What kind of mathematical algorithm was used? The contents of Grandpa's trunk provide clues. He remembers the photograph of Grandpa with Turing and von Hacklheber at Princeton, where all three of them were evidently fooling around with zeta functions. And in the trunk were several monographs on the same subject. And the Cryptonomiconstates that zeta functions are even today being used in cryptography, as sequence generators-which is to say, machines for spitting out series of pseudo-random numbers, which is exactly what a one-time pad is. Everything points to that Azure and Arethusa are siblings and that both are just implementations of zeta functions.
The big thing standing in his way right now is that he doesn't have any textbooks on zeta functions sitting around his jail cell. The contents of Grandpa's trunk would be an excellent resource-but they are currently stored in a room in Chester's house. But on the other hand, Chester's rich, and he wants to help.
Randy calls for a guard and demands to see Attorney Alejandro. Enoch Root goes very still for a few moments, and then shunts directly back into the loping, untroubled sleep of a man who is exactly where he wants to be.
Chapter 89 SLAVES
People smell all kinds of ways before they have burned, but only one way afterwards. As the Army boys lead Waterhouse down into the darkness, he sniffs cautiously, hoping he won't smell that smell.
Mostly it smells like oil, diesel, hot steel, the brimstony tang of burnt rubber and exploded munitions. These smells are overpoweringly strong. He draws in a lungful of reek, blows it out. And that, of course, is when he catches a whiff of barbecue and knows that this concrete-coated island is, among other things, a crematorium.
He is following the Army boys down black-smudged tunnels bored through a variegated matrix of concrete, masonry, and solid rock. The caves were there first, eaten into the stone by rain and waves, then enlarged and rationalized by Spaniards with chisels, jackhammers, blasting powder. Then along came the Americans with bricks, and finally the Nipponese with reinforced concrete.
As they work their way into the maze, they pass down some tunnels that apparently acted like blowtorches: the walls have been scoured clean as if a torrent had been running through it for a million years, silver pools lie on the floor where guns or filing cabinets melted into puddles. Stored heat still radiates from the walls, adding to the heat of the Philippine climate, making all of them sweat even more, if that is possible.
Other corridors, other rooms were nothing more than backwaters in the river of fire. Looking into doorways, Waterhouse can see books that were charred but not consumed, blackened papers spilling from burst cabinets-"One moment," he says. His escort spins around just in time to see Waterhouse ducking through a low door into a tiny room, where something has caught his eye.
It's a heavy wooden cabinet, mostly transmuted into charcoal now, so it looks like the cabinet's gone but its shadow persists. Someone has already pulled one of its doors off its hinges, allowing black confetti to flood into the room. The cabinet was filled with slips of paper, mostly burned now, but thrusting his hand into the ash-heap (slowly! Most of this place is still hot) Waterhouse pulls out a bundle, nearly intact.
"What kind of money is that?" the Army guy asks.
Waterhouse pulls a bill from the top of the bundle. The top is printed in Japanese characters and bears an engraved picture of Tojo. He flips it over. The back is printed in English: TEN POUNDS.
"Australian currency," Waterhouse says.
"Don't look Australian to me," the Army guy says, glowering at Tojo.
"If the Nips had won..." Waterhouse says, and shrugs. He throws the stack of ten-pound notes onto the ash-heap of history and carries his single copy out into the corridor. A necklace of lightbulbs has been strung along the ceiling. The light glances off what looks like pools of quicksilver on the floor: the remains of guns, belt buckles, steel cabinets and doorknobs, melted down into puddles in the holocaust, now congealed.
The fine print on the bill says, IMPERIAL RESERVE BANK, MANILA.
"Sir! You okay?" the Army guy says. Waterhouse realizes he's been thinking for a while.
"Carry on," he says, and stuffs the bill in his pocket.
He was thinking about whether it was okay to take some of this money with him. It's okay to take souvenirs, but not to loot. So he can take the money if it's worthless, but not if it is real money.
Now, someone who was not so inclined to think and ponder everything to the nth degree would immediately see that the money was worthless, because, after all, the Japanese did not take Australia and never will. So that money's just a souvenir, right?
Probably right. The money is effectively worthless. But if Waterhouse were to find a real Australian ten-pound note and read the fine print, it would also probably bear the imprimatur of a reserve bank somewhere.
Two pieces of paper, each claiming to be worth ten pounds, each very official-looking, each bearing the name of a bank. One of them a worthless souvenir and one legal tender for all debts public and private. What gives?
What it comes down to is that people trust the claims printed on one of those pieces of paper but don't trust the other. They believe that you could take the real Australian note to a bank in Melbourne, slide it over the counter, and get silver or gold-or somethingat least-in exchange for it.
Trust goes a long way, but at some point, if you're going to sponsor a stable currency, you must put up or shut up. Somewhere, you have to actually have a shitload of gold in the basement. Around the time of the evacuation from Dunkirk, when the Brits were looking at an imminent invasion of their islands by the Germans, they took all of their gold reserves, loaded them on board some battleships and passenger liners, and squirted them across the Atlantic to banks in Toronto and Montreal. This would have enabled them to keep their currency afloat even if the Germans had overrun London.
But the Japanese have to play by the same rules as everyone else. Oh, sure, you can get a kind of submission from a conquered people by scaring the shit out of them, but it doesn't work very well to hold a knife to someone's throat and say, "I want you to believe that this piece of paper is worth ten pounds sterling." They might say that they believe it, but they won't really believe it. They won't actas if they believe it. And if they don't actthat way, then there is no currency, workers don't get paid (you can enslave them, but you still have to pay the slavedrivers), the economy doesn't work, you can't extract the natural resources that prompted you to conquer the country in the first place. Basically, if you're going to run an economy you have to have a currency. When someone walks into a bank with one of your notes you have to be able to give them gold in exchange for it.
The Nipponese are maniacs for planning things out. Waterhouse knows this; he has been reading their decrypted messages twelve, eighteen hours a day for a couple of years now, he knows their minds. He knows, as surely as he knows how to play a D major scale, that the Nipponese must have given thought to this problem of backing their imperial currency-not just for Australia but New Zealand, New Guinea, the Philippines, Hong Kong, China, Indochina, Korea, Manchuria.
How much gold and silver would you need in order to convince that many human beings that your paper currency was actually worth some thing? Where would you put it?
The escort takes him down a couple of levels and finally to a surprisingly large room, deep down. If they are in the bowels of the island, then this must be the vermiform appendix or something. It is glob shaped, walls smooth and ripply in most places, chisel-gnawed where men have seen fit to enlarge it. The walls are still cool and so is the air.
There are long tables in this room, and at least three dozen empty chairs-so Waterhouse nips in tiny whiffs of air at first, terrified that he will smell dead people. But he doesn't.
It figures. They're in the center of the rock. There's only one way into the room. No way to get a good draft through this place-no blowtorch effect-no burning at all, apparently. This room was bypassed. The air is as thick as cold gravy.
"Found forty dead in this room," the escort says.
"Dead of what?"
"Asphyxiation."
"Officers?"
"One Japanese captain. The rest were slaves."
Before the war started, the term "slave" was, to Lawrence Waterhouse, as obsolete as "cooper" or "chandler." Now that the Nazis and the Nipponese have revived the practice, he hears it all the time. War's weird.
His eyes have been adjusting to the dim light ever since they stepped into the chamber. There's a single 25-watt bulb for the whole cavern and the walls absorb nearly all of the light.
He can see squarish things on the tables, one in front of each chair. When he first came in he assumed that these were sheets of paper-indeed, some of them are. But as his vision gets better he can see that most of them are hollow frames, sprinkled with abstract patterns of round dots.
He fumbles for his flashlight and nails the switch. Mostly all it does is create a fuzzy yellow cone of oily smoke, swirling fatly and lazily in front of him. He steps forward shooing the smoke out of his way, and bends over the table.
It's an abacus, its beads still frozen in the middle of some calculation. Two feet down the table is another. Then another.
He turns to face the Army guy. "What's the plural of abacus?"
"Beg pardon, sir?"
"Shall we say abaci?"
"Whatever you say, sir."
"Were any of these abaci touched by any of your men?"
There is a flurry of discussion. The Army guy has to confer with several enlisted men, dispatch gofers to interview people, and make a couple of phone calls. This is a good sign; there are a lot of men who would just say "no, sir," or whatever they thought Waterhouse wanted to hear, and then he would never know whether they were telling the truth. This guy seems to understand that it's important for Waterhouse to get an honest answer.
Waterhouse walks up and down the rows of tables with his hands clasped carefully behind his back, looking at the abaci. Next to most of them is a sheet of paper, or a whole notebook, with a pencil handy. These are all covered with numbers. From place to place, he sees a Chinese character.
"Did any of you see the bodies of these slaves?" he says to an enlisted man.
"Yes, sir. I helped carry 'em out."
"Did they look like Filipinos?"
"No, sir. They looked like regular Asiatics."
"Chinese, Korean, something like that?"
"Yes, sir."
After a few minutes, the answer comes back: no one will admit to having touched an abacus. This chamber was the last part of the fortress to be reached by Americans. The bodies of the slaves were mostly found piled up near the door. The body of the Nipponese officer was on the bottom of the pile. The door had been locked from the inside. It is a metal door, and has a slight outward bulge, as the fire upstairs apparently sucked all the air out of the room in a big hurry.
"Okay," Waterhouse says, "I am going to go upstairs and report back to Brisbane. I am personally going to take this room apart like an archaeologist. Make sure that nothing is touched. Especially the abaci."
Chapter 90 ARETHUSA
Attorney Alejandro comes to see Randy the next day and they swap small talk about the weather and the Philippine Basketball Association whilst exchanging handwritten slips of paper across the table. Randy gives his lawyer a note saying, "Give this note to Chester" and then another note asking Chester to go though that trunk and find any old documents on the subject of zeta functions and get them to Randy somehow. Attorney Alejandro gives Randy a somewhat defensive and yet self-congratulatory note itemizing his recent efforts on Randy's behalf, which is probably meant to be encouraging but which Randy finds to be unsettlingly vague. He had rather expected some specific results by this point. He reads it and looks askance at Attorney Alejandro, who grimaces and taps himself on the jaw, which is code for "the Dentist" and which Randy interprets to mean that said billionaire is interfering with whatever Attorney Alejandro is trying to accomplish. Randy hands Attorney Alejandro another note saying, "Give this note to Avi" and then yet another note asking Avi to find out whether General Wing is one of the Crypt's clients.
Then nothing happens for a week. Since Randy lacks the information that he needs about zeta functions, he can't do any actual codebreaking work during this week. But he can lay the groundwork for the work he'll do later. The Cryptonomicon contains numerous hunks of C code intended to perform certain basic cryptanalytical operations, but a lot of it is folk code (poorly written) and anyway needs to be translated into the more modern C++ language. So Randy does that. The Cryptonomiconalso describes various algorithms that will probably come in handy, and Randy implements those in C++ too. It is scut work, but he has nothing else to do, and one of the good things about this particular kind of scut work is that it acquaints you with every little detail of the mathematics; if you don't understand the math you can't write the code. As the days go by, his mind turns into some approximation of a cryptanalyst's. This transformation is indexed by the slow accretion of code in his code-breaking library.
He and Enoch Root get into the habit of having conversations during and after their meals. Both of them seem to have rather involved inner lives that require lots of maintenance and so the rest of the day they ignore each other. Anecdote by anecdote, Randy plots the trajectory of his life to date. Likewise Enoch speaks vaguely of some wartime events, then about what it was like to live in postwar England, and then in the U.S. in the fifties. Apparently he was a Catholic priest for a while but got kicked out of the Church for some reason; he doesn't say why, and Randy doesn't ask. After that all is vague. He mentions that he began spending large amounts of time in the Philippines during the Vietnam War, which fits in with Randy's general hypothesis: if it's true that Old Man Comstock had U.S. troops combing the Philippine boondocks for the Primary, then Enoch would have wanted to be around, to interfere or at least keep an eye on them. Enoch claims he's also been gadding about trying to bring Internet stuff to China, but to Randy this just sounds like a cover story for something else.
It is hard not to get the idea that Enoch Root and General Wing may have other reasons to be pissed off at each other.
"Like, if I can just play Plato's advocate here, what do you mean exactly when you talk about defending civilization?"
"Oh, Randy, you know what I mean."
"Yeah, but China is civilized, right? Has been for a while."
"Yes."
"So maybe you and General Wing are actually on the same team."
"If the Chinese are so civilized, how come they never invent anything?"
"What-paper, gunpowder-"
"Anything in the last millenniumI mean.
"Beats me. What do you think, Enoch?"
"It's like the Germans in the Second World War."
"I know that all the bright lights fled Germany in the thirties-Einstein, Born-"
"And Schr
"Well, because they didn't like the Nazis, of course!"
"But do you know specifically why the Nazis didn't like them?"
"A lot of them were Jews."
"It goes deeper than mere anti-Semitism. Hilbert, Russell, Whitehead, G
"Okay," Randy says, "but what the Nazis didn't understand was that if you tore it down and rebuilt it, it was even more heroic than before."
"Indeed. It led to a renaissance," Root says, "like in the seventeenth century, when the Puritans tore everything to rubble and then slowly built it back up from scratch. Over and over again we see the pattern of the Titanomachia repeated-the old gods are thrown down, chaos returns, but out of the chaos, the same patterns reemerge."
"Okay. So-again-you were talking about civilization?"
"Ares always reemerges from the chaos. It will never go away. Athenian civilization defends itself from the forces of Ares with metis,or technology. Technology is built on science. Science is like the alchemists' uroburos, continually eating its own tail. The processof science doesn't work unless young scientists have the freedom to attack and tear down old dogmas, to engage in an ongoing Titanomachia. Science flourishes where art and free speech flourish."
"Sounds teleological, Enoch. Free countries get better science, hence superior military power, hence get to defend their freedoms. You're proclaiming a sort of Manifest Destiny here."
"Well, someone'sgot to do it."
"Aren't we beyond that sort of thing now?"
"I know you're just saying that to infuriate me. Sometimes, Randy, Ares gets chained up in a barrel for a few years, but he never goes away. The next time he emerges, Randy, the conflict is going to revolve around bio-, micro-, and nanotechnology. Who's going to win?"
"I don't know."
"Are you not just a bit unsettled by not knowing?"
"Look, Enoch, I'm trying my best here-I really am-but I'm broke, and I'm locked up in this fucking cage, all right?"
"Oh, stop whining."
"What about you? Suppose you go back to your yam farm, or whatever, and one day your shovel hits something that rings, and you suddenly dig up a few kilotons of gold? You'd invest it all in high-tech weapons?"
Root, not surprisingly, has an answer: the gold was stolen from all of Asia by the Nipponese, who intended to use it as backing for a currency that would become the legal tender of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and that while it goes without saying that those particular Nips were among the most egregious buttheads in planetary history, some aspects of their plan weren't such a shitty idea. That to the extent life still sucks for many Asians, things would get a lot better, for a lot of people, if the continent's economy could get jerked into the twenty-first, or at least the twentieth, century and hopefully stay therefor a while instead of collapsing whenever some dictator's-nephew-in-charge-of-a-central-bank loses control of his sphincters and wipes out a major currency. So maybe stabilizing the currency situation would be a good thing to accomplish with a shitload of gold, and that's the only moral thing to do with it anyway considering whom it was stolen from-you can't just go out and spendit. Randy finds this answer appropriately sophisticated and Jesuitical and eerily in sync with what Avi has written into the latest edition of the Epiphyte(2) Business Plan.
After a decent number of days has gone by, Enoch Root comes right back and asks Randy what he'd do with a few kilotons of gold, and Randy mentions the Holocaust Education and Avoidance Pod. Turns out that Enoch Root already knows about the HEAP, has already downloaded various revisions of it over the gleaming new communications network that Randy and the Dentist strung through the islands, thinks it's right in line with his ideas vis-
Shortly thereafter, Avi himself comes in for a visit and says very little, but does let Randy know that, yes, General Wing is one of the Crypt's clients. The grizzled Chinese gentlemen who sat around the table with them in Kinakuta, and whose mugs were secretly captured by the pinhole camera on Randy's laptop, are among Wing's chief lieutenants. Avi also lets him know that the legal pressure has eased; the Dentist has suddenly reined in Andrew Loeb and allowed any number of legal deadlines to be extended. The fact that Avi says nothing at all about the sunken submarine would seem to imply that the salvage operation is going well, or at least going.
Randy's still processing these pieces of news when he receives a visit from none other than the Dentist himself.
"I assume that you think I had you framed," says Dr. Hubert Kepler.
He and Randy are alone in a room together, but Randy is conscious of many aides, bodyguards, lawyers, and Furies or Harpies or whatever just on the other side of the nearest door. The Dentist seems ever so slightly amused, but Randy gradually collects that he is actually quite serious. The Dentist's upper lip is permanently arched, or shorter than it ought to be, or both, with the result that his glacier-white incisors are always slightly exposed, and depending on how the light is hitting his face he looks either vaguely beaverish or else as if he's none too effectively fighting back a sneering grin. Even a gentle soul like Randy cannot gaze upon such a face without thinking how much better it would look with the application of some knuckles. From the perfection of Hubert Kepler's dentition it is possible to infer that he had a sheltered upbringing (full time bodyguards from the time his adult teeth erupted from the gumline) or that his choice of careers was motivated by a very personal interest in reconstructive oral surgery. "And I know that you're probably not going to believe me. But I'm here to say that I had nothing to do with what happened at the airport."
The Dentist now stops and gazes at Randy for a while, by no means one of those guys who feels any need to nervously fill in gaps in conversation. And so it is during the ensuing, lengthy pause that Randy figures out that the Dentist isn't grinning at all, that his face is simply in its state of natural repose. Randy shudders a bit just to think of what it must be like to never be able to lose this alternatively beaverish and sneering look. For your lover to gaze on you while you're sleeping and see this. Of course, if the stories are to be believed, Victoria Vigo has her own ways of exacting retribution, and so maybe Hubert Kepler really is suffering the abuse and humiliation that his face seems to be asking for. Randy heaves a little sigh when he thinks of this, sensing some trace of cosmic symmetry revealed.
Kepler is certainly correct in saying that Randy is not inclined to believe a single word he says. The only way for Kepler to gain any credibility is for him to show up in person at this jail and utter the words face-to-face, which given all of the other things that he could be doing, for fun or profit or both, at this moment, gives a lot of weight to what he's saying. It is implicit that if the Dentist wanted to lie, badly and baldly, to Randy, he could send his lawyers around to do it for him, or just send him a fucking telegram, for that matter. So either he's telling the truth, or else he's lying but it's very important to him that Randy should believe in his lies. Randy cannot work out why on earth the Dentist should give a flying fuck whether Randy believes in his lies or not, which pushes him in the direction of thinking that maybe he really is telling the truth.
"Who framed me, then?" Randy asks, kind of rhetorically. He was just in the middle of doing some pretty cool C++ coding when he got yanked out of his cell to have this surprise encounter with the Dentist, and is surprising himself with just how bored and irritated he is. He has reverted, in other words, back into a pure balls-to-the-wall nerdism rivaled only by his early game-coding days back in Seattle. The sheer depth and involution of the current nerdism binge would be hard to convey to anyone. Intellectually, he is juggling half a dozen lit torches, Ming vases, live puppies, and running chainsaws. In this frame of mind he cannot bring himself to give a shit about the fact that this incredibly powerful billionaire has gone to a lot of trouble to come and F2F with him. And so he asks the above question as nothing more than a perfunctory gesture, the subtext being I wish you'd go away but minimal standards of social decency dictate that I should say something.The Dentist, no slouch himself in the social ineptness department, comes right back as if it were an actual request for information. "I can only assume that you have somehow gotten embroiled with someone who has a lot of influence in this country. It appears that someone is trying to send you a-"
"No! Just stop," Randy says. "Don't say it." Hubert Kepler is now looking at him quizzically, so Randy continues. "The message theory doesn't hold up."
Kepler looks genuinely baffled for a few moments, then actually does grin a little bit. "Well, it certainly isn't an attempt to do away with you, because-"
"Obviously," Randy says.
"Yes. Obviously."
There is another one of those long pauses; Kepler seems unsure of himself. Randy arches his back and stretches. "The chair in my cell is not what you call ergonomic," he says. He holds his arms out and wiggles the fingers. "My carpals are going to start acting up again. I can tell."
Randy is looking at Kepler pretty carefully when he says this, and there's no doubt that genuine astonishment is now spreading across the Dentist's face. The Dentist only has one facial expression (already described) but it changes in intensity; it gets more so and less so depending on his emotions. The Dentist's expression proves he had no idea, until now, that Randy's been allowed to have a computer in his cell. In the trying-to-figure-out-what-the-fuck-is-going-on department, the computer is the single most important datum, and Kepler didn't even know about it until just now. So to whatever extent the Dentist actually gives a shit, he has a lot of thinking to do. He excuses himself pretty soon after.
Not half an hour later, some twenty-five-year-old American guy with a ponytail shows up and has a brief audience with Randy. It turns out that he works for Chester in Seattle and has just now flown across the Pacific on Chester's personal jet and came here straight from the airport. He is completely jazzed, totally in bat-out-of-hell mode, and cannot shut up. The sheer amazingness of his sudden flight across the ocean on a rich guy's private jet has made a really, really deep impression on him and he obviously needs someone to share it with. He has brought a "care package" consisting of some junk food, a few trashy novels, the largest bottle of Pepto-Bismol Randy's ever seen, a CD Walkman, and a cubical stack of CDs. This guy can't get over the battery thing; he was told to bring a lot of extra batteries, and so he did, and sure enough, between the luggage guys at the airport and the customs inspectors, all of the batteries disappeared en route except for one package that he's got in the pocket of his long baggy Seattle-grunge-boy shorts. Seattle's full of guys like this who flipped a coin when they graduated from college (heads Prague, tails Seattle) and just showed up with this expectation that because they were young and smart they'd find a job and begin making money, and then appallingly enough did exactly that. Randy can't figure out what the world must look like to a guy like this. He has a hard time getting rid of the guy, who shares the common assumption (increasingly annoying) that just because Randy's in jail, he doesn't have a life, has nothing better to do than interface with visitors.
When Randy gets back to his cell, he sits crosslegged on his bed with the Walkman and begins dealing out the CDs like cards in a solitaire game. The selection is pretty reasonable: a two-disc set of the Brandenburg Concertos, a collection of Bach organ fugues (nerds have a thing about Bach), some Louis Armstrong, some Wynton Marsalis, and then various selections from Hammerdown Systems, which is a Seattle-based record label in which Chester is a major investor. It is a second-generation Seattle-scene record label; all of its artists are young people who came to Seattle after they graduated from college in search of the legendary Seattle music scene and discovered that it didn't really exist-it was just a couple of dozen guys who sat around playing guitar in one another's basements-and so who were basically forced to choose between going home in ignominy or fabricating the Seattle music scene of their imagination from whole cloth. This led to the establishment of any number of small clubs, and the foundation of many bands, that were not rooted in any kind of authentic reality whatsoever but merely reflected the dreams and aspiration of pan-global young adults who had all flocked to Seattle on the same chimera hunt. This second wave scene came in for a lot of abuse from those of the original two dozen people who had not yet died of drug overdose or suicide. There was something of a backlash; and yet, about thirty-six hours after the backlash reached its maximum intensity, there was an antibacklash backlash from young immigrants who asserted their right to some kind of unique cultural identity as people who had naively come to Seattle and discovered that there was no there there and that they would have to create it themselves. Fueled by that conviction, and by their own youthful libidinous energy, and by a few cultural commentators who found this whole scenario fetchingly post-modern, they started a whole lot of second-generation bands and even a couple of record labels, of which Hammerdown Systems is the only one that didn't either go out of business or get turned into a wholly-owned subsidiary of an L.A. or New York-based major label inside of six months.
And so Chester has decided to favor Randy with those recent Hammerdown selections of which he is most proud. Perversely, almost all of these are from bands that are not even in Seattle at all but in small, prohibitively hip college towns in North Carolina and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. But Randy does find one from an evidently Seattle-based band called Shekondar. Evidently,that is, because on the back of the CD is a blurry photograph of several band members drinking sixteen-ounce lattes in cups bearing the logo of a chain of coffee bars that as far as Randy knows has not yet burst free from the city limits of Seattle to crush everything in its path worldwide in the now wearisomely predictable manner of Seattle-based companies. Now, Shekondar happens to have been the name of an especially foul underworld deity who played an important role in some of the game scenarios that Randy played with Avi and Chester and the gang back in the old days. Randy opens up the case of the CD and notes immediately that the disc has the golden hue of a master, not the traditional silver of a mere copy. Randy puts that golden master into his Walkman and hits the Play button and is treated to some passable post-Cobain-mortem material, genetically engineered to have nothing in common with what is traditionally thought of as the Seattle sound and in that sense absolutely typical of Seattle du jour. He jumps forward through a couple more tracks and then rips the earphones off his head, cursing, as the Walkman attempts to translate a stream of pure digital information, representing something other than music, into sound. This feels a bit like needles of dry ice jabbed into his eardrums.
Randy moves the golden disc to the CD-ROM drive that is built into his laptop, and checks it out. Indeed it does sport a couple of audio tracks (as he's discovered) but almost all of the disc's capacity is given over to computer files. There are several directories, or folders, each named after one of the documents that was in grandfather's trunk. Within each of these directories is a long list of files named PAGE.001.jpeg, PAGE.002.jpeg, and so on. Randy starts opening them up, using the same net-browser software that he uses to read the Cryptonomicon,and discovers that they are all scanned image files. Evidently Chester had a bunch of minions de-staple those documents and feed them page by page through a scanner. At the same time he must have had graphic artists, presumably people he knows through Hammerdown Systems, hastily whipping up this fake Shekondar album cover. It's even got a package insert, photographs of Shekondar in concert. What it really is is a parody of the post-Seattle Scene Seattle scene that aligns perfectly with the faulty notions of same that could be expected in the imagination of a Philippine airport customs inspector, who like everyone else is fantasizing about moving to Seattle. The lead guitarist looks kind of like Chester in a wig.
All of this sneaky stuff is probably gratuitous. It probably would have been okay for Chester to just Fedex the fucking documents straight to the jail. But Chester, sitting in his house by Lake Washington, is working on a set of assumptions about Manila just as faulty as what half of the world believes about Seattle. At least Randy gets a laugh out of it before diving into zeta functions.
A word about libido: it's been something like three weeks for Randy now. He was just beginning to address this situation when a highly intelligent and perceptive Catholic ex-priest was suddenly introduced into the cell next to his and began sleeping six inches away from him. Since then, masturbation per se has been pretty much out of the question. To the extent Randy believes in any god at all, he's been praying for a nocturnal emission. His prostate gland now has the size and consistency of a croquet ball. He feels it all the time, and has begun to think of it as his Hunk of Burning Love. Randy had a spot of prostate trouble once when he was chronically drinking too much coffee, and it made everything between his nipples and his knees hurt. The urologist explained that Little Man 'tate is neurologically wired into just about every other part of your body, and he didn't have to exert any rhetorical skill, or marshall any detailed arguments, in order to make Randy believe that. Randy has believed, ever since, that the ability of men to become moronically obsessed with copulation is in some way a reflection of this wiring diagram; when you are ready to give the external world the benefit of your genetic material, i.e. when the 'tate is fully loaded, even your pinkies and eyelids know about it.
And so it might be expected that Randy would be thinking all the time about America Shaftoe, his sexual target of choice, who (just to make things a lot worse) has probably been spending a lot of time in wetsuits lately. And indeed that is where his thoughts were directed at the moment Enoch Root was dragged in. But since then it has become evident that he needs to exercise some kind of iron mental discipline here and not think about Amy at all. Whilst juggling all of those chainsaws and puppies, he is also walking a sort of intellectual tightrope, with decryption of the Arethusa intercepts at the end of that tightrope, and as long as he keeps his eyes fixed on that goal and just keeps putting one foot in front of the other, he'll get there. Amy-in-a-wetsuit is down below somewhere, no doubt trying to be emotionally supportive, but if he even glances in her direction he's a goner.
What he's reading here is a set of academic papers, dating to the 1930s and early forties, that have been heavily marked up by his grandfather, who went through them none-too-subtly gleaning anything that could be useful on the cryptographic front. That it's none too subtle is a good thing for Randy, whose grasp of pure number theory is just barely adequate here. Chester's minions had to scan not only the fronts of these pages but the backs too, which were originally blank but on which Grandpa wrote many notes. For example there is a paper written by Alan Turing in 1937 in which Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse has found some kind of error, or at least, something that Turing didn't go into in sufficient detail, forcing him to cover several pages with annotations. Randy's blood absolutely runs cold at the very idea that he is being so presumptuous as to participate in such a colloquy. When he realizes just how deep over his head he is intellectually, he turns off his computer and goes to bed and sleeps the bootless sleep of the depressed for ten hours. Eventually he convinces himself that most of the junk in these papers probably has no direct relevance to Arethusa and that he just needs to calm down and filter the material carefully.
Two weeks pass. His prayers vis-
Enoch, when he called Randy on the plane, said his old NSA buddy was working for one of the Crypt's clients. It seems clear now that this client is Wing. Consequently Wing knows that Randy has Arethusa. Wing believes that the Arethusa intercepts contain information about the location of the Primary. He wants Randy to decrypt those messages so that he'll know where to dig. Hence the whole setup with the laptop.
All of Attorney Alejandro's efforts to spring Randy loose will be unavailing until Wing has the information that he wants-or thinks he does. Then, all of a sudden, the ice will break, and Randy will unexpectedly be cut loose on a technicality. Randy's so sure of this that he finds Attorney Alejandro's visits annoying. He would like to explain all of this so that Attorney Alejandro could knock it off with the wild goose chase, and his increasingly bleak and dull situation reports on same. But then Wing, who presumably surveils these attorney/client conferences, would know that Randy had figured out the whole game, and Randy doesn't want Wing to know that. So he nods through these meetings with his lawyer and then, for good measure, goes back and tries to sound convincingly bewildered and depressed as he gives Enoch Root the update.
He gets to the point, conceptually, where his grandfather was when he commenced breaking the Arethusa messages. That is, he has a theory in mind now of how Arethusa worked. If he doesn't know the exact algorithm, he knows what family of algorithms it belongs to, and that gives him a search space with many fewer dimensions than he had before. Certainly few enough for a modern computer to explore. He goes on a forty-eight-hour hacking binge. The nerve damage in his wrists has mounted to the point where he practically has sparks shooting out of his fingertips. His doctor told him never again to work on these nonergonomic keyboards. His eyes start to go out on him too, and he has to invert the screen colors and work with white letters on a black background, gradually increasing the size of the letters as he loses the ability to focus. But at last he gets something that he thinks is going to work, and he fires it up and sets it to running on the Arethusa intercepts, which live inside the computer's memory but have never yet been displayed upon its screen. He falls asleep. When he wakes up, the computer is informing him that he's got a probable break into one of the messages. Actually, three of them, all intercepted on 4 April 1945 and hence all encrypted using the same keystream.
Unlike human codebreakers, computers can't read English. They can't even recognize it. They can crank out possible decrypts of a message at tremendous speed but given two character strings like
SEND HELP IMMEDIATELY
and
XUEBP TOAFF NMQPT
they have no inherent ability to recognize the first as a successful decryption of a message and the second as a failure. But they can do a frequency count on the letters. If the computer finds that E is the most common, followed by T, and so on and so forth, then it's a pretty strong indication that the text is some natural human language and not just random gibberish. By using this and other slightly more sophisticated tests, Randy's come up with a routine that should be pretty good at recognizing success. And it's telling him this morning that 4 April 1945 is broken. Randy dare not display the decrypted messages onscreen for fear that they contain the information that Wing's looking for, and so he cannot actually read these messages, as desperately as he'd like to. But by using a command called grep,which searches through text files without opening them, he can at least verify that the word MANILA occurs in two places.
Based on this break, with several more days' work Randy solves Arethusa entirely. He comes up, in other words, with A(x)= K,such that for any given date x he can figure out what K,the keystream for that day would be; and just to prove it, he has the computer crank out Kfor every day in 1944 and 1945 and then use them to decrypt the Arethusa intercepts that came in on those days (without displaying them) and does the frequency count on them and verifies that it worked in each case.
So now he has decrypted all of the messages. But he cannot actually read them without transmitting their contents to Wing. And so now, the subliminal channel comes into play.
In cryptospeak, a subliminal channel is a trick whereby secret information is subtly embedded in a stream of other stuff. Usually it means something like manipulating the least significant bits of an image file to convey a text message. Randy's drawn inspiration from the concept in his labors here in jail. Yes, he has been working on decrypting Arethusa, and that has involved screwing around with a tremendous number of files and writing a lot of code. The number of separate files he's read, created, and edited in the last few weeks is probably in the thousands. None of them have had title bars on their windows, and so the Van Eck phreakers surveilling him have presumably had a terrible time keeping track of which is which. Randy can open a file by typing its title in a window and hitting the return key, all of which happens so fast that the surveillance people probably don't have time to read or understand what he has typed before it disappears. This, he thinks, may have given him just a bit of leeway. He has kept a subliminal channel going in the background: working on a few other bits of code that have nothing to do with breaking Arethusa.
He got the idea for one of these when he was paging through the Cryptonomiconand discovered an appendix that contained a listing of the Morse code. Randy knew Morse code when he was a Boy Scout, and learned it again a few years ago when he was studying for a ham radio license, and it doesn't take him long to refresh his memory. And neither does it take him very long to write a little bit of code that turns his computer's space bar into a Morse code key, so that he can talk to the machine by whacking out dots and dashes with his thumb. This might look a little conspicuous, if not for the fact that Randy spends half of his time reading text files in little windows on the screen, and the way you page through a text file in most UNIX systems is by whacking the space bar. All he has to do is whack it in a particular rhythm, a detail he's relying on the surveillance guys to miss. The results all go into a buffer that is never displayed on the screen, and get written out to files with completely meaningless names. So, for example, Randy can whack out the following rhythm on his spacebar while pretending to read a lengthy section of the Cryptonomicon:
dash dot dot dot (pause) dot dot dash (pause) dash dot (pause) dash dot dot (pause) dash dash dash (pause) dash dot dash
which ought to spell out BUNDOK. He doesn't want to open the resulting file on screen, but later, while he's in the middle of a long series of other cryptic commands he can type
grep ndo (meaningless file name) > (another meaningless file name)
and grep will search through the first-named file to see if it contains the string "ndo" and put the results into the second-named file, which he can then check quite a bit later. He can also do "grep bun" and "grep dok" and if the results of all of these greps are true then he can be pretty confident that he has successfully coded the sequence "BUNDOK" into that one file. In the same way he can code "COORDINATES" into some other file and "LATITUDE" into another, and various numbers into others, and finally by using another command called "cat" he can slowly combine these one-word files into longer ones. All of these demands the same ridiculous patience as, say, tunneling out of a prison with a teaspoon, or sawing through iron bars with a nail file. But there comes a point, after he's spent about a month in jail, when suddenly he's able to make a window appear on the screen that contains the following message:
COORDINATES OF PRIMARY STORAGE LOCATIONS
SITE BUNDOK: LATITUDE NORTH FOURTEEN DEGREES THIRTY-TWO MINUTES . . . LONGITUDE. EAST ONE TWO ZERO DEGREES FIFTY SIX MINUTES .