and dollars  for
every order of magnitude by which Chester's net worth currently exceeds his,
then he (Randy) would  never have to work  again. This turned out to be more
clever  than informative,  and so Amy was not  prepared for what  they  have
found here and is still steepling her eyebrows.
     "For the locomotive," Chester says. "There are no railway lines nearby,
so we barged the locomotive in  and then winched it up a  short railway into
the foyer."
     Amy just scrunches up her face, silent.
     "Amy hasn't seen the articles," Randy says.
     "Oh! Sorry," Chester says, "I'm  into obsolete technology. The house is
a museum of dead tech. Stick your hand into these things."
     Lined up  before  the front  entrance  are four waist  high  pedestals,
emblazoned with the Novus Ordo Seclorum eyeball/pyramid  logo, with outlines
of  hands stenciled onto  their lids, and knobs in the  lagoons between  the
fingers. Randy  fits his hand into place  and feels the knobs slide in their
grooves, reading and memorizing the  geometry of his  hand. "The house knows
who  you  are now,"  Chester  says,  typing  their names into a  ruggedized,
weatherproofed  keyboard,   "and   I'm   giving  you   a  certain  privilege
constellation that I use for personal guests now you can come in through the
main gate and park your car and wander around the grounds whether or not I'm
home. And you can enter the house if I'm home, but if I'm not home, it'll be
locked to you. And  you can wander  freely in  the  house except for certain
offices where I keep proprietary corporate documents."
     "You have your own company or something?" Amy says weakly.
     "No.  After  Randy and Avi  left town,  I dropped out  of  college  and
snagged a job with a local company, which I still have," Chester says.
     The front door, a  translucent  crystal slab on a  track,  slides open.
Randy  and  Amy follow  Chester into  his house. As  advertised, there  is a
fullscale steam locomotive in the foyer.
     "The house is patterned after flex space," Chester says.
     "What's  that?"  Amy  asks.  She  is  completely  turned   off  by  the
locomotive.
     "A  lot of  high  tech companies get started in flex  space, which just
means  a  big warehouse with no  internal walls  or  partitions  just  a few
pillars to hold up the ceiling. You can drag partitions around to  divide it
up into rooms."
     "Like cubicles?"
     "Same  idea, but  the partitions go up higher so you  have a feeling of
being in  a  real room.  Of course,  they don't go  all  the way  up to  the
ceiling. Otherwise, there wouldn't be room for the TWA."
     "The what?" Amy asks. Chester,  who is  leading them into the  maze  of
partitions,  answers  the question  by  tilting his  head back  and  looking
straight up.
     The roof of the house is made entirely of glass, held up by a trusswork
of white  painted steel  tubes. It  is  maybe forty or fifty feet above  the
floor. The  partitions rise  to  a height of maybe twelve  feet. In the  gap
above the partitions and  below the  ceiling, a grid has been constructed, a
scaffolding of  red  pipes, nearly as vast  as the house  itself. Thousands,
millions, of aluminum shreds are  trapped in that space grid, like tom tufts
caught in a three  dimensional screen. It looks like an  artillery shell the
length of a football field that has exploded into shrapnel a microsecond ago
and been frozen in place;  light filters through the metal  scraps, trickles
down bundles of shredded wiring and glances flatly  off the crusts of melted
and hardened upholstery. It is so vast and so close that when Amy and  Randy
first look up at it they flinch, expecting it to fall on them. Randy already
knows what it is. But Amy has to stare at it for a long time, and prowl from
room to room, viewing it from different angles, before it takes shape in her
mind, and becomes recognizable as something familiar: a 747.
     "The FAA  and  NTSB were  surprisingly cool  about  it," Chester muses.
"Which  makes sense. I  mean, they've  reconstructed this thing in a hangar,
right?  Dredged up all the pieces, figured out where  they go, and hung them
on this  grid.  They've gone  over it and gathered all the forensic evidence
they  could  find,  hosed out all the human  remains  and  disposed  of them
properly, sterilized the debris so that the crash investigation team doesn't
have to worry about getting AIDS from touching a bloody flange or something.
And they're done with it. And they're paying like rent on  this hangar. They
can't throw it away. They have to store it somewhere. So all I had to do was
get  the  house certified as a federal warehouse, which was  a  pretty  easy
legal hack. And  if  there's a lawsuit,  I have to let the lawyers in to  go
over it. But really  it was not a problem to  do  this. The Boeing guys love
it, they're over here all the time."
     "It's like a resource to them," Randy guesses.
     "Yeah."
     "You like to play that role."
     "Sure!  I  have  defined  a  privilege  constellation  specifically for
engineer types who can come here anytime they  want to access the house as a
museum of dead tech. That's what I mean by the flex space analogy. To me and
my guests, it's  a home.  To  these visitors . . . there's one right there."
Chester  waves his arm across  the room (it  is a  central  room maybe fifty
meters on a side) at an  engineer type who has set up a Hasselblad on a huge
tripod and is pointing it straight up at a bent landing gear strut ". . . to
them  it's exactly like a  museum in that there  are places they  can go and
other places that  if they step over the line will  set  off  alarms and get
them in trouble."
     "Is there a gift shop?" Amy jokes.
     "The gift shop is roughed in, but not up and running the LOHO throws up
all kinds of impediments," Chester grumbles.
     They end up in  a relatively cozy glass  walled room with a view across
the churned mud to the lake. Chester fires up an espresso machine that looks
like a scale model of an  oil refinery and generates a brace of lattes. This
room happens  to  be underneath the TWA's left wing tip, which is relatively
intact. Randy realizes, now, that the entire plane has been hung in a gentle
banking attitude, like it's making an  imperceptible course change, which is
not really appropriate; a vertical  dive would make more sense, but then the
house would have to be fifty  stories high  to accommodate it. He can  see a
repeating pattern of tears in the wing's skin that seems to be an expression
of the same underlying math  that generates repeating vortices in a wake, or
swirls  in a Mandelbrot set. Charlene and his friends used to heckle him for
being a Platonist,  but everywhere he goes  he sees the same few ideal forms
shadowed in the physical world. Maybe he's just stupid or something.
     The  house lacks  a woman's touch. Randy gathers, from hints dropped by
Chester, that the TWA has not turned out to be the conversation starter that
he had hoped it would be. He is considering building fake ceilings over some
of the house's partitions so that they will feel more like rooms,  which, he
admits, might make "some people" feel  more  comfortable there and open  the
possibility  of  their  committing  themselves  to "an  extended  stay."  So
evidently  he is in early negotiations with  some  kind of  female, which is
good news.
     "Chester, two  years  ago you sent me e mail about a  project you  were
launching to build replicas of early computers. You wanted information about
my grandfather's work."
     "Yeah," Chester  says.  "You  want to see that stuff?  It's been on the
back burner, but "
     "I just inherited some of his notebooks," Randy says.
     Chester's eyebrows go up. Amy  glances out the window; her  hair, skin,
and  clothes take  on a pronounced reddish tinge from  Doppler effect as she
drops out of the conversation at relativistic velocity.
     "I want to know if you have a functioning ETC card reader."
     Chester snorts. "That's all?"
     "That's all."
     "You want a 1932 Mark III card reader? Or a 1938 Mark IV? Or a "
     "Does it make any difference? They all read the same cards, right?"
     "Yeah, pretty much."
     "I have some  cards  from circa 1945 that I would like to have read out
onto a floppy disk that I can take home."
     Chester picks up a cellphone the size  of  a gherkin and begins to prod
it. "I'll call my card man," he says. "Retired ETC engineer. Lives on Mercer
Island. Comes up  here on  his  boat a couple times  a week and tinkers with
this stuff. He'll be really excited to meet you."
     While Chester is conversing with  his card man,  Amy meets Randy's eyes
and gives  him a look that is almost perfectly  unreadable.  She seems a bit
deflated. Worn down.  Ready to  go home. Her very unwillingness to show  her
feelings  confirms this.  Before  this trip, Amy  would  have agreed that it
takes all kinds to  make a world.  She'd still assent to it now. But Randy's
been showing her  some  practical applications of that  concept, in the last
few days, that are going to take her a while to fit into her world view. Or,
more importantly, into her Randy view. And sure enough, the moment Chester's
off the phone, she's asking if she can use it to call the airlines. There is
only a momentary upward flick of the eyes towards the  TWA. And once Chester
gets over his astonishment that anyone still uses  voice technology  to make
airline reservations  in  this  day and age,  he takes  her  to  the nearest
computer (there is a fully outfitted UNIX machine in every room) and patches
into the airline databases directly  and begins  searching  for the  optimal
route  back  home.  Randy goes  and  stares  out  the  window at  the chilly
whitecaps slapping  the mud shore and  fights  the urge to just stay here in
Seattle,  which is a town where he could  be very happy. Behind  him Chester
and Amy  keep saying "Manila," and it sounds ridiculously exotic and hard to
reach. Randy thinks that he  is marginally smarter than Chester and would be
even richer if he'd only stayed here.
     A fast white boat comes  larruping around the point from  the direction
of Mercer Island and banks towards him. Randy  sets down his cold coffee and
goes out to  his car and retrieves  a  certain trunk  a  lovely gift  from a
delighted  Aunt  Nina.  It is  full  of  certain  old  treasures,  like  his
grandfather's high  school  physics notebooks. He sets aside (for example) a
box labeled HARVARD  WATERHOUSE PRIME  FACTOR CHALLENGE '49  52 to reveal  a
stack of bricks, neatly wrapped in  paper that has  gone gold with age, each
consisting  of  a  short  stack  of  ETC  cards, and each  labeled  ARETHUSA
INTERCEPTS  with a  date  from 1944  or  '45. They  have  been in  suspended
animation for more than fifty years, stored on a dead medium, and now  Randy
is going to breathe life  into them again,  and  maybe send them out on  the
Net,  a  few  strands of fossil DNA  broken out of  their  amber shells  and
released in the world again.
     Probably  they will fail and die,  but if they flourish, it should make
Randy's  life a little  more  interesting. Not  that it's devoid of interest
now, but it is easier to introduce new complications than to resolve the old
ones.


     <B>Chapter 73 ROCK</B>


     Bundok is  good  rock;  whoever picked  it must have  known this.  That
basalt is so strong that Goto Dengo can  carve into it any system of tunnels
that  he desires. As long as he observes a few basic engineering principles,
he need not worry about tunnels collapsing.
     Of course, cutting holes  into such rock is hard work. But Captain Noda
and Lieutenant Mori have provided  him with an unlimited supply  of  Chinese
laborers.  At first the chatter of their drills drowns out the sounds of the
jungle. Later, as  they burrow into the  earth, it fades  to a thick tamping
beat,  leaving only the buzzing drone of the air compressors.  Even at night
they work by the dim  light of lanterns,  which  cannot penetrate the canopy
overhead. Not that MacArthur is sending observation planes over Luzon in the
middle of the  night, but work lights  shining  up on the  mountain would be
noticed by the lowland Filipinos.
     The inclined shaft connecting  the bottom of  Lake Yamamoto to Golgotha
is by far the longest part of the complex, but it need not have a very great
diameter: just big enough for a single worker to worm  his way up to the end
and operate his drill. Before the lake is created, Goto Dengo has a crew dig
the extreme  upper  end  of  that  shaft,  tunneling out and down  from  the
riverbank  with  a  dip  angle  of  some  twenty  degrees.  This  excavation
continually fills up with water it is  effectively  a well and removing  the
waste rock is murder, because it all has to be hauled uphill. So when it has
proceeded for  some  five meters, Goto Dengo has the opening sealed  up with
stones and mortar.
     Then he  has the  latrines'  filled  in, and the area  around  the lake
cleared  of workers. They can  do nothing now but contaminate the place with
evidence. Summer has arrived,  the  rainy season on Luzon, and he is worried
that rain will find the ruts worn into the soil by the Chinese workers' feet
and  turn  them into gullies, impossible to  conceal.  But the unusually dry
weather holds, and vegetation rapidly takes root on the bare ground.
     Goto  Dengo is  faced with a challenge that would seem  familiar to the
designer of a garden back home:  he needs to create an  artificial formation
that seems  natural. It  needs to look as  though a boulder rolled down  the
mountain  after  an earthquake  and  wedged  itself  in a bottleneck of  the
Yamamoto River. Other  rocks, and the  logs of dead trees, piled up  against
it, forming a natural dam that created the lake.
     He finds the boulder he  needs sitting in the middle  of  the  riverbed
about a kilometer upstream. Dynamite would only shatter it, and so he brings
in a stout crew of  workers with iron levers, and  they  get it  rolling. It
goes a few meters and stops.
     This is discouraging, but the workers have the  idea now.  Their leader
is Wing  the  bald  Chinese  man  who  helped Goto Dengo bury the corpse  of
Lieutenant  Ninomiya.  He has the mysterious physical strength that seems to
be common among bald  men, and he has a kind of mesmerizing leadership power
over the other Chinese. He somehow manages to  get them excited about moving
the boulder. Of course, they have to move it, because Goto Dengo  has let it
be known that he wants it moved, and if they don't, Lieutenant Mori's guards
will shoot them on the spot. But above and beyond this, they seem to welcome
the challenge. Certainly  standing in cool running  water beats working down
in the mineshafts of Golgotha.
     The boulder is in place three days later. The  water divides around it.
More boulders  follow, and the river begins to pool. Trees do not  naturally
sprout  from  lakes, and so Goto  Dengo has  workers fell the  ones that are
standing here not with axes, though. He shows them how to excavate the roots
one at  a time, like archaeologists digging up a skeleton,  so that it looks
as if the trees were uprooted during a  typhoon. These are piled  up against
the boulders,  and smaller stones  and gravel follow. Suddenly the level  of
Lake Yamamoto begins to rise. The dam leaks, but the leaks peter out as more
gravel  and clay are dumped in behind it.  Goto  Dengo is not above plugging
troublesome holes with sheets of tin, as long as it's down where no one will
ever see it. When the lake has reached its desired level, the only sign it's
manmade is a pair of wires trailing up onto  its shore, rooted in demolition
charges molded into the concrete plug on its bottom.
     Golgotha is cut into a ridge of basalt that is flung out from  the base
of the mountain  like a buttress  root from the  trunk of a jungle tree that
separates the watersheds of the Yamamoto and  Tojo Rivers. Moving southwards
from the summit of Calvary, then, one would pass through the teeming bowl of
its extinct  crater  first, over the remains  of its  southern rim, and then
onto the gradual downward slope of a much larger mountain on which Calvary's
cinder cone  is just a blemish, like a  wart on  a nose.  The small Yamamoto
River  runs generally parallel  to the Tojo  on the other side of the basalt
ridge,  but descends  more gradually, so that its elevation gets higher  and
higher  above that  of  the  Tojo  River  as both work  their  way  down the
mountain. At the site  of Lake Yamamoto, it  is fifty meters above the Tojo.
By drilling  the connecting tunnel in a  southeasterly direction rather than
straight east underneath the ridge, one can  bypass a chain of  rapids and a
waterfall on the Tojo which drop that river's  elevation to almost a hundred
meters beneath the bottom of the lake.
     When  The General comes to inspect the works, Goto Dengo astonishes him
by taking him  up the Tojo River in the same Mercedes he used to  drive down
from Manila. By this point, the workers have constructed  a single lane road
that leads  from  the prison camp up the rocky bed of the river to Golgotha.
"Fortune  has smiled  on our endeavor by giving us a dry summer," Goto Dengo
explains. "With the water low, the riverbed makes an ideal roadway the  rise
in  altitude is gentle  enough for the heavy trucks that we will be bringing
in. When we are  finished, we will create a low dam near the site  that will
conceal  the most  obvious signs  of our work.  When the river  rises to its
normal height, there will be no visible trace that men were ever here."
     "It is  a good idea," The  General concedes, then mumbles  something to
his aide about using the  same technique at the  other  sites. The aide nods
and <I>hais</I> and writes it down.
     A kilometer into the jungle,  the banks rise up into  vertical walls of
stone  that climb higher and  higher above  the  water's  level  until  they
actually overhang the river. There is  a hollow in the  stony  channel where
the  river  broadens out; just  upstream is the waterfall. At this point the
road makes a left turn directly into the rock wall, and stops. Everyone gets
out of the  Mercedes: Goto Dengo, The General,  his  aide, and Captain Noda.
The river runs over their feet, ankle deep.
     A  mouse hole has been dug into the rock here. It has a flat bottom and
an arched ceiling. A six year  old could stand upright in here,  but  anyone
taller will have to stoop. A pair of iron rails  runs into the opening. "The
main drift," says Goto Dengo.
     "This is it?"
     "The opening is  small  so that we can conceal it later," Captain  Noda
explains, cringing, "but it gets wider inside."
     The General looks pissed off and nods. Led by Goto Dengo, all four  men
squat and  duck  walk into  the tunnel, pushed by a steady  current  of air.
"Notice the excellent  ventilation,"  Captain  Noda enthuses, and Goto Dengo
grins proudly.
     Ten  meters in, they are able to stand up. Here, the drift has the same
vaulted shape, but it's six feet high and six wide, buttressed by reinforced
concrete arches that they have poured in wooden forms on the floor. The iron
rails run far away into blackness.  A train of  three mine cars sits on them
sheet  metal boxes  filled with shattered basalt. "We  remove waste  by hand
tramming," Goto Dengo  explains.  "This drift, and  the rails, are perfectly
level, to keep the cars from running out of control."
     The  General grunts. Clearly he has no respect  for the  intricacies of
mine engineering.
     "Of course, we will  use  the same cars to move the,  er, material into
the vault when it arrives," Captain Noda says.
     "Where did this waste come from?" The General demands. He is pissed off
that they are still digging at this late stage.
     "From our longest and most  difficult  tunnel the inclined shaft to the
bottom of Lake Yamamoto," says Goto Dengo. "Fortunately, we can continue  to
extend that shaft even while the  material is  being loaded  into the vault.
Outgoing cars will carry waste from the shaft work, incoming cars will carry
the material."
     He stops to thrust his finger into a drill hole in the ceiling. "As you
can  see, all  of the holes are ready for the demolition  charges.  Not only
will  those  charges  bring  down  the  ceiling, but  they  will  leave  the
surrounding rock so rotten as to make horizontal excavation very difficult."
     They walk down the main drift for fifty meters. "We are in the heart of
the  ridge now,"  Goto  Dengo  says,  "halfway  between the two rivers.  The
surface is  a hundred meters straight up." In front of  them, the  string of
electric  lights  terminates  in  blackness. Goto Dengo  gropes for  a  wall
switch.
     "The vault," he says, and hits the switch.
     The tunnel  has abruptly broadened into a flat bottomed chamber with an
arched ceiling, shaped like a Quonset hut, lined with concrete, the concrete
massively  ribbed every couple of meters. The floor  of the vault is perhaps
the size of  a tennis  court. The only  opening  is a  small  vertical shaft
rising up from the  middle of the ceiling, just barely big enough to contain
a ladder and a human body.
     The General folds his arms  and waits while the aide goes around with a
tape measure, verifying the dimensions.
     "We go  up," says Goto Dengo, and, without waiting for  The  General to
bristle,  mounts the ladder up  into  the shaft.  It only goes  up for a few
meters, and then they are in another drift with another narrow gauge railway
on the floor. This one's shored up with  timbers  hewn from  the surrounding
jungle.
     "The haulage  level, where we  move rock around," Goto  Dengo explains,
when they have  all convened at the top of the  ladder. "You asked about the
waste in those cars. Let me show you  how it got there." He leads the  group
down the tracks for twenty or thirty meters,  past a train of battered cars.
"We are headed northwest, towards Lake Yamamoto."
     They reach the end of the drift, where another narrow shaft pierces the
ceiling. A fat reinforced  hose runs up into  it, compressed air keening out
through tiny leaks. The sound of drills can be heard, from very far away. "I
would  not  recommend  that  you look  up this  shaft,  because stray  rocks
occasionally come down from where we  are  working," he warns. "But  if  you
looked straight up, you would see that,  about  ten meters  above  us,  this
shaft comes  up into the floor  of a narrow inclined shaft that  goes uphill
that way " he motions northwest " towards the lake, and  downhill that way "
He turns a hundred and eighty degrees, back towards the vault.
     "Toward the fool's chamber," The General says, with relish.
     <I>"Hai!"</I> answers Goto Dengo. "As we extend the shaft up  toward the lake,
we rake the broken rock downhill with an iron hoe drawn by a winch, and when
it reaches the top of  this vertical shaft that you see  here, it falls down
into  waiting cars. From here  we can drop it down into  the main  vault and
from there hand tram it to the exit."
     "What are you doing with all the waste?" asks The General.
     "Spreading  some of it  down the riverbed, using it to make the roadway
that we  drove up  on.  Some of  it is  stored  above  to  backfill  various
ventilation shafts. Some  is being crushed into sand for a trap which I will
explain later."  Goto  Dengo  leads them back in the direction  of  the main
vault,  but  they pass  by  the  ladder  and turn  into another  drift, then
another. Then  the drifts become  narrow and cramped  again, like the one at
the entrance.  "Please forgive  me for leading you  into what seems  like  a
three  dimensional  maze,"  Goto  Dengo  says. "This  part  of  Golgotha  is
intentionally confusing.  If a thief  ever manages to break into  the fool's
chamber  from  above, he  will  expect to  find a  drift  through  which the
material was loaded into it. We have left one  there for him to find a false
drift  that  seems  to  lead away toward the Tojo River. Actually,  a  whole
complex  of false drifts and shafts that will all be demolished by  dynamite
when we are finished. It will be so difficult, not to mention dangerous, for
the thief to work his way through so much rotten rock, that he will probably
be satisfied with what he finds in the fool's chamber."
     He keeps pausing and looking back at The General, expecting him to tire
of this, but  clearly The  General  is getting a second wind.  Captain Noda,
taking up the rear, gestures him onwards impatiently.
     The  maze  takes  some  time  to  negotiate  and  Goto  Dengo,  like  a
prestidigitator, tries to fill up the time with some convincing  patter. "As
I'm sure you understand, shafts and  drifts must be engineered to counteract
lithostatic forces."
     "What?"
     "They must be  strong enough to  support the  rock  overhead. Just as a
building must be strong enough to hold up its own roof."
     "Of course," says The General.
     "If you have two parallel drifts, one above the other like storeys in a
building, then the rock in  between them the floor or the ceiling, depending
on which way you look at it  must be thick enough to  support itself. In the
structure we are  walking through, the rock is just barely thick enough. But
when the demolition charges have been set off, the rock will be shattered so
that reconstructing these drifts will be a physical impossibility."
     "Excellent!" says The General, and again tells his  aide to make a note
of it apparently so that the other Goto Dengos in the other Golgothas can do
the same.
     At one  point a drift has  been plugged by  a wall made of rubble stuck
together  with mortar. Goto Dengo shines his lantern on it, lets the General
see the iron rails disappearing beneath the masonry. "To a thief coming down
from  the  fool's chamber, this will look like the main drift," he explains.
"But if he demolishes that wall, he dies."
     "Why?"
     "Because on the other side of that wall is a shaft that connects to the
lake  Yamamoto pipe. One blow from a sledgehammer and that wall will explode
from the water pressure that  will  be  on the  other side  of it. Then Lake
Yamamoto rushes forth from that hole like a tsunami."
     The General and his aide spend some time cackling over this one.
     Finally  they waddle  down a drift into a vault, half the dimensions of
the main vault, that is illuminated from above by dim bluish sky light. Goto
Dengo  turns  on  some  electric  lights  as well. "The  fool's  vault,"  he
announces. He points up  the vertical shaft in the ceiling. "Our ventilation
has been courtesy of this."  The  General peers  upwards and sees, a hundred
meters above them, a circle of radiant  green blue  jungle  quartered by the
spinning  swastika of  a  big  electric  fan. "Of course,  we would not want
thieves to find the fool's chamber too easily or it wouldn't fool anyone. So
we have added some features, up there, to make it interesting."
     "What sorts of features?" asks Captain  Noda, stepping crisply into his
role as straight man.
     "Anyone who attacks Golgotha will  attack from above to gain horizontal
access, the distance  is too  great.  This  means they  will have  to tunnel
downwards, either  through fresh rock  or through the column of  rubble with
which this ventilation  shaft  will  be filled. In either  case,  they  will
discover, when they are about halfway down, a stratum of sand, three to five
meters  in  depth, spread across the whole area. I  need  hardly  remind you
that, in  nature, pockets of sand are  never found in the  middle of igneous
rock!"
     Goto  Dengo begins  climbing up  the ventilation shaft.  Halfway to the
surface,  it comes  up  into  a  network of  small,  rounded, interconnected
chambers, whittled out of  the rock,  with fat pillars left in place to hold
up the ceiling. The pillars are so thick and numerous that it's not possible
to  see very far,  but when the others have arrived,  and Goto  Dengo begins
leading them  from  room  to room,  they learn that  this system of chambers
extends for a considerable distance.
     He takes them to a place where an  iron manhole is  set into  a hole in
the rock wall,  sealed  in place with tar. "There are a  dozen of these," he
says. "Each one leads to the Lake  Yamamoto shaft so pressurized water  will
be  behind  it.  The only thing  holding  them in  place  right  now  is tar
obviously not enough to hold back the pressure of  the lake  water. But when
we have  filled  these rooms  with sand,  the sand will hold the manholes in
place. But if  a thief breaks in and  removes the sand, the manhole explodes
out of its  seat and millions  of gallons of water force their way  into his
excavation."
     From there, another climb up the shaft takes them to the surface, where
Captain Noda's men are waiting to move the ventilation fan out of their way,
and his aide is waiting with bottles of water and a pot of green tea.
     They  sit at  a folding table and  refresh themselves. Captain Noda and
The  General talk about goings on  in Tokyo evidently The General  just flew
down from there a few days ago. The  General's aide performs calculations on
his clipboard.
     Finally, they hike up over the top of the ridge to take  a look at Lake
Yamamoto. The jungle  is so  thick  that they almost  have to fall  into  it
before they can see it. The  General pretends to be  surprised that it is an
artificial body of water. Goto Dengo takes this as a high commendation. They
stand, as people often will, at the edge of the water, and say nothing for a
few  minutes. The General  smokes a cigarette,  squinting through the  smoke
across  the lake,  and  then turns to  the  aide  and  nods.  This seems  to
communicate much to the aide, who turns to  face Captain  Noda and  pipes up
with a question: "What is the total number of workers?"
     "Now? Five hundred."
     "The tunnels were designed with this assumption?"
     Captain  Noda  shoots  an  uneasy  look  at  Goto  Dengo.  "I  reviewed
Lieutenant  Goto's  work   and  found  that  it  was  compatible  with  that
assumption."
     "The  quality  of  the work is  the highest we  have  seen,"  the  aide
continues.
     "Thank you!"
     "Or expect to see," The General adds.
     "As a result, we may wish to increase the amount of material  stored at
this site."
     "I see."
     "Also . . . the schedule may have to be greatly accelerated."
     Captain Noda looks startled.
     "He has  landed on Leyte with  a  very great force,"  The  General says
bluntly, as if this had been expected for years.
     "Leyte!? But that is so close."
     "Precisely."
     "It is insane," Noda raves. "The Navy will crush him it is what we have
been waiting for all these years! The Decisive Battle!"
     The General and the  aide  stand uncomfortably for a  few long moments,
seemingly unable to speak. Then The  General fixes  Noda with a long, frigid
stare. "The Decisive Battle was yesterday."
     Captain  Noda  whispers,  "I see." He  suddenly looks  about ten  years
older, and he is not at a point in his life where he can spare ten years.
     "So. We  may  accelerate the work. We may  bring  more  workers for the
final phase of the operation," says the aide in a soft voice.
     "How many?"
     "The total may reach a thousand."
     Captain  Noda  stiffens,  grunts  out a  <I>"Hai!"</I>  and turns towards Goto
Dengo. "We will need more ventilation shafts."
     "But sir, with all due respect, the complex is very well ventilated."
     "We will need more deep,  wide ventilation shafts," Captain  Noda says.
"Enough for an additional five hundred workers."
     "Oh."
     "Begin the work immediately."


     <B>Chapter 74 THE MOST CIGARETTES</B>


     To: randy@epiphyte.com
     From: cantrell@epiphyte.com
     Subject: Pontifex Transform: tentative verdict
     Randy.
     I forwarded the Pontifex transform to the Secret Admirers mailing  list
as soon as you forwarded it to  me, so it has been rattling around there for
a  couple  of  weeks now.  Several very  smart people  have  analyzed it for
weaknesses, and  found no  obvious flaws. Everyone agrees that the  specific
steps involved in this transform are a  little bit peculiar, and wonders who
came up with them and how but that is not uncommon with good cryptosystems.
     So the verdict, for  now,  is that root@eruditorum.org knows  what he's
doing notwithstanding his strange fixation on the number 54.
     &ndash; Cantrell
     "Andrew Loeb," Avi says.
     He and Randy are enduring some kind of a forced march up the  beach  in
Pacifica; Randy's not sure why. Over and over again, Randy  is surprised  by
Avi's  physical vigor. Avi looks  like he  is  wasting away  from some vague
disease invented as a plot device by a screenwriter. He is kind of tall, but
this just  makes him seem more perilously  drawn  out. His slender body is a
tenuous link between huge feet and a huge head; he has the profile of a lump
of  silly  putty that has been  drawn apart  until the middle part is just a
tendril.  But he can stomp  up a beach like  a Marine.  It is January, after
all, and according to the Weather Channel there is this flume of water vapor
originating in a tropical storm about halfway between Nippon  and New Guinea
and jetting directly across the Pacific and taking a violent left turn  just
about  here. The  waves  thrashing the beach, not that far  away, are so big
that Randy has to look slightly upwards to see their crests.
     He has been telling  Avi all about Chester, and  Avi has (Randy thinks)
used this as a segue into reminiscing about the old days back in Seattle. It
is  somewhat unusual  for Avi to do this; he  tends to  be very  disciplined
about having  any given  conversation be either  business  or  personal, but
never both at  once. "I'll never forget," Randy  says, "going up to the roof
of Andrew's building to talk  to him about the  software, thinking to myself
'gosh, this is  kind of fun,'  and watching him just slowly and gradually go
berserk  before my  eyes.  It  could almost  make  you  believe  in  demonic
possession."
     "Well, his dad apparently believed  in  it," Avi says. "It was his dad,
right?"
     "It's  been a  long  time. Yeah, I  think it was his  mom  who  was the
hippie, who  had him  in  this commune,  and then his  dad was  the  one who
extracted  him from there, forcibly he  brought in  these  paramilitary guys
from Northern Idaho to actually do the job they literally took Andrew out in
a bag and then  put him through  all kinds of  repressed memory  therapy  to
prove that he'd been Satanically ritually abused."
     This tweaks Avi's interest. "Do you think his dad was into the  militia
thing?"
     "I only met him once. During the lawsuit. He took my deposition. He was
just this Orange County white shoe lawyer, in a big practice with a bunch of
Asians  and Jews and Armenians. So  I  assumed  he  was just using the Aryan
Nations guys because they were convenient, and for sale."
     Avi nods, apparently finding that a satisfactory hypothesis. "So he was
probably not a Nazi. Did he believe in the Satanic ritual abuse?"
     "I  doubt it," Randy says. "Though after spending some time with Andrew
I found it  highly plausible. Do we have  to talk  about this?  Gives me the
creeps," Randy says. "Depresses me.
     "I recently learned what became of Andrew," Avi says.
     "I saw his web site a while ago."
     "I'm speaking of very recent developments."
     "Let me guess. Suicide?"
     "Nope."
     "Serial killer?"
     "Nope."
     "Thrown into prison for stalking someone?"
     "He is not dead or in prison," Avi says.
     "Hmmm. Is this anything to do with his hive mind?"
     "Nope. Are you aware that he went to law school?"
     "Yeah. Is this something to do with his legal career?"
     "It is."
     "Well,  if Andrew  Loeb  is  practicing  law,  it must  be  some really
annoying and socially nonconstructive form of it.  Probably  something to do
with suing people on light pretexts."
     "Excellent," Avi says. "You're getting warm now."
     "Okay, don't tell  me, let me think," Randy says. "Is  he practicing in
California?"
     "Yes."
     "Oh, well, I've got it, then."
     "You do?"
     "Yes.  Andrew  Loeb would be  one  of these  guys who gins up  minority
shareholder lawsuits against high tech companies."
     Avi smiles with his lips pressed tightly together, and nods.
     "He'd  be  perfect," Randy  continues,  "because  he  would be  a  true
believer. He  wouldn't think that he was just out there being an asshole. He
would really, truly,  sincerely believe that he was representing  this class
of  shareholders  who  had been Satanically  ritually  abused  by the people
running the company.  He would work thirty six hours at a stretch digging up
dirt on them. Corporate memories  that had been repressed. No trick would be
too dirty, because he would be on  the side of  righteousness. He would only
sleep or eat under medical orders."
     "I can see that you got to know him incredibly well," Avi says.
     "Wow! So, whom is he suing at the moment?"
     "Us," Avi says.
     There  is now this five minute stoppage in the conversation, and in the
hike, and possibly in some  of Randy's neurological processes. The color map
of his vision goes out of whack: everything's in extremely washed out shades
of yellow and purple.  Like  someone's  clammy  fingers are around his neck,
modulating the flow in his  carotids  to the bare minimum  needed to sustain
life. When  Randy finally  returns to full consciousness, the first thing he
does is to look down at his shoes, because he  is  convinced for some reason
that he  has sunk into the wet sand to his knees. But his shoes  are  barely
making an impression on the firmly packed sand.
     A  big wave collapses  into a sheet of foam that skims up the beach and
divides around his feet.
     "Gollum," Randy says.
     "Was that an utterance,  or some kind of physiological  transient?" Avi
says.
     "Gollum. Andrew is Gollum."
     "Well, Gollum is suing us."
     "Us, as in you and  me?" he asks. It takes Randy about a full minute of
time to  get these words around  his tongue. "He's suing  us over  the  game
company?"
     Avi laughs.
     "It's possible!" Randy says. "Chester told me that  the game company is
now like the size of Microsoft or something."
     "Andrew Loeb has filed a minority shareholder lawsuit against the board
of directors of Epiphyte(2) Corporation," Avi says.
     Randy's body has  now finally had time  to deploy  a  full on  fight or
flight reaction part of his genetic legacy as a stupendous badass. This must
have been very useful when saber toothed tigers tried to claw their way into
his  ancestors'  caves  but  is  doing  him  absolutely  no  good  in  these
circumstances.
     "On behalf of whom?"
     "Oh, come on, Randy. There aren't that many candidates."
     "Springboard Capital?"
     "You told me yourself that Andrew's dad  was a white shoe Orange County
lawyer. Now, archetypally, where would a  guy like  that put  his retirement
money?"
     "Oh, shit."
     "That's right.  Bob  Loeb, Andrew's dad, got in on AVCLA very early. He
and the Dentist have been sending each other Christmas cards for like twenty
years. And so when Bob Loeb's idiot son graduated from law school, Bob Loeb,
knowing full well that the kid was too much of a  head case to be employable
anywhere  else, paid a  call on Dr. Hubert Kepler, and Andrew's been working
for him ever since.
     "Fuck. Fuck!" Randy says. "All these years. Treading water."
     "How's that?"
     "That time in Seattle  during the  lawsuit was a  fucking  nightmare. I
came  out of  it  dead  broke,  without a house,  without anything except  a
girlfriend and a knowledge of UNIX."
     "Well,  that's something," Avi says. "Normally those  two are  mutually
exclusive."
     "Shut up," Randy says, "I'm trying to agonize."
     "Well, I think that  agonizing  is  so  fundamentally pathetic  that it
borders on funny," Avi says. "But please go ahead."
     "Now,  after all  those years all that fucking  work I'm  back  where I
started.  A  net worth  of  zero.  Except  this time I  don't  even  have  a
girlfriend per se."
     "Well,"  Avi says,  "to begin with,  I think it's  better  to aspire to
having Amy than to actually have Charlene."
     "Ouch! You are a cruel man."
     "Sometimes wanting is better than having."
     "Well, that's good news," Randy says brightly, "because "
     "Look at Chester. Would you rather be Chester, or you?"
     "Okay, okay."
     "Also, you have a substantial amount  of  stock in Epiphyte,  which I'm
quite convinced is