'Sir, no sir! But I do detect a strong odor of politics in the room now, sir!'
The colonel gets a little twinkle in his eye, and glances out the window towards the Capitol dome. 'These politicians can be real picky about how they get things done. Everything has to be just so. They don't like excuses. Do you follow me, Shaftoe?'
''Sir! Yes, sir!''
'The Corps had to fight to get this. They were going to make it an Army thing. We pulled a few strings with some former Naval persons in high places. Now the assignment is ours. Some would say, it is ours to screw up.
'Sir! The assignment will not be screwed up, sir!'
'The reason that son of a bitch MacArthur is killing Marines like flies down in the South Pacific is because sometimes we don't play the political game that well. If you and your new unit do not perform brilliantly, that situation will only worsen.'
''Sir! You can rely on this Marine, sir!''
'Your commanding officer will be Lieutenant Ethridge. An Annapolis man. Not much combat experience, but knows how to move in the right circles. He can run interference for you at the political level. The responsibility for getting things done on the ground will be entirely yours, Sergeant Shaftoe.'
''Sir! Yes , sir!''
'You'll be working closely with British Special Air Service. Very good men. But I want you and your men to outshine them.'
'Sir! You can count on it, sir!'
'Well, get ready to ship out, then,' the major says. 'You're on your way to North Africa, Sergeant Shaftoe.'
Chapter 12 LONDINIUM
The massive British coinage clanks in his pocket like pewter dinner plates. Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse walks down a street wearing the uniform of a commander in the United States Navy. This must not be taken to imply that he is actually a commander, or indeed that he is even in the Navy, though he is. The United States part is, however, a safe bet, because every time he arrives at a curb, he either comes close to being run over by a shooting-brake or he falters in his stride; diverts his train of thought onto a siding, much to the disturbance of its passengers and crew; and throws some large part of his mental calculation circuitry into the job of trying to reflect his surroundings through a large mirror. They drive on the left side of the street here.
He knew about that before he came. He had seen pictures. And Alan had complained of it in Princeton, always nearly being run over as, lost in thought, he stepped off curbs looking the wrong way.
The curbs are sharp and perpendicular, not like the American smoothly molded sigmoid-cross-section curves. The transition between the side walk and the street is a crisp vertical. If you put a green lightbulb on Waterhouse's head and watched him from the side during the blackout, his trajectory would look just like a square wave traced out on the face of a single-beam oscilloscope: up, down, up, down. If he were doing this at home, the curbs would be evenly spaced, about twelve to the mile, because his home town is neatly laid out on a grid.
Here in London, the street pattern is irregular and so the transitions in the square wave come at random- seeming times, sometimes very close together, sometimes very far apart.
A scientist watching the wave would probably despair of finding any pattern; it would look like a random circuit, driven by noise, triggered perhaps by the arrival of cosmic rays from deep space, or the decay of radioactive isotopes.
But if he had depth and ingenuity, it would be a different matter.
Depth could be obtained by putting a green light bulb on the head of every person in London and then recording their tracings for a few nights. The result would be a thick pile of graph-paper tracings, each one as seemingly random as the others. The thicker the pile, the greater the depth.
Ingenuity is a completely different matter. There is no systematic way to get it. One person could look at the pile of square wave tracings and see nothing but noise. Another might find a source of fascination there, an irrational feeling impossible to explain to anyone who did not share it. Some deep part of the mind, adept at noticing patterns (or the existence of a pattern) would stir awake and frantically signal the dull quotidian parts of the brain to
One day this person would walk out of that room carrying a highly accurate street map of London, reconstructed from the information in all of those square wave plots.
Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is one of those people.
As a result, the authorities of his country, the United States of America, have made him swear a mickle oath of secrecy, and keep supplying him with new uniforms of various services and ranks, and now have sent him to London.
He steps off a curb, glancing reflexively to the left. A jingling sounds in his right ear, bicycle brakes trumpet. It is merely a Royal Marine (Waterhouse is beginning to recognize the uniforms) off on some errand; but he has reinforcements behind him in the form of a bus/coach painted olive drab and stenciled all over with inscrutable code numbers.
'Pardon me, sir!' the Royal Marine says brightly, and swerves around him, apparently reckoning that the coach can handle any mopping-up work. Waterhouse leaps forward, directly into the path of a black taxi coming the other way.
After making it across that particular street, though, he arrives at his Westminster destination without further life-threatening incidents, unless you count being a few minutes' airplane ride from a tightly organized horde of murderous Germans with the best weapons in the world. He has found himself in a part of town that seems almost like certain lightless, hemmed-in parts of Manhattan: narrow streets lined with buildings on the order of ten stories high. Occasional glimpses of ancient and mighty gothic piles at street-ends clue him in to the fact that he is nigh unto Greatness. As in Manhattan, the people walk fast, each with some clear purpose in mind.
The amended heels of the pedestrians' wartime shoes pop metallically. Each pedestrian has a fairly consistent stride length and clicks with nearly metronomic precision. A microphone in the sidewalk would provide an eavesdropper with a cacophony of clicks, seemingly random like the noise from a Geiger counter. But the right kind of person could abstract signal from noise and count the pedestrians, provide a male/female break down and a leg- length histogram-
He has to stop this. He would like to concentrate on the matter at hand, but that is still a mystery.
A massive, blocky modern sculpture sits over the door of the St. James's Park tube station, doing twenty- four hour surveillance on the Broadway Buildings, which is actually just a single building. Like every other intelligence headquarters Waterhouse had seen, it is a great disappointment.
It is, after all, just a building-orange stone, ten or so stories, an unreasonably high mansard roof accounting for the top three, some smidgens of classical ornament above the windows, which like all windows in London are divided into eight tight triangles by strips of masking tape. Waterhouse finds that this look blends better with classical architecture than, say, gothic.
He has some grounding in physics and finds it implausible that, when a few hundred pounds of trinitrotoluene are set off in the neighborhood and the resulting shock wave propagates through a large pane of glass the people on the other side of it will derive any benefit from an asterisk of paper tape. It is a superstitious gesture, like hexes on Pennsylvania Dutch farmhouses. The sight of it probably helps keep people's minds focused
