Cryptonomicon

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He embodies (he realizes) just about the worst nightmare, for many women, of what might happen in their lives. As for the men he saw last night, they were pretty strongly incensed to back whatever stance their wives adopted. Some of them really did, apparently, feel similarly. Others eyed him with obvious curiosity. Some were openly friendly. Weirdly, the ones who adopted the sternest and most terrible Old Testament moral tone were the Modern Language Association types who believed that everything was relative and that, for example, polygamy was as valid as monogamy. The friendliest and most sincere welcome he'd gotten was from Scott, a chemistry professor, and Laura, a pediatrician, who, after knowing Randy and Charlene for many years, had one day divulged to Randy, in strict confidence, that, unbeknownst to the academic community at large, they had been spiriting their three children off to church every Sunday morning, and even had them all baptized.

Randy had gone into their house once to help Scott wrestle a freshly reconditioned clawfoot bathtub up the stairs, and had actually seen the word GOD written on actual pieces of paper stuck to the walls of their house-like on the refrigerator door, and the walls of the children's bedrooms, where juvenile art tends to be reposited. Little time-wasting projects they had done during Sunday school-pages torn from coloring books, showing a somewhat more multicultural Jesus than the one Randy had grown up with (curly hair, e.g.), talking to little biblical kids or assisting disoriented Holy Land livestock. The sight of this stuff around the house, commingled with normal (i.e., secular) kid-art-junk from elementary school, Batman posters, etc. made Randy feel grossly embarrassed. It was like going to the house of some supposedly sophisticated people and finding a neon-on-black-velvet Elvis painting hanging above their state-of-the-art Italian designer furniture. Definitely a social-class thing. And it wasn't like Scott and Laura were deadly earnest types, and neither were they glassy-eyed and foaming at the mouth. They had after all managed to pass themselves off as members in good standing of decent academic society for a number of years. They were a bit quieter than many others, they took up less space in the room, but then that was normal for people trying to raise three kids, and so they passed.

Randy and Amy had spent a full hour talking to Scott and Laura last night; they were the only people who made any effort to make Amy feel welcome. Randy hadn't the faintest idea what these people thought of him and what he had done, but he could sense right away that, essentially that was not the issuebecause even if they thought he had done something evil, they at least had a framework, a sort of procedure manual, for dealing with transgressions. To translate it into UNIX system administration terms (Randy's fundamental metaphor for just about everything), the post-modern, politically correct atheists were like people who had suddenly found themselves in charge of a big and unfathomably complex computer system (viz, society) with no documentation or instructions of any kind, and so whose only way to keep the thing running was to invent and enforce certain rules with a kind of neo-Puritanical rigor, because they were at a loss to deal with any deviations from what they saw as the norm. Whereas people who were wired into a church were like UNIX system administrators who, while they might not understand everything, at least had some documentation, some FAQs and How-tos and README files, providing some guidance on what to do when things got out of whack. They were, in other words, capable of displaying adaptability.

'Yo! Randy!' says America Shaftoe. 'M.A. is honking at you.'

'Why?' Randy asks. He looks in the rearview, sees a reflection of the ceiling of the Acura, and realizes he is slouched way down in his seat. He sits up straight, and spots the Impala.

'I think it's because you're driving ten miles an hour,' Amy says, 'and M.A. likes to go ninety.'

'Okay,' Randy says, and, just as simple as that, pushes down on the accelerator pedal and drives out of town forever.

Chapter 66 BUNDOK

'The name of this place is Bundok,' Captain Noda tells him confidently. 'We have chosen it carefully.' Goto Dengo and Lieutenant Mori are the only other persons present in the tent, but he speaks as if addressing a battalion drawn up on a parade ground.

Goto Dengo has been in the Philippines long enough to understand that in the local tongue bundokmeans any patch of rugged mountainous terrain, but he does not reckon that Captain Noda is the sort who would appreciate being brought up to speed by a subordinate. If Captain Noda says that this place is called Bundok, then Bundok it is, and forever will be.

Captain is not an especially high rank, but Noda carries himself as if he's a general. Somewhere, this man is important. He is pale-skinned, as if he's been spending the winter in Tokyo. His boots have not begun to rot on his feet yet.

A hard leather attache case rests on the table. He opens one end and draws out a large piece of folded white cloth. The two lieutenants scurry to assist him in unfolding this across the tabletop. Goto Dengo is startled by the feel of the linen. His fingertips are the only part of his body that will ever touch bedsheets as fine as these. THE MANILA HOTEL is printed along the selvedge.

A diagram has been sketched out on the bedsheet. Blue-black fountain-pen marks, punctuated with spreading blotches where the hand hesitated, reinforce an earlier stratum of graphite scratches. Someone terribly important (probably the last person to sleep on this bedsheet) has come in with a black grease pencil and reshaped the whole thing in his own image with fat thrusting strokes and hasty notations that look like unraveled braids in a woman's long hair. This work has been annotated politely by a fastidious engineer, probably Captain Noda himself, working with ink and a fine brush.

The heavy with the grease pencil has labeled the entire thing BUNDOK SITE.

Lieutenants Mori and Goto affix the sheet to the canvas of the tent with some small, rusty cotter pins that a private brings to them, triumphantly, in a cracked porcelain coffee cup. Captain Noda watches calmly, puffing on a cigarette. 'Be careful,' he jokes, 'MacArthur slept on that sheet!'

Lieutenant Mori dutifully cracks up. Goto Dengo is standing on tiptoe, holding up the top edge of the sheet, examining the faint pencil marks underlying the whole diagram. He sees a couple' of little crosses and, having spent too long in the Philippines, supposes at first that they are churches. In one place, three of them are clustered together and he imagines Calvary.

Nearby, diggings have been indicated. He thinks Golgotha: The Place of the Skull.

Lunatic! He needs to get his mind in order. Lieutenant Mori shoves pins through the linen with faint popping noises. Goto Dengo steps away, keeping his back to the Captain, closes his eyes, and gets his bearings. He is Nipponese. He is in the Southern Resource Zone of Greater Nippon. The cross-shaped marks represent summits. The diggings are some sort of excavation in which he is destined to play an important role.

The blue-black fountain-pen marks are rivers. Five of them sprawl from the triple summit of Bundok. Two of the south-going streams combine to make a larger river. A third stream roughly parallels this one. But the man with the black grease pencil has drawn a stout line across the stream with such force that loose curls of black grease can still be seen dangling from the linen. The fountain pen has been used to scratch out a bulge in the river just upstream of this mark. Apparently they want to dam the river and make a pool, or a pond, or a lake; it is difficult to get a sense of scale. It is labeled, LAKE YAMAMOTO.

Looking more closely, he sees that the larger river-the one formed by the confluence of the two tributaries- is also to be dammed, but much farther south. This has been dubbed TOJO RIVER. But there is no LAKE TOJO. It appears that this dam will thicken and deepen the Tojo River but not turn it into an actual lake. Goto Dengo infers from this that the valley of the Tojo River must be steep-sided.

The same basic pattern is repeated everywhere on the bedsheet. Grease pencil wants a complete perimeter security system. Grease pencil wants one and only one road leading to this place. Grease pencil wants two areas for barracks: one big area and one small area. The details have been worked out by smaller men with better penmanship.

'Worker housing,' explains Captain Noda, pointing to the big area with his swagger stick. 'Military barracks,' he says, pointing to the small area. Bending closer, Goto Dengo can see that the larger, worker area is to be surrounded by an irregular polygon of barbed wire. Actually, two polygons, one nested within the other, a barren space in between. The vertices of this polygon are labeled with the names of weapons:

Nambu, Nambu, Model 89 field mortar.