He can run for it or not. He decides to run. It's only a few steps. He realizes, halfway there, that he's going to make it. The adrenaline is finally flowing; he lunges forward mightily and collapses in the shelter of the big log. Half a dozen bullets thunk into the other side of it, and wet, fibrous splinters shower down over him. The log is rotten.
Shaftoe has gotten himself into a bit of a hole, and cannot see forward or back without exposing himself. He cannot see his fellow Marines, only hear some of them screaming.
He risks a peek at the machine gun nest. It is well concealed by jungle vegetation, but it is evidently built into a cave a good twenty feet above the mudflat. He's not that far from the base of the cliff-he might just reach it with another sprint. But climbing up there is going to be murder. The machine gun probably can't depress far enough to shoot down at him, but they can roll grenades at him until the cows come home, or just pick him off with small arms as he gropes for handholds.
It is, in other words, grenade launcher time. Shaftoe rolls onto his back, extracts a flanged metal tube from his web gear, fits it onto the muzzle of his ought-three. He tries to clamp it down, but his fingers slip on the bloody wing nut. Who's the pencil-neck that decided to use a fucking wing-nutin this context? No point griping about it here and now. There is actually blood all over the place, but he is not in pain. He drags his fingers through the sand, gets them all gritty, tightens that wing nut down.
Out of its handy pouch comes one Mark II fragmentation grenade, a.k.a. pineapple, and with a bit more groping he's got the Grenade Projection Adapter, M1. He engages the former into the latter, yanks out the safety pin, drops it, then slips the fully prepped and armed Grenade Projection Adapter, Ml, with its fruity payload, over the tube of the grenade launcher. Finally: he opens up one specially marked cartridge case, fumbles through bent and ruptured Lucky Strikes, finds one brass cylinder, a round of ammunition sans payload, crimped at the end but not endowed with an actual bullet. Loads same into the Springfield's firing chamber.
He creeps along the log so that he can pop up and fire from an unexpected location and perhaps not get his head chewed off by the machine gun. Finally raises this Rube Goldberg device that his Springfield has become, jams the butt into the sand (in grenade-launcher mode the recoil will break your collarbone), points it toward the foe, pulls the trigger. Grenade Projection Adapter, M1 is gonewith a terrible pow,trailing a damn hardware store of now-superfluous parts, like a soul discarding its corpse. The pineapple is now soaring heavenward, even its pin and safety lever gone, its chemical fuse aflame so that it even has a, whattayoucallit, an inner light. Shaftoe's aim is true, and the grenade is heading where intended. He thinks he's pretty damn smart-until the grenade bounces back, tumbles down the cliff, and blows up another rotten log. The Nips have anticipated Bobby Shaftoe's little plan, and put up nets or chicken wire or something.
He lies on his back in the mud, looking up at the sky, saying the word "fuck" over and over. The entire log throbs, and something akin to peat moss showers down into his face as the bullets chew up the rotten wood. Bobby Shaftoe says a prayer to the Almighty and prepares to mount a banzai charge.
Then the maddening sound of the machine gun stops, and is replaced by the sound of a man screaming. His voice sounds unfamiliar. Shaftoe levers himself up on his elbow and realizes that the screaming is coming from the direction of the cave.
He looks up into the big, sky-blue eyes of Enoch Root.
The chaplain has moved from his nook at the back of the plane and is squatting next to one of the little windows, holding onto whatever he can. Bobby Shaftoe, who has rolled uncomfortably onto his stomach, looks out a window on the opposite side of the plane. He ought to see the sky, but instead he sees a sand dune wheeling past. The sight makes him instantly nauseated. He does not even consider sitting up.
Brilliant spots of light are streaking wildly around the inside of the plane, like ball lightning, but-and this is far from obvious at first-they are actually projected against the wall of the plane, like flashlight beams. He back-traces the beams, taking advantage of a light haze of vaporized hydraulic fluid that has begun to accumulate in the air; and finds that they originate in a series of small circular holes that some asshole has punched through the skin of the plane while he was sleeping. The sun is shining through these holes, always in the same direction of course; but the plane is going every which way.
He realizes that he has actually been lying on the ceiling of the airplane ever since he woke up, which explains why he was on his stomach. When this dawns on him, he vomits.
The bright spots all vanish. Very, very reluctantly, Shaftoe risks a glance out the window and sees only greyness.
He thinks he is on the floor now. He is next to the corpse, at any rate, and the corpse was strapped down.
He lies there for several minutes, just breathing and thinking. Air whistles through the holes in the fuselage, loud enough to split his head.
Someone-some madman-is up on his feet, moving about the plane. It is not Root, who is in his little nook dealing with a number of facial lacerations that he picked up during the aerobatics. Shaftoe looks up and sees that the moving man is one of the British flyboys.
The Brit has yanked off his headgear to expose black hair and green eyes. He's in his mid-thirties, an old man. He has a knobby, utilitarian face in which all of the various lumps, knobs and orifices seem to be there for a reason, a face engineered by the same fellows who design grenade launchers. It is a simple and reliable face, by no means handsome. He is kneeling next to the corpse of Gerald Hott and is examining it minutely with a flashlight. He is the very picture of concern; his bedside manner is flawless.
Finally he slumps back against the ribbed wall of the fuselage. "Thank god," he says, "he wasn't hit."
"Who wasn't?" Shaftoe says.
"This chap," the flyboy says, slapping the corpse.
"Aren't you going to check me?"
"No need to."
"Why not? I'm still alive."
"You weren't hit," the flyboy says confidently. "If you'd been hit, you'd look like Lieutenant Ethridge."
For the first time, Shaftoe hazards movement. He props himself up on one elbow, and finds that the floor of the plane is slick and wet with red fluid.
He had noticed a pink mist in the cabin, and supposed that it was produced by a hydraulic fluid leak. But the hydraulic system now seems hunky-dory, and the stuff on the floor of the plane is not a petroleum product. It is the same red fluid that figured so prominently in Shaftoe's nightmare. It is streaming downhill from the direction of Lieutenant Ethridge's cozy nest, and the Lieutenant is no longer snoring.
Shaftoe looks at what is left of Ethridge, which bears a striking resemblance to what was lying around that butcher shop earlier today. He does not wish to lose his composure in the presence of the British pilot, and indeed, feels strangely calm. Maybe it's the clouds; cloudy days have always had a calming effect on him.
"Holy cow," he finally says, "that Kraut twenty-millimeter is some thing else."
"Right," the flyboy says, "we've got to get spotted by a convoy and then we'll proceed with the delivery."
Cryptic as it is, this is the most informative statement Bobby's ever heard about the intentions of Detachment 2702. He gets up and follows the pilot back to the cockpit, both of them stepping delicately around several quivering giblets that were presumably flung out of Ethridge.
"You mean, by an alliedconvoy, right?" Shaftoe asks.
"An alliedconvoy?" the pilot asks mockingly. "Where the hell are we going to find an alliedconvoy? This is Tunisia."
"Well, then, what do you mean, we've got to getspotted by a convoy? You mean we have to spota convoy, right?"
"Very sorry," the flyboy says, "I'm busy."
When he turns back, he finds Lieutenant Enoch Root kneeling by a relatively large piece of Ethridge, going through Ethridge's attache case. Shaftoe cops a look of exaggerated moral outrage and points the finger of blame.
"Look, Shaftoe," Root shouts, "I'm just following orders. Taking over for him."
He pulls out a small bundle, all wrapped in thick, yellowish plastic sheeting. He checks it over, then glances up reprovingly, one more time, at Shaftoe.
"It was a fucking joke!" Shaftoe says. "Remember? When I thought those guys were looting the corpses? On the beach?"
Root doesn't laugh. Either he's pissed off that Shaftoe successfully bullshitted him, or he doesn't enjoy corpse-looting humor. Root carries the wrapped bundle back to that otherbody, the one in the wetsuit. He stuffs the bundle inside the suit.
Then he squats by the body and ponders. He ponders for a long time. Shaftoe kind of gets a kick out of watching Enoch ponder, which is like watching an exotic dancer shake her tits.
The light changes again as they descend from the clouds. The sun is setting, shining redly through the Saharan haze. Shaftoe looks out a window and is startled to see that they are over the sea now. Below them is a convoy of ships each making a neat white V in the dark water, each lit up on one side by the red sun.
The airplane banks and makes a slow loop around the convoy. Shaftoe hears distant pocking noises. Black flowers bloom and fade in the sky around them. He realizes that the ships are trying to hit them with ack-ack. Then the plane ascends once more into the shelter of the clouds, and it gets nearly dark.
He looks at Enoch Root for the first time in a while. Root is sitting back in his little nook, reading by flashlight. A bundle of papers is open on his lap. It is the plastic-wrapped bundle that Root took out of Ethridge's attache case and shoved into Gerald Hott's wetsuit. Shaftoe figures that the encounter with convoy and ack-ack finally pushed Root over the edge, and that he yanked the bundle right back out again to have a look at it.
Root glances up and locks eyes with Shaftoe. He does not seem nervous or guilty. It is a strikingly calm and cool look.
Shaftoe holds his gaze for a long moment. If there were the slightest trace of guilt or nervousness there, he would turn the chaplain in as a German spy. But there isn't-Enoch Root ain't working for the Germans. He ain't working for the Allies either. He's working for a Higher Power. Shaftoe nods imperceptibly, and Root's gaze softens.
"They're all dead, Bobby," he shouts. "Those islanders. The ones you saw on the beach on Guadalcanal."
So thatexplains why Root is so touchy about corpse-looting jokes. "Sorry," Shaftoe says, moving aft so they don't have to scream at each other. "How'd it happen?"
"After we got you back to my cabin, I transmitted a message to my handlers in Brisbane," Root says. "Enciphered it using a special code. Told them I'd picked up one Marine Raider, who looked like he might actually live, and would someone please come round and collect him."
Shaftoe nods. He remembers that he'd heard lots of dots and dashes, but he had been out of whack with fevers and morphine and whatever home remedies Root had pulled out of his cigar box.
"Well, they responded," Root went on, "and said 'We can't go there, but would you please take him to such-and-such place and rendezvous with some other Marine Raiders.' Which, as you'll recall, is what we did."
"Yeah," Shaftoe says.
"So far so good. But when I got back to the cabin after handing you over, the Nipponese had been through. Killed every islander they could find. Burned the cabin. Burned everything. Set booby traps around the place that nearly killed me. I just barely got out of the damn place alive."
Shaftoe nods, as only a guy who's seen the Nips in action can nod.
"Well they evacuated me to Brisbane where I started making a stink about codes. That's the only way they could have found me-obviously our codes had been broken. And after I'd made enough of a stink, someone apparently said, 'You're British, you're a priest, you're a medical doctor, you can handle a rifle, you know Morse code, and most importantly of all, you're a fucking pain in the ass-so off you go!" And next thing I know, I'm in that meat locker in Algiers."
Shaftoe glances away and nods. Root seems to get the message, which is that Shaftoe doesn't know anything more than he does.
Eventually, Enoch Root wraps the bundle up again, just like it was before. But he doesn't put it back in the attache case. He stuffs it into Gerald Hott's wetsuit.
Later they emerge from the clouds again, close to a moonlit port, and dip down very close to the ocean, going so slow that even Shaftoe, who knows nothing about planes, senses they are about to stall. They open the side door of the Dakota and, one-two-three-NOW, throw the body of PFC Gerald Hott out into the ocean. He makes what would be a big splash in the Oconomowoc town pool, but in the ocean it doesn't come to much.
An hour or so later they land the same Gooney Bird on an airstrip in the midst of a stunning aerial bombardment. They abandon the Skytrain at the end of the airstrip, next to the other C-47, and run through darkness, following the lead of the British pilots. Then they go down a stairway and are underground-in a bomb shelter, to be precise. They can feel the bombs now but can't hear them.
"Welcome to Malta," someone says. Shaftoe looks around and sees that he is surrounded by men in British and American uniforms. The Americans are familiar-it's the Marine Raider squad from Algiers, flown in on that other Dakota. The Brits are unfamiliar, and Shaftoe pegs them as the SAS men that those fellows in Washington were telling him about. The only thing they all have in common is that each man, somewhere on his uniform, is wearing the number 2702.
Chapter 18 NON-DISCLOSURE
Avi shows up on time, idling his fairly good, but not disgustingly ostentatious, Nipponese sports car gingerly up the steep road, which has crazed into a loose mosaic of asphalt flagstones.
Randy watches from the second-floor deck, staring fifty feet almost straight down through the sunroof. Avi is clad in the trousers of a good tropical-weight business suit, a tailored white Sea Island cotton shirt, dark ski goggles, and a wide-brimmed canvas hat.
The house is a tall, isolated structure rising out of the middle of a California grassland that slopes up from the Pacific, a few kilometers away. Chilly air climbs up the slope, rising and falling in slow surges, like surf on a beach. When Avi gets out of his car the first thing he does is pull on his suit-jacket.
He hauls two oversized laptop cases out of the tiny luggage compartment in the car's nose, walks into the house without knocking (he has not been to this particular house before, but he has been to others run along similar principles), finds Randy and Eb waiting in one of its many rooms, and hauls about fifteen thousand dollars worth of portable computer gear out of the bags. He sets them up on a table. Avi hits the start button on two laptops and, as they crawl through the boot process, plugs them into the wall so that the batteries won't drain. A power conduit, with grounded three-prong outlets spaced every eighteen inches, has been screwed down remorselessly along every inch of every wall, spanning drywall; holes in the drywall; primeval op-art contact paper; fake wood-grain paneling; faded Grateful Dead posters; and even the odd doorway.
One of the laptops is connected to a tiny portable printer, which Avi loads with a few sheets of paper. The other laptop starts up a few lines of text running across the screen, then beeps and stops. Randy ambles over and looks at it curiously. It is displaying a prompt:
FILO.
Which Randy knows is short for Finux Loader, a program that allows you to choose which operating system you want to run.
"Finux," Avi mumbles, answering Randy's unspoken question.
Randy types "Finux" and hits the return key. "How many operating systems you have on this thing?"
"Windows 95, for games and when I need to let some lamer borrow my computer temporarily," Avi says. "Windows NT for office type stuff. BeOS for hacking, and screwing around with media. Finux for industrial-strength typesetting."
"Which one do you want now?"
"BeOS. Going to display some JPEGs. I assume there's an overhead projector in this place?"
Randy looks over at Eb, the only person in the room who actually lives here. Eb seems bigger than he is, and maybe it's because of his detonating hair: two feet long, blond with a faint reddish glow, thick and wavy and tending to congeal into ropy strands. No ponytail holder can contain it, so when he bothers to tie it back, he uses a piece of string. Eb is doodling on one of those little computers that uses a stylus so that you can write on the screen. In general, hackers don't use them, but Eb (or rather, one of Eb's defunct corporations) wrote the software for this model and so he has a lot of them lying around. He seems to be absorbed in whatever he's doing, but after Randy has been looking in his direction for two seconds, he senses it, and looks up. He has pale green eyes and wears a luxuriant red beard, except when he's in one of his shaving phases, which usually coincide with serious romantic involvements. Right now his beard is about half an inch long, indicating a recent breakup, and implying a willingness to take new risks.
"Overhead projector?" Randy says.
Eb closes his eyes, which is what he does during memory access, then gets up and walks out of the room.
The tiny printer begins to eke paper. The first line of text, centered at the top of the page, is: NONDISCLOSURE AGREEMENT. More lines follow. Randy has seen them, or ones like them, so many times that his eyes glaze over and he turns away. The only thing that ever changes is the name of the company: in this case: EPIPHYTE(2) CORP.
"Nice goggles."
"If you think these are weird, you should see what I'm going to put on when the sun goes down," Avi says. He rummages in a bag and pulls out a contraption that looks like a pair of glasses without lenses, with a dollhouse-scale light fixture mounted above each eye. A wire runs down to a battery pack with belt loops. He slides a tiny switch on the battery pack and the lights come on: expensive-looking blue-white halogen.
Randy raises his eyebrows.
"It's all jet-lag avoidance," Avi explains. "I'm adjusted to Asian time. I'm going back there in two days. I don't want my body to get back on Left Coast time while I'm here."
"So the hat and goggles-"
"Simulate night. This thing simulates daylight. See, your body takes its cues from the light, adjusts its clock accordingly. Speaking of which, would you mind closing the blinds?"
The room has west-facing windows, affording a view down the grassy slope to Half Moon Bay. It is late afternoon and the sun is pouring through. Randy savors the view for a moment, then drops the blinds.
Eb stalks back into the room with an overhead projector dangling from one hand, looking for a moment like Beowulf brandishing a monster's severed arm. He puts it on the table and aims it at the wall. There is no need for a screen, because above the ubiquitous power strips, every wall in the house is covered with whiteboards. Many of the whiteboards are, in turn, covered with cryptical incantations, written in primary colors. Some of them are enclosed in irregular borders and labeled DO NOT ERASE! or simply DNE or NO! In front of where Eb has put the overhead projector, there is a grocery list, a half-erased fragment of a flowchart, a fax number in Russia, a couple of dotted quads-Internet addresses-and a few words in German, which were presumably written by Eb himself. Dr. Eberhard F
Two more men come into the room, deeply involved in a conversation about some exasperating company in Burlingame. One of them is dark and lean and looks like a gunfighter; he even wears a black cowboy hat. The other is tubby and blond and looks like he just got out of a Rotary Club meeting. They have one detail in common: each is wearing a bright silver bracelet on his wrist.
Randy takes the NDAs out of the printers and passes them out, two copies each, each pair preprinted with a name: Randy Waterhouse, Eberhard F
"Those look new," Randy says. "Did they change the wording again?"
"Yeah!" John Cantrell says. "This is version 6.0-just out last week."
Anywhere else, the bracelets would mean that John and Tom were suffering from some sort of life-threatening condition, such as an allergy to common antibiotics. A medic hauling them out of a wrecked car would see the bracelet and follow the instructions. But this is Silicon Valley and different rules apply. The bracelets say, on one side:
IN CASE OF DEATH SEE REVERSE FOR BIOSTASIS PROTOCOL FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS COLLECT REWARD $100,000
and on the other:
CALL NOW FOR INSTRUCTIONS I-800-NNN-NNNN
PUSH 50,000 U HEPARIN IV AND DO CPR WHILE COOLING WITH ICE TO 10C.KEEP PH 7.5
NO AUTOPSY OR EMBALMING
It is a recipe for freezing a dead, or nearly dead, person. People who wear this bracelet believe that, if this recipe is followed, the brain and other delicate tissues can be iced without destroying them. A few decades down the line, when nanotechnology has made it possible to be immortal, they hope to be thawed out. John Cantrell and Tom Howard believe that there is a reasonable chance that they will still be having conversations with each other a million years from now.
The room gets quiet as all of the men scan the forms, their eyes picking out certain familiar clauses. They have probably signed a hundred NDA forms between them. Around here, it is like offering someone a cup of coffee.
A woman comes into the room, burdened with tote bags, and beams an apology for being late. Beryl Hagen looks like a Norman Rockwell aunt, an apron-wearing, apple-pie-toting type. In twenty years, she's been the chief financial officer of twelve different small high-tech companies. Ten of them have gone out of business. Except in the case of the second one, this was through no fault of Beryl's. The sixth was Randy's Second Business Foray. One was absorbed by Microsoft, one became a successful, independent company in its own right. Beryl made enough money from the latter two to retire. She consults and writes while she looks for something interesting enough to draw her back into action, and her presence in this room suggests that Epiphyte(2) Corp. must not be completely bogus. Or maybe she's just being polite to Avi. Randy gives her a bearhug, lifting her off the floor, and then hands her two copies of the NDA with her name on them.
Avi has detached the screen from his big laptop and laid it flat on the surface of the overhead projector, which shines light through the liquid-crystal display and projects a color image on the whiteboard. It is a typical desktop: a couple of terminal windows and some icons. Avi goes around and picks up the signed NDAs, scans them all, hands one copy back to each person, files the rest in the outer pocket of a laptop bag. He begins to type on the laptop's keyboard, and letters spill across one of the windows. "Just so you know," Avi mumbles, "Epiphyte Corp., which I'll call Epiphyte(1) for clarity, is a Delaware corporation, one and one half years old. The shareholders are myself, Randy, and Springboard Capital. We're in the telecoms business in the Philippines. I can give you details later if you want. Our work there has positioned us to be aware of some new opportunities in that part of the world. Epiphyte(2) is a California corporation, three weeks old. If things go the way we are hoping they will go, Epiphyte(1) will be folded into it according to some kind of stock transfer scheme the details of which are too boring to talk about now.
Avi hits the return key. A new window opens on the desktop. It is a color map scanned in from an atlas, tall and narrow. Most of it is oceanic blue. A rugged coastline juts in through the top border, with a few cities labeled: Nagasaki, Tokyo. Shanghai is in the upper left corner. The Philippine archipelago is dead center. Taiwan is directly north of it, and to the south is a chain of islands forming a porous barrier between Asia and a big land mass labeled with English words like Darwin and Great Sandy Desert.
"This probably looks weird to most of you," Avi says. "Usually these presentations begin with a diagram of a computer network, or a flowchart or something. We don't normally deal with maps. We're all so used to working in a purely abstract realm that it seems almost bizarre to go out into the real world and physically do something.
"But I like maps. I've got maps all over my house. I'm going to suggest to you that the skills and knowledge we have all been developing in our work-especially pertaining to the Internet-have applications out here." He taps the whiteboard. "In the real world. You know, the big round wet ball where billions of people live."
There is a bit of polite snickering as Avi skims his hand over his computer's trackball, whacks a button with his thumb. A new image appears: the same map, with bright color lines running across the ocean, looping from one city to the next, roughly following the coastlines.
"Existing undersea cables. The fatter the line, the bigger the pipe," Avi says. "Now, what is wrong with this picture?"
There are several fat lines running east from places like Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Australia, presumably connecting them with the United States. Across the South China Sea, which lies between the Philippines and Vietnam, another fat line angles roughly north-south, but it doesn't connect either of those two countries: it goes straight to Hong Kong, then continues up the China coast to Shanghai, Korea, and Tokyo.
"Since the Philippines are in the center of the map," John Cantrell says, "I predict that you are going to point out that hardly any fat lines go to the Philippines."
"Hardly any fat lines go to the Philippines!" Avi announces briskly. He points out the one exception, which runs from Taiwan south to northern Luzon, then skips down the coast to Corregidor. "Except for this one, which Epiphyte(l) is involved with. But it's not just that. There is a general paucity of fat lines in a north-south direction, connecting Australia with Asia. A lot of data packets going from Sydney to Tokyo have to be routed through California. There's a market opportunity."
Beryl breaks in. "Avi, before you get started on this," she says, sounding cautious and regretful, "I have to say that laying long-distance, deep sea cables is a difficult business to break into."
"Beryl is right!" Avi says. "The only people who have the wherewithal to lay those cables are AT&T, Cable & Wireless, and Kokusai Denshin Denwa. It's tricky. It's expensive. It requires massive NRE."
The abbreviation stands for "non-recoverable expenses," meaning engineering work to complete a feasibility study that would be money down the toilet if the idea didn't fly.
"So what are you thinking?" Beryl says.
Avi clicks up another map. This one is the same as the previous, except that new lines have been drawn in: a whole series of short island-to-island links. A bewilderingly numerous chain of short hops down the length of the Philippine archipelago.
"You want to wire the Philippines and patch them into the Net via your existing link to Taiwan," says Tom Howard, in a heroic bid to short-circuit what he senses will be a lengthy part of Avi's presentation.
"The Philippines are going to be hot shit informationally speaking," Avi says. "The government has its flaws, but basically it's a democracy modeled after Western institutions. Unlike most Asians, they do ASCII. Most of them speak English. Longstanding ties to the United States. These guys are going to be big players, sooner or later, in the information economy."
Randy breaks in. "We've already established a foothold there. We know the local business environment. And we have cash flow."
Avi clicks up another map. This one's harder to make out. It looks like a relief map of a vast region of high mountains interrupted by occasional plateaus. Its appearance in the middle of this presentation without any labels or explanation from Avi makes it an implicit challenge to the mental acumen of the other people in the room. None of them is going to ask for help anytime soon. Randy watches them squint and tilt their heads from side to side. Eberhard F
"Southeast Asia with the oceans drained," he says. "That high ridge on the right is New Guinea. Those bumps are the volcanoes of Borneo."
"Pretty cool, huh?" Avi says. "It's a radar map. U.S. military satellites gathered all this data. You can get it for next to nothing."
On this map the Philippines can be understood, not as a chain of separate islands, but as the highest regions of a huge oblong plateau surrounded by deep gashes in the earth's crust. To get from Luzon up to Taiwan by going across the ocean floor you would have to plunge into a deep trench, flanked by parallel mountain ranges, and follow it northwards for about three hundred miles. But south of Luzon, in the region where Avi is proposing to lay a network of inter-island cables, it's all shallow and flat.
Avi clicks again, superimposing transparent blue over the parts that are below sea level, green on the islands. Then he zooms in on an area in the center of the map, where the Philippine plateau extends two arms southwest toward northern Borneo, embracing, and nearly enclosing, a diamond-shaped body of water, three hundred and fifty miles across. "The Sulu Sea," he announces. "No relation to the token Asian on Star Trek."
No one laughs. They are not really here to be entertained-they are concentrating on the map. All of the different archipelagos and seas are confusing, even for smart people with good spatial relations. The Philippines form the upper right boundary of the Sulu Sea, north Borneo (part of Malaysia) the lower left, the Sulu Archipelago (part of the Philippines) the lower right, and the upper left boundary is one extremely long skinny Philippine island called Palawan.
"This reminds us that national boundaries are artificial and silly," Avi says. "The Sulu Sea is a basin in the middle of a larger plateau shared by the Philippines and Borneo. So if you're wiring up the Philippines, you can just as easily wire Borneo up to that network at the same time, just by outlining the Sulu Sea with shallow, short-hop cables. Like this."
Avi clicks again and the computer draws in more colored lines.
"Avi, why are we here?" Eberhard asks.
"That is a very profound question," Avi says.
"We know the economics of these startups," Eb says. "We begin with nothing but the idea. That's what the NDA is for-to protect your idea. We work on the idea together-put our brainpower into it-and get stock in return. The result of this work is software. The software is copyrightable, trademarkable, perhaps patentable. It is intellectual property. It is worth some money. We all own it in common, through our shares. Then we sell some more shares to an investor. We use the money to hire more people and turn it into a product, to market it, and so on. That's how the system works, but I'm beginning to think you don't understand it."
"Why do you say that?"
Eb looks confused. "How can we contribute to this? How can we turn our brainpower into equity that an investor will want to own a part of?"
Everyone looks at Beryl. Beryl's nodding agreement with Eb. Tom Howard says, "Avi. Look. I can engineer big computer installations. John wrote Ordo-he knows everything about crypto. Randy does Internet, Eb does weird stuff, Beryl does money. But as far as I know, none of us knows diddly about undersea cable engineering. What good will our resumes do you when you go up in front of some venture capitalists?"
Avi's nodding. "Everything you say is true," he concedes smoothly.
"We would have to be crazy to get involved in running cables through the Philippines. That is a job for FiliTel, with whom Epiphyte(1) has been joint-venturing."
"Even if we were crazy, Beryl says, "we wouldn't have the opportunity, because no one would give us the money."
"Fortunately we don't need to worry about that," Avi says, "because it's being done for us." He turns to the whiteboard, picks up a red magic marker, and draws a fat line between Taiwan and Luzon, his hands picking up a leprous, mottled look from the shaded relief of the ocean floor that is being projected against his skin. "KDD, which is anticipating major growth in the Philippines, is already laying another big cable here." He moves down and begins to draw smaller, shorter links between islands in the archipelago. "And FiliTel, which is funded by AVCLA-Asia Venture Capital Los Angeles-is wiring the Philippines."
"What does Epiphyte(l) have to do with that?" Tom Howard asks.
"To the extent they want to use that network for Internet Protocol traffic, they need routers and network savvy," Randy explains.
"So, to repeat my question: why are we here?" Eberhard says, patiently but firmly.
Avi works with his pen for a while. He circles an island at one corner of the Sulu Sea, centered in the gap between North Borneo and the long skinny Philippine island called Palawan. He labels it in block letters:
SULTANATE OF KINAKUTA.
"Kinakuta was run by white sultans for a while. It's a long story. Then it was a German colony," Avi says. "Back then, Borneo was part of the Dutch East Indies, and Palawan-like the rest of the Philippines-was first Spanish and then American. So this was the Germans' foothold in the area."
"Germans always ended up holding the shittiest colonies," Eb says ruefully.
"After the First World War, they handed it over to the Japanese, along with a lot of other islands much farther to the east. All of these islands, collectively, were called the Mandates because Japan controlled them under a League of Nations Mandate. During the Second World War the Japanese used Kinakuta as a base for attacks on the Dutch East Indies and the Philippines. They retained a naval base and airfield there. After the war, Kinakuta became independent, as it had been before the Germans. The population is Muslim or ethnic Chinese around the edges, animist in the center, and it's always been ruled by a sultan-even while occupied by the Germans and the Japanese, who both co-opted the sultans but kept them in place as figureheads. Kinakuta had oil reserves, but they were unreachable until the technology got better and prices went up, around the time of the Arab oil embargo, which was also when the current sultan came into power. That sultan is now a very rich man-not as rich as the Sultan of Brunei, who happens to be his second cousin, but rich."
"The sultan is backing your company?" Beryl asks.
"Not in the way you mean," Avi says.
"What way do you mean?" Tom Howard asks, impatient.
"Let me put it this way," Avi says. "Kinakuta is a member of the United Nations. It is every bit as much an independent country and member of the community of nations as France or England. As a matter of fact, it is exceptionally independent because of its oil wealth. It is basically a monarchy-the sultan makes the laws, but only after extensive consultation with his ministers, who set policy and draft legislation. And I've been spending a lot of time, recently, with the Minister of Posts and Telecommunications. I have been helping the minister draft a new law that will govern all telecommunications passing through Kinakutan territory."
"Oh, my god!" John Cantrell says. He is awestruck.
"One free share of stock to the man in the black hat!" Avi says. "John has figured out Avi's secret plan. John, would you like to explain to the other contestants?"
John takes his hat off and runs his hand back through his long hair. He puts his hat back on and heaves a sigh. "Avi is proposing to start a data haven," he says.
A little murmur of admiration runs through the room. Avi waits for it to subside and says, "Slight correction: the sultan's starting the data haven. I'm proposing to make money off it."
Chapter 19 ULTRA
Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse goes into battle armed with one-third of a sheet of British typing paper on which has been typed some words that identify it as a pass to Bletchley Park. His name and some other things have been scribbled on it in some upper-class officer's Mont Blanc blue-black, the words ALL SECTIONS circled, and a stamp smashed across it, blurred into a red whore's kiss, with sheer carelessness conveying greater Authority and Power than the specious clarity of a forger.
He finds his way round the mansion to the narrow lane that runs between it and its row of red-brick garages (or stables, as his grandparents would be likely to peg them). He finds it a very pleasant place for a cigarette. The lane is lined with trees, a densely planted hedge of them. The sun is just setting now. It is still high enough to snipe through any small defects that it finds in the defensive perimeter of the horizon, so narrow red beams strike him surprisingly in the eye as he ambles back and forth. He knows one is shining invisibly through the clear air several feet above him, because it is betraying an aerial: a strand of copper wire stretched from the wall of the mansion to a nearby cypress. It catches the light in precisely the same way as the strand of the spiderweb that Waterhouse was playing with earlier.
The sun will be down soon; it is already down in Berlin, as in most of the hellish empire that Hitler has built from Calais to the Volga. Time for the radio operators to begin their work. Radio does not, in general, go around corners. This can be a real pain when you are conquering the world, which is inconveniently round, placing all of your most active military units over the horizon. But if you use shortwave, then you can bounce the information off the ionosphere. This works a good deal better when the sun is not in the sky, sluicing the atmosphere with wideband noise. So radio telegraphers, and the people who eavesdrop on them (what the Brits call the YService) are, alike, nocturnal beings.
As Waterhouse has just observed, the mansion has an aerial or two. But Bletchley Park is a huge and ravenous spider that requires a web the size of a nation to feed it. He has seen enough evidence, from the black cables climbing the mansion's walls and the smell and hiss of the massed teletypes, to know that the web is at least partly made of copper wires. Another piece of the web is made of rude stuff like concrete and asphalt.
The gate swings open and a man on a green motorcycle banks steeply into the lane, the two cylinders of his machine blatting away, the noise stinging Waterhouse's nose as he rides by. Waterhouse strides after him for some distance, but loses his trail after a hundred yards or so. That is acceptable; more of them will be along soon, as the Wehrmacht's nervous system awakens and its signals are picked up by the Y Service.
The motorcyclist went through a quaint little gate that joins two old buildings. The gate is topped by a tiny cupola with a weathervane and a clock. Waterhouse goes through it and finds himself in a little square that evidently dates back to when Bletchley Park was a precious Buckinghamshire farmstead. To the left, the line of stables continues. Small gables have been set into the roof, which is stained with bird shit. The building is quivering with pigeons. Directly in front of him is a nice little red brick Tudor farmhouse, the only thing he has seen so far that is not architecturally offensive. Off to his right is a one-story building. Strange information is coming out of this building: the hot-oil smell of teletypes, but no typing noises, just a high mechanical whine.
A door opens on the stable building and a man emerges carrying a large but evidently lightweight box with a handle on the top. Cooing noises come from the box and Waterhouse realizes that it contains pigeons. Those birds living up in the gables are not feral; they are homing pigeons. Carriers of information, strands of Bletchley Park's web.
He homes in on the building that smells of hot oil and gazes into a window. As evening falls, light has begun to leak out of it, betraying information to black German reconnaissance planes, so a porter is strutting about the courtyard slamming the black shutters closed.
Some information comes into Waterhouse's eyes at least: on the other side of that window, men are gathered around a machine. Most of them are wearing civilian clothes, and they have been too busy, for too long, to trifle much with combs and razors and shoe polish. The men are intensely focused upon their work, which all has to do with this large machine. The machine consists of a large framework of square steel tubing, like a bedstead set up on one end. Metal drums with the diameter of dinner plates, an inch or so thick, are mounted at several locations on this framework. Paper tape has been threaded in a bewilderingly loopy trajectory from drum to drum. It looks as if a dozen yards of tape are required to thread the machine.
One of the men has been working on a rubber drive belt that goes around one of the drums. He steps back from it and makes a gesture with his hand. Another man flips a switch and the drums all begin to spin at once. The tape begins to fly through the system. Holes punched in the tape carry data; it all blurs into a grey streak now, the speed creating an illusion in which the tape appears to dissolve into a ribbon of smoke.
No, it is not an illusion. Real smoke is curling up from the spinning drums. The tape is running through the machine so fast that it is catching fire before the eyes of Waterhouse and the men inside, who watch it calmly, as if it were smoking in an entirely new and interesting way.
If there is a machine in the world capable of reading data from a tape that fast, Waterhouse has never heard of it.
The black shutter slams home. Just as it does, Waterhouse gets one fragmentary glimpse of another object standing in the corner of the room: a steel rack in which a large number of grey cylindrical objects are stored in neat rows.
Two motorcyclists come through the courtyard at once, running in the darkness with their headlights off. Waterhouse jogs after them for a bit, leaving the picturesque old courtyard behind and entering into the world of the huts, the new structures thrown up in the last year or two. "Hut" makes him think of a tiny thing, but these huts, taken together, are more like that new Pentagon thing that the War Department has been putting up across the river from D.C. They embody a blunt need for space unfiltered through any aesthetic or even human considerations.
Waterhouse walks to an intersection of roads where he thought he heard the motorcycles making a turn, and stops, hemmed in by blast walls. On an impulse, he clambers to the top of a wall and takes a seat. The view from here is no better. He knows that thousands of people are at work all around him in these huts, but he sees none of them, there are no signposts.
He is still trying to work out that business that he saw through the window.
The tape was running so fast that it smoked.There is no point of driving it that fast unless the machine can read the information that fast-transforming the pattern of holes in the tape into electrical impulses.
But why bother, if those impulses had nowhere to go? No human mind could deal with a stream of characters coming in at that speed. No teletype that Waterhouse knew of could even print them out.
It only makes sense if they are constructing a machine. A mechanical calculator of some sort that can absorb the data and then do something with it-perform some calculation-presumably a cipher-breaking type of calculation.
Then he remembers the rack he glimpsed in the corner, its many rows of identical grey cylinders. Viewed end-on, they looked like some kind of ammunition. But they are too smooth and glossy for that. Those cylinders, Waterhouse realizes, are made of blown glass.
They are vacuum tubes. Hundreds of them. More tubes in one place than Waterhouse has ever seen.
Those men in that room are building a Turing machine!
It is no wonder, then, that the men in the room accept the burning of the tape so calmly. That strip of paper, a technology as old as the pyramids, is merely a vessel for a stream of information. When it passes through the machine, the information is abstracted from it, transfigured into a pattern of pure binary data. That the mere vessel burns is of no consequence. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust-the data has passed out of the physical plane and into the mathematical, a higher and purer universe where different laws apply. Laws, a few of which are dimly and imperfectly known to Dr. Alan Mathison Turing and Dr. John von Neumann and Dr. Rudolf von Hacklheber and a few other people Waterhouse used to hang around with in Princeton. Laws about which Waterhouse himself knows a thing or two.