s walking back towards the barn.
Chapter 25 THE CASTLE
Just as Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse detrains, some rakehell hits him
full in the face with a turn of brackish ice water. The barrage continues as
he walks a gauntlet of bucket slinging ne'er do wells. But then he realizes
no one's there. This is just an intrinsic quality of the local atmosphere,
like fog in London.
The staircase that leads over the tracks to Utter Maurby Terminal is
enclosed with roof and walls, forming a gigantic organ pipe that resonates
with an infrasonic throb as it is pummeled by wind and water. As he walks
into the lower end of the staircase, the storm is suddenly peeled away from
his face and he is able to stand there for a moment and give this phenom the
full appreciation it deserves.
Wind and water have been whipped into an essentially random froth by
the storm. A microphone held up in the air would register only white noise a
complete absence of information. But when that noise strikes the long tube
of the staircase, it drives a physical resonance that manifests itself in
Waterhouse's brain as a low hum. The physics of the tube extract a coherent
pattern from meaningless noise! If only Alan were here!
Waterhouse experiments by singing the harmonics of this low fundamental
tone: octave, fifth, fourth, major third, and so on. Each one resonates in
the staircase to a greater or lesser degree. It is the same series of notes
made by a brass instrument. By hopping from one note to another, Waterhouse
is able to play some passable bugle calls on the staircase. He does a pretty
decent reveille.
"How lovely!"
He spins around. A woman is standing behind him, lugging a portmanteau
the size of a hay bale. She is perhaps fifty years old, with the physique of
a stove, and she had a nice new big city permanent until a few seconds ago
when she stepped out of the train. Salt water is running down her face and
neck and disappearing beneath her sturdy frock of grey Qwghlm wool.
"Ma'am," Waterhouse says. Then he busies himself with hauling her
portmanteau up to the top of the stairs. This puts the two of them, and all
of their luggage, on a narrow covered bridge that leads across the tracks
and into the terminal building. The bridge has windows in it, and Waterhouse
suffers a nauseating attack of vertigo as he looks through them, and through
the half inch of rain and saltwater that is streaming down them at any given
moment, towards the North Atlantic Ocean. This major body of water is only a
stone's throw away and is trying vigorously to get much closer. This must be
an optical illusion, but the tops of the waves appear to be level with the
plane on which they're standing despite the fact that it's at least twenty
feet off the ground. Each one of those waves must weigh as much as all of
the freight trains in Great Britain combined, and they are rolling towards
them relentlessly, simply hammering the living daylights out of the rocks.
It all makes Waterhouse want to pitch a fit, fall down, and throw up. He
plugs his ears.
"Are you a bandsman, then, I take it?" the lady enquires.
Waterhouse turns to look at her. Her gaze is darting back and forth
around the front of his uniform, checking the insignia. Then she looks up
into his face and gives him a grandmotherly smile.
Waterhouse realizes, in that instant, that this woman is a German spy.
Holy cow!
"Only in peacetime, ma'am," he says. "The Navy has other uses, now, for
men with good ears."
"Oh!" she exclaims, "you listen to things, do you?"
Waterhouse smiles. "Ping! Ping!" he says, mimicking sonar.
"Ah!" she says. "I am Harriett Qrtt." She holds out her hand.
"Hugh Hughes," Waterhouse says, and shakes.
"Pleasure.
"All mine.
"You'll be needing a place to stay, I suppose." She blushes
ostentatiously. "Forgive me. I just assume you are bound for Outer." That's
Outer, as in Outer Qwghlm. Right now, they are on Inner Qwghlm.
"Quite right, actually," Waterhouse says.
Like every other place name in the British Isles, Inner and Outer
Qwghlm represent a gross misnomer with ancient and probably comical origins.
Inner Qwghlm is hardly even an island; it is joined to the main land by a
sandbar that used to come and go with the tides, but that has been beefed up
with a causeway that carries a road and the railway line. Outer Qwghlm is
twenty miles away.
"My husband and I operate a small bed and breakfast," Mrs. Qrtt says.
"We should be honored to have an Asdic man stay with us." Asdic is simply
the British acronym for what Yanks refer to as sonar, but every time the
word is mentioned in the presence of Alan, he gets a naughty look on his
face and goes on an unstoppable punning tear.
So he ends up at the Qrtt residence. Waterhouse and Mr. and Mrs. Qrtt
spend the evening huddled round the only source of heat: a coal burning
toaster that has been bricked into the socket of an old fireplace. Every so
often Mr. Qrtt opens the door and pelts the ashes with a mote of coal. Mrs.
Qrtt ferries out the chow and spies on Waterhouse. She notices his slightly
asymmetrical walk and manages to ferret out that he had a spot of polio at
one point. He plays the organ they have a pedal powered harmonium in the
parlor and she remarks on that.
***
Waterhouse first sees Outer Qwghlm through a scupper. He doesn't even
know what a scupper is, except a modality of vomiting. The ferry crew gave
him and the other half dozen passengers detailed vomiting instructions
before they fought past the Utter Maurby breakwater, the salient point being
that if you leaned over the rail, you would almost certainly be swept
overboard. Much better to get down on all fours and aim at a scupper. But
half the time when Waterhouse peers down one of these, he sees not water but
some distant point on the horizon, or seagulls chasing the ferry, or the
distinctive three pronged silhouette of Outer Qwghlm.
The prongs, called Sghrs, are basaltic columns. This being the middle
of the Second World War, and Outer Qwghlm being the part of the British
Isles closest to the action of the Battle of the Atlantic, they are now
flecked with little white radio shacks and hairy with antennas. There is a
fourth sghr, much lower than the others and easily mistaken for a mere
hillock, that rises above Outer Qwghlm's only harbor (and, indeed, only
settlement, not counting the naval base on the other side). On top of this
fourth sghr is the castle that is the nominal home of Nigel St. John
Gloamthorpby Woadmire and that is to be the new headquarters of Detachment
2702.
Five minutes' walk encompasses the whole town. A furious rooster chases
a feeble sheep down the main street. There is snow at the higher elevations,
but just grey slush down here, which is indistinguishable from the grey
cobblestones until you step on it and fall down on your ass. The
Encyclopedia Qwghlmiana had made much use of the definite article the Town,
the Castle, the Hotel, the Pub, the Pier. Waterhouse stops in at the
Shithouse to deal with some aftershocks of the sea voyage, and then walks up
the Street. The Automobile pulls up alongside and offers him a ride; it
turns out to be the Taxi, too. It takes him round the Park where he notices
the Statue (ancient Qwghlmians thrashing hapless Vikings); this gesture that
does not go unnoted by the Taxi Driver, who veers into the Park to give him
a better look.
The Statue is the sort that has a great deal to say and covers a
correspondingly large expanse of real estate. Its pedestal is a slab of
native basalt, covered on at least one side with what Waterhouse recognizes,
from the Encyclopedia, as Qwghlmian runes. To an ignorant philistine, these
might look like an endless, random series of sans serif Xs, Is, Vs, hyphens,
asterisks, and upside down Vs. But it is an enduring source of pride to
"We didn't care for those Romans and that Julius Caesar fellow,"
observes the taxi driver, "and we weren't too taken with their alphabet
either."
Indeed the Encyclopedia Qwghlmiana features a lengthy article about the
local system of runes. The author of this article has such a chip on his
shoulder that the thing is almost physically painful to read. The Qwghlmian
practice of eschewing the use of curves and loops, forming all glyphs out of
straight lines, far from being crude as some English scholars have asserted
gives the script a limpid austerity. It is an admirably functional style of
writing in a place where (after all the trees were cut down by the English)
most of the literate intellectual class suffered from chronic bilateral
frostbite.
Waterhouse has rolled down the window so that he can get a clearer
view; apparently someone has lost the Squeegee. The chill breeze washing
over his face finally begins to clear away his seasickness, to the point
where he begins to wonder how he should go about making contact with the
Whore.
Then he realizes, with some disappointment, that if the Whore has half
a brain in her head, she's across the island at the naval base.
"Who's the wretch?" Waterhouse asks. He points to a corner of the
statue, where a scrawny, downtrodden loser, with an iron collar welded
around his neck and a chain dangling from that, quivers and quails at the
carnage being meted out by the strapping Qwghlmian he men. Waterhouse
already knows the answer, but he can't resist asking.
"Hakh!" blurts the taxi driver, as if he is working up a loogie. "He is
from Inner Qwghlm, I can only suppose."
"Of course."
This exchange seems to have put the driver into a foul and vengeful
mood that can only be assuaged with some fast driving. There are a dozen or
more switchbacks in the road up to the Castle, each one glazed with black
ice and fraught with mortal danger. Waterhouse is glad he's not walking it,
but the switchbacks and the skating motion of the taxi revive his motion
sickness.
"Hakh!" the driver says, when they are about three quarters of the way
up, and nothing has been said for several minutes. "They practically laid
out the welcome mat for the Romans. They spread their legs for the Vikings.
There are probably Germans over there now!"
"Speaking of bile," Waterhouse says, "I need you to pull over. I'll
walk from here."
The driver is startled and miffed, but he relents when Waterhouse
explains that the alternative is a lengthy cleanup job. He even drives
Duffel up to the top of the sghr and drops it off.
Detachment 2702 arrives at the Castle some fifteen minutes later in the
person of Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse USN, who is serving as the advance
party. The walk gives him time to get his story straight, to get himself
into character. Chattan has warned him that there will be servants, and that
they will notice things, and that they will gossip. It would be much more
convenient if the servants could simply be packed off to the mainland for
the duration, but this would be a discourtesy to the duke. "You will,"
Chattan said, "have to work out a modus vivendi." Once Waterhouse had looked
this term up, he agreed heartily.
The castle is a mound of rubble about the size of the Pentagon. The lee
corner has been fitted out with a functional roof, electrical wiring, and a
few other frills such as doors and windows. In this area, which is all
Waterhouse gets to see for that first afternoon and evening, you can forget
you are on Outer Qwghlm and pretend that you are in some greener and balmier
place such as the Scottish Highlands.
The next morning, accompanied by the butler, Ghnxh, he strikes out into
other parts of the building and is delighted to find that you can't even
reach them without going outside; the internal connecting passages have been
mortared shut to stanch the seasonal migrations of skrrghs (pronounced
something like "skerries"), the frisky, bright eyed, long tailed mammals
that are the mascot of the islands. This compartmentalization, while
inconvenient, will be good for security.
Both Waterhouse and Ghnxh are encased in planklike wrappings of genuine
Qwghlm wool, and the latter carries the GALVANICK LUCIPHER. The Galvanick
Lucipher is of antique design. Ghnxh, who is about a hundred years old, can
only smile in condescension at Waterhouse's U.S. Navy flashlight. In the
sotto voce tones one might use to correct an enormous social gaffe, he
explains that the galvanick lucipher is of such a superior design as to make
any further reference to the Navy model a grating embarrassment for everyone
concerned. He leads Waterhouse back to a special room behind the room behind
the room behind the room behind the pantry, a room that exists solely for
maintenance of the galvanick lucipher and the storage of its parts and
supplies. The heart of the device is a hand blown spherical glass jar
comparable in volume to a gallon jug. Ghnxh, who suffers from a pretty
advanced case of either hypothermia or Parkinson's, maneuvers a glass funnel
into the neck of the jar. Then he wrestles a glass carboy from a shelf. The
carboy, labeled AQUA REGIA, is filled with a fulminant orange liquid. He
removes its glass stopper, hugs it, and heaves it over so that the orange
fluid begins to glug out into the funnel and thence into the jar. Where it
splashes out onto the tabletop, something very much like smoke curls up as
it eats holes just like the thousands of other holes already there. The
fumes get into Waterhouse's lungs; they are astoundingly corrosive. He
staggers out of the room for a while.
When he ventures back, he finds Ghnxh whittling an electrode from an
ingot of pure carbon. The jar of aqua regia has been capped off now, and a
variety of anodes, cathodes, and other working substances are suspended in
it, held in place by clamps of hammered gold. Thick wires, in insulating
sheathes of hand knit asbestos, twist out of the jar and into the business
end of the galvanick lucipher: a copper salad bowl whose mouth is closed off
by a Fresnel lens like the ones on a lighthouse. When Ghnxh gets his carbon
whittled to just the right size and shape, he fits it into a little hatch in
the side of this bowl, and casually throws a Frankensteinian blade switch. A
spark pops across the contacts like a firecracker.
For a moment, Waterhouse thinks that one wall of the building has
collapsed, exposing them to the direct light of the sun. But Ghnxh has
simply turned on the galvanick lucipher, which soon becomes about ten times
brighter, as Ghnxh adjusts a bronze thumbscrew. Crushed with shame,
Waterhouse puts his Navy flashlight back into its prissy little belt
holster, and precedes Ghnxh out of the room, the galvanick lucipher casting
palpable warmth on the back of his neck. "We've got about two hours before
she goes dead on us," Ghnxh says significantly.
They work out a modus vivendi, all right: Waterhouse kicks an old door
open and then Ghnxh strides into the room that is on the other side and
sweeps the beam of the lantern around as if it were a flame thrower, driving
back dozens or hundreds of squealing skerries. Waterhouse clambers
cautiously into the room, typically making his way over the collapsed
remnants of whatever roof or story used to be overhead. He gives the place a
quick inspection, trying to gauge how much effort would be required to make
it liveable for any more advanced organism.
Half of the castle has, at one point or another, been burned down by a
combination of Barbary corsairs, lightning bolts, Napoleon, and smoking in
bed. The Barbary corsairs did the best job of it (probably just trying to
stay warm), or maybe it's just that the elements have had longer to
decompose what little was left behind by the flames. In any case, in that
section of the castle, Waterhouse finds a place where there's not too much
rubble to shovel out, and where they can quickly enclose an adequate space
with a combination of tarps and planks. It is diametrically opposed to the
part of the castle that is still inhabited, which exposes it to winter
storms but protects it from the prying eyes of the staff. Waterhouse paces
off some rough measurements, then goes to his room, leaving Ghnxh to see to
the decommissioning of the galvanick lucipher.
Waterhouse sketches out some plans for the upcoming work, at long last
putting his hitherto misspent engineering skills to some use. He draws up a
bill of required materials, naturally involving a good many numbers:
100 8' 2 x 4s is a typical entry. He writes out the list a second time,
in words not numbers: ONE HUNDRED EIGHT FOOT TWO BY FOURS. This wording is
potentially confusing, so he changes it to TWO BY FOUR BOARDS ONE HUNDRED
COUNT LENGTH EIGHT FEET.
Next he pulls a sheet of what looks like ledger paper, divided
vertically into groups of five columns. Into these columns he transcribes
the message, ignoring spaces:
TWOBY FOURB OARDS ONEHU NDRED
COUNT LENGT HEIGH TFEET
and so on. Wherever he encounters a letter J he writes I in its stead,
so that JOIST comes out as IOIST. He only uses every third line of the page.
Ever since he left Bletchley Park, he has been carrying several sheets
of onionskin paper around in his breast pocket; when he sleeps, he puts them
under his pillow. Now he takes them out and selects one page, which has a
serial number typed across the top and is otherwise covered with neatly
typed letters like this:
ATHOP COGNQ DLTUI CAPRH MULEP
and so on, all the way down to the bottom of the page.
These sheets were typed up by a Mrs. Tenney, an aged vicar's wife who
works at Bletchley Park. Mrs. Tenney has a peculiar job which consists of
the following: she takes two sheets of onionskin paper and puts a sheet of
carbon paper between them and rolls them into a typewriter. She types a
serial number at the top. Then she turns the crank on a device used in bingo
parlors, consisting of a spherical cage containing twenty five wooden balls,
each with a letter printed on it (the letter J is not used). After spinning
the cage the exact number of times specified in the procedure manual, she
closes her eyes, reaches through a hatch in the cage, and removes a ball at
random. She reads the letter off the ball and types it, then replaces the
ball, closes the hatch, and repeats the process. From time to time, serious
looking men come into the room, exchange pleasantries with her, and take
away the sheets that she has produced. These sheets end up in the possession
of men like Waterhouse, and men in infinitely more desperate and dangerous
circumstances, all over the world. They are called one time pads.
He copies the letters from the one time pad into the empty lines
beneath his message:
TWOBY FOURB OARDS ONEHU NDRED ATHOP COGNQ DLTUI CAPRH MULEP
When he is finished, two out of every three lines are occupied.
Finally, he returns to the top of the page one last time and begins to
consider the letters two at a time. The first letter in the message is T.
The first letter from the one time pad, directly below it in the same
column, is A.
A is the first letter in the alphabet and so Waterhouse, who has been
doing this cipher stuff for much too long, thinks of it as being synonymous
with the number 1. In the same way, T is equivalent to 19 if you are working
in a J less alphabet. Add 1 to 19 and you get 20, which is the letter U. So,
in the first column beneath T and A, Waterhouse writes a U.
The next vertical pair is W and T, or 22 and 19, which in normal
arithmetic add up to 41, which has no letter equivalent; it's too large. But
it has been many years since Waterhouse did normal arithmetic. He has
retrained his mind to work in modular arithmetic specifically, modulo 25,
which means that you divide everything by 25 and consider only the
remainder. 41 divided by 25 is 1 with a remainder of 16. Throw away the 1
and the 16 translates into the letter Q, which is what Waterhouse writes in
the second column. In the third column, O and H give 14 + 8 = 22 which is W.
In the fourth, B and O give 2 + 14 = 16 which is Q. And in the fifth, Y and
P give 24 + 15 which is 39. 39 divided by 25 is 1 with a remainder of 14.
Or, as Waterhouse would phrase it, 39 modulo 25 equals 14. The letter for 14
is O. So the first code group looks like
T W O B Y
A T H O P
U Q W Q O
By adding the random sequence ATHOP onto the meaningful sequence TWOBY,
Waterhouse has produced undecipherable gibberish. When he has enciphered the
entire message in this way, he takes out a new page and copies out only the
ciphertext UQWQO and so on.
The duke has a cast iron telephone which he has put at Waterhouse's
disposal. Waterhouse heaves it out of its cradle, rings the operator, places
a call across the island to the naval station, and gets through to a radio
man. He reads the ciphertext message to him letter by letter. The radio man
copies it down and informs Waterhouse that it will be transmitted forthwith.
Very soon, Colonel Chattan, down in Bletchley Park, will receive a
message that begins with UQWQO and goes on in that vein. Chattan possesses
the other copy of Mrs. Tenney's one time pad. He will write out the
ciphertext first, using every third line. Beneath the ciphertext he will
copy in the text from the one time pad:
U Q W Q O
A T H O P
He will then perform a subtraction where Waterhouse performed an
addition. U minus A means 20 minus 1 which equals 19 which gives the letter
T. Q minus T means 16 minus 19 which equals 3, giving us 22 which is W. And
so on. Having deciphered the whole message, he'll get to work, and
eventually two by fours one hundred count will show up at the Pier.
Chapter 26 WHY
Epiphyte Corp.'s business plan is about an inch thick, neither fat nor
skinny as these things go. The interior pages are slickly and groovily
desktop published out of Avi's laptop. The covers are rugged hand laid paper
of rice chaff, bamboo tailings, free range hemp, and crystalline glacial
meltwater made by wizened artisans operating out of a mist shrouded temple
hewn from living volcanic rock on some island known only to aerobically
gifted, Spandex sheathed Left Coast travel bores. An impressionistic map of
the South China Sea has been dashed across these covers by molecularly
reconstructed Ming Dynasty calligraphers using brushes of combed unicorn
mane dipped into ink made of grinding down charcoal slabs fashioned by blind
stylite monks from hand charred fragments of the True Cross.
The actual content of the business plan hews to a logical structure
straight out of the Principia Mathematica. Lesser entrepreneurs purchase
business plan writing software: packages of boilerplate text and spread
sheets, craftily linked together so that you need only go through and fill
in a few blanks. Avi and Beryl have written enough business plans between
the two of them that they can smash them out from brute memory. Avi's
business plans tend to go something like this:
MISSION: At [name of company] it is our conviction that [to do the
stuff we want to do] and to increase shareholder value are not merely
complementary activities they are inextricably linked.
PURPOSE: To increase shareholder value by [doing stuff]
EXTREMELY SERIOUS WARNING (printed on a separate page, in red letters
on a yellow background): Unless you are as smart as Johann Karl Friedrich
Gauss, savvy as a half blind Calcutta bootblack, tough as General William
Tecumseh Sherman, rich as the Queen of England, emotionally resilient as a
Red Sox fan, and as generally able to take care of yourself as the average
nuclear missile submarine commander, you should never have been allowed near
this document. Please dispose of it as you would any piece of high level
radioactive waste and then arrange with a qualified surgeon to amputate your
arms at the elbows and gouge your eyes from their sockets. This warning is
necessary because once, a hundred years ago, a little old lady in Kentucky
put a hundred dollars into a dry goods company which went belly up and only
returned her ninety nine dollars. Ever since then the government has been on
our asses. If you ignore this warning, read on at your peril you are dead
certain to lose everything you've got and live out your final decades
beating back waves of termites in a Mississippi Delta leper colony.
Still reading? Great. Now that we've scared off the lightweights, let's
get down to business.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: We will raise [some money], then [do some stuff] and
increase shareholder value. Want details? Read on.
INTRODUCTION: [This trend], which everyone knows about, and [that
trend], which is so incredibly arcane that you probably didn't know about it
until just now, and [this other trend over here] which might seem, at first
blush, to be completely unrelated, when all taken together, lead us to the
(proprietary, secret, heavily patented, trademarked, and NDAed) insight that
we could increase shareholder value by [doing stuff]. We will need $ [a
large number] and after [not too long] we will be able to realize an
increase in value to $ [an even larger number], unless [hell freezes over in
midsummer].
DETAILS:
Phase 1: After taking vows of celibacy and abstinence and forgoing all
of our material possessions for homespun robes, we (viz, appended resumes)
will move into a modest complex of scavenged refrigerator boxes in the
central Gobi Desert, where real estate is so cheap that we are actually
being paid to occupy it, thereby enhancing shareholder value even before we
have actually done anything. On a daily ration consisting of a handful of
uncooked rice and a ladleful of water, we will [begin to do stuff].
Phase 2, 3, 4, . . . , n 1: We will [do more stuff, steadily enhancing
shareholder value in the process] unless [the earth is struck by an asteroid
a thousand miles in diameter, in which case certain assumptions will have to
be readjusted; refer to Spreadsheets 397 413].
Phase n: before the ink on our Nobel Prize certificates is dry, we will
confiscate the property of our competitors, including anyone foolish enough
to have invested in their pathetic companies. We will sell all of these
people into slavery. All proceeds will be redistributed among our
shareholders, who will hardly notice, since Spreadsheet 265 demonstrates
that, by this time, the company will be larger than the British Empire at
its zenith.
SPREADSHEETS: [Pages and pages of numbers in tiny print, conveniently
summarized by graphs that all seem to be exponential curves screaming
heavenward, albeit with enough pseudo random noise in them to lend
plausibility].
RESUMES: Just recall the opening reel of The Magnificent Seven and you
won't have to bother with this part; you should crawl to us on hands and
knees and beg us for the privilege of paying our salaries.
***
To Randy and the others, the business plan functions as Torah, master
calendar, motivational text, philosophical treatise. It is a dynamic, living
document. Its spreadsheets are palimpsests, linked to the company's bank
accounts and financial records so that they automatically adjust whenever
money flows in or out. Beryl handles that stuff. Avi handles the words the
underlying, abstract plan, and the concrete details, that inform those
spreadsheets interpreting the numbers. Avi's part of the plan mutates too,
from week to week, as he gets new input from articles in the Asian Wall
Street Journal, conversations with government officials in flyblown Shenzhen
karaoke bars, remote sensing data pouring in from satellites, and obscure
technical journals analyzing the latest advances in optical fiber
technology. Avi's brain also digests the ideas of Randy and the other
members of the group and incorporates them into the plan. Every quarter,
they take a snapshot of the business plan in its current state, trowel some
Maybelline onto it, and ship out new copies to investors.
Plan Number Five is about to be mailed simultaneous with the company's
first anniversary. An early draft had been sent to each of them a couple of
weeks ago in an encrypted e mail message, which Randy hadn't bothered to
read, assuming he knew its contents. But little cues that he's picked up in
the last few days tell him that he'd better find out what the damn thing
actually says.
He fires up his laptop, plugs it into a telephone jack, opens up his
communications software, and dials a number in California. This last turns
out to be easy, because this is a modern hotel and Kinakuta has a modern
phone system. If it hadn't been easy, it probably would have been
impossible.
In a small, stuffy, perpetually dark, hot plastic scented wiring
closet, in a cubicled office suite leased by Novus Ordo Seclorum Systems
Incorporated, sandwiched between an escrow company and a discount travel
agent in the most banal imaginable disco era office building in Los Altos,
California, a modem wakes up and spews noise down a wire. The noise
eventually travels under the Pacific as a pattern of scintillations in a
filament of glass so transparent that if the ocean itself were made out of
the same stuff, you'd be able to see Hawaii from California. Eventually the
information reaches Randy's computer, which spews noise back. The modem in
Los Altos is one of half a dozen that are all connected to the back of the
same computer, an entirely typical looking tower PC of a generic brand,
which has been running, night and day, for about eight months now. They
turned its monitor off about seven months ago because it was just wasting
electricity. Then John Cantrell (who is on the board of Novus Ordo Seclorum
Systems Inc., and made arrangements to put it in the company's closet)
borrowed the monitor because one of the coders who was working on the latest
upgrade of Ordo needed a second screen. Later, Randy disconnected the
keyboard and mouse because, without a monitor, only bad information could be
fed into the system. Now it is just a faintly hissing off white obelisk with
no human interface other than a cyclopean green LED staring out over a dark
landscape of empty pizza boxes.
But there is a thick coaxial cable connecting it to the Internet.
Randy's computer talks to it for a few moments, negotiating the terms of a
Point to Point Protocol, or PPP connection, and then Randy's little laptop
is part of the Internet, too; he can send data to Los Altos, and the lonely
computer there, which is named Tombstone, will route it in the general
direction of any of several tens of millions of other Internet machines.
Tombstone, or tombstone.epiphyte.com as it is known to the Internet,
has an inglorious existence as a mail drop and a cache for files. It does
nothing that a thousand online services couldn't do for them more easily and
cheaply. But Avi, with his genius for imagining the most horrific
conceivable worst case scenarios, demanded that they have their own machine,
and that Randy and the others go through its kernel code one line at a time
to verify that there were no security holes. In every book store window in
the Bay Area, piled in heaps, were thousands of copies of three different
books about how a famous cracker had established total control over a couple
of well known online services. Consequently, Epiphyte Corp. could not
possibly use such an online service for its secret files while with a
straight face saying that it was exerting due diligence on its shareholders'
behalf. Thus tombstone.epiphyte.com.
Randy logs on and checks his mail: forty seven messages, including one
that came two days ago from Avi (avi@epiphyte.com) that is labeled:
epiphyteBizPlan.5.4.ordo. Epiphyte Business Plan, 5th edition, 4th
draft, in a file format that can only be read by [Novus] Ordo [Seclorum],
which is wholly owned by the company of the same name, but whose hard parts
were written, as it happens, by John Cantrell.
He tells the computer to begin downloading that file it's going to take
a while. In the meantime, he scrolls through the list of other messages,
checking the names of their senders, subject headings, and sizes, trying to
figure out, first of all, how many of these can simply be thrown away
unread.
Two messages jump out because they are from an address that ends with
aol.com, the cyberspace neighborhood of parents and children but never of
students, hackers, or people who actually work in high tech. Both of these
are from Randy's lawyer, who is trying to get Randy's financial affairs
disentangled from Charlene's with as little rancor as possible. Randy feels
his blood pressure spiking, millions of capillaries in the brain bulging
ominously. But they are very short files, and the subject headings seem
innocuous, so he calms down and decides not to worry about them now.
Five messages originate from computers with extremely familiar names
systems that are part of the campus computer network he used to run. The
messages come from system administrators who took over the reins when Randy
left, guys who long ago asked him all the easy questions, such as What's the
best place to order pizza? and Where did you hide the staples? and have now
gotten to the point of e mailing him chunks of arcane code that he wrote
years ago with questions like, Was this an error, or something incredibly
clever I haven't figured out yet? Randy declines to answer those messages
just now.
There are about a dozen messages from friends, some of them just
passing along Net humor that he's already seen a hundred times. Another
dozen from other members of Epiphyte Corp., mostly concerning the details of
their itineraries as they all converge on Kinakuta for tomorrow's meeting.
That leaves a dozen or so other messages which belong in a special
category that did not exist until a week ago, when a new issue of TURING
Magazine came out, containing an article about the Kinakuta data haven
project, and a cover photo of Randy on a boat in the Philippines. Avi had
gone to some lengths to plant this article so that he would have something
to wave in the faces of the other participants in tomorrow's meeting. TURING
is such a visual magazine that it cannot be viewed without the protection of
welding goggles, and so they insisted on a picture. A photographer was
dispatched to the Crypt, which was found visually wanting. A tizzy ensued.
The photographer was diverted to Manila Bay where he captured Randy standing
on a boat deck next to a big reel of orange cable, a volcano rising from the
smog in the back ground. The magazine won't even be on newsstands for
another month, but the article is on the Web as of a week ago, where it
instantly became a subject of discussion on the Secret Admirers mailing
list, which is where all of the cool guys like John Cantrell hang out to
discuss the very latest hashing algorithms and pseudo random number
generators. Because Randy happened to be in the picture, they have
mistakenly fastened upon him as being more of a prime mover than he really
is. This has spawned a new category of messages in Randy's mailbox:
unsolicited advice and criticism from crypto freaks worldwide. At the moment
there are fourteen such messages in his in box, eight of them from a person,
or persons, identifying himself, or themselves, as Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.
It would be tempting to ignore these, but the problem is that a solid
majority of people on the Secret Admirers mailing list are about ten times
as smart as Randy. You can check the list anytime you want and find a
mathematics professor in Russia slugging it out with another mathematics
professor in India, kilobyte for kilobyte, over some stupefyingly arcane
detail in prime number theory, while an eighteen year old, tube fed math
prodigy in Cambridge jumps in every few days with an even more stupefying
explanation of why they are both wrong.
So when people like this send him mail, Randy tries to at least skim
it. He is a little leery of the ones who identify themselves as Admiral
Isoroku Yamamoto, or with the number 56 (which is a code meaning Yamamoto).
But just because they are political verging on flaky doesn't mean they don't
know their math.
To: randy@tombstone.epiphyte.com
From: 56@laundry.org
Subject: data haven
Do you have public key somewhere posted? I would like to exchange mail
with you but I don't want Paul Comstock to read it:) My public key if you
care to respond is
– BEGIN ORDO PUBLIC KEY BLOCK – (lines and lines of
gibberish)
– END ORDO PUBLIC KEY BLOCK
Your concept of data haven is good but has important limits. What if
Philippine government shuts down your cable? Or if the good Sultan changes
his mind, decides to nationalize your computers, read all the disks? What is
needed is not ONE data haven but a NETWORK of data havens more robust, just
like Internet is more robust than single machine.
Signed,
The Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto who signs his messages thus:
– BEGIN ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK – (lines and lines of
gibberish)
– END ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK
Randy closes that one without responding. Avi doesn't want them talking
to Secret Admirers for fear that they will later be accused of stealing
someone's ideas, so the reply to all of these e mails is a form letter that
Avi paid some intellectual property lawyer about ten thousand dollars to
draft.
He reads another message simply because of the return address:
From: root@pallas.eruditorum.org
On a UNIX machine, "root" is the name of the most godlike of all users,
the one who can read, erase, or edit any file, who can run any program, who
can sign up new users and terminate existing ones. So receiving a message
from someone who has the account name "root" is like getting a letter from
someone who has the title "President" or "General" on his letterhead.
Randy's been root on a few different systems, some of which were worth tens
of millions of dollars, and professional courtesy demands he at least read
this message.
I read about your project.
Why are you doing it?
followed by an Ordo signature block.
One has to assume this is an attempt to launch some sort of
philosophical debate. Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a
sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be or to be
indistinguishable from self righteous sixteen year olds possessing infinite
amounts of free time. And yet the "root" address either means that this
person is in charge of a large computer installation, or (much more likely)
has a Finux box on his desk at home. Even a home Finux user has got to be
several cuts above your average Internet surfing dilettante. Randy opens up
a terminal window and types
whois eruditorum.org
and a second later gets back a block of text from the InterNIC:
eruditorum.org (Societas Eruditorum)
followed by a mailing address: a P.O. Box in Leipzig, Germany.
After that a few contact numbers are listed. All of them have the
Seattle area code. But the three digit exchanges, after the area code, look
familiar to Randy, and he recognizes them as gateways into a forwarding
service, popular among the highly mobile, that will bounce your voice mail,
fa