Cryptonomicon

'Yes, these are both Lawrence when he was in the service.' Grandmother has always had this knack for telling people the obvious in a way that is scrupulously polite but that makes the recipient feel like a butthead for having wasted her time. By this point she is obviously tired of IDing photographs, a tedious job with an obvious subtext of 'you're going to die soon and we were curious-who is this lady standing next to the Buick?'

'Grandmother,' Randy says brightly, trying to rouse her interest, 'in this photo here, he is wearing a Navy uniform. And in this photo here, he is wearing an Army uniform.'

Grandma Waterhouse raises her eyebrows and looks at him with the synthetic interest she would use if she were at a formal affair of some kind, and some man she'd just met tried to give her a tutorial on tire-changing.

'It is, uh, I think, kind of unusual,' Randy says, 'for a man to be in both the Army and the Navy during the same war. Usually it's one or the other.'

'Lawrence had both an Army uniform and a Navy uniform,' Grandmother says, in the same tone she'd used to say he had both a small intestine and a large intestine, 'and he would wear whichever one was appropriate.'

'Of course he would,' Randy says.

* * *

The laminar wind is gliding over the highway like a crisp sheet being stripped from a bed, and Randy's finding it hard to keep the Acura on the pavement. The wind isn't strong enough to blow the car around, but it obscures the edges of the road; all he can see is this white, striated plane sliding laterally beneath him. His eye tells him to steer into it, which would be a bad idea since it would take him and Amy straight into the lava fields. He tries to focus on a distant point: the white diamond of Mount Rainier, a couple of hundred kilometers west.

'I don't even know when they got married,' Randy says. 'Isn't that horrible?'

'September of 1945,' Amy says. 'I dragged it out of her.'

'Wow.'

'Girl talk.'

'I didn't know you were even rigged for girl talk.'

'We can all do it.'

'Did you learn anything else about the wedding? Like-'

'The china pattern?'

'Yeah.'

'It was in fact Lavender Rose,' Amy says.

'So it fits. I mean, it fits chronologically.The submarine went down in May of 1945 off of Palawan-four months before the wedding. Knowing my grandmother, wedding preparations would have been well advanced by that point-they definitely would have settled on a china pattern.'

'And you think you have a photo of your grandpa in Manila around that time?'

'It's definitely Manila. And Manila wasn't liberated until March of '45.'

'So what do we have, then? Your grandpa must've had some kind of connection with someone on that U- boat, between March and May.'

'A pair of eyeglasses was found on the U-boat.' Randy pulls a photo out of his shirt pocket and hands it across to Amy. 'I'd be interested to know if they match the specs on that guy. The tall blond.'

'I can check it out when I go back. Is the geek on the left your grandpa?'

'Yeah.'

'Who's the geek in the middle?'

'I think it's Turing.'

'Turing, as in TURING Magazine?'

'They named the magazine after him because he did a lot of early work with computers,' Randy says.

'Like your grandpa did.'

'Yeah.'

'How about this guy we're going to see in Seattle? He's a computer guy too? Ooh, you're getting this look on your face like 'Amy just said something so stupid it caused me physical pain.' Is this a common facial expression among the men of your family? Do you think it is the expression that your grandfather wore when your grandmother came home and announced that she had backed the Lincoln Continental into a fire hydrant?'

'I am sorry if I make you feel bad sometimes,' Randy says. 'The family is full of scientists. Mathematicians. The least intelligent of us become engineers. Which is sort of what I am.'

'Excuse me, did you just say you were one of the least intelligent?'

'Least focused, maybe.'

'My point is that precision, and getting things right, in the mathematical sense, is the one thing we have going for us. Everyone has to have a way of getting ahead, right? Otherwise you end up working at McDonald's your whole life, or worse. Some are born rich. Some are born into a big family like yours. We make our way in the world by knowing that two plus two equals four, and sticking to our guns in a way that is kind of nerdy and that maybe hurts people's feelings sometimes. I'm sorry.'

'Hurts whose feelings? People who think that two plus two equals five?'

'People who put a higher priority on social graces than on having every statement uttered in a conversation be literally true.'

'Like, for example . . . female people?'

Randy grinds his teeth for about a mile, and then says, 'If there is any generalization at all that you can draw about how men think versus how women think, I believe it is that men can narrow themselves down to this incredibly narrow laser-beam focus on one tiny little subject and think about nothing else.'

'Whereas women can't?'

'I suppose women can.They rarely seem to wantto. What I'm characterizing here, as the female approach, is essentially saner and healthier.

'See, you are being a little paranoid here and focusing on the negative too much. It's not about how women are deficient. It's more about how men are deficient. Our social deficiencies, lack of perspective, or whatever you want to call it, is what enables us to study one species of dragonfly for twenty years, or sit in front of a computer for a hundred hours a week writing code. This is not the behavior of a well-balanced and healthy person, but it can obviously lead to great advances in synthetic fibers. Or whatever.'

'But you said that you yourself were not very focused.'

'Compared to other men in my family, that's true. So, I know a little about astronomy, a lot about computers, a little about business, and I have, if I may say so, a slightly higher level of social functioning than the others. Or maybe it's not even functioning,just an acute awareness of when I'm notfunctioning, so that I at least know when to feel embarrassed.'

Amy laughs. 'You're definitely good at that. It seems like you sort of lurch from one moment of feeling embarrassed to the next.'

Randy gets embarrassed.

'It's fun to watch,' Amy says encouragingly. 'It speaks well of you.'

'What I'm saying is that this does set me apart. One of the most frightening things about your true nerd, for many people, is not that he's socially inept-because everybody's been there-but rather his complete lack of embarrassment about it.'

'Which is still kind of pathetic.'

'It was pathetic when they were in high school,' Randy says. 'Now it's something else. Something very different from pathetic.'

'What, then?'

'I don't know. There is no word for it. You'll see.'

* * *

Driving over the Cascades produces a climatic transition that would normally require a four-hour airplane flight. Warm rain spatters the wind shield and loosens the rinds of ice on the wipers. The gradual surprises of March