Cryptonomicon (19 page)

“Sir! There is no excuse, sir!”

The major and the colonel nod approvingly at each other.

This “sir, yes sir” business, which would probably sound like horseshit to any civilian in his right mind, makes sense to Shaftoe and to the officers in a deep and important way. Like a lot of others, Shaftoe had trouble with military etiquette at
first. He soaked up quite a bit of it growing up in a military family, but living the life was a different matter. Having now experienced all the phases of military existence except for the terminal ones (violent death, court-martial, retirement), he has come to understand the culture for what it is: a system of etiquette within which it becomes possible for groups of men to live together for years, travel to the ends of the earth, and do all kinds of incredibly weird shit without killing each other or completely losing their minds in the process. The extreme formality with which he addresses these officers carries an important subtext: your problem, sir, is deciding what you want me to do, and my problem, sir, is doing it. My gung-ho posture says that once you give the order I’m not going to bother you with any of the details—and
your
half of the bargain is you had better stay on your side of the line, sir, and not bother me with any of the chickenshit politics that you have to deal with for a living. The implied responsibility placed upon the officer’s shoulders by the subordinate’s unhesitating willingness to follow orders is a withering burden to any officer with half a brain, and Shaftoe has more than once seen seasoned noncoms reduce green lieutenants to quivering blobs simply by standing before them and agreeing, cheerfully, to carry out their orders.

“This Lieutenant Reagan complained that you kept trying to tell him a story about a lizard,” the major says.

“Sir! Yes, sir! A giant lizard, sir! An interesting story, sir!” Shaftoe says.

“I don’t care,” the major says. “The question is, was it an appropriate story to tell in that circumstance?”

“Sir! We were making our way around the coast of the island, trying to get between these Nips and a Tokyo Express landing site, sir! . . .” Shaftoe begins.

“Shut up!”

“Sir! Yes, sir!”

There is a sweaty silence that is finally broken by the colonel. “We had the shrinks go over your statement, Sergeant Shaftoe.”

“Sir! Yes, sir!”

“They are of the opinion that the whole giant lizard thing is a classic case of projection.”

“Sir! Could you please tell me what the hell that is, sir!”

The colonel flushes, turns his back, peers through blinds at sparse traffic out on Eye Street. “Well, what they are saying is that there really was no giant lizard. That you killed that Jap
^*
in hand-to-hand combat. And that your memory of the giant lizard is basically your id coming out.”

“Id, sir!”

“That there is this id thing inside your brain and that it took over and got you fired up to kill that Jap bare-handed. Then your imagination dreamed up all this crap about the giant lizard afterwards, as a way of explaining it.”

“Sir! So you are saying that the lizard was just a metaphor, sir!”

“Yes.”

“Sir! Then I would respectfully like to know how that Nip got chewed in half, sir!”

The colonel screws up his face dismissively. “Well, by the time you were rescued by that coastwatcher, Sergeant, you had been in that cove for three days along with all of those dead bodies. And in that tropical heat with all those bugs and scavengers, there was no way to tell from looking at that Jap whether he had been chewed up by a giant lizard or run through a brush chipper, if you know what I mean.”

“Sir! Yes I do, sir!”

The major goes back to the report. “This Reagan fellow says that you also repeatedly made disparaging comments about General MacArthur.”

“Sir, yes, sir! He is a son of a bitch who hates the Corps, sir! He is trying to get us all killed, sir!”

The major and the colonel look at each other. It is clear that they have, wordlessly, just arrived at some decision.

“Since you insist on reenlisting, the typical thing would be to have you go around the country showing off your medals and recruiting young men into the Corps. But this lizard story kind of rules that out.”

“Sir! I do not understand, sir!”

“The Recruitment Office has reviewed your file. They
have seen Reagan’s report. They are nervous that you are going to be in West Bumfuck, Arkansas, riding in the Memorial Day parade in your shiny dress uniform, and suddenly you are going to start spouting all kinds of nonsense about lizards and scare everyone shitless and put a kink in the war effort.”

“Sir! I respectfully—”

“Permission to speak denied,” the major says. “I won’t even get into your obsession with General MacArthur.”

“Sir! The general is a murdering—”

“Shut up!”

“Sir! Yes, sir!”

“We have another job for you, Marine.”

“Sir! Yes, sir!”

“You’re going to be part of something very special.”

“Sir! The Marine Raiders are already a very special part of a very special Corps, sir!”

“That’s not what I mean. I mean that this assignment is… unusual.” The major looks over at the colonel. He is not sure how to proceed.

The colonel puts his hand in his pocket, jingles coins, then reaches up and checks his shave.

“It is not exactly a Marine Corps assignment,” he finally says. “You will be part of a special international detachment. An American Marine Raider platoon and a British Special Air Services squadron, operating together under one command. A bunch of tough hombres who’ve shown they can handle any assignment, under any conditions. Is that a fair description of you, Marine?”

“Sir! Yes, sir!”

“It is a very unusual setup,” the colonel muses, “not the kind of thing that
military
men would ever dream up. Do you know what I’m saying, Shaftoe?”

“Sir, no, sir! But I do detect a strong odor of politics in the room now, sir!”

The colonel gets a little twinkle in his eye, and glances out the window towards the Capitol dome. “These politicians can be real picky about how they get things done. Everything has to be just so. They don’t like excuses. Do you follow me, Shaftoe?”

“Sir! Yes, sir!”

“The Corps had to fight to get this. They were going to make it an Army thing. We pulled a few strings with some former Naval persons in high places. Now the assignment is ours. Some would say, it is ours to screw up.”

“Sir! The assignment will not be screwed up, sir!”

“The reason that son of a bitch MacArthur is killing Marines like flies down in the South Pacific is because sometimes we don’t play the political game that well. If you and your new unit do not perform brilliantly, that situation will only worsen.”

“Sir! You can rely on this Marine, sir!”

“Your commanding officer will be Lieutenant Ethridge. An Annapolis man. Not much combat experience, but knows how to move in the right circles. He can run interference for you at the political level. The responsibility for getting things done on the ground will be entirely yours, Sergeant Shaftoe.”

“Sir! Yes, sir!”

“You’ll be working closely with British Special Air Service. Very good men. But I want you and your men to outshine them.”

“Sir! You can count on it, sir!”

“Well, get ready to ship out, then,” the major says. “You’re on your way to North Africa, Sergeant Shaftoe.”

T
HE MASSIVE
B
RITISH COINAGE CLANKS IN HIS
pocket like pewter dinner plates. Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse walks down a street wearing the uniform of a commander in the United States Navy. This must not be taken to imply that he is actually a commander, or indeed that he is even in the Navy, though he is. The United States part is, however, a safe bet, because every time he arrives at a curb, he either comes close to being run over by a shooting-brake or he falters in his stride; diverts his train of thought onto a siding, much to the disturbance of its passengers and
crew; and throws some large part of his mental calculation circuitry into the job of trying to reflect his surroundings through a large mirror. They drive on the left side of the street here.

He knew about that before he came. He had seen pictures. And Alan had complained of it in Princeton, always nearly being run over as, lost in thought, he stepped off curbs looking the wrong way.

The curbs are sharp and perpendicular, not like the American smoothly molded sigmoid-cross-section curves. The transition between the sidewalk and the street is a crisp vertical. If you put a green lightbulb on Waterhouse’s head and watched him from the side during the blackout, his trajectory would look just like a square wave traced out on the face of a single-beam oscilloscope: up, down, up, down. If he were doing this at home, the curbs would be evenly spaced, about twelve to the mile, because his home town is neatly laid out on a grid.

Here in London, the street pattern is irregular and so the transitions in the square wave come at random-seeming times, sometimes very close together, sometimes very far apart.

A scientist watching the wave would probably despair of finding any pattern; it would look like a random circuit, driven by noise, triggered perhaps by the arrival of cosmic rays from deep space, or the decay of radioactive isotopes.

But if he had depth and ingenuity, it would be a different matter.

Depth could be obtained by putting a green light bulb on the head of every person in London and then recording their tracings for a few nights. The result would be a thick pile of graph-paper tracings, each one as seemingly
random as the others. The thicker the pile, the greater the depth.

Ingenuity is a completely different matter. There is no systematic way to get it. One person could look at the pile of square wave tracings and see nothing but noise. Another might find a source of fascination there, an irrational feeling
impossible to explain to anyone who did not share it. Some deep part of the mind, adept at noticing patterns (or the existence of a pattern) would stir awake and frantically signal the dull quotidian parts of the brain to
keep looking
at the pile of graph paper. The signal is dim and not always heeded, but it would instruct the recipient to stand there for days if necessary, shuffling through the pile of graphs like an autist, spreading them out over a large floor, stacking them in piles according to some inscrutable system, pencilling numbers, and letters from dead alphabets, into the corners, cross-referencing them, finding patterns, cross-checking them against others.

One day this person would walk out of that room carrying a highly accurate street map of London, reconstructed from the information in all of those square wave plots.

Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is one of those people.

As a result, the authorities of his country, the United States of America, have made him swear a mickle oath of secrecy, and keep supplying him with new uniforms of various services and ranks, and now have sent him to London.

He steps off a curb, glancing reflexively to the left. A jingling sounds in his right ear, bicycle brakes trumpet. It is merely a Royal Marine (Waterhouse is beginning to recognize the uniforms) off on some errand; but he has reinforcements behind him in the form of a bus/coach painted olive drab and stenciled all over with inscrutable code numbers.

“Pardon me, sir!” the Royal Marine says brightly, and swerves around him, apparently reckoning that the coach can handle any mopping-up work. Waterhouse leaps forward, directly into the path of a black taxi coming the other way.

After making it across that particular street, though, he arrives at his Westminster destination without further life-threatening incidents, unless you count being a few minutes’ airplane ride from a tightly organized horde of murderous Germans with the best weapons in the world. He has found himself in a part of town that seems almost like certain lightless, hemmed-in parts of Manhattan: narrow streets lined with buildings on the order of ten stories high. Occasional glimpses of ancient and mighty gothic
piles at street-ends clue him in to the fact that he is nigh unto Greatness. As in Manhattan, the people walk fast, each with some clear purpose in mind.

The amended heels of the pedestrians’ wartime shoes pop metallically. Each pedestrian has a fairly consistent stride length and clicks with nearly metronomic precision. A microphone in the sidewalk would provide an eavesdropper with a cacophony of clicks, seemingly random like the noise from a Geiger counter. But the right kind of person could abstract signal from noise and count the pedestrians, provide a male/female breakdown and a leg-length histogram…

He has to stop this. He would like to concentrate on the matter at hand, but that is still a mystery.

A massive, blocky modern sculpture sits over the door of the St. James’s Park tube station, doing twenty-four hour surveillance on the Broadway Buildings, which is actually just a single building. Like every other intelligence headquarters Waterhouse had seen, it is a great disappointment.

It is, after all, just a building—orange stone, ten or so stories, an unreasonably high mansard roof accounting for the top three, some smidgens of classical ornament above the windows, which like all windows in London are divided into eight right triangles by strips of masking tape. Waterhouse finds that this look blends better with classical architecture than, say, gothic.

He has some grounding in physics and finds it implausible that, when a few hundred pounds of trinitrotoluene are set off in the neighborhood and the resulting shock wave propagates through a large pane of glass, the people on the other side of it will derive any benefit from an asterisk of paper tape. It is a superstitious gesture, like hexes on Pennsylvania Dutch farmhouses. The sight of it probably helps keep people’s minds focused on the war.

Which doesn’t seem to be working for Waterhouse. He makes his way carefully across the street, thinking very hard about the direction of the traffic, on the assumption that someone inside will be watching him. He goes inside, holding the door for a fearsomely brisk young woman in a quasimilitary outfit—who makes it clear that Waterhouse had
better not expect to Get Anywhere just because he’s holding the door for her—and then for a tired-looking septuagenarian gent with a white mustache.

The lobby is well guarded and there is some business with Waterhouse’s credentials and his orders. Then he makes the obligatory mistake of going to the wrong floor because they are numbered differently here. This would be a lot funnier if this were not a military intelligence headquarters in the thick of the greatest war in the history of the world.

When he does get to the right floor, though, it is a bit posher than the wrong one was. Of course, the underlying structure of everything in England is posh. There is no in-between with these people. You have to walk a mile to find a telephone booth, but when you find it, it is built as if the senseless dynamiting of pay phones had been a serious problem at some time in the past. And a British mailbox can presumably stop a German tank. None of them have cars, but when they do, they are three-ton hand-built beasts. The concept of stamping out a whole lot of cars is unthinkable—there are certain procedures that have to be followed, Mr. Ford, such as the hand-brazing of radiators, the traditional whittling of the tyres from solid blocks of cahoutchouc.

Meetings are all the same. Waterhouse is always the Guest; he has never actually hosted a meeting. The Guest arrives at an unfamiliar building, sits in a waiting area declining offers of caffeinated beverages from a personable but chaste female, and is, in time, ushered to the Room, where the Main Guy and the Other Guys are awaiting him. There is a system of introductions which the Guest need not concern himself with because he is operating in a passive mode and need only respond to stimuli, shaking all hands that are offered, declining all further offers of caffeinated and (now) alcoholic beverages, sitting down when and where invited. In this case, the Main Guy and all but one of the Other Guys happen to be British, the selection of beverages is slightly different, the room, being British, is thrown together from blocks of stone like a Pharaoh’s inner tomb, and the windows have the usual unconvincing strips of tape on them. The Predictable Humor Phase is much shorter than in America, the Chitchat Phase longer.

Waterhouse has forgotten all of their names. He always immediately forgets the names. Even if he remembered them, he would not know their significance, as he does not actually have the organization chart of the Foreign Ministry (which runs Intelligence) and the Military laid out in front of him. They keep saying “woe to hice!” but just as he actually begins to feel sorry for this Hice fellow, whoever he is, he figures out that this is how they pronounce “Waterhouse.” Other than that, the one remark that actually penetrates his brain is when one of the Other Guys says something about the Prime Minister that implies considerable familiarity. And he’s not even the Main Guy. The Main Guy is much older and more distinguished. So it seems to Waterhouse (though he has completely stopped listening to what all of these people are saying to him) that a good half of the people in the room have recently had conversations with Winston Churchill.