Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

  And the big steel trunk with all of the Army codebooks. These books were heavy as death when they were bone dry; now they are sodden. To carry them out is beyond imagining. The rules dictate that they must therefore be burned.

  The men of the 20th Division’s radio platoon are not much inclined to humor of any kind at the moment, not even the grim sardonic humor universal among soldiers. If anything in the world is capable of making them laugh at this moment, it is the concept of trying to construct a bonfire out of saturated codebooks in a swamp during a rainstorm. They might be able to burn them if they used a lot of aviation fuel—more than they actually have. Then the fire would produce a towering column of smoke that would draw P-38s as the scent of human flesh draws mosquitoes.

  Burning them can’t be necessary. New Guinea is a howling maelstrom of decay and destruction; the only things that endure are rocks and wasps. They rip off the covers to bring home as proof that they have been destroyed, then pack the books into their trunk and bury it in the bank of an especially vindictive river.

  It’s not a very good idea. But they have been getting bombed a lot. Even if the shrapnel misses you, the bomb’s shock wave is like a stone wall moving at seven hundred miles an hour. Unlike a stone wall, it passes through your body, like a burst of light through a glass figurine. On its way through your flesh, it rearranges every part of you down to the mitochondrial level, disrupting every process in every cell, including whatever enables your brain to keep track of time and experience the world. A few of these detonations are enough to break the thread of consciousness into a snarl of tangled and chopped filaments. These men are not as human as they were when they 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.

  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 Blet
chley 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 his department and his problem. The question is: how quickly can we replace our busted merchant shipping codes without tipping the Germans off to the fact that we have broken Shark?

  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 con coct 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 never been exposed to the direct rays of the sun and brings to mind rose petals strewn over Devonshire clotted cream.

  “Oh! Let me take it!” Waterhouse blurts, and lunges forward with a jerkiness born of passion blended with hypothermia. While taking the tray from her hands, he inadvertently pulls off one of her mittens, which falls to the floor. “Sorry!” he says, realizing he has never seen her hands before. She has red polish on the nails of the offended hand, which she cups over her mouth and blows on. Her large green eyes are looking at him, full of placid expectation.

  “Beg pardon?” Waterhouse says.

  “Is everything quite all right?” she repeats.

  “Yes! Why shouldn’t it be?”

  “The antenna,” Margaret says. “It hasn’t moved in over an hour.”

  Waterhouse is so flummoxed he can barely remain standing.

  Margaret is still breathing through her lacquered fingertips, so that Waterhouse can only see her green eyes, which now angle and twinkle mischievously. She glances towards his hammock. “Been napping on the job, have we?”

  Waterhouse’s first impulse is to deny it and to explain the truth, which is that he was thinking about sex and crypto and forgot to move the antenna. But then he realizes that Margaret has supplied him with a better excuse. “Guilty as charged,” he says. “Was up late last night.”

  “That tea will keep you alert,” Margaret says. Then her eyes return to the hammock. She pulls her mitten back on. “What is it like?”

  “What is what like?”

  “Sleeping in one of those. Is it comfortable?”

  “Very comfortable.”

  “Can I just see what it’s like?”

  “Ah. Well, it’s very difficult to get in—at that height.”

  “You manage it, though, don’t you?” she says chidingly. Waterhouse feels himself blushing. Margaret walks over to the hammock and kicks off her heels. Waterhouse winces to see her bare feet on the stone floor, which has not been warm since the Barbary Corsairs burned the place down. Her toenails are also painted red. “I don’t mind it,” Margaret says, “I’m a farmer’s daughter. Come on, give me a leg up!”

  Waterhouse has completely lost whatever control he might ever have had over the situation and himself. His tongue seems to be made of erectile tissue. So he lumbers over, bends down, and makes a stirrup of his hands. She puts her foot into it and launches herself into the hammock, disappearing with a whoop and a giggle into his bulky nest of grey wool blankets. The hammock swings back and forth across the center of the chapel, like a censer dispersing a faint lavender scent. It swings once, twice. It swings five times, ten times, twenty. Margaret is silent and motionless. Waterhouse stands as if his feet were planted in mortar. For the first time in weeks he does not know exactly what is going to happen next, and the loss of control leaves him stunned and helpless.

  “It’s dreamy,” she says. Dreamily. Then, finally, she shifts. Waterhouse sees her little face peeking out over the edge, shrouded in the grey cowl of a blanket. “Ooh!” she screams, and flips flat on her back again. The sudden movement puts an eccentric jiggle into the rhythmic motion of the hammock.

  “What’s wrong?” Waterhouse says hopelessly.

  “I’m afraid of heights!” she exclaims. “I’m so sorry, Lawrence, I should have warned you. Is it all right if I call you Lawrence?” She sounds as if she would be terribly hurt if he said no. And how can Lawrence wound the feelings of a pretty, barefoot, acrophobic girl, helpless in a hammock?

  “Please. By all means,” he says. But he knows perfectly well that the ball is still in his court. “Can I be of any assistance?”

  “I should be so obliged,” Margaret says.

  “Well, would you like to climb down onto my shoulders, or something?” Waterhouse essays.

  “I’m really far too terrified,” she says.

  There is only one way out. “Well. Would you take it the wrong way if I came up there to help?”

  “It would be so heroic of you!” she says. “I should be unspeakably grateful.”

  “Well, then…”

  “But I insist that you continue with your duties first!”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Lawrence,” Margaret says, “when I get down from this hammock I shall go to the kitchen and mop the floor—which is already quite clean enough, thank you. You, on the other hand, have important work to do—work that might save the lives of hundreds of men on some Atlantic convoy! And I know that you have been very naughty in sleeping on the job. I refuse to allow you up here until you have made amends.”

  “Very well,” Waterhouse says, “you leave me no alternative. Duty calls.” He squares his shoulders, spins on his heel, and marches back to his desk. Skerries have already made off with all of Margaret’s scones, but he pours himself some tea. Then he resumes encrypting his instructions to Chattan: ONLY BRUTE FORCE APPROACH WILL BE SAFE PUT CODE BOOK ON SHIP INSERT SHIP IN MURMANSK CONVOY WAIT FOR FOG RAM NORWAY.

  The one-time pad encryption takes a while. Lawrence can do mod 25 arithmetic in his sleep, but doing it with an erection is a different matter. “Lawrence? What are you doing?” Margaret asks from her nest in the hammock, which, Lawrence imagines, is getting warmer and cozier by the minute. He glances surreptitiously at her discarded high heels.

  “Preparing my report,” Lawrence says. “Doesn’t do me any good to make observations if I don’t send them out.”

  “Quite right,” Margaret says thoughtfully.

  This is an excellent time to stoke the chapel’s pathetic iron stove. He puts in a few scoops of precious coal, his worksheet, and the page from the one-time pad that he has just used to do the encryption. “Should warm up now,” he says.

  “Oh, lovely,” Margaret says, “I’m all shivery.”

  Lawrence recognizes this as his cue to initiate a rescue operat
ion. About fifteen seconds later, he is up there in the hammock with Margaret. To the great surprise of neither one of them, the quarters are awkward and tight. There is some flopping around which ends with Lawrence on his back and Margaret on top of him, her thigh between his.

  She is shocked to discover that he has an erection. Ashamed, apparently, that she did not anticipate his need. “You poor dear!” she exclaims. “Of course! How could I have been so dense! You must have been so lonely here.” She kisses his cheek, which is nice since he is too stunned to move. “A brave warrior deserves all the support we civilians can possibly give him,” she says, reaching down with one hand to open his fly.

  Then she pulls the grey wool over her head and burrows to a new position. Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is stunned by what happens next. He gazes up at the ceiling of the chapel through half-closed eyes and thanks God for having sent him what is obviously a German spy and an angel of mercy rolled into one adorable package.

  When it’s finished, he opens his eyes again and takes a deep breath of cold Atlantic air. He is seeing everything around him with newfound clarity. Clearly, Margaret is going to do wonders for his productivity on the cryptological front—if he can only keep her coming back.

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