which goes straight to Bletchley, its final destination, with no stops in between. Everyone on that train, it seems, is a female in a quasimilitary uniform.
The RAF men with the Sten guns, standing watch by each door of that train, checking papers and passes, will not let him aboard. Waterhouse looks through the yellowing influence of the windows at the Bletchley girls in the train, facing each other in klatsches of four and five, getting their knitting out of their bags, turning balls of Scottish wool into balaclavas and mittens for convoy crews in the North Atlantic, writing letters to their brothers in the service and their mums and dads at home. The RAF gunmen remain by the doors until all of them are closed and the train has begun to move out of the station. As it builds speed, the rows and rows of girls, knitting and writing and chatting, blur together into something that probably looks a good deal like what sailors and soldiers the world over are commonly seeing in their dreams. Waterhouse will never be one of those soldiers, out on the front line, out in contact with the enemy. He has tasted the apple of forbidden knowledge. He is forbidden to go anywhere in the world where he might be captured by the enemy.
The train climbs up out of the night and into a red-brick arroyo, headed northwards out of the city. It is about three in the afternoon; that special BP train must have been carrying swing shift gals.
Waterhouse has the feeling he will not be working anything like a regular shift. His duffel bag-which was packed for him-is pregnant with sartorial possibilities: thick oiled-wool sweaters, tropical-weight Navy and Army uniforms, black ski mask, condoms.
The train slowly pulls free of the city and passes into a territory patched with small residential towns. Waterhouse feels heavy in his seat, and suspects a slight uphill tendency. They pass through a cleft that has been made across a low range of hills, like a kerf in the top of a log, and enter into a lovely territory of subtly swelling emerald green fields strewn randomly with small white capsules that he takes to be sheep.
Of course, their distribution is probably not random at all-it probably reflects local variations in soil chemistry producing grass that the sheep find more or less desirable. From aerial reconnaissance, the Germans could draw up a map of British soil chemistry based upon analysis of sheep distribution.
The fields are enclosed by old hedges, stone fences, or, especially in the uplands, long swaths of forest. After an hour or so, the forest comes right up along the left side of the train, covering a bank that rises up gently from the railway siding. The train's brakes come on gassily, and the train grumbles to a stop in a whistle-stop station. But the line has forked and ramified quite a bit, more than is warranted by the size of the station. Waterhouse stands, plants his feet squarely, squats down in a sumo wrestler's stance, and engages his duffel bag. Duffel appears to be winning as it seemingly pushes Waterhouse out the door of the train and onto the platform.
There is a stronger than usual smell of coal, and a good deal of noise coming from not far away. Waterhouse looks up the line and discovers a heavy industrial works unfurled across the many sidings. He stands and stares for a couple of minutes, as his train pulls away, headed for points north, and sees that they are in the business of repairing steam locomotives here at Bletchley Depot. Waterhouse likes trains.
But that is not why he got a free suit of clothes and a ticket to Bletchley, and so once again Waterhouse engages Duffel and gets it up the stairs to the enclosed bridge that flies over all of the parallel lines. Looking toward the station, he sees more Bletchley girls, WAAFs and WRENs, coming towards him; the day shift, finished with their work, which consists of the processing of ostensibly random letters and digits on a heavy-industrial scale. Not wanting to appear ridiculous in their sight, he finally gets Duffel maneuvered onto his back, gets his arms through the shoulder straps, and allows its weight to throw him forward across the bridge.
The WAAFs and WRENs are only moderately interested in the sight of a newly arriving American officer. Or perhaps they are only being demure. In any case, Waterhouse knows he is one of the few, but not the first. Duffel shoves him through the one-room station like a fat cop chivvying a hammerlocked drunk across the lobby of a two- star hotel. Waterhouse is ejected into a strip of open territory running along the north-south road. Directly across from him the woods rise up. Any notion that they might be woods of the inviting sort is quickly dissolved by a dense spray of gelid light glinting from the border of the wood as the low sun betrays that the place is saturated with sharpened metal. There is an orifice in the woods, spewing WAAFs and WRENs like the narrow outlet of a giant yellowjacket nest.
Waterhouse must either move forward or be pulled onto his back by Duffel and left squirming helplessly in the parking lot like a flipped beetle, so he staggers forward, across the street and onto the wide footpath into the woods. The Bletchley girls surround him. They have celebrated the end of their shift by applying lipstick. Wartime lipstick is necessarily cobbled together from whatever tailings and gristle were left over once all of the good stuff was used to coat propeller shafts. A florid and cloying scent is needed to conceal its unspeakable mineral and animal origins.
It is the smell of War.
Waterhouse has not even been given the full tour of BP yet, but he knows the gist of it. He knows that these demure girls, obediently shuffling reams of gibberish through their machines, shift after shift, day after day, have killed more men than Napoleon.
He makes slow and apologetic progress against the tide of the departing day shift. At one point he simply gives up, steps aside, body-slams Duffel into the ivy, lights up a cigarette, and waits for a burst of a hundred or so girls to go by him. Something pokes at his ankle: a wild raspberry cane, furious with thorns. It supports an uncannily small and tidy spider-web whose geodesic strands gleam in a beam of low afternoon light. The spider in the center is an imperturbable British sort, perfectly unruffled by Waterhouse's clumsy Yank antics.
Waterhouse reaches out and catches a yellow-brown elm leaf that happens to fall through the air before him. He hunkers down, plants his cigarette in his mouth, and, using both hands for steadiness, draws the sawtooth rim of the elm leaf across one of the web's radial strands, which, he knows, will not have any sticky stuff on it. Like a fiddle bow on a string, the leaf sets up a fairly regular vibration in the web. The spider spins to face it, rotating instantly, like a character in a badly spliced movie. Waterhouse is so startled by the speed of the move that he starts back just a bit, then he draws the leaf across the web again. The spider tenses, feeling the vibrations.
Eventually it returns to its original position and carries on as before, ignoring Waterhouse completely.
Spiders can tell from the vibrations what sort of insect they have caught, and home in on it. There is a reason why the webs are radial, and the spider plants itself at the convergence of the radii. The strands are an extension of its nervous system. Information propagates down the gossamer and into the spider, where it is processed by some kind of internal Turing machine. Waterhouse has tried many different tricks, but he has never been able to spoof a spider. Not a good omen!
The rush hour seems to have ended during Waterhouse's science experiment. He engages Duffel once more. The struggle takes them another hundred yards down the path, which finally empties out into a road just at the point where it is barred by an iron gate slung between stupid obelisks of red brick. The guards are, again, RAF men with Sten guns, and right now they are examining the papers of a man in a canvas greatcoat and goggles, who has just ridden up on an Army green motorcycle with panniers slung over the rear wheel. The panniers are not especially full, but they have been carefully secured; they contain the ammunition that the girls feed into the chattering teeth of their ravenous weapons.
The motorcyclist is waved through, and makes an immediate left turn down a narrow lane. Attention falls upon Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, who after a suitable exchange of salutes, presents his credentials.
He has to choose among his several sets, which he doesn't manage to hide from the guards. But the guards do not seem alarmed or even curious about this, which sets them distinctly apart from most whom Waterhouse has dealt with. Naturally, these men are not on the Ultra Mega list, and so it would be a grave breach of security to tell them that he was here on Ultra Mega business. They appear to have greeted many other men who can't state their real business, however, and don't bat an eyelash when Lawrence pretends to be one of the naval intelligence liaisons in Hut 4 or Hut 8.
Hut 8 is where they decrypt naval Enigma transmissions. Hut 4 accepts the decrypts from Hut 8 and analyzes them. If Waterhouse pretends to be a Hut 4 man the disguise will not last for long, because those fellows have to actually know something about the Navy. He perfectly fits the profile of a Hut 8 man, who need not know anything except pure math.
One of the RAF men peruses his papers, then steps into a small guardhouse and stirs the crank on a
