Once you have transfigured the data into the realm of pure information, all that is required is a tool. Carpenters work with wood and carry a box of technology for measuring it, cutting it, smoothing it, joining it. Mathematicians work with information and need a tool of their own.
They have been building these tools, one at a time, for years. There is, just to name one example, a cash register and typewriter company called the Electrical Till Corporation that makes a dandy punched-card machine for tabulating large quantities of data. Waterhouse's professor in Iowa was tired of solving differential equations one at a time and invented a machine to solve them automatically by storing the information on a capacitor-covered drum and cranking through a certain algorithm. Given enough time and enough vacuum tubes, a tool might be invented to sum a column of numbers, and another one to keep track of inventories, and another one to alphabetize lists of words. A well-equipped business would have one of each: gleaming cast-iron monsters with heat waves rising out of their grilles, emblazoned with logos like ETC and Siemens and Hollerith, each carrying out its own specialized task. Just as a carpenter had a miter box and a dovetail jig and a clawhammer in his box.
Turing figured out something entirely different, something unspeakably strange and radical.
He figured out that mathematicians, unlike carpenters, only needed to have one tool in their toolbox, if it were the right sort of tool. Turing realized that it should be possible to build a meta-machine that could be reconfigured in such a way that it would do any task you could conceivably do with information. It would be a protean device that could turn into any tool you could ever need. Like a pipe organ changing into a different instrument every time you hit a preset button.
The details were a bit hazy. This was not a blueprint for an actual machine, rather a thought experiment that Turing had dreamed up in order to resolve an abstract riddle from the completely impractical world of pure logic. Waterhouse knows this perfectly well. But he cannot get one thing out of his mind as he sits there atop the blast walls at the dark intersection in Bletchley Park: the Turing machine, if one really existed, would rely upon having a tape. The tape would pass through the machine. It would carry the information that the machine needed to do its work.
Waterhouse sits there staring off into the darkness and reconstructs Turing's machine in his mind. More of the details are coming back to him. The tape, he now recollects, would not move through the Turing machine in one direction; it would change direction frequently. And the Turing machine would not just read the tape; it would be able to erase marks or make new ones.
Clearly you cannot erase holes in a paper tape. And just as clearly the tape only moves through this Bletchley Park machine in one direction. So, much as Waterhouse hates to admit this fact to himself, the rack of tubes he just spied is not a Turing machine. It is some lesser device-a special-purpose tool like a punched-card reader or Atanasoffs differential equation solver.
It is still bigger and more fiendishly terrific than anything Waterhouse has ever seen.
A night train from Birmingham blows through, carrying bullets to the sea. As its sound dies away to the south, a motorcycle approaches the park's main gate. Its engine idles as the rider's papers are checked, then Waterhouse hears a Bronx cheer as it surges forward and cuts the sharp turn into the lane. Waterhouse climbs to his feet at the intersection of the walls, and watches carefully as the bike sputters past him and homes in on a "hut" a couple of blocks away. Light suddenly leaks from an open door as the cargo changes hands. Then the light is snuffed and the bike stretches a long loud raspberry down the road to the park's exit.
Waterhouse lets himself down to earth and gropes his way down the road through the moonless night. He stops before the entrance to the hut and listens to it teem for a minute. Then, working up his courage, he steps forward and pushes the wooden door open.
It is unpleasantly hot in here, and the atmosphere is a nauseating distillation of human and machine odors, held in and concentrated by the coffin doors slabbed down over all the windows. Many people are in here, mostly women working at gargantuan electrically powered typewriters. He can see even through his squint that the place is a running sluice for scraps of paper, maybe four by six inches each, evidently brought in by the motorcyclists. Near the door, they have been sorted and stacked up in wire baskets. Thence they go to the women at their giant typewriters.
One of the few men in the place has risen to his feet and is homing in on Waterhouse. He is about Waterhouse's age, that is, in his early twenties. He is wearing a British Army uniform. He has the air of a host at a wedding reception who wants to make sure that even the most long lost, far-flung members of the family are properly greeted. Obviously he is no more a real military man than is Waterhouse himself. No wonder this place is surrounded by so much barbed wire and RAF men with machine guns.
"Good evening, sir. Can I help you?"
"Evening. Lawrence Waterhouse."
"Harry Packard. Pleased to meet you." But he has no idea who Waterhouse is; he is privy to Ultra, but not to Ultra Mega.
"Pleasure's mine. I imagine you'll want to have a look at this." Waterhouse hands him the magic pass. Packard's pale eyes travel over it carefully, then jump around to focus on a few sites of particular interest: the signature at the bottom, the smeared stamp. The war has turned Harry Packard into a machine for scanning and processing slips of paper and he goes about his work calmly and without fuss in this case. He excuses himself, works the crank on a telephone, and speaks to someone; his posture and facial expression suggest it is someone important. Waterhouse cannot hear the words above the clicking and thrumming of the massed typewriters, but he sees interest and bemusement on Packard's young, open, pink face. Packard gives Waterhouse a sidelong glance or two while he is listening to the person at the other end of the line. Then he says something respectful and reassuring into the phone and rings off.
"Right. Well, what would you like to see?"
"I'm trying to get an overall sense of how the information flows."
"Well, we are close to the beginning of it here-these are the headwaters. Our wellsprings are the Y Service-military and amateur radio operators who listen in on Jerry's radio transmissions, and provide us with these." Packard takes a slip from a motorcyclist's pannier and hands it to Waterhouse.
It is a form with various boxes at the top in which someone has written in a date (today's) and time (a couple of hours ago) and a few other data such as a radio frequency. The body of the form is mostly occupied by a large open space in which the following has been printed in hasty block letters:
A Y W B P R O J H K D H A O B Q T M D L T U S H I
Y P I J S L L E N J O P S K Y V Z P D L E M A O U
T A MO G T M O A H E C
the whole thing preceded by two groups of three letters each:
Y U H A B G
"This one came in from one of our stations in Kent," Packard says. "It is a Chaffinch message."
"So-one of Rommel's?"
"Yes. This intercept came in from Cairo. Chaffinch gets top priority, which is why this message is on the top of the pile."
Packard leads Waterhouse down the central aisle of the hut, between the rows of typists. He picks out one girl who is just finishing up with a message, and hands her the slip. She sets it up next to her machine and commences typing it in.
At first glance, Waterhouse had thought that the machines represented some British concept of how to build an electric typewriter-as big as a dinner table, wrapped up in two hundred pounds of cast-iron, a ten-horse motor turning over under the hood, surrounded by tall fences and armed guards. But now that he is closer he sees that it is something much more complicated. Instead of a platen, it has a large flat reel on it carrying a roll of narrow paper tape. This is not the same kind of tape he saw earlier, smoking through the big machine. This is narrower, and when it emerges from the machine, it does not have holes punched through it for a machine to read. Instead, every time the girl slams down one of the keys on the keyboard-copying the text printed on the slip-a new letter is printed on the tape. But not the same letter that she typed.
It does not take her long to type in all of the letters. Then she tears the tape from her machine. It has a sticky backing which she uses to paste it directly onto the original intercept slip. She hands it to Packard, giving him a demure smile. He responds with something between a nod and a smart little bow, the kind of thing no American male could ever get away with. He glances at it and hands it to Waterhouse.
The letters on the tape say
EINUNDZWANZIGSTPANZERDIVISIONBERICHTET
KEINEBESONDEREEREIGNISSE
"In order to obtain those settings, you have to break the code-which changes every day?"
Packard smiles in agreement. "At midnight. If you stay here-" he checks his watch "-for another four hours, you will see fresh intercepts coming in from the Y Service that will produce utter gibberish when we run them through the Typex, because the Jerries will have changed all their codes on the stroke of midnight. Rather like Cinderella's magic carriage turning back into a pumpkin. We must then analyze the new intercepts using the bombes, and figure out the day's new codes."
"How long does that take?"
"Sometimes we are lucky and have broken the day's codes by two or three o'clock in the morning. Typically it does not happen until after noon or evening. Sometimes we do not succeed at all."
"Okay, this is a stupid question, but I want to be clear. These Typex machines-which merely do a mechanical deciphering operation-are a completely different thing from the bombes, which actually break the codes."
"The bombes, compared to these, are of a completely different, enormously higher order of sophistication," Packard agrees. "They are almost like mechanical thinking machines."
"Where are they located?"
"Hut 11. But they won't be running just now."
"Right," Waterhouse says, "not until after midnight when the carriage turns back into a pumpkin, and you need to break tomorrow's Enigma settings."
"Precisely."
Packard steps over to a small wooden hatch set low into one of the hut's exterior walls. Next to it sits an office tray with a cup hook screwed into each end, and a string tied to each cup hook. One of the strings is piled up loose on the floor. The wall hatch has been slid shut on the other string. Packard puts the message slip on top of a pile of similar ones that has accumulated in the tray, then slides the hatch open, revealing a narrow tunnel leading away from the hut.
"Okay, your pull!" he shouts.
"Okay, my pull!" comes an answering voice a moment later. The string goes taught and the tray slides into the tunnel and disappears.
"On its way to Hut 3," Packard explains.
"Then so am I," Waterhouse says.
Hut 3 is only a few yards away, on the other side of the inevitable blast wall. GERMAN MILITARY SECTION has been scrawled on the door in cursive; Waterhouse presumes that this is as opposed to "NAVAL" which is in Hut 4. The ratio of men to women seems higher here. During wartime it is startling to see so many hale young men in one room together. Some are in Army or RAF uniforms, some in civvies, and there is even one Naval officer.
A large horseshoe-shaped table dominates the center of the building, with a rectangular table off to the side. Each chair at each table is occupied by intent workers. The intercept slips are pulled into the hut on the wooden tray and then move from chair to chair according to some highly organized scheme that Waterhouse can only vaguely grasp at this point. Someone explains to him that the bombes just broke the day's codes around sundown, and so the entire day's load of intercepts has just come down the tunnel from Hut 6 during the last couple of hours.
He decides to think of the hut as a mathematical black box for the time being-that is, he'll concentrate only on its inputs and outputs of information and ignore the internal details. Bletchley Park, taken in its entirety, is a black box of sorts: random letters stream into it, strategic intelligence streams out, and the internal particulars are of no interest to most of the people on the Ultra distribution list. The question that Waterhouse is here to figure out is: is there another vector of information coming out of this place, hidden subliminally in the teletype signals and the behaviors of the Allied commanders? And does it point to Rudolf von Hacklheber, Ph.D.?
Chapter 20 KINAKUTA
Whoever laid out the flight paths into the sultan's new airport must have been in cahoots with the Kinakuta Chamber of Commerce. If you're lucky enough to be in a window seat on the left side of the plane, as Randy Waterhouse is, the view during the final approach looks like a propaganda flyby.
Kinakuta's matted green slopes surge out of a mostly calm blue sea, and eventually soar high enough to be dusted with snow at the summits, even though the island is only seven degrees north of the equator. Randy sees right away what Avi meant when he said that the place was Muslim around the edges and animist in the middle. The only places you could hope to build anything like a modern city are along the coast, where there's an intermittent fringe of nearly flat land-a beige rind clinging to a giant emerald. The biggest and best flat place is on the northeastern corner of the island, where the main river, several miles inland, bottoms out into a flood plain that broadens to an alluvial delta that reaches out into the Sulu Sea for a mile or two.
Randy gives up counting the oil rigs ten minutes before Kinakuta City even comes into sight. From high above they look like flaming tank traps scattered in the surf to deter incoming Marines. As the plane sheds altitude they begin to look more like factories on stilts, topped with high stacks where troublesome natural gas is flamed off. This gets more alarming as the plane gets closer to the water, and it begins to seem as if the pilot is threading his way between pillars of fire that would roast the 777 like a pigeon on the wing.
Kinakuta City looks more modern than anything in the States. He has been trying to read about the place but has found precious little: a couple of encyclopedia entries, a few fleeting mentions in World War II histories, some puckish but basically glowing articles in the Economist.Putting his rusty interlibrary loan skills to work, he paid the Library of Congress to make him a photocopy of the one book he could find specifically about Kinakuta: one of about a million out-of-print World War II memoirs that must have been penned by G.I.s during the late forties and fifties. So far, he hasn't had time to read it, and so the two-inch stack of pages is just dead weight in his luggage.
In any case, none of the maps he has seen tallies with the reality of the modem Kinakuta City. Anything that was there during the war has been torn down and replaced with new. The river has been dredged into a new channel. An inconvenient mountain called Eliza Peak has been dynamited, and the rubble shoved into the ocean to make several new square miles of real estate, most of which has been gobbled by the new airport. The dynamitings were so loud that they prompted complaints from the governments of the Philippines and of Borneo, hundreds of miles away. They also brought down the wrath of Greenpeace, which was afraid that the sultan was scaring whales in the central Pacific. So Randy expects half of Kinakuta City to be a smoking crater, but of course it's not. The stump of Eliza Peak has been neatly paved over and used as the foundation of the sultan's new Technology City. All of the glass-walled skyscrapers there, and in the rest of the city, have pointy tops, recalling a traditional architecture that has long since been bulldozed and used to fill in the harbor. The only building Randy can see that looks to be more than ten years old is the sultan's palace, which is ancient. Surrounded by miles of blue glass skyscrapers, it's like a reddish-beige mote frozen in a tray of ice.
Once Randy fixes on that, everything snaps into its proper orientation. He bends forward, risks the censure of the cabin crew by pulling his bag out from under the seat ahead of him, and pulls out his photocopied G.I. memoir. One of its first pages is a map of Kinakuta City as it appeared in 1945, and dead center is the Sultan's Palace. Randy rotates it before his face in the way of a panicky driver with a steering wheel, and gets it to line up with his view. There's the river. There's Eliza Peak, where the Nipponese used to have a signals intelligence detachment and a radar station, all built with slave labor. There's the former site of the Japanese Naval Air Force field, which became the Kinakuta Airport until the new one was built. Now it is a flock of yellow cranes above a blue nebula of rebar, lit from within by a constellation of flickering white stars-arc-welders at work.
Next to it is something that doesn't belong: a patch of emerald green, maybe a couple of city blocks, surrounded by a stone wall. Inside, there's a placid pond toward one end-the 777 is now so low that Randy can count the lily pads-a tiny Shinto temple hewn from black stone, and a little bamboo teahouse. Randy presses his face to the window and keeps turning his head to follow it, until suddenly his view is blocked by a high-rise apartment building just off the wingtip. Through an open kitchen window, he gets a microsecond's glimpse of a slender lady swinging a hatchet towards a coconut.
That garden looked like it belonged a thousand miles farther north-in Nippon. When Randy finally realizes what it was, the hairs stand up on the back of his neck.
Randy got on this plane a couple of hours ago at Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Manila. The flight was delayed and so he had plenty of time to look at the other passengers: three Westerners including himself, a couple of dozen Malay types (either Kinakutan or Filipino), and everyone else Nipponese. Some of the latter looked like businessmen, traveling on their own or in twos and threes, but most belonged to some kind of an organized tour group that marched into the boarding lounge precisely forty-five minutes before scheduled takeoff, queued behind a young woman in a navy blue skirt suit holding up a neat little logo on a stick. Retirees.
Their destination is not the Technology City, or any of the peculiar pointy-topped skyscrapers in the financial district. They are all going to that walled Nipponese garden, which is built on top of a mass grave containing the bodies of three and a half thousand Nipponese soldiers, who all died on August 23, 1945.
Chapter 21 QWGHLM HOUSE
Waterhouse eddies up and down the quiet side street, squinting at brass plaques on sturdy white row houses:
SOCIETY FOR THE UNIFICATION OF HINDUISM AND ISLAM
ANGLO-LAPP SOLIDARITY SOCIETY
FULMINANTS ASSOCIATION
CHIANG TZSE MUTUAL BENEVOLENT SOCIETY
ROYAL COMMITTEE ON MITIGATION OF MARINE CRANKSHAFT WEAR
BOLGER DAMSELFLY PROPAGATION FOUNDATION
ANTI-WELCH LEAGUE
COMITY FOR [theta]E REFORMASHUN OF ENGLISH OR[theta]OGRAFY
SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF CRUELTY TO VERMIN
CHURCH OF VEDANTIC ETHICAL QUANTUM CONSCIOUSNESS
IMPERIAL MICA BOARD
At first he mistakes Qwghlm House for the world's tiniest and most poorly located department store. It has a bow window that looms over the sidewalk like the thrusting ram of a trireme, embarnacled with Victorian foofawfery, and housing a humble display: a headless mannequin dressed in something that appears to have been spun from steel wool (perhaps a tribute to wartime austerity?); a heap of sallow dirt with a shovel in it; and another mannequin (a recent addition shoehorned into one corner) dressed in a Royal Navy uniform and holding a wooden cutout of a rifle.
Waterhouse found a worm-eaten copy of the Encyclopedia Qwghlmianain a bookshop near the British Museum a week ago and has been carrying it around in his attache case since then, imbibing a page or two at a time, like doses of strong medicine. The overriding Themes of the Encyclopedia are three, and they dominate its every paragraph as totally as the Three Sgrhs dominate the landscape of Outer Qwghlm. Two of these themes are wool and guano, though the Qwghlmians have other names for them, in their ancient, sui generistongue. In fact, the same linguistic hyperspecialization occurs here that supposedly does with the Eskimos and snow or Arabs and sand, and the Encyclopedia Qwghlmiananever uses the English words "wool" and "guano" except to slander the inferior versions of these products that are exported by places like Scotland in a perfidious effort to confuse the naive buyers who apparently dominate the world's commodity markets. Waterhouse had to read the encyclopedia almost cover-to-cover and use all his cryptanalytic skills to figure out, by inference, what these products actually were.
Having learned so much about them, he is fascinated to find them proudly displayed in the heart of the cosmopolitan city: a mound of guano and a woman dressed in wool[9]. The woman's outfit is entirely grey, in keeping with Qwghlmian tradition, which scorns pigmentation as a loathsome and whorish innovation of the Scots. The top part of the ensemble is a sweater which appears, at a glance, to be made of felt. A closer look reveals that it is knit like any other sweater. Qwghlmian sheep are the evolutionary product of thousands of years' massive weather-related die-off. Their wool is famous for its density, its corkscrewlike fibers, and its immunity to all known chemical straightening processes. It creates a matted effect which the Encyclopediadescribes as being supremely desirable and for which there is an extensive descriptive vocabulary.
The third theme of the Encyclopedia Qwghlmianais hinted at by the mannequin with the gun.
Propped up against the stonework next to the building's entrance is a gaffer dressed in an antique variant of the Home Guard uniform, involving knickerbockers. His lower legs are encased in formidable socks made of one of the variants of Qwghlmian wool, and lashed in place, just below the knee, with tourniquets fashioned from thick cords woven together in a vaguely Celtic interlace pattern (on almost every page, the Encyclopediarestates that the Qwghlmians are not Celts, but that they did invent the best features of Celtic culture). These garters are the traditional ornament of true Qwghlmians; gentlemen wear them hidden underneath the trousers of their suits. They were traditionally made from the long, slender tails of the Skrrgh, which is the predominant mammal native to the islands, and which the Encyclopediadefines as "a small mammal of the order Rodentia and the order Muridae, common in the islands, subsisting primarily on the eggs of sea birds, capable of multiplying with great rapidity when that or any other food is made available to it, admired and even emulated by Qwghlmians for its hardiness and adaptability."
After Waterhouse has been standing there for a few moments, enjoying a cigarette and examining those garters, this mannequin moves slightly. Waterhouse thinks that it is falling over in a gust of wind, but then he realizes that it is alive, and not exactly falling over, but just shifting its weight from foot to foot.
The gaffer takes note of him, smiles blackly, and utters some word of greeting in his language, which, as has already become plain, is even less suited than English to transcription into the Roman alphabet.
"Howdy," Waterhouse says.
The gaffer says something longer and more complicated. After a while, Waterhouse (now wearing his cryptanalyst hat, searching for meaning midst apparent randomness, his neural circuits exploiting the redundancies in the signal) realizes that the man is speaking heavily accented English. He concludes that his interlocutor was saying, "What part of the States are you from, then?"
"My family's done a lot of traveling around," Waterhouse says. "Let's say South Dakota."
"Ahh," the gaffer says ambiguously whilst flinging himself against the slab of door. After a while it begins to move inwards, hand-hammered iron hinges grinding ominously as they pivot round inch-thick tholes. Finally the door collides with some kind of formidable Stop. The gaffer remains leaning against it, his entire body at a forty-five degree angle to prevent its swinging back and crushing Waterhouse, who scurries past. Inside, a tiny anteroom is dominated by a sculpture: two nymphets in diaphanous veils kicking the crap out of a scurrying hag, entitled Fortitude and Adaptability Driving Out Adversity.
This operation is repeated a few times with doors that are successively lighter but more richly decorated. The first room, it becomes clear, was actually a pre
On the walls, diverse oil paintings. At a first glance Waterhouse sorts them into ones that are higher than they are wide, and others. The former category is portraits of gentlemen, all of whom seem to share a grievous genetic flaw that informs the geometry of the skull. The latter category is landscapes or, just as often, seascapes, all in the bleak and rugged category. These Qwghlmian painters are so fond of the locally produced blue-green-grey paint[10] that they apply it as if with the back of a shovel.
Waterhouse fights through the miring shag of the Carpet until he nears the Desk, where he is greeted by the Lady, who shakes his hand and pinches her face together in a sort of allusion to a smile. There is a long exchange of polite, perfunctory speech of which all Waterhouse remembers is: "Lord Woadmire will see you shortly," and: "Tea?"
Waterhouse says yes to the tea because he suspects that this lady (he has forgotten her name) is not really earning her keep. Clearly disgruntled, she ejects herself from her chair and loses herself in deeper and narrower parts of the building. The gaffer has already gone back to his post out front.
A photograph of the king hangs on the wall behind the desk. Waterhouse hadn't known, until Colonel Chattan discreetly reminded him, that His Majesty's full title was not simply By the Grace Of God of England King, but B.T.G.O.G. of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man, Guernsey, Jersey, Outer Qwghlm, and Inner Qwghlm King.
Next to it is a smaller photograph of the man he is about to meet. This fellow and his family are covered rather sketchily by the Encyclopedia, which is decades old, and so Waterhouse has had to do some additional background research. The man is related to the Windsors in a way so convoluted that it can only be expressed using advanced genealogical vocabulary.
He was born Graf Heinrich Karl Wilhelm Otto Friedrich von
The tea takes some time in coming and Lord Woadmire does not seem to be in any particular hurry to win the war either, so Waterhouse makes a circuit of the room, pretending to care about the paintings. The biggest one depicts a number of bruised and lacerated Romans dragging their sorry asses up onto a rocky and unwelcoming shore as splinters of their invasion fleet wash up around them. Front and center is a particular Roman who looks no less noble for wear and tear. He is seated wearily on a high rock, a broken sword dangling from one enervated hand, gazing longingly across several miles of rough water towards a shining, paradisiacal island. This isle is richly endowed with tall trees and flowering meadows and green pastures, but even so it can be identified as Outer Qwghlin by the Three Sghrs towering above it. The isle is guarded by a forbidding castle or two; its pale, almost Caribbean beaches are lined with the colorful banners of a defending host which (one can only assume) has just given the Roman invaders a bit of rough handling which they will not soon forget. Waterhouse does not bother to bend down and squint at the plaque; he knows that the subject of the painting is Julius C
"Where Caesar failed, what hope has Hitler?"
Waterhouse turns towards the voice and discovers Nigel St. John Gloamthorpby a.k.a. Lord Woadmire, a.k.a. the Duke of Qwghlm. He is not a tall man. Waterhouse goose-steps through the carpet to shake his hand. Though Colonel Chattan briefed him on proper forms of address when meeting a duke, Waterhouse can no more remember this than he can diagram the duke's family tree, so he decides to structure all of his utterances so as to avoid referring to the duke by name or pronoun. This will be a fun game and make the time go faster.
"It is quite a painting," Waterhouse says, "a heck of a deal."
"You will find the islands themselves no less extraordinary, and for the same reasons," the duke says obliquely.
The next time Waterhouse is really aware of what's going on, he is sitting in the duke's office. He thinks that there has been some routine polite conversation along the way, but there is never any point in actually monitoring that kind of thing. Tea is offered to him, and is accepted, for the second or third time, but fails to materialize.
"Colonel Chattan is in the Mediterranean, and I have been sent in his place," Waterhouse explains, "not to waste time covering logistical details, but to convey our enormous gratitude for the most generous offer made in regards to the castle." There! No pronouns, no gaffe.
"Not at all!" The duke is taking the whole thing as an affront to his generosity. He speaks in the unhurried, dignified cadences of a man who is mentally thumbing through a German-English dictionary. "Even setting aside my own... patriotic obligations... cheerfully accepted, of course..., it has almost become almost... terribly fashionable to have a whole... crew... of... uniformed fellows and whatnot running around in one's... pantry.
"Many of the great houses of Britain are doing their bit for the War," Waterhouse agrees.
"Well... by all means, then... use it!" the duke says. "Don't be... reticent! Use it... thoroughly! Give it a good... working over! It has... survived... a thousand Qwghlm winters and it will... survive your worst."
"We hope to have a small detachment in place very soon," Waterhouse says agreeably.
"May I... know..., to satisfy my own... curiosity..., what sort of... ?" the duke says, and trails off.
Waterhouse is ready for this. He is so ready that he has to hold back for a moment and try to make a show of discretion. "Huffduff."
"Huffduff?"
"HFDF. High-Frequency Direction Finding. A technique for locating distant radio transmitters by triangulating from several points."
"I should have... thought you knew where all the... German... transmitters were."
"We do, except for the ones that move."
"Move!?" The duke furrows his brow tremendously, imagining a giant radio transmitter-building, tower and all-mounted on four parallel rail road tracks like Big Bertha, creeping across a steppe, drawn by harnessed Ukrainians.
"Think U-boats," Waterhouse says delicately.
"Ah!" the duke says explosively. "Ah!" He leans back in his creaky leather chair, examining a whole new picture with his mind's eye. "They... pop up, do they, and send out... wireless?"
"They do."
"And you... eavesdrop."
"If only we could!" Waterhouse says. "No, the Germans have used all of that world-famous mathematical brilliance of theirs to invent ciphers that are totally unbreakable. We don't have the first idea what they are saying. But, by using huffduff, we can figure out where they are saying it from,and route our convoys accordingly."
"Ah."
"So what we propose to do is mount big rotating antennas, or aerials as you call them here, on the castle, and staff the place with huffduff boffins."
The duke frowns. "There will be proper... safeguards for lightning?"
"Naturally."
"And you are aware that you may... anticipate... ice storms as late in the year as August?"
"The Royal Qwghlm Meteorological Station's reports, as a body of work, don't leave a heck of a lot to the imagination."
"Fine, then!" the duke blusters, warming to the concept. "Use the castle, then! And give them... give them hell!"
Chapter 22 ELECTRICAL TILL CORPORATION
As evidence of the allies' slowly developing plan to kill the Axis by smothering them under a mountain of manufactured goods, there's this one pier in Sydney Harbor that is piled high with wooden crates and steel barrels: stuff that has been disgorged from the holds of ships from America, Britain, India and just left to sit there because Australia doesn't know how to digest it yet. It is not the only pier in Sydney that is choked with stuff. But because this pier isn't good for much else, it is mounded higher and the stuff is older, rustier, more infested with rats, more rimed with salt, more thickly frosted and flagrantly streaked with gull shit.
A man is picking his way over the pile, trying not to get any more of that gull shit on his khakis. He is wearing the uniform of a major in the United States Army and is badly encumbered by a briefcase. His name is Comstock.
Inside the briefcase are various identity papers, credentials, and an impressive letter from the office of The General in Brisbane. Comstock has had occasion to show all of the above to the doddering and yet queerly formidable Australian guards who, with their doughboy helmets and rifles, infest the waterfront. These men do not speak any dialect of the English language that the major can recognize and vice versa, but they can all read what is on those papers.
The sun is going down and the rats are waking up. The major has been clambering over docks all day long. He has seen enough of war and the military to know that what he is looking for will be found on the last pier that he searches, which happens to be this one. If he begins searching that pier at the near end, what he is looking for will be at the far end, and vice versa. All the more reason to stay sharp as he works his way along. After casting an eye around to make sure there are no leaking stacks of drums of aviation fuel nearby, he lights up a cigarette. War is hell, but smoking cigarettes makes it all worthwhile.
Sydney Harbor is beautiful at sunset, but he's been looking at it all day and can't really see it anymore. For lack of anything better to do, he opens up his briefcase. There's a paperback novel in there, which he's already read. And there is a clipboard which contains, in yellowed, crackling, sedimentary layers, a fossil record that only an archaeologist could unravel. It is the story of how The General, just after he got out of Corregidor and reached Australia in April, sent out a request for some stuff. How that request got forwarded to America and bounced pinball-like through the cluttered infinitude of America's military and civilian bureaucracies; how the stuff in question was duly manufactured, procured, trucked hither and yon, and caused to be placed on a ship; and finally, some evidence to the effect that said ship was in Sydney Harbor several months ago. There's no evidence that this ship ever unloaded the stuff in question, but unloading stuff is what ships always do when they reach port and so Comstock is going with that assumption for a while.
After Major Comstock finishes his cigarette, he resumes his search. Some of the papers on his clipboard specify certain magic numbers that ought to be stenciled on the outside of the crates in question; at least, that's what he's been assuming since he started this search at daybreak, and if he's wrong, he'll have to go back and search every crate in Sydney Harbor again. Actually getting a look at each crates' numbers means squeezing his body through narrow channels between crate piles and rubbing away the grease and grime that obscures the crucial data. The major is now as filthy as any combat grunt.
When he gets close to the end of the pier, his eye picks out one cluster of crates that appear to be all of the same vintage insofar as their salt encrustations are of similar thickness. Down low where the rain pools, their rough-sawn wood has rotted. Up where it is roasted by the sun, it has warped and split. Somewhere these crates must have numbers stenciled onto them, but something else has caught his eye, something that stirs Comstock's heart, just as the sight of the Stars and Stripes fluttering in the morning sun might do for a beleaguered infantryman. Those crates are proudly marked with the initials of the company that Major Comstock (and most of his comrades-in-arms up in Brisbane) worked for, before they were shunted, en masse, into the Army's Signal Intelligence Service. The letters are faded and grimy, but he would recognize them anywhere in the world: they form the logo, the corporate identity, the masthead, of ETC-the Electrical Till Corporation.
Chapter 23 CRYPT
The terminal is supposed to echo the lines of a row of Malay longhouses jammed together side by side. A freshly painted jetway gropes out like a giant lamprey and slaps its neoprene lips onto the side of the plane. The elderly Nipponese tour group makes no effort to leave the plane, respectfully leaving the aisles clear for the businessmen: You go ahead, the people we're going to visit won't mind waiting.
On his march up the jetway, humidity and jet fuel condense onto Randy's skin in equal measure, and he begins to sweat. Then he's in the terminal, which notwithstanding the Malay longhouses allusion has been engineered specifically to look like any other brand-new airport terminal in the world. The air-conditioning hits like a spike through the head. He puts his bags down on the floor and stands there for a moment, collecting his wits beneath a Leroy Neiman painting the dimensions of a volleyball court, depicting the sultan in action on a polo pony. Trapped in a window seat during a short and choppy flight, he had never made it out to the lavatory, so he goes to one now and pees so hard that the urinal emits a sort of yodeling noise.
As he steps back, perfectly satisfied, he becomes conscious of a man backing away from an adjacent urinal-one of the Nipponese businessmen who just got off the plane. A couple of months ago, the presence of this man would have ruled out Randy's taking a leak at all. Today, he didn't even notice that the guy was there. As a longtime bashful kidney sufferer, Randy is delighted to have stumbled upon the magic remedy: not to convince yourself that you are a dominating Alpha Male, but rather to be too lost in your thoughts to notice other people around you. Bashful kidney is your body's way of telling you that you're thinking too hard, that you need to get off the campus and go get a fucking job.
"You were looking at the Ministry of Information site?" the businessman says. He is in a perfect charcoal-grey pinstripe suit, which he wears just as easily and comfortably as Randy does his souvenir t-shirt from the fifth Hackers Conference, surfer's jams, and Teva sandals.
"Oh!" Randy blurts, annoyed with himself. "I completely forgot to look for it." Both men laugh. The Nipponese man produces a business card with some deft sleight-of-hand. Randy has to rip open his nylon-and-velcro wallet and delve for his. They exchange cards in the traditional Asian two-handed style, which Avi has forced Randy to practice until he gets it nearly right. They bow at each other, triggering howls from the nearest couple of computerized self-flushing urinals. The bath room door swings open and an aged Nip wanders in, a precursor of the silver horde.
Nip is the word used by Sergeant Sean Daniel McGee, U.S. Army, Retired, to refer to Nipponese people in his war memoir about Kinakuta, a photocopy of which document Randy is carrying in his bag. It is a terrible racist slur. On the other hand, people call British people Brits, and Yankees Yanks, all the time. Calling a Nipponese person a Nip is just the same thing, isn't it? Or is it tantamount to calling a Chinese person a Chink? During the hundreds of hours of meetings, and megabytes of encrypted e-mail messages, that Randy, Avi, John Cantrell, Tom Howard, Eberhard F
This particular Nipponese individual is identified, on his card, as GOTO Furudenendu ("Ferdinand Goto"). Randy, who has spent a lot of time recently puzzling over organizational charts of certain important Nipponese corporations, knows already that he is a vice president for special projects (whatever that means) at Goto Engineering. He also knows that organizational charts of Nipponese companies are horseshit and that job titles mean absolutely nothing. That he has the same surname as the guy who founded the company is presumably worth taking note of.
Randy's card says that he is Randall L. WATERHOUSE ("Randy") and that he is vice president for network technology development at Epiphyte Corporation.
Goto and Waterhouse stroll out of the washroom and start to follow the baggage-claim icons that are strung across the terminal like bread-crumbs. "You have jet lag now?" Goto asks brightly-following (Randy assumes) a script from an English textbook. He's a handsome guy with a winning smile. He's probably in his forties, though Nipponese people seem to have a whole different aging algorithm so this might be way off.
"No," Randy answers. Being a nerd, he answers such questions badly, succinctly, and truthfully. He knows that Goto essentially does not care whether Randy has jet lag or not. He is vaguely conscious that Avi, if he were here, would use Goto's question as it was intended-as an opening for cheery social batter. Until he reached thirty, Randy felt bad about the fact that he was not socially deft. Now he doesn't give a damn. Pretty soon he'll probably start being proud of it. In the meantime, just for the sake of the common enterprise, he tries his best. "I've actually been in Manila for several days, so I've had plenty of time to adjust."
"Ah! Did your activities in Manila go well?" Goto fires back.
"Yes, very well, thank you," Randy lies, now that his social skills, such as they are, have had a moment to get unlimbered. "Did you come directly from Tokyo?"
Goto's smile freezes in place for a moment, and he hesitates before saying, "Yes.''
This is, at root, a patronizing reply. Goto Engineering is headquartered in Kobe and they would not fly out of the Tokyo airport. Goto said yes anyway, because, during that moment of hesitation, he realized that he was just dealing with a Yank, who, when he said "Tokyo," really meant "the Nipponese home islands" or "wherever the hell you come from."
"Excuse me," Randy says, "I meant to say Osaka."
Goto grins brilliantly and seems to execute a tiny suggestion of a bow. "Yes! I came from Osaka today."
Goto and Waterhouse drift apart from each other at the luggage claim, exchange grins as they breeze through immigration, and run into each other at the ground transportation section. Kinakutan men in brilliant white quasinaval uniforms with gold braid and white gloves are buttonholing passengers, proffering transportation to the local hotels.
"You are staying at the Foote Mansion also?" Goto says. That being theluxury hotel in Kinakuta. But he knows the answer already-tomorrow's meeting has been planned as exhaustively as a space shuttle launch.
Randy hesitates. The largest Mercedes-Benz he's ever seen has just pulled up to the curb, condensed moisture not merely fogging its windows but running down them in literal streamlines. A driver in Foote Mansion livery has erupted from it to divest Mr. Goto of his luggage, Randy knows that he need only make a subtle move toward that car and he will be whisked to a luxury hotel where he can take a shower, watch TV naked while drinking a hundred-dollar bottle of French wine, go swimming, get a massage.