Cryptonomicon

'Why, no sir! I want to wait around and see how it all comes out with that darned submarine.'

Waterhouse goes to the oven and takes out a brick of hot, blank ETC cards. He has learned that he has to keep the cards hot, or else they will soak up the tropical humidity and jam the machinery; so before he moved the digital computer into this room, he insisted that a whole bank of ovens be installed.

He drops the hot cards into the hopper of a card punching machine, sits down at the keyboard, and clips the first intercept sheet up in front of him. He begins to punch the letters into it, one by one. It is a short message; it fits onto three cards. Then he begins punching in the second message.

The lieutenant comes in carrying a cardboard box. 'All of the original Arethusa intercept sheets.'

'Thank you, Lieutenant.'

The lieutenant looks over his shoulder. 'Can I help you transcribing those messages?'

'No. The best way for you to help me would be to refill my water pitcher and then don't bother me for the rest of the night. I have a bee in my bonnet about this Arethusa business.'

'Yes, sir!' says the lieutenant, insufferably cheerful about the fact that the mystery submarine is, even now, on the run from Catalina bombers.

Waterhouse finishes punching in the second message, though he already knows what it would say if it were decrypted: 'TRAP REPEAT TRAP DO NOT TRANSMIT STOP HUFFDUFF UNITS NEARBY.'

He takes those cards out of the puncher's output tray and places them neatly in the box along with the cards containing all of the previous Arethusa messages. He then takes the entire contents of this box-a brick of messages about a foot thick-and puts them into his attache case.

He unclips the two fresh intercept slips from the card puncher and puts them on top of the stack of older slips. The brick of cards in his attache case, and the pile of slips in his hand, contain exactly the same information. They are the only copies in all the world. He flips through them to make sure that they contain all of the critical intercepts-such as the long message giving the location of Golgotha, and the one that mentions Goto Dengo's initials. He puts the whole stack of slips on top of one of the ovens.

He dumps a foot-thick stack of hot blank cards into the input hopper of the card punch. He connects the punch's control cable up to the digital computer, so that the computer can control it.

Then he starts the program he has written, the one that generates random numbers according to Turing's function. Lights flash, and the card reader whirrs, as the program is loaded into the computer's RAM. Then it pauses, waiting for input: the function needs a seed. A stream of bits that will get it going. Any seed will do. Waterhouse thinks about it for a moment, and then types in COMSTOCK.

The card punch rumbles into action. The stack of blanks begins to get shorter. Punched cards skitter into the output tray. When it's finished, Waterhouse pulls one of them out, holds it up to the light, and looks at the pattern of tiny rectangular holes punched out of the manila. A constellation of doorways.

'It'll look like any other encrypted message,' he explained to Goto Dengo, up on the bleachers, 'but the, uh, the crypto boys' (he almost said the NSA) 'can run their computers on them forever and never break the code- because there isno code.'

He puts this stack of freshly punched cards into the box labeled ARETHUSA INTERCEPTS, and puts it back in its place on the shelf.

Finally, before leaving the lab, he goes back over to that oven, and slides the corner of that stack of intercept sheets very close to a pilot light. It is reluctant to catch, so he gives it some help with a flick of his Zippo. He stands back and watches the pile burn for a while, until he's sure that all of the strange information on those sheets has been destroyed.

Then he goes out into the hallway in search of a fire extinguisher. Upstairs, he can hear Comstock's boys, gathered around the radio, baying like hounds.

Chapter 101 PASSAGE

When he has picked himself up off the deck, and his ears have stopped ringing, Bischoff says, 'Take her down to seventy-five meters.'

The dial that tells their depth says twenty. Somewhere, perhaps a hundred meters above them, crewmen of a circling bomber are setting their depth charges to explode when they have sunk to a depth of twenty, and so twenty is a bad place to be for a while.

The dial does not move, though, and Bischoff has to repeat the command. Everyone on the boat must be deaf.

Either that, or the V-Million has sustained damage to her dive planes. Bischoff presses his skull against a bulkhead, and even though his ears don't work so well anymore, he can feel the whine of the turbines. At least they have power. They can move.

But Catalinas can move faster.

Say what you want about those old, clanking diesel U-boats, they at least had guns on them. You could surface, and go out on the decks in the sun and the air, and fight back. But in the V-Million, this swimming rocket, the only weapon is secrecy. In the Baltic, fine. But this is the Mindoro Strait, which is an ocean of window-glass. V-Million might as well be suspended in midair from piano wires, searchlights crossing on it.

The needle on the dial is moving now, passing down through twenty-five meters. The deck twists under Bischoff's feet as she recoils from another depth charge. But he can tell from the way it twists that this one has detonated too high to deal serious damage. From habit he glances at the dial that tells their speed, and notes it down along with the time: 1746 hours. The sun must be lower and lower in the sky, its light glancing off the tops of the waves, forcing the pilots of the Catalinas to peer down through a screen of bright noise. Another hour and V- Million will be completely invisible. Then, if Bischoff has kept careful records of their speed and course, dead reckoning will tell them approximately where they are, and enable them to run down the Palawan Passage in the night, or to cut west across the South China Sea if that seems like a good idea. But really he is hoping to find some nice pirate cove on the north coast of Borneo, marry a nice orangutan, and raise a little family.

The face of the depth dial says Tiefenmesser in that old-fashioned Gothic lettering that the Nazis loved so much. Messer means a gauge or meter, but it also means knife. Das Messer sitzt mir an der Kehle. The knife is at my throat; I am face-to-face with doom. When the knife is at your throat, you don't want it to move the way the needle on the Tiefenmesser is moving now. Every tick on the dial's face is another meter of water between Bischoff and the sun and the air.

'I would like to be a Messerschmidt,' Bischoff mutters. A man who smashes Messers with a hammer, but also a beautiful thing that flies.

'You will see light, and breathe fresh air again, Gunter,' says Rudolf von Hacklheber, a civilian mathematician who really has no place on the bridge of a U-boat during a fight to the death. But there's no goodplace for him to be, and so here he is.

Now this is a fine thing for Rudy to say, a lovely show of support for Gunter. But saving the life of everyone on the U-boat, and getting its cargo of gold to safety, now depends on Gunter's emotional stability, and especially on his confidence. Sometimes, if you want to live and breathe tomorrow, you have to dive into the black depths today, and that is a leap of faith-faith in your U-boat, and your crew-beside which the saints' religious epiphanies amount to nothing.

So Rudy's promise is soon forgotten-or at least it is forgotten by Bischoff. Bischoff derives strengthfrom having heard it, and from similar things that members of his crew say to him, and from their grins and thumbs-up and slaps on the shoulder, and their displays of pluck and initiative, the clever repairs that they make to broken plumbing and overtaxed engines. Strength gives him faith, and faith makes him into a good U-boat skipper. Some would say the best who ever lived. But Bischoff knows many others, better than him, whose bodies are trapped in knuckles of imploded metal on the floor of the North Atlantic.

It comes together like this: the sun has gone down, as it can be relied on to do every day, even when you are a beleaguered U-boat. The V-Millionhas reamed a tunnel through the Palawan Passage, screaming along, for several hours, at the completely unreasonable speed of twenty-nine knots-four times as fast as U-boats are supposed to be capable of going.

The Americans will have drawn a small circle around the point in the ocean where the mysterious U-boat