Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

  “Spoken like a flack,” says Kepler, his shoulders sagging. He goes out into the hallway and turns around, saying, “See you tomorrow at the Crypt.” Then he winks. “Or the Vault, or Cornucopia of Infinite Prosperity, or whatever the Chinese word for it is.” Having knocked Randy off balance with this startling display of humanity, he walks away.

  YAMAMOTO

  * * *

  TOJO AND HIS CLAQUE OF IMPERIAL ARMY BONEheads said to him, in effect: Why don’t you go out and secure the Pacific Ocean for us, because we’ll need a convenient shipping lane, say, oh, about ten thousand miles wide, in order to carry out our little plan to conquer South America, Alaska, and all of North America west of the Rockies. In the meantime we’ll finish mopping up China. Please attend to this ASAP.

  By then they were running the country. They had assassinated anyone in their way, they had the emperor’s ear, and it was hard to tell them that their plan was full of shit and that the Americans were just going to get really pissed off and annihilate them. So, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, a dutiful servant of the emperor, put a bit of thought into the problem, sketched out a little plan, sent out one or two boats on a small jaunt halfway across the fucking planet, and blew Pearl Harbor off the map. He timed it perfectly, right after the formal declaration of war. It was not half bad. He did his job.

  One of his aides later crawled into his office—in the nauseatingly craven posture that minions adopt when they are about to make you really, really unhappy—and told him that there had been a mix-up in the embassy in Washington and that the diplomats there had not gotten around to delivering the declaration of war until well after the American Pacific Fleet had gone to the bottom.

  To those Army fuckheads, this is nothing—just a typo, happens all the time. Isoroku Yamamoto has given up on trying to make them understand that the Americans are grudge-holders on a level that is inconceivable to the Nipponese, who learn to swallow their pride before they learn to swallow solid food. Even if he could get Tojo and his mob of shabby, ignorant thugs to comprehend how pissed off the Americans are, they’d laugh it off. What’re they going to do about it? Throw a pie in your face, like the Three Stooges? Ha, ha, ha! Pass the sake and bring me another comfort girl!

  Isoroku Yamamoto spent a lot of time playing poker with Yanks during his years in the States, smoking like a chimney to deaden the scent of their appalling aftershave. The Yanks are laughably rude and uncultured, of course; this hardly constitutes a sharp observation. Yamamoto, by contrast, attained some genuine insight as a side-effect of being robbed blind by Yanks at the poker table, realizing that the big freckled louts could be dreadfully cunning. Crude and stupid would be okay—perfectly understandable, in fact.

  But crude and clever is intolerable; this is what makes those red-headed ape-men extra double super loathsome. Yamamoto is still trying to drill the notion into the heads of his partners in the big Nipponese scheme to conquer everything between Karachi and Denver. He wishes that they would get the message. A lot of the Navy men have been around the world a few times and seen it for themselves, but those Army guys have spent their careers mowing down Chinamen and raping their women and they honestly believe that the Americans are just the same except taller and smellier. Come on guys, Yamamoto keeps telling them, the world is not just a big Nanjing. But they don’t get it. If Yamamoto were running things, he’d make a rule: each Army officer would have to take some time out from bayoneting Neolithic savages in the jungle, go out on the wide Pacific in a ship, and swap 16-inch shells with an American task force for a while. Then maybe, they’d understand they’re in a real scrap here.

  This is what Yamamoto thinks about, shortly before sunrise, as he clambers onto his Mitsubishi G4M bomber in Rabaul, the scabbard of his sword whacking against the frame of the narrow door. The Yanks call this type of plane “Betty,” an effeminatizing gesture that really irks him. Then again, the Yanks name even their own planes after women, and paint naked ladies on their sacred instruments of war! If they had samurai swords, Americans would probably decorate the blades with nail polish.

  Because the plane’s a bomber, the pilot and copilot are crammed into a cockpit above the main tube of the fuselage. The nose of the plane, then, is a blunt dome of curving struts, like the meridians and parallels of a globe, the trapezoids between them filled with sturdy panes of glass. The plane has been parked pointing east, so the glass nose is radiant with streaky dawn, the unreal hues of chemicals igniting in a lab. In Nippon nothing happens by accident, so he has to assume that this is a deliberate morale-building tip o’ the helmet to the Rising Sun. Making his way up to the greenhouse, he straps himself in where he can stare out the windows as this Betty, and Admiral Ugaki’s, take off.

  In one direction is Simpson’s Harbor, one of the best anchorages in the Pacific, an asymmetrical U wrapped in a neat grid of streets, conspicuously blighted by a fucking British cricket oval! In the other direction, over the ridge, lies the Bismarck Sea. Somewhere down there, the corpses of a few thousand Nipponese troops lie pickled in the wrinkled hulls of their transport ships. A few thousand more escaped to life rafts, but all of their weapons and supplies went to the bottom, so the men are just useless mouths now.

  It’s been like this for almost a year, ever since Midway, when the Americans refused to bite on Yamamoto’s carefully designed feints and ruses up Alaska way, and just happened to send all of their surviving carriers directly into the path of his Midway invasion force. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Yamamoto’s chewing on a thumbnail, right through his glove.

  Now those clumsy, reeking farmhands are sinking every transport ship that the Army sends to New Guinea. Double shit! Their observation planes are everywhere—always showing up in the right place at the right time—tally-hoing the emperor’s furtive convoys in the sawing twang of bloody-gummed Confederates. Their coast-watchers infest the mountains of all these godforsaken islands, despite the Army’s efforts to hunt them down and flush them out. All of their movements are known.

  The two planes fly southeastwards across the tip of New Ireland and enter the Solomon Sea. The Solomon Islands spread out before them, fuzzy jade humps rising from a steaming ocean, 6,500 feet below. A couple of small humps and then a much bigger one, today’s destination: Bougainville.

  Have to show the flag, go out on these inspection tours, give the frontline troops a glimpse of glory, build morale. Yamamoto frankly has better things to do with his time, so he tries to pack as many of these obligatory junkets into a single day as possible. He left his naval citadel at Truk and flew to Rabaul last week so that he could supervise his latest big operation: a wave of massed air attacks on American bases from New Guinea to Guadalcanal.

  The air raids were purportedly successful; kind of. The surviving pilots reported vast numbers of sinkings, whole fleets of American aircraft destroyed on their mucky airstrips. Yamamoto knows perfectly well that these reports will turn out to be wildly exaggerated. More than half of his planes never came back—the Americans, and their almost equally offensive cousins, the Australians, were ready for them. But the Army and the Navy alike are full of ambitious men who will do everything they can to channel good news the emperor’s way, even if it’s not exactly the truth. Accordingly, Yamamoto has received a personal telegram of congratulations from none other than the sovereign himself. It is his duty, now, to fly round to his various outposts, hop out of his Betty, wave the sacred telegram in the air, and pass on the blessings of the emperor.

  Yamamoto’s feet hurt like hell. Like everyone else within a thousand miles, he has a tropical disease; in his case, beriberi. It is the scourge of the Nipponese and especially of the Navy, because they eat too much polished rice, not enough fish and vegetables. His long nerves have been corroded by lactic acid, so his hands quiver. His failing heart can’t shove fluid through his extremities, so his feet swell. He needs to change his shoes several times a day, but he doesn’t have room here; he is encumbered not only by the curvature of the plane’s g
reenhouse, but also by his sword.

  They are approaching the Imperial Navy airbase at Bougainville, right on schedule, at 9:35. A shadow passes overhead and Yamamoto glances up to see the silhouette of an escort, way out of position, dangerously close to them. Who is that idiot? Then the green island and the blue ocean rotate into view as his pilot puts the Betty into a power dive. Another plane flashes overhead with a roar that cuts through the noise of the Betty’s engines, and although it is nothing more than a black flash, its odd forktailed silhouette registers in his mind. It was a P-38 Lightning, and the last time Admiral Yamamoto checked, the Nipponese Air Force wasn’t flying any of those.

  The voice of Admiral Ugaki comes through on the radio from the other Betty, right behind Yamamoto’s, ordering Yamamoto’s pilot to stay in formation. Yamamoto cannot see anything in front of them except for the surf washing ashore on Bougainville, and the wall of trees, seeming to grow higher and higher, as the plane descends—the tropical canopy now actually above them. He is Navy, not an Air Force man, but even he knows that when you can’t see any planes in front of you in a dogfight, you have problems. Red streaks flash past from behind, burying themselves in the steaming jungle ahead, and the Betty begins to shake violently. Then yellow light fills the corners of both of his eyes: the engines are on fire. The pilot is heading directly for the jungle now; either the plane is out of control, or the pilot is already dead, or it is a move of atavistic desperation: run, run into the trees!

  They enter the jungle in level flight, and Yamamoto is astonished how far they go before hitting anything big. Then the plane is bludgeoned wide open by mahogany trunks, like baseball bats striking a wounded sparrow, and he knows it’s over. The greenhouse disintegrates around him, the meridians and parallels crumpling and rending which isn’t quite as bad as it sounds since the body of the plane is suddenly filled with flames. As his seat tears loose from the broken dome and launches into space, he grips his sword, unwilling to disgrace himself by dropping his sacred weapon, blessed by the emperor, even in this last instant of his life. His clothes and hair are on fire as he tumbles like a meteor through the jungle, clenching his ancestral blade.

  He realizes something: The Americans must have done the impossible: broken all of their codes. That explains Midway, it explains the Bismarck Sea, Hollandia, everything. It especially explains why Yamamoto—who ought to be sipping green tea and practicing calligraphy in a misty garden—is, in point of fact, on fire and hurtling through the jungle at a hundred miles per hour in a chair, closely pursued by tons of flaming junk. He must get word out! The codes must all be changed! This is what he is thinking when he flies head-on into a hundred-foot-tall Octomelis sumatrana.

  ANTAEUS

  * * *

  WHEN LAWRENCE PRITCHARD WATERHOUSE SETS foot on the Sceptered Isle for the first time in several months, at the ferry terminal in Utter Maurby, he is startled to find allusions to springtime all over the place. The locals have installed flower boxes around the pier, and all of them are abloom with some sort of pre-Cambrian decorative cabbage. The effect is not exactly cheerful, but it does give the place a haunted Druidical look, as if Waterhouse is looking at the northwesternmost fringe of some cultural tradition from which a sharp anthropologist might infer the existence of actual trees and meadows several hundred miles farther south. For now, lichens will do—they have gotten into the spirit and turned greyish purple and greyish green.

  He and Duffel, their old companionship renewed, tussle their way over to the terminal and fight each other for a seat aboard the disconcertingly quaint two-car Manchester-bound whistle-stop. It will sit there for another couple of hours raising steam before leaving, giving him plenty of time to take stock.

  He’s been working on some information-theoretical problems occasioned by the Royal and U.S. Navies’ recent* propensity to litter the floor of the Atlantic with bombed and torpedoed milchcows. These fat German submarines, laden with fuel, food, and ammunition, loiter in the Atlantic Ocean, using radio rarely and staying well away from the sealanes, and serve as covert floating supply bases so that the U-boats don’t have to go all the way back to the European mainland to refuel and rearm. Sinking lots of ’em is great for the convoys, but must seem conspicuously improbable to the likes of a Rudolf von Hacklheber.

  Usually, just for the sake of form, the Allies send out a search plane beforehand to pretend to stumble upon the milchcow. But, setting aside some of their blind spots in the political realm, the Germans are bright chaps, and cannot be expected to fall for that ruse forever. If we are going to keep sending their milchcows to the bottom, we need to come up with a respectable excuse for the fact that we always know exactly where they are!

  Waterhouse has been coming up with excuses as fast as he can for most of the late winter and early spring, and frankly he is tired of it. It has to be done by a mathematician if it’s to be done correctly, but it’s not exactly mathematics. Thank god he had the presence of mind to copy down the crypto worksheets that he discovered in the U-boat’s safe, which give him something to live for.

  In a sense he is wasting his time; the originals have long since gone off to Bletchley Park where they were probably deciphered within hours. But he’s not doing it for the war effort per se, just trying to keep his mind sharp and maybe add a few leaves to the next edition of the Cryptonomicon. When he arrives at Bletchley, which is his destination of the moment, he will have to ask around and find out what those messages actually said.

  Usually, he is above such cheating. But the messages from U-553 have him completely baffled. They were not produced on an Enigma machine, but they are at least that difficult to decrypt. He does not even know, yet, what kind of cipher he is dealing with. Normally, one begins by figuring out, based on certain patterns in the ciphertext, whether it is, for example, a substitution or a transposition system, and then further classifying it into, say, an aperiodic transposition cipher in which keying units of constant length encipher plaintext groups of variable length, or vice versa. Once you have classified the algorithm, you know how to go about breaking the code.

  Waterhouse hasn’t even gotten that far. He now strongly suspects that the messages were produced using a one-time pad. If so, not even Bletchley Park will be able to break them, unless they have somehow obtained a copy of the pad. He is half-hoping that they will tell him that this is the case so that he can stop ramming his head against this particular stone wall.

  In a way, this would raise even more questions than it would answer. The Triton four-wheel naval Enigma was supposedly considered by the Germans to be perfectly impregnable to cryptanalysis. If that was the case, then why was the skipper of U-553 employing his own private system for certain messages?

  The locomotive starts hissing and sputtering like the House of Lords as Inner Qwghlmians emerge from the terminal building and take their seats on the train. A gaffer comes through the car, selling yesterday’s newspapers, cigarettes, candy, and Waterhouse purchases some of each. The train is just beginning to jerk forward when Waterhouse’s eye falls on the lead headline of yesterday’s newspaper: YAMAMOTO’S PLANE SHOT DOWN IN PACIFIC—ARCHITECT OF PEARL HARBOR THOUGHT TO BE DEAD.

  “Malaria, here I come,” Waterhouse mumbles to himself. Then, before reading any further, he sets the newspaper down and opens up his pack of cigarettes. This is going to take a lot of cigarettes.

  One day, and a whole lot of tar and nicotine later, Waterhouse climbs off the train and walks out the front door of Bletchley Depot into a dazzling spring day. The flowers in front of the station are blooming, a warm southern breeze is blowing, and Waterhouse almost cannot bear to cross the road and enter some windowless hut in the belly of Bletchley Park. He does it anyway and is informed that he has no duties at the moment.

  After visiting a few other huts on other business, he turns north and walks three miles to the hamlet of Shenley Brook End and goes into the Crown Inn, where the proprietress, Mrs. Ramshaw, has, during these last three and a half years, m
ade a tidy business out of looking after stray, homeless Cambridge mathematicians.

  Dr. Alan Mathison Turing is seated at a table by a window, sprawled across two or three chairs in what looks like a very awkward pose but which Waterhouse feels sure is eminently practical. A full pint of something reddish brown is on the table next to him; Alan is too busy to drink it. The smoke from Alan’s cigarette reveals a prism of sunlight coming through the window, centered in which is a mighty Book. Alan is holding the book with one hand. The palm of his other hand is pressed against his forehead, as if he could get the data from book to brain through some kind of direct transference. His fingers curl up into the air and a cigarette projects from between them, ashes dangling perilously over his dark hair. His eyes are frozen in place, not scanning the page, and their focus point is somewhere in the remote distance.

  “Designing another Machine, Dr. Turing?”

  The eyes finally begin to move, and swivel around towards the sound of the visitor’s voice. “Lawrence,” Alan says once, quietly, identifying the face. Then, once more warmly: “Lawrence!” He scrambles to his feet, as energetic as ever, and steps forward to shake hands. “Delighted to see you!”

  “Good to see you, Alan,” Waterhouse says. “Welcome back.” He is, as always, pleasantly surprised by Alan’s keenness, the intensity and purity of his reactions to things.

  He is also touched by Alan’s frank and sincere affection for him. Alan did not give this easily or lightly, but when he decided to make Waterhouse his friend, he did so in a way that is unfettered by either American or heterosexual concepts of manly bearing. “Did you walk the entire distance from Bletchley? Mrs. Ramshaw, refreshment!”

  “Heck, it’s only three miles,” Waterhouse says.

  “Please come and join me,” Alan says. Then he stops, frowns, and looks at him quizzically. “How on earth did you guess I was designing another machine? Simply a guess based on prior observations?”