After a while he stopped seeing new things. Then he got on his bicycle and rode back through the Pine Barrens. He got lost in the dark and so didn't find his way back to the fire tower until dawn. But he didn't mind being lost because while he rode around in the dark he thought about the Turing machine. Finally he came back to the shore of the pond where they had camped. The dawn-light shining on the saucer of calm reddish water made it look like a pool of blood. Alan Mathison Turing and Rudolf von Hacklheber were lying together like spoons on the shore, still smudged a little bit from their swim yesterday. Lawrence started a little fire and made some tea and they woke up eventually.
"Did you solve the problem?" Alan asked him.
"Well you can turn that Universal Turing Machine of yours into any machine by changing the presets-"
"Presets?"
"Sorry, Alan, I think of your U.T.M. as being kind of like a pipe organ."
"Oh."
"Once you've done that, anyway, you can do any calculation you please, if the tape is long enough. But gosh, Alan, making a tape that's long enough, and that you can write symbols on, and erase them, is going to be sort of tricky-Atanasoffs capacitor drum would only work up to a certain size-you'd have to-"
"This is a digression," Alan said gently.
"Yeah, okay, well-if you had a machine like that, then any given preset could be represented by a number-a string of symbols. And the tape that you would feed into it to start the calculation would contain another string of symbols. So it's G
"And ze Entscheidungsproblem?" Rudy reminded him.
"Proving or disproving a formula-once you've encrypted the formula into numbers, that is-is just a calculation on that number. So it means that the answer to the question is, no! Some formulas cannot be proved or disproved by any mechanical process! So I guess there's some point in being human after all!"
Alan looked pleased until Lawrence said this last thing, and then his face collapsed. "Now there you go making unwarranted assumptions."
"Don't listen to him, Lawrence!" Rudy said. "He's going to tell you that our brains are Turing machines."
"Thank you, Rudy," Alan said patiently. "Lawrence, I submit that our brains are Turing machines."
"But you proved that there's a whole lot of formulas that a Turing machine can't process!"
"And you have proved it too, Lawrence."
"But don't you think that we can do some things that a Turing machine couldn't?"
"G
"Give me one example," Alan said.
"Of a noncomputable function that a human can do, and a Turing machine can't?"
"Yes. And don't give me any sentimental nonsense about creativity. I believe that a Universal Turing Machine could show behaviors that we would construe as creative."
"Well, I don't know then . . . I'll try to keep my eye out for that kind of thing in the future.''
But later, as they were tiding back towards Princeton, he said, "What about dreams?"
"Like those angels in Virginia?"
"I guess so."
"Just noise in the neurons, Lawrence."
"Also I dreamed last night that a zeppelin was burning."
Soon, Alan got his Ph.D. and went back to England. He wrote Lawrence a couple of letters. The last of these stated, simply, that he would not be able to write Lawrence any more letters "of substance" and that Lawrence should not take it personally. Lawrence perceived right away that Alan's society had put him to work doing something useful-probably figuring out how to keep it from being eaten alive by certain of its neighbors. Lawrence wondered what use America would find for him.
He went back to Iowa State, considered changing his major to mathematics, but didn't. It was the consensus of all whom he consulted that mathematics, like pipe-organ restoration, was a fine thing, but that one needed some way to put bread on the table. He remained in engineering and did more and more poorly at it until the middle of his senior year, when the university suggested that he enter a useful line of work, such as roofing. He walked straight out of college into the waiting arms of the Navy.
They gave him an intelligence test. The first question on the math part had to do with boats on a river: Port Smith is 100 miles upstream of Port Jones. The river flows at 5 miles per hour. The boat goes through water at 10 miles per hour. How long does it take to go from Port Smith to Port Jones? How long to come back?
Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat. Clearly, 5 miles per hour was nothing more than the averagespeed. The current would be faster in the middle of the river and slower at the banks. More complicated variations could be expected at bends in the river. Basically it was a question of hydrodynamics, which could be tackled using certain well-known systems of differential equations. Lawrence dove into the problem, rapidly (or so he thought) covering both sides of ten sheets of paper with calculations. Along the way, he realized that one of his assumptions, in combination with the simplified Navier Stokes equations, had led him into an exploration of a particularly interesting family of partial differential equations. Before he knew it, he had proved a new theorem. If that didn't prove his intelligence, what would?
Then the time bell rang and the papers were collected. Lawrence managed to hang onto his scratch paper. He took it back to his dorm, typed it up, and mailed it to one of the more approachable math professors at Princeton, who promptly arranged for it to be published in a Parisian mathematics journal.
Lawrence received two free, freshly printed copies of the journal a few months later, in San Diego, California, during mail call on board a large ship called the U.S.S. Nevada.The ship had a band, and the Navy had given Lawrence the job of playing the glockenspiel in it, because their testing procedures had proven that he was not intelligent enough to do anything else.
The sack of mail carrying Lawrence's contribution to the mathematical literature arrived just in the nick of time. Lawrence's ship, and quite a few of her sisters, had until then been based in California. But at just this moment, all of them were transferred to some place called Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in order to show the Nips who was boss.
Lawrence had never really known what he wanted to do with his life, but he quickly decided that being glockenspiel player on a battleship in Hawaii during peacetime was a long way from the worst life you could possibly have. The harshest part of the job was sometimes having to sit or march in very warm conditions, and enduring occasional fluffed notes by other band members. He had abundant free time, which he spent working on a series of new theorems in the field of information theory. The field had been invented and pretty much encompassed by his friend Alan, but there was much detail work to be done. He and Alan and Rudy had sketched out a general plan of what needed to be proved or disproved. Lawrence tore through the list. He wondered what Alan and Rudy were up to in Britain and Germany, but he couldn't write to them and find out, so he kept his work to himself. When he wasn't playing the glockenspiel or working out theorems, there were bars and dances to go to. Waterhouse did some penis work of his own, got the clap, had it cured[1], bought condoms. All of the sailors did this. They were like three-year olds who shove pencils in their ears, discover that it hurts, and stop doing it. Lawrence's first year went by almost instantly. Time just blazed by. Nowhere could be sunnier, more relaxing, than Hawaii.
Chapter 2 NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM
"Filipinos are a warm, gentle, caring, giving people," Avi says, "which is a good thing since so many of them carry concealed weapons."
Randy is in Tokyo's airport, ambling down a concourse with a slowness that is infuriating to his fellow travelers. They have all spent the last half-day strapped into bad chairs, stuffed into an aluminum tube aslosh with jet fuel. Over the safety-engineered nubs molded into the jetway floor, their rolling suitcases drone like fighter planes. They graze the backs of his knees as they bank around his husky columnar body. Randy is holding his new GSM phone to the side of his head. Supposedly it works anywhere in the world, except for the United States. This is his first chance to try it out.
"You sound clear as a bell," Avi says. "How was the flight over?"
"All right," Randy says. "They had one of those animated maps up on the video screen."
Avi sighs. "All the airlines have those now," he announces monotonically.
"The only feature between San Francisco and Tokyo was Midway Island."
"So?"
"It kind of hung there for hours. MIDWAY. Mute embarrassment all around."
Randy reaches the departure gate for Manila, and pauses to admire a five-foot-wide high-definition TV set bearing the logo of a major Nipponese consumer-electronics company. It is running a video in which a wacky cartoon professor and his adorable canine sidekick cheerfully tick off the three transmission routes of the AIDS virus.
"I have a fingerprint for you," Randy says.
"Shoot."
Randy stares at the palm of his hand, on which he has written a string of numbers and letters in ballpoint pen. "AF 10 06 E9 99 BA 11 07 64 C1 89 E3 40 8C 72 55."
"Got it," Avi says. "That's from Ordo, right?"
"Right. I e-mailed you the key from SFO."
"The apartment situation is still resolving," Avi says. "So I just reserved you a suite at the Manila Hotel."
"What do you mean, it's still resolving?"
"The Philippines is one of those post-Spanish countries with no clear boundaries between business and personal relationships," Avi says. "I don't think you can secure lodgings there without marrying into a family with a major street named after it."
Randy takes a seat in the departure area. Perky gate attendants in jaunty, improbable hats zero in on Filipinos with too many carry-ons, and subject them to a public ritual of filling out little tags and surrendering their possessions. The Filipinos roll their eyes and stare longingly out the windows. But most of the waiting passengers are Nipponese-some businessmen, mostly vacationers. They are watching an educational video about how to get mugged in foreign countries.
"Huh," Randy says, looking out the window, "got another 747 down to Manila."
"In Asia, no decent airline bothers to dick around anything smaller than a 747," Avi snaps. "If someone tries to pack you on board a 737 or god forbid an Airbus, run, don't walk, away from the boarding lounge, and call me on my Sky Pager and I'll send in a chopper to evacuate you."
Randy laughs.
Avi continues. "Now, listen. This hotel you're going to is very old, very grand, but it's in the middle of nowhere."
"Why would they build a grand hotel in the middle of nowhere?"
"It used to be a happening place-it's on the waterfront, right on the edge of Intramuros."
Randy's high-school Spanish is enough to translate that: Inside the Walls.
"But Intramuros was annihilated by the Nipponese in 1945," Avi continues. "Systematically. All of the business hotels and office buildings are in a new neighborhood called Makati, much closer to the airport."
"So you want to put our office in Intramuros."
"How'd you guess?" Avi says, sounding a little spooked. He prides himself on unpredictability.
"I'm not an intuitive guy generally," Randy says, "but I've been on a plane for thirteen hours and my brain has been turned inside out and hung up to dry."
Avi rattles off canned justifications: office space is much cheaper in Intramuros. Government ministries are closer. Makati, the gleaming new business district, is too isolated from the real Philippines. Randy pays no attention to it.
"You want to work out of Intramuros because it was systematically annihilated, and because you're obsessed with the Holocaust," Randy finally says, quietly and without rancor.
"Yeah. So?" Avi says.
Randy stares out the window of the Manila-bound 747, sipping on a fluorescent green Nipponese soft drink made from bee extracts (at least, it has pictures of bees on it) and munching on something that a flight attendant handed him called Japanese Snack. Sky and ocean are the same color, a shade of blue that makes his teeth freeze. The plane is so high that, whether he looks up or down, he sees foreshortened views of boiling cumulonimbus stacks. The clouds erupt from the hot Pacific as if immense warships were exploding all over the place. The speed and power of their growth is alarming, the forms they adopt as bizarre and varied as those of deep-sea organisms, and all of them, he supposes, are as dangerous to an airplane as punji stakes to a barefoot pedestrian. The red-orange meatball painted on the wingtip startles him when he notices it. He feels like he's been thrown into an old war film.
He turns on his laptop. Electronic mail from Avi, encrypted to a fare-thee-well, has been piling up in his in-box. It is a gradual accumulation of tiny files, thrown at him by Avi whenever a thought popped into his head over the last three days; it would be obvious, even if Randy didn't know it, that Avi owns a portable e-mail machine that talks to the Internet by radio. Randy fires up a piece of software that is technically called Novus Ordo Seclorum but that everyone calls Ordo for short. It is a fairly strained pun based on the fact that Ordo's job, as a piece of cryptographic software, is to put a message's bits in a New Order and that it will take Centuries for nosy governments to decrypt it. A scanned image of a Great Pyramid appears in the middle of his screen, and a single eye gradually materializes at its apex.
Ordo can handle this in one of two ways. The obvious way is to decrypt all of the messages and convert them into plaintext files on his hard disk, which he can then read any time he wants. The problem with this (if you are paranoid) is that anyone who gets his hands on Randy's hard disk can then read the files. For all he knows, the customs officials in Manila will decide to ransack his computer for child pornography. Or, fogged by jet lag, he'll leave his laptop in a taxi. So instead he puts Ordo into a streaming mode where it will decrypt the files just long enough for him to read them and then, when he closes the windows, expunge the plaintext from the computer's memory and from its hard drive.
The subject heading of Avi's first message is: "Guideline 1."
We look for places where the math is right. Meaning what? Meaning that pop. is about to explode—we can predict that just by looking at age histogram—and per capita income is about to take off the way it did in Nippon, Taiwan, Singapore. Multiply those two things together and you get the kind of exponential growth that should get us all into fuck-you money before we turn forty.
This is an allusion to a Randy/Avi conversation of two years ago wherein Avi actually calculated a specific numerical value for "fuck-you money." It was not a fixed constant, however, but rather a cell in a spreadsheet linked to any number of continually fluctuating economic indicators. Sometimes when Avi is working at his computer he will leave the spreadsheet running in a tiny window in the corner so that he can see the current value of "fuck-you money" at a glance.
The second message, sent a couple of hours later, is called "Guideline 2."
Two: pick a tech where no one can compete with us. Right now, that=networking. We're kicking the crap out of everyone else in the world when it comes to networking. It's not even funny.
The next day, Avi sent a message called, simply, "More." Perhaps he had lost track of the number of guidelines he'd issued so far.
Another principle: this time we retain control of the corporation. That means that we keep at least fifty percent of the shares—which means little to no outside investment until we've built up some value.
"You don't have to convince me," Randy mumbles to himself as he reads this.
This shapes the kinds of businesses we can get into. Forget anything that requires a big initial investment.
Luzon is green-black jungle mountains gouged with rivers that would appear to be avalanches of silt. As the navy-blue ocean verges on its khaki beaches, the water takes on the shocking iridescent hue of a suburban swimming pool. Farther south, the mountains are swidden-scarred-the soil beneath is bright red and so these parts look like fresh lacerations. But most is covered with foliage that looks like the nubby green stuff that model railroaders put over their papier-m
The view gets blurry as they belly down into the pall of sweaty smog above the city. The plane begins to sweat like a giant glass of iced tea. The water streams off in sheets, collects in crevices, whips off the flaps' trailing edges.
Suddenly they are banking over Manila Bay, which is marked with endless streaks of brilliant red-some kind of algal bloom. Oil tankers trail long time-delayed rainbows that flourish in their wakes. Every cove is jammed with long skinny boats with dual outriggers, looking like brightly painted water skaters.
And then they are down on the runway at NAIA, Ninoy Aquino International Airport. Guards and cops of various stripes are ambling around with M-16s or pistol-handled pump shotguns, wearing burnooses fashioned from handkerchiefs clamped to the head with American baseball caps. A man dressed in a radiant white uniform stands below the ragged maw of the jetway holding his hands downwards with fluorescent orange sticks in them, like Christ dispensing mercy on a world of sinners. Sulfurous, fulminating tropical air begins to leak in through the jumbo's air vents. Everything moistens and wilts.
He is in Manila. He takes his passport out of his shirt pocket. It says,
RANDALL LAWRENCE WATERHOUSE.
This is how Epiphyte Corporation came into existence:
"I am channeling the bad shit!" Avi said.
The number came through on Randy's pager while he was sitting around a table in a grubhouse along the coast with his girlfriend's crowd. A place where, every day, they laser-printed fresh menus on 100% recycled imitation parchment, where oscilloscope tracings of neon-colored sauces scribbled across the plates, and the entrees were towering, architectonic stacks of rare ingredients carved into gemlike prisms. Randy had spent the entire meal trying to resist the temptation to invite one of Charlene's friends (any one of them, it didn't matter) out on the sidewalk for a fistfight.
He glanced at his pager expecting to see the number of the Three Siblings Computer Center, which was where he worked (technically, still does). The fell digits of Avi's phone number penetrated the core of his being in the same way that 666 would a fundamentalist's.
Fifteen seconds later, Randy was out on the sidewalk, swiping his card through a pay phone like an assassin drawing a single-edged razor blade across the throat of a tubby politician.
"The power is coming down from On High," Avi continued. "Tonight, it happens to be coming through me-you poor bastard."
"What do you want me to do?" Randy asked, adopting a cold, almost hostile tone to mask sick excitement.
"Buy a ticket to Manila," Avi said.
"I have to talk it over with Charlene first," Randy said.
"You don't even believe that yourself," Avi said.
"Charlene and I have a long-standing relationsh-"
"It's been ten years. You haven't married her. Fill in the fucking blanks."
(Seventy-two hours later, he would be in Manila, looking at the One-Note Flute.)
"Everyone in Asia is wondering when the Philippines is finally going to get its shit together," Avi said, "it's the question of the nineties."
(The One-Note Flute is the first thing you see when you make it through Passport Control.)
"I flashed on this when I was standing in line at Passport Control at Ninoy Aquino International Airport," Avi said, compressing that entire name into a single, sharply articulated burst. "You know how they have different lanes?"
"I guess so," Randy said. A parallelpiped of seared tuna did a barrel roll in his gullet. He felt a perverse craving for a double ice-cream cone. He did not travel as much as Avi, and had only a vague idea of what he meant by lanes.
"You know. One lane for citizens. One for foreigners. Maybe one for diplomats."
(Now, standing there waiting to have his passport stamped, Randy can see it clearly. For once he doesn't mind the wait. He gets in a lane next to the OCW lane and studies them. They are Epiphyte Corp.'s market. Mostly young women, many of them fashionably dressed, but still with a kind of Catholic boarding-school demureness. Exhausted from long flights, tired of the wait, they slump, then suddenly straighten up and elevate their fine chins, as if an invisible nun were making her way up the line whacking their manicured knuckles with a ruler.)
But seventy-two hours ago he hadn't really understood what Avi meant by lanes, so he just said, "Yeah, I've seen the lane thing."
"At Manila, they have a whole lane just for returning OCWs!"
"OCWs?"
"Overseas Contract Workers. Filipinos working abroad-because the economy of the Philippines is so lame. As maids and nannies in Saudi. Nurses and anesthesiologists in the States. Singers in Hong Kong, whores in Bangkok."
"Whores in Bangkok?" Randy had been there, at least, and his mind reeled at the concept of exporting prostitutes to Thailand.
"The Filipino women are more beautiful," Avi said quietly, "and have a ferocity that makes them more interesting, to the innately masochistic business traveler, than all those grinning Thai bimbos." Both of them knew that this was complete bullshit; Avi was a family man and had no firsthand experience whereof he spoke. Randy didn't call him on it, though. As long as Avi retained this extemporaneous bullshitting ability there was a better than even chance of all of them making fuck-you money.
(Now that he's here, it is tempting to speculate as to which of the girls in the OCW lane are hustlers. But he can't see that going anywhere but wrong, so he squares his shoulders and marches toward the yellow line.
The government has set up glass display cases in the concourse leading from Passport Control to the security barrier. The cases contain artifacts demonstrating the glories of pre-Magellan Filipino culture. The first one of these contains the pia rustic hand-carved musical instrument labeled with a long and unreadable name in Tagalog. Underneath that, in smaller letters, is the English translation: ONE-NOTE FLUTE.)
"See? The Philippines is innately hedged," Avi said. 'You know how rare that is? When you find an innately hedged environment, Randy, you lunge into it like a rabid ferret going into a pipe full of raw meat."
A word about Avi: his father's people had just barely gotten out of Prague. As Central European Jews went, they were fairly typical. The only thing about them that was really anomalous was that they were still alive. But his mother's people were unbelievably peculiar New Mexican crypto-Jews who had been living on mesas, dodging Jesuits, shooting rattlesnakes and eating jimsonweed for three hundred years; they looked like Indians and talked like cowboys. In his relations with other people, therefore, Avi dithered. Most of the time he was courtly and correct in a way that was deeply impressive to businesspeople-Nipponese ones expecially-but there were these eruptions, from time to time, as if he'd been dipping into the loco weed. Randy had learned to deal with it, which is why Avi called him at times like this.
"Oh, calm down!" Randy said. He watched a tanned girl rollerblade past him, on her way up from the beach. "Innately hedged?"
"As long as the Philippines don't have their shit together, there'll be plenty of OCWs. They will want to communicate with their families-the Filipinos are incredibly family-oriented. They make Jews look like a bunch of alienated loners."
"Okay. You know more about both groups than I do."
"They are sentimental and affectionate in a way that's very easy for us to sneer at."
"You don't have to be defensive," Randy said, "I'm not sneering at them."
"When you hear their song dedications on the radio, you'll sneer," Avi said. "But frankly, we could take some pointers from the Pinoys on this front."
"You are so close to being sanctimonious right now-"
"I apologize," Avi said, with absolute sincerity. Avi's wife had been pregnant almost continuously for the four years they'd been married. He was getting more religiously observant daily and couldn't make it through a conversation without mentioning the Holocaust. Randy was a bachelor who was just about to break up with the chick he'd been living with.
"I believe you, Avi," Randy said. "Is it a problem with you if I buy a business-class ticket?"
Avi didn't hear him, so Randy assumed that meant yes. "As long as that's the case, there will be a big market for Pinoy-grams."
"Pinoy-grams?"
"For god's sake, don't say it out loud! I'm filling out the trademark application as we speak," Avi said. Randy could hear a rattling sound in the background, computer keys impacting so rapidly it sounded like Avi was simply holding the keyboard between his pale, spindly hands and shaking it violently up and down. "But if the Filipinos do get their shit together, then we see explosive growth in telecoms, as in any other Arday."
"Arday?"
"R-D-A-E. Rapidly Developing Asian Economy. Either way, we win."
"I gather you want to do something with telecoms?"
"Bingo." In the background, a baby began to cough and cry. "Gotta go," Avi said, "Shlomo's asthma is spiking again. Take down this fingerprint."
"Fingerprint?"
"For my encryption key. For e-mail."
"Ordo?"
"Yeah."
Randy took out a ballpoint pen and, finding no paper in his pocket, poised it over the palm of his hand. "Shoot."
"67 81 A4 AE FF 40 25 9B 43 OE 29 8D 56 60 E3 2F." Then Avi hung up the phone.
Randy went back into the restaurant. On his way back, he asked the waiter to bring him a half-bottle of good red wine. Charlene heard him, and glowered. Randy was still thinking about innate ferocity, and did not see it in her face; only a schoolmarmishness common among all of her friends. My god! I have to get out of California, he realized.
Chapter 3 SEAWEED
Woman holds baby Eyes pale as a muzzle flash Band chimes frozen tears
The fourth marines is marching downhill to the strains of John Philip Sousa, which ought to be second nature to a Marine. But the Fourth Marines have been in Shanghai (which ain't no halls of Montezuma nor shores of Tripoli) for too long, longer than Marines should ever stay in one place, and Bobby's already seen his sergeant, one Frick, throw up from opium withdrawal.
A Marine band is several Shanghai blocks ahead. Bobby's platoon can hear the thumpity-thump of the big drums and the piercing noises from piccolos and glockenspiels but he can't follow the tune. Corporal Shaftoe is effectively their leader, because Sergeant Frick is useless.
Shaftoe marches alongside the formation, supposedly to keep an eye on his men, but mostly he's just staring at Shanghai.
Shanghai stares back, and mostly gives them a standing ovation. Of course there is a type of young street rowdy who makes it a point of honor to let the Marines know he isn't scared of them, and they are jeering the Marines from a safe distance, and setting off strings of fire crackers, which does nothing to steady anyone's nerves. The Europeans are applauding-a whole chorus line of Russian dancing girls from Delmonte's is showing thigh and blowing kisses. But most of the Chinese look pretty stonefaced, which-Bobby suspects-means they're scared shitless.
The worst thing is the women carrying half-white babies. A few of these women are rabid, hysterical, throwing themselves into formations of massed Marines, undeterred by rifle butts. But most of them are stoic: they stand with their light-eyed babies and glare, searching the ranks and files for the guilty party. They've all heard about what happened upriver in Nanjing when the Nips came there, and they know that when it's all over, the only trace that they and their babies ever existed may be a really bad memory in the mind of some American Marine.
It works for Shaftoe: he has hunted deer in Wisconsin and seen them limping across the snow, bleeding to death. He saw a man die in basic training at Parris Island. He has seen whole tangles of bodies in the Yangtze, downstream of where the Nipponese were prosecuting the China Incident, and he has seen refugees from places like Nanjing starve to death in the gutters of Shanghai. He has himself killed people who were trying to storm the riverboats it was his duty to protect. He thinks that he has never seen, and will never see, anything as terrible as those stone-faced Chinese women holding their white babies, not even blinking as the firecrackers explode all around them.
Until, that is, he looks into the faces of certain Marines who stare into that crowd and see their own faces looking back at them, pudgy with baby fat and streaked with tears. Some of them seem to think it's all a joke. But many of the Marines who march out of their empty barracks that morning sane and solid men, have, by the time they reach the gunboats waiting for them at the Bund, gone mad. They don't show it. But Shaftoe can see in their eyes that something has given way inside.
The very best men in the regiment are in a foul mood. The ones like Shaftoe, who didn't get involved with the Chinese women, are still leaving plenty behind: houses with maids and shoeshine boys and coolies, with women and opium for almost nothing. They don't know where they are being shipped off to, but it's safe to say that their twenty-one dollars a month won't go as far. They'll be in barracks and they'll have to learn to polish their own boots again. When the gangplanks are drawn in from the stone edge of the Bund, they are cut off from a whole world that they'll never see again, a world where they were kings. Now they are Marines again, It's okay with Shaftoe, who wants to be a Marine. But many of the men have become middle-aged here, and don't.
The guilty men duck belowdecks. Shaftoe remains on the deck of the gunboat, which casts off from the Bund, headed for the cruiser Augusta,which awaits in mid-channel.
The Bund is jammed with onlookers in a riot of differently colored clothing, so one patch of uniform drab catches his eye: a group of Nip soldiers who've come down to bid their Yank counterparts a sarcastic farewell. Shaftoe scans the group looking for someone tall and bulky, and picks him out easily. Goto Dengo's waving to him.
Shaftoe takes his helmet off and waves back. Then, on impulse, just for the hell of it, he winds up and flings the helmet directly at Goto Dengo's head. The throw goes awry and Goto Dengo has to knock down about a dozen of his comrades in order to catch it. All of them seem to think that it is a high honor, as well as tremendously amusing, to be knocked down by Goto Dengo.
Twenty seconds later, a comet sails up out of the flesh cosmos of the Bund and bounces on the wooden deck of the gunboat-a hell of a throw. Goto Dengo is showing off his follow-through. The projectile is a rock with a white streamer wrapped around it. Shaftoe runs over and snatches it. The streamer is one of those thousand-stitch headbands (supposedly; he's taken a few off of unconscious Nips, but he's never bothered to count the stitches) that they tie around their heads as a good-luck charm; it has a meatball in the center and some Nip writing to either side. He unties it from around the rock. In so doing he realizes, suddenly, that it's not a rock after all; it is a hand grenade! But good old Goto Dengo was just joking-he didn't pull the pin. A nice souvenir for Bobby Shaftoe.
Shaftoe's first haiku (December 1940) was a quick and dirty adaptation of the Marine Creed:
This is my rifle
There are many like it but
This rifle is mine.
He wrote it under the following circumstances: Shaftoe and the rest of Fourth Marines were stationed in Shanghai so that they could guard the International Settlement and work as muscle on the gunboats of the Yangtze River Patrol. His platoon had just come back from the Last Patrol: a thousand-mile reconnaissance-in-force all the way up past what was left of Nanjing, to Hankow, and back. Marines had been doing this ever since the Boxer Rebellion, through civil wars and everything else. But towards the end of 1940, what with the Nips[2] basically running all of northeast China now, the politicians back in D.C. had finally thrown in the towel and told the China Marines not to steam up the Yangtze any more.
Now, the Old Breed Marines like Frick claimed they could tell the difference between organized brigands; armed mobs of starving peasants; rogue Nationalists; Communist guerrillas; and the irregular forces in the pay of warlords. But to Bobby Shaftoe they were all just crazy, armed slopes who wanted a piece of the Yangtze River Patrol. The Last Patrol had been a wild trip. But it was over and they were back in Shanghai now, the safest place you could be in China, and about a hundred times more dangerous than the most dangerous place you could be in America. They had climbed off the gunboat six hours ago, gone to a bar, and not come out until just now, when they had decided it was high time they went to a whorehouse. On their way, they happened to pass this Nip restaurant.
Bobby Shaftoe had looked in the windows of the place before, and watched the man with the knife, trying to figure out what the hell he was doing. It looked a hell of a lot like he was cutting up uncooked fish and putting the raw meat on bullets of rice and handing it over to the Nips on the other side of the counter, who were wolfing it down.
It had to be some kind of optical illusion. The fish must have been precooked in the back room.
This had been nagging at Shaftoe for about a year. As he and the other horny drunk Marines went by the place, he slowed down to peer through the window, trying to gather more evidence. He could swear that some of that fish looked ruby red, which it wouldn't have been if it were cooked.
One of his buddies, Rhodes from Shreveport, noticed him looking. He dared Shaftoe to go in there and sit down at that bar. Then another private, Gowicki from Pittsburgh, double-dared him!
Shaftoe sucked his teeth and considered the matter. He had already made up his mind that he was going to do it. He was a sniper scout, and it was in his nature to do crazy shit like this; but it was also part of his training to scan the terrain carefully before venturing in.
The restaurant was three-quarters full, and everyone in the place was a uniformed member of the Nipponese military. At the bar where the man was cutting up the apparently raw fish, there was a marked concentration of officers; if you only had one grenade, that's where you'd throw it. Most of the place was filled with long tables where enlisted men sat, drinking noodle soup from steaming urns. Shaftoe paid particular attention to these, because they were the ones who were going to be beating the shit out of him in about sixty seconds. Some were there alone, with reading material. A cluster of them, back in one corner, were paying attention to one fellow who was apparently telling a joke or story.
The longer Shaftoe spent reconnoitering the place, the more convinced Rhodes and Gowicki became that he was actually going to do it. They became excited and called for the other Marines, who had gone ahead of them down the block, headed for that whorehouse.
Shaftoe saw the others coming back-his tactical reserve. "What the fuck," he said, and went into the restaurant. Behind him, he could hear the others shouting excitedly; they couldn't believe he was doing it. When Shaftoe stepped over the threshold of that Nip restaurant, he passed into the realm of legend.
All the Nips looked up at him when he came in the door. If they were surprised, they didn't show it. The chef behind the counter began to holler out some kind of ritual greeting, which faltered and trailed off as he got a look at what had just come in. The fellow in the back of the room-a husky, pink-cheeked Nip-continued telling his joke or story or whatever it was.
Shaftoe nodded to no one in particular, then stepped to the nearest empty chair at the bar and sat down.
Other Marines would have waited until the whole squad had assembled. Then they would have invaded the restaurant en masse, knocked over a few chairs, spilled some soup. But Shaftoe had seized the initiative before the others could do any such thing and gone in by himself as a sniper scout was supposed to do. It was not just because be was a sniper scout, though. It was also because he was Bobby Shaftoe, and he was sincerely curious about this place, and if he could, he wanted to spend a few calm minutes in here and learn a few things about it before the fun started.
It helped, of course, that Shaftoe was a quiet and contemplative drunk, not a dangerous explosive drunk. He must have reeked of beer (those Krauts in Tsingtao cranked out a brew whose taste took him right back to Wisconsin, and he was homesick). But he wasn't hollering or knocking things over.
The chef was busy crafting one of his little morsels and pretended to ignore Shaftoe. The other men at the counter stared coldly at Shaftoe for a while, then turned their attentions back to their food. Shaftoe looked at the array of raw fish laid out on shaved ice behind the bar, then looked around the room. The guy back in the corner was talking in short bursts, reading from a notebook. He would speak maybe ten or twenty words, and then his little audience would turn to one another and grin, or grimace, or sometimes even make a patter of applause. He wasn't delivering his material like a dirty joke. He spoke precisely and expressively.
Fuck! He was reading poetry! Shaftoe had no idea what he was saying, but he could tell, by the sound of it, that it must be poetry. Didn't rhyme though. But the Nips did everything queerly.
He noticed that the chef was glaring at him. He cleared his throat, which was useless since he couldn't speak Nip. He looked at some of that ruby red fish behind the bar, pointed to it, held up two fingers.
Everyone was startled that the American had actually placed an order. The tension was broken, only a little. The chef went to work and produced two morsels, which he served up on a wooden pedestal.
Shaftoe had been trained to eat insects, and to bite the heads off chickens, so he figured he could handle this. He picked the morsels up in his fingers, just like the Nips were doing, and ate them. They were good. He ordered two more, of another variety. The guy in the corner kept reading poetry. Shaftoe ate his morsels and then ordered some more. For perhaps ten seconds, between the taste of the fish and the sound of the poetry, he actually felt comfortable here, and forgot that he was merely instigating a vicious racial brawl.
The third order looked different: laid over the top of the raw fish were thin translucent sheets of some kind of moist, glistening material. It looked sort of like butcher paper soaked in oil. Shaftoe gawked at it for a while, trying to identify it, but it looked like no foodstuff he knew of. He glanced left and right, hoping that one of the Nips had ordered the same stuff, so that he could watch and learn the right way to eat it. No luck.
Hell, they were officers. Maybe one of them spoke a little English. " 'Scuse me. What's this?" Shaftoe said, peeling up one corner of the eerie membrane.
The chef looked up at him nervously, then scanned the bar, polling the customers. Discussion ensued. Finally, a Nip officer at the end of the bar, a naval lieutenant, stood up and spoke to Bobby Shaftoe.
"Seaweed."
Shaftoe did not particularly like the lieutenant's tone of voice-hostile and sullen. This, combined with the look on his face, seemed to say, You'll never understand it, you farmer, so why don't you just think of it as seaweed.
Shaftoe folded his hands primly in his lap, regarded the seaweed for a few moments, and then looked up at the lieutenant, who was still gazing at him expressionlessly. "What kindof seaweed, sir?" he said.
Significant glances began flying around the restaurant, like semaphores before a naval engagement. The poetry reading seemed to have stopped, and a migration of enlisted men had begun from the back of the room. Meanwhile the lieutenant translated Shaftoe's inquiry to the others, who discussed it in some detail, as if it were a major policy initiative from Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The lieutenant and the chef exchanged words. Then the lieutenant looked at Shaftoe again. "He say, you pay now." The chef held up one hand and rubbed his fingers and thumb together.
A year of working the Yangtze River Patrol had given Bobby Shaftoe nerves of titanium, and unlimited faith in his comrades, and so he resisted the impulse to turn his head and look out the window. He already knew exactly what he would see: Marines, shoulder to shoulder, ready to die for him. He scratched the new tattoo on his forearm: a dragon. His dirty fingernails, passing over the fresh scabs, made a rasping sound in the utterly silent restaurant.
"You didn't answer my question," Shaftoe said, pronouncing the words with a drunk's precision.
The lieutenant translated this into Nipponese. More discussion. But this time it was curt and decisive. Shaftoe could tell that they were about to bounce him. He squared his shoulders.
The Nips were good; they mounted an organized charge out the door, onto the sidewalk, and engaged the Marines, before anyone actually laid a hand on Shaftoe. This spoiling attack prevented the Marines from invading the restaurant proper, which would have disturbed the officers' meal and, with any luck, led to untold property damage. Shaftoe then felt himself being grabbed from behind by at least three people and hoisted into the air. He made eye contact with the lieutenant while this was happening, and shouted: "Are you bullshitting me about the seaweed?"
As brawls went, the only remarkable part of this one was the way he was carried out to the street before he could actually get started. Then it was like all the other street fights he'd been in with Nip soldiers in Shanghai. These all came down to American brawn (you didn't get picked for the Fourth Regiment unless you were an impressive-looking six-footer) versus that Nipponese chop-socky.
Shaftoe wasn't a boxer. He was a wrestler. This was to his advantage. The other Marines would put up their dukes and try to fight it out-Marquis of Queensberry style-no match for chop-socky. Shaftoe had no illusions about his boxing, so he would just put his head down and charge like a bull, take a few blows to the face on his way in, but usually get a solid hold on his opponent and slam him into the cobblestones. Usually that shook the Nip up enough that Shaftoe could get him in a full-nelson or a hammerlock and get him to cry uncle.