'You of all people. Don't you see? I have a machine, Rudy! The machine does the work for me. So I don't need a room full of computers-human ones, leastways. And as soon as I read the decrypted message, I burned all of the cards. So I am the only one who knows.'
'Ah!' Rudy says, stepping back and looking into the sky, adjusting his mind to these new facts. 'So, I gather that you have come here to join us? Otto will be troublesome about it, but you are quite welcome.'
Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse actually has to think about it. This surprises him a little.
'Most of it is going to help victims of the war, in one way or another,' Rudy says, 'but if we take a tenth of a percent as commission, and distribute it among the entire crew of the submarine, we are all among the richest men in the world.'
Waterhouse tries to imagine himself one of the richest men in the world. It doesn't seem to fit.
'I've been exchanging letters with a college in Washington State,' he says. 'My fiancee put me on to them.'
'Fiancee? Congratulations.'
'She's Qwlghmian-Australian. It seems that there's a colony of Qwghlmians in the Palouse Hills as well, where Washington and Oregon and Idaho all come together. Sheepherders mostly. But there is this little college there, and they need a mathematics professor. I could be chairman of the department within a few years.' Waterhouse stands there in the Philippine jungle smoking his cigarette and imagining this. Nothing sounds more exotic. 'It sounds like a nice life!' he exclaims, as if this were the first time he had thought of such a thing. 'It sounds perfectly all right to me.'
The Palouse Hills seem very far away. He is impatient to begin covering the distance.
'That it does,' says Rudy von Hacklheber.
'You don't sound very convincing, Rudy. I know it wouldn't be so great for you. But for me it's the cat's pajamas.'
'So, are you telling me you don't want in?'
'I'll tell you this. You said most of the money was going to charity. Well, the college can always use a donation. If your plan works out, how about endowing a chair for me at this college? That's all I really want.'
'I will do that,' Rudy says, 'and I'll endow one for Alan too, at Cambridge, and I'll provide both of you with laboratories full of electrical computers.' Rudy's eyes wander back to the hole in the ground, where the Germans- having withdrawn most of their sentries-are making steady progress. 'You know that this is nothing more than one of the outlying caches. Seed capital to finance the Golgotha work.'
'Yes. Just as the Nips planned it.'
'We'll dig it up soon enough. Sooner, now that we no longer have to worry about the Crocodile!' Rudy says, and laughs. It is an honest, genuine laugh, the first time Waterhouse has ever seen him drop his guard. 'Then we will go to ground until the war is over. In the meantime, maybe there will be enough left over to give you and your Qwghlmian bride a nice wedding present.'
'Our china pattern is Lavender Rose by Royal Albert,' Waterhouse says.
Rudy takes an envelope out of his pocket and writes that down. 'It was very good of you to come out and say hello,' he mumbles around his cigarette.
'Those bicycle rides in New Jersey might as well have taken place on a different planet,' Waterhouse says, shaking his head.
'They did,' Rudy says. 'And when Douglas MacArthur marches into Tokyo, it's going to be a different planet yet again. See you there, Lawrence.'
'See you, Rudy. Godspeed.'
They embrace one more time. Waterhouse backs away and watches the shovels biting into the red mud for a few moments, then turns his back on all of the money in the world and starts walking.
'Lawrence!' Rudy shouts.
'Yes?'
'Don't forget to destroy that sealed envelope you left in your office.'
Waterhouse laughs. 'Aw, I was just lying about that. In case someone wanted to kill me.'
'That's a relief.'
'You know how people are always saying 'I can keep a secret' and they are always wrong?'
'Yes.'
'Well,' Waterhouse says, 'I can keep a secret.'
Chapter 99 CAYUSE
Another shock wave passes silently through the ground, setting up a pattern of waves, and reflections of waves, in the water that laps around their knees.
'Things are going to happen very slowly now for a while. Get used to it,' says Doug Shaftoe. 'Everyone needs a probe-a long knife or a rod. Even a stick.'
Doug's got a big knife, he being that kind of guy, and Amy has her kris. Randy pulls the lightweight aluminum frame of his backpack apart to produce a couple of tubes; this takes a while but, as Doug said, everything is happening slowly now. Randy tosses one of the tubes to Enoch Root, who snatches a basically poorly aimed throw out of the air. Now that everyone is equipped, Doug Shaftoe gives them a tutorial on how to probe one's way through a minefield. Like every other lesson Randy's ever imbibed, this one is sort of interesting, but only until Doug divulges the main point, which is that you can poke a mine from the side and it won't blow up; you just can't poke it vertically. 'The water is bad because it makes it hard to see what the hell we're doing,' he says. Indeed, the water has a milky look, probably from suspended volcanic ash; you can see clearly for a foot, hazily for another foot, and below that you can see vague, greenish shapes at best; everything is covered in a uniform brown jacket of silt. 'On the other hand, it's good because if a mine gets detonated by something other than your foot, the water's going to absorb some of the blast by flashing into steam. Now: tactically our problem is that we are exposed to an ambush from above left: the west bank. Poor old Jackie Woo is down and he can't protect that flank anymore. You can bet that John Wayne is covering things on the right as best as he can. Since it is the left bank that's most vulnerable, we will now head for the bank on that side, and try to reach the protection of the overhang. We should not all converge on the same point; we spread out so that if one of us detonates a mine it won't hit anyone else.'
Each one of them picks a destination on the west bank and tells everyone else what it is, so that they won't converge on the same place, and then each begins probing his or her way towards it. Randy tries to resist the temptation to look up. He says, after about fifteen minutes: 'I know what's going on with the explosions. Wing's people are tunneling their way toward Golgotha. They're going to remove the gold through some kind of an underground conduit. It'll look like they are excavating it from their own property. But they'll actually be taking it from here.'
Amy grins. 'They're robbing the bank.'
Randy nods, mildly annoyed that she's not taking it more seriously. 'Wing must have been too busy with the Long March and the Great Leap Forward to buy this real estate when it was available,' Enoch says.
A few minutes later, Doug Shaftoe says, 'To what extent do you give a shit, Randy?'
'What do you mean?'
'Would you be willing to die to prevent Wing from getting that gold?'
'Probably not.'
'Would you be willing to kill?'
'Well,' says Randy, a bit taken aback, 'I said I wouldn't be willing to die. So-'
'Don't give me that golden rule shit,' Doug says. 'If someone broke into your house in the middle of the night and threatened your family, and you had a shotgun in your hands, would you use it?'
Randy involuntarily looks towards Amy. Because this is not only an ethical conundrum. It's also a test to determine whether Randy is fit to be Doug's daughter's husband, and the father of his grandchildren. 'Well, I should hope so,' Randy says. Amy's pretending not to listen.
The water all around them makes a spattering, searing noise. Everyone cringes. Then they realize that a handful of small pebbles was tossed into the water from above. They look up at the rim of the overhang, and see a
