Cryptonomicon

like many of the people who still live there, he believes that things should be done in a plain, open, and logical fashion.

'I don't mean to alarm you,' Randy says, 'I'm not implying that any such thing is happening, or about to. But America being the way it is right now, you'd be amazed how often business ventures lead to lawsuits. When that happens, any and all documents are disclosable. So people like Avi and Beryl never write anything down that they wouldn't want to see in open court. Furthermore, anyone can be asked, under oath, to testify about what happened. That's why two-person conversations, like this one, are best.'

'One person's word against another. I understand this.'

'I know you do.'

'We should anyway have been discreetly told.'

'The reason that Avi and Beryl didn't tell us about this until now was that they wanted to work out the problem face-to-face, in two-person conversations. In other words, they did it to protect us-not to hide anything from us. Now they are formally presenting us with the news.'

Eberhard is no longer suspicious. Now he is irked, which is worse. Like a lot of techies, he can become obstreperous when he decides that others are not being logical. Randy holds up his hands, palms out, in surrender.

'I stipulate that this does not make sense,' Randy says.

Eb glares into the distance, not mollified.

'Will you agree with me that the world is full of irrational people, and crazy situations?'

'Jaaaa-' Eb says guardedly.

'If you and I are going to hack and get paid for it, people have to hire us, right?'

Eb considers it carefully. 'Yes.'

'That means dealing with those people, at some level, unpleasant as it may be. And accepting a whole lot of other nonsense, like lawyers and PR people and marketroids. And if you or I tried to deal with them, we would go out of our minds. True?'

'Most likely, yes.'

'It is good, then, that people like Avi and Beryl have come into existence, because they are our interface.' An image from the Cold War comes into Randy's head. He reaches out with both hands and gropes in the air. 'Like those glove boxes that they use to handle plutonium. See?'

Eberhard nods. An encouraging sign.

'But that doesn't mean that it's going to be like programming computers. They can only filter and soften the irrational nature of the world beyond, so Avi and Beryl may still do things that seem a little crazy.'

Eb has been getting a more and more faraway look in his eyes. 'It would be interesting to approach this as a problem in information theory,' he announces. 'How can data flow back and forth between nodes in an internal network'-Randy knows that by this Eb means people in a small corporation—'but not exist to a person outside?'

'What do you mean, not exist?'

'How could a court subpoena a document if, from their reference frame, it had never existed?'

'Are you talking about encrypting it?'

Eb looks slightly pained by Randy's simple-mindedness. 'We are already doing that. But someone could still prove that a document, of a certain size, had been sent out at a certain time, to a certain mailbox.'

'Traffic analysis.'

'Yes. But what if one jams it? Why couldn't I fill my hard drive with random bytes, so that individual files would not be discernible? Their very existence would be hidden in the noise, like a striped tiger in tall grass. And we could continually stream random noise back and forth to each other.'

'That would be expensive.'

Eberhard waves his hand dismissively. 'Bandwidth is cheap.'

'That is more an article of faith than a statement of fact,' Randy says, 'but it might be true in the future.'

'But the rest of our lives will happen in the future, Randy, so we might as well get with the program now.

'Well,' Randy says, 'could we continue this discussion later?'

'Of course.'

They go back into the room. Tom, who has spent the most time here, is saying: 'The five-footers with yellowish-brown spots on an aqua background are harmless and make great pets. The six-footers with brownish- yellow spots on a turquoise background kill you with a single bite, in ten minutes, unless you commit suicide in the meantime to escape the intolerable pain.'

This is all a way of letting Randy and Eb know that the others have not been discussing business while they were out of the room.

'Okay,' Avi says, 'the upshot is that the Crypt is going to be potentially much bigger than we thought at first, so this is good news. But there is one thing that we have to deal with.' Avi has known Randy forever, and knows that Randy won't really be bothered by what is to come.

All eyes turn towards Randy, and Beryl picks up the thread. She has arrogated to herself the role of worrying about people's feelings, since the other people in the company are so manifestly unqualified, and she speaks regretfully. 'The work Randy's been doing in the Philippines, which is very fine work, is no longer a critical part of this corporation's activities.'

'I accept that,' Randy says. 'Hey, at least I got my first tan in ten years.'

Everyone seems immediately relieved that Randy is not pissed off.

Tom, typically, gets right to brass tacks: 'Can we pull out of our relationship with the Dentist? Just make a clean break?'

The rhythm of the conversation is abruptly lost. It's like a power failure in a discotheque.

'Unknown,' Avi finally says. 'We looked at the contracts. But they were written by the Dentist's lawyers.'

'Aren't some of his partners lawyers?' Cantrell asks.

Avi shrugs impatiently, as if that's not the half of it. 'His partners. His investors. His neighbors, friends, golfing buddies. His plumberis probably a lawyer.'

'The point being that he is famously litigious,' Randy says.

'The other potential problem,' Beryl says, 'is that, if we did find a way to extract ourselves from the deal with AVCLA, we would then lose the short-term cash flow that we were counting on from the Philippines network. The ramifications of that turn out to be uglier than we had expected.'

'Damn!' Randy says, 'I was afraid of that.'

'What are the ramifications?' Tom says, hewing as ever to the bottom line.

'We would have to raise some more money to cover the shortfall,' Avi says. 'Diluting our stock.'

'Diluting it how much?' John asks.

'Below fifty percent.'

This magic figure touches off an epidemic of sighing, groaning and shifting around among the officers of Epiphyte Corp., who collectively hold over fifty percent of the company's stock. As they work through the ramifications in their heads, they begin to look significantly at Randy.

Finally Randy stands, and holds out his hands as if warding them off. 'Okay, okay, okay,' he says. 'Where does this take us? The business plan states, over and over, that the Philippines network makes sense in and of itself-that it could be spun off into an independent business at any time and still make money. As far as we know, that's still true, right?'

Avi thinks this over before issuing the carefully engineered statement:

'It is as true as it ever was.'

This elicits a titter, and a bit of sarcastic applause, from the others. Clever Avi! Where would we be without him?

'Okay,' Randy says. 'So if we stick with the Dentist-even though his project is now irrelevant to us-we hopefully make enough money that we don't need to sell any more stock. We can retain control over the company. On the other hand, if we break our relationship with AVCLA, the Dentist's partners start to hammer us with