proving that this is so, using formal logic, but he is weak in this area and doesn't know enough of the underlying axioms to reach a Q.E.D.
By the end of the week, though, he has figured out that these meetings are just one ramification of the Yamamoto assassination. Winston Spencer Churchill is very fond indeed of Bletchley Park and all its works, and he places the highest priority on preserving its secrecy, but the interception of Yamamoto's airplane has blown a gaping hole in the screen of deception. The Americans responsible for this appalling gaffe are now trying to cover their asses by spreading a story that native islander spies caught wind of Yamamoto's trip and radioed the news to Guadalcanal, whence the fatal P-38s were dispatched. But the P-38s were operating at the extreme limit of their fuel range and would have had to be sent out at precisely the correct time in order to make it back to Guadalcanal, so the Japanese would have to have their heads several feet up their asses to fall for that. Winston Churchill is pissed off in the extreme, and these meetings represent a prolonged bureaucratic hissy fit intended to produce some meaningful and enduring policy shift.
Every evening after the meetings, Waterhouse takes the tube to Euston and the train to Bletchley, and sits up late working on Rudy's numbers. Alan has been working on them during the daytime, so the two of them, combining their efforts, can almost pound away on it round the clock.
Not all of the riddles are mathematical. For example, why the hell do the Germans have Rudy copying out big long numbers by hand? If the letters do indeed represent big numbers that would indicate that Dr. Rudolf von Hacklheber had been assigned to a job as a mere cipher clerk. This would not be the stupidest move ever made by a bureaucracy, but it seems unlikely. And what little intelligence they've been able to gather from Germany suggests that Rudy has in fact been given a rather important job-important enough to keep extremely secret.
Alan's hypothesis is that Waterhouse has been making an understandable but totally wrong assumption. The numbers are
Usually, making one-time pads is just as lowly a job as enciphering messages-a job for clerks, who use decks of cards or bingo machines to choose letters at random. But Alan and Waterhouse are now operating on the assumption that this encryption scheme is a radical new invention-presumably, an invention of Rudy's-in which the pads are generated not at random but by using some mathematical algorithm.
In other words, there is some calculation, some equation that Rudy has dreamed up. You give it a value- probably the date, and possibly some other information as well, such as an arbitrary key phrase or number. You crank through the steps of the calculation, and the result is a number, some nine hundred digits long, which is three thousand binary digits, which gives you six hundred letters (enough to cover one sheet of paper) when you convert it using the Baudot code. The nine-hundred-digit decimal number, the three-thousand-digit binary number, and the six hundred letters are all the same abstract, pure number, encoded differently.
Meanwhile, your counterpart, probably on the other side of the world, is going through the same calculation and coming up with the same one time pad. When you send him a message encrypted using the day's pad, he can decipher it.
If Turing and Waterhouse can figure out how the calculation works, they can read all of these messages too.
Chapter 41 PHREAKING
The dentist is gone, the door locked, the phone unplugged. Randall Lawrence Waterhouse lies naked on the starched, turned-down sheets of his king-sized bed. His head is propped up on a pillow so that he can peer through the vee of his feet at a BBC World Service newscast on the television. A ten-dollar minibar beer is near at hand. It's six in the morning in America and so rather than a pro basketball game, he has to settle for this BBC newscast, which is strongly geared to South Asian happenings. A long and very sober story about a plague of locusts on the India/Pakistan border follows a piece on a typhoon about to nail Hong Kong. The king of Thailand is calling in some of his government's more corrupt officials to literally prostrate themselves before him. Asian news always has this edge of the fantastic to it, but it's all dead serious, no nods or winks anywhere. Now he's watching a story about a nervous system disease that people in New Guinea come down with as a consequence of eating other people's brains. Just your basic cannibal story. No wonder so many Americans come here on business and never really go home again-it's like stepping into the pages of
Someone is knocking on his door. Randy gets up and puts on his plush white hotel bathrobe. He peers through the peephole, half expecting to see a pygmy standing there with a blowpipe, though he wouldn't mind a seductive Oriental courtesan. But it's just Cantrell. Randy opens the door. Cantrell is already holding up his hands, palms out, in a cheerful 'shut up already' gesture. 'Don't worry,' Cantrell says, 'I'm not here to talk about Biz.'
'In that case I won't break this beer bottle over your head,' Randy says. Cantrell must feel exactly the same way Randy does, which is that so much wild shit happened today that the only way to deal with it is not to talk about it at all. Most of the brain's work is done while the brain's owner is ostensibly thinking about something else, so sometimes you have to
'Come to my room,' Cantrell says. 'Pekka is here.'
'The Finn who got blown up?'
'The same.'
'Why is he here?'
'Because there's no reason not to be. After he got blown up he adopted a technomadic lifestyle.'
'So it's just a coincidence, or-'
'Nah,' Cantrell says. 'He's helping me win a bet.'
'What kind of bet?'
'I was telling Tom Howard about Van Eck phreaking a few weeks ago. Tom said it sounded like bullshit. He bet me ten shares of Epiphyte stock that I couldn't make it actually work outside of a laboratory.'
'Is Pekka good at that kind of thing?'
By way of saying yes, Cantrell adopts a serious look and says, 'Pekka is writing a whole chapter about it for the
This sounds almost like a call to arms. Randy would have to be some kind of loser to retreat to his bed after that, so he backs into the room and steps into his trousers, which are standing there telescoped into the floor where he dropped them upon his return from the sultan's palace.
Cantrell grins, but says, 'If we begin talking about surreal, we'll end up talking about today.'
'You got that right,' Randy says. 'Let's go.'
Before Pekka became known around Silicon Valley as the Finn Who Got Blown Up, he was known as Cello Guy, because he had a nearly autistic devotion to his cello and took it with him everywhere, always trying to stuff it into overhead luggage racks. Not coincidentally, he was an analog kind of guy from way back whose specialty was radio.
When packet radio started to get big as an alternative to sending data down wires, Pekka moved to Menlo Park and joined a startup. His company bought their equipment at used-computer stores, and Pekka ended up scoring a pretty nice nineteen-inch high-res multisync monitor perfectly adequate for his adaptable twenty-four- year-old eyes. He hooked it up to a slightly used Pentium box jammed full of RAM.
He also installed Finux, a free UNIX operating system created by Finns, almost as a way of proclaiming to
