improperly canned oysters, and rogue waves.
The tea takes some time in coming and Lord Woadmire does not seem to be in any particular hurry to win the war either, so Waterhouse makes a circuit of the room, pretending to care about the paintings. The biggest one depicts a number of bruised and lacerated Romans dragging their sorry asses up onto a rocky and unwelcoming shore as splinters of their invasion fleet wash up around them. Front and center is a particular Roman who looks no less noble for wear and tear. He is seated wearily on a high rock, a broken sword dangling from one enervated hand, gazing longingly across several miles of rough water towards a shining, paradisiacal island. This isle is richly endowed with tall trees and flowering meadows and green pastures, but even so it can be identified as Outer Qwghlin by the Three Sghrs towering above it. The isle is guarded by a forbidding castle or two; its pale, almost Caribbean beaches are lined with the colorful banners of a defending host which (one can only assume) has just given the Roman invaders a bit of rough handling which they will not soon forget. Waterhouse does not bother to bend down and squint at the plaque; he knows that the subject of the painting is Julius C?sar's failed and probably apocryphal attempt to add the Qwghlm Archipelago to the Roman Empire, the farthest from Rome he ever got and the least good idea he ever had. To say that the Qwghlmians have not forgotten the event is like saying that Germans can sometimes be a little prickly.
'Where Caesar failed, what hope has Hitler?'
Waterhouse turns towards the voice and discovers Nigel St. John Gloamthorpby a.k.a. Lord Woadmire, a.k.a. the Duke of Qwghlm. He is not a tall man. Waterhouse goose-steps through the carpet to shake his hand. Though Colonel Chattan briefed him on proper forms of address when meeting a duke, Waterhouse can no more remember this than he can diagram the duke's family tree, so he decides to structure all of his utterances so as to avoid referring to the duke by name or pronoun. This will be a fun game and make the time go faster.
'It is quite a painting,' Waterhouse says, 'a heck of a deal.'
'You will find the islands themselves no less extraordinary, and for the same reasons,' the duke says obliquely.
The next time Waterhouse is really aware of what's going on, he is sitting in the duke's office. He thinks that there has been some routine polite conversation along the way, but there is never any point in actually monitoring that kind of thing. Tea is offered to him, and is accepted, for the second or third time, but fails to materialize.
'Colonel Chattan is in the Mediterranean, and I have been sent in his place,' Waterhouse explains, 'not to waste time covering logistical details, but to convey our enormous gratitude for the most generous offer made in regards to the castle.' There! No pronouns, no gaffe.
'Not at all!' The duke is taking the whole thing as an affront to his generosity. He speaks in the unhurried, dignified cadences of a man who is mentally thumbing through a German-English dictionary. 'Even setting aside my own... patriotic obligations... cheerfully accepted, of course..., it has almost become almost... terribly fashionable to have a whole... crew... of... uniformed fellows and whatnot running around in one's... pantry.
'Many of the great houses of Britain are doing their bit for the War,' Waterhouse agrees.
'Well... by all means, then... use it!' the duke says. 'Don't be... reticent! Use it... thoroughly! Give it a good... working over! It has... survived... a thousand Qwghlm winters and it will... survive your worst.'
'We hope to have a small detachment in place very soon,' Waterhouse says agreeably.
'May I... know..., to satisfy my own... curiosity..., what sort of... ?' the duke says, and trails off.
Waterhouse is ready for this. He is so ready that he has to hold back for a moment and try to make a show of discretion. 'Huffduff.'
'Huffduff?'
'HFDF. High-Frequency Direction Finding. A technique for locating distant radio transmitters by triangulating from several points.'
'I should have... thought you knew where all the... German... transmitters were.'
'We do, except for the ones that move.'
'Move!?' The duke furrows his brow tremendously, imagining a giant radio transmitter-building, tower and all-mounted on four parallel rail road tracks like Big Bertha, creeping across a steppe, drawn by harnessed Ukrainians.
'Think U-boats,' Waterhouse says delicately.
'Ah!' the duke says explosively. 'Ah!' He leans back in his creaky leather chair, examining a whole new picture with his mind's eye. 'They... pop up, do they, and send out... wireless?'
'They do.'
'And you... eavesdrop.'
'If only we could!' Waterhouse says. 'No, the Germans have used all of that world-famous mathematical brilliance of theirs to invent ciphers that are totally unbreakable. We don't have the first idea what they are saying. But, by using huffduff, we can figure out where they are saying it
'Ah.'
'So what we propose to do is mount big rotating antennas, or aerials as you call them here, on the castle, and staff the place with huffduff boffins.'
The duke frowns. 'There will be proper... safeguards for lightning?'
'Naturally.'
'And you are aware that you may... anticipate... ice storms as late in the year as August?'
'The Royal Qwghlm Meteorological Station's reports, as a body of work, don't leave a heck of a lot to the imagination.'
'Fine, then!' the duke blusters, warming to the concept. 'Use the castle, then! And give them... give them hell!'
Chapter 22 ELECTRICAL TILL CORPORATION
As evidence of the allies' slowly developing plan to kill the Axis by smothering them under a mountain of manufactured goods, there's this one pier in Sydney Harbor that is piled high with wooden crates and steel barrels: stuff that has been disgorged from the holds of ships from America, Britain, India and just left to sit there because Australia doesn't know how to digest it yet. It is not the only pier in Sydney that is choked with stuff. But because this pier isn't good for much else, it is mounded higher and the stuff is older, rustier, more infested with rats, more rimed with salt, more thickly frosted and flagrantly streaked with gull shit.
A man is picking his way over the pile, trying not to get any more of that gull shit on his khakis. He is wearing the uniform of a major in the United States Army and is badly encumbered by a briefcase. His name is Comstock.
Inside the briefcase are various identity papers, credentials, and an impressive letter from the office of The General in Brisbane. Comstock has had occasion to show all of the above to the doddering and yet queerly formidable Australian guards who, with their doughboy helmets and rifles, infest the waterfront. These men do not speak any dialect of the English language that the major can recognize and vice versa, but they can all read what is on those papers.
The sun is going down and the rats are waking up. The major has been clambering over docks all day long. He has seen enough of war and the military to know that what he is looking for will be found on the last pier that he searches, which happens to be this one. If he begins searching that pier at the near end, what he is looking for will be at the far end, and vice versa. All the more reason to stay sharp as he works his way along. After casting an eye around to make sure there are no leaking stacks of drums of aviation fuel nearby, he lights up a cigarette. War is hell, but smoking cigarettes makes it all worthwhile.
Sydney Harbor is beautiful at sunset, but he's been looking at it all day and can't really see it anymore. For lack of anything better to do, he opens up his briefcase. There's a paperback novel in there, which he's already read. And there is a clipboard which contains, in yellowed, crackling, sedimentary layers, a fossil record that only an archaeologist could unravel. It is the story of how The General, just after he got out of Corregidor and reached Australia in April, sent out a request for some stuff. How that request got forwarded to America and bounced
