Cryptonomicon

machines by changing its internal configuration. At the moment, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is the only guy in the world who understands the Digital Computer well enough to actually do this, though he's training a couple of Comstock's ETC men to do it themselves. On the day in question, he is turning the Digital Computer into a machine for calculating the zeta function that he thinks is at the core of the cryptosystem called Azure or Pufferfish.

The function requires a number of inputs. One of these is a date. Azure is a system for generating one-time pads that change every day, and circumstantial evidence from the room of the dead abacus slaves tells him that, at the moment of their death, they were working on the one time pad for 6 August 1945, which is four months in the future. Waterhouse writes it down in the European style (day of the month first, then month) as 06081945, then lops off the leading zero to get 6,081,945-a pure quantity, an integer, unmarred by decimal point, rounding error, or any of the other compromises so abhorrent to number theorists. He uses this as one of the inputs to the zeta function. The zeta function requires a fewother inputs too, which the person who designed this cryptosystem (presumably Rudy) was at liberty to choose. Surmising which inputs Rudy used has occupied much of Waterhouse's thoughts in the last week. He puts in the numbers he has guessed, anyway, which is a matter of converting them to binary notation and then physically incarnating those ones and zeros on a neat row of stainless-steel toggle switches: down for zero, up for one.

Finally he puts on his artilleryman's ear protectors and lets the Digital Computer howl through the calculation. The room gets much hotter. A vacuum tube burns out, and then another one. Waterhouse replaces them. That's easy because Lieutenant Colonel Comstock has made a basically infinite supply of tubes available to him-quite a remarkable feat during wartime. The filaments of all those massed tubes glow redly and shine palpable radiant heat across the room. The smell of hot oil rises from the louvers on the ETC card machines. The stack of blank cards in the input hopper shortens mysteriously as they vanish into the machine. Cards skitter into the output bin. Waterhouse pulls them out and looks at them. His heart is pounding very hard.

It's quiet again. The cards have numbers on them, nothing more. They just happen to be exactly the same numbers that were frozen on certain abaci down in the room of the computer slaves.

Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse has just demolished another enemy cryptosystem: Azure/Pufferfish may now be mounted like a stuffed head on the wall of the Basement. And indeed, looking at those numbers he feels the same kind of letdown that a big game hunter must feel when he's stalked some legendary beast halfway across Africa and finally brought it down with a slug through the heart, walked up to the corpse, and discovered that after all it's just a big, messy, pile of meat. It's dirty and it's got flies on it. Is that all there is to it? Why didn't he solve this thing a long time ago? All of the old Azure/Pufferfish intercepts can be decrypted now. He'll have to read them, and they will turn out to be the usual numb mutterings of giant bureaucracies trying to take over the world. He doesn't, frankly, care anymore. He just wants to get the hell out of here and get married, play the organ, and program his Digital Computer, and hopefully get someone to pay him a salary to do one or the other. But Mary's in Brisbane and the war's not over yet-we haven't even gotten around to invading Nippon, for crissakes, and conquering the place is going to take forever,with all those plucky Nipponese women and children drilling on soccer fields with pointed bamboo staves-and it's probably going to be something like 1955 before he can even get discharged from the military. The war is not over yet, and as long as it goes on they will need him to stay down here in the Basement doing more of what he just did.

Arethusa. He still hasn't broken Arethusa. Now that'sa cryptosystem! He's too tired. He can't break Arethusa just now.

What he really needs is someone to talk to. Not about anything in particular. Just to talk. But there's only half a dozen people on the planet he can really talk to, and none of them is in the Philippines. Fortunately, there are long copper wires running underneath the oceans which made geographical location irrelevant, as long as you have the right clearance. Waterhouse does. He gets up and leaves the Basement and goes to have a chat with his friend Alan.

Chapter 92 AKIHABARA

As Randy's plane banks into Narita, a low stratum of cloud screens the countryside like a silk veil. It must be Nippon: the only two colors are the orange of the earth-moving equipment and the green of the earth that has not yet been moved. Other than that, everything is greyscale: grey parking lots divided into rectangles by white lines, the rectangles occupied with black, white, or grey cars, fading off into silvery fog beneath a sky the color of aviation alloy. Nippon is soothing, a good destination for a man who has just been rousted from his jail cell, hauled up before a judge, tongue-lashed, driven to the airport, and expelled from the Philippines.

The Nipponese look more American than Americans. Middle-class prosperity is lapidary; the flow of cash rounds and smooths a person like water does riverbed stones. The goal of all such persons seems to be to make themselves cuddly and nonthreatening. The girls in particular are unbearably precious, although perhaps Randy just thinks so because of that troublesome neurological hookup between his brain and Little Man 'tate. The old folks, instead of looking weathered and formidable, tend to wear sneakers and baseball caps. Black leather, studs, and handcuffs-as-accessories are the marks of the powerless lower classes, the people who tend to end up in the pokey in Manila, and not of the persons who actually dominate the world and crush everything in their path.

'The doors are about to close.' 'The bus is leaving in five minutes.' Nothing happens in Nippon without a perky, breathy woman's voice giving you a chance to brace yourself. It is safe to say that this is not true of the Philippines. Randy thinks about taking a bus into Tokyo until he comes to his senses and remembers that he's carrying around in his head the precise coordinates of a mine that probably contains not less than a thousand tons of gold. He hails a taxi. On the way into town, he passes by a road accident: a tanker truck has crossed the white line and flipped over on the shoulder. But in Nippon, even traffic accidents have the grave precision of ancient Shinto rituals. White-gloved cops direct traffic, moon-suited rescue workers descend from spotless emergency vans. The taxi passes beneath Tokyo Bay through a tunnel that was built, three decades ago, by Goto Engineering.

Randy ends up in a big old hotel, 'old' meaning that the physical structure was constructed during the fifties, when Americans competed with Soviets to build the most brutalistic space-age buildings out of the most depressing industrial materials. And indeed one can easily imagine Ike and Mamie pulling up to the front door in a five-ton Lincoln Continental. Of course the interior has been gutted and redone more frequently than many hotels steam-clean their carpets, and so everything is perfect. Randy has a strong impulse to lie in bed like a sack of shit, but he is tired of being confined. And there are many people he could talk to on the phone, but he is supremely paranoid about telephone conversations now. Any talking that he might do would have to be censored. Talking openly and freely is a pleasure, talking carefully is work, and Randy doesn't feel like work. He calls his parents to tell them everything's fine, calls Chester to thank him.

Then he takes his laptop downstairs and sits in the middle of the hotel's lobby, which is ostentatiously vast by Tokyo standards; the value of the land beneath the lobby alone probably exceeds that of Cape Cod. No one can even get near him with a Van Eck antenna here, and even if they do there will be plenty of interference from the nearby computers of the concierge desk. He starts ordering drinks, alternating between brutally cold pale Nipponese beer and hot tea, and writes a memo explaining more or less what he has spent the last month accomplishing.

He writes it very slowly because his hands are practically immobilized now by carpal tunnel syndrome, and any motion that even faintly resembles typing causes him a lot of pain. He ends up cadging a pencil from the concierge and then using its eraser to punch the keys one at a time. The memo begins with the word 'carpal' which is a little code that they have developed to explain why the following text seems unnaturally terse and devoid of capital letters. He's barely got that tapped out when he's approached by a devastatingly cute and fluttery young thing in a kimono who tells him that there is a staff of typists on call in the Business Center to help him with this should he desire it. Randy declines as politely as he knows how, which is probably not politely enough. Kimono Girl backs away in tiny steps, bowing and uttering truncated sub-vocal hais.Randy goes back to work with the pencil eraser. He explains, as briefly and clearly as he can, what he's been doing, and what he thinks is going on with General Wing and Enoch Root. He leaves the subject of what the fuck's going on with the Dentist open for speculation.

When he's done, he encrypts it and then goes up to his room to e-mail it. He can't get over the cleanliness of his lodgings. The sheets appear to have been tightened around the mattress with turnbuckles, then dipped in starch. This is the first time in over a month that he hasn't had the warm wet reek of sewer gas climbing up his