Cryptonomicon (71 page)

FLATS ARE HARDER
and harder to find in Brisbane, which has become a spy boomtown—Bletchley Park Down Under. There’s Central Bureau, which has set up out at the Ascot Racetrack, and another entity in a different part of town called Allied Intelligence Bureau. The people who work at Central Bureau tend to be pallid mathematics experts. The AIB people, on the other hand, remind Waterhouse very much of those Detachment 2702 fellows: tense, tanned, and taciturn.

Half a mile from the Ascot Racetrack, he sees one of the latter tripping lightly down the steps of a nice gingerbready rooming-house, carrying a five-hundred-pound duffel bag on his back. The man is dressed for a long trip. A grandmotherish lady in an apron is on the veranda, waving a tea towel at him. It is like a scene from a movie; you wouldn’t even know that only a few hours’ flight from here, men are turning black like photographic paper in a developer tray as their living flesh is converted into putrid gas by Clostridium bacteria.

Waterhouse does not stop to estimate the probability that he, who needs a place to live, should happen along at the exact moment that a room has become available. Cryptanalysts wait for lucky breaks, then exploit them. After the departing soldier has disappeared round the corner, he knocks on the door and introduces himself to the lady. Mrs. McTeague says (to the extent Waterhouse can penetrate her accent) that she likes his looks. She sounds distinctly astonished. It seems clear that the improbability of Waterhouse’s having happened upon this vacant room is nothing compared to the improbability of having his looks liked by Mrs. McTeague. Thus, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse joins a small elite group of young men (four in all) whose looks
Mrs. McTeague likes. They sleep, two to a room, in the bedrooms where Mrs. McTeague’s offspring grew from the brightest and most beautiful children ever born into the finest adults who walk the earth except for the King of England, The General, and Lord Mountbatten.

Waterhouse’s new roommate is out of town just now, but by glancing over his personal effects, Waterhouse estimates that he is paddling a black kayak from Australia to Yokosuka Naval Base, where he will slip on board a battleship and silently kill its entire crew with his bare hands before doing an Olympic-qualifying dive into the bay, punching out a few sharks, climbing back into his kayak and paddling back to Australia for a beer.

The next morning, at breakfast, he meets the fellows in the next room: a redheaded British naval officer who shows all the earmarks of working at Central Bureau, and a fellow named Hale, whose nationality cannot be pegged because he’s not in uniform and he’s too hung over to speak.

Having accomplished his mission (according to his understanding with The General’s minions), found a place to live, and settled his other personal affairs, Waterhouse begins hanging around the Ascot Racetrack and the adjacent whorehouse, trying to find some way to make himself useful. Actually he would rather sit in his room all day and work on his new project, which is to design a high-speed Turing machine. But he has a duty to contribute to the war effort. Even if he didn’t, he suspects that when his new roommate gets back from his mission, and finds him sitting indoors all day drawing circuit diagrams, he will thrash Waterhouse to the point where Mrs. McTeague will no longer like his looks.

To put it mildly, Central Bureau is not the kind of place where a stranger can just wander in, check the place out, introduce himself, and find a job. Even the wandering-in part is potentially fatal. Fortunately, Waterhouse has Ultra Mega clearance, the highest clearance in the Entire World.

Unfortunately, this category of secrecy is itself so secret that its very existence is secret, and so he can’t actually reveal it to anyone—unless he finds someone else with Ultra Mega clearance. There are only a dozen people with Ultra
Mega clearance in all of Brisbane. Eight of them comprise the top of The General’s command hierarchy, three work at Central Bureau, and one is Waterhouse.

Waterhouse sniffs out the nerve center in the old whorehouse. Superannuated Australian Territorial Guards in jaunty asymmetrical hats ring the place, clutching blunderbusses. Unlike Mrs. McTeague, they don’t like his looks. On the other hand they are used to this kind of thing: smart boys from far away showing up at the gate with long and, in the end, boring stories about how the military screwed up their orders, put them in the wrong boat, sent them to the wrong place, gave them tropical diseases, threw their belongings overboard, left them to fend for themselves. They don’t shoot him, but they don’t let him in.

He hangs around and makes a nuisance of himself for a couple of days until he finally recognizes, and is recognized by, Abraham Sinkov. Sinkov is a top American cryptanalyst; he helped Schoen break Indigo. He and Waterhouse have crossed paths a few times, and though they aren’t friends, per se, their minds work the same way. This makes them brothers in a weird family that has only a few hundred members, scattered about the world. In a way, it is a clearance that is rarer, harder to come by, and more mysterious than Ultra Mega. Sinkov writes him a new set of papers, giving him a clearance that is very high, but not so high that he can’t reveal it.

Waterhouse gets a tour. Shirtless men sit in Quonset huts made stifling by the red-hot tubes of their radios. They pluck the Nipponese Army’s messages out of the air and hand them off to legions of young Australian women who punch the intercepted messages onto ETC cards.

There is a cadre of American officers composed entirely of a whole department of the Electrical Till Corporation. One day, early in 1942, they put their white shirts and blue suits into mothballs, donned Army uniforms, and climbed on ships to Brisbane. Their ringleader is a guy named Lieutenant Colonel Comstock, and he has gotten the whole codebreaking process totally automated. The cards punched by the Aussie girls come into the machine room stacked into ingots which are fed through the machines. Decrypts
fly out of a line printer on the other end and are taken off to another hut where American nisei, and some white men trained in Nipponese, translate them.

A Waterhouse is the last thing these guys need. He’s beginning to understand what the major said to him the other day: they have passed over the watershed line. The codes are broken.

Which reminds him of Turing. Ever since Alan got back from New York he’s been distancing himself from Bletchley Park. He has moved up to another installation, a radio center called Hanslope in north Buckinghamshire, a place of reinforced concrete, wires, antennas, more military-formal in its atmosphere.

At the time, Waterhouse could not understand why Alan would want to move away from Bletchley. But now he knows how Alan must have felt after they turned decryption into a mechanical process, industrializing Bletchley Park. He must have felt that the battle was won, and with it the war. The rest might seem like glorious conquest to people like The General, but to Turing, and now to Waterhouse, it just looks like tedious mopping-up. It is exciting to discover electrons and figure out the equations that govern their movement; it is boring to use those principles to design electric can openers. From here on out, it’s all can openers.

Sinkov provides Waterhouse with a desk in the whorehouse and begins to feed him the messages that Central Bureau hasn’t been able to decrypt. There are still dozens of minor Nipponese codes that remain to be broken. Maybe, by breaking one or two, and teaching the ETC machines to read them, Waterhouse can shorten the war by a single day, or save a single life. This is a noble calling that he undertakes willingly, but in essence it is no different from being an Army butcher who saves lives by keeping his knives clean, or a lifeboat inspector in the Navy.

Waterhouse cracks those minor Nip codes one after the other. One month he even flies up to New Guinea, where Navy divers are salvaging code books from a sunken Nip submarine. He lives in the jungle for two weeks and tries not to die, comes back to Brisbane, and puts those recov
ered codebooks to good but dull use. Then one day the dullness of his work becomes irrelevant.

On that day, he returns to Mrs. McTeague’s boardinghouse in the evening, goes to his room, and finds a large man snoring in the upper bunk. A lot of clothing and equipment is scattered about the place, emanating sulfurous reek.

The man sleeps for two days and then comes down late for breakfast one morning, peering around the room with Atabrine yellow eyes. He introduces himself as Smith. His oddly familiar accent is not made any easier to understand by the fact that his teeth are chattering violently. He doesn’t seem especially bothered by this. He sits down and paws an Irish linen napkin into his lap with a hand that is stiff and raw. Mrs. McTeague fusses over him to the extent that all of the men at the table must resist the impulse to slug her. She pours him tea with plenty of milk and sugar. He takes a few sips, then excuses himself and goes to the WC, where he crisply and politely vomits. He comes back, eats a soft-boiled egg from a bone china egg cup, turns green, leans back in his chair, and closes his eyes for about ten minutes.

When Waterhouse returns from work that evening, he blunders into the parlor and interrupts Mrs. McTeague having tea with a young lady.

The young lady’s name is Mary Smith; she is the cousin of Waterhouse’s roommate, who is upstairs shivering and sweating in his bunk bed.

Mary stands up to be introduced, which is not technically necessary; but she is a girl from the outback and has no use for effete refinement. She is a petite girl dressed in a uniform.

She is the only woman Waterhouse has ever seen. She is the only other human being in the universe actually, and when she stands up to shake his hand, his peripheral vision shuts down as if he has been sucking on a tailpipe. Black curtains converge across a silver cyclorama, shuttering down his cosmos to a vertical shaft of carbon-arc glory, a pillar of light, a heavenly follow-spot targeted upon Her.

Mrs. McTeague, knowing the score, bids him sit down.

Mary is a tiny, white-skinned, red-headed person who is often seized by little fits of self-consciousness. When this happens she averts her eyes from his and swallows, and when she swallows there is a certain cord in her white neck, rounding the concavity from shoulder to ear, that stands out for a moment. It draws attention both to her vulnerability and to the white flesh of her neck, which is not white in a pallid sick way but in another way that Waterhouse could never have understood until recently: viz., from his little stint in New Guinea, where everything is either dead and decaying, or bright and threatening, or unobtrusive and invisible. Waterhouse knows that anything this tender and translucent is too vulnerable and tempting to hold its own in a world of violently competing destroyers, that it can only be sustained for a moment (let alone years) by the life force within. In the South Pacific where the forces of Death are so powerful, it leaves him vaguely intimidated. Her skin, as unmarked as clear water, is an extravagant display of vibrant animal power. He wants his tongue on it. The whole curve of her neck, from collarbone to earlobe, would make a perfect cradle for his face.

She sees him looking at her, and swallows again. The cord flexes, stretching the living skin of her neck out for just a moment, and then relaxes, leaving nothing but smoothness and calm. She may just as well have caved his head in with a stone and tied his penis round a hitching-rail. The effect must be calculated. But apparently she has not ever done it to anyone else, or there would be a band of gold round her pale left ring finger.

Mary Smith is beginning to get annoyed with him. She lifts the teacup to her lips. She has turned so that the light is grazing her neck in a new way, and this time when she swallows he can see her Adam’s apple moving up. Then it comes down like a pile driver on what is left of his good judgment.

There is a thumping noise upstairs; her cousin has just regained consciousness. “Excuse me,” she says, and she’s gone, leaving only Mrs. McTeague’s bone china as a reminder.

D
R.
R
UDOLF VON
H
ACKLHEBER IS NOT MUCH OLDER
than Sergeant Bobby Shaftoe, but even emotionally crushed, he has a certain bearing about him that men in Shaftoe’s world don’t acquire until they are in their forties, if then. His eyeglasses have tiny rimless lenses that look like they were scavenged from a sniper’s telescopic sights. Behind them is a whole paintbox of vivid colors: blond lashes, blue eyes, red veins, lids swollen and purple from weeping. Even so, he has a perfect shave, and the silvery Nordic light coming in through the tiny windows of Enoch Root’s church cellar glances from the planes of his face so as to highlight an interesting terrain of big pores, premature creases, and old dueling scars. He has tried to grease his hair back, but it misbehaves and keeps tumbling down over his brow. He is wearing a white dress shirt and a very long, heavy overcoat on top of that to ward off the cellar’s chill. Shaftoe, who hiked back to Norrsbruck with him several days ago, knows that the long-legged von Hacklheber has the makings of a half-decent jock. But he can tell that rude sports like football would be out of the question; this Kraut would be a fencer or a mountain climber or a skier.

Shaftoe was only startled—not bothered—by von Hacklheber’s homosexuality. Some of the China Marines in Shanghai had a lot more young Chinese boys hanging around their flats than they really needed to shine their boots—and Shanghai is far from the strangest or most far-flung place where Marines made themselves at home between the wars. You can worry about morality when you’re off duty, but if you are always stewing and fretting over what the other guys are doing in the sack, then what the hell are you going to do when you’re presented with an opportunity to hit a Nip squad with a flamethrower?

They buried the remains of Angelo, the pilot, two weeks
ago, and only now is von Hacklheber feeling in any kind of shape to talk. He has rented a cottage outside of town, but he has come into Norrsbruck to meet with Root, Shaftoe, and Bischoff on this day, partly because he is convinced that German spies are watching it. Shaftoe shows up with a bottle of Finnish schnapps, Bischoff brings a loaf of bread, Root breaks out a tin of fish. Von Hacklheber brings information. Everyone brings cigarettes.

Shaftoe smokes early and often, trying to kill the mildewy smell of the cellar, which reminds him of being locked up there with Enoch Root, kicking his morphine habit. During that time, the pastor once had to come downstairs and ask him please to stop screaming for a while because they were trying to do a wedding upstairs. Shaftoe hadn’t known he was screaming.

Rudolf von Hacklheber’s English is, in some respects, better than Shaftoe’s. He sounds unnervingly like Bobby’s junior high school drafting teacher, Mr. Jaeger. “Before the war I worked under Dönitz for the Beobachtung Dienst of the Kriegsmarine. We broke some of the most secret codes of the British Admiralty even before the outbreak of hostilities. I was responsible for some advances in this field, involving the use of mechanical calculation. When war broke out there was much reorganization and I became like a bone that several dogs are fighting over. I was moved into
Referat
Iva of
Gruppe
IV, Analytical Cryptanalysis, which was part of
Hauptgruppe
B, Cryptanalysis, which reported ultimately to Major General Erich Fellgiebel, Chief of
Wehrmachtnachrichtungenverbindungen.
”

Shaftoe looks around at the others, but none of them laughs, or even grins. They must not have heard it. “Come again?” Shaftoe asks, proddingly, like a man in a bar trying to get a shy friend to tell a sure-fire thigh-slapper.

“Wehrmachtnachrichtungenverbindungen,” von Hacklheber says, very slowly, as if repeating nursery rhymes to a toddler. He blinks once, twice, three times at Shaftoe, then sits forward and says, brightly: “Perhaps I should explain the organization of the German intelligence hierarchy, since it will help you all to understand my story.”

A BRIEF TRIP INTO HELL’S DEMO with HERR
DOKTOR PROFESSOR RUDOLF VON HACKLHEBER ensues.

Shaftoe only hears the first couple of sentences. At about the point when von Hacklheber tears a sheet out of a notebook and begins to diagram the organizational tree of the Thousand-Year Reich, with “Der Führer” at the top, Shaftoe’s eyes take on a heavy glaze, his body goes slack, he becomes deaf, and he accelerates up the throat of a nightmare, like the butt of a half-digested corn dog being reverse-peristalsed from the body of an addict. He has never been through this experience before, but he knows intuitively that this is how the trip to Hell works: no leisurely boat ride across the scenic Styx, no gradual descent into that trite tourist trap, Pluto’s Cavern, no stops along the way to buy fishing licenses for the Lake of Fire.

Shaftoe is not (though he should be) dead, and so this is not hell. It is closely modeled after hell, though. It is like a mock-up slapped together from tar paper and canvas, like the fake towns where they practiced house-to-house warfare during boot camp. Shaftoe is gripped with a sort of giddy queasiness that, he knows, is the most pleasant thing he will feel here. “Morphine takes away the body’s ability to experience pleasure,” says the booming voice of Enoch Root, his wry, annoying Virgil, who for purposes of this nightmare has adopted the voice and physical shape of Moe, the mean, dark-haired Stooge. “It may be some time before you feel physically well.”

The organizational tree of this nightmare begins, like von Hacklheber’s, with Der Führer, but then branches out widely and crazily. There is an Asian branch, headed up by The General, and including, among other things, a Hauptgruppe of giant carnivorous lizards, a Referat of Chinese women holding up pale-eyed babies, and several Abteilungs of plastered Nips with swords. In the center of their domain is the city of Manila, where, in a tableau that Shaftoe would identify as Boschian if he had not spent his high school art class out behind the school leg-fucking cheerleaders, a heavily pregnant Glory Altamira is being forced to do blow jobs on syphilitic Nipponese troops.

The voice of Mr. Jaeger, his drafting teacher—the most
boring man Shaftoe had ever known, until perhaps today—fades in for a moment with the words, “but all of the organizational structures I have detailed to this point became obsolete at the outbreak of hostilities. The hierarchy was shuffled and several of the entities changed their names, as follows…” Shaftoe hears a new sheet of paper being torn from the notebook, but what he sees is Mr. Jaeger tearing up a diagram of a table leg bracket that the young Bobby Shaftoe had spent a week drafting. Everything has been reorganized, General MacArthur is still very high in the tree, walking a brace of giant lizards on steel leashes, but now the hierarchy is filled with grinning Arabs holding up lumps of hashish, frozen butchers, dead or doomed lieutenants, and that fucking weirdo, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, dressed in a black, hooded robe, heading up a whole legion of pencil-necked Signals geeks, also in robes, holding bizarrely shaped antennas above their heads, wading through a blizzard of dollar bills printed on old Chinese newspapers. Their eyes glow, flashing on and off in Morse code.

“What are they saying?” Bobby says.

“Please, stop screaming,” says Enoch Root. “Just for a little while.”

Bobby’s lying on a cot in a thatched hut in Guadalcanal. Swedish tribesmen run around in loincloths, gathering food: every so often, a ship gets blown up out in the Slot, and fish-shrapnel rains down and gets hung up in the branches, along with the occasional severed human arm or hunk of skull. The Swedes ignore the human bits and harvest the fish, taking it off to make lutefisk in black steel drums.

Enoch Root has an old cigar box on his lap. Golden light is shining out of the crack around its lid.

But he’s not in the thatched hut anymore; he’s inside a cold black metal phallus that has been probing around down below the surface of the nightmare: Bischoff’s submarine. Depth charges are going off all over the place and it’s filling up with sewage. Something clocks him on the side of the head: not a ham this time, but a human leg. The sub’s lined with tubes that carry voices: in English, German,
Arabic, Nipponese, Shanghainese, but confined and muffled in the plumbing so that they mingle together like the running of water. Then a pipe is ruptured by a near miss from a depth charge; from its jagged end issues a German voice:

“The foregoing may be taken as a rather coarse-grained treatment of the general organization of the Reich and particularly the military. Responsibility for cryptanalysis and cryptography is distributed among a large number of small Amts and Diensts attached to various tendrils of this structure. These are continually being reorganized and rearranged, however I may be able to provide you with a reasonably accurate and detailed picture…”

Shaftoe, chained to a bunk in the submarine by fetters of gold, feels one of his small, concealed handguns pressing into the small of his back, and wonders whether it would be bad form to shoot himself in the mouth. He paws wildly at the broken tube and manages to slap it down into the rising sewage; bubbles come out, and von Hacklheber’s words are trapped in them, like word balloons in a comic strip. When the bubbles reach the surface and burst, it sounds like screaming.

Root is sitting on the opposite bunk with the cigar box on his lap. He holds up his hand in a V for Victory, then levels it at Shaftoe’s face and pokes him in the eyes. “I cannot help you with your inability to find physical comfort—it is a problem of body chemistry,” he says. “It poses interesting theological questions. It reminds us that all the pleasures of the world are an illusion projected into our souls by our bodies.”

A lot of the other speaking tubes have ruptured now, and screaming comes from most of them; Root has to lean close in order to shout into Bobby’s ear. Shaftoe takes advantage of it to reach over and make a grab for the cigar box, which contains the stuff he wants: not morphine. Something better than morphine. Morphine is to the stuff in the cigar box what a Shanghai prostitute is to Glory.

The box flies open and blinding light comes out of it. Shaftoe covers his face. The salted and preserved body parts suspended from the ceiling tumble into his lap and begin to writhe, reaching out for other parts, assembling themselves
into living bodies. Mikulski comes back to life, aims his Vickers at the ceiling of the U-boat, and cuts an escape hatch. Instead of black water, golden light rushes through.

“What was your position in all this, then?” asks Root, and Shaftoe nearly jumps out of his chair, startled by the sound of a voice other than von Hacklheber’s. Given what happened the last time someone (Shaftoe) asked a question, this is heroic but risky. Starting with Hitler, von Hacklheber works his way down the chain of command.

Shaftoe doesn’t care: he’s on a rubber raft, along with various resurrected comrades from Guadalcanal and Detachment 2702. They are rowing across a still cove lit by giant flaming klieg lights in the sky. Standing behind the klieg lights is a man talking in a German accent: “My immediate supervisors, Wilhelm Fenner, from St. Petersburg, who headed all German military cryptanalysis from 1922 onwards, and his chief deputy, Professor Novopaschenny.”

All of these names sound alike to Shaftoe, but Root says, “A Russian?”

Shaftoe is really coming around now, reemerging into the World. He sits up straight, and his body feels stiff, like it hasn’t moved in a long time. He is about to apologize for the way he has been behaving, but since no one is looking at him funny, Shaftoe sees no reason to fill them in on what he’s been doing these last few minutes.

“Professor Novopaschenny was a Czarist astronomer who knew Fenner from St. Petersburg. Under them, I was given broad authority to pursue researches into the theoretical limits of security. I used tools from pure mathematics as well as mechanical calculating devices of my own design. I looked at our own codes as well as those of our enemies, looking for weaknesses.”

“What did you find?” Bischoff asks.

“I found weaknesses everywhere,” von Hacklheber says. “Most codes were designed by dilettantes and amateurs with no grasp of the underlying mathematics. It is really quite pitiable.”

“Including the Enigma?” Bischoff asks.

“Don’t even talk to me of that shit,” von Hacklheber says. “I dispensed with it almost immediately.”

“What do you mean, dispensed with it?” Root asks.

“Proved that it was shit,” von Hacklheber says.

“But the entire Wehrmacht still uses it,” Bischoff says.

Von Hacklheber shrugs and looks at the burning tip of his cigarette. “You expect them to throw all those machines away because one mathematician writes a paper?” He stares at his cigarette a while longer, then puts it to his lips, draws on it tastefully, holds the smoke in his lungs, and finally exhales it slowly through his vocal cords whilst simultaneously causing them to emit the following sounds: “I knew that there must be people working for the enemy who would figure this out. Turing. Von Neumann. Waterhouse. Some of the Poles. I began to look for signs that they had broken the Enigma, or at least realized its weaknesses and begun trying to break it. I ran statistical analyses of convoy sinkings and U-boat attacks. I found some anomalies, some improbable events, but not enough to make a pattern. Many of the grossest anomalies were later accounted for by the discovery of espionage stations and the like.

“From this I drew no conclusion. Certainly if they were smart enough to break the Enigma they would be smart enough to conceal the fact from us at any cost. But there was one anomaly they could not cover up. I refer to human anomalies.”