left home; they cannot be expected to think clearly or to do things for good reasons. They throw mud on the trunk not as a sane procedure for getting rid of it but as a kind of ritual, just to demonstrate the proper respect for its lode of strange information.
Then they shoulder their burdens of iron and rice and begin to strain up into the mountains. Their comrades have left a trampled path that is already growing back into jungle. The mileposts are bodies-by now just stinking battlegrounds-disputed by frenzied mobs of microbes, bugs, beasts, and birds never catalogued by scientists.
Chapter 28 HUFFDUFF
The huffduff mast is planted before they even have a roof on the new headquarters of Detachment 2702, and the huffduff antenna is raised before there is any electricity to run it.
Waterhouse does his best to pretend as if he cares. He lets the workers know: vast tank armadas clashing in the African desert might be dashing and romantic, but the real battle of this war (ignoring, as always, the Eastern Front) is the Battle of the Atlantic. We can't win the Battle of the Atlantic without sinking some U-boats, and we can't sink them until we find them, and we need a way of finding them other than the tried-and-true approach of letting our convoys steam through them and get blown to bits. That way, men, is to get this antenna in action as soon as humanly possible.
Waterhouse is no actor, but when the second ice storm of the week blows through and inflicts grievous damage on the antenna, and he has to stay up all night repairing it by the light of the Galvanick Lucifer, he is pretty sure that he has them hooked. The castle staff work late shifts to keep him supplied with hot tea and brandy, and the builders give him some zesty hip-hip-hoorays the next morning when the patched antenna is winched back up to the top of the mast. They are all so sure that they are saving lives in the North Atlantic that they would probably lynch him if they knew the truth.
This huffduff story is ridiculously plausible. It is so plausible that if Waterhouse were working for the Germans, he'd be suspicious. The antenna is a highly directional model. It receives a strong signal when pointed towards the source and a weak signal otherwise. The operator waits for a U-boat to begin transmitting and then swings the antenna back and forth until it gives the maximum reading; the direction of the antenna then gives the azimuth to the source. Two or more such readings, supplied by different huffduff stations, can be used to triangulate the origin of the signal.
In order to keep up appearances, the station needs to be manned 24 hours a day, which almost kills Waterhouse during the first weeks of 1943. The rest of Detachment 2702 has not shown up on schedule, so it is up to Waterhouse to preserve the illusion in the meantime.
Everyone within ten miles-basically, the entire civilian population of Qwghlm, or, to put it another way, the entire Qwghlmian race-can see the new huffduff antenna rising from the mast on the castle. They are not stupid people and some of them, at least, must understand that the damn thing doesn't do any good if it is always pointed in the same direction. If it's not moving, it's not working. And if it's not working, then just what the hell is going on up there in the castle anyway?
So Waterhouse has to move it. He lives in the chapel, sleeping-when he sleeps-in a hammock strung at a perilous altitude above the floor ('skerries' are excellent jumpers, he has found).
If he sleeps during the daytime, even casual observers in the town will notice that the antenna does not move. That's no good. But he can't sleep at night, when the Germans bounce their transmissions off the ionosphere between the U-boats in the North Atlantic and their bases in Bordeaux and Lorient because a really close observer- say an insomniacal castle worker, or a German spy up in the rocks with a pair of binoculars-will suspect that the immobile huffduff antenna is just a cover story. So Waterhouse tries to split the difference by sleeping for a few hours around dusk and another few hours around dawn-a plan that does not go over well with his body. And when he gets up, he has absolutely nothing to look forward to besides sitting at the huffduff console for eight or twelve hours at a stretch, watching the breath come out of his mouth, twiddling the antenna, listening to-nothing!
He freely stipulates that he is a selfish bastard for feeling sorry for himself when other men are being blown to bits.
Having gotten that out of the way, what is he going to do to stay sane? He has got his routine down pat: leave the antenna pointed generally westwards for a while, then swing it back and forth in diminishing arcs, pretending to zero in on a U-boat, then leave it sitting for a while and do jumping jacks to warm back up. He has ditched his uniform for raiments of warm Qwghlmian wool. Every once in a while, at totally unpredictable intervals, members of the castle staff will burst in on him with an urn of soup or tea service or simply to see how he is doing and tell him what a fine chap he is. Once a day, he writes down a bunch of gibberish-his purported results-and dispatches it over to the naval base.
He divides his time between thinking about sex and thinking about mathematics. The former keeps intruding upon the latter. It gets worse when the stout fiftyish cook named Blanche, who has been bringing him his meals, comes down with dropsy or ague or gout or colic or some other Shakespearian ailment and is replaced by Margaret, who is about twenty and quite fetching.
Margaret really messes up his head. When it gets really intolerable, he goes to the latrine (so that the staff will not break in on him at an inopportune moment) and executes a Manual Override. But one thing he learned in Hawaii was that a Manual Override is unfortunately not the same as the real thing. The effect wears off too soon.
While he's waiting for it to wear off, he gets a lot of solid math done. Alan provided him with some notes on redundancy and entropy, relating to the voice encryption work he is currently doing in New York City. Waterhouse works through that stuff and comes up with some nice lemmas which he lamentably cannot send to Alan without violating both common sense and any number of security procedures. This done, he turns his attention to cryptology, pure and raw. He spent enough time at Bletchley Park to realize just how little of this art he really understood.
The U-boats talk on the radio way too much and everyone in the German Navy knows it. Their security experts have been nagging their brass to tighten up their security, and they finally did it by introducing the four- rotor version of the Enigma machine, which has knocked Bletchley Park on its ass for about a year...
Margaret has to walk round the castle out of doors to bring Waterhouse his meals, and by the time she gets here, her cheeks have turned rosy red. The steam coming from her mouth floats around her face like a silken veil-
Stop that, Lawrence! The subject of today's lecture is the German Naval four-wheel Enigma, known to them as Triton and to the Allies as Shark. Introduced on 2 February of last year (1942), it wasn't until the recovery of the beached German U-boat U-559 on 30 October that Bletchley Park got the material they needed to break the code. A couple of weeks ago, on 13 December, Bletchley Park finally busted Shark, and the internal communications of the German Navy became an open book to the Allies once more.
The first thing they have learned, as a result, is that the Germans have broken our merchant shipping codes wide open, and that all year long they have known exactly where to find the convoys.
All of this information has been provided to Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse within the last few days, via the totally secure one-time pad channel. Bletchley is telling him this stuff because it raises a question of information theory, which is
Waterhouse does not have to think about this one for very long before he concludes that it is far too tricky to play games with. The only way to handle the situation is to concoct an incident of some sort that will explain to the Germans why we have totally lost faith in our own merchant shipping codes and are changing them. He writes up a message to this effect, and begins to encrypt it using the one-time pad that he shares with Chattan.
'Is everything quite all right?'
Waterhouse stands and whirls around, heart thrashing.
It is Margaret, standing there veiled in the steam of her own breath, a grey wool overcoat thrown over her maid's uniform, supporting a tray of tea and scones with grey wool mittens. The only parts of her not encased in wool are her ankles and her face. The former are well turned; Margaret is not above wearing heels. The latter has
