. Then he
spends the afternoon digging grubs out of rotten logs with a bayonet. The
sun goes down and he stands in a foxhole full of sewage until it comes up
again. When bombs go off nearby, the concussion puts him into a state of
shock so profound as to separate mind from body entirely; for several hours
afterwards, his body goes around doing things without his telling it to.
Stripped of its connections to the physical world, his mind runs in circles
like an engine that has sheared its driveshaft and is screaming along at
full throttle, doing no useful work while burning itself up. He usually does
not emerge from this state until someone speaks to him. Then more bombs
fall.
***
One night he notices that there is sand beneath his feet. Strange.
The air smells clean and fresh. Unheard of.
Others are walking on the sand with him.
They are being escorted by a couple of shambling privates, and a
corporal bent under the weight of a Nambu. The corporal is peering into Goto
Dengo's face strangely. "Hiroshima," he says.
"Did you say something to me?"
"Hiroshima."
"But what did you say before you said 'Hiroshima'?"
"In?"
"In Hiroshima."
"What did you say before you said 'in Hiroshima'?"
"Aunt."
"You were talking to me about your aunt in Hiroshima?"
"Yes. Her too."
"What do you mean, her too?"
"The same message."
"What message?"
"The message that you memorized for me. Give her the same message."
"Oh," Goto Dengo says.
"You remember the whole list?"
"The list of people I'm supposed to give the message to?"
"Yes. Recite the list again."
The corporal has an accent from Yamaguchi, which is where most of the
soldiers posted here came from. He seems more rural than urban. "Uh, your
mother and father back on the farm in Yamaguchi."
"Yes!"
"And your brother, who is in the Navy?"
"Yes!"
"And your sister, who is "
"A schoolteacher in Hiroshima, very good!"
"As well as your aunt who is also in Hiroshima."
"And don't forget my uncle in Kure."
"Oh, yeah. Sorry."
"That's okay! Now tell me the message again, just to make sure you
won't forget it."
"Okay," says Goto Dengo, and draws a deep breath. He is really starting
to come around now. They are trudging down to the sea: he and half a dozen
others, all unarmed and carrying small bundles, accompanied by the corporal
and privates. Below, in the gentle surf, a rubber boat awaits them.
"We're almost there! Tell me the message! Tell it back to me!"
"My beloved family," Goto Dengo begins.
"Very good perfect so far!" says the corporal.
"My thoughts are with you as always," Goto Dengo guesses.
The corporal looks a bit crestfallen. "Close enough keep going."
They have reached the boat. The crew shoves it out into the surf a few
paces. Goto Dengo stops talking for a few moments as he watches the others
wade out to it and climb in. Then the corporal prods him in the back. Goto
Dengo staggers out into the ocean. No one has started yelling at him yet in
fact they reach for him, pulling him in. He tumbles into the bottom of the
boat and clambers up to a kneeling position as the crew begin to row it out
into the surf. He locks eyes with the corporal, back on the beach.
"This is the last message you will receive from me, for by now I have
long since gone to my rest on the sacred soil of the Yasukuni Shrine."
"No! No! That's totally wrong!" hollers the corporal.
"I know that you will visit me there and remember me fondly, as I
remember you."
The corporal splashes into the surf, trying to chase the boat, and the
privates plunge in after him and grab him by the arms. The corporal shouts,
"Soon we will deal the Americans a smashing defeat and then I will march
home through the streets of Hiroshima in triumph along with my comrades!" He
recites it like a schoolboy doing his lessons.
"Know that I died bravely, in a magnificent battle, and never for one
moment shirked my duty!" Goto Dengo shouts back.
"Please send me some strong thread so that I can mend my boots!" the
corporal cries.
"The Army has looked after us well, and we have lived the last months
of our lives in such comfort and cleanliness that you would hardly guess we
had ever left the Home Islands!" Goto Dengo shouts, knowing that he must be
difficult to hear now above the surf. "When the final battle came, it came
quickly, and we went to our deaths in the full flower of our youth, like the
cherry blossoms spoken of in the emperor's rescript, which we all carry
against our breasts! Our departure from this world is a small price to pay
for the peace and prosperity that we have brought to the people of New
Guinea!"
"No, that's totally wrong!" wails the corporal. But his comrades are
dragging him up the beach now, back towards the jungle, where his voice is
lost in an eternal cacophony of hoots, screeches, twitters and eerie cries.
Goto Dengo smells diesel and stale sewage. He turns around. The stars
behind them are blocked out by something long and black and shaped kind of
like a submarine.
"Your message is much better," someone mumbles. It is a young fellow
carrying a toolbox: an airplane mechanic who has not seen a Nipponese
airplane in half a year.
"Yes," says another man also a mechanic, apparently. "His family will
find your message much more comforting."
"Thank you," Goto Dengo says. "Unfortunately I have no idea what the
kid's name is."
"Then go to Yamaguchi," says the first mechanic, "and pick some old
couple at random."
Chapter 52 METEOR
"You sure don't fuck like a smart girl," says Bobby Shaftoe, his voice
suffused with awe.
The wood stove glows in the corner, even though it's only September for
crissakes, in Sweden, where Shaftoe has spent the last six months.
Julieta is dark and lanky. She reaches one long arm far across the bed,
gropes on the nightstand for a cigarette.
"Could you reach that jiz rag?" Shaftoe says, eyeing a neatly folded
United States Marine Corps handkerchief next to the cigarettes. His arm is
too short.
"Why?" Julieta speaks great English like all the other Finns. Shaftoe
sighs in exasperation and buries his face in her black hair. The Gulf of
Bothnia whooshes and foams down below them, like a badly tuned radio pulling
in strange information.
Julieta is given to asking big questions.
"I just don't want there to be a big mess when I execute my withdrawal,
ma'am," he says.
He hears the flint of Julieta's lighter itching once, twice, thrice
behind his ear. Then her chest pushes him up as her lungs fill with smoke.
"Take your time," she purrs, her vocal cords syrupy with condensed tar.
"What are you going to do, go for a swim? Invade Russia?"
Somewhere out there, across the Gulf, is Finland. There are Russians
there, and Germans.
"See, even when you mention going for a swim, my dick gets smaller,"
Shaftoe says. "So it's going to come out. Inevitably." He thinks he
pronounces this last word correctly.
"Then what will happen?" Julieta says.
"We'll get a wet spot."
"So? It's natural. People have been sleeping on wet spots as long as
beds have existed."
"God damn it," Shaftoe says, and lunges heroically for the Semper Fi
handkerchief Julieta digs her fingernails into one of the sensitive spots
that she has located during her exhaustive cartographic survey of his body.
He squirms to no avail; all the Finns are great athletes. He pops out. Too
late! He knocks his wallet onto the floor while grabbing the hanky, then
rolls off Julieta and wraps it around himself, a flag on a broken pole, the
only flag of surrender Bobby Shaftoe will ever wave.
Then he just lies there for a while, listening to the surf, and the
popping of the wood in the stove. Julieta rolls away from him and lies
curled up on her side, avoiding the wet spot, even though it is natural, and
enjoying her cigarette, even though it isn't.
Julieta smells like coffee. Shaftoe likes to nuzzle and smell her
coffee scented flesh.
"The weather is not too bad. Uncle Otto should be back before night,"
she says. She is lazily regarding a map of Scandinavia. Sweden dangles like
a flaccid, circumcised phallus. Finland bulges scrotally underneath. Its
eastern border, with Russia, no longer bears any resemblance to reality.
This illusive frontier is furiously crosshatched with pencil marks, the axes
of Stalin's repeated efforts to castrate Scandinavia, obsessively recorded
and annotated by Julieta's uncle, who like all Finns is an expert skier,
crack shot, and indomitable warrior.
Still they despise themselves. Shaftoe thinks it's because they
eventually farmed out the defense of their country to the Germans. Finns
excelled at an old fashioned, personalized, retail style of Russian killing,
but when they started to run low on Finns, they had to call in the Germans,
who are more numerous and who have perfected a wholesale Russian
slaughtering operation.
Julieta scoffs at this simple minded theory: the Finns are a million
times more complex than Bobby Shaftoe can ever understand. Even if the war
had never happened, there would be an infinity of reasons for them to be
depressed all the time. There is no point even in trying to explain it all.
She can only provide him with the haziest glimpses into Finnish psychology
by fucking his brains out once every couple of weeks.
He has been lying there for too long. Soon the left over jism in his
tract will harden like epoxy. This peril spurs him to action. He slides out
of bed, cringes from the chill, hops across cold planks to the rug, scurries
instinctively toward the warmth of the stove.
Julieta rolls over onto her back to watch this. She looks at him
appraisingly. "Be a man," she says. "Make me some coffee."
Shaftoe snatches the cabin's cast iron kettle, which could double as a
ship anchor if need arose. He throws a blanket over his shoulders and runs
outside. He stops at the brink of the seawall, knowing that the splintery
pier will not be kind to his bare feet, and pisses down onto the beach. The
yellow arc is veiled in steam, redolent of coffee. He squints across the
gulf and sees a tug pulling a boom of logs down the coast, and a couple of
sails, but not Uncle Otto's.
Behind the cabin is a standpipe that is fed from a spring in the hills.
Shaftoe fills the kettle, snatches a couple of hunks of firewood and
scampers back inside, maneuvering between stacked bricks of foil packed java
and crates of Suomi machine pistol ammunition. He sets the kettle on the
iron stove and then stokes it up with the wood.
"You use too much wood," Julieta says, "Uncle Otto will be noticing."
"I'll chop more," Shaftoe says. "This whole fucking country is full of
nothing but wood."
"You'll be chopping wood all day if Uncle Otto gets angry at you."
"So it's okay for me to sleep with Otto's niece, but burning a couple
of sticks of wood to make her coffee is grounds for dismissal?"
"Grounds," Julieta says. "Coffee grounds."
The entire country of Finland (to hear Otto tell it) has been plunged
into an endless night of existential despair and suicidal depression. The
usual antidotes have been exhausted: self flagellation with steeped birch
twigs, mordant humor, week long drinking bouts. The only thing to save
Finland now is coffee. Unfortunately the government of that country has been
short sighted enough to raise taxes and customs duties through the roof.
Supposedly it is to pay for killing Russians, and for resettling the
hundreds of thousands of Finns who have to pull up stakes and move whenever
Stalin, in a drunken lunge, or Hitler, in a psychotic fit, attacks a map
with a red Crayola. It just has the effect of making coffee harder to
obtain. According to Otto, Finland is a nation of unproductive zombies,
except in areas that have been penetrated by the distribution networks of
coffee smugglers. Finns are generally strangers to the entire concept of
good fortune, however they are lucky enough to live right across the Gulf of
Bothnia from a neutral, reasonably prosperous country famous for its coffee.
With this background, the existence of a small Finnish colony in
Norrsbruck becomes pretty much self explanatory. The only thing that is
missing is muscle to load the coffee onto the boat, and to unload whatever
swag Otto brings back. Needed: one muscular lunkhead willing to be paid off
the record in whatever specie Otto comes up with.
Sergeant Bobby Shaftoe, USMC, pours some beans into the grinder and
starts to belabor the crank. A black flurry begins to accumulate in the
coffeepot below. He has learned to make this stuff the Swedish way, using an
egg to settle the grounds.
Chopping wood, fucking Julieta, grinding coffee, fucking Julieta,
pissing on the beach, fucking Julieta, loading and unloading Otto's ketch.
This has been pretty much it for Bobby Shaftoe during the last half year. In
Sweden he has found the calm, grey green eye of the blood hurricane that is
the world.
Julieta Kivistik is the central mystery. They do not have a love
affair; they have a series of love affairs. At the beginning of each affair,
they are not even speaking to each other, they do not even know each other,
Shaftoe is just a drifter who loads for her uncle. At the end of each affair
they are in bed fucking. In between, there is anywhere from one to three
weeks of tactical maneuver, false starts, and arduous cut and thrust
flirtation.
Other than that, each affair is completely different, like a whole new
relationship between two entirely different people. It is crazy. Probably
because Julieta is crazy much crazier than Bobby Shaftoe. But there's no
reason for Shaftoe not to be crazy, here and now.
He boils the coffee, does the trick with the egg, pours her a mug. This
is nothing more than a courtesy: their affair just ended and the new one
hasn't started yet.
When he brings her the mug, she is sitting up in bed, smoking another
cigarette, and (just like a woman) cleaning out his wallet, which is
something that he has not done since well, since he first made it, ten years
ago, in Oconomowoc, in fulfillment of the requirements for the
Leatherworking merit badge. Julieta has pulled the stuffing out of the thing
and is going through it as if it were a paperback book. Much of the stuff in
there has been ruined by seawater. But she is looking, analytically, at a
snapshot of Glory.
"Gimme that!" he says, and snatches it from her.
If she were his lover, she would try to play keep away with him, there
would be silliness and, perhaps, more sex at the end of it. But she is a
stranger now and she lets him have the wallet.
She watches him set down the coffee, as if he's a waiter in a cafe.
"You have a girlfriend where? In Mexico?"
"Manila," Bobby Shaftoe says, "if she's even still alive."
Julieta nods, completely impassive. She is neither jealous of Glory,
nor worried about Glory's fate at the hands of the Nips. What's happening in
the Philippines can't be any worse than what she's seen in Finland. And why
should she care, anyway, about the past romantic entanglements of her
uncle's stevedore, young what's his name?
Shaftoe pulls on boxers, wool pants, a shirt and a sweater. "I'm going
into town," he says. "Tell Otto I'll be back to unload the boat."
Julieta says nothing.
As a last, polite gesture, Shaftoe stops at the door, reaches behind a
stack of crates, hauls out the Suomi machine pistol (1) and
checks it: clean, loaded, ready for action, just like it was about an hour
ago, the last time he checked it. He puts it back in its place, turns
around, locks eyes with Julieta for a moment. Then he goes out and pulls the
door shut. Behind him, he can hear her naked feet on the cold floor, and the
satisfying sound of the door's bolts being rammed home.
He steps into a pair of tall rubber boots and then begins to trudge
south along the beach. The boots are Otto's and are a couple of sizes too
big for his feet. They make him feel like a little boy, splashing through
puddles in Wisconsin. This is what a boy of his age ought to be doing:
working, hard and honest, at a simple job. Kissing girls. Walking into town
to buy some smokes and maybe have a beer. The idea of flying around on
heavily armed warplanes and using modern weapons systems to kill hundreds of
foreign homicidal maniacs now strikes him as dated and inappropriate.
He slows down every few hundred yards to look at a steel drum, or other
war debris, cast up by the waves, half buried in sand, stenciled cryptically
in Cyrillic or Finnish or German. They remind him of the Nipponese drums on
that Guadalcanal beach.
Moon lifts sea, but not the ones who sleep on the beach Each wave a
shovel
A lot of stuff gets wasted in a war not just stuff that comes in crates
and drums. It frequently happens, for example, that men are called upon to
die willingly that others may live. Shaftoe learned on Guadalcanal that you
can never tell when circumstances will make you into that guy. You can go
into battle with the clearest, simplest, smartest plan ever devised, worked
out by Annapolis trained, battle hardened Marine officers, and based upon
tons of intelligence. But ten seconds after the first trigger has been
pulled, shit is happening all over the place, people are running around like
maniacs. The battle plan that was genius a minute ago suddenly looks as
sweetly naive as the inscriptions in your high school year book. Guys are
dying. Some of them are dying because a shell happens to fall on them, but
surprisingly often, they are dying because they are ordered to.
It was like that with U 691. That whole thing with the Trinidadian
steamer was probably a brilliant plan (Waterhouse's, he suspects) at some
point. But then it all went wrong, and some Allied commander gave the order
that Shaftoe and Root, along with the crew of U 691, were to die.
He should have died on the beach on Guadalcanal, along with his
buddies, and he didn't. Everything between then and U 691 was just sort of
an extra bonus life. He got a chance to go home and see his family, sort of
like Jesus after the Resurrection.
Now Bobby Shaftoe is dead for sure. This is why he walks so slowly down
the beach, and takes such a brotherly interest in these items, because Bobby
Shaftoe is, too, a corpse washed up on the beach in Sweden.
He is thinking about this when he sees the Heavenly Apparition.
The sky here is like a freshly galvanized bucket that has been inverted
over the world to block out inconvenient sunlight; if someone lights up a
cigarette half a mile away, it blazes like a nova. By those standards, the
Heavenly Apparition looks like a whole galaxy falling out of orbit to graze
the surface of the world. You could almost mistake it for an air plane,
except that it does not make the requisite chesty, droning thrum. This thing
emits a screaming whine and a long trail of fire. Besides, it goes too fast
for an airplane. It comes streaking in from the Gulf of Bothnia and crosses
the shoreline a couple of miles north of Otto's cabin, gradually losing
altitude and slowing down. But as it slows down, the flames burgeon, and
claw their way forward up the thing's black body, which resembles the
crumpled, curling wick at the root of a candle flame.
It disappears behind trees. Around here, everything disappears behind
trees sooner or later. A ball of fire erupts from those trees, and Bobby
Shaftoe says, "One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, one
thousand four, one thousand five, one thousand six, one thousand seven" and
then stops, hearing the explosion. Then he turns around and walks into
Norrsbruck, going faster now.
Chapter 53 LAVENDER ROSE
Randy wants to go down and look at the U boat in person. Doug says
evenly that Randy is welcome to do so, but he needs to draw up a valid dive
plan first, and reminds him that the depth of the wreck is one hundred and
fifty four meters. Randy nods as if he had, of course, expected to draw up a
dive plan.
He wants everything to be like driving cars, where you just hop in and
go. He knows a couple of guys who fly airplanes, and he can still remember
how he felt when he learned that you can't just get in a plane (even a small
one) and take off you have to have a flight plan, and it takes a whole
briefcase full of books and tables and specialized calculators, and access
to weather forecasts above and beyond the normal consumer grade weather
forecasts, to come up with even a bad, wrong flight plan that will surely
kill you. Once Randy had gotten used to this idea, he grudgingly admitted it
made sense.
Now Doug Shaftoe's telling him he needs a plan just to strap some tanks
on his back and swim a hundred and fifty four meters (straight down,
admittedly) and back. So Randy yanks a couple of diving books off the
bungeed shelves of Glory IV and tries to come up with even a vague idea of
what Doug's talking about. Randy has never gone scuba diving in his life,
but he's seen them doing it on Jacques Cousteau and it seems straightforward
enough.
The first three books he consults contain more than enough detail to
perfectly reproduce the crestfallenness that Randy experienced when he
learned about flight plans. Before he'd opened the books Randy had gotten
out his mechanical pencil and his graph paper in preparation for making
marks on the page; half an hour later he's still trying to get a handle on
the contents of the tables, and he hasn't made any marks at all. He notes
that the depths in these tables only go down as far as a hundred and thirty,
and at that level they only talk in terms of staying down there five or ten
minutes. And yet he knows that Amy, and the Shaftoe's colorful and ever
enlarging cast of polyethnic scuba divers, are spending much longer at this
depth, and are in fact beginning to come up to the surface with artifacts
from the wreck. There is, for example, an aluminum briefcase wherein Doug
hopes to find clues as to who was on this U boat and why it was on the wrong
side of the planet.
Randy begins to fear that the entire wreck is going to be stripped bare
before he even makes any marks on his piece of graph paper. The divers show
up, one or two each day, on speedboats or outrigger canoes from Palawan.
Blond surf boys, taciturn galoots, cigarette smoking Frenchmen, Nintendo
playing Asians, beer can crumpling ex Navy guys, blue collar hillbillies.
They all have diving plans. Why doesn't Randy have a diving plan?
He starts sketching one out based on the depth of one hundred and
thirty, which seems reasonably close to one hundred and fifty four. After
working on it for about an hour (long enough to imagine all sorts of
specious details) he happens to notice that the table he's been using is in
feet, not meters, which means that all of these divers have been going down
to a depth that is way more than three times as deep as the maximum that is
even talked about on these tables.
Randy closes up all of the books and looks at them peevishly for a
while. They are all nice new books with color photographs on the covers. He
picked them off the shelf because (getting introspective here) he is a
computer guy, and in the computer world any book printed more than two
months ago is a campy nostalgia item. Investigating a little more, he finds
that all three of these shiny new books have been personally autographed by
the authors, with long personal inscriptions: two addressed to Doug, and one
to Amy. The one to Amy has obviously been written by a man who is
desperately in love with her. Reading it is like moisturizing with Tabasco.
He concludes that these are all consumer grade diving books written for
rum drenched tourists, and furthermore that the publishers probably had
teams of lawyers go over them one word at a time to make sure there would
not be liability trouble. That the contents of these books, therefore,
probably represent about one percent of everything that the authors actually
know about diving, but that the lawyers have made sure that the authors
don't even mention that.
Okay, so divers have mastered a large body of occult knowledge. That
explains their general resemblance to hackers, albeit physically fit
hackers.
Doug Shaftoe is not going down to the wreck himself. As a matter of
fact he looked surprised, bordering on contemptuous, when Randy asked him
whether he would go down. Instead, he's going over the stuff that is brought
up from the wreck by the younger divers. They began by doing a photographic
survey, using digital cameras, and Doug's been printing out blowups of the
inside of the U boat on his laser printer and pasting them up around the
walls of his personal wardroom on Glory IV.
Randy does a sorting procedure on the diving books now: he ignores
anything that has color photographs, or that appears to have been published
within the last twenty years, or that has any quotes on the back cover
containing the words stunning, superb, user friendly, or, worst of all, easy
to understand. He looks for old, thick books with worn out bindings and
block lettered titles like DIVE MANUAL. Anything with angry marginal notes
written by Doug Shaftoe gets extra points.
To: randy@epiphyte.com
From: root@eruditorum.org
Subject: Pontifex
Randy,
For now, let's use "Pontifex" as the working title of this
cryptosystem. It is a post war system. What I mean by that is that, after
seeing what Turing and company did to Enigma, I came to the (now obvious)
conclusion that any modern system had better be resistant to machine
cryptanalysis. Pontifex uses a 54 element permutation as its key one key per
message, mind you! and it uses that permutation (which we will denote as T)
to generate a keystream which is added, modulo 26, to the plaintext (P), as
in a one time pad. The process of generating each character in the keystream
alters T in a reversible but more or less "random" fashion.
At this point, a diver comes up with a piece of actual gold, but it's
not a bar: it's a sheet of hammered gold, maybe eight inches on a side and
about a quarter of a millimeter thick, with a pattern of tiny neat holes
punched through it, like a computer card. Randy spends a couple of days
obsessing over this artifact. He learns that it came out of a crate stored
in the hold of the U boat, and that there are thousands more of them.
Now all of a sudden he's reading stuff by guys whose names are preceded
by naval ranks and succeeded by M.D.s and Ph.D.s and they are going on for
dozens of pages about the physics of nitrogen bubble formation in the knee,
for example. There are photographs of cats strapped down in benchtop
pressure chambers. Randy learns that the reason Doug Shaftoe doesn't dive to
one hundred and fifty four meters is that certain age related changes in the
joints tend to increase the likelihood of bubble formation during the
decompression process. He comes to terms with the fact that the pressure at
the depth of the wreck is going to be fifteen or sixteen atmospheres,
meaning that as he ascends to the surface, any nitrogen bubbles that happen
to be rattling around in his body are going to get fifteen or sixteen times
as large as they were to begin with and that this is true whether those
bubbles happen to be in his brain, his knee, the little blood vessels of the
eyeball, or trapped underneath his fillings. He develops a sophisticated
layman's understanding of dive medicine, which amounts to little because
everyone's body is different hence the need for each diver to have a
completely different dive plan. Randy will need to figure out his body fat
percentage before he can even begin marking up his sheet of graph paper.
It is also path dependent. These divers' bodies get partly saturated
with nitrogen every time they go down, and not all of it goes out of their
bodies when they come back up all of them, sitting around Glory IV playing
cards, drinking beer, talking to their girlfriends on their GSM phones, are
all outgassing all the time nitrogen is seeping out of their bodies into the
atmosphere, and each one of them knows more or less how much nitrogen's
stuffed into his body at any given moment and understands, in a deep and
nearly intuitive way, just exactly how that information propagates through
any dive plan that he might be cooking up inside the powerful dive planning
supercomputer that each of these guys apparently carries around in his
nitrogen saturated brain.
One of the divers comes up with a plank from the crate that contained
the stacks of gold sheets. It is in very bad shape, and it's still fizzing
as gas comes out of it. Fizzing in a way that Randy has no trouble imagining
his bones would do if he made any errors in working out his dive plan. There
is some stenciled lettering just barely visible on the wood: NIZ ARCH.
Glory IV has compressors for pumping air up to insanely high pressures
to fill the scuba tanks. Randy develops an awareness that the pressure has
to be insanely high or it won't even emerge from the tanks while these guys
are down at depth. The divers are all being suffused with this pressurized
gas; he half expects that one of these divers is going to bump into
something and explode into a pink mushroom cloud.
To: randy@epiphyte.com
From: cantrell@epiphyte.com
Subject: Pontifex
You forwarded me a message about a cryptosystem called Pontifex. Was
this invented by a friend of yours? In its general outlines (viz, an n
element permutation that is used to generate a keystream, and that slowly
evolves) it is similar to a commercial system called RC4, which enjoys a
complicated reputation among Secret Admirers it seems secure, and has not
been broken, but it makes us nervous because it is basically a single rotor
system, albeit a rotor that evolves. Pontifex evolves in a much more
complicated & asymmetrical way than RC4 and so might be more secure.
Some things about Pontifex are slightly peculiar.
(1) He talks about generating "characters" in the key stream and then
adding them, modulo 26, to the plaintext. This is how people talked 50 years
ago when ciphers were worked out using pencil and paper. Today we talk in
terms of generating bytes and adding them modulo 256. Is your friend pretty
old?
(2) He speaks of T as a 54 element permutation. There is nothing wrong
with that but Pontifex would work just as well with 64 or 73 or 699
elements, so it makes more sense to describe it as an n element permutation
where n could be 54 or any other integer. I can't figure out why he settled
on 54. Possibly because it is twice the number of letters in the alphabet
but this makes no particular sense.
Conclusion: the author of Pontifex is cryptologically sophisticated but
shows possible signs of being an elderly crank. I need more details in order
to deliver a verdict.
– Cantrell
"Randy?" says Doug Shaftoe, and beckons him into his wardroom.
The inside of the wardroom door is decorated with a big color
photograph of a massive stone staircase in a dusty church. They stand in
front of it. "Are there a lot of Waterhouses?" Doug asks. "Is it a common
name?"
"Uh, well, it's not a rare name."
"Is there anything you'd like to share with me about your family
history?"
Randy knows that as a possible suitor to Amy, he will be undergoing
thorough scrutiny at all times. The Shaftoes are doing due diligence on him.
"What kind of thing are you looking for? Something terrible? I don't think
there's anything worth hiding from you."
Doug stares at him distractedly for a while, then turns to face the now
open aluminum briefcase from the U boat. Randy supposes that merely opening
it required coming up with a detailed plan. Doug has spread out
miscellaneous contents on a tabletop to be photographed and cataloged. Ex
Navy SEAL Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe has, at the peak of his career, become a
sort of librarian.
Randy sees a pair of gold rimmed spectacles, a fountain pen, a few
rusty paper clips. But it looks as though a lot of sodden paper was taken
out of that briefcase too, and Doug Shaftoe has been carefully drying it out
and trying to read it. "Most wartime paper was crap," he says. "It probably
dissolved into mush within days of the sinking. The paper in this briefcase
was at least protected from marine critters, but most of it's gone. However,
the owner of this briefcase was apparently some sort of aristocrat. Check
out the glasses, the pen."
Randy checks them out. The divers have found teeth and fillings in the
wreck, but nothing that qualifies as a body. The places where people died
are marked by these trails of hard, inert remains, such as eyeglasses. Like
the debris footprint of an exploded airliner.
"So what I'm getting at is that he had a few scraps of good paper in
his briefcase," Doug continues. "Personal stationery. So we suspect his name
was Rudolf von Hacklheber. Does that name ring any bells with you?"
"No. But I could do a web search . . ."
"I tried that," Doug says. "Turned up just a few hits. There was a man
by that name who wrote a couple of mathematics papers back in the thirties.
And there are some organizations in and around Leipzig, Germany, that use
the name: a hotel, a theater, a defunct reinsurance company. That's about
it."
"Well, if he was a mathematician, he might have had some connection
with my grandfather. Is that why you were asking about my family?"
"Check this out," Doug says, and pings one fingernail against a glass
tray full of a transparent liquid. An envelope, unglued and spreadeagled, is
floating in it. Randy bends over and peers at it. Something has been written
on the back in pencil, but it's impossible to read because the flaps of the
envelope have been spread apart. "May I?" he asks. Doug nods and hands him a
couple of latex surgical gloves. "I don't have to file a diving plan for
this, do I?" Randy asks, wiggling his fingers into the gloves.
Doug is not amused. "It is deeper than it looks," he says.
Randy flips the envelope over, then folds the flaps back together,
reassembling the inscription. It says:
WATERHOUSE LAVENDER ROSE.
Chapter 54 BRISBANE
Through a small dusty window Xed with masking tape, Lawrence Pritchard
Waterhouse gazes out at downtown Brisbane. Bustling it ain't. A taxi limps
down the street and pulls into the drive of the nearby Canberra Hotel, which
is home to many mid ranking officers. The taxi smokes and reeks it is
powered by a charcoal burner in the trunk. Marching feet can be heard
through the window. It's not the tromp, tromp of combat boots, but the
whack, whack of sensible shoes worn by sensible women: local volunteers.
Waterhouse instinctively leans closer to the window to get a look at them,
but he's wasting his time. Dressed in those uniforms, you could march a
regiment of pinup girls through all the cabins and gangways of an active
battleship and not draw a single wolf whistle, lewd suggestion, or butt
grab.
A delivery truck creeps out of a side street and backfires alarmingly
as it tries to accelerate onto the main drag. Brisbane is still worried
about attack from the air, and no one likes sudden loud noises. The truck
looks like it is being attacked by an amoeba: on its back is a billowing
rubberized canvas balloon full of natural gas.
He's on the third floor of a commercial building so nondescript that
the most interesting observation one can make about it is that it has four
stories. There is a tobacconist on the ground floor. The rest of the place
must have been empty until The General beaten like a red headed stepchild by
those Nips came to Brisbane from Corregidor, and made this city into the
capital of the Southwest Pacific Theater. There must have been an incredible
amount of surplus office space around here before The General showed up,
because a lot of Brisbaners had fled south, expecting an invasion.
Waterhouse has had plenty of time to familiarize himself with Brisbane
and its environs. He's been here for four weeks, and he's been given nothing
to do. When he was in Britain, they couldn't shuffle him around fast enough.
Whatever his job was at the moment, he did it feverishly until he received
top secret, highest priority orders to rush, by any available means of
transportation, to his next assignment.
Then they brought him here. The Navy flew him across the Pacific,
hopping from one island base to the next in an assortment of flying boats
and transports. He crossed the equator and the international date line on
the same day. But when he reached the boundary between Nimitz's Pacific
Theater and The General's Southwest Pacific Theater, it was like he'd glided
into a stone wall. It was all he could do to talk himself onboard a troop
transport to New Zealand, and then to Fremantle. The transports were almost
unbelievably hellish: steel ovens packed with men, baked by the sun, no one
allowed to go abovedecks for fear they'd be sighted, and marked for
slaughter, by a Nip submarine. Even at night they couldn't get a breeze
through there, because all openings had to be covered with blackout
curtains. Waterhouse couldn't really complain; some of the men had traveled
this way all the way from the East Coast of the United States.
The important thing was that he made it to Brisbane, as per his orders,
and reported to the right officer, who told him to await further orders.
Which he's been doing until this morning, when he was told to show up at
this office upstairs of the tobacconist. It is a room full of enlisted men
typing up forms, trundling them around in wire baskets, and filing them. In
Waterhouse's experience with the military, he has found that it's not a good
sign when one is ordered to report to a place like this.
Finally he is allowed into the presence of an Army major who has
several other conversations, and various pieces of important paperwork going
on at the same time. That is okay; Waterhouse doesn't need to be a
cryptanalyst to get the message loud and clear, which is that he is not
wanted here.
"Marshall sent you here because he thinks that The General is sloppy
with Ultra," the major says.
Waterhouse flinches to hear this word spoken aloud, in an office where
enlisted men and women volunteers are coming and going. It's almost as if
the major wishes to make it clear that The General is, in fact, quite sloppy
with Ultra, and rather likes it that way, thank you very much.
"Marshall's afraid that the Nips will get wise to us and change their
codes. It's all because of Churchill." The major refers to General George C.
Marshall and Sir Winston Churchill as if they were bullpen staff for a farm
league baseball team. He pauses to light a cigarette. "Ultra is Churchill's
baby. Oh yeah, Winnie just luuuuuves his Ultra. He thinks we're going to
blow his secret and ruin it for him because he thinks we're idiots." The
major takes a very deep lungful of smoke, sits back in his chair, and
carefully puffs out a couple of smoke rings. It is a convincing display of
insouciance. "So he's always nagging Marsh