Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

  Shaftoe looks around at the others, but none of them laughs, or even grins. They must not have heard it. “Come again?” Shaftoe asks, proddingly, like a man in a bar trying to get a shy friend to tell a sure-fire thigh-slapper.

  “Wehrmachtnachrichtungenverbindungen,” von Hacklheber says, very slowly, as if repeating nursery rhymes to a toddler. He blinks once, twice, three times at Shaftoe, then sits forward and says, brightly: “Perhaps I should explain the organization of the German intelligence hierarchy, since it will help you all to understand my story.”

  A BRIEF TRIP INTO HELL’S DEMO with HERR DOKTOR PROFESSOR RUDOLF VON HACKLHEBER ensues.

  Shaftoe only hears the first couple of sentences. At about the point when von Hacklheber tears a sheet out of a notebook and begins to diagram the organizational tree of the Thousand-Year Reich, with “Der Führer” at the top, Shaftoe’s eyes take on a heavy glaze, his body goes slack, he becomes deaf, and he accelerates up the throat of a nightmare, like the butt of a half-digested corn dog being reverse-peristalsed from the body of an addict. He has never been through this experience before, but he knows intuitively that this is how the trip to Hell works: no leisurely boat ride across the scenic Styx, no gradual descent into that trite tourist trap, Pluto’s Cavern, no stops along the way to buy fishing licenses for the Lake of Fire.

  Shaftoe is not (though he should be) dead, and so this is not hell. It is closely modeled after hell, though. It is like a mock-up slapped together from tar paper and canvas, like the fake towns where they practiced house-to-house warfare during boot camp. Shaftoe is gripped with a sort of giddy queasiness that, he knows, is the most pleasant thing he will feel here. “Morphine takes away the body’s ability to experience pleasure,” says the booming voice of Enoch Root, his wry, annoying Virgil, who for purposes of this nightmare has adopted the voice and physical shape of Moe, the mean, dark-haired Stooge. “It may be some time before you feel physically well.”

  The organizational tree of this nightmare begins, like von Hacklheber’s, with Der Führer, but then branches out widely and crazily. There is an Asian branch, headed up by The General, and including, among other things, a Hauptgruppe of giant carnivorous lizards, a Referat of Chinese women holding up pale-eyed babies, and several Abteilungs of plastered Nips with swords. In the center of their domain is the city of Manila, where, in a tableau that Shaftoe would identify as Boschian if he had not spent his high school art class out behind the school leg-fucking cheerleaders, a heavily pregnant Glory Altamira is being forced to do blow jobs on syphilitic Nipponese troops.

  The voice of Mr. Jaeger, his drafting teacher—the most boring man Shaftoe had ever known, until perhaps today—fades in for a moment with the words, “but all of the organizational structures I have detailed to this point became obsolete at the outbreak of hostilities. The hierarchy was shuffled and several of the entities changed their names, as follows…” Shaftoe hears a new sheet of paper being torn from the notebook, but what he sees is Mr. Jaeger tearing up a diagram of a table leg bracket that the young Bobby Shaftoe had spent a week drafting. Everything has been reorganized, General MacArthur is still very high in the tree, walking a brace of giant lizards on steel leashes, but now the hierarchy is filled with grinning Arabs holding up lumps of hashish, frozen butchers, dead or doomed lieutenants, and that fucking weirdo, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, dressed in a black, hooded robe, heading up a whole legion of pencil-necked Signals geeks, also in robes, holding bizarrely shaped antennas above their heads, wading through a blizzard of dollar bills printed on old Chinese newspapers. Their eyes glow, flashing on and off in Morse code.

  “What are they saying?” Bobby says.

  “Please, stop screaming,” says Enoch Root. “Just for a little while.”

  Bobby’s lying on a cot in a thatched hut in Guadalcanal. Swedish tribesmen run around in loincloths, gathering food: every so often, a ship gets blown up out in the Slot, and fish-shrapnel rains down and gets hung up in the branches, along with the occasional severed human arm or hunk of skull. The Swedes ignore the human bits and harvest the fish, taking it off to make lutefisk in black steel drums.

  Enoch Root has an old cigar box on his lap. Golden light is shining out of the crack around its lid.

  But he’s not in the thatched hut anymore; he’s inside a cold black metal phallus that has been probing around down below the surface of the nightmare: Bischoff’s submarine. Depth charges are going off all over the place and it’s filling up with sewage. Something clocks him on the side of the head: not a ham this time, but a human leg. The sub’s lined with tubes that carry voices: in English, German, Arabic, Nipponese, Shanghainese, but confined and muffled in the plumbing so that they mingle together like the running of water. Then a pipe is ruptured by a near miss from a depth charge; from its jagged end issues a German voice:

  “The foregoing may be taken as a rather coarse-grained treatment of the general organization of the Reich and particularly the military. Responsibility for cryptanalysis and cryptography is distributed among a large number of small Amts and Diensts attached to various tendrils of this structure. These are continually being reorganized and rearranged, however I may be able to provide you with a reasonably accurate and detailed picture…”

  Shaftoe, chained to a bunk in the submarine by fetters of gold, feels one of his small, concealed handguns pressing into the small of his back, and wonders whether it would be bad form to shoot himself in the mouth. He paws wildly at the broken tube and manages to slap it down into the rising sewage; bubbles come out, and von Hacklheber’s words are trapped in them, like word balloons in a comic strip. When the bubbles reach the surface and burst, it sounds like screaming.

  Root is sitting on the opposite bunk with the cigar box on his lap. He holds up his hand in a V for Victory, then levels it at Shaftoe’s face and pokes him in the eyes. “I cannot help you with your inability to find physical comfort—it is a problem of body chemistry,” he says. “It poses interesting theological questions. It reminds us that all the pleasures of the world are an illusion projected into our souls by our bodies.”

  A lot of the other speaking tubes have ruptured now, and screaming comes from most of them; Root has to lean close in order to shout into Bobby’s ear. Shaftoe takes advantage of it to reach over and make a grab for the cigar box, which contains the stuff he wants: not morphine. Something better than morphine. Morphine is to the stuff in the cigar box what a Shanghai prostitute is to Glory.

  The box flies open and blinding light comes out of it. Shaftoe covers his face. The salted and preserved body parts suspended from the ceiling tumble into his lap and begin to writhe, reaching out for other parts, assembling themselves into living bodies. Mikulski comes back to life, aims his Vickers at the ceiling of the U-boat, and cuts an escape hatch. Instead of black water, golden light rushes through.

  “What was your position in all this, then?” asks Root, and Shaftoe nearly jumps out of his chair, startled by the sound of a voice other than von Hacklheber’s. Given what happened the last time someone (Shaftoe) asked a question, this is heroic but risky. Starting with Hitler, von Hacklheber works his way down the chain of command.

  Shaftoe doesn’t care: he’s on a rubber raft, along with various resurrected comrades from Guadalcanal and Detachment 2702. They are rowing across a still cove lit by giant flaming klieg lights in the sky. Standing behind the klieg lights is a man talking in a German accent: “My immediate supervisors, Wilhelm Fenner, from St. Petersburg, who headed all German military cryptanalysis from 1922 onwards, and his chief deputy, Professor Novopaschenny.”

  All of these names sound alike to Shaftoe, but Root says, “A Russian?”

  Shaftoe is really coming around now, reemerging into the World. He sits up straight, and his body feels stiff, like it hasn’t moved in a long time. He is about to apologize for the way he has been behaving, but since no one is looking at him funny, Shaftoe sees no reason to fill them in on what he’s been doing these last few minutes.<
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  “Professor Novopaschenny was a Czarist astronomer who knew Fenner from St. Petersburg. Under them, I was given broad authority to pursue researches into the theoretical limits of security. I used tools from pure mathematics as well as mechanical calculating devices of my own design. I looked at our own codes as well as those of our enemies, looking for weaknesses.”

  “What did you find?” Bischoff asks.

  “I found weaknesses everywhere,” von Hacklheber says. “Most codes were designed by dilettantes and amateurs with no grasp of the underlying mathematics. It is really quite pitiable.”

  “Including the Enigma?” Bischoff asks.

  “Don’t even talk to me of that shit,” von Hacklheber says. “I dispensed with it almost immediately.”

  “What do you mean, dispensed with it?” Root asks.

  “Proved that it was shit,” von Hacklheber says.

  “But the entire Wehrmacht still uses it,” Bischoff says.

  Von Hacklheber shrugs and looks at the burning tip of his cigarette. “You expect them to throw all those machines away because one mathematician writes a paper?” He stares at his cigarette a while longer, then puts it to his lips, draws on it tastefully, holds the smoke in his lungs, and finally exhales it slowly through his vocal cords whilst simultaneously causing them to emit the following sounds: “I knew that there must be people working for the enemy who would figure this out. Turing. Von Neumann. Waterhouse. Some of the Poles. I began to look for signs that they had broken the Enigma, or at least realized its weaknesses and begun trying to break it. I ran statistical analyses of convoy sinkings and U-boat attacks. I found some anomalies, some improbable events, but not enough to make a pattern. Many of the grossest anomalies were later accounted for by the discovery of espionage stations and the like.

  “From this I drew no conclusion. Certainly if they were smart enough to break the Enigma they would be smart enough to conceal the fact from us at any cost. But there was one anomaly they could not cover up. I refer to human anomalies.”

  “Human anomalies?” Root asks. The phrase is classic Root-bait.

  “I knew perfectly well that only a handful of people in the world had the acumen to break the Enigma and then to cover up the fact that they had broken it. By using our intelligence sources to ascertain where these men were, and what they were doing, I could make inferences.” Von Hacklheber stubs out his cigarette, sits up straight, and drains a half-shot of schnapps, warming to the task. “This was a human intelligence problem—not signals intelligence. This is handled by a different branch of the service—” and he’s off again talking about the structure of the German bureaucracy. Terrified, Shaftoe flees from the room, runs outside, and uses the outhouse. When he gets back, von Hacklheber is just winding up. “It all came down to a problem of sifting through large amounts of raw data—lengthy and tedious work.”

  Shaftoe cringes, wondering what something would have to be like in order to qualify as lengthy and tedious to this joker.

  “After some time,” von Hacklheber continues, “I learned, through some of our agents in the British Isles, that a man matching the general description of Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse had been stationed to a castle in Outer Qwghlm. I was able to arrange for a young lady to place this man under the closest possible surveillance,” he says dryly. “His security precautions were impeccable, and so we learned nothing directly. In fact, it is quite likely that he knew that the young woman in question was an agent, and so took added precautions. But we did learn that this man communicated through one-time pads. He would read his encrypted messages over the telephone to a nearby naval base whence they would be telegraphed to a station in Buckinghamshire, which would respond to him with messages encrypted using the same system of one-time pads. By going through the records of our various radio intercept stations we were able to accumulate a stack of messages that had been sent by this mysterious unit, using this series of one-time pads, over a period of time beginning in the middle of 1942 and continuing up to the present day. It was interesting to note that this unit operated in a variety of places: Malta, Alexandria, Morocco, Norway, and various ships at sea. Extremely unusual. I was very interested in this mysterious unit and so I began trying to break their special code.”

  “Isn’t that impossible?” Bischoff asks. “There is no way to break a one-time pad, short of stealing a copy.”

  “That is true in theory,” von Hacklheber says. “In practice, this is only true if the letters that make up the one-time pad are chosen perfectly randomly. But, as I discovered, this is not true of the one-time pads used by Detachment 2702—which is the mysterious unit that Waterhouse, Turing, and these two gentlemen all belong to.”

  “But how did you figure this out?” Bischoff asks.

  “A few things helped me. There was a lot of depth— many messages to work with. There was consistency—the one-time pads were generated in the same way, always, and always exhibited the same patterns. I made some educated guesses which turned out to be correct. And I had a calculating machine to make the work go faster.”

  “Educated guesses?”

  “I had a hypothesis that the one-time pads were being drawn up by a person who was rolling dice or shuffling a deck of cards to produce the letters. I began to consider psychological factors. An English speaker is accustomed to a certain frequency distribution of letters. He expects to see a great many e’s, t’s, and a’s, and not so many z’s and q’s and x’s. So if such a person were using some supposedly random algorithm to generate the letters, he would be subconsciously irritated every time a z or an x came up, and, conversely, soothed by the appearance of e or t. Over time, this might skew the frequency distribution.”

  “But Herr Doctor von Hacklheber, I find it unlikely that such a person would substitute their own letters for the ones that came up on the cards, or dice, or whatever.”

  “It is not very likely. But suppose that the algorithm gave the person some small amount of discretion.” Von Hacklheber lights another cigarette, pours out more schnapps. “I set up an experiment. I got twenty volunteers—middle-aged women who wanted to do their part for the Reich. I set them to work drawing up one-time pads using an algorithm where they drew slips out of a box. Then I used my machinery to run statistical calculations on the results. I found that they were not random at all.”

  Root says, “The one-time pads for Detachment 2702 are being created by Mrs. Tenney, a vicar’s wife. She uses a bingo machine, a cage filled with wooden balls with a letter stamped on each ball. She is supposed to close her eyes before reaching into the cage. But suppose she has become sloppy and no longer closes her eyes when she reaches into it.”

  “Or,” von Hacklheber says, “suppose she looks at the cage, and sees how the balls are distributed inside of it, and then closes her eyes. She will subconsciously reach toward the E and avoid the Z. Or, if a certain letter has just come up recently, she will try to avoid choosing it again. Even if she cannot see the inside of the cage, she will learn to distinguish among the different balls by their feel—being made of wood, each ball will have a different weight, a different pattern in the grain.”

  Bischoff’s not buying it. “But it will still be mostly random!”

  “Mostly random is not good enough!” von Hacklheber snaps. “I was convinced that the one-time pads of Detachment 2702 would have a frequency distribution similar to that of the King James Version of the Bible, for example. And I strongly suspected that the content of those messages would include words such as Waterhouse, Turing, Enigma, Qwghlm, Malta. By putting my machinery to work, I was able to break some of the one-time pads. Waterhouse was careful to burn his pads after using them once, but some other parts of the detachment were careless, and used the same pads again and again. I read many messages. It was obvious that Detachment 2702 was in the business of deceiving the Wehrmacht by concealing the fact that the Enigma had been broken.”

  Shaftoe knows what an Enigma is, if only because Bischoff won’t shut up ab
out them. When von Hacklheber explains this, everything that Detachment 2702 ever did suddenly makes sense.

  “So, the secret is out then,” Root says. “I assume you made your superiors aware of your discovery?”

  “I made them aware of absolutely nothing,” von Hacklheber snarls, “because by this time I had long since fallen into a snare of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. I had become his pawn, his slave, and had ceased to feel any loyalty whatsoever towards the Reich.”

  The knock on Rudolf von Hacklheber’s door had come at four o’clock in the morning, a time exploited by the Gestapo for its psychological effect. Rudy is wide awake. Even if bombers had not been pounding Berlin all night long, he would have been awake, because he has neither seen nor heard from Angelo in three days. He throws a dressing gown over his pajamas, steps into slippers, and opens the door of his flat to reveal, predictably, a small, prematurely withered man backed up by a couple of classic Gestapo killers in long black leather coats.

  “May I proffer an observation?” says Rudy von Hacklheber.

  “But of course, Herr Doktor Professor. As long as it is not a state secret, of course.”

  “In the old days—the early days—when no one knew what the Gestapo was, and no one was afraid of it, this four in the morning business was clever. A fine way to exploit man’s primal fear of the darkness. But now it is 1942, almost 1943, and everyone is afraid of the Gestapo. Everyone. More than they are of the dark. So, why don’t you work during the daytime? You are stuck in a rut.”