy says. "As well as anyone can know a guy like that."
Cantrell is paying undue diligence to the project of picking the label
off of his beer bottle and so Tom picks up the thread now. "You were in
business together?"
"Not really. Can I ask how you guys are aware of this? I mean, how do
you even know that Andrew Loeb exists in the first place? Because of the
Digibomber thing?"
"Oh, no it was after that. Andy became a figure of note in some of the
circles where Tom and I both hang out," Cantrell says.
"The only circles I can imagine that Andy'd be a part of would be
primitive survivalists, and people who believe they've been Satanically
ritually abused."
Randy says this mindlessly, as if his mouth is a mechanical teletype
hammering out a weather forecast. It kind of hangs there.
"That helps fill in a few gaps," Tom finally says.
"What did you think when the FBI searched his cabin?" Cantrell asks,
his grin returned.
"I didn't know what to think," Randy says. "I remember watching the
videotape on the news the agents coming out of that shack with boxes of
evidence, and thinking my name must be on papers in them. That somehow I'd
get mixed up in the case as a result."
"Did the FBI ever contact you?" Tom asks.
"No. I think that once they searched through all of his stuff, they
figured out pretty quickly that he wasn't the Digibomber, and crossed him
off the list."
"Well, not long after that happened, Andy Loeb showed up on the Net,"
Cantrell says.
"I find that impossible to believe."
"So did we. I mean, we'd all received copies of his manifestoes printed
on this grey recycled paper that was like the sheets of fuzz that you peel
off a clothes dryer's lint trap."
"He used some kind of organic, water based ink that flaked off like
black dandruff," Tom says.
"We used to joke about having Andy grit all over our desks," Cantrell
says. "So when this guy called Andy Loeb showed up on the Secret Admirers
mailing list, and the Eutropia newsgroup, posting all of these long rants,
we refused to believe it was him."
"We thought that someone had just written really brilliant parodies of
his prose style," Cantrell says.
"But when they kept coming, day after day, and he started getting into
these long dialogs with people, it became obvious that it really was him,"
Tom grumbles.
"How did he square that with being a Luddite?"
Cantrell: "He said that he'd always thought of computers as a force
that alienated and atomized society."
Tom: "But as the result of being the number one Digibomber suspect for
a while, he'd been forcibly made aware of the Internet, which changed
computers by connecting them."
"Oh, my god!" Randy says.
"And he'd been mulling over the Internet while he was doing whatever
Andrew Loeb does," Tom continues.
Randy: "Squatting naked in icy mountain streams strangling muskrats
with his bare hands."
Tom: "And he'd realized computers could be a tool to unite society."
Randy: "And I'll bet he was just the guy to unite it."
Cantrell: "Well, that's actually not far away from what he said."
Randy: "So, are you about to tell me that he became a Eutropian?"
Cantrell: "Well, no. It's more like he discovered a schism in the
Eutropian movement we didn't know was there, and created his own splinter
group.
Randy: "I think of the Eutropians as being totally hard core
individuals, pure libertarians."
"Well, yeah!" Cantrell says. "But the basic premise of Eutropianism is
that technology has made us post human. That Homo sapiens plus technology is
effectively a whole new species: immortal, omnipresent because of the Net,
and headed towards omnipotence. Now, the first people to talk that way were
libertarians."
Tom says, "But the idea has attracted all kinds of people including
Andy Loeb. He showed up one day and started yammering about hive minds."
"And of course he was flamed to a crisp by most of the Eutropians,
because that concept was anathema to them," Cantrell says.
Tom: "But he kept at it, and after a while, some people started
agreeing with him. Turned out there was really a pretty substantial faction
within the Eutropians who didn't especially care for libertarianism and who
found the idea of a hive mind attractive."
"So, now Andy's the leader of that faction?" Randy asks.
"I would suppose so," Cantrell says. "They split away and formed their
own newsgroup. We haven't heard much from them in the last six months or
so."
"So how did you become aware of a connection between Andy and me?"
"He stills pops into the Secret Admirers newsgroup from time to time,"
Tom says. "And there's been a lot of discussion there about the Crypt
lately."
Cantrell says, "When he found out that you and Avi were involved, he
posted this vast rant twenty or thirty K of run on sentences. Not very
complimentary."
"Well, Jesus. What's his beef? He won the case. Completely bankrupted
me. You'd think he'd have something better to do than beat this dead horse,"
Randy says, thumping himself on the chest. "Doesn't he have a day job?"
"He's some kind of a lawyer now," Cantrell says.
"Ha! Figures."
"He's been denouncing us," Tom says. "Capitalist roader. Atomizing
society. Making the world safe for drug traffickers and Third World
kleptocrats."
"Well, at least he got something right," Randy says. He's delighted to
have an answer, finally, to the question of why they're building the Crypt.
Chapter 27 RETROGRADE MANEUVER
Sio is a mud cemetery. Those who have already given their lives for the
emperor compete for mire space with those who intend to. Bizarre forktailed
American planes dive out of the sun every day to murder them with terrible
glowing rains of cannon fire and the mind crushing detonations of bombs, so
they sleep in open topped graves and only come out at night. But their pits
are full of reeking water that chums with hostile life, and when the sun
goes down, rain beats them, carrying into their bones the deadly chill of
high altitudes. Every man in the 20th Division knows that he will not leave
New Guinea alive, so it remains only to choose the method of death:
surrender to be tortured, then massacred by the Australians? Put grenades to
their heads? Remain where they are to be killed by the airplanes all day,
and all night by malaria, dysentery, scrub typhus, starvation, and
hypothermia? Or walk two hundred miles over mountains and flooding rivers to
Madang, which is tantamount to suicide even when it is peacetime and you
have food and medicine...?
But that is what they are ordered to do. General Adachi flies to Sio it
is the first friendly plane they have seen in weeks and lands on the rutted
septic field that they call an airstrip, and orders the evacuation. They are
to move inland in four detachments. Regiment by regiment, they bury their
dead, pack up what is left of their equipment, hoard what little food is
left, wait for dark, and trudge towards the mountains. The later echelons
can find their path by smell, following the reek of dysentery and of the
corpses dropped behind the pathfinder groups like breadcrumbs.
The top commanders stay to the end, and the radio platoon stays with
them; without a powerful radio transmitter, and the cryptographic
paraphernalia that goes with it, a general is not a general, a division is
not a division. Finally they go off the air, and begin breaking the
transmitter down into the smallest pieces they can, which unfortunately are
not all that small; a divisional radio transmitter is a powerful beast, made
for lighting up the ionosphere. It has an electrical generator,
transformers, and other components that cannot be made light. The men of the
radio platoon, who would find it difficult to move even the weight of their
own skeletons over the mountains and across the surging rivers, will carry
the additional burdens of engine blocks, fuel tanks, and transformers.
And the big steel trunk with all of the Army codebooks. These books
were heavy as death when they were bone dry; now they are sodden. To carry
them out is beyond imagining. The rules dictate that they must therefore be
burned.
The men of the 20th Division's radio platoon are not much inclined to
humor of any kind at the moment, not even the grim sardonic humor universal
among soldiers. If anything in the world is capable of making them laugh at
this moment, it is the concept of trying to construct a bonfire out of
saturated codebooks in a swamp during a rainstorm. They might be able to
burn them if they used a lot of aviation fuel more than they actually have.
Then the fire would produce a towering column of smoke that would draw P 38s
as the scent of human flesh draws mosquitoes.
Burning them can't be necessary. New Guinea is a howling maelstrom of
decay and destruction; the only things that endure are rocks and wasps. They
rip off the covers to bring home as proof that they have been destroyed,
then pack the books into their trunk and bury it in the bank of an
especially vindictive river.
It's not a very good idea. But they have been getting bombed a lot.
Even if the shrapnel misses you, the bomb's shock wave is like a stone wall
moving at seven hundred miles an hour. Unlike a stone wall, it passes
through your body, like a burst of light through a glass figurine. On its
way through your flesh, it rearranges every part of you down to the
mitochondrial level, disrupting every process in every cell, including
whatever enables your brain to keep track of time and experience the world.
A few of these detonations are enough to break the thread of consciousness
into a snarl of tangled and chopped filaments. These men are not as human as
they were when they left home; they cannot be expected to think clearly or
to do things for good reasons. They throw mud on the trunk not as a sane
procedure for getting rid of it but as a kind of ritual, just to demonstrate
the proper respect for its lode of strange information.
Then they shoulder their burdens of iron and rice and begin to strain
up into the mountains. Their comrades have left a trampled path that is
already growing back into jungle. The mileposts are bodies by now just
stinking battlegrounds disputed by frenzied mobs of microbes, bugs, beasts,
and birds never catalogued by scientists.
Chapter 28 HUFFDUFF
The huffduff mast is planted before they even have a roof on the new
headquarters of Detachment 2702, and the huffduff antenna is raised before
there is any electricity to run it.
Waterhouse does his best to pretend as if he cares. He lets the workers
know: vast tank armadas clashing in the African desert might be dashing and
romantic, but the real battle of this war (ignoring, as always, the Eastern
Front) is the Battle of the Atlantic. We can't win the Battle of the
Atlantic without sinking some U boats, and we can't sink them until we find
them, and we need a way of finding them other than the tried and true
approach of letting our convoys steam through them and get blown to bits.
That way, men, is to get this antenna in action as soon as humanly possible.
Waterhouse is no actor, but when the second ice storm of the week blows
through and inflicts grievous damage on the antenna, and he has to stay up
all night repairing it by the light of the Galvanick Lucifer, he is pretty
sure that he has them hooked. The castle staff work late shifts to keep him
supplied with hot tea and brandy, and the builders give him some zesty hip
hip hoorays the next morning when the patched antenna is winched back up to
the top of the mast. They are all so sure that they are saving lives in the
North Atlantic that they would probably lynch him if they knew the truth.
This huffduff story is ridiculously plausible. It is so plausible that
if Waterhouse were working for the Germans, he'd be suspicious. The antenna
is a highly directional model. It receives a strong signal when pointed
towards the source and a weak signal otherwise. The operator waits for a U
boat to begin transmitting and then swings the antenna back and forth until
it gives the maximum reading; the direction of the antenna then gives the
azimuth to the source. Two or more such readings, supplied by different
huffduff stations, can be used to triangulate the origin of the signal.
In order to keep up appearances, the station needs to be manned 24
hours a day, which almost kills Waterhouse during the first weeks of 1943.
The rest of Detachment 2702 has not shown up on schedule, so it is up to
Waterhouse to preserve the illusion in the meantime.
Everyone within ten miles basically, the entire civilian population of
Qwghlm, or, to put it another way, the entire Qwghlmian race can see the new
huffduff antenna rising from the mast on the castle. They are not stupid
people and some of them, at least, must understand that the damn thing
doesn't do any good if it is always pointed in the same direction. If it's
not moving, it's not working. And if it's not working, then just what the
hell is going on up there in the castle anyway?
So Waterhouse has to move it. He lives in the chapel, sleeping when he
sleeps in a hammock strung at a perilous altitude above the floor
("skerries" are excellent jumpers, he has found).
If he sleeps during the daytime, even casual observers in the town will
notice that the antenna does not move. That's no good. But he can't sleep at
night, when the Germans bounce their transmissions off the ionosphere
between the U boats in the North Atlantic and their bases in Bordeaux and
Lorient because a really close observer say an insomniacal castle worker, or
a German spy up in the rocks with a pair of binoculars will suspect that the
immobile huffduff antenna is just a cover story. So Waterhouse tries to
split the difference by sleeping for a few hours around dusk and another few
hours around dawn a plan that does not go over well with his body. And when
he gets up, he has absolutely nothing to look forward to besides sitting at
the huffduff console for eight or twelve hours at a stretch, watching the
breath come out of his mouth, twiddling the antenna, listening to nothing!
He freely stipulates that he is a selfish bastard for feeling sorry for
himself when other men are being blown to bits.
Having gotten that out of the way, what is he going to do to stay sane?
He has got his routine down pat: leave the antenna pointed generally
westwards for a while, then swing it back and forth in diminishing arcs,
pretending to zero in on a U boat, then leave it sitting for a while and do
jumping jacks to warm back up. He has ditched his uniform for raiments of
warm Qwghlmian wool. Every once in a while, at totally unpredictable
intervals, members of the castle staff will burst in on him with an urn of
soup or tea service or simply to see how he is doing and tell him what a
fine chap he is. Once a day, he writes down a bunch of gibberish his
purported results and dispatches it over to the naval base.
He divides his time between thinking about sex and thinking about
mathematics. The former keeps intruding upon the latter. It gets worse when
the stout fiftyish cook named Blanche, who has been bringing him his meals,
comes down with dropsy or ague or gout or colic or some other Shakespearian
ailment and is replaced by Margaret, who is about twenty and quite fetching.
Margaret really messes up his head. When it gets really intolerable, he
goes to the latrine (so that the staff will not break in on him at an
inopportune moment) and executes a Manual Override. But one thing he learned
in Hawaii was that a Manual Override is unfortunately not the same as the
real thing. The effect wears off too soon.
While he's waiting for it to wear off, he gets a lot of solid math
done. Alan provided him with some notes on redundancy and entropy, relating
to the voice encryption work he is currently doing in New York City.
Waterhouse works through that stuff and comes up with some nice lemmas which
he lamentably cannot send to Alan without violating both common sense and
any number of security procedures. This done, he turns his attention to
cryptology, pure and raw. He spent enough time at Bletchley Park to realize
just how little of this art he really understood.
The U boats talk on the radio way too much and everyone in the German
Navy knows it. Their security experts have been nagging their brass to
tighten up their security, and they finally did it by introducing the four
rotor version of the Enigma machine, which has knocked Bletchley Park on its
ass for about a year...
Margaret has to walk round the castle out of doors to bring Waterhouse
his meals, and by the time she gets here, her cheeks have turned rosy red.
The steam coming from her mouth floats around her face like a silken veil
Stop that, Lawrence! The subject of today's lecture is the German Naval
four wheel Enigma, known to them as Triton and to the Allies as Shark.
Introduced on 2 February of last year (1942), it wasn't until the recovery
of the beached German U boat U 559 on 30 October that Bletchley Park got the
material they needed to break the code. A couple of weeks ago, on 13
December, Bletchley Park finally busted Shark, and the internal
communications of the German Navy became an open book to the Allies once
more.
The first thing they have learned, as a result, is that the Germans
have broken our merchant shipping codes wide open, and that all year long
they have known exactly where to find the convoys.
All of this information has been provided to Lawrence Pritchard
Waterhouse within the last few days, via the totally secure one time pad
channel. Bletchley is telling him this stuff because it raises a question of
information theory, which is his department and his problem. The question
is: how quickly can we replace our busted merchant shipping codes without
tipping the Germans off to the fact that we have broken Shark?
Waterhouse does not have to think about this one for very long before
he concludes that it is far too tricky to play games with. The only way to
handle the situation is to concoct an incident of some sort that will
explain to the Germans why we have totally lost faith in our own merchant
shipping codes and are changing them. He writes up a message to this effect,
and begins to encrypt it using the one time pad that he shares with Chattan.
"Is everything quite all right?"
Waterhouse stands and whirls around, heart thrashing.
It is Margaret, standing there veiled in the steam of her own breath, a
grey wool overcoat thrown over her maid's uniform, supporting a tray of tea
and scones with grey wool mittens. The only parts of her not encased in wool
are her ankles and her face. The former are well turned; Margaret is not
above wearing heels. The latter has never been exposed to the direct rays of
the sun and brings to mind rose petals strewn over Devonshire clotted cream.
"Oh! Let me take it!" Waterhouse blurts, and lunges forward with a
jerkiness born of passion blended with hypothermia. While taking the tray
from her hands, he inadvertently pulls off one of her mittens, which falls
to the floor. "Sorry!" he says, realizing he has never seen her hands
before. She has red polish on the nails of the offended hand, which she cups
over her mouth and blows on. Her large green eyes are looking at him, full
of placid expectation.
"Beg pardon?" Waterhouse says.
"Is everything quite all right?" she repeats.
"Yes! Why shouldn't it be?"
"The antenna," Margaret says. "It hasn't moved in over an hour."
Waterhouse is so flummoxed he can barely remain standing.
Margaret is still breathing through her lacquered fingertips, so that
Waterhouse can only see her green eyes, which now angle and twinkle
mischievously. She glances towards his hammock. "Been napping on the job,
have we?"
Waterhouse's first impulse is to deny it and to explain the truth,
which is that he was thinking about sex and crypto and forgot to move the
antenna. But then he realizes that Margaret has supplied him with a better
excuse. "Guilty as charged," he says. "Was up late last night."
"That tea will keep you alert," Margaret says. Then her eyes return to
the hammock. She pulls her mitten back on. "What is it like?"
"What is what like?"
"Sleeping in one of those. Is it comfortable?"
"Very comfortable."
"Can I just see what it's like?"
"Ah. Well, it's very difficult to get in at that height."
"You manage it, though, don't you?" she says chidingly. Waterhouse
feels himself blushing. Margaret walks over to the hammock and kicks off her
heels. Waterhouse winces to see her bare feet on the stone floor, which has
not been warm since the Barbary Corsairs burned the place down. Her toenails
are also painted red. "I don't mind it," Margaret says, "I'm a farmer's
daughter. Come on, give me a leg up!"
Waterhouse has completely lost whatever control he might ever have had
over the situation and himself. His tongue seems to be made of erectile
tissue. So he lumbers over, bends down, and makes a stirrup of his hands.
She puts her foot into it and launches herself into the hammock,
disappearing with a whoop and a giggle into his bulky nest of grey wool
blankets. The hammock swings back and forth across the center of the chapel,
like a censer dispersing a faint lavender scent. It swings once, twice. It
swings five times, ten times, twenty. Margaret is silent and motionless.
Waterhouse stands as if his feet were planted in mortar. For the first time
in weeks he does not know exactly what is going to happen next, and the loss
of control leaves him stunned and helpless.
"It's dreamy," she says. Dreamily. Then, finally, she shifts.
Waterhouse sees her little face peeking out over the edge, shrouded in the
grey cowl of a blanket. "Ooh!" she screams, and flips flat on her back
again. The sudden movement puts an eccentric jiggle into the rhythmic motion
of the hammock.
"What's wrong?" Waterhouse says hopelessly.
"I'm afraid of heights!" she exclaims. "I'm so sorry, Lawrence, I
should have warned you. Is it all right if I call you Lawrence?" She sounds
as if she would be terribly hurt if he said no. And how can Lawrence wound
the feelings of a pretty, barefoot, acrophobic girl, helpless in a hammock?
"Please. By all means," he says. But he knows perfectly well that the
ball is still in his court. "Can I be of any assistance?"
"I should be so obliged," Margaret says.
"Well, would you like to climb down onto my shoulders, or some thing?"
Waterhouse essays.
"I'm really far too terrified," she says.
There is only one way out. "Well. Would you take it the wrong way if I
came up there to help?"
"It would be so heroic of you!" she says. "I should be unspeakably
grateful."
"Well, then . . ."
"But I insist that you continue with your duties first!"
"Beg pardon?"
"Lawrence," Margaret says, "when I get down from this hammock I shall
go to the kitchen and mop the floor which is already quite clean enough,
thank you. You, on the other hand, have important work to do work that might
save the lives of hundreds of men on some Atlantic convoy! And I know that
you have been very naughty in sleeping on the job. I refuse to allow you up
here until you have made amends."
"Very well," Waterhouse says, "you leave me no alternative. Duty
calls." He squares his shoulders, spins on his heel, and marches back to his
desk. Skerries have already made off with all of Margaret's scones, but he
pours himself some tea. Then he resumes encrypting his instructions to
Chattan: ONLY BRUTE FORCE APPROACH WILL BE SAFE PUT CODE BOOK ON SHIP INSERT
SHIP IN MURMANSK CONVOY WAIT FOR FOG RAM NORWAY.
The one time pad encryption takes a while. Lawrence can do mod 25
arithmetic in his sleep, but doing it with an erection is a different
matter. "Lawrence? What are you doing?" Margaret asks from her nest in the
hammock, which, Lawrence imagines, is getting warmer and cozier by the
minute. He glances surreptitiously at her discarded high heels.
"Preparing my report," Lawrence says. "Doesn't do me any good to make
observations if I don't send them out."
"Quite right," Margaret says thoughtfully.
This is an excellent time to stoke the chapel's pathetic iron stove. He
puts in a few scoops of precious coal, his worksheet, and the page from the
one time pad that he has just used to do the encryption. "Should warm up
now," he says.
"Oh, lovely," Margaret says, "I'm all shivery."
Lawrence recognizes this as his cue to initiate a rescue operation.
About fifteen seconds later, he is up there in the hammock with Margaret. To
the great surprise of neither one of them, the quarters are awkward and
tight. There is some flopping around which ends with Lawrence on his back
and Margaret on top of him, her thigh between his.
She is shocked to discover that he has an erection. Ashamed,
apparently, that she did not anticipate his need. "You poor dear!" she
exclaims. "Of course! How could I have been so dense! You must have been so
lonely here." She kisses his cheek, which is nice since he is too stunned to
move. "A brave warrior deserves all the support we civilians can possibly
give him," she says, reaching down with one hand to open his fly.
Then she pulls the grey wool over her head and burrows to a new
position. Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is stunned by what happens next. He
gaze