Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

  “You got it.”

  “Is that what Marcos eventually found?”

  “Opinions differ,” Doug says. “A lot of people think that the Primary is still waiting to be discovered.”

  “Well, there isn’t any information about the Primary, or anything else, in these messages,” Randy says. The laptop has booted up now, in UNIX mode, with a torrent of error messages triggered by its inability to find various pieces of hardware that were present on Randy’s laptop (which is in a Ford dealership’s dumpster in Los Altos) but are not on Tom’s. And yet the basic kernel works to the point that Randy can look at the file system and makes sure it’s intact. The Arethusa directory is still there, with its long list of short files, each file the result of running a different stack of cards through Chester’s card-reader. Randy opens up the first one and finds several lines of random capital letters.

  “How do you know there’s no information about the primary in those messages, Randy?” Doug asks.

  “The NSA couldn’t decrypt these messages in ten years,” Randy says. “It all turned out to be a hoax. The output of a random number generator.”

  Randy jumps back out to the file listing and types

  grep AADAA *

  and hits the return key. It is a command to find the opening letter group in the ETC card messages, the famous one to which Pontifex had alluded. The machine answers back almost immediately with an empty prompt, meaning that the search failed.

  “Ho-ly shit,” Randy says.

  “What?” everyone says at once.

  Randy takes a long, deep breath. “These are not the same messages that Earl Comstock spent ten years attempting to break.”

  DELUGE

  * * *

  IT TAKES GOTO DENGO ABOUT HALF A MINUTE TO waddle up the narrow entrance of the tunnel. He is trailing the fingers of one hand along the stone ceiling just above his head, feeling the scars of the drills. Behind him he can hear the four members of his crew making their way along, muttering to each other calmly.

  His fingers slide over a lip and rise up into empty, dark space; he’s into the main drift now. He stands up and wades forward. Perfect blackness is cozy and reassuring to him—in it, he can always pretend that he is still a boy, back on Hokkaido. He can make believe that the last few years of his life have never happened.

  But in fact he is a grownup and he is trapped in a hole in the Philippines and surrounded by armies of demons. He opens the valves on an acetylene headlamp and sparks it into life. He is perfectly capable, by this point, of finding his way around Golgotha in the dark, but his crew is not, and he leaves them far behind. He stubs his toe brutally on a large gold bar that has carelessly been left lying across the iron railway, and curses.

  “Is everything okay, Lieutenant?” says one of his crew, fifty meters behind him.

  “Fine,” Goto Dengo says, loudly and clearly. “You four be careful you do not break your toes on this bar.”

  So now, Wing and Rodolfo and their men, waiting up ahead, know the number of Nipponese soldiers they have to kill.

  “Where are the last few workers?” one of the crew shouts.

  “In the fool’s vault.”

  It takes them several minutes to pick their way through the main vault, because it is packed with treasure. The starry core of a galaxy must look like this. They clamber up the shaft in its ceiling and make their way to the Hall of Glory. Goto Dengo finds the bare wires that lead to the electric light bulb and attaches them to the screw terminals on a battery. Running at the wrong voltage, the bulb looks like a tangerine floating in ink.

  “Shut off your headlamps,” Goto Dengo says, “to conserve fuel. I will leave mine burning in case there is an interruption in the power.”

  He pulls a fistful of white cotton from a sterile box. It is the cleanest whitest thing he has seen in several years. He pulls it apart into smaller wads, like Father Ferdinand breaking the bread of the mass, and passes them out to the men, who stuff it ritualistically into their ears. “There is no more time to waste,” he hollers, “Captain Noda must be growing impatient out there.”

  “Sir!” one of the men says, standing at attention and handing him a pair of wires marked MAIN TUNNEL DEMOLITION.

  “Very well,” Goto Dengo says, and screws the wires down to a pair of terminals on a wooden switch box.

  It seems as though he should say something ceremonious, but nothing comes to mind. Nipponese men are dying all over the Pacific without first getting to make speeches.

  He clenches his teeth together, shuts his eyes, and twists the switch handle.

  The shock wave comes through the floor first, whacking the soles of their feet like a flying plank. A moment later it comes through the air and strikes them like a moving wall of stone. The cotton in the ears seems to accomplish nothing. Goto Dengo feels his eyes bounce off the backs of their sockets. All of his teeth feel as though they have been crisply sheared off at the gumline with cold chisels. The wind is all forced out of his lungs. They are empty for the first time since the moment of his birth. Like newborn infants, he and the other men can only writhe and look around themselves in a panic until their bodies learn how to draw breath again.

  One of the men brought a bottle of sake, which has shattered. They pass around the jagged bottom of the bottle, each man taking a gulp of what remains. Goto Dengo tries to pull the cotton out of his ears and finds that the shock wave drove it in so deep that it cannot be extracted. So he merely shouts: “Check your watches.” They all do. “In two hours, Captain Noda will demolish the plug on the bottom of the lake and flood the water traps. In the meantime, we have work to do. You all know your jobs—get to work!”

  They all hai, turn on their heels, and go their separate ways. It is the first time that Goto Dengo has actually sent men off to their deaths. But they are all dead men anyway, and so he doesn’t know how to feel about it.

  If he still believed in the emperor—still believed in the war—he would think nothing of it. But if he still believed, he wouldn’t be doing what he is about to do.

  It is important to keep up the appearance that this is a normal operation, and so he descends to the vault to perform his next scheduled duty: inspect what used to be the main drift. The vault is filled with a fog of rock dust around which his windpipe clenches like a fist grabbing a rope. His acetylene lamp only makes the dust glow, giving him a visibility of perhaps six inches. All he can see is the bullion right in front of his face, which still glimmers beneath a film of dust and smoke. The shock wave has deranged his formerly neat stacks of crates and bricks and turned the entire hoard into a rude mound that is still shedding avalanches, seeking its angle of repose. A 75-kilogram gold brick slides down the pile like a runaway boxcar, emerging suddenly from the cloud of dust, and he jumps out of its way. Bits of rock are still sifting down from the crazed ceiling and plinking against his helmet.

  He scrambles carefully over the heap, breathing through a wad of cotton, until he can see what used to be the main drift. The dynamite has done the right thing: shattered the roof of the drift into billions of shards. Collapsed on the floor, they occupy a larger volume than the same mass of stone did when it was all in one piece. The drift is filled with tons of loose stone, all the way down to the entrance along the Tojo River, where Captain Noda’s men are at work even now, concealing the tiny puncture wound behind river rocks.

  He feels, rather than hears, a small explosion, and knows that something is going wrong. No one should be setting off explosions now.

  Movement in this place is agonizingly slow, like a nightmare when you are trying to run away from a demon. It takes him so long to get back to the Hall of Glory that there is almost no point in doing it; whatever was happening is over when he arrives.

  What he sees, when he arrives, is a group of three men waiting for him: Wing, Rodolfo, and the Filipino named Bong.

  “The soldiers?”

  “All dead,” Rodolfo says flatly, irritated by the stupidity of the question.<
br />
  “The others?”

  “One soldier set off a grenade. Killed himself and my two men,” Wing says.

  “Another soldier heard the grenade and had a knife ready when Agustin came for him,” Bong says. He shakes his head sorrowfully. “I think that Agustin was not ready to kill a man. He hesitated.”

  Goto Dengo stares at Bong, fascinated. “And you?”

  Bong doesn’t understand the question for a moment. Then light dawns. “Oh, no, I did not hesitate, Lieutenant Goto. A Nipponese soldier hurt my sister one time, in a very inappropriate way.”

  Goto Dengo stands there silently for a while, until he notices that the other men are all looking at him expectantly. Then he checks his watch. He is shocked to see that only half an hour has gone by since he set off the dynamite.

  “We have an hour and a half before the water traps are flooded. If we are not in the Bubble by then, we will be sealed off, with no escape possible,” says Goto Dengo.

  “We go there and wait,” Wing suggests, in Shanghainese.

  “No. Captain Noda listens, outside, for more explosions,” Goto Dengo says, also in Chinese; then, in English, tells the Filipinos, “We have to set off the demolition charges at certain times or Noda-san will grow suspicious.”

  “Whoever sets them off will be trapped forever in this chamber,” Rodolfo says, gesturing around them at the Hall of Glory.

  “We will not set them off from here,” says Goto Dengo, pulling the lid from a crate. Inside are several long coils of two-stranded telephone wire. He hands the coils out to Rodolfo, Wing, and Bong. They understand, and begin to splice the new wires onto the ones that terminate here.

  They retreat through Golgotha in stages, lugging battery packs with them and unrolling the wires as they go, dynamiting the tunnel sections behind them one by one. As they do this, certain oddities of the tunnel system finally become clear to Rodolfo, Wing, and Bong. It becomes fully evident to them, for the first time, that the entire complex was carefully designed by Goto Dengo to serve two entirely contradictory purposes. To a loyal Nipponese engineer like Captain Noda it looks like precisely what he was ordered to build: a vault laced with booby traps. But to the four men sealed inside, Golgotha has a second function. It is an escape machine. As the purposes of certain rooms, drifts, and other features suddenly become clear, they straighten up, blinking, and turn to look at Goto Dengo, with the same expressions as the soldiers wore, weeks ago, when they discovered the Buddha in the Mercedes.

  Their destination is the Bubble, a niche that Goto Dengo had them carve out of the stone during the last couple of months. He claimed, to anyone who asked, that it was a water reservoir, put there to increase the deadliness of one of the traps. It is a wide vertical shaft, four meters in diameter, that begins in the ceiling of a peripheral drift and goes straight up for a few meters, then dead-ends. Ladders still cling to its walls, and by ascending, they can reach a rock ledge big enough to sit on. Canteens of water and boxes of biscuits have already been stocked here by Wing and his men.

  By the time they reach their seats in the top of the Bubble, all of the others are in awe of Goto Dengo, and ready to do whatever he says. He senses this. It fills him with unutterable misery.

  They have fifteen minutes to wait. The others spend it sipping water and nibbling biscuits. Goto Dengo fills it with self-recrimination. “I am a loathsome worm,” he says, “a traitor, a filthy piece of dog shit, not worthy to clean out the latrines of true soldiers of Nippon. I am bereft—totally cut off from the nation I’ve betrayed. I am now part of a world of people who hate Nippon—and who therefore hate me—but at the same time I am hateful to my own kind. I will stay here and die.”

  “You are alive,” Rodolfo says. “You have saved our lives. And you are rich.”

  “Rich?”

  Wing and Rodolfo and Bong look at each other, confused. “Yes, of course!” Bong says.

  Goto Dengo is still looking nonplussed. Reckoning that he has merely gone deaf or daft from the explosions, Bong reaches into his trousers and pulls out a hand-sewn pouch, teases it open, and displays a healthy double handful of diamonds. Wing and Rodolfo scarcely take note.

  Goto Dengo looks away despondently. He himself has saved no treasure except these men’s lives. But that’s not why he feels so bad. He had hoped that being thus saved they would all be noble, and not think of the treasure. But maybe that was too much to hope for.

  A distant thump lifts them slightly off the ledge, just for a moment. Goto Dengo feels a strange sensation in his head: the air pressure is beginning to rise. The column of air trapped in the diagonal is being compressed by a piston of water rushing down it from the lake. Captain Noda has dynamited the plug.

  Goto Dengo is so excited that he forgets to die.

  He is an engineer, trapped inside one of his own machines. The machine was designed to keep him alive, and he will never know whether it worked unless it works. After he has achieved that satisfaction, he supposes, he can always kill himself at leisure.

  He pinches his nose shut, presses his lips together, and begins to blow air into his Eustachian tubes, equalizing the pressure. The others follow his lead.

  All of Golgotha’s traps are basically the same. All of them derive their killing power from the pressure of the water communicated down to this level from the bottom of Lake Yamamoto. In any number of places in the complex, false walls have been constructed, designed to be pierced by greedy thieves, or to collapse of their own accord when thieves dig out the sand that holds them up. Then the water will rush in with explosive force and probably crush them before they have a chance to drown.

  At its Golgotha end, the diagonal tunnel forks again and again, like a river breaking up into distributaries. Goto Dengo explained it to inspecting officers by likening it to the plumbing inside a modern hotel, which is supplied by a single main that is pressurized by a distant water tower, but which divides into many different pipes that supply pressurized water to taps all over the structure.

  Golgotha seethes, hisses, and moans as every pipe in its ramified system is pressurized by the deluge unleashed by Captain Noda’s dynamite charge. The bubbles of air trapped at the ends of those pipes are seeking escape: some are leaking out through cracks in the walls and others are bubbling away into the diagonal. The surface of Lake Yamamoto must be boiling like a cauldron, and Captain Noda must be standing above it, watching the air flee Golgotha, grinning with satisfaction. In moments, the floors of the tunnels are obscured by whirling lagoons of dirty water, and the barrels and railcars that were left there have begun to rise, bobbing like corks and clanging together.

  Most of the air trapped in the Golgotha does not, however, come bubbling up out of Lake Yamamoto. Most of it rises towards the Bubble, because that is how Goto Dengo planned it. He knows it’s working because his ears begin to pop.

  Eventually the water rises up into the Bubble itself, but it rises slowly, because the pressure of the air in here has become quite high already. As the water climbs, it further pressurizes the bubble of air in which Goto Dengo and the others are trapped. The pressure of the air rises steadily until it becomes equal to the pressure of the water. Then balance is achieved, and the water cannot rise any more. Another kind of balance is being reached within their bodies, as the compressed air floods into their chests, and the nitrogen in that air seeps through the membranes of their lungs and dissolves into their bloodstreams.

  “Now we wait,” says Goto Dengo, and shuts off his acetylene lamp, leaving them in darkness. “As long as we do not burn lamps, there is enough air in this chamber to keep us alive for several days. Captain Noda and his men will spend at least that long tidying up the Bundok site, erasing all traces of our work, and killing themselves. So we must wait, or else his men will only kill us when we appear on the shores of Lake Yamamoto. I would like to spend the time educating you on the subject of caisson disease, also known as the bends.”

  Two days later they set off one last, relatively small dy
namite charge, blowing a hole through the wall of the Bubble that is large enough to admit a human being. On the other side, the diagonal to Lake Yamamoto begins.

  Rodolfo is more terrified than anyone else, and so they send him first. Then goes Bong, and then Wing. Finally Goto Dengo leaves the foul, used-up air of the Bubble behind. Within a few moments they have found their way into the ascending diagonal tunnel. They begin to swim uphill through total darkness. All of them are trailing their hands against the tunnel ceiling, feeling for the opening of the first vertical shaft. Rodolfo is supposed to stop when he feels it, but the others must also be alert in case Rodolfo misses.

  They thud into one another in the darkness like a loosely connected train bumping to a halt. Rodolfo has stopped— with any luck, he has found the first vertical shaft. Wing finally moves forward, and Goto Dengo follows straight up the vertical shaft and finally into a bulb at its top where a bubble of air has been trapped. The bulb is just barely wide enough to accommodate four men. They pause there, all jammed together in a cluster of bodies, heaving as they exhale the nitrogen- and carbon-dioxide-tainted air that they’ve been living on for the last sixty seconds, and breathe in fresh lungfuls. Goto Dengo feels his ears popping as pressure is relieved.

  They have covered only a small fraction of the four hundred and fifty meters that separate Golgotha from the lake horizontally. But half of the hundred-meter vertical distance has already been covered. That is, the pressure of the air they are breathing in this chamber is only half of what it was in the Bubble.

  Goto Dengo is not a diver, and knows very little of diving medicine. But his father used to speak of how caissons were used to send workers deep underwater, to build things or to mine. That is how he learned about caisson disease, and how he learned the rule of thumb that most men will not suffer its symptoms if you have them decompress for a while at half the original air pressure. If they stop and breathe for a while, the nitrogen will come out of the tissues. Once this is done, the air pressure may be halved again.