high to accommodate it. He can see a repeating pattern of tears in the wing's skin that seems to be an expression of the same underlying math that generates repeating vortices in a wake, or swirls in a Mandelbrot set. Charlene and his friends used to heckle him for being a Platonist, but everywhere he goes he sees the same few ideal forms shadowed in the physical world. Maybe he's just stupid or something.
The house lacks a woman's touch. Randy gathers, from hints dropped by Chester, that the TWA has not turned out to be the conversation starter that he had hoped it would be. He is considering building fake ceilings over some of the house's partitions so that they will feel more like rooms, which, he admits, might make 'some people' feel more comfortable there and open the possibility of their committing themselves to 'an extended stay.' So evidently he is in early negotiations with some kind of female, which is good news.
'Chester, two years ago you sent me e-mail about a project you were launching to build replicas of early computers. You wanted information about my grandfather's work.'
'Yeah,' Chester says. 'You want to see that stuff? It's been on the back burner, but-'
'I just inherited some of his notebooks,' Randy says.
Chester's eyebrows go up. Amy glances out the window; her hair, skin, and clothes take on a pronounced reddish tinge from Doppler effect as she drops out of the conversation at relativistic velocity.
'I want to know if you have a functioning ETC card reader.'
Chester snorts. 'That's all?'
'That's all.'
'You want a 1932 Mark III card reader? Or a 1938 Mark IV? Or a-'
'Does it make any difference? They all read the same cards, right?'
'Yeah, pretty much.'
'I have some cards from circa 1945 that I would like to have read out onto a floppy disk that I can take home.'
Chester picks up a cellphone the size of a gherkin and begins to prod it. 'I'll call my card man,' he says. 'Retired ETC engineer. Lives on Mercer Island. Comes up here on his boat a couple times a week and tinkers with this stuff. He'll be really excited to meet you.'
While Chester is conversing with his card man, Amy meets Randy's eyes and gives him a look that is almost perfectly unreadable. She seems a bit deflated. Worn down. Ready to go home. Her very unwillingness to show her feelings confirms this. Before this trip, Amy would have agreed that it takes all kinds to make a world. She'd still assent to it now. But Randy's been showing her some practical applications of that concept, in the last few days, that are going to take her a while to fit into her world-view. Or, more importantly, into her Randy-view. And sure enough, the moment Chester's off the phone, she's asking if she can use it to call the airlines. There is only a momentary upward flick of the eyes towards the TWA. And once Chester gets over his astonishment that anyone still uses voice technology to make airline reservations in this day and age, he takes her to the nearest computer (there is a fully outfitted UNIX machine in every room) and patches into the airline databases directly and begins searching for the optimal route back home. Randy goes and stares out the window at the chilly whitecaps slapping the mud shore and fights the urge to just stay here in Seattle, which is a town where he could be very happy. Behind him Chester and Amy keep saying 'Manila,' and it sounds ridiculously exotic and hard to reach. Randy thinks that he is marginally smarter than Chester and would be even richer if he'd only stayed here.
A fast white boat comes larruping around the point from the direction of Mercer Island and banks towards him. Randy sets down his cold coffee and goes out to his car and retrieves a certain trunk-a lovely gift from a delighted Aunt Nina. It is full of certain old treasures, like his grandfather's high school physics notebooks. He sets aside (for example) a box labeled HARVARD-WATERHOUSE PRIME FACTOR CHALLENGE '49-52 to reveal a stack of bricks, neatly wrapped in paper that has gone gold with age, each consisting of a short stack of ETC cards, and each labeled ARETHUSA INTERCEPTS with a date from 1944 or '45. They have been in suspended animation for more than fifty years, stored on a dead medium, and now Randy is going to breathe life into them again, and maybe send them out on the Net, a few strands of fossil DNA broken out of their amber shells and released in the world again.
Probably they will fail and die, but if they flourish, it should make Randy's life a little more interesting. Not that it's devoid of interest now, but it is easier to introduce new complications than to resolve the old ones.
Chapter 73 ROCK
Bundok is good rock; whoever picked it must have known this. That basalt is so strong that Goto Dengo can carve into it any system of tunnels that he desires. As long as he observes a few basic engineering principles, he need not worry about tunnels collapsing.
Of course, cutting holes into such rock is hard work. But Captain Noda and Lieutenant Mori have provided him with an unlimited supply of Chinese laborers. At first the chatter of their drills drowns out the sounds of the jungle. Later, as they burrow into the earth, it fades to a thick tamping beat, leaving only the buzzing drone of the air compressors. Even at night they work by the dim light of lanterns, which cannot penetrate the canopy overhead. Not that MacArthur is sending observation planes over Luzon in the middle of the night, but work lights shining up on the mountain would be noticed by the lowland Filipinos.
The inclined shaft connecting the bottom of Lake Yamamoto to Golgotha is by far the longest part of the complex, but it need not have a very great diameter: just big enough for a single worker to worm his way up to the end and operate his drill. Before the lake is created, Goto Dengo has a crew dig the extreme upper end of that shaft, tunneling out and down from the riverbank with a dip angle of some twenty degrees. This excavation continually fills up with water-it is effectively a well-and removing the waste rock is murder, because it all has to be hauled uphill. So when it has proceeded for some five meters, Goto Dengo has the opening sealed up with stones and mortar.
Then he has the latrines' filled in, and the area around the lake cleared of workers. They can do nothing now but contaminate the place with evidence. Summer has arrived, the rainy season on Luzon, and he is worried that rain will find the ruts worn into the soil by the Chinese workers' feet and turn them into gullies, impossible to conceal. But the unusually dry weather holds, and vegetation rapidly takes root on the bare ground.
Goto Dengo is faced with a challenge that would seem familiar to the designer of a garden back home: he needs to create an artificial formation that seems natural. It needs to look as though a boulder rolled down the mountain after an earthquake and wedged itself in a bottleneck of the Yamamoto River. Other rocks, and the logs of dead trees, piled up against it, forming a natural dam that created the lake.
He finds the boulder he needs sitting in the middle of the riverbed about a kilometer upstream. Dynamite would only shatter it, and so he brings in a stout crew of workers with iron levers, and they get it rolling. It goes a few meters and stops.
This is discouraging, but the workers have the idea now. Their leader is Wing-the bald Chinese man who helped Goto Dengo bury the corpse of Lieutenant Ninomiya. He has the mysterious physical strength that seems to be common among bald men, and he has a kind of mesmerizing leadership power over the other Chinese. He somehow manages to get them excited about moving the boulder. Of course, they have to move it, because Goto Dengo has let it be known that he wants it moved, and if they don't, Lieutenant Mori's guards will shoot them on the spot. But above and beyond this, they seem to welcome the challenge. Certainly standing in cool running water beats working down in the mineshafts of Golgotha.
The boulder is in place three days later. The water divides around it. More boulders follow, and the river begins to pool. Trees do not naturally sprout from lakes, and so Goto Dengo has workers fell the ones that are standing here-not with axes, though. He shows them how to excavate the roots one at a time, like archaeologists digging up a skeleton, so that it looks as if the trees were uprooted during a typhoon. These are piled up against the boulders, and smaller stones and gravel follow. Suddenly the level of Lake Yamamoto begins to rise. The dam leaks, but the leaks peter out as more gravel and clay are dumped in behind it. Goto Dengo is not above plugging troublesome holes with sheets of tin, as long as it's down where no one will ever see it. When the lake has reached its desired level, the only sign it's manmade is a pair of wires trailing up onto its shore, rooted in demolition charges molded into the concrete plug on its bottom.
Golgotha is cut into a ridge of basalt that is flung out from the base of the mountain-like a buttress root
