Cryptonomicon

So far so good, but then with a few whacks of the Page Down key Randy's looking at endless staggered grids of random letters (some kind of predigital method for solving ciphers) which the author would not have put into the document if they did not convey some kind of useful lesson to the reader. Randy is miserably aware that until he has learned to read through these grids he will not even be up to the level of competence of a World War II novice cryptanalyst. The sample messages used are like ONE PLANE REPORTED LOST AT SEA and TROOPS HAVING DIFFICULTY MAINTAINING CONNECTION WITH FORTY FIFTH INFANTRY STOP which Randy finds kind of hokey until he remembers that the book was written by people who probably didn't know what 'hokey' meant, who lived in some radically different pre-hokiness era where planes really did get lost at sea and the people in those planes never came back to see their families and in which people who even raised the issue of hokeyness in conversation were likely to end up pitied or shunned or maybe even psychoanalyzed.

Randy feels like a little shit when he thinks about this stuff. He wonders about Chester. Is the shattered 747 hanging from Chester's ceiling just a monumental act of bad taste, or is Chester actually making a Statement with that thing? Could it be that nerdy Chester is actually some kind of deep thinker who has transcended the glibness and superficiality of his age? This very subject has been debated by serious people at some length, which is why learned articles about Chester's house keep showing up in unexpected places. Randy wonders if he's ever had a serious experience in his life, an experience that would be worth the time it would take to reduce it to a pithy STOP-punctuated message in capital letters and run it through a cryptosystem.

They must have flown right by the site of the wreck. In a few days Randy will turn right around and come halfway back to Kinakuta to make what meager contribution he can to the job of dragging gold bars out of it. He's only going to Manila to take care of some business there; some kind of urgent meeting demanded by one of Epiphyte's Filipino partners. The stuff that Randy came to Manila to do, a year and a half ago, mostly runs itself now, and when it actually requires his attention he finds it fantastically annoying.

He can see that the modern way of thinking about stuff, as applied to the Cryptonomicon,isn't going to help him very much in his goal of decrypting the Arethusa intercepts. The original writers of the Cryptonomiconactually had to decrypt and read these goddamn messages in order to save the lives of their countrymen. But the modern annotators have no interest in reading other people's mail per se; the only reason they pay attention to this subject at all is that they aspire to make new crypto systems that cannot be broken by the NSA, or now this new IDTRO thing. The Black Chamber. Crypto experts won't trust a cryptosystem until they have attacked it, and they can't attack it until they know the basic cryptanalytical techniques, and hence the demand for a document like this modern, annotated version of the Cryptonomicon.But their attacks generally don't go any further than demonstrating a system's vulnerabilities in the abstract. All they want is to be able to say in theorythis system could be attacked in the following way because from a formal number-theory stand point it belongs to such-and-such class of problems, and those problems as a group take about so many processor cycles to attack. And this all fits very well with the modern way of thinking about stuff in which all you need to do, in order to attain a sense of personal accomplishment and earn the accolades of your peers, is to demonstrate an ability to slot new examples of things into the proper intellectual pigeon-holes.

But the gap between demonstrating the vulnerability of a cryptosystem in the abstract, and actually breaking a bunch of messages written in that cryptosystem, is as wide, and as profound, as the gap between being able to criticize a film (e.g., by slotting it into a particular genre or movement) and being able to go out into the world with a movie camera and a bunch of unexposed film and actually make one. Of these issues the Cryptonomiconhas nothing to say until you tunnel down to its oldest and deepest strata. Some of which, Randy suspects, were written by his grandfather.

The head flight attendant comes in on the intercom and says something in various languages. Each transition to a new language is accompanied by a sort of frisson of confusion running through the whole passenger compartment: first the English-speaking passengers all ask each other what the English version of the announcement said and just as they are giving it up as a lost cause the Cantonese version winds down and the Chinese-speaking passengers ask each other what it said. The Malay version gets no reaction at all because no one actually speaks the Malay language, except maybe for Randy when he is asking for coffee. Presumably the message has something to do with the fact that the plane is about to land. Manila sprawls out below them in the dark, vast patches of it flickering on and off as different segments of the electrical power grid straggle with their own particular challenges vis-a-vis maintenance and overload. In his mind, Randy is already sitting in front of his TV tucking into a bowl of Cap'n Crunch. Maybe there is a place in NAIA where he can purchase a brick of ice-cold milk, so that he will not even have to stop at a 24 Jam on the way home.

The Malaysian Air flight attendants all have big smiles for him on the way out; as globe-trotting expat technocrats all know, hospitality-industry people think it is just adorable, or pretend to think so, when you try to use some language-any language-other than English, and they remember you for it. Soon he is inside good old NAIA, which is sort of, but not fully, air-conditioned. There is a whole group of girls in identical windbreakers gathered by his baggage carousel, chattering like an exaltation of larks under a DEATH TO DRUG TRAFFICKERS sign. The bags take a long time to arrive-Randy wouldn't have checked baggage at all except that he acquired a lot of books, and a few other souvenirs, on his trip-some salvaged from the ruined house and some inherited from his grandfather's trunk. And in Kinakuta he bought some new diving gear that he hopes he will put to use very soon. Finally he had to buy a big sort of duffel-bag-on-wheels to carry it all. Randy enjoys watching the girls, apparently some kind of high school or college field-hockey team on the road. For them, even waiting for the baggage carousel to start up is a big adventure, full of thrills and chills; e.g., when the carousel groans into action for a few moments and then shuts down again. But finally it starts up for real, and out comes a whole row of identical gym bags, color-coordinated to match the girls' uniforms, and in the middle of them is Randy's big duffel. He heaves it off the carousel and checks the tiny combination padlocks: one on the zipper for the main compartment and one on a smaller pocket at the end of the bag. There is one more tiny pocket on the top of the bag which has no practical function that Randy can think of; he didn't use it and so he didn't lock it.

He deploys the bag's telescoping handle, lifts it up onto its built-in wheels, and heads for customs. Along the way he gets mixed into the group of field-hockey players, who find this extremely titillating and hilarious, which is slightly embarrassing for him until they start finding their own hilarity hilarious. There are only a few customs lanes open, and there is a sort of traffic director waving people this way and that; he shoos the girls towards the green lane and then, inevitably, ducts Randy into a red one.

Looking through the lane, Randy can see the area on the other side where people wait to greet arriving passengers. There is a woman in a nice dress there. It's Amy. Randy comes to a complete stop the better to gape at her. She looks fantastic. He wonders if it's totally presumptuous of him to think that Amy put on a dress for no other reason than that she knew Randy would enjoy looking at her in it. Whether it's presumptuous or not, that's what he does think, and it almost makes him want to faint. He doesn't want to let his mind run completely out of control here, but maybe there is something better in store for him tonight than digging into a bowl of Cap'n Crunch.

Randy steps into the lane. He wants to just bolt through and head straight for Amy, but this would be a bad idea. But it's okay. Anticipation never killed anyone. Anticipation can actually be kind of enjoyable. What did Avi say? Sometimes wanting is better than having.Randy's pretty sure that having Amy would not disappoint, but wanting ain't such a bad thing either. He is holding his laptop bag out before him and drawing the big duffel behind, slowing gradually to a stop so that it won't roll forward under its own momentum and break his knees. There is the requisite long stainless-steel table and a bored fireplug-shaped gentleman behind it saying, 'Nationality? Port of embarkation?' for the hundred thousandth time in his life. Randy hands over his documents and answers the questions while bending down to heft the duffel bag up onto the metal tabletop. 'Remove the locks please?' the customs inspector says. Randy bends down and squints at the tiny brass wheels, trying to line them up into the right combination. While he's doing that, he hears the customs inspector working right next to his head, unzipping the tiny, empty pocket on the top of the duffel bag. There is a rustling noise. 'What is this?' the inspector asks. 'Sir? Sir?'

'Yes, what is it?' Randy says, straightening up and looking the inspector in the eye.

Like a model in an infomercial, the inspector holds up a small Ziploc bag right next to his head and points to it with the other hand. A door opens behind him and people come out. The Ziploc bag has been partly filled with sugar, or something-maybe confectioner's sugar-and rolled into a cigar-shaped slug.

'What is this, sir?' the inspector repeats.