Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

  COMPUTER

  * * *

  LIEUTENANT COLONEL EARL Comstock of the Electrical Till Corporation and the United States Army, in that order, prepares for today’s routine briefing from his subordinate, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, much as a test pilot readies himself to be ripped into the stratosphere with a hot rocket engine under his ass. He turns in early the night before, wakes up late, talks to his aide and makes sure that (a) plenty of hot coffee is available and (b) none of it will be given to Waterhouse. He gets two wire recorders set up in the room, in case either goes on the fritz, and brings in a team of three crack stenographers with loads of technical savvy. He has a couple of fellows in his section—also ETC employees during peacetime—who are real math whizzes, so he brings them in too. He gives them a little pep talk: “I do not expect you fellows to understand what the fuck Waterhouse is talking about. I’m gonna be running after him as fast as I can. You just hug his legs and hold on for dear life so that I can sort of keep his backside in view as long as possible.” Comstock is proud of this analogy, but the math whizzes seem baffled. Testily, he fills them in on the always-tricky literal vs. figurative dichotomy. Only twenty minutes remain before Waterhouse’s arrival; right on schedule, Comstock’s aide comes through the room with a tray of benzedrine tablets. Comstock takes two, attempting to lead by example. “Where’s my darn chalkboard team?” he demands, as the powerful stimulant begins to rev up his pulse. Into the room come two privates equipped with blackboard erasers and damp chamois cloths, plus a three-man photography team. They set up a pair of cameras aimed at the chalkboard, plus a couple of strobe lights, and lay in a healthy stock of film rolls.

  He checks his watch. They are running five minutes behind schedule. He looks out the window and sees that his jeep has returned; Waterhouse must be in the building. “Where is the extraction team?” he demands.

  Sergeant Graves is there a few moments later. “Sir, we went to the church as directed, and located him, and, uh—” He coughs against the back of his hand.

  “And what?”

  “And who is more like it, sir,” says Sergeant Graves, sotto voce. “He’s in the lavatory right now, cleaning up, if you know what I mean.” He winks.

  “Ohhhh,” says Earl Comstock, cottoning on to it.

  “After all,” Sergeant Graves says, “you can’t blow out the rusty pipes of your organ unless you have a nice little assistant to get the job properly done.”

  Comstock tenses. “Sergeant Graves—it is critically important for me to know—did the job get properly done?”

  Graves furrows his brow, as if pained by the very question. “Oh, by all means sir. We wouldn’t dream of interrupting such an operation. That’s why we are late—begging your pardon.”

  “Don’t mention it,” Comstock says, slapping Graves heartily on the shoulder. “That is why I try to give my men broad discretion. It has been my opinion for quite some time that Waterhouse is badly in need of some relaxation. He concentrates a little too hard on his work. Sometimes I frankly cannot tell whether he is saying something very brilliant, or just totally incoherent. And I think you have made a pivotal, Sergeant Graves, a pivotal contribution to today’s meeting by having the good sense to stand off long enough for Waterhouse’s affairs to be set in order.” Comstock realizes that he is breathing very fast, and his heart is pounding madly. Perhaps he overdid the benzedrine?

  Waterhouse drifts into the room ten minutes later on flaccid legs, as if he had inadvertently left his own skeleton behind in bed. He barely makes it to his designated seat and thuds into it like a sack of guts, popping a few strands of wicker out of its bottom. He is breathing raggedly through his mouth, blinking heavy eyelids frequently.

  “Looks like today’s going to be a milk run, men!” Comstock announces brightly. Everyone except Waterhouse snickers. Waterhouse has been in the building for a quarter of an hour, and it took at least that long for Sergeant Graves to drive him here from the church, and so it has been at least half an hour. And yet, to look at him, you’d think that it had happened five seconds ago.

  “Someone pour that man a cup of coffee!” Comstock orders. Someone does. Being in the military is amazing; you give orders, and things happen. Waterhouse does not drink, or even touch, the coffee, but at least it gives his eyes something to focus on. Those orbs wander around under their rumpled lids for a while, like ack-ack guns trying to track a housefly, before finally fixing on the white coffee mug. Waterhouse clears his throat at some length, as if preparing to speak, and the room goes silent. It remains silent for about thirty seconds. Then Waterhouse mumbles something that sounds like “coy.”

  The stenographers take it down in unison.

  “Beg pardon?” says Comstock.

  One of the math whizzes says, “He might be talking about Coy Functions. I think I saw them when I was flipping through a graduate math textbook once.”

  “I thought he was saying ‘quantum’ something,” says the other ETC man.

  “Coffee,” Waterhouse says, and heaves a deep sigh.

  “Waterhouse,” says Comstock, “how many fingers am I holding up?”

  Waterhouse seems to realize that there are other people in the room now. He closes his mouth, and his nostrils flare as air begins to rush through them. He tries to move one of his hands, realizes that he is sitting on it, and shifts heavily to and fro until it flops loose. He gets his eyes all the way open, providing a really good, clear view of that coffee mug. He yawns, stretches, and farts.

  “The Nipponese cryptosystem that we call Azure is the same thing as the German system that we call Pufferfish,” he announces. “Both of them are also related somehow to another, newer cryptosystem I have dubbed Arethusa. All of these have something to do with gold. Probably gold mining operations of some sort. In the Philippines.”

  Whammo! The stenographers go into action. The photographer fires off his strobes, even though there’s nothing to take pictures of—just nerves. Comstock glances beadily at his wire recorders, makes sure those reels are spinning. He is a little unnerved by how rapidly Waterhouse is coming up to speed. But one of the responsibilities of leadership is to mask one’s own fears, to project confidence at all times. Comstock grins and says, “You sound awfully sure of yourself, Waterhouse! I wonder if you can get me to feel that same level of confidence.”

  Waterhouse frowns at the coffee mug. “Well, it’s all math,” he says. “If the math works, why then you should be sure of yourself. That’s the whole point of math.”

  “So you have a mathematical basis for making this assertion?”

  “Assertions,” Waterhouse says. “Assertion number one is that Pufferfish and Azure are different names for the same cryptosystem. Assertion number two is that Pufferfish/Azure is a cousin of Arethusa. Three: all of these cryptosystems are related to gold. Four: mining. Five: Philippines.”

  “Maybe you could just chalk those up on the blackboard as you go along,” Comstock says edgily.

  “Glad to,” Waterhouse says. He stands up and turns toward the blackboard, freezes for a couple of seconds, then turns back around, lunges for the coffee mug, and drains it before Comstock or any of his aides can rip it from his grasp. Tactical error! Then Waterhouse chalks up his assertions. The photographer records it. The privates massage their chamois cloths and glance nervously in Comstock’s direction.

  “Now, you have some sort of, er, mathematical proof for each one of these assertions?” Comstock asks. Math isn’t his bag, but running meetings is, and what Waterhouse has just chalked up on that board looks, to him, like the rudiments of an agenda. And Comstock feels a lot better when he has an agenda. Without an agenda, he’s like a grunt running around in the jungle without a map or a weapon.

  “Well, sir, that’s one way to look at it,” Waterhouse says after some thought. “But it is much more elegant to view all of these as corollaries stemming from the same underlying theorem.”

  “Are you telling me that you have succeeded in breaking Azure? B
ecause if so, congratulations are in order!” Comstock says.

  “No. It is still unbroken. But I can extract information from it.”

  This is the moment where the joystick snaps off in Comstock’s hand. Still, he can pound haplessly on the control panel. “Well, would you mind taking them one at a time, at least?”

  “Well, let’s just take, for example, Assertion Four, which is that Azure/Pufferfish has something to do with mining.” Waterhouse sketches out a freehand map of the Southwest Pacific theater of operations, from Burma to the Solomons, from Nippon to New Zealand. It takes him about sixty seconds. Just for grins, Comstock pulls a printed map out of his clipboard and compares it against Waterhouse’s version. They are basically identical.

  Waterhouse draws a circle with a letter A in it at the entrance to Manila Bay. “This is one of the stations that transmits Azure messages.”

  “You know that from huff-duff, correct?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Is that on Corregidor?”

  “One of the smaller islands near Corregidor.”

  Waterhouse draws another circle-A in Manila itself, one in Tokyo, one in Rabaul, one in Penang, one in the Indian Ocean.

  “What’s that?” Comstock asks.

  “We picked up an Azure transmission from a German U-boat here,” Waterhouse says.

  “How do you know it was a German U-boat?”

  “Recognized the fist,” Waterhouse says. “So, this is the spatial arrangement of Azure transmitters—not counting the stations in Europe that are making Pufferfish transmissions, and hence, according to Assertion One, are part of the same network. Anyway, now let us say that an Azure message originates from Tokyo on a certain date. We don’t know what it says, because we haven’t broken Azure yet. We just know that the message went out to these places.” Waterhouse draws lines radiating downward from Tokyo to Manila, Rabaul, Penang. “Now, each one of these cities is a major military base. Consequently, each is the source of a steady stream of traffic, communicating with all of the Nipponese bases in its region.” Waterhouse draws shorter lines radiating from Manila to various locations in the Philippines, and from Rabaul to New Guinea and the Solomons.

  “Correction, Waterhouse,” Comstock says. “We own New Guinea now.”

  “But I’m going back in time!” Waterhouse says. “Back to 1943, when there were Nip bases all along the north coast of New Guinea, and through the Solomons. So, let us say that within a brief window of time following this Azure message from Tokyo, a number of messages are transmitted from places like Rabaul and Manila to smaller bases in those areas. Some of them are in ciphers that we have learned how to break. Now, it is not unreasonable to suppose that some of these messages were sent out as a consequence of whatever orders were contained in that Azure message.”

  “But those places send out thousands of messages a day,” Comstock protests. “What makes you think that you can pick out the messages that are a consequence of the Azure orders?”

  “It’s just a brute force statistics problem,” Waterhouse says. “Suppose that Tokyo sent the Azure message to Rabaul on October 15th, 1943. Now, suppose I take all of the messages that were sent out from Rabaul on October 14th and I index them in various ways: what destinations they were transmitted to, how long they were, and, if we were able to decrypt them, what their subject matter was. Were they orders for troop movements? Supply shipments? Changes in tactics or procedures? Then, I take all of the messages that were sent out from Rabaul on October 16th—the day after the Azure message came in from Tokyo—and I run exactly the same statistical analysis on them.”

  Waterhouse steps back from the chalkboard and turns into a blinding fusillade of strobe lights. “You see, it is all about information flow. Information flows from Tokyo to Rabaul. We don’t know what the information was. But it will, in some way, influence what Rabaul does afterwards. Rabaul is changed, irrevocably, by the arrival of that information, and by comparing Rabaul’s observed behavior before and after that change, we can make inferences.”

  “Such as?” Comstock says warily.

  Waterhouse shrugs. “The differences are very slight. They hardly stand out from the noise. Over the course of the war, thirty-one Azure messages have gone out from Tokyo, so I have that many data sets to work with. Any one data set by itself might not tell me anything. But when I combine all of the data sets together—giving me greater depth—then I can see some patterns. And one of the patterns that I most definitely see is that, on the day after an Azure message went out to, say, Rabaul, Rabaul was much more likely to transmit messages having to do with mining engineers. This has ramifications that can be traced all the way back until the loop is closed.”

  “Loop is closed?”

  “Okay. Let’s take it from the top. Azure message goes from Tokyo to Rabaul,” Waterhouse says, drawing a heavy line down the chalkboard joining those two cities. “The next day, a message in some other cryptosystem—one that we have broken—goes from Rabaul to a submarine operating out of a base here, in the Moluccas. The message states that the submarine is to proceed to an outpost on the north coast of New Guinea and pick up four passengers, who are identified by name. From our archives, we know who these men are: three aircraft mechanics and one mining engineer. A few days later, the submarine transmits from the Bismarck Sea stating that it has picked those men up. A few days after that, our waterfront spies in Manila inform us that the same submarine has showed up there. On the same day, another Azure message is transmitted from Manila back up to Tokyo,” Waterhouse concludes, adding a final line to the polygon, “closing the loop.”

  “But that could all be a series of random, unconnected events,” says one of Comstock’s math whizzes, before Comstock can say it. “The Nips are desperate for aircraft mechanics. There’s nothing unusual about this kind of message traffic.”

  “But there is something unusual about the patterns,” Waterhouse says. “If, a few months later, another submarine is sent, in the same way, to pick up some mining engineers and some surveyors who have been trapped in Rabaul, and, upon its arrival in Manila, another Azure message is sent from Manila up to Tokyo, it begins to look very suspicious.”

  “I don’t know,” Comstock stays, shaking his head. “I’m not sure if I can sell this to The General’s staff. It’s too much of a fishing expedition.”

  “Correction, sir, it was a fishing expedition. But now I’m back from the fishing expedition, and I’ve got the fish!” Waterhouse storms out of the room and down the hall toward his lab—half the fucking wing. Good thing Australia is a big continent, because Waterhouse is going to take all of it if he’s not held sternly in check. Fifteen seconds later he’s back with a stack of ETC cards a foot high, which he pounds down on the tabletop. “It’s all right here.”

  Comstock has never fired a gun in his life, but he knows card-punching and -reading machinery like a jarhead knows his Springfield, and he’s not impressed. “Waterhouse, that stack of cards carries about as much information as a letter home to Mom. Are you trying to tell me—”

  “No, this is just the summary. The result of the statistical analysis.”

  “Why the hell did you punch it onto ETC cards? Why not just turn in a plain old typed report like everyone else?”

  “I didn’t punch it,” Waterhouse says. “The machine punched it.”

  “The machine punched it,” Comstock says very slowly.

  “Yes. When it was done performing the analysis.” Waterhouse suddenly breaks into his braying laugh. “You didn’t think this was the raw inputs, did you?”

  “Well, I—”

  “The inputs filled several rooms. I had to run almost every message we have intercepted through the whole war through this analysis. Remember all those trucks I requisitioned a few weeks ago? Those trucks were just to carry the cards back and forth from storage.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Comstock says. He remembers the trucks now, their incessant comings and goings, fender-benders in the motor p
ool, exhaust fumes coming through his window, the enlisted men shoving heavy carts up and down the hallways, laden with boxes. Running over people’s feet. Scaring the secretaries.

  And the noise. The noise, the noise, from Waterhouse’s goddamned machine. Flowerpots vibrating their way off file cabinets, standing waves in coffee cups.

  “Wait a sec,” says one of the ETC men, with the nasal skepticism of a man who has just realized he’s being bullshitted. “I saw those trucks. I saw those cards. Are you trying to get us to believe that you were actually running a statistical analysis on each and every single one of those message decrypts?”

  Waterhouse looks a little defensive. “Well, that was the only way to do it!”

  Comstock’s math whiz is homing in for the kill now. “I agree that the only way to accomplish the analysis that is implied by that”—he waves at the mandala of intersecting polygons on Waterhouse’s map—“is to go through all of those truckloads of old decrypts one by one. That is clear. That is not what we are objecting to.”

  “What are you objecting to, then?”

  The whiz laughs angrily. “I’m just worried about the inconvenient fact that there is no machine in the whole world that is capable of processing all of that data, that fast.”

  “Didn’t you hear the noise?” Waterhouse asks.

  “We all heard the goddamn noise,” Comstock says. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Oh,” Waterhouse says, and rolls his eyes at his own stupidity. “That’s right. Sorry. Maybe I should have explained that part first.”

  “What part?” Comstock asks.

  “Dr. Turing, of Cambridge University, has pointed out that bobbadah bobbadah hoe daddy yanga langa furjeezama bing jingle oh yeah,” Waterhouse says, or words to that effect. He pauses for breath, and turns fatefully towards the blackboard. “Do you mind if I erase this?” A private lunges forward with an eraser. Comstock sinks into a chair and grips its arms. A stenographer reaches for a benzedrine tablet. An ETC man chomps down on a number two lead pencil like a dog on a drumstick. Strobes flash. Waterhouse grabs a fresh stick of chalk, reaches up, and presses its tip to the immaculate slate. The crisp edge of the stick fractures with a slight pop, and a tiny spray of chalk particles drifts to the floor spreading into a narrow parabolic cloud. Waterhouse bows his head for a minute, like a priest getting ready to stride up the aisle, and then draws a deep breath.