will they want to mow the lawn?'
'No.'
'Right. They only talk like that because mowing the lawn sounds great when you're sitting in a foxhole picking lice off your nuts.'
One of the useful things about military service is that it gets you acclimatized to having loud, blustery men say rude things to you. Waterhouse shrugs it off. 'Could be I'll hate it,' he concedes.
At this point Comstock sheds a few decibels, scoots closer, and gets fatherly with him. 'It's not just you,' he says. 'Your wife might not be crazy about it either.'
'Oh, she loves the open countryside. Doesn't care for cities.'
'You wouldn't have to live in a city. With the kind of salary we are talking about here, Waterhouse-' Comstock pauses for effect, sips, grimaces, and lowers his voice another notch '-you could buy a nice little Ford or a Chevy.' He stops to let that sink in. 'With a V-8 that would give you power to burn! You could live ten, twenty miles away, and drive in every morning at a mile a minute!'
'Ten or twenty miles away from where? I'm not clear, yet, on whether I would be working in New York for Electrical Till, or in Fort Meade for this, uh, this new thing-'
'We're thinking of calling it the National Security Agency,' Comstock says. 'Of course, even that name is secret.'
'I understand.'
'There was a similar thing, between the wars, called the Black Chamber. Which has a nice ring to it. But a bit old-fashioned.'
'That was disbanded.'
'Yes. Secretary of State Stimson did away with it, he said 'Gentlemen do not read one another's mail.' ' Comstock laughs out loud at this. He laughs for a long time. 'Ahh, the world has changed, hasn't it, Waterhouse? Without reading Hitler's and Tojo's mail, where would we be now?'
'We would be in a heck of a fix,' Waterhouse concedes.
'You have seen Bletchley Park. You have seen Central Bureau in Brisbane. Those places are nothing less than factories. Mail-reading on an industrial scale.' Comstock's eyes glitter at the idea, he is staring through the walls of the building now like Superman with his X-ray vision. 'It is the way of the future, Lawrence. War will never be the same. Hitler is gone. The Third Reich is history. Nippon is soon to fall. But this only sets the stage for the struggle with Communism. To build a Bletchley Park big enough for that job, why, hell! We'd have to take over the whole state of Utah or something. That is, if we did it the old-fashioned way, with girls sitting in front of Typex machines.'
For the first time, now, Waterhouse gets it. 'The digital computer,' he says.
'The digital computer,' Comstock echoes. He sips and grimaces. 'A few roomfuls of that equipment would replace an acre of girls sitting in front of Typex machines.' Comstock now gets a naughty, conspiratorial grin on his face, and leans forward. A drop of sweat rolls off the point of his chin and plonks into Waterhouse's coffee. 'It would also replace a lot of the stuff that Electrical Till manufactures. So, you see, there is a confluence of interests here.' Comstock sets his cup down. Perhaps he is finally convinced that there is no deep stratum of good coffee concealed underneath the bad; perhaps coffee is a frivolous thing compared to the importance of what he is about to divulge. 'I have been in constant touch with my higher-ups at Electrical Till, and there is intense interest in this digital computer business.
'I understand, sir.'
'A business deal that would bring Electrical Till, the world's mightiest manufacturer of business machines, together with the government of the United States to construct a machine room of titanic proportions at Fort Meade, Maryland, under the aegis of this new Black Chamber: the National Security Agency. It is an installation that will be the Bletchley Park of our upcoming war against the Communist threat-a threat both internal and external.'
'And you would like me to get mixed up in this somehow?'
Comstock blinks. He draws back. He is suddenly cool and remote. 'To be absolutely frank, Waterhouse, this thing will go forward with or without you.'
Waterhouse chuckles. 'I figured that.'
'All I'm doing is giving you a greased path, as it were. Because I respect your skills, and I have a certain, I don't know, fatherly affection for you as the result of our work together. I hope you don't mind my saying so.
'Not at all.'
'Say! And speaking of that-' Comstock stands up, walking around behind his terrifyingly neat desk, and plucks a single piece of typing paper off the blotter. 'How are you coming with Arethusa?'
'Still archiving the intercepts as they come in. Still haven't broken it.'
'I have some interesting news about Arethusa.'
'You do?'
'Yes. Something you're not aware of.' Comstock scans the paper. 'After we took Berlin, we scooped up all of Hitler's crypto people and flew thirty-five of them back to London. Our boys there have been interrogating them in detail. Filling in a lot of blanks for us. What do you know about this Rudolf von Hacklheber fellow?'
All traces of moisture have disappeared from Waterhouse's mouth. He sips and does not grimace. 'Knew him a little at Princeton. Dr. Turing and I thought we saw his handiwork in Azure/Pufferfish.'
'You were right,' Comstock says, rattling the paper. 'But did you know that he was very likely a Communist?'
'I had no knowledge of his political leanings.'
'Well, he is a homo, for one thing, and Hitler hated homos, so that might have pushed him into the arms of the Reds. Also, he was working under a couple of Russians at Hauptgruppe B. Supposedly they were Czarists, and pro-Hitler, but you never know. Well, anyway, in the middle of the war, sometime in late '43, he apparently fled to Sweden. Isn't that funny?'
'Why's it funny?'
'If you have the wherewithal to escape from Germany, why not go to England, and fight for the good guys? No, he went to the east coast of Sweden-directly across the water,' Comstock says portentously, 'from Finland. Which borders on the Soviet Union.' He slaps the page down on his desk. 'Seems pretty clear-cut to me.'
'So . . .'
'And now, we have these goddamn Arethusa messages bouncing around. Some of them emanating from right here in Manila! Some coming from a mysterious submarine. Not a Nip submarine, evidently. It seems very much like a secret espionage ring of some description. Wouldn't you say so?'
Waterhouse shrugs. 'Interpretation isn't my department.'
'It is mine,' Comstock says, 'and I say it's espionage. Probably directed from the Kremlin. Why? Because they are using a cryptosystem that, according to you, is based on Azure/Pufferfish, which was invented by the Communist homo Rudolf von Hacklheber. I hypothesize that von Hacklheber only stayed in Sweden long enough to get some shuteye and maybe cornhole some nice blond boy and then scooted right over to Finland and from there to the waiting arms of Lavrenti Beria.'
'Well, gosh!' Waterhouse says, 'what do you think we should do?'
'I have taken this Arethusa thing off the back burner. We have become lazy and complacent. More than once, our huffduff people observed Arethusa messages emanating from this general area.' Comstock raises his index finger to a map of Luzon. Then he catches himself, realizing that this would be more dignified if he used a pointer. He bends down and grabs a long pointer. Then he realizes he is too close, and has to back up a couple of steps in order to get the business end of the pointer on the part of the map that his index finger was touching a moment earlier. Finally situated, he vigorously circles a coastal region south of Manila, along the strait that separates Luzon from Mindoro. 'South of all these volcanoes, along the coast here. This is where that submarine has been skulking around. We haven't gotten a good fix on the bastards yet, because all of our huffduff stations have been way up north here.' The pointer swoops up for a lightning raid on the Cordillera Central, where Yamashita has gone to ground. 'But not anymore.' Down swoops the pointer, vengefully. 'I have ordered several huffduff units to set up in this area, and at the northern end of Mindoro. Next time that submarine transmits an
