torrent of error messages triggered by its inability to find various
pieces of hardware that were present on Randy's laptop (which is in a Ford
dealership's dumpster in Los Altos) but are not on Tom's. And yet the basic
kernel works to the point that Randy can look at the file system and makes
sure it's intact. The Arethusa directory is still there, with its long list
of short files, each file the result of running a different stack of cards
through Chester's card reader. Randy opens up the first one and finds
several lines of random capital letters.
"How do you know there's no information about the primary in those
messages, Randy?" Doug asks.
"The NSA couldn't decrypt these messages in ten years," Randy says. "It
all turned out to be a hoax. The output of a random number generator."
Randy jumps back out to the file listing and types
grep AADAA *
and hits the return key. It is a command to find the opening letter
group in the ETC card messages, the famous one to which Pontifex had
alluded. The machine answers back almost immediately with an empty prompt,
meaning that the search failed.
"Ho ly shit," Randy says.
"What?" everyone says at once.
Randy takes a long, deep breath. "These are not the same messages that
Earl Comstock spent ten years attempting to break."
Chapter 81 DELUGE
It takes Goto Dengo about half a minute to waddle up the narrow
entrance of the tunnel. He is trailing the fingers of one hand along the
stone ceiling just above his head, feeling the scars of the drills. Behind
him he can hear the four members of his crew making their way along,
muttering to each other calmly.
His fingers slide over a lip and rise up into empty, dark space; he's
into the main drift now. He stands up and wades forward. Perfect blackness
is cozy and reassuring to him in it, he can always pretend that he is still
a boy, back on Hokkaido. He can make believe that the last few years of his
life have never happened.
But in fact he is a grownup and he is trapped in a hole in the
Philippines and surrounded by armies of demons. He opens the valves on an
acetylene headlamp and sparks it into life. He is perfectly capable, by this
point, of finding his way around Golgotha in the dark, but his crew is not,
and he leaves them far behind. He stubs his toe brutally on a large gold bar
that has carelessly been left lying across the iron railway, and curses.
"Is everything okay, Lieutenant?" says one of his crew, fifty meters
behind him.
"Fine," Goto Dengo says, loudly and clearly. "You four be careful you
do not break your toes on this bar."
So now, Wing and Rodolfo and their men, waiting up ahead, know the
number of Nipponese soldiers they have to kill.
"Where are the last few workers?" one of the crew shouts.
"In the fool's vault."
It takes them several minutes to pick their way through the main vault,
because it is packed with treasure. The starry core of a galaxy must look
like this. They clamber up the shaft in its ceiling and make their way to
the Hall of Glory. Goto Dengo finds the bare wires that lead to the electric
light bulb and attaches them to the screw terminals on a battery. Running at
the wrong voltage, the bulb looks like a tangerine floating in ink.
"Shut off your headlamps," Goto Dengo says, "to conserve fuel. I will
leave mine burning in case there is an interruption in the power."
He pulls a fistful of white cotton from a sterile box. It is the
cleanest whitest thing he has seen in several years. He pulls it apart into
smaller wads, like Father Ferdinand breaking the bread of the mass, and
passes them out to the men, who stuff it ritualistically into their ears.
"There is no more time to waste," he hollers, "Captain Noda must be growing
impatient out there."
"Sir!" one of the men says, standing at attention and handing him a
pair of wires marked MAIN TUNNEL DEMOLITION.
"Very well," Goto Dengo says, and screws the wires down to a pair of
terminals on a wooden switch box.
It seems as though he should say something ceremonious, but nothing
comes to mind. Nipponese men are dying all over the Pacific without first
getting to make speeches.
He clenches his teeth together, shuts his eyes, and twists the switch
handle.
The shock wave comes through the floor first, whacking the soles of
their feet like a flying plank. A moment later it comes through the air and
strikes them like a moving wall of stone. The cotton in the ears seems to
accomplish nothing. Goto Dengo feels his eyes bounce off the backs of their
sockets. All of his teeth feel as though they have been crisply sheared off
at the gumline with cold chisels. The wind is all forced out of his lungs.
They are empty for the first time since the moment of his birth. Like
newborn infants, he and the other men can only writhe and look around
themselves in a panic until their bodies learn how to draw breath again.
One of the men brought a bottle of sake, which has shattered. They pass
around the jagged bottom of the bottle, each man taking a gulp of what
remains. Goto Dengo tries to pull the cotton out of his ears and finds that
the shock wave drove it in so deep that it cannot be extracted. So he merely
shouts: "Check your watches." They all do. "In two hours, Captain Noda will
demolish the plug on the bottom of the lake and flood the water traps. In
the meantime, we have work to do. You all know your jobs get to work!"
They all hai, turn on their heels, and go their separate ways. It is
the first time that Goto Dengo has actually sent men off to their deaths.
But they are all dead men anyway, and so he doesn't know how to feel about
it.
If he still believed in the emperor still believed in the war he would
think nothing of it. But if he still believed, he wouldn't be doing what he
is about to do.
It is important to keep up the appearance that this is a normal
operation, and so he descends to the vault to perform his next scheduled
duty: inspect what used to be the main drift. The vault is filled with a fog
of rock dust around which his windpipe clenches like a fist grabbing a rope.
His acetylene lamp only makes the dust glow, giving him a visibility of
perhaps six inches. All he can see is the bullion right in front of his
face, which still glimmers beneath a film of dust and smoke. The shock wave
has deranged his formerly neat stacks of crates and bricks and turned the
entire hoard into a rude mound that is still shedding avalanches, seeking
its angle of repose. A 75 kilogram gold brick slides down the pile like a
runaway boxcar, emerging suddenly from the cloud of dust, and he jumps out
of its way. Bits of rock are still sifting down from the crazed ceiling and
plinking against his helmet.
He scrambles carefully over the heap, breathing through a wad of
cotton, until he can see what used to be the main drift. The dynamite has
done the right thing: shattered the roof of the drift into billions of
shards. Collapsed on the floor, they occupy a larger volume than the same
mass of stone did when it was all in one piece. The drift is filled with
tons of loose stone, all the way down to the entrance along the Tojo River,
where Captain Noda's men are at work even now, concealing the tiny puncture
wound behind river rocks.
He feels, rather than hears, a small explosion, and knows that some
thing is going wrong. No one should be setting off explosions now.
Movement in this place is agonizingly slow, like a nightmare when you
are trying to run away from a demon. It takes him so long to get back to the
Hall of Glory that there is almost no point in doing it; whatever was
happening is over when he arrives.
What he sees, when he arrives, is a group of three men waiting for him:
Wing, Rodolfo, and the Filipino named Bong.
"The soldiers?"
"All dead," Rodolfo says flatly, irritated by the stupidity of the
question.
"The others?"
"One soldier set off a grenade. Killed himself and my two men, Wing
says.
"Another soldier heard the grenade and had a knife ready when Agustin
came for him," Bong says. He shakes his head sorrowfully. "I think that
Agustin was not ready to kill a man. He hesitated."
Goto Dengo stares at Bong, fascinated. "And you?"
Bong doesn't understand the question for a moment. Then light dawns.
"Oh, no, I did not hesitate, Lieutenant Goto. A Nipponese soldier hurt my
sister one time, in a very inappropriate way."
Goto Dengo stands there silently for a while, until he notices that the
other men are all looking at him expectantly. Then he checks his watch. He
is shocked to see that only half an hour has gone by since he set off the
dynamite.
"We have an hour and a half before the water traps are flooded. If we
are not in the Bubble by then, we will be sealed off, with no escape
possible," says Goto Dengo.
"We go there and wait," Wing suggests, in Shanghainese.
"No. Captain Noda listens, outside, for more explosions," Goto Dengo
says, also in Chinese; then, in English, tells the Filipinos, "We have to
set off the demolition charges at certain times or Noda san will grow
suspicious."
"Whoever sets them off will be trapped forever in this chamber,"
Rodolfo says, gesturing around them at the Hall of Glory.
"We will not set them off from here," says Goto Dengo, pulling the lid
from a crate. Inside are several long coils of two stranded telephone wire.
He hands the coils out to Rodolfo, Wing, and Bong. They understand, and
begin to splice the new wires onto the ones that terminate here.
They retreat through Golgotha in stages, lugging battery packs with
them and unrolling the wires as they go, dynamiting the tunnel sections
behind them one by one. As they do this, certain oddities of the tunnel
system finally become clear to Rodolfo, Wing, and Bong. It becomes fully
evident to them, for the first time, that the entire complex was carefully
designed by Goto Dengo to serve two entirely contradictory purposes. To a
loyal Nipponese engineer like Captain Noda it looks like precisely what he
was ordered to build: a vault laced with booby traps. But to the four men
sealed inside, Golgotha has a second function. It is an escape machine. As
the purposes of certain rooms, drifts, and other features suddenly become
clear, they straighten up, blinking, and turn to look at Goto Dengo, with
the same expressions as the soldiers wore, weeks ago, when they discovered
the Buddha in the Mercedes.
Their destination is the Bubble, a niche that Goto Dengo had them carve
out of the stone during the last couple of months. He claimed, to anyone who
asked, that it was a water reservoir, put there to increase the deadliness
of one of the traps. It is a wide vertical shaft, four meters in diameter,
that begins in the ceiling of a peripheral drift and goes straight up for a
few meters, then dead ends. Ladders still cling to its walls, and by
ascending, they can reach a rock ledge big enough to sit on. Canteens of
water and boxes of biscuits have already been stocked here by Wing and his
men.
By the time they reach their seats in the top of the Bubble, all of the
others are in awe of Goto Dengo, and ready to do whatever he says. He senses
this. It fills him with unutterable misery.
They have fifteen minutes to wait. The others spend it sipping water
and nibbling biscuits. Goto Dengo fills it with self recrimination. "I am a
loathsome worm," he says, "a traitor, a filthy piece of dog shit, not worthy
to clean out the latrines of true soldiers of Nippon. I am bereft totally
cut off from the nation I've betrayed. I am now part of a world of people
who hate Nippon and who therefore hate me but at the same time I am hateful
to my own kind. I will stay here and die."
"You are alive," Rodolfo says. "You have saved our lives. And you are
rich."
"Rich?"
Wing and Rodolfo and Bong look at each other, confused. "Yes, of
course!" Bong says.
Goto Dengo is still looking nonplussed. Reckoning that he has merely
gone deaf or daft from the explosions, Bong reaches into his trousers and
pulls out a hand sewn pouch, teases it open, and displays a healthy double
handful of diamonds. Wing and Rodolfo scarcely take note.
Goto Dengo looks away despondently. He himself has saved no treasure
except these men's lives. But that's not why he feels so bad. He had hoped
that being thus saved they would all be noble, and not think of the
treasure. But maybe that was too much to hope for.
A distant thump lifts them slightly off the ledge, just for a moment.
Goto Dengo feels a strange sensation in his head: the air pressure is
beginning to rise. The column of air trapped in the diagonal is being
compressed by a piston of water rushing down it from the lake. Captain Noda
has dynamited the plug.
Goto Dengo is so excited that he forgets to die.
He is an engineer, trapped inside one of his own machines. The machine
was designed to keep him alive, and he will never know whether it worked
unless it works. After he has achieved that satisfaction, he supposes, he
can always kill himself at leisure.
He pinches his nose shut, presses his lips together, and begins to blow
air into his Eustachian tubes, equalizing the pressure. The others follow
his lead.
All of Golgotha's traps are basically the same. All of them derive
their killing power from the pressure of the water communicated down to this
level from the bottom of Lake Yamamoto. In any number of places in the
complex, false walls have been constructed, designed to be pierced by greedy
thieves, or to collapse of their own accord when thieves dig out the sand
that holds them up. Then the water will rush in with explosive force and
probably crush them before they have a chance to drown.
At its Golgotha end, the diagonal tunnel forks again and again, like a
river breaking up into distributaries. Goto Dengo explained it to inspecting
officers by likening it to the plumbing inside a modern hotel, which is
supplied by a single main that is pressurized by a distant water tower, but
which divides into many different pipes that supply pressurized water to
taps all over the structure.
Golgotha seethes, hisses, and moans as every pipe in its ramified
system is pressurized by the deluge unleashed by Captain Noda's dynamite
charge. The bubbles of air trapped at the ends of those pipes are seeking
escape: some are leaking out through cracks in the walls and others are
bubbling away into the diagonal. The surface of Lake Yamamoto must be
boiling like a cauldron, and Captain Noda must be standing above it,
watching the air flee Golgotha, grinning with satisfaction. In moments, the
floors of the tunnels are obscured by whirling lagoons of dirty water, and
the barrels and railcars that were left there have begun to rise, bobbing
like corks and clanging together.
Most of the air trapped in the Golgotha does not, however, come
bubbling up out of Lake Yamamoto. Most of it rises towards the Bubble,
because that is how Goto Dengo planned it. He knows it's working because his
ears begin to pop.
Eventually the water rises up into the Bubble itself, but it rises
slowly, because the pressure of the air in here has become quite high
already. As the water climbs, it further pressurizes the bubble of air in
which Goto Dengo and the others are trapped. The pressure of the air rises
steadily until it becomes equal to the pressure of the water. Then balance
is achieved, and the water cannot rise any more. Another kind of balance is
being reached within their bodies, as the compressed air floods into their
chests, and the nitrogen in that air seeps through the membranes of their
lungs and dissolves into their bloodstreams.
"Now we wait," says Goto Dengo, and shuts off his acetylene lamp,
leaving them in darkness. "As long as we do not burn lamps, there is enough
air in this chamber to keep us alive for several days. Captain Noda and his
men will spend at least that long tidying up the Bundok site, erasing all
traces of our work, and killing themselves. So we must wait, or else his men
will only kill us when we appear on the shores of Lake Yamamoto. I would
like to spend the time educating you on the subject of caisson disease, also
known as the bends."
***
Two days later they set off one last, relatively small dynamite charge,
blowing a hole through the wall of the Bubble that is large enough to admit
a human being. On the other side, the diagonal to Lake Yamamoto begins.
Rodolfo is more terrified than anyone else, and so they send him first.
Then goes Bong, and then Wing. Finally Goto Dengo leaves the foul, used up
air of the Bubble behind. Within a few moments they have found their way
into the ascending diagonal tunnel. They begin to swim uphill through total
darkness. All of them are trailing their hands against the tunnel ceiling,
feeling for the opening of the first vertical shaft. Rodolfo is supposed to
stop when he feels it, but the others must also be alert in case Rodolfo
misses.
They thud into one another in the darkness like a loosely connected
train bumping to a halt. Rodolfo has stopped with any luck, he has found the
first vertical shaft. Wing finally moves forward, and Goto Dengo follows
straight up the vertical shaft and finally into a bulb at its top where a
bubble of air has been trapped. The bulb is just barely wide enough to
accommodate four men. They pause there, all jammed together in a cluster of
bodies, heaving as they exhale the nitrogen– and carbon dioxide
tainted air that they've been living on for the last sixty seconds, and
breathe in fresh lungfuls. Goto Dengo feels his ears popping as pressure is
relieved.
They have covered only a small fraction of the four hundred and fifty
meters that separate Golgotha from the lake horizontally. But half of the
hundred meter vertical distance has already been covered. That is, the
pressure of the air they are breathing in this chamber is only half of what
it was in the Bubble.
Goto Dengo is not a diver, and knows very little of diving medicine.
But his father used to speak of how caissons were used to send workers deep
underwater, to build things or to mine. That is how he learned about caisson
disease, and how he learned the rule of thumb that most men will not suffer
its symptoms if you have them decompress for a while at half the original
air pressure. If they stop and breathe for a while, the nitrogen will come
out of the tissues. Once this is done, the air pressure may be halved again.
In the Bubble, the air pressure was nine or ten atmospheres. Here in
the first chamber, it's more like five. But there's not much air in this one
just enough to let them breathe for fifteen or twenty minutes, and bleed
nitrogen out of their tissues, and get lungfuls of air for the next leg of
the swim.
"Okay," Goto Dengo says, "we go." He finds Rodolfo in the darkness and
slaps him encouragingly on the shoulder. Rodolfo takes a series of deep
breaths, getting ready, and Goto Dengo recites the numbers that they all
know by heart: "Twenty five strokes straight. Then the tunnel bends up.
Forty strokes up a steep hill. Where the tunnel bends again, you go straight
up to the next air chamber."
Rodolfo nods, crosses himself, and then does a somersault in the water
and kicks himself downwards. Then goes Bong, then Wing, and finally Goto
Dengo.
This leg is very long. The last fifteen meters is a vertical ascent
into the air chamber. Goto Dengo had hoped that the natural buoyancy of
their bodies would make this easy, even if they were on the verge of
drowning. But as he is kicking up the narrow shaft, pushing frantically on
the feet of Wing, who is above him and not going as fast as he would like,
he feels a growing panic in his lungs. Finally he understands that he must
fight the urge to hold his breath that his lungs are filled with air at a
much higher pressure than the water around him, and that if he doesn't let
some of that air out, his chest will explode. So against his instinct to
save that precious air, he lets it boil out of his mouth. He hopes that the
bubbles will pass by the faces of the men above him and give them the idea
too. But shortly after he does it, they all stop moving entirely.
For perhaps ten seconds Goto Dengo is trapped in total darkness in a
water filled vertical hole in the rock that is not much wider than his own
body. Of all the things he has experienced in the war, this is the worst.
But just as he gives up and prepares to die, they begin moving again. They
are half dead when they get to the breathing chamber.
If Goto Dengo's calculations were right, then the pressure in here
should be no more than two or three atmospheres. But he is beginning to
doubt those calculations. When he has breathed in enough air to restore full
consciousness, he's aware of sharp pains in his knees, and it's clear from
the sounds that the others are making that they are suffering the same way.
"This time we wait as long as we can," he says.
The next leg is shorter, but it's made more difficult by the pain in
their knees. Again Rodolfo goes first. But when Goto Dengo rises up into the
next air chamber, about one and a half atmospheres above normal, only Bong
and Wing are there.
"Rodolfo missed the opening," Bong says. "I think he went too far up
the ventilation shaft!"
Goto Dengo nods. Only a few meters beyond where they turned into this
passage is a ventilation shaft that goes all the way to the surface. It has
a sharp sideways jog in the middle that Goto put there so that when Captain
Noda filled it up with rubble (which he has presumably done by now), the
diagonal tunnel their escape route would not be blocked. If Rodolfo went up
that shaft, he found a cul de sac, with no air bubble in the top.
Goto Dengo doesn't have to tell the others that Rodolfo is dead. Bong
crosses himself and says a prayer. Then they stay for a while and take
advantage of the air that Rodolfo should be sharing. The pain in Goto
Dengo's knees becomes sharper, but after a while it plateaus.
"From here, only small changes in altitude, not much need to
decompress. Mostly we swim for distance now," he says. They still have more
than three hundred horizontal meters to cover, pierced with four more shafts
for air. The last of these doubles as a legitimate ventilation shaft.
So from there on it is just swimming and resting, swimming and resting,
until finally the walls of the tunnel peel away from them and they find
themselves in Lake Yamamoto.
Goto Dengo breaks the surface and does nothing for a long time but
tread water and breathe clean air. It is nighttime, and for the first time
in a year, Bundok is quiet, except for the sound of Bong, kneeling on the
shore of the lake, making the sign of the cross and mumbling prayers as fast
as his lips can move.
Wing has already departed, without so much as a good bye. This is
shocking to Goto Dengo until he realizes what it means: he, too, is free to
go. As far as the world knows, he is dead, all of his obligations
discharged. For the first time in his life, he can do whatever he wants.
He swims to the shore, gets up on his feet, and starts walking. His
knees hurt. He cannot believe that he has come through all of this, and his
only problem is sore knees.
Chapter 82 BUST
"Kopi," Randy says to the flight attendant, then reconsiders,
remembering that he is in steerage this time, and getting to a toilet might
not be so easy. It's just a little Malaysian Air 757. The flight attendant
sees the indecision on his face and wavers. Her face is framed in a gaudy,
vaguely Islamic scarf that is the most tokenistic nod to sexual modesty he
has ever seen. "Kopi nyahkafeina," Randy says, and she beams and pours from
the orange carafe. It is not that she doesn't speak English, just that Randy
is starting to feel comfortable with the local pidgin. He realizes that this
is the first step in a long process that will eventually turn him into one
of these cheerful, burly, sunburned expats who infest the airport bars and
Shangri La hotels of the Rim.
Outside his window, the long slender isle of Palawan lies parallel to
their flight path. A fogbound pilot could almost get from Kinakuta to Manila
by following Palawan's beaches, but that is a moot point on a day like this.
Those beaches slope gradually into the transparent waters of the South China
Sea. When you're down there planted in the sand, looking at a glancing angle
across the waves, it probably doesn't look like much, but from up here you
can see straight down through the water for many fathoms, and so all of the
islands, and even the coral heads, have skirts that start out dark brown or
dun near the water and blend into yellow and finally into swimming pool blue
before eventually fading into the deep blue of the ocean. Every little coral
head and sandbar looks like the iridescent eye on a peacock's plume.
After the conversation at Tom Howard's last night, Randy slept in his
guest room and then spent most of the day in Kinakuta buying a new laptop,
complete with a new hard drive, and transferring all of the data from the
drive he salvaged in Los Altos onto the new one, encrypting everything in
the process. Considering all of the completely boring and useless corporate
documents he has subjected to state of the art encryption, he can't believe
he carried the Arethusa stuff around on his hard drive, unencrypted, for
several days, and across a couple of national borders. Not to mention the
original ETC punch cards, which now reside in Tom Howard's basement safe. Of
course that stuff is encrypted to begin with, but that was done in 1945, and
so by modern standards it might as well have been enciphered with a cereal
box decoder ring. Or at least that is what Randy is kind of hoping. Another
thing he did this morning was to download the current version of the
Cryptonomicon from the ftp server where it lives in San Francisco. Randy's
never looked at it in detail, but he has heard it contains samples of code,
or at least algorithms, that he could use to attack Arethusa. With luck, the
very latest public code breaking techniques in the Cryptonomicon might match
up to the classified technology that Pontifex and his colleagues were
employing at the NSA thirty years ago. Those techniques didn't work against
the Arethusa messages that they were trying to decrypt, but this was
probably only because those messages were random numbers not the real
messages. Now that Randy has what he suspects are the real messages, he may
be able to accomplish what Earl Comstock tried and failed to do during the
fifties.
They are angling across the terminator not the robotic assassin of
moviedom, but the line between night and day through which our planet
incessantly rotates. Looking east, Randy can see over the rim of the world
to places where it is dusk, and the clouds catch only the reddest fraction
of the sun's light, squatting in darkness but glowing with sullen contained
fire like coals in their feathery ruffs of ash. The airplane is still in the
daylight, and is assiduously tracked by mysterious bars of rainbow, little
spectral doppelgangers probably some new NSA surveillance technology. Some
of the Palawan's rivers run blue and straight into the ocean and some carry
enormous plumes of eroded silt that feather out into the ocean and are swept
up the shore by currents. In Kinakuta there is less deforestation than there
is here, but only because they have oil instead. All of these countries are
burning resources at a fantastic rate to get their economies stoked up,
gambling that they'll be able to make the jump into hyperspace some kind of
knowledge economy, presumably before they run out of stuff to sell and turn
into Haiti.
Randy is paging his way through the opening sections of the
Cryptonomicon, but he can never concentrate when he's on an airplane. The
opening sections are stolen pages from World War II era military manuals.
These used to be classified until ten years ago, when one of Cantrell's
friends found copies just sitting in a library in Kentucky and drove there
with a shitload of dimes and photocopied them. That got public, civilian
cryptanalysis up to where the government was in the l940s. The Xeroxes have
been scanned and OCRed and converted to the HTML format used for Web pages
so that people can put in links and marginal notes and annotations and
corrections without messing with the original text, and this they have done
enthusiastically, which is all very well but makes it hard to read. The
original text is set in a deliberately crabbed, old fashioned typeface to
make it instantly distinguishable from the cyber era annotations. The
introduction to the Cryptonomicon was written, probably before Pearl Harbor,
by a guy named William Friedman, and is filled with aphorisms probably
intended to keep neophyte code breakers from slapping grenades to their
heads after a long week of wrestling with the latest Nipponese machine
ciphers.
The fact that the scientific investigator works 50 percent of his time
by nonrational means is, it seems, quite insufficiently recognized.
Intuition, like a flash of lightning, lasts only for a second. It
generally comes when one is tormented by a difficult decipherment and when
one reviews in his mind the fruitless experiments already tried. Suddenly
the light breaks through and one finds after a few minutes what previous
days of labor were unable to reveal.
And, Randy's favorite,
As to luck, there is the old miners' proverb: "Gold is where you find
it."
So far so good, but then with a few whacks of the Page Down key Randy's
looking at endless staggered grids of random letters (some kind of
predigital method for solving ciphers) which the author would not have put
into the document if they did not convey some kind of useful lesson to the
reader. Randy is miserably aware that until he has learned to read through
these grids he will not even be up to the level of competence of a World War
II novice cryptanalyst. The sample messages used are like ONE PLANE REPORTED
LOST AT SEA and TROOPS HAVING DIFFICULTY MAINTAINING CONNECTION WITH FORTY
FIFTH INFANTRY STOP which Randy finds kind of hokey until he remembers that
the book was written by people who probably didn't know what "hokey" meant,
who lived in some radically different pre hokiness era where planes really
did get lost at sea and the people in those planes never came back to see
their families and in which people who even raised the issue of hokeyness in
conversation were likely to end up pitied or shunned or maybe even
psychoanalyzed.
Randy feels like a little shit when he thinks about this stuff. He
wonders about Chester. Is the shattered 747 hanging from Chester's ceiling
just a monumental act of bad taste, or is Chester actually making a
Statement with that thing? Could it be that nerdy Chester is actually some
kind of deep thinker who has transcended the glibness and superficiality of
his age? This very subject has been debated by serious people at some
length, which is why learned articles about Chester's house keep showing up
in unexpected places. Randy wonders if he's ever had a serious experience in
his life, an experience that would be worth the time it would take to reduce
it to a pithy STOP punctuated message in capital letters and run it through
a cryptosystem.
They must have flown right by the site of the wreck. In a few days
Randy will turn right around and come halfway back to Kinakuta to make what
meager contribution he can to the job of dragging gold bars out of it. He's
only going to Manila to take care of some business there; some kind of
urgent meeting demanded by one of Epiphyte's Filipino partners. The stuff
that Randy came to Manila to do, a year and a half ago, mostly runs itself
now, and when it actually requires his attention he finds it fantastically
annoying.
He can see that the modern way of thinking about stuff, as applied to
the Cryptonomicon, isn't going to help him very much in his goal of
decrypting the Arethusa intercepts. The original writers of the
Cryptonomicon actually had to decrypt and read these goddamn messages in
order to save the lives of their countrymen. But the modern annotators have
no interest in reading other people's mail per se; the only reason they pay
attention to this subject at all is that they aspire to make new crypto
systems that cannot be broken by the NSA, or now this new IDTRO thing. The
Black Chamber. Crypto experts won't trust a cryptosystem until they have
attacked it, and they can't attack it until they know the basic
cryptanalytical techniques, and hence the demand for a document like this
modern, annotated version of the Cryptonomicon. But their attacks generally
don't go any further than demonstrating a system's vulnerabilities in the
abstract. All they want is to be able to say in theory this system could be
attacked in the following way because from a formal number theory stand
point it belongs to such and such class of problems, and those problems as a
group take about so many processor cycles to attack. And this all fits very
well with the modern way of thinking about stuff in which all you need to
do, in order to attain a sense of personal accomplishment and earn the
accolades of your peers, is to demonstrate an ability to slot new examples
of things into the proper intellectual pigeon holes.
But the gap between demonstrating the vulnerability of a cryptosystem
in the abstract, and actually breaking a bunch of messages written in that
cryptosystem, is as wide, and as profound, as the gap between being able to
criticize a film (e.g., by slotting it into a particular genre or movement)
and being able to go out into the world with a movie camera and a bunch of
unexposed film and actually make one. Of these issues the Cryptonomicon has
nothing to say until you tunnel down to its oldest and deepest strata. Some
of which, Randy suspects, were written by his grandfather.
The head flight attendant comes in on the intercom and says something
in various languages. Each transition to a new language is accompanied by a
sort of frisson of confusion running through the whole passenger
compartment: first the English speaking passengers all ask each other what
the English version of the announcement said and just as they are giving it
up as a lost cause the Cantonese version winds down and the Chinese speaking
passengers ask each other what it said. The Malay version gets no reaction
at all because no one actually speaks the Malay language, except maybe for
Randy when he is asking for coffee. Presumably the message has something to
do with the fact that the plane is about to land. Manila sprawls out below
them in the dark, vast patches of it flickering on and off as different
segments of the electrical power grid straggle with their own particular
challenges vis à vis maintenance and overload. In his mind, Randy is already
sitting in front of his TV tucking into a bowl of Cap'n Crunch. Maybe there
is a place in NAIA where he can purchase a brick of ice cold milk, so that
he will not even have to stop at a 24 Jam on the way home.
The Malaysian Air flight attendants all have big smiles for him on the
way out; as globe trotting expat technocrats all know, hospitality industry
people think it is just adorable, or pretend to think so, when you try to
use some language any language other than English, and they remember you for
it. Soon he is inside good old NAIA, which is sort of, but not fully, air
conditioned. There is a whole group of girls in identical windbreakers
gathered by his baggage carousel, chattering like an exaltation of larks
under a DEATH TO DRUG TRAFFICKERS sign. The bags take a long time to arrive
Randy wouldn't have checked baggage at all except that he acquired a lot of
books, and a few other souvenirs, on his trip some salvaged from the ruined
house and some inherited from his grandfather's trunk. And in Kinakuta he
bought some new diving gear that he hopes he will put to use very soon.
Finally he had to buy a big sort of duffel bag on wheels to carry it all.
Randy enjoys watching the girls, apparently some kind of high school or
college field hockey team on the road. For them, even waiting for the
baggage carousel to start up is a big adventure, full of thrills and chills;
e.g., when the carousel groans into action for a few moments and then shuts
down again. But finally it starts up for real, and out comes a whole row of
identical gym bags, color coordinated to match the girls' uniforms, and in
the middle of them is Randy's big duffel. He heaves it off the carousel and
checks the tiny combination padlocks: one on the zipper for the main
compartment and one on a smaller pocket at the end of the bag. There is one
more tiny pocket on the top of the bag which has no practical function that
Randy can think of; he didn't use it and so he didn't lock it.
He deploys the bag's telescoping handle, lifts it up onto its built in
wheels, and heads for customs. Along the way he gets mixed into the group of
field hockey players, who find this extremely titillating and hilarious,
which is slightly embarrassing for him until they start finding their own
hilarity hilarious. There are only a few customs lanes open, and there is a
sort of traffic director waving people this way and that; he shoos the girls
towards the green lane and then, inevitably, ducts Randy into a red one.
Looking through the lane, Randy can see the area on the other side
where people wait to greet arriving passengers. There is a woman in a nice
dress there. It's Amy. Randy comes to a complete stop the better to gape at
her. She looks fantastic. He wonders if it's totally presumptuous of him to
think that Amy put on a dress for no other reason than that she knew Randy
would enjoy looking at her in it. Whether it's presumptuous or not, that's
what he does think, and it almost makes him want to faint. He doesn't want
to let his mind run completely out of control here, but maybe there is
something better in store for him tonight than digging into a bowl of Cap'n
Crunch.
Randy steps into the lane. He wants to just bolt through and head
straight for Amy, but this would be a bad idea. But it's okay. Anticipation
never killed anyone. Anticipation can actually be kind of enjoyable. What
did Avi say? Sometimes wanting is better than having. Randy's pretty sure
that having Amy would not disappoint, but wanting ain't such a bad thing
either. He is holding his laptop bag out before him and drawing the big
duffel behind, slowing gradually to a stop so that it won't roll forward
under its own momentum and break his knees. There is the requisite long
stainless steel table and a bored fireplug shaped gentleman behind it
saying, "Nationality? Port of embarkation?" for the hundred thousandth time
in his life. Randy hands over his documents and answers the questions while
bending down to heft the duffel bag up onto the metal tabletop. "Remove the
locks please?" the customs inspector says. Randy bends down and squints at
the tiny brass wheels, trying to line them up into the right combination.
Whil