for the possibility of grotesque pre-erotic fumbling. Also, Aurora smiles a lot, and she has a really spectacular smile, where Amy's face was intense and preoccupied. The next dance is announced as ladies' choice, and Randy is still trying to make eye contact with Amy when he finds this tiny middle-aged Filipina standing there asking Aurora if she would mind terribly. Aurora consigns him to the other lady like a pork belly futures contract on the commodity exchange, and suddenly Randy and the lady are dancing the Texas two-step to the strains of a pre-disco Bee Gees tune.
'So, have you found wealth in the Philippines yet?' asks the lady, whose name Randy did not quite catch. She acts as if she expects him to know her.
'Uh, my partners and I are exploring business opportunities,' Randy says. 'Maybe wealth will follow.'
'I understand you are good with numbers,' the lady says.
Randy is really racking his brain now. How does this woman know he's a numbers kind of guy? 'I'm good with
'Isn't that what I said?'
'Nah, mathematicians stay away from actual, specific numbers as much as possible. We like to talk about numbers without actually exposing ourselves to them-that's what computers are for.'
The lady will not be denied; she has a script and she's sticking to it. 'I have a math problem for you,' the lady says.
'Shoot.'
'What is the value of the following information: fifteen degrees, seventeen minutes, forty-one point three two seconds north, and a hundred and twenty-one degrees, fifty-seven minutes, zero point five five seconds east?'
'Uh. . . I don't know. It sounds like a latitude and longitude. Northern Luzon, right?'
The lady nods.
'You want me to tell you the value of those numbers?'
'Yes.'
'Depends on what's there, I guess.'
'I suppose it does,' the lady says. And that's all she says, for the rest of the dance. Other than complimenting Randy on his balletic skills, which is just as hard to interpret.
Chapter 57 GIRL
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 code-breaking 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
