Cryptonomicon

rhetorical road. 'I myself studied with Drs. Turing and von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton.'

Father John snaps awake, and Mr. Drkh looks as if he's just taken a fifty-caliber round in the small of his back. Clearly, Mr. Drkh has had a long career of being the weirdest person in any given room, but he's about to go down in flames.

In general, Waterhouse isn't good at just winging it, but he's tired and pissed off and horny, and this is a fucking war, and sometimes you haveto. He mounts the podium, dives for a round of chalk, and starts hammering equations onto the blackboard like an ack-ack gun. He uses well-tempered tuning as a starting point, takes off from there into the deepest realms of advanced number theory, circles back all of a sudden to the Qwghlmian modal scale, just to keep them on their toes, and then goes screaming straight back into number theory again. In the process, he actually stumbles across some interesting material that he doesn't think has been covered in the literature yet, and so he diverts from strict bullshitting for a few minutes to explore this thing and actually prove something that he thinks could probably be published in a mathematical journal, if he just gets around to typing it up properly. It reminds him that he's not half bad at this stuff when he's recently ejaculated, and that in turn just fuels his resolve to get this Mary-fucking thing worked out.

Finally, he turns around, for the first time since he started. Father John and Mr. Drkh are both dumbfounded.

'Let me just demonstrate!' Waterhouse blurts, and strides out of the room and doesn't bother looking back. Back in the church, he goes to the console, blows the dandruff off the keys, hits the main power switch. The electric motors come on, somewhere back behind the screen, and the instrument begins to complain and whine. No matter-it can all be drowned out. He scans the rows of stops-he already knows what this organ's got, because he's listened and deconstructed. He starts yanking out knobs.

Now Waterhouse is going to demonstrate that Bach can sound good even played on Mr. Drkh's organ, if you choose the right key. Just as Father John and Mr. Drkh are about halfway up the aisle, Waterhouse slams into that old chestnut, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, except that he's transposing it into C-sharp minor as he goes along, because (according to a very elegant calculation that just came into his head as he was running up the aisle of the church) it ought to sound good that way when played in Mr. Drkh's mangled tuning system.

The transposition is an awkward business at first and he hits a few wrong notes, but then it comes naturally and he transitions from the toccata into the fugue with tremendous verve and confidence. Gouts of dust and salvos of mouse droppings explode from the pipes as Waterhouse invokes whole ranks that have not been used in decades. Many of these are big bad loud reed stops that are difficult to tune. Waterhouse senses the pumping machinery straining to keep up with this unprecedented demand for power. The choir loft is suffused with a brilliant glow as the dust flung out of the choked pipes fills the air and catches the light coming through the rose window. Waterhouse muffs a pedal line, spitefully kicks off his terrible shoes and begins to tread the pedals the way he used to back in Virginia, with his bare feet, the trajectory of the bass line traced out across the wooden pedals in lines of blood from his exploded blisters. This baby has some nasty thirty-two-foot reed stops in the pedals, real earthshakers, probably put there specifically to irritate the Outer Qwghlmians across the street. None of the people who go to this church have ever heard these stops called into action, but Waterhouse puts them to good use now, firing off power chords like salvos from the mighty guns of the battleship Iowa.

All during the service, during the sermon and the scripture readings and the prayers, when he wasn't thinking about fucking Mary, he was thinking about how he was going to fix this organ. He was thinking back to the organ he worked on in Virginia, how the stops enabled the flow of air to the different ranks of pipes and how the keys on the keyboards activated all of the pipes that were enabled. He has this whole organ visualized in his head now, and while he is pounding through to the end of the figure, the top of his skull comes off, the filtered red light pours in, he sees the entire machine in his mind, as if in an exploded draftsman's view. Then it transforms itself into a slightly different machine-an organ that runs on electricity, with ranks of vacuum tubes here, and a grid of relays there. He has the answer, now, to Turing's question, the question of how to take a pattern of binary data and bury it into the circuitry of a thinking machine so that it can be later disinterred.

Waterhouse knows how to make electric memory. He must go write a letter to Alan instantly!

'Excuse me,' he says, and runs from the church. On his way out, he brushes past a small young woman who has been standing there gaping at his performance. When he is several blocks away, he realizes two things: that he is walking down the street barefoot, and that the young woman was Mary cCmndhd. He will have to circle back later and get his shoes and maybe fuck her. But first things first!

Chapter 65 HOME

Randy opens his eyes from out of a sliding nightmare. He was in his car, driving down the Pacific Coast Highway, when something went wrong with the steering. The car began to wander, first towards the vertical stone cliff on the left and then towards the sheer drop to huge jagged rocks projecting from thrashing waves on the right. Big rocks were rolling nonchalantly across the highway. He could not steer; the only way to stop moving is to open his eyes.

He is lying on a sleeping bag on a polished maple floor that is not level, and that is why he had the sliding dream. The eye/inner ear conflict makes his body spasm, he flails to plant both hands against the plane of the floor.

America Shaftoe sits, jeaned and barefoot, in the blue light of a window, bobby pins sprouting from chapped lips, looking at her face in an isosceles triangle of mirror whose scalpel-sharp edges depress but do not cut the pink skin of her fingertips. A web of lead ropes sags in the empty windowframe, a few lozenges of beveled glass still trapped in the interstices. Randy lifts his head slightly and looks downhill, into the corner of the room, and sees a great heap of swept shards. He rolls over, looks out the door and across the hallway and into what used to be Charlene's home office. Robin and Marcus Aurelius Shaftoe are sharing a double mattress in there, a shotgun and a rifle, a couple of big black cop flashlights, a Bible and a calculus textbook neatly arranged on the floor next to them.

The nightmare's feeling of panic, of needing to go somewhere and do something, subsides. Lying here in his ruined house listening to Amy's brush whistle through her hair, throwing off electrostatic snaps, is one of the calmer moments he's had.

'You just about ready to hit the road?' Amy says.

Across the hallway, one of the Shaftoe boys sits up without making any sound. The other opens his eyes, lifts his head, glances towards the weapons, lights, and Good Book, then relaxes again.

'I got a fire going out in the yard,' Amy says, 'and some water boiling. Didn't think it was safe to use the fireplace.'

Everyone slept in their clothes last night. All they have to do is put their shoes on and piss out the windows. The Shaftoes move about the place faster than Randy does, not because they are more surefooted, but because they never saw this house when it was level and sound. But Randy lived here for years and years when it was, and his mind thinks it knows its way around the place. Going to bed last night, his biggest fear was that he would get up drowsily in the middle of the night and try to go downstairs. The house used to have a beautiful winding stairway which has now telescoped into the basement. Last night, by dint of pulling the U-Haul onto the front lawn and aiming its headlights directly in through windows (whose cracks and jags and facets refracted the light gorgeously), they were able to clamber into the basement and find a ten-foot aluminum extension ladder which they used to get into the upstairs. Once they had gotten up, they pulled the ladder up with them, like a drawbridge, so that even if looters did enter the downstairs, the Shaftoe boys would be able to sit at the top of what used to be