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? Thisis 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 drivethe 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 itin 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 otherinteresting 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 Trekand 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 somemoney. 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-rying 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 starting kindergarten. And I saw M.A. more recently-he was probably eight or ten."
"And you are related to them how, one more time?"
"I think Robin is my second cousin. And I could explain M.A.'s relationship to me, but you'd start shifting around and heaving great big sighs before I got more'n halfway through it."
"So, to these guys, you are a shirttail relative they glimpsed once or twice when they were tiny little boys."
Amy shrugs. "Yeah."
"So, like what possessed them to come out here?"
Amy looks blank.
"I mean," Randy says, "from the general attitude they copped, when they fishtailed to a stop in the middle of my front yard and leapt out of their red-hot, bug-encrusted vehicle, fresh from Tennessee, obviously the number one mission objective was to ensure that the flower of Shaftoe womanhood was being treated with all of the respect, decency, worshipfulness, et cetera, properly owed it."
"Oh. That's not really the vibe that I got."
"Oh, it wasn't?Really?"
"No. Randy, my family sticks together. Just 'cause we haven't seen each other for a while doesn't mean our obligations have lapsed."
"Well, you are making an implied comparison to my family here which I'm not that crazy about and maybe we should talk about later. But as far as those family obligations go, I do certainlythink that one of those obligations is to preserve your notional virginity."
"Who says it's notional?"
"It's gotto be notional to thembecause they haven't seen you for most of your life. That's all I mean."
"I think you are blowing the perceived sexual aspect of this thing way out of proportion," Amy says. "Which is perfectly normal, for a guy, and I don't think less of you for it."
"Amy, Amy. Have you done the math on this thing?"
"Math?"
"Counting the trip through Manila traffic to NAIA, the check-in procedure, and formalities at SFO, my entire journey from Manila to San Francisco took me something like eighteen hours. Twenty for you. Another four hours to get down to my house. Then eight hours after we got to my house, in the middle of the night, Robin and Marcus Aurelius showed up. Now, if we assume that the Shaftoe family grapevine functions at the speed of light, it means that these guys, shooting hoops in front of their trailer in Tennessee, received a news flash that a female Shaftoe was in some kind of guy-related personal distress at about the time you jumped off of Glory IVand hopped in a taxi in Manila."
"I sent e-mail from Glory,"Amy says.
"To whom?"
"The Shaftoe mailing list."
"God!" Randy says, slapping himself in the face. "What did this e-mail say?"
"Can't remember," Amy says. "That I was headed for California. I might have made some kind of backhanded remark about a young man I wanted to talk to. I was kinda upset at the time and I can't remember exactly what I have said."
"I think you said something like 'I am going to California where Randall Lawrence Waterhouse, who has AIDS, is going to forcibly sodomize me upon arrival.' "
"No, it was nothing of the kind."
"Well, I think that someone read it between the lines. So, anyway, Ma or Auntie Em or someone emerges from the side door, shaking flour out of her gingham apron-I'm imagining this."
"I can tell."
"And she says, 'Boys, your umpteenth cousin thrice removed America Shaftoe has sent us e-mail from Uncle Doug's boat in the South China Sea stating that she is having some kind of dispute with a young man and it's not out of the question that she might need someone around to lend her a hand. In California. Would you swing by and look in on her?' And they put away their basketball and say, 'Yes ma'am, what city and address?' and she says, 'Never you mind, just get on Interstate 40 and drive west not failing to maintain an average speed of between one hundred and a hundred and twenty percent of the legal speed limit and call me collect from a Texaco somewhere and I will supply you with specific target coordinates later,' and they say, 'Yes ma'am' and thirty seconds later they are laying a patch in the driveway as they pull five gees backing out of the garage and thirty hours subsequently they are in my front yard, shining their twenty-five-D-cell flashlights into my eyes and asking me a lot of pointed questions. Do you have any idea how far the drive is?"
"I have no idea."
"Well, according to M.A.'s Rand McNally Road Atlas, it is an even twenty-one hundred miles."
"So?"
"So that means that they maintained an average speed of seventy miles an hour for a day and a half"
"A day and a quarter," Amy says.
"Do you have any idea how difficult that is to do?"
"Randy, you push on the gas pedal and keep it between the lines. How hard is that?"
"I'm not saying it's an intellectual challenge. I'm saying that this willingness to, e.g., urinate into empty McDonald's cups rather than stop the car, suggests a kind of urgency. Passion, even. And being a guy, and having had the experience of being a guy of the age of M.A. and Robin, I can tell you that one of the few things that gets your blood boiling to that extent is this notion of some female you love being done wrong by a strange male."
"Well, what if they did?" Amy says. "Now they think you're okay."
"They do? Really?"
"Yeah. The financial disaster aspect makes you more human. More approachable. And it excuses a lot."
"Do I need an excuse for something?"
"Not in my book."
"But to the extent they thought I was a rapist, it kind of palliates my image problems."
A brief lull in the conversation ensues. Then Amy pipes up.
"So tell me about your family, Randy."
"In the next couple of days, you're going to learn a great deal more than I would like you to about my family. And so am I. So let's talk about something else."
"Okay. Let's talk about business."
"Okay. You go first."
"We got a German television producer coming out next week to have a look at the U-boat. They might do a documentary about it. We have already hosted several German print journalists."
"You have?"
"It has caused a sensation in Germany."
"Why?"
"Because no one can figure out how it got there. Now, your turn."
"We are going to launch our own currency." By saying this, Randy is divulging proprietary information to someone not authorized to hear it. But he does it anyway, because opening himself up to Amy in this way, making himself vulnerable to her, gives him a hard-on.
"How do you go about that? Don't you have to be a government?"
"No. You have to be a bank. Why do you think they're called bank notes?" Randy is fully aware of the insanity of divulging secret business information to a woman solely for purposes of sexual self-titillation but it is in the nature of things, right now, that he doesn't especially care.
"Okay but still, usually it's done by governmentbanks, right?"
"Only because people tend to respectthe government banks. But government banks in Southeast Asia have a huge image problem right now. That image problem translates directly into crashing exchange rates."
"So, how do you do it?"
"Get a big pile of gold. Issue certificates saying 'this certificate can be redeemed for such-and-such an amount of gold.' That's all there is to it."
"What's wrong with dollars and yen and stuff?"
"The certificates-the banknotes-are printed on paper. We're going to issue electronic banknotes."
"No paper at all?"
"No paper at all."
"So you can only spend it on the Net."
"Correct."
"What if you want to buy a sack of bananas?"
"Find a banana merchant on the Net."
"Seems like paper money'd be just as good."
"Paper money is traceable and perishable and has other drawbacks. Electronic banknotes are fast and anonymous."
"What's an electronic banknote look like, Randy?"
"Like any other digital thing: a bunch of bits."
"Doesn't that make it kind of easy to counterfeit?"
"Not if you have good crypto," Randy says. "Which we do."
"How did you get it?"
"By hanging out with maniacs."
"What kind of maniacs?"
"Maniacs who think that having good crypto is of near-apocalyptic importance."
"How'd they get around to thinking any such thing?"
"By reading about people like Yamamoto who died because they had bad crypto, and then projecting that kind of thing into the future."
"Do you agree with them?" Amy asks. It might be one of those pivotal-moment-in-the-relationship questions.
"At two in the morning, when I'm lying awake in bed, I do," Randy says. "In the light of day, it all seems like paranoia." He glances over at Amy, who's looking at him appraisingly, because he hasn't actually answered the question yet. He's got to pick one thing or the other. "Better safe than sorry, I guess. Having good crypto can't hurt, and it might help."
"And it might make you a lot of money along the way," Amy reminds him.
Randy laughs. "At this point, it's not even about trying to make money," he says. "I just don't want to be totally humiliated."
Amy smiles cryptically.
"What?" Randy demands.
"You sounded just like a Shaftoe when you said that," Amy says.
Randy drives the car in silence for about half an hour after that. He was right, he suspects: it wasa pivotal moment in the relationship. All he can do now is totally screw it up. So he shuts up and drives.
Chapter 69 THE GENERAL
For two months he sleeps on a beach on New Caledonia, stretched out under a mosquito net, dreaming of worse places, polishing his line.
In Stockholm, someone from the British Embassy got him to a certain cafe. A gentleman he met in the cafe got him to a car. The car got him to a lake where a floatplane just happened to be sitting with its motors running and its lights off. The Special Air Service got him to London. Naval Intelligence got him back to D.C., drained his brain, and turned him over to the Marines with a big stamp on his papers saying that he must never again be sent into combat; he Knew Too Much to be taken prisoner. The Marines found that he Knew Too Little to serve as a Rear Echelon Motherfucker, and gave him a choice: a one-way ticket home, or higher education. He opted for the ticket home, then talked a green officer into believing that his family had moved, and home was now San Francisco.
You could practically cross San Francisco Bay by jumping from one Navy ship to the next. The waterfront was lined with the Navy's piers, depots, hospitals, and prisons. All of them were guarded by Shaftoe's military brothers. Shaftoe's tattoos were obscured by civilian clothes and his haircut grown out. But he only had to look a Marine in the eye from a stone's throw, and that Marine would recognize him for a brother in need and open any gate for him, break any regulation, probably even lay down his life. Shaftoe stowed away on a ship bound for Hawaii so fast he didn't even have time to get drunk. From Pearl, it took him four days to get on a ship to Kwajalein. There, he was a legendary hero. His money was no good on Kwaj; he smoked, drank and ate for a week without being allowed to spend a dime, and finally his brothers got him on a plane that took him a couple of thousand miles due south to Noumea, in New Caledonia.
They did so with great reluctance. They would willingly have hit a beach with him, but this was different: they were sending him perilously close to SOWESPAC, the Southwest Pacific Theater, the domain of The General. Even now, a couple of years after The General had sent them into action, poorly armed and poorly supported, on Guadalcanal, Marines still spent approximately fifty percent of their waking hours talking about what a bad guy he was. He secretly owned half of Intramuros. He had become a billionaire from Spanish gold that his father had dug up when he'd been governor of the Philippines. Quezon had secretly named him postwar dictator of the archipelago. The General was running for president, and in order to win, he was going to start throwing battles just to make F.D.R. look bad, and blaming it all on the Marines. And if that didn't work he'd come back to the States and stage a coup d'etat. Which would be beaten back, against enormous odds, by the United States Marine Corps. Semper Fi!
Anyway, his brothers got him to New Caledonia. Noumea's a neat French city of wide streets and tin-roofed buildings, fronting on a big harbor lined with mountainous dumps of nickel and chromium ore from gigantic mines up-island. The place is about one-third Free French (there's pictures of de Gaulle all over the place), one-third American servicemen, and one-third cannibals. Word on the street is that the cannibals have not eaten any white people in twenty-seven years, so Bobby Shaftoe, sleeping out on that beach, feels almost as safe as he did in Sweden.
But when he reached Noumea he slammed into a barrier more impervious than any brick wall: the imaginary line between the Pacific theater (Nimitz's turf) and SOWESPAC. Brisbane, The General's headquarters, is just a short (by Pacific standards) hop almost due west. If he can just get there and deliver his line, everything's going to be fine.
During his first couple of weeks on the beach, he's stupidly optimistic. Then he's depressed for about a month, thinking he'll never get off this place. Finally he starts to come around, starts to display adaptability again. He's had no luck getting on board a ship. But the amount of air traffic is incredible. Seems that The General likes airplanes. Shaftoe starts tailing flyboys. The MPs won't give him the time of day, he can't get into an Army NCOs' Club to save his life.
But an NCOs' Club offers strictly limited entertainments. Customers in search of more profound satisfactions must leave the perimeter defined by hardassed MPs and enter the civilian economy. And when horny, well-paid American flyboys are dropped into a culture defined half by cannibals and half by Frenchmen, you get a hell of a civilian economy. Shaftoe finds a vantage point outside an airbase gate, plants himself there, his pockets loaded with cigarette packs (the Marines on Kwaj left him with a lifetime supply) and waits. Flyboys come out in twos and threes. Shaftoe picks out the sergeants, follows them to bars and whorehouses, sits down in their line of sight, begins to chain-smoke. Before long they've come over and started to bum cigarettes off him. This leads to conversations.
Once he gets this routine figured out, he learns a lot about the Fifth Air Force in a big hurry, makes a lot of friends. In a few weeks, he strikes the jackpot. He goes over the airfield fence at 1:00 A.M. of a moonless night, belly-crawls for about a mile along the shoulder of a runway, and just barely makes a rendezvous with the crew of the Tipsy Tootsie, a B-24 Liberator bound for Brisbane. In fairly short order, he finds himself stuffed into the glass sphere at the tail of the plane: the rear ball turret. Its purpose, of course, is to shoot down Zeroes, which tend to attack from behind. But Tipsy Tootsie's crew seems to think that they are about as likely to find Zeroes around here as they would be over central Missouri.
They warned him to wear something warm, but he didn't have any thing of that nature. Tipsy Tootsie has barely left the runway when he begins to understand his mistake: the temperature drops like a five-hundred-pound bomb. It is physically impossible for him to get out of the turret. Even if he could, it would just lead to his getting arrested; he has been smuggled on board without the knowledge of the officers who are actually flying the plane. Calmly he decides to add prolonged hypothermia to his already extensive knowledge of suffering. After a couple of hours, he either loses consciousness or falls asleep, and this helps.
He is awakened by pink light that comes from every direction at once. The plane has lost altitude, the temperature has risen, his body has thawed out enough to bring him awareness. After a few minutes he's able to move his arms. He reaches into the pink glow and rubs condensation off the inside of the ball turret. He takes out a hanky, wipes the whole thing clean, and now he's looking straight down the throat of a Pacific dawn.
The sky is streaked and mottled by black clouds, like jets of squid ink in a Caribbean cove. For a while, it's as if he is under water with Bischoff.
Puckered scars mar the Pacific in loops and lines, and he is reminded of his own naked flesh. But the hard jagged pieces work their way out of the scar tissue like old shrapnel: coral reefs emerging from a shallowing sea. Warmer and warmer. He begins to shiver again.
Someone has dumped brown dust into the Pacific, made a great pile of it. On the edge of the pile, is a city. The city swings around them, comes closer. Warmer and warmer. It's Brisbane. A runway streaks up and he thinks it's going to take his ass off, like the world's biggest belt sander. The plane stops. He smells gasoline.
The pilot discovers him, loses his temper, and makes ready to call the MPs. "I'm here to work for The General," Shaftoe mumbles through blue lips. It just makes the pilot want to slug him. But after Shaftoe has uttered these words, everything is different, the angry officers stand a pace or two farther away from him, tone down their language, knock off the threats. Shaftoe knows, from this, that The General does things differently.
He spends a day recovering in a flophouse, then rises, shaves, drinks a cup of coffee, and strikes out in search of brass.
To his extreme chagrin, he learns that The General has relocated his headquarters to Hollandia, in New Guinea. But his wife and son, and a bunch of his staff, are still staying at Lennon's Hotel. Shaftoe goes there and analyzes the traffic pattern: to pull into the hotel's horseshoe drive, the cars have to come around a particular corner, just up the street. Shaftoe finds a good loitering-place near that corner, and waits. Looking through the windows of the approaching cars, he can see the epaulets, count the stars and eagles.
Seeing two stars, he decides to make his move. Jogging down the block, he reaches the awning of the hotel just as this general's door is being hauled open by his driver.
"'Scuse me, General, Bobby Shaftoe reporting for duty, sir!" he blurts, snapping out the perfectest salute in military history.
"And who the hell might you be, Bobby Shaftoe?" says this general, hardly batting an eye. He talks like Bischoff! This guy actually has a German accent!
"I've killed more Nips than seismic activity. I'm trained to jump out of airplanes. I speak a little Nip. I can survive in the jungle. I know Manila like the back of my hand. My wife and child are there. And I'm kinda at loose ends. Sir!"
In London, in D.C., he'd never have gotten this close, and if he had he'd have been shot or arrested.
But this is SOWESPAC, and so the next morning at dawn he's on a B-17 bound for Hollandia, wearing Army green, no rank.
New Guinea is a nasty-looking piece of work: a gangrenous dragon with a wicked, rocky spine, covered with ice. Just looking at it makes Shaftoe shiver from a queasy combination of hypothermia and incipient malaria. The whole thing belongs to The General now. Shaftoe can plainly see that such a country could only be conquered by a man who was completely fucking out of his mind. A month in Stalingrad would be preferable to twenty-four hours down there.
Hollandia is on the north shore of this beast, facing, naturally, towards the Philippines. It is well known throughout Marinedom that The General has caused a palace to be built for himself there. Some credulous fools actually believe the rumor that it is merely a complete 200%-scale replica of the Taj Mahal, built by enslaved Marines, but savvy jarheads know that it is actually a much vaster compound built out of construction materials stolen from Navy hospital ships, dotted with pleasure domes and fuck houses for his string of Asiatic concubines, with a soaring cupola so high that The General can go up there and see what the Nips are doing to his extensive real estate holdings in Manila, 1,500 miles to the northwest.
Bobby Shaftoe sees no such thing out the windows of the B-17. He glimpses one large and nice-looking house up on a mountain above the sea. He supposes that it is a mere sentry post, marking the benighted perimeter of The General's domain. But almost immediately the B-17 bounces down on a runway. The cabin is invaded by an equatorial miasma. It's like breathing Cream O' Wheat direct from a blurping vat. Shaftoe feels his bowels loosening up already. Of course there are many Marines who feel that Army uniform trousers look best when feces-stained. Shaftoe must put such thoughts out of his head.
All the passengers (mostly colonels and better) move as to avoid working up a sweat, even though they are already drenched. Shaftoe wants to kick their fat, waffled butts downstairs-he's in a hurry to get to Manila.
Pretty soon he is hitching a ride on the rear bumper of a jeep full of brass. The airfield is still ringed with ack-ack guns, and shows signs of having been bombed and strafed not too long ago. Some of these signs are obvious physical evidence like shell holes, but Shaftoe gets most of his information from watching the men: their posture, their facial expressions as they stare into the sky, tell him exactly what the threat level is.
No wonder, he thinks, remembering the sight of that big white house up on the mountain. You can probably see that thing by moonlight, for crissakes! It must be visible from Tokyo! It's just begging to be strafed.
Then, as the jeep begins to trundle up the mountain in first gear, he figures it out: that thing's just a decoy. The General's real command post must be a network of deep tunnels hidden beneath the jungle floor, and thatis where you would have to look for your Asiatic concubines, etc.
The trip up the mountain takes an eon. Shaftoe jumps off and soon outpaces the whining jeep, and the one in front of it. Then he's on his own, walking through the jungle. He'll just follow the tracks until they lead him straight to the cleverly camouflaged mineshaft that leads down to The General's HQ.
The walk gives him plenty of time to have a couple of smokes and savor the unrelieved nightmarishness of the New Guinea jungle, compared to which Guadalcanal, which he thought was the worst place on earth, seems like a dewy meadow strewn with bunnies and butterflies. Nothing is more satisfying than to consider that the Nips and the United States Army spent a couple of years beating the crap out of each other here. Pity the Aussies had to get mixed up in it, though.
The tracks take him straight to that big white clay pigeon of a house up on the mountainside. They've gone way overboard in trying to make the house look like someone's actually living there. Shaftoe can see furniture and everything. The walls are crisscrossed by bullet trails. They have even set up a mannequin on the balcony, in a pink silk dressing gown,corncob pipe, and aviator sunglasses, scanning the bay through binoculars! As reluctant as he is to approve of anything done by the Army, Shaftoe cannot keep himself from laughing out loud at this witticism. Military humor at its finest. He can't believe they got away with it. A couple of press photographers are standing down below, taking pictures of the scene.
Standing in the middle of the house's mud parking lot, he plants his feet wide and thrusts his middle finger up at that mannequin. Hey, asshole, this one's from the Marines on Kwajalein! Damn, this feels good.
The mannequin swivels and aims its binoculars directly at Bobby Shaftoe, who freezes solid in his bird-flipping posture as if caught in the gaze of a basilisk. Down below, air-raid sirens begin to weep and wail.
The binoculars come away from the sunglasses. A puff of smoke blurts out of the pipe. The General snaps out a sarcastic salute. Shaftoe remembers to put his finger away, then stands there, rooted like a dead mahogany.
The General reaches up and removes the pipe from his mouth so he can say, "Magandang gabi."
"You mean, 'magandang umaga,' "Shaftoe says. "Gabimeans nightand umagameans morning."
The drone of airplane engines is now getting quite noticeable. The press photographers decide to pack it in, and disappear into the house.
"When you're headed north from Manila towards Lingayen and you get to the fork in the road at Tarlac and you take the right fork, there, and head across the cane breaks towards Urdaneta, what's the first village you come to?"
"It's a trick question," Shaftoe says. "North of Tarlac there are no cane breaks, just rice paddies."
"Hmm. Very good," The General says grumpily. Down below, the antiaircraft guns open up with a fantastic clattering; from this distance it sounds as if the north coast of New Guinea is being jackhammered into the sea. The General ignores it. If he were only pretendingto ignore it, he would at least lookat the incoming the Zeroes, so that he could stoppretending to ignore them when it got too dangerous. But he doesn't even do so much as look. Shaftoe forces himself not to look either. The General asks him a big long question in Spanish. He has a beautiful voice. He sounds like he is standing in an anechoic sound booth in New York City or Hollywood, narrating a newsreel about how great he is.
"If you're trying to find out if I hablo Espathe answer is, un poquito,"Shaftoe says.
The General cups a hand to his ear irritably. He can't hear anything except for the pair of Zeroes converging on him and Shaftoe at three hundred odd miles per hour, liquefying tons of biomass with dense streams of 12.7-millimeter slugs. He keeps a sharp eye on Shaftoe as a trail of bullets thuds across the parking lot, spraying Shaftoe's trouser legs with mud. The same line of bullets makes a sudden upwards right-angle turn when it reaches the wall of the General's house, climbs straight up the wall, tears out a chunk of the balcony's railing about a foot away from where the General's hand is resting, beats up a bunch of furniture back inside the house, and then clears the roof of the house and vanishes.
Now that the planes have passed overhead, Shaftoe can look at them without having to worry that he is giving The General the idea that he is some kind of lily-livered pansy. The meatballs on their wings broaden and glower as they bank sharply, sharper than any American plane, and come round for a second try.
"I said-" The General begins. But then the atmosphere's riven by a series of bizarre whizzing noises. One of the house's windows is suddenly punched out of its frame. Shaftoe hears a thud from inside and some crockery breaking. For the first time, The General shows some awareness that a military action is taking place. "Warm up my jeep, Shaftoe," he says, "I have a bone to pick with my triple-A boys." Then he turns around and Shaftoe gets a look at the back of his pink silk dressing gown. It is embroidered, in black thread, with a giant lizard, rampant.
The General suddenly turns around. "Is that you screaming down there, Shaftoe?"
"Sir, no sir!"
"I distinctly heard you scream." MacArthur turns his back on Shaftoe again, giving him another look at the lizard (which on second thought might be some sort of Chinese dragon design) and goes inside the house, mumbling irritably to himself.
Shaftoe gets into the vehicle indicated and starts the engine.
The General emerges from the house and begins to plod across the lot cradling an unexploded antiaircraft shell in his arms. The wind makes his pink silk dressing gown billow all around him.
The Zeroes come back and strafe the parking lot again, cutting a truck nearly in half. Shaftoe feels as if his intestines have dissolved and are about to spurt from his body. He closes his eyes, puckers his anal sphincter, and clenches his teeth. The General takes a seat next to him. "Down the hill," he orders. "Drive towards the sound of the guns."
They have barely gotten onto the road when their progress is blocked by the two jeeps that had been carrying all the brass up from the airfield. They now sit empty on the road, their doors hanging open, engines still running. The General reaches across in front of Shaftoe and honks the horn.