Cryptonomicon

'Beg pardon, sir?'

'Shall we say abaci?'

'Whatever you say, sir.'

'Were any of these abaci touched by any of your men?'

There is a flurry of discussion. The Army guy has to confer with several enlisted men, dispatch gofers to interview people, and make a couple of phone calls. This is a good sign; there are a lot of men who would just say 'no, sir,' or whatever they thought Waterhouse wanted to hear, and then he would never know whether they were telling the truth. This guy seems to understand that it's important for Waterhouse to get an honest answer.

Waterhouse walks up and down the rows of tables with his hands clasped carefully behind his back, looking at the abaci. Next to most of them is a sheet of paper, or a whole notebook, with a pencil handy. These are all covered with numbers. From place to place, he sees a Chinese character.

'Did any of you see the bodies of these slaves?' he says to an enlisted man.

'Yes, sir. I helped carry 'em out.'

'Did they look like Filipinos?'

'No, sir. They looked like regular Asiatics.'

'Chinese, Korean, something like that?'

'Yes, sir.'

After a few minutes, the answer comes back: no one will admit to having touched an abacus. This chamber was the last part of the fortress to be reached by Americans. The bodies of the slaves were mostly found piled up near the door. The body of the Nipponese officer was on the bottom of the pile. The door had been locked from the inside. It is a metal door, and has a slight outward bulge, as the fire upstairs apparently sucked all the air out of the room in a big hurry.

'Okay,' Waterhouse says, 'I am going to go upstairs and report back to Brisbane. I am personally going to take this room apart like an archaeologist. Make sure that nothing is touched. Especially the abaci.'

Chapter 90 ARETHUSA

Attorney Alejandro comes to see Randy the next day and they swap small talk about the weather and the Philippine Basketball Association whilst exchanging handwritten slips of paper across the table. Randy gives his lawyer a note saying, 'Give this note to Chester' and then another note asking Chester to go though that trunk and find any old documents on the subject of zeta functions and get them to Randy somehow. Attorney Alejandro gives Randy a somewhat defensive and yet self-congratulatory note itemizing his recent efforts on Randy's behalf, which is probably meant to be encouraging but which Randy finds to be unsettlingly vague. He had rather expected some specific results by this point. He reads it and looks askance at Attorney Alejandro, who grimaces and taps himself on the jaw, which is code for 'the Dentist' and which Randy interprets to mean that said billionaire is interfering with whatever Attorney Alejandro is trying to accomplish. Randy hands Attorney Alejandro another note saying, 'Give this note to Avi' and then yet another note asking Avi to find out whether General Wing is one of the Crypt's clients.

Then nothing happens for a week. Since Randy lacks the information that he needs about zeta functions, he can't do any actual codebreaking work during this week. But he can lay the groundwork for the work he'll do later. The Cryptonomicon contains numerous hunks of C code intended to perform certain basic cryptanalytical operations, but a lot of it is folk code (poorly written) and anyway needs to be translated into the more modern C++ language. So Randy does that. The Cryptonomiconalso describes various algorithms that will probably come in handy, and Randy implements those in C++ too. It is scut work, but he has nothing else to do, and one of the good things about this particular kind of scut work is that it acquaints you with every little detail of the mathematics; if you don't understand the math you can't write the code. As the days go by, his mind turns into some approximation of a cryptanalyst's. This transformation is indexed by the slow accretion of code in his code- breaking library.

He and Enoch Root get into the habit of having conversations during and after their meals. Both of them seem to have rather involved inner lives that require lots of maintenance and so the rest of the day they ignore each other. Anecdote by anecdote, Randy plots the trajectory of his life to date. Likewise Enoch speaks vaguely of some wartime events, then about what it was like to live in postwar England, and then in the U.S. in the fifties. Apparently he was a Catholic priest for a while but got kicked out of the Church for some reason; he doesn't say why, and Randy doesn't ask. After that all is vague. He mentions that he began spending large amounts of time in the Philippines during the Vietnam War, which fits in with Randy's general hypothesis: if it's true that Old Man Comstock had U.S. troops combing the Philippine boondocks for the Primary, then Enoch would have wanted to be around, to interfere or at least keep an eye on them. Enoch claims he's also been gadding about trying to bring Internet stuff to China, but to Randy this just sounds like a cover story for something else.

It is hard not to get the idea that Enoch Root and General Wing may have other reasons to be pissed off at each other.

'Like, if I can just play Plato's advocate here, what do you mean exactly when you talk about defending civilization?'

'Oh, Randy, you know what I mean.'

'Yeah, but China is civilized, right? Has been for a while.'

'Yes.'

'So maybe you and General Wing are actually on the same team.'

'If the Chinese are so civilized, how come they never invent anything?'

'What-paper, gunpowder-'

'Anything in the last millenniumI mean.

'Beats me. What do you think, Enoch?'

'It's like the Germans in the Second World War.'

'I know that all the bright lights fled Germany in the thirties-Einstein, Born-'

'And Schrodinger, and von Neumann, and others-but do you know why they fled?'

'Well, because they didn't like the Nazis, of course!'

'But do you know specifically why the Nazis didn't like them?'

'A lot of them were Jews.'

'It goes deeper than mere anti-Semitism. Hilbert, Russell, Whitehead, Godel, all of them were engaged in a monumental act of tearing mathematics down and beginning from scratch. But the Nazis believed that mathematics was a heroic science whose purpose was to reduce chaos to order-just as National Socialism was supposed to do in the political sphere.'

'Okay,' Randy says, 'but what the Nazis didn't understand was that if you tore it down and rebuilt it, it was even more heroic than before.'

'Indeed. It led to a renaissance,' Root says, 'like in the seventeenth century, when the Puritans tore everything to rubble and then slowly built it back up from scratch. Over and over again we see the pattern of the Titanomachia repeated-the old gods are thrown down, chaos returns, but out of the chaos, the same patterns reemerge.'

'Okay. So-again-you were talking about civilization?'

'Ares always reemerges from the chaos. It will never go away. Athenian civilization defends itself from the forces of Ares with metis,or technology. Technology is built on science. Science is like the alchemists' uroburos, continually eating its own tail. The processof science doesn't work unless young scientists have the freedom to attack and tear down old dogmas, to engage in an ongoing Titanomachia. Science flourishes where art and free speech flourish.'

'Sounds teleological, Enoch. Free countries get better science, hence superior military power, hence get to defend their freedoms. You're proclaiming a sort of Manifest Destiny here.'

'Well, someone'sgot to do it.'

'Aren't we beyond that sort of thing now?'

'I know you're just saying that to infuriate me. Sometimes, Randy, Ares gets chained up in a barrel for a