Cryptonomicon (78 page)

Indeed, when he’s almost there the Germans smash the windows out and begin firing in the direction of Enoch Root. Shaftoe creeps underneath the cabin, opens the trap door, and emerges into the center of the room. The Germans are standing there with their backs to him. He fires his Suomi into their backs until they stop moving. Then he drags them over to the trapdoor and dumps them down onto the beach so they won’t bleed all over the floor. The next high tide will carry them away, and with any luck they’ll wash ashore on the Fatherland in a couple weeks.

It is silent now, the way it’s supposed to be at an isolated cabin by the sea. But that doesn’t mean anything. Shaftoe makes his way carefully up into the trees and circles around
behind the action, surveying the killing zone from above. The one German is still crawling around on his elbows, trying to figure out what’s going on. Shaftoe kills him. Then he makes his way down to the beach and finds Enoch Root bleeding into the sand. He has taken a bullet just under the collarbone and there is a lot of blood, both from the wound and from Root’s mouth, whenever he exhales.

“I feel like I’m going to die,” he says.

“Good,” Shaftoe says, “that means you probably won’t.”

One of the Mercedes automobiles is still functional, though it has a number of shrapnel holes and a flat tire. Shaftoe jacks it up and swaps in a surviving tire from the other Mercedes, then drags Root over and gets him laid out in the backseat. He drives into Norrsbruck, fast. The Mercedes is a really great car and he wants to drive it all the way to Finland, Russia, Siberia, down through China—maybe stop for a little sushi in Shanghai—then on down through Siam and then Malaya, whence he could hop a sea-gypsy’s boat to Manila, find Glory, and—

The ensuing erotic reverie is cut short by the voice of Enoch Root, bubbling through blood, or something. “Go to the church.”

“Now padre, this is no time to be trying to convert me into a religious nut. You take it easy.”

“No, go
now.
Take
me.
”

“What, so you can make your peace with god? Hell, Rev, you ain’t gonna
die.
I’ll take you to the doctor’s. You can go to church later.”

Root drifts off into a coma, mumbling something about cigars.

Shaftoe ignores these ravings, burns rubber into Norrsbruck, and wakes up the doctor. Then he goes and finds Otto and Julieta and takes them over to the doctor’s office. Finally, he goes round to the church and wakes up the minister.

When they get back to the clinic, Rudolf von Hacklheber’s arguing with the doctor: Rudy (who’s apparently speaking on behalf of Enoch, who can hardly even talk) wants Enoch’s wedding to Julieta to happen now, in case Enoch dies on the table. Shaftoe is startled by how bad the
patient suddenly looks. But remembering what he and Enoch talked about earlier, he weighs in on Rudy’s side, and insists that marriage must come before surgery.

Otto produces a diamond ring literally out of his asshole—he carries valuables around in a polished metal tube shoved up his rectum—and Shaftoe serves as best man, uneasily holding that ring, still hot from Otto. Root’s too weak to thread it over Julieta’s finger and so Rudy guides his hands. A nurse serves as bridesmaid. Julieta and Enoch are joined in holy matrimony. Root utters the words of the oath one at a time, pausing after each one to cough blood into a stainless-steel bowl. Shaftoe gets all choked up, and actually sniffles.

The doctor etherizes Root, opens his chest, and goes in to repair the damage. Combat surgery isn’t his metier, and so he makes a few mistakes and generally does a great job of keeping the tension level high. Some major artery gives way, and it’s necessary for Shaftoe and the minister to go out and yank Swedes off the streets and persuade them to donate blood. Rudy is nowhere to be found, and Shaftoe suspects for a few minutes that he has blown town. But then suddenly he shows up at Root’s bedside holding an ancient Cuban cigar box, Spanish words all over it.

When Enoch Root dies, the only other people in the room are Rudolf von Hacklheber, Bobby Shaftoe, and the Swedish doctor.

The doctor checks his watch, then steps out of the room.

Rudy reaches out and closes Enoch’s eyes, then stands there with his hand on the late padre’s face, and looks at Shaftoe. “Go,” he says, “and make sure that the doctor files the death certificate.”

In war, it happens pretty frequently that one of your buddies dies, and you have to go right back into action, and save the waterworks for later. “Right,” Shaftoe says, and leaves the room.

The doctor’s sitting in his little office, umlaut-studded diplomas all over the walls, filling out the death certificate. A skeleton dangles in one corner. Bobby Shaftoe stands at attention on the opposite flank, he and the skeleton sort of triangulating on the doctor and watching him scrawl out the date and time of Enoch Root’s demise.

When the doctor’s finished, he leans back in his chair and rubs his eyes.

“Can I buy you a cup of coffee?” asks Bobby Shaftoe.

“Thank you,” says the doctor.

The young bride and her father are sprawled blearily in the doctor’s waiting room. Shaftoe offers to buy them coffee too. They leave Rudy to keep watch over the body of their late friend and coconspirator, and walk down the high street of Norrsbruck. Swedish people are beginning to come out of their houses. They look
exactly
like American midwesterners, and Shaftoe’s always startled when they fail to speak English.

The doctor stops in at the courthouse to drop off the death certificate. Otto and Julieta go on ahead to the cafe. Bobby Shaftoe loiters outside, staring back up the street. After a minute or two he sees Rudy poke his head out the door of the doctor’s office and look one way, then the other. He pulls his head back inside for a moment. Then he and another man walk out of the office. The other man is wrapped in a blanket that covers even his head. They climb into the Mercedes, Blanket Man lies down in the back seat, and Rudy drives off in the direction of his cottage.

Bobby Shaftoe sits down in the cafe with the Finns.

“Later today I’m gonna get into that fucking Mercedes and drive into Stockholm like a fucking bat out of hell,” Shaftoe says. Though the Finns will never appreciate it, he has chosen the “bat out of hell” phrase for a good reason. He understands, now, why he has thought of himself as a dead man ever since Guadalcanal. “Anyway. I hope y’all have a nice boat ride.”

“Boat ride?” Otto says innocently.

“I gave you up to the Germans, just like you did to me,” Shaftoe lies.

“You bastard!” Julieta begins. But Bobby cuts her off: “You got what you wanted and then some. A British passport and—” glancing out the window he sees the doctor emerging from the courthouse “—Enoch’s survivor’s benefits on top of it. And maybe more later. As for you, Otto, your career as a smuggler is over. I suggest you get the fuck out of here.”

Otto’s still too flabbergasted to be outraged, but he’s sure enough gonna be outraged pretty soon. “And go where!? Have you bothered to look at a map?”

“Display some fucking adaptability,” Shaftoe says. “You can figure out a way to get that tub of yours to England.”

Say what you will about Otto, he likes a challenge. “I could traverse the Göta Canal from Stockholm to Göteborg—no Germans
there
—that would get me almost to Norway—but Norway’s full of Germans! Even if I make it through the Skagerrak—you expect me to cross the North Sea? In winter? During a war?”

“If it makes you feel any better, after you get to England you have to sail to Manila.”

“Manila!?”

“Makes England seem easy, huh?”

“You think I am a rich yachtsman, who sails around the world
for fun!?
”

“No, but Rudolf von Hacklheber is. He’s got money, he’s got connections. He’s got a line on a good yacht that makes your ketch look like a dinghy,” Shaftoe says. “C’mon, Otto. Stop whining, pull some more diamonds out of your asshole, and get it done. It beats being tortured to death by Germans.” Shaftoe stands up and chucks Otto encouragingly on the shoulder, which Otto does not like at all. “See you in Manila.”

The doctor’s coming in the door. Bobby Shaftoe slaps some money down on the table. He looks Julieta in the eye. “Got some miles to cover now,” he says, “Glory’s waiting for me.”

Julieta nods. So in the eyes of one Finnish girl, anyway, Shaftoe’s not such a bad guy. He bends over and gives her a big succulent kiss, then straightens up, nods to the startled doctor, and walks out.

W
ATERHOUSE HAS BEEN CHEWING HIS WAY THROUGH
exotic Nip code systems at the rate of about one a week, but after he sees Mary Smith in the parlor of Mrs.
McTeague’s boarding house, his production rate drops to near zero. Arguably, it goes negative, for sometimes when he reads the morning newspaper, its plaintext scrambles into gibberish before his eyes, and he is unable to extract any useful information.

Despite his and Turing’s disagreements about whether the human brain is a Turing machine, he has to admit that Turing wouldn’t have too much trouble writing a set of instructions to simulate the brain functions of Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse.

Waterhouse seeks happiness. He achieves it by breaking Nip code systems and playing the pipe organ. But since pipe organs are in short supply, his happiness level ends up being totally dependent on breaking codes.

He cannot break codes (hence, cannot be happy) unless his mind is clear. Now suppose that mental clarity is designated by
C
_m
, which is normalized, or calibrated, in such a way that it is always the case that

where
C
_m
= 0 indicates a totally clouded mind and
C
_m
= 1 is Godlike clarity—an unattainable divine state of infinite intelligence. If the number of messages Waterhouse decrypts, in a given day, is designated by
N
_decrypts
, then it will be governed by
C
_m
in roughly the following way:

Clarity of mind (
C
_m
) is affected by any number of factors, but by far the most important is horniness, which might be designated by σ, for obvious anatomical reasons that Waterhouse finds amusing at this stage of his emotional development.

Horniness begins at zero at time
t = t
₀
(immediately following ejaculation) and increases from there as a linear function of time:

The only way to drop it back to zero is to arrange another ejaculation.

There is a critical threshold σ
_c
such that when σ > σ
_c
it becomes impossible for Waterhouse to concentrate on anything, or, approximately,

which amounts to saying that the moment σ rises above the threshold σ
_c
it becomes totally impossible for Waterhouse to break Nipponese cryptographic systems. This makes it impossible for him to achieve happiness (unless there is a pipe organ handy, which there isn’t).

Typically, it takes two to three days for σ to climb above σ
_c
after an ejaculation:

Critical, then, to the maintenance of Waterhouse’s sanity is the ability to ejaculate every two to three days. As long as he can arrange this, σ exhibits a classic sawtooth-wave pattern, optimally with the peaks at or near σ
_c
[see below] wherein the grey zones represent periods during which he is completely useless to the war effort.

So much for the basic theory. Now, when he was at Pearl Harbor, he discovered something that, in retrospect, should have been profoundly disquieting. Namely, that ejaculations obtained in a whorehouse (i.e., provided by the ministrations of an actual human female) seemed to drop σ below the level that Waterhouse could achieve through executing a Manual Override. In other words, the post-ejaculatory horniness level was not always equal to zero, as the naive theory propounded above assumes, but to some other quantity dependent upon whether the ejaculation was induced by Self or Other: σ = σ
_self
after masturbation but σ = σ
_other
upon leaving a whorehouse, where σ
_self
> σ
_other,
an inequality to which Waterhouse’s notable successes in breaking certain Nip naval codes at Station Hypo were directly attributable, in that the many convenient whorehouses nearby made it possible for him to go somewhat longer between ejaculations.

Note the twelve-day period [above], 19–30 May 1942, with only one brief interruption in productivity—during which Waterhouse (some might argue) personally won the Battle of Midway.

If he had thought about this, it would have bothered him, because sigma
_self
> sigma
_other
has troubling implications—particularly if the values of these quantities w.r.t. the all-important sigma
_c
are not fixed. If it weren’t for this inequality, then Waterhouse could function as a totally self-contained and independent unit. But sigma
_self
> sigma
_other
implies that he is, in the long run, dependent on other human beings for his mental clarity and, therefore, his happiness. What a pain in the ass!

Perhaps he has avoided thinking about this precisely because it is so troubling. The week after he meets Mary Smith, he realizes that he is going to have to think about it a lot more.

Something about the arrival of Mary Smith on the scene has completely fouled up the whole system of equations. Now, when he has an ejaculation, his clarity of mind does not take the upwards jump that it should. He goes right back to thinking about Mary. So much for winning the war!

He goes out in search of whorehouses, hoping that good old reliable sigma
_other
will save his bacon. This is troublesome. When he was at Pearl, it was easy, and uncontroversial. But
Mrs. McTeague’s boardinghouse is in a residential neighborhood, which, if it contains whorehouses, at least bothers to hide them. So Waterhouse has to travel downtown, which is not that easy in a place where internal-combustion vehicles are fueled by barbecues in the trunk. Furthermore, Mrs. McTeague is keeping her eye on him. She knows his habits. If he starts coming back from work four hours late, or going out after dinner, he’ll have some explaining to do. And it had better be convincing, because she appears to have taken Mary Smith under one quivering gelatinous wing and is in a position to poison the sweet girl’s mind against Waterhouse. Not only that, he has to do much of his excuse-making in public, at the dinner table, which he shares with Mary’s cousin (whose first name turns out to be Rod).

But hey, Doolittle bombed Tokyo, didn’t he? Waterhouse should at least be able to sneak out to a whorehouse. It takes a week of preparations (during which he is completely unable to accomplish meaningful work because of the soaring sigma level), but he manages it.

It helps a little, but only on the sigma management level. Until recently, that was the only level and so it would have been fine. But now (as Waterhouse realizes through long contemplation during the hours when he should be breaking codes) a new factor has entered the system of equations that governs his behavior; he will have to write to Alan and tell him that some new instructions will have to be added to the Waterhouse-simulation Turing machine. This new factor is
F
_MSp
,
the Factor of Mary Smith Proximity.

In a simpler universe,
F
_MSp
, would be orthogonal to sigma, which is to say that the two factors would be entirely independent of each other. If it were thus, Waterhouse could continue the usual sawtooth-wave ejaculation management program with no changes. In addition, he would have to arrange to have frequent conversations with Mary Smith so that
F
_MSp
would remain as high as possible.